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Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a “Jewish renaissance.” At the heart of their program lay a radically new vision of Jewish culture predicated not on religion but on art and secular individuality, national in scope yet cosmopolitan in content, framed by a fierce devotion to Hebrew or Yiddish yet obsessed with importing and participating in the shared culture of Europe and the world. These cultural warriors sought to recast themselves and other Jews not only as a modern nation but as a nation of moderns. Kenneth Moss offers the first comprehensive look at this fascinating moment in Jewish and Russian history. He examines what these numerous would-be cultural revolutionaries, such as El Lissitzky and Haim Nahman Bialik, meant by a new Jewish culture, and details their fierce disagreements but also their shared assumptions about what culture was and why it was so important. In close readings of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian texts, he traces how they sought to realize their ideals in practice as writers, artists, and thinkers in the burgeoning cultural centers of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. And he reveals what happened to them and their ideals as the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over cultural life. Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century. (20100212)
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Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution Kenneth B. Moss Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2009 Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moss, Kenneth B. Jewish renaissance in the Russian revolution / Kenneth B. Moss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03510-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Russia—Intellectual life—20th century. 2. Hebrew language—Social aspects— Russia—History—20th century. 3. Yiddish language—Social aspects—Russia—History— 20th century. 4. Russia—Intellectual life—20th century. 5. Language and culture. I. Title. DS134.82.M67 2009 305.892⬘404709041—dc22 2009008220 For Anne, Itsik-Leyb, and Arn-Volf Khane’n, mit libe un dankshaft, un mayne kinder Itsik-Leyb un Arn-Volf: “in shpil fun friyorike shtraln, derher ikh dem reynem gepilder fun kinder” —un davke af a loshn an eygenem! Contents Note on Transliteration and Translation ix Introduction 1 1 The Time for Words Has Passed 23 2 The Constitution of Culture 60 3 Unfettering Hebrew and Yiddish Culture 101 4 To Make Our Masses Intellectual 142 5 The Liberation of the Jewish Individual 173 6 The Imperatives of Revolution 217 7 Making Jewish Culture Bolshevik 253 Conclusion 280 Notes 299 Acknowledgments 358 Index 361 Illustrations follow page 172. Note on Transliteration and Translation Because most of the sources for this study are in Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish, and in a very few cases Ukrainian, I have had to transliterate extensively. For Yiddish sources, I have transliterated according to the guidelines of the YIVO Institute. Note that the transliterations remain true to the spelling in the Yiddish originals, however, which often deviates from YIVO standards, because this is relevant histo