This is not a history of Hebrew literature in America. Instead it relates a fascinating chapter of that literature’s preoccupation with America’s indigenous minorities, African Americans and Native Americans. The uniqueness of this interest stems from the fact that at no time in the annals of Hebrew literature and in any land of the Jewish Diaspora have writers demonstrated such a curiosity about other groups, out of sympathy with how other marginalized peoples have fared compared to the way Jews have fared in America. And while some of the ensuing interest is a consequence of the onset of modernity and...

With the arrival of the masses of Jewish immigrants at America’s shores came also a number with an inclination or educational background to form a small nucleus of Hebraists intent on forming a new literary center. The leading figure of the early years was Benjamin N. Silkiner (1882–1933). He not only had a deep immersion in traditional textual studies, but melded these with a love for modern literature and the Haskalah.

Influenced by the Odessa literary circles of Bialik and Aḥad-Haʿam, Silkiner brought their habits, attitudes, and ideological inclinations along when, in 1904, he arrived in the United States...

In a preface in the manuscript ofSilent Wigwams(Vigvamim shotkim), Israel Efros’s premiere composition about Native Americans—currently in the possession of his daughter, Ghela (Efros) Scharfstein—the poet has left the following lengthy note:

In 1928 fate robbed me of two dear souls one after the other, souls that forever remain irreplaceable.

I fled from the place of my double calamity to a distant and cold city. But from there I began to greatly miss that parcel of land I left behind, the quiet and sun-drenched Maryland fields.

Long ago I read a legend. It was the tale...

American Hebrew literature, the poetry and prose fiction composed almost exclusively by immigrants, is a tapestry of forms, trends, and genres. It is a testimony documenting early responses of the encounter between Hebraists and the New World. In terms of literary forms and styles, this literature runs the gamut of Hebrew belles lettres, ranging from the traditional European Hebrew literary models to the innovativeness of modernism as affected by American and English literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the case of a few exceptional individuals, principally Gavriel Preil, this literature has also given rise to trends...

Ever since Silkiner’s long poem, Hebrew literature has continued to struggle with the tendency to stereotype Native Americans. The seeming dearth of intimate familiarity and social contact between Jews and Native Americans underlies part of the reason. Representations of First Nations in American Hebrew letters tend to rely heavily on a range of popular stock features of Indian culture, a matter that continued to perpetuate their exoticism and remoteness. Remaining beyond the sphere of a true familiarity, Native Americans continued to be for Hebrew literature the unknown Others, superficial images in place of fleshed-out individuals. Nonetheless their representation as the...

Americans are cognizant of allusions to Indians in their culture. Many use, and some are even familiar with, a few loan words from Indian languages in English. Bearing references to Native Americans are sports teams, train lines, and place names. For these, no actual Indians need be present. The impression left in the minds of some is that Native Americans are missing from the continent.

Such was the impression conveyed in the works of some Hebraists who dwelled on the fate of Native Americans in their critique of the imagined ideal life in the New World. In them they saw...

The African American population in the United States represented the most immediate indigenous minority with whom Jews had contact upon arriving in the New World. Moving into large cities, they witnessed the concomitant migration wave of Blacks out of the rural South, cresting in the years after the First World War. Many African Americans settled into predominantly poorer neighborhoods of northern cities, often adjacent to those of Jews.¹ Unlike Europeans who had recently made their way from across the ocean, the exoticism of Blacks for Jews was in their being “Americans,” but with a difference. For contrary to the utopian...

As sound as Heyd’s observation may be about the representation of Blacks by Jews in painting or sculpture, the issue is more complex in belles lettres. While Heyd’s observation applies to some of the latter, other works are nuanced, realistic, and particularistic. In representing African Americans, Hebrew literature runs the gamut from the most superficial references, in which the subjects are mere tropes, all the way to focused, three-dimensional individuals. At times Blacks are portrayed metonymically as a long-suffering people whose pains, travails, and challenges humanize them, while at other times they are mere images in the social background of...

The realistic representation of African Americans is embedded primarily in prose fiction and published contemporaneously with the poetry. This mode is not of a uniform intensity and attention to detail, however. In most cases, references to Blacks are incidental generalizations which omit intimate personal acquaintance, leaving African Americans as a flat background in the plots.

Such is the case when Blacks are mentioned in passing by the poet and short-story writer, Ḥayim Abraham Friedland. His works are marked by a gentle narrative in which the reader is invited to consider the protagonists against their surroundings. He is fond of basing...

Even before the Czernowitz conference of 1908, when Yiddish was proclaimed by some as the Jewish national language, the preference by others for Hebrew distinguished them ideologically from the former. Supporters of the Zionist platform were also adherents of Hebrew and wedded it with the Jews’ national and political aspirations. Opponents of Zionism, who favored the Jews’ continued Diasporic existence, often allied behind the quintessential Jewish language of the European Diaspora, Yiddish. In this equation, mainline Hebrew literature was presumed enlisted to the national cause. The Hebrew literary canon of the time became replete with works promoting Zionism. Those Hebrew...

Literary representations of the encounter between Jews and America are inevitably portrayed in archetypal, if not cosmic, terms, much like when American Hebrew literature comes into contact with Eretz Israel. In each instance, it is as if authors were cognizant of the significance of the change from their European experience. To mark the encounter between Jews and the United States and Israel, writers resorted to stock archetypes of national mythic dimensions, drawing particularly on the sea crossing to underscore the imagined leap of difference.

The encounters expressed in such passion by some prompted the less enthusiastic of writers to challenge...

Glancing back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century at what transpired in American Hebrew letters, we witness a chapter that has now reached its conclusion. Circumstances within and beyond the pale of Jewish society have coalesced to efface any prospects for a lasting imprint of Hebrew culture’s flowering in America. Of all the Hebrew literary talent that populated the American landscape, little has remained. The contribution by America’s Hebraists was consigned to oblivion, falling mostly by the wayside of the canon.

The very center that it begat has also come to an end, facilitated by Hebraists whose conservatism...