During the medieval period, the majority of Jewish and Hebrew literature was composed in Islamic North Africa, Spain, Palestine, and the Middle East.
Moses Hayyim Luzzatto's allegorical drama "La-Yesharim Tehillah" (1743) may be regarded as the first product of modern Hebrew literature.
One of the leading Haskalah writers there was Jehudah Loeb Jeiteles (1773–1838), author of witty epigrams ("Bene ha-Ne'urim") and criticism of Hasidism and superstition.
[8] Italian Jews of the nineteenth-century who wrote in Hebrew included I. S. Reggio (1784–1854), Joseph Almanzi, Hayyim Salomon, Samuel Vita Lolli (1788–1843).
Another figure of note was Rachel Morpurgo (1790–1860), who was one of the few female writers in the Haskalah movement, and whose poems have been described as characterized by "religious piety and a mystic faith in Israel's future".
[7] As Zionist settlement in Palestine intensified at the start of the twentieth century, Hebrew became the shared language of the various Jewish immigrant communities along with native Palestinian Jews of the Old Yishuv, who continued the literary traditions of earlier Sephardic and Arab-Jewish writers such as Maimonedes (Moshe ibn Maimoun) and al-Harizi.
Bialik contributed significantly to the revival of the Hebrew language, which before his days existed primarily as an ancient, scholarly, or poetic tongue.
[10] The novelist Yitzhaq Shami was a Palestinian Jewish native of Hebron, and his work—which was written from the perspective of both Arabic-speaking Jews and Muslim Palestinians—incorporated diverse Arabic, Sephardic, and Middle Eastern themes.
In 1966, Agnon won the Nobel Prize for Literature for novels and short stories that employ a unique blend of biblical, Talmudic and modern Hebrew.
This new generation included the novelists Aharon Megged, Nathan Shaham, and Moshe Shamir, and the poets Yehudah Amichai, Amir Gilboa, and Haim Gouri.
Many Hebrew writers in the late twentieth century dealt with the Holocaust, women's issues, and the conflict between Israelis and Arabs.
Contemporary Israeli authors whose works have been translated into other languages and attained international recognition are Ephraim Kishon, Yaakov Shabtai, A.
Hebrew poets include David Avidan, Maya Bejerano, Erez Biton, Dan Pagis, Dalia Ravikovitch, Ronny Someck, Meir Wieseltier, and Yona Wallach.