Jewish literature

Jewish literature is a broad term used for writing done by Jewish writers. It encompasses works with Jewish themes, as well as those written in Jewish languages such as Hebrew and Yiddish or that are written by a Jew regardless of topic. Jewish literature has a three-thousand-year history dating back to the Hebrew Bible and other ancient sacred texts written by rabbis. It also includes instructional texts written by rabbis, historical accounts, prose and poetry, and a variety of other forms written over the centuries.

The genre is far-reaching because people who identified themselves as Jews have lived in virtually every culture and country around the world. As a result, Jewish literature includes a number of classifications based on types of literature, time period, and nationality of the author. Some of these include religious texts; medieval literature; literature created by Israeli, German, American, Polish and Russian Jews; and folklore known as Ladino literature.

Background

People can be defined as Jewish by either ethnic or religious qualifications. The first Jews were an Iron Age (1200–600 BCE) people who lived in ancient Mesopotamia. According to Jewish history, a man named Abraham was told by a divine being—God of the Jewish and Christian faith traditions—that his descendants would be God’s chosen people.

These descendants of Abraham became known as Israelites after Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, was renamed Israel by God. Over time, Abraham and Jacob/Israel’s descendants received various instructions on how they should act and how they should worship God. This became the basis of the Jewish faith.

The term “Jew” came from the Kingdom of Judah, where many ancient Israelites lived around 930 BCE. Judah was Jacob/Israel’s son. The Kingdom of Judah was run by political leaders who also adhered to Jewish religious principles and practices. This Kingdom was conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Jewish people were exiled, which led to them being spread more widely around the ancient world.

In Jewish tradition, anyone born to a Jewish mother is automatically considered to be ethnically a Jew whether or not the mother or the child adheres to Jewish religious practices. As a result, many people consider themselves to be Jewish even if they do not follow Jewish religious teachings. While a person cannot change their ethnic heritage, they can change their religious beliefs and practices. Therefore, anyone who converts to Judaism and adopts the religious practices associated with Judaism is also considered to be Jewish. In addition, some people whose genetic make-up indicates that they had Jewish ancestors are also considered to be ethnically Jewish.

Overview

Any written material produced by an ethnic or religious Jew is considered to be Jewish literature. Therefore, the genre includes everything from the Jewish Bible to contemporary novels. It also includes everything from ancient sacred texts to the work of Jewish historians, philosophers, and scientists to modern poetry and fiction.

Jewish literature can be written in any language. Some ancient Jewish literature is written in Aramaic, which was commonly spoken in the Middle Eastern areas where the earliest literature originated. Later, it was written in Hebrew and Yiddish, two languages used primarily by Jews. Some Medieval Jewish literature was written in Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and other languages.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some Jewish writers returned to using Hebrew, which was lost for a time. This literature helped spark the revival of this uniquely Jewish language. Other Jewish works written during the twentieth century were in Russian, German, Polish, and English because the countries where these languages were spoken had large Jewish populations. Some Jewish writers write in Yiddish, a language spoken by many central and eastern European Jews before the Holocaust in the early 1940s, when some six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II (1939–1945).

Early Jewish Literature

Ancient Jewish religious texts are the earliest and possibly the best known forms of Jewish literature. The most significant is the Tanakh, or Jewish Bible. It includes the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch, or “five books” in Greek, as well as the Prophets, or Nevi’im, and the Writings, or Ketuvim. Together, these books include the origin tale of the Jewish people, ancient prophecies about its future, poetry, psalms or sacred songs, and other writings of instructional or historical importance to the Jewish people. They are considered so important to Jews that ancient scribes who copied the texts by hand took great care to avoid changing a single character from the originals.

A number of other early Jewish writings are variations of the Biblical texts. For example, in 1947, a collection of ancient texts was found hidden in caves near Qumran in Israel. They became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These texts were written by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes between around 66 CE and 200 CE. Some are copies or near copies of biblical texts, while others tell stories of people who were contemporaries of Jesus Christ, the first-century Jewish rabbi revered by Christians as the Son of God.

In addition, a number of religious texts are not included in the Jewish canon, or accepted collection of sacred biblical texts. These included a group known as the deuterocanonical texts, or religious texts of secondary importance to the Tanakh. These also include a collection of texts known as the Pseudepigrapha texts. Some of these were writings attributed to ancient Israelites and prophets without proof they were the actual authors. Most of these are thought to have been written between 200 BCE and 100 CE.

Some early Jewish literature sought to help people understand the biblical texts and clarify the teachings of the Tanakh and rabbinic writings. For example, Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote a number of texts expounding on and explaining the meaning of the biblical books and God’s expectations for people. Other Jewish writers made significant contributions to understanding the history of ancient times. For instance, Joseph Ben Matthias, later known as Flavius Titus Josephus or simply Josephus, wrote one of the most detailed known accounts of the history of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas in the first century and earlier.

Not all early Jewish literature was aimed at instructing or recording history. Liturgical Jewish poetry, known as piyyut or piyut, is intended to be sung or chanted during religious rituals. The earliest of these were written during the days when the Jewish temples stood in Jerusalem, between around 832 BCE and 66 CE. After the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 66 CE, the Jews lost the center of their religious worship. However, piyyut continued to be written for use in synagogues.

Medieval Jewish Literature

Some of the best known Jewish payyetan, or poets, wrote during the early medieval period. Key writers from this time included Eleazar Kalir, Yose ben Yose, and Yanai. Secular, or non-religious, poetry was also written during this time.

Nearly all Medieval Jewish writers were men; only one short stanza of poetry written by an unnamed Jewish woman is known to exist from this time. This work is only known because of her husband, Dunash ben Labrat. Ben Labrat was a Jewish poet and grammarian from what historians call the Jewish Golden Age in Muslim Spain in the tenth century. He was the first Jewish poet to incorporate Arabic rhyme schemes into his poetry, creating a new form of Jewish poetry. Some of the Jewish literature from this time period is known as Sephardic literature; “Sephardic” refers to Jewish people from a Hispanic area such as Spain or Portugal.

In addition to poetry, a number of works of prose fiction were also created by Jewish writers during the Medieval era. These include folklore texts known as Ladino literature. This form, which continues to be written in modern times, includes folktales, legends, and fables featuring biblical personalities and other characters. Examples of this include Mishlei Shu’alim, a collection of fables written by Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan; and Sefer Sha’ashu’im, or The Book of Delights, by the twelfth-century writer Joseph ibn Zabara, which is a collection of folktales mixed with some writings of a philosophical and scientific nature.

Several other works of the time focused on Aggadah, or historical tales, folktales, and advice written by rabbis but not considered to be official religious texts. Some of these works included Sefer ha-Ma’asiyyot by Tunisian Rabbi Nissim ben Jacob ben Nissim ibn Shahin and Meshal ha-Kadmoni written in the thirteen century by Isaac ibn Sahula, which also includes original writings. In addition, some Jewish writers created literature focused on Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah, which focuses on the nature of God or on philosophical topics. Other writers wrote halakhic literature focused on the legalistic aspects of following Jewish law.

Other texts by Medieval Jewish writers focused on subjects that were not Jewish in theme. One example of this is Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir, written by Abraham ben Samuel ha-Levi ibn Hasdai. Translated as The Prince and the Hermit, it is based on a story about Buddah and tells of a Hindu prince who becomes a monk.

Modern Jewish Literature

Nearly all of the ancient forms of Jewish writing continue into the modern age. One of the first significant modern Jewish writers was Moshe Chaim Luzzato, an Italian-born rabbi who wrote “La-Yesharim Tehillah” in 1743. The allegorical drama in three acts translates as “Praise to the Righteous.” Luzzato also wrote a book of ethics entitled The Path of the Righteous, which is considered to be one of the most important texts of its time.

Other important writers from this time period included Dutch writer David Franco Mendes, a student of Luzzato. German writer Naphtali Hartwig Wessely began his literary career by translating the Bible’s Song of Solomon. His most famous work is the highly regarded poem Shirei Tiferet, an epic retelling of the stories of Moses and the Jewish Exodus from Egypt originally told in the Tanakh.

The nineteenth century saw the resurgence of the Hebrew language. The language was lost during the second century of the common era during the Jewish Diaspora. The Jews were defeated during a revolt in 135 CE. They scattered from Jerusalem to many other countries, where most adopted the local languages. Near the end of the nineteen century, newspaper editor Eliezer Ben-Yehuda encouraged a group of his friends to speak only Hebrew when they were together. This led to a revitalization of the language that carried over to the literature. Soon, Jewish writers in a number of countries were writing in Hebrew.

The nineteenth century also saw the rising popularity of historical fiction and the trend of serialization, where longer works were broken down into installments and printed in newspapers. “Ghetto literature” also became popular. During this time, a “ghetto” was a neighborhood where Jews chose to live voluntarily; this is different than the ghettos and the ghetto literature that arose in the mid-twentieth century when Jews were forced into cramped “ghettos” by Nazi oppressors.

Some of the key Jewish writers of the nineteenth century were philosopher Nahman Krochmal, who wrote Moreh Nevukhey Ha-Zeman (Guide for the Perplexed of the Time), and Abraham Mapu, whose work Ahabat Tziyyon is considered to be the first Hebrew novel. Other influential writers of this period include Ludwig Philippson, Marcus Lehmann, Leopold Kompert, and Karl Emil Franzos. Nineteenth-century Jewish poets included Lithuanian-born Abraham Baer Lebensohn, who is considered the father of Jewish poetry; Michah Joseph Lebensohn, who is considered to be the father of Jewish prose; and Heinrich Heine, who wrote lyrical poetry.

Important twentieth-century Jewish writers include Hayim Nahman Bialik, who became Israel’s national poet even though the nation of Israel did not exist until fourteen years after his death. Also considered important are the Jews who recorded accounts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. One of the most famous of these is Anne Frank, a Jewish teen whose diary of the time her family spent hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam is required reading in schools around the world. Other influential writers who published accounts of the Holocaust include Elie Wiesel, whose memoir Night (1956) recorded his Holocaust experience and time at Auschwitz, and Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel Maus (1986) describes his father's experience as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor and Art's attempts to understand his family history.

In contemporary times, Jewish literature often includes writers of Jewish heritage who write about any subject and in any language. Important twentieth-century Jewish writers include Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Norman Mailer, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Gertrude Stein, and Leonard Cohen. Other well-known contemporary Jewish writers of the twenty-first century include Joshua Cohen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alice Hoffman, and Michael Chabon.

Bibliography

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