Hebrew Literature Outside of Israel Since 1948

Hebrew literature, defined expansively, has existed outside of the land of Israel since at least the first millennium of the Common Era. Hebrew religious, liturgical, and poetic works were composed in Europe, the Middle East, and North America for a thousand years before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The presence of vocabulary, grammar, and genres that were adapted from non-Jewish-dominant cultures are a testament to the long imbrication of Hebrew in the Diaspora, the areas of Jewish dispersion outside the land of Israel. Hebrew literature in its modern form originated in the cities of Europe in the 19th century, drawing on European languages and literatures, historical layers of the Hebrew textual tradition, and Yiddish for inspiration. In the early 20th century, the Tarbut Ivrit (Hebrew Culture) movement, a deeply Zionist group made up of American Hebraists, most of whom had immigrated from the Russian Empire and been influenced by Ahad Ha’am’s idea of a national Hebrew culture, created another center of Hebrew literary production in the United States. At the same time, the center of Hebrew culture was shifting from Europe to Palestine, and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestine rapidly became the main center of Hebrew literary production. Nonetheless, even since 1948, there has always been a small but significant amount of Hebrew literature written outside of Israel, whether by translingual Hebraists or Israeli expatriates. While most of the American Hebraist movement had died out by the 1960s, a few writers continued to produce Hebrew literature in America until the 1990s. And since that time, Israeli expatriate writers in the United States and Europe have begun to create a contemporary Hebrew literature outside of Israel, with its own idioms and ideologies. Unlike the American Hebraists of the Tarbut Ivrit movement, these writers often see Hebrew in apolitical terms or are explicitly anti-Zionist in their use of Hebrew in the Diaspora. This contemporary Diaspora Hebrew literature has also been accompanied by the rise of multilingual Israeli literature, often with overt references to Hebrew but written in other languages. These Hebrew and multilingual literary cultures are also strongly tied to art in other forms and media, which are essential to understanding contemporary Hebrew culture in a global context.

Jewish Heritage and Cultural Revival in Poland

Interest in the Jewish heritage and Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, has grown in recent decades. The cultural phenomenon has been termed variously as the “Jewish renaissance,” “Jewish revival,” or “Jewish boom” and has demonstrated enormous complexity. The phenomenon consists of two intertwined social processes: a Jewish communal revival and a Jewish heritage celebration, the latter of which includes various cultural initiatives undertaken by outsiders to the Jewish community. The opening of the Eastern Bloc after the collapse of communism made foreign institutional support and funding for the renewal of Jewish communal life available. The growing popularity of heritage and Holocaust tourism enabled the gentrification of neglected historical Jewish neighborhoods and sites and renovation or restoration of material Jewish heritage. Increasingly people have pursued their Jewish roots upon discovering them. The “unexpected generation”—the generation of Poles born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s who claimed their Jewish ancestry as teenagers—has emerged carrying their own notions of Jewishness. Simultaneously, growing interest by non-Jewish Poles in Jews and all things Jewish has been observable in the multiplication of Jewish-style cultural products, in the opening of new cultural institutions (of which the most notable is the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw), and in the emergence of Jewish studies programs at many universities. However, as many Polish cities and towns hold Jewish festivals of some kind and concerts of klezmer music are organized all over the country, artists, intellectuals, and scholars approach the “Jewish revival” with widely divergent views. They do so mainly because Poland was the geographic epicenter of the Holocaust. Little remains of Poland’s large, vibrant, and diverse Jewish communities, which, prior to World War II, constituted approximately 10 percent of the Polish population. Until recently, most historical and sociological analysis of Jews in Poland after World War II concluded that the Jewish community will soon end. Estimates of the number of members of Jewish communities range from a little over 7,000 to 20,000 people. Polish society remains overtly homogenous in terms of its ethnicity and religion, identifying mostly as Roman Catholic. Therefore, the revival of Jewish culture and the preservation of Jewish memory have been carried out mainly by non-Jews and, for the most part, for non-Jewish audiences. Consequently, the phenomenon has been often perceived as a simulacrum, as a cultural theft lacking authenticity—morally ambivalent endeavors concerning Polish complicity in the Holocaust and widespread anti-Semitism. Yet, some scholars have put forward another reading of the Jewish cultural revival, one that is not mere imitation and reproduction of the lost heritage but rather one that entails the reinvention of a new Jewish culture, which may create a new Jewish/non-Jewish contact zone. The latter approach acknowledges the role that both Polish and foreign Jewish communities have played in the phenomenon.

