INTRODUCTION

This essay describes the circumstances in which Jewish ethnography and folkloristics came into being during the period between the anti-Jewish violence of 1881 and the commencement of the First World War and examines the philosophical and ideological dimensions of early Jewish folkloric and ethnographic studies. As part of the “new Jewish politics,” historical studies, folkloristics and ethnography became important tools for cultural revival and preservation. In turning to these modes of cultural self-description, Jews borrowed from other national minorities among whom they lived, such as Poles, as well as Russian populists and Slavophiles who all had differing purposes in turning to the culture of the “people.” Ultimately, for the secular Jews who pioneered a movement to study and preserve the popular aspect of East European Jewish culture and history, most of whom had left homes of traditional upbringing, it was disappointment with the failures of social integration in late imperial Russia that led them to an awareness of the uses of popular culture as a path to greater national consciousness.

POLISH POSITIVISM AND I. L. PERETZ

In the late nineteenth century, as Russian folklorists and ethnographers scrambled to document peasant culture before it disappeared, a few Jewish intellectuals realized that Eastern European Jewish culture was similarly in jeopardy.^[1]Like their Russian and European predecessors, these individuals recognized the potential for Jewish folklore and cultural history to facilitate cultural and therefore national revival. This awakening of interest culminated in the creation of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic society, with Semen Ansky (1863-1920) arguing in his seminal essay “Jewish Ethnopoetics” that folklore must be collected from its natural setting and preserved, as it is the spiritual expression of the Jewish people.^[2]Having previously studied both Russian and French folklore, Ansky was conscious of how far behind the Jews were in their own ethnographic task, compared to their Russian and European counterparts. In “Jewish Ethnopoetics,” Ansky chastised his fellow Jews for lacking, “even minimal aspiration and awareness to explore the folkloric perception of the world, and the faith in the national singularity of the Jewish people.”^[3]Although Ansky’s unhappiness with the contemporary state of Jewish ethnography may have been justified in comparison to European and Russian ethnography, he failed to appreciate the rapidity with which the Jewish discipline had by then developed.
The publication of Isaac Leib Peretz’s (1852-1915) “Monish” in 1888, marked a positive turning point in Jewish attitudes to folklore, and inspired a neo-romantic literary and non-literary interest in the subject.^[4]“Monish,” a mock-epic poem, was Peretz’s Yiddish literary debut, and in it a pious boy succumbs to the seductions of Lilith, which is meant to depict not only the sexual desires of youth, but also to symbolize the attraction of Christian culture.^[5]Peretz later drew a parallel between his own attraction as a young man to a study full of European books to the urges of his character Monish. As Peretz stated in his memoirs, “It was knowledge that summoned me. All I had learned told me not to go, but as with Monish, the evil inclination prevailed.”^[6]The motif of “Monish” was particularly appropriate for Peretz’s Yiddish debut, as Peretz’s earliest writings were Polish poems, he read Polish literature and the Polish-Jewish press, and first discovered Yiddish literature in Polish translations. Peretz initially aspired not only to be a Polish-Jewish writer, but to be a part of the liberal society that Polish intellectuals were advocating, and like many Jewish intellectuals in Poland who embraced the tenets of the Haskalah (“Jewish Enlightenment”), was particularly attracted to Polish positivism.
The Polish positivist program was systematically articulated after the unsuccessful Polish uprising against Russia in 1863 and Prussia’s defeat of France in 1870-1871 quashed any hope of foreign intervention on behalf of Polish national aspirations. Borrowing from the “positive philosophy” of the French philosopher August Comte, positivism became a broad nineteenth-century intellectual movement, which critics generally reduced to an attempt to discuss human behaviour using analogies drawn from the natural sciences.^[7]Despite the French origins of the title, Polish positivism (known alternatively as Warsaw positivism) was closer in articulation to a combination of Darwinian evolution and the utilitarian philosophies of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, than to Comtian philosophy. The failed Polish uprising had led to widespread disillusionment with romanticism in both its literary and political forms, and many Polish intellectuals turned to science as an alternative lens through which to view the Polish national struggle.^[8] Polish positivists searched for analogies between human societies and biological evolution, and as such tended to reject theories proposing revolutionary change in favour of those supporting organic growth. Where the movement was characteristically Comtian was in its optimistic outlook, as Polish positivists reacted against the tragic misfortunes of their national past.^[9]
Articles on the “Jewish question” which began to appear in the Polish positivist press in 1872 painted the Jews as socially uncivilized and economically parasitic, although the blame for this condition was placed on continued discrimination – namely that Jews had still not been granted citizenship – and not on the Jews themselves. Despite the paternalistic tone of these articles, positivists advocated removing social barriers between Poles and Jews through education, and legal barriers through reform (the positivist program for the Jews largely mimicked their program for the peasantry). The positivists’ best known figure was the editor of Prawda, Aleksander Swietochowski (1849-1939) whose newspaper’s program called for “enlightened Jews” to actively participate in ending their separatism.^[10]
With the positivists’ regular condemnation of anti-Semitism at a time when tolerance of the Jews was decreasing, it is not difficult to see why many in the Jewish intelligentsia were drawn to this movement. In particular, the Jewish financial and industrial elites in Warsaw, who were already largely acculturated into Polish society, enthusiastically supported the positivist program. The assimilationism called for by the Polish positivists and their leader Swietochowski was largely adopted by the Polonized Jewish intelligentsia, and is best exemplified by the liberal Polish-language Jewish newspaper Izraelita, founded in 1866 to promote the philosophy of the assimilationist Jews and positivists. This publication identified openly with the positivists, attacked Jewish religious conservatism and “separatism,” and viewed the continued use of Yiddish and the existence of religious schools as obscurantist.^[11]
What began as Polish initiatives for Jewish assimilation in the 1860s, however, was later transformed into outright anti-Semitism, ranging from written attacks on Jewish religious custom to supposed economic arguments attacking Jews. The anti-Jewish disturbances which occurred throughout the Tsarist Empire in December 1881 did not leave Poland unscathed. Although encouraged by the tsarist police in Warsaw, and condemned by many elements of Polish society, the violence still badly damaged Jewish hopes of integration as an achievable goal. Polish-Jewish relations changed after 1881, and in particular, the attitudes of the positivists were shaped by increasing anger at Russian occupation, the perceived adverse effects of socioeconomic changes and rising anti-Semitism among the Polish population.^[12]
As the much hoped for liberal society never became a reality, and many of the Polish positivist proponents of Jewish integration were scared into anti-Semitism in the latter half of the nineteenth century by the very successes and scale of Jewish acculturation, the disappointments of positivism came to shape I. L. Peretz’s literary career. Thus, although Peretz began his forays into Jewish cultural study mainly for the benefit of Polish Christians, he eventually came to the conclusion that Jewish culture should rather be employed in creating the foundations of a secular Yiddish culture from which Jews could base their national aspirations. The Poles themselves provided a model for Peretz, as throughout his life the Polish intellectuals pursued their national aspirations through language and culture in the absence of political sovereignty.^[13]
Peretz first became involved in an amateurish sort of ethnography in 1890, when he was hired by the wealthy Jewish convert to Christianity, Jan Bloch,^[14] to participate in researching the condition of Jews in the small towns of Poland. After Peretz was arbitrarily disbarred by the tsarist government in 1888, and deprived of his primary source of income as a lawyer, his close friend Nahum Sokolow (1859-1936) helped him obtain employment with Bloch.^[15]The purpose of Bloch’s project was to gather evidence to counter anti-Semitic accusations of Jewish parasitism and draft evasion. As a result of his work for Bloch, Peretz produced his Bilder fun a provints rayze, or Rayzebilder which were sketches in Yiddish of the living conditions of Jews in the small towns around Peretz’s native Zamość, as described through the medium of a fictional narrator.^[16]
Peretz’s modern treatments of traditional Jewish life and its contemporary challenges, in both “Monish” and his Rayzebilder helped him become the dominant cultural figure of Polish Jewry. Although the tone of Peretz’s writing changed over time, becoming progressively more hostile to Jewish assimilation, he continually gave the impression, as Ruth Wisse states, that “a natural transition was possible from the religious, small-town communal life of the past to the secular individual strivings of young Jews in the cities.”^[17] Peretz’s interest in folklore stemmed not nearly as much from the experiences of his traditional Jewish upbringing as from his contacts with Poles and Polonized Jews at Wisła, a positivist “ethnographic-geographic” journal founded in Warsaw in 1889. Wisła provided cultural analysis and folkloristic studies relating primarily to peoples of Polish territories, and implicit in Wisła’s agenda was an attempt to legitimize Polish political and national aspirations by first legitimizing (or actually creating) a Polish national culture. Despite his disillusionment with Polish positivism, through Wisła, Peretz was evidently influenced by European ideas relating to the national uses of folklore. For example, Peretz used the German term Bildung to represent the idea of cultural education for a new Jewish way of life. Bildung as Peretz saw it, was an accommodation meant to introduce Jews to European thought while simultaneously preserving Jewish culture.^[18]
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, even the highly assimilationist Polish-Jewish press began to awaken to the idea that Jewish folk culture could serve an internal Jewish purpose, and the positivist tribune of Polonized Jewry, Izraelita, employed Regina Lilienthal, who later became prominent in both Jewish and Polish folkloristics.^[19] Although initially Izraelita, according to Stanislaus Blejwas, “in general, combated everything that symbolized the separateness of the Jewish masses,”^[20] the journal became receptive to Jewish folklore after Nahum Sokolow became its editor in 1896. With the rise of the Yiddish press in Warsaw following the increased freedoms granted by the Tsar’s Manifesto of October 1905, Izraelita reacted with fear to the power of the emerging Yiddish nationalism and returned to a more staunchly integrationist position.^[21] For a short period around the turn of the century however, even Izraelita was sympathetic to the increasing popularity of “the new Jewish politics.” This new, more sympathetic understanding of both the Yiddish language, and Jewish folk life, eventually culminated in the presentation on the pages of Izraelita of a national Jewish folkloristic program by Henryk Lucjan Kohn in 1901.^[22] Ironically it is on the pages of the positivist Jewish press that Kohn chastised his Polonized Jewish colleagues for being completely detached from Jewish culture, and therefore having also “lost every spiritual connection with the countless multitudes.” Kohn addressed those people who debate the existence of Jewish ethnopoetry, arguing that the Herderian idea that folk poetry is a collective expression of the Volk, applies to Jewish folk-songs:

“And although refined aesthetes, brought up on the fruits of modern decadence contemptuously shake their heads, not believing that in the harsh dissonance of the zhargon [Yiddish], a work of art could ever take shape – as long as the many millions of the nation will live, and… its heart does not lose the capacity for sincere response to the joyful laughter of happiness and the burning tears of suffering, the folk song – the child of the nation – does not subside…
