Cadernos de Língua e Literatura Hebraica
A revista Cadernos de Língua e Literatura Hebraica, destinada à comunidade científica, tem como objetivo incluir todos os elementos que constituem o vasto arco dos estudos acadêmicos judaicos e hebraicos, desde a sua origem, que passa pela Antiguidade no Oriente Médio, até as mais recônditas diásporas judaicas do mundo contemporâneo. São contempladas as áreas de estudos literários e lingüísticos, história, filosofia, sociologia, antropologia, estudos religiosos, estudos do antissemitismo e crítica de arte.
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
Autores que publicam nesta revista concordam com os seguintes termos: Autores mantém os direitos autorais e concedem à revista o direito de primeira publicação, com o trabalho simultaneamente licenciado sob a Licença Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-SA, que permite o compartilhamento do trabalho com reconhecimento da autoria e publicação inicial nesta revista; Autores têm permissão e são estimulados a publicar e distribuir seu trabalho online (ex.: em repositórios institucionais ou na sua página pessoal) a qualquer ponto antes ou durante o processo editorial, já que isso pode gerar alterações produtivas, bem como aumentar o impacto e a citação do trabalho publicado.
Copyright (c) 2025 Moacir Amâncio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In the Pomegranate Orchard: Cordovero, Kabbalah, and Jewish Mysticism in Pardês Rimonim
The translation of Pardes Rimonim by Moses Cordovero marks a milestone for Kabbalah studies in Portuguese. This work, originally written in the 16th century, is one of the most in depth and systematic treatises on Jewish mysticism, exploring focal kabbalistic concepts such as the Sefirot, Ein Sof, and the creation. The translation aims to preserve conceptual accuracy and literary beauty of the book, making this fundamental text accessible to scholars and enthusiasts of Kabbalistic thought.
Copyright (c) 2025 Saul Kirschbaum, Ms Maria Lucia Guilherme https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
At the home of the illustrious writer, Octave Mirbeau
This is a translation of the chronicle "Chez l'Illustre Écrivain" by Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), published on 28 November 1897 in Le Journal. The text marks Mirbeau's involvement in the fight to review the trial of French officer Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly convicted in France of the crime of high treason. A journalist, pamphleteer, art critic, novelist and playwright, one of the most interesting and original figures in French literature of the Belle Époque, Mirbeau joined Émile Zola and other writers of the period in the battle to correct one of France's greatest miscarriages of justice. He was part of the group called the Dreyfusards, who, following the publication of Émile Zola's letter to the President of the Republic Félix Faure in the newspaper L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, also became known as the 'intellectuals'.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Inês Canedo Arigoni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The fear of the Lord and the order of the world: infinite and finite in the proverbs of Solomon
One of the central challenges in understanding the biblical book of Proverbs—an issue that has sparked divergent interpretations in modern scholarship—concerns how the Hebrew sages conceived the relationship between the God of Israel and the seemingly automatic outcomes of reward and punishment according to human behavior, a facet of the moral order of the world in the sapiential doctrine famously termed the "act-consequence nexus" by one interpreter. The question is also closely tied to the proper understanding of the book’s most iconic refrain: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” In this study, we propose a philosophical and hermeneutic model based on the philosophy of the English theologian Austin Farrer, which, in our view, provides a more effective and insightful explanation to the source than those offered by traditional approaches.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vitor Ericeira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Sexual violence and denial of motherhood in Sherri Szeman’s “The Kommandant’s Mistress”
The aim of this paper is to analyze the novel The Kommandant’s Mistress, by Sherri Szeman. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Rachel, a survivor of the horrors of the Holocaust, experiences of Jewish women are put in perspective. Holocaust Gendered studies, founded by Professor Joan Ringelheim in the 1980s, have been surrounded by controversy, whether by the taboo subjects such as rape, abortion, sexual violence, sexual bartering, or by the male-dominated academic point of view. The article discusses the main character’s survival and coping mechanisms, the objectification of female bodies by SS officers, and the psychological impacts of the suffering, such as infertility and denial of motherhood. It also seeks to challenge historical silences and give voice to women’s experiences during the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rebeca Serrano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Eva Schloss in two autobiographies ─ resistance, diaspora and testimony
This study aims to analyze two books by Eva Schloss, Eva’s story, from 1988, and After Auschwitz, from 2013, both memoirs about the Second World War, categorized in the autobiographical genre, in which the author revisits her memories of the horrors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. The main theoretical foundations of this proposal are texts that privilege the writing of self and the testimony, especially traumatic autobiographical memories. The concept of resistance is also considered as a theme in the writer's narratives, as well as diaspora. In this sense, propositions by Philippe Lejeune, Michel Foucault, Alfredo Bosi, Jaime Ginzburg, Márcio Seligmann-Silva, González among others, are used as references.
