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- Title
David Schornstein and the Rise of Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France.
- Authors
Samuels, Maurice
- Abstract
This article analyzes a set of six historical novellas published serially in French by David Schornstein (1826-79) in the short-lived scholarly journal La Vérité Israélite between 1860 and 1862. Despite their melodramatic style and lurid descriptions of violence, these fictional texts perform an ideological function in keeping with the more sober articles surrounding them, many of which were also historical in nature. Focusing on the suffering of Jews in the ghettos of medieval Europe, the stories look teleologically to emancipation as the desired outcome of Jewish history and to France as a new Jewish promised land. They thematize Jewish suffering in the past to solidify Jewish solidarity in the present, and they advance history itself as the basis of a new form of Jewish identity with fiction as its scripture.
- Subjects
FRANCE; EUROPE; SCHORNSTEIN, David; JEWISH history; JEWISH identity; LIBERTY; SOLIDARITY; VIOLENCE; FICTION
- Publication
Jewish Social Studies, 2008, Vol 14, Issue 3, p38
- ISSN
0021-6704
- Publication type
Article