Jewish Primitivism by Samuel J. Spinner (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Primitivism by Samuel J. Spinner Talia Katz Samuel J. Spinner. Jewish Primitivism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2021. 272 pp. What is at stake in anthropological descriptions of difference? How might we consider what descriptions of difference reveal about their author? At a time when it has come to feel that to simply describe exotism or the denial of coevalness (Fabian 1983) of one's interlocutors does not get anthropologists far enough, Jewish Primitivism—a text written by a literary studies scholar about early twentieth century European ethnography of Jewish life—offers the discipline a treasure-trove of insights through which to re-approach long-standing anthropological debates around questions of otherness, catastrophic violence, the subject/object division in ethnography, and reason/unreason in anthropological knowledge production. Samuel Spinner's highly original first monograph develops the concept of "Jewish Primitivism" to characterize the varied media created by Jewish artists and writers (who partake in diverse political projects) as they grapple with acute precarity. This reckoning and creating takes place in a milieu of intensifying European ethno-nationalisms, forms that depend upon the "creation of ineradicable difference—between the Jew and the Christian, between the Volk and everyone else, between the civilized and the primitive" (2). Importantly, Jewish Primitivism is thus characterized by its self-directedness: Western European Jewish artists activated a critique of the hollowness of European modernity via descriptions of the Ostjuden (literally "Jews of the East," meant to refer to Hassidim and other Eastern Jewish communities taken to be more "traditional" than their assimilated, Jewish brethren in the West). As Spinner explains, "unlike European primitivism more broadly, which sought to replace the European subject with the Primitive Object, Jewish Primitivism was the struggle to be both at End Page 425 once" (4). While both Folklorism and Primitivism take up an idea of traditional Jewish peoplehood, Folklorism reifies a notion of the collective for the sake of nationalization projects while the self-reflective stance of Primitivism complicates any given notion of identity. That being said, as Spinner shows in Chapter 5, this self-reflective stance cannot be said to lead in any one direction as Jewish Primitivists participated in a diverse array of political projects. The book, based on a literary review of ethnographic and literary texts from the early to mid-nineteenth century, tracks how the aesthetic and the political become hooked into one another as Jewish artists and thinkers negotiate life in the shadows of catastrophic pogroms and other forms of anti-Jewish violence post-World War I and with the Holocaust looming. Jewish Primitivism powerfully shows that Primitivisms can be more than just an internalization or replication of racisms. The map of concepts Spinner lays out requires understanding of a few key distinctions. Primitivism and Folklorism (discussed in Chapter 1) are distinguished by their stance towards their object. Primitivism and Exoticism (discussed in the Conclusion) are distinguished by the respective presence or absence of a critical self-posture towards modernity. Anthropologists may particularly appreciate Chapters 1 and 2 (for the discussion of genres of ethnographic writing beyond/beside realism), as well as Chapter 6 (for the discussion of ethnographic photography and Spinner's engagement with James Clifford). The book's (often humorous) descriptions of the ethnographers' trials and tribulations as they attempt to invoke interviews and participant observation know a great Hassidic Rebbe make spaces for critical reflection on the practice of ethnography. It is worth highlighting two vital interventions that Spinner makes through his conceptual apparatus and methodology. First, "Jewish Primitivism" is a concept formulated with existential stakes. In Spinner's words, it was "an urgent response to the urgent challenges of European Jewish life" (9). While not wanting to subject the artists, and Rabbis, writers, painters, photographers, sculptors featured across these pages to the monograph to the axe of premonition, it is difficult to read the text without worrying for their fates. By the time one reaches the Conclusion, which takes up the limits of Jewish Primitivism after the Holocaust, almost all of those featured in the preceding chapters likely have been displaced, murdered, or otherwise suffered world-annihilating loss. Even before one reaches the period of Holocaust, Spinner shows how...