This course explores how modern writers read sacred texts to find meaning in a world disenchanted by science and the Enlightenment. We will examine the turbulent world of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century eastern European literature in which Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bialik, Feierberg and An-sky confronted related issues and responded to major European thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and John Stuart Mill.