Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews 9780823275618

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Bestiarium Judaicum

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Bestiarium Judaicum Unnatural Histories of the Jews

Jay Geller

fordham university press New York 2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

List of Abbreviations

vii

Introduction. A Field Guide to the Bestiarium Judaicum “O beastly Jews”: A Brief History of an (Un)Natural History Name that Varmint: From Gregor to Josephine (Con) Versions of Cats and Mice and Other Mouse Traps “If you could see her through my eyes . . .”: Semitic Simiantics Italian Lizards and Literary Politics I: Carrying the Torch and Getting Singed Italian Lizards and Literary Politics II: Deer I Say It The Raw and the Cooked in the Old/New World, or Talk to the Animals Dogged by Destiny: “Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit” Afterword. “It’s clear as the light of day”: The Shoah and the Human /Animal Great Divide

1 29 57 81

221

Acknowledgments Notes References Index

233 237 341 385

109 139 155 170 188

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a b b r e v i at i o n s

A

B B1 B2 B3 BE BG BK BL BM Br CP

CS

Jacques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Franz Kafka. Briefe 1900 –1912. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1999. Franz Kafka. Briefe 1913–März 1914. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1999. Franz Kafka. Briefe April 1914 –1917. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2005. Franz Kafka. Briefe 1918–1920. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2013. Felix Salten. Bambi. Translated by Whittaker Chambers. N.p.: Barton Press, 2011. Felix Salten. Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2003. Felix Salten. Bambis Kinder. Eine Familie im Walde. Berlin: Ullstein, 1968. Franz Blei. Das große Bestiarium der Literatur. Edited by Rolf-Peter Baacke. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1995. Heinrich Heine. Ludwig Börne: A Memorial. Translated by Jeffrey L. Sammons. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2006. Franz Kafka. Briefe 1902–1924. Edited by Max Brod. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1958. Heinrich Heine. The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version. Edited and translated by Hal Draper. Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982. Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories and Parables. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1983.

vii

viii

Abbreviations

D1

Franz Kafka. The Diaries 1910 –1913. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken Books, 1948. Franz Kafka. The Diaries 1914 –1923. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Martin Greenberg, with Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1949. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Heinrich Heine. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke. Edited by Manfred Windfuhr/Heinrich-Heine-Institut (Düsseldorf ). 16 vols. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973–97. Franz Kafka. Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch, Wolf Kittler, and Gerhard Neumann. Vol. 1. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1994. Gertrud Kolmar. Dark Soliloquy: The Selected Poems of Gertrud Kolmar. Translated and Introduction by Henry A. Smith. New York: The Seabury Press, 1975. Heinrich Heine. Briefe von Heine. 1815–31. HSA 20. Heinrich Heine. Briefe von Heine. 1831– 41. HSA 21. Heinrich Heine. Briefe an Heine. 1823–1836. HSA 24. Heinrich Heine. Briefe an Heine. 1837–1841. HSA 25. Karl Kraus. “Heine and the Consequences” / “Heine und die Folgen.” In The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, edited and translated by Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlman, 2–133. Bilingual edition. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2013. Richard Wagner. “Judaism in Music.” In Judaism in Music and Other Essays, translated by William Ashton Ellis, 75–122. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Jens Hanssen. “Kafka and Arabs.” Critical Inquiry 39 (2012): 167–97. Michael Schmidt. “Katz und Maus: Kafkas ‘Kleine Fabel’ und die Resonanz der frühneuzeitlichen Konvertitenbiographik.” German Life and Letters 49, 2 (1996): 205–16. Franz Kafka. Letters to Felice. Edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born. Translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. Franz Kafka. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.

D2

DE

DHA

DL

DS

HB1 HB2 HB3 HB4 HC

JM

KA KM

LF

LFr

Abbreviations

ix

Franz Kafka. Letters to Milena. Translated and Introduction by Philip Boehm. New York: Schocken Books, 1990. NS Franz Kafka. Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente. Edited by Jost Schillemeit. 4 vols. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1992. ON Sigmund Freud. “Originalnotizen zu einem Fall von Zwangsneurose (‘Rattenmann’).” G.W. 19:505–69. OR Sigmund Freud. “Addendum: Original Record of the Case.” S.E. 10: 251–318. RMB Sigmund Freud. Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose. G.W. 7: 379– 463. RMN Sigmund Freud. Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. S.E. 10:153–249. SC Otto Weininger. Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles. Edited by Daniel Steuer with Laura Marcus. Translated by Ladislaus Löb. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. T Franz Kafka. Tagebücher. Edited by Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, 3 vols. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1990. TP Heinrich Heine. Travel Pictures. Translated by Peter Wortsman. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008. W H. Leivick. “The Wolf.” In Radiant Days, Haunted Nights, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel, 125– 46. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005. WM Sigmund Freud. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” S.E. 17:3–122. WMM Curt Siodmak. Wolf Man’s Maker: Memoir of a Hollywood Writer. Revised edition. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2001. WSM Donna Haraway. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. LM

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Bestiarium Judaicum

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Introduction A Field Guide to the Bestiarium Judaicum [N]atural species are chosen not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think.” —claude lévi-strauss1

In 1920, well-known writer and publicist Franz Blei, under the nom de plume Peregrin Steinhövel,2 privately issued Bestiarium Literaricum, a collection of vignettes in which literary figures, mostly contemporary, were transformed into all manner of beast and the occasional animated object. This field guide to predominantly Germanophone Literatiere (literary animals; a play on Littérateurs, [would-be-seen-as] men of letters) achieved instant notoriety; every German writer both hoped and feared to find him- or herself included.3 Often Blei’s characterizations punnily—and nastily— played off his prey’s surname. For example, the entry for the Prague-born Expressionist poet, dramatist, and novelist Franz Werfel, whose surname is a virtual homophone of Würfel (a die or cube), ironically began “Unlike the hedgehog [Igel ] the Werfel possesses its spherical rotundity not by rolling up into itself but rather by spreading out” (BL 72); the entry for the German dramatist Herbert Eulenberg, whose surname means “owl mountain,” described “The Eulenberg [as] a jinx [Pechvogel, lit. pitch bird]4 from a family of screech owls [Käuzchen]. He builds his elaborate nest in the ruins of baroque or rococo or Biedermeier palaces or other such chateaux” (BL 32–33). Though the Austrian writer Anton Wildgans, whose surname 1

2

Introduction

means “wild goose,” is characterized as “a completely tame domestic goose [Hausgans], willingly kept in small Viennese flats” (BL 74), the author whose surname is a virtual homophone of the Czech word for jackdaw (kavka) and for whose 1908 print debut Blei was responsible,5 Franz Kafka, is otherwise speciated: “The Kafka is a very rare magnificent moon-blue mouse [Maus] that does not eat meat but feeds on bitter herbs. It is a fascinating sight because it has human eyes [Menschenaugen]” (BL 45).6 When Blei published an expanded edition in 1922 under his own name and with a new title, Das grosse Bestiarium der modernen Literatur ( The great bestiary of modern literature) he added an entry on the viciously antisemitic literary historian Adolf Bartels to his menagerie (BL 23): Bartels is the name of a zoologist of German literary fauna, who became such only after he had been one of said animal species [ein Tier besagter Fauna]. It is hard to establish what he was overall before. In any case, he had little luck as a literary beast [Literatier], the blame for which he ascribed to the stables being so overfilled with Jewish literary animals [Literatieren] that a scraggy little Christian tail [Christenschwänzchen; i.e., a little Christian prick] couldn’t find a place. As a zoologist he invented a radiometer that detects noses he does not like.7

Among the four German literary historians (Bartels, Eduard Engel, M. Richard Meyer, Max Koch), with whose works Bestiarium shared bookshelf space, as Blei mused in his forward to its fifth printing in 1924 (BL 9), Bartels was the only one on exhibit.8 Though never completing his university studies, this freelance writer and prominent member of völkisch associations wrapped himself in the academic cloak of Wissenschaft (science), both racial and literary;9 his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (History of German literature), from its initial publication in 1901– 02 to 1919, established itself as a standard work, selling over fifteen thousand copies. With the resurgence of the völkisch movement after World War I Bartels’s Geschichte achieved an even wider reception and influence. It was a pioneering exercise in reading literature and its production through a racial lens: it detailed how works were the expression of the seelisch and geistig (spiritual, intellectual, and, therefore, moral) traits of their authors’ distinctive racial origin.10 It also foreclosed any Germanophone writer with even the suspicion of Jewish descent from inclusion in the German literary canon. Bartels employed the language of race rather than species and therefore distinguished his object— differentiation among human (animal) groups— from that of zoology— differentiation among (nonhuman) animal groups.11

Introduction

3

Moreover, Bartels was concerned with detailing racially distinctive intellectual, rather than physical, physiognomies and behaviors. Consequently, Blei’s labeling Bartels’s pretense of scientificity as zoology may simply have been the logical counterpoint to his own use of the medieval bestiary genre for his literary history. However, besides an implicit distinction of the human (animal) from the (nonhuman) animal, both Bartels and zoologists also shared certain epistemological presuppositions about their respective objects of study (texts and animal bodies). The contemporary racial theories, upon which Bartels based his interpretations, assumed the identity of mind (Geist) and body and therefore that the spirit (Geist) of the race—its essential nature— could be discerned in its physical products and actions.12 Because much of contemporary zoology assumed the absence of Geist in nonhuman animals, observation of their bodies and (re)actions revealed their essential nature. Further, in his determination of any given population, Bartels adopted a quasi-zoological taxonomic perspective on its relations with other population groups: That the Swabian Friedrich Schiller had “perhaps a drop of Celtic blood” neither excluded him from the German canon nor negated the value of his work;13 however, the effect of any trace of Jewish descent or influence had debilitating consequences. For example, that the “Artiste” and “Phänomen” Hugo von Hofmannsthal “descends from a Jewish family” (his paternal grandfather, born Jewish, later converted to Catholicism) leads Bartels to conclude with regard to Hofmannsthal’s reworking of Greek dramas such as Elektra and Oedipus Rex that “there is no more trace of the Greek therein, [instead] the perverse, bloodthirsty, oriental Judentum is there.”14 With regard to the Jews and their works, Bartels engaged in pseudospeciation. That is, as Erik Erikson described this phenomenon: “while man is obviously one species, he appears and continues on the scene split up into groups . . . which provide their members with a firm sense of unique and superior human identity—and some sense of immortality. . . . [However] in times of threatening technological and political change and sudden upheaval, the idea of being the preordained foremost species tends to be reinforced by a fanatic fear and anxious hate of other pseudospecies. It then becomes a periodic and often reciprocal obsession of man that these others must be annihilated or kept ‘in their places.’ ”15 From a positivistic perspective “pseudo” may be an appropriate qualifier of the speciation of the Jews; however, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno note, such specious speciation of the Jews needed no qualifying “pseudo”: “They who propagated individualism, abstract law, the concept

4

Introduction

of the person, have been debased to a species [Spezies]. They who were never allowed untroubled ownership of the civic right [Bürgerrecht] that should have granted them human dignity [Qualität der Menschheit] are again called ‘The Jews’ [sic; ‘Der Jude,’ i.e., ‘The Jew’] without distinction [ohne Unterschied]” (DE 143– 44). “Speciation” is not about distinguishing one species from another; rather, it is about distinguishing one taxonomic group among those who are categorized according to species—for example, animals—from all of those who are not—i.e., humans. It is animalization. In his roughly contemporaneous Minima Moralia (ca. 1944 – 45) Adorno isolates the phrase “only an animal” as the telltale justification for the possibility of “pogroms” against “savages, blacks, Japanese.” Before offering his portent, Adorno speculates about how the victims traditionally associated with pogroms, i.e., Jews, have been perceived: “Perhaps the social schematism of perception in anti-Semites is such that they do not see Jews as human beings at all.” This aphorism is entitled “Menschen sehen dich an” (People are looking at you), by which Adorno is ironically playing on Juden sehen Dich an ( Jews are looking at you), Nazi ideologue Johann von Leers’s 1933 antisemitic natural-historical taxonomy of “the Jew.” The latter includes illustrated chapters on the Lügenjude (liar-Jew; that is, “the Jew” as critic of National Socialism), Betrugsjude (swindler-Jew; that is, “the Jew” as profiteer), Zersetzungsjude (corrosion-Jew; that is, “the Jew” as teacher of immorality), and so on.16 Drawing upon the experience of him and his fellow Jews in a German prisoner of war camp, Emanuel Levinas observes, “We were beings entrapped in their species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language.” He then concludes: “Racism is not a biological concept; antiSemitism is the archetype of all internment. . . . It shuts people away in a class, deprives them of expression and condemns them to being ‘signifiers without a signified’ and from there to violence and fighting.”17 As is the practice with nonhuman animals, the Jewish-identified18 individual is merely an instantiation of the species “Jew”; any seemingly distinguishing negative trait is ascribed to the specific (base) property by which one of the several varieties of the species “Jew” manifests itself, any positive one to accident. Thus, an article on the May 1939 opening of “The Mental and Racial Manifestation of the Jews” exhibition at Vienna’s Natural History Museum reports: “The exhibition concerned itself with all of those appearances of Judentum, which are typical for this race. We see in a great number of images, which were produced from Vienna police department photos, that the telltale marks of the original racial character, regardless of any mixing with European races, is always recognizable.”19

Introduction

5

(Un)Natural Histories and the Era of the Jewish Question The animalization of “the Jew” did not begin with the biologization of “Jew hatred” by racial antisemitism. Rather, over the past two millennia a vast menagerie of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, and so on) has been disseminated to debase and bestialize Jews. Analogies and/or identifications of Jews with either particular animals or animality in general, almost always derogatorily, had long accompanied discourse about and iconography of “the Jew.”20 These forays into the wild often appropriated their figuration from scriptural sources or subsequent Christian midrash (legend), although everyday practice was no less a source (for example, Jewish dietary prohibitions, the routine castration of pigs, distinctions between mongrels and pure-bred dogs). While the history of that unnatural Jewish bestiary, the provisioning of the Bestiarium Judaicum with Jew-Animals, will be sketched in Chapter 1, it is not the primary object of this monograph. Instead, this study focuses on the deployment of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone, writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire, given this history, about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems. That era, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, was shaped by the asking of such questions as: when and under what conditions unbaptized Jews might attain citizenship in the nation’s political incarnation as the state? whether and how to alleviate, even remove, the numerous impositions and restrictions on the economic, residential, political, and even conjugal lives of such individuals? and whether or not those identified as Jews (unbaptized or not) can be or are even able to be integrated into the dominant society? This was the era in which the last question remained open even after unbaptized Jews achieved emancipation from virtually all civil, economic, and political limitations. These questions arose concurrently with the collapses of the religious and the lineage/corporate (estate, guild, and so on) narratives of value and meaning and of the institutions that sustained them amid the social dislocations, geographic relocations, colonial expansions, economic destabilizations, and increasing bureaucratizations that were also occurring.21 European identifications and hierarchies that could replace those eroded by modernization, secularization, and commodification needed to be created, maintained, and confirmed. In place of the traditional narratives, biological knowledges and national histories provided explanatory frames and moral valuations with the force of objective truth. Naturalized signifiers

6

Introduction

of categorical difference (gender, race, class, species, and so on) as divined by the natural-scientific and historico-philological disciplines imbricated the bodies of individuals and groups. The ascription of intersecting identifiers not only enacted both the subordination or marginalization of those so marked and the dominance of the unmarked markers, it also (re)constructed the authority of hierarchical oppositions indexed by each identifier. Hence, to analogize or identify Jews with animals not only maintains the hierarchical opposition of Jew and Gentile but that of Animal and Human as well. Such intersections also maintained the normativity of hierarchical determinations within each identifying category as well as reinforced the stigma (or prestige) of each categorical identification. Beyond rendering difference visible, a body of aggregated identifiers settled into the already assumed distribution of accidents, properties (visible or hidden, actual or potential), and essence. For example, where some saw a female Jew, others saw a Jewish Woman, and still others saw a Woman who happened to be wearing a six-pointed-star necklace. Where differentia may have been observed among identified members of a specific population, only a variety of accidents were seen. For example, the cravatwearing, German-speaking individual over here and the caftan-wearing, Yiddish-speaking individual over there were both identified as Jews; and the individual was but an instantiation of the collective or categorical singular: “the Jew,” “the Woman,” “the African,” and so on. Otherwise put, these groups underwent (pseudo)speciation. As I argued in The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, Jewish identification like that for all identified populations was inextricably tied to the articulation of European modernity as a normative category and to the formation and continuous maintenance of the intersecting identifications and hierarchies it subsumed. The Other Jewish Question insisted, however, that the emergence, dissemination, and ascription of the ethnicity-, race-, gender-, and sexuality-coded representations, preeminently corporeal, which produced knowledge about “the Jew” in Germanophone Central Europe, were conditioned by the specific situation of Jews in each land. As Jews increasingly engaged in acculturation to further social integration, their “host” societies were concurrently undergoing their own processes of identity formation; identifiable constructions of “the Jew” sought to forestall, if not foreclose, the two-fold narcissistic crisis presented by the increasing difficulty to distinguish “German” from “Jew” and by the persistence of supposedly superseded Judentum (that amalgamation of Jewry, Jewishness, and Jewish religious belief and practice).22 In sum, the Era of the Jewish Question was an era that

Introduction

7

begged the question of Jewish difference: for the Central European societies, into which Jews sought admission, demanded complete assimilation of and into the dominant culture, even to the point of obliterating any traces of Judentum; yet, often accompanying the demand was the assumption that “the Jew” was constitutionally incapable of eliminating its difference. While working on The Other Jewish Question, I repeatedly encountered zoological images and analogies and came to realize that modern “knowledge-producing” disciplines (from medicine to anthropology, psychiatry to “racial hygiene”) were not the only “sciences” to contribute to the noisome reservoir of anti-Jewish representations and that there was another hierarchical categorical opposition by which Jewish difference was identified: human(animal) / (nonhuman)animal. In line with Pliny the Elder’s comment in his Natural History that “a foreigner is hardly a member of the human species,”23 the identification of “the Jew” for most Central Europeans had also drawn upon the millennia-old tradition of natural history and its practices: the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human.24 As Jew/German difference appeared to become less self-evident, the need increased to render the assumed underlying, hidden difference of “the Jew” visible and to depict it as always already having been visible. As Ernst Hiemer, Der Stürmer’s resident author of antisemitic works for children,25 warned in Poodle-PugDachshund-Pinscher (see Figure 1), his collection of eleven fables about different animals that threaten other similar species and/or humans and eleven conjoined lessons about the corresponding variety of “the Jew”: Just as it is often hard to perceive bacteria, so, too, it is often impossible to recognize the Jew. Not every Jew has the same racial characteristics! Not every Jew has a crooked nose or protruding ears! Not every Jew has a protruding lower lip or black, curly hair! Not every Jew has the typical Jewish eyes and flat feet! No! It is often hard to recognize a Jew. One must look very carefully to avoid being fooled. The variety in the Jew’s appearance is a great danger for other peoples.26

Even the absence of difference became a sign of Jewish difference; it bore manifest witness to “the Jew” possessing an innate mimetic capacity like the chameleon and other such creatures.27 Not only did stories and feuilletons, poems and polemics, stock an entire menagerie of nasty Jewishidentified nonhuman animals, but there were picture posters (Bilderbogen) and other visual media (postcards, tchotchkes [bric-a-brac]) in which the varieties of the species “Jew,” partes extra partes, were taxonomically displayed (see Figure 2).28 These images were widely disseminated; for example,

8

Introduction

Figure 1. Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher (The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pinscher). Front cover of Fritz Hiemer, Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher.

cultural historian Peter Dittmar observed that the picture poster, issued in quantities of one thousand, “was the only visual medium in the first half of the nineteenth century that reached diverse social strata, above all the urban bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie.”29 The implicit goals of such representation, of such rendering wholly visible, were that “confronted with the

Figure 2. Illustration from “Unser Verkehr. Eine kleine erbauliche Bildergallerie aufgenommen nach dem Leben” (Our gang. A small, edifying picture gallery, drawn from life) by Johann Michael Voltz (ca. 1815/20). Reproduced in Michaela Haibl, Zerrbild als Stereotyp. Reprinted by courtesy of Michaela Haibl.

10

Introduction

same individual entity, everyone will be able to give the same description; and, inversely, given such a description everyone will be able to recognize the individual entities that correspond to it.”30 Along side these bestial answers to the “Jewish Question,” I encountered another question long posed across Europe that has come under renewed examination by scholars such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Élisabeth de Fontenay, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe: “the question of the (nonhuman) animal(s).”31 They have observed how, in the answers proffered by European scholarly traditions, nonhuman animals are denied the capacity to speak and are all but inevitably referred to in the categorical singular of “the Animal.” Those responses foreclosed both the diversity of animal species and the singularity of individual nonhuman animals. Further, they served a number of anthropocentric purposes including the exclusive determinations of “the (hu)man,” of the (human) subject, and of the universal (over and against the particular). The question of the animal has been the unheimliche Gast (uncanny guest)32 of what Immanuel Kant in his 1800 Introduction to Logic came to recognize as the fourth and, ultimately, ultimate question that philosophy must address: “What is man?”33 In that earlier monograph, I analyzed what I referred to as “the other Jewish Question” of Jewish-identified individuals (e.g., Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, and Walter Benjamin): that is, how and under what conditions they appropriated those denigrating ascriptions, principally of the Jewish body, by which “the Jew” had been identified and “the Jewish Question” answered, and then employed them as building blocks for working through their situations and constructing their own responses.34 The present work undertakes analyses of nonhuman-animal constructions of such Jewish-identified writers as Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. Their other-than-silent responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and Animal questions converged and varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted and classified constituted a constellation of diverse and diversely motivated public interventions. Where in my earlier monographs I demonstrated how corporeal rhetoric—both as signifiers of their supposed signifieds and in their morphemic/orthographic/phonemic materiality as components of other words—mediated Jewish identification, in this work I attend to the zoological. For example, pronunciations or letter-sequences that could evoke associations with a particular nonhuman animal, such as Maus (mouse) in Mauscheln (the derogatory designation of the sounds, rhythms, and constructions of Yiddish/Judendeutsch and its assumed-to-be native speakers),35 implicate the Gentile/Jew divide

11

Introduction

with that of the human /animal one; invocations of a human(animal)/(nonhuman)animal diacritic, such as the presence/absence of a tail (Schwanz/ Zopf [queue]), perform this function as well. Moreover, by overcoding the Gentile/Jew divide with the human /animal one, both of these apparatuses for identification and domination are maintained. But it is necessary to explore “the question of the animal” and its intersections with the Jewish Question before undertaking analyses of exemplary animal tales and poems generated by these writers in their wake.

