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    Literary History and Hebrew Modernity

    Anidjar, Gil.

    Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 42, Number 4, 2005,

    pp. 277-296 (Article)

    Published by Penn State University Press

    DOI: 10.1353/cls.2006.0013

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    COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES , Vol. 42, No. 4, 2005.

    Copyright 2005 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

    277

    LITERARY HISTORY AND HEBREW MODERNITY

    Gil Anidjar

    To write reflectively about Hebrew literature means to acknowledge itsmodernity.1 And yet, more than the usefulness of the term modernity, it

    is perhaps its efficacy that leads to difficulty. Acknowledging the conflictbetween history and modernity, while embodying an ethos of literary his-tory, Hebrew literature has sought to describe, assert, or establish its singu-larity. This endeavor, which may remain implicit in literary practice, mustand has become explicit in critical practice. As the problematic unity of setsof practices, and with varying degrees of self-consciousness, the whole ofHebrew literature takes part in the production of separations, distinctions,and determinations that touch on history and periodization, genre andmovements, legacy and rebellion, center and margin, inside and outside,

    and more. It is, no doubt, an effect of increased self-consciousness thatsuch distinctions have multiplied, and that critics have been involved insharpening them. Writers and critics have thus engaged in what may ap-pear as a narcissism of minor differences but could be more accuratelydescribed as a search for the new, a genuine impulse toward modernity,seeking to define the new, to recognize or produce it.2 This desire for thenew explains, if only partly, why the privileged site of contemporary He-brew literature is modernity (and, within it, modernism) and its limits. Thesheer novelty of the forms and kinds of Hebrew writing such as began inEurope two hundred years ago and the repeated attempt to determine thenature of that criticali.e. decisive, distinguishing, separatingmoment istherefore paradigmatic of the way in which Hebrew literature seeks to de-termine its singularity. Accounting for the new and for singularity has beenand remains the privileged and crucial task of literary critics across nationalboundaries, and prominent among them literary historians. Accordingly,

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    and because the concern with the new appears quintessentially modern,most histories of Hebrew literature are not only modern (in the historicalsense of belonging to modernity); they primarily attend to a modern phe-

    nomenon, namely, Modern Hebrew literature. Thus, the term modernityreappears with increasing frequency and seems again to have become anissue not only as an ideological weapon, but as a theoretical problem aswell (142).

    Clearly, a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope ofreaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of originthat marks a new departure can be found in various forms in a number of,and perhaps in all, literary traditions.3 The appeal of modernity, in otherwords, haunts all literature.4 The desire for a clean break is part and par-

    cel of the constitution and institution ofnationalliterary traditions. It par-takes of an act of critical judgment directed toward and against the literaryself, individual or collective. It embodies, finally, the undoing of the inclu-sive and exclusive boundaries of the literary object. But this desire also ac-quires a particular poignancy in situations of bilingualism (or of poly-lingualism), in diasporic or migrant settings, or in colonial and postcolonialconditions. In most of these cases, the conflict of distinctions, beginningwith the opposition between tradition and modernity, takes place by meansof a name that often appears to erase differences at the very moment it

    buttresses others (womens literature, Chinese literature). Or, it is em-blematized by a new name (one that is often no less hegemonic and differ-ence-erasing, but marks nonetheless a recognizable site of difference, forbetter or for worse).5 Here one could think of any number of proliferatinglinguistic markers that have thankfully, if often problematically, come tofunction as alternatives to the labels and confines of national literatures(Anglophone, as opposed to English, Francophone as opposed to French,and so forth). Rda Bensmaa, for example, has powerfully argued for theoriginality, indeed, the inventiveness and creativity of Francophone, spe-

    cifically Maghrebi, literature. His argument is, however, less about the mo-dernity of Francophone literature than about its distinctiveness, itsproduction of works in French that contribute to an understanding of thenew world. Like Peggy Kamuf, who writes that history will have itselfbeen inscribed within literature, Bensmaa proposes an understanding ofliterature as experimental, as creative of experimental nations, nations toimagine or explore as if they were territories to rediscover and stake out,step by step, countries to invent and to draw while creating ones language.6

    What has been most forcefully demonstrated thereby is less an acknow-

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    ledgement of singularity, less a refashioning of literariness, but rather that,over against literature itself, what we usually call literary history has littleor nothing to do with literature.7 More broadly and importantly, these

    institutional developments have confirmed that the bases for historicalknowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts mas-querade in the guise of wars or revolutions (165). Nowhere is this moreevident today than in the case of Hebrew literature, where for some timenow wars have masqueraded in the guise of texts. It is in this specific con-text, in fact, that Edward Said underscores some of the tragic links that, inaddition to the obvious and overall pertinence of his analyses, make Paul deMans work oddly relevant to our discussion of literary history and Hebrewand Jewish literatures. Said points out that in the most offensive of his Le

    Soirarticles (March 4, 1941) de Man says that one thus sees that a solutionof the Jewish problem which would aim at the creation of a Jewish colonyisolated from Europe, would not entail deplorable consequences from theliterary life of the West. None of the commentators I have read, Saidcontinues, glosses one especially sinister resonance in the phrase the cre-ation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe. Indeed, no one else hasnoted this particular instance in which, in an anti-Semitic, brazenly col-laborationist, and pro-Nazi paper an author seemed to be in fact not justrecommending the Zionist project already underway . . . already entailing

    the onset of Palestinian dispossession, but to be doing so casually, almostbackhandedly, as if the real subject was the health of Europe, not the disas-ter to be visited upon at least three generations of Palestinians.8

    What follows is an attempt to engage the singularity of Hebrew litera-ture, its modernity as ideological weapon in the critical and institutionalwars it has conducted with its outside as well as with itself. Beginning withthe question of language (or languages, as Yitzhak Laor paradoxically sug-gests) Hebrew literature inherited a rift between its cultural and spokenlanguages that it has been unable to repair.9 This rift is, in a sense, at the

    basis of a war that has little or nothing to do with literature. Indeed, whilethe participation (one might say, the collaboration, and at rare times, thecritique) of Hebrew literature in the wars of Israel against Palestine haslong been recognized most sharply perhaps by Laor himself who aptlydescribed Israeli literature as the production of narratives with no natives,thus highlighting that there are other, more covert, wars it is unclear whatthe stakes are in approaching intellectual or academic developments in lit-erary studies, in the United States (but elsewhere too, and always far fromIsraeli state apparatuses, at least apparently) as if they were today an urgent

