“Like A Necklace of Black Pearls Whose String Has Snapped”: Bialik's “Aron ha-sefarim” and...

“Like A Necklace of Black Pearls Whose String Has Snapped”: Bialik's “Aron ha-sefarim” andthe Sacralization of ZionismAuthor(s): Adam RubinSource: Prooftexts, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 157-196Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/PFT.2008.28.2.157 .

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y 157

PROOFTEXTS 28 (2008): 157–196. Copyright © 2008 by Prooftexts Ltd.

“Like A Necklace of Black Pearls Whose String Has Snapped”: Bialik’s “Aron ha-sefarim” and the Sacralization of Zionism

A D A M R U B I N

A B S t R A c t

This study seeks to disentangle the relationship between Zionism and Jewish religious tradition by exploring Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik’s project of cultural ingathering (kinus). Bialik played a critical role in the Zionist movement’s endeavor to fashion a critical mass of Jews into a national collectivity; during the first decades of the twentieth century, he, along with other Zionist activists and intellectuals, believed that the nation’s aron ha-sefarim, its “ bookcase” of classical Hebrew texts, its Torah, could be mobilized to construct a unified Hebrew nation from diverse Jewish communities dispersed throughout the world. This study argues that Bialik’s efforts to instill a new enthusiasm for the Bible, rabbinic literature, medieval Hebrew poetry, and other classical texts among Jews were less an expression of the nationalization of the religious tradition than the reverse: a sacralization of Jewish nationalism. Rather than secularizing religious texts, Bialik sought to imbue the national movement with a measure of their sanctity. Drawing upon the work of theorists who challenge the distinction between “secular” and “religious” so often used to describe Zionist theory and praxis, this article argues for the persistent centrality of religion in the national movement and insists that the boundaries between the secular and sacred are permeable and overlapping. Notwithstanding its rebellion against and negation of religious life, Zionist nationalism (like other nationalisms) remained theological, and emerged out of a process of sacralization as well as secularization. An analysis of the cultural enterprise of one important Zionist writer and activist may be the first step in untangling the deeply entwined connection between the sacred and profane in the Zionist movement more generally.



158 y Adam Rubin

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My eye, exhausted, gropes between the lines,searching silently among the crowns of the letters,and struggling to catch a glimpse there of the tracks left by my souland to find a path to its first stirringsin the place where it was born and began its life . . .Like a necklace of black pearls whose string has snappedyour lines are to me; our pages have been widowedand each and every letter has become an orphan

—Ÿ. N. Bialik, “Lifnei aron ha-sefarim” (1910)

It is no easy feat to disentangle the relationship between Zionism and Jewish

religious tradition.1 Words such as ‘am, umah, le’umi, ge’ulah, and even Yisra’el

have become so commonly used and their meanings so taken for granted that it

is hard to separate their original religious connotations from those invested in them

by Zionist activists, intellectuals, writers, and politicians for more than a century.

Many are familiar with Gershom Scholem’s famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig, in

which Scholem characterized as illusory the desire to secularize Hebrew words that

had long evoked profound religious meaning; it was simply not possible to remove

their “apocalyptic thorn,” as he put it.2 Similarly, Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik, in his well-

known essay “Giluy vekhisuy belashon” (Revelation and Concealment in Language;

1915), describes the original, poetic power of words that attenuates over time but

never disappears entirely; within each word is stored away (nignaz) its essential

essence, and despite its transformation through mundane use over time, that essence

“leaves behind a shadow and scent.”3 Notwithstanding the prescience and force of

Scholem and Bialik’s words, the precise relationship between Jewish religious tradi--

tion and secular Zionism remains elusive. While a good deal of scholarship has

been dedicated to understanding the connection between the two, much of it

presupposes a firm distinction between secular and religious identities, a distinction

that fails to account for the complex interaction between the two and may obscure

more than it illuminates.4

One place to turn in search of a clearer understanding of this relationship is

to the work of Bialik (1873–1934), one of the greatest Hebrew writers of the

modern era, who was recognized during his life as “The National Poet” (ha-



"Like a Necklace of Black Pearls Whose String Has Snapped" y 159

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meshorer ha-le’umi). Although his reputation was built on his artistry as a poet, he

also achieved fame as a leading cultural activist, essayist, and publisher in the

Zionist movement.5 Indeed, he was probably the most important and well-known

disciple of the “father” of cultural Zionism, Aÿad Ha’am.6 While a vast amount

of scholarship and literary criticism has been devoted to Bialik’s poetry, he rates

barely a mention in much historical writing on the Jewish national revival. One

searches in vain in synthetic histories of Zionism for anything more than a brief

mention of his name.7

This fact is particularly surprising in light of the important role Bialik played

in the Zionist movement’s effort to fashion a critical mass of Jews into a national

collectivity. Scattered throughout the world, speaking a variety of languages,

comprising an integral part of many different cultures, Jews presented a daunting

challenge to nationalists intent on transforming them into a unified nation.

Indeed, as one observer has noted, the multilingual, extraterritorial nature of

their collective existence makes them a case study for such a transformation.8 One

means of effecting this metamorphosis was through the mobilization and trans--

valuation of the texts and traditions of Judaism, which Gershon Shaked has

described as “the nationalization of the religious tradition.” Bialik was an

outstanding representative of this tendency.9 During the first decades of the

twentieth century, he, along with other Zionist activists and intellectuals, recog--

nized that the nation’s aron ha-sefarim, its “bookcase” of classical Hebrew texts, its

Torah, could be mobilized to construct a unified Hebrew nation from diverse

Jewish communities dispersed throughout the world. Bialik believed that gath--

ering and organizing the scattered and neglected texts of the Jewish tradition into

an orderly, cohesive literary canon could achieve this goal. His project of cultural

ingathering (kinus) was, in the words of Ÿannan Ÿever, “integral to the establish--

ment of the ideological consensus of modern Jewish nationalism.”10 Bialik drew

freely upon Judaism’s symbolic repertory in formulating an ambitious agenda for

Jewish cultural rescue and renewal. And yet something deeper and more signifi--

cant is at work in kinus than the appropriation of religious language for the

purpose of legitimizing a secular national movement, or of replacing religion with

nationalism.11 By exploring Bialik’s efforts to instill a new enthusiasm for the

Bible, rabbinic literature, medieval Hebrew poetry, and other classical texts



160 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

among Jews, this study argues that they were less an expression of “the national--

ization of the religious tradition,” in Shaked’s words, than the reverse: a sacraliza--

tion of Jewish nationalism. Rather than secularizing religious texts, Bialik sought

to imbue the national movement with a measure of their sanctity.

An analysis of the cultural enterprise of one important Zionist writer and

activist may be the first step in untangling the deeply entwined connection

between the sacred and profane in the Zionist movement more generally. Before

embarking upon such an analysis, it is important to note the theoretical underpin--

ning upon which this study is based. It draws upon the claims of two scholars

who challenge the distinction between “secular” and “religious” so often used to

describe Zionist theory and praxis. Yehouda Shenhav and Amnon Raz-

Krakotzkin call into question the widespread assumption that the rise of modern

nationalism was accompanied by the secularization of political discourse and the

replacement of religion as a form of collective solidarity by the secular/national.

They challenge the “secularization paradigm” which asserts that the decline and

even disappearance of religion from the public sphere are essential constituents of

modernity, and instead argue for the persistent centrality of religion in Western

society, insisting that the boundaries between the secular and sacred are perme--

able and overlapping. Both maintain that notwithstanding its rebellion against

and negation of religious life, Zionist nationalism (like other nationalisms)

remained theological, and emerged out of a process of sacralization as well as secu--

larization. For Raz-Krakotzkin, Zionist national consciousness “was not separate

from the theological myth, but was rather a particular interpretation of that

myth. . . .Secularization meant the nationalization of religious-messianic concep--

tions, not their replacement.”12 Both Shenhav and Raz-Krakotzkin offer a

textured understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Zionism; this

study aims to contribute to this understanding by applying their insights to

Bialik’s ambitious cultural mif ’al.

By the time he died in 1934 at the age of seventy, Bialik had attained unques--

tioned standing not only as the nation’s preeminent Hebrew poet but as one of its

leading advocates of Hebrew culture as well.13 He possessed a broad, ambitious

agenda—to redefine the form and content of Jewish culture in its entirety—and

his views were grounded in the cultural Zionism that he had imbibed from Aÿad




Spring 2008

Ha’am.14 Like his mentor, Bialik was convinced that the primary problem

confronting Jews was spiritual—modern trends and ideas had undermined their

commitment to and knowledge of their own heritage, a consequence of which

was a weakening of their national consciousness.15 He was also keenly aware of a

decline in Jewish learning among young East European Jews; for many Jews, texts

had become, in the words of the poem cited at the beginning of this study, “like a

necklace of black pearls whose string has snapped.”16 This recognition led him to

the conclusion that the contemporary crisis of Judaism could only be overcome by

providing direct, unmediated access to classical Hebrew sources.

Those sources and the religious tradition they represented figured promi--

nently in several of Bialik’s poems, and would come to dominate his cultural

undertakings during the last two decades of his life. His complex approach to

them is evident in his poetry—admiration, longing, and nostalgia coexist along--

side rejection and even revulsion. In an early poem, “El ha-aggadah,” he gives

expression to his deep attachment to traditional Jewish texts: “In you, pages of

Talmud, in you, worn-out pages / charming and ancient aggadot / when my life is

empty and I moan gloomily— / in you my soul finds consolation.”17 A sense of

wistful longing for the world he had left behind and a sense of decay and obsoles--

cence are powerfully evoked in “’Al saf beit hamidrash,” published a few years

later. The poem depicts the poet confronting a noble but forlorn beit midrash:

. . . Walls of the house of study, sacred walls!

Hiding place of a mighty spirit, shelter of an eternal people! . . .

Why do you stand speechless and in despair

Casting dark, silent shadows

Has God departed forever from your ruins

You having sunken in dust, will He not return to you? . . .

Do you not remember, like me, those days long gone?

Your sons who left you sorrowfully?

Should you not inquire after your foundlings so far away. . . .

And I, an exiled orphan, an infant in your care

Wretched, ashamed, and defeated, have returned to you once

again . . .



162 y Adam Rubin

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You shall not fall, Shem’s tent! I will build you

From heaps of your dust I will resurrect your walls

Palaces will decay and wither before you do . . .

And when I restore God’s destroyed mikdash

I will draw its curtains, open its windows

And the light will drive away the darkness of its expansive

shadow

And with the cloud lifted, the glory of God will descend there

For the grass withers, the blossom fades, but God endures forever!

(ll. 15–20, 23–25, 29–30, 91–93, 95–98, 100)18

Descriptions of degeneration and darkness (“speechless and in despair”; “dark,

silent shadows”; “sunken in dust”) are offered not in anger but with a sense of

pathos. Having left the world of tradition in sorrow, the poet has become a

foundling, an exile, and returns to that world humbled and even humiliated.

Chastened by his experience, he refers to the nurturing qualities of the beit

midrash (“your sons,” “an infant in your care”) and defiantly proclaims the possi--

bility of its resurrection and renewed vitality.