The Question of the Animal Among the appended “Notes and Drafts” to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is a consideration of “Man and Beast” (Mensch und Tier). It begins: Throughout European history the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction to the animal. The latter’s lack of reason [Unvernunft] is the proof of human dignity [Menschenwürde]. So insistently and unanimously has this antithesis been recited by all the earliest precursors of bourgeois thought, the ancient Jews, the Stoics, and the Early Fathers, and then through the Middle Ages to modern times, that few other ideas are so fundamental to Western anthropology. The antithesis is acknowledged even today . . . Humans possess reason, which pitilessly follows its path; the animals from which they draw their bloody conclusions have only unreasoning terror, the impulse to take flight on a path which is cut off. The lack of reason has no words. (DE 203– 4)

Some forty years later, in a 1997 lecture, later collected in the eponymous The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida (re)initiates an analysis of the “question of the animal,” the deployment of the figure of “the Animal” in the Western carnophallogocentric philosophic tradition. In Animal, Derrida introduces animot, a homophonic play on the French plural of “animal,” animaux, and the French word for “word,” mot. Derrida’s neologism ironically points to how nonhuman animals in that tradition are denied the capacity to speak and are all but inevitably referred to in the categorical singular of “the Animal.”36 Derrida argues that this foreclosure of both the diversity of animal species (aside from the opposed human [animal] and [nonhuman] animal) and the singularity of the individual nonhuman animal has served a number of anthropocentric purposes including the assertion of human exceptionalism. Derrida also reminds the

12

Introduction

attendees of his subsequent seminar on “The Beast and the Sovereign” of the obverse determinations of the animal: that human behavior characterized as animalistic, as bestial, is not characteristic of actual nonhuman animals. In French, it “is never said of the beast that it is bête [stupid] or bestial. The adjective, epithet, attribute bête, or ‘bestial’ is never appropriate for animal or beast.”37 Rather than the fruit of naturalist or zoological description, those characteristics and behaviors that garner the label “bestial” are often38 drawn from what one would abject from the determination of the human— of one’s self or community as the human—and anyone so labeled is located outside the bounds of moral obligation. A number of other scholars39 have recently addressed this question. For example, in The Open, Giorgio Agamben characterizes this determination of the human through opposition to or exclusion of the animal (or nonhuman) as the anthropological machine or, rather, machines. He distinguishes the modern machine from the premodern one. The anthropological machine of the moderns “functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human.”40 By symmetrical contrast, the earlier machine functioned by humanizing an animal; exemplifying the animal in human form were, on the one hand, the enfant sauvage and the homo sylvestris (orang-outang), and, on the other, the slave and the barbarian. Intrinsic to the functioning of either machine, to the articulation of the opposition as disjunctive, is determining and securing the absolute differentia(e). This becomes particularly acute with regard to the human / animal opposition because that stark differentiation has to be compatible with reigning zoontologies:41 since before the Common Era, with a notion of the great chain of being or, since at least Darwin’s Origin of the Species, with an evolutionary narrative that would include the human animal with the nonhuman ones. Whereas the earlier model could call upon a divine plan to, at least superficially, resolve any seeming incompatibility, the evolutionary narrative could not find its resolution from either a deity or some necessary outcome of natural laws. Agamben discusses the German popularizer of Darwinism Ernst Haeckel’s aporia-rife efforts to salvage the modern anthropological machine. Drawing upon the tradition, which went back at least to Aristotle, that named language as the essential diacritic—humans have it and animals do not—Haeckel endeavored to plot the development from anthropoid ape to human. Into the breach in 1874 he postulated the onetime existence of Pithecanthropus alalus, the speechless ape-man, that he also referred to as the sprachloser Urmensch or speechless primal human. To ground the notion

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Introduction

of human exceptionalism, Haeckel had to create an animalized human as earlier generations had generated humanized animals—those creatures whose ability to speak would nevertheless not grant them human status nor erase the human /animal opposition. Despite Agamben’s overgeneralized periodization, his overformalized algorithm by which he generates his machines—“an exclusion (which is always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is always already an exclusion)”—and his logical positing of a “perfectly empty” “zone of indifference” in which “the articulation between the human and the animal . . . must take place,”42 his notion of the anthropological machine has heuristic value. It calls attention to the necessary misrecognition both of the artificiality of any clear, distinct, and “natural” boundary between human (animal) and (nonhuman) animal and of its intrinsic instability and porousness. Agamben’s construct also recognizes the necessity for discursive strategies by which that alleged disjunction must be continuously (re)constructed.

Along the Great Divide Those philosophic and scientific discourses discussed by Derrida, Agamben, and others, both presume and enact—and thereby maintain—what primatologist and cyborg theorist Donna Haraway has called the “Great Divide” between human and nonhuman animals that sustains human exceptionalism.43 Haraway develops her notion from historian of science Bruno Latour’s analysis of the “Two Great Divides” that mark Western modernity: the Great Divide between Us (the modern West) and Them (the premodern rest) and that between the human (society, the knower) and the nonhuman (nature, the known). He argues that it is our “ability” to recognize the latter Great Divide and the concomitant assumption of their inability to do so that “accounts” for and justifies the former Great Divide.44 Haraway does not ascribe primacy, whether historically or logically, to the human(animal)/(nonhuman)animal Great Divide; there is no greatest or original divide nor are they identical homologies of one another; nevertheless, they are mutually implicated and often employed intersectionally. Forms of this opposition emerged, however, before any postulated onset of the modern. Though Aristotle classified the human as an animal, specifically a zoon politikon or political animal, he made a fundamental distinction between humans and other animals. Political sociability, however, was not what made humans unique among animals; bees, after all, were social animals. Rather, humans were simply more political than other animals

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Introduction

because the human ability to speak or think with reason (logos) enabled the development of a city-state or polis. Conversely, in the Politics, Aristotle wrote: “But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. . . . For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.”45 The human (animal) is opposed by the (human) animal. The Church Fathers and the medieval scholastics interpreted Gen. 1:26 —“Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness, to have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, all wild animals on land, and everything that creeps on the earth’ ”—to ground humanity’s fundamental difference in status.46 In his City of God, Augustine also argued how the Sixth Commandment, “thou shall not kill,” applied only to humans: “of the irrational animals that fly, swim, walk, or creep, since they are dissociated from us by their want of reason, and are therefore by the just appointment of the Creator subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses.” According to Aquinas, while enemies in a “just war” must be treated as human beings, that is, with love and charity, because animals are “naturally subject to man . . . the hunting of wild animals is just and natural.”47 The combination of Christian exegesis with the medieval Aristotelian tradition, by which the human /animal opposition was mediated by both their visible commonalities (and differences) and the invisible human difference of reason (and soul), “enable[d] the thought that not every living human body is actually a human being.”48 Historian Keith Thomas notes: “What all such definitions [of ‘man’ and ‘animal’] have in common is that they assume a polarity between the categories ‘man’ and ‘animal’ and that they invariably regard the animal as the inferior.” After this gloss, he draws an important inference: “In practice, of course, the aim of such definitions has often been less to distinguish men from animals than to propound some ideal of human behavior.”49 Better, differentiation and self-definition /-idealization are necessarily co-implicated. Distinguishing one’s own human group from another no less engages such self-definition and self-idealization as well as often promotes the assumption that any apparent outer commonality does not preclude fundamental inner difference. Another factor is also operative; the bodies of human individuals and groups are imbricated with categorical human identifiers such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and so on, each of which, at a given historical moment and location, consists of particular internal distinctions and hierarchies. When encountering the human other, the confluence of human identifiers, its mix of the desired

Introduction

15

and the abjected, may be so dissonant and undecidable that the dynamic of human definition and differentiation shifts. These factors may result in the overcoding of group difference with the human /animal distinction.50 Then, Thomas observes: “Once perceived as beasts, people were liable to be treated accordingly. The ethic of human domination removed animals from the sphere of human concern. But it also legitimized the ill-treatment of those humans who were in a supposedly animal condition. . . . [T]he ideal of human ascendency, therefore, had implications for men’s relations to each other, no less than for their treatment of the natural world.”51 The animalization of the human other set up its own taxonomic hierarchy from “useful beasts, to be curbed, domesticated and kept docile [all the way down to] vermin and predators, to be eliminated.”52 Historian of Religions David Chidester, drawing on Thomas’s work, elaborates further on the relationship of the animal to human community that became formalized in seventeenth-century Europe and on how it informed the European engagement with the indigenous peoples they encountered beyond the Eurasian landmass: “Animals can have no right of society with us,” according to the seventeenth-century English theologian Lancelot Andrewes, “because they want reason.” With respect to land, animals had no rights, Andrewes concluded on biblical grounds, because God had given the earth to humans, rather than to sheep or deer. Since they had no rights animals could be exterminated, both in the sense of being driven from land settled by humans and in the sense of being killed, because biblical commandments against theft or murder did not apply to nonhumans. Independent of biblical or theological basis, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes concluded that human beings had no moral or legal obligations to animals because “to make covenants with brute beasts is impossible.” Animals therefore had no right to life or land; neither did the indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Africa, or the Pacific Islands, who were classified as beastly or brutal because they lacked religion. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, this implication in the correlation between animals and indigenous people was made explicit in 1609 by the Reverend Robert Gray. Most of the earth was “possessed and wrongfully usurped by wild beasts,” Gray complained, “or by brutish savages, which by reason of their godless ignorance, and blasphemous idolatry, are worse than those beasts.”53

Such analogies were employed in the philosophic discourses on race that emerged in the late eighteenth century and were extended to include the

16

Introduction

Jews. In his 1799 Moses and Christ, Gottlob Benjamin Gerlach wrote:54 “But these philosophers [e.g., Christoph Meiners] go so far as to claim that moral character—that noble proclivity that first makes all humans human—is lacking in the poor creatures of these peoples. . . . These people, like animals, are not capable of feeling moral duty and have thus no rights . . . , an argument that comes up in England to justify the slave trade and in Germany the oppression of the Jews.”

“We don’t murder, we kill . . . You don’t murder animals, you kill them.” Yet, as Haraway points out, the Great Divide is not simply a matter of human dominion over what is identified as animal; it is about who is or is not killable:55 “only human beings can be murdered. . . . Every living being except Man can be killed but not murdered” (WSM 78). As St. John Chrysostom noted in the first of his Eight Homilies Against the Jews, when the “useful beast” strays from its place, its killability comes to the fore56— so, too, when its place is on the human food chain. Derrida describes a logic of sacrifice undergirding the Great Divide whereby human exceptionalism requires the noncriminal putting to death of the nonhuman—including slaughter for consumption—its sacrifice, to legitimate itself.57 Jonathan Elmer and Cary Wolfe58 developed a species grid that sought to account for the various positions in the human-animal relationship and for the apparent exceptions to human exceptionalism, whether the pet schnauzer Fritz or the female slave. At opposing ends are the humanized human, endowed with subjectivity and dominion, and the animalized animal, without subjectivity, outside of the political order—and killable. This brute beast is legitimately subjected to human brutality. They add: “That the ostensibly ‘pure’ categories of ‘animalized animal’ and ‘humanized human’ are the merest ideological fictions is evinced by the furious line drawing at work in the hybrid designations.”59 Between the two are the humanized animal and the animalized human. Humanized animals include members of a “companion species,”60 for example pet dogs with names. Also included in this category are domesticated or otherwise subjugated animals that serve determinate functions within and occupy (as well as stay within their) determinate places in human society such as being a source of food on the farm, security at the gate, or spectacle in the circus. The brutality to which these animals are subject in their instrumental use and slaughter is often disguised or distanced, and, generally, regularized.61 The humanized animal can be employed to distinguish the humanized human from the animalized human, to render one human as animalized and their master as

Introduction

17

the humanized human. Subjected to dominion by an animal the animalized human falls out of the political order and the community of moral obligation; denied subjectivity, it can be brutalized and is killable. For Americanist Colleen Glenney Boggs, the conditions to which prisoners at Abu Ghraib were subjected exemplified the animalization of the human.62 The identification of a killable and (un)naturally monstrous animalized human emerged—well before these qualities were theorized, respectively, by Elmer/ Wolfe and Agamben—in the form of the Untermensch or underman /subhuman. A term that emerged in the 1890s as simply the logical antipode to Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch or overman /superman, “Untermensch” became a topos of the racial-biological imaginary in 1922 when U.S. historian and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard published his The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man. When translated into German three years later, its characterization of Bolshevism as the Weltanschauung of the Untermenschen found great resonance with leading National Socialist ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. Incorporated into Rosenberg’s 1930 Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), a massive supplement to Chamberlain’s foundational 1899 racial historiography Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century),63 the notion of “Untermensch” began to be widely disseminated and soon pervaded National Socialist geopolitical imagination and propaganda.64 The Untermensch made its most graphic appearance in the lushly illustrated eponymous pamphlet widely distributed domestically by Himmler’s SS Main Office in 1942. This field guide warned: This creation of nature, seemingly wholly of the same sort [gleichgeartet] biologically [as the human], with hands, feet, and some sort of brain, with eyes and a mouth, is all the same a totally different, a terrifying creature. . . . Not all those who appear human are in fact so. . . . The beast [Bestie]—

the Untermensch—“stands lower than the animal.”65 It manifests itself in various forms, including “the Mulatto,” “the Gypsy,” “the Slav,” and “the African” as well as “the Jew”; any differences among the taxa are essentially happenstantial. “Der ewige Jude” (the eternal Jew), however, emerges out of “the mire” (dem Sumpf) as primus inter pares, as the leader of this beastly horde, as the exemplar. Such efforts to mobilize abject affect among the public toward the Untermensch by rendering it visible, however, proved at times an obstacle to its desired removal from the human community of moral obligation. For example, after the Germans occupied Belarus

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Introduction

(Weissruthenien) in 1941, so-called Reichsjuden, thoroughly acculturated Jews living in Germany, began to be deported to the newly formed ghettos there. As the last ghettos began to be liquidated in 1943, the SS order to exterminate those gleichgeartet individuals— cultured, German-looking— with the rest of the Eastern Jewish rabble concerned Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar of Belarus since October 1941. Kube, a Nazi party member and official since the early 1920s, had as Generalkommissar already overseen the murder of virtually all Jews in the region; however, he initially obstructed the execution of the order. Such a traitorous attitude in part led Himmler in his infamous October 4, 1943 speech to SS Officers in Poznan to comment that, while every party member will readily agree that “the Jewish race is to be exterminated . . . Each one has his decent [anständige] Jew. Of course the others are swine [Schweine], but this one is a first-class Jew.”66 The anständige Mensch (decent [hu]man) was an Enlightenment ideal type who in his bearing and behavior respected the humanity of others.67 For the post-Enlightenment bourgeoisie, decency remained a principal virtue; however, the set of others to whom one should be decent, the community of moral obligation, was circumscribed by the assumption that that other was always already capable of such bearing and behavior, i.e., that that other possessed humanity—and that other others did not. Hence to have a “decent Jew” both identified all other Jews as animal and confirmed one’s own decency, one’s own humanness. Situating anständig etymologically supports this inference: “being in a standing position” had a long association with identifying the human over and against the animal. For example, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud speculated that “with man’s adoption of an erect posture [Aufrichtung] . . . the chain of events would have proceeded through the devaluation of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of the menstrual period to the time when visual stimuli were paramount and the genitals became visible, and thence to the continuity of sexual excitation, the founding of the family and so to the threshold of human civilization.” Freud went on to suggest that “the deepest root of sexual [and olfactory] repression . . . is the organic defense of the new form of life achieved with man’s erect gait [aufrechten Gang] against his earlier animal existence.”68 These “decent” Jews, it appeared, had to be made animal so that they could be brutalized and killed, a practice to which the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, Franz Stangl, confessed when asked “if [the Nazis and their collaborators] were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” His answer: “To condition those

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Introduction

who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.”69 Even though the animalization of “the Jew” like the animalization of the (nonhuman) animal may be presumed as natural, it had to be continuously reproduced in order to mutually maintain the human / animal Great Divide and the German /Jew distinction that it overcoded.

Of Jews as Animals: From the Species Jew-Animal to the Genre (Gattung) Jew-as-Animal Analogizing or identifying Jews with animals does not exhaust the history of bestial anti-Jewish representation (see Chapter 1). Antisemitic70 discourses deploy “the Jew” rather than “the Animal” and some conceptual category of human (animal) collectivity—not excluding “species”—to maintain and justify comparable foreclosures and serve comparable ends as those of animalization. At one point in The Animal, Derrida “return[s] for a moment to Adorno [on the] Kantian or idealist hatred of the animal, this zoophobia. . . . [F]or an idealist system, he [i.e., Adorno] says, animals virtually play the same role as Jews did for a fascist system” (A 102–3).71 Derrida then cites the historian of philosophy Elisabeth de Fontenay, first, in order to present another Jewish-accented relation to the animal question: Those who evoke the summa injuria [an allusion to Nazi zoophilia and Hitler’s vegetarianism] only in order to better make fun of pity for anonymous and mute suffering are out of luck, for it happens that some great Jewish writers and thinkers of this century were obsessed by the question of the animal: Kafka, Singer, Canetti, Horkheimer, Adorno.

And second, Derrida erects both her observation that these Jewishidentified individuals had insistently inscribed this question in their “interrogation of rationalist humanism and of the solid ground of its decisions” and her claim about the ethical grounds for this inscription—that “Victims of historic catastrophes have in fact felt animals to be victims also, comparable up to a certain point to themselves and their kind”72—as a double foil against which he can interrogate the relative absence of the animal question in “the Jewish thinker who, no doubt with justification, passes in this [twentieth] century for the most concerned with ethics and sanctity, Emmanuel Levinas” (A 104 –5). In this and subsequent publications Derrida does not return, with one brief exception,73 to analyze those “Jew”-inscribed sites in Fontenay’s canon. Though Bobby, the dog that Levinas dubbed “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany,” is but tangential to it,74 there is indeed a critical tradition of

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Introduction

analyses of the Jew and the Animal, in which, for example, both have been situated in virtually homological hierarchical oppositions within the dialectic of enlightenment (as Derrida situates Adorno); or both have functioned as figure, especially the figure of the particular, in philosophic discourses (A. Benjamin and, differently, Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment); or the diverse but in any case deadly assaults suffered by Jews and animals have been analogized with one other, whether the emphasis is on shared suffering (Fontenay)75 or on the “making killable”76 of bare life by the modern anthropological machine of the biopolitical (Agamben). Unfortunately, understanding the constellation of the Jew and the Animal in terms of “mechanical solidarity”77 leaves little space for Jewish (or animal) agency aside from bearing witness to victimization or offering an alternative social epistemology (drawn from neither Jewish nor animal lifeworlds) such as that signaled by the title of Andrew Benjamin’s analysis Of Jews and Animals. Benjamin develops his alternative by running the specificity of “the Jew” (and, separately, “the Animal”), figured by philosophy as a particular figure of the particular, back through philosophy to subvert the authority it ascribes to the general and/or universal.78 Yet what is clearer in Benjamin, especially in his incisive critique of Agamben’s failure to address the specificity of the decision to mark the Jews as killable,79 is that the figuration of Jews as the “figure of the Jew” exceeds the at-handness, the happenstantial availability, of Jews. Horkheimer and Adorno, for their part, still tend to situate the Jews within series of distant and proximate others, including women and children. In sum, for all representatives of this critical tradition it’s a matter of here is how the Jew is deployed, there is how the Animal, or here is how the Jew like the Animal, or here is how the Animal like the Jew, but not how a particular Jew figured as a particular (nonhuman) animal acts and interacts. They do not explore the ways by which Jews (and [nonhuman] animals) put the oppositions in question by performing their particularity, their responses80 to the hierarchical oppositions, in which they would be situated as mere instantiations of the categorical singular. Those investigations do not explore the “organic solidarity” of Jews and (nonhuman) animals: of Jews as animals. For this we need to step out of theory qua theory and examine the Jewish animot, which inverts and then converts Derrida’s index into practice. That is, we need to attend to how, in praxis, the appropriation of particular animal-figures (for example, apes, dogs, and pigs; lice, mice, and other assorted vermin; and so on) that

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Introduction

have served to bestialize and dehumanize Jews helped a number of Jewishidentified writers to think through their situation in modernity. The “as” signals neither a tradition of metaphors and similes nor a canon of allegories, fables, and parables. Rather, these writers have produced prose, poetic, and dramatic narratives entailing characters who should be understood less as becoming-animal, the Deleuze and Guattarian escape from Oedipus,81 than as performing82 animal, the Jew-as-Animal, by literalizing their societally figured identifications (i.e., the Jew-Animal).83 In many of these texts, the actions of the nonhuman animal protagonists as well as their interactions with other nonhuman and/or human animals would render undecidable the species and ethnic specificity of the Jew-Animal, about which denigrating associations and abjecting affects constellate,84 and subvert the correlation Human:Animal::Gentile:Jew.85 For example, as Scott Spector observes, Kafka inscribed the association of the Ostjude with animality “with a literalism approaching absurdity, a gesture that has at the very least the effect of denaturalizing the discourse.”86 That is, these writers endeavor to betray the manufacture of and render problematic the (nonhuman)animal / human(animal) divide as it was being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations in their authors’ lived experience. They perform, what Todd Pressner calls in his analysis of the “German /Jewish,” a “deconstruction” of the separatrix: “search out [its] operations . . . and undercut its attempts to ground meaning, establish foundation, and stabilize truth” by demonstrating how the supposedly incommensurate terms (for example, Human /Animal, Gentile/Jew) are “ ‘contaminated’ by one another . . . [how they] overlap . . . become blurred . . . switch places . . . [how each] cannot be adequately articulated without the other.”87

The Jewish Animot Rather than leaving Jewish language to “the rumor about the Jews,” as Adorno characterized antisemitism in Minima Moralia’s “Second Harvest,”88 or adopting the silence of the animal’s “mute witness,”89 which, Adorno also noted (see earlier discussion), is disavowed by those who would also bestialize “the Jew,” these writers sought to enunciate the Jewish animot by taking upon themselves the practice of identification and, among other strategies, substituting the Jew-as-Animal for the Jew-Animal. In their works they deploy creatures that either invoke or evoke the nonhuman animals that populate their respective societies’ Jewish menagerie, their Bestiarium Judaicum; that is, in some cases, the nonhuman character

22

Introduction

is identified as Jewish or some variety of Jew, either explicitly or by an unmistakable context, and in others not. In addition to the other goals and motives Jewish-identified writers pursued in creating the works in which the Jew-as-Animal dwelled—including problematizing human /animal difference aside from any possible Gentile/ Jew overcoding—their enunciating the Jewish animot entailed a political intervention. Such engagements ranged from resisting (and, if possible, neutralizing or, at least, mitigating) to succumbing to those bestial identifications that would instrumentally marginalize and oppress their purported referents, the Jews, in and ultimately foreclose them from the polis and the community of moral obligation. Identified as Jews they were not in a position where saying “Jews are humans, not animals”90 or “Jews may be like animals, but those analogized animals actually do good for or figure the best in the human community” could be heard. Consider this schoolroom scene that Heinrich Heine recalled in his posthumously published Memoirs: Scarcely had I [told them about my grandfather] when it went from mouth to mouth, was repeated in all tones, and accompanied by imitations of the voices of animals. The little fellows jumped upon tables and benches, tore from the walls the blackboards, which, together with the inkstands, tumbled down upon the floor; and at the same time they kept laughing, bleating, grunting, barking, crowing—making an infernal noise, with the ever-repeated refrain that my grandfather was a little Jew and had a big beard.91

In reciting his classmates’ animalizing identification of “the Jew,” Heine displaced it unto them by displaying their bestial behavior. However, what could be enunciated and be heard (if not necessarily understood) was the abject Jew-Animal92—and therein lay the risk. When the nonhuman character is inflected as Jewish, whether manifestly, tacitly, or by reader assumption, both the character and the world in which it dwells open themselves to allegorical reduction. Even those who would disrupt the correlation Human:Animal::Gentile:Jew by irony or other antiallegorical strategies, such as the grotesque,93 to undermine the oppressive force of the Jew-Animal, are engaged in a dangerous game. Their bestiaries often seem to feed on negative Jewish stereotypes: aping apes (nachäffende Affen) and mauscheling mice (mauschelnde Mäuse). By unleashing this menagerie of literalized animal figures and their associated cognates and near homophones, have these Jewish-identified writers mimetically represented their fellow Jews according to the debasing images of the dominant, oppres-

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Introduction

sive culture? Have they thereby denied their people—and themselves— any self-determined identity? These narrative ploys are vulnerable both to legitimating the views of the oppressors and to yielding to self-loathing.