David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion (b. 1886–d. 1973) was probably the most important figure in the history of modern Israel, if only for the fact that he proclaimed the independence of Israel on 14 May 1948 and led it for the next fifteen years. He was also the most prolific writer among Israel’s leaders, leaving behind a vast literature covering the history of Zionism and the events leading to and following Israel’s independence. He was born in Plonsk, Poland, in 1886 to a middle-class Jewish family. From an early age he studied Hebrew and was drawn to socialism and Zionism, a commitment that became more intense following the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1903. He immigrated to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1906, and worked as an agricultural laborer for several months before moving to Jerusalem to become an activist and workers’ organizer. In 1906 he was among the founders of the Poale Zion party and edited its newspaper. In 1912 he went to Istanbul to study law, but illness and the outbreak of World War I ended his academic career and he returned to Palestine only to be expelled by the Ottoman regime. From 1915 to 1918 he lived in America, lecturing, writing, and recruiting for his party. In 1918 he married Paula Munvez and joined the Jewish Legion, which brought him back to Palestine. After the war, he continued his political activities in the labor movement and in 1920 became the first secretary general of the Federation of Labor (Histadrut), of which he was one of the founders, a position he held for ten years. In 1930 he was one of the founders and became the leader of the Mapai party, which was the ruling party in the country from 1930 until 1977. In 1933 he was elected to the Zionist Executive and in 1935 became the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, the central institute of the Jewish community of Palestine until 1948. In that capacity he led the Jewish community of Palestine (known as the Yishuv) during the Second World War, and was one of the framers of the 1942 Biltmore Program that called for the creation of a Jewish Commonwealth. From 1945 to 1948 he led the struggle for independence that culminated in the adoption in November 1947 of the United Nations Partition Plan that divided Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. He headed the Provisional State Government and in that capacity proclaimed the independence of Israel on 14 May 1948 and led the country in its War of Independence. He became Israel’s first prime minister as well as defense minister and served in that capacity from 1948 to 1953 and from 1955 to 1963. During those years he was responsible for building the Israel Defense Forces, insisting on unlimited immigration, and adopting basic laws such as the Law of Return, Civil Service Commission Law, State Comptroller Law, Security Service Law, and Free and Compulsory Education Law. He led Israel in the 1956 Sinai War and established close ties with France and the Federal Republic of Germany. He resigned in 1963 over differences with his colleagues on how to govern Israel. In 1965 he split from the Mapai party and created the short lived Rafi party, which gained ten seats in the Knesset that year. In 1969 he retired from politics and devoted his time to writing. He died in 1973 and is buried next to his wife in his Kibbutz Sede Boker in the Negev desert.

Sabbath

In Judaism, the Sabbath is the seventh and the sacred day of the week, a recurring seven-day temporal unit. The concept of Sabbath influenced the Christian Sunday and the Muslim Friday, and with the expansion of both, the seven-day week became a globally common temporal unit. As such, the Sabbath is identified with two highly influential ideas: the seven-day week institution of cyclical temporality almost disconnected from nature, and the dichotomy of sacred and profane days. The Jewish Sabbath is famously introduced by the first biblical story of creation, as God sanctifies the seventh day and rests from his labor of creation. Therefore, some etymologists suggest the Hebrew word Shabbat is derived from rest (Shevita), and some point to its similarity to the number seven (Sheva). However, the information in the Bible regarding the Sabbath is limited and deals mainly with the prohibition of labor. It is only by the Second Temple period and later in rabbinical writings that the Sabbath is seen as a day of communal worship, complex practices, rituals, and limitations that are not directly related to cessation from work. The academic scholarship on the Sabbath, which is the focus of this bibliography, usually concentrates on contextualizing the elements of the Sabbath to specific periods and locations. Thus, academic scholarship does not present the Sabbath as a whole, but instead picture it as a multilayered social institution, gradually developed across thousands of years, with no clear starting point and, of course, as ever changing. Already by the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the “Sabbath question” was an urgent scholarly discussion regarding its Mesopotamian origins, its parallels in other cultures, and the idea of the week. Through these debates, the specific Jewish concept became a universal category for thinking of time, society, and religion. Moreover, the academic scholarship created a direct link between the Jewish concept of Sabbath and the Christian concepts of Sunday and the seven-day week. Therefore, instead of leading to difference and confrontation, as in earlier periods, the Sabbath became a Judeo-Christian idea, separating this group from the rest of the world. In the second half of the 20th century, scholarship shifted from the big question of origin to more minor aspects of it, shading light on the different stages of Sabbath development, like the Second Temple period, classical rabbinic writings, and Kabbalah. It seems that the last centuries present the popular current phase of the Sabbath as a rest day in capitalist and secular modern societies. A unique case here is the formation of the modern State of Israel, which recreated the Sabbath as a national rather than a religious category, being another intriguing turn in the relationship between the Sabbath and Jewish identity.

