Disseminating Jewish Literatures: Knowledge, Research, Curricula PDF
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Disseminating Jewish Literatures Disseminating Jewish Literatures Knowledge, Research, Curricula Edited by Susanne Zepp, Ruth Fine, Natasha Gordinsky, Kader Konuk, Claudia Olk and Galili Shahar ISBN 978-3-11-061899-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-061900-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-061907-2 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020908027 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Susanne Zepp, Ruth Fine, Natasha Gordinsky, Kader Konuk, Claudia Olk and Galili Shahar published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: FinnBrandt / E+ / Getty Images Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Introduction This volume is dedicated to the rich multilingualism and polyphony of Jewish literarywriting.Itoffersaninterdisciplinaryarrayofsuggestionsonissuesofre- searchandteachingrelatedtofurtherpromotingtheintegrationofmodernJew- ish literarystudies intothe differentphilological disciplines. Itcollectsthe pro- ceedings of the Gentner Symposium funded by the Minerva Foundation,which was held at the Freie Universität Berlin from June 27 to 29, 2018. During this three-day symposium at the Max Planck Society’s Harnack House, more than fifty scholars from a wide range of disciplines in modern philology discussed theintegrationofJewishliteratureintoresearchandteaching.Amongthepartic- ipants were specialists in American, Arabic, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Ro- mance and Latin American, Slavic, Turkish, and Yiddish literature as well as comparative literature.The symposium was conceived and carried out in coop- erationbetweentheFreieUniversitätBerlin,theHebrewUniversityofJerusalem, TelAvivUniversity,theUniversityofHaifa,andtheUniversityofDuisburg-Essen. One pointofdeparturefor thejoint initiativeresultinginthepublicationof this volume was a conversation about the fact that there is no permanent chair forHebrewliteratureinGermany.WhileHebrewliteratureisasubjectatuniver- sities worldwide, it surprisingly seems to be somewhat neglected in Germany. When we conducted a sample examination of the course catalogues from the last ten semesters at the fifteen largest German universities in German, Slavic, American,Romance,andcomparativeliterarystudies,wediscoveredthatJewish literatures were not adequately represented in academic teaching. As a result, students are neither given the chance to study key texts of world literature nor the literary works in which many of the challenges of our present moment are negotiated. Further discussion with European colleagues made it evident that thisisnotaphenomenonrestrictedtoGermany:majormodernJewishtextswrit- teninArabic,French,German,Hungarian,Polish,Portuguese,Spanish,Russian, Turkish, and Yiddish do not form an integral part of their respective national philologies in Germany, Europe, Israel, Latin America, or the United States. A third issue under discussion was the state of diasporic literatures in courses on Hebrew literature in Israel. More generally,we observed that in our current BAandMAcourses,thefocusonteachingthebasicgistofrelevantunderstudied textsleavesverylittle roomtointroduceour students toa fuller range of world literature. Similarly, our day-to-day teaching routine sometimes neglects more profound methodological reflections. Thus, the editors of this volume have joinedforceswithscholarsfromdifferentphilologicaldisciplinesdrawingondif- ferenthistoricalfocusesandmethodologicalapproachesinordertodevelopcon- OpenAccess.©2020,publishedbyDeGruyter. ThisworkislicensedundertheCreative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives4.0License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110619003-001 VI Introduction crete proposals on how to address this lacuna,based on case studies fromvar- ious language cultures. Despiteits inherenttransnationality,muchofthe research intoJewishliter- atures continues to unfold within a national framework—an approach that is alsotraceableinhyphenatedtermssuchas“Jewish-American”or“German-Jew- ish”. In addition,the significance of analyzing and comparing what constitutes “Jewishness”inaGermanorTurkish,ChristianorMuslim,literarycontextmust be taken into account.The fact that Islam has now become the second largest religious community in Europe shifts the discourse on Jewish literatures in un- precedented ways.We must react to this.The process of modernization that Ju- daism has undergone, and which can be traced in its literary history, offers ample opportunity toconnect with the challenges that Muslim cultures arefac- ing. Precisely because our students have diverse