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The Messianic Impulse in the Life and Poetry of Isaiah Tishby

Tue, December 18, 10:15 to 11:45am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Backbay 1 Complex

Abstract

This paper will focus on the messianic orientation in the personal life and poetry of Isaiah Tishby. As a young man Tishby wrote copiously in Hungarian for various literary outlets in Hungary and Transylvania including major Jewish magazines of the period, such as "The New East" and “Past and Future,” which at the time was under the editorship of Yosef Patai. In an effort to imbue the cultural zeitgeist of the times, he moved from Transylvania first to Budapest and then to Vienna in the 1920s “to absorb the atmosphere of a cosmopolitan city with a vibrant Hebraic culture.” In his first anthology of poems, "Sötét Percek éneke" (Songs of Dark Moments), Tishby devotes several poems to contrasting the bucolic mood of the countryside of his youth with the menacing darkness of city life in Budapest. Born Sándor Schwartz, the first volume of his early poems already denotes a marked shift in his emerging self-perception. Associating himself with the biblical prophet Elijah and invoking the poem of the famous Hungarian symbolist poet, Endre Ady, “On Elijah’s Chariot,” he changes his name to Illés (Elijah) Tisbi. Embracing the zeal of the prophet and no longer content with the bourgeoisie salons of Budapest, he finds his calling as a Jew in the return to the ancient land and language of the Jewish people and immigrates to Mandatory Palestine in 1933. As a tourist he sets out on a pilgrimage and as he humorously notes, “forgets to leave.” From then on, Tishby’s research as a scholar of Kabbalah, as well as his later poetry are defined by a devotion to the Hebrew Language and Jewish intellectual revival in the Land of Israel.

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