Jewish Writers Research Articles

Ozick’s Feminism and the Woman Writer

Abstract As Ozick herself has noted, readers have observed a contradiction between her championing of the particularity of the Jewish writer and her insistence on the human universality of the writer who happens to be a woman. Examining Ozick’s thinking about sex and gender, this article explains why this apparent contradiction isn’t one for her. Considering the relationship between her “classical feminism” and her ideas about genius and art making, this article highlights the key claims of her polemics against “the woman writer” from the 1970s. The article then reads Ozick’s essays on Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton from the same decade as richly unruly works of fiction that undermine some of those claims. Locating Ozick’s feminism among those of her peers in the late twentieth century, this article also points to the relevance of her ideas for the contending feminisms of the present.

Why Bruno Schulz Did Not Want to Be a Jewish Writer: On the “Erasing” of Jewishness in “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” and “The Cinnamon Shops”

The absence of the Drogobych synagogue in Bruno Schulz’s fiction suggests his strategy of erasing all the traces of his cultural identity. Next to that absence, one can notice his significant choice of names – to realize that, it is enough to compare Schulz’s short stories with Julian Stryjkowski’s novel, “Austeria”. Apparently, Schulz eliminated from his represented world all Jewish connotations. His use of foreign words, borrowed from different languages, may be explained as an effort to make his fiction as cosmopolitan as possible. This refers not just to the represented reality, but to the very structure of Schulz’s imagination and his linguistic sensibility. The writer did not renounce his Jewishness, but wanted it to be only one component of his fiction. Biblical references and the paraphernalia of the Jewish culture were to be just one piece in a multicultural narrative mosaic which tended toward universality.

Bruno, Son of Franz

Already the first reviewers of Bruno Schulz’s exhibitions and stories compared him to Franz Kafka, pointing at clear resemblances of imagination and motifs. Those analogies were later noticed also by literary scholars who either tried to prove that Schulz was inspired by the work of the Prague writer, or – on the contrary – demonstrated that all the correspondences between their literary worlds were accidental or determined by the times. Analyzing the reception of Kafka and Schulz in Poland before World War II, and the arguments used by both parties, the author makes an attempt to establish whether Schulz was indeed Kafka’s follower. It transpires that even though Schulz most likely knew Kafka’s novels and stories already before 1926, and one may find a number of links connecting not only their works, but also biographies, in terms of their idiom and worldviews the two writers were dramatically different. This, however, does not mean that there is no connection between them. On the contrary, the author realizes that it was actually Kafka who encouraged Schulz to write and ultimately made him an artist, so that Schulz’s writing may be considered a kind of response addressed to his literary progenitor. The picture of Schulz as an imitator of Kafka was largely influenced by the first postwar critics of his work, who promoted it abroad and looked for analogies with that of another Jewish writer active at approximately the same time and in the same geographical area. The ultimate step toward a firm belief in the literary affinity of Schulz and Kafka was made by Jerzy Ficowski who, even though he rejected analogies, created Schulz’s legend using the same methods as Max Brod – with similar merits as well as errors.

“God Is One” or “the One Is God” in Hellenistic Jewish and Greco-Roman Theology

Abstract “God is one” is the theological foundation of many of the world’s religions. The Greek version of this expression, heis theos, was especially significant to ancient religious development. Past scholarship has tended to place its emergence early, among the sixth century BCE Presocratic philosophers. In this article, I argue that the expression “God is one” in Greek likely develops later, in Jewish writings of the Hellenistic period. My work supports a minority opinion in the scholarship that attributions in second century Christian apologetics of this expression to Presocratics such as Xenophanes should not be relied upon. Rather, I suggest that the expression heis theos emerged in the context of second to first century BCE Alexandrian Jewish theology in conversation with ideas from Greek philosophy.

