The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by Marina Zilbergerts (review)

Abstract

It has long been acknowledged that deep knowledge of biblical and rabbinic literature on the part of early modern Hebrew poets and prose writers played a vital role in the creation of modern Hebrew literature and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. As Benjamin Harshav notes, “Secular Hebrew poetry grew in the soil of Hebrew study in the religious society against which all Hebrew poets rebelled in their youth.” In light of this, Marina Zilbergerts’s new study of the yeshiva and the rise of modern Hebrew literature might seem, at first, like old news. Far from it, however. Whereas previous studies of this subject emphasized the role of Haskalah, Zionism, or secularism, Zilbergerts examines the rise of the modern yeshiva, with its elite ethos of Torah lishmah (Torah study for its own sake), as a way of explaining the seemingly miraculous rise of Hebrew literary culture. The book sets out to answer several questions from this vantage point: How and why did modern Hebrew literature come to be, and why in the setting of late nineteenthcentury Russia? Given the utter impracticality of creating a literature in a language that no one actually spoke, and the ideological push in Russian culture for writing that was materially useful to society, how did these midand late nineteenthcentury Hebrew writers make the case for their writing? Zilbergerts argues that the textcenteredness of the modern yeshiva led to an orientation where texts became more real than the physical world, where the “play and pleasure” of textual learning took on heightened importance. The result of viewing Torah as an omnisignificant literature to be interpreted and debated through a variety of hermeneutic and literary strategies was a blurring of the conventional boundary between sacred and secular Hebrew texts. All this laid the groundwork for these textcentered values to be transferred to secular Hebrew literary production once these young writers left the yeshiva. In addition to considering the autotelic value of text in yeshiva culture, Zilbergerts considers corresponding patterns of study and ideological dissent among nineteenthcentury Russian Orthodox seminarians. Yeshiva and Russian Orthodox students alike experienced both the exhilaration of elite study and deep