The Mamaloschen of Speaking Animals Such was the position the late-eighteenth-century, native-Yiddish-speaking Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon found himself in. In his autobiography, Maimon gave an account of his reception by Berlin’s educated elite: At first [Moses Mendelssohn’s] friend regarded me as a speaking animal [ein redendes Tier], and entertained himself with me, as one is apt to do with a dog or a starling [Star] that has been taught to speak a few words. The odd mixture of the animal [Mischung des Tierischen] in my manners, my expressions, and my whole outward behavior, with the rational in my thoughts, excited his imagination more than the subject of our conversation roused his understanding.94

The pervasive animalization of “the Jew” led some of those so identified, such as Maimon, to presume such dehumanizing identification. Though Maimon did not accept this judgment, many other appropriations of these animal-figures by Jewish-identified writers were not deployed, consciously or unconsciously, in acts of resistance against their ascribed categorical and bestial identification. Often animal figures were employed by members of one Jewish-identified group to characterize negatively, so as to distinguish themselves from, another Jewish-identified group—whether Westjuden speaking of Ostjuden, acculturated Jews speaking of traditional Jews, Zionists speaking of anti-Zionists. Further, a number of Jewish-identified individuals acted out their ambivalence or even hatred toward themselves and their situation by ascribing such debasing animal figurations to themselves, by performing the JewAnimal. Theodor Lessing concludes the opening chapter of his indictment of so-called “Jewish Self-Hatred,” the psychological condition to which Jews are allegedly predisposed (thanks in no small part to his popularization of the phrase), with the following rhetorical call and response: What psychologist could not but know whether centuries-long belittling of individuals does not also actually transform those so belittled, such that in the end every historical injustice becomes in fact an established injustice, thus [becomes] what is, in effect, the rule?—Because in order to transform a human being into a dog, one need only to address him for a long enough time: “You, Dog!”95

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Introduction

Just as some argue that the animalization of the other is projecting onto that other one’s own abjected self,96 so one might argue that when the Jewish writer, industrialist, and eventual Weimar foreign minister Walter Rathenau analogized the Jewish parvenu “donning the costumes of the lean Anglo-Saxons” to “a dachshund [Teckel] dressed up like a greyhound [Windhund ]”97 in “Hear O Israel” (Höre Israel, the opening words of the German translation of the Shema), he was corroborating the subsequent judgment of his 1897 essay as an exemplary exercise in “Jewish self-hatred.”98 A similar judgment may be made of Theodor Herzl’s animalizing characterization of that reluctantly recognized, embarrassing “co-ethnic” (Volksgenosse) he identified as “Mauschel”: “A Jew is a human being [Mensch] like any other. . . . Mauschel, on the other hand, is a distortion of human character, something unspeakably low and repugnant.” An aspect of Mauschel is here alone qualified by “human” (menschlichen), and then only as a distortion of the human; such qualification is absent throughout the remainder of the portrait. Instead, Mauschel is shorn of any article that would name either a human individual or a particular member of a group; Mauschel is a “type” (Typus) or a “figure” (Gestalt) that constellates every instance an identified Jew has looked or acted in a way that corresponds with anti-Jewish stereotype and with everything that Herzl’s “true Jew” is not. To name this “hideous companion” (fürchterliche Begleiter) of the “Jew,”99 Herzl adopted one of the negative epithets traditionally applied to Jews: the pejorative term, as noted earlier, for Jewish speech, Mauscheln. Of uncertain origin, it may have derived from a Yiddish pronunciation of Moses, Moyshe, or—as the German writer and theologian Johan Peter Hebel transliterated it— “Mauses”;100 it also evoked a verminous abject, the mouse, both orthographically (Maus) and virtually phonetically (as in mäuschenstill [silent as a mouse]). At least one tendentious German novelist during the Third Reich seemed to have noticed these resemblances. In his 1934 Shylock unter Bauern (Shylock among the farmers), the author Felix Nabor has the Jewish usurer respond to the question of whether there was something Oriental about him: “No . . . — only mauscheling [das Mauscheln]. But that’s a matter of blood, like mousing [das Mausen] for a cat.”101

“If one is named Kuh [cow] and wishes to be taken seriously, he must act as if he were a Stier [bull].” When seeking the significance of the use of Jew-Animals in the works of Jewish-identified writers, their written work and lived world102 need first be examined before suggesting that they were either acting out or working

Introduction

25

through a self-identification, on the one hand, and/or engaging in an ongoing subversion of the endemic Jewish identifications, on the other. In any case, any speculations about interior states that lead to a rush to judgment of these writers as, to employ the oft-used but extremely problematic label, self-hating Jews should be forestalled. After providing an overview in Chapter 1 of the traditional fields in which a bestiary worth of JewAnimals have been corralled since the European Middle Ages, subsequent chapters seek to delineate the various other defiles by which Jewish-identified authors have led the Jew-Animal. “Kafka”—my answer to the question about the nature of my project that usually sufficed, once I got past “Jews and Animals,” “what was going on when (German-speaking) Jewish(-identified) writers told animal stories,” and “(primarily) before the Shoah.” With the possible exception of Art Spiegelman (whose efforts to resist species and ethnic essentialist readings of Maus are addressed in Chapter 2), no other Jewish(-identified) author is more identified with animal stories.103 “Yea, Metamorphosis” would often accompany my questioner’s nod of recognition. So Chapter 2 examines Kafka’s novella, his first published animal story and first major publication, together with his last completed creature feature and last publication during his lifetime, “Josephine the Singer.” Unlike the nonhuman animal protagonists in many of Kafka’s other stories, Gregor and Josephine are specifically identified by name; however, left somewhat indeterminate are their species and (possibly alluded to) ethnic identifications. Supplementing Walter Benjamin’s observation that “You can read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all. When you finally come upon the name of the creature—monkey [Affe], dog, mole—you look up in fright and realize that you are already far away from the continent of man,”104 the chapter notes that what makes readers’ discovery of the creature’s taxonomic designation (Metamorphosis) or the uncanny realization of its absence (“Josephine”) so disturbing is that within the world of the stories the other principal characters accept as part of the everyday or the new normal interaction with what for the reader may be an incomprehensible, astonishing, or horrifying figure. Kafka’s readers may no longer be inhabiting the “continent of man,” but the very ordinariness of this other continent may lead them to the realization that the old coordinates by which the “continent of man” had been mapped were always already distorted. This chapter explores Kafka’s rhetorical strategies of taxonomic indeterminacy in these works and their possible implications. Chapter 3 follows the trail of other rodent droppings by Kafka, the socalled “Little Fable” from his Nachlaß (literary remains), as well as some

26

Introduction

found among the Nachlaß of another Jewish-identified writer, Heinrich Heine’s “From the Age of Pigtails.” It examines how their protagonists’ murine identifications are bound together with their proverbial (feline) foes and oppressors. Counterposed against infelicities that have plagued some new historicist interpretations as exemplified by Michael Schmidt’s study of Kafka’s work, this chapter burrows into these resonating works and undertakes chronotopic analyses of how animal figuration mediates social relations, especially of how the Jew-as-Animal would disturb the intercourse between the unequally positioned codependents of Central Europe—Jews and Gentiles—whether in 1920 Prague, as the Judenfrage is ever more insistently posed, or—after a brief detour through Freud’s ratiocinations in the Vienna of 1907/8—in 1820s Berlin, as the promise of emancipation envisioned by the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Juden was being thwarted. “Josephine the Singer” makes a guest appearance in Chapter 4; however, Red Peter’s “Report to an Academy” takes center stage. It first maps the (fe)malevolent naturalizations of “the Jew” ’s alleged mimetic capacity or talent for aping its hosts as Jews adopted various strategies in their pursuit of integration into European societies. Then, after tracing the Judentumassociated signifiers that inscribe Red Peter, the chapter follows Kafka’s simian protagonist as he, having attained the “cultural level of an average European” (DL 312; CS 258), performs the Jew-as-Animal. The next two chapters again bring together Kafka and Heine, whose singular styles have each been deemed among the finest and most influential for subsequent writers in their respective centuries, yet between whom little if any literary relationship has been assumed in the critical literature. With reported encounters with lizards (Eidechsen) on Italian hill paths in both Kafka’s 1911 critique of Max Brod’s novel Die Jüdinnen (the Jewesses) and the opening chapters of Heine’s The City of Lucca, these chapters chart numerous correlations among the contemporary ressentiment-laden literary politics and Jewish-Gentile relations in which each author was embedded. Constructing this configuration of Kafka, Heine, and their Umwelten is aided by the allusive mediation of Karl Kraus’s vicious denunciation of “Heine and the Consequences.” These chapters explore how the invocation of such saurian sightings sought to counter the everyday practice of identifying individuals with the undifferentiated collective singular of “the Jew” by offering instead the encounter with another being’s “unsubstitutable individuality and indexical import” as both this specific “I” and a Jew;105 that is, Jewishness does not exhaust one’s identification, nor does one’s identification exhaust the possibilities of Jewishness. Chapter 5 also

Introduction

27

recuperates the nineteenth century’s foremost historical discipline, philology, to address philosopher and hate-speech analyst Judith Butler’s cavalier tossing of Kafka’s “lizard” into the pickle barrel106 of contemporary identity politics and the question of Israel-Palestine in a 2011 British Library lecture. Chapter 6 turns to Heine’s Baths of Lucca, the prequel to City of Lucca, and follows Heine’s proleptic encounter on an Italian mountain road with a different sort of animal, a Hirsch or stag, in the form of the Jewish lottery dealer and chiropodist Hirsch-Hyacinth. One cervine encounter leads to another as the chapter takes a side trip into the woods when it inquires of the Austrian-Jewish author Felix Salten’s 1922/23 novel Bambi and its 1940 sequel Bambi’s Children as to whether a doe is just a female deer. Chapter 7 returns to the fray as it engages another instrumentalization of Kafka’s animal figures for contemporary cultural-political ends, Jens Hanssen’s scavenged-together anti-Zionist reading of “Jackals and Arabs.” Drawing in part upon genre analysis and a mixed multitude of Kafka’s canids in their shamelessness and eating habits, the chapter draws out the anti-allegorical force and function of Kafka’s allegedly “Jewish jackals.” Chapter 8 follows different canids as it springs from Freud’s case study of the Russian Christian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff, who has been known since his case’s publication as “the Wolf-Man,” to The Wolf Man, GermanJewish émigré Curt Siodmak’s script(s) for the 1941 film. Though there were few sightings of Jewish werewolves prior to the twentieth century, this chapter examines correlations between the medieval German notion of the wargus, the werewolf or outlaw, and the identification of “the Jew” as wolf. In particular, it attends to how Siodmak and H. Leivick, in his Yiddish narrative poem “Der Volf,” differently work through the relation among “the Jew,” the Law, and the lupine. The chapter also addresses Heine’s portrayal of diverse Jewish were-canids, whether imagined by Gentile audiences or experienced by Jewish peddlers in nineteenth-century Central Europe. Images of cattle cars and of sheep going to the slaughter commonly lead to portrayals of the Shoah as the abyss of Jewish animalization and as the abattoir for those animalized Jews. Conversely, Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s protagonist in “The Letter Writer” laments that “for the animals [life in the Anthropocene] is an eternal Treblinka,”107 and this apothegm has become a cri de coeur for many animal rights activists. Michael André Bernstein, however, has warned against backshadowing, against employing our knowledge of the Shoah as the lens through which to read the past as feeding the river of antisemitism that inevitably emptied, along with the ashes of the crematoria, into the ponds of Auschwitz-Birkenau. This work has neither sought to uncover the history of the Bestiarium Judaicum as a

28

Introduction

tributary to that torrent nor to analyze the works of Jewish-identified writers as necessarily hopeless attempts to fight the current. I’ve located these performances of the Jew-as-Animal and other animal constructions as the authors’ responses to their very specific chronotopic situations. While “affiliation does not amount to inevitability,”108 any study of the animal works of Central European Jewish-identified writers cannot ignore directing attention to some of those identified as Jews in occupied Europe around the time of the so-called Final Solution. Bestiarium Judaicum concludes with an Afterword that discusses observations of the construction of the JewAnimal by Gertrud Kolmar, Primo Levi, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Jiri Weil, and others. In sum, these writers’ creatures do not simply present “the Jew” as the dominant antisemitic society’s “Other,” the monstrous animal-object, the Jew-Animal constructed by Gentile, bourgeois fears, hatreds, and identification practices. Rather, they present individuals and groups whose identifications are shaped by their interpellation into such a society. In the “hostile surrounding world” of Europe, even after Emancipation, Jews (unbaptized or not) may not have been completely self-determining, but neither were they totally at the mercy of their enemy’s power to define and represent. They responded. These writers and their creatures—whether ironized or internalized, whether the Jew-as-Animal or the Jew-Animal— do not only indict a dominant culture that both requires and denies the Jews’ move toward (Gentile) European bourgeois humanity. Their works also grant insight into the complex forms, institutions, and practices of identification in Central European society since the advent of Emancipation by which Jew and Gentile (whether denoted as Christian, European, Aryan, German, and so on) bzw. Animal and Human were co-constituted.109 The following chapters examine their attempts to undermine or otherwise respond to the force and authority of the Jew-Animal by uncannily rendering, via the Jewish animot and the Jew-as-Animal, the purported Jewish referent of those interpellating identifications as indefinite: as both animal and human and neither; as both Jew and Gentile and neither.

chapter 1

“O beastly Jews” A Brief History of an (Un)Natural History I lead then, the monstrous beast [iumentum] out from its lair, and push it laughing onto the stage of the whole world, in the view of all peoples. —peter the venerable1

Heinrich Heine recalls his school days in his brilliant prose pastiche Ideen. Buch: Le Grand (1827): “One has an easier time with natural history, not so many changes can occur there, and we have accurate copper engravings of monkeys [Affen], kangaroos, zebras, rhinoceros, etc. Because such pictures stuck in my mind it later happened very often that many people looked to me right away like old friends.”2 This chapter chronicles instances of the less jocular and far less benign practice of identifying human animals with images of nonhuman ones—the fabrication of the Jew-Animal—that Jewish-identified writers such as Heine engaged. The subsequent chapters of this volume will address a number of those diverse engagements, but here I will turn again to Heine, who almost twenty-five years after he shared that childhood memory, would invoke—in part, to render both the practice and its practitioners ridiculous—Jewish bestialization. In “Disputation,” the last of his Hebrew Melodies (1851), Heine stages a fictional fourteenth-century debate over the true religion between Rabbi Judah of Navarre and the Franciscan Friar José. At one point in their backand-forth the Christian plaintiff unleashes a swarm of bestial epithets against the Jews (DHA 3/1: 163). They are grouped together in (un)natural historical taxa: first, as carrion-eating canids, then as snouty creatures,3 29

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then as flying predators and scavengers, and, lastly, as cold-blooded, slimy, slithering, and poisonous vermin: Jewish people, you are hyenas, Wolves, jackals, who grub around Graves, driven by blood thirst To unearth the corpses of the dead. Jews, Jews, you are sows, Baboons, horned-nose beasts Called rhinoceri, Crocodiles and vampires. You are ravens, hoot owls, eagle owls, Bats, hoopoes, Corpse-eating vultures, basilisks, Gallow’s birds, night creatures. You are vipers and blind worms, Rattlesnakes, poisonous toads, Serpents and adders . . .4

As creative as Heine was, he did not have to invent such beastly Christian invective. This chapter rehearses the prehistory of Heine’s bestiary and then maps out some of the transformations of that tradition in Central European modernity as Jews sought integration into societies that were increasingly shaped by a biologistic worldview.

A Venerable Tradition Had Heine picked up Peter the Venerable’s mid-twelfth-century treatise Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, he would have read: For how long, O Jews, will this bovine intellect [bovinus intellectus] possess your hearts. . . . The ass hears but does not understand; the Jew hears but does not understand. . . . I lead then, the monstrous beast [iumentum] out from its lair, and push it laughing onto the stage of the whole world, in the view of all peoples. I display that book of yours to you in the presence of all, O Jew, O wild beast, that book, I say, that is your Talmud, that egregious teaching of yours . . .5

Peter was just one more contributor to a venerable tradition that found sanction in the potentially deadly glosses of biblical passages in St. John Chrysostom’s late-fourth-century Eight Homilies Against the Jews in which

“O beastly Jews”: A Brief History

31

he corrals a mixed herd of Jewish fauna—including bovines,6 horses,7 pigs,8 and these:9 Christ said: “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and to cast it to the dogs.” Christ was speaking to the Canaanite woman when He called the Jews children and the Gentiles dogs. But see how thereafter the order was changed about: they became dogs, and we became the children. Paul said of the Jews: “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the mutilation. For we are the circumcision.” Do you see how those who at first were children became dogs? (1.2.2) You Jews broke the yoke, you burst the bonds, you cast yourselves out of the kingdom of heaven, and you made yourselves subject to the rule of men. Please consider with me how accurately the prophet hinted that their hearts were uncontrolled. He did not say: “You set aside the yoke,” but “You broke the yoke” and this is the crime of untamed beasts, who are uncontrolled and reject rule . . . Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter. (1.2.4, 6)

For Chrysostom, it is not just that Jews are like animals or even that they are animals; animals have their proper places in the cosmic order, even wild beasts, and they are all naturally subject to humankind and its needs. That creature, “the Jew,” however, does not fit. “The Jew” is the human who has become animal or the domestic animal that breaks away. “The Jew” is wilder than the wildest beast:10 Wild beasts oftentimes lay down their lives and scorn their own safety to protect their young. No necessity forced the Jews when they slew their own children with their own hands to pay honor to the avenging demons, the foes of our life . . . Because of their licentiousness, did they not show a lust beyond that of irrational animals? . . . [They] are more dangerous than any wolves. (1.6.8, 4.1.2)

Scholastic apologists, in particular, appropriated “the Jew” as wolf motif; they “set themselves against that judaizing which the church, its doctors, philosophers and apologists had always feared, imagining ‘the Jew’ as a sort of wolf that prowled around the sheepfold in order to carry the sheep away from a happy life. These were the sentiments that guided, e.g., Cedrenus and Theophanes when they wrote their Contra Judaeos, and Gilbert Crépin, abbot of Westminster, in his Disputatio Judei cum Christiano de fide Christiana.”11 This lupine identification would later be claimed to have been

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asserted by the Jews themselves; the eleventh protocol of the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion declares: “The goyim [Gentiles] are a flock of sheep, and we are their wolves. And you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock?”12

