Modern Jewish Literature
Modern Jews continued to write standard forms of rabbinic literature: Jewish philosophical literature, mystical (Kabbalistic) literature, musar (ethical) literature, halakhic literature, and commentaries on the Bible.
The modern era also saw the creation of what is generally known as "modern Jewish literature," discussed here. Modern Jewish literature emerged with the Hebrew literature of the Haskalah and broke with religious traditions about literature. Therefore, it can be distinguished from rabbinic literature which is distinctly religious in character. Modern Jewish literature was a unique Jewish literature which often also contributed to the national literatures of many of the countries in which Jews lived.
Read more about this topic: Jewish Literature
Famous quotes containing the words modern, jewish and/or literature:
“The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.”
—George Bernard Shaw (18561950)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making ladies dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present timethis one, for instanceas it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (18991986)