Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography
426
Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography
426eBook
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Overview
Focusing on Eastern and Central Europe before WWII, this collection explores various genres of “ethnoliterature” across temporal, geographical, and ideological borders as sites of Jewish identity formation and dissemination.
Challenging the assumption of cultural uniformity among Ashkenazi Jews, the contributors consider how ethnographic literature defines Jews and Jewishness, the political context of Jewish ethnography, and the question of audience, readers, and listeners. With contributions from leading scholars and an appendix of translated historical ethnographies, this volume presents vivid case studies across linguistic and disciplinary divides, revealing a rich textual history that throws the complexity and diversity of a people into sharp relief.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253019646 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 426 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Andreas Kilcher is a professor at ETH Zurich and author of The Linguistic Theory of Kabbalah as an Aesthetical Paradigm and Dictionary of German-Jewish Literature.
Gabriella Safran is the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University and author of Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky.
Read an Excerpt
Writing Jewish Culture
Paradoxes in Ethnography
By Andreas Kilcher, Gabriella Safran
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01964-6
CHAPTER 1
The Voice of a Native Informer
Salomon Maimon Describes Life in Polish Lithuania
LILIANE WEISSBERG
FIELD WORK
The discipline of ethnography, writing — graphein — about ethnicity as scholarly endeavor, is an invention of the late eighteenth century, when descriptions of peoples, their customs, and their cultures began to flourish. Of course, travel accounts of foreign lands and their populations existed earlier, as well as descriptions of foreign customs and lifestyles, but it was only in the late eighteenth century that these texts were viewed as "scientific," as part of a scholarly discipline, or Wissenschaft.
Early scientific literature in this field was mostly written in German. The historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller took part in the second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–1743) and issued descriptions of various peoples and tribes. His account may be the first detailed description of a foreign encounter cast for a reading public at home. August Ludwig von Schlözer published his Vorstellung einer Universalgeschichte (Introduction to Universal History) in 1772, and his colleague at the University of Göttingen, Johann Christoph Gatterer, translated his genealogical knowledge into his own version of world history. Both authors aimed to expand historical and geographical knowledge by turning to the East. While Müller still sought to describe peoples, or engage in "Völker-Beschreibung" (1740), these scholars began to coin terms that would name the emerging discipline and separate it from the already existing field of history. The new research would be named ethnographia (1767–1771), Völkerkunde (1771–1775), or ethnologia (1781–1783).
Later, in his monumental sketch of the development of mankind, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, 1784–1791), Johann Gottfried Herder would describe human characteristics as dependent on geography and climate, thus distinguishing between peoples of the North — such as Germans — and those of the South. Not accidentally, perhaps, it was Herder, too, who devised a model of historical progress. In Herder, history combined with teleology, as human development moved in a forward direction. People not only differed from each other because of the circumstances of their surroundings; some were simply backwards, while others progressed and became more "civilized." Indeed, Herder relied on this notion of civilization throughout his work.
Anthropology, another brainchild of the eighteenth century, sought to describe human beings in general; ethnography took on the task of describing peoples more specifically. This development paralleled the difference between philosophy of language, with its eighteenth-century speculations on the nature and origin of speech and writing, and later linguistics, which cared about the specific characteristics of each individual tongue, beginning with the description of Sanskrit. Description was also central to ethnography, while a theologian and philosopher like Herder still offered general outlines that sought universal validity. Herder lived in the small German town of Weimar; he encountered the world via books and a close reading of the Scriptures. His followers, though, were eager to travel and encounter their objects of research in their natural habitats. These traveling scholars were, by their own admission, representatives of civilized peoples, and thus able to employ the necessary distance and judgment to evaluate others whom they considered less far along in their development. Early ethnographers were less interested in the familiar, and more attracted to the far-flung and exotic. Describing a people's Otherness provided, moreover, the assurance of one's own properties and characteristics. Thus, ethnography could strengthen and even define the newly emerging national idea; it could define home. Ethnography and the construction of nationhood went hand in hand.