A Bestiary Beast Without Its Own Chapter Scholastic tractates were not, however, the most widely disseminated source of anti-Jewish animal figuration in the European Middle Ages. As medieval art historian Debra Higgs Strickland notes: “the bestiaries . . . should be ranked among the most popular and widely disseminated of Christian polemical texts directed against Jews.”13 These were illustrated compendia of various animals and birds that, by combining description and moral lesson, illuminated the symbolic meaning each creature, by its inclusion in Gd’s creation, necessarily embodied. The two primary sources for these bestiaries were Magnentius Hrabanus Maurus’s popular ninth-century encyclopedia De rerum naturis (On the nature of things), usually known as De universo, and the Physiologus, an early Christian text (2d– 4th c.) written in Alexandria, then a center of the Adversus Judaeos (against the Jews) literature. In its twenty-two14 volumes, De universo drew upon then-extant works of natural history (for example, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder) together with the canon of allegorical Christian biblical exegesis (including Augustine, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville) in order to describe the characteristics and mystical meanings of everything in the visible and invisible worlds. The Physiologus had less global ambitions. It consisted of a series of chapters, most devoted to a single, occasionally legendary, creature that would be described and then embedded in a moralizing anecdote. Beyond drawing upon classical natural history literature, it often employed allegorical exegeses of biblical passages that mentioned the particular animal. It devoted particular attention to Leviticus 11. Because the practice of Jewish dietary law was perhaps the most visible sign of Jewish literalism and intransigence as well as of Jewish carnality, exegesis of that chapter’s discussions of the use of animals for food and sacrifice and their determination as clean or unclean provided a ready site for discrediting Judentum. Medieval bestiaries had entries for many of the animals invoked in Heine’s beastly breviary, such as the hyena and the two kinds of owl, and ascribed to them symbolic meanings supplemented by denigrating analogies with Jews. According to Guillaume le Clerc’s bestiary (1210), “The hyena also changes sex; sometimes it is male, and sometimes it is female,” which leads Strickland to argue: “It is the characteristic of sexual perversity

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that provides Guillaume with a link between the hyena and the ‘duplicitous Jews’ who first worshipped the true god . . . but were later given over to idolatry. . . . Like the hyena, who is neither male nor female, the Jew is double-minded and weak and lying: he desires to serve both you and me, but will not keep faith with any.”15 The nocturnal habits and virtual day blindness of owls16 generated a series of different invidious analogies with Jews “who prefer the darkness of ignorance to the light brought by Christ.”17 Another aspect of owl life detailed by Pliny the Elder and reproduced in bestiaries bore anti-Jewish significance: Rendered vulnerable by its near blindness, the owl was reputed to be attacked by other birds should it show itself during the day. Often sculpted in church entablatures, the image of the harassed owl became “a symbol of the righteous indignation of Christians against the wickedness of the Jews”18 and could be used to justify attacks on Jews who defied canon law–prescribed restrictions on travel outside ghetto walls. Another source of medieval animal figuration of Jews was their assumed ties to their “father . . . the devil” ( John 8:44) and the devil’s beasts, especially those emblems of immoderation and licentiousness: the goat and the pig.19 The goat achieved iconic status in medieval and early modern depictions of Jews: from the thirteenth-century Bible moralisée picturing Jews kissing a he-goat’s anus to a fifteenth-century Flemish church depiction of a Jew riding the back of a he-goat. Even blind Synagoga, that pervasive medieval emblem of subjected and superseded Judentum, was interpellated into this tradition; a number of churches sculpted her riding goats, and one Erfurt church gave her a goat head.20 The goat came to emblematize the Jewish deity, as indicated by a once oft-heard ditty that has been traced back to the late medieval period: “Itzig came riding / on a billy-goat, / and all the Jews thought / he was the good Lord.”21 Proverbs analogized Jews with other goat traits, such as smell and the propensity to damage property: for example, “the Jew and the goat stink of lechery” and “Just as the goat brings nothing / but harm to the garden, / so a city with many Jews / falls victim to total disaster.”22 Male Jews during this period could not avoid these vicious hircine associations as their beards were characterized and depicted as Ziegenbärter or goatees.23

Sow What? More pertinent than any satanic connection to the conjunction of Jew and pig, however, was the Jewish prohibition against eating pork. Since before the Common Era speculations, implications, and accusations, have been

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drawn about this dietary proscription. This seemingly strange and unusual taboo fascinated ancient writers. They commented that transgressing the prohibition was what Jews found most abhorrent; for example, the Roman satirist Juvenal depicted a God-fearer for whom eating pork was comparable to cannibalism.24 Others, like the historian Tacitus, repeating the third-century BCE Hellenistic-Egyptian historian Manetho’s charge that the Jews were not liberated from Egypt but instead were expelled because they were dirty disease-bearers, tied Jewish abstinence to the “scab to which this animal [i.e., the pig] is subject, [and which recalls a plague that] once afflicted [the Jews].” The first-century CE Greek grammarian Apion had, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, denounced the Jews for not eating pork and therefore for not partaking of civic sacrifices (pigs being the sacrificial victims), hence for failing to be good citizens, if not, in fact, for being traitors. Thus the refusal to eat pork in part contributed to the millennia-long belief that Jews would not be loyal to any Gentile government.25 Among Christians, a widely disseminated legend arose to explain why Jews abstain from pork.26 According to the tale, Jews once tried Christ’s omniscience. They hid a Jewess with children . . . behind a wall (in other variants, in a pigsty, barrel, trough, oven, or pail) and asked him what was there. Jesus replied, “A woman with children,” to which the Jews falsely replied, “No, these are sow and pigs,” and mocked him. Christ said, “If so, let them be sow and pigs,” and the Jewess with the children were accordingly transformed.

The conclusion drawn is that Jews abstain from pork out of fear that they would be engaging in cannibalism by eating a descendant of their fellow (transformed) Jews. The French ethnographer Claudine Fabre-Vassas suggests another set of associations of Jews and pigs surrounding not only the important role of pork in the rural diet but of the action necessarily performed on pigs to ensure their growth and profitability: castration. Castration is as determinative of the pig(’s value and significance) as circumcision is of the (male) Jew.27 Isaiah Shachar in his monograph28 devoted to the anti-Jewish icon the Judensau (lit. Jew-Sow), a large sow with Jews kneeling beneath it suckling at every teat, places great emphasis upon another site as the most likely source for this motif: an errant translation of Psalm 17:14 in Hrabanus’s De universo’s chapter on “livestock and beasts of burden” (De pecoribus et iumentis):29

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35

The pig similarly signifies the unclean and the sinners of whom it is written in the Psalm: “Their belly is full with your hid (things). They are sated with swine’s flesh [reading ‘Saturati sunt porcini’ rather than ‘saturati sunt filiis’—sated with sons—that the Hebrew would dictate and that the Vulgate as well reads] and they leave what is superfluous to them for their children.” He [the Psalmist] says the Jews [are full] of unclean [things] which are hidden by the Lord, that is things which are known to be prohibited. By swine’s flesh he means polluted things, which are named unclean among other precepts of the Old Testament. They [the Jews] transmitted however the remnant of their sins to their sons when they exclaimed: “His blood be on us and on our children.” (MT 27:25)

Here syllogism-like Hrabanus draws the pig-as-eater-and-eaten mediated conclusion that, because swine symbolize the unclean and sinners and because Jews are unclean and sinners, therefore swine can also symbolize Jews. Obsessed with the Jewish proscription on eating pork and following the dream-logic30 that informs so much stereotype, Christian Europe inextricably associated Jews with pigs: not only by Marrano, the label, generally traced etymologically to freshly weaned pigs,31 given to Iberian Jewish conversos who were accused of secretly remaining Jews, or in the form of the nasty slur Saujude ( Jew pig or dirty Jew), but also in representations of the Judensau. It began to be displayed on friezes, sculpted on corbels, or molded into gargoyles in numerous German churches from the thirteenth century on. By the fifteenth century and on through the sixteenth, the Judensau motif was ubiquitous in word and image throughout German lands.32 With the shift in medium from stone to woodcut, the Judensau would often be ridden by a Jew, sitting backward and grasping its tail.33 A depiction of the Judensau also adorned the tower that stood (until it was demolished in 1801) above Frankfurt’s principal harbor-side gate on the Old Main [River] Bridge.34 The tower’s mural not only drew the attention of such famous authors as Goethe, but thanks to its reproduction in the many broadsides and leaflets issued to mark the renovation of the bridgetower gate in 1678 and subsequently reproduced in Johann Jakob Schudt’s 1714 popular compendium of Jewish Peculiarities (Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten), it became perhaps the most frequently disseminated depiction of the Judensau. However much this particular representation may have been employed to render “the Jew” grotesque and ludicrous, whether with images

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of Jews suckling at the sow’s teats and engaging in anilingus, through captions informing the viewer that Jews employ pig feces to heal their scabs and otherwise clean themselves, or by evoking the foetor Judaicus (the Jewish stench), it also portended the Jewish threat to Christian existence by depicting the ritually murdered corpse of Simon of Trent hovering above the porcine scene (see Figure 3). As “the Jew” ’s familiar or constant companion, the Judensau also appeared in various early modern broadsheets such as “Der Juden Synagog” (The Jew synagogue)35 and “Das Juden Bad” (The Jew bathhouse), and it continued to be reproduced into the nineteenth century in prints and on playing cards as well as embossed on or sculpted into tchotchkes. Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky used a contemporary rural scene of a group of Jews surrounding and suckling a sow as the frontispiece of his 1822 anti-Jewish pamphlet Die Judenschule (the Jew-school = the Jew-synagogue).36 Traveling theaters exhibiting a pig marionette that would transform into a Jewish peddler were a regular fixture of country fairs into the early twentieth century.37 While Jewish peddlers were also frequently caricatured as pigs in

Figure 3. Judensau ( Jew-sow). Eighteenth-century engraving, after a painting in Main Bridge Tower, Frankfurt am Main.

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37

so-called “humorous” postcards, their wealthier assimilated confrères were no less wallowing with swine in adjoining cards: They were emblematically displayed feasting on pork roast to exemplify the fruits of Emancipation. Mass-produced since 1887 by commercial companies as well as by antisemitic organizations and political parties, these cards were available everywhere—at “book and writing-goods stores, photo shops, souvenir stands, guest houses, cafes and hotels, railway terminal waiting areas, at post-card automats, and at various folk and church festivals”38—and embedded in a network of multiple practices and agents: from card designer to its ultimate recipient who preserved this souvenir (see Figure 4).39 Like the earlier broadsheets, one function of such “humorous” caricatures was to render the other or the (possible) opponent /rival ridiculous. Such was the intended effect of the series of posters, each pseudonymously signed by V. Lenepveu and bearing the title Musée des Horreurs, that caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and his supporters, both Jewish and Gentile, as well as leading French Jews. From Fall 1899, when the first appeared, to 1901 when the French Interior Ministry apparently ordered a stop to their publications, some 47 appeared, the vast majority of which attached the head of the object of ridicule onto the body of an animal (see Figure 5). The menagerie included two pigs, six dogs, five apes, two donkeys, two foxes, and

Figure 4. The three pigs. Postcard: “Gruss aus” (Dresden /Budapest: Edgar Schmidt, ca. 1900). Reprinted by courtesy of Wolfgang Haney.

Figure 5. Henri Rothschild. “No. 47 Henri” in V. Lenepveu, Musée des Horreurs (Paris[?]: G. Lenepveu, 1899–1900). Reprinted by courtesy of David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

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two bears, as well as a host of other creatures: a hydra, an octopus, a turkey, a rat, an elephant, a toad, a hyena, a goose, a fly, a rabbit, an owl, a goat, a cow, a camel, a fish, and a crocodile.40 Making his opponent look ridiculous was also a prime motivation in perhaps the foremost literary representation of the Judensau: the aphorist and physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s 1783 “Fragment von Schwänzen” (fragment on tails), the bitingly funny parody of the wildly popular Physiognomic Fragments of the leading advocate of physiognomics, the theologian Johan Kaspar Lavater. Lichtenberg’s satire moves from its opening analysis of a cut-off tail of a sow of explicitly Jewish nature to the pigtails or queues (Zöpfe)41 of young knaves with ready allusions to their phallic character. The Jewish character of his first caudal specimen is so obvious that he admonishes his readers: “If you do not recognize in this Schwanz . . . if you do not smell, with your eyes, as if you had a nose in them, the lowly slime in which it grew up at d . . . you should stop reading right here.”42 Lichtenberg goes on to describe the history of this sow to which this tail was once attached. It poisoned the streets with her unspeakable stench of manure, desecrated a synagogue, and cannibalistically consumed alive her three piglets. Then when attacking a poor young child (a possible allusion to Simon of Trent in the Frankfurt Judensau) the less-than-maternal sow was slaughtered and consumed half-cooked by a gang of young beggars. This parody both of physiognomic claims and of the physiognomist Lavater’s anti-Jewish polemics implies that Jewish physiognomy and what it reveals about Jewish character are self-evident. Lichtenberg is neither denying nor parodying this anti-Jewish characterization. Rather, the long history of debasing associations of Jews with pigs provides a ready vehicle for his satiric purposes. This is reinforced by his subsequent physiognomic analysis of the silhouette of the tail of “a most promising young pig.” While Lichtenberg would trace its genealogy back to the Erymanthian boar, he serves it up for the delectation of both Gentile and Jewish Stutzern or dandies, after lamenting that it was “unfortunately, already destined to be made into mettwurst, which I whinily recommend [for the consideration of ] all warm, pliable, circumcised and uncircumcised, smart-alecky dandies [Stutzern], whether of the human or porcine variety.”43 The designation “Stutzer” mockingly alludes to the pigskin gloves (Stutzen or Stützer), the fingertips of which are cut off, that were then in fashion among fops and coxcombs. Between the tale of the Judensau and the panegyric occasioned by the caudal index of the porcine preferences of the dandyish bearers of circumcised

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gloves (if not of other cropped parts), Lichtenberg expounds upon the manly tail of an English hound, specifically of Cäsar, Henry VIII’s guard dog (Leibhund). As Lichtenberg notes, there is nothing “namby-pamby” or “hysterical” about this canine’s “completely masculine” (nichts weichlich . . . nichts Damenschößiges . . . Überall Mannheit) posterior appendage.44 Juxtaposing the sow’s dismembered member with Cäsar’s, she clearly embodies the bestial and nonmasculine identification of “the Jew.”

Mutt and Juif Jews are here, like everywhere, considered intolerable hagglers and dirtrags unpleasing to the Christian middle class, and the upper classes feel even more loathing. Our little dog is sniffed and abused on the street— Christian dogs apparently have their own type of loathing [Risches] for the Jewish dog [Judenhund]. —heinrich heine45

By setting up the contrast with Cäsar and his tail, Lichtenberg is also drawing upon traditions of anti-Jewish representation. Dogs have often been pictured as no friends of the Jews (or the Jews of them). A frequent late medieval and early modern type scene was the Hasenjagd or rabbit hunt; as part of a hunting party hounds, symbolizing loyalty or truth, pursue hares that symbolize Jews (see Figure 6).46 In the nineteenth century there were numerous bric-a-brac, cartoons in mass-market illustrated “humor” magazines, and souvenir postcards that had Jewish peddlers and travelers fending off angry dogs with their umbrellas (see Figure 7);47 the extremely popular humorist and illustrator Wilhelm Busch set the eponymous dogs of his cautionary tale Plisch and Plum upon the caricatured Jew Schmulchen Schievelbeiner.48 Whereas Cäsar may be emblematic of the noblest and most un-Jewish of dogs—indeed the aristocratic separating out such noble breeds from the common mongrel in the Late Middle Ages contributed to the formation of a notion of race49—there is that other variety of canine from which dogs like Cäsar were distinguished and with which “the Jew” was identified: the cur or mongrel, the variety that is nothing but variety. According to Georg Schwartz aka Georgius Nigrinius, in his 1570 Jüden Feind (The Jewish enemy), his Jewish contemporaries formed “a race of mixed blooded half-breeds,”50 or, 370 years later, Der Stürmer’s lead writer Ernst Hiemer would entitle his 1940 collection of antisemitic fables for children

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Figure 6. Hasenjagd (rabbit hunt). From the Rylands Haggadah (ca. 1330); Hebrew MS 6, Haggadah, f. 29b, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester; Copyright of The University of Manchester.

The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pinscher, in which malignant and menacing animals (including the eponymous mongrel mix) were each paired with its Jewish analogue (see Introduction). This is the dog of familiar phrases that German shares with English: wie ein Hund leben (live like a dog); jemanden wie ein Hund behandeln (treat someone like a dog); auf den Hund kommen

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Figure 7. A captured ( Jewish peddler named) Hirsch (= stag). Postcard: “Ein gestellter Hirsch” (Leipzig: Regel & King, ca. 1898). Reprinted by courtesy of Wolfgang Haney.

(going to the dogs). These correlate to a different relation between Jews and canines: the Judenhund ( Jew-dog), “the Jew” as dog.51 This variety is not noble but servile, not loyal but a turncoat; it is poor and miserable— with an uncontrollable and indiscriminate horniness. While this beast is itself indigestible (Euro-Americans do not eat dog meat), it has a voracious appetite for food; it even eats its own vomit. In the continuation of his discussion of the pig in De universo, Hrabanus does not contrast the dog and pig; rather, he conjoins them in an exegesis of a dog-and-vomit laden verse (2:22) in 2 Peter: as Peter says in his epistle: The dog is turned to his own vomit again, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire (2 Peter 2:22). When, therefore, the dog vomits, he really throws up the food which oppressed the stomach; but when he returns to the vomit from which he was freed, he burdens himself again with what he rejected. Thus those who repent their sins really throw away, by confessing, the wickedness of their soul, of which evil they were full [and] which oppressed them inwardly; which wickedness they resume if they repeat it after confession.52

This commentary combined with Chrysostom’s identification of postIncarnation Jews with dogs contributed to medieval Christian writings’

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frequent characterization of lapsed Jewish converts as returning (usually “like a dog”) to their vomit—that is, to Judentum.53 For example, Pope Alexander II (1169) employed the analogy with regard to indigent Jewish converts who returned out of despair and need;54 similarly, Pope Benedict XII in 1338 characterized a relapsed Jewish convert as “returning to the Jewish error like a dog to its vomit.”55 This identification of Jews with dogs also emerged elsewhere.56 Historian Kenneth Stow details how it came to color Christian perceptions of Jewish religious life: So canine was the Jews’ image that even the synagogal chanting was likened to “barking.” More than one papal text invokes the term for barking, ululare, to refer to the clamore attached to the synagogue service. A letter by King Henry III of England in 1253 employs ululare, as well as the companion term, streptium, a racket. The term appears again in a text of Philip V of France in 1320, which speaks in the same breath of “their braying” (suos latratos) and also “their barking” (suos ululates). Philip directed that the offending synagogue from whose walls these sounds were emanating be removed; its “noise competed” (concurrenter emittere) with the prayer of the nearby church. Jewish prayer, if not all Jewish practice, seems universally to have been sensed as the yelping of dogs “pra/eying” to devour the host.57

Some medieval Christian Psalters (and cathedral sculptures) are illustrated with dog-headed figures. Such creatures are shown tormenting Jesus in the illumination that accompanies Psalm 22 that begins with a line that would find its way into the Passion narrative in the Gospel of Matthew, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” and whose sixteenth verse reads: “For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me.”58 Such caninical identifications were not only canonical; when King John of England issued an edict forbidding attacks on Jews, he reminded any who might defy it: “If I give my peace even to a dog, it must be kept inviolate.”59 The common association of Jews and dogs,60 when conjoined with the medieval practice of putting animals on trial, may have influenced another practice, the Judenstrafe ( Jew-punishment):61 Jews, found guilty of crimes and condemned to die but who refused to convert, would be tied to a gibbet together with a very hungry dog or two. Dogs (and pigs), allowed to roam freely in the narrow, winding streets of medieval villages, sometimes maimed and killed infants and young children.62 The guilty party would regularly be brought before a magistrate to be tried and sentenced and then publicly tortured and executed in a town square, often

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while being hung upside down.63 Legal scholar Steven Wise comments: “It was not just animals but humans who were thought to be on the level of ‘beasts’ who were treated this way. Jewish killers of Christians were hung upside down throughout Europe. In twelfth-century Burgundy, a homicide committed by ‘beasts or Jews’ was punished by hanging, usually upside down.”64 Ulrich Tengler’s influential law book, the 1511 Leyenspiegel, indicates that the practice continued into the sixteenth century: “Jewish execution means to pull or to drag a Jew accompanied by two mangy dogs by chains or ropes to the common gallows place where he has to be hanged upside down. . . . And in this way [some] one who sticks to his Jewish heresy is put from life to death.”65 Wise, asking why both Jews and dogs were hung upside down, answers: “A beast or beastly human who killed a human reversed the ordained hierarchy and breached divine boundaries. Inversion set the world right again.”66 Wise’s conclusion is key: It is not just a matter of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human /animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order. Such “ritual acting” both confirmed and enacted Jews’ “exclu[sion] from the binding ties of social community.”67 Medieval historian Birgit Wiedl also notes that more is going on than simply correlating Jews with the vices that particular animals may symbolize. Many of the animals identified or correlated with Jews somehow invert the natural order or render it topsy turvy: “owls fly backwards and at night; the hyena and the rabbit who can change their sex, the hybrid manticore and mannursing pig; animals who act contrary to nature, like the Jews act contrary to the real faith, a truly abhorrent thing.”68

Excursus: O Beasts of the Jews Medieval Jewry also employed animal or hybrid animal-human figures in representing Jews. A number of historians locate this practice within a network of cultural exchanges between Jews and Christians, such as the earlier Christian zoo- or theriocephalic traditions that provided models for how to approach the depiction of the human face and the Christian craftsmen who were commissioned by wealthy Jewish patrons to illuminate some of the works.69 The Birds’ Head Haggadah, produced ca. 1300 in South Germany, is well known. Marc Michael Epstein convincingly argues that the illuminators gave birds’ heads only to Jews while providing blank faces for all other human figures (which included angels and celestial bodies as well as Egyptians) in order to distinguish the Jews favorably from the rest. Not

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only did the use of birds’ heads allow the depicted Jews to be individuated by age, sex, and status, but, Epstein suggests, given their mammalian ears, the specific “bird” selected was in fact a griffin. This heraldic hybrid of lion and eagle thereby endowed the Jewish figures with the noble and holy traits emblematic of those two animals. By contrast, the blank faces of the other human figures denied them individuation and will as well as signaled that they “lack Torah, and therefore lack fullness and dimension to their lives.”70 Other medieval Jewish works made use of different human-animal hybrids. A number of the illuminations in the three-volume thirteenthcentury TaNaKh found in Milan’s Ambrosian Library employ such figures —and not just, as Giorgio Agamben’s opening to The Open would ingenuously imply,71 in the two full-page illuminations with which the so-called Ambrosian Bible closes. In addition to the animal-headed figures enjoying the concluding feast of the righteous, the initial word panel for 1 Kings has two bird-headed musicians, and a harp-playing David with animal head and crown opens Psalms. Though in a number of instances these animal-human hybrids may well be, as Agamben’s source Zofia Ameisenowa speculates, representing the righteous, theriomorphism in the Ambrosian Bible does not, unlike the zoocephalic figures of the Birds’ Head Haggadah, function as a necessary diacritic, whether distinguishing the righteous from the rest or Jew from Gentile. In addition to Christian practices of theriomorphic illumination, animal fable traditions, both Aesopian and the Arabic Maqama—in which tales would illustrate moral traits and practices (reason, repentance, good counsel/preparedness, modesty/humility, fear of Gd)—were disseminated among medieval Jewish communities. Hebrew editions of fables by medieval Jewish philosophers, including the Mishlei Shu’alim (Fox fables) of Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan (late twelfth– early thirteenth century) and the Meshal ha-Kadmoni (The fable of the ancients) of Isaac ben Solomon Abi Sahula (late thirteenth century), circulated72 and later were incorporated (together with non-Jewish collections) into popular Yiddish collections such as the Ku-Bukh (Cow-book; sixteenth century) and the Sefer Meshalim (Book of fables; 1697) of Reb Moshe Wallich.73 Like the traditions from which they drew, these collections employed animals either as figures of the character traits a particular species conventionally symbolized or as ciphers for everyman; they did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups.

