The Jews in Eastern Europe: New Historiography

On the earlier hasidim and their asceticism, see Gershon David Hundert , Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press , 2004).

Dynner describes a three-stage model of Hasidic takeover (vaguely analogous to Miroslav Hroch's three stages of nation-building): the establishment of Hasidic prayer houses, the usurping of control over the Bet Midrash, and the invasion of the synagogue—plus an epilogue: the conquest of the rabbinate.

Here Dynner uses Yuri Lotman's definition of cultural appropriation, according to which the receiver becomes the transmitter.

Bauer uses no Russian sources, and perhaps it was the case that Sokolow did not function in Russian at all. This, however, seems somewhat improbable given the time and place and Sokolow's level of education.

Bauer questions whether the 1881-1882 pogroms that followed Tsar Aleksandr II's assassination were in fact the turning point the historiography has often portrayed them to be. Sokolow's development, according to Bauer, suggests that ideological developments had begun moving forward even before the pogroms. In his classic account of the rise of modern Jewish politics, Jonathan Frankel argues that with the reversal of 1881, [the Jewish community in Russia] moved, as it were, directly from a preliberal to a postliberal stage of development, from medieval community to projects for national revival, from a religious to a social and secular messianism. See Jonathan Frankel , Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 2.

On Polish positivism, see Jerzy Jedlicki , A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest: CEU Press, 1999); and Stanislaus A. Blejwas , Realism in Polish Politics: Warsaw Positivism and National Survival in Nineteenth Century Poland (New Haven, CT.: Yale Russian and East European Publications, 1984).

The late 1880s saw the decline of Polish positivism. Bauer describes Polish positivism as taking a nationalist turn after its “doctrine of organic work had brought almost no political results twenty-five years after its first expression” (p. 38). In fact, both Polish nationalism and Polish Marxism can be read as heirs of Polish positivism. On positivism's “clearing an intellectual path” for Marxism through its unequivocal materialism, see Norman Naimark , The History of the “Proletariat”: The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870-1887 (Boulder, CO.: East European Monographs, 1979).

The phrase “politics in a new key” is from Carl E. Schorske , Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).

“By the beginning of the twentieth century, however,” Bauer writes, “it was clear that the idea of Jewish integration into Polish society was not receiving the same approval among Polish intellectual circles that it had received a decade earlier” (p. 126). On this topic, see Brian Porter , When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Timothy Snyder , Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872-1905), Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Theodore R. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850-1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press , 2005).

On Lukács, see Mary Gluck , Georg Lukács and His Generation 1900-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

On “Jewish culture” as a neologism and on the tension implicit in the endeavor of those Jewish intellectuals—Yiddishists and Hebraists alike—in the disintegrating Russian empire who wanted to produce “Jewish culture” that was at once authentically Jewish and European, secular, and cosmopolitan, see Kenneth Moss , “`A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up': Recasting Jewish Culture in Eastern Europe, 1917-1921” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2003).

On Jewishness as a workshop of German Art and the cult of Kultur among Viennese Jews, see Marjorie Perloff , The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 2004).

On an analogous attempt by Poland to woo the Ukrainians on the other side of the border, a program named Prometheanism, see Timothy Snyder , Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2005).

See Ezra Mendelsohn , “Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?” in Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk , and Antony Polonsky eds., The Jews of Poland, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 130-39.

Isaac Deutscher , “The Non-Jewish Jew,” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays , ed. Tamara Deutscher (London : Oxford University Press, 1968): 25-41.

Michael Stanislawski , Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 176.

In an eloquent essay, Steven Zipperstein, in discussing Dubnov's writings of the 1890s, draws attention to this: “The essays themselves challenge [Dubnov's] own deeply felt, sincere positivist convictions in their foregrounding of existential goals and in their unabashed use of history as a balm for the Jewish people.” Steven J. Zipperstein , Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 91.

E.J. Hobsbawm , “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today ,” Anthropology Today 8:1 (February 1992): 3-8, quote on 3.

Henry Hardy summarizes Berlin's position well in his introduction to a volume of Berlin's correspondence:

More equality may mean less excellence, or less liberty; justice may obstruct mercy; honesty may exclude kindness; self-knowledge may impair creativity or happiness, efficiency inhibit spontaneity . . . tragedy, indeed, far from being the result of avoidable error, is an endemic feature of the human condition.

See Henry Hardy , Introduction to Isaiah Berlin, Letters 1928-1946, ed. Henry Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), xlii-xliii.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi , Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 89.

Ibid., 93.