Antonio’s Devils deals both historically and theoretically with the origins of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature by tracing the progress of a few remarkable writers who, for various reasons and in various ways, cited Scripture for their own purpose, as Antonio’s “devil,” Shylock, does in The Merchant of Venice.By examining the work of key figures in the early history of Jewish literature through the prism of their allusions to classical Jewish texts, the book focuses attention on the magnificent and highly complex strategies the maskilim employed to achieve their polemical and ideological goals. Dauber uses this methodology to examine foundational texts by some of the Jewish Enlightenment’s most interesting and important authors, reaching new and often surprising conclusions. When the leading figures of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskala, wanted to convince their traditionalist audiences to subscribe to their secularist ideologies, they needed to legitimate their points in traditional language—otherwise, the audiences would simply dismiss them out of hand as heretical. Taking that as a starting point, the book looks at how a few of these individuals subversively drew on a classical tradition for modern purposes.