Jewishness and World History in Clive Sinclair’s Death & Texas

At first glance, Death & Texas (2014), the title of the fourth short story collection by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair, appears somewhat misleading for several reasons. First, death may not seem a central theme in all the eight stories. Second, Texas is not the spatial setting in all stories, as some of them take place elsewhere in the USA or even in other countries. However, on closer inspection, both the theme of death and the American environment occur in most stories by means of their characters’ interests, as the protagonists are often Jewish writers or artists concerned with American and world history as well as the rendering of historical events in popular culture. This article thus aims to survey the theme of Jewishness and the reflection of world history in the collection.

Rome Better Than Christ: Levinas’s (Negative) Political Theology

ABSTRACT This paper delves into Emmanuel Levinas’s political theology, as found in his Jewish writings, positing an analysis of a philosophical historiography, termed “eschatology” by Levinas. Within this framework, the narrative revolves around two pivotal entities: the West and Israel. Levinas contends that Israel embodies the ideal and telos of the West, portraying Judaism as the essence of Western civilization. The focus here centers on the adverse aspects, particularly three figures identified by Levinas’s eschatological political theology as problematic embodiments of Western civilization: Hitlerism, Christianity, and Rome. The paper asserts that, contrary to common assumptions, Levinas places Rome, not Christianity, in the closest and most significant rivalry with Judaism. Levinas posits that Judaism's primary role is political, not religious, and its historical struggle pertains more to the Empire than to matters of faith.

On Similarity in Contemporary German Jewish Literature

This essay calls for a theoretical discussion of the aesthetics and politics of comparison in contemporary German Jewish literature and beyond. It describes the tendency of recent German Jewish writers and thinkers to compare and connect the experiences of Jews to those of other minoritized groups. The essay briefly discusses several theoretical paradigms that spell out the political stakes of such comparisons, including touching tales (Leslie Adelson) and multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg). It then draws attention to another modality of comparison that is particularly promising because of its purposive abstractness and its relevance for literary texts: similarity. Finally, the essay offers two examples of the productive use of similarity in recent German Jewish literature: Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (which connects different instances of historical trauma) and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich (which weaves the experience of a Syrian refugee in Istanbul into a web of similar migratory movements).

Joking Around, Seriously: Freud, Derrida, and the Irrepressible Wit of Heinrich Heine

This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find a Heine joke in Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness in Le parjure et le pardon (1998–1999), where the name Heine is invoked precisely in order to recall the scandalous automaticity, the machine-like quality of forgiveness. Beginning with Derrida’s surprising reference to the man George Eliot called a “unique German wit”, this essay will begin by arguing that there is something about Heine’s jokes, his Witze, his mots d’esprit, that not only plays up, but also paradoxically takes seriously, what Derrida, echoing Nietzsche in Of Grammatology, describes as the “play of the world.” The second part of this essay will engage Freud’s particular and quite special relation to Heine: Heine is the third most cited German writer in all of Freud’s work (after Goethe and Schiller). Neither Homer nor Sophocles is cited more often than Heine. Indeed, a bon mot from Heine is always ready-to-hand in the face of theoretical obstacles (e.g., “Observations on Transference Love”, “On Narcissism”, etc.). But perhaps nowhere is Freud’s affinity with Heine more apparent and more striking than in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Heine’s witticisms offer the best and most canonical examples of jokes. In conclusion, this essay will argue that Heine’s wit can be read as a playbook—not only for psychoanalysis’s economic understanding of jokes, but also, more radically, for deconstruction’s thinking of play.

Was King David an Exorcist?

This article analyses the image of David as an exorcist. The choice of the research topic has been inspired by the fact that in the literature, more specifically, in an article by Kenneth E. Pomykala, this issue is presented in a very general way, by indicating only texts where such an image of David can be found, without entering into their deeper interpretations. Also, no scientific article covering this topic in detail has been published to date. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part presents biblical texts in which – as Pomykala has proven – one can talk about this characteristic of David. In the second part, fragments of two Qumran manuscripts, 11Q5 and 11Q11, are analysed. Finally, an analysis of the literaturę of early Jewish writings, portraying David as an exorcist, is provided.

