The Professor Dan Miron Lecture in Hebrew Literature with Shai Ginsburg

In his paper, Prof. Ginsburg traces the surprising entanglement of commerce, capital, and Hebrew culture in the Jewish communities of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Focusing on the town of Kapyl (Kopyl) and drawing on autobiographical and fictionalized autobiographical writings by Abraham Jacob Paperna and Sholem Yankev Abramovich (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), it argues that the transformation of Hebrew education—and, with it, the “emergence” (though this term itself is debatable) of modern Hebrew fiction—cannot be understood simply as the triumph of Maskilic ideology. Rather, new forms of Hebrew learning emerged alongside the expansion of capitalist networks, the circulation of goods and people across the Russian Empire and beyond, and the rise of a Jewish middle class eager to redefine its social identity.

Using Kapyl as a case study, the talk will reflect on the relationship between different historiographical frameworks: between so-called Jewish and general history; between social, economic, and literary history; between the history of Hebrew literature and Jewish literatures in other languages; and between the history of Hebrew literature and the history of the Hebrew language itself.