Already for Herder, the description of the Jewish people caused a problem. As the people of the Bible, they are Morgenländer (Oriental), living in the hot climate of the eastern desert. In his early essay on "Ueber den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen" (On Diligence in Many Scholarly Languages, 1764), Herder wrote: "Here the Oriental [Morgenländer] glows under a hot vertex: his booming mouth brings forth a heated language, full of affect." Jews as Morgenländer could be placed in the Near East and in ancient history — an ancient history that Germans in the Abendland (Occident) were eager to share. Herder described their ancient poetry as beautiful, and Moses as a national leader who may have established a precedent for Germany's own struggle for national unity and recognition. There was a problem to be considered, though: some of these Orientals were also living in present-day German lands. Even though they were largely absent in Weimar, they were elsewhere working as moneylenders, traffickers in clothes and used merchandise, or even as beggars. There was no poetry or heroism in their way of life.
In his brief essay on the conversion of Jews, "Bekehrung der Juden" (Conversion of the Jews, 1804), Herder was thus eager to distinguish between the Then and There and the Here and Now. The Hebrews of old were admirable as the predecessors to German civilization in a sort of historical continuum. Present-day Jews, in contrast, were poor folk and even "parasites." They were obstinate, and they were missing out on the historical civilizing process. Thus, Herder was not only able to distinguish between Hebrews (of the past) and Jews (of the present), but also to offer a picture of the underside of his depiction of progress, namely the possibility of evolutionary standstill or even degeneration. These unfavorable paths of development were only open to the ethnographer's object of description, however. The ethnographer himself (a male and Western European figure) was firmly settled at the peak of a hierarchical order of development, a position that assured him a discerning eye and ear and a capacity for precise description.
Was Herder's essay on the "Bekehrung der Juden" already "Jewish ethnography"? "Jewish ethnography" could perhaps be simply understood as the ethnographical description of Jews in various diaspora settings. In this case, Jews would be merely the object of research and fact-finding missions. For Jews to become ethnographers themselves, however, more would be needed. A Jew would have to turn from being passively observed to being the active observer, would have to assume agency and the self-confidence of a subject position. He would have to appear emancipated — if not for his readers, then at least for the objects of his description — and he needed to be empowered for his task.
What if "Jewish ethnography" were to cover both sides, to establish Jews as scholars and writers as well as objects of scholarship? What began with Müller or Schlözer as a way of describing different peoples and distinguishing among them has also been a way of unifying descriptions and establishing, more abstractly, the idea of nationhood. Thus, ethnography has always been a statement of division itself: between the Self and the Other. While describing other peoples, Müller and his followers achieved something else: through the ethnographical project, the German nation could define itself.
This situation would not be quite the same for the Jewish ethnographer who set out to describe Jews. The Jewish ethnographer as an active observer could not be, and did not want to be, part of the group that he would describe. He had thus to accept Jews as a diverse multitude, and to assume different customs and lifestyles for each Jewish group in different parts of the world. Still, there would be some sense of Jewishness uniting subject and object. Unlike the work of the German ethnographers, learning about the Other now meant turning against oneself, against this shared sense of Jewishness. Jews had to defamiliarize themselves to make "Jewish ethnography" possible; not the strange and the foreign, but estrangement and alienation, had to be at the core of this endeavor.
In this sense, "Jewish ethnography" is the result of Jewish diaspora existence. The Jewish people appear as tribes or groups who relate to each other with different degrees of familiarity. The readers of this ethnography's early texts were not only scholars, but also a general public eager to learn about the exotic and new, either via vivid descriptions or through paintings and illustrations. Often, these texts addressed both Jews and non-Jews. And if early Jewish readers shared the sense of estrangement from other Jews, those of the later studies focused on a kind of national self-reflection.
Once again, however, the geographical scope in these texts was limited. Jewish ethnographers who largely hailed from the so-called West turned toward the East and Slavic lands; they continued a perspective that has defined ethnography since its founding days. This point of view produced descriptions that rejected the East for the more advanced and "civilized" West, in which a steady stream of Eastern European Jewish immigrants sought economic success and political emancipation. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, life in the East became sentimentalized in the so-called Ghettogeschichten (tales of the ghetto) that dealt with the East nostalgically, as offering a glimpse of the Jewish past. Jewish ethnographers who traveled to the Pale were no longer looking to reject that life, but to revitalize Jewish values. The East morphed from a primitive, foreign land into a place of common roots that had to be explored; it became the phantom image of true and authentic Judaism.