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    or even a determining moment of these wars.10 And yet, stakes there ap-pear to be when, following more than thirty years of unprecedented anduninterrupted growth of programs, centers, or departments of Jewish Studies,

    and the more recent explosion of Holocaust studies within or without thesesame structures, we are now witnessing the mushrooming of more pro-grams and centers, this time of Israel studies. This trend can be explainedin a number of ways, not all of them scholarly, but be that as it may, it wasinitiated by my own institution, Columbia University, where Israel andJewish Studies have long been placed under the same roof and heading.Home to the first chair in Jewish History, the second position in Jewishstudies in the Ivy League (after Harvard), Columbia has since become oneof the major centers of Jewish studies in the country. It is also unique in

    having produced so early (1950) the institutional collapse of Jewish studieswith Israel studies (note that it is Israel studies and not Israeli studiesthat names the endeavor. I am aware of no parallel use of a substantiverather than an adjective in such contextsthere is no such thing as Francestudies, Germany studies, or Asia studies. With this gesture, the State,rather than its different cultural sites, is augmented and appears to haveimposed itself at once as object and title of the scholarly enterprise, this ata time when other national literatures and cultures have come under in-creasing, critical attention, and calls are issued for them to justify their con-

    tinued existence). What is coming under scrutiny, if hardly gaining clarity,is not only a wide range of ideological weapons, but more importantly thehighly contested natureto say the leastof the distinction between Jew-ish and Israeli, between Zionist and Jew, and in a different register, be-tween Hebrew and Jewish. At the juncture between critical and institutionalthinking, Hebrew literature has already staked much in this last distinc-tion.11 Strangely enough, it has also succeeded in erasing its manifest rel-evance by sealing the hegemony of Hebrew. Writing in 1962, Arnold Band,today still one of the leading American critics of Hebrew literature, could

    already dedicate the bulk of a lecture on Jewish Literature in the Univer-sity to Hebrew literature. Acknowledging, for example, that modern He-brew writers comprised a determined and talented minority that nevercommanded a vast audience until the last generation or two, acknowledg-ing as well that the close relations between Yiddish literature and Hebrewliterature are historically fraught (after all, most Hebrew and Yiddish writersbetween 1860 and 1920 wrote in both languages) and have remained un-derstudied in spite of the obvious closeness (we still dont have a history ofliterature which presents an adequate statement of the peculiar relationship

    between the two literatures),12 Band presents Hebrew or Jewish litera-

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    ture as if it constituted one term, at least two equivalent terms, that coverthe same unified area of cultural production. Hebrew or Jewish literature,he writes, lamenting what was once a rare or marginal curricular offering,

    is not the only area of cultural importance missing from the curriculum ofmost American universities, but the exclusion of Jewish literature [. . .] can-not be attributed either to geographical distance from Europe or the hu-manistic insignificance of the values embodied in it (384). The unifiedarea of cultural importance here ostensibly described in the singular ap-pears, furthermore, to cover the same geographical area, the same valuesas Europe. But be that as it may, the question remains of the distinctionnonetheless made, be it syntactically, and at other times, historically (thereare periods and centers of Jewish literature, but there is alsoand the

    status of this also locates the entire question we are engagingmodernHebrew literature, even if we dont even have a label in English for thespecialist in post-Biblical Jewish literature [372]). More recently, DanMiron, the foremost Israeli critic of Modern Hebrew (and Yiddish) litera-ture could assert, on the basis of his assessment of a past and present, alleg-edly unified national culture, that there is no such thing as a unifiedJewish literature, and there has not been one since the fragmentation of ournational culture at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nine-teenth centuries.13 The history of the relation between Yiddish and He-

    brew literature has made an enormous leap since Band wrote these lines in1962. The works of Dan Miron and Benjamin Harshav, of Ruth Wisse,Naomi Seidman, and Chana Kronfeld, and of many others, have contrib-uted much to a deeper and richer understanding of the two distinct bodiesof texts and languages. They have done so, however, without yet alteringthe more general question of Jewish literatures in their relation to thenow overwhelming hegemony of Hebrew, particularly modern Hebrew lit-erature. Clearly, Jewish and Hebrew (our national culture) are not oneand the same. How, then, does Hebrew literature intervene in the con-

    struction (or destruction) of Jewish literature? How does modern Hebrewliterature configure its past and its present in relation to Jewish literature(or Jewish literatures)?

    Between Histories

    The history of Hebrew literature as part of the practice of Hebrew

    literature is thus essentially modern: it is the modern history of Hebrew

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    literature and it is the history of Modern Hebrew literature. This is empiri-cally true (the overwhelming majority of books of Hebrew literary historyare histories of Modern Hebrew literature or chapters thereof ), but it also

    partakes of a more abstract, modern phenomenon whereby the self-con-scious concern with history and with the new have themselves become de-termining. The distinction, the quarrel even, between les anciens et lesmodernes must itself be modern (in a relative sense) and it takes greaterurgency with the new historical task that seeks to define modernity, thattakes it upon itself to define the distinct nature of its own modernity, aswell as the modernity of its object. Thus, modernity turns out to be indeedone of the concepts by means of which the distinctive nature of literaturecan be revealed in all its intricacy.14

