Jewish Primitivism

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or “primitive” tribesmen, using ethnographic and folkloristic tropes as a way of negotiating their position as insider-outsiders in Europe. Samuel Spinner argues that in literature, graphic art, and photography, Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present in Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. Jewish Primitivism introduces this concept to the existing body of scholarship on modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literature and culture. Drawing on works from Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, Elsa Lasker-Schüler and others, Spinner investigates the relationship between Jewish artistic production and modernism, and reorients the scholarly understanding of primitivism and “otherness” in European modernity.