The Auto-Anti-Semitism of Yosef Hayyim Brenner

Why is the writing of this great modern Hebrew novelist so dark and anguished, and why does so much of it take such a ferociously negative view of Jews?

This, the eighth essay by Hillel Halkin in his series on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries, is devoted to two figures: the novelist Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner (1881-1921) and the philosopher A.D. Gordon (1856-1922): “friends, mutual admirers, and public disputants.”

We present this essay in two consecutive parts: the first, today, focuses mainly on Brenner, and the second, tomorrow, mainly on Gordon and on the pair’s disagreements.

The preceding seven essays in Halkin’s series deal one by one with the novelists Joseph Perl, Avraham Mapu, and Peretz Smolenskin, the poets Yehudah Leib Gordon and Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, the essayist and Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am, and the writer, journalist, and intellectual Micha Yosef Berdichevsky.

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