Construction Of Jewish Identity Research Articles

Minding the Body: Space, Memory, and Visual Culture in Constructions of Jewish Identity

While it is well established that articulations of identity must always be contextualized within time and place, only when we consider how bodies move through, touch, and are touched by physical, cognitive, and even imaginary spaces do we arrive at dynamic and intersectional expressions of identity. Using two divergent visual culture case studies, this essay first applies Setha Low’s theory of embodied spaces to understand the intersection and interconnection between body, space, and culture, and how the concept of belongingness is knotted with material and representational indicators of space at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Israel. Marianne Hirsch’s ideas about the Holocaust and affiliative postmemory are also considered to further understand how Jewish bodies inherit their identifies and sense of belonging. To test how embodied spaces and affiliative postmemory or collective memory implicitly operate to help shape and articulate expressions of Jewish identities, the focus then shifts to a consideration of the eight-decade career of New York jazz musician and visual artist, Bill Wurtzel. The clever combination of “schtick and sechel” in Wurtzel’s artistic practice, activated by his movement through the Jewish spaces of his youth such as the Catskills, and through his interaction with Jewish design great, Lou Dorfsman, underscore how Jewish belonging and identity are forged at the intersection of physical and tactile “embodied spaces,” where the internal meets the external and human consciousness and experience converge.

Between Neighbors and Strangers: Representations of the Indigenous People of America and Construction of Jewish Identity in Early Modern Western Europe

Between Neighbors and Strangers: Representations of the Indigenous People of America and Construction of Jewish Identity in Early Modern Western Europe

Anti-Semitism and Orthodoxy

This article explores the way theories of race and religion feature in the construction of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. It focuses on the writings of the nineteenth-century French intellectual Ernest Renan and the leading Eastern European Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin.

The Construction of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Serbia: The Case of the Musician Josif Schlesinger

The Construction of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Serbia: The Case of the Musician Josif Schlesinger

Converts in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Gēr and Mutable Ethnicity by Carmen Palmer

Reviewed by: Converts in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Gēr and Mutable Ethnicity by Carmen Palmer Aryeh Amihay carmen palmer, Converts in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Gēr and Mutable Ethnicity (STDJ 126; Leiden: Brill, 2018). Pp. xii + 231. €95/$114. This comprehensive study of the term gēr in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a revised version of Palmer’s Ph.D. dissertation (University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 2016; supervised by Sarianna Metso and Judith Newman), seeks to fill a lacuna in Second Temple [End Page 124] scholarship. As Palmer notes in her introduction, “to date, no monograph and only a little over half a dozen articles exist” (p. 17) for this specific topic. Her research question is stated clearly at the opening of the volume: “what is the meaning of gēr when the term is employed within the Dead Sea Scrolls?” (p. 1). The primary reason that this question has far from a simple answer is the distinct terminological shift that occurred in this term from denoting the resident alien in the Hebrew Bible to marking the convert to Judaism in rabbinic parlance. Hebrew will sub sequently clarify the ambiguity by references to a resident gēr and a righteous gēr, but this is a rabbinic development. In Second Temple times the confusion is not yet apparent, and hence it is unclear which of the two, if either, is designated by the term. Evidently, any inter -pretation carries with it the danger of imposing notions that are foreign to the text in question. Although P. presents her research question as a limited, almost lexical, inquiry, the scope of the study goes far beyond philology. A remarkably systematic approach guides the discussion, allowing the author to make astute observations and offer firm statements on foundational matters relating to the scrolls. The introduction presents a careful and thorough survey of scholarship, familiarizing the reader with the problem at hand, demonstrated by the array of possible interpretations of the term gēr. Any doubts that this small word merits such close inspection are certainly dispersed by the end of this chapter. The survey also addresses the concept of gēr in scholarship of the Hebrew Bible, as well as two crucial concepts for the understanding of Second Temple Judaism: the notion of sectarianism and the debate over its evidence in the scrolls, and the construction of Jewish identity as an ethnic, rather than a religious, identity. Following this survey, P. presents her own methodology and states the conclusions of her research: in the Dead Sea Scrolls, she claims, “the gēr is always a Judean convert whether included as a sectarian movement member, or excluded as ‘yet a gentile’” (p. 40). The conclusion that the terminological shift occurred before rabbinic times and outside of the circles of the scrolls could raise some concern that P. is reading the scrolls through the lens of later Jewish sources. This is plainly not the case, however, as she carefully catalogues each occurrence of the term in the scrolls and thus cements her argument in the internal evidence of the scrolls themselves. Chapter 2 is dedicated to examining each of these occurrences. It opens with some background material that perhaps belongs in the introduction, including the social history of the sectarian movement and whether it should be identified with the Essenes (pp. 42–48). P. is skeptical about this identification but concludes that to link the sect reflected in the scrolls with the Essenes is “neither accurate nor necessary for the present task” (p. 48), setting the debate aside. A discussion more pertinent to this chapter is the relationship between the Damascus Document texts (D) and the Community Rule texts (S). P. considers to be extreme Eyal Regev’s opinion (Sectarianism in Qumran: A Cross-Cultural Perspective [Religion and Society 45; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007]) that these texts reflect entirely different movements (p. 50), but she nevertheless finds the distinction of these two groups of texts helpful, as they suggest “two dominant traditions within the sectarian movement” (p. 51). This prism proves to be one of the most innovative contributions of the volume, as P. then proceeds to analyze each...

Construction of Jewish Identity in Philo's Sabbath Explanations

Construction of Jewish Identity in Philo's Sabbath Explanations

Building Babylonian giur

Review of Moshe Lavee's The Rabbinic Conversion of Judaism: The Unique Perspective of the Bavli on Conversion and the Construction of Jewish Identity (2018)

Gendered Language and the Construction of Jewish Identity in 2 Maccabees

Gendered Language and the Construction of Jewish Identity in 2 Maccabees Joshua Ezra Burns (bio) When thinking about Judaism and gender, it is a common misconception to assume that the interface between the two is an exclusively modern phenomenon. According to conventional wisdom, Judaism is an ancient construction steeped in the scientific and sociocultural sensibilities of people who lived long before the contemporary distinction between sex and gender came to be articulated as such. Yet as that distinction has made its way into the discipline of Jewish studies, several scholars have observed that the ancient sages who authored Judaism's Talmudic intellectual canon exhibited acute anxieties about the instability of gender binaries analogous to those detected by contemporary gender theorists in modern texts. Thus, they have proposed to look within classical Jewish texts for signs of non-binary gender identities later written out of Judaism by self-appointed regulators of rabbinic orthodoxy.1 In this paper I hope to contribute to this project with a discussion of the earliest text that identifies Jewish culture as "Judaism." This text is 2 Maccabees, a second-century BCE Jewish composition predating the Talmudic era and preserved exclusively in Christian scriptural traditions. I shall contend that the author of 2 Maccabees used gendered language in his construction of Judaism to make the point that women were just as likely as men to exemplify its values, a point lost on subsequent Jewish generations who propagated more strictly hierarchical gender regimes. Finally, I argue that it useful to understand 2 Maccabees' negotiations between Jewish and Greek culture in the work. Interrogating Jewish Identity in Antiquity Before considering how 2 Maccabees articulates its author's sense of Judaism, it will be instructive to address what it meant to be a Jew in antiquity.2 Conventional wisdom has it that it meant something not unlike what it means to be a Jew today, namely to identify in whole or in part with the multifaceted religious, ethnic, and cultural system traditionally known as Judaism.3 Yet the very premise of describing "Jews" and "Judaism" in antiquity has been challenged [End Page 107] of late, eliciting a minor scholarly imbroglio with far-reaching implications for the documentation of the Jewish past.4 That debate is a consequence of an apologetic trend in biblical scholarship that started in the mid-twentieth century. After the Holocaust, Christian theologians became sensitive to the ills of antisemitism and sought to dull the sharp rhetoric against the Jews embedded within their sacred texts. Their solution, as it were, was to change the translation of the Greek term ioudaios (plural: ioudaioi), a linguistic cognate of "Jew" utilized in the New Testament and traditionally understood to indicate the Jewish identities of Jesus' opponents. As the hostile portrait of those Jews had given Jews in general a bad reputation in Christian discourse, scholars took to rendering ioudaios no longer as "Jew," but as "Judean," an ostensibly value-neutral demonym indicating nothing more than its subject's association with the long-since-vanished territory of Judea. The Christian animosity once heaped upon the Jews was thereby redirected toward the Judeans, a people who could not possibly be offended since they no longer existed as such.5 Yet what began as a well-meaning effort to circumvent the vilification of the Jew in early Christian texts eventually went off course. In his new edition of the writings of the first-century CE Jewish chronicler Flavius Josephus, Steve Mason decided to take the premise of recasting Jews as Judeans to its logical conclusion. Following the precedent of New Testament scholarship, Mason opted to render the generations of ioudaioi documented by Josephus as Judeans, effectively erasing every last Jew from the historian's work.6 He explained his rationale in a subsequent publication addressed to his detractors,7 first noting that the Greek word ioudaios and its Latin cognate iudaeus were commonly understood in antiquity to indicate one's nationality or ethnicity. According to Mason, the reinvention of the ethnic "Judean" as a religious "Jew" was the result of an invidious Christian arrogation of the terminology in question. Early Christian writers seeking to malign the erstwhile adversaries of Jesus, Mason maintained, cast...

