Page 319 - זכרונות חדשים לאתר

317 ‫קיצורים ביבליוגרפיים‬

formation, innovative editing principles, and occasionally subversive
contents.

Being the most influential anthology of the period, H. N. Bialik and
Y. H. Ravnitzky’s Sefer ha’aggadah (Kraków-Odessa, 1908-1911) is
extensively discussed throughout the final four chapters. Aiming to
preserve ‘remnants’ of the Jewish past, the vastly comprehensive Sefer
ha’aggadah reads the Hazalic traditions anew, employing novel editing
principles and an original choice of genres. It reconstructs a popular
Jewish history, compiles biographies of cultural heroes, and creates a
new literary heritage based on international folk genres. It thus presents
its readers with the foundations of Judaism as a national culture rather
than as a particularistic religion.

The book concludes with the early Zionist perspective that Bialik and
Ravnitzky had hoped to promote with their ingathering project (kinus).
The literary model of the modern anthology, which they inherited from
earlier Jewish authors, enabled them to extricate themselves from the
overbearing influence of rabbinic traditions and to use those selectively
for their own purposes in order to establish a new national canon.
Bialik and Ravnitzky‘s contribution to the modernization of the ‘Jewish
bookshelf’ lies, therefore, in the polemic spirit that they brought to their
dialogue with sanctified conventions.