Overview
- Presents lively picture of Eastern European Jewish society through the lens of its reading and writing practices
- Links modernization, revolutionary shift from oral to writing dominance, and rise of new male Jewish subjectivity
- Argues that modern Hebrew literature emerged against background of social restrictions on writing
Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History (NDBH)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature contends that the processes of enlightenment, modernization, and secularization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society were marked not by a reading revolution but rather by a writing revolution, that is, by a revolutionary change in this society's attitude toward writing. Combining socio-cultural history and literary studies and drawing on a large corpus of autobiographies, memoirs, and literary works of the period, the book sets out to explain the curious absence of writing skills and Hebrew grammar from the curriculum of the traditional Jewish education system in Eastern Europe. It shows that traditional Jewish society maintained a conspicuously oral literacy culture, colored by fears of writing and suspicions toward publication. It is against this background that the young yeshiva students undergoing enlightenment started to “sin by writing,” turning writing and publication in Hebrew into the cornerstone of their constitution as autonomous, enlightened, male Jewish subjects, and setting the foundations for the rise of modern Hebrew literature.
Reviews
“Excellent multidisciplinary book The Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature … . Each chapter approaches, in a bricoleur-like manner, its primary sources with the relevant theories … . Parush’s book carefully traces the genealogy of the (manly) ideal of the maskil by, among other things, sketching the training process for writing in the Hebrew language. …” (Yaniv Hagbi, European Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 17 (2), 2023)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Iris Parush is Professor Emerita of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her current scholarly writing explores the literature and literary criticism of the Jewish enlightenment and national revival periods, examining them within their socio-cultural and ideological context. Her book Reading Jewish Women (2004) won the prestigious Zalman Shazar Prize for Jewish History.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature
Authors: Iris Parush
Translated by: Jeffrey M. Green
Series Title: New Directions in Book History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81819-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-81818-0Published: 22 March 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-81821-0Published: 23 March 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-81819-7Published: 21 March 2022
Series ISSN: 2634-6117
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6125
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 407
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of the Book, Nineteenth-Century Literature, European Literature, Judaism, Printing and Publishing, Literature and Technology/Media