Lost Tribes: The Indian in American Hebrew Poetry

Abstract

The figure of the American Indian was a central motif and preoccupation for the immigrant Hebrew poets in the United States. Many critics date the beginnings of an estimable Hebrew literature in the United States to the publication of Benjamin Nahum Silkiner's Indian epic Mul ohel Timmura (1910). Using the figure of the Indian, these poets could claim the mantle of Americanness through Romantic and pastoral nature poetry while avoiding the modern, urban American landscape that they found alienating and aesthetically difficult to render. The Indian was also an object of dark fascination for a group of poets desperately concerned with the possibility of Jewish national and cultural survival in modernity. Significantly, they tended to focus on dying tribes, on the crisis of cultural continuity, and on the predations of Christian antisemitism. These poets created a body of work that reflected and refracted Jewish experience—including Zionism and contemporary events in Palestine.