Introduction

For a long time, Israeli literature tried to become a secular-national literature and to “free itself from the ‘burden’ of its religious past.”¹ In this context, recent academia states a shift away from the biblical as a striking feature of modern Hebrew writing.² In contrast, Mizrahi literature as a subgenre of Hebrew literature, is characterized by the fact that it always drew from the holdings of Judaism, including numerous direct and indirect biblical quotations, religious symbols, or Jewish mysticism as well as hints to the popular literature of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), or piyyutim. In various aspects Mizrahi writing represents a broad and present spectrum of biblical references in literature. Thus, Mizrahi prose and poetry refuses the dichotomies of the canon and has not sided with the ideal of either secular or religious. Against this backdrop the following paper argues that the biblical intertextuality by Mizrahi authors must be read as a complex interaction with Jewish traditions in modernity. For this purpose, three examples of popular works of recent years are analyzed.

The article sheds light on the place of the Jewish Bible in Hebrew literature by Mizrahi authors. It is devoted to examples which are of ambivalent biblical allusions. They bear witness to complex identifications. They do not necessarily testify to a religious positioning but to a social milieu and are used as figures of speech or cultural symbols. Almog Behar’s Tchahla ve-Hezkel (2010), Sara Shilos’ Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou (2005), and Shimon Adaf’s Mox Nox (2011) are presented as spotlights of biblical intertextuality in modern Mizrahi writing. The authors belong to the second and third generation of Mizrahi literature in Israel and stand for a cross section of this writing. There are explicitly religious Mizrahi authors, as Haim Sabbato (b. 1952 in Cairo, Egypt) for example, whose literature and style is precisely influenced by piyyutim. Haviva Pedaya’s (b. 1957 in Jerusalem, Israel) poetic work contains obvious cabbalistic and mystical elements. Authors such as Dan-Benaya Seri (b. 1935 in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine), and Mira Kedar (b. 1956 in Jerusalem, Israel) draw on biblical stories and language too. Besides that a turn toward religious poetry can also be observed in the 2010s.³ Nevertheless, the selected works are more representative of modern Mizrahi literature and its relationship to religion, while the explicit religious authors have a rather limited impact. The books presented here are directing religious content at a predominantly secular audience and by that, they blur the dichotomy of secular and religious through a literary approach.

Even though Mizrahi literature is unique in Israeli literature in this respect, this perspective has hardly been considered so far. In the reception of Mizrahi literature, the ethnic tensions between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim and the experience of migration often overlay the religious implications. The following analysis attempts to connect the ethnic and biblical threads. Based on the three examples I want to illustrate a biblical continuity in Jewish writing and Israeli culture and discourses. With a certain freedom in dealing with the biblical texts as well as the intertwining of Jewish motifs with other cultural frameworks of the Arab world, modern Mizrahi fiction connects to Jewish textual traditions and draws a multifactored positioning. In this context the examples also raise the question of what role traditionalism (Masortiyut) plays for Mizrahiyut in Israel. The following analysis shows that the Bible has many faces, and its textual diversity is still visible in various forms.

Tchahla ve-Hezkel (2010)

Tchahla ve-Hezkel (“Rachel and Ezekiel,” 2010) is an example of a striking reference to the Bible and its tradition in modern Mizrahi writing. In a high, artful language, which is somewhat difficult to access even for Hebrew readers, Almog Behar’s (b. 1978 in Netanya, Israel) novel tells the story of an initially childless married religious couple, living in the poor quarters of Jerusalem. Hezkel first works as a printer, Tchahla is a housewife. The print shop in which Hezkel works produces religious literature as well as secular fiction, which gives him a mediated connection to non-religious poetry and literature. When Hezkel gets fired, he starts to look for new employment. Through a chance encounter, he begins to write and present poetry himself at the café ‘Tmol Shilshom.⁴ In Hezkel’s becoming an author, the story is reminiscent of a Bildungsroman. Central to the plot is that Tchahla and Hezkel, who met through a shiddukh,⁵ struggle to communicate with each other. The book is characterized by silence as a theme and yet the language is the outstanding feature of the book. In the background, economic misery and poverty are always smoldering.⁶

The novel expresses its ambivalence towards religion even before the actual content begins: the book is dedicated to Sasson Somekh (1933–2019), an author, translator, outspoken secularist, and former Professor for Arabic Literature at the Tel Aviv University, as well as to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1920–2013), a Talmudic scholar, the spiritual leader of the Haredi SHAS party and the Sephardi chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983. This seemingly contradictory paratext points to a certain spiritual and religious influence, but also to an intellectual, scientific, and worldly perspective, that Behar tries to merge.

The first sentence of the novel makes the setting of the plot apparent. Through the opening saying “הלכה למשה מסיני”‪⁷‬ [halakha lemoshe misinai, “a law given to Moshe in/from Sinai”]⁸, a phrase used to describe oral laws in Jewish tradition, the context can be clearly placed in the field of Jewish practice. The action takes place between Jerusalem’s narrow lanes, small synagogues, the couple’s apartment, that of his teacher Ovadia, and the literary café ‘Tmol Shilshom, which points to a contemporary plot. The number of characters is limited but most of them are explicitly religious, traditional protagonists, which can be seen in their everyday practices, the spaces where they act, but also in their language. This limited but spiritual and intellectual world is a place rarely visited by Hebrew literature.⁹ Although the setting is specific, Tchahla ve-Hezkel tells a human story about relationships and loneliness, about understanding and misunderstandings, and about living together in a diverse immigration society.

Tchahla ve-Hezkel is drawing from the Talmud, piyyutim, and the Hebrew Bible itself. Hezkel, who is not entirely distinguishable from the narrator,¹⁰ discovers his talent to write. As he himself remarks, his writing is clearly based on his religious education and knowledge of the Jewish sources, prayers and piyyutim¹¹: “Maybe if I also put together a few lines that I’ve heard in the prayers and that I know by heart, and insert some words of mine in between that come to my mind, I can also write words as a song and call it my song,”¹² he thinks.

Behar makes use of a complex syntax, which is not strictly a Tanakhic or Talmudic language, although the Jewish sources resonate in it. Throughout the book there are recitations of prayers traditionally said at the Biyur Hametz ceremony or the blessing on wine and grape juice, for example,¹³ but also contemporary, vernacular language as well as Arabic sentences.¹⁴ Besides the biblical verses and phrases, which are liberally incorporated in the book, the text contains intertextual references to other Mizrahi literature and research, such as Haviva Pedaya, Sasson Somekh, Ella Shohat, Sami Michael, and Erez Biton.¹⁵ Behar uses them all quite freely, which underlines the crossovers in his work. The complexity of the various characterizations in Behar’s book is expressed, for example, in a scene in which the protagonist is standing in line at the bank and at the train station. In these worldly places, his mind wanders. He recites Shir Hashirim, the book of Song of Songs, which is quoted with great regularity, and which he had to learn by heart, but after two lines he forgets the wording.¹⁶ The motif of the forgotten text is repeated a few times in the book.¹⁷

Behar strews his novel with biblical verses as well as rabbinical idioms, a practice that reminds writers of the Haskalah. One example of biblical intertextuality in the text can be found in the topic of naming. As in other works by Mizrahi authors, Behar takes the names of the protagonists as an opportunity to link the migration narrative with biblical stories. On page 232 it is mentioned that the characters originally had other names when they arrived in Israel. Rabbi Ovadia, for example, was called Abdallah and his wife Mazal, Georgette. These names refer to an Arab (Iraqi) and North African, respectively French colonial (Moroccan), context. Behar addresses the fact that many immigrants, upon their arrival in Israel, had to shed their old names in favor of new Hebrew names. Names, like Georgette for example, had the fragrance of foreign countries attached to them and names like Abdallah were even more associated with the supposed new Arab enemies. Migrants in Israel therefore had to be “Hebrewized,” which is what the Jewish-Hebrew names Mazal and Ovadia stand for. This theme is repeated earlier on page 203 of Behar’s novel, where a Midrash on the book of Exodus, or Shemot, is indirectly quoted:

… How will you be prepared for miracles and wonders if you change your names and your languages and your clothes, for which the Israelites in Egypt were praised for not changing their names, nor changing their language, nor changing their clothes, nor did the Israelites in Babylon change their names, nor change their language, nor change their clothes, whereas you are the children of Babylon in Israel you changed your names and you changed your language and you changed your clothes, we changed our names and we changed our language and we changed our clothes …¹⁸

This biblical intertextuality appears frequently in Mizrahi literature. Almog Behar, as well as the poet and activist Sami Shalom Chetrit (b. 1960 in Errachidia, Morocco) in his poem Ele Shemot (“These are the Names,” 2003) for example, allude to the Exodus from Egypt in their wording.¹⁹ The content, however, also refers to the Midrash Leviticus Rabbah 32, which lists four reasons for the liberation from Egypt: first, the Israelites did not changed their name, second, they kept their language, furthermore, they did not speak bad of others, and fourth, they were not sexually promiscuous. These reasons can also be found in the Lekah Tov written by the Talmudist Tobia ben Eliezer or the writings of Rabbi Eliyahu Habahur, who said that Israel did not change their name, their clothing, and their language in Egypt. In the figurative sense Behar, as well as Chetrit, retell the Israelite genealogy and point to a gap: those who came to Israel in the 1950s and 60s were forced to change their names and language.²⁰ By that the prevailing narrative in today’s Israel rendered Georgette and Abdallah invisible and allowed only one narrow Jewish narrative. In other texts, this experience is emphasized more clearly as a trauma of migration; in Behar’s case it is more implied.

Many authors recalled the Exodus from Egypt as well as the Babylonian exile and the parable about the tower of Babel in the book of Genesis. Since these stories are dealing with themes such as migration, homeland, and language, they are frequently invoked in Mizrahi literature. The intertextuality is an approach to retell modern migration experiences in traditional images.²¹ The literary scholar Avraham Balaban argues in this context that “despite losing its religious content, the biblical stories are still narratives that can be recycled and retold, or transferred … to modern Israel.”²² Tying in with universal Jewish stories can be read as an attempt of the authors to make the memories relatable for non-Mizrahi Jews, for example, and to make themselves heard in Israeli society, which is still Ashkenazi-dominated. These selective motifs nevertheless highlight certain values from the canon. Here they fulfill a political purpose and parallel the immigration of Jews from the Arab world to Israel in the twentieth century. Several references to Babel can be also found in Shimon Ballas’ early work Hamaabara (1964) or in Mona Yahia’s When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad (2000), for instance. Due to its geographical location, Babel was a particularly suitable reference for Iraqi writers.

Besides the ethnic gap, the theme that most characterizes Mizrahi literature is the complex relationship to Arabic as a culture and language. Apart from the Jewish influences, Arabic elements are also important for Behar’s novel. The reference to Mizrahi history and discourse in the book is provided, among other things, by the historical Black Panthers group in Israel. Hezkel does not want to join the political movement of his friend, the “New Black Panthers”; politics does not seem to interest him very much.²³ The Panterim Hashhhorim [הפנתרים השחורים, The Black Panthers], to which reference is made here and whose name is directly linked to the Black Panther movement in the USA, was founded in 1971. The group’s protests initially took place in Musrara, a former Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem. Later, numerous Mizrahi citizens across the country joined the protests. By August of the same year, the movement had held demonstrations throughout Israel with up to ten thousand participants. Their demands included the upgrading of Mizrahi housing, higher wages and improved working conditions, better and free access to education and healthcare systems, and greater representation of Mizrahim in Israeli politics and public life.²⁴ The movement is referred to in the book as the “New Panthers,” suggesting that there is continuity in the Mizrahi concerns. The evocation of the movement in the present points to the structural problems that have become entrenched since the original movement in the 1970s. Although Hezkel is not interested in a commitment to the group, he identifies with the Arab part of his personality. He for example, buys Umm Kulthum’s Arabic music with the little money he has, or reads Mizrahi poetry, fiction, and research.²⁵ Furthermore the gradually revealed storyline that Hezkel has an Arab half-brother through his father, indicates a strong but complicated relationship with Arab culture. It is no coincidence that this story is also reminiscent of Abraham’s son Ishmael with the Egyptian maid Hagar (Gen 16–17). It thus points to a natural closeness but also a remarkable distance between the unequal Arab and Jewish siblings. These remarks in the text point to the ambivalence that links Behar’s book with the other works presented below.

Behar became known for his short story Ana Min Al-Yahud (“I am one of the Jews,” 2005) in which Arabic as a culture and language comes to the forefront even more than in the novel. Ana Min Al-Yahud won Haaretz’s prestigious short story competition in 2005 and caused a stir among the Israeli public with its subject of the linguistic distress of the Mizrahim. The story, whose oxymoronic Arabic title irritated its Hebrew audience, addresses the loss of Jewish languages. The narrator, who miraculously forfeits his knowledge of Hebrew, suddenly lapses into his grandparents’ Arabic diction. For the Israeli police this makes him indistinguishable from Palestinians. His attempts to reclaim his Israeli-Jewish identity on a linguistic level fail. Although he professes to be “one of the Jews” [انا من اليهود, ana min al-yahud], he falls under a general suspicion precisely because of his language as a marker of non-belonging. As the story unfolds, the ominous “Dybbuk” of aphasia begins to infect other Israelis of different backgrounds, who also revert to the different accents of their ancestors. In confronting his parents and grandparents, who had laboriously broken away from Arabic, and resisting the virus, the narrator decides to remain silent. But even silence no longer represents a way out of his tragedy: he is nevertheless imprisoned and, as someone who is read as an Arab, particularly harassed. Through the impossibility of the narrator’s return to his Israeli-Jewish identity, Behar confronts his reading audience with the pain of the linguistic dilemma and the despair over the loss of the common Arab-Jewish heritage.²⁶

Tchahla ve-Hezkel comes to a head with the planned pessah seder, which is intended to bring together the different positions to one holiday table, typified by the different invited protagonists. Behar’s characters, however, are not completely absorbed by either the Jewish or the Arab culture and always remain in the in-between. Tchahla ve-Hezkel demonstrates an ambivalence between secular and religious, and between the Jewish and migrant identity, in a special way. Compared to other books in the genre, Jewish sources have a significantly higher relevance. More clearly than others, Behar chooses religion as a literary, thematic, and stylistic framework to narrate the identity conflict. The following paragraph introduces Sara Shilo’s novel Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou in which this reference is chosen more restrained.

Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou (2005)

Sara Shilo’s (b. 1958 in Jerusalem, Israel) award-winning novel Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou (“No Gnomes Will Appear,” 2005) sheds light on an implicit approach to the Bible. The novel consists of individual monologues and became especially known for its striking language use, but in a different way than Behar’s novel. The story is about a family in the Israeli periphery and is set in the early 1980s, shortly after the historic Knesset election of 1977. Shilo’s and Behar’s novels are comparable in their remoteness, however, the characters are not religious as in Behar’s book. They therefore represent a different religious orientation. The plot of Shilo’s novel, which has been translated into several languages, takes place in a Masorti, traditionalist-influenced surrounding, which is especially evident to Israeli and Hebrew readers. It can be assumed due to implications to the football club Beitar Yerushalayim or recurrently motioned assembly of the historically significant person of Rav Meir Kahane (1932–1990), the founder of the right-wing, religious party KAKH (כך). Kahane as well as the logo of his party, a “fist, yellow in a puddle of black”²⁷ that forms a Star of David, are described in Shilo’s novel. Time references in the book are also often based on Jewish holidays.²⁸ However, religiosity is more of a subplot that can easily be overlooked in the translations. Cultural knowledge is a precondition here.

Since most of Shilo’s book is written in a supposedly lower language register, there is rather less reference to artistic biblical Hebrew phrasings. At first glance, the Hebrew in Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou seems to be a secularized slang or everyday language–the vernacular serves for communication and has no higher meaning. Nevertheless, the word “God” alone occurs almost a hundred times in Shilo’s novel, and the first generation of immigrants also use spiritual Arabic terms or phrases, such as (min) allah²⁹, inshallah³⁰, or ya rabb.³¹ Especially in the chapter of the two brothers, Dudi and Itzik, liberally biblical allusions can be found. They relate to the creation of the world by God,³² the delivery of the Ten Commandments to Moses at mount Sinai,³³ to the Garden Eden, or to the story of Noah.³⁴ Here a selective choice of topoi and well-known biblical narratives is taken up. The main topic of the brothers’ monologue is their complex relationship with each other, with God, and with the falconess Delilah, whom they raise to defend them from terrorists. The ease and confidence with which the protagonists in Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou use the biblical metaphors indicates a high intertwining of Jewish motifs in their daily lives and thinking. The narratives are presupposed to some extent.

I have apologized to Herzl and King David and Abraham, Itzhak, Ya‘akov and the four mothers, and also Hagar, whom I put with them, for how she was sent to the desert to die with Ishmael, and I also apologized to all IDF Soldiers …³⁵

In this quote, modern Zionist symbols are mixed with religious ones. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed Israel 1948 a democratic and Jewish state. The self-conception of the state has therefore always been theological. There is no formal separation between state and religion in Israel’s legal and political system to this day. Religion is intertwined at all levels of governance and society.³⁶ As a result, faith in the public sphere and political rhetoric is indeed more dominant in comparison to other Western countries. In literature, biblical narratives have long served to unite the spiritual past with the political present. The Bible nurtured a national romanticism which served as a proof of the historical continuity between land and people.³⁷ Since Palestine’s topography was full of symbolic attributions, the Bible also lent an influential intertext for imagining or describing a Jewish state by Hebrew writers in the twentieth century.³⁸ As mentioned above, dealing with the topics of migration and exile in Hebrew literature also promoted the reference to canonical imagery. In the quotation out of Shilo’s novel, the Bible functions as a cultural metaphor. The biblical genealogy stands side by side with secular, patriotic tokens such as Theodor Herzl or the Israeli Army. Jewish textual tradition is here meant as a cultural, nationalist symbol. The series in Dudi’s apology points to the entanglement of the Jewish textual traditions in the Israeli statehood and everyday culture. As in this quotation, the Bible functions as a political and thus Zionist narrative in Israeli literature.³⁹ Even though the references are quite mediated, the Israeli cultural context enters through the biblical intertextuality in Shilo’s novel and help to situate the plot in a very specific cultural and literary tradition.

The biblical allusions in the text are used quite freely, as Itzik’s following comparison of the cinema with paradise shows:

Believe me Dudi, when you go into the movie you’re not in the world anymore. It’s paradise, I swear paradise. […] Only that the guard of the paradise is Shushan, the son of a bitch, not such an angel.⁴⁰

The cinema serves as a heterotopia to the neglected neighborhood in Shilo’s text. For the disillusioned Itzik and his little brother Dudi, it is an exceptional refuge and a transcendent place. For them, film is the only way to encounter Western culture and opens up a foreign world that exceed the closed space of their own milieu and cramped surrounding: “Movies are mandatory, without [them] you’d die here.”⁴¹ The positive biblical metaphor, however, is disrupted. The cinema does not quite correspond to paradise on earth. Shushan is not an “angel,” as he catches the children trying to squeeze into one pair of pants as “on the ark of Noah” to hide and save one entrance fee. Dudi and Itzik have a complicated relationship with religion and feel abandoned by God. The cinema nevertheless opens a sphere of the fantastic for the brothers and suggests that imagination alone enables the protagonists to overcome their geographical marginality and limited perspectives.⁴²

Rabbinical quotes can also be found in the novel. Their high-flown Hebrew stands out clearly. The literary scholar Vered Shemtov notes that the role of the Bible in Hebrew literature has changed. She argues that biblical intertextuality in contemporary fiction is less common than it was in the past and therefore is often very striking in the texts.⁴³ This is especially true for the rabbinic quotations in this book. It is important to point out here that these sayings are used by the probably Ashkenazi manager of the factory,⁴⁴ in which the oldest brother Kobi works. Regarding the wave of layoffs ordered by the local authority, the factory manager quotes Mishna Pirkei Avot: “Beware of the authorities” [הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, m. Avot 2:3]⁴⁵, and enlists Kobi in his plan. The sayings are expressed in a business-related conversation. They are used to describe a certain work ethos, to moralize hard work and sacrifice and, not least, to end the meeting. Since Ashkenazi figures in Mizrahi literature are usually characterized in a rather secular way, and because Kobi adds, that the wording of his boss makes him feel like “you’re back in school,”⁴⁶ the quotes can be interpreted as a statement of authority which establish the hierarchy between the two characters. They irritate by not confirming the lower language of the previous chapters. By that the rabbinical sayings attest to an intellectual approach and educational horizon that the proletarian Mizrahi characters, despite their traditional background, do not seem to have. Nevertheless, the quotes are taken out of their spiritual context and seem to be used more like proverbs than as religious wisdom. Kobi’s alienation is also reinforced in another scene in which he says the Kaddish for his father. The corresponding bow he casually describes as doing a “yes with the head.”⁴⁷

The main protagonists in Shilo’s novel are the elder daughter, Etti, and the mother, Simona. The father is completely absent due to his sudden death. Contrary to the patriarchal and orientalist stereotype, Mizrahi writing often rather testify to a female dominance in families, multifaceted and dynamic relationships between women, and initiation stories of upstanding girls. Authors like Ronit Matalon (1959–2017), Orly Castel-Bloom (1960), Dudu Bussi (1963), Sami Berdugo (1970), Dorit Rabinyan (1972), and Shilo show widowed, divorced, single, working, loving, rising, but also broken women. Interesting in relation to gender and Bible is also, that the brothers in Shilo’s novel name their beloved falcon after Delilah, Shimshon’s lover in the book of Judges,⁴⁸ who in Jewish tradition is mostly interpreted rather negatively as a non-Jewish femme fatale. The falcon turns out to be male and is therefore killed. The aforementioned reference to Hagar, the Egyptian maid and Abraham’s concubine, also ties in with this. Interestingly, Castel-Bloom, an author of Egyptian origin, also evokes the image of the female demon Lilith from the book of Isaiah in her novel Dolly City (1992), as well as in the short story Ummi Fi Shurl.⁴⁹ Lilith and Delilah here epitomize women who refuse to be defined by men. Both are hardly present figures in the Bible but are personified with the danger of the beauty as well as with the evil. Here, reference is made to a mode of resistant femininity that can be traced in other aspects in Mizrahi fiction as well. Analyzing Mizrahi literature through the lens of gender likewise reveals no distinct positioning in the spectrum of religiosity and secularism, but rather a broad spectrum of female characters with confident decisions for and against traditionalism but also uncertainties about faith.

Shilo chooses a peripheral place instead of a holy place, such as Jerusalem in Behar’s novel, for her action. The protagonists even seem alienated from the sacred sites, as can be seen, for example, in the fact that Etti does not seem to develop any connection to the nationally relevant sights during a school trip to Jerusalem and is only interested in the radio tower.⁵⁰ This shows how biblical places, which are also ordinary places in today’s Israel, are opened up for non-religious interpretations in Israeli literature. As argued, Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou nevertheless takes place in a Masorti surrounding. In this way, the novel depicts a milieu that is rare in canonical Hebrew literature, but which reveals a very specifically Mizrahi-Israeli space. Dudu Bussi’s book Ima Mitgaagaat Lamilim (“Mom is Longing for Words,” 2006), for example, but also Shimon Adaf’s novel Mox Nox, analyzed below, refer to a similar environment.

