Jewish Primitivism by Samuel J. Spinner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish Primitivism by Samuel J. Spinner Nick Block Samuel J. Spinner. Jewish Primitivism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 272 pp. Scholars of modern Jewish culture, specifically German Jewish studies and Yiddish studies, would do well in reading Samuel Spinner’s Jewish Primitivism, a reassessment of modern Jewish literature and visual arts. The introduction defines primitivism as “a critique of modernity activated by the positive evaluation of premodern society” (1). Whereas European primitivism “sought to replace the European subject with the primitive object, Jewish primitivism was the struggle to be both at once” (4). Spinner sees his study contributing to primitivism, a field in which “literature seems barely to exist as a subject” (13). Within Jewish studies, research on the Eastern Jew as aesthetic project in the [End Page 200] early twentieth century goes back to the 1980s with Paul Mendes-Flohr, Sander Gilman, and, most notably, Steven Aschheim’s Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Spinner’s study emerges among a wave of new scholarship into the ties between German Jews and eastern European Jews, including studies by Rachel Seelig, Marc Caplan, and Geoff Grossman. Spinner reframes scholarship on Jewish Orientalism, identity politics, and the cult of the Eastern Jew. His intervention is less in the framing and more in the analysis of works across languages to show that this atavistic way of thinking about Eastern Jews was largely a modern phenomenon regardless of language in Europe. Scholars of German Jewish literature will be interested in knowing that the primitivist strain that they have studied on the Ostjuden (bearded shtetl eastern European Jew) was an interest equally shared by urban writers from Warsaw, for example. The first chapter, on Y. L. Peretz’s folklorism, defines folklorism as a domestic exoticism (12). Folklorism was a first step necessary in the later development of Jewish primitivism as a reaction. Spinner positions Peretz’s complicated relationship to folklorism. His Hasidic tales exhibit clear folklorism, but Peretz moved beyond that in his essays to critique the neo-Romantic project. For Spinner, Peretz was someone with a folklore aesthetic who was nevertheless against folklorism, but not quite primitivist. This staging ground for primitivism is then brought to the fore in the second chapter’s analysis of well-worn texts. Here Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and S. Y. Agnon are shown to exhibit primitivist interests. Spinner identifies an uncharted pattern in these authors’ works, whereby both the German Jewish authors and Agnon are at their most primitivist after visiting the eastern European Jews in real life. All three wrote a rather tempered primitivist travelogue account, moderated by their real experiences that ran counter to expectations, before then writing fully imaginative primitivist novels with Eastern Jewish characters. Spinner’s emphasis is on the unifying forces across Europe that transcend the supposed East-West divide. A short chapter on Franz Kafka follows with a revelatory demonstration of primitivism at work in the German short story “A Report to an Academy,” which centers on a gorilla speaking before an academy about his journey to civilization. By focusing on Kafka’s real-life visit to the Belzer Hasidic rebbe, Spinner carries through the motif of literature informed by traveling from the previous chapter. He gestures toward the Völkerschau exotic race exhibits in the Western metropoles in contextualizing the story, for which I would have appreciated a further unpacking of this comparison. Akin to a trend in the French literary scholarship of Michael Löwy and Tzvetan Todorov, Spinner also positions Kafka outside of his German-speaking Jewish generation in relation to his study: “Kafka departs from the mainstream of Jewish primitivism. . . . Kafka’s Jewish primitivism did not seek to replace the bourgeois Jewishness of his upbringing with something more authentic . . . it was rather an attempt to be free of the entire problem of identity . . . free of the anxieties and challenges of being Jewish, perhaps even of being human” (92). [End Page 201] The latter three chapters turn to the primitivist visual realm with the artwork of the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler in chapter 4, the visually infused literature of...