“[L]e divorce terrible entre le cœur et la chair:” Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour (1928)

The publication in 2020 of Joseph Kessel’s writings in Gallimard’s distinguished Pléiade series prompted Gaby Levin to publish an article titled “France Rediscovers Joseph Kessel, the Jewish Writer of Belle de Jour.” It is curious that out of all of Kessel’s many publications Levin should single out Belle de Jour given that it has garnered virtually no scholarly attention, in contrast to Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film adaptation starring Catherine Deneuve. The novel tells the story of Séverine Sérizy, a wealthy young married woman who, in sync with her husband emotionally and intellectually but not sexually, takes up afternoon work as a prostitute. In the preface, Kessel explains, in reaction to accusations of “licence inutile, voire de pornographie,” that his intent was simply to “montrer le divorce terrible entre le cœur et la chair, entre un vrai, immense et tendre amour et l’exigence implacable des sens.” This study focuses at the micro-textual level on how Kessel works out his promised chair/cœur binary, one which not only figures into, but structures, a text that by all appearances follows the blueprint for a classic roman de formation, a generic classification that Kessel ultimately problematizes.

Tracing social connections in the Victorian Jewish Writers Project

AbstractIn March 2022, we launched the Victorian Jewish Writers Project (VJWP), a digital collection of texts written by nineteenth‐century British Jews accompanied by short articles on significant authors, places, and events of the Anglo‐Jewish world. When we began building the collection in 2021, our conceptual framework was clear: Victorian Jewry is underrepresented both in Jewish Studies and Victorian Studies, so we would create a resource to supply primary texts and some analytical information to anyone interested. Despite our familiarity with archive theory, we considered our role in the project as little more than what Latour calls intermediaries, or “mere informants.” Yet, the process of digitizing and publicizing a canon, particularly a canon tied to a cultural heritage, is an inherently social act, and in this article we will explore the modes of social engagement inherent in creating and maintaining digital archives. In particular, we make use of Latour’s actor‐network theory to understand the relationships forged by archives in digital spaces.

Sabbatai, Sebastião: immersion and dissimilation in “A balada do falso messias”

ABSTRACT The short story “A balada do falso messias”, by the Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar, is an anachronistic version of the arrival of Jews to Rio Grande do Sul in the early 1900s, which includes the historical character of Sabbatai Zevi. Scliar’s use of anachronism, parody and non-realistic representation, as well as the amalgamation of different literary traditions and historical references, serves to problematize the inherent conflicts within Jewish Brazilian identity. His version of the titular false messiah echoes and parodies not only the historical Zevi but also Christian and Lusophone messianic figures. By introducing a series of paradoxes and contradictions, the narrative suggests a process of Jewish immersion in Brazilian society not by assimilation, but rather by seclusion and rebellion. An analysis of the story’s implicit author presents it as the result of such process.

Jewish Literature & World Literature. Unlearning (Trans)Nationalism

The present paper proposes an investigation of the concept of Jewish literature in its relation to world literature studies within an analysis of the first generation of Jewish writers who became part of the Romanian literary life following the 1923 emanc

REBELLION AND REJECTION OF HERITAGE IN MODERN HEBREW POETRY

This research deals with the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage in modern Hebrew poetry. Poetry is considered a type of literature and one of its important basic forms. One of the literary genres, poetry has played an important role in shaping the cultural identity of nations throughout ancient and modern times. Where the Jewish writers distinguished themselves in this genre as one of the forms of social awareness, which occupies an important place and occupies an e ssential space in mobilizing societies and peoples and enlightening them to struggle for their liberation and crystallizing their revolutionary and civilizational awareness, in addition to the aesthetic function of poetry as an artistic value added to life. The phenomenon of rebellion and the rejection of the heritage emerged in Hebrew poetry in Israel and the departure from the official line of the ruling establishment in the wake of the wars that Israel waged with neighboring countries, the continuation of the occupation, the control of Jewish settlers over the Palestinian lands, and the increase in violence and injustice against the Palestinians. And the outbreak of the Palestinian uprisings since (1987-1993) and (2000) and Israel launched a war on Lebanon in 2006. All of this uttered cries of rebellion and rejection, and then expressed it in many poems. As a result, the phenomenon of rebellion and rejection poetry expanded in recent years. Hence, it can be said that the emergence of the literature of rebellion and rejection in Israel and the refusal of some Jewish writers to politicize literature and recruit it is tantamount to protesting and rebelling against the government and its institutions because they are trying to impose political dictates on their literary and intellectual writings... We will explain in this study the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage by Jewish poets to the situation The ruling political and repressive practices in Israel and their impact on many poets as fertile material that poets derived and expressed in their poems

