LEBN UN VISNSHAFT: Science and Socialism among Russian Jews

• In Event: VISNSHAFT AF YIDDISH: Science in Translation

Abstract

The Yiddish-language scientific monthly LEBN UN VISNSHAFT [Life and Science] was published in Vilna between 1909-1912 against the backdrop of popular interest in scientific rationality among Imperial Russia’s growing cohort of Jewish students and radicals. The reason behind the rising interest in science was twofold: In the first place, “science" was considered to be applicable to all aspects of life, and was the principal means by which Imperial Russia’s intellectuals inferred the inevitability of a socialist state. Second, the language of scientific rationalism provided a veneer of objectivity to political dissidence. Indeed, LEBN UN VISNSHAFT billed itself as a non-partisan “city of refuge” during the repressive period of political reaction after the first Russian Revolution of 1905, with its scientific content ranging from fiction and poetry, to popularizations of Darwinism, August Bebel, along with explanations for how freezers worked. A socialist journal modeled after the New York-based DI TSUKUNFT [The Future], LEBN UN VISNSHAFT’s editors and writers relied on the international ideas of science to universalize the particular, and vice versa.

The accessibility of Yiddish and the wide uses of science, then, went hand in hand, as Russia-Jewish intellectuals sought to make inroads into the larger Jewish population using the twin tools of scientific rationality and a shared Jewish vocabulary. Exactly how they imagined “visnshaft” and its applications to Russia’s Jewish populations—especially in the realms of family life and future political inclusion—are questions this paper explores. What made poetry and fiction scientific? How did those wielding the category of “visnshaft” seek to reorder the existing social and family structure of Russia’s Jewish populations? The editions of LEBN UN VISENSHAFT will provide an entry point to the emergent scientific worldview of Jewish intellectual and political dissidents, alongside other relevant Russian and Yiddish printed press materials. VISNSHAFT, or scientific rationality, made claims to authority that lay substantively outside the irrational, or divine claims made by autocracy or Rabbis. As such, it provided a uniquely effective medium for socialists to articulate an alternate political future for Russia, and the place of Jewish populations inside it.

Author

• Tova Pearl Benjamin, New York University