Jewish Literature / World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational

Abstract

In the past two decades, scholars of world literature and transnational literary studies have called for an overhaul of the national literature model, in favor of a model based on literature's movement beyond national boundaries. Yet across the spectrum of approaches, scholarship on world literature has focused on the languages of the metropolitan center while largely overlooking the literary cultures of the so-called peripheries. We examine Jewish literature as a transnational and multilingual body of writing whose networks of linguistic and cultural exchange provide a clear counterpoint to the center-periphery model of global literary circulation. Moreover, the essay offers one of the first comparative studies of Eastern European Jewish literature and Middle Eastern Jewish literature, furnishing new methodological tools for a comparative approach to Jewish literary culture.