The writer AB Yehoshua, who has died aged 85 of cancer, helped project modern Hebrew literature on to the international scene. He came to notice in the 1960s with three volumes of short stories and his books included The Lover (1977), A Late Divorce (1982) and A Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997).
Of his many novels, Mr Mani (1989) was the most highly regarded. Rooted in a long psychoanalytical exploration of fathers and sons, this multigenerational novel explored the destiny of the fictional Mani family and was inspired by Yehoshua’s own lineage. Starting in 1982 in Jerusalem, the book flashes back to Crete in 1944, Palestinian Jerusalem in 1918, Kraków in 1899 and the Athens of 1848. Mainly written in monologues, it often touches on major turning points in Jewish history.
Yehoshua was an enlightened Zionist. An admirer of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, he endorsed Herzl’s opinion that there was “no cure for antisemitism and that the Jew must be changed by separating him from the pathological interaction with his non-Jewish environment”.
Yehoshua thought that Herzl’s imaginary Jewish state (and this was certainly Yehoshua’s fantasy) was that of an idealistic, liberal, secular and democratic land where Arabs had full rights. He was critical of Jews who preferred exile in the diaspora rather than joining those who were part of the first waves of Zionism.
Unlike his Ashkenazi literary contemporaries Amos Oz and Joshua Sobol, Yehoshua was of Sephardi background: his world was not that of the European Yiddish-speaking ghetto but was rooted in Arabic, Greek and Ladino. As a Sephardi, his links with the Arabs nourished his hope for both a Jewish and a Palestinian state. His novel The Liberated Bride (2001) centred on the experience of an Arab student at Haifa University.
Yehoshua’s belief in peace with Arabs was an organic development of his father’s love of Arabic, which he studied and later used as translator for the British colonial and Israeli governments. Arabs were frequent guests of the family, which made the novelist aware that they were “a part of our identity”. In 1990, Yehoshua appeared in the BBC television series Homelands, in which prominent artists examined their own societies, and his 1980 essay Between Right and Right confronted the pressure for a Palestinian state.
Yehoshua was deeply aware of the way Israeli writers are seen as prophets by their own people and sharply commented that he was sure that Martin Amis was not asked for his opinion during the Gulf war. When asked if he would like to have been prime minister during the Oslo peace process, he replied: “Of course. I would give back the territories. Israel could put up a statue to me and I could go back to my writing.”
One of the main doves in the Israeli literary scene, together with Oz, his close childhood friend, he was from 1967 one of the leading members of the activist group Peace Now. He blamed Yasser Arafat for “throwing away the chance of peace at Oslo”.
Abraham Gabriel Yehoshua (his writing name, AB, was based on a childhood nickname) was born in Jerusalem, the son of Malka (nee Rosilio) and Yaakov Yehoshua. His father, a historian and orientalist, was descended from Jews who had lived in Jerusalem for generations; his mother arrived in Palestine from Morocco four years before his birth. He studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University, taught in Israel and then lived in Paris from 1963 until 1967. In 1972 he began teaching comparative literature at Haifa University and was later appointed professor.
A secularist, who hated the fact that Israelis could not marry under civil law, Yehoshua nonetheless was drawn to the vicissitudes of religious dogma. In Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997), he wrote about a Sephardi trader who travels to Ashkenazi Europe for a disputation on polygamy.
In his research, Yehoshua immersed himself in talmudic law and spoke of a certain envy of the religious. He was an Israeli intellectual with no wish to be cut off from the Jewish past and asked, “What do the orthodox think, that we secularists want to be know-nothings?” He found a way to connect the two warring areas of Judaism. At New Year, he would go to the orthodox Sephardi synagogue to hear the melodies of his childhood and at Yom Kippur he would sit with his wife, Rivka, a psychologist, in Haifa’s Reform synagogue.
Yehoshua’s life was full of contradictions. Too old to fight in the 1982 Lebanon war, he was asked to join the educational division and support an invasion that he profoundly opposed. He could not stomach this and withdrew. When his sons were in the army during the second intifada, he was worried about “what they might do to the Arabs”.
His legacy is a complex one. He repeatedly urged diaspora Jews to return to Israel and at the same time championed Palestinian rights. To the outside world, this may have seemed a contradiction, but to the Israeli left, such dreams and ideals were necessary in the dark intifada years. Certainly Yehoshua was never afraid to criticise his people for their attachment to the diaspora. “Even Abraham chose exile rather than the Promised Land. And he was the first Jew,” he said.
Later novels included A Woman in Jerusalem (2004), Friendly Fire (2007) and The Extra (2014); in 2005 Yehoshua was nominated for the inaugural Man Booker international prize – awarded not for an individual publication but for a writer’s body of work. His last novel, The Tunnel, was published in English in 2020.
He married Rivka (nee Kirsninski) in 1960; she died in 2016. He is survived by their children, Sivan, Gideon and Nahum.
• AB Yehoshua (Abraham Gabriel Yehoshua), writer, born 19 December 1936; died 14 June 2022
