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Background
Russian Empire had large Jewish population in the so-called Pale of Settlement, territory between the Baltic and Black seas where Jews can settle, in the territory of modern Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, and Latvia. Around five million Jews lived there at the beginning of the 20th century, another two million emigrated to America before the October Revolution of 1917.

S. An-sky was born and raised in the Pale, in the territory of modern Belarus; his native tongue was Yiddish. He had a cheder education, but he left Vitebsk in 17, learned Russian and joined narodniki, and became known as a Russian author. He was, and considered himself, an assimilated Jew. He moved to the Donbas region in the spirit of the Going to the People movement, popular among narodniki, and changed his Jewish name, Shlomo Rappoport, to more Russian "Semen An-sky". To him, and to other members of Jewish intelligentsia, Jews of the Pale of Settlement were not interesting, some did not considered them a people or a nation, some thought that Yiddish was "a hybrid unnatural tongue" and Hebrew a dead language.

An-sky left the Russian Empire in 1892 for France and Switzerland, and returned back only after the Revolution of 1905. He did some ethnographic work before, mainly among Russian workers and peasants. He now realized, through the works of Jewish authors like I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, that Jews were "a people and, just as importantly, that they were his people", and in 1907 he decide to "go to the Jewish people".

In 1891 historian Simon Dubnow, also an assimilated Jew born and raised in the Pale, directly compared the Pale of Settlement with the "dark continent" of Africa, and called for ethnographic studies of the region and its people. Dubnow founded the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society in 1908 to promote such studies. For An-sky, the expedition was not only a scientific study; he believed that shtetl life was eroded by modernization and thus vanishing, and that folk art gathered in the Pale of Settlement can "provide the basis for a revived national culture".

An-sky's expedition to the Pale was not the first ethnographical study of Eastern European Jews. Moisei Berlin published first ethnographic study of the Jews of the Pale in 1860s. In 1901, Peysakh Marek and Shaul Ginzburg published Jewish Folk Songs in Russia, that contained "hundreds of songs sent to them by Jewish zamlers (collectors) throughout the Pale of Settlement". Max Grunwald (rabbi) founded the first Jewish museum in and the first Jewish foklore society in Hamburg in 1890s. In 1890, Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz conducted an ethnographical study of the Jews from Tomaszow region of Poland, commisoned by the banker Jan Bloch to "combat anti-Semitic charges of economic parasitism". Bloch also funded Andrei Subotin's expedition, who published two-volume book In the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1888-1890.

Expedition and members


Before the expedition took place, An-sky gathered a conference in Saint Petersburg on March 24– 25, 1912 with prominent participants to discuss it. Among the attendees were historian Simon Dubnov, anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg, ethnographers Vladimir Jochelson and Lev Shternberg, historian Shaul Ginzburg, musicologist Yoel Engel, attorney Mikhail Kulisher, Maksim Vinaver, David Maggid, and others. It was decided that a questionnaore should be created, that should have been sent to communities not visited by the expedition. Despite An-sky's idea to gather folklore, Shternberg argued that statistics and physiological measurements are more important. Engel insisted that a phonograph need to be included to the expedition to record local songs and melodies.

Baron Vladimir Gintsburg, son of Jewish philanthropist Horace Günzburg (Naftali Hertz), donated 10,000 rubles for the expedition to the Pale of Settlement. With this donation, An-sky gathered more than 20,000 rubles, and the expedition was officially called "The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in Honor of Baron Naftali Hertz Gintsburg".

An-sky was quite nervous before the expedition, and wrote about in a letter to Vladimir Gintsburg, on June 30, 1912: "I am very nervous, as if standing before the great unknown. How will this all turn out? Will I be able to gain the trust of the poor and primitive people from whose ranks I myself have come but whom I left so far behind over these past years? ... And yet, at the same time, I have a great feeling of joy in my soul, that the most treasured dream of my life is beginning to come to fruition."

