At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders, leading historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.” Just before World War I, the author, revolutionary, and ethnographer known as An-sky led an ethnographic expedition into the Pale, producing an archive of what he called the Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite, consisting of thousands of jokes, tales, songs, incantations, and other cultural traditions. An-sky also created a massive ethnographic questionnaire—The Jewish Ethnographic Program—consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish exploring Jewish life and death in the Pale. In his talk, Nathaniel Deutsch discusses his forthcoming book, which explores An-sky’s almost messianic efforts to create a distinctively Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change and contains the first-ever translation of The Jewish Ethnographic Program.