“Shadowy Presences”: Harold Fisch's Criticism and a Jewish Reading of Romanticism

Harold Fisch (1923-2001) was a well-respected Israeli literary critic and scholar, a man whose professional work was rooted in seventeenth-century English literature but who also wrote extensively on modern fiction and the Bible. Fluent in English and Hebrew, equally at home in the distinct and seemingly incompatible worlds of modern English literary studies and the Jewish talmudic tradition, Harold Fisch ranks among the many great Jewish lite ran critics of the twentieth century. Along with others, such as Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, George Steiner, Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, M.H. Abrams, Stanley Fish, and Geoffrey Hartman, Fisch took advantage of new freedoms made possible through the historical forces of liberalism and Enlightenment: he joined the academy and became a professor of English literature. ¹