    Commenting on the elusive singularity of Modern Hebrew literature,its most prominent (if not necessarily critical) critics have embraced theterm along with its highly discriminating objective. Works with titles suchasModern Hebrew Literature,Modern Hebrew Fiction, Hebrew and Moder-nity, are proliferating and too numerous to list, whether in Hebrew or inEnglish. In some cases, leaving out the term modern, functions to reinscribeits force, as well as the critical intent behind it, the hope of reaching at lasta point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks anew departure, as de Man put it. Thus, Gershon Shaked, whose major

    contribution has been to diagnose a kind of modernity within modernity, anew wave in Israeli fiction (one that would be described from as present,as contemporary a perspective as possible, mi-nequdat reut akhshavit ke-khol ha-efshar), documents the development of Hebrew fiction begin-ning in the 1880s.15 Here, modernity remains implicit. It is simply assumedat the precise moment that demonstrating its historical distinctiveness re-mains the goal to achieve. Shaked writes: Hebrew fiction has its own in-ternal development, and in order to determine its distinctiveness, one mustseparate it from its parallels [lit. sisters, ahayiot] and attend to its history

    on its own.16 Earlier, Dov Sadan had done extensive work to address thenumerous difficulties involved in writing a history of Modern Hebrew lit-erature when one considers its very concept as well as the discrepancybetween this concept and the different histories to which it gave rise. Sadan,perhaps the greatest Israeli literary critic of the twentieth century, madeclear that a historical, philosophical and psycho-analytical understandingwas essential to any reading of Hebrew literature (Sadan had also diag-nosed a schizophrenic dimension in all of Jewish literature). The rigor ofSadans distinctions and of his readings throughout his numerous studies

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    and monographs imprinted itself on every aspect of Modern Hebrew liter-ary practice and have been furthered, and critically expanded, by Dan Miron.More recently still, Alan Mintz has attended to the self-conception of

    Israeli literature, one carried over from pre-State Hebrew literature, and tothe status of Israeli literature as literature in critical practice. Mintz be-gins his description of the boom in Israeli fiction with the following seriesof historical distinctions, a series of historical beginnings, which conciselyset the stage for my own discussion here, albeit without concerning itself,indeed, ignoring the very possibility of Jewish literature: Hebrew litera-ture, which began with the Bible, has had a very, very, long history. ModernHebrew literature, which began with the Enlightenment, has been aroundfor two centuries. Against this time line, the Hebrew novels and short sto-

    ries written in Israel since 1970 might seem callow and unproven recentarrivals.17 One could of course mention many more examples where thequestion of methodological significance and historical specificity is addressedwith more or less acknowledgment of the difficulty involved in establishingmodernity, always to argue nonetheless for and about it as the uniqueproblem of literary research (as Simon Halkin puts it in his own survey ofModern Hebrew literature).18 Thus does critical, even dissenting, reflec-tion buttress the boundaries (and legitimacy) of its object.

    In this context, one may already learn from historians of nationalism

    who have long shown that defining the new (the moment of birth, nasci, ofthe Nation) has been a cultural task, which, in historical terms, often takesthe form of a paradox. The demand for the new requires a sharp distancingfrom the past, an interruption made in the name of a past said to havealways already been there and that must be revisited, appropriated by thenew as itspast. Put another way, the call for (cultural, literary, political)autonomy and independence may seek to establish that which was neverthere (a national literature, a nation state) but must nevertheless be shownto have already been operative. This paradox may or not make it necessary

    to emphasize one over the other (there is nothing new, it is really the oldand has always been so, as a certainand, ironically, quite modernfun-damentalism would claim; or: the new is a break from the old which iteither cancels or preserves, even resolves and heals, as the logic of the mod-ernizing has it). Be that as it may, historians of nationalism have also pointedout that this general, indeed universal if also differential pattern is itselfmodern, and that its self-presentation is always accompanied by a claim forsingularity.19 In other words, nationalism is an assertion of singularity inthe name and under the form of a universal ideal (as the Hebrew version

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    has it, Jewish nationalism would make the Jews into a nation like all theother nations,goy ke-khol ha-goyim). Within these parameters, to engagein an attempt to determine the singularity of the Hebrew literary tradition

    is not, of course, without difficulties.And yet, it is well known that the singularity of Hebrew literature

    must be distinguished from nationalism, from Zionism, if only because,historically, it precedes, exceeds, at times contradicts and even opposes anynational project aiming for the so-called normalization of Jewish exist-ence, i.e., aiming for its participation in a national project. By now, theZionist claim that Hebrew literature could only be written when territorial,political, and linguistic conditions would make it possible has been provenspectacularly wrong in Europe, not in Palestine, in the nineteenth, and even

    twentieth, century.20 The singularity of Modern Hebrew literature lies, there-fore, in another kind of distinction than a nationalist one. What is it, then,that makes Modern Hebrew literature a new, and distinct, phenomenon?What is it that it distinguishes itself from? And what are the kinds of dis-tinctions operative in the definition of its singularity?

    Modern Hebrew literature is new, which is to say that it is modern.This tautology should not obscure the variety of answers that have beenoffered in order to determine its novelty, its singularity. Without doing toomuch violence to this diversity, these many answers can be gathered under

    two general (and quite banal) headings.

    1. Modern Hebrew literature fundamentallybreakswith the past. Itis an entirely new phenomenon that has no precedent. This radicalbreak can be affirmed or lamented, and it can be descriptive (therehas been a break) or prescriptive (there should be a break) or both.In other words, Modern Hebrew literature isor should betheresult of a crisis.

    2. Modern Hebrew literature is new but does not break with its past.It may learn from it or ignore it; it may resolve it, synthesize it, orfail to do so. Burdened with internal tensions, it remains since itsbeginnings, in a state of crisis. And here too, description and pre-scription co-exist: crisis has either been resolved (for example, withthe creation of the State of Israel), orit will be resolved in the future,orit will never be and should never be resolved.