And certainly, if not everyone wants to recognize the existence of a self-contained Jewish communal poetry, it is because there will always be people, who [by nature] do not find the evidence to see a miracle or to hear words of revelation…”^[23]
Kohn exemplifies the kind of dramatic realization which came over many Jewish positivists. After years of arguing that Jews must transform themselves into Poles of the Mosaic faith, many such as Kohn experienced an epiphany convincing them that the Jews may actually be a nation after all. Furthermore, Kohn considered the reluctance of Jewish intellectuals to see Jewish folk-songs as ethnopoetry to be a result of their “modern decadence” and concern only for non-Jewish art and culture. Kohn felt compelled to point out to Polonized Jewry what he considered obvious, that the continued existence of Jewish folk culture was living proof of Jewish nationality, and he challenged acculturated Polish Jews to discover this fact for themselves: “Run to the garret, descend to the basements, look in the workshops and ateliers, and you will realize that the Jewish people – those trading, abject, poor, people – have always a song on the lips.”^[24]
Like the emergence of modern Jewish historiography among the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jewish folkloristics similarly began precipitously out of efforts towards assimilation, before eventually becoming an important cultural component of a reformulated Jewish identity.^[25] In comparison to their Polish peers, the Jewish intelligentsia in Warsaw showed little interest in their own folklore before Peretz, and when they did, its presentation was primarily for a Polish audience. What Peretz learned from reading Wisła and other Polish publications was that a subjected minority could use folklore to express its national ambitions, and came to believe that Jewish folklore could be both a source of modern national pride and a means of preserving tradition. Peretz attempted to impress on his followers the need to collect ordinary Jewish folk materials, including stories, songs and sayings. The idea that Jewish folksongs were a commodity valuable enough to bother collecting and recording was almost incomprehensible at the time.^[26] Around the turn of the century, after he had collected enough material, Peretz adapted the folk motifs in creating a new Yiddish literary form, folkstimlekhe geshikhtn – stories in a folk manner.
Mark Kiel argues convincingly that although Jewish folkloristics may have existed before Peretz’s contribution, it suffered from a lack of respect. Indeed it is evident that what existed of Jewish folkloristics before Peretz was intended either for external consumption, was derisive, or aimed at promoting a maskilic integrationist agenda.^[27] Although Peretz himself had left traditional observance to become a secular Jew, and was initially attracted to the Haskalah, he achieved the status of a heroic figure by fostering pride in Jewish Diaspora culture. As Peretz himself surmised, “I crossed the threshold of the Enlightenment – but, I didn’t sink into its quagmire!”^[28] By hailing Jewish folklore, calling for its collection, and promoting it in Jewish languages, Peretz represents the first genuine attempt at creating a Jewish Volkskunde – an internally oriented celebration of folk culture, for national reasons.

LAVROV, ANSKY AND THE POPULIST ORIGINS OF JEWISH ETHNOGRAPHY IN RUSSIA

Soon after Peretz’s creation of folkstimlikhe geshikhtn, another Jewish intellectual, a Russian populist who went by the pseudonym Semen Ansky (1863-1920), similarly drew himself back from enlightenment to immerse himself in the popular culture of East European Jewry. Ansky is best known as the author of the famous folklore-inspired play The Dybbuk, and the hymn “Di Shvue” (“The Oath”), adopted as the anthem of the Bund. Ansky credited Peretz with initiating his interest in Jewish folklore, as reading Peretz’s Collected Works in 1901 provided Ansky with the impetus to write in Yiddish again after a twenty year hiatus.^[29]Ansky rather literally carried on Peretz’s work, as for one of his early Jewish literary efforts Ansky wrote his own satirical sequel to “Monish” in 1904 called “Ashmeday.”^[30]Ansky devoted the final twelve years of his life to the study and collection of folklore and conducted a number of ethnographic expeditions between 1911 and 1914 under the auspices of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society. Whereas Peretz was primarily concerned with creating a cultural bedrock for East European Jewry based on folkstimlikhe geshikhtn in the Yiddish language, Ansky (in addition to his literary output) was obsessed with the task of preserving as much as possible of what was left of traditional Jewish culture in Eastern Europe.
Ansky was born Shloyme Zanvl (Solomon Zainwil) Rappoport in 1863 and left his traditionally observant Jewish home in Vitebsk at the age of seventeen to spread the views of the Haskalah among the shtetl Jews of the Russian Pale of Settlement.^[31] Sometime after leaving home, Rappoport became a narodnik, joining the “going to the people” movement, and living among the Russian peasants. He worked as a teacher and as a manual labourer among the miners of the Don Basin, and adopted the Russified first name and patronymic Semen Akimovich (as opposed to Solomon Aronovich).^[32] During his early days as a narodnik, he began to write in Russian, and on the recommendation of the Russian populist Gleb Uspensky, his essays describing peasant life – “In the Tavern,” “On the Farm,” “Pastures New,” and “Market” – were published in the populist magazine Russkoye Bogatsvo under the literary surname (derived from his mother’s name) Ansky. On the advice of Uspensky, Ansky moved to St. Petersburg to take a position at the publication, although his employment proved to be short-lived as he was forced (or possibly chose) to leave Russia in 1892. Ansky eventually made his way to Paris, the home of many Russian political émigrés, and he likely worked as a private secretary to the populist philosopher Petr Lavrov between 1896 and 1900, when Lavrov died.^[33] Following Lavrov’s death Ansky migrated to Berne, Switzerland, where he began to regain his interest in Judaism, and in the wake of the political amnesties granted after the 1905 Revolution, returned to Russia as a member of the agrarian Social-Revolutionary (SR) Party.
