The People’s Torah: Crowd-Sourcing Jewish Customs from An-ski to the Internet

Nathaniel Deutsch | Delivered in English.

A century ago, Sh. An-ski, the revolutionary and playwright most famous for The Dybbuk, described the countless customs that guided Jewish daily life as a kind of “Oral Torah.” To document the People's Torah, An-ski created a massive ethnographic questionnaire in Yiddish for use in the Russian Pale of Settlement and especially among its Hasidic residents. Now, a team of researchers led by Nathaniel Deutsch is launching The Digital Minhag Project, an interactive website built around a Yiddish-English version of An-ski’s ethnographic questionnaire that seeks to crowd-source contemporary Jewish customs or minhagim, beginning with those still practiced by Hasidic communities. What has changed since An-ski created his questionnaire? What has remained the same?

Part of the 2025 Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series.

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