Rachel Wamsley
I work on a constellation of early modern Yiddish and Hebrew genres which trouble the generic distinction between the literary and the exegetical (e.g. the biblical epic, the Purim play, homiletic prose). My current book project, "Unstable Exegesis: Scripture and Textuality in Early Modern Europe" is a comparative study of Jewish-Christian collaboration in book production after the advent of print. In tracing the transmission histories of individual works of biblical exegesis and the material circumstances of their reproduction, I reconsider early modern religious culture through compelling accounts of material texts and the literary sensibilities of their human makers.
A second project, tentatively entitled "Archaism and Anachronism: Exercises in Historical Imagination," attempts to revise critical assessments of these two literary postures, which have too often been dismissed as symptomatic of historical naiveté. By contrast, I explore how these two modes of linguistic and literary imagination can function as the implements of hermeneutic encounter with historically distant materials. In destabilizing temporal perspective, archaism and anachronism rhetorically interrogate the role played by the reading subject in generating narrative coherence. In pursuing this claim, I turn to contemporary critical discourses of historiography and narrative: theorizations of Jewish history and time, and postmodern historiography's reassessment of literary narrative as a way into, or out of, historical meaning.
Supervisors: Chana Kronfeld, Robert Alter, Naomi Seidman, Simon Neuberg, and Elaine Tennant
Address: Mandel Scholion – Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies
Faculty of Humanities, Mandel Building, Mount Scopus
The Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 9190501
Israel
A second project, tentatively entitled "Archaism and Anachronism: Exercises in Historical Imagination," attempts to revise critical assessments of these two literary postures, which have too often been dismissed as symptomatic of historical naiveté. By contrast, I explore how these two modes of linguistic and literary imagination can function as the implements of hermeneutic encounter with historically distant materials. In destabilizing temporal perspective, archaism and anachronism rhetorically interrogate the role played by the reading subject in generating narrative coherence. In pursuing this claim, I turn to contemporary critical discourses of historiography and narrative: theorizations of Jewish history and time, and postmodern historiography's reassessment of literary narrative as a way into, or out of, historical meaning.
Supervisors: Chana Kronfeld, Robert Alter, Naomi Seidman, Simon Neuberg, and Elaine Tennant
Address: Mandel Scholion – Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies
Faculty of Humanities, Mandel Building, Mount Scopus
The Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 9190501
Israel
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This essay considers one such artifact: a manuscript commissioned in 1697 by the Lutheran Rector Christof Wagenseil. The manuscript contains an obscene Yiddish Purim play, copied by Wagenseil’s research assistant, the recently baptised Jew Johan Kemper. Though this is a document hand-written precisely thanks to the obstacles to printing it, for only one intended reader, Kemper nevertheless decorates his title-page with all the trappings of a printed book: architectural motifs, a dedication to Wagenseil himself, and detailed colophon. He also maintains with utter seriousness the rhetorical gestures of early modern Jewish books. Yet as soon becomes strikingly clear, all this dogged con- ventionality is merely the satiric set-up for Kemper’s own Christian conversion story, told as an inside joke between Wagenseil and himself. Taken together, these ironic uses of convention cast a bright light on the nuance, idiosyncrasy, and unpredictability of Jewish textual transmission in the age of print.
This essay considers one such artifact: a manuscript commissioned in 1697 by the Lutheran Rector Christof Wagenseil. The manuscript contains an obscene Yiddish Purim play, copied by Wagenseil’s research assistant, the recently baptised Jew Johan Kemper. Though this is a document hand-written precisely thanks to the obstacles to printing it, for only one intended reader, Kemper nevertheless decorates his title-page with all the trappings of a printed book: architectural motifs, a dedication to Wagenseil himself, and detailed colophon. He also maintains with utter seriousness the rhetorical gestures of early modern Jewish books. Yet as soon becomes strikingly clear, all this dogged con- ventionality is merely the satiric set-up for Kemper’s own Christian conversion story, told as an inside joke between Wagenseil and himself. Taken together, these ironic uses of convention cast a bright light on the nuance, idiosyncrasy, and unpredictability of Jewish textual transmission in the age of print.