Between East and West: controversies over the modernization of Hebrew culture in the works of Shaul Abdallah Yosef and Ariel Bension / Yuval Evri and Almog Behar
published 2017 at "JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES"
ABSTRACT
A tendency exists in Jewish historiography to associate Jewish
modernization and Hebrew renaissance with Europe and Western
culture. Europeanization and Westernization are emphasized as
the focal points for Jewish cultural transformation. We take a
different approach by shedding light on a number of centres
where modern Jewish and Hebrew culture was created. This
approach allows us to expand the perspective beyond the
Eurocentric prism and instead emphasize movement – of people,
knowledge, goods and capital – in real or symbolic spaces as key
drivers for processes of transformation. We accordingly examine
different pathways to the renewal of Hebrew and Jewish cultures
at the turn of the twentieth century. We re-asses the research and
literary work of Shaul Abdallah Yosef (1849–1906) and Ariel
Bension (1880–1933) and their contesting interpretations of the
modernization of Hebrew culture. Driven by both real and
symbolic return to the “East,” the two formulated different
political and cultural models for the modernization of Jewish and
Hebrew culture. By doing so they challenged mainstream trends
concerning modern European Jewish discourse that prevailed
during the nineteenth century in the work of the Wissenschaft des
Judentums (science of Judaism) movement, in Europe’s Hebrew
Haskalah circles and later on in Palestine/Land of Israel.
אלמוג בהר 