Jewish Revolution Research Articles

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power, by Andrew Sloin

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power, by Andrew Sloin

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power, written by Andrew Sloin

This is a very important book for both Jewish studies and the history of the early Soviet Union. As a history of the revolution, it tells the story of mobilization of ethnicity that resulted in the failure of the revolution’s universalist and anticolonial promise and in the resurgence of racial animosity. Going against the mainstream view of Soviet modernity as unequivocally prioritizing class over race, Andrew Sloin presents the transition from the Civil War to the New Economic Policy and to the Stalinist Great Break as a “slide from nationality

Jews and Russians from Imperial to Soviet Times

Jews and Russians from Imperial to Soviet Times Theodore R. Weeks (bio) Yuli Kosharovsky, “We Are Jews Again”: Jewish Activism in the Soviet Union. Translated by Stefani Hoffman. 420 pp. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 9780815654001. $39.95. Vassili Schedrin, Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917. 292 pp., illus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0814340424. $49.99. Anna Shternshis, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin. 247 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0190223106. $34.95. Andrew Sloin, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power. 329 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0253024664. $39.00. The field of Jewish history in Russia continues to show vitality and to produce exciting new works. Among these are the four books under review here. Examining topics as diverse as Jewish chinovniki, Jews in one Soviet republic in the first years after 1917, an intimate portrait of Jews under Stalin, and the recovery of Jewish identity in the final decades of the USSR, all of these books make significant contributions to topics that “we already know.” That is, we know a little—this is a richly researched field—but at times what we know is not very accurate, and nearly always it is partial and insufficient. In particular, we know quite little on everyday life of Russian Jews, family life, and practical [End Page 133] issues of Jewish identity in the USSR. These books help deepen and problematize important aspects—in particular private life and identity—of one of the most vibrant fields of Russian-Jewish history (I should say, “Jewish history in Russia/USSR”). ________ “Russian” history for some time now has looked not just at the experience of ethnic Russians, but at all subjects of the tsar/gensek. There are a number of reasons that Jews figure very prominently among Russian/Soviet nationalities. For one thing, Jews were the only non-Christian minority that lived in large numbers among Slavic peoples in the western part of the empire, making up a majority of the population in many small towns of what are now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine—and a very significant percentage in major cities like Warsaw, Łódź, Odessa, Vilnius/Vilna, and Minsk.1 Imperial officials were well aware that a future European war could well be fought precisely in this region and had grave doubts—with some reason—as to the loyalty of the Jewish population here. Government officials in the Russian Empire—and the tsar himself—frequently harbored stereotypical views of the “Jewish menace,” merging old-fashioned Christian Judeophobia with the (at least partially correct) perception that the revolutionary movement attracted young Jews to its ranks in disproportionate numbers.2 The Jews were—and to some extent still are—a unique “nationality.” The very use of that word will seem strange to Central and Western Europeans who counter that Jews are a religious congregation, nothing more. But in the context of Eastern Europe in the 19th century, Jews did represent a nationality, with their own languages, customs, daily life, calendar, and so on. While assimilationists (and liberals—sometimes but not always the same group) vociferously denied the possibility of a “Jewish nationality” (joined here by such luminaries as Iosif Stalin and Lev Trotskii), the very vehemence of their argumentation indicates that the question was, at best, complicated and highly disputed. One indication that this complication continued well into the Soviet period is reflected in Kosharovsky’s book, many of whose “heroes” admitted freely that they knew nothing about Judaism as a religion, nor [End Page 134] Jewish languages, nor Jewish customs before they were drawn into the movement to become “Jews again.”3 In the 19th century, however, the distinction between “Jew” and “Russian” was stark and even legally defined (and, of course, Jewish nationality also became enshrined in Soviet identity through the “fifth point” in passports from the 1930s onward). An individual born into the Jewish community (and religion was a legal reality—unlike “nationality”) could exit that community only by conversion.4 After the Great Reforms (1860s–70s), however...

