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Research Articles

Yiddish-Language World History and the Emergence of a Jewish Nationalist Politics in Late Imperial Russia

Pages 78-94 | Published online: 02 Sep 2020
 

ABSTRACT

Scholars have long posited a connection between the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness and the “new Jewish politics” of the period 1881–1917. They have largely neglected, however, the many popular Yiddish-language histories that appeared during this time. These popular histories – nearly all of them printed in Warsaw and dedicated to the topic of “world history” – were sold in the first decade of the twentieth century by newly established Yiddish publishing houses and were heavily advertised in the burgeoning Yiddish daily press. I argue that the narratives of cultural work presented in this genre of history provided a conceptual infrastructure for the eventual articulation of a Jewish mass politics in the post-1905 era. Moving beyond the textual analysis of canonical (Russian and Hebrew-language) historical literature reveals the discourses and practices that enabled Yiddish-speakers in the rapidly urbanizing Pale to imagine the Jewish nation as a coherent historical agent.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of this special issue for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article and to Malachi Hacohen for his sustained engagement with this piece and my scholarly work as a whole. I am also thankful for Mustafa Tuna's feedback on the initial draft of this article, as well as for Colin Bos's criticisms and suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank the Duke Center for Jewish Studies for their generous support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Thomas R. Prendergast is a PhD Candidate in History at Duke University and, beginning in 2021, a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research explores the intellectual and legal history of East Central Europe from a global and Jewish perspective, specifically the formative role this region played in shaping modern concepts of imperialism, federalism, internationalism, and decolonization. Articles based on his research have appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals. From 2017 to 2018, he was a Fulbright Junior Visiting Fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna, Austria.

Notes

1 Israel Bartal saw the decades immediately following 1881 as a critical period for the “modernization” of Jews in the Russian Empire and tied this development to the emergence of a new “historical consciousness.” See Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881, 7–9. Shmuel Feiner and Antony Polonsky share similar views on the interconnectedness of historicism and Jewish (diaspora) nationalism after 1881. See Haskalah and History, 345–28; and Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Vol. 2, 37–8.

2 In a 1948 article, Koppel Pinson credited Dubnow with raising “the historiography of East European Jews to a scientific level comparable to the standards of the science of Judaism in Germany,” and argued that he “inherited the mantle of Heinrich Graetz as the Jewish national historian.” Pinson, “The National Theories of Simon Dubnow,” 335–58.

3 In a journal entry from 1916, Dubnow wrote: “I build and rebuild the Temple of Historiography and pray in it in holy silence.” Quoted in Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 93.

4 Benjamin Nathans, “On Russian Jewish Historiography,” 411.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Gechtman, “Creating a Historical Narrative for a Spiritual Nation,” 98–124.

8 In his 1891 Russian-language manifesto “On the Study of the History of Russian Jews,” Dubnow stated that the primary objective of Russian-Jewish historiography should be the construction of what we would call today a usable past for the Jewish people. For more on Jewish attempts to find a “usable past,” see Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past.

9 Moss, “At Home in Late Imperial Russian Modernity—Except When They Weren’t,” 402.

10 While it is true that proficiency in the Russian language continued to increase among Russian Jews during this period, only a small minority spoke Russian as their native tongue. Of the 210,000 Jews living in Warsaw in 1894, 176,000 spoke Yiddish, 29,000 spoke Polish, and 4,500 spoke Russian. For more on language and literacy in late imperial Warsaw see Corsin, “Language Use in Cultural and Political Change in Pre-1914 Warsaw,” 69–90. For more on the limited Hebrew literacy of Russian Jews during roughly this period, see Moss, “Bringing Culture to the Nation,” 282.

11 Moss, “At Home in Late Imperial Russian Modernity,” 402.

12 Moss, “At Home in Late Imperial Russian Modernity,” 441.

13 Feiner, Haskalah and History, 4. In Feiner’s view, Jewish historiography evolved gradually over the past two and a half centuries. The traditional “sacred histories” of the early modern period gave way, beginning in the late eighteenth century, to the secular, humanistic historical works of the maskilim, out of which eventually emerged, in turn, the nationalist histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

14 Simon Dubnow’s A General History of the Jews (Vseobshchaia istoriiaevreev) was published in 1896. A Yiddish translation did not appear until 1915–1917. His multivolume World History of the Jewish People was published between 1925 and 1930.

