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From the very moment Alfred Dreyfus was placed under arrest for
treason and espionage, his entire world was turned upside down, and
for the next five years he lived in what he called a
phantasmagoria. To keep himself sane, Dreyfus wrote letters to and
received letters from his wife Lucie and exercised his intellect
through reading the few books and magazines his censors allowed
him, writing essays on these and other texts he had read in the
past, and working out problems in mathematics, physics, and
chemistry. He practiced his English and created strange drawings
his prison wardens called architectural or kabbalistic signs. In
this volume, Norman Simms explores how Dreyfus kept himself from
exploding into madness by reading his essays carefully, placing
them in the context of his century, and extrapolating from them the
hidden recesses of the Jewish Alsatian background he shared with
the Dreyfus family and Lucie Hadamard.
Two groups were persecuted over four hundred years in what is now
the south-western United States, each dissimulating and disguising
who they truly were. Both now declare their true identities, yet
raise hostility. The Penitentes are a lay Catholic brotherhood that
practised bloody rites of self-flagellation and crucifixion, but
claim this is a misrepresentation and that they are a community and
charitable organisation. Marranos, an ambiguous and complicated
population of Sephardic descendants, claim to be anousim. Both
people have a complex, shared history. This book disentangles the
web, redefines the terms, and creates new contexts in which these
groups are viewed with respect and sympathy without idealising or
slandering them. It uses rabbinics, literary analyses,
psychohistory, and cultural anthropology to consolidate a history
of mentalities.
This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with
emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently
published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie.
Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive,
intellectual and Jewish man is revealed than was previously
suspected. He and Lucie, through their family connections and
mutual loyalty, were interested in and supported the artistic,
scientifi c, philosophical and historical movements that formed
their Parisian milieu. But as an Alsatian Jew, Alfred was also
critical of many aspects of technological and ideological
developments, making his mentality one of skepticism as well as
idealism. Norman Simms addresses the way Dreyfus perceived the
world, challenged many of its assumptions and contextualized it in
the style of a rabbinical midrash, a process that created what
Alfred called a "phantasmagoria" of the Affair that bears his name,
and also interprets the man, his milieu and his mentality in the
style of a midrash, a creative, transformative reading.
Although the Middle English poem known as 'Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight' is assumed to be a kind of comic or satirical romance
deriving from the Christian courts of England in the fourteenth
century, several strange features suggest a different origin and
generic categorization. Renaming it Sir Gawain and the Knight of
the Green Chapel initiates the defamiliarization process. This book
argues that the poet and his or her milieu belong to the small and
confused converso community left behind after the Jewish expulsions
at the end of the thirteenth century and still wondering who they
were and what their place in society might be. Such a perspective
may help explain why the goal of the young Sir Gawain is not only
not green or even a chapel, but also why he arrives in the Castle
of Hautdesert and undergoes a totally unexpected series of ordeals
and tests.
The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic
patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars.
They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture,
entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative
reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them
died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came
back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend,
this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th
century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of
their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women,
comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty
performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant
society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish
heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the
imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of
illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking
glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical
and grotesque screen between them.
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