Sharon B. Oster. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 368 pp.

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Sharon B. Oster Julian Levinson Sharon B. Oster. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 368 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001077 Sharon Oster's insightful, well-researched book is framed by a discussion of the notorious Seligman affair, which she describes as a turning point in the relationship between Jews and American society. In the summer of 1877, the German Jewish financier Joseph Seligman was denied entry to the prestigious Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, on the grounds that he represented what hotel manager Judge Henry Hilton called a class of "ostentatious … vulgar" outsiders who were "repulsive to the well-bred" (8). Seligman was a Jew "in the trade sense of the word" (8) and hence deemed irredeemably unfit to rub shoulders with the leisure class. Scholarship on Jews in America has dwelt considerably on negative stereotyping of Jews, but Oster draws attention to the surprising note of praise that Hilton reserved for another kind of Jew: those like the old New York Sephardic families the Nathans and the Hendricks. These represented what he termed the "Orthodox Hebrew Church" (8), a noble religious heritage that the Seligman Jews had long forgotten. For Oster, this opposition between the debased materialistic Jew and the noble Hebrew is a central, if unstable, binary structure in the American imaginary. Seligman may have been sent packing, but the idea of the noble Hebrew endured even from this notorious episode as an alternate source of value, and it is chiefly here that Oster's interest lies. Oster's book may be seen as an effort to reread American literary representations of Jewishness in light of the recent "temporal turn" in the humanities. Whereas many recent scholars of American Jewish culture have analyzed constructions of Jewishness in relation to discourses of race and nationhood (e.g., Sander Gilman, Jonathan Freedman, Eric Goldstein, and Jennifer Glaser), Oster explores how Jews have been associated with competing models of temporality and history. The "Hebraic myth" in her subtitle refers to a constellation of ideas about the deep biblical past within American Protestant culture: biblical Israel is an ancient nation whose erstwhile privileged role in salvation history has been superseded by Christianity; yet it also continues to exert its presence throughout history, either as a typological precedent for Christians (as in the Puritan settlers' self-conception as the "new" Israel), or as a still-legible stratum within the practices, sensibilities, even the physiognomy, of contemporary Jews (as in Hilton's understanding of the Sephardim). As an enduring, alternate locus of meaning within Christian society, the "Hebraic myth" thus complicates the notion of history as a unilinear progression. As Oster contends, "the noble Hebrew marks the disruptive return of the past, complicating narratives of Protestant redemption in anticipation of alternate futures" (25). In order to show a range of uses for this Hebraic myth in American literature, Oster brings together a set of texts written by Jews and Christians (the key figures are Abraham Cahan, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and Emma Lazarus). In her readings, she explores how ostensibly secular literary [End Page 214] texts are bound up with religious modes of thinking, specifically ideas about temporality. Cahan represents New York City as a "crossroads of different orders of time" (85); Yezierska creates a protagonist who "convert[s] her noble Jewish past into the stuff of narrative and social distinction" (221); and Lazarus "harness[es] the Hebraic myth to disrupt typology" (235). Her readings of these figures are solid and illuminating. By linking secular and religious themes under the broader rubric of temporality, Oster enables us to reconsider important questions such as the roles of nostalgia, redemptive futurity, and cultural critique in Jewish American texts. The most original and, to my mind, the truly inspiring sections of the book are those that take up non-Jewish writers, particularly James and Wharton. Anyone interested in the representation of Jews in the classic texts of American literature will especially welcome Oster's extended readings of The Golden Bowl...