Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.05
Shmuel Feiner
Abstract:This article explores how Naḥman of Bratslav and his scribe Nathan Sternharz made sense of the rise of Haskalah and interpreted Haskalah literature.
{"title":"Sola Fide! The Polemic of Rabbi Nathan Sternharz against Atheism and the Haskalah","authors":"Shmuel Feiner","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how Naḥman of Bratslav and his scribe Nathan Sternharz made sense of the rise of Haskalah and interpreted Haskalah literature.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81298362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.11
B. Horowitz
Abstract:This article attempts to reassess the last years of the writer Lev Levanda's life and work in order to consider new paradigms for understanding the influence of Russia's first pogroms (1881–82) on Jewish individuals. Conventionally, studies of the pogroms deal with the macro-picture: How did the Jewish people react? This research investigates the response of one person, Levanda, who previously tethered himself ideologically to the idea of integration in Russia. After 1882, he found himself without an ideal and mission. He flirted with several movements, including Ḥibbat Tsiyyon, but could not find a positive solution and consolation to his disappointments. The pogroms apparently contributed to the mental illness that killed him.
{"title":"Lev Levanda, Russian Jewish Literature, and Literary Madness in 1880s Russia","authors":"B. Horowitz","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article attempts to reassess the last years of the writer Lev Levanda's life and work in order to consider new paradigms for understanding the influence of Russia's first pogroms (1881–82) on Jewish individuals. Conventionally, studies of the pogroms deal with the macro-picture: How did the Jewish people react? This research investigates the response of one person, Levanda, who previously tethered himself ideologically to the idea of integration in Russia. After 1882, he found himself without an ideal and mission. He flirted with several movements, including Ḥibbat Tsiyyon, but could not find a positive solution and consolation to his disappointments. The pogroms apparently contributed to the mental illness that killed him.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77019733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.09
T. Cohen
Abstract:Rachel Morpurgo, née Luzzatto, of Trieste (1790–1871) was the first woman to leave a corpus of poems in Hebrew. Her poems and letters—some published during her lifetime, others found after her death by her daughter—were collected and published posthumously in 1890 by Isaac Ḥayyim Castiglioni, also of Trieste, in a book he entitled ʿUgav Raḥel (Rachel's Harp). Despite Morpurgo's relative fame among her contemporaries, she failed to earn the appreciation of historians of modern Hebrew literature. Only during the last two decades have a number of women scholars started to discover the complexity of the first woman poet to write in Hebrew and her poetry. This article attempts to answer two central questions that have not previously been addressed: Which circumstances explain the emergence of Morpurgo in Trieste, some thirty years before the first Hebrew women poets in eastern Europe? and What was unique about Morpurgo's writing, compared to other writers of her time? To answer the first, a connection will be drawn between the poet's development, her sociocultural circumstances (Italian-Jewish culture, the special nature of the Triestian Haskalah) and her family of origin, the Luzzattos. To answer the second, her poetic technique will be defined in terms of the techniques of palimpsest and Re-Vision. These make her poetry unique and reflect the painful comprehension of her marginal position, determined by her gender, in the world of Jewish learning. Understanding her feeling of marginality and the way in which she overcame it by employing sophisticated poetic techniques enables us both to decipher her enigmatic poems and understand her position in the history of Hebrew literature.
{"title":"The Power of Writing from the Margins: Assessing Rachel Morpurgo, the First Hebrew Woman Poet","authors":"T. Cohen","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.09","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Rachel Morpurgo, née Luzzatto, of Trieste (1790–1871) was the first woman to leave a corpus of poems in Hebrew. Her poems and letters—some published during her lifetime, others found after her death by her daughter—were collected and published posthumously in 1890 by Isaac Ḥayyim Castiglioni, also of Trieste, in a book he entitled ʿUgav Raḥel (Rachel's Harp). Despite Morpurgo's relative fame among her contemporaries, she failed to earn the appreciation of historians of modern Hebrew literature. Only during the last two decades have a number of women scholars started to discover the complexity of the first woman poet to write in Hebrew and her poetry. This article attempts to answer two central questions that have not previously been addressed: Which circumstances explain the emergence of Morpurgo in Trieste, some thirty years before the first Hebrew women poets in eastern Europe? and What was unique about Morpurgo's writing, compared to other writers of her time? To answer the first, a connection will be drawn between the poet's development, her sociocultural circumstances (Italian-Jewish culture, the special nature of the Triestian Haskalah) and her family of origin, the Luzzattos. To answer the second, her poetic technique will be defined in terms of the techniques of palimpsest and Re-Vision. These make her poetry unique and reflect the painful comprehension of her marginal position, determined by her gender, in the world of Jewish learning. Understanding her feeling of marginality and the way in which she overcame it by employing sophisticated poetic techniques enables us both to decipher her enigmatic poems and understand her position in the history of Hebrew literature.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91119473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.03
