Hebrew literature

The classical period was from the 10th-c to the 4th-c BC, the time of the composition of the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) and much more of the Bible, though some of the later books are in Aramaic. The Hebrew Mishna and the Aramaic Gemara form the Talmud, the basis of Jewish law and scholarship. After AD c.220 Hebrew became a literary language only. The centre of Jewish culture moved from North Africa to Muslim Spain (7th-c–-15th-c), where it experienced its Golden Age. Despite frequent persecution, Hebrew literature survived through the Middle Ages, when many fine piyytim or liturgical poems were composed. European (especially Spanish) Judaism produced several important Hebrew writers, such as the poet and philosopher Solomon Ben-Judah (Ibn Gabirol, c.1020–1070), Judas Ha-Levi (c.1080–1141), and Moses Maimonides. In the 16th-c and 17th-c Poland emerged as a major centre of Jewish learning. Hebrew literature contributed to the 18th-c Hebrew enlightenment (the Haskalah) in Germany, Galicia, and Russia with Moses Mendelssohn, and to the 19th-c novel with Abraham Mapu's Ahavat Zion (1853, The Love of Zion) and the poetry of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. The 20th-c saw a revival of Hebrew literature with Zionism and the State of Israel, though writers such as I L Peretz (1851–1915), Shmuel Agnon, and Amos Oz also wrote in Yiddish.

Hebrew literature consists of ancient, medieval, and modern writings in the Hebrew language.

Most Jewish religious literature is written in Hebrew. Jewish worship services were compiled in book form primarily in Hebrew, originally by Amram Gaon and Saadia Gaon.

These works of Hebrew literature were in many cases combined or augmented with additional literature in a language that was more familiar to Jews at the time. These rabbis and their successors in Spain, Provence, and Italy translated many works of Jewish, Muslim, Greek, and Roman philosophy and science into Hebrew from Arabic. The influx of subject matter into the Hebrew language forced an expansion of its vocabulary.

In the eighteenth century, the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) movement worked to achieve equality and freedom for European Jews by promoting Jewish culture as equal. Moses Mendelssohn's translation of the Hebrew Bible into German inspired interest in the Hebrew language that led to the founding of a quarterly review written in Hebrew.

In the late nineteenth century, some writers who later became known largely for their Yiddish writing, such as Sholom Aleichem, started out by composing in Hebrew.

During the same period, the rise of the Zionist settlement in Palestine encouraged the use of Hebrew as a shared language among the various Jewish immigrant communities. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in particular worked to adapt Hebrew to the complete range of modern purposes. All of the earlier periods of the Hebrew language provided words to revive, words to repurpose, and routes to import additional foreign words.

In 1922, Hebrew became an official language of the British Mandate of Palestine.

Today thousands of new books are published in Hebrew each year, primarily works of Israeli literature.