יצירתם של יהודים-ערבים והיסטוריוגרפיה של הספרות העברית

גאוגרפיה ספרותית חדשה

תקציר

Although Hebrew literary criticism has begun redressing the exclusion of Hebrew and minority writers from the Modern Hebrew canon, the literary geography of Modern Hebrew remains largely unquestioned. Modern Hebrew literature is still viewed as the progeny of European maskilim, while the concurrent creations by non-Ashkenazi Jews of belles lettres in Hebrew and other languages have been overlooked. This exclusion of the intellectual and literary history of Asian and African Jewries has important ramifications for our understanding of Jewish cultural modernity, of the origins of Modern Hebrew literature, and of contemporary Israeli literature written by Mizrahi and Sephardi writers. In this essay I call for a new approach to Hebrew literary historiography on two fronts. Firstly, I advocate exploring the relationship between Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Arab-Jews in the multilingual corpus of Jewish literature written from the nineteenth century onwards. Secondly, I propose investigating the full range of cultural influences that resonate in Mizrahi literature coming out of Israel. This essay focuses primarily on the first of these two questions: the revision of Hebrew literary historiography. I begin by reviewing how Hebrew literary historiography has approached the question of Mizrahi literature. I then suggest a revision of the historiographical narrative, commencing with a “global”, multilingual model of haskala that emphasizes reciprocal channels of cultural circulation and transmission between and among Europe, Asia, and Africa. By way of example, I sketch the contours of modern Arab-Jewish cultural production beginning in the nineteenth century, lingering on the overlapping participation of Jewish intellectuals in the haskala and the nahda (modern Arabic “renaissance”). The next section examines a defining moment in modern Hebrew-Arabic interculturality in the twentieth century, in 1920’s Baghdad. I conclude the essay with a consideration of the myriad cultural influences shaping the work of the two leading Israeli writers from Iraq, Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael.