ABSTRACT
There is an early episode of The Simpsons in which Bart takes a job at a mafia hangout, the “Legitimate Businessmen’s Social Club.” One day while he tends bar there, Police Chief Wiggum visits the local mob boss, Fat Tony, to ask if he knows anything about a cigarette truck hijacked on route 401. “What’s a truck?” Fat Tony cagily replies (www.snpp.com/episodes/8F03.html). By the same token, when considering the contemporary study of Jewish literature, one must first ask, “What is literature?” From a historical perspective, the study of literature as such begins with what was originally a Jewish text: the Hebrew Scriptures. As primarily (Christian) ecclesiastical institutions, the first European universities were dedicated in part to the study of Biblical Hebrew, and pioneering American colleges such as Harvard and Yale replicated these requirements. The modern institutionalization of Jewish Studies as an academic inquiry began with the 1819 establishment of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums (Society for Jewish Culture and Science) in Berlin. Though this was the first organization dedicated to the study of Jewish culture with a historicist focus, rather than a Christian or rabbinic one, it replicated previous presumptions and preoccupations by focusing primarily on classical Jewish texts such as Talmud and Midrash, and medieval Jewish thinkers such as Rashi and Maimonides, to the deliberate exclusion of contemporary Jewish culture conducted in vernacular languages such as Yiddish or Ladino (or German), along with non-rational strains within Jewish thought such as mysticism, messianism, or heresy.
