Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-2h6rp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-12T13:41:49.718Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Jewish Literature / World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lital Levy  and
Allison Schachter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the past two decades, scholars of world literature and transnational literary studies have called for an overhaul of the national literature model, in favor of a model based on literature's movement beyond national boundaries. Yet across the spectrum of approaches, scholarship on world literature has focused on the languages of the metropolitan center while largely overlooking the literary cultures of the so-called peripheries. We examine Jewish literature as a transnational and multilingual body of writing whose networks of linguistic and cultural exchange provide a clear counterpoint to the center-periphery model of global literary circulation. Moreover, the essay offers one of the first comparative studies of Eastern European Jewish literature and Middle Eastern Jewish literature, furnishing new methodological tools for a comparative approach to Jewish literary culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 92 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abramovitsh, S. Y. The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third. Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler. Ed. Miron, Dan and Frieden, Ken. Trans. Halkin, Hillel. New York: Schoken, 1996. 301–91. Print.Google Scholar
Abramovitsh, S. Y. Kitser masoes binyomen ha-shlishi: Dos heyst di nesie oder rayze-beshraybung fun binyamin dem driten. Vilna: Romm, 1878. Print.Google Scholar
Agosín, Marjorie. Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America. Austin: U of Texas P, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Agosín, Marjorie. Passion, Memory, and Identity: Twentieth-Century Latin American Jewish Women Writers. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Alcalay, Ammiel. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Allan, Michael. “Reading with One Eye, Speaking with One Tongue: On the Problem of Address in World Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 44.1 (2007): 1–19. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Print.Google Scholar
Avishur, Yitzhak. He-hakham ha-bavli mi-kalkuta. 2 vols. Tel Aviv: Pirsumey Merkaz Arkhiyologi, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Avishur, Yitzhak. “Sidud maʿarakhot sifrutiyot u-tmurot leshoniyot be-kerev yehudey ʿirak ba-ʿet ha-hadasha (1750-1950).” Mi-kedem u-mi-yam 6 (1995): 235–54. Print.Google Scholar
Avishur, Yitzhak. “Sifrut ve-ʿitonut be-ʿaravit-yehudit shel yehudey bavel be-dfusey hodu.” Peʿamim 52 (1992): 101–15. Print.Google Scholar
Balbuena, Monique. Sephardic Literary Identities in Diaspora. Stanford: Stanford UP, forthcoming. Print.Google Scholar
Bashkin, Orit. New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bashkin, Orit. “Why Did Baghdadi Jews Stop Writing to Their Brethren in Mainz? Some Comments about the Reading Practices of Iraqi Jews in the Nineteenth Century.” History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East. Ed. Sadgrove, Philip. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 95–110. Print.Google Scholar
Benor, Sarah. “Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language in the Twenty-First Century.” Religion Compass 2.6 (2008): 1062–80. Print.Google Scholar
Berg, Nancy E. Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Bernheimer, Charles, et al. “The Bernheimer Report, 1993: Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century.” Comparative Literature in the Age of Multicul-turalism. Ed. Bernheimer, . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 39–50. Print.Google Scholar
Borovaya, Olga. Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Borovaya, Olga. “The Serialized Novel as Rewriting: The Case of Ladino Belles Lettres.” Jewish Social Studies 10.1 (2003): 30–68. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brann, Ross, and Sutcliffe, Adam. “Al-Andalus, Enlightenment, and the Renewal of the Jewish Past.” Introduction. Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From Al-Andalus to the Haskala. Ed. Brann, and Sutcliffe, . Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. 1–18. Print.Google Scholar
Brenner, Naomi. “‘Soon You Will Know My Secret’: Language and Ideology in the Hebrew Translation of Eugène Sue's Les mystères de Paris.” 2002. TS.Google Scholar
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Chaver, Yael. What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Cheah, Pheng. “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” Daedalus 137.3 (2008): 26–38. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chetrit, Josef. “Moderniyut leʾumit ʿivrit mul moderniyut tsarfatit: ha-haskala ha-ʿivrit be-tsfon-afrika be-sof ha-meʾa ha-yud-tet.” Mi-kedem u-mi-yam 3 (1990): 11–78. Print.Google Scholar
Chow, Rey. “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 69–74. Print.Google Scholar
Cohen, Julia Philips. “Fresco, David.” BrillOnline Reference Works. Brill, 2012. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.Google Scholar
