| Toward the end of the nineteenth century a taboo was broken in modern Jewish culture: the figure of Christ was introduced into the works of Jewish writers and artists. The emergence of Christ as an aesthetic device in modern Jewish literature and art reflects the Jewish embrace of two signs of modernity: the increasing emphasis on aesthetic considerations and the changing attitude toward the figure of Christ. An analysis of these two markers of modernity in literature, as well as in art, constitutes the main thrust of this dissertation.;Our study, spanning from the 1870s to the 1980s, is primarily concerned with the way the identity, background and perspectives of specific Jewish writers and artists affect the usage and the portrayal of Christ in their works. We examine figurations of Christ in the fiction of three Hebrew authors, S. Y. Agnon, Haim Hazaz, and Avigdor Hameiri, the Yiddish writer, Sholem Asch, and the American Jewish writers, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. These writers display a variety of positions toward the figure of Christ, mostly multi-layered and ambiguous, ranging from the traditional Jewish rejection of his divinity to an embrace of his figure as a code of ethics relevant to Jews and non-Jews alike. In the course of the dissertation, we analyze the literary-aesthetic role of the Christian deity in these specific narratives within modern Jewish, predominantly Hebrew literature, and define Christ's different configurations according to the following categories, arrived at empirically: (1) The rejection of the divine Christ; (2) The historical Jesus: the man and the Jew; (3) Jesus as a symbol of the contemporary suffering Jew; (4) Jesus Christ as the root of the Jewish-Christian paradox; (5) Jesus as an archetype of universal suffering; (6) Fusion of two or more categories. Although such categories are inherently somewhat schematic, they are useful guides and touchstones serviceable for the organization of this material.;The analysis of the visual arts is used comparatively to illuminate the literary study. This inter-art examination that concludes the dissertation provides a varied view of Jewish perspectives on, and aesthetic usages of the figure of Christ, thus reflecting the psychological, cultural and intellectual climate of the time. |
