Japhet in the Tents of Shem: Rabbinic Hermeneutics and Modern Literary Theory

Abstract

The article is devoted to the extremely fruitful “meeting&8j1; of modern literary theory with traditional Jewish hermeneutics that took place in American literary criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. American poststructuralists sought not only to read Jewish sources using the optics of a new theory of reading based on the ideas of J. Derrida and R. Barthes, but also to see in rabbinic hermeneutics an actual source of models, images and terms for modern text theory. An analysis of the approaches of S. Handelman, H. Bloom, D. Boyarin shows that for them the terms of Kabbalah, the Midrash technique, and the rabbinic notion of the role of the interpreter, of tradition and innovation, stabilization and deformation of the canon have become tools for solving problems of modern literary theory. For these authors, the problem of continuing tradition in a situation of breaking with tradition and the problem of the theoretician's situation on the border of two worlds came to the fore. We can talk about the aspiration in poststructuralism to a triple reading of traditional Jewish texts: both as sacred texts, as objects of scientific study and as “modern” theoretical texts. In turn, the texts of modern theory are read by American poststructuralists as a continuation of an ancient tradition.