Auerbach Against Historical Criticism

Nancy Jay glossed historical biblical criticism as the originary interpretive tradition of “hermeneutic philosophies of understanding.” This paper offers one way into thinking about the disciplinary transpositions of biblical hermeneutics by considering representations of historical criticism and its alternatives in Erich Auerbach’s “Odysseus’ Scar.” If, as James Porter and others argue, Auerbach’s account of Homer and Genesis is to be understood as a critique of German National Socialism and its Protestant theological institutions, the throughline of this critique is best centered not on philology, but on historical criticism, the specific hermeneutic most effectively structured by and generative of modern anti-Judaism. Against this context, Auerbach deems historical criticism a method appropriate to Homer but not the Bible, advancing instead his own conception of how the Bible represents its universal historicity.