"The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people"
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Boundaries, for A. B. Yehoshua, aren’t lines on a map so much as a permanent condition of Jewish history: diaspora as lived expertise in passing through languages, jurisdictions, and cultures without fully dissolving into them. Calling Jews “great experts of crossing boundaries” is a provocation with a double edge. It sounds like praise for adaptability, even cosmopolitan virtuosity, but it also hints at the suspicion that has followed Jews for centuries: the unsettling figure who moves between worlds, never quite fixed, therefore always misread.
The second sentence tightens the screw. Yehoshua distinguishes between crossing borders and crossing into others. The “sense of identity inside themselves” becomes both armor and limit. It protects a people who have repeatedly needed internal cohesion to survive dispersion, persecution, and minority status. At the same time, he implies that this inward certainty can harden into separateness - a barrier that complicates full reciprocity with surrounding societies.
Context matters: Yehoshua was an Israeli novelist and public intellectual who often argued that Jewish identity should be grounded in political sovereignty and civic normalcy, not only in portable memory and religious law. Read that way, the remark is less a blanket ethnographic claim than a critique of diaspora psychology and, by extension, a warning to Israel. If identity is primarily internal and self-referential, it can become a kind of portable border wall - useful for survival, costly for coexistence. The tension he names is the engine of his fiction: belonging as both talent and trap.
The second sentence tightens the screw. Yehoshua distinguishes between crossing borders and crossing into others. The “sense of identity inside themselves” becomes both armor and limit. It protects a people who have repeatedly needed internal cohesion to survive dispersion, persecution, and minority status. At the same time, he implies that this inward certainty can harden into separateness - a barrier that complicates full reciprocity with surrounding societies.
Context matters: Yehoshua was an Israeli novelist and public intellectual who often argued that Jewish identity should be grounded in political sovereignty and civic normalcy, not only in portable memory and religious law. Read that way, the remark is less a blanket ethnographic claim than a critique of diaspora psychology and, by extension, a warning to Israel. If identity is primarily internal and self-referential, it can become a kind of portable border wall - useful for survival, costly for coexistence. The tension he names is the engine of his fiction: belonging as both talent and trap.
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