Mox Nox (2011)

Shimon Adaf’s (1972 in Sderot, Israel) œuvre consists of detective novels, poetry, short stories, science fiction, and fantasy. More or less obvious references in the texts suggest that the main characters are usually Mizrahim.⁵¹ Adaf’s writing is moreover known for strong mystical and mythical undertones and references to multiple texts and languages.⁵² Mox Nox (“Night is Soon to Come,” 2011) is Adaf’s fifth novel and the counterpart to his previous novel, Kfor (“Nuntia,” 2010), a religious dystopia and Arim Shel Mata (“Undercities,” 2012), which he published afterwards. The series Kfor, Mox Nox and Arim Shel Mata can be read as a trilogy on the subject of religion, but Mox Nox is considered one of Adaf’s more accessible and realistic books.⁵³ As Shilo’s Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou, Mox Nox won the prestigious Sapir Prize in 2012. In the context of this analysis, the chosen novel represents an intermediate form: it takes an explicit approach to religious identity. It refers to a similar social and spatial remoteness as Shilo’s book, but faith is, as in Behar’s novel, much more present for the Mizrahi identity of the characters. At the same time, biblical quotes are encrypted, modified, and used sparingly, significantly less than in Behar’s book. In Adaf’s book, Mizrahiyut is primarily presented as a question of religion and class. Kfor, which is also accounted in the analysis at the end of the chapter, in turn refers strongly to the tradition of piyyutim.

Mox Nox is divided into two parallel narratives, between which there is no chronological alternation. It consists of 51 short chapters, constantly moving back and forth between the past and the present. The first autobiographically inspired story part is about a teenager from a religious family. It is set in the southern periphery, from which it is essential to “get out.”⁵⁴ It is important to mention here that the nameless place is labeled as an Ayara. This indicates that it is a former development town, which replaced the Israeli immigrant camps from the early fifties onwards.⁵⁵ Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou also plays in an Ayara. Karen Grumberg points out that especially places like these, which have no political or cultural significance, invite their inhabitants to hold on to traditions and customs.⁵⁶ Therefore, the location is constitutive for the plot and the religious identification in the book. The second narrative strand takes place a few years later. The adult protagonist now lives in southern Tel Aviv, works as an author, and holds literary workshops. Tel Aviv is a completely different place that suggests centrality and participation. Like Hezkel and Etti, the main protagonist here is concerned with gaining a voice. He finds it in writing although his books do not seem too successful or accessible.⁵⁷ Here, too, the author echoes in the protagonist himself.

One of the main themes is the fragility of religious identity. In the first storyline the narrator describes the events of a summer in which the protagonist works in a kibbutz factory for dried fruits, where his father is also employed.⁵⁸ The sixteen-year-old is only moderately suited to the work in the factory, but he requires the money to buy books.⁵⁹ The most significant issue presented is that the nameless boy decides to detach himself from faith and his surroundings, represented by the religious, irascible father figure: ״ברחתי מבית הכנסת מפני זעם אבי״ [“I fled the synagogue from my father’s anger”]⁶⁰, the protagonist notes. He gradually stops praying and instead devotes himself to the Latin language and ancient philosophy as well as philosophy of the enlightenment.⁶¹ Although the kibbutz is a distinctly Ashkenazi and secular place, the loss of faith is attributed to the bookstore and the town rather than the kibbutz. In the kibbutz, the Mizrahi characters are workers and therefore excluded from the actual idealistic space.

The protagonist escapes to the library, to the bookshop and spends a lot of time learning Latin grammar. This thread unfolds the relationship with his father. Referring to earlier poems by Adaf, Dorit Lemberger notes that the image of the cruel father and the intergenerational conflict due to disagreement over religious issues is a reappearing subject in Adaf’s work. Lemberger compares this literary image to Gen 22,⁶² the divine command toward Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac–a recurring motif in Hebrew poetry.⁶³ In fact, the conflict with the father, who embodies religiosity, is central to the book. The motif is implicit, but here, too, the father virtually sacrifices the relationship to his family for his piety. All children, but also his wife, explicitly or inwardly turn away from him. The biblically negotiated bond between humankind and God becomes a negotiation of the relation between people in Adaf’s novel. In an interview from 2012, the author defines his own relationship to Judaism as follows:

Nowadays I am not religious in the institutional sense, but it is something I cannot escape from. All my aesthetics pass through the Jewish world. I am a machine built by Jewish engineers and the chief engineer was my father. My main dialog is with the Mishnah, the Talmud and the Rambam, and I move between great love and loathing for this. When you grow up in a strict religious home, the Halacha is the first thing you hate.⁶⁴

Mox Nox largely dispenses with theological questions. Judaism is traced through symbols as prayers, the synagogue as a place of action, ritual objects, and religious clothing (kippah, tallit, tefillin). Biblical intertextuality is highly implicit. In very abstract and coded scenes, however, the protagonist reflects on the creation of the world, for example, or makes linguistic reflections on rabbinic, Latin and Hebrew vocabulary.⁶⁵ However, Jewish culture becomes more present through the language used. The Masorti milieu of the book influences linguistic processes in terms of word choice, syntax, and morphology. Biblical vocabulary appears occasionally in the form of idioms or proverbs and specific verb conjugations. Chapter eight, for example, begins with a biblically inspired phrase: חמתו של אבי בערה להשחית״״ [“My father’s anger burned within him (to the point of destruction)”; Esther 1:12]⁶⁶, which appears in a similar form in the book of Esther, when Vashti refuses to appear before the king Ahasuerus. In the same dialog, the protagonist also uses the biblical saying: ״על אפך ועל חמתך אני אלך״ [כִּי עַל-אַפִּי וְעַל-חֲמָתִי; “Even if it makes you angry”; Jer 32:31]⁶⁷ towards his father. The proverb quoted on page 135, ״שהמושל ברוחו וכובש את זעמו״, for example, refers also in the context of anger to rabbinical literature.⁶⁸ The quote echoes a formulation in Rabbi David Kimchi‘s commentary on Kings 1:2: ״ומושל בנפשך וכובש את יצרך״ [“And a ruler in your soul and conquers your desire”; RADAK on 1 Kings 2:2]. Religious language is used throughout the novel, but characterizes in particular the description of the father.

