ABSTRACT
The decisive turning point for the focus of Hebrew writing came in the 1920s. It was during this decade that Europe was to be fragmented into nation-states with their separate national interests and cultures, tending more and more towards exclusivist chauvinism in an increasingly dangerous world. This was the case in the xenophobic Soviet Union under Stalin (from 1924 onwards), in renascent nationalist Poland and, of course, in Germany and the German-speaking world too. Hebrew was banned in the Soviet Union and marginalized in the USA. When most of the leading Hebrew writers settled in Palestine (e.g. U. Z. Greenberg and H. N. Bialik arrived in 1924), this confirmed the yishuv as the most exclusive centre of Hebrew culture. Now diaspora activity was indisputedly peripheral. The implications though had to be understood. Palestine had to become a subject and Hebrew had to offer a total register capable of expressing the totality of life, feeling and activity. Whereas the Hebrew writer hitherto had expressed Jewish man in his partial capacity, separate from his secular non-Jewish concerns in a 'special' language, the tendency of the new Palestinian settlement was to integrate Jewishness into a Hebrew Palestinianism that would become statehood. H. N. Bialik (1873-1934), U. Z. Greenberg (1896-1983) and evenS. Y. Agnon (1888-1970) were rooted in Europe and observed this new environment with foreign eyes, relating to it as from Europe and diaspora Judaism, albeit a Judaism secularized and Zionized.
