The great monuments of the earliest period of Hebrew literature are the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. Parts of the Pseudepigrapha and of the Dead Sea Scrolls were also produced before the conquest of Judaea by Titus. The literature of the Jews developed mainly in the Hebrew language, although there were also works in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic.
In the 2d cent. A.D. began the Talmudic period, which lasted well into the 6th cent. In these centuries the great anonymous encyclopedic work of religious and civil law, the Talmud, was compiled, edited, and interpreted. The Midrash—a collection of halakah (found also in the Talmud) and haggadic material—likewise forms part of the Hebrew literature of that period. In the 4th cent. the Targum to the Pentateuch and to the Prophets was finished. The 6th and 7th cent. saw the development of the Masora in Palestine. In Babylonia meanwhile many valuable additions to Hebrew literature were made by the Gaonim after the 6th cent.
Commentaries on the Talmud and haggadic material continued to be written until the 11th cent., when the Babylonian academies were suppressed and the center of Jewish literary activity shifted to Spain. France and Germany became the main centers of Talmudic commentary. In Spain, and to some extent in Italy, Hebrew literature flourished for centuries. The finest work was accomplished in the realms of poetry—influenced by Arab and Indian literature—and philosophy. Philology, exegesis, and codification also flourished. By the 14th cent. the largely Aramaic mystical treatise, the Zohar, had appeared—the masterpiece of a flourishing literature of Jewish mysticism (see kabbalah).
On the threshold of the transition from the old isolated life to a wider one was the poet Moses Hayyim Luzzatto—a contemporary of the Gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Solomon—but the modern period of Hebrew literature really began with Moses Mendelssohn. While Nachman Krochmal and Shloime Ansky (Solomon Seinwel Rapoport) were contributing to biblical criticism and historical scholarship, writers such as Peretz (Peter) Smolenskin were devoting themselves to Haskalah, or literature of enlightenment, intended to shake the Jews of Central Europe from their medieval attitudes. Other important figures of the period are the scholar Joseph Halévy, the poet Jehuda (Leon) Gordon, and the novelist Solomon Yakob Abramovich, whose pseudonym was Mendele mocher sforim.
The rise of Zionism, particularly reflected in the writings of Ahad Ha-am (Asher Ginzberg), gave Hebrew literature fresh impetus, and Palestine became again the center of publication in Hebrew. Hebrew was proclaimed the national language of the Jews even before the establishment (1948) of the state of Israel. The two great poets of modern Hebrew literature are Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Saul Tchernihovsky, who was strongly influenced by ancient Greek literature. The poetry of Abraham Shlonsky, Lea Goldberg, and Nathan Alterman deals with social and political themes.
Among the many writers of prose are Joseph H. Brenner, who described Jewish life in Eastern Europe and pioneer life in Palestine, and Salman Shneur, who wrote of the simple and uneducated Jews. The Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon portrayed the Eastern European milieu and pioneer life in Palestine; his works have become classics in modern Hebrew epic literature. Hebrew writers who are native to Israel seek inspiration in the classical Hebrew past or in the new life of Israel. The most outstanding writer of this group is Moshe Shamir, who in his two novels—one depicting a Hasmonean king and the other dealing with the Arab-Israeli War of 1948—gave new dimensions to Hebrew fiction.
Aron David Gordon (1856–1922) was one of the greatest social and political essayists of Hebrew literature; significant Hebrew language literary critics include David Frishman (1861–1922) and Yosef Klausner (1874–1958). In recent years the Israeli novelists Amos Oz, Abraham B. Yehoshua, and Aharon Appelfeld, and the poet Yehuda Amichai have been widely translated and have achieved international distinction. Outside Israel, the writing of the Jews is ordinarily in the language of the countries in which they live or in Yiddish, whose literary use developed rapidly after the middle of the 19th cent.
See N. Kravitz, Three Thousand Years of Hebrew Literature (1972); T. Carmi, ed., The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (1981); M. Neiman, A Century of Modern Hebrew Literary Criticism, 1784–1884 (1983); B. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources (1984); R. Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose (1988).
