The Beginnings of Jewish Primitivism

Abstract

Chapter 1 shows how an incipient Jewish literary modernism based on the aesthetics of romantic nationalism was challenged by the emergence of avant-garde primitivist critique. The folklore-inspired Jewish literature of the turn of the twentieth century was influential culturally and politically, in its contribution to the formation of a modern Jewish literary canon. But it also prompted a backlash by members of the avant-garde who cast the Herderian folklorism of the neo-Romantics as mere “stylization” and called for the aesthetic, but not its subject matter, to be discarded. This critique opened the door to a Jewish primitivism that sought to push beyond neo-Romantic aesthetics while remaining ambivalent about its ethno-nationalist politics.