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Ideas of Jewishness in Contemporary Jewish, Postcolonial, and Palestinian Literature

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Ideas of Jewishness in Contemporary Jewish, Postcolonial, and Palestinian Literature View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online The Outsider Inside: Ideas of Jewishness in Contemporary Jewish, Postcolonial, and Palestinian Literature Isabelle Hesse Ph.D. University of York Department of English December 2012 2 ABSTRACT My thesis creates a comparative framework for unDerstanDing representations of Jewishness in Jewish, postcolonial, and Palestinian literature in response to particular historical events such as the Holocaust, the creation of the state of Israel, the first intifada, anD the siege of Ramallah During the seconD intifaDa. Central to my stuDy is the shift from Jewish identity in Europe before the creation of Jewish settlements in Palestine – as a minority iDentity in the Diaspora, facing Discrimination anD persecution in Europe, which culminateD in the Holocaust – to Jewishness as Israeliness, defined in relation to the state of Israel, Zionism, and settler-colonialism. My study contests ahistorical and Decontextualised uses of Jewishness and each chapter proposes a different angle to engage with ideas of Jewishness in their specific historical context. I examine narrative fiction and travelogues, published between 1971 and 2008, by Jurek Becker, Anita Desai, David Grossman, Shulamith Hareven, EDgar Hilsenrath, Sahar Khalifeh, Caryl Phillips, Anton Shammas, Raja Shehadeh, and A. B. Yehoshua. Through these examples, I interrogate the political and stylistic reasons underlying the inclusion and appropriation of ideas of Jewishness in literature. I suggest that literature offers alternative moDels of Jewishness which question receiveD notions of Jewish victimhooD anD powerlessness. By Determining the ways in which ideas associateD with Jewishness travel across Different geographical locations anD examining aDaptations of these concepts in non-Jewish contexts, I illustrate the centrality of ideas of Jewishness in the construction and definition of identities for both Jewish and non-Jewish writers and readers anD inDicate the global ramifications of engaging with Jewishness for contemporary literature anD culture. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7 INTRODUCTION 8 Ideas of Jewishness in Literature 9 Between Emancipation anD Assimilation 17 The Jew in Nazi IDeology: Subhuman or Superhuman? 20 Post-Holocaust Jewishness in Germany anD Israel after the Holocaust 22 From Jewish Other to Jewish Self: The Creation of the Jewish State 24 Zionism and the Palestinians 26 ‘KnotteD Intersections of Histories’: Racism anD Discrimination 30 Israel, Palestine, anD Postcolonial StuDies 33 Diaspora anD the Jews 36 Postcolonial Theory and the Jew 39 CHAPTER ONE The Complexities of Victimhood: Ambiguous Jewishness in German- Jewish Holocaust Literature 48 Victims and Perpetrators in Post-War Germany 48 GooD Jews anD BaD Germans? Satire, Humanism, anD Opportunism 53 From Victim to Settler: The Nazi Who Lived as a Zionist 58 Reflections of Nazism anD Zionism anD the Impossibility of Justice 61 Jewishness, VictimhooD, and Philo-Semitism in East Germany 66 The Return of the RepresseD: The Victims Who Became Perpetrators 71 Conclusion 78 4 CHAPTER TWO Rewriting the Foundations of Israel: The Bible, the Holocaust, and the Occupation of Palestine in Shulamith Hareven’s Thirst: The Desert Trilogy and David Grossman’s See Under: Love 80 The Foundations of Israel 80 Political Zionism and the Exodus Myth: Utopia and Conquest 85 The Bible and Colonialism: The Gibeonites and Palestine 91 After ChilDhooD: Alternative Israels 94 The Holocaust in 1950s Israel: The OlD Jew/New Jew Binary in See Under: Love 97 The Transformative Power of Stories: Literature, Humanity, anD Resistance 101 Conclusion 108 CHAPTER THREE Colonising Jewishness? Minority, Exile, and Belonging in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood 110 Between Europe anD Its Others: The Jew in Postcolonial Literature 110 ‘Accepting but Not AccepteD’: Alienation, Race, anD Belonging 115 His War Was Not Their War: Jewish anD (Post)Colonial Minorities 120 The Nature of BlooD: Kinship anD Difference 125 Anne Frank anD Othello RevisiteD: The Illusion of Belonging 129 Promised Lands? Jewish Identities in Israel 132 Conclusion 135 CHAPTER FOUR ‘Within the Bounds of the Permissible’: The Boundaries of Israeliness in A. B. Yehoshua’s The Lover and Anton Shammas’s Arabesques 137 Israeli Palestinian Citizens and Israeliness 137 Prejudices, Power, and the Plurality of Israeliness 141 The ‘Enemy Within’: The Limits of Israeli-Palestinian Coexistence 146 5 An Authorial Arabesque: Israeli Palestinian Narrative Resistance 151 An Israeli-Arab Schizophrenia: The BlurreD BounDaries of Israeliness 153 Israeli, Palestinian, anD