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Scholar, Zionist, And Man Of Letters: Reuven Fahn (1878-1939/1944) In The Caraite Community Of Halicz (Notes On The Development Of Jewish Ethnography, Epigraphy And Hebrew Literature)

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Kizilov M.

Kwartalnik Historii Żydow

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2012

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issue 4(244)

470-489

EN

Reuven Fahn (1878–1939/1944), was a self-made historian, ethnographer, epigraphist, poet, writer, journalist, and ardent Zionist of Galician origin. Already in his youth he could speak and write literary Hebrew, German, Yiddish, and apparently, Polish and Ruthenian (Ukrainian). At the age of 13 he was a Jewish nationalist and admirer of Erets Yisra’el. He published his first journalist report in Hebrew in the periodical “Ha-Magid” in 1893. At the age of 16 he published a poem entitled Beit Yisra’el. In 1897 he and moved to Halicz which was at that time a shtetl with significant Rabbanite and Karaite community. Fahn left an impressive literary heritage: ca. 14 separate monographs and brochures, and more than 200 articles and reports in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. These publications included journalist reports, travel notes, poems, short stories, legends, feuilletons, and scholarly essays. The importance of Fahn’s scholarly publications on the Karaites is also strengthened by the fact that many of the sources used by Fahn (e.g. tombstone inscriptions, manuscripts, and architectural monuments) were later lost or destroyed. During Fahn’s lifetime his belletrist publications attracted much attention and criticism on the part of famous Jewish litterateurs such as Samuel Agnon, Joseph Brenner, or Gershom Bader. The aim of this paper is to analyse Reuven Fahn’s publications dedicated to the Karaite community of Halicz and to remind scholarly public about the importance of the contribution to the field of Jewish studies and Hebrew literature of Reuven Fahn – writer, scholar, Zionist and a victim of Nazi persecution. Readers can also find interesting information on the contacts between Fahn and important twentieth–century Jewish figures such as Samuel Agnon, Majer Bałaban, Sholem Asch, Samuel Poznański and others.

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“IF I FORGET THEE, O BAGHDAD”: THE DEMISE OF ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY AND CULTURE

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Snir R.

Asian and African Studies

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2021

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vol. 30

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issue 1

173 – 188

EN

This article examines the emergence of the modern Arabic literary writing of the Jews of Iraq. After only a few decades, the start of its demise, in both Iraq and outside it, and then the switch to writing in Hebrew in Israel. The high point of such writing in Arabic was during the 1920s when Iraqi-Jews started to produce literary works that “were Arabic in essence and expression.” It was a secular literature, inspired by a cultural vision whose most eloquent dictum was “religion is for God, the fatherland is for everyone.” However, during recent decades the Arabic literature that 20th-century Iraqi-Jews have produced has been totally relegated to the margins of Arabic culture. This development was due not only to political and national circumstances but also to the aesthetic and cultural norms of both Arabic-Muslim and Hebrew-Jewish cultural systems. The vision embedded in the aforementioned dictum was the product of a very limited period, a very confined space, and a very singular history. It lived to the age of a sturdy human being, by this rare combination of time, space and history, before disappearing and being forgotten, at least for the foreseeable future.

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PRAGUE BEYOND KAFKA: RETHINKING MINOR LITERATURE THROUGH THE WORK OF JIŘÍ LANGER

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Sabatos C.

World Literature Studies

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2022

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vol. 14

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issue 2

85 - 102

EN

This article moves from their opposition of “major/minor” literatures to their “tetralinguistic” model of vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythic language taking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature as a starting point. It presents the work of the polyglot poet and Hasidic scholar Jiří Langer to offer a multifaceted view of three distinct contexts: the theoretical discourse of minor literature, the literary milieu of interwar Prague, and the history of gay Czech and Jewish writing. Langer appears in Franz Kafka’s diaries and letters over a period of several years as a source of information on Jewish culture, as well as a personal contact to prominent rabbis from the east. Two decades later, Langer produced his own remarkable work in Czech, Devĕt bran (Nine Gates, 1937), a popular-scholarly study of Hasidic traditions based on his experience in the Galician town of Belz. Much of what is known today about Jiří Langer’s unconventional life comes from the memoirs of his brother František, published as a foreword for the English translation of the book. However, it was only in recent years that Langer’s Hebrew poetry has also become available to English-speaking readers, revealing his linguistic strategies that draw on mystical traditions in the attempt to form a modern synthesis of Jewish homosexual identity. Jiří Langer’s literary activity shows Prague as a site of self-definition through multilingualism, rather than the more familiar image of Kafka’s “deterritorialization”.

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Scholar, Zionist, And Man Of Letters: Reuven Fahn (1878-1939/1944) In The Caraite Community Of Halicz (Notes On The Development Of Jewish Ethnography, Epigraphy And Hebrew Literature)

“IF I FORGET THEE, O BAGHDAD”: THE DEMISE OF ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY AND CULTURE

PRAGUE BEYOND KAFKA: RETHINKING MINOR LITERATURE THROUGH THE WORK OF JIŘÍ LANGER