“What’s Love Got to Do With It?”: Critical Love Studies in Russian Jewish History

I N L E V L E VA N D A’ S Turbulent Times (Goriachee vremia), a novel serialized in Evreiskaia biblioteka between 1871 and 1873, the female protagonists ponder the capacity of Jews to love and be loved. When her suitor Adol’f Krants “ frees” Meri Tidman from the promise of marriage because she is forced to move to another town, she retorts, “How do you like this sincere love, which is really based on practical calculations? No Sophie, say what you will, but we Jews are created in a completely dif fer ent manner. Where other people feel, we only reason. People love with their hearts but we with our intellects.” She observes that unlike Polish Christian youth, Jews do not easily give in to romance.1 The conviction that love in a Jewish key was distinct became a concern for Jews in the Rus sian empire, with re spect to not only marriage, family, and sexuality but also religion and politics. In recent years, a small but innovative body of Jewish scholarship has contributed to the emerging field of Critical Love Studies. According to Renata Grossi and David West, scholars have been divided about the nature of love in modernity. Some have argued that modern love is a dangerous, radical, and “intrinsically subversive” force that promotes “individual autonomy and agency at the cost of disconnection from obligations deriving from family, class position, religious duty, and ethnic affiliation.”2 Others view love as an oppressive ideology that is “embedded in heterosexual