Trapped in Time – Early Modern Court Jew, Early Maskil or Outsider? Yehuda Leyb Nevakhovich and his Historiographical Tract

Abstract

Yehuda Leyb Nevakhovich (1776-1831) seems to be almost forgotten in current research on Jewish literature and culture in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, among his contemporaries, he enjoyed a remarkable success in the realm of cultural production, and to some extent in the realm of imperial Russian society. Entangled between Hebrew, Russian, and European literatures, the scope of Nevakovich’s writing encompasses occasional poetry, emancipation treatises, and historical dramas. His understanding of literature was wide, interlacing the fields of literature, history and historiography. In his historiographical treatise “Remarks on a Review” (1806), the review being written by a German historian, Nevakhovich reflects on the state of Russian historiography and discusses the position of historiography and its meaning for the formation of a national discourse. He presents a polemic in favour of Russian scholarship that in its verve and gesture does not rank behind his emancipation treatise “Lamentation of the Daughter of Yehuda” (1803). With this treatise, he leaves the circle of Jewish intellectuals working in Hebrew. He now sees his place of speech primarily as one that is anchored in Russian imperial culture and attempts to install himself at this European interface as mediator. In his cosmopolitan mind set Nevakhovich was not acknowledged by later generations of Jewish thinkers and did not leave notable traces in the Jewish literature being created since the middle of the 19th century in Eastern Europe.