Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (review)

Antonio's Devils: Writers of Jewish Enlightenment and Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, by Jeremy Dauber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 354 pp. $60.00. All too often, literature and literary questions are addressed solely from their own narrow and self-contained disciplinary confines. Reacting, perhaps, to scholarly predilections of earlier generations, wherein literature was often pressed into service of history of ideas, contemporary scholars have generally insisted upon detaching study of literature from all matters historical. One of many significant contributions of Jeremy Dauber's Antonio's Devils is fact that he sets aside such scholarly inclinations and produces a book that is a wonderfully enriching exploration of literary texts, as well as a suggestive and intelligent foray in field of intellectual history. Dauber's subject is literature of Haskalah, Jewish Enlightenment, which flourished first in Prussia through second half of eighteenth century, and then a few decades later in Galicia. Dauber's key to understanding Haskalah and its variegated literatures and languages-literature written in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish-is use of textual allusion, that is, all manner of explicit and implicit allusion to earlier biblical and rabbinic canons. Given long tradition of allusiveness in Jewish literature, from intrabiblical references to poetry and prose of medieval scholars, focus on textual allusion is a particularly useful tool, one that beautifully captures complex lines of historical-cultural continuity even as they are fraught with far-reaching discontinuities. In Dauber's skilled hands and expertly trained eyes, an appreciation of textual allusion not only highlights rich tapestry of Maskilic literature, but also deepens our understanding of historical context that spawns modern Jewish literature, and beyond that, very tensions and challenges that shaped Jewish encounter with modernity. Dauber begins his book in a somewhat daring fashion with a chapter-long analysis of passage of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock alludes to a section of Genesis, triggering Antonio's famous quip that the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. Dauber's intent, of course, is to illuminate a certain methodological approach, one that refers both to literary contexts of allusive material and historical and social factors that shaped ways in which that material was employed (p. …