Modern Jewish Literature in the Tsarist Empire and Galicia
Modern Jewish Literature in the Tsarist Empire and Galicia
This chapter describes how the emergence of a modern Jewish literature in Yiddish, Hebrew, and to a lesser extent in German, Polish, and Russian, was a development linked with the modernization of the Jewish communities in the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was only in the 1860s that a word for literature—sifrut (sifrus in the Ashkenazi pronunciation)—became current among the Jews of this area. The development of a literature of this type among the Jews, as among other nations in Europe, was linked to secularization, the waning of the power of religion and of traditional ways of life, and the growth of a consciousness of individual identity. Indeed, much of the literature written by Jews in the nineteenth century is concerned with the discovery of self. This was a new phenomenon in the Jewish world.
Keywords: modern Jewish literature, Yiddish literature, Hebrew literature, modernization, Jewish communities, sifrut, secularization, Jewish identity, self-discovery, Jewish writers
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
