Theological Stains

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assaf Shelleg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
Late Modern

Theological Stains traces the growth of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a riveting and provocative account, Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers grappling with biblical redemptive promises and diasporic patrimonies. Unveiling the network that bred territorial nationalism and Hebrew culture, Shelleg shows how this mechanism infiltrated composers’ work as much as it triggered less desirable responses from composers who sought to realize to the nonterritorial diasporic options Zionism has renounced. In the process, compositional aesthetics was stained by the state’s nationalization of the theological, by diasporism that refused redemption, and by Jewish musical traditions that permeated inaudibly into compositions written throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Accompanying this rich and dramatic story are equivalent developments in modern Hebrew literature and poetry alongside vast and previously unstudied archival sources. The book is also lavishly illuminated with 135 music examples that render it an incisive guide to fundamental chapters in modern and late modern art music.

Bialik, Hayim Nahman (H. N.) (1873–1934)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miryam Segal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Long Poems ◽  
Hebrew Culture

Hayim Nahman Bialik was one of the most influential and widely-read Hebrew poets of the twentieth century. He revitalized modern Hebrew poetry with his romantic tropes, intense introspection, allusive irony and modernist treatment of language. Together with Shaul Tchernichovsky, his peer in the literary revival of the turn of the century, Bialik re-invented the sound of Hebrew poetry by introducing accentual-syllabic meter to Hebrew. Bialik was born into a religious and very poor family, and engaged with the Jewish textual tradition even after leaving behind, first, his Hasidic upbringing, and then the more rationalist and intellectual but ultimately unsatisfying world of the famous Volozhin yeshiva. Bialik spent the better part of three very productive decades in Odessa, the capital of the literary revival in which he was received as a young literary talent, then as national poet and one of the foremost Hebrew writers. He wrote lyric poetry, long poems, poems in the form of folk-song lyrics, children’s poetry and essay, and was an important figure in Hebrew publishing, with a particular interest in preserving the ‘Jewish Bookcase’ of classic works for secular Hebrew culture.

The Non-Reading Reader: European Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the 20th Century

Zutot ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-124
Author(s):  
Lilach Nethanel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
National Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

Abstract European Hebrew literature presents a challenge to the study of early-twentieth-century national literature. By the end of the nineteenth century, the reading of modern Hebrew in Europe was neither part of a religious practice, nor did it merely satisfy a purely aesthetic inclination. It mainly functioned as an ideological means used by a minority of Jews to support the linguistic-national Jewish revival. However, some fundamental contradictions put into question the actual influence of this literature on the political sphere. This article asks a series of questions about this period in the history of Hebrew readership: How did the non-spoken Hebrew language come to produce popular Hebrew writings? How did this literature engage the common Jewish reader? In this article I propose a new consideration of Hebrew reading practices. I argue for the inclusion of the non-reading readers as important contributors to the constitution of the Jewish literary nation.

Space in Modern Hebrew Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Grumberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Spatial Configurations ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
The City

The complex relationship between space and modern Hebrew literature proceeds from key spatial paradigms of the Hebrew Bible: Egypt, the desert, and Zion. Over centuries, Jews dispersed around the globe used Hebrew to express different modes of spatial engagement: rabbis considered the places and placelessness of God; medieval Andalusian poets longed for Zion; communist Jews in Baghdad and Jewish polyglots in Odessa used Hebrew to narrate their relationship to places their families inhabited for generations; Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians, in an era when Hebrew is no longer the sole purview of Jews, share Hebrew to reflect on homeland and diaspora in poetry and prose. Though “space” is by no means a novel phenomenon, the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences offered scholars of Hebrew culture conceptual and theoretical tools for addressing the diverse spatial configurations they encountered. The theorization of space and place in literature emphasized their active role in social relations and called for new conceptualizations of the construction and subversion of identities. Works by Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Edward Said, Edward Soja, and Yi-Fu Tuan, among others, have undergirded investigations of space and place in modern Hebrew literature. Because most of the critical work on space in Hebrew literature addresses Hebrew texts from the 20th century, this entry focuses on this period, though it also provides citations of scholarship analyzing biblical, rabbinic, Andalusian, and Haskalah texts. The citations mostly refer to literary texts but also include spatial analyses in cultural studies and history contexts. While many of the texts cited address the nation and territory or, alternatively, spatial paradigms that coalesce in resistance to the national, others investigate spatial paradigms in Hebrew that circumvent the national to consider fluid spatialities such as diaspora, migration, transnationalism, and travel, as well as historical spatial configurations that exist as memories, dreams, or specters. The preponderance of concrete investigations of specific places such as the city, the desert, and the kibbutz indicates the materiality of much of Hebrew literary spatiality. As the final section on modernity demonstrates, the spatial has opened fruitful avenues of inquiry within the existing historical discourse on Hebrew culture. There is, inevitably, some overlap in these categories: entries under The City, for example, might feel at home under Modernism and Place, while the line demarcating Borders and Beyond is appropriately penetrable, bleeding into Spatialities of Center and Margins. Finally, this entry should by no means be taken to represent all the scholarship on space in modern Hebrew literature, but rather to provide a sense of significant contributions and recent research.

