Jews, Modernity, and the Fiction of Ben-Levi
This article presents the work of Ben-Lévi [pseud. Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878], who published a series of short stories in the Archives Israélites de France, the leading French Jewish newspaper, during the 1840s. One of the first Jews to write fiction in French, Ben-Lévi offers a portrait of a community caught between tradition and progress. Combining the "realist" literary codes of Balzac with the "idealist" codes of Sand, his stories hold up a critical mirror to the assimilating Jewish bourgeoisie of the era and show how a reformed Judaism could help resolve the dilemmas of modernity. Ben-Lévi's forgotten fictions reveal the agency and creativity of nineteenth-century French Jews in the face of momentous social change while also demonstrating the versatility of French literary models. (MS)
SEMITISM AND CRITICISM: VICTORIAN ANGLO-JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY
IN THE JEW IN THE TEXT: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1995) Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb noted that although questions of race, colonialism, and Eurocentrism were now prominent in cultural studies, the ways in which the “Jew” had been represented in modern culture remained relatively unexplored (6). Over the last few years, however, exploration of this kind has burgeoned, bringing with it important challenges both for Jewish studies and for English literary history. The nineteenth century has proved a particularly rich resource for such research, and the importance of this period for considering the relationship between modernity and the “Jew” is underlined by Nochlin:
A History of the Jews
A chronological account of Jewish history and the role Jews played in the creation of the modern world and also an argument about the nature of Jewish genius, its strengths and contradictions. From the early second millennium to recent times, Johnson presents the entire Jewish phenomenon.