In Yehuda Amichai’s writings, recurrent instances of visiting ruins
serve to confront individuals with history. This motif appears to
engage with the romantic tradition prevalent in literature and art,
which typically glorifies the ancient majesty of ruins. However, Amichai’s
treatment of ruins diverges from this tradition; Rather than
employing ruins to impart a collective–historical lesson, he employs
them to underscore the ephemeral nature of human existence.
The first sections of this article explore these instances of visiting
ruins, while the subsequent sections focus on a specific subset:
ruined synagogues. Through depictions of synagogues in the Galilee
(in the northern part of Israel) and in Würzburg, both in his poetry
and prose, emerges the unique, humanistic ethics of Amichai’s
oeuvre.

The ties that bind the Greco-Roman and Hebrew cultures together are strong and convoluted, from as early as their beginnings in ancient times. This chapter deals with the encounter of modern Hebrew poetry with the Greco-Roman classical tradition, situating it in the polarized relations between the two cultures, as well as in their close and symbiotic interactions. Complex historical residues played a role in the relatively belated reception of Greco-Roman classical elements in modern Hebrew literature. And while Greco-Roman elements contributed to the shaping of Hebrew literature as part of modern European culture, they were not integrated deeply into it. It was only after the Second World War that a window of opportunity for a common cross-cultural destiny opened up, when Hebrew writers saw the shared platform of the two cultures as a bulwark against fascism. At the same time, the belatedness in the reception of elements of the Greco-Roman classical tradition in Hebrew poetry prevented them from being “eroded”, as it were, by the Biblical corpus (the main point of reference of Hebrew literature) – by becoming, for example, objects of irony or parody.