Crucially for our purposes, the poem contains an early hint of Bialik’s

tendency to blur the lines between religion and nationalism. His description of

the beit midrash as the “[h]iding place of a mighty spirit, shelter of an eternal

people” may be understood as an effort to imbue the nation with some of the

sanctity of the “sacred walls” of the house of study. Similarly, in his well-known

epic poem “Ha-matmid” (1894–95), Bialik portrays the yeshiva, with its passion

for learning Talmud and severe demands made on matmidim (day-and-night

Talmud students), as a smithy of the national soul:

Oh, oh said Rava, oh said Abayei’

Is this here the potter’s house for the soul of the nation?

Is this the source of her blood that plants within her ever-

lasting life, that instills in her fire and warmth?

Is this here where her majesties are—future luminaries

Who will form her spirit upon the birthstones?19 (213–18)




Spring 2008

If “the soul of the nation” (nishmat ha-umah) was indeed the product of the

culture of the yeshiva, as the poet implies, then rejecting the beit midrash was less

important than investing the nation with some of its sanctity. To be sure, this was

a distinctly encumbered form of sanctity; the same yeshiva characterized as a

forge of the national soul is also described as a site of desolation and sorrow. “Ha-

matmid” expresses profound ambivalence about the world of tradition, oscillating

between admiration and fierce condemnation, between an ardent critique of reli--

gious quietism, degeneration, and obsolescence and an affirmation of a vital core

of dynamism and vigor within the bounded world of Torah study, and concludes

with a melancholy description of rebellion against the gloomy discipline of the

study hall (“Poor unfortunates—from your threshold was I separated. / I forsook

my Torah, on account of bread I sinned, . . . / The times changed, and far away

from your boundary, / I erected my boundary, I set my threshold . . .”).20 And yet

the poem should be understood not as a straightforward condemnation of religion

in favor of secularism but as marking a shift from one type of religious sensibility

to another, from reverence for God to reverence for the nation:

And I remember how strong the kernel, how healthy

The seed which is hidden in your sparse plot of land;

How great the blessing it would have brought to us,

If only a single ray of light had warmed it by its warmth . . .

If only a single willing spirit blew upon you

And cleared “the way of Torah” from which we rebelled,

And paved a path of life into the yeshivah . . .21 (513–16, 518–20)

The impulse behind both his poetry and cultural activism was not one of rejec--

tion and repudiation, but of renewal.22 Bialik’s cultural project was precisely aimed

at clearing “the way of Torah,” and at paving “a path of life into the yeshiva,” not

through a return to religious observance or traditional study in the beit midrash,

but rather by planting that seed of dynamism hidden within the classical textual

tradition in the fertile fields of nationalism.

His first attempt to articulate a comprehensive vision of cultural renewal

occurred just as his last great period of poetic creativity was coming to an end. In



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the fall of 1910, he gave an address in Kiev to a local conference of the Associa--

tion for the Advancement of Hebrew Language and Culture, which had been

established two years earlier in Berlin. Entitled “On the Purpose of a Cultural

Assembly” (“‘Al te’udat ha-kenesiyah ha-tarbutit”), the speech includes several of

the themes that he would expand upon a few years later in a detailed plan for

ingathering (kinus) of Jewish texts and traditions. Comparing his own circum--

stances to that of the fifth century B.C.E. priest Ezra, who enacted several

important religious reforms in Judah to prevent assimilation to surrounding pagan

cultures, Bialik lamented the fact that Jewish intellectuals, in their enthusiastic

embrace of the Russian language and literature, were abandoning their own

culture. What was needed was something dramatic and ambitious, something

that would change the course of Jewish history:

This assembly needs to proclaim that the time has arrived to work for the

sake of obligation. Up to this point we’ve only been admirers [ÿovevim]: of

literature, of Zion, of the Hebrew language. Let’s put an end to this admira--

tion! We must begin with concrete deeds and enterprises for the sake of our

national cultural possessions. We seek to place the entire historical process on

a new track.23 [emphasis in original]

His speech anticipates the distinction he would later make between the sentimental

quality of aggadah and the sense of duty and obligation implicit in the notion of

halakhah.24

In the summer of 1913, Bialik gave a speech at the second conference of the

Federation of Hebrew Language and Culture in Vienna, entitled “On the Hebrew

Book” (“‘Al hasefer ha’ivri”) in which he offered a comprehensive manifesto for

kinus:25 “If we want to restore to our literature some of its vitality, and revive its

influence on the people . . . it is our responsibility to once again create a new kinus,

national and not religious, of course, of the best Hebrew literature from all

historical periods.”26 Bialik’s program emerged from the premise that the nation

possessed a body of literature that comprised the permanent, inalienable treasury

of the entire nation (nikhsei tson barzel). Over the course of generations, this liter--

ature had accumulated into an unwieldy, confusing mass of texts, inaccessible to




Spring 2008

the great majority of literate Jews. The aim of his manifesto for cultural ingath--

ering was to make these texts relevant and accessible to the Jewish masses, thereby

restoring them to their former place of honor on the Jewish bookshelf. “The

essential purpose of kinus,” Bialik argued, “is to give to all literate Jews the ability

to recognize the creative foundation of the literature of Israel from all periods,

based on the original text to the extent that it was possible.”27 Just as art was gath--

ered, examined, and organized into museum displays, and pedagogical material

collected and adapted into one educational program, so too should classical

Hebrew texts be sifted and gathered into one book or one series of books in order

to provide easy, unmediated (lo ‘al yedei sarsur) access to the essential character of

the nation and provide the foundation for future literary creativity. Without

modern anthologies of the best of rabbinic and medieval texts, Bialik argued, the

rich treasury of postbiblical cultural expression would remain a “closed book” to

the vast majority of Jews who were moving ever further from the sources of their

national heritage. Though comprised of religious texts, these collections would be

viewed as a secular national canon (“national and not religious, of course”). He was

to dedicate the last two decades of his life to the realization of this project.28

Indeed, he seemed to invest it with more effort and a greater sense of urgency as

he grew older; a year before his death in 1934, he proclaimed before an audience

of journalists assembled in Jerusalem: “From the tempests of our life the voice of

history cries out: now is the time for kinus! Woe to those who do not hearken to

this voice!”29

Bialik’s cultural manifesto set forth three approaches to the reinvention of

tradition. First, he aimed to broaden and expand the limits of what constituted

the classical corpus of Jewish religious texts, going beyond biblical and rabbinic

writings, ethical literature, kabbalah, and Hasidic writings to include the Apoc--

rypha, Hebrew translations of Josephus and Philo, philosophy, poetry, sermons,

and folk literature in his ambitious enterprise. Second, he reimagined this vast

body of (mostly) religious texts as secular literary canon, making frequent use of

the word kanon in the speech to describe his proposal “to create a new kinus of the

best of Hebrew literature from every era, which is national and not, of course, reli--

gious” [emphasis added]. In this view, distinctions between philosophy and mysti--

cism, ancient and modern works, folktales and poetry were blurred, or erased



166 y Adam Rubin

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altogether—Jewish texts of every sort and from every age were to coalesce into

one great anthology of literature.30

And third, and for our purposes most important, he endeavored to imbue his

project with the sanctity of Torah, doing so by borrowing from the vocabulary of

Jewish religious tradition to describe it. Bialik’s manifesto is filled with religious

language, which served to lend his project authority and blur the distinction

between Torah and sifrut. He expressed the hope that “the kinus of classical

Hebrew sources will be viewed as the new Shas [Talmud] on the shelf of every

literate Jew . . . which will contain the selected essence of Hebrew thought and

feeling in every generation . . .” and employed language associated with the

ancient Tabernacle, arguing that modern, secular Jews should approach these

texts as they would “the holy of holies . . . in a relationship of holiness.”31

Claiming that the authentic, creative force of the nation’s sifrut possessed an

eternal sanctity, he reinterpreted the traditional notion of the yoke of the

kingdom of heaven (‘ol malkhut shamayim), replacing God with literature: “Even--

tually, whether willingly or by compulsion, people will accept the yoke of its

kingdom and open the gates of their hearts to its influence.” Bialik insisted that

the texts which would be gathered into kinusim could provide unmediated access

to the nation’s innermost essence: “The . . . reflective reader wants to become

familiar with the Divine Presence (shekhinat ‘amo) of his people face to face, and

not through an intermediary.”32 Here God’s divine indwelling presence is replaced

by the nation itself. He also drew quite overtly on kabbalistic imagery, likening

cultural ingathering of the lost sparks of national creativity to the Lurianic notion

of raising the lost sparks (nitsotsot) of divine light from the powers of evil that

held them captive. In Bialik’s program, tikkun would be brought about not

through proper intentions and meditations directed toward ritual acts, but

through a this-worldly form of rescue: “From all branches of our literature, from

every corner in which a part of the ‘holy spirit’ of the nation is hidden, a part of

the creativity of its best writers—we have to extract the best, scattered sparks, to

join them together, to be united in the people’s hand.”33

Bialik’s appropriation of traditional religious phraseology is also evident in

his comparison of kinus with the practice of ÿatimah, the Hebrew term for the

process of closing or canonizing a body of literary sources.34 In pointing to the




Spring 2008

Bible, Mishnah, and Talmud as examples of this practice, expressing an Aÿad

Ha’amist pessimism about Jews’ ignorance of these sources of their tradition, and

warning of the dangers this condition posed to the nation, Bialik placed his own

secular project within the long tradition of Jewish religious responses to catas--

trophe.35 Drawing on the language of earlier codes, he consciously modeled his

cultural activity on the work of Yehudah Hanasi, Maimonides, and Yosef Karo,

all of whom had been able to ensure the continuity of Judaism, he argued, by

producing simple, easily accessible compendia of Jewish law for ordinary people

in the aftermath of chaos and disaster.36

Bialik was careful to note in his speech that codification depended on selec--

tion—what was left out of collections was often as important as what was

included. Any final codification (ÿatimah) had to be accompanied by genizah (a

chest or archive where sacred texts and ritual articles no longer in use are kept).

That is, in every generation, there was simply too much literary material to be

digested; the sheer scope of Jewish textual creativity had become a burden. It was

the “great national task” of scholars to forestall the crisis Jews were then

confronting by selecting the best, most representative texts from each era and

genre. In so doing, they would remove the burden and render the nation’s heritage

both manageable and accessible. Here Bialik echoed Yosef Karo’s lament,

expressed in his famous sixteenth-century halakhic work Beit Yosef, that “the

multitude of books written to explicate [the Torah’s] laws and rules” justified the

creation of a new legal code.37 An overabundance of texts required the sifting and

selecting of ÿatimah.

This process provides apt illustration of Gregory Jusdanis’s claim that literary

canonization requires selection and classification, through which particular texts

are deemed worthy of being saved and transmitted to future generations while

others are pushed to the margins and allowed to disappear. By bolstering the

authority of certain texts, distinguishing the acceptable from the unacceptable,

and organizing the former into hierarchies, literary canons maintain the identity

of a nation by serving “as a utopian site of continuous textuality in which a nation,

class, or an individual may find an undifferentiated identity.” At the same time,

the mechanics of canonicity conceal this process of selection by making the

survival of particular texts appear natural and self-evident.38



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Bialik’s manifesto should be understood as his attempt to create a “utopian site

of continuous textuality,” a national Hebrew narrative which the Jewish public

would regard as archetypal and manifestly true.39 Drawing upon the very heart of

the Jewish religious culture, its Torah, kinus aimed to provide direct access to this

treasury of texts, an anthology of self-evidently sacred material unmediated by the

subjective voice of the scholar or writer.40 And yet for all of its insistence on

continuing the tradition of earlier codes and compilations and its use of religious

language, kinus bespeaks an impulse to radically reshape tradition, under the guise

of continuity and preservation. The varied, at times disorderly, conglomeration of

texts traditionally conceived as “Torah,” whether philosophical, poetic, midrashic,

or hasidic, was to be transformed into one unified body of secular literature, their

differences obscured and their individual characteristics and idiosyncrasies ignored.

