{"id":180032,"date":"2026-04-04T21:39:31","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T05:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=180032"},"modified":"2026-04-30T14:47:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T22:47:23","slug":"jews-the-guardianship-question-in-canada-latin-america-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=180032","title":{"rendered":"Jews & The Guardianship Question In Canada, Latin America, Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Custodianship Question in America<\/a> Australia, New Zealand<\/a> Europe<\/a> Alliance Theory<\/a> Asia<\/a><\/p>\n

Canada’s relationship between literary culture, academic institutions, and Jewish intellectual participation was shaped by configurations that differ from the American case even though the two countries share a language, a continental geography, and many institutional similarities. Canada’s bilingual character, with English and French as official languages and with Quebec’s distinct cultural formation as a permanent feature of the national landscape, means that the custodianship question<\/a> operates differently in English Canadian and French Canadian literary culture, and the Jewish intellectual contribution to each has been shaped by those differences.
\nThe English Canadian literary tradition is often more analogous to the British case than to the American case because Canada maintained a closer institutional and cultural connection to Britain through the Commonwealth well into the twentieth century. The Canadian university system, particularly the older institutions like McGill, Toronto, Queen’s, and Dalhousie, was modeled more on British university traditions than on American ones, and the cultural formation of the English Canadian literary establishment in the early twentieth century was more thoroughly shaped by British cultural assumptions than by the American pragmatism and populism that gave American literary culture its distinctive character.
\nThe Jewish community in Canada developed differently from the American Jewish community in ways that shaped the intellectual contribution. The major waves of Eastern European Jewish immigration to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created large Jewish communities in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg that were in some ways more concentrated and more culturally distinct than the equivalent American communities. Montreal’s Jewish community in particular developed a distinctive cultural character shaped by its position between English and French Canadian culture, belonging fully to neither while participating in both, that produced a specific form of the double outsideness my analysis has been tracing across all the national cases<\/a>.
\nMontreal is the essential starting point for any serious account of Jewish intellectual participation in Canadian literary culture. The Montreal Jewish community of the early and mid twentieth century was simultaneously a Eastern European immigrant community maintaining Yiddish language and culture, an English Canadian community navigating the institutions of British-influenced Canadian culture, and a community living in a predominantly French Catholic city whose relationship to Jewish presence was shaped by a specific form of Quebec Catholic antisemitism that differed from both the British Protestant and the American Protestant varieties.
\nQuebec Catholicism in the early and mid twentieth century was shaped by an ultramontane tradition that was more consistently and more ideologically antisemitic than most other Catholic traditions in the English-speaking world. The influence of figures like Lionel Groulx<\/a>, the Quebec nationalist historian and priest whose antisemitism was explicit and sustained, created a cultural environment in which Jewish intellectuals in Montreal faced a form of hostility that was religious, ethnic, and nationalist in ways that the WASP Protestant antisemitism of English Canadian institutions was not. The Montreal Jewish intellectual was positioned between two hostile formations, the British Protestant establishment of English Canadian academic and cultural life and the French Catholic nationalism of Quebec, and this double outsideness produced a specific form of intellectual formation.
\nAM Klein<\/a> (1909-1972) is the founding figure of Canadian Jewish literature in English. He was a Montreal Jewish poet whose formation combined traditional Jewish learning, including Hebrew and Yiddish, with a thorough engagement with the English literary tradition from the King James Bible through Joyce. His poetry is among the most formally accomplished Canadian poetry of the mid twentieth century and it is simultaneously the most thoroughly Jewish in its formation and references. Klein did not perform the assimilation strategy that my analysis has identified in the American Jewish critics Susanne Klingenstein documents<\/a>. He brought his Jewish formation openly and explicitly into his engagement with the English literary tradition, finding in the intersection a voice that was new rather than a diluted version of either inheritance.
\nHis poem Hath Not a Jew<\/a>, his translations from Hebrew and Yiddish, his novel The Second Scroll<\/a>, which is a meditation on the founding of the State of Israel structured around the five books of the Torah, all represent Jewish intellectual engagement with English literary culture that insists on the value and the distinctiveness of the Jewish formation rather than subordinating it to the requirements of the dominant tradition. Klein’s refusal of the assimilation strategy and his insistence on the full presence of his Jewish formation in his literary work produced poetry of density and moral seriousness that the English Canadian literary establishment found difficult to assimilate into its canonical frameworks because it resisted the universalizing reduction that canonical inclusion required.
\nHis breakdown in the early 1950s and his subsequent silence, from which he never recovered, raises questions that parallel the fates of Benjamin<\/a>, Celan<\/a>, and Levi<\/a>. The poet who had most insistently maintained the full presence of Jewish formation in his engagement with English literary culture paid a personal cost that, whatever its specific psychological causes, was shaped by the impossibility of the position he occupied. The silence into which he withdrew for the last twenty-five years of his life is the Canadian equivalent of Benjamin’s exile, Celan’s irresolvable tension with the German language, and Levi’s suicide, the personal cost of maintaining an honest double formation in conditions that made that maintenance unsustainable.
\nIrving Layton<\/a> is the most flamboyant figure in the Canadian Jewish literary tradition and his relationship to the custodianship question<\/a> is deliberately provocative. Layton was a Montreal Jewish poet whose early formation in the Eastern European immigrant community was followed by a thorough engagement with the English literary tradition and a sustained attempt to bring the energy and the moral urgency of the Jewish prophetic tradition into Canadian poetry. His public persona, deliberately offensive, sexually explicit, politically engaged, contemptuous of Canadian cultural timidity, was itself a form of the defamiliarization that my analysis has identified as a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture. He was making strange the comfortable assumptions of English Canadian literary culture by refusing to perform the gentility and the understatement that the tradition valued.
\nHis relationship to his own Jewishness was explicit and productive in ways that differed from most of the American Jewish critics Klingenstein documents<\/a>. He did not subordinate his Jewish formation to the requirements of universalist acceptance. He used it as a weapon, as a lens, as a source of moral authority, and as a resource for the kind of prophetic denunciation of comfortable hypocrisy that the tradition had cultivated over three thousand years. His poetry at its best performs the operation of the prophetic tradition with genuine literary power, speaking truth to the comfortable bourgeois culture of English Canada with an energy and an honesty that the tradition’s native custodians could not easily produce from inside it.
\nMordecai Richler<\/a> is the most internationally recognized Canadian Jewish literary figure and his case adds dimensions to the custodianship question<\/a> that Klein and Layton do not provide. Richler was a Montreal Jewish novelist whose engagement with the Montreal Jewish community of his youth, the St Urbain Street world of Eastern European immigrant families working their way into Canadian bourgeois life, produced a body of work that is a loving and honest account of what that world was and what it cost. His novels, particularly The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz<\/a> and St Urbain’s Horseman<\/a>, perform the operation that was distinctively Jewish in its formation, the reading of a community’s official self-presentation against the grain of its practice, with a specificity and a moral honesty that the community found uncomfortable and sometimes experienced as betrayal.
\nHis relationship to both English Canadian literary culture and to the Montreal Jewish community illustrates the custodianship question<\/a> from the perspective of the writer who belongs fully to neither of the traditions he engages with. He was too Jewish and too Montreal for the English Canadian literary establishment, whose WASP Protestant formation found his energy and his subject matter foreign in ways that were similar to the resistance that American Jewish writers encountered in the equivalent American institutions. He was too honest and too critical for the Montreal Jewish community, whose self-presentation he subjected to the same defamiliarizing analysis that his outsider position made possible. He occupied the classic double outsider position and produced from it some of the most morally serious and most formally accomplished Canadian fiction of the twentieth century.
\nHis extended engagement with England, where he lived for many years and from which he wrote about Canada with the perspective that geographical distance combined with cultural intimacy provides, adds a specifically Canadian dimension to the custodianship question<\/a>. The Canadian writer in England occupies a specific position that has no precise equivalent in the American case, belonging to a culture that is simultaneously colonial and independent, formed by British cultural traditions that are simultaneously his inheritance and someone else’s property. The Jewish Canadian writer in England occupies a triple outsider position, Jewish in a Protestant country, Canadian in England, and writing about a world that is absent from him geographically, and this triple outsideness produces a specific form of critical clarity that is recognizably continuous with the gifts my analysis has identified across all the national cases.
\nThe academic institutional context for Canadian literary and historical scholarship is shaped by the specific history of Canadian university development in ways that differ from both the American and British models. Canadian universities developed later than the major American and British institutions, with significant growth coming primarily in the postwar period, and the expansion of the university system in the 1960s created opportunities for Jewish academic participation that parallel the American postwar expansion that Klingenstein documents<\/a> but that came with a specifically Canadian character.
\nThe University of Toronto is the most important institution for the custodianship question<\/a> in Canadian literary scholarship because it was the institutional home of Northrop Frye<\/a>, the most influential Canadian literary critic of the twentieth century. Frye was not Jewish but his critical system, the archetypal criticism developed in Anatomy of Criticism<\/a> and the biblical criticism developed in The Great Code and Words with Power, is relevant because it represents the most sustained attempt in twentieth century anglophone literary criticism to restore the typological and biblical framework that is one of the losses produced by the shift in literary academic custodianship.
\nFrye’s project was explicitly to recover the Bible as the central document of the Western literary imagination, to restore typological reading as a legitimate critical method, and to show that the entire tradition of English literature from Milton through Blake to the present was intelligible only in terms of its biblical inheritance. This is the custodianship function<\/a> that had been lost when the dominant critical establishment became secular and post-Christian. Frye was performing it from inside a Canadian Protestant formation rooted in his United Church background and his engagement with Blake’s prophetic poetry, which gave him the theological formation that secular Jewish critics lacked while also giving him an outsider’s perspective on the dominant WASP Anglican establishment that the United Church’s dissenting character provided.
\nHis relationship to Jewish scholars and to Jewish intellectual traditions is complicated. Frye’s engagement with the Hebrew Bible was serious and sustained and drew on Jewish scholarly resources, including the work of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on biblical translation and interpretation, in ways that went beyond the conventional Christian engagement with the Old Testament as prefiguration of the New. He understood the Hebrew Bible as a literary and spiritual document with its own integrity and its own internal logic that was not exhausted by its Christian typological reading. This gave his biblical criticism a depth and a generosity that Christian critics who approached the Hebrew Bible only through the lens of New Testament fulfillment could not easily achieve.
\nThe Jewish scholars who worked within or alongside the Toronto tradition of literary criticism brought to it specific gifts that Frye’s own formation, rooted in Canadian Protestant culture, could not provide. The sensitivity to the specifically Jewish dimensions of the biblical tradition, the awareness of what the Christian typological reading of the Hebrew Bible had concealed as well as revealed, the hermeneutic sophistication developed through centuries of Talmudic commentary, all of these were resources that Jewish scholars could bring to the encounter with Frye’s biblical criticism in ways that enriched it and complicated it simultaneously.
\nEli Mandel<\/a> is an important Canadian Jewish academic critic and poet. He was a prairie Jew from Estevan, Saskatchewan, whose formation combined the specifically Western Canadian experience of Jewish immigrant life on the prairies with a thorough engagement with the English literary tradition through his academic career at York University. His critical work on Canadian poetry and his own poetry both engage with the question of what it means to bring a specifically Jewish formation to the interpretation and production of English Canadian literature, and his answers are characteristically honest about both the gifts and the limitations of his position.
\nThe Jewish writer on the Canadian prairies occupies a position of outsideness that has no European equivalent, because the landscape itself is alien to the Jewish literary imagination in ways that the cities of Europe and America are not. There is no Jewish tradition of prairie writing to draw on, no inherited vocabulary for the specific character of the prairie experience, and yet the prairie was the actual landscape of Mandel’s formation and the actual subject his poetry needed to engage with. The result is a poetry that brings a Jewish moral and perceptual formation to a landscape that it has no prior claim on, and that finds in the intersection a form of creative outsideness that is productive because it has no conventional resolution.
\nThe French Canadian case presents a completely different version of the custodianship question<\/a> that deserves separate attention. The Quebec literary tradition is shaped by a specifically French Catholic formation that is in some ways more analogous to the Italian or French cases than to the English Canadian case. The relationship between Jewish intellectuals and French Canadian literary culture was shaped by the specific character of Quebec Catholic culture, which combined a profound engagement with the French literary tradition with a nationalist politics that was in the early and mid twentieth century explicitly antisemitic in ways that the English Canadian establishment’s Protestant antisemitism was not.
\nThe figure of \u00c9mile Nelligan<\/a>, the greatest French Canadian poet of the nineteenth century, is relevant here as a counter-case because Nelligan’s tragic career, he went insane at nineteen and spent the rest of his long life in an asylum, illustrates the specific vulnerabilities of the French Canadian literary tradition’s relationship to outsideness and to the demands of genuine literary achievement. Nelligan was not Jewish but he was an outsider to the dominant cultural formation of French Canada in ways that his Irish father’s background and his artistic temperament made unavoidable, and his breakdown raises questions about what the dominant cultural formation could accommodate and what it could not.
\nThe Jewish contribution to French Canadian literary culture was primarily through the Montreal Jewish community’s engagement with Quebec culture in ways that were shaped by the specific bilingual character of Montreal life. Jewish Montrealers who were formed in Yiddish language culture but who also participated in French Canadian civic and cultural life occupied a triple linguistic and cultural position, Yiddish, English, and French, that gave them a specific form of the multilingual sensitivity that is a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture in the European cases. The translation work that this multilingualism enabled, the movement between literary traditions that it facilitated, and the defamiliarizing perspective on each tradition that the other traditions provided, all represent forms of the Jewish intellectual contribution operating in a specifically Canadian configuration.
\nThe Quiet Revolution<\/a> in Quebec from the early 1960s onward is essential for understanding the subsequent development of the custodianship question<\/a> in French Canadian literary culture. The Quiet Revolution secularized Quebec institutions, dismantled the clerical establishment that had dominated Quebec cultural life, and created a new Quebec nationalist identity that was secular and linguistic rather than Catholic and ethnic. This transformation of Quebec cultural formation created new possibilities for Jewish intellectual participation in Quebec literary culture that the earlier clerical nationalism had foreclosed, while simultaneously creating new tensions because the secular Quebec nationalism that replaced Catholic nationalism was organized around linguistic identity in ways that positioned the Montreal Jewish community, which was predominantly English-speaking, as a cultural other in a newly assertive French-speaking Quebec.
\nNaim Kattan<\/a> was a Jewish intellectuals who engaged with French Canadian literary culture in the postwar period. Kattan was an Iraqi Jewish writer who came to Montreal by way of Paris and who worked for many years at the Canada Council for the Arts, where he was among the most important institutional figures in Canadian literary culture. His position, simultaneously an Arabic-speaking Jew formed in Iraqi Jewish culture, a French-speaking intellectual formed in Parisian literary culture, and a Canadian literary administrator working in a bilingual institutional context, represents the most complex version of the multiple outsider position. His critical writing about the relationship between Jewish identity, Arabic culture, Canadian culture, and the French literary tradition brings together dimensions of the custodianship question<\/a> that no other figure has combined in the same way.
\nThe Canadian historical scholarship dimension of the custodianship question<\/a> is shaped by specific features of Canadian history that differ from the American, British, and European cases. Canadian history is organized around questions of national identity that are more contested and more unresolved than in most other national cases, partly because of the French-English division, partly because of the specific character of Canadian colonialism and its relationship to Indigenous peoples, and partly because of the uncertainty about what Canadian national identity actually is that has been a permanent feature of Canadian cultural and intellectual life.
\nJewish historians who entered the Canadian historical profession brought to it the specific gifts my analysis has identified across the other national cases, the sensitivity to what official narratives conceal and exclude, the moral urgency rooted in accountability, the awareness of how canonical histories are constructed through institutional and coalition processes rather than through neutral scholarly evaluation. The Canadian historical profession’s engagement with questions of colonialism, with the treatment of Indigenous peoples, with the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, and with the uncomfortable dimensions of Canadian immigration policy, including its explicit antisemitism in the refusal of Jewish refugees during the Nazi period, has been shaped significantly by scholars whose formation gave them specific reasons to pursue specific narratives hostile to majority interests.
\nIrving Abella and Harold Troper’s None Is Too Many<\/a>, published in 1982, is the most praised contribution of Jewish historical scholarship to Canadian history in the twentieth century. The book documented the Canadian government’s systematic refusal to admit Jewish refugees during the Nazi period, a policy motivated by explicit antisemitism at the highest levels of the immigration bureaucracy and the civil service. The title comes from the response of a Canadian immigration official who, when asked how many Jewish refugees Canada would admit, replied that none was too many. The book is a work of rigorous archival scholarship and a work of moral witness in the tradition of Presser’s Ondergang, bringing the specific moral urgency of Jewish historical formation to the honest accounting of what Canadian institutions had done when required to choose between their Jewish applicants and the comfortable antisemitism of their own officials.
\nThe book’s reception illustrates the convenient beliefs<\/a> framework with unusual clarity. The dominant Canadian self-image, which emphasized Canada’s humanitarian tradition and its role as a refuge for the persecuted, was challenged by documentation of a policy that was explicitly antisemitic and explicitly inhumane. The resistance to the book’s conclusions, the attempts to minimize or contextualize the evidence, the suggestions that the authors were motivated by special pleading rather than honest scholarship, all follow the pattern my analysis predicts for cases where an anti-majoritarian narrative threatens national identity.
\nDo any of these books bother to consider the interests of the majority? Do they consider the possibility that the majority acts in its own interests in ways that contradict the interests of Jews? The genre this book represents almost never does. The frame is moral indictment serving particular interests. Restriction equals failure. Failure equals antisemitism. Antisemitism equals irrational bigotry. The story ends there.
\nWhat the genre cannot ask: did the majority have interests of its own? Did large-scale Jewish immigration impose costs on existing populations that those populations perceived correctly? Were Mackenzie King, Blair, and Massey responding to coalition pressures from their own constituencies, including French Canadian Catholic voters who had clear reasons to oppose any demographic shift that strengthened Anglophone Protestant or secular liberal blocs? Abella and Troper do not treat these as live questions. They treat them as cover stories for prejudice.
\nThe asymmetry runs deep. Jewish historians write extensively about Gentile failures to admit Jews. Few books examine Jewish coalition behavior toward majorities with the same scrutiny. Fewer still treat Jewish advocacy for open immigration as a coalition strategy that majorities might reasonably resist. The literature treats one side as moral agents with interests and the other as moral patients whose duty is to receive.
\nA handful of writers cut against this. Strangers in the Land<\/a> by John Higham takes American nativism seriously as a response to real demographic and economic pressures rather than reducing it to character failure. Esau’s Tears<\/a> by Albert Lindemann asks why Jews provoked the responses they did and treats the question as legitimate rather than scandalous. Whiteshift<\/a> by Eric Kaufmann treats majority ethnic interests as a normal political fact rather than pathology. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe<\/a> by Christopher Caldwell treats native European concerns about Muslim immigration as rational rather than racist. None of these books gets the institutional reception that None Is Too Many got.
\nThe dominant genre, the one that wins prizes and enters school curricula and produces government apologies, runs in one direction. It assumes the majority has no legitimate interests as a majority. It assumes that any restriction reflects moral failure. It assumes the host nation’s coalition structure is invisible while the refugee group’s claims are self-evidently just.
\nA coalition reading of None Is Too Many<\/a> notices what the book cannot see. Mackenzie King<\/a> had to hold together a Liberal coalition that ran through Quebec. Quebec Catholic opinion was not interested in absorbing large numbers of European Jews. The Liberal Party survived by reading that opinion correctly. Blair was not an ideological outlier inserting personal prejudice into otherwise neutral machinery. He executed the preference of the coalition that kept the government in power. Massey reflected the dominant Anglophone Protestant establishment view that Canadian society had a character worth preserving and that mass immigration of any group, Jewish or otherwise, threatened it.
\nThe book treats this entire structure as an obstacle to morality rather than as a political fact a historian should explain on its own terms. The majority’s coalition becomes something to overcome, not understand. That framing is the coalition strategy of the historians, not a neutral reading of the past. The book wins acclaim because it tells the dominant postwar coalition the story it wants to hear about itself: that restrictionism was always shameful, that majority interests were never legitimate, that the moral arc bends toward openness. None of those propositions is obvious. All three serve a coalition. The book never says so.<\/p>\n

