The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement

The Jewish Dark Continent The Jewish Dark Continent Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement N AT H A N I E...

Author: Nathaniel Deutsch

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The Jewish Dark Continent

The Jewish Dark Continent

Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement

N AT H A N I E L D E U T S C H

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England • 2011

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deutsch, Nathaniel. The Jewish dark continent : life and death in the Russian pale of settlement / Nathaniel Deutsch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04728-0 1. An-Ski, S., 1863–1920—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Jews—Russia (Federation)— Folklore. 3. Jews—Ukraine—Folklore. 4. Russia—Social life and customs. 5. Russia—Ethnic relations. 6. Ukraine—Social life and customs. 7. Ukraine—Ethnic relations. I. An-Ski, S., 1863–1920. Yidishe etnografishe program English. II. Title. PJ5129.R3Z58 2011 947.004924—dc22 2011016277

For Simi and Tamar

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

I 1 Exploring the Jewish Dark Continent

19

2 The Rebbe as Ethnographer/ The Ethnographer as Rebbe

40

3 A Total Account: Writing Down the People’s Torah

54

4 The Book of Man

72

II Preface to the Annotated Translation

95

The Jewish Ethnographic Program

103

Afterword

315

Notes Acknowledgments Index

327 353 355

Map of An-sky’s Travels. From Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard University Press, 2010).

INTRODUCTION

The Jew answers every question with another question. —Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

In 1912, some three decades after the journalist Henry Morton Stanley published Through the Dark Continent, an account of his adventures—or, more accurately, misadventures—in equatorial Africa, the intrepid hero of our story set out on another kind of expedition.1 Between 1912 and 1914, Shloyme Zanvil Rapoport, the writer, revolutionary, and ethnographer better known to the world by his pseudonym An-sky, led the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition into the Pale of Settlement, the territory between the Black and Baltic Seas to which a majority of Russia’s Jews had been legally restricted since the time of Catherine the Great. By the beginning of the twentieth century, around five million Jews lived in the Pale, many in the thousands of market towns, or shtetls, that dotted its landscape, and gave the region its distinctively Jewish character. Despite the immigration of two million Jews from the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1914, following the passage of discriminatory legislation known as the May Laws, a series of bloody pogroms, and the increasing impoverishment of its population, the Pale of Settlement nevertheless remained home to the largest Jewish population in the world, one marked by great diversity in religious practice and political orientation. Members of different Hasidic sects, misnagdim (non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews), Communists, Jewish Socialists, and Zionists of various orientations all inhabited the same communities; indeed, they could even be found in the same families. 1

2

T H E J E W I S H DA R K C O N T I N E N T

Born in 1863 in the small town of Chashniki and raised in the nearby provincial capital of Vitebsk—later home to Marc Chagall—An-sky was a native son of the Pale.2 After moving to Vitebsk, An-sky was literally raised in a tavern operated by his mother, while his father, who led a peripatetic existence, was absent from home for long periods. An-sky received a traditional kheyder (elementary school) education, but like many of his contemporaries, he became attracted to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, as an adolescent and, with the help of his close friend, the future Socialist author and activist Chaim Zhitlovsky, An-sky set out to learn Russian and to transform himself into an intellectual.3 After leaving Vitebsk as a young man, An-sky initially found work as a tutor (he was chased out of the Hasidic bastion of Liozna for clandestinely spreading the Haskalah) before briefly apprenticing as a blacksmith and bookbinder, physical occupations that jibed with his emerging identification with the Populist movement that was sweeping the Russian intelligentsia during the 1870s.4 While Russian Populists shared many of the Socialist ideals of their orthodox Marxist counterparts, including their valorization of physical labor and the working classes who engaged in it, they parted ways with Marx’s view that societies necessarily had to pass through an industrial capitalist phase before entering a revolutionary mode. Instead, Russian Populists, or narodniki, were convinced that recently emancipated peasants who still lived an agrarian lifestyle could serve as the wellspring for revolutionary change, albeit with the help of the intelligentsia. An-sky’s upbringing in his mother’s tavern sensitized him to the experiences of working-class people and helped lay the foundation for the Populist sensibility that would not only inflect his voluminous fiction and journalistic writing but also his ethnography. Following in the footsteps of a generation of young Russian Populists who abandoned their homes in the middle of the 1870s to live among peasants in the countryside—a phenomenon known as “going to the people” (khozhdenie v narod) in Russian—An-sky departed in 1885 for the Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining region, a rough-and-tumble industrial zone that was then attracting thousands of migrant workers, including many peasants looking for seasonal employment, from throughout the Russian Empire.5 As a self-styled narodnik, An-sky supported himself as a literacy tutor while searching for work as a manual laborer, a path that eventually brought him employment in a salt processing plant, where he filled and hauled heavy bags for many hours a day. During this period

Introduction

3

An-sky not only observed extreme poverty firsthand but he also experienced it, living, as he wrote to Chaim Zhitlovsky in a letter from November 9, 1886, “very badly, literally without a roof, food, or clothing.”6 It would not be the last time that An-sky lived without a permanent roof over his head. Rather, these early years of hardship would establish a lifelong pattern of going for long stretches without a stable domicile, during which he frequently lived out of suitcases and slept on friends’ sofas, even after he had established himself as one of the most prominent members of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia. Significantly, the An-sky of the 1880s felt that in order to “go to the people,” he had to leave the shtetls of his youth, where Jews formed a large proportion of the population and, in some cases, the majority, and, instead, immerse himself in the hardscrabble life of Russian peasants and newly industrialized workers. Indeed, it may be argued that An-sky could not satisfy his Populist impulses among the Jews of the Pale because, at the time, he did not acknowledge that Jews could constitute a “people,” or narod. To understand the cognitive dissonance produced by this juxtaposition during this period, we must first appreciate the historical context of the early 1880s in Russia and the intensely anti-Semitic climate that enveloped various classes of Russian society, from the highest reaches of the imperial government to the poorest peasants. Just as An-sky reached adulthood, the Jews of the empire were rocked by bloody pogroms in Odessa and elsewhere, as well as by the passage of the May Laws, draconian legislation—which the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnov witheringly called “legislative pogroms”—that would help contribute to the increasing marginalization, impoverishment, and political radicalization of the Jews of the Pale of Settlement during the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.7 Within this climate of anti-Semitism, Jews were stereotyped en masse as an economically parasitic class of permanent aliens who lacked profound attachments to the soil or to legitimate forms of labor, whose own culture was dominated by atavistic and reactionary religious traditions, and whose lingua franca, Yiddish, was not an authentic language—one of the most important prerequisites of a legitimate people—but rather a corrupt jargon. Exemplifying this view was the interior minister, Count N. P. Ignatiev, one of the chief architects of Russian imperial policy visà-vis the Jews, who implicitly justified the bloody pogroms that erupted in 1881 as a logical reaction to the supposedly endemic exploitation of poor Russian “natives” by alien Jews:

4


The Jews have taken over not only trade and production but through rent or purchase significant amounts of landed property. Because of their clannishness and solidarity, all but a few of them have bent every effort not to increase the productive forces of the country but to exploit the native inhabitants, and primarily the poorer classes. This provoked the protest of the latter, finding such deplorable expression in acts of violence . . . an evenhanded government must immediately take no less energetic steps to remove the abnormal conditions which now exist between Jews and natives.8

Although An-sky did not endorse the extremist anti-Semitic ideology underlying this rhetoric, these contemporary attitudes nevertheless had a profound impact on An-sky’s view of his fellow Jews, as well as on his own self-conception. Thus in a letter to Zhitlovsky from June 1888, Ansky observed to his old friend: “The fact is I cannot find a solid foundation for action in Jewish life.”9 And even more strongly, in a letter to the Populist Russian writer Gleb Uspensky in February 1892: “I see only one possible solution to the Jewish question: to remove from the Jews, in the most radical way, all possibility of exploiting the population, and especially to protect the defenseless peasant village from them.”10 The sentiment in these letters reflected a broader attitude among Jewish narodniki, namely, that “going to the Jews” was not viewed as a legitimate expression of Populism, or narodnichestvo. As Aaron Zundelevitch, one of a number of Jewish Populist leaders during the 1870s, put it: “ ‘For us Jewry as a national organism did not present a phenomenon worthy of support. Jewish nationalism, it seemed to us, had no raison d’être. As for religion, that cement which combines the Jews into one unit, it represented to us complete retrogression. . . . For the Jewish narodnik the motto—‘Go to the people’—meant go to the Russian people.’ ”11 An-sky was not the only Jewish narodnik to channel his Populist energies into the ethnography of ethnic Russians and other non-Jewish peoples during this period. On the contrary, three of the most important Russian Jewish ethnographers of the turn of the twentieth century—Lev (né Chaim Leyb) Shternberg, Vladimir (né Nathan) Bogoraz, and Vladimir (né Benyomin) Yochelson—were active members of the Populist organization Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) and actually began their careers as ethnographers while they were exiled in Siberia for revolutionary activities.12 Commenting on this phenomenon, Yochelson observed: “The [Yiddish] jargon was, in our view, a hybrid unnatural tongue, and Hebrew—a dead language of interest to scholars only. . . .

Introduction

5

We were incorrigible assimilationists . . . I must concede that Russian literature, while instilling in us a love for the Russian people and its culture, persuaded us also that the Jews were not a people at all, but a parasitic class. This appraisal of the Jews was widespread even among radical Russian writers and was one of the reasons, I submit, for our defection [from Jews and Judaism].”13 It is important to note that when An-sky abandoned the Pale in order to “go to the [Russian] people” in the 1880s, the wide range of Russian Jewish political parties, each reflecting its own nationalist ideology, had yet to emerge. While there were incipient Zionist circles within the Russian Empire, they had not yet coalesced into a full-blown cultural and political movement. Similarly, both the Bund and the Folkspartey, the political arm of Simon Dubnov’s Jewish autonomist ideology, would only emerge in the final years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, respectively. In short, none of the contemporary Jewish political ideologies that were grounded on the presumption that Jews were a people, indeed, that they constituted a nation in the modern sense of the word, had yet to establish themselves. During this same period, An-sky had turned his back on more religiously inflected conceptions of Jewish collective identity. Against this backdrop, An-sky’s initial turn to the Russian narod rather than to the Jews of the Pale as the chief object of his Populist energies makes sense. In the years to come, however, An-sky would develop highly complicated but significant relationships with all of these Jewish nationalist ideologies—composing the anthem (i.e., Di Shvue) for the Bund, working closely with Simon Dubnov on a variety of projects, including the Jewish Ethnographic Society, articulating increasing sympathies for Zionism, despite initial criticism, and even revising his formerly negative opinion of the kheyder to such a degree that he came to defend it as a critically important institution for inculcating traditional Jewish national values.14 It is also important to point out that even as Russian anti-Semites like Count Ignatiev were accusing “all but a few” Jews of conspiring “to exploit the native inhabitants, and primarily the poorer classes,” the actual economic reality, as Shlomo Lambroza has observed, was that “Jews throughout the Pale were as poor if not poorer than their Russian counterparts.”15 Indeed, the decades following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 witnessed a significant decline in Jewish economic fortunes within the Pale of Settlement due to the dramatic changes in the rural economy in which the Jews were heavily imbricated. Commenting on these changes,

6


John Klier has noted, “The break-up of Russia’s semi-feudal agricultural economy did the Jews no favours. . . . In the short and middle term, these changes were catastrophic for the Jewish population. Widespread poverty, and the phenomenon of the luftmensch, became a journalistic and literary cliché.”16 Having grown up in Chashniki and Vitebsk, Ansky was well aware, firsthand, of Jewish poverty in the Pale of Settlement. Indeed, before embarking on his journey to the Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining region, An-sky had even written a novel in Yiddish (his first), entitled History of a Family, whose central characters, including the hero, a Jewish ditchdigger named Moisei, were mired in poverty. Not surprisingly, given An-sky’s orientation during this period, the novel— which he later published in Russian under a pseudonym—portrays traditional Jewish culture as unable to offer any succor to its poor characters and, instead, depicts physical labor as the only possible source for redemption.17

Through the Jewish Dark Continent: An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition In 1892, having drawn the unwelcome attention of the government due to his political activities, An-sky left Russia for Western Europe, where he immersed himself in fin-de-siècle intellectual life, served as the private secretary to the Russian Populist leader and theoretician Petr Lavrovich Lavrov, and became an early member of the radical Socialist Revolutionary Party. The 1905 Russian Revolution drew An-sky back to Russia, where instead of focusing on the Russian narod he now turned his attention to the Jews of the Pale, whose folk culture he soon became obsessed with documenting.18 Under the influence of contemporary political developments such as the First Zionist Congress and the founding of the Bund—both in 1897—as well as the creation of a new Yiddish literary culture embodied by realist masters such as I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, An-sky had come to realize that the Jews were, indeed, a people and, just as importantly, that they were his people. On January 9, 1910, at a banquet organized in his honor by colleagues at the publications Der Fraynd and Evreiskii Mir, An-sky recounted this transformation: When I first entered literature 25 years ago I wanted to labor on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it appeared to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews. . . . Possessing an eternal longing

Introduction

7

for Jewishness, I [nevertheless] threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. My life was broken, split, torn. . . . I lived among the Russian folk for a long time, among their lowest classes. Things are different for us now than when I wrote my first story. We have cultural, political, and literary movements. . . . I believe in a better future and in the survival of the Jews!”19

As early as 1907, An-sky appears to have decided that ethnography would serve as his chief vehicle of “going to the [Jewish] people” of the Pale of Settlement. Located between the Baltic and Black Seas, this vast territory was home to a Jewish population of more than five million, according to the all-Russian census of 1897, representing over 40 percent of the world total. Despite its great size and huge Jewish population, at the turn of the twentieth century the Pale of Settlement remained relatively unexplored by scholars, leading Simon Dubnov to describe it as a kind of Jewish “dark continent” (Rus., temnaia materika) in an 1891 publication calling for the establishment of a Russian Jewish historical society that would produce the kind of discoveries that explorers like Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Henry Morton Stanley had made in central Africa: When Burton, Speke or Stanley undertook their bold expeditions into then uncharted Central Africa, they could not predetermine in advance exactly all the great discoveries—geographic, ethnographic, naturalistic—that would subsequently give us a completely new idea of that part of the world. . . . We future explorers of Russian-Jewish history find ourselves in just such a position. We also have before us our own kind of dark continent (“the dark continent”)—as the English called the interior of Africa—that lies ahead to be explored and illuminated.20

Seventeen years later, Dubnov’s dream finally came to fruition with the establishment of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society in Saint Petersburg. At an inaugural celebration for the society in 1908, Dubnov returned to the same theme: I cannot conceal from you, gentlemen, that this triumphal moment of inaugurating the “Jewish Historico-Ethnographic Society,” stirs in me mixed feelings—joyful and sad. Gladdened that, at last, the institution that is necessary to satisfy the vital requirements of our national idea is finally emerging. Grieving over the fact that the establishment of this institution has

8


taken so long, that the core of the Jewish people has waited until now for that, which for a long time smaller groups in the West have already had. At this moment, I cannot but recall one unfulfilled project from the year 1891, a project very close to me, what was then the first appeal to establish a Jewish Historical Society. . . . Delaying this was not without consequences for us: in the area of historical research on the Jews in Russia we greatly lag behind our Western compatriots. As a result, the greatest center after Babylonia and Spain in the history of the Diaspora—Poland-Russia—remains the least explored, remains a “dark continent” in our historiography.21

By employing a phrase—in both Russian translation and English— originally applied to the uncharted regions of central Africa, Dubnov indicated the need for scholars to shed light on the history and culture of the Pale, but he also gestured to a contemporary—and an implicitly colonial—discourse that characterized the Jews of Eastern Europe, or Ostjuden, as “primitives,” whose home territory had yet to be enlightened by modern civilization. The racialized image of Jews, in general, and Eastern European Jews, in particular, was commonplace during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, as Celia Brickman has noted, “the Jews of Europe . . . were variously described as ‘Oriental,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘barbarian,’ ‘white Negroes,’ ‘mulatto,’ and ‘a mongrel race.’ . . . the Eastern European Jew, in particular, could be described ‘as the exemplary member of the ‘dark skinned’ races.’ ”22 By implicitly casting assimilated Russian Jewish intellectuals in the role of western explorers like Burton and Stanley, Dubnov distanced himself and his colleagues from the Jewish masses of the Pale (also achieved linguistically by quoting the phrase “dark continent” in the original English). He also implied that the activities of a Jewish historical society would in some sense participate in the civilizing mission embraced by segments of both the imperial Russian government (especially before the 1880s) and the elite elements of the Russian Jewish community, most notably, after its founding in 1863, the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia Mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii), or OPE, whose main benefactors, the Gintsburg family, would later fund An-sky’s ethnographic work.23 Within this context the status of the Pale of Settlement as a colonized space emerges more clearly, and Saint Petersburg appears, in the words of Benjamin Nathans, as “the first in a series of increasingly distant vantage points from which secularized Jews were able to conceive of the Pale and shtetl as historical entities.”24

Introduction

9

And yet Dubnov’s identification with the western explorers of central Africa only constituted part of the complex and ambivalent position that he occupied. For like An-sky, Dubnov was a native son of that same Jewish “dark continent” that he now called on people to explore. Born in 1860 in the town of Mstislav, Mohilev province, Dubnov had a traditional Jewish upbringing before pursuing the path of a secular intellectual, a path that eventually led him to Saint Petersburg, where he lived illegally throughout the 1880s, since he was unable to acquire permanent residency in the city. Thus although as a young man he had intellectually and physically abandoned the Pale—a place whose traditional elementary schools, or khadorim, inspired him to write in 1884 that the “entire Pale is filled with thousands of children’s prisons”—Dubnov was prevented from being an official resident of the Russian metropole because of his identity.25 Moreover, Dubnov’s call to study the history and culture of the Pale, while couched in the racialized language of colonial exploration, nevertheless acknowledged the importance of this region as a “center” of Jewish civilization, indeed, as the most important center since Spain. In this regard, Dubnov situated the new field of Russian Jewish historiography as both a successor to the German Wissenschaft des Judentums (Scientific Study of Judaism), whose members, especially the great historian Heinrich Graetz, had helped shape his intellectual development, and as a rival, which had unique access to a hitherto unexplored archive of Jewish history and culture that would decisively reorient the historical narrative developed by Wissenschaft scholars. Finally, Dubnow, like An-sky, was heavily influenced by contemporary Russian Populism, and his call to explore the Pale of Settlement was not only directed to assimilated Russian Jews living outside its borders—that is, to a kind of intellectual vanguard—but also, as the remainder of his essay made clear, to Jewish residents of the Pale, whom he exhorted to collect and preserve local pinkasim (communal record books) and other historical materials before they disappeared. As we will see, this exhortation to the Jewish residents of the Pale to “know thyself” would have a powerful impact on An-sky’s emerging view that Russian Jews should become both the subject and the object of their own ethnography. Like Dubnov, An-sky also emphasized the ambivalent status of Jews in Russia during the first few decades of the twentieth century as both cosmopolitans and provincials, ethnographers and objects of ethnography, savages and civilized. For assimilated Russian Jewish intellectuals with personal roots in the Pale of Settlement, like Dubnov, An-sky, and

10


Zhitlovsky, this split could produce Jewish forms of “double consciousness,” to borrow a phrase that W. E. B. Du Bois originally applied to African Americans during the same period. As Du Bois put it in The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903: “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”26 Similarly, Viktor Chernov, the Russian leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, perceptively observed of his two Jewish comrades: “Just like . . . An-sky, Zhitlovsky too was through and through the Jew, through and through the Russian narodnik, but with this possible deep distinction—with An-sky both his natures were whole, indivisible, each one its separate self. But Zhitlovsky during his life would often say: ‘Two souls live in my heart and each seeks to escape the other.’ ”27 By the fall of 1909 An-sky had figured out a course of action that would satisfy both his Jewish and Russian Populist selves, and he wrote a letter to Chaim Zhitlovsky in which he described his nascent plan to lead his own ethnographic expedition into the Jewish Dark Continent: “I have a plan now and if it succeeds I will be infinitely happy. I will try to get the Jewish Ethnographic Society to send me around Russia to gather folk songs, sayings, stories, spells, and so on, in short, folklore. If this works out, I will willingly dedicate what remains of my life to it. It is worth it.”28 Then, as now, bringing such a vision to reality required financial support, as An-sky noted to Zhitlovsky: “It is an enormous cultural task. It will require 8 to 10 thousand rubles. If I can get them, I will be the happiest person.” Ironically, therefore, in order to accomplish his goal of documenting the lives of the Jewish masses of the Pale, An-sky, the committed Socialist revolutionary, would have to collaborate with a wealthy patron.29 An-sky would find his enthusiastic collaborator in the person of Baron Vladimir Goratsievich Gintsburg, a wealthy Jewish industrialist from Kiev, whose father, Baron Goratsii (Naftali Hertz) Gintsburg, was the most prominent Jewish philanthropist in the Russian Empire and a modern version of the shtadlan, or traditional liaison, between the Jewish community and the government. Like his better-known father, Vladimir Gintsburg was a committed philanthropist whose personal projects within the Jewish community included funding a hospital, synagogue, library, and girls’ high school. Inspired by An-sky’s vision, Vladimir Gintsburg agreed to contribute 10,000 rubles of seed money and help him

Introduction

11

raise additional funds for the expedition; eventually, with Gintsburg’s help, An-sky collected more than 20,000 rubles for what would become known officially as “The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in Honor of Baron Naftali Hertz Gintsburg.” When An-sky returned to the Pale of Settlement with the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in the summer of 1912, therefore, it was both as prodigal son and explorer of uncharted territory. In a letter dated June 30, 1912, a day before the expedition first set out from Kiev for Ruzhin, An-sky acknowledged the dual significance of the journey to Gintsburg: “I am very nervous, as if standing before the great unknown. How will this all turn out? Will I be able to gain the trust of the poor and primitive people from whose ranks I myself have come but whom I left so far behind over these past years? . . . And yet, at the same time, I have a great feeling of joy in my soul, that the most treasured dream of my life is beginning to come to fruition.”30 Before setting out on the expedition, An-sky had hoped to visit three hundred of the most important Jewish communities throughout the Pale, but logistical problems, including an ever-dwindling budget, forced him to scale back. Nevertheless, over the course of three seasons, before the outbreak of World War I put an end to their groundbreaking work, An-sky and his intrepid team of musicologists, photographers, and fieldworkers traveled to over sixty towns in three provinces of the Pale—Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev—where many of the oldest and most culturally significant shtetls were located. There they took more than two thousand photographs of people, cemeteries, synagogues, and other sites, were given or purchased seven hundred ritual and everyday objects (at a cost of 6,000 rubles), collected five hundred manuscripts, including numerous pinkasim transcribed eighteen hundred folktales, legends, and proverbs, fifteen hundred folk songs, and one thousand melodies, and recorded five hundred wax cylinders of music.31 An-sky never intended for this remarkable treasury of Jewish folk traditions to become a time capsule.32 On the contrary, in his role as a public intellectual, An-sky stressed the immediate relevance of his ethnographic research for his contemporaries, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Non-Jews would learn that Jews were a legitimate people—not an atavistic survival or a parasitic economic class—possessing a rich folk culture that was both uniquely Jewish and deeply embedded within the local environment. Jews, especially the growing ranks of the assimilated, would gain a deeper knowledge and appreciation of their own folk traditions and, just as

12


importantly, would now be able to redeploy these traditions as the raw material for a wide range of new and, as An-sky envisioned it, authentically Jewish cultural creations, including museum exhibitions, theatrical performances, musical compositions, fine art, and literature. The result, An-sky hoped, would be a veritable renaissance of Jewish culture, one deeply rooted in tradition yet cutting edge in sensibility. The vicissitudes of the October Revolution put an end to An-sky’s dream. As a leading member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, An-sky soon found himself on the wrong side of the Bolsheviks. In September 1918 An-sky escaped Russia for Vilna, before leaving the city in the wake of a pogrom for Warsaw, where he died on November 8, 1920, broken and sick, at the age of fifty-seven.33 The fate of the vast ethnographic collection that An-sky left behind mirrored his own peregrinations. According to his last will and testament, An-sky donated five suitcases and boxes of materials to the Ethnographic Division of the Russian Museum, a small number of objects were exhibited in 1917 and 1923 at the Jewish Museum in Saint Petersburg that An-sky had helped establish in 1916, and some documents and photos related to the expedition eventually made their way to the YIVO Institute in Vilna and, later, New York. Yet the whereabouts of most of the collection remained unknown over the following decades, and much of it appears to have led a peripatetic existence, traveling incognito, as it were, from place to place within the Soviet Union.34 And so, over time, the photographs, wax cylinder recordings, folktales, manuscripts, ritual objects, and other materials gathered by the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition were transformed—albeit inadvertently—into a time capsule, waiting to be discovered by a generation for whom the Pale of Settlement and its remarkably rich Jewish culture was but a distant memory. This discovery of An-sky’s accidental time capsule would occur following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when archives, museums, and libraries were finally opened to researchers, who found material from An-sky’s expedition in the collections of the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, the Ethnographic Museum in Saint Petersburg, and a few other locations. Employing a Jewish idiom, we might describe these holdings as constituting the ethnographic equivalent of a genizah, the room or attic where observant Jews traditionally place damaged holy books and folios with the name of God written on them, until they can be properly buried in a cemetery. In practice, documents of all kinds have often

Introduction

13

ended up in these storehouses, thereby transforming them into veritable archives of Jewish culture, religion, and commerce. While most genizahs are emptied periodically, the now famous Cairo Genizah, discovered in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fostat, remained in use for a millennium and contained nearly two hundred thousand manuscript fragments (including holy texts, personal letters, dowries, business receipts, etc.) when it was finally emptied by the scholar Solomon Schechter at the end of the nineteenth century, instantly becoming the single most important source on Mediterranean Jewish culture in the medieval period. Unlike the Cairo Genizah, An-sky assembled his collection over a few short years, but it contained manuscripts, artifacts, and folk traditions that were, in some cases, centuries old. And, despite its much smaller size, An-sky’s collection, like the Cairo Genizah, continues to shed light on many aspects of Jewish life that would have otherwise gone unrecorded, not least of all the experiences of Eastern European Jewish women and children. With this as a brief introduction, the first part of this book will delve more deeply into the extraordinary story of how, through his pioneering efforts to invent a distinctly Jewish ethnography, An-sky ended up creating his own genizah of Eastern European Jewish folk traditions, thereby ensuring their survival at a time when many of his contemporaries were figuratively burying these same traditions, either by ignoring them entirely, dismissing them as inconsequential, or condemning them as reactionary. The second part of this book will focus on another, largely unexplored aspect of An-sky’s ethnographic research, “Dos Yidishe Etnografishe Program” (The Jewish Ethnographic Program), a unique literary artifact that An-sky and the other members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition created themselves rather than collected in the field. An-sky and a team of collaborators, including the prominent Russian Jewish anthropologist Lev Shternberg, compiled The Program over two years and originally planned on distributing copies of it to communities throughout the Pale before their work was cut short by World War I. The Jewish Ethnographic Program is an encyclopedic ethnographic questionnaire consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish. Its ambitious size and scope inspired David Roskies, the scholar whose poetic meditations on An-sky first introduced him to a new generation of English readers, to write that An-sky “turned the fieldworker’s questionnaire into a modern epic.”35 Beginning with the soul before it enters the body, ending with the soul once it leaves the body, and covering an enormous range of topics in between, The Jewish Ethnographic Program not only

14


represents the most comprehensive portrait of life and death in the Jewish Pale of Settlement produced by An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition but also one of the most illuminating, idiosyncratic, and, until now, unplumbed portraits of this complex reality that anyone has ever created. This is the case despite the fact that An-sky never received any responses to the two-hundred-page questionnaire after it was published in 1914. But how can a set of questions without answers reveal so much? Instead of being open-ended, many of the questions in The Jewish Ethnographic Program contain detailed information about specific traditions, practices, or beliefs. For example, in a section devoted to midwives, we find the question: “Is there a custom that when a midwife dies, all of the children whom she brought into the world accompany her funeral procession with candles in their hands?” Similarly, in a section on adultery, we find the question: “What kind of punishments and embarrassments would people impose on the sinful woman or man (leading them around the streets with a lung and liver around their neck, and the like)?” Or, in a section on the afterlife: “Do you know any stories about a cow or other animal that suddenly started to talk because a gilgul [reincarnated soul] was in it?” Just as importantly, many of the more open-ended questions contribute to a nuanced portrait of life and death in the Pale by calling attention to either mundane or troubling issues that are absent from stylized, nostalgic, or narrowly focused representations. Thus when we encounter questions like “What do people say when a child farts?” “What kind of games are played by girls?” or “Did husbands ever beat their wives?” we are reminded that not everything in the Pale of Settlement revolved around learning Torah, plotting revolution, or creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. There is something profoundly Jewish about a text consisting entirely of questions.36 It is as if the Talmud itself were stripped down to its barest interrogative architecture or if a Responsa collection were published with just the questions addressed to a famous rabbi but none of his answers, except that An-sky addressed the questions of The Jewish Ethnographic Program to the common people rather than to the rabbinic elite. It is likely that An-sky would have appreciated these comparisons. In the introduction to The Jewish Ethnographic Program, he explicitly referred to the Jewish folk traditions that he was attempting to record via his questionnaire as an “Oral Torah,” one created by the Jewish “masses” over the centuries—a provocative identification that we will

Introduction

15

explore at length in the following chapters. Although An-sky did not know it at the time, his epic questionnaire would become one of the most detailed—and, until now, most inaccessible—witnesses to this People’s Torah; a kind of folkloric Talmud for the twentieth century, one even more open-ended than the original, reflecting the uncertain and ruptured nature of the era itself. For the first time, this book will provide English readers with a translation of this entire document.37 Paging through The Jewish Ethnographic Program is like taking a virtual tour of the Pale of Settlement, with An-sky and the other members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition as expert guides, or like discovering an accidental time capsule containing fragments of a lost world.

I

1 E X P L O R I N G T H E J E W I S H DA R K CONTINENT

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Despite their best efforts, the distinguished old woman politely but firmly refused to sing for the ragtag group of visitors from Saint Petersburg, the faraway capital. Their forlorn leader, a tall, slope-shouldered man with the long black kapote (coat) of a Hasid but the manners of an assimilated Russian Jewish intellectual, was crestfallen at her silence. Yet she was a pious woman and, according to the Jewish legal principle known as kol isha (lit. voice of a woman), it would be improper for her to sing in front of men, especially complete strangers like the ones who had arrived in the shtetl of Kremenetz only a few days earlier. By the summer of 1913, when they encountered the recalcitrant matriarch of the Roykhel family in Kremenetz, An-sky and the other members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition had already faced numerous obstacles. Strapped for cash and limited to travel during warmer months when the roads were passable, An-sky and his team had also come under police surveillance during the expedition’s first season in 1912. As a “strictly confidential” report from the head of the Secret Political Police Department of Saint Petersburg to the head of the Province Gendarme Administration in Kiev put it in August 1912: “a certain Rappoport, also known as An-sky, a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party . . . has left Petersburg for Berdichev . . . external watch should be established over the above mentioned person.”1 Despite these difficulties, 19

20


An-sky and his ethnographic team had already managed to collect hundreds of objects, take scores of photographs, and record thousands of songs, jokes, stories, and other Jewish folk traditions during their epic journey through the Pale of Settlement. Would this time be different? From the younger members of the Roykhel household, An-sky had learned that the old woman remembered a lullaby sung more than a century and a half earlier to Abraham Joshua Heschel (1748–1825), a Hasidic holy man popularly known as the Apter Rebbe, when he was a baby in the town of Nayshtot. An-sky viewed Hasidism, the Jewish pietistic movement that originated in the Polish borderlands during the eighteenth century, as the most important living repository of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. On his travels throughout the Pale of Settlement, An-sky always made a special effort to collect Hasidic nigunim (melodies), mayses (tales), and other traditions, which he then incorporated into his own literary works, including a short story called “The Apter Rebbe and Nicholas I.” In light of its intimate connection to the Apter Rebbe, An-sky desperately wanted to hear the old woman’s lullaby and, if possible, to record it with the Edison wax cylinder equipment he had brought along for such occasions. Although he was not a trained musicologist, An-sky had an intense interest in Jewish music, and he and the two professional musicologists who took part in the expedition—Zisman (Zinovii) Kisselhof and Yoel (Iuly) Engel—ultimately produced five hundred wax cylinder recordings and over one thousand musical transcriptions of Hasidic nigunim, Yiddish folk songs, klezmer wedding tunes, and lullabies. In these efforts they were preceded by the groundbreaking research of Peysakh Marek and Shaul Ginzburg, whose Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii (Jewish Folk Songs in Russia), published in 1901, was based on hundreds of songs sent to them by Jewish zamlers (collectors) throughout the Pale of Settlement following a widely publicized call for submissions.2 Avrom Rekhtman, another member of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, later recalled that when An-sky and his fieldworkers arrived in a shtetl, they would set up recording equipment in the local hotel where they stayed or, more frequently, in the town’s besmedresh (study house). There, after prayers were over, the team would place the phonograph equipment on a long table and An-sky would explain to the people standing around the “sublime wisdom” that “animated” this wondrous machine. One of us would then sing into the phonograph some

Exploring the Jewish Dark Continent

21

well-known tune. In the middle of singing we would intentionally make a mistake with a word, or would laugh or cough, and as soon as the “membrane,” was turned over, the tune would immediately play back along with the mistake, the laugh, or the cough. This would captivate those gathered and many were pleased to sing.3

Sometimes the fieldworkers would pay people to sing songs or tell stories—with decidedly mixed results.4 Yoel Engel, the prominent composer and musicologist who accompanied the expedition during its first season, reminisced that when the team first arrived in the town of Ruzhin, it naively paid the local children five kopeks each to record their stories and songs. As word spread, nearly all of the town’s children skipped school and “mobbed our inn from the morning on. Some tried to invent stories themselves [while] others tried to remember the most literary examples.” In short, they enthusiastically provided An-sky and his fellow researchers with everything but the “authentic” Jewish folk traditions that they were interested in collecting, a problem encountered by fieldworkers in other cultural contexts as well, including John and Alan Lomax, whose efforts to record American folk music two decades later paralleled the work of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in a number of ways. Of course the fact that many local informants—whether residents of the Pale of Settlement or of the American South—did not readily differentiate between their own musical creations, published songs, and traditional folk music suggests that “authenticity” was a fluid category that mattered far more for the fieldworkers than for the so-called folk. On other occasions the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition encountered a different set of problems.5 In Skvira, for example, a shtetl known as a stronghold of the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty, Engel recalled that a “half traditional, half modern” man refused any payment and only agreed to sing a song attributed to the early Hasidic master Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev after elaborate precautions were taken, including closing the window of the hotel room (although it was July), drawing the curtains, and locking the door. Then the man sang beautifully, but his “face registered terrible fear and agitation.”6 Not surprisingly, recording women’s voices posed a particular challenge for the all-male expedition team, since Jewish religious tradition and cultural conventions alike discouraged even secularized women from singing in front of men, especially strangers. In the town of Pavoloch, Engel observed, “Women, young or old, would not sing for anything. This had also

22


been the case in Ruzhin. They would promise to come and then not show up, and when I offered to take the phonograph to them, even female factory workers refused. I asked, ‘Why?’ and they said, “Me shemt zikh’ [We’re embarrassed].” Nevertheless, in other locales, women agreed to sing for the fieldworkers, as long as certain concessions to modesty were made. In Skvira, for example, Engel set up recording equipment in a school, since “this made it easier to work with women, who might have hesitated to come to the inn.” After this was done, “Young educated women, as well as simple heymishe meydelekh [regular girls] and workers, came there. I recorded from them lullabies, love songs, and other songs.” In the town of Kremenetz, An-sky had already overcome one potential obstacle when a family named Landsberg initially refused to part with a pinkas (record book) that had originally belonged to their ancestor, a religious judge who lived in the shtetl at the end of the eighteenth century. Despite the family’s great reluctance, An-sky was determined to acquire the pinkas for the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society (Evreiskoe Istoriko-Etnograficheskoe Obshchestvo) in Saint Petersburg, headed by Simon Dubnov, the doyen of Russian Jewish historians. After gathering together the entire Landsberg clan, An-sky delivered such an impassioned plea that with “tears in their eyes” the family members handed him the precious heirloom. Now, employing the same approach, the famously charming An-sky so “entranced” the matriarch of the Roykhel family, according to another fieldworker named Isaac Fikangur, that she finally agreed to sing the lullaby, albeit on one condition: she would perform before her daughters and granddaughters, while An-sky and his fellow team members listened out of sight in an adjacent room. It was a compromise that appeared to satisfy both parties, except that An-sky had failed to inform the old woman about a very significant detail. Unbeknownst to her, the expedition’s musicologist, Zisman Kisselhof, would be producing a wax cylinder recording of the lullaby while she sang it. “How great were her astonishment and her grief,” wrote Fikangur, who witnessed the scene and later described it in a memoir, “when afterwards, she heard her own voice on the cylinder that Kisselhof had produced without her knowledge.”7 Looking back on this provocative episode nearly a century later, there is something both troubling and inspiring about An-sky’s behavior in Kremenetz. Did An-sky intentionally betray the trust of Roykhel because it was the only way he could get the recording? Throughout the


23

three grueling seasons of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, An-sky demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice nearly everything, beginning with his own precarious health, to accomplish his goal of collecting the folk traditions of Russia’s Jews before they disappeared forever. Perhaps, An-sky reasoned, it was more important to save the Apter Rebbe’s lullaby from oblivion than to preserve the dignity of an old woman. Perhaps he simply neglected to tell her about the recording equipment, or perhaps he assumed that she would refuse to sing at all if he informed her about his plans, like the reluctant women in Ruzhin and Pavoloch had during the expedition’s first season. By the time An-sky and his team set out for the Pale, bringing along a phonograph to make recordings in the field had apparently become de rigueur among ethnographers working elsewhere in the Russian Empire. During the period 1908–1909, for example, twin brothers named Boris and Yuri Sokolov had employed a phonograph while conducting ethnographic research in the isolated villages of the Belozersk region of Novgorod province. Their notes from the expedition, first published in 1915, reveal the practical benefits of using the technology, as well as its potential drawbacks: Lately, it has become customary to take along a phonograph on an ethnographic expedition. It is indeed very useful and lets one record the melody along with the contents of the song, something that a non-musical collector was not able to do before. The phonograph is also important for recording samples of local speech which, in spite of all existing diacritics, cannot be transcribed with total accuracy. Finally the phonograph renders an important service in a practical sense. It attracts and interests the people and in this way permits the collector to achieve great results. But, on the other hand, it sometimes adds a new log to the fire: it confuses and frightens. “Oh, who is sitting in there?” they ask us. “No, someone is sitting in there and singing songs.” “It’s the devil,” says a peasant woman, and having realized the truth, recoils from the phonograph.8

In his memoir of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, Avrom Rekhtman later reminisced that most people in the towns of the Pale viewed the phonograph in one of two ways: “In the eyes of the common folk, the phonograph was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World and its inventor, Edison, to be a ‘great brain.’ But the rabbis, for whom it was beneath their dignity to be impressed by something modern, related to the

24


phonograph as something insignificant, that was only created to amuse people and whose pleasure from its music was like that which people derive from a mischievous boy.”9 In addition to these attitudes, some people apparently “suspected [the ethnographic team] of making phonographic recordings in order to perform these songs in restaurants and other inappropriate places.”10 We will never know where the matriarch of the Roykhel family fell along this spectrum of attitudes, although her pained reaction suggests a combination of wonder, disapproval, and betrayal. The drama in Kremenetz raises important questions about the ethics of ethnography, highlighting, in particular, the degree to which ethnographic observation can frequently take on the character of espionage or surveillance. The goal of ethnography is not only to observe and record but also to reveal that which is concealed, a process that, in turn, often involves—and is facilitated by—strategic dissimulation on the part of the ethnographer. In this regard there is an illuminating irony in the fact that Russian government officials suspected An-sky and his fieldworkers of engaging in espionage or revolutionary activity, while local shtetl dwellers suspected them of engaging in government surveillance. In his unpublished diary, Shmuel Shrayer (later Sherira), who accompanied the expedition and later collaborated on The Jewish Ethnographic Program with other students from the Jewish Academy in Saint Petersburg, recalled that “In every town the local police monitored each new visitor with seven eyes and all the more so when several strangers showed up taking photographs, buying old artifacts, and collecting songs. On more than one occasion we had confrontations with small jackals from the provincial authority, who took an interest in us and our work and inquired after us. This was especially the case in towns near the border.”11 In 1914 two members of the expedition, Avrom Rekhtman and Shlomo Yudovin, were even arrested in Zhitomir on suspicion of spying and were only released after the prominent anthropologist Lev Shternberg intervened on their behalf. As Rekhtman later admitted, “Naturally, the authorities suspected us, since we went around with cameras taking pictures everywhere.”12 Similarly, in Kremenetz itself, one of the locals initially “suspected that perhaps they [the members of the expedition] were disguised undercover-agents” and was therefore reluctant to meet with them, while in the town of Vishnevets a former resident remembered that when An-sky arrived, “People on the street were frightened; the children looked at one another, anxious that perhaps he was an inspector.”13 Indeed, according to one of An-sky’s own diary entries


25

from the expedition, his visit to a kheyder inspired the same reaction in a suspicious melamed (teacher).14 An-sky and his team were not the only ethnographers to become objects of local suspicion during the tumultuous years between the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. While conducting fieldwork in the Belozersk region, the Sokolov brothers were also frequently labeled spies or revolutionaries by the locals whom they encountered: Why would anyone go to a remote village on account of the village itself and not on “official business”? It is easy to understand why the arrival of unknown people would cause the Belozersk peasants so much anxiety and puzzlement. And what’s more, from where? From Moscow! Looking for songs! “ ‘They haven’t come for nothing,’ ” is the first thought that occurs to the peasant. . . . In such troubled times as those (1908–1909), fear and mistrust of the stranger became an obstacle blocking our way. . . . In some villages, thanks to idle gossips, the rumor that it was “secret police” traveling around would become so entrenched that it cost us great efforts to dissuade the villagers. . . . However, we were not always taken for secret police. We were just as often assigned to the opposite camp: that is, to “insurgents,” “politikers,” “politicians,” “strikers,” “students,” and so on.15

The members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and the Sokolov brothers “naturally” provoked suspicion because ethnographers, like spies, are strangers who observe others carefully, ask lots of questions, and seek to ingratiate themselves, while frequently trying to conceal aspects of their own identities. Thus in their recollections of the expedition, team members and local residents alike stressed that An-sky carefully choreographed the team’s ethnographic work, insisting that assimilated members like Engel and Yudovin speak Yiddish rather than Russian in public (even though, by his own admission, Engel’s Yiddish was rudimentary); telling them to put out their cigarettes on the Sabbath, when smoking is forbidden, according to Jewish law; and compelling them to attend services in the small prayer houses and synagogues they visited, all in an effort, as one former resident of Kremenetz later put it, to have them “act Jewish” in order to perform their ethnographic work more effectively. These details indicate that while espionage is a useful mode for understanding An-sky’s ethnographic method, theatrical performance is another. An-sky viewed ethnography through the eyes of the playwright and playwriting through the eyes of the ethnographer. In his dramatic works, including, most famously, The Dybbuk, An-sky incorporated tropes,

26


plot devices, and settings drawn from his ethnographic research. In the field, meanwhile, An-sky not only staged ethnographic performances by residents, which he then recorded for posterity, but he himself also engaged in elaborate performances. Recalling the first season of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, Engel observed that the balogole (driver) who transported the team from the train station to the town of Ruzhin “first took us for actors, then decided that An-sky was a khazan, a synagogue cantor, and that I was a choir leader.” Later in the expedition Engel noted, “We were for a while even taken for gramophone players, that is, people who peddle songs and tales.”16 He was not far off the mark. An-sky and the other members of the expedition not only looked like a troupe of traveling performers but they frequently acted like one. Nowhere was this more apparent than in An-sky’s pioneering efforts to record the activities of Jewish women healers or exorcists (opshprekherkes), whose services were typically sought after more than those of their male counterparts in the Pale. Wary of competition, these women jealously guarded the incantations, amulets, and folk remedies that formed the tools of their trade. In order to record their frequently dramatic performances, An-sky and his team had to put on some of their own, as Rekhtman recalled in his memoir: Almost every shtetl in Ukraine had its old women whom people went to for advice in times of crisis. . . . These women performed magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient. . . . We employed strategies to get these old women to tell us their charms. Sometimes one of us would pretend to be ill, take to bed and call for the healer. . . . Another member of the expedition generally sat in a corner, trying to write down everything he heard while the photographer took pictures. Often An-sky would go to one of these old healers and complain that he was suffering continual bad luck; he told them that he had once been a rich man, a merchant, and now—alas—he was poor, fallen on hard times, without an income. And having explained why he had come to ask her for help he would ask her to give him some magic spells to help him find a way to earn a living. An-sky was always careful to mention that he was not looking for charity but ready to pay for her services. His broken voice and his straight-forward story nearly always produced the desired result. The old woman would get caught up in the story and start to pity her client, hoping later to be able to ask for more money. Having haggled over the price, the old woman would reveal her secret spell and An-sky would write it down.17


27

Within the context of An-sky’s complex life, these ethnographic performances may be seen as one link in a long chain of masquerades stretching back to 1881, when he first left Vitebsk at the age of seventeen to work as a tutor in the town of Liozno, a bastion of Lubavitcher Hasidim. As An-sky later recounted, “I did not go to Liozno so much to teach as to spread Haskala [the Jewish Enlightenment] among the young people. . . . To avoid provoking malicious acts against me from the start, I put on a mask of piety.”18 It did not take long, however, for the concerned citizens of Liozno to unmask An-sky and drive him from their town under threat of arrest. As one of them smilingly put it, “Two pounds of tea to the police commissioner, and tomorrow you march out with the prisoners.” More than three decades later, during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, An-sky once again donned the “mask of piety” that he had earlier worn in Liozno. He dressed in clothes that evoked—though did not exactly duplicate—the traditional garb of a Hasid, prayed in shtiblekh (small prayer houses), and avoided behavior that would be perceived as “non-Jewish.” This time around, however, An-sky was more successful in his masquerade. Indeed, precisely those representatives of tradition who had previously excommunicated and exiled him now welcomed him warmly in shtetl after shtetl. Perhaps An-sky succeeded because the mask of piety he donned was no longer an expression of cynicism, as it had been in Liozno, but a gesture—albeit a pragmatic one—of sympathy and even solidarity, or perhaps he succeeded because he no longer came to “enlighten the natives” but to preserve their traditions.19 As Rekhtman later recalled: The synagogues and houses of study were the first places that we would visit. We would come to pray in a different house of prayer every day, introduce ourselves to the people praying, and after services An-sky would invite the old men to the inn where he was staying. Over a cup of tea, and sometimes over a glass of “tikkun,” we would sit and speak. An-sky would ask and they would answer, and the faces of the Jews would light up with pleasure and An-sky would melt with satisfaction.20

Seen within the broader context of early twentieth-century ethnography, An-sky’s willingness to engage in dramatic subterfuge and even outright deception during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition reflected a growing perception that so-called traditional cultures needed to be “salvaged” at all costs lest they disappear without a trace. Similarly, An-sky’s

28


elaborate efforts to stage and record what were essentially ethnographic performances must be seen as part of a wider movement that reached its celluloid apogee in Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North.21 Yet unlike Flaherty, indeed, unlike a majority of ethnographers before or since, An-sky had grown up and subsequently abandoned the very culture that he was now trying to salvage or, to put it in a more Jewish idiom—one that An-sky himself embraced—redeem. This critical difference is the key to understanding An-sky’s complex relationship to ethnography and why the discipline played such an important role in shaping his own identity, as well as his portrait of Jewish life and death in the Pale of Settlement. An-sky’s approach to ethnography embodied both “the salvage mode and the redemptive mode,” identified by George Marcus as the “two most common modes for self-consciously fixing ethnography in historic time,” but it also functioned as a kind of auto-ethnography, one that An-sky hoped would be adopted by the Jewish people en masse.22 This was made clear in an article entitled “A Jewish Ethnographic Expedition,” which was published in the Yiddish newspapers Der Moment and Haynt in the summer of 1913, around the same time that An-sky and his team were visiting Kremenetz.23 The article began by articulating the underlying ideology of the expedition, namely, that everyone who aspires to a “normal national life” must work, first and foremost, to achieve “selfawareness.” For this to occur, it was argued in the article, the Jewish people themselves must build on the ethnographic work of the expedition, and to this end readers were invited to send in “material and objects” to the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society located on Vasilievsky Island in Saint Petersburg. Several years earlier, in 1908, An-sky had published a groundbreaking essay in the Russian language journal Perezhitoe entitled “Jewish Folk Art” (evreiskoe narodnoe tvorchestvo) in which he sardonically observed, “There is no other people like the Jewish people, that talks about itself so much, but knows itself so little.” Ironically, An-sky noted, there were many prominent Russian Jewish ethnographers—for example, Lev Shternberg, M. A. Krol, V. G. Bogoraz, and V. I. Yokhelson— who studied “savage and semi-savage” tribes in Siberia and elsewhere within the Russian Empire. Yet none had “dedicated their time to constructing the elements of a distinctly Jewish ethnography,” and so Ansky lamented, “the Jewish people still awaits its own ethnographer!”24


29

Embedded within these remarks was an unspoken paradox: Jews were at once civilized and semi-savage, ethnographers and potential objects of ethnography.25 By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Pale of Settlement had produced numerous intellectuals, artists, political activists, and ethnographers, but An-sky suggested that its Jewish residents were still somehow akin to “Buryats, Yakagirs, Liaks, Chukchis, and others.” In fact, as Gabriella Safran has noted, this association actually had a legal basis within the Russian Empire, “since Jews and Siberians both belonged to the legal category of inorodtsy, non-Christian and seemingly unassailable foreigners.”26 Many assimilated Jews, especially those in Western Europe, responded to this paradox by distancing themselves from all things Jewish that could be construed as primitive, not least of all the Eastern European Jews, or Ostjuden, who were beginning to settle in large numbers in countries such as Germany. Others, by contrast, embraced and even idealized this identification, since it reinforced their romantic Orientalist notions. Thus, for example, Martin Buber argued that despite centuries spent living in Europe, the “Jew has remained an Oriental” and is a “son of the East,” a status that he claimed granted the Jewish people a unique ability to mediate between the supposedly spiritual East and the rational West.27 An-sky was a native of the Pale of Settlement—a kind of Jewish Heart of Darkness in the western imaginary—who had nevertheless spent decades living the life of an assimilated Jewish intellectual in places such as Paris, Berlin, and Bern. He therefore understood and, to some degree, had even identified with both of these positions over the course of his life. Against this backdrop, An-sky’s dream of creating a distinctly Jewish ethnography may be seen as an attempt to address the paradox of modern Jewish identity, not by erasing or choosing between the antinomies of savage and civilized, primitive and modern, or religious and rational but by enabling Jews from all walks of life—beginning with An-sky himself—to bridge these antinomies via ethnography. Despite the dramatic rhetoric in “Jewish Folk Art,” An-sky was not the first ethnographer of the Jews. As early as the 1860s, Moisei Berlin (1821–1888), a Jewish native of Shklov in Mogilev province, had produced ethnographic studies of the Jews of the Pale of Settlement and was subsequently elected to the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, the central organ for ethnographic research in the Russian Empire.28 Although Berlin was an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism, his ethnographic

30


writings reflected a rationalist prejudice against supposedly outmoded and uncivilized Jewish folk customs. Thus, for example, in his Survey of the Ethnography of the Jewish Population in Russia (Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonasileniia v Rossii), Berlin dismissed the Jewish practice of women dancing with women at weddings as an “Eastern custom,” and he referred to the charismatic Jewish healers known as bale shem (Masters of the Name) as “charlatans.”29 Less tendentious and far more important for the future of Jewish ethnography was the groundbreaking work of Max Grunwald. During the 1890s, while serving as a rabbi in Hamburg, Germany, Grunwald established a number of institutions that would foreshadow and, either directly or indirectly, influence the work of An-sky and his colleagues in Russia. In the span of a few years, Grunwald founded the first Jewish ethnographic museum, the first journal of Jewish folklore (Mitteilungen zur jüdischen Volkskunde), and the first society for Jewish folklore (Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde).30 As Adam Rubin has noted, Grunwald also published an appeal asking people to “send him collections of nursery rhymes, folk songs, fairy tales, comical tales, riddles, proverbs, inscriptions, religious beliefs and customs, prophesies, magic, folk medicine, folk remedies, and accounts of housing and clothing traditions,” as well as an ethnographic questionnaire that was later translated into Yiddish and Hebrew and printed in Jewish publications in the Russian Empire, where it “exerted a powerful influence on Jewish cultural activists there, most prominent among them the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz,” whose early ethnographic forays into the Tomaszow region and literary transformations of Jewish folklore, in turn, would have a great impact on An-sky.31 Of equal importance to these material accomplishments were the theoretical and ideological foundations that Grunwald laid for the fields of Jewish ethnography and folklore studies. Perhaps most significantly, Grunwald largely conflated these disciplines, setting a pattern that would be followed by many of his successors, who treated folklore as the central object of Jewish ethnography rather than, for example, cranial measurements and other elements of physical anthropology. Under the influence of Romantic nationalism, Grunwald described folklore as an expression of the Jewish people’s soul or spirit, a move that opened the nascent field to critique by fellow Jews uncomfortable with the very idea of a Jewish nation. Like his non-Jewish counterparts throughout Europe, Grunwald viewed the collection of folklore as not only important for preserving the past but also for constructing the present, in this case,


31

a contemporary Jewish national culture. Finally, in moves that would anticipate An-sky’s later ethnographic work, Grunwald encouraged the Jewish people themselves to take an active role in the collection of their own folklore, and he stressed the importance of rescuing as many artifacts and traditions as possible rather than just representative examples. Closer to home, in 1890, the writer I. L. Peretz was commissioned by Jan Bloch, a prominent Polish financier and convert from Judaism to Christianity, to conduct an informal ethnographic expedition of Jewish communities in the Tomaszow region of Poland in order to combat antiSemitic charges of economic parasitism, providing a precedent for Baron Gintsburg’s financial sponsorship of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition two decades later.32 Peretz transformed his impressions of this journey into a Yiddish literary work, thereby establishing an early model for An-sky’s view that ethnography should serve as the foundation for new forms of Jewish cultural production. Not long after Peretz set out on his travels in the Polish hinterland, in 1891 Simon Dubnov issued a public call for the creation of a Russian Jewish historical society; seventeen years later, this led to the creation of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society in 1908, as well as its literary organ, the journal Evreiskaia Starina (Jewish Heritage or Antiquity), both of which played critical roles in facilitating An-sky’s emergence as the foremost ethnographer of Russia’s Jews in the years immediately preceding the revolution.33 During the same period, Regina Lilienthal (aka Lilientalowa) (1877– 1924), a native of Zawichost, fashioned herself into a prolific and widely respected ethnographer and folklorist of the Jews of Poland, a trajectory that also led her to become the first translator of I. L. Peretz’s Yiddish stories into Polish.34 Beginning in 1898, she published a wide range of studies on Jewish folk customs and beliefs, including articles on superstitions, betrothals and weddings, and the afterlife, in prominent Polish language anthropological journals, as well as Polish books on Jewish childhood and holidays. In 1924, the year of her death, a Yiddish translation of her study of the evil eye appeared in the journal Yidish Filologye.35 Parallel to these developments, there also existed a decades-long tradition of Russian ethnography that influenced An-sky’s ethnographic method and sensibility. Soon after the Imperial Russian Geographical Society was established in 1845, members of its Ethnographic Division set about creating an extensive ethnographic questionnaire, focusing on

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ethnic Russians, which was printed and distributed to local correspondents beginning in 1848. This questionnaire will be examined at greater length in a subsequent chapter, but for now it is important to note that Nikolai Nadezhdin, its chief architect, envisioned ethnography—like An-sky—“as an expression of national identity,” or narodnost, in this case of the Russian people.36 Indeed, as Nathaniel Knight has noted, “Nadezhdin insisted that Russians should strive first and foremost to ‘know ourselves,’ ” via ethnography, a sentiment that would shape Ansky’s ideological stance as well.37 In the coming years, ethnographic questionnaires would become a staple tool of Russian ethnographers in their efforts to study both ethnic Russian peasants and inorodtsy. During this period, large-scale expeditions would also emerge as a mainstay of Russian ethnography; Benyamin Lukin has even suggested that Lev Shternberg’s 1910 expedition to study the tribes of the Amur River region may have served as the “final push that stimulated An-sky’s efforts” to lead his own expedition into the Jewish Pale of Settlement.38 Building on these diverse foundations, An-sky dreamed of creating a distinctly Jewish ethnography that would serve as the chief vehicle for a Jewish cultural renaissance. In order to do that, however, An-sky would first have to make the case that the Jews already existed as a legitimate object for ethnography, that is, that they were a people or folk in their own right, an assertion that paralleled—and was influenced by—claims by contemporary Jewish Nationalists from across the political spectrum, including Zionists, Bundists, and members of Simon Dubnov’s Folkspartey. This critical ideological move, which An-sky made in “Jewish Folk Art” and other writings, should thus be seen as part of a broader effort to normalize the Jews by arguing that they existed as a nation like other nations. Among other things, this meant that, according to An-sky, Jewish folk culture in Eastern Europe was not isolated from the traditions of surrounding non-Jewish cultures but, instead, had both impacted and been impacted by them in a variety of significant ways. As An-sky put it in a 1920 essay devoted to the subject: “Each side borrows cultural, artistic and even religious elements from the other and adapts them to its own national psychology. Such mutual cultural influence implies no force or oppression of one culture over another. The encounter of Jewish culture with the peoples among whom they have lived over many years can serve as an illustration of this phenomenon.”39 Similarly, in the penultimate sentence of his 1908 essay “Jewish Folk Art,” An-sky stressed the commonality between Jewish and non-Jewish


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folk culture: “On the whole, we find in the creative works of the Jewish people almost all the foundational elements of the folklore of other nations.”40 And yet, in the concluding sentence of the same essay, An-sky emphasized that Jewish folk culture was, in fact, different from the folk culture of other peoples in two fundamental ways: it valorized spiritual over physical qualities and it reflected an unbroken tradition extending all the way back to the Hebrew Bible. As An-sky put it, “However, all of these elements have been transferred from a material basis to a spiritual one, penetrated with a Biblical-Talmudic spirit and colored with a powerful religious frame of mind.” Throughout “Jewish Folk Art,” An-sky argued that instead of heroes who exhibited physical strength, Jewish heroes were elevated because of their spiritual virtues, a contrast embodied in the classic rabbinic understanding of the phrase from Genesis 27:22, “the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” Jacob, the ancestor of the Jews, ultimately triumphed because of the power of his voice—understood by the rabbis as signifying his spiritual or intellectual qualities—whereas Esau, the forerunner of both Rome and Christianity in the rabbinic imaginary, rose and fell by virtue of his physical strength or “hand.” According to An-sky, this distinctly Jewish ethos was grounded in the most fundamental Jewish difference of all, the adherence to monotheism, which served as a unifying thread for all stages of Jewish cultural production from the biblical period to the modern era. Thus in the same seminal essay in which An-sky called for the creation of a Jewish ethnography, he also took pains to identify the paradoxical nature of the Jews as a people: Jews were at once profoundly like their neighbors— that is, they were “normal”—and fundamentally different from them; Jewish culture was constantly being influenced by (and influencing) the cultures around it, and yet it also exhibited an essential unity from the Bible on. In short, Jewish culture was universal and particular, same and other. Having grown up in a traditional milieu, An-sky realized that the most important step in transforming ethnography into a Jewish enterprise would be to translate its categories into a Jewish idiom, and nothing could do that more effectively than to define its subject matter as Torah itself.41 This is precisely what he did in The Jewish Ethnographic Program. In the introduction to this work, An-sky articulated what was at once his most radical and conservative statement concerning the significance of Jewish ethnography:

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Yet on a par with the Book, with the great Written Torah that we have received as an inheritance from hundreds of chosen generations—pious sages and great scholars, thinkers and spiritual guides—we possess yet another Torah, an Oral Torah. The people, themselves, especially the common folk, have created this Torah without interruption during their long, hard, and tragic history. This Oral Torah, which consists of folk tales and legends, parables and aphorisms, songs and melodies, traditions, habits, beliefs and so on, is also an enormously significant product of the same Jewish spirit that created the Written Torah. It reflects the same beauty and purity of the Jewish soul, the gentleness and nobility of the Jewish heart, the height and depth of Jewish thought.

In order to appreciate the full significance of this statement, it is first important to understand that since the time of the rabbis, Judaism had made a distinction between a Written and an Oral Torah—indeed, it may be argued that this is the defining feature of rabbinic Judaism. According to tradition, both Torahs were given at Sinai, but the former was inscribed, while the latter was passed down orally. Then, afraid that these revealed teachings were becoming confused or, even worse, forgotten, the sages decided to compile them in standardized collections that they initially committed to memory and eventually wrote down. This process culminated in the formation of the Mishnah and Talmud, which were still called Oral Torah or torah she-bealpeh (literally, “Torah in the mouth”) in Hebrew, despite their written form. By contrast, in An-sky’s new taxonomy, both the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic canon now belonged to the category of Written Torah, while the category of Oral Torah was redefined to include the “folk tales and legends, parables and aphorisms, songs and melodies, traditions, habits, beliefs and so on” that the “common folk,” rather than the rabbinic elite, had passed down from generation to generation.42 Whereas the rabbis had claimed that both the Written and Oral Torahs were divinely inspired, An-sky described this People’s Torah as deriving from the “same Jewish spirit that created the Written Torah.” In other words, the Jewish people themselves, rather than God, were the ultimate source of all forms of Torah, whether “written” or “oral,” a provocative assertion that reflected the influence of Russian Populism and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Romantic-Nationalist concept of the Volksgeist (the People’s Soul). An-sky’s explicit description of the “folk tales and legends, parables and aphorisms” as Oral Torah reflected a profound desire to legitimate the subject of Jewish ethnography within the conceptual universe of


35

Judaism.43 This move placed An-sky in a long continuum of Jewish innovators—beginning, of course, with the rabbis themselves—who identified their own creative interpretations as Torah. Yet these same innovators, including the rabbis, medieval Jewish philosophers, Kabbalists, and Hasidic masters, had also affirmed the divinely revealed character of Torah and, concomitantly, of their own interpretations, thereby establishing the latter as authoritative according to the internal logic of Judaism. Like these predecessors, An-sky was engaged in what some have called “inventing tradition,” in this case, a Jewish folk tradition rather than, say, a Jewish philosophical or mystical tradition.44 But unlike them, he emphatically chose not to anchor this (or any other Jewish tradition, for that matter) in divine revelation but, rather, in the workings of the Jewish “soul,” “heart,” and “thought.” In this way not only did An-sky conceptually place the Oral Torah produced by the “common folk” on an equal footing with the now reconceived Written Torah, but he also elevated the Jewish people and those who studied them, that is, ethnographers, to an authoritative position vis-à-vis this newly identified tradition. The implication of An-sky’s ethnographic vision was nothing less than a profound transvaluation of Judaism itself. Just as generations of rabbinic scholars had devoted themselves to compiling, learning, and legally interpreting the traditional Oral Torah, so An-sky imagined that the Jews of his own day and of future generations would devote themselves to collecting, studying, and creatively reappropriating the Oral Torah of the “common folk.”45 Instead of only a scholarly elite, An-sky hoped that Jews of all backgrounds would become amateur ethnographers, or zamlers (literally, “collectors”), a dream that An-sky tried to bring to fruition by delivering numerous lectures throughout the Pale of Settlement on the topic of Jewish ethnography, encouraging the formation of local ethnographic societies, publishing newspaper advertisements exhorting shtetl Jews to mail in folk traditions to the Jewish HistoricalEthnographic Society in Saint Petersburg, and, last but not least, distributing ethnographic questionnaires. An-sky envisioned a Populist transformation of Eastern European Jewish society in which an ever-growing cohort of professional and folk ethnographers, rather than rabbis, would play a defining role as culture producers and interpreters. In short, ethnography would become a, if not the, central mode for performing Judaism. This was what An-sky had in mind when he wrote in The Jewish Ethnographic Program: “In order to revive traditional Jewish culture with

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all its customs, practices, and beliefs, the expedition put together a program with questions concerning each realm of Jewish life.” At first glance, it might appear from this statement that An-sky hoped that ethnography could help reconstitute or “revive” traditional Jewish life exactly as it had existed before its encounter with modernity. Toward the end of his life, An-sky did reverse his earlier, highly critical view of the kheyder (traditional elementary school) and began to champion the institution as an effective vehicle for inculcating positive “national” values in Jewish children.46 However, in general, An-sky was far from endorsing a naive return to tradition.47 Instead, he intended the Yiddish verb oyfleben (to revive) to be understood in a different sense, one closer to Barbara KirshenblattGimblett’s theory of “heritage,” in which traditions are given a “second life” through their exhibition or performance.48 Rather than a re-creation of the past, therefore, the revival that An-sky hoped to inspire would treat Jewish folk traditions as the raw material for new forms of Jewish cultural production—that is, a kind of renaissance. As David Roskies has observed concerning An-sky’s project, “Just as the Written Torah was the source of all prior Jewish creativity, so the Oral Torah, this language of symbol and memory, was to become the wellspring for Jewish creative artists of the future.”49 In the decades before his death, An-sky single-handedly attempted to make this dream a reality by producing an astonishing range of artistic works incorporating Jewish folk traditions and by establishing a Jewish Museum in Saint Petersburg to display the wealth of artifacts he had collected during the ethnographic expedition. The crucial role of ethnography in this hoped-for Jewish cultural renaissance was twofold: to help provide artistic inspiration and to guarantee the Jewish authenticity of the museum exhibitions, plays, musical compositions, and other creative expressions produced by An-sky and others. Seen in this light, An-sky’s conception of a distinctively Jewish ethnography has significant parallels with other Jewish efforts during the first few decades of the twentieth century to “construct a usable past,” including—despite their significant differences—Mordechai Kaplan’s vision of Judaism as a “civilization” consisting of “folkways.”50 An-sky and Kaplan both stressed the centrality of culture in their respective reconstructions of Judaism, a move that reflected a newly emerging reality in which culture rather than Torah would become the defining category for many Jews’ experience of Judaism. As Hayim Bialik, the poet who published a Hebrew translation of An-sky’s play The Dybbuk


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in 1918, put it: “The concept of ‘culture,’ in its comprehensive and panhuman sense, has now overtaken the theological concept of ‘torah’ in the nation’s consciousness.”51 And yet An-sky was not satisfied with merely replacing Torah with culture. Instead, he sought to redefine Jewish culture, specifically folk culture, as Torah. Torah in this new taxonomy was not a theological category, however, but an ethnographic one. The anxiety that drove An-sky to collect Jewish folk traditions before they disappeared or were forgotten also reflected a broader European Zeitgeist that was intimately linked to the emergence of a modern—and nationalist—sensibility. In Russia, this phenomenon—aptly described by Kevin Tyner Thomas as “collecting the Fatherland”—led to a proposal to establish a Russian national museum as early as 1817 and, during the late imperial period, the emergence of an arts and crafts movement that sought to collect and display traditional Russian folk crafts.52 Among Jews, the desire to collect and record Jewish traditions first took root in Western Europe, where it was part of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism). Known in Hebrew as kinnus (ingathering), the movement to collect Jewish traditions combined rationalist impulses from the Haskalah, such as an interest in systemization, with Romantic, Nationalist ones.53 Against this backdrop, one of the chief ways that a usable Jewish past was constructed in the early twentieth century was through the creation of anthologies, in particular, the compilation—and rewriting—of the nonlegal rabbinic traditions known as Aggadah (pl. Aggadot), an indigenous category that was seen as a repository of authentic Jewish folklore. Appearing on both sides of the Atlantic, these anthologies included The Legends of the Jews, in which Louis Ginzburg transformed scattered aggadic interpretations of the Bible into a continuous narrative; Mimekor Yisrael, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky’s compilation of aggadic folklore; and Sefer Ha-Aggadah, the monumental collection of reworked aggadic teachings published by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitsky. The idea of gathering aggadic traditions in one place was not new. Most notably, these modern efforts were preceded by the Ein Yaakov, a sixteenthcentury compilation of aggadic material in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, which, not coincidentally, was first translated into English for an American audience in 1921, that is, during the same period in which these other collections appeared. For centuries the Ein Yaakov had enjoyed great popularity among Jewish women as well as men who did not have the rigorous training necessary to master the Halakhic or

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legal sections of the Talmud. Yet it did not undermine the traditional hierarchy of rabbinic literature in which Halakhah had pride of place. By contrast, the veritable explosion of interest in the Aggadah that occurred in the early twentieth century represented an inversion of this traditional hierarchy, one inspired by the movement of more and more Jews away from ritual observance and rabbinic authority, on the one hand, and a concomitant desire to reconstruct or invent an authentic Jewish culture, on the other. Within this milieu, the Aggadah came to be seen as a longneglected, or at least underappreciated, repository of authentically Jewish cultural traditions (e.g., ethical sayings, legends, folklore, aphorisms) that could be mined for contemporary usage. While these Herculean efforts were undertaken by Jewish intellectuals possessing great knowledge of Jewish traditions, Simon Dubnov publicly exhorted the Jews of Russia in 1891 to take up the kinnus project en masse: To all educated readers, regardless of their party: to the pious and enlightened, to the old and to the young, to traditional rabbis and to Crown Rabbis. . . . I call out to all of you: come and join the camp of the builders of history! Not every learned or literature person can be a great writer or historian. But every one of you can be a collector of material, and aid in the building of our history. . . . Let us work, gather our dispersed from their places of exile, arrange them, publish them, and build upon their foundation the temple of our history. Come let us search and inquire!54

Dubnov’s call to collective action struck a profound chord among his contemporaries, including An-sky himself, who, along with the Yiddish writers I. L. Peretz and Jacob Dinezon, published a similar appeal at the beginning of World War I in which they implored “all members of our people, men and women, young and old . . . [to] become historians yourselves! Don’t depend on the hands of strangers! Record, take it down, and collect!”55 While these efforts may have helped alleviate—or at least express—the anxiety of historians and ethnographers such as Dubnov and An-sky, they could also provoke a different kind of anxiety among the people whose help they sought to enlist, as An-sky discovered during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. In one of his diary entries from the expedition, An-sky noted: “A legend about the expedition has already been created. Baron Gintsburg [the financial sponsor of the expedition] is very rich. He gives money to collect old Jewish things because he


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wants to become a kind of Jesus or Muhammad. When all these things are printed and it will be stated that he himself thought them up, people will declare that he is a god.”56 On the one hand, this folk legend reflects the mythologization of the Gintsburgs that already existed among the poor Jews of the Pale of Settlement as a result of the family’s decades-long history of philanthropy and their powerful government connections.57 Yet in an inchoate way, it also expressed an incipient awareness that the “ingathering” of folk traditions and artifacts was not only about a desire to preserve the old but also about power, including the power to create the new. Thus while neither Baron Gintsburg nor An-sky imagined that the expedition would lead to their deification, there was a Promethean quality to their efforts.

2 THE REBBE AS ETHNOGRAPHER/ THE ETHNOGRAPHER AS REBBE

As a young man in Vitebsk, a town within the orbit of the ChabadLubavitch branch of the Hasidic movement, An-sky had dismissed Hasidism as anachronistic at best and reactionary at worst. By the time he embarked on the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, however, An-sky had become convinced that the Hasidic movement had both inspired and preserved many of the Jewish folk traditions that he was now most interested in collecting. Hasidic culture was not only important as a living repository for these traditions but also, as An-sky argued at a board meeting of the expedition, “Hasidic tales and legends were the best possible means of acquainting non-Jews with the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Jewish culture.”1 Influenced especially by I. L. Peretz’s extensive use of Hasidic themes and characters in his Yiddish stories (first collected together in the volume Khsidish in 1901), An-sky’s sympathetic view placed him at odds with most members of the Jewish intelligentsia, as well as their ethnic Russian counterparts, who viewed contemporary Hasidic culture as an atavistic survival that stubbornly resisted the modernization of Jewish society. In some important respects, An-sky’s approach paralleled the better-known efforts of Martin Buber to translate—or distort, according to his critics—Hasidic tales into a popular idiom that could communicate otherwise inaccessible Jewish wisdom to non-Jews and assimilated Jews alike.2 Significantly, in compiling his anthologies of Hasidic tales, Buber had frequently relied on hagiographic collections that were in turn compiled and published by Hasidim themselves (and, therefore, Buber’s romanticized tales tended to be highly reworked versions of printed stories that were already at least one step removed from any oral tradition). Ironically, despite the ideological chasm that lay between these Hasidic 40

The Rebbe as Ethnographer

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authors and secular Jewish “collectors,” they too were participating in the broader kinnus phenomenon of the day.3 Like Buber, An-sky made extensive use of printed sources in his own published retellings of Hasidic stories.4 Yet during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, An-sky set out to record Hasidic traditions on the ground, where, in his view, they still formed part of a living Oral Torah. Indeed, An-sky was adamant that potential respondents to The Jewish Ethnographic Program not simply record traditions that they had read in a book, as he stated in the instructions to the document: “Before recording anything, one should first ask the respondent whether he first encountered what he wants to narrate or sing in a printed work. It is not necessary to record such material.” In striving to identify what he considered authentic Jewish folk traditions, however, An-sky did not appreciate the degree to which oral and written sources had long interpenetrated one another, making it impossible to draw a hard-and-fast distinction between the two.5 As a young man, An-sky had turned away from traditional Jewish life and toward Russian Populism for inspiration when he “went among the people” in the villages and factories of southern Russia. During the final phase of his life, however, An-sky came to see Hasidism as an organically Jewish form of Populism in its own right, one that could help guide him as he led his expedition into the Pale of Settlement. In this regard, An-sky joined a small but significant group of Left-leaning Jewish intellectuals who had begun to regard Hasidism—at least during its early years—as embodying Populist values, even if these values did not always find expression in the historical reality of the movement following its supposed decline into dynastically dominated “zaddikism” during the nineteenth century, a view promoted by Simon Dubnov in his groundbreaking study of the movement. Thus the Yiddish language author Menashe Unger, who hailed from an aristocratic Hasidic background and left the fold as a young man to become a Socialist, eventually found a way of integrating the two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his identity, even describing Hasidism as “a development of the Jewish popular masses” that “liberated the simple Jews, the humble people, from the hegemony, from the sovereignty of the powerful and the scholars.”6 Similarly, Emma Goldman, who vehemently rejected all religion, including the traditional Judaism of her youth, nevertheless noted with approval, “There are many anarchist elements among the Hasidim.”7 And An-sky’s closest friend, Chaim Zhitlovsky, a committed Socialist whose father was a Lubavitcher Hasid,

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wrote that “The holy word of the Baal Shem—socialism . . . has had the impact of the messiah’s shofar.”8 The supposedly Populist, and even revolutionary, character of Hasidism—an interpretation that has since been challenged by a range of scholars—appealed to An-sky, but so did the movement’s conservative approach to preserving traditions.9 An-sky’s distinctive vision of Hasidism embodied many of the same tensions—one might even say paradoxes—that characterized his own life and work. It was revolutionary and obsessed with transmitting tradition; Populist and centered around charismatic individuals; Jewish and deeply embedded in its Eastern European environment.10 Over time, An-sky came to see the Hasidic movement as an inspiration for his own emerging vision of Jewish ethnography and the Hasidim themselves as proto-ethnographers who could serve as indigenous models for the network of collectors he hoped to establish in communities throughout the Pale of Settlement.11 Since the eighteenth century, members of the Hasidic movement had collected, preserved, and transformed both Jewish and non-Jewish folk traditions, including tales, dances, songs, incantations, clothing, and material objects—in other words, precisely those things that most interested An-sky. According to Hasidic ideology, the rebbe or zaddik played a special role in this undertaking by “descending” into the world, gathering the holy sparks that exist in every thing, according to Lurianic Kabbalah, and raising them up to a higher level. Thus zaddikim like Yitshak Taub of Kaliv (1744–1828) famously elevated the divine “sparks” contained in the profane songs of shepherds and others by removing their words and transforming them into Hasidic melodies. As An-sky noted in an essay from 1920, the final year of his life, “It is also characteristic of Hasidic and religious Jews, especially the more mystical ones, to make use of non-Jewish proverbs and expressions. . . . These pious Jews also liked to find a mystical-religious meaning in perfectly ordinary non-Jewish expressions.”12 In a variety of ways, the activities of Hasidic collectors anticipated the kind of ethnographic work embarked upon by An-sky and his collaborators in the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. Thus, for example, in the preface to Shivhei Ha-Besht, the first published collection of tales about the Baal Shem Tov, the work’s compiler, Dov Ber ben Samuel, of Ilintsy, declared: “Therefore, I was careful to write down all the awesome things that I heard from truthful people. In each case I wrote down from whom I heard it. Thank God, who endowed me with


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memory, I neither added nor omitted anything. Every word is true, and I did not change a word.”13 Similarly, in the instructions that he appended to The Jewish Ethnographic Program, An-sky exhorted potential respondents: “After each song, tale, or other folk tradition, the first name, surname, age, and profession of the person whose words are being recorded should be noted. . . . What the storyteller says should be recorded precisely and completely.” In both cases we see a self-conscious movement from oral tradition to writing, from a chain of transmission based on memory to the printed page, and, concomitantly, an anxiety about recording—and attributing—this tradition accurately, that is, an anxiety about authenticity. Rather than possessing a spark of divinity, as the Hasidim believed, Ansky argued in The Jewish Ethnographic Program that songs, tales, and, indeed, all Jewish folk traditions possessed a spark of the Jewish people’s creative spirit or soul. Consequently, for An-sky it was never enough to collect representative examples of a particular type of song, tale, or amulet. Instead, for Jewish ethnography to perform the redemptive function that An-sky envisioned for it, each and every Jewish folk tradition had to be collected and elevated, as it were, by representing it in a new, cultural context, such as a museum exhibition, theatrical play, or encyclopedia entry.14 Just as importantly, the Hasidic movement emphasized the importance of materiality—broadly understood to include dance, music, eating, and other bodily expressions, as well as physical objects, such as clothing and relics—as a means for achieving higher spiritual states. This doctrine, known in Hebrew as avodah be-gashmiyut (worship in corporeality), served as a precedent for Jewish ethnography’s focus on the material culture of the common Jewish folk. In addition to its ideological influence, Hasidism also impacted the way that An-sky presented himself and, just as importantly, the way that others perceived him during his journeys with the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. In the town of Kremenetz, for example, one of the locals who greeted An-sky at the hotel where he was staying “cracked a joke about the modern Rebbe (An-sky), who only wore a hat on his head and not a shtreymel.”15 The fur-lined hat known as a shtreymel remains one of the most recognizable sartorial symbols of Hasidic affiliation. Although An-sky did not wear one during the expedition, he did cultivate a look— beard, long black coat, hat—that subtly blurred the lines between his identity as a secular Jewish intellectual and what was increasingly becoming

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his alter ego as a kind of “modern Rebbe.” Nor were the young zamlers in Kremenetz the only people struck by An-sky’s resemblance to a Hasidic holy man. Indeed, there is a hagiographical quality to many of the descriptions of An-sky during the final period of his life. After watching An-sky conduct a meeting in 1919 to establish a historic-ethnographic society in Vilna, for example, Chaim Lunski likened him to “a Hasidic rebbe addressing his followers.”16 Similarly, when he encountered An-sky in Saint Petersburg, the poet Osip Mandelstam observed: “In his single person he contained a thousand provincial Rabbis, if one reckons by the amount of his advice and consolations, conveyed in the guise of parables, anecdotes, and so on,” a description that recalls the traditional Hasidic saying that a rebbe is like a “Torah on two legs.”17 Others did not explicitly draw the comparison to a rebbe but instead employed Hasidic tropes when recalling the impression that An-sky made. Thus Yitzhak Fikangur, one of the expedition’s fieldworkers, recalled: “Reb Shlomo—that is An-sky—wearing his kapote, would engage in discussions with people from different strata . . . with the town Rabbi, for example, or with the ‘Rebbe,’ if there was such a figure in the community, with the Hasidic congregation in the besmedresh. . . . All this was done with a purity and dveykes that very few people are able to achieve.”18 An-sky, the Socialist revolutionary and intellectual who had abandoned Vitebsk at the age of seventeen to escape the traditional Jewish milieu of his youth, was now transformed into “Reb Shlomo” who wore the long black coat of a Hasid, spent hours in Hasidic study houses listening to stories and songs, and behaved with dveykes, a Hasidic term that typically refers to the ecstatic state of communion between a rebbe and his disciples or an individual and God. Thirty years earlier, the guardians of tradition in Liozno had exiled An-sky for secretly attempting to indoctrinate their sons in the heretical ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment. Now, in the towns visited by the expedition, Hasidim welcomed An-sky with the kind of respect they typically accorded to a holy man. Indeed, when An-sky visited the Hasidic kloyz (synagogue) in Kremenetz on the Sabbath following his arrival, people extended their hands to him in greeting “as if to a ‘guter yid’ ” as one observer later put it in the memorial book for the town, employing a phrase that literally means “good Jew” in Yiddish but is a colloquial way of referring to a Hasidic holy man.19 The gathered Hasidim then handed An-sky a tallis (prayer shawl) with a silver atarah (collar), seated him in a place of honor by the


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eastern wall of the synagogue, and called him up during the reading of the Torah for the sixth aliyah, an honor which Hasidim traditionally reserve for their rebbes. In Kremenetz and elsewhere, people sometimes treated An-sky like a zaddik because his public persona during the expedition tapped into preexisting models of Hasidic holiness. An-sky owned almost nothing and, according to those who knew him, everything he did own (i.e., some books and papers) fit into a few valises that he carried around with him as he moved from place to place, frequently sleeping on people’s sofas. As Yona Makhover put it in An-sky’s obituary, published in 1920, “He never had any private belongings, only the clothes on his back. The large suitcases that he always carried with him during his travels were filled only with books, manuscripts and all sorts of scholarly and literary material. Bent over, with white hair and beard, he gave the impression of an old man, even though he was only fifty-seven. But the spirit that burned inside him was like that of a youth of twenty and his eyes were piercing and youthful. An-sky was always full of movement, full of energy and hitlahavut [enthusiasm], and all who crossed his path were carried away with admiration.”20 Significantly, like Fikangur, Makhover resorted to traditional Hasidic terminology, in this case hitlahavut (Yid., hislayves), or “fiery enthusiasm,” to capture the powerful impression that An-sky made on those around him. For some observers, An-sky’s itinerant lifestyle and lack of possessions may have suggested the Hasidic ideal of hitpashtut ha-gashmiyut, or “stripping away of corporeality,” a spiritual state that lies beyond avodah be-gashmiyut (worship through corporeality). For others, An-sky’s efforts to go among the Jewish folk of the Pale, while rooted in the Populist notion of khozhdenie v narod (going to the people) of his youth, may have appeared like a kind of ethnographic yeridah le-zorekh aliyah, or “descent in order to ascend,” that is, the Hasidic belief that a holy man must leave his lofty place and lower himself to the level of the common people in order to raise them up along with the sparks in their surroundings. These factors, combined with his “soulful” appearance and intensely charismatic personality, could have lent An-sky the aura of a zaddik nistar (hidden zaddik), a category of holy man exemplified by Zisha (Zusya) of Annipol, an itinerant zaddik whose own travels through the Jewish towns of Eastern Europe had inspired a host of miracle stories that Ansky enthusiastically recorded when he visited Annipol in 1912 during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition.21

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According to Shmuel Shrayer, who traveled with him during the expedition’s second summer, An-sky’s metamorphosis into a guter yid— at least in terms of the impression he made on some of the people he encountered—did not happen overnight. Indeed, Shrayer suggests that before embarking on the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, An-sky’s knowledge of Hasidism was based almost entirely on written sources, since according to him, An-sky had long ago forgotten whatever he might have learned firsthand during his childhood in Vitebsk. While Yoel Engel, who accompanied An-sky during the expedition’s first season, indicates that An-sky was already able to gain the confidence of local Jews, including Hasidim, in those early days, Shrayer, by contrast, claims that An-sky was woefully unprepared to engage in the kind of participant-observer fieldwork necessary to succeed among small-town Hasidim who were profoundly wary of strangers, especially big-city types whom they—correctly in this case—suspected of being apikoyresim, or heretics. The problem, according to Shrayer, was that An-sky had completely forgotten even the most basic Jewish observances, let alone specialized Hasidic practices: “In the towns of the Pale, we needed to gain the trust of the Hasidim and other pious people, and yet over the course of many years An-sky had forgotten all the Jewish minhagim [customs]!” What An-sky needed was a crash course in yidishkayt. “I therefore acquired for him a tallis and tefillin, and taught him how to use them. He had also forgotten the prayers, but preserved in his memory was Psalm 104 ‘Borchi nafshi’ [‘Bless the Lord, my soul’]. He used to repeat this text in place of the Shema and the Amidah [the two most important prayers in the Jewish liturgy]. In short, his praying was entirely ‘Borchi nafshi.’ ”22 Nor could An-sky reveal his true identity as a prominent author and Socialist revolutionary to the Hasidim, lest they reject him out of hand. As Shrayer put it, “We needed to gain the trust of the Hasidim. It was impossible, therefore, for An-sky to appear in Jewish towns as An-sky the writer.” For this reason, Shrayer and the other members of the expedition took to calling An-sky by his original name, Shlomo Rapoport, or, simply, Reb Shlomo. Indeed, the surname “Rapoport” posed its own problems, since in Eastern Europe it was associated with Kohanim (members of the Jewish priestly caste), who are traditionally prohibited from entering cemeteries, something that An-sky spent a lot of time doing during the expedition. In one town, a curious—and perhaps suspicious—local rabbi pointedly asked, “How can Reb Shlomo Rapoport allow himself to


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visit cemeteries?” Thinking on his feet, Shrayer responded that An-sky was, in fact, descended from the well-known family of priestly Rapoports who had originally hailed from the Italian town of Porto (hence, the origin of the name), but only on his mother’s side. An-sky had taken on his mother’s maiden name in order to avoid the draft, a claim that satisfied the rabbi, “since in almost every town it was possible to find brothers who were the sons of a single father but who each had a different surname—as a segulah [protection] against conscription.” According to Shrayer, despite An-sky’s initial ignorance of Jewish and, especially, Hasidic customs, he proved to be a quick study. “Over time, An-sky learned Hasidic terms and ideas and was able to hold a sensible conversation with the rabbis without any difficulty,” Shrayer recalled years later, “though in the beginning I had to serve as an intermediary between him and them.” Ultimately, An-sky felt comfortable enough in the numerous Hasidic gatherings that the team attended and recorded that he even became an active participant: “Our phonograph stood in the corner and recorded the Hasidic melodies with all the ‘bimbumim.’ Sometimes An-sky would get into the groove and he would sing along like one of them.” Whether An-sky already possessed the ability to conduct fieldwork comfortably among Hasidim during the expedition’s first season, as Engel claims, or required some intensive training as late as the second, as Shrayer asserts, it is clear that he came to inhabit the role successfully. Yet An-sky’s skill at performing a kind of quasi-Hasidic identity did not prevent him from taking liberties that presumably would have disturbed many—though, as we will see, apparently not all—Hasidim. Most strikingly, according to Shrayer, members of the ethnographic team “robbed the graves of the zaddikim”; that is, they would collect the kvitlekh (notes containing petitionary prayers) that Hasidim traditionally place on the graves of holy men, hoping for intercession on their behalf. In his detailed memoir of the expedition, Avrom Rekhtman confirmed this activity, writing: “The expedition gathered a big collection of all kinds of kvitlekh.”23 According to Shrayer, the kvitlekh left on the graves of dead zaddikim “were more interesting than those given by a Hasid to a living Rebbe, because with his Rebbe a Hasid isn’t always fully open but this isn’t the case when the note is placed on the grave of a dead Rebbe. [For instance] in one town, we bought a bundle of notes from the gabbai (assistant) of the local Rebbe and compared them with the notes that we took from the grave of the Besht. In one note that we found on the grave

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of the Besht, a Hasid complained about all sorts of evils, among them that he suspected his wife of adultery.” Because of their aura of sanctity, such notes were traditionally burned once enough of them had accumulated on a zaddik’s grave. Now, however, in the eager hands of An-sky, they became yet another object to be collected and placed in an ethnographic museum, alongside other relics such as the broken skull from Chmielnitsky’s time that An-sky dug up himself or the petrified finger that An-sky purchased from an old man in Proskurov, who had amputated it in order to avoid conscription into the tsar’s army (normally, severed limbs would be saved and buried alongside the individual so that the entire body would be intact for the Resurrection of the Dead).24 While An-sky had no compunctions about engaging in sacrilege if it meant furthering his ethnographic agenda, he could also display sensitivity concerning the negative effects his work might have on the beliefs of local Hasidim, as the following example illustrates. On the way from Rovne to Berdichev, the expedition stopped in Miropol, a small town that An-sky would later immortalize in the figure of Rebbe Azriel of Miropol, the Hasidic holy man who is called upon to exorcise Khonen’s spirit from Leah’s body in The Dybbuk. Across the river from Miropol was another town named Kaminka (practically speaking, there was really only one town, but officially there were two), which in turn was known as the home of Shmuel Kaminker (d. 1843)—a disciple of the zaddikim Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev and Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt—who was famous in the region for his ability to exorcise dibbuks. Indeed, in his diary of the expedition, Shmuel Shrayer went so far as to assert: “Rebbe Azriel of Miropol is none other than Shmuel of Kaminka.” Following the zaddik’s death and burial in the town cemetery during the nineteenth century, the people of Kaminka/Miropol had become convinced that Shmuel Kaminker’s grave continued to protect their community from fires (a constant threat in the towns of the Pale) and from the flooding of the local river. Predictably enough, An-sky was intrigued by the legends surrounding Shmuel Kaminker, and he requested that the caretaker show him the holy man’s moss-covered tombstone in the town’s old cemetery. What happened next is worth quoting at length, for it reveals how An-sky’s ethnographic research, while intended to preserve and even introduce Hasidic folk culture to a wider public, might also, under certain circumstances, subvert or destroy it:


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Bit by bit, An-sky peeled away the moss covering the letters and saw to his great astonishment: “Here lies Rabbi Moshe son of Rabbi Moshe.” When he informed the caretaker about this, and told him that it was not the grave of Rabbi Shmuel, he laughed and replied: “You’re mocking me. I’ve served here for more than fifty years. Every one who lives in this town knows that this is the grave of Rabbi Shmuel and you come and say that this isn’t the grave of that zaddik.” An-sky, of course, was not satisfied with this response and he requested that he read it with him letter by letter. The caretaker turned as pale as plaster from this sudden discovery. Without speaking a word, he left An-sky and ran to the town and gathered the rabbis and the other religious functionaries. After a few moments, they all came to the cemetery along with men, women, and children. In that instant, their world was destroyed, and the holy grave that had protected them from all evils was stolen from them. Chastened, they stood around the grave without knowing what to do. An-sky saw their suffering and already regretted his strange discovery. To quiet their spirits, he told them that in his great experience he knew that sometimes a tombstone moved from its place on account of various reasons and over time ended up in a different location. He convinced them, therefore, to believe that indeed this was the grave of the zaddik Rabbi Shmuel, but that his tombstone had been destroyed and over the years a different tombstone had moved from its gravesite and settled next to the grave of Rabbi Shmuel. For an entire day, Hasidim of all types thronged to his hotel in order to hear his explanation and drink in thirstily his words. His explanation was accepted, of course, with great desire because they wanted to believe in it. “I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself,” An-sky told me after this incident, “if I hadn’t found a way to convince them to believe that this was in fact the zaddik’s grave. For it was without malice that I stole from the innocents their precious and holy property and only with great difficulty was I able to return to them what I had stolen. And you, go and learn how much care is needed in such matters.”25

Throughout the expedition, An-sky had employed dissimulation in order to reveal that which was concealed—all in the name of ethnography. In the town of Kaminka/Miropol, by contrast, An-sky drew on his considerable skills as an actor to conceal that which he had—regretfully— revealed. As An-sky wistfully noted to Shrayer, the episode in Kaminka provided him with a sobering lesson in the potentially destructive effects that ethnography, even ethnography intended to “salvage” a culture before it disappeared, could have on the people who were still part of it. In the towns of the Pale that they visited, An-sky had gotten used to being

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mistaken for a spy, a revolutionary, a performer, and even a holy man. Now he came to understand that the ethnographer might also appear in the guise of a thief. An-sky’s complex ethnographic engagement with Hasidism was groundbreaking for his time. Simon Dubnov had treated Hasidic tales as a source for reconstructing history, Martin Buber as a font of universal spiritual wisdom, and I. L. Peretz as the raw material for his own folkstimlikhe (folklike) stories. Like them, An-sky was interested in Hasidic tales, in his case, those that were still orally transmitted in the Jewish communities of the Pale, as well as the printed versions that widely circulated among readers. Yet An-sky was also captivated by the rich visual and material culture that Hasidim had produced, a distinction that Dov Noy, in his own study of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, has referred to as “aural (Folklore) and visual (Ethnography).”26 In practical terms, this meant that An-sky was as interested in visiting Hasidic synagogues and graves, and collecting kvitlekh, artifacts, and old manuscripts associated with zaddikim, as he was in recording or retelling tales about the holy men themselves.27 More than any of his contemporaries, therefore, An-sky turned Hasidism into an object of ethnography, and in so doing he revealed the existence of a wider Hasidic culture beyond the tales that had hitherto inspired so much attention. Indeed, one of the major contributions of memoirs of the expedition— and especially of Rekhtman’s book-length account—is that they provide detailed physical descriptions of the places where Hasidic tales were set (e.g., sites in and around Mezibozh, the town where the Besht lived and was buried) and where they continued to be told (the Hasidic synagogues and study houses that could be found in practically every shtetl that the expedition visited). In this way, the expedition illuminated how, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, many Hasidic tales remained intimately connected to their original settings, as well as the important role of place itself in the creation and ongoing transmission of Hasidic oral tradition. Although Hasidim were now the objects of an ethnographic gaze, they stubbornly asserted their own subjectivity in a variety of ways over the course of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. Indeed, in the towns that the expedition visited, An-sky frequently found himself being scrutinized by local Hasidim who were just as curious about him as he was about them. For this reason, Shrayer noted, “To Hasidim I needed to explain what we saw in this [endeavor] that made us take the trouble


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to come from afar, from Petersburg the capital in order to collect nigunim, tales, and old artifacts—strange ‘business’ in their eyes.” The explanation, Shrayer told them, was that “Reb Shlomo Rapoport was one of the wealthy residents of Petersburg and since he was childless, he had taken a vow to collect the remnants of the antiquities of the Jewish people, in order to show the nations and their neighbors the beauty of the ‘Congregation of Israel.’ This story found favor with them, and we not only gained the trust of the Hasidim but also of the rabbis.” There is something both intentionally evasive and psychologically revealing about the justification offered by Shrayer. Ironically, the truth— that An-sky was a perennially homeless yet celebrated writer, revolutionary, and, now, ethnographer—would have seemed more fantastical and less comprehensible to the small-town Hasidim than the half-truth spun by Shrayer. Far from belonging to the wealthy Jewish elite of Saint Petersburg, An-sky never even acquired a permit to reside legally in the city, and therefore he habitually crashed on friends’ sofas or slept outside the city limits. Yet An-sky was childless, and his embrace of ethnography may have reflected a deeply felt desire for personal posterity as well as a vehicle to reclaim national pride in the face of endemic anti-Semitism and Jewish self-doubt. Thus An-sky had written in a letter: “I have no wife, no children, no house. I even lack an apartment, furniture, or fixed habits. What connects me to these notions with a powerful bond is the nation!”28 We should also pause to consider another provocative aspect of Shrayer’s narrative: Despite the predilection of Hasidim themselves to collect songs, tales, and artifacts, it apparently did not “make sense” to them that a group of assimilated Jews from the big city would want to do the same thing. We have already seen that some townspeople in the Pale suspected the expedition’s financial sponsor, Baron Gintsburg, of collecting “old Jewish things because he wants to become a kind of Jesus or Muhammad . . . people will declare that he is a god.” Rather than personal aggrandizement or even apotheosis, Shrayer asserted that the motivation for the expedition was twofold: on the one hand, it served as a substitute for An-sky’s lack of children; on the other, it was a way of making known the glory of the Jewish people and, concomitantly—at least in the minds of the Hasidim—the God of Israel. Given their overlapping interests as collectors, it may come as no surprise that on at least one occasion the members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and a Hasidic rebbe attempted to acquire the same object for their respective collections. In September 1913 Levi Yitzhak

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Vaynshteyn, the secretary of the expedition, wrote to An-sky that a correspondent in Miropol had offered to help them acquire a manuscript dating from 1811, “in which could be found sgules [methods for bringing about good fortune] from Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichiv,” a Hasidic holy man of particular interest to An-sky. Vaynshteyn added that the manuscript was currently in the possession of a descendant of the zaddik who had already been approached by a Hasidic rebbe named Moshe Mordechai of Makarov-Berdichev (1844–1920) who had offered to purchase it for 75 rubles. However, the owner “refused to sell it for any money. Only for such a national concern [i.e., the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition] would he deliver it for fifty rubles.”29 Here, in stark terms, we see how the ethnographic work of An-sky’s expedition might parallel, compete with, and, in some sense, even substitute for the activities of Hasidim themselves who sought to collect and preserve the same set of tales, songs, and artifacts for their own purposes. Unlike the Hasidim, who went about collecting in a nonsystematic manner, An-sky employed contemporary ethnographic methods in his own efforts to document Hasidic culture in situ. In practical terms, this meant two things: making Hasidism an important focus of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and charging Avrom Yuditsky, one of his young assistants from the Jewish Academy in Saint Petersburg to create an ethnographic questionnaire dedicated exclusively to the subject. Although the resulting document was never published, it is a sign of how central Hasidism was to An-sky’s understanding of Jewish folk culture and to his vision of Jewish ethnography that he decided the movement deserved its own questionnaire rather than being subsumed under the omnibus umbrella of The Jewish Ethnographic Program, like so many other phenomena. Given the testimony of Shrayer concerning An-sky’s initial ignorance of lived Hasidic culture, it makes sense that he would rely on someone with a more intimate knowledge of the subject to compose the questionnaire. Today, a copy of the questionnaire survives in the collection of the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, Ukraine. Entitled “Hasidim,” and consisting of forty-four unnumbered questions, the handwritten Yiddish language questionnaire is attributed solely to “A. Yuditsky.” Beginning with the question “Is your town Hasidic?” it explores a wide range of Hasidic topics, comprising ritual, economic, and social dimensions. Many of the questions focus on the figure of the Hasidic holy man asking, for example, whether a rebbe lives in the town itself or whether a guter yid


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(i.e., a zaddik) visits from elsewhere, and, if so, whether these visits take place on a regular schedule. Most of the questions address the practices of the town’s rank-and-file Hasidim. For example, do they organize themselves into special societies for reading the Mishnah or other traditional texts? Do they have their own place in town to gather and pray? What Hasidic customs do they engage in, for example, commemorating the anniversary of a zaddik’s death; telling stories about the Besht and other zaddikim during the melaveh malkeh meal that ushers out the Sabbath; or making a pilgrimage to the grave of a zaddik? How do Hasidim give monetary donations to their rebbe, via traveling emissaries or local representatives? Do any Hasidim give a certain percentage of their annual income to their rebbe? The questionnaire also asks whether followers of more than one rebbe live in the community and, reflecting the tension that sometimes existed between such groups, whether inter-Hasidic conflicts ever resulted in physical violence, killings, or informing to the government. Finally, the questionnaire devotes special attention to followers of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, a zaddik famous for his tales, who died in 1810 without leaving a successor. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Nachman of Bratslav and his tales enjoyed a renaissance among writers like Hillel Zeitlin and Martin Buber, whose first published volume on Hasidism in 1906 was Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman. Reflecting this broader interest, the questionnaire asks whether Bratslavers live in the community and have their own gathering place; what their relations are like with other Hasidim; and whether they make a special pilgrimage to the site of Nachman’s grave in Uman on the Jewish New Year (a custom known as the Rosh Hashanah kibbutz).

3 A T O TA L A C C O U N T: W R I T I N G D OW N T H E P E O P L E ’ S TO R A H

Once the Besht saw a demon walking and holding a book in his hand. He said to him: “What is the book that you hold in your hand?” He answered him: “This is the book that you have written.” The Besht then understood that there was a person who was writing down his Torah. He gathered all his followers and asked them: “Who among you is writing down my Torah?” The man admitted it and he brought the manuscript to the Besht. The Besht examined it and said: “There is not even a single word here that is mine.” —Shivhei ha-Besht

This enigmatic tale appears in Shivhei ha-Besht, the earliest hagiographical collection devoted to the life of the Baal Shem Tov, or Besht, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism.1 Like a Zen koan, it confronts the reader—here slyly represented by a demon “holding a book in his hand”—with a paradox. On the one hand, the tale purports to be a written account of what the Besht did and said, employing the term “Torah” (or toyre) to refer to his oral teachings, a common Hasidic practice. On the other hand, the Hasidic tale portrays the Besht as denying that these teachings can ever be captured in writing. The aporia generated by this tale has its roots in an ancient and profound Jewish ambivalence about transmitting Oral Torah in the form of writing—and, similarly, transmitting Written Torah orally. As the Babylonian Talmud declares: “Words [of Torah] which are in writing you are not permitted to transmit orally, and words [of Torah] which are oral you may not transmit in writing.”2 And yet this Talmudic text, like the Hasidic tale about 54

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the Besht, is at odds with itself, since the Talmud is the written transmission of the Oral Torah par excellence. Like the anonymous man in the tale who wrote down the Besht’s oral teachings, An-sky appointed himself to be the recorder of the Jewish people’s Oral Torah, which he described in The Jewish Ethnographic Program as “folk tales and legends, parables and aphorisms, songs and melodies, traditions, habits, beliefs and so on.” Yet unlike the man in the Hasidic tale, An-sky did not undertake this task surreptitiously. Instead, he openly and proudly announced that this was his life’s mission, and in a variety of ways he sought to enlist the help of the entire Jewish population of the Pale in this grand project of auto-ethnography—an endeavor that An-sky described in Russian as samopoznanie (self-knowledge).3 For, as An-sky put it in the preface to The Jewish Ethnographic Program, the first duty of Jewish ethnography was to arrest the calamitous, even traitorous, phenomenon of forgetting that plagued his generation of Jews and to salvage the People’s Torah before it disappeared forever: The great upheaval in Jewish life that has occurred in the last fifty to sixty years has above all devastated our folk traditions, a great many of which have already vanished. With every old man who dies, with every fire, with every exile, we lose a piece of our past. We are rapidly forgetting the most beautiful expressions of traditional life, the customs and beliefs, the old, profound poetic tales, songs, and melodies. The ancient and beautiful synagogues are being abandoned or consumed by fire; their most precious decorations and holy objects are either disappearing or being sold, often into non-Jewish hands. The tombstones of our sages and martyrs are sinking into the earth, their inscriptions rubbed off. In short, our past, soaked with so much holy blood and so many tears shed by martyrs and innocent victims, sanctified by so much self-sacrifice, is being forgotten and disappearing.

An-sky was not the first to call for writing down the Oral Torah lest it be forgotten. In the Mishneh Torah, his magisterial twelfth-century compendium of the Oral Law, Maimonides, the preeminent Jewish philosopher and jurist of the Middle Ages, justified his own efforts by citing the precedent of Judah the Prince, who, according to legend, had compiled the Mishnah, the first attempt to write down the Oral Torah, a thousand years earlier. As Maimonides explained: He [Judah the Prince] gathered together all the traditions, all the enactments, and all the explanations, and interpretations that had been heard

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from Moshe Our Teacher. . . . Why did Our Holy Teacher do so, and did not leave things as they were? Because he saw that the number of students was continuing to decrease, calamities were constantly occurring, and wicked government was expanding in the world and gaining strength, and the Israelites were wandering and settling in remote places. He thus composed a work to serve as a handbook for all, so that it could be rapidly learned and would not be forgotten.4

Invoking the same logic in the twentieth century as Maimonides had in the twelfth and Judah the Prince in the second, An-sky implicitly figured himself as a successor—albeit an unlikely one, given his Socialist revolutionary politics—to an august lineage of Jewish culture heroes who had “saved” Judaism during a time of crisis and ensured its survival for future generations by transmitting the Oral Torah in writing. In the stormy period following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, a sage had played this role; in the Middle Ages, it was a philosopher; now, in the modern era, it would be an ethnographer. Both Maimonides and, according to legend, Judah the Prince had responded to the plague of forgetfulness in their own day by producing monumental works that sought to record the Oral Torah for posterity. The process set into motion by Judah the Prince ultimately led to the creation of the Talmud, a massive, multitractate work that articulated numerous Halakhic (i.e., legal) questions but, in general, did not resolve the divergent opinions expressed in its pages.5 This step was taken by Maimonides, whose Mishneh Torah—under the systematizing influence of philosophy—sought to provide definitive legal decisions for the Halakhic questions debated by the Talmud, Midrashic collections, the Geonim (post-Talmudic Babylonian authorities), and other sources. The Mishneh Torah, in turn, generated a series of law codes that reached an apex (but did not end) with Joseph Karo’s sixteenth-century Shulhan Arukh (The Set Table), which, along with Moshe Isserles’s commentary for the Ashkenazi community known as HaMapah (The Table Cloth), became the single-most authoritative Jewish law code in the modern period. Each of these attempts to fix the Oral Torah in writing did not end its ongoing reinterpretation, nor did it prevent the creation of new traditions that might one day achieve the status of Oral Torah in their own right. Rather, the various written compendia of the Oral Torah, no matter how emphatic or widely accepted their claims to be definitive, always coexisted dialectically with oral and written traditions outside of their

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purview. Thus the Oral Torah remained an open and renewable category despite the traditional claim that it reflected an unbroken chain of transmission originating with Moses at Sinai, on the one hand, and the persistent attempts to fix it in place and time by writing it down, on the other. Like his predecessors, An-sky envisioned a monumental written work that would record the Oral Torah before it disappeared or was forgotten. Several years before the expedition set out for its first season, Ansky wrote to his old friend Chaim Zhitlovsky in August 1910: “I have set myself a task; the goal of my life is to write one book, Jewish Ethnography. I devote every spare minute to it.”6 Later, as the expedition took shape, An-sky became more ambitious, hoping to produce a fivevolume opus entitled Evrei v ikh bytovoi i religioznoi zhizni (Jews in Their Daily and Religious Life), which would begin with a chapter on the soul (neshome) before it entered the body and end with a chapter on the fate of the soul following death.7 Other topics included “education, military service, marriage and sexuality (including cases of depravity and ‘fallen women’), religious life, morality, norms regarding the relation between human beings and nature, folk medicine, prayers, customs and rituals, synagogues, legal procedures, welfare societies, messianism, the Jewish enlightenment movement, Zionism, participation in revolutionary movements, art and literature in Hebrew and Yiddish, and in a self-reflexive gesture, Jewish scholarship on Jews.”8 By 1916 An-sky had formulated even grander plans, writing to his friend Rosa Ettinger, “The last time I was in Moscow, I had talks with some people about publishing my collected ethnographic and historical materials, musical compositions and the albums of art works (there’ll be 40 volumes in all).”9 In the end, none of these volumes would come to fruition. Rather than a definitive compendium of Jewish folk traditions—a kind of ethnographic Mishneh Torah—An-sky would produce The Jewish Ethnographic Program, a document whose open-endedness, collective authorship, and structure of questions without answers would more closely resemble a stripped-down Talmud or, as I will argue in the next chapter, an ethnographic Sefer Minhagim, or Book of Customs.

Yavneh in Saint Petersburg The genesis of The Jewish Ethnographic Program may be traced to a remarkable conference convened by An-sky in Saint Petersburg on March

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24–25, 1912, in which prominent Jewish intellectuals from around the Russian Empire discussed his forthcoming expedition into the Pale of Settlement.10 An-sky had initially hoped that Yiddish and Hebrew literary lions such as Hayim Bialik, Y. H. Ravnitsky, Yaakov Dinezon, and I. L. Peretz would participate in the meeting, but none ended up attending. Instead, the participants included Simon Dubnov, the doyen of Russian Jewish historians; Samuel Weissenberg, a physician and anthropologist from Elizavetgrad, whose extensive anthropometric studies in search of an ideal “Jewish type” ( judische Typus) or “Original Jew” (Urjude) had led him to conclude that environmental and cultural factors, rather than race, accounted for so-called Jewish characteristics; Vladimir Iokhelson and Lev Shternberg, the Populist ethnographers whose own expeditions in Siberia had likely inspired An-sky; Shaul Ginzburg, the historian and pioneering Jewish folk song collector; Yoel Engel, the ethnomusicologist who would later accompany An-sky into the Pale; and more than ten others.11 Presiding over the meeting was Mikhail Kulisher (1847–1919), an attorney, journalist, and activist who not only took a leading role in the Jewish Colonization Association and other important Russian Jewish communal organizations but was also a longtime author on ethnographic topics, beginning with a contribution to the seminal journal Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1876.12 On the opening day of the conference—which was conducted in Russian, the language of the Jewish intelligentsia—Kulisher welcomed the assembled participants by questioning the raison d’être of the ethnographic society and its proposed expedition into the Pale of Settlement. “The answer to our question,” Kulisher continued, “is provided to us by our own history.” Kulisher then invoked the events following the Roman general (and later emperor) Titus’s conquest of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., when Yochanan ben Zakkai, “to the surprise of the iron fisted Romans, requested permission to open an academy at Yavneh. The sage turned out to be right: within this academy over the course of centuries was forged the great strength that would rescue Judaism and preserve it for millennia.” According to Jewish legend, Yochanan ben Zakkai and his circle of disciples had responded to the dire conditions of their day by laying the foundations for rabbinic Judaism. As Daniel Boyarin has observed, “The Talmud conceives Yavneh as the ecumenical council of Fathers who transmitted the immortal (but ever-growing and shifting) body of the Oral Torah.”13

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With the kind of gesture to the past that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi would later identify as emblematically Jewish in his book Zakhor, Kulisher encouraged his fellow participants to see their own contemporary efforts through the ancient lens of Yavneh.14 Like Yochanan ben Zakkai and his colleagues, the attendees of the conference in Saint Petersburg were living through one of the most traumatic periods in Jewish history, one marked by the bloody pogroms of the period 1903–1905, the Revolution of 1905, and the mass physical and cultural dislocations produced by emigration and assimilation. Yet they too could ensure the future of Judaism by recording and transmitting the Oral Torah of their own day, this time via ethnography. Over the next two days, the sages of Saint Petersburg debated the methods and goals of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition.15 How many places should the expedition visit? Would it be better to stay for a long time in a handful of towns, become immersed in local life, and record material in great depth, or to visit as many locations within the Pale as possible? Should advertisements be placed in newspapers seeking material? What kind of recording equipment should be employed? Shternberg, for example, was particularly emphatic about the need to employ “cutting edge technology” such as gramophones and dictaphones. Should the expedition pay special attention to “old aristocratic Jewish families: Luria, Lifshitz, Shapiro, Pozner, Dlugach, Gurevich, etc.”? Should it seek out local Jewish doctors to serve as “valuable collaborators,” as the Moscow-based physician Samuel Vermel recommended? Should local inhabitants, in general, play a central role in collecting material or, as Ansky declared (in a view that was seconded by other participants), “I think that the expedition itself should carry out most of the work. My experience persuades me that it is almost impossible to rely on local people.” Perhaps the biggest point of contention among the participants concerned the potential role of anthropology, which Lev Shternberg defined at the conference as falling into two categories, “somatic” (i.e., physical anthropology) and “demographic.” While Shternberg warned that they should not “subordinate anthropology to folklore, the work of the expedition must possess a harmonious goal,” An-sky stressed the centrality of folklore, even if it came at the expense of anthropology. As he put it, “I repeat: the main task of the expedition must be collecting Jewish folklore. If in a certain place we exhaust all the folkloric material in the course of a week, and to do anthropological work would require a

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month, should the expedition be delayed on account of it? I believe that no, to do otherwise would be a distraction from our main task.” In support of his position, An-sky passionately argued “Collecting folklore—for us is a task that is not only scholarly but also national and timely. In order to educate our children in a national Jewish spirit, we must give them folktales, folksongs, in short, that which forms the basis of children’s education for other peoples. Of course, we must not deny the great importance of anthropological work but at this moment it does not have for us such vital importance because anthropological data is not disappearing like our folklore.” Several participants, including Iokhelson, Weissenberg, and Ginzburg, rejected An-sky’s faith in the redemptive power of folklore as impractical at best and completely unrealistic at worst, given the great distance of Jewish youth from their folk traditions. Meanwhile, Vermel asserted that “the task of demography was no less important for the salvation of the people as folklore,” while Shternberg added that “the task of anthropology was no less of a national matter: of extraordinary importance for Jewish history is clarifying the question of the Jewish race.” Despite the deep reservations expressed by his colleagues, An-sky was determined that Jewish folklore would remain the primary object of the ethnographic expedition and, indeed, as we have already seen, the collection and recording of literally hundreds of tales, songs, jokes, and other folk traditions occupied most of the team’s attention in the field. By contrast, gathering extensive economic data and demographic statistics and conducting anthropometry (measuring skulls, etc.) were not pursued, although An-sky appears to have considered undertaking anthropometric research as late as June 10, 1912, when Weissenberg convinced him via a letter that it was “unnecessary.”16 Nevertheless, An-sky’s young nephew, Solomon Iudovin, did incorporate stylistic elements from standard ethnographic photography in the “Jewish types” that he recorded in some of his photos from the expedition.17 Although An-sky succeeded in making Jewish folklore the central focus of the expedition in the field, it would not become the sole subject of The Jewish Ethnographic Program. Instead, along with folkloric traditions, many of the document’s 2,087 questions would explore another category of ethnographic knowledge, one identified by Lev Shternberg in his opening remarks on the second day of the conference in Saint Petersburg, as follows: “The task of the expedition may be expressed in just a few words,” Shternberg told his fellow attendees, “record Jewish

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life [evreiskuyu zhizn] ‘im Wort und Bild’, [word and picture] giving a full portrait of Jewish daily life [evreiskago byta].” In combining these German and Russian phrases, Shternberg was gesturing to the German tradition of ethnology, that is, Volkskunde, on the one hand (and perhaps even more specifically to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s popular 1891 work Jüdisches Leben in Wort und Bild), and, on the other hand, to the Russian ethnographic focus on the common people’s daily or material life, a category expressed by the Russian term byt.18 Scholars have noted the great difficulty of translating byt into other languages and cultures, one even going so far as to state “that other nations do not have byt.”19 Nathaniel Knight, in his study of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, has argued that byt represented a unique element in the emergence of a distinctive Russian ethnographic tradition: “The concept of byt—the totality of material and cultural elements comprising a particular way of life—was unique to Russian ethnography. Unlike the notions of civilization, enlightenment, or culture that dominated the thinking of imperialist ethnographers both in Russia and the West, byt was nonhierarchical and noncomparative.”20 Within this context, Shternberg’s use of byt to refer to Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement—alongside the more neutral phrase evreiskaia zhizn that he also employed—reflected both his Populist orientation and his willingness to apply the concepts and methods of Russian ethnography to the ethnographic study of the Pale’s Jews. In the process, Shternberg drew a terminological parallel between Jewish folk culture and krestianskii byt, or “the everyday life of the Russian peasant,” a category frequently placed in opposition to the mundane experience of Russian Jews, which anti-Semitic critics typically reduced to a caricature of its economic aspects. Continuing his remarks at the conference, Shternberg explained that the expedition should seek out information on the “material life [materialnogo byta] and spiritual culture [dukhovnoi kulturi] of the Jews,” an echo of the traditional Russian distinction between byt and bytie, that is, material and spiritual life, respectively. Employing the phrase “material culture” [materialnaya kultura] as a synonym for byt, Shternberg then described its contents, including dwellings, clothes, synagogues, and cemeteries; “Jewish professions,” such as scribes (soferim), tallis makers, matzo bakers, kheyder teachers (melamdim), and teachers’ assistants (behelfers); and ritual settings, such as weddings, funerals, circumcisions, and the bringing of a child to the kheyder for the first time. Shternberg differentiated these phenomena from “religious culture” proper, which he

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described as “fixed in spiritual literature” but not limited to its pages. Thus, for example, he noted that established rituals such as divorce and “chalitsa” (the ceremony, outlined in Deuteronomy 25, by which a widow and her brother-in-law may avoid levirate marriage) were currently undergoing modifications. “It would be very important,” Shternberg observed, “to take note of any deviations in this area.” The taxonomic categories employed by Shternberg in these remarks reflected those applied by contemporary Russian ethnographers— including Shternberg himself—to the various peoples of the empire. Indeed, during the same period in which he was involved in the planning and execution of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, Shternberg also participated in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society’s Commission for Establishing Ethnographic Maps of Russia (established in 1910), which, as Francine Hirsch has noted, sought to “produce maps of different aspects of byt (economic practices, clothing types, dwelling types, folk art, music, and religion)” for a host of nationalities within the Russian Empire.21 Like Shternberg, An-sky translated the concept of byt into the context of Jewish ethnography, for instance, in the title of the five-volume Russian language work that he hoped to produce from his ethnographic findings, that is, Evrei v ikh bytovoi i religioznoi zhizni (Jews in their Daily and Religious Life). An-sky’s division of this projected but never completed work into daily and religious spheres paralleled Shternberg’s own bipartite model, although such a theoretical division became highly problematic when actually applied to traditional Jewish life within the Pale, life in which the mundane and religious were often inseparable. Nevertheless, the use of the term byt by two veteran Jewish Populists turned ethnographers reflected an important ideological shift, namely, the realization that Russia’s Jews possessed their own legitimate material culture, one that was worthy of ethnographic study. On its second day, in order to reach communities that the members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition could not visit in person, the gathering in Saint Petersburg appointed a special commission consisting of An-sky, Shternberg, Iokhelson, Kulisher, and Dubnov to “produce a Program,” that is, an ethnographic questionnaire, for distribution throughout the Pale of Settlement and beyond.22 Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian ethnographers had made extensive use of highly detailed questionnaires in their research. Although they did not pioneer the use of such questionnaires—French ethnographers had employed them

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as early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, for example— Russians took to them with great gusto.23 Indeed, soon after the Imperial Russian Geographical Society was established in 1845, members of its Ethnographic Division set about creating an extensive ethnographic questionnaire focusing on the lives of ethnic Russians. Preceding An-sky by more than half a century, Nikolai Nadezhdin, the questionnaire’s chief architect, envisioned Russian ethnography “as an expression of national identity,” or narodnost.24 Nadezhdin’s questionnaire was divided into six categories, including physical appearance (hair, skin and eye color, height, etc.); language (local expressions and words, etc.); the domestic sphere (dwellings, utensils, food, folk medicine, etc.); the social or public sphere (assemblies, crime and punishment, etc.); mental and moral development (literacy, the relations between different ethnic groups, etc.); and folklore.25 In 1848 seven thousand copies of this program—as such ethnographic questionnaires came to be known in Russian—were printed and distributed “in the localities themselves by individuals who are well acquainted with the lifeways, language, character, and habits of those classes of the population in which national features are best preserved.”26 Ultimately, local correspondents—mainly parish priests but also teachers, government officials, and landowners, as well as small numbers of seminarians, merchants, peasants, doctors, and others—returned more than two thousand responses to the Ethnographic Division of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.27 The use of questionnaires by Russian ethnographers to study ethnic Russians and other peoples of the empire continued unabated in the decades leading up to the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. In 1914, the same year An-sky finally succeeded in printing The Jewish Ethnographic Program, Zhivaia Starina (Living Heritage), the organ of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and a model for Dubnov’s journal Evreiskaia Starina, published a collection of ethnographic questionnaires developed by the society’s Commission on Maps for use with ethnic Russians: “Little Russians” (i.e., Ukrainians), Belorussians, and Bashkirs (a Turkic people).28 These questionnaires were relatively brief and limited in scope. However, there did exist a contemporary Russian precedent for An-sky’s far more ambitious ethnographic questionnaire: Count Viacheslav Nikolaevich Tenishev’s Program of Ethnographic Information about the Peasants of Central Russia.29 In 1896 Tenishev established an independent Ethnographic Bureau to study the lives of Russian peasants in their traditional village context.

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Tenishev was not only an accomplished ethnographer but also a prominent philanthropist who funded an eponymous college in Saint Petersburg in addition to financing his own ethnographic research, thereby combining in a single individual the separate roles that An-sky and Baron Gintsburg would later play in the creation of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. In 1897, 1898, and 1900 Tenishev designed and distributed modified versions of the Program of Ethnographic Information about the Peasants of Central Russia.30 Although the first version of the program officially listed 491 questions, the actual total was closer to 2,500, since almost all of the numbered questions had multiple parts or separate sub-questions.31 In a variety of ways, Tenishev’s Program of Ethnographic Information about the Peasants of Central Russia anticipated An-sky’s Jewish Ethnographic Program. Both documents contained around two thousand questions; both were produced by an independent ethnographic organization rather than a government-sponsored agency; both were intended for use by local correspondents who would mail their written responses to a central ethnographic bureau in Saint Petersburg; both included precise instructions for how to record the information (i.e., write clearly, note the exact location of where the information was being recorded, the name of the respondent, etc.); both were created for use with a single ethnic group, Russian peasants and Jews, respectively; both sought to gather information from many localities across a vast region; and, finally, both were intended to serve as the basis for a definitive compendium, in Tenishev’s case, a monumental ethnographic work entitled Byt velikorusskikh krest’ian-zemlepashtsev, which he was unable to publish before his death in 1903. At the same time, however, the content of the questions themselves was often profoundly different due to the cultural and religious differences between Russian peasants and Jewish residents of the Pale. Indeed, as I will argue in detail later, the content of The Jewish Ethnographic Program more closely resembles the subject matter in a traditional Sefer Minhagim (Book of Customs) than it does any of the Russian ethnographic questionnaires, with the notable exception of questions devoted to pregnancy and childbirth, an area in which men were almost entirely absent and, not coincidentally, cross-cultural parallels between Jewish women and their non-Jewish neighbors were common (another such area was healing and exorcism, where Jews and non-Jews frequently interacted with one another).

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The parallel methods employed by Tenishev and An-sky also shared commonalities with—as well as significant differences from—the ethnographic approach of Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaiai and her collaborator K. V. Nikolaevskii, who spent four years (1898–1902) observing peasant life firsthand in a cluster of villages near her family estate in Riazan province, concentrating especially on the selo, or village, of Muraevnia. Like many of their contemporaries, Semyonova and Nikolaevskii designed and distributed a detailed ethnographic questionnaire to gather information about byt; however, their lengthy fieldwork in a single location not only distinguished them from their Russian peers but from finde-siècle ethnographers in general.32 Rather than an encyclopedic compendium of ethnographic material from a variety of places, Semyonova planned on transforming her copious field notes into a synthetic literary portrait of a representative Russian peasant named—naturally enough— “Ivan.” Although Semyonova died in 1906 before she could see this project to fruition, her friend, Vavara Shneider, published an edited version of the volume under the auspices of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Entitled The Life of “Ivan”: Sketches of Peasant Life from One of the Black Earth Provinces, the volume appeared in 1914, the same year as The Jewish Ethnographic Program.33 These comparisons reveal the degree to which An-sky’s work was embedded within a broader Russian ethnographic tradition dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century, one that made extensive use of detailed questionnaires and documented the everyday life, or byt, of the common people via local correspondents, long-term fieldwork, and/or ethnographic expeditions. Against this backdrop, An-sky’s own ethnographic approach looks heavily indebted to Russian predecessors and contemporaries alike, even as he assiduously sought to carve out a distinctive identity for Jewish ethnography by defining its subject as Oral Torah and its approach to collecting and transforming Jewish folk traditions as only the latest in a series of Jewish ethnographic moments stretching from the Talmud to the Hasidic movement. Like a man possessed, in the days following the eventful March gathering in Saint Petersburg, An-sky immersed himself completely in the task of compiling an ethnographic program that would document the traditional Jewish culture of the Pale of Settlement before it disappeared forever. Only a few weeks later, on April 13, 1912, An-sky enthusiastically informed his financial patron Baron Gintsburg that he had already made progress on assembling a massive questionnaire:

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At the present moment, all of my efforts are concentrated on compiling a “Program for Collecting Material on Jewish Ethnography.” It is turning out to be an absolutely major undertaking. In order to give you some idea of its scope, the entry “synagogue,” alone, takes up more than 100 questions. The entry “yeshivot,” just as many. I began with “engendering the fetus,” and I’m following the life of a person until death. Death, the afterlife, demonology, holidays, daily life [byt], abstract concepts. In short—a total of 10,000 questions, encompassing all aspects of the daily life and beliefs of the [Jewish] people. Since, despite my own intensive efforts I alone cannot complete this task by June, when we will set out on the expedition, I would like to employ for this purpose a group of young people, experts in the Jewish way of life.”34

There is something fantastical about an ethnographic questionnaire consisting of ten thousand questions, as if it were possible to ask everything under the sun and, then, perhaps even more improbably, to get answers to all of your questions. In its all-encompassing scope, the questionnaire envisioned by An-sky embodies the anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin’s observation that “In ethnography, as in memory, the desire is for a total account.”35 Indeed, it is precisely this fantastical quality that makes An-sky’s ethnographic endeavor a spiritual descendant of earlier efforts to write down Oral Torah lest it be forgotten. Like these attempts to fix the memorized traditions of generations of Jewish sages in writing, the ethnographic “total account” envisioned by An-sky would be a collective endeavor, initially involving a “group of young people, experts in the Jewish way of life,” who would compose an ethnographic questionnaire and, then, a network of local Jewish correspondents from throughout the Pale of Settlement, who would provide answers. The result, An-sky hoped, would fulfill the rabbinic sage Ben Bag Bag’s famous dictum in Pirke Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”): “Turn it [Torah] and turn it again, for everything is in it.” Never one to think small, An-sky apparently planned on completing all ten thousand questions within a few months, in time for the launch of the expedition in the summer of 1912. Yet the actual composition of what would eventually become The Jewish Ethnographic Program ended up taking closer to two years. During this period, An-sky relied heavily on the help of students from the Jewish Academy in Saint Petersburg or, as it was officially known, “The Higher Courses in Eastern Studies,” (Vysshie kursy vostokovedeniia).36 Founded by the amateur Orientalist Baron David Gintsburg, brother of An-sky’s patron, Vladimir, the Jewish

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Academy opened its doors to students in January 1908, seeking to train scholars and rabbis on the model of modern rabbinic seminaries located in New York, Cincinnati, Breslau, and Padua.37 The institute’s impressive official curriculum, published in the quarterly Ha-Kedem, included Syriac, Hebrew Bible (with medieval commentaries), Talmud, Midrash, Jewish history, medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, Arabic, and modern European languages—though the actual courses offered did not match this list.38 In addition to David Gintsburg himself, a number of prominent scholars served on the faculty, including Lev Katznelson, editor of the Evreiskaya entsiklopedia (Jewish Encyclopedia), and Simon Dubnov, who, despite his own participation, criticized the general quality of the instruction as “amateurish” and the “student body . . . [as] made up mainly of provincials, self-taught or experts, former members of yeshivahs, well versed in specialist Jewish subjects, but without sufficient background of general education.”39 While the parochial background of the academy’s students irked Dubnov, it suited An-sky perfectly, since, for the purposes of the ethnographic questionnaire, he was in need of collaborators with a more intimate knowledge of traditional Jewish culture than he, long removed from the shtetl culture of his youth, now possessed. Ultimately, ten students from the academy helped An-sky compile what would become The Jewish Ethnographic Program, including Sh. Vaynshtayn, A. Yuditsky, Sh. Lakshin, Y. Luria, Y. Neusikhin, Y. Kimelman, Y. Ravrebbe, Y. Fikangur, A. Rekhtman, and Sh. Shrayer.40 Of these, at least five had grown up in Hasidic households in the traditional strongholds of Volhynia and Podolia (Avrom Rekhtman, Avrom Yuditsky, Yizhak Fikangur, Shmuel Shrayer, and Yekhiel Ravrebbe); several had already received rabbinic ordination before arriving in Saint Petersburg (Ravrebbe and Shrayer); and three accompanied An-sky on the expedition (Rekhtman, Shrayer, and Fikangur).41 In addition to working on The Jewish Ethnographic Program, An-sky also commissioned Yuditsky to produce a separate questionnaire on Hasidism, as we have already seen, and An ortige historishe program (“A Local Historical Program”), the only ethnographic questionnaire that An-sky both published and distributed. Consisting of 166 questions, without any real order, “A Local Historical Program” covers a wide range of historical, sociological, and economic topics, including many that Shternberg had defined as composing Jewish materialnaya kultura (material culture) during the March planning session in Saint Petersburg. Thus

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there are questions devoted to “old Jewish dress”; ritual objects such as amulets, pinkasim (minute books), and prayer books; Jewish spaces and institutions, including the cemetery, synagogue, yeshiva, printing house, Kahal building, almshouse, rabbinical court, and mikve; “special Jewish industries,” such as talisnikes (tallis makers) and traditional occupations performed by men and women, respectively, for example, chazzan (cantor), klezmer (musician), badkhn (wedding jester), as well as forshprekherins (women exorcists or healers), tukerins (mikve workers), and klogerins (women mourners). Other questions explore significant historical events, including the messianic movements surrounding Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, the Khmelnytskyi massacres of 1648, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and more contemporary phenomena such as blood libels and pogroms, the administration of local Jewish institutions, and the recent appearance of political parties, protests, and labor strikes. Relations between different groups, including Hasidim and Misnagdim, rabbis and Christian clergy, and Cossacks and gentry, as well as communal attitudes toward Jewish converts to Christianity and informers, occupy other questions. Reflecting both traditional Jewish attitudes and the intense apocalyptic spirit that gripped various sectors of Russian society at the turn of the twentieth century, the program asks whether messianic “signs and allusions indicating the geulah [redemption]” were ever linked to Khmelnytskyi’s massacres, the Napoleonic Wars, the Polish uprisings, the era of the cantonists, the 1905 Revolution, or the Zionist movement. The program ends by gesturing to another, more secular vision of the future, asking, “Is emigration to America strong in your community? The reasons? How many have left? To where?” Copies of “A Local Historical Program” were distributed to Jewish communities throughout the Pale and beyond, including to individuals who responded to Yiddish newspaper advertisements placed by the ethnographic bureau seeking to enlist local residents in the work of the expedition.42 Overseeing the compilation of The Jewish Ethnographic Program itself was Levi Yitzhak Vaynshteyn, the frequently beleaguered secretary of the Ethnographic Expedition Bureau of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, whose increasingly plaintive missives to An-sky suggest that assembling a questionnaire from multiple contributors was a bit like herding cats. Initially, Vaynshteyn tried to reassure An-sky that he was up for the challenge, despite An-sky’s reservations, writing on August 6, 1913,

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“Dear Friend! You write that you have given me considerable work and scare me that there will be still more. But no! You cannot scare me with any work! I am happy to work.” By November 7, 1913, however, disillusionment had set in and Vaynshteyn was clearly feeling overwhelmed by the logistical difficulties involved in creating a “total account” of Jewish life in the Pale: “We have been working on the program to the best of our capacity. Frankly speaking, the job has been neither fast nor easy. I should confess that, had I familiarized myself with the entire material on the day of your departure from Petersburg, I would hardly have undertaken the job.”43 As work proceeded, An-sky decided that creating and employing a single document with ten thousand questions was impractical, so therefore he divided The Jewish Ethnographic Program into two volumes, one that focused on the Jewish life cycle and the second devoted exclusively to examining the Jewish holidays.44 In his memoir of the expedition, Avrom Rekhtman writes, “After the suspension of the expedition, in 1914, An-sky mostly devoted himself to classifying and putting together ‘The Jewish Ethnographic Program,’ ” adding that he personally saw several page proofs of this second volume, entitled Shabbes un Yontif, or “The Sabbath and Holidays,” before the outbreak of World War I prevented its publication.45 In addition to ensuring that the students of the academy completed their sections in a timely fashion, Vaynshteyn had to mediate between An-sky and Lev Shternberg, whose official imprimatur as editor An-sky was determined to secure for the questionnaire, despite the latter’s growing ambivalence. Like An-sky, Shternberg was a son of the Pale, in his case, the Volhynian town of Zhitomir. Growing up in a more bourgeois environment than An-sky, with a father who took an active interest in furthering his son’s education, Shternberg attended kheyder as well as the town’s rabbinical seminary before its closure led him to enroll in a Russian gymnasium, where he received a well-rounded education in Russian and broader European literature and thought.46 In the early 1880s Shternberg joined the Populist cause and, as a result of his revolutionary activities, was exiled to the notorious penal colony on Sakhalin Island, where the authorities nevertheless recruited him to conduct several groundbreaking expeditions to study local Gilyak and Ainu communities.47 By the time An-sky invited him to help with the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, Shternberg had returned to the mainland and established himself as

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one of the empire’s foremost ethnographic authorities while still maintaining his devotion to revolutionary causes and, like An-sky, also embracing an identity as a “Jewish activist.”48 Despite their shared commitments, An-sky and Shternberg possessed radically different sensibilities when it came to ethnography, with Shternberg favoring a more professionalized and quantitative approach that incorporated contemporary developments in physical anthropology, demography, and archaeology alongside the study of folklore and byt.49 It is not surprising, therefore, that Shternberg evinced skepticism regarding An-sky’s methodological approach—or what seemed to him, lack thereof—when it came to the compilation of the questionnaire. Unfortunately for An-sky, Shternberg also appears to have suffered what his biographer, Sergei Kan, has described as a “set of professional and political troubles, and he and his wife also suffered a major personal loss” in the spring of 1913, that is, precisely the period during which An-sky wanted him to edit the questionnaire.50 These problems made it difficult for Shternberg to complete any of his outstanding commitments, including a comprehensive ethnography of the Gilyak that Franz Boas, the preeminent cultural anthropologist of the day, had commissioned from him, leading Boaz to complain in a letter dated October 2, 1913, “ ‘Last time you wrote to me you said you were going to send me your manuscript very soon. I am exceedingly anxious to get your material. . . . Can you not please finish your part of the work, so that we can at least go ahead with that part that has been translated?’ ”51 Although An-sky’s letters to Vaynshteyn from this period are no longer extant, the latter’s responses make it clear that completing the ethnographic program was on the top of An-sky’s mind in the second half of 1913, and that Shternberg had become a less than enthusiastic participant in the project. Writing from Saint Petersburg on June 12, 1913, Vaynshteyn informed his frustrated boss—or, as he referred to him, “Herr Rapaport!”—“I have received your letter from Mohilev and I will answer you from first to last. 1) Concerning the Program. It is my great desire to fulfill your request. Unfortunately, however, I am unable to accomplish this at present. There are a number of reasons for this: The first and foremost reason is that Mr. Shternberg is unable right now to devote time to editing the sections.”52 In the continuation of his letter, Vaynshteyn relayed Shternberg’s profound doubts about the “expediency” of printing the program without a “definite order or systemization of the material,” and even the “danger” of distributing it with-

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out an introduction providing an explanation for how to use it in the field. A few months later, on August 6, 1913, Vaynshteyn complained to An-sky, “I wrote to Shternberg a long time ago but I have yet to receive an answer.”53 Concerned that his first letter to Shternberg may not have arrived, Vaynshteyn added, “I will try to write him a second letter, though in the meantime there is enough work on the Program for me alone. I’m now working on the calendar, namely: the holidays and half-holidays,” that is, material that would go into the projected second volume of the program. Less than a month later, on August 29, 1913, Vaynshteyn informed An-sky that Shternberg had responded to his second letter, and that they were finally collaborating to complete the questionnaire, though it remains unclear to what degree Shternberg actually contributed to its final form.54 In the end, Shternberg would be listed as the editor and An-sky as the compiler of The Jewish Ethnographic Program. Ironically, An-sky, who passionately championed the idea that the Oral Torah of the Jewish folk was as important as the Written Torah of the Jewish elite, would nevertheless attempt to transform the words and deeds of the Jewish masses of the Pale of Settlement into an ethnographic “Book of Man.” It is to this book that we now turn.

4 THE BOOK OF MAN

There is the Book of God, through which God questions himself. And there is the book of man. It is on the scale of God’s. —Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

The first volume of The Jewish Ethnographic Program, entitled Der Mentsch (“The Person”), was published in Saint Petersburg in 1914 but never distributed due to the outbreak of World War I. While not quite “on the scale of God’s,” The Jewish Ethnographic Program (hereafter, The Program) is nevertheless a monumental work, consisting of 2,087 questions, many of them rich in ethnographic detail rather than open-ended in their formulation. However, even those questions that are open-ended gesture evocatively to a way of life that is no more. This book of man—and woman, as a substantial number of questions concern girls and women—is not a “total account,” but it is one of the most detailed and revealing portraits of Jewish personhood in Eastern Europe that we possess from the early twentieth century, a watershed period when Jewish identity and culture were in great flux. Based on the Jewish life cycle, The Program is divided into five main sections—the Child, from the Kheyder to the Wedding, the Wedding, Family Life, and Death—and fifty-five subsections, with topics ranging from pregnancy to the Resurrection of the Dead.1 Reading its questions, one is immediately struck by the fact that its portrait of Jewish life in the towns and villages of the Pale does not begin with physical birth nor does it end with the death of the body. Rather, The Program depicts the traditional Jewish life cycle as a continuum, marked by the peregrinations of the soul, known in Yiddish as the neshome, which exists long 72

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before the physical body is conceived and survives long after it is buried. Indeed, even the Jewish body itself, carefully prepared for burial and ritually interred, does not disappear forever once it is consumed by the worms of the cemetery—to which two questions in The Program are devoted—since the ancient Jewish belief in physical resurrection meant that the body, as well as the soul, would ultimately transcend death. Thus the first question of The Program asks, “What beliefs are there about a person’s soul before it enters the body?” while the last asks, “What kind of life will there be after the Resurrection of the Dead?” Nor, according to The Program, was there a fine line between life and death in the Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement. Rather, as numerous questions make vividly clear, the dead persistently made themselves present in the world of the living, and, just as significantly, the living continually sought to establish connections with the dead, resulting in what Phillipe Ariès has evocatively described—in a Latin Christian context—as the “promiscuity of living and dead.”2 From the vantage point of twenty-first-century America, where death has largely been relegated to the hospital instead of the home, cemeteries are no longer a significant space for most communities or individuals, and the dead survive as a memory, if at all, the world depicted in The Jewish Ethnographic Program might as well be Mars in terms of the multiple and meaningful ways that death and the dead are portrayed as inflecting daily life. Are dead relatives invited to a wedding? Do people go to the cemetery to beseech the dead on behalf of a woman who is having trouble giving birth? Is it considered a sgule (means for bringing good fortune) to hold a wedding in a cemetery? Do the dead leave their graves at night? Do they gather to pray in the shul (synagogue)? Do the dead hear everything that is said to them at their grave sites? Do they appear to the living in dreams and express their desires? Do the dead enter a house where people are saying shiva over them? Is the dead person’s soul present in the candle that burns during shiva? Is there a minhag (custom) to whisper in the dead person’s ear: So-and-so, you are dead? All of these questions—and there are many more—reveal the degree to which death was an important part of life, not its termination, and the dead themselves continued to be significant members of the Jewish community, beings to interact with as much as to remember and honor. Like an unwelcome guest, death also insinuated itself into Jewish homes during pregnancy and childbirth. Although infant mortality rates

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were apparently lower for Jews in the Pale of Settlement than for their non-Jewish neighbors, they were still shockingly high by contemporary American standards.3 For this reason, Jews, like their neighbors, developed a wide range of beliefs and practices surrounding the pregnant mother— who also faced great danger—and the unborn fetus or newborn infant. Questions such as “Is it considered better for the pregnant woman that no one knows about her condition?” and “What protective amulets, incantations, and sgules [special measures] are there to protect a woman from the evil eye?” attest to the prophylactic efforts that residents of the shtetl took to save mother and child alike from the physical and demonic forces that threatened them. Yet pregnancy was not only a period of great danger, it was also a time of opportunity, when the physical appearance, character, and gender of the unborn child could be influenced in utero. Thus we find questions such as “What kinds of sgules exist to influence whether the child in the mother’s belly will be a boy or a girl?” and “Is the belief widespread that the appearance of children depends on what the mother sees during the time that she is leaving the mikve [ritual bath] and during her pregnancy? Therefore, a pregnant woman is forbidden to look at impure animals and fowl and on crippled, ugly, sinful, and evil people, as well as on ugly pictures?”4 The home, rather than the hospital, was the site for childbirth, since the latter—if it existed at all in a particular community—was frequently seen as a destination of last resort, where only the seriously ill went to die (or somehow recover) and was, therefore, not a place to welcome a new life into the world. Giving birth at home, Jewish women in shtetls relied on the expertise of midwives, who merited their own section of The Program due to the critically important role they played at the beginning of the Jewish life cycle, as a number of questions attest, including “Is it customary to give honor to the midwife wherever she goes?” and “Is there a minhag that when a midwife dies, all of the children whom she brought into the world accompany her funeral procession with candles in their hands?” I begin my discussion of The Jewish Ethnographic Program with the subtle interplay between life and death because I believe that for An-sky this serves as the underlying principle of the entire Jewish life cycle, a principle that he articulated in the original title of The Dybbuk, or “Between Two Worlds,” which explores the ways in which the dead and the living share the same spaces, and even the same bodies. As the questions

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of The Program suggest, the Jewish self was not delimited by death but was constituted by an intimate and ongoing relationship to it. Seen through this lens, death, for the Jewish inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement, was as much a beginning as it was an end.

Ethnography as Alchemy Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founder of the Musar, or “ethics,” movement in the nineteenth century, once declared: “The Maharal of Prague created a golem and this was a great wonder. But how much more miraculous it is to transform a man of flesh and blood into a mentsh.” While Salanter employed the Yiddish term mentsh in its ethical sense, An-sky employed it in the subtitle of The Program as an anthropological category, though for him, as for Salanter, the Jewish person, or mentsh, was ideally, if not always in practice, an ethical being. For Salanter, to become a mentsh was to engage in a process of supralegal, ethical self-examination (i.e., Musar), so exacting that it was truly miraculous if one succeeded. For An-sky, the question was different, though in his mind, at least, the outcome was no less miraculous: How, in an anthropological sense, was a Jewish person, or mentsh, created? According to The Jewish Ethnographic Program, there was nothing natural about this process. It was, on the contrary, the idealization of culture over nature, even its triumph, which characterized the Jewish life cycle in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement. For this reason, The Program does not contain questions about the natural environment or people’s relationship to it, a striking contrast to the contemporary ethnographic questionnaires designed for Russian peasants. This is not to say that Jews in the Pale lacked connections to the land or to the flora and fauna in their immediate environment. But, in contrast to the Russian peasant, these connections were not viewed—by An-sky, at least—as constitutive of the Jewish person. When does the long process of creating a mentsh begin? Immediately after birth, The Program suggests, when it asks: “Is there is a minhag that when the child is born one should whisper the “Shema Yisroel” in his ear?”5 From this moment on, little was left to chance. The infant was transformed into a Jewish person via a complex of daily rituals, major rites of passage, and formal education, all of which The Jewish Ethnographic Program documents in great detail. Much space is devoted to the institution of the kheyder, or elementary school, which by the turn of the century had become a touchstone for criticism because of a well-earned

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reputation for poor pedagogy, horribly overcrowded conditions, and frequently violent instructors. In response, Jewish reformers established what became known as the kheyder metukan (reformed or improved kheyder), which emphasized the teaching of modern Hebrew as well as other subjects excluded from the traditional curriculum.6 An-sky did not shy away from the endemic problems of the kheyder. On the contrary, an entire section of The Program, consisting of more than twenty questions, focuses on the harsh, even sadistic, discipline sometimes meted out by teachers. Despite the shocking brutality of these punishments—“Are there still teachers who soak the rods in salt water?” and “Does the teacher ever command the children to taunt the whipped child?” are only two examples—and despite his own previously strident criticism of the institution, by the time he published The Jewish Ethnographic Program, An-sky had become a passionate advocate for the kheyder, which he now viewed as an effective means for inculcating Jewish values and behaviors, in short, for helping to turn a Jewish child into a mentsh. Consequently, The Program devotes several hundred questions to the curriculum, teachers, physical layout, games played by children, and many other aspects of the kheyder. Today, students in Hasidic and other Haredi communities are strictly segregated according to sex.7 Yet a century ago, as The Program attests, some of their ancestors in the shtetls of Eastern Europe attended kheyders where girls and boys learned together. Nor were such kheyders the only way that Jewish girls could receive an education. The Program also includes a number of questions concerning the largely unacknowledged role that female teachers—referred to as rebetsins—played in educating Jewish girls in the Pale. The education of Jewish girls was shaped by a number of factors that differed from those impacting boys. First, because Jewish tradition held that girls were not commanded to learn Torah, they were free to study other subjects, including those considered bittul torah, or a waste of time, for boys; second, because the “cult of domesticity” did not exist among the Jews of Eastern Europe and Jewish women were expected to help support their families by working—indeed, they were sometimes the sole economic support, especially when their husbands were scholars—practical skills such as the ability to speak, read, and write non-Jewish languages frequently formed an important part of a girl’s education. Thus we find questions such as “Do people frequently hire a special teacher for girls to teach them Russian, other

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languages, or music?” and “How many girls are there who learn in gymnasium?” While Jewish girls frequently had more latitude than boys when it came to what they studied, their behavior was nevertheless highly regulated and their interaction with members of the opposite sex surveilled in order to ensure that it conformed to traditional Jewish norms concerning female modesty, or tsniyes. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of The Jewish Ethnographic Program is its attention to the particular ways in which Jewish girls were acculturated and prepared for their roles as adult Jewish women, although it should still be noted that the number of these questions is still substantially lower than those dedicated to Jewish boys. On the one hand, The Program starkly demonstrates that the life cycle of Jewish girls in the shtetl was not marked by the major rites of passage—bris (circumcision), opshernesh (first haircut), ritualized introduction to the alef beys (Hebrew alphabet), and bar mitzvah—that characterized the experience of Jewish boys. On the other hand, The Program seeks to document how Jewish girls in the communities of the Pale experienced mundane aspects of daily life, as well as important developmental milestones of their own—for example, beginning to light Sabbath candles and observing the laws of menstruation. Accordingly, in a section entitled, “The Upbringing and Education of a Girl,” we find the following questions (among others): What lullabies and stories do people sing and tell especially to a girl? What special girls’ jokes and games do people teach her? What Jewish clothes do people dress her in and at what age? When does a girl begin to light candles? When does she begin to fast? Do people take girls to shul [synagogue]? Significantly, this section of The Program concludes with several questions concerning the qualities people look for in a bride and, alternatively, those that cause people to gossip about her—and, thereby, lower her value—followed by a longer series of questions about alte moyden, or “old maids.” For example: At what age do people begin to consider a girl an old maid? What stories do you know about old maids from the past? Is an old maid considered a blemish on the family? Do the community or private individuals invariably make an effort to arrange a marriage for an old maid, even if she is a cripple? The implication of these questions is clear: Jewish girls were expected to move directly from adolescence to marriage. If they did not, they were not only considered anomalous as

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individuals but their unmarried status could negatively impact their family and provoke community intervention. While Jewish boys were also expected to marry—indeed, unlike Jewish girls, they were actually commanded to have children according to the Halakhah—they faced two possible institutional detours on their way to marriage, one created by the Jewish community itself—the yeshiva— and one imposed by the Russian state—the draft. Beginning in 1827 with a decree from Tsar Nicholas I, Jews in the Russian Empire were subject to military conscription. Jewish communities were expected to deliver a quota of recruits who, like their non-Jewish counterparts, would serve twenty-five years in the military—if they survived. Rabbis, members of merchant guilds, agricultural colonists, and several other categories of individuals were exempt from conscription. In addition, the local Jewish authorities (i.e., the Kahal) entrusted with delivering recruits were concerned about maintaining the hegemony of the socioeconomic elite within their communities, and therefore they targeted its most vulnerable members for conscription, namely, vagrants, orphans, and, above all, poor children. Although the Russian government set a minimum age of twelve for conscription, Jewish communal authorities sometimes filled their quotas with children as young as eight—employing thugs called khappers (grabbers) to forcibly snatch recruits when necessary. Once conscripted, child recruits, or cantonists, as they were known, were sent to military schools, where they faced brutal conditions. At the age of eighteen, cantonists were transferred to the regular military and began to serve their twenty-five-year terms, during which they remained subject to official discrimination if they refused to convert. Once their service was completed, cantonists were free to settle outside of the Pale of Settlement or to return to their communities. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a series of reforms incrementally decreased the number of years that recruits were required to serve, and in 1856 a decree by Tsar Alexander II abolished the cantonist system entirely. Nevertheless, Jews, like other residents of the empire, still remained subject to military conscription, which was now compulsory for twenty-year-olds and typically lasted for a term of six years. Not only did military conscription personally affect tens of thousands of Jewish recruits and their families but the institution, especially during the period of the cantonists, had a powerful impact on the Russian Jewish imaginary, as evinced by the enduring trope of the young Jewish

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recruit in Jewish folklore and literature, and on traditional Jewish society, whose socioeconomic fault lines were now revealed in a starkly negative light. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Program devotes an entire section to the phenomenon, which it places between a question about old bokherim (unmarried men) and a series of questions concerning the Jewish wedding. Significantly, the first questions of the section focus on the impact that military conscription had on the marriage prospects of the recruit. Thus, according to the logic of The Program, one of the most important aspects of military conscription was that it interrupted—sometimes permanently—the normative life cycle of the Jewish boy and either delayed or prevented him from becoming a fullfledged, that is, married, member of the community. In dramatic contrast to conscription, which, from its inception, was designed by the Russian state to have a corrosive effect on traditional Jewish society—an effect, not incidentally, which was consistent with notions of state-sponsored reform—the institution of the yeshiva or rabbinic academy was created and maintained by the Jewish community in order to cultivate a scholarly elite that in both symbolic and practical ways would strengthen and even create “tradition.”8 While almost all Jewish boys and some girls in the Pale of Settlement attended kheyder, only a relatively small minority of young men—unlike in contemporary Haredi society—went on to learn in one of the yeshivas that dotted the Pale of Settlement. They were especially important institutions in the territory of contemporary Lithuania and Belarus, where the modern yeshiva movement first emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century with the establishment of the famous Volozhin yeshiva in 1803. As the institutional focal point for an ideological and social movement that helped shape the experience of modernity among the Jews of the Russian Empire—even as it explicitly rejected the very notion of the modern as antithetical to traditional Jewish values—the yeshiva merited a large number of questions in The Program. Yet the sheer scale of these questions (nearly two hundred), as well as their intimate detail, also reflects the shared scholarly background and recent personal experiences of the young members of the Jewish Academy who collaborated with An-sky. Moreover, as is typical of The Program, the questions concerning the yeshiva do not explore its ideological dimension, at least in an explicit way, but the more mundane ways that the yeshiva was integrated into the daily life of the community and the role that the institution played in the life cycle of the students who attended it. Thus, for

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example, we find a number of questions concerning the practice of “eating days,” in which local householders took turns hosting yeshiva students in their homes, a practice that served as one of the main avenues of interaction between students and community members and as a potential catalyst for arranged marriages with local girls. In a gesture to An-sky’s own particular interest in the development of an indigenous Jewish theatrical tradition that might have served as the background for the emergence of the modern Yiddish theater, The Program also contains some twenty questions concerning the performance of plays within the yeshiva, including the following: On holidays, do yeshiva bokherim ever put on different plays? In which language are they performed, Hebrew or Yiddish? Who takes part in these plays? Who is the author of such plays? Is the entire play produced under the direction of the Rosh yeshiva (i.e., the head of the yeshiva)? What kinds of costumes are used for such plays (for example, masks, paper hats, wooden swords, spears, and the like)? Do yeshiva bokherim willingly perform a woman’s role? Within the traditional Jewish society of the Pale, yeshiva students, especially those considered to be illuim, or prodigies, occupied a privileged position in the marketplace of arranged marriages, where a match between a Torah scholar and the daughter of a wealthy merchant was seen as the ideal union—at least before the cultural transformations of the end of the nineteenth century began to change marriage patterns. Along with birth and death, the wedding and the events leading up to it were the most heavily ritualized moments of the Jewish life cycle, beginning with the various criteria associated with identifying good or bad marriage prospects and the critical role of the matchmaker, or shadkhn. While personal qualities such as scholarly achievement and beauty impacted a potential match, The Program makes clear that marriages established bonds between families at least as much as individuals, as evinced by questions about yikhes (i.e., family background), matches arranged between very small children, and, even more strikingly, between those yet to be born. For this reason, breaking an engagement was frequently seen as more problematic than getting a divorce, since the former suggested a blemish on one or both families, while the latter implied a failure of the two individuals to get along. The wedding itself was often an elaborate, drawn-out occasion that served as the locus for a variety of cultural activities, including klezmer music, dancing (the “kosher dance,” the “circle dance,” etc.), and

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batkhones, the performance of the traditional wedding jester, known in Yiddish as badkhn or, in some communities, the marshelik. The questions devoted to these topics are largely practical in their orientation and illuminate the quotidian aspects of Jewish cultural production in the Pale: Do the klezmer musicians and badkhn from your shtetl make their living from weddings, or do they have other jobs? What kinds of instruments usually comprise a Jewish band? Do the klezmer musicians from the shtetl have exclusive right to the weddings in the shtetl, or do people sometimes bring in klezmer musicians from other shtetls? What witticisms, sayings, and jokes do you know from badkhonim? How did the kosher dance take place in the past and how now? Do people dance with a handkerchief? Weddings not only united the bride and groom and their respective families but also the entire Jewish community, which witnessed or actively participated in different stages of the event, beginning, in some places, with the ritualized entrance of the groom into the bride’s shtetl (reflecting the town exogamy and matrilocal marriage practices of many Jews in the Pale). While the khupe, or marriage canopy, was the site of the actual union, other rituals associated with the wedding were held in the shul, or synagogue, the bride’s home, or elsewhere within the shtetl. Among these rituals was a special feast held specifically for poor people, one of many ways in which the poor were integrated into the ceremonial and ritual life of the Jewish community via various forms of public charity, or tsedakah. It is telling that The Program depicts even the most intimate relations between bride and groom as subject to community surveillance and, potentially, intervention. Thus we find the following questions: Would people teach the children how to behave like man and wife after the wedding? Would people ever force them to? Was there a special female teacher, an old Jewess, who would remain with the children the first night in order to teach them? Is there a tradition that the parents should stand by the door? To whom do people show the sheet in the morning and how does this take place? Is there a custom to drink red liquor if the bride is honorable? Is there a custom to eat hard cheese if she is honorable? What does this signify? Do people ever take the sheet to show a rabbi if there is a doubt? Do you know of a former custom that people would dance with the sheet in the market? How do people react if the bride is not honorable? Do people shame her publicly and how does this take place? Perhaps you know stories from the past about punishments that people used to administer to such a bride?

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The involvement of the extended family in the couple’s affairs did not end with the wedding night. Most strikingly, the practice of kest, in which the bride’s parents financially subsidized the young couple, meant that some newlyweds were dependent on, and actually lived with, the bride’s relatives for several years. Although the ability of families to provide kest in the communities of the Pale of Settlement declined as a result of the general impoverishment of Russian Jewry in the final decades of imperial rule, when it did occur, the practice meant that the bride enjoyed the presence and support of her own family during a period of potential vulnerability, a sharp contrast to the situation of Russian peasant women, who typically moved in with their husbands’ families following marriage.9 The detailed instructions accompanying The Program inform potential respondents that they “must not be ashamed to record the most crude, even obscene, expressions and words. Ethnography knows no cynicism or crudity.” Taking this sentiment to heart, The Program explores the relations between the young married couple in great detail, asking questions ranging from the concrete to the abstract—including what husband and wife call one another, whether it is socially acceptable for them to go walking together in public, how Jews, in general, view love and beauty, and what constitutes a good married life. The Program also asks straightforward questions about what it refers to as the “bad life,” that is, a variety of marital problems, including adultery, fighting in public, abandonment, wife abuse, and divorce: Do husbands and wives fight and swear in public? Do husbands ever beat their wives? Is this common? Do a husband and wife ever go to the rabbi to have their disputes adjudicated? Does the wife ever come to shul to wail about the husband or the mother-in-law? Do the townspeople ever intervene to make peace between a husband and wife? Does the young wife ever flee to her parents? Do the parents ever return their daughter to her husband themselves? Do you know any stories in which people caught an adulteress? Do a husband and wife ever divorce and then take each other back several times? What sort of stories, songs, and sayings do you know about divorce, divorcés, or divorcées? Such questions provide a corrective to the sugarcoated stereotype of Jewish family life that frequently passes for reality in popular accounts and collective memory alike, a phenomenon that ChaeRan Freeze has called “the modern idealization of Jewish family life in pre-revolutionary Russia.”10 Instead, for much of the nineteenth century, divorce rates among Jews in the Pale of Settlement were extremely high relative to

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Christians (for whom it was legally much harder), only diminishing toward the turn of the twentieth century, when a variety of factors made divorce both less feasible and less appealing to many Russian Jews.11 The Program frames even the most serious marital strife as having the potential to move easily from the domestic to the public sphere, either through the efforts of the couple itself, or via community intervention. Significantly, however, The Program does not include questions concerning the growing phenomenon of Jewish men and especially Jewish women—who were at a distinct disadvantage under the Halakhah—to seek legal redress for marital problems by appealing to secular Russian authorities, including state-run courts.12 The chief goal of Jewish marriage was to produce children and, thereby, to fulfill what was traditionally seen as the first biblical commandment, that is, “be fruitful and multiply.” Accordingly, The Program asks many questions about children and their status within the Jewish family, such as what was considered a large number to have, what relations were like between children and their parents and grandparents, and the treatment of an only child, and how inheritances were distributed. The traditional cultural preference for male children is indicated by questions that refer to the common practice of calling a boy a kaddesh zoger, that is, someone who can recite the mourner’s prayer on behalf of the deceased parent. Not having boys was seen as a hardship in this world and the next; not having children at all was a tragedy that, as The Program makes clear, warranted the use of amulets, visits to Tatar healers (who were particularly popular among the Jews of the Pale), and, depending on how long the situation lasted, potentially divorce. The ideal culmination of the traditional Jewish life cycle in the Pale was an old age surrounded by children and grandchildren who demonstrated the filial piety commanded by the Torah. Unfortunately, The Program only asks questions concerning the status of old men and not women; nevertheless, its questions provide a rare glimpse into how the aging process was experienced and perceived in the Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement, raising issues such as when someone was considered old, how people showed respect for the elderly, whether old men were consulted to interpret dreams, how senility was identified and treated, and so on. Once again, The Program complicates one of the enduring stereotypes concerning the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe—in this case, that most, if not all, old people lived with their families—when it raises the subject of the old-age home. In fact, as Shaul Stampfer has shown, unlike their

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Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox counterparts in Eastern Europe, “older Jews usually did not live in the homes of their children” but instead continued to live alone or in the growing number of old-age homes that Jewish communities built and maintained for an elderly population that was increasing due to a marked decline in the adult mortality rate of Jews during the second half of the nineteenth century.13 Of course, arriving at old age meant avoiding or surviving a host of illnesses, many of them easily curable today but potentially fatal a century or more ago. Like much else in the Jewish communities of the Pale, illness was conceived of in collective terms, and not only because epidemics affected all segments of society. To some degree at least, the sick were seen as the collective responsibility of the entire community, which dealt with the problem as it did with so many others, namely, by creating a special organization, known as a bikur khoylim society, whose structure and responsibilities are explored in several questions. The Program also asks whether certain illnesses were considered typically Jewish, a notion that dated to the Middle Ages and gained new currency in the nineteenth century with the rise of modern racial science. By the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists had posited a wide range of “Jewish diseases,” including hemorrhoids, diabetes, foot disorders, and various types of mental illness, that were viewed as especially likely to affect the “unwashed” Jewish masses of Eastern Europe.14 Yet rather than focusing on the efforts of scientists, anthropologists, and racial theorists to define the characteristics of a pathological Jewish body, The Program asked Jews on the ground how they conceived of their own bodies. By the time the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition was launched in 1912, modern medicine had made inroads into the Pale of Settlement, as evinced by questions that ask about the presence of professionally trained doctors and modern hospitals. Yet many Jews continued to embrace premodern etiologies for illness that focused on the evil eye and demonic possession. Within this context, treatment frequently took the form of magical remedies or exorcisms performed by male and, especially, female Jewish healers, or opshprekherkes, who, according to the evidence gathered by the expedition, appear to have been more popular among the Jews of the Pale. Nor, when the situation demanded it, were Jews in the multiethnic communities of the Pale averse to seeking help from nonJewish healers, whether Christian or, in the case of Tatars, Muslim. When all these efforts failed, a mortally ill person began the transition to death. The Program refers to this, the final stage of the Jewish life

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cycle, as gesise, a technical term originating in Halakhic sources that extensively debate the legal status of the dying individual, or goyses. Like the period surrounding birth, the moments leading up to death were richly inflected with folk beliefs and rituals. For example: Is there a belief that if the person on the verge of death lies on pillows filled with chicken feathers that the death throes will be difficult and this accounts for why Jews don’t use chicken feathers in bedding? Are there biblical verses or tractates that people who are attending the departure of the soul are supposed to say? Is there a belief that before a goyses dies, his parents or other dead people appear before him and call him to them? Death itself marked the end of the Jewish life cycle insofar as the soul departed from the body—at least that is what was supposed to happen— which was then carefully prepared for burial by the shtetl’s most important communal organization, the hevra kadisha, or “holy society.” Yet in some profound sense, the role of the hevra kadisha was more akin to that of a midwife than an undertaker, since death also signified a kind of rebirth: the beginning of the Afterlife, a stage of human existence in which an important aspect of the dead individual not only survived but also continued to interact in a variety of meaningful ways with the living.

An Ethnographic Book of Customs It is important to emphasize that The Jewish Ethnographic Program is neither definitive—despite its more than two thousand questions—nor is it merely a snapshot of life and death in the Pale of Settlement. Rather, it constitutes an act of ethnographic portraiture, of literary representation in its own way as crafted and, at the same time, historically embedded as any other literary portrait of Eastern European Jewish communities from this period, whether penned by Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, or An-sky himself. While its form is dramatically different, its ethnographic content recalls in particular the quotidian detail of contemporary Eastern European Jewish memoirs such as those produced by Pauline Wengeroff (1833–1916) and Yekhezkel Kotik (1847–1921).15 Published a few years before The Jewish Ethnographic Program, these memoirs shared in a common Zeitgeist, and it is quite likely that Kotik’s memoir in particular had a direct influence on the composition of The Program via the figure of Avrom Yuditsky who played an important role in drawing up its questions. As David Assaf has noted, Yuditsky published a glowing review of Kotik’s memoir in the Vilna Hebrew newspaper

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Ha-Zeman in the summer of 1913, that is, precisely when The Program was being put together. In his review, Yuditsky observed, “ ‘This book is unique, of a genre not found at all in our Yiddish literature, whose lack is genuinely felt in our other literatures, the Hebrew and the Russian. This is the start of a memoir literature, which sheds light on the life of the previous generation and transports us to another world.’ ”16 While not everyone could write a memoir like Kotik’s, they could respond to an ethnographic questionnaire concerning what Yuditsky referred to in his review as the “naked pulse of life.”17 Indeed, the explicit goal of The Program was to document the “naked pulse” of traditional Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement as it was experienced and represented by the Jewish masses or folk. As its introduction declares, “With this Program, the expedition hopes to reach everyone who knows and remembers how people behaved in the past, as well as the present, in those places where Jewish life still continues in the old manner.” Because of its explicit focus on Jewish folk tradition, which it was attempting to define as much as to document, The Program—in contrast to the “Local Historical Program,” that An-sky published and distributed earlier—asks almost no questions about a variety of contemporary developments that were radically transforming life in the Pale, including the emergence of Jewish political parties; the growing impact of industrialization and the concomitant increase in labor activism; the internal migration to large cities within the Pale and outside its borders; and, with the exception of one question that only elliptically mentions the topic, the dramatic impact of emigration to the United States, Argentina, and elsewhere. Nor does The Program situate itself historically by asking questions about key events in the time line of Russian Jewry, again in contrast to the “Local Historical Program.”18 Nevertheless, it does acknowledge that cultural change is occurring in the Pale, frequently asking whether a particular practice used to exist in the past even if it no longer does in the present, for example. Moreover, while it generally avoids asking questions connected to political, economic, and demographic developments, it does refer to significant cultural shifts, such as the growing popularity of secular Yiddish literature—for example, Do people read Yiddish literature (Mendele Mokher Seforim? Peretz? Sholem Aleichem? Ash?)—although these questions are still situated within the life cycle and their number is small compared to those that focus on traditional practices and beliefs.

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In “Jewish Folk Art,” An-sky had argued that classical Jewish literary sources, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, had provided the defining ethos and motifs of Jewish folk culture. By contrast, in The Jewish Ethnographic Program, An-sky frequently attempted to distinguish between oral and written sources for Jewish customs, pointedly seeking to identify those that were nonliterary in origin and presumably, from a folkloristic perspective, more authentic. Thus, for example, the fourth question in The Program asks, “What views exist, besides those known from books [emphasis added], concerning the life of the child in its mother’s belly?” Other questions attempt to differentiate between minhagim that are mentioned in the Shulhan Arukh and those that are not, for example, “What sort of customs and versions are there for a get [writ of divorce] besides those that are found in the Shulhan Arukh?” However, even as The Program attempts to differentiate between the oral and the written, it mentions many Jewish folk traditions that only make sense against the backdrop of—generally noncited—written sources, including many rabbinic works. Thus a question that might seem obscure at first glance—“What beliefs exist concerning a child who is born circumcised? Is this considered a good sign?”—takes on new significance when its literary background is revealed, in this case, a rabbinic tradition that certain figures in the Torah, including Noah and Jacob, were born already circumcised, a phenomenon that the Zohar later interprets as a sign that the Shekhinah is cleaving to the individual.19 Similarly, a question that we have already seen—“Is the belief widespread that the appearance of children depends on what the mother sees during the time that she is leaving the mikve and during her pregnancy?”—can only be fully understood against the backdrop of numerous Jewish literary sources on maternal imprinting, including the biblical story of Jacob and the rods and the Talmudic tale of the famously beautiful Rabbi Yohanan, who declared: “When the daughters of Israel come out of the mikvah, they will look at me in order that they will have children as beautiful as I am.”20 In both style and content, The Jewish Ethnographic Program most closely resembles one Jewish literary genre in particular: the Sefer Minhagim, or “Book of Customs.” The Hebrew term minhag (pl. minhagim) refers to a practice that has become customary and, we will see later, binding, whether for an entire cultural-geographic zone (e.g., Ashkenazi or Sephardi), a specific community, a family, or even a single individual.21 While some minhagim originated with the rulings or personal practices

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of important rabbis, in many cases their origin lies with Jewish folk practices or non-Jewish ones that have been adopted by Jews. The Populist character of many minhagim finds expression in the rabbinic saying puk chazi mah ama daber (“go and see what the people are doing”); that is, if a particular legal question cannot be resolved among the sages, then the practice of the common people should be employed as a guide, and even more strongly, hakol ke minhag ha medinah (“everything is according to the custom of the land”). The degree to which minhag was, in fact, legally binding provoked debate over the centuries, with some sources going so far as to describe it as Torah itself—minhag avotenu torah hi (“the custom of our ancestors is Torah”) and minhag yisrael torah hi (“the custom of Israel is Torah”)—while others attempted to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate minhagim or warned of the great dangers in blindly following minhag, for example, by pointing out that the anagram of minhag is gehenom, or “hell.” For most people, minhagim were learned by word of mouth or via mimetic repetition in the home, on the street, or in the synagogue. While the oral and performative dimensions of minhagim were always fundamental to their transmission, many were also put into writing, both in collections devoted exclusively to them, and, significantly, in major Halakhic compendia, including Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh and the Mapah, in which Moshe Isserles appended Ashkenazi minhagim to Caro’s Sephardi-oriented work. The prominent place of minhagim in these normative legal codes indicates that the relationship between minhag and Halakhah and, concomitantly, between popular and elite, as well as written and oral, sources for Jewish practice cannot be reduced to one of opposition but instead reflect what Jean Baumgarten has insightfully described as a “dialectical rapport of complementarity” and “interpenetration.”22 As such, the category of minhag long provided a mechanism for the broader Jewish population to participate in and even generate legal tradition, even as elite sages still retained their privileged status as Halakhic authorities. The first printed book to focus exclusively on minhagim was the appropriately titled Sefer Minhagim, a collection of Ashkenazi customs compiled and organized according to the Jewish calendar by Isaac Tyrnau, a sage who was active in Austria and Hungary during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.23 The Sefer Minhagim was first printed in Hebrew in Venice in 1566 and then in a Yiddish translation by Shimon Guenzburg, also in Venice, in 1589. The fact that it was so quickly pub-

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lished in Yiddish, the vernacular of the Ashkenazi Jewish population, indicates that the book was intended to serve as a practical guide for Jews who were unable to understand the scholarly Hebrew of the original edition. Indeed, as Baumgarten has noted, the proliferation of Yiddish language “custom books,” or sifre minhogim, reflected rabbinic anxiety over the possibility that the ignorant Jewish masses, or amei ha-aretz, would either cease to engage in Jewish practices altogether or would engage in ones that they perceived to be incorrect. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this anxiety was heightened as many new Jewish communities—frequently without the presence of a rabbinic sage to provide personal guidance—were established throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Of course, over time, these same communities developed their own distinctive minhagim, which in turn could end up being printed in a subsequent “Book of Customs.” Moreover, with the rise of the Hasidic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many new minhagim were now generated by rebbes, whose actions and sayings were imitated and eventually codified by their followers, thereby helping to produce distinctive Hasidic subcultures. Minhag literature took on new significance at the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of the kinnus phenomenon, in which—as we have already seen—Jews from a variety of backgrounds, from secular Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox collectors of Hasidic tales, embraced the “ingathering” of all manner of Jewish traditions.24 This broader movement helps explain the publication and great popularity of Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim (“Reasons for the Customs”) by Abraham Isaac Sperling in 1890.25 Sperling took an encyclopedic approach to the subject, including a wide variety of minhagim from numerous sources, some familiar to large swaths of his readership and others limited to a particular locale or Hasidic community. As such, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim should be placed alongside other literary touchstones of the broader kinnus phenomenon, including Berdichevsky’s Mimekor Yisrael, Bialik and Ravinitsky’s Sefer Ha-Aggadah, Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, and The Jewish Ethnographic Program itself, which may have drawn directly on Sperling’s work for the content of some of its questions. In its own way, The Jewish Ethnographic Program may also be seen as an early, secular harbinger of what would soon become a broader phenomenon within Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox (i.e., Haredi) Jewish circles, namely, the systematic writing down of customs and, concomitantly, the transformation of a traditionally oral and mimetic model of

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cultural transmission and reproduction into a predominantly written one. Haym Soloveitchik, in a groundbreaking essay, has described—and interrogated—this process as follows: If I were asked to characterize in a phrase the change that religious Jewry has undergone in the past generation, I would say that it was the new and controlling role that texts now play in contemporary religious life. And in saying that, I open myself to an obvious question: What is this new role? Has not traditional Jewish society always been regulated by the normative written word, the Halakhah? . . . However, as the Halakhah is a sweepingly comprehensive regula of daily life—covering not only prayer and divine service, but equally food, drink, dress, sexual relations between man and wife, the rhythms of work and patterns of rest—it constitutes a way of life. And a way of life is not learned but rather absorbed. Its transmission is mimetic, imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school. . . . Custom was a correlative datum of the halakhic system. And on frequent occasions, the written word was reread in light of traditional behavior. . . . One of the most striking phenomena of the contemporary community is the explosion of halakhic works on practical observance . . . books and pamphlets on every imaginable topic. . . . Abruptly and within a generation, a rich literature of religious observance has been created and, this should be underscored, it focuses on performance Jews have engaged in and articles they have used for thousands of years. These books, moreover, are avidly purchased and on a mass scale.26

Ironically, given the profound religious gulf between them, An-sky and the contemporary Haredim who have produced this new literature share some of the same motivations: an awareness of the rupture caused by modernity, a fear that traditions are in danger of disappearing, and, therefore, an obsessive desire to collect and preserve these traditions in writing so that they can serve as the basis for Jewish life in the present and future, or, as An-sky put it in The Jewish Ethnographic Program: “In order to revive traditional Jewish culture with all its customs, traditions, practices, and beliefs, the expedition put together a survey with questions concerning every aspect of Jewish life. . . . When numerous responses to all the questions are collected, it will be possible to represent and to bring to life the entire order of the traditional Jewish community, the Jewish family, and our once complete national life.” While An-sky hoped to accomplish this renaissance via the transvaluation of Jewish

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traditions into the raw material for museum exhibits, theater, literature, and other elements of a secular Jewish culture, contemporary Haredim, in the wake of the Holocaust and other dislocations, have deployed this literature to help them regulate behavior in insular enclaves where the supralegal stringency known as humra has become the norm. As one such book declares: “The truth is that we believe in all the customs of Israel and all the humrot [pl. of humra], just as we do in all the Torah.”27 Significantly, the epigraph to An-sky’s seminal 1908 essay “Jewish Folk Art”—and the only part of the text that is not in Russian—is a quote of the Aramaic phrase puk chazi mah ama daber (“go and see what the people are doing”). Indeed, the word minhag itself appears nearly two hundred times in The Jewish Ethnographic Program—more than any other term. Like a traditional Sefer Minhagim, one of the explicit goals of The Program was to collect all of the Jewish customs in a particular region—in this case, the Pale of Settlement—while documenting local differences both past and present. The structure of The Program around the Jewish life cycle recalls the traditional structuring of minhag books around important rites of passage, such as the circumcision, first haircut, wedding, and burial or around the Jewish calendar (indeed, the fact that the second unpublished volume of The Program was going to focus exclusively on Jewish holidays furthers the parallel). The Program’s detailed exploration of various minhagim produced some ironic, and even paradoxical, results, however. For example, An-sky, the Socialist revolutionary who had long ago abandoned Jewish ritual himself, nevertheless included highly technical questions about tefillin (phylacteries)—for example: “When do people begin to lay Rabbenu Tam’s tefillin?” and “Is it a custom to sometimes lay two pairs of tefillin?”— whose value for his stated project of creating a modern Jewish culture grounded in traditional Jewish folk practices was far from obvious. The inclusion of such ritually detailed questions raises an important issue, namely, to what degree it was possible to treat religious observance and folkways as separate categories within the Jewish communities of the Pale. An-sky appears to have realized that it was impossible to draw a hard-and-fast distinction between these categories, with minhag representing the most striking way in which potential differences between the two were mediated, if not entirely collapsed. Indeed, it is easy to see why An-sky would be drawn to the category of minhag in his attempt to identify and document an authentic Jewish folk tradition. Like the English term folkways, with which the Hebrew

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word has sometimes been translated—or, closer to home for An-sky, the Russian term byt—minhag could readily be understood as a Populist phenomenon, though this elides the rabbinic source of some minhagim as well as the repeated efforts of the scholarly Jewish elite to codify and standardize minhagim. Moreover, minhagim were often locally specific and, for most of Jewish history, were typically transmitted orally and mimetically, though again this elides the ongoing production of minhag literature. Finally, the category of minhag had provided the chief conceptual and practical means by which the common Jewish people, rather than just the rabbinic elite, had produced traditions that were accepted, at least by some sources, as Torah itself. Like all phenomena that laid claim to the category of Oral Torah, therefore, minhag embodied the tension between tradition, on the one hand, and innovation, on the other, the same tension that lay at the heart of An-sky’s own vision of Jewish ethnography.

II

P R E FAC E TO T H E A N N OTAT E D T R A N S L AT I O N

I began translating The Jewish Ethnographic Program when my wife, Miriam, was pregnant with our oldest daughter, Simi. Every night I would translate at least twenty questions from my dog-eared copy of the Yiddish text before going to sleep. While Miriam’s belly got bigger and bigger, the stack of pages that remained to be translated—a stack that had seemed dauntingly thick at first—got smaller and smaller. By the time I found myself driving Miriam in the middle of the night to the hospital, where, hours later, she would deliver our first child, I had completed a rough draft of the entire questionnaire, which is also to say, I had made my way through the entire Jewish life cycle described in its pages. That was eight years ago. Since then The Jewish Ethnographic Program (hereafter, The Program) has never been far from my mind, as I continued to work on it through the death of my father, Zvi Deutsch, and the birth of our second daughter, Tamar. In order to refine my translation and make sense of the many questions that working through The Program the first time had raised for me, I decided to consult with three groups of people, each possessing unique and invaluable insight into the language and content of the questions. The first group consisted of elderly Jews who were born and raised in some of the same shtetls that An-sky had visited during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. I decided to begin with two former residents of Ludmir (Rus., Vladimir-Volynsk), whom I had gotten to know while writing a book about a Jewish holy woman—the Ludmirer Moyd, or Maiden of Ludmir—who had lived in the town during the first half of the nineteenth century. A strong connection existed between Ludmir and the various strands of An-sky’s work. An-sky visited the town during the expedition and returned while doing the war relief he chronicled to great effect 95

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in Khurbn Galitsiye (The Destruction of Galicia). One of the questions (no. 896) in The Program was devoted to the Maiden of Ludmir, and it is even possible that An-sky incorporated elements of her story into his play The Dybbuk. While the people I planned on talking with had been born after An-sky visited their hometown, I knew that one of them, Nechama Singer Ariel, still remembered stories about his visit to Ludmir that she had heard from her grandmother. In fact, my initial goal in approaching the former residents of Ludmir (and, eventually, other shtetls) was not just to enlist their help in refining my translation but also to have them answer the 2,087 questions of The Program. I hoped, in this way, to continue the ethnographic work that An-sky had planned before the outbreak of World War I prevented him from distributing the questionnaire. It was, I soon realized, a naive hope. The problem was not that The Program’s questions failed to inspire rich commentary when I posed them to former residents of Ludmir but that they inspired too much commentary to get through even a handful of questions in a single sitting. At the rate we were going it might take years before we made it to the final question. And so I abandoned this plan and instead introduced The Program to another group with close, though very different, ties to the now-vanished Jewish communities of Eastern Europe: contemporary Hasidim living in Brooklyn, New York. Once again my initial goal was not just to fine-tune my translation but also to get answers to The Program and, in so doing, extend An-sky’s ethnographic research into the present day. After building trust with a few Hasidim from different communities, I hoped to enlist their help in distributing printed copies of The Program to Hasidic men and women of different ages and backgrounds in the Hasidic enclaves of Williamsburg, Boro Park, and Crown Heights. As we have seen, An-sky was particularly interested in documenting lived Hasidic culture, which he felt had preserved many folk beliefs and practices that other Eastern European Jews had already abandoned, even by the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, Hasidim pride themselves on faithfully transmitting the traditions of their ancestors in the Old Country. Moreover, they have widely adopted the ideological stance of the broader Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, first articulated by the non-Hasidic Hungarian sage Moses Sofer in the nineteenth century, that “the new is forbidden by the Torah.” And yet despite their ideological rejection of the new and their concomitant devotion to preserving tradition, in practice, Hasidim are constantly incorporating new things into their lives. By having contemporary Hasidim

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in Brooklyn respond to an ethnographic questionnaire designed for use by Hasidim (among others) in the Pale of Settlement in 1914, I hoped to identify some of the changes that had occurred in the intervening century as well as what beliefs and practices had, in fact, been transmitted. I began by introducing The Program to two Hasidim, one an advanced yeshiva student who was then on the verge of receiving semichah (rabbinic ordination) and the other a mortgage broker who lived a few blocks away from me in Williamsburg, and, in recent months, had become my informal guide to the Hasidic section of the neighborhood. Neither had ever heard of An-sky or ethnography. And yet The Program, with its pages of dense Yiddish text—written, as is customary, in Hebrew characters— and its numerous questions about Jewish practices, did not seem out of place in the Hasidic study houses where we typically met to go over The Program, study together, or just kibbitz. On the contrary, I was struck by the parallels between The Program and the other texts that surrounded us in these spaces and by the way in which working through its questions resembled the kind of traditional learning that was taking place all around us. Indeed, on many occasions, the two activities intersected with one another, as our discussion of a particular question often led us to open one or more of the sforim (Jewish holy books) that lay at hand, or when our study of one of these same texts led us back to one of the questions in The Program. This process illuminated the degree to which many of The Program’s questions did not merely reflect textually unmediated practices and beliefs of the common Jewish folk—what An-sky called their “Oral Torah”—but, in fact, were deeply imbricated within the vast corpus of Jewish literary works devoted to Halakhah and minhag. Meeting on a weekly basis for nearly half a year, we managed to work through hundreds of questions. In the process, I came to appreciate several things about The Program in a much more practical way than when I had only gone over it myself. Perhaps most fundamentally, I was struck by the fact that no single person could ever answer all of the questions—at least without conducting a lot of research. Thus, for instance, only people who had served in their community’s Burial Society might be able to answer certain questions; other questions might only be answerable by women who had given birth, and so on. Moreover, it became clear that even within a tightly knit and highly regulated community such as Hasidic Williamsburg, people’s experiences of basic life cycle events could still be different in significant ways—and they could be ignorant of these differences.

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This point was driven home to me when we reached the questions about midwives. As the young father of six children himself and an uncle to many more, my Hasidic respondent in Williamsburg confidently informed me that these questions were no longer relevant, since women in the community did not employ midwives, relying instead on obstetricians. At that point, I assumed that this was simply one of the ways in which this particular Hasidic community differed from its antecedents in Eastern Europe. My plan of using The Program to gauge cultural changes over time appeared to be working. Yet not long after I made this “discovery,” my wife became pregnant with our second child, and she decided that she wanted to give birth with the help of a midwife. After making inquiries, she learned that there was a highly recommended midwife whose office was located only a few blocks away from our apartment in Williamsburg. I accompanied Miriam on the first visit and was surprised and intrigued as we made our way from our own section of the neighborhood, that is, the North Side, into the South Side section heavily inhabited by Hasidim. If I still had any doubts about the current presence of midwives in the Hasidic community, the waiting room full of pregnant Hasidic women (and no men) convinced me otherwise. As it turned out, the midwife was an Irish American woman who had delivered thousands of babies in the Hasidic community over a period of several decades. I was now convinced more than ever that I needed to create a network of respondents to The Program, including women, the elderly, and members of the various groups (Satmar, Pupa, Munkasz, Vishnitz, Lubavitch, Bobov, etc.) that made up the larger Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. I no longer expected that any single person would be able to answer all or even many of the questions. Instead, I viewed The Program as an opportunity to create a communal portrait based on responses from a wide variety of individuals. To this end, I enlisted the help of a sociologist to identify what kinds of people (and how many) to include in the project; I also made personal contact with other Hasidim who expressed enthusiasm about participating and who assured me that they knew family and friends who would also be interested. In order to expedite my work, I eventually decided to seek the imprimatur of a well-respected Hasidic rebbe, whose influence extended beyond his immediate community in Boro Park into Williamsburg, as well as into upstate Hasidic enclaves such as Monsey. I had met him several months earlier when a Hasidic acquaintance brought me to a tish (gathering) that the rebbe was leading for his followers on the holiday of


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Hanukkah, where I was the only non-Hasid present. I was impressed with the rebbe’s discourse, in which he expertly wove together rabbinic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic sources. I was also impressed with his reaction when I was introduced to him after the tish as the author of a book on the Maiden of Ludmir. Rather than dismissing her as insignificant, as had some of the Hasidim whom I had encountered over the years, the rebbe described her as a “holy woman and a wonder worker.” Now, several months later, the rebbe agreed to a private meeting in his office. I arrived with a copy of The Jewish Ethnographic Program and my daughter, Simi, whose babysitter had called in sick unexpectedly. After discussing our respective family backgrounds for a few minutes, I presented him with The Program and he paged through it as I described my project. When I was finished, the rebbe looked up from the text and asked me a single question: “Was this An-sky frum (religious)?” To which I responded, “Well, he was frum. . . . When he was a child. But then he fell off the derekh (path).” And with that, our conversation was essentially over. It was clear that the rebbe would not be giving his blessing to my project, although he did offer to give my daughter a blessing as we got up to leave. I never learned whether the rebbe discussed my project with anyone else. In the coming weeks, however, I was frustrated but not completely surprised when the Hasidim who had previously agreed to participate all bowed out. I also realized that the rebbe’s question could just as easily have been directed toward me—and perhaps it was on some level—and that his unwillingness to endorse the project may have had as much to do with doubts about me as about An-sky. At that point I could have continued to pursue my project with other Hasidim, but I took my visit with the rebbe as a sign that if I did, many obstacles—some perhaps insurmountable—lay ahead. Instead I devoted my energies to consulting with a third group of experts: professional Yiddishists, that is, people who have dedicated their lives to studying and teaching Yiddish language and culture. Whereas I met with former residents of Ludmir in their homes and with Hasidim in their neighborhood study houses, my interactions with Yiddishists unfolded in a variety of settings where the scholarly study of Yiddish currently takes place: the university, academic conferences, the reading room of the YIVO Institute in New York, and the Internet. Unlike with the first two groups, I did not attempt to have the Yiddishists answer the questions of The Program. Instead I asked them to illuminate particular Yiddish terms or expressions and help smooth over my translation in spots where it

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seemed rough around the edges. While numerous individuals generously shared their expertise with me over the years, two people in particular went over the entire translation, Jon Levitow and Itzik Gottesman. Of course any errors that remain are my own. During the same period that I was refining the translation, I also turned my attention to annotating The Program. Initially I planned on providing explanatory notes to only those questions that seemed especially obscure. After all, one of the things that I had always found most compelling about The Jewish Ethnographic Program was the very fact that it was a book of questions without answers and, therefore, a kind of stripped-down, elemental version of a classical Jewish text. And yet as I went through The Program looking for questions that needed clarification or commentary, I soon found myself creating more and more notes. Before I knew it, I had completed notes to one hundred questions, and then two hundred, and then three hundred, and so on. By this point, practically every countertop in the house—and not a few floors—were covered with books: memoirs about growing up in the Pale of Settlement, yizker bikher (memorial books) for Eastern European Jewish communities, scholarly works on Russian Jewish history and culture, and traditional sforim, or books on Halakhah and minhag. In one sense I was reverse-engineering the creative process that had led to the composition of The Jewish Ethnographic Program in the first place, with of course the critically important difference being that I was a single individual living in twenty-first-century America, whereas The Program had been created by a team of people born and raised in the Pale of Settlement. In another sense, and despite my best—at least conscious—efforts not to do so, I was also attempting to answer all of the questions myself. The result was something akin to inhabiting two worlds at once. When I was not taking my kids to school, teaching a class, or doing one of the other activities that made up a typical day, I was occupied by the intricacies of the Jewish betrothal ceremony, or by popular beliefs about dibbuks and reincarnation, or funeral customs—all circa 1914. In short, the more I devoted myself to annotating all of the questions of The Jewish Ethnographic Program, the more I found myself inhabiting a kind of imaginal Pale of Settlement. At times the experience of living with, and in some sense in, The Jewish Ethnographic Program was profoundly illuminating and even exhilarating. At other times, however, especially after a long day, annotating the questions seemed like an endless task. And, in truth, it was. No matter how much research I did, my notes


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would always be incomplete, only reflecting a tiny sliver of the possible responses to the questions. Whereas a century ago a resident of a particular shtetl could answer at least some of the questions of The Program in regard to her or his community, that was not the case for me. As a scholar of life in the Pale of Settlement rather than an inhabitant, there was nothing to limit the “answers” I might provide. Ultimately I decided not to annotate every question of The Program. Instead I have tried to ensure that notes are distributed throughout the entire document rather than concentrated in only a handful of sections, and I have attempted to fulfill my original goal of explaining what are likely to be obscure—at least to the average reader—terms and practices. In no way, however, should the notes be viewed as definitive or as the answers to the questions of The Program. Rather, they are intended as an illustration of what can be done with the questions and as an invitation to those interested in doing their own research, whether by asking the questions of someone they know or by examining the many books, articles, and Internet resources that are available. The result, I hope, is an annotated translation of The Jewish Ethnographic Program that retains the open and provocatively incomplete character of the original while still illuminating and clarifying its more obscure elements.