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The Tradition Evolves Reformation and post-Reformation anti-Jewish writings were rife with bestial epithets and identifications. In these tomes, treatises, and diatribes Jews to their detriment were widely analogized to or identified with dogs (for example, Luther labels Jews “blood hounds”), wolves, snakes (vipers, adders), reptiles (basilisks, dragons, crocodiles), and varieties of invertebrate vermin (including leeches, lice, worms, spiders, and slime).74 These creatures were still on the prowl when, by the late eighteenth century, the anti-Jewish literature of triumphalistic Christian apologetic was joined by more secular and nationalistic polemics written in opposition to the possibility of Jewish emancipation and to Jewish striving for increased integration into European societies.75 The perspective of an emerging biologistic worldview began to color the tradition of moralizing allegory. This can be seen in the changed title of the 1848 reissue of the anti-Jewish polemicist Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky’s virulent 1819 tractate, Judenspiegel. Ein Schand- und Sittengemälde alter und neuer Zeit (Mirror of the Jew. A portrait of scandal and vice in former and recent times); it bore the new title Die Naturgeschichte der Juden (the natural history of the Jews). The epigraph for both editions came from the account of the fourth plague in Exod. 8:24: “Und das Land wird verderbet von den Ungeziefer” (and the land was ruined by [swarms of ] vermin). Since the selection of animal figure in anti-Jewish epithet was usually tied to whichever alleged negative Jewish character trait the writer wished to emphasize, to the vices of obduracy, licentiousness, greed, blindness, falsehood, and deceit were added the threatening acts of “grasping, infiltrating, burrowing in, infesting, sinking its claws in, sucking out, devouring, corroding, choking, overflowing, rapidly increasing, uncontrollably spreading, rampantly growing.”76 Where once associating “the Jew” with apes or parrots was tied to the Devil’s imitatio dei and dissimulation it became grounded in an innate mimetic capacity that the animal employs to preserve itself and to prey on others; similarly, the association with vermin shifted from the discourse of sin and subjection to that of disease and parasitology.

Taxonomies of an Animal Like No Other The animalization of the Jews in Central European modernity was neither a continuation of same old, same old debasing vilification of Jews by figuring them as or like beasts nor a simple exercise in working through

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anthropological anxiety, the threat to human /animal difference and human exceptionalism precipitated by the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.77 Darwin’s analysis of homo sapiens sapiens’s kinship with all other species secreted egalitarian overtones, and his account of the mechanisms—adaptation, selection, struggle—for species’ emergence, preservation, and extinction over time generally avoided any suggestion of teleology. However, thanks in part to the ready adoption of the Herbert Spencer– coined phrase “the survival of the fittest,” a metaphor that fed into the moralization of health/illness, “the story of development tended to restore hierarchy and to place at its apex not only man in general, but contemporary European man in particular— our kind of man.”78 The behavior of the “other kind of man” was, as a consequence, ascribed to those evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation, selection, and struggle, characterized as innate and marked as animal(istic). The Jews, however, were not simply an-other group that happened to be (in)conveniently located in the vicinity. In the Era of the Jewish Question, the Jews had always already precipitated a narcissistic crisis for German-identifying human animals.79 As the forging of a German national identity encountered the Jewish striving for integration and as, concomitantly, the ability to distinguish German-identifying Gentile from German-identifying Jew diminished, analogizing or identifying “the Jew” with creatures that evoke disgust (worms), threat (beasts of prey), ridicule (apes, pigs, goats, parrots), or some combination of these (mongrels, vermin, and parasites of all sorts), and, more generally, characterizing any Jewish behavior as innately dictated by natural laws served important functions. By situating Jews on the other side of the human /animal Great Divide, such tactics rendered “the Jew” visibly different in discourse. The second edition (1845– 49) of von Rotteck and Welcker’s standard reference work of the governance of states, the Staats-Lexikon, included a rather evocative passage from Schudt’s 1714 Jewish Peculiarities to exemplify the worldview underlying the subjection of Jews to humiliating restrictions during the ancien régime: “As the countrysides of many lands, especially in those torrid places of Africa and Asia, are plagued by snakes, dragons [Drachen], scorpions, tarantulas and all sorts of other poisonous worms, so it is with our beloved Germany, where many locales are plagued and beleaguered by a whole host of Jews.”80 That this entry on “Regulation and Taxation of Jews” (Judenschutz und Judenabgabe) also discussed the restoration of restrictions on Jewish civic and economic life in a number of German states after the defeat of Napoleon, this selection of Schudt’s analogy pointed toward the continuing animalization of the Jews by contemporary German nationalists.

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“Whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name” (Gen. 2:19) An unintended spur to Jewish animalization was the legal requirement that, as a prerequisite to further relaxation of the restrictions on Jewish civic and economic life in Austria (1787), Prussia (1812), and other German states, Jews had to adopt surnames.81 In some areas their choice was restricted to a list of non-Gentile German names, and, in others, local officials assigned humiliating surnames, such as Raubvogel (raptor) or Ferkeltaub (piglet deaf ) or Mausehund (mousing dog)—with less demeaning ones available for a price.82 Often Jews adopted the German equivalent of their given names; these stemmed from either biblical personages or the traditional emblem, often an animal, associated with names derived from the twelve tribes of Israel. For example, if Naftali (stag) ben Schmuel adopted Hirsch (stag) as his surname, his brothers might act correspondingly: e.g., Judah (lion) appending Löw(e) (lion), Benjamin (wolf ) appending Wolf(f ) (wolf ), and Issachar (bear) appending Bär or Beer (bear).83 Although the vast majority of adopted surnames had no animal associations,84 there was a perception of a Jewish predilection, in contradistinction to non-Jewish Germans, for such names.85 This was one of the antiJewish libels and prejudices tied to Jewish names and naming practices that Leopold Zunz, the foremost proponent and practitioner of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, sought to refute in his 1837 “historical investigation” of Jewish names.86 Nevertheless, the association held and was exploited by anti-Jewish and antisemitic polemicists. In 1862, H. Naudh claimed “Germans name themselves after their work (‘Miller,’ ‘Carpenter,’ etc.), Jews after beasts of prey [Raubtieren].” Wilhelm Marr, out of whose circle the neologism Antisemitismus emerged, wrote in his 1879 pamphlet Wählet keine Juden! (elect no Jews): “If one were to open the cages in a zoo and let the predators [Raubtiere] loose, should the ‘Fox’ [Fuchs] then refrain from gobbling up chickens, the ‘Wolf ’ [Wolf] from devouring sheep, the ‘Lion’ [Löwe] from falling upon the herd, the ‘Bear’ [Bär] from stealing honey? Yes, shouldn’t even the ‘Deer’ [Reh] and the ‘Stag’ [Hirsch] pursue their heart’s desire wherever they could?” In the 1893 edition of his annual Antisemiten-Katechismus (Catechism for antisemites), Theodor Fritsch asserted that the alleged Jewish preference for adopting predator surnames accords with their inner nature.87 The Aryan mystagogue Joerg Lanz von Liebenfals took that assertion across the human /animal divide in his 1930 tractate on the zoological and talmudic origins of ( Judeo-)Bolshevism: “We

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need no further proof of the zoological origin of Bolshevism; we need only look at its leaders [and their names] . . . The extensive revolution-menagerie of the diverse Löwys [lions], Adlers [eagles], Bärs [bears], Hirsch [stags], Roß [steeds], etc.”88 Jewish animal-evoking surnames also provided material for the illustrated humor magazines and postcard manufacturers; by graphically literalizing them they produced an array of animalized Jewish caricatures. For example, in 1876 the Leipzig illustrated periodical Puck, combining a play on composer Jacques Offenbach’s surname with Richard Wagner’s denunciation of Jewish music (“à la Offenbach”; JM 114) as a motley chaos of imitation (“hurl[ing] together the diverse forms and styles of every age and master”; JM 92),89 printed a drawing of the composer with an ape body and the caption “Der semitisch-musikalisch-akrobatische Gorilla (simia Affenbach)” (the semitic-musical-acrobatic gorilla).90 As this (see Figure 8) and the other examples of Jewish surname–related caricature, ridicule, defamation, and dehumanization indicate, identifying Jewish animality was often disseminated by phonemic, orthographic, and morphemic semes. A German proverb reproduced by Hiemer—“Yes the Jew has the form of the human / However it lacks the human’s inner being”91—indicates the dilemma faced by identity-forging Gentile Germans of how to keep “the Jew,” given its seemingly human appearance, on the other side of the human /animal Great Divide. Further, they also had the problem of how to reconcile the variety of Jews with the assumption of “the Jew.” Wordcombinations that had earlier been all but nonexistent pervaded not only anti-Jewish and antisemitic writings from the late eighteenth century on, but everyday discourse as well.92 These terms were formed by appending indices to the morpheme “Jude”: including not only so-called Jewishidentified public roles (Schachern/haggling or Wuchern/usury) or negative traits (Lügen/lying or Betrug/deceit), but also designations of a commodity, of an object or product of vocational activity engaged by a Jewishidentified individual, of an instrument or tool necessary for such activity, or of a site for such activity. For example, a Jew engaged in rural livestock (Vieh) trade was called a Viehjude; that there was no corresponding Viehdeutsche indicates that these neologisms were not value-free descriptions. In his introduction to his 1793 Akten-Stücke, die Reform der Jüdischen Kolonieen in den Preußischen Staaten (Documents [regarding] the reform of the Jewish colonies in the Prussian states) the businessman and leader of Berlin’s Jewish lay community David Friedländer notes the implications of these combination words:

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Figure 8. “The Semitic-Musical-Acrobatic Gorilla (Simia Affenbach).” Reproduced from Puck (Leipzig: 1876) in Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur, 167 (Abb. 174).

How much this general name Jew [Jude] has damaged us is indescribable. From a name that designates the nation or religion is branded a character-name [an indicator of character or nature that is ascribed as “very {morally} corrupt” {sehr verderbt}] and in speech is, often against all rule and logical correctness, taken up. Such is the case of the denominations: Hofjude [court Jew], Betteljude [ Jewish beggar], Geldjude

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[ money Jew or financier], Münzjude [coin-minting Jew], Kornjude [ Jewish grain dealer] . . .93

The second definition for “Jude” in the 1796 expanded edition of Johann Christoph Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart corroborated Friedländer’s observation; it listed a figurative usage whereby it referred contemptuously to a “mean usurer” (karger Wucherer), especially in the combination words “Geldjude, Kornjude etc.”94 The use of these word-combinations increasingly served to devalue the Jewish practitioner, polarize Jews and non-Jews, and eventually came to indicate that the entire field of their endeavor had become jewified (verjudet).95 Even when, for example, the Viehjude served a necessary function for rural German communities and, as a regular visitor to these communities, often developed social relations marked by familiarity if not neighborliness, such humanization ever remained contingent.96 Visual correlates of those word-combinations also circulated. Following the success of Karl Boromäus Alexander Sessa’s anti-Jewish farce Unser Verkehr (Our Gang) in the 1810s, large picture posters bearing that rubric were produced that displayed varieties of “the Jew” according to activity. Each portrait bore a mock-Jewish name that often reinforced negative Jewish stereotypes associated with the activity in order to distort further his or her contribution.97 Among the thirty or so represented types were: the businessman (Commerziant) named Meyer Schwindler (=swindler); the livestock dealer (Viehhändler) named Simon Ochs (=ox); the serving wench (Dienstmagd) called Kaile evoking Kalle, a Yiddish term for bride or betrothed that became a German slang term for prostitute (see Figure 2 in the Introduction). The perception of Jewish “actuality as outside the normative [als gultig erachteten] social order [thereby] became especially obvious.”98 In his 1930 tractate on the zoological and talmudic origins of ( Judeo-)Bolshevism, cited previously, Liebenfels again took Jewish difference one step farther. The Jews (die Bolschjuden), he argued, descended from “Dämonozoa” that are variously characterized as “bipedal dinosaurforms,” “hominid dragons,” and “antediluvian dragon-monsters”; to corroborate this genealogy he inserted the image of a Protoceratops, found in the naturalist Chapman’s (sic; Roy Chapman Andrews’s 1926) On the Trail of Ancient Man, onto a 1919 poster that displayed the leaders of Hungary’s short-lived Soviet Republic (see Figure 9).99 Beyond stigmatization, these word-combinations and illustrated field guides to German Judentum helped render Jews qua Jews visible and signal “the Jew” beneath the varieties of Jews; in their taxonomic character, they

Figure 9. The “Antediluvian Dragon-Monster” and Its Judeo-Bolshevik Descendants. From Jörg Lanz v. Liebenfels. Der zoologische und talmudische Ursprung des Bolschewismus, back matter.

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presumed even as they produced Jewish animalization. These field guides and natural histories had other implications: a Jew qua “the Jew,” understood as a member of a species, cannot change and therefore cannot be integrated into German society, let alone become a German. Two passages from Josef Goebbels’s 1941 speech “Die Juden sind schuld!” (the Jews are guilty) make manifest their underlying assumptions: “There is no difference between Jews and Jews”; and “The fact, that the Jew still lives among us is no proof therefore that he also is one of us [zu uns gehört], just as the flea does not thereby become a house pet [Haustier] because he is residing in the house.”100

The Jewish Question Is an Animal Problem Identifying “the Jew” as an abject animal adversary has continued to this day. The blogger Video Rebel—picking up on the reference, from the opening lines of Matt Taibbi’s provocative 2009 Rolling Stone article, to the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, a company bearing the surnames of its Jewish founders, as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money”101—published a series of blogs, including “The Vampire Squid Talmud,” “The Vampire Squid Protocols” (paraphrasing portions of the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and “The Vampire Squid Anti-Defamation League, Parts I and II.”102 Video Rebel’s counterhistory asserts, for example: “The Vampire Squid Anti-Defamation League [like the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith] was founded in 1913 which was the year the humans in America allowed the Squids to issue their currency for them through the Federal Reserve Act.” Ironically, the actual length of the vampire squid, the appearance of which earned it the taxonomic classification of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis or vampire squid from hell, is at most one foot.103 Complementing the proliferation of threat descriptors in the nineteenth century’s lexicon of animal analogy and identification was a linguistic inventory of countermeasures: “rendering harmless, rendering distant, culling, exterminating.” The “decay,” “disease,” and “death” attributed to such vermin were to be met by “curing” and “cleaning out.”104 Labeling Jews (and other social groups) with zoological and entomological metaphors in the latter part of the nineteenth century may have been catalyzed by the coincidence of Eastern European Jewish flight westward from pogroms in Russia beginning in the late 1870s with both European entomologists’ increasing use of social metaphors and the ongoing massive defensive

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campaigns against infestations of North American insects (grape phylloxera [Reblaus] and flour moth [Mehlmotte]) that had accidentally been brought back to Europe—that is, against insects identified as foreign pests ( fremder Schädlinge).105 For example, in his Conquest of the World by the Jews the international con-man and antisemitic writer Osman Bey (actually Frederick Millingen) wrote: “Just as the Phylloxera attack the grapes, so too the Jews [attack] clock manufacture and the other branches of Swiss industry.”106 In another conflation of zoological and anthropological discourse that would have ominous consequences, the German entomologist Karl Escherich, leading the effort to combat these alien insects, re-interpreted Darwin such that extermination (Vernichtung) becomes a key aspect of natural selection (the struggle for existence [Kampf ums Dasein]), by obstructing the “degeneration” of “culture” (Kultur) in the forest and restoring its equilibrium.107 By 1900, the animal parasite and the human parasite began to co-constitute each other as pervasive alien threats and objects of (Social) Darwinist and epidemiological analysis. In German-occupied Polish territory during World War I, they fused in the form of the lice-ridden Ostjude.108 Bridging both the Christian and the biologistic traditions were the numerous anti-Jewish proverbs, sayings, and ditties that drew upon analogies and identifications of Jews with animals, or more generally, of “the Jew” as other than the human. In his encyclopedic 1942 Der Jude im Sprichwort der Völker (The Jew in the proverbs of [European] peoples) Ernst Hiemer included sayings and songs conjoining Jews with apes (4+), goats (4+), birds (raptors/pests, 7+), felines (6+), canids (dogs/foxes/wolves, 15+), insects/invertebrates (17+), snakes (3+), rodents/rabbits (9), others (4).109 Obversely, Theodor Fritsch countered that the retort, to which he and his fellow antisemites were confronted—that is, “Jews are actually also human beings”—was nothing other than a figure of speech (Redensart).110

Excursus: Jewish Misozoony Even as the animalization of “the Jew” was deployed to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, a different relationship between Jews and animals also endeavored to serve those ends. In “On Religion,” the philosopher and a progenitor of animal ethics111 Arthur Schopenhauer denounces “the Jewish view that regards the animal as something manufactured for man’s use.” He holds the Jews responsible for what he considers the fundamental defect of Christianity: “it has most unnaturally separated man from the animal world to which in essence he nevertheless belongs . . . And regards animals positively as things.”112 Because “in all essential respects, the animal is absolutely

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identical with us and that the difference lies merely in the accident, the intellect, not in the substance which is the will,” Schopenhauer concludes, “The Jewish view of the animal world must, on account of its immorality, be expelled from Europe.”113 Ironically, Schopenhauer invokes one abject distinguishing trait of the Jews that has traditionally been identified as an intrinsic mark of animal difference, stench. He repeatedly114 laments how the foetor Judaicus, the Jewish stench that adheres to the instrumental view of the animal, has numbed Europeans so as to fail to recognize that “the animal is essentially the same as man.” While Schopenhauer situates the source of the alleged Jewish view of animals in Genesis chapters 1 and 9, many animal protection societies have directed their onus on Jewish ritual slaughter, viewing it as particularly cruel and, more and more toward the end of the nineteenth century, as reflecting the unnatural nature of “the Jew.”115 Jews’ views and treatment of animals were considered of a piece with “the Jew” ’s alleged innate misanthropy.116 This culminated in the climactic scene of the viciously antisemitic Nazi documentary, Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). As the exemplar of Jewish religious practice and of the savage and inhuman(e) cruelty of “the Jew,” the filmmaker Fritz Hippler screens a more than five-minute-long scene at a Kosher slaughterhouse. In contrast to the “well-known” German love of animals, cruel torture of innocent and defenseless animals “reveals the character of a race that hides its senseless brutality behind the façade of pious religious customs.”117

Letting the Cat out of the Bag? Heine may have manufactured as many mots-valises as Samsonite has travel cases. This chapter began with the pack of Jew-Animals that Heine had Friar José unleash in “Disputation.” When that litany is resituated within the poem as a whole, Heine’s title reveals itself to be—at least in English—a portmanteau word: for his disputation attempts the disruption of an imputation. Throughout the poem, Heine draws upon animal figures to undermine the authority and force of Christianity’s tradition of dehumanizing animalization of Judentum. Before allowing the Friar to speak directly, Heine relates the Friar’s account of the animal witnesses at the scene of Jesus’ birth: “How the Lord lay in the manger, / Calf and heifer at his side / Standing by devout and pious / Two dumb cattle, oxen-eyed” (DHA 3/1:162; CP 680). On the one hand, these totally reverent (schier andächtig) beasts anticipate, as a stark contrast, the Friar’s characterization of the Jews as vicious beasts; on the other

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hand, given the irony of the previous stanza ( Jesus having been “conceived in fact / By the Virgin, who kept always / Her virginity intact”) and the English translator’s supplementing Heine’s original, making the “zwei Rindviehlein” “dumb” and “oxen-eyed,” Heine ironically anthropomorphizes the testimony of the livestock and thereby assumes the human /animal Great Divide and hence the absence of witness. The Friar, too, frames his taxonomic denunciation of the Bestiarium Judaicum with contrasting Christian animal ideals. He invokes the “Mighty Ox” (DHA 3/1:163; CP 681) Thomas Aquinas as authority for this identification.118 Heine here alludes to the epithet with which Aquinas’s fellow students at the University of Paris had dubbed him: “dumb ox.” And the Friar concludes with a call for the Jews to submit to conversion and cleanse themselves of the vermin with which they have been ever linked: “Get deloused [Lauset] on Jesus’ bosom /From the vermin [Ungeziefer] known as Sin! // Oh, our God is love incarnate, / Gentle as a lamb is He” (DHA 3/1:164; CP 682). Jesus is not merely lamblike in his gentleness, for the Friar soon identifies him as “the Lamb.” The animal figures continue to roam about when Rabbi Judah responds, “It was not our Lord who perished / Like your wretched little lamb’s tail [armes Lämmerschwänzchen] . . . // No, our God’s not love incarnate, / Never bills and coos [Schnäbeln]” (DHA 3/1:166; CP 684). He then notes how to the Jewish deity church bells sound like “piglets grunting” (Ferkelgrunzen; DHA 3/1:167; CP 685). Then comes a long homage to “the fish Leviathan” as the heavenly banquet. In line with Heine’s frequent paeans to Jewish food, animals are haute cuisine. More important, it erects a contrast with what Friar José celebrates as the Christian’s this-worldly culinary preference for the human-animal hybrid: “Christ’s my favorite dish, much better / Than Leviathan-in-a-pot . . . // Oh! Instead of wrangling, I would/ Rather roast [braten] you on a fire, / Braise [schmoren] you and your comrades with you / On the hottest funeral pyres” (DHA 3/1:171; CP 687–88). Heine’s word-choice dredges up the ancient accusation of Christian cannibalism and displaces on to them the blood libel that returned to European consciousness with the Damascus Affair ten year earlier. However, Heine also employs animal imagery to put in question the justice of the Rabbi’s model of divine wrath and revenge when he has the Lord drown Pharaoh’s host “like kittens” (DHA 3/1:170; CP 687). In “Disputation,” Heine seeks to undermine the Bestiarium Judaicum by rendering those who disseminate it as both ridiculous and bestial; however, he also represents the Jews as maintaining human /animal difference. In subsequent chapters, other strategies to combat the Jew-Animal are examined, especially the performance of the Jew-as-Animal.

