Milton and the Jews

The issue of the Jews deeply engaged Milton throughout his career, and not necessarily in ways that make for comfortable or reassuring reading today. While Shakespeare and Marlowe, for example, critiqued rather than endorsed racial and religious prejudice in their writings about Jews, the same cannot be said for Milton. The scholars in this collection confront a writer who participated in the sad history of anti-Semitism, even as he appropriated Jewish models throughout his writings. Well grounded in solid historical and theological research, the essays both collectively and individually offer an important contribution to the debate on Milton and Judaism. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Milton and of seventeenth-century literature, but also to historians of the religion and culture of the period.

Reviews & endorsements

'The essays in this volume richly document the productive ambivalence of Milton's thinking about the Jews. On the one hand the suffering Jew who endures the Babylonian captivity and remains faithful to his God is a model for God's Englishman. On the other, the literalist, surface-loving Jew - the outer Jew - exemplifies the idolatrous materialism that links him with the Turk and with Asian cybarites. Milton's complex deployment of these two figures of the Jew, the contributors show, is a key to the structure of his thinking about almost every issue that arises in both the poetry and the prose. All this and the incidental pleasure of learning that Sin is Jewish. Who knew.' Stanley Fish

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Product details

• Date Published: February 2012
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9781107404694
• length: 240 pages

• dimensions: 229 x 152 x 14 mm
• weight: 0.36kg
• availability: Available