Jewish Writers Research Articles

Gehenna Reexamined: Annihilation and Final Punishment in Intertestamental Jewish Thought

Intertestamental Jewish writings often vaguely yet sometimes specifically address the nature and duration of final punishment of the ‘wicked.’ What constituted the ‘wicked’ in the extrabiblical Jewish literature—similarly to the Hebrew Bible—was consistently defined as those who broke God’s moral law intentionally and persistently. For these wrath-appointed persons, their final judgement lay in the commonly recognized and dreaded place (or state) of punishment called Gehenna. This paper will argue that upon examination of intertestamental Jewish writings there is considerable support for the view of Gehenna judgment as a terminable period of suffering leading to complete destruction (annihilation) of the wicked. The approach of this paper will be to analyze intertestamental Jewish writings and the teachings of Jesus in relation to the Gehenna. While the views on death and judgement in the afterlife were as varied in the intertestamental period as they are today, the intertestamental authors’ use language which depicts the final judgment as something which may at times be interpreted as analogous with the traditional—more accurately “Hellenistic”—Christian view of hell, or at times prevents resurrection of the wicked entirely (Maccabees), or majoritively as a punishment which ends in a fiery conflagration spawning an eternal consequence of destruction in its most non-figurative and complete sense.

The Desert as an Inventarium

Abstract This article is about the symbolic representation of the wilderness motif in a selection of rabbinic travel tales, taking into consideration its representation in earlier Jewish writings. The article includes a selection of rabbinic travel narratives found in b. Baba Batra that concern the desert journeys of the remarkable rabbinic protagonist Rabba bar Bar Ḥanna. The hero of the stories is presented as viewing the giant dead bodies of the biblical tribes in the wilderness, Mount Sinai, and Korah and his people, all according to the sequence of biblical events in the books of Moses. Wilderness plays an integral role in these stories. While there is little interest in this motif in Palestinian rabbinic literature, wilderness plays a distinct role in the eschatological process according to the rabbinic theological speculations known from the Babylonian Talmud. According to the selected travel narratives, which all focus on the wilderness, several objects from the biblical past, as well as some items from the dawn of creation, which are designated to play an important role in the eschatological process, are stored there.

Satanwebs and the Torch Bearer: Reading Samīr Naqqāsh’s Unreadable Vernacular Novel

Abstract Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shīṭān (1986) is the great “vernacular novel” of the late Iraqi Jewish writer Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004). The novel, set in the 1940s–early 1950s, tells of the twilight of Jewish Baghdad. Vernacularity and hybridity are the hallmarks of the text’s difficulty, its supposed unreadability and untranslatability. Nzūlah manifests an extreme case of heteroglossia, as it is written in literary Arabic, but also in the Jewish and Muslim Baghdadi vernaculars, while also including hundreds of footnotes that affect and direct the act of reading. In this article, this seemingly inaccessible novel is analyzed through the lens of the theoretical concepts of “untranslatability” and “comprehensibility.” Besides being a lament for a lost homeland, Nzūlah calls for its readers to appropriate a seemingly dying idiom and, in so doing, perform a significant political gesture that resonates with the ways Naqqāsh’s work has been read in both Iraq and Israel since his death in 2004.

Escape to Judaism: Levinas’s First Steps toward Becoming a Jewish Thinker

Abstract This paper recontextualizes Emmanuel Levinas’s intellectual journey of the 1930s, focusing on his first philosophical and Jewish writings and his initial criticism of Martin Heidegger. It demonstrates Levinas’s philosophical transformation using newly discovered texts alongside published writings. These texts illustrate the early stage of his philosophical development and its connection to his first involvements with Jewish thought. An English translation of a newly discovered radio talk Levinas gave in 1937 is appended. This lecture enables a glimpse into the historical and philosophical context of the journey taken by a young immigrant Jewish philosopher in the intellectual scene of 1930s Paris.

A Sephardic female odyssey: homecoming in Ruth Knafo Setton’s The Road to Fez

ABSTRACT Moroccan Jewish writer Ruth Knafo Setton’s novel, The Road to Fez, challenges the Eurocentric silencing of Sephardic female agency. Setton depicts a reverse exile through her main character, Brit, whose return to Morocco subverts the dispossession and uprooting of the Moroccan Sephardim following their forced exile. Central to Setton’s novel is an effort to put emphasis on the Moroccan Judeo-Islamic landscape and mythology. In re-vindicating Moroccan Jewish-Muslim heritage, The Road to Fez further questions the exclusion of Sephardic female voices in Eurocentric readings of Jewishness. Setton presents an alternative Jewish perspective through Moroccan Judeo myths and legends. This article analyzes Setton’s magical realist integration of Moroccan spirituality and superstition into her narrative as an attempt to de-Orientalize the Sephardic female experience. The article argues that Setton incorporates supernatural elements like spell-making and “djnoun” into a realistic setting to express the rich mosaic of Sephardic Moroccan culture and to destabilize pan-Arabist, Zionist and colonial occlusions of Arab Judeo identity.

