Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860-1890 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780815638605)

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.

Author: Svetlana Natkovich
ISBN-10: 0815638604
ISBN-13: 9780815638605
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/16/2025
Format: Hardcover