Although Ansky later reflected on the time he spent away from Jewish culture with contempt,^[34] one must address the influence of Russian populism on Ansky and the other individuals who spearheaded the efforts to create a serious Jewish ethnographic discipline in the early twentieth century, in order to understand the political basis for the emergence of Jewish ethnography, and in particular the creation of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society. The Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society’s founder, Simon Dubnov, was deeply influenced by populism, and its two most important ethnographic researchers – Ansky, and additionally, Lev Shternberg – were committed Russian populists. The intellectual foundations of Jewish ethnography in Russia began with Russian populism in general, and with the philosophy of Petr Lavrov in particular, a theorist who believed in the historical mission of the elites in bringing about change in the peasantry. Lavrov’s Historical Letters was one of three important “classical” populist treaties published in 1869, along with Mikhailovskii’s What is Progress?, and Flerovskii’s The Situation of the Working Class in Russia.^[35]
Lavrov and others, including Ansky, who participated in the “going to the people” movement, envisioned peasant life as preserving the true essence of justice and humanity which had been eroded by urban life. When instead of experiencing their idealized vision of a better humanity, the populists witnessed only human degradation and misery, as Richard Wortman explains, their “conceptual apparatus” was incapable of explaining the meaning of the actual conditions. According to Wortman, the rifts which developed within populist ideology were a consequence of each individual attempting to defend their own worldview by formulating a plan for what the relationship between the Russian intelligentsia and the peasantry should look like.^[36] Lavrov explained the poverty in the countryside according to what he called the “cost of progress,” and attempted to counter the Russian Hegelianism of the 1830s and 1840s, which contended that progress was an inevitable law of development, with his own philosophy of history. Lavrov proposed that “progress” would come to the peasantry not because of any inevitable functioning of history, but because of dynamic critical thinking individuals who would intervene and gradually replace traditional customs, religion and folkways with science and the rational rule of law. Walicki suggests that Lavrov wanted the populist youth to consciously consider themselves as these “critical thinking individuals,” to give the populist youth a sense of historical mission; a significant contrast to the utopian populist outlook which advocated the hegemony of the common people over the educated elite.^[37]
Lavrov’s political philosophy, in which the gradual transformation of the peasantry is central, and the intellectual elite are endowed with a special role in this process, accorded ethnography an important role in the populist struggle. As outlined in Lavrov’s Historical Letters, ethnography is the perfect combination of the historical and natural sciences. Lavrov perceived any single group’s understanding of historical questions to be altered by its own “topical concerns and present stage of development,” and as such, ethnography and anthropology provide the necessary context for historical interpretation.^[38] Echoing the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder, Lavrov stated in Historical Letters that “Consciously or unconsciously, a man applies the level of moral development which he himself has attained to the entire history of mankind.”^[39] According to Lavrov’s historical-anthropological theory, a society’s culture is a product of its environment and age, and human thought is “the only factor which humanizes social culture.”^[40] He further emphasized the importance of culture in human development, as the “only events which elucidate the history of mankind are those which elucidate the history of culture and thought in their interaction.”^[41]In addition to Lavrov’s theories, the narodniki belief that peasant communes would be the basis for any future egalitarian society in Russia, combined with sympathy for oppressed minorities who were victims of tsarism, inclined many Russian populists to the field of ethnography.^[42]
Reflective of the trend of populist inclination to cultural study and the influence of Lavrov on his intellectual development, Ansky first became interested in Russian folklore while working with miners, and in the 1890s, shortly after emigration, his belief that the social elements of national consciousness can be seen reflected in popular oral tradition led to his more serious engagement with European folklore and ethnography.^[43] Lavrov was also one of a very small number of Russian socialists to sympathize openly with the plight of the Jews, perhaps another factor explaining Ansky’s attraction to Lavrov and his philosophy. Russian socialist leaders were notable for their evasion of the issue of the mistreatment of the Jews in Russia and Lavrov was possibly the only Russian socialist leader in the nineteenth century to address the issue in a way which was not overtly anti-Semitic (although even Lavrov’s opinions were tempered by a concern not to offend the wider Russian public).^[44]Yet, while remaining sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, Lavrov later revised his position vis-а-vis “the Jewish question and socialism.” Lavrov argued in an 1894 letter to the editors of the London Yiddish-language socialist organ Der veker that although Yiddish-language propaganda is appropriate in the short-term in order to reach potential socialists for whom Yiddish is their only tongue, in the long-term, Jews (or more accurately, socialists of formerly Jewish affiliation) must acculturate linguistically with whatever their country of residence.^[45] Lavrov ardently exhorted Jews to disclaim their religio-national allegiances in favour of socialism. “For a convinced socialist the national question is eliminated in principle by the very fact that he declares himself to be a socialist.”^[46] Lavrov further expounded that because of the demands of socialist theory to both renounce national differences and cast off the yoke of archaic traditions, “a Jewish socialist… does not exist, and dare not exist.”^[47]
Ansky, like many others, came to reject Lavrov’s belief that one cannot be a “Jewish socialist,” and yet he remained a populist throughout his life, in essence, separating the wheat from the chaff in Lavrov’s philosophy. Benyamin Lukin suggests that as an émigré, both his experiences in cosmopolitan socialist circles and his work in Russian and French folklore drew Ansky to national-cultural work, but the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and the subsequent anti-Jewish violence between 1903 and 1905 aroused in him a belief in the importance of a Jewish national awakening.^[48] The writings of Peretz also played a role in Ansky’s transformation to Jewish self-consciousness. Still, as a number of scholars including Lukin, Irina Sergeeva and David Roskies have argued, when Ansky eventually returned to the Jewish cultural fold, he did so shaped by his experiences as a Russian populist.^[49] The importance of Ansky’s experiences as a narodnik in shaping his later turn to Jewish ethnography can be seen from his earliest publications. For example, Ansky’s Essays on Folk Literature published collectively in St. Petersburg in 1894, clearly enunciated the concepts which he would later apply to Jewish culture. Ansky argued in these essays that “the singular features and forms of folk life, departing as they do from cultural tendencies, may, given the right development, achieve a higher degree of perfection and give the people a social structure which is much ampler, loftier, and more rational than any cultural system.”^[50] Even after Ansky decided to devote the rest of his life to studying what Lavrov calls “the yoke of custom,” Ansky’s work remained consistent with Lavrov’s belief that the “only events which elucidate the history of mankind are those which elucidate the history of culture and thought in their interaction.”^[51] Thus, like Peretz and Polish positivism, Ansky was drawn to Russian populism out of the desire for integration, but instead, found in this ideology a model in which to approach, preserve and create Jewish culture.

