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Did pre-Revival Hebrew literature have its own langue? Quotation and improvization in Mendele Mokher Sefarim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Lewis H. Glinert
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Extract

In the history of Hebrew letters, few dates have so cavalierly been invested with literary and linguistic significance as 1886/7, the publication date of Mendele's short story BeSeter Ra'am.

Such scholars of literature as Ravnitzki, Klausner and Werses have hailed its style as the pointer or veritable trigger to a redeployment of the traditional ‘synthetic’ (composite Biblical/post-Biblical) Hebrew style—instead of being confined to the registers of non-fiction, it now rose to supplant Biblical Hebrew as the standard for narrative prose. Some historians of language have gone so far as to present it as a total innovation (for its time) in that the aforegoing Haskalah writers had adhered almost exclusively to a Biblical manner.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , October 1988 , pp. 413 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1988

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