DECONSTRUCTING THE ZIONIST HERMENEUTICS OF THE NATIONAL HEBREW POET

This article considers the ways that modern Hebrew literature written by European Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries grappled with the violent manifestations of the “Jewish Question.” It charts a history of increasing activism and materialization in literature produced in and around the height of Jewish emergency in Europe, as writers began advancing the cause of national self-liberation through various means, including self-critique within blistering satires and the imagining of Jewish immigration in Zion. Such works helped precipitate the emergence of the institution of Zionist Hebrew literature at whose center stood the leading poet Haim Nahman Bialik. Through an in-depth analysis of the literary and personal relationship between Bialik and the prominent literary critic Fishel Lachower, the article uncovers the main hermeneutic patterns of the institution of Zionist Hebrew literature. Lachower’s hermeneutic, based on a suspicion of Zionism’s entanglements with violence, reveals said violence while inflicting its own on Bialik’s work. By neutralizing rejective and critical dialectics, Lachower subordinated himself and Bialik to the institution of Zionist Hebrew literature in a self-limiting fashion, as they constituted it.