Squabbling Brothers and Overarching Unity: the Image of the ‘Ideal Jew’ as an Expression of National Self-Consciousness among Russian-Jewish Intellectuals in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century
Squabbling Brothers and Overarching Unity: the Image of the ‘Ideal Jew’ as an Expression of National Self-Consciousness among Russian-Jewish Intellectuals in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century

Summary/Abstract: This article examines how Russian-Jewish intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – liberals, Zionists, and Bundists alike – constructed the figure of the “ideal Jew” as a model of national self-consciousness. Despite ideological conflicts, these groups shared a vision of a modern Jew who embodied both Russian and Jewish cultural orientations. The ideal Jew was imagined as an educated, socially responsible individual, capable of elevating the Jewish masses, articulating communal values, and serving as a prototype for collective regeneration. Tracing this figure from the Haskalah of the 1860s and 1870s, through the rise of Jewish nationalism after 1882, and into the post-1917 emigration, the article shows how attitudes toward Russian culture, diasporic identity, and nostalgia shaped the evolving conception of Jewish selfhood. By analyzing literary criticism, historiography, social theory, and journalism, it reveals a persistent pattern of synthesis, Russian and Jewish, cosmopolitan and national, underpinning intellectual debates across generations.

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