15 “World History” is the term used by almost all the Yiddish authors cited below. It represents, for the purposes of this article, a discursive, rather than an analytical, category. For more on the history of “world history,” see Conrad, What is Global History? 17–36.

16 Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, 1.

17 See Madison, Yiddish Literature, 20; and “Literature of the Enlightenment,” 24–8.

18 Resser, Ayne ḳurtse allgemayne ṿelṭ-geshikhṭe. The intended audience of this bilingual book, the author states, is schoolchildren. See also Greenbaum, “The Beginnings of Jewish Historiography in Russia,” 99–105.

19 In a later reflection on the year 1881, Simon Dubnow described the skepticism with which the Russian Jewish intelligentsia viewed Yiddish at that time. See Madison, Yiddish, 31–2.

20 Warsaw and Łódź represented the third and fifth largest cities in the Russian Empire, respectively, in 1897, the year of the first (and only) imperial census. It is estimated that 34% of the population of Warsaw in 1900 was Jewish, and 32% of the population of Łódź. See Letschinsky, “The Jews in the Cities of the Republic of Poland,” 165–6.

21 Fishman, Rise of Yiddish, 19–20.

22 Wisse, “Der Yud.”

23 For a chronology of milestones in Jewish publishing, see Prager, Yiddish Literary and Linguistic Periodicals and Miscellanies, 205–8.

24 Moss, “Ahi’asaf.”

25 Due to the outbreak of the First World War, the Folks-universitet series, launched in 1913, remained a half-completed vision.

26 Veidlinger, Public Culture, 58–61.

27 Ibid., 100–112.

28 Ibid., 88–9.

29 Ibid., 89.

30 Ibid., 85, 89.

31 Di Khineser (Warsaw: Ferlag Idishes Tageblat, 190-?); Yapan, dos land un di befelkerung, (Warsaw: Ferlag Idishes Tageblat, 190-?). No authors could be identified.

32 Hoyz-biblioṭeḳ (Warsaw: Ferlag Yehudiah, 1913). Three volumes.

33 Haynt, October 8,1908, 1.

34 Der moment, November 21, 1910, 3.

35 הצפירה / Ha-Tsfira, April 3, 1901, 275.

36 For a representative advertisement, see המליץ / Ha-Melitz, March 26, 1901, 4. Numerous advertisements from Warsaw-based publishers were placed in Ha-Melitz and Ha-Tsfira between 1900 and 1903.

37 המצפה / Ha-Mitspeh, January 24, 1913, 7.

38 Ha-Tsfira, July 28, 1902, 4. The two works of history listed are Di Geshikhte fun der Menshlikhen Entviklung (Kultur-geshikhte) and Di Geshikhte fun Tsivilizatsye, both edited by A. Bresler.

39 Ha-Tsfira, July 28, 1902, 4.

40 Ha-Tsfira, October 19, 1904.

41 Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 180.

42 Both historical materialists and philosophical idealists subscribed, according to Harris, to an evolutionist theory of culture; see Harris, Anthropological Theory, chapter 7.

43 For more on the growing criticism of the evolutionist paradigm in fin-de-siècle European anthropology, particularly among German-speaking scholars, see Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany.

44 Bachl, Di geshikhte fun sivilizatsyon.

45 See Iggers and Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography, 137–8.

46 Bresler, ed., Geshikhte fun der menshlikhen entviklung.

47 Dineson, Di Velt-geshikhte, 6–14.

48 Levin, Kultur-geshikhte, 9–11. This book formed part of the Folks-universitet series.

49 Levin, Kultur-geshikhte, 8.

50 Epshtayn, Velt-geshikhte, I. This book, like the above-cited Kultur-geshikhte, formed part of the Folks-universitet series and was originally published in 1913.

