Myths and counter-myths about Odessa’s Jewish intelligentsia during the late Tsarist period

Abstract

This paper examines the Odessa myth in the context of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. In a study of three contexts – the origins of the Russian-Jewish newspaper Rassvet; the (fictional) memoirs of Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Mendele Mocher Sforim (Solomon Abramovitch) who made Odessa their home; and the 1902 debates over schools in the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia – Horowitz discovers that for every myth, there is a counter-myth. Jewish Odessa of the nineteenth century was involved in a battle over its identity and definition. Rather than embodying a single ideological position, the Jewish intelligentsia tells a messy, complicated, and contradictory story of the development of the city and the evolution of the intelligentsia itself.

Keywords:

• Odessa
• Odessa myth
• Russian-Jewish intelligentsia
• Jewish history
• Russian history
• nineteenth-century Russia

Notes

1. Rebecca Jane, Stanton, Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 3–4.

2. Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011).

3. Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 99–100.

4. J. Schlör, “Odessa: In Search of Transnational Odessa (or ‘Odessa the Best City in the World: All about Odessa and a Great Many Jokes’),” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 2 (October 2011).

5. A similar definition of the Odessa myth can be found in Oleg Gubar and Patricia Herlihy, “The Persuasive Power of the Odessa Myth,” in Cities after the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 137–66.

6. Ibid., 139.

7. Stanton, Isaac Babel and the Self Invention, 4.

8. In this context, one might note that the latest scholarly literature on Odessa reflects the role of the city as embodying an alternative model in Russia. The literature on Odessa is extensive, but many of the works reflect the idea of Odessa as unique. For example, see works by Charles King, Alexei Hofmeister, Joachim Schlör, Jerrod Tanny, Maria Vassilikou, Matthias Stadelman, and Nicholas Iljine.

9. Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 3.

10. Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History 1794–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute/Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

11. Among famous Odessans, I refrain from mentioning musicians or artists because I concentrate on Jewish journalists, writers, and other intellectuals.

12. Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers, 36.

13. On Osip Rabinovich as a writer, see Shimon Markish, “Osip Rabinovich,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 21 (1980): 1–2.

14. For a broad study of Rassvet, see Alexander Orbach, New Voices of Russian Jewry: A Study of the Russian-Jewish Press of Odessa in the Era of the Great Reforms, 1860–1871 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980).

15. I. Sosis, “Period obruseniia: natsional’nyi vopros v literature v kontse 60-kh godov i nachala 70–kh godov,” Evreiskaia starina 2 (Apr.-June 1915): 144.

16. O. R., “I skazal Bog: da budet svet!,” Rassvet 27 (May 1, 1860): 1.

17. O. R., “Poslednii god,” Rassvet 45 (March 31, 1861): 715.

18. S. M. Gintsburg, Minuvshee: istoricheskie ocherki, stat’i i kharakteristiki (Petrograd, 1923), 88.

19. John Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 359. A similar tale of optimism and pessimism from the history of the Jewish press of Odessa is offered in the example of Day (Den’), a weekly Jewish paper in Russian. That appeared from 1870 to 1871. The two editors, Il’ia Orshanskii and Menashe (Mikhail) Morgulis, viewed themselves as carrying the unfulfilled mantel of Rassvet (and the proceeding paper Sion, 1861–62). The editors were convinced that a receptive audience for a message about reforms existed and that the best way to fight “ignorance and backwardness” was to insist on absolute truthfulness. They too found that there was no group in Russian society – not Jews, government officials, or Russian society–that supported Jewish emancipation and closed after the pogroms of 1871 in Odessa.

20. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa, 5.

21. For a discussion of Jewish memoirs, see Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–36; also Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 3–17.

22. Moshe Leib Lillienblum, “Sins of My Youth,” in The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, ed. Lucy Dawidowicz (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 125.

23. Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Hatot Neurim, quoted in Leon Simon, Moshe Leib Lilienblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912).

24. Ibid., 13–4.

25. Mendele Mocher Sforim (Abramovitch), Of Bygone Days, in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. Ruth R. Wisse (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 249–358. The original Yiddish can be found in the Jubilee edition of Ale verk (Warsaw: Ferlag Mendele, 1911–1913).

26. Ibid., 267. Translated by Raymond P. Sheindlin.

27. Ibid., 282–83. Translated by Raymond P. Sheindlin.

28. Joseph Goldstein, “Some Sociological Aspects of the Russian Zionist Movement at its Inception,” Jewish Social Studies 47, 2 (1985): 167.

29. For a short biography and abbreviated bibliography of Leo Pinsker, see Evyatar Friesel, “Lev and Simhah Pinsker,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2: 1362–3.

30. Steven Zipperstein, “Representations of Leadership (and Failure) in Russian Zionism: Picturing Leon Pinsker,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, eds. Jehuda Reinharz & Anita Shapira (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 191–210.

31. For a history of the Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment, see Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 42–55.

32. In his book Alexis Hofmeister treats the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment in Odessa in detail. See Selbstorganisation und Bürgerlichkeit: Jüdisches Vereinswesen in Odessa um 1900, Schriften des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts, Band 8, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).

33. Shlomo Almog, Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness (New York, 1987), 84–100; David Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford, 1982), 190–98; and Itzhak Maor, Sionistskoe dvizhenie v Rossii, trans. O. Mints (Jerusalem, 1977), 108–17.

34. Among them, Dubnov, the Jewish historian and theorist, was the only non-Zionist.

35. Ezhenedel’naia khronika Voskhoda, 1, 6 (January 1902): 12.

36. Ibid., 15.

37. Ibid.

38. “Mnenie komiteta odesskogo otdeleniia Obshchestva rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia o evreiskoi narodnoi shkole,” Ezhenedel’naia nedelia Voskhoda 16 (19 April 1902): 6.

39. “Po povodu vybora v obshchstve prosveshcheniia, Budushchnost’ 2 (11 January 1902): 22.

40. One may recall that my examples belong to the nineteenth century (and two years into the twentieth century), before Isaac Babel endowed the myth with his own imagery and before the Soviet Union appeared to complicate the Odessa story further. Jarrod Tanny treats the Soviet period of the Odessa myth in detail. See City of Rogues and Schnorrers, 131–72.

41. For definitions of the Russian intelligentsia see M. Raeff, “Russian Intellectual History and its Historiography,” Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte 25 (1978): 169–93.

42. The Vekhi (Landmarks) debate in 1909–1910 was a sign in Russia of the break-up of any unified intelligentsia. Similar signs, such as the break-up of the Jewish People’s Party, could be identified as harbingers of the Jewish intelligentsia’s divisions.