“An Ageless Ritual of the Cockroach World”: Vermin in Modern Jewish Literature

PhD Porject by Noga Resh

With the rise of modernity, an uncanny figure starts creeping into Jewish literature: vermin. These unwanted creatures inhabit the works of prominent Jewish writers from Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Mocher Sforim) to Clarice Lispector. This PhD thesis explores the literary appearance of vermin as a key motif for interpreting modern Jewish literatures as well as historical, aesthetic, religious and biopolitical discourses. The project constructs a terminological triangle between “vermin”, Jewish literature and modernity to examine the epistemological significance of this motif. The comparative approach creates a corpus that may be termed “vermin literature”, offering new, “lower” perspectives on canonical works.

At its core is the semantic complexity of the term “vermin” (German Ungeziefer, Hebrew sheretz), which is strongly linked in both Jewish tradition and German-speaking culture to concepts of impurity and sacrifice. Rather than a clearly defined term, “vermin” emerges as a shifting discursive category, functioning as a historical attribution. The Jewish background of the authors enables a dual perspective: as targets of antisemitic dehumanization (Jews as “vermin”) and as part of a religious tradition that itself engages with complex notions of purity, disgust and animal alterity.

The thesis is organized around ten conceptual categories drawn from the semantic field of vermin – such as swarming, parasitizing and metamorphosing – illuminating literary representations of impurity, extermination, illness, infection, empathy and redemption. Special attention is given to the physicality of these creatures, probing connections to disgust, transformation, masochism and sexuality. Metamorphosis emerges as a central theme, examined in relation to world literature, biological processes and Jewish mysticism.