Every people has a national literature, for national literature writes about home. But most national literatures are nothing to write home about, even for the people who live there. National literature is read under duress in the school room. After that, the resources of fiction, like armies and flags, are reserved for ceremonies and emergencies.

The Jews have one national home but three national literatures, written in multiple languages. The ancient Judeans managed to stay on the right side of the Greeks, but they got on the wrong side of the Romans; then as now, relations with the Persians could go either way. So the first Jewish literature, the Bible and Talmud, is in Hebrew of various vintages and Aramaic with Greek, Latin, and Persian accretions. If, that is, it is mere literature. It is read—no literature has been read for so long and attentively—but it is not so much a canon as a corpus, massive with sacred weight, at once living and morbid.

This first Jewish literature is all about home—its conquest and defense, its kings and heroes, its domestic purity and agricultural ethics, and, above all, the Temple cult. But its largest and most influential part, the Babylonian Talmud, derives from exile. The second Jewish literature is that of pure homelessness: unmoored, syncretic, improvisatory, ever-dying.

This first Jewish literature is all about home. The second Jewish literature is that of pure homelessness.

Medieval adaptation to the host languages of German, Spanish,