Hebrew has survived as a continuously written literature for nearly 3,000 years. It is the oldest, and in some ways most successful, minority literature. While Hebrew is central to the social history of the Jews, its history also offers a panoramic window into the relationships of other minority literatures to their majority cultures.

Until 1948, written Hebrew was created primarily under the rule of empires, notably those of ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, medieval Islam, and Tsarist Russia. In this controversial volume, David Aberbach analyzes Hebrew's development, arguing that several...

This book analyzes major transformations in Jewish life and thought: from idolatry to exclusive monotheism in the biblical age, from state-based identity to cultural nationalism in the Roman empire; and, in the European Diaspora, from theology to secularism and revived political nationalism in the modern period. Fundamental questions are asked about Jewish survival in a variety of topics including prophecy, Jewish law, Midrash, the Roman-Jewish wars, Stoicism, secular poetry in Muslim Spain, Marx and Freud, and Hebrew literature through the ages.

Jewish Cultural Nationalism explores the development of Jewish nationalism from the Bible to modern times, focusing on particular movements and places as well as texts which signified, or themselves brought about, change: the Bible (Hebrew prayer book), and the modern Hebrew literature, particularly in Tsarist Russia. While the influence of the Hebrew Bible alone on nationalism in individual periods has been subject to much scholarly study, the present work is unusual in its emphasis on the continuity of Jewish cultural nationalism and its influences through Hebrew texts.

Explores the psychology of prejudice and self-hate in the fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim, one of the key figures in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. The book presents an analysis of the tension between realism and caricature in Mendele's portrayal of the Russian Jews under tsarist rule.

In this controversial book, the authors show how the Roman-Jewish wars were precipitated partly by Jewish demographic and religious expansion and by conflict with the Greeks and their culture. They argue that the trauma and humiliation of defeat, stimulated Jewish cultural growth, particularly in Hebrew, during and after the wars. This culture was an implicit rejection of Graeco-Roman civilization and values in favour of a more exclusivist religious-cultural nationalism. This form of nationalism, though unique in the ancient world, anticipates more recent cultural-national movements of...

This text uses historical, sociological, social-psychological, theological, and especially literary insights to depict various forms of European Jewish patriotism. It combines scrutiny of socio-historical and religious forces with more recent factors deriving from the rise of secular enlightenment and nationalism.

Are the origins of charisma the same in politics, the media and religion? This interpretation of charisma argues that the basis of charisma in all its forms must be found in the often-obscure symbolic intersection between the inner world of the charismatic and external social and political reality.

Nationalism has given the world a genre of poetry bright with ideals of justice, freedom and the brotherhood of man, but also, at times, burning with humiliation and grievance, hatred and lust for revenge, driving human kind, as the Austrian poet Grillparzer put it, 'From humanity via nationality to bestiality'. National Poetry, Empires and War considers national poetry, and its glorification of war, from ancient to modern times, in a series of historical, social and political perspectives.

Starting with the Hebrew Bible and Homer and moving through the Crusades and...

Charismatics shine in three main arenas: politics, religion, and the media. In his analysis of charisma, David Aberbach adopts an eclectic, comparative approach, which emphasizes its paradoxical nature. Charisma in Politics, Religion, and the Media examines the inner world of the charismatic along with the historical and sociological phenomenon of charisma.

David Aberbach shows that the sources of charismatic motivation are often found in traumatic failure in private life, often as a result of loss, separation or distortion in childhood family relationships. Private trauma...