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power

Book Reviews

Literature and Fine ArtsFusso, Susanne. Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel.Rosenshield, Gary. Physical Pain and Justice: Greek Tragedy and the Russian Novel.Shevelenko, Irina. Modernizm kak arkhaizm: Natsionalizm i poiski modernistskoi estetiki v Rossii.Iliazd. Rapture. Translated by Thomas J. Kitson.Babel, Isaac. The Essential Fictions. Edited and translated by Val Vinokur.Proffer Teasley, Elendea. Brodsky among Us: A Memoir.Smola, Klavdia, and Dirk Uffelman, eds. Postcolonial Slavic Literatures after Communism.Ågren, Mattias. Phantoms of a Future Past: A Study of Contemporary Russian Anti‐Utopian Novels.Oukaderova, Lida. The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement.Guynn, William. Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe.Strukov, Vlad. Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols of a New Era.Wolf, Erika. Aleksandr Zhitomirsky: Photomontage as a Weapon of World War II and the Cold War.Crone, Anna Lisa. Collected Writings, Vol. 1, Poetry.Crone, Anna Lisa. Collected Writings, Vol. 2, Rozanov and Philosophical Literature.Crone, Anna Lisa. Collected Writings, Vol. 3, Collaborations, Prose Studies, and Other Works.HistoryKollmann, Nancy Shields. The Russian Empire 1450–1801.Kivelson, Valerie A., and Ronald Grigory Suny. Russia's Empires.Plokhy, Serhii. Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation from 1470 to the Present.Coţofană, Alexandra, and James M. Nyce, eds. Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post‐Socialist Contexts I: Historic and Ethnographic Case Studies of Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Alternative Spirituality.Magocsi, Paul Robert. Carpathian Rus': A Historical Atlas.Avrutin, Eugene M. The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian TownKaplan, Vera. Historians and Historical Societies in the Public Life of Imperial Russia.Henderson, Robert. Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia: A Revolutionary in the Time of Tsarism and Bolshevism.Chernev, Borislav. Twilight of Empire. The Brest‐Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East‐Central Europe, 1917–1918.Eisfeld, Alfred, Guido Hausmann, and Dietmar Neutatz, eds. Hungersnöte in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1891–1947: Regionale, ethnische und konfessionelle Aspekte.Glebov, Sergey. From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s.Peri, Alexis. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad.Sloin, Andrew. The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power.Shternshis, Anna. When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin.Fürst, Juliane, and Josie McLellan, eds. Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc.Roberts, Graham H., ed. Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities.Plokhy, Serhii, ed. The Future of the Past: New Perspectives on Ukrainian History.Weiss‐Wendt, Anton. The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention.Besemeres, John. A Difficult Neighborhood: Essays on Russia and East‐Central Europe since World War II.Altayli. Enver. A Dark Path to Freedom: Ruzi Nazar, from the Red Army to the CIA. Translated by David Barchard.Keefer, Edward C. Harold Brown: Offsetting the Soviet Military Challenge, 1977–1981. Secretaries of Defense Historical Series, Vol. 9. Edited by Erin R. Mahan.Zhuk, Sergei I. Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR: People's Diplomacy in the Cold War.Savranskaya, Svetlana, and Thomas Blanton. The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush Conversations that Ended the Cold War.Parks, Jenifer. The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape.Congdon, Lee. Solzhenitsyn: The Historical‐Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West.Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory.Social Sciences, Contemporary Russia, and OtherKovalev, Andrei. Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin. Translated by Steven I. Levine.Reuter, Ora John. The Origins of Dominant Parties: Building Authoritarian Institutions in Post‐Soviet Russia.Altstadt, Audrey L. Frustrated Democracy in Post‐Soviet Azerbaijan.Samokhvalov, Vsevolod. Russian‐European Relations in the Balkans and Black Sea Region: Great Power Identity and the Idea of Europe.Krasheninnikova, Yulia. Informal Healthcare in Contemporary Russia: Sociographic Essays on the Post‐Soviet Infrastructure for Alternative Healing Practices.Gans‐Morse, Jordan. Property Rights in Post‐Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and the Demand for Law.Orttung, Robert W., and Sufian N. Zhemukhov. Putin's Olympics: The Sochi Games and the Evolution of Twenty‐First Century Russia.

