Recent scholarship has expressed a growing interest in the origins and practices of Jewish and Yiddish ethnography as it emerged in the late nineteenth century and in the historical and epistemological role it played in the project of fashioning a modern Jewish identity. Reflecting a broader movement in the nineteenth century to collect, record, preserve, and interpret the material and ceremonial aspects of traditional cultures, the field of Jewish ethnography shared many common features with mainstream ethnographic research, while developing its own set of organizing principles and critical frameworks. In the highly encoded, shifting space known as the Pale of Settlement, Jewish researchers and scholars, many of whom could trace their family origins to the area, located an authentic site through which to articulate and craft a Jewish ethnography. As was true with other ethnographic projects, the process of determining and framing a set of folkloric and historical materials designed to capture and preserve the essence of Jewish traditional and ceremonial life operated as a mechanism to stabilize the shifting boundaries of what was seen as an authentic Jewish identity.

This quest to record and preserve an image of the “authentic” Jew was driven by a set of distinct discursive strategies. One thread, informed by a type of nostalgia discourse, configured the Jewish communities of the Pale as a source of cultural pride and an intellectual buttress against the ideology of assimilation so prominent among the urban, Jewish elite of Europe by positioning and equating traditional Jewish culture within the spectrum of other European and Slavic peoples as one among many ethnic collectives. In addition to a nostalgia discourse, the development of a Jewish ethnography served as a response to the claims of inauthenticity raised by the multitude of voices in the antisemitic movement, as well as the contemporary social and cultural critiques posited by Jewish thinkers who argued that assimilationism and cosmopolitanism were responsible for an ethos of degeneration undermining the cultural integrity and vitality of the Jewish people. Crafting an image of the Jewish community through its material, ceremonial, and folkloric culture operated as a regenerative or redemptive mechanism by articulating what Steven Aschheim described as a countermyth of the Ostjuden, in which the forms and structures of traditional Jewish life offered the cosmopolitan Jew an alternative framework for organizing identity and ensuring the continuity of the Jewish people. The call to document and preserve the culture of the Pale of Settlement was also voiced by Jewish and particularly non-Jewish ethnographers during the late nineteenth century as part of a broader strategy to rescue or salvage the material and ceremonial remnants of traditional communities facing a seemingly inevitable process of extinction under the demands of modernity. Situated as part of this “extinction discourse,” ethnographers and others warned that without a strong and urgent commitment to record its remains, Jewish life in the Pale would disappear like so many other traditional societies before the breadth of its cultural significance could be mapped and interpreted.

In the early formation of the field of Jewish ethnography, the research and cultural program of S. An-sky (1863–1920) represented an attempt to integrate each of these discursive strategies into a critical project of Jewish national revival. Although there exists an extensive body of literature on An-sky, particularly regarding his work as a playwright, most of the scholarship woefully ignores his ethnographic work (notable recent exceptions, however, would include the studies by David Roskies, Simon Rabinovitch, Nathaniel Deutsch, and an important volume edited by Gabriella Safran and Steven Zipperstein).Footnote ¹ Beginning in 1911, An-sky developed plans, which he referred to as his “program for collecting material on Jewish ethnography,” to conduct a series of ethnographic expeditions throughout the Pale. Lasting from 1912 through 1914, the expeditions visited more than sixty specifically designated Jewish settlements and shtetlach spread over three provinces (Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev) and were responsible for collecting, recording, and documenting the cultural and national life of the surviving Jewish communities. Considering the expedition's limited financial resources and the size of its territorial mandate, the scope and quality of the materials assembled in the final collection represent a truly remarkable achievement. During the expedition's three years, An-sky and his team were able to register a diverse set of cultural and ethnographic artifacts, including well over 3,000 folk narratives, songs and plays, 100 rare manuscripts, including 50 Pinaxes, 1,000 nigunim (hasidic melodies), and more than 700 ceremonial objects. The team also captured over 2,000 ethnographic and documentary photographs. Like others at the time, such as Max Grunwald, Simon Dubnow, Eugen Taubler, and Martin Buber, An-sky hoped to carve out a reservoir of Jewish knowledge beneath the surface geography in order to preserve it as a source for refashioning and renewing the cultural space of contemporary Jewish life residing outside the Pale.

In Photographing the Jewish Nation, a series of beautifully detailed photos from An-sky's Jewish expeditions is reproduced, framed by a collection of short review essays that describe the historical and cultural context informing the expeditions and its treasures. Originally prepared in conjunction with an exhibition of the photoarchive of An-sky's expeditions held at the European University in St. Petersburg in 2005, the five essays in the volume are arranged thematically, focusing on different research imperatives inscribing An-sky's project. The corresponding photograph sets follow immediately after each essay and demonstrate brilliantly An-sky's attempt to capture the “residues of lived culture” and to craft a particular ethnographic and cultural space.

