The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation

Abstract

Gertrude stein wrote the twenty-five-page manuscript “the modern jew who has given up the faith of his fathers can reasonably and consistently believe in isolation” for a composition class at Radcliffe College in 1896, when she was twenty-two years old. The essay is distinctly occasional and reads like an early work. It is, nonetheless, one of the few known pieces in which Stein treats directly the question of Jewish identity and the only one to link that question to a specifically political description of the public sphere. The manuscript thus sheds a remarkable light on a number of the most contested questions in studies of Stein's life and works—the problem of her later protofascist political allegiances, of her sense of her exiled Americanness, and of her treatment of writing as an asemantic medium for sketching mobile identities.