Bialik’s criteria for inclusion into the national aron sefarim had nothing to do with

particular texts’ religious content, but centered primarily on the extent to which

they embodied the national creative spirit, as well as aesthetic questions of clarity

and elegance. These criteria meant that certain texts (Philo, the Apocrypha) that

had been excluded from the normative rabbinic corpus could be included in the

national bookcase. They also meant that folk literature (ha-sifrut ha’amamit) such as

jokes, folktales, and legends created anonymously by “the people” could be included

alongside elite, sometimes abstruse texts produced by (or ascribed to) individual

rabbis and sages; in the anthologies Bialik envisioned, popular legends had the same

status as talmudic texts. Perhaps most radically, his vision of the national canon

excluded those texts that had stood at the center of traditional Torah study in the

beit midrash, the legal components of the Babylonian Talmud and halakhic codes

and commentaries.

Bialik’s best known kinus was Sefer ha-aggadah, an arrangement of exegetical

legends and imaginative interpretations taken from both midrashic literature and

the Talmud. This text was by far the most successful book published by Bialik

and his editing partner Y. H. Ravnitski, and was one of the most successful

Hebrew books of the first half of the twentieth century. Issued in three volumes

between 1908 and 1911, it was used as a textbook in schools in the Yishuv and

throughout the Diaspora.41 Eighteen editions of the book appeared within the

first twenty years of its publication, and by the early 1930s, more than 100,000




Spring 2008

copies had been sold throughout the Jewish world.42 It is difficult to overstate the

impact this anthology had on several generations of Jewish students, cultural

activists, and Hebrew writers.43 According to one review published in 1935, “there

is not one Hebrew reader in the entire world who is unfamiliar with Sefer ha-

aggadah . . . its value is immeasurable. Its historic role regarding aggadah may be

compared with the impact that Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah had on Jewish law.”44

Ernst Simon likened its influence on imparting national consciousness to Jewish

schoolchildren to that of Homer and Dante in contemporary Greek and Italian

schools, respectively.45

The first volume of Sefer ha-aggadah appeared five years before Bialik issued

his detailed program for kinus in Vienna, but many of the central themes of that

speech were anticipated in his monumental anthology: collecting and sifting

through a vast body of rabbinic stories and legends in order to select the material

most suitable for a modern audience, thereby rescuing it from slow decay and

disappearance; presenting classical texts to the reader as a coherent, seamless

whole, unmediated by the subjective voice of the scholar, and thus offering direct

access to the Jewish essence; and offering those texts to the reader as a window

onto the nation’s soul. More than one contemporary compared Bialik and

Ravnitski’s anthology to Maimonides’ great legal code, and for good reason.46

Rambam was motivated to write the Mishneh Torah in part because he was

convinced that the Jewish masses, threatened by persecutions from without and

increasing fragmentation and dispersion from within, were unable to make their

way through the enormously complex world of Jewish law; he sought to remedy

this problem by separating the wheat from the chaff of endless commentaries and

precedents in order to provide them with a simple, accessible, all-encompassing

code.47 Similarly, Bialik argued that the precious treasury of aggadot was being

neglected by modern Jews who lacked the linguistic skills required to negotiate

the vast labyrinth of traditional texts. Bialik explained that

in our day not everyone is accustomed to ancient books, nor is everyone

willing and able to scratch about among the hills, piled up into moun--

tains over the course of several generations, in order to find pearls

underneath them; so much the more so that not everyone is able to stitch



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together rags and patches into a whole prayer shawl, or produce a

building out of scattered pebbles.48

It was for this reason that aggadot had been relegated to scholars who had the skill

and patience to find the “pearls” hidden beneath mountains of texts. Bialik sought

to “restore the crown to its original position,” as the saying went, that is, to revive

the status of aggadah as popular folk literature, beloved by the masses, by sifting

through the tradition and gathering the best material into a coherent, accessible

anthology that could impart national consciousness to a people increasingly

estranged from the classical sources of its tradition.49 The book would preoccupy

Bialik long after the first volume appeared, becoming the most significant exem--

plar of kinus; he continued to edit and refine Sefer ha-aggadah for over thirty years,

making minor changes almost until the day he died.50

Bialik’s romantic-nationalist conception of the aggadah was premised on the

notion that the material at his disposal constituted pristine, authentic ur-texts,

preserved in their original form.51 He believed that the aggadot contained in his

anthology constituted “a grand palace in which the spirit and soul of the nation

lives,” in which one could encounter “the complete source of life of the nation of

Israel and glimpse within its depths.”52 Every aspect of the nation’s character—its

customs, beliefs, teachings, its responses to historical events—could be found

within the aggadah. This was because it had been the creation not of individuals

but of entire generations, over the course of centuries. In other words, the aggadah

reflected the nation’s essence because it had been created by the nation.53 Hence,

his insistence that those aggadot imprinted with “the national spirit” (ruaÿ ha’am)

could not be altered in any way by the editors, since such changes would have

undermined their claim to provide the Jewish masses with a direct, unmediated

window into that spirit.54 It is telling that Bialik referred to Sefer ha-aggadah as

the ‘Ein Ya’akov, a reference to the traditional compendium of aggadot compiled

by Ya’akov ben Shelomoh ibn Ÿaviv (1440–1516); Bialik no doubt hoped to

convey that like its precedent, his work offered a direct encounter with the unal--

tered substance of the tradition.55

In fact, Bialik and Ravnitski changed their original source material quite

radically in order to make the anthology more accessible to its audience, as several




Spring 2008

critics have noted.56 Their most obvious modification is the thematic organiza--

tional scheme of the book; the first third of Sefer ha-aggadah follows the chro--

nology of the biblical narrative (“The Deeds of the Patriarchs,” “Israel in Egypt

and the Exodus,” “Israel in the Desert,” etc.), as well as postbiblical historical

events, such as the rise of the Hasmoneans and the destruction of the Second

Temple, while the remaining two-thirds is organized around themes such as

“Exile,” “Good and Evil,” and “Shabbat, Holidays, and Fasts.” This represented a

dramatic departure from traditional collections (yalkutim) of aggadot, which were

organized according to talmudic tractates or, in the case of aggadic midrash,

biblical verses, and also from modern compendia intended for scholars, which

were arranged alphabetically or according to the sages’ names.57 In addition, the

criteria by which the editors measured the worthiness of particular stories and

legends were distinctly modern; they made their selections according to aesthetic

and national, rather than religious, standards. Inclusion in the anthology was deter--

mined by the extent to which a text reflected the nation’s national essence, as

noted above. Its literary merit and ability to satisfy the modern tastes of the book’s

audience were also crucial criteria. Indeed, while one scholar has framed the

creation of Sefer ha-aggadah in terms of the transformation of rabbinic texts into

folklore, its editors were more interested in what might be called the “literariza--

tion” of aggadah; Bialik expressed hope that these texts would be “place[d] firmly

among other important works of literature” and asserted that they should be

viewed “as belles-lettres, as poetry.”58 Perhaps most significantly, Bialik and

Ravnitski were quite willing to alter, add to, and detract from original aggadic

material, translating and vocalizing Aramaic texts selected from the Talmud, and

in many cases, combining several versions of the same story taken from several

different sources into one complete text.59 Notwithstanding their insistence on

continuity and authenticity, the anthology was quite innovative in its organiza--

tional scheme, scholarly presentation, criteria for selection, and inventive editing.

While the “creative destruction” involved in the creation of Sefer ha-aggadah

and its inventive character are undoubtedly important and have been noted by

several scholars, this study is more concerned with tracing precisely how the

anthology constructed a new kind of religiosity, endowing the national project

with the sanctity of the Jewish religious tradition. Bialik’s well-known transfor--



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mation of the rabbinic expression “If you wish to know him by whose word the

world came into being, study aggadah; thus you will know the Holy One, Blessed

be He, and cling to His ways” into “whoever wishes to know the nation of Israel,

let him ‘go to the aggadah’” appears to be a straightforward substitution of the

nation for God; aggadah provides a pathway to the national origins and character

of its author(s) rather than to the divine.60 However, this transfiguration might be

understood another way, as an instance of Hegelian Aufhebung, of the preservation

of tradition, at the same time that it is altered through its dialectical interaction

with the secular/national. God is not left behind in this formulation, since the

nation retains a measure of the divine within it. Eliezer Schweid echoes this

notion by suggesting that for Bialik, presenting traditional rabbinic texts as

secular literature did not imply a simple substitute for religion. Rather, “he was

alert to the sacred dimension from the past, and tried to reflect this dimen--

sion . . . even within the realm of the mundane, he did not concede the sacred

dimension.”61 In attempting to discern the precise contours of Bialik’s approach to

Jewish religious tradition, it may be helpful to examine a lengthy excerpt from a

lecture he gave in Jerusalem in 1933 on the study of aggadah in primary and

secondary schools in the Yishuv, in which he addressed the distinction between

the secular and holy in the contemporary Jewish world. He asserted that the

Hebrew Bible remained sacred, even for secular Jews:

In my view . . . even those who are the most secular were not able to

rupture the relationship of holiness to the Tanakh, but rather this was a

different kind of holiness, a holiness of the mundane [kedushah shel ÿol].

There is also secular sanctity [kedushah ÿilonit], national sanctity

[kedushah le’umit], the sanctity of magnificent creation . . . [the sanctity]

of numerous generations, a collective anonymous creation which indeed

remains holy . . . even in a time of “desecration of sanctity” [ÿilul ha-

kodesh, which according to Bialik’s parenthetical note, means seculariza--

tion], the holiness of the Tanakh has not ceased . . . instead the concept

of holiness now has a different coloration; its religious character has

declined and has been almost completely negated, and in its place has

come a different kind of holiness. We speak now of the creative power,




Spring 2008

the holy spirit [ruaÿ ha-kodesh] of the Tanakh, though the religious

meaning of “holy spirit” does not apply to its secular usage. In this sense

we still see the Tanakh as a sacred book [sefer kadosh]. But even if we

speak today of “kitvei kodesh” it is no longer surrounded by a cloud of

religious sanctity, as it once was. We view this as something with

influence and value for the world, part of world culture. We now view

the Tanakh in the same light as all cultural creations.62

Although Bialik makes a clear distinction between traditional religious and secular

sanctity here, he does not reject the notion of kedushah altogether. His liminal

notion of kedushah shel ÿol was not restricted to the Tanakh, but, as he argued in the

remainder of his speech, could be found in rabbinic literature as well. Bialik’s

anthology of aggadot was not merely an exercise in “repackaging” rabbinic texts in a

new, secular form, offering “old wine preserved in new vessels,” in the words of one

scholar, but rather a conscious effort to fashion a new type of kedushah.63

In order to explore precisely how this fashioning occurred, it is instructive to

compare the aggadot in Sefer ha-aggadah with the original versions in the Babylonian

Talmud. Bialik gathered a good deal of his material from many different midrashic

collections, and, as several observers have noted, his severing of aggadot from partic--

ular biblical verses represented a radical break from traditional midrashic exegesis.