The first essay, by Alexander Ivanov, entitled “The Making of a Young Photographer: From Ethnography to Art,” examines the pictorial grammar and aesthetic/ethnographic practices of the expeditions' official photographer, An-sky's teenage nephew, Solomon Iudovin. Although he would achieve recognition later for his graphic work, Iudovin's expedition photographs demonstrate a profound sensitivity to visual texture and a remarkable command of photographic technique and processing. While the subject matter of the photographs might conform to a conventional index common to ethnographic photography at the time (i.e., profiles and frontal portraits of body types, daily and ceremonial activities, costumes, cultural or architectural sites), the author of the essay situates Iudovin's distinct visual aesthetic within a contemporary avant-garde movement in Russia known as pictorialism or photo-impressionism. Joining myth and an ideology of populism with a “rejection of documentary detail” and “the heightening of emotion,” “the goal of pictorialism was to grant photography the status of art by using techniques, or ‘pictorial effects,’ that made photographs resemble paintings” (32). Iudovin's use of these “pictorial effects,” particularly his mastery of shading and the mechanics of spatial contrast and framing—clearly indicative of Rembrandt—fits perfectly into An-sky's long-term strategy of crafting the expeditions and their collections into ideological mechanisms to stimulate a movement of Jewish cultural renewal. By bathing metalworkers, tailors, weavers, students, or cigarette-factory workers in a cascade of wet, glimmering sunlight or a forest of school-age faces emerging from a sea of saturated shadows beneath it, Iudovin's photographs of Jewish artisans, workers, and students allowed An-sky to render or distill an ethnopoetic narrative of Jewish life in the Pale designed to inspire a sense of cultural and national pride among cosmopolitan Russian Jews (just as ethnographic work on the peasantry had contributed to the configuration of contemporary Russian identity, e.g., Prince Tenishev's massive peasant expeditions in 1890s), as well as to foster a discourse of nostalgia as mythic/utopian return (real, not imaginary) through which Jews would be free to assert a claim on their past as their own.

The theme of Jewish cultural renewal is developed in the next essay by Valerii Dymshits, entitled “ ‘Brothers & Sisters in Toil & Struggle’: Jewish Workers and Artisans on the Eve of Revolution,” which describes the importance of socialist ideology in the articulation of An-sky's ethnographic thought and practice. As a committed Socialist Revolutionary, An-sky believed that he had discovered a vital source of Jewish national strength in the figure of the Jewish worker/artisan. Configured as a redemptive mechanism, the Jewish working class represented for An-sky a “healthy,” productive, and, therefore, authentic “foundation” from which to fashion a Jewish national identity and to counter the conditions of degeneracy and disintegration registered throughout contemporary Jewish urban culture. “An-sky thought,” Dymshits writes, “that the Jewish people were in need of salvation, and that the Jewish people would find the means for salvation within themselves, in the ‘healthiest’ part of the people, namely, among Jewish workers” (63–64). In his photographs of matzo carriers, tombstone engravers, or bricklayers, Iudovin reaffirmed An-sky's ideological project by blending the “organic forms” of Jewish labor with its redemptive potentiality. He crafted, therefore, “a portrait of Jewish workers from a political point of view,” acting in common with a shared sense of dignity and solidarity, and encoded as the source for future Jewish renewal (62).

As part of the movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century to collect and preserve the material and verbal forms of authentic peasant culture, Russian ethnographers and historians of folk art developed the concept of starina “to refer to material and verbal artifacts that embodied the national artistic heritage” (133). In “The Space of Jewish Tradition: Sacred and Profane Places,” Alla Sokolova argues that An-sky's approach to the Jewish material culture was informed by this concept of starina. In conducting the expeditions, contends Sokolova, An-sky “was not searching the Pale of Settlement for remnants of the past, but rather for a living Jewish tradition, for a past that continued to be vital in the present” (134). When An-sky encountered even a simple wooden synagogue or a plain gravestone, he interpreted them through a critical framework as material expressions of a living and vital cultural heritage, an authentic, “spiritual” source uniting and defining the local Jewish communities.

Photographing the Jewish Nation is, however, a deeply unbalanced volume. Although the set of published photographs presents a remarkable and penetrating view into the daily and ceremonial lives of the Jewish communities of prerevolutionary Russia, the accompanying essays fail, on the whole, to achieve the level of critical analysis demanded by the photographs themselves. With moments of notable exception, such as the dramatic synthesis between Iudovin's use of the contemporary principles of ethnographic photography and “the artistic methods of pictorialism” drawn out in Ivanov's essay, the analysis in Dymshits's first essay on An-sky's interpretation of Jewish labor and craftsmanship as a source for cultural renewal, and Sokolova's discussion of Jewish architectural and visual culture as embodying, for An-sky, a historical connection to a vibrant Jewish heritage, the essays exhibit a shallowness and an overall lack of sophistication in their arguments and scope. There is no mention, for example, of how An-sky's project of Jewish national renewal offered a counter-discourse to the rhetoric of the emerging antisemitic movement in Russia, particularly the analytic of authenticity with which he configured the Jewish worker and Jewish folklore traditions, or how it might have accentuated “the tensions and contradictions” already existing within the Zionist Hebrew culture movement toward the remnants of Jewish heritage in the Diaspora. None of the essays in the volume discusses the importance An-sky placed on using the collected ethnographic materials as sources for forging a distinctively new Jewish aesthetic or how his program conflicted with the aesthetic claims of contemporary Russian Modernism, which rejected domestic artifacts as mere “conservative relics.” In addition, the essays are designed to frame the corresponding photography sets, but only rarely, in fact, do they actually discuss or reference particular images; incorporating more analysis of the photographs and their composition into the structure of the essays would have relieved this general impression of disconnection and interpretive discord. The essays also provide minimal critical guidance for reading the photographs: There is an enormous epistemic gulf separating, on the one hand, An-sky's fundamentally optimistic attempt to capture in them the living and vibrant legacy of Jewish heritage in the Pale from, on the other hand, the dominant interpretive mechanics of the post-Holocaust era through which we read the photographs as ruins defined by shadows of death, with no “effect of presence” to be discerned. Probing this divide would have made Photographing the Jewish Nation more than simply a catalogue of “beautiful” ethnographic images; it would have provided a tool for understanding the power of “flat death.”