Hersh Dovid Nomberg (1876–1927) was a leading Hebrew and Yiddish writer, playwright, and social activist in early-twentieth-century Warsaw. Fiercely committed to the development of a modern Jewish culture in the Yiddish language, it was he who coined the term Yiddishism. To that end, he advocated for folkism (another term that he devised), the Jewish political ideology that argued for national cultural autonomy in the Diaspora, briefly serving as a party delegate in the Sejm, the Polish parliament.

The text centers around Nalewki Street, the center of Jewish commerce in Warsaw. More than just a street, Nalewki with its teeming courtyards was the physical locus of the Jewish body politic in the city, then the largest Jewish community in Europe. Nomberg’s feuilleton presents two opposing images from Nalewki—the bustling commercial activity on the street, emblematic of Jewish collective socio-economic development, and the sordid scene that played out in the inner courtyard of Nalewki 35, where thousands thronged to witness a dybbuk exorcism. For Nomberg, much like for the generations of maskilim who preceded him, the task of ushering the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe into the modern world began with the excision of any vestigial beliefs in demons, dybbuks, and the like. The contrast between the “exterior” Nalewki, hub of Jewish economic and cultural life, and the “interior” Nalewki, where Jews still grant credence to spirit possession, illustrates the yawning gap between Nomberg’s envisioned modern Yiddish-speaking Jewish collective, and how this collective revealed itself to be in actuality. Confronted with the sight of Jews gathering for a dybbuk exorcism in Warsaw, the supposed vanguard of Jewish modernity in Eastern Europe, his pen runs dry. “There is nothing to be done,” he laments, “with people who hawk demons and propagate dybbuks.”

Nomberg then turns his sights on the nascent Yiddish press, which began to develop rapidly in Eastern Europe from around 1905. The Yiddish press, he writes, made the mistake of assuming the same standard of cultural development as the veteran Hebrew press, whose newspapers reached a small, highly educated readership. While Hebrew literature had arrived at a “post-Haskalah” stage in which demons and dybbuks, now safely relegated to the realm of fantasy, could be reapproached as the subjects of artistic creation, the hundreds of thousands of readers of the Yiddish press, never having come under the edifying influence of the Haskalah, still regarded the phenomena as real. Der moment, in reporting on a haunted house several weeks earlier, had unwittingly unleashed “a deep abyss of the darkest, most foolish superstitions” that culminated in the Nalewki Street exorcism. However long the masses continued to believe in demons and dybbuks, it was not yet safe to engage with the latter in anything other than a critical light.¹

Further Reading:

• “Nomberg, Hersh Dovid.” YIVO Encyclopedia. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Nomberg_Hersh_Dovid