Cohen, Julia Philips, and Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History.” Jewish Quarterly Review 100.3 (2010): 349–84. Print.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ralph, ed. Literary History in the Global Age. Spec. issue of New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 375–767. Print.Google Scholar
Couégnas, Daniel. “Forms of Popular Narrative in France and England, 1700-1900.” History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Moretti, Franco. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 313–35. Print. Vol. 1 of The Novel.Google Scholar
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
David, Abraham. “Benjamin ben Jonah of Tudela.” Brill-Online Reference Works. Brill, 2012. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.Google Scholar
Dolle, Verena, ed. Múltiples identidades: Literatura judeo-latinoamericana de los siglos XX y XXI. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2012. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eshel, Amir. Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Dichter im Angesicht der Shoah. Heidelberg: Winter, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Estraikh, Gennady. “Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin.” Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 16.1 (2006): 103–28. Print.Google Scholar
Even-Zohar, Itamar. “Polysystem Theory.” Poetics Today 11.1 (1990): 9–26. Print.Google Scholar
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Feiner, Shmuel. “Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah.” New Perspectives on the Haskalah. Ed. Feiner, and Sorkin, David. London: Littman Lib. of Jewish Civilization, 2001. 184–219. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felski, Rita, and Friedman, Susan Stanford, eds. Comparison. Spec. issue of New Literary History 40.3 (2009): 453–680. Print.Google Scholar
Figueira, Dorothy. “Comparative Literature versus World Literature.” Comparatist 34 (2010): 29–36. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finkin, Jordan. “Constellating Hebrew and Yiddish Avant-Gardes.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8.1 (2009): 1–22. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finkin, Jordan. “Markish, Trakl, and the Temporaesthetic.” Modernism/Modernity 15.4 (2008): 783–801. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, David William, ed. Latin American Jewish Cultural Production. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2009. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Harvey. Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Gottreich, Emily Benichou. “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib.” Jewish Quarterly Review 98.4 (2008): 433–51. Print.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Racial Memory and Literary History.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 48–63. Print.Google Scholar
Haddad, ʿAzra [Ezra]. Introduction. Rihlat binyamin li-l rahhala alʿarabi binyamin ibn yuna al-tatili al-nibari al-andalusi. By Benjamin ben Jonah. Baghdad: al-Matbaʿa al-sharqiyya, 1945. 10–42. Print.Google Scholar
Halevi-Wise, Yael, ed. Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination. Ed. Halevi-Wise, . Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print.Google Scholar
Halevi-Wise, Yael. “Through the Prism of Sepharad.” Halevi-Wise, Sephardism 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayot, Eric. “On Literary Worlds.” Modern Language Quarterly 72.2 (2011): 129–61. Print.Google Scholar
Hochberg, Gil Z. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Kellman, Ellen. “Newspaper Novel in the Jewish Daily Forward (1900-1940): Fiction as Entertainment and Serious Literature.” Diss. Columbia U, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Kramer, Michael P. “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question.” Prooftexts 21.3 (2001): 287–321. Print.Google Scholar
Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, Lital. “Haddad, Ezra.” BrillOnline Reference Works. Brill, 2012. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.Google Scholar
Levy, Lital. “Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History, and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1863-1914.” Diss. U of California, Berkeley, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Levy, Lital. Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014. Print.Google Scholar
Levy, Lital. “Reorienting Hebrew Literary History: The View from the East.” Prooftexts 29.2 (2009): 127–72. Print. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Miller, Joshua L. Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miron, Dan. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Miron, Dan, and Norich, Anita. “The Politics of Benjamin III: Intellectual Significance and Its Formal Correlatives in Sh. Y. Abramovitsh's Masoes Benjamin Hashlishi.” The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature. Ed. Herzog, Marvin I. et. al. Philadelphia: Inst. for the Studies of Human Issues, 1980. 1–115. Print.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Print.Google Scholar
