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Power and Powerlessness: Niagara, Primitivism, and the Hebrew Literary Imagination

In its assorted guises, Primitivism has had a strong draw on the practitioners of Modern Hebrew Literature. In some of its forms—among them those presented by Berdichevsky and Tschernichivsky—the attraction of the natural, pre-civilized and ‘‘authentic’’ human has played an active role in transforming Hebrew letters and bolstering the ideological underpinnings of the teiyah (the national renaissance) movement, which followed upon the heels of the haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment (c. 1780s–1880s). Yet despite European intellectual discourse in general and their Hebrew literary colleagues’ preoccupation with the subject for several decades before, Hebrew writers in America were ambivalent latecomers to the discourse on Primitivism. The matter of the primitive and Primitivism, which has its roots in the thought of Locke and Rousseau, who were both instrumental in awakening interest about human and natural rights, was not a subject that engaged American Hebraists. The latter appear to have been even less enthusiastic about joining discussions on matters of the primordial, wild, and elemental features of human nature as a subject engaging some followers of Primitivism. For the former, the followers of Locke and Rousseau, the debate led to conclusions pertaining to racial equality and aspects of the natural domain, a subject that did attract the Americanized Hebraists. These sentiments challenged and clashed with the sociopolitical realities of a modern ‘‘civilization’’ in its attempt to remedy the status quo of alienation and social stratification. Yet Hebraists, it seems, were engaged with the subject in ways pertaining to their unique national-cultural situation. As science, technology, and industrialism proliferated in the West, and societies identified these achievements with progress, a move to counter this sentiment emerged as if to challenge the values of progress. In this discourse, advocates opposed to the notion that progress means a pursuit and support of the scientific ideology sided with the pristine, natural, and non-technological as a valued and unadulterated