THE COMPLEX POLITICS OF THE FOUNDING OF THE JEWISH HISTORICAL-ETHNOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

Jewish nationalism and Russian populism, at least according to Lavrov, were two ideologies completely at odds with one another. Nonetheless, these competing philosophies found a compromise in Simon Dubnov’s (1860-1941) ideology of autonomism. Between 1897 and 1906, Dubnov published a series of essays in the Russian-language Jewish journal Voskhod which argued that assimilationists and proponents of the Haskalah had wrongly denied the existence of Jewish nationhood and had foolhardily attempted to trade Jewish national rights for civic equality. Unlike the Zionists who shared this view of Jewish nationhood, Dubnov saw the Jewish future as remaining in Eastern Europe, and therefore advocated Jewish rights to autonomous political and cultural organization to be implemented through the reinstitution of the kahal (Jewish communal government) as a secular organ of Jewish government within the Russian state. Dubnov also founded a Jewish political party in December 1906, the Evreiskaia Narodnaia Partiia, known in Yiddish as the Yidishe Folkspartey, which aimed to achieve the autonomist goals articulated in Dubnov’s political writings.^[52] Although not the first proponent of “Diaspora nationa-lism,” Dubnov was the first to develop a collection of moderate Jewish nationalist and populist ideas into a coherent ideology. Influenced by both Russian populism and Comtian positivism, Dubnov saw human development and history as a progressive and gradual evolutionary process, both as it related to Jewish history and contemporary Russian politics.^[53]
The theoretical writings of Dubnov are exemplary of the unity of political philosophy, nationalist ideology and the study of history and folklore as it existed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Benjamin Nathans observes, Dubnov’s historiography can be understood, “as a series of dialectical responses to wide-ranging reading in the literature of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, European romantic nationalism, and Russian populism.”^[54] Following the wave of pogroms between 1881 and 1882, increased residential restrictions applying to Jews, quotas on Jewish admission to educational institutions and the liberal professions, and the expulsion of the 15,000 members of the Jewish community in Moscow from that city, Dubnov, like many others, came to believe that Jewish integration had decisively failed. For Dubnov, like Ansky, the defining moment in his turn to Jewish nationalism came with the Kishinev pogroms of 1903. The violence of the Kishinev pogrom, and in the eyes of the Jews, the government’s apparent acquiescence, impacted the politicization of Dubnov and others (to a far greater degree than the pogroms of 1881), and led to fierce criticism of the traditional Jewish communal leadership for its supposed passivity.^[55]
In his historical style Dubnov was an intellectual descendant of his mentor Heinrich Graetz, however, unlike most Wissenschaft des Judentums historians, Dubnov did not ignore the social dimensions or the importance of culture in Jewish history.^[56] According to Dubnov, “each generation creates its own culture and is itself in turn the product of the creative efforts of all past generations. A nation is not merely an aggregate of individuals, but also of successive generations, a community of the living and the dead.”^[57] Dubnov defined Judaism, as neither merely a religion or a nationality, but “a body of culture,” commenting that Judaism’s unique historical conditions which brought the life of the Jewish nation under the dominance of religion, also “converted Judaism into an all-embracing world view which encompasses religious, ethical, social, messianic, political and philosophical elements.”^[58]
Like Ansky, Dubnov owed much to his philosophical predecessors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Certainly Dubnov’s conception of the subject of Jewish history “as a living national organism” echoes both Herder and subsequent romantic nationalists.^[59] Like the romantic nationalists, Dubnov believed that historical and cultural study should have an important and overt role in national politics. For example, Dubnov argued that no matter how small, spiritually and culturally strong nations can preserve their identity, even under severe conditions of political subordination. “Social autonomy,” which Dubnov defined as the ability to order communal self-government according to historical traditions and inner needs, is the key to a spiritually and culturally strong nation.^[60] Even Dubnov’s romanticized view of the kahal closely resembled the Russian populist admiration for the peasant commune, and the Slavophile philosopher Konstantin Aksakov’s conception of the peasant mir.^[61]Unlike his positivist conception of history, in his conception of nationality Dubnov was a student of the Russian anti-positivists. Jeffrey Veidlinger argues that Dubnov borrowed nationalist ideas from Mikhailovskii and Lavrov, but Dubnov most closely echoes the position of Vladimir Soloviev, who defended national consciousness as fundamentally good, while attacking aggressive nationalism.^[62] Furthermore, Dubnov’s theory that Jews had become spiritually stronger as a result of foreign rule is similar to the Slavophile understanding of Russia’s national origins, especially according to Aksakov.^[63]
Not content as merely a passive theorist, Dubnov took active measures for the internal regeneration of the Jewish nation. In 1892, the Jewish Historical Ethnographical Committee of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia was established in St. Petersburg, comprised of a group of Jewish intellectuals – Maxim Vinaver, Vasily Berman, and Samuel Gruzenberg, as well as a group of Moscow University students – who had responded to Dubnov’s call for increased Jewish historical consciousness in his essay “On Studying the History of the Russian Jews and the Creation of a Russian-Jewish Historical Society.”^[64] The establishment of an independent Jewish historical society as proposed in this essay was prohibited by police censors, and therefore, the Society for the Promotion of Culture had to act as a substitute until after the 1905 Revolution.^[65] The kind of organization Dubnov had originally envisioned did however eventually come into being in 1908, thanks to the wealthy and influential St. Petersburg lawyer, Maxim Vinaver (1862-1926), who received government permission to set up the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, and to hold organizational meetings in his apartment on Zakharyevskaya ulitsa. The new society sponsored lectures and conferences, and inaugurated two Russian language journals, Perezhitoe, and the more important Evreiskaia Starina (until 1918, edited by Dubnov), as forums for its research.^[66]