Between 1912 and 1913, An-sky traveled through Podolia and Volhynia. In the first season, from July to October 1912, they visited 15 shtetls, and in the second season, June–November 1913, another 60. His team included artist and photographer Solomon Yudovin (An-sky's nephew), musicologists Yoel Engel (for the first season) and Susman Kiselgof (for the second season), and ten students of The Higher Courses in Eastern Studies, founded by Baron David Gintsburg. Three students, Avrom Rechtman, Yitskhok Fikangur, Shmuel Schreier, took part in the second season of the expedition. Others are Sh. Vaynshtayn, Avrom Yuditsky, Sh. Lakshin, Y. Luria, Y. Neusikhin, Y. Kimelman, Yekhiel Ravrebbe. Five students were from Hasidic shtetls, and two (Ravrebbe and Shrayer) "received rabbinic ordination". Levi Yitzhak Vaynshteyn was the secretary of the expedition.

The expedition began on July 1, 1912, when An-sky, Yudovin, and Engel departed on a train from Kiev to a station near Ruzhin. An-sky planned to visit "three hundred of the most important Jewish communities throughout the Pale", but because of multiple problems and the outbreak of the war, they were able to visit just around 60 or 70 shtetls.

An-sky's team tried to pay for the stories and songs in some shtetls, and sometimes local children invented such songs to get money. Gathering of women's traditional songs was usually difficult, because it wasn't customary to Jewish women to sing in the presence of men, and considered immodest. In some shtetls women completely refused to sing, in some they refused to be recorded. When the expedition reached a shtetl, they showed phonograph to locals, usually singing something with a intentional mistake and then playing it back to the people; usually everyone except for rabbis were very impressed. Though all members of the expedition were Jews, they all were assimilated. They spoke only Yiddish in shtetls, even though Yoel Engel had rudimentary knowledge of it. An-sky also insisted his tem to "act Jewish": everyone was required to observe Shabbat while in shtetl; it meant, for example, no smoking, because it is forbidden to lit fire on Shabbat. An-sky especially wanted to get pinkasim (record books), and often persuaded people to get them. Some members of the expedition were arrested by local police as spies. Some locals though that they were actors, or even that An-sky was a cantor accompanied by his choirmaster.

An-sky concealed his Socialist revolutionary and writer fame, and was called by his Jewish name in shtetl, or simply "Reb Shlomo". He had a beard, wore a black coat and a hat, and was sometimes welcomed "with the kind of respect they [Hasidim] typically accorded to a holy man", and sometimes even treated as a tzaddik, "because his public persona during the expedition tapped into pre-existing models of Hasidic holiness", as An-sky had almost no belongings besides his valises with books and papers. According to Shrayer, An-sky forgot everything from his Jewish childhood, and remembered only one prayer, Psalm 104 ‘Borchi nafshi’ [‘Bless the Lord, my soul’], that he used instead of all other prayers when he visited synagogues. However, Engel's writing doesn't support this account.

An-sky was eager to gather as much material as possible, often employing what Deutsch calls "ethnographic performances". Rechtman describes their approach later in his memoir, published in 1958:

"Almost every shtetl in Ukraine had its old women whom people went to for advice in times of crisis. ... These women performed magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient. ... We employed strategies to get these old women to tell us their charms. Sometimes one of us would pretend to be ill, take to bed and call for the healer. ... Another member of the expedition generally sat in a corner, trying to write down everything he heard while the photographer took pictures. Often An-sky would go to one of these old healers and complain that he was suffering continual bad luck; he told them that he had once been a rich man, a merchant, and now—alas—he was poor, fallen on hard times, without an income. And having explained why he had come to ask her for help he would ask her to give him some magic spells to help him find a way to earn a living. An-sky was always careful to mention that he was not looking for charity but ready to pay for her services. His broken voice and his straightforward story nearly always produced the desired result. The old woman would get caught up in the story and start to pity her client, hoping later to be able to ask for more money. Having haggled over the price, the old woman would reveal her secret spell and An-sky would write it down."

An-sky considered Jewish folk traditions he wanted to gather as an "Oral Torah". An-sky was especially interested in Hasidim, especially in their oral tales; in the instructions to the questionare he implicitly said that the fieldworker need to ask whether the story is oral, if the respondent read it somewhere, there were no need to record it. Hasidim themselves were interested in gathering their own folk songs, tales, and religious artifacts, but were surprised to see a group of assimilated Jews from St. Petersburg interested in it. Shrayer invented a story that was approved by locals, but was mostly fake (An-sky was poor, though he indeed was childless): "Reb Shlomo Rapoport was one of the wealthy residents of Petersburg and since he was childless, he had taken a vow to collect the remnants of the antiquities of the Jewish people, in order to show the nations and their neighbors the beauty of the ‘Congregation of Israel.’ This story found favor with them, and we not only gained the trust of the Hasidim but also of the rabbis."

With the outbreak of the World War I, An-sky decided to finish the expedition and went to the shtetls of Galicia with a relief mission. At the same time, he continued to collect stories and salvaged the artifacts, sending them to the museum in St. Petersburg. He published a book about it later; historian Amos Morris-Reich described it as "a catalogue of the unprecedented forms of barbarism inflicted on Jews". His three-volume book was titled Khurbn Galitsiye (The Destruction of Galicia).

Collection


An-sky was interested in all kinds of artifacts. Shrayer and Avrom Rekhtman recalled gathering kvitlekh, notes that Hasidim brought to the zaddiks' graves, that were usually burned. Shrayer wrote about this as "[we] robbed the graves of the zaddikim". Other unusual artifacts that were gathered include "the broken skull from Chmielnitsky's time that An-sky dug up himself or the petrified finger that An-sky purchased from an old man in Proskurov, who had amputated it in order to avoid conscription into the tsar’s army (normally, severed limbs would be saved and buried along-side the individual so that the entire body would be intact for the Resurrection of the Dead)". Besides, they took around 2,000 photographs, collected 700 "ritual and everyday objects (at a cost of 6,000 rubles)", 500 manuscripts, including pinkasim, recorded 1,800 folk tales, legends, folk songs and melodies. Joel Engel visited only four shtetls and made 44 phonograph records, before he cut the journey in July 1912 because of the family matters. In the next season, Susman Kiselgof became responsible for the recordings. In total, thay made more than 500 phonograph records of music.

Yudovin museum curator, Odessa

After ... the materials were forgotten and were thought to be lost. They were stored in several museum collections until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Deutsch called the gathered recordings, photographs, and documents a "time capsule", an "ethnographic equivalent of a genizah", and compared it to the Cairo genizah. The Vernadsky Library in Kiev and the Russian Museum of Ethnography in Saint Petersburg hold the majority of materials.

Music
Phonograph recordings and notes collected during the expedition ended up in the Vernadsky Library in Kiev. It was digitised and transcribed in the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project started in 2020 and supported by the Klezmer Institute. The collection includes "850 high-resolution photographs of handwritten music manuscripts and catalog pages, with a total of around 1,300 melodies". The library has 26 notebooks that Kisselgod filled during the expedition, and a catalog based on this notebooks created by Moshe Beregovski in 1930s. In 1938, Avrom-Yeshieh Makonovetsky prepared a manuscript based on the notebooks and the catalog.

Photography
Solomon Yudovin, An-sky's 20-year-old nephew, was the official photographer of the expedition. Yudovin was a student of Vitebsk artist Yudel Pen, and learned photography working in a photographic studios. His photographs are different from "traditional expedition photography". Morris-Reich writes that there is no clear distinction between scientific and artistic photos made by Yudovin, and that he "sometimes mixed genres within the same photograph", given as an example a "photographs of a Jewish blacksmith from Slavuta, which merges racial discourse, revolutionary Russian iconography, and ideas of Jewish productivity", and even that Yudovin's "racial type photographs of Jewish blacksmiths thus partook of the language of socialist propaganda". Morris-Reich also notes that Yudovin photographs were not stricly scientific photographs of "racial type". He "treated the subjects gently, with empathy, reverence, even intimacy", and as a result, his photographs "were free of exoticization and strove instead to normalize Jewish visibility".

Photographs made during the expedition are in the collections of several museums in Russia (Russian Museum of Ethnography), Israel (Israel Museum, Archive of the History of the Jewish People at Giv'at Ram, Jerusalem), the US, and in private collections. There is no full catalogue of the photographs. Yudovin became a well-known artist later, highly influenced by his experience during the expedition. After the 2009 book Photographing the Jewish Nation that gathered around 170 photographs, Yudovin was called simultaneously "a brilliant young photographer", and An-sky's "teenage nephew ... merely a photographer on demand" by different reviewers. Yudovin's photographs were compared to Alter Kacyzne's Roman Vishniac's, and W. E. B. Du Bois'.

Composition
As early as 1910, An-sky decided to write a book on Jewish ethnography. Later, he wanted to write a more extended study in five volumes, and in 1916 he aimed for 40 volumes. None was written. Avrom Yuditsky, one of the students who helped An-sky to gather questions, was asked to create a special questionnare, titled "Hasidim". It wasn't used, and now can be found in Vernadsky Library in Kiev. Another questionnare, "Local Historical Program", was distibuted during the expedition. It contained questions not only about Jewish life cycle, but also about important historical events and figures like Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, 1648 Khmelnytsky pogroms, 1812 war with Napoleon, blood libels, pogroms, emigration to America and other.

An-sky did not invent ethnographic questionnares, Russian and French ethnographers already used similar ones. Notable examples include 1848 Nikolai Nadezhdin's program focused in Russian peasants, and 1896 Viacheslav Tenishev's Program of Ethnographic Information about the Peasants of Central Russia, that consisted of around 2,500 questions. Another example is Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaiai's ethnographic study that also used a questionnare, made during four years in a several local villages around her family's estate. The results of the study was publsihed in 1914, after Semyonova death, titled The Life of "Ivan": Sketches of Peasant Life from One of the Black Earth Provinces.

Initially, An-sky wanted to create a program of 10,000 questions, but soon decided that it was "impractical", and decided to divide it into two parts. Only the first one was finished. An-sky wrote the program in 1914, after the expedition, with the help of ethnographer Lev Shternberg, though his involvement is questionable. The program was written in Yiddish and titled "Dos Yidishe Etnografishe Program" ("The Jewish Ethnographic Program"). The first volume, titled "Der Mentsch" ("The Person") and devoted to the traditional Jewish life cycle, was published in St. Petersburgh in 1914, but wasn't distributed because of the war. The second volume, "Shabbes un Yontif" ("The Sabbath and Holidays") was not finished. The first volume has 2,087 questions, divided into five parts: the Child, from the Kheyder to the Wedding, the Wedding, Family Life, and Death.

Besides the materials gathered during the expedition, Yekhezkel Kotik's autobiography can be a source used for the questionnaire. Avrom Yuditsky reviewed Kotik's book for the Vilna magazine Ha-Zeman in 1913. Unlike the smaller "Local Historical Program", "Der Mentsch" has no questions about contemporary life like political parties and labor activism, or emigration to America.

The program was never never distibuted because of the World War I. In 1920s, YIVO institute in Vilno used parts of the program and collected answers for the questions from the "Death" part.

Selected questions from the Program

 * 5. The Angel of Death, the Dumah [Guardian Angel of the Dead], the Soul after Death, Gilgul, Dybbuk
 * 1967. How do people picture the Angel of Death? His appearance, his characteristics?
 * 1968. What weapons or instruments does the Angel of Death employ: a sword or poison or both together?
 * 1974. Is it possible to fool the Angel of Death? What stories do you know about such cases? Do people think that you can fool the Angel of Death by changing your name?
 * 2006. What does the Khibit-ha-keyver [beating after death] consist of? Which Angels of Destruction [Malakhe-Khabole] punish the dead man? How long does the beating last?
 * 2017. Can a dead man come before the Celestial Council of Justice or go to the Patriarchs and Matriarchs to intercede for living people if he wants to or only if he is summoned to the Celestial Council of Justice?
 * 2023. Is there a belief that because of certain sins a [deceased] person must return to the world in the form of a human being, an animal, or a bird in order to expiate his sin?
 * 2025. Is there a belief that a sinner can be reincarnated as a tree or another kind of plant?
 * 2026. Is there a belief that he can be reincarnated as a rock?
 * 2035. What does a dybbuk normally say and shout?