    Every historical account of Modern Hebrew literature partakes of one

    (or both) of these answers or set of answers to the question of its modernity

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    and its singularity. It is also the case that each answer appeals to a differentconcept of history (history as a history of breaks versus history as a historyof change). Yet, the distinction between the two answers also reveals an-

    other, quite different determination of the crisis, which may be illustratedin another area of literary practice, namely, in the institutional setting of itsstudy: the university. Here one finds a certain discrepancy between the criticalpractice ofwriting literary history and that of teachingit. Whatever thecritical consensusand there is noneregarding the nature of the crisis(rupture or change), it is clear that the university has articulated its ownanswer to the question of Hebrew literature: there is not a single programor department of Hebrew literature which refrains or would consider re-fraining from teaching courses covering the entirety of the history of He-

    brew literature, from its ancient beginnings in the Hebrew Bible to thelatest and most contemporary poem or novel of Israeli writing. This is notonly acknowledging and abiding by a pedagogical necessity. Nor does itimpose a decision as to whether the crisis is past and resolved or continu-ing. Rather, the teaching of (the history of ) Hebrew literature constitutesand sediments the space of Hebrew literature. It opens the space of ques-tioning within which literary historians struggle with the question of thesingularity of Hebrew literature and, most pointedly, of Modern Hebrewliterature (hence, the discrepancy, as literary historians have dominantly

    produced a history of modern Hebrew literature). As will become clear,this institutional, pedagogical situation may be construed as distinct andeven as opposed to the writing of the history of Modern Hebrew literatureinsofar as the novelty of the latter seems to have granted it autonomy. Butone could also argue that no history of Modern Hebrew literature, as radi-cal as it may be in distinguishing between ancient and modern (comparefor example HalkinModern Hebrew literature is the product of the lasttwo hundred years of Jewish lifeto Fischel Lachover who immediatelytraces a longer history of softer transitions), ever ignores the past that pre-

    ceded its development or appearance on the historical scene, favoring ei-ther biblical, rabbinical, medieval, renaissance or all of the above (indeed,and to continue with him, Halkin argued in fact for the continuous en-gagement of Hebrew literature with its Jewish past).21 Yet that relative au-tonomy leaves no doubt as to the definition of the field as Modern andnew, thus standing in tension with the longue dure, if one could call it that,of the pedagogical approach. Critics, as well as writers and readers, are thusable to explore both tradition and crisis, masoret u-mashber in what ap-pears to be a historically responsible way.

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    And yet, this institutional history reveals that the distance betweenthe two answers (crisis as rupture, crisis as change) covers something elsethan a disagreement about history. It may in fact reveal that, philosophi-

    cally speaking, the disagreement is not as stark as it seems. This is so be-cause both answers are preciselyhistorical, that is to say that they both agreethat the distinctiveness of Hebrew literature and of Modern Hebrew lit-erature must be accounted for historically. Moreover, any account of histori-cal crisis as radical rupture presupposesmuch like the notion of crisis aschangea historical continuum under which it is ultimately subsumed. Suchdisappearance of the singular into a generality in the movement of historymay be explained by way of Hegels discussion of the here, now, I, inwhich the very indexing of singularity is always already lost to abstraction

    and generality. Consider the following, distinct parallel from the field ofJewish history: the most important and well-known Jewish historians ofmodern times have been primarily scholars of Medieval history (the Jew-ish Middle Ages extending, according to some, all the way to 1492 andeven to the Enlightenment) such as Yitzhak Baer, Benzion Dinur, HaimHillel Ben-Sasson, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, and most importantly, ofcourse, Gershom Scholem. Recent scholarship has moreover shown thatthese historians were more than academic scholars in the narrow sense ofthe term. They intervened and shaped the national discourse to an extraor-

    dinary extent. In comparison, literary medievalists such as David Yelin,Hayim Schirmann, Ezra Fleischer, Dan Pagis, and Yosef Dan are impor-tant scholarsperiod. Pagis was also a significant public figure, of course,but that is related to his extraordinary work as a poet (On these issues andmore, see the continuing and important work of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin).Pointing to the moment of singularity (crisis as radical break) thus alreadytransports that moment into a general movement of time and abstraction,into a general and continuous history. This may be a linguistic or historio-graphical failure, or it may be an ontological necessity, but whatever the

    case, it enables the coexistence of narratives of ruptures together with nar-ratives of continuity. Indeed, one implicates the other, and one is depen-dent on the other. Like Jewish historyand after Gershom Scholem, it ismightily banal to make this claimthe space of Hebrew literature is there-fore fully determined byboth tradition andcrisis, both by interruptionand by continuity. A distinct understanding of history, of crisis as change oras rupture, may therefore not constitute the essential difference, the privi-leged criteria according to which one could separate between the two an-swers.

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    What, then, is the determining factor or element regarding the singu-larity of Hebrew literature and its modernity, regarding its relation to Jew-ish literature and to the Jewish past? What is the element that the two

    answers would not share, and which would therefore fundamentally distin-guish between them?

    One could summarize it as follows: whereas the first answer (crisis asrupture) considers descriptively or prescriptively that the Hebrew (and laterthe Israeli) is no longer a Jew, the second answer (crisis as change) stillinsists that the Hebrew (and the Israeli) is a Jew, if a new Jew, and even ifa profoundly different Jew.22 More precisely put, in the first case, Hebrewliterature is not (is no longer or should no longer be) Jewish literature. Inthe second case, Hebrew literature is one among many Jewish literatures, if

    a different one (and whether or not it should continue to be so remains analtogether different question).

    Let us recall that Hebrew is only one of the languages read, written orspoken, often only memorized by Jews who, for most of their history, usedother languages both privately and publicly (parts of the Bible are writtenin Aramaic, and so are the entire Talmud and the Zohar, both major sourcesof literary inspirations for the moderns). Some of these languages are calledJewish languages (Yiddish or Ladino, Judeo-Persian or Judeo-Arabic),but they may also be whatever languages were spoken and/or written in

    whatever specific time and place ( Jews have spoken or written in Italianand in Arabic, in Russian and in German, in Spanish and in Latin, to takeonly a few examples). With the advent of Zionism, the distinction betweenHebrew and Jewish (a cultural and linguistic, as well as a political distinc-tion), and more recently, the distinction between Israeli and Jewish (whichfurther engages cultural and linguistic criteria, as well as political, religious,and even ethnic ones), continues to be the site of tensions, from within andfrom without. The terms may be related, even difficult to distinguish, butthey are never identical. As we will see, it is the institutional field of Jewish

    studies (and its lack of reflection on Jewish literatures, its embrace of Israelstudies) that appears to dim, and even erase, this lack of identity and ensu-ing tensions.

