This book deals with two remarkable events--the worldwide transformations of the Jews in the modern age and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language. It is a book about social and cultural history addressed not only to the professional historian, and a book about Jews addressed not only to Jewish readers. It tries to rethink a wide field of cultural phenomena and present the main ideas to the intelligent reader, or, better, present a "family picture" of related and contiguous ideas. Many names and details are mentioned, which may not all be familiar to the uninitiated; their function is to provide some concrete texture for this dramatic story, but the focus is on the story itself.]]>
This book deals with two remarkable events--the worldwide transformations of the Jews in the modern age and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language. It is a book about social and cultural history addressed not only to the professional historian, and a book about Jews addressed not only to Jewish readers. It tries to rethink a wide field of cultural phenomena and present the main ideas to the intelligent reader, or, better, present a "family picture" of related and contiguous ideas. Many names and details are mentioned, which may not all be familiar to the uninitiated; their function is to provide some concrete texture for this dramatic story, but the focus is on the story itself.]]>
PREFACE
PART I • THE MODERN JEWISH REVOLUTION
An Essay on the History of Culture and Consciousness
1. Transformations: Extrinsic and Intrinsic
2. The Internal Response to History
3. A New Period in History
4. The Centrifugal Movement
5. The Force of Negation
6. The New Cultural Trends
7. The Secular Polysystem
8. Assimilation
9. A Jewish Century
10. The Continuous Rainbow
11. The Individual
12. Flashback: Collapse and Victory of the Enlightenment
13. Politics and Literature
14. Consolidation
15. Two Endings to One Revolution
16. The Age of Modernism
PART II • THE REVIVAL OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE
Anatomy of a Social Revolution
17. The Miracle of the Revival of Hebrew
18. The Social Existence of Language
19. Theory of Twin Systems
20. Language as a Unifying Force
21. The Pitfalls of Scholarship
22. The Beginnings of the Language Revival
23. Three Factors in the Revival of the Language
24. The Life of "Dead" Hebrew
25. The Revival of Written Hebrew
26. New Cells of Society in a Social Desert
27. Ashkenazi or Sephardi Dialect?
28. Remarks on the Nature of Israeli Hebrew
29. Principles of the Revolution: A Retrospective Summary
30. Remarks Toward a Theory of Social Revolution
PART III • SOURCES ON THE HEBREW LANGUAGE REVIVAL
Translated from Hebrew by Barbara Harshav
Rachel Katznelson: Language Insomnia (1918)
Yitzhak Tabenkin: The Roots (1937)
Berl Katznelson: On the Question of Languages (1919)
Yosef Klauzner: Ancient Hebrew and Modem Hebrew (1929)
Tsvi Shats: Exile of Our Classical Poetry (1919)
REFERENCES
INDEX
Benjamin Harshav, was a translator, poet, and scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Harshav was and the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at Yale University, and in 1992, a professor of Slavic languages and literature.
"[An] altogether fascinating book. . . . [It is] among the most fascinating studies of the Hebrew revival to have emerged in recent years."--"Modernism
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