Writing Jewish Culture Paradoxes in Ethnography [Paperback]

Focusing on Eastern and Central Europe before WWII, this collection explores various genres of ethnoliterature across temporal, geographical, and ideological borders as sites of Jewish identity formation and dissemination. Challenging the assumption of cultural uniformity among Ashkenazi Jews, the contributors consider how ethnographic literature defines Jews and Jewishness, the political context of Jewish ethnography, and the question of audience, readers, and listeners. With contributions from leading scholars and an appendix of translated historical ethnographies, this volume presents vivid case studies across linguistic and disciplinary divides, revealing a rich textual history that throws the complexity and diversity of a people into sharp relief.

Andreas Kilcher is a professor at ETH Zurich and author of The Linguistic Theory of Kabbalah as an Aesthetical Paradigm and Dictionary of German-Jewish Literature.

Gabriella Safran is the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University and author of Wandering Soul: The Dybbuks Creator, S. An-sky.

Note on Transliteration and Names
Introduction / Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran
Part 1: Reinventing the Jews in Ethnographic Writing
1. The Voice of a Native Informer: Salomon Maimon Describes Life in Polish Lithuania / Liliane Weissberg
2. Legends of Authenticity: Das Buch von den polnischen Juden (1916) by S. J. Agnon and Ahron Eliasberg / Sylvia Jaworski
3. The Cold Order and the Eros of Storytelling: Joseph Roths Exotic Jews / Andreas Kilcher
4. Yiddish Ethnographic Poetics and Moyshe Kulbaks Vilne / Jordan Finkin
Part 2: Seeing, Hearing, and Reading Jews
5. Listening in the Dark: The Yiddish Folklorists Claim of a Russian Genealogy / Gabriella Safran
6. Ethnoliterary Modernity: Jewish Ethnography and Literature in the Russian Empire and Poland (1890-1930) / Annette Werberger
7. Imagining the Wandering Jew in Modernity: Exegesis and l“,