Copyright (c) 2025 Joyce Rodrigues Silva Gonçalves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Treblinka II through the written, artistic, and oral testimonies of seven Jewish prisoners
Of the three Aktion Reinhardt camps (Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka II), Treblinka II is the extermination camp in which the most Jewish victims (men, women, and children) were murdered: 900,000. The harrowing and heartbreaking testimonies of the few Jewish prisoners who managed to escape are an invaluable source for Holocaust research. In this paper, I present the three Aktion Reinhardt camps (highlighting the high number of Jewish victims and the low number of survivors), I make a clear distinction between Treblinka II (extermination camp) and Treblinka I (labour camp), while describing the three ‘sections’ of Treblinka II (reception area, camp 1, and camp 2 –Totenlager). I rely on the historiography of Treblinka and, above all, on the written, artistic, and oral testimonies of seven Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in Treblinka II (Jakub Krzepicki, Eliahu Rozenberg, Richard Glazar, Abraham Leib Bomba, Chil Rajchman, Kalman Teigman, and Samuel Willenberg). Moreover, I discuss the problems that we may encounter when using the testimonies of victims and survivors, arguing that these testimonies are a priceless and an invaluable source for both Treblinka and Holocaust research.
Copyright (c) 2025 Antonia Tejeda Barros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Between fantasy and reality: Guedali’s conflicts in “The Centaur in the Garden”
This work discusses the theme of fantasy and reality from Guedali's conflicts in "The Centaur in the Garden", by Moacyr Scliar. To do this, it carries out a detailed analysis of the protagonist's Bovarian characteristics, focusing on his notorious romantic dissatisfaction, evidenced through his fantasists’ desires and disconnected from reality. The theoretical approach adopted is based on Lacan's concept of "Object a", which is related to the character's Bovarian condition, as he incessantly seeks something that cannot be achieved. Passages of the text are examined to exemplify these desires and connect the analysis to the Lacanian framework, highlighting the protagonist's intrinsic duality. In addition to the novelistic dissatisfaction, the study also explores Guedali's inability to adopt a critical perspective. This is evidenced in their emotional and identity dilemmas throughout the narrative. The analysis not only describes these dilemmas, but also situates them within the broader context of the work, in view of Scliar's characteristic humor and his Jewish cultural roots. In the end, the study seeks to offer a deep interpretation of the themes covered, exploring the interconnections between fantasy and reality in Scliar's narrative. This provides a more complete understanding of the protagonist's conflicts and the way these issues are woven into the novel's plot.
Copyright (c) 2025 FRANCIELLE MANINI, Wellington Stefaniu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Moacir Amâncio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Modernity, messianism and assimilation in Albert Cohen’s Solal
This article discusses the novel Solal by the French-language Jewish writer Albert Cohen in the light of its protagonist's journey from the insular Jewish community of Cephalonia in Greece to France, where he struggles to integrate into the modernity that has fascinated him since childhood. In the eyes of this protagonist, Western modernity takes on the shape of a kind of new Messiah, according to a belief that was widespread among Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Solal's journey thus becomes emblematic of the fate of an entire generation and its outcome points to the tragic nature of this endeavor, making the novel a refutation of the Western European genre of the Bildungsroman.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luis Sergio Krausz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Primo Levi: testimony, atrocity (unpacking Auschwitz), moral conscience and the victims' memory
ABSTRACT: Primo Levi was a Jewish Italian chemist and writer who survived Auschwitz III (Monowitz) and left his testimony in Se questo è un uomo (1947), La tregua (1963), Il sistema periodico (1975), I sommersi e i salvati and other writings and interviews. Levi's voice is the voice of moral conscience, testimony of atrocity and memory of the victims (a voice that speaks of deportation, injustice, collapse and destruction). In the present paper, I trace a short biographical journey within the framework of the Holocaust (emphasizing that Levi did not commit suicide), I break down the gigantic Auschwitz complex (its three main camps and its 44/45 subcamps) (whose reality is often mixed and confused), differentiating, for the sake of clarity, the extermination camps (Vernichtungstlager, VL –also, Totenlager) from the concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, KZ), I describe Levi's testimony as memory and moral conscience, I examine his concept of survival and dignity, and I analyze Levi's theses about the absence of God in Monowitz and the meaninglessness of the victims' suffering in the KZ.
