Two Centuries of Hebrew
Modern Hebrew Literature.
by Simon Halkin.
Schocken Books. 238 pp. $3.00.
Jewish literary expression, whether in the form of revelation, law, liturgy, or poetry, has always echoed a conscious sense of the uniqueness of the Jewish people and its history. However he has expressed it—as the Deutero-Isaiah’s Suffering Servant of the Lord, or David Shimonovitz’s “in spite of it all”—the Hebrew writer has borne within him the sense of a peculiar Jewish fate. Jewish literature has been, just as surely as Jewish life itself, a Promethean attempt to wrest the Yerushalayim Shel Maala (“Celestial Jerusalem”) from the heavens. Certainly one’s awareness of this classically tragic strain in Jewish experience is intensified by a reading of Mr. Halkin’s competent survey.
Jewish history is informed throughout with the anomalous and perverse spirit of its stiff-necked protagonist. Just as the Jews continued to study the detailed laws pertaining to the Temple rite long centuries after the destruction of the Temple, so, too, they burst forth into the joyous song of a national literary renaissance a half century before the reestablishment of their state—before, indeed, there was any substantial resettlement of the country or any prospect of it. And in this way, a handful of people played havoc with the “objective factors” of history and successfully returned to the Land of the Fathers. Truly, a perverse people.
A study of modern Hebrew literature should help to clarify the background of recent Jewish history. For this literature is, as Mr. Halkin rightly says, a “faithful and comprehensive record of Jewish life” during much of the past two centuries. It is Mr. Halkin’s intention to examine this record; and no one is better qualified than he to undertake such a study since he is himself an accomplished Hebrew poet, a discerning critic, and a distinguished teacher. He wants this work to be primarily an essay in the sociology of literature and the history of ideas. Notwithstanding certain limitations, his attempt is largely successful.
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In his analysis of the first hundred years of modern Hebrew literature, which was the period of the Haskalah (enlightenment), from about 1750 on, Mr. Halkin very ably avoids oversimplifications indulged in by most Hebrew literary historians. Making use of the researches of Scholem and others, he offers some suggestive remarks on Hasidism as a movement that bore within itself the seeds of a humanism that was only later championed in a full-fledged and articulate manner by the maskilim(“enlighteners”). While granting due weight to the influence of the European enlightenment’s progressivism and cosmopolitanism on the early Haskalah, Halkin is undoubtedly correct in judging that period to be most closely akin to the European Renaissance.
Mr. Halkin also avails himself of more recent historical investigation in refuting the popular notion that the Jewish cultural renaissance followed upon political emancipation: the reverse is true, and it was the constantly reiterated faith of the maskilim that it was only through the acquisition of hochma—secular wisdom and knowledge—that the Jewish people could hope to achieve not only political rights but true humanization. Above all, Mr. Halkin makes a solid contribution to the reestablishment of a correct perspective on the Jewish loyalty of the first generations of maskilim. The enlighteners from Mendelssohn on have been maligned by Hebrew literary criticism as advocates of a philosophy of assimilation. On the contrary, as Mr. Halkin shows, their one refrain was the call to the creation of a new humanistic Jewish civilization. It was they, more than others, who were appalled by the assimilation of emancipated Jews.
Mr. Halkin draws finer lines of distinction than are generally to be met with in Hebrew criticism. He discards the commonly accepted and superficial subdivision of the first century of Hebrew letters into three successive periods of rationalism, romanticism, and realism. A far truer, albeit exceedingly subtle, analysis would indicate that these three were never mutually exclusive, and that Haskalah literature was a peculiar blending of them all. Both poetry and prose served the god of enlightenment and championed the cause of secularization. Throughout there was an identification of “life in this world” with “the life of reason.” A thin line of demarcation can be drawn only between a prose that was didactic, utilitarian, satirically critical of the social, economic, and religious condition of the real Jew and a poetry that was romantic in its projection of the ideal Jew. But the presuppositions of the different genres were complementary rather than antithetical.
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The events of the 1880’s, the pogroms and discriminatory laws coupled with the onward rush of cultural emancipation, led to an entirely different mood among Hebrew writers. Their confidence and optimism gave way to frustration and despair. As, under the shadow of destruction, castigating prophets become the comforters of their people, so the Hebrew writers turned from satire to penitence. But this time they knew no God with whose balm they could soothe Gilead. There was no ready answer, they groped in the darkness. Thus arose two generations of uprooted Jews. And yet out of this despair there came the finest Hebrew literature since the Spanish Golden Age. And out of this groping, a few hundred young doubters, skeptical even of their own last-ditch ideals, wandered forth to grasp life by the throat in Palestine, and created a new society.
