'The most musical nation': Jews, culture and nationalism in the late Russian Empire

This dissertation combines a social and cultural history of Jewish musicians in the late Russian Empire with an analysis of the distinctive role of music in the emergence of modern Russian Jewish identity. The first Russian conservatory was established in St. Petersburg in 1862 by the composer and pianist Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894). A child convert to Christianity, Rubinstein pursued a vision of art as a substitute for religion, nationality and social estate in modern Russian society. The St. Petersburg conservatory quickly became a popular destination for individual Jews seeking a pathway out of the enforced cultural and legal isolation of the Pale of Settlement. Jewish conservatory students and graduates achieved a new modern cultural identity as secularized, acculturated participants in middle-class Russian artistic life.;These trends of integration and acculturation accelerated rapidly in the three decades before World War I, as the growing network of Russian conservatories drew thousands of Jewish students each year. At the same time, with the post-1881 rise of anti-Semitism and modern Jewish nationalism, the Russian Jewish intelligentsia adopted music as a central tool in their efforts to define secular, Jewish national identity. At the center of this process was Joel Engel (1868-1927), a pioneering ethnographer, composer and critic who sought the Jewish national essence in the Yiddish folk songs of the Jewish masses. In 1908, a new Russian Jewish cultural organization emerged, the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Over the next decade the group launched a formal program of Jewish musical nationalism designed to unify Russian Jews across the emerging modern political, social and religious divisions.;Ultimately, this dissertation sheds new light on one of the core historiographical questions of modern Jewish history: the transition between the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and modern Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe. Rather than view Jewish cultural nationalism as a post-1881 rejection of European Enlightenment, Russian culture and liberal politics, this study reveals how acculturation, nationalism and Enlightenment all combined to form modern Russian Jewish identity and modern Jewish culture.