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Marrano as Metaphor

Author: Elaine Marks

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780231103084

When Europeans in the Middle Ages spoke of "marranos," they were making a derogatory reference to "crypto-Jews"--those who publicly converted to and performed as Christians, but who remained secretly faithful to Judaic law. Today, asserts Elaine Marks in Marrano as Metaphor, the concept can be used to describe all Jews living in a dominant Christian or Muslim culture, whatever may be their conscious relationship to Judaism. A sweeping examination of the Jewish presence in French literature from the sixteenth century to the present, Marrano as Metaphor explores the many shapes and forms in which jews are perceived, spoken, and written about. Employing a wide spectrum of analytical methods from history, literary theory and psychoanalysis, renowned French scholar Elaine Marks opens new doors in the study of literature. Marrano as Metaphor investigates questions of difference and assimilation, of respect and derogation, in a wide range of French literature--from Alain Robbe-Grillet's discussion in his memoirs of his parents' antisemitism to the story of Esther through Jean Racine and Marcel Proust; from efforts to address Jewish issues in the writings of Marguerite Duras and Jean-Paul Sartre to the secular, "assimilated" Jewish tradition of Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous. Marks looks closely at strains of antisemitism running through French literature, analyzing such antecedents as the nihilism of the 1880s and its meditation on death and absence.

The Marrano Way

Author: Agata Bielik-Robson

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-05-09

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 3110768275

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The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.

Derrida's Marrano Passover

Author: Agata Bielik-Robson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 150139262X

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In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida's 'Toledo confession' – where he portrayed himself as 'sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture' – Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida's marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida's Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida's 'universal Marranism' an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging. By concentrating on Derrida's deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valéry, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Différance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida's works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida's Marrano 'auto-fable'.

The Scroll and the Cross

Author: Ilan Stavans

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-23

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1136698523

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Jews and Latinos have been unlikely partners through tumultuous times. This groundbreaking, eclectic book of readings, edited by Ilan Stavans, whom The Washington Post described as "one of our foremost cultural critics," offers a sideboard of the ups and downs of that partnership. It includes some seventy canonical authors, Jews and non-Jews alike, through whose diverse oeuvre-poetry, fiction, theater, personal and philosophical essays, correspondence, historical documents, and even kitchen recipes-the reader is able to navigate the shifting waters of history, from Spain in the tenth century to the Spanish-speaking Americas and the United States today. The Reader showcases the writings of such notable authors as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry W. Longfellow, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacobo Timerman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ruth Behar, and Ariel Dorfman to name only a few.

The Converso's Return

Author: Dalia Kandiyoti

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1503612449

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Five centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past. Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory.

Recovering Jewishness

Author: Frederick S. Roden

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-02-22

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13:

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Judaism and Jewish life reflect a diversity of identity after the past two centuries of modernization. This work examines how the early reformers of the 19th century and their legacy into the 20th century created a livable, liberal Jewish identity that allowed a reinvention of what it meant to be Jewish—a process that continues today. Many scholars of the modern Jewish identity focus on the ways in which the past two centuries have resulted in the loss of Jewishness: through "assimilation," intermarriage, conversion to other faiths, genocide (in the Holocaust), and decline in religious observance. In this work, author Frederick S. Roden presents a decidedly different perspective: that the changes in Judaism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in a malleable, welcoming, and expanded Jewish identity—one that has benefited from intermarriage and converts to Judaism. The book examines key issues in the modern definition of Jewish identity: who is and is not considered a Jew, and why; issues of Jewish "authenticity"; and the recent history of the debate. Attention is paid to the experiences of individuals who came to Judaism from outside the tradition: through marrying into Jewish families and/or choosing Judaism as a religion. In his consideration of the tragedy of the Holocaust, the author examines how a totalitarian regime's racial policing of Jewish identity served to awaken a connection with and reconfiguration of what that Jewish identity meant for those who retrospectively realized their Jewishness in the postwar era.

Translating the Jewish Freud

Author: Naomi Seidman

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1503639274

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There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.