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The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity

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Ours is an age in which identity is constructed by and through texts. In this book we see the texts from which the Jewish people can construct their identity. Here is Dickens justifying his demonic portrayal of Fagin to a horrified British lady by saying that "Fagin in Oliver Twist is a Jew, because it was unfortunately true of the time in which the story refers, that the class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew." Or how about this quote from the famous novel "The Butterfl": "The language of the Jew reveals the Jew's hidden character, no matter what language the Jew tries to speak." And here too is the association of the Jewess with eroticism, with the orient; and of the male Jew with capitalism and with exploitation. Here also is the image of Proust: a Jew, a Catholic, a homosexual, and a Dreyfussard struggling to also be French; and here is Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses.

These identities, these portraits emerge in a collection of essays by some of the most notable writers of our time; they ask us to think what it means to be a Jew in an European society today-not merely to answer the question "Why do they hate us" but to try to answer the question: "With such a rich tradition of anti-Semitism (for anti-Semitism is woven into the very fabric of European tradition) how can a Jew in a European country have a positive image of him/herself?"