Jewish Ethnographic Expedition

Led by the writer and social activist S. An-sky, the expedition was motivated by concerns that the modernization of Eastern European Jewish life was rapidly erasing centuries-old customs, folklore, and religious practices.

The Pale of Settlement, home to millions of Jews, was seen as a critical area for capturing authentic Jewish traditions that had been largely insulated from the influences of urbanization and assimilation.

Jews that were subjects of the Empire could settle only there, in the territory of modern Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, and Latvia, but not in Russian cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg.

[3] For An-sky, the expedition was not only a scientific study; he believed that shtetl life was eroded by modernization and thus vanishing, and that folk art gathered in the Pale could "provide the basis for a revived national culture".

Joel Engel, who would later join An-sky in the expedition, was an active member of the society, as well as Lazare Saminsky, Mikhail Gnesin, Joseph Achron, Solomon Rosowsky, Alexander Krein, and others.

[10] In 1890, Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz conducted an ethnographical study of the Jews from Tomaszow region of Poland, commissioned by the banker Jan Bloch to "combat anti-Semitic charges of economic parasitism".

... 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.Between 1912 and 1913, An-sky's team traveled through Podolia and Volhynia regions.

[25][26] When the expedition reached a shtetl, they showed phonograph to locals, usually singing something with an intentional cough or laugh and then playing it back to the people; usually everyone, even the rabbis, were very impressed.

After that many people wanted to be recorded; some called Thomas Edison, the phonograph's inventor "bal-moyekh [a man with brains], or ayzerner kop [a great head], a Yiddish metaphor for an exceptionally smart person."

These women performed magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient.

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.

Having haggled over the price, the old woman would reveal her secret spell and An-sky would write it down.An-sky considered Jewish folk traditions he wanted to gather as an "Oral Torah" (Toyre shebalpe).

Shrayer invented a story that was approved by locals, but was mostly fake (An-sky was poor, though he indeed was childless):[32] 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.Overall, the expedition of 1912 was conducted on July 1 to October 15, and of 1913 from June to September 20.

As the war began in 1914, nearly one million Jews lived in Galicia alone (approximately twelve percent of its population), a region of Austria-Hungary occupied by the Russian Empire.

Jewish civilians of the region suffered from enemy bombardment while simultaneously facing systematic persecution from Russian military forces, who viewed them as potential German sympathizers.

In August 1915, mounting humanitarian concerns and international pressure led the Tsar's Council of Ministers to provisionally expand the borders of the Pale of Settlement, though Jews still had no rights to settle in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

This created what contemporaries called a "new Pale", where displaced Jews faced overcrowding, poverty, and continued discrimination in their new settlements, where they were considered an "outsiders ... branded as traitors and spies".

Peretz and Yankev Dinezon, published an appeal to people in two Yiddish newspapers, Haynt and Moment, to record their wartime experience and send it to the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society:[39][40][41] Become historians yourselves!

An-sky compiled his 1915 wartime diary into a book in Yiddish;[h] historian Amos Morris-Reich described it as "a catalogue of the unprecedented forms of barbarism inflicted on Jews".

Ethongrapher Lev Shternberg, who previously worked with An-sky and also became a representative of the Jewish Committee, traveled to Lithuania, where he witnessed and documented the expulsion of the whole population of the shtetl Onikshty.

[63][l] The Jewish-American composer Aaron Copland attended Habima's performance in New York in c. 1925–1927, and was inspired by Engel's music for his piano trio "Vitebsk: A Study on a Jewish Theme".

[68][n] Avrom Yuditsky, a student of the Higher Oriental Courses, who assisted An-sky with a smaller questionnaire, worked for Bundist newspapers and gathered information on pogroms in Korsun, Smel, and Cherkassy during WWI.

[22] Besides Engel and Kiselgof composers Lazare Saminsky and Hayim Kopyt from the Society for Jewish Folk Music worked with the collected songs, notating and transcribing them.

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 forever.

Unlike the smaller "Local Historical Program", "Der Mentsch" has no questions about contemporary themes like political parties and labor activism, or emigration to America.

[21] He notes that Jewish life in the Pale is mostly unimaginable to modern Americans: 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.

It had no questions but was an "outline for collectors" on two pages and 34 sections like ‘onomastics and dialect’, ‘literature’, ‘belief and legend’, ‘tradition and custom’, ‘augury, magic and folk-medicine’, ‘house-building and folk-costume’.

In the Russian Empire, Hebrew writers from Odessa Alter Druyanov, Haim Nahman Bialik and Yehushua Hanna Ravnitski created a questionnaire in 1914, similar to Grunwald's "in its emphasis on genres and its lack of question-marks".

Hungarian folklorist Bernhard Heller [de] published his questionnaire in 1930, with questions related not to folklore, but "to the house’s furniture, jewelry, clothes, crafts".

[124] Gabriella Safran writes that the purpose of An-sky's expedition was "to depict and to mourn a Jewish way of life that they perceived as dying", the approach called "salvage ethnography".