In Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860-1890, author Svetlana Natkovich focuses on Jewish intellectuals during the period of Russian Reform less as individuals in a transitionary period, instead focusing on the style and aesthetic choices that characterized and informed a movement. In the below excerpt from the book’s introduction, Natkovich explains her thesis.
In the early 1860s, life looked bright and promising for Lev (Yehudah Leib) Levanda (1835–88). As a recent graduate of the Vilnius (Vilna) Rabbinical Seminary, he had secured a stable position as the expert Jew in the governor-general’s office of the Vilna province in 1860. During that year, he also began publishing journalistic and literary works in the newly founded Razsvet (Dawn), the first Russian Jewish journal. At that time, with the Great Reforms under way, Russian and Russian Jewish life seemed to be on the verge of profound civilizational change, and Levanda likely saw himself as a member of the avant-garde that would facilitate this breakthrough and steer the Jewish community through this turbulent transition. In a photograph from this period, his appearance could be interpreted as an external expression of his fervor for modernization. At first glance, he seems to be a European dandy, devoid of outward markers of his Jewish identity. From head to toe, every detail projects a conscious effort to look modern, daring, and sophisticated: his pomaded hair is meticulously parted in the middle; he is clad in a fashionable, long-sleeved redingote that reveals a light-colored vest and a shirt fastened with a decorative stickpin; he wears loose, wide-legged trousers; and he has a glossy top hat in hand. However, upon careful examination, discrepancies that cast doubt on this suave air become evident. His shoes look scuffed, the hand that holds his hat is drowning in an oversize sleeve, his trousers appear slightly wrinkled, and one lock of hair rebels against the sleek hairdo, yielding an unruly tuft. Closer scrutiny reveals his posture as awkward and unsteady. He ostensibly leans against a marble column with confidence, but, perhaps unsure of the reliability of this prop in the photo atelier, his elbow barely grazes it and he stretches one leg forward for equilibrium. After noticing these disruptive details, the initial impression of Levanda’s posh mien seems more like a costume than an authentic presentation. The tension that Levanda and other maskilim (members of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah) endured between their real social and physical bodies and their desired images—some were partially actualized in reality and others only imagined—forms the core of this volume, which focuses on how this gap was filled, understood, mediated, and represented.
Indeed, the problem of “inauthentic” appearance and impostor syndrome is inherent to the very question of social mobility and modernity. But unlike many social upstarts who were attempting to integrate themselves into a new societal role, the return of modernized Jewish intellectuals to their premodernized identity and presentation posed a special challenge. Whereas toggling between the city and the village on a seasonal basis had become accepted among Russian working-class and agrarian laborers who were gradually becoming urbanized, for the cohort being studied here, it was far more difficult to strive for change while preserving their social status within traditional Jewish society in the Pale.
While I do not seek to disprove the optimistic narrative of accomplishments promoted by recent scholarship on Russian Jewry, I do claim that many of the apparent achievements of the empire’s Jews were gained through complex and frustrating processes of adaptation and that these outstanding displays of creativity, resourcefulness, and insightfulness were fraught with paradoxes, failures, and collapses. Despite their presumptions of leading the entire Jewish community into modernity, maskilim were barely able to support themselves. They were relentlessly confronted by the dissonance between their understanding of how things should be and their lived reality, as they constantly struggled with economic hardship.
The period of the Great Reforms is remarkable for the major upheavals that took place in various spheres of Russian social existence. Previously stable social realities (in both the Jewish and the imperial realms) were being shattered into myriad personal experiences that were neither associated with a steady social order nor capable of being depicted with well-established social and ideological languages. Thus, the sense of disorientation and multiple possibilities that characterized this time is best described through the distinct experiences and idiosyncratic vocabularies that were elaborated by each maskil. This study is grounded on the assumption that, in the absence of stable connections between self-perceptions and accepted patterns of recognition in the social field, the body functions as an anchor that affirms the reality of personal existence. When the surroundings eschew the acknowledgment of individuals as dignified agents who are worthy of respect and understanding, their physical presence nevertheless challenges the existing order of recognition.
The emergence of Jewish modernity has fascinated scholars and the general public for decades. This phenomenon has been described as an outcome of increasing contact with external social and cultural realms but, to no lesser degree, as the result of inner processes in Jewish life and thought. Some scholars have associated the ascendance of modernity with the intellectual avant-garde within the Jewish community, whereas others have attributed this development to encounters with shifting features of everyday life.