הריאליזם ברומן העברי המודרני הרומן של אלי עמיר "מפריח היונים" כדוגמה

This research sheds light on realism in the Hebrew novel, “Mutayrul-Hamam" (Birdman) by the Jewish writer, of an Iraqi origin, Eli Amir. Realism is a method for portraying life in all its aspects honestly, as it describes the var-ious abstract things, the lifestyle of the environment accurately. Realism derives its material from reality and reflects it as much as it can through the various literary productions that appear. The Jewish writer used this genre in writing his novel (The Bird of Pigeons), which occupied the list of the most widely read novels. This novel reveals to us the extent of the Jews' attachment to their Iraqi singing heritage, in addition to that, the writer was able to take the reader to the alleys of Baghdad, the beaches of the Tigris, and the picturesque nature. And since the novelist Eli Amir is a Jew of Iraqi origin, it became clear to me that his novel is closely related to the Iraqi environment, and we find among its folds many events that reflect his biography and the history of the Jewish community in Iraq. For the Baghdadi families and other sects, and all these events formed a major suggestive source in his novel, in order to draw the reader's attention to the situation in Iraq and to highlight the aesthetic side of the novel.

The Jewish ‘monopoly’ of the slave trade in the early Middle Ages: the origins of an enduring historical motif

ABSTRACT Phelan examines the evidence to support the claim that the assertion that Jews played a leading role in the slave trade in the period following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire originated with the work of a number of late nineteenth-century historians, particularly Heinrich Graetz and Wilhelm Roscher. He finds prior examples of this historical motif in the work of several earlier historians, and traces its origins back to the Henry Hart Milman’s History of the Jews published in 1829. His article demonstrates that Milman’s work was widely known and used throughout the nineteenth century, and examines the reasons behind the emphasis in his work on the mutual antagonism between Christians and Jews. Phelan then goes on to examine the adoption of this motif by late nineteenth-century Jewish writers, including the historian and folklorist Joseph Jacobs, and its appearance in standard reference works like The Jewish Encyclopaedia. He concludes with some reflections on the reasons for this surprising development, as well as some suggestions about the reasons for the renewed interest in this topic among historians in recent years.