THE JEWISH ETHNOGRAPHIC PROGRAM

First Section: The Child from Conception until the Kheyder Second Section: From the Kheyder to the Wedding Third Section: The Wedding Fourth Section: Family Life Fifth Section: Death

Foreword With good reason the Jewish people have earned the highest title to which a nation can aspire, the honor of being called The People of the Book [Am ha-seyfer]. “Der Seyfer,” the book, has always been and remains today the most important foundation of Jewish life. Yet on a par with the book, with the great Written Torah [Toyre shebiksav1] that we have received as an inheritance from hundreds of generations of the chosen—pious sages and great scholars, thinkers and spiritual guides—we possess yet another Torah, an Oral Torah [Toyre shebalpe], which the people themselves, and especially the common folk, have ceaselessly created during their long, hard, and tragic history. This Oral Torah, which consists of folktales and legends, parables and aphorisms, songs and melodies, customs, traditions, beliefs, and so on, is also an enormously significant product of the same Jewish spirit that created the Written Torah. It reflects the same beauty and purity of the Jewish 1. In this paragraph An-sky borrows expressions from rabbinical literature to contrast the written tradition with its ongoing reinterpretation through the lens of lived experience.

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soul, the tenderness and nobility of the Jewish heart, and the height and depth of Jewish thought. For a long time, the civilized peoples of the entire world have appreciated the great historical, scholarly, psychological, and aesthetic worth of folk creations. Great attention has been paid to the smallest things that bear the stamp of the folk process. The lives of the common people have been described in precise detail. Their beliefs, customs, traditions, tales, songs, and opinions have been recorded for posterity. Indeed, everything that the folk have created, whether for religious or secular purposes, has been collected. With this objective in mind, hundreds of scholarly societies have been founded, and numerous periodicals and special volumes, collected works, and studies have been published. Ethnographic and art museums have been established. In addition, entire expeditions have been organized and dispatched to remote lands in order to investigate the lives, beliefs, customs, and poetic creations of primitive or savage peoples. The Jewish folk represent the single exception to this phenomenon. As much as the Jew respects and honors the printed word, he disdains the great and rich tradition that lives within the common people, imparted orally from one generation to another. Among us, except for a few volumes of collected folk songs and witticisms, there has been almost no work along these lines, and, explorations of our own folk traditions have yet to appear. The great upheaval in Jewish life that has occurred in the last fifty to sixty years has above all devastated our folk traditions, a great many of which have already vanished. With every old man who dies, with every small-town fire, with every exile, a piece of our past is lost, and the most beautiful expressions of traditional life, with its customs, traditions, and beliefs, disappear. The old, profound, and poetic tales, songs, and melodies are forgotten. The ancient and beautiful synagogues are being abandoned or consumed by fire; their most precious decorations and holy objects are either lost or sold, often into non-Jewish hands. The tombstones of our sages and martyrs are sinking into the earth, their inscriptions rubbed off. In short, our past, soaked with so much holy blood and so many tears shed by martyrs and blameless victims, sanctified by so much self-sacrifice, is disappearing and being forgotten. Several years ago, a “Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in Honor of Baron Naftali Hertz Gintsburg” was established. Its goal was to visit the most important cities and towns in the Jewish Pale of Settlement and to collect all that still remains of our past, both spiritually and materially.


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It set out to record tales, historical information, songs, and parables; to write down the old Jewish melodies in musical notation; to take photographs of old synagogues, tombstones, characters, and scenes from Jewish life; and to gather writings, documents, and antique Jewish objects for a national Jewish museum. In order to revive traditional Jewish culture with all its customs, traditions, practices, and beliefs, the expedition put together a survey with questions concerning every aspect of Jewish life. With this program, the expedition hopes to reach everyone who knows and remembers how people behaved in the past, as well as how they behave in the present, in those places where Jewish life still continues in the old manner. When numerous responses to all the questions are collected, it will be possible to represent and to bring to life the entire order of the traditional Jewish community, the Jewish family, and our once complete national life.

Instructions: A. How answers to the survey should be recorded. 1. Answers should be written in a special notebook, preferably on one side of the page and, as much as possible, in clear, legible handwriting. 2. Before the answers are written down, the person who is providing the answers should record in the beginning of the notebook: A. first name and surname B. age C. form of employment D. the city or town where he is located E. the time (day, month, year). 3. Before writing down an answer to a question, the number of the question being answered should be noted. If a single answer applies to two or more questions, all the relevant questions should first be indicated. For instance, for question no. 1465, “Is it a custom for the grandfather to cut the grandchild’s hair at three years?,” the answer should be, “1465: Among us there is no such custom (or there is, or there was).” 4. Answers should only be provided for questions about which the respondent is absolutely certain. In the case of an answer about which one is not entirely certain, one should add: “it seems that,” “people say,” et al. If someone provides an answer that he has heard from another person, a written note should be added: heard from so and so, first name, surname, age, employment, city, and time when it was heard. Questions to which a respondent has no answer should be omitted.

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5. An effort should be made to write down the answers as concisely and clearly as possible. 6. The answers should be recorded as they are given, even when they are not grammatical. B. How to record tales, songs, and other types of folk material heard from a third party. 1. Before beginning, the recorder needs to note the time, place (city, province, district), and his own first name, surname, age, and form of employment. 2. Before recording anything, one should first ask the respondent whether he first encountered what he wants to narrate or sing in a printed work. It is not necessary to record such material. 3. After each song, tale, or other folk tradition, the first name, surname, age, and profession of the person whose words are being recorded should be noted. 4. If the source is from another city, record the city where he is from. 5. If someone has recited something first heard from another person, that person’s first name, surname, age, profession, dwelling place, and the time when he heard it should also be recorded. 6. By no means should one prompt or correct the storyteller or singer. 7. What the storyteller says should be recorded precisely and completely, even if some words may be gratuitous (for example, “well . . ,” “in other words,” . . . “more or less,” . . . “for example,” . . . “as people say,” . . . ) or repeated phrases. 8. The words should be recorded exactly as the storyteller pronounces them. For instance, in some places people say tate-mame [father and mother], and in others, tote-mome; some say vos [what], others vus, still others vues. One should write down exactly what the speaker says. 9. Corrupt Hebrew expressions must be written down as they are pronounced (for instance: a terets (teyruts) [an excuse], Rosheshone (Rosh ha-Shanah) [New Year].2 10. When a tale or song that one is recording contains local words that are unknown in other places or that refer to local happenings or people that are not generally known, after completing the task of

2. By “corrupt,” An-sky here means the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew.


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copying, one should supply a note that explains everything. Whoever makes such a note should sign his name to it. 11. One must not be ashamed to record the most vulgar and even outright crude expressions and words. Ethnography knows no cynicism or vulgarity. First Section: The Child from Conception until the Kheyder A. Pregnancy 1. What beliefs are there about a person’s soul before it enters the body?3 2. At what moment in the development of the fetus do people think that the soul enters the body?4 3. How does the soul’s entry into the body take place? 4. Besides the familiar material found in holy books, what beliefs are there concerning the life of the child in its mother’s belly?5 3. The Zohar 1:90b describes God as an “artist” who patterns the soul on the Sefirot before placing it in the fetus. Kabbalistic sources, in general, and Lurianic ones, in particular, depict a wide range of possibilities before the soul enters the body, including various forms of transmigration, or gilgul. 4. On the belief that the soul enters the body at conception, see the discussion between Rabbi Judah the Prince and his Roman interlocutor, Antoninus, in Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 91b. According to another tradition, an angel named Lailah (Heb., “night”) guides the entrance of the soul into the body. See Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 199–200: “When the time has come for a man and his wife to conceive a child, God directs Lailah to seek out a certain soul hidden in the Garden of Eden, and command [sic] it to enter a drop of semen. At first the soul refuses, for it still remembers the pain of being born, and it prefers to remain pure. But Lailah compels the soul to obey, and it is then God decrees what the fate of that sperm will be, whether male or female, strong or weak, rich or poor, and so on. Then the angel turns around and places the soul in the womb of the mother.” 5. Here The Program has in mind iconic sources such as Babylonian Talmud Niddah 30b, which describes the life of the fetus in the womb in great detail. Among other things, the text describes the fetus as resembling “a folded writing tablet: its head lies between its knees; its two hands against its two temples; its two heels against its two buttocks . . . and it eats what its mother eats and drinks what its mother drinks, but produces no excrement for otherwise it might kill its mother.” (See parallel in Leviticus Rabbah 14:8.) The text elaborates that a light shines above the fetus’s head, enabling it to see from one end of the world to the other, and it is taught the entire Torah before an angel taps it above the lip, causing the unborn child to forget

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5. What signs, besides the usual ones, are there to determine whether a woman is pregnant?6 6. Are there signs that indicate whether a woman is pregnant with a boy or a girl?7 7. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman sleeps a lot, it’s a sign that she will give birth to a girl? 8. Which is considered a greater blessing, to have a boy or a girl? And why?8 everything (and leaving a permanent dent). On this and other rabbinic traditions concerning the fetus, see Gwynn Kessler, Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). For a wonderfully evocative description of the life of the fetus in the womb, also see Seder Yetsirat HaValad, in Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 1, ed. Adolph Jellinek, 153–158 (Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann, 1938). 6. One of the most interesting Yiddish language documents concerning pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care was produced by a Jewish midwife named Malka Berlant (née Levenshtern), who published a Yiddish guidebook for mothers called Di gliklekhe muter (Vilna: B. Rashenberg, 1836), or “The Happy Mother.” In the book’s foreword, Berlant explains that she wrote the book “in our national language,” that is, Yiddish, in order to serve as a practical guide for mothers, who were typically unable to read either Russian or Hebrew (though the Yiddish text does include Hebrew glosses for certain terms). Berlant provides advice based on current scientific knowledge rather than prevailing Jewish folk belief. In a section entitled “The Signs of Pregnancy,” p. 2, Berlant writes, “Pregnancy causes a great transformation of the body of the woman; from the beginning it is possible to tell from different feelings.” Among the “usual” signs of pregnancy, Berlant includes feelings of weakness, fatigue, nausea, angst, lack of appetite, and other physical manifestations. 7. On this question, see Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 189: “There were manifold infallible ways of determining the sex of the child prior to birth. The male lies face up in the womb, the female face down . . . if a pregnant woman drips some milk from her breast upon a board or rock, if it spatters, the child will be a boy, otherwise a girl; if the milk sinks in water, she will bear a girl, and if it floats, a boy,” etc. 8. A preference for sons is found in a wide variety of Jewish sources, including the statement in Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 82b: “Happy is he whose children are males and woe to him whose children are females.” In her essay “Lost Childhood in East European Hebrew Literature,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer, 98–99 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Anne Lapidus Lerner observes (concerning Isaac Dov Berkowitz’s story “Ben Zakhar”): “Rules and customs notwithstanding, even a newborn girl is a source of great fulfillment to both parents. There is no doubt, of course, that male children are valued more than females. The midwife announcing the birth of a son to Zalman . . . says, ‘But see, see


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9. What special means9 exist to influence whether a child in the mother’s belly will be a boy or a girl?10 10. What stories do you know concerning this? 11. Are there any signs to determine whether a woman is pregnant with twins? 12. Are twins considered to be a blessing or a punishment?11 13. What do people consider to be the reason for twins?12 how lucky you are, may the evil eye stay away—almost all your children are males, one after the other!’ ” Jewish women even recited tkhines (Yiddish supplicatory prayers) to help ensure that they gave birth to boys, for example: “Almighty God, that you may pronounce: from this seed will come forth a righteous man and a pious man, a fearer of your holy Name, who will keep your commandments and find favor in your eyes and in the eyes of all the people. May he study Torah day and night, never be ashamed in the Yeshiva, and not err in Halakha. And if it be destined to be a daughter, grant me that she be tidy and not impudent and that she may learn to accept reproof from all those who wish to instruct her.” Translation of Seder tehinot (1752), 9b, in Chava Weissler, “The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women,” in Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987). 9. “Special means” is a translation of the Yiddish zgule or sgule, from Hebrew segulah, a term with biblical roots, meaning something special or highly valued. The term sgule (pl. sgules) covers a wide range of practices, many of which may appear in modern eyes as sympathetic magic or as good luck charms, but which broadly have to do with any activity, such as eating, drinking, wearing clothes, reciting prayers or incantations, or even Torah study, which is believed to affect the course of daily life. Sgule has been translated variously elsewhere here, according to context, as “protection,” “precaution,” “provision,” “benefit,” and “good luck.” Indeed, the present text provides an indication of the wide range of meanings that sgule can have. 10. In Babylonian Talmud Shevuot 18b, Rabbi Elazar declares, “Whoever sanctifies himself during intercourse will have male children.” See Zohar 112a for a Kabbalistic elaboration on this motif. Abraham Isaac Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim u-Mekore ha-Dinim (Jerusalem: Shay Lamora, 1999), 567, mentions a number of sgules for having boys. 11. H. Jacob Zimmels, Magicians, Theologians, and Doctors: Studies in Folk Medicine and Folklore as Reflected in the Rabbinical Responsa (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1997), 72, citing Joseph Saul Nathansohn, Shoel u-Meshib (Lemberg, 1868), writes, “Twins are weak by nature, since the sperm was split in two.” Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, 120–121, discusses the ancient Jewish belief that “even numbers, ‘pairs,’ invite demonic attack.” This belief may have influenced people’s attitudes toward twins in some communities. 12. Zimmels, Magicians, Theologians, and Doctors, 71, cites a number of Jewish sources that describe the cause of twins as “the splitting of the sperm.”

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14. Is there a belief that if a woman eats a double nut, she will give birth to twins?13 15. Is there a belief that one of a pair of twins will probably not live long? And what is the reason for this? 16. What means are employed to prevent this? 17. What medicines, precautions, and other means are employed in order to have clever children? 18. Do people also call upon a Hasidic rebbe for this, and what special protections does he provide? 19. Is it a common belief that in most cases the children will resemble the mother’s brother?14 20. Is it a common belief that the appearance and resemblance of children depends on what the mother sees during the time that she is leaving the mikve [ritual bath, here taken by women after menstruation] and during her pregnancy? Therefore, a pregnant woman should not look at impure animals and fowl, on crippled, ugly, sinful, or evil people, or at ugly pictures?15 21. What stories do you know about children who were born very ugly, crippled, or deformed, and do people explain the reason for 13. On the belief among some Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire that a “pregnant almond” or “double nut” could help with fertility, see Michele Klein, A Time to Be Born: Customs and Folklore of Jewish Birth (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1998), 38. 14. Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 110a declares, “Most children resemble the brother of the mother.” The idea that children resemble the maternal uncle is also found in Islamic literature (i.e., the Hadith collection of Sahih Bukhari). 15. On this belief, see Yehuda Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” Reshumot 1 (1918): 365. “Yehuda Elzet” was a pseudonym for Yehuda Leib Slotnick, a rabbi and an important folklorist. For an examination of the phenomenon of parental imprinting that includes Jewish sources, see Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner, “Misconceptions: Female Imaginations and Male Fantasies in Parental Imprinting,” in Science in Culture, ed. Peter Galison, Stephen Graubard, Everett Mendelsohn, 97–130 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001). Babylonian Talmud Baba Metsiah 84a describes the famously beautiful Rabbi Yohanan as sitting outside the mivkah so that women who were exiting (after ritually immersing themselves in preparation for intercourse with their husbands) would look upon him and have beautiful children. On this narrative, see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 214–215. Avrom Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ekspeditsye, ongefirt fun Sh. An-ski (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1958), 292, quotes a Yiddish translation of this story.


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this as being that the mother looked at such things while she was pregnant?16 22. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman touches part of her body during the time of a fire, the child will be born with a red mark on the same body part?17 23. What stories do you know about this? 24. Is it considered better for the pregnant woman if no one knows about her condition? What is the reason for this?18 25. Are there special prayers, amulets [kameyes, most often parchments inscribed with prayers, holy “Names,” alphabetical formulas, and other symbols], or protections for a pregnant woman? Does she make special vows or give alms?19 26. Is there a custom for a pregnant woman to add a candle to the Sabbath candle lighting?20 27. What protective amulets, charms, and precautions are there to protect a woman from the Evil Eye?

16. See Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, 187: “If, on the way home from the ritual bath to which she repaired after her period (a procedure preliminary to intercourse), a woman encounters a dog, her child will have an ugly dog-face, if she meets an ass, it will be stupid, if an ignorant lout, it will be an ignoramus.” 17. Yehuda Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” Reshumot 1 (1918): 362, describes this belief in greater detail. See Itzik Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 66–69, on his life and work. According to a Japanese folk belief, if a pregnant woman looks at a fire, her child will be born with a birthmark. See Fumi Kawamoto, “Folk Beliefs among Japanese in the Los Angeles Area,” Western Folkore 21, no. 1 (1962): 13–26. 18. People feared that various demons and evil spirits, especially the arch-demoness known as Lilith, might harm the unborn child and/or mother if her pregnancy was known. 19. Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, 190, mentions a Hasidic tradition that women who want an easy labor should eat the food from the Melavah Malkah (Heb., “escorting the [Sabbath] Queen”) meal eaten on Saturday night. Berl Kagan and Nathan Sobel, eds., Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1997), 52, mentions that printed copies of Shir ha-Maalos (Psalm 121) were posted on the door lintels of the room where a woman was to go into labor, and a copy of the mystical book Sefer Raziel was placed under her head. These were, and in some Jewish communities still are, widespread customs. 20. Some add an extra candle for every new child born into a family. The candle is linked to the neshome yetira, or “extra soul,” that every Jew is supposed to receive on the Sabbath.

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28. What foods or drinks are considered beneficial for a pregnant woman, and what should be avoided? (For example, not to drink wine from Havdole [i.e., Havdalah, ceremony that marks the end of Sabbath and holidays] or not to eat liver, etc.)21 29. Is biting off the protuberance at the end of an esrog [the citron used on the holiday of Sukkot] considered a protection for a pregnant woman? Against what?22 30. Is it considered a protection for a pregnant woman to wear an apron? For what reason? 31. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman steps on the spot where a mare has rolled around, she will carry her child for twelve months? 32. Is there a belief that a pregnant woman should not sit on a doorstep, because on this account she will have difficulty giving birth? 21. There is a widespread folk belief that women should not drink wine from the Havdalah ceremony lest they grow facial hair. Some Jewish communities appear to have taken another step, linking the threat of masculinization to female infertility. On the folk belief, see Ari Zivotofsky, “Wine from Havdalah, Women and Beards,” Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 10 (Winter 2010): 175–187. Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, 188, links the custom to a belief that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden was actually a grapevine. Because of Eve’s sin, which caused the “light of the world to diminish,” women should not drink wine associated with the light of the Havdalah ceremony. On the tradition that eating garlic was harmful to a pregnant woman, see David WeissHalvni, The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 13–14. Berlant, Di gliklekhe muter, 5, in a section entitled “Concerning Food and Drink for the Pregnant Women,” recommends “good hearty soups, not from fatty meat but only from chickens, young doves, veal,” and so on. 22. On the practice of eating a part of the etrog in order to become pregnant or help ensure an easy delivery, see Judith Reesa Baskin, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 176–177. Baskin cites the rabbinic sources for this tradition, for example, Babylonian Talmud Ketubot 61a, twentieth-century ethnographic evidence, and several tkhines (supplicatory prayers), including one included in the Tsene-rene (i.e., the Yiddish “women’s Bible,” first published in 1600 and then reprinted in numerous editions). Also see Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 217, n. 23. Morris Goldstein, a native of Ludmir, informed the author that the shames of the shtibl would go around to all the houses in the neighborhood and help the women bentsch (bless) the lulav and etrog on Sukkot. On these occasions, Goldstein’s mother would tell her daughters that eating the protuberance of the etrog was a sgule to become pregnant.


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33. Is there a belief that a pregnant woman should not hold anything in her apron, because on account of this she will have difficulty giving birth? 34. Is there a belief that a pregnant woman should not blow on a fire in an oven because as a result of this, the child may have convulsions when it cries? 35. Is there a belief that a pregnant woman should not lend anything out from her house? What is the reason for this?23 36. Is there a belief that a pregnant woman should not go out alone at night? What is the reason for this? 37. What stories do you know about a pregnant woman who came to harm when she went out alone at night? 38. Is there a belief that a pregnant woman should not enter the house of a non-Jew or walk alone on a bridge over a river? What is the reason for this? 39. Perhaps you know other customs and practices that a pregnant woman should observe? List them all, and give the reason for each. 40. Is there a belief that one should not throw anything to a pregnant woman? What is the reason for this, and what should she do if someone does throw something to her? 41. Is there a belief that the request of a pregnant woman should not be refused? What is the reason for this? 42. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman asks to borrow something and her request is refused, mice will consume everything that they find belonging to those who refused her request? As a protection against this, should one throw something after the pregnant woman as she goes away?24 23. On Russian concerns over lending something to a pregnant woman, see T. A. Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material on the Customs and Rituals Associated with Childbirth,” question 8, in Russian Traditional Culture: Religion, Gender, and Customary Law, ed. Marjorie Mandestam Balzer, 253–264 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992) [Russ. “Programma sbora materiala po obychaiam I obriadam, sviazannym s rozhdeniem rebenka,” in Russkie: Semeinyi I obshchestvennyi byt (Moscow: Nauka Publishers, 1989), 292–307]. A compilation based on other programs, including those of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and the Tenishev Ethnography Bureau, Listova’s program has a number of parallels with the questions in The Jewish Ethnographic Program. 24. On the Russian belief that mice will consume the clothing of an individual who refuses the request of a pregnant woman, see Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material,” question 8. The belief that mice will eat the food and/or belongings of an

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43. Is there a belief that anything thrown after the pregnant woman will become a mark on the child’s countenance? For example, if someone throws a piece of coal, there will be a black mark on the child’s face; if a pea—there will be a wart like a pea under the child’s eye, etc. If someone strikes a blow with an axe on the threshold over which the pregnant woman has stepped, will the child have a harelip?25 44. Are there any moments which have special significance for a pregnant woman? 45. Do you have a concept of “molodeye” (postevkes)[also postemkes, cravings and morning sickness], and what do you call it? 46. When does this usually occur, and what are its symptoms? 47. What beliefs and practices are connected with this phenomenon? 48. Is there a belief that during the time of molodeye, one must not refuse the whims and requests of the pregnant woman? What is the reason for this?26 49. What remedies and protections are there to prevent a pregnant woman from miscarrying?27 50. What reason do people usually give for a woman’s miscarriage?28 individual who denies the request of a pregnant woman was also found among Ukrainians. 25. H. Khayes, “Gleybungen un minhogimin farbindung mitn toyt,” YIVO Filologishe shriften 3 (1929): 311, n. 1, writes: “It is dangerous to chop wood on the threshold before a pregnant woman. . . . If someone chops the threshold with an axe and a pregnant woman crosses over it later, then her child will have a harelip.” Khayes recorded this belief from a source in Warsaw; similar beliefs were expressed by sources in Bilsk, Brisk, and Vilna. 26. Klein, A Time to Be Born, 106, writes, “Jews feared that unfulfilled cravings could induce miscarriage or handicap.” On cravings and the dangers associated with not satisfying them, see also 91–93. 27. On Jewish laws and customs concerning a woman who has miscarried or is in danger of miscarrying (as well as the miscarried fetus), see Yitzchok Silberstein and Moshe Rothschild, Toras Hayoledes (Bnei Brak, Israel: The Institute of Halacha and Medicine, 1989), 199–201. On the practice of wearing an even tekumah or protective stone as a segula against miscarriage, see Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 66b; Silberstein and Rothschild, Toras Hayoledes, 387–389. Klein, in A Time to Be Born,38, discusses later Jewish sources that describe the stone as containing another stone within it (and, therefore, on the principle of sympathetic magic, signifying the fetus safely ensconced in the womb). On the even tekumah, also see Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, 133–134. 28. For reasons that women miscarry, see Klein, A Time to Be Born, 106.


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51. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman steps on nail clippings or in ritually unclean water, she will miscarry?29 52. Describe what people do with the miscarried fetus. How do people bury it, etc.?30 B. The Midwife 53. How does a woman become a midwife? Does she inherit the position from her mother, or does she learn it?31 54. Are midwives only old women or young ones too?32 55. Is it a respected profession?33 56. Are there midwives who are well-off but who take care of women in childbed only as a mitzvah [religious command, i.e., a virtuous action done without regard to personal profit]?34 29. The belief that if a pregnant woman steps on nail clippings she may miscarry appears in several rabbinic sources (e.g., Babylonian Talmud Moed Katan 18), where it is cited to explain why clipped nails should be disposed of by burning, as well as in later Halakhic literature, that is, Shulhan Arukh Orakh Haim 260. Kabbalistic sources provide their own explanation for why nails are dangerous, linking them to the klipot, or evil forces. 30. On the view that the miscarried fetus should be buried, see Silberstein and Rothschild, Toras Hayoledes, 201. 31. A number of sources depict Jewish midwives as inheriting their position from their mothers. See, for example, Charlie Shukh, “A vunderlekher tsuzamenshtetl,” in Sefer Vladmirets, ed. Aharon Meyerowitz (Tel Aviv: Irgun yotse Vladimerets beYisrael, 1963), 87, who writes that when the local midwife, a woman known as “Di bobe Tsharne,” became too old to perform her duties, she was succeeded by her daughter, Breindel. 32. The Yiddish term employed for “midwife,” that is, bobe, literally means “grandmother,” suggesting the older age of the typical Jewish midwife in the communities of the Pale of Settlement. 33. From all the sources I have examined, it appears that at least most Jewish midwives were respected in their communities. For example, Morris Goldstein informed the author that the midwife in his town (a woman called Lubchikha, who was a relative of L. L. Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto) was “highly respected.” Shukh, in “A vunderlekher tsuzamenshtetl,” 87, also notes concerning Tsharne the midwife, “Later, when I was older, I, like everyone else in the shtetl, began to feel great respect [derkherets] for the beloved old woman.” 34. Shukh, “A vunderlekher tsuzamenshtetl,” 86–87, describes both the local Jewish midwife Tsharne and her daughter, Breindel, as not “working to make a living [parnose] but only to perform a mitsve.”

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57. Do women from the home-owning class [fun balebosn klas, lit. “from the class of owners.” The Heb. expression balebos literally means “owner,” therefore the owner of a house or a business, and, broadly speaking, the affluent, leading families of the community. See below, sec. H, nos. 1564–1581.] take up this profession?35 58. Do midwives employ remedies and charms? For what illnesses? 59. Do people more often employ a traditional midwife or an akusherke [a professionally trained midwife]?36 60. What are considered the virtues of a traditional midwife as opposed to such a professional?37

35. Avraham Miller, “Krinker haylers,” in Pinkas Krinki, ed. Dov Rabin (Tel Aviv: Hadekel, 1970), 211, describes the town midwife as the wife of a cantor. 36. The question contrasts the Yiddish term bobe, which means “grandmother” or, in this case, “traditional midwife,” with the Yiddish/Russian term akusherke (from the French accoucheur), which refers to a professionally trained midwife (though the term itself did not appear in Russian legislation, where a different set of titles was employed, except in the case of the compound phrase feldsheritsa-akursherka. On the competition between a traditional midwife, or bobe, and a younger Jewish akusherke (in this case, trained in Vilna), see Miller, “Krinker haylers,” 211. In the end, the bobe, a woman named Miriam Rayzel, who was “very afraid of a Jewish competitor,” drove the younger woman from the town. On this issue, Shukh, “A vunderlekher tsuzamenshtetl,” 87, writes, “It never occurred to anyone, not to turn to a great authority like Tsharne, even though a doctor lived in the shtetl, as well as a professionally trained akusherke.” 37. Samuel Ramer, “Childbirth and Culture: Midwifery in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Countryside,” in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David Ransel, 218–235 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), discusses the professionalization of midwifery in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1905 the number of schools to train professional midwives had increased to more than fifty, including some located in towns of the Pale of Settlement (e.g., Kishinev, Kamenets-Podolski, Kherson, Mogilev), and had produced more than ten thousand midwives. Ramer points out, on p. 228, that “a highly disproportionate number of midwives were Jews (25 percent of those in training in 1910).” Whether the relatively large number of Jewish midwives meant that Jewish women in the Pale availed themselves of their services is another question, however, especially since professionally trained Jewish midwives were allowed “to live outside the Pale of Settlement.” Indeed, Ramer argues that “escaping the confines of a traditional way of life” was a main motivation for many women entering the profession.


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61. Does it ever happen that people call upon a Christian midwife? Are there any beliefs associated with this?38 62. What does a midwife usually receive for her efforts? 63. What gifts do people give her, and who gives them?39 64. Is there a custom that the relatives and guests at the circumcision also give the midwife gifts (for example, the parents of the woman who gave birth, the sandek [man who holds the baby during circumcision], the kvater [godfather], etc.)? 65. Does the midwife also receive gifts at certain moments of the child’s life? (For example, at the time of the wedding is a shirt sent to the midwife?)40 66. Do people invite the midwife to the celebrations of the children she delivered? 67. Is it customary everywhere to treat the midwife with respect?41 68. Is there a custom that when the midwife dies, all of the children whom she brought into the world accompany her funeral procession with candles in their hands?42

38. Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 234, mention that in Apt there were two Jewish midwives, a woman and her daughter. In addition, there was an “akusherke . . . Polish woman, and she attended everyone. She brought her tools in a little wicker case.” 39. For a similar question concerning Russian peasants, see Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material,” question 28. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Food and Drink,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia. org/printarticle.aspx?id=2098, notes, “The bagel is mentioned in Kraków’s Jewish community’s statutes from 1610 as one of the gifts that may be given to a woman who has given birth, the midwife, and the girls and women who were present.” 40. Miller, “Krinker haylers,” 211, writes, “Each Purim she [the town midwife] would send ‘her’ children a sugar-cake for shalokh-manos [the foodstuff traditionally sent to others on Purim].” 41. Morris Goldstein informed the author that he would always say “Good day” if he encountered the midwife who had delivered him on the street. 42. T. A. Listova, “Russian Rituals, Customs, and Beliefs Associated with the Midwife (1850–1930), in Russian Traditional Culture: Religion, Gender, and Customary Law, ed. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, 131 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), notes that in “Saratov Province, ‘when a midwife dies, the women whom she delivered wind ribbons about her hands, so that the dead children may recognize and serve her.’ ”

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69. What do the children whom the midwife delivered call her, and what does she call them?43 70. Is there a belief that the more children the midwife leaves behind, the greater the reward she will receive in the afterlife?44 C. Childbirth 71. Is it considered better for the woman in childbed that no outsiders should know when she is about to give birth?45 72. How does the midwife prepare herself to deliver the baby? Does she wash her hands, put on special clothes? 73. Does she recite any particular prayers, supplications [tkhines, personal prayers usually in Yiddish, most often recited by women], or incantations?46

43. See Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material,” question 32. 44. Listova, “Russian Rituals, Customs, and Beliefs Associated with the Midwife (1850–1930),” 131, writes that “In Moscow Province, it was believed that the midwife ‘would not even suffer these terrible punishments in the next world that were reserved for us sinners. The children would pray for her and God would accede to their prayers.’ ” Conversely, in Shenkursk, people believed that “The midwife ‘must harvest a whole field of thorns in the next world.’ ” See also, Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material,” question 35, “What was the attitude of the community to the profession of the midwife: How were those views reflected in the notions concerning the midwife’s life after death?”; “Was it believed that a connection existed after death between the midwife and the children that she delivered (e.g., would the children attend her)?” 45. See Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material,” question 11. Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, 52, mentions that when a woman was about to give birth, a curtain was erected as a separation between her and the rest of the house for the sake of modesty and as a precaution against the Evil Eye. 46. For the original Yiddish text (and English translation) of a tkhine to be recited by a pregnant woman preparing to give birth, see Ida Cohen Selavan, Tracy Guren Klirs, and Gella Schweid Fishman, eds., The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women’s Prayers (West Orange, N.J.: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992), 126–127. On tkhines for pregnancy and childbirth, see Chava Weissler, “Mitsvot Built into the Body: Tkhines for Niddah, Pregnancy, and Childbirth,” in Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women ed. Chava Weissler, 66–75 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).


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74. What remedies or other means are employed in order to facilitate labor?47 75. Are there prayers or incantations [shprekhenishn] recited for this? Who says them? 76. Where do people lay the woman down when she is going to give birth? 77. Are the men sent out of the house when a woman is giving birth?48 78. Is the husband permitted in the room where the woman is in labor?49 79. Do people order the woman in labor to scream at, curse, or scold the husband? 80. What medicines, protections, or other means are employed when a woman is having difficulty giving birth?50 47. Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, 581, mentions a sgule for difficult childbirth that involves giving the woman snuff tobacco. 48. On the Eastern European Jewish practice of sending all the men out of the room where childbirth is taking place, see Shalom Sabar, “Childbirth and Magic: Jewish Folklore and Material Culture,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, vol. 2, ed. David Biale, 695 (New York: Schocken Books, 2002). 49. From a Halakhic perspective, the woman in childbirth has the status of a niddah (menstruating woman), which made the presence of the husband complicated. For a comparative context, see Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material,” question 16. 50. Aaron Berachia of Modena, Sefer Maavar Yabok, Siftei Tsedek (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 1995). chap. 5, writes, “If a woman is having difficulty giving birth, her husband should bring a candle from the synagogue and people should help her to light it herself. And this is to remind her of the merit of lighting the candle that is her duty [as one of three commandments traditionally required of Jewish women, along with taking Challah and observing the laws concerning menstruation].” Another response to a difficult labor was to visit the cemetery and pray at a grave. On this, see Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” 366. On p. 363, Elzet mentions the practice— which he considers silly—of putting a coin on the belly of the woman in labor, “because when the fetus sees the coin he will hurry out to snatch it.” Hannah Fuchs, “A khaseneh in shtetl,” in Pinkas Khmielnik: Yizker bukh nokh der khorev-gevorener yidisher kehile, ed. Efraim Shedletsk, 312 (Tel Aviv: Irgun yotse Hmyelnik beYisrael, 1960), relates how when she was a girl of marriageable age, another woman in the shtetl was having trouble giving birth. She was brought to her bedside and her “two long, black braids” were unbraided as a sgule that the woman should give birth. Fuchs also mentions other practices, including blowing a shofar and tying a

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81. Is it considered good luck to unlock all locks, to open all shut doors, drawers, and dressers, to loosen the clothes of everyone in the house, and to undo all buttons?51 82. Is it considered a protection to wrap the woman in labor in the paroykhes [the curtain over the Ark in which the Torah scrolls are kept]?52 83. When a woman is having difficulties giving birth, do people open the Ark in the synagogue, pray in the cemetery, measure the cemetery [feld mestn], or recite Psalms?53 84. Is it considered of benefit for a woman having difficulty giving birth to tie one end of a string to a Torah scroll and the other end of the string to the leg of the bed of the woman in labor?

string from the bed of the woman in labor to the Ark where the Torah was kept in the town’s besmedresh. 51. See Listova, “A Program for Collection of Material,” question 18, “Actions to facilitate birth: procession around the table, opening all doors and shutters, loosening the belt, administering a substance to produce contractions, opening the ‘heavenly’ gates in the church, etc.” On the practice of opening the “Tsar’s gates in the iconostatis” of a church in order to facilitate labor, also see Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 12. See also Daniel Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle: Custom, Lore and Iconography: Jewish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2008), 20. Hayyim Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew: Throughout the Ages of Jewish History (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1950), 67, writes, “In Lithuania, one who entered a house and found the chests and drawers open, would usually ask jestingly, ‘Is anyone in labor here?’ ” 52. On placing the band securing the Torah scroll on the woman in labor, see Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, 67. On the tradition of placing a Torah itself on the women in labor (a practice that generated controversy), see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 20. 53. The practice of Jewish women opening the Ark in the synagogue during times of danger is attested to in many sources from Eastern Europe. For instance, An-sky includes it in Act 1 of The Dybbuk (my thanks to Itzik Gottesman for reminding me of this). For another example, see Nathaniel Deutsch, The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 14. On the cemetery as an important site of Jewish women’s devotional practices, including the recitation of tkhines, and the practice of measuring graves or the cemetery itself with candle-wick, see Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 45, 48, 139ff.


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85. Do you know of any remedies that are employed in the case of a woman having problems giving birth? List them.54 86. What does the midwife do if the child comes out feet first, or when it extends a hand? 87. Are there any beliefs associated with this? 88. What beliefs exist concerning a child who is born in a caul? Is this considered a sign of good luck? And what do people do with the membrane?55 89. Is it considered good luck if a child is born with six fingers on a hand? What do people think the reason is for this phenomenon?56 90. What beliefs exist concerning a child who is born with teeth? 91. What beliefs exist concerning a child who is born with long hair? 92. What beliefs exist concerning a child who is born circumcised? Is this considered a good sign?57 93. What interpretations or beliefs are there concerning a child who cries as soon as he is born, or one who is born with a smile? 94. What interpretations or beliefs are there concerning the times when a child is born, and what do these times signify about the character and fortune of the child?

54. Morris Goldstein informed the author that people in Ludmir would study mishnayes (sections from the Mishnah) if a woman was having problems delivering her child. 55. Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” 363, mentions the belief that this is a good sign. Trachtenberg, in Jewish Magic and Superstition, p. 134, writes: “A man born with a caul was counseled to keep it on his person throughout his life as a protection against the demons who battle during a storm.” On the association of being born with a caul and good fortune (or, alternatively, witchcraft) elsewhere in Europe, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 15–16. 56. Morris Goldstein informed the author that he saw several individuals with six fingers while growing up, and that in Ludmir, at least, it was not considered good luck. 57. According to Jewish tradition, a number of biblical figures, including Adam, Noah, and Moses, were born circumcised. On Noah, for example, see Zohar 1:58b. Similarly, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was born already circumcised. In all these cases, it was viewed as a sign that the child was destined for greatness. While rare, the phenomenon, known as aposthia in medical literature, does occur in nature.

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95. Is there a custom that when the child is born, one should whisper the biblical verse, “Hear O Israel” [“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” Deut. 6:4] in his ear?58 96. Do you know any stories about children who were born overgrown with hair, with two heads, with three legs, with the head of a wild animal or cow, or as an hermaphrodite or androgyne? 97. Are there beliefs associated with these phenomena, and how do people explain them? 98. What reasons do people offer for why a child is born dead, and what beliefs are associated with this?59 99. What remedies and other means are employed in order to strengthen the child when he is born in a weakened condition?60 100. How is a child extracted from a woman who dies before she can give birth?61 101. What remedies and means are employed in this case? 58. According to another tradition, the first thing the child should hear is the shehekheyanu blessing typically recited upon performing a commandment for the first time during the year, eating a new fruit, and so on. 59. Hannah Fuchs, “A khaseneh in shtetl,” in Pinkas Khmielniki, p. 312, writes, “When, God forbid, it happened that a child died during the delivery, all the blame fell on the midwife.” 60. Morris Goldstein informed the author that people would recite tehillim (Psalms) on behalf of the child. 61. Babylonian Talmud Erchin 7a states that if a woman dies during childbirth on the Sabbath, then people should “bring a knife and cut open her belly and remove the fetus.” This practice is cited in a variety of Halakhic works, including Maimonides’s Hilkhot Shabbat and the Shulhan Arukh. However, Moshe Isserles notes that “In Ashkenaz, this practice was not engaged in even on weekdays, since people are not sufficiently expert in determining the death of the mother in a timely enough fashion to ensure that the fetus would survive.” On these sources, see Aaron Wertheim, Halakhot ve-Halikhot be-Hasidut (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1960), 228, n. 136. On p. 229, Wertheim describes an elaborate ritual in the name of the Hungarian Hasidic master Moshe Teiteilbaum of Ujhel (1759–1841). If a woman dies in labor, those around her blow a shofar and adjure her under the threat of excommunication to deliver the child. After waiting some time, if the woman still does not give birth, then three pious men form a beys din (court) and tell her in gentle tones that perhaps she has not delivered because she is afraid that the fetus will not have a name. Therefore, they promise to give him a “name in Israel, whether male or female, and if male, that they will circumcise him . . . and that by this name he will be raised with her during the Resurrection of the Dead. This they say to her three times in Hebrew and three times in Yiddish, and if they see that this also isn’t effective, after some time they


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102. Is the deceased woman commanded to give birth? Who makes this command, and how does it take place?62 103. What reasons do people offer for why she seems not to want to deliver the child? 104. How does the burial of such a child take place? Do people wash the body, do they bury it in the same grave as the mother, in the same burial shroud, or in a separate one?63 105. If the child is male, is he circumcised before the burial?64 106. With what is he circumcised? And where does the circumcision take place?65 107. Do people call him anything before the burial (a name)?66 108. How does the cutting of the umbilical cord take place? 109. What methods do people employ in order to expel the placenta? Do they give the woman in labor a bottle to blow into? 110. What is the woman given to eat right after labor? 111. Do you know of any cases or stories in which the husband of the woman giving birth also went into labor?

remove the fetus from the womb and ask her for forgiveness and tell her that they will do everything according to the custom of Israel and will bury her.” 62. See question 100. 63. A child who is born dead is referred to as a nefel (stillborn) and is traditionally buried in a Jewish cemetery without the ritual purification and other rites typically performed for a corpse. Nor are the parents expected to engage in the formal rituals of mourning. Various sources debate the procedure for burying the stillborn child. See Gavriel Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel: Taglahat ha-Yeladim ve-Holakhtam le-Heder (Israel: Cong. Nitei Gavriel, 2001), part 2, p. 721. 64. If the stillborn child was male, it was customary to circumcise him before burial. See Avraham Steinberg, Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics (Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 2003), 741; Solomon Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law: Kitzur Shulhan Arukh, trans. Hyman Goldin (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1961), vol. 4, p. 44, writes: “An infant who dies before circumcision, whether within the eight days or thereafter, must be circumcised at the grave, in order to remove the foreskin which is a disgrace to him, but no benedictions should be pronounced over this circumcision. He should be given a name to perpetuate his memory, and that mercy may be shown him from Heaven to be included in the resurrection of the dead, and that he may then have sufficient understanding to recognize his father and his mother.” In vol. 4, p. 103, Ganzfried notes, “A female infant should also be given a name; and it is necessary to inform the undertakers concerning this law.” 65. See question 105. 66. Ibid.

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112. How does this take place, what does it signify, and how do people explain it? 113. Is it customary for the midwife to squeeze the head of the child? Is this done with all children? 114. What form does she apply to it, and what is the reason for this? 115. What kinds of charms, amulets, or religious books are placed in the bed of the woman in labor? What are the texts of the amulets?67 116. In how many and in what places is it customary to hang up texts of shir hamales [the Psalms which begin “A Song of Ascents”]? 117. Is it customary to leave an open Khumesh [text of the five books of Moses used for study] with a male child until his circumcision?68 118. Is there a custom to lock the shutters at night in the room where the woman has given birth? 119. Do you know of any stories about children or expectant mothers who were harmed while the mothers were giving birth? 120. Is it considered a protection against evil spirits to place a key and a knife by the head of a woman giving birth?69 121. What precautions and means are employed when the child is unable to nurse? 122. When do people bathe a child for the first time? What practices are associated with this and with bathing a child in general?

67. On the widespread custom of placing a book of magical formulas called Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh under the pillow of the woman in labor, see Shalom Sabar, “Childbirth and Magic: Jewish Folklore and Material Culture,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, vol. 2, ed. David Biale, 695 (New York: Schocken Books, 2002). 68. Ivan Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), p. 34, mentions that “In medieval Ashkenaz, a special ceremony is described after birth in which a Pentateuch is placed under the baby’s head in the cradle.” 69. Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, p. 169, writes: “During the last days prior to delivery she would keep a knife with her when she was alone . . . the key to the synagogue was placed in her hand during labor; in isolated country places and villages where there was no synagogue the key to a church was borrowed for this purpose.” Sperber, Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 21–25, discusses the use of keys as a charm for women having difficult childbirth. On p. 21, n. 4, Sperber cites the important work by Shabbetai ben Jacob Isaac Lipschutz, Segulot Yisrael (Munkacs, 1905), which is a compendium of numerous protective and prophylactic measures. On the placing of a sword under the new mother’s head as a protection against Lilith, the baby-snatching demoness, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 26–31. In some communities the woman would actually wave this sword in the cardinal directions to ward off Lilith.


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123. How many days after the birth does one begin to swaddle the child?70 124. Is there a custom to place a cat, pieces of cake, or something else in the crib before one lays the child in it? Does one whisper something in the cat’s ear at that time?71 125. Is it a custom for all the students from the kheyder [lit. a room, more broadly a religious elementary school, see Second Section, nos. 305–520 below] in town or for students from just one kheyder to come over and to recite the verses beginning “Hear O Israel [see above, no. 95]”?72

70. On Eastern European Jewish swaddling practices in a cross-cultural context, see Ruth Benedict, “Child Rearing in Certain European Countries,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 19, no. 2 (1949): 342–350. 71. Antonina Martynova, “Life of the Pre-Revolutionary Village as Reflected in Popular Lullabies,” in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David Ransel, p. 178 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), writes: “In some parts of Russia people put a cat in the empty cradle before laying the infant down, in hopes that the child might sleep more soundly.” Of course, this runs counter to another folk belief that cats, perhaps attracted to the scent of milk, will enter the crib and smother the infant. Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 80, writes of Eastern European Jews: “Sometimes a living creature was rocked in the cradle before the child was placed in it. In the case of the boy, a little rooster was rocked; in the case of a girl, a little hen. Occasionally a cat or dog also served this purpose. It was believed that if the cradle held any mishap for the child, the danger would be transferred to the animal or fowl.” Schauss also mentions the Eastern European Jewish custom of throwing sweets, raisins, or coins in the cradle to bring on good luck. On p. 79, Schauss describes a medieval Jewish ritual surrounding the “cradling” of the boy following his circumcision, in which a quorum of ten men participated. The child was dressed in his fancy circumcision clothes, then a copy of the Pentateuch and a quill and ink bottle were placed with him in the cradle, so that the child would grow up to be a scholar and Torah scribe. 72. H. Gelernt, “The An-sky Expedition in Kremenets,” in Pinkas Kremenets: Sefer Zikaron, ed. A. Sh. Stein, p. 370 (Tel Aviv: Hotsaat Irgun Oley Kremenets beYisrael, 1954), mentions this custom. Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, p. 53, states that students from only the kheyder that was nearest to the home of the newborn would visit the child. Yekhiel Shtern, Kheyder un besmedresh (New York: YIVO, 1950), based on his own town of Tishevitz, is the most detailed account of the traditional Jewish educational institutions in a prewar Eastern European Jewish community. On p. 11, Shtern writes, “The child is tied to the kheyder already from the first day of his life. The Shir Hamayles that people place by the woman who has given birth are sold by the kheyder teacher. On the seventh day of life, the

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126. Which biblical verses do the other people recite during the recital of “Hear O Israel,” and what is given to the kheyder children afterwards (beans, cake)?73 127. Is it customary that the teacher who comes to recite “Hear O Israel” is considered to be the teacher of the child from that point on? Does he send the child Khanike [i.e., Hanukkah] dreidels, a Simkhes Toyre flag, a sword [at the holidays of Tisha be-Av or Lag ba-Omer— see below, nos. 512, 519], etc.?74 128. Is is customary for relatives and good friends to send gifts or food when a woman gives birth? D. Ben Zokher, Shalom Zokher, and Vakhnakht 129. Is it a custom on the first Sabbath of confinement to make an announcement on Friday night in the synagogue and to invite the congregation to a reception called a ben zokher?75 130. Is the announcement made in all the synagogues in town or only in the synagogue where the father prays? What is the text of the announcement? behelfer (teacher’s assistant) would lead the kheyder children after learning to the house of the woman who had given birth and there would recite the Shema with them.” Morris Goldstein informed the author that boys from the town beys yesomim (orphanage) would come to recite the Shema a day before the bris. Shukh, in “A vunderlekher tsuzamenshtetl,” p. 86, writes that when a boy was born, the melamed would write out a Shir Hamayles. The behelfer (also belfer), or teacher’s assistant, would then lead the students to the house of the woman who had given birth. The behelfer would attach the Shir Hamayles to the cradle rope and then lead the students in the Shema. Upon leaving, Tsharne, the local Jewish midwife, would reach into her apron full of nuts and candies and give some to each boy, declaring, “God grant that you should be fruitful and multiply.” 73. Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, p. 53, states that the kheyder children would recite the “Shema” and “Ha Malakh haGoel Oti miKol Ra” (“the angel who has redeemed me from all evil”), that is, Genesis 48:16. 74. For a description of boys playing with swords on Tisha be-Av, see Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Shulamit Magnus, 152 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 75. On the custom of the Ben Zokher, which appears to have taken root in Poland (where it probably arrived via Germany) by the sixteenth century, see Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 38. Marcus speculates that the phrase itself may derive from Jeremiah 20:15: “A boy (ben zakhar) is born to you.”


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131. What is served to the guests at a ben zokher? (peas, kvas, beer)? 132. Do people sing any particular songs [zmires]? 133. Is it a custom on Sabbath to call to the Torah the relatives of the father and for them to recite a mi shebeyrekh [“He Who blessed . . . ,” the first words of a special request for blessing] on behalf of the mother of the child? 134. Is it a custom on Sabbath, after praying, to make an announcement and invite people to a reception called the sholem zokher [“Greeting of the Male”]?76 135. What do the guests say who come to the sholem zokher, and what refreshments are served?77 136. Do you have a rule [tekoneh, lit. a “correction,” a rabbinical ruling] that at the sholem zokher one does not give the guests any refreshments besides a pinch of tobacco? What is the reason for this? 137. What are the greetings that are given at the ben zokher and the sholem zokher? 138. What is done on the night before the circumcision, called the vakhnakht [“Wakeful Night”]? Describe it.78 139. What refreshments are served to the guests?79 140. Which prayers are said at night by the crib of the child? 141. Is there a belief that on this night the child is in great danger of coming to harm and therefore must be watched?80 142. Do you know any stories about children who were taken and harmed during the vakhnakht? 76. Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 38: “[Shalom Zakhar is] an allusion to a Talmudic teaching, ‘When a boy (zakhar) is born, peace (shalom) comes too.’ ” 77. Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, p. 53, mentions that liquor, baked goods, and chickpeas seasoned with pepper and salt were typically served at the Shalom Zokher party. The same refreshments are also mentioned in the memorial book for Vengerov. 78. Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, p. 47, describes the Vakhnakht ritual as “a Jewish adaptation of the German Christian custom, by the same name, the night before baptism.” On Jewish customs associated with the night before the circumcision, see Lawrence Hoffman, “The Eve of Circumcision: A Chapter in the History of Jewish Nightlife,” Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 46–69. 79. Traditionally, poppy seed cake, honey cake, and bean dishes were served. 80. The female demon Lilith was believed to threaten the child before his circumcision, requiring a host of prophylactic precautions, including hanging up amulets in the room or placing a knife in the bed of the mother.

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143. Is it a custom on the vakhnakht to place the knife of the moyel [one who performs the ritual circumcision] by the head of the child? What is the reason for this?81 144. Is it a custom for the midwife to sit next to the child the entire night? E. Circumcision 145. Is it a custom on the day of the circumcision to light lots of candles in the synagogue before prayers? 146. Is there a custom on the day of the circumcision for the cantor in the synagogue where the father of the circumcised child prays to sing out loud the passage: vekhoros imoy habris [“And God made a covenant with him (Abraham),” Nehemaia 9:8, recited, along with several verses before and after, in the morning service], etc.? 147. Does your community perhaps have other prayers or biblical verses that people sing or recite? Do you perhaps have other customs? Describe all of them. 148. Is there a custom, if it is a day on which the Torah is read, to call up the father of a circumcised child? 149. Is there a belief that someone who is invited to a circumcision and doesn’t attend is in a state of excommunication for forty days, and therefore, when someone does not want to attend, he takes care that the synagogue caretaker [shames] does not happen to invite him? 150. Is it a custom for friends and acquaintances to send gifts to the circumcision? List which ones (for example, a tort, a cake, wine, etc.).82 81. On this custom, see Raphael Pattai, “Folk Customs and Charms Relating to Birth,” Talpioth 4 (1953–1954): 250–251 (Heb.). In general, Pattai’s article is a crucial source. Also see Hayyim Schauss, “The Birth of a Jewish Child,” YIVO Bleter 17 (1941): 47–63. 82. Shtern, Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 11, writes: “For the bris people would prepare a special cake called reshete. This reshete would be brought to the teacher to bake in the kheyder and the teacher would decorate the dough with . . . a fish and the words ‘mazl tov’.” Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July, p. 190, call this a “reshinke, a flat cake made from cookie dough. Two intertwined coils of dough make a decorative border, with an almond in every section. In the center are the words mazl-tov, congratulations, written with a coil of dough. . . . It was customary to serve this cake to the guests at the party after the circumcision and to save with mazl-tov written on it for the kimpeturn, the woman in confinement.”


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151. Where does the circumcision take place? In the synagogue or at home? If in the synagogue, what do people do in winter?83 152. Do you have a Chair for Elijah in your synagogue? How old is it?84 153. Describe the procedure of the circumcision, the names of all the honors, and what they consist of.85 154. What customs and practices exist concerning the bathing of the child before the circumcision and concerning the swaddling?86 155. Is there a custom for the friends and parents of the child to throw money for the midwife into a kneading trough?87

83. While circumcisions took place in both the home and the synagogue, the norm in Eastern Europe was to hold the ritual in the synagogue, either near the door or in front of the Ark. On this issue, see Shaye Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 37. 84. The textual source for the custom of the “Chair for Elijah” is a passage in Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer: “The sages have instituted [the custom] that there should be [at every circumcision] a seat of honor for the Messenger of the Covenant; for Elijah is called the Messenger of the Covenant, as it is said [I am sending my messenger to clear the way before me] the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, he is coming [emphasis in original]. [Malachi 3:1]” (translation in Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? 38–39). Such chairs were often beautifully carved and decorated and became the treasured possession of many communities. The circumcision did not usually take place on the Chair for Elijah itself but in a chair next to it, where the sandek sat. 85. Typically, the kvatterin (godmother) would take the child from the mother and hand him to the kvatter (godfather), who would give the child to the mohel, who would briefly place the child on the Chair for Elijah before transferring him to the lap (usually on a pillow) of the sandek, who sat on a neighboring chair. These actions were accompanied by a series of blessings. The circumcision ritual itself consists of three steps: milah (circumcision); periah (uncovering the corona); and metsitsah (suctioning the blood), followed by bandaging; see Mishnah Shabbat 19:2. 86. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 193, write: “When a child was born, it was placed in a swaddling cushion. The vikl-kishn, as it was called in Yiddish, was a long, narrow pillow, made of white linen, filled with down, and decorated with a little frill around the area where the baby’s head rested. The swaddling cushion was about twice as long as the baby. Mother placed the baby on the top half of the cushion and brought the other half up over the legs and as far as the neck, to cover the child. She tied the cushion together with little strips of cloth attached to its sides.” 87. On this custom, see Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 363, who mentions it as a sgule to help the child become wealthy. For the widespread Russian, Belorussian, and

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156. Is there a custom for the wife of the godfather to bring clothes for the child at the circumcision? 157. Is there a custom to give the honor of being godparents to a pair of young people, a bride and groom, a brother and sister, etc.?88 158. Is there a belief that being a godparent is of benefit in having children?89 159. Is there a custom that the sandek for a first son should be the mother’s father?90 160. Do all the honors of being a sandek in your town belong to the town rabbi, and is this recorded in his contract?91 161. Does it happen that an important person in a town will lease all of the sandek honors for himself? 162. Do you know of any stories about someone giving the honor of being a sandek to the first person he met, and what is the reason for this? 163. Do poor people ever give the honor of being a sandek to an important person so that he will pay for the cost of the circumcision? 164. Is it considered to be more likely [a sgule] that the child will turn out well if an important person is made the sandek? 165. Who is the moyel in your community? Does he receive payment, or does he do it as a mitzvah?92 166. Is there a belief that serving as a moyel is good luck [a sgule] for becoming wealthy? Ukrainian custom of giving money to the midwife during the christening ceremony of the child for what was colloquially known as the “baba’s porridge,” see Listova, “Russian Rituals, Customs, and Beliefs Associated with the Midwife (1850–1930),” 135. 88. It was customary to give the honor of being godparents to a young couple without children, since this was seen as a sgule for fertility. 89. This was, and in some communities still is, a common belief. 90. The term sandek derives from the Greek sunteknos (“the one with the child”). Also known as the baal beris (or baal berit), the sandek was typically an older male relative or respected member of the community who would hold the child in his lap during the circumcision. 91. Ezekiel Judah Landau (1713–1793), known popularly as the Noda biYehudah from the title of his book, observed, “In many locations [in Poland], the permanent rabbi is obliged to be the sandak.” For this quote, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 368, n. 34. 92. The term moyel (mohel in Hebrew) refers to the individual who performs circumcisions. While men traditionally served in this capacity, women could perform the ritual if a suitable man was unavailable.


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167. Does the moyel perform metsitse [sucking blood away from the penis], or do people honor another person with this?93 168. Where do people put the excised foreskin, and what practices and beliefs are associated with this?94 169. What beliefs and stories are associated with all of these mitsves [see above, no. 56], for example, with Elijah’s Chair, etc., and with the circumcision in general? 170. Is it a custom to name the first child after the wife’s family? 171. Are there some people who are accustomed to give their children names that appear in the weekly Torah portion or names of historical figures with a connection to the day? 172. Is it considered more likely that the child will become a good Jew if he is named after a Hasidic rebbe or a great sage? 173. Is there a custom that if a first child dies, the second child will be named after him? 174. Is it customary for people to name a child after the parents when they have died before the child is given a name? 175. Is it a custom to name a girl after a man and a boy after a woman [who has passed away]? 176. Give the names of this type that you know how to spell. 177. Is there a belief that the dead will have no rest in the grave until someone is named after him or her?

93. After removing the foreskin during circumcision, the moyel would traditionally (and in some Jewish communities still does) suck the blood directly from the wound, a practice known as metsitsah, or “sucking,” in Hebrew. In some communities, this aspect of the ritual would be performed by another person, known as a balmetsitse (see, for example, Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July, 191). This practice began to generate considerable controversy during the nineteenth century, when reformers attempted to eliminate it entirely or modify it in order to make it more hygienic and/or more palatable to non-Jews and assimilated Jews alike. Even the great Hungarian sage Moses Sofer (1762–1839), that is, the Hasam (or Hatam) Sofer, who became the ideological founder of the Haredi movement, decreed that modification to metsitsah (i.e., the use of a pipette) was permissible, a ruling that was later rejected or reinterpreted to the point of reversal by some of his followers. See Leonard Glick, Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 130– 131. The question takes for granted that this aspect of the ritual will be performed. 94. Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?, pp. 32–33, discusses a variety of traditions for how to dispose of the severed foreskin and blood, for example, burying both.

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178. Do you know any stories about a dead person who has appeared in a dream and requested that someone be named after him or her? What do people do in such a case?95 179. Does it happen that a child is given three or more names? 180. What terms of endearment exist for children (Zeydele [“little Grandfather”], Biueni, etc.)? 181. What special names are there for physically fragile children (Alter, Khayim) [“Old One”; “Life”—i.e., names that suggest a long life]? 182. What songs and biblical verses are sung at the circumcision? 183. Is it a custom for the cantor or shames to make mi shebeyrekh [see above, no. 133] on behalf of all the guests, and is he therefore given mi shebeyrekh money? 184. Is it a custom at a circumcision for people to set out collection plates for various organizations? 185. Do people customarily make the circumcision nicer and bigger for the first son? 186. What kind of congratulations are offered at the circumcision? 187. Does it ever happen that the mother of the child refuses to hand over the child to be circumcised, and what is the reason for this? 188. What provisions are there if the child bleeds after the circumcision? 189. How does the circumcision take place for a child who is born already circumcised?96 190. Is there a custom that if a child dies before the circumcision, he is circumcised in the cemetery before the burial?97 191. Is there a custom to circumcise him with a sharp stone? 192. What precautions and charms are employed to protect the mother and child from the Evil Eye at the time of the circumcision?98 95. Khayes, “Gleybungen un minhogimin farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 319, writes, “In general if a dead person comes frequently to someone in a dream, he must go to [the] grave to ask forgiveness.” 96. In cases of children who are born without a foreskin (i.e., aposthia), Hillel and Shammai both agree that a drop of blood must be drawn from the place where the foreskin would normally exist (see Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 135a). 97. See question 105. 98. An-sky, “Opshrekhenish un feraydung bay di litvish-raysishe yuden,” in Gezamlte shriften, vol. 15, p. 156 (Vilna-Warsaw-New York: Ferlag An-sky, 1925), notes that the surest way to avoid the Evil Eye is to keep the mother and newborn child away from strangers and even to limit contact with close relatives. He adds that protective amulets (typically hung around the neck of the child) containing salt or quicksilver (i.e., mercury) or dirt from the floor under the bed where the child


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193. If perhaps you know of other practices and customs, whether widespread or local, describe them. 194. If you know of any stories, beliefs, jokes, or aphorisms connected to the circumcision in general or to particular moments, describe them clearly. F. Pidyen ha-Ben [The Redemption of the Firstborn Son] 195. Describe the order of the pidyen ha-ben. What honors and customs are associated with it?99 196. Where does the pidyen ha-ben take place, with the father at home or in synagogue? 197. Are there any tkhines [see above, no. 73] that are recited during the pidyen ha-ben? 198. Are there any special congratulations for the occasion? 199. Which kohen [lit. “priest,” a member of the priestly class who performs the “redemption”] is preferred for the pidyen ha-ben, a rich one or a poor one? A relation or a stranger? A young man or an old man? Do people seek out an important person, a scholar? 200. Is there a festive meal, and how does it take place? 201. Does the kohen keep the pidyen ha-ben money for himself, or does he return it to the parents of the child or donate it to charity?100 202. What stories do you know about pidyen ha-ben? G. Nursing and the Wet Nurse 203. Do you know of any stories about a child who recited a blessing over nursing immediately after being born [according to Jewish religious law, a blessing must be recited before drinking or eating]? was born were thought to be most effective. It was also helpful to dress the child in clothes that were given as a gift and not in clothes that were bought especially for him or her. If, despite these precautions, someone was suspected of giving the Evil Eye to a child, after he or she had departed, one was supposed to throw a coal over the threshold or throw salt on his footsteps and then wash the child’s face with cold water. My thanks to Itzik Gottesman for pointing me to this essay by An-sky. 99. Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 145, describes the practice of pidyen ha-ben as follows: “It is the duty of every Jew to redeem his son, who is the mother’s firstborn. He redeems him from a Kohen, by giving him five selaim, which in our currency is equal to five and one-third ounces of refined silver. . . . It is customary to make a feast when this precept is performed.” 100. On the custom that the kohen returns the redemption money to the father, see Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, 46.

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204. What special practices and remedies are employed when the mother doesn’t have any milk for nursing?101 205. At what age do people begin to give a child food, and what kind?102 206. If a child begins to talk before he is weaned, is he taught to make a blessing over nursing? 207. At what age is a child usually weaned?103 208. Is there a difference between a boy and girl? 209. Does it happen that a physically weak child is nursed much longer than normal? Until what age? 210. Is there a belief that the longer a child nurses, the poorer his faculties will turn out to be? 211. Are there any incantations or special precautions for the weaning of a child? 212. With what do people smear the breast during weaning so that the child will not take it? 213. What other methods are employed to wean the child from the breast?104 101. Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 568, mentions a sgule for “increasing the milk of a woman.” 102. Berlant, Di gliklekhe muter, pp. 33–44, in a section entitled “The Weaning of the Child from the Breast,” advises: “When the child is healthy, from twenty-four to thirty-six weeks, one can begin to nurse it less often and instead of milk give it other types of food.” Berlant suggests a few foods to start with, including “not very fresh white bread with some water and a little sugar,” “not very strong chicken soup,” veal, groats, or rice. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 81, writes: “Among the Jews in Eastern Europe, weaning a child was marked by certain symbolic acts. The first food that the child received after weaning was not the mother’s, but was usually procured from a neighbor. When the child took the food from the other woman, the mother announced that it would be the last time that the boy or girl would be supported by others. A second parallel custom placed a tiny bag around the child’s neck, into which coins might be dropped. This also signified that the child had received donations for the last time in his or her life.” 103. Rabbinic sources indicate twenty-four months as the period of breastfeeding, though later authors mention various ages at which Jewish children were weaned (up to five years, in the case of an unhealthy child, according to one medieval source). Berlant, in Di gliklekhe muter, “Concerning the Amount of Time Which One Should Nurse the Child,” p. 32, writes, “The order of nature shows us that it is enough to nurse for eight or nine months or forty weeks.” 104. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 193, describe the weaning of children as follows: “When the baby got teeth and


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214. Does it ever happen that people start to nurse a child over again? 215. Does it ever happen that a child is weaned before the usual time? For what reasons does this occur? 216. For what reasons do people usually give a child to a wet nurse? Does it only happen when a mother doesn’t have any milk, or also for other reasons? Which ones? 217. Is it considered more Jewish for a mother to nurse her child herself?105 218. How often was a child given to a wet nurse in the past, and how often does this happen now? 219. Is it different with a boy or a girl? 220. Is there a belief that a mother loves her children more when she has nursed them herself? 221. How do people behave with the wet nurse in the house? Is she held in more esteem than other employees in the home? 222. Do people seek to rehire the same wet nurse who nursed the first child? 223. What does the wet nurse do with her own child during the time that she’s nursing someone else’s child? 224. Does it happen that people take the wet nurse into their home along with her own child? 225. Do people often bring a child to the wet nurse’s house?106

bit on the nipple, my mother complained bitterly. That was when she stopped nursing. To pacify the child, she would put a little lump of sugar into a white piece of cloth and let the baby suck on it. When the baby was ready for solid food, she would heat some milk to a lukewarm temperature and drop in some challah. The mother or whoever else was feeding the baby would take the moistened challah in their mouth, masticate the food, return it to the spoon, and feed it to the baby.” 105. Berlant, Di gliklekhe muter, p. 25, argues strongly that women should nurse their own children: “The first duty of every healthy mother and for her own benefit and that of the child is for her alone to nurse her child. However, many women do not nurse their own children alone because they think that by doing so, they will preserve their beauty and youth longer. But this way of thinking is very false.” For an illuminating discussion of Jews and wet nurses in the Middle Ages, see Elisheva Baumgarten, “Maternal Nursing and Wet Nurses: Feeding and Caring for Infants,” in Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten, 119–153 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 106. Although Halakhic sources opposed Jewish children being nursed in the houses of non-Jewish wet nurses, Baumgarten has demonstrated that this sometimes occurred during the medieval period at least.

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226. Do people look for a wet nurse from a good family because they believe that the milk will have an effect on the child’s character?107 227. Did it used to happen that people hired an unmarried girl as a wet nurse? Does it often happen now? 228. Does it often happen that people get a Christian wet nurse?108 229. Do you know of any stories about a child who would not nurse from a Christian wet nurse?109 230. Besides the usual foods and drinks, is the wet nurse also given those such as will help her to produce more milk (for example, beer, milk, eggs, etc.)? 231. Is it customary to give the wet nurse gifts at different moments in the child’s life? At which moments? What kinds of gifts? 232. What kind of connection remains between a child and the wet nurse who nursed him? 233. What kinds of relations exist between children who have nursed from the same wet nurse?110 107. Baumgarten, in Mothers and Children, p. 133, notes, “The importance attributed to maternal nursing derived from the common belief that breast milk not only gave nourishment, but also passed on personality traits. Therefore, in theory, when hiring a wet nurse, it was important not only to ensure that she was healthy and that her milk was plentiful, but also that she was of solid character.” 108. Halakhic authorities allowed Jewish women to employ Christian wet nurses, but they strictly prohibited Jewish women from serving as wet nurses to Christians. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 48, writes: “Legally, a Jewish child may be given to a non-Jewess to be nursed. Nevertheless, if possible to have it nursed by a Jewess, it should not be given to a non-Jewess, for it tends to dull the sensibilities and to create a bad temper.” Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 194, describe the Christian wet nurse employed by Mayer Kirshenblatt’s grandmother at the end of the nineteenth century: “After my mother was born . . . her mother had a problem with her nipples and could not nurse, so she hired a wet nurse. . . . Jadwiga always managed to have a child at the same time as my grandmother did; this was how she was able to nurse six of grandmother’s children for her.” 109. On the tradition that Moses refused to nurse from an Egyptian wet nurse before Miriam “said to Pharaoh’s daughter: Shall I go and get you a Hebrew nurse to suckle the child for you” (Exodus 2:7), see Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 133–134. 110. Islamic legal sources treat children who have nursed from the same woman as “milk siblings” and prohibit their marriage on the grounds of incest. Such a view does not appear in Jewish legal writings, yet similar beliefs may have existed on the level of folk culture.


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234. What stories, sayings, or jokes do people tell about a wet nurse and the male children she has nursed? H. The Nursling 235. Is there a belief that one should not leave a child completely alone in a room until he is four weeks old?111 236. When is a child first swaddled? 237. How is the child swaddled? 238. From what do people make the swaddling clothes? 239. Are there any customs associated with this?112 240. When do people stop swaddling a child? Is it the same for all children, or are there differences, and if so, what are they? 241. What kinds of cradles are used in your community? 242. Is it perhaps customary not to rock a child at all? 243. Is there a belief that two people must not rock a child together? 244. Is there a belief that one should not rock an empty cradle?113 245. Is there a belief that one should not pass something over a child’s cradle?114 246. Is there a belief that a child should not be held in front of a mirror until he gets his first teeth?115 247. Is there a belief that one should not kiss a child on the mouth or lift him over one’s head until he gets teeth? 248. What signs are there to determine whether a child is beginning to teethe? 249. What is a child given to bite on when teething? Do you have such things?

111. This practice is connected to the fear that the arch-demoness Lilith will harm the child if she or he is left alone. 112. There was a tradition of cutting a strip of cloth from the swaddling clothes of a boy following his circumcision in order to make it into a decorated wimpel, that is, a cloth used to tie a Torah scroll. 113. On this belief, see Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, 80. 114. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 90, states that among Jews in Eastern Europe, stepping over a child was frowned upon, and that if it occurred, the offending individual was supposed to step back over the child in the opposite direction. 115. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 89, states that in Eastern Europe, Jews did not expose a child to moonlight until he cut his first tooth.

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250. What do people smear on the gums?116 251. Are there any charms [farshprekhenishn, formulas or incantations to be recited] against difficult teething? 252. What other special practices are there for this? 253. What beliefs are associated with it? 254. What do people do with a child’s tooth when it falls out? Do people throw it on top of the stove and say: “Little mouse, little mouse, here is a tooth of bone for you; give me an iron one!”?117 255. What do people do when a nursling bites his mother’s breast? 256. Do you know of any cases in which a mother suffocated a child while nursing him in bed? 257. What penance does such a mother perform? 258. How is a child taught to walk? 259. Are there special stools for this? 260. Is there a custom that the first time that a child begins to walk, one cuts his fetter? How does this take place, and where does this custom come from?118 261. Is it considered a remedy if a child is a sedun (who cannot stand on his feet) to place him in warm tripe [tribukh]? 262. What other remedies or practices are employed for this condition?

116. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 579, states: “When the teeth begin to emerge, one should rub butter or chicken fat on the gums or hang from his [the child’s] neck the tooth of a horse or of a dog.” 117. Variations on the “tooth mouse” tradition are found in a variety of cultures. William Francis Ryan, in The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 128, writes: “When a child lost a milk tooth the child or its nurse would throw the tooth behind the stove and say: ‘Mouse, mouse, here is a radish tooth, forge me an iron one.’ ” 118. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, pp. 81–82, writes: “Among the Jews in Eastern Europe, there were some curious customs and beliefs connected with aiding a child to walk. The child was placed on the threshold and a knife was drawn three times under the soles of his feet. The knife was supposed to cut the fetter which prevented the child from walking. Some made a cut with the knife on the spot where the child stood. If the child stumbled and fell, water was immediately poured on that spot and the spot was perforated with a knife. Believing that the earth drew the child toward itself, certain means were employed to counteract that effect. There was a saying among women that if children fall and are not hurt, they fall on invisible pillows that angels place under them.”


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263. With what lullabies do people lull a child to sleep? Which lullabies do people sing to a boy and which to a girl?119 264. Recount the stories that people tell to a child in a crib. 265. What words do people teach the child to speak first?120 266. What songs, dances, and games do people teach the child? Which ones to a boy and which ones to a girl?121 267. What riddles do people ask a child? 268. What tongue-twisters do people teach a child (for example, “four pair of porcelain plates”)? 269. With what do people frighten a child so that he will go to sleep more quickly? 270. What play-things are there for such children (blocks, rings, etc.)? 271. Do you know anyone who has antique children’s playthings? 272. With what and with whom do people forbid a child from playing (with cats, dogs, etc.)? 273. What kinds of treats do people give children? 274. What kinds of food do people give a child that are different from those for older people? 275. What kinds of charms [shmires, lit. “protections”] do people hang on a child’s neck (curatives, etc.)? Do people place a seashell around the child’s neck? For what is this a remedy? Do you have such a seashell? 276. Where can such things be obtained?

119. For a collection of Eastern European Jewish lullabies, see Saul Ginzburg and Peysakh Marek, Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Voskhod, 1901), 59ff. The best known of these was Abraham Goldfaden’s 1880 composition “Rozhinkes mit mandlen,” or “Raisins and Almonds,” about a little white goat. 120. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 367, writes: “When the small child knows how to speak, his father teaches him, besides the verse, ‘Torah tsivah lanu Moshe’ [Moses commanded us the Law] . . . the names of the limbs in Hebrew: hand, foot, head, etc.” 121. Among the questionnaires produced by the YIVO Ethnographic Section during the 1920s was one devoted to children’s games and toys. See “Questionnaire 6: Children’s Play and Games,” June 1926, YIVO RG 1.2, Records of YIVO (Vilna): Ethnographic Committee, F7. A digitized copy can be found at http://www .yivoencyclopedia.org/search.aspx?query=toys.

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277. What do people say when a child sneezes?122 278. What do people say when a child yawns?123 279. What do people say when a child farts?124 280. What do people say when a child coughs? 281. What do people say when a child puts on a clean shirt?125 282. What blessings is a child taught to say before going to sleep and when getting up? 283. Does it happen that a Christian maidservant ever teaches a child to say Jewish blessings or to observe Jewish practices?

122. James Matisoff, in Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 31–32, lists a number of Yiddish expressions that can be used when a child (or someone else) sneezes, including a lebn tsu dir (“Life to you”); zolstu zayn gezunt (“May you be healthy”), and, the most popular, tsu gezunt (“to your health”). In addition, there is a more widespread Jewish tradition of responding with the Aramaic assuta (“health”) or asia (“doctor”). Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 384–401, discusses Jewish customs regarding sneezing in a cross-cultural context. From an early period, Jewish sources operate on the principle that “sneezing carries the danger of breathing out the soul.” 123. Eastern European Jews, like members of various other cultures, believed that yawning could be a sign of the Evil Eye and, therefore, required protective measures, such as incantations and spitting. On this cross-cultural belief, see Alan Dundes, The Evil Eye: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 258. Abraham Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” in East European Jewry in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 36, writes: “If a child was ill, particularly if it yawned, the mother immediately concluded that the child was given the evil eye. The only remedy for the evil eye was exorcism. For that purpose the women had several Yiddish incantations. . . . [for example] There are three cracks in the ceiling wide. There the child’s eye will depart and hide.” 124. I do not know any expression specifically for farting. However, Matisoff, in Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears, p. 32, mentions the following expression to be used after burping a child: a greptsele aroys, a gezuntele arayn (“A burpie-wurpie out, and a healthie-wealthie in”). Other expressions that are used for children include a gezunt dir in yeder eyverl (“a health to all your little body parts”) and a gezunt dir in kepele (“a health to your little head”). 125. Matisoff, in Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears, pp. 35, 129, notes that when someone puts on a new garment for the first time, the following Yiddish expressions are used: trog es gezunterheyt (“wear it in good health”), and tserays es gezunterheyt (“tear it in good health”).


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I. Opsherenish [the haircut—first performed on a boy when he is three] 284. How do people explain the custom of the Opsherenish?126 285. How does the ritual of Opsherenish take place? Are there special scissors for it?127 286. Who does the cutting, and is it customary that the honor goes to the grandfather?128 287. Is the father called to the Torah on that day, and does he make a mi shebeyrekh for the child? [See above, no. 133.] 288. Is a festive meal prepared for the Opsherenish?129 289. Do you know of any words from the Torah that the child says during the Opsherenish? 290. Do you know of any stories about a child reciting a commentary on the Torah at the Opsherenish? 291. Where do people put the cut hair?130

126. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 23–24, discusses the origin of first cutting a boy’s hair at the age of three years. Zinner attributes this Hasidic custom, which does not appear in the Shulhan Arukh or other major Halakhic works, to stories concerning the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, who in turn were influenced by a tradition that the Kabbalist Isaac Luria cut his three-year-old son’s hair on the holiday of Lag be-Omer. On why the cutting takes place at three years (or at other ages, depending on the community), see pp. 29–31. 127. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 41–42, describes various customs for how to perform the haircut (e.g., making the first cut near the place where the peyes (sidelocks) will be, or near the spot where the tefillin are placed on the head). 128. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 82, states that the honor of making the first cut was given to the oldest person present, ideally a kohen (priest). Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 47–48, mentions a variety of customs, including giving the honor of making the first cut to a Hasidic rebbe, a grandfather, a kohen, or another “important person.” While the mother is able to participate in the cutting, employing a non-Jewish barber is frowned upon for Kabbalistic reasons. A Hasid from Brooklyn informed the author that in his community “some people go [to] their rebbe, some people do it at home. Anybody can cut, but they start with the oldest person and go down.” 129. On the custom of holding a feast, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 73; Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, 82. 130. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, p. 70, discusses customs concerning what to do with the cut hair (e.g., all agree that it should not be thrown away, some burn it while others don’t, etc.).

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292. Is it a custom to weigh the hair and to dedicate its weight to charity? What stories do you know about this?131 293. Are there any customs associated with a girl turning three years old? J. The Upbringing of the Child until the Kheyder 294. At what age do people first put a hat or a yarmulke and an arbe kanfes [lit. “four corners,” an undergarment with ritual fringes worn by adult males] on a child? And what do people say while they are doing it?132 295. At what age do people begin to teach the child to say Moyde ani and Borikh Rakhmone [Hebrew and Aramaic, respectively: “I acknowledge” and “Blessed is the Merciful One,” prayers said when first waking up]?133 296. At what age do people start bringing a young boy with them to the synagogue?134 297. Record all of the blessings that people teach a child to say in Yiddish and in Hebrew. Which ones does one teach a boy and which ones a girl? 298. Does it happen that a child is taught to say blessings in other languages? 299. At what age do people begin to make religious play-things for a child (a grager [noisemaker used at Purim], a flag [at Simkhat

131. An-sky, in “Folks kinder-lider,” in Gezamlte shriften, vol. 15 (Vilna-WarsawNew York: Ferlag An-sky, 1925), p. 197, discusses the custom of opsherenish in general and mentions “a touching custom: the parents weigh the child’s cut hair and donate the weight in silver or gold to the shul or poor people.” On this custom, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 70–72; Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, 82. This custom was related to other practices—rooted in the Talmud—in which the child himself was weighed (in some places in Eastern Europe, on every birthday) and his weight in bread was given to charity. 132. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 76–84, describes the various customs associated with introducing the yarmulke and arbe kanfes to the child. 133. The Moyde ani prayer was frequently taught to a boy as soon as he could speak. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 20, mentions that one of the duties of the behelfer (teacher’s assistant) in his town’s kheyder was to go to each of the children’s homes in the morning and help them recite the Moyde ani. 134. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, p. 100, discusses the custom of not bringing a boy to synagogue until he is three years old.


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Torah], a sword [at Lag ba-Omer—see below, nos. 512, 519], etc.)?135 300. At what age do people begin to make special, small khales [braided white bread for religious celebrations] for children on Sabbath and religious holidays? 301. What manners do people teach a child before kheyder (to greet people, to wish them a good Sabbath, etc.)? 302. What non-Jewish manners do people teach a child? 303. What religious customs are first taught to a child (kissing the ritual fringes during prayer, observing Sabbath, etc.)?136 304. At what age is a child taught to ask the four questions on Passover? Second Section: From the Kheyder to the Wedding A. Preparation for Kheyder 305. Is it customary among you to send the child to kheyder to play before he begins studying?137 306. At what age is he sent to school? At three years old?138 307. What terms do people establish with the teacher concerning this? 308. Who brings the child to kheyder and takes him home: the school assistant or someone from the child’s family? 135. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 22, writes: “An important holiday in the kheyder was Lag ba-Omer. . . . The behelfer together with the older boys of the kheyder, who knew how to carve, would make bows and arrows.” Eliezer Meir Lifshitz, “Ha-Heder,” in Ha-Heder: Mekharim, teudot, pirke sifrut ve-zikhronot, ed. David Assaf and Immanuel Etkes, p. 150 (Tel Aviv: Universitat Tel Aviv, 2010), describes the different toys and objects associated with each holiday, depicting them as part of what he calls “children’s Judaism.” 136. Kissing holy books, washing the hands upon waking, and reciting the Shema were among the first religious practices taught to a child. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 31, writes: “Every day in the morning [the assistant behelfer] would go to the home of each kheyder student and help him get dressed, recite the Moyde ani and Shema, and kiss the tsitsis.” 137. Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, p. 54, mentions that “Until the age of five or six the youngsters still enjoyed a bit of freedom of movement and a few games: pitching buttons at a hole, hide-and-seek, horses, chasing pigs and throwing stones at their non-kosher hides, and others.” 138. On this question, see Moshe Brill, “The Age of the Child When He Enters School,” Tarbiz 9 (1938) (Hebrew).

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309. How do people pay the assistant? And what other responsibilities does the helper have besides bringing the children to kheyder?139 310. Is he supposed to teach the child to say Moyde ani [see above, no. 295], take him to synagogue on Sabbath, and say “amen” with him, etc.? 311. How long do people send a child to play in kheyder? For a school term or more? 312. How many hours a day does the child sent there only to play spend in the kheyder? 313. Do people also send such a child to kheyder at night in winter time? 314. What does he do in the kheyder? 315. Does the melamed [lit. the teacher in a religious elementary school] teach him anything? What does he teach him? 316. Does the child sit with all the other students at the table or by himself? 317. Does the teacher punish him the same as the other students or not? What special punishments are there for a child who is only there playing?140 318. Is the child who plays in the kheyder already considered a future student by the teacher? B. Introduction to the Kheyder 319. At what age is a child in your community brought to the kheyder?141 139. A Hasid from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, informed the author that in his community the teacher’s assistant gets paid by the school and by parents’ tips on Hanukkah, Purim, and Passover. 140. A Hasid from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, informed the author that in his community, “the kid might be put in the corner. Nowadays, teachers don’t hit anymore.” 141. While most communities or families introduced the child at three years old, this was not universal. Shaul Stampfer, “Heder Study, Torah, and Social Stratification,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in NineteenthCentury Eastern Europe, ed. Shaul Stampfer, p. 150 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), discusses the practical reasons for introducing the child at three years of age. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 176, provides a particularly evocative description of a six-year-old’s ritual entry to the kheyder that coincided with a visit by the famous Jewish educational reformer Max Lilienthal. On this custom, also see Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: Schocken, 1995), 88; Diane Roskies and


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320. Do people in your community celebrate the bringing of a child to the kheyder? 321. Do people make a festive meal for the bringing to the kheyder?142 322. What kind of meal do people prepare: cake and brandy or a hot meal? 323. Does the child recite a commentary on the Torah? What does he say? Give an example. 324. Is it a custom in your community that on the day that the child is brought to kheyder, he is carried to synagogue beforehand? 325. What happens in synagogue? 326. Who carries the child to synagogue or kheyder?143 327. Do people carry him wrapped in a tallis [ritual prayer shawl]? What is the reason for this?144 328. Do people cover his face so that he will not be able to see impure things on the way?145 329. In your community, do people recite biblical verses or other texts when they carry a child to kheyder?146

David Roskies, The Shtetl Book: An Introduction to East European Jewish Life and Lore (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1975), 151–157. 142. On this custom see, Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 152–157. 143. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 103–104, mentions the custom that the father himself should bring the child (connected to the commandment that the father should teach his son Torah), and, in his absence, the mother or grandfather. 144. An-sky, “Folks kinder-lider,” p. 197, describes this custom. Ivan Marcus, in Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 76, provides a “thick description” of this rite and its symbolism. Medieval Jewish texts stress that the child must be carried, even though he can walk, and that “He is to be wrapped in a garment, either a coat or a talit. In some of the German-Jewish versions, this gesture is explained as a means of protecting the child from seeing any sources of impurity, such as ‘a Christian or a dog’ or a ‘dog, pig, ass, or a Christian.’ ” A French-Jewish source states that the custom of wrapping the child in the tallis is to “teach him modesty and humility,” and “so the evil eye does not harm him.” 145. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 121–125, discusses a wide variety of impure people (gentiles, menstruating women), animals (flies, pigs), and things (pictures of animals) that the child should not look at on the way to (or from) the kheyder. 146. On the different biblical verses customarily recited by the melamed and others present, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 136.

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330. Does a custom exist in your community that the children from the kheyder go out to meet their new schoolmate?147 331. Do you know of a custom that people should teach the child a moral lesson of some kind [musar here is meant broadly, as moral admonition or instruction. Contrast below, no. 605] before showing him the alef [the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet]? 332. What kind of things do people say to the child? Record them.148 333. Do people smear the alefbeys [alphabet] tablet with honey so that the child will lick it? What is the reason for this?149 334. What do people say when they show the child the alef (yell at the aleph)?150 335. Do people show the child designs which form letters, for instance, a yoke with two buckets is an alef?151 336. Do people throw cakes, other sweets, or coins over the child’s head onto the tablet and then say that an angel threw them to him from heaven for his learning?152

147. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 11, writes, “The children [from the kheyder] would stand around the newly arrived child and watch with curiosity, waiting for the sweets and cakes that the father and mother would distribute among them.” 148. Moshe Sagi-Klinmintz, “Ha-heder, ha-melamdim u-vet midrash,” in Sefer Zikaron Voislavitsa (Tel Aviv: Ha-Tsafon, 1970), p. 131, describes the situation in his town: “When the child completed his third year, he was brought to the barber to receive his first hair cut . . . and people prepared him to accept the understanding that he must stop wasting his time chasing after butterflies and birds. He is already big and he must begin to learn. The father of the family would contact Moshe the melamed and after negotiations they would come to an agreement on the payment for a single ‘semester.’ ” 149. An-sky, in “Folks kinder-lider,” vol. 15, p. 197, writes that people “smear the letters of the alef-beys with honey and give the child a lick, ‘so that he should feel the sweetness of the holy letters.’ ” On the ancient and medieval roots and complex significance of this tradition, see Ivan Marcus, “Food Magic and Mnemonic Gestures,” in Rituals of Childhood, 47–73. 150. For an examination of how the alef beys was taught, see Diane Roskies, “Alphabet Instruction in the East European Heder,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 17 (1978): 21–53. 151. On this practice, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 134. 152. On this tradition, see Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother, 176; Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 139. An-sky, in “Folks kinder-lider,” p. 197, describes the kheyder children as throwing cookies, candies, other treats, and coins from above, “in order to convince the child that they are being thrown by angels in heaven, so that


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337. Do people only show the child an alef at first or more letters as well?153 338. Do people show him letters that can be combined into a holy word?154 339. What words of congratulations are said to the child and the parents when they bring him to the kheyder?155 340. Is it customary for people to distribute cakes and other treats to the children of the kheyder?156 341. Who from among the child’s relatives comes with him to the kheyder?157 342. Do people carry the child back from the kheyder in a tallis as well?158 343. What other customs are associated with bringing a child to kheyder? 344. Does the teacher receive a gift for showing the alef?159 345. Does the child begin to go to the kheyder the next day or later?

he will learn diligently.” A Hasid from Brooklyn informed the author that in his community this custom is still practiced by some members. 153. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 127–129, discusses a variety of customs regarding which letters of the alef beys the child should be taught (e.g., the letters alef, mem, and tav, which form the Hebrew word emet, or “truth.”) Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 12, mentions that the letters shin, dalet, yod, alef, mem, and tav were taught first, which form the Hebrew words Shadai emet, or “God is truth.” 154. A Hasid from Brooklyn informed the author that in his community the teacher “shows the letters alef-mem-tuv, which makes the world ‘Emes,’ which is the name of Hashem [God].” 155. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 11, mentions that the rebetsin (wife of the teacher) would tell the parents of the child that “He should desire to learn.” 156. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 176, mentions cookies, nuts, raisins, and sweets, which the child’s mother provided. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 140–143, describes the custom of baking a cake and decorating it with the words from Isaiah 50:4–5 (or different verses in other communities); hard-boiling an egg and inscribing it with the text from Ezekiel 3:3; or writing the letters of the alef beys on almonds and feeding them to the boy. 157. In many communities the mother was expected to accompany the child as well as the father. 158. This was the tradition in some communities. 159. A Hasid from Brooklyn informed the author that in his community the teacher receives “a tip” for showing the child the alef.

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346. Does the teacher who recited the “Hear O Israel” when the child was born [see above, no. 125] have a right to be the child’s teacher? 347. What stories do you know about bringing a child to kheyder? C. Behelfer [the Teacher’s Assistant] 348. Are teachers’ assistants only young unmarried men, or are there older married ones too?160 349. Are there teachers’ assistants who have other jobs at the same time?161 350. Who pays the teacher’s assistant: the families of the children or the teacher?162 351. How much do people pay him, and how do they pay him, by the month or the school term?163 352. Does the teacher’s assistant eat his meals in the homes of well-off families?164

160. For an evocative description of a behelfer, see Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother, 139–142. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 30, mentions that in his kheyder there was a chief behelfer and an assistant behelfer. On the different types of teachers’ assistants, see Lifshitz, “Ha-Heder,” in Ha-Heder, pp. 138–140. Lifshitz, a native of Skole in Galicia, first published his essay in Ha-Tekufah 7 (1920): 294–352. 161. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 31, writes, “In our region there was a custom that at each wedding the chief behelfer had to prepare the fish. Very often he would also serve as the waiter at the wedding. . . . For these aforementioned jobs the behelfer would receive payment.” 162. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 30, writes, “The chief behelfer received full room and board from the teacher, and in addition to that he also received a certain payment in money after every school term.” 163. While the chief behelfer was paid by the teacher, Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 31, writes that the assistant behelfer “would receive monthly payments from each householder whose child he would help to recite the Moyde ani with in the morning. In addition, he would have ‘eating days’ with the rich householders who had children in the kheyder.” Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” p. 141, notes that the behelfer was paid by the semester and the “amount he received, apart from food and dwelling, varied significantly.” 164. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 139, notes that her behelfer (“an extremely tall sprout of a youth,” named Velvel) “ate with us ‘days,’ as we called it then, that is, on each day of the week he ate at the parents of a different student.”


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353. Do the earnings from the flags, dreidels, gragers, and the like belong to the teacher’s assistant?165 354. Does the teacher’s assistant carry the children to the kheyder on his shoulders?166 355. Does he carry girls as well?167 356. Does he bring food to the children in kheyder? Does he ever steal their lunches?168 357. Does the teacher’s assistant gather the children in synagogue on Sabbath to say with them “amen,” or yehe shme robo [the congregation’s response during the kaddish or “sanctification” prayer that is repeated several times a day], etc.?169 358. What does the assistant teach the children in kheyder?170 359. What games does he usually play with the children?171

165. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 30, writes, “The behelfer would earn side income from different play-things that he used to make for the children, such as: toy guns, dreidels, gragers, etc.” 166. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 31, writes, “The assistant behelfer would also carry children on his shoulders who either were not able or did not want to go in good will to the kheyder. He was therefore hated by the youth because of those whom he would carry on his shoulders by force, without paying any attention to their crying.” 167. Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 140, describes Velvel as accompanying her and her sister to their kheyder but not physically carrying them. 168. Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 140, describes lunch in her girl’s kheyder as follows: “The long awaited man finally arrived and was a sight to see: Velvel carried pots, jars bows, glasses, spoons of various sorts and sizes, bread and food, as follows: the pots and mugs were tied tightly to the long broad girdle around his waist and reached down well over his hips. The ingenious bokher [unmarried male] placed the bread on his chest between his shirt and caftan; the filled, little dishes he placed one upon the other, pressing them tightly on his arm against his chest and holding them with his other free hand.” 169. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 30, mentions that the behelfer would bring the children to synagogue on each Sabbath and holiday and help them pray and recite “amen” at the appropriate times. 170. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 30, writes, “The chief behelfer would learn with the children in the kheyder exactly as the teacher would.” 171. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 31, notes that one of the duties of the assistant behelfer was to help with all the games that were played in kheyder during the holidays.

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360. Do you know of any stories about holy men [zaddikim, lit. “righteous ones,” i.e., people of the highest religious attainment] and lamed vovnikim [lit. “the 36”—according to a mystical teaching, 36 unknown, righteous people on whom the existence of the world depends in every generation) who disguised themselves as teachers’ assistants?172 361. Does it often happen that teachers’ assistants become melamdim [pl. of melamed]? D. The Melamed 362. List all the levels of melamdim (a dardeki melamed [who teaches the youngest children], a Khumesh melamed [who teaches the basic text of the Five Books of Moses], etc.). What is the usual tuition for the highest and the lowest levels? 363. How many school terms does a child usually learn with a melamed from each level? 364. How old do the melamdim in your community tend to be? 365. How did they support themselves before they became melamdim? 366. Do the melamdim also have side jobs (matchmaking, etc.)?173 367. How much does a melamed earn in a school term? The highest and the lowest? Do people pay the melamed even if the child becomes sick and does not attend kheyder?174 172. This question reflects the well-known tradition that the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, worked as a behelfer in a kheyder before revealing himself to be a holy man. 173. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 146, mentions that the melamed in her kheyder, Reb Leser, made money on the side as a healer (including exorcising the Evil Eye) and, especially, as a shadkhn, or matchmaker. 174. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 33, writes, “Wages [for a melamed] were seven rubles a semester. Poor children did not pay anything. The community took care of them.” I. M. Rubinow, in “Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia,” U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor 72 (September 1907), p. 582, writes, “While the income of the ‘melamed’ is small, the expense of education is a heavy burden to a poor family with several children of school age. For a half-year term the average tuition fees vary from 10 to 15 rubles [$5.15 to $7.73] for the older and more advanced pupils. The fees are usually higher in the large cities and lower in the small settlements, the average being about 25 rubles [$12.88] a year in the former and 18 rubles [$9.27] a year in the latter. Such fees scarcely provide the ‘melamed’ with an income of 200 to 300 rubles [$103.00 to $154.50] a year.”


