The Book in the Jewish World, 1700-1900

This book offers the reader a voyage in the new world that opened up to the enlightened Jewish reader of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when the first glimmerings of emancipation and secular education were giving large numbers of Jews their first exposure to science, literature, and art, and opening their minds to new ideas. And as on any voyage led by a knowledgeable guide, there are fascinating side-trips along the way: insights into the world of scholarship, then and now, and into the nature of knowledge. All this was happening at a time when Jews' civil status and place in society was undergoing great change in Europe. In this seminal work, Zeev Gries shows that although the history of the book in the Jewish world has long been regarded as the province of librarians and bibliophiles, it is in fact the history of the Jewish intellect. He starts by tracing the awakening of a dormant Jewish intelligentsia-men, women, and children who were thirsty for knowledge. Books were the magic kiss that opened new doors to the modern world; within a century, Jews were making invaluable contributions to the advancement of science and of culture more generally. By surveying the literary output of those years, the author is able to discover what books were being published, where they were published and distributed, and who was reading them. He surveys the fields of halakhic literature, ethical literature, kabbalistic and mystical literature, literature for children and women, and more general literature. He talks about the role of libraries and of book reviews. Above all, he considers the role of books as agents of culture: were they guardians of hallowed sanctity or harbingers of secularization? Gries shows how the types of books favoured by the Jewish reading public offer an insight into the changing nature of their 'portable homeland'. He then goes on to discuss the Haskalah movement and the tensions between increasing secularization and the more traditional world-view, as well as how the resurrection of Hebrew as a secular literary language contributed to the awakening of Jewish nationalism. Nevertheless, he argues that the study of literary history of the period reveals that secular and Zionist leanings were not the only trends present; Jewish literature continued to be permeated with the spirit of religion.

ISBN 1874774994   Pages 270 ISBN13 9781874774990 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization   Weight (grammes) 522 Imprint The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization   Published in Oxford Format Hardback   Series title Littman Library of Jewish Civilization Publication date 31 May 2007   Height (mm) 235 Translator Jeffrey M. Green   Width (mm) 155 Library of Congress 2006048838   Spine width (mm) 28 DEWEY 909.04924   Academic level Tertiary education, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

Pt. I		The awakening of the nascent intelligentsia
1		Expanding horizons		13
2		On reading and readers		20
3		Elite literature : Halakhic works and textual commentaries		35
4		Ethical literature in Hebrew and Yiddish		46
5		On libraries private and public		57
6		Kabbalistic literature and its role in Hasidism		69
7		Literature for women and children only, or for everyone?		91
Pt. II		The book : guardian of the sacred or herald of secularization?
8		The new Hebrew literature : continuity or revolution?		103
9		Jewish books and their authors in the nineteenth century		113
10		Book reviews in the Hebrew press		138
11		The bibliographer and librarian as an agent of culture : the contribution of Abraham Ya'ari to the study of Jewish publishing in Eastern Europe		154
		Afterword: the revolution in the world of Hebrew books at the start of the twentieth century		181
App		The young Abraham Ya'ari by S. H. Bergma		191

 Be the first to write a customer review

Version	Price	Published	Edition
Paperback	£16.95	2009	New edition