/ Ed. by Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman and Ber Kotlerman. โ Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. โ 696 pp.
For millennia, Jewish letters have appeared in dozens of languages. The
borderlines of Jewish letters โ lingual, national, geographical, and thematic
are not positively defined. However, we see this immense nonlinear and
dynamic multiplicity as revolving around one point โ the consciousness of
Jewish cultural continuity. The highly intensive and inclusive Jewish
hypertextuality overwhelms all narrow contextual historicist limits, and
invites complex philological, historiographical, and theoretical approach.
Such approach is represented by this collection of papers.
The purpose of this volume was not to cover all the languages of
Jewish letters and their entire geographical or historical spread. Neither
was our objective the discussion of the essence of Jewish literature and its
definition. We rather aimed at creating a framework for scholars who
consider their subject to be the multilingual literature, culture, and thought
of the Jewish People. Although at the center of the Peopleโs creativity the
Hebrew Sacred Writings have always remained, it has never been
considered separate from writings and practices in other languages.
Nowadays, the growing self-consciousness of Jewish writers all over the
world as belonging to a united Jewish literature by no means undermines
the unique role of Hebrew literature.