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368. What attributes were considered to be virtues for a melamed in the past, and what are they considered to be now?175 369. How do people behave toward a Lithuanian melamed in Poland and a Polish melamed in Lithuania?176 370. With whom do people prefer to place their children in kheyder: an old-fashioned melamed or a modern one? An old one or a young one? 371. What tales, sayings, and jokes do you know about melamdim? 372. When do melamdim begin their employment as teachers? 373. Does tenure exist in the profession? 374. Does the melamed’s wife ever teach for her husband? 375. Does it often happen that one melamed sues another in a rabbinical court on account of a student? 376. Does it happen that melamdim make an agreement among themselves not to lower the cost of tuition? 377. Does it happen that melamdim make an alliance not to take a certain student because his father has done something offensive? 378. Does it occur that a melamed gives a student room and board in his home? Under what circumstances? 379. Does it occur that a melamed from another town or one who is unmarried eats his meals with a well-off family? 380. Does it often occur that a homeowner takes in a melamed as a boarder? What other tasks besides teaching does the melamed perform in such a case? Does it happen that the homeowner also boards a student so it costs less for him? 381. Does it ever occur that Jews in rural areas board melamdim in their villages? What responsibilities besides teaching do the melamdim take on (for instance, ritual slaughter, etc.)? And what do you know about this from former times? 382. Are there a lot of melamdim who teach the children how to write Yiddish or to read and write Russian? 175. Melamdim typically came from the lower rungs of Jewish society and were not men known for their learning. Having said that, some melamdim were more skilled than others and typically attracted students from more affluent families who could pay higher tuitions (thereby reducing the total number of students in the kheyder and, concomitantly, improving the learning conditions). 176. On the derogatory expressions Litvak khazir (“Lithuanian pig”) and Litvak tseylem kop (lit. “Lithuanian cross head,” i.e., heretic), sometimes applied by Polish Jews to their Lithuanian counterparts, see Yekhezkel Kotik, A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik, ed. David Assaf (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 30.

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383. When a melamed has his own children, does he teach them himself or give them to another melamed? E. The Kheyder and the Curriculum in the Dardeki [Beginners] and Khumesh [Pentateuch] Kheyders 384. How many kheyders are there in your town?177 385. Are there khedorim metukonim [lit. “improved” or “reformed schools”], and how many?178 386. In the traditional kheyders do boys and girls learn together? And in which ones?179 387. How many children learn in a kheyder? In a dardeki kheyder and in a higher kheyder?180 177. For bibliographic sources on the kheyder, see Diane Roskies, “Heder: Primary Education among East European Jews—A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of Published Sources,” YIVO Working Papers in Yiddish and East European Studies 25 (1977); Assaf and Etkes, Ha-Heder. For statistical surveys done prior to World War I, see “Sovremennyi kheder,” Vestnik Obshchestva rasprostraneniya prosveshcheniya mezhdu evreyami v Rossii 17 (November 1912): 3–90 (Hebrew translation, “Ha-Heder ha-yom,” in Assaf and Etkes, Ha-Heder, 269–346). Initiated by the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, this work contains statistics on different provinces of the Russian Empire, including Ekaterionslav, Volhynia, Minsk, and Plock and Lublin. Concerning the total number of kheyders in the Pale of Settlement, see Rubinow, “Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia,” 581: “The Jewish Colonization Society [i.e., Association] collated data from 507 localities, with a Jewish population of 1,420,000 and found 7,145 ‘kheders,’ from which data it estimates the total number existing ‘kheders’ to be 24,000.” For the result of the Jewish Colonization Association survey, see Jewish Colonization Association, Sbornik materialov ob konomicheskom polozhenii Evreev v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Izd. Evreskago kolonizatsionnago obshchestva, 1904); Jewish Colonization Association, Recueil de Matériaux sur la situation économique des Israélites de Russie I (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1906). 178. Steven Zipperstein, “Reinventing Heders,” Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 49, notes that by 1903 there were about nine hundred Zionist “reformed” kheyders in Russia, representing approximately 10 percent of all registered kheyders. 179. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 14, mentions that “A small number of girls learned in the kheyder with boys. The majority of girls learned in a special girl’s kheyder, where instead of a rebbe a rebetsin would teach.” Many other sources attest to the presence of mixed-gender kheyders. 180. Gabriella Safran, in Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 198, notes that during the


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388. How many children learn in a kheyder metukah? 389. Is the kheyder located in the melamed’s home or in another house?181 390. Are there kheyders in the study houses [bate-medroshim], the women’s sections of the synagogues, or in the private prayer houses [shtiblekh]? 391. Is the room where children learn used only as a kheyder, or do people live there too? 392. What types of tables and chairs are used in a kheyder?182 393. When do school terms begin, and when do they end?183

expedition “in one town, An-sky saw forty children (thirty-five boys, five girls) crowded into a heder ‘like herrings in a box,’ although the limit was officially twenty.” Rubinow, in “Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia,” p. 581, writes: “An investigation conducted by the well-known Imperial Russian Free Economic Society in 1894 determined the number of ‘kheders’ at 14,740, with 202,000 pupils, or an average of 13.7 pupils per ‘kheder.’ ” 181. Typically the kheyder was held in a room in the home of the melamed. Rubinow, in “Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia,” p. 582, writes: “Only in about 20 percent of the schools investigated was a separate room specially provided in the house of the teacher. In the remaining 80 percent the schoolroom was the living room of the teacher’s family, which was at the same time the sleeping room, the kitchen, etc.” Hayim Yosef Sobol, in “Yalduti ve-neuri be-heder u-ve-yeshiva,” Sefer HaZikaron le Kehilat Chelm (Tel Aviv: Chelm Society in Israel and the United States, 1981), p. 237, writes, “The heders [in Chelm] were generally very small and were part of the dwelling of the melamed’s family.” 182. Rubinow, in “Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia,” p. 582, writes, “The furnishings of a typical ‘kheder’ are limited to a long table provided on both sides with plain wooden benches, so high that the children’s feet hang down without touching the floor, because the teacher cannot afford to provide the children of different ages with benches of different heights. Usually there is not even a back to lean on, and the children are forced to bend over the table through the long school day.” Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” p. 145, describes the typical furniture in a kheyder as “a table and benches. A long table in a spot with a lot of light, and a chair at the head of the table with two benches on either side: the chair for the melamed and the benches for the students. . . . The benches were typically without any [back] support, and the child was supported by the table in front of him.” 183. Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” p. 146, writes, “Each ‘semester’ lasted for six months from the holiday of Sukkot [in the fall] to the festival of Passover [in the spring], and from here to Rosh Hashanah. Between the semesters were several free days, the summer semester ended with Rosh Hashanah, and the winter semester began after the holiday.”

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394. How long do Dardeki and Khumesh kheyder children learn in the summer, and how long in the winter?184 395. When, in which months, and on which days, do the children begin to learn at night, and when do they stop?185 396. Do people make a festive meal when the children stop learning at night? 397. Does the teacher teach a moral lesson [see above, no. 331] to the children during the meal? 398. Is it a custom for the melamed to learn with the children Friday at dawn? 399. Do the children go to each other’s houses to wake one another up? 400. On what days do the children not learn in the kheyder at all or learn for only half a day?186 401. Does the teacher give homework on these days? 402. If there are several classes in the kheyder, do all of them sit at the same table when one of the classes is learning? 403. How does teaching begin in a Dardeki kheyder? Is a pointer used for teaching? Does the teacher have everyone repeat after him? Does he have them yell out loud? 404. Is the Khumesh taught along with accompanying translation and commentaries [khibur, lit. that which is attached, the accompaniment] in the Dardeki kheyder?187 405. How does the beginning of Khumesh learning take place?188 406. Does the child recite a Torah commentary when he begins to learn Khumesh? Write down the commentary. Do people stand the

184. Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” p. 146, writes, “The period of learning in the heder is for the entire day. . . . The fixed hours of study are from after the Shahrit [morning prayers] until the time of the Minha [afternoon prayers] in the summer, and in the winter two or three hours in the evening.” In the gemore kheyder, they started earlier, before the morning prayers. 185. Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” p. 146, notes, “Learning in the evening began at the start of the winter and continued for the entire semester.” 186. Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” p. 146, notes that children did not attend the kheyder on Sabbaths or holidays. 187. Kheyder students learned Khumesh along with a Yiddish translation. On this phenomenon, see Shlomo Noble, Khumesh-Taytch: An oysforshung veygn der traditsie fun taytshn Khumesh in di khedorim (New York: YIVO, 1943). 188. Traditionally, children began learning the biblical book of Leviticus. On this custom, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 158–162; Lifshitz, “Ha-Heder,” 170.


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child on the table while he gives the commentary? Do they make a festive meal?189 407. Is the Khumesh taught consecutively, or are a few sections from the weekly portion studied at a time? 408. Which readings do people omit? 409. When do the children start learning Khumesh with Rashi [Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, an eleventh-century rabbi whose commentary on the entire Bible and Talmud was and is considered essential in a traditional education]?190 410. When do the children start learning Tanakh [the Hebrew Bible]?191 411. Do people always begin with the former prophets [Joshua through Kings] or also with the latter prophets [Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.]? 412. Which prophets are taught most often? 413. How much time is devoted to teaching Khumesh, and how much to Tanakh? 414. Are there prominent families or melamdim who maintain that teaching Tanakh is a superfluous or half-heretical thing? 415. What is taught to children in your community before religious holidays and at the end of the semester (Kiddush [lit. “sanctification,” the holiday and Sabbath prayer over wine], makhzor [lit. “cycle,” the New Year prayer book], dinim [ Jewish laws determining specific aspects of behavior], Shulhan Arukh [lit. “the Set Table,” Yosef Caro’s code of law along with explanations], and the like)? 189. On the festive meal and ritual question and answer that accompanied the beginning of learning the Pentateuch (i.e., Khumesh), see Lifshitz, “Ha-Heder,” 171. An-sky, in “Folks kinder-lider,” p. 197, also describes this custom. 190. Stampfer, in “Heder Study, Torah, and Social Stratification,” p. 154, writes: “The study of humash with Rashi not only served as a means of learning Hebrew and gaining familiarity with a basic sacred text, but it also exposed the pupil to the midrashic view of the world and to traditional opinions on the role of the Jew in the world. It introduced them to rabbinic methods of thought and textual analysis.” Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” pp. 174–175, discusses the learning of Rashi. 191. In the wake of the Haskalah, teaching the rest of the Tanakh (rather than simply the Pentateuch) frequently engendered controversy in Eastern Europe, with traditional Jews often avoiding or limiting this activity, and educational reformers advocating for it. Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” p. 176, points out that studying the Prophets and Writings did not occupy a significant place in the advanced kheyder curriculum in part because of the focus on learning Talmud.

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416. What is taught in your community on Friday (for example, a review of the Khumesh, a lesson in the Talmud, the weekly Torah portion, the Aramaic translation of the Torah, or the Song of Songs)?192 417. Is it customary that on Sabbath, the teacher comes to the home to examine the child?193 418. Does the father ever bring his child to a prominent man to examine him? 419. Is there a tradition in your community for the teacher to recite a biblical chapter on Sunday, and for the good students to repeat it after him? 420. Is it a custom for the good students to review with the weaker ones? 421. Does the teacher punish the good student if the bad student entrusted to him for review can’t repeat the biblical chapter on Thursday? 422. Is it a custom for the teacher to bring his students on the day before Yom Kippur to the Rov [the chief rabbi in town], or to an important man, like an elder, for him to bless them? F. The Gemore Kheyder (see no. 423 below) 423. At what age do people begin to learn Gemore [lit. “completion,” the Aramaic section of the Talmud produced by the Amoraim]?194 424. Do people make a festive meal for this? 425. Does the student recite a Torah commentary? Write it down. If it comes from a religious book, from which one? 426. Does one always begin with Lekekh Tov [“A Good Lesson”—a religious text from the eleventh century, which combines material from the Talmud with midrashim, rabbinical stories supplemental to those in the Bible, as well as Jewish law] or from easy chapters of the Mishneh [lit. “Repetition,” a second-century collection of Jewish religious law, pl. Mishnayes]? From which ones?195

192. In many communities, on Fridays, children were tested on what they had learned during the previous week. 193. It was customary for either the father or the melamed to examine the child on the week’s material on the Sabbath. 194. Most students began to learn in the gemore kheyder at ten years of age. 195. For a description of what was learned initially, see Lifshitz, “Ha-Heder,” 177. An-sky, in “Folks kinder-lider,” p. 197, mentions that the Lekekh-Tov was employed to introduce the child to learning gemore.


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427. Which tractates are learned first, and which later?196 428. List the tractates that people learn more often and those that people never learn in kheyder, and the reason for this. 429. When do people begin to learn with Toysfes [medieval Ashkenazi commentaries on the Talmud] and Maharsho [Shmuel Eidels, 1555–1631, author of the Talmudic commentary Khiddushei Halakhot]? 430. Is it customary for the students themselves always to read over the material that they are going to learn beforehand? 431. Is it customary that on Thursday the students review everything that they learned during the week? 432. What stories do you know from the past about the review of what has been learned on Thursdays? 433. Is it customary for children to learn by heart, and which tractates? 434. Are there still certain students who can memorize entire tractates? 435. What do you know about those in the past who could do so? 436. What do you know about virtuosos at memorizing Gemore (for instance, to know the text by heart if someone points at a place with their finger, to say the text backwards, to know how many times such and such a word is found in the Talmud, etc.)? 437. Which students are considered to be good, those who grasp things easily or those who have a good memory? 438. List and describe all the qualities of a good student (retention, insight, diligence, brilliance, etc.). 439. List and describe the faults of a bad student. G. Punishments 440. List all the punishments, whether corporeal or psychological, that occur in the kheyder.197 196. In many communities, the Talmudic tractates Bava Metsia or Berakhot were learned first. 197. Kotik, in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, pp. 144–145, describes some of the vicious punishments meted out to kheyder children by the melamed. Lifshitz, in “Ha-Heder,” pp. 148–149, notes that the kind of punishment meted out in a particular kheyder depended on a variety of factors, including the temperament of the melamed (e.g., some could “control their students with a glance,” while others relied on the whip) and the attitude of the parents, with some actually encouraging the melamed to be tough with their children. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, pp. 28–29, lists different kinds of punishments in the kheyder.

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441. Does the beating of students occur in all kheyders or just some of them? Does a difference exist between kheyders for rich children and poor ones? 442. Do you notice the beating of students gradually disappearing from the kheyders? 443. At what age are students usually no longer beaten? 444. For what does one most often strike the students: for mischief, for poor comprehension, or for bad habits? 445. With what are they beaten? (a whip, a rod, or a yarmulke [skullcap], how many tails in the whip, how many rods in a bundle)? 446. Are there still melamdim who always keep a rod stuck in the door so that the students can see it? Are there still melamdim who soak the rods in salt water? 447. Where do people lay the child, over a stool or a knee? 448. How many blows are usually given? For which actions more, for which less? 449. Is the number of blows reduced if the child lays himself over the stool? 450. Do people always strike the bare flesh? 451. What does the teacher say while he is beating the child? 452. Does the teacher ever command one child to beat another? 453. Does the teacher ever command the children to spit on the place which has been beaten? 454. Does the teacher ever command the children to taunt the beaten child? Does it often happen that the teacher beats a child on the parents’ order? 455. Must the beaten child kiss the rod after the beating? 456. What derisive jokes and songs are there about a beaten child? 457. Do you know of a phenomenon from the past in which every Thursday the entire kheyder was beaten, guilty and innocent alike? What is the reason for this? And what was it called? 458. What other punishments were there in the kheyders, and which ones are there now? 459. Are students made to kneel on [uncooked] peas? For how long?198 460. Are children put in a pillory with a shirt over their heads? 461. Are children put in a pillory with their faces to the wall? With a poker in hand? 198. Eddy Portnoy’s grandmother recalled a similar punishment from her childhood in the shtetl of Tonyez (near Toraf).


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462. Is a dunce cap made of paper put on the child’s head? What is written on it? 463. Is the child placed in a pillory with a prayer book or book of Psalms and commanded to pray or recite Psalms as a punishment? 464. Does the teacher strike someone sitting at the table with his whip? 465. With what other blows does the teacher punish someone (a slap, a pinch, striking a hand with a ruler, etc.)? 466. How else does the teacher shame the students? 467. Does the teacher order the students not to divulge what happens in the kheyder?199 468. Do children ever become ill from a teacher’s blows? Crippled? 469. What stories do you know about this from the past? 470. With what words does the teacher berate a bad student? With what curses does he curse the student? 471. Does it happen that people remove a child from the kheyder because the teacher has beaten him? 472. What were the punishments in kheyder in former times? Describe them. 473. What stories do you know about kheyders in the past? H. Manners in the Kheyder 474. How much respect are the kheyder children obligated to show the teacher? 475. What specific behaviors express the respect that kheyder children show the teacher? 476. Is care taken not to sit in the teacher’s chair? 477. Is it considered a duty to approach the teacher in the synagogue and say “Good Sabbath” and “Happy Holiday”? 478. Is it customary for people who have already stopped learning in a kheyder to send their former teacher shalokh manos [gifts on Purim] or money on holidays or Khanike [Hanukkah], etc.? 479. Is it considered a duty to attend the funeral of one’s former teacher? 480. Does the teacher employ the kheyder children for various errands and housework? 199. Itzik Gottesman has reminded me that the phrase “nisht oyszogn fun kheyder,” or “do not divulge what happens in the kheyder,” has become a Yiddish expression meaning “do not reveal to the outside what is happening on the inside.”

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481. Does the rebetsin also employ kheyder children to perform various errands related to the household? 482. What kind of teacher do the students consider good, and what kind bad? 483. What kind of nicknames do the students give the teacher (for example, demon, goat, yellow, etc.)?200 484. What pranks do the children play on the teacher out of spite (for example, hiding his whip, gluing his beard to the table when he falls asleep, etc.)? 485. Is it customary for a kheyder-boy to request permission from the teacher when he needs to leave class a while? Does he have to explain why he needs to leave? 486. How do the children in the kheyder occupy themselves when the teacher is teaching another class? Do they practice writing?201 487. Do the children knead human figures out of clay, make carvings, or play games [lozn flitermayz, lit. “to let out or let go of bats,” an unidentified children’s game], etc.?202 488. Do the children trade buttons, old pens, etc.?203 489. Are the children allowed to play jacks, buttons, etc., in kheyder?

200. Nicknames were extremely common among the Jewish communities of the Pale. Kotik, in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, p. 145, mentions that one of the melamdim in Kamenetz was “nicknamed David with the tangled hair, as his head was covered with a mass of knotted hair.” 201. Stampfer, in “Heder Study, Torah, and Social Stratification,” p. 152, notes that “for most East European Jews before the mid-nineteenth century writing was a useful skill, but it was not a necessary one.” Parents who wanted their children to learn how to write would employ special teachers known as shraybers, who also taught arithmetic. On this phenomenon, see also Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 68–69. 202. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 28, mentions that girls in the kheyder would shape challahs out of mud. 203. On children’s games, see Shmuel Lehman, “Di kinder velt,” in Bay undz Yidn: zamlung far folklor un filologye, ed. Pinkhes Graubard (Warsaw: M. Vanvild, 1923); Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 210–224 (including diagrams). My thanks to Itzik Gottesman for these references.


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490. Which children’s games are there among the kheyder children? Describe them if you know how they go (for example: Goliath the Philistine, Samson the Hero and the Philistines, etc.).204 491. Are the children allowed to play in front of the teacher, or do they hide from him? 492. Do kheyder boys play together with girls? 493. Do children ever quarrel or fight during a game and go to the teacher to sort it out? 494. What tricks does the teacher employ to arrive at the truth? (For example, giving both sides straws of equal length to hold in their mouths and saying that the straw of the one telling a lie will grow so that the liar gets excited and bites the straw.) 495. What games are prohibited by the teacher? 496. What riddles do the teacher and older people ask the children? 497. What stories are told in the kheyder particularly between afternoon and evening prayers when the teacher leaves to go to synagogue? 498. What songs are sung among the kheyder children? 499. What riddles and jokes are told among the children?205 500. Is there solidarity among the children from the same kheyder?206

204. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 55, writes: “Whether in a boys’ kheyder or a girls’ kheyder, there were a great number of games that were handed down from generation to generation. The older children would teach the younger.” On pp. 55–76, Shtern provides detailed descriptions of these games, including their names, rules, accompanying songs, and so on. Shtern divides the games into major categories, such as “games with books”; “games with buttons”; “hand-games”; and so on. 205. An-sky published a short essay on Yiddish folk riddles. See An-sky, “Yidishe folks-retnishen,” in Gezamlte shriftin, vol. 15, 225–229 (Vilna-Warsaw-New York: Ferlag An-sky, 1925). One example: “It flies without wings, builds without bricks, lies down like a lord, and gets up like a fool (Snow).” My thanks to Itzik Gottesman for pointing me to this essay by An-sky. 206. Yoysef Fridman, “A Strike in Kheyder,” Loshits (Lisice); le-zeykher an umgebrakhte kehile, in From a Ruined Garden, Second Expanded Edition: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, ed. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, pp. 133–134 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), describes how he called on his fellow kheyder students “to refuse to be beaten anymore and to strike in protest. All the children agreed not to return to kheyder . . . we didn’t return to kheyder until we were assured that the rebe would no longer beat us.”

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501. Do children from one kheyder ever make an agreement to behave a certain way with the teacher or with the children from other kheyders? 502. What are the students not supposed to reveal about the kheyder to outsiders? 503. Does the melamed ever tell one of the students to spy on the other children and then tell him what they are doing? 504. How do students behave toward a fellow student who has become an informer? 505. Do they ever try him and punish him? How? 506. What stories do you know about this? 507. Do wars ever take place between children from one kheyder and those from other kheyders? 508. Do wars ever take place between Jewish children and Christian ones? 509. Do children make weapons and paper clothes for these wars? Can you obtain such weapons and clothes? 510. Do these wars take place in secret, unknown to the teacher? 511. Does the teacher ever go for strolls with the children? To bathe? 512. Does the teacher go walking with the children outside of the town on Lag ba-Omer [lit. the thirty-third day of the Sheave Offering, a springtime holiday on which, because of its association with the Jewish Revolt against Rome, children are encouraged to play at being soldiers outdoors]? Where does he go with them? To the cemetery or to a mountainside? What is the reason for this? 513. Do all the children carry bows and swords? 514. Do you have any such bows and swords? 515. What foods do the children bring to the festive meal? 516. What stories does the teacher tell them then? 517. Do the children from all the kheyders go to one place, or does each kheyder go to a separate place? 518. How do the children play out in the open, on a mountainside? 519. Do people make swords for children on Tisha be-Av [the ninth of the month of Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem]?207 520. Do they go and stick the swords in the graves of their parents or grandparents? What is the reason for this?

207. See question 127.


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I. Talmud Toyre [lit. “Study of the Torah”—a religious school supported by the community for those who could not afford kheyder] 521. In your community is the talmud toyre located in the synagogue, in a rented apartment, or in a private home?208 522. How long has it existed? 523. Who supports it?209 524. How much does it cost annually? 525. Is it traditional or progressive [metukan, see above, no. 385]? 526. How many teachers are there? 527. How many students? How many classes? 528. What are the lowest and the highest ages of the students? 529. Is it a custom in your community to go around on Fridays to collect donations for the talmud toyre? 530. Do the families pay a monthly fee for the talmud toyre? 531. Is a plate set out at weddings and circumcisions in your community on behalf of the talmud toyre? 532. What other measures are employed in order to maintain the talmud toyre? 533. Are there perhaps pious women who go out to collect donations and clothes for the talmud toyre? Who are they? 534. Do you know any stories about such women? 535. Are the children in the talmud toyre also provided with food and clothes? 536. Are there poor children in the talmud toyre who eat their meals in other people’s homes? 537. Is there a kitchen in the talmud toyre, or do people bring food there from the homes of those who can afford it? 538. Do the children of well-off people also learn in the talmud toyre in exchange for their support? 539. Do poor people pay any tuition for their children? 540. Are there any customs for the introduction of a child into the talmud toyre? 208. Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, p. 54, describes the talmud toyre as existing in a separate building. 209. The talmud toyre was supported by the community to ensure that the children of its indigent members received a basic Jewish education. Stampfer, in “Heder Study, Torah, and Social Stratification,” pp. 148–149, n. 10, has described the institution as “simply a heder with magnified problems. The classes were large and the teachers of even lower quality than poor heder teachers. Students in a talmud torah had low academic aspirations—and matching low achievements.”

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541. Which subjects are taught in the talmud toyre?210 542. Do people also teach Gemore, and which tractates? 543. Are the children taught how to write there? 544. Are children taught a trade in the talmud toyre? 545. Which trades are taught? For how much time a day? 546. Do people see to it that the children who finish the talmud toyre are apprenticed to a tradesman?211 547. How do the teachers punish the children? Are the same punishments used as in the kheyders, or are there others, and which? 548. Is a student ever expelled from the talmud toyre, and for what? 549. Is a child ever punished by not being given food? 550. Is there a special pillory or dungeon for the talmud toyre? 551. Do men from prominent families come on Sabbath to examine the talmud toyre students? 552. Is it customary for the talmud toyre teachers to bring the students to the Study House to recite Psalms on behalf of a sick person, or to a funeral to recite Psalms, or to the house of a woman giving birth to recite the Psalms, which begin “Song of Ascents”? 553. Must the students of a talmud toyre go to the funeral of a gabai [synagogue manager] or other such important Jews? 554. Are there fraternal societies or individual people in your community who ensure that bright children from the talmud toyre go to a yeshiva or otherwise come to a good end? J. Bar Mitzvah [“son of the commandment,” celebration of the initiation of a thirteen-year-old boy into religious observance—alt., the boy himself] 555. Is it a custom in your community to celebrate the bar mitzvah a month before the boy turns thirteen years old? Is this done for all children or only for a few bright ones?212 556. When does a boy learn how to lay tefillin [phylacteries, leather boxes containing parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, 210. Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, p. 54, states, “In addition to religious subjects, prayers, and Chumash, they [students] were taught some arithmetic and Russian.” 211. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 31, writes: “The years between twelve and fourteen were years of decision for the boys. Most of them entered at that age the leather factories, or were apprenticed to artisans.” 212. On the significance of the thirty days before the bar mitzvah, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 53, 56.


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worn on the head and arm during morning prayers by religiously observant men]?213 557. Is it customary in your community for an orphan to begin laying tefillin a short time before his bar mitzvah?214 558. Describe how tefillin are made. 559. Is there a custom for the bar mitzvah to give a Torah commentary?215 560. What presents do people give the bar mitzvah on the day of the event?216 561. Is it a custom for the town rabbi or the teacher to put the tefillin on the bar mitzvah for the first time? 562. Is the bar mitzvah boy dressed in a gartel [belt tied around the waist, outside the kapote or long coat, separating the upper and lower halves of the body] and yarmulke? 563. Do people make a speech on a moral subject [see above, no. 331] to the bar mitzvah? 564. Is it a custom that until the signs from the tefillin straps have disappeared from the hand, the bar mitzvah should not eat? 565. Is it a custom for the bar mitzvah to go to the mikve on that day?217 566. Is it a mitzvah to invite the moyel, the midwife, and the godparents to the festival meal of the bar mitzvah? 567. What kinds of presents do people give on that day to the scribe of the tefillin? 568. Is it a custom to give charitable donations on that day?

213. On the custom of teaching the boy to put on tefillin six months before the day of the bar mitzvah, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 55; on other customs (e.g., at twelve years old, thirteen years old, or one, two, or three months before the bar mitzvah), see 218–223. 214. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, p. 226, writes: “For an orphan without a father or mother, there are those who begin to lay tefillin from the age of twelve on behalf of the soul of the deceased, and those who begin a month before the time of the bar mitzvah.” Zinner has a lengthy discussion of the various sources that discuss this issue. By contrast, on p. 228, he notes that the general practice is to treat orphans like other boys in this respect. 215. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, pp. 135–142, discusses a variety of customs surrounding the bar mitzvah Torah commentary. 216. On giving gifts, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 141–142. 217. On this custom, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 59.

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569. Is it a custom for the bar mitzvah not to say anything about profane matters all day? 570. What kind of festive meal is made for the bar mitzvah?218 571. Who is invited to the meal? 572. Ho do people congratulate the bar mitzvah? The parents?219 573. Is it a custom to make a feast for the poor? 574. Is it considered a dangerous day for the bar mitzvah, and does he need to be watched over? 575. Do you know any stories about a boy who was injured, drowned, snatched by demons, or forcibly converted on that day? 576. Was there a custom in your community that when people would arrange marriages between young children that the bride would sew a tefillin bag for the groom? What words would she sew on it? Are any such bags still found in your community? 577. What kinds of tefillin are there (Rashi’s, Rabbenu Tam’s, Shimusha Raba)? [The first two, named after important medieval rabbis and Torah commentators, differ in the portions of the Torah that they contain; the last is worn for Kabbalistic reasons only during afternoon prayers.]220 578. When do people begin to lay Rabbenu Tam’s tefillin?221 218. On the origins and importance of this custom, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, 117–134. 219. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, pp. 68–69, describe Mayer Kirshenblatt’s bar mitzvah in the town of Apt during the 1920s. After the traditional prayers were recited, Mayer’s grandfather (his father had immigrated to Canada) “gave everyone a few candies. He gave me some cigarettes, which my friends and I thoroughly enjoyed.” 220. Tefillin, or phylacteries, are traditionally worn by Jewish men (though a few Jewish women are described as wearing tefillin in the past, most famously the daughters of Rashi and the Maiden of Ludmir, and more do so today). The practice is based on a number of biblical verses (i.e., Exodus 13:9, 13:16, Deuteronomy 6:8, 11:18). Rashi is the acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (1040–1105), the famous medieval French commentator on the Torah and Talmud; Rabbenu Tam, or Jacob ben Meir, was one of Rashi’s grandsons; Shimusha Rabbah is the name of a Halakhic work. Each is associated with a different version of tefillin, along with Rabad (Abraham ben David), a twelfth-century sage. 221. The Shulhan Arukh, Orakh Hayim 34:2–3, advises people to lay Rashi’s version of tefillin, although it adds that one who is extremely pious may also lay those of Rabbenu Tam. On this basis, Hasidim adopted the practice of laying both Rashi’s and Rabbenu Tam’s tefillin, typically adding those of Rabbenu Tam following marriage, with the exception of Lubavitcher Hasidim, who began with the bar mitzvah.


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579. Is it a custom sometimes to lay two pairs of tefillin (for instance, Rabbenu Tam’s and Shimusha Raba)?222 580. Which are considered to be the most valuable (those made from a single piece of leather, etc.)?223 581. Which great scribes do you know whose tefillin are considered very valuable and are collectors’ items? 582. Which stories do you know about such scribes and their tefillin? 583. Is it a custom to present the bar mitzvah with the tefillin of a holy man? His grandfather’s? 584. Do people make silver or gold tefillin boxes?224 585. Is there now or was there in the past in your community a maker of artistic boxes? 586. Do you perhaps know someone who possesses such boxes? 587. What kinds of stories do you know about tefillin which have been made invalid? 588. Do you know any stories about a scribe who opened the tefillin of a holy man and the letters flew away, leaving the parchments blank? 589. What is the usual price for plain tefillin and for those made from a single piece of leather? K. Learning in the Besmedresh [the House of Study] 590. Do boys learn in the besmedresh who have hired a teacher or who have a friend to serve as a teacher? 591. Does such a teacher occupy himself solely with teaching or principally with other things (for example, as a ritual slaughterer or with an especially advanced young scholar)? 592. Are there teachers who learn with students for the sake of a mitzvah or for the company? 593. What does the instruction of such teachers consist of (for example, giving a lecture, explaining a reading, teaching Yoyre Deah [a 222. As noted earlier, Hasidim took on the custom of laying both Rashi’s and Rabbenu Tam’s tefillin. In addition, Kabbalists developed the practice of laying a third pair, known as Shimusha Raba tefillin, during the afternoon, or Minha, prayer. Finally, some Lubavitcher Hasidim add yet a fourth type, associated with the medieval sage known as Rabad. 223. Tefillin vary in price, with those made from a single piece of thick leather (called gassot) being the most expensive and the most durable. 224. Decorative silver tefillin boxes, in particular, were produced in Eastern Europe and were especially valuable.

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work of Halakhah], reviewing the history of legal decisions, or giving answers to legal questions)? 594. Do such teachers punish their students, and how? 595. Are there particularly diligent young students in your community who sit in the besmedresh and learn all the time?225 596. Do you know any stories about such young students?226 597. Are there married young men in your community who sit and learn in the besmedresh after the wedding? 598. Are there young people in your community who are taken as sons-in-law on the condition that they will sit and learn after the wedding until they receive ordination as rabbis? 599. Are there cliques of young men in your community who do nothing but sit and learn?227 600. What stories do you know about such young people? 225. Stampfer, “Heder Study, Torah, and Social Stratification,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 157, writes: “It appears that up until the end of the nineteenth century only a minority of the youths who chose to study full-time went to yeshivas. Most chose to continue their studies in one of the many batei midrash, or communal study halls, that were found in every community.” Stampfer, “Dormitory and Yeshiva in Eastern Europe,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 216, observes that “during the day most of those present in the study hall were youths. They studied the Talmud individually without the guidance of a rabbi or teacher and without a fixed programme of study. . . . The scholarly agenda of the students in the batei midrash was based on the inclinations, desires, and ability of the students themselves. . . . They spent most of their waking hours in the study of Talmud in the study hall and at night they would simply sleep on a bench in the women’s section.” 226. Stampfer, in “Dormitory and Yeshiva in Eastern Europe,” p. 217, quotes Shemaryahu Levin’s account of student life in the besmedresh, “A regular cushion stuffed with feathers was rarely to be seen among them. They slept mostly on sacks stuffed with hay and straw. Blankets were unknown. They covered themselves with their topcoats. . . . And it was unbecoming to stop studying before midnight.” Indeed, as Stampfer notes, only those students who were diligent in their studies would be invited over to the homes of local householders for meals (i.e., esn teg, or “eating days”)— their only source of sustenance. Thus those who didn’t demonstrate their ability to study, didn’t eat, and, consequently, did not remain in the besmedresh for long. 227. Stampfer, in “Heder Study, Torah, and Social Stratification,” 158, writes: “Study in a beit midrash can be understood as an extended test of initiation in which youths demonstrated their commitment to Torah. Instead of enduring physical tortures, the beit midrash students studied day and night. In this way, they proved to others, and to themselves, the depth of their commitment to study and to the service of God.”


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601. Is it a custom that every besmedresh should support several young scholars and perushim [typically older men who devote themselves entirely to learning]?228 602. Do they receive candles from the shames to learn by? 603. What practical jokes do the young men play on the shames and the older men? 604. How do the young scholars relate to a new young man? (Do they ask him questions about specific points in the Gemore or the Maharsho?) [“Maharsho” is the acronym for Rabbi Shmuel Eidels, a seventeenth-century commentator on the Talmud.] 605. Do the young scholars learn “The Duties of the Heart” [an eleventh-century work by Rabbi Bakhya Ibn Pakuda, which provides a philosophical synthesis of Jewish theology and ethics], Kabbalah, and Musar in the besmedresh [in the broadest sense, Musar refers to traditional Jewish works of ethics; more narrowly, to works by the nineteenth-century Rabbi Israel Salanter and his followers, which emphasized intense moral self-scrutiny]?229 606. How do the young scholars amuse themselves during the nights of Khanike [Hanukkah] and nitl [Christmas]?230 228. Each community typically provided material support to a few boys in the besmedresh; local families would take turns providing students with meals on different days of the week, a practice known as esn teg (“eating days”); the students would sleep in the women’s gallery of the besmedresh. On the phenomenon of perushim, see Shaul Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait be-hithavutah (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-Toldot Yisrael, 1995), 297. This is the best history of the Yeshiva movement in Lithuania. 229. Kotik, in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, pp. 310–312, describes the negative impact that studying the Kabbalah at a young age had on a child prodigy whom he knew. 230. Jews were encouraged to play games of chance on Hanukkah. For some Ashkenazi Jews, especially within Hasidic communities, Christmas Eve, known as nitl, was the only time during the year when Torah study was discouraged or even prohibited. The name nitl almost certainly derives from the phrase Natale Dominus, though alternative folk etymologies also exist. Rather than learning Torah, Jews who followed this custom would typically play cards or other games. On this custom and its reasons (which range from Kabbalistic beliefs to fears of being attacked on the way to the study house), see Marc Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 319–353. However, Misnagdim did not accept this practice and continued to learn as on any other day. See, for example, Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” 350. This jibes with the centrality of Torah study among Misnagdim. On this phenomenon, see Allan Nadler, The Faith

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607. Do they play kvitlekh [special Jewish playing cards]? Cards?231 608. Do the young scholars study Tanakh in the besmedresh?232 609. How do they view Tanakh learning? 610. Is a young scholar who learns Tanakh looked at with suspicion? L. Yeshiva [advanced religious school for young men] 611. Was there once a yeshiva in your community that has since been shut down? 612. When was it shut down, and for what reasons?233 613. Describe in detail your former yeshiva (who were the Roshe Yeshiva [“heads of the yeshiva,” i.e., the chief administrators], how big was the yeshiva, what kind of reputation did it have, what kind of memories and stories still remain about the old yeshiva, etc.)? 614. Did any famous people come out of your yeshiva: rabbis, writers, and community leaders? 615. How many students were there in the yeshiva? 616. Who supported them? 617. Does a yeshiva exist in your town today? Who established it? How long has it existed? What is it called? 618. Where is it located: in a synagogue or in a separate building? 619. How much does it cost a year, and by what means does it survive?

of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 151–170. 231. On card playing and other leisure activities in the Volozhin yeshiva, see Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, 166–167. Roskies and Roskies, in The Shtetl Book, p. 224, note: “Jews did not use popular playing cards because of the crosses and other Christian symbols found on them. Instead, there were special, handmade Yiddish cards called Lamed-alefniks or kvitlekh. The cards were decorated with Hebrew letters (standing for numbers), common objects—such as teapots, feathers, and sometimes portraits of biblical heroes.” 232. In some circles, learning Tanakh was viewed as a legitimate activity; in others, it was viewed with suspicion or as time taken away from learning Talmud. 233. For example, in 1892 the Russian government closed the famous yeshiva in Volozhin (it reopened several years later but never achieved its former status) ostensibly on the grounds that it was failing to provide its students with sufficient secular instruction but actually because it feared the institution would become a hothouse for revolutionary activity. On the closing of the yeshiva, see Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, 215–217.


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620. Does it receive support from other towns, or does the town itself support it?234 621. Do students from other towns come to your yeshiva? 622. How does the town get along with the yeshiva? 623. Who is the Rosh Yeshiva [the head of the yeshiva]? 624. Does it happen that the Rosh Yeshiva is also the chief rabbi of the town at the same time? 625. Does he receive a salary, or does he do it for the mitzvah? 626. From whom does he receive his salary? 627. Does he receive tuition from the yeshiva students themselves? 628. How much does each yeshiva student pay? 629. Does the Rosh Yeshiva also have students outside of the yeshiva? 630. Does the Rosh Yeshiva or the Mashgiah [lit. “supervisor,” who oversees yeshiva operations and the moral education of the students] select one of the students as an associate? 631. Does he learn with some of the students from the same yeshiva on the side for money? 632. How much time does the Rosh Yeshiva learn with the students? 633. When does he give lectures? 634. Is there a Mashgiah in the yeshiva, and who is he? (a private person who is solely a Mashgiah or someone who has other ways of supporting himself)?235 635. Is he also a Khoyzer [someone who “repeats” or reviews the lessons with students] or only a Mashgiah? 636. Does he listen to the lecture of the Rosh Yeshiva and then go over it with the yeshiva students, or does he give lectures himself? 637. Does he receive a salary for his administrative duties, and from whom? 638. What is the curriculum in the yeshiva? 639. How much time are the yeshiva students obligated to learn? 234. Stampfer, in “Dormitory and Yeshiva in Eastern Europe,” p. 218, notes that when Hayim Volozhin founded the first modern yeshiva in the town of Volozhin in 1803, he raised “funds from the whole region.” 235. On the figure of the Mashgiah, see Moshe Halbertal and Tova Hartman Halbertal, “The Yeshiva,” in Philosophers on Education, ed. Amelie Rorty, 465 (London: Routledge, 1998): “He is not a particularly outstanding scholar but rather a figure of legendary moral character, who serves as a model for the Yeshiva students. At their best, some of the mashgichim produced perceptive and insightful tracts of moral psychology.”

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640. Is the yeshiva divided up by tables, like a small table and a big table? 641. By how many tables is it divided? 642. Who leads the studies at each table? 643. Is it customary for the students themselves to give lectures? 644. Is it customary for a yeshiva student to lead the daily prayers, and is the one who does this always the same? 645. Is it customary for the oldest class to pray in the company of the Rosh Yeshiva on Sabbath? And who leads the prayers? 646. Is it customary for the oldest class to come to the Rosh Yeshiva’s home for Shalosh Seudes [“third meal,” held on Sabbath in the afternoon] and for him to give a Torah commentary for them? What kind of commentary? 647. Is it customary on school holidays for the Rosh Yeshiva and the Mashgiah to recite rhymes and for the students to take part? 648. Is it customary to lift the Rosh Yeshiva and the Mashgiah? And what do people yell during the lifting? 649. Do the yeshiva students learn individually or in groups? 650. Are there “watches” or groups which learn one after another organized among you?236 651. Does it happen that yeshiva students from lower tables take study partners from higher tables in order to go over lectures with them? 652. Does each yeshiva student also learn a Talmudic tractate independently? 653. Which tractates are studied most frequently in the yeshiva? 654. Which tractates are never studied, and what is the reason for this? 655. Do people also learn the Poskim [“legal deciders”]? How does the learning of Poskim take place (with everyone or with select students)? 656. Do yeshiva students also learn Tanakh on their own, and what is the attitude of the Rosh Yeshiva to this? 657. Does the Rosh Yeshiva or the Mashgiah ever learn the Torah portion of the week with the students? When? 658. Do people also learn Musar literature in the yeshiva? [See above, no. 605. In the following questions the second, narrower definition of Musar given above is clearly meant. In no. 664 below, typical themes of Musar in this sense are enumerated. As no. 660 236. On this custom, see Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, 150.


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implies, Musar in this sense was often discouraged because it led to extreme or antisocial behavior.]237 659. Which books of Musar do people learn? 660. Do conflicts ever occur between the students and the Rosh Yeshiva over the learning of Musar? 661. What do these conflicts entail? 662. Are there Musarniks in your yeshiva who are enthusiastic about learning Musar and who adopt Musar as a program for their lives? What stories do you know about them?238 663. With what kinds of bodily movements and melodies for recitation is Musar studied? 664. Does a Khizuk Ha-Musar [lit. “Strengthening of Musar”] society exist in your community? Do people gather together, mainly after dark, and think about shvires-hayetzer [lit. “breaking of the inclination,” i.e., the evil inclination that leads people to indulge in worldly pleasures] and repentance? Do they confess their sins to one another and avoid this-worldly pleasures? 665. Do you know of any rich men who support such Musar yeshivas? 237. Stampfer, in Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, pp. 221ff., discusses the establishment of the yeshiva in Slobodka in 1881 and its seminal role in “instilling in the community of scholars the consciousness that engagement with Musar was vital to the formation of a Torah based character.” This development, which engendered controversy, ultimately led to the establishment of other Musar yeshivas, most famously the Novardok yeshiva in 1896 under the direction of Yosef Yosl Horwitz (known as “der Alter fun Novardok”), a disciple of Israel Salanter (1810–1883), the father of the Musar movement. Stampfer describes the focus of Musar as follows: “The Musar movement called for devoting time and effort not only to Talmud study but also to conscious efforts at ethical self-improvement. The main tools for this work were considered to be introspection, the study of classical Jewish texts on ethics, and the guidance of scholars in ethics. Within the framework of a yeshiva, this meant combining the study of Talmud with a different body of literature, and having on the faculty both Talmud teachers and specialists in ethics. These subjects offered students a defense against charges that yeshiva students were neglecting the challenge of creating a better world while their peers, active in revolutionary movements, were giving their lives for a noble cause.” See Stampfer, “The Yeshiva after 1800,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article .aspx/Yeshiva/The_Yeshiva_after_1800. 238. The writings of Chaim Grade, especially his novel The Yeshivah and poem “Musarnikes,” explore the Musar movement and Musar yeshiva life, which he knew firsthand.

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666. Are there in your town or in your area yeshivas or collectives where students learn without a Rosh Yeshiva, under the guidance and supervision of an administrator or a Mashgiah only?239 667. Do people learn Hasidic philosophy in the yeshiva? Which Hasidic books do people learn?240 668. How much time is devoted to this? 669. Do the young men read secular books, and which ones?241 670. Do people harass them on account of this? 671. How do people harass them? 672. Do you know of any stories from the past in which for reading heretical books people were expelled from the yeshiva, beaten, excommunicated, or handed over to become soldiers? 673. Did the Rosh Yeshiva warn the student beforehand with a letter of musar [here, moral condemnation]? Does someone in your community still possess such a letter? 674. Are the yeshiva students interrogated about secular books? 675. Which stories do you know about this from the past? 676. Do people ever attribute the illnesses of young children to the sins of such young men? 677. Which Jewish writers were considered in the yeshivas to be the greatest heretics (for example, Moyshe Odesser [Mendelssohn], Yitzak Ber Levinzon, Smolinski, Mapu, [Reuven Asher] Braudes, Slonimski, Lillienblum)? 678. Which books were considered to be highly heretical (for example, the Biur [“Explanation,” a commentary on the Torah by Mendelssohn], Ahavat Zion [“Love of Zion,” one of the first modern Hebrew 239. On this phenomenon, see Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, 232. 240. On the contentious relationship of the yeshiva movement in Lithuania to Hasidism, see Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, 31–37. In 1897 Lubavitcher Hasidim established the first Hasidic yeshiva, Tomchei Temimim, which also included Hasidic texts in its curriculum. In the interwar period, other Hasidic groups in Poland founded their own yeshivas. 241. Zipperstein, in “Reinventing Heders,” p. 59, discusses the reading habits of young Russian Jews in general. Parush, Reading Jewish Women, in “The Bookshelf of the Yeshiva Scholar Undergoing Enlightenment,” pp. 107ff., describes how yeshiva students often began by reading works of medieval Jewish philosophy, then moved on to Hebrew literary and historical works written by Maskilim. Although they also read works in Yiddish, many former yeshiva students omitted these from their memoirs because of the stigma widely attached to the language in Maskilic circles. By contrast, works in non-Jewish European languages were viewed with respect.


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novels, by Mapu], Hatat Ne’urim, [“The Sins of Youth,” autobiography of Lillienblum], and the like)?242 679. What stories did people tell about what was supposedly written in these books? 680. What stories did people tell about Jewish writers and scholars [presumably those of the Haskalah or secular enlightenment]? 681. Did people in the yeshivas show more respect for general education than for Jewish education? 682. Do people prevent the yeshiva students from also learning secular subjects (languages, mathematics, etc.)? 683. Do people prevent the students from reading newspapers?243 684. Do the yeshiva students themselves ever publish a newspaper? 685. What kind of character did the newspaper have? Describe its contents. 686. Can you acquire a copy of such a newspaper? 687. Are there in your community or in your region yeshivas with a program of secular studies?244 688. Are such yeshivas divided into classes? 689. How long have such yeshivas been established? 690. Who established them? 691. Who supports them financially? 692. Who are the Rosh Yeshivas, Mashgihim [plural of Mashgiah], teachers, etc., in them? 693. How does the population behave toward them? 694. At what age did young men start going to yeshiva in the past, and at what age today? 695. Do children often run away from their parents to go to a yeshiva? 696. Do the parents of such yeshiva students ever pay for them? 242. On the impact of the Haskalah within yeshivas, see Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, 158ff. On p. 159 he discusses a student who read Ahavat Zion, in particular, as well as other forbidden texts. 243. Newspapers were one of the chief ways that secular ideas reached yeshiva students and were therefore viewed as dangerous by administrators. Indeed, Avraham Greenbaum has even noted that “The first two Jewish socialist periodicals were actually written in Hebrew so that they could influence yeshiva students.” See “Newspapers and Periodicals,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Newspapers_and_Periodicals 244. In Svencionys in 1882 and, much more successfully, in Lida in 1905, Yitzhak Yaakov Reines established yeshivas where both traditional and secular subjects were studied.

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697. Until what age do young men remain in the yeshiva? 698. Are there married young men in your yeshiva who are there because of a vow? 699. Are there any adults who devote themselves entirely to study in your community? 700. What do people say about elderly yeshiva students? 701. How many students are there in your community’s yeshiva? 702. How many are local, and how many from other places? 703. Are there young men from your town studying in non-local yeshivas, and in which ones? 704. Do kheyder children aspire to enter a yeshiva as quickly as possible? 705. From which social class are the majority of yeshiva students? 706. Are there also wealthy children in yeshiva? 707. How do the local residents get along with the yeshiva students? 708. What do people call the yeshiva students? For instance, “yeshiva man,” kloyznik [from kloyz, a Hasidic synagogue; the term is related to “cloister”], patron, etc. 709. By what names are the yeshiva students known in the yeshiva? By their own surnames, by the names of their towns, or by some kind of nickname? 710. Cite the nicknames that people give the yeshiva students and the reasons for them. 711. How does the acquisition of a nickname occur? Is it accompanied by some kind of ceremony? 712. From what does a yeshiva student live? Does he eat his meals in the homes of well-off families, or is he paid for teaching? Or does he receive money from home? 713. Do the local homeowners consider it a duty to take turns providing a yeshiva student with meals for a day, with a place to sleep for a night?245 714. Is it customary for the homeowners to give the yeshiva student money instead of a day’s worth of meals? And how much?

245. Z. Sher, “My ‘Days’ in Slonim,” Pinkas Slonim; sefer gimel, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 136, describes his “eating days” (esn teg) in detail, observing that one of his hosts, a poor widow with four children, “was very pious, and poor as she was, she had a yeshiva student one day a week in order to earn merit in the World to Come.”


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715. Is it common for the students to take on more days than they need in order to receive money from the homeowners instead of eating days?246 716. Are there yeshivas where the practice of eating days does not exist? 717. From what do the yeshiva students there live? 718. Do they receive financial support from the yeshiva, and how much a month? 719. Are all the yeshiva students supported equally, or do some receive more and others less? 720. In determining this support, do people look at the accomplishments of the student, at his family background, or at the hometown from which the yeshiva receives the most money? 721. Where do the students sleep? In the synagogue where they learn, or do they have lodgings? 722. Is a separate house with rooms for sleeping arranged for the students? And who administers such houses: the yeshivas themselves or private families? 723. Is there a kitchen in such houses for the students? 724. How do the homeowners relate to the students who eat with them? 725. Does the yeshiva student eat together with the family at one table, or is he seated separately? 726. What stories and songs do you know about the eating days of yeshiva students? 727. Do the host families use the yeshiva students for any kinds of domestic work? 728. Do they use them for any kinds of religious matters (like immersing vessels in the mikve, etc.)? 246. On this possibility, the following story (told to the author by a Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn) is germane: “It once happened that three women were standing in the street and talking. The subject of the shabbes bokher (the student who was designated to eat at their house on the Sabbath) came up. The first woman said, ‘My bokher is a real mentsh. He comes home from shul with my husband, but he leaves before the meal, excusing himself to go to Torah study.’ The second woman said ‘My bokher, he’s a little khsidish. He stays in shul after davening to learn a few pages of Talmud. He usually shows up about one hour after shul ended.’ They turn to the third woman and ask ‘What about your bokher?’ ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘My bokher is a real late comer. He spends time davening til late. He barely comes before late afternoon and at that time he hardly wants to eat.’ As she finishes talking they turn around and simultaneously point to the lone student walking down the street. ‘That’s him, that’s my bokher!’ they exclaimed.”

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729. Do villagers often come to the yeshiva to take a student back to the village for holidays? 730. Which stories and jokes do you know about this? 731. Is there a practice among you for people to call on yeshiva students to recite Psalms by a dead body, to complete a minyan [lit. “count,” quorum of ten needed for prayers] for a mourner or at a yortzayt [“anniversary,” yearly memorial prayer on behalf of the deceased], to read the Megilleh at Purim, or to lead the Passover seder in houses where there is no adult male? 732. Do they receive payment for this? How much? 733. Is there a special society which provides clothes for yeshiva students? 734. Do people today still come to yeshiva to select a son-in-law for a daughter? 735. Does the Rosh Yeshiva receive a gift for this? 736. What stories do you know about this from former times?247 737. Is there solidarity among the yeshiva students? 738. Do they have their own societies, and which ones (for example, for charitable purposes and the like)? 739. Do they perhaps have a pinkas [i.e., a record book]? Is it possible for someone to get these record books? 740. Are there ever conflicts between the yeshiva students and the Rosh Yeshiva or with the Mashgiah, and for what reasons? 741. In the yeshivas where the students receive a salary, do clashes occur with the Rosh Yeshiva on this account? 742. Do strikes occur over this?248 247. In response to this question, the following story was related to the author by a Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn: “Once there was a rich man who came to the yeshiva to seek a son-in-law for his daughter. He offered to support the groom to be for ten years of Torah study after marriage. All the student had to do was to answer a complex Talmudic problem. All the students studied intensely trying to resolve the problem. After three days, no one stepped forward with a satisfactory answer. The rich man packed his bags and climbed into his carriage and left. As he was pulling away one student ran after him screaming ‘What’s the answer to your question?’ The rich man turned around and said ‘You are the one I want for a son-in-law. All the other students were not interested in resolving the difficulty, they were just interested in my daughter. You however are interested in the Talmud.’ ” 248. Stampfer, in Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, pp. 118, 275, mentions strikes by yeshiva students over perceived injustices, including one prompted by the slapping of a student as punishment for clipping his sidelocks.


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743. What accompanies the strikes? Do the students ever stage a kind of mutiny and break windows, tables, and so on?249 744. How do the Rosh Yeshivas react to such outbreaks?250 745. Is it customary for the yeshiva students to select their own representatives to defend their interests, or does the Rosh Yeshiva himself choose them according to his judgment? 746. Are the representatives entirely from the eldest class or from each class? 747. How does the election of a representative take place? 748. Do arguments take place in the yeshiva on account of this? Do people turn to the Rosh Yeshiva in such cases? 749. For what period of time are such representatives chosen? 750. What does their work consist of? 751. Does one student ever accuse a second one before the representatives? Why? Are punishments given out? What? 752. Are the punishments carried out in public or in private? 753. Do the representatives record such judgments in a recordbook? Is there such a book in your community? 754. Do the students generally obey the representatives? 755. What kinds of measures are taken against those who do not obey the decisions of the representatives? 756. Does it ever happen that a student becomes angry at another and composes a “curse notice” [zidl moydo’a] and posts it covertly in the study halls on Friday night so that it hangs there the entire Sabbath? 757. Do such cases also involve the Rosh Yeshiva, the Mashgiah, or the administrators? 758. Does the Rosh Yeshiva ever summon a student to his house so that he can scold him? 759. Is there a society among the yeshiva students for mutual support (making underwear, staying over with a sick friend, and the like)? 760. Do yeshiva students ever swap their eating days? And for what reasons? 761. What kinds of nicknames do the yeshiva students give the homeowners with whom they eat their meals?

249. Stampfer, in Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, p. 275, mentions the violence that erupted in Telz over the introduction of a stricter Musar regime in the yeshiva. 250. In response to a sometimes-violent struggle between two factions in the Telz yeshiva over the role of Musar in the institution, the administration decided to expel some of the students in 1905. See Stampfer, Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, 274–275.

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762. What kinds of acrostics and songs are composed and sung in the yeshivas? Perhaps you know someone who knows them? 763. When a yeshiva student is expelled for a serious infraction, are other yeshivas informed about it so that they won’t take him in? 764. On holidays, do yeshiva students ever put on plays (like Jacob and Joseph, Goliath the Philistine, and the like)?251 765. List all the plays that you know and which ones are performed the most often. 766. On what holidays in particular are such plays performed?252 767. [Missing] 768. In which language are they performed (Hebrew or Yiddish)? 769. Who takes part in these plays? 770. Who is the author of such plays? 771. Is the entire play produced under the direction of the Rosh Yeshiva? 251. Around the holiday of Purim, the performance of plays, known as Purim shpiln (sing., shpil) was extremely popular in the Jewish communities of the Pale. See, for example, Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother, 114–115. From a later period (interwar Poland), Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 34, write: “The most popular plays were Mordecai and Esther, which told the story of Purim; Mekhiras-yoysef, which was about the sale of Joseph by his brothers (this play drew a few tears); and, above all, The Kraków Wedding (Krakowskie Wesele in Polish). . . . The troupe would rehearse for months. Most of the performers were laborers and artisans.” As in Wengeroff’s day, men would play “the female parts. In the Jewish tradition, a woman would not perform this sort of thing.” Roskies and Roskies, in The Shtetl Book, p. 228, note: “It seems that the first purim-shpiln based on biblical themes were performed in Western Europe, in Prague and Frankfurt, by yeshive students in the besmedresh.” Yitzhak Shternfeld, “Sh. Ansky in Lutsk,” in Sefer Lutsk, ed. Nahum Sharon, p. 264 (Tel Aviv: Irgun yotse Lutsk be-Yisrael, 1961), writes that when he visited the town, “Sh. An-sky was extremely interested in the old Purim shpil which in Lutsk was called the “Goliath play” and for some time had been performed in the yeshiva, later—among people.” 252. Until 1879 or so, in the Volozhin yeshiva it was customary for a student to be selected as the “Rav shel Purim,” or “Purim rabbi.” In the carnivalesque spirit of the Purim holiday, this figure would perform the role of the Rosh Yeshiva (including wearing his hat) in a satirical way; these performances were sometimes attended by members of the larger community outside the yeshiva. As Stampfer, in Ha-Yeshivah ha-Litait, pp. 152–154, points out, the performances had acceptable limits and when they were eventually crossed (at least in the mind of the Rosh Yeshiva Naftali Tsvi Yehuda Berlin’s young wife, who complained “ ‘First they dance with my husband, and afterwards they joke at his expense’ ”), the practice was eliminated.


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772. What kinds of costumes are used for such plays (for example, masks, paper hats, wooden swords, spears, and the like)? 773. Does anyone have such costumes? 774. Who assigns the roles, and is it considered a disgrace to receive a lowly role? 775. Do any of the names used in the play remain in use afterwards? 776. Do yeshiva students willingly perform women’s roles?253 777. [Missing] 778. What is the purpose of such plays? Are they produced solely for the fun of it? In such a case, are outsiders prevented from entering? Or is the opposite true, that is, they are performed with the aim of making money, and therefore people pay to get in? 779. What is the usual price? 780. Where does the money go? 781. Where do people usually put on the play, in a rented room or in the yeshiva? 782. What do people hang on the walls? Do they perhaps paint something on the walls (decorations)? Who paints them? 783. Do the actors perform in the homes of the town’s notable citizens or the directors of the yeshiva?254 784. Do the directors of the yeshiva therefore hold a dinner on their behalf? 785. Is care taken during the performance not to say the word “God” in order not to mention a holy “Name” [as is prohibited by Jewish law]? Do people only use the expression “Most High” [eybershter, commonly used in secular contexts for “God”]? 786. At what level of learning does a student earn the title “prodigy” [ilui]? 253. On the carnivalesque holiday of Purim, the usual Jewish prohibition on cross-dressing was relaxed. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 114, notes: “A young boy in women’s clothes usually played Queen Esther, whom we followed with curious excited eyes and gazed at in astonishment.” Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish community,” p. 34, writes: “Formerly, Joseph and Esther plays, in Yiddish, were given during the Purim season. The actors, who were young men, took the parts of both men and women. Some time in 1905 or 1906 the first Yiddish play was given in which women, too, acted. This play was sponsored by the Bund.” 254. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 35, note that “The Purim players would perform for five or six families in an evening. They did not visit every house, only those of prominent citizens.”

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787. Does the Rosh Yeshiva often take a prodigy to be his own son-in-law? 788. How do the yeshiva students in general get settled in places to live? 789. Do they receive ordination as rabbis? 790. Who gives the ordination, and how does it take place? 791. Do the yeshiva students have special holidays? 792. Do the yeshiva students from other towns go home frequently for visits? M. Der Lerer [lit. “the teacher,” i.e., of secular subjects] 793. How long ago did people in your community start teaching children secular subjects? 794. How did this begin? 795. Name the person who first began teaching his children secular studies. 796. [Missing] 797. [Missing] 798. Did people harass him? In what way? 799. What did the secular studies consist of? Were they centered around German or Russian culture? 800. [Missing] 801. When did the first secular teacher come to your community? 802. What did people call him (shrayber, [writer, scribe, secretary], teacher, etc.)?255 803. How many children studied with him, and were they divided into classes? 804. How was the teacher paid? By the school term or by the month? And approximately how much? 805. Who was the first teacher, and what was his name? 806. How did people relate to him at first? 807. Was he harassed? Was he driven out of the shtetl?

255. On the shrayber, see Stampfer, “Is the Question the Answer: The Context and Consequences of an Educational Pattern,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, 231. Parush, in Reading Jewish Women, p. 69, writes: “What is chiefly important here is that those shraybers who taught the girls to read were among the vectors by which maskilic ideas were carried to the smaller towns, and the girls who learned from them the craft of writing were exposed to such ideas, among others.”


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808. Did the religious Jews try to reform him? Did it ever happen that he became a bal tshuve [a penitent, a person who returns to Jewish observance]? 809. How did the teacher behave? Did he comport himself according to traditional, religious norms? 810. What subjects did he teach? 811. Was it the case at first that people only gave him their girls to teach? 812. Did he have his own schoolroom, or did he go to the families’ homes to give lessons? 813. Did he go around to the kheyders of melamdim giving lessons? 814. How would a melamed react to this? 815. Would the melamed supervise when the teacher taught the children in order to ensure that he didn’t teach anything heretical? 816. Were there cases when the teacher spread anti-religious views in town? 817. Was a Haskole [i.e., Haskalah, “Enlightenment”] movement begun in town because of him?256 818. Were there cases in which the teacher’s influence led to children running away from their parents to the large cities in order to study? 819. When and who was the first person to send a child to a gymnasium [non-Jewish middle/high school]? 820. How did people react to this in town? 256. On the spread of the Haskalah in Eastern Europe, see Israel Bartal, “ ‘My Heart Is in the West’: The Haskalah Movement in Eastern Europe,” in The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881, ed. Israel Bartal, 90–101 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Bartal argues against the commonly accepted view that the Haskalah began in Germany and then only later spread to Eastern Europe. Instead, he writes, on p. 91, “The Haskalah movement emerged simultaneously in several centers, some in Central Europe, some in Eastern Europe.” On the role that teachers played in spreading the Haskalah in Eastern Europe, see Parush, Reading Jewish Women, p. 69, quoting Ben-Zion Katz (b. 1876 in Lithuania): “ ‘As many of the town’s members were resettling in America, the girls in the town were made to learn to write Latin script, so as to be able to write English characters. The girls did not go to heder, and no school existed for them. One time an ex-yeshiva scholar who had decided to become a teacher came and instructed the girls, so they would know how to write Yiddish and also English script. He brought with him maskilic books, and he also had an issue of the monthly Hashahar edited by Peretz Smolenskin; and so, drop by drop, the Haskalah penetrated my town.’ ”

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821. What stories, sayings, and jokes do you know about secular teachers from the past? 822. Are there such teachers in your town now? How many? Do they only teach Russian or modern Hebrew too? 823. Are there female teachers in your community? 824. Are there special modern Hebrew teachers in your community? How many?257 825. Do they give lessons in the kheyder, or in family homes? N. The Upbringing and Education of a Girl 826. How does the naming of a girl take place?258 827. What kinds of customs are associated with this? 828. What names do people give a physically fragile girl? 829. What names are given to girls that are based on names for men, and in what cases (after Barukh—Brokheh, Khayim—Khayeh)?259 830. What lullabies and stories do people sing and tell especially to a girl? 831. What special jokes and games for girls is she taught? 832. What traditional Jewish clothes do people dress her in, and at what age? 833. When do people begin to teach her the morning prayers, which begin Moyde ani [“I give thanks,” see above, no. 295]? 834. What children’s prayers for getting up and going to sleep are taught to her? Record them. 835. What specifically girlish qualities is she taught? 836. When do people begin to teach her about modesty? 837. When does a girl begin to light candles? 838. When does she begin to fast? 257. Eliezer Margaliot, “Ha-tenuah ha-ivrit be-Tsortkov,” in Sefer yizkor lehantsahat kedoshe kehilat Tsortkov, ed. Yeshayahu Austridan, p. 142 (Haifa, Israel: Irgun yotse Tsortkov be-Yisrael, 1967), describes how modern Hebrew instruction, that is, ivrit be-ivrit (“Hebrew in Hebrew”), arrived in Chortkov [a town in eastern Galicia rather than Russia) in 1904 with the arrival of two teachers who were escaping conscription into the Russian army. By 1911 sixty-nine male and female students were studying in a local Hebrew school. 258. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 366, writes that the naming of a girl would take place in the synagogue, when the father was called up to the Torah (i.e., an aliyah). The aliyah for a new father, whether of a girl or a boy, was known as a “hov yoledet.” 259. On this practice, see Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” 366.


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839. Which jobs are taught a girl first? Housework: cooking and baking, sewing, darning socks, cleaning up? 840. What children’s songs does a girl sing? 841. What girls’ games are there? List and describe all of them.260 842. From what age is it considered inappropriate for a girl to play together with boys? 843. Do people take girls to synagogue?261 844. When is a girl taught to remove the portion of khale dough [lit. “to take challah”—to do this according to religious prescription is considered one of the main duties of observant women]? 845. How is a girl taught the laws relating to menstruation?262 846. What manners do people teach a girl? 847. How is she taught to behave with men? 848. Does a girl ever lose her virginity because of an accident? Is this recorded in a pinkas [communal record book]?263 849. Are there cases of children being raped? 849. [Question no. 849 is repeated in the original. However, each instance has different texts] Did such things occur during pogroms?264 260. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 64, writes: “Organized, collective games in the girls’ kheyder, which were actually all dramas, were of two types: bride-and-groom games and mother-and-father games.” Shtern then proceeds to describe these games in detail, quoting extensively from typical songs and dialogue that would form part of their content or “script.” 261. In many communities, girls rarely attended synagogue, especially the shiblekh, where most men and boys tended to pray on a regular basis. 262. Although a few Yiddish works were published for women on the laws of menstruation, most learned from other women. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 369, writes: “When a girl began to menstruate for the first time, her mother would strike her on the cheeks as a sgule for her to always be red.” 263. Pinkas books recorded many cases of girls who accidently lost their virginity—a phenomenon known as mukat ets (Heb., “woodstruck”)—in order to prevent problems when the girls later sought to marry. ChaeRan Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2001), p. 36, quotes one such entry: “ ‘Let it be recorded this day of the mishap that occurred to so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so. By an act of heaven she fell from the stove and impaled herself on a sharp-edged bedpost standing nearby. There was blood on that spot and blood on the bedpost. Therefore, lest it be questioned, God forbid, in the future should there not be a sign of virginity, we, the undersigned have inscribed this event in this pinkas as evidence of accidental loss of virginity.’ ” 264. The rape of Jewish women and girls was a common feature of pogroms. John Klier, “The Pogrom Paradigm in Russian History,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish

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850. Have girls become pregnant after pogroms? 851. What did people do in such cases? 852. At what age do people begin to teach a girl to read the Hebrew letters [Ivri, minimal phonetic knowledge of Hebrew required to follow along in a prayer book]? Do girls attend dardeki kheyders together with boys in your community?265 853. Are there teachers especially for girls in your community?266 854. Are there rebetsins especially for girls?267 Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, p. 37, n. 36 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), has noted: “The extent of rape was one of the most controversial elements in accounts of the pogroms of 1881, because of their highly emotional impact and because they contradicted attempts to give a ‘moral’ slant to the pogroms through the claim that they were directed against the property, rather than the person, of the Jews.” 265. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 31, notes: “The education of girls was delayed until the age of seven or eight.” Shaul Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, pp. 168–169, writes: “In many locations special heders operated for girls,” whereas in other towns, boys and girls studied together in the same kheyder, until girls learned how to read, at which point they left while boys remained to study Jewish texts. Drawing on the statistics compiled by the Jewish Colonization Association, on p. 170, Stampfer writes: “The total number of female heder students, whether with boys in a regular heder or in special girls’ heders, was, not surprisingly, low when compared with the number of boys. In 1894, out of 13,683 heders (probably fewer than half of the heders in the tsarist empire), 191,505 male pupils were enrolled and 10,549 female pupils.” 266. Stampfer, in “Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women,” p. 169, quotes Haya Weizmann-Lichtenstein as noting that “In the town it wasn’t customary to send girls to heder; rather, a rebbe [elementary teacher] would come to the house for an hour and teach the girls.” On the other hand, AMI, “Girls’ Kheyders,” in Horodets (Horodec); a geshikhte fun a shtetl, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 72, describes a male teacher named Shimshon Aler Visotsky, who “established a girls’ kheyder in which he taught how to write Russian and Yiddish, as well as arithmetic.” 267. AMI, in “Girls’ Kheyders,” p. 71, writes: “The melamdeke or rebetsin, as she was called, was different from the melamed. Most of the male teachers worked at this profession all their lives, until their deaths. The women, however, held their positions only temporarily. Often they saw it as a means of earning extra income to help out their husbands.” Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, pp. 35–37, paints an evocative portrait of Binele, the rebetsin in the girls’ kheyder in his town: “Binele, the rebetsin, an old yidene [Jewish woman], a widow, conducted the kheyder for girls. In the shtetl, people would call Binele the zaddekes [holy woman] and with


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855. How does a girl’s learning with a rebetsin take place?268 856. Does she have a kheyder, or does she visit the children at home?269 857. From what class of people does the rebetsin usually come? 858. Are there young rebetsins too? 859. How is a girl entrusted to the rebetsin for instruction? Are there any customs associated with this, similar to those for bringing a boy to kheyder? 860. Does a rebetsin teach by the semester or the month? 861. What kind of payment does she receive? 862. Are there rebetsins who eat their meals in family homes? 863. What do the rebetsins teach girls besides reading and writing Hebrew letters?270 good reason. Every Friday at twelve, she would canvas the shtetl from house to house and collect challah and fish for poor people for the Sabbath. . . . Young women, her former students, would come to her for advice on how to live with their husbands, and she, Binele the rebetsin, would teach them how to create shalom bayis [peace in the home]. A man is like a small child, one only needs to know how to get around them—Binele used to teach. She would also exorcise the evil eye . . . give sgules and procure different remedies for all sorts of illnesses. People would come to her to read a letter or write out an address. . . . Every Monday and Thursday she would fast [a custom for especially pious individuals] and she would only eat meat on the Sabbath [another pious practice]. In the synagogue she was a firzogerin [female prayer leader] for women who were not able to pray. . . . On Tisha be-Av, she would sit on an overturned washtub and the women would sit around her on the ground, wailing over her stories about the destruction of Jerusalem. She was a rebetsin for young and old, and she truly made the shtetl holy.” 268. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, pp. 34–36, writes: “The method of instruction [in the girls’ kheyder] was a mish-mash: All the children were taught together, in groups, two or three girls in a group, or individually. . . . With beginning girls [the rebetsin] taught each one individually. Those who had already learned to read, she would gather in groups of two or three. The children would then wait their turn to learn. In their free time, they would sit and write or copy or sew.” 269. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, pp. 34–35, provides a detailed physical description of such a kheyder in his town. AMI, in “Girls’ Kheyders,” pp. 71–72, mentions several in the town of Horodets, including one led by a woman named Khane Tsodek, who “introduced the girls to the Bible in the original [Hebrew, rather than in Yiddish translation], in addition to spoken Russian and letter writing.” 270. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 34, writes: “In the girls’ kheyder, the rebetsin would teach the girls how to pray, read and write Yiddish, count, and write

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864. Does she teach them how to pray?271 865. Does she teach them how to recite tkhines [see above, no. 73]? 866. Does she teach them Jewish customs? Qualities? Which ones?272 867. Does a rebetsin ever learn Khumesh or Tanakh with girls?273 868. Does she also teach them some kind of work?274 869. From what age is it considered inappropriate for a girl to play with dolls? 870. At what age do people from the poorer class give a girl to a tradesman or a businessman?275 871. Under what conditions? 872. To what kind of tradesmen do people generally give girls?276 873. At what age does a girl begin to work in the store when the parents are storeowners?277 874. What special punishments are there for a girl? 875. Is a girl beaten as often as a boy? 876. Does the teacher strike girls when they learn in a dardeki kheyder?278 877. What additional punishments are there for girls? out an address in Russian. The textbooks were the siddur, the tkhine, Tsene-rene and Nakhlas tsvi.” Commenting on the picture drawn by Shtern, Stampfer, in “Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women,” p. 169, observes: “Other girls’ heders were probably no different.” 271. See note 270. 272. Shtern, Kheyder un besmedresh, 37. 273. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 14, writes: “After mastering the technique of reading Hebrew, girls would begin to read Yiddish from the Yiddish translation of the khumesh (Tsene-rene).” 274. Shtern, in Kheyder un besmedresh, p. 34, writes: “In the girls’ kheyder, people would also teach how to sew, embroider, and knit, and also how to darn a sock, and patch torn clothes.” 275. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 31, notes: “At the age of thirteen or fourteen girls were usually apprenticed to seamstresses. The poorest became domestics. Some girls worked as saleswomen in their parents’ stores part of the time and continued their education.” 276. See no. 870. 277. Ibid. 278. Stampfer, in “Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women,” p. 178, writes: “It was considered right for boys to be beaten but not for girls— though there were exceptions. Esther Rosental-Schneiderman (born around 1900) recalled never being beaten by her teacher, the rebetsin, but she got plenty of slaps and pinches from the teacher’s husband, the rabbi!”


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878. What are the relations between a girl and her brothers? 879. Is she permitted to play with them? 880. Is she permitted to play with boys who are closely related to her? 881. Do people frequently hire a special teacher for girls to teach them Russian, other languages, or music?279 882. In your community, do girls learn modern Hebrew? How long ago did this begin? What is the reason for this? 883. Approximately how many girls are there in your community who can speak Hebrew? 884. How many girls are there who learn in gymnasium?280 885. How many are there who learn in a university? 886. What kinds of books do girls from the religiously observant class read? 887. On Sabbath, do girls from well-off families still read the Tsene rene [“Come Out and See”] or Menoras ha-meor [“Candlestick of Light”], etc.?281 279. Wealthy families often hired private tutors to teach their daughters languages such as Russian and French, as well as piano playing and other cultural rather than religious subjects. As Stampfer writes, in “Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women,” p. 184: “At a time when secular studies were traditionally seen in Jewish circles as irrelevant but not evil or harmful, such an education, which was typical for the non-Jewish elite, could easily be seen as not only permissible but even desirable for Jewish women.” 280. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 192, notes the prominent role played by wealthy Jewish families in the establishment of private Jewish gymnasia for women in Russia beginning in the late nineteenth century. During the 1880s Jewish women attended gymnasia in Moscow and Kiev in very large numbers as auditors and were particularly well represented in the women’s medical courses in Saint Petersburg. Stampfer, in “Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women,” p. 184, writes: “In 1899 a survey of such [modern] schools in the tsarist empire found 193 girls’ schools and 68 schools for both boys and girls (usually in separate classes) as opposed to 383 schools for both boys and girls (usually in separate classes) as opposed to 383 boys’ schools. . . . Of the 50,773 students enrolled in such schools, about a third were girls.” On the experiences of Jewish girls in gymnasia, see Parush, Reading Jewish Women, 83–92. 281. The Tsene-rene is a seventeenth-century companion to the Khumesh, in Hebrew and Yiddish, a favorite for centuries among literate Jewish women; Menoras ha-meor is a fifteenth-century work by Rabbi Yitzhak Aboab on Jewish ethics, life, and customs. On the practice of women reading the Tsene-rene on the Sabbath, see Turniansky, “Iberzetsungen un baarbetungen fun der Tsene-rene’,” in Sefer Dov

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888. Do people read Yiddish literature (Mendele Mokher Seforim? Peretz? Sholem Aleichem? Sholem Ash)?282 889. Do people read old folktales? Describe which ones.283 890. Do people read pulp fiction (Shomer’s)?284 891. At what age does a girl begin to be considered for marriage? 892. What qualities are considered inappropriate for a future bride? 893. What qualities cause people to gossip about a girl? 894. At what age do people begin to consider a girl an old maid? How is it now, and how was it in the past? 895. What stories do you know about old maids from the past? 896. What stories do you know about the Maiden of Ludmir and the Minsker “Gray Braids”? [The former is known as the only woman to function as a Hasidic rebbe in her own right; I have not been able to identify the latter.]285 897. How did people treat an old maid in the past, and how do they do so now? 898. For what reasons does a maid remain single until she is too old to marry? 899. With what does an old maid typically occupy herself? Sadan, ed. Shmuel Verses, Natan Rotenstreich, and Chone Shmeruk, 165–190 (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibuts ha-Meuhad, 1977). 282. On the reading habits of Jewish women, who were a major proportion of Yiddish readers, in general, see David Roskies, “Yiddish Popular Literature and the Female Reader,” Journal of Popular Culture 10, no. 4 (1977): 852–858. 283. Among the most popular sources of printed folktales was the Yiddish language Mayse Bukh, first published in 1602 and then reprinted in numerous editions. 284. Shomer was the pseudonym for Nokhem-Meyer Shaykevitsh (1846–1905), an extremely prolific Yiddish author whose work was very popular among the Jewish masses. The critics, however, condemned Shomer’s writing as shund (trash) and waged a campaign in the Yiddish press that reached an apex with the publication of Sholem-Aleichem’s pamphlet “Shomer’s mishpet” (“Shomer’s Judgement”), which called for Shomer’s literary excommunication. On Shomer and the attacks against him, see Sophie Grace-Pollak, “Shomer in the Light of Shomers mishpet (“Shomer’s Judgement”),” in Khulyot: Journal of Yiddish Research 5 (Winter 1998): 109–159 (Yiddish). David Biale, in Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 167, describes Shomer’s romantic tales as “the Jewish equivalent of Harlequin romances.” 285. On the Maiden of Ludmir, see Nathaniel Deutsch, The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). I have not been able to locate information about the Minsker “Gray Braids.”


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900. Is there a Hakhnoses Kale society in your community [lit. “Bringing in the Bride,” a charitable society that provided money in order for poor girls to be married]? 901. Does this society, or private individuals, invariably make an effort to arrange a marriage for an old maid, even if she is a cripple? 902. Is an old maid considered a blemish on the family? 903. What kind of sayings and jokes do you know about old maids?286 904. Do you know of any stories about old bachelors?287 O. Military Conscription 905. Are people very careful not to make a match if the potential groom is facing conscription? 906. Do people write into the marriage agreement a stipulation about conscription? 907. Do people ever give money to conscriptees so that they won’t run away, and so people won’t have to turn over any only sons in their places? 908. Do people ever have to turn over those with deformities because it is suspected that the deformities are self-inflicted? 909. Do people ever have to turn over frail individuals because it is suspected that they have caused their own illnesses?

286. Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All its Moods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), p. 311, writes: “The spinster is called a farzesene alte moyd. In modern Yiddish, farzesene is used only with alte moyd, but the root meaning of the word (which is still used in contemporary German) is ‘to sit around waiting.’ The Yiddish farzesene skhoyre used to mean merchandise that didn’t move; it sat in the store and gathered dust on the shelf, just as the alte moyd gathers dust on the marriage market.” 287. In general, Jewish men and women in Eastern Europe married at very high rates. For men, this was considered a religious obligation, since Halakhah held that Jewish men—but not women—were commanded to “be fruitful and multiply.” For this reason, few Jewish men remained bachelors, especially those who were ablebodied and of sound mind. Yet there were always exceptions. Berl Robakh, “Ayzikl the Bachelor,” in Sefer zikaron le-kehilat Sanok ve-ha-seviva, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 101, describes such a case: “In Sanok there lived a pious old bachelor. His name was Ayzikl. He didn’t want to get married because he was dreadfully shy. He used to say he would get married only in a cellar, where no one could see.”

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910. What kinds of stories do you know about self-inflicted injuries?288 911. Which deformities occur most frequently among Jews? 912. Are there any special practices for staying free from military service? 913. Are there any charms, amulets, incantations, tkhines, etc., for this? 914. What songs do you know about conscription? What sayings and jokes do you know about this? 915. Do parents ever try to have their son conscripted as punishment for his bad behavior? 916. Are there cantonists [Jews who were conscripted into the military as children] in your community? What stories do they tell? 917. How old are they? 918. At what age were they given up? 919. Were they seized by force, or did the Kahal [communal authorities] turn them over by lottery? 920. Where did they serve? 921. Were they forced to convert? What hardships were they forced to undergo?289 288. There are many accounts of this practice, both in order to avoid conscription and, once drafted, in order to be relieved of military duty. See Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor, 47, on the especially sad case of a man whose only son cut off a finger from his right hand to avoid conscription and then contracted an infection and died. 289. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, in Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917: Drafted into Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 97, writes: “Of the 10,283 Jews who had passed through the cantonist battalions in the period between 1827 and 1840, 61.5 percent remained Jewish, while 38.5 percent converted.” It was only after 1840 that Nicholas focused his energies on converting Jewish conscripts as part of a broader effort to Russify them. See also Michael Stanislawski’s discussion in Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825– 1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 23–25: “From the moment that Jewish soldiers, and particularly Cantonists, were brought to their camps, they were subjected to constant pressure to convert. In clear violation of the original regulation, all signs of their former life—phylacteries, ritual fringes, prayer books, prayer shawls—were taken from them, and they were forbidden to speak Yiddish. . . . Every punishment they received was preceded by a promise of repeal upon baptism. They were forbidden visits with relatives or with other Jews in the area of their camps. . . . Several former soldiers testified that the only meat they received was pork, and that most food was cooked in lard . . . physical torture was used as well. The memoirs of


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922. What stories do they tell about their comrades who sacrificed themselves for kiddush ha-Shem [lit. “Sanctification of the Name”— that is, they died rather than undergo conversion or violate Jewish religious commandments]? 923. With whom and how did they get married? 924. How did they support themselves? 925. How did they act toward those who did not serve? 926. How does the community treat them now? 927. Do any former khappers [thugs who forcibly supplied Jewish boys to the army for money] still live in your community? 928. How did people act toward them in the past? 929. What stories do you know about khappers from the past?290 930. Does anyone in your community have old objects that once belonged to cantonists [see above, no. 916] (a uniform, medal, etc.)? 931. How do people view an arranged marriage with a soldier who has completed his service? 932. Do soldiers returning from duty often become drunkards? Reprobates? 933. What kinds of stories do people tell about contemporary military service? 934. Are there institutions in your community to ensure that soldiers in town eat kosher food, have a minyan [see above, no. 731] during the Days of Awe and other holidays, or have matzah on Passover?291 former soldiers abound with descriptions of whippings in the name of religion. One former Cantonist related that while bathing in the river, his corporal forced Jewish children to remain under water for long periods of time unless they agreed to convert; another Jewish soldier was stuffed into a sack, thrown down a flight of stairs, and then dragged back up by a rope when he refused to convert.” 290. On literary accounts of khappers, see Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2, 4, 117, 119–120, 137–138. On p. 193, Litvak quotes a passage from Y. L. Katsnelson’s What My Eyes Have Seen: “To our shame and humiliation, my son, the khappers were all Jews, Jews with beards and side locks . . . Jews come, pious Jews with beards and side locks and kidnap Jewish children and give them over to be converted—and this is a punishment not listed even among the Bible’s list of the greatest curses. Jews spilling the blood of their brothers, and God sits silent in heaven and the rabbis sit silent down here.” For the original, see Y. L. Katsnelson, Mah she-rau ‘einai ve-sham’u ‘oznai (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1947), 15–16. 291. Petrovsky-Shtern, in Jews in the Russian Army, pp. 192–195, discusses the mixed record of Jewish communities in helping Jewish soldiers continue observing

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935. Is it easy to get authorization for soldiers to observe Jewish holidays and to keep Jewish customs [lit. yidishkayt]?292 936. Are there still soldiers now who sacrifice themselves in order to maintain their Jewish identity and observance [lit. yidishkayt]?293 937. How do the officers and enlisted soldiers treat a Jewish soldier?294 Judaism. On the one hand, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan (i.e., the Chofetz Chaim) made great efforts to encourage Jewish soldiers to remain connected to their Jewish identity and practice, even publishing a book on the subject for soldiers’ use, Mahaneh Israel. He also invited local Jewish soldiers as Sabbath guests, while some communities provided meals or, in at least one case, organized a Passover seder. Yet as Petrovsky-Shtern notes on p. 194, “The paucity of evidence on the active role played by Jewish communities in assisting the recruits is instructive; care for Jewish soldiers, especially regarding their food, was the exception.” 292. On the ability of Jewish soldiers to observe Jewish holidays and customs while serving in the military, see Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, “A Shtetl in the Army,” 76–82; “Judaizing the Military,” 163–165. On pp. 76–77, Petrovsky-Shtern writes: “When a regiment was billeted permanently in one place, a soldier’s synagogue was established; itinerant military units sometimes formed prayer groups or even havurot, self-governing Jewish fraternities.” While documentation for most of these societies is no longer extant, Petrovsky-Shtern examines in detail the history of the Guardians of Faith Society of the Briansk regiment (Hevrah shomrei emunah shel Brianski polk), which operated from 1843 to 1893. The society concerned itself with prayer, dietary laws, Sabbath observance, the proper burial of comrades, mourning rituals, and so on. In addition, its “members were forbidden to betray a fellow Jew to an officer.” On pp. 191–192, Petrovsky-Shtern observes: “Until the very end of the Russian Imperial Army, both observant and secular soldiers participated in the joint celebration of Jewish festivals.” Michael Stanislawski, Psalms for the Tsar: A Minute Book of a Psalms Society in the Russian Army (New York: Yeshiva University Pres, 1988), examines another Jewish soldiers’ organization that existed during the period 1864–1867. 293. The religious martyrdom of Jewish soldiers in the Russian army was an enduring trope of folktales and literature alike. Litvak, in Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry, p. 198, has noted that in the period 1915–1916, An-sky “wrote the last original conscription tale to appear in imperial Russia,” called Tsvey martirer (“Two Martyrs”). For this story, see An-sky, “Tsvey martirer,” in Gezamlte shriftin, vol. 14, 139–151 (Vilna-Warsaw-New York: Ferlag An-sky, 1925); also see Oysgeklibene shriftn, ed. Shmuel Rozhanskii, 88–100 (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1964). 294. Treatment of Jewish soldiers by non-Jewish enlisted comrades and officers varied tremendously depending on the individuals involved. Here it should be noted that Jews were almost completely prevented from entering the officer class. Indeed,


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Third Section: The Wedding A. Matches between Young Children 938. Do you know of cases or stories from the past in which a match was made between children before they were born?295 939. For what reasons would people do this? 940. Would people also do this in the past for special protection [a sgule]? Against what? 941. How would the agreement take place? 942. Would a written agreement be drawn up? 943. Would people make an agreement concerning the dowry or room and board for the couple, etc., at that time? 944. Was it considered dangerous for people not to keep their word? 945. Do people still make matches between children who are not yet born?

as Petrovsky-Shtern, in Jews in the Russian Army, pp. 134–136, demonstrates, between 1874 and 1917, out of the many thousands of Jews who served in the Russian military, only nine were promoted to officer, and only one, Gertsel Tsam, because of his own merits rather than his family connections. On p. 135, Petrovsky-Shtern observes: “After the 1874 introduction of universal military service, Tsam applied for promotion to the officers’ ranks. However, the Omsk district commander rejected his application, asserting that Jews who remained Jewish were not eligible to become officers.” After his wife filed a formal complaint, Tsam was “grudgingly granted . . . the lowest officer’s rank of ensign. . . . By his [Tsam’s] own admission, nobody in the officer’s corps mistreated him because he was a Jew. Quite the contrary: his district commander repeatedly promoted him.” Nevertheless, despite his thirty-five years of excellent service, Tsam was never officially promoted to battalion commander and was only granted the rank of retired captain ten years after leaving military service. On pp. 252–258, Petrovsky-Shtern examines attitudes toward, and treatment of, Jewish soldiers during the final years of the empire, concluding, on p. 257, that “Officers’ personal experience determined their treatment of Jews: The staff officers susceptible to [virulently anti-Semitic] state propaganda dealt with them scornfully, while the combat officers better acquainted with Jews in the trenches regarded them neutrally or even accorded them respect.” 295. Biale, in Eros and the Jews, p. 166, notes that the trope of “a girl and boy . . . [who] fall in love, only to discover at the end of the story that they were destined for each other by a vow (tekiyas kaf) sworn between their parents at birth,” appeared in popular Yiddish chapbooks. An-sky would later incorporate this narrative element into his play The Dybbuk.

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946. Do you know of any cases from the past in which a match was made between very small children?296 947. Would such cases occur frequently, and what age would the children most often be? 948. For what reasons would people do this? Perhaps as a protection [a sgule]? 949. How would the agreement take place? 950. Would people write up the marriage agreement immediately, or would they wait until the children were older? 951. How would the future bride and groom behave toward one another? 952. Would they be allowed to see one another or not? How did their first meeting take place? 953. Would such arrangements frequently fall apart, and for what reasons? 954. Would people dissolve such a match to protect one of the children against sickness because they believed that the pair was unlucky? 955. What is the youngest age at which people used to arrange marriages for their children? A boy? A girl?297 956. Would people teach the children how to behave like man and wife after the wedding? 957. Would they ever be forced to do so? 958. Was there a special female teacher, an old Jewess, who would remain with the children on the first night in order to teach them?

296. The traditional stereotype (bolstered by the autobiographies of prominent Maskilim such as Solomon Maimon and Moshe Leib Lilienblum, as well as the historical assertions of Simon Dubnov) is that matches between young children were common among Eastern European Jews in the early modern period. However, as Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 52, has written, such matches were “exceedingly rare and limited to a special subgroup, the scholarly elites.” Shaul Stampfer, “The Social Implications of Very Early Marriage,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 15, also writes that “it was common only in one sector or class of the Jewish community—the upper class—a group that included the wealthy and the learned . . . termed di sheyne yidn (the beautiful Jews).” 297. Stampfer, in “The Social Implications of Very Early Marriage,” p. 7, has written: “In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many East European Jews married off their children at the age of 13, 12, or even younger.”


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959. Do people still make matches between small children now?298 960. What was considered the usual age for being matched in the past? For a boy and for a girl? 961. How do people explain the custom that Jews used to make matches between young children? 962. Would this happen only because of religious reasons, or would other factors from Jewish life have an impact? Which ones?299 963. What do you know about cases of panic [i.e., “panic marriages”]? What stories do you know about this?300 964. Does anyone today still take a promising boy into their home and raise him to be their son-in-law? 965. At what age do people begin to discuss matches for a boy and at what age for a girl?301

298. The marital age for Jews, which was relatively low compared to other groups in the Russian Empire during the first half of the nineteenth century, increased significantly during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century (i.e., by the time of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition). On the complex reasons (including higher education, worsening economic conditions, criticism by Orthodox authorities, etc.) for the marked rise in marital age, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce,55–58; Stampfer, “The Social Implications of Very Early Marriage,” 21–23. 299. Stampfer, in “The Social Implications of Very Early Marriage,” p. 19, argues that “early marriage indicated membership in the elite,” since the young groom in such a union was almost invariably supported by his father-in-law (a phenomenon known as kest) and, in return, was expected to devote himself for a few years after the wedding to public study of Torah in the local besmedresh, thereby demonstrating the commitment of his father-in-law to Torah, as well as his affluence. 300. This question refers to the phenomenon of nisuei behalah, or “panic marriages” that were hastily arranged between Jewish children during the eighteenth century and the first few decades of the nineteenth century in response to fears that the government was going to raise the minimum age of marriage (some instances were connected to the popular belief that boys who were married would be exempt from the draft). On such marriages, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 54– 55; Israel Halpern, “Nisuei behalah bemizrah eiropah,” Zion 27 (1962): 36–58. 301. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 291. By 1902 the average age of marriage for Jewish men in the European part of Russia (including the Pale) was 28.14 years and for Jewish women 24.38 years. See Jacques Siler, “Some Demographic Characteristics of the Jewish Population in Russia at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Jewish Social Studies 42, no. 3⁄4 (1980): 278.

