Introduction

The Introduction surveys the languages, media, and politics of Jewish primitivism and defines it in relation to modernist primitivism more broadly. Jewish primitivism redirected toward the self the dominant European primitivism that valorized racial and ethnic difference. Further, while typical European primitivism figured European aesthetics and society as challenged by the savage other, the identification of Jewish with primitive identity placed primitive aesthetics in the heart of Europe. Jewish primitivism spanned Yiddish, German, and Hebrew, and extended from central to eastern Europe; it expressed a powerful critique of the aesthetics as well as the politics of Jewish cultural nationalism. The necessity of social and cultural inclusion in Europe is questioned in Jewish primitivism even as the project is premised on that very inclusion. This account of Jewish primitivism reorients the scholarly perspective that views the place of primitivism in discourses on power, race, and colonialism strictly in terms of alterity.