ABSTRACT
After 1917, the Russian Revolution stifled a thriving Eastern European Hebrew culture, and the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine and the Balfour Declaration opened the way for the return of Hebrew to its central place in its ancient home of origin. In Eretz Yisrael, militarism was thrust upon the Jews, forced to defend themselves against attack. Hebrew, compressed and direct, proved effective in combat, as in poetry, its style honed by centuries of war in the biblical era and after. Hebrew, like Hindi and Arabic, and many other languages and literatures, flourished in the British empire, aided by a huge expansion of the press and school system, and its literature became far more experimental, even avant garde. Practically all important Hebrew writers of the interwar years were born in Europe but moved to Eretz Yisrael. Some, including the future Nobel laureate, S. Y. Agnon, were averse to the return of fighting Jews. Others, such as Greenberg, believed that anti-Semitism left the Jews no choice but to fight. The Holocaust confirmed Greenberg’s pre-war views. Greenberg represents a return to biblical militarism away from rabbinic pacifism, and a rejection of corrupt Gentile culture, as he saw it, in favor of a purer, more Judaeo-centric form of education, based on Jewish statehood and the Hebrew language.
