Invention of a Vanished World Photographs of Traditional Jewish Life in the Russian Pale of Settlement

Abstract

The article explores the tradition and making of ethnographic photography of the East European Jews in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century. In the early Twentieth century in particular, Jewish ethnography identified and established religious Jews as national Jews. Ethnographic photography was part of a general trend among secular Jewish intellectuals to gather the remnants of the Jewish past in order to give rise to a Jewish historical awareness. Research into the history of photography of religious Jews in the Russian Empire thus affects the topic of Jewish nationalism, historiography, ethnography and the modem search for Jewish identity. It connects also to Russian Jewish art history, the primitivism of the Russian avant-garde and its sources in nineteenth century realism. The tradition of the photographs was strongly affected by the vicissitudes of Russian and Soviet history in the twentieth century, and almost as significantly by the modes and practices of scientific treatment of photographs in historical sciences. A new and careful approach to the rich variety of ethnographic photographs of Jews will thus enhance a new reading and understanding of those sources. This methodological innovation has already been applied very successfully to the historical understanding of Jewish literature from this period. A translation of those findings into visual culture is overdue.