This book locates the common ground between the social and intellectual histories of Jewish modernization at the consciousness of the maskilim, the vanguard of the Jewish Enlightenment who attempted to frame, comprehend, and mediate notions of modernity and modern Jewish selfhood amid rapidly changing social realities in the Russian Empire. It examines the life and literature of Jews in the Russian Empire from the early 1860s to the late 1880s (the period, larger part of which is known as the age of the Great Reforms in Russian historiography). For modernized Jewish individuals like Levanda, it was a time of existential indeterminacy that was lacking in established models of modern Jewish subjectivity and respectability, as well as firm boundaries between different channels for the expression of Jewish creativity in terms of language, style, and ideology. This generation of Jewish intellectuals came of age as the policies of the Great Reforms raised hope for Jewish emancipation, only to experience its devastation amid waves of restrictive legislation and pogroms—starting in the 1870s and intensifying in the 1880s—that resulted in profound disappointment and alienation.
Current scholarship on Russian Jewish modernization has revised the established narratives of Jewish victimhood in the empire, which were introduced in the late nineteenth century by the first generation of modern Jewish historians. Rather than focusing on oppression, contemporary scholars tend to emphasize the unprecedented achievements that nineteenth-century Russian Jewry attained economically and socially, educationally and professionally. Even when addressing the specific legal and administrative barriers that pervaded Jewish life in the empire, scholars often highlight the remarkable tenacity that many Jews demonstrated, not only to evade limitations but at times to harness them to their advantage. However, this book shifts the focus from external descriptions of Russian Jews’ adaptations to internal processes, particularly the imaginative faculties that fostered their capacity to adjust their selves to these challenging circumstances and, for most of them, to maintain a relatively functional “unified agency.” Rather than consider the Jewish population as a whole, I examine a discrete group of Jewish writers and intellectuals (self-identified interchangeably as maskilim and Russian Jewish intelligenty) who were born between 1825 and 1855 and whose marginality in adulthood was inversely correlated to their ambitions.
Therefore, this exploration of the Jewish encounter with modernity during the Great Reforms devotes particular attention to personal perspectives. Specifically, it concentrates on the inward perceptions of acutely self-aware, eloquent, and neurotic modernized Jewish individuals who dwelled at the margins of the imperial order—which is understood here not only as a complex of social realities but also as a conglomeration of conditions that regulate visual perception and the protocols of recognition. This study examines the key components of these men’s dramatic attempts to navigate their convoluted, often paradoxical experiences: namely, their constant need to account for the transgressive dimensions of their existence in Jewish and Russian imperial settings, respectively; their varied ways of perceiving and representing Jewish bodies and sexualities; their understanding of vision as a physical phenomenon and an aspect of personal experience; and their attempt to stage performances of the self before others. This book presents a range of scenarios by which this drama was comprehended and represented: at one end of this spectrum is the fantasy of dissolution of the body that leads to self-realization in the form of a gaze or a text; at the other are intensified performances of the body and sexuality that serve as means for circumventing the limited areas of Jewish visibility and the resulting crisis of signification in Russian discourse. I assert that these contrasting solutions correspond with specific ideological stances that developed in reaction to the imperial marginalization of Jews. The first reflects the rejection of imperial social topography by attempting to imagine Jewishness as a center of social coordinates. Indeed, its proponents knew that this center remained a desideratum, but the subjectivity constructed in their discourse already presupposed its own sovereignty and authority. However, this subjectivity could not be enacted in the actual body of a subaltern Jew in the Russian Empire. Hence their own or their characters’ physicality had to be suspended or neutralized. By contrast, intellectuals who adopted the other solution acknowledged and embraced their marginality. They activated Jewish physicality as a means for compensating for the paucity of satisfactory legal and social markers to represent and identify dignified Jewish existence in the empire. In their writings, the body functioned as the ultimate instrument of and target for cultural and political self-realization as subalterns.
A scholarly consensus concurs that literary texts offer a singular window onto the political unconscious of authors and their societies. The glimpse into the inner process of ideological production that close readings can yield becomes especially important at times of existential and ideological disorientation. Through textual analysis, we are able to trace the development of epistemic and ideological formations on the level of individual perceptions before they acquire a socially discernible form. Prior to becoming commonplace, new epistemes and ideologems begin on the level of structure, symbolism, and figurative language in literary works. Thus, maskilic literature provides the main sources for this study, reinforced by additional forms of discursive production, most significantly ego-documents and journalistic writings.