ABSTRACT
There was normally a coincidence of language, culture, affiliation, nation and religion. Russian was the language of a great literature, but also of a Christian and anti-Semitic culture. German and French too had their own traditions, and were much associated with particular national ambitions. The post-Enlightenment era had torpedoed the Jew into a world of options, or, at least, temptations. Some Jewish writers seem vaguely uncomfortable with the very idea of artistic originality even as they aspire to it, as though it were something they had filched from European Romanticism without ever being quite sure of the genuineness of the article. The Rabbinic tradition had as its object clarification of a Jewish role in observance of commandments, in explication of revealed texts and God’s functioning, not the recounting of fables for their own sake.
