Writing Jewish Culture

Description

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.

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 Khayim Khayes, Translated by Jordan Finkin
B. Research Your Shtetl / H. Aleksandrov, Translated by Jordan Finkin
C. "A Strange Experience" / A. Almi, Translated by Gabriella Safran
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• European Studies
• Ethnic Studies
• Literary Criticism
• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• Diáspora
• Judaísmo
• Jews
• Travel
• Ethnography
• Judaism
• Anthropology
• Études européennes
• Cultural Studies
• History
• Diaspora
• Judaïsme

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253019646
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WRITING JEWISH CULTURE
WRITING
Jewish
CULTURE
PARADOXES IN ETHNOGRAPHY

EDITED BY ANDREAS KILCHER AND GABRIELLA SAFRAN
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Writing Jewish culture : paradoxes in ethnography / edited by Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran.
pages cm
Selected papers presented at a conference titled Jewish ethnography between science and literature held in Zurich (Switzerland) in September 2013.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01962-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01958-5 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01964-6 (ebook) 1. Jews-Europe, Eastern-Social life and customs-Congresses. 2. Jews-Social life and customs-Congresses. 3. Jewish folklorists-Europe, Eastern-Congresses. 4. Folk literature, Yiddish-Congresses. 5. Jewish folk literature-Congresses. 6. Ethnology-Europe, Eastern-Congresses. 7. Europe, Eastern-Ethnic relations-Congresses. I. Kilcher, Andreas B., 1963-editor. II. Weissberg, Liliane. The voice of a native informer: Salomon Maimon describes life in Polish Lithuania. Container of (work):
DS135.E83W75 2016
305.892 4047-dc23
2015033420
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
To our families
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
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 Leon Feuchtwanger s Jud S ss / Galit Hasan-Rokem
8. Exclusion and Inclusion: Ethnography of War in Kriegsgefangene (1916) and Das ostj dische Antlitz (1920) / Eva Edelmann-Ohler
9. Avant-Garde Authenticity: M. Vorobeichic s Photographic Modernism and the East European Jew / 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
APPENDIXES
Note to Readers
Appendix A. What Is Jewish Ethnography? (Handbook for Fieldworkers) / Naftoli Vaynig and Khayim Khayes, Translated by Jordan Finkin
Appendix B. Research Your Shtetl! / H. Aleksandrov, Translated by Jordan Finkin
Appendix C. A Strange Experience / A. Almi, Translated by Gabriella Safran
List of Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WE ARE GRATEFUL to the contributors to this volume, who have joined us in an intellectual journey that originated with the international conference Jewish Ethnography between Science and Literature at the ETH Zurich in Fall 2013, and that has carried almost all of us beyond the borders of our scholarly comfort zones. We want to acknowledge three participants in our Zurich conference, Sasha Senderovich, Alexander Lvov, and Bernhard Tschofen, whose work is for various reasons not included here but who offered very valuable contributions to our conversation. We thank James Clifford for consulting with us and carefully reading our introduction. Raina Polivka, Janice Frisch, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, and Jenna Whittaker shepherded the manuscript through at Indiana University Press, and Joyce Rappaport copyedited it with informed precision. At Stanford, we thank the Humanities Center, which gave Andreas the possibility of spending two months in the Bay Area and working on the volume. D. Brian Kim elegantly and carefully edited and translated from Russian; Brian Tich effectively edited multiple parts of the manuscript and organized the paperwork around it. In Zurich, we thank Victoria Laszlo, who was of great help in the organization of the conference, and Jonas St helin, who was responsible for the index of the volume. Thanks go also to the Swiss National Science Foundation for the support of our Zurich conference, and to the Stanford Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Georges und Jenny Bloch Foundation, Zurich, who provided support for the volume. Finally, we thank the authors and artists we analyze, whose writings about Ashkenazic Jews continue to challenge and provoke us today.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND NAMES
As a rule we have used a modified Library of Congress transliteration style for Russian and Hebrew and YIVO style for Yiddish, but for personal names we have attempted to use the spelling that is most familiar in English (often following The YIVO Encyclopedia ). With Eastern European place names, we have strived for consistency and often settled on the Russian spellings that were familiar to our subjects.
WRITING JEWISH CULTURE
Introduction
ANDREAS KILCHER AND GABRIELLA SAFRAN
PARADOXES
Ethnography by its nature is a highly complex kind of writing. Ethnographers try to describe a culture using a specific scientific language, but they know the words they use may limit their readers understanding of that culture and betray the limitations of their own knowledge. Ethnographic writing is inevitably objective and subjective at the same time; the description of the alien reveals the self, whereas the seemingly familiar self emerges as alien and unknown. To use rhetorical and literary-critical terminology, ethnographic writing lends itself to ambivalences, contradictions, and aporias , or moments that give rise to philosophically systemic doubt. These aporias are at once epistemic -concerning the possibility of gaining knowledge-and aesthetic -concerning modes of imagination and narration, the effect of writing and art through various means of representation. Analyzing ethnographic texts consequently requires one to evaluate their success at empirical scholarly measurement and at aesthetic representation that evokes the ethnographer s experience of seeing and listening by means of drawing and storytelling in multiple media.
This constellation of scholarly and literary questions is the starting point of this volume, which concerns ethnographic writings on the Jews produced between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. When writers worked to describe Jews as a group, they produced powerful epistemic and aesthetic aporias heightened furthermore by a cultural aporia: a claim and at the same time a hesitation about the consistency of Jewish culture across time and space. Even though these writers worked at times and in places where most Jews and non-Jews perceived Jewishness as an essentially fixed, unchangeable category of identity, this ethnographic writing suggests that the notion of the Jews as a single, clearly definable people commensurate with the other peoples described in ethnographies at the time is problematic. 1 This problem might seem to contradict the expectation that ethnography permits writers to construct and claim distinct cultural identities. From the eighteenth century, European scholars who encountered unfamiliar peoples wrote ethnographies about them, describing their customs, buildings, language, economic activities, and beliefs. Writing since that period on Jewish ethnography suggests that Jews can be described in the same secular mode: that they constitute a single body, unified across space and time by customs, beliefs, language, and economic activity. However, when we take a closer look, Jewish ethnographic texts, considered as a body, reveal the fissures in these notions, which are apparent even when the focus is narrowed to the Ashkenazic Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe that from the sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries constituted the bulk of the world s Jews and are the subject of the lion s share of Jewish ethnographic writing. A case study based on some two centuries of writing about these Ashkenazic Jews reveals problems that concern