“The verse serves either as the stimulus and irritant for the creation of the aggadah,”

according to Alan Mintz, “or as the peg upon which its homiletical ideas are

hung.”64 And yet many other stories in the anthology were selected from the Baby--

lonian (and to a lesser extent Palestinian) Talmud, and in talmudic discourse, this

link is not as crucial. The text moves from halakhah to aggadah and back again

haphazardly; aggadot in the Talmud are rarely linked to a scriptural “peg.” In some

cases an aggadah will begin at random in the middle of a thorny halakhic sugiya; at

other times it responds to or expands upon a particular idea, which in turn is devel--

oped in a series of aggadot that taken together constitute a thematic matrix. Often

the context of a particular sugiya in which an aggadah is located is crucial to under--

standing its meaning, and, conversely, removing aggadot from their original contexts

in the Talmud can alter their message, in some cases quite dramatically.65 As we

shall see, by detaching legends and stories from the literary–legal matrix in which



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they were originally situated, Bialik did not drain them of kedushah, but rather

created a new type of national–secular sanctity that could mediate the relationship

between Judaism and nationalism.

We find a clear example of this in the large section of the anthology devoted

to “the deeds of sages” (ma’asei ÿakhamim). In light of the significance of Rabbi

Akiva, it is not surprising to find several legends that focus on the great second-

century tanna. The following three stories provide apt illustration of the impulse

at work in the book:

Resh Lakish said: What is meant by “This is the book of the generations

of Adam” (Gen. 5:1)? It intimates that the Holy One showed him each

generation and its expounders of Scripture, each generation and its

sages. When He reached the generation of R. Akiva, Adam rejoiced in

R. Akiva’s Torah but grieved over his death and protested, “How

precious to me Thy friends [each sage, each expounder of Scripture], O

God” (Ps. 139:17) (BT Sanhedrin 38b).66

We have been taught that, according to R. Judah, such was the practice

of R. Akiva: when he prayed with a congregation, he used to make his

prayer brief and conclude the service, in order not to inconvenience the

congregation; but when he prayed by himself, a man would leave him

praying in one corner and find him later [still praying] in another corner,

because of his many genuflections and prostrations. (BT Brakhot 31a)67

One of R. Akiva’s disciples fell ill, and the sages did not come to visit

him. So R. Akiva went to visit the disciple, and because he saw to it that

the ground was swept and sprinkled for him, he recovered and said, “My

master, you have brought me back to life!” R. Akiva went out and

expounded, “He who does not visit the sick, it is as though he had shed

blood.” (BT Nedarim 40a)68

All three stories illustrate Rabbi Akiva’s distinctive qualities: the first empha--

sizes his outstanding traits as an expounder of Torah and the especially tragic




Spring 2008

nature of his death (the subtext is his brutal death as a martyr at the hands of the

Romans); the second illustrates his great fervor during prayer, as well as his sensi--

tivity to the needs of others; and the third shows his exceptional devotion to

visiting the sick. By compiling these and other legends about the sage into a list of

his “deeds,” the anthology provides a heroic depiction of Rabbi Akiva that bears a

similarity to the classical literary meaning of the word hero in Greek mythology,

that is, a moral exemplar and guardian of sacred values who possesses the will and

courage for self-sacrifice in the name of a greater good.69

However, the original versions of the stories convey distinctly different

messages if viewed in their respective literary contexts, embedded in the matrix of

talmudic discourse. The first story comprises one small part of a long discussion on

the obligation of a witness to a capital crime to provide accurate testimony, given

the terrible consequences of taking the life of an innocent person accused of a

crime. To reinforce the point, the particular mishnah upon which the gemara (where

our aggadah appears) is based emphasizes the singular nature of human beings

created in God’s image. This singularity is illustrated through numerous stories

about the creation and nature of the first human being, Adam, of which ours is one.

Although it clearly presupposes the exalted status of Rabbi Akiva, a premise that

would have been widespread among later generations of tanna’im and amora’im,

Akiva-as-hero is clearly not the central concern of the aggadah; rather, at the most

fundamental level, it addresses the significance of the sages and their project of

expounding upon the Torah (“the Holy One showed him each generation and its

expounders of Scripture, each generation and its sages”), in the context of a larger

discussion on the precious singularity of human beings. Similarly, the second and

third stories are only tangentially “about” Rabbi Akiva. The talmudic context of the

second one is a broader discussion of the attitude, approach, and intention appro--

priate to prayer, while the third is one story in a series of several on the importance

of visiting the sick, generated by the baraita that appears on the previous page,

“visiting the sick has no measure” (bikur ÿolim ein lah shi’ur). Of course for Bialik, the

meaning that emerges out of the original textual setting is less consequential than

that produced by the text’s new location in a long catalog of stories about Rabbi

Akiva. The sage appears in both places; in the former he is a means to larger end—

an ethical or religious teaching—while in the latter he is the end itself, a religious



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sage transformed into a national hero. Put another way, the Rabbi Akiva of Sefer

ha-aggadah is imbued with secular sanctity, kedushah shel ÿol, which emerges simul--

taneously out of the religious milieu of the Talmud on the one hand and the secu--

larity engendered through excision from that milieu on the other.

Countless other examples could be cited to illustrate the same point, but only

a few will have to suffice. The anthology contains a section on the Land of Israel,

with subheadings such as “Love of the Land,” “Sanctity of the Land,” and “A

Land Flowing with Milk and Honey.” According to one aggadah in this section,

“Synagogues and houses of study outside the Land are destined to be implanted

in the Land of Israel” (BT Megilah 29a); another declares that “the Land of

Israel is on higher ground than all other lands” (BT Zevakhim 54b); and a third

that Moses longed to enter the Land because “many precepts given to Israel could

not be fulfilled except in the Land of Israel” (BT Sotah 14a).70 These three

stories, along with many others in the same section, are obviously intended to

highlight the special qualities of the Land of Israel and the Jewish people’s invio--

lable connection to it. And yet an examination of the talmudic matrices in which

they appear in their original forms demonstrates that they are only incidentally

“about” the Land of Israel itself. In the first instance, the sugiya in which the story

is located emphasizes the special sanctity of synagogues, and focuses on those

located in Babylonia (“the synagogues and study houses of Babylonia [are likened

to a miniature Temple]”); in the second, the aggadah appears in the context of an

extended discussion on the precise measurements and location of the Temple

Altar; and in the third, the context is a long series of aggadic meditations on the

location of Moses’ burial and its meaning.71 This is not to deny that the sages of

the Talmud believed that the Land of Israel possessed a uniquely sacred status—

such a conviction was undoubtedly embraced by many of them and constituted a

fundamental precept of rabbinic culture, clearly reflected in these and many other

aggadic as well as halakhic discussions. But again, in the Talmud itself the stories

are either asides or a means to a larger moral, didactic, or halakhic end; as

presented in Sefer ha-aggadah, they become an end in themselves, simultaneously

detaching erets ha-kodesh from its traditional religious framework and investing

the secular–national project with a new form of sanctity, kedushah le’umit. For

Bialik and his audience, the Land of Israel was not secularized but re-sacralized.




Spring 2008

Bialik himself did not move to Palestine until 1924; he spent most of his

professional life in Odessa, moving there (for the second time) in 1900 at the age

of twenty-seven, and helped to make it one of the most important centers of

Zionist politics and Hebrew cultural activism in the world. After being forced to

leave the city in 1921 in the wake of Soviet repression, he contributed to a brief

flourishing of Hebrew literary activism in Berlin before settling in Tel Aviv three

years later. His arrival coincided with the emergence of the Yishuv as the most

important center of Hebrew writing and publishing. Hebrew cultural activity in

Palestine had been dependent on writers and readers in the Diaspora at the begin--

ning of the twentieth century, but by the late 1920s, this situation was reversed:

Hebrew culture in the Diaspora became dependent on journals, books, and insti--

tutions published in Palestine.72 The rapid growth of the Jewish population in

Palestine and the emergence of a Hebrew-speaking society there generated a

demand for Hebrew books, newspapers, schools, and theaters. As a result, writers,

teachers, and intellectuals created a network of Hebrew publishing houses, peri--

odicals, schools, and other cultural institutions in Palestine.73

It was in the midst of this flourishing atmosphere that Bialik engaged in a

variety of cultural activities. At the center of his many ventures stood the

publishing house Dvir. Ambitious plans for the enterprise had originally been

formulated in Odessa, but Soviet policies put a halt to its activities. When

Moriah, which had mostly been devoted to textbooks, was closed by the authori--

ties, Dvir took its place; Bialik and Ravnitski, along with Shemaryahu Levin,

reestablished it in Berlin in 1921, along with a branch in Tel Aviv directed by

Alter Druyanow. When the latter office became Dvir’s main address after Bialik

had moved to Palestine, it was able to draw not only on the symbolic capital of its

ancient eponym, but on its location in the Land of Israel as well. Within a few

years of its creation, Dvir was recognized throughout the Jewish world as one of

the most important Hebrew-language publishers.74

The goal Bialik set for the publishing house was ambitious: to become “the

national publishing house . . . a gathering house [beit kinus] of all of the nation’s

treasures.”75 Dvir was created for the purpose of the revival and construction of

Hebrew literature in all of its branches, including literature, scholarship, art, and

pedagogy; its founders envisioned constructing a network of bookstores and



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printing presses for the production and distribution of its books. The poet was

very clear about his aims. “What is its task? To gather and to order, to inject a

spirit of organization and order in the scattered work of isolated laborers and

gradually to transform a few pennies into one great fund.”76 The publishing house

set about creating a modern, accessible canon or “bookcase” of classical texts from

every age. Its work was animated by an impulse to gather scattered texts in order

to rescue them from the musty world of tradition with which they were encum--

bered. “What we have of our spiritual possession is not sufficient to sustain us.

The dust of generations weights heavily upon it. . . . It is scattered in various

archives [genizot], and even that which is available deserves to be in the archives

because it is cloaked in the garment of the ghetto.”77 Overcoming the problem of

pizur (scattering) through kinus was not merely a matter of selecting particular

texts, but of presenting them to the reading public in the modern form of literary

anthologies; the founders of Dvir aimed to renew and reinvigorate religious tradi--

tion through the radical reshaping of Torah. This project, so evident in Sefer ha-

aggadah, continued to inform Bialik’s editing work at Dvir.

As we shall see, Dvir’s primary importance lay in its role as means of

fulfilling Bialik’s project of kinus, but it is worth noting that the very name of the

publishing house points to the larger phenomenon under consideration, namely

the sacralization of the secular–national enterprise. Just as Moriah, the name of

Bialik’s first publishing house in Odessa, refers to the hill in Jerusalem where,

according to Jewish tradition, Solomon’s Temple was built, Dvir is a name for the

Holy of Holies, the innermost room of the Temple that contained the Ark of the

Covenant. The use of this name points to the seriousness, even reverence, with

which its editors viewed the kinus of the Jewish past, and perhaps indicates their

hope that modern Hebrew anthologies would, like the Temple in ancient times,

provide a spiritual center for the Jewish people. In a similar instance of imbuing

the secular with an element of the sacred, a writer for the Yiddish daily Forverts

assessed Dvir in 1927 by offering a modern understanding of Isaiah 2:3 (“and

instruction [Torah] shall come forth from Zion”): “It is impossible to know with

certainty whether Torah actually came from Zion long ago . . . but in our own

day, such a Torah comes from Tel Aviv. When I say Torah, I mean Jewish culture

in its broadest sense . . . and it is this Torah from Tel Aviv that is being spread




Spring 2008

through Dvir, the greatest Jewish publishing house in existence. . . .”78 What did

the reviewer mean by “Torah”? Was he claiming that Torah should be understood

as Jewish culture or the reverse, that Jewish culture possesses some of the sanctity

of Torah? Both interpretations are possible, of course, but if draining Torah of its

religious meaning by transforming it into culture is one implication, surely

another and no less important one is the investment of secular culture with the

prestige, authority, and legitimacy of the Jewish religious tradition. Bialik and his

fellow publishers at Dvir drew upon several core components of that tradition,

publishing kinusim of proverbs and sayings, creative retellings of legends about

King David and King Solomon, new editions of Sefer ha-aggadah, numerous

historical works, the collected works of the most important modern Jewish

writers,79 a commentary to the first order of the Mishnah (zera’im), and antholo--

gies of the poetry of Solomon ibn Gabirol (three volumes; 1927–32) and Moshe

ibn Ezra (two volumes; 1928).80

Bialik’s publication of the first order of the Mishnah with his own commen--

tary in 1932 represented an important departure from his other kinusim because it

was his first and only volume that concentrated on Jewish law. Bialik’s version of

the Mishnah was intended to appeal to the skills and abilities of secular Jews who

were unable to understand its distinctive Hebrew idiom or the traditional

commentaries from the medieval and early modern periods that accompanied it.

He claimed that most Jews were not only unable to comprehend the text he

viewed as second in importance only to the Hebrew Bible, but, even worse, were

uninterested in it, dismissing the Mishnah, along with the rest of the Oral Law,

as obsolete, fossilized remnants of an earlier age. To render the text comprehen--

sible and compelling to modern Jews, he wrote introductions to each tractate,

vocalized the text, and composed a simple, accessible commentary based on

premodern antecedents.81

It was undoubtedly his most conservative work of kinus; unlike his anthologies,

Bialik did not in this case gather scattered texts or select particular mishnayot he felt

were worthy of being preserved, nor did he alter them in any way, but presented the

contents of the legal code in their original form (apart from adding vocalization and

punctuation). He also drew upon Rashi, Maimonides, Ovadyah Bertinoro (first

published in the sixteenth century), and Yisra’el Lipschitz (Tif ’eret Yisra’el; nine--



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teenth century), and other traditional commentaries for his own explanatory notes.

Perhaps his caution stemmed from a belief that the Mishnah was itself a form of

ancient kinus, a selection of tannaitic material compiled by Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi

in the early third century to provide coherent religious authority in the face of

dispersion and upheaval. Bialik may have felt that editing the canonical source of

Torah sheba’al peh (Oral Law), the second most important foundation of Jewish law

after the Torah itself, required circumspection. Whatever the explanation, Bialik’s

version of the first order of the Mishnah, published in 1932, appeared to adhere

quite closely to the original text.

And yet the self-evidently classic nature of this text, its seeming authenticity,

conceals a more inventive, ideologically purposeful impulse at work. The very act

of presenting the Mishnah as a self-contained, independent text was itself a radi--

cally innovative act; notwithstanding the commentaries of Maimonides and

Bertinoro, the Mishnah was traditionally viewed as an inextricable component of

the Talmud, a point of departure for the much more elaborate discussions of the

Gemara. For Bialik, the Mishnah was a literary and educational work that could

stand on its own, offering a rich vein of Hebrew more supple than the biblical

language. He also believed that the text should be viewed not as a compendium

of normative rules of conduct, but rather as a window into the nation’s seminal

experiences in the Land of Israel at a time when Herod’s Temple still stood;

though he only managed to publish the first order of the Mishnah (zeraim) before

he died, it is telling that Bialik began with the part of the oral tradition that deals

with agricultural work and produce in the Land (with the exception of the first

tractate of the order, brakhot).82 The Mishnah represented an archetypal act of

ingathering in response to the destruction of the Temple and subsequent disper--

sion of the nation. Perhaps most important, in presenting the code as a literary

anthology, he may have been seeking to invest the Zionist enterprise with a sense

of national duty that drew upon one of the pillars of rabbinic thought, religious

obligation. In his introduction, Bialik claimed that the Mishnah emphasized the

importance of action (ha-ma’aseh) and obligation (ha-ÿovah) on behalf of the

Jewish people, as well as its collective will (ha-ratson ha-kibutsi). In other words,

the rabbinic code of law par excellence revealed not the will of God, as Jewish

religious tradition had long maintained, but the will and needs of the nation; put




Spring 2008

another way, the will of the nation had the same claim on contemporary Jews as

the will of God had had in the past, and was invested with the same urgency and

obligatory character. The point again is not that the Mishnah was secularized by

Bialik, but that the nation was sacralized through (his version of) the Mishnah.

Bialik’s surprising turn to Jewish legal texts is in fact quite consistent with a

famous essay he had published fifteen years earlier, “Halakhah and Aggadah” (Law

and Legend), which consists of a sustained critique of the modern Jewish tendency

to focus on aggadah at the expense of halakah. “We are now blessed with a genera--

tion that is completely aggadah, aggadah in its literature and aggadah in its life,” he

wrote. “The whole world is nothing but a great aggadah. The halakhah with all its

nuances is no longer known . . . halakhah has ceased in Israel.”83

This formulation is

striking for several reasons. Bialik’s favorable conception of halakhah is surprising,

given his complete neglect of Jewish law in his work as an editor up to that point in

his life (1917) as well as his explicit renunciation of halakhic obligation in various

writings and speeches, and within the essay itself. Even more notable is his phrase

“halakhah has ceased in Israel.” As a description of the objective reality of Jewish

life at the time, Bialik’s claim was absurd on its face; though observance of Jewish

law had indeed declined, it certainly had not disappeared, and Bialik knew it. If so,

what did he mean? An answer may be found in his use of the words aggadah and

halakhah. He did not employ them in their classical rabbinic sense, but rather as

abstract concepts: aggadah referred to matters of the heart, to lofty aspirations and

deep feeling. Too much emphasis on these feelings had led to an ethereal, “arbitrary

Judaism,” a Judaism defined by vague notions of love of language, literature, and

country. In contrast, halakhah signified actions and duties: “The heart’s aspira--

tions . . . are fine and significant things if only they issue in deeds, deeds hard as

iron, and in stern duty. . . .We are hungry for deeds. Train us in life for action rather

than talk, and in writing, for halakhah rather than aggadah. We bend our necks:

where is the iron yoke?”84

Though the image of the yoke is clearly a reference to the

traditional notion of the yoke of the Law, it is likely that he is alluding to one’s duty

to the nation, the imperative of acting on behalf of ‘am Yisra’el. With reinvention of

a new Torah for the modern era, a Torah of poetry and aggadah unburdened by

halakhic material was necessary, but it was insufficient; what was also needed was a

modern version of halakah, understood by Bialik as national imperative.



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While it is tempting to read this essay as Bialik’s appeal for replacing tradi--

tional religious obligation with modern national duty, as a secularization of the

religious ideal of halakhic obligation, such an interpretation needlessly creates a

separation between the two concepts, since it is grounded in the assumption that

the national belongs exclusively in the realm of the secular–modern and stands in

opposition to religious tradition; as Raz-Krakotzkin puts it, Zionist national

consciousness cannot be separated from the theological.85 Another reading of

Bialik’s essay is possible, one that blurs the boundaries between the two and

captures their mutual interdependence in Zionist discourse. Perhaps Bialik aimed

to imbue the newly emergent and still fragile notion of Israel as a national–polit--

ical community with the authority and gravitas of Jewish law. If so, he would not

have called for a renewed commitment to halakhah, but for a new national collec--

tive whose bonds of solidarity and community would be grounded in the same

type of commitment that halakhah had demanded. It may be that this is the reason

why Bialik turned to the Mishnah late in his life; if the Yishuv was filled with

aggadah, with feelings of “love of language, literature and country,” it was still

lacking “deeds hard as iron . . . action rather than talk.” What text was better able

to impart values of action and obligation than the authoritative code of Oral Law?

In this reading, the Mishnah, and Bialik’s culture project more generally, provide

apt illustrations of two simultaneous impulses: the secularization of Jewish tradi--

tion through its transformation into “culture,” and the sacralization of the nation

through its reappropriation of Jewish tradition.

Department of Jewish History Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles

N O t E S

¬ I would like to express my deep gratitude to the participants of the Jewish Studies

Colloquium, arranged and sponsored by the Tauber Institute for the Study of

European Jewry at Brandeis University, for sharing their reflections on an earlier

version of this paper in January 2008. Our stimulating and constructive discus--

sion was enormously helpful to me in thinking about (and reframing) the issues

raised in this article. I am particularly indebted to Sylvia Fuks Fried, Eugene




Spring 2008

Sheppard, and Sacvan Bercovitch. The epigraph from Sefer ha-aggadah is from

the translation by Alan Mintz, “Sefer ha-Aggadah: Triumph or Tragedy?” in

History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, ed.

William Cutter and David C. Jacobson (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies,

2002), 22, 24.

1 In Yehouda Shenhav’s formulation, “nationalism, religion, and ethnicity are not only

related in Zionist thought, they are almost interchangeable, or intertwined. Each of

these categories is a necessary but insufficient condition for the whole, and each

category requires the other two in order to produce the ‘Zionist Subject.’ Only when

these three categories co-appear do they succeed in manufacturing a coherent

Zionist identity.” Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism,

Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 13.

2 For a penetrating analysis of Scholem’s letter, see William Cutter, “Ghostly Hebrew,

Ghastly Speech: Scholem to Rosenzweig, 1926,” in Prooftexts 10, no. 3 (1990):

413–33. Pointing to the use of religiously laden words by modern Hebrew writers,

Cutter adds others to the list: ‘ol, siyag, tehom, and so on (p. 421).

3 Ÿ. N. Bialik, “Giluy vekhisuy be-lashon,” in Kol kitvei Ÿ. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir,

1953), 191. For particularly stimulating analyses of the essay, see Arnold Band,

“Hagiluy bakisuy: tafkid hametaforah be-masot Bialik,” in Jerusalem Studies in

Hebrew Literature 10 (1988): 189–99; and Azzan Yadin, “A Web of Chaos: Bialik

and Nietzsche on Language, Truth, and the Death of God,” in Prooftexts 21, no.

2 (2001): 179–203.

4 Notable examples of such scholarship include Yosef Salmon, “Tradition and

Nationalism,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, eds., Essential Papers on

Zionism (New York and London: 1996), 94–116; and articles by Shmuel Almog,

Anita Shapira, and Israel Kolatt in their Zionism and Religion (Hanover, N.H.:

University Press of New England, 1998), 237–301.

