Archival Communities

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 social and economic classes in a time of change, a generation of thinkers forced to radically assert their self-hoods.
Questionable People locates the common ground between the social and intellectual histories of Jewish modernization.