Identity Loss and Reconstruction in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Day

Mordecai Richler, a contemporary Canadian Jewish writer, reveals the identity confusion faced by Jewish immigrants in their integration into Canadian society through the description of the life experience of the protagonist Duddy Kravitz in his novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). Meanwhile, in the novel Day (1961), Elie Wiesel, a contemporary American Jewish writer born in Romania, examines how Holocaust survivors lose their identities and attempt to seek identity reconstruction within the context of traumatic memories and guilt through the perspective of the protagonist, Eliezer. This article aims to interpret the manifestations and reasons for identity loss and the possibility of identity reconstruction of the protagonists Duddy Kravitz and Eliezer based on identity theory. Through interpretation, it can be concluded that Duddy is marginalized by mainstream society and blamed for anti-Semitism within the Jewish community, resulting in a significant identity crisis. However, his success in purchasing land offers the possibility for him to escape marginalization and achieve identity reconstruction in mainstream society. Similarly, Eliezer, as a Holocaust survivor, experiences identity loss under the influence of traumatic memories and feelings of guilt, leading to questioning the existence of God and a death wish. Nevertheless, in the later part of the novel, he transitions from an unnamed narrator to “Eliezer”, and the ashes left after his portrait is burned symbolize his completeness, allowing him to regain self-identity.

Melmoth Irreconcilable? Supersessionism and Jewish and Christian Responses to the Wandering Jew Legend

Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) draws from the legend of the Wandering Jew, infusing the figure with Faustian characteristics in an evolution already begun in William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799). Maturin’s Melmoth also reflects the anti-Judaism inherent in the Wandering Jew legend, especially supersessionism, which views Christianity as the true fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. The influence of supersessionism endures in discernible, but very different forms, in works influenced by Melmoth in French and in Yiddish. Drawing on Carol Davison’s analysis of Gothic antisemitism and Karen Grumberg’s important exploration of ‘Hebrew Gothic’, this essay discusses how Jewish writers, including Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981), a poet of Yiddish and Hebrew from Lviv, Polish-born Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch (1880–1957), and contemporary U.S. novelist Dara Horn (b. 1977) have appropriated and adapted the legend of the eternal wanderer in ways that could be seen as reflecting a distinctly Jewish response to the gothic.

Illustrating a Jewish Life: Portrait Photography, Biography and the Creation of a Jewish Public Sphere

Abstract Portrait photography is a fixed element in the history of German Jewry. This article asks what we can learn about a Jewish biography like that of the German–Jewish writer Sammy Gronemann by seeking to follow his life’s trajectories through the images he and others created of him and the appearances he coined. It argues that photography not only represented but also actively shaped his work as a writer and a Zionist politician and that it influenced the worlds he inhabited. It does so by situating Gronemann, the German Jew, in the history of German portrait photography, Gronemann, the Western Zionist, in the history of international Zionist image politics and Gronemann, the writer in the history of the creation of a visible cultural scene in the Yishuv and later Israel. Pondering Gronemann’s relationship with visual arts offers insights into the ways public visibility shaped German–Jewish realities both in Europe and in Palestine, both before and after the foundation of the State of Israel.

‘Linguistic compatriots’: on the relationship between Tajik and Judeo-Tajik language and literature

ABSTRACT This paper follows the traces of Tajik and Judeo-Tajik literature in the early Soviet period and compares some prominent works and biographies of Tajik and Bukharan Jewish writers. In the 1920s and 1930s, national literatures were heavily supported by the Party and the state and used as vehicles for propagating the new ideology, creating Soviet nationalities (the Tajiks) and national minorities (the Bukharan Jews). For a period that lasted about ten years, parallels and mutual influences within an emerging scene of Tajik and Bukharan Jewish literature are well documented. While this laboratory of Soviet nation-building continued with the Tajiks, the Judeo-Tajik project was stopped in the late 1930s. From then until the end of the Soviet period, Bukharan Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals contributed to mainstream Tajik culture.

Esther Gad und das gesellige Leben in Breslau um 1800

Abstract The article paints a vivid picture of late-eighteenth-century Breslau and places the Jewish writer Esther Gad, who was married to local tradesman Samuel Bernard in 1791, in the city’s sociable life. Mentioning Gad’s many contacts to writers and philosophers such as Christian Garve, Jean Paul, and Elisa von der Recke, the article singles out Esther Gad’s friendship with Rahel Levin Varnhagen, who visited Breslau in 1794 and described her impressions of the city in letters to her family. In 1798, Gad joined her friend in Berlin, seeking for opportunities in the Prussian capital she did not have in her Silesian hometown.

