Profaning the Sacred and Sacralising the Profane: Transforming Objects and Bodies in Elie Wiesel’s Night and A. M. Klein’s The Second Scroll

Abstract

<p>This thesis seeks to interrogate how Elie Wiesel’s <em>Night</em> and A. M. Klein’s <em>The Second Scroll</em> illustrate the spiritual journeys of their protagonists and depict dehumanization of the Jewish people. Through their interactions with sacred bodies, as well as profane, religious and sacred objects, both novels map the spiritual quests of the protagonists, revealing very different conclusions. Using Virginia Greene’s “‘Accessories of Holiness’: Defining Jewish Sacred Objects” as an analytic framework, I explore how both novels transform sacred bodies into profane “objects” to illustrate various forms of anti-Semitic subjugation and de-personification. I then interrogate how <em>The Second Scroll</em> “textualizes” these objectified bodies, as well as how Klein’s novel turns Israeli society into a sacred text. This “textualization” offers a space to re-affirm God’s providence in a post-Holocaust imagination—an imagination that strongly differs from the rejection of God in <em>Night</em>. Through this exploration of spirituality and dehumanization, both texts humanize those who have been dehumanized in the camps and re-face the victims whose personhood was stripped from them, inviting them to dwell in both the novels and the readers’ memory.</p>