Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature

Iris Parush is Professor Emerita of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her current scholarly writing explores the literature and literary criticism of the Jewish enlightenment and national revival periods, examining them within their socio-cultural and ideological context. Her book Reading Jewish Women (2004) won the prestigious Zalman Shazar Prize for Jewish History.

• 1. ​Introduction.- 2. Literacy: Theory, Methodology, Ethnography.- 3. Reading without Writing and the Myth of Universal Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society.- 4. The Primacy of Speech over Writing in Hasidic Society.- 5. The Primacy of Speech over Writing in Mintagdic Society.- 6. The Written Torah and the Oral Torah: Class, Gender, and the Cultural Images of the Corpora.- 7. Intentional Ignorance of the Hebrew Language.- 8. From Mother Tongue to Father Tongue: The Study of Grammar, Reading, and Writing in Hebrew as a Male Maskilic Rite of Passage.- 9. “I Made Myself a Notebook of Blank Paper”: The Sin of Writing and the Constitution of the Subject.- 10.  Epilogue: Writing, Tradition, and Modernity in Only for the Lord Alone by S. Y. Agnon.

“Excellent multidisciplinary book The Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature … . Each chapter approaches, in a bricoleur-like manner, its primary sources with the relevant theories … . Parush’s book carefully traces the genealogy of the (manly) ideal of the maskil by, among other things, sketching the training process for writing in the Hebrew language. …” (Yaniv Hagbi, European Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 17 (2), 2023)