What the Canadian case adds to this comparative analysis is several distinctive contributions that the other national cases do not provide.<\/p>\n

The Montreal configuration, with its triple cultural layering of English Canadian, French Canadian, and Eastern European Jewish formations, produces a specific form of the multiple outsider position that is more complex than anything in the American, British, or European cases. The Montreal Jewish writer or scholar occupies simultaneously the position of the outsider to English Canadian culture, the outsider to French Canadian culture, and the inheritor of an Eastern European Jewish formation that is itself a tradition of multiple outsideness developed over centuries of living between cultures. The resulting intellectual formation is capable of seeing each of the traditions it participates in with a clarity that insiders to any single tradition cannot easily achieve, and the Canadian Jewish literary tradition at its best, in Klein, Richler, and the subsequent generation, demonstrates this capacity with unusual richness and power.<\/p>\n

The prairie Jewish formation adds a specifically North American dimension to the custodianship question that the Montreal configuration does not provide. The Jewish writer on the Canadian prairies occupies a position of outsideness to the landscape itself that has no European equivalent and that produces a specific form of creative challenge that is illuminating for the broader analysis. The absence of any prior Jewish literary tradition for engaging with the prairie landscape forces the Jewish writer to bring his formation to a genuinely new situation without the resources that prior engagement would have provided, and the results, in Mandel and in subsequent prairie Jewish writers, illustrate the creative possibilities and the specific limitations of the outsider position.<\/p>\n

The Frye connection adds the most important institutional dimension of the Canadian case because Frye’s project of recovering the biblical and typological framework for literary criticism represents the closest thing to a serious institutional attempt to restore the custodianship function that had been lost in the American case. That this attempt was made from a Canadian Protestant formation rather than from the Anglican formation of the English case or the secular Jewish formation of the American case, and that it engaged seriously with Jewish scholarly resources without fully assimilating them, produces a model of cross-traditional intellectual engagement that is collaborative.<\/p>\n

The None Is Too Many<\/a> case adds the clearest Canadian example of the Jewish historical formation producing an anti-majority pro-Jewish accounting of a national convenient belief<\/a> that the dominant historical establishment resisted. The Canadian case is particularly clear because the convenient belief<\/a> being challenged, Canada’s humanitarian self-image, was so thoroughly load-bearing for Canadian national identity and so thoroughly inconsistent with the documented historical record that the challenge could not be accommodated without significant institutional discomfort. The resistance to the book’s conclusions and the gradual acceptance of its findings over the subsequent decades follows the pattern of the Swiss and Norwegian reckonings but in a specifically Canadian institutional and political context.<\/p>\n

The Canadian case reveals something about the link between the custodianship question and national identity in countries where that identity is contested. Canada’s uncertainty about what it is, its ongoing negotiation between English and French, between colonial inheritance and indigenous reality, between American cultural dominance and the desire for distinctiveness, creates an intellectual environment where the outsider’s perspective is not merely tolerated but structurally useful. A culture uncertain about its identity has reasons to value the view of those who can see it from outside, and the Canadian Jewish intellectual contribution has been most received in those areas where Canadian culture was most uncertain about itself. That might be the most Canadian resolution of the custodianship question the comparative analysis offers: a culture uncertain enough about its identity to draw on the outsider’s perspective, and a Jewish intellectual community shaped by enough generations of Canadian experience to offer that perspective from a position of knowledge and attachment to the tradition it stands both inside and outside.<\/p>\n

