The Crimean War
A quarrel over the holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem grows into a war of four powers, and defeat pushes Russia towards reform.
It began with keys and lamps: Russia and France quarrelled over which church held the rights at the holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and that quarrel became the occasion for the war declared in the autumn of 1853. Against Russia stood the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain and the kingdom of Sardinia. The main fighting was in the Crimea, and Sevastopol held out under siege for nearly a year. Hostilities ended in February 1856, and peace was signed in Paris on 30 March.
For Jewish history what followed matters more than the war itself. Defeat showed the Russian Empire that it was ordered worse than its rivals, and under the new tsar a run of changes began. The cantonist levies ended, and this timeline has its own record of them; over the next ten years merchants of the first guild, men with a university degree and craftsmen received the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement. So there came to be a Jewish Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev, and with them a Russian Haskalah that was no longer a circle but a milieu.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Treaty of Paris, 30 March 1856 — the day the war ended and the terms of the peace
Scholarship
- Studies in the history of the Russian Empire and the Eastern Question — the dispute over the holy places as the occasion, the course of the war and the reforms begun after the defeat
Basis: documents and evidence.