    By now, the distinction between the two answers we have consideredmay have become clear. If Modern Hebrew literature is the result of a crisis,which radically separates between Hebrew and Jewish, one cannot (or shouldnot) study it as part of a continuum constituted by (pre-modern) Hebrewliterature, since the latter is itself a part (if only in the past) of Jewish litera-ture. Depending on whether the diagnosis is descriptive or prescriptive one

    would teach only Jewish literature (which includes pre-crisis, pre-modern

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    Hebrew literature) or only Hebrew (that is, Modern) literature, or, at anyrate, teach them apart from each other. If, on the other hand, Modern He-brew literature is in a state of crisis, if it is the literature of the new Jew who

    still seeks his Jewishness, ancient or modern, then it does inscribe itself in acontinuum, and it is indeed one within which it should be studied. Suchcontinuum would have to include both Hebrew and Jewish literature (which,unified by tradition, had been co-extensive, if never identical, before thecrisis instituted by modernity). An institutionalization of the two historicalanswers would demand the founding of two different kinds of departments,programs, or fields of study: one in which Jewish literature and Hebrewliterature are two distinct fields; and one in which they are one and thesame field. In both cases, periodization and the question of history would

    remain essential.

    Between Languages

    It is at this juncture that the reality of the field reveals itself to bestrikingly different from the range of scholarly positions that have beenarticulated about its object. Indeed, none of the curricular choices implied

    by these positions has been pursued, and Hebrew literature as a field ofstudy remains fundamentally distinct from and overwhelminglyexclusiveofJewish literature. Jewish literature remains, with very few exceptions, with-out institutional backing and, for the most part, untaught.23 To the best ofmy knowledge, there are only two departments of Jewish literature (or Jew-ish literatures) in the world, namely, at the Jewish Theological Seminary inNew York and at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. But these are exceptions thatstrikingly confirm the rule: there is no such field as Jewish literatures.

    This is a strange situation, especially if compared with the field of

    Jewish history, which both in Israel and elsewhere has long gained exten-sive recognition.24 Hence, in the year 2000, Ruth Wisse is (finally? still?)advocating for the recognition of a Jewish canon (I propose that . . . amodern Jewish canon has come into existence) and that the study of thiscanon, which surprisinglyincludesModern Hebrew and Israeli literature asone of its sub-divisions, would attend to the phenomenon of a multilin-gual Jewish literature. Wisse leaves, however, little hope for the medieval-ist literary critic as she too insists on the modern, and on building themodern Jewish canon, as the title of her book has it. One should note that

    in mentioning the linguistic richness of what she calls Jewish languages,

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    Wisse includes Yiddish and Ladino and Judaeo-Persian (6). Not Judeo-Arabic and much less Arabic. Wisse knows of Albert Memmi, but not ofYaqub Sanu or of Samir Naqqash. Nor does she recall Edmond Jabs or

    Edmond Amran El Maleh, and much less, but this goes without saying,Yehuda ha-Levi. Not to speak, finally, of Anton Shammas. Inclusiveness atits limits, this series of gestures or non-gestures, this situation, remainsstrange if only because there would appear to be nothing inherently lessmanageable about the diversity of Jewish literary texts than there is aboutother Jewish historical materials. Hence, Dan Mirons claim that there isno such thing as a unified Jewish literature, that there are instead manyvariants of possible Jewish cultures or sub-cultures . . . two or three or fourindependent Jewish literatures as well as many Jewish-oriented literary de-

    velopments, which evolved within the contexts of non-Jewish literatures,hardly seems to warrant a different institutionalization for Jewish literature(and much less an absence thereof) than for Jewish history, or indeed, Jew-ish culture.25 Alternatively, the argument would seem to warrant abstainingfrom studying fragmented cultures, the elements of which are indepen-dent or evolving in widely different contexts, Jewish and non-Jewish. Thisis not a very plausible or likely development, and not one that Miron wouldwant to advocate. The peculiar predicament of Jewish literature as (not) aninstitution is itself the result of a complex history, no doubt, but it is also

    the consequence of a particular, even hegemonic, historical thinking, whichhas extended its reach, as we saw, even to literary studies, Hebrew or other.For understandable reasons, periodization, contextualization, andhistoricization are by now recurring mots dordrein the humanities. Abid-ing by them, the field of Hebrew literature has structured itself as histori-cal, opening the space of Hebrew literature as tradition and crisis. Yet, itis this very same historical thinking that has also refigured the complexrelations existing between Hebrew literature and Jewish literature as chro-nological, as historical relations that are thought of as either inclusive or

    exclusive. Inclusive in that Jewish literatures are seen as trends to be in-cluded in the development of Hebrew literature or, alternatively, as part ofa general phenomenon that includes both Hebrew and Jewish literatures(solutions advocated respectively by Dov Sadan and Ruth Wisse, either ofwhich have yet to gain any institutional ground, any institutional imple-mentation in any department or program of Jewish studies or Hebrew lit-eraturewith the exception, perhaps, of Yiddish literaturebut this lastfield conjures very different issues, of course).

    Alternatively, one witnesses a more exclusive institutional relation be-

    tween Hebrew and Jewish literatures such that there is (or should be) an

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    unbridgeable difference, a difference in kind between Hebrew and Jewishliteratures (Baruch Kurzweil and Yonathan Ratosh being the two extremesthat meet, as Dan Miron has shown, who lament or advocate that separa-

    tion). Yet, as we saw, the two institutions that have existing departments ofJewish literature never went so far as to create anotherdepartment for thestudy of non-Jewish (i.e., no longer Jewish) Hebrew literature.