backgrounds,we need to em- phasize thenumerousconnectionsin ahistoricizingperspectiveratherthanes- sentializingcultural differences. Seeking to redefine and explore the sociological and cultural conditions of different migrant experiences, diaspora studies has unfolded new perspectives acrossdisciplinesinrecentdecades,andyet,asystematicinclusionintothere- spective philological disciplines in Germany and Israel remains a desideratum. The volume at hand aims to develop ideas and concepts for bringing together differentepistemologicalandtextualapproachesintothecurriculaandresearch programsofthecorrespondingdepartmentsofliterarystudiesinEurope,Israel, and the States. Jewish literatures from their ancient traditions to modernity— fromtheBible,MishnaandTalmud,KabbalahandHasidismandbeyond—chal- lengeourverynotionofliterature.EvenworksbyauthorsofJewishbelongingin modernism alone—from Marcel Proust to Osip Mandelstam, from Bruno Schulz to Bernardo Kucinski, from Natalia Ginzburg to Hélène Cixous, from Paul Celan toDan Pagis—not to mention contemporary Hebrew, Russian, and Pales- tinianwritinginIsrael,challengescholarstotranscendthestrictconfinesofna- tional philologies and their respective disciplines. In hisbook FromContinuity toContiguity, Dan Mironacknowledges the fact that most authors in the history of Jewish literary thinkingcame from multilin- gual environmentsandweredeeplyimmersed intherespectivelingua francain theliteraturesandculturesoftheirtime.Suchanobservationisnotwithoutsig- nificance. Miron suggests the mapping of a “modern Jewish literary complex” which is “vast,disorderly, and somewhatdiffuse”, and which is “characterized by dualities, parallelisms, occasional intersections, marginal overlapping, hy- brids, similarities within dissimilarities, mobility, changeability” and more. While we share Miron’s poly-perspectival conception of Jewish literatures, whichchallengesamonolithic,nationalunderstandingofwhatJewishliterature Introduction VII means,wealsoneedtomovebeyond EurocentricdefinitionsofwhatJewishlit- eratureswereandstillare.MenachemBrinker’sstudyHebrewLiteratureasEuro- pean Literature once again demonstrated the close ties between Hebrew litera- ture and the European literary world. And yet Brinker, like Miron, Gershon Shaked, and manyothers,considers neither the liturgical traditions of Judaism nor the dialogues of Jewish authors with the traditions of Islam. To address thesegaps,the2018GentnerSymposiumproposedare-orientationinourfields of studies, acknowledging the multilingual, post-national, ambiguous, and dif- fusenatureofJewishliteratures,thenatureofwhichalsochallengesthebinaries ofWesternexperienceandtheconceptionsoftheEast(theOrient),thedichoto- mies of modernism and tradition, critique and prayer, subjectivity and commu- nal being.Questions of canonisation and curricula need to undergo a renewed discussion, as do our methods and practices of reading. This volume contains essays with very different approaches. Such a broad conception of Jewish literatures,which is totakeintoaccount notonly Western European and Latin American literatures, but also the modern Jewish cultural productionintheEast,inHebrewaswellasinotherJewishandnon-Jewishlan- guages (Judeo-Spanish,Judeo-Arabic,Classical Arabic,Turkish, Persian), seems theintellectualalternativethatwehavetodevelopagainstisolating,essentialist perspectives.The volumeofferscross-cultural perspectives in adynamic, multi- lingualsetting,encouragingapost-essentialistengagementwithbelonginginlit- erary texts,unrestrained by a national canon. For this reason,wedo not consider this volume to be yet another contribu- tiontothedefinitionofwhatmightbeunderstoodasJewishliterature;instead,it focusesontheliteraryrepresentationofdifferentconstructionsofJewishbelong- ing. In literary studies,we insist on linking the concept of Jewish belonging to the status of the literary text, not the biography of the author. Nevertheless, wekeepwitnessinginourrespectivefieldsrepeatedattemptstoidentifyandsol- idifyessentialist understandings of Jewish literatureand culture. Asrecentlyas 2001,MichaelP.Kramer,forexample,soughttoapplytheconceptofracetode- termine what should and should not be regarded as Jewish literatures.The de- bate that followed is documented in the journal Prooftexts. Kramer’s polemic criticized pluralist understandings of belonging as an evasive strategy so as to avoidthenecessityoffacingtheconsequencesofaconsistentdefinition.Incon- trast, we argue that Jewish belonging as represented and imagined in literary textsis not an a priori given,but is instead constructed in andthrough specific narrative situations. For this very reason, the methodological discussions pre- sented in this book are not intended to establish a canon of