The literature of the Hebrew Enlightenment originated within a gradually intensifying controversy, and has a multilayered foundation embracing at once conservative views, modern historical consciousness, and the first Jewish glimpses of a modern European aesthetic. These diverse, if not contradictory, layers form an unnatural synthesis. Through this fusion, the authors of the Haskalah sought to transform modern modes of thinking into an acceptable ‘Work of the Chariot’ – a permissible intellectual aspiration. This hybrid literature is genuinely entangled in the thickets of halakhic norms, and has nothing to do with the art of the prevaricator. Certain halakhic inhibitions have had a limiting and even depressing effect on the work, and the attempts to escape such constraints have left their mark on this literature’s subject matter, its contents, and its artistic development and design. This volume, sixth in a series of studies by Prof. Yehuda Friedlander in modern Hebrew literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deals with the cultural-literary uniqueness of the debate between rabbis and maskilim in Lithuania in the nineteenth century as one of the most challenging genres of Haskalah literature.
Danacode: 110-20243 ISBN: 978-965-226-499-2 Language: Hebrew Pages: 336 Weight: 600 gr Dimensions: 17x24 cm Publication Date: 08/2017 Publisher: Bar-Ilan University Press