Abstract

This article argues that Heine’s 1851 poem “Jehuda ben Halevy” modifies Goethe’s concept of world literature to make a place within it for the geographically dispersed, multilingual literature of the Jewish diaspora. Heine’s efforts to imagine Jewish literature as world literature resemble those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which made explicit the political implications of Goethean world literature by likening the arrival of Jewish literature in a world literary canon to the achievement of civil rights for German Jews. The article argues, however, that Heine goes further than Jewish scholars like Michael Sachs and Leopold Zunz by suggesting that Jewish literature not only deserves attention as world literature, but that its transculturality and multilingualism anticipate it and provide a model for future thought on world literature. Heine’s reflections in “Jehuda ben Halevy” indeed foreshadow contemporary interventions in the study of world literature regarding the status of medieval literature, untranslatability, and multilingualism.

摘要

本文认为，海涅 1851 年的诗作“Jehuda ben Halevy”修改了歌德的世界文学概念，以便在其中为散居在各地的犹太侨民的多语言文学占据一席之地。海涅将犹太文学想象成世界文学的努力与犹太文学的努力相似运动，通过将犹太文学进入世界文学经典比作德国犹太人获得公民权利，明确了歌德世界文学的政治含义。然而，这篇文章认为，海涅比迈克尔·萨克斯和利奥波德·祖兹等犹太学者走得更远，他认为犹太文学不仅值得作为世界文学受到关注，而且其跨文化性和多语言性预示着它，并为未来思考世界文学提供了一个模型. 海涅在“Jehuda ben Halevy”中的反思确实预示了当代对世界文学研究的干预，涉及中世纪文学的地位、不可译性和多语言性。