Jewish Literature and the Christian Question

Almost no scholarly attention has been devoted to the question of Christianity in Jewish literature. This paper begins to address that lacuna, but in so doing asks what it means to think Christianity in Jewish modernity at all. Taking a cue from scholars that urge us to consider Christianity beyond the rubric of religion, I ask how literature registers the Jewish encounter with Europe as a distinctively Christianizing affair. I bring post-colonial and deconstructionist accounts of secularization into conversation with Cynthia Ozick, who is distinctive among modern Jewish writers for her openly theological rendition of literature. Attending to the Christian figuration of literary mediation in Ozick’s writings, I argue that modern Jewish literature confronts Christianity as a framework of language and loss. Jewish literature, then, is not an expression of Jewish life, but a translational archive of the fractures and ghosts engendered by the organizing mediation of Christianity in modernity.