Modern Hebrew Poetry

Modern Hebrew poetry, written in a language comprehensible only to parts of its audience, the Yiddish speaking masses, emerged at the end of the 19th century and became canonized by the time of the publication of C. N. Bialik’s second book in 1908. The Jewish generation that grew up in Eastern Europe after the 1880s aspired to create in Hebrew, a language of ancient texts and commentary, modern alternative expression that matched the pedigree of the European poetry from the Renaissance on. Some Hebrew poetry was written throughout the ages (medieval, Haskalah, Hibat Zion), but in the absence of a steady linear evolution (of models, forms, and prosody), modern Hebrew poetry was a pioneering project accumulated from the biblical narrative monologue and poetry; the commentary and the dialogical tension of the Talmud; the contribution of the Drasha (sermon) tradition; elements of history, literature, folklore, and theology extolled in Halakhic books written throughout the ages; and from threads adapted from the neighboring Russian or German cultures. Seen in retrospect, a growing chorus of Hebrew poets gave voice to the transition of Jews into general Western culture (in its unique realization in the Middle East), the human condition and landscapes, the political and social realities, and the traumas of Jewish existence and its triumph. Their renaissance at the turn of the centuries laid the foundations for the mature poetry written in the new major literary center in Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine and Israel for a new growing class of Hebrew readers.

Ghettos in the Holocaust

The surprising aspect of Nazi ghettoization is that there was no centralized German policy and no clear agreement on what comprised a ghetto. Most decisions about ghettoization were taken at the regional or local level. The most workable definition of a ghetto is that it was a place where Jews were concentrated, consisting generally of entire family units, as opposed to forced labor camps for Jews that contained Jews selected for labor. In fact, not all ghettos were fenced, as some towns had open ghettos marked only by signs or just an occasional police patrol. Others had quite porous barbed-wire fences, whereas the larger ghettos, such as those in Łódź and Warsaw, were defined by their high walls that were very difficult to cross. A great wealth of information on ghettos can be found in the respective memorial (Yizkor) books, only a small sample of which can be mentioned here. Other key information can be found in memoirs, chronicles, and diaries. By contrast, relatively few monographs have been devoted specifically to ghettos, and even fewer to the general topic of ghettos. However, much useful information, including additional references, can be found in the more detailed encyclopedias devoted to the topic. Several regional overviews of the Holocaust also provide an excellent analysis of the role played by ghettos in the Nazi plans for the destruction of the Jews. In terms of geographical organization, three main subdivisions have been used below. The General Government and territories incorporated into the Reich form one large region that covers most of modern-day Poland as well as the western fringes of what is now Ukraine and Belarus. Here the majority of the Jews were deported by rail from ghettos to extermination centers. In Nazi-occupied territory of the Soviet Union (as of 1940, including the Baltic States), Jews were mostly marched out of the ghettos to be shot in nearby forests and ravines. Finally, the ghettos under Hungarian and Romanian administration are treated as a third regional group, as here the chronology of ghettoization and the ultimate fate of the Jews varied somewhat from the other two areas.

