Bringing culture to the nation: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and the dilemmas of Jewish cultural formation in Russia and Ukraine, 1917–1919

Abstract

Focusing on the pivotal 1917–1919 conjuncture in Russia and Ukraine, this paper analyzes the efforts of the divided Jewish nationalist intelligentsia to disseminate new forms of Jewish culture to a mass audience, the reception of these efforts in the former Tsarist empire’s variegated Jewish population, and the intelligentsia’s parallel exploration of other forms of cultural formation less dependent on popular support. Comparing the cultural programs of Hebraism and Yiddishism, it demonstrates important parallels in their cultural visions and highlights their shared belief in the possibility of implanting a secularist, aestheticist intelligentsia culture in the whole of “the nation.” The paper reconstructs both substantial forms of popular openness to this culture and its sociocultural weaknesses. Finally, it examines experiments made by the intelligentsia with alternative routes to cultural transformation: suppression of popular culture, non-market cultural arrangements, cultural revolution through education, and the uses of the state. The paper seeks a fuller understanding both of the roots of interwar cultural programs in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and of the Jewish nationalist intelligentsia’s underlying conception of “culture,” its own authority, and the evolving relationship between these conceptions and the realities of East European Jewish social, cultural, and political life from the 1890s onward.