Drawing on traditional ethnography and primitivist theories, Samuel Spinner's book unfolds the primitivist strands of Jewish Europeanness, the fluidity of what, in conventional ethnography, has been seen as clearly binary: the (primitive) savage and the (European) civilized, the “other” and the “self,” the object (of ethnographic or aesthetic investigation), and the (modern) subject. Given its self-directed alignment, Jewish primitivism blurs the boundaries between these notions. As a part of a modern Jewish identity and politics, built on Herderian and Romantic ideas of national culture, Jewish primitivism challenges, even undermines, this very European modernity and its binarisms. This productive paradox forms the heart of the analysis. Through the examples of Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Else Lasker-Schüler, Sh. An-ski, Y. L. Perets, Der Nister, Uri Zvi Grinberg, and Moshe Vorobeichic, the study demonstrates how, in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, these players were engaged in the project of Jewish primitivism. Considering literary and visual manifestations alike, Spinner explores literature (and visuality in literature), graphic art, and photography in order to unfold its aesthetics, stimulated by the more general primitivist movement in avant-garde as well as its different political implications.
Spinner repeatedly draws a fine line between folklorism and primitivism. While the former, a kind of exoticism based on its own domestic (Jewish) sources, aims to assimilate and incorporate its own material into the dominant western modern aesthetic, primitivism, drawing on the same sources, represents a form of critique of this model and rejects it. Instead, it destabilizes container concepts such as Jewish folk, collectivity, or national culture and, according to its aesthetic agenda, dynamically synthesizes “own” and “foreign” without eradicating difference and alterity.
Chapter 1 traces the complex interweaving of primitivism and folklorism in Y. L. Peretz's ambivalent literary thinking. As a narrator, he follows folkloristic writing principles. In his essays on Yiddish literature, on the other hand, he undertakes a primitivist critique of folklore (as tool of a national revival). Although criticized by pro-primitivist avant-garde representatives, it is in this way that Peretz creates the theoretical basis for Jewish primitivism without completely abandoning the neo-romantic program.
Spinner demonstrates a dual writing practice, one more attached to folklorism, the other to its primitivist subversion, in the second chapter through the travelogues and fictional texts of Döblin, Roth, and An-ski. It becomes clear how the narrative or the dramatic mode validate the primitive of the Ostjude, an object of analysis and external observation in their ethnographic travelogues. Only the subsequent fictional imaginings unravel Jewish primitivism and its interaction with modernism.
Franz Kafka shifts the encounter with the Jewish Other, the primitive, into his very self. Compared to Jiří Mordechai Langer and in the context of the popular ethnographic showcases of the time, Kafka's texts disconcertingly stage the collapse of the observer and the observed. Within Kafka's self, the reader discovers the ambivalent modern Jewish condition of similitude and difference, of belonging and not-belonging (Chapter 3).
When, in Chapter 4, Else Lasker-Schüler and Uri Zvi Grinberg are being discussed, Jewish primitivism reveals its political dimension. Lasker-Schüler’s “Bund der wilden Juden” (the Society of Savage Jews), serves as a form of orientalist, primitivist communality and, at the same time, secures the poet's individuality. Grinberg, in his poetry, transfers and transforms Lasker-Schüler's “Bund” into a political community he calls “Berit hayehudim hapera'im” (Society of Savage Jews). He turns her fantasy, which originated in Weimar Berlin, into a vision in and for Eretz Israel.
Chapter 5 and 6 are devoted to the aesthetics of Jewish primitivism. Spinner's reading of Der Nister through the prism of Carl Einstein's primitivist art theory reveals the primacy of perception in Der Nister's poetry and the complex and multimodal conflations of visuality and textuality. Der Nister's primitivist narrative strategies erase individuality as a key category of modern (westernized) thought. Vorobeichic's 1931 albums on Vilne (Vilnius) combine the rather contrary aesthetic trajectories and idioms of ethnography and avant-garde photography. Aware of the precarious situation of the Jews in (eastern) Europe, Vorobeichic‘s “ethnographic surrealism” (James Clifford) allowed him to “recuperate the subjecthood of the Jews he photographed” (168). In the face of the Holocaust, the heuristic potential of primitive difference lost its significance. This is one of the many lessons to learn from Spinner's nuanced analysis in his eloquently written book. Its focus on the visual (in literature), on the destabilizing potential of Jewish primitivism, is a stimulus for further research seeking to understand the Jewish revival of different languages, media, and aesthetic models at the turn of the nineteenth century.
