From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking
560
From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking
560Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804762007 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2010 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
From Continuity to Contiguity
Toward a New Jewish Literary ThinkingBy Dan Miron
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6200-7
Chapter One
Prologue: Old Questions; Do They Deserve New Answers?
What is this thing called (since the 1860s) hasifrut ha'ivrit hakhadasha (the new Hebrew literature)? In what does its "newness" subsist? How does this newness indicate a break from an "old" Hebrew literature? In what did the passage from that "old" literature to the "new" one differ from the normal evolving of other literatures through changes of style, poetics, philosophical underpinnings, and socio-historical circumstances? What justifies the sweeping separation of the new Hebrew literature from the presumably old one, drawing between the two a historical demarcation line that is so much bolder than the lines separating the Italian literary baroque from Italian neoclassicism or English medieval literature from its Renaissance continuation; and that, in spite of the fact that the advent of the new Hebrew literature never involved a linguistic shift as sharp and far reaching as the one that separates Chaucer from Spenser?! And when and where did the new Hebrew literature begin-in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, in Germany, as part of the so-called Enlightenment revolution, as the majority of scholars maintain, or half a century earlier, when Hebrew writing in Italy and Holland assumed some of the stylistic and generic characteristics of European neoclassicism, as other scholars and Chaim Nachman Bialik, the greatest modern Hebrew poet, believed; or in the sixteenth century, when Hebrew poetry written in Italy gradually distanced itself from its medieval origins and absorbed the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, as one single scholar (Eisig Silberschlag) insisted? And what about the old literature with which the new one presumably broke; was there ever such a thing? Was there a unified and continuous pre-modern or medieval Hebrew literature, or what the historical record really shows is that there were quite a few old Hebrew literatures (in themselves forming a part of the larger complex of Jewish literatures), each with its separate traditions, themes, ideational presuppositions, and poetics; and that some of them, for instance, the medieval Spanish (actually, Andalusian) Hebrew poetry, in both its main genres, the sacred and the secular, has in reality been continued-in North Africa, Iraq, and other centers in the Middle East-alongside, and totally independently, of the contemporary new literature, well into the twentieth century? For how can we subsume under the single roof of an old Hebrew literature completely divergent entities such as: the vast domains of the rabbinical legal discourse; a tradition of philosophical-rationalist writing informed by the medieval legacy of Aristotelianism; an aggregate of commentary on the sacrosanct texts, which was split in two and ran in opposite directions; a quasi-philological one, which strove to discover the "simple" meaning of the holy text within its specific context, and a homiletic-midrashic one, which deconstructing the text, tearing parts of it from their respective contexts and conflating them with other parts with which they ostensibly had no real connection, elicited from them the exegete's own ethical and theological cogitation; a liturgical tradition of a poetry written with the purpose of supplementing the synagogue ritual-periphrastic, allusive, astoundingly innovative in its style, and yet surprisingly continuous in its forms and prosody, and in its abiding by a separate taxonomy of generic traditions, all its own, which it did not share with the other poetry written in Hebrew at the same time: a poetry based on Arabic models, with meters, forms, and genres borrowed from these models; a poetry that could be hedonistic, sensual, celebrating the pleasures of wine and sex (both heterosexual and homosexual), of manicured gardens, music, fragrances, and the sweet flow of the seasons within the sheltered courtly world of the rich and pampered, and at the same time-metaphysical, spiritual, philosophical, somberly pondering the realities of death and decomposition, the awesome dimensions of the universe, the ultimate reality of an unseen God, the inability to grasp the various aspects of His being, and the yearning for His proximity, for an intimate contact with Him; a moralistic narrative literature of didactic and edifying parables, legends, and hagiography (stories about the lives, deeds, and sayings of holy and wise people); counterbalanced by collections of witty and comic tales, written in flowery rhyming prose, misogynist in its tendency, sexist, replete with salacious double entendres, and offering a view of human behavior as lowly and debased, conditioned by greed, lust, egotism, and inherent obtuseness; a mystical tradition replete with Neoplatonic myths and metaphors, dramatizing the history of the universe as having undergone a primal metaphysical big bang, a catastrophe that destroyed the conduits through which the divine overflow could reach the lowly world of matter through the ten spheres of God's immanence. Did all these belong within one old literature? If it was religious faith that cemented all the different old Jewish literatures in one monolithic continuity, and the new Hebrew literature resulted from a crisis of faith and from secularism in the theological rather than socio-cultural sense of the term (the loss of "the primal certainty that all the phenomena of life are played against the background holiness by which their value is measured," Baruch Kurzweil), then the beginning of that new literature must be moved to the last decades of the nineteenth century.