Hybrid Vigor<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The English Canadian Protestant tradition, the French Canadian Catholic tradition, and the Eastern European Jewish formation each carried distinct selection histories. Their meeting in Montreal and Toronto produced offspring with traits no parent tradition could have produced alone. The biological frame lets us see what happened without the moral coloration that usually drives this conversation.
\nStart with heterosis. Klein, Richler, Layton, and Mandel are hybrid offspring in the strict sense. Klein’s poetry fuses Hebrew prosody, Yiddish formation, King James cadence, and the modernist English line. No source population could have produced him alone. Richler’s prose carries the same signature. The St Urbain world he documented had no native chronicler with his formation, and the English Canadian novel had no equivalent voice before him. Layton brought prophetic energy into a literary culture schooled in understatement. Mandel brought a Jewish moral sensibility to a prairie landscape that had no prior Jewish literary tradition to draw on. Each man shows hybrid vigor in the technical sense. Traits in the offspring exceed traits in either parent.
\nHeterosis cuts both ways. The hybrid outperforms the parents, but the parents are not made fitter by the cross. The English Canadian Protestant literary tradition that opened to these voices got Klein and Richler and lost the unitary Protestant formation that had given the tradition its earlier coherence. No complaint here about Klein or Richler. Description, not critique. When populations hybridize, the parents pay a cost. The Quebec Catholic formation experienced the same thing in different ways once the Quiet Revolution lowered its boundaries. The Jewish source population experienced the most dramatic effect. Heterosis requires two distinct populations to cross. Once the hybrid offspring become the dominant phenotype and marry back into the host population, the Jewish source formation itself thins out. The Canadian Jewish community that produced Klein and Richler is not the same community three generations later. The hybrid vigor came at the price of the source.
\nNiche construction is the next frame. Naim Kattan at the Canada Council is the clearest case. He did not enter an existing niche. He helped build the institutional environment in which Canadian literary culture would operate after the 1960s. The Council, the bilingual literary administration, the support structures for writers in both languages, all reflect choices made by men whose formation gave them intuitions about what literature is for and what cultural institutions should do. Frye’s biblical criticism at Toronto did the same work from inside the Protestant tradition. He built an academic environment where Jewish scholarly resources had a place near the center, and that environment then selected for further engagement of the same kind.
\nNiche construction has consequences for populations that did not do the constructing. The English Canadian Protestant academic establishment that existed before Frye was a coherent formation with its own logic. The new institutional environment Frye and Kattan helped build does not select for that older formation the way the older institutions did. The selection pressure changed. Phenotypes once favored became less favored. The Protestant cultural majority that ran Canadian universities a century earlier did not lose its position because anyone took it from them. The niche they had occupied changed character and selected for something else.
\nThe French Canadian case is sharper. Quebec’s ultramontane Catholic formation under figures like Groulx was itself a defensive niche construction against Anglo-Protestant absorption and against secular liberalism. The Quiet Revolution dismantled this formation. The new secular francophone Quebec is also a niche construction, but it constructed against the older Catholic formation as much as against Anglo dominance. Quebec Jewish intellectuals like Kattan operate in this newer niche with far less friction than Klein operated in the older one. The cause is not greater accommodation. The niche has been reconstructed. The older Quebec Catholic population’s interest in maintaining its formation lost out, partly through internal Quebec choices and partly because the new arrangement favored mobile multilingual intellectuals over rooted clerical ones.
\nCrypsis matters too. Klingenstein’s American Jewish critics performed crypsis. They camouflaged formation to gain entry. Klein refused crypsis and his career shows the cost. Richler used selective visibility. He was Jewish in his subject matter but his prose style did not code as ethnically Jewish the way some American Jewish writing of his period did. Layton went the opposite direction entirely. Aposematism. Warning coloration. Conspicuous and deliberately offensive. Each strategy has fitness consequences and each carries costs. From the host population’s perspective, crypsis is the strategy that creates the most strain because it makes accurate detection harder, and accurate detection is part of how a population maintains its boundaries. The host culture had a legitimate interest in knowing who was operating from what formation. Klein and Layton, by refusing crypsis, gave the host population the information it needed even when the information was uncomfortable.
\nExaptation runs through the whole story. Hermeneutic skills evolved over centuries of Talmudic commentary got recruited for literary criticism. Prophetic denunciation evolved for ancient Israel got recruited for the critique of Canadian bourgeois life. Multilingual sensitivity evolved through the Yiddish-Hebrew-Russian-Polish situation of Eastern Europe got recruited for the English-French-Yiddish situation of Montreal. None of these traits were designed for their new functions. They were available because earlier selection pressures had built them, and the new environment found uses for them. The host population’s literature was enriched by traits it did not produce. It was also reshaped by them. The English Canadian critical tradition before Frye did not have the hermeneutic equipment Klein and Mandel brought. After their entry, the tradition included this equipment and the writing produced under its influence. The tradition is not what it was before. Whether that is gain or loss depends on premises the biological frame does not supply.
\nPhenotypic plasticity tells us the Canadian environment itself was generative. Kattan in Baghdad would have produced different work than Kattan in Montreal. The Montreal environment elicited expressions the Iraqi or Parisian environment would not have. Klein’s New York counterparts produced different poetry than Klein because the cultural environment around them differed. The Canadian setting was not a passive container into which Jewish formation poured itself. It was an active environment that pulled certain expressions out and suppressed others. The bilingual Montreal context pulled out Klein’s double consciousness. The prairie pulled out Mandel’s particular outsider relation to landscape. These phenotypes are not in the genotype. The encounter produces them.
\nHorizontal gene transfer is the cleanest frame for what happened between Frye and Jewish scholarship. Frye took Buber and Rosenzweig into his biblical criticism. Jewish scholars took Frye’s typological framework into their reading of Hebrew literature. Neither tradition descended from the other. The exchange happened laterally. Lateral transfer enriches both lineages and blurs them. The English Canadian Protestant critical tradition that incorporated Buber is no longer the same tradition. The Jewish hermeneutic tradition that incorporated Frye’s archetypal framework is not the same tradition either. Both lineages gained capacities. Both lost some of their distinctness as separate formations.
\nThe interests clash because populations in contact have real and competing stakes in continuity. The English Canadian Protestant majority had a coherent formation with theological grounding, aesthetic preferences, and institutional structures it had built over a century. Its interest in maintaining that formation was not arbitrary. The British connection, the United Church and Anglican institutional life, the blend of British literary inheritance and Canadian regional experience, was a working cultural ecosystem. Its resistance to rapid hybridization was the immune response of a coherent population. Calling it racism or antisemitism captures part of the phenotype but misses what the phenotype was for.
\nThe French Canadian Catholic majority had stronger reasons for the same response. A French Catholic minority on a Protestant Anglo continent under permanent demographic pressure had every biological reason to resist hybridization. The ugly forms this took, Groulx’s antisemitism among them, were phenotypic expressions of a population under pressure. No moral defense here. Description. Populations that do not defend boundaries do not persist as distinct populations, and the French Catholic population of Quebec had reason to know this from its own history of British conquest and Anglo economic dominance.
\nThe Jewish Canadian population had its own continuity interest, and it ran in two directions that did not fully line up. One interest was producing the Klein-and-Richler hybrid offspring that gave the community standing in Canadian literary culture and gave individual Jewish writers extraordinary opportunities. The other interest was the long-term persistence of the source formation, the Eastern European Jewish culture that made Klein and Richler possible. The same conditions that produced the hybrids accelerated the dissolution of the formation that made them possible. Heterosis is not a sustainable strategy for source population continuity. It is a one-generation effect that depends on having distinct populations to cross.
\nThese interests cannot be reconciled by shared moral premises because the parties do not share the relevant premises. The English Canadian Protestant interest in cultural continuity, the French Canadian Catholic interest in cultural continuity, and the Jewish interest in producing hybrid offspring while also maintaining the source formation are all coherent interests pointing in different directions. The Canadian outcome, partial hybridization with substantial dissolution of all three source formations, is one possible outcome among several. It is not the morally correct outcome. It is the outcome the Canadian institutional and demographic situation produced.
\nWhat the biological frame adds to the literary analysis is the recognition that none of these populations were villains or heroes. Each had interests. The interests were partly compatible and partly opposed. The hybrid offspring produced extraordinary work that no parent population could have produced alone. The parent populations paid costs for this productivity that they had reasons to resist paying. Frye’s openness to Jewish scholarship enriched his work and changed the Protestant tradition he had inherited. Klein’s refusal of crypsis gave us his poetry and accelerated the dissolution of the Eastern European Jewish formation his parents had carried to Montreal. Groulx’s antisemitism was ugly and intelligible as a defensive phenotype. None of this delivers a moral verdict. It is the population-level description of what happens when these specific groups meet under these specific conditions.
\nThe custodianship question looks different from this angle. Custodianship implies a stable formation passing intact through time, with custodians keeping it in trust for the next generation. The biological frame suggests no formation is stable in this way. All formations are working out their relations to other formations under selection pressure. Custodianship is itself a phenotype, a strategy populations adopt under certain conditions. When the conditions change, the custodianship strategy loses fitness, and other strategies replace it. Hybridization. Niche construction. Exaptation. The Canadian Jewish contribution to Canadian literary culture and the Canadian Protestant and Catholic majority cultures’ partial absorption of that contribution are not deviations from a custodianship that should have been maintained. They are the evolutionary process that custodianship was always one phase of.
\nThe honest accounting the biological frame permits is that all three populations had legitimate interests, none of those interests aligned cleanly with the others, and the outcome served some interests more than others. The hybrid offspring won, in the sense that their work now stands as the canonical Canadian literature of the period. The parent populations lost cultural distinctness, in different proportions and through different routes. No party has clean hands and no party deserves the role of victim. Each played its strategy and bore its costs. That is what happens when populations meet, and it is happening still.<\/p>\n