extermination camp (Vernichtungstlager, VL, Totenlager)
concentration camp (Konzentrationslager, KZ)
Copyright (c) 2024 Antonia Tejeda Barros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Cadernos de Língua e Literatura Hebraica https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Hugo Almeida’s recently released book catches the reader’s attention in several aspects: on the one hand, it breaks down genre barriers, merging fiction with chronicle, art criticism and reflection on recent historical events; on the other hands, it breaks with the postulate of the novelistic plot: the narrative describes the protagonist’s relationship with several women – wives, lovers, friends , but it does not exactly have a plot: each relationship would serve as the basis for a separate novel; in several passages, the book is self-referential, that is, it refers to itself; in yet another dimension, the author constructs a protagonist who was a literature professor, which allows him to comment on important authors and their works; finally, it reflects on the human condition in the face of tragic historical events, such as the military dictatorship imposed on Brazil between 1964 and 1985 and, mainly, the Nazi occupation of Poland and the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War.
The feminine, the instrumentalization of evil and the monarchist thesis in Sefer Shoftim (Book of Judges)
The issue of the feminine, as well as the concept of evil, unfolds widely throughout the Sefer Shoftim (book of Judges) – a prosaic biblical book that records the transition from a “family nation” to a strong monarchical state. Acsa emerges as a paradigm for the other female characters to come, who are inserted in a constant social tension demarcated by patriarchy confronted with female freedom and emancipation. From the work's records, the theme of evil appears in two related categories, used for political interest. The present study seeks to understand and explore the use of these concepts in the book of Judges (with special attention to the final part of the work), presenting the paths of a process of instrumentalization of evil that is practiced there through the use of a woman's story.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eliathan Carvalho Leite https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Resilience in Remembrance: Proposal for a Pedagogical Framework for Teaching the Holocaust Through Survivor Biographies
The document discusses the use of Holocaust survivors' biographies as teaching material, emphasizing the extraordinary resilience and courage of the survivors. It highlights the importance of teaching the Holocaust to young Brazilians, aiming to promote tolerance, respect for diversity, and human rights. The analysis of the selected biographies revealed the profound and impactful narratives of the survivors, providing valuable insights into the human dimension of the tragedy. The research also evaluates the effectiveness of the teaching material in promoting students' understanding and emotional connection with the Holocaust. Furthermore, it emphasizes the role of these biographies in humanizing the Holocaust, promoting empathy, and preserving the memory of the events. The study aims to provide educators with comprehensive and effective tools to address this sensitive and impactful topic in the classroom.
Copyright (c) 2025 João Paulo Vani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Faith as a construction of meaning in the Book of Psalms: a lexicographical analysis of the words Emunah and Bitachon
The purpose of this article is to analyze the words Emunah and Bitachon in Psalms 119, 71 and 37, in the Hebrew language, in order to understand their effects of meaning, which are also highlighted in the Portuguese text. The aim is also to trace the relations of meaning generated by these words within the Hebrew text and, for this purpose, the above psalms were selected, since these texts contain the two words in their corpus. In order to achieve this objective, the article is based on an understanding of the word in its magical dimension, since it is constituted as "magical, cabalistic, sacred, [...] endowed with power" (BIDERMAN, 1998, p. 81). As a result, it became possible to understand the word Emunah as faith based on trust that everything is for the good, and to understand the word Bitachon as faith built on absolute certainty. It was also possible to understand the acrostics of the word Amen within Jewish thought, in order to understand their relationship with the word Emunah and their presence within the text. It was also possible to see that these words permeate each other in their meanings, building a web of meanings generated by the biblical text.