In her research dealing with the speech of Mizrahim in Israel, the linguist Yehudit Henshke establishes the concept of Ivrit Masoratit [“traditional Hebrew”]. Henshke argues, that a widespread traditionalism among Mizrahim, is reflected as a sociolinguistic feature in the “language of the Israeli periphery.”⁶⁹ Henshke’s concept therefore refers to the living environment of Mizrahim in Israel and thus the plot location of all three novels. Masorti, Henshke says, as it is closely associated with Mizrahi, thus includes a significant component of linguistic and cultural continuity. The religious idiom hence encompasses the cultural space of its speakers as a contemporary Israeli identity. The language which is closely linked to the places symbolizes a shared Mizrahi memory of customs, feelings, values, and beliefs.⁷⁰ It is therefore not surprising that many Jewish, Middle Eastern religious and textual traditions are interwoven in contemporary Mizrahi fiction. Omnipresent proverbs, metaphors, creeds, and words from the semantic field of the biblical traditions shape the language of the protagonists in Mizrahi literature and poetry and in the Israeli periphery, which they map. The wording characterizes the social, spiritual, and political milieu. The intertextuality with the Bible contributes to the definition of the literary world and the environment in this literature. This turns rabbinical and biblical language into a modern artistic and political tool.

The ongoing search for the relationship between the world and language is a central theme throughout Adaf’s writing.⁷¹ Mox Nox mixes a colloquial Hebrew, a high-level religious speech, and the Latin language (in Hebrew transcription). The book’s title, an expression that in Latin means “night is soon to come,” and its meaning of “the matter is expedited” or “something approaches the matter,” points to ambiguities. The linguistic diversity and the crossovers refer to the experience of disassociation and fragmentation of Mizrahim in Israel. However, Adaf’s story shifts not only between languages but also between times and spaces: the protagonist „simultaneously belongs and does not belong” to neither of the two settings.⁷² Adia Mendelsohn-Maoz notes in this context, that by replacing the Zionist ideal of a stable identity with a process of “becoming” and the absence of a set home and temporality, the book “presents an aesthetic alternative that deliberately resists any fixed notion of space and identity.”⁷³ Lemberger also claims appropriately, that the hybridity in Adaf’s work enables him to overcome the particularism of identity politics. By confounding the readers expectations, he steps out of the representative mode and asks universal questions.⁷⁴ Adaf’s work thus opens options in-between.

Both Adaf and Behar grew up in a traditional environment. The spotlights on their work show that their literary project is clearly based in the culture of traditional Sephardic Judaism. Behar’s style and language refer to liturgical poetry, the Halakha and the Midrash. Their writing is an exceptional example of the presence of ancient texts in modern Hebrew writing. As in Behar’s novel, piyyutim play a central role in Adaf’s dystopia Kfor, which combines science fiction and fantasy with a deep grounding in Judaism. In the book itself piyyutim are presented as the right to express oneself.⁷⁵ The plot centers on investigation of people reciting religious poems without having passed the corresponding exam–likewise contagious phenomenon, for which there is initially no kosher medicine.⁷⁶ The misappropriation of the liturgy leads to misery.⁷⁷ Gideon Katz states, that the recurs on Piyyut in Kfor “reinforces the image of Judaism as a semi-lost entity.”⁷⁸ Although Adaf’s dystopia “focuses on the life of an Orthodox community and describes the life and faith of its inhabitants,” Katz argues that the reference to piyyutim hint “at another kind of Judaism, dissimilar to both the Judaism of the Diaspora and to the Israeli stereotype of the ultra-Orthodox.”⁷⁹ The reference to piyyutim at this point is thus not only Jewish, but Mizrahi Jewish. As a similar practice in the Ashkenazi tradition was lost over time, the liturgical poems have shaped Sephardic culture in particular.⁸⁰ In her book Return of the Lost Voice, the author and scholar Haviva Pedaya herself discusses the influence of piyyutim on Israeli culture. She notes a secularized opening in the cultural field from the 1980s onwards.⁸¹ According to Pedaya, the search for identity in the Israeli context can also be cited as a reason for the turn to piyyut in pop culture.⁸² Adaf’s and Behar’s work are impressive examples of this development, as they deal precisely with these questions. The religious intertextuality moreover contributes to the specific context of the literature, adds depth to the language and characters, as well as layers of meaning to the text. In relation to the question posed in this article, the reference to piyyutim can be defined as a feature of Mizrahi writing.

