At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the
world s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the
Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of
the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its
borders. This led the historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory
a Jewish Dark Continent.
Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary and aspiring
ethnographer named An-sky pledged to explore the Pale. He dreamed
of leading an ethnographic expedition that would produce an archive
what he called an Oral Torah of the common people rather than the
rabbinic elite which would preserve Jewish traditions and transform
them into the seeds of a modern Jewish culture. Between 1912 and
1914, An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took
thousands of photographs, and created a massive ethnographic
questionnaire. Consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish exploring
the gamut of Jewish folk beliefs and traditions, from everyday
activities to spiritual exercises to marital intimacies the Jewish
Ethnographic Program constitutes an invaluable portrait of Eastern
European Jewish life on the brink of destruction.
Nathaniel Deutsch offers the first complete translation of the
questionnaire, as well as the riveting story of An-sky s almost
messianic efforts to create a Jewish ethnography in an era of
revolutionary change. An-sky s project was halted by World War I,
and within a few years the Pale of Settlement would no longer
exist. These survey questions revive and reveal "shtetl" life in
all its wonder and complexity.
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