Modern Jewish literature in 19th-century Europe reflects the conjunction between Romanticism and nationalism, and between poetics and politics in modern western societies. As in other national European cultures, Jewish nationalism combines a poetic paradigm introduced by Romanticism with a political paradigm. It exploits the Romantic reconstruction of language and history in order to create a unified community sharing a common foundation myth.

19th-century Jewish nationalism distinguishes itself from other European national cultures due to the status of its national language, the role of the national territory in its nation-building project, and by the significant diversity among the communities it sought to unify under the same national identity.

Jewish nationalism was articulated both in Hebrew and Yiddish. These were alternatively considered potential languages of the Jewish nation. While Yiddish was the spoken language of East European Jewry, where the majority of European Jewry was once situated, Hebrew was a written language, the language of the sacred books and of religious ritual, the language of prayer and liturgy. Like other national revival movements, Jewish nationalism was preoccupied with the question as to which of these languages, with their diverging vernacular or historicist appeal, represented the essence of the nation. Written in Yiddish, Jewish literature expressed the vernacular turn of a national culture. Written in Hebrew, this literature expressed an ambition to modernize Jewish book culture. It was only during the third and fourth waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, between the 1920s and 1930s, that Hebrew gradually became the renewed vernacular of the Jewish colonists. Until that time, and during more than a century of Jewish nationalism, Hebrew literature was more invested in the symbolic revolution of Jewish culture than in the territorial aspirations of the nation-building project.

The modern Jewish nation was composed of a newly-emerging public sphere of readers long before it became engaged in colonizing the historical national territory of Palestine. This reading public developed among a Jewish population dispersed across different European host societies, in a fundamental split between Western and Eastern Europe. The modern Jewish mass reading public developed in Eastern Europe from the 1860s onward with the rise of the Jewish daily press in tsarist Russia. At that time leading East-European Jewish authors gained recognition as the moulders of the evolving national community. In the West a modest literary presence is to be noted, among which the popular literary works of Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) stand out. Zangwill’s work offered a genuine mélange of influences between East and West. His realistic novels describing the Jewish ghetto were inspired by his fellow-Englishman Charles Dickens as well as by the East-European Jewish author Sholem Yankev Abramovich (1836–1917).

Two distinct Jewish national cultures emerged in Europe towards the end of the century. In the west, a pragmatic nationalism embodied in the Zionist movement as conceived by Theodor Herzl; in tsarist Russia, the cultural nation-building project led by the Jewish thinker and writer Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg, 1856–1927). Two political alternatives mark these forms of Jewish nationalism: the aim of political-territorial state formation advanced by the Zionist movement and the project of reconstruction of a national Jewish culture within Europe’s existing states. These alternatives are a late result of the modernization of European Jewry. They are part of the political reform of Jewish identity as initially conceived by Moses Mendelssohn in late-18th-century Berlin.

Modern Jewish literature was an important factor in the ideological and political reform of Jewish identity, as it opted for the establishment of a new intellectual leadership to replace the traditional rabbinic leadership. This literature addressed European Jewry’s main challenge since the advent of the modern state: integration in modern civil society. From its very beginnings in the late 18th century and until its peak at the turn of the 20th century, modern Jewish literature aimed to represent the national essence of European Jewry. This is manifest in the long-term effort to modernize both the Yiddish and Hebrew languages; in the redaction of the Jewish chronicles by modern historians like Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) and Leopold Zunz (1794–1886); and finally, in documentary and fictional representations of the Jewish European communities. This last phenomenon forms the core of the Romantic Nationalism of 19th-century Jewish literature. It reflects the deep hold of a Romantic notion of individualism on the national reconstruction of the community.

Representations of the Jewish communities were composed in many literary genres, each declaring a different mode of engagement of literature in the nation-building project. Early Hebrew satirical writings by Joseph Perl (Tarnopol 1773 – Tarnopol 1839) and Isaac Erter (nr Przemyśl 1791 – Brody 1851) were mainly aimed against the Hasidic movement and point at a didactic approach towards the community. The bilingual novels written during the second half of the 19th century by Sholem Yankev Abramovich (Kapyl 1836 – Odessa 1917; writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim, “Mendele the book-pedlar”), while maintaining this satiric perspective, also succeeded in creating a fictional map of Jewish communities, elevating Jewish daily prayers, conversations, habits, and clothing into a national mythology. In the Yiddish work of Sholem Aleichem (Pereyaslav 1859 – New York 1916; real name: Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich), the national mythology is an already familiar construct. The train compartment, the urban communities of Jewish immigrants, and the emigrants’ crossing of the Atlantic all serve as casual and random appearances of the essential condition of modern Jewish existence. The short stories by Isaac Leib Peretz (Zamość 1852 – Warsaw 1915) manifest a growing interest of the modern Jewish fictional imaginary in Hasidic literature and Jewish popular records. The representation of the community changed at the turn of the 20th century as a result of a revaluation of individualism, alienation, and withdrawal. These principally Romantic themes were central in the Hebrew short stories by David Frishman (Zgierz 1859 – Berlin 1922) and Micha Joseph Berdyczewski (Medžybiž 1865 – Berlin 1921). Finally, the work of Yosef Haim Brenner (nr Cherniyiv 1881 – Jaffa 1921) inherited these themes and transported them from the European context to a Palestinian one. Brenner’s literature is largely invested in the question of colonization and the evolution of Jewish literature written within the boundaries of a national territory. As such, together with other literary work of its time, it marks the final boundary of the Romantic Nationalism of Jewish European literature.

