Page 320 - זכרונות חדשים לאתר

‫ קיצורים ביבליוגרפיים‬318

Abstract

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, dozens of Jewish anthologies
of Hazalic legends (aggadot) were published – part of the formation of
a new, modern, Jewish ‘heritage’ informed by both the particularistic
spirit of Jewish traditions and the universal values of nascent European
nationalism. These anthologies reflected a ‘quiet revolution’ which
profoundly changed the foundations of the ‘Jewish bookshelf’, its
inspirations and cultural horizons.

This book attempts to explain the cultural thirst that yielded the most
influential Jewish anthologies of the time, and to delineate the ways
in which they helped quench this thirst. Thus, the book is primarily
concerned with the following two questions: Why did canonical Jewish
authors devote so much time and energy to compiling ancient Jewish
traditions, even while they themselves were breaking away from Jewish
religion? And how did they resolve the contradictions between the
Hazalic worldview(s) that they were supposedly trying to represent and
the modern nationalistic worldview of their own times?

The first three chapters discuss the historical background of the
modern Jewish anthologies and their ideological as well as literary-
theoretical contexts. Specifically, they examine the motivations for
restoring Hazalic legendary traditions, the unique properties of the
Jewish anthology as a genre, and the shared innovations of the first
modern Hebrew anthologies.

The following three chapters consider the contributions of seminal
modern Hebrew anthologies compiled by I. Margolis (Sippurei yeshurun,
Berlin 1877), Z. Jawitz (Sihot minnei kedem, Warsaw 1887) and I. B.
Levner (Kol aggadot yisrael, Piotrków 1898-1905), to the formation
of a new Hebrew canon. While all three anthologies were compiled by
Jewish rabbis who upheld the sanctity of the Jewish religious canon, the
study focuses on their selective choice of stories, revolutionary genre

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