5 Bialik was the leading force behind two of the most important Hebrew publishing

houses in the world (Moriah and Dvir), and the editor and publisher (along with

Y. H. Ravnitski) of Sefer ha’aggadah, a successful anthology of midrashic material

issued in three volumes between 1908 and 1911. In addition to his publishing

work, Bialik devoted much of his time to public activities; after moving to Tel

Aviv in 1924, he served on the board of the Hebrew University and as honorary

president of the Hebrew Writers’ Association, and helped to found the literary

journal Moznayim. These activities, combined with his long-established reputa--

tion as the national poet and his work as a publisher, editor, and teacher, consoli--



184 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

dated his status as the leading cultural figure in the Yishuv. See Yosef Sapir, “Ÿ.

N. Bialik ha’askan hatsiburi,” in Ha-tsiyoni ha-klali 3 (1933): 4.

6 Adam Rubin, “From Torah to Tarbut: Hayim Nahman Bialik and the Nationaliza--

tion of Judaism” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2000), 133–34.

7 Bialik is either ignored entirely or briefly mentioned in Moshe Lissak, Anita Shapira,

and Gavriel Cohen, eds., Toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be’erets yisra’el meaz ha-aliyah

ha-rishonah: tekufat ha-mandat ha-briti (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1994);

Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Own Time

(New York: Knopf, 1976); Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, eds, Essential

Papers on Zionism (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996); and

Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975).

He is also neglected in the pages of the journal Ha-tsiyonut: me’asef letoldot

hatnu’ah ha-tsiyonit veha-yishuv ha-yehudi be’erets yisra’el. More generally,

historians of Zionism have tended, until quite recently, to privilege politics,

economic and social life, and diplomacy over culture, with the notable exception

of their treatment of Aÿad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism of the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. Indeed, a recent conference at Arizona State University

was devoted to overcoming this very problem. (See www.asu.edu/clas/jewishstudies/

conference_imagination.html).

8 See David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and

the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5. For a

remarkably acute analysis of the process through which nations are constructed,

see David A. Bell’s study of early modern France, The Cult of the Nation in France:

Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001),

1–21.

9 Gershon Shaked, The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers (Philadel--

phia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 104. The other means of national

transformation—Hebrew labor, settling and working the land, building, and

being remade through effort (livnot u-lehibanot), and so forth—are undoubtedly

more familiar; they have received a great deal of attention from historians who

focus on an important stream of Zionist thought, shelilat ha-golah, that is, the

radical rejection of traditional Jewish life in the Diaspora as passive and unpro--

ductive, and the construction of distinctly secular literature, communal norms

and rituals, and so on. While not denying the validity of this account, the present

study aims to describe another important aspect of the movement’s history, one

that has not received as much scholarly attention.




Spring 2008

10 Hannan Hever, “The Struggle over the Canon of Early-Twentieth-Century Hebrew

Literature: The Case of Galicia,” in Steven Kepnes, ed., Interpreting Judaism in a

Postmodern Age (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 256.

11 Yehouda Shenhav suggests that in making the claim that nationalism replaced religion

as a form of political mobilization and collective solidarity, theorists of nationalism

err by treating nationalism and religion as antinomies; paradoxically, the attempt to

describe nationalism as analogous to religion “keeps religion out of the equation and

portrays nationalism as ostensibly sacred. . . . Zionism and religion are [mistakenly]

perceived as mutually exclusive.” See Shenhav, The Arab Jews, 82–83.

12 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “A National Colonial Theology—Religion, Orientalism,

and the Construction of the Secular in Zionist Discourse,” in Tel Aviv Jahrbuch

für deutsche Geschichte (2002): 315. See also Shenhav, The Arab Jews, 77–109. For a

perceptive examination of the persistent presence of religion in ostensibly secular

national movements, see Bell’s The Cult of the Nation in France, 22–49.

13 An important indicator of Bialik’s standing as a national icon is his necrology; in the

days following his death, Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers throughout the world

proclaimed the news in banner headlines, and called for a period of national

mourning. The consensus that developed around him emerged well before the

outbreak of World War I when he was still a young man, and was to a large extent

a result of his unequaled talent as a Hebrew poet. Even David Frishman, who was

an outspoken critic of Bialik’s project of cultural ingathering, referred to him as

“the poet of the national revival” and “our national poet.” Uriel Ofek, Gumot

Ÿ”N: po’alo shel Bialik besifrut ha-yeladim (Jerusalem-Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1984), 7.

14 As a young poet, Bialik had enthusiastically identified with Aÿad Ha’am. In

describing his gradual estrangement from the yeshiva world and embrace of

Jewish nationalism, Bialik explained in a letter: “I was an ‘aÿad ha’amist.’ I

regarded a day on which I read one of his new articles as a holiday. It was as if

each word that issued from his pen was directed toward the depths of my heart,

and descended to the furthest extent of my understanding.” See Fishel Lahover,

ed., Igrot Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1938), 2:168. Bialik even

employed the traditional terms of approbation for a hasidic rebbe in referring to

Aÿad Ha’am as “our holy rabbi, our master and teacher Asher Ginzburg, may he

live long” (rabbenu hakadosh, ha’admor rav Asher Ginzburg sheyiÿyeh). Extending

the metaphor, he alluded to Aÿad Ha’am’s authority to hand down a decree of

literary excommunication (ÿerem) (p. 191). See also Dan Miron, Bodedim

bemo’adam (Tel Aviv: ‘Am Oved, 1987), 36; and Naÿman Mayzel, “Aÿad Ha’am



186 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

un Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik: a fragment fun a greserer arbet,” in Haynt, August 3,

1934. Several critics have argued that Bialik occupied a more ambivalent position

between Aÿad Ha’am’s cultural conservatism and Berdyczewski’s embrace of a

Nietzschean transvaluation of values (shinuy arakhin), including Menaÿem

Brinker, Ziva Shamir, and Arnold Band. For a summary of these views, see

Azzan Yadin, “A Web of Chaos,” 179–81.

15 See Adam Rubin, “Jewish Nationalism and the Encyclopaedic Imagination: The

Failure (and Success) of Aÿad Ha’am’s Otsar ha-yahadut,” in Journal of Modern

Jewish Studies 3 (2004): 254–55. Shimon Dubnow’s urgent plea for the preservation

of the surviving fragments of the East European Jewish past also exerted a

considerable influence on Bialik. This influence is evident in his interest in joining

Sh. An-ski’s expedition to rescue Jewish folk customs and traditions, launched in

Ukraine in 1912. See Igerot Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik 2:133. It is also clear in the

manifesto that he, along with Y. H. Ravnitski and Alter Druyanow, published in

1918 in the first volume of Reshumot, a Hebrew journal edited by the three of them

and devoted to the collection and study of folklore in the destructive wake of World

War I: “[C]ome and help! Scatter out among the people Israel in all of its Diaspora

and record! Seek out its elders, research its old women and children as well, and

rescue from their hands that which you can.” See Reshumot I (1918): vi. See also

Yosef Klausner, Historiyah shel ha-sifrut ha’ivrit ha-ÿadashah (Jerusalem: Ÿevrah

lehotsa’at sefarim ‘al yad ha-universitah ha’ivrit, 1950), 103–4. On Dubnow’s

program of cultural recovery, see Neÿapsah venaÿkorah: kol korei el ha-nevonim be’am,

ha-mitnadvim le’esof ÿomer lebinyan toldot benei yisra’el bepolin verusiyah (Odessa,

1892), 23–24.

16 Alan Mintz observes that the poem is less concerned with the tension between

religious tradition and modern rebellion or reconciliation with the world of the

beit midrash that had nurtured Bialik as a child and been rejected by him as an

adult than with “a kind of Wordsworthian project of recovering the origins of the

self in childhood by returning to the scene of the most formative early experi--

ences.” See Mintz, “Sefer Ha’aggadah: Triumph or Tragedy?”, 22.

17 Author’s translation. For the Hebrew original, see Kol shirei Ÿ. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv:

Dvir, 1962), 29.

18 Author’s translation. For the Hebrew original, ibid., 36–37.

19 Steven L. Jacobs, Shirot Bialik: A New and Annotated Translation of Chaim Nachman

Bialik’s Epic Poems (Columbus, Ohio: Alpha Publishing Co., 1987), 46.

20 On the poem’s ambiguous stance toward the traditional world, see Avner Holtzman’s




Spring 2008

introduction to “Ha-matmid” in Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik: ha-shirim (Tel Aviv: Dvir,

2004), 114; and Dan Miron, Ha-peridah min ha-ani ha’ani: mahalakh behitpatÿut

shirato ha-mukdemet shel Ÿ. N. Bialik (1891–1901) (Tel Aviv: The Open University,

1986), 170–72. I would like to thank Barbara Mann and Jeremy Dauber for

suggesting a more critical reading of this poem.

21 Jacobs, Shirot Bialik, 80.

22 Bialik’s severe criticism of the Jewish condition in exile, expressed most powerfully

in his shirei za’am (poems of rage), written between 1903 and 1906, existed

uneasily alongside devotion to postbiblical Jewish culture. While condemning the

nation for its passivity, weakness, and assimilation in the face of pogroms and

revolution (“Boorishness and indifference are increasing in every corner of the

nation, rot penetrates to every extremity . . .”), he possessed an Aÿad Ha-’amist

commitment to the nation’s entire cultural legacy and was unwilling to renounce

the totality of Jewish existence in the Diaspora. In fact, Bialik sought to rescue

the Jewish past, not wage war against it, admitting to one of his readers, “You

should know that galut is at the root of my soul—perhaps poetry only rests upon

me when I am sorrowful and in an unclean land.” Cited in Shelomoh Sheva,

Ÿozeh braÿ: sipur ÿayav shel Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1990), 143. For

a powerful critique of Jewish “rot,” see his letter to Y. H. Ravnitsky in Fishel

Lahover, ed., Igerot Ÿayim Naÿman Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1938) 1:117. Several of

Bialik’s poems condemn Jewish docility and lethargy, while others celebrate the

people’s latent potential for resurrection. “Akhen ÿatsir ha’am” (1897) and “Be’ir

ha-haregah” (1903) contain some of the most withering denunciations of

traditional religious quietism in the modern Hebrew canon, and “Mibnei ha-

aniyim” (1896) presents a remarkably gloomy portrait of the traditional heder. On

the other hand, the poem which some regard as his masterpiece, “Metei midbar,”

conveys both frustration directed against passive, slumbering giants, seemingly

reconciled to their plight in Exile, and praise for the promise of revival. Jacob

Segal makes this point in Jacobs, Shirot Bialik, 85. See also Eliezer Schweid, “The

Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought: Two Approaches,” in Reinharz

and Shapira, eds., Essential Papers on Zionism, 157.

23 Ÿ. N. Bialik, Dvarim sheba’al peh (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1935), 1:10.

24 Bialik, “Halakhah ve’aggadah,” in Kol kitvei Ÿ. N. Bialik, 207–13.

25 For a general summary of Bialik’s program of kinus, see Natan Rotenstreich, “’Al

mahuto ha’iyunit shel tokhnit hakinus,” in Moznayim 18 (Summer 1944): 198–

203; Shemu’el Verses, “ ‘Ha-sefer ha’ivri’ shel Bialik—shtei girsa’ot umisaviv



188 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

lehen,” in Meÿkarei Yerushalayim besifrut ‘ ivrit (1981): 29–48; Shelomoh Sheva,

Ÿozeh braÿ, 152–55; and Shalom Shtreit, Penei ha-sifrut: masot (Tel Aviv: Dvir,

1939), 2:42–53. On the relationship between Bialik’s poetry and kinus, see Z.