During the first half of that century, Hebrew literature did not report any significant crisis of faith, and its creators would have violently objected to their description as secularists who lost their faith in a personal God and a divine providence. On the contrary, they regarded themselves as the true defenders of "pure" religion, based on faith in God's revelation to Moses and the prophets, as well as on the assumption that in post-biblical time, "the windows of heaven were shut off " (Y. Erter),3 and that therefore the law, as well as a reasonable interpretation of God's will based on contemplation of the cosmos and of history, had to replace epiphany as the basis of faith. The very diluted deism of these writers hardly went beyond the boundaries of the traditional Maimonidean Jewish medieval rationalism.
Besides, we never hear of the emergence of the far more radical deism of Voltaire as having caused a schism in the history of French literature, tearing it from its historical moorings and resulting in the creation of a new French literature in which Voltaire and Diderot belonged but from which Racine and Pascal were excluded. For that matter, no one would dream of pointing to the advent of atheism as the spiritual event that presumably ruptured English literature into two separate historical entities, the old and the new English literatures. Clearly, the crisis of faith, which emerged as an experiential focal point in Hebrew writing of the end of the nineteenth century, by no means cut off the various historical continuities that unified, in spite of all ideological and artistic shifts, the Hebrew literature of the Enlightenment and the nationalist era.
Thus, it is possible that at least the new Hebrew literature was not completely cut off from certain, distinct parts of its so-called old predecessor (actually, predecessors). Probably there was no one old Hebrew literature anyway. Perhaps the new one, while being truly and totally divorced from some of the older literatures, was not as dramatically different from others, such as the previously mentioned medieval Hebrew-Andalusian poetry that focused on the vicissitudes of the human condition, or the delectable love poetry written in Italy during the Renaissance and the Baroque by a host of elegant Hebrew sonneteers? Perhaps the new literature formed mere new links or chapters within the chain or narrative, which connected it with much or some of what had preceded it.
Moreover, was the literature marked as new the only new Hebrew literature? What, for instance, was its position vis à vis the literature of the Hasidic movement, which chronologically was coterminous with it, indeed, running alongside it throughout the span of the last two hundred and fifty years? At first regarded by the new literature as its mortal enemy, which it set out to uproot and destroy, this other new literature eventually was looked upon by its rival as a source of inspiration and models that it sometimes tried to emulate. By the same token, what was the position of the new Hebrew literature vis à vis the equally new Yiddish one, which was born together with its Hebrew counterpart in the Germany of the waning eighteenth century (if, indeed, these were the date and place of the birth of both literatures), as much a part of the Jewish "Enlightenment Revolution" as the other one; and then, in the first half of the nineteenth century, moved together with it to eastern Europe? Are these twin literatures, one written in a spoken vernacular of Germanic origin and the other in the somewhat Europeanized language of the Bible, just two branches of one (eyntsike) modern Jewish literature, as a well-known bilingual Yiddish-Hebrew critic (Baal-makhshoves, Isidor Elyashiv, 1918) put it? Or were the two literatures, in spite of whatever they had in common at one time or another, two separate literary entities, not only differentiated by language but also by ideological underpinnings, different brands of cultural and linguistic dynamism, and separate artistic trajectories, as both ardent Hebraists (such as the Zionist philosopher Achad ha'am) and determined Yiddishists (Chaim Zhitlovsky, Nathan Birnboym et al.) insisted? And what was the connection between the new Yiddish literature and its own old predecessors? Was it in any significant way a continuation of a literary Yiddish tradition started in northern Italy, Switzerland, and south Germany about half a millennium before its modern follower? This was a literature of collections of didactic fables and Gesta; translations and adaptations of the Pentateuch and the narrative sections of the Bible, written as epics in the characteristic stanza and meter of the German Niebelungen Lied, or as a simplified version of the Pentateuch embroidered with midrashic glosses for the benefit of women who could not understand the weekly portion of the Torah when read in Hebrew in the synagogue every Sabbath morning. It also included a semi-secular literature of entertaining and adventurous romances of love, intrigue, chivalrous valor, and princes and princesses fleeing cruel usurpers and then regaining their legitimate birthrights as spouses and rulers. In addition, it was comprised of sequels of religious poems, often written by learned and pious women, through which Jewish women could communicate with God, unburden in His presence individual and collective tales of woe, bring to Him their requests, and participate in occasions of national mourning.
