The Birth of Modern Secular Writing

Secular Writing in Modern Jewish Languages

The traditional Judaism fundamentally shared by most Jews around the world until the nineteenth century had always had room for poetry and plenty of storytelling. But the idea that aesthetic creativity in language—literature—could be an exalted human end in itself had remained largely foreign to traditional Jewish culture, with the great exception of medieval Al-Andalus, where a Hebrew poetry of love, war, and existential reflection flourished in dialogue with Arabic models. The still more revolutionary notion that poetic culture could be more important than religious devotion or could even displace it was anathema wherever Jewish religious tradition remained strong. The acculturation of Western European Jewry beginning in the mid-nineteenth century undid this situation in that segment of the Jewish world well before 1880. By 1880, the involvement of individual Jews in English, French, and German arts and letters was a given, German Jews were already famed and satirized for their intense devotion to the German classics Goethe and Schiller, and a generation of notable French, American, English, German, and Italian novelists and poets of Jewish origin was coming of age. In the much larger Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, new kinds of engagement with fiction, poetry, and drama had taken shape in Hebrew by midcentury under the banner of Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. But not until the 1880–1918 period did creating and consuming secular literature—fiction, drama, and poetry—become a mainstream practice among Jews in every major community around the Jewish world and in all three of the great regional Jewish vernaculars: Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. By the same token, in this period modern drama traditions in those three languages began virtually ex nihilo—a development underpinned by a sudden mass hunger for theater associated particularly with immigrant New York but that actually burgeoned across the Old World as well, from the cities of the Ottoman Empire to small towns in the Pale of Settlement.

Much of the fiction and drama that appeared in Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic consisted of adaptations from German and French literature. But in all three languages, growing numbers of writers used original fiction and drama to explore the pressing questions facing their communities: secularization and acculturation, the bonds and boundaries of community, Jewish fate in the modern age, and new ideals of individuality and romantic love. Mass immigration to the New World produced great fiction of immigrant life in Yiddish, English, and ultimately Spanish. The period between 1880 and 1918 saw the birth of a full-fledged Yiddish secular literature seen by its creators as culturally valuable in itself. Even as prejudices against the language remained widespread among many of its own speakers, a rapidly growing population of poets, prose writers, and dramatists on both sides of the Atlantic collectively leaped beyond sentimental poetry and largely satirical fiction to produce a literature remarkable for its range: exuberant and mordant comedy, sharp-eyed social realism, urbane lyricism, delicate neo-Romanticism, and modernism both clangorous and cerebral. 

Starting from a different point of departure, Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe and Palestine underwent a convergent process of enrichment, expansion, and institutionalization in the same period, as wooden poetry of national revival gave way to searing, vital poetry and prose of divided selves struggling to define a relationship to tradition, nationhood, and the world.

The twinned and tension-ridden birth of full-fledged modern Hebrew and Yiddish secular-poetic literatures was fed by revolutionary currents of secularism, national consciousness, and a paradoxical sacralization of art. The same ideals drove Hebrew and Yiddish writers in particular toward a special interest in creating modern children’s literatures in those languages. More generally, writing specifically for Jewish children flourished in every Jewish community in this period, perhaps fed by a growing need to transmit Jewish culture outside of religious institutions.

Finally, the 1880–1918 period saw dramatic expansion in the amount and scope of nonfictional forms of modern writing as well. Jewish newspaper cultures flourished in every language used by Jews; a mass press burgeoned in Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic alike; and thus serious reportage and the feuilleton flourished as well. Life writing, already a well-established minor tradition in Jewish letters, gained further weight, perhaps due to ever-more rapid and unsettling changes.