Hebrew Literature and Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Ben-Horin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
The Relationship

Literature and music have a long entwined history. Since antiquity, music and poetry (a crystalized form of “literature” or the “poetic”) have been regarded as “twin sisters,” constituting a productive source of creation and inspiration. In the Romantic era (especially German Romanticism) this affinity reached one of its peaks, as demonstrated in the emergence of symbiotic musical-poetic forms and modes of aesthetic expression. From the perspective of cultural history, however, the scope of this relationship is even wider and can be traced back to the overlap between language and music. The compatibility of music and poetry has produced a range of scholarship elaborated in various traditions of knowledge and research disciplines, including semiotics, poetics, aesthetics, musicology, cultural studies, and critical theory. It is well known that sound is a central component of both musical and verbal sign systems. What happens to this sound, however, when we read a story? Moreover, whereas the connection between sounds and poems seems obvious, as shown in the field of research called prosody, which explores various phenomena such as rhythm and alliteration, metric and intonation, the connection between sounds and prose fiction is less obvious. This article focuses on a body of works—theoretical, methodological, and textual—dedicated to the exploration of literature and music relationships in general, in order to understand the relationship between Hebrew literature (including poetry, but mainly prose fiction) and music in particular. Compared to other national literatures such as French, English, and above all German, the scholarly study of Hebrew literature and music is relatively young. Central domains of this study are the employment of sound and acoustic components (i.e., prosody), the incorporation of musical intertexts (i.e., texts that are connected to the realm of music, such as musical terminology, descriptions of music playing, allusions to musical repertoire and themes), and the shaping of analogies between musical forms and narrative structures (i.e., the sonata form or the counterpoint). Hebrew literature also has a history, of course, from the Bible and other ancient texts, to medieval Hebrew poetry, and up to modern Hebrew and contemporary Israeli literature. Viewing these poetic traditions through the specific lens of language/literature and music relationships, an emerging field of study dealing with representations of music in modern Hebrew and Israeli prose fiction will be discussed, alongside scholarship on the relationship between Hebrew poetry and music.

Trends in the Study of Medieval Hebrew Literature

AJS Review ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Dan Pagis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Medieval Hebrew

The vast body of premodern Hebrew literature is usually termed “medieval“—a somewhat misleading term, partly based on the assumption that in most countries the Jewish Middle Ages lasted until the Emancipation in the eighteenth century. However, as is well known, this literature was by no means monolithic. It comprised such disparate schools and styles as portions of the liturgy dating back to late Roman times, the Palestinian and Eastern piyyut (liturgical poetry) of the Byzantine and Moslem periods, the famed Hebrew-Spanish school and its ramifications or parallel schools in Provence, North Africa, Turkey, and the Yemen, other important centers like Germany and France, and an entire millennium of Hebrew poetry in Italy whose later stages coincided with, and were influenced by, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Israel Davidson's monumental bibliography, entitled in English Thesaurus of Hebrew Mediaeval Poetry, actually spans more than a millennium and a half, or, as its Hebrew title states, “from the canonization of the Bible to the beginning of the period of Enlightenment” (in the late eighteenth century). Alternative terms to “medieval” seem scarcely clearer; “postbiblical” tacitly and misleadingly excludes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while “premodern” includes the Bible.

Michael Gluzman. The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xiv, 250 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-181
Author(s):  
Chanita Goodblatt
Keyword(s):  
Full Range ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Primary Interest ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Leah Goldberg

In his epilogue to The Politics of Canonicity, Michael Gluzman has aptly delineated the parameters of this book, by writing that it “originates from the American debate on canon formation and cultural wars that predominated academic discourse during my years at University of California, Berkeley” (p. 181). This statement firmly sets its author within a critical context that auspiciously brings a wider literary discourse, such as that sustained by Chana Kronfeld and Hannan Hever, into the realm of modern Hebrew poetry. In particular, The Politics of Canonicity is identified by its publication in the series entitled Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, which has a primary interest in the ongoing redefinition of Jewish identity and culture, specifically involving issues of gender, modernity, and politics. The Politics of Canonicity is effectively divided into two parts. In the first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, Gluzman provides the intellectual and historical context for the interwoven formation of national identity and the literary canon in modern Hebrew literature. In particular, in Chapter 1 he relates the story of the 1896–1897 debate between Ahad Ha'am and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky, arguing that it produced a dominant and regulative paradigm of Hebrew literature that integrates the private and public, the aesthetic and the national. In the second chapter, Gluzman discusses the way in which Hebrew modernism created a counterpoint to international modernism's glorification of exile. He discusses a full range of premodernist and modernist Hebrew poets—Shaul Tchernichovsky, Avigdor Hameiri, Avraham Shlonsky, Noach Stern, and Leah Goldberg—in order to underline their resistance to “the idea of exile as a literary privilege or as an inherently Jewish vocation” (p. 37), a resistance which Gluzman determines as calling into question “the critical tendency to read modernist practices as essentially antinationalist” (p. 37).

