"Those Who See and are Not Seen": On Discourses of Visibility and Invisibility in the Literature of Russian Maskilim in the 1860s and 1870s

During the 1860s and 1870s one of the recurring motifs in the literature written by Jews in the Russian Empire in Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish was a fantasy of the invisibility, or, according to a traditional Hebrew formula – of becoming `the one who sees and is not seen` [ha-roe ve-eino nir`e]. In the course of the presentation I will review the appearances of this motif in the Jewish tradition, with special focus on the literature of Mendele Moykher Sforim, Grigorii Bogrov, and Abraham Ber Gottlober. I will shed light on the paradox in the literature of the authors in the 60s and 70s, who, at the one hand, following the imperatives of Enlightenment, celebrated the light and the possibility of knowledge associated with it, but on the other, expressed their concerns regarding the stability and adequacy of the visual field.

The more deeply the practices of surveillance, partitioning of the population, and its documentation were introduced into the repertoire of the modern techniques of power, the more pivotal became the dialectics of the relations between visibility and invisibility on various strata of social relationships. Thus, I will analyze the motif of invisibility in the Jewish literatures written in Russia against the backdrop of social conditioning of Jewish subjects. When modern Jewish visibility was denied an adequate signification, the fantasy of dissolution of the body and self-realization as an aerial and all-encompassing gaze was devised as a possible solution for representation and conceptualization of the maskilic experience.