The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition (1912–1914) was a project to document and preserve the traditional Jewish culture of the Pale of Settlement, the only region of the Russian Empire where Jews were legally allowed to live. Led by the writer and social activist S. An-sky, the expedition was motivated by concerns that the modernization of Eastern European Jewish life was rapidly erasing centuries-old customs, folklore, and religious practices. The Pale of Settlement, home to millions of Jews, was seen as a critical area for capturing authentic Jewish traditions that had been largely insulated from the influences of urbanization and assimilation.
The expedition, funded primarily through Jewish philanthropic efforts, sought to create a comprehensive ethnographic record. An-sky and his team, which included musicians, photographers, and students, traveled across Ukraine, visiting approximately 60–70 shtetls (small Jewish towns). They collected thousands of artifacts, including ritual objects, manuscripts, and photographs, and made over 500 recordings of Jewish folk music using a phonograph. The team also documented folk tales, legends, and songs, and recorded traditional healing practices and magical rituals performed by local women.
An-sky's ethnographic methodology combined scientific approaches such as the use of questionnaires and measurements with a deep personal connection to the communities he studied. His goal was not only to preserve these cultural elements but also to use them as a foundation for a future Jewish national revival. The expedition had a lasting impact on the study of Eastern European Jewish history, folklore, and identity, even though its materials were long thought lost. Much of the material collected during the expedition is now housed in various archives and museums, with some of it forming the basis for later research in Jewish ethnography.
Background
The Russian Empire had a large Jewish population in the so-called Pale of Settlement, a territory between the Baltic and Black seas. Jews could settle only there, in the territory of modern Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, and Latvia, but not in Russian cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg. Around five million Jews lived in the Pale at the beginning of the 20th century; another two million emigrated to America before the October Revolution of 1917. Though Jews of the Pale of Settlement were subjects of the Russian Empire, they lacked full citizen rights.
S. An-sky was born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport in 1863 and raised in the Pale, in the territory of modern Belarus; his native tongue was Yiddish. He had a cheder education, but left Vitebsk at 17, learned Russian, 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 to the more Russian-sounding "Semen An-sky". An-sky and other members of the Jewish intelligentsia did not consider the Jews of the Pale interesting; some did not consider them a people or a nation, and 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 only after the Revolution of 1905. He had done some ethnographic work earlier, mainly among Russian workers and peasants. Through the works of Jewish authors such as I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, he realized that Ashkenazi Jews of the Russian Empire were "a people and ... that they were his people", and in 1907 decided to "go to the Jewish people".
In 1891, historian Simon Dubnow, also an assimilated Jew born and raised in the Pale, 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 (JHES) in 1908 to promote such studies. For An-sky, the expedition was not only a scientific study; he believed that shtetl life was being eroded by modernization and thus vanishing, and that folk art gathered in the Pale could "provide the basis for a revived national culture". In 1909, JHES also launched a journal, (Russian: Еврейская старина), which existed until 1930. Abraham Duker called the journal the "most important activity" of the society.
The Society for Jewish Folk Music was also founded in 1908 in St Petersburg. It promoted Jewish music via "research, composition, performance, and publishing". Joel Engel, who would later join An-sky in the expedition, was an active member of the society, as were Lazare Saminsky, Mikhail Gnesin, Joseph Achron, Solomon Rosowsky, Alexander Krein, and others. Multiple branches of the society were opened in the Russian Empire and abroad.
An-sky's expedition to the Pale was not the first ethnographical study of Eastern European Jews. Moisei Berlin published the first such study in the 1860s. In 1901, and Saul Ginsburg published Jewish Folk Songs in Russia that contained "hundreds of songs sent to them by Jewish zamlers" (collectors). founded the first Jewish museum and the first Jewish folklore society in Hamburg in the 1890s. In 1890, Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz conducted an ethnographical study of the Jews from the Tomaszow region of Poland, commissioned by the banker Jan Bloch to "combat anti-Semitic charges of economic parasitism". Bloch also funded 's expedition, whose two-volume book In the Jewish Pale of Settlement was published in 1888–1890.
