Ancient Bible Interpretation and its Legacies: Politics, Literature, and Heresy offers a sweeping exploration of the evolving role of Bible interpretation from ancient to modern times, revealing its profound impact on religious, political, literary, and secular culture.Tracing the origins of Midrash in post-Temple Judaism and its transmission across Christian and Islamic traditions, this book examines how scriptural exegesis has shaped – and been shaped by – historical tra...

Samuel Joseph Agnon, Psychoanalysis and Jewish History: A Comparative Study compares the writings of Samuel Joseph Agnon (1887–1970) with other writers, including Gustav Flaubert, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, and Carl Gustav Jung, as well as his great Hebrew predecessors, Mendele Mocher Sefraim and Chaim Nachman Bialik, who drew on the ancient Jewish biblical and rabbinic tradition in creating a modern secular literature.Through close readings of Agnon’s fiction in comparis...

Islam, Nationalism, and 1000 Years of European Poetry considers the long history of Islam and European poetry and its central importance in the development of European culture.David Aberbach offers a panoramic history of European poetry as it was affected by the centuries-long conflict between Islam and Christianity, from the early-medieval Old French chanson de geste, The Song of Roland, set against the Muslim invasion of France in the eighth century, to...

In the attempts to unify divided peoples on the basis of a shared past, both historical and mythical, this book illumines aspects of cultural nationalism common since the Middle Ages.As an edited work, the Bible includes texts mostly depicting long-gone historical eras extending over several centuries. Following on from Aberbach’s previous work National Poetry, Empires, and War, this book argues that works of this nature – notably the Mujo-Halil songs in Albania, the Irish...

Exploring the literature of environmental moral dilemmas from the Hebrew Bible to modern times, this book argues the necessity of cross-disciplinary approaches to environmental studies, as a subject affecting everyone, in every aspect of life.Moral dilemmas are central in the literary genre of protest against the effects of industry, particularly in Romantic literature and ‘Condition of England’ novels. Writers from the time of the Industrial Revolution to the present—including Wil...

The Hebrew Bible is the main legislative and literary influence on European Poor Law and on literature on poverty and the poor. No extant literature from the ancient world placed more importance upon social welfare and the duty of the better-off toward the poor. It is the founding text for liberation movements.This book assesses why the Bible is so unambiguously positive in its view of the poor, unlike most later literary and legislative works. It seeks to understand what historica...

During his lifetime, Chaim Nachman Bialik was hailed and the poet larueate of Jewish nationalism and was regarded as one of the major Jewish cultural influences of his age. He was seen as the poet of hope and revival in an age which witnessed the Russian Pale of Settlement, pogroms, the Russian Revoltuion, the rise of Zionim and of Hebrew as a living language. David Aberbach explores the historical, social and literary background to Bialik's rise a a Romantic-nationalist poet, his ambivale...

Imperialism and Biblical Prophecy is a radically new interpretation of prophetic poetry. Using more than thirty new translations from the Hebrew Bible, it shows that this poetry is inseparable from imperialism, that each of the three major waves of biblical prophecy which have survived in the Old Testament occurred in response to simultaneous waves of imperialist conquest.

This book explores the life and poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) in the context of European national literature between the French Revolution and World War I, showing how he helped create a modern Hebrew national culture, spurring the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.The author begins with Bialik’s background in the Tsarist Empire, contextualizing Jewish powerlessness in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. As European anti-Semitism grew, Bialik emerged at...

Jewish Cultural Nationalism explores the development of Jewish nationalism from the Bible to modern times, focusing on particular movements and places as well as texts which signified, or themselves brought about, change: the Bible (Hebrew prayer book), and the modern Hebrew literature, particularly in Tsarist Russia. While the influence of the Hebrew Bible alone on nationalism in individual periods has been subject to much scholarly study, the present work is unusual in its empha...

The fragility of the liberal democratic state after 1789 is illustrated in the history of the European Jews from the French Revolution to the Holocaust. Emancipation and hope of emancipation amongst the European Jewish population created a plethora of Jewish identities and forms of patriotism.This book takes the original approach of studying European Jewish patriotism as a whole, with particular attention given to creative literature. Despite their growing awareness of racial, geno...

Literature and Poverty offers an engaging overview of changes in literary perceptions of poverty and the poor. Part I of the book, from the Hebrew Bible to the French Revolution, provides essential background information. It introduces the Scriptural ideal of the ‘holy poor’ and the process by which biblical love of the poor came to be contested and undermined in European legislation and public opinion as capitalism grew and the state took over from the Church; Part II, from the French Rev...