The Drama of Narration: Y. H. Brenner's In Winter

AJS Review ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Fleck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Unconscious Processes ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Twentieth Century Fiction ◽  
Do So

In her book, Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn reminds us that one of the special powers of fiction lies in its ability to reveal the normally hidden inner life of people other than ourselves. Writers of fiction can, if it fits their purposes, place before our scrutiny the most intimate and private thoughts, feelings, motives, fears, and passions of their imagined characters, and can do so with a variety of techniques which, especially in twentieth-century fiction, take account of the complex, overdetermined, and largely unconscious processes of the human psyche. In modern Hebrew literature, no novelist has exploited this aspect of fiction with more passion and technical inventiveness than Y. H. Brenner. From the very outset of his career, Brenner's ability to make transparent the minds of his characters drew special attention and praise. Responding to his first collection of short stories, M. Y. Berdyczewski, for example, marveled that Brenner's characters had only to speak and they “stand before us naked, revealing all that is within.” And even Bialik, who was troubled by Brenner's fiction on other grounds, had to admit his impatience with literary theories when, as he put it, he was able to “see a living soul.”

Traditions of Translation in Hebrew Literature

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Biblical Translation

The centrality of translation in the history of Hebrew literature cannot be overstated. Scholars of Hebrew translation history often attribute the fact that Hebrew writers have steadily relied on translation for enriching and sustaining the Hebrew literary canon to Hebrew’s long-standing existence in a state of diglossia or multiglossia: a condition in which a community habitually uses two or more languages or several forms of the same language for different purposes. Jewish communities from antiquity to the present have generally used Hebrew alongside other tongues, even after Hebrew’s reinvention as a modern vernacular, its so-called revival, in the 20th century. It is possible that Hebrew served as a vernacular in antiquity, but sufficient proof of this possibility has never surfaced. Nevertheless, in late-19th-century Eastern Europe, Jewish thinkers and lexicographers began promoting the idea of resuscitating Hebrew. They often articulated this goal through the metaphor and practice of translation, borrowing from European cultures the notion that every modern nation is defined by a shared vernacular, while also translating into Hebrew a cornucopia of texts—scientific, poetic, journalistic, and philosophical. This enabled those late-19th- and early-20th-century Jewish thinkers to enrich, expand, and test the limits of Hebrew in a modern context. If the modern Hebrew literary canon includes the Hebrew Bible, as many Hebrew writers and scholars believe, then it consists of the most frequently translated and widely circulated text in the world. Yet Biblical Hebrew differs from later formations of the language, and traditions of biblical translation in and outside the Jewish world call for separate bibliographies. The following bibliography focuses on central theoretical questions relating to traditions of translation in Hebrew literature, foregrounding the intensifying debates on Hebrew’s spiritual and national status from the 19th century onward. Translation has often served as a unique arena for such debates, acting as a vehicle for transforming Hebrew literature from within, while allowing for its venturing out. It has frequently allowed its practitioners to define the imaginary boundaries of Hebrew literature and delineate the contours of Hebrew culture as primarily Jewish-national.

Howling “A Hot Time”: The Paradoxical Anthem of the Progressive Age

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
DEIRDRE O'CONNELL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Time Served ◽  
Musical Traditions

This study investigates the shifting meanings invested in the ragtime song “A Hot Time in the Old Time, Tonight” at the turn of the twentieth century. Complicating the tune's place in the canon of military, political, and national anthems was its associations with “vice,” black culture, and white supremacy. By mapping the ritual and representational uses of the song, this investigation demonstrates how “A Hot Time” served paradoxical functions that simultaneously affirmed and unsettled American exceptionalism. In doing so, this article traces the processes of obfuscation whereby black musical traditions and white supremacy defined America's distinctive national identity.

Cyclopedia of Modern Hebrew Literature, Vol. I

1967 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Abraham I. Katsh ◽  
G. Kressel
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Modern Hebrew

Italian-Jewish Patrons of Modern Art in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italy

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Museums

With a focus on art donations, this article explores several case studies of Jewish Italian patrons such as Sforni, Uzielli, Sarfatti, Castelfranco, Vitali, and others who supported artists of movements that were considered modern at their time: the Macchiaioli (1850-1870), the Futurists (1910s), the Metaphysical painters (1920s), the Novecento group (1920-1930s), and several post WWII cases. It reflects on differences in art donations by Jews in Italy and other European countries, modes of reception, taste, meanings and strategy of donations, thus contributing to the social history of Italian and European Jewry and the history of collections and donations to public museums.

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