For almost two thousand years, various images of Jesus accompanied Jewish thought and imagination: a flesh-and-blood Jew, a demon, a spoiled student, an idol, a brother, a (failed) Messiah, a nationalist rebel, a Greek god in Jewish garb, and more. This volume charts for the first time the different ways that Jesus has been represented and understood in Jewish culture and thought.

In a groundbreaking book, Neta Stahl examines the attitudes adopted by modern Jewish writers toward the figure of Jesus. Stahl argues that twentieth-century Jewish writers reconsidered Jesus' traditional status as the Christian Other and looked to him instead as a fellow Jew, a "brother," and even as a model for the "New Jew."

Other and Brother analyzes the work of a wide array of modern Jewish writers, beginning in the early twentieth century and ending with contemporary Israeli literature. Stahl takes the reader through dramatic changes in Jewish life from the Haskalah (or...

The twentieth century brought significant changes for many Jews. Some of these were dramatic, even apocalyptic, while others were more gradual shifts in ways of life and worldviews. As traditional lifestyles eroded, Jews began to develop a new understanding of the divine and its place in their lives.

Twentieth Century Jewish Literature examines how these radical changes manifested themselves in modern Jewish literature, by tracing the ways in which the Jewish writers of this period imagined and depicted the divine. In order to understand these writers' approach to the...