The Eastern European Hasidic Hebrew tale corpus is a large collection of hagiographic stories composed during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century by followers of the Hasidic spiritual movement in a region spread chiefly over parts of present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, explains Kahn. The tales offer a unique perspective on the nature of Hebrew in traditional Eastern European Jewish society in the pre-modern period, she says, because they constitute the sole extensive record of narrative and discursive language use from this setting. In addition, the idiom of the tales played a pivotal role in the historical development of Hebrew, being one of the two chief narrative forms of Hebrew--along with the employed by the Maskilim--that flourished immediately before and were the direct forerunners of the revernacularization project in Palestine beginning in the 1880s. She analyzes the language of the tales, considering such elements as orthography, adjectives, pronouns, preposition, clauses, and lexis. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
This volume constitutes the first reference grammar of the Hasidic Hebrew hagiographic tales composed in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern Europe. It presents a thorough survey of Hasidic Hebrew orthography, morphology, syntax, and lexis illustrated with extensive examples.