At its core, "Jewish Ethnography," as it was practiced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is not related to world or universal history. It is, rather, a limited endeavor that deals most often with Jewish life in the East as viewed through Western eyes. And more often than not, it does not study Jewish life as much as the transformations of its perception, changes happening in and through the Western gaze. This direction is set with one of the earliest ethnographic studies, Salomon Maimon's description of Jewish life in Poland in the late eighteenth century.
FROM EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY TO ETHNOGRAPHY
It may not be surprising, then, that the concept of "Jewish Ethnography" can be linked to another Enlightenment invention, the idea of the introspective individual. More precisely, the creation of ethnographic texts happened alongside the first efforts of German Jewish autobiography. Those autobiographical sketches were regarded as scientific studies as well, and were published in a scholarly venue.
In 1783, Karl Philipp Moritz founded his journal of empirical psychology, Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Journal of Experiential Psychology), and went on to publish it until his death in 1793. Moritz had been friends with Moses Mendelssohn, who suggested the name for the journal and the new scientific study it would pursue, as well as with the Kantian scholar and doctor Marcus Herz, who offered advice in regard to medical classification of the study of the soul. Moritz adopted terminology offered in Herz's outline of the field, Grundriss aller medicinischen Wissenschaften (Outline of All Medical Sciences, 1782).
Moritz himself was a pedagogue and the director of a well-known Berlin gymnasium, the Graues Kloster, an institution of higher learning that was partially supported by tax money from Berlin's Jewish community. Moritz's Magazin set out to gather case studies in which the author would describe psychological ailments or strange behaviors noted in others, as well as Selbstbeobachtungen (self-observations). These case studies were supposed to be gathered like facta, without further explanations, in order to supply the data for a later description of humankind and offer a "mirror in which mankind could view itself." This may, indeed, sound paradoxical. While psychological case studies would concentrate on an individual's psyche, anthropological studies were to describe man in general, as well as peoples and ethnicities often other than the one to which the author belonged. Indeed, the issue of the "distance" required for proper observation was particularly at stake in Selbstbeobachtungen. The observer had to view himself or herself as both subject and object at once, and stress his or her specific characteristics while also generalizing. The Magazin was not only the first psychological journal ever published, but also an important contribution to anthropological research. Its case studies were, moreover, closely related to a literary genre that stressed the author's double role as subject and object: autobiographical discourse. In the late eighteenth century, autobiography often tried to fulfill the same twofold task of stressing the particularities of an individual life while integrating it into a more general framework, be it of a historical, religious, or ethnic nature.
Perhaps it was because of Moritz's social connections, or the community's involvement with his school, or the topic itself, but no other German language paper attracted as large a number of Jewish contributors as the Magazin. Moses Mendelssohn, Lazarus Bendavid, David Veit, and Markus Herz wrote about themselves and others, describing mental ailments and eccentric behavior that set people apart and were viewed as unusual or strange. Salomon Maimon became Moritz's most important contributor, as he offered a new manifesto for the psychological discipline that Moritz had sketched in volume one of the Magazin, a "Revision der Erfahrungsseelenkunde" (Revision of Experiential Psychology) published in volumes 9 and 10 in 1792 and 1793. In addition, Maimon served as the coeditor of the journal during these years, and compiled the index for the ten volumes of the Magazin in 1793.
Unlike Mendelssohn, Bendavid, and Veit, Maimon was not from Berlin. He grew up in Polish Lithuania and moved to the Prussian capital in 1780, a few years before Moritz founded his Magazin. At that time, Maimon was about twenty-five years old. Like many eighteenth-century intellectuals, he excelled in a range of pursuits not limited by contemporary disciplinary boundaries. He was a Talmud scholar of rabbinical learning who was fluent in Hebrew and conversant in Hebrew scholarship. He was interested in mathematical problems. He studied pharmacy. He immersed himself in philosophical history, especially in the works of Moses Maimonides, whose name he would eventually adopt as his own. He wrote books and essays on philosophy and engaged with Enlightenment figures like Moses Mendelssohn and, in particular, Immanuel Kant. In Berlin, where both Kant and Mendelssohn were well regarded, Maimon sought to find the center of Enlightenment thought.
