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Background

Pale of Settlement map, showing the percentage of the Jewish population in 1884

Pale of Settlement

Expedition and members

Susman Kiselgof

Between 1912 and 1913, An-sky headed an ethnographic commission, financed by Baron Vladimir Günzburg and named in honor of his father Horace Günzburg, which traveled through Podolia and Volhynia in the Pale of Settlement. They documented the oral traditions and customs of the native Jews, whose culture was slowly disintegrating under the pressure of modernity. According to his assistant Samuel Schreier-Shrira, An-sky was particularly impressed by the stories he heard in Miropol of a local sage, the hasidic rebbe Samuel of Kaminka-Miropol (1778 – May 10, 1843), who was reputed to have been a master exorcist of dybbuk spirits. Samuel served as the prototype for the character Azriel, who is also said to reside in that town.

Collection

Members of the S. An-sky's ethnographic expedition, 1914. From left to right: Abraham Rechtman, Solomon Yudovin, S. An-sky, Sholem Aleichem and his wife Olga Rabinovitch, Moisei Ginsburg

Questionnaire

According to Nathaniel Deutsch, An-sky's ethnographic program is the most comprehensive study of Eastern European Jewish life. An-sky composed a detailed ethnographic questionnaire of 2087 questions.

Before setting out on the expedition, An-sky had hoped to visit three hundred of the most important Jewish communities throughout the Pale, but logistical problems, including an ever-dwindling budget, forced him to scale back. Nevertheless, over the course of three seasons, before the outbreak of World War I put an end to their groundbreaking work, An-sky and his intrepid team of musicologists, photographers, and fieldworkers traveled to over sixty towns in three provinces of the Pale—Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev—where many of the oldest and most culturally signifi cant shtetls were located. There they took more than two thousand photographs of people, cemeteries, synagogues, and other sites, were given or purchased seven hundred ritual and everyday objects (at a cost of 6,000 rubles), collected five hundred manuscripts, including numerous pinkasim, transcribed eighteen hundred folktales, legends, and proverbs, fifteen hundred folk songs, and one thousand melodies, and recorded five hundred wax cylinders of music.
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The Jewish Ethnographic Program is an encyclopedic ethnographic questionnaire consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish. Its ambitious size and scope inspired David Roskies, the scholar whose poetic meditations on An-sky first introduced him to a new generation of English readers, to write that An- sky “turned the fieldworker’s questionnaire into a modern epic.” Beginning with the soul before it enters the body, ending with the soul once it leaves the body, and covering an enormous range of topics in between, The Jewish Ethnographic Program not only represents the most comprehensive portrait of life and death in the Jewish Pale of Settlement produced by An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition but also one of the most illuminating, idiosyncratic, and, until now, unplumbed portraits of this complex reality that anyone has ever created. This is the case despite the fact that An-sky never received any responses to the two-hundred-page questionnaire after it was published in 1914.

Selected questions from S. An-sky's questionnaire.

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?

6. Gehenna, Kafakál [Limbo, Purgatory; also the Infernal Punishment in Which Evil Spirits Hurl the Soul Back and Forth]; The World of Chaos

• 2042. How do people picture the place where Gehenna is located?
• 2044. How do people picture the Seven Halls of Gehenna?
• 2062. How do people picture the World of Chaos?

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?

Sources

• Rechtman, Abraham (2021). The lost world of Russia's Jews: ethnography and folklore in the pale of settlement. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253056948.
• Deutsch, Nathaniel (2011). The Jewish dark continent: life and death in the Russian pale of settlement. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674047280.
• Safran, Gabriella; Zipperstein, Steven J., eds. (2006). The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-4527-7.
• Avrutin, Eugene M., ed. (2014). Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expeditions. Brandeis University Press. ISBN 978-1-61168-683-8.
• Neugroschel, Joachim, ed. (2000). The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A Haunted Reader. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815628712. Retrieved 16 June 2024.