Between East and West: controversies over the modernization of Hebrew culture in the works of Shaul Abdallah Yosef and Ariel Bension

ABSTRACT

A tendency exists in Jewish historiography to associate Jewish modernization and Hebrew renaissance with Europe and Western culture. Europeanization and Westernization are emphasized as the focal points for Jewish cultural transformation. We take a different approach by shedding light on a number of centres where modern Jewish and Hebrew culture was created. This approach allows us to expand the perspective beyond the Eurocentric prism and instead emphasize movement – of people, knowledge, goods and capital – in real or symbolic spaces as key drivers for processes of transformation. We accordingly examine different pathways to the renewal of Hebrew and Jewish cultures at the turn of the twentieth century. We re-asses the research and literary work of Shaul Abdallah Yosef (1849–1906) and Ariel Bension (1880–1933) and their contesting interpretations of the modernization of Hebrew culture. Driven by both real and symbolic return to the “East,” the two formulated different political and cultural models for the modernization of Jewish and Hebrew culture. By doing so they challenged mainstream trends concerning modern European Jewish discourse that prevailed during the nineteenth century in the work of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) movement, in Europe’s Hebrew Haskalah circles and later on in Palestine/Land of Israel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yuval Evri is a Post-Doctoral Researcher, School of Asian and African Studies, University of London, London, UK.

Almog Behar is a Post-Doctoral Fellow, The Polonsky Academy, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Jerusalem, Israel.

Notes

1. We are consciously using the formulation “Palestine/Land of Israel” when referring to the space/land. While some readers may find it clumsy, it is important for us to use both terms because this phrasing better represents the multiple affiliations to the land/space by various constituencies

2. Perah was published as a Judeo-Arabic weekly in Calcutta at the end of the nineteenth century, and distributed throughout Iraqi-Jewish communities in India, China, and Iraq. See: Ben-Yaakov (1985); Avisur (1992).

3. His book Givat Shaul, which includes commentary on Yehuda Halevi, was published after his death by Shmuel Krauss, in 1923 in Vienna (Yosef 1923), in response to the diwan of Halevi edited by Chaim Brody and published by Mektize nirdamim (Berlin: 1894–1930, 1895, 1901).

4. Mishbetzet hatarshish: A Book of Commentary on Sefer hatarshish by Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra, was published after its author’s death by Shmuel Krauss in Vienna in 1926; Baron David Ginsburg had printed Sefer hatarshish in 1886.

5. He discovered the diwan of Tudros ben Joseph Abulafia, The Garden of Parables and Riddles, and wrote a commentary on it. After Shaul Abdallah Yosef ‘s death, Yellin published the diwan together with the commentary (Abulafia 1932–1936).

6. Bension (1928).

7. For Burla’s attempt to deviate from this pattern in his later novel The Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, and his writing in the maqama style, see Behar (2013)