Mr. Halkin illuminates the nature of this great self-despair with a telling and significant point. By the first decade of the 20th century, Hebrew writers were all intellectually convinced Zionists. And yet the best of them, even the giants Bialik and Tschernichowsky, did not become the singers of Zion until much later. There was hope only in Zion, but they saw few Jews taking the way of this hope. Jews were streaming to America, or they were joining the local revolutionary movements. Who was ascending the mountain of the Lord? Only a few young fantasts. The Zionism of the Hebrew writers and of the first halutzim was not a glowing faith; it was an act of desperation.
These were the turbulent decades when young Jews were lost “between the walls,” when they were preparing revolutions with hectic thought and activity and confusion. Whole new worlds of Jewish life and culture were created then—it was the age of Peretz and the Bund in Warsaw, of the vast new discovery of fabled America, of the Second Aliyah (immigration to Palestine), of the Odessa of Ahad Ha-am, Bialik, and Mendele. Without an understanding of this seminal generation nothing in subsequent Jewish life in Israel, Europe, or America is intelligible. Yet the period, strangely enough, has generally been accorded only superficial treatment. Mr. Halkin has attempted to reveal the heart of this generation, but he has succeeded in only one respect. He has shown us the anxiety and the frustration, but we are given no real insight into the energetic, creative, and fruitful uses to which this despair was put.
The key to this grave defect may be discovered in the author’s statement of purpose: “The reader may note that the material in this book is almost evenly divided between the last fifty years and the earlier one hundred and fifty. . . . The tremendous upheavals in the history of East European Jewry in the last fifty years, the destruction of Jewry in recent years, and the emergence of the State of Israel in 1948, are the overwhelming events in the past twenty centuries of Jewish history. In their light, all Jewish historiography will have to refocus its perspective. Hebrew literature has been aware of the historical significance of these decades.”
Now it goes without saying that the Great Catastrophe and the Great Return are “overwhelming events” in Jewish history. It is also true that Zionist thought and achievement were the inspiration of Hebrew writers—the emergence of “the new Jew” so much celebrated in Israeli literature. But one is frankly at a loss to understand why “all Jewish historiography will have to refocus its perspective.” The creative achievement of the first two decades of this century remains colossal; its significance and value have neither diminished nor been augmented by subsequent developments, no matter how overwhelming. There is a discernible, but unstated, undercurrent of feeling in this book that Israeli literature is somehow the apogee of modern Hebrew writing. More than half the book is devoted to it, and it is the past thirty years of Israeli writing to which most attention is paid, rather than the past fifty years as promised in the preface. But the first two decades of this century were the crucial and pivotal years of Jewish creativity, in Hebrew letters and elsewhere, in comparison with which more recent native Israeli literature seems puny. It is a paradoxical fact that the finest modern Hebrew literature was created in an era preceding the large-scale settlement of Palestine, that it was born out of the depths of pessimism, and that even the best Israeli literature has been written by men who were themselves children of the Second Aliyah, or at any rate, of that generation of East European Jewry.
However, there is no question but that the nature and quality of Israel’s cultural life must from now on become a significant concern of Jews everywhere. Mr. Halkin’s discussion of the tendencies in Israeli writing is intelligent and moderate. He has given an excellent survey of the development there in the past thirty years, indicating that Israel’s writers have been in many ways, for better or worse, within the mainstream of the world’s literary trends since World War I. Above all, he has ably clarified the central problems with which contemporary Hebrew literature has grappled—the significance of the return to Zion, the “meaning of the disaster,” and the fate of the people of Israel. One cannot but agree with his conviction that “much of Palestinian literature will some day be recognized as the multiple modern restatement of the theme of salvation so central in Jewish traditional lore, in all its aspects—individual, national, and universal.”
It is, to be sure, still too early to make conclusive evaluations of any sort. The new Jew and the new Jewish literature are as yet barely discernible. Mr. Halkin asks one of the necessary questions: “What will be the balance finally struck between the demands of Jewish tradition and those of secular humanism?” But he does not ask the equally important question as to the balance to be struck between Jewish humanism and the worldly corruption of the new Jewish “life of the flesh.” Perhaps Jewish history supplies the only possible approach to an answer: even out of the depths of distress the Lord can be found.
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