Fictions of identity: (Re)imagining the stories we tell

In Perceptions of Jewish History, Amos Funkenstein argues that Jews are caught in a continuous loop of telling and retelling Jewish history. Taking medieval reimaginings as a starting point, this essay maps this loop as expressing a resistance to temporal erasure by considering modern historical fiction that reimagines Jewish presence in annus domini temporality. In essence, modern Jewish writers populate history with Jewish characters in order to write Jewish presence into the medieval now of Christian time. This essay explores what is involved in balancing the historical record (where Jews are frequently subalterns and often oppressed victims of establishment authority) with a fictionalized history (where utopian visions of the past imagine a Jew who has agency and voice).