The Figure of Moses in Modern Hebrew Poetry

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Malka Shaked
Keyword(s):  
Israeli Society ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Hebrew

From its inception in the Enlightenment to this day, modern Hebrew poetry conveys a deep connection to the Bible that manifests itself in a variety of ways. An in-depth understanding of this connection—including its various expressions in content and language, its causes, its purposes, and its manifestations in all the literary genres, in each generation and for each individual writer—would require extensive research that could profitably occupy a large number of scholars. Nonetheless, even with the limited research that I have conducted, focusing on the place of the Bible in Hebrew poetry from the generation of national renaissance to the present time, the substantial anthology of poems that I am preparing for this purpose demonstrate clearly that modern Hebrew poetry constantly returns to the Bible, and that the Bible's oft-lamented decline in stature in Israeli society is nowhere to be seen.

Shlonsky, Abraham (1900–1973)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ari Ofengenden
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Literary Magazine ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Unique Style

Abraham Shlonsky can be regarded as the main architect of modern Hebrew poetry. He was born in 1900 to a socialist revolutionary mother and a Chassidic father in Kryukovo (East Ukraine) and emigrated to Palestine in 1922. Shlonsky first worked in agriculture as a pioneer at the kibbutz Ein Harod. He later moved to Tel Aviv to become a journalist, editor and translator. Early on Shlonsky rebelled against the romantic nationalism of Hayim Nahman Bialik and created a modernist symbolist style of poetry that was hegemonic in Israel from the 1930s until the early 1960s. Shlonsky’s poetry has had a decisive impact on Hebrew literature; more than any other poet, he is responsible for the transition from romantic to modernist poetry. The unique style that he developed became prevalent in Hebrew poetry from the 1930s until the early 1960s. More recently (2005), this style has experienced a renaissance via an influential group of young poets associated with the literary magazine Ho.

NONCONFORMITY IN AFRICA'S CULTURAL HISTORY

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
DEREK R. PETERSON
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Religious Activity ◽  
African History ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Interpretive Strategies ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThis article uses E. P. Thompson's last book – Witness against the Beast (1993) – as an occasion to claim oddity, peculiarity, and nonconformity as subjects of African history. Africa's historians have been engaged in an earnest effort to locate contemporary cultural life within the longue durée, but in fact there was much that was strange and eccentric. Here I focus on the reading habits and interpretive strategies that inspired nonconformity. Nonconformists read the Bible idiosyncratically, snipping bits of text out of the fabric of the book and using these slogans to launch heretical and odd ways of living. Over time, some of them sought to position themselves in narrative structures that could authenticate and legitimate their dissident religious activity. That entailed experimentation with voice, positionality, and addressivity.

Non-biblical Tonalities

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-92
Author(s):  
Assaf Shelleg
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Biblical Literalism ◽  
1 Samuel ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
Cultural Networks

Chapter 1 revolves around Josef Tal’s 1955 opera Saul at Ein-Dor, whose libretto is word-for-word the narrative given in 1 Samuel 28. Through this opera the chapter examines the actualization of the Bible in Hebrew culture and its promotion of territorial nationalism, as well as the artistic formulations that contested the literalist way Zionists had selectively appropriated the Bible. Under the purview of what Anita Shapira terms “biblical literalism” and Jean-Christophe Attias calls “Zionist biblocentrism,” the literal reading of selected texts facilitated a national allegory that actualized tropes of return, of redemption, and of territorial expansionism. To understand the cultural networks activated by such readings, the chapter studies the works of Ben-Haim, Orgad, Boskovich, and additional works by Tal. A parallel discussion on the portrayals of King Saul in modern Hebrew poetry complements the entire narrative, and a thorough analysis of the post-tonal devices in Tal’s opera concludes the chapter.

Preface

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Jay M. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Broad Theme ◽  
Modern Hebrew

With this issue of the AJS Review, I bring my editorship to a close. I am proud to present this special issue to the Review's readership. It marks a change from the normal patterns of the Review, in that this issue consists entirely of articles solicited by the editors, revolving around the broad theme of the reverberations of the Bible in modern Hebrew literature and culture.

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