What makes the new Hebrew literature "new" is its claim of the role of political authority and the mission to communicate both modern ideas and modern practical realities to the Jewish people. The choice to write in Hebrew, in this respect, was central for this new literary movement because the Hebrew language represented the last surviving vestige of the national sovereignty of the Jewish people.
The Hebrew tongue is the tongue of Israel, the tongue of a living, fighting nation, the language of power and nature; Aramaic is the language of inner submission, the language of religion, the Jewish language ... And this, too, is worth pointing out: the light of Hebrew flickered as our sovereignty weakened and began to ebb.
— MICHA JOSEF BERDYCZEWSKI
The so-called new Hebrew poetry, which appeared in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, came into its own over the course of the nineteenth century and really flourished at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in the works of Naphtali Herz Wessely, Adam Hakohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn), Micha Yosef Lebenson, Yehudah Leib Gordon, Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and their followers. It was not created, as people sometimes assume, solely in order to construct a poetic corpus modeled on European poetic forms and infused with the ideals and ideas of first the Enlightenment and then Zionism. These aims were certainly in the background for the founders of this literature and for those who followed. The pioneers were steeped in German Enlightenment poetry, in Sturm und Drang, and in the poetic innovations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller that followed. They were also familiar, although to a lesser extent, with the English, French, and Italian poetry of the eighteenth century. They had read the "Idylls" of Salomon Gessner; the stormy lyrics of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, his religious epic poem "The Messiah" (1751) in particular; the hymns of Albrecht von Haller; and "Night Thoughts" by Edward Young (1742–45). They translated, or rather adapted, passages from these and other poets (while replacing the historical and classical mythological figures) and, with a certain hesitation (especially with regard to pagan Greco-Roman mythological allusion and to texts that aroused powerful erotic feelings) attempted to imitate them in their own original work. Those who followed throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, in Austria, Galicia, and the Russian Pale, did likewise, choosing from the available models of European poetry in their own times—the poetry of Schiller, of Gavrila Derzhavin, Giacomo Leopardi and, in the course of time, also Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Nekrasov, and Lord Byron. Toward the end of the century, the poetry of Heinrich Heine and then Mikhail Lermontov became a source for translation and imitation.
But in their connection with Europeanism and humanism, the so-called new poets were no different from their predecessors; they were new only in the narrow sense of reflecting the changes and novelties embedded in new generations and literary eras within a more-or-less continuous tradition of living, changing, and variegated poetry. This newness and difference signified no serious rupture that could justify a historiographical demarcation separating these poetic developments from all that had preceded them. The Hebrew poets of the Renaissance and then the Baroque era also deftly adopted contemporary poetic models for their own uses, particularly in Italy. They also gave clear expression to the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance and the complex, stormy sensibilities of the Baroque.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, critics and literary historians mistakenly claimed that modern Hebrew poetry was born at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Italy and Holland, in particular with the poems and poetic plays of Rabbi Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto (1707–46), seeing the principal novelty of this poetry as its use of European themes; its formal, generic, and prosodic choices (stanza form, rhyme, and meter); and its expression of humanistic ideals. And, while there can be no doubt either of Luzzatto's significance as a poet (or as a kabbalist and a musar thinker) or of the fact that he, like any great poet, opened new poetic vistas, it is not the case that he fundamentally broke with the Hebrew poetic tradition and should be considered the founder of a new poetic era. In fact, he was an enormously gifted follower of the Hebrew-European poetic tradition, encapsulating and in some sense bringing to its greatest height a tradition that blossomed in the fifteenth century and achieved some of its greatest expressions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the work of such poets as Yosef Tsarfati (?–1527), who composed some of the most charming poems of the Hebrew Renaissance, and especially in those two outstanding representatives of Hebrew Baroque poetry, Jacob Frances (1615–67) and Immanuel Frances (1618–1710), along with a long line of other poets and playwrights. Luzzatto internalized this tradition and bestowed on it emotional harmony, stylistic clarity, and the formal organization of neoclassicism, but these innovations were not essentially different from the innovations of those who, for instance, infused the Hebrew poetry of the late nineteenth century with the spirit of European Romanticism.
The thing that was truly new in the new Hebrew poetry, as well as in the Hebrew literature that would come to be called "the new Hebrew literature," and that justified the perception that a truly new path in Jewish cultural history had opened was the impact of a new and in fact revolutionary concept, which made a deep impression on both literary production—first poetry and later (in the middle of the nineteenth century) narrative prose—and nonliterary writings. This concept, which determined the scope, character, and aim of modern Hebrew literature, assigned to Hebrew writing in general and to literature in particular the task of national instruction and guidance, thus demanding that literature take a stance on public issues as if it were appointed to the institutional task of safeguarding the well-being of the nation and pointing to the direction it should take through the complexities of modern life. Hebrew poetry (in the broad sense of the term, which includes emotive prose) had not assigned itself such a role since the days of the prophets. Even in the most luminous heights of medieval literature (Shmuel Hanagid, Judah Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra), poetry was not accompanied by the assumption that it was paving an essential path that would lead toward redemption. The task of national instruction had for many generations been allotted to the rabbinic elite and identified with Jewish law. It was no coincidence that a well-known talmudic dictum declared: "Who are the kings? Our rabbis!" This slogan expressed the reality of the loss of Jewish political sovereignty, in which the rule of the kings of Israel gave way to the supremacy of Jewish law.