Latin America is not a single national configuration but a continental one encompassing multiple national traditions, multiple waves of Jewish immigration, multiple relationships between Jewish intellectual formation and dominant cultural institutions, and multiple versions of the relationship between Catholic culture, national identity, and literary tradition. The custodianship question<\/a> therefore operates differently in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, and the smaller Latin American countries, and the honest analysis requires attending to these differences rather than treating Latin America as a single homogeneous case.
\nThe Catholic literary and cultural tradition that Jewish intellectuals were entering in Latin America was shaped by a specifically Iberian Catholicism that differed importantly from the Italian, French, or Swiss Catholic formations. Spanish and Portuguese colonial Catholicism was organized around the specific theological and institutional legacy of the Counter-Reformation, which had been more thoroughly implemented in the Iberian peninsula and its colonies than anywhere else in the Catholic world. The Inquisition, which had been the instrument of forced conversion and persecution of Jews and conversos in Spain and Portugal, had operated in the colonies as well, creating a specific relationship between Catholic institutional power and Jewish identity that was more violent and more historically recent than the equivalent relationship in most European countries.
\nThe historical background of the conversos, the Jews who converted to Christianity under pressure of persecution in Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, is essential for understanding the Latin American case because the converso tradition created a specific form of crypto-Jewish identity that persisted in Latin America for generations after the original forced conversions. Converso families maintained Jewish practices in secret while publicly conforming to Catholic requirements, developing a specific form of the double life in an extreme and literally life-threatening form. The Inquisition’s pursuit of conversos who maintained Jewish practices created a culture of concealment and coded communication that is itself a version of the hermeneutics of survival that is a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture, but developed under conditions of far greater danger than anything the European diaspora communities faced in the post-emancipation period.
\nThe converso legacy is visible in Latin American literary culture in ways that literary scholars have only begun to examine seriously in recent decades. The suggestion that figures like Santa Teresa of Avila and Luis de Le\u00f3n had converso ancestry has been argued by scholars and, if correct, raises interesting questions about the relationship between crypto-Jewish formation and the specific character of their mystical and literary work. The possibility that the interior spiritual life celebrated by Spanish mysticism was partly shaped by the enforced interiority of the converso experience, the cultivation of an authentic inner life that the external performance of Catholic conformity could not reach, is a hypothesis that connects the Spanish mystical tradition to the Jewish intellectual formation in ways that the official history of Spanish literature has been reluctant to examine.
\nArgentina is the most important single country for the custodianship question in Latin America because it developed the largest and most culturally productive Jewish community in Latin America and one of the largest in the world, with a peak population of approximately four hundred and fifty thousand by the mid twentieth century. The Argentine Jewish community was the product of several waves of immigration, Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire, Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing the pogroms and the poverty of the Pale of Settlement, and German and Central European Jews fleeing Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. This diversity of origins produced a specifically Argentine Jewish formation that combined multiple Jewish intellectual traditions in a specifically Latin American context.
\nThe Argentine literary tradition that Jewish intellectuals entered was organized around a specific cultural and intellectual formation that differed importantly from the European national traditions. Argentine culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped by the project of national consolidation through immigration and European cultural influence, and the dominant Argentine intellectual tradition celebrated the European heritage while navigating the specific tensions between European cosmopolitanism and the gaucho nationalism that romanticized the indigenous and criollo elements of Argentine identity. The tension between these two poles of Argentine cultural identity, the cosmopolitan European and the nationalist criollo, created an intellectual environment that was more genuinely open to European Jewish participation than the equivalent European environments because Argentine culture was itself in the process of constructing a national identity rather than defending an established one.
\nJorge Luis Borges<\/a> is the central figure for any account of the relationship between Jewish intellectual formation and Argentine literary culture, even though Borges was not Jewish. His engagement with Jewish textual tradition, particularly with Kabbalah and with the Talmudic tradition of interpretive plurality, was sustained and substantive in ways that go beyond decorative literary borrowing. His stories repeatedly draw on specifically Jewish hermeneutical concepts, on the idea of the text as an infinite space of interpretation, on the relationship between original and copy, between the divine library and its human readers, on the possibility that all texts are secretly the same text read from different angles. The Library of Babel, Tl\u00f6n Uqbar Orbis Tertius, Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote, all engage with ideas that are structurally continuous with the Kabbalistic tradition of reading the Torah as a text whose meaning is inexhaustible and whose interpretation is a form of participation in the divine creative act.
\nBorges’s relationship to his Jewish intellectual interlocutors was close and sustained. His friendships with Argentine Jewish writers and intellectuals, his engagement with the work of Gershom Scholem, whose scholarship on Jewish mysticism he read with great attention, and his explicit references to Talmudic and Kabbalistic sources in his fiction, all suggest a relationship to Jewish intellectual tradition that was more than superficial. He was not simply borrowing exotic material for literary effect. He was finding in the Jewish hermeneutical tradition resources for a vision of textuality and interpretation that resonated with his own philosophical sensibility and that he could not find as fully articulated in any other tradition he had access to.
\nThe Argentine Jewish writers who engaged with Borges and with the Argentine literary tradition he dominated occupy a position in the custodianship question that is somewhat different from the European equivalents. They were entering a tradition that was itself in the process of construction, that was genuinely open to multiple influences, and that was organized around values, cosmopolitanism, formal sophistication, philosophical depth, that the Jewish intellectual formation was well equipped to contribute to. The entry into Argentine literary culture did not require the same degree of assimilation or the same degree of self-concealment that entry into the established European literary traditions demanded, because the Argentine tradition was less settled and therefore less defensive about its essential character.
\nAlberto Gerchunoff<\/a> is the founding figure of Argentine Jewish literature and his Los gauchos jud\u00edos, The Jewish Gauchos<\/a>, published in 1910 to coincide with the centenary of Argentine independence, is the paradigmatic text for understanding the specific form that Jewish engagement with Latin American literary culture took in its initial phase. The book describes the experience of Jewish immigrants in the agricultural colonies of the Entre R\u00edos province, funded by the Baron Hirsch philanthropy as an experiment in transforming Eastern European Jewish immigrants into Argentine farmers, and it does so in a literary language that is simultaneously Hebrew biblical in its cadences and Spanish pastoral in its genre conventions.
\nThe conceit of the Jewish gaucho is itself a form of the defamiliarization that is a distinctively Jewish contribution, making strange both the Jewish immigrant experience and the Argentine pastoral tradition by placing them in unexpected combination. But it is also a form of the assimilation strategy, the demonstration that Jews can become fully Argentine by entering the most distinctively Argentine cultural formation, the gaucho tradition, without abandoning their Jewish identity. The Jewish gaucho who reads the Torah and rides the pampas is simultaneously a Jewish intellectual contributing his formation to Argentine culture and an Argentine claiming the gaucho heritage for a people that had no prior claim on it.
\nGerchunoff’s subsequent career and his political trajectory, he became increasingly nationalist and eventually broke with the Zionist movement in favor of a vision of Argentine Jewish integration that he believed made Jewish nationalism unnecessary. The investment in Argentine national identity required a corresponding disinvestment from Jewish particularism that Gerchunoff was willing to make but that the subsequent history of Argentine antisemitism, culminating in the military dictatorship’s specific targeting of Jewish intellectuals during the dirty war of the late 1970s, revealed as tragically mistaken.
\nThe dirty war is essential for understanding the Argentine Jewish custodianship question in its full historical weight. The military dictatorship that seized power in 1976 and held it until 1983 killed between ten thousand and thirty thousand people, with estimates of the proportion of victims who were Jewish ranging from ten to twenty percent in a country where Jews represented less than two percent of the population. The specific targeting of Jewish intellectuals, academics, journalists, and political activists reflected a form of Argentine Catholic nationalism that combined antisemitism with anticommunism in ways that made Jewish intellectual participation in Argentine cultural and political life specifically dangerous. The detention centers where prisoners were tortured and killed included specifically antisemitic dimensions to the treatment of Jewish prisoners that survivors documented and that the subsequent truth commission confirmed.
\nThe Argentine Jewish intellectual community’s response to the dirty war illustrates the custodianship question. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who organized the most visible public resistance to the dictatorship’s disappearances, included significant Jewish participation, and their weekly silent marches around the central square of Buenos Aires drew on a tradition of witness and of refusing to allow the disappeared to be forgotten that is recognizably continuous with the zachor, the obligation of memory, that is a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary and historical culture. The specific form of bearing witness that the Mothers developed, carrying photographs of the disappeared, wearing white scarves to symbolize the diapers of the children they had lost, refusing silence in the face of official denial, is the prophetic tradition’s insistence on naming what power wants unnamed translated into a form of public political action that was simultaneously deeply Argentine and deeply continuous with Jewish moral grammar.
\nThe writers who bore witness to the dirty war from within the Argentine Jewish intellectual tradition include Jacobo Timerman<\/a>, whose Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, published in 1981, is the most internationally recognized account of the specific treatment of Jewish intellectuals during the dictatorship. Timerman was a journalist and newspaper publisher whose imprisonment and torture by the military regime was explicitly antisemitic in its character, and his account of that experience is simultaneously a political document, a work of literary witness, and an engagement with the question of what Jewish identity means in conditions of extreme political violence. His argument that the Argentine Jewish community’s establishment organizations were too willing to accommodate the dictatorship in order to protect their institutional position illustrates the convenient beliefs<\/a> framework with painful precision, the coalition maintenance behavior that sacrifices honest accounting for institutional survival operating within the Jewish community itself rather than merely in the dominant culture surrounding it.
\nThe relationship between Argentine Jewish intellectuals and the Borges tradition in Argentine literary culture illustrates the custodianship question from a different angle. The generation of Argentine Jewish writers who came of age in the shadow of Borges, figures like David Vi\u00f1as and No\u00e9 Jitrik, engaged with his legacy in ways that were shaped by their Jewish formation and by their political commitments in ways that produced genuine critical insights alongside genuine distortions. Vi\u00f1as’s engagement with Argentine literary history was organized around a Marxist critique of the relationship between literature and power that brought the prophetic tradition’s sensitivity to the gap between official piety and actual practice to the analysis of Argentine literary culture, finding in the canonical tradition the ideological justifications for the social order that the tradition presented as universal aesthetic achievement.
\nRicardo Piglia is an Argentine literary critics and novelists of the late twentieth century. Piglia was not Jewish but his critical project, the sustained examination of the relationship between Argentine literary tradition and political power, between the official canon and the suppressed alternatives, drew on intellectual resources that were significantly shaped by his engagement with the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory and with the Argentine Jewish intellectual tradition. His concept of the two stories, the idea that every narrative contains a visible story and a hidden story that the visible story simultaneously reveals and conceals, is structurally continuous with the hermeneutics of suspicion, the reading beneath the surface of official discourse to find what the official discourse is designed to conceal.
\nBrazil presents a different version of the Latin American custodianship question because the Brazilian cultural formation differs importantly from the Argentine one. Brazilian Catholicism was shaped by a specific mixture of Portuguese colonial culture, African cultural traditions brought through the slave trade, and indigenous cultural elements that produced a syncretic religious and cultural formation unlike anything in the Spanish colonial world. The Brazilian Jewish community, concentrated primarily in S\u00e3o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, was somewhat smaller than the Argentine community and somewhat less politically engaged with specifically Jewish institutional life, which produced a different form of the relationship between Jewish intellectual formation and dominant cultural institutions.
\nMoacyr Scliar<\/a> is the most important Brazilian Jewish literary figure and his work illustrates the custodianship question in a specifically Brazilian form. Scliar was a physician and novelist from Porto Alegre in the Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost Brazilian state with a significant population of European immigrants, whose work combined a medical practitioner’s attention to the specific particularity of individual suffering with a specifically Jewish moral formation rooted in his immigrant community’s Eastern European heritage. His novel The Centaur in the Garden, which follows a Jewish Brazilian man born as a centaur who undergoes surgery to become fully human and spends his life negotiating the relationship between his animal nature and his human aspiration, is simultaneously a magical realist fable in the Latin American tradition and a specifically Jewish meditation on the experience of assimilation, the surgical removal of the distinctive formation in order to pass as fully human in a culture that defines humanity in terms that exclude you.
\nThe magical realism tradition in Latin American literature is distinctive. The Latin American literary tradition’s comfort with the coexistence of realistic and fantastic elements in the same narrative, its willingness to treat the apparently impossible as simply another dimension of ordinary experience, reflects a relationship to storytelling that is in some ways more continuous with the Jewish midrashic tradition than with the European realist tradition. The midrash, which fills the gaps in the biblical narrative with imaginative elaboration that is simultaneously fictional and theologically serious, is a form of storytelling that treats the boundary between the literal and the legendary as permeable in ways that are structurally similar to what magical realism does with the boundary between the realistic and the fantastic. Jewish writers who engaged with the magical realist tradition were therefore in some respects entering a literary form that was more continuous with their own narrative tradition than the European realist forms.
\nGabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez<\/a>, the most internationally celebrated practitioner of magical realism, was not Jewish, but his engagement with the tradition of the Hebrew Bible as a literary model, which he acknowledged explicitly, and his relationship to the Colombian Jewish community through which he encountered some of his literary influences, illustrates the cross-traditional fertilization that the Latin American literary environment made possible. The influence of Faulkner, filtered through the Latin American reception of Faulkner that was shaped partly by Jewish translators and critics, combined with the influence of Kafka, whose Jewish formation and whose engagement with the experience of the outsider in an incomprehensible bureaucratic world made him particularly resonant for Latin American writers living under authoritarian regimes, produced the specific synthesis that Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez called magical realism and that transformed world literature in the second half of the twentieth century.
\nKafka’s influence on Latin American literature is itself a form of the Jewish intellectual contribution operating through translation and reception rather than through direct participation in literary institutions. The Latin American reception of Kafka, mediated significantly by Jewish translators and literary critics who understood from their own formation what Kafka was doing with the experience of outsideness and institutional incomprehensibility, brought to Latin American literary culture a specifically Jewish vision of what it means to inhabit a world whose rules you did not make and cannot fully understand, and that vision resonated with the specific experience of Latin American writers living under colonial legacies and authoritarian governments in ways that the European reception of Kafka could not fully anticipate.
\nJorge Amado<\/a> in Brazil and his engagement with the Afro-Brazilian religious and cultural tradition illustrates a dimension of the Latin American custodianship question that has no European equivalent. The syncretic religious cultures of Latin America, candombl\u00e9 and umbanda in Brazil, santer\u00eda in Cuba and the Caribbean, which combined African religious traditions with Catholic iconography and practice, created a model of cultural hybridization that was different from the assimilation model that dominated European Jewish engagement with dominant cultures. The Latin American model suggested that two traditions could genuinely interpenetrate rather than simply with one subordinating the other, and this model of syncretism offered Jewish intellectuals in Latin America a different way of thinking about the relationship between Jewish formation and dominant cultural traditions than the assimilation or outsideness options that the European cases had predominantly presented.
\nMexico presents yet another variation on the Latin American custodianship question because Mexican cultural politics in the twentieth century were organized around a specifically Mexican nationalist project that was simultaneously revolutionary in its social commitments and deeply rooted in pre-Columbian indigenous culture in ways that created a distinctive cultural environment for Jewish intellectual participation. The Mexican muralist tradition, the literary nationalism associated with figures like Octavio Paz, and the specifically Mexican Catholic culture that synthesized indigenous and Spanish Catholic elements in the form associated with the Virgin of Guadalupe, all created a cultural environment that was simultaneously more nationalist and more syncretic than the Argentine equivalent.
\nThe Mexican Jewish community was smaller than the Argentine and Brazilian communities and more recently settled, with significant immigration occurring only in the early twentieth century. The community’s engagement with Mexican cultural institutions was shaped by the specific character of Mexican nationalism, which was both welcoming of immigrant contributions to the national project and insistent on the primacy of Mexican national identity in ways that created specific pressures toward assimilation that differed from the Argentine and Brazilian equivalents.
\nMargo Glantz<\/a> illustrates the custodianship question in a specifically Mexican form. Glantz is a novelist, critic, and academic whose career combines literary criticism of the colonial and contemporary Mexican literary tradition with autobiographical fiction that engages with the question of what it means to be Jewish in Mexico. Her Las genealog\u00edas, published in English as The Family Tree, is a meditation on her family’s immigrant history that combines personal memoir with cultural history in ways that bring the specifically Jewish tradition of memory as moral obligation into the Mexican literary tradition. Her critical work on colonial Mexican literature, particularly on the figure of Sor Juana In\u00e9s de la Cruz, the brilliant seventeenth century Mexican nun whose intellectual achievements and whose eventual silencing by the Inquisition make her one of the most compelling figures in the Latin American literary tradition, illustrates what the Jewish intellectual formation brings to the reading of a specifically Latin American tradition.
\nGlantz’s reading of Sor Juana relates to my custodianship argument because Sor Juana’s position in colonial Mexican culture was itself a form of the insider-outsider position. Sor Juana was a woman of extraordinary intellectual gifts who gained access to the colonial intellectual tradition through the convent but whose access was always conditional on her conformity to the institutional requirements of a tradition that ultimately silenced her. Glantz’s reading of Sor Juana from a position of Jewish feminist formation finds in Sor Juana’s experience resources for understanding the custodianship question in its gender dimension that the Mexican literary establishment, organized primarily around male nationalist and indigenist concerns, had not been able to see. The outsider’s gift of defamiliarization is operating here across multiple dimensions simultaneously, the Jewish outsider reading the female outsider reading the colonial tradition, and producing from the intersection a critical insight that none of the individual positions could have generated alone.
\nThe Cuban case adds a specifically Caribbean dimension to the Latin American custodianship question. Cuba’s Jewish community, relatively small and concentrated in Havana, engaged with Cuban cultural life in ways that were shaped by the specific character of Cuban culture, its Afro-Cuban religious and musical traditions, its Spanish colonial heritage, and its specific revolutionary politics after 1959. The Cuban Revolution created a situation in which the existing Jewish community largely emigrated, removing from Cuban cultural life the specific intellectual formation that is a significant contributor, and replacing it with a revolutionary cultural politics that was organized around different categories entirely.
\nThe relationship between the Cuban Revolution and Jewish intellectuals is itself an interesting dimension of the broader Latin American custodianship question because many of the Latin American Jewish intellectuals who supported the revolution, and there were many, did so partly through the universalist political commitment that Novick identified in the American Jewish historians, the adoption of a universalist framework as both a genuine commitment and an assimilation strategy that allowed Jewish intellectuals to participate in a transformative political project without foregrounding their Jewish particularity. The subsequent disillusionment that many of these intellectuals experienced when the revolution revealed its authoritarian dimensions is a version of the same pattern, the convenient belief<\/a> of revolutionary universalism collapsing when the coalition it served revealed itself to be organized around particular interests rather than universal values.
\nUruguay presents a smaller but instructive case because Montevideo’s Jewish community, relatively prosperous and well-integrated into Uruguayan civic life, participated in one of Latin America’s most genuinely democratic and most socially progressive national cultures. Uruguay’s early secularism, its early welfare state, and its relatively tolerant civic culture created an environment for Jewish intellectual participation that was more genuinely inclusive than most Latin American equivalents, and the Uruguayan Jewish intellectual contribution to Uruguayan literary and cultural life reflects this more hospitable environment. The figure of Juan Carlos Onetti, while not Jewish, produced a body of fiction whose engagement with alienation, with the gap between aspiration and reality, and with the experience of living on the margins of a culture that promises more than it delivers, resonates with the specifically Jewish intellectual formation in ways that suggest cross-traditional influence even in the absence of direct biographical connection.
\nWhat the Latin American case collectively adds to my comparative analysis is several distinctive contributions that none of the previous national cases had provided.
\nThe converso legacy is the most historically distinctive contribution because it demonstrates that the double life, the simultaneous performance of belonging and maintenance of a concealed authentic identity, was not merely a metaphor for the Jewish intellectual’s position in dominant cultural institutions but was literally the condition of Jewish survival in the Iberian colonial world for several generations. The converso experience is the most extreme possible form of the assimilation strategy, and its legacy in Latin American cultural life, both in the identifiable converso descendants who maintained some form of Jewish identity in secret and in the broader cultural influence of converso formation on Spanish and Latin American literary and religious culture, adds a dimension to the custodianship question that the European and North American cases do not provide.
\nThe magical realism connection adds the most important literary critical contribution of the Latin American case to my analysis, because it suggests that the Jewish narrative tradition’s comfort with the interpenetration of the literal and the legendary, the realistic and the miraculous, found in Latin American magical realism a cultural environment that was more continuous with specifically Jewish narrative modes than any of the European literary traditions my analysis had previously examined. The Jewish writer who engaged with Latin American magical realism was not entering a foreign tradition and bringing an outsider’s perspective to it. He was finding in the Latin American tradition a narrative mode that was in some respects closer to his own formation than the European realist tradition that had dominated the literary cultures his community had entered in Europe and North America.
\nThe dirty war and the specific targeting of Jewish intellectuals adds the most politically extreme version of the custodianship question available in the comparative analysis outside the Nazi period, demonstrating that the structural vulnerability of the Jewish intellectual in the dominant cultural institution is not simply a matter of professional marginalization or assimilation pressure but can in specific historical configurations become a matter of physical survival. The Argentine case is the most recent instance in the comparative analysis where the Jewish intellectual paid for the attempt to participate in the dominant culture with his life, and the bearing witness tradition that emerged from the dirty war, in Timerman and in subsequent Argentine Jewish writing, is continuous with the tradition of witness.
\nThe syncretic model of cultural engagement that Latin American culture offered Jewish intellectuals is the most important structural contribution of the Latin American case to the broader analysis. The Latin American experience suggests that the assimilation or outsideness binary that the European cases had predominantly presented is not the only possible resolution of the custodianship question. The Latin American model of cultural syncretism, of genuine interpenetration between traditions rather than subordination of one to the other, offers a third possibility that the European cases had not made clearly available. Whether this model is genuinely achievable or whether it too conceals assimilation costs that the syncretic rhetoric obscures is a question that the Latin American evidence does not definitively resolve, but it raises the possibility in ways that enrich the comparative analysis and complicate the binary that the European cases had established.
\nThe final distinctive contribution of the Latin American case is what it reveals about the relationship between the custodianship question and the question of colonial legacy. Latin American literary culture is organized around the colonial relationship between European and indigenous traditions in ways that create a specific context for Jewish intellectual participation that differs from all the European national contexts. The Jewish intellectual in Latin America is not simply an outsider to a dominant tradition. He is an outsider to a tradition that is itself organized around the relationship between colonial and colonized cultures, and his position in that relationship is complicated by the fact that he is simultaneously a European in his cultural formation and a non-Christian in his identity, simultaneously a participant in the colonial cultural tradition and a member of a community that has its own experience of persecution and displacement. This complexity produces a form of the custodianship question that is more multidimensional than anything the European cases had presented and that requires a more nuanced analysis than the binary of insider and outsider that has organized the comparative analysis throughout.<\/p>\n