The Early Modern Yiddish Bible, 1534–1686

The Bible has been the central text of Judaism since its earliest history. Translations of the Bible into the vernaculars of the Jewish people in their various diasporas are a venerable tradition. The earliest Jewish translation of the Bible was into Greek, known as the Septuagint, and produced in the centuries preceding the rise of Christianity for the benefit of Greek-speaking Hellenistic Jews. The Bible was then translated during the Talmudic period in Aramaic, the lingua franca of Jews living in the eastern Roman Empire. There were several Aramaic translations, collectively called Targums (translation in Aramaic). The major ones were the Targums of Onkelos, Jonathan, Yerushalmi, and another Targum found in the 20th century known as Targum Neofiti. Unlike the Septuagint, the Targums did not constitute a complete translation, but only covered selected parts of the Bible. The Torah (Five Books of Moses) was the subject of several Targums, while the other parts of the Bible may have had one or more Targums or none at all. After the rise of Islam, the lingua franca of the Jews living under Islamic rule gradually changed from Aramaic to Judeo-Arabic, a version of Arabic with a significant component of Hebrew and Aramaic terminology. The translation of the Bible into Judeo-Arabic by Saadia Gaon (b. 882–d. 942), known as the Taj, became the de facto standard translation and achieved almost canonical status among Jews living in the orbit of Islam. It is believed that Saadiah completed the translation of the whole Bible, but some parts of the translation have been lost. The Jews of the Christian lands in Europe developed a variety of Jewish vernaculars like Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Italian, and others. The vernacular developed by the Jews living in the German-speaking lands was referred to as “Teutsch,” meaning translation. In the 18th century it began to be called Jüdisch-Deutsch (Jewish-German) and eventually received its modern name, Yiddish. However, unlike the earlier Bible translations, there is no significant tradition in the lands where German/Yiddish was spoken of translating the Torah or other parts of the Bible into the Jewish vernacular prior to the Early Modern period. Hebrew remained the language of the Bible and its study. There is a meager tradition of Yiddish biblical manuscripts, with the majority of the few surviving manuscripts dating from no earlier than the 15th century. Many of the surviving manuscripts are copies of published works from the 16th and even the 17th century. There has been no significant scholarship on this manuscript tradition. For this reason, this study will restrict itself to the printed Yiddish works from the Early Modern period relating to the Bible.

Shlomo Carlebach

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (b. 1925–d. 1994) was a spiritual guide, charismatic religious leader, and influential composer of popular modern Hasidic tunes. Through his musical storytelling, inspirational insights, and personal contacts, he inspired a new form of heartfelt soulful Judaism and became a progenitor of the 20th-century neo-Hasidic renaissance. Born in Berlin on 14 January 1925, he grew up in Baden near Vienna where his father, Rabbi Naphtali Carlebach, served as chief rabbi (1931–1938). Shlomo was named after his paternal grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo (Salomon) Carlebach (b. 1845–d. 1919), chief rabbi of Lübeck, Germany. Shlomo’s maternal grandfather was Rabbi Dr. Asher (Arthur) Cohn (b. 1885–d. 1926), Chief Rabbi of Basel, Switzerland. Young Shlomo was destined by his parents to continue in the family’s rabbinic calling. With the ominous Nazi rise to power, the Carlebach family fled, eventually arriving in New York on 23 March 1939. Shlomo studied in the Haredi yeshiva high school Mesivta Torah Vodaas until April 1943, and then joined a dozen students who helped Rabbi Aharon Kotler establish the first Haredi full-time Torah-learning yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey. Then, in 1949, Shlomo embarked upon a career as the outreach emissary for the Chabad Lubavitch Rebbe. From the home base of his father’s synagogue, Kehillath Jacob, in Manhattan, Shlomo set up the first Hasidic outreach program in America. But by 1955 he had begun charting a unique “outreach” career as a “singing Rabbi.” Highlights of his career include establishing the House of Love and Prayer (HLP) in Haight-Ashbury (1968–1978) and Moshav Meor Modi’in in Israel (1976). He was the featured singer at rallies of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), and his most famous song, “Am Yisrael Chai,” was composed for their protest movement. In 1989, he led the first Jewish music tour in Russia, reaching fifty thousand people in three weeks and inspiring Soviet Jewry. He also visited Poland 1–10 January 1989 with eight concerts in ten days and thus was the first openly religious Jew to perform in Communist Poland after the 1967–1968 wave of anti-Semitism. But in his own eyes, his major achievement was as “Rebbe of the Street-Corner.” His potential constituency could be found in any forlorn corner that he encountered. And since he traveled around the world sharing his utopian vision of love and peace, he assumed a unique role as a charismatic iconoclast rebbe.