The sovereignty of Jewish law was expressed primarily in the fact that its influence, and the influence of those who represented it (the rabbis), spread far beyond the strictly legal domain, its primary and original site, to encompass a wide range of perspectives on the lives of individuals and the collective. The new writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—for instance those who published the periodicals Hameʾasef and Keremḥemed: figures like Naphtali Herz Wessely, Shalom Hakohen, Yosef Haʾefrati, Joseph Perl, and Isaac Erter—who spread the message of what was already called "the Enlightenment project" or "the Enlightenment revolution," did not actually overthrow religious dogma as critics of modern Hebrew literature like Baruch Kurzweil mistakenly claimed, nor did they reject religious experience or Jewish law. Most of them believed wholeheartedly in the divine provenance of the Torah, in God's revelation to the prophets, and in the absolute validity of religious law within its defined scope. In fact, many of them fought strenuously against atheism in any form, which they saw as a gateway to ethical nihilism and social anarchy; with a few exceptions, most of them were not the deists they were commonly suspected of being. Until the 1860s, they did not fight against Jewish law and rabbinic authority as long as that authority kept to its legitimate territory, the realm of halakhah.
Even in the 1860s and 1870s, when the so-called war of religion and life was raging in Hebrew literature—with the great literary fighters Moses Leib Lilienblum and Gordon, among many others—the most radical of these fighters demanded no more than the reform of Jewish law, its updating for modern conditions, a renewal of the flexible experiential spirit that had animated the legal tradition at its height but that had been suppressed by the conservative character of more recent generations. The novelist Reuben Asher Braudes, who portrayed this struggle in his novel Religion and Life, translated the title of his book as a battle between life and Ritualgesetz (religious law) rather than religion itself, a correction designed to avoid misunderstanding and deflect criticism. Braudes and the literature in whose name he spoke were not trying to overthrow religion, only to correct and update its ritual rules.
In fact, until the end of the nineteenth century, no writer of Hebrew literature explicitly called for the repudiation of Jewish law. Rather, from the very beginnings of modern Hebrew literature at the end of the eighteenth century, the new Hebrew writers took issue with the authority of halakhah to decide how Jews lived their lives in every regard. They questioned the authority of the rabbis in many domains in which Jewish laws could not and should not be the sole determinant in regard to their content or scope or behavioral norms. This included the areas of education, health, the economy, and public civic life, but also aesthetics, emotional experience, intellectual curiosity, and erotic experience (as long as this did not transgress the rules of modesty and sexual decorum).
Education, they argued, should include not only "the laws of God" but also the "teachings of Man"—science, foreign languages, and practical knowledge—which enable participation in the modern nation-state. Health should be based on new medical discoveries and on principles of hygiene. And economic life should leave behind the outdated feudal models and adapt itself to the productive dynamics of capitalism, something that required the minimization of the old barriers between Jews and non-Jews, the study of European languages, and integration into national and international commercial networks. The civic life of the collective would itself have to take on the behavioral practices of the European bourgeoisie—in dress, speech, manners, and relations between the individual and the laws of the state. The intellectual curiosity and critical spirit that was part of this culture would have to moderate dogmatic habits of thought and, as long as they did not lead to absolute heresy, had to be given great leeway and encouraged through the education and socialization of the younger generation. It was likewise important to promulgate rationalist thought based on cause and effect, actions and consequences.
Aesthetics and the pleasures it brought should serve the Jew as an individual and as part of a national collective, extending his spiritual and emotional world, ennobling his desires, sharpening his sensitivity to the beautiful and moving. It was for this reason that Jews had to develop the arts generally, and literature in particular (reversing the distrust for the representational arts that was part of Jewish religious principles). Erotic desire or sexuality, beyond the narrowly instinctual—that is, when it became love—had to serve as the basis of Jewish sexual culture, marriage, and family life. Literature should be allowed to arouse it, to praise it, and to celebrate its victories as long as these did not transgress the legitimate boundaries of Jewish and bourgeois institutions.
In all these matters the new writers rejected the authority of the rabbinical institutions and presented themselves as a substitute for them. The effect of their activities was to signify, directly or indirectly, that they would be the ones to decide (through the literary means at their disposal) on the new norms, to set the boundaries between forbidden and permitted, to establish what should be embraced and what must be rejected.
Similarly, they would be the ones to judge all matters related to the political governance and fate of the Jewish collective, because the Jewish legal tradition lacked concepts that could allow it to come to terms with the new conditions of modernity. They would take careful measure of the state of affairs of Jewish communities within each of its non-Jewish cultural contexts and point out new opportunities that were opening up through the long process of the dissolution of the old caste system (in which the ruler of the state interacted with corporate groups distinguished by their economic, occupational, ethnic and religious identities) and the rise of the modern nation-state, which was based on the relationship of the state, its laws, and the individual rather than any group to which this individual might belong. They would also fight on behalf of these communities for civil equality within the modern European state even while safeguarding the living connection that tied Jews to their unique cultural tradition, primarily through the spread of the Hebrew language and the culture that was growing around it. Finally, they would act as mediators or decisors whenever contradictions or tensions arose between these two developing directions—the integration of Jews into the modern nation-state and the preservation of the link between these Jews and their unique heritage—to suggest compromises that could resolve these contradictions; as Gordon says, "Be a man in the street and a Jew in the home."[
In short, the new writers were appointed as "watchmen over the house of Israel," the title chosen by Erter for his cycle of satires (written in the 1820s to 1840). This title may have been originally based on an attempt to translate Spectator, the title of a bourgeois English periodical edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele that had an enormous effect on the bourgeois literature of the eighteenth century throughout Europe; Erter may have intended to produce a similar periodical in which to publish his satires. Nevertheless, the title actually demonstrates a far broader and more inclusive intention than what was signified by the concept of the spectator as it functioned as a principle for the English writers associated with the Whig party, representatives of the rising British middle classes. While the latter saw themselves merely as guides for the manners and ethical behavior of the mercantile class that was gaining a decisive influence in the administration of the state, the Hebrew writers saw themselves as true leaders, captains of a ship navigating the stormy waters of the new historical epoch.