A Journey across Multidirectional Connections: Linda Grant’s The Cast Iron Shore

Among the numerous groups that have negotiated their fragmented identities through various literary practices in the last few decades, the Jewish collective has come to symbolize the epitome of diaspora and homelessness. In particular, British-Jewish writers have recently started to reconstruct their fragmented memories through writing. This is an extremely interesting phenomenon in the case of those Jewish women who are fiercely struggling to find some sense of personhood as Jewish, British, female, immigrant subjects. Linda Grant’s novel The Cast Iron Shore will be analyzed so as to unveil the narrative mechanisms through which many of the identity tensions experienced by contemporary Jewish women are exhibited. The different stages in the main character’s journey will be examined by drawing on theories on the construction of Jewish identity and femininity, and by applying the model of multidirectional memory fostered by various contemporary thinkers such as Michael Rothberg, Stef Craps, Max Silverman, and Bryan Cheyette. The main claim to be demonstrated is that this narration links the (hi)stories of oppression and racism endured both by the Jewish and the Black communities in order to make the protagonist encounter the Other, develop her mature political self, and liberate her mind from rigid religious, patriarchal, and racial stereotypes. The Cast Iron Shore becomes, then, a successful attempt to demonstrate that the (hi)stories of displacement endured by divergent communities during the twentieth century are connected, and it is the establishment of these connections that can help contemporary Jewish subjects to claim new notions of their personhood in the public sphere.

