THE EMERGENCE OF a modern Jewish literature in Yiddish, Hebrew, and to a lesser extent in German, Polish, and Russian, was a development linked with the modernization of the Jewish communities in the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was only in the 1860s that a word for literature— sifrut (sifrus in the Ashkenazi pronunciation)—became current among the Jews of this area. The development of a literature of this type among the Jews, as among other nations in Europe, was linked to secularization, the waning of the power of religion and of traditional ways of life, and the growth of a consciousness of individual identity. Indeed, much of the literature written by Jews in the nineteenth century, starting with the autobiography of Solomon Maimon (1754–1800), written in 1792 in German by a young Polish Jew who made his way to the Berlin of Moses Mendelssohn, is concerned with the discovery of self. This was a new phenomenon in the Jewish world. To quote David Roskies:

Of course it would be ridiculous to suggest that the Jews had no literature before the nineteenth century. Pre-modern Ashkenazi culture was highly literate and had a strongly developed intellectual life, focused on religion and on the rituals of the Jewish year. (On this, see Volume I, Chapter 5.) This culture did not have a modern historical consciousness. It saw time as cyclical, the repetition of a series of rituals which were coordinated with the yearly reading of the Pentateuch. It also had a sacred concept of history. The Jews had been assigned a special mission by God. When they had deviated from this mission, they had been expelled from their homeland. Their return, through the coming of the messiah, however this was understood, would come about by their repentance and complete carrying out of God's commandments.

The Ashkenazi world was bilingual, and its literature reflected the different roles assigned to Hebrew and Yiddish in its culture. Hebrew, or rather lashon kodesh (literally ‘the holy language’—the mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic in which the Bible and Talmud were written) was the medium of high culture.