Making Sacrifices: Visions of Sacrifice in European and American Cultures. Opfer bringen: Opfervorstellungen in europäischen und amerikanischen Kulturen ed. by Nicholas Brooks, Gregor Thuswaldner

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 205 ment is clearly laid out in her introduction, and she meaningfully engages in interdisciplinary debates about religion in modernity. Kelly presents a diverse account of modern Russian Orthodox culture—in both traditional and unorthodox manifestations—that complements and complicates existing scholarship on Western European poetry in the more familiar contexts of Catholicism and Protestantism. Jefferson Gatrall Montclair State University Making Sacrifices: Visions of Sacrifice in European and American Cultures. Opfer bringen: Opfervorstellungen in europäischen und amerikanischen Kulturen Edited by Nicholas Brooks and Gregor Thuswaldner new academic press, 2016. 216 pp. € 29.90 paperback. This book represents the first volume of Symphilologus, the book series of the Salzburg Institute of Religion, Culture, and the Arts, and comprises twelve articles that reflect on the meaning of sacrifice in modern European and American culture. The title “Symphilologus” is based on German classics scholar Friedrich Creuzer’s term Symphilologie—meaning to collaboratively transcend traditional academic boundaries—and is intended by the volume editors as a bringing together of different disciplines in which religion will play a special role. The subjects in this collection fulfill the volume ’s eclectic goal of interdisciplinarity interwoven with religious themes. By design, this volume in the series is neither an exhaustive approach to the topic of sacrifice nor a new thesis about the understanding of sacrifice in the West. The introduction by Nicholas Brooks does, however, provide a very useful overview of the history of sacrifice in Western culture, particularly as it relates to the rise of Christianity and its relationship to both the marginalization of ritual physical sacrifice (regarded as superfluous superstition by Enlightenment thinkers Picart, Bernard, Jancourt, and Voltaire) and the theological/philosophical redefinition of sacrifice as an inner state of obedience (Tertullian, Augustine, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel). Brooks concludes his introduction by explaining how modern thinkers have: (1) viewed sacrifice as insignificant with respect to modern theories of political and economic life (Hobbes, Rousseau); (2) denied the clarity needed for dutiful sacrifice (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud); and (3) challenged the very idea of sacrifice itself Religion & Literature 206 given its association with twentieth-century revolutionary politics. Written by scholars from a variety of disciplines and academic institutions (both American and European), the collection includes a fascinatingly rich array of individual studies from a variety of genres: medieval and modern German literature, French literature, music and literature in translation, Yiddish Midrashic poetry, philosophy, visual culture, film, political discourse, and twentieth-century British religious art. Three of the articles are written in German and nine are in English. The style and content will appeal both to the specialist and non-specialist academic reader alike. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac is a key theme revisited across several of the articles. Armin Eidherr’s essay focuses on the modern Midrashic interpretation of the Akejdeß-Jizchok-Mythos (“Binding-of-IsaacMythos ”) by Yiddish authors Itzik Manger und Hirsch Oscherowitsch. Eidherr suggests that these Biblically grounded Midrashic texts be understood in terms of Lyotard’s definition of myth, thus allowing for a re-narration via legend that could be applied exegetically to other historical contexts. J. M. Baker examines the poetics of the singular from recent discussions (Agacinski , Levinas, Nancy, and Ricoeur) that have drawn on or been inflected by Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous treatment of Abraham’s sacrifice in his work Fear and Trembling. Timothy B. Malchow analyzes Turkish-German relations and sacrifice in Fatih Akin’s film Auf der anderen Seite (On the Other Side) and shows how the film applies Koranic and Biblical narratives of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham to the lives of the film’s characters living in modernday Turkey and Germany (depicted in the film as a single cultural space). Malchow explains how Akin reconfigures these sacred sacrificial narratives, effectively destabilizing the ideological hostility between individual duty and universal ethics, and ultimately portraying sacrifice not as the destruction of the other out of duty, but as a “courageous, forgiving willingness to reimagine the boundaries of one’s own identity” in an encounter with the threatening other (159). The volume also considers the wide-ranging influence of Christ’s sacrifice both symbolically and liturgically. Lyrica Taylor’s “Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, and...