Wandering and Wondering: Jewish Identity and Minority Writing

Abstract

Jewishness as an area within debates about language politics and the politics of representation has come to concern recent criticism on modernism in general, and on Barnes, Loy and Stein in particular.¹ The late nineteenth century saw a particular turn in definitions of, and debates about Jewishness, not just in response to the wave of Eastern European migration following the pogroms in the Tsarist Empire from 1881 onwards, but also emerging from new racialist definitions of Jewish identity (a shift from religious and cultural ideas of the ‘Hebrew’ to conceptions of a Semite race). The notion of a Jewish-Bolshevik menace (after the 1917 revolution) or an international Jewish conspiracy (with the widespread dissemination of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in the 1920s) further modulated conceptions of Jewishness and its place in (or threat to) modern society.