Or maybe the canonic new Yiddish literature (although it would not be granted even the rudiments of a canonic stature before the 1880s) was somehow continuing the sub-canonic semi-anonymous homiletic chapbooks (short pietistic novellas wrapped with moralistic warnings and ethical guidance), which some of the new writers imitated either for the purposes of parody and satire or with the wish of smuggling in this manner some maskilic good sense into the minds of unsuspecting, naive readers (most of whom were women)? Or was the new Yiddish poetry a continuation of the anonymous eastern European Yiddish Folklied, or of the witty and sometimes quite biting rhyming harangues of traditional wedding jesters? Was the new canonical Yiddish literature essentially secular and anti-traditional, as the Soviet Yiddish critics insisted; or was it, while attempting to replace religion, also informed and enlivened by it, as the American Yiddish critic Baruch Rivkin believed. And what was its position vis à vis its own, Yiddish, Hasidic "sister," which at the beginning it wished to obliterate (indeed, there are reasons to believe that its very existence was allowed or suffered by exponents of the Jewish enlightenment, most of whom loathed Yiddish and could not wait for the day of its replacement by Russian or German, for the sole reason of it being an effective weapon against Hasidism and its popular Yiddish literature), but eventually it tried to emulate-of course, smoothing its rough edges, gentrifying, and aestheticizing it?
Then, how did both the new Hebrew and Yiddish literatures position themselves within the larger Jewish literary complex? Jewish writers wrote "Jewish" texts (whatever the definition of this Jewishness) also in non-Jewish languages. Did a specific and definable brand of Jewish writing exist outside the boundaries of Jewish languages (not only Hebrew and Yiddish, but also Judesmo, better known as Ladino, the Jewish vernacular of Jews of Hispanic origin; Jewish Persian, Jewish Arabic, etc.)? If it did, how could it be detected and differentiated from the general non-Jewish literary context. Clearly the mere Jewish extraction of the author was not enough of a defining shibboleth, for there were many writers, born as Jews, who were quite indifferent to their ethnic background, saw themselves and were seen by many others as participants in an altogether non-Jewish literary endeavor (for instance, that of Russian modernism, which was greatly enhanced by the contributions of Jewish participants such as Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelshtam, who, as writers, were not a bit more Jewish than their Christian contemporaries and artistic allies). By the same token, the treatment of Jewish themes in itself had nothing quintessentially Jewish about it. Biblical themes were, of course, the legacy of all Christian literatures; even interest shown in relatively late Jewish figures and issues was no proof of the existence of that evanescent and indefinable thing sometimes referred to as Jewish "essence" or "condiment," which, Achad ha'am said, added a special tanginess to the Russian or German writing of Jews, even when they did not intend or wished it to be there. But of what did this essence consist? It was supposed to be a salient characteristic of the writing (not only on Jewish themes) of Heinrich Heine; but how exactly was Heine's historical novella of the tribulation of Jews in fourteenth-century Germany, "Der Rabbi von Bacherach," different, as a "Jewish" text, from the historical drama featuring the sixteenth-century thinker "Uriel Acosta," (published only a few years after Heine's tale), in which a non-Jew, the rebellious exponent of "Jung Deutschland," Karl Gutzkow, used the parable of the Jewish apostate, whose biblical criticism lead to his excommunication by the rabbis of Amsterdam, to enhance his contemporary struggle as a German against clericalism and autocratic regimes? And in what inhered the difference between Gutzkow's drama and the Jew Berthold Auerbach's novel about the life, persecution, and eventual triumph of Baruch Spinoza, which treated the same theme? Or was Marcel Proust's portrayal of an assimilated Jew (Swann), who negotiated a precarious social role in the milieu of the French aristocracy, where he belonged but also did not altogether belong, more Jewish (because of the author's emotional ties with his Jewish mother) than James Joyce's portrayal of an assimilated lower-middle-class Jew (Bloom), whose Catholic wife replaced him in her bed with gentile, uncircumcised lovers? Was Franz Kafka a "Jewish" writer, in spite of the fact that he almost never mentioned in his stories and novels the word Jew and never as much as hinted (in his literary works, to be differentiated from his letters and diaries) at the specific kind of alienation the portrayal of which became known as Kafkaesque, as being in any way rooted in the Jewish experience? If he was quintessentially "Jewish," as Max Brod, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and many others insisted, in what did Kafkaesque Jewishness inhere? Was Scholem justified in maintaining that the parable "Before the Law," and the lengthy interpretative controversy that followed it (in the cathedral chapter of The Trial), was the epitome of Talmudic cogitation, in which the light of the Talmudic mind was brilliantly broken into its componential bright colors, and that The Trial as a whole was a sequel to the book of Job, the only text, Scholem maintained, with which the novel could be meaningfully and productively compared? Or was Franz Rosenzweig right when he said that Kafka related to God as only the authors of the biblical books did?7 Or maybe Jewish literature written in non-Jewish languages had to be narrowly defined (as it was by Dov Sadan) as only that literature written by Jews for Jewish consumption; a definition that rendered this literature almost devoid of substance because the writers to whom it could be applied were solely those highly forgettable epigones who, for a short while, served conservative Jewish communities in Germany and to some extent also in Russia, and who adopted the language of their respective host societies but did not yet achieve the level of acculturation that would have allowed them to participate in these societies' cultural and literary dialogues. If this is what this literature is about-a tasteless fodder for a community in transition to temporarily feed on-perhaps it cannot be of interest to the literary scholar and critic, and only the cultural historian can elicit from it some significant insight.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Continuity to Contiguity by Dan Miron Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixNote on Transliteration....................xiii
1. Prologue: Old Questions; Do They Deserve New Answers?....................3
2. The "Old" Jewish Literary Discourse and the Illusion of Israeli Cultural Normalcy....................20
3. Modern Jewish Literary Thinking: The Enlightenment and the Advent of Nationalism....................57
4. The Jewish Literary Renaissance at the Turn of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries....................90
5. The Inter-Bellum Decades: Hebrew....................134
6. The Inter-Bellum Decades: Yiddish; Issues of Cultural Continuity in Revolutionary Times....................171
7. Vertical and Horizontal Continuities and Discontinuities....................204
8. Dov Sadan's Concept of Sifrut Yisra'el, and Why the "Old" Jewish Literary Discourse Became Irrelevant....................246
9. Jewish Diglossias-Differential and Integral....................278
10. Contiguity: Franz Kafka's Standing Within the Modern Jewish Literary Complex....................303
11. Contiguity: How Kafka and Sholem Aleichem Are Contiguous....................351
12. Conclusion: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking....................403
Breathing Through Both Nostrils? Shalom Ya'akov Abramovitsh Between Hebrew and Yiddish....................421
Notes....................499
Index....................530