LITERATURA, ESTUDOS BÍBLICOS E LINGUÍSTICOS
Genesis 2:4 is a short verse, but it is at the center of an intense discussion about belonging. Some scholars place it as the final part of the first section of Genesis, others as the beginning of the second section, and there are even those who divide it into two parts. Therefore, it is necessary to look at the text again and seek to understand how it functions within the context in which it is found, precisely because this helps in better understanding the larger narrative. Thus, using the tools of narrative criticism, this article aims to understand Genesis 2:4 within its immediate literary context and within the book of Genesis and, then, conclude about its belonging within the sections of Genesis.
Copyright (c) 2024 Edson M Nunes Junior https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
A specter haunts... the intempestive topicality of Stefan Zweig
This article addresses the relevance and contemporaneity of the life and work of the German-speaking Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig, amidst the crises of the 20th century. Highlighting the intersection of Zweig's trajectory with crucial historical events of that period, such as the two world wars, and his subsequent literary shift towards pacifism after World War I. Regarding theoretical framework, the paper explores the relationship between the concepts of contemporaneity and untimeliness, arguing that to be contemporary is essentially to be in disagreement with one's time, as discussed by philosophers such as Nietzsche (1999), Benjamin (2013a and 2013b), Deleuze (2018a, 2018b and 2020), and Agamben (2004, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2016). Thus, the analysis includes reflections on the ethical-political responsibility of memory and the need for resistance in the face of a past that continues to (re)assert itself, drawing from Zweig's timeless legacy as a humanistic source of inspiration to confront not only present challenges but also those of the future. Ultimately, the text concludes that Zweig's work transcends spatiotemporal boundaries, offering valuable insights into the human condition and urging readers to take a critical and active approach to the contemporary world.
Copyright (c) 2024 Geovane Melo Junior https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Foreign workers in Israel and identity revisited
From the creation of the State of Israel, given the variety of the Jewish population that settled there, and in compliance with the precept of “gathering of exiles”, an institutionalization of a single identity that should overlap with the multiplicity of cultures of the different branches and ethnicities that began to coexist, prevailed in the country. This condition did not fully triumph and, as an object of study to this day, can be appreciated in prominent works of Hebrew literature. Oxana (2013), a novel by Merav Nakar-Sadi, author whose family is originally from Iraq, by bringing the inglorious experience of a foreign worker who lives and works illegally in the country, opens up the possibility of a review of aspects of Israeli-Jewish identity when faced with this category of population.
Women's Torah: writing at the limit of (im)possibility
The Torah is the founding book of the Jewish tradition, and as such, it was and still is transmitted from generation to generation in the same way and with the same materials as in ancient times. The continuity of the parchment manuscript finds its basis in the sacred character of the book, which is emphasized by rules directed to the maintainers of the tradition: the scribes. For most of this history, the office of scribe was undertaken only by men, who received the divine mandate to copy the Torah manuscript. For women, the possibility of subscribing to this tradition was censored, due to a Talmudic prohibition. This prohibition began to be questioned and some women entered the profession of scribes of the sacred book, embracing all the questions and challenges of this endeavor. This article tells the story of the Women’s Torah project, which brought together six female scribes who wrote a Sefer Torah for a Jewish Synagogue in Seattle.