The difference between these two conceptions found clear expression in the phrase Erter borrowed from Ezekiel: "O mortal, I appoint you watchman for the House of Israel; and when you hear a word from My mouth, you must warn them for me" (Ezekiel 3:17, NJPS). As soon as the enlightened and satirical spectator of the English writers and their German and French imitators became "the watchman for the House of Israel" from Ezekiel, the Hebrew concept was charged with the full weight of the biblical-prophetic impulse. Although Erter's watchman—in "The Nature of the Watchman," the text in which he laid out his literary mission—conceded that, unlike the biblical prophets, he was conveying no direct divine message because that line of communication had broken off in the postbiblical era. Nevertheless, he argued, he was conveying an indirect divine revelation, the revelation that emerged from the causal relationships that structured nature, and from the progress that guided historical developments. When the expression of this revelation was accompanied by a moral sensibility and the faculty of reason, against the background of a deep knowledge and understanding of the world and of culture, it earned the new writer, the modern Hebrew prophet, a national authority parallel to that of the biblical prophets. In this way, the new literature claimed for itself the role of legislator over all realms of life not encompassed by Jewish law, in the narrow and obligatory sense of the term. In the absence of independent Jewish political institutions, Jewish literature saw itself as a kind of parliament, a legislative body. In other words, literature claimed for itself the role of political authority.
It was in this unprecedented claim that the novelty of the new literature lay. Thus, about a century before the emergence of Zionism and the other varieties of new Jewish nationalism, modern Hebrew literary culture took upon itself the role of constructing a new national-Jewish political identity. Moshe Leib Lilienblum, the famous ideologue of the Haskalah who became an impassioned Zionist, saw clearly that the writers who created modern Hebrew literature at the end of the eighteenth century were the first nationalists (see his 1893 essay "The First Nationalists in the Previous Century")—that is, they were the ones who constructed a modern Jewish political-national discourse. Lilienblum argued that the Haskalah that held fast to the Hebrew language and tried to build a modern literary structure in that language did not and could not relinquish its pronounced nationalist component, even if it dulled its messianic edge—at least until the rise of Zionism. This is opposed to the Haskalah that emerged from the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, which based Jewish identity on religious principle, stripped of the messianic-national idea that had been an inextricable component of the religious tradition, a renunciation designed to ease the integration of Jewish communities into the nation-state and the new national populations arising at this time. Lilienblum's Haskalah did, however, ground this principle on a new foundation: national culture.
In fact, Peretz Smolenskin made the same argument more than two decades before Lilienblum, in referring to the so-called Berlin Haskalah as national Hebrew culture. These two thinkers understood that the definitive novelty of the new literature was embodied not in its aesthetic concepts or in its attempts to construct a European literature in the Hebrew language, and not even in its (extremely moderate) theological argument with the Jewish tradition, but primarily in its understanding of Hebrew and the continuous creativity within it—in changing social and cultural contexts—as the source of a new form of national Jewish identity and the vehicle for a modern Jewish politics. This, then, was the principle innovation (although not the only one) that characterized what was called the "new" Hebrew literature from its emergence in the late eighteenth century until—at the very earliest—the founding of the State of Israel in the middle of the twentieth, and perhaps even after that.
This understanding was not unique to the Hebrew thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: Smolenskin, Lilienblum, Aḥad Haʿam (Asher Ginzberg), and Micha Josef Berdyczewski, who, in response to nascent Jewish nationalisms, and specifically Zionism, looked back at and surveyed the development of new Hebrew Literature a century before their time. These intellectuals were not the only ones to understand the significance of the seeds that its founding fathers had sown a century earlier. These founding fathers were themselves fully aware of what they were sowing, even if they were far indeed from imagining of the rise of Jewish nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century and could not, even in their wildest dreams, have envisioned the possibility of an independent Jewish state. Of course, we need to know how to interpret their references to this matter, which of course requires us to overcome the effects of time and changing tastes, which hide their meaning from those who cannot conquer their distaste for the florid maskilic style, which sounds so foreign and outlandish to a modern ear.
Let us consider, for example, an excerpt from the manifesto "Naḥal habesor" ("The Besor Stream"), published in 1783 by a group of intellectuals and writers in anticipation of the soon-to-published first Hebrew literary journal, Hameʾasef. In an open letter, they sought the guidance of Wessely as a grammarian, interpreter, educator, and poet. This letter, along with Wessely's response, which advised them to follow contemporary European models and avoid the pagan mythology so often referenced in neoclassical literature as well as the overt eroticism of this literature, appeared in the first issue of the journal in 1784. The opening of the letter strikes us today as not only pompous but also downright bizarre in its flattery for a man who wrote poetry to which no modern reader can relate. Nevertheless, beneath the florid style and the ridiculously excessive praise, the opening reflects a clear-eyed consciousness of the significance of the project these authors were taking upon themselves.