Israeli-Palestinian: Conflicting National Identities 159 Conclusion 165 CHAPTER FIVE Imagining the Other? Jewish Soldiers, Settlers, and Civilians in Palestinian Literature 168 Empathy, Humanity, and the IDF 168 ‘We Will Never See Each Other’: Perceptions of Jewishness in ShehaDeh's The Third Way 174 DaviD versus Goliath: Discourses of Power anD Security in The Sealed Room 178 Palestinian Walks: Settler IDeology anD Rights to the LanD 183 Between Intolerance anD Humanity: Representations of Israeli Jews in the 1970s 188 The Louse and the Demon: IDeas of Jewishness After Oslo 193 Jewishness, Politicisation, anD the SeconD IntifaDa 196 Conclusion 200 CONCLUSION 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY 205 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was generously funDeD by the Luxembourgish National Research FunD (FNR). Grants from the Department of English anD RelateD Literature and the F. R. Leavis Fund at York helped to support conference travels and a language studies trip to Israel/Palestine. I’D like to thank my supervisor Anna BernarD for believing in me anD supporting me throughout the whole process: her time, interest, anD commitment have proveD invaluable to this thesis, as have her insightful anD challenging comments anD questions. Thanks to Derek AttriDge for his critical insights anD generous help as my thesis aDvisory panel member anD as acting supervisor in York for my writing-up year. For acaDemic support anD aDvice, thanks go to ZiaD Elmarsafy, Jason EDwarDs, and Zoë NorriDge. Thanks to the Gang – Anna, James, Katherine, Nicola, and Sarah – for long lunches, coffee breaks, bike trips, pub quizzes, pot lucks, and collective attempts at maintaining sanity. Thanks to the Canterbury crowd: Dario, DaviD, Eleni, Isaac, Jamie, Natalija, and Vivien. The Beckett woulDn’t have been the same without you. E riesegrousse Merci un D’Clique: Julie, Martina, Christine, Fuseli, Marcia, a Swiffer. For being there anD making home feel like home, even after having been away for a while. Thanks for your frienDship, encouragement, anD laughter along the way. Thanks to my family and especially to my mum for her unconDitional support throughout. AnD last but not least: thanks to my husbanD Jacques. Without you I couldn’t have done any of this. 7 CANDIDATE DECLARATION I hereby confirm that the work submitteD is my own anD that appropriate creDit has been given where reference has been maDe to the work of others. Isabelle Hesse 8 INTRODUCTION Ideas of Jewishness in Literature It is therefore the idea of the Jew that one forms for himself which woulD seem to Determine history, not the ‘historical fact’ that produces the idea. (Sartre 1948: 16) In his influential work The Anti-Semite and the Jew (1948), Jean-Paul Sartre – reflecting on anti-Semitic constructions of Jewishness – argues that society, rather than history, constructs the idea of the Jew, and that Jewishness as a social construct determines history. He foregrounds society’s role in shaping history and stresses the fact that Jewishness is defined by the context in which it is useD, disavowing the concept of ‘eternal’ Jewishness that remains fixed and unchanged throughout history. Moreover, Sartre’s argument adDs an important angle to receiveD iDeas of Jewishness as shapeD by majority societies and their perceptions and positioning of Jews within their community: the possibility of Jewishness as reflecting on society from a minority point of view and influencing the creation of the majority’s ‘history.’ This study focuses on the two Defining moments for the iDea of Jewishness in twentieth-century Jewish history: the Holocaust and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and extends the analysis of iDeas of Jewishness in Jewish literature to include considerations of the ways in which these concepts are appropriateD in postcolonial and Palestinian literature. Critical attention to ideas of Jewishness, and especially their representation in literature in relation to the Holocaust and Israel/Palestine, is generally limiteD to Jewish literature written after 1945.1 Although there 1 Although the Holocaust anD Israel play a major role in Jewish literature, there are of course other key themes like assimilation, secularism, anD notions of home anD Diaspora. For a general overview of Jewish literature in the twentieth century, see Wisse’s The Modern Jewish Canon (2003). For concerns pertinent to American-Jewish literature in the twentieth anD twenty-first century, see Wirth-Nesher anD Kramer’s The Cambridge Companion to American-Jewish Literature (2003). Kerbel’s The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century (2003) offers a gooD overview of themes anD trenDs in American Jewish anD British Jewish literature, anD for a focus on Jewish literature written in English, see Stähler’s eDiteD collection Anglophone Jewish Literature (2007).
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