Esther Gad – eine aufgeklärte Jüdin als Akteurin der Haskala in Breslau. Feministische Perspektiven

Abstract The article presents a close reading of a poem which was written by the local Jewish writer Esther Gad for the occasion of the Jewish Wilhelm School’s inauguration in Breslau on March 15, 1791. On this basis, it offers a feminist perspective on the Jewish Enlightenment: Esther Gad was the first Jewish woman who emerged as a writer in the German language, but the Haskalah did not provide her with suitable conditions for her emancipation as a female Jewish author, as it was restricted to learned men proficient in Hebrew.

Isaac Breuer's Antiliberal Neo-Kantianism and the Politicization of Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy

This article centers on the early writings of Isaac Breuer (1910–17), arguing that Breuer's radicalization of neo-Kantianism anchors his revolutionary call to politicize Jewish Orthodoxy. Moreover, it contends that neo-Kantianism, which is normally associated with liberal or social-democratic politics, was given a thoroughly antiliberal reading by Breuer that led to an antiliberal Orthodox politics. While the rise of non-Zionist political Orthodoxy is often regarded as an obsolete traditionalism unattuned to the nature of mass politics, Breuer's politicization of Orthodoxy reveals a coherent antiliberal political theory that addresses the aporias of the democratic age. Breuer uses neo-Kantianism to develop an anti-Weberian “science of politics” which attempts to overcome the modern plurality of values by positing Judaism as coercive public morality. Reading Breuer's Jewish writings through the lens of his quarrels with Weber, Stammler, and Cohen, this article explores Breuer's attempt to overcome the association of Kantian morality with liberalism, by legitimizing coercion politically, philosophically, and theologically. This enabled Breuer to criticize apolitical forms of Jewish Orthodoxy, Zionist programs to politicize Judaism, and democratic politics more generally.

An Arab Jew Reads the Quran: On Isaac Yahuda’s Hebrew Commentary on the Islamic Scripture

How did an Arab Jew read the Quran against the backdrop of contradictory ideologies and the rise of key movements, including nationalism, colonialism, and Zionism, in Mandate Palestine? Approaching Isaac Yahuda as an Arab Jew challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a linkage perceived as inconceivable, and on the other hand, that linkage is asserted, contested, and tested in the context of nationalism. This article also challenges the advancement of Jewish singularity and superiority by exploring how Jewish writers interacted with the Islamic scripture in Mandatory Palestine rather than dismissing it. This article examines Hebrew interpretation of various passages from the Quran that produced an understanding of the Quran that advanced Zionist ideals, including the nationalization of contested religious sites and the consolidation of the indigeneity of Jews in the East. Isaac Yahuda’s Hebrew commentary on the Quran challenged his Arab Jewishness in such a divisive nationalist atmosphere in Mandate Palestine. His hybrid background and dynamic connections with both Jews and Arabs enabled him to navigate these turbulent times by invoking the Quran, demonstrating respect for it, and at the same time challenging the understanding of his contemporary Muslims while utilizing German Jewish scholarship on the origins of Islam.

Ethnic Ethics: Paul's Eschatological Myth of Jewish Sin

AbstractPaul's letters depict gentiles and Jews with different characteristics of sin. This article focuses on Paul's rhetoric about Jewish shortcomings and argues that he has an eschatological myth of Jewish sin: it is the period in the Jewish deity's plan when he has hardened his people into disobedience and disloyalty. While scholars have traditionally tried to connect Paul's ideas about Jewish sin to deficiencies of historical Jews, Paul's claims are primarily animated by his Jewish eschatological scheme and competitive rhetorical needs. Paul re-emerges as a Jewish writer within his competitive social landscape wherein ethnic differentiation was an expected way of imagining the human and divine realms.

Plato or Moses? The Use of the Antiquity Argument in Hellenistic Jewish Writings

ABSTRACT In antiquity, apologetic defences often included appeals to an ancient past. Fundamental to the ancient mind was a notion that favoured primitive wisdom over contemporary culture, antiquity over novel discoveries. In the ongoing clashes between cultures and ethnicities which signified the Hellenistic era, this notion was often combined with a competitive search for communal recognition and validity. This article offers a survey of Jewish authors in Hellenistic times, who engaged in this battle for old age. The article shows how various Jewish writers employed the antiquity argument through comparative historiography, in which they traced the roots of civilization to ancient heroes of Israel. The article ends with a discussion on the logic, structure, and purpose of the antiquity argument.

