Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am), was a reclusive, self-taught intellectual active in a small circle of Hebraists in early twentieth-century Odessa. Though born to a wealthy Hasidic family, he reinvented himself as a secular rationalist and modeled himself after a prophet-hero he identified in biblical, rabbinic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Ahad Ha’am’s monumental prophetic persona, though, carried within it demonic forces that he couldn’t shake: ever-present anger, despair, and failure. As Ahad Ha’am, then, takes up a Romantic prophetic figure to convey a strong nationalist ideal, his multivalent allusions to Jewish and European culture expose his personal anxieties and weaknesses – as well as those of the secular Hebrew culture he hoped to create. Ahad Ha’am draws on an eclectic array of sources to construct his heroic, seemingly indigenous, Jewish prophetic model: perhaps the most surprising is Thomas Carlyle’s Victorian portrait of Muhammad, which inadvertently introduces a (Scottish) Zionist Muhammad into early Hebrew literature.

In the years following World War II, modern Hebrew poets like Leah Goldberg wrestled with the rupture from European culture and their own longing for it against Zionism’s “rejection of the diaspora.” In this context, translation allowed for a continued dialogue with past and present Europe, while it also constituted a vital investment on behalf of a national literature in Hebrew. Anthologies of shirat ‘olam, world poetry, appeared with greater frequency in the post-war years, both to increase the corpus of world literature in Hebrew translation and to position Hebrew as a national literary language on the world stage. This chapter explores how an understanding of world literature took shape in early twentieth century Hebrew literature, and particularly in the field of poetry, where translated poems circulated widely in a range of formats, from radio broadcasts to newspapers and anthologies. Drawing from Goldberg’s oeuvre, this chapter considers her translation activity as part of a broader discourse on “world literature” in early to mid-twentieth century Hebrew literary culture, one that privileged, as I show, a European world literary model. Goldberg’s translations of the poetry from Far Eastern languages, specifically Chinese and Japanese poetry, both expand and complicate the coordinates of her world literary map. The inclusion of Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation expanded her poetic map “beyond Bialystock” and Tel Aviv, but as translations mediated by German translation and European Orientalism, they bring into relief a critical tension between “the far and the near” that underlies world literary models in general, and the case of the Hebrew ‘olam in particular.