“The Rest is Literature: Midrash and the Institution of ‘Theory’ in America" offers a new interpretation of the brief, unlikely mutual interest taken by rabbinicists and American literary theorists in each other’s fields from 1975–1995. Revising the few extant accounts of this moment, which the rabbinicist David Stern has nicknamed “the midrash–theory connection,” this dissertation avoids relitigating the connection’s question of whether midrash and postmodern literary theory share some genetic or structural affinity than in elucidating just what made that question both possible and pressing to ask at a particular time (the 1980s), in a particular place (the United States), within a delimited discursive and institutional milieu (the academic study of English, French, and comparative literatures). At its broadest level, the dissertation argues that the “theory” phenomenon of the 1970s–80s should be understood as a byproduct of the Christian genealogy of the modern project of aesthetic education, a genealogy which has continued to determine the category of “literature” itself even in, and as, a hegemonic secularism. From this slant, the dissertation contends that “theory” is continuous in Euro-American modernity with what we know, in a different context, by the name “the Jewish question.” Framing “theory” as an iteration of the Jewish question allows us to get a firmer handle on what was at stake for the American literary critics affiliated with “theory” who valorized rabbinic hermeneutics in the 1980s. The first three chapters of the dissertation are primarily historical. Chapter 1 supplies an overview of the “midrash-theory connection” with special attention to the uptake of literary theory among rabbinicists, situating this uptake in the longer history of academic Jewish studies since the Wissenschaft des Judenthums. Chapter 2 maps the Christian genealogy of the institutionalized study of literature, from the rise of philosophical aesthetics in late eighteenth century German philosophy through the New Criticism’s consolidation of pedagogical power in American colleges and universities after World War II, using this background to explain the vituperative reaction of the aesthetic-humanist mainstream of American literary studies to the unorthodox style and methods of the so-called “Yale Critics” in the 1970s. Chapter 3 examines the rise of “Bible as literature” scholarship during this same period, showing how literary critics interested in reading the Hebrew Bible were forced by an increasingly hegemonic secularism in “theory”-adjacent literary studies to perform their disavowal of scripture’s religious elements. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on specific authors who sought to mobilize the linking of midrash and “theory” in a positive sense. Chapter 4 revisits the book which kicked off the midrash-theory connection, Susan Handelman’s The Slayers of Moses (1982). Chapter 5 reads a pair of essays on midrash by Geoffrey Hartman. Handelman and Hartman ultimately arrive at opposed understandings of how repetition works, understandings characterized here as “tradition” and “error,” respectively. The conclusion compares Hartman’s idea of error to Edward Said’s notion of “secular criticism,” and suggests the implications of this interpretation of the midrash–Theory connection for contemporary debates about literary studies in the neoliberal university.