chapter 2

Name That Varmint From Gregor to Josephine Jews are as beneficial for a land as mice [Mäuß ] are for a granary and moths [Motten] for a wardrobe. —german proverb1

[Kafka’s] parents had given him the Hebrew name Amschel, a word commonly associated among Central European Jews with another black bird, the Amsel (‘blackbird’ [or ‘thrush’]). —clayton koelb2 kavka = jackdaw

This chapter is principally constructed about two taxonomic questions— “What is Gregor Samsa?” and “What is Josephine the Singer?”—and the possible implications of the indeterminate answers offered by the works in which these characters appear: the first animal narrative and the last one that Franz Kafka published during his lifetime, respectively, The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” ( Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse). Questions—and answers—about the species and ethnic identification of their protagonists have long been posed. While “into what kind of nonhuman animal did the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, having most uncharacteristically slept through his alarm, wake up to find himself metamorphosed” has remained an open question, if not its “commentators’ despair,”3 Josephine has generally been assumed to be a mouse. On the other hand, like all of Kafka’s protagonists, neither was explicitly identified as Jewish. Indeed, the Samsa family’s Christianity is several times signaled, such as when Gregor’s father, mother, and sister cross themselves over his corpse; Josephine’s possible religious affiliation, however, is never

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broached. Then again, in Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude, after concluding a series of snapshots of his best friend Kafka’s protagonists with the “monstrous insect” of the recently published Metamorphosis, Max Brod asserted: “Although the word ‘Jew’ [Jude] never appears in his works, they belong to the most Jewish documents of our time.”4 True to form, Brod maintained that the Volk scurrying through Kafka’s last completed work “will be readily identified with the Jewish people in the Diaspora.”5 This brings forth other catalysts for commentators’ possible despair. Do these and Kafka’s other (animal) stories shed light on the universal (at least as could be imagined by his Euro-American contemporaries) human condition? Are they occasions for Kafka to engage in a (masochistic?) exercise of self-analysis (bzw. selfportrayal)?6 Are they abyssal reflections on (the vocation of ) writing? Or are they about some very particular Jewish situation: whether as Western Jew, Eastern Jew, or Zionist; as under threat, whether real, imagined, or ignored; as tradition-bound or -bereft; as transcendence-seeking or -forsaking, whether understood as Gd, Law, or redemption; as self- or otheridentified; as othered? One does not have to accept Brod’s hagiographic Judaization of Kafka’s corpus—an absolutist position rendered problematic since Walter Benjamin’s 1931 review of Brod’s collection of selected shorter writings from Kafka’s Nachlaß, Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China)7—in order to pursue how the absence of explicit Jewish reference does not preclude situating both these as well as other Kafka stories and their animal protagonists within a constellation of Kafka’s Jewish-related contexts and concerns. Specifically, this chapter will not resolve the mooted question of Gregor’s species determination, but it will argue that Kafka also left open the question of Josephine’s. This chapter will not endeavor to establish the Jewishness of either; however, it will argue that the taxonomic undecidability of both implicates the Jew-Animal and its mediation of Jewish-Gentile relations by examining the different strategies through which Kafka generated that undecidability. It will show several of the ways Kafka’s tales of the Jew-as-Animal8 confronted their readers with the constructedness of both human /animal difference and species essentialism, and thereby intervened, whether effectively or not, against an apparatus that these two constructs conditioned, an apparatus that helped naturalize both Gentile/ Jew difference and the violent means sustaining it: the identification of the Jew-Animal.

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“Any dumb punk can step on a beetle. All the professors in the world, however, cannot produce one.” The Metamorphosis narrates the life and death of the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa after he “awoke one morning from uneasy dreams [and] found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect [ungeheueren Ungeziefer]” (DL 115; CS 89). Kafka’s novella has inspired dance, film, graphic/manga, opera, and stage adaptations, as well as prose works ranging from Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams (2002) to Haruki Murakami’s “Samsa in Love” (2013), from Lance Olsen’s Anxious Pleasures (2007) to Coleridge Cook’s The Meowmorphosis (2011), all of which are confronted with the problem of how to portray Gregor.9 This last mentioned metamorphosis of Metamorphosis, Meowmorphosis, has Gregor wake up to discover “that he had been changed into an adorable kitten,”10 but for the rest the question remains: What is the nature of that “monstrous vermin,” a more literal translation of the German ungeheueren Ungeziefer, into which he found himself transformed? One can’t rightly say. When Metamorphosis’s eventual publisher, Kurt Wolff, sought to add to his publishing house’s roster of new and recent literary lights, he first wrote to Kafka,”Mr. Franz Werfel has told me so much about your new novella—is it called ‘The Bed Bug’ [Wanze]?—that I would very much like to look it over. Would you send it to me?” (B1 572; March 1913). Kafka responded a few days later: “Don’t believe Werfel! He’s not familiar with one word from the story” (B1 143; LFr 95).11 On the advent of the novella’s appearance over two years later, Kafka steadfastly refused his publisher’s request to have the transformed Gregor visually represented on the cover; in that letter Kafka did, however, refer to “the insect” (das Insekt) as that which cannot be depicted.12 Kafka’s description of Gregor in Metamorphosis doesn’t correspond exactly to any known insect species;13 hence the famous lepidopterist and novelist Vladimir Nabokov opens his Cornell class lecture on the novella by asserting that, faute de mieux, Gregor is a “big beetle.” Perhaps bearing in mind the apothegm that heads this section,14 Nabokov readily dismisses the numerous commentators who refer to him as a cockroach: “A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small.”15 Indeed, only once in all of Kafka’s extant writings does he refer to cockroaches (Schaben). In a mid-November 1920 letter to his non-Jewish Czech translator and one-time inamorata Milena Jesenská, he

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ironically analogizes them to those “heroic” Jews who would remain where they are so hated and so mortally vulnerable to violence, yet cannot be “exterminated” (auszurotten); he thereby transvalues the bestializing epithets he heard Czech antisemites scream at his fellow Prague Jews (B3 370 –71; LM 213). Nabokov also notes that when the charwoman called Gregor an “alter Mistkäfer,” an old dung beetle (DL 179; CS 127), she was merely using a familiar epithet; toddlers crawling underfoot were often tagged Mistkäfer by caregivers.16 Moreover, a dung beetle, no matter how large, would not possess the mandibles necessary to open the door as Gregor’s had.17 Several beetles do crawl across the corpus of Kafka’s extant writings, including letters and diary entries. For example, in the first, but not subsequent, version of an earlier written but posthumously published story, “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (1906 –9), the character Raban daydreams: “As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle [eines großen Käfers], a stag beetle [Hirschkäfer] or a cockchafer [Maikäfer], I think.” Raban goes on to imagine “pressing my little legs [Beinchen] to my bulging belly [gebauchten Leib]” (NS 1.1:18; CS 56). Less than a year after completing Metamorphosis (October 21, 1913), Kafka records in his diary: “I keep thinking of the black beetle [Schwarzkäfer], but will not write” (T 1:587; D1 304). The original editor of the diaries, Max Brod, noted that Kafka was referring to the novella (D1 330 –31 n61).18 That may have been the case; however, the two times Kafka ascribes a color to Gregor’s body, it is brown. Then again, the lack of species specificity may lie, empirically speaking, with Gregor Samsa not having been transformed into a nonhuman animal at all; rather, as some argue,19 Gregor is delusional and suffering from body dysmorphic disorder among other proffered psychopathological diagnoses. Putting aside his readers’ taxonomic speculations, Kafka provides only one zoological denomination of the “huge brown mass” (riesigen braunen Fleck; DL 166; CS 119) that Gregor has become—“Ungeziefer” (vermin)— and its single mention is in the novella’s opening sentence. Included under this rubric are any number of small pests that gnaw or bite, including rodents, insects, and lice. Given the depiction of Gregor’s “domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments [and] his numerous legs” in the opening paragraph, “rodent” and other vertebrates can be crossed off the list of suspected vermin. Prior to composing Metamorphosis in December 1912, Kafka may well have encountered such creatures in their generic as well as in their specific forms in the works of, at least, two (Nobel-prize winning) authors he is known to have read, the Danish writer Johannes

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V. Jensen and the Belgian symbolist (and amateur entomologist) Maurice Maeterlinck. The doyen of German Kafka criticism Hartmut Binder notes, in his massive monograph on Metamorphosis, a number of overlaps with Jensen’s story “Der Kondignog,” which depicts in first person a possibly delusional man who transforms (verwandelt) into a monstrous creature; it first appeared in the November 16, 1909 issue of März and then in his 1910 collection Mythen und Jagden.20 Binder also sees traces of the next story in Jensen’s collection, the everyday horror story “Das Ungeziefer”; its firstperson narrator describes in disgust-laden detail how without cease he is beset in his abode by all manner of insects, lice, and other multi-legged invertebrates.21 The second work, Maurice Maeterlinck’s “Der Homer der Insekten,” appeared in the September 1910 issue of Die neue Rundschau, a journal generally read by Kafka. Before his extensive depictions of various insects, beginning with the dung beetle, Maeterlinck offers an ominous overview of the fundamentally uncanny relationship of the human with the insect: The insect does not belong to our world. . . . There is something . . . about the insect that does not seem to belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. . . . In vain does it seize upon life with an authority, a fecundity unequalled here below; we cannot accustom ourselves to the idea that it is a thought of that nature of whom we fondly believe ourselves to be the privileged children and probably the ideal to which all the earth’s efforts tend. . . . There is, no doubt, in this astonishment and lack of understanding a certain instinctive and profound uneasiness inspired by those existences incomparably better-armed, better equipped than our own, by those creatures made up of a sort of compressed energy and activity in whom we suspect our most mysterious adversaries, our ultimate rivals and, perhaps, our successors.22

While the taxonomic undecidability of the protagonists of a number of Kafka’s subsequent animal stories—is the proprietor of the “Bau” (burrow) a badger, a hamster, a mole, a fox, a weasel? what is the roughly marten-sized “animal in the synagogue”?—inhibits the reader from ascribing significations to them commonly associated with particular species, such is not the case with the designation of Gregor as Ungeziefer. This mix of abjection from within and of trespass from without is always already tied to the word Ungeziefer. Grimms’ Wörterbuch speculates that Ungeziefer originally

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designated (kinds of ) animals that were inappropriate for sacrifice; as such, they evoked disgust and impurity as well as the monstrous and demonic. Such a mix was maintained in the word’s overgrown field of associations as Ungeziefer became pathogenically identified with allegedly dirty and disease-bearing creatures and the alleged bearers of those creatures, such as the Polish Jewish men with “their populated beards” (bevölkerten Barte; DHA 6: 62) that the young Heinrich Heine encountered in 1822. Such animalizing of a population by labeling it Ungeziefer would appear to exemplify the overcoding of assumed difference between human groups with the human /animal opposition. The “Un” in “Ungeziefer,” however, positions it topographically—as not “x,” as opaque, other, and outside23—so as to problematize its taxonomic position within. Its presence threatens the closure assumed for the human /animal divide and therefore for the other structuring oppositions with which it intersects, such as man /woman and Gentile/Jew, and that, as noted in the Introduction, mutually implicate and therefore help sustain one another. As animal it is killable; as a threat to the boundaries maintaining human /animal difference, it must be. The association of Juden and Ungeziefer itself became pandemic when the epidemic threat of typhus (Fleckfieber) failed to succumb to the explanatory security of the newly hegemonic germ-theory. This association had appeared and been rather widely disseminated long before the connection would be biopoliticized,24 but from the 1880s on anxious eyes turned a potentially exterminationist gaze at such possible sources of contamination.25 The identification of the Jews as Ungeziefer emerged when one of the foremost German Orientalists and a leading proponent of a Germanic Christianity, Paul de Lagarde, exhorted the readers of his 1887 “Juden und Indogermanen” to hate and despise those who— out of “humanity!”—speak for the Jews or are too cowardly to trample on this vermin [Ungeziefer]. One does not negotiate with intestinal worms [Trichinen26] or bacteria, worms and bacteria cannot be “educated,” they are rendered harmless as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.27

Even the Jewish-identified discoverers of infecting agents were pictured in the antisemitic press as themselves the agents of infection.28 Such developing concern did not preclude the exploitation of the association by the manufacturers of so-called humorous postcards. One such, from 1902, pictured a butterfly-winged but otherwise stereotypical Eastern European Jewish peddler holding the reins of a louse upon which he stands; in the background is a giant lice comb with broken teeth, curly

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strands of hair, and many tiny lice. This image parodies a well-known motif of greeting cards traditionally exchanged on May Day: a wingèd elf riding a Glückskäfer (good-luck beetle), usually a Marienkäfer or ladybug. Also adorning the postcard was a little ditty: “It’s no wonder that you always enjoy good fortune, it’s the same with pigs who happily wallow in filth” (see Figure 10).29 This connection between Jews and lousy vermin was also maintained by many acculturated West and Central European Jews with regard to their often differently dressed and differently speaking confrères from Eastern Europe— even by the Kafka family. In a frequently cited passage from his never delivered “Letter to his Father,” Kafka writes: “Without knowing [the Yiddish actor Yitzhak Löwy] you compared him, in some dreadful way that I have now forgotten, to vermin [Ungeziefer] and, as was so often the case with people I was fond of, you were automatically ready with the proverb of the dog and fleas [Hunden und Flöhen].”30 The son, however, shared his father’s fear of contamination; in a passage (that Brod omits from his edition of Kafka’s diaries) describing an exchange between Löwy and Kafka when they were sitting together for an October 16, 1911 performance in Prague’s National Theater, one reads: “then my hair contacted [Löwy’s] when I drew close to his head; I became afraid in any case

Figure 10. The good-luck louse. Postcard: “S’ist kein Wunder . . .” (ca. 1902). Reprinted by courtesy of Wolfgang Haney.

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[immerhin] because of possible lice [Läuse].”31 However, Jews were not the only human (animal) group so labeled; hence, Kafka’s labeling of the transformed Gregor as Ungeziefer is far from sufficient for him to “be readily identified with the Jewish people in the Diaspora.”32

Talking of Animals While the reader encounters Gregor’s description, nonhumanoid part by nonhumanoid part, of his transformed body, it is only when he is heard speaking that he is first identified by other characters as “animal.” After Gregor delivers an extensive litany of apologies, excuses, and selfaccusations as to why he has yet to open the door to his room, he is met with the chief clerk’s “That was an animal voice” (Das war ein Tierstimme; DL 131; CS 98).33 Worse, he later comes to realize, “since what he said was not understood by the others it never struck any of them, not even his sister, that he could understand what they said, and so whenever his sister came into his room he had to content himself with hearing her utter only a sigh now and then . . . ” (DL 149; CS 109). Gregor is placed outside the circle of human language speakers, but by his confinement to a room within the family apartment, he nevertheless remains defined in terms of his relationship to that human circle (menschlichen Kreis; DL 132; CS 99), however nonspecifically: that is, as animal to their human.34 Hence, the more significant question is not “what kind of animal is Gregor?” but “is he exclusively inscribed within the human /animal opposition?” Throughout the story Kafka is ironizing the role of animal or vermin commonplaces. Gregor characterizes the company porter, whom he was supposed to meet at the rail station, as an invertebrate, “as the creature [Kreatur] of the chief ’s, spineless and mindless [ohne Rückgrat und Verstand]” (DL 118; CS 91). Later, after the metamorphosed Gregor first becomes visible to others by pushing himself through the opening [Öffnung] and into the living room, he remains unaware “that his words in all possibility, indeed in all likelihood, would again be unintelligible” (DL 138; CS 102). He is eventually driven back in by his father, who, by contrast, is “making hissing noises like a savage” (stieß Zischlaute aus, wie ein Wilder; DL 140; CS 104)35— or like Gregor, who later “hissed [zischt] loudly with rage because not one of them thought of shutting the door to spare him such a spectacle and so much noise” (DL 178; CS 126). Months after his transformation, Gregor reverses his retreat from “his human background” (seiner menschlichen Vergangenheit or “past”; DL 162; CS 116) and moves— for what will be his last time—from his “naked den” (Höhle or “lair”; DL

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162; CS 116) into the living room. Then, coated with the useless detritus of human life (“dust; fluff and hair and remnants of food”),36 he advances “a little over the spotless floor” to listen to his sister’s violin-playing and asks himself: “Was he an animal [ein Tier], that music had such an effect upon him” (DL 185; CS 130). By invoking the proverbial connection of animals and music, Gregor utters his first and only self-association with the label “animal”; it is a paradoxical moment of the “animal” reasserting his humanness by questioning his humanness, and it proves climactic. It is at this moment of crossing from the animal outside (which, again, is necessarily encrypted in the Samsas’ apartment) to the human inside that Gregor becomes neither human nor animal: for from the site of his eruption Gregor witnesses a telling exchange over socially interpellating names and pronouns37 between Grete and their parents.

“It is what it is”? Once the family discovered his metamorphosis, only Grete would ever address Gregor directly by name, and then only once: Accompanying her mother into Gregor’s room, Grete cries out, “Du, Gregor” (DL 166; CS 119), after her mother, catching sight of the “huge brown mass on the flowered wallpaper,” begins to decompensate. With her mother seeking the restoration of the normal order of the world with her cry “Oh God, oh God!” Grete’s verbal acknowledgment of Gregor as a familiar (“Du”) and as possessing a proper name performs that reestablishment. A number of weeks later, however, when Grete last encounters Gregor alive, she declares: “I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature [Untier], and so all I say is we must try to get rid of it [es]. We’ve tried to look after it [es] and to put up with it [es] as far as humanly possible [das Menschenmögliche] . . . We must try to get rid of it [es].” Her father, at a loss, “half-questioningly” laments, “If he [er] could understand us . . . then perhaps we might come to some agreement with him [ihm]” (DL 189; CS 133). Grete and her father are employing different pronouns to refer to this Untier, this “un-animal.”38 His sister cuts to the quick: “It [es] must go. . . . You must try to get rid of the idea that it [es] is Gregor. The fact that we had believed it for so long was our trouble. But how can it be Gregor? If it [es] was Gregor, he [er] would have realized long ago that human beings [Menschen] can’t live with such a creature [einem solchen Tier] and [would] have gone away on his own accord” (DL 190; CS 134). Grete is explicitly making the distinction between the metamorphosed protagonist as an unnamed (and unnamable?)

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“it” versus a namable and addressable “he,” who would recognize the distinction between human and animal and maintain the foreclosure of what is neither. Identifying Gregor as Untier echoes Maeterlinck’s distinction between “the insect” and “the other animals”: [They], the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain earthly brotherhood in them. They often surprise and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not seem to belong. . . .39

She then continues with a litany of ascribed acts, intentions, and desires that render this unnamable “it,” not as bare life but as an all-powerful threat: “As it is this creature [dieses Tier] persecutes us. . . . ” This Tier is not an animal; for if it were Gregor (that is, one who played according to the rules of the human /animal divide), he would sustain human /animal difference (whether by staying in his ascribed place as animal or, now, by doing the human thing and leaving the apartment). Rather, it is the outlaw, the were-beast—for to be both human and animal is to be neither.40 This is made clear by Grete’s next statement and its accompanying affect: “ ‘Just look, Father.’ She shrieked all at once, ‘he’s [er] at it again!’ ” (DL 191; CS 134). Grete here employs the masculine pronoun. The earlier distinction, by which she had endeavored to restore order to the family, between Gregor and this Untier—between the human /animal opposition “Gregor” emblematizes and its abject—has collapsed. The narrator describes the effects and affects of her blurring of the distinction: “And in an access of panic [Schrecken] that was quite incomprehensible to Gregor she even quitted her mother, literally thrusting the chair from her as if she would rather sacrifice [opfern] her mother than stay so near to Gregor . . .” (DL 191; CS 134). Unable to make a sovereign decision that would institute order in this state of emergency, she flees in terror. Gregor eventually manages to crawl back into his room where by morning’s light he would die; he is then, in death and in family memory, restored to “er.” Grete, observing his corpse, comments: “Just see how thin he [er] was. It’s such a long time since he’s [er] eaten anything” (DL 195; CS 136). The Metamorphosis betrays the operation of the human /animal opposition (and the other “Great Divides”). In line with one prominent school of interpretation, Kafka’s protagonist, ultimately perceiving no way out of his ascribed place within it, submits to an order-restoring (or even an order-founding) sacrificial death of the animal.41 Perhaps echoing the

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contrapuntal exchange of his sister’s “Finally” (Endlich), as she locked him back in his lair, and his last words, the question “And what now?” (Und jetzt; DL 193; CS 135), this sacrificial reading of “his” death opened the way for the Samsa family to kick out the boarders and, as the novella closes with the family on a “tram into the open country [ins Freie] outside the town” (DL 199; CS 139), to endeavor to find some form of self-determination.42 Then again, if not enacting a transformation from Jew-Animal to Jew-as-Animal, perhaps Gregor’s last defile, the emergence of this Untier that bears the “Un” trace of the ungeheuren Ungeziefer, the death of which cannot serve as a sacrifice, called attention to, bespoke— even more than Gregor’s frustrating species identification did—the non-natural, constructed status of order-maintaining hierarchical distinctions and divides.43 Perhaps pointing to this supplemental reading is the brief return of the Ungeziefer as the object of discussion. Between Grete’s flat and dry description of Gregor’s “completely flat and dry” corpse and the concluding description of her in bloom (aufgeblüht), stretching her voluptuous (üppig) young body, the charwoman interrupts the three remaining Samsas, when they are each writing their respective employers exculpatory letters explaining their absences, to report her restoration of order (Es ist schon in Ordnung). By announcing that she had gotten “rid of the thing” (das Zeug), she “seemed to have shattered the composure they had barely achieved.” Getting rid of— Mr. Samsa announces that he will fire—that last nonfamilial witness to the crisis that “it” (Gregor as an Untier) posed to the assumed-to-be-natural order, is not enough for his family to finally let go of what had transpired (Laßt schon endlich die alten Sachen). Only the substitution of a past order that preceded Gregor and his metamorphosis—the patriarchal reassertion of “And you might have some consideration [Rücksicht] of me” (DL 199; CS 138–39)—allows them to complete their task and move on.

