Inventing the nation: aspects of the romantic Israeli literature pre-independence, their origins and contradictions

Abstract

Could a literature written by some Jewish immigrants, of the most varied origins and native speakers of a myriad of languages, produced in a place whose political sovereignty and cultural autonomy was still nothing more than an ideal, Palestine, and written in an archaic and dead  language (at least in speech), eminently used in religious writings, with very few relationships with the daily life of this heterogeneous group to aspire to the status of a national or nationalist literature, which expressed the character of the people and their broadest aspirations? Could political ideology, heritage and historical and religious traditions, already quite diluted in secularism since Napoleon Bonaparte's rise to power, elevate such literature, and therefore such language, to this status? Starting from these questions and taking as a basis the main characteristics of romantic literature in general, we will investigate the models of literary production, prose and poetry, of the so-called Israeli Romanticism and its contradictions regarding the assumptions of the aesthetics in question.