Amir Banbaji
Abstract:Associated with translation (Genesis 42: 23), figurative speech (Proverbs 1:6), and prophecy (Genesis Rabbah 44:1), melitsah was a venerable term in medieval, renaissance, and Haskalah literary thought. Designating rhetoric, eloquent speech, poetry, and rhetorical theory, it was a focus of considerable attention during the period of European Haskalah (1780–1880). Since the mid-nineteenth century, and increasingly since the rise of neoromantic and nationalist literary ideologies, the poetic practice of melitsah became a target of severe attacks, which ultimately led to a sematic change in its meaning. While brief scholarly studies of this term have been undertaken, its evolving history, as well as its potential for critique of modern literary practice, have been completely overlooked by scholars of modern Hebrew literature. The present article attempts to study the concept of melitsah outside the framework of the massive denunciation it suffered due to the rise of competing literary discourses. Stressing the deep affinity between Hebrew melitsah and Renaissance rhetoric, the article demonstrates that, rather than an instrument for assimilating Hebrew literature to Enlightenment ideas of knowledge, poetry or politics, maskilim employed melitsah-based theory for defending and upholding ancient Hebrew scriptures as vessels of theological, poetic, and political difference, which they saw as contributing to a critique of dominant Enlightenment ideas. Associating melitsah with a recent paradigm shift in the study of Jewish Enlightenment, this article follows key maskilim who studied the melitsah, showing that their veneration of the scriptural Hebrew is not an expression of blindfolded cult of biblical commonplaces, as many scholars have believed, but an attempt to glean from Hebrew scripture—through poetic analyses, readings, and adaptation—a host of theological, poetic, and political ideas that, couched as they are in the figurative language of scripture, supplements and displaces ideas whose origin is not textual.
{"title":"Melitsah, Rhetoric, and Modern Hebrew Literature: A Study of Haskalah Literary Theory","authors":"Amir Banbaji","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Associated with translation (Genesis 42: 23), figurative speech (Proverbs 1:6), and prophecy (Genesis Rabbah 44:1), melitsah was a venerable term in medieval, renaissance, and Haskalah literary thought. Designating rhetoric, eloquent speech, poetry, and rhetorical theory, it was a focus of considerable attention during the period of European Haskalah (1780–1880). Since the mid-nineteenth century, and increasingly since the rise of neoromantic and nationalist literary ideologies, the poetic practice of melitsah became a target of severe attacks, which ultimately led to a sematic change in its meaning. While brief scholarly studies of this term have been undertaken, its evolving history, as well as its potential for critique of modern literary practice, have been completely overlooked by scholars of modern Hebrew literature. The present article attempts to study the concept of melitsah outside the framework of the massive denunciation it suffered due to the rise of competing literary discourses. Stressing the deep affinity between Hebrew melitsah and Renaissance rhetoric, the article demonstrates that, rather than an instrument for assimilating Hebrew literature to Enlightenment ideas of knowledge, poetry or politics, maskilim employed melitsah-based theory for defending and upholding ancient Hebrew scriptures as vessels of theological, poetic, and political difference, which they saw as contributing to a critique of dominant Enlightenment ideas. Associating melitsah with a recent paradigm shift in the study of Jewish Enlightenment, this article follows key maskilim who studied the melitsah, showing that their veneration of the scriptural Hebrew is not an expression of blindfolded cult of biblical commonplaces, as many scholars have believed, but an attempt to glean from Hebrew scripture—through poetic analyses, readings, and adaptation—a host of theological, poetic, and political ideas that, couched as they are in the figurative language of scripture, supplements and displaces ideas whose origin is not textual.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89849216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.04
I. Schorsch
Abstract:By the beginning of the twentieth century the study of midrash was the largest subfield of Jewish studies. The achievement reflects the impact of Leopold Zunz who, in 1832, published a pioneering, comprehensive history of midrashic literature that inspired several generations of scholars to pursue the subject on multiple fronts. The purpose of this article is to construct the dialectic of this unfolding scholarship and its indebtedness to Zunz with a view to refuting Gershom Scholem's negative judgment of him as a scholar out to bury Judaism. The reality of the nineteenth century simply does not comport with that unwarranted, ideologically motivated condemnation which, given Scholem's stature, has enjoyed a far longer shelf life than it deserves.