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B. Matchmakers, Matches, Family Background, Dowry 966. Are there special town matchmakers in your community? 967. Do they make a living solely from matchmaking, or do they have other occupations? 968. From what class of people do they come, and with what did they occupy themselves before becoming matchmakers? 969. Do they have relationships with matchmakers from other towns as well? 970. Are there land shadkhonim in your community, and why are they called that?302 971. Do women work at matchmaking too?303 972. Do distinguished people ever arrange a match and then take a matchmaking fee for it? 973. How are the relations between a matchmaker and the young people of the town? 974. How is the future bride supposed to behave with the matchmaker? 975. Is it a custom for her to show him respect? 976. Approximately what percent of the dowry is paid as a matchmaking fee?304 977. Is there a difference in the percentage when the match is arranged between people who live far away from one another [iber a vasser, lit. “over a water”]?305 978. And what percent of the matchmaker’s fee does each side pay?306 302. I have been unable to locate a definition of this expression. 303. Most matchmakers in the Pale of Settlement were men. 304. Stampfer, in “The Social Implications of Very Early Marriage,” p. 19, notes: “According to the enactments of the Jewish Council of the Four Lands, marriage brokers could charge between 0.8 percent and 2 percent of the value of the bride’s dowry.” Of course, this reflects an earlier period (the council was dissolved in 1764). Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 400, cites several sources that state the appropriate figure should be 3 percent. 305. The Yiddish expression iber a vasser is a translation of the Hebrew phrase meever ha-nahar (“on the other side of the river”). See Joshua 24:3. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 400, states that “if the matchmaker is from the other side of the river [me-ever ha-nahar] or farther, [he should receive] four percent [of the dowry].” 306. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 400, states that the standard division is for the groom’s side to pay 2 percent and the bride’s side 1 percent of the dowry to the matchmaker as a fee, though there are other traditions depending on the place or circumstances.


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979. When is the matchmaker paid? 980. Do feuds often break out on account of matchmaking? 981. Until what point does the matchmaker take part in arrangements for the match, and at what point is his task considered completed? 982. What stories, sayings, and jokes do you know about matchmakers? 983. How do people view a match between relatives?307 984. What degree of kinship is considered impermissible for marriage?308 985. Do people observe the injunction of Rabbi Judah the Hasid [a famous twelfth-century Ashkenazi sage], that two families should not marry twice with one another?309 986. Do people today still guard against making a match if both fathers-in-law or both mothers-in-law, or the groom and the father-inlaw, or the bride and the mother-in-law, have the same name?310 987. Do people still seek a first son-in-law who is a scholar?311 307. In some Eastern European Jewish circles (especially among Hasidic dynasties), a match between first cousins was seen as positive, if not ideal. The Babylonian Talmud Yebamot 62b describes marriage between a man and his niece as laudable, and such marriages sometimes took place among Eastern European Jews. On this, see also Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, 7. 308. For a biblical list of prohibited unions, see Leviticus 18. Rabbinic and postrabbinic Halakhic sources added their own prohibitions to this list. See Babylonian Talmud Yebamot and Shulhan Arukh, Eben ha-Ezer, 16:1. 309. Rabbi Judah ha-Hasid (d. 1217) is known as the founder of the Haside Ashkenaz movement (a branch of medieval Jewish mysticism) and the author of Sefer Hasidim. The view that two families should not marry twice with one another is part of a broader Jewish cultural aversion to “pairs” versus odd numbers. As Trachtenberg, in Jewish Magic and Superstition, p. 121, writes: “We can piece together a schedule of unlucky marriages involving ‘pairs’: two stepchildren in one family; two brothers who marry sisters; a man who marries two sisters (the second after the death of the first); two brothers who marry a mother and a daughter, or two sisters who marry father and a son; in short, any dual unions within two families.” 310. According to Sefer Hasidim, a man should not marry a woman if she has the same name as his mother or if his future father-in-law has the same name as he does. See Sefer Hasidim, ed. Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1957), para. 23, p. 17. 311. On the declining “market value” of yeshiva students as grooms over the course of the nineteenth century, see Stampfer, “The Social Implications of Very Early Marriage,” 22. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, pp. 32–33, notes that at the beginning of the nineteenth century “Erudition in Jewish law could even outweigh

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988. Do people still turn to a Rosh Yeshiva so that he can select a yeshiva student to be the groom? 989. Do you know any cases or stories about this from the past? 990. List the qualities that people value in a groom and a bride.312 991. What has a higher standing in your community, personal worth or family lineage? 992. Indicate what is considered a good family background in your community. 993. What kinds of background are considered the best?313 994. Are there still families that possess a document describing their lineage [yikhes briv—a letter of pedigree]? From what generation?314 995. Do you know anyone who has such a document? 996. What families in your community are known for their distinguished lineage? 997. What towns are considered in your community as towns with distinguished lineage? 998. List what is considered in your community to be a blemish in the family (a convert, an illegitimate child, etc.)?315 worldly considerations of wealth and family lineage. . . . As one observer pointed out, ‘the dowry of a girl is proportionate to the scholarship of the prospective bridegrooms.’ ” However, “By the late nineteenth century . . . Jewish brides took little interest in the effete, studious grooms who bore no resemblance to the cosmopolitan males lionized in popular romance novels.” 312. Parush, in Reading Jewish Women, p. 40, notes that according to Avrom Ber Gotlober (1811–1899), who wrote an important memoir of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish life, “Knowledge of foreign languages increased a girl’s value on the ‘matchmaking market’ . . . and when the time came for marrying drew near, matchmakers often included language skills in their list of the prospective bride’s virtues.” Languages, such as Polish or Ukrainian, were helpful to women who worked in stores and other settings where they came into contact with non-Jews. 313. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 181, writes: “Families and descendants of famous rabbis were of the highest social rank.” However, this view was contingent upon the traditional valorization of Torah learning, an ideal that was eroded by the impact of secularization. 314. In Sholem Aleichem’s story “Chava,” Tevye the Dairyman ironically alludes to the traditional significance of the yikhes briv when he laments his daughter’s gentile suitor, Khvedke Galagan. See Gants Tevye der milkhiker, in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, vol. 5, p. 124 (New York: Folksfond Edition, 1917–1923). 315. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 181, notes: “The very greatest discredit to a family was to have among its members, no matter how remote, an apostate


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999. How do people in your community behave toward a family in which there are tradespeople? 1000. What trades are generally considered vulgar, and what are their degrees? Which of them is considered more vulgar than the others?316 1001. What personal qualities are considered objectionable and can damage a match for a potential bride and groom? 1002. What stories and sayings do you know about family backgrounds in general? 1003. What signs of beauty exist in your community for females, and what for males? Describe them in detail.317

from the Jewish faith.” In addition to apostates, government informers were anathema in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Depending on the religiosity of the family, having a relative who was a maskil (Enlightener) could also cause problems for a match. Finally, serious physical blemishes could also diminish the marital “value” of an individual. 316. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 30, note: “The water-carrier, the vaser-treyger, was one step above the beggar.” Indeed, the water-carrier appears as the lowly laborer, par excellence, in many accounts of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. 317. Eastern European Jewish attitudes toward female beauty favored physically robust and full-figured women. See, for example, Sarah Schulman’s remarks in “Yidl Mitn Fidl: Yiddish Fictional Cinema,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 31 (1986): 42: “The detail I found the most interesting in Yidl Mitn Fidl was the surprising information about Jewish aesthetic standards. We are told that the bride is ‘the most beautiful girl in the village.’ She is large-boned, plump, with big features and kinky hair. This is a pre-Americanization image of Jewish beauty. Today, an assimilated Jewish woman who looks like this would think of herself as unattractive.” Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 68ff., argues that “the passive, pale, gentle, and physically weak Yeshiva-Bokhur was an object of erotic, desire. . . . Two genres of Yiddish folk literature . . . represent the pale, gentle scholar as favored love-object for women as well, not only for their fathers and brothers. One genre consists of legends, lullabies, and songs representing the desire of the young woman to be married and whom she chooses as her ideal partner. The other genre is memoirs of nineteenth-century Ashkenazic life.” However, such aesthetic attitudes may have shifted at the turn of the century (at least in some circles), as the value of the Torah scholar as a marriage partner declined in Eastern European Jewish society. See also Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July, 102: “If a woman or man were thin, the person had a hard time attracting a partner. The man or woman was suspected of having a lung disease, like consumption. If the man was heavy, the saying was ‘Look at him! What a belly! He must be wealthy!’ ”

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1004. What percent of the dowry must the groom’s side usually give, over and against the dowry from the bride’s side? 1005. When do people deposit the dowry, and with whom do they deposit it? 1006. Do feuds often break out on account of dowries? Is it common for people not to deliver the entire dowry that has been agreed on? 1007. Is there a prevailing view that it’s permitted to be deceptive when it comes to the dowry? 1008. Do you know of any cases in which the groom did not go through with the marriage until the entire dowry was delivered to him? 1009. What is the meaning of “A Document of Half of a Male” [shtar khetzi zakhar], and how is it composed?318 1010. Which side usually provides room and board for the young couple, and how long do they usually provide it? 1011. What living expenses are generally included in this? 1012. Are clothes included? Does it depend on how long the couple stays with the parents, or does a special stipulation have to be made? 1013. Do people ever provide meals without housing, or housing without meals? 1014. What kind of guarantee do people give for this? Is a Jewish contract enough, or do people require a legal promissory note or notarized document? 1015. Does the side that provides room and board consequently demand a larger dowry than the other side? 318. In order to ensure that a daughter would receive part of an inheritance (a process that favors sons, according to the traditional understanding of the Halakhah), Ashkenazi Poskim ( jurists), such as the Rama (Rabbi Moshe Isserles), developed a document called shtar khotzi zakher or shtar khetsi zakhar (see Rama, Even Ha-Ezer 113:2; Choshen Mishpat 281:7). Chaim Jachter, in Gray Matter: Exploring Contemporary Halachic Challenges, vol. 3 (Teaneck, N.J.: Kol Torah Publications, 2008), p. 288, describes it as follows: “This procedure involves the father obligating himself at the time of the daughter’s wedding, as part of the dowry he provides for his daughter, to pay her a very large sum of money (larger than the expected value of the estate), so that the heirs will be motivated to avoid the debt. He stipulates that the debt will be chal (effective) only as of one hour preceding his death. This debt passes to the halakhic heirs, generally the sons, although the concept can be extended to any stages of the Torah order of yerushah [inheritance]. However, the father includes a provision voiding the debt if the halakhic heirs give the daughters a share (e.g., each daughter receives one half of what each male child receives) of the inheritance.”


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1016. What stories, sayings, and jokes do you know about dowries and about the room and board provided to young couples in general? C. References and Interviews 1017. By what means does one side in a marriage agreement inquire about the other (sending inquiries to the rabbi of the town and the like)?319 1018. Does one of the in-laws ever come in disguise to look at the groom or bride? 1019. Does it still happen that parents make a match without the groom and bride seeing one another?320 1020. Do you know stories about this from the past? 1021. Describe how the meeting takes place. Who usually accompanies the groom, and who accompanies the bride?321 1022. Do people ever bring a special expert with them? 1023. How do people interview the groom and bride? Describe this in detail. 1024. Is the groom ever interviewed today? Who interviews him?322

319. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 187, describe one such inquiry that took place around the time that The Jewish Ethnographic Program was published: “My mother was about eighteen years old when her parents first tried to make a match for her. The first candidate was Usher (Asher) Wajcblum, a distant relative. When Usher’s mother came to inspect the prospective bride, she declared that she came wearing a big apron with two deep pockets, one pocket for a dowry for her son and the other for a dowry for her daughter. My mother walked out of the room when she heard that.” 320. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 21, writes: “It is permissible, and even desirable, to look at the woman that one wishes to marry.” Nevertheless, marriages did take place without the couple ever setting eyes on one another, especially before the end of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Wengeroff’s description of her sister’s betrothal and wedding in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 209. 321. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 187, describe such a meeting: “On another occasion, a matchmaker came to my grandparents and said he had found a very nice man for Rivke by the name of Avner Kirszenblat. He came from a very respectable family in Drildz. A meeting was arranged, and Avner came to Apt. Avener took Rivke for a nice walk with a chaperone trailing about ten feet behind. They liked each other and met two or three more times. The wedding was arranged, and they got married in [1915 in] Apt.” 322. Kotik, in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, p. 333, describes how his future father-in-law tested his learning before agreeing to a match with his daughter.

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1025. Is it customary for the bride’s side to bring a special interviewer? 1026. Does the groom’s teacher ever accompany him as an interviewer today? 1027. Do you know any stories about this from the past? 1028. How are the bride and groom supposed to behave when they first see one another? May they participate in the conversation? 1029. Is it customary for the bride and groom to go for a stroll when they meet one another, and for how much time? 1030. Do you know any stories and witticisms about the conversations of the bride and groom when they are left alone? 1031. Do people provide refreshments at the meeting before coming to an agreement among themselves? 1032. What stories and witticisms do you know about the references, the meeting, and the interview? 1033. How do people regard the idea that some unions are fated?323 1034. How did people in the past deal with matches that were the result of love and not a matchmaker? Were they considered to be un-Jewish?324 1035. Was it customary in such matches for a matchmaker to be called in for appearances’ sake? D. Breaking Off a Match, the Act of Acquisition, Preliminaries, the Marriage Agreement 1036. What does it mean to give one’s word regarding a marriage agreement? And what specifically does it entail? 323. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 210, notes: “The girls of earlier times [i.e., before the cultural changes of the second half of the nineteenth century] knew that the husband their parents chose for them was determined by God. God willed that he be her life’s companion, and so one submitted from the first moment to all the fortunes of married life with patience and resignation and arranged thought and action accordingly.” Yet as Shulamit Magnes observes, p. 332, n. 294, this sanguine view contradicts the high divorce rates that affected Russian Jewry during the first half of the nineteenth century, of which Wengeroff was well aware. 324. As Stampfer, “Love and Family,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 33, has noted, love played an important role in the marriages of many Eastern European Jews, especially those from the lower classes, for whom matchmaking was much less common. Such unions became more and more common as the effects of modernization became more widespread during the end of the nineteenth century, though arranged marriages continued, especially in Hasidic circles.


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1037. What does the act of acquisition [kinyen, lit. “acquisition”—in religious law, the marriage agreement requires a symbolic exchange of something of value similar to that in the sale of property] signify, and what does it consist of? What is decided by it? 1038. What do the preliminary agreements [roshe prokim, lit. “general headings”—a statement of intention prior to the drawing up of the marriage agreement] signify, and how do they take place?325 1039. What is the usual text of the roshe prokim, and what congratulations are given the parties to the agreement? 1040. Are there specific times when people customarily draw up the marriage agreement [tnoyim, lit. “conditions”—a document that formalizes the agreement between the families and its terms, as distinct from both the roshe perokim and the ketubah or marriage “contract”]? 1041. Are there specific days on which people customarily do not write this agreement? 1042. Describe how the drawing up of the agreement takes place.326 1043. Who usually writes the document, and who pays the writer?327 1044. What kinds of obligations are written into the document? 1045. Do people include a fine [for violating the terms of the agreement], and at what percent?328 325. Sh. Zabludovitsh, “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” Kehilat Vengerov (Wegrow); sefer zikaron, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 119, writes: “After the bride’s and groom’s families had agreed to a match, and finished discussing all the conditions [Heb., tnaim/tnoyim], a day was set for the outlines of the agreement [Heb., roshe perakim] to be written down. The bride’s family prepared a meal on that day for relatives and close friends on both sides. At the meal the in-laws shook hands, drank a toast, wrote a document sealing the match, and set a date for the betrothal [Heb., tnaim/tnoyim].” 326. Zabludovitsh, ibid., describes the ritual as follows: “The betrothal [Heb., tnaim/tnoyim] was no less festive than the wedding. It took place at the home of the bride, where a generous feast was served. The guests were dressed in their holiday clothes. The parents of the couple filled in formulas on parchment in Hebrew and Aramaic: the names of the bride and groom and of their parents, the place, the dowry, and the gifts. The bride and groom signed the document, and then one of the invited guests read it in a loud voice. When the reading was finished, several plates were broken as a sign of luck, and everyone wished the couple and their parents ‘Mazel tov!’ Then the feast began. At the feast the parents gave the bride and groom valuable gifts, and there was always singing and sometimes even invited musicians.” 327. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 182, states that the tnoyim were written up by the shames (sexton) of the synagogue. 328. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 183, mentions a penalty of half the dowry for breaking the engagement.

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1046. Did it ever happen in the past that after a match was broken off, someone would seek to have a fine imposed by a Jewish or Christian court? 1047. What item is broken to mark the completion of the marriage agreement: a plate, a pot? How does the breaking take place?329 1048. What significance do people give to the breaking of the plate?330 1049. Is it possible that you know other customs associated with the marriage agreement and its significance? 1050. What congratulations are offered at the time of the marriage agreement? 1051. Is it a custom for the groom to remain as a guest for a few days at the bride’s after concluding the marriage agreement?331 1052. For what reasons do people most often break off a match? 1053. When people break off the agreement, do they give the reason that they are doing so? 1054. How do people regard a broken engagement, and what kind of sayings do you know about this? (“Better to tear parchment than paper,” or “Better the first quarrel than the second,” etc.)332 329. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 183, describes the shadkhn as breaking a piece of crockery first, followed by all of the guests throwing plates, platters, and bowls brought from home onto the ground. 330. Like the breaking of the glass during the wedding ceremony itself, some sources describe the breaking of the plate (or other crockery) during the tnoyim ritual as connected to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. See also Elzet, “Meminhagei Yisrael,” 355. 331. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 34, writes: “After the engagement the bride and groom were invited to the houses of their future in-laws for a holiday or a weekend. On such occasions relatives and friends would send wine to the house entertaining the guest, with a greeting, ‘Welcome to your guest!’ (Mit lib aykh ayer gast).” 332. On the phrase “Better to tear parchment than paper,” see Elzet, “Meminhagei Yisrael,” 353. On the ban against canceling engagements in medieval Ashkenazi Jewish society, see Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 51–55. The great sage Rashi even stated that the potential groom should receive corporal punishment if he backed out of the marriage, though it is unclear whether this ruling was widely accepted. In his memoir of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, Shmuel Shrayer noted that “a dibbuk entered the body of a person because of a sin they committed, especially breaking a vow or cancelling an engagement. Incidentally, Hasidim considered a broken engagement to be a very serious transgression.”


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1055. How does the dividing up of assets take place, and at whose house? 1056. Do the two sides issue a document of forgiveness [ksav mekhileh—indicating that neither side has a claim against the other]? 1057. When someone returns the marriage agreement, and the second side does not absolve him, does this prevent him from making another match? 1058. Is it generally considered a defect in a match when someone has already been a groom or a bride? 1059. Do people consider breaking off a match as a bad sign for future life?333 1060. What stories do you know about this? E. Scheduling the Wedding, Trousseau, Presents, Letters 1061. How long do people usually put off the wedding? 1062. Is it considered un-Jewish to hold the wedding right after the marriage agreement? 1063. What are the usual times to schedule a wedding (the Sabbath after Shavues [Shavuot], Sabbath Nakhamu [“Be comforted,” a section from Isaiah read after Tisha be-Av], etc.)?334

333. It was commonly believed that breaking up an engagement would bring bad luck. For a particularly powerful literary portrait of the negative impact of abandoning an engagement, see Chaim Grade, The Yeshiva (New York: Macmillan, 1977). 334. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 45, discusses the popular times for Jewish weddings in the Russian Empire. Traditionally, Jews did not hold weddings between Passover and Shavuot (though this was possible under certain circumstances), the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha be-Av, and during the High Holidays. Consequently, many Jewish weddings were held during the period right after Tisha be-Av and before Rosh Hashanah. Preferred days for weddings differed, depending on the region (with Fridays and Tuesdays being the most popular days). Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 184, notes: “Friday was the wedding day for a maiden; Tuesday or Thursday for a widow or divorcee. Weddings occasionally took place on Sunday. . . . The favorite Fridays for weddings were the Friday following Tisho B’Ov and preceding Sabbath Nachamu, the one following Shovuos, and the one between Yom Kippur and Sukos.”

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1064. At what times and days are people careful not to perform a wedding (the end of the month, Monday, etc.)?335 1065. In scheduling the wedding, do people take into consideration the time when the bride is usually ritually pure [that is, not menstruating]?336 1066. List the necessary things and garments that a bride would usually need in her trousseau [gob, lit. “gift”—personal items necessary for future life provided to the bride] in the past and now? 1067. List the necessary wedding garments for a groom. Is it still a custom to bring tailors to his house in order to sew wedding clothes?337 1068. Is it fashionable for the apprentice tailors to take charge of the groom or bride when they come to take the measurements for the wedding clothes, and how does this take place? 1069. What congratulations are offered at the picking up of the wedding clothes and at the sewing? 1070. List and describe all the garments that were common in the past.338 1071. List and describe the jewelry that was common in the past among Jews and that was considered particularly Jewish (for instance, pearls, a head-covering draping over the forehead [shterntikhl, lit. “forehead kerchief”)?339 335. Mondays and Wednesdays were widely regarded as unlucky days; therefore, people avoided holding weddings on those days. 336. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 10, writes: “It is proper not to make the wedding before the bride purifies herself; but now the prevailing custom is to disregard it. Nevertheless, it is well to inform the groom before the ceremony that she is menstrually unclean.” 337. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 119, notes: “Several months before the wedding, material for the bride’s and groom’s wedding clothes was bought. Rich parents had the tailors come to their homes.” 338. Concerning her older sister’s wedding in 1848, Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 211, writes: “For her wedding dress, she received a pale violet silk dress, trimmed with dazzling, white lace and a myrtle bridal garland and long veil, besides,” adding parenthetically, “In comparison to the manners of those days, the dress was remarkably modern!” 339. Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz, “Dress,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/printarticle.aspx?id=2094, describes the shterntikhl as follows: “The fanciest headdress of Polish Jewish women was the shterntikhl and its variation in Lithuania known as the binda. Worn only on special occasions, this was an expensive article, decorated with precious stones that emphasized the owner’s status. It was first used during the late eighteenth century and became popular in the nineteenth; some families possessed one (though it was no lon-


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1072. Perhaps you have these kinds of old garments and jewelry? 1073. Do people pledge beforehand to give gifts to the bride and groom? 1074. What are the usual gifts among the poor and among the rich? Now and in the past?340 1075. Is it still in vogue for the bride to send the groom a gift of embroidery (a tefillin bag, a wall hanging [mizrekh—lit. “east,” a design hung on the wall to indicate the eastward direction for prayer], etc.)?341 1076. What do you know about the custom for a bride to be bashful? 1077. What does the bashfulness consist of? 1078. Should she make a show of being indifferent to the groom? 1079. In what language would the couple write to one another? 1080. About what would they write?342 1081. Perhaps you know someone with such old letters? ger worn) until the interwar period. . . . The shterntikhl was composed of two bands with precious stones and pearls sewn onto them, encircling the head. Both bands were stiff and sewn above the forehead. The upper part was usually simple and formed a diadem, while the lower part, with a zigzag edge, encircled the face closely and reached beyond the ears.” So ubiquitous was this headdress that Israel Askenfeld even employed it for the title of his mid-nineteenth-century Yiddish novel, Dos Shterntikhl. 340. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 44, notes: “It was also customary for a wealthy bride’s parents in Ukraine to send the groom ‘small gifts,’ such as ‘a silver or gold watch, a silver box for tobacco powder, a headpiece covered with gold, a small Humash (the Pentateuch) bound in silver.’ . . . According to the ethnographer I. M. Pulner, only the poor gave each other clothes as presents.” 341. Many brides would send the groom a tallis and kittel (the white garment traditionally worn by Jewish men on Yom Kippur, during the Passover seder, at their wedding, and for burial). See Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, 405, for the reasons for this custom. 342. Biale, in Eros and the Jews, p. 153, discusses the “custom of writing formulaic letters based on literary models known as egronim.” As Biale demonstrates, over time this practice was replaced by “spontaneous expressions of affection that would never have been put into writing earlier.” Concerning the letters exchanged between her older sister and her fiancé, Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 210, notes: “The exchange of letters was already not without a certain spiritual sympathy, affection, and fondness but was absolutely not emotional.” Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 183, notes: “These letters were distinctive in character, consisting of high-sounding, stereotyped phrases. In most cases, the betrothed couple did not write their own letters, but delegated the task to a man in the town who had beautiful handwriting and the ability to use pompous language.”

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1082. Was it considered a duty for the groom to visit the bride? How is this viewed now? F. The Silver and Golden Weeks, Calling the Groom to the Torah, Entertainment on Sabbath before the Wedding 1083. Which week is called the silver and which the gold?343 1084. How are the bride and groom watched over during the last week before the wedding?344 1085. In which days and moments do the bride and groom require more supervision? What places are the bride and groom prohibited from going during these days? 1086. With what are they supposed to occupy themselves during the week?345 1087. What stories do you know about grooms and brides who came to harm during the week?346 1088. Is it a custom in your community to bring the groom to the synagogue in order to be called to the Torah [oyfrufenish, lit. “being called upon”]? Do people call him to the Torah only on Sabbath, or also during the week?347

343. Moshe Lerer, “An amolike yidishe khasene in Khelm,” in Yizkor Bukh Khelm, ed. Meylekh Bakalczuk-Felin, p. 318 (Johannesburg, South Africa: Khelmer Landsmanshaft, 1954), writes: “The week before the oyfruf [when the groom was called up to the Torah on the Sabbath before the wedding] was called—silver week, from the oyfruf to the wedding—golden week (on account of the golden broth that was given to the fasting bride and groom, and those in attendance would grab the leftovers [lit. shirayim].” In the 1930s, Lerer went to Vilna, where he became a researcher for the YIVO Institute before being martyred during the Holocaust. 344. Customarily, the bride and groom are not left alone during the week before the wedding. 345. There is a tradition to visit the graves of relatives and zaddikim during this period. 346. Haim Schwarzbaum, in “The Hero Predestined to Die on His Wedding Day,” Folklore Research Center Studies, vol. IV (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1974), examines Jewish folk legends concerning the dangers faced by the bridegroom before his wedding, including a number of tales depicting a confrontation between the groom and the Angel of Death. 347. On this custom, see Gavriel Zinner, The Laws and Customs of the Jewish Wedding (Nitei Gavriel) (Lakewood, N.J.: CIS Publishers, 1993), 13–18.


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1089. Who brings him to the synagogue? Only close relatives or all the in-laws, and how does this take place?348 1090. Does the groom sit in his usual place in the synagogue, or is he seated in front, by the Eastern Wall? And who gives up his place? 1091. How does the distribution of honors and turns at being called to the Torah among the in-laws take place? 1092. What kind of honors are usually given to the groom (opening the Ark, reading the haftorah selection from the Prophets)?349 1093. By whom and how is the groom called to the Torah (versions and tunes)? 1094. Are the mothers of the bride and groom brought to the synagogue for the custom of bestrewing the groom [bashitns, lit. “throwing or strewing,” i.e., with candies, etc.]?350 1095. When is the groom bestrewn? When he is standing on the bimeh [raised platform where the prayer leaders stand], or when he returns from the Torah? And who does the throwing? Do the women enter the men’s section of the synagogue to do this?351 1096. What do people throw?352 1097. [Missing]

348. In some communities, the groom was accompanied to the synagogue with singing. 349. If no Kohen is present to receive the first aliyah (being called up to the Torah), the groom traditionally receives this honor. There is also a tradition to give the groom maftir (last person called to the Torah on the Sabbath and holidays who chants the Haftarah or prophetic reading). 350. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 45, notes: “To ensure that the groom’s mother witnessed this important event, the women escorted her to the synagogue, showering her with candy and nuts along the way. After the blessing, the women in the balcony (or the female section of the synagogue) would cast nuts down onto the congregation, and in most Ukrainian towns the poor children would run in to gather them up.” 351. Traditionally, women (and, in some places, men) would throw sweets and nuts at the groom after the Torah reading. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 356, discusses this custom. 352. The practice of throwing sweets and nuts is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 50b. Lerer, in “An amolike yidishe khasene in Chelm,” p. 317, writes: “On the last Sabbath before the wedding the groom was called up [Yid., oyfrufn] (to read from the Torah) and the mothers-in-law and other female relatives in the women’s section of the synagogue would toss nuts, sweets, and raisins on him.”

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1098. What do people say when they are throwing? What is the reason for each type of thing that people throw?353 1099. Describe how the Kiddush [lit. “sanctification,” the ceremony over wine that follows Sabbath and holiday prayers] takes place. 1100. Do people bring refreshments to the synagogue if the oyfrufenish is in the middle of the week? 1101. Is it still a custom to have a forshpil for the groom and for the bride?354 1102. Describe how a forshpil takes place.355 1103. Who are usually the guests of the groom and of the bride? 1104. Can girls also be guests of the groom, and boys of the bride? What kind of refreshments are usually served? 1105. How do people congratulate the couple then? 1106. What are the different kinds of comic entertainment [badkhones, lit. “comedy”—improvised, humorous rhymes directed by the master of ceremonies, or badkhn, at the wedding participants and guests in the course of the ceremony] and tunes for the wedding morning music [dobridyen, lit. “good morning”—music played for the bride on the morning of the wedding day]? 1107. What is the meaning of the “Groom’s Meal” and the “Maiden’s Meal” [khosn-mol and maden-mol—separate celebrations for the bride and groom, respectively, and their friends before the wedding]? When and how does this take place?356 353. In some communities, people would recite peru u-revu (“be fruitful and multiply”) from Genesis 1:28, considered to be the first commandment in the Torah. This suggests a close connection between the custom of throwing nuts, and so on, and the hoped-for fertility of the couple. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 402, provides reasons for why nuts, almonds, and raisins are thrown in particular. 354. The groom’s friends would gather before minhah (the afternoon prayers) on the Sabbath before the wedding to celebrate by singing, drinking wine, and eating fruit, a custom known as the forshpil in some communities. In others, the forshpil was a celebration (in some places, it was known as the Shabbes kallah, or “Sabbath Bride”) held for the bride by her friends and family. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 211, states that this celebration was “called at that time [the middle of the nineteenth century] zemires.” On this custom, see also Elzet, “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” 357. 355. Ain, in “Swislocz,” p. 34, writes: “Wedding festivities began on the Saturday night prior to the wedding. The bride’s girlfriends would gather in her house for dancing and merrymaking. This gathering was called the prelude (forshpil).” 356. For a discussion of this custom, in which the groom was brought to the house of the bride for a feast on the night before the wedding, see Zinner, The Laws


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1108. Does this still take place now? 1109. What kinds of presents do the invited guests usually send (a cake, a twisted loaf of bread [kitke], etc.)?357 1110. Is it a custom to send back part of the presents? 1111. Is it a custom for the bride and groom to send their midwives presents before the wedding? What are the usual gifts (a shirt, an apron, etc.)? 1112. Is it a custom for the groom and bride to ask forgiveness from the people with whom they’ve been quarreling and to invite them to the wedding? G. The Day of the Wedding, Leading the Bride to the Ritual Bath, the Meal for the Poor 1113. Is it a custom for a bride and groom who are orphans to go to their parents’ graves before the wedding ceremony?358 1114. Is it a custom to go invite deceased relatives to the wedding? Who goes to do this? Versions of this?359 1115. Is it still a custom for the bride and groom to fast until after the wedding ceremony and to recite the long version of the confession of sins [vidui] during afternoon prayers?360 and Customs of the Jewish Wedding, 22–24. Zinner mentions that the bride and groom would exchange presents. In some cases, the mitzvah dance would take place with the bride; some served a meal specifically for women and another for men. Lerer, in “An amolike yidishe khasene in Chelm,” p. 317, writes: “The night before the wedding day, the relatives, friends and acquaintances would be invited to a party that was called a khosn-mol. The majority also then made a ‘feast for the poor’ (for the poor people), at which they would distribute money after already setting the table with all sorts of good things.” 357. At the wedding feast, the bride and groom would distribute pieces of kitke (or challah, as it was known elsewhere) to the guests. 358. It was customary for orphans to visit the cemetery in order to invite dead parents to their wedding. See, for example, Khayes, “Gleybungen un minhogimin farbindung mitn toyt,” pp. 326–327, who writes: “Before the wedding the bride and groom go to the graves of their parents and ask forgiveness for all that they have done and invite them to attend the wedding. The dead parents come to the wedding and bless their children.” Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 357, also describes this custom. 359. This was a common practice, especially for people whose parents had died. 360. Both bride and groom would fast on the day of the wedding. Various explanations are offered for this custom, including the idea that the marriage traditions are patterned on the giving of the Torah, before which the Jews fasted, and that the sins

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1116. How does the leading of the bride to the ritual bath [mikve] take place, and who leads her?361 1117. Do you know of the custom in the past to lead the bride to the ritual bath with music?362 1118. What customs are there for the immersion in the bath? 1119. Is it still a custom to dance before the khupe [a canopy under which the marriage must take place] on a broom? Who dances, and what do people say at it? The reason for it?363 1120. Does the groom also go to the ritual bath on the marriage day? How does this take place? 1121. Is the custom still widespread to serve a meal for the poor [orem moltzayt]?364 1122. How are the poor people called together?

of bride and groom are forgiven on the wedding day, as on Yom Kippur. On this custom, see Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 9; Sperling, Sefer Taame HaMinhagim, 403. 361. E. Lifschutz, in “Merrymakers and Jesters among Jews (Materials for a Lexicon),” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Sciences 7 (1952) (originally published in Arkhiv far der geshikhte fun yidishn teater un drame, 1930), p. 63, provides the following description, quoting from David Fränkel, “Über die jüdischen Heirathsstiftungen und Hochzeitsfeste,” in Sulamith (Leipzig, 1806), p. 231: “In Brody, Galicia, a peculiar and ridiculous custom prevails. Several hundred girls, dressed in their holiday attire, accompany the bride to the ritual bathhouse in broad daylight. The procession is led by a comedian, who sits on a horse, facing backwards, and amuses his dear public with all kinds of antics.” 362. Lerer, in “An amolike yidishe khasene in Chelm,” p. 317, writes: “Concerning the bride, the night before the wedding, when she was led to the ritual immersion [in the mikve], besides handing out cake at the bathhouse—with the female bathhouse attendants, the tukerins—people would accompany her with klezmer, playing in the street, and a celebration began in the house, during which the badkhn would soften up and break the bride’s heart with his moralizing rhymes.” 363. At the wedding of the last child in a family to be married, the mother of the bride would dance with a broom. This dance, known as a mazhinka, signified the sweeping out of the household of marriageable children. 364. See question 1107. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 119, notes: “Rich parents made a meal for the poor several days before the wedding, after which a substantial amount of money was distributed.” Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 185, writes: “Well-to-do families arranged a feast for the paupers of the community a day or two before the wedding.”


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1123. Is it a custom for the bride herself to serve food at the table?365 1124. What kinds of food and beverages are served at the poor persons’ meal? Do musicians play?366 1125. Is it customary for the in-laws to dance with the poor people?367 1126. Do people give gifts to the poor after the meal? What?368 1127. Do people give them donations? Typically, how much for each poor person? Is there a difference between men, women, and children? 1128. What congratulations are offered? 1129. Is it common for a rich man to lead the wedding procession outside of town? For what reasons? H. The Musicians and the Badkhn [lit. “comedian”; also the master of ceremonies; see above, no. 1106] 1130. Do the musicians and badkhn from your town make their living from weddings, or do they have other jobs?369 365. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, 185, writes: “The bride and groom were seated at the head of the table with the paupers who were waited on by the parents and some of the distinguished relatives of the bride and groom.” 366. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, 185, writes: “On this occasion, the poor folks were served with a meal abounding in fish, meat, beer, and in some instances, even mead and wine.” 367. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, 185, writes: “After the meal, the bride and groom danced with the poor folk, and distributed coins among them.” 368. See question 1121. 369. Moshe Beregovski (1892–1961) was an important researcher of Eastern European Jewish folk music in the period up to World War II. His groundbreaking work (including the use of a questionnaire and extensive interviews) has been edited and annotated in Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski, trans. and ed. Mark Slobin, Robert Rothstein, and Michael Alpert (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001). According to Beregovski’s research, until the twentieth century, klezmer musicians essentially formed a kind of professional caste within the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe: marrying into each other’s families, speaking their own argot, and passing on their trade to children and grandchildren. In Berdichev, klezmorim (musicians) even had their own synagogue. The music itself was performed at Jewish weddings, which gave rise to a repertoire structured around wedding rituals, dances, and so on. Despite their integral role in the communal life of Eastern European Jewry, Beregovski notes that musicians in klezmer kapelyes (bands) had a very hard time making a living from playing music alone. For this reason, most engaged in other activities, such as barbering and money lending (see Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, p. 56, n. 81). For

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1131. What instruments usually comprise a Jewish band?370 1132. Do the musicians from the town have exclusive rights to the weddings there, or do people sometimes bring in musicians from other towns?371 1133. Are the musicians paid by the in-laws, or do they make do with the money they make from the dances and dobridyens [see above, no. 1106]?372 1134. Do people ever bring in a famous badkhn from another town for weddings? example, Avram-Yehoshua Makonovetskii, a klezmer musician who responded to Beregovski’s questionnaire, addressed this issue in Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, p. 32, as follows: “In town, my father was known as Yisroel der fiddler. He was not only a fiddler but also a watchmaker, barber, and glazier and also a pauper. In spite of this, he took in poor children and taught them music.” According to Jean Baumgarten, in a personal communication with the author, most badkhonim also had other jobs in order to survive. 370. Beregovski, in Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, pp. 29–30, writes: “The instrumentation of larger kapelyes, and of smaller ones as well, beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, generally included a first violin, second violin [Yiddish, sekunde], viola (rare—two sekundes were more common), cello or bass, clarinet (always in C), flute, cornet, trombone (or tuba, occasionally), and Turkish drum with cymbals.” 371. Beregovski, in Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, p. 34, observes: “Fierce competition raged between klezmer bands, especially in towns and cities with two or more ensembles. The struggle reached its fiercest around a wealthy wedding that might yield substantial earnings. Often, a kapelye would set out to play for a wedding in the territory of another band. Sometimes the competing bands would reach an agreement, and the local band would pay the visitors a fee for leaving. However, frequently the incident would lead to fisticuffs.” 372. Beregovski, in Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, pp. 59, 105, writes: “Klezmorim would receive only a small sum from the bride’s parents, who arranged the wedding. The musicians’ basic earnings came from the payment received from other relatives and guests for dances, vivats [salutatory tunes], fanfares, and the like. Before starting a dance, the dancers paid the musicians money collected from the participants. A musician, usually the lead violinist, would keep the money in the fiddle case or a special cup. After the wedding, two musicians would tally the receipts and distribute them among the band members, according to a fixed system of shares.” Aharon Zilbershteyn, in “Klezmer,” Kehilat Vengerov, p. 132, mentions that the town’s klezmer musicians (who belonged to a single family named Shpielman) would play for a nominal fee, or even for free if the bride and groom were poor.


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1135. List all the famous badkhonim [pl.] that you know.373 1136. What witticisms, sayings, and jokes do you know from badkhonim? 1137. Is it still a custom that on the day of the wedding the musicians go to all the in-laws in the town and play them a dobridyen? Does each pay them? How much? 1138. Describe how the first dobridyen for the bride takes place. 1139. Describe the different things that the badkhn recites and the tunes of the dobridyen for the in-laws and bride.374 1140. Is it a fashion to call together all the close friends to the dobridyen? 1141. How does the dressing of the bride in her wedding clothes take place, and who helps her? 1142. How does the bringing of the bride to the house where people will dance take place, and who leads her there? 1143. Who goes to invite the girls and women to dance? 1144. Do girls [who are strangers to the families involved] ever attend the weddings of poor people as a mitzvah?

373. For famous badkhonim, as well as a history of the phenomenon and examples of badkhones, see Ariela Krasney, Ha-Badhan (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University, 1998). Zilbershteyn, “R. Brish ha-Badkhan,” in Kehilat Vengerov, p. 133, mentions that the town badkhn was “known as one of the best badkhonim in Poland.” Intriguingly, the memorial book for the town of Zambrow describes a woman named Malkah Tsimbl as a badkhn who used to “sing folk songs and recite badkhones, etc. People say that in the past, during her younger years, she used to dance at weddings and sing with a tsimbl in hand, like the prophetess Miriam did when the children of Israel were passing through the Sea of Reeds, and for that reason people called her ‘Malkah Tsimbl.’ ” See “Nashim lamdanios: Zambrover vayber vos hoben gekent in di kleyne pintelekh,” in Groys Radomishle un svive: yizker bukh, ed. Hillel Harshoshanim and Isaac Turkov-Grudberg, 299–301 (Tel Aviv: Irgun yotse Radomishel ve-ha-sevivah be-Yisrael, 1965). 374. Zilbershteyn, “R. Brish ha-Badkhan,” in Kehilat Vengerov, p. 133, notes: “For a regular wedding his style was light and spiced with humor; by contrast, for scholars’ weddings he would interweave biblical verses and profound concepts. . . . [For example, at one wedding] R. Brish opened with a statement from the Zohar on the subject of creation and interpreted it with wondrous rhymes and rich content. And if it was the wedding of a bride who was an orphan, the celebration was transformed at first into crying and wailing under the influence of R. Brish’s words which touched the heart.”

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I. Taking over the Groom [ibernemen dem khosn], Seating the Bride on the Bridal Chair [bazetsns], Veiling the Bride Prior to the Wedding Ceremony [badekns] 1145. Describe how “the taking over of the groom” takes place.375 1146. Do people send out an announcement that the groom is leaving?376 1147. Who goes out to meet him, and how does this take place?377 1148. How does the meeting take place? Are refreshments served?378 1149. Do the wagon drivers from the groom’s side request a ransom for the groom? 1150. How does the entry into the town take place (with a song)? 1151. Is it still a custom to take the groom into the town with instrumental music?379 1152. Is it a custom for the town’s young wagon drivers to bar the way of the groom with whips? From where does this custom stem? 1153. Is there a designated place (for example, a stone) at which people circle around with the groom? From where does this custom stem?380 1154. Is it a custom, when the groom and bride are from the same town, that the groom leaves town earlier, and then afterwards people bring him in? 1155. Is it a custom for a water-carrier to meet the groom with a full barrel of water and then to pour it out? What is the reason for this? 1156. Must the water carrier be a Jew, or may he be a gentile as well? 375. Lerer, in “An amolike yidishe khasene in Chelm,” p. 317, writes: “There was a klezmer accompaniment for the groom’s arrival at the bride’s residence and they made a ceremonial procession around the city hall, the market ring seven times. They stopped about a few verst [Russian measurement equaling .66 miles] from the city and gave a forewarning by way of a herald, a rider, to the bride’s side.” 376. See question 1145. 377. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, 188–189, notes that when the bridegroom was from another town, “A number of relatives and close friends of the bride ride to meet him and his entourage. This ride to meet the bridegroom is an important feature of the wedding and is carried out with much commotion and spectacular splendor. The best available coaches with bells attached to the splendid harness of each horse are hired or borrowed for the parade.” 378. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 189, writes: “After partaking of cake and brandy, the bride’s party, with the bridegroom now in its midst, hurry back to the town with the wagons of the bridegroom’s entourage lagging a little behind.” 379. See question 1145. 380. Ibid.


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1157. Is it a custom that the groom should not stay in a rented inn? 1158. Do all the in-laws stay where the groom is staying? 1159. How does the first dobridyen for the groom take place? 1160. Record the different versions of badkhones and the tunes which are played at that time.381 1161. If the bride and groom have not yet seen one another, do people bring them together to see one another then? 1162. Upon what is the bride seated? 1163. How did people perform this in the past? 1164. Do people send an invitation to the groom’s side to dance with the bride? 1165. What does skotsl kumt signify, and how does it take place?382 1166. Does the groom’s mother bring a gift for the bride? What does she bring? 1167. What congratulations do people say when the in-laws greet the bride? 1168. Is it a custom to give the groom’s or bride’s grandmother a shirt for her to put on over her clothes and then go dancing in front of the in-laws across the town with a tray of refreshments in her hand? 1169. Should the shames also go to invite the groom to the reception prior to the wedding [kabbalas ponim, lit. “welcoming”] if wedding invitations have also already been sent out? 381. Beregovski, in Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, p. 12, writes: “The musical component of the ‘seating of the bride’ ritual consisted of two basic elements: 1) a fairly extensive introduction and refrain played as a fiddle solo, accompanied by the whole band or by the second fiddle and bass, and 2) the couplets of the badkhn. The badkhn ‘said’ (sang) his couplets in a free recitative. At breaks, the musicians responded to his singing with a chord, usually on the cadential tone.” For more on the music played when the bride was seated, a ritual also called kale-baveynen (“making the bride weep”) and kale-bazingen (“singing to the bride”), see pp. 50–51, n. 25. 382. There is a lot of debate about the etymology of this Yiddish phrase. My thanks to Nehama Singer Ariel, a native of Ludmir, for discussing the issue at length with me. In general, skotsl kumt (or kimt) functions as a greeting to someone who has arrived unexpectedly. In some communities, it also appears to have been applied to a particular moment during the wedding celebrations. See Lerer, “An amolike yidishe khasene in Chelm,” 318: “The mother-in-law’s visit to the bride before the veiling ceremony with presents—in general, a ring—was called ‘skotsl kumt’ (‘Skotsl kumt, mother-in-law!’—people would accompany her with great joy).”

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1170. How does the reception take place?383 1171. Must the bride’s side send a kitke [twisted loaf of bread] to the groom for the reception? 1172. Is the custom still prevalent that young students should not dance with girls? 1173. When do people braid the bride’s hair? Who braids it? How does this take place? Do people say anything at the time?384 1174. Do you know of the custom of smearing the bride’s hair with honey; of pouring sugar on the hair? Do people still do this today? 1175. Describe how the seating of the bride takes place.385 1176. Upon what do they seat her?386 1177. Do you know of the custom to seat the bride on a kneading trough, a noodle board with a pillow, etc.? Does the custom still exist today?387 1178. List all the things upon which people used to seat the bride, and describe the significance of each one. 1179. Record the different versions of badkhones and musar [here, a speech of moral admonition; compare above, no. 331] for the bride at the bazetsn. What tunes are used to accompany this? 1180. How does the calling of all the mothers-in-law to the so-called “kosher dance” with the bride take place?388

383. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, pp. 189–190, describes the couple as sitting at the head of table “covered with a fine tablecloth . . . bottles of brandy and wine, platters of cakes and abundant cigarettes, which the bridegroom offers literally to everyone.” 384. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 405, states: “The reason for undoing the hair of the head of the bride and braiding it anew before the wedding is that the Holy One Blessed be He braided Eve’s hair and adorned her with twenty-four ornaments and brought her to Adam.” See Babylonian Talmud Eruvin 18a for the source of this tradition. 385. Klezmer musicians and the badkhn would accompany the seating of the bride with performances. 386. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 190, writes: “The bride . . . is seated on a chair, covered with a white sheet and decorated with flowers, particularly with myrtle.” 387. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 190, writes that in the past “it was customary to seat the bride in the center of the room on a kneading bowl stuffed with pillows. This custom was later discarded.” 388. This is one of two wedding dances referred to as a “kosher dance” (the other occurred after the wedding ceremony and involved the bride and male guests


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1181. What do people call this in your community now (to congratulate the bride)? 1182. How did the “kosher dance” take place in the past, and how does it now? 1183. Record the different versions of the calling out and the tunes used as musical accompaniment for the dance. 1184. How does the seating of the groom take place?389 1185. Record what people say and play at that time. 1186. Who leads the groom to the badekns [veiling], and how?390 1187. Who usually serves as the best man or maid of honor, and who is considered preferable?391 1188. What is the reason that a person who has a second wife or a second husband is forbidden to be a best man or maid of honor?392

holding a handkerchief between them to avoid touching, hence the name). Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 191, describes the “kosher dance” that preceded the ceremony as follows: “[After the badekns] the bridegroom and all the males return to the house where they are lodged. Only the klezmorim and the badchon remain for the third ceremony, called ‘mazel-tov-dance’ or ‘kosher dance.’ The badchon calls aloud the name of each woman present, who then embraces the bride and completes a circle with her.” In some communities, the mothers-in-law would also perform the broygez tants (“angry dance”), during which they would mimic a quarrel and even exchange mock blows before embracing, thus symbolizing and, ideally, at least, physically releasing the tension that was seen as naturally existing between them. 389. Zabludovitsh, “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” Kehilat Vengerov, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 119, notes: “The groom sat in front, surrounded by young boys, relatives, and friends. The tables were covered with white cloths, and many candles were lit.” 390. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” pp. 119–120, writes: “Late at night the ceremony of veiling the bride began. The in-laws took the groom by the hand and led him to the bride’s house. At the entrance, musicians played, while the groom approached the bride and covered her head with a white silk shawl. Then the groom was led back to where he waited. During this ceremony, the wedding jester [badkhn] began to sing rhymed couplets in Yiddish, and sometimes in Hebrew as well, accompanied by the fiddlers.” 391. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 358, n. 2, mentions that in Lithuania, the bride’s mother and father bring her to the wedding canopy, and if she is an orphan, her relatives or close friends do so. 392. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 359, mentions this custom.

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1189. Is there a custom in your community to give a childless person the honor of being best man as good luck [a sgule] for having children?393 1190. Who meets the groom with an upside down fur pelt, and how? What is the significance of this, and where does the custom come from? 1191. What do people say when the groom enters to veil the bride (old women bless the groom)?394 1192. Who leads him to the bride, and how does the badekns take place? 1193. What does he veil her with? Is it still a custom to veil her with a paroykhes [the curtain that hangs over the Ark in the synagogue]? 1194. Who bestrews the groom, and what do they throw?395 1195. What do people say when they bestrew him (“bestrew him so that he won’t be a groom again”)? J. The Wedding Ceremony 1196. Does the groom still wear a kittel [a white overgarment worn during certain holidays and when an individual is buried] to the wedding ceremony, and what is the reason for this?396 1197. Is the custom widespread for the groom to pour ashes over his head before the ceremony? What is the significance of this?397 1198. Describe how the procession to the khupe canopy takes place.398

393. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 359, notes: “One should not choose a couple that is childless.” 394. When the bride is veiled, those present recite the phrase “Our sister, be the mother of thousands and tens of thousands,” (Genesis 24:60), said to Rebekah by her brother and mother before she left with Abraham’s servant to be married to Isaac. The veiling ceremony itself is connected to Rebekah veiling herself before meeting Issac. 395. In some places it was customary to throw seeds on the bride and groom as a sign of fertility. See Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, 506. 396. Various explanations are offered for why the groom wears a kittel, including as a reminder of the day of death or the day of judgment, as well as a sgule that the couple should remain together until death. 397. The custom of placing ashes on the groom’s head (and in some places, the bride’s head as well) is done in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Some also recite the verse “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand whither” (Psalm 137:5). 398. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 120, writes: “Exactly one hour before midnight, the parents walked the groom arm-in-arm to the canopy. The musicians went first, playing festive music, and guests carried burning,


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1199. Do people make sure that the groom sets out on his right foot? 1200. What is the order of the procession? Who goes first?399 1201. What do people carry during the procession: regular candles or havdole [i.e., Havdalah] candles [large, braided candles used at the ceremony to mark the end of the Sabbath]?400 1202. If the bride is an orphan, who leads her instead of the parents? 1203. Is there a belief that when the bride goes to the wedding canopy, she should not carry anything, and she should remove all of the pins from her hair, untie all knots, and unhook all of her clothes? What is the reason for this?401 1204. Do people lead the groom and bride at the same time, or do they first lead out the groom and afterward the bride?402 1205. What do people call out when the bride arrives at the canopy (“go to hakhnoses kale [the bringing in of the bride]”)? 1206. Record the melodies with which people are led to the wedding canopy. 1207. Where is the canopy erected, in the courtyard of the central synagogue of the town, or by any synagogue? multicolored candles; the groom was led to the synagogue, where the canopy had already been set up. When he was in place under the canopy, the whole crowd, including the town rabbi, stood near him, awaiting the bride’s arrival. The bride was accompanied by both of the mothers-in-law, and musicians played before her. Guests carried candles, while women danced near the bride with special challahs in their hands. These wedding challahs were braided and covered with many-colored poppy seeds. When the bride reached the canopy, the musicians ceased playing.” Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 327, note that “This procession was called tsi ladn firn, to escort to sorrow, because before the wedding everything was serious. Bevaynen di kale was a ceremony during which the badkhn made everyone cry with his mournful rhymes about the end of the bride’s carefree youth and the challenges of married life to come.” 399. Traditionally, the groom went first. See question 1204. 400. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 507, links the custom of accompanying the bride and groom with “candles and torches” to the giving of the Torah, which was also accompanied by lightning and flames. In general, Jewish sources liken the giving of the Torah to a wedding and vice versa. 401. On this custom, see Zinner, The Laws and Customs of the Jewish Wedding, 50. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 192, notes: “In some regions . . . it was customary to untie all knots in the garments of the groom and the bride so that no one could ‘bewitch’ them by means of the knots.” 402. Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 11, mentions that the groom should be led to the khupe [marriage canopy] first and then the bride.

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1208. Do people still take care that the canopy should only be under an open sky, and what is the reason for this?403 1209. Are people called before the canopy to bless the bride and groom, and whom do they call? 1210. What do the people who do not go to give blessings answer (that God should bless them)? 1211. Describe how the wedding ceremony takes place. 1212. How many times do people walk in a circle around the groom, and who does this?404 1213. Does the cantor sing with the synagogue choirboys when the groom is being circled? 1214. What sayings and songs do you know about circling around the groom, and in general about the wedding ceremony (the groom loses his composure, etc.)?405 1215. Is there a belief that if the bride steps on the groom’s foot while standing under the wedding canopy, she will dominate him?406 1216. Is there a belief that if it rains during the ceremony, it is a sign that the bride has a sweet tooth?407 1217. Describe how the ritual of the wedding vows takes place and who usually officiates at them. 1218. Is it a custom in your community for the person who officiates at the vows to lead the groom by first reciting the phrase, hare at. [“hare at mekudeshet li,” “From here on you are betrothed to me”]? Where does this come from? 1219. Is it a custom in your community to honor particular people with the blessings at the wedding canopy? 1220. Who breaks the glass: the groom or the shames? 403. Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 10, and other sources, state that the khupe should be under an open sky in order to recall Exodus 15:15, “Thus (like the stars) shall your children be.” 404. Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 11, notes: “The bridesmaids bring the bride under the huppah, and together with her, they walk around the groom seven times.” Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 120, notes: “The bride walked around the groom three times and stood at his left.” 405. On this custom, see Aaron Arend, “The Bride’s Circling the Groom at the Wedding,” Sidra 7 (1991): 5–11 (Hebrew). 406. See question 1237. 407. In her richly detailed account of a Jewish wedding from the nineteenth century, Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 216, observes, “since it rained at her khupe, she [the bride] must have been downright sweet toothed.”


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1221. Where does the custom of breaking a glass come from?408 1222. What other customs are associated with the wedding ceremony? 1223. What is the difference between a typical wedding canopy and a canopy for orphans?409 1224. Is there a belief that the deceased parents attend the ceremony?410 1225. What stories and songs do you know about this? 1226. How do people lead the bride and groom back from the wedding ceremony?411 1227. Is there a difference in this respect between a “kosher” and a “non-kosher” bride? Do people observe this now?412 1228. With what tunes do people lead the couple from the wedding ceremony (“Oy, My Daughter Is a Wife,” etc.)? 1229. Do people perform a circle dance on the street while leaving the ceremony?413 1230. Does the badkhn recite any rhymes at that point? 408. The Babylonian Talmud 30b and 31a mention several stories in which a glass was broken during a wedding in order to demonstrate that even moments of great joy should be leavened by seriousness. Later, after the practice of breaking a glass became customary, it was associated with the destruction of Jerusalem. On the development of the custom, see Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 166–170. 409. On the different performance of the badkhn at an orphan’s wedding, see question 1139. 410. Deceased parents were traditionally invited to attend their children’s weddings. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, pp. 191–192, notes: “If the bride is an orphan, [before the wedding ceremony] the chazan [cantor] now recites the prayer for the dead, ‘Merciful God, etc.,’ chanting it in the accepted mournful tone. The klezmorim after each sentence reply antiphonally in the same tone, accompanied by floods of tears and the loud sobbing of the women, especially the bride. The klezmorim then depart from the house in which the bridegroom is lodged. If the bridegroom is an orphan, the above ceremony is repeated except for sobs and tears.” 411. Zabludovitsh, “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” in From a Ruined Garden, p. 120, writes: “On the way back as well, the groom was led off first by himself, and the bride came after. Along the way the musicians played, as some relatives sang and others danced alongside with wedding challahs in their hands.” 412. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 357, writes: “When the bride and groom return from the wedding ceremony they walk arm-in-arm, even among Hasidic families, for whom that is the only time in their lives. Excluded from this, of course, is a ‘treyf [non-Kosher] wedding’ (with a menstruating bride).” 413. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 215, notes that after the wedding ceremony, “the bridal pair strode arm and arm on the way home, accompanied

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1231. Do people dance before the bride and groom with an upside down fur pelt? Who dances? 1232. Do people meet those who are leaving the wedding ceremony with full buckets? Who meets them? 1233. Is it a custom for the bride and groom and the in-laws to throw money into the buckets? 1234. Do people overtake the bride and groom at the door with a kitke [twisted loaf]?414 1235. Do people lay a silver teaspoon on the threshold for the bride and groom to step over?415 1236. With what foot must they step on it, and with what foot must they enter the house?416 1237. Who enters first, the bride or groom? 1238. Is there a belief that this will determine which one of them will be in charge?417 by the thundering, deafening music of trumpets and the whole crowd, at which the old women in particular danced a roundelay just in front of the bridal pair.” 414. On this custom, see Israel Reichel, Mayn Shtetl Postov (Tel Aviv: Israel Reichel, 1977), 49. Reichel notes that one of the grandfathers would typically recite the blessing over the kitke. Also see question 1226. 415. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 215, writes: “All of the women took their jewelry off and laid it here on the threshold; the newlyweds must stride over it.” 416. The widespread custom was for the bride and groom to take the first step with their right foot. 417. In his biography, Solomon Maimon mentions the belief that whoever stepped on the other’s foot under the chuppah would dominate in the marriage: “I was just going [to] tread on her foot, but a certain je ne sais quoi, whether fear, shame, or love, held me back. While I was in this irresolute state, all at once I felt the slipper of my wife on my foot with such an impression that I should almost have screamed aloud if I had not been checked by shame. I took this for a bad omen.” In his memoir, Yekhezkel Kotik (1847–1921) mentions a similar custom: “Under the wedding canopy my bride stepped on my foot. I thought it was accidental. Immediately after the ceremony, her relatives whisked her away toward the house so that she might be the first to enter it. This was done in accordance with the then current belief that the one of a newly wedded couple who first stepped into their home would dominate the other for the rest of their conjugal life.” Both quotes are in Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 177–179. On a parallel custom among Russian peasants, see Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 167: “Their actions in relation to one another foretold who would dominate their marriage. For example, whether the groom or bride took the first step into


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1239. Is it a custom that after the wedding, the bride should light and bless the candles even if it isn’t Friday? What is the significance of this? 1240. Does the bride sometimes light more than two candles? 1241. Does the groom’s or the bride’s mother add an additional candle to her Sabbath candles on account of the wedding of the children? 1242. Do people lay a kitke near the bride and groom? How is it twisted? 1243. Where does the saying originate: “He puts on airs like a groom before a kitke”? 1244. Do people give the bride and groom coffee with pletzlekh [flat rolls]?418 K. The Wedding Supper, The Seven Days of Banquet 1245. Is it a custom for the groom and his side to go to their inn before the supper and eat bread soup [kapun/kaplun—An-sky gives both] there? 1246. Is it a custom to go and invite the groom and his side to the supper? 1247. Does the shames go and invite all the local in-laws individually to the supper? 1248. How does the assigning and ordering of the places at the table take place? 1249. Do the men and women eat together or separately? 1250. Do people try to satisfy the groom’s side more, and should the groom’s side make a show of putting on airs? 1251. What foods did people serve at the supper in the past, and what now? Record what they are called and how they are prepared. 1252. Why do people call the soup “golden broth”?419 1253. How does the dobridyen take place at the wedding supper?

the church or onto the wedding towel therein decided the question of authority between the two. . . . The spectators ensured that the bride acquiesced to the groom’s taking the first step.” Similar beliefs existed among French peasants. See Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 29–36. 418. On the custom of eating pastries with coffee or tea, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 49. 419. The name “golden broth” came from the gobs of golden chicken fat floating in the soup.

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1254. What kinds of badkhones, rhymes, and tunes do people say and play?420 1255. Is it still a custom for the groom to give a Torah commentary? When does he say it? 1256. Describe how the groom would deliver his commentary in the past. Perhaps you know the contents of such a commentary? 1257. Describe how the order of the “commentary-gifts” [droshegeshank, i.e., the wedding presents] takes place (who calls out, which side goes first, etc.)?421 1258. What things were given in the past as wedding presents, and what now? 1259. What words of praise do people say to the giver of a wedding present? Does the badkhn recite a rhyme?422 1260. What portion of the wedding presents and cash belongs to the badkhn? 1261. How do the blessings after the meal and the seven traditional wedding blessings take place (who do people honor, with how many cups, etc.)? 1262. Must the bride and groom drink from the cup used for the blessings? 1263. List all the people and societies that put out plates for contributions at the wedding supper. 1264. Are there special waiters and cooks in your community? Who are they?423

420. Lifschutz, “Merrymakers and Jesters among Jews (Materials for a Lexicon).” On pp. 54–83, Lifschutz includes excerpts from a variety of Eastern European sources (e.g., the memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik, Pauline Wengeroff, and Avrom Ber Gotlober) concerning badkhns and their performances. 421. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 216, describes the ceremony as follows: “After a luxurious meal that ended with a great drinking bout, the assembled company still remained sitting at the table. It was a custom that the bridegroom spice the meal with a talmudic oration (a droshe). Now the droshe gifts, that is, the wedding gifts from family, parents, and friends, were presented to the newlyweds.” 422. On this custom, see Lifschutz, “Merrymakers and Jesters among Jews,” 71–72: “And now the wedding gifts from the parents, relatives and friends are brought in. The badkhn becomes active again. Now he appears in a more agreeable mood. He amuses the guests with various comic antics and improvises anecdotes and rhymes, coins a bon mot about each of the guests, appropriate also to his gift, and entertains the bride and groom with jests and bitter truths, garbed in a humorous form” (quoting Wengeroff, Memoiren einer Grossmutter (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1913), vol. 1, p. 178. 423. See note to question 349.


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1265. Does the father of the bride pay them, or do the guests reward them? 1266. Is it a custom that after the supper the waiter sits at the table and consumes sour milk from a narrow-necked milk pot in order to show that he did not taste the supper? 1267. Describe how the “kosher dance” of the men of the community with the bride takes place, and what it is called in your community (Polish).424 1268. Do people dance with a handkerchief?425 1269. List all the Jewish dances which you know and describe how they take place (a kazatshke [Cossack dance], keytsad merakdin [“how do they dance,” a quotation from the Mishnah, Ketubot], mazel tov [congratulations], a shemele [a little name], a sher [scissors], etc.).426 1270. How does the returning of the groom’s side to the inn take place? 1271. Do people lead them with music, and what is played for them before leaving (melodies from a gute nakht [“good night”], a gezegntantz [“farewell dance]”)? 1272. How does the procession of the groom and bride to the nuptial bed take place? Who leads?427 1273. How do people prepare the bed? 1274. In which room, a cold or a warm one? 424. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 217, describes the “kosher dance” as follows: “Then [following the wedding meal] in its turn came the so-called kosher dance. The bride, covered with her veil, was placed in the midst of the bridesmaids, one of whom had in her hand a silk, four-cornered handkerchief. The badkhen invited one of the men to dance with the bride, at which the bridesmaid gave the corner of the kerchief into the bride’s hand and presented the second corner to the dancer. They made the rounds in this way twice; the badkhen exclaimed, ‘Done!’—and the bride took a seat again amid her bridesmaids. In this manner, the bride danced with all the men present. This went on until long after midnight. The poor bride, however, was not allowed to lift her veil.” 425. During the kosher tants (“kosher dance”), or mitsve tants, as it was also known in some communities, the bride would dance with various male guests (e.g., her father, father-in-law, etc.) while both were holding a handkerchief. Beregovski mentions that since the middle of the nineteenth century almost all of the klezmer bands in Ukraine played a polonaise by the composer Michal Oginski for the kosher dance. 426. On the various dances performed at weddings, see Beregovski, in Jewish Instrumental Music, 9–11. 427. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 359, writes: “When they bring the groom and bride to their room, the women in-laws try to take off the clothes of the bride and this is considered a ‘mitzvah.’ ”

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1275. Is it still fashionable to teach the groom? Who teaches him? 1276. Perhaps you know about such behavior from the past? 1277. What stories and sayings do you know about this? 1278. Is there a custom that the parents should stand by the door? 1279. To whom do people show the sheet in the morning, and how does this take place?428 1280. Is it a custom to drink red liquor if the bride turns out to be a virgin [iz erlekh, lit. “is honest”]?429 1281. Is it a custom to eat hard cheese if she is a virgin? What does this signify? 1282. Do people ever take the sheet to show a rabbi if there is a doubt? 1283. Do you know of an old custom for people to dance with the sheet in the marketplace? 1284. How do people react if the bride does not appear to be a virgin [nit erlekh, lit. “not honest”]? Do people shame her publicly, and how does this take place? 1285. Perhaps you know stories from the past about punishments that people used to administer to such a bride? 1286. Does a husband ever divorce his wife immediately after the wedding?430 1287. Who is supposed to buy the large prayer shawl worn by married men for the groom? 1288. How does the putting on of the prayer shawl for the first time take place, and what congratulations are offered then? 1289. Who is supposed to buy the wig (veil [shleyer]) for the bride? 1290. List all the things that people wear in your community in place of a wig (a bonnet, a cap, etc.). 428. I have not come across any sources that mention this practice among Eastern European Jews, though it existed among Jews (and non-Jews) in other places (e.g., North Africa and Kurdistan). For a discussion of this issue, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 323–326. 429. Elzet, in “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” p. 359, writes: “When the couple has already entered their room, several relatives—especially among Hasidim—enter into an adjoining room and drink there ‘liquor’ and call out with artificial profligacy ‘Good night!’ and this is in order to stir up the hearts of the groom and bride, who were, as is customary, far from one another and did not dare to touch each other.” 430. Such divorces might occur especially when a husband suspected his wife of not being a virgin at the time of the wedding (this was particularly the case with Kohanim, who were held to a higher standard of marital purity).


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1291. How does the cutting of the bride’s hair take place?431 1292. Perhaps you know how this used to take place in the past?432 1293. Where would people put the shorn hair? 1294. How do people behave toward married women who continue to go around with their own hair? How would people harass them for this in the past? 1295. Is there still a belief that on account of this, small children die or other misfortunes occur?433 431. Lerer, in “An amolike yidishe khasene in Chelm,” p. 318, describes the ritual of cutting the bride’s hair as follows: “The next morning after the khupah [ceremony], when the sheitl [wig] had already been sent to the bride at home, the regal siddur [prayer book] in the golden cloth with a lock, a shkot (a mirror in a [wooden] frame), etc., according to one’s financial ability, the groom’s mother, often with all of the relatives, went to see the nakhas [proud enjoyment], that is, if the mitzvah was done in the true Jewish way, and the bride was lifted from the bed. After undressing her, her hair was cut, during which the young, often 14- or 15-year-old bride heartbreakingly would cry over her beautiful cut locks and braids. After the cutting, the bride would be veiled. Afterwards, as a dairy meal was eaten, such as coffee with butter cakes, etc., a joyous musical march was led, that is, the groom’s mother invited the bride and all on her [side] to the station, accompanied the entire way by klezmer. The refreshments here were: beverages, fruit layered cakes, preserves and the like. Here the mother-in-law also gave the young wife a present—a bracelet, brooch, rings and the like that was called shein-gelt [literally, beautiful money] (inspection money for looking at the bride in her veil for the first time in the groom’s house). Everyone who wanted to be treated to the honor of looking at the bride, who the excited inlaws were allegedly hiding, disguised—had to pay a fee.” Translated by Gloria Berkenstat Freud, at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/chelm/che295.html. Also see Zabludovitsh, “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” in From a Ruined Garden, p. 120: “The next morning [after the chuppah] the hair of a pious bride was shorn and a wig was fitted on her head. At the same time she was given a black silk shawl and a fine bound prayer book.” 432. Wengeroff, in Memoirs of a Grandmother, p. 217, mentions that the woman who cut the bride’s hair was known as a gollerke. On the day after the wedding of Wengeroff’s sister, the gollerke came “armed with a great pair of scissors, and, at my mother’s command, took possession [of] my poor sister’s head, laid it against her breast, and soon under her murderous shears, one lock after another of beautiful hair fell from my sister’s head, as Jewish precept prescribed. After scarcely ten minutes, the lamb was shorn. She was left with only a little hair over her brow, the better to sweep it under, because not one trace of her own hair was to appear.” 433. This was a common belief. For example, Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogimin farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 328, writes that women who went around without covering their hair were liable to be possessed by a dibbuk, or evil spirit.

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1296. Describe how the bride is first brought to the synagogue after the wedding and what congratulations are offered then. 1297. Is it a custom in your community for the rebetsin or a rich woman from the town to give up her usual place on Sabbath to the bride whom people have led into the synagogue?434 1298. What other customs are related to the procession of the bride into the synagogue?435 1299. Do people teach her how she is supposed to pray and behave in the synagogue? 1300. What is the significance of the word rumpel (holiashtshine) [celebration] on the day after the wedding?436 1301. Which side is supposed to make the rumpel? Describe how it takes place. 1302. What clothes was the bride supposed to wear in former times? What now? 1303. Describe how the reception known as a “veil lunch” [shleyervaremes] takes place at the home of the bride. 1304. Do people then add something to the marriage contract [toysefes-ksube, an additional document that gives the bride more rights], and what is the significance of this?437

434. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 195, writes: “As soon as the reading from the Torah begins in the men’s section [of the synagogue], the bride’s mother in the women’s section calls loudly, ‘Who is going to lead the newly married woman into the synagogue?’ Almost all the women present answer the call. One of them, the rebitsin (the rabbi’s wife), is obliged to go.” 435. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, pp. 195–196, describes this ritual as follows: “In a quiet procession the bride is then led to the synagogue where she is seated by the side of the rebitsin. She sits silent during the services, reciting no prayers. The motive of this custom is not to shame an illiterate bride.” Elzet, in “Meminhagei Yisrael,” p. 359, mentions the same custom. 436. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 196, describes the rumpel as deriving from a German word meaning “tumult.” A “farewell meal” would be served in the afternoon, and the badkhn would announce the wedding gifts before the assembled guests. The event would end with a farewell dance. According to Schauss, the rumpel is also when the klezmer musicians and badkhn would be paid. 437. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 48, writes: “This important document [the ksube or ketubah] contained a statement on the mutual obligations of the spouses and stipulated the monetary compensation due to the wife in the event of divorce or her husband’s death. In most cases, the husband was also to pay the value of her trousseau and an additional sum called the tosefet ketubah, depending


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1305. Do you know about the custom in which the mother of the bride dances on a broom, and what does this signify?438 1306. How does the departure of the in-laws take place? Describe how they bid farewell and offer congratulations. 1307. How long did the days of celebration last in the past, and how long do they now? 1308. How does the watching over the groom and bride take place during the seven days of celebration? 1309. Does the bride bind up the hand with her wedding ring on it during the entire seven days, and what is the reason for this? 1310. What other customs do you know that are observed during the seven days of celebration? 1311. How does the Sabbath of the seven days of celebration take place, and what do people call it in your community (“Seven Blessings,” “the Joyous Sabbath”)? 1312. Is it a custom to call all the in-laws to the Torah on that Sabbath? Who gives out the turns? 1313. Is there a custom for the in-laws who have been called up to give donations to different societies? 1314. Which aliyah [turn at being called to the Torah] do people usually give the groom? How is he called up? 1315. Describe how the Kiddush takes place [see above, no. 415]. 1316. Describe how the zmires [traditional songs sung on the Sabbath and holidays] take place. L. Unusual Weddings and Vows 1317. Do you know stories about forced marriages or marriages for money, in order to receive money for the divorce? 1318. What stories do you know about “black” weddings [shvartze khupes, false marriage ceremonies carried out in taverns or brothels as part of nights of revelry], and how did they take place? 1319. Do you know stories about weddings in cemeteries carried out as protections against misfortune? Does this occur only during a plague, or also in other cases, and if so which ones?439

on the nature of the marriage contract. This financial arrangement was intended to prevent rash divorces and to protect, ‘the divorcée against financial disaster.’ ” 438. See question 1119. 439. Holding weddings in cemeteries during epidemics was a common practice among Eastern European Jews.

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1320. What stories and songs do you know about misfortunes that occurred to the bride and groom under the wedding canopy and on the first night? 1321. Do people repeat the marriage vows if the bride was ritually unclean [due to menstruation] when she went to be married? 1322. What is the reason for this, and how do the second vows take place? 1323. Describe what changes there are for the wedding of a widower, a divorcé, a widow, a divorcée, and a woman released from a levirate marriage.440 1324. Describe how the wedding takes place when the couple or the groom or bride is getting married for the second time. 1325. What stories, songs, and sayings do you know about weddings between old people? 1326. What stories, songs, sayings, and jokes do you know that have a relation to matches and weddings in general or to their specific features and circumstances? 1327. Perhaps you know special local customs, beliefs, etc., that are connected to weddings? Describe all of them clearly. Fourth Section: Family Life A. Boarding the Bride and Groom [kest—room and board provided particularly when the son-in-law is a religious scholar or works in the father-in-law’s business], Father-in-Law, Mother-in-Law 1328. Is the practice still widespread in your region to take in the son-in-law as a boarder?441 440. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 197, observes: “The wedding of a widow or divorcee took place on Thursday. The chupo was not put up in the courtyard of the synagogue, but inside the house, and klezmorim were not present. It was not designated a wedding and people did not say, ‘So-and-so is celebrating her wedding day,’ but ‘So-and-so is setting up chupo today.’ ” 441. The practice of boarding the young married couple, known as kest in Yiddish and mezonot in Hebrew, became an important part of the culture that emerged in Eastern Europe to support the learning of Torah into adulthood by scholars, or lomdim, and, in general, helped young couples to get on their feet financially. On the custom’s relationship to the culture of learning Torah, see Immanuel Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study among the Lomdim,” in The Jewish Family, pp. 153– 178. During the nineteenth century, Haskalah authors condemned kest as “an unproductive custom that only encouraged the husband to shun work and shame-


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1329. Which side provides this more often? The reason for this?442 1330. How long do people usually provide room and board for the young couple?443 1331. Is it still the practice to provide room and board perpetually? 1332. Is it the practice to provide a son-in-law with room and board so that he can sit and learn?444 1333. What responsibilities does the provider of room and board assume (nothing more than food or other outlays as well)? 1334. Does it often happen that the young couple pays for room and board? How much?

lessly sponge off his in-laws and wife.” Quote is from Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 31. Concerning its historical trajectory, Freeze, on pp. 31–32, observes: “The institution of kest, which had deep roots in the Polish Commonwealth, remained an important institution for Jewish families in tsarist Russia. . . . Kest, whether from maskilic satire or the vicissitudes of the Jewish economy, apparently became widespread.” One of the biggest factors in the decline of kest was increased urbanization and concomitant overcrowding: “Such limited living space not only produced inter- and intra-family conflict but also rendered the traditional system of kest all but impossible” (p. 58). 442. It was more common for the parents of the bride to provide kest. When the couple included a young Torah scholar, this was seen as a duty in return for having the merit of a son-in-law devoted to learning. As Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 320, n. 129, also observes: “It [matrilocal kest] may have provided a favorable environment for early childbearing, which generally took place at home into the early twentieth century.” David Ransel, in “The Ethno-Cultural Impact on Childbirth and Disease among Women in Western Russia,” Jews in Eastern Europe 45 (Fall 2001): 37, notes: “A significant difference between the Jews and their Slavic neighbors was the matrilocal residence of young Jewish married couples. The bride’s continuing residence with her own family afforded her protection from her husband and especially from his relatives. The situation made quite a contrast with the sorry lot of Slavic brides, who came into their husbands’ households occupying the lowest rung on the social ladder and under the tyranny of their mothers-in-law.” 443. The terms of the kest, including its duration, were part of the prenuptial agreement signed by both families. Several years of support were the norm. However, Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 181, mentions that when the match involved a good student, kest sometimes lasted for ten or twenty-five years, and,“in very rare cases . . . a particularly brilliant student was given ‘eibige kest,’ a life pension.” 444. Such a son-in-law was known as an eydem af kest in Yiddish.

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1335. How does the young couple occupy itself during the period of room and board? 1336. When is the dowry handed over? 1337. When do the children who are boarding with their in-laws begin to make a living themselves? 1338. What is the usual job of children boarding with their in-laws? 1339. How does the giving up of room and board take place? 1340. Are there certain beliefs and customs associated with this? 1341. What gifts do people give to the departing couple? 1342. Is it a custom to give a hen to those who are departing? 1343. Are they given household items and furniture? 1344. Is the young man called up to the Torah in the synagogue because he is giving up room and board? 1345. Do people congratulate the young couple on their giving up room and board? 1346. Is it a custom to send the young couple that is giving up room and board bread and salt, a kitke or a khale [braided breads]? 1347. Is it a custom that when the young couple has a nursing child, people give them a cow or a goat as a gift? 1348. What stories, songs, and sayings do you know about boarding a young couple? 1349. What form of respect is the son-in-law or daughter-in-law obligated to show the father-in-law and mother-in-law? 1350. Is it customary for the children to visit the father-in-law and mother-in-law on holidays? 1351. Is the young daughter-in-law supposed to show respect to the older daughters-in-law? The same among the sons-in-law? 1352. Do the parents involve themselves in the private life of the boarding children? 1353. Do they involve themselves in the work life of the boarding children? 1354. Do conflicts and feuds often occur between the boarding children and the in-laws? 1355. What kind of nicknames are the in-laws given? 1356. Do the parents ever take the boarding children’s dowry for their own business? 1357. Do people ever board two or more children at the same time? 1358. What kinds of stories and songs do you know about relations between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law?


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B. Husband and Wife 1359. What were the typical relations between a young couple immediately after the wedding like in the past, and what are they like now? 1360. Does it still happen now that the young couple doesn’t call each other by their names but only as “you” or “do you hear” [du, herstu—both using the familiar form of the Yiddish second-person singular pronoun]?445 1361. Does it still happen that the husband doesn’t look at his wife for a long time after the wedding?446 1362. What do you know about this from former times? 1363. Does it still happen that after the wedding the wife earns a living, and the husband doesn’t do anything?447 1364. How do such young people usually spend their day? Do they occupy themselves with community affairs? 1365. In the past, in what form did the husband express love to his young wife? 1366. How do Jews look upon love and beauty?448

445. Shaul Stampfer, “Love and Family,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 43, has noted that the traditional Jewish aversion to public displays of affection between husband and wife “led to the creation of curious circumlocutions for the terms ‘my husband’ and ‘my wife’, the most common being mayner and mayne (‘mine’, masc. and fem.) . . . [and] the term tsi-herstu [lit. ‘do you hear?’], which evolved from a phrase of address like ‘listen here!’ into a common noun meaning ‘wife’ or ‘husband’.” 446. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 20, writes: “Husband and wife are not allowed to flaunt their love for each other, like a wife patting her husband’s head in the presence of others, so that the lookers-on might not come to sinful thoughts.” 447. Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, a wife who worked to support her husband while he studied Torah was a cultural ideal (and, therefore, a sharp contrast to the “cult of domesticity” in Western Europe), however, most couples could not afford such an arrangement. 448. On the complex question of Eastern European Jewish attitudes toward love, see Stampfer, “Love and Family,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, 26–55. On the concept of “beautiful Jews” (sheyne yidn) versus “simple Jews” (proste yidn), Stampfer, “Heder Study, Torah, and Social Stratification,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 147, has written: “ ‘Beauty’ for them was not an aesthetic characteristic of physical features but a reflection of the behaviour, manners, and particularly the talmudic knowledge of the ‘beautiful’ Jew.”

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1367. How do people characterize a beautiful woman (for example, “straight as a pine tree,” and the like)? 1368. Did it used to be considered socially acceptable for a young couple to go walking together? 1369. Was it perhaps considered unacceptable for them to go walking together even in order to wish others “good Sabbath” and “happy holiday”? 1370. How did people react to young men who looked at their wives in synagogue on Sabbath or on holidays? 1371. What stories and songs do you know about this? 1372. In former times, what did a good married life mean? What does a good married life mean now? Does the husband ask his wife for advice? 1373. Does the husband ever sign over to his wife his share in the World to Come? Do people make a written contract in such a case? And what do people write in such a contract? 1374. What words do people say about a couple which has gotten along well with one another their entire lives? 1375. Over what would people most often begin to have marriage problems? 1376. In what way did a bad marriage become apparent? 1377. Would it happen that a husband and wife would fight and swear in public? 1378. Would it happen or happen often that the husband would beat his wife?449 449. Avraham Grossman, “Violence toward Women,” in Pious and Rebellious, devotes an entire chapter to medieval Jewish rulings concerning the physical abuse of women by their husbands. After surveying sources from a variety of Jewish communities, Grossman observes, on p. 227: “Ashkenazi sages, more so than those in any other Jewish diasporas in the Middle Ages . . . [were particularly] harsh with the wife-beater.” Despite medieval and later rabbinic rulings strongly condemning wife abuse, such abuse did sometimes occur among the Jews of Eastern Europe. For an example, see Z. Sher, “My ‘Days’ in Slonim,” Pinkas Slonim; sefer gimel, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 136, who records the following scene en passant while describing the practice of “eating days” (esn teg), in which a Yeshiva student would eat meals in the homes of local householders: “Mondays I would eat at a shoemaker’s house. When I arrived the first time, he was beating his wife with a broad, leather shoemaker’s strap. She wept and cried out, but he cut her like cabbage. I stood embarrassed, with my eyes to the ground, and finally left the house hungry, never to return.” Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, pp. 141, 173–177, examines nineteenth-century


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1379. Would it happen and does it still happen that the mother-inlaw is implicated in the marriage problems? 1380. Do a husband and wife ever go to the rabbi to have their disputes adjudicated? 1381. Does the wife ever come to the synagogue to lament her husband or mother-in-law? 1382. Do the townspeople ever intervene to make peace between a husband and wife?450 records that document the physical abuse of Jewish women by their husbands. She observes that, despite the legal protections afforded by the Halakhah, in practice, it was often difficult for Jewish women to compel divorce on the basis of such complaints and that younger Jewish women in particular initiated divorce on these grounds. For unclear reasons, “wife beating as a grounds for divorce” among Jews appears to have declined in at least some Russian locales during the middle of the nineteenth century. 450. In his memoir, Israel Reichel, in Meyn Shtetl Postov (Tel Aviv: Israel Reichel, 1977), pp. 31–32, describes such an intervention in his hometown (located on the border of Lithuania and Belorussia) during the first few decades of the twentieth century: “It was an accepted fact that a Jew doesn’t beat his wife. But there were exceptions. And there was such an exception in Postov. There was a middle-aged Jew who would often beat his wife. It isn’t important to know the name of this man, for it will add nothing at all to this sorrowful episode. Neighbors used to tell about the wife’s terrible screaming and crying, day and night, that was heard from this Jew’s house. The whole town knew what was going on there, and people deliberated about what to do to help the woman. After long consultations, some of the young adults decided to do something in order to stop the man’s brutal handling of his wife. A delegation of two Jews came to him in his house and had an innocent and ‘cozy’ talk . . . with him about the attitudes of Yiddisheh men according to age-old Jewish traditions. The Jew agreed with what he heard of this morality lecture, but he didn’t want to make any promise that he would stop beating his wife. Before the delegation left the man’s house, they told him that they would deal very harshly with him. They gave him a week’s time to decide how to deal with this matter. Two weeks passed and there was no change. The strong young fellows decided to carry out what they had said they would do. On Shabbes, between Mincheh and Mai’rev, when the town’s rabbi was studying Mishna with the Jews in the shul, these fellows tricked the ‘wife-beater’ into the shtibl [small prayer room], stretched him out on a long table, and began to beat the tender parts of his body with a leather strap. The Yid, however, was also a strong fellow, and he freed himself, jumped down from the table and out through an open window into the street. A few weeks later they again grabbed him, got him into the shul and spread him out on a table, and pulled down his trousers. Four fellows held him down on the table, and two ‘shmeisers’ [thrashers] with specially prepared kontshikes [disciplinary whips], one on either side of the table,

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1383. Does the young wife ever flee to her parents? (Is this escaping called ufratskes [from Heb. ufaratzta, “and you shall break forth . . . (to the east and west . . . ),” Gen. 28: 14, part of the promise God gives to Jacob, plus Yiddish substantive ending]?) 1384. Do the parents ever return their daughter to her husband themselves? 1385. Do the parents ever come to take their daughter away from her husband? 1386. How is peace made between husband and wife in such cases? 1387. Does a man ever separate himself from his wife and become a poyresh [lit. “one who separates,” a man who chooses to live alone, usually in order to devote himself to religious studies]? 1388. What kinds of stories do you know about this? 1389. Which wives would people call “modest women”? 1390. In the past, how did people refer to moral laxity on the part of a woman? 1391. Would it be considered a sign of immorality to keep one’s own hair after marriage, to sing and speak with a man? 1392. Did it used to happen that the husband would divorce his wife on account of this? 1393. Would people blame plagues and other misfortunes like children’s illnesses and the like on a woman keeping her own hair?451 1394. When would it occur more frequently that a man would suspect his wife of unfaithfulness, now or in the past? 1395. To whom would the husband turn in such cases to investigate the matter? 1396. How would the investigation take place: in public or in secret? 1397. Do you know any stories in which people caught an unfaithful wife?452 delivered twenty-five lashes. Before they let him go, they told him that he would get fifty if he didn’t begin to behave in a menshlecheh [decent, humane] and Yiddisheh way to his wife. The twenty-five lashes helped, but it was perhaps the fear of the promised fifty lashes that worked to ensure that he stop beating his wife.” Translation is by Reichel’s niece, Eilat Gordon Levitan, at http://www.eilatgordinlevitan. com/postavy/pos_pages/postovy_stories_mein_shtetl_selected_chapters.htm. 451. This was a common belief. 452. Rekhtman, in Yidishe etnografye un folklor, pp. 136–139, records a story that the expedition heard in Ostroh about a woman who was falsely accused of becoming pregnant through an adulterous affair. She was brought before the town


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1398. What kind of punishments and embarrassments would people impose on the sinful woman or the sinful man (leading them around the streets with a lung and liver around their neck, and the like)?453 1399. What penance would the rabbi impose on a sinful woman or a sinful man? 1400. What stories do you know about brothels from the past? 1401. What stories do you know from the past about beautiful women whom noblemen would force into sin? 1402. What would the husband do with such a wife? Would he have to divorce her? 1403. Do you know any stories from the past about a great lord who demanded that people bring him a virgin or a married woman, and the Kahal [communal authorities] forced her to go? Was this considered self-sacrifice for kiddush ha-Shem [see above, no. 922]? rabbi, who gathered together witnesses and put her on trial. Ultimately, it was decreed that no one within the community could come within four cubits of her. She died during childbirth and was given an ignominious burial. Eventually her husband returned from a long trip and testified that the child was his (unbeknownst to the townspeople he had impregnated her during an earlier visit). Miraculously, when they opened up the grave to remove the child from her womb (which they would have done had she not been an adulterer), they found that he had already been born and was nursing from her breast. The town realized that the woman was innocent and repented what they had done. 453. Public shaming of adulterers is known in many cultures. Although I have not found a source that describes this particular practice, Moisei Berlin, in Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonaseleniia v Rossii (Saint Petersburg: V. Bezobrazov, 1861), 32–33, mentions that in the past (i.e., the first half of the nineteenth century or earlier), rabbis would publicly shame both male and female adulterers, for instance, placing a headdress made of feathers on an adulteress and having the shames [caretaker] of the synagogue parade her through the streets in front of other people. On the phrase “lung and liver,” see Max Weinreich, “Tsu der kharakteristik fun undzere folksgleybenishn,” Yidishe filologye 1 (1924): 168. Weinreich notes, “In the conception of the folk, ‘lung and liver’ is the seat of the life-force.” Wex, in Born to Kvetch, p. 187, notes that the phrase “ ‘Lung-un-leber’ also comes up in the delightful onhengen a lung-un-leber af der noz, ‘to hang a lung and liver from a person’s nose’—to dupe them, trick them, leave them with egg (or in this case, something rather colder and slimier) all over their face.” It is easy to imagine how this expression could have been connected to an act of public shaming. On the literary use of this expression, see Sholem Aleichem’s story “Hayntike kinder” (Today’s Children), in Gants Tevye der milkhiker, in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem (New York: Folksfond Edition, 1917– 1923), vol. 5, p. 80.

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1404. Do you know any stories from early times, that on the first night after her wedding, every bride was sexually defiled by the nobleman?454 1405. Do you know whether there used to be a special fee paid to the nobleman to buy back the right of dishonor? 1406. Would the nobleman ever donate the fee to the Jewish community? 1407. Does the practice still exist today that before the wedding the bride must pay some money to the community, as if to buy back the right? 1408. Do you know of any stories from the past about a noblewoman who forced a Jew to sin with her? 1409. Do you know of any cases in which a woman suspected her husband of adultery? 1410. To whom would she turn to investigate the matter? 1411. How would the investigation take place? How would a sinful husband be punished? 1412. How would people punish prostitution in general? 1413. Do you know of cases of such punishments still occurring? 1414. Have cases occurred in your community in which a husband sold his wife into prostitution?455

454. On specifically Jewish legends concerning the “right of the first night,” or droit du seigneur (“right of the lord”), which apparently has little if any historical basis, at least in the medieval and early modern periods, see Raphael Patai, “Jus Primae Noctis,” Folklore Research Center Studies, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1974). 455. A common method for entrapping an Eastern European Jewish woman in the thriving international prostitution trade (popularly known as the white slave trade) was for a Jewish procurer to marry her, transport her to Buenos Aires or another center of the trade, and then turn her out. For a description of this phenomenon, see Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 105. On Jews and prostitution within the Russian Empire, see Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 103–104, 161–166. On p. 164, she writes: “How accurate was the general impression of brothel prostitution as a uniquely Jewish trade? To be sure, Jews worked in prostitution disproportionately to their numbers in the population, with the percentages of Jewish madams far exceeding the percentages of Jewish brothel prostitutes, and both outnumbering the proportion of Jews in Russia’s population. According to an 1897 census, Jews composed only 4 percent of the population in the entire Russian empire (including Poland, with its nearly five million


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C. Parents and Children 1415. What is the typical number of children that a couple has? 1416. What is considered a lot of children? 1417. What did people do in the past in order to have a lot of children? Males and females? How do people do it now? Is it considered a blessing to have a lot of children or the opposite? 1418. Is there a belief that the more sons the parents have to say kaddish for them [lit. “sanctification,” a prayer said for the departed by their surviving sons], the less their suffering will be in the afterlife?456 1419. What beliefs are there about people who leave behind a minyan [see above, no. 731] of kaddish sayers? 1420. What kinds of remedies and practices does a mother who has only given birth to females employ in order to have a kaddish [i.e., a son who will say kaddish for her]?457 1421. How is an only child treated? 1422. What names do people typically give such children as good luck for a long life (Alter, Zeyde, Alte, etc. [“Old Man,” “Grandfather,” “Old Woman,” respectively])?458 Jews). In 1889, Jews made up 7 percent of the prostitutes registered in the empire’s brothels (570 of 7,840 women) and 6 percent of its odinochki (631 of 9,763). In contrast, a full 24 percent of the madams were Jewish (297 of 1,214 women). In 1889, in Minsk, Bessarabia, Kherson, and Tavrichesk provinces, Jewish brothelkeepers reached percentages of 64 (7 of 11 women), 79 (15 of 19 women), 83 (30 of 36 women), and 92 (22 of 24 women), respectively. Within the Pale of Settlement as a whole, Jewish women ran a full 70 percent of the brothels. Though Jews clearly did not dominate brothel prostitution numerically, their disproportionate status, their visibility, and the public’s readiness to think badly of them left Jews extremely vulnerable to the image of brothelkeepers as rapacious Jews who profited off the bodies of young Russian women.” 456. In answer to this question, a Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn gave the figure of “seven boys” to the author. 457. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 253, describe the case of a couple in Apt who had seven daughters but whose male children all died. They went to a rabbi who “gave Khiel [the father] an amulet and told him to make the boy wear it all the time: it would ward off evil spirits. Second, the child must always be dressed in white: the white clothes would fool the Angel of Death, the malekh-hamuves, into thinking the boy was already dead and not taking him, since Jews always bury their dead in white burial shrouds. A boy was born. Der shvartser Khiel followed the rabbi’s instructions, and the boy survived.” 458. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 390, writes: “The reason that those whose children do not survive, God forbid, call a boy or a girl by the name

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1423. Do people have such children wear different forms of protection [shmires] and amulets [kameyes]? List them. 1424. Is it a custom to dress an only child in someone else’s clothes? Until what age? The reason for this? 1425. What other protective practices do you know? 1426. How are twins regarded?459 1427. What is the reason that twins are born?460 1428. Is there a belief that a Jewish woman who has many sets of twins will be spared from khibut hakever [lit. “the pounding of the grave,” suffering inflicted on the deceased in the grave for a year after death]? 1429. What special practices and penances do parents employ whose children die young? 1430. Describe in what ways respect for a father and mother is expressed (for example, not sitting in the father’s place, not eating with his spoon, and the like)? 1431. How do younger children behave and show respect toward older ones, and vice versa? 1432. Do people still make an effort not to marry younger children before older ones?461 1433. Do people make sure to seek the agreement and forgiveness of the older child in such a case?462 1434. Is there a belief that if the older child does not consent, the younger will have bad luck? 1435. What stories and songs do you know about this? 1436. What is the attitude toward an illegitimate child? 1437. How does the circumcision of such a child occur? 1438. What sort of name do people give him? 1439. Is it considered a mitzvah to participate in such a circumcision?

Alter or Alte is in order to conceal/or protect him or her with the name so that the hand of the Accuser (lit. Ha-Satan) will not be able to injure the child. And we call him ‘Zakan’ so that he will merit old age.” 459. See question 12. 460. See question 13. 461. In answer to this question, a Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn informed the author: “Only in the same gender. The custom is to get permission in writing, and to appease them with a gift. Some families try to marry off the kids in the order that they were born.” 462. See question 1432.