The Jewish intellectual engagement with Arabic and Persian literary culture in the medieval and early modern periods represents a productive episode of cross-traditional intellectual fertilization, followed by one of the most complete destructions of a literary and intellectual community that the modern period has produced.<\/p>\n

Start with what makes the Middle Eastern case structurally unique. The Jewish communities of the Arab world, the Sephardic communities of North Africa and the Levant and the Mizrahi communities of Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Iran, were not communities that entered an established literary and academic tradition from outside as immigrants seeking inclusion in a host culture’s institutions. They were ancient communities, in many cases predating the Arab conquest, whose presence in the region was as old as or older than the dominant culture that surrounded them. The Iraqi Jewish community traced its origins to the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE, making it one of the oldest continuously settled Jewish communities in the world. The Egyptian Jewish community had roots going back to the Hellenistic period. The Syrian and Lebanese communities were ancient beyond reliable historical memory.<\/p>\n

This deep rootedness created a relationship between Jewish intellectual formation and Arabic literary and intellectual culture that was fundamentally different from the relationship between Jewish intellectuals and European literary cultures. The Jewish scholar in medieval Baghdad or Cairo was not a recent immigrant seeking entry into an established institution. He was a member of an ancient community that had participated in the intellectual life of the region for centuries, that shared with the surrounding culture a common set of philosophical and scientific references derived from the Greek tradition, and that engaged with Islamic intellectual culture on terms that were in some respects more equal and more genuinely bilateral than anything available in the European Jewish encounter with Christian literary culture.<\/p>\n

The Islamic concept of dhimmitude, the protected but subordinate status of Jews and Christians under Islamic rule, created a specific form of the insider-outsider position that differs importantly from the European equivalents. The dhimmi was simultaneously a recognized and protected member of the society and a permanently subordinate one, excluded from certain positions of political authority but permitted to participate in intellectual, commercial, and professional life in ways that the Jewish communities of medieval Christian Europe frequently were not. The specific terms of dhimmitude varied considerably across time and place, from the relatively tolerant conditions of the Abbasid caliphate’s golden age to the more restrictive conditions of the Almohad period in North Africa and Spain, but the overall framework created a context for Jewish intellectual participation in Arabic culture that was both more structured and in some periods more genuinely open than the equivalent European contexts.<\/p>\n

The Andalusian period is the essential starting point for any account of Jewish intellectual engagement with Arabic literary culture because it represents the most complete and the most productive example of Jewish-Islamic intellectual partnership available in the historical record. Al-Andalus, the Islamic civilization of the Iberian peninsula from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, created a cultural environment in which Jewish, Islamic, and Christian intellectual traditions engaged with each other with a depth and a genuine mutual influence that has no precise parallel in any other period or place in Western cultural history. The convivencia, the coexistence of the three Abrahamic traditions in medieval Spain, was not a perfect harmony and it was punctuated by periods of severe persecution, particularly under the Almohad dynasty, but it created conditions for intellectual exchange that produced some of the most important achievements in Jewish, Islamic, and Western intellectual history.<\/p>\n