Prayer for Family and Friends: The Body and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

AbstractThis article explores how writers, predominantly adhering to a variety of different Christian denominations but also including Jewish writers, discussed religion and the body in letters throughout the long eighteenth century. It draws on a corpus of over 2,500 familiar letters written by men and women of different denominations between 1675 and 1820. That these letters were not chosen because of their religious content makes them a good ‘test’ of the role of faith in everyday understandings of the body. This article underscores the continued centrality of religious discourse and devotional practice in eighteenth-century everyday life. Our research finds that religion was a commonplace register deployed when discussing bodily matters throughout the long eighteenth century. Significantly, this was the case for individuals who otherwise made scant reference to their faith. Discussion of the physical body encouraged recourse to providence, a public discussion of doctrine, and the shared expression of devotion. The ongoing force of religion in people’s lives was thus intimately tied to their embodied experiences. Letters not only expressed but actively maintained this widely shared religious framework for understanding the body.

Between Two Worlds: the Image of a Dybbuk on the Modern Opera Stage

The article is devoted to the theme of the artistic embodiment of the Hebrew legend of the dybbuk on the modern opera stage. The legends about the restless soul of a sinner, “stuck” between two worlds — the world of the living and the world of the dead — are reflected in the works of famous Jewish writers of the turn of the 19th—20th centuries. They received their first vivid refraction in drama in the play “Between Two Worlds (Dybbuk)” (1915) by the outstanding folklorist and ethnographer Semyon Akimovich Ansky. The story of the dybbuk, heard by Anton during folklore expeditions in Volhynia and Podolia, is reinterpreted by the playwright, “overgrown” with complex literary and philosophical connotations. The dramatic play is literally saturated with music: songs, dances, prayers and Hasidic melodies, one of which — “Mipney ma” in the genre of nigun — becomes the leitmotif of the work. The masterpiece of Ansky, reflecting the specifics of the everyday, cultural and religious life of the Hasidic community of the early twentieth century, gave rise to an extensive body of musical and theatrical works — more than ten over the last century (operas by L. Rocca, D. Tamkin, ballet by L. Bernstein, etc.). The article discusses the multimedia chamber opera “Dybbuk. Between Two Worlds” (2007) by the Israeli-American composer Ofer Ben-Amots through the prism of a dialogue with the original source. Previously, Ben-Amots’s musical work had not been studied in Russian art criticism, which predetermined the novelty of the chosen topic. The musician interprets the main ideas of Ansky’s dramatic play in his own way, presenting the image of the dybbuk as an allegory of the “borderline” existence between two worlds, turns to the traditional musical culture of Judaism (conducts the nigun “Mipney Ma” as the leitmotif of the opera, brings to the fore the timbres of the violin and clarinet, uses special techniques of sound production on these instruments associated with music playing in Klezmer chapels, stylizes the folklore of Jewish towns).

Moloch and Monotheism: Ozick’s Aestheticism

Abstract A tidy story is told about Cynthia Ozick: an aesthete in her youth, her reading of Leo Baeck prompted a break with this “religion of Art” and inspired a polemical commitment to literature centered by a particularly Jewish moral seriousness. This article contests this consensus by revisiting Ozick’s career-long articulation of aestheticism’s appeal, and particularly her relation to the avatar of modernism in her work, Henry James. By attending to the persistence of aestheticism in a series of Ozick’s essays from “Toward a New Yiddish” (1972) to “Tradition and (or Against) the Jewish Writer” (2006), this article shows how the consistency of her attachment to modernism troubles the mainstream view of Ozick as a polemicist for an anti-aesthetic Jewish ethics. In so doing, this article seeks to both rethink the question of Ozick’s Jewishness and to contribute to what Benjamin Schreier characterizes as the non-identitarian project of critical Jewish literary study.

Between Granite and Rainbow: Woolfian Literary Speculation in Ozick’s Nonfiction

Abstract While figures such as Ruth R. Wisse hold that Cynthia Ozick’s melding of fiction with nonfiction is a rejection of authorial responsibility, Ozick’s fictionalized accounts of real-life writers has a literary precedent: Virginia Woolf. Just as Woolf speculates about how Austen might have become an experimental, proto-modernist writer had she lived longer, Ozick speculates that Woolf herself might have fully realized her genius if she had lived like her sister. By examining how Ozick adopts Woolf’s technique of turning real-life writers into her own characters to speculate about their lives, this article argues that Ozick revises Woolf’s approach—using literary-historical counterfactuals to redress the historical omission of women writers—to counter the suppression of Jewish writers in history. This article makes a case for how Ozick’s creative rewritings of other writers’ lives is not a rejection of authorial responsibility, but a real attempt to redress the unfulfilled promise of real people whose lives were unjustly cut short by violent historical realities.

Ozick’s Idols

Abstract An exploration of Ozick’s critique of Harold Bloom, in which she argues that his literary critical schemas amount to a form of idolatry, is developed into a wider account of the place of the risks of idol making and idol worship in her fictional and nonfictional writings. Ozick is seen to gradually move from a vision of the imagination as intrinsically idolatrous—hence the very notion of a Jewish writer is seen as contradictory—toward a moderated stance in which the risks of idolatrous imagining can be navigated, if never eliminated altogether.