{"title":"Scholem on Zunz: An Egregious Misreading","authors":"I. Schorsch","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:By the beginning of the twentieth century the study of midrash was the largest subfield of Jewish studies. The achievement reflects the impact of Leopold Zunz who, in 1832, published a pioneering, comprehensive history of midrashic literature that inspired several generations of scholars to pursue the subject on multiple fronts. The purpose of this article is to construct the dialectic of this unfolding scholarship and its indebtedness to Zunz with a view to refuting Gershom Scholem's negative judgment of him as a scholar out to bury Judaism. The reality of the nineteenth century simply does not comport with that unwarranted, ideologically motivated condemnation which, given Scholem's stature, has enjoyed a far longer shelf life than it deserves.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87882503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.10
Marina Zilbergerts
Abstract:This article details how the ideas of nihilism challenged the incipient sphere of Hebrew literature in nineteenth-century Russia. In the 1860s, Russian nihilist critics Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Dmitrii Pisarev argued that the value of literary works lies in their social utility. For young Jewish writers emerging from rabbinic milieus where the engagement with sacred texts was valued for its own sake, discovery of the utilitarian view of literature threatened to undermine their own literary aspirations and the project of Hebrew literature as a whole. I show that, in the wake of the nihilist critique in the 1860s, yeshivaeducated writers began to turn against the newly formed sphere of Hebrew letters with the accusation that a "useless" textual engagement characteristic of Talmud study pervaded the Hebrew literary production of their day. I track the development of this idea in the debates of pioneering Hebrew writers and literary critics such as Abraham Uri Kovner, his lesser-known brother Isaac Kovner, and the writer Abraham Ber Gottlober. Reading early Jewish writers and critics alongside their Russian contemporaries, this article illuminates the struggle of modern Hebrew writers with the Jewish religious textual tradition, while situating it in the context of larger Russian debates about literature's value and function in the world.
{"title":"The War on Useless Literature: Nihilism and the Crisis of Modern Hebrew Literature in Russia","authors":"Marina Zilbergerts","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article details how the ideas of nihilism challenged the incipient sphere of Hebrew literature in nineteenth-century Russia. In the 1860s, Russian nihilist critics Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Dmitrii Pisarev argued that the value of literary works lies in their social utility. For young Jewish writers emerging from rabbinic milieus where the engagement with sacred texts was valued for its own sake, discovery of the utilitarian view of literature threatened to undermine their own literary aspirations and the project of Hebrew literature as a whole. I show that, in the wake of the nihilist critique in the 1860s, yeshivaeducated writers began to turn against the newly formed sphere of Hebrew letters with the accusation that a \"useless\" textual engagement characteristic of Talmud study pervaded the Hebrew literary production of their day. I track the development of this idea in the debates of pioneering Hebrew writers and literary critics such as Abraham Uri Kovner, his lesser-known brother Isaac Kovner, and the writer Abraham Ber Gottlober. Reading early Jewish writers and critics alongside their Russian contemporaries, this article illuminates the struggle of modern Hebrew writers with the Jewish religious textual tradition, while situating it in the context of larger Russian debates about literature's value and function in the world.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72816303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.02
D. Miron
Abstract: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.
{"title":"A Straight Arrow: On the Essential National Principle of Modern Hebrew Literature","authors":"D. Miron","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: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.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83393133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.3.04
Holler
{"title":"Multiple Identity Politics: Dahn Ben-Amotz and the Biased Readings of Hebrew Literature","authors":"Holler","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.3.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.3.04","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78399406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-03DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.38.1.03
S. Spinner
Abstract:This article examines the shared primitivism of the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg. In her art and poetry, Lasker-Schüler imagined a bohemian utopia ruled by the Bund der wilden Juden, or Society of Savage Jews; Greenberg adopted this figure and turned it into an expression of his radical Zionism. This transformation of aesthetic to political sovereignty reveals one trajectory of Jewish primitivism, with the blurred boundary between Jewish and primitive identities mirroring the blurred boundary between divergent political agendas.
摘要:本文考察了德国诗人埃尔斯·拉斯克-施勒与希伯来语和意第绪语诗人乌里·兹维·格林伯格共同的原始主义。在她的艺术和诗歌中，拉斯克-施勒想象了一个由野蛮犹太人协会(Bund der wilden Juden)统治的波西米亚式的乌托邦;格林伯格采用了这个形象，并把它变成了他激进的犹太复国主义的一种表达。这种从审美到政治主权的转变揭示了犹太原始主义的一条轨迹，犹太人和原始身份之间模糊的界限反映了不同政治议程之间模糊的界限。
{"title":"Else Lasker-Schüler and Uri Zvi Greenberg in \"The Society of Savage Jews\": Art, Politics, and Primitivism","authors":"S. Spinner","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.38.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.38.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the shared primitivism of the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg. In her art and poetry, Lasker-Schüler imagined a bohemian utopia ruled by the Bund der wilden Juden, or Society of Savage Jews; Greenberg adopted this figure and turned it into an expression of his radical Zionism. This transformation of aesthetic to political sovereignty reveals one trajectory of Jewish primitivism, with the blurred boundary between Jewish and primitive identities mirroring the blurred boundary between divergent political agendas.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85229579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：