In an article on Russian-Jewish historians, Brian Horowitz cites the lawyer and Jewish communal leader Maksim Vinaver's description of a meeting of the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Commission (an organization founded in St. Petersburg in 1889):
Whoever peeked into this crowded room, in which a play of personalities took place, would be amazed at the scene before him. Ten or fifteen people appeared, each with a packet of cards, which he took out of his pocket with pride, showing off the abundance of his cards. And the reading began. The unfortunates who had not succeeded in locating a single mention of the word zhid looked depressed and confused and asked everyone to take them at their word that they had indeed read through the fat tome, alas, entirely fruitlessly. (27)
This citation describes one aspect of east European Jewish studies: the pleasure, and communal approval, attached to gathering and sharing data. This pleasure is evident in Horowitz's collection of essays, which includes thirteen chapters about historians, and Jewish and non-Jewish writers on Jewish topics. It addresses well-known figures: the historian Simon Dubnow; the Jewish writers S. An-sky, Vladimir Zhabotinskii, and Mikhail Gershenzon; the Russian writers Vladimir Solov΄ev and Vasilii Rozanov. There are also less familiar topics, including a very informative article on how the Soviet Jewish historian Saul Borovoi survived the years of repression, and an exploration of the literary critic Boris Eikhenbaum's interest in his Jewish roots.
Little effort is made here to bring the chapters together, aside from an introduction by the architecture historian William Craft Brumfield (who also contributed the striking cover image, a photograph of a Jewish store in Nerchinsk with carved stars of David on the façade). Brumfield notes that the essays reflect attempts by the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia to find a place for themselves in Russian society. They did this, we see here, in varied and changing ways; it is difficult to find patterns in their behavior. Even the individual chapters tend to avoid making a single pointed argument about the dominant element in an individual's ideas or strategies. Rather, Horowitz repeatedly draws attention to inconsistencies and multiple, shifting viewpoints in all his subjects. Thus, the historians he studies shift their attitudes toward the heder (traditional Jewish primary schooling) and toward the pogroms; they had multiple ideologies that did not allow them to articulate a single vision. Individuals emerge as hardly more consistent. Using Bakhtinian vocabulary, Horowitz defines both Ansky and Zhabotinskii as dialogic writers who create polyphonic worlds full of multiple voices. Although Solov΄ev is often lauded as a philosemite, Horowitz points out his conviction that the Jews should convert to Christianity. Although Rozanov is understood as an anti-Semite, Horowitz observes that Jews, who functioned as projections of his fears and desires, are often portrayed positively in his work. Eikhenbaum seemed to turn his back on Jewishness (and the Formalists argued against the significance of biography) but became fascinated by his grandfather's Hebrew poem about chess. Gershenzon rejected culture in principle, opposing it to personal liberation, but simultaneously embraced it. Zhabotinskii shifted back and forth from romanticizing violence, as his followers did, to seeing its limitations.
If there was any powerful, single, positive intellectual commitment among these people, it seems, it was not to an ideology, but rather to the urge to document and to describe one's own reactions to evidence. This notion of the power of writing is evident in Horowitz's citation from a letter Rozanov wrote to Gershenzon in 1909: “I fear that the Jews will grab the history of Russian literature and Russian criticism still more firmly than the banks” (227). Writing about literature, Rozanov believed, was a way to take power. The Russian Jewish intellectuals, it appears, agreed—and Horowitz pays homage to their achievements. In his essay on historiography, he describes the fantastic number of publications that this community supported: historical journals in Russian, journals in Hebrew, newspapers in Yiddish. Most remarkably, between 1907 and 1913, they produced the sixteen-volume Evreiskaia entsiklopediia; Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul΄ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem. This was a cohort that grasped the value of data, sensing that it might ultimately matter more than argumentative analysis. In an era of the reevaluation of old ideologies—in Russia, Israel, and the United States—this is an increasingly appealing principle, one to which Horowitz too is heir.
