1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (review)

Today it is apparently an easy matter for many cultural studies scholars and other intellectuals to forget the degree to which the self-understanding and theoretical language of postcolonial and multicultural scholarship are indebted to the Jewish conception of Diaspora, so it is refreshing when one comes along to note the under pinnings of both. As a literary scholar devoted to identifying diasporic currents in Jewish modernity, I find there is much to celebrate in 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora, John Docker’s unprecedented historical and theoretical approach to his act of recovery.

The book’s attractive thesis posits the “lost world” of a shared Indian, Arab, and Jewish culture which was destroyed in the early modern period by the expansion of Europe. In ways that are occasionally indebted to, but more often enlarge on, Salman Rushdie’s creative treatment of that world in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), Docker explains why the crucial event of 1492 was not the discovery of the “New World,” but rather the almost concurrent defeat of Moorish Spain and the expulsion of its Jews. There have been regrettably few attempts to interweave the fall of Muslim ruler Boabdil’s Granada and Jewish exile in ways that demonstrated how each catastrophe marked Europe’s attempt to oppose itself to an earlier Mediterranean civilization, and Docker’s analysis of the subsequent staggering cultural consequences—he sees losses as well as gains—serves as a marvelous corrective to that past neglect.

At its best a celebratory but judicious exploration of the fluid Judeo-Islamic world that the expulsion of 1492 destroyed, this work also offers up provocative ways of considering marginalized, or hidden, aspects of contemporary Jewish identity. This is a richly interdisciplinary study of literary and other readings of the Judeo-Islamic world that reverberates with significance for our own historical moment. Docker offers powerful, and often persuasive, new readings here of a range of literary texts which he reveals to show unexpected affinities for the Jewish condition in a variety of times and places. Happily, the author’s close readings of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Joyce’s Ulysses are exemplary. In the former, Docker identifies Isaac, the polyglot and cosmopolitan merchant, as Scott’s sympathetic rebuttal to Shakespeare’s Eurocentric conception of Shylock as pariah and eternal outsider. But it is his re-reading of Rebecca that will likely send a new generation of Jewish readers back to the novel. As Docker has it, Scott’s heroine emerges as a surrogate for an entire Levantine world, evoking a thousand-year history of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish creativity and intermingling. And though she might seem an anachronistically feminist figure, Scott’s Rebecca is actually a surprisingly faithful portrait of the radical mobility of the Jewish women of her age: vocationally serving as “midwives, textile workers, bankers, merchants, teachers, doctors”—even traveling by sea to Jerusalem, holy shrines, or visiting extended family abroad. Noting her medical expertise, Docker reads her as part of the proud generations of Jewish physicians in the greater Islamic world, a tradition which included figures such as Maimonides and the great poet of exile, Judah ha-Levi. Though often read as a narrative of English national culture, Docker proposes a refreshing reading that juxtaposes the violence of Saxon-Norman ambitions with profoundly attractive Jewish characters whose transnational affinities beckon to a “pluralist alternative to the European nation-state.”

Docker’s in-depth treatment of the myriad ways that Jewish identity comes to inflect the nexus of nation, race, and identity in James Joyce’s Ulysses produces a revelatory account, creating exciting new paradigms for reading Joyce’s “poetics of heterogeneity”—and modernism as a whole—as a celebration of multiple habitations highly indebted to the Jews’ diasporic consciousness. An attentive reader of Jewish scholars such as Yirmiyahu Yovel, Docker demonstrates how the paradoxical and dissonant nature of converso and marrano identities shaped Joyce’s rich and affectionate portrait of Leopold Bloom. For Docker, Joyce’s trickster Jew is a complex postnationalist...