Hebrew literatureArticle Free Pass
- Ancient Hebrew literature
- Literary revival, 500–1000
- The Middle Ages
- The period of retrenchment, 1200–1750
- The 18th and 19th centuries
- Modern literature in Hebrew
Beginnings of the Haskala movement
In the Berlin of Frederick II the Great, young intellectuals from Poland and elsewhere, brought in as teachers, met representatives of the European Enlightenment; they came under the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and also met some representatives of Italian and Dutch Hebrew cultures. One, a Dane, Naphtali Herz Wessely, who had spent some time in Amsterdam, wrote works on the Hebrew language, and another, an Italian, Samuel Aaron Romanelli, wrote and translated plays. Out of these contacts grew Haskala (“Enlightenment”), a tendency toward westernization that venerated Hebrew and medieval western Jewish literature. Among German Jews, then already in rapid process of Germanization, this Hebrew movement had no place. The Enlightenment was introduced in Galicia (Austrian Poland), a centre of Ḥasidism, by the Edict of Toleration (1781) of the emperor Joseph II. By supporting some of its aims, Hebrew writers incurred hatred and persecution. Their chief weapon was satire, and the imitation by Joseph Perl of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515; “Letters of Obscure Men”) of Crotus Rubianus and the essays of Isaac Erter were classics of the genre. One poet, Meir Letteris, and one dramatist, Naḥman Isaac Fischman, wrote biblical plays.
Galicia’s chief contribution was to the Jüdische Wissenschaft, a school of historical research with Romanticist leanings. The impact of Haskala ideas upon the humanistic Italo-Hebrew tradition produced a short literary renaissance. Its main connections were with the Jüdische Wissenschaft, to which Isaac Samuel Reggio contributed. Samuel David Luzzatto, a prolific essayist, philologist, poet, and letter writer, became prominent by his philosophy of Judaism, while a poet, Rachel Morpurgo, struck some remarkably modern chords. For the Jews of the Russian Empire, the Enlightenment proper began with Isaac Baer Levinsohn in the Ukraine and with Mordecai Aaron Ginzberg (Günzburg), in Lithuania. In the 1820s an orthodox reaction set in, coinciding with the rise of a Romanticist Hebrew school of writers. A.D. Lebensohn wrote fervent love songs to the Hebrew language, and his son Micah Judah, the most gifted poet of the Haskala period, wrote biblical romances and pantheistic nature lyrics. The first Hebrew novel, Ahavat Ziyyon (1853; “The Love of Zion”), by Abraham Mapu, was a Romantic idyll, in which Mapu, like all Haskala writers, employed phrases culled from the Bible and adapted to the thought the writer wished to express.
Mapu’s third novel, ʿAyiṭ tzavuaʿ (1857–69; “The Hypocrite”), marked a departure. It dealt with contemporary life and attacked its social evils and portrayed a new type, the maskil (possessor of Haskala), in a fight against orthodox obscurantism. The new, aggressive Haskala soon came under the influence of Russian left-wing writers, such as Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev. Judah Leib Gordon, like Mapu, had started as a Romantic writer on biblical subjects. From 1871 onward he produced a series of ballads exposing the injustices of traditional Jewish life. Moses Leib Lilienblum began as a moderate religious reformer but later became absorbed by social problems, and in Mishnat Elisha ben Abuyah (1878; “The Opinions of Elisha ben Abuyah”) he preached Jewish socialism. Peretz Smolenskin created in six novels a kaleidoscope of Jewish life in which he rejected the westernized Jew as much as orthodox reactionaries did.
Modern literature in Hebrew
The first formative influences on 20th-century Hebrew literature belong to the late 19th century. The middle classes of eastern European Jewry that read Hebrew books turned to Jewish nationalism, and Zionist activity, coupled with the movement for speaking Hebrew, widened the circle of Hebrew readers. Hebrew daily papers began to appear in 1886. Writers borrowed extensively from medieval translators and European languages, and the Hebrew language assumed a new character. A key figure in the transition to modern writing was Shalom Jacob Abramowitsch, who wrote under the pseudonym of Mendele Mokher Sefarim; after his first novel he became convinced that biblical Hebrew was unsuitable for modern subjects and turned to Yiddish. From 1886 onward he returned to writing mainly in Hebrew and by using Hebrew and Aramaic phrases from the Talmud was able to capture the homeliness he prized in Yiddish. His stories depicted life as it really was, and his style and support of traditional values attracted a wide readership. The popularity of his stories of ghetto life ensured that they would remain the most read and written genre of Hebrew literature until the mid-20th century. A group of writers adopted “grandfather Mendele” as their model. One of these, Asher Ginzberg (Aḥad Haʿam), wrote, from 1889 onward, articles evolving a secular philosophy of Jewish nationalism. His periodical ha-Shiloaḥ attained editorial standards previously unknown in Hebrew. From 1921, he devoted his last years to the editing of his correspondence, a valuable documentary of the period.
Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, an important poet, essayist, editor, and anthologist of medieval literature, was, for a time, literary editor of ha-Shiloaḥ and was much influenced by Aḥad Haʿam. His poetry expressed the inner struggles of a generation concerned about its attitude to Jewish tradition. Saul Tchernichowsky, on the other hand, was untroubled by tradition, and his poetry dealt with love, beauty, and the three places where he had lived: Crimea, Germany, and Palestine. Isaac Leib Peretz, who wrote both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, introduced the Ḥasidic, or pietistic devotional, element into literature. The emotionalism and simple joy of life of that milieu thereafter strongly influenced writers, and the language absorbed many Ḥasidic terms. A literary historian, Ruben Brainin, discerned the presence of a “new trend” in literature and foresaw a concentration on human problems. Bialik had already pointed to a conflict between Judaism and the natural instincts of Jews. This psychological interest dominated the work of a group of short-story writers and, in particular, that of the writer and critic David Frischmann, who, more than anyone else, imposed European standards on Hebrew literature. European literary tendencies thus became absorbed into Hebrew. Uprooted by the pogroms of 1881 and the two Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Jews had emigrated to western Europe and America, and Hebrew literary activity in eastern Europe was disrupted. The Soviet Union eventually banned Hebrew culture, and it also decayed in other eastern European countries and in Germany as the position of Jews deteriorated.
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