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin (review)

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 778 Sloin, Andrew. The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and BolshevikPower.TheModernJewishExperience.IndianaUniversityPress, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2017. xi + 329 pp. Map. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $38.00: £33.00 (paperback). In a meticulously researched book, Andrew Sloin explores how the Bolshevik experiment, premised upon principles of national liberation in a post-capitalist order, gave way to repeated outbreaks of popular ethnic resentment and racial animosity. In many respects, the story that Sloin tells is well known. Much has been written about the promises and pitfalls of Soviet nationality policies and the ways in which the Soviet state managed its multi-ethnic empire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped archival materials from Belorussian archives, Sloin’s excellent study nonetheless fills a major lacuna. It will stand alongside some of the best scholarship in Soviet Jewish history that has been published in recent years. Sloin’s focus is on ‘ordinary’ people — Jewish artisans, workers, local party operatives and small-scale labourers — most of whom lived in small towns in Belorussia. Moving beyond official statist agendas or top-down modernization campaigns, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia emphasizes that, above all, local contexts mattered. The book is divided into seven well-developed chapters, with the most innovative sections dealing with the problem of race. Sloin positions himself in the larger debates on the meanings and practices of race, articulated most forcefully by Francine Hirsch and Eric Weitz, and wisely moves away from what he labels as ‘extreme measures in determining the degree to which race persisted in the Soviet context’ (p. 16). By focusing on the relationship between economy, labour and identity formation, Sloin’s study enlarges our understanding of the role that the logic of race played in everyday Jewish life. Regardless of its commitment to equality, antiracism and internationalism, Sloin demonstrates that the policies embraced by the Soviet state reproduced the conditions of race socially and shaped understandings of nationality at the grassroots level. The new economic reality of the Soviet helped produce much of the racial animosity. In fascinating detail, Sloin describes the interethnic tensions, antagonisms and anxieties that resulted from the NEP economy slidingintocrisis.ReaderslearnhowBelorussianworkersmockedandassaulted Jews on the shop floor, how the new regime of labour caused ethnic divisions, and how the state repeatedly questioned Jewish assimilability. Antisemitic incidents surged in the late 1920s, as the Stalin revolution helped fuel violence against Jews. Sloin provides a compelling, multivalent explanation of the debates on the integration and assimilability of Jews in the post-Revolutionary order. He argues that the Soviet state helped fuel antisemitism. As the Soviet Union slid into crisis, the language used to describe Jews became more absolute. REVIEWS 779 More broadly, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia also provides a compelling argument that the global economic and political crisis of the late 1920s played no small role in shaping racialized conceptions of antisemitism. ‘Each episode of crisis,’ Sloin writes, ‘hypostasized a certain manifestation of “Jewishness” and took this manifestation to be a malignancy on the body politic’ (p. 243). Andrew Sloin’s attempt to chart how the Bolshevik movement restructured Jewish lives in Belorussia is an engaging and theoretically sophisticated study. The book makes a timely contribution to Soviet and Jewish history and modern European history, and deserves to be read widely. University of Illinois Eugene M. Avrutin Graziosi, Andrea and Sysyn, Frank (eds). Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, Edmonton, AL and Toronto, ON, 2016. viii + 158 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. $24.95 (paperback). This book presents six of the papers from a conference on Communism and hunger held at the University of Toronto in 2014. Only a few of the papers have substantial academic value, while most of them have flaws that undermine their validity and novelty. The best contribution is the comparative study of famines in Central Asia by Niccolò Pianciola, which places the history of the Soviet Kazakh famine of 1931–33 in the context of Soviet and Chinese treatment of their spheres in Mongolia and of the effects of the Chinese Great Leap Famine [GLF] in Tibet and Central Asia in...

Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective by Frank (eds) Graziosi, Andrea and Sysyn (review)

