Jewish Childhood Transformed: Through the Looking Glass of Art and Visual Representation in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia

Abstract

Abstract The present article studies the thematic ways in which Jewish childhood was represented in Russian Jewish art and visual media from the 1850s to the 1930s. During this period, Russian Jewry was undergoing important transformations. It saw the establishment of a traditional model of religious life, a subsequent process of modernization and acculturation, and finally the education of the “New Jew” as part of post-Revolutionary secular culture, as well as the seeding of extreme forms of radicalization that would develop in the Soviet era. Jewish art and visual media were always a documentary means of representing collective ideals, key among which was the value associated with Jewish children’s future. The images preserved in art, photography, and print show how diligent study for boys and young men was extolled in traditional communities; this resulted in the formation of an intellectual elite that served as a bulwark of religious and spiritual self-consciousness against outside cultural influences. Along with historical-statistical studies and memoirs, these images recreate a psycho-emotional and social background for the traditional model of children’s education. On the one hand, this model perpetuated the lifestyle and values established over the centuries, yet on the other, it sparked charges of anachronism and fanaticism, which intensified the antagonism of Russian society toward its Jewish minority. The same model proved to be extremely influential for the Jewish masses; it came by its iconic visual representation in various “Cheder” compositions and portraits of the “Talmudist Iluy.” Both types of works brought out the value of religious education. Later artistic depictions demonstrated that upon passing through the grinder of the Soviet atheist system, this model inspired the zeal that Jews had for secular education and the prospect of their children’s being granted equal opportunity, resulting in the loss of their ethno-cultural identity in the new Soviet reality.