Hebrew Creativity in Times of Collapse?

#whatireadovershabbat David Aberbach's Revolutionary Hebrew, Empire and Crisis: Four Peaks in Hebrew Literature and Jewish Survival (NYU Press, 1998)

What is the relationship between creativity and social collapse? How do empires spur their minority subjects to imitation and repudiation? Is there a connection between aesthetic excellence and survival value? These and other questions are explored by David Aberbach in his slim, fast-moving study of Hebrew literary creativity in four periods of empire collapse. Whether he does justice to the full array of Hebrew literary creativity, however, is open to debate.

In Revolutionary Hebrew, Empire and Crisis, Aberbach returns to topics he’s explored in previous books (Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis [1989], Realism, Caricature, and Bias: The Fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim [1993]), and he previews the topics of several books to come (The Roman-Jewish Wars and Hebrew Cultural Nationalism [2000], Major Turning Points in Jewish Intellectual History [2003]). His main focus here, however, is the relationship between imperial crisis and Hebrew creativity. Examining the Prophets (who emerged amid the various Mesopotamian empires), the Mishnah (compiled during the Roman empire), the golden age of medieval Hebrew poetry (Muslim Spain), and the peak of modern Hebrew literature before 1948 (Tsarist Russia), Aberbach concludes that Jews were spurred to creativity by a mix of envy, superiority, and anxiety, precisely when these empires were about to collapse.

Aberbach proves to be a convincing, if sometimes unnuanced, reader of these works. He deftly selects texts that show the imprint of their times, from the Prophets' jeremiads against the empires warring around them to poems by Bialik that dramatize Russian Jewry's retreat from general Russian culture as the latter turned against them, blaming them for growing societal chaos. Readers who know these bodies of literature well will know that they include much that isn't conducive to Aberbach's claims. But read charitably, Aberbach, as a kind of sociologist of literature (he cites the eminence grise of the field, Lucien Goldmann, approvingly), can be understood to say that his selections, while not all-encompassing, are representative.

When approached on his own terms, that of literary sociology or, broadly, sociology of knowledge, a real methodological issue comes to the fore: Aberbach never explains why the end of these empires spurred major creativity, while others didn’t...

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