Under the sponsorship of the new Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, Ansky began a lecture tour in 1908 to spread interest in Jewish folklore and Yiddish language in the Pale of Settlement. For Ansky, the spiritual value of Jewish folklore, and the belief that the spiritual source of Jewish nationality was being lost, brought him back to the Jewish (cultural) fold. Ansky feverishly refocused all of the energy he had previously concentrated on populism into preserving Jewish culture. Writing in 1909 to his close friend and fellow Jewish narodnik Chaim Zhitlowsky, Ansky proclaimed:

“I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to the Jewish task I consider to be paramount for the making of Jewish culture. I mean, the creation of Jewish ethnography, the collection of artefacts of Jewish folklore, etc. There is no need to explain to you how important is this task; you know only too well that nothing has been done in this field.”^[67]
From his first writings on the topic, Ansky made clear that what he intended was not Jewish ethnography for the benefit of non-Jews, but the creation of a serious Jewish Volkskunde, with all it national implications. Ansky’s first article in Evreiskaia Starina was a collection of Hebrew and Yiddish formulas found among Lithuanian Jews for warding off the evil-eye against sickness and injury.^[68] Such a publication, drawing attention to the superstitious practices of Jews, by implication rejected previous Jewish ethnographic agendas, which had primarily aimed to demonstrate the rational basis of Jewish traditions. It is likely no coincidence that Ansky’s next two articles in Evreiskaia Starina were one “About Yiddish Folksongs” followed by a collection of children’s folk songs, short tales, and prayers.^[69] In turning his attention to folk songs, Ansky was not only following the tradition of earlier Russian and German folklorists tracing back to Herder, whose book Stimmen der Völker in Liedern was hugely influential in initiating interest in the collection and publication of folklore, but was also committing himself to continuing the earlier tasks of Jewish folklore, begun by his predecessor Peretz.
The 1908 article “Jewish Ethnopoetics,” (published in Russian as “Evreskoye narodnoye tvorchestvo”) which Ansky wrote for the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society’s inaugural edition of Perezhitoe, perhaps best articulates the nationalist elements of Ansky’s Jewish ethnographic and folkloristic initiative. Ansky called upon the Jewish people (or at least its intelligentsia) to rediscover their folklore under the framework of a nationalist agenda not dissimilar from Dubnov’s call for Jews to rediscover their past. Ansky accused Jews of being completely apathetic to the fate of their culture, and drew a direct line between a lack of aspiration to explore the Jewish folkloric perception of the world, and the loss of faith in the national singularity of the Jewish people.^[70]
In “Jewish Ethnopoetics,” Ansky, like Peretz, implored Jews to collect Jewish folklore and publish existing collections, not for others, but for Jewish education, pride, and national awakening. Ansky addressed the fact that whenever Jewish folklore appears in a liberal newspaper or journal, it is mostly “intended not for ourselves but those around us, not for the sake of self-recognition, but for the sake of self-defence, from within the need to remove and to shake from the Jews that which is the stain of guilt, to deny any plot. It seems as if there are no Jews that truly need any self-recognition.”^[71] Deriding other Jews for failing to do so, Ansky declared it is “time to create Jewish ethnography!”^[72] Ansky was being perhaps unjustly critical of the people who came before him, such as Peretz and Kohn, who did previously argue that a Jewish ethnographic discipline should be created and called for the collection and publication of materials, but he was moved by his own epiphany in which he saw the onslaught of modernity wiping out what was left of pristine Jewish culture. As he rather desperately observed, “every year, even every day and days we proceed to lose most of our precious pearls of folkloric creation. The older generation, from before the cultural upheaval, withdraws from the nation taking with it to the grave the legacy of thousands of years of folkloric creation.”^[73]
Whether because of Ansky’s pleas or otherwise, Russian-Jewish intellectuals who had no previous interest in Jewish culture flocked to the new society. The most prominent example is that of Lev Shternberg (1861-1927), a Russian anthropologist who was also Jewish, who became a major contributor to the Society’s journal, Evreiskaia Starina, in addition to being a member and lecturer.^[74] Shternberg was the senior curator of Russia’s only museum of general anthropology, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, between 1901 and 1927, and was the last anthropology editor of the main Russian encyclopaedia, Brockhaus and Efron. Shternberg’s political background, like Ansky, was populist; in Shternberg’s case his populism rather directly impacted his interest in ethnography. Shternberg was arrested in the 1880s for revolutionary activities, and it was during his exile in the Sakhalin Islands that he became interested in the ethnography of the local indigenous peoples, documenting their social organization, religion, folklore and language.^[75]
Although Shternberg’s work for Evreiskaia Starina comprised only a small fraction of the corpus of his ethnographic work, Sergei Kan points out that Shternberg was unique for being one of a very small number of professional Russian ethnographers who were also Jewish, and the only one to explicitly identify himself with Judaism and Jewish causes (Kan refers to Shternberg’s interest as “philosemitism”). Shternberg also came from an observant Jewish home, and had a traditional Jewish education in a heder.^[76] According to Kan, “Shternberg’s Weltanschauung, while heavily influenced by evolutionism, also incorporated and tried to reconcile his populist socialism and his ideas about the uniqueness of Jews and Judaism.”^[77] Shternberg’s similar transition from observant Jew to Russian populist, and his shared belief with Ansky that ethnography had a role to play in building Jewish national consciousness did not prevent Ansky from chastising Shternberg in “Jewish Ethnopoetics” for wasting his time on the “wild nomads” of the “Siberian tundras” instead of the Jews. Ansky and Shternberg also disagreed on how to focus the Jewish ethnographic expedition of the Pale, which the Society began planning in 1910. Shternberg advocated a comprehensive study of Jewish physical and social anthropology, but Ansky, as the project’s primary organizer, won this debate and maintained a folkloristic emphasis throughout the several expeditions that the Society conducted.^[78]
