The European Baroque shaped the cultural self-defining of peoples, combining exalted and grassroots forms, and native folklore with borrowed principles. It affected the genesis of Eastern European Jewish culture in the same way. Distanced, latecomer views of the shtetl as Eastern European Jewry’s cradle invite more precise defining. Can “Jewish Baroque” as a term pinpoint cultural identity? What would make it “Jewish”? Form, content, worldview symbolic interpretation? Slavic ramifications, especially the neighborly experience of Ukraine and contemporary “Ukrainian Baroque” incarnations help address these questions. The Jews’ and Ukrainians’ long history and status under Polish rule unite the two groups in a single social-cultural context. The 1600-1700s, the flowering of Ukrainian ecclesiastical and secular art introduced a unique vocabulary of terms, archetypes, and mythologems. In periods of state integration, the Ukrainian Baroque became a vehicle of expression for the nation’s spirit, embodying a national ideal. The Baroque’s duplicitous language, combining reality with illusion, provided artistic expression for the religious and cultural-daily dimensions of the “cosmos of shtetl Jewry,” fusing its wealth of forms, symbolism, and illusoriness with folk culture and naivete. Baroque esthetics encompassed traditional art along with religious-philosophical poetics and Hasidism, which was close to the Ukrainian thinker G. Skovoroda’s “philosophy of the heart.” 2012 saw the exhibit devoted to the “Myth of the Ukrainian Baroque” at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, which included traditional Jewish art. But by contrast with the legitimated “Ukrainian Baroque,” which had grown into a national idea, “Jewish Baroque” remained only an identity marker, Eastern European Jewry’s patriarchal tag congealed in traditionalist molds and modernist and contemporary Jewish deliberations. This provides sufficient grounds for debate concerning the term’s conventionalized use.