Category:Jewish

The page: Jewish Authorship, includes (in chronological order) scholarly and fictional works on Second Temple Judaism (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Origins), authored by Jewish authors, from the second half of the 15th century to the present, as well as biographical information about their authors.

In the Jewish tradition, we don't see a development of works of fiction and art on Second Temple comparable to what Christianity developed since the Renaissance. There are two notable exceptions--composer Salomone Rossi and playwright Leone Modena. They were the product of the closest integration achieved by some Jewish communities in Northern Italy at the beginning of the 17th century.

With the Emancipation Jewish authors had more opportunities in Europe to contribute to the cultural life of their time. In 1774 Venetian-born rabbi Jacob Raphael ben Simhah Judah Saraval commissioned Italian-Austrian composer Cristiano Giuseppe Lidarti to set to music an Esther oratorio for the Jewish community in Amsterdam. In the first half of the 19th century, composers Isaac Nathan, Samuele Levi, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and Ferdinand Hiller, and Julius Kossarski authored music, oratorios and dramas on biblical figures like Judith or Paul and events, like the Destruction of Jerusalem, which were also popular in Christian tradition. For some time the struggle of oppressed Jews became a symbol of the universal struggle of oppressed peoples for their own freedom, in works of non-Jewish authors like Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi.

In the second half of the 19th century, Jewish writers and rabbis influenced by the Reform movement began addressing some subjects of the Second Temple period from a more distinctive Jewish point of view, for a Jewish audience. We can now talk of the emergence of a distinctively "Jewish" fictional literature.

Credit goes to Isaac Mayer Wise, leader of the Reform movement in the United States, with his groundbreaking novels, The First of the Maccabees (1855) and The Combat of the People; or, Hillel and Herod (1858). The Jews were no longer described as a suffering people longing for a savior but as a fighting people, eager to take their destiny into their own hands.

The example of Wise inspired in Europe the rise of a similar fictional literature in Hebrew (Kalman Schulman, Judah Loeb Landau), and German (Leopold Stein, Ludwig Philippson). In 1873 Anton G. Rubinstein and Salomon Hermann Mosenthal

Soon, most of this literature, aimed to educate the masses, was written in Yiddish, the popular language of Jews in Eastern Europe by authors such as Isaac Meir Dick, Israel Meir Wohlman, Abraham Goldfaden, Nahum Meir Shaikewitz, Joseph Judah Lerner, Ya`akov Ter.

In the United States, the example of Wise was followed by Henry Iliowizi and Herman Milton Bien. The emphasis on education also produced the emergence of a literature specifically addressed to children (Henry Pereira Mendes). For the first time Jewish women contributed to the field like Minnie Dessau Louis, Janie Jacobson and Elma Ehrlich Levinger.

In the 1920s and 1930s, publication of novels meant to strengthen the endurance of the jewish people if difficult times of persecution

some Jewish authors began to investigate subjects of the Christian tradition from a Jewish perspective, as a reaction against rampant anti-Semitism. Egon Friedell, Meir Wiener, and Franz Werfel in Germany, Nathan Bistritzky in Palestine, Cecil Roth in England, Edmond A. Fleg (1933) and Marc Chagall in France, up to the controversial and very successful trilogy of Sholem Asch in the United States.

After the Holocaust, Jewish authors focused on the reconstruction and the rebirth of the Jewish people around the new State of Israel.

Howard Fast My Gl

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