The Spread of National Consciousness and Modern Jewish Culture

Secularization + Ethnonationalism = Cultural Revolution

The spread of Jewish national consciousness in Zionist and other forms profoundly transformed how Jewish culture could be imagined and expressed. Particularly in Jewish Eastern Europe, secularization intersected with rising Jewish ethnonational consciousness to effect a genuine revolution in what Jewish culture itself was supposed to be and do. 

Beginning in the 1880s, growing numbers of young Jews in the Russian Empire’s ethnically mixed borderlands embraced the radical idea that Jews had to create a new kind of Jewish culture centering not around divine revelation, Torah, and commandedness, but instead around this-worldly, modern, and above all aesthetic creativity by a posited “Jewish nation” and the individuals who comprised it. Initially, the protagonists of this quiet revolution were mostly young men with one foot in the world of traditional texts and the other in Russian or Polish or German culture—figures like the era’s preeminent Hebrew poet Chaim Nahman Bialik and the Yiddish writer-cum-seer Y. L. Peretz. By the turn of the century, the visionaries of the new culture came to include men and women with modern European educations.

The Language of the New Jewish Culture: Hebrew or Yiddish?

Like traditional Jewish culture, this new Jewish culture was to be housed in its own language. Hebrew, with its rich textual inheritance, initially seemed the only candidate, but soon, some insisted that Yiddish—the only language actually spoken and read by millions of Jews—made more sense. 

Yet if embrace of Hebrew or Yiddish established a kind of continuity with East European Jewish tradition, the main story was nevertheless one of rupture. In place of traditional practices of study, commentary, mystical exercise, and philosophical speculation, the new Hebrew or Yiddish culture would enthrone human creativity in the modes that had defined European high culture since the Renaissance, taken new form in the previous century’s ideal of Bildung, and been revitalized in nineteenth-century Romanticism: poetry, theater, plastic and musical art, and the writing of secular history as realms in which the self could express itself, realize its powers and ends, define its identity and community, and find some harmony with the world.

The Urge to Create, “Like All Other Peoples”

Jewish nationalism as an ethos and a closely linked vision of a new kind of secular-national Jewish Kultur flourished above all in Eastern Europe and the New Yishuv in Palestine. In ways that still demand further inquiry, it also attracted some in the Sephardic Ottoman Balkans, particularly in Bulgaria, and in the Middle East and North Africa, where it resonated for a network of traditionally educated but modern-minded intellectuals from Tripoli to Jaffa to Baghdad who wrote in Hebrew and already identified with the Haskalah, the transnational nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment movement. 

Where Jewish national consciousness flourished, it profoundly changed the character of Jewish cultural practice. Hebrew and Yiddish literatures moved in our era beyond sentimentalism and satire to encompass the whole territory of literary realism and naturalism, leapt from belated Romanticism to sophisticated neo-Romanticism to daring modernist experimentation, attained to a full range of lyrical expression in poetry, achieved the grand human comedy of the Russian Jew and Yiddish writer Sholem Rabinovitsh, better known as Sholem Aleichem, and the stunning poetic artistry of the Hebrew poet Saul Tschernikhovsky. So too, between 1880 and 1918, growing numbers of artists and actors, composers and musicians, began to imagine that Jews “like all the other peoples” could give birth not only to worthwhile individual paintings, dramas, and musical compositions but also to collective formations of Jewish visual art, theater, and art music. 

Of course, the flourishing of Hebrew and Yiddish literature that looms so large in the Posen Library was no mere by-product of either secularization or Jewish nationalism. The urge to artistic creativity that exploded among users of those two languages was born of many impulses, including a desire to capture one’s own mixed experience of modern life and transmute it into something of one’s own making. And sometimes, accidents of place and linguistic surroundings played the decisive role. As a young woman raised in the Belarusian-Ukrainian borderlands of the Russian Empire, Celia Dropkin quite naturally began her poetic career at the turn of the century, writing in Russian—naturally, both because she received an unusually fine Russian-language education for someone of that generation and because Russian was a language of recognized poetic merit while her native Yiddish was not—yet. But when conditions drove her to immigrate to New York in 1910, she found herself in a milieu where Russian-language literature was suddenly a merely spectral presence and a bold Yiddish poetry scene was emerging. Translating her own early work into Yiddish, she then embarked on a career as one of the language’s most daring voices, although her best poetry would be written in the interwar years. Dropkin’s rebirth as a Yiddish poet reminds us that there is plenty of historical accident, personal will, and desire woven into the cultural history reflected in the contents of the Posen Library.