Tuesday, November 3, 2026 · 天火 · tianmu.org
Literature and Learning
Essays and studies on Hebrew and Jewish literature, its books, its writers and the life around them.
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Texts
By-paths in Hebraic Bookland — Israel AbrahamsIsrael Abrahams’s 1920 collection of fifty short papers on lesser-known books of the Jewish and Hebraic tradition, from the Story of Ahikar, Philo and the Letter of Sherira through Ibn Gebirol, the Sarajevo Haggadah, Menasseh ben Israel and Mendelssohn to Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Grace Aguilar, Emma Lazarus and Imber’s Ha-Tikwah, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America.Chapters on Jewish Literature — Israel AbrahamsIsrael Abrahams’s 1899 manual of Jewish literature for home and school, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America: twenty-five short chapters from the schools of Jamnia after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 to the death of Moses Mendelssohn in 1786, taking in the Mishnah and Talmud, the Midrash, the Gaonim and the Karaites, the Spanish-Hebrew poets, Rashi and Maimonides, the Zohar, ethical literature, travellers and chroniclers, and the Shulchan Aruch, each with a list of English reading.The Book of Delight and Other Papers — Israel AbrahamsIsrael Abrahams’s 1912 collection of eight papers, most of them first given as spoken addresses, on Jewish literature and life: a study and tale-by-tale rendering of Joseph Zabara’s medieval Hebrew romance the Book of Delight, a visit to Hebron, the love of books, medieval Jewish travel, the fable of the fox’s heart, marriages made in heaven, Hebrew love songs, and eight shorter curiosities, with the author’s notes.The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century — Leo WienerLeo Wiener’s 1899 history of Yiddish (Judeo-German) literature in the nineteenth century, from folklore, folksong and popular poetry through the poets and prose writers of Russia and America to the Jewish theatre, the press and the book trade, with a chrestomathy of eighteen extracts in transliterated Judeo-German with English translations, a bibliography, a list of pseudonyms and an index.The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) — Nahum SlouschzNahum Slouschz’s history of modern Hebrew letters from Moses Hayyim Luzzatto’s drama of 1743 to the end of Perez Smolenskin’s journal Ha-Shahar in 1885, written as a Paris doctoral thesis, published in French in 1902, and translated into English by Henrietta Szold.