Guilty Pleasures: Popular Literature and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Modernity in Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish

Abstract

Guilty Pleasures: Popular Literature and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Modernity in Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish investigates the transnational development of popular literary culture in Jewish languages during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studying texts in Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish, which are, in many cases, translations from Russian, German, and French, I explore the function of popular literature as one of the primary sites for the negotiation of modern Jewishness. This project focuses on lesser-studied genres of adventure, romance, and historical novels and their translation, adaptation, circulation, and popularization. I argue that, precisely because of its use of translation and its position outside the canon, popular literature fostered linguistic and literary experimentation and hybridity, propelling the modernization of Jewish languages and cultures. The first chapter shows how the contentious Hebrew translation of Eugène Sue’s sensational novel, Les Mystères de Paris, published in 1857, played a definitive part in the Hebrew language revival. It was instrumental to the novel’s circulation in Yiddish and Ladino, where it became a cornerstone of modern literary writing. As part of the reception of the novel in the Jewish cultural spheres of the nineteenth century, the paradigmatic text of mass-produced literature became a flexible signifier that blurred the lines of aesthetic categories, defying their logic as it was being used to form them. The second chapter examines the literary tradition of Sepharad – historical novels about the Jewish past in Spain. The fictional corpus of Sepharad drew on two distinct sources – European popular literature and Jewish historiography, particularly the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. Sepharad novels were used to articulate modern parameters for a distinctly Jewish identity. However, the popularized traits of Sepharad novels–their formulaic nature and reliance on melodramatic romance plots–outweighed historical accuracy and didactic purposes. Consequently, Sepharad novels were readily translatable and adaptable to different historical circumstances and political and cultural contexts. My analysis of works published in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino in the Russian and Ottoman Empire shows that Sepharad fiction continuously disrupted generic and textual boundaries between history and fiction, original and translation. In the course of its circuitous trajectory between Jewish languages, Sepharad fiction also confounded ethnic cultural distinctions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi cultural domains. I argue that, as Jewish historical novels came to function as “authentic” expressions of ethnic and national identities, their indebtedness to a long and multilayered chain of translation and circulation impeded notions of “originality” and exposed the innate hybridity and multilingualism of modern Jewish cultures. The third chapter traces the evolution of notions of authenticity and originality in popular fiction about the Ottoman Empire. Works of “Ottoman” fiction circulated between Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish in New York, Istanbul, and Jerusalem during the late Ottoman period. Analyzing the adaptation and circulation of Jewish “Ottoman” fiction, I show how contemporary Ottoman life became the locus of popular writing in a process that was propelled by the emergence of a Hebrew popular press in Ottoman Palestine. Writers and publishers turned their focus to their immediate surroundings, aspiring to forge a native popular literature. However, they used translation to import narrative devices and representations of this sphere from external sources. The translated corpus of “Ottoman” fiction reflects the constructed nature of Jewish “nativeness” with the gradual consolidation of Zionism in Palestine.