Copyright (c) 2024 Denise Cristina Campos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Izaque de Castro Tartas meets Baruch de Spinoza: the criticism of the inquisitorial theological-political regime and the truce treaty of 1641
The article’s objective is to analyze the mobilization of international treaties, natural law and jus gentium in Izaque de Castro Tartas’ process of the Lisbon Inquisition, imprisoned in Brazil, using as a theoretical perspective the criticism of the theological-political carried out by the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. From that analysis, it will be possible to understand not only how Jews and New Christians were inserted in the international legal discourse of the 17th century, but also how concepts of jus gentium and natural law were mobilized by such actors as minorities. persecuted by Iberian political and theological powers. Spinoza, when carrying out a critique of the theological-political in his work Theological-Political Treatise, converges with the perspectives defended by more New Christian critics of his time, such as Uriel da Costa and Juan de Prado. However, it is also necessary to carry out an analysis of the intellectual and philosophical convergence of Spinoza's thought with New Christians’ criticisms of the Holy Office. Cecil Roth claimed that a historical meeting may have occurred between Izaque de Castro Tartas and Baruch de Spinoza as young men in the 17th century Amsterdam community. Roth's hypothesis awakens the need to investigate the existence of possible convergent perspectives between the two that can highlight a critical intellectual line that permeates freedom of conscience in Amsterdam and comes to direct conflict with the theological-political power of the Lisbon Inquisition using jus gentium and natural law in defense of the application of the 1641 Truce Treaty.
Memory and Judaism in the creative process of The house in Smyrna: an interview with Tatiana Salem Levy
This paper presents a transcription of an interview with writer Tatiana Salem Levy, originally recorded on a Zoom meeting on October 2, 2023. The questions focus on the influence of memory and Judaism on Levy’s creative process, especially while she was writing the novel The house in Smyrna. Besides exploring this subject, Salem Levy describes other aspects of her creative process, such as the way in which she structured the novel’s chapters, her creative influences, and the conflation of real experience and imagination in fiction writing. She also reflects on what Judaism means to her personally and what the relationship between memory, literature and transgenerationality might mean for the Jewish people.
Arendtian Zionism and the Statelessness of the Jews at the Shoah
The Jewish people suffered the persecutions of the Nazi Reich in Europe as a result of anti-Semitic sentiment that had been going on long before the Nazi regime. The climate of xenophobia and discrimination against everything that was considered different grew exponentially every day. In Germany, the conservative sentiment developed more and more in the context of the Weimar Republic, created in the period when Germany was about to lose the First World War and the nostalgia of a once powerful nation, from the times of the German Empire, compared to the new democratic but economically deficient reality was in the air. Many groups persecuted during this period had their rights reduced to nothing, especially during the Nuremberg Laws. This legal body incorporated many of the racial theories underpinned by the scientific racism of Nazi ideology. The present deals with the genocide of the Jewish people (Shoá), who became the target of extremism/fanaticism and the terrorist state policy of the time, a stateless and isolated people, a minority that had no representation, many of whom were considered stateless even for reasons of assimilation/migratory policy of the nation-states of which they were part, often without the "right to have rights". From this, the Zionist movement will be analyzed from the perspective of Arendtian thought, where we find defined the concepts of pariah, and throwaway society. The methodology used is based on bibliographical research, in addition to the use of theoretical, conceptual, and historical data.
Copyright (c) 2024 Desirée Garção Puosso, Karina Stange Calandrin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Brazilians in Israel: memories of Brazilian Moroccan cuisine
This article focuses on the project Brazilians in Israel: memories and diversity and presents some preliminary census data on the immigration of Brazilians to Israel and passages from interviews with Brazilians of Moroccan origin. To contextualize the theme of "Brazilians in Israel", it provides a brief overview of the processes of Jewish immigration to Brazil. In conclusion, by highlighting some memories of Moroccan-Brazilian cuisine in Israel, it points to the need for more data and other studies to understand, for example, the use and preservation of the Portuguese language in Israel.
Copyright (c) 2024 Debi Chaimovitch Yehoshasfat, Carlos Alberto Póvoa, Adriana Russi Tavares de Mello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
War memories in Onde Estão as Flores? by Ilko Minev
This work aims to investigate the war memories present in the novel Onde estão as flores? by Ilko Minev, a Bulgarian writer settled in the Amazon, considering the theories of memory and testimony. In the narrative, the nonagenarian Bulgarian Licco Hazan, examining his memories, tells his story lived in more than forty years in the Amazon and reveals himself as a victim of the Nazi catastrophe, a survivor of a forced labor camp in Bulgaria. To develop this work, we will take the studies by Samuel Benchimol (2008), Regina Igel (1997), Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Maurice Halbwachs (2006) among others.