Despite Ansky’s suggestion in “Jewish Ethnopoetics” that the task of Jewish ethnography is national-cultural, but “completely apolitical,” this distinction is not always obvious. The very belief in the necessity of a national-cultural revival in Eastern Europe was in itself a program with very specific political aims. Furthermore, even among the early advocates and practitioners of Jewish ethnography the numerous competing visions of the purpose and task of Jewish ethnography consistently reflected individual political worldview. Still, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society was that it managed to function despite the diversity of political visions represented in its membership. For example, as he did in all of his historical work, Dubnov used the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society and its publications to demonstrate that Jews had historically sought to exercise their autonomy, and therefore nationality, wherever limitations on rights did not hamper their ability to do so. This agenda was apparent as early as the first article Dubnov published in Evreiskaia Starina. “The Spoken Language of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry” aimed to prove that Jews in the sixteenth century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth spoke a dialect of Yiddish, as opposed to the Slavic languages which Avraham Harkavy and Sergei Bershadskii had previously argued.^[79] As Jeffrey Veidlinger has pointed out, Dubnov’s three volume History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times Until the Present Day, a fundamentally autonomist work of historical interpretation, was first serialized in Evreiskaia Starina, and Veidlinger further argues that as editor of the publication, Dubnov “used the journal to promote his theories of hegemonic centers and communal autonomy.”^[80] Documents collected in Evreiskaia Starina such as pinkasim (Jewish communal records) and articles on anti-Semitic government legislation reflected the benefits of Jewish cultural autonomy within the greater society in which they lived, and in doing so promoted Jewish political autonomy in Eastern Europe as the autonomist alternative to Jewish emigration.
Despite the fact that the Society operated under the intellectual guidance of populists, autonomists and nationalists, it was supported financially, materially and organizationally by the most acculturated Jews in the empire. The founding meeting of the society took place on November 16, 1908 in the Alexandrovsky Hall of the Choral Synagogue on Bolshaya Masterskaia ulitsa, a bastion of the St. Petersburg Jewish elite.^[81] At the opening meeting of the newly founded society, the best connected Jewish lawyer in the city and most important liberal Jewish leader, Maxim Vinaver reflected upon his work over the previous fifteen years of meetings with the members of the proto-historical society to discuss the materials they were collecting.^[82] “In all these explicit expressions of a way of life, so much was your own that you felt a blood relationship with them, as with a departed world, even before you realized consciously that this relationship was called ‘nationality.’ We did not debate the ‘national idea’; we felt its vigorous influence.”^[83] Vinaver evidently considered himself distinctly different from his subject matter, but nonetheless he felt that studying Jewish culture was the key to his own national identity. That Vinaver was born in a wealthy and highly assimilated urban Jewish family (Vinaver was born in Warsaw and moved to St. Petersburg) may have been a reason he felt disconnected in a way that even Ansky, who cut himself off from all things Jewish for sixteen years, did not. The Society was not only co-founded by the most influential Russian-Jewish lawyers, such as Vinaver and others, but its ethnographic activities were financially supported by the ennobled Gintsburg family. Vladimir Gintsburg even donated 10,000 rubles toward Ansky’s ethnographic expedition, which was then named in honour of his father, Baron Naftali Horace Gintsburg.^[84]
Ansky’s expedition was actually not the Gintsburg family’s first venture in Jewish ethnography. In 1884, the elder Gintsburg approached the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov about writing a complete ethnographic description of Jewish culture for a Russian readership, as Leskov had previously published a series of articles on Judaism and Jewish rituals. Between 1860 and 1880, several ethnographic depictions of Jews by Russian writers revolved around Russians attempting to answer for themselves whether or not Jews were civilized enough, or even safe enough (there existed widespread fear that Jews ritually murdered Christian children), to live among Russians. In response, Gintsburg hired an expert to convince the Russian public that Jewish ritual and custom posed no danger to either Christians or Christianity. The result was Leskov’s pseudo-ethnographic treatise Evrei v Rossii which while perhaps not a favourable description of Judaism, did at least present Jews as non-threatening. Evrei v Rossii presented similarities between Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish folklore, and even advocated the preservation of Jewish folk culture.^[85]