The Jewish poets of al-Andalus represent the most direct example of Jewish intellectual engagement with an Arabic literary tradition in the custodianship sense. Figures like Shmuel HaNagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, and Moses ibn Ezra were simultaneously major figures in the Jewish literary tradition and participants in the Arabic literary culture of their time. They wrote in both Hebrew and Arabic, engaged with Arabic literary forms and adapted them to Hebrew poetic purposes, and participated in the intellectual life of the Andalusian courts in ways that gave them access to the highest levels of Islamic intellectual culture while maintaining and deepening their specifically Jewish formation.<\/p>\n

Shmuel HaNagid is perhaps the most striking case because he was simultaneously the leader of the Granada Jewish community and the commander in chief of the Granada Muslim army, a position of political power and military responsibility that no Jewish figure in Christian Europe could have approached in the same period. His Hebrew poetry, written in Arabic literary forms adapted to biblical Hebrew idiom, represents the most complete available example of genuine bilingual and bicultural literary formation, the creation of a literary voice that was simultaneously and authentically both Jewish and Arabic rather than one with a distancing mechanism applied to the other.<\/p>\n

Judah Halevi is the most philosophically important figure for my analysis because his work engages with the custodianship question. Halevi was a philosopher and poet who wrote in both Hebrew and Arabic and who engaged with Islamic Aristotelian philosophy, the dominant intellectual tradition of his time, with a critical honesty that produced one of the most searching interrogations of the relationship between philosophical universalism and religious particularism available in any tradition. His Kuzari, written as a philosophical dialogue in which a Jewish scholar persuades the king of the Khazars to convert to Judaism rather than to Islam or Christianity, is simultaneously a defense of Jewish particularity against universalist philosophical reduction and an engagement with Islamic and Aristotelian philosophy at the highest available level of intellectual sophistication.<\/p>\n

He argues for the priority of formation over analysis in the transmission of religious and cultural truth. Halevi argues that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob cannot be reached through philosophical reasoning but only through the specific historical experience of the Jewish people, through the inherited formation that the tradition transmits across generations. This is the philosophical articulation of the point my analysis has been making empirically across all the national cases, that the tradition requires custodians who inhabit it rather than analyze it from outside, and that the analytical distance that philosophical universalism provides, however intellectually sophisticated, cannot substitute for the formative inheritance that living inside the tradition produces.<\/p>\n

His subsequent decision to emigrate from Spain to the Land of Israel, dying on the journey or shortly after arriving, is the most extreme version of the choice that Scholem embodied in the twentieth century, the redirection of the Jewish intellectual formation from engagement with the dominant culture toward commitment to specifically Jewish cultural and spiritual enterprise. Halevi understood that the Andalusian golden age, however productive for Jewish intellectual life, came at the cost of a kind of dispersal of Jewish intellectual energy into the service of a culture that was not ultimately Jewish, and his pilgrimage was a personal rejection of that dispersal in favor of the most direct possible engagement with the specifically Jewish inheritance.<\/p>\n

Moses Maimonides is the most universally recognized figure in medieval Jewish intellectual history and his relationship to Arabic intellectual culture is the most important single example of the custodianship question in its medieval Middle Eastern form. Maimonides was born in Cordoba in 1138, fled with his family during the Almohad persecution, spent years in North Africa, and eventually settled in Egypt where he became court physician to Saladin’s vizier and the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community. He wrote his major philosophical work, the Guide for the Perplexed, in Arabic using Hebrew characters, and his entire philosophical project was organized around the attempt to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy, transmitted through Islamic philosophical tradition, with the specific claims of the Jewish tradition.<\/p>\n

The Guide for the Perplexed is the most sustained medieval attempt to perform the operation that my analysis has been examining throughout the comparative study, the engagement with the dominant intellectual tradition from a position of Jewish formation that brings specific gifts to the encounter while maintaining a specific relationship to the tradition that the formation requires. Maimonides brought to Aristotelian philosophy the hermeneutical sophistication of the Talmudic tradition, the sensitivity to the gap between literal and non-literal meaning, the awareness of how canonical texts conceal as well as reveal their deepest commitments, and the moral urgency rooted in the covenant tradition’s insistence on accountability. The result was a philosophical work that transformed both Jewish philosophy and the broader tradition of Aristotelian philosophy in ways that had lasting influence on both Islamic and Christian philosophy as well as on Jewish thought.<\/p>\n

His relationship to Islamic intellectual culture illustrates both the gifts and the costs of the custodianship question in its medieval Middle Eastern form with unusual precision. Maimonides engaged with Islamic philosophy at the highest available level, drew on it generously, and produced work that was recognized by Islamic scholars as a significant contribution to the shared philosophical enterprise. But he also maintained a clear understanding of the limits of the Islamic intellectual framework, arguing in the Guide that the Islamic prohibition on philosophical inquiry, while it had not prevented the development of a rich philosophical tradition, ultimately restricted what that tradition could achieve. He was simultaneously inside the Arabic intellectual culture of his time and outside it in a way that gave him the critical perspective his own project required.<\/p>\n

The figure of Saadia Gaon, the tenth century Jewish philosopher and linguist who headed the Babylonian academy and who was one of the most important Jewish intellectual figures of the early Islamic period, illustrates the same pattern from an Iraqi Jewish perspective. Saadia wrote in Arabic and engaged with Islamic theological and philosophical tradition at the highest level while simultaneously defending the specific claims of the Jewish tradition against both Islamic and Christian challenge. His Emunot ve-Deot, Beliefs and Opinions, is the first systematic Jewish philosophical work, written in Arabic and drawing on the methods of Islamic kalam theology, and it illustrates the specific form of the insider-outsider engagement with the dominant intellectual tradition.<\/p>\n

The Cairo Geniza is itself a document of the custodianship question. The Geniza, the storage room of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, the old city of Cairo, contained hundreds of thousands of manuscript fragments preserved there because Jewish tradition prohibited the destruction of documents containing the name of God and therefore required their careful storage until formal burial. The Geniza documents, discovered by Solomon Schechter in 1896 and subsequently studied by generations of scholars culminating in the work of S.D. Goitein, reveal the texture of medieval Egyptian Jewish life with a completeness and an intimacy that no European archive of the same period can match for any Jewish community.<\/p>\n

Goitein’s six-volume A Mediterranean Society, based on decades of work with the Geniza documents, is among the most important works of historical scholarship produced in the twentieth century and it illustrates the Jewish intellectual contribution to historical scholarship. Goitein was a German Jewish scholar formed in the tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the German Jewish scholarly movement that applied the methods of modern historical scholarship to Jewish texts and history, who brought that formation to the study of the Cairo Geniza and produced from the encounter a reconstruction of medieval Mediterranean Jewish society of extraordinary richness and detail. His work is simultaneously a contribution to Islamic history, to Mediterranean economic history, to the history of the family and of gender, and to the history of Jewish communal life, and its interdisciplinary scope reflects the Jewish intellectual formation that is a distinctive contribution, the sensitivity to the interconnection of all dimensions of communal life, the refusal to separate the aesthetic from the ethical, the economic from the cultural, the private from the communal.<\/p>\n

The Mizrahi Jewish communities of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Yemen represent the other major strand of Middle Eastern Jewish intellectual engagement with the surrounding culture, distinct from the Sephardic strand that my analysis has been examining primarily in the Andalusian context. These communities had been part of the intellectual life of their regions for centuries before Islam and continued to participate in that life, in varying degrees and under varying conditions, throughout the Islamic period.<\/p>\n

The Iraqi Jewish community in particular developed a distinctive intellectual tradition that combined deep engagement with the Babylonian Talmudic tradition, which had been codified in Baghdad’s academies, with participation in the broader intellectual life of the Abbasid caliphate. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the great translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries that brought Greek philosophical and scientific texts into Arabic, included significant Jewish participation in ways that parallel the Jewish contribution to European intellectual life in later centuries. Jewish translators and scholars participated in the transmission of Greek learning into Arabic, bringing to the enterprise the multilingual facility and the textual sophistication that the Jewish tradition had developed through centuries of engagement with multiple languages and multiple textual traditions.<\/p>\n

The Iranian Jewish community presents a distinctive case because Persian literary culture, organized around the great tradition of classical Persian poetry from Ferdowsi through Rumi and Hafez, created a specific intellectual environment for Jewish engagement that differed from the Arabic literary tradition in important ways. Persian literary culture was more explicitly aesthetic and more organized around the celebration of beauty, love, and wine in ways that created specific tensions with Jewish religious tradition while also creating specific opportunities for Jewish engagement with forms and themes that the Arabic tradition did not provide in the same way.<\/p>\n

Jewish poets who wrote in Persian, a tradition that extended from the medieval period through the modern era, brought their Jewish formation to an aesthetic tradition that was simultaneously magnificent and in some respects incompatible with Jewish religious values. The Persian literary celebration of wine, which was a central theme of the classical tradition, was obviously in tension with Jewish prohibition, and the Persian tradition’s complex relationship to Islamic religious orthodoxy, which it simultaneously honored and subverted, created a specific intellectual environment in which Jewish participation could take forms that were not available in the more strictly regulated Arabic literary tradition.<\/p>\n

The modern period and the destruction of Middle Eastern Jewish communities is the catastrophic interruption that shapes the entire contemporary dimension of the Middle Eastern custodianship question. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars, and the rise of Arab nationalism combined to produce the emigration and expulsion of approximately eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews from Arab countries between 1948 and the early 1970s. Communities that had been part of the intellectual and cultural life of their regions for centuries, in some cases for millennia, were destroyed in a historical moment that was as complete as the Nazi destruction of European Jewry even if its mechanisms were different and its mortality rate was lower.<\/p>\n

The Iraqi Jewish community, which had been one of the most culturally productive in the Arab world, with significant participation in Iraqi national cultural and intellectual life in the early decades of the twentieth century, was essentially destroyed between 1948 and 1952. Iraqi Jews had been among the founders of the Iraqi national theater, had participated significantly in Iraqi journalism and literature, and had contributed to the development of Iraqi national culture in ways that the Arab nationalist politics of the mid twentieth century made it impossible to acknowledge. The destruction of this community and the erasure of its contribution from Iraqi national memory is one of the most complete examples available in the comparative analysis of the convenient belief<\/a> framework operating at the national level, the construction of a national narrative that erases the contribution of a minority whose presence complicates the nationalist story the dominant culture wants to tell about itself.<\/p>\n

Naim Kattan’s trajectory from Baghdad to Paris to Montreal represents the specific form of cultural displacement that the destruction of the Iraqi Jewish community produced. His engagement with multiple literary traditions, Arabic, French, and English Canadian, reflects the specific multilingual formation that the Iraqi Jewish community had developed through centuries of participation in multiple linguistic and cultural environments, and the dispersal of that formation across multiple countries and multiple literary traditions following the community’s destruction illustrates what is lost when an ancient community is expelled from the region that formed it.<\/p>\n

The Egyptian Jewish community, which had included figures like the novelist Albert Cossery and the diplomat and philosopher Georges Cattaui, was similarly destroyed in the wake of the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the subsequent expulsion of Egyptian Jews. The Alexandria that Lawrence Durrell celebrated in the Alexandria Quartet, with its cosmopolitan mixture of Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Egyptians living in productive if tense proximity, was itself destroyed by the Arab nationalist politics of the Nasser period, and the Jewish intellectual contribution to that cosmopolitan culture was erased along with the community itself.<\/p>\n

