Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860-1890

di Svetlana Natkovich (Autore)

Syracuse University Press, 2025

In the 1860s, a series of reforms imposed by Tsar Alexander II dramatically began modernizing and reshaping life in imperial Russia. However, for a generation of Jewish artists and intellectuals educated under earlier doctrines, the reforms became an opportunity to interrogate and construct a new view of Jewish identity. Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860–1890 explores how these young intellectuals, the maskilim, used self-expression, fashion, dress, and their artistic work to define themselves. Differentiating themselves from what came before, maskilim crafted Jewish identities within a modernizing Russia. While many surveys of the Great Reforms and Jews in the Russian Empire examine assimilation and urbanization, Questionable People focuses on the reformers themselves, their self-construction and work as unique to their era, rather than part of a larger transitional moment. Svetlana Natkovich analyzes the maskilim as a group existing between social and economic classes in a time of change, a generation of thinkers forced to radically assert their self-hoods. Questionable People locates the common ground between the social and intellectual histories of Jewish modernization.

• Autore: Svetlana Natkovich
• Editore: Syracuse University Press
• Collana: Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art
• Anno: 2025
• Rilegatura: Hardback
• Pagine: 277 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 152 mm
• EAN: 9780815638605

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