Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries

Introduction: Intersections and Boundaries in Modern Jewish Literary Study

INTRODUCTION Intersections and Boundaries in Modern Jewish Literary Study Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner A Wall-Less Ghetto The act of defining, circumscribing, and demarcating has long been a principal activity of modern Jewish literary scholarship, yet the boundaries have proved elusive. While many definitions of Jewish literature have been offered, none has been universally accepted, and questions about who is and who is not a Jewish writer, what is and what is not a Jewish book, remain unsettled.1 So vexed has the enterprise been, that Hana Wirth-Nesher has wondered whether the only thing that unifies the field is the question itself: What is Jewish literature?2 Modern Jewish literature lacks the basic markers of national literatures: it has neither a shared language nor a common geography, though some have tried to limit it in these ways.3 Indeed, the field is so diverse—written in so many languages and so many places, embodying so many intersecting literary traditions and cultural influences —that Dan Miron has suggested that it cannot be contained within the bounds of one literary category but that we must refer to multiple Jewish literatures, a suggestion that we have adopted for this volume.4 Instead of seeking to define modern Jewish literature in lockstep with fixed categories or rigid binary oppositions, Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries examines sets of relations, adopting the perspective , broadly conceived, of modern Jewish writing moving back and forth between and through categories, of intersections and boundaries as 2 Introduction mutually inclusive by way of continual movement across borders, of separations and syntheses.5 This perspective is emblematized for us—in a figurative sense—by a unique institution in modern Jewish history: the ghetto. We have in mind not the isolated Jewish world as described by Heinrich Graetz that long pervaded the Jewish imaginary: squalid, backward, impervious to outside influence. Nor are we thinking of the idea of the ghetto as conceived by its founders in Venice as an ‘‘urban condom,’’ in the image made familiar by Richard Sennett.6 The figure we wish to evoke is something more like the culturally complex, vibrant, and fluid Italian ghettos described by historians Robert Bonfil and David Ruderman: closed off from the surrounding Gentile society yet an integral part of it, traditional yet in flux, deeply Jewish yet receptive to external ways.7 Indeed, a particular example we have in mind is the ghetto of Rome in the period immediately before the unification of the city in 1870 with the rest of the fledgling Italian nation. For more than three centuries, the Roman ghetto constituted both a physical space and a legal institution, separating Jews from Gentiles and Gentiles from Jews. Contiguous residential buildings bereft of external doors and windows, along with a single, freestanding wall, divided the ghetto from the rest of the city, while five iron gates controlled entries and exits. On the eve of the Revolution of 1848, Pius IX ordered the gates and wall torn down but stopped short of ending the institution of the ghetto, such that movements in and out, while freer, continued to be regulated by law if not by iron. With the revolution, the pope went into exile, a republic was proclaimed, and the situation was reversed: although no law obligated them to do so, most Jews, either too poor to move or reluctant to leave their community, continued to inhabit the ghetto space, whose physical boundaries, rendered permeable by the elimination of the gates and wall, nonetheless remained largely intact, thanks to the buildings along its perimeter . A short time later, the pope returned to power, reinstituted the ghetto, and ordered all Jews back inside, though he did not rebuild the gates and wall. For the next twenty years, the last of Europe’s historic ghettos continued to operate, circumscribed by a combination of real and imaginary boundaries, with century-old structures still intended to separate and invisible gates promoting movement in and out. We have in mind, too, a modern wall-less ghetto of a different kind: the Lower East Side of New York, which, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, became, in Abraham Cahan’s words, ‘‘the Ghetto of the Introduction 3 American metropolis, and, indeed, the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world.’’ What kept the Jews in this wall-less ghetto was neither physical nor legal but the immigrants...