Jewish Culture as a Political Religion in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes NOTES 1. For example, Nora Levin refers to the “bleak history of Soviet Yiddish Culture,” in Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 216. 2. Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 3. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Also noteworthy in this respect are Katerina Clark, Petersbourg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000). 4. On the presence of Jesus in the most disenchanted expressive chords of Soviet promotion and propaganda, see Jay Bergman, “The Image of Jesus in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The Case of Russian Marxism,” International Review of Social History 35 (1990): 220–48. For an analysis of mass public ceremonies and rites of passage in the Soviet regime, see, in particular, Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society–The Soviet Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Also relevant is Christopher Binns, “Sowjetische Feste und Rituale,” Osteuropa 1.2 (1979); Christopher Binns, “The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Development of the Soviet Ceremonial System,” Man 14 and 15 (1979): 585–606 and 170–87, respectively; Claes Arvidsson and Lars Erik Blomqvist, eds., Symbols of Power: The Esthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1987); Richard Stites, “Bolshevik Ritual Building in the 1920s,” in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 295–309; Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). On Soviet communism as a political religion, see James Thrower, Marxism-Leninism as the Civil Religion of Soviet Society: God's Commissar (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992); Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion,” Totalitarian Movements & Political Religions 1 (2005): 97–126. 5. See, for example, James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 6. Eric Hobsbawm insists on the minor importance of “invented traditions” in private life, delineating, for example, the weakening of tradition when “among liberal Jews, dietary prohibitions are justified pragmatically, as by arguing that the ancient Hebrews banned pork on grounds of hygiene.” This ignores the relevance of the private sphere and, as the book in question demonstrates, the modifications in dietary traditions that occurred with the arrival even of Kosher Pork in Soviet Yiddish Culture. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 4–11. The author does not fail to cite as a methodological reference for her study the works of Clifford Geertz, which, through attention to the so-called “modernizing ethnocentrism,” that is, the processes of modernization in the society most closely tied to tradition, offer a more incisive working frame of reference. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 306–10. See also David E. Apter, “Political Religion in the New Nations,” in Old Societies and New States, ed. Clifford Geertz (London: Free Prescott Clence, 1963), 57–104. 7. James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), xvi–xvii.