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Fifty-five years ago, the twenty-six-year-old Philip Roth published his first story in The New Yorker, “Defender of the Faith.” It sparked a violent reaction in certain quarters of the Jewish establishment. Roth was vilified as a self-hating Jew and a traitor to his people who had given ammunition to their enemies by seeming to reinforce degrading stereotypes. One character, in particular, aroused the patriarchs’ wrath: Sheldon Grossbart, an Army private during the Second World War who plays on the ambivalent loyalties (as a Jew and an American) of his commanding officer, Sergeant Nathan Marx. Pretending to be devout, the devious Grossbart coaxes Marx into bending certain rules for him, and Marx defies his own scruples to do so, with increasing reluctance as the demands escalate, until he finally exacts revenge for having been conned. Marx, it should be noted, is a combat hero (Jimmy Stewart might have played him), and Grossbart is hardly the Jud Süss. Yet rabbis denounced Roth from their pulpits, and a leading educator at Yeshiva University wrote to the Anti-Defamation League to ask, “What is being done to silence this man? Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.” When the story was included, later that year, in Roth’s first volume of fiction, “Goodbye, Columbus,” the defenders of the faith found more apostasy to deplore. (In the title story, a nice Jewish girl, an A student at Radcliffe, gets a diaphragm and takes a lover; in “Epstein,” a hapless middle-aged husband has an affair.) Roth answered his critics in an essay, “Writing About Jews,” that asserted the right of a novelist to explore transgression, which is to say, human nature. “The world of fiction,” he wrote, “frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling.” Yet the pummelling from his tribal elders left its scars. (...)