PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"Goethe’s Song of Songs : Reorientation, World Literature","authors":"Galili Shahar","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899251","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The engagement of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) with biblical Hebrew poetry already during the early stages of his career in the 1770s and later during the Divan period (1814–27) was associated with his study of Oriental literatures. Under the influence of his mentor and friend, Johann Gottfried Herder, Goethe devoted himself to studying and translating Hebrew and Arabic sources (mostly from the Latin), among them the Song of Songs, alongside chapters from the Qurʿan. In his late work his reflections on the Hebrew biblical poem were associated with his interpretation of Persian classical poetry, first and foremost the ghazals, the love poems by Hâfiz, while composing his work Der westöstlicher Divan . This article offers a comparative study of Goethe’s translation and interpretation of Song of Songs, discussing its major motives, the dialectic of profane love and the sacred, confusion and disorientation, drunkenness, erotic desire, and gender ambiguities. It refers to Goethe’s translation of the Hebrew poem also in conjunction with a critical, decolonial review of Weltliteratur (world literature). Goethe’s Song of Songs serves us as a map of literary interactions, in which the German, the Hebrew and the Persian are brought into conversation.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Uses of Biblical Poetics: Protestant Hermeneutics and American Jewish Self-Fashioning","authors":"Julian Levinson","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899253","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article shows how new trends in Protestant biblical hermeneutics in nineteenth-century America helped to raise the cultural status of modern-day Jews, while inspiring bold new directions in American Jewish literary culture. The interpretive framework under discussion emerged in the work of Bishop Robert Lowth and Johann Gottfried Herder, whose studies of biblical poetry became highly influential in the United States when they were both published at the height of the Second Great Awakening. By reconceptualizing biblical poetry (especially in the works of the biblical prophets) as sublime art, their approach created the possibility for valorizing the biblical tradition for its aesthetic power alongside its religious teachings. Since Jews were commonly seen as continuous with biblical Israel, this approach meant that Jews could be seen as heirs to a glorious literary tradition, a point that American Jewish poets, such as Emma Lazarus, emphasized when they launched their own poetic experiments modeled on the biblical prophets.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aesthetic Convention and Ritual Creativity in Late Antique Piyyut","authors":"Laura S. Lieber","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899248","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In this article, I will examine how liturgical poets creatively reworked biblical quotations and allusions in service of their own poetic and liturgical ambitions through analysis of a late antique composition attributed to Eleazar Haqallir (Qallir) (late sixth/early seventh century), “What Man Lives and Does not See Death?” This poem, which takes its opening line from Psalm 89:49, was composed for an occasion when the Torah reading began with Deuteronomy 33:1, Moses’s poetic blessing of the Israelites before his death. Qallir’s composition transforms the biblical episode into a miniature, multivoiced drama, one that draws on an extensive body of postbiblical exegetical tradition. First, it depicts Moses’s vigorous arguments with God and various heavenly intercessors as he seeks to avert his fate; upon conceding that he cannot escape mortality, it describes how Moses is mourned by not only the Israelites but all creation. The final portion of the piyyut transitions from a depiction of funerary ritual (in the biblical past) to the recitation of the Qedushah (in the liturgical present). With its complex, multivocal narrative, this composition illustrates how liturgical poets reworked biblical poetry—in this case, Deuteronomy 32–33 and Psalm 90—by reading it through the lens of postbiblical narrative traditions while also leveraging the performative-ritual context in which the poems were experienced. This poem’s reuse of traditional material reflects the aesthetic conventions of the poetic craft and performative practices of dramatic delivery in late antiquity.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imagining the Hebrew Ode: On Robert Lowth’s Biblical Species","authors":"Yosefa Raz","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899250","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The subject of this article is the reception history of biblical genres, or the metapoetics of genre-making. It argues that the seemingly fixed presentations of the genres of biblical poetry in the twentieth century—as in Robert Alter’s classic guide to biblical Hebrew poetry—emerge from an eighteenth-century encounter: the English exegete Robert Lowth’s dramatic attempt to fit Greek and Roman generic models to the Hebrew text. Lowth’s resulting genres, or what he called the “species” of biblical poetry, were shaped both by the parallels he discovered between classical and Hebrew traditions, and by the small and large aberrations he faced in his process of translation. The article focuses on the characterization of a poetic form that never existed: the ancient Hebrew ode. Although, in this case, Lowth fails in his biblical scholarship, his Hebrew ode demonstrates the spirit of his creative project. By fitting Hebrew poetry to neoclassical models, Lowth subtly transformed neoclassical categories and possibilities, opening up new imaginative expanses within the lyrical mode and preparing the way for a more flexible, complex, and emotionally sophisticated Romantic lyric.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Politics of Parallelism: Biblical Allusions in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene","authors":"Raphael Magarik","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899249","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Modern scholarship tends to investigate biblical poetry in an exhaustive, disciplined fashion and thus defines parallelism in an apolitical way. Returning to the premodern period, more partial conceptions of parallelism can newly open the question of the form’s politics. I argue that Spenser shapes the episode of the Egalitarian Giant in The Faerie Queene around his conception of biblical parallelism, which involves a recourse to literary balance to transcend political tensions within scripture. In The Faerie Queene , we see an early employment of a literary approach to Scripture to contain political conflict; Spenser’s conception of parallelism testifies both to biblical poetry’s fractious, radical possibilities to disrupt the social order and to the emergence of a more detached, disciplined, and aestheticized approach to that poetry.