Wessely was far better known at that time for his Hebrew grammars and biblical commentaries and as the formulator of the Haskalah program for renewing Jewish education by harmonizing divine law and the humanities than he was known as a poet; his ideas were formulated in the article "Words of Truth and Peace," the first maskilic response to Joseph II's 1781 Edict of Tolerance. In the open letter, however, he is presented as a writer who revived the Hebrew language and poetry:
The weary soul that desires cold water goes to the source, and the lovers of Hebrew will appeal to you. Since Israel lost its pride, its crown fallen to the ground, and was exiled together with God, there is no prophet, poet, or eloquent speaker. Until you rose, Naftali, and raised Hebrew from the dust. You took the measure of the sublime style of our prophets, and like them you advocated for your people. And who could compare to you, mightily making your name in Israel? With the spirit of your wisdom you went down to Babylon, and there you took down the harps hanging from the willows, and you played on them your songs. And from then on your poems have spread throughout Judah, and the heart of every maskil burns with the fire of your songs, everyone yearns to hear your words, to speak as you do, because your voice is like that of a prophet and your place is among the true poets![
On the face of it, this is pure nonsense. Did the editors of Hameʾasef not know that Hebrew had been revived time and again over the long periods since the decline of the Hebrew sovereignty in the first century? No matter how limited their knowledge of the great poets of the Spanish Golden Era—the true extent of which was only revealed in the course of the nineteenth century, with the bibliographic scholarship of the Wissenschaft des Judentums—they nevertheless knew enough of Halevi and Ibn Gabirol to know that any talk about the disappearance of Hebrew poetry or the harps supposedly left by the rivers of Babylon (according to Psalm 137) was entirely without merit.
Moreover, they surely knew at least some of the Hebrew Baroque and Renaissance poetry that had been written in Italy and the Netherlands, and especially the play Layesharim tehilah (Praise to the Upright), by Luzzatto, who was almost their contemporary, and whose monologues they sometimes used as a model in their intellectual and pastoral poetry. Luzzatto, it is worth pointing out, is mentioned later in the manifesto as a poet whose poetry could guide their generation.
What, then, was the meaning of crowning Wessely—an obscure poet, whose poetry should not be mentioned in the same breath as that of the Golden Age poets, or as Luzzatto—the first Hebrew poet since the close of the biblical canon, or ascribing to him not only of the role of grammarian and biblical commentator but also advocate for his people? Only an understanding of the political context of their statement can resolve these contradictions and provide a convincing explanation for the questions that emerge from them.
The writers of this letter to Wessely make no effort to place his poetry within the ongoing development of postbiblical Hebrew poetry. The context in which they champion his work is historical and political, and it is readily apparent by the second sentence of their letter: "Since Israel lost its pride, its crown fallen to the ground, and was exiled together with God."
The crisis, the interruption, took place not within the development of poetry but within the history of Jewish political autonomy. The destruction of Second Temple Judaism also shattered one dimension of Hebrew poetry—the dimension of national governance and its character as the product of national sovereignty. The authors of the manifesto allude to this dimension with the expression "the words of our prophets," which refers not only to the aesthetic sublimity of the best of prophetic poetry, but also to the content of this poetry. Here the aesthetic sublime is mobilized for reproach and consolation, for scrutiny into the ways of life of the national collective, and for the raging pathos of the attempt to correct them, which is the expression of national independence in its most essential dimensions of sovereignty and responsibility. It is this prophetic content that grants the religious and national autonomy its aesthetic dimension.
It is worth asking whether some of this sense of responsibility that is a product of the autonomous life of a national collective was not already expressed in medieval Hebrew poetry, for instance in Spain, or in Halevi's Zion poems. As the authors of the manifesto saw it, it was Wessely who went to Babylon and lifted the harps off the willows, renewing biblical poetry. And that was not only because he was the Hebrew poet considered to have revived a so-called pure biblical style, stripped of its later historical strata, but also because he took upon himself public responsibility for Jewish national and political destiny in his widely read programmatic essays.
What they had in mind was not the first sections of the didactic epic poem "Shirei tifʾeret" ("Songs of Glory"), Wessely's main contribution to Hebrew poetry, which only appeared in 1789; he continued to publish additional parts of this epic poem until 1802, and it was published as a complete poem only after Wessely's 1805 death. When the letter was published, "Naḥal habesor" had not yet "spread throughout Judah." They were also not thinking of Wessely's grammars and commentaries, although the allusion to Wessely as a master stylist bears on this work, nor were they thinking of his few published poems, impressive as they were. It is true that the manifesto explicitly mentions "the fire of his songs"—namely, the power of his poetry—but those just-mentioned works of his that circulated widely were not books of poetry but the essays in "Words of Truth and Peace," which had appeared the year before (1782). These indeed had spread like wildfire, the fire of an intensive polemic, the very first polemic that Hebrew poetry waged against rabbinic authority.
To be sure, the writers of this manifesto were also driven, from their perspective, by aesthetic and stylistic justifications. The few poems Wessely published before "Shirei tifʾeret"—for example, the celebrated elegy "ʿOdkha ḥai bameromim" ("You Still Live on High"), written after the tragic death of Duke Leopold of Brunswick and better known by its first, often-cited line, "What can you call the death of an innocent?"—displayed a new poetic style, based on but not enslaved to biblical idiom, a lucid and balanced language that adopted the clarity and inner harmony praised by European neoclassicism, fully liberated from the medieval meter still preserved in Hebrew Italian Renaissance and Baroque poetry. Instead, Wessely mobilized the accentual-syllabic metrical system, which late eighteenth-century European literatures slightly modified into a tonal-syllabic meter, the meter that the Romantics discovered best suited their emotions.
