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Unlike rabbinic literature or medieval Jewish philosophy, travel writing has rarely been considered part of the Jewish canon and, as a result, has merited little discussion and analysis by modern scholars until fairly recently. Hebrew travel writing as a literary genre, broadly defined, first emerged in the context of the crusades, when the increase in maritime traffic between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean also facilitated a renewed Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy places in the Levant. The fact that the social context of this genre was the medieval European pilgrimage movement is the reason that most of its authors turned to Hebrew instead of Judeo-Arabic, which was the preferred written language of Jews in the Islamicate world. It also explains the closeness in form and some of the content between these Hebrew travel accounts and contemporaneous Christian-authored texts, such as the itinerarium or peregrinatio. At the same time, medieval Hebrew travel writings include place-specific information and lore similarly known from Arabic (Muslim-authored) literature of travel and geography.
This chapter touches on three moments in Modern Hebrew realist literature. The earliest is the late nineteenth century, in which Modern Hebrew was first widely read. Focusing on S. Y. Abramovich’s “In the Secret Place of Thunder,” I argue that the novella’s formal clash between realist and religious social worlds constitutes an attempt to think through the uneven capitalist development of Eastern European Jewish towns in the period. I then turn to Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel, He Walked through the Fields, a novel paradigmatic in the development of narrative interiority in Hebrew realism. I argue that interiority is invented in order to retain the historical perception of a reality that has gone into crisis. The last text is Avivit Mishmari’s 2013 satirical novel The Old Man Lost His Mind. I argue that the novel should be read against its postmodern predecessors, which registered the terminal crisis of older national-hegemonic historicity. In Mishmari’s novel new developments in Israeli capitalist social form – the advent of anti-liberal capitalism alongside older neoliberal sensibilities – are allegorically juxtaposed to one another, in an effort to restart the Israeli historical imagination.
Jewish modernity in Europe began with Hebrew, the ancient language of the Jews. Intellectuals like Moses Mendelssohn used Biblical Hebrew to introduce Jews to modern, secular European culture and disseminate the ideas of the Enlightenment among them. This odd choice had two advantages. Hebrew was familiar to many Jewish men and the Biblical version used by Jewish intellectuals was also proof of the ancient heritage of the Jews. But if Hebrew was a kind of cultural affectation for enlightened Jews, after the rise of Zionism and the establishment of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, it became a necessity and a vehicle for forming a new Jewish nation there.
Chapter 31 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in Hebrew literature, examining figures such as Margot Klausner, Aharon Kaminka, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Amir Or.
The mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe carried some Hebraists to the United States, adding New York City to the major centers of Hebrew literary production. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers in America included Naphtali Hertz Imber, whose poem Hatikvah later became the Israeli national anthem. In the introduction to his 1938 anthology of Hebrew poetry in America, Menachem Ribalow described the rise of modernism as a storm swept through all literatures and rocked the foundations of poetry. In the early 1920s, Hillel Bavli published a series of five articles on contemporary American poetry that shows how difficult it was for the Hebrew poet in America to see Anglo-American modernism as a resource and a model. To the extent that a new flowering of Hebrew culture in America such as the Hebraists accomplished is at all conceivable, it would be an extension of Israeli literature and not a center in its own right.
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