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1440. To whom belongs the responsibility of supporting the child if it is known who the father is? 1441. Is there a belief that an illegitimate child is always clever? From where does this stem? 1442. What sort of sayings, songs, and stories do you know about illegitimate children?463 1443. What is the attitude of parents to children who convert?464 1444. Is there a belief that the parents of such children will have a “black” funeral [shvartse levaya], and what does this signify? 1445. Do you know of cases when children have converted because they suffered at the hands of their parents?465 1446. Do you know of cases in which parents took back their children before conversion? Describe how this occurred. 463. In response to this question, a Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn told the author: “A mamzer talmid khokhem [a Torah scholar who is the product of a forbidden sexual relationship] is respected more than a high priest who is an ignoramus. I was told a story about a mamzer. At his bris the moyel castrated him. The child grew into a fine Torah scholar and was engaged to marry into a respected family. An old man in the town remembered the story of the bris and broke up the marriage. The scholar left town and vanished. Years later a decree was issued against the Jewish community. The town priest saved the Jews by taking his own life. The priest was the mamzer.” 464. On the one hand, in his Yiddish study of the phenomenon of Jewish apostasy, Shmuel Leib Tsitron, in Meshumodim: Tipn un siluetn fun noentn over (Warsaw: Farlog Tsentral, 1923), p. 3, observed that the meshumed, or convert, “immediately became the enemy of the entire Jewish people.” On the other hand, ChaeRan Freeze, “When Chava Left Home: Gender, Conversion, and the Jewish Family in Tsarist Russia,” Polin 18 (2005): 165, has written that “Jewish families rarely responded to conversion by simply severing ties with their children or kin, especially during the preparatory period for baptism, but even after the dreaded act.” In many cases, she demonstrates, such parents attempted to convince Russian officials that their children had been abducted and converted under duress. The Russian press, meanwhile, “regularly published sensational accounts about young Jewish women who were found murdered or beaten violently after their baptism,” by “ ‘fanatical Jews.’ ” 465. The motif of parental neglect or abuse appears frequently in the conversion narratives of impoverished Jewish girls (see Freeze, “When Chava Left Home,” 156– 157). On the phenomenon of conversion in Russia in general, see also Michael Stanislawski, “Jewish Apostasy in Russia: A Tentative Typology,” in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd Endelman, 189–205 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987).

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1447. Do you know of cases in which parents prevailed upon their converted children to return to Judaism? 1448. Do you know of cases in which parents sent such children abroad? 1449. What is the attitude toward a family in which there are apostates? 1450. What stories, songs, and sayings do you know about apostates in general? D. Kinship 1451. Are there large families where all the children with their wives and grandchildren live together? 1452. In such families, is the father considered the sole authority? 1453. What rights do the children have in such families? When family conferences take place, does the father consult with the eldest son? 1454. List all the terms for kinship employed in your community (for example, great uncle or aunt [sheyni-barishon], cousin once removed [sheyni-basheyni] and second cousin [sheyni-bashlishi], great uncle [elter feter], second cousin [glid-shvesterkind], and the like). 1455. What are the relations like between all the different degrees of kinship?466 1456. List all the different names for the degrees of in-law kinship (for example: the husband’s brother and sister, the husband’s sister’s husband, and the like). 1457. What are the relations like between all the different degrees of in-laws to one another and between in-laws in general? 1458. Is it considered a duty to help poor relatives? Until what degree of kinship? 1459. What sayings, songs, and stories do you know about poor relatives? 1460. Are grandchildren considered to be like one’s own children? 1461. Is there a belief that those who have merited to have greatgrandchildren during their lifetimes will not suffer any khibut hakever [see above, no. 1428] in Gehenem [see below, nos. 2042ff.]? 466. In response to this question, a Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn told the author: “Some say ‘The Sefardim consider a third cousin like a brother. In Meah Shearim [a Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem], a brother is like a third cousin.’ ”


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1462. How do grandchildren express respect for their grandfather and grandmother? 1463. Is it a custom to go to the grandfather and grandmother to be blessed at certain times (Sabbath evening, the evening of Yom Kippur, and the like)?467 1464. Is it a custom for the grandfather to receive the honor of being the first sandek [for his grandchildren; see above, no. 64]? 1465. Is it a custom for the grandfather to cut the grandchild’s hair at three years? 1466. Is it a custom for the grandfather to show the grandchild his first alef [see above, no. 331]? 1467. Is it a custom to call the grandfather with the grandmother to the wedding canopy to bless the bride and groom? 1468. Is it a custom to go wish the grandparents a “good Sabbath” or “happy holiday?” E. A Barren Man, a Barren Woman, Divorce, a Divorcé, a Divorcée 1469. How long after the wedding do people begin to consider a woman who has not had any children to be barren? 1470. What reasons do people give for why a woman is barren? 1471. Do barren women still travel to rebbes to request children?468 1472. What sorts of provisions, amulets, and penances do rebbes give for this? 1473. Are there such amulets in your community? 1474. Do barren women travel to Tatars or sorcerers to request remedies to have children?469 1475. Who are the sorcerers, and what kinds of provisions do they give them? 1476. What sort of medical remedies does a barren woman employ to have children? 467. In response to this question, a Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn told the author: “On the Eve of Yom Kippur, those that are accustomed to bless their children Friday will also have their grandparents bless them.” 468. This was a common practice. Thus, for example, the pious mother of the Maiden of Ludmir was said to have visited the important Hasidic Rebbe Mordechai of Chernobyl to seek a miraculous cure for her barrenness. 469. On the numerous folk practices associated with barren women, see Raphael Patai, “Jewish Folk-cures for Barrenness,” Folklore 54 (1943), 117–124; 56 (1945), 208–218.

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1477. What kinds of penances and practices do people employ for this (for instance: writing a Torah scroll, donating a Torah mantle or curtain, promising charity at a synagogue, raising someone else’s children, dedicating a special penance candle, etc.)? 1478. Is it considered good luck for having children for a barren woman to be honored at a circumcision?470 1479. Do people ever assert that a woman is barren because she or her husband had earlier abandoned a match and did not beg the pardon of the groom or the bride? 1480. If the husband is barren, what sort of remedies does he employ to be cured? 1481. Do people still observe the religious law that if a woman has not had children for ten years, her husband should divorce her?471 1482. Do more divorces happen now than in the past, or fewer?472 1483. For what reasons would a husband divorce his wife in the past, and for what reasons now?473 1484. How long after a wedding do divorces most often occur?

470. This was a common belief. 471. On this tradition, see Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 64a. On the barren wife in rabbinic sources, see Judith Baskin, “Rabbinic Reflections on the Barren Wife,” Harvard Theological Review 82 (1989): 1–14. Shaul Stampfer, “Love and Family,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 49, has noted that “the east European Jewish tradition was not to enforce this law . . . though when a husband wanted to divorce a wife on the grounds of infertility this law was used as a proof text.” 472. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, pp. 146ff., has demonstrated that Jewish divorce rates in Russia, which were relatively high compared to other religious communities, declined over the course of the nineteenth century. Thus, on p. 146, she notes: “The Jews followed a pattern that was diametrically opposed to the dominant tendency in Europe—a steady, inexorable increase in the rate of marital dissolution. Instead, the Jews showed the contrary tendency with modernization: from astronomically high divorce rates in the early nineteenth century, they demonstrated a striking tendency to reduce, not increase, the divorce rate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (emphases in original). 473. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, pp. 163–164, lists eleven common causes of divorce: failure to meet economic responsibilities, absence of love, inability to tolerate in-laws, stepchildren, childlessness, abuse, adultery, insanity, religious conversion, aspirations for female education, and different approaches to religious observance.


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1485. Does it happen that the rabbi and the townspeople try to make peace between the couple that wants to divorce? 1486. Does it often happen that the husband gives the wife a divorce against her will—by tricking her? 1487. Is a divorce document often delivered by a messenger? 1488. Do the husband and wife go together to the divorce proceeding or separately? 1489. Do they present their claims before the rabbi? 1490. Is it a custom for the rabbi to spend a long time trying to persuade them not to divorce? 1491. Is it a custom that during the time when the divorce document is being written, the rebetsin should console the divorcée? 1492. What sorts of customs and versions are there for a divorce document besides those that are found in the code of Jewish law [Shulkhan Arukh]? 1493. Does a conditional divorce [tnay get, given by a sick man or one facing mortal danger in war, etc., to his wife to free her from levirate obligation on the condition of her remarrying him in case of his recovery or to prevent her from becoming an agune] often occur, and under what circumstances?474 1494. Does the husband ever give his wife a divorce before his death in order to free her from levirate marriage? 1495. How does a divorce take place with a male apostate or with a female apostate? What sort of customs are there for this?475 1496. How much time after a divorce is a divorcée or a divorcé prohibited from marrying? 1497. If the divorcée is pregnant, how much time must pass before she may marry? 1498. How does the giving of the marriage contract back to the divorcée take place [for the divorce to be final, the ksube [i.e., ketubah], 474. On levirate marriage—and its avoidance through the practice of halitsah—in medieval Ashkenazi society, see Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 93–97. For the problems caused by men who refused to perform the ritual of halitsah in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 238–240. 475. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, p. 188, writes: “Religious conversion (apostasy) provided certain and speedy grounds for divorce, not only because of religious incompatibility with the spouse who remained loyal to Judaism but also because Russian authorities clearly favored dissolution of such mixed marriages.” On the other hand, a Jewish woman could become an agune (Heb., agunah) if her apostate husband refused to divorce her.

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or ceremonial contract, must be returned to the woman; see above, no. 1487]? 1499. Does it often happen that divorced people will take each other back? 1500. Who has the right to take the children: the father or the mother? 1501. Is there a difference in this respect between boys and girls? 1502. Do people ask the children with whom they want to stay? 1503. If the children stay with the mother, is the father obligated to support them with a designated sum of money? 1504. In what cases is the one who divorced his wife responsible for providing support to her and the children? 1505. Do a husband and wife ever divorce and then take each other back several times? 1506. How does the wedding of a divorcé or a divorcée take place? What sorts of changes to the usual customs are there for it? 1507. What stories, songs, and sayings do you know about divorce, divorcés, or divorcées? F. Widower, Widow, Deserted Husband, Deserted Wife 1508. For how long after a husband’s death is the widow forbidden to marry? Have there been changes regarding this over and against the law in the Shulkhan Arukh? How long after the divorce [sic] is the widow prohibited from getting married?476 1509. Do cases occur in which a widower gets married during the shloyshim [“thirty,” traditional thirty-day mourning period] or when still sitting shive [“seven,” seven days of strict mourning immediately after a loved one’s death; see below, nos. 1938ff.]? 1510. Before dying, does the husband or wife ever elicit a promise from the one remaining alive never to marry again or never to marry a certain person, or the opposite, to marry only a particular person?

476. On the custom of waiting after the thirty days of mourning (shloyshim) are over, see Gavriel Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel: Hilkhot Avelut, part II (Jerusalem: Hotsaat Shemesh, 2001), 116. For exceptions, see pp. 117ff. On an oral Kabbalistic tradition that a widow should wait at least twelve months, see Shaul Stampfer, “Remarriage among Jews and Christians,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, 70.


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1511. Do people always keep such a vow, or has permission [heter, lit. “release”] been given by religious experts and rabbis to ignore it? 1512. Do you know stories in which the dead partner comes to the surviving individual in a dream and demands that he or she should fulfill the vow? 1513. When do people usually begin to discuss marriage matches with a widower or a widow? 1514. Do people make sure that a pregnant widow does not marry until after she has given birth? 1515. Do people observe the religious law that a widow who is nursing a child should not marry until she has weaned him? Has rabbinical permission been given not to observe this? 1516. Do people avoid making a match with a widow? For what reasons?477 1517. How do people regard a match with a woman who has already been widowed twice? Is it the same as with a widower?478 1518. Is it considered a mitzvah to help a widower or widow marry?479 1519. Is this only when small orphans have been left behind, or also in other cases? 1520. What differences are there in the form of the dowry and the matchmaking process for a match between a girl and a widower or a young man and a widow? 1521. What differences are there for such individuals in the wedding agreement [tnoyim; see above, no. 1040] and the wedding? 1522. Is there a practice to hold the marriage ceremony of a widow by the oven? 477. Kabbalistic texts such as the Zohar discouraged marrying a widow because it would cause a conflict between the second husband’s soul and the still lingering soul of the first husband. 478. According to the Shulkhan Arukh, Even ha-Ezer, Hilkhot Ishut, 9:1, 2, a woman who is widowed twice (technically known as a katlanit, or “slayer”) may not remarry, but a man in the same situation is permitted to do so. However, many Eastern European rabbis (e.g., Moses Isserles, Moses Sofer, David of Novogrudok) argued for leniency in such cases. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Stampfer, “Remarriage among Jews and Christians,” 66–69. 479. In general, it was seen as a mitzvah to help both widowers and widows to remarry, despite the Kabbalistic criticism of the latter phenomenon.

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1523. Is there a practice that the children of a widower or a widow do not go to the wedding ceremony of their father or mother? 1524. Do cases occur in which the children do not permit the father or the mother to marry a second time? 1525. Is it a custom for widowers or widows with grown children not to marry until they make weddings for their children? 1526. How do neighbors act toward a widow or a widower? Are people careful not to quarrel with a widow or a widower? 1527. Do people recite the prayer El Male Rakhomim [“God full of compassion,” sung at funerals and memorial services] for the first husband at the marriage ceremony of the widow? Do people do the same thing for the first wife at the wedding of a widower? 1528. Does the widow go on the day of the wedding to visit the grave of her first husband? Does the widower likewise go to the grave of his first wife? 1529. Does it often happen that a husband abandons his wife and leaves her an agune [i.e., agunah, “anchored or chained woman,” an abandoned woman prevented from remarrying because her husband’s consent is required by religious law for a divorce]? 1530. Have such cases occurred more often since the beginning of the emigration to America?480 1531. What methods does the agune employ to find her husband (travel to a rabbi, to diviners)? 1532. In your community, are there old Responsa from rabbis [Shayles un Tshuves, lit. “questions and answers,” discussions of religious law focused on specific questions] resulting from attempts to free an agune? 1533. Which rabbis do you know of who became famous for freeing agunes?481

480. There was a widespread feeling that emigration to the United States (as well as other countries, such as Argentina and South Africa) had produced a veritable epidemic of abandoned wives. In 1911 this led the National Council of Hebrew Charities to create the National Desertion Bureau. On this, see R. S. Friedman, “Send Me My Husband Who Is in New York City: Husband Desertion in the American Jewish Immigrant Community, 1890–1926,” Jewish Social Studies 44, no. 1 (1982): 1–18. 481. A number of rabbis were known for attempting to ameliorate the plight of agunes, including Rabbi Moshe Nahum ben Binyamin Yerusalimsky, Rabbi D. Menkis of Sokol, and Rabbi Yitshak Elkanan Spektor of Kovno. On their efforts, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 230–237.


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1534. Does it happen that an agune is freed through the action of one hundred rabbis [Meah Rabonim, a quorum of legal scholars]? 1535. What sort of stories do you know about agunes whose husbands were lost during a war?482 1536. Does it happen that a wife abandons her husband and leaves him an agun [“bound man,” since the divorce cannot be finalized until the wife receives her get document]?483 G. Inheritance 1537. How does the writing of a will normally take place for a healthy person, and how for a dying one? 1538. Do people call the rabbi, the Jewish religious court, or only several prominent townspeople? 1539. Does it often happen that the father includes instructions in his will about how the children should comport themselves in life? 1540. Do you know who would have such wills in their possession? 1541. How does the division of the inheritance take place when no will has been left behind? 1542. What share do the sons get, and what share do the daughters get? 1543. Is it still a custom for the first-born son to receive two shares? 1544. What share does the widow receive? Is the money from her ksube [marriage contract, see above, no. 1040] taken into account? 1545. What share of the inheritance does a stepmother receive? 1546. Do disputes often occur over the inheritance? 1547. To whom do people usually turn during a dispute? To a Jewish court or a Christian one? 1548. Do children who have not yet married receive a greater share of the inheritance than those who have married already? 1549. Does a greater share of the inheritance go to a child who is not capable of working?

482. In order to prevent their wives from becoming agunes, some Jewish men divorced their wives (or gave them “conditional divorces”) before entering the military and remarried them after returning safely. 483. Freeze, in Jewish Marriage and Divorce, pp. 240–241, discusses several cases of men whose wives abandoned them and subsequently sought recourse from rabbinic courts in order to get a divorce. Unlike in the case of women abandoned by their husbands, such men were typically granted a divorce on the grounds that their wives were “rebellious” (a Halakhic category), even if the wife refused, or could not be located, to accept the get (bill of divorce).

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1550. Is a portion of the inheritance given to the parents of the dead person if they are poor? 1551. If the deceased did not leave behind any children, does the entire inheritance belong to the widow, or is a certain share divided among the deceased’s brothers and sisters? 1552. What share of the inheritance do brothers or nephews, sisters or nieces, receive? 1553. If someone has not left behind any heirs, what do people do with the money? 1554. Does it often happen that someone bequeaths his estate to charitable institutions? Which ones? 1555. Does a portion of the inheritance belong to another person’s child whom the deceased has raised in his home? 1556. Does it often happen that a father excludes children from an inheritance because they opposed him or were not religiously observant? 1557. How is immovable property divided up among heirs (houses, stores, etc.)? 1558. Is it customary that until it is divided up, each of the heirs hangs his own lock on the house or the store? 1559. Do the children consider it a duty to repay their parents’ debts? 1560. How are the books, jewelry, clothes, and dishes divided up among the sons and sons-in-law, daughters and daughters-in-law? 1561. Are such things ever divided up according to lot? 1562. Is it considered a mitzvah to take something from the inheritance? 1563. Does it happen that children refuse an inheritance because the parents earned their money in a non-kosher manner (for example, from prostitution, theft, and the like)? H. A Leading Citizen [balabos; see above, no. 57] or Elder [zaken, lit. “old man,” more broadly an elder] 1564. What makes someone a leading citizen (someone from a distinguished family [a yakhsn], a wealthy man, a scholar, a philanthropist)? 1565. Is someone considered a leading citizen who has fine children, sons-in-law? 1566. What is the attitude toward such a prominent person? What kinds of respect do people show him? 1567. Is it considered a duty for a prominent man to involve himself with community affairs?


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1568. At what age does a man begin to be considered an elder? 1569. What is the attitude toward an elder?484 1570. Do people show him respect even when he is not a prominent citizen? 1571. Does he receive honors before a wealthy man? 1572. Do people call on an elder, even if he is a stranger, for matters related to a mitzvah? 1573. Do people honor him in the synagogue (with taking out the Torah scroll for Kol Nidre [lit. “All Vows,” prayer said on the evening of Yom Kippur], opening the Ark, and the like)? 1574. Do people call upon him to interpret dreams? 1575. Do people ask him advice? Do people call him to important gatherings? 1576. Do people give up their places for him to sit down? 1577. Does an old man ever hand all of his business concerns over to his children and sit in the synagogue learning or saying Psalms? 1578. Does it happen that such an old man quarrels with his children and brings them to a rabbi for judgment? 1579. Do extremely old men ever marry in order to have a woman in the home? 1580. Do such old men ever sell their possessions and travel to Israel?485

484. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 5, writes: “It is also mandatory to respect and honor a person of seventy years or over, even if he is unlearned, provided he is not an evildoer.” 485. By 1914 there were 86,000 Jews living in Palestine, including younger Zionist settlers who had started arriving in the Aliyot (waves of immigration) that began in the 1880s, as well as pious Jews who had been coming for centuries to fulfill the mitzvah of living (and dying) in the land of Israel. The latter group included many elderly Jews who came to spend their final years and, after they passed away, ideally to be buried on the Mount of Olives, where the Resurrection of the Dead would begin, according to Jewish tradition. While The Jewish Ethnographic Program’s question focuses on Jewish men, in fact, census data indicate that women formed a majority of the Jewish population in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman period. Moreover, as the demographer Uzriel Schmelz has demonstrated, in 1905 there were twice as many Jewish women age sixty or older in Palestine than Jewish men in the same age bracket. This was due to the large number of widows who immigrated, out of religious motivation, and their relatively lower mortality rates. For this analysis, see Margaliot Shilo, “Old Yishuv: Palestine at the End of the Ottoman Period,” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, Jewish Women’s Archive,

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1581. To which places in Israel do such old men generally go?486 I. A Senile Person/Dotard [Oyver Botl, lit. “one who goes around empty and void”] 1582. By which signs do people begin to consider an old man to be a dotard? 1583. At what age does an old man usually become a dotard?487 1584. How does senility express itself? 1585. Do people show the dotard the usual respect, disregarding the fact that he is senile? 1586. Does it happen that children run after him in the streets? 1587. Does it ever happen that his own children don’t want to keep their senile father with them at home, and he goes from house to house begging? 1588. Do you know any stories from the past in which a dotard converted before his death? 1589. Do you know any stories in which old people would make a declaration before the fact because of this [mesires moydoeh, lit. “handing over a declaration,” a way of invalidating in advance a subsequent commitment anticipated as being made under duress or without genuine conviction]? 1590. Does it ever happen that an old man takes his own life? 1591. Is there a home for the elderly in your community?488 accessed December 12, 2010, at http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/old-yishuv-palestine-at-end-of-ottoman-period. 486. Jews who immigrated to Palestine for religious reasons almost invariably settled in one of the four “holy cities” of Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberius. These, in turn, hosted a large number of communities, or kolelim, as they were known during the period of the Old Yishuv, or “settlement,” that were comprised of Jews from the same place in the Diaspora, for example, Kolel Volin (from Volhynia), Kolel Ungarn (from Hungary), and so on. 487. In Pirkei Avot 5, Judah ben Teima is quoted as saying, “A man of one hundred is like a dead person who has passed away and been negated from the world.” The Hebrew phrase employed here for “passed away and been negated” is the source for the Yiddish/Hebrew expression oyver botl. 488. Shaul Stampfer, “Scientific Welfare and Lonely Old People: The Development of Old-Age Homes,” in Families, Rabbis, and Education, p. 86, writes: “In traditional east European Jewish society before the mid-nineteenth century the elderly usually neither lived with their children nor resided in institutions. They lived on their


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1592. How many old men and women live there?489 1593. How long has it existed? 1594. By what means is it supported?490 1595. Do people admit only local old people or those from other towns as well? 1596. Is it considered a disgrace for children to give up their old parents to a home for the elderly?491 own. . . . This pattern, which had been typical for many generations, was one that distinguished east European Jews from the predominantly agricultural populations among whom they lived.” Elderly Jews who could not take care of themselves, or were too poor to survive on their own, sometimes lived in communal poorhouses known as hekdeshim (sing., hekdesh), which were generally characterized by terrible conditions. However, in the spirit of reform and modernization, from the 1840s on, Jewish communities in Warsaw, Vilna, and, eventually, Rovno, Bialystok, and other towns and cities established homes for the aged, a phenomenon that became even more widespread following World War I (for a full list of Jewish communities with a home for the aged, see p. 94). 489. Stampfer, in “Scientific Welfare and Lonely Old People,” p. 93, notes: “By 1917 the home [for the aged in Vilna] occupied a four-story building with seventyfive rooms, and housing some four hundred residents.” Most such institutions were much smaller and could only serve a minority of the Jewish elderly in their communities. 490. Stampfer, in “Scientific Welfare and Lonely Old People,” p. 97, writes: “Women were often the organizers and supporters of old-age homes.” This reflected the growth in opportunities for Jewish women to play important roles within communal institutions, as modernization eroded the exclusive patrimony that Jewish men had previously enjoyed in these realms. On p. 98, Stampfer notes: “Old-age homes are expensive to operate, and the need for sources of funding cannot be overestimated. . . . Jewish old-age homes were often dependent on support from the taxes that were collected from Jews or from city administrations.” 491. Stampfer, in “Scientific Welfare and Lonely Old People,” p. 89, notes that many observers have assumed that the establishment of Jewish old-age homes in the United States during the first few decades of the twentieth century reflected the corrosive effects of immigration, urbanization, and assimilation. Yet, “The reality was that old-age homes in America continued Old World patterns.” Moreover, he argues, on pp. 99–100, “It would be a mistake to view homes for the aged in a stereotypical fashion, as an expression of a decline in responsibility for the aged that had once characterized the Jewish community. Some of them offered superb care. . . . In many respects, the interest in homes for the aged was actually indicative of an increased sense of responsibility of the Jewish community vis-à-vis the elderly.”

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J. Illnesses 1597. Which illnesses are especially widespread in your region?492 1598. Which illnesses are considered in your community to be typical of Jews?493 1599. Are there untutored male and female doctors in your community?494 1600. Are there men and women in your community who can conjure away an Evil Eye? Who are they in general (religious school teachers, female bathhouse attendants)?495

492. The Pale of Settlement (along with other parts of Europe and Asia) experienced epidemics (including influenza, cholera, and typhus) throughout the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. On typhus in particular, and its associations with Jews, see Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 30, notes: “All types of disease were prevalent in town, though they rarely attained epidemic proportions.” 493. John Efron, in Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 26–27, writes: “Medical science postulated that Jews were racially protected from certain contagious diseases and at the same time prone to unique psychopathologies . . . ancient superstitions that Jews did not succumb to plague and pestilence to the same extent that non-Jews did were widely held to hold true in modern times with regards to typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera. Childhood illnesses such as measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and croup were said to have fewer victims among Jews than nonJews. . . . On the other hand, Jews were believed to suffer inordinately from diabetes, known in German as Judenkrankheit, respiratory ailments, hemorrhoids, cancer (but neither penile nor uterine, due to circumcision), conjunctivitis trachoma, and color blindness.” Whether Jews in the communities of the Pale shared these stereotypes or believed that other illnesses were typically Jewish is another question. 494. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 233, describe one such figure: “If someone had a boil on the neck or arm, which was quite common, he went to this old man with a long beard. I never visited him, but I heard about what he did. He smoked a pipe with a long stem and a big bowl at the bottom. I believe there was a little trapdoor at the bottom of the bowl, which he would open up so he could drain some of the tobacco juice: it was a mixture of nicotine and spit. He would smear this on the boil. I think he also had another profession—setting bones: if you dislocated a limb, most often a shoulder, he would snap it back into place.” 495. Exorcists and folk healers existed in every Jewish community of the Pale of Settlement. During the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, An-sky devoted special attention to documenting both men and women who engaged in these activities. In his account of the expedition, Avrom Rekhtman described the results of this research in


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1601. How does the exorcism of an Evil Eye take place—in the presence of the sick person and before his eyes? 1602. Describe all the versions of exorcising the Evil Eye that you know.496 1603. Are there in your community exorcists and incantation-sayers for different illnesses (for instance, skin inflammation [royz], a toothache, a snake bite, etc.)?497 1604. What sort of movements do they make during the exorcism? Do they yawn?498

detail. For English translations of excerpts from Rekhtman’s account, see “Healers, Magicians, and Fortune-tellers,” in Tracing Ansky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg, ed. Mariella Beukers and Renée Waale, 111–112 (Zwolle, The Netherlands: Waanders Uitgevers, 1992). An-sky, in “Opshrekhenish un feraydung bay di litvish-raysishe yuden,” pp. 164–167, quotes Yiddish and Belorussian incantations to be recited for health problems such as a toothache, being bitten by a mad dog or a snake, and so on. In 1907 An-sky collected data on the Evil Eye during ethnographic fieldwork in three sites: Vilna, Vitebsk, and the nearby shtetl of Beshenkovitch. 496. For a collection of Jewish methods and incantations for exorcising the Evil Eye, see Regina Lilienthal, “Eyn hore,” Yidishe filologye 1 (1924): 256–271, originally published in Polish and here translated into Yiddish. An-sky also published an essay devoted to the Evil Eye, “Zagovory ot durnogo glaza, boleznei i neschastnykh sluchaev sredi evreev severno-zapadnogo kraia,” Evreiskaia Starina 1 (1909). For an incantation that the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition recorded from a woman named Chaya Beyla Shapira in the town of Alt-Konstantin (Starokonstantinov), see Rekhtman, “Healers, Magicians, and Fortune-tellers,” 111: “If a man has wronged that person, he will lose his beard, and if it is a woman who wronged the subject, she will lose her teeth and breasts. There is no sea route, the fish have no kidneys and you will not possess an evil-eye and no malady will afflict you . . . be safe as certainly as God healed Hizkiahu. Tfu, tfu, tfu” (to be followed by spitting three times and a sneeze). Rekhtman noted that Jewish women healers used incantations in Yiddish and Ukrainian, while male healers typically employed Hebrew and Aramaic. 497. Miller, in “Krinker haylers,” p. 211, notes: “In Krinik there was also no shortage of men and women who occupied themselves with medicine in other ways [rather than being professional physicians]: exorcising an evil eye, conjuring away a royz and a toothache, casting away fright, draining a swelling, applying cupping glasses.” 498. Rekhtman, in “Healers, Magicians, and Fortune-tellers,” p. 112, writes: “The preparations for the performance and the way in which the spell is executed can be different: the women [healers] make a noise, wink, pinch their noses and blow; some even bark like dogs, crawl on all fours, bleat like sheep, go round in circles or hop around the bed.”

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1605. Describe the different versions of these incantations and charms. 1606. What special practices does the incantation sayer employ when he is reciting an incantation for each illness (for instance, chopping a rose [royz], squeezing the mumps, etc.)?499 1607. Are there Tatars in your community, old male and female gentiles, who heal? What provisions [sgules] and remedies do they offer?500 1608. Is the practice of bloodletting still widespread? Applying leeches? Does this still take place in the bathhouse?501 1609. Are there healers in your community who are barbers? Do they let blood, vaccinate children, and the like?502 499. A. Kronenburg, “The Healer in Bilgoray,” Khurbn Bilgoray (Bilgoraj), in From a Ruined Garden, p. 123, describes a woman healer named Sore Mordkhe-Yoysef: “When anyone caught a royz (a case of erysipelas), Sore took a piece of flax, lit it, and passed it near the infected area, saying various spells and repeating constantly: ‘Black royz, into the field, into the field.’ Later she took a kerchief spread with honey and bound the royz with it.” 500. Tatar healers, in particular, were popular among Jews in the Pale of Settlement. On this phenomenon during the nineteenth century, see, for example, Berlin, Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonaseleniia v Rossii, 33. For the twentieth century, see “Kadorim,” and “Kadorim un mekhashfim,” Yidishe filologye 1 (1924): 163 and 394–396, which describes the methods of both Tatars (i.e., Kadorim) and Christian sorcerers (i.e., mekashfim), especially women. Tatars could be found throughout the Pale of Settlement and in some villages even constituted the majority. Today only a few villages in what is now Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus have significant Tatar populations and mosques. 501. Shukh, “A vunderlekher tsuzamenshtetl,” in Sefer Vladmirets, p. 88, writes: “In those days, people used to use cupping-glasses [bankes], they used to cut open a vein, place leeches, exorcise an evil eye. An expert in these old wives’ remedies was Yosef the healer [royfe].” 502. Lisa Epstein, “Caring for the Soul’s House: The Jews of Russia and Health Care, 1860–1914” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), p. 25, writes: “The barber surgeons known as roifes, sirulkniks, or feldshers, in Yiddish, Polish, and Russian, respectively, were widely patronized, especially for cupping and bleeding.” Feldshers (from a German phrase meaning “field shearer”) were originally associated with the military and had very little training until feldsher schools were set up at the end of the nineteenth century. Prior to their professionalization, feldshers had such a poor reputation that they even inspired the sardonic Russian saying ne lechat, a kalechat, or “they don’t cure, they only cripple you.” By 1905 there were 20,640 male and


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1610. Are there trained doctors in your community? How many of them are Jews?503 1611. Do the doctors receive financial support from the community, and how much?504 1612. How much is the usual fee for a visit to the doctor in his home? And how much if he comes to the sick person?505 1613. What are the relations like between the doctor and the community?506 1614. Does he speak Yiddish with the patients or only Russian? Does he participate in the Jewish institutions? 1615. Is there a poorhouse [hekdesh, lit. “sanctified place,” often a room connected to the synagogue, where people with no other means and poor travelers stay] in your community?

female feldshers (versus 15,962 civilian physicians) in the Russian Empire, and they played a disproportionately important role in rural areas. For these statistics and on feldshers in general, see Samuel Ramer, “Who Was the Russian Feldsher?” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50, no. 2 (1976): 213–225. 503. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 30, writes: “There were two physicians (Poles, who had estates in the vicinity), an assistant (a Jew), and two Jewish midwives in private practice.” Leyb From, “Der doktor un heymeshe refuos,” in Sefer Zikaron Voislavitsa, pp. 344–346, describes the experiences of his brother, a Jewish doctor trained in Warsaw, who served a residency in the small Jewish community (two hundred families) of Voislavitsa and recorded the healing methods of the local rabbis, “sorceresses,” and grandmothers who treated the ill. 504. D. Selkof, “Nokh vegn poylishn doktor,” in Pinkas Krinki, ed. Dov Rabin (Tel-Aviv: Be-hotsaat ha-Irgunim shel yotse Krinki be-medinat Yisrael uva-tefutsot, 1970), 212, writes: “The Krinker community would pay him [the Polish doctor] one hundred rubles a year as a reward for his angelic visits to poor people.” 505. Selkof, in “Nokh vegn poylishn doktor,” p. 212, mentions that in the period before World War I, the town’s Polish doctor (who was extremely popular in the Jewish community) would “take thirty kopeks for a visit,” but that he would typically treat people for free if they could not afford to pay him. Moreover, he would often bring food and drink to poor women who were in labor. 506. Selkof, in “Nokh vegn poylishn doktor,” p. 212, writes that the town’s Polish doctor was so beloved that people “were sure that he was among the righteous gentiles of the world and that when he died, he would surely enter the heavenly Garden of Eden.” Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 30, writes: “The physicians enjoyed an excellent reputation in the entire district.”

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1616. If there was a hekdesh in your community in the past, describe what the conduct in it was like.507 1617. Is there a hospital in your community?508 1618. How long has it existed? 1619. Is it especially for Jews? 1620. Who supports it? 1621. How much does it cost a year?509 1622. How many inpatients and outpatients receive help there during the course of a year? 1623. Do they give out prescriptions free of charge there? 1624. Does the Jewish population have confidence in the healing there?510 1625. Do you know of any cases in which a sick person was afraid of being taken to the hospital?511 1626. What great plagues were there in your region in former times?512 1627. List the years in which they occurred. 1628. Do any cemeteries remain from such epidemics outside of town? 1629. What stories do you know about epidemics from former times? 507. Miriam Porer, “ ‘Moshav-zekanim’ be-Chortkov,” in Sefer yizkor le-hantsahat kedoshe kehilat Chortkov, p. 166, offers a chilling description of what the hekdesh looked like. 508. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 30, writes: “The town had a municipal hospital, with one physician, one assistant (felcher), and a midwife.” 509. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 30, writes: “Hospital service was free to all, and the non-Jewish population made use of it.” 510. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 30, writes: “The Jews, as a rule, avoided the hospital, although they occasionally used the services of the physician and the assistant in the capacity of private patients.” Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 196, note: “In our town [Apt], people went to the local hospital to die.” However, on pp. 230–231, they add, “Jews didn’t have their own hospitals. Nor did they go to the Christian hospitals in Apt. If Jews needed a hospital they went to Warsaw . . . Jews went to specialists, or they died at home.” 511. It was very common for Jews in the shtetls of the Pale to view the hospital as a place where people went to die. 512. Epstein, “Caring for the Soul’s House,” pp. 18–19, discusses the cholera epidemics of the 1890s in the Pale of Settlement and the pivotal role that they played in galvanizing professional Jewish physicians to pay closer attention to the “particular health needs of the Jewish community.”


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1630. Do you know any cases in which epidemics inspired false accusations against the Jews? What false accusations? 1631. On what reasons and sins did people blame epidemics in the past? 1632. What practices would people employ in order to stop an epidemic?513 1633. Would it ever happen that in order to stop an epidemic, a marriage ceremony would be held in the cemetery?514 1634. Would it ever happen that during an epidemic, the rabbi would permit the preparation of food on Yom Kippur? 1635. Who used to bury the dead from the epidemic, the usual burial society or also people who took this on for the sake of a mitzvah? 513. In his memoir of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, Yekhezkel Kotik writes that when a cholera epidemic struck his town of Kamenetz, “Jews resorted to all sorts of remedies: a crippled, mute virgin was married to a blind man. The wedding ceremony was held in the graveyard in the hope that they would produce a generation of righteous offspring.” Members of the community also carried Torah scrolls through the town on Friday while reciting prayers. Elsewhere, Jews wore rings made out of the lulav or palm fronds used on Sukkot and “hitched four young girls to a plowshare and had them plow a plot of land lying in the path of the advancing epidemic. In addition, a Gentile was stationed at the gate to the graveyard for three rubles a day and ordered to call out the moment a corpse was brought for burial, ‘There’s no more room here!’ ” (quoted in Assaf, A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 383–384). For another description of such a wedding, see Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July, 13–14, where a cholera epidemic in 1892 inspired a shvartse khasene (black wedding) between a poor bachelor whose job it was to clean the communal bath and young woman who had lost both parents and was therefore a kalekhidke yesoyme, or “round orphan.” 514. On such a wedding that was held in the cemetery of Olyka, one of the towns visited by An-sky during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, in order to stop an epidemic, see Natan Rosenfeld, “The Wedding in the Cemetery,” in Pinkas Ha-Kehilah Olyka: Sefer Yizkor (Tel Aviv: Hotsaat Irgun Yotsey Olyka be-Yisrael, 1972), 115– 116, including a photograph of the ceremony. Rosenfeld mentions that after the ceremony the epidemic did indeed stop. Assaf, in A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, p. 472, n. 5, observes: “During epidemics, it was customary to marry off the poor, cripples, orphans, and the unfortunate, because such deeds, considered the ultimate expression of charity, were thought to be powerful enough to stop the outbreak. He cites, for example, a case in which “The righteous women gathered from the marketplace a dirty virgin maid who stalks in doorways . . . whose countenance could make one vomit, and they found for her a mate of short stature, blind, with a huge nose . . . and joyfully they led them both to the graveyard to be married.”

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1636. Do you know any stories about a zaddik who took the epidemic upon himself, and after his passing the epidemic ended? 1637. What illnesses are considered to be the most dangerous? 1638. Which illnesses are considered disgusting? 1639. Do disgusting illnesses often occur now among Jews? 1640. When do people begin to consider a sick person to be dangerously ill? 1641. What remedies and special practices are employed at that point (reciting Psalms, praying at graves, etc.)?515 1642. Do people divide up the sick person’s clothes among poor people? Do they pledge donations to a Hasidic rebbe? 1643. Is it considered a remedy to lay the dangerously ill person on another pillow? 1644. Is it considered a remedy to slaughter a calf, quickly remove the liver, boil it, and give it to the ill person to eat? 1645. Is it considered a remedy to place under the ill person’s bed a tied up rooster? 1646. In what condition of illness do people give the sick person a new name?516 1647. Do people ever divine by opening a religious book whether the sick person will live?517 1648. Are people careful not to say out loud that the sick person is dangerously ill because that could harm him? 1649. Is it still a custom to go visit a sick person for the sake of a mitzvah, even a stranger?

515. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 121, notes: “When someone grew seriously ill, the Psalm Society came and recited psalms day and night. Relatives and friends ran to pray at the gravestones of ancestors, and women who were friends or neighbors of the sick person prostrated themselves before the Ark of the Torah in the synagogue to ask God to show mercy.” 516. It was a common practice to give a seriously ill person a new name so that the Angel of Death would not recognize him or her. Sometimes the individual would also be “adopted” by someone else. Before World War II, the author’s grandfather, Benno Deutsch, performed this ritual on behalf of a sick woman. See also Zabludovitsh, “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” 85: “As a sgule, another name was given to the sick person and a mi sheberakh was recited” (my translation of this differs somewhat from that in From a Ruined Garden, p. 121). 517. Bibliomancy, or opening a book to a random page, was a common method of divination employed by both Jews and non-Jews.


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1650. Do people go to visit a sick person even in the case of an individual who has a contagious disease? 1651. Do young people also visit the sick? 1652. Does it ever happen that a man goes to visit a sick woman who is not a close relative, or vice versa? 1653. Among which class of affluent citizens is it considered a duty to visit the sick? 1654. What refreshments do people typically send a sick person? 1655. Is there a society devoted to visiting the sick [Khevre Bikur Khoylim] in your community?518 1656. When was it established? 1657. Do the members of the society simply visit the sick, or do they spend the night too?519 1658. Does the society provide monetary support or prescriptions? Does it send a doctor?520 1659. Do people only spend the night with sick members of the society or with outsiders as well? 1660. Does the society choose representatives from among its supporting members or send others to stay overnight, according to their estimation of the need? 1661. Does the society have a pinkas [record book], and with whom can it be found?521 1662. Are the members who refuse to spend nights with the sick recorded in the book? 1663. Is there a society for visiting the sick among intellectuals in particular?522

518. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 29, writes: “The most popular of the organizations in town was the Nursing Association (Khevre Line). The function of this association was to provide nursing service for cases of prolonged illness.” 519. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 29, writes: “The association sent two members—to a male, two men, and to a female, one man and a woman—to attend to the patient from ten o-clock in the evening to seven o-clock in the morning.” 520. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 29, writes: “The very poor were also supplied with medicine and nourishing food.” 521. On these, see Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1844–1917 (Jerusalem: Posner and Sons, 1981), 173. 522. Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 173, notes that the Ostraha Bikkur Holim pinkas had a “list of 150 members stating their occupations, among whom

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1664. Do people remind the sick person to write a will? How do they remind him? 1665. Who comes to the sick person to write the will? 1666. When do people propose that the sick person say his last confession [vidui]?523 1667. Do people dress him in clean undergarments before the confession? 1668. Who recites the confession with the sick person?524 1669. Is reciting the confession considered good luck [a sgule] for becoming healthy again?525 1670. Do people congratulate the sick person after the confession?526 K. Dying [Gesise] 1671. At what stage is the sick person considered to be a goyses [a person who is dying]?527 were numbered a water carrier, a shoemaker, a hatter, a miller and a brushmaker—all of them of the lower class.” 523. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 89, notes: “If the visitors notice that the patient is on the point of death, they should tactfully turn the conversation to the matter of confession.” 524. The dying individual is supposed to recite a confession, or vidui. This practice is already mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 32a. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 121, writes: “When the time came for the sick person’s death throes, the rabbi and the burial society came to recite the final confession with him, placed at his head the holy book Me’ever Yabok, which contains the laws of death, and stayed with him until his soul departed. Then they would say, ‘God gives and God takes, may the name of God be blessed.’ ” 525. Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 106, notes that one formula of the confession was for “a sick person asking to be healed.” The Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 338:1, suggests that reciting the confession may help the sick person recover. 526. See question 1668. 527. During the 1920s, YIVO in Vilna distributed ethnographic questionnaires to residents of Jewish communities. Responses to a questionnaire on death and dying were gathered in the following article, which constitutes one of the most important sources on the subject: Khayim Khayes, “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” Filologishe shriften 2 (1928): 281–328. On p. 296, Khayes lists various “signs” (provided by respondents from different communities) that an individual is mortally ill. These include if a sick person starts to laugh; rubs his nose (others say this is a sign that the person will recover); complains of neck pain or of choking; or


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1672. Is there a belief that if a dying person lies on a bed that contains iron, the death throes will be difficult? 1673. Is there a belief that if the dying person lies on pillows filled with chicken feathers, the death throes will be difficult, and does this account for why Jews don’t use chicken feathers in bedding?528 1674. Is there a belief that a dying person can be called back to life?529 1675. Is it considered a transgression to do this?530 1676. What stories do you know about this? 1677. Do people see to it that at the moment of death [lit. when the soul leaves the body], there will be as many people present as possible, at least a minyan?531 1678. Is it considered to be an honor for the dead if at the moment of death there are prominent people, scholars, present? 1679. In which hours, days, weeks, and months is death considered easier or harder? What is the reason for this?532 turns himself to the wall. On the other hand, some believe that if the sick person “picks his nose or bites his nails, it is a sign that he will recover.” 528. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 297, cites a respondent from Brisk: “It is a very widespread belief that chicken feathers prolong the suffering before death. Therefore people do not place any pillows filled with chicken feathers under the ill person.” Others from Vilna and Bratslav confirmed, “It is difficult to die on chicken feathers.” 529. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 296, cites the view (from Bereze and Brisk) that “When a person dies, it is possible to revive him three times by screaming and calling him, but the ‘recalled person’ will not live long.” 530. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 297, quotes a respondent from Brisk who cautioned that “It is a transgression to call a dead person back to life. It is like someone who has climbed to a high peak, arrived at the summit, and then is forced to go further.” 531. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 298, cites a view from Vilna that “People believe that for the soul to have an easy departure, more people should be present near the goyses.” A source from Oshmene related, “A single individual must not be present when the person dies; there must be a lot of people.” On the other hand, a respondent from Sventsian stated, “People leave the room, so that it is easier for the goyses to die.” Others noted that children (especially in the case of a mother who is dying) should be sent out of the room. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 90, mentions that a minyan should be gathered. 532. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 300, cites the following views: From Bilsk, “It is good to die on Friday; Saturday night, bad.”;

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1680. Is it considered a mitzvah to be present at the moment of someone’s death?533 1681. Do people see to it that the dying person says the verses that begin “Hear O Israel” at the moment of death?534 1682. Are there biblical verses or other texts that people who are present for someone’s death are supposed to say?535 1683. Is there a belief that when the soul is departing, one should not stand opposite the dying person’s bed because the Angel of Death appears then with a knife?536 1684. Do you know of any stories in which people revived a dead person, and he related that he had been lying in a trance [hinerplet, a trance, stupor, perhaps a coma]? 1685. Is there a belief that if one places an ear to the threshold, the sounds of the person dying can be heard, but that this is dangerous?537 From Brisk, “It is [good] during the month of Nisan.”; From Vilna, “A pious person dies on Sabbath eve.”; From Bereze, “Zaddikim die in the month of Elul.” See the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 118b on the merit of different times of death. 533. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 298, cites views from Kobrin and Bereze that “One must not leave the goyses alone; it is a mitzvah to be near him then.” Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 90, writes: “From the moment a person is in the throes of death, no one is allowed to leave him, in order that his soul may not depart when he is all alone, because it is bewildered when departing from the body.” 534. This was a common practice. 535. Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 90, writes: “The prayers [to be recited when a person is dying] are arranged in the book known as Maabar Yabbok.” 536. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 300, cites a view from Bereze that “Right after the person dies, and a large group of people is gathered in the room, the people immediately form into two rows in order to allow the Angel of Death to pass, like for a bride. No small child must be present then.” 537. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 310, writes: “In the beliefs of different people the threshold is a significant place. Under the threshold the dead of various peoples used to be buried. Today there still remain a lot of superstitions.” Khayes then quotes a number of them, including: “When a person dies, if one lies down on the threshold and looks through the eye of a needle, one can see the Angel of Death; however, the person who looked will immediately die (Vilna). If one puts one’s ear to the threshold of the room in which the dead person is lying, one will hear how he is pleading; people should forgive him for his sins, but he who hears him will immediately die. Therefore, no one does this (Bereze). . . . One hears how the dead cries, but the person who does this cannot tear himself away from the threshold and dies on that place (Sventsien).”


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1686. Is there a belief that before a person dies, his parents or other dead people come to him and call him to them?538 Fifth Section: Death A. The Dead Body, the Burial Society [Aram., Khevre Kedishe, lit. “Holy Society”], Ritual Purification of the Dead, the Shroud, the Funeral 1687. What means do people employ to tell whether a person is dead (placing a mirror or a feather in front of the nose, etc.)?539 1688. Is it a custom for the first-born son or one of the children to close the parent’s eyes after death?540 1689. Why are people supposed to pour out all the water in the house and in the surrounding houses?541 1690. Do people consider it a duty to inform the surrounding houses immediately about the dead person so they can pour out their water? 1691. In how many houses surrounding the one where the corpse is lying do people pour out their water?542 1692. Do people also pour out soft foods and beverages? 1693. Do people also pour out water from sealed containers?

538. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 294, cites a belief that “Before death, if a dead relative appears in a dream and takes something or calls to the sleeping person, in a short while he will die (Rozhanai).” 539. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 299, mentions the general practice of placing a feather or a mirror in front of the nose “in order to see whether the soul has departed.” A source from Kobrin related, “People stick a needle under the nail of the person.” Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 90, mentions that a “light feather” should be placed under the nostrils. 540. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 300, writes: “Respectfully, people close the eyes and the mouth of the deceased and immediately open all the windows.” Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 91, states: “The eyes of the dead are to be closed. If there are sons, it is done by one of them, as it is written (Genesis 46:4): ‘And Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes’; and if there is a firstborn son, it should be done by him.” 541. On this widespread custom, see Sh. H. Kook, “The Pouring Out of the Water in the Neighborhood of the Deceased,” Yeda-Am 2, no. 4–5 (1954): 218–219 (Hebrew); Khayes, “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” 306. 542. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 306, cites a source from Bereze that “One pours out the water in three neighboring houses: In two houses that are in the same row as the house of the deceased and in the house facing it.” Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 91, mentions three houses.

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1694. Do people also pour out the water in a synagogue if it stands near the house where the dead person is located? 1695. Is there a belief that one will die from drinking such water because the Angel of Death has rinsed his knife in it?543 1696. Do you know any stories about this? 1697. Are people careful not to leave a dead body overnight? What is the reason for this?544 1698. Is there a belief that if the dead body is left alone at night, it will disappear (evil spirits will take it)?545 1699. Do you know any stories about cases in which a dead body was left alone at night and it disappeared? 1700. Is there a belief that when the eyes of a dead body remain open, it’s a sign that someone else in the family will die? 1701. Is there a belief that one should not borrow or take anything from the house where a corpse is lying?546 1702. Does the shames go around and knock twice on every door in order to inform people about the corpse?547 1703. Is it a custom to leave a lit candle on the bed after removing the corpse? 1704. Is it a custom to turn over the bed? 1705. Is it a custom to lay coins around the dead person and then to distribute these coins to poor people?

543. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 306, writes: “One pours out the water from all the houses surrounding the deceased, because the Angel of Death has washed his knife in it. . . . The Angel of Death rinses his knife in the water of the three houses surrounding the dead, and therefore one must pour out the water there (Bereze).” 544. Dead bodies were never left alone, lest they come to harm by evil spirits or demons. 545. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 428, states: “The reason the dead need to be guarded is to prevent an evil spirit from entering them.” 546. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 305, mentions: “People must not take out anything from the room where the deceased is lying (Vilna).” Other customs include not eating any bread that is in the room, or sweeping it out. 547. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 311, mentions several locales where “a gentile or a small child” would announce the death of the individual. A source from Bereze stated that “When the head of the house dies, the cows announce that he has passed away by mooing. People say that they feel that someone has died.”


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1706. Are candles placed around the corpse?548 1707. Is it a custom to turn over or to cover the mirrors? What is the reason for this?549 1708. How does the removal of the corpse from the death bed to the floor take place?550 1709. Who removes the dead person, the Burial Society or the relatives? 1710. Is it a custom to lay the dead person on straw, with the feet facing the door?551 1711. Is it a custom to put bread with salt on the navel? What is the reason for this?552 548. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 301, mentions a custom that “At the head of [the] corpse, one should place two lit candles. People should not do anything to them. If one of the candles is extinguished, it is a bad sign for the family.” Others believed that as many candles as possible should be placed around the corpse, “but if someone could not afford to purchase more, they should at least burn three, one at the head and one at each side (Orleh).” 549. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 306, mentions a variety of customs, including covering all of the pictures, mirrors, and clocks in the house of the deceased with black cloth. In Volp, “People cover a mirror with a cloth, so that they will not see the image of the Angel of Death with a knife in his hand, and it remains hanging like this for the entire shive week.” 550. The custom of placing the corpse on the floor is called opheyben in Yiddish. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 300, mentions a number of traditions associated with this, including waiting for a lot of people to arrive before moving the corpse; laying straw on the ground; moving the deceased in the clothes he died in and then placing a black cloth on the body; asking for forgiveness while transferring the body; and making sure that men move a male corpse and women a female corpse. 551. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 301, mentions: “People lay the corpse on the ground with the face to the door. Therefore one must not lay the corpse with the feet to the door (Orleh).” Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 36, writes: “In case of death, the Khevre Kadishe was notified, and its representatives came and ‘lifted’ the deceased, that is, strewed a little straw on the floor and placed him with his feet at the door.” On the practice of laying the deceased on straw on the ground, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 438– 440. Sperber notes: “The practice of placing the corpse on straw is explained in the Jewish sources as being done so that it would not appear as if the dead person was being stoned, by being placed directly on the floor.” 552. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 309, writes: “If the deceased has to lie for a day’s time, one should lay a copper coin on

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1712. How does the asking for forgiveness from the dead person take place?553 1713. Who asks for forgiveness first? What do people say when they’re asking for forgiveness?554 1714. Do people ask for forgiveness from a dead child? 1715. Do people outside the family also come to ask for forgiveness?555 1716. Is there a belief that if someone has a growth on their flesh, it will disappear if people take the hand of a dead person and guide it around the spot several times?556

his belly, bread and salt (Volin). If a bird comes and eats the bread, people see the following signs: a) That the deceased died from hunger and the soul is returning to eat. b) If the deceased did not die from hunger, the soul comes in the body of a bird in order to guard the dead body (Bereze).” In several other communities (e.g., Bialystok and Sventsian), “People lay bread and a piece of iron on the deceased so that he will not become swollen.” 553. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 301, mentions the belief that “the close relatives ask forgiveness but they must not cry, because the tears will stain the clothes of the deceased and he must be clean when he arrives at the yene velt [the Afterlife].” In Motele, a source stated, “People ask forgiveness of the deceased three times.” Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 446– 450, discusses various practices associated with this custom. A Hasidic yeshiva student in Brooklyn informed the author: “First the kids in the order of age, then the rest of the family. This is all done before the funeral.” 554. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 301, mentions the tradition that “Before people ask for forgiveness, they request that the deceased should be an advocate and that he should intercede [on behalf of the living] with the Patriarchs [in Heaven].” 555. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 301, writes that in Orleh it was the custom that “When the deceased was lying on the ground, everyone would come to him to ask forgiveness, not just the relatives, but also the neighbors and everyone who had quarreled with him while he was alive.” 556. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 307, cites a number of beliefs connected to the healing power of a dead person’s hand and other body parts. For example: “If a child is ill and his mother or father has died, then people should pass the dead person’s hand over the afflicted spot and it will be healed (Bereze). . . . People say that if you guide a dead person’s hand over a hunchback that it will straighten out . . . Rubbing with a dead person’s hand can help eliminate warts, bruises, and swellings (Brisk).”


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1717. When do people publically bewail [baklogn] the dead person?557 1718. Do the relatives lament him together or individually? As they do so, do they stand around the dead in a circle? 1719. Are there female mourners [baklogerins] who receive payment for this? If different versions of their laments exist, record them.558 1720. Do people hold that the wife and children should not wail too much because it will cause the dead person distress? 1721. Is it a custom that the clothing a dead person wore while alive should be distributed among poor people? 1722. Is there a belief that people should not wear the shoes of a dead person because they will tread on the head of the dead person?559 557. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 312, mentions that people would mourn while the corpse was still lying in the house, on the way to the cemetery, and at the grave site. On the phenomenon of Yiddish folk laments, see Itzik Gottesman, “Yidishe klogenishn,” New series, YIVO Bleter 4 (2003): 137–155. 558. An-sky and his team examined these practices on the ground during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition as attested in Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ekspeditsye, ongefirt fun Sh. An-ski, 306–307. On p. 327, Rekhtman reproduces a photograph taken by the expedition of several klogmuters, or professional women mourners, in a cemetery in the town of Nemirov. Shmuel Lifshits, in “Esther-Khaye the Zogerin [“Sayer”], Zabludove (Zabludow) yizker-bukh, in From a Ruined Garden, pp. 104–105, describes one such woman: “At the beginning of the month of Elul, Esther-Khaye the zogerin [sayer] appears on the scene. . . . Every moment of her time is gold. Women stand waiting for her as if she were the greatest celebrity. Not only the people of Zabulodove alone, but even strangers who come to visit their ancestors’ graves know her already. Who doesn’t know that with her ‘saying’ she can move a stone from a pit? . . . Just at daybreak before the High Holy Days, this picture is to be seen: a large crowd of women, led by Esther-Khaye bearing her book of supplications [tkhines], set off for the cemetery. The way to the graveyard is not far from town, and as Eshter-Khaye enters, she feels at home, among people she knows. ‘Good morning, God,’ she begins in a tragic melody. ‘Your servant Esther-Khaye has come.’ And approaching the grave, she looks over at the woman on whose behalf she is supplicating, and words begin to pour out of her mouth, as if from a spring.” Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 312, mentions the presence of professional female mourners (known as zogerkes, klogvayber, or beterkes) in many communities. Such women were paid following the funeral. Khayes also records a number of their laments. 559. Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 510–511, discusses sources that mention this custom, though none of them cite the reason given earlier.

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1723. When was the Burial Society established in your community? 1724. What stories do you know about the powers of the Burial Society in the past? 1725. What kinds of small and large feasts would the Burial Society hold in the past and today? At what times of year? 1726. Describe how the feasts would take place in the past and today.560 1727. Do you know any stories about a person who was punished or banished by the Burial Society forever on account of a rude word or a foolish act? 1728. Did the Burial Society ever sentence someone to an ignominious burial [lit., a “donkey’s burial”]?561 1729. How did the “donkey’s burial” take place? 1730. Did people shame the corpse, for instance, by striking it or burying it standing? 1731. Does the Burial Society have pinkasim [record books] from the past? From what years? 1732. Who has the record book of the Burial Society? 1733. How is the Burial Society organized in your community? 1734. How many members are enrolled in the Burial Society? 1735. How much does each member pay per year? 1736. How much do people pay to join the Burial Society?562 560. A. S. Horodetser, “The Burial Society,” from Horodets (Horodec): A geshikhte fun a shtetl, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 69, describes several annual feasts. The first was “the winter feast before Rosh Khoydesh Shevat. Before the feast was celebrated, all of the members fasted and said penitential prayers in the study house. . . . It [the feast] was just like the feasts of King Solomon in his day. Special challahs were baked, large pieces of fish were served, along with meat, chicken, tsimes, and compote. There was no shortage of wine and brandy either. The mood was quite festive. Various tunes were loudly sung.” Another “smaller feast was also held on Simkhes Toyre. . . . The feast consisted of fruit, tarts, and brandy. . . . After the feast, everyone went out in the street, and the gabay was led into the synagogue. People carried burning candles in their hands and loudly sang Hasidic and misnagid tunes.” 561. The tradition of the donkey’s burial was based on the biblical verse Jeremiah 22:19: “He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem” (Jewish Publication Society translation). 562. Horodetser, “The Burial Society,” in From a Ruined Garden, p. 68, writes: “Whenever someone wanted to join the society, he had to pay an initiation fee of


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1737. How much time does one serve as a junior member before becoming a full member?563 1738. What responsibilities does a junior member have?564 1739. Must each member hold a great feast and a small one?565 1740. Are prominent citizens enlisted in the Burial Society? How does this take place?566 1741. What responsibilites do Burial Society members have? 1742. Is there an obligation to go spend the night with a critically ill person or a corpse? 1743. What sort of fine is imposed upon members who don’t obey? 1744. How does the balloting occur for electing officers? 1745. How does the Burial Society determine the cost of a plot?567 twenty-five rubles, and also make the annual feast on the night before the beginning of the month of Shevat. And if the feast wasn’t sufficiently lavish, the new member was liable to be forced to give a second and better one.” 563. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 28, writes: “Admission [to the Burial Society] took place in one of the following ways: first, members could enroll their children or grandchildren as minors and upon attaining maturity they became full-fledged members; or, second, an adult wishing to be admitted to the association had to serve for a year as a sexton, whose duties were the calling of the membership to meetings and attendance at funerals.” 564. Horodetser, “The Burial Society,” in From a Ruined Garden, pp. 68–69, writes: “The new member also had to serve as the society’s shames for a period of three years. The role of this shames was to call members of the society to do their duty whenever someone died.” 565. See question 1736. 566. Horodetser, “The Burial Society,” in From a Ruined Garden, p. 68, writes: “It was a great honor to belong to the burial society, not to mention becoming one of its officers. Very few people achieved the distinction of being a gabay in the burial society, which was somewhat like being a president. Only outstanding individuals, the scholars of the town . . . merited that honor.” 567. Based on his analysis of twenty-three pinkasim of burial societies, Levitats, in The Jewish Community in Russia, 1844–1917, p. 171, writes: “The price of a grave fluctuated between 5 and 150 rubles.” Horodetser, “The Burial Society,” in From a Ruined Garden, p. 69, writes: “The society attempted to cover its expenses by charging a fee for each burial, based on the financial situation of the family. A committee was appointed to determine how much to charge in each case.” As a result of the “not very precise” accounting of the Burial Society, Horodetser notes that a group of young townspeople, inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the times, decided to es-

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1746. Does it happen that when a wealthy miser dies, the Burial Society demands a large sum of money from the heirs for charitable purposes, or the townspeople gather together and demand money for some purpose?568 1747. Does a dead person ever remain unburied for several days because the relatives cannot come to an agreement with the Burial Society?569 1748. Has it happened that the relatives have turned to the police, and they would force the Burial Society to bury the dead person? 1749. What stories do you know about similar cases? 1750. Does it ever happen that an apostate turns to the Burial Society before his death and requests to be buried in the Jewish cemetery? 1751. How does the Burial Society react in such a case? 1752. What stories do you know about this from the past? 1753. Is there a society for carrying the bier [Khevre Noyse Mite] in your community?570

tablish a new society that would be more transparent and fair in its charges. For a period of three years, the two societies competed with one another until both agreed to have the situation adjudicated by a rabbinic court, or beys din. The verdict, which both sides accepted, disbanded the new Burial Society but required the old society to charge “a standard price of three rubles . . . for each corpse, and no more; the poor were not to be charged at all; and wealthier people could be charged more, but at the rabbi’s, not the society’s, discretion.” 568. Levitats, in The Jewish Community in Russia, p. 173, writes that “In Konotop the society asked 3,000 rubles for a burial in order to cover the arrears of a previous burial; they settled for 1,300. The high cost of burial was explained in Odessa by the fact that for every 10 wealthy persons there were 10,000 poor and free burials. This was a gross exaggeration; a much lower proportion would be closer to the truth.” 569. Ain, in “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 29, observes: “It [the Burial Society] obtained the necessary funds from the deceased, in accordance with their financial abilities. To the credit of the association be it said that it never wronged these families.” However, see Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, p. 173: “In one case of a Maskil, an excessive fee was charged for burial and when the heirs refused to pay, the burial was delayed for a long time.” 570. Gelernt, in “The An-sky Expedition in Kremenets,” Pinkas Kremenets, p. 372, mentions that in the town there was a society specifically for carrying the coffin to the cemetery.


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1754. Does the society have a record book, and with whom can it be found?571 1755. What responsibilities do the members have? 1756. When do people inform the Burial Society about a sick person? 1757. Does the Burial Society send someone to find out whether the sick person is still living? 1758. Does the Burial Society send someone to say the final confession with the sick person and to be present at the moment of death?572 1759. When does the Burial Society take charge of the corpse? 1760. Who determines the time of the burial? 1761. Where does the ritual cleaning of the corpse [tahore, lit. “purification”] take place in your community, in the home of the dead person or at the cemetery in a room for this purpose [tahore shtibl]?573 1762. Is there a belief that water used in cleaning the corpse heals illnesses, and which ones?574 1763. Is there an obligation for the water with which one washes the dead to be brought by a Jew? 1764. How many people wash the dead? 1765. Where do people begin to wash the dead, from the head or the feet? 1766. Is it a custom that the corpse should be placed in a standing position when water is being poured on it?575 1767. Do you know any stories in which the dead person bent his own head during the immersion in the water? 571. Each Burial Society kept a pinkas, or record book. During the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, An-sky made a point of trying to locate and acquire these documents. 572. See question 1668. 573. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 302, cites sources from Orleh and Brisk that “The deceased is washed in the home,” as well as one from Sventsian, that “A dead person brought from elsewhere is washed in a tahore shtibl, while a native is washed at home.” 574. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 302, mentions that in Orleh “The water with which the dead is washed is kept in vessels and small bottles as a remedy for illness.” 575. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 98, writes: “The body is placed in a standing position on the bare ground or on some straw, and the water is poured over the head, so that it runs down the entire body.”

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1768. Is it a custom after washing the corpse to sprinkle it with egg white mixed with water?576 1769. What do people say then? 1770. What biblical verses and passages do people recite when washing a corpse (for example: Roysho kesem paz [“His head is like fine gold,” Song of Songs: 5:11], etc.)? 1771. Is it considered an honor to wash an important person? 1772. Is it a custom to refer to the limbs of the corpse in Hebrew during the purification? 1773. Do people dry off the corpse after washing it? 1774. Do people give the dead an enema? 1775. If a pregnant woman dies, how is the child removed? 1776. Is it customary to refer to the corpse as du rather than ir [singular and familiar rather than plural and formal form of “you”]? 1777. When do people tear their clothes as a sign of mourning?577 1778. Who cuts and who rips?578 1779. When do people begin to sew the shroud? 1780. Who takes the measurements for the shroud, and who sews it?579 1781. Is it a custom not to cut the shroud but only to tear it? 1782. Do people tear the linen over the head of the corpse? 1783. Are people careful not to make any knots in the thread while sewing?580

576. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 99, notes that after washing the corpse with water, “an egg with its shell is beaten up with wine, to symbolize the revolving wheel of fortune in this world (where wine is not obtainable, water may be used) and the head of the corpse washed with it. The custom in some places, that each one takes a little of that mixture and sprinkles it upon the head of the deceased is an improper custom and should be abolished, because it resembles the customs of the Gentiles; it is to be used only to wash his head.” On this custom, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 441–442. 577. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 91, writes: “If possible, the garments should be torn when one’s sorrow is still most intense, before the coffin is closed.” 578. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 91, notes: “For all relatives, one may rend the garments either with the hands or with an instrument, but for one’s father or mother it must be done by hand.” 579. Zabludovitsh, “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” Kehilat Vengerov, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 121, mentions that the Burial Society sewed the shroud. 580. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 303, writes: “In the shrouds there should be no knots, so that the dead will more easily be freed, if the messiah comes.” He also mentions other beliefs connected to knots in the burial


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1784. What part of the shroud do people sew first for a male and for a female? 1785. List the names of all the garments for a male corpse and for a female one.581 1786. What do people put on first, for a male and a female? 1787. Are there any people who prepare a shroud for themselves while they are still alive?582 1788. Is this considered to be a sgule [good luck] for a long life? 1789. Are there any people who put on a burial shroud every day?583 1790. Do people ever borrow the shroud of an old man? Is it loaned out gladly?584 1791. Do people ever go and choose someone for a shroud [presumably, for measurements or a loan]? Who chooses? 1792. Is it considered a great shame to lie in someone else’s shroud? 1793. Does anyone ever declare in his will that he should be buried in a stranger’s shroud in order to atone for his sins? shrouds. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 98, mentions the custom of not making any knots in the shroud. See also Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 440, n. 17. 581. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 303, mentions that first shrouds are put on a dead man, then a kittel, and a tallis. For a woman, “people put on a white linen shirt, a linen cloak, longer than the shirt, and then they wrap her in a sheet. On her head, they place a cap.” 582. Blume Goren-Malovany, “My Grandmother Sews Her Own Burial Shroud,” Sefer Zikaron le-kehilat Kolno, in From a Ruined Garden, p. 141, describes her grandmother, Sheyne-Rokhl Malovany, who was the “oldest female member of the town burial society,” and the one who would sew burial shrouds for the dead. In addition, she sewed her own burial shroud. 583. Goren-Malovany, in “My Grandmother Sews Her Own Burial Shroud,” p. 141, writes: “One night he [her brother] saw my grandmother getting out of bed, washing her hands, putting on the shroud, putting two pair of glasses on her nose, taking a prayer book in one hand, and striking her heart with the other as she said a wailing last confession. My brother saw it quite clearly because a small lamp burned all night there. The first time he was badly frightened. Then he became used to it, because she did it every night. Thus she prepared herself to pass away into eternity.” 584. Goren-Malovany, in “My Grandmother Sews Her Own Burial Shroud,” p. 141, writes: “Whenever a townswoman died just before the Sabbath or a holiday, and there was no time to sew a shroud for her, my grandmother gave away her own shroud, and soon sat down to cut new linen and begin working all over again.”

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1794. Is it a custom to place a pouch of earth in the belt of the kittel [white outergarment] of a dead person? 1795. Is it a custom to render ritually invalid one of the tassels or to tear the whole tallis which the dead person is wearing?585 1796. Does the shames go around to call people to the funeral of a dead person whose burial is an obligation on the community [mes mitzve, a corpse that is a mitzvah for the community to take care of because of financial need]?586 1797. Who carries the bier or the coffin from the house?587 1798. Is there a fixed route by which the dead are carried to burial? 1799. Are the dead carried in coffins or on biers?588 1800. Is it a custom in your community to make each dead person his own bier and to cover him with it in the grave? 1801. Do people carry the bier by hand or on the shoulders?589 1802. Is it considered an honor to carry the bier close to the ground? 1803. Do people make sure that women don’t come close to the bier of a man?590 585. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 303, mentions that in Oshmeneh, people would bite off one of the tassels on the tallis of the deceased. Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 98, advises that people should “tuck one fringe in the corner pocket of the tallit when the body is already in the grave.” 586. Ain, “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” p. 36, writes: “The sexton was sent to call out through the town ‘mes mitsve,’ implying that the attendance at the funeral was requested.” 587. See question 1753. 588. Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 474–475, discusses practices associated with carrying the dead on a bier. 589. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Avelut, 4:2, notes that the dead should be carried to the cemetery on the shoulders. While this was generally accepted by later sources, at least one (Yosef Karo’s Kessef Mishneh) stated that carrying the dead with the hands was also permissible. For a discussion of the relevant sources, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 475, n. 23. 590. Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, p. 470, discusses sources that emphasize the need for men and women to be kept apart during the funeral procession and at the cemetery. He quotes from J. R. Marcus, “The Triesch Hebre Kaddisha, 1687– 1828,” Hebrew Union College Annual 19 (1945–1946): 180–181: “One of the duties of the shammash in 1687 was to put an end to the ‘danger’ (sakkanah) of men and women mixing together at the time when the dead were carried to the cemetery and when the people returned home after the burial. The beadle was enjoined to keep the two groups separate, to walk between them, to use every effort to keep


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1804. If the dead are carried in coffins, is it customary for important men to carry them? 1805. Do children from the talmud toyres [publically supported religious schools; see above, First Section, no. 521ff.] walk in front of the bier of an important person and recite Temanyeh Apin [Aram., “Eighteen Faces,” i.e., Psalm 119]? 1806. With what do people cover the coffin? 1807. Is it a custom to carry or transport the dead quickly? 1808. Is it a custom to slow down by a synagogue and to run by a church?591 1809. What stories do you know in which a zaddik sat up when being carried by an impure place? 1810. Is it a custom for store owners to close their shops when a funeral procession passes? 1811. Is it a custom not to cross the path of a funeral procession? 1812. Is it a custom when a rabbi dies to remove the head from his walking stick and then go around the town with the stick crying: “Our Rabbi has died”? 1813. Is it a custom to walk in circles around the bier of an important man or woman? How does this take place, and what do people say then? 1814. Is it customary for the shames of the Burial Society to walk in front of the bier and cry “Charity saves from death” [Proverbs 10:2 and 11:4]?592 1815. Do people go around with a charity box and collect donations while crying “Charity saves from death”? Do they shake the charity box so that the sound of the money can be heard?593 them apart, and, if necessary, in order to accomplish this, to throw stones at the offending parties. This physical meeting of men and women was looked upon as something immoral, and a great danger which might cost one his life.” 591. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 122, mentions that the funeral procession would stop in front of the synagogue, where people would beg forgiveness from the deceased. 592. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 122, writes: “In front of every funeral went the sexton with a collection box, saying in a loud voice: ‘Charity saves from death.’ ” 593. The nineteenth-century Scottish clergyman Norman Macleod, in his journal Good Words, vol. 11 (1870): 566, writes: “In continental countries a Jewish funeral still retains much of the severe simplicity of its ancient ceremonial. . . . In front of all walks an official of the synagogue, who shouts out ‘Charity saves from

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1816. To whom belongs the money that is collected in the charity box?594 1817. Is it customary in your community to stop with the corpse in front of all the synagogues and recite the prayer El Male Rakhomim [see above, no. 1527]?595 1818. Are important people eulogized? Who usually gives the eulogy? 1819. When is the eulogy given, during the procession or at the cemetery? 1820. What good deeds in particular do people focus on in the eulogy? 1821. What sorts of praises do people say about the deceased? 1822. Are there special eulogy makers? Do they receive payment? B. Cemetery, Graves 1823. What is the holy ground [dos heylike ort, lit. “the holy place”] called in your community (beys oylem [eternal house], beys almin [Aram., same], beys khayim [house of life], feld [the field], Tsien [Zion], and the like)?596 1824. How many cemeteries are there in your community? 1825. How old is the oldest cemetery? 1826. When did people discontinue burying the dead in the old cemetery? 1827. Does each cemetery have a special name from the past? 1828. What stories and memories are associated with the cemeteries from the past? 1829. Is your cemetery the kind that has not grown according to a bequest [al pi tsvue, where arrangements were made to purchase additional land], and the dead are buried on top of one another? 1830. What do people customarily do if they find bones while digging a grave? Do they rake them off to one side? Do people request forgiveness from them, and how so? death,’ and the more effectually to give emphasis to his proclamation, moneyboxes are vigorously rattled in the rear of the procession. The proceeds go to an association for burying the dead, which takes upon itself to provide for all poor funerals.” 594. See question 1815. 595. See question 1808. 596. See Avriel Bar-Levav, “Makom aher: beit ha-kevarot be-tarbut ha-yehudit,” Peamim 98–99 (2003): 5–38.


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1831. Is your cemetery built on top of the old cemetery from the past?597 1832. Have you heard of any Jewish cemeteries located near to you in non-Jewish settlements? 1833. How do the gentiles behave toward such a cemetery? 1834. Are they careful not to mow the grass or graze cattle on it?598 1835. Do you know any stories about a nobleman wanting to plow an old Jewish cemetery, and the oxen or the people went lame or dropped dead? 1836. Is there an old cemetery next to the synagogue in your community? 1837. What do people say about it? When was it begun? 1838. Are there fenced-in graves in your community next to the synagogue or in the town, and where do they come from? 1839. Do people say that these are the graves of a bride and groom who were killed under the wedding canopy during the time of Khmielnitsky?599 597. The most famous Jewish cemetery with multiple layers of graves is the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague. Levitats, in The Jewish Community in Russia, p. 173, mentions: “In one community sepulture was set in three stories.” 598. The Babylonian Talmud Megillah 29a states: “Cemeteries must not be disrespected. Cattle cannot be grazed in them.” In a gloss on this issue in Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 368:1, Moshe Isserles acknowledges en passant that non-Jewish rulers might graze their cattle on grass growing on the graves. In fact, as Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 453–461, demonstrates, it was the practice of some German Jewish communities (e.g., Worms, Frankfurt am Main) to raise the firstborn of clean animals “from the grass and herbs of the graves.” This was based on their understanding that the law requiring that kohanim care for the firstborn of a clean animal also applied outside the land of Israel. In order to raise such animals in a way that did not overburden the community financially, they were allowed to live on the grass in the Jewish cemetery. 599. Bogdan Khmielnitsky (1595–1657) led a rebellion of Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the period 1648–1654, which brought about catastrophic destruction among the Jewish settlements there. “The Grave and the Dibbuk or An-sky in Vishnevets,” in Vishnevets: Sefer Zikaron le-Kedoshei Vishnevets she-Nispu be-Shoat ha-Natsim (Tel Aviv: Irgun Oley Vishnevets, 1970), p. 447, mentions that locals showed An-sky such a grave during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and that he later incorporated this into his play The Dibbuk. For a description of another grave containing a martyred bride and groom, in this case, located next to the great synagogue in Mogilev-Podolsk

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1840. Are there in your community, in town or outside of town, graves of martyrs or places where people say there were once graves of martyrs? Describe what martyrs are buried there. If there is a tombstone, record what is written on it, or take a photograph. 1841. How does the inauguration of a new cemetery take place?600 1842. Is a renowned zaddik invited for it?601 1843. Do people customarily measure the area of the new cemetery with a string?602 1844. Do people walk around it in a circle? How many times, and how, and what do they say while doing it?603 1845. Do people decree a fast day? Do they recite slikhes [“pardons,” prayers for the forgiveness of sin, recited before the New Year and surrounded by an iron fence, see Aharon-Zev Berman, “Mi-pe ha-Shemuah,” Reshumot 1 (1918): 413. 600. Sefer Maavar Yabok, Sefat Emet, 11, describes the dedication of a new cemetery as follows: When the first corpse is to be buried in the cemetery, the residents of the place take a rooster (who is called gever, i.e., male) and slaughter it without a blessing. They then bury the rooster alone or next to the feet of the first corpse to be interred. Since the rooster is gever perhaps its slaughter and burial will weaken the power of judgment that is associated with the angel Gavriel, whose name is also gever. This is one of many Jewish folk rituals that involve substituting a rooster for a human being. On this ritual, see Wertheim, Halakhot ve-Halikhot be-Hasidut, 229. Wertheim describes an elaborate ritual that was developed by Hasidim for the dedication of a new cemetery involving multiple circumambulations by at least ten men, along with the recitation of verses from Psalms and Isaiah with the proper kavanah, or intention. Also see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, 708–720. For the Hasidic practice described by Wertheim, see p. 714. 601. Given how labor-intensive this ritual was, many Hasidim preferred to rely on a local zaddik whose merit would bring about the same effect (Wertheim, Halakhot ve-Halikhot be-Hasidut, 230). On the general practice of inviting a local zaddik (or if one was not available, a zaddik from another place) to dedicate the cemetery, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, 711. 602. Eastern European Jews measured the cemetery itself, or individual graves, with a string on a number of ritual occasions. The string was then typically cut into shorter pieces and used as wicks in candles. See, for example, Michele Klein, A Time To Be Born: Customs and Folkore of Jewish Birth (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1998), 147. 603. Wertheim, in Halakhot ve-Halikhot be-Hasidut, pp. 229–230, mentions seven circumambulations. See also Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, p. 716, for the order of these circumambulations.


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and Yom Kippur, during times of trouble, and for other purposes, as here] in the synagogues?604 1846. Is a feast provided for the poor in the cemetery? Do all the townspeople get cake and brandy?605 1847. Is it a custom on that day for everyone, from young to old, to give charity?606 1848. Is there a belief that during the inauguration of a new cemetery, the dead from the old one congregate near the fence and look on, and if someone sees them, he should not tell anyone? 1849. What do people do when a new plot of earth is added to an old cemetery? Are the same customs observed as when a new cemetery is established?607 1850. What is done with the first dead person buried in the new ground? Is a guard placed to watch him until more dead are buried in the cemetery? Until how many people are buried is this done? What is the reason for this?608 1851. Do people ask him for forgiveness? What is the procedure for this?609 1852. Is there a belief that if the first dead person buried in the new ground is an important person or an old man, it is a good sign? 1853. Is there a belief that if the first dead person in the new ground is young, it is a sign that young people will die?

604. When a new cemetery was dedicated or a plot of land was added to an old cemetery, the Burial Society ordained a fast. At least ten members of the society fasted; those who were unable, fasted half a day and added slikhes to their regular prayers. On these customs, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, p. 709. 605. Wertheim, in Halakhot ve-Halikhot be-Hasidut, p. 230, mentions a feast held at the dedication of the new cemetery during which a zaddik recited toyre, or teachings. 606. On this custom, see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, p. 710. 607. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, p. 719, states that the rites of dedication are the same for adding a plot to an old cemetery. 608. Zinner, in Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, pp. 721–722, discusses this custom and whether it is necessary if the first burial is a stillborn child. 609. Wertheim, in Halakhot ve-Halikhot be-Hasidut, p. 230, n. 145, mentions hearing from his father, Rabbi Shimon Shlomo Wertheim, that in the hesped, or eulogy, for the first person buried in his town’s new cemetery he told her “Don’t be afraid to remain here alone, for our Mother Rachel also lies alone [in Rachel’s Tomb].”

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1854. Do people ever bury the dead in the old cemetery even when there is a new one? What is the reason for this?610 1855. Is it customary to plant trees in the cemetery?611 1856. What sorts of beliefs are associated with the trees that grow in the cemetery? 1857. Do people eat the fruit that grows on the trees?612 1858. Do people trim the grass of the cemetery? To whom does it belong?613 1859. What kind of stories do you know about people who went to the cemetery at night and came to harm? 1860. Do you know any stories about angels who transported a zaddik from one cemetery to another or to the Land of Israel? 1861. At which times of year do people visit the cemetery?614 1862. Are there special female supplicants and mourners [betterins un klogerins]? 610. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 85, writes that when a certain zaddik died in the town on the eve of the Sabbath, people were unable to bury him in the new ohel, and so they brought the body to the old ohel in which two zaddikim were already buried. They begged forgiveness from the dead, requested that they create a little space for the new burial, and left the ohel for a few minutes. When they returned, the graves had moved to the sides and created a space between them, where the zaddik was buried. 611. In responsa concerning Jewish cemeteries published in the Yearbook of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, vol. 27 (1917), p. 88, Kaufman Kohler and Jacob Lauterbach write: “And it seems that the Jews in the middle ages loved to plant trees in their cemeteries, so that we find them called by Christian writers, Hortus judaeorum, ‘the garden of the Jews.’ ” On this issue, see Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, 368:2. 612. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 320, writes: “Fruit from trees growing in the cemetery cannot be picked or eaten.” 613. On the question of whether it is permissible to derive benefit from the grass growing in cemeteries, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 455, n. 5. 614. The Jewish month of Elul (in the early fall) was the most popular time to visit the cemetery. People also visited the cemetery on Tisha be-Av (the Ninth of Av), the day that commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. See, for example, Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 56, who write: “On Tisha b’Av, they were very busy at the cemetery. For a small fee, there were men who would recite the El mule rakhamim, a prayer for the dead. There was a lot of coming and going. Everyone carried garlic to leave on the graves. It was a custom, perhaps to ward off evil spirits.”


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1863. What do people say when they come to the cemetery and what when they leave? 1864. Are there besides the printed ones supplications and petitionary prayers [tkhines un bekoshes] which people say at the cemetery? Record them. 1865. How do people ask forgiveness from the dead when they tread on their graves if there is no other way to go? 1866. Is it a custom before leaving the cemetery that one should toss a stone onto the grave where one was praying? 1867. Do people toss a head of garlic onto graves in your community? How and when: when one is arriving or leaving? What do people say then? What is the reason for this?615 1868. Do people tear out grass and toss it over their heads onto the graves while leaving? What is the reason for this?616 1869. What do the kohanim [members of the priestly class who are not permitted in cemeteries] say while standing by the fence? 1870. Which spot within the cemetery is considered to be an important place? 1871. Which places are considered unimportant?617 1872. Who is buried by the cemetery fence or outside the fence? 1873. Does a dispute ever occur on account of a grave site, in which one side claims that he has the right of possession because his parents lie nearby?

615. Gelernt, “The An-ski Expedition in Kremenets,” in Pinkas Kremenets, p. 370, mentions the practice of laying garlic on graves in the town cemetery. Also see “The Grave and the Dibbuk or An-sky in Vishnevets,” in Vishnevets, 445–456, which mentions that women used to “throw garlic as if on a real cemetery” on the site in the town of Vishnevets, where local tradition held that a bride and groom were killed during the Khmielnitsky massacres during the period 1648–1654. The magical use of garlic was widespread among Jews (and, indeed, Jews were associated with garlic in the broader culture). 616. The Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 376:4, mentions the practice of plucking the grass before leaving the cemetery. Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 570, writes: “The reason that people pluck grass or a bunch and place it on the tombstone is only out of respect for the dead, to show that he was at the grave.” For other sources on this custom, see Sperling, The Jewish Life Cycle, 538–540. 617. In general, people with lower status or who were problematic in the eyes of the communal leadership were buried near the cemetery fence.

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1874. In your cemetery, are there caves, vaults, or mausoleums for entire families? 1875. What stories are there about particular graves? 1876. Do you know any stories in which the graves of two zaddikim moved close to one another and made a place for a third?618 1877. What zaddikim rest in your community’s cemetery? Who are they? Recount their family genealogies. 1878. Do you have a mausoleum for a zaddik where an eternal flame is kept burning?619 1879. Who provides the money for the oil? Is there a right of possession for this? Is a special collections plate set out for it? 1880. Do people put notes with requests for intercession [kvitlekh] on the grave of a zaddik?620 1881. Do people lay a brick on the graves of zaddikim as a protection against apostasy? Record what is written on such a brick. How do people lay the brick? Is it burnt in fire beforehand? How long?621 618. See question 1854. 619. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 320, writes: “On the grave of a rebbe or a zaddik, visitors place a burning candle.” 620. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, pp. 11–12, describe the cottage industry that existed before World War I around the grave of the Hasidic holy man Reb Mayer of Apt on the anniversary of his death: “Anyone who could write Hebrew would trundle out a table and chair and set up shop along di yidishe gas, which means the Jewish Street, all the way from synagogue to the Jewish cemetery. In the two centuries since Reb Mayerl’s death, the town had developed a whole new industry—shraybn kvitlekh (writing petitions). For a few pennies, the town’s teachers and their students would write a petition. They had a very busy day. With petitions in hand, the followers of Reb Mayerl would go to the cemetery. . . . Hundreds of people crowded the path to and from Reb Mayerl’s grave. They had to run a gauntlet. Beggars lined up along each side of the path and pulled at the corners of the kapotes, the long black coats or caftans, of all those who passed.” For the original description, see Akiba Katz, “R. Mayerl’s Yortsayt,” in Apt (Opatov): Sefer zikaron le-ir ve-em be-Yisrael asher hayetah veenenah od—Yizker-bukh tsum ondenk fun undzer geburts-shtot in Poyln velkhe iz mer nishto, ed. Zvi Yashiv, 69 (Tel Aviv: Yotse Apt be-Yisrael, 1966). 621. On this custom, which the expedition encountered in some of the towns it visited, see Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor, 120–121. According to Rekhtman, the brick was supposed to be baked in an oven for seven days and seven nights before it was brought to the cemetery. He also provides the text that was typically inscribed on such a brick in the script associated with scribes: “Just as this brick is


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1882. In what cases do people still lay a brick with an inscription on the grave of a zaddik?622 1883. Do Hasidic rebbes ever make supplications [praven, lit. “celebrate”] at the grave of a zaddik? How does this “celebration” take place? 1884. In the month of Elul do many Hasidim come to the grave of a zaddik who lies in your community?623 1885. What prayers besides the printed ones do people say at the grave of a zaddik? 1886. Is there a special attendant at the mausoleum of a holy man? 1887. Is it considered dangerous to repair the mausoleum of a holy man? 1888. Does it happen that gentiles repair the mausoleum of a holy rabbi because he had helped them with something while he was alive? 1889. What stories and songs do you know about graves of either zaddikim or simple people? C. Burial 1890. How many stations [maymades] do people make before coming to the cemetery?624 1891. Do people lay down the bier at the gate of the cemetery? 1892. What do people say when they bring the dead into the cemetery?

burned in fire, so should the heart of so-and-so that turned away from Judaism and followed a bad path, now turn back to God for good.” 622. Rekhtman, in Yidishe etnografye un folklor, pp. 121–122, also describes how people would perform the same ritual with a “love brick” in order to break up a couple. 623. On this Hasidic custom and the opposition among some Misnagdim, who viewed it as coming close to violating the biblical prohibition on doresh el ha-metim, or necromancy, see Elliot Horowiz, “Speaking to the Dead: Cemetery Prayer in Medieval and Early Modern Jewry,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 315. 624. The Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 100b states that no fewer than seven stations should be made on the way to the cemetery. In practice, a variety of customs existed.

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1893. Is it a custom to whisper in the dead person’s ear, “So-and-so, be aware that you are dead”? When do people whisper these words in the ear? 1894. If the body was washed at home, is it carried nevertheless into the purification room [tahore shtibl; see above, no. 1761] of the cemetery? 1895. Do people measure the dead person in order to know what size to dig the grave? 1896. How deep is the grave dug? Is there a difference when the earth is soft or rocky? 1897. Is it permitted for gentiles to dig a grave?625 1898. What do people do when they find water that cannot be drained while digging a grave? Do they lower the corpse into the water? 1899. Does the open grave need to be watched until they bring the corpse? 1900. What do people do if they dig a grave and then don’t need it? Do they bury a live rooster there?626 1901. What do people say before they lower the corpse into the grave? 1902. Do people place boards under the corpse and a pillow of earth under the head?627 1903. Is earth from the Land of Israel placed at the head of the corpse? What is the reason for this?628 1904. Do people sell soil from the Land of Israel in your community?629 1905. From where in the Land of Israel do people take the soil? 625. In a responsum, Kaufman Kohler and Jacob Lauterbach, Yearbook of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, vol. 27 (1917), p. 89, write: “For digging the grave or doing other mechanical work preparatory to the burial, non-Jews may be and always have been employed.” 626. On the related custom of burying a rooster in the first grave of a new cemetery (which some sources rejected as darkhei emori (i.e., the way of the Amorites, or “pagan”), see Zinner, Sefer Nitei Gavriel, part II, p. 720. 627. On the common practice of placing boards in the grave, see Zabludovitsh, “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” 122. 628. On this custom, see Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 466–467, n. 7. 629. Concerning this phenomenon, Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 266, writes: “Once in a great while a pious stranger from Jerusalem visited the town. He told quaint and wonderful tales of sacred graves and holy sites, and sold bags of white sand from the Holy Land. Aged men and women seized this opportunity to provide themselves with earth from Erets Yisroel. The Chevro Kadisho, too, provided itself with a stock of this burial accessory.”


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1906. Is it a custom that the boards placed under the dead should not be planed? 1907. How do people lower the corpse into the grave?630 1908. Is it a custom that if the dead is a scholar who learned day and night, the table at which he learned should be broken up and made into a cover for him in the grave?631 1909. Do people place forked wooden twigs [gepelekh] between the fingers of the corpse? What is the reason for this?632 1910. Do people place fragments of pottery or eggshells on the eyes of the corpse?633 1911. Is filling the grave with earth considered to be a mitzvah?634

630. Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 362:2, states that the corpse should be placed in the grave on its back with its face turned upward, like a person sleeping. Other sources also permit burying the corpse on its side instead. 631. The practice of using the table upon which a sage learned Torah to construct his coffin is found in a remarkable range of Jewish communities, including Spain, Italy, Libya, Salonika, and Poland. Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, p. 498, writes: “This practice . . . incorporates the conception that an object that was used to fulfill a commandment should be used for the fulfillment of an additional precept, based on Shabbat 117b: ‘Since one commandment has been performed with it, let another commandment be performed with it.’ ” On p. 496, Sperber cites a related custom from the Wormser Minhagbuch: “ ‘If a woman was accustomed to make wax candles for the synagogue, the plank on which she made the candles is used as a plank for her coffin, within the boards of the coffin.’ ” 632. Paul Isaac Hershon, in Otsrot ha-Talmud (London: Ames Nisbet & Co., 1882), p. 285, notes: “To this very day among the Polish Jews the dead are provided for their long subterranean journey [through underground tunnels following Resurrection, see question 2082] with little wooden forks, with which, at the sound of the great trumpet, they are to dig and burrow their way from where they happen to be buried till they arrive in the Land of Palestine.” Ganzfried, in Code of Jewish Law, vol. 4, p. 99, states: “It is also a foolish custom to place in his hands some twigs, generally called forks; if they insist on placing it, it should be put alongside the corpse.” 633. Placing potsherds on the eyes of the deceased was a common practice. For example, see Ain, “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community,” 36: “One of the members of the Khevre Kadishe descended into the grave and put away the body, placed potsherds over the eyelids and two forked twigs in the hands, and boards over the body.” Sperling, in Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, p. 531, discusses the custom of smearing the dead person’s head with eggs and eggshells. 634. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 267, describes this ritual as follows: “The first shovels of earth were placed in the grave with the convex side of the

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1912. Who tosses the first spade of earth?635 1913. When is the dead person’s name removed from the lists of all the societies? How is this done?636 1914. Is it a custom everywhere to lay the corpse with his head to the east and his feet to the west?637 1915. Are people careful when filling in the grave not to pass the shovel from hand to hand but, rather, to lay it on the ground?638 1916. Is it a custom to turn over the bier three times?639 1917. Are there laments and tkhines [supplicatory prayers] that people say immediately after the burial?640 1918. Is there a belief that with the last tap of the shovel, the dead person forgets everything? 1919. Do you know any stories about a person who was buried while in a coma [hinerplet, a trance or stupor; see above, no. 1684] and afterward appeared in a dream to relate this, and then people dug him up and discovered him lying overturned in the grave? 1920. How do people behave when placing martyrs in the cemetery? Do people place them in a special place? How does the burial take place? 1921. Do you know any stories from the past in which people sacrificed themselves in order to bring a Jew to a Jewish burial?

shovel by those who wished to attain the religious merit which accrued to those who performed this task.” 635. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 267, writes: “The shamoshim [members] of the Chevro Kadisho [Burial Society] hurriedly filled in the grave, taking great care that no one take the shovel from the hand of another. Each shamosh placed the shovel on the ground from which another picked it up.” 636. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 266, notes that after the rituals (e.g., putting twigs between the fingers, etc.) associated with placing the corpse in the grave were completed, the “member of the burial society . . . announced that death had now withdrawn the deceased from all brotherhoods of which he was a member.” 637. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 318, mentions that it is customary to place the corpse with the “face toward the East” so that it will be facing in the right direction when the Messiah comes. 638. See question 1912. 639. On this custom, see the Kitsur Shulhan Arukh. 640. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 122, writes that immediately after the burial, the assembled would say: “ ‘From dust you came and from dust you return, blessed be the true Judge.’ ”


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1922. How does the burial of defiled pages of holy books or Torah scrolls torn up by evil people take place?641 1923. How do people customarily proceed when placing informers and heretics in the cemetery? Do they place them outside the fence? How do they bury apostates?642 1924. Do people wash [metaher, lit. “purify”] a corpse that has been designated for a “donkey’s burial” [see above, no. 1728]? 1925. Do you know any stories about a corpse that the earth did not want to accept? What did people do in such a case? 1926. Do you know any stories about people opening up a grave and finding that the corpse had been disturbed [tserisn, lit. “torn”]? 1927. Is there a belief that when someone’s children consistently die young, a locked padlock should be laid in the grave of a dead child so that the earth will be locked up? 1928. If the deceased did not leave behind any children or close relatives, who says kaddish [see above, no. 1418] at the grave? Do people drink brandy at the cemetery after the kaddish? 1929. Do people immediately erect a marker on the grave, and what kind?643 1930. Where do people wash their hands when leaving the cemetery? 1931. Is it a custom that when people leave the cemetery and wash their hands, they should wipe them off in the grass or on a wall of a non-Jewish house?644

641. H. Gelernt, “The Funeral of a Torah Scroll,” in Pinkas Kremenets, pp. 378– 379, describes the funeral ritual conducted for a Torah scroll in the town cemetery during the winter of 1909–1910. 642. For a discussion of the informer in Eastern European Jewish society and literature, see Ruth Wisse, “The Jewish Informer as Extortionist and Idealist,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry, ed. Richard Cohen, Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010). Such individuals were among the most reviled figures in the community, along with apostates, or meshumadim. 643. Zabludovitsh, in “Customs, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” p. 122, mentions that “a board was placed in the ground at the head of the grave, bearing the name of the dead person, the date of birth, and the date of death.” 644. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 268, notes: “The custom forbade wiping the hands with a cloth or rag, unless the latter could then be discarded. Hands were usually dried in the air.”

