Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
1 - Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
Summary
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
(Genesis 1:1)Rabbi Isaac said: He did not have to begin the Torah but with, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months” [Exodus 12:2], which is the first commandment that Israel was commanded. So why did He open with, “In the beginning”? Because of this: “He hath declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the heritage of the nations” [Psalms 111:6]. So if the nations of the world would say to Israel, “You are thieves, since you have conquered the lands of the seven nations,” they could say to them: “The entire earth belongs to the Holy One, Blessed be He. He created it and gave it to whom He saw fit. According to His will, he gave it to them; and according to His will, He took it from them and gave it to us.”
(Rashi on Genesis 1:1)It may seem self-evident that the Bible should begin “in the beginning.” But Rashi, the quintessential medieval Jewish exegete, did not think so. He plainly understood a thousand years ago what we post-moderns think only we have discovered, that every narrative has a purpose, that every beginning is a means to an end.
The Bible begins at the beginning, Rashi tells us, because, in narrative terms, it will eventually take the Children of Israel not only to the foot of Mount Sinai but also to the banks of the Jordan – because, in terms of genre, it is not only a book of laws but also a national chronicle, a historical defense of sovereignty. Cosmogony legimates conquest.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , pp. 12 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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