The sacred in the profane: Sinai thinking in German Jewish literature

How can readers identify a text as being "Jewish" if there is no Jewish language? How can they explain the term "Jewish literature" if there is no Jewish nation and if an author can declare himself Jewish while denying any relationship to Judaism? This study seeks to clarify a Jewish intellectual structure, as demonstrated by Jewish texts from the biblical era presenting themselves in modern texts. This research assumes this structure is the base of contemporary Jewish identity and offers a coherent answer to the question, "What is Jewish literature?"The term "Jewish" is not an epithet, affirms the philosopher Shmuel Trigano by showing in its writings that Judaism constitutes an epistemological order to the same degree, the same nature and the same truth, that Western thinking claims for itself. Trigano affirms that Judaism is neither reducible to religion, nor more particularistic, and is also not more bound to a specific identity than its Greco-Western sibling. Nor does it depend on ethnic origin, but refers to an order of the human thought, a noetic order that nourishes and is nourished up to the present day by its writings.This project puts Trigano's epistemology into practice by describing the role of the adjective "Jewish" in regard to German-language literature. This study describes mental structures of "Sinai thinking" in literary texts. This thought has been developed through a long tradition of hermeneutics, thanks to three fundamental Jewish scriptures: the Torah, the Talmud and the Kabala. The study contends that the literature of Jews written in German, their observance of Jewish law not withstanding, reflects this noetic order. This order will help the reader to understand that Jewish identity is above all a textual identity and that the Jewish text is a hermeneutical mega-structure of the self, a so to say "bibliognostic" ontology.The study analyzes some components of "Sinai-thinking" by means of an etymological study of basic Hebrew words and as well as by a method of Talmudic interpretation that calls upon four levels of reading (Pardes).This dissertation sees itself as a reaction to the intellectuals who pose the existence of a "Jewish literature" without ever defining it. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Thesis (Ph.D.)--Universite de Montreal (Canada), 2005.School code: 0992