Ansky would later call Gintsburg’s commissioning of Leskov Jewish ethnography in “self-defence.”^[86] Indeed, the Gintsburg family members were not only advocates on behalf of Russian Jewry, but were also a powerful force working for Jewish integration into Russian society. Among their activities included funding the creation, maintenance and continual leadership of the Society for the Spreading of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (founded in 1863). Until the revolutions of 1917, the Gintsburgs dominated Jewish communal affairs and the largest Jewish philanthropic organizations, and did their best to resist the democratization of the philanthropies and communal bodies they controlled.^[87] Steven Zipperstein has argued that as a result, “a stolidly conservative leadership continued to speak for the Jews until 1917 in the eyes of both the authorities and most of Russian Jewry.”^[88] In this context, Vladimir Gintsburg’s support for Ansky’s project specifically, and the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic society generally, is emblematic of the tensions and contradictions within the Russian Jewish elite and intelligentsia at the time. But the process, in which the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society drew together individuals of varying political ideologies to work toward national, if not nationalist goals, is reflective of the turn toward organic work which resulted from the narrowing of political options in 1907.^[89] This process also represents another important fin-de-siиcle phenomenon; the widespread disillusionment with the promise of integration which spanned Jewish ideological and political divisions. As Benjamin Nathans observes, “despite relatively unfavorable conditions, the historical trajectory of Russian Jewry was profoundly shaped by aspirations for civic emancipation and social integration… Indeed, the postliberal movements that arose among Jews in fin-de-siиcle Russia cannot be fully understood without reference to their explicit self-distancing from the hopes and perils of integration.”^[90]
Perhaps the greatest contradiction spanning all participants in the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society is the fact that the operational language of the Society and the language of its publications was Russian. As Russian was the native language of only a small number of the empire’s Jews, this fact confirmed the Society’s status as one targeting the Jewish intellectual elite only.^[91] As Mark Kiel poignantly observes, “For Dubnov, folklore was a component of a new secular and nationalistic Torah. Passionately ‘for’ the people, Dubnov and the learned members of the commission were not ‘of’ the people.”^[92] Yet, the inherent paradoxes and contradictions in the program of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society did not impede its members from doing valuable work. The Society did help in the creation of a cultural foundation for a secular and national interpretation of Judaism, both in improving the historiographical corpus for later scholars, and in serving as a source of cultural inspiration for generations of Jewish writers.
Whatever the politics of its individual members, the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society was a refuge where disillusioned Jews could leave behind the ideologies that had failed them. Even those individuals who did not necessarily embrace all of the political aspects of Dubnov’s autonomism, accepted the necessity of the preservation of Jewish cultural life for the health of future Jewish national life. The first proponents of Jewish ethnography believed that by recapturing lost elements of Jewish culture and by taking specimens of a culture which they believed to be fading, they would build a frame of reference which would inform secular, not traditionally religious Judaism. Reflecting the failure of the Haskalah, the conception of the Jews as a religious community was replaced with the belief that the Jews are a nation, Volk, or narod. The populist sentiments of Dubnov, Ansky and Shternberg contributed to their sense that a unifying national culture is something to be found among the people, and also to their belief that modernity was rapidly destroying traditional culture at a popular level. It is evident that the intellectuals who created a Jewish ethnographic discipline in late imperial Russia did not do so in a vacuum. Although it is unlikely that Ansky or any of the members of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society read the works of the (rather xenophobic) Russian ethnographer Ivan Petrovich Sakharov, they certainly seemed to be heeding his call to “Remember your narodnost’ and preserve it for yourself and for your descendents.”^[93]

CONCLUSION

The decision to collect and preserve the folklore of the Jews of Eastern Europe was made by individuals with varying degrees of personal connection with their subject matter. In essence though, the Jewish ethnographic discipline – a field of study devoted to examining the folklore and popular culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe – developed whereby urban, highly acculturated Jews became anthropologists both of themselves and of their rural, traditional, and unacculturated brethren. Former positivists such as Peretz, populists such as Shternberg and Ansky, liberals such as Vinaver, and the ideologically eclectic Dubnov, similarly found in history, folkloristics and ethnography a means of forging a Jewish national identity. What they also all commonly shared was a fundamental disillusionment with the gap between the promises and reality of integration in late imperial Russia.
The Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society was founded under a two-pronged agenda: to protect against the physical destruction of Jewish historical and ethnographic records of Jewish cultural life, and to preserve this cultural foundation as the basis for Jewish national identity in Eastern Europe, in place of religious observance. The members of the Society experienced only limited success in achieving either of these two goals. Peretz, Ansky, Dubnov and others foresaw industrialization, urbanization, forced and voluntary assimilation, and even the destructive capabilities of war as the major threats to traditional Jewish cultural life. Ansky himself undertook a frenzied attempt to collect valuable Jewish artefacts in the Galician towns endangered by the violent Russian occupation during the First World War.^[94] None however, possibly imagined the magnitude of destruction which would be wrought upon all aspects of Jewish life, by both Soviet communism and Nazism. After being interrupted by the Russian civil war, the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society resumed its activities, only under the direction of Shternberg, but was closed by the Commissariat for the People’s Education in 1929.^[95] The achievements of these pioneering Jewish ethnographers must be seen both for the considerable academic and literary output they produced in a very short and historically significant period of time, and perhaps most importantly, for establishing a precedent for Jews to academically study not just their history and religion, but the totality of their popular culture.