The talion law, which stipulates an exact retribution of "eye for eye" in cases of injury or murder, is commonly associated with the Vengeful God of the New Testament and with the favoring of literality over spirituality. In opposition to such a view, this essay, based on a close reading of the Talmud and later Jewish commentators, and equipped with the insights of contemporary structuralist and post-structuralist theory, analyzes the modes that the Jewish tradition offers for the displacement of the literal. It attempts to show that a detour into a figurative reading of lex talionis is what effects, through subtle rhetoric, a restitution of its original sense, both ethical and ontological.

March 2023:

Betty Rojtman is Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been the Katherine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature. As the chair of the Department of French studies, she has founded the Desmarais Center for French Culture at the Hebrew University, and headed it for many years. Her current research deals with Transcendence and Negativity in traditional Jewish sources (Midrash, Hassidism, Kabbalah) and (post)modern texts (literature, philosophy).

Professor Rojtman is the author of several books, including Feu noir sur Feu Blanc: Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (Verdier, 1986); English translation, by Steven Rendall, Black Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah, Prefaced by Moshe Idel, 1998), Une grave distraction. Preface by Paul Ricoeur (Balland, 1991), Une Rencontre improbable: Equivoques de la destinée (Gallimard, 2002).

In parallel to her academic work, she writes meditative and poetical essays (Le Pardon à la lune: Essai sur le tragique biblique, Gallimard, 2001. trans. Hebrew by Nir Ratzkovski, Seli’hat halevana, Al hatragiut hatana’hit, Jerusalem, Carmel, 2008), Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (Gallimard, 2007).

Her most recent essay (Une faim d’abîme. La fascination de la mort dans l’écriture contemporaine, Desclée de Brouwer, 2019), has come out in English as Longing for the Abyss: The fascination for death in Contemporary French Thought, trans. Bartholomew Begley (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020) and in Hebrew as Kemiha Latehom. Kessem Hamavet bahagut hatzarfatit shel hameah haesserim, trans. Itay Blumenzweig (Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2020).

Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury offers an early exploration of racial and cultural identity within the wider context of a nascent colonial expansion. He and his brother, the poet George Herbert, question dominant notions of race, culture, and color. Their poems bring color associations from abstract theological and philosophical levels to present the intimacy of human contact in intercultural and interracial contexts. The result is a view of human connectedness that affirms equality and commonality over dominant views of European superiority and priority.

This essay investigates the concept, experience, and autobiographical rendering of recognition.  The first two sections consider and elaborate upon two philosophical accounts of recognition: those by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles Taylor.  The essay then reads a contemporary work of Australian life-writing, Peter Rose’s award winning Rose Boys, as an autobiographical exploration of recognition. The essay argues that recognition is a many-faceted concept and phenomenon with a range of important moral, political, logical and perceptual implications, and that it is central to the genre of autobiography.

The paper locates Svengali, the Jewish villain of the novel Trilby (1894), within historical and literary contexts that informed the culture of his creator, George Du Maurier. It argues that Svengali emblematizes the figure of the Jew that is seen by late nineteenth-century European culture as troubling the cultural categories invoked for purposes of national self-definition; additionally Svengali reflexively troubles the generic categories that work to contain and define the novel in which he appears. In doing so, Svengali re-enacts the situation of the transgressive Wandering Jew, escaping the confines of his text to wander textually homeless in the popular imagination.

This article analyses some seminal novels by Dickens, Disraeli, Gaskell, and Kingsley in their relation to developments in society and welfare of the early Victorian period, inferring from them a social discourse that challenged some but not all aspects of classical political economics. It argues that they reveal a view of society as “trisected,” that is as one in which the realms of production, distribution and reproduction are barely regarded as occupying the same conceptual space. So while some aspects of social policy are deplored, e.g. the workhouse, some of the assumptions and values upon which they were based are upheld. Rather than extensive institutional reform these books demand a new set of ethical coordinates which reflect a growing awareness of the interdependencies of individuals.

