Reception of hebrew literature in Brazil

Abstract

Modern Hebrew literature was born in the 19 th century, in Europe, as an instrument for spreading the ideas of a movement that sought to raise the cultural level of the Jewish masses, living in the midst of medieval backwardness. It followed the great migration that marked the beginning of the coloniz ation of Palestine, assuming ethnic, nationalist and collectivist characteristics, in the service of the formation of a new Jewish identity and the construction of a national state. Created the S tate of Israel, the language evolved from its initial status, with precarious vocabulary and artificial structure, into a full and dynamic language of expression; literature, now better referred as “contemporary Israeli”, overcomes its particularistic limitations, and expresses the way of life of a people living in their national territory and producing in the everyday language. As for its reception in Brazil, in the beginning, literature is consumed by the Jewish community as a sort of common property of the ethnic group; in the last three decades, the readership ha s expanded, as a result, perhaps, of two phenomena: the entrance of Jewish studies into postgraduate programs of the main universities and the investment of important publishers in the translation, production and divulgation of the works of its main expone nts.