Mufti, Aamir R. “Dossier: Orientalism and the Invention of World Literatures.” Introduction. Boundary 2 39.2 (2012): 71–74. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mufti, Aamir R. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mufti, Aamir R. “Global Comparativism.” Critical Inquiry 31.2 (2005): 472–89. Print.Google Scholar
Mufti, Aamir R. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36.3 (2010): 458–93. Print.Google Scholar
Munk, Sh. G., trans. Di geheymnise fun pariz. By Eugène Sue. Warsaw: Defus yosef lebenson, 1866. Print.Google Scholar
Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paley, Yohann. Preface. Geheymnise fun pariz. By Eugène Sue. Trans. Paley. New York: Hebrew, 1918. 1. Yiddishbookcenter.org. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.Google Scholar
Pelli, Moshe. “How a Cultural Renaissance Preceded a National Renaissance: The Revival of Hebrew and the Rejuvenation of the Jewish People.” Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature. Ed. Schildgen, Brenda Deen, Zhou, Gang, and Gilman, Sander L. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 87–112. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinsker, Shachar. “Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism.” Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture. Ed. Estraikh, Gennady and Krutikov, Mikhail. Oxford: Legenda, 2010. 28–53. Print.Google Scholar
Pinsker, Shachar. Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Ram, Harsha. “Futurist Geographies: Uneven Modernities and the Struggle for Aesthetic Autonomy: Paris, Italy, Russia, 1909-1914.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Wollaeger, Mark and Eatough, Matthew. New York: Oxford, 2012. 313–40. Print.Google Scholar
Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. “Oriyentalizm, madʿey hayahadut, ve-ha-hevra ha-yisraʾelit.” Gamaʿah 3 (1998): 34–61. Print.Google Scholar
Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective.” Orientalism and the Jews. Ed. Kalmar, Ivan Davidson and Penslar, Derek. Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2005. 162–81. Print.Google Scholar
Rokem, Naʾama. Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2013. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schachter, Allison. Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schachter, Allison. “Orientalism, Secularism, and the Crisis of Hebrew Modernism: Reading Leah Goldberg's Avedot.” Comparative Literature 65.3 (2013): 345–62. Print.Google Scholar
Schulman, Kalman, trans. Mistere pariz. By Eugène Sue. Vilna: Romm, 1858. Benyehuda.org. Web. 17 Oct. 2014. <http://benyehuda.org/schulmann/sue_paris_I.html#_ftnref1.Google Scholar
Seidman, Naomi. A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Shih, Shu-mei. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA 119.1 (2004): 16–30. Print.Google Scholar
Shulman, Elihayu. Geshikhte fun der yidisher literature in amerike, 1870-1900. New York: Biderman, 1943. Print.Google Scholar
Signer, Michael. Introduction. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages. By Benjamin of Tudela. Malibu: Simon, 1983. 13–36. Print.Google Scholar
Siskind, Mariano. “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature.” Comparative Literature 62.4 (2010): 336–60. Print.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Rethinking Comparativism.” New Literary History 40.3 (2009): 609–26. Print.Google Scholar
Starr, Deborah. Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Culture, Society, and Empire. London: Routledge, 2009. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stavans, Ilan, ed. Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers. New York: Holmes, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Strauss, Janine. “La traduction hébraïque des Mystères de Paris.” Tsafon: Revue d'études juives du Nord 50 (2005): 63–88. Print.Google Scholar
Sue, Eugène. Les mystères de Paris. 1842-43. Paris: Laffont, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Tanoukhi, Nirvana. “The Scale of World Literature.” R. Cohen 599–617.Google Scholar
Tobi, Yosef. “The Flowering of Judeo-Arabic Literature in North Africa.” Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era. Ed. Goldberg, Harvey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. 213–25. Print.Google Scholar
Tobi, Yosef. “Literature, Judeo-Arabic.” BrillOnline Reference Works. Brill, 2012. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.Google Scholar
Tortonese, Paolo. “The Mysteries of Paris (Eugène Sue, 1842-1843).” Forms and Themes. Ed. Moretti, Franco. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. 181–88. Print. Vol. 2 of The Novel.Google Scholar
Twena, Shlomo, trans. Mysterey paris. By Eugène Sue. Calcutta, 1896. PDF file.Google Scholar
Wirth-Nesher, Hana. Introduction. What Is Jewish Literature? Ed. Wirth-Nesher, . Philadelphia: Jewish Pub. Soc., 1994. 3–23. Print.Google Scholar
Wisse, Ruth R. The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture. New York: Free, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Post-monolingual Condition. New York: Fordham UP, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Yosef, Hamutal Bar. Magaʿim shel dekadans: Biyalik, berdishevski, ve-brener. Be'ersheva: Hotsa'at ha-sfarim shel universitat ben gurion ba-negev, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Zivin, Erin Graff. The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.Google Scholar