CHAPTER II
JEWISH CULTURE
The comprehensiveness of Jewish culture - The linguistic aspect of Jewish literature - The development of Yiddish literature - Character of its medieval period - Distinctive features of modern period - Present-day writers and tendencies - The character of modern Hebrew literature - Its earlier period - Phases of Romance and Realism - The nationalist phase - Jewish music and art - The manifold promotion of Jewish culture
It is commonly supposed that the culture of the Jewish people is purely religious in character. This supposition is as erroneous as the widespread doctrine that the Jews are merely a religious community and is a natural corollary thereof, whilst it is partly derived from the fact that the Bible, the supreme product of the Hebrew genius is in the main a work of religious inspiration. The scope of Jewish culture, however, is not merely spiritual in character: it embraces all other aspects and elements of social and intellectual life, though not in the same degree as the culture of a Western nation rooted to the soil from which it is sprung and favoured in its many-sided development by natural progressive forces. Although deprived of its land for nearly two thousand years the Jewish people has not only preserved all the literary treasures that it created on its own soil but continued to give literary expression in its own language to its thoughts, ideals, and emotions, in all the lands of its dispersion down to the present day. That the study of the Bible and the Talmud, with their accumulation of commentaries and super-commentaries, claimed its foremost attention and formed the principal anodyne in the long dark night of suffering is a fact that admits of little dispute; but the pages of Jewish literature bear vivid and abundant evidence that there were always creative minds who were not so utterly absorbed in meditating on the Law as to be deaf to the inspiration of life itself, or to the appeal of secular learning. Jewish literature provides a faithful record of the ideals and longings that animated the people in different ages, of its sorrows and tribulations, its habits and customs, its foibles and superstitions. Like every other literature, so too that of the Jewish people has not only its writers of liturgies and law-books but also its poets and dramatists, its philosophers and moralists, its historians and chroniclers, its fabulists and romancers, its satirists and humorists, and it has withal a wealth of folklore and proverbs. The bulk of this literature was produced in the national language, Hebrew, which was never exclusively the language of prayer. Its makers, being everywhere in a minority in the lands of exile, were influenced in matters of form by alien writers: the poets of Spain modelled their style upon that of their Arabic contemporaries, and their brethren in Italy admiringly followed in the footsteps of Dante. But despite this adoption of foreign forms the literature of the Jewish people was essentially Jewish in character, in its language, its modes of thought and its intellectual outlook; it had a unity of ideals despite the dispersion of its writers over a dozen lands; and it formed the collective product of the minds of the entire nation. Such was the character of Jewish literature until the end of the eighteenth century, when the acquisition of modern education and the growth of social intercourse with its non-Jewish neighbours brought about a change in the intellectual life of Jewry, which has reached its most advanced stage in the lands of liberty. Henceforth the Jews of the Western countries ceased to contribute solely to their national literature and left their brethren in the East as its main producers. They studied it, indeed, but as a literature of the past; they wrote learned and voluminous works upon it, and translated many of its masterpieces into their adopted tongue, particularly in Germany; but they no longer moved and had their being in it like their forefathers of old. For them it was finished book, which required no continuation but merely a commentary. They did not, indeed, become utterly and suddenly divorced from the life and thought of their people, otherwise they would have ignored its literature too. But they devoted their principal energies in a growing measure to the service of the culture of their native country, they participated in the making of its literature and art, its music and drama, and co-operated in all the other fields of intellectual labour - science, medicine, law, politics, journalism. A certain remnant, it is true, still remained faithful to the literature of their people, but as they were unable to use Hebrew as literary medium they wrote their works in their vernacular, many of which have found their way in the form of translations into the treasury of Hebrew literature. But these non-Hebrew works, even if not translated into Hebrew, dealing as they do with Jewish life and thought, and inspired by Jewish ideals, have a rightful claim to belong to Jewish literature, just like the Arabic works of Saadyah or Maimonides or the Spanish works of Manasseh ben Israel. The writings of Zunz and Graetz, of Geiger and Munk, of Franzos and Zangwill, are products of the Jewish mind concerned with Jewish matters, and are all in their various ways contributions to Jewish culture. 

No other literature has been composed in so many languages as Jewish literature, for no people like Israel has been scattered among so many different lands and continued to develop its national literature through centuries of exile. But just as the literature of every other nation is composed in the national language, so, too, the main body of Jewish literature, reflecting most faithfully the ideals, traditions, and tribulations of the people, is contained in Hebrew. The creation of this Hebrew literature never ceased and was never interrupted, not even by the advent of emancipation; it has continued from the age of the Psalmists and the Prophets down to the present day, and has even received a fresh and invigorating stimulus in recent years. But an important difference that distinguishes the ancient and medieval periods from the modern is that formerly the entire nation, wheresoever scattered, was engaged in its production, whereas nowadays the cultivators of Hebrew literature are confined mainly to a small section of the people and are locally de limited, the chief centres of activity being Russia and Palestine. The modern output of Hebrew literature has been accompanied by a parallel development in Yiddish, which testifies to the intellectual fertility of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and which forms with it the twofold expression of the Jewish national genius that has been least affected by alien influence. For the Jews in Russia and Galicia, living for centuries in a compact mass and endowed with all the features of a self-contained community, remained for the most part impervious to the ideas of education and progress that speedily seized their brethren in Western lands; they continued to keep true to the ancient ideals, and gave utterance to their thoughts and emotions either in the common national language or in the tongue which they had fashioned in their German exile. In this twofold medium they created a valuable and voluminous literature, comprising every form of prose and verse, lyric and epic, elegy and drama, satire and parody, the novel as fostered by different schools of romance, sentiment, and realism, the essay and biography, the sketch and feuilleton, apart from works on history, science, and philosophy, and a periodical press remarkable both for its fertility and its variety. 

The rise and development of Yiddish literature is one of the most striking phenomena in the annals of the Jewish people. Yiddish, which is an English transliteration of the German word Jüdisch (itself elliptically used for Jüdisch -Deutsch or Judeo-German) is the name of the language which was spoken by the Jews in Germany in the Middle Ages, which they carried with them on their forced emigration in the sixteenth century into Poland, Lithuania, and Bohemia, and which now forms the principal medium of intercourse of more than six million people. Its basis is the High German of the Middle Rhine district, which was spoken by Jew and Christian alike; but it was written by the Jew in Hebrew characters, and upon being transplanted to Slavonic soil it absorbed many Russian and Polish words and inflexions from its new environment and appropriated many expressions and idioms from the Hebrew vocabulary, particularly those relating to religious matters, whilst it underwent slight variations of pronunciation and orthography in different regions and has even annexed a great number of English words and phrases in its latter-day development in England and America. The rise and growth of Yiddish is as natural as that of any other language, but because it differs from modern classical German it is often branded as a bastard lingo and is even spoken of by its own writers as "Jargon." But its analogy with English, to which it is closely related, should suffice to redeem it from the obloquy that is unjustly cast upon it. For English is simply the development of the Low German dialect that the Angles and Saxons brought with them to the island of Britain in the fifth century, whilst Yiddish is the High German dialect that the Jews carried with them into Poland and Bohemia ten centuries later. The former was the speech of conquerors, the latter that of fugitives: hence the difference in their later evolution. But the growth of Yiddish is not unique in the vicissitudes of Israel. The Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and settled in Turkey took their Castilian mother-tongue with them and fashioned therefrom a Judeo-Spanish language; whilst their brethren in North Africa spoke and wrote a Judeo-Arabic tongue, and those in Persia a Judeo-Persian, all, like their Judeo-German counterpart, being written in Hebrew characters. But the surpassing importance of Yiddish consists in its being spoken by half of Jewry, and in forming the medium of a rich literature palpitating with living interest. 

The history of Yiddish literature is divided into two periods by the advent of Moses Mendelssohn. The first or medieval period is mainly distinguished by the production of translations and paraphrases of the Bible, as well as of folk-tales and folk-songs; whilst the latter period is marked by the output of novels, poems, and instructive works, which breathe a modern and critical spirit. The first Yiddish translation of the Pentateuch appeared in 1540, and that of the Old Testament more than a century later, in 1676; but the most characteristic and popular work of a religious nature was a homiletical paraphrase of the Bible, entitled Ze'ena Ure'ena ("Go ye forth and see")1 and published in 1590, which embodied the pith of the principal medieval commentaries and of the vast legendary lore of the Talmud, and which, with its quaint medley of legends, parables, and naive moralizing, has formed the treasured companion of the pious Jewess down to the present day. In the sphere of secular literature the supreme place is held by the Ma'ase-Buch ("Story Book"), a compilation of over three hundred stories drawn from the Talmud, the Midrash, and the Cabbala, from the saga cycles of Germany and the fables of India and Arabia, which appeared in Western Germany at the end of the sixteenth century. Apart from this main collection a multitude of other tales was produced, for every Jewish town evolved its own cycle of stories; celebrated characters, such as the founder of the Chassidic sect,2 inspired romances dealing with their exploits; and many of the popular romances of medieval Europe, such as those about King Arthur and Bevys of Hampton, likewise found their way into the Yiddish garner. But the literary spirit of the medieval Jew also found utterance in verse, and a host of folk-songs, the product of ready rhymesters who wandered troubadour-like from town to town and sang their lays in the streets and inns of the Ghetto, remain to tell us of the hopes, the sorrows, and the joys of a bygone age. 

The transition to the modern period of Yiddish literature was ushered in by Mendelssohn's translation of the Pentateuch into pure German (1780-83). This translation was at once the symbol and the most important expression of a movement which was destined to have a profound and lasting influence upon the development of the Jewish people - the movement for the espousal of modern culture. The Haskalah or "Enlightenment," as this intellectual reformation was called, preached the adoption of the vernacular and secular education, the abandonment of all Ghetto peculiarities of dress, and assimilation in all things not pertaining to religion, to the ways and customs of the surrounding population. The effect of this teaching of Mendelssohn and his disciples, coupled with the growth of social intercourse between Jews and Christians, was that the Jews of Germany began to look with disdain upon Yiddish literature and ceased to take part in its production. Henceforth the cultivation of Yiddish letters was conducted alone by their brethren on the east of the German frontier, who displayed a creative energy and critical faculty far exceeding those of the earlier period. Although the Jews of this region remained loyal to the despised "Jargon" they nevertheless studied German literature, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century their writers were under the spell of German culture. They modelled their poetical productions upon the style of Schiller and Lessing; they wrote satires upon the customs and superstitions of the Chassidim; and they sought in divers ways to bring home to the masses the blessings of secular knowledge and of a practical view of life. This didactic tendency continued until the advent of Solomon Jacob Abramowitsch, who was the first to give a really modern note to Yiddish literature. Endowed with a rich imagination, with acute observation, and with a masterly style, Abramowitsch, who wrote mostly under the quaint nom de plume of "Mendele the Bookseller," has depicted the kaleidoscopic life of his people in the Russian Pale in a series of novels and dramas, marked by a vein of satire and a spirit of criticism, which are possessed of high worth both as artistic works and as historic documents. The best of his prose works, Die Kliatsche (The Dobbin), is an allegory on the storm-tossed life of the Jew, whilst his Judel (The Jew), the only epic in Yiddish literature, narrates with glowing passion the various phases in the chronicles of Israel from the days of Pharaoh down to the modern era of Anti-Semitism. Abramowitsch, who was born in 1835, and is still alive, exercised a stimulating influence upon his generation, which manifested itself in an increased literary activity that has continued to the present day, whilst the afflictions that have over taken the Pale - the toll inflicted by the Russo-Japane War, the abortive Revolution, and the periodic pogroms have also given a powerful impetus to Yiddish literature. 

The most popular writers who now dominate the Yiddish world, and specimens of whose works are accessible in a modern language, are Solomon Rabinowitsch, better known as Shalom Aleichem ("Peace unto you!")) who is at once poet, playwright, novelist, and critic, and whose volatile wit and vivid characterization are best displayed in Stempenyu, the romance of a humble violinist3; Leon Perez, a prolific writer of stories, sketches, and poems, whose ballad, "The Sewing of the Wedding Gown," surpasses Hood's "Song of the Shirt" in pathos and technique; Morris Rosenfeld, transplanted to the New York Ghetto, where the grind of the sweatshop has drawn from him some of the most passionate lyrics in the Yiddish tongue; and Schalom Asch, who is at the head of the newer generation of writers, and has written several realistic novels depicting the most recent phase of Jewish life in Russia. But an enumeration of all these writers and a characterization of their works can afford but a faint conception of the many-sided interest of this literature, or of the feverish activity by which it is marked and is likely to be marked for many decades to come. For the denizens of the Russian Pale have been brought into intellectual communion with the Western world. All the great writers of European literature, from Shakespeare and Boccaccio down to Victor Hugo and Tolstoi, besides most of the popular modern authors, have been rendered into Yiddish; and hundreds of daily newspapers, magazines, and literary annuals, are issuing from the presses of Russia, America, and other lands in which Russian and Galician Jews have settled in large numbers. It is inevitable that the children of the East European immigrants settled in Western countries, particularly in England and America, should soon be estranged from the literary fare of their fathers; but the constancy and the immensity of the emigration from the East to the West, as well as the improbability of the abolition of the Russian Pale or of any radical change in the life of its inhabitants within any measurable period, are likely to prolong the life of Yiddish and its literature both in the Old and the New World for at least another fifty years. 

Yiddish literature is the literature of the masses, produced, it is true, by men of education with a touch of genius, but intended for the great majority of the people whose knowledge of Hebrew has been confined to the prayer book and the Bible. The new Hebrew literature which developed simultaneously was at first cultivated only in educated circles, but it gradually penetrated to the masses too. In character it presents a radical contrast to the literature of the ancient and medieval periods, for it is marked by a spirit of revolt against Rabbinical tradition and re-echoes with the voice of the critic and the rationalist. It comprises a succession of romances, poems, and satires, which faithfully reflect the lights and shadows of life in the Russian Pale; it includes a number of critical and philosophical studies dealing with the manifold problems of present-day Jewry; and it has a widely-ramified periodical press, which is increasing in vigour and volume from year to year. The language in which this modern literature is composed is in all essentials the same as that of the chroniclers, the psalmists, and the prophets of ancient Israel, developed and amplified to respond to all the latest needs of modern civilization, and fashioned into a facile instrument of modern thought. The propagation of the national idea during the last thirty years has given a powerful impetus, intensified of late, to the use of Hebrew both as a literary and a colloquial medium, especially among the idealists of Eastern Europe, but its advance is hampered by economic and social conditions which provide an uncongenial soil for its development. The future of the Hebrew tongue lies in Palestine, where it has already become the principal language of the Jewish community; it is the only medium through which the diverse elements of this community, drawn from a dozen climes, can under stand one another; it has become the language of the school and the home, of the shop and the bank, of the mart and the field, of the lecture-room and concert-hall. All the Jewish newspapers of the country are printed in it, forming for the present the principal channel of literary production; but with the growth of the community, nourished and inspired by national ideals, it is inevitable that Hebrew literature should witness a new age of efflorescence in the land to which it owes its finest fruits. 

The Renaissance of Hebrew letters, which assumed its most vigorous and creative form in Lithuania, was preceded by a period of preparation in different countries. It was inaugurated in 1743 by Moses Haim Luzzatto, in Italy, with his allegorical drama, Praise to the Righteous, and it was furthered in Germany by Naphtali Hartwig Wessely (1725-1805) with his epic on the Exodus, which was influenced by Klopstock's Messiad, and in Holland by David Mendes (1763-92) with his adaptation of Racine's Athalie. But these works were for the most part literary and artistic exercises, which bore little or no relation to contemporary life. It was in Galicia that the Hebrew writers, Rapaport, Krochmal, Erter, and Letteris, first derived their themes from the conditions and spirit of their time and expressed in various works the critical attitude that was slowly spreading in intellectual circles; but even their activity had little or no influence upon the masses. The real ferment began in Wilna, where in 1830 a literary circle called the "Berliners" - a frank acknowledgment of Mendelssohnian influence - was founded for the cultivation of Hebrew literature and the advancement of Humanism. Its foremost figures were the poet, Abraham Beer Lebensohn (1794-1880), and the prose-writer, Mordecai Aaron Ginzburg (1795-1846). First a teacher and then a pedlar, Lebensohn, who was a free-thinker and pessimist, was the first to give passionate utterance in a cycle of poems to the misery of his people. His philosophy of despair is summed up in the line: 

"All human life is like the lightning that precedes 
The thunderbolt of death."
Ginzburg was the first master of modern Hebrew prose, whose principal work, an autobiography, criticizes the defective education of his day, whilst Isaac Beer Levinsohn (1788-1860), who is styled the Mendelssohn of Russia, also devoted his main activity to modernizing Jewish education. 

All these writers, however, did not exercise such a decisive and far-reaching influence as Calman Shulman (1826-1900), who, by his universal history in ten volumes and his universal geography on a similar scale, popularized Hebrew literature among the masses. His great achievement was the founding of the Romantic movement by his translation in 1847 of Sue's Mysteries of Paris, which may be regarded as the most notable event in Hebrew literature since the invention of a Hebrew prosody by the medieval singers of Spain. The romantic spirit found its first original expression in Abraham Mapu, whose Love of Zion, an idyllic story of Amnon and Tamar, is the first prose work of creative imagination in Hebrew. But the stress of life soon caused the taste for Romance to be replaced by the wish for Realism, which was also exemplified by Mapu in The Hypocrite, a novel exposing the tyrannous persecution of the votaries of modern learning by fanatical Rabbis. Both in the fields of Romance and Realism, however, Mapu was overshadowed by Judah Loeb Gordon (1830-92), the greatest Hebrew poet since the Middle Ages, whose dramatic poems display artistic perfection and throb with the passion of a rebel spirit. Gordon's was the bitterest protest against the Rabbinical code as the foe to progress: 

"By cords of precepts are we all enchained, 
By fetters of inane and galling rules. 
No more do strangers persecute our lives, 
But our own kin. Our hands are bound no more, 
But shackles clog our soul."
But he was also moved to despair by the pogroms and by the general helplessness of his people, exclaiming: 
    "Whereto shall I compare thee, people mine, 
    Thee and thy vast and variegated lore? 
    Unto a giant stricken prostrate, slain, 
    With all the earth thy yawning sepulchre, 
    Thy lore an epitaph for endless time." 
The critical phase represented by Gordon was superseded by the national idealism which now dominates Hebrew literature and which was heralded by the work of Perez Smolenskin (1842-85). Reared from childhood like all the previous writers in the Talmudic atmosphere, and seized in early manhood with modern tendencies, Smolenskin saw the only effective remedy for the ills of his people in its restoration to the land of its origin, and he accordingly dedicated his life to the propagation of Jewish nationalism. The medium of his mission was the review Hashachar ("The Dawn"), which he founded in Vienna and which enjoyed the co-operation of the best Hebrew writers of Europe; but he owes his popularity at least in equal measure to his novels, which present a graphic and critical description of the conditions of Jewish life in his day, rounded off by a Zionist romance. It is Zionism that is the main source of inspiration of all subsequent writers, among whom the foremost place is held by Asher Ginzburg, better known as Achad Haam ("One of the People"). The distinguishing achievement of Ginzburg is the creation of a system of thought designated as Spiritual Zionism, which regards the establishment of a centre of national culture in Palestine as the paramount need of modern Jewry: a view that provides the spiritual justification of Zionism, which is generally based upon political and economic grounds. In the poetical world the most inspired singer is Nachman Bialik, likewise a votary of the national idea, who is ranked by some even higher than Gordon whilst Tchernichowsky, who has drunk of Hellenic springs, dedicates his muse to love and nature. The labourers in the field of Hebrew letters are now too numerous to mention, for the Zionist movement has given a powerful impetus to literary productivity, not only in Russia but also in other Jewish centres. Frischmann the critic and poet, Sokolow the publicist, Ben-Avigdor the novelist, Brainin the biographer, and Klausner the historian, these and a multitude of others have enriched Hebrew literature with works that can compare in variety of interest with a European literature, for all the phases of Jewish life, its internal problems and its external conflicts, the doubts and hopes for the future, find ready and multifarious expression in the ancient language that has renewed its youth. Russia is likely to remain the principal home of Hebrew literature for many years to come, though several of its leading writers have of late removed to Western countries.4 The future of Hebrew culture, however, rests in Palestine. The Jewish community there is too young and too small to have yet produced any notable literary fruits, apart from the great Hebrew dictionary of Ben-Jehuda; but its development will assuredly be attended by the growth of a literature worthy of the land of its birth. 