Jewish literature. TheGentnerSymposiumprovideduswithaninterdisciplinaryandcollabo- rativeconferencesetting,whichbroughttogethertheexpertiseandthemutually VIII Introduction reinforcing perspectives of a variety of literary disciplines in the humanities— such as linguistics and philology, cultural studies, literary hermeneutics, and comparativeliterature.Wewouldliketoexpressoursinceregratitudetoourcon- tributorsfortheirwillingnesstoengageinthisunusualformat.Fromourpointof view,boththesymposiumandalsothejointeffortstocreatethisvolumebrought together agroupofscholarswhorecognizethatconcertedresearchisindispen- sabletothefutureofJewishstudiesandthehumanitiesasawhole.Wetherefore feelthatthesymposiumyieldednewapproachesfortheteachingofdiverseJew- ishliteraturesinbothJewishandalsonon-Jewishlanguages.Thediscussionsat the symposium offered the opportunity to experiment with different analytical methods, thus encouraging an intensified use of critical and discursive tools of a comparative quality for dealing with the theoretical and practical incorpo- ration of the respective texts of Jewish literatures into the overall framework of literary studies. Asaresult,thisvolumesuggestsafar-reaching—andnotdichotomous—con- ceptualization of canonical texts of the Jewish literary corpus, which includes writings within Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Latin-American, Polish, Portuguese-Brazilian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddishstudies.Ratherthanbuyingintooverlyenthusiasticconceptsofa“trans- national space” (assuming that all forms of belonging to a nation state have been dissolved),we suggest a rationale that allows for a historical perspective on experiences related to migration, diaspora, and belonging—in all their var- iants and concomitant, specific sets of problems. We proceed from the conviction that philological knowledge is attained by meansofacontinuousdialoguewiththeliterarytextassuch.Inlinetherewith, weaccentuateliteratureasdeterminedbylanguageandhighlightthathistorical understandingmustbeaccompaniedbyanawarenessoftheinevitablehistoric- ity of knowledge. Individual researchers cannot possibly have at their disposal all the tools necessary for comparative research if the literary cultures in ques- tion comprise texts in Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish. Consequently, the volume is also meant as an impetus to building networks for future collaboration. In presentingdifferentcase studies,our volume dedicates special attention totheimportanceofmodernJewishliteraturesfordidacticseducationwithinthe current parameters of globalization. The case studies assess the potential for moving teacher training further towards a paradigm of transnationalization via the systematic integration of modern Jewish literatures into the curricula of language teaching.The different essays examine these aspects from a wide rangeofphilologicalperspectives.Wehavetriedtoincludeanalysesofdifferent literary genres (poetry, drama, prose) and different literary periods and move- Introduction IX ments.Ouraimistoadvancetheexplorationofkeytermsandtheoreticalmodels that further a complex understanding of Jewish literatures as post-essentialist. Wehopetocontributetothedevelopmentofahighqualityinterdisciplinarycur- riculumatbothundergraduateandgraduatelevels.Inthisway,thevolumealso intends to promote research on interdisciplinary and integrative methods of teaching and studying modern Jewish literatures and enhancing their visibility. Our publication in open access format is meant to be an opening towards furthercooperation,notanendofit.Wehopetoenabletheconstructionofacol- laborative network based on cross-disciplinary data available to all interested students and teachers of literature.We are very much aware that the plethora of scholarly questions in Jewish literary studies cannot even be approximated bythemethodsandlanguagesofasinglediscipline,butinsteadrequireavariety ofverifiedapproachesandperspectives,enablingtheincorporationofconcepts andmethodsfromseveraldisciplinessimultaneously.Wesincerelyhopethatthe case studies collected in this book will stimulate a continued dialogue on the matters we have raised. The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the continuous commitment from and support of Dr. Lou Bohlen of the Minerva Foundation as well as Dr.Ulrike Krauss, Katja Lehming, and Dr.Christina Lem- brechtofDeGruyterVerlagBerlin.Weowethemgratitudeforenhancingthevis- ibilityofthisproject.AspecialthanksgoestoDr.ElizabethBonapfelforherdil- igent copy-editing. We wish to dedicate this book to our students,who rightly expect us to re- flect upon post-essentalist approaches to literary studies.
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