Arrhythmias by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman

Reviewed by: Arrhythmias by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman Misha Klein ANGELINA MUÑIZ-HUBERMAN Arrhythmias Trans. D. P Snyder. Houston. Literal Publishing / Hablemos Escritoras. 2022. 167 pages. IN TITLING HER COLLECTION of essays Arrhythmias, Mexican poet, novelist, and essayist Angelina Muñiz-Huberman signals to the reader that this collection of thirty-two essays is highly irregular. The theme of arrythmias pulses through these essays, both explicitly in the repetition of the word itself throughout the book and implicitly in the varying lengths and modes of these musings. Recently inducted into the prestigious Mexican Academy of Language (where she now occupies the seventh chair of the exclusive thirty-six-chair literary society), the eighty-six-year-old Muñiz-Huberman is professor of medieval and comparative literature at the renowned Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City. Muñiz-Huberman has also just received an honorary doctorate from UNAM in recognition of her prolific lifetime of work, which includes fifty books of poetry, essays, novels, and translations. The essays in this volume hint at her own early peripatetic life, a life that paralleled, intersected, and shadowed the lives of philosophical and literary giants of the twentieth century, a century punctuated (arrhythmically) by wars and exiles that demarcated and, in many cases, defined the lives of those who lived and died along the way. Muñiz-Huberman's own parents fled Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and she was born at the very end of 1936 in Hyères in southern France. From there, the family was forced to flee again, first to Cuba in 1939, before finally settling in Mexico City in 1942. The reader catches glimpses of these incidents and traumas in fragmented accounts and oblique references, sometimes clearly autobiographical [End Page 90] and sometimes refracted through the lives of twentieth-century prophets, poets, and philosophers, many of whom were Jewish. Drawing on the Jewish themes of exile and mysticism that she is credited with introducing to Mexican literature, as well as classical Western mythology, art, and music, Muñiz-Huberman is an extraordinarily erudite scholar. These meditations on death and other passages are a retrospective journey through the memories of an accomplished woman of letters late in life, confronting aging and the "proximity of death." However, this is far from a standard chronology of a singular life or accounting of a fraught century. These poetic, jagged, fractured contemplations reject order and convention. Elements of Muñiz-Huberman's biography appear in these essays, sometimes in first person, sometimes more distantly, occasionally displaced onto other historical figures as repositories of memory, all filtered through travels and crossings, loss, and (inevitably) trauma. She muses on death, exile, and wandering, through biographical and autobiographical hints and sketches, both her own as well as those of the philosophers and writers who populate these essays. In referring to luminaries by first name, she creates intimacy: Walter (Benjamin), Gershom (Scholem), Hannah (Arendt), Simone (Weil), and so many others. She also ponders the fate of lesser-known witnesses: journalists and photographers who were reunited in death across decades while documenting the human atrocities of "Spain. Vietnam. Suez." (She personalizes the tragedy of the ill-fated ship, the St. Louis, in the figure of the young poet, Leo Baum, who would rather plunge to his death in the port of Havana than return to Europe and its death camps.) They are connected to Muñiz-Huberman by the repetition or simultaneity of their experiences across time and across the ocean. These ocean crossings are layered onto those of Greek mythology, while the meanderings of exiled Jewish writers recapitulate the diasporas of their ancestors. In recuperating their stories, she recovers fragments of their memory, lost in death. However, Muñiz-Huberman is ambivalent about memory, referring to it as a hindrance, a prison sentence, an "unbearable accumulation" but also a "necessary guide," one that is unifying: "all memories are one exalted memory." Syncopated throughout these essays, arrhythmia serves as both metaphor and method. Her writing starts and stops, hiccups and sighs, with sentences and paragraphs that sometimes barely qualify as such, orchestrated by one for whom language is the very heart of...

Становлення Державного єврейського театру імені Шолом Алейхема в Чернівцях у 1945 році

The purpose of the study is to highlight the processes of the formation and devel- opment of the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Th eater (Kyiv GOSET) in Chernivtsi in 1945. Th e re- search methodology is based on the principles of concrete-historical approach or historicism, objectivity, comprehensiveness, integrity, systematicity, and the use of the methods – of analysis and synthesis, historical-genetic, historical-comparative, historical-typological, and problem- chronological. Th e scientifi c novelty lies in the fact that for the fi rst time in historiography, un- published archival documents on the history of the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Th eater were circu- lated and analyzed in 1945; the problems of the formation and development of the well-known theater group are highlighted, its creative activity in Chernivtsi and anniversary tour in Kyiv are characterized, its leading actors and managers are identifi ed. In particular, M. Goldblat, L. Kalmanovych, D. Zhabotynsky, A. Nuger, A. Sonts, D. Stryzhevsky, D. Ruvynsky-Dneprov, P. Pomerants, V. Shaykevych, Sh. Fingerova and many others. Among the well-known plays presented by the creative team of the theater, it is worth noting “I Live” (M. Pinchevskyi), “Th e Magician” (A. Goldfaden), “Tevye the Milkman”, “Th e Enchanted Tailor” (Sholem Aleichem). The processes of development of Kyiv GOSET in Bukovyna took place based on personal experi- ence of creative activity. Also, they accumulated ancient traditions of Jewish theater art that existed in Chernivtsi. Conclusions. Th e formation and development of the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Th eater, which was re-evacuated in Chernivtsi on February 9, 1945, turned out to be gene rally successful. Th e well-known theater group managed to restore its pre-war creative po- tential and enrich its repertoire policy. On October 5, 1945, in honor of its twentieth anniver- sary, the theater was named aft er the prominent Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem. Since then, the theater has forever changed not only its registration but also its offi cial name.

Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor.” by Dana Hollander

Reviewed by: Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor.” by Dana Hollander Shira Billet Dana Hollander. Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 324 pp. Chief among Leo Strauss’s instructions for the student of the history of philosophy was the insistence on a “serious, i.e. passionate interest in the past.” For Strauss, this meant being “prepared to learn something not merely about” past philosophers “but from them.”1 In an exciting monograph, Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor,” Dana Hollander turns to Strauss for guidance in key places to illuminate difficult aspects of the philosophy of the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). This historically grounded and philosophically insightful book offers readers much to learn “about” Cohen’s oeuvre, context, and philosophical contributions. The book’s more ambitious and audacious claim is that we have something important to learn “from” him, found in the central but little understood—and indeed counterintuitive—claim of his systematic philosophical ethics that “ethics is founded in law.” Hollander suggests that this claim is ripe for recovery for contemporary ethical and political thought, perhaps more so than it was in Cohen’s day, especially for a contemporary ethics of hospitality, and for a politics deeply concerned with the place of those who are othered and marginalized. She finds a crucial interpretive key to Cohen’s “ethicolegal” philosophy in his Jewish and philosophical understanding(s) of the “neighborstranger,” a theme that traverses his Jewish and philosophical corpora. Hollander presents an “integrative” reading of Cohen “across” his two corpora as a methodological contribution not only to the study of Cohen, but to the study of Jewish philosophy more broadly. Cohen’s nineteenth-century German legal and philosophical language is unfamiliar terrain for contemporary readers, but Hollander is a skilled guide. In chapter 1, out of Cohen’s understanding in his 1904 Ethik des reinen Willens (Ethics of the Pure Will) of Recht and Gesetz (differently inflected terms for law), legal personhood, and Genossenschaft (association), Hollander explicates Cohen’s understanding of the self that seeks to be ethical as inevitably situated within communities and social frameworks structured by legal and political norms. Central to Cohen’s ethico-legal understanding of law is the idea of law as “generative and futural” (79)—that law is “not encountered” merely “as a preexisting, ready-to-hand instrument to be wielded”; rather, the facts that arise from our [End Page 198] embeddedness in law constitute a “starting point for interrogating the legal order for the purpose of achieving greater universal justice” (262). Hollander shows how Cohen’s attention to the legally situated, future-oriented ethical self contributes to philosophical accounts of ethics that typically pay little attention to law. Hollander identifies a “paradoxical” aspect of Cohen’s account of law in the Ethik that leads her to seek clarification, in chapter 2, through his Jewish writings, introducing the other major project of the book beyond the mere recovery of Cohen’s ethico-legal insight—namely, her methodological project of reading Cohen “across” or “traversing” the two corpora (“systematic philosophy” and “Jewish writings”) in which his writings have been inherited. The book explicates a method of reading across corpora that identifies certain themes as the “hinges” or “passageways” or “relays” that “join” them, or, in a different metaphor, renders visible the “seams” that are stitched between the “Jewish-philosophical” and “ethico-legal” agendas in Cohen’s work. Hollander’s attention to methodological questions animates chapter 3, where Strauss’s own methodological reflections on Cohen’s Jewish philosophical work offer the scaffolding for Hollander’s method. Chapter 4 is a transitional chapter in which Hollander identifies an unexpectedly political aspect of law in Cohen’s Jewish discussion of Gesetz (a justice-oriented, messianic politics), and introduces the “neighbor-stranger” as the central “hinge” that links the philosophical and Jewish corpora with respect to the question of “ethics out of law.” Cohen had argued from very early on that the Biblical Hebrew reʿa (Leviticus 19:18) was properly understood not in the proximate notions of the “neighbor” or “nearest one” (der Nächste), but rather in universal...