Literature is only one of many channels in which the Jewish genius least affected by alien influence has sought expression, for it has also found utterance in drama, music, and art. The founder of the Yiddish drama is Abraham Goldfaden, who derived most of his themes from Biblical and medieval history, but a large number of plays dealing with modern life have been written by writers in America to gratify the ceaseless demand of the Yiddish theatres in New York for new productions. Plays in Hebrew dealing with modern conditions have also been produced in recent years in Russia and Palestine. Jewish music, apart from that of the synagogue, has its distinctive quality, a fusion of Oriental motives with the pathos of exile, which resounds in a growing collection of operas, songs, and ballads; whilst there is also a distinctive note in the work of Jewish artists who have been reared in a Jewish milieu and are inspired by Jewish themes, such as Hermann Struck, Leopold Pilichdwski, and the late Samuel Hirszenberg. The range of Jewish art, the existence of which is denied by some critics, is small as yet, but it is steadily growing and even includes a special manifestation in the form of book-plates with Hebrew designs and historic symbols. But Jewish art cannot properly develop and flourish except in a Jewish land. 

The world of Jewish culture, however, as already observed, is not confined to Eastern Europe or Palestine, for in all the communities throughout the globe there is a certain amount of purely Jewish intellectual activity which lies quite outside the domain of religion, and the most distinguished representatives of which are sometimes even estranged from the synagogue. This activity expresses itself in a multitude of forms - creative and critical, popular and scientific. Novels, poems, and plays by Jewish authors, dealing in a modern language with Jewish themes, are now a regular feature of modern literature; but far more energetic and fertile is the activity that is concerned with the history and literature of Israel, with his religion and philosophy. The most numerous and valuable contributions in this sphere have been made by the Jews in Germany, who, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, devoted themselves to the scientific research of the intellectual treasures of their people - "die Wissenschaft des Judentums," as they called it-and have produced many standard works, such as the comprehensive history by Graetz, the studies on the liturgy by Zunz, and the exposition of the ethics of Judaism by Lazarus. But important additions to this branch of literature have also been made in England and America during the last quarter of a century, the most valuable being the Jewish Encyclopedia the publication of which will always be a landmark in Jewish history. Moreover, the study of the past is cultivated in a host of learned periodicals, mainly in Hebrew, Russian, German, English, and French; and there are special societies for the dissemination of literary works, b6th old and new, the largest being the Jewish Publication Society of America, which has 12,000 members and issues four new books every year. On the Continent the most important publication societies are the German "Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums," which is issuing a series of authoritative works on all branches of Jewish history, literature, and theology, publishes a Monatsschrift, and subventions learned works that would otherwise be unable to see the light; and the Russian "Society for the Publication of Jewish Scientific Works," which has published a Jewish encyclopedia in sixteen volumes and is now issuing a general history of the Jews in Russian. The conservation of Jewish culture is also served by the popular literary societies that abound in nearly every community, by the historical and academic societies in the principal countries, and by a host of Jewish libraries and reading-rooms. 

 

1 Canticles iii. II. 
2 See p.278. 
3 An English translation by Hannah Berman has been published by Methuen & Co. (1913). 
4 There is a universal Jewish association, Histadruth Ibrith ("Hebraic Organization"), with headquarters in Berlin, for the revival of Hebrew as a living language. 

Back to table of contents
 
Back to
Back to Shtetl
 
© Iosif Vaisman
Feedback, questions: send e-mail to Iosif_Vaisman@unc.edu