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ZUTO 014 01-Nethanel.Indd zutot �4 (�0�7) ���-��4 ZUTOT: Perspectives on Jewish Culture brill.com/zuto brill.com/zuto The Non-Reading Reader: European Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the 20th Century Lilach Nethanel Bar-Ilan University Abstract European Hebrew literature presents a challenge to the study of early-twentieth- century national literature. By the end of the nineteenth century, the reading of mod- ern Hebrew in Europe was neither part of a religious practice, nor did it merely satisfy a purely aesthetic inclination. It mainly functioned as an ideological means used by a minority of Jews to support the linguistic-national Jewish revival. However, some fun- damental contradictions put into question the actual influence of this literature on the political sphere. This article asks a series of questions about this period in the history of Hebrew readership: How did the non-spoken Hebrew language come to produce popular Hebrew writings? How did this literature engage the common Jewish reader? In this article I propose a new consideration of Hebrew reading practices. I argue for the inclusion of the non-reading readers as important contributors to the constitution of the Jewish literary nation. Keywords modern Hebrew literature – Hebrew readership – history of reading Non-reading The study of literacy in Europe, as it was conducted by sociologists, historians and literary scholars who studied the reception of literary texts, has defined the reader as the main figure when it came to the pedagogical, aesthetic and political transformations of modern society.1 The study of modern reading 1 See, for instance, the relationship between print and radical movements in 18th-century England, as described by Wittman: ‘with the multiplication of production and reception © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/�8750��4-��Downloaded34��84 from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:28AM via free access The Non-Reading Reader 113 in Europe examines the social conditions that allowed the spread of literacy, while taking into account population growth throughout time.2 The theory of reception underlines the prominent role of the reader in the constitution of the meaning of the text.3 The construct of ‘the ideal or idealized reader,’4 who underlines the construction of textual meaning, turns into a historical com- munity of readers that holds considerable political and economic power. It appears that these definitions have overlooked the contribution of the educated non-reading reader to modern literature’s evolvement into a source of socio-political power. Non-reading was firstly defined by major historians of reading such as Atlick and Chartier. They consistently associated it with the illiterate lower classes and regarded non-reading as a barrier to the spread of literacy.5 In a meaningful contrast with this approach, my argument is that non-reading was developed by and for the sake of the literate. As such it differs from ‘unruly reading,’ ‘indirect literacy’ and other extensive readings which are associated with the illiterate or the ‘common’ reader.6 Non-reading marks a hermeneutic preference for the blank spaces over the black letters on the densely printed pages of the most popular genres of 19th-century literature: the periodical and the novel. Non-reading is sustained by paratextual infor- mation such as covers, titles, editions, woodcuts and other illustrations that of the novel in late 18th century the mania for reading novels assumed a sociopolitical dimension for the first time.’ R. Wittman, ‘Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?,’ in G. Cavallo and R. Chartier, ed., A History of Reading in the West (tr. Lydia G. Cochrane), (Amherst, MA 1999) 304. 2 R.D. Atlick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800– 1900 (Chicago/London 1957); R. Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la révolution Française (Paris 1990). 3 20th-century reception theory, starting with the work of Hans Robert Jauss including reader- response theory and its different developments in the field of literary studies (Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and others) as in the field of cultural studies (Stuart Hall), is an important refer- ence which demands further development. However, the question of the reader’s constitu- tion of the literary object remains a key concept. 4 S. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA 1980) 48. 5 See for example Atlick’s overview of the conditions of living in Victorian England, from the diffusion of print, to home lighting and the use of spectacles. Atlick, The English Common Reader, 98. 6 Modern changes in reading practices are often defined by the use of the terms ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ readings. Intensive reading refers to a repetitive and thorough reading of a limited collection of texts, while extensive reading could be defined as ‘an eagerness to consume new and varied reading materials for information, and for private entertainment in particular.’ R. Wittemann, ‘Reading Revolution,’ 285. zutot 14 (2017) 112-124 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:28AM via free access 114 Nethanel accompany the text, as well as by the author’s name.7 These elements enabled one to treat a large corpus of printed texts by focusing on white spaces, bold titles, author’s signature and illustrations. The practice of non-reading is a required skill based on a reconstruction of the literary object by its partial manifestations. Hence, in order to fully understand the constitution of the ‘great’ literary oeuvres one should take into account the ‘great’ unread.8 The history of literature must therefore be per- ceived not only in terms of a characterization of its readers, but also by a con- sideration of its non-reading readers. Pierre Bayard already suggested a detailed description of this practice in Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus?9 Most of the time, says Bayard, we discuss books we have not actually, or, at least, completely read. Each of us is, at times, a non-reading reader, when we skip a paragraph in a book, or when we discuss Joyce’s or Balzac’s writing which impressed us though we only read some fragments from their prose. But non-reading demands further reflection, since it suggests that what was not (yet) read is an inseparable part of the formation of literary meaning. Literature is introduced into the political and social spheres not only by being read, but also by the anticipations and expectations it generates. This article focuses on a particular historical case of non-reading, which can be detected in late-19th-century European Hebrew literature. Modern Hebrew literature draws a particular attention to some of the aspects of the non- reading reader, as it illustrates the important role of non-reading in the consti- tution of modern literatures. This article addresses the limited Hebrew literacy of European Jewry while exploring the unprecedented expansion of diverse popular Hebrew writings from the middle of the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century. It focuses on a key period which combines two historical phenomena: the grow- ing engagement of modern Hebrew literature in the nation-building project, 7 The importance of paratextual information, initially noted by Gerard Genette, was recently developed in Shlomo Berger’s book Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective (Leiden 2013). 8 The ‘great unread,’ a term Margaret Cohen coined in 1999, refers to what she calls ‘the dusty documents neglected in libraries,’ containing the ‘non-canonical and forgotten [pre-realis- tic] novels’; ‘the vast number of books out there.’ M. Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ 1999) 23. This term was further developed by Franco Moretti. See mainly F. Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, in his Distant Reading (London/New York 2015) 43–62. 9 P. Bayard, Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (Paris 2007). Downloadedzutot from 14 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 112-124 12:09:28AM via free access The Non-Reading Reader 115 and the declining numbers of Hebrew readers as attested by Hebrew authors of the time. The Non-reading Hebrew Reader The 19th-century Hebrew poet Judah Leib Gordon assumed that future genera- tions of European Jewry would not embrace the modernization of Hebrew lan- guage and literature. In his 1871 poem, ‘Le-mi ani ʿamel’ (For whom do I toil?) Gordon claimed that once assimilated Jews gain linguistic access and develop an aesthetic sensibility to European culture, they will prefer to become readers of Russian, German or French literatures.10 In 1892, the year Gordon passed away in St. Petersburg, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who would come to be known as the national Hebrew poet, published his first Hebrew poem in Odessa. The following decade was perhaps the most fertile period for Hebrew literary production in Europe.11 However, Bialik too expressed doubts regarding the survival of modern Hebrew literature among an emancipated European Jewry despite his ambition to lead a great Hebrew cultural revival.12 In the midst of its national turn and with its aspiration of gaining a meaningful position in the public sphere of European Jewry, modern Hebrew literature had to face perhaps the most complicated fact of its exis- tence: its non-reading readers. European Hebrew readers of the 19th century faced two major difficulties. The first was the difficulty of becoming a modern Hebrew reader. Or in other words, the difficulty of gaining access to Hebrew as the language of understanding and as the language of self-understanding, the language of personal and communal identification. The second difficulty was to understand Hebrew descriptions of the sur- rounding actual world, or to mimetically represent reality in the Hebrew lan- guage.
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