To take yet another example: a long lyric narrative poem already composed in the 1830s in Vilna, after the Hebrew literary center had migrated from German-speaking lands to Eastern Europe, at first primarily to northern Lithuania, where authors maintained direct contact with the waning German center through its geographical and cultural proximity to the eastern peripheries of German influence in cities like Königsburg in eastern Prussia. In this poem, the author, Adam Hakohen, who was considered the poetic heir of Wessely, related a dream he had had "on the eve of the ninth of the fifth"—that is, on the eve of Tishah B'av (according to the biblical calendar, Av is the fifth month of the year). It was the melancholy, devastating dream of someone who saw before his eyes the enormity of the national catastrophe:
It was the evening of Tisha Be'av
The day fire and sword consumed everything holy
I was thinking of all the glories we have lost:
The land, sovereignty, the pomp of royalty,
The Temple and its servants—shepherds of the flock—
Which up to the present day are in the hand of the Arab.[
Insufficient attention has been paid to the subversive and revolutionary character of this stanza, the first in the poem "An Evening Dream" (or of other, similar poems of the nineteenth century). The religious reasons behind the choice of the ninth of Av as a traditional day of mourning in the Jewish calendar are subjected by Adam Hakohen to dramatic revision and, from the standpoint of tradition, even turned on their head.
According to tradition, the essence of the catastrophe embodied in Tisha B'av is the destruction of the temple—that is, the banishment of the divine presence from the spaces and lives of the national collective (as implied by "Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them," Exodus 25:8). One can think of this as the opening of a distance between God and the Jewish people, and between God and the Shekhina (the feminine godhead)—a condition that causes far more theological distortion and trauma than the cessation of political independence alone, and the dependence on strangers, wandering, and persecution that comes with it. On the face of it, the poet accepts this religious understanding of the day at the outset, describing Tishah B'av as a day in which "Fire and sword consumed everything holy." The word "holy" seems to refer to the temple, but it quickly becomes clear that, according to the hierarchy reflected in the work of the modern poet, the destruction of the temple is ranked no higher than fourth among the devastations memorialized on this day of mourning. Preceding it in both place and value are the loss of national territory ("the land"), the loss of sovereignty (national independence), and the loss of royalty, the concrete embodiment of this sovereignty. Even the loss of the "pomp" of kingship—the richness of ceremony, the colorfulness of national ritual—take precedence for the poet over the destruction of the temple. And, as for that destruction, it is portrayed in the poem more as the loss of a ritual and administrative center than as a theological catastrophe. The priests, the functionaries of the temple who stand alongside the kings as "shepherds of the flock," are those who set social norms and enforce the law rather than acting as intermediaries between the human and divine spheres.
The closing of the stanza on such a concrete note—all these "lost things" did not disappear but are, up to this very day, held by "the Arab" (an imprecise reference to the Ottoman Empire)—makes explicit the political character of the poem as a whole. If the essence of the catastrophe mourned on Tishah B'av is the loss of territory and sovereignty, then this loss might in fact be temporary, because the territory continued to exist, and sovereignty over it, even if it is in the hands of others, might one day be recovered. Adam Hakohen wrote in a pre-Zionist era but, as one of the founders of the new national discourse—which is to say, of modern Hebrew literature—his grasp of the national condition was necessarily political and thus contained within it the Zionist idea as a latent potential.
Within this context, the national-political significance that the poet accords the Hebrew language—a significance the whole new literature accorded to it—is particularly conspicuous. Adam Hakohen attempts to find some measure of comfort in the fact of the survival of the Hebrew language, which was perceived by the literature of the Haskalah as what they called "the sole survivor." But what exactly survived? And of what was it a remnant? The religious tradition in no way saw Hebrew as a remnant of something that had been lost. In its view, Hebrew was the holy tongue (lashon haqodesh), the language of the Torah, and perhaps also the Ursprache created by God and in which God spoke with the angels and with Adam and Eve. (See the description of the divine origin of Hebrew in Halevi's Kuzari.) Far from being lost, it had been preserved by the Jewish people, who were commanded to study it as a necessary condition for observing the commandment of Torah study and as part of the Jewish synagogue service. In the eyes of the Haskalah poet, the matter was entirely different:
In my despondency I sought some comfort:
Has any vestige of our royalty survived?
I found our language. It is still ours;
The hands of strangers have not touched it.
It escaped into the holy books and thus was rescued.[
Hebrew is thus a remnant of "royalty"—that is to say, a surviving vestige of the national sovereignty of the Jewish people. It was true that it was the holy tongue (Adam Hakohen titled his poetry collection Songs in the Holy Tongue), but this sacredness was conceived differently. It was not the theological holiness of sacred scripture; this last concept was merely the rescue vehicle, a kind of linguistic Noah's ark that saved Hebrew from the flood that swept away national sovereignty. Hebrew was understood through the secular sacredness with which modern Jewish nationalism imbued its central values—that is, those values that preserved the existential and cultural distinctiveness of the nation.
Nevertheless, in the historical context that gave rise to early Haskalah literature, the Hebrew language was the primary sacred national value as the sole remnant of the complex system of ancient Jewish sovereignty (which also comprised territory, political authority, royalty, temple, and priesthood). As such, it served Haskalah literature as a quasi-divinity, the object of an alternative religious rite principally expressed by the study of biblical Hebrew grammar and the creation of a literature based on biblical Hebrew expression.
