THE JEWISH POPULATION OF KHARKIV IN THE PERIOD OF THE LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA IN THE WORKS OF DMYTRO BAHALIY

Dmytro Bahaliy is an important figure for Kharkiv regional memory. Being a prolific historian and active publicfigure, he devoted most of his works to local history, that is Slobid Ukraine region. Having found himself at KharkivUniversity, accidentally to some extent, he became the part of local community until the end of his life. He was activein public life, and at the same time, he was distant from radical positions. His moderate public views corralated withacademic interests. Bahaliy was beyond political processes, he was a researcher of migration, culture and everydaylife of the population of the region. Traditionally, in the optics of his time, he saw the region and its main city -Kharkiv, as a territory where two communities - Ukrainians and Russians - "Little Russians" and "Great Russians", inBahaliy's terminology, interacted. Bahaliy moved to Kharkiv during the period of rapid growth of the city. Theresearcher could not but notice that one of the actors in these processes was the Jewish community. Bahaliy noted thatthe number of the Jewish population in the city was constantly and steadily growing. Nevertheless, in his main works,the researcher gives a minimal place to the Jews. He easily used stereotypes about Jews, characteristic of the discourseof the Russian Empire at the time. Perhaps this silence was an attempt to ignore the "Jewish question", which hadbecome serious problem since Bahaliy's arrival in Kharkiv. In 1881-1882, a wave of anti-Jewish violence sweptthrough the south of the empire. There were no so-called pogroms in Kharkiv, but anti-Semitic discourse was quitewidespread, among Bahaliy's colleagues in political activity in particular. In the future, the situation did not get better,the period of Jewish emancipation, which lasted from 1859, was finished. Bahaliy certainly did not intend to writeabout the birth of Zionism in Kharkiv, or the revolutionary activity of the Jews, but in his description of the Jewishcommunity he did not go beyond the official censuses.