Taking their cue from Writing Culture, an influential collection of anthropological essays from the mid-1980s, Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran (both scholars of literature and Jewish Studies) bring together fourteen essays that illustrate an argument that Jewish ethnography is a particularly complex and paradoxical kind of writing. There are several obvious reasons for it. Firstly, as a “people of the Book,” Jews as ethnographic subjects were not as sharply separated from the ethnographers who studied them, especially since most of the latter were themselves Jewish. Secondly, while studying the customs and folklore of the shtetl Jews (the major subject of ethnographic research of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discussed in this volume), Jewish ethnographers were not always certain whether the information they were collecting had come from the oral tradition, the written one, or a combination of both. Thirdly, even though these writers labored in an era and ideological milieu when many Jews and non-Jews perceived Jewishness as an essentially unchangeable category of identity, their own “data” suggested that the notion of Jews as a single and clearly identifiable people comparable with the other peoples described by ethnographers was problematic. Thus, as the editors suggest, the Jewish ethnographers discussed in this book, produced so-called epistemic and aesthetic “aporias,” or moments that give rise to philosophically-systemic doubts. In this particular case, these were doubts about the consistency of Jewish culture across time and space as well as other related issues.
It should be pointed out that most of the scholars whose work is discussed in this volume were not ethnographers in a narrower sense of the term. In other words, only a few of them conducted the kind of research that we have come to associate with Semyon An-sky, the “father of Jewish ethnography,” who led the first ethnographic expedition among east European Jews and the program for which he had developed in consultation with the St. Petersburg Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society under the guidance of such a prominent professional Russian-Jewish ethnographer as Lev Shternberg. In the tradition of much of Russian and European Volkskunde, An-sky and his colleagues focused on recording the customs, beliefs, and folklore of the Jewish shtetl as well as collecting objects of material culture pertaining to Jewish religious and everyday life.
The closest analogy to his project was the work of Yiddish folklorists discussed in Safran's paper. In it she demonstrates that such early twentieth century folklore collectors as Herschele (Hershl Danilevitsh), Shmuel Lehman, and A. Almi linked their work to that of nineteenth-century Russian Romantic and narodnik folklorists, poets and writers such as Aleksei Kol΄tsov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol΄, and Ivan Turgenev. The inspiration identified by Safran is obvious, just as was the case with An-sky, who himself had started as a narodnik interested in Russian workers' folklore. However, as she correctly points out, while the Russian folklore collectors had to deal with a major class divide between themselves and their subjects, Yiddish folklorists' biggest challenge was to bridge the gap between their own gender and that of the Jewish women whose songs and stories they often tried to record. Of course, one might add that there was also a significant class and educational divide between these representatives of the Jewish urban intelligentsia and the shtetl folk whose culture they were trying to “salvage.” The most interesting aspect of this paper is the idea that both the Russian and Yiddish folklore collectors managed to overcome this chasm while in such liminal states as nap or sleep (or pretend sleep) and in such liminal spaces as the synagogue at dusk when stories were often told. In the case of Russian folklorists' and major literary figures, I would also add a very popular genre of lullabies sung by a peasant nanny to a child of nobility (this trope could be traced from Pushkin all the way to Vladislav Khodasevich).
Having embraced James Clifford's and George Marcus' view of ethnography as a “blurred genre,” where no clear distinction could be drawn between ethnographic data obtained from an interview or a recorded song, on the one hand, and a reworked folk tale plot incorporated into a work of fiction, the editors and many of the contributors use a “supra-generic category” of “ethnoliterature” to bring together and discuss various types of literary works, some of which resemble more standard ethnographies, while others are difficult to identify as “ethnographic.” They define this term, proposed by Annette Werbner, one of the volume's contributors, as being products of a “contact zone” between ethnography and literature, which use their own specific literary devices and “serve ethnographic functions in their ability to describe travels, experiences, encounters—be they individual or social—in a subjective and autobiographical way” (8). This definition, which to this reviewer (an anthropologist) seems too broad, justifies an inclusion of a very broad range of topics: from an autobiography of German-Jewish philosopher Salomon Maimon (1753–1800) to Joseph Roth's journalistic reports and fiction dealing with the “exotic” Jews of the Soviet Union and from Y.L. Peretz's literary rendition of Jewish folklore to Leon Feuchtwanger's re-interpretation of the (legendary) history of Jüd Suss in his novel by the same name. With the thematic net cast so wide, Writing Jewish Culture even features essays on the sketches by Hermann Struck of the of Russian-Jewish prisoners of war and other east European Jews, descriptions of east European Jewish architecture by nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian and Russian-Jewish travelers, twentieth-century Yiddish travelogues describing Jewish settlers in Argentina, and even M. Vorobeichic's 1920s avant-garde photographs of Vilna.
While Writing Jewish Culture is a significant work in the field of Jewish Studies as well as German-Jewish and Yiddish literature and will be of great interest to scholars in these fields, its contribution to the history of Jewish ethnography seems somewhat limited. Readers interested in that subject would gain more from reading another recent collection: Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, edited by Jeffrey Veidlinger.
