From Sefer Ha'aggadah to the Jewish Bookcase: Dynamics of a Cultural Change

What is it about?

This article seeks to characterize what is widely regarded to be H.N. Bialik's unique contribution to the formulation of modern Judaism in Sefer Ha'aggadah, which he compiled and published together with Y.H. Ravnitzky 100 years ago (1908-1911). The manifest popularity of the anthology over many years, its influence on the educational curriculum in the yishuv and later in the State of Israel and the various languages into which it is translated bear witness to the formative role it had through the years in the construction of the modern cultural memory. Bialik and Ravnitzky’s success, as the present article maintains, was achieved through the employment of novel criteria in editing and formulating this collection than those used in previous anthologies. While earlier compilers of Jewish literature like Itzhak Margolis, Ze'ev Jawitz and Israel Benyamin Levner had already presented the aggadot as the national literary heritage, Bialik and Ravnitzky were the first to enjoin an exclusive national definition of the aggadah and thus replaced the religious affinity to traditional sources with a purely cultural one. Following the model of the Pentateuch or the Mishnah, and the thematic editing of the texts, like the choice of the "halakhic legend" (a genre unique to Bialik and Ravnitzky), indicates as well a pioneering attempt to attribute to the aggadah the epic style of halakhah and its practical uses. The prevalence of proverbs in the anthology, greater not only than in parallel anthologies but in the writings of the rabbinic sages themselves, shows that the editors sought to present Judaism as a language of timeless wisdom that their readers could employ in the changing cultural contexts. In this way an effort was made to bridge the gap the editors were witnessing between the particular Jewish tradition and the universal values of the time. The last part of this article deals with the national perception of Bialik, who regarded Zionism like his mentor Ahad Ha'am, as a spiritual and cultural mission, and not as a new secular religion as some recent research on his anthology suggests.

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