Revolutionary Hebrew, Empire and Crisis: Four Peaks in Hebrew Literature and Jewish Survival

by David Aberbach

Hebrew has survived as a continuously written literature for nearly 3,000 years. It is the oldest, and in some ways most successful, minority literature. While Hebrew is central to the social history of the Jews, its history also offers a panoramic window into the relationships of other minority literatures to their majority cultures.
Until 1948, written Hebrew was created primarily under the rule of empires, notably those of ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, medieval Islam, and Tsarist Russia. In this controversial volume, David Aberbach analyzes Hebrew's development, arguing that several of the most original periods in its history coincided with--and resulted partially from--imperial crisis. During these periods, social and political instability set off violence against the Jews. In each case a revolutionary body of Hebrew literature emerged, influenced decisively by the dominant culture, but asserting Jewish separatism and, to varying degrees, nationalism.
Revolutionary Hebrew offers a historical account of Judaism from biblical times to 1948, as exemplified through the growth or decline of Hebrew writing. Examining patterns in the social development of Hebrew, Aberbach explicates the role of Hebrew in the survival of Judaism and sheds light on the significance of literary creativity in ethnic survival.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1995

About the author

David Aberbach is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at McGill University, Canada.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aberbach returns here to topics he's explored in previous books (Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis, Realism, Caricature, and Bias: The Fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim), and he previews the topics of several books to come (The Roman-Jewish Wars and Hebrew Cultural Nationalism, Major Turning Points in Jewish Intellectual History). His main focus, however, is the relationship between imperial crisis and Hebrew creativity. Examining the Prophets (who emerged amid the various Mesopotamian empires), the Mishnah (during the Roman empire), the golden age of medieval Hebrew poetry (Muslim Spain), and the peak of modern Hebrew literature before 1948 (Tsarist Russia), Aberbach concludes that Jews were spurred to peak creativity by a mix of envy, superiority, and anxiety, precisely when these empires were about to collapse.

Aberbach proves to be a convincing, if sometimes unnuanced, reader of these works. Yet he never explains why the end of these empires spurred major creativity, while others didn't. Why didn't Babylonian Jewry produce major works in Hebrew immediately prior to the conquest of Islam? Why didn't Grecian Jewry do so prior to the conquest of Rome? Why didn't British Jewry before the sunset of the British Empire? A reader can charitably speculate about the factors involved (degree of assimilation, duration and severity of collapse, whether caused by internal issues or unexpected conquest, etc.), but at least some criteria of distinction would have been appreciated.

Indeed, the unspoken key criteria seemed rather to be aesthetic than historical. That is to say, the periods of peak literary creativity also happen to be those in which Jews worked outstandingly in genres Aberbach likes, namely, poetry, fable, short story, and novel. But Jews' main creative output, at least since the turn of the second millennium, has clearly been the glosses, novellae, and legal codes of rabbinic Judaism, which Aberbach several times knocks. And that creativity hasn't been confined to the periods considered here.