The essay examines some of the fascinating ways in which islands have inspired writers, and especially poets, into acts of symbolization in which an island provides the pretext for a variety of compulsive themes that range from the love or fear of solitude, isolation, and the need to escape to or from an island. The recurrent figures of this allegorical mode include Crusoe, Caliban, Odysseus, and The Man Who Loved Islands.

The paper explores the relationship between a language and its environment. It focuses on Chinua Achebe’s experimentation with English as a suitable language for depicting the African landscape in Anthills of the Savannah. Since landscape was an imperial fascination, it was inevitable that with the expansion of the British Empire the English pictorial rhetoric would be exported to the colonies. This export brought out visual and psychological disparities between the changeable African landscape and the invariably picturesque English language. The conventions of picturesque description encoded in the language were imposed on the landscape, implicitly affirming and naturalizing the values of the colonialist, but failing to do justice to a genuinely African world-view. Achebe believes that despite its colonial bias English can still be a useful tool for African writers to capture and promote their ancestral heritage; nonetheless he questions whether it can lose enough of its own cultural past to be made suitable for an African discourse.

Vladimir Pecherin (1807-1885), a Russian political emigré and Catholic convert was a controversial figure both in nineteenth-century Ireland and in Russian intellectual history. In his autobiographical notes and in the letters to his Russian corespondents of the 1860s and the 1870s, eventually collected in Apologia pro vita mea (Mémoires d'outre-tombe), Pecherin provides a vivid display of the evolution of Russian thought. His writings as a whole constitute an artistic presentation of the Russian Zeitgeist. Certain glaring contradictions between the ideas expressed in Pecherin's Russian correspondence and the reality of his long life within the Catholic Church require explanation. The article focuses on the authorial intention behind Pecherin’s autobiographical writing. In the hope of cementing his connection with Russia, Pecherin created in his memoirs the largely stock literary image of a “superfluous man,” a dominant literary figure of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Pecherin’s practical activity within the Catholic Church was, however, by no means superfluous, as his reputation in Dublin attests. Pecherin’s epistles to Russia invert the genre of  “confession of conversion” and form a “confession of disillusionment.” Pecherin’s “hero” writes a repentant story in which he recounts a life-long pattern of devotion to various deceptive illusions, among which he counts Socialism, Hegelianism, as well as Catholicism and religion in general. The constant reinventions of himself are matched by surprising flexibility of his literary style, which seems to imitate the major voices of Russian classic literature, from Karamzin and Dostoevsky to Turgenev. If we acknowledge that Pecherin’s memoirs are primarily a work of art and only then a source of historically accurate information, many of his apparent contradictions are explained.

The article is a historiographical against-the-grain reading of archetypal constructions of Virginia Woolf’s “madness.” A genealogical tracing of Woolf’s own testimonials concerning her mental life is juxtaposed with the interpretive analytic specularization of her primary biographers. This new lens exposes the normative reading practices that have produced, simultaneously, both the problematic of Woolf’s “madness” and a near elision of any traces of the conditions of its own production. Woolf’s writing about her “contrary instincts” is examined without searching for underlying pathology; the latter would have amounted to reinscribing Woolf in the institualization of “mental illness.”

The essay discusses parallels in the work of Franz Kafka and Shmuel Yosef Agnon as writers whose rebellion against tradition and authority was complicated by ambivalent nostalgia for the harmonies of God and Kaiser.

Major works:

   in Hebrew
      Between Laughter and Tears (on Mendele Mokher Sefarim), Tel-Aviv, 1965
      The Hebrew Historical Drama, Jerusalem, 1970
      A New Wave in Modern Hebrew Narrative Fiction, Tel-Aviv, 1971
      The Narrative Art of Agnon, Tel-Aviv, 1973
      Hebrew Narrative Fiction  1880-1980 (Five Volumes) Tel-Aviv, 1977-1998

  in English
     The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers, Philadelphia,1987
     S. Y. Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, New-York,1989
     Modern Hebrew Fiction, Bloomington, 2000

      The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature, 2006

  in German
     Die Macht der Identitaet, Frankfurt, 1986
     Die Geschichte der modernen hebraeschen Literatur, Frankfurt, 1996.

updated in January 2007