From Torah to tarbut: Hayim Nahman Bialik and the nationalization of Judaism

This dissertation traces the development of the tarbut 'Ivrit (Hebrew Culture) movement from its origins in fin de siecle Odessa among small circles of writers and intellectuals to its institutional consolidation in pre-State Palestine and interwar Poland. From the 1890s to the 1930s, a tightly-knit circle of Hebrew writers, scholars, and educators, led by the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, actively sought to "transvalue" classical Hebrew sources into an authoritative national carton by gathering, translating, and editing classical Hebrew texts into modern kinusim (collections, anthologies). They hoped that the creation and dissemination of these anthologies would provide the foundations for a new national identity, and established important scholarly and literary journals, innovative Hebrew schools, and publishing houses in order to realize their program.;In telling the story of kinus (collection, ingathering), this dissertation argues that mekhansim (collectors, anthologizers) cloaked their work in the language of continuity and tradition, principally in order to conceal their innovative, even radical, reshaping of that tradition into a secular national literary canon. The present work also argues that books, or at least the idea of books, played a very important role in the early Zionist movement. Several leading Zionists believed that the creation of a national library based on Judaism's classical texts could win over masses of Jews alienated from their religious traditions and tempted by alien cultures and political ideologies by reawakening their feelings of national solidarity and belonging.;Finally, this dissertation provides a new understanding of the complex, ambivalent relationship between the early Zionist movement and rabbinic Judaism, calling into question the centrality of schelilat ha-golah (rejection of Jewish life in Exile) in Zionist ideology. Bialik and his disciples sought to "redeem" classical Hebrew texts by transforming them into tarbut, that is, a homogenous, coherent "national culture," and appropriating these texts for the sake of constructing a modern national identity. In other words, kinus involved a simultaneous embrace and rejection of classical Hebrew sources---texts created in Exile were mobilized as a "usable past" to overcome the condition of Exile.