A Squabbling Brothers and Overarching Unity:  the Image of the ‘Ideal Jew’ as an Expression of   National Self-Consciousness among Russian-Jewish Intellectuals  in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century

Brian Horowitz

doi:10.31261/IR.2025.14.07

Published: 2025-12-30

2025

A Squabbling Brothers and Overarching Unity: the Image of the ‘Ideal Jew’ as an Expression of National Self-Consciousness among Russian-Jewish Intellectuals in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century

Brian Horowitz

Section: Articles

https://doi.org/10.31261/IR.2025.14.07

Abstract

This article examines how Russian-Jewish intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – liberals, Zionists, and Bundists alike – constructed the figure of the “ideal Jew” as a model of national self-consciousness. Despite ideological conflicts, these groups shared a vision of a modern Jew who embodied both Russian and Jewish cultural orientations. The ideal Jew was imagined as an educated, socially responsible individual, capable of elevating the Jewish masses, articulating communal values, and serving as a prototype for collective regeneration. Tracing this figure from the Haskalah of the 1860s and 1870s, through the rise of Jewish nationalism after 1882, and into the post-1917 emigration, the article shows how attitudes toward Russian culture, diasporic identity, and nostalgia shaped the evolving conception of Jewish selfhood. By analyzing literary criticism, historiography, social theory, and journalism, it reveals a persistent pattern of synthesis, Russian and Jewish, cosmopolitan and national, underpinning intellectual debates across generations.

Keywords:

Russian-Jewish intelligentsia , Ideal Jew , Jewish nationalism , Haskalah , Diaspora identity , Russian-Jewish press

Download files

PDF

Citation rules

Horowitz, Brian. 2025. “A Squabbling Brothers and Overarching Unity: the Image of the ‘Ideal Jew’ As an Expression of National Self-Consciousness Among Russian-Jewish Intellectuals in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century”. Iudaica Russica, December, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.31261/IR.2025.14.07.

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.

References

Grigorii Aronson, “Zhizn’ I deiatel’nost’ Leontiia Moiseevicha Bramsona,” Evreiskii mir: sbornik 1944 goda, New York, [republished by Gesharim, Jerusalem 2001, pp. 13–119.
Google Scholar

Boym, S., The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Google Scholar

Brenner, J. H., Out of the Depths and Other Stories, D. Patterson and E. Spicehandler, eds., New Milford: Toby Press, 2008.
Google Scholar

Dinur, B., Bīmē milḥamā ū-mahpek̲ā: Zikhronot u-reshumot me-derekh ḥayyim (5674–5681), Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1960.
Google Scholar

Dubnov, S., Kniga zhizni: Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia, 3 vols., Riga, 1934–35 (vols. 1–2); New York, 1957 (vol. 3). Republished by Moscow – Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2004.
Google Scholar

Dubnov, S., “Chto takoe evreiskaia istoriia? Opyt kratkoi filosofskoi kharakteristiki,” Voskhod, 1893, no. 1, pp. 111–114.
Google Scholar

Dubnov, S., Ob izuchenii istorii russkikh evreev i ob uchrezhdenii russko-evreiskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, St. Petersburg, 1891.
Google Scholar

Dubnov, S., Pis’ma o starom i novom evreistve, 2nd ed., St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1907.
Google Scholar

Dubnov, S., “Sabbatai Tsevi i psevdomessianizm v 17 veke.” Voskhod, 1882, no 7 and 8, p. 137.
Google Scholar

Dubnov, S., “O rasteriavsheisia intelligentsii.” Voskhod, 1902, no 12; reprinted in Pis’ma o starom i novom evreistve, 2nd ed., St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1907.
Google Scholar

Engelstein, L., “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia.” The American Historical Review 98, 1993, no 2, pp. 338–340.
Google Scholar

Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Vintage Books, New York 1980.
Google Scholar

Frankel, J., Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1981.
Google Scholar

Friedgut, T. H., Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, 1881–1891 & Recollections of a Communist. Academic Studies Press, Boston, 1914.
Google Scholar

Garkavy, A., “O iazyke evreev, zhivshikh v drevnee vremia na Rusi, i o slavianskikh slovakh, vstrechaemykh u evreiskikh pisatelei.” Trudy Vostochnogo otdela Imperatorskogo Arkheologicheskogo Obshchestva, 1865, p. 3.
Google Scholar

Ginsburg, Sh. “O russko–evreiskoi intelligentsii.” Evreiskii mir, no 1, Paris 1939, p. 40.
Google Scholar

Gorny, Y., Converging Alternatives: the Bund and the Zionist Labor Movement, 1897–1985. State University of New York Press, Albany 2006.
Google Scholar

Halpern, B. and Jehuda R., Zionism and the Creation of a New Society. Brandeis University Press, Hanover and London 2000.
Google Scholar

Horowitz, B., “Poet and Nation: Fame and Amnesia in Shimon Frug’s Literary Reputation.” In Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Russia. Slavica, Bloomington 2009, pp. 51–64.
Google Scholar

Horowitz, B., “Mandarin Jew: Herman Rosenthal’s Peculiar Eastern-European Legacy in Progressive-Era New York (1881–1917).” American Jewish Archives 65, 2013, no 1 and 2, pp. 45–71.
Google Scholar

Jabotinsky, V., Piatero. Ars, Paris 1936.
Google Scholar

Kel’ner, V. E., Missioner istorii: zhizn’ i trudy Semena Markovicha Dubnova. Mir, St. Petersburg 2008.
Google Scholar

Klausner, J., Historiyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-hadashah. 6 vols. Ahi’asaf, Jerusalem 1949–1954.
Google Scholar

Klier, J. D., “State Policies and the Conversion of Jews in Imperial Russia.” In Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia. R. P. Geraci and M. Khodarkovsky, eds., Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 2001, pp. 92–112.
Google Scholar

Klier, J., “The Concept of ‘Jewish Emancipation’ in a Russian Context.” In Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, O. Crisp and L. Edmondson, eds. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1989, p. 144.
Google Scholar

Klier, J., “The Jewish ‘Den’ and Literary Mice, 1869–1872.” Russian History 10, 1983, no. 1, pp. 31–49.
Google Scholar

Levin, V., “Russian Jews and the First Three Dumas: the Elections and the Jewish Question in the Dumas (1906–1912).” An M.A. thesis, Hebrew University, 1998 (in Hebrew).
Google Scholar

Levin, V., “Jewish Politics in the Russian Empire during the Period of Reaction, 1907–1914.” A PhD thesis, Hebrew University, 2007 (in Hebrew).
Google Scholar

Levin, V., “The Folks-Partey of Simon Dubnow – a Story of Failure?” Tsion, 1912, no 3, pp. 359–368.
Google Scholar

Lestschinsky, J., Jewish Migration for the Past Hundred Years. Yiddish Scientific Institute, New York, 1944.
Google Scholar

Medem, V., Vladimir Medem zum zviantsikstn yortseyt. American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, New York 1943.
Google Scholar

Nathans, B., Beyond the Pale: the Jewish Encounter with Late-Tsarist Russia. University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2002.
Google Scholar

Niger-Charney, S., “Simon Dubnow as a Literary Critic.” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 1946, no 1, pp. 305–317.
Google Scholar

Orshansky, I., Evrei v Rossii: ocherki i issledovaniia. St. Petersburg, 1872.
Google Scholar

Orshansky, I., “Russkoe zakonodatel’stvo o evreiakh.” Evreiskaia biblioteka, 1875, no. 3, pp. 92–95.
Google Scholar

Polishchuk, M., Evrei Odessy i Novorossii: sotsial’no-politicheskaia istoriia evreev Odessy i drugikh gorodov Novorossii, 1881–1904. Gesharim, Jerusalem 2002.
Google Scholar

Rabinovich, O., “Odessa.” Rassvet, 1860, no 7, p. 101.
Google Scholar

Rabinovich, O., “Intelligentsiia.” Rassvet, 1860, no 31, p. 492.
Google Scholar

Shapira, A., Land and Power: the Zionist Resort to Force. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto 1999.
Google Scholar

Stanislawski, M., For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry. Oxford University Press, New York 1988.
Google Scholar

Zipperstein, S., “The Politics of Relief: the Transformation of Russian Jewish Communal Life during the First World War.” In Jews and the Eastern European Crisis, 1914–1921, J. Frankel, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 22–40.
Google Scholar

2025
Published: 2024-12-31

ISSN: 2657-4861

eISSN: 2657-8352

10.31261/IR

Publisher

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

Licence CC

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Submit