The figure of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff<\/a> is perhaps the most important example of the Egyptian Jewish intellectual contribution to the custodianship question in its specifically Middle Eastern form. Kahanoff was an Egyptian Jewish writer who coined the term Levantinism to describe the specific cultural formation of the cosmopolitan Eastern Mediterranean communities that had brought together Jewish, Greek, Italian, and Arab intellectual traditions in cities like Alexandria and Cairo. Her essays, written primarily in English and published in Israeli journals after her emigration to Israel, argued for the value of this Levantine formation as a model for the kind of genuine cross-traditional engagement that the custodianship question my analysis has been examining had only partially achieved in any of the national cases.<\/p>\n

Her argument that the Levantine intellectual tradition, organized around genuine multilingualism, genuine comfort with cultural plurality, and genuine engagement with multiple traditions simultaneously without subordinating any of them to the others, represented a more complete resolution of the custodianship question than the assimilation or outsideness options that the European cases had predominantly presented, is the most sophisticated available articulation of the third possibility that the Latin American syncretic model had suggested. Whether the Levantine model was as genuinely bilateral and as genuinely non-hierarchical as Kahanoff claimed, or whether it too concealed asymmetries and impositions that the celebratory rhetoric obscured, is a question that the historical evidence does not definitively resolve, but the model she articulated has become increasingly important for scholars thinking about the relationship between Jewish intellectual formation and the surrounding cultural traditions it has engaged with throughout history.<\/p>\n

The Yemeni Jewish community adds a specifically different dimension to the Middle Eastern custodianship question because Yemeni Jewish culture developed in relative isolation from the major centers of Islamic civilization and therefore maintained a more purely Jewish character than the Iraqi or Egyptian communities while simultaneously developing a specific relationship to Yemeni Arabic culture that was shaped by the specific conditions of Yemeni Jewish life.<\/p>\n

The Yemeni Jewish tradition of diwan poetry, which combined Hebrew religious poetry with Arabic musical forms in ways that were simultaneously deeply Jewish and deeply embedded in the surrounding Yemeni culture, illustrates the custodianship question in a form that differs from the high philosophical and literary examples my analysis has been primarily examining. The diwan poets were not academic intellectuals engaging with the dominant culture at the level of philosophical debate or formal literary criticism. They were communal poets maintaining a living tradition of religious and aesthetic practice that combined the specific inheritance of Yemeni Jewish formation with the musical and poetic forms of the surrounding Arab culture in a synthesis that was both genuinely Jewish and genuinely Yemeni.<\/p>\n

The emigration of most of the Yemeni Jewish community to Israel between 1948 and 1950, in the airlift known as Operation Magic Carpet, brought this specific cultural formation to Israel where it engaged with the dominant Ashkenazic cultural formation in ways that illustrate the custodianship question in its internal Jewish form. The Yemeni Jewish tradition, with its specific liturgical practices, its specific musical tradition, and its specific relationship to the Arabic cultural environment from which it came, was simultaneously a distinctive and valuable Jewish inheritance and a formation that the Ashkenazic dominated Israeli cultural establishment found difficult to fully receive and transmit. The gradual recovery and celebration of Yemeni Jewish cultural tradition in Israel, which has accelerated in recent decades, is a form of the zachor operating within the Jewish community rather than between the Jewish community and the dominant non-Jewish culture.<\/p>\n

The medieval Andalusian case is important because it provides the historical example of Jewish intellectual participation in a dominant culture at the highest possible level of genuine bilateral engagement, the case where the custodianship question comes closest to a genuinely equal partnership rather than a relationship between a dominant tradition and a marginal minority seeking entry. The Jewish poets and philosophers of al-Andalus were not seeking entry into an established institution that was reluctant to receive them. They were participating in a shared intellectual enterprise to which they contributed as equals and from which they derived intellectual enrichment that was genuine rather than merely the consolation of proximity to a tradition that excluded them. The Andalusian case is therefore the most complete historical example of what genuine cross-traditional intellectual partnership looks like, and its eventual destruction by the Almohad persecution and the Christian Reconquista is a reminder that even the most productive cross-traditional engagements are vulnerable to political configurations that redraw the boundaries of belonging in ways that make the partnership impossible to maintain.<\/p>\n

The Maimonidean case adds the most philosophically sophisticated engagement with the custodianship question available anywhere in the comparative analysis, because Maimonides was not simply a Jewish thinker who engaged with Islamic philosophy but a philosopher who understood from within both traditions what each could contribute to the other and what the limits of each were. His ability to hold simultaneously the insider’s formation and the outsider’s critical perspective, to be genuinely formed in both the Jewish and the Islamic intellectual traditions while maintaining a clear understanding of the differences between them, represents the ideal resolution of the custodianship question that the comparative analysis has been seeking and finding only partially achieved in any of the other national cases.<\/p>\n

The modern destruction of Middle Eastern Jewish communities adds the most complete example available in the comparative analysis of what is lost when an ancient community that has been part of the intellectual life of a region for centuries is expelled or forced to emigrate in a historical moment. The Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Yemeni Jewish communities had developed specific intellectual formations over centuries that combined Jewish and Arabic cultural traditions in ways that were both deeply Jewish and deeply embedded in the specific regional cultures from which they came. The destruction of these communities and the erasure of their contribution from the national narratives of the countries that expelled them is the most recent example of the convenient belief<\/a> framework operating at the national level to exclude an inconvenient reality<\/a> from the story a culture tells about itself.<\/p>\n

The Levantine model that Kahanoff articulated from the wreckage of the Egyptian Jewish community is the most important intellectual legacy of the Middle Eastern case for my comparative analysis because it suggests a resolution of the custodianship question that goes beyond the assimilation or outsideness binary that has organized the analysis throughout. The Levantine intellectual who is genuinely formed in multiple traditions simultaneously, who brings to each tradition the perspective of the others without subordinating any of them to a master framework, who finds in the intersection of multiple inheritances a creative position that none of the individual traditions could generate alone, represents the most complete possible resolution of the custodianship question. Whether this resolution is achievable in practice or whether it too dissolves under political pressure into the more familiar patterns of assimilation and expulsion is a question that the Middle Eastern case answers with tragic clarity. The Levantine intellectual communities that came closest to achieving this resolution were destroyed by the political configurations of the mid twentieth century before the resolution could be fully achieved or fully understood.<\/p>\n

All the other national cases my analysis has examined involved relatively recent Jewish entry into established literary and academic traditions that predated the Jewish presence. The Middle Eastern case involves communities that in many instances predated not only the academic institutions they entered but the dominant cultures that surrounded them. The Iraqi Jewish community was older than Islam. The Egyptian Jewish community was older than Arabic literary culture. The Syrian Jewish community had been part of the region’s intellectual life since before the Hellenistic period. This temporal depth changes the nature of the custodianship question in fundamental ways, because the question of who is the legitimate custodian of a tradition becomes considerably more complex when the community seeking entry has a longer presence in the region than the dominant tradition that controls the institution. The Jewish intellectual entering an American English department in 1940 was entering an institution with a history of a few centuries in a cultural tradition of a millennium. The Jewish intellectual participating in Baghdad’s intellectual life in the tenth century was a member of a community with a presence in the region of two and a half millennia, engaging with an Islamic culture that was three centuries old. The custodianship question in that context is not the same question that it is in the American or British cases, and the Middle Eastern evidence enriches the comparative analysis by forcing a recognition of the temporal dimension that the more recent national cases had not required.<\/p>\n

Africa is the most complex and the most internally differentiated case in the entire comparative analysis, because Africa is not a single cultural configuration but a continent of extraordinary diversity encompassing hundreds of distinct linguistic and cultural traditions, multiple colonial inheritances, multiple relationships between indigenous and imported literary cultures, and multiple forms of Jewish presence ranging from the ancient and deeply rooted to the recent and superficial.<\/p>\n

Start with what makes Africa structurally unique as a context for the custodianship question. Unlike all the previous national cases, Africa does not have a single dominant literary tradition that Jewish intellectuals entered from outside. It has multiple literary traditions in multiple languages, both indigenous African languages and the European colonial languages that became the primary vehicles for formal literary and academic culture in the modern period, and the relationship between Jewish intellectual formation and these traditions varies dramatically depending on which part of Africa, which linguistic tradition, and which historical period you are examining. The honest analysis requires attending to these differences rather than treating Africa as a single homogeneous case.<\/p>\n

The Jewish communities in Africa can be divided into several distinct categories that have very different relationships to the custodianship question. The ancient communities of North Africa, the medieval and early modern communities of Ethiopia, the Sephardic and later communities of sub-Saharan Africa concentrated primarily in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and the small scattered communities in various West and East African cities each have their own specific relationship to the African literary and intellectual traditions they participated in, and each illustrates a different version of the custodianship question.<\/p>\n

North Africa is the most historically complex dimension of the African case because the Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt were ancient communities whose presence in the region predated the Arab conquest and whose engagement with the surrounding literary and intellectual culture had developed over centuries in ways that my analysis has already partially examined in the Middle Eastern context. The North African Jewish communities were simultaneously part of the broader Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish world that my Middle Eastern analysis examined and part of the specifically North African cultural configuration that differed from the Levantine case in important ways.<\/p>\n

The Maghrebi Jewish community, concentrated primarily in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, developed a specific cultural formation that combined deep engagement with the Arabic and Berber cultures of the region with a specifically Sephardic Jewish inheritance rooted in the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The Moroccan Jewish community in particular developed a rich intellectual and literary tradition that was simultaneously deeply Jewish, in its engagement with Talmudic learning and the Sephardic liturgical tradition, and deeply Moroccan, in its engagement with the specific forms of Moroccan Arabic literary and musical culture. The Judeo-Moroccan tradition of malhun poetry, which combined Arabic poetic forms with Jewish religious themes, illustrates the specific form of cross-traditional engagement that the North African case produced, similar in structure to the Yemeni diwan tradition my Middle Eastern analysis examined but shaped by the specific character of Moroccan culture.<\/p>\n

The French colonial period is essential for understanding the modern dimension of the North African custodianship question because the establishment of French colonial institutions, including French-language universities and French-language literary culture, created a new set of institutional structures that Jewish intellectuals entered in ways that were shaped both by their specific Jewish formation and by their specific position in the colonial hierarchy. The Cr\u00e9mieux Decree of 1870, which granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews while denying it to Algerian Muslims, created a specific and deeply problematic asymmetry in the colonial hierarchy that shaped the relationship between Jewish and Muslim intellectuals in the Maghreb for the subsequent century.<\/p>\n

The Cr\u00e9mieux Decree is relevant to my custodianship analysis because it created a situation in which Algerian Jewish intellectuals entered French colonial cultural institutions with the status of French citizens, while Algerian Muslim intellectuals entered those same institutions as colonial subjects. This asymmetry meant that the Jewish intellectual in Algeria occupied a position in the colonial hierarchy that was simultaneously privileged relative to the Muslim majority and subordinate relative to the European settler population, a double positioning that has no precise parallel in any of the other national cases my analysis has examined. The Algerian Jewish intellectual was simultaneously an insider to French colonial cultural institutions and an outsider to the European settler culture that dominated those institutions, and simultaneously an insider to the Algerian cultural environment and an outsider to the Muslim Arab majority whose citizenship the colonial system had denied.<\/p>\n

Albert Bensoussan<\/a> illustrates the custodianship question in its specifically North African colonial form. Bensoussan is a novelist, translator, and literary critic whose work engages with the experience of Algerian Jewish life under French colonialism and with the devastating displacement of the community following Algerian independence in 1962. His translations of Latin American literature, particularly his translations of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and other magical realists, brought his specifically Algerian Jewish formation to the transmission of a literary tradition that was itself shaped by the colonial experience in ways that resonated with his own formation, illustrating the cross-traditional fertilization that the multilingual position of the Maghrebi Jewish intellectual made possible.<\/p>\n

Albert Memmi<\/a> is the most philosophically important figure in North African Jewish intellectual engagement with the custodianship question. Memmi was a Tunisian Jewish intellectual whose major works, The Colonizer and the Colonized and Portrait of a Jew, engage with the double positioning of the Tunisian Jewish intellectual in the colonial system and with the question of what Jewish identity means for someone who is simultaneously a colonial subject and a member of a community that the colonial system had partially privileged.<\/p>\n

