The Jewess Question: Biblical Murderesses and the Modern Jewish Women Who Rewrote Them, 1886-1927

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Hever, Hannan

Abstract

This dissertation examines modern representations of two biblical murderesses, Judith and Jael, and the ways that Jewish women have contributed to rewriting these figures’ place in the canon. Combining cultural history and close textual analysis, and building links between ancient and modern texts in English, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French, published in America, Europe, and the Middle East, by non-Jews and Jews, it explores how Jewish women authors reimagined these figures at the turn of the twentieth century to articulate tensions around power and authority within their gendered experiences of Judaism. This dissertation does not just explore the role of Jewish women in the European cultural imagination, but also directly analyzes the experiences of modern Jewish women through rare works by understudied authors. As the biblical murderess developed into a popular theme in modern Europe and its cultural sphere of influence, the figures of Jael and Judith brought together discourses surrounding the “woman question” and “Jewish Question.” At the meeting-point between these two questions, these figures raise questions of women’s power, autonomy, and authority. As the quintessential biblical murderess of the era, Salome is treated in the introduction and conclusion as a framing figure who remains a through-line within the chapters themselves. Chapter 1 focuses on the apocryphal heroine Judith and her modern popular persona as a tragic heroine who suffers for her act of killing. Chapter 2 reads Miriam Karpilove’s Yiddish-language novel Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe (1911), published in New York, as a reworking of Judith’s story in which a tragic romance reveals the violence behind the demand on women to show their loyalty, rebranded as heroism, through willing suffering. Chapter 3 uses a range of texts to contextualize Jael’s marginal place, relative to Salome and Judith, in the cultural imaginations of Jewish and non-Jewish publics. Chapter 4 focuses on two rare dramas by Jewish women that take up Jael as a protagonist. Through Friederike Kempner’s German-language Jahel (1886), a play by a prolific author whose legacy has been overshadowed by her branding as a bad poet, it shows Jael’s reemergence as a modern heroine claiming her place in the canonical lineage. Next, the chapter reads Florence Kiper Frank’s one-act English-language drama Jael (1914), an arthouse drama that resists the tendency to assign Jael a motive to either absolve or condemn her. By reading this drama through Kiper Frank’s own position as an American Jewish woman writer, it exposes an underlying critique of gender hierarchies in modern Judaism. As rare authors of Judith and Jael dramas in this period, Karpilove, Kempner, and Kiper Frank represent important examples of Jewish women’s recovery and use of challenging biblical women.

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