    Such dialectics of (theoretical, if not practical) inclusion/exclusion arerepresentative of literary studies as a whole. Indeed, the expansion of theboundaries of the literary object, spearheaded by the critique of its aestheticautonomyan autonomy which itself has a long and conflicted historyhas reached new heights not only with the increased significance of histori-cal thinking already mentioned (the New Historicism and Cultural Studies

    are general and, perhaps, recognizable headers here), but also with the open-ing or widening of psychological, social, political, and cultural entrywaysinto the realm of the literary. Under the general heading of the significanceof literature, the literary object has had to include (or has been shown toexclude) other realms of material and intellectual life. In Jewish and He-brew literature, the significance of feminism and gender criticism has nodoubt provided the most convincing illustration of this trend (from EstherFuchss discussion of the participation or non-participation of women inthe prose writing scene to Dan Mirons account of early women poets, Lily

    Ratoks anthology of womens short stories, and Yael Feldmans recent syn-thesis on the work of Hebrew female novelists).26 But there are others (Iam thinking here of the work of Ross Brann and Yosef Tobi on culturaldynamics in medieval Arab Jewish writings, of Dan Mirons early and subtlerenderings of the socio-historical context of Hebrew and Israeli poetry andprose, of Ammiel Alcalay radical refiguring of Hebrew literature along aMediterranean cultural and geographical axis, of Arthur Lesley call for areconsideration of rhetorical criticism in Medieval Hebrew literature, ofChana Kronfelds rethinking of the category modernism out of a renewed

    consideration of Hebrew and Yiddish writers, or of Hannan Hevers work,as undoing the Modern Hebrew canon and as rearticulating another inclu-sive/exclusive relationship, that of religion and literature in Modern He-brew poetry. I am thinking finally, of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkins account ofthe invention of Jewish literature by Christian censorship in the sixteenthcentury, and of Yitzhak Laors vitriolic critique of Israeli literature as col-laborating with the worst).

    Finally, perhaps, what is revealed by a consideration of the dialectics ofinclusion and exclusion operating within the question of Hebrew litera-

    ture, between Hebrew literature and Jewish literature, is a peculiar failureof historical thinking. For none of the distinct historical arguments we have

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    considered have enabled or succeeded in enabling a strict separation be-tween Hebrew and Jewish literatures. Indeed, except for Ratosh and theYoung Hebrews or Canaanites no one ever realistically considered imple-

    menting such a separation, the very absolute separation that nonethelessremainsthe institutional reality in Hebrew literature departments and programswhere the historical study of Hebrew literature remains fundamentally cutoff from the systematic study of Jewish literatures. If anything the historicalarguments we have followed demonstrate that the two terms are indeeddistinct, not at all co-extensive, if fundamentally undissociable as their rela-tionship structures, throughout history, any historical understanding ofHebrew literature. In other words, throughout history, Hebrew and Jewishliteratures have remained heterogeneous and undissociable . What is clear

    is that they could neither be located diachronically (Hebrew then Jewish,Jewish then Hebrew, depending on where one begins) nor could the differ-ence between them be defined as particularly modern (not, at least, if oneuses the term historically).

    Without contesting, therefore, the relative autonomy ofModern He-brew literature, nor calling for an increased institutionalization of Jewishliterature, what remains is the question of the space of Hebrew literature asa field of study.

    It is remarkable that the rich collection of essays edited by Hana Wirth-

    Nesher does not constitute a call for institutionalization. Jewish literatureis the object of a debate to which a number of individuals contribute, someare affiliated with Israeli universities, others with universities in Europe orthe United States.27 I already mentioned Ruth Wisses recent call for theacknowledgment that there isa modern Jewish canon. There are no appealsto create positions, to initiate programs of research, or even hold seminarsor conferences on the topic. Such is not the case with Israel studies, orwith the teaching of Hebrew or of Jewish history. Positions are requestedand created, funds are raised and conferences organized. The National Yid-

    dish Book Center has recently taken upon itself to identify the 100 greatestworks of Modern Jewish literature. Appealing to a number of scholars(none of whom, incidentally, hold positions officially identified, as it were,as Jewish literature, although a number of them do hold positions in Yid-dish literature), that organization has therefore produced a list intended forthe general public. Clearly, a kind of institutionalization is at work, yet it isnot one that takes place in the university, nor is it one that appears to seeka future beyond itself. Once the list was produced, the project appeared tobe complete. What we find is therefore a field that continues to be struc-

    tured by a schizoid history (as Sadan diagnosed it) in which no strict oreven desirable autonomy has ever been established, neither of the Hebrew

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    vis--vis the Jewish, nor of the Jewish vis--vis the non-Jewish, nor of theliterary vis--vis the non-literary.28 What appears(or disappears)in mod-ern discourse as the distinct relation (and non-relation, even a rupture) of

    Jewish and Hebrew literature (figured as exteriorities that no longerconsti-tute a whole), becomes within the space of Hebrew literatureas a fullyestablished disciplinary field, an urgent, perhaps insurmountable historicaldifficulty: It is because historical thinking governs the field, and becauseHebrew literature is said to have a longevity and a continuity that puts it ona par with Sanskrit and Chinese (as Robert Alter suggests), that it has tocontend with the undoing, the fragmentation of its very history, the undo-ing of the Hebrew-ness of this history, an undoing that makes it impos-sible to write (or teach) a history of Hebrew literature without relating to

    and reading texts in Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Yiddish,French and other languages (hence Alter can waver between the polyglotnature of Hebrewtexts as well as the polyglot contextof Hebrew litera-ture, implicitly affirming the principled, if not actual, victory of DovSadans call for expansion and synthesis of Hebrew and Jewish literatures).29

    This very impossibility, rather than any empirically based literary history, iswhat has been institutionalized in a study of Hebrew literature as such.But the history of Hebrew literature is not, nor can it ever be the history ofHebrew literature. As a historythat governs understanding and never quite

    breaks with the pasti.e., the (Aramaic) Talmud, (Arabic and Judeo-Ara-bic) Maimonides, Yehuda ha-Levi ( Judeo-Arabic) and the (Aramaic) Zoharall the way to Persian and Judeo-Persian, Italian, Arabic, French, and, ofcourse, Yiddish and EnglishHebrew literature as a literature in the He-brew language cannot but fail to include this very past which is not one:neither past, nor a unified one. Nor can it resolve this historical problemsimply by growing more inclusive. Indeed, it is the duty of historical think-ing to consider the singularity of each period, and therefore the dynamicsof inclusion and exclusion that institute themselves vis--vis distinct oth-

    ers and according to different historical limits. And it is this very problemwhich could constitute the nature of the singularity of Hebrew literature, asingularity that exceeds, therefore, all periodizations as such, and all at-tempts to contain the schizoid or traditionally unified dimension to anyparticular period. What one could call the empirical reality of Medieval,Renaissance and Modern Hebrew literature as polyglot has always al-ready constituted a comparative literature.