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1932. Do people return from the cemetery by a different route than the one by which they came? 1933. Do people wash their hands a second time when they come home?645 1934. Do people knock on the window so that water is brought outside? 1935. Are people careful not to pass the water pitcher from hand to hand?646 1936. Is it a custom that if people transport a dead person from one town to another, they whisper into the horses’ ears that they are transporting a corpse? 1937. Is there a belief that if one encounters a dead person, one should bump into him in passing [or “strike him in an offhand way”] and he will disappear? D. Shive, Shloyshim [“seven,” the seven days of strict mourning practices that follow the death of a close relative, and “thirty,” the thirty days of less strict mourning that follow the shiva] 1938. Is it a custom to turn over the bed on which the dead person was lying? For how long? What is the reason for this? 1939. Is there a belief that the soul of a dead person is present in the candle that burns the week of shiva?647 1940. Is it a custom to place a glass of water at the window and to attach a piece of linen from the burial shroud to the pane of glass during the entire shiva?648 645. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 268, writes: “Returning from a funeral, one did not enter a house before washing his hands.” 646. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 268, writes: “The vessel was not handed by one person to another, but each one placed it on the ground, from which the next picked it up.” 647. Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 573–574, discusses a number of sources (e.g., Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Zohar) that depict the soul as returning to mourn its former body during the shiva period, and one, Shibbolei ha-Leket, that states: “‘And in our place it was the practice to light a candle each night, all of the seven [days of the mourning week], where the corpse was washed, on the ground, to please the soul, that returns and mourns for [the body] all the seven, as it was said.” On the significance of the candle in Jewish tradition in general, see Yitzhak Ganuz, “The Candle in Jewish Folklore and Literature,” Yeda Am 19 (1979): 28–44 (Hebrew). 648. On this custom, see Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, 178; Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle, 434–435; Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, 268. The pop-


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1941. Is there a belief that the soul immerses itself in the glass of water and wipes itself off with the piece of linen during the entire shiva?649 1942. Is it a custom to eat a sudes havroe [lit. “meal of recovery,” a meal prepared by friends for a mourner returning from a funeral]? How does it take place?650 1943. Is it a custom not to say hello or goodbye to the mourner?651 1944. Who is obligated to go up and comfort the mourner? What words of comfort do people say to the mourner? What do people recite when comforting mourners (Psalms and which chapters)? 1945. What do people learn during shiva (Mishnayes [see above, no. 426], Job, other tractates), and which passages?652 1946. Is it a custom to sit shiva in the synagogue? On what does the mourner sit? 1947. Is there a belief that if people discuss the deceased during shiva, he enters the house? 1948. Is it a custom to welcome the mourner on the Sabbath in the synagogue during the singing of the verse Boy besholem so that when the entire congregation turns around to the west side, it faces the mourner standing by the door? 1949. Is it a custom after shiva to carry a stone into a non-Jewish house? What is the reason for this?653 1950. Is it a custom to fence in the grave immediately after shiva? ular explanation was that the Angel of Death would wash his sword in the water and wipe it with the cloth. 649. Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, p. 434, n. 4, writes: “It appears that this custom is based on the assumption that the soul is as thirsty as when it exists in the body, and needs to drink.” Alternately, Trachtenberg, in Jewish Magic and Superstition, p. 178, notes: “In modern times Jews in Eastern Europe set a glass of water and a towel beside the bed of a dying man so that the angel of death may cleanse his sword and wipe it. But this same custom also prevails among non-Jews, their explanation being that the soul bathes and dries itself before departing on its long journey.” 650. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 268, mentions that this first meal “consisted of hard-boiled eggs and beigel (hard rolls shaped like doughnuts).” 651. Speaking as little as possible, if at all, to the mourner was customary. 652. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 268, mentions the biblical book of Job and the Yiddish version of the Musar work Menoras Ha-Meor by Isaac Aboab. 653. In response to this question, a Hasidic Yeshiva student in Brooklyn informed the author: “No, but a nail is knocked in where the mourners sat.”

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1951. Do people sit shiva for an apostate, and for how long? Do people sit shiva for one whose way of life is morally offensive [yatza letarbes ro, lit. “who has gone out to a bad culture”]?654 1952. Is the custom prevalent not to cut one’s hair during the entire shloyshim period? 1953. When do people erect the tombstone? What sort of customs and prayers are there for this?655 1954. Are there tombstones with beautiful carvings in your community? Were there famous stone engravers in your community? Describe what you know about them.656 1955. Do people tell stories about a dead person who comes in a dream during shloyshim and requests that people name someone after him? 654. Schauss, in The Lifetime of a Jew, p. 268, notes: “If an apostate was killed by accident, Kaddish might be recited for him, because his unnatural death atoned for his sins.” 655. The unveiling of the tombstone typically, but not always, took place twelve months after death. 656. Tombstone carving was one of the main avenues of artistic expression in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and, not surprisingly, An-sky attempted to document particularly striking examples during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. For photographs of tombstone engravers taken during the expedition, see Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions, ed. Eugene Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Ivanov, Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav, Alla Sokolova (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2009), 75–76. On the history of the art form and a bibliography, see Marcin Wodzinski, “Tombstones,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Tombstones. For an evocative description of the metsayve-kritser (tombstone carver) in Apt, see Kirshenblatt and KirshenblattGimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, pp. 152–153, where they write: “A farmer would deliver the slabs to him from the quarry already shaped, the tops rounded. Some slabs were a little bigger than others. Sandstone was soft and easy to work. He carved motifs and inscriptions appropriate for the deceased. For a young girl, he made a mourning dove with a twig in its mouth or a broken branch or a candlestick with a broken candle, indicating a life cut short. For a woman, he carved two Sabbath candles in candlesticks, for a man a pair of lions rampant. A hand holding an alms box indicated a charitable man. An open prayer book or Torah symbolized that the man was pious or learned. . . . Using a chisel and a maul, the metsayve-kritser carved both the inscription and the ornaments in a shallow relief. When he had finished carving the stone, he would paint it with bright colors.”


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1956. Do you know stories about a dead person who appeared in a dream during shloyshim to a faraway son and told him that he should say kaddish? 1957. Do people believe that sometimes the deceased calls someone to him, and how does this calling take place? 1958. Does a dead person ever approach someone to request forgiveness or to request that another should pay his debts? 1959. Did anyone ever make a tkies-kaf [handshake signifying agreement] with someone else that after death he would return to relate what takes place in the afterlife? Did he return, and what did he say? 1960. Is there a belief that the soul hovers above the grave for the entire shloyshim?657 1961. Is the mourner supposed to wear the clothes that he tore in mourning for the entire year? 1962. What things do people say when they speak well about a dead person, and what when they speak badly? 1963. Do you know any stories about a lawsuit before a rabbinical court involving a dead person? 1964. Do you know any stories in which a dead person came to a zaddik to request a tikkun [lit. a “correction,” or “repair,” i.e., to put right something that had been left undone or to correct a sin in a past life]? 1965. Do you know any stories in which a dead person came to announce pending disasters [gzeyres, lit. “decrees” from Heaven] persecutions, and other misfortunes? 1966. Is there a belief that a dead person can bring healing to a sick person or give advice on how to cure an illness? What stories do you know about this? E. The Angel of Death [Malakh HaMoves], The Silent Angel [Malakh Doyme, the angel who accompanies the deceased in the afterlife], the Soul After Death, Reincarnation, Dibbuk 1967. How do people conceive of the Angel of Death? His appearance and his attributes?658

657. According to the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 152b–153a, for twelve months following death, the body persists and the soul ascends and descends. After twelve months, the body ceases to exist and the soul ascends and does not return. 658. According to the Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zara 20b, the Angel of Death is covered with eyes. Roskies and Roskies, in The Shtetl Book, pp. 243–245, list a

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1968. Which weapons does the Angel of Death employ: a sword or poison, or both of them together?659 1969. Is it possible, according to this conception, that even after the Angel of Death is already in the house, the sick person may nevertheless remain alive? 1970. Is there a belief that the Angel of Death engages in a debate with the soul? 1971. What is considered an easy death, and what is considered a difficult one? 1972. Does the Angel of Death gladly take the soul from people, or does he do it only because he has received a command to do so? 1973. Do assistants accompany the Angel of Death, and who are they? 1974. Is it considered possible to deceive the Angel of Death? What stories do you know about such cases? Is adding a name considered a means for deceiving the Angel of Death?660 1975. Is there a belief that the Angel of Death reveals himself to the sick person some time before death?661 1976. Is there a belief that the Angel of Death has no power over people when they are learning Torah?662 1977. Does the sick person always see the Angel of Death?

number of traditions concerning the appearance of the Angel of Death, including: “old man with a poisoned sword, a beggar, a peddler, an Arab, he’s married to Lilith, a wanderer, a cat, an old grandfather, a spy, a soldier, he has a metal-colored beard, he has no body at all, he carries a wooden sword, he strangles with his thumb, he disguises himself as an animal.” 659. The Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zara 20b describes the Angel of Death as holding a sword dripping with poison. When an ill person sees the Angel of Death standing at his bedside, he trembles and opens his mouth, thereby allowing a drop of poison to enter and kill him. 660. See, for example, Babylonian Talmud Ketubot 77b. 661. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 286, mentions that the Angel of Death reveals himself three times to his victim. 662. There are a number of rabbinic stories concerning people who frustrated the Angel of Death by learning Torah. On these and other rabbinic traditions concerning the Angel of Death, see Eliezer Diamond, “Wrestling the Angel of Death: Form and Meaning in Rabbinic Tales of Death and Dying,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 36 (1995): 76–92.


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1978. Is there a belief that a dying person cries out at the moment of death, and that his cry is heard from one end of the world to another, and that no one hears it except for the roosters? 1979. Is there a belief that the Angel of Death can injure the surrounding people? 1980. Can it happen that the Angel of Death kills the same person several times because he is called away? 1981. Does a zaddik have the power to drive the Angel of Death away from the bed of a sick person? 1982. How long before the death of a sick person does the Angel of Death come to his bed? 1983. Where does he stand, at the head of the bed or at the foot? And what does this signify?663 1984. Through what place does the Angel of Death enter the house of the sick person, and through what place does he exit? 1985. Does the Angel of Death pull out the soul, or does it leave the body on its own?664 1986. Can the Angel of Death be with many sick people in different places at one time? 1987. How do people conceive of the soul? 1988. Is there a belief that the soul does not want to be separated from the body? 1989. Does the soul weep when it is leaving the body? 1990. Do you know any stories about a debate between the soul and the body? 1991. Through what part of the body does the soul depart? 663. Sperber, in The Jewish Life Cycle, pp. 424–425, notes that in the Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zarah 20b, the Angel of Death is described as standing at the head of the dying person’s bed but that later sources shifted his position to the foot of the bed (for example, Sefer Maavar Yabok). 664. The Midrash on Psalms, vol. 1, trans. William Braude (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), 11:6: 165, states: “And when the time comes for a man to depart from the world, and the angel of death enters to take up his soul, the soul has the semblance of a kind of reed filled with blood, with smaller reeds distributed through the entire body. The angel lays hold of the upper part of the reed and pulls it, but pulls it gently out of the body of the righteous man, as though taking a hair out of milk. But out of the body of the wicked man, it is as though he were pulling tangled rope through a narrow opening. . . . [Once the angel draws the soul out of a man’s body] the man dies right away, but his spirit comes out and sits on the tip of the nose until the body begins to decay.”

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1992. Where is the soul immediately after it leaves the body? 1993. Do any of the senses remain in the body following the departure of the soul (for instance, feeling sorrow, hearing the cries of the surrounding people, etc.)?665 1994. Does the soul stay near the body until after the burial?666 1995. When does the soul fly off to heaven?667 1996. Does the soul know and feel all that happens to the body in the grave? 1997. Is there a belief that during the funeral, angels accompany a zaddik, while malicious spirits throw an evil person into the grave?668 1998. What stories do you know about this? 1999. Is there a belief that the dead parents and relatives of the dead person come to the funeral in order to welcome him? 2000. Is there a belief that immediately after the deceased is placed in the grave, the malakh doyme comes to him?669 665. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 317, writes that people are careful not to shake the corpse when it is being carried to the cemetery “because the dead person feels everything. In general, the dead hear everything until people cover the grave [with dirt].” 666. There are a variety of Jewish beliefs concerning whether the soul leaves the body upon death or remains in proximity for three days, a week, or up to a year. On the view that it remains connected, see Sefer Maavar Yabok, Sefat Emet, sec. 1. 667. Khayes, in “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” p. 326, mentions that for thirty days after the burial, the soul returns daily to where the dead individual used to live. Sinful souls in particular return to cry and wail, while the souls of mothers come to cry over their children. Souls also return to the graves of their bodies on the yortsayt (anniversary) of their death and during the month of Elul (when cemetery visits are customary) in order to attend to the visits of relatives. 668. According to the Babylonian Talmud Ketubot 104a, when a zaddik dies, three groups of ministering angels go out to greet him with words of peace, but when an evil person dies, three groups of angels of destruction go out to greet him with words of rebuke. 669. Gelernt, “The An-sky Expedition in Kremenets,” in Pinkas Kremenets, p. 372, mentions that a joke was told to An-sky during his visit to the town about an encounter between a Hasidic rebbe and the malakh doyme in the yene velt (world to come). The Midrash on Psalms, vol. 1, 11:6: 166, states: “As decay sets in, the spirit [of the dead person], weeping, cries out to the Holy One, blessed be He, saying: ‘Master of the universe, whither am I to be taken?’ Immediately Dumah takes the


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2001. What sort of conception is there of the appearance and attributes of the malakh doyme?670 2002. What is the reason for his coming? 2003. What does the malakh doyme do with a deceased person who has forgotten the biblical verse associated with his name?671 2004. Does he beat him, hack him with a sword or with a chain? 2005. What happens to the dead person after the malakh doyme leaves him? 2006. What does the khibut hakever [see above, no. 1428] consist of? Which angels of destruction [malakhe khavole] punish the person? How long does khibut hakever last?672

spirit and carries it to the courtyard of the dead, to join the other spirits. If the man was righteous, the words ‘Clear a place for such-and-such a righteous man’ are spoken before him, and he passes from dwelling to dwelling place until he beholds the face of the Presence.” 670. The Midrash on Psalms, vol. 1, 11:6: 165, states: “Why is the guardian of the spirits called Dumah? Because he guards domemot, ‘the silent,’ who eat but do not speak; even when they drink, the sound of their drinking is not heard.” A section of An-sky’s Yiddish narrative-poem, “Ashmedai,” is entitled “Der malakh hamoves un der malakh doyme.” See An-sky, “Ashmedai,” in Gezamlte shriften, vol. 8, 19–31. 671. On this belief, see Khayes, “Gleybungen un minhogim in farbindung mitn toyt,” 316. For this reason, people would remind the dead person before burying him not to forget his name. 672. Masekhet Hibbut Ha-Kever, in Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. I, p. 150, states: “They asked Rabbi Eliezer, ‘How does the judgement of hibbut ha-kever take place?’ He said to them, ‘When a person dies the Angel of Death comes and sits on his grave and strikes it with his hand and says to him ‘Rise and declare your name.’ ” This is followed by a variety of punishments from which, according to the text Masekhet Hibbut Ha-Kever, no one is exempt, unlike Gehennom. See p. 151: “The day of judgement on which the Holy One Blessed be He judges the person in the grave is greater than the judgement of Gehennom. . . . Even zaddikim are judged in the judgement of the grave. . . . Even nurslings are judged in it.” However, see Norman Lamm, The Religious Thought of Hasidism: Text and Commentary (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House, 1999), 496, quoting from R. Yitzhak Yehudah Yehiel of Komarno: “Our master R. Israel Baal Shem Tov commented on the passage, ‘He who passes away on the eve of the Sabbath is spared the body’s tribulations in the grave (hibbut ha-kever).’ ” Sefer Maavar Yabok, Siftei Renanot, sec. 42, explains that “the true explanation of hibbut ha-kever” is that following the burial, four angels

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2007. Is there a belief that if a woman had adulterous relations with a gentile, he comes to her in the grave after her death? 2008. Is there a belief that the body of a zaddik does not decay, and that worms have no power over it?673 2009. What stories do you know about cemetery worms?674 2010. Is there a belief that the dead lying in graves can interact with one another? 2011. Do the dead leave their graves at night, and what do they do? 2012. Is there a belief that one dead person can occupy the grave of another? 2013. Is there a belief that if the dead person does not return to his grave by the time the roosters begin to crow, demons will snatch him? 2014. Is there a belief that, like the living, the dead hear everything that people say to them when they come to their graves? 2015. Is there a belief that all the dead go at night to pray in the synagogue, or only some of them?675 2016. Do you know any stories in which two dead people bring a legal dispute to a rabbi? 2017. Can the dead come before the Heavenly Court [Beys Din shel Mayle] or to the Patriarchs and Matriarchs to intercede on behalf of the living whenever they want, or only when they are called before the Heavenly Court?676

come and beat the dead individual with rods of iron to separate the kelipah (husk) in the form of the dust that has attached itself to the body, from the soul. 673. A number of stories exist concerning zaddikim whose graves were opened long after their burial and the corpse was preserved without any sign of decay. For such a story concerning Sholem Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, who was buried in Rostov-on-Don in 1920, see Moshe Rivkin, Kuntres Ashkavta DeRebbe (New York: Vaad le-Hadpasat ha-Kuntres, 1953), 145–148. 674. See Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 18b: “And Rabbi Yitzhak declared, ‘A worm is as hard for the dead as a needle in living flesh.’ ” 675. There was a widespread belief among Eastern European Jews that the dead gathered in the synagogue at night to pray. See, for example, Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 264. 676. From the rabbinic period on, Jewish sources describe the workings of the Heavenly Court. For a collection of these tales in English, see Yisroael Klapholtz, Tales of the Heavenly Court: A Collection of Stories Gathered from the Talmud Bavli


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2018. Who makes up the Heavenly Court?677 2019. When does the judgment of the dead take place, immediately after death or the first thing after khibut hakever?678 2020. How does the judgment before the Heavenly Court take place? Who weighs the sins against the mitsves, etc.?679 2021. With what kind of punishment is each type of sin punished? 2022. Is the body also present during the judgment, or just the soul? 2023. Is there a belief that for certain sins the person must come into the world another time in the form of a person, an animal, or a bird in order to repair his sin?680 2024. In which creatures is such a sinner reincarnated?681 and Yerushalmi, Midroshim and Chassidic Sources Arranged according to Topic, vol. 1 (Bnei Brak, Israel: Peer Hasefer, 1982). 677. There are multiple traditions concerning the makeup of the Heavenly Court, which parallels the rabbinic beyt din (court). For example, Klapholtz, in Tales of the Heavenly Court, pp. 14–15, relates the following tradition in the name of the Ruzhiner rebbe: “There are three heavenly courts, one of angels, one constituting of [sic] the souls of departed tzadikim and a third one made up of tzadikim on this world.” 678. Masekhet Hibbut Ha-Kever, in Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 1, pp. 150–151, indicates that judgment takes place after hibbut ha-kever. 679. Klapholtz, in Tales of the Heavenly Court, includes many accounts of judgment before the Heavenly Court. On p. 40, Klapholtz attributes the following tale (which An-sky would have undoubtedly appreciated) to Moshe Mordechai Epstein (1866–1934), the Rosh Yeshiva of the Slabodka yeshiva: “A well-known actor once died: Appearing before the heavenly court, he argued that he deserved to enter Gan Eden for he had done so much for the theater which was a sublimating and educational influence upon mankind. The Answer he was given was, ‘Fine, go and wait by the gates of paradise. As soon as you spot a person who repented his evil ways as a result of his theater going, you will be permitted to enter yourself.’ That actor is still standing there, waiting.” 680. Kabbalistic and Hasidic sources describe many situations when a soul must transmigrate into another body (human or otherwise) in order to perform a tikkun (repair) for a transgression in a previous incarnation. In Hebrew, reincarnation is known as gilgul, or gilgul ha-neshamot (“the transmigration of souls”). The doctrine appears in the earliest Kabbalistic sources, including the Sefer ha-Bahir in the late twelfth century, and it became one of the central beliefs of Lurianic Kabbalah and, from there, the Hasidic movement. 681. Hayim Vital (1543–1620), one of the chief disciples of Isaac Luria, the master of a circle of Kabbalists in sixteenth-century Safed, lists in his work, Shaar haGilgulim, section 22, the transmigrations that result from various sins (most of them sexual in nature): “One who has sexual relations with an animal is reincarnated as a

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2025. Is there a belief that a sinner can be reincarnated into a tree or into another plant? 2026. Is there a belief that he can be reincarnated into a stone?682 2027. Is there a belief that a person can be reincarnated several times, and in what kind of form at first?683

bat, one who has relations with a menstruent as a non-Jewish woman, one who commits adultery is reincarnated as a donkey, with his mother as a she-ass, with a man as a rabbit or hare,” and so on. In one of the tales in Shivhei ha-Besht, the Baal Shem Tov encounters a giant frog that had been a scholar in a previous incarnation. In this form, he had committed the sin of not ritually washing his hands, which had led him to many other transgressions. Because his first sin was connected to water, the scholar was reincarnated as a frog (in Kabbalistic sources, the punishment for not ritually washing one’s hands is typically to be reincarnated as water itself). During their encounter, “The Besht redeemed his soul and elevated it, and the body of the frog lay dead.” See In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, trans. and ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, 26 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). The righteous, by contrast, typically reincarnate as fish because, unlike other animals, fish do not have to be ritually slaughtered before being rectified via eating (accompanied by an appropriate blessing, of course). On this tradition, see Gedalyah Nigal, Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism: The Supernatural in Jewish Thought (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1994), 58–59. Roskies and Roskies, in The Shtetl Book, pp. 266–267, list the following beliefs: “The soul of a tsadek becomes the soul of a fish. The soul of a butcher who eats treyf meat becomes the soul of a black crow. The soul of a dishonest khazn [cantor] becomes the soul of a dog. Because his prayer was as pleasing to the Lord as a dog’s bark. The soul of an informer becomes that of parrot. Because he acted like a parrot: spoke the wrong things at the wrong time to the wrong people.” 682. Vital, Shaar ha-Gilgulim, section 22, writes: “Know that he who speaks lashon hara [slander] and the like is reincarnated in an inanimate stone.” 683. Vital, Shaar ha-Gilgulim, section 22, describes the process of transmigration, “from an inanimate object to a plant and from a plant to an animal and from an animal to one with speech.” Many Kabbalistic and Hasidic masters described the previous incarnations of their souls all the way back to figures in the Hebrew Bible or were able to identify the previous transmigrations of those around them. For a list of Hasidic zaddikim and their previous transmigrations, see Nigal, Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism, 52–53. For example, the soul of the Baal Shem Tov was said to have been previously incarnated in the biblical Enoch and Saadia ha-Gaon (d. 942), the Babylonian Jewish legal scholar, philosopher, and communal leader. Although some sources limit the number of transmigrations to three (see, for example, Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim, 530), there are many examples of a soul transmigrating more times.


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2028. How can each type of reincarnated spirit be made right again [hobn a tikn, lit. “have a repair/correction,” i.e., be corrected]?684 2029. Do you know any stories about a cow or an animal that suddenly started to talk because a reincarnated spirit was in it?685 2030. Do you know any stories about a piece of wood in the oven that started to cry when it was burning because there was a reincarnated spirit in it? 2031. Is there a belief that if people make a blessing over a thing in which there is a reincarnated spirit, that the soul is made right again?686 2032. What should one do when one recognizes a reincarnated spirit? 2033. What stories do you know about such rebirths in general? 2034. Do you know any stories in which the soul of a dead person that cannot find rest becomes a dibbuk [lit. “something attached,” a malevolent spirit that attaches itself to a living person] and enters a living person?687 684. Such souls can be “repaired” in a variety of ways according to Kabbalistic and Hasidic sources. For instance, souls that have been reincarnated into (Kosher) animals can be repaired by slaughtering the animal according to the rules of Kashrut and consuming it following an appropriate blessing. 685. For a recent example of this phenomenon that occurred in the Hasidic community of New Square in New York State, see Corey Kilgannon, “Miracle? Dream? Prank? Fish Talks, Town Buzzes,” New York Times, March 15, 2003. “The story goes that a 20-pound carp about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte fish for Sabbath dinner began speaking in Hebrew, shouting apocalyptic warnings and claiming to be the troubled soul of a revered community elder who recently died. . . . The fish . . . identified itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man who died last year, childless. The man often bought carp at the shop for the Sabbath meals of poorer village residents. Mr. Rosen panicked and tried to kill the fish with a machete-size knife. But the fish bucked so wildly that Mr. Rosen wound up cutting his own thumb and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. The fish flopped off the counter and back into the carp box and was butchered by Mr. Nivelo and sold. . . . Whether hoax or historic event, it jibes with the belief of some Hasidic sects that righteous people can be reincarnated as fish.” 686. See question 2028. 687. The term dibbuk comes from a Hebrew root meaning “to cleave,” and it refers to the malevolent soul of a dead person who inhabits or cleaves to the body of a living person. Dibbuk is the mirror image of the phenomenon known as ibbur, or “impregnation” in Kabbalistic sources in which a righteous soul temporarily inhabits the body of a living person in order to help the latter perform a commandment or to perform a commandment that it was unable to perform itself in a previous incarnation. For a dibbuk story collected during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, see H. Kremer, “Freydke R. Noach’s from Olyka Tells An-sky the Story of a Dibbuk,” in Pinkas ha-Kehilah

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2035. What does a dibbuk usually say and cry?688 2036. For which transgressions does a dibbuk enter a person?689 2037. Does a male dibbuk ever enter a female, or vice versa?690 2038. In whom does a dibbuk enter in a majority of cases: in a male or in a female, in an older person or a young one?691 2039. What sgules [special practices] and remedies do people employ in such a case?692 2040. Does a dibbuk ever injure bystanders [i.e., people other than the one it has entered]?693 2041. Which holy rabbis were famous for exorcising dibbuks?694

Olyka: Sefer Yizkor (Tel Aviv: Hotsaat Irgun Yotsey Olyka be-Yisrael, 1972), 69–72. On the phenomenon of dibbuks, see Gedalyah Nigal, Sipure “Dibuk” be-sifrut Yisrael (Jerusalem: Reuven Mas, 1983); Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism, 67–133. 688. One classical sign of dibbuk possession was that the possessed individual reacted violently, including cursing and screaming, when religious objects or books were placed in his or her vicinity. A number of accounts mention possessed individuals suddenly speaking a foreign language or in a voice not their own. Often it was the inability of an individual to recite prayers or say anything in Hebrew that provided evidence for possession. 689. Accounts mention various sins that led to dibbuk possession, including drinking water without first saying a blessing, applying makeup on the Sabbath, preventing one’s husband from devoting himself to Torah study, marrying a gentile, and so on. 690. Nigal, in Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism, pp. 100–101, writes that from his survey of approximately eighty accounts of dibbuk possession, the largest number involve male spirits entering female bodies, followed by male spirits in male bodies, female spirits in female bodies, and, lastly, female spirits in male bodies. In general, 90 percent of the spirits are male. 691. The most common scenario was for a male spirit to enter the body of a young woman (those entering puberty, brides, and recently married women). Most men who were possessed were also younger. In both cases, victims typically belonged to the lower classes rather than to the scholarly or economic elites. 692. A variety of methods was developed to exorcise dibbuks, including fumigation, amulets, chanting prayers, reciting Divine Names, blowing the shofar, and threatening to ban or excommunicate the spirit. On these, see Nigal, Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism, 115–124. An-sky drew on these traditions for the exorcism scene in his play The Dybbuk. 693. Some possessed individuals are described as physically attacking, cursing, and/or spitting at those around them. 694. Eastern European rabbis, Kabbalists, and Baale Shem renowned for performing exorcisms, include (but are not limited to) the Baal Shem Tov, David of Talnoye, Solomon of Bobov, Shalom of Belz, and Israel of Rizhin. In the Mediterranean and


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F. Hell [Gehenem], Purgatory [Kaf HaKele, lit. “the slingshot,” the infernal punishment in which souls are hurled back and forth], Limbo [Oylem HaToyhu, lit. “World of Chaos,” infernal world where evil souls are condemned to wander] 2042. Where do people think Gehenem is located?695 2043. How big is Gehenem?696 2044. What kind of conception is there about the seven sections of Gehenem?697 2045. How are people punished in each section? For which sin?698 2046. What angels of destruction and demons are there in Gehenem? What do they look like?699 Middle East, we find Hayim Vital, Sason ben Mordechai Shindookh, Judah Petayah, Benzion Hazan, and others. 695. The name Gehenna, Gehennom, or Gehenem comes from the biblical references to a “valley of the son of Hinnom,” outside of Jerusalem, where children were sacrificed to Moloch. The medieval Jewish text known as Midrash Konen (based on an earlier Jewish tradition that evil comes from the north) states: “Gehennom is in the North of the World.” See Midrash Konen in Adolph Jellinek, ed., Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann, 1938), 30. Schwartz, in Tree of Souls, 232– 243, relates a number of rabbinic and post-rabbinic traditions concerning Gehenna. On p. 232, he writes: “Where is Gehenna? Some say it is above the firmament, others that it lies below the earth. Still others say that it lies behind the Mountains of Darkness.” Masekhet Gehennom, in Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann, 1938), p. 147, states: “There are three gates to Gehennom. One in the sea. One in the desert. One in the settled land.” 696. Schwartz, in Tree of Souls, p. 232, writes: “How big is it [Gehenna]? As big as the Garden of Eden, and that is said to be boundless.” On p. 239, he quotes from Pesikta Rabbati 41:3: “The wicked wonder, ‘How many myriads can Gehenna hold? Two hundred, three hundred myriads? How can it ever hold all the wicked who appear in every generation?’ God replies, ‘As you increase, Gehenna, too, increases, growing wider and broader and deeper every day.’ ” 697. Masekhet Gehennom, in Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 1, p. 149, states: “There are seven sections in Gehennom and in each section there are six thousand houses and in each house there are six thousand windows and in each window there are six thousand jugs of bile.” 698. Schwartz, in Tree of Souls, p. 237, cites Eliyahu Rabbah 18:108: “Those who slander are hung by their tongues and subject to all the tortures that Gehenna has to offer.” Other sources mention that adulterers are suspended by their sexual organs. 699. Schwartz, in Tree of Souls, p. 236, writes: “Gehenna, where the souls of the wicked are punished, is ruled by the angel Dumah. Dumah was appointed to rule over the netherworld. Three angels of destruction are at his command.

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2047. Is the same body that lies in the grave also found in Gehenem?700 2048. Does the grave remain empty the whole time that the body is in Gehenem? 2049. Is the soul also present in Gehenem? Is it joined to the body there?701 2050. Are people only punished corporeally in Gehenem or also spiritually?702 2051. Is it a custom to delay praying the evening service at the end of the Sabbath because the souls of sinners return to Gehenem only after the evening prayers? 2052. Do all the damned sinners rest on Sabbath?703 2053. Is there a belief that even the greatest sinner cannot be sentenced to more than twelve months in Gehenem?704 Their names are Mashit, Af, and Hema, and they command many legions of avenging angels. All of Gehenna is filled with their din, and their shouts reach into heaven.” 700. The Babylonian Talmud Rosh Hashanah 17a declares that “the sinners of Israel in their bodies and the sinners of the nations of the world in their bodies go down to Gehennom and are judged there for twelve months and after twelve months their body is consumed and soul is burned and the wind scatters them under the soles of the feet of the righteous.” 701. See question 2047. 702. See question 2047. 703. Schwartz, in Tree of Souls, p. 238, writes: “Even the wicked in Gehenna enjoy a respite on the Sabbath. Every Sabbath eve, when the day becomes sanctified, the angel in charge of souls announces, ‘Let the punishment of the sinners cease, for the Holy King approaches and the Day is about to be sanctified. He protects all!’ Instantly all punishment ceases, and the guilty have a respite. The sinners who observed the Sabbath are led to two mountains of snow, where they remain until the end of the Sabbath, when the angel in charge of the spirits shouts, ‘All evildoers, back to Gehenna—the Sabbath is over!’ . . . Some of them, however, take snow with them to cool them during the six days of the week, but God says to them: ‘Woe to you who steal even in hell!’ But the fires of Gehenna do not come to a halt for those who never observed the Sabbath.” For the Hebrew original of most of this passage, see Masekhet Gehennom, in Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 1, p. 148. 704. For the view that most sinners only spend twelve months in Gehenem, see Babylonian Talmud Rosh Hashanah 17a (see also Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1), which adds the following qualification: “However, sectarians, informers, and heretics, who denied the Torah and denied the Resurrection of the Dead . . . descend to Gehennom


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2054. Is there a belief that even a zaddik must pass through Gehenem?705 2055. Do you know any stories about zaddikim who were able to see Gehenem while still alive?706 2056. When is the sinner sentenced to be thrown into Kaf HaKele: before Gehenem or after?707 2057. Are there sins for which one is punished in Kaf HaKele forever? 2058. Where is Kaf HaKele located? What conception is there about this? 2059. What punishments are carried out in Kaf HaKele? 2060. Is the evildoer thrown by the angels of destruction from one place to another there? 2061. Are the angels of destruction the same ones there as in Gehenem? and are judged there for eternity.” Masekhet Gehennom, in Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 1, p. 148, states: “Three descend to Gehennom and do not ascend. He who commits adultery. He who insults his fellow in public. He who swears falsely with God’s name.” The figure of twelve months became standard in later sources, including Vital’s Kabbalistic work, Shaar ha-Gilgulim. 705. The Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 15a suggests that zaddikim do not go to Gehennom. However, Babylonian Talmud Sotah 4b declares that even a Torah scholar goes to Gehennom if he commits adultery. A number of Kabbalistic sources state that those who learn Torah are exempt from the fires of Gehennom and must therefore be reincarnated. See, for example, Vital, Shaar ha-Gilgulim: “Since men fulfill the commandments and study Torah, they cannot enter Gehennom, for the light of Gehennom does not rule over them. . . . And therefore they are required to transmigrate, to cleanse their sins in place of Gehennom.” 706. Schwartz, in Tree of Souls, p. 240, writes: “Once in a while a sage or rabbi descends to Gehenna in order to obtain a bill of divorce from one of the souls being punished there. But the gatekeeper turns them all away, all except for Rabbi Naftali Katz. . . . Rabbi Naftali threatened to take a vow to remain there for eternity and to pester the angel until he let him in. So the angel let him in.” Also see p. 241 for a retelling of the legend of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi’s visit to Gehennom. 707. The Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 152b states: “Concerning the souls [of evil doers], He [God] declares, ‘and the soul of your enemies, he will sling it away, as from the hollow of a sling.’ [I Samuel 25:29] . . . And one angel stands at the end of the world and another angel stands at [the opposite] end of the world and they sling the soul back and forth to one another.” This became the basis of later speculation.

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2062. What conceptions are there of Oylem HaToyhu?708 2063. Do those sinners which the earth does not want to accept wander about there? 2064. What stories do you know about people who wandered in Oylem HaToyhu? G. Heaven [Gan Eydn, i.e., Gan Eden, “the Garden of Eden”], Resurrection [Tkhias HaMeysim, “revival of the dead”] 2065. What conceptions are there about where Heaven [i.e., the heavenly Garden of Eden] is located? 2066. Where is the “Lower” Heaven located [Gan Eydn HaTakhton]? Where is the “Upper” Heaven located [Gan Eydn HaElyon]? 2067. How many sections are there in Heaven?709 2068. What sort of reward do zaddikim receive for their deeds?710 708. The Hebrew phrase Olam Ha-Tohu (Yid., Oylem HaToyhu), or “World of Chaos,” has a variety of meanings in Kabbalistic and Hasidic sources. See, for example, Pinchas Giller, Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 21. On R. Nahman of Bratslav’s view of Olam Ha-Tohu, see Yakov Travis, “Adorning the Souls of the Dead: Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and Tikkun Ha-Neshamot,” in God’s Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, ed. Shaul Magid, 190, n. 90 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002) (quoting R. Nahman of Cheryn’s comment in Hayyey MoHaRan), “ ‘Even after a person passes away, as long as he does not yet merit to go in wholeness to his place of rest, he is still not in the World of Truth. Just the opposite! The essence of his punishment and suffering is brought about through Angels of Destruction that lead him along in the World of Confusion (‘Olam haTohu) where it appears to him as though he is still in this world. And they deceive him with many deceptions, as is well known from the [holy] books.’ ” 709. There is no standard portrait of Heaven in Jewish sources. Instead, a great variety of traditions emerged over the centuries. For example, the medieval text known as Midrash Konen states that there are seven sections or, as it refers to them, “houses” in the heavenly Garden of Eden, each containing its own category of zaddikim. And the dimensions of each of these sections is 120,000 miles by 1 million miles. 710. Lamm, in The Religious Thought of Hasidism, p. 499, states: “The Zohar and the Midrash ha-Ne’elam teach: What is the reward of the righteous? Certainly it is not what most people think, that in the world-to-come the righteous are placed upon an exalted and lofty throne. The zaddik derives neither entertainment nor pleasure from such things. . . . In the world-to-come, however, he achieves a funda-


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2069. Who goes out to meet a zaddik?711 2070. Do the Patriarchs and Matriarchs go out to meet him with dance and song? 2071. Does God [Riboyne Shel Oylem, lit. “the Ruler of the World”] visit Heaven? 2072. Does He study with the zaddikim?712 2073. Are holidays observed in Heaven? 2074. What do the zaddikim do in Heaven when persecutions and disasters happen to the Jews? 2075. How are the levels of greater and lesser zaddikim arranged in Heaven? 2076. Is there a special women’s Heaven? How is it different from the men’s?713

mental understanding of how to serve the Creator” (quoting from R. Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev). 711. Aaron Berachia of Modena, in Sefer Maavar Yabok, Siftei Tsedek, chap. 22, writes: “Three groups of angels go out to greet every zaddik. One for his neshama [the highest soul], declaring ‘Come in peace.’ One for the ruah [the middle level of the soul]. And one for the nefesh [the lowest soul].” 712. There is a widespread Jewish belief that God learns with the righteous in heaven. When my father, Zvi Deutsch, was seriously ill, he had a vision of the afterlife in which righteous men and women were learning with God in a heavenly besmedresh. For a full description of this vision, see Nathaniel Deutsch, “Herring in Heaven,” in Guilt and Pleasure, at http://www.guiltandpleasure.com/index.php?site =rebootgp&page=gp_article&id=243. 713. For a detailed description of the women’s section in heaven, see Zohar 3:332–335, as translated in David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 246–250. They write: “Six halls they showed me, with so many different pleasant things, in the place where the veil is drawn in the Garden. For from that veil onward, men do not enter at all. In one hall is Bitya, the daughter of Pharaoh, and several tens of thousands and thousands of women who have merit along with her. Each one of them merits wide places of light and pleasantness without bound . . . they occupy themselves with commandments of Torah. . . . In another hall is Deborah. She, too, and all the women with her, render thanks and sing the song she recited in the world. . . . Well within these palaces are four hidden halls of the four matriarchs, which were not allowed to be revealed.” See also “Seder Gan Eden B,” in Jellenick, Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann, 1938), p. 136.

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2077. Do people eat and drink in Heaven?714 2078. Is there a belief that each zaddik receives the pleasures that he did not receive in the world? 2079. If two zaddikim quarreled in this world, do they make peace in the next world? 2080. Do you know any stories about a zaddik who came back from the afterlife in order to reveal secrets of Torah? 2081. What conception exists of the future resurrection of the dead?715 2082. Will all the dead roll through the earth to the Land of Israel [Gilgul Mekhilos, lit. “Rolling through Tunnels”]?716 2083. In which body will the dead be revived if they have undergone several reincarnations?717 714. According to the Babylonian Talmud 17a, “In the World to Come, there is neither eating nor drinking.” Instead of food and drink, the righteous will be nourished by the radiance of the Shekhinah. However, other sources describe the heavenly Garden of Eden as a place where the righteous feast on delicious food and drink. See, for example, “Seder Gan Eden,” in Jellenick, Bet ha-Midrasch, vol. 2, p. 52, where sixty angels attend each zaddik and encourage him to eat honey and drink wine—which are both likened to the Torah, which the zaddik learned while he was alive. 715. Resurrection of the Dead, known as tehiyat ha-metim in Hebrew, has ancient roots in Judaism. Over the centuries, it entered the liturgy (see, for example, the second blessing in the Amidah or Shmoneh Esre prayer) and was also one of the Thirteen Principles articulated by Maimonides. The sages of the rabbinic period understood resurrection to be physical (i.e., the bodies of the righteous would be resurrected and reunited with their souls), but Maimonides—under the influence of philosophy—was ambivalent about whether resurrection would be physical or entirely spiritual. The Midrashic collection known as Leviticus Rabbah, at 18:1, mentions that the resurrection of the body will begin with a section of the spine known in Hebrew as the luz, while the Babylonian Talmud Ketubot 111b asserts that the righteous will be resurrected in their clothes. For a discussion of these and other Jewish traditions concerning resurrection, see Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1997), 132–135ff. 716. There is a belief that the bodies of Jews who are buried in the Exile will roll through underground tunnels to the land of Israel following the Resurrection of the Dead, a process that is described as painful. 717. Lamm, in The Religious Thought of Hasidism, p. 565, writes: “There is a well-known debate between the kabbalists and the philosophers concerning one [whose soul] has undergone many transmigrations. In which body will he be resur-


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2084. Which sinners will not be resurrected? 2085. Will the righteous of the non-Jewish nations be resurrected?718 2086. What will happen to Gehenem and Heaven after the resurrection of the dead?719 2087. What kind of life will there be after the Resurrection of the Dead?720 rected? The kabbalists hold that the soul will be vested in the first body, the philosophers, that it will be vested in the last body. I maintain a middle position” (quoting R. Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev). 718. The rabbis debated this question (see Tosefta Sanhedrin 13:2) with Maimonides later taking the side of Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah (versus Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus), that the righteous of the nations would, indeed, be included in the Resurrection of the Dead. 719. Lamm, in The Religious Thought of Hasidism, p. 579, quoting R. Yaakov Yosef of Polennoye, writes: “I suggest that the answer agrees with the statement in the Talmud that in the time-to-come [there will be no Gehenna; but] God will remove the sun from its sheath, bringing healing to the righteous and punishment to the wicked. I have heard it said [in explanation of this text] that instead of Gehenna, the wicked will be admitted to the Garden of Eden—and it will be their Gehenna! For there they will see the righteous praying joyously, dancing, and diligently learning Torah, and in itself this will [cause them] suffering, for the wicked are unaccustomed to this.” 720. Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in They Called Me Mayer July, p. 264, describe the popular Jewish belief that “when the Messiah comes, the righteous will feast on the Leviathan and the huge red ox, the shorabor, in paradise, with King David playing his harp at the table.” Lamm, in The Religious Thought of Hasidism, p. 567, quotes from R. Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev concerning the abrogation of all the holidays except Purim: “In the future, in the messianic time, all of nature will be compelled to act in accordance with the will of God’s people, Israel. . . . The holidays will be abrogated because they are a sign to remind us of the Exodus, when supernatural miracles and wonders occurred. . . . Purim, however, will not be abolished, for the [special] illumination of Purim was that nature had not been rectified, for the miracles occurred within nature, even as will happen in the days of the Messiah.” On p. 527, Lamm quotes from R. Zevi Elimelekh of Dinov, who writes that once the people of Israel have lifted “all the holy sparks from the four corners of the earth . . . [and the final] separation is completed, then all the earth shall be filled with glory of the Lord, and all the nations will revert to a pure language so that they can together call upon the unified Name” (emphasis in original).

A F T E RWO R D

The Pale of Settlement ceased to exist following the Russian Revolution of 1917. But the Jewish communities that survived within its former borders, as well as those located elsewhere in Eastern Europe, remained the subject of intense ethnographic study throughout the 1920s and 1930s. At the vanguard of this research was the Historic-Ethnographic Society in Vilna, founded by An-sky during his 1919 sojourn in the city, and its younger rival, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO, which was established in the same city in 1925 and quickly distinguished itself as the most important center for the study of Eastern European Jewish culture in situ.1 Like An-sky, YIVO encouraged local Jews to become zamlers in their own right and to send the material they had collected to the central office in Vilna, where it could be collated, analyzed, and included in one of the numerous publications produced by the institute.2 YIVO also created and distributed ethnographic questionnaires that resembled The Jewish Ethnographic Program in form and content, though not in scale— not surprisingly, they were much shorter—and it even reproduced some of the questions about death from An-sky’s program in one of its own questionnaires.3 At the same time, ethnographic work on Jews continued within the newly formed Soviet Union, where some of the individuals who had contributed to the work of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition— for example, Lev Shternberg and Avrom Yuditsky—continued to play an active role. The Holocaust would seal the fate of millions of Jews in Eastern Europe and, in the process, put an end to the Jewish ethnography that had flourished during the interwar years. Across the ocean, in the relatively new “Jewish center”—to borrow Simon Dubnov’s phrase—of the United 315

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States, transplanted Eastern European Jews struggled to make sense of the loss of their loved ones and of a Jewish cultural milieu that increasingly came to be seen as a world unto itself, now vanished. One of the chief responses to this trauma was mythologization, most powerfully articulated by Abraham Joshua Heschel in a 1945 speech before YIVO that was later published in English translation as “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” and in an expanded form, in his book The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner Life of the Jew in East Europe (1950). Employing evocative language whose profoundly religious character comes out most strongly in the Yiddish original, Heschel described the Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe as a kind of Jewish Avalon, “the golden period in Jewish history, in the history of the Jewish soul.”4 Influenced by the valorization of Jewish folk culture that An-sky and others had initiated, Heschel emphasized the importance of the folk within Eastern European Jewish society. Yet rather than depicting Eastern European Jewish culture as intersecting with that of the surrounding peoples, over and over Heschel stressed its interiority and isolation, for, as he put it, “the Jews developed a unique Jewish collective life, based upon its own traditions, upon the cultivation of the indigenous and the personal, to the utter disregard of the outside world. They borrowed from other cultures neither substance nor form.”5 Despite its ideological distance from the writings of An-sky, which, we have seen, acknowledged the ongoing interpenetration of Jewish and non-Jewish folk traditions, Heschel’s work possessed an ethnographic quality of its own—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has described it as an example of “the popular arts of ethnography”—and he drew special attention to many of the same quotidian aspects of Eastern European Jewish life, as had An-sky in The Jewish Ethnographic Program.6 Thus, for example, Heschel asked his audience: “What other nation has a lullaby to the effect that ‘study is the best of wares’? At the birth of the child, the schoolchildren come and chant the Shema in unison around the cradle. The child is taken to school for the first time wrapped in a tallis. . . . What institution has done more to promote the spiritual development of large numbers of people than kest?” and so on.7 Heschel’s act of mythologization was intimately connected to his memorialization of Eastern European Jewry: “Korzec, Karlin, Bratslav, Lyubavitch, ‘Ger,’ Lublin—hundreds of towns—are like holy books.” He wrote, “When a Jew utters the name of Mezhbuzh or Berdichev, it is as if he were to utter a holy name.”8 From the 1940s on, this same senti-

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ment found expression in the emergence of a new literary genre—the Holocaust memorial book, or yizker bukh. With deep roots in the earlier Eastern European Jewish practice of keeping a community record book, or pinkas (indeed, many memorial books actually have the word pinkas in their title), memorial books sought to transform each destroyed Jewish community into a holy book that, in turn, would also function as a literary matseva, or tombstone. At the same time, memorial books served as a vehicle for the kind of collective auto-ethnography that Ansky, YIVO, and others had exhorted the Jews of Eastern Europe to engage in while their communities still existed.9 Indeed, the hundreds of memorial books published after the war included thousands of pages documenting traditional Jewish practices, beliefs, tales, and so on, thereby constituting a collectively generated ethnographic archive on a grand scale. An-sky’s fear, expressed so powerfully in The Jewish Ethnographic Program, that traditional Eastern European Jewish culture would disappear forever, had come to pass with the Holocaust. In the wake of this destruction, some of those who survived or who had immigrated before World War II sought to document this vanished way of life with the kind of ethnographic questionnaires that An-sky had pioneered among Russian Jews. Now transplanted to New York City from Vilna, YIVO continued to produce and distribute these questionnaires through its affiliated Cahan Folklore Club. In the instructions to one such questionnaire on the topic of “Passover Customs and Practices,” YIVO articulated the philosophy underlying its efforts: “Many Jewish customs and practices are becoming extinct, particularly in the wake of the recent catastrophe in Europe. The Cahan Folklore Club, Yiddish Scientific Institute—Yivo, has therefore resolved to record some of these Jewish customs, ceremonies, and practices that are still alive in the memories of the present generation. As a beginning, the Cahan Club has prepared a questionnaire on the subject Passover in Jewish Life.”10 YIVO was not the only Jewish institution to employ ethnographic questionnaires to document Eastern European Jewish life during this period. In 1945 the Yiddish language newspaper Forverts (The Forward) published a series of questionnaires on Jewish holidays and life cycle events, including one devoted to wedding customs, which appeared in the October 15, 1945, edition of the paper. In an article entitled “We Ask Our Readers Twenty Questions about Customs Associated with Jewish Weddings,” Yitshak Warshavsky—better known to the world as

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Isaac Bashevis Singer—posed twenty questions to his readers that closely resembled those in The Jewish Ethnographic Program. Over the next month, The Forward published readers’ responses to the questionnaire, along with their names, current addresses, and hometowns in Eastern Europe. In an article from November 12, 1945, entitled “ForwardReaders Discuss Jewish Life Practices from the Past,” Warshavsky included a response to the wedding questionnaire from “Mr. V. Cooper, 894 Beck Street, Bronx, from Zhilkevke [Pol., Zolkiewka], Lublin Province,” which included descriptions of wedding rituals, music, and the text from a badkhn’s performance. In the next paragraph, Warshavsky—that is, Singer—mused to his readers, “If the author of this article is not mistaken, he knew the father of the [letter] writer. He was named Rabbi Avraham Cooperman from Zhilvekve, and he lived in Warsaw, on Krokhmolna Street.” Thus in the pages of The Forward, the ethnographic questionnaire not only served as a tool for collecting information but also as a prompt for memory, one that linked people to a destroyed way of life and to one another. While the Yiddish articles published by The Forward sought to represent the diversity of Eastern European Jewish life in its original idiom, this was not the case for the book that would do more to translate—or, as its many critics would later complain, mistranslate—this way of life for English-language readers in the postwar period. Instead of a venerable Jewish institution like The Forward or YIVO, Life Is with People was produced by the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures project, funded by the Office of Naval Research, and overseen by the prominent anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.11 Beginning in 1946, the research that culminated in 1952 with the publication of Life Is with People (first subtitled “The Jewish Little-Town in Eastern Europe,” and then, in later editions, “The Culture of the Shtetl”) was the brainchild of Mark Zborowski, whose shadowy career as a Soviet spy was documented by Steven Zipperstein. Indeed, the link between ethnography and espionage that had only been a symbolic undercurrent (or the subject of false accusations) during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition gained a new significance with the creation of Life Is with People. As Zipperstein has noted, “It would be a mistake simply to collapse the activities of Zborowski as spy and anthropologist, even if their skill-sets overlap. Nonetheless, it remains striking how similar his ‘fieldreports’ to both Stalin and Trotsky . . . are in texture to this ethnographic work on the shtetl.”12

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In marked contrast to The Jewish Ethnographic Program, which strove to create a “total account” of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement by documenting the myriad variations that existed in its thousands of towns, the goal of Life Is with People was to synthesize these local differences into a supposedly representative portrait of a single imagined community, that is, The Shtetl. Like Heschel, Life Is with People largely portrayed this realm as a world apart, what Zipperstein has referred to as “not quite part of Russia or Poland yet inside both, a kind of island of unadulterated Yiddishkayt before it was diluted, then destroyed,” and Jack Kugelmass as “a land imaginaire, a yiddishland whose primary settlement type was the shtetl, conceived here as a preindustrial backwater hermetically disconnected from larger polity and majority population.”13 However problematic and misleading, this act of translation would prove to be remarkably effective, so much so that Life Is with People would eventually sell more than 100,000 copies and become one of the chief influences on an even more popular rendition of life in The Shtetl, namely, Fiddler on the Roof, which opened on Broadway in 1964. Thus as the chronological and cultural distance widened between American Jews and their Eastern European ancestors, mythologization and memorialization increasingly gave way to nostalgia. While Life Is with People and Fiddler on the Roof were reifying the image of an imaginary shtetl, in both the United States and the newly created State of Israel, prewar Eastern European Jewish culture in its complexity continued to be the subject of what might be termed retrospective or historical ethnography. Following in the footsteps of their antecedents in Europe, Israeli publications such as Reshumot, Edot, and Yeda-Am focused primarily on collecting and analyzing Jewish folklore, including a great deal of material from pre–World War II Eastern European Jewish communities. The doyen of Israeli folklorists, Dov Noy, documented folklore traditions from the Diaspora as well as those emerging in Israel, eventually preserving some 25,000 narrative texts in the Israel Folklore Archives at the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, which he created with the support of the Haifa municipality in 1955.14 During the same period, Uriel Weinreich and, after his death in 1967, Marvin Herzog, were spearheading the creation of the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ) at Columbia University in New York, employing a questionnaire of more than two hundred pages to produce, “5,755 hours of audiotape field interviews with Yiddish speaking informants collected between 1959 and 1972 and ca. 100,000 pages

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of accompanying linguistic field notes . . . collected from 603 locations in Central and Eastern Europe carefully chosen to reflect the distribution of the Yiddish speaking population on the eve of World War II.”15 While researchers in the United States and Israel were collecting this material, the archive amassed by An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition was languishing in various sites around the Soviet Union, save for a relatively small part of the collection that had been transferred to YIVO.16 The fate of The Jewish Ethnographic Program itself can be traced during this period via the writings of former members of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. In the early 1950s, Yitzhak GurAryeh (né Fikangur), who accompanied the expedition during its second season, published a Hebrew translation of the first 304 questions of The Program. In the introduction to his translation, Gur-Aryeh, who was then living in Israel, explained that he only possessed fragments of The Program and that “efforts to locate this work have until now been in vain, and it would have been forgotten completely. . . . [Yet] this ethnographic program has great value for Jewish folklore, for it includes all the terms and beliefs, customs and habits of the Jewish person of the past, from birth until his day of death. For this reason, I compelled myself, as apparently the only person who still remained alive from An-sky’s expedition, to adapt the material that has remained in my possession since then and to publish the questionnaire in Hebrew.”17 Among the readers of Gur-Aryeh’s translation was Avrom Rekhtman, who had immigrated in 1916 to the United States, where he wrote articles for the Yiddish press under the pseudonym Doktor Zamler. Rekhtman received a copy of the translation from his friend, Yohanan Twersky, editor of the journal Reshumot, where it was first published. In a subsequent letter to Twersky, Rekhtman requested that he inform GurAryeh that “he is not the only one who remains alive from among the members of the expedition . . . also let him know that the first part of the ethnographic questionnaire was published in 1914 and that I am in possession of two copies. . . . In general, I would like to correspond with him and perhaps we can exchange material, documents, and photographs.”18 In 1958 Rekhtman published his own book-length account of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, Yidishe etnografye un folklor, in which he reproduced the cover of The Jewish Ethnographic Program (with an inscription from An-sky, to “my dear friend and assistant, Avrom Rekhtman”) and briefly discussed the history of its composition.19

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Thus in the decades immediately following World War II, An-sky’s former associates ensured that his ethnographic work would not be completely forgotten. Yet An-sky’s vision of a distinctly Jewish ethnography, established on the ideological principles and methods he had developed in the years between his return to Russia and his death in Poland, would not come to fruition. Indeed, commenting on An-sky’s significance in what might be termed the genealogy of Jewish ethnography, Jack Kugelmass has written, “It is commonplace to consider S. An-sky the father of Jewish ethnography. Yet, when asked to discuss the impact of An-sky on Jewish anthropology, I was hard pressed to come up with a solid genealogical connection between so ostensive a progenitor and the field as it exists today.”20 While such a connection may not exist for Jewish anthropology, in general, it does exist for a group of contemporary scholars who literally followed in An-sky’s footsteps by leading ethnographic expeditions of their own into the former Pale of Settlement. The Russian pioneers in this research, such as Valerii Dymshits, Benyamin Lukin, Boris Khaimovich, and Ilya Dvorkin, began to lead these expeditions before the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the lifting of internal and international travel restrictions, as well as the opening of formerly closed archives, including those that were found to contain a veritable treasure trove of ethnographic material collected by An-sky. Although Dymshits made his first informal foray as early as 1979, Khaimovich dates the “beginning of the first real expeditionary work” to the 1988–1989 season.21 Significantly, on one of these early journeys in 1984, “Dvorkin and a group of Chabad Hasidim from Leningrad visited places connected to Lubavitch Hasidim: Vitebsk, Senno, Lubavitch, and Liadi,” thereby closing the circle between ethnographers and Hasidim that An-sky had drawn (indeed, after travel restrictions were relaxed, Hasidim from abroad began to organize regular pilgrimages to holy sites such as Medzibozh, Uman, and Mezeritch).22 As the published accounts of these early expeditions make clear, An-sky served as a personal inspiration to a generation of largely selftrained Russian Jewish ethnographers seeking their own cultural roots in the Pale, and his methodological approach—a combination of salvage and auto-ethnography—served as a model for their fieldwork. In a retrospective essay evocatively entitled Dva puteshestviya po odnoi doroge (“Two Journeys Along the Same Road”), Dymshits captured this sentiment: “One of the motivations that induced An-sky to begin his research

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was the premonition of the imminent destruction of the shtetls, the disappearance of traditional Jewish culture, although he, of course, did not realize the scale of the coming catastrophe. Now, in its wake, we who have set out on the same road must gather and save everything that can still be saved.”23 After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian-led ethnographic expeditions into the former Pale of Settlement continued and expanded their circle of participants. Between 2005 and 2007, the Petersburg Judaica Center organized “a full fledged ‘field school’ that would combine the elements of an educational field trip and a research expedition. . . . One of the main aims of our expeditions was to continue the line of research initiated by An-sky.”24 Focusing on the Ukrainian towns of Balta, Mogilev-Podolsk, and Tulchin, some of the fieldworkers in these expeditions asked local Jewish residents questions from The Jewish Ethnographic Program to determine how beliefs and practices surrounding childbirth and death were transformed in the Soviet era. During this period, American scholars also organized ethnographic expeditions into the same territory. Dovid Katz, an expert on Yiddish language and culture based at the Vilnius Research Institute, invoked the image of the last of the Mohicans to describe the elderly Jewish residents he encountered on these travels: “The Vilnius Yiddish Institute’s own expeditions for Yiddish folklore and dialectology have led us to meet more and more ‘Mohicans’ in smaller towns in Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, Ukraine, and Moldova (Moldavia).”25 In addition to recording interviews and collecting data on local Jewish folklore and customs, the Vilnius Yiddish Institute partnered with American relief agencies to provide material aid to indigent Jews in these communities, an echo of the humanitarian aid provided by An-sky during the journeys he chronicled in Destruction of Galicia.26 From 2002 to 2009, the institute also collaborated with an ethnographic initiative led by Dov-Ber Kerler and Jeffrey Veidlinger to interview hundreds of individuals (most born between 1900 and 1930) in communities throughout Eastern Europe. The collected recordings became the basis of AHEYM (the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories), which preserves linguistic data, oral histories, Holocaust testimonials, musical performances (“including Yiddish folk songs, liturgical and Hasidic melodies and macaronic songs”), folklore (“including anecdotes, jokes, stories, children’s ditties, folk remedies, and Purim plays”), as well as “reflections on contemporary Jewish life . . . [and] sites of Jewish memory in the region.”27

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Thus a century after An-sky embarked on the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in 1912, the kind of fieldwork that he pioneered in the Russian Pale of Settlement has been taken up and extended by scholars working with remnants of Jewish communities in the same territory as well as elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Along with a host of important new historical and literary studies, this ethnographic research has helped reorient scholarly representations, at least, of Eastern European Jewish life away from the synthetic, static, and nostalgic image of The Shtetl exemplified by Life Is with People toward a more complex and dynamic portrait, even as the specter of destruction and loss continues to serve as a significant motivation for these researchers at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it did for An-sky during the first few decades of the twentieth century. A desire to preserve the diverse elements of Eastern European Jewish culture that were transplanted to the United States—where they underwent further transformations—has also inspired several generations of American zamlers who, if they were not always directly influenced by An-sky, have nevertheless revived the spirit of his work. As early as 1964, Yugntruf, a youth organization devoted to both preserving and creatively engaging with Yiddish language and culture, steadfastly resisted the pressure to abandon the Yiddish heritage of most American Jews.28 In recent years, a new wave of Yugntruf members has organized gatherings where young people have conducted interviews with older native Yiddish speakers employing questions from The Jewish Ethnographic Program.29 Beginning in the 1970s, a klezmer music revival was catalyzed by the growing American interest in ethnic identity and a concomitant rejection of the assimilatory ethos that had turned Eastern European Jewish culture into an object of nostalgia, safely ensconced in the chronologically and geographically distant world of the idealized Shtetl, rather than a source of ongoing creative inspiration for contemporary Jews. The first wave of the klezmer revival included pioneers such as Michael Alpert, Henry Sapoznik, Andy Statman, and Yale Strom, who not only sought out surviving klezmer musicians and old recordings but also transformed this musical heritage into a foundation for a contemporary renaissance of klezmer and neo-klezmer music, much as An-sky had called for in the introduction to The Jewish Ethnographic Program when he referred to the oyfleben, or “revival,” of Jewish culture that ethnography could engender. As Seth Rogovoy wrote in a 1997 article on the revival: “It is

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both young and old. Urban and rural. Old World meets New World. Traditional and experimental. . . . It is a music of contradictions, and the vibrant, cutting edge of a cultural revival. . . . Risen from the ashes of the European Holocaust and sprung from the closet of American assimilation, Klezmer is experiencing a contemporary revival as rich as that of any other world-beat or ethnic music.”30 In the past few decades, the klezmer revival has been joined by the National Yiddish Book Center, Living Traditions, the Yiddish Radio Project, and the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, all established to collect and preserve various Jewish cultural practices and artifacts— books, radio recordings, dance, folklore, crafts, and music. Significantly, all of these organizations have combined their work as contemporary zamlers with a wide range of creative and educational activities devoted to making this culture meaningful to a new generation, including musical performances, museum exhibits, websites, public radio broadcasts, educational programs, and digitized online collections.31 In engaging in these acts of oyfleben, they, like An-sky before them, have sought to transform the Jewish cultural traditions of the past into a living bridge—what the National Yiddish Book Center has evocatively described as a “Bridge of Books”—to the present.

notes A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s index

NOTES

Introduction The epigraph for this chapter is from Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, Vol. 1, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1991), p. 116. 1. Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent or The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878). On Stanley, see Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 2. On An-sky’s life, see the definitive biography by Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). For his birth and early years, see 9–30. 3. On Zhitlovsky, see Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 125–178. 4. On An-sky’s early association with Russian Populism, see Safran, Wandering Soul, 31–54. 5. For more on this period of An-sky’s life, see Safran, Wandering Soul, 31ff. 6. Letter to Chaim Zhitlovsky, November 9, 1886, from YIVO RG 308 (Zhitlovsky Collection). This collection comprises more than two hundred letters written by An-sky to Zhitlovsky between 1883 and 1920. Some of these letters have been published in Mikhail Krutikov, ed., “Briv fun Sh. An-ski tsu Haim Zhitlovski,” YIVO-Bleter 2 (1992). This letter appears on p. 283. 7. Simon Dubnov, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1916–1920), vol. 2, p. 309. 8. Iu. Gessen, “Graf N. P. Ignat’ev I ‘Vremmenye pravila’ oevreiakh 3 maia 1882 goda,” Pravo 30 (1908): 1632, cited in Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press), 135–136. 327

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Notes to Pages 4–6

9. Letter to Chaim Zhitlovsky, June 16, 1888, from YIVO RG 308; Krutikov, “Briv fun Sh. An-ski tsu Haim Zhitlovski,” 291. 10. As quoted in Gabriella Safran, “An-sky in 1892: The Jew and the Petersburg Myth,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven Zipperstein, 65 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 11. Aaron Zundelevitch, in Dray literarishe doyres, vol. 2, ed. S. L. Zitron, 109 (Vilna, Russia: S. Sreberk, 1921), as quoted in Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia: The Struggle for Emancipation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 148. On this phenomenon, see Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 12. On Yochelson, see Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and the Jewish Question after Marx (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 180, n. 21; E. Tscherikower, “Yidn-revolutsionern in rusland in di zekhtsiker un zibtsizer yorn,” Hitorishe shriftn, vol. 3 (Paris: Wilno, 1939), 156–157; on Shternberg, see Sergi Kan, Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 13. As quoted in Judd Teller, Scapegoat of Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), 131. 14. On the broader context for An-sky’s reevaluation of the kheyder, see Steven Zipperstein, “Reinventing Heders,” in Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 41–62. David Assaf, “ ‘Katan ve-hamim’?—Ha-shir ‘Oyfn Pripetshik’ ve-ha-shinui be-dimuyo shel ha-heder,” in Ha-Heder: mehkarim, teudot, pirke sifrut ve-zikhronot, ed. David Assaf and Immanuel Etkes, 122–125 (Tel Aviv: Universitat Tel Aviv, 2010), discusses a broader shift from criticism to nostalgia among Russian Jewish intellectuals vis-à-vis the kheyder. 15. Shlomo Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1903–1906,” in Pogroms: AntiJewish Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, 212 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 16. John Klier, “What Exactly Was a Shtetl?” in The Shtetl: Image and Reality: Papers of the Second Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, 32, in Legenda: European Humanities Research Centre Studies in Yiddish 2 (2000). Ben-Cion Pinchuk, “The Shtetl: An Ethnic Town in the Russian Empire,” Cahiers du Monde russe 41, no. 4 (October–December 2000): 501–502, writes, “The overall view of the shtetl reflected the poverty of its inhabitants, their culture and the economic underdevelopment of the region, among the poorest in Europe.” 17. David Roskies, S. Ansky: The Dybbuk and Other Writings (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), xiii–xiv. Of this work, Roskies writes that


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An-sky’s novel suggested “there was nothing in [Jewish] tradition that had any redemptive power whatsoever,” and described it as a “frontal attack on all the institutions of yiddishkayt.” 18. On An-sky’s return to Russia, see Safran, Wandering Soul, 125ff. 19. Moshe Shalit, “Sh. An-ski loyt zany bukh fun di tsaytungs-oysshnitn,” Fun noyentn ever 1 (1937): 231. Shalit described An-sky’s remarks as a vidui, or confession of sins. 20. Simon Dubnov, Ob izuchenii istorii russkikh evreev i ob uchrezhdenii russko-evreiskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva (St. Petersburg: A. E. Landau, 1891), 36–37. 21. Evreiskaia Starina 1, no. 1 (1909): 154. On Dubnov’s use of this phrase, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 378. Nathans writes, “It was while living in St. Petersburg that Simon Dubnov conceived his lifelong project of gathering primary sources for the history of Russian Jewry, a task he likened to the expeditions of Burton and Stanley in Central Africa.” See also p. 378, n. 23, for the phrase “dark continent.” 22. Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 163. There is a wide body of literature on the racialization of Jews in this period and, in particular, the depiction of Eastern European Jews as “savage” or “black.” See, for example, Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 7ff, where he discusses “the image of the Jews as black,” and 282, where he writes, “One of the stories that Kafka published in Buber’s The Jew [a periodical] was ‘A Report to the Academy,’ the tale of how an ape, ripped from the jungle, acquires the most human of all attributes, language, and thus becomes a member, if a marginal one, of human society. Without language, the ape has no consciousness; he simply exists in the jungle. The analogy to the image of the Eastern Jew, existing outside of history and consciousness [i.e., in a kind of ‘dark continent’], is clear.” On the relationship of Russian Jewish intellectuals like Dubnov, to what he terms “their Central European counterparts in the early twentieth century, figures such as Martin Buber, Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, and Franz Rosenzweig, in whose eyes the Ostjuden became bearers of a vibrant Jewish authenticity,” see Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 379. 23. On this organization, see Brian Horowitz, “The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, and the Evolution of the St. Petersburg Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia, 1893–1905,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 19 (2004). 24. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 379. On these issues, see also Benjamin Nathans, “On Russian-Jewish Historiography,” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multi-National State, ed. Thomas Sanders, 397–432 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). For the original, see

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S. An-sky, Dos yidishe etnografishe program. Ershter teyl: der mentsh, ed. I. L. Shternberg (Petrograd: Yosef Luria, 1914). 25. For the full quote, see Koppel Pinson, ed., Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism by Simon Dubnov (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), 9–10. 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1995), 45. 27. As quoted in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 287. 28. An-sky letter to Zhitlovsky, YIVO RG 308. 29. Safran, Wandering Soul, 190, notes that “At times, the financier Gintsburg and the radical An-sky disagreed on fund-raising techniques.” For another contemporary case of collaboration (i.e., the Jessup expedition) between capitalist patron and revolutionary ethnographers, including Yokhelson and Borgoraz, see Stanley Freed, Ruth Free, and Laila Williamson, “Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolutionaries (1897–1902),” American Anthropologist 90 (1988). On Franz Boas’s relationship to his own Jewish identity, see Leonard Glick, “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation,” American Anthropologist 84, no. 3 (1982); Frank Gelya, “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 4 (1997). 30. An-sky to Gintsburg, 6/30(7/13)/1912, IR NBUV, Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine Manuscript Division (Jewish Section), Kiev. Safran, in Wandering Soul, 196–197, also discusses the significance of this quote. 31. Marièella Beukers and Renée Waale, eds., Tracing An-sky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg (Amsterdam: Waanders Uitgevers, 1992), 18. 32. Benyamin Lukin, “An-sky and the Jewish Museum,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky, 285, has described An-sky as “hoping for modern Jewish culture to be rooted in folklore.” 33. For An-sky’s final years and death, see Safran, Wandering Soul, 258–291. 34. On these peregrinations, see A. Kantsedikas and I. Serheyeva, eds., The Jewish Artistic Heritage Album/Al’bom evreiskoi khudozhestvennoi stariny (Moscow: Mosty kultury, 2001), 126–130. 35. David Roskies, “Ansky Lives!” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 14, no. 1–2 (1992): 66. 36. On the profound cultural significance of questions and their role in traditional Jewish education in Eastern Europe, see Shaul Stampfer, “Is the Question the Answer? The Context and Consequences of an Educational Pattern,” in Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe, by Shaul Stampfer, 229–251 (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010). 37. Joachim Neugroschel, “From the Ethnographic Expedition Questionnaire,” in The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A Haunted Reader, ed. Joachim Neugroschel, 53–56 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), provides an English translation of questions 1967–2087.


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1. Exploring the Jewish Dark Continent The epigraph for this chapter is from Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 200. 1. “Brothers and Sisters of Work and Need!: Jewish Workers and Artisans on the Eve of Revolution,” in Photo-Archive of An-sky’s Expeditions, Exhibition II, Catalogue (St. Petersburg: Petersburg Judaica, 2005), 4. Eventually, in 1914, two members of the expedition would even be arrested in Zhitomir on suspicion of spying, only to be released from custody following the timely intervention of An-sky and Lev Shternberg. See Marièella Beukers and Renée Waale, eds., Tracing An-sky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg (Amsterdam: Waanders Uitgevers, 1992), 13. 2. In these efforts, An-sky and his team were preceded by the groundbreaking research of Peysakh Marek and Shaul Ginzburg, whose Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii (Jewish Folk Songs in Russia), published in 1901, was based on hundreds of songs sent to them by Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement following a widely publicized call for submissions. On the significance of music to the construction of a modern Jewish cultural identity in late imperial Russia, see James Loefller, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). 3. Avrom Rekhtman, “In Memory of Sh. Z. An-sky (Rapoport),” Yeda-Am 2, no. 4–5 (1954): 111 (Hebrew). 4. Just as it offered money in exchange for antique objects—in both cases, with decidedly mixed results. While many residents agreed to relinquish their family heirlooms, others resisted, no matter what the price, including the Zusmans, a family in Ostrov who broke An-sky’s heart when they refused to part with objects connected to a famous sixteenth-century rabbi. 5. Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 196–205, provides a description of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and the challenges it faced. 6. Engel quotes are from a 1915 lecture translated and published as “Jewish Folksongs,” in a CD booklet accompanying The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven Zipperstein (Stanford, Calif., 2006). 7. Yitzhak Gur Aryeh (Fikangur), “An-sky, the Man and His Life’s Work,” Yeda-Am 2, no. 4–5 (1954): 116–117 (Hebrew). 8. B. M. Sokolov and JU. M. Sokolov, “In Search of Folktales and Songs (From Travel Impressions),” in The Study of Russian Folklore, ed. Felix Oinas and Stephen Soudakoff, 18–19 (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton De Gruyter, 1975), originally published in Boris Sokolov and Yuri Sokolov, Skazki I pesni Belozerskogo kraia (Moscow: Snegireva, 1915). My thanks to Gabriella Safran for pointing me to this source. 9. Rekhtman, “In Memory of Sh. Z. An-sky (Rapoport),” 111.

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10. Izaly Zemtsovsky, “The Musical Strands of An-sky’s Texts and Contexts,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky, ed. Safran and Zipperstein, 209, based on David Shor’s comments at the founding of the Moscow branch of the Society for Jewish Folk Music on October 8, 1923. 11. Shmuel Shrayer (aka Sherira), unpublished diary. Parts of Shrayer’s account of the expedition were published in modified form in “With An-sky on His Travels,” Davar (November 8, 1940) (Hebrew). My thanks to Shrayer’s granddaughter, Eilat Gurfinkel, for generously providing access to his diary and other documents and to Gabriella Safran, for making the connection between us. 12. Tracing An-sky, 13. Rekhtman, “In Memory of Sh. Z. An-sky (Rapoport),” 112, writes that “At the end of 1914, during the First World War, while I was with Sh. Yudovin, the photographer doing work for the expedition in Zhitomir—they arrested the two of us for the ‘crime of spying.’ Because we were always going around the streets with our camera, and we were taking photos in public—the police put us in custody and confiscated all of the materials in our possession: the cameras, phonograph machine, and all of the recordings. An-sky was in Petrograd then (the name change from ‘Petersburg’ to ‘Petrograd’ began in 1914). We informed him by telegraph about our incarceration—and he immediately contacted L. Y. Shternberg, who served as the head of the ‘Russian Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Imperial Scientific Academy in Honor of Peter the Great,’ and through his efforts An-sky was able to secure a document that proved that the two of us, Yudovin and I, were fieldworkers of that same ‘AnthropologicalEthnographic’ museum. Immediately after this document was received, they freed us from our incarceration and returned our confiscated material.” 13. “An-sky in Vishnevets,” in Vishnevets: sefer zikaron le kedoshei Vishnevets she-nispu be-shoat ha-natsim, ed. Chaim Rabin (Tel Aviv: Irgun oleh Vishnivits, 1970), 445. 14. Ibid. 15. Sokolov and Sokolov, “In Search of Folktales and Songs (from Travel Impressions),” in The Study of Russian Folklore, 13–16. 16. Yuli Engel, Evreiskaya narodnaya pesnya. Etnograficheskaya poezdka letom 1912 goda, as quoted in The Jewish Artistic Heritage Album by Semyon An-sky, ed. A. Kantsedikas and I. Serheyeva (Moscow: Mosty kultury, 2001), 158. 17. Rekhtman, as quoted in Tracing An-sky, 111. 18. See An-sky, “Pod maskoi (rasskaz starogo maskila),” Evreiskii Mir (June 1909). Translation in Safran, Wandering Soul, 25. 19. David Roskies, “S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer, 259 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), has written, “In some towns, the only way Ansky could win the trust of the local inhabitants was to pose as an orthodox Jew and to appear in shul wearing tallith and tefillin. Ansky and his fieldworkers did not come there to pray. They came to sanctify the relics.”


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20. Avrom Rekhtman, “In Memory of Sh. Z. An-sky (Rapoport),” 110. 21. See Michelle Raheja, “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner),” in American Quarterly 59 (2007). 22. George Marcus, “Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System,” in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus, 165, n. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), writes that “the two most common modes for self-consciously fixing ethnography in historic time are what I shall call the salvage mode and the redemptive mode.” As will become clear below later, An-sky’s sense of ethnography as redemptive was deeply embedded in a Jewish context, and in particular in a Hasidic ethos. 23. An-sky, “A idishe etnografishe ekspeditsie,” Haynt, July 2, 1913; Der Moment, July 13, 1913. 24. For this and following quotes, see S. An-sky, “Evreiskoe narodnoe tvorchestvo,” Perezhitoe 1 (1908): 276–314. 25. As Gabriella Safran has observed in “Jews as Siberian Natives: Primitivism and S. An-sky’s Dybbuk,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 635, “On the one hand, they [Jews] might be seen as an ancient people, identified with the past of the Hebrew Bible, or as an Eastern people, preserving a mystical religion (Hasidism) and a patriarchal way of life in their shtetlakh. On the other, they might be imagined as the consummate moderns, ably adapting to the capitalist system and fully at home in urban space.” 26. Safran, “Jews as Siberian Natives,” 652, n. 19. On this category, see John Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998). 27. Martin Buber, “The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,” in On Judaism, by Martin Buber, 75–76 (New York: Schocken, 1996). 28. See Moisei Berlin, Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonasileniia v Rossii (St. Petersburg: V. Bezobrazova, 1861). On Berlin, who was from the town of Shklov, in what is now Belorussia, see I. Lurie and A. Zeltser, “Moses Berlin and Lubavich Hasidism: A Landmark in the Conflict between Haskalah and Hasidism,” Shvut: Studies in Russian and East European Jewish History and Culture 5 (1997): 32–64. 29. Berlin, Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonasileniia v Rossii, 27, 33, 82. 30. On Grunwald’s activities within the broader context of the history of Jewish folklore, see Dan Ben-Amos, “Jewish Folk Literature,” Oral Tradition 14, no. 1 (1999): 202. 31. Adam Rubin, “Hebrew Folklore and the Problem of Exile,” Modern Judaism 25, no. 1 (February 2005): 68–69. This is an important article for

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understanding the historical and ideological contexts in which Jewish folklore studies emerged. 32. On this mission and Peretz’s subsequent literary account, Bilder fun a provints rayze, see “Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszow Region,” in The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse, 17ff. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002). On the place of Peretz in the genealogy of early Jewish ethnography, see Simon Rabinovich, “Positivism, Populism, and Politics: The Intellectual Foundations of Jewish Ethnography in Late Imperial Russia,” Ab Imperio: Theory and History of Nationalism and Empire in the Post-Soviet Space 3 (2005): 227–256. In general, I am indebted to Rabinovich’s clear exposition of the historical context and ideological commitments of Jewish ethnography in late imperial Russia. On Peretz and the study of Jewish folklore, see Mark Kiel, “Vox populi, vox dei: The Centrality of Peretz in Jewish Folkloristics,” Polin 7 (1992). 33. On the establishment and activities of the society and the journal, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 234–256; Sergei Kan, Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 212–214. 34. On Lilientalowa’s relationship to Peretz, see Itzik Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2003), 4–5. 35. For a biography of Regina Lilientalowa and a bibliography of her works, see Magda Opalski’s entry in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Lilientalowa_Regina. 36. Nathaniel Knight, “Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845–1855,” in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David Ransel, 118 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 37. Ibid. 38. Lukin, “ ‘An Academy Where Folklore Will Be Studied’: An-sky and the Jewish Museum,” in The Worlds of An-sky, 289. 39. An-sky, “Mutual Influences between Christians and Jews,” as translated by Golda Werman, in “Ansky Lives!” ed. David Roskies, trans. Golda Werman, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 14, no. 1–2 (1992): 67. 40. All quotes are from An-sky, “Evrieskoe narodnoe tvorchestvo,” 276–314. 41. Roskies, “S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return,” in The Uses of Tradition, 260, writes, “He [An-sky] turned the disparate remains of Jewish folklore and folk life in an all-embracing Oral Torah.” 42. On this transformation, see David Biale, “A Journey between Worlds: East European Culture from the Partitions of Poland to the Holocaust,” in Cultures of the Jews: Modern Encounters, vol. 3, ed. David Biale, 121 (New York: Schocken, 2002): “Ansky clearly intended his characterization of Jewish folklore as an


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‘oral tradition’ to usurp the rabbinic idea that the Talmud was the oral law; for an intellectual alienated from the world of Talmudic scholarship, rabbinic culture had become a fossilized ‘written’ tradition.” 43. An-sky’s formulation parallels those of contemporaries like Simon Dubnov, whom Mark Kiel has described as viewing folklore as part of a “new secular and nationalistic Torah,” and Chaim Zhitlovsky, who employed the phrase “socialist Torah” in praising the ideology of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine. In certain respects, An-sky’s sensibility also anticipated the outlook of Abraham Joshua Heschel. 44. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 45. Brian Horowitz, “Spiritual and Physical Strength in An-sky’s Literary Imagination,” in The Worlds of An-sky, 117, has written: “Instead of regarding revolution as the motor of Jewish salvation, An-sky believed in the promise of ethnography. Convinced—and he was probably right—that many modern Jews were alienated from religion and community, An-sky believed folk culture could have the same anthropological function as the Torah had had in earlier times.” 46. In 1896 An-sky wrote “In a Jewish Family” about a Jewish boy’s rebellion against his kheyder. In April 1913, by contrast, An-sky gave a lecture praising the kheyder to the Jewish Literary and Scientific Society. See Benyamin Lukin, “ ‘An Academy Where Folklore Will Be Studied’: An-sky and the Jewish Museum,” in The Worlds of An-sky, 302. 47. Simon Rabinovitch, “Positivism, Populism, and Politics: The Intellectual Foundations of Jewish Ethnography in Late Imperial Russia,” Ab Imperio 3 (2005): 227–256, has written, “The first proponents of Jewish ethnography believed that by recapturing lost elements of Jewish culture and by taking specimens of a culture which they believed to be fading, they would build a frame of reference which would inform secular, not traditionally religious Judaism.” 48. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Theorizing Heritage,” Ethnomusicology 39, no. 3 (1995): 367–380. On p. 369, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes, “Heritage, for the sake of my argument, is the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct. Heritage is created through a process of exhibition (as knowledge, as performance, as museum display). Exhibition endows heritage thus conceived with a second life.” In the case of An-sky, the second part of this definition clearly applies, while the first part may not, since traditional Eastern European Jewish culture was not “dead” or “defunct” in 1912, though An-sky certainly believed that it was in danger of becoming so. 49. Roskies, “S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return,” in The Uses of Tradition, 258. 50. Arnold Eisen, “Constructing the Usable Past: The Idea of ‘Tradition’ in Twentieth-Century Judaism,” in The Uses of Tradition, 435, has noted that despite Kaplan’s extended critique of tradition, he ultimately “must appeal to tradition in

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order to legitimize his project of wholesale reconstruction.” In 1909 An-sky wrote Zhitlovsky, “Do not look for yidishkayt on the edges of the tsitsit [ritual fringes], on the rim of the milah [foreskin], or on the tip of the tongue. The more I think of it the clearer I realize that yidishkayt is embedded in a 4,000-year psychology and 4,000-year culture (if you like, add two millenniums more!).” As quoted in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern,“ ‘We Are Too Late’: An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return,” in The Worlds of An-sky, 91. 51. Israel Bartal, “The Kinnus Project: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Fashioning of a ‘National Culture’ in Palestine,” in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni, 311–312 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). 52. On this, see John Bowlt, “The An-sky Expedition and the Russian AvantGarde,” in The Worlds of An-sky, 311–312. 53. Bartal, “The Kinnus Project.” 54. From an adapted Hebrew version of Dubnov, “Ob izuchenii istorii ruskikh evreev,” as quoted in Adam Rubin, “Hebrew Folklore and the Problem of Exile,” Modern Judaism 25, no. 1 (February 2005): 70. Also see Bartal, “The Kinnus Project,” 313. 55. David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 18. 56. An-sky, Jewish Ethnographic Expedition diary fragment. YIVO 3:53:3260, 112030. 57. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 152, n. 89, notes the “near-mythic status of the Gintsburg family in popular Jewish lore.” On pp. 151– 152, he writes, “On their periodic visits to their sprawling estate in Podolia (a province in the Pale), the Gintsburgs were often besieged by crowds of poor Jews begging for assistance or intercession of various kinds. In the popular Jewish imagination, hungry for all-powerful protectors, various prominent Petersburg Jews who happened to bear the name Ginsberg, Ginsburg, Ginzburg, or Günzburg were merged into a single ‘Baron Gintsburg,’ to whom all good deeds were attributed.”

2. The Rebbe as Ethnographer/ The Ethnographer as Rebbe 1. David Roskies, ed., S. Ansky, p. xxv, from the minutes of a meeting published in Hebrew translation by Isaiah Trunk in the journal Gal-Ed 6 (1982): 236. S. Anskii, “Tsadik Zalman Shneerson. Biograficheskii ocherk,” 1–2, NBUV f. 339, no. 10. 2. On An-sky’s literary relationship to Peretz and Buber, see Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 204. 3. On this phenomenon, see Justin Jaron Lewis, Imagining Holiness: Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2009).


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4. For an analysis of An-sky’s Hasidic writings against the backdrop of Jewish (including Peretz and Buber) and Russian authors, see Gabriella Safran, “Revolutionary Rabbis: Hasidic Legend and the Hero of Words,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark Steinberg and Heather Coleman, 276–303 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 5. On this question, see the theoretical approach of Dan Ben-Amos in “Context in Context,” Western Folklore 53 (April 1993), and Ben-Amos, “Jewish Folk Literature,” Oral Tradition 14, no. 1 (1999). Safran, “Revolutionary Rabbis,” 298, discusses Ben-Amos’s work as it applies to An-sky. 6. For Unger quote, see Nathaniel Deutsch, The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 39. 7. Ruven Braynen, “Zeks froyen: Di interesantste zeks froyen, vos ikh hob bagegent in meyn leben,” Der Tog, September 22, 1935. My thanks to Anna Torres for providing me with this reference. 8. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 285, quoting from Chaim Zhitlovsky, “Briv fun a yidishn sotsyalist,” Folks-shtime 1 (December 1906): 58–59. 9. On the question of whether early Hasidism and the figure of the Baal Shem Tov, in particular, were radical, see Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 10. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “ ‘We Are Too Late’: An-sky and the Paradigm of No Return,” in a CD booklet accompanying The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven Zipperstein, 95 (Stanford, Calif., 2006), acknowledges that An-sky was influenced by Peretz but adds that “it was An-sky who reimagined Hasidism as the only non-blurred source of Jewish culture that still nurtured idiosyncratic modes of thinking, folklore, ethics, music, applied arts, and, indeed, literature. He strongly disagreed with Dubnov in regard to the spiritual values of nineteenth-century Hasidism. An-sky turned Hasidism into a universal myth, in whose midst he envisioned himself as its rhapsodist, harbinger, and champion.” 11. On this phenomenon, see Karl Grözinger, “The Buber-Scholem Controversy about Hasidic Tale and Hasidism—Is There a Solution,” in Gershom Scholem’s “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism” 50 Years After: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on the History of Jewish Mysticism, ed. Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan, 332 (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 1993): “Hasidism accepted previous and contemporary popular Jewish folk tales as a legitimate means of religious expression and by this, Hasidism sanctified popular Jewish folk-religion as a legitimate form of Jewish piety, opposing the view that only Rabbinic culture represents true Judaism.”

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12. An-sky, “Mutual Influences between Christians and Jews,” trans. Golda Werman, in David Roskies, “Ansky Lives!” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology 14, no. 1–2 (1992): 67–69. 13. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, eds., In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivhei ha-Besht): The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 4. 14. Izaly Zemtsovsky, “The Musical Strands of An-sky’s Texts and Contexts,” in The Worlds of An-sky, 214, argues that under the pseudonym “Unicus,” An-sky “emphasized the deep ideological meaning of folk practice and music that could be found in the kabbalistic theory of ‘raising of little sparks’ (vozvedie iskorok) and ‘sanctifying the slivers’ (osviashchenie oskolkov).” 15. H. Gelernt, “Di An-ski ekspeditsie in Kremenets,” Pinkas Kremenets (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at Irgun ’ole Kremenets be-Yisrael, 1954), 371. 16. Kh. Lunski, “A halb yor zikhroynes vegen An-ski,” Leben 7–8 (December 1920): 20. 17. The Mandelstam quote is from Seth Wolitz, “Inscribing An-sky’s Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters,” in The Worlds of An-sky, 165. 18. The writer Hillel Zeitlin echoed this sentiment in one of the many reminiscences published following An-sky’s death, “Der lebensveg fun Sh. An-ski,” Almanakh tsum tsen-yehrigen yubileum fun “Moment” (Warsaw: Der Moment, 1921), 51: “He went to the people and became one of the people. He turned his spirit to the people, dissolved his soul within the soul of the people and became one with them.” 19. Members of the Trisker, Stoliner, Ruzhiner, Husiatyner, and Chernobler sects all prayed together, a fact that surprised An-sky, since in other communities Hasidim often clashed with one another, even violently, on occasion. 20. Yona Makhover, “Sh. An-ski: Zikhronot,” Haolam, November 25, 1920. 21. For a photograph of An-sky recording stories about Zisha (or Zusya) in Annipol, see Jack Kugelmass, “The Father of Jewish Ethnography,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky, 347. 22. Shmuel Shrayer, unpublished diary. In the continuation of his remarks, Shrayer explained why An-sky only remembered this particular prayer: “When I asked why this particular prayer had succeeded in settling in his brain more than the other prayers, even though among the pious it is only recited on the Sabbaths during the winter, An-sky explained to me that during his youth he had been very taken by the descriptions of nature in this text, and in his free time he would meditate on them and so they became fixed in his brain.” 23. Avrom Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor: Zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ekspeditsye ongefirt fun Sh. An-ski (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1958), 120. Rekhtman even includes a text of a “typical kvitl.” 24. Shmuel Shrira (aka Shrayer), “Im Anski bemaasotav,” Davar, November 8, 1940, 3. On An-sky’s acquisition of these relics, see Gabriella Safran, Wandering


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Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 204. 25. The passage is from Shmuel Shrayer’s unpublished diary. In light of the Ashkenazi tradition not to name a child after a living person, it is possible that Shrayer listed the inscription as “Rabbi Moses son of Moses” because he could no longer recall the original name. 26. Dov Noy, “An-ski hameshulah: Beyn hashmiati vehahizoni batarbut haamamit,” in Behazarah leayarah: An-ski ve- hamishlahat haetnografit hayehudit, 1912–1914, ed. Rivka Gonen, 77 (Jerusalem: Muzeon Yisrael, 1994). 27. For a detailed account of these activities, see Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor, 115–141. 28. Nachman Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler (New York: Ikuf, 1946), 140. 29. See Vaynshteyn to An-sky, September 24, 1913, IR IFO NBUV 339: 196.

3. A Total Account 1. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, eds., In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivhei ha-Besht): The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 179. 2. The locus classicus for this tradition is BT Temurah 14b. Also see BT Gittin 60b and PT Megillah 74b. 3. On An-sky’s use of this term, see Eugene Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Ivanov, Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav, and Alla Sokolova, eds., Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expedition (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2009), 8. 4. For translation, see http://www.mechon-mamre.org/e/e0000.htm. 5. This is especially the case in the Babylonian Talmud. On the greater tendency of the Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud to provide decisions than the more open-ended Babylonian Talmud, see Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 151, and his discussion of Jacob Neusner. 6. As cited in The Jewish Artistic Heritage Album by Semyon An-sky, ed. A. Kantsedikas and I. Serheyeva, 66 (Moscow: Mosty kultury, 2001). 7. On this volume, see Avrutin et al., Photographing the Jewish Nation, 3; F. Shargorodskaia, “O nasledii S. Anskogo,” Evreiskaia Starina (1924): 308. For the outline of An-sky’s Evrei v ikh bytovoi i religioznoi zhizni, see Judaica Section, Manuscript Division, Vernadsky National Library, Kiev (IR IFO NBUV), f. 339, ed. Khr. 11, ll. 1–6. 8. Quote is from Avrutin et al., Photographing the Jewish Nation, 3–4. 9. The Jewish Artistic Heritage Album by Semyon An-sky, 37, quoting from Roza Ettinger, Roza Nikolaevna Ettinger (Jerusalem, 1980), 34.

