Abstract

Although Hebrew literary criticism has begun redressing the exclusion of women and minority writers from the 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 production of belles lettres in Hebrew and other languages by non-Ashkenazi Jewries has been overlooked. What are the ramifications of this Eurocentric viewpoint for our understanding of the origins of Jewish cultural modernity, of modern Hebrew literature, and of contemporary Israeli literature produced by Mizraḥi and Sephardi writers?

In this essay, I call for a new approach to the study of Hebrew literature and its history on two fronts. First, I advocate exploring the relationships between Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Arab Jews in the multilingual corpus of Jewish literature produced from the nineteenth century onward. Second, I propose investigating the full range of cultural influences that resonate in Mizraḥi literature produced in Israel. This essay focuses primarily upon the first of these two questions: the revision of Hebrew literary historiography. I begin by reviewing the state of Hebrew literary historiography in relation to Mizraḥi writing. I then suggest commencing my proposed historical revision with a multilingual, "global" model of Haskalah that emphasizes reciprocal channels of cultural circulation and transmission between and among Europe, Africa, and Asia. By way of example, I sketch the contours of modern Arab Jewish textual production beginning in the nineteenth century. The last part of the essay considers examples of Hebrew–Arabic interculturality in the context of Iraqi Jewry during two different historic moments. After closely analyzing a 1920 Hebrew poem from Baghdad, I conclude with a preliminary investigation of the myriad cultural influences shaping the work of the two leading Israeli writers from Iraq, Sami Michael and Shimon Ballas.

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