Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-Century Jewish Literary Landscape
Neta Stahl
Abstract
This work explores the striking metamorphosis of the figure of Jesus from Other to brother in 20th century Hebrew and Yiddish literature and culture. Jesus and Christianity function in this book as the window through which the author presents and examines major shifts in Jewish self-perception. This historical journey follows changes in Jewish life before and after the Holocaust and Israeli statehood. Zionist writers of the 1920s and 1930s associated Christian symbols and places mentioned in the New Testament like Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee with the enthusiasm and the hardships of redeemi ... More
This work explores the striking metamorphosis of the figure of Jesus from Other to brother in 20th century Hebrew and Yiddish literature and culture. Jesus and Christianity function in this book as the window through which the author presents and examines major shifts in Jewish self-perception. This historical journey follows changes in Jewish life before and after the Holocaust and Israeli statehood. Zionist writers of the 1920s and 1930s associated Christian symbols and places mentioned in the New Testament like Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee with the enthusiasm and the hardships of redeeming the Holy Land. Post-Israeli statehood poets exhibit attraction to Jesus as the absolute Other. The new generation of poets, free from personal experience of living under the cross, identified with Jesus whom they associated with European culture and aesthetics in an attempt to transcend the actual and imagined borders of their parochial lives in Israel. Twentieth century Jewish writers redeem Jesus from his traditional status as the Other, from the Christian Church, and even from his exile in Europe, reconstructing through this contradictory figure their own new selves. The book provides a panoramic overview of Twentieth Century Jewish Literature and its towering figures—U.Z. Greenberg, Abraham Shlonsky, Zalman Shneor, Scholem Asch, S.Y. Agnon, Avot Yeshurun, Yona Wollach, Yoel Hoffman, and Yitzhak Laor—from a unique and unconventional angle.
Keywords:
Jesus,
Christianity,
modern Hebrew literature,
Jewish modernism,
Uri Zvi Greenberg,
S.Y. Agnon,
Yoel Hoffman,
Natan Zach,
Yona Wollach,
Avot Yeshurun,
Zionism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199760008 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199760008.001.0001 |