The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin

Reviewed by: The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin David H. Price Kenneth Austin. The Jews and the Reformation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 288 pp. Providing substantially more than the title promises, Kenneth Austin’s The Jews and the Reformation surveys Christian theological and political reflection on Judaism, Jews, and Hebrew Scripture from the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. This is a long and complex period, one that marks the nadir of Jewish fortunes in western Europe (before the Holocaust) as well as the significant, if uneven, improvement in the conditions for Jewish life in many places, a turning point that began in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The great value of this new book is its simultaneous focus on Catholic and Protestant writers and governments across central and western Europe; its impressive scope encompasses the Iberian expulsions, the inquisitions (especially in Spain, Portugal, and Rome), the humanist movement (especially the Jewish book controversy and Christian Hebraism), Luther and his movement, the radical Reformation, Reformed Protestantism (especially Calvin and the biblical scholar Immanuel Tremellius), and the Tridentine Catholic response to Judaism as well as the early history of the new Jewish communities in the United Provinces and in England during the Commonwealth. Austin, admirably, is reluctant to draw general conclusions as to which Christian denominations were more or less favorably disposed to supporting legal toleration. Nonetheless, his inclination to strike a “balanced” position occasionally results in apologetic tendencies. For example, he claims that “Portugal proved a much more hospitable home for Jews” (125), just one sentence before mentioning the traumatic bloodshed of the 1506 Lisbon massacre (which cost ca. 1,000 to [End Page 188] 4,000 Jewish lives), as if it were an inconvenient historical detail. There is also a reluctance to fully acknowledge the harshness of the end of Sicut Judeis (the medieval protection of Jewish rights under canon law) initiated by Paul IV, a transformation that ultimately resulted in censorship, expulsions, strict ghettoization, and expanding papal support for inquisitional persecution. Austin does not mention the horrifying execution of twenty-four Jewish Marranos in papal Ancona in 1556 (nor the emergence of substantial, but temporary, Jewish resistance to the papacy organized by Gracia Mendes Nasi). The overall analysis adopts Kenneth Stow’s valuable but one-sided position that papal policy changed in order to promote conversion to Christianity, and also the commonly expressed view that Jewish culture was able to thrive to a limited degree under ghettoization in Italy, at least for a while and especially in Venice. Austin sees considerable impact from Christian Hebrew studies. This is an exceedingly difficult innovation to assess because Christian Hebraists used their expertise variously to create benevolent portrayals of Judaism and also to construct anti-Jewish polemics, sometimes of great severity. One of the harshest and most substantial anti-Jewish books ever published—Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judentum (1700; Judaism Uncovered)—goes unmentioned, even though the author was a major Calvinist Hebrew scholar and the text’s extreme hostility provoked intense theological and political controversy at the highest levels of power in the empire. Similarly, on the other side of the ledger, the strongly favorable and influential accounts of Judaism by the great Catholic biblical scholar Richard Simon (who also translated and promoted Leon Modena’s History of the Jewish Rituals) are not mentioned. In some cases, Austin’s optimistic portrayal of Christian Hebraism is not accurate. He claims, for instance, that Johannes Reuchlin, the founder of Christian Hebrew studies, “persuaded the emperor to reverse his position” (3) on the stunning policy initiative to confiscate and destroy all Hebrew books in the empire except the Bible. In fact, the emperor reversed his position under pressure from the Frankfurt Jewish community. Reuchlin’s defense of Jewish writings, which resulted in a heresy trial (he was convicted of being “impermissibly favorable to Jews”), galvanized Europe but ultimately contributed only modestly to a gradual shift in Maximilian’s policy of eradication of Jews back to a more traditional one of legal toleration in return for fiscal exploitation. The portrayal of imperial politics overall seems somewhat constrained. Austin does not comment on the...