In his introduction to Songs in the Holy Tongue—a kind of florid, ecstatic apostrophe to "the comely Lady of the House of the Lord, the beloved of the God of Israel, the treasure of his prophets, the Queen of languages, whose holy name is: the Hebrew tongue"—Adam Hakohen described these rites as if they were the rituals of a secret society, a sort of freemasonry. The lovers of the language, with whom traditionalists were engaged in mortal battle
gather in secrecy or in the dead of the night for fear of these zealots, to steal into your temple of old and grace the dust of your ruins, awestruck by the genius of your ancient builders; and they pick from the budding flowers that grow among these ruins, each according to the blessings that God has bestowed on him, and they weave these stalks of sprouts and blossoms into beautiful wreaths, and they place them upon your head, accompanying their sacred songs by the instruments that hang on the walls around them, to restore your strength and to comfort you, and put an end to your mourning and desolation."[
Again, we have to look past the flowery language and elaborate metaphors to the content hidden behind them. The Hebrew language is sacred because it is the remnant of the destroyed temple of ancient Jewish sovereignty. Among the ruins of this destruction bloom fresh flowers, which are the new Hebrew literature; the new writers pick these buds as if for a purely aesthetic purpose—to weave a splendid wreath from "stalks of sprouts and blossoms," a phrase that alludes to both Aaron's flowering staff and the golden frontlet on the priestly headdress—to place on the bowed head of Hebrew, the fallen Queen of languages.[
The principle of the continued survival of the language is the primary national aim of the new Hebrew literature as modern literature, and not as a continuation of the literary tradition of sacred poetry and prayer; in the Haskalah view, this religious tradition destroyed the language and emptied it of its primary value. It cut it off from its biblical sources—which is to say, from its national independence—and turned it into a diasporic language. According to an elegy by Gordon, a student of Adam Hakohen and the greatest of the Haskalah poets, mourning the death of Lebensohn (the son of Adam Hakohen), the Hebrew language could speak of two destructions: the destruction of Judah and the destruction that took place when "her land was plundered by many nations." During the first catastrophe (the Babylonian exile), the language was saved, embalmed "in the sacred bookshelf and in the hearts of the wise." Despite this, the embalming of these dry bones meant the end of its prophetic vision, and it ceased to be the language of poetry. During the second destruction, the fate of Hebrew was harsher; not only did it "find shelter only in sacred sites, and from the tongue of the people was forgotten, as if I had died," but:
False authors and evil writers flourished
While frivolous versifiers mocked me
And countless liturgists devoid of taste
Buried my holy soul in heaps of sand
Debasing my splendor, abusing my glory,
Disgracing my honor with words without sense.[
Again, the overt aesthetic arguments are only part—if the most evident part—of a more general attack on the Hebrew that was cut off from its biblical roots, in the sense that it lost its royal authority. It was turned into the holy tongue, but in reality it was a desacralized language, because the "sacred spirit" of ancient Hebrew had been killed off. In a brilliant reversal, the poet connects the literal ruins—"heaps of sand," a word which shares a root with profanation or desecration—with the illusory sacredness of diasporic Hebrew. The sand and desecration signify the uprooting from biblical sources, which deprived Hebrew of its political function.
The new writers attempted to revive this function. It is no accident that they so loved the prophetic declaration, "He made my mouth like a sharpened blade. And he made me like a polished arrow" (Isaiah 49:2). The Hebrew language was a weapon. The deceased Wessely is brought back from the dead to appear in Adam Hakohen's poem "Evening Dream" in order to point to the direction in which Hebrew must develop in order to fulfill its national mission. Like a Hebrew Virgil he leads Dante/Adam Hakohen from the vale of tears in which Hebrew is persecuted and forgotten to the ancient biblical landscape, in which he hears wondrous "temple songs" in the Hebrew tongue at its pure source. But in a characteristic and significant move, the temple to which the poet is taken is not the Temple of Solomon in all its glory but the Lebanon Forest House (1 Kings 7). There, promises Wessely, "you will hear that which your soul desires, a mouth speaking the clear Hebrew you love," after the poet complains about the corruption of Hebrew at the hands of writers who preceded Wessely in "France and Spain, Germany and Italy."
The direction of this dream journey specifically to Lebanon is required by the wordplay of the poet, who succeeds in weaving into his descriptions of the Lebanon Forest House most of the titles of the grammatical studies and biblical commentaries by Wessely, who was called "Master of Lebanon" ("Lebanon," "A Gated Garden," "Wine in Lebanon," "A Tower in Lebanon," etc.). But Adam Hakohen does not forget the primary biblical function of the house, which was built by King Solomon beside the temple and as if in contrast with it, as a foil for or completion of it. He asserts: "We came upon an armory, built by Solomon, / It was made for the purpose of fighting ancient kings."[
This was the fundamental significance of the secularization of the Hebrew language—this, and not its adaptation to daily life and its faithful mimetic representation of the dialogue and realities of Eastern European Jewish life, as many think. The secularization of Hebrew was first and foremost the transformation of a theological communicative system into a political one. Certainly secularization in its secondary meaning—the appropriation of the language for everyday use, the construction of a new lexicon that could enable this adaptation, and so on—became a palpable need in the course of the development of Hebrew literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This need required both the aesthetic development of the language (especially with the emergence of Hebrew prose realism at the end of the nineteenth century) and its use to communicate both modern ideas and modern practical realities. But, in essence, the primary aspect of the secularization of Hebrew up to the development of vernacular Hebrew in the Erets Yisraʾel at the end of the century was cultural and political rather than practical; evidence of this was the widespread negative attitude within Hebrew literature toward Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his projects.