Mausi: “Was he an animal [ein Tier], that music had such an effect upon him?” While readers of Metamorphosis encounter several instances in which characters react to the sight of Gregor with manifest fright, even terror, they never learn what specifically it is about Gregor’s presence that affected them because the third-person narration never leaves Gregor’s side until his death. Readers are regularly denied such access in those Kafka stories in which the narration derives from a (nonhuman) animal protagonist’s position; instead, those specifics are left to readers’ imaginations and expectations. On occasion, however, Kafka does offer in letter or diary entry

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the source of the affect he experienced when faced with certain nonhuman animals. For example, during Fall 1917, Kafka spent several months at a Zürau sanitorium in an attempt to recuperate from his recently diagnosed tuberculosis and, as many of his letters of the time testify, there he felt besieged by a “plague of mice”44 (Mäuseplage). His “reaction toward the mice [was] one of sheer terror [platte Angst].”45 In order to communicate to his correspondent Brod what it was that spurred his reaction, he compares his fear to Ungezieferangst. It is connected with the unexpected, uninvited, inescapable, more or less silent, persistent, secret aim of these creatures [Tiere], with the sense that they have riddled the surrounding walls through and through with their tunnels and are lurking within, that the night is theirs, that because of their nocturnal existence and their tininess they are so remote from us and thus outside our power. (B2 373; LFr 174)

When some six years later Kafka places what are assumed to be mice at the center of a story that would be both his last to complete and the last that he would see published, “Josephine the Singer,”46 his protagonists do not elicit terror. Indeed they are the ones who are said to be in constant danger, although no specific menace or perilous occasion is depicted. The story’s narrator notes: “our people [Volk] . . . are almost always on the run and scurrying hither and thither for reasons that are often not very clear” (DL 356; CS 364). Rather, in what the narrator describes as “a small episode in the eternal history of our people” (DL 376; CS 376), Kafka chronicles the rise and fall of one of the Volk, the singer Josephine. It is generally assumed that the model for the “Mouse Folk” is “of course the Jew[s].”47 In the wake of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s moving graphic memoir of his parents’ experience of the Shoah (see this chapter’s concluding excursus) or Fievel Mousekevitz, the murine protagonist of Steven Spielberg and Don Bluth’s animated An American Tail (as well as of its several sequels and television spin-off ), such a conclusion appears to modern readers as self-evident. The association of Jews with mice and other members of the Murinae subfamily did in fact long precede Spiegelman and Spielberg. Kafka’s mice are like many of the furtive, fertile, and cowardly creatures that menaced the imagination of anti-Jewish writers. For example, some dozen years before the writing of “Josephine” Werner Sombart characterizes the Jews by a term rooted in mice and their storied behavior. Amid the controversy surrounding his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben ( Jews and Modern Capitalism; 1911) and his even more controversial discursus on the Zukunft der Juden (Future of the Jews; 1912), Sombart asserts

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that Jewish assimilation would destroy the character of Western peoples because the Jews were “Duckmäuser,” sneaks and cowards.48 A more direct and visual analogy of Jews to mice and rats is the driving force behind the thirtieth of the thirty-one posters that the proudly antisemitic Glöß Publishing House in Dresden printed and disseminated throughout Germany between 1892 and 1901. In the “Rattenfänger” (rat catcher) of 1899, not only do the rats being removed from the city by the pied piper of antisemitism bear Jewish facial traits, the accompanying text reads: “Like mice and rats the Jews seek to undermine the public order” (see Figure 11).49 Earlier that decade, the noted and notorious publicist Maximilian Harden, in the two- or three-faced language of “Sem,” also appears to have analogized Jews with mice. Rather than question whether the rabid antisemite and Reichstag deputy Hermann Ahlwardt really believes his characterization of the Jews as a criminal race conspiring to destroy Germany, Harden writes that Ahlwardt is “just as honest as any sufferer from the DTs [ jeder Delirant] who sees mice dancing.”50 Ahlwardt’s Jews therefore are such dancing mice. A decade earlier, in Goldene Ratten und rothe Mäuse (golden

Figure 11. The rat catcher. Der Rattenfänger, Politische Bilderbogen no. 30 (Dresden: Glöß Verlag, 1899). Reprinted by courtesy of the Stadtsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung.

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rats and red mice), Wilhelm Marr, the man popularly credited with coining the term “antisemitism,” taunts the presumably Jewish capitalists as golden rats and the members of the allegedly Jewish socialist movement as red mice.51 When the lead article of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (October 7, 1865) analogizes the authentic (ächte) Reform-Jew with the mouse, however, it warns the reader not to draw comfort from the mistaken belief that the mouse, and therefore that group with which it is analogized, is more nuisance than mortal threat: “That the Reform-Jew also gnaws at everything that furthers human life, at everything that warms the soul, what is beautiful, what is noble and worth loving, and if it should come upon you alone, nothing more would long remain except a dead, flayed skeleton.”52 The ascribed family resemblance of “the Jew” and Murinae was effected in other ways by Gentile societies. Heinrich Heine, in his never-completed novella The Rabbi of Bacherach (published in 1840), has his protagonist point out to his wife Sara a little house, the Rattenhäuschen, in the middle of Frankfurt’s Main River Bridge in which “a baptized Jew lives . . . , who pays six farthings to every man who brings him a dead rat on account of the Jewish community, who are obliged to deliver annually to the city council five thousand rats’ tails [Rattenschwänze] for tribute.”53 Achim von Arnim had earlier offered his own version, in verse, of how Frankfurt had freed itself from a plague of rats. In the middle of “Über die Kennzeichen des Judentums” (On Judentum’s identifying marks), his notorious 1811 guide to unmasking Jews, including converts, who might attempt to join the German Christian Eating Club from which they were excluded, Arnim focuses on one particular Jewish rat: “The Jew so gladly would conceal himself, like a rat in a tiny hole; he would like to be invisible.”54 He ironically names this “rat” Katz (“cat” in German is “Katze”), who had shaved off his beard and adopted other means of disguise in order to attend a tournament from which Jews were excluded. Once outed, Katz is trapped, and baptism, rat redemption, and ultimately rat poison (he swallows arsenic) become his fate.55 Arnim concludes his address with an expectation of murderous persecutions of Jews that he explains by means of a Jewish self-identification with mice. He has a rabbi “rightly say that war is made against all Jews as it is against all mice, if only one mouse had devoured the cheese; it is the same as if all of the mice had done it.”56 Also a member of the Eating Club, the author E. T. A. Hoffmann recounts in his 1818 story “Die Brautwahl” (the bridal choice) how, during the fiery execution of the court Jew Lippold, a giant mouse, said to be the accused wizard’s familiar [Zauberteufel], leaped into the flames. Beyond whatever resonance this history of representation may have had, Kafka had himself some more direct encounters with mice of pos-

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sible Jewish descent. Leo Lensing suggests that if one were to read “Josephine” as Kafka’s reflection upon his own situation as a “germanophone writer of Jewish descent” then there is a very specific ( Jewish) mouse that Kafka may well have been portraying: “Die Kafka,” a mouse—the German Maus is a feminine noun—who, as we’ve seen, was portrayed in Franz Blei’s satirical menagerie Bestiarium Literaricum.57 Outside of the “Little Fable” (discussed in the next chapter) and “Josephine,” mice do not play a significant role in Kafka’s narrative bestiary; however, in addition to the “mouse plague” that left its traces across his Fall 1917 correspondence, they make their presence known during several other periods in Kafka’s epistolary life, including Summer 1920, that is, contemporaneous with the appearance of “die Kafka” in Blei’s Bestiarium. In a letter, written to Milena Jesenská on July 18, two weeks after their first intimate meeting in Vienna ( June 29–July 4, 1920), Kafka compares himself to a mouse: “In the atmosphere of your life with him [i.e., her husband] I really am just the mouse in the ‘big house’ which is allowed to run freely across the carpet once a year at the most” (B3 233; LM 92).58 Mice, however, are usually the object rather than the subject of Kafka’s letters. They make a rather evocative appearance in a January 17–18, 1913 letter to his soon-to-be fiancée Felice Bauer.59 After accounts of his evening’s reading, of his failure to write that evening, and of his anticipation of another day without writing since he would be attending the Russian ballet the following evening, and after then rather schmaltzily signing off, he appends a postscript. It begins with mention of a parapraxis: He confesses that he had mistakenly addressed the letter with his own house number 60 rather than hers. He then adds: “and around me in a circle seven empty chairs were watching” (B1 46; LF 160).61 The remainder of the postscript appears to consist of comments and queries on several specific items from Felice’s latest letter. After a few questions about her parents, Kafka asks (B1 46; LF 160): “You write that in summer you go to the synagogue on Friday afternoons [nachmittags]; do you have different office hours in summer than in winter?” He parenthetically adds a comment on his own synagogue attendance: “(During the past few years I’ve only gone to Temple twice—at my sisters’ weddings).”62 Then comes a last message: “I thought you were joking about the mice. So they really exist? Poor child!” One can only speculate about where Felice encountered the mice. Could they have been in the synagogue? Kafka’s only narrative that mentions a synagogue, “Das Synagogtier” (The Animal in the Synagogue; 1922), is built around the animal that has inhabited it, most noticeably in the women’s section, for a number of generations. It is about the “size of a marten” rather than of a mouse and

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is “pale blue-green” (helles Blaugrün; NS 2.1:406; CS 467)63 rather than a “magnificent moon-blue” ( prachtvolles Mondblau) like die Kafka’s eyes. Several years after his letter to Felice, Kafka records his own encounter with mice that was no joking matter: the already mentioned “plague of mice.” Writing to his friend Felix Weltsch around November 15, 1917 from Zürau (B2 365–66; LFr 168–69), he recounts “a night of mice, a fearful experience.” He felt himself besieged by this “frightful mute and noisy race [schreckliches stummes lärmendes Volk] . . . Up the coal box, down the coal box, across the room they ran, describing circles, nibbling at wood, peeping [gepfiffen] softly while resting, and all along there was that sense [Gefühl ] of silence, of the secret labor of an oppressed proletarian race [Volkes ] to whom the night belongs.” The mice’s noisiness and muteness— the latter imposed? or merely felt?—turned all his other perceptions (e.g., “smell and taste”) “mousy” (mäusig) and spoiled (verdorben) everything for him in Zürau. And they peep—pipe ( pfeiffen)64—just like Josephine and her Volk commonly do. In addition to the apparent choice of mice to represent Josephine’s people, Kafka offers numerous allusions to Jewish diasporic existence. For example, the narrator laments that “the areas on which, for economic reasons, we have to live in dispersion are too wide, our enemies too numerous, the dangers lying everywhere in wait for us too incalculable” (DL 363; CS 368). A number of characteristics shared by the Volk are also ascribed to Jews. For example, Josephine’s sees herself as one of the “Auserwählten,” one of the chosen, a group identifier term strongly associated with Judentum. The narrator’s observation that “generally speaking, we ignore historical research entirely” (DL 360 –61; CS 366) conforms to Yosef Yerushalmi’s characterization of Jewish culture as oriented toward collective memory and not history until the nineteenth century.65 When the narrator comments that “Among our people there is no age of youth, scarcely the briefest childhood” (DL 363; CS 368), he could have been paraphrasing the conclusion of the Jewish psychiatrist Abraham Myerson in 1920: “In other words, the Jew, through his restrictions, was cheated out of childhood.”66 Other characteristics of the Volk are familiar stereotypes from antiJewish discourse. For example, the narrator emphasizes that the Volk “are quite unmusical,” recalling the diatribes of Wagner and Weininger (see Chapter 4). The narrator also notes the “fertility of the race” (DL 364; CS 368); the term employed here is Stamm, or tribe, as in the twelve tribes of Israel. Stamm “was a central concept in German debates about national unity and diversity between the mid-nineteenth century and the late 1920s . . . [as well as] of a German Jewish discussion about the nature of

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Jewish identity.”67 Because the term conjoins an ethnic group with a particular territory, nationalistic anti-Jewish discourse readily identified the Jews as an Asiatic or foreign tribe. For the Western and Central European bourgeoisie who were concerned about their demographic decline, the alleged fertility of this foreign Stamm was viewed as a threat. The connection between the Volk as mice and the Jews is also reinforced by the orthographic similarity of M-a-u-s and M-a-u-s-chel. So, particularly in this context of a story that focuses upon the way a people speak and sing, the German Maus resonates with allusions to the language of the Jews, Mauscheldeutsch.68 Further, for Kafka who spent much of his adult life, albeit often ambivalently, in Zionist circles, the German Maus could not but also recall Herzl’s picture of Mauschel, the “spineless, repressed and shabby” anti-Zionist Jew who embodies all the worst of anti-Jewish stereotypes.69 Kafka’s depiction of a particular figure, the diva Josephine, also reproduces several of the behaviors ascribed by Herzl to Mauschel and by many to the often-Jewish virtuoso:70 what she lacks in talent she makes up in attitude. Josephine puts on a great show of being offended at the effrontery of others to notice her inadequacies. Her excessive demands, efforts to shirk manual labor, and egoistic belief that her rights are so self-evident that it does not matter how she secured them, are all typical both of the Mauscheljude, the Jew who mauschels, and of the virtuosic Mausi, “Little Mouse.” According to the master mauscheler71 Karl Kraus: “if something makes a grand gesture of something but displays nothing but a total failure in showing it off, one must plant oneself in front of it with arms crossed, let it play out, look thoughtful, and in a whisper, so as not to interrupt, simply say: ‘Little Mouse!’ ”72

Best Laid Plans, or “Ceci n’est pas une souris” More telling and most puzzling, the only time that the morpheme “maus-” appears in the body of the story is when the narrator comments on the paradoxical behavior of Josephine’s audience: “Since piping is one of our thoughtless habits, one might think that people would pipe up in Josephine’s audience too; . . . but her audience never pipes, it sits in mouselike stillness” (mäuschenstill; DL 354; CS 362, emphasis added).73 In a story about murine noisemaking, the only appearance of “maus” conjoins it with silence and with the Volk when they are most unlike themselves.74 Further, not only is the orthography in this singular iteration of maus, “mäuschen,” closer to mauscheln, but its pronunciation is much closer to one of Mauschel ’s suggested origins, the Yiddish “Moyschele” or “little Moses.” Never once

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are the narrator’s Volk identified as mice in the story. Indeed, “Maus,” or rather “Mäuse,” does not appear in either the story’s original title or its initial April 20, 1924 publication in the Prager Presse. When Kafka mentions the story in his correspondence, he refers only to “Josefine.” Even when Kafka spoke to his friend Robert Klopstock about his just completed story, as Klopstock would later recollect, he described it as an investigation of “animal-like squeaking” (or chirping, tierischen Piepsens).75 Although Kafka did not refer to mice as the object of his investigation (thus, by extension, as the object of his story) in Klopstock’s recollection, Piepsen is often ascribed to mice. It is the sound of the mouse that keeps Kafka company nightly during the summer of 1920;76 it also characterizes the “singing” of Arthur Schnitzler’s Jewish salonière Else Ehrenberg in his 1908 novel The Road into the Open: she “really chirped [gepiepst] more than sang.”77 Else, with what she herself recognizes as a “little voice,” would seem to incarnate, avant la lettre, Kraus’s “Mausi.”78 “A persistent horrible twittering squeak [schmerzliches Piepsen]” (DL 119; CS 91) is how the narrator identifies Gregor’s voice when Gregor first hears it; Piepsen, however, is all but absent from “Josefine.” Josephine and the Volk generally pipe (pfeiffen) when they make sounds. In its single appearance in the tale, “chirping” (piepsend), along with “lisping” (zischend )— one of the qualities that Wagner ascribed to Jewish speech— characterize the forms of vocalization by children who have not yet learned to pipe.79 In “Der Bau” (The Burrow) the sometimes pfeifen-like, other times zischen-like (but never piepsen-like; NS 2.1:606 –9; CS 343– 45) noises of the unseen “klein Volk” disrupt the composure of its first-person narrator—much as the zischen of his father caused Gregor to “quite lose his head” (DL 141; CS 104). They are unlikely to be either “forest mice” (Waldmäuser; NS 2.1:579; CS 326) or rats, since “The Burrow” ’s narrator80 makes reference elsewhere to those rodent varieties. And then there are those other anthropomorphic anomalies in the account of “Josephine” ’s narrator. Describing her last performance, the narrator observes: “but when she stands up to sing, obviously at the end of her resources, weary, her arms [Arme] not widespread as usual but hanging lifelessly down, so that one gets the impression that they are perhaps a little bit too short . . . ” (DL 375; CS 375). Earlier the narrator imagines what it would be like if an individual [Einzelner] rather than the Volk had to deal with her demands: “one might imagine that this man [Mann] had been giving in to Josephine all the time while nursing a wild desire to put an end to his submissiveness one fine day: that he made superhuman [übermenschlich viel] sacrifices for Josephine . . . ” (DL 371; CS 373).

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Only when Kafka is preparing the story for eventual (ultimately posthumous) publication in his story collection Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) does he add “oder Das Volk der Mäuse” to the title. He recognizes that an “Or-Title” (“Oder-Titel”) is not “very pretty”; still he claims, according to his confidante and biographer Max Brod, that it would perhaps serve a special [besonderen] function: to “balance” the original, “Josefine, die Sängerin.”81 That this is a late supplement is generally overlooked by commentators, if it is even realized. Margot Norris does read the title in terms of a certain kind of narrative toggle that the human /animal opposition overcodes: “If Josefine can be distinguished from the mouse folk, even as an infantile brat . . . she becomes anthropomorphized, individualized, significant, and her story can be told. If not, she becomes appropriated by the mouse folk, animalized, obliterated, her story prevented.”82 While she argues that this titular differentiation ultimately undercuts itself as the “narrative . . . consumes itself in the telling,”83 both the human and the animal function as figures,84 and species specificity is irrelevant. Most commentary on Kafka’s title addition—including his use of “or”—and explanation, however, see Kafka both highlighting one of his common concerns, the interrelationship of an individual and that individual’s community bzw. of the artist and society,85 and seeking to problematize the conventional identification of the story’s point with the eponymous character: Is the story about an individual, about an individual who represents a group, about an individual and a group who share a family resemblance but are not identical, or about a group despite membership in that group by the eponymous individual? Even when the interpretive focus is on Josephine as Kafka’s reflections upon himself as a writer, whether one qualified by “Jewish” or not, the murine identity of the Volk is simply assumed. None sees its late addition to the title as constraining the interpretive imposition of species on the Volk without absolutely determining their identity as mice. None notes that the revised “Or-title” alone directly identifies the Volk with mice even as it may render that identification indefinite. Clayton Koelb recognizes that in giving “his story a double title” Kafka was “far from trivial[ly]” imagining his prospective readers: “it is impossible to say whether the reader is supposed to understand the ‘oder’ as an inclusive or exclusive ‘or.’ Are we supposed to make a choice between Josephine and the Mouse Folk, or are we to believe that one can take the place of the other?”86 Rather than, like Koelb who unreflectively delimits his own use of “or,” argue that the story ultimately resolves such ambiguity with regard to which question as well as to the identification of each half of the “double title,” I would argue that Kafka’s own term, “Or-title,”

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signals that the force of the title and of the story it supplements is directed at maintaining both form and content as undecidable. The ambiguity of the “Or-title” (and its relation to the body of the text)—awareness of that ambiguity—may generate a similar cognitive response as awareness of the imagined castration of the no-less imagined maternal penis does for the little boy: “I know very well, but just the same . . .”87 That is, the reader seeks fetishistic satisfaction in a good-enough interpretation. Still, Kafka’s initial avoidance of specifically identifying Josephine and her Volk taxonomically as well as his use on several occasions of descriptors that problematize any murine identification of them further signals a desire to inhibit readers from imagining them as mice. Such indeterminacy, in general, serves Kafka, here and in other stories, a variety of aesthetic purposes. In “Josephine the Singer,” specifically, given the pervasive association of mice with Judentum, naming the Volk mice would have had as a possible consequence the reproduction of the Jew-Animal. Kafka may well have realized that despite his efforts and because the demands of his writing required the absence of any specific determination of the Volk, the readers’ identification of the Jew-Animal remained quite possible.88 Consequently, he may have insisted on the “Or-title” and the resulting ambiguity as an additional ward against the perilous homologization of Jews and mice.89

A Kierkegaardian Coda The ambiguity of Kafka’s “Oder-Titel” also appears to refract the work of a writer that had kept him company during his mouse-plagued days in Zürau and that appeared in one of his last diary entries (December 18, 1922; D2 232): “All this time in bed. Yesterday [Soren Kierkegaard’s] Either/Or.” Kierkegaard, adopting the persona of Judge Vilhelm, elaborates on the significance of the “either/or” (and its Latin equivalent “aut/ aut”) in the chapter “Equilibrium between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Composition of Personality.” Given Kafka’s justification of the new title as providing balance, it takes but a short leap of credulity to read his title’s conjunction of singer and folk as alluding to Kierkegaard’s conjoining of the mutually exclusive modalities of the aesthetic and the ethical. Kierkegaard, however, insists that the “or” without the “either” (like a single iteration of the Latin “aut”) “does not make the situation clear.” Next, he goes on to discuss how posing the “either/or” is usually just that, an aesthetic posing and not an ethical choosing by “you,” when he employs a figure and an analogy that implicate the violence of Jewish-Gentile relationships. “You yourself are nothing, an enigmatic figure on whose brow

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is inscribed Either/or.” The alluded-to “mark of Cain” was inscribed upon the first fratricide to preserve him from being killed by those he encountered as he wandered the world during his perpetual banishment. Not surprisingly, the indelible mark, albeit displaced downward, born by a population of exiled, allegedly deicidal (male) wanderers, of which, according to Christian soteriology, a remnant needed to be preserved—the Jews—was readily identified with the “mark of Cain.” Kierkegaard/Judge Vilhelm, as porte-parole for his addressee, then explains the significance of the inscription: “For this . . . is my motto, and these words are not, as the grammarians believe, disjunctive conjunctions; no, they belong inseparably together and therefore ought to be written as one word, inasmuch as in their union they constitute an interjection which I shout at mankind, just as boys shout ‘Hep’ after a Jew.”90 Kierkegaard’s analogy directly alludes to the slogan “Hep-Hep, Juda verreck!” that accompanied the violent pogroms that erupted in 1819 against Jewish residents in German cities and towns.91 While the specific origin of the doubled “Hep” remains uncertain,92 Juda verreck “suggested that Jews were animals since the German word verrecken (perish like a beast) is in decent language exclusively applied to animals.”93 The use of “Juda,” a reference to a corporate or speciated entity, rather than “Juden,” an aggregate of individuals, testified further to the animalization of those subjected to pogromist assault. By performatively analogizing the collapsing of the disjunctive conjunctions (either either/or or aut/aut) into a single word with the single iteration of “Hep” Kierkegaard suggests that posing the distinction between “either” and “or” (or, more relevantly, the repetition of the “aut”) as indifferent betrays in normal practice the collapsing of disjunction within conjunction (that is, the obviating of internal difference in relation to an external difference) and the fear of the conjunction within disjunction (that is, the fear of the loss of external difference) that together generate such violent and potentially murderous othering.94 Kafka’s supplemented title “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk” refuses the “either” and leaves the choice undecidable. This was neither a matter of either aesthetic self-assertion or ethical indecision. The Jews were not in a position to make a choice that would be recognized by the society at large; their best hope was to inhibit the threatening determinations made by those in the position to make them. Whereas the dominant Gentile is largely implicit in the works discussed in this chapter—is there another Volk to whom the narrator of “Josefine” is identifying as “unser Volk”?—and in the excursus below, the next chapter explores the dynamic of Jewish-Gentile relations when so-called Jewish mice or their cousins,

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so-called Jewish rats, encounter possibly Gentile cats in Kafka as well as in Heinrich Heine and others.