Shapira, Bialik beyetsirotav (Tel Aviv: Yosef Shim’oni, 1951), 58–66.

26 Bialik, “Ha-sefer ha’ivri,” in Kol kitvei Ÿ. N. Bialik, 196.

27 Ibid., 199. Bialik’s appeal to religious texts reveals an interesting irony. As David

Myers has noted, Jewish intellectuals and scholars in Eastern Europe departed

from the German Jewish historical tradition of the nineteenth century, which

conceived of Jews as a religious community and consequently focused on their

classical religious texts. In contrast, East European figures such as Peretz

Smolenskin, Dubnow, Raphael Mahler, Elias Tcherikower, and Emanuel

Ringelblum viewed Jewish history in national terms, and hence emphasized its

material rather than spiritual foundations; several of them produced important

studies of Jewish social and economic history. Synthesizing these trends, Bialik

viewed Jewish life and culture through the lens of nationalism; rather than

turning away from religious texts, he appropriated and “nationalized” them to

bolster the Zionist movement. See Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, 30–31.

28 Bialik’s biographer argues that the poet dedicated so much of his time and effort to

kinusim during the last years of his life in order to keep himself busy and distract

attention away from the awkward fact that the National Poet was no longer capable

of writing poetry. Sheva, Ÿozeh braÿ, 354. While there may be some truth in this

observation, it is clear that the project of kinus was no mere diversion for Bialik; it

had been attracting a great deal of his time and creative energy since the turn of the

century. In fact, he and Ravnitski had begun to work on their anthology of Solomon

ibn Gabirol’s poetry almost fifteen years earlier, during World War I. Moreover,

while Bialik did not publish his commentary on the Mishnah until 1932, he had

called for a new emphasis on Jewish law in his famous essay, “Halakhah and

Aggadah,” which appeared in 1917; it is possible that in turning to Mishnah, he was

attempting to fulfill the vision he had set forth in the earlier essay.

29 See Bialik, Dvarim she-ba’al peh, 1:230.

30 In Bialik’s words: “the very best of literary creations of every generation, from the

beginning to our own day, should be included in [kinus]. In so far as the material

will be gathered and organized according to a predetermined plan, corresponding

to one fundamental approach and in the name of one great purpose . . . the chasm

between ancient and modern literature will therefore be closed, and we will

possess one unified Hebrew literature.” “Hasefer ha’ivri,” 197.




Spring 2008

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 196.

33 David Aberbach, Bialik (London : Halban, 1988), 117. Aberbach suggests that the

impulse behind kinus was rooted in Bialik’s own experience of personal fragmenta--

tion in childhood, and his desire “to put the pieces of his shattered life back

together.”

34 In a 1932 lecture to a Mapai seminar, Bialik examined traditional legal codes and

compilations in his discussion of kinus; “Leshe’eilat hatarbut ha’ivrit,” in Dvarim

sheba’al peh, 1:181–97.

35 Isadore Twersky demonstrated that the compilation and “sealing off” of medieval

and early modern legal codes was often justified as a response to political

adversity and intellectual decline. See Twersky, “The Shulÿan Arukh: Enduring

Code of Jewish Law,” in The Jewish Expression, ed. Judah Goldin (New Haven,

Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 338.

36 In his famous sixteenth-century code Beit Yosef, which was written in the form of a

commentary to Ya’akov ben Asher’s Arba’ah turim, Yosef Karo attributed the

decrepit state of Jewish law to the dispersion and oppression of his own time:

“As time has passed, we have been poured from vessel to vessel. We have

become scattered, and terrible trials and tribulations, one after the other,

have come upon us, to the extent that, as a result of our sins, the verse ‘And

the wisdom of its wise shall fail’ has become applicable to us. The Torah and

its students have become helpless. For the Torah has become not [only] two

Torahs; rather, it has been fragmented into innumerable Torahs because of

the multitude of books written to explicate its laws and rules. . . .” Else--

where, Karo concludes that “the Jews of that generation needed a book such

as this that collects all the laws and reveals their sources so that a correct

conclusion can be reached as to what the Halakhah prescribes.” Cited in

Menachem Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles (Philadelphia:

Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 3:1311.

37 Menachem Elon has argued that Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides, Ya’akov ben Asher, and

Yosef Karo set out to create legal codes for the same fundamental reasons: the

difficulty of finding one’s way through the halakhic sources, the diffuseness of

the laws, and the proliferation of conflicting views. See Elon, Jewish Law,

3:1167–68, 1184–85, 1278–82, 1311–12.

38 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature



190 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 59–63. For a discussion of the

creation of a national canon in Germany, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A

Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 11.

39 Hannan Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority

Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 26.

40 Lucia Re has suggested that since anthologists must decide which texts merit inclusion

and how those texts are to be arranged, they play an essential role in canon

formation. She maintains that the contents of an anthology, unmediated by the

subjective voice of the scholar, take on a deceptively neutral, objective appearance

that masks the fundamentally ideological character of the enterprise. See Re,

“(De)constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of

Modern Italian Poetry,” in Modern Language Review 87 (July 1992): 585–86.

41 Sefer ha-aggadah was not the first modern collection of aggadot. Louis Ginzberg’s The

Legends of the Jews and Micha Josef Berdyczewski’s Mimkor Yisra’el appeared at

roughly the same time as Bialik and Ravnitski’s work; several decades earlier, a

number of modern collections of aggadot were published, including Yisra’el

Levner’s Kol aggadot yisra’el (1898) and Ze’ev Yavetz’s Siÿot minei kedem (1887).

All of these works were very different from Sefer Ha’aggadah in content, form,

and purpose, and none of them was as successful or well received.

42 Ben-Tsiyon Dinur, “Tokhniyot shel Bialik,” in Keneset 9 (1945): 15. A much-enlarged

version of the work was published two years after his death, which was vocalized

and included brief explanations of difficult terms, the sources of biblical citations

contained in the aggadot, as well as the sources of the aggadot themselves.

43 As Shelomoh Sheva has noted, Sefer ha-aggadah, along with the Hebrew Bible, “was

then one of the essential works in the bookcases of Jews in Palestine. . . . It was

through this work, not just his poetry, that Bialik attained great influence in

fashioning the Jewish countenance of several generations in Palestine.” Sheva,

Ÿozeh beraÿ, 107. Shalom Kremer maintains that after the Bible, Sefer ha-

aaggadah was the most important book for Hebrew education. See Kremer,

Bisha’arei sefer: kitvei Y. H. Ravnitski (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1961), 28.

44 “Bibliyografiyah,” in Ha-olam 8 (21 February 1935): 127.

45 Simon, Chajjim Nachman Bialik: Eine Einführung in sein Leben und sein Werk (Berlin:

Schocken, 1935), 99.

46 In a review of Sefer Ha’aggadah published in 1910, the Hebrew scholar Shimon

Bernfeld asserted that what Maimonides accomplished “in organizing the Oral




Spring 2008

Torah, providing it with a ‘spinal column’ [shidrah] and turning it into an organism,

so too did the editors of Sefer ha-aggadah.” See Bernfeld, “Sefer Ha’aggadah,” in

Ha-olam 4 (10 February 1910): 10. Yehoshu’a Gutman also compares the two works;

see Gutman, “Bialik ba’al ha’aggadah,” in Keneset 5 (1940): 71.

47 David Stern argues Bialik aimed to liberate rabbinic texts from the musty, outdated

world of religious tradition. See Stern, “Introduction,” The Book of Legends:

Legends from the Talmud and Midrash (New York: Schocken, 1992), xxi. Stern’s

claim is buttressed by Bialik’s statement that “[aggadah] still is a bit wretched to

us, a bit embarrassing, relegated to a distant corner. . . . It is up to us and our

generation to redeem the aggadah from the religious atmosphere of the beit

midrash. . . .” Bialik, “Limud ha-aggadah beveit ha-sefer,” in Keneset 10 (1946): 19

[Hebrew pagination].

48 Bialik, “Lekinuso shel ha’aggadah,” in Kol kitvei Ÿ. N. Bialik, 205.

49 See Mintz’s discussion of Bialik’s concern about the pizur (scattering) of aggadot in

Mintz, “Sefer Ha’aggadah: Triumph or Tragedy?,” 24.

50 His editing partner in the enterprise, Y. H. Ravnitski, remarked that whenever his

partner found an aggadah he liked, “he would express his joy excitedly, shouting

gleefully like a child.” See Ofek, Gumot Ÿ”N, 40. The writer Mordekhai ben

Yeÿezkel noted that during a meeting with Bialik in the summer of 1934, the poet

impatiently dismissed ben Yeÿezkel’s suggestion that he temporarily stop working

on revising Sefer ha-aggadah, proclaiming: “You have no idea what this work means

to me . . . only this work revives my soul and heals my anguish. I almost know it by

heart. All of its sayings are engraven on my heart. Every time I go over them it’s as

if I see them anew . . . they are pure marble, upon which all the teaching of the

world are engraved.” Cited in Efrayim Urbakh, “Bialik ve’agadat ÿazal:

haha’arakhah vehahashra’ah,” in Molad: yarÿon medini vesifruti 17 (July 1959): 268.

51 “The aggadot in this work should be presented as they are, in their own form and

language,” Bialik claimed, “without ‘adaptations’ which lead to depletion and

fabrication, without cheap additions by the editors.” [Emphasis in the original.]

See Bialik, “Lekinuso shel ha-aggadah,” 205.

52 Bialik, “Lekinuso shel ha-aggadah,” in Kol kitvei H. N. Bialik, 204–5. For more on

Bialik’s views on aggadah, see Mark Kiel, “Sefer Ha’aggadah: Creating a Classic

Anthology for the People and by the People,” in Prooftexts 17, no. 1 (1997): 177–

97; and Stern’s “Introduction,” The Book of Legends, xvii-xxii.



192 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

53 Ben-Tsiyon Dinur, “Tokhniyot shel Bialik,” in Kneset 9 (1945): 15. See also Bialik’s

letter to Berdyczewski, written in October 1904. Igrot 1:274.

54 He insisted that the aggadot in the anthology had to be presented “as they are, in their

own form and language, without ‘adaptations’ which lead to depletion and

fabrication, without cheap additions by the editors,” who were forbidden from

changing “anything of form which the national spirit has stamped on its agenda”

(emphasis in original). See his “Lekinuso shel ha-aggadah,” 205.

55 In his first mention of Sefer ha-aggadah in his correspondence, a letter written to

Ravnitski and Ben-Tsiyon in May 1904, he notes that “these days I have moved to

green pastures . . . and have done additional work on the ‘Ein Ya’akov.” Letters,

1:237. On the ‘Ein Ya’akov, see Marjorie Lehman, “The ‘Ein Ya’akov: A Collec--

tion of Aggadah in Transition,” in Prooftexts 19, no. 1 (1999): 21–40.

