"Returning to the People": Haim Hazaz, "The Yemeni Project," and the Tradition of "The Ethnographic Writer"

• In Event: Mizrachi Jews- Boundaries and Identities

Abstract

Haim Hazaz's "Yemeni Project" signifies a distinct juncture in both Hebrew and Jewish literary traditions for multiple reasons. There are scant instances where an author's engagement in systematic and in-depth ethnographic investigation has significantly influenced their literary output as it has in Hazaz's case. This lecture aims to situate Hazaz and his project within the evolving tradition of "the observing writer" or "the ethnographic writer" in modern Jewish literature. This tradition emerged from the literary persona cultivated by nineteenth-century Yiddish writers such as Y.L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, and Sholem Aleichem, and persisted through manifestos like "The New Direction in Hebrew Literature," in literary journals such as "Ha'Omer," and in the narratives of figures like Moshe Smilansky and Nechama Pohatchevsky. It also included the paradigms proposed by literary figures and ethnographers such as Leo Tolstoy and Sh. Ansky.
In my presentation, I will contend that Hazaz, through his ethnographic explorations during the 1920s and 1930s and especially via "The Yemenite Project," only partly perpetuated these traditions. Indeed, Hazaz's ethnographic endeavors transcended the national or romantic mandates of his predecessors, most notably reflected in the substantial discrepancy between the comprehensive ethnographic data he amassed and the limited representation of these findings in his literary publications.

Author

• David Rotman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem