“If there be aught to condemn”: Toward a Genealogy of Grievance in Anglo/American Jewish Authors

• In Event: Ambivalent, Critical, Self-Divided: Perspectives on Jewish Self-Appraisal from Literature and Philosophy

Abstract

In THE SPIRIT OF JUDAISM(1842), the British poet and prose writer Grace Aguilar wonders about the animosity Jews direct toward Christian missionaries; no apostate, indeed fully self-identified as a committed Jew, Aguilar turns her attention to the real source of her frustration: “If there be aught to condemn, it is the lukewarmness and ignorance of those of our own people, who declare there is no comfort, no spirit in their faith.” My paper will explore the literary registers and representation of frustrated critique in Anglo/American poets and novelists from Grace Aguilar in the nineteenth century to Howard Jacobson in the twentieth and twenty-first. The line I am tracing focuses not quite on ambivalence or alienation, but rather on the awkward yield of irritation with one’s own Jewish self-identification. The paper will seek to identify a dynamic in Anglo-Jewish literary history in which critique—of Jewish norms, or of putative Jewish misprisions of Jewish religious or ethical precepts—joins hands with irony and wit. I consider that the questions about Jewish modernization, familiar from earlier discourses about the Haskalah, are still evident well into our current moment; Howard Jacobson’s THE FINKLER QUESTION (2010), for example, invests his frustration over the so-called “ASHamed Jews” with motifs about Jewish authenticity and secularization, while Amy Levy in the novel Reuben Sachs (1888) thematizes the anxieties inherent in identifying with a Jewish community that is just emerging into full emancipation; its publication was met with complaints that Levy was surely a self-hating Jew. I will try to answer one of the most pressing questions in this literature: what are the analytic stakes of Anglo/American Jewish literary works that highlight their authors’ vexations with Jewish life and community?

Author

• Karen Weisman, University of Toronto