The Plausibility of Jewish Primitivism

Chapter 2 analyzes Jewish primitivism in the works of the Yiddish writer S. An-sky and the German-Jewish writers Alfred Döblin and Joseph Roth. While European primitivism generally suppressed the subjectivity of the “primitive” in order to objectify it, Jewish primitivism paradoxically both suppressed and revealed the potential for equality between the civilized writer and the savage Jew, blurring the border between observer and observed. Jewish primitivism was thus a “plausible” primitivism, which manifested in literary projects that contained two contradictory but equally necessary parts: on the one hand, a range of belletristic genres presented an idealized vision of Jewish primitivity; on the other hand, travelogues foregrounded the reality of European Jewish life. Together, suspended in mutual opposition, these genres expressed Jewish primitivism.