REVIEWS 779 More broadly, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia also provides a compelling argument that the global economic and political crisis of the late 1920s played no small role in shaping racialized conceptions of antisemitism. ‘Each episode of crisis,’ Sloin writes, ‘hypostasized a certain manifestation of “Jewishness” and took this manifestation to be a malignancy on the body politic’ (p. 243). Andrew Sloin’s attempt to chart how the Bolshevik movement restructured Jewish lives in Belorussia is an engaging and theoretically sophisticated study. The book makes a timely contribution to Soviet and Jewish history and modern European history, and deserves to be read widely. University of Illinois Eugene M. Avrutin Graziosi, Andrea and Sysyn, Frank (eds). Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, Edmonton, AL and Toronto, ON, 2016. viii + 158 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. $24.95 (paperback). This book presents six of the papers from a conference on Communism and hunger held at the University of Toronto in 2014. Only a few of the papers have substantial academic value, while most of them have flaws that undermine their validity and novelty. The best contribution is the comparative study of famines in Central Asia by Niccolò Pianciola, which places the history of the Soviet Kazakh famine of 1931–33 in the context of Soviet and Chinese treatment of their spheres in Mongolia and of the effects of the Chinese Great Leap Famine [GLF] in Tibet and Central Asia in 1958–61. Using archival and other primary sources in Russian and Chinese, Pianciola shows that the Soviet government restrained collectivization and livestock procurement policies in Mongolia in the 1930s, unlike in Kazakhstan, and that China emulated the Soviet Virgin Lands programme in the 1950s. The paper by Xun Zhou on the GLF presents revealing examples of the extreme violence perpetrated by Chinese officials, based on her monograph and document collection on the GLF. Sarah Cameron’s brief paper on the Kazakh famine discusses some of the scholarly literature, showing the dispute over the use of the term ‘genocide’. All these articles have minor errors in their discussions of the USSR. Theotherarticlesinthebookareweaker.LucienBiancoarguesthattheUSSR and PRC faced similar problems of chronic famines and growing population that both exploited the rural economy to support industrialization; that both increased grain collections from the villages during the famine; and that both chose to supply urban populations at the expense of villagers. The two SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 780 cases differed, according to Bianco, in that the Chinese regime disrupted the villages more than in the USSR with the people’s communes, that nationality was more important in the USSR, and that the Chinese famine lasted longer and was more lethal and inconsistent. Bianco also compares the roles of the ‘actors’ responsible for the famine, among whom he includes some of the peasants (p. 76), and the different responses of the victims to the famines. Bianco’s comparisons are not very profound and have errors. He asserts, for example, that neither the Soviet nor Chinese authorities reduced grain procurement quotas (p. 59), but then admits that the Soviet government not only reduced quotas but returned grain to the villages (p. 59), and that the Chinese authorities reduced quotas once they learned of the famine (p. 71). He asserts that the Soviets had ‘local famines’ in 1924 and 1926, but in fact there was no famine in 1926 because the USSR had a large harvest that year — Werth in his essay calls 1925–27 a ‘golden age’ (p. 11), but Bianco does not mention this. The 1924 famine was not local but affected Ukraine, the Volga and other regions, which Werth also acknowledges (p. 11). Bianco asserts that Stalin in 1928 ‘needed to feed 41 million more people than Tsar Nicholas’ in 1897, but the difference between the Soviet 1926 census (147 million) and the 1897 census (125 million) was 22 million. He also cites Wemheuer but omits his finding that environmental factors reduced the 1960 harvest that caused the peak of the famine (Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, New Haven, CT, 2014, pp. 12, 246). Nicholas...

American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States by Michael Weingrad, and: Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature by Stephen Katz, and: Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry by Alan Mintz (review)

