Preserving Tradition in the Modern Age: The Jewish Anthological Impulse

Rebellion and Preservation: Modern Jewish Anthologies

The Posen Library has also focused on the extraordinary creative outpouring of anthologies and similar publications produced between 1880 and 1918, designed to provide Jewish cultural consumers with a panoramic view of Jewish creativity in many genres stretching across the expanse of Jewish geography and history. The editing of these anthologies involved collecting, sorting, and arranging texts and rendering them accessible to readers. The aim was to conserve beliefs, opinions, selected chapters of history, and exemplary artistic values that have accompanied Jewish civilization from antiquity to modern times.

The accelerated disintegration of traditional communal frameworks and the intense exposure of millions of Jews to the powerful influences of a rich and multilingual variety of non-Jewish cultures in the nineteenth century brought changes to the anthological tradition. The content of anthologies expanded as unfamiliar genres and new creative fields were added. Thus, a new type of modern Jewish anthology was formed. In dialectical relationship to such modernizing anthological efforts, more conservative creators compiled “counteranthologies” that emphasized continuity in the tradition.

Across Borders: The Global Anthological Reach

In the Posen Library, users will learn about selected anthologies from the early 1880s to 1918, which marked the start of World War I. The compilers came from various countries in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, as well as overseas destinations to which they had immigrated. In addition to professional historians and ethnographers, the compiler-editors included rabbis, writers, amateur folklorists, cantors, musicians, storytellers, and political activists. All shared some sense that their initiatives were the latest links in a multigenerational anthological and cultural chain loaded with powerful associations with place, history, and identity. Yet at the same time, these anthologizers felt that something unprecedented was happening to Jews in their encounter with modernity: the old traditions were being forgotten. If anything remained of them, whatever survived was changing in form, moving away from its original source, or even being re-created in fresh contexts. Quite a few of the editors of the anthologies included in the Posen Library were torn between the aspiration to continue and the desire to disengage, between attraction to a European culture with its captivating charms and an indelible commitment to the rich heritage of the past that they sought to preserve and refine with tools borrowed from the West.

Sometimes the compilers took to this task with a sense of urgency. They regarded the locating of endangered cultural assets as a sort of rescue operation, especially in light of their anxiety over the tangible danger to the very survival of old lifestyles and the impact of changes in language, the rapid disappearance of forms of social organization, and new intercommunal networks of communication.

The tension between rebelling against and preserving Jewish heritage is astutely described by Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski, one of the most prominent creators of innovative Hebrew anthologies that tapped into the ancient aggadic literature: “with one hand he wants to tear the yoke of generations off himself, while with the other hand he continues to pull the chain onward; he himself is one more link in the very chain that he intends to rupture. [ . . . ] Various forces pull him hither and thither.”¹ 

Even “traditional” collections represented in the Posen Library—which might appear to the contemporary reader as yet more collections of hagiographic literature, or compilations of halakhic works, sermons, moralistic essays in the spirit of previous generations—were no longer the same. The defense against the winds of national revival, the seeds of social overhaul, theological and social threats, and Western scientific research methods which underpinned many of the modern anthological ventures, combined to form an internal creative impulse that galvanized Orthodox conservatives toward innovation. Anthologies composed in the Orthodox spirit—whether overtly or covertly—conducted a poignant dialogue with the modern experience while adopting more than a little of its content and form.

Hasidic story collections, some of which the user will find in the Posen Library, and which attained great popularity in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, were published in competition with parallel, distinctly nontraditional compilations that were edited in a neo-Romantic spirit inspired by modern nationalism and written in the German language. The parallel encounter of the Jews of North Africa in those same years with French culture was given an Orthodox stamp, precisely in the vernacular language of the masses, in a collection of stories edited in the Algerian Judeo-Arabic language. Committed to the preservation and encouragement of the religious, mystical experience of common folk, women, and children, and the shaping of their Jewish identity through education in the spirit of previous generations, the creators of this anthology were also deeply aware of the growing danger to local traditional life in a context where Jews enjoyed French citizenship from 1870. Perhaps ironically, conservative anthologizing impulses could sometimes produce an expanded sense of Jewish audience and Jewish society itself no less than modernizing ones. Thinking about his Algerian context, the musician-anthologist Edmond-Nathan Yafil envisioned local Jewish women and children as an audience uninterested in feuilletons and novels in European languages and hungry for stories in their native tongue (Judeo-Arabic).

New Voices and Genres

Yet although traditionalist actors no less than modernizing ones could apply the anthologizing method, the shared scientific approach to anthologization that characterized this era was decidedly new. The application of the principles of sorting, deciphering, and publishing by Western methods—a legacy from Judeo-German Wissenschaft—greatly intensified the innovative message. Some of the anthologies highlighted the commonality of Jewish cultural creativity with that of neighboring cultures and extended the frontiers of works they recommended to readers beyond the accepted boundaries that had been established by Jewish society over the generations between what lay “inside” and “outside.” The pursuit of a common platform for Jews and neighboring cultural environments went hand in hand with the impulse—in the European national Romantic spirit—to present characteristic aspects of Jewish culture.

This built-in contrast, familiar to both editors and readers, distinguished the new Jewish anthology from its traditional predecessors. There were also cases in which sources that had been shelved and forgotten, or doomed to oblivion, were rediscovered afresh. These were made accessible to contemporary readers and were rehabilitated, so to speak, and brought back into the circle of modern cultural creation. The discovery of the cultural creativity of historically marginalized groups—such as women, children, laborers, the poor, and members of the underworld—bespoke the internalization of the effects of social radicalism. The expansion of fields of interest, social groups, historical periods, and genres covered by these new collections sent a heretical message to the target audience. Applying “external” tools to sacred texts and incorporating them into a historical-literary sequence while suppressing their theological and faith elements further intensified this message.

Musical Anthologies

The Posen Library has also included musical anthologies, which exemplify the enormous cultural tension between tradition and innovation in the modern intersections of the Jewish anthology project. Thus, for example, the anthological work of the German cantor Louis Lewandowski, Todah w’simrah (Music of Thanksgiving), and the Algerian musician Yafil’s Anthology of Songs and Melodies of Andalusian Heritage, were shaped through the encounter between the world of Western art and the treasury of Ashkenazic creativity, or the musical language—common to Jews and Muslims—of local ethnic groups in Europe or North Africa. The goal was to preserve centuries-old musical traditions in danger of being forgotten while adapting the melodies to Western annotation, recomposing them, and rendering them accessible to performers and listeners alike.

The central motivating force behind all this was the desire to create a new Jewish canon, which differed from previous ones in composition, hierarchy of authorities, and selection of genres represented. The new canon varied from one anthology to another, in accordance with the editor’s worldview, cultural environment, and education. It was also influenced by the target audiences that the editor of this or that anthology wished to address, with the stated intention of forging a fresh Jewish collective identity, or preserving and strengthening the purported old identity.