Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860-1890 (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art)

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 s