The Jewish Dark Continent

A century ago, The Jewish Ethnographic Program gave us the culture of the shtetl at such close range and in such extraordinary detail that we can see the blood spot on the conjugal sheet and read the petitionary notes on the Zaddik's grave. Thanks to Nathaniel Deutsch, An-sky's 'dark continent' is revealed to us as a living, luminous place. -- David Roskies, author of Yiddishlands: A Memoir The Jewish Dark Continent is much more than the story of an amazing individual and an inspired, if quixotic, project of collaborative research. It is a genuine voyage of exploration, a work of erudition and vision that restores complexity, paradox, and possibility to the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Brilliant and genre-bending. -- James Clifford, author of The Predicament of Culture and Routes A highly original work--a superb translation, an erudite, lively annotation, above all an extended conversation with one of late imperial Russian Jewry's most intriguing minds. -- Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Imagining Russian Jewry For the first time, a rare and precious document, as lost as the world it was intended to document, comes to light. World War I halted the ethnographic expedition that would have provided the answers to this unique questionnaire about all aspects of the Jewish life cycle in Eastern Europe. Thanks to Nathaniel Deutsch's fine translation and erudite commentary these tantalizing questions--without answers--reveal what those who formulated them expected to find. Truly a treasure. -- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, editor of Writing a Modern Jewish History and co-author of They Called Me Mayer July

The Jews of the Pale of Settlement created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders. Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary named An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took thousands of photographs, and created a revealing questionnaire in Yiddish, translated here in its entirety for the first time.

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.