Power and Powerlessness: Niagara, Primitivism, and the Hebrew Literary Imagination

In its assorted guises, Primitivism¹ has had a strong draw on the practitioners of Modern Hebrew Literature. In some of its forms—among them those presented by Berdichevsky and Tschernichivsky—the attraction of the natural, pre-civilized and “authentic” human has played an active role in transforming Hebrew letters and bolstering the ideological underpinnings of the teiyah (the national renaissance) movement, which followed upon the heels of the haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment (c. 1780s–1880s).

Yet despite European intellectual discourse in general and their Hebrew literary colleagues’ preoccupation with the subject for several decades before, Hebrew writers in America were ambivalent late-comers to the discourse on Primitivism. The matter of the primitive and Primitivism, which has its roots in the thought of Locke and Rousseau, who were both instrumental in awakening interest about human and natural rights, was not a subject that engaged American Hebraists. The latter appear to have been even less enthusiastic about joining discussions on matters of the primordial, wild, and elemental features of human nature as a subject engaging some followers of Primitivism. For the former, the followers of Locke and Rousseau, the debate led to conclusions pertaining to racial equality and aspects of the natural domain, a subject that did attract the Americanized Hebraists. These sentiments challenged and clashed with the sociopolitical realities of a modern “civilization” in its attempt to remedy the status quo of alienation and social stratification. Yet Hebraists, it seems, were engaged with the subject in ways pertaining to their unique national-cultural situation.

As science, technology, and industrialism proliferated in the West, and societies identified these achievements with progress, a move to counter this sentiment emerged as if to challenge the values of progress. In this discourse, advocates opposed to the notion that progress means a pursuit and support of the scientific ideology sided with the pristine, natural, and non-technological as a valued and unadulterated product of human activity, products deemed to be an outgrowth of the uniqueness and naturalness of individual groups, cultures, and even persons. To foster the emergence of the latter, as by focusing on the “authentic” self, artists emulated the model they found in primitive societies. Examining how these societies lived facilitated recognition of similar and perhaps latent traits within western civilization. The discernment of such qualities within the self, as unique individual or group, would bring to the fore identities repressed by industrialism and technology, urbanization, and science. In their contemplation of the subject of natural rights, they also considered as an enviable ideal the possibility of a return to pristine modes of existence. Natural Man, deemed uncorrupted by progress, would emerge when primitive ways were adopted to awaken dormant traits, thereby loosening and revitalizing western society.²

Ever since the age of the haskalah, these views have also taken hold among Hebrew writers and other Jewish intellectuals. Ideologically, promotion of equality and acceptance of diverse values and modes of existence were at the root of haskalah ideology. Similarly, an interest in primitive culture, and what was an imagined pre-rabbinic existence for Hebrews, were pursued as a means for communal and national revival, considered an age of intimacy with nature and ensuing freedom before the onset of overarching laws that regimented and confined one under the yoke of authority. Imprints of these attitudes remain discernible in contemporary Hebrew literature and art.

The image of primitive civilizations, and the idea of Primitivism, has often been regarded in contradictory ways. Initially, primitives were considered racially and culturally inferior to progressive western civilization which saw in the former uncultivated and threatening savages, societies who manifested their savage ways through the most basic, violent, and animalistic instincts and attitudes. Under the impact of Romanticism and anti-classicism’s (and anti-urbanism’s) challenge to racist attitudes, this notion was mitigated as primitive societies were idealized, their members regarded as noble savages, as possessors of the keys to the kind of natural existence by which every human ought to live. By the late nineteenth century, the leading view about primitive societies was that even they possessed a sophisticated aesthetic sense...