Investigating the politics of Christianity in modern Jewish thought, the paneI brings together scholars of modern Jewish thought and culture who seek to understand how modern Jewish writers navigate and negotiate the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in modernity. Drawing on a capacious archive of philosophical, literary, and archival sources, scholars pay particular attention to themes of text and thought; time and trauma; and, grief and responses to the Holocaust. In so doing, the aim is to trace the limits of Christianity in Jewish thought, and the theologico-political ramifications of the Jewish-Christian encounter in modernity.
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.
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.
Abstract: Previous scholarship has studied the figuration of Jesus of Nazareth as the suffering “other” in twentieth century Jewish thought (Hoffman 2007, Stahl 2012). Following the maternal turn (Benjamin 2018), I look to read how Jewish authors read Jesus’ grieving mother Mary as a site of loss, grief, and survival in the context of the Holocaust. Reading with Benjamin, Fackenheim (1968), and Levinas (1982), I assess the figuration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in three pieces of twentieth century Jewish cultural and intellectual production: Anna Margolin’s 1929 Mary cycle, the anonymous poem “To the Mother of Our Generation” (“Tsu der mamen fun undzer dur”) from the Ringelblum archives, and Marc Chagall’s 1976 “Descent from the Cross” (“La descente de croix”). With attention to the movement of grief, gender, and embodiment, I argue that in contrast to the figuration of Jesus as suffering “other” and victim, in twentieth century Jewish thought, Mary emerges as a symbol of the suffering survivor.
| Samuel Catlin | scatlin@uchicago.edu | View |