Expedition
Before the expedition took place, An-sky convened a conference in Saint Petersburg on March 24–25, 1912, with prominent participants to discuss it. Among the attendees were historian Simon Dubnov, anthropologist , ethnographers Vladimir Jochelson and Lev Shternberg, historian Shaul Ginzburg, musicologist Joel Engel, attorney , lawyer Maksim Vinaver, and others. It was decided that a questionnaire should be created, which was to be sent to communities not visited by the expedition. Despite An-sky's idea to gather folklore, Shternberg argued that statistics and physiological measurements were more important. Engel insisted that a phonograph needed to be included in the expedition to record local songs and melodies.
Baron Vladimir Gintsburg, son of the Jewish philanthropist Naftali Hertz (Horace) Gintsburg, donated ten thousand 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 it in a letter to Vladimir Gintsburg, on June 30, 1912:
Between 1912 and 1913, An-sky's team traveled through the Podolia and Volhynia regions. In the first season, from July to October 1912, they visited 15 shtetls, and in the second season, June–November 1913, around 60. The team included artist and photographer Solomon Yudovin (An-sky's nephew), musicologists Joel Engel (for the first season) and Susman Kiselgof (for the second season), and ten students of the Higher Oriental Courses (or the Higher Courses in Eastern Studies), founded by Baron David Gintsburg. Three students, Abraham Rechtman, Yitskhok Fikangur, and , took part in the second season of the expedition. Others were Sh. Vaynshtayn, Avrom Yuditsky, Sh. Lakshin, Isaac Lurie, Y. Neusikhin, Y. Kimelman, and . Five students were from Hasidic shtetls, and three (Rechtman, Ravrebe, and Shrayer) received rabbinic ordination. Levi Yitzhak Vaynshteyn was the secretary of the expedition. According to Rechtman, the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik joined the expedition for several weeks, though no one else ever mentioned it.
Two musicologists took part in the expedition, both of whom were members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Zusman Kiselgof was born into a family of a melamed in Velizh, a shtetl in Vitebsk region. He became a teacher, and a collector of Jewish music. He started in 1902, and went to his first field expedition in 1907 to Lubavitch, in the Mogilew region. Joel Engel was born in a Russian-speaking family outside the Pale, and studied music in the Moscow Conservatory. He was also a collector of Jewish songs, starting from 1898, and was a noted music critic. Before An-sky's expedition, Engel was an advisor for Saul Ginsburg and Pesach Marek, who published a "groundbreaking" book on Jewish tunes, Jewish Folksongs in Russia, in 1901.
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, the expedition was able to visit around 60 or 70 shtetls. An-sky outlined a plan of the expedition in a 1913 memorandum: he planned to stay in each shtetl for 3 or 4 days and contact "the local intelligentsia" in advance. The shtetl's synagogue was always the first destination in a new place. Among those visited were: Podolia province (Bogopol, Letichev, Medzhibozh, Proskurov), Kiev province (Tetiev, Berdichev, Pavoloch, Ruzhin, Skvira, Talne), Volyn province (Olyka, Kovel, Trisk, Zaslav, Kremenets, Polonne, Dubno, Rivno, Korets, Derazhnja, Lutsk, Sudilkov, Muravitsa, Shepetovka, Slavuta, Annopol, Klevan, Ludmir). The expedition visited the shtetls in Ukraine because they believed them to be more traditional and "less changed by modern forces".
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 women's traditional songs was usually difficult, because it wasn't customary for Jewish women to sing in the presence of men, as it was 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 the phonograph to locals, usually singing something with an intentional cough or laugh and then playing it back to the people; usually everyone, even the rabbis, were very impressed. After that many people wanted to be recorded; some called Thomas Edison, the phonograph's inventor "bal-moyekh [a man with brains], or ayzerner kop [a great head], a Yiddish metaphor for an exceptionally smart person." In some shtetls though people completely refused to be recorded. All members of the expedition were assimilated Jews. An-sky insisted that they needed to "act Jewish": everyone was required to observe Shabbat while in shtetls; this meant, for example, no smoking, because it is forbidden to light fire on Shabbat. They spoke only Yiddish in shtetls, even though Engel had only a rudimentary knowledge of it. Sometimes locals thought that they were actors, or even that An-sky was a cantor accompanied by his choirmaster.
An-sky concealed his fame as a Socialist revolutionary and writer, and was called by his Jewish name in shtetls, 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 zaddik, "because his public persona during the expedition tapped into pre-existing models of Hasidic holiness": 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 writings don't support this account. An-sky was a Kohen, and locals often had their own understanding of what was an appropriate behaviour for him; a Kohen, for example, can't enter a cemetery.