Arnold in Aysheshok, Schiller in Shnipishok: Imperatives of “Culture” in East European Jewish Nationalism and Socialism

Abstract

When the February Revolution of 1917 unfettered public life across the Russian Empire, hundreds of thousands threw themselves into activism on behalf of numerous, conflicting visions of political, social, and cultural transformation. Although histories of the Russian Revolution still resonate with tropes of 1917 as rupture, most of these activists initially greeted February as a chance to realize programs born well before 1917, in the decades preceding the Revolution. Among the divided multitude of whom this was true was twenty-two-year-old Natan Bistritsky. Raised in a small, heavily Jewish town in the Ukraine and vouchsafed a traditional Jewish education, Bistritsky had broken with the world of Eastern Europe’s distinctive pietistic Judaism as an adolescent. He embraced instead two closely linked, self-consciously modern ideals: Jewish political nationalism and a secular nationalist vision of Jewish cultural reformation. Now, first in Moscow and then, by early 1918, in Kiev, he worked for Russia’s resurgent Zionist movement and for a Hebraist cultural movement that sought to create a modern Hebrew-language culture and transform Russia’s variegated Jewish population into a nation of secular Hebrews. Bistritsky—he would later assume a Hebrew name, Agmon, as the culmination of his own Hebraist self-transformation—was charged with bringing these ideals to the swelling Jewish populations of these metropoles, where small, Russified Jewish bourgeoisies were now swamped by tens of thousands of Jewish war refugees and