Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein
Conventional wisdom says that
although most of the heroes of early Modern Hebrew literature and poetry were
born and raised in traditional families, their very foray into the world of the
Haskalah and Eastern European intelligentsia demonstrates their total break
from that religious milieu. Instead, these writers were said to have completely
shed their “backwards” upbring in order to become participants in an
“enlightened” republic of letters. They were said to be so thoroughly engrained
in secular culture, that their discarded background is of no use to scholars
trying to understand what these writers meant and what drove them to write in
the ways that they did.
In this scholarly study,
Zilbergerts upends the conventional take on those early Modern Hebrew writers.
She painstakingly details how various aspects of traditionalism and religious
thought continued to influence and inform even the most secular of Modern
Hebrew writers. In doing so, this book focuses on the lives and times of
various early Modern Hebrew writers, most notably Avraham Uri Kovner
(1842–1905), Moshe Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910), Micha Yosef Berdichevsky
(1865–1921), and Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934). All of these figures
rejected the Yeshiva way of life and the Yeshivas rejected them, yet there
always remained some vestigial residue from their former lives. The author thus
examines the life-trajectories and writings of these famous writers, highlighting
along the way the various ways in which they were unable to escape the
expectations and, to some extent, ideologies of their religious upbringing.
One overarching theme that
emerges from Zilbergerts’ study is the concept of Torah lishmah. This
Talmudic ideal was understood by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin (1749–1821) to refer
to the notion that one ought to study Torah “for its [the Torah’s] own sake.” That
formulation of this Talmudic concept became the motto of the Yeshiva World that
developed in Eastern Europe, and especially in the former Grand Duchy of
Lithuania. As Zilbergerts explains it, when reduced to its core, this ideal represents
the notion of an autotelic textuality that encouraged Yeshiva students to study
religious texts simply because they were religious texts, with no alternative motives.
She sees evidence of this staunch
devotion to textuality in the writings and lives of the writers mentioned above.
Many of those writers had previous attended and study in the halls of the
Yeshivas that advocated for Torah lishmah, and throughout their lives
they continued to devote themselves to reading and writing texts — albeit, they
simply swapped the holy texts of the Talmud and Halacha for the non-holy texts
of the Haskalah, Zionism, and other intellectual movements.
For Zilbergerts, one of the most
persuasive pieces of evidence for this trend was the early Modern Hebrew
writers’ general resistance to Russian Nihilism. That movement tended to reject
textualism in favor of more materialistic or pragmatic endeavors. Yet, the
Russian Haskalah (which followed some of the other trends of Russian
intellectualism) bucked this trend or simply paid lip service to it, as those
Maskillic exponents continued to devote themselves to reading and writing more
and more texts, with an almost-religious fervor.
Another aspect of traditional
life that Zilbergerts looks at is its conception of marriage. In the Yeshiva
World, the ideal student would marry a girl from a rich family and would
continue to study the Talmud uninterrupted, while being supported by his
parents-in-law (called “eating kest”) and/or having his wife tend to his
financial affairs. In this way, the elite Yeshiva student’s devotion to his
studies and texts superseded his responsibilities to his wife and family. Zilbergerts
shows how this traditional outlook influenced some early writers of Modern
Hebrew, many of whom had entered failed/unhappy marriages in their younger
years, which bequeathed to them an unhealthy — and even cynical — way of
viewing the entire endeavor of matrimony.
Many of these debates continue to
rage on in contemporary times. For example, the virtue of textuality is at the
center of one of the most hotly contested discussions in the Knesset. The outspoken
secularist Avigdor Lieberman echoes many of the Nihilist talking points in his
attacks against the modern Yeshiva movement in Israel, while Ultra-Orthodox
apologists tend to affirm and reaffirm their commitment to studying the Talmud
and, thus, to textuality.
In summation, this fascinating
book is a well-sourced study on how different aspects of early Modern Hebrew
writers’ religious upbringing continued to influence their lives and writings well
after they shed their religiosity and became more thoroughly secularized. It
shows how even when these writers were following whatever intellectual trends
were in vogue at the time, they were still also heavily informed by their
experiences in the Yeshiva and the ideologies imparted to them by their
upbringing. With this book in hand, the reader can contextualize many of the
debates that continue within the global Jewish community about the nature of
textuality and the importance of Yeshiva Students.