The invention of a new Hebrew for the sake of reviving the language as a vernacular was understood to be a destructive act because it cut Hebrew off from the sources that provided it with its authority as the cultural language of the Jewish people, and thus as the language that could provide a blueprint for its future in the modern world. As writers like Aḥad Haʿam, Shalom Yaʿakov Abramovitsh and Bialik saw it, Ben-Yehuda achieved "life" for the language at the cost of authority and sovereignty. But this kind of life, without authority or sovereignty, was something Yiddish had, too. Ben-Yehuda, it could be said, revived Hebrew by bringing it down to the level of Yiddish, and Hebrew literature had no intention of going along with that project. Hebrew writers were looking to Hebrew not only for descriptive tools and as a means of communication but also as a source of collective cultural power. Prophetic exhortations to the people could be expressed only in Hebrew, as in Bialik's poems of prophetic wrath. Hebrew, as Rachel Katzenelson Shazar clearly saw, in her cautionary essay "Language Pangs," was a revolutionary language, while Yiddish could at most be a language in which revolutionaries addressed the masses. Yiddish functioned as a vehicle for revolutionary ideas; Hebrew was itself a revolution.
It was the language that derived its power from some "ancient dominion," absorbing this power into itself. Just as it declined with the decline of Jewish authority (political power, independence, sovereignty), ceding ground first to Aramaic and then to Yiddish and other Jewish diaspora languages, so—Berdyczewski believed—would its flame flare up again with the attempt to establish national sovereignty. For that reason, Berdyczewski defended the turn of the earliest Haskalah writers to biblical Hebrew against Aḥad Haʿam, who saw this as a fateful error. With this defense, Berdyczewski sanctioned the sometimes obscured connection between the emergence of modern Hebrew literature and the revival of Hebrew sovereignty. Hebrew was "the tongue of a living, fighting nation, the language of power and nature," he asserted.
Our aim here is not to trace the various ways in which nineteenth-century Hebrew literature imparted this conception of the political mission and character of the Hebrew language to the revival literature of Bialik's era and to the Hebrew literature created in Palestine in the interwar period. Conceptions of the language and the mission of its literature broadened immeasurably, alongside the growth of the literature itself, and even a summary of these processes would require a book-length work. Especially influential for this conception was the relative detachment of Hebrew prose from the biblical model and its alignment with a model that has been called (it seems to me, mistakenly) "synthetic"—that is, a composite model, which brought together various historical strands of the language, including a significant Aramaic component, while allegedly achieving some kind of peace and harmony among these components. It seems more correct to describe this model, at least as it was developed by its major practitioners (Abramovitsh and his followers, Shmuʾel Yosef Agnon and Ḥayyim Hazaz), as a tense model, which constructed meaning through intentional contrast and at times even outright combat among the linguistic components, which rubbed up against each other, igniting brilliant parodic sparks in the process. But this is a separate issue, which also requires broader clarification and substantiation.
But it is possible to assert, even without the requisite detail and examples, that Hebrew literature continued to see itself as "a watchman over the house of Israel" until the founding of the State of Israel at the very earliest; its primary weapon was the Hebrew language in its metacommunicative function—that is to say, in its role not only of describing reality or conveying information but also and primarily of guarding the continued existence of national Jewish culture. One could say that it was an existential, and thus necessarily political, language, a language that was the primary reservoir of the national life force so that its use was bound up with the exercise of power, its distribution or direction. This argument may be grounded in a consideration of principles rather than in historical evidence, and it is to this consideration that the rest of this essay will be dedicated.
These days, there is a general assumption that literature is political—all literature, of whatever kind, including those texts that focus entirely on the most personal issues. According to this assumption, the very fact of literary publication—and after all, a literary text that does not sooner or later find publication does not exist as part of literary reality—accords a text its political character, whatever its content, form, genre, style, or aim. A literary text exists only within a holistic collective space, however narrow or broad, a space that should be differentiated from the public sphere in its legal, economic, or geographic senses in the same way that a collective might be differentiated from a population, a community from a collection of chance neighbors, and a city in the sense of a polis from a municipality. Literature belongs to the polis and in this sense is inevitably political. It is true that the polis includes different types of activity, not all of which can be characterized as "political" in the usual meaning of the term. It is also true that all these types of activity, as different from one another as they might be, not only influence each other, but also interpenetrate each other, such that each absorbs some of the essence of these other strands.
The writer, even one who directs attention to the inner world of an individual, or to universal matters, is already—by the very act of choosing the language of a certain collective and directing their work to this collective or some part of it—deciding certain questions, choosing certain options, preferring certain paths that are unavoidably part of a larger network of direct or indirect connections to the basic existential questions faced by that collective about how resources and power might be distributed in an effort to solve these problems. It is almost impossible to conceive of literary decisions, even purely aesthetic ones, that have no connection with the political issues faced by the group of real historical individuals addressed by a literary text, along with (although in different ways) the group of imagined readers addressed within this utterance.
When Uri Zvi Greenberg responded in 1926 to those who accused him of lowering the standard of poetry to political discourse by saying, "Speechify to them, aesthetes, in the language of the stars. And I will speak the language of one man to another. I will sing out that anti-poetic word: Politics," he was not saying anything in contradiction with the essential nature of literature, as his detractors argued.[
This is the matter that Greenberg highlighted in his declaration: one should sing out politics, a "non-poetic" concept in its nature. In other words, in order for engagement with the political to be literary, one must add to the political an independent, autonomous element, the singing out evoked by the poet. This element in and of itself is distinct from the political and not a product of it. If that were not the case, there would be no need to add poetry, to integrate it in a fabric in which it is another thread, and in a certain sense an alien one, even if it is adapted to its environment. It is this principle of adaptation—the intentionality and effort required for its implementation—that bears witness to the distinctiveness and separation of the poetic and the political, and to the fact that their integration and harmonization is achieved only with some effort.