Reviewed by: American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States by Michael Weingrad, and: Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature by Stephen Katz, and: Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry by Alan Mintz Shachar Pinsker (bio) American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States. Michael Weingrad, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010. 280 pages. $34.95 cloth. Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature. Stephen Katz. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 363 pages. $30.00 cloth. Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry. Alan Mintz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 544 pages. $65.00 cloth. In 2003, Alan Mintz wrote in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature that the "existence of a substantial body of Hebrew literature written on American shores is one of the best-kept secrets of Jewish American cultural history" (92). Almost a decade later, the secret of Hebrew in America has been revealed with three new books by Stephen Katz, Michael Weingard and Alan Mintz. But what exactly is the secret and why is it being uncovered now? Does it tell us something new about American-Jewish culture, something that historians and literary scholars did not know, or at least did not pay attention to until now? Part of the "secret" revealed in these three books is no doubt the very existence of a living and breathing literary and cultural Hebrew presence in America during most of the 20th century. The common story of American Jewish culture is one of the immigrants' Yiddish giving way to English as a language of everyday communication and Jewish cultural and literary activity. Hebrew, on the other hand, is identified today almost exclusively with the State of Israel or as a language of religious liturgy and ancient texts. But these three books make it amply clear that Hebrew has been a viable option for extraterritorial creativity and Jewish identity in America. In 1927 (around the most productive time for Hebrew letters in America), Daniel Persky counted no less than 110 active writers of poetry, prose, criticism, scholarship, essays and journalism, who published their work in Hebrew journals, newspapers and books, most of them edited and produced in America. Although they never reached the mass readership that the Yiddish press attracted and always were as an elitist (even aristocratic) minority group, their numbers and their literary and cultural activity were quite impressive. So who were these figures, sometimes referred to as "Hebraists"? Although there have been (and still are today) a handful of American-born [End Page 183] writers of Hebrew literature, the overwhelming majority came from Eastern Europe to the United States as part of the migration that took place between the 1880s and the 1920s. Hebrew was not their mother tongue, but a language they acquired as part of their traditional and modern Jewish education. They inherited the legacy of European Haskalah, with its emphasis on Hebrew as a core of Jewish spiritual wellspring, and were part of the great ferment that Benjamin Harshav called "the modern Jewish revolution" at the turn of the 20th century, which saw the simultaneous emergence of Jewish nationalism and socialism, the rise of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature which went hand in hand with a mass Jewish migration out of the Pale of Settlement. These Hebrew writers lived and worked in large American urban centers of Jewish immigration: New York City (which was certainly the center of Hebrew cultural activity), Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit, but some of them arrived in far-flung corners of America. If we think of them as a group, it existed mainly as a network or virtual community of writers scattered across the vast country. The majority of Hebrew writers were also educators, teaching in Jewish schools and teachers colleges, which some of them founded, led and nurtured for years. Indeed, as both Mintz and Weingrad make clear, the most far-reaching impact the Hebrew movement had on American Jewish life was in the area of education. They effectively transformed Jewish education in America into what is known until today as "Hebrew school," with its...

Remnants of Forgotten States and Resurrection of Suppressed Possibilities

A curatorial essay on the research project and exhibition "Where to?", held at the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon between April and June 2012. The exhibition set out to reexamine forgotten ideological currents and modes of activity within the framework of the modern Jewish revolution in general, and the Zionist movement in particular. This attempt led to an engagement with these lost possibilities, and their problems, within contemporary Jewish-Israeli existence.

DAVID BEN‐GURION ON PLATO

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relationship between David Ben‐Gurion’s political thinking, his political practice and his interpretation of some aspects of Plato’s political philosophy. Ben‐Gurion ascribed to Plato three main political values: activism, or the ability to reject existing norms and mold society after the moral laws of man; a striving to create a unified society; and the ideal of a society based on justice. These values also form the bedrock of Ben‐Gurion’s Zionism. The “Jewish Revolution”—as he called the profound changes brought by the Zionist movement—is an active effort to control Jewish destiny. Its main goal is to create a unified people and realize moral norms. Activism and unity were also, as the article tries to demonstrate, the central guiding principles of Ben‐Gurion’s practice as a political leader, as exemplified in his reliance on pioneering and in fostering a strong political centre of authority.

Exorcising the "Angel of National Death" -- National and Individual Death (and Rebirth) in Zionist Palestine

During the decade preceding WWI, a sense that the Jews were a nation on its deathbed motivated Zionist cultural activists to work for the creation of a new Jewish national culture in Palestine. Imagery of death and a counter-imagery of rebirth consequently emerged as central elements in the Yishuv's new national culture. Informed by a European discourse in which the threat of racial degeneration and social decadence had become a ubiquitous trope, imagery of death emerges as a window into the new Jewish life which Zionists sought to construct. The refiguration of death was part of a comprehensive Jewish revolution which remained, almost despite itself, deeply indebted to the discourses and imageries of the traditional Judaism it sought to reject and defy. It was the encounter between a European nationalist sensibility and a quintessentially Jewish language that informed the consciousness and motivations of the Yishuv's cultural activists, and which shaped the culture they would produce. Their attempt to grant new meanings to death-and through it, to life-sheds light on a complex and nuanced interaction of old and new in Jewish nationalism. It seems to call for a historiography more attentive to the continued stirrings of the old within the new in nationalism generally-not in negation of nationalism's fundamental modernity, but towards a deepened appreciation of the nature of that modernity itself.