Excursus: Art Spiegelman, Mausketeer— Another Mouse of the Jewish Persuasion? In answering twenty-five years later the meta-question of “Why mice?” in Maus, Art Spiegelman adds: “The image of Jews as defenseless scurrying creatures was in there somewhere—I’d read Kafka’s ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,’ but I don’t think I’d even focused on it specifically as a metaphor for the Jewish people back then.”95 Spiegelman has to negotiate the relationship between the “metaphor” and the historical identification of Jews and mice differently than Kafka since as a graphic work all of Maus’s characters are visually represented. In what proved to be the first of two parts, the original Maus depicts Artie’s father Vladek’s life story, from meeting Artie’s mother Anja to their capture, shipment, and arrival at Auschwitz; this narrative is framed by the story of Artie asking for and his father telling his tale. Every character who is identified as Jewish is portrayed as a murine biped; Germans and Poles are, respectively, bipedal cats and pigs. In several panels, the tails of these bipeds are depicted. Even the self-portrait of the author that adorns the original publication is of a tail-bearing, bipedal mouse as cigarette-smoking, visor-wearing graphic artist. After the remarkable and unexpected success of Maus following its publication in 1986, Spiegelman found himself in a quandary that he needed to resolve before continuing his family’s story. Even though the mice he drew were bipeds, he became aware that his figurative representations were often taken as essentialist identifications. That Spiegelman feared that his readership would homologize Jews and mice is evident from the brilliant opening panels of the sequel, Maus Part II (see Figure 12). Readers first see, sketched on a drawing pad, five different animal heads—a moose, a French poodle, a frog, a rabbit, and a mouse— each is attached to more-orless-the-same female upper torso dressed in a blouse and kerchief. Next, Françoise, a murine biped like her husband, Artie, and wearing an identical blouse-kerchief combination, approaches him as he sits, leaning against a tree and sketching in a pad. The scene is part of the framing narrative that antedates the 1986 publication of Maus. She asks him what he is drawing. When Artie responds that he is trying to figure out “what kind of animal I should make you?” she responds, “Huh? A mouse of course.” “But you’re French!” he exclaims. When she suggests “the bunny rabbit,” he rather

Figure 12. Sketches of Françoise. From Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 171. Maus Volume I, copyright © 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman; Maus Volume II, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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disingenuously—his lapine exemplar was more of the desirable Playboy variety—“Nah. Too sweet and gentle.” He continues, “I mean the French in general. Let’s not forget the centuries of anti-semitism . . .” Finally, in the page’s last panel, Françoise ends his dithering and insists: “But if you’re a mouse, I ought to be a mouse too. I converted didn’t I?”96 Artie, acting the naïf, betrays with his responses both how intrinsically divided against itself any would-be general categorization is and how inadequate any particular representation of that essentialized type would be. On the one hand, his anger over French antisemitism and Nazi collaboration portend how his own values and concerns could shape the resulting representation, and, on the other hand, the opening menagerie of Françoise possibilities shows how any one individual is the object of multiple identifications: as the sidekick to his rodential self (he Rocky, she Bullwinkle), as French (whether figured by continental sophistication or by its abject past), as object of male desire, and, faute de mieux, as his wife. Finally, Françoise’s explanation of why she should be represented as a mouse, her conversion to Judaism, thoroughly undermines one of the foundations of Jewish animalization: the assumption that Jews are a population exclusively determined by descent and not by choice. Beyond this lesson in the problematics of representation and in the multiple identifications we all perform (and are ascribed), Spiegelman makes several changes in his graphic practice. The portrait of the author affixed to the sequel changes; now Spiegelman pictures himself as a human wearing a mouse mask. This image also replaces the author’s earlier self-portrait in all subsequent editions of the first part. Moreover, in one chapter of Maus II, he creates a frame for the framing narrative of Artie and his father. In its recounting of events after the publication of Maus I, Art Spiegelman and all other characters are humans wearing animal masks. Further, though Part II retains animal figuration, none of the mice nor any other animal figure (qua animal figure)97 has a tail, unlike in Part I. Just as significant, he does not remove any of the tails depicted in the original Maus, including Anya’s, in any subsequent edition of Part I. Unlike the principal perpetrators of the Shoah, Spiegelman does not attempt to erase any trace of (his past constructions of ) Jews.98

chapter 3

(Con)Versions of Cats and Mice and Other Mouse Traps The cats and mice just came as a set. —art spiegelman1

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up. —franz kafka2

In Fall 1920, using almost as few different words as Dr. Seuss in Green Eggs and Ham, Franz Kafka wrote down a seventy-six-word narrative that has come down to us with the title, courtesy of Max Brod, “Kleine Fabel” (“Little Fable”), and has served, if not as an entry text for beginning readers, then as a test case for beginning Germanists of different critical approaches to literature or of the authorial use of shifting verb tense and narrative point of view. Speculations about its genre and referent(s) range widely. Was Kafka composing an allegory, a fable, or a paradox?3 Did he have the stages of an individual’s life, the nature of human fate, or a situation of societal crisis in mind? Was he merely engaging in an exercise in narrative style? Or was he perhaps simply telling a sick joke—a bit of gallows humor (Galgenhumor)? While this little piece from Kafka’s Nachlaß has generated much commentary, the historian of antisemitism and its cultural representations Michael Schmidt points out an omission that, he notes, is also characteristic of the commentary on another work with cats and mice, Spiegelman’s Maus (KM 205). What the literary analyses of both works share was how

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the critics leave the specific relationship between cat and mouse unquestioned. They assume that both Spiegelman and Kafka were, for their respective purposes, employing these creatures’ proverbial—and assumed natural—relationship: or, as the cat Mr. Jinks explains to the mice brothers Pixie and Dixie in every one of their cartoons, “[Cats] hate those meeces to pieces.”4 This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse pairings by certain Jewish-identified writers, particularly Kafka and Heinrich Heine, and historical power relations between Gentiles and Jews. I will eventually situate a late poem (ca. 1852–55) from Heine’s Nachlaß, “Aus der Zopfzeit” (“From the Age of Pigtails”), and that he labels “Fabel” (fable) over and against, on the one hand, the Jews’ acquisition and subsequent partial loss of civil rights in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and, on the other hand, the rise and fall of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (the society for the [promulgation of the] culture and scholarly study [or science] of and by Jews) during this period. But first this chapter, by means of a deconstruction of Schmidt’s new-historicist article “Katz und Maus: Kafkas ‘Kleine Fabel’ und die Resonanz der frühneuzeitlichen Konvertitenbiographik” (Cat and mouse: Kafka’s “Little Fable” and the resonance of early modern convert biography), interpellates Kafka’s “Little Fable” into a number of intertextual and extratextual networks in order to suggest linkages between it and Kafka’s historical situation as a Jew in Germanophone Central Europe in the early twentieth century. My analyses of Kafka’s and Heine’s texts examine their “resonances,” Stephen Greenblatt’s term of art invoked in Schmidt’s subtitle. That is, following the putative progenitor of New Historicism Greenblatt, these readings seek to “illuminate the conditions of [the resonating texts’] making, to disclose the history of [their] appropriation and the circumstances in which [they] come to be displayed” in order to demonstrate how by being in the world, these texts always already “reach[ed] beyond [their] formal boundaries to the larger world.”5 Even though neither Heine nor Kafka ever loosed these works into the public sphere, their having been written down always already intended a public—and that larger world reached back. Focusing, particularly, on Kafka’s and Heine’s deployment of animal figuration, their performance of the Jew-as-Animal, brings forth the dynamics of the often Jew-Animal–mediated asymmetrical relationships between Gentiles and Jews and the violence or the threat thereof that accompanies these relations.

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A “Little Fable,” or How One Avoids One Trap by Stepping into Another After Schmidt’s important observation of the blind spot in the critical literature on Kafka’s “Little Fable” (as well as on Maus), he situates the lack of concern about alternative rationales for and meanings of the cat-mouse pairing on the ruling assumption of the time (the mid-1990s) in Germanistik: Kafka as German Literat and not as Jew. He then mentions that Kafka was not only caught up in the contemporary Klatsch (gossip) of Central European literary life, but was also familiar with spießbürgerlich Schwatz (bourgeois blather) from half a century past by indicating that Kafka read old issues of Die Gartenlaube (the gazebo; KM 209). Schmidt does not indicate which Gartenlaube. There is the mass-circulating illustrated magazine, which prior to German unification in 1871 is devoted to the propagation of liberal middle-class values. It even on occasion presents Jewish families as moral exemplars. In other words, the Gartenlaube that usually figures in Germanophone German literary scholarship. Then there is the Gartenlaube that in the 1870s transformed itself into the leading spewer of antiJewish Quatsch (nonsense). Beginning with the December 1874 issue, it is the original venue for Otto Glagau’s series of increasingly vicious articles accusing the Jews of causing and profiting from the stock-market crash of 1873 and ensuing depression.6 Indeed this is the Gartenlaube that would have been known by much of the Anglophone readership of German Life and Letters, the Anglo-American, largely English-language journal that printed the article. Appended to this evocation of Kafka as Gartenlaube reader is a note (KM 206n6) that refers the reader to a specific page from Kafka’s Letters to Felice (Bauer of Berlin, with whom Kafka was twice engaged) as a corroborating source for this Kafka factoid. Schmidt does not forewarn the reader, however, that several pages hence in his article he will invoke the letter in which Kafka would write of his Gartenlaube reading habits. This letter will be the main bridge between the “Little Fable” and a less well-known proverbial use of cats and mice, by which skepticism about any authentic Jewish conversion to Christianity is expressed: “a mouse is as likely to devour a cat as a Jew is to become a devout Christian” (So wenig diese Katze diese Maus frißt, so wenig bleibt ein Jude ein guter Christ; KM 207). In between, Schmidt rehearses a brief history of the Era of the Jewish Question and what underlay the continuing pressure on conversion despite Jewish attempts at “so-called assimilation” (sogenannten Assimilation; KM 206). He emphasizes the double bind in which Jews found themselves: the

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non-Jewish community’s demand for Jewish assimilation and its refusal to accept or even positively valorize the Jews’ efforts. The underlying assumption of the latter is the impossibility of a Jew, like the proverbial leopard, to change its spots. In German the adage is a bit different: “die Katze lässt das Mausen nicht” (a cat cannot stop mousing). This rather banal proverb goes unmentioned.7 Schmidt, instead, offers the less familiar saying about Jewish baptism not holding water and provides its locus classicus: a ca. 1776 (auto)biography of a Jewish convert (KM 207). He thereby delineates a double bind, without calling it as such,8 that Jews faced earlier: the demand that Jews convert and Christian skepticism about whether the new convert can ever wash away Jewishness. Schmidt also mentions that the author of the memoir encountered these “bekannte Worte” (this familiar quotation) in over 20 other books and writings (KM 207). The import of this citation from 1776 is its listing as the phrase’s original source in the popular five-volume German Lexicon of Proverbs: A Treasury for the German People, published in 1867 by the leading German reference publisher Brockhaus. Schmidt’s readers do not know, yet, that Kafka was reading issues of the Gartenlaube from the year 1863— and therefore one unlikely to draw upon a lexicon not yet accessible. So it should be no surprise that Schmidt mentions in his footnotes that the lexicon cites its own immediate source as an 1855 article in the Germanlanguage Yearbook for Slavic Literature, Art, and Science (KM 208n12). Finally, after citing from the one earlier source he was able to track down (its use in 1550 by a Jewish convert), Schmidt explains why it would be difficult to track down the nineteen or so others (KM 208–9). Schmidt neglects to mention (or was unaware) that on September 25, 1539, Luther preached about a converted Jew who “after his death . . . it was found that he had ordered the erection of the figures of a cat and a mouse on his grave, to indicate that a Jew can as little become a Christian as the two animals can live together on friendly terms.” Such sentiments already adorned Freising’s medieval cathedral, where beneath its infamous anti-Jewish icon, the Judensau, appeared the inscription: “As surely as the mouse never eats the cat so surely can the Jew never a true Christian become.”9 Then Schmidt finally comes to the January 17–18, 1913 letter to Felice (KM 209). Kafka reports that he spent the evening slowly leafing through 200 pages of the bound-together issues of the Gartenlaube from the year 1863, primarily looking at the illustrations and “only now and then coming across anything particularly interesting to read.” Schmidt also cites Kafka’s confession in the letter of the “immense” (ungeheuer)10 and “contradiction-

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laden” pleasure he derives from reading old magazines and newspapers from the middle of the nineteenth century. The historian concedes that it would be virtually impossible to prove that Kafka came across the analogical use of cat-and-mouse in relationship to Jewish converts by chance in some library or old bookshop—let alone that he was even familiar with the saying outside those nineteen or twenty sources. Schmidt is, moreover, silent regarding whether or not he (Schmidt) checked out that 1863 volume of the Gartenlaube to see if the phrase or related content appears such as the large illustration of dwarf mice (Zwergmäuse) climbing upon and making a nest out of katkins (Kätzchen).11 He also neglects to mention the mice that, as described in the last chapter, pop up at the end of Kafka’s letter to Felice. In sum, the only significance that this letter holds for Schmidt is as evidence of Kafka’s reading practices. Schmidt proceeds next to situate Kafka within a particular historical context (KM 209). Not inaccurately, he characterizes Kafka as living in a period in which the hopes for integration and acceptance, generated during the period of Jewish Emancipation and political liberalism that, like those old magazines, antedated his birth, have been tragically dashed in the wake of political and racial antisemitism. Moreover, this was a period in which the one route to civil freedom and security that had been available to Jews before Emancipation, baptism, was also closed off. Schmidt wants to suggest that the emblematic proverb about a supposed way out—that, as the saying implies, in fact never was—would have “resonated” with Kafka and other Germanophone Jews of his generation (KM 210). In order to implant this suggestion, Schmidt returns to the pressure for conversion as a way out even among Jews of Kafka’s generation12 and conjoins him with that no-question-about-his-being-Jewish intellectual Franz Rosenzweig (KM 210). He does not cite any instance in which Kafka confronted this choice—not even Kafka’s one mention of conversion, which was manifestly less than serious. In an earlier letter to Felice (November 18, 1912) Kafka unfurls an inventory of his despair-inducing woes—“Beset by many problems, uncertain of you, quite incapable of coping at the office, my novel at a standstill for a day, with a fierce longing to continue the new, equally demanding story [The Metamorphosis], all but total insomnia”—and confesses “I decided quite definitely that my only salvation was to write to a man in Silesia, with whom I had made friends this summer and who for whole long afternoons had tried to convert me to Christ.” He then pauses—he inserts a dash—and delivers the punch line: “But now your telegram is here and we can leave that letter for a while, you sweet temptation” (B 245;

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LF 49).13 Instead, Schmidt recounts Rosenzweig’s famous decision not to go through with his planned baptism. Schmidt now invokes Greenblatt’s definition of resonance and substitutes Kafka’s “In der Strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony”) for the “Little Fable” as a lead-in to a discussion of the use of torture to force Jewish conversions (KM 210 –11). He then leaves Kafka and all of his works behind in order to describe and decry the infamous history of explicitly or implicitly coerced Jewish conversions. Kafka does not return. There is no turning back. There is no changing direction. Because of Kafka’s absence here, we can assume that Schmidt is not arguing that the “Little Fable” is about the irony that a Jew’s supposed escape exit, a transformative conversion (whether to Christianity or to the cultured German bourgeoisie), does not transform that Jew’s situation in the Gentile-dominated world. Based on his evidence, that would have been a tough sell. The purpose of the article it seems is to illustrate how certain resonant tropes may traverse the cultural landscape and shape its products: such as Kafka’s “Little Fable” that occasioned this survey. We are left with Kafka the Okkasion; in other words, “Little Fable” is neither text nor context, but principally a pretext. One way to get back to Kafka’s “Little Fable” and its depiction of the relationship between cat and mouse is to examine Kafka’s nonproverbial experience with that mésalliance. When Kafka felt himself entrapped by the mouse plague in Zürau, discussed in the last chapter, he brought the sanitorium’s cat into his room; unfortunately, rather than solving the problem he already had, it initially created even more of them. To the noise generated by the mice were now added the droppings of the cat. Indeed, even “when [the cat] is good, she lies by the stove while at the window one early riser of a mouse scratches unequivocally” (B2 366; LFr 169).14 Soon her presence allowed Kafka to get through the night; however, she would try to jump onto his lap and interrupt him when he attempted to read or write. Kafka also described a scene that uncannily anticipated a primal scene of critical animal studies. Almost 80 years before Derrida famously confessed “I often ask myself, just to see, who I am —and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time, overcoming my embarrassment” (A 3– 4), Kafka had written to Brod that “I don’t like being alone with the cat. With other people around it is less embarrassing but then it’s a considerable nuisance to undress in front of her” (B2 368; LFr 170).15

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By the beginning of December, he conceded, “I control the mice with a cat,” but then lamented “but how shall I control the cat?” (B2 372; LFr 173).16 He explained to Brod why he didn’t employ mousetraps: “Traps actually lure more and exterminate only the mice that they kill.” He continued: “Cats, on the other hand, drive away mice by their mere presence.” And then suggested what might be, quite paradoxically for Kafka, the secret of their success: “perhaps even by their excretions, so that these should not be entirely despised” (B2 374; LFr 175).17 Even after he “comes to terms” with the cat, he glossed the phrase “Mouseless Sanitorium”: “if a place is mouseless, it is also catless, and that is to be sure an impressive phrase” (B2 378; LFr 176).18 Perhaps given these diverse experiences with cats and mice, when Kafka set out to stage the encounter of mouse with cat in the “Little Fable” he had more than the proverbial relation between cat and mouse in mind. Mice were also scurrying about Kafka’s life around the time that he composed his “Little Fable” in late 1920. As noted in the last chapter, there were a few. In July of 1920, a thousand exemplars of a strange little book was published in Munich: Franz Blei’s Bestiarium Literaricum, which included in its exotic menagerie of exotic Literatiere “die Kafka” a “rarely seen, magnificent moon-blue”-colored vegetarian mouse with “fascinating . . . human eyes” (BL 45). Mice also populated Kafka’s letters to Milena Jesenská that year, including the one ( July 18) in which Kafka compared himself to a mouse that would have at most one day a year to scurry about freely in the household she shared with her husband (see Chapter 2). Perhaps Kafka had a proverb in his mind (if not Schmidt’s) for how he intended to spend that one day: “Ist die Katze aus dem Haus, tanzen die Mäuse auf dem Tisch,” or, as one says in English, “when the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

Deus ex Murinea In letters to Milena that summer, a mouse functioned less as an object of (manifest) identification than as a sort of deus ex machina that interceded at crucial moments in Kafka’s attempts to negotiate Jewish-Gentile relations and that left in its wake traces of Jewish-Gentile mésalliances— feared, imagined, or realized—that threatened violence. One encounters such droppings in the fifth (dated July 5/6) of the numbered letters that Kafka wrote to her immediately after their first intimate meeting in Vienna ( June 29– July 4, 1920). Informing Milena that he had just learned that

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his friend Brod had not previously realized that she is his latest paramour, he confessed to have lied to her. The confession began by his recalling a follow-up conversation—“You once asked”—to an earlier letter ( June 12) to her, in which he had related virtually verbatim the contents of a note Brod had sent him about the Reiner affair. The Czech-Jewish poet and newspaper editor Josef Reiner had earlier that year committed suicide in despair over the affair his wife, Jarmila— a friend of Milena, and like Milena a Christian—was having with Willy Haas, who was part of Prague’s Jewish literary circle that included Kafka and Brod. Crucially, Kafka excised Brod’s comments that Jarmila is Christian and that “people say [she] is similar” to her friend Milena. Nevertheless, Kafka had retained two obscure, shifter-laden sentences: “I don’t know why I’m telling you this gruesome story [grausame Geschichte]. Perhaps only because the same demon is causing us to suffer and so the story belongs to us just as we belong to it” (B3 179; LM 