On Goldman’s <em>The American Jewish Story Through Cinema</em>

On Goldman's The American Jewish Story Through CinemaEric A. Goldman, The American Jewish Story Through Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-292-74430-1 (hc), US $55.00; 978-0-29275469-0 (pb), US $25.00.Eric Goldman's cultural case studies of nine mainstream representative films join a growing body of key studies of the American Jewish experience(s) that portray the social history of reel Jews and Jewish issues. The book recounts the Zeligesque process of mimesis, adaptation, and assimilation, as represented throughout the twentieth century through film. The book is clearly written and places its subjects in a general historical context that incorporates primary documents as well as personal interviews with filmmakers such as Barry Levinson.Goldman's scope is limited to nine American-made films: The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1958), The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973), The Prince of Tides (Barbra Streisand, 1991), Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990), Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson, 1999), and Everything Is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2005). This focus allows him to illustrate themes such as coming out of the ghetto (The Jazz Singer); anti-Semitism in the 1940s (Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire); guaranteeing acceptance (The Young Lions); the evolving Jewish woman as a strong, successful, assertive, and vibrant professional (The Way We Were, The Prince of Tides); the fragmentation of Jewish life, offered as a paradigmatic sketch of the American Jewish immigrant experience (Avalon, Liberty Heights); and the new trend whereby the search for home in Eastern Europe's pre-Holocaust shtetl represents the comfort of identifying with Jewish heritage, and the search for a usable past by which to construct a transcontinental multigenerational Jewish identity (Everything Is Illuminated).Goldman's book, which broadens our understanding of acculturated Jewishness as represented in American cinema, develops further the mid-1980s surveys of American Jewish film by Patricia Erens (The Jew in American Cinema, 1984) and Lester Friedman (The Jewish Image in American Film, 1987). However, Erens's and Friedman's surveys attempt to cover the entirety of American film history and deal in general outlines, whereas Goldman's focuses on a small number of case studies that specifically raise questions about the construction of Jewish identity, assimilation, and Jewish-gentile social and economic relations. (Further recent groundbreaking work has also appeared in print.)1Goldman, the author of Visions, Images, and Dreams: Yiddish Film-Past & Present (2011), is well positioned to draw on his experience as curator of film for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he supervised the preservation of archival Yiddish films. For many years Goldman also developed and moderated the film program at the Center for Jewish History and Yeshiva University, and in 2011 he served as film curator at the International Yiddish Theatre Festival in Montreal.A great strength of the book is Goldman's tracing of the ideological tensions behind adapting a book to film. The novel The Young Lions, for example, was published by Irwin Shaw in 1948. Its later film adaptation involved many differences of interpretation over how to represent the plot, which followed the lives of three soldiers during World War II. Shaw bitterly disagreed with Marlon Brando's sympathetic portrayal of Christian and with the playing down of the anti-Semitism that Noah encounters in the original book. Shaw felt Brando unjustifiably exculpated the perpetrators and bystanders in a way that did an injustice to the victims of the Nazis. The process and product of this contested adaptation would reveal a shift in the ways some Americans came to respond to images of the Holocaust. Goldman's analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), as adapted and directed by actor Liev Schreiber, also brilliantly reveals how the author revealed what it means for an American Jew without a known immediate connection to the Shoah to return to an annihilated European shtetl to confront unfinished business. …

Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy

We examine the notion of obscenity in relation to constructions of Jewish sexuality in stand-up. Since Lenny Bruce, stand-up has been defined by extreme licence. Acknowledging that stand-up is reliant on the construction of performer identity, we examine the routines of Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, female Jewish contemporaries of Bruce, in contrast to Bruce, and show that Bruce used his construction of Jewish identity as a scourge to beat a wider, more general audience, whereas Barth and Williams used theirs as a way to ridicule and deflate themselves and their mainly Jewish audiences. All accused of obscenity, these comedians referred to themselves as ‘dirty’ rather than obscene, implying a contrast between dirtiness and obscenity. Exploiting this distinction, they pushed the latitudes of comic licence. Although they all attacked hypocrisy, their targets and goals were different. Some 60 years later, Bruce is generally acknowledged as the father of modern stand-up – he is immortalized and beatified – whereas Belle Barth and Pearl Williams are forgotten. We argue, however, that their personae persisted in Bruce's female inheritors: Joan Rivers, and Sarah Silverman. We examine selected material from Rivers and Silverman, tracing public and domestic uses of ‘dirt’ as a means of attack in Jewish comedy. Their performances stringently interrogated social mores while simultaneously questioning and comically deflating obscenity. We conclude that, as with their forerunners, in their intensely Jewish construction of self, obscenity is licensed as simply dirtiness.

You Can’t Pick Your Family

Familism is a model of a social organization that assigns the family an important role in individual and collective identity. This article proposes a historical analysis and interpretation of the Seder celebrations of Jewish Israelis, in order to explore what is unique about Israeli familism—that it imagines the entire nation as an extended family. This ritual continues to be widely practiced today by Jews of every sector—secular, traditional, and religious. As a result, it has a significant presence in Israeli popular culture. The focus is on two questions: (1) who celebrates? That is, what forum convenes around the table? (2) How is it celebrated? That is, what ritual is conducted during the festive gathering? The historical and ethnographic analysis shows that over the course of the twentieth century, the extended family became the preferred forum for celebration, and that the conformist reading of the Haggadah and the other parts of the ceremony continue on the whole to follow the Orthodox rules, even in secular families. This mode of celebration is analyzed here as an expression of the political image of the entire Jewish people as one large extended family and as a demonstration of the extensive use of Jewish familism in the construction of Jewish identity in Israel today.

