Hebrew Literature Outside of Israel Since 1948

Abstract

Hebrew literature, defined expansively, has existed outside of the land of Israel since at least the first millennium of the Common Era. Hebrew religious, liturgical, and poetic works were composed in Europe, the Middle East, and North America for a thousand years before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The presence of vocabulary, grammar, and genres that were adapted from non-Jewish-dominant cultures are a testament to the long imbrication of Hebrew in the Diaspora, the areas of Jewish dispersion outside the land of Israel. Hebrew literature in its modern form originated in the cities of Europe in the 19th century, drawing on European languages and literatures, historical layers of the Hebrew textual tradition, and Yiddish for inspiration. In the early 20th century, the Tarbut Ivrit (Hebrew Culture) movement, a deeply Zionist group made up of American Hebraists, most of whom had immigrated from the Russian Empire and been influenced by Ahad Ha’am’s idea of a national Hebrew culture, created another center of Hebrew literary production in the United States. At the same time, the center of Hebrew culture was shifting from Europe to Palestine, and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestine rapidly became the main center of Hebrew literary production. Nonetheless, even since 1948, there has always been a small but significant amount of Hebrew literature written outside of Israel, whether by translingual Hebraists or Israeli expatriates. While most of the American Hebraist movement had died out by the 1960s, a few writers continued to produce Hebrew literature in America until the 1990s. And since that time, Israeli expatriate writers in the United States and Europe have begun to create a contemporary Hebrew literature outside of Israel, with its own idioms and ideologies. Unlike the American Hebraists of the Tarbut Ivrit movement, these writers often see Hebrew in apolitical terms or are explicitly anti-Zionist in their use of Hebrew in the Diaspora. This contemporary Diaspora Hebrew literature has also been accompanied by the rise of multilingual Israeli literature, often with overt references to Hebrew but written in other languages. These Hebrew and multilingual literary cultures are also strongly tied to art in other forms and media, which are essential to understanding contemporary Hebrew culture in a global context.