majority of productions of Jewish interest are, however, written in Hebrew and the allied tongues, and great attention has naturally been paid to this section of Jewish literature. While the Encyclopedia does not attempt to give a complete biography of this extensive subject, it is hoped that there will be found under the various authors’ names an account of almost all works of importance written in Hebrew.
After the destruction of the national life of the Jews, nearly their whole energy was directed toward the inner life and found expression in their literature. Their productiveness History of
Literature. in this respect was remarkable, and is testified to by the large collections of Hebrew manuscripts and books which are to be found in private and public libraries. When printing was invented they eagerly seized upon the new art, ass it gave them a further means of spreading within their own ranks a knowledge of their literature. The history of Jewish books and Jewish book-making from the technical point of view is one of great interest and has, up to the present time, hardly received systematic treatment.
For the history of their own literature the Jews did little during the Middle Ages, and even when they did work along these lines the motive was in most cases other than purely literary. Such works, for example, as the "Seder Tannaim we-Amoraim," and the well known "Letters" or "Responsa" by Sherira Gaon on the composition of the Talmudic literature, were not written with the purpose of giving a history of literature, but of proving the validity of tradition.
In modern times Christian scholars were among the first to attempt a comprehensive view of the contents of Jewish literature, though important bio-bibliographical works were compiled by Conforte, Heilprin, and Azulai. Hottinger (died 1667) gave this literature a place in his "Bibliotheca Orientalis," and Otho (1672) sought to describe in the form of an encyclopedia the work and times of the teachers of the Mishnah. The most ambitious work of this kind was the "Bibliotheca Magna Rabbinica" of Bartolocci (died 1687), together with the additions of Imbonati (1694), which was followed up by the collosal work of Johann Christian Wolf (1683-1739). That these attempts failed was due to the fact that the time was not ripe for any such comprehensive presentation, as the preliminary work in detail was still to be done. Order was first wrought in this chaos when the modern spirit of research had engendered what is now known as "the science of Judaism." Zunz’s great work "Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge" (1832), was the first attempt to give an accurate account of the development of one branch of this literature, the homiletic. He followed this with histories of the religious poetry and of the literary productions connected with the Synagogue; and in 1836, a few years after Zunz’s first book, a Christian scholar, Franz Delitzsch, in his "Zur Geschichte der Jüdischen Poesie," wrote a history of Jewish poetry which, even at this date, has not been superseded. Steinschneider’s remarkable attempt at a comprehensive history of Jewish literature, first published (1850) in Ersch and Gruber’s "Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste," and translated into English (London, 1857) and Hebrew (Warsaw, 1900), has as yet found no imitator, though special departments have received careful treatment at various hands. Neubauer’s exhaustive volumes on the history of Jewish literature in France during the fourteenth century have at least placed all the material for that period at our disposal, and Steinschneider’s "Hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters" has brought together a mass of material on the special activity of the Jews in transmitting the science of antiquity to western Europe. In addition to the above publications, attempts have been made at a more comprehensive popular presentation in the compendium of David Cassel (1879), in Karpeles’ "Geschichte der Jüdischen Literatur" (1886), and in Winter and Wünsche’s "Jüdische Literatur," the last of which is rather a collection of extracts than a history. Making use of all this