Cinema Studies/Jewish Studies, 2011–2013

In an era of massive university budget cuts and pervasive malaise regarding the future of the humanities, cinema and media studies continue to be a growth industry. Many academic fields have been paying increasing attention to film, in terms of both curriculum development and research. Jewish studies is no exception. Since 2011, a boom in publications has included a range of new books that deal with Jews on screen, Jewish themes in cinema, and the construction of Jewish identity through film. To assess what these recent titles contribute to Jewish cinema studies, though, requires assessing the parameters of the field—and that is no easy task. The definition of what belongs is as elastic as the boundaries of Jewish identity and as perplexing as the perennial question, who is a Jew? Consequently, the field is wildly expansive, potentially encompassing the many geographical locales where films on Jewish topics have been produced as well as the multiple languages and cinematic traditions within which such films have emerged. At issue are not just numerous national cinemas, but also transnational productions and international histories. Yiddish film, for instance, was produced in Poland, the Soviet Union, the US, Argentina, and other places as well. Compounding the challenge of assessing the field of Jewish film is the fact that Jewish studies overlaps with Holocaust studies, itself a vast enterprise that has grown dramatically over the past two decades. A simple WorldCat search, restricted to scholarly books from respectable academic presses, turns up dozens of titles on cinema and the Holocaust published since the year 2000. Not surprisingly, the long-standing debates on “what is Jewish literature?” have morphed into controversy over “what is Jewish cinema”?

Jewish memory and family heirlooms (based on materials from field studies in St Petersburg, 2010–11)

The article presents the results of a field study carried out within the framework of the project “Family Heirlooms and Jewish Memory,” which resulted in the organisation of an exhibition at the State Museum of the History of Religion in St Petersburg. On the basis of interviews collected from the owners of the heirlooms, the article examines relations between owner and object, as well as the practices of storage and the presentation of such things. These practices are defined as a particular channel of existence for family memory, which plays an important role in the construction of Jewish identity on the basis of ancestry.

The Expression ביד רמה in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Legacy of the Holiness School in Essene Legal Texts

The Hebrew expression ביד רמה (“with an uplifted hand”) is used in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls to convey defiance and arrogance. It is also used to qualify intent with respect to sin. This essay examines how data from the Qumran library significantly enhance our knowledge about how the expression was used in ancient Judaism. Special emphasis is placed on how a rare meaning found in the book of Numbers was used to shape religious law in many of the sectarian texts found at Qumran. Essene writers would not have made distinctions between what modern scholars label as Priestly and Holiness source materials in pentateuchal books, but modern literary analysis of the Pentateuch can shed light on how and why certain texts had the particular influences that they did in history. This paper suggests that the legal/literary innovations of the postexilic Holiness School ultimately played a role in the later development of Essene/sectarian constructions of Jewish identity. Literary and linguistic analyses can provide a partial genealogy of sin between the Holiness School and the Essenes. The Holiness School’s extension of the concept of holiness from the collective to the individual made it possible for the Essenes to develop a unique notion of Jewish identity that tied the Torah faithfulness of various types of individuals to their community status.

Thinking about Belonging in Early Rabbinic Literature: Proselytes, Apostates, and “Children of Israel,” or: Does It Make Sense to Speak of Early Rabbinic Orthodoxy?

Abstract This paper offers a modest contribution to the discussion of the rabbinic construction of Jewish identity in Tannaitic times, by showing that in the few occasions in which early rabbinic texts relate to the question of belonging in the Jewish community they do not consider belief as a relevant category for the discussion. This, I suggest, indicates that for Palestinian rabbis of the first, second, and early third century, Jewish identity was not a matter of belief and doctrine. Rather, it was either a matter of birth and descent, or a matter of loyalty to the covenant.

