Letters from the Irkutsk official rabbi S.Kh. Beilin to G.N. Potanin (from the funds of the Krasnoyarsk regional museum of local lore)

The Archive of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Museum of Local Lore contains a lot of personal documents, photos, books, brochures of Grigory Potanin (1835-1920) who was a Russian geographer, ethnographer, folklorist, public figure and the greatest organizer of science in Siberia. These materials entered to the museum's archive from the Russian historian and ethnographer Nikolai Kozmin, who had lived and worked in Krasnoyarsk in 1910-1919. Among these documents, there are letters from colleagues of G. Potanin from different parts of Russia, which are of great interest to researchers. Grigory Potanin was in correspondence with the Irkutsk official rabbi Solomon Beilin (1857-1942). Beilin was a Jewish publicist and ethnographer who stood at the origins of Jewish folklore in Russia. He was born in the Pale of Settlement and had received there an excellent religious and secular education, then he came to Irkutsk as the official rabbi. Here he led the largest Jewish community in Siberia from 1901 to 1921, and made it into its history as one of the most educated leader and bright public figure. Solomon Beilin has begun to record of Jewish folklore in the eighties of the 19 century. In the last decade of the 19 century, since 1895, he is published in the Mitteilungen zur judischen Volkskunde journal (in German) and had a various publications in Russian journals on folklore and ethnography (in Russian). Two collections of Jewish fairy tales written by S.Kh. Beilin in Russian were published in 1898 in Odessa and Vilna. As a follower of academician A.N. Veselovsky he has published a number of articles (1895-1906) concerning the historical and comparative analysis of folklore of different natives. In 1907 these studies were included in his book “Wandering tales and legends in the ancient rabbinical script”. In 1909-1915 journalistic and science articles by S.Kh. Beilin about Jewish folklore were published on the pages of the “Jewish Old Man” (St. Petersburg), “Relived” (St. Petersburg), “Future” (St. Petersburg), “Siberian Archive” (Irkutsk), etc. journals. Among the publications that exist today, the authors did not find indications that Jewish folklore was p ublished in Russia by anyone earlier than S.Kh. Beilin. The ten surviving letters from S. Beilin to G. Potanin are published for the first time and cover the period from 1901 to 1910. In these letters Beilin and Potanin discussed books and articles that had been published in German (Germany), including books by G. Estherli “The Roman Acts” (1872), covering Christian, Latin and didactic literature, and S. Kraus “The Life of Christ from Jewish Sources” (1902), a collection of ethnographic articles by F. Librecht "Zur Volkskunde" (1879), some parallels of fairy tales from Jewish and Christian literature and references to previously unknown articles by S.Kh. Beilin. The letters also confirm his initiative in preparing materials for his future book on the history of the Irkutsk Jewish community and his ethnographic interest in the life of Siberian Sabbath sectarians. The letters are unique not only in that they contain valuable information about friendship and professional contact between two outstanding personalities, but also in that they are the only unofficial correspondence of S. Beilin found to date.

Keywords

Authors

References