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Chapter 14 Bringing Tidings to the Jews: Aron Shteinberg, Dostoevsky's Disciple The subject "Dostoevsky and the Jews" can be conceived in the broadest way as touching on antisemitism in Russia from the middle of the 19th to the first quarter of the 20th centuries. For the most part, the question has been formulated as a conundrum: How could Jewish readers, such as Avram Kovner, Leonid Tsypkin, Leonid Grossman, Grigory Fridlender, and Pavel Kogan admire Dostoevsky the way they did? Were they self-hating Jews? Did they embrace Dostoevsky in order to gain acceptance in Russian culture? Surveying such Jewish admirers, certainly we need not forget the many Jews who criticized Dostoevsky's antisemitism. Arkady Gornfeld symbolizes them, writing in the Evreiskaia el1tsiklopediia from before World War I: From the very beginning of "The Diary [of a Writer]" (The Citizen, 1873), at every convenient moment Dostoevsky pointed to the nefarious role of the Jews, first economic, then political and ideological. No serious evidence or original ideas are brought forth in his accusations; this is banal antisemitism, which undoubtedly attracts the reader with the extreme pathos of certitude that characterizes Dostoevsky's publicistic writings. Dostoevsky's antisemitism is especially terrible because it affects one's emotions and not one's mindl These two poles of adoration and antipathy are well enough known. I would like to outline yet a third category designating those who neither valorized Dostoevsky's attitudes on Russian national culture nor denigrated them, but nonetheless looked to Dostoevsky as an inspiration in the construction of their own specifically Jewish perspectives on contemporary problems. For example, Dostoevsky haunted the Hebrew writer and Zionist Yosef Brenner , who translated him into Hebrew and for whom Dostoevsky defined the best in literary style. One can also look to Lev Shestov, Albert Camus, Martin Buber, or Emmanuel Levinas as other examples. Aron Shteinberg (1891- 1975), Russian-Jewish thinker, emigre, and civic leader, provides a striking example of a writer who was strongly influenced 1 Evreisknin el1tsiklopediin, s.v. "Dostoevskii, Feodor Mikhailovich" (by A. Gornfel'd), 7: 311. BRINGI NG TIDINGS TO THE JEWS 251 in his understanding of Judaism by none other than Dostoevsky. Shteinberg employed his ideas to formulate definitions of Jewish national unity, religious epiphany, and the meaning of history. An original member of the Free Philosophical Society, Volfil, which he organized with Andrei Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik in the days after the Bolshevik Revolution, Shteinberg became an important figure in Petersburg in the short spell between 1917 and 1922. Born in Daugavpils (Dvinsk), in what is present-day Latvia, in a religious family, Shteinberg was educated in a traditional Jewish heder and then Russian schools. Like many Jews of the time, the numerus clausus forced him to earn his university degree in Western Europe. He graduated from the University of Heidelberg with a PhD. in Philosophy at the age of 22. In 1912, soon after returning to Russia, he began writing articles on philosophy for the venerable thick journal Russkaia mysl'. Like others of his generation, he watched his world shatter under Bolshevik rule; he fled Soviet Russia in 1922. In Berlin, Shteinberg involved himself in Jewish life. Spending the interwar years translating the work of Simon Dubnov, the Russian-Jewish historian , into German, Shteinberg also served as an editor of the English-language Jewish Encyclopedia and wrote numerous articles on Jewish theology and history . Making London his home, he became a leader of the World Jewish Congress , ultimately becoming its representative to UNESCO. During his life he published three books on Dostoevsky: Sistema svobody Dostoevskogo (1923); a play, Dostoevskii v Londone: Povest' v chetyrekh aktakh (1932); and a work of literary criticism in English simply entitled Dostoievsky (1960). In order to make sense of Shteinberg's own philosophical oeuvre, one has to realize that he was a final representative, almost an epigone, of Russia's Silver Age, preserving its values and intellectual premises into the 1920s and beyond . Like other fin-de-siecle humanists, Shteinberg showed an indifference to disciplinary boundaries, refraining from making distinctions between philosophy , creative literature, and criticism, viewing all intellectual endeavors as an exploration of man's spiritual dimension or metaphysics. Like many others of his generation, his fascination with art was accompanied by a lack of interest in practical politics: Shteinberg personally experienced Russia's short experiment with democracy and turn to Communism, and the destabilization of democracy in post-World War I Germany and the rise of totalitarianism there. To get an impression...

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