    Paul de Man has suggested that the nature of the debate between theancients and the moderns had forced the participants to make comparative

    critical evaluations of ancient versus contemporary readings.30 Doing so,

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    de Man seems to confirm that the issue is an empirical one, and that itcould therefore be resolved by practices of inclusion, further institutional-ization, or more efficient categorization, and so forth.31 But against this

    reading, de Man offers another sense of the comparative as a dimensioninternal to literature. Literature, he writes, exists at the same time inthe modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode ofbeing (163). This internal tension, this treacherous obedience of literatureconstitutes the distinctive character of literature and it takes place, it be-comes manifest as an inability to escape from a condition that is felt to beunbearable (162). This inner tension, this inherent conflict cannot beinstitutionalized, even if it operates within the institution, as well as with-out. It is what de Man has described as a going to war of texts and with

    texts, written texts that masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions,and of wars that masquerade as texts.32 Comparative literature, in such acontextand it is the context within which we find ourselvesgoes to warin the mode of betrayal. Throughout and against history, literature resists.Literature is that which resists historicization, a linguistically and generi-cally fragmented field rather than a unified one.33 To name this fragmented,resisting field, to name it provisionally and locally, as it were, and to name itJewish literature, to do so in the context of Hebrew literary studies, in thecontext of Jewish studies, thus answers to a number of necessities. But the

    difficulties to which this naming bears witness must further be thought ofas the disappearance of the space of literature as common space, and itsbecoming comparative. It is the disappearance of the modern singularity ofHebrew literature, and of its linguistic, national, and even historical integ-rity as Hebrew literature. If the history of Hebrew Literature is not itshistory (but the history of Jewish literatures), if Hebrew literature is notHebrew literature (because Hebrew is not its language, as Laor compel-lingly demonstrates), if the institution of Hebrew literature is the forcefulinscription of its failure as institution, and if, finally, the space of Hebrew

    literature is not to be found in Hebrew literature nor in Hebrew literarymodernity, then Hebrew literature disappears.34 To acknowledge this dis-appearanceno longer a hypothetical onewithin Hebrew literary stud-ies is, for the critic primarily an act of critical judgment directed againsthimself. De Man singularly affirms this rle of the literary critic, whoproduces acknowledgments of such disappearances as the rle of a traitor,one of a peculiar kind. He has to perform his task with full knowledge thathe thus destroys his own project, with the hatred of the traitor for the campthat he has chosen to join (161). And his treason, which is also an active

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    joining (a treacherous obedience), a belonging without allegiance, perhaps,is the promise, no more than a promise and, equally, the threat of anotherfuture, if not of another modernity. Then, writes Friedrich Nietzsche,

    quoted by de Man, then it will become clear how illegitimate the existenceof something, of a privilege, a caste or a dynasty actually is, and how muchit deserves to be destroyed. Then the past is judged, critically attacked at itsvery roots with a sharp knife, and brutally cut down, regardless of estab-lished pieties. This is always a dangerous process, dangerous for life itself.35

    Columbia University

    Notes

    1. This paper, inspired in part by Paul de Mans reflections on literature and modernity,was presented at the Jewish Studies Seminar organized by Susannah Heschel at DartmouthCollege in May 2003. I am grateful for the invitation, for Heschels generous hospitality, andfor the opportunity to discuss the vexed question of relating Hebrew to Jewish literaturefrom a variety of perspectives. The paper was also presented at a conference honoring Pro-fessor Dan Miron at Columbia University in December 2003.

    2. Paul de Man, Literary History and Literary Modernity in Blindness and Insight: Es-says in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,1983) 145.

    3. De Man, Literary History, 148. The paradigmatic example is, of course, womensliterature, a debated corpus since it emerged on the American scholarly scene and elsewhere(see Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront toLessing[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999]).

    4. De Man, Literary History, 152.5. Jacques Derrida discusses the chances and risks of institutionalization around a name

    (women) in Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida in Men in Femi-nism, Alice Jardine & Paul Smith, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1989), 189-203. For an illu-minating account of these issues and concerns in the specific case of Chinese literature andof the function of the attribute Chinese and Chineseness, see Modern Chinese Literaryand Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, Rey Chow, ed. [Durham:Duke University Press, 2000]).

    6. R. Bensmaa, Experimental Nations, Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton:

    Princeton University Press, 2003) 8; and see Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature or theUniversity in Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

    7. De Man, Literary History, 165.8. E.W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 38.

    The tension (to say the least), between Zionist and Jew, between Hebrew and Jewish, couldhardly be made more palpable.

    9. Yitzhak Laor, Schizolingua: Or, How Many Years Can Modern Hebrew RemainModern? On the Ideological Dictates of the Hebrew Language inIdeology and Jewish Iden-tity in Israeli and American Literature, Emily Miller Budick, ed. (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 2001) 214.

    10. The phrase narratives with no natives is Laors own translation of a Hebrew volumeof essays on Israeli literature (Y. Laor,Anu kotvim otakh moledet: masot al sifrut yisraelit[Tel

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    Aviv: Ha-kibbutz hameuchad, 1995]). I am not suggesting that the conflicts that take placearound literature in American universities and elsewhere are unimportant or marginal, ofcourse. In fact, the compelling argument made by Peggy Kamuf, whereby we must recognizethat literature, in effect, is instituted as a division and as such its institutional status is never

    fully assured, is at the very source of my endeavor here. Indeed, the word division, asKamuf uses it, is meant to evoke the divisions and partitions, the wars and revolutions ofwhich de Man writes and which literature is (Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 39).

    11. See Hannan Hever, A Map of Sand: From Hebrew Literature to Israeli Literature[in Hebrew] in Teoria ve-bikoret20 (Spring 2002), 165-190.

    12. Arnold Band, Jewish Literature in the University in Studies in Modern Jewish Litera-ture(Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003) 378-379.

