Enlightening the Skin: Travel, Racial Language, and Rabbinic Intertextuality in Modern Yiddish Literature

This dissertation argues for a new model of continuity - offered by the Jewish travel narrative form - to explain the appearance of race and racism in the literary history of Ashkenazi Jews. The ascendance of emigration in its heyday invigorated a new social order that derived its legitimacy from entirely different ways of conceptualizing Jewish identity - from a structured, territorialized Yiddishkay t of rabbinic authority, ritual observance, and the vernacular to a more ethereal Ashkenazi individuality embedded in the colonial and racial contingencies of the Atlantic world.The first part of this study examines the first Yiddish adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Vilna,1868), retitled Slavery or Serfdom, by Isaac Meir Dik. I show how the author’s rereading of rabbinic slave laws transformed Stowe’s sentimental novel of Christian abolitionism into a travel report about the ethical superiority of Jewish over Christian slaveholding practices, and thus the socio-political benefit of Jewish emigration to the United States. During the 19th century Yiddish, in contrast to Hebrew, offered a stylistically pliant medium for Atlantic and racial language to be disseminated to all segments of Jewish society. The second part of the dissertation traces the development of Lithuanian Yiddish in Southern Africa in triangulated contexts of race, travel and intertextuality. I focus on the development of Yiddish literary modernism, which first appears in the midst of the South African War (1898-1902) and culminates in the reappearance of Yiddish as a language of white resistance in the Apartheid era. I analyze biblical and rabbinic intertextuality in the Yiddish literature of Southern Africa, including in texts narrated from the point of view of black Africans.By reassessing the travel form, I argue that the literature of “Black-Jewish Relations” ought not to be understood as the objective assessment of interracial contact between Jews and African-Americans, but rather an imagined and imaginative construct, internal to modern Jewish literature and culture, and rooted in the global dynamics of Jewish modernization.