Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire

8 The Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society: Collecting the Jewish Past

a 8 b The Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society: Collecting the Jewish Past Recent scholarship has acknowledged the dominant role that remembrance of the past and evocation of history plays in public culture and the formation of national identity. Nineteenth- and early-­ twentieth-century historians have often been credited with creating a “usable past” that then becomes the basis for nation-building. This trend has been particularly noticeable in Jewish history, a discipline that has always been acutely aware of the authority of memory and its connection to communal awareness.1 In the words of Ismar Schorsch, historical thinking has become “the dominant universe of discourse in Jewish life and historians its major intellectual figures.”2 Historical thinking, he argues, defines Jewish modernity itself. Because of the role of history in Jewish public culture, the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society (JHES) came to represent the pinnacle of the Jewish voluntary association movement in Russia. The learned society was designed more explicitly than most to establish a public sphere on the model of Western and Central European voluntary associations. The membership roster of the society and the list of contributors to its journal read like a who’s who of Jewish public life in late tsarist Russia. Its membership included not only historians—in fact, very few were professionally trained practitioners of history—but also a diverse group of political activists, scholars, writers, and lawyers. Among those who found a place within the society are historians as diverse as Simon Dubnow, Iulii Gessen (1871–1939), Majer Balaban (1877–1943), and Ignacy Schipper (1884–1943), the latter two of whom contributed from Galicia; Kadet leader Maksim Vinaver; writer and folklorist S. An-sky; racial anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg (1867–1928); liberal jurist Genrikh Sliozberg (1863– 1937); and ethnographer Lev Shternberg (1861–1927). The story of how this disparate group of individuals from around the Russian Empire came together in St. Petersburg to advance the scholarly study of Jewish history provides a case study of social networks and voluntary association formation in action. It also elucidates the role of elites in stimulating broad public 230 Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire initiatives and identity formation and demonstrates the role history played as a cultural marker and rallying point for people of diverse political and ideological backgrounds.3 The JHES was part of a broad movement in Russian middle-class and intellectual circles to use private initiatives to disseminate higher education to adults, both to advance science and to cultivate morality and a sense of civic obligation. The predominantly liberal educators who served as its organizers believed that liberalization, civic emancipation, and a civil society were impossible without the spread of education. With government permission they set out to disseminate education to those excluded from universities on academic grounds and on the basis of their socioeconomic and religious status. They believed that only education could turn subjects into citizens.4 The preponderance of Jewish academic societies in Russia and throughout Europe can be at least partially attributed to the difficulties Jews faced in gaining access to universities. Unable to establish themselves in formalized academic environments, many Jews throughout Europe turned to informal journals and societies as surrogates for the ivory tower. Many institutions whose charters did not discriminate on the basis of religion were pressured throughout the nineteenth century into preventing Jews from receiving academic appointments. Even after they opened their doors to Jewish instructors in the second half of the century, these individuals were limited in how far they could advance professionally in certain fields, including history.5 Among the Jewish students who could be found in disproportionate numbers in German universities were many from Eastern Europe, where access to universities under Russian control was limited even further.6 History was one of the primary fields of academic and educational enrichment for Eastern European Jews, although the founding of modern historical societies among Jews began in Western and Central Europe. The prototype of all Jewish historical societies was the Society for Jewish Culture and Learning, which was founded in 1819 by a group of German Jewish intellectuals that included Eduard Gans, Heinrich Heine, Isaac Jost, and Leopold Zunz. The society’s tremendous success in modernizing Jewish scholarship by introducing textual criticism, epigraphy, and a synthetic approach to historical sources cannot be overlooked. Its achievements culminated in the publication of the Monatschrift fur die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (Monthly Journal of the History and Science of Judaism, 1851–1939) and the establishment...