51 Levin, Kultur-geshikhte, 4.

52 Epshtayn, Velt-geshikhte, I.

53 Ibid., 8.

54 In Central European academic discourse, the dichotomy between so-called “natural” and “historical” peoples represented a widely, if not universally, accepted anthropological paradigm. For an overview of the history of these analytical categories, see Grotsch, “Naturvölker/Kulturvölker,” 635–41.

55 Dineson, Velt-geshikhte, 17.

56 Epshtayn, Velt-geshikhte II.

57 Ibid..

58 Ibid.. Epshtayn uses here the Hebrew שבטים.

59 Dineson, Velt-geshikhte, 16.

60 Krantz, Di Kultur-geshikhte, 4. This book was advertised and available in Warsaw.

61 Perhaps the best account of Jewish politics in Poland during this period is Joshua Zimmerman’s 2004 Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality. Zimmerman’s book offers an examination of the complex, and often antagonistic, relationship between the General Jewish Labor Bund and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).

62 Veidlinger, Public Culture, 1.

63 As David Fishman has shown, the development of Yiddish-language literature developed independently from the Bund are other organized political parties, although these parties certainly contributed to its growth. David E. Fishman, “The Bund and Modern Yiddish Culture,” 109. It is true that certain of the authors discussed above were committed socialists who refused to endorse Zionism and diasporic nationalism and regarded Yiddish simply as a medium through which to educate the urban proletariat. The New York-based Philip Krantz, for example, believed in the necessity of Jewish assimilation into English-language American culture. The argument of this article, however, is that the intentions of these authors matter less than the concepts employed in these popular books, the theory of historical agency presented in them, and the fact of their wide diffusion in Polish cities. Socialist internationalism, it should also be noted, did not, as the term itself indicates, entail the complete rejection of nation-centric political organizing, and in fact was thought, by some, to be advanced by the national awakening of historically oppressed groups. For more on Krantz, socialism, and Jewish nationalism, see Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, esp. 21–23, 194, 211.

64 Krantz, Kultur-geshikhte, 4.

65 “Tsum leser,” Folks-universitet, v.1, Naturvisenshaft (Warsaw: Tog Oysgabe, 1920), II. Originally published in 1913 by Ferlag Yehudiyah, Warsaw.

66 Nathaniel Wood, Becoming Metropolitan.

67 Robert Blobaum, review of Wood, Becoming Metropolitan, 633–4.

68 Ury, Barricades and Banners, 3.

69 Ury, Barricades and Banners, 12.

70 In 1906, the Russian Zionist Congress introduced the concept of Gegenwartsarbeit to the party’s platform. Zionists thus committed to improving the economic, social, and cultural position of Jews in the diaspora and indirectly endorsed a kind of autonomism not unlike that advanced by the Bund and Folkists. The concept of Kultur-arbet/Kulturarbeit played a prominent role at the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz, and by the second decade of the twentieth century it had become a key organizing principle of Zionists. Moses Feldstein, a Zionist from Warsaw and later member of the city’s Kehillah, published, for example, an article on the importance of cultural work in 1914. See Feldstein, “Jüdische Kulturarbeit in Palästina,” 512.

71 For more on historicism in the Russian public sphere, see Plokhy, The Cossack Myth; for a classic philosophical and historical investigation into the historicization of human thinking in the modern era, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, esp. chapter 1.

72 Dineson, Kultur-geshikhte, 3.

73 Levin, Kultur-geshikhte, 3.

74 Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte. Translated as Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'état and its Place in Modern History.

75 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 15.

76 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 41.

77 On the relationship between experience and expectation in modern historical temporality, see Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectations’,” 267–88.

78 Ury, Barricades and Banners, 4.

79 Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity.

80 White, Metahistory.

81 See Geyer and Bright, “World History in a Global Age”; and Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 902–3. Osterhammel describes the long nineteenth century as an “age of increased self-reflection,” during which “grandiose attempts were made to grasp the whole of the contemporary world and to place it within the historical longue durée.”

82 On the simultaneous emergence of nationalist and global historical consciousness during this period, see Conrad, Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany, 61.

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