Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages

Description

/ Ed. by Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman and Ber Kotlerman. – Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. – 696 pp.For millennia, Jewish letters have appeared in dozens of languages. The borderlines of Jewish letters – lingual, national, geographical, and thematic are not positively defined. However, we see this immense nonlinear and dynamic multiplicity as revolving around one point – the consciousness of Jewish cultural continuity. The highly intensive and inclusive Jewish hypertextuality overwhelms all narrow contextual historicist limits, and invites complex philological, historiographical, and theoretical approach. Such approach is represented by this collection of papers. The purpose of this volume was not to cover all the languages of Jewish letters and their entire geographical or historical spread. Neither was our objective the discussion of the essence of Jewish literature and its definition. We rather aimed at creating a framework for scholars who consider their subject to be the multilingual literature, culture, and thought of the Jewish People. Although at the center of the People’s creativity the Hebrew Sacred Writings have always remained, it has never been considered separate from writings and practices in other languages. Nowadays, the growing self-consciousness of Jewish writers all over the world as belonging to a united Jewish literature by no means undermines the unique role of Hebrew literature.