His Portrait of a Jew is the most honest engagement with the assimilation question available in the North African context because it refuses the comfortable narrative of either successful integration or victimhood and instead examines the specific psychological and social mechanisms through which Jewish identity is maintained, eroded, or transformed in conditions of double outsideness. Memmi argues that the Jew’s position in the modern world is defined by a specific form of the insider-outsider tension that is both more extreme and more generative than any single dimension of it suggests. He is simultaneously attracted to and excluded from the dominant culture, simultaneously formed by and resistant to the Jewish tradition he inherited, and the resulting position, which Memmi describes with unusual psychological honesty, is the position that my analysis has been examining across all the national cases but which Memmi is the first figure to examine with this degree of direct philosophical attention.<\/p>\n

His The Colonizer and the Colonized, which became one of the foundational texts of post-colonial theory and which influenced Frantz Fanon and subsequent generations of post-colonial thinkers, illustrates the Jewish intellectual contribution to the analysis of colonial power relations. Memmi brought to the analysis of colonialism both the outsider’s perspective that his Jewish formation provided and the insider’s knowledge that his experience as a colonial subject in Tunisia gave him, and the combination produced a theoretical framework that was more nuanced and more psychologically precise than anything the European or American academic traditions had generated on the subject. The specifically Jewish contribution to post-colonial theory, mediated through Memmi’s work, is one of the most important and least acknowledged intellectual contributions of the North African Jewish intellectual tradition to world intellectual culture.<\/p>\n

Frantz Fanon, though not Jewish, engaged with Memmi’s work and acknowledged its influence on his own thinking, and the relationship between Jewish and Black intellectual traditions in the post-colonial context is itself an important dimension of the African custodianship question. Fanon was a Martiniquais psychiatrist whose work on the psychology of colonialism and on the Algerian independence struggle produced some of the most important texts of post-colonial theory, and his engagement with the European philosophical tradition, particularly with Sartre and Hegel, illustrates the operation that my analysis has identified as a distinctively Jewish contribution to intellectual culture but performed from a specifically Black Caribbean position.<\/p>\n

The relationship between Jewish and Black intellectual traditions in the African context is one of the most complex and most politically charged dimensions of the custodianship question because the two communities have been both allies and competitors in their different engagements with European cultural institutions and European political power. The Jewish intellectual tradition and the African intellectual tradition share certain structural features that my analysis has been identifying, the outsider’s gift of defamiliarization, the hermeneutics of survival, the moral urgency rooted in the experience of persecution, the obligation of memory applied to a history of suffering that the dominant culture prefers to forget. These shared structural features created specific possibilities for intellectual alliance and mutual influence that the historical record documents in multiple contexts.<\/p>\n

The comparison between the Jewish experience and the African experience, between antisemitism and racism, between the Holocaust and slavery and colonialism, has been a persistent and contested dimension of African and African American intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The Black intellectual tradition’s engagement with Jewish intellectual resources, from the influence of the prophetic tradition on the civil rights movement to the influence of post-colonial theory developed partly through Memmi’s work on subsequent African intellectual culture, illustrates the cross-traditional fertilization that my analysis has been examining but in a context where the usual direction of influence is reversed and where the specifically Jewish intellectual contribution is received by a community with its own experience of outsideness and its own intellectual formation rather than by the dominant European cultural tradition.<\/p>\n

The South African case is the most important dimension of the sub-Saharan African custodianship question because South Africa developed the largest and most culturally productive Jewish community in sub-Saharan Africa, with a peak population of approximately one hundred and twenty thousand concentrated primarily in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The South African Jewish community was overwhelmingly Ashkenazic in origin, the product of immigration from Lithuania in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its formation was shaped by the specific Lithuanian Jewish intellectual tradition, which placed unusual emphasis on Talmudic scholarship and produced a distinctive intellectual culture that was recognized as exceptional even within the broader Ashkenazic world.<\/p>\n

The South African Jewish community’s engagement with South African literary and intellectual culture was shaped by the specific and deeply divided character of South African society, organized around the apartheid system of racial classification and enforced segregation that structured every dimension of South African life from 1948 until 1994. The Jewish intellectual’s position in apartheid South Africa was a version of the insider-outsider positioning with a specific South African character that differed from all the European equivalents.<\/p>\n

Jewish South Africans were classified as White under the apartheid system and therefore had access to the institutions and privileges of the White minority. They were simultaneously members of a community with a specific history of persecution and displacement that gave them specific reasons to understand the experience of the Black majority in ways that their White classification did not. This double positioning, White in the apartheid classification system and Jewish in their own self-understanding, created a specific form of the insider-outsider tension that produced some of the most important literary and intellectual opposition to apartheid in South African cultural history.<\/p>\n

Nadine Gordimer<\/a> is the most internationally recognized figure in South African Jewish literary engagement with the apartheid system. Gordimer was a South African Jewish novelist whose entire literary career was organized around the honest examination of what apartheid did to the people who lived within it, both Black and White, and whose work brought to that examination a combination of moral urgency rooted in her Jewish formation and literary precision rooted in her thorough engagement with the European modernist literary tradition.<\/p>\n

Her Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 recognized her as among the most important novelists of the twentieth century, and the specific character of her achievement is continuous with the Jewish intellectual contributions my analysis has been tracing across all the national cases. The defamiliarizing vision that allowed her to see White South African society from outside its own self-justifying narrative, the moral urgency rooted in the prophetic tradition’s insistence on accountability, the sensitivity to the gap between official discourse and lived reality, all of these are recognizably Jewish intellectual gifts applied to a specifically South African situation with a specificity and a depth that the situation demanded.<\/p>\n

Her relationship to the African National Congress and to the Black intellectual tradition of the anti-apartheid movement illustrates the cross-traditional fertilization that the South African case made possible. Gordimer brought her European Jewish formation to the analysis of South African racial capitalism and produced work that was received both within the White liberal tradition and within the Black liberation tradition as a significant contribution, managing the double positioning that the South African situation imposed with unusual honesty and unusual artistic integrity. Her friendships with Black South African writers and intellectuals, particularly with Es’kia Mphahlele, illustrate the specific form of cross-racial intellectual partnership that her double positioning made possible and that the apartheid system was designed to prevent.<\/p>\n

Breyten Breytenbach is relevant here as a counter-case, not Jewish but an Afrikaner poet who chose to oppose apartheid from inside the Afrikaner tradition rather than from outside it, and whose imprisonment and subsequent exile illustrate what the cost of voluntary outsideness looks like when it is exercised by someone with the deepest possible insider formation. The comparison between Gordimer’s Jewish outsider position and Breytenbach’s voluntary Afrikaner outsider position is illuminating for the custodianship question because it shows both the similarities and the differences between involuntary and voluntary outsideness as positions from which to engage critically with a dominant tradition.<\/p>\n

Doris Lessing<\/a>, though she is more commonly associated with British literature, was born and raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and her early fiction engaged with the racial dynamics of white settler society in ways that were shaped partly by her outsider position as a woman and partly by her specific formation in the colonial settler culture that she was simultaneously inside and critical of. Her relationship to the Jewish intellectual tradition is indirect but her work illustrates the operation of the defamiliarizing vision that my analysis has identified as a distinctively Jewish contribution operating from a different form of outsideness in a closely related African colonial context.<\/p>\n

Dan Jacobson<\/a> is a South African Jewish novelist whose work engages with the custodianship question in a specifically South African Jewish form. Jacobson was born in Johannesburg and emigrated to Britain, where he spent most of his career, and his novels and criticism engage with the experience of South African Jewish life, with the tension between the Jewish formation he brought from his community and the White privilege that the apartheid system imposed on him, and with the literary tradition he engaged with from a position of double outsideness as a South African and a Jew in the British literary establishment. His memoir Heshel’s Kingdom, which traces the history of his Lithuanian Jewish family and their emigration to South Africa, is a form of the zachor applied to the specific experience of the South African Jewish community, bringing the obligation of memory to bear on a history that the community’s success and assimilation into White South African privilege had made it convenient<\/a> to forget.<\/p>\n

The relationship between South African Jewish intellectuals and the anti-apartheid movement more broadly illustrates what my analysis identified in the American case as the adoption of a universalist political framework as both a genuine commitment and a form of coalition building that allowed Jewish intellectuals to participate in a transformative political project. Many South African Jewish intellectuals were involved in the anti-apartheid movement, in the Communist Party of South Africa, in the African National Congress, and in various legal and journalistic dimensions of the resistance. Their involvement was partly rooted in genuine moral commitment rooted in Jewish formation and partly in the specific logic of coalition building that my analysis has traced across all the national cases.<\/p>\n

Joe Slovo<\/a> is the most important example of this involvement. Slovo was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant to South Africa who became one of the most important figures in the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress, serving as a military commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, and eventually as a cabinet minister in the post-apartheid government. His trajectory from Lithuanian Jewish immigrant to South African Communist revolutionary is a specifically South African version of the pattern Novick identified in the American Jewish historians, the adoption of a universalist political framework as both a genuine commitment and an assimilation strategy, but in a context where the stakes of both the commitment and the strategy were considerably higher than in the American academic case.<\/p>\n

The West African case presents a completely different version of the custodianship question because West African Jewish communities were tiny, recent, and had limited engagement with the major West African literary traditions. The small Jewish communities in Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal were primarily associated with Lebanese and Syrian Jewish merchants and had minimal impact on West African literary and intellectual culture. The custodianship question in West African literary culture is therefore less about Jewish intellectual participation in established literary traditions and more about the influence of Jewish intellectual frameworks, particularly post-colonial theory and the Frankfurt School tradition, on West African intellectuals who engaged with these frameworks in the context of their own struggles with colonial and post-colonial cultural politics.<\/p>\n

Wole Soyinka’s engagement with German expressionism and with the Yoruba dramatic tradition, his Nobel Prize lecture’s implicit critique of the n\u00e9gritude movement’s essentialist conception of African identity, and his engagement with the European philosophical and literary tradition from a position of deep formation in the Yoruba cultural tradition, illustrates the custodianship question in its West African form. Soyinka is not Jewish and his engagement with Jewish intellectual traditions is indirect, but his operation of simultaneous insider and outsider positioning, bringing the Yoruba cultural formation to the analysis of the Western dramatic tradition while bringing the Western critical tradition to bear on Yoruba religious and cultural practice, is structurally continuous with the operation my analysis has been tracing throughout the comparative study.<\/p>\n

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the foundational text of modern African literature in English, is itself a meditation on the custodianship question in its colonial form. The novel’s central subject is the destruction of an Igbo community’s cultural formation by Christian missionary and colonial administrative pressure, and the specific form of that destruction, the replacement of the community’s own narrative about itself with the colonial narrative that dismisses it as primitive and superstitious, is analogous to the destruction of the Jewish community’s capacity to transmit its own formation that my analysis has been documenting across all the national cases. Achebe was writing about the custodianship of Igbo culture rather than Jewish culture, but the structural analysis he performs, the examination of what is lost when a community loses control of its own narrative and its own institutions, is recognizably continuous with the broader argument my analysis has been making.<\/p>\n

The Negritude movement and its relationship to Jewish intellectual traditions illustrates this cross-traditional fertilization. Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor, the founding figures of Negritude, developed their celebration of African cultural heritage in Paris in the 1930s in a context that was shaped by their engagement with surrealism, whose Jewish intellectual participants, particularly Andr\u00e9 Breton, brought to the movement the defamiliarizing vision and the critique of bourgeois rationalism. The relationship between the Jewish intellectual contribution to surrealism and the African intellectual contribution to Negritude is a complex and underexamined dimension of the intellectual history of the twentieth century that illustrates cross-traditional fertilization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Custodianship Question in America Australia, New Zealand Europe Alliance Theory Asia Canada’s relationship between literary culture, academic institutions, and Jewish intellectual participation was shaped by configurations that differ from the American case even though the two countries share a language, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jews","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t