The chronology of 19th-century European-Jewish literature presents two successive periods: the Jewish enlightenment (Haskala) followed by Jewish nationalism (Tehia). The Haskala developed on a dual basis: a search for civil integration in modern European societies as well as the promotion of a modern Hebrew culture based on the historical assets of Judaism. It insisted on the national particularity of the Jewish identity while adopting Enlightenment-style universalist ideas. According to the Haskala’s neoclassical approach, the Bible was the only genuine cultural and aesthetic foundation of modern Jewish identity. The later Talmudic tradition, the medieval Jewish writings, as well as the contemporary Yiddish language did not hold the essence of Jewish culture and should therefore be excluded from the reconstruction of modern Jewish identity. Combining Jewish cultural particularism and European influences, modern Hebrew literature under the influence of the Haskala was written in Biblical Hebrew, from the literary periodical Hame’asef (Königsberg and Berlin, 1782-1811) and the biblical epic Shirey Tiferet (“Poems of glory”) by Naphtaly Herz Wessely (Berlin 1789) to the first Hebrew novel, the biblical allegory of Ahavat Zion (“Love of Zion”) by Avraham Mapu (Vilnius 1853).

Jewish literary historicism developed in the Yiddish-language popular theatre of David Pinski (Mohilëv 1899 – New York 1908) and Abraham Goldfaden (Starokostiantyniv 1840 – New York 1908) and in the Hebrew-language work of writers from the rabbinical tradition like Kalman Schulman (Mohilëv 1819 – Vilnius 1899) and Judah Leib Landau (Brody 1866 – Johannesburg 1942). Memory figures were given literary currency such as Simon bar Kochba, who from the 1850s on was thematized in prose narrative (Schulman in 1858) and plays (Goldfaden in 1882, Landau in 1884, Pinski in 1910, Černihovskij in 1929). His name (alongside that of the Maccabees) was frequently used by Jewish sports clubs that were established from the mid-1890s onwards.

The Haskala’s central conflict between integrationism and particularism reached a turning point towards the end of the 19th century with the advent of the national period, the Tehia. This period is profoundly marked by Romanticism. It starts with the collapse of the dual-based identity of the enlightened Jew, shifting the balance from civic integrationism towards cultural particularism.

During the period of Tehia modern Jewish literature came to function as a symbolic national space. The Jewish press served as a public arena shared by Jewish readers in remote and dispersed locations. The didactic literary allegories of the Haskala and its intellectual Jewish readership were replaced by realistic representations of the Jewish communities intended for mass reading. Instead of the earlier idealism, Jewish literature now aimed to express the social and political reality of the Jewish communities. The narrative poem and the novel were the main literary genres developed in this period, by Yehuda Leib Gordon (Vilnius 1830 – St Petersburg 1892), Peretz Smolenskin (Monastyrščina 1842 – Merano 1885), and others.

Romanticism was implicitly present in the proto-national conception of Jewish identity. It appeared in some of the new literary genres adopted by 19th-century Jewish literature, notably the first part of the autobiography written by Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Hetot Neurim (“Sins of Youth”, Vilnius 1876). But it was not until the 1890s that Romanticism made its formal appearance in Jewish literature, with the poetry of the Russian-Jewish writer Simon Frug (nr Kherson 1860 – Odessa 1916), the neo-Hasidic short stories of Peretz and Berdyczewski, the increasing interest in a popular record of Jewish history and social life which led to the publication of the anthology of Yiddish folk songs in Russia by Marek and Ginzburg (St Petersburg 1901), the translations into Hebrew of Romantic authors like Byron, Puškin, and Nietzsche, and the Hebrew poetry of Saul Černihovskij (Mykhailivka 1875 – Jerusalem 1943) and Haim Nachman Bialik (nr Žytomyr 1873 – Vienna 1936). Bialik’s poetry was the first genuine expression of the conflictual link between the political register of Jewish nationalism, envisioning a unified collectivity, and the Romantic focus on individualism and withdrawal from the community. Bialik’s poetry reflects a rare sensitivity to the historical bond between Romanticism and nationalism by joining together the modern dilemmas of Jewish identity with an awakened concern for the future of the Jewish nation.