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ideas of Biblical Poetry: Aesthetics and Literary History","authors":"Elaine T. James, Steven Weitzman","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899247","url":null,"abstract":"The Ideas of Biblical PoetryAesthetics and Literary History Elaine T. James and Steven Weitzman While the study of biblical poetry has a venerable history of scholarship, at least since Robert Lowth’s De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae (1753), the modern literary study of the Bible since the 1980s has had much more to say about biblical prose, focusing much of its energy on analyzing narratives in works like Genesis and 1–2 Samuel. In 2007, for example, Prooftexts published a special issue dedicated to the legacy of Robert Alter and the literary study of the Bible. The essays in that volume dealt almost exclusively with what Alter had termed “the art of biblical narrative.” In the years since 2007, however, there has been a distinct rise in interest in the study of biblical poetry among scholars committed to the aesthetic turn championed by Alter and others, although they have taken research in new directions. This special issue of Prooftexts seeks to advance this conversation by calling attention to research that probes the historically contextualized ideas of biblical poetry—how biblical poetry has been received as poetry in different periods. Philip Sidney’s sophisticated and pithy Defence of Poesie, published posthumously in 1595, offers one example of a thinker grappling with ideas about poetry through the lens of biblical aesthetics. For Sidney, the valor and possibility of poetry [End Page 1] is modeled by the Bible itself, which, he noted, “hath whole parts in it poetical.”1 We point to this example because it represents a turning point in literary study and anticipates the influential work of both Lowth and Johann Gottfried Herder, forerunner of German Romanticism, two centuries and more later.2 Within the intellectual stream of European Romanticism and the rise of the university in the early modern period, these scholars brought Sidney’s passing observations into full critical examination. Lowth shed light on parallelism, a common technique in Psalms and other biblical poetic texts that he regarded as the central formal dimension of Israelite poetry. Herder pioneered a comparative approach that situated the question of poetry in a larger intellectual project of understanding the unique contributions of traditional cultures; this insight, along with his development of a philosophy of language and interpretation, led to the rise of new fields of study: linguistics, cultural anthropology, and ethnomusicology, among others. The combined influence of their scholarship elevated biblical poetry to the status of literary transcendence, a model of how to express intense emotion and the experience of the sublime. In the aesthetic turn, biblical poetry found a distinctive place in the intellectual history of poetry. The effort to understand the aesthetic dimensions of biblical poetry continued into the late twentieth century, and the subject served as something of a cultural flashpoint in the heyday of American liter","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Coleridge’s Translation of the Song of Deborah","authors":"Lilach Naishtat Bornstein","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899252","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Coleridge wrote a translation of the first ten verses of the Song of Deborah in September 1798, while on a boat overseas on the way to Germany, in what was his first-ever voyage outside of England. This article offers a close reading of this manuscript, which has not yet been examined thoroughly by scholars, and suggests what lay behind Coleridge’s choice to translate it at this specific moment in his life and career. The Song of Deborah in fact continued to fascinate the poet throughout his life, especially in relation to the innovative Romantic poetics he developed together with William Wordsworth. Translating the Song of Deborah was Coleridge’s first experience with translating Hebrew. As such, it provides early evidence of his grasp of Hebrew, as well as his understanding of the act of translating, both of which he was to develop further later in life. The text in question thus constituted an experimental exercise for Coleridge during a transitional period in his career, in which it is clear that he was playing with the tonal qualities of the Hebrew words and their multiplicity of meanings, including intra- and interlinguistic ones, as well as aspects of the language’s polyphony and its use of tautological repetition.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s Feminist Poetics: Reading Biblical Poetry as Countertheology","authors":"Sean Burt","doi":"10.2979/ptx.2023.a899254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899254","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of a wide range of literary and critical works, including several books of poetry and criticism of English-language poetry. This article argues that Ostriker’s work as a poet and literary scholar informs her engagement with biblical literature, particularly biblical poetry. In her formative work on twentieth-century English-language women’s poetry, she articulates how women’s poetry voices embodied identities and creates spaces of intimacy that can break down ideologically constructed barriers. Her creative, poetic biblical criticism mutually informs her interest in the ability of women’s poetry to transform and revise male-dominated mythologies. For Ostriker, the poetry of the Bible provides a resource located within Jewish tradition that can transform it from the inside. As a reader and creative inheritor of the literary heritage of the Bible who is carefully attuned to its literary power, Ostriker’s work reading and revisioning the Bible creates a feminist countertheology grounded in the aesthetic, material possibilities of poetic language.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Accidental Epiphanies: “Gilgul”—Listening (Again) to Yerushalmi","authors":"Peter Kussell","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.05","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91295585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Galician Yeshiva-Boḥur and Two Cities: Hame͑orer’s Minority Report","authors":"Avi-ram Tzoreff","doi":"10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/prooftexts.39.3.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on the role played by the author Yehoshua Radler-Feldman, also known as R. Binyamin (1880–1957), in the editing of the journal Hame͑orer and his poetic-political editorial approach that often contradicted the approach of his fellow editor, Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner. Brenner is usually described as bearing the burden of publication alone, a view influenced by Brenner’s hegemonic status in the sphere of Hebrew literature, as opposed to R. Binyamin’s marginality. This exclusive identification of Hame͑orer with Brenner illustrates the attempt to depict the development of Modern Hebrew literature as a linear process. This article argues that restoring R. Binyamin to a prominent position in the context of Hame͑orer leaves us with an image of the journal as a site where various poetics competed and where the power relations between these different approaches were crystallized. In order to examine these approaches, this article turns to the cultural and geographical context of London’s East End, where they developed at the turn of the century. It describes the reality of Hame͑orer as it emerges from R. Binyamin’s perspective and highlights the differences between R. Binyamin’s experiences in London and those of Brenner, which were due largely to their different points of origin—the Russian Empire and Habsburgian Galicia via Berlin, respectively. This will serve as a basis for understanding the rift between the two figures, which was simultaneously poetic, religious, and political.","PeriodicalId":43444,"journal":{"name":"PROOFTEXTS-A JOURNAL OF JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81757453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}