Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (review)

Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, by Jeremy Dauber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 354 pp. $60.00. All too often, literature and literary questions are addressed solely from their own narrow and self-contained disciplinary confines. Reacting, perhaps, to the scholarly predilections of earlier generations, wherein literature was often pressed into the service of the history of ideas, contemporary scholars have generally insisted upon detaching the study of literature from all matters historical. One of the many significant contributions of Jeremy Dauber's Antonio's Devils is the fact that he sets aside such scholarly inclinations and produces a book that is a wonderfully enriching exploration of literary texts, as well as a suggestive and intelligent foray in the field of intellectual history. Dauber's subject is the literature of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which flourished first in Prussia through the second half of the eighteenth century, and then a few decades later in Galicia. Dauber's key to understanding the Haskalah and its variegated literatures and languages-literature written in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish-is the use of textual allusion, that is, all manner of explicit and implicit allusion to earlier biblical and rabbinic canons. Given the long tradition of allusiveness in Jewish literature, from intrabiblical references to the poetry and prose of medieval scholars, the focus on textual allusion is a particularly useful tool, one that beautifully captures the complex lines of historical-cultural continuity even as they are fraught with far-reaching discontinuities. In Dauber's skilled hands and expertly trained eyes, an appreciation of textual allusion not only highlights the rich tapestry of Maskilic literature, but also deepens our understanding of the historical context that spawns modern Jewish literature, and beyond that, the very tensions and challenges that shaped the Jewish encounter with modernity. Dauber begins his book in a somewhat daring fashion with a chapter-long analysis of the passage of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock alludes to a section of Genesis, triggering Antonio's famous quip that "the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." Dauber's intent, of course, is to "illuminate a certain methodological approach," one that refers "both to the literary contexts of the allusive material and the historical and social factors that shaped the ways in which that material was employed" (p. …