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חביבה פדיה אל מול "הספרות העברית החדשה"

תקציר

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.