 * 7. Paradise, Resurrection of the Dead
 * 2065. How do people imagine the place where Paradise is located?
 * 2066. Where is the Earthly Paradise? Where is the Supreme Paradise?
 * 2071. Does the Lord of the Universe ever visit Paradise?
 * 2072. Does he study [the holy texts] with the tsaddiks?
 * 2076. Is there a special Paradise for women, and how does it differ from the one for men?
 * 2083. If a dead person has been reincarnated several times, in which body will he come alive at the Resurrection?
 * 2087. What will life be like after the Resurrection?

Translation and modern reception
David Roskies wrote that An-sky "turned the fieldworker's questionnaire into a modern epic". Nathaniel Deutsch, who translated and annotated the questionnare to English, calls it "one of the most illuminating, idiosyncratic, and, until now, unplumbed portraits of this complex reality that anyone has ever created". He notes that Jewish life in the Pale is mostly unimaginable to modern Americans: "From the vantage point of twenty-first-century America, where death has largely been relegated to the hospital instead of the home, cemeteries are no longer a significant space for most communities or individuals, and the dead survive as a memory, if at all, the world depicted in The Jewish Ethnographic Program might as well be Mars in terms of the multiple and meaningful ways that death and the dead are portrayed as inflecting daily life."

Deutsch translated and annotated the program, and it was published as The Jewish Dark Continent in 2011. Deutsch writes that he consulted with Hasidim in New York, with elderly Jews who emigrated to the US from the shtetls visited by An-sky, and with professional Yiddishists. He called the translation and annotation process a "reverse-engineering" of its composition. Deutsch's book received positive reviews.

After the expedition
Though An-sky's expedition and questionnare were unprecedented in scale, and An-sky himself is often called "the father of Jewish ethnography", his influence on the field was described as negligible. Nevertheless, Kugelmass calls An-sky a "progenitor" of Jewish anthropology. Eastern European Jewry was studied after the October Revolution that demolished the Pale of Settlement; YIVO was one of the main engines of such studies. After the World War II and the Holocaust, shtetl life was completely destroyed. Multiple memorial books about the former communities were published by survivors or people who emigrated before; one of the most influential books about shtetl life was 1952 Life Is with People by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Uriel Weinreich and Marvin Herzog founded the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ) at Columbia University in New York; they also employed a "questionnaire of more than two hundred pages" and gathered hundreds of hours of interviews in Yiddish. Kugelmass compares An-sky's program and with Barbara Myerhoff's book Number Our Days.

El Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Ryback traveled through shtetls in Belarus in ..... The expedition was probably funded by Jewish Ethnographic Society. They visited Cold Synagogue, Mogilev, ...

Of the An-sky's expedition members, Yitzhak Gur-Aryeh (Fikangur), moved to Israel, and published a translation of 400 questions in Hebrew. Abram Rekhtman moved to the United States in 1916. He published his memoirs about the expedition in 1958, ''Yidishe etnografye un folklore: zikhroynes vegn der etnografisher ekspeditsye ongefirt fun Sh. An-ski'', in Buenos-Ayres in Yiddish, under the pen name Dr. Zamler. The book was almost unknown and wasn't republished. It was digitised in 2009; English translation was published in 2021. The book was called "a suture across the aura of myth and fantasy in which the fabled An-sky ethnographic expeditions have been suspended".

Ethnographers in the Soviet Union started their field work in the former settlements of the Pale in the end of 1980s, few years before the collapse of the USSR. Among them were Valerii Dymshits, Benyamin Lukin, Boris Khaimovich, and Ilya Dvorkin. Vilnius Research Institute interviewed "hundreds of individuals" in 2002-2009, that are now in the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories.