Kenneth B Moss

The story of modern Jewry is often told as one of passionate idealisms, bold creativity, and stubborn commitment to diasporic flourishing on Jews’ own terms. Revisiting a darker but no less paradigmatic dimension of the modern Jewish experience, An Unchosen People investigates how some in prewar Europe’s largest Jewish community, assailed by antisemitism and witnessing liberalism’s collapse, looked past progressive hopes and religious or revolutionary faiths to investigate with new eyes what the nation-state was becoming, what powers minority communities really possessed, and where a future might be found—and for whom. An Unchosen People combines an intellectual history of how Polish Jewry’s most searching thinkers struggled to comprehend the unexpected powers of the politics of hate and fear in modern societies, a cultural history of how Diasporist activists and poets sought to counter despair where they could not redress its causes, and a grassroots political history of how ordinary people wrestled with the clashing claims of integrationism, revolution, and Zionism – and sought a future for themselves, in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Challenging histories that focus on Jewish agency and self-making, An Unchosen People rediscovers a Jewish search for realism amidst a reckoning with nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice under conditions of uncertainty, vulnerability, and danger.

Focusing on the pivotal 1917–1919 conjuncture in Russia and Ukraine, this paper analyzes the efforts of the divided Jewish nationalist intelligentsia to disseminate new forms of Jewish culture to a mass audience, the reception of these efforts in the former Tsarist empire’s variegated Jewish population, and the intelligentsia’s parallel exploration of other forms of cultural formation less dependent on popular support. Comparing the cultural programs of Hebraism and Yiddishism, it demonstrates important parallels in their cultural visions and highlights their shared belief in the possibility of implanting a secularist, aestheticist intelligentsia culture in the whole of “the nation.” The paper reconstructs both substantial forms of popular openness to this culture and its sociocultural weaknesses. Finally, it examines experiments made by the intelligentsia with alternative routes to cultural transformation: suppression of popular culture, non-market cultural arrangements, cultural revolution through education, and the uses of the state. The paper seeks a fuller understanding both of the roots of interwar cultural programs in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and of the Jewish nationalist intelligentsia’s underlying conception of “culture,” its own authority, and the evolving relationship between these conceptions and the realities of East European Jewish social, cultural, and political life from the 1890s onward.