Files
Abstract
Senses of Zionism: Aesthetic Education in the Hebrew Revival shows how German aesthetic thought—particularly Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)—informed Hebrew literary responses to crisis and transformation during the Tehiya period, also known as the Hebrew Revival. Focusing on three Hebrew writers canonized by Zionism—David Frishman (1859–1922), Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik (1873–1934), and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921)—this dissertation traces how their engagements with Schiller’s theory of ästhetische Erziehung led them to formulate a vision of Hebrew aesthetic education that resisted rather than promoted the instrumentalization of literature in the service of national ideology. Challenging dominant strands of scholarship that frame Hebrew literature as a teleological precursor to Zionist statehood—whether in celebratory or critical terms—this project foregrounds the sensorium as the central site of modern Hebrew literature’s aesthetic and conceptual innovation, and as the terrain through which it articulated its most distinctive claims. It identifies a counter-current within the Hebrew Revival: the works examined here pursue a model of Hebrew culture grounded in the refinement of taste, aesthetic autonomy, and the cultivation of judgment. These revivalists were not disengaged from national questions; rather, they insisted that any durable collective renewal must be grounded in aesthetic experience and anthropological cohesion. Drawing on multilingual practices and strategic engagements with German philosophical frameworks, the dissertation shows how Hebrew literature carved out a space for disinterested aesthetic contemplation that maintained critical distance from both traditional religious authority and emerging Zionist orthodoxy. By bringing Hebrew literary modernism into dialogue with German aesthetic thought, Senses of Zionism reconsiders the stakes of the Hebrew Revival and its contested legacy as a Zionist project. It contributes to scholarship on Hebrew literature, the Jewish and Hebrew receptions of German thought, and the role of aesthetic education in shaping—and at times resisting—projects of collective identity.