56 This is the argument of the Israeli scholar Joseph Heinemann, who was an admirer

of Sefer ha-aggadah but demonstrates that the editing of Bialik and Ravnitski

could at times more accurately be described as “composing.” Heinemann, “‘Al

darko shel Bialik ba-aggadah ha-talmudit,” in Molad 6, no. 31 (April-June 1974):

92. See also A. A. Halevi, “Ha-kompozitsiyah shel ha-aggadah,” Keneset 10

(1946): 41–58 [Hebrew pagination]. Other scholars criticized Bialik and

Ravnitski for conflating folk legends with stories of scholarly-literary value, while

others faulted them for their overemphasis on particular material. What these

critics miss is that Bialik was quite explicit in his programmatic statement that he

intended the work as a popular literary anthology and not a work of pure

scholarship. As Ben-Tsiyon Dinur pointed out, its very scholarly shortcomings

helped transform the book into a large-scale “enterprise” (mif ’al). See Dinur,

“Tokhniyot shel Bialik,” 15–16. Bialik himself was quite explicit in claiming that

Sefer ha-aggadah had not been intended as “a ‘scientific’ book in the broad sense of

the term . . . concerned with historical development . . . or in the limited,

‘archaeological’ sense, a book which deals with grammar, various versions, etc.”

See Bialik, “Lekinuso shel ha-aggadah,” 206.

57 Alan Mintz provides an astute and cogent summary of the radicalism of the

anthology’s thematic organizational scheme. See Mintz, “Sefer Ha’aggadah:

Triumph or Tragedy?,” 21.

58 Bialik, “Limud ha-aggadah bevet ha-sefer,” 13–16, 19 [Hebrew pagination]. Stern

notes the Romantic roots of Bialik’s identificaton of aggadah with literature. See

his “Introduction,” The Book of Legends, xxi. For more of Bialik’s views on aggadah

as secular literature, see his 1933–34 lectures entitled “‘Al ha-aggadah” in Bialik,




Spring 2008

Devarim sheba’al peh, 2:42–76. On the argument that Sefer ha-aggadah constituted

an exercise in “folklorization,” see Mark Kiel, “A Twice Lost Legacy: Ideology,

Culture, and the Pursuit of Jewish Folklore in Russia Until Stalinization (1930–

1931),” (Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 1991).

59 In David Stern’s formulation, Bialik’s anthology “serves as a figurative, idealized

space . . . for transforming the past into a new entity through conscious fragmen--

tation, literary montage and collage.” See Stern, “The Anthological Imagination

in Jewish Literature,” in Prooftexts 17, no. 1 (January 1997): 6.

60 Stern, “Introduction,” The Book of Legends, xxi.

61 Schweid, Ha-yaÿadut veha-tarbut haÿilonit (Tel Aviv: Hakibbuts hame’uÿad, 1981),

59. Stern also hints at this idea in claiming that for cultural Zionists like Bialik,

the recovery of the national ethos had become “a kind of religious calling, a

sacred vocation.” Stern, “Introduction,” The Book of Legends, xxi.

62 Bialik, “Limud ha-aggadah bevet ha-sefer,” 13–14. Most of the speech is devoted to

bemoaning the fact that rabbinic literature did not attract the same measure of

devotion as the Tanakh among secular Jews, and to making the case for such

devotion.

63 Heinemann concludes his critique of Sefer ha-aggadah with the observation that “old

wine is preserved in new vessels in Sefer ha-aggadah, but old vessels, like new

ones, have their own beauty; moreover, the taste of the wine changes after it is

transferred into a new container.” Heinemann, “‘Al darko shel Bialik,” 92. In

editing and publishing new editions of the volume as well as speaking and

writing on behalf of the kedushah le’umit of aggadot, Bialik continued to make the

case for the “secular sanctity” of aggadah many years after the first edition

appeared. In addition to his speech on teaching aggadot in primary and secondary

schools in the Yishuv (see previous note), he gave several talks on the topic during

the last two years of his life. See Devarim sheba’al peh, 2:37–76.

64 See Mintz, “Sefer Ha’aggadah: Triumph or Tragedy?,” 21.

65 Aryeh Cohen makes precisely his point in his critique of the decontextualized

approach of Jonah Fraenkel. See Cohen, Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law, and the

Poetics of Sugyot (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 84–89. Ofra Meir also highlights

the importance of literary context in understanding the meaning of talmudic

stories. See Jeffrey Rubenstein’s discussion of her work in his Talmudic Stories:

Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore and London: The Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1999), 12–14.



194 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

66 David Stern, “Introduction,” in The Book of Legends, 232 (aggadah #139).

67 Ibid., 235 (aggadah #161).

68 Ibid., 236 (aggadah #168).

69 See Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature (1995). Online search of “hero”

through Literature Resource Center>Encyclopedia of Literature. It is worth

noting one important difference between the two—the physical skill and strength

of heroic figures are emphasized in Greek mythology, while such an emphasis is

absent in Sefer ha-aggadah ’s depiction of Rabbi Akiva.

70 Ibid., 364 (aggadah # 50 and #51) and 360 (aggadah #16).

71 The meaning of another story was significantly altered by the editors of Sefer ha-

aggadah not only by being removed from its talmudic setting, but also by elimi--

nating the biblical citation that accompanies it. The aggadah declares that had Israel

not sinned, they would have been given only the five books of Torah and the book of

Joshua, since the latter contained the dimensions of the Land (BT Nedarim 22b). In

the original version in the Talmud, it concludes with words from Ecclesiastes 1:18:

“For with much wisdom is much anger” (ki berov hokhmah rav ka’as). The text from

Ecclesiastes is meant to show that the wisdom contained in the Prophets is

accompanied by angry rebuke at a sinful Israel; if only Israel had avoided sin, they

would have only “needed” the Five Books of Moses and Joshua, but instead, their

transgressions required the Prophets as well. The story is set within a lengthy

discussion about the need to avoid anger, and descriptions of how God punishes

those who are not able to control this emotion. Without this context and biblical

citation, the version in the anthology is merely evidence for the boundaries of the

Land of Israel (described in Joshua). See The Book of Legends, 364.

72 On the dependence of turn-of-the-century Hebrew culture in Palestine on the

Diaspora, see Gershon Shaked, “The Great Transition,” in The Great Transition:

The Recovery of the Lost Centers of Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. Glenda Abramson

and Tudor Parfitt (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 117–25.

73 Among the most prominent were the Hebrew University, the Writers’ Association,

the Palestine Opera, the Hebrew Artists Association, and the Jewish National

Library. On the shift of Hebrew culture from Europe to Palestine, see Zohar

Shavit, “’Aliyatam venefilatam shel ha-merkazim ha-sifrutim be’eropah

uve’Amerikah veha-kamat ha-merkaz be’erets yisra’el,” in ‘Iyunim bitkumat yisra’el

4 (1994): 422–77; Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1993), 104–80; Abraham Cordova, “The Institu--




Spring 2008

tionalization of a Cultural Center in Palestine: The Writers’ Association,” in

Jewish Social Studies (1978): 37–62; and Shavit, The Great Transition. For a

summary of Hebrew cultural expression in Palestine, see Zohar Shavit, ed.,

Toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be’erets yisra’el meaz ha-aliyah ha-rishonah: beniyatah shel

tarbut ‘ ivrit, ÿelek rishon (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1998).

74 One writer in the Yiddish press called it “the greatest Jewish publishing house in

existence . . . though there are several great publishing houses producing a large

number of good books in Hebrew, they cannot be compared to Dvir, which

constitutes an entirely new phenomenon in Jewish life.” See Z. Kadish, “Der

hebreisher farlag ‘Dvir’ fun Tel Aviv,” in Forverts (September 1928). For similar

contemporary assessments of the importance of Dvir, see Aaron Frankel, “Heikhal

safrutenu veardikhalo,” in Ha-doar 23 (1926): 417–20; and Moyshe Rivlin, “Di

kulturele vikhtigkayt fun ‘Dvir’,” in Der morgen zhurnal (2 April 1928): 8.

75 Bialik, “Dvir” u“moriah”: skirah ktsarah ‘al gidulam vehitpatÿutam, 3–4. See also M.

Sobel, “Eikh nosdah hotsa’at ‘Dvir’ be’odesah,” in Ha’olam (6 July 1939).

76 “Dvir”: hotsa’at sefarim le’umit tsiburit (Berlin: ‘Avar, 1922), 9–10. For information on

Dvir during its first few years of existence, see Igrot Shemaryahu Levin (Tel Aviv:

Dvir, 1966), 389–434; and Gedalyah Elkoshi, ed., Igrot Tsvi Vislavski (Jerusalem:

Kiryat Sefer, 1973). The canonizing nature of this enterprise is evident in the

remarks of one contemporary of Bialik’s, who observed that “almost every book

[published by Dvir] . . . has permanent value; its worth does not depend on a

particular time or place.” See A. Ginzburg, “Der ‘Dvir’ un zayn tetigkayt,” in Di

tsukunft (December 1927): 713.

77 “Dvir”: hotsa’at sfarim le’umit tsiburit, 5. Tsvi Vislavski also conveys this sense of crisis

in his article “Dvir” in Ha-toren 8 (November-December 1921): 56.

78 Z. Kadish, “Der hebreisher farlag ‘Dvir’ fun Tel Aviv,” in Forverts (September 1928).

79 The modern works included the collected writings of Y. L. Perets, Sholem Alechem,

Mendele, Sholem Asch, Ya’akov Steinberg’s stories, David Frishman’s literary

essays, and Tshernihovski’s poetry, as well as historical works by Dubnow, Ismar

Elbogen, Shemu’el Abba Horodetsky, and Shimon Bernfeld, See Reshimat sefarim

(katalog) shel Ÿevrat “Dvir” (Tel Aviv: 1925).

80 At their time of publication, no comprehensive collection of the poetry of ibn

Gabirol or ibn Ezra existed. Bialik lamented the fact that Sephardic poetry had

failed to gain a place “among our national possessions.” This neglect was

especially appalling to him in light of the superior aesthetic and spiritual quality



196 y Adam Rubin

PROOFTEXTS 28: 2

of Hebrew verse produced during the Judeo-Islamic “Golden Age” in Spain.

Notwithstanding his insistence on offering his readers unmediated access to

original sources, he was willing to make several significant innovations, changing

the original order of the poems, arranging them thematically instead of alpha--

betically, and providing explanatory notes and appendices. His real innovation

was simply gathering the texts into vocalized, accessible anthologies and claiming

that the finished product belonged on the national bookshelf; in previous kinusim,

Bialik had argued that anthologizing was necessary because classical texts were

scattered, disorganized, and too numerous, but since medieval Hebrew poems

lacked classical status altogether, the very act of including them in the project of

kinus would bestow them with much-deserved canonical standing. See Bialik,

“Lekinusah shel shirat Sefarad,” Kol kitvei Ÿ. N. Bialik, 219–20.

81 For Bialik’s views on the Mishnah, see his introduction, entitled “Mishnah la’am,” in

Kol kitvei Ÿ. N. Bialik, 214–18. Subsequent analyses of his approach to the text

are based on this introduction. See also Fishel Lahover’s review of Bialik’s

commentary in Moznayim 39 (1932): 12–14.

82 Another reason for the significance of zera’im for Bialik might have been its absence

from the Babylonian Talmud (apart from Tractate Brakhot); perhaps this fact

liberated him from the weight of talmudic-legal tradition, giving him the latitude

to present this part of the Mishnah on its own, as an autonomous work which was

not dependent on the Talmud for its authority. I am grateful to Professor Aryeh

Cohen of the American Jewish University for this insight.

83 Bialik, “Halakhah and Aggadah,” in Modern Jewish Thought: A Source Reader, ed.

Nahum N. Glatzer (Schocken Books: New York, 1977), 62.

84 Ibid., 63–64.

85 See note 11 above.



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