Kilcher Andreas - Writing Jewish Culture

WRITING JEWISH CULTURE

PARADOXES IN ETHNOGRAPHY

EDITED BY
ANDREAS KILCHER AND
GABRIELLA SAFRAN

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Writing Jewish culture : paradoxes in ethnography / edited by Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran.

pages cm

Selected papers presented at a conference titled Jewish ethnography between science and literature held in Zurich (Switzerland) in September 2013.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-01962-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-253-01958-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-253-01964-6 (ebook) 1. JewsEurope, EasternSocial life and customsCongresses. 2. JewsSocial life and customsCongresses. 3. Jewish folkloristsEurope, EasternCongresses. 4. Folk literature, YiddishCongresses. 5. Jewish folk literatureCongresses. 6. EthnologyEurope, EasternCongresses. 7. Europe, EasternEthnic relationsCongresses. I. Kilcher, Andreas B., 1963editor. II. Weissberg, Liliane. The voice of a native informer: Salomon Maimon describes life in Polish Lithuania. Container of (work):

DS135.E83W75 2016

305.892'4047dc23

2015033420

1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16

To our families

/ Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran

WE ARE GRATEFUL to the contributors to this volume, who have joined us in an intellectual journey that originated with the international conference Jewish Ethnography between Science and Literature at the ETH Zurich in Fall 2013, and that has carried almost all of us beyond the borders of our scholarly comfort zones. We want to acknowledge three participants in our Zurich conference, Sasha Senderovich, Alexander Lvov, and Bernhard Tschofen, whose work is for various reasons not included here but who offered very valuable contributions to our conversation. We thank James Clifford for consulting with us and carefully reading our introduction. Raina Polivka, Janice Frisch, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, and Jenna Whittaker shepherded the manuscript through at Indiana University Press, and Joyce Rappaport copyedited it with informed precision. At Stanford, we thank the Humanities Center, which gave Andreas the possibility of spending two months in the Bay Area and working on the volume. D. Brian Kim elegantly and carefully edited and translated from Russian; Brian Tich effectively edited multiple parts of the manuscript and organized the paperwork around it. In Zurich, we thank Victoria Laszlo, who was of great help in the organization of the conference, and Jonas Sthelin, who was responsible for the index of the volume. Thanks go also to the Swiss National Science Foundation for the support of our Zurich conference, and to the Stanford Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Georges und Jenny Bloch Foundation, Zurich, who provided support for the volume. Finally, we thank the authors and artists we analyze, whose writings about Ashkenazic Jews continue to challenge and provoke us today.

As a rule we have used a modified Library of Congress transliteration style for Russian and Hebrew and YIVO style for Yiddish, but for personal names we have attempted to use the spelling that is most familiar in English (often following The YIVO Encyclopedia). With Eastern European place names, we have strived for consistency and often settled on the Russian spellings that were familiar to our subjects.

WRITING JEWISH CULTURE

ANDREAS KILCHER AND GABRIELLA SAFRAN

Ethnography by its nature is a highly complex kind of writing. Ethnographers try to describe a culture using a specific scientific language, but they know the words they use may limit their readers understanding of that culture and betray the limitations of their own knowledge. Ethnographic writing is inevitably objective and subjective at the same time; the description of the alien reveals the self, whereas the seemingly familiar self emerges as alien and unknown. To use rhetorical and literary-critical terminology, ethnographic writing lends itself to ambivalences, contradictions, and aporias, or moments that give rise to philosophically systemic doubt. These aporias are at once epistemicconcerning the possibility of gaining knowledgeand aestheticconcerning modes of imagination and narration, the effect of writing and art through various means of representation. Analyzing ethnographic texts consequently requires one to evaluate their success at empirical scholarly measurement and at aesthetic representation that evokes the ethnographers experience of seeing and listening by means of drawing and storytelling in multiple media.

This constellation of scholarly and literary questions is the starting point of this volume, which concerns ethnographic writings on the Jews produced between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. When writers worked to describe Jews as a group, they produced powerful epistemic This problem might seem to contradict the expectation that ethnography permits writers to construct and claim distinct cultural identities. From the eighteenth century, European scholars who encountered unfamiliar peoples wrote ethnographies about them, describing their customs, buildings, language, economic activities, and beliefs. Writing since that period on Jewish ethnography suggests that Jews can be described in the same secular mode: that they constitute a single body, unified across space and time by customs, beliefs, language, and economic activity. However, when we take a closer look, Jewish ethnographic texts, considered as a body, reveal the fissures in these notions, which are apparent even when the focus is narrowed to the Ashkenazic Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe that from the sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries constituted the bulk of the worlds Jews and are the subject of the lions share of Jewish ethnographic writing. A case study based on some two centuries of writing about these Ashkenazic Jews reveals problems that concern ethnography more generally.

A closer examination of this Jewish ethnography makes these fissures visible and prompts five central questions that reveal five paradoxes, which emerge from the epistemic, aesthetic, and cultural aporias evident in the texts. From the ancient Greek terms for something contrary to expectations,