Voices of Transmission

Haviva Pedaya in the Face of “Modern Hebrew Literature”

Abstract

This article deals with the oeuvre of the poet, prose writer, essayist, and scholar Haviva Pedaya. It argues that Pedaya, a Jewish-Israeli writer and descendant of a renowned family of Baghdadi Kabbalists, challenges in her work the modern/modernist, secular, Europe-oriented, national history and historiography of Hebrew literature. In her poetry, Pedaya questions the monolingual dictum of modern Hebrew, fashioning instead a Hebrew informed by its non-modern pre-secular Jewish modalities and its close links to Arabic. Emphasizing the delivery of the living voice, Pedaya “returns” in her poetry to piyyut, a continuous tradition of oral liturgical poem, as an alternative to the modern Western lyric poetic formation. In ecstatic mystical Hebrew, she addresses the divine, mobilizing a devotional, mesmerizing language of messianic potentiality. Her piyyut poetry challenges the view of modernity as a rupture (first secular and later national) underpinning the Eurocentric historiography of Hebrew literature. Pedaya conceptualizes, instead, the processes of transmission, in which (Jewish, or Arab-Jewish) tradition is disseminated and transformed across pre-modern and modern times, thus calling for an alternative history of Hebrew textuality, arising from and addressed to the collectivities of the Orient.