ABSTRACT
In previous chapters, we have explored national elements of Hebrew in a longterm framework including medieval Spain and the French Enlightenment, which prepared the language to become a vehicle for modern Jewish cultural nationalism. This chapter considers in greater detail a narrower and in some ways more striking change: the point at which modern Hebrew literature emerged as art, between the outbreak of the pogroms in 1881 and the 1917 revolution. This renascence is arguably the most important development in Jewish culture since the Bible. Hebrew literature was the main cultural spur to the rise of modern Jewish nationalism. The Russian Jewish population prior to 1881 had been moving toward increased acculturation within the Tsarist empire and had hopes of emancipation and civil rights. They were deeply wounded, psychologically as well as economically, by Russian government policies legislated in a futile reactionary struggle to adapt to major changes in socio-economic conditions and the international balance of power.
