Identity, Diaspora, and the Secular Voice in the Works of Isaac D’Israeli

Abstract

Those who in our time discuss the Jewish literary voice and/or literary identity¹ proceed in the main without a clear sense of what it was like to be an educated, self-aware, and primarily secular European Jew seeking to establish or locate a literary identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Without an autonomous homeland for more than sixteen centuries and counting, European Jewry’s own foundational narratives tell over and over a tale of exile and belatedness. The chronicle of lost homelands includes the losses of Eden, the pre-Noachian earth, the monolingual Plains of Shinar, and the united kingdom of Israel, not to mention a wandering exile of forty years in the desert, after escaping enslavement that followed upon what had been a place of honor in ancient Egypt. Then there were the expulsions in Europe—from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from Spain in 1492—to conjure with, as well as the constant persecution of the Jews by the Inquisition, especially in Mediterranean Europe.

D’Israeli, Language, and the Problematic of the Jewish Literary Identity in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries