ABSTRACT
The history of Hebrew children's literature, dating back to 1779, is the history of an ideological attempt to build a new literary system and to invent its consumers and producers simultaneously. It is a history characterised by strong ideological inclinations, and delayed developments and regressions, until Hebrew children's literature attained the conditions typical of the European children's systems which it sought to emulate. Its peculiar circumstances of development involved the special status of the Hebrew language as the language of high culture rather than the native language of its child readership, as well as the multi-territorial existence of Hebrew culture: a situation which ended only when the centre of Hebrew culture was transferred to Eretz-Israel in the mid-1920s.
