Jewish Traditionalism in Eastern Europe: The Historiographical Gadfly

Here's again the wizened man,With shrunk and shrivelled looks,Shade of dry stubble, shaking leaf,Swaying over his books.

hayim nahman bialik, 'On My Return'

History is probably our myth.

michel de certeau, The Writing of History

The Jewish transition to modernity is often portrayed as an inexorable process in which the sun of Enlightenment steadily heated, shrank, and broke up the glacial world of tradition. Standard histories of east European Jewry, popularly remembered for its rabbinic luminaries, iconic yeshivas, and hasidic dynasties, may contain brief caveats about the 'vast majority' of traditionalists in imperial Russia or the 'much larger Orthodox sector' in inter-war Poland, while some may include detailed descriptions of Orthodox experiments in the quintessentially modern realm of party politics,¹ but nearly all conform to a schema in which young secular 'prophets' plunge into politics, shunt aside a stodgy rabbi-merchant old guard, and foster a secular transformation within Jewish society by the early twentieth century.² According to the boldest formulation, the elders' credulous 'world-to-come' orientation was rapidly displaced at the beginning of the twentieth century by the younger generation's more realistic 'this-world' orientation.³

It is increasingly difficult to write in such a celebratory vein. In 1994 Jose Casanova issued a book-length challenge to those who would 'conceive the process of secularization as the progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices in the modern world'. Such a conception, Casanova declared provocatively, was 'reproducing a myth that sees history as the progressive evolution of humanity from superstition to reason, from belief to unbelief, from religion to science', a product of Enlightenment dogma that is not sustained by the histories of even modernized countries like Poland, Ireland, and the United States.⁴ Around the same time, the anthropologist Talal Assad accused historians of engaging in a kind of project ('by definition teleological') that ignored or discredited all attempts to 'turn back the clock of history'.⁵ Post-colonial theorists like Dipesh Chakrabarty, with an eye towards non-western countries, began to question the very tradition/modernity binary, re-envisioning modernity as an assortment of traditional and modern hybrids.⁶ More recently, Saba Mahmood has cast doubt on the assumption that all people have an innate desire for Western-style freedom and autonomy and that, left to their own devices, they will reject 'fundamentalist' religious norms. Instead, Mahmood argues, in her study of Islamic revival in Egypt, many men and women quite willingly join movements that promote humility, discipline, asceticism, and other more traditional means of self-fulfilment.⁷ Even modernity's pre-eminent commentator, Jürgen Habermas, now concedes that we are living in a 'post-secular' society in which 'religion maintains a public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernization is losing ground'.⁸

In the case of east European Jewish history, the temptation to present a trajectory of wholesale secularization has in all likelihood been more acute. Few sub-disciplines have struggled so hard to emancipate their subjects from such stigmatizing images of backwardness and insularity, originating in the older, Germanocentric Jewish historiography and enhanced by immensely popular artistic products of shtetl nostalgia. At the same time, Polish Jewry's almost total destruction in the Holocaust and its aftermath thwarted the community's natural cultural progression, leaving only hopeful projections about what might have been.

This chapter highlights works that re-envisage nineteenth- and early twentieth-century east European Jewish culture as a contested arena with no clear victor on the eve of its destruction. According to this conception, Jewish modernity included potent varieties of conscious 'traditionalism', known in its more institutionalized forms as 'Orthodoxy'. Notwithstanding its unabashed ethnocentricism, gender exclusion in the public sphere, rejection of Western cultural products, and other perceived deficiencies, Jewish traditionalism rebounded in inter-war Poland according to important measures like educational and religious institutional growth, as well as projects of more secondary priority for traditionalists like modern politics, press, and youth groups. A better understanding of the way in which the ascendant traditionalism...