Contemporary nativism gathers much of its steam from what many Westerners fear to be a free-for-all of desperate refugees invading peaceful Western countries to seek shelter from dictatorial violence and civil war, but in antiquity its impact is much more difficult to measure, given (a) that so few extant texts overtly or covertly reference it; and (b) that so many of those which do are inadequately, incompetently, even speciously interpreted. Complicating this is the fact that at root the allies-aliens polarity refers not simply to conflict between cultures, but to the challenge of measuring the gaps between cultures--what linguists call "translation." Allies or Aliens? examines six Jewish diaspora texts (and the traditions in their wake), engaging them intertextually in order to (a) identify the response(s) to nativistic prejudice featured in each text; (b) ascertain the effectiveness of each response; and (c) suggest which response(s) might best help readers struggling to deal with nativistic prejudice today.
