Writing Indigenousness

What is it about?

This article studies how German-Jewish novelists of the nineteenth century have represented the life of Jews in the big cities of the recent or distant past. By comparing six texts of different authors, I come to the conclusion that until the 1850s, writers tend to represent Jews as foreigners inside a threatening environment, whereas later novels imagine their Jewish characters as indigenous, well-integrated urbanites whose position is, however, challenged by newcomers from outside. I try to argue that the change in the literary perception of the city is not just a reflection of urbanization experiences, but that is also makes a new choice among the various mythic patterns of the city that are offered by world literature.

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