Questionable People

Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860-1890

Svetlana Natkovich

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780815657378
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

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 selfhoods. Questionable People locates the common ground between the social and intellectual histories of Jewish modernization.

Table of contents

• Natkovich-Cvr Idea #1b_REV_Cropped_Flat
• Natkovich Final