Vilna

The Jewish community in Vilna began in the middle of the 16th century, when the Polish king, Zygmunt August, allowed the Jews to settle in the city and operate mainly in the commercial sphere. From this stage onward, the local Jewish community developed rapidly, the community synagogue was established and the Jews lived in the space allocated to them, and later became recognized as the Jewish quarter. From the middle of the 18th century Vilna became a community of unique importance in eastern European space, due to the development of a religious scholarly center, the most prominent of which was Rabbi Eliyahu Kremer, known as the Gaon of Vilna. Since the beginning of the 19th century, there has been a significant increase in the city’s Jewish population, which has spread to other neighborhoods in the city. At the same time, various circles among local Jews underwent a gradual process of cultural change, manifested in the absorption of the worldview of the Enlightenment. Several social circles operated in this spirit, among them poets, writers, and educators. The latter initiated the establishment of modern schools, and in the middle of the 19th century Vilna became the most important center of Jewish enlightenment in eastern Europe. In the second half of the century, Vilna became one of the main centers of the spread of nationalist and socialist ideologies, as well as one of the worldly most known center of Jewish books printing and publication. At the beginning of 1880, the first association of Hovevei Zion was organized in the city, and in 1897, the General Federation of Jewish Workers in Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, better known as the Bund, was also established in Vilna. During the First World War many of the Jews of Vilna left the city, and at the beginning of 1920 the city was annexed to Poland. In the period between the world wars, most of the local Jewish population suffered from considerable economic difficulties, and at the same time they experienced a significant cultural and educational flowering. The Institute for Jewish Research, known as YIVO, was established in Vilna in 1925. Likewise, during those years there was an impressive diversity in the local Jewish educational system, both for boys and girls, and especially for those with a Zionist orientation. Hundreds of Jewish students studied at the various faculties of the local university, despite manifestations of hostility and violence by militant groups of Polish students. With the outbreak of World War II, many refugees from Poland arrived in Vilna, and with the German invasion in the summer of 1941, all city Jews were concentrated in two ghettos. During the war, most of the Vilna’s Jews were murdered in Ponary, and other murder sites. After the war, a small Jewish community lives in the city.

Gender and Modern Jewish Thought

Modern Jewish thought has been largely a masculine discursive space in both its historical construction and its focus, which is reflected in the makeup of its accepted canon. Certain figures are generally included in edited collections and syllabi of modern Jewish thought and philosophy. The field’s medieval and early modern antecedents include 12th-century scholar Moses Maimonides and 17th-century thinker Baruch Spinoza. The 18th-century German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn is generally viewed as the “father” of the field. Beginning with the 19th- and 20th-century German philosopher Hermann Cohen, prominent 20th-century figures include the following: German philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber; French-Lithuanian thinker Emmanuel Levinas; American thinkers Mordecai Kaplan, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel; and post-Holocaust philosophers and theologians Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, and Eliezer Berkovits. Other notable figures include founding Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger, Orthodox rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Abraham Isaac Kook, political philosopher Leo Strauss, Israeli Orthodox thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and American rabbi and philosopher Eugene Borowitz. Sometimes the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and feminist theologians such as Judith Plaskow are included, but the entirety of the canon is often male-dominated. Form tends to mirror content in the formation and maintenance of such canons. In these cases, male-dominated discourse, drawn from a network of male thinkers who operate in relation to one another, favors approaches that foreground and privilege the masculine. While this textual corpus has remained largely immune to critiques informed by gender and feminist analysis, important and groundbreaking contributions to the fields of gender and Jewish philosophy have been made. It is not simply a matter of adding women-identified and nonbinary voices to the canon (although any heterogeneity is preferable to none), but of attending to critiques informed by gender and feminist analysis in order to uncover viewpoints and frameworks that have been overlooked. This article includes sources that attend to this aim in a variety of ways and with differing methodologies: texts by women-identified writers and texts about women and gender (in many cases overlapping), texts that critically analyze the construction and preservation of sex and gender hierarchies, texts that uncover philosophical omissions by male-identified thinkers, and texts that philosophically reflect upon experiences and lived realities that have been largely neglected, including embodiment, emotion, affect, vulnerability, maternity, and a feminist ethics of care, among others. These interventions consider, among other foundational questions: Who is included or excluded from the canonical framework? What can contemporary theories of gender teach us about the use of gendered terms in Judaism? In what ways can feminist criticism identify the masculinist assumptions of texts and the hierarchical construction of masculinity and femininity? How does the historical construction of the field reflect exclusive social and political norms? These questions and demands can extend to the ways that we canonically (re)construct the field of modern Jewish thought. This article addresses developments and interventions in critical gender analysis in relation to modern Jewish thought, tracking these contributions in secondary literature to increase their visibility, with an eye to expanding the scope and inclusiveness of the canon in the future.