Copyright (c) 2024 Libna Gama, Alessandra Fabrícia Conde da Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Teaching Shoah to children and adolescents in the museum: a framework of guidelines
This article aims to compile guidelines from museums dedicated to the Holocaust and related topics (namely the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum, in Washington, D.C.; Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem; ANOHA, the children's section of the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin; and the Holocaust Museum, in Curitiba) on how to present the subject, in the museum environment, to children and teenagers. The compilation of these guidelines was necessary during the course of our master's research, which deals with the strategies employed by Shoah museums in presenting the subject to these age groups, since the focus of our study is on exhibitions, and those institutions mentioned above carry out their own research activities, thus serving as sources. Therefore, they issue guidelines that can be applied both by teachers in the classroom and in non-formal education contexts, such as other museums.
“Land Israel” – an analysis of the role of the Land of Israel in the lyric poetry of Nelly Sachs
Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), a German Jewish author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, is one of the most important German-language poets of the post-war period. As someone who had to go into exile because of anti-Semitism, the poet was pleased with the founding and recognition of the State of Israel. However, she distanced herself from a Zionist position that saw the recognition of this state as the solution to the problems of the Jewish people. In “Sternverdunkelung” [Darkening of Stars], a book published in 1949, there is a cycle entitled Land Israel, and also a poem with the same title. According to Nelly Sachs, the cycle sought to "find the symbolic meaning of homeland" (SACHS, 1984, p. 93). The poem "Land Israel" is built on references to the Bible and tensions between movement and immobility, nation and exile, past and present, material and immaterial, as well as foreigner and native. In the poem, Israel exceeds its geopolitical borders and is measured by its contact with the divine and by its words, its poetry. The aim of this article is to discuss the different meanings of "Land" in the work of Nelly Sachs, based on an analysis of the tensions presented by the poem "Land Israel".
Albert Bensoussan: writing from shore to shore
This article discusses the work of the Jewish writer of Algerian origin Albert Bensoussan (1935-), and the memories of his movements between languages ​​and continents: Arabic and French; Spanish; his origins in colonial Algeria and his present in Brittany. Bensoussan's trajectory is emblematic of the destiny of an entire generation and an entire group: the Jews born in the Islamic world in the 19th and 20th centuries, who were marked, on the one hand, by the experience of the colonization of their home countries by European nations and, on the other, by the persecutions and expulsions that took place after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The article also discusses the issues of mother tongue and language as homeland.
Divine Attributes: the maimonidean thesis and Hasdai Crescas’ critique
The philosophical discussion about the divine attributes was important both to Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1135/1138–1204) as to Hasdai ben Judah, also known as Crescas (1340–1410/1411). More than a polemic of medieval Jewish and Arabic ontotheology, it is a key issue, both from Maimonides’ perspective and that of his opponent. At the center of the debate is the Avicenian concept of Necessary Being, derived from the Aristotelian Prime Mover, postulated by Maimonides and rejected by Crescas.
Autobiographic narratives in Yiddish: women writers, their writings and their stories
This paper results from a research that were translated and analyzed 23 short stories written by 17 writers and that reveal histories of young Jewish women who suffered discrimination for being women, for being writers and for writing in Yiddish, a language almost extinguished in the 20th century, and which is today the focus of movements for resistance. Discovered by feminist groups in the United States, the short stories are valued for their literary quality and for showing diverse and adverse contexts of women who immigrated from Eastern Europe to America, Israel and other European countries. The text is organized in three items. The first provides a brief overview of the Yiddish language and of the narratives, their autobiographical nature and context, the research background and the criteria used to choose them. The second item focuses on the short stories. From them emerge struggles, loss of places, people and dreams, suffering reported sometimes with bitterness, anger or irony. The stories show in the almost lost language different ways of expressing desires, dreams, constriction and overcoming. The writers talk about migration and displacement across continents, countries, cities, cultures that have placed them in a vulnerable situation due to what they saw, lived and wanted, and were forbidden or unable to achieve, as well as the changes required to live. The third item shows two short stories written by two of the authors studied. The research was supported by the research institute of the university where it was carried out.