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10. Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 190–192, discusses this gathering and its outcome. 11. On Weissenberg, see John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors & Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 91ff. Efron, on p. 92, describes Weissenberg as “the world’s foremost expert on the physical anthropology of the Jews,” and the search for the “Jewish type,” as his “anthropological quest.” 12. On Mikhail Kulisher, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 321; Sergei Kan, Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 212; Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 127; Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 239. 13. Boyarin, Border Lines, 196. Boyarin’s discussion of the significance of Yavneh in the Talmudic imaginary and his comparison with the Council of Nicea is a tour de force. 14. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). 15. Quotes from the various participants at the conference are taken from minutes in the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Jerusalem, RU/11, Protocols of the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society. My thanks to James Loeffler for providing me with this material. Some minutes from the conference are also in the YIVO Archives, YIVO Ethnographic Committee in Vilno, RG 1.2. 16. Letter from Samuel Weissenberg to An-sky, June 10, 1912, IR IFO NBUV, f. 339, ed. Khr. 213, as quoted in Avrutin et al., Photographing the Jewish Nation, 12. 17. On these issues, see Avrutin et al., Photographing the Jewish Nation, 12, 29–37, where Alexander Ivanov discusses the ways in which Iudovin’s photographs during the expedition resembled and diverged from ethnographic photography. 18. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naimon, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 10, write that “Byt denotes the material, repetitive, unchanging, and therefore deeply conservative activities associated with the domestic sphere and the body.” See also Catriona Kelly, “Byt: Identity and Everyday Life,” in National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction, ed. Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis, 149ff. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 19. Igor Shaitanov, as quoted in National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction, 149.


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20. Nathaniel Knight, “Science, Empire and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845–1855,” in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David Ransel, 127 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 21. See Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 40; F. Volkov, “Anketny voprosy Komissii po sostavleniiu etnograficheskikh kart Rossii, sostoiashchei pri Otdelenii Etnografii Imperatorskago Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva,” Zhivaia starina 23, no. 1–2 (1914): 195–212. 22. On the commission (and a subcommission consisting of Engel, Kisselhof, and D. Maggid, which was established to pursue musicological questions), see Veniamin Lukin, “Ot narodnichestva k narodu. S. An-skii—etnograf vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva,” in Evrei v Rossii. Istoriia i kul’tura. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, ed. D. A. Eliashevich, 133, 136–137 (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskii Evreiskii Universitet, 1995). 23. On the development of French ethnographic questionnaires (including samples), see Arnold Van Gennep, Le folklore français: Bibliographies, questionnaires provinces et pays (Paris: R. Laffont, 1999). 24. Nathaniel Knight, “Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845–1855,” in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David Ransel, 118 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 25. For the contents of the questionnaire, see M. G. Rabinovich, “Otvety na programmu Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva kak istochnik dlia izucheniia etnografii goroda,” in Ocherki istorii russkoi etnografii, fol’klorisitiki, i antropologii, vol. 5 (1971): 38–39. A copy of the questionnaire is located in the papers of Peter Keppen, ARGO, f. 2, op. 1, no. 215, ll, 14–20. 26. As cited and translated from the questionnaire by Knight, “Science, Empire, and Nationality,” 138, n. 68. My thanks to Professor Knight for his great generosity in discussing the work of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society with me, including the creation of the Nadezhdin questionnaire. 27. For these figures, see Knight, “Science, Empire, and Nationality,” 125, 138, n. 72. 28. See F. Volkov, “Anketnye voprosy Komissii po sostavleniiu etnograficheskikh kart Rossii, sostoiashchei pri Otdelenii Etnografii Imperatorsgago Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva,” Zhivaia starina 23, no. 1–2 (1914): 193–212. On the work of the Commission on Maps, see Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 38–42. 29. On the Tenishev questionnaire as a possible influence on An-sky, see Avrutin et al., Photographing the Jewish Nation, 11. 30. N. Nachinkin, “Materialy ‘Etnograficheskogo biuro’ V. N. Tenishiva,” Sovetskaia etnografia 1 (1955); Kniaz V. N. Tenishev, Programma etnograficheskikh

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svedenii o krest’ianakh tsentral’noi Rossii (Smolensk, 1898); V. N. Tenishev, Programma na osnovanii soobrazhenii izlozhennykh v knige V. N. Tenisheva deiatel’nost’ cheloveka (Smolensk, 1897); B. M. Firsov and I. G. Kiseleva, eds., Byt velikorusskikh krestian-zemlepashtsev: Opisanie materialov etnograficheskogo byuro kniazia V. N. Tenisheva (na primere Vladimirskoi Gubernii) (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Evropeiskogo Doma, 1993). Tenishev planned on writing a book called “Byt velikorusskikh krest’ian-zemlepashtsev.” 31. For the figure of 2,500 separate questions, see Rose Glickman, “ ‘Unusual Circumstances’ in the Peasant Village,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 23, no. 1–4 (1996): 216. My thanks to Professor Glickman for generously sharing her work and her extensive knowledge of the Tineshev questionnaire. 32. As David Ransel, “Introduction,” to Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, ed. and trans. David Ransel, with Michael Levine, xiv (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), has noted, “Not until the 1910s did British ethnographers set up camp in a village for months on end and become ‘participant observers’ of everyday life. . . . In this respect, Semyonova was ahead of her time.” 33. In Russian, the work was called Zhizn’ “Ivana”: Ocherki iz byta krest’ian odnoi iz chernozemnykh gubernii (=Zapiski imperatorskogo russskogo geograficheskogo obshchestva po otdeleniiu etnografii, vol. 39 (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1914). For its publication history, see Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, xvii. David Assaf, in his introduction to Yekhezkel Kotik, Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 96, n. 133, notes the parallels between Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia’s ethnographic work and that of contemporary Russian Jews such as An-sky. 34. Letter from An-sky to Baron Gintsburg, April 13, 1912, IR IFO NBUV, 339: 946. 35. Jonathan Boyarin, “Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book,” in Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory, by Jonathan Boyarin, 50 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 36. See Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in LateTsarist Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 198–199. 37. On the influence of these institutes on the Jewish Academy in Saint Petersburg, see Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 201. 38. On the curriculum, which did not correspond to what was actually offered due to the limited size of the faculty and other factors, see Mikhail Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions through a Noble Past (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1989), 111; also see Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 200. 39. See Simon Dubnov, Kniga zhizni: Vospominaniia I razmyshleniia: Materially dlia istorii moego vremeni, 3 vols. (Riga: Jauna¯tnes Gra¯mata, 1934–1935,


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vols. 1–2; New York: Izd. Soiuza Russkikh Evreev, 1957, vol. 3), 293, as translated in Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg, 113. 40. The title page of The Jewish Ethnographic Program lists the students in both Yiddish and Russian, providing only the initials of their first names. 41. Born in the Volhynian shtetl of Baranovka to Hasidic followers of the Makarov Rebbe, Yekhiel Ravrebbe exemplified the kind of individual whose expertise An-sky relied upon. As a youth, Ravrebbe gained a reputation as an illui (prodigy) and was known as a “walking encyclopedia” for his vast knowledge of Jewish tradition. Ravrebbe became exposed to socialism while still in his home shtetl, tried his hand at Hebrew poetry, and, after receiving smikhah (rabbinic ordination) in Vilna, eventually made his way to Saint Petersburg, where he became one of the most highly respected students in the Jewish Academy. In the late 1930s, after continuing to pursue scholarly work following the revolution, Ravrebbe was arrested and disappeared during Stalin’s purges. For an elegiac account of Ravrebbe, see Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg, 236–244. 42. S. An-sky (with the help of A. Yuditsky), An ortige historishe program (“A Local Historical Program”) (St. Petersburg, 1913). While responses to the program do not survive in any of the archives containing material from An-sky’s expedition, a partial set of answers is preserved in the Yizker bukh (Memory Book) for the town of Sochaczew, located in central Poland, not far from Warsaw, that is, outside of the Pale proper. See Yaakov Friedman, “Anski-Ankete,” in Pinkas Sochaczew, ed. A. Sh. Stein and Gavriel Veisman, 320–329 (Jerusalem: Irgun Sokhotshev˙, 1962). 43. Letter from Levi Yitzhak Vaynshteyn to An-sky, November 7, 1913, IR IFO NBUV 339: 946, as quoted in Kantsedikas and Serheyeva, The Jewish Artistic Heritage Album by Semyon An-sky, 154. 44. Safran, Wandering Soul, 222–224, discusses the creation of the questionnaire. 45. Avrom Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor: Zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ek˙speditsye, ongefirt˙ fun Sh. An-Ski (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1958), 17. Today, the only surviving section of this work exists in manuscript form in the Vernadsky Library in Kiev. Focusing on taneysim (fast days), the document consists of forty-plus questions beginning with one about whether people still shlog kaparos (the practice of swinging a chicken or rooster above one’s head in order to remit one’s sins) on the eve of Yom Kippur. 46. On Shternberg’s life, see Kan, Lev Shternberg. For his early education, see p. 5. 47. On this work, see Lev Shternberg, The Social Organization of the Gilyak, edited by Bruce Grant (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1999). 48. The language is borrowed from Kan’s biography. 49. Kan, Lev Shternberg, 189. 50. Ibid., 190.

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51. Franz Boas to Lev Shternberg, as quoted in Kan, Lev Shternberg, 190. 52. Letter from Vaynshteyn to An-sky, June 12, 1913, IR IFO NBUV 339: 196. 53. Letter from Vaynshteyn to An-sky, August 6, 1913, IR IFO NBUV 339: 201. 54. Letter from Vaynshteyn to An-sky, August 29, 1913, IR IFO NBUV 339: 202.

4. The Book of Man The epigraph for this chapter is from Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, Vol. 1, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1991), p. 20. 1. The decision to structure The Program around the life cycle differentiated it from the Russian ethnographic questionnaires produced by Nadezhdin and Tenishev, which have different organizing principles. 2. Phillipe Ariès, Images of Man and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 19. 3. David Ransel, “The Ethno-Cultural Impact on Childbirth and Disease among Women in Western Russia,” in Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Mordechai Altshuler, Yisrael Cohen, and Arkadii Zeltser, 28–30 (Jerusalem: The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 2001), notes that at the end of the nineteenth century, infant mortality for Eastern Orthodox peoples in the Russian Empire was 284 deaths per 1,000 live births, whereas Jewish infant mortality was approximately 130 deaths per 1,000 live births. 4. Like a number of other questions in The Program, this one is rooted in ancient Jewish literary sources; in this case, both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, where what has come to be called “maternal imprinting” is an important element of several narratives. 5. Perhaps in the womb itself, as The Program suggests when it asks “What views are there, besides those known from books, concerning the life of the child in its mother’s belly?” Thus, for example, Jewish tradition holds that an angel teaches the fetus the entire Torah, before the same angel taps the fetus above the lip, producing a permanent dent and causing it to forget everything. 6. Steven Zipperstein, “Reinventing Heders,” in Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, by Steven Zipperstein, 41–62 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), explores the changing significance of the kheyder in Russian Jewish society at the turn of the twentieth century, including the emergence of the kheyder mutukan. See also Yosef Goldstein, “ ‘Ha-Heder hametukan be-Rusyah ke-vasis le-maarekhet ha-hinukh ha-tsiyonit,” Iyunim behinukh 45 (1986): 147–157.


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7. On this contrast, see Shaul Stampfer, “The Social Implications of Very Early Marriage,” in Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe, by Shaul Stampfer, 32 (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010). 8. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2–8, argues that Tsar Nicholas I’s initiation of the draft was motivated by an “Enlightenment agenda” rather than by an overriding desire to convert Jewish draftees to Christianity, as later folk sources (and, not incidentally, many historians) would assert. 9. On statistics concerning kest and its declining frequency, see ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 30–32, 53, 58. 10. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 131. 11. On the reasons for declining divorce rates among Russian Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 199–200. It is noteworthy that The Program only includes a few questions regarding the physical abuse of wives by their husbands, in contrast to the ethnographic questionnaires designed for Russian peasants, which devote much more attention to the subject of domestic violence. While we cannot draw any statistical conclusions from this contrast concerning the rates of such violence in the two communities, it does point to the social acceptability, even approval, of wife beating among Russian peasants as well as within the Russian Orthodox legal tradition, as opposed to the more ambivalent position of the Halakhah and the existence of social taboos associated with the behavior among Eastern European Jews— though in practice, of course, these did not prevent cases from occurring. On wife abuse among Russian peasants, see, for example, Barbara Alpern Engel, in The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia, ed. Christine Worobec, 118 (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), “Wife beating was commonplace, if not ubiquitous, in peasant villages. ‘The more you beat your wife, the tastier the cabbage soup,’ opined one peasant saying. A wife’s desire to escape an abusive husband often elicited little sympathy from fellow villagers.” Also see Christine Worobec, “Accommodation and Resistance,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine Worobec, 22 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991): “Orthodox teachings actively countenanced wife beating that did not seriously injure a woman.” For an ethnographic perspective on the subject, see Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, “Childbirth, Christening, Wife Beating,” in Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, ed. and trans. David Ransel, with Michael Levine, 6ff. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). On wife beating in Jewish legal tradition, see Yale Levine, “Alimut neged nashim ba-sifrut ha-ivrit,” Ha-Tzofeh, October 5, 2007; Avraham Grossman, “Violence toward Women,”

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in Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, by Avraham Grossman, 212–230 (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2004). On the situation of abused Jewish women in imperial Russia, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 173–177. 12. On this growing phenomenon, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 205 and elsewhere. 13. For the quote and an analysis of the declining adult mortality rate, see Shaul Stampfer, “Remarriage among Jews and Christians in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe,” Jewish History 3, no. 2 (1988): 105. 14. On this issue, see John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 26–27, and the work of Sander Gilman, especially The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). 15. See Pauline Wengeroff, Memoiren einer Grossmutter, Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Juden Russlands im 19 Jahrhundert (Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Berlin: M. Poppelauer, vol. 1, 1908; reprinted with vol. 2, 1910). For an English translation of vol. 1, see Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Shulamit Magnus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Yekhezkel Kotik’s memoir, Mayne zikhroynes, was first published in Yiddish in 1913. For an English translation, see A Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik, edited by David Assaf (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). 16. Avrom Yuditsky, “Sirtutim sifrutiyyim,” as quoted in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 53–54. 17. Ibid., 54. 18. As we have already seen, The “Local Historical Program,” which An-sky published and distributed in 1913, asks questions about both contemporary phenomena such as the Bund and Zionism, as well as historical events such as Napoleon’s invasion and the Revolution of 1905. 19. On the rabbinic tradition, see I. Kalimi, “ ‘He Was Born Circumcised’: Some Midrashic Sources, Their Concept, Roots and Presumably, Historical Context,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 93, no. 1–2 (2002); Gwynn Kessler, “ ‘Famous’ Fetuses in Rabbinic Narratives,” in Imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture, ed. Vanessa Sasson and Jane Marie Law, 185–202 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). On the Zoharic tradition, which concerns Noah, specifically, see Zohar 1:58b, in Daniel Matt, The Zohar, vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 331. 20. Translation and discussion in Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 221. In not mentioning these literary sources, An-sky may have hoped to gauge the de-

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gree to which Jewish folk beliefs and practices existed on multiple registers, depending on the knowledge and background of the respondents themselves. Thus one individual might be aware of the literary source for a particular custom and mention it in his or her response to a question, while another might be completely ignorant of it. 21. See Herman Pollack, “On Jewish Folkways in Germanic Lands,” The Journal of American Folklore 86, no. 341 (1973): 293–294. 22. Jean Baumgarten, “Prières, rituels et pratiques dans la société juive ashkénaze. La tradition des livres de coutumes en langue yiddish (xvie siècle),” Revue de l’histoire des religions 218, no. 3 (2001): 369–403. 23. On minhag literature that preceded printing, see Herman Pollac, “An Historical Explanation of the Origin and Development of Jewish Books of Customs (Sifre Minhagim): 1100–1300,” Jewish Social Studies 49, no. 3–4 (1987). 24. In his “Introduction” to Kotik, Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 96, n. 132, David Assaf writes, “We must also note that similar feelings moved Orthodox rabbis to engage in source-collecting projects” and quotes from an essay written by a Polish rabbi named Yehuda Leib Zlotnick (under the pen name Elzet), “Me-minhagei Yisrael,” Reshumot 1 (1918): 337, “ ‘We shall do a great disservice to our nation if we allow the memory of certain customs currently practiced to be lost, particularly as it seems that the time for customs as ended, for they are being pushed out of our lives one by one’ ” (emphasis added by Assaf). This sentiment parallels, to a remarkable degree, that of An-sky in The Jewish Ethnographic Program. 25. Abraham Isaac Sperling, Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim u-Mekore ha-Dinim (Lemberg, 1890). All page citations are from the reprinted edition (Jerusalem: Shay Lamora, 1999). 26. Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 65–68. 27. Yisroel Klapholz, ed., Sefer ha-Hasidut mi-Torat Belz, vol. 1 (Bnei Brak, Israel, 1990), 150.

Afterword 1. On the creation of both the Historic-Ethnographic Society and YIVO, as well as their ongoing rivalry in interwar Vilna, see Cecile Kuznitz, “An-sky’s Legacy: The Vilna Historic-Ethnographic Society and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Culture,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven Zipperstein, 320–345 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). In December 1920 the “Historic-Ethnographic Society in the Name of Sh. An-sky” was established by I. L. Cahan and others in New York City. On this, see I. L. Cahan, Shtudyes

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vegn yiddisher folksshafung, edited by Max Weinreich, 121–128 (New York: YIVO, 1952). 2. On the interwar ethnographic activities of YIVO and the other Jewish folklorists in Poland, see the definitive work by Itzik Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). 3. See “Der toyt in dem yidishn folksgloybn: A fregboygn fun Sh. An-ski,” Filologishe shriftn 3 (1929): 89–90. 4. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History,” in East European Jews in Two Worlds, Studies from the YIVO Annual, ed. Deborah Dash-Moore, 2 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research,1990). On the different versions of this work, see Jeffrey Shandler, “Heschel and Yiddish: A Struggle with Signification,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1993): 245–299. 5. Heschel, “Eastern European Era in Jewish History,” 3. 6. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe: The Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography,” in Divergent Centers: Shaping Jewish Cultures in Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen, 156 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett also observes, “Without ever using the term ethnography, the 1949 preface to The Earth of the Lord’s invokes this modality and transmutes it” (145). 7. Heschel, “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History,” 7–8. 8. Ibid., 16. 9. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe,” p. 165, refers to memorial books as a “vernacular authoethnography.” 10. “Yivo Conducts Study of Passover Customs and Practices,” publication of the Yiddish Scientific Institute—YIVO, 1949. Significantly, one section of the questionnaire was dedicated to gathering information on “Passover in America.” 11. For a history of the book and its reception, see Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, “Introduction,” Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl, ed. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, ix–xlviii (New York: Schocken, 1995). 12. Steven Zipperstein, “Underground Man: The Curious Case of Mark Zborowski and the Writing of a Modern Jewish Classic,” Jewish Review of Books (Summer 2010): 38. 13. Zipperstein, “Underground Man,” 38; Jack Kugelmass, “The Father of Jewish Ethnography?” in The Worlds of S. An-sky, 350. 14. For a description of these activities, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Jewish Folklore and Ethnography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman, 969–972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 15. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/projects/digital/lcaaj/what.html. For more on the archive, see Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 44–45.


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16. On the fate of the An-sky materials, see Igor Krupnik, “Jewish Holdings of the Leningrad Ethnographic Museum,” in Tracing An-sky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg, ed. Marièella Beukers and Renée Waale, 16–23 (Amsterdam: Waanders Uitgevers, 1992); Aleksander S. Kantsedikas and Irina Sergeeva, The Jewish Artistic Heritage Album by Semyon An-sky, and Benyamin Lukin, “An-ski Ethnographic Expedition and Museum,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia .org/printarticle.aspx?id=2074. 17. Yitzhak Gur-Aryeh first published his translation in the new series of Reshumot 5 (1953), under the editorship of Yohanan Twersky. It was republished in a volume published in his memory, Yitzhak Gur-Aryeh, Z”L: Mehanekh, hoker ha-folklor ve-ish ha-tarbut, shenatayim le-moto, edited by L. Y. Ronli, 59–79 (Jerusalem: Hotsaat ha-Mishpahah u-Moetset ha-Morim le-Ma’an ha-Keren ha-Kayemet le-Yisrael, 1959). The quote is from this volume, pp. 62–63. In the continuation of his remarks, Gur-Aryeh explicitly depicted the publication of his translation as a clarion call to the Israeli government and its educational institutions to take up the collection of Jewish folklore. 18. Avrom Rekhtman to Yohanan Twersky, undated letter, YIVO Archives, RG 677. 19. Avrom Rekhtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklor zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ekspeditsye, ongefirt fun Sh. An-ski (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1958), 17–18. 20. Kugelmass, “The Father of Jewish Ethnography?” 346. On p. 356, Kugelmass adds: “Although apparently not inspired by him (and this confirms my argument about the disjuncture between An-sky and the emergence of Jewish anthropology), at least one major Jewish anthropological work closely parallels An-sky’s—in its formulation as ‘return,’ its concern for salvage, and its transmission to us via the rhetoric of ethnographic realism albeit through dramaturgical techniques that make the work as much one of fiction as it is ethnographic. . . . Here I am speaking of a key text in American Jewish culture, Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days.” 21. Boris Khaimovich, “Istoriko-etnograficheskie ekspeditsii Peterburgskogo evreiskogo universiteta,” in Istoriia evreev na Ukraine I v Belorussii: ekspeditsii, pamiatniki, nakhodki: sbornik nauchnykh trudov, ed. Valerii Dymshits, 16 (St. Petersburg: Petersburg Jewish University, 1994). 22. Valerii Dymshits, “Dva puteshestviya po odnoi doroge,” in Istoriia evreev na Ukraine I v Belorussii, 9. 23. Ibid., 14. 24. Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Lvov, and Alla Sokolova, eds., Shtetl, XXI vek: Polevye issledovaniya (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskogo Universiteta v SanktPeterburge, 2008), 287–290.

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25. Dovid Katz, letter to the Survivor Mitzvah Project, posted on http://www .survivormitzvah.org/about4.shtml. In Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (New York: Basic Books, 2004), Katz applies the phrase “Mohicans” to elderly, non-Hasidic native Yiddish speakers in general. For a description of the expeditions, see http://www.judaicvilnius.com/en/main/research/expeditions. 26. See S. An-sky, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002). 27. See “AHEYM: The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (2002–2009) on the website of EVIA (Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis), at http://www.eviada.org/collection.cfm?mc=7&ctID=69. 28. Shandler, in Adventures in Yiddishland, 147, has noted: “Yugntruf’s constitution begins by identifying Yiddish as ‘more than simply a means of linguistic expression’ for its members. . . . Rather, it is a ‘symbol of ethnic identification’ and of ‘Jewish creativity,’ linking its speakers across time (the thousand-year history of Ashkenaz) and space (the global geography of the Ashkenazic diaspora).” 29. On the new generation of leaders in Yugntruf, see Eli Rosenblatt, “Yiddishists: The Next Generation Takes the Reins,” The Forward, February 22, 2008. The use of The Jewish Ethnographic Program by Yugntruf members took place at yidishtog (Yiddish day) and yidishvokh (Yiddish week) events organized by the group. My thanks to Chana Pollack for providing me with a DVD of these activities and for informing me about them in the first place. 30. Seth Rogovoy, “The Klezmer Revival: Old World Meets New,” July 31, 1997, at http://www.berkshireweb.com/rogovoy/interviews/klez.html. 31. The National Yiddish Book Center, at http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/, was founded and is headed by Aaron Lansky. For the story of his work, see Aaron Lansky, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books (New York: Algonquin Books, 2004). Living Traditions, at http://www.livingtraditions.org/, which, among its other activities, runs KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program, is headed by Henry Sapoznik. The Yiddish Radio Project, at http://www.yiddishradioproject.org/, was a collaboration between Living Traditions and Sound Portraits Productions, at http://www.soundportraits.org/, headed by David Isay, who went on to establish StoryCorps, at http://www.storycorps.org/, which has collected and archived tens of thousands of interviews. The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, at http://www.idelsohnsociety.com/, was founded by Roger Bennett, Courtney Holt, David Katznelson, and Josh Kun. As the websites for the Idelsohn Society—named in honor of the important Jewish musicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882–1938)—and Living Traditions state, respectively: “We are a small but dedicated team from the music industry and academia who passionately believe Jewish history is best told by the music we have loved and lost. In

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order to incite a new conversation about the present, we must begin by listening anew to the past,” and “Living Traditions brings the lush bounty of Yiddish culture to new generations in ways both inspiring and relevant to contemporary Jewish life. Not as a symbol of a lost world, or as a ‘duty’ to perpetuate but as a meaningful part of one’s active personal identity in a multi-cultural world.”

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Many people helped me to complete this book. My idea for producing an annotated translation of The Jewish Ethnographic Program crystallized during a far-ranging conversation with Dan Ben-Amos on the University of Pennsylvania campus years ago. My thanks to him for his encouragement and for helping me to realize the significance of the project at an early stage of its development. Since then, I have drawn on the expertise of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Jon Levitow and Itzik Gottesman both read over the complete manuscript of my translation and offered many insightful comments and suggestions. I am greatly indebted to them. Other Yiddish-language specialists, including Paul Glasser, Eddy Portnoy, and Zehavit Stern, provided help with particular issues. Nechama Singer Ariel and Morris Goldstein, both natives of Ludmir, shared their memories of what it was like to grow up in one of the shtetls that An-sky visited during the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition. A number of Hasidim, and in particular, Moshe Yida Leibowitz, z"l, and Zalman Shneur, shared their intimate knowledge of contemporary Hasidic communities in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Robert Weinberg helped with research in St. Petersburg and was a constant source of knowledge and good humor. Ilya Kolmanovsky provided aid in the An-sky collection of the Vernadsky National Library in Kiev. Bruce Grant shared his great expertise on Russian and early Soviet ethnography. Jean Baumgarten provided illuminating observations concerning the history of minhag in Ashkenazi society. Eilat Elgur Gurfinkel gave me access to the papers of her grandfather, Shmuel Shrira (aka Shrayer), who accompanied An-sky on the expedition. Chana Pollack kindly shared information and materials concerning Yugntruf’s engagement with The Jewish Ethnographic Program. Special thanks to Gabriella Safran for being such an insightful reader of my manuscript and for serving as an invaluable source of knowledge on An-sky over the course of many years. Other scholars and colleagues have helped in a variety of ways. They include Nathaniel Knight, Rose Glickman, Shaul Stampfer, Naomi Seidman, Marcy 353

354

Acknowledgments

Danan-Brink, Yossi Chajes, Michael Fishbane, Steven Hopkins, Joshua Schreier, Arnie Eisen, Murray Baumgarten, Ken Koltun-Fromm, Bruce Thompson, Peter Kenez, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Valerii Dymshits, Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, Elliot Wolfson, Benjamin Wurgaft, Zachary Baker, Joel Blecher, James Loefller, Harriet Murav, ChaeRan Freeze, Sergei Kan, and Steven Zipperstein. My extraordinary graduate student Polly Zavadivker helped me track down several hard-to-find sources. Thanks to Alan Christy for our conversations about the parallels—and differences—between An-sky’s ethnographic work and that of early twentieth-century Japanese ethnographers. While working on this project, I received support from Swarthmore College, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Stanford University, where I was a visiting professor. I also benefited from a Guggenheim Fellowship and from my time as the Workmen’s Circle/Dr. Emmanuel Patt Visiting Professor in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. A number of institutions invited me to present my research, including Vassar, Hofstra, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Graduate Theological Union, and YIVO. My beloved wife, Miriam, and our wonderful daughters, Simi and Tamar, were a constant source of inspiration and strength. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to discuss this project with my father, Zvi Deutsch, z"l, before he passed away after a long and arduous struggle. He was truly an ish tov ve-yashar. I cannot begin to thank my mother, Suzanna, for being such a devoted wife and caretaker to him during those difficult last years. Finally, thanks to the many people at Harvard University Press who helped bring this book into existence, including Jeannette Estruth and, especially, my great editor, Joyce Seltzer.

INDEX

Aboab, Yitzhak, 189–190n281 adultery, 14, 240–241n452, 241n453, 303–304n681, 308–309n704, 309n705 aesthetic standards, 201n317, 237n448 Af (angel), 307–308n699 Africa, 7 afterlife, 14, 118n44, 297–306, 311n712. See also Gehenna; Heaven Aggadot, 37–38 aging and the elderly, 83–84, 256–257, 256–257n488, 257nn489,490 agrarian lifestyle, 2 agunes, 249n475, 252n480, 253n482 akusherke, 116n36, 117n38. See also midwives Aleichem, Sholem, 6, 85, 86 Alexander II, 78 aliyah, 184n258, 211n349 Alpert, Michael, 323 American South, 21 amulets, 132–133n98 anarchism, 41 Angel of Death, 297–299; and bridegrooms, 210n346; and collection of the soul, 299n664; at death bed, 299n663; and funeral practices, 295n649; and judgment, 301–302n672; physical appearance of, 297–298n658, 298n659, 299n663; protection against, 243n457, 264n516; and punishments, 301–302n672; revealed to victim, 298n661; and rituals surrounding death, 270n543, 271n549; and the threshold, 268nn536,537;

and Torah study, 298n662; and water, 294–295n648, 295n649 angels: Angels of Destruction, 310n708; and burials, 301–302n672; and children in the womb, 107–108n5, 345n5; and death of zaddikim, 300n668, 301–302n672, 311n711; and Gehenna, 307–308n699, 308n703, 309n707; and Heaven, 312n714; See also Angel of Death Angels of Destruction, 310n708 animal sacrifices, 284n600 Annipol, 45 annotations, 100–101 An-sky (Shloyme Zanvil Rapoport): and anthropology, 349n20; and audio recordings, 11–12, 20–24, 26, 59; background of, 1–6; and byt concept, 62; on conscription, 194n293; description of, 43–44; and “doubleconsciousness,” 10; and Dubnov, 38; ethnographic method, 25–27; and exorcisms, 258–259n495; faith in power of ethnography, 335n45; focus and structure of the Ethnographic Program, 14–15; funding for expedition, 8, 10–11; and Hasidism, 27, 40–53, 96–97; and Haskalah, 27; and Heschel, 316; and the Holocaust, 317; influences on, 29–32, 38, 337n10; and “inventing tradition” charges, 35; itinerant lifestyle, 45; and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 6–15; on Jewish folk culture, 32–33; and the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic

355

356

Index

An-sky (continued) Society, 27, 28, 315; and Jewish intellectualism, 9–10; and the Jewish life cycle, 74; and the kheyder, 2, 5, 25, 36, 76, 335n36; and klezmer music, 323–324; Kugelmass on, 321; and memorized prayer, 338n22; obituary, 45; obstacles faced by, 19; and the October Revolution, 12; and Oral Torah, 34–36, 41, 55–56, 65, 71, 334–335n42; and Purim shpiln, 180n251; and Ravrebbe, 343n41; regard for, 44–45; and Shternberg, 69–71; on significance of ethnography, 33–36; and spying allegations, 331n1, 332n12; and tombstone carvings, 296n656; visits to Ludmir, 95–96 anthropology, 30, 58–60, 349n20 anti-Semitism, 3–4, 29–31, 51, 61 Antoninus, 107n4 apostasy, 200–201n315, 245n464, 249n475, 296n654. See also conversion aposthia, 121n57 Apter Rebbe (Abraham Joshua Heschel), 20, 23 “The Apter Rebbe and Nicholas I” (An-sky), 20 Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM), 322 Argentina, 86 Ariel, Nechama Singer, 96 Ariès, Phillipe, 73 arithmetic, 160n201, 164n210 Ark of the Torah, 119–120n50, 120n53, 129n83, 264n515 arranged marriages. See matchmaking arts and crafts movement, 37 Ashkenazi Jews, 88–89; and aesthetic standards, 201n317; and childbirth practices, 122–123n61, 124n68; and Christmas Eve, 169–170n230; and domestic violence, 238–239n449; and Hebrew, 106n2, 184n257; Heschel on, 316 Askenfeld, Israel, 208–209n339 Assaf, David, 85, 347n24 assimilation of Jews, 29 audio recordings, 20–24 avodah be-gashmiyut (worship in corporeality), 43, 45

“Ayzikl the Bachelor” (Robakh), 191n287 Azriel of Miropol, 48 baal beris, 130. See also sandek Baal Shem Tov, 42, 54, 141n126, 150n172, 303–304n681, 304n683 Babylonian Talmud, 54, 110n14, 225n408, 312n714 Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zara, 297n658, 298n659, 299n663 Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra, 289n624 Babylonian Talmud Baba Metsiah, 110n15 Babylonian Talmud Erchin, 122n61 Babylonian Talmud Hagigah, 309n705 Babylonian Talmud Ketubot, 300n668, 312n715 Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin, 108–109n8 Babylonian Talmud Megillah, 283n598 Babylonian Talmud Niddah, 107n5 Babylonian Talmud Rosh Hashanah, 308n700, 308–309n704 Babylonian Talmud Shabbat, 297n657, 309n707 Babylonian Talmud Shevuot, 109n10 Babylonian Talmud Sotah, 309n705 Babylonian Talmud Yebamot, 199n307 bachelorhood, 191n287 badkhn, 217nn373,374, 232n436 bagels, 117n39 bar mitzvahs, 77, 164–167, 165n213, 166nn219,221 The Bathhouse at Midnight (Ryan), 138n117 Baumgarten, Jean, 88, 89 beauty standards, 201n317, 237n448 behelfer (teacher’s assistant), 148–150; Baal Shem Tov as, 150n172; and childbirth practices, 125–126n72; duties of, 142n133, 149nn166,169,171; education of, 149n170; and Lag ba-Omer holiday, 143n135; payment of, 144n139, 148nn163,164, 149n165; and religious practices, 143n136; and weddings, 148n161 beit midrash, 168nn225,226,227 Belarus, 79, 260n500, 322 Ben Bag Bag, 66

Index

Benedict, Ruth, 318 Ben Ezra synagogue, 13 ben Teima, Judah, 256n487 ben zokher, 126–128, 126n75 Berdichevsky, Micha Yosef, 37, 89 Beregovski, Moshe, 215–216n369, 229n425 Berlant, Malka, 108n6 Berlin, Moisei, 29–30 besmedresh (study house), 167–170; and Ark of the Torah, 119–120n50; and eating days, 169n228; and methods of the expedition, 20, 44; and Purim shpiln, 180n251; and young grooms, 197n299 betrothal rituals, 205nn325,326, 206nn329,330,331 Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 36, 37, 58, 89 bibliomancy, 264n517 bikur khoylim society, 84 binda, 208–209n339 Binele, 186–187n267 Bitya, 311n713 Bloch, Jan, 31 Boas, Franz, 70 bobe, 115n32, 116n36. See also midwives Bogoraz, Vladimir, 4, 28 The Book of Questions (Jabès), 72 Boro Park neighborhood, 96, 98 Boyarin, Daniel, 58, 201n317 Boyarin, Jonathan, 66 breastfeeding. See nursing Brickman, Celia, 8 bris (circumcision ceremony), 77, 128n82, 129n83, 245n463 Brooklyn, New York, 97 brothels, 242–243n455 broygez tants (“angry dance”), 220–221n388 Buber, Martin, 29, 40–41, 50, 53, 89 the Bund, 5, 6, 32 burial practices, 289–294; and angels, 301–302n672; and ascension of the soul, 297n657; burial shrouds, 278–279n580, 279nn581,582,583,584; and burial societies, 97, 274–275n562, 275nn563,564,566, 275–276n567, 276n569, 277n571, 285n604, 292n636; and construction of coffins, 291n631; cost of burials, 276nn568,569; dedication of cemeteries,

357

284nn600,601,602,603, 285nn604,605; donkey’s burial tradition, 274n561; and eulogies, 285n609; funeral processions, 280n589, 280–281n590, 281nn591,592, 281–282n593, 300n665; hand-washing, 293n644, 294nn645,646; items buried with corpse, 291n632; orientation of the corpse, 291n630, 292n637; potsherds placed on eyes, 291n633; and Resurrection of the Dead, 73, 255–256n485; shoveling dirt into grave, 291–292n634, 292n635; and stillborn children, 123n63, 285n608; tombstones and grave markers, 293n643, 296nn655,656; washing the body, 277nn573,574,575,576; and zaddikism, 286n610, 302n673; See also cemeteries Burton, Richard, 7 byt, 61–62, 65, 70, 92 Byt velikorusskikh krest’ianzemlepashtsev (Tenishev), 64 Cahan Folklore Club, 317 Cairo Genizah, 13 cantonist system, 78–79 capitalism, 2 Caro, Joseph, 88 cats, 125n71 caul, 121n55 cemeteries, 282–289; and apostasy, 288–289n621; dedication of, 284nn600,601,602,603, 285nn604,605; and the expedition, 283–284n599; and expedition practices, 46–49; and first person buried, 285n609; garlic-on-graves custom, 286nn614,615; grass-plucking custom, 287n616; and grave digging, 290n625; and grave-robbing, 47–48; and grazing animals, 283n598; measurement of, 284n602; Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague, 283n597; and petitionary writings, 288n620; and placement of corpses, 291n630, 292n637; and “promiscuity of the living and dead,” 73; and social status, 287n617; and speaking to the dead, 289n623; stations prior to visiting,

358

Index

cemeteries (continued) 289n624; trees planted in, 286nn611,612; visiting, 286n614; and weddings, 213n358, 233n439, 263n513; See also burial practices Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, 40 Chagall, Marc, 2 “Chair for Elijah” custom, 129n84 chalitsa, 62 challah, 119, 134–135n104, 160n202, 222–223n398, 225n411, 274n560 charismatic leaders, 42 charity, 81, 214n364, 222–223n398, 281n592, 281–282n593, 336n56 Chashniki, 2 Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty, 21 Chernov, Viktor, 10 childbirth, 118–126; and Ashkenazi Jews, 122–123n61, 124n68; and the behelfer, 125–126n72; birthmarks, 111n17; cauls, 121n55; curtains for, 118n45; death of mothers in childbirth, 122–123n61; and death rituals, 73–74; determining sex of child, 108n7; and diet of mother, 111n19; folk practices of, 119–120n50, 120n51; and gender of babies, 74, 243n457; gifts, 117nn39,40; Halakhic perspective on, 119n49; and Sabbath observances, 122–123n61; and schools, 125–126n72, 316; sgules for, 129–130n87; stillbirths, 123nn63,64, 285n608; and synagogues, 124n69; and twins, 110n11 children and childhood, 107–143; Ben Zokher, Shalom Zokher, and Vakhnakht, 126–128; and besmedresh studies, 167–170; and charms, 124n69; childhood illnesses, 258n493; and cradle rituals, 125n71; and the first haircut, 77, 141nn126,127,128,130, 141–142, 142n131, 146n148; games and toys, 139n121, 185n260; and goal of marriage, 83; and grandparents, 145n143; and infant mortality, 73–74, 344n3; and learning to walk, 138n118; and matchmaking, 195–197, 196nn296,297; and midwives, 115–118; and military conscription, 191–194, 192–193n289; and nursing, 133–137, 134nn102,103, 134–135n104,

133–137, 135nn105,106, 135n106, 136nn107,108,109,110, 137–140; and the nursling, 137–140; and order of marriage, 244n461; and “panic marriages,” 197n300; and Pidyen ha-Ben, 133; and secular studies, 182–184, 189n279; stepping-overchildren prohibition, 137n114; and swaddling cushions, 129n86; upbringing till kheyder, 142–143; See also childbirth; circumcision; education; pregnancy cholera epidemics, 262n512, 263nn513,514 Chortkov, 184n257 circumcision: and aposthia, 121n57; ceremony for, 77, 128n82, 129n83, 245n463; “Chair for Elijah” custom, 129n84; and “cradling,” 125n71; and death of mothers in childbirth, 122–123n61; and grandparents, 129n85; and Lilith, 127n80; and the moyel, 130n92, 131n93, 245n463; and Program questions, 87; as rite of passage, 77; steps of, 129n85; and stillborn children, 123n64; and Vakhnakht ritual, 127n78; and wimpel tradition, 137n112 class conflict, 2 clothing, 27, 140n125 Code of Jewish Law (Ganzfried), 133n99 coffins, 291n631 Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures project, 318 Commission for Establishing Ethnographic Maps of Russia, 62, 63 conception of children, 107n4, 111n16 confessions, 266nn523,524,525, 279n583 conscription, 191–194; abuse of Jewish soldiers, 192–193n289; and conditional divorces, 253n482; and khappers, 193n290; length of service, 78–79; measures to avoid, 48, 192n288 Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Litvak), 194n293 conversion, 78, 192–193n289, 193n290, 245n464, 249n475. See also apostasy Cooperman, Avraham, 318 Cossacks, 68, 283–284n599 cradles, 125n71 cross-dressing, 181n253

Index

Crown Heights neighborhood, 96 crude expressions, 107 cultural heritage, 36, 335n48 cures and remedies, 247n468 custom books (sifre minhogim), 89–90 customs, 85–92 dance: “angry dance,” 220–221n388; and Eastern customs, 30; kosher dance, 220–221n388, 229nn424,425; mazhinka dance, 214n363; and weddings, 80–81, 215–216n369, 215–217, 216nn370,371,372, 218n375, 220n385, 220–221n388, 225n410, 229nn424,425, 231n431 death and dying, 269–313; announcements of death, 270n547, 280n586; and asking forgiveness, 272nn553,554,555; and chicken feathers, 267n528; and children, 73–74, 122–123n61, 243n457, 243–244n458; and confessions, 266nn523,524,525, 279n583; and days of the week, 267–268n532; and death of zaddikim, 300n668; and departure of soul, 269n539; and divination, 271–272n552; and dreams, 269n538; dying process, 84–85, 266–269; funeral processions, 280n589, 280–281n590, 281nn591,592, 281–282n593, 300n665; gathering data on, 266–267n527; gatherings of people for, 267n531, 268nn533,536; and gender segregation at funerals, 280–281n590; and gesise, 84–85; guarding dead bodies, 270nn544,545; healing powers associated with the dead, 272n556; heaven and resurrection, 310–313; infant mortality, 73–74, 344n3; and Jewish cemeteries, 283nn597,598; and judgment, 301–302n672, 303n679; and mourning practices, 123n63, 250n476, 273nn557,558, 278nn577,578, 294–297, 294n647; prayers recited at death, 268n535; revival of dying persons, 267nn529,530; rituals and customs at death, 269nn540,542, 270nn543,546, 271nn548,549,550,551, 271–272n552; and the threshold, 268n537; treatment of the dead body, 269–282; and weddings, 213n358,

359

225n410; and the World of Chaos, 310n708; See also afterlife; burial practices; cemeteries Deborah, 311n713 deception used by An-sky, 22, 26–27 demographic trends and data, 59–60, 152n177, 234–235n441, 255–256n485 demons and demonic possession, 84, 124n69, 127n80. See also dibbuks Der Fraynd, 6 Der Mentsch, 72 Der Moment, 28 desertion of spouses, 251–253, 252n480, 253n483 Destruction of Galicia (An-sky), 322 Deutsch, Benno, 264n516 Deutsch, Simi, 95, 99 Deutsch, Tamar, 95 Deutsch, Zvi, 95, 311n712 dibbuks: and broken engagements, 206–207n332; described, 305– 306n687; exorcising, 48, 306n692; and gender of spirits, 306nn690,691; signs of possession, 306nn688,689,693; and women’s hair, 231n433; See also demons and demonic possession; The Dybbuk (An-sky) Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (Zeitlin and Buber), 53 Di gliklekhe muter (Berlant), 134n102, 135n105 Dinezon, Jacob, 38, 58 divination, 108n7, 264n517, 271–272n552 divorce, 248–250; and apostasy, 249n475; and bills of divorce, 309n706; common causes of, 248n473; conditional divorces, 253n482; and domestic violence, 238–239n449; get (bill of divorce), 87, 253n483; and infertility, 248n471; and levirate marriage, 62, 249n474; and marriage contracts, 232–233n437; rates of, 82–83, 204n323, 248n472, 345–346n11; and virginity of wife, 230n430; weddings of widows and divorcees, 234n440 domestic violence, 238–239n449, 239–240n450, 345–346n11

360

Index

Donbass-Dnepr Bend mining region, 2, 6 double consciousness, 10 Dov Ber ben Samuel, 42 dowries, 198nn304,305, 198–203, 199–200n311, 205n326 draft. See conscription dreams, 132n95 Dubnov, Simon: and collective action, 38; creation of the Jewish HistoricalEthnographic Society, 7–8, 22, 31; and the ethnographic questionnaire, 62; and Hasidic themes, 50; and the Jewish Academy, 67; and Jewish intellectualism, 9–10; Kiel on, 335n43; on matchmaking, 196n296; Nathans on, 329n21; on the Pale of Settlement, 7; on pogroms, 3; and political parties, 5, 32; and St. Petersburg conference, 58; on the United States, 315–316; and zaddikism, 41 Du Bois, W. E. B., 10 Duma, 307–308n699 Dvorkin, Ilya, 321 The Dybbuk (An-sky), 25–26, 36–37, 48, 74, 96, 195n295, 283–284n599 Dymshits, Valerii, 321–322 The Earth Is the Lord’s (Heschel), 316 “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” (Heschel), 316 Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden), 8, 29, 329n22 eating days, 80, 169n228, 176n245, 177n246, 201n317, 238–239n449 economic conditions, 197n298 Edison, Thomas, 23 education: of An-sky, 2; curriculums, 152–156, 164n210; female teachers, 186–187n267, 187n269; and gender issues, 76–77, 152n179, 182n255, 183n256, 184–191, 186nn265,266, 187nn268,269, 187–188n270, 188nn273,278,280, 200n312; and gymnasia, 189n280; Hebrew instruction, 184n257; and kest practice, 234–235n441, 235n442; and marriage, 199–200n311, 200n312; payment of teachers, 144n139, 147n159, 148nn163,164, 149n165, 150n174; professionalization of midwifery,

116n37; and religious practices, 143n136; rituals associated with, 146n149, 147nn153,156, 146– 147n152; and Talmud Toyre, 163n209, 163–164; and wealthy families, 189n279; See also kheyder; yeshivas Ein Yaakov, 37–38 emigration, 68, 86, 252n480, 255–256n485, 256n486 Engel, Yoel, 20–22, 25–26, 46–47, 58 Enoch, 304n683 entertainment at weddings, 211–213 epidemics, 258n492, 262nn512,513,514 Epstein, Moshe Mordechai, 303n679 Esther-Khaye the Zogerin, 273n558 ethics. See Musar (ethics) movement Ethnographic Museum (Saint Petersburg), 12 etrog, 112n22 Ettinger, Rosa, 57 eulogies, 285n609 Evil Eye: and child’s entry into kheyder, 145nn144,145; and modern medicine, 84; protections against, 74, 108–109n8, 118n45, 132–133n98, 259n496; remedies for, 140n123, 150n173, 186–187n267, 259n497, 260n501; signs of, 140n123; study of, 31, 258–259n495, 259n496 Evreiskaia Starina, 31, 63 Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii (Jewish Folk Songs in Russia) (Marek and Ginzburg), 20 Evreiskii Mir, 6 Evrei v ikh bytovoi i religioznoi zhizni (Jews in Their Daily and Religious Life) (An-sky), 57, 62 exorcism: An-sky’s focus on, 258– 259n495; in The Dybbuk, 48; and dibbuks, 306n692; and the Evil Eye, 140n123, 150n173, 186–187n267, 259n497, 260n501; and female healers, 26, 64, 68; and modern medicine, 84; rabbis famous for, 306–307n694 family life, 234–269; boarding the bride and groom, 234–236; and deserted spouses, 251–253, 252n480, 253n483; and the dying process, 266–269; husband and wife relations, 237–242; and illnesses, 258–266; and infertility,

Index

247–248; and inheritance, 253–254; and kinship, 246–247; and leading citizens, 254–256; parents and children, 243–246; and senility, 256–257; and weddings, 82; widows and widowers, 250–251; See also childbirth; children and childhood; divorce; marriage farzesene alte moyd (spinster), 191n286 fasting, 186–187n267, 213–214n360, 285n604 feasts: and the afterlife, 312n714; and betrothal ceremonies, 205n326; and burial societies, 274n560, 274– 275n562; and dedication of cemeteries, 285nn604,605; and redemption of the son, 133n99; and weddings, 81, 211nn350,351,352, 212n353, 212– 213n356, 213n357, 214n364, 222– 223n398, 227–233, 228n421, 231n431 feldshers, 260–261n502 fertility, 130n88 feudal system, 6 Fiddler on the Roof (play), 319 Fikangur, Isaac, 22, 44, 67 First Zionist Congress, 6 Flaherty, Robert, 28 Folkspartey, 5, 32 forshpil, 212n354 Forverts (the Forward), 317–318 Frank, Jacob, 68 Freeze, ChaeRan, 82 funding for expedition, 8, 10–11 games, 143n137, 161n204, 169–170n230 Garden of Eden, 107n4, 307n696, 310n709, 312n714, 313n719 garments, 27, 140n125 Gavriel, 284n600 Gehenna: and avenging angels, 307– 308n699; and the Garden of Eden, 313n719; length of judgment, 308n700, 308–309n704; origin of name, 307n695; punishments of, 307n698; rabbis visits to, 309n706; and the Sabbath, 308n703; size of, 307n696; structure of, 307n697 gemore kheyder, 154n184, 156n194, 156–157 gender issues: and birth of children, 74, 243n457; and cross-dressing, 181n253;

361

and dibbuk possession, 306nn690,691; and education, 76–77, 152n179, 182n255, 183n256, 184–191, 186nn265,266, 187nn268,269, 187–188n270, 188nn273,278,280, 200n312; female teachers, 76, 186–187n267, 187n269; and games and toys, 185n260; on gender preferences in childbirth, 108–109n8, 110n10, 243n457; and Heaven, 311n713; matchmakers’ gender, 198n303; naming of girls, 184n258; and performance of plays, 180n251; segregation by gender, 76, 280–281n590; and synagogue attendance, 185n261 Genesis, 33 genizah, 12–13 Geonim, 56 get (bill of divorce), 87, 253n483 gifts: and childbirth, 117nn39,40; and weddings, 207–210, 209n340, 212n355, 212–213n356, 228nn421,422, 232n436 Gintsburg, David, 66–67 Gintsburg, Goratsii (Naftali Hertz), 10 Gintsburg, Vladimir Goratsievich, 10–11, 31, 38–39, 51, 65, 330n29 Gintsburg family, 8, 336n56 Ginzburg, Louis, 37 Ginzburg, Shaul, 20, 58, 60, 331n2 godparents, 130n88 “going to the people,” 2–5, 7 golden weeks, 210 Goldfaden, Abraham, 139n119 Goldman, Emma, 41 Goldstein, Morris, 112n22, 121nn54,56, 122n60, 125–126n72 golems, 75 Goliath plays, 180n251 Gottesman, Itzik, 100, 159n199, 161n205 Gotlober, Avrom Ber, 200n312 goyses, 85 Grade, Chaim, 172–173n238 Graetz, Heinrich, 9 grandparents: and blessings, 247n467; and bringing children to kheyder, 145n143; and circumcision rituals, 129n85; and first haircuts, 105, 141n128; and the Jewish life cycle, 83; and midwives, 115n32, 116n36

362

Index

graves, 47–48, 282–289. See also cemeteries Greenbaum, Avraham, 175n243 Greenberg, Miriam, 95, 98 Grossman, Avraham, 238n449 Grunwald, Max, 30–31 Guardians of Faith Society, 194n292 Guenzburg, Shimon, 88 Gur-Aryeh, Yitzhak, 320, 349n17 Gurfinkel, Eilat, 332n11 ha-Hasid, Judah, 199n309 “Ha-Heder” (Lifshitz), 154nn184,185,186, 155n191, 157n197 haircuts, 77, 141nn126,127,128,130, 141–142, 142n131, 146n148 Ha-Kedem, 67 Halakhah: and aggadic traditions, 37–38; and childbirth, 119n49, 122–123n61; and creation of the Talmud, 56; and cultural transmission, 90; and death, 85; and domestic violence, 238– 239n449; and first haircuts, 141n126; and marital problems, 83; and marriage, 78; and minhagim, 88; and nursing children, 135n106; and Oral Torah, 97; and sforim, 100 halitsah, 249n474 HaMapah (Isserles), 56 Hananiah, Joshua ben, 313n718 handicaps, 114nn25,26 Hanukkah, 169–170n230 Haredi movement, 76, 79, 90–91, 96, 131n93 harelips, 114n25 Hashahar, 183n256 Haside Ashkenaz movement, 199n309 Hasidism: and An-sky’s methods, 27, 40–53, 96–97; and first haircuts, 141n126; and folk culture, 337n11; founder of, 54; and gender segregation, 76; and Jewish communities, 1; and Jewish folk culture, 20; and minhagim, 89; and Oral Torah, 65; questionnaire on, 67–68; and reincarnation, 305n685; and reparation of souls, 305n684; and tefillin rituals, 166n221, 167n222; and transmigration of the soul, 303n680, 304n683; See also Lubavitcher Hasidism

Haskalah movement: and An-sky, 2, 27; and educational reform, 155n191; and education of girls, 182n255; and kest practice, 234–235n441; and kinnus, 37; spread of, 183n256 Havdalah ceremony, 112n21 Haynt, 28 Ha-Zeman, 86 healers and physicians: bale shem, 30; and the evil eye, 140n123, 150n173, 186–187n267, 258–259n495, 259nn496,497, 260n501; feldshers, 260–261n502; female healers, 26, 64, 84, 259n498; as focus of expedition, 26; healing powers associated with the dead, 272n556; in Krinik, 259n497; payment of, 261n505; practices described, 258n494; regard for, 261n506; in Swislocz, 261n503; teachers as, 150n173 health issues: epidemics, 258n492, 262n512, 263nn513,514; and modern medicine, 84; and the Nursing Association, 265nn518,519; and racial theories of disease, 258n493; See also healers and physicians; illness and disease Heaven, 310n709, 310–313 Heavenly Court, 302–303n676, 303nn677,679 Hebrew: and Ashkenazi Jews, 106n2, 184n257; and assimilationism, 4–5; contemporary instruction in, 184n257; and corrupt expressions, 106; and education of girls, 188n273; and female literacy, 189–190n281; Hebrew Bible, 33; and kheyder studies, 155n190; and minhagim, 91–92; and Oral Torah, 34; and questionnaire translations, 30; and Yiddish, 97 hekdeshim, 256–257n488 Hell, 307n695, 307–310. See also Gehenna Hema (angel), 307–308n699 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 34 Herzog, Marvin, 319 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 20, 48, 316–317 hevra kadisha (“holy society”), 85 Hilkhot Shabbat (Maimonides), 122–123n61

Index

Hirsch, Francine, 62 “History of a Family” (An-sky), 6 hitpashtut ha-gashmiyut, 45 holidays: and kheyder, 143n135; and military service, 193–194n291, 194n292; and structure of The Program, 69; and the yeshiva, 80; See also Purim holiday Holocaust, 91, 315, 317 Horodets, 187n269 Horwitz, Yosef Yosl, 172n237 hospitals, 262nn510,511 Hyrcanus, Eliezer ben, 313n718 Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, 324 Ignatiev, Pavel Nikolayevich, 3–4, 5 illness and disease, 258–266; epidemics, 258n492, 262n512, 263nn513,514; healing powers associated with the dead, 272n556; in the Pale of Settlement, 258n492, 262nn512,513; and the Psalm Society, 264n515; and racial theories of disease, 258n493 Imperial Russian Geographical Society, 29, 31–32, 61–63, 65 impurity, 145nn144,145 infant mortality, 73–74, 344n3 infertility, 247n468, 247–248, 248n471 inheritance, 202n318, 253–254 inorodtsy, 28 instruction for the Ethnographic Survey, 105–107 Iokhelson, Vladimir, 58, 60, 62 Islamic tradition, 121n57, 136n110 Israel, 319 Israel Folklore Archives, 319 Isserles, Moshe, 56, 88, 122–123n61, 202n318, 283n598 Iudovin, Solomon, 60 Jabès, Edmond, 1, 72 Jerusalem, 290n629 jesters, 214n361 Jewish Academy (Saint Petersburg), 24, 52, 66, 79 Jewish Colonization Association, 58, 152n177, 186n265 Jewish Enlightenment, 44 Jewish Ethnographic Expedition: and An-sky, 6–15; dates of, 1; and the

363

Ethnographic Program, 13–14; fate of expedition materials, 320; folk legends on, 38–39; and the Hasidic movement, 40–53; launching of, 84; methods and goals of, 59–61; obstacles faced by, 19; official name of, 104; patronage for, 10–11; and questionnaire creation, 63; and spying allegations, 24, 318, 331n1, 332n12 “A Jewish Ethnographic Expedition” (An-sky), 28 The Jewish Ethnographic Program: and education, 76–77; and the ethics movement, 75–76; genesis of, 57–58; and Hasidism, 52; instructions for, 43, 64, 105–107; introduction to, 33; and Oral Torah, 41, 55; and oral vs. written sources, 87; precursors of, 63–65; primary purpose of, 55, 86; questionnaire creation, 52, 62–63, 65–69; structure of, 57, 72, 91; student contributors, 67 Jewish Ethnographic Society, 5, 10 “Jewish Folk Art” (An-sky), 28, 29, 32–33, 87, 91 Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society: and amateur ethnographers, 35; and An-sky’s methods, 27, 28, 315; creation of, 7–8, 22, 31, 315; establishment of, 7–8; and pinkas collections, 22; secretary of, 68 Jewish Instrumental Folk Music (Makonovetskii), 215–216n369, 216nn370,371 Jewish intellectuals, 41, 58 The Jewish Life Cycle (Sperber), 140n122 Jewish Magic and Superstition (Trachtenberg): on birth cauls, 121n55; on childbirth, 124n69; on conception of children, 111n16; on death rituals, 295n649; on determining sex of children, 108n7; on twins, 109n11; on unfavorable marriage pairs, 199n309 Jewish Museum (Saint Petersburg), 12, 36 Jewish Nationalism, 4, 5, 32, 37, 63. See also Zionism The Jew (periodical), 329n22 Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917 (Petrovsky-Shtern), 192n289, 193– 194n291, 194n292, 194–195n294, 345n8

364

Index

Joseph and Esther plays, 181n253 Judah the Prince, 55–56, 107n4 judgment, 301–302n672, 303n679, 308n700, 308–309n704 Jüdisches Leben in Wort und Bild (Sacher-Masoch), 61 Kabbalah: and first haircuts, 141nn126,128; and folk practices, 338n14; and ibbur, 305–306n687; Kotik on, 169n229; Lurianic Kabbalah, 42, 107n3, 303n680, 303–304n681; and marriage of widows, 250n476, 251nn477,479; and reparation of souls, 305n684; and tefillin rituals, 167n222; and theories of Gehenna, 309n705; and transmigration of the soul, 107n3, 303n680, 304n683, 312–313n717 Kaddish, 296n654 Kagan, Israel Meir, 193–194n291 Kamenetz, 263n513 Kaminka, 48–49 Kaminker, Shmuel, 48–49 Kan, Sergei, 70 kapelyes, 216n370 Kaplan, Mordechai, 36 Karo, Joseph, 56 Kashrut, 305n684 Katz, Dovid, 322 Katz, Naftali, 309n706 Katznelson, Lev, 67 Kerler, Dov-Ber, 322 Kerouac, Jack, 19 Kershenblatt, Mayer, 166n219 kest practice, 82, 234–235n441, 235nn442,443 Khaimovich, Boris, 321 khappers, 78, 193n290 kheyder: and An-sky, 2, 5, 25, 36, 76, 335n36; and Bar Mitzvahs, 164–167; and the Besmedresh, 167–170; and the bris, 128n82; and childbirth practices, 125–126n72; child’s entry into, 144n141, 145nn143,144,145, 146nn147,148, 146–147n152; curriculum of, 152–156, 154n188, 155n191, 164n210; daily schedule, 154nn184,185; and female teachers, 186–187n267, 187n269; food of, 149n168; furnishings of, 153n182;

games and toys, 161n204, 185n260; gemore kheyder, 154n184, 156–157, 156n194; and gender issues, 76, 152n179, 184–191, 186nn265,266, 186–187n267, 187nn268,269, 187–188n270, 188n273; and “Hear O Israel” recital, 126; and holidays, 143n135; introduction to, 144–150; location of, 153n181; manners in, 159–162; and the melamed, 125– 126n72, 150nn173,174,175, 150–152, 157n197, 160n200, 183; and military conscription, 191–194; number of kheyders in Russian Empire, 152nn177,178, 152–153n180; preparation for, 143–144; and punishments, 76, 144n140, 157–159, 157n197, 161n206, 164, 188, 188n278; raising of children prior to, 142–143; and secrecy, 159n199; and secular subjects, 182–184, 189n279; semester length, 153n183; and Shternberg, 61, 69; and structure of The Program, 72, 75–76; and Talmud Toyre, 163–164; tests in, 156nn192,193; See also behelfer; melamed Khmelnytskyi massacres, 68 Khsidish (An-sky), 40 Khurbn Galitsiye (The Destruction of Galicia) (An-sky), 96 Kiel, Mark, 335n43 Kiev province, 11 kinnus movement, 37, 38, 41, 89 kinship ties, 246n466, 246–247 Kirshenblatt, Mayer, 136. See also They Called Me Mayer July (Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 36, 166n219, 316, 335n48. See also They Called Me Mayer July (Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) Kisselhof, Zisman, 20, 22 klezmer music: revival of, 323–324; and weddings, 80–81, 216nn370,371,372, 215–216n369, 218n375, 225n410, 231n431 Klier, John, 6 Knight, Nathaniel, 32, 61 knots, 223n401 Kohanim, 46, 230n430 kohen, 133n99, 211n349

Index

kol isha, 19 kosher animals, 305n684 kosher dance, 220–221n388, 229nn424,425 Kotik, Yekhezkel, 85–86, 226n417, 263n513 The Kraków Wedding (play), 180n251 Kremenetz, 19, 22–23, 25, 43–45 Krinik, 259n497 Krol, M. A., 28 Kugelmass, Jack, 319, 321, 349n20 Kulisher, Mikhail, 58, 62 labor activism, 86 Lailah, 107n4 Lambroza, Shlomo, 5 Landau, Ezekiel Judah, 130n91 Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), 319–320 Lansky, Aaron, 350–351n31 Latvia, 322 Lavrov, Petr Lavrovich, 6 laws and legal codes, 56, 88, 238–239n449 The Legends of the Jews (Ginzburg), 37 Lekekh Tov, 156 Leviathan, 313n720 Levi Isaac ben Meir of Berdichev, 21, 48, 52, 313n720 levirate marriage, 62, 249n474 Leviticus Rabbah, 312n715 Levitow, Jon, 100 life cycle, 69, 72, 75, 77, 83, 91 Life Is with People project, 318–319, 323 The Life of “Ivan” (Shneider), 65 The Lifetime of a Jew (Schauss): on apostasy, 200–201n315; on burial practices, 290n629; on children learning to walk, 138n118; on cradling practices, 125n71; on first haircut, 141n128, 142n131; on funeral and burial practices, 290n629, 291–292n634, 292nn635,636, 293n644, 294nn645,646, 296n654; on kest practice, 235n443; on stepping over children, 137n114; on Torah learning, 200n313; on weaning, 134n102; on wedding rituals, 206n329, 207n334, 209n342, 214n364, 215nn365,366,367, 218nn377,378, 220nn383,386,387, 220–221n388, 223n401, 225n410, 232nn434,435,436, 234n440

365

Lilienblum, Moshe Leib, 196n296 Lilienthal, Regina (Lilientalowa), 31 Lilith, 124n69, 127n80, 137n111, 297–298n658 Limbo, 307–310 Liozno (town), 27, 44 Lipschutz, Shabbetai ben Jacob Isaac, 124n69 Lithuania: and derogatory expressions, 151n176; and Tatar populations, 260n500; and wedding rituals, 208–209n339, 221n391; and yeshivas, 79, 174n240; and Yiddish folklore, 322 Living Traditions, 324 “Local Historical Program” (An-sky), 86 local words, 106 Lomax, Alan, 21 Lomax, John, 21 Lubavitcher Hasidism: and An-sky, 40–41; Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, 40; and ethnographic expeditions, 321; and Lionzo, 27; and recent ethnographic expeditions, 321; and tefillin, 166–167n221, 167n222; and yeshivas, 174n240 Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, 127n77 Ludmir, 95–96, 121n54 Ludmirer Moyd (The Maiden of Ludmir) (Deutsch), 95–96 luftmensch, 6 Lukin, Benyamin, 32, 321 lullabies, 139n119, 316 Lunski, Chaim, 44 Luria, Isaac, 141nn126,127, 303–304n681 Macleod, Norman, 281n593 magical, 84 Mahaneh Israel, 193–194n291 Maiden of Ludmir, 99, 166n220, 247n468 Maimon, Solomon, 196n296, 226n417 Maimonides, 55–56, 122–123n61, 280n589, 312n715, 313n718 Makhover, Yona, 45 Makonovetskii, Avram-Yehoshua, 215–216n369 malekh-hamuves. See Angel of Death Malovany, Sheyne-Rokhl, 279n582 Mandelstam, Osip, 44

366

Index

Mapah (Isserles), 88 Marcus, George, 28, 333n22 Marcus, Ivan, 145n144 Marek, Peysakh, 20, 331n2 marriage: and abandoned spouses, 252n480, 253n483; and adultery, 240–241n452, 241n453; and aesthetic standards, 201n317; age for girls to marry, 77–78; arranged marriages, 80; and betrothal rituals, 205nn325,326, 206nn329,330,331; and broken engagements, 206–207n332, 207n333; children’s order of marriage, 244n461; and conditional divorces, 253n482; and conscription, 78–79; contracts, 204–207, 205n326, 232–233n437; between cousins, 199n307; desertion of spouses, 251–253, 252n480, 253n483; and divorce rates, 82–83, 204n323, 248n472, 345–346n11; and domestic violence, 238–239n449, 239–240n450; and dowries, 198nn304,305, 198–203, 199– 200n311, 205n326; goal of, 83; husband and wife relations, 237–242; and infertility, 248n471; and kest practice, 82, 234–235n441, 234–236, 235nn442,443; levirate marriage, 62, 249n474; and love, 195n295, 204n324; marital age among Jews, 197nn298,299,301; and men’s Torah study, 237n447; “panic marriages,” 197n300; prohibited pairings, 199n310; and public displays of affection, 237nn445,446; rates of, 191n287; and tefillin rituals, 166n221; value of yeshiva students, 199–200n311; and widows/widowers, 250n476, 251nn477,478,479; and yeshiva students, 178n247; See also matchmaking; weddings martyrdom, 194n293 Marxism, 2 Mashit (angel), 307–308n699 Maskilim: and burial practices, 276n567; and female education, 182n255, 183n256; and kest practice, 234–235n441; and marital value, 200–201n315; and matchmaking, 196n296; and yeshiva curriculum, 174n241

matchmaking, 198–203; and betrothal rituals, 205nn325,326; and children, 195–197, 196nn296,297; between cousins, 199n307; and dowries, 203n319; fees of, 198nn304,305; gender of matchmakers, 198n303; and love in marriages, 195n295, 204n324; and meetings of matched couples, 203n321; and yeshiva students, 80 material culture, 43, 61–62 maternal imprinting, 87, 344n4 Mayer of Apt, 288n620 May Laws, 1, 3 Mayse Bukh, 190n283 mazhinka dance, 214n363 Mead, Margaret, 318 Mekhiras-yoysef (play), 180n251 melamed, 150–152; and childbirth practices, 125–126n72; and nicknames, 160n200; and punishments, 157n197; side jobs of, 150n173; social background of, 151n175; wages of, 150n174 Me-minhagei Yisrael (Elzet), 230n429 Memoirs of a Grandmother (Wengeroff), 148n163, 149n168 menstruation, 77, 119nn49,50, 185n262, 208n336 mentsh, 75–76 messianism, 68, 313n720 metsitsah, 131n93 Mezibozh (town), 50 Midrashic collections, 56 Midrash Konen, 307n695, 310n709 midwives, 115–118; and the afterlife, 118n44; and “bobe” term, 115n32, 116n36; and contemporary practices, 98; death of, 117n42; and gender of newborns, 108–109n8; and guidebooks, 108n6; importance of, 74; inheritance of role, 115n31; midwifery as a mitzvah, 115n34; and miscarriages, 122n59; professionalization of, 116n37; Program questions on, 14; regard for, 115n33 military service. See conscription “milk siblings,” 136n110 Mimekor Yisrael (Berdichevsky), 37, 89 Miriam, 217n373 Miropol, 48–49, 52 miscarriages, 114nn26,27, 115n29, 122n59

Index

Mishnah, 34, 53, 55–56 Mishneh Torah, 55–57 Misnagdim, 68, 169–170n230 modernity and modernization: and divorce rates, 248n472; impact on matchmaking, 204n324; and modern medicine, 84; and old-age homes, 256–257n488, 257n489; and the yeshiva, 79–80 Moldova (Moldavia), 322 monotheism, 33 Monsey, 98 moonlight, 137n114 Mordecai and Esther (play), 180n251 Mordechai of Chernobyl, 247n468 mortality rates, 84, 255–256n485 Moses, 136n109 Moshe Mordechai of MakarovBerdichev, 52 Moshe Teiteilbaum of Ujhel, 122–123n61 Mount of Olives, 255–256n485 mourning practices, 294–297; length of mourning, 273n557; and professional mourners, 273n558; and rending garments, 278nn577,578; and returning souls, 294n647; and stillbirths, 123n63; and widows, 250n476 Moyde ani prayer, 142n133 moyels, 130n92, 131n93, 245n463 Muhammad (prophet), 121n57 mukat ets, 185n263 mundane aspect of the Program, 14 Muraevnia, 65 Musar (ethics) movement, 75–76, 172n237, 172–173, 179nn249,250 “Musarnikes” (Grade), 172–173n238 music: and the badkhn, 217n373; instrumentation of kapelyes, 216n370; and Jewish cultural identity, 331n2; musical transcriptions, 20; musicology, 20; and preservation efforts, 350–351n31; recordings of, 20–23; of weddings, 80–81, 215–216n369, 215–217, 216nn370,371,372, 218n375, 220n385, 220–221n388, 225n410, 229nn424,425, 231n431; See also klezmer music mysticism, 42, 199n309. See also divination

367

Nachman of Bratslav, 53 Nadezhdin, Nikolai, 32, 63 Nanook of the North (1922), 28 Napoleonic Wars, 68 Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), 4 narodniki (Russian Populists), 2, 4, 10 Nathans, Benjamin, 8, 329n21 Nathansohn, Joseph Saul, 110n11 nationalism, 4, 5, 32, 37, 63. See also Zionism National Yiddish Book Center, 324, 350–351n31 necromancy, 289n623 neshome, 57, 72–73, 111n20. See also souls newspapers, 175n243 Nicholas I, 78 nicknames, 160n200 Nikolaevskii, K. V., 65 nitl (Christmas Eve), 169–170n230 Noda bi-Yehudah (Landau), 130n91 Novardok yeshiva, 172n237 Noy, Dov, 50, 319 nursing, 133–137, 137–140; and “milk siblings,” 136n110; and Moses, 136n109; weaning children, 134nn102,103, 134–135n104; wet nurses, 135nn105,106, 136nn107,108 Nursing Association, 265nn518,519 October Revolution, 12 Office of Naval Research, 318 old-age homes, 83–84, 256–257n488, 257nn489,490 On the Road (Kerouac), 19 opsherenish (first haircut), 141–142; described, 142n131, 146n148; and the Jewish life cycle, 77; origins of custom, 141n126; participants, 141n128; performance of, 141nn127,130 Oral Law, 55 oral sources, 41 Oral Torah: and An-sky, 34–36, 41, 55–56, 65, 71, 334–335n42; background of, 54–59; and Jewish folk traditions, 65, 66; and minhagim, 92; and The Program, 14–15, 97, 103; and rabbinic Judaism, 34, 87, 103n1; and Yavneh, 58 Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), 8, 29, 329n22

368

Index

Pale of Settlement: and anti-Semitism, 3–4; and brothels, 242–243n455; cultural and religious divisions in, 64; described, 1; epidemics in, 258n492, 262nn512,513; and Gintsburg family, 38–39; and Hasidism, 41, 42; and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 6–15; population of, 7; poverty in, 5–6; and purpose of expedition, 104–105; and the Russian Revolution, 315; and Tatar healers, 260n500; western perceptions of, 29 Palestine, 255–256n485, 335n43 Passover, 144n139, 153n183, 193– 194n291, 207n334, 209n341 Pavoloch (town), 21, 23 Pentateuch, 125n71 People of the Book, 103 Peretz, I. L.; and activism, 30, 38; ethnographic surveys, 31, 85; and Hasidic themes, 40, 50; influence on An-sky, 337n10; and politics, 6; and the St. Petersburg conference, 58 Perezhitoe, 28 Petersburg Judaica Center, 322 Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. See Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917 (Petrovsky-Shtern); “We Are Too Late” (Petrovsky-Shtern) philanthropy, 10–11, 38–39. See also charity phonograph machines, 23–24, 47 photography: and composition of the expedition, 11–12; “ethnographic photography,” 60; and expedition tactics, 26; and funeral rituals, 273n558; and purpose of expedition, 105; and spying allegations, 24, 332n12 phylacteries, 166n220. See also tefillin pidyen ha-ben, 133, 133n99 Pinchuk, Ben-Cion, 328n16 pinkas (communal record books); of burial societies, 275–276n567, 277n571; collected by the expedition, 9, 11, 22, 68; and the Holocaust memorial book, 317; Ostraha Bikkur Holim pinkas, 265–266n522; and records of accidents, 185n263 Pirke Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”) (Ben Bag Bag), 66 Podolia province, 11

pogroms, 1, 3, 59, 185–186n264 Poland: and Ben Zokher custom, 126n75; ethnographic expeditions in, 31; and kest practice, 234–235n441; and Lithuanian Jews, 151n176; Polish uprisings, 68; and Tatar populations, 260n500; Tomaszow region, 30–31; and yeshiva movement, 174n240 polydactyly, 121n56 poorhouses, 256–257n488 Populism: and An-sky, 2–5, 6, 10, 35, 45; and Dubnov, 9; and Hasidism, 41–42; and minhagim, 88; and Shternberg, 4, 61, 69; and the St. Petersburg conference, 58 Postov, 239–240n450 poverty, 328n16 prayer, 46 pregnancy, 73–74, 107–115; and birthmarks, 111n17; and demons, 111n18; description of fetus in womb, 107–108n5; determining sex of child, 108n7; and diet of mothers, 111n19, 112nn21,22; and gender preferences, 108–109n8, 110n10; and guidebooks for mothers, 108n6; and physical appearance of children, 110nn14,15, 111n16; refusing requests of pregnant women, 113–114n24; and soul entering fetus, 107nn3,4; and twins, 110nn11,12, 111n13; See also childbirth; midwives press, 190n283 primitivism, 29 Program of Ethnographic Information about the Peasants of Central Russia (Tenishev), 63–64 pronunciations, 106, 106n2 prostitution, 242–243n455 Province Gendarme Administration, 19 Psalm Society, 264n515 public health, 84 punishments: and the Angel of Death, 301–302n672; and the Angels of Destruction, 310n708; and broken engagements, 206–207n332; of Gehenna, 307n698; and kheyder, 76, 144n140, 157–159, 157n197, 161n206, 164, 188, 188n278; and military service, 192–193n289 Purgatory, 307–310

Index

Purim holiday: and cross-dressing, 181n253; and messianism, 313n720; and the Purim rabbi figure, 180n252; and Purim shpiln, 180nn251,252, 181nn253,254 Rabad, 167n222 rabbinic Judaism: and abandoned spouses, 253n483; and the Angel of Death, 298n662; and custom books, 89; and domestic violence, 238– 239n449; and folk culture, 337n11; and the Heavenly Court, 302– 303n676, 303n677; and the Jewish Academy, 66–67; and kheyder studies, 155n190, 156; origin of, 58; and Shternberg, 69; and Written vs. Oral Torah, 34, 87, 103n1 race issues, 8, 329n22 Rachel, 285n609 Ramer, Samuel, 116n37 rape, 185–186n264 Rapoport, Shloyme Zanvil. See An-sky (Shloyme Zanvil Rapoport) Rapoports, 46–47 Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki), 166nn220,222, 167n222, 206–207n332 Ravnitsky, Yehoshua Hana, 37, 58, 89 Ravrebbe, Yekhiel, 67, 343n41 Rayzel, Miriam, 116n36 rebetsins, 76, 147n155, 152n179, 186–187n267, 187n268, 187–188n270 Rebekah, 222n394 recording of answers to survey, 105–107 recording technology, 11–12, 20–24, 26, 59 redemption mode of ethnography, 28, 333n22 reincarnation, 303–304n681, 305nn684,685 Reines, Yitzhak Yaakov, 175n244 “Reinventing Heders” (Zipperstein), 174n241 Rekhtman, Avrom: and compilation of The Program, 67, 69; on expedition practices, 27; and funeral customs, 273n558; on grave-robbing, 47–48; and healers, 258–259n495; immigration to United States, 320; memoir of

369

the expedition, 23–24; on recordings, 20; and spying allegations, 332n12 remedies, 26, 84, 186–187n267, 263n513. See also healers and physicians reshete and reshinke (cakes), 128n82 Reshumot, 319–320 Resurrection of the Dead, 310–313; and death of mothers in childbirth, 122–123n61; debate on, 313n718; and Gehenna, 313n719; and the Jewish life cycle, 85; origins of concept, 312n715; The Program’s focus on, 73; of those buried in Exile, 312n716; and transmigrations of the soul, 312–313n717; and Zionist settlers, 255–256n485 riddles, 161n205 Rituals of Childhood (Marcus), 145n144 Robakh, Berl, 191n287 Rogovoy, Seth, 323–324 Roman Empire, 58 Romantic Nationalism, 30, 34, 37 Rosh Khoydesh Shevat, 274n560 Rosh Yeshiva, 180n252 Roskies, David, 13, 328–329n17, 332n19 Roykhel family, 19–20, 22–23 Rozhinkes mit mandlen (“Raisins and Almonds”), 139n119 Rubin, Adam, 30 rural economy, 5–6 Russian Museum, 12 Russian Revolutions, 6, 25, 59, 68 Ruzhin, 21, 22, 23 Ryan, William Francis, 138n117 Saadia ha-Gaon, 304n683 Sabbath observances: and burial practices, 279n584; and childbirth practices, 122–123n61; and expedition practices, 25; and Gehenna, 308n703; and military service, 193–194n291; and newlywed women, 232nn434,435; and structure of The Program, 69, 77; and zaddikism, 53 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 61 Safran, Gabriella, 28, 333n25 Saint Petersburg, 8, 9, 51 Sakhalin Island, 69 Salanter, Israel, 75, 172n237 salvage mode of ethnography, 28, 333n22 sandek, 117, 129nn84,85, 130, 130nn90,91, 247

370

Index

Sapoznik, Henry, 323 Schauss, Hayim. See The Lifetime of a Jew (Schauss) Schechter, Solomon, 13 Schmelz, Uzriel, 255–256n485 Secret Political Police Department, 19 secularism, 175nn243,244, 182–184, 189n279, 200n313, 335n47 Sefer Ha-Aggadah (Bialik and Ravnitsky), 37, 89 Sefer Hasidim (ha-Hasid), 199nn309,310 Sefer Minhagim (Book of Customs), 57, 64, 87, 88–89, 91 Sefer Raziel, 111n19 Sefer Taame ha-Minhagim (“Reasons for the Customs”) (Sperling), 89 Seforim, Mendele Mokher, 86 senility, 256–257, 256n487 Sephardic Jews, 88 seven days of banquet, 227–233 sforim, 100 sgules: of Binele, 186–187n267; and childbirth practices, 129–130n87; etymology of term, 109n9; and the Evil Eye, 74; for health, 264n516; manuscript of, 52; and menstruation, 185n262; and pregnancy, 109n10, 112n22 Shabbes un Yontif (The Sabbath and Holidays), 69 shadkhn, 80, 206n329 Shalom Zokher, 126–128, 127n77 Shaykevitsh, Nokhem-Meyer, 190n283 shehekheyanu blessing, 122n58 Shenkursk, 118n44 Shimusha Raba tefillin, 167n222 Shir ha-Maalos, 111n19 Shir Hamayles, 125–126n72 shiva, 73, 294n647, 294–295n648 Shivhei Ha-Besht, 42, 54, 303–304n681 Shneider, Vavara, 65 shofar, 119–120n50, 122–123n61 shorabor, 313n720 shraybers, 160n201, 182n255 shraybn kvitlekh (writing petitions), 288n620 Shrayer, Shmuel: accounts of the expedition, 332n11; on An-sky, 338n22; and compilation of The Program, 67; on dibbuks, 206–207n332; and methods

of the expedition, 46–52; on police surveillance, 24 Shternberg, Lev: Amur River expedition, 32, 58; background, 69–71; compilation of The Program, 13; continued ethnographic work, 315; and goals of the expedition, 58–62; and Jewish ethnography, 28; and Populism, 4, 61, 69; and spying allegations, 24, 331n1, 332n12 shterntikhl, 208–209n339 The Shtetl Book (Roskies and Roskies), 180n251 Shulhan Arukh (Karo), 56, 87, 88, 122–123n61, 166n221 shvartse khasene (black wedding), 263nn513,514 Siberia, 28 silver weeks, 210 Singer, Isaac Bashevis (Yitshak Warshavsky), 317–318 Skvira, 21, 22 slave trade, 242–243n455 Slobodka, 173n237 Slotnick, Yehuda Leib, 110n15 Smolenskin, Peretz, 183n256 sneezing, 140n122 socialism, 175n243, 343n41 Socialist Revolutionary Party, 6, 10, 12, 19 social structure: and cemeteries, 287n617; and kest practice, 235n442; and the melamed, 151n175; and Torah study, 200n313; and yeshivas, 168n225 Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, 8, 152n177 sociology, 98 Sofer, Moses, 96, 131n93 Sokolov, Boris, 23, 25 Sokolov, Yuri, 23, 25 Soloveitchik, Haym, 90 somatic anthropology, 59 souls: at death, 85, 267n531, 269n539, 300n666, 300–301n669; and decay of the body, 297n657; in Gehenna, 307–308n699, 309n707; neshome yetira (extra soul), 111n20; and pregnancy, 107, 107nn3,4,5; repair of, 305n684; return to grave site,

Index

300n667; during shiva, 294n647; and structure of The Program, 57, 72–73; and transmigration, 107n3, 303n680, 303–304n681, 304n683 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 10 Soviet Union, 12, 315, 320–322 Spain, 9 Speke, John Hanning, 7 Sperling, Abraham Isaac, 89 spinsters, 191n286 spying allegations, 24, 318, 331n1, 332n12 Stampfer, Shaul, 83–84 Stanley, Henry Morton, 1, 7 Statman, Andy, 323 stepping over children, 137n114 stillbirths, 123nn63,64, 285n608 strikes, 178n248 Strom, Yale, 323 Survey of the Ethnography of the Jewish Population in Russia (Berlin), 29–30 swaddling clothes, 129n86, 137n112 “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish community” (Ian), 181n253 sympathetic magic, 109n9 synagogues: and Ark of the Torah, 120n53; and birthing practices, 124n69; and circumcisions, 129n83; as focus of expedition research, 11, 25, 27, 44–45, 50, 57, 61, 66, 68; and gathering of the dead, 302n675; and gender issues, 185n261; and genizahs, 13; and loss of folk culture, 55, 104–105; and minhagim, 88; and philanthropy of Gintsburg, 10; and weddings, 81 Tales of the Hasidim (Buber), 89 Talmud: and batei midrash, 168n225; and kheyder curriculum, 155n191, 156; legal sections of, 38; and model for The Jewish Ethnographic Program, 57; and Musar movement, 172n237; and oral tradition, 65, 334–335n42; origin of, 34, 56; and rabbinic Judaism, 58; on resurrection, 313n719; and structure of The Program, 14; Talmud toyres, 163n209, 163–164, 164n210; and yeshiva study, 178n247 Tam, Rabbenu, 166n221, 167n222 Tanakh, 155n191, 170n232

371

Tatar healers, 83–84, 260n500 teacher’s assistants, 148–150. See behelfer teething, 134–135n104, 137n115, 138n116 tefillin, 91, 165nn213,214, 166nn220,221, 167nn223,224 Tenishev, Viacheslav Nikolaevich, 63–65 They Called Me Mayer July (Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett): on aesthetic standards, 201n317; on bar mitzvahs, 166n218; on cemetery weddings, 263n513; on circumcisions, 131n93; on gender preferences in childbirth, 243n457; on gifts at births, 117n39; on gifts at bris, 128n82; on healers, 258n494; on hospitals, 262n510; on matchmaking, 203nn319,321; on the Messiah, 313n720; on midwives, 117n38; on prayers for the dead, 286n614, 288n620; on Purim shpiln, 180n251, 181n254; on swaddling cushions, 129n86; on tombstone carving, 296n656; on water carriers, 201n316; on weaning children, 134–135n104; on wedding processions, 222–223n398; on wet nurses, 136n108 Thomas, Kevin Tyner, 37 thresholds, 114n25, 132–133n98, 138n118, 226n415, 268n537 Through the Dark Continent (Stanley), 1 Tian-Shanskaiai, Olga Semyonova, 65 Tisha be-Av, 286n614 Tishevitz, 125–126n72 Titus, 58 tkhines (supplicatory prayers), 109n8, 112n22, 120n53, 273n558 Tomaszow region of Poland, 30–31 Tomchei Temimim, 174n240 “tooth mouse” tradition, 138n117 Torah and Torah study: and Angel of Death, 298n662; background of, 54–55; and cholera epidemics, 263n513; and Christmas Eve, 169–170n230; on filial piety, 83; and kest practice, 234– 235n441, 235nn442,443; and marriage arrangements, 197n299, 237n447; and minhagim, 88, 92; and Musar movement, 172n237; and social status, 200n313; as subject of The Program,

372

Index

Torah and Torah study (continued) 33–37; and theories of Gehenna, 309n705; and wimpels, 137n112; Written Torah, 54–55, 71, 103; See also Oral Torah Trachtenberg, Joshua. See Jewish Magic and Superstition (Trachtenberg) trades, 164n211 tradition, 335–336n50 translation process, 95 transmigration of the soul, 107n3, 303n680, 303–304n681, 304n683, 312–313n717 Tree of Souls (Schwartz): on conception of children, 107n4; on location of Gehenna, 307n695; on punishments of Gehenna, 307n698, 307–308n699, 308n703; on rabbis entering Gehenna, 309n706; on size of Gehenna, 307n696 Tsam, Gertsel, 194–195n294 tsedakah, 81. See also charity Tsene-rene, 189–190n281 Tsimbl, Malkah, 217n373 Tsodek, Khane, 187n269 Tsvey martirer (An-sky), 194n293 Tub, Yitshak, of Kaliv, 42 Twersky, Yohanan, 320, 349n17 twins, 110n11 Tyrnau, Isaac, 88–89 Ukraine, 129–130n87, 209n339, 322 Unger, Menashe, 41 Unheroic Conduct (Boyarin), 201n317 United States, 86, 252n480, 257n491, 315–316, 319, 323 Uspensky, Gleb, 4 Vakhnakht ritual, 126–128, 127n78 Vaynshteyn, Levi Yitzhak, 51–52, 68–71 Veidlinger, Jeffrey, 322 Vermel, Samuel, 59, 60 Vernadsky Library, 12, 52 Vilnius Research Institute, 322 virginity, 185n263, 230n430 Vishnevets (town), 24 Vital, Hayim, 303–304n681 Vitebsk, 2, 40, 46 Volhynia province, 11 Volksgeist, 34 Volkskunde tradition, 61

Volozhin, Hayim, 171n234 Volozhin yeshiva, 170n234, 171n234, 180n252 vulgar language, 107 Wajcblum, Usher (Asher), 203n319 Warsaw, 12 Warshavsky, Yitshak (Isaac Bashevis Singer), 317–318 water-carriers, 201n316 wax cylinder recordings, 20–23 weaning children, 134nn102,103, 134–135n104 “We Are Too Late” (Petrovsky-Shtern), 335–336n50, 337n10 weddings: and aliyah, 211n349; and arrival at the canopy, 222–223n398, 223n402; and authority in marriage, 226–227n417; and the badkhn, 217nn373,374, 219n381; behelfer’s role, 148n161; and the bride’s hair, 220n384, 231nn431,432; and bridesmaids, 224n404; and bride’s party, 218n378; broken glass tradition, 206nn329,330, 225n408; and calling the groom, 210–211; in cemeteries, 213n358, 233n439, 263n513; ceremony, 222–227; and charity, 214n364; and cholera epidemics, 263nn513,514; clothing of, 208n338, 222n394; and dangers faced by grooms, 210n346; and dead relatives, 213n358, 225n410; and destruction of the Temple, 222n397; and dowries, 198nn304,305, 198–203, 199–200n311, 205n326; and entertainment, 211–213; and exchange of letters, 209n342; and “farewell meal,” 232n436; and fasting, 213–214n360; feasts and foods, 81, 211nn350,351,352, 212n353, 212–213n356, 213n357, 214n364, 222–223n398, 227–233, 228n421, 231n431; and fertility, 212n353; and focus of ethnographic study, 80–82; and forshpil, 212nn354,355; garments of, 208n337, 209n341; and gifts, 207–210, 209n340, 212n355, 212–213n356, 228nn421,422, 232n436; and groom’s entourage, 218n377; and groom’s mother, 211n350; and jesters, 214n361; and

Index

kest practice, 234n441; Lithuanian customs, 208–209n339, 221n391; and marriage contracts, 204–207, 205n326, 232–233n437; and mazhinka dance, 214n363; music and dance of, 80–81, 215–216n369, 215–217, 216nn370,371,372, 218n375, 220n385, 220–221n388, 225n410, 229nn424,425, 231n431; placement of the canopy, 224n403; references and interviews, 203–204; and responses to ethnographic surveys, 318; return from wedding ceremony, 225–226n413, 225n412; and ritual cleansing, 208n336, 214n362; rituals of wedding day, 213–215, 218–222; and Sabbath observances, 232nn434,435; “seating of the bride” ritual, 219n381, 220n387; shvartse khasene (black wedding), 263nn513,514; and silver and golden weeks, 210, 210n343; and skotsl kumt, 219n382; timing of, 207n334, 208n335; unusual weddings and vows, 233–234; veiling of the bride, 221n390, 222n394; wedding night, 229n427, 230n429; of widows and divorcees, 234n440; See also marriage; matchmaking Weinreich, Uriel, 319 Weissenberg, Samuel, 58, 60 Wengeroff, Pauline, 85 Wertheim, Shimon Shlomo, 285n609 wet nurses, 133–137, 135n105, 136nn107,108 widows, 250n476, 251nn477,478,479, 255–256n485 widows and widowers, 250–251, 250n476 Williamsburg neighborhood, 96, 98 wimpel, 137n112 Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism), 9, 37 World of Chaos, 310n708 World War I, 11, 13, 69, 72, 96 World War II, 317 writing skills, 160n201, 182n255, 183n256 Written Torah, 54–55, 71, 103 yarmulke, 142n132 Yavneh, 57–59 yawning, 140n123

373

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 59 The Yeshivah (Grade), 172–173n238 yeshivas, 170–182; background of, 79–80; curriculum of, 174n241, 175n244; and eating days, 80, 169n228, 176n245, 177n246, 201n317, 238–239n449; funding for, 171n234; in Lithuania, 79, 174n240; and marriage, 78, 178n247, 199– 200n311; and mashgichim, 171n235; and Musar movement, 172n237, 179nn249,250; and Purim shpiln, 180n251; and revolutionary activity, 170n233; and social stratification, 168n225; and strikes, 178n248; student life in, 168n226; Volozhin yeshiva, 170n234, 171n234, 180n252 Yiddish: and An-sky’s writings, 6; and assimilationism, 4–5; and education of girls, 188n273; and ethnic identification, 350n28; and expedition practices, 25; and female literacy, 189– 190n281; and Hasidism, 41, 44; and Hebrew characters, 97; and kheyder studies, 154n187; and military service, 192–193n289; and popular literature, 86; and pregnancy guidebooks, 108n6; and preservation efforts, 323; and publications for women, 185n262; and Purim plays, 181n253; and Sefer Minhagim (Book of Customs), 88–89; and stereotypes of Jews, 3; term for spinster, 191n286; and translation of the questionnaire, 30; Vilnius Yiddish Institute, 322; and writing skills, 183n256 Yiddish Radio Project, 324 Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO): and An-sky’s collections, 12; and ethnographic questionnaires, 139n121, 266–267n527; and materials from The Program, 320; and memorial books, 317; and Yiddishist studies, 99 Yidishe etnografye un folklor (Rekhtman), 320 Yidish Filologye, 31 “Yidl Mitn Fidl” (Schulman), 201n317 yizker bikher (memorial books), 100, 317, 343n42 Yochanan ben Zakkai, 58–59 Yochelson, Vladimir, 4, 28

374

Index

Yohanan, Rabbi, 87, 110n15 Yom Kippur, 247n467 Yuditsky, Avrom, 52, 67–68, 85–86, 315 Yudovin, Shlomo, 24, 25 Yugntruf (youth organization), 323 zaddikism: and burial practices, 286n610, 302n673; and cemetery dedications, 284n601; and death of zaddiks, 300n668; as focus of expedition research, 47–50, 52–53; and Gehenna, 309n705; and Hasidism, 41–42, 45; and Heaven, 310n709, 310–311n710, 311n711, 312n714; and transmigration of the soul, 304n683 Zakhor (Yerushalmi), 59 zamlers, 35, 315, 324 Zborowski, Mark, 318

Zeitlin, Hillel, 53 Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 58 Zevi, Sabbatai, 68 Zhitlovsky, Chaim, 2–4, 10, 41, 57, 335n43 Zhitomir, 24, 69 Zhivaia Starina (Living Heritage), 63 Zilbershteyn, Aharon, 216n372 Zionism: and Jewish cultural identity, 6, 32; and kheyders, 152n178; and political parties, 5; and settlement of Palestine, 255–256n485, 256n486, 335n43; and topics in The Program, 57, 68 Zipperstein, Steven, 318, 319 Zisha of Annipol, 45 Zlotnick, Yehuda Leib, 347n24 Zohar, 87, 107n3, 251n477 Zundelevitch, Aaron, 4

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