Myths and counter-myths about Odessa’s Jewish intelligentsia during the late Tsarist period

This paper examines the Odessa myth in the context of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. In a study of three contexts – the origins of the Russian-Jewish newspaper Rassvet; the (fictional) memoirs of Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Mendele Mocher Sforim (Solomon Abramovitch) who made Odessa their home; and the 1902 debates over schools in the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia – Horowitz discovers that for every myth, there is a counter-myth. Jewish Odessa of the nineteenth century was involved in a battle over its identity and definition. Rather than embodying a single ideological position, the Jewish intelligentsia tells a messy, complicated, and contradictory story of the development of the city and the evolution of the intelligentsia itself

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Intelligentsia · Judaism · Mythology · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Classics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law

• Leon Pinsker's Autoemancipation! and the Emergence of German as a Language of Jewish Nationalism

  Open Access•Marc Volovici•Central European History•2017

  Add to list