Maimon had studied German while still living at home, having taught himself the language to be able to read German books. A decade after his arrival in Berlin, he was not only able to pen philosophical essays in German and set down his thoughts on Erfahrungsseelenkunde and the new psychology, but he was also willing to turn himself into an object of contemplation for Moritz's Magazin. However, while Mendelssohn would write about incidents of stammering, or Herz about episodes of dizziness, Maimon had something else to offer. He presented his entire previous life for review. Thus, the story of a poor Eastern Jew would rival accounts of odd behavior or illness, and his move from the Polish wilderness to Berlin was, at the same time, a proof of his health and of his entry into accepted civilization.
The first part of Maimon's life story was published in 1792 in volume 9 of the Magazin, already coedited by the author, and it was subsumed under the medical category Seelennaturkunde (natural study of the soul). It appeared as a case study, in the form of a third-person narrative titled "Fragmente aus Ben Josua's Lebensgeschichte" (Fragments of the Life Story of Ben Josua), with Maimon's name given according to the Jewish tradition of patronymics. The article itself, which continued in the following issue of the Magazin, gives no hint of its authorship, but Moritz's introduction to the account was meant to assure readers of its veracity. "As the editor of these fragments may not have to affirm, they represent a literally faithful representation of truly experienced events [eine buchstäblich getreue Darstellung wirklich erlebter Schicksale]," Moritz writes. "The whole narrative bears too much the faithful stamp of truth; nobody whose heart responds to it would be able to misjudge it. The editor hopes as well to offer more of this story to the public, a story that speaks from heart to heart."
Moritz insists not only on the literal truth offered by the narrative that follows, but also that it would speak "from heart to heart." While offering specific glimpses of a Jewish childhood in Polish Lithuania, Maimon's tale should point, therefore, to the general suffering of humankind. Maimon himself — still known under his Jewish name, Salomon Ben Josua — is simply called "B.J." here.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Writing Jewish Culture by Andreas Kilcher, Gabriella Safran. Copyright © 2016 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Note on Transliteration and Names
Introduction / Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran
Part 1: Reinventing the "Jews" in Ethnographic Writing
1. The Voice of a Native Informer: Salomon Maimon Describes Life in Polish Lithuania / Liliane Weissberg
2. Legends of Authenticity: Das Buch von den polnischen Juden (1916) by S. J. Agnon and Ahron Eliasberg / Sylvia Jaworski
3. The Cold Order and the Eros of Storytelling: Joseph Roth’s "Exotic Jews" / Andreas Kilcher
4. Yiddish Ethnographic Poetics and Moyshe Kulbak’s "Vilne" / Jordan Finkin
Part 2: Seeing, Hearing, and Reading Jews
5. Listening in the Dark: The Yiddish Folklorists’ Claim of a Russian Genealogy / Gabriella Safran
6. Ethnoliterary Modernity: Jewish Ethnography and Literature in the Russian Empire and Poland (1890-1930) / Annette Werberger
7. Imagining the Wandering Jew in Modernity: Exegesis and Ethnography in Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süss / Galit Hasan-Rokem
8. Exclusion and Inclusion: Ethnography of War in Kriegsgefangene (1916) and Das Ostjüdische Antlitz (1920) / Eva Edelmann-Ohler
9. Avant-Garde Authenticity: Ethnography and Identity in Moï Ver’s Photobook Ein Ghetto im Osten / Samuel Spinner
Part 3: Spaces of Jewish Ethnography between Diaspora and Nation
10. Zionism’s Ethnographic Knowledge: Leo Motzkin’s and Heinrich York-Steiner’s Narratives of Palestine (1898-1904) / Alexander Alon
11. Eastern Europe in Argentina: Yiddish Travelogues and the Exploration of Jewish Diaspora / Tamar Lewinsky
Part 4: Politics and the Addressee of Ethnography
12. From Custom Book to Folk Culture: Minhag and the Roots of Jewish Ethnography / Nathaniel Deutsch
13. In Search of the Exotic: "Jewish Houses" and Synagogues in Russian Travel Notes / Alla Sokolova
14. Ballads of Strangers: Constructing "Ethnographic Moments" in Jewish Folklore / Dani Schrire
Appendices
Note to Readers
A. What Is Jewish Ethnography? (Handbook for Fieldworkers) / Naftoli Vaynig and Kha
