Sholem Aleichem and Qumran: Jewish-Related Scholarship in the Soviet Union, 1953–1967

Abstract

The Jewish academic centers established in the early Soviet state functioned almost exclusively in Yiddish and had eclipsed or subdued the remnants of Jewish studies pursued at academic and independent organizations of the pre-1917 period. In Kiev, the most vigorous of the new centers developed ultimately into the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (IJPC), a structural unit of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. By 1934, the IJPC had on its payroll over seventy people in academic and administrative roles. Two years later, however, the Stalinist purges of the time had consumed the IJPC and sent many of its employees to prison to be later sentenced to death or gulag.1 In Minsk, the authorities similarly destroyed the academic Institute of National Minorities, which mainly dealt with Jewish-related research.2 By this time, all Jewish (in fact, Yiddish-language) educational institutions, including university departments, ceased to exist. Some scholars moved to other fields of research or left academia entirely. Soviet school instruction and cultural activity in Yiddish emerged in the territories of Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states, forcibly acquired in 1939 and 1940, but after June 22, 1941, all these disappeared in the smoke of World War II. However, the IJPC had an afterlife: in the fall of 1936, the authorities permitted the formation of a small academic unit named the Bureau (kabinet) for Research on Jewish Literature, Language, and Folklore. The Bureau endured until 1949, when it fell victim to a campaign that targeted the remaining Jewish institutions. In the same year, the authorities closed the Lithuanian Jewish Museum,