Theses on the Historical Context of the Modern Jewish Revolution

The new situation of the Jews in the world of the twentieth century came as a result of two vast historical processes, unprecedented in Jewish history: a) the creation of a Jewish majority with its own language and national culture in a network of small towns over a vast territory in the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century; b) the modern Jewish revolution, which rejected the modes of existence and behavior of the smalltown Jews and embraced the values and systems of European secular culture. The Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel were un-

The Role of Language in Modern Art: On Texts and Subtexts in Chagall's Paintings

The Role of Language in Modern Art: On Texts and Subtexts in Chagall’s Paintings Benjamin Harshav* (bio) In this essay, I shall explore the functions of natural language as a “secondary medium” in visual art, as it appears in the polyphonic work of Marc Chagall. Language is here part of the private “fictional world” that Chagall constructed in his paintings in counterpoint to the languages of the avant-garde. It conveys some of the images and perceptions of a local culture and carries the “thick knowledge” of a periphery that Chagall brought to the centers of modernist art. I shall focus primarily on the role of Yiddish language and literature, which have the deepest roots in his conscious world. 1 1. The Semiotics of Chagall’s Modernism Innovations in modern art and science claimed general validity and were accepted in the general canon, yet the context of their discovery was narrowly local and depended on a specific combination of national, linguistic, social, and personal forces and circumstances. The opposition between “Western European” and other cultures, as emphasized in recent criticism, may divert our attention from the fact that European culture itself has been time and again formed by an awareness of the differences among national cultures and their reciprocal oppositions, interactions, and influences. The most prominent outsiders nestled within the European world were the Jews in their traditional, religious society. In the heart of Europe—in recent centuries, primarily [End Page 51] Eastern and Central Europe—they maintained a religion that stood in opposition to the dominant Christianity and a culture based on the teaching and interpretation of an ever growing library of texts. Though influenced by the folklore and beliefs of their neighbors, and often multilingual (using Slavic, German, and other languages), they maintained tightly knit communities with their own social and educational network and an internal multilingualism in three languages of their own: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. In Eastern Europe, and especially in the “Pale of Settlement” of the Russian Empire, where until 1917 over five million Jews were kept in a huge geographical ghetto (comprising most of Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania), the Jewish masses were concentrated in small towns (called shtetls). Two-thirds of the population of a typical shtetl was Jewish (67% in Chagall’s family town of Lyozno), and shtetl life was dominated physically by a towering Church and politically by a Russian administration. It was a more or less self-contained island amid a sea of Christian villages. In the larger towns, Jews constituted half the population (52.4% in Chagall’s Vitebsk), and in several big cities, about one third. It was a polka-dotted map, a powerless Jewish empire within an empire, unified by a voluntary cultural network—from the spread of authoritative books and Hasidic sects to modern ideological parties, educational systems, literature, and newspapers. It was in this context that the Modern Jewish Revolution erupted at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century: a veritable explosion of modernity within one or two generations, entailing both a massive transformation of millions of Jews, and their influx into the centers of European and American culture. 2 Jews eagerly joined the “general” modern culture in manners both extrinsic and intrinsic; while many took up the languages and entered the cultural institutions of the extant European nations, others created a European-type secular culture of their own in Hebrew and Yiddish, accepting European genres and modes of discourse and infusing them with elements transformed from the Jewish tradition. Unlike writers, however, who had to choose either an intrinsic or an extrinsic language (either I. B. Singer or Franz Kafka), painters could simultaneously participate in both. Chagall (1887–1985) was a typical child of this Modern Jewish Revolution. He was the first of many siblings, born to religious, Yiddish-speaking parents of limited education in Vitebsk, the capital of a province or gubernia (in today’s Byelorussia), in the Russian Pale of Settlement. He moved rapidly from Vitebsk to St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and again France, the U.S.A., and France; he lived through three Russian revolutions, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the rebirth of Israel...

Antichrist. Including the Period from the Arrival of Paul in Rome to the End of the Jewish Revolution. Ernest Renan , Joseph Henry Allen

Previous articleNext article FreeRecent Theological LiteratureAntichrist. Including the Period from the Arrival of Paul in Rome to the End of the Jewish Revolution. Ernest Renan , Joseph Henry Allen Hamilton Ford AllenHamilton Ford Allen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 2, Number 4Oct., 1898 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/477012 Views: 9 Journal History This article was published in The American Journal of Theology (1897-1920), which is continued by The Journal of Religion (1921-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.