    13. Dan Miron, Modern Hebrew Literature: Zionist Perspectives and Israeli Realities inWhat is Jewish Literature?Hana Wirth-Nesher, ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Soci-ety, 1994) 95.

    14. De Man, Literary History, 161.15. Gershon Shaked, Gal hadash ba-siporet ha-ivrit(Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1970) 7.

    Robert Alter proceeds along the same lines when he titles a series of lectures The Inventionof Hebrew Prose. The precision comes only in the subtitle which does, of course, affirm themodern (R. Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism[Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988]).

    16. G. Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit, 1880-1970( Jerusalem: Keter, 1977) 13.17. Alan Mintz, Translating Israel: Contemporary Hebrew Literature and Its Reception in

    America[Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001] 55.18. Simon Halkin,Modern Hebrew Literature From Enlightenment to the Birth of the State

    of Israel: Trends and Values(New York: Schocken Books, 1970).19. On National Time, see Joseph Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity

    in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), esp. 25-33; on the Form of thenation, and the nation as Form, see Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colo-nization and the Institution of Modern Greece(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

    20. Zionism equated cultural freedom with political independence, and therefore pre-scribed linguistic normalcy as the only base for a full-fledged artistic literature. The greatHebrew masters of the first quarter of the twentieth century, some of whom were ardentZionists, demonstrated that such normalcy was not an artistic sine qua non (Miron, Mod-ern Hebrew Literature, 101).

    21. S. Halkin,Modern Hebrew Literature, 15; and see Y.F. Lachover, Toledot ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-hadashah (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1955).

    22. For a discussion of the relation between Hebrew modernism and the new Jew, seeAriel Hirschfeld, Locus and Language in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, Ed. DavidBiale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002) 1011-1062.

    23. R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (NewYork: Free Press, 2000) 3; emphasis added.

    24. The history of Jewish Studies in the US would no doubt be relevant to explore here,and I have alluded to it earlier. The first two appointments made in Jewish Studies wereHarry Austryn Wolfson (at Harvard as Professor of Hebrew [sic] Literature and Philoso-phy in 1925) and Salo Wittmayer Baron (at Columbia, the first Professor of Jewish His-tory in 1930). Interestingly enough, the term Hebrew literature in Wolfsons position hadlittle to do with Hebrew or with literature: Wolfson, it may be recalled, is the great scholar ofPhilo, of the Arabic Kalam, and of Spinoza.

    25. Dan Miron, Modern Hebrew Literature, 95.26. Highly pertinent to my argument is Feldmans opening sentence: Although the mod-

    ern Hebrew woman writer has yet to find her literary historian, her first century may bedemarcated as spanning the years 1897-1997 (Y. S. Feldman,No Room of Their Own: Gen-der and Nation in Israeli Womens Fiction [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999] 1).

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    27. H. Wirth-Nesher, Defining the Undefinable: What is Jewish Literature in What isJewish Literature, 11.

    28. As I have already suggested, the medieval Arab Jewish, philosopher poet, Yehuda ha-Levi functions as an ideal cipher for the impossibility of such borders, articulating the move-

    ment from non-Jew to Jew (the famous conversion of the King of the Khazars), from Arabicto Hebrew, from philosophical prose to poetry, and morethough not necessarily in thisorder. Yehuda ha-Levi is a figure of Arab Jewish Letters which I have tried to describe inmyOur Place in al-Andalus: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters(Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2002).

    29. Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)4-5, 7.

    30. De Man, Literary History, 153.31. Writing from a different perspective, Yitzhak Laor, whose highly original and singu-

    larly courageous work, as a poet, critic and political commentator, is unmatched in Israel,endorses a similar, empirical argument against literary Hebrew and Hebrew literature as awhole. Save rare examples, Laor explains, the writer who lives and writes Hebrew in Israel

    . . . belongs to the elite and identifies with the language that erases the others. The Hebrewwriter, in other words, ignores the different dialects and languages that are operating in oneway or another in Israeli culture, in Hebrew as it is spoken and practiced by the populationof the State, be it Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, or Palestinian. Laor pointedly asks whether thatwriter, or Hebrew literature as a whole (including departments of Hebrew literature), gainsanything by turning a deaf ear or a dull tongue to the languages that have been made todisappear (Y. Laor, Schizolingua, 231). Clearly, Laors argument is essential to retain andponder.

    32. Avital Ronell has elaborated a compelling argument tracing the links between litera-ture and war in her Stupidity(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), esp. 3-29.

    33. In the article I mentioned earlier, Arnold Band had already made the important sug-gestion that written in different languages, in different cultural milieux and in differentcenturies, Jewish literature by itself is a perfect paradigm of comparative literature, by whichwe mean a concept of literature which evolves from the study of several literatures, each initself and in comparison with the others (A. Band, Jewish Literature in the University,372). Leaving aside the troubling question of paradigm as well as the matter of definingboundaries between self and other, it is important to note that Band proceeds to qualify hisown suggestion by inscribing clear hierarchies. Even more than Jewish literature through-out the ages, he writes, modern Hebrew literature included all the major components of abody of literature which lends itself to comparative treatment (380). Modern Hebrew lit-erature would thus be (or have beenBand curiously writes of it in the past tense), moreparadigmatic, more inclusive of the components necessary for a comparative treatment. It isunclear why this might be the case, nor is it at all clear why such a claim would be made ina lecture entitled Jewish Literature in the University.

    34. With this disappearance, and keeping in mind the oft-made comparisons betweenHebrew and Sanskrit, I want partly to signal toward Sheldon Pollocks fruitful argumentabout the death of Sanskrit. In Pollocks pertinent description, the death of Sanskrit wasaccompanied by a larger phenomenon, namely, that the mental and social spheres of San-skrit literary production grew ever more constricted, and the personal and this-worldly, andeventually even the presentist-political, evaporated, until only the dry-sediment of religioushymnology remained (S. Pollock, The Death of Sanskrit, Comparative Studies in Historyand Society43:2 [2001] 417).

    35. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Abuses of History, quoted in de Man, Liter-ary History, 149.