For our purposes, there is no need to fully explore this matter, which juxtaposes two radically different concepts of the literary phenomenon, and of what can be called the "literary act." The claim that guides our discussion does not hinge on choosing between these two approaches. The Hebrew literature we call "new," from its beginning until it was transformed into Israeli literature—which was both a continuation of Hebrew literature and its canonization and end—contained a fundamentally political element, which was expressed in different modes and styles, but which was nevertheless consistently present. Strange as it may seem, what divides Hebrew and Israeli literature, then, is the loss of this essential principle. Israeli literature is political only when it intends to be. It is devoid of the immanent political nature of Hebrew literature.
The new Hebrew literature was political from its very inception in the Haskalah circles in Germany, because engaging with it necessitated three choices of clear political significance. The first choice was to use Hebrew as a literary language; this choice was far from obvious either for the community of Hebrew writers or for their readers. Second, the literature had to choose a specific Hebrew, as we have seen, within the great, stratified domain of the Hebrew language—or, rather, to choose a specific understanding of the essence of the Hebrew language, which had nothing in common with other conceptions of the language, based on long and deeply rooted traditions about what the language was and how it functioned. These two choices were associated with a third, which we have also already mentioned: the choice to use the Hebrew language for literature, a specific goal that brought writers into inevitable conflict with social and cultural elements of their society that considered this aim—spiritual and social guidance of the Hebrew readership as the representatives of the national collective in its entirety—their own fiefdom, inseparable from their own essential functions.
All these choices distinguished the new Hebrew literature from the other European national literatures developing at the same time, which served as a model of inspiration. It is true that these literatures—in German, Russian, French, and later English—also required their writers to choose among options: stylistic options, the preference for one register over another, power struggles against influential cultural-spiritual institutions such as the church. Yet all of these choices were made within a general literary space that they themselves were not constructing—that is to say, the space itself was, as it were, neutral ground, enabling freedom to choose from a range of options without threatening the space itself.
This was not the case with modern Hebrew literature, which was, as we have seen, closer to the famous definition of "Minor Literature" by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially the aspect that considers a minor literature a space that is too constrained to allow the same choices a major literature offers, particularly the choice between the political and apolitical. In a minor literature, Deluze and Guattari write, everything is political.[
In other words, modern Hebrew literature required its creators to subscribe to a number of commitments. Denying or ignoring these commitments destabilized the borders of this literature, and the literary act might be ejected from its domain. In the best case, if the denial or rejection were partial or subdued, the literature would relegate this literary act to the periphery of literary life and the literary canon. By contrast, Israeli literature, as it increasingly distanced itself from the earliest phases, which were still close to Hebrew literature, relinquished some of these commitments and thus expanded its realm of possibilities. For this reason, the political has become significantly less inherent, and turning to politics therefore requires intention; in Hebrew literature, the political was an obvious or prerequisite. In any case, the political character of the Israeli literature that intended to be political was achieved in different ways than in Modern Hebrew literature. For example, a political poem by Yitzhak Laor is different than one by Bialik, or Greenberg, or Natan Alterman, not only in matters such as content, style, or genre (categories that are represented differently in the poems of Bialik, Greenberg, and Alterman themselves), but also in the essence of the literary act, or, one might almost say, between the poetic essence and the public essence.
As I have argued, the choice of creating a new Jewish literature—in Hebrew—was not obvious at all. Jewish literature could not be new unless it took upon itself a mediating role between the Jewish collective and the social and cultural modern realities. Hebrew was apparently the least suited to be a mediator of all other languages. It was a language steeped in tradition, rooted in ancient sacred texts, foreign to the new everyday reality and to modern culture. Most of all, it was incomprehensible for the majority of the community it was supposed to address: both those elements who had distanced themselves from Jewish languages in the process of acculturating to foreign societies and cultures and those elements who were not exposed to the process of acculturation at all, but whose language was Yiddish.
One could argue that it was much more logical to write modern Jewish literature in German, Russian, or Yiddish. Indeed, the emergence of modern Hebrew literature in the late eighteenth century was followed by the beginnings of Jewish literary production in German and Yiddish, and later also in Russian and English. The choice of Hebrew was a product of the seemingly paradoxical supposition that only in that language could modern Hebrew literature address its readership as a nation. (Although there were also practical considerations, including the fact that traditional Jewish education was based on the study of the Torah, and thus on the learning of Hebrew.)
As long as the possibility of addressing the Jewish reader in a language other than Hebrew prevailed—which was the case starting at the very beginning of this literary enterprise and continuing until the crystallization of a Hebrew-speaking community in Eretz Yisraʾel, and even in much of the period after this community existed—the choice of Hebrew was political, and the literature in Hebrew was political in its very essence. Once writers no longer had a linguistic choice, the political nature of literature faded, and its role as the "watcher to the house of Israel" could be challenged. Now this aim necessitates a deliberate choice, and the political connection is only one possibility among others rather than an immanent characteristic.
To this day, a major aspect of the deep dynamics of Israeli literature, which are fueled by subterranean sources, is the struggle between its minoritarian character (which is self-evidently political) and its majoritarian character—between politics as a choice and the impossibility of avoiding this choice. The traditions of modern Hebrew literature, the more they wane in the tempestuous stream of the Israeli cultural reality, are still like the fathers, who—as Alterman said—are hard to kill off, like an oak that cannot be broken."[
By Dan Miron
Reported by Author