Conclusion

Israelis of Mizrahi background are, according to public opinion, on average more religious than Ashkenazim, Jews of European descent. All three books point to this cultural localization in different ways. Many studies do indeed show a widespread traditionalism among Mizrahim.⁸³ Yet, some also argue that the increased identification with Judaism is to be understood precisely as a reaction to an anti-Arabic marginalization in Israel.⁸⁴ The thesis here, however, is not that biblical intertextuality affirms this attribution, but on the contrary—that references to Jewish tradition can be read as an opposition to Zionist ideals of secularization and equalization and as a confident attempt of self-constitution. A number of scholars have argued that the dichotomy of religious and secular is a Western pattern that was adopted in the pre-state era and Israeli Zionism.⁸⁵ Traditionalism, in contrast, can be seen as one path in between the poles of religiosity and secularism—as a way of dealing with religion in the modern age.⁸⁶ Masorti identity does not turn its back on religion and tradition—but rather conveys a sense of compatibility. The analysis here has shown a dialog with the attribution and a broad range in relation to literature.

The reference to the Hebrew Bible in Jewish and Israeli literature is marked by different phases. Especially since the Haskalah the Bible has been considered as an important wellspring of inspiration for Jewish prose as a whole.⁸⁷ The literary scholar Gershon Shaked states that through an open, secular, and sometimes subversive reading of the Bible, Hebrew literature becomes a “modern midrash.”⁸⁸ All three novels, Tchahla ve-Hezkel, Shum Gamadim Lo Yavou, and Mox Nox can be described as such. Of course, non-Mizrahi writers also dealt with religious content and symbolism, Shmuel Yosef Agnon (b. 1887 in Buczacz, Galicia/Austro-Hungarian Empire, d. 1970 in Rehovot, Israel) being perhaps the best-known example. However, Mizrahi literature is characterized by the fact that it has defied general conventions and has always been ambivalent. Ballas’ work Hamaabara, which can be described as the first Mizrahi novel in Israel, for example, already contained direct quotations from piyyutim, although secularization was particularly demanded during this time. Both on the linguistic and on the religious level, Mizrahi literature cannot be rigidly defined. While Hebrew literature has tried to reposition itself as secular, examples as analyzed above show that the Bible is a cornerstone of Israeli and Jewish identity.⁸⁹ By an open and interpretative approach, Mizrahi authors testify to the ongoing dialog with the Bible in Jewish tradition—but also offer new directions for reflecting it. The three works show how dynamic Judaism is and how hard it can be, to assign identities to two poles.

Meanwhile, several authors with a Mizrahi background have questioned the monolithic ideals. Adaf, Behar, and Shilo were just three examples of different approaches regarding religion. Of course, this cannot be an overall judgment of all Mizrahi literature, but the examples should emphasize the diversity of dealing with the Bible as a Jewish textual source and a cultural background for Israeli society. They show how Mizrahi literature responds to the prevailing dichotomies in Israeli society. The analysis has illustrated that the Hebrew Bible continues to be, and in a variety of ways, an important cultural and literary source for modern Hebrew literature and that Mizrahi authors are not deterred from referring to it. The Tanakh’s richness and the art of its language continue to influence Hebrew writing of all kinds to this day. It is an important poetic inspiration for Israeli writers, and, not least, for their means: today’s modern Hebrew language. In contrast to the general abandonment of references to the Bible in Hebrew literature, which was also noticeable in the impoverishment of language,⁹⁰ all three novels suggest, what Gershom Sholem claimed 1926 in his famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig; that the modern Hebrew language is inseparable from its religious well in the Tanakh. The books are characterized by sophisticated crossovers between the biblical, rabbinic, modern Hebrew, and the Arabic language. Their multilingualism creates a unique literary language in modern Mizrahi literature. The Bible as well as the rabbinical sources provide, as we have seen in Adaf’s novel, numerous figures of speech and idioms. Behar’s novel was used to show how the biblical allusions generate meaning and give density to the text. The Bible offers symbols, metaphors, and points of reference for Jewish identities and Hebrew writing, which is evident in Shilo’s work.⁹¹ Mizrahi literature thus offers a compromise between modernity and traditionalism, both in terms of content and language.

It is important to point out the peculiarity and differences at this point. This development cannot be reduced to a stylistic device but also reflects social trends and the resurgent role of religion in Israeli society.⁹² However, analyzing Mizrahi literature in the context of this topic, also runs the risk of perpetuating stereotypes. The reference should therefore not be read merely as an affirmation, but rather as a complex engagement with a modern Jewish identity or even as an attempt to counteract the hegemony and its narratives. Modern Mizrahi literature thus blurs the distinction between the secular and the religious and helps to expand Judaism from different perspectives.