ABSTRACT
The traditional dichotomy between Hebrews and Hellenes, between Jews and Greeks, as the embodiment of the antithesis of cultures haunted the nineteenth century, from G. W. F. Hegel to Heinrich Heine to Matthew Arnold. Jews and Greeks simply imagined the world differently, and this difference was embodied in their texts, especially in those representing death and dying. The sacrifice without human death in the Akedah is reflected into Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. The Akedah becomes a central model for death and dying in the modern Western literary tradition only through its later transformation into the Christian model of death and resurrection. Victorian writers and their French contemporaries were fascinated by good deaths. Although the late Victorians and Edwardians—the first of the moderns—saw such beautiful representations of death as "inept and vulgarly sentimental", they simply do not vanish from the literary canon.
