SOURCE: Balaban, Avraham. “Between God and Beast: Religious Aspects of Oz's Work.” In Between God and Beast: An Examination of Amos Oz's Prose, pp. 79-136. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Balaban provides a religious interpretation of the stories in Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories and traces the influence of the philosophy of Spinoza, the psychoanalytic theory of Carl Jung, and the panentheism of Schelling on Oz's fiction.

Oz describes the Jerusalem of his childhood as a highly religious city:

The Jerusalem of my youth was a city of sleepwalkers, awash with contradictory dreams, a shaky federation of sects, nations, faiths, ideologies, and hopes. There were extremely orthodox Jews who sat and waited in prayer for the coming of the Messiah, there were energetic, revolutionary Jews who intended to play the role of the Messiah themselves, and there were oriental Jews who...