Repositioning The “Holy Remnant” of Israel: German Jewish Negotiations with Christian Culture on the Eve of the Holocaust

By maintaining the spiritual centrality of Israel as God’s “holy remnant,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, unwittingly perhaps, entered into negotiations with Jewish thinkers over their continued theological and cultural relevance to German society. This paper focuses on the Jewish side of these negotiations by examining the work of three Jewish thinkers who helped shape them, Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Joachim Schoeps and Martin Buber. Despite their divergence from one another, the theological approaches of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber represent a common attempt to map out the course of twentieth-century Jewish identity construction based on a shared, but at times unacknowledged engagement with Christian thought and culture. Their writings constitute a mutual opposition to the perceived failure of their forbearers in the Wissenschaft des Judentums to balance Jewish particularity and universalism, while at the same time reflecting a desire for varying degrees of mutual coexistence with their Christian contemporaries. Ultimately the work of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber confirmed Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the continuing validity of Jewish existence in relation to God during the Holocaust, while at the same time providing models for a later, dialogical mapping of Jewish identities vis à vis Christianity in an increasingly multicultural, post-Holocaust world.

Between Orient and Occident

This paper revisits the fabled yet substantially neglected public exchange between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem in the wake of Arendt’s publication of the book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Analyzing the central concept of the correspondence, Ahabath Israel, the paper investigates what may be considered two diametrically opposed constructions of Jewish identity and politics. Scholem’s particularistic “politics of continuity” is analyzed in terms achieving continuity or even unity between past and present, the sacred and the secular. This construction is supported by his ultimate dividing line being between the Jewish and non-Jewish, where his correspondent’s place is constructed outside the boundaries of the group. In turn, Arendt introduces the rigidly universalist constitutive categories of post-Enlightenment liberal democracies, where the firm demarcation is drawn exactly between the sacred and secular, the religious and the politics. Consequently, the intrusion of a religious tradition is understood by her as an attempt by Scholem to render otherwise earthly objects beyond the limits of criticism, manifesting not only a racist but a downright totalitarian tendency. Having presented these radical positions — Occidentalism and Orientalism, respectively —, the paper will conclude with pondering the possibility of their reconciliation.

South Africa's Newest "Jews": The Moemedi Pentecostal Church and the Construction of Jewish Identity

This article examines the Moemedi Pentecostal Church, a small, recently established group outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it reviews the origins and theology of the church with particular emphasis on members' assertion of Jewish identity. The Moemedi Pentecostal Church (MPC) emphasizes the Old Testament and biblical Jews in a manner common to many Zionist churches in Africa. While it is common among Zionist churches for congregants to believe they are God's "new chosen people," MPC members take the additional step toward self-identification as Jews, even while claiming no historical Jewish identity. The Moemedi Pentecostal Church broke off from the International Pentecostal Church (IPC) after its founder, Frederick Modise, died in 1998. While continuing to embrace Modise's teachings, members of the new group eschew the divine messianic qualities many in the IPC attribute to him. The result is a complex blend of Zionist and Jewish elements in the MPC. This article suggests that the claim to be Jewish made by the members of the Moemedi Pentecostal Church is related to their assertion that they have a true understanding of Moemedi's function as a human messiah, as opposed to the divinity attributed to Moemedi by members of the IPC.

The Rebel Queen and Constructions of Jewish Identity in Late Victorian Britain

This essay examines The Rebel Queen, a novel written by Walter Besant and illustrated by Adolph Birkenruth for serialization in The Illustrated London News in 1893. The text and images tell the story of Francesca Elveda, a young woman who does not know that she is Jewish because her mother—estranged from the faith herself—keeps her identity from her. The turning point of the narrative is Francesca's realization that she is in fact Jewish. As her heritage is revealed to her, tensions arise between the visibility and invisibility, the stability and the instability, of Jewish identity. This paper argues that the complexity of The Rebel Queen rests in the way it relies on a racial worldview even as it contests antisemitism. Equally multi-faceted is the novel's representation of patriarchy: although the author is attracted to Jewish culture because he admires its preservation of male dominance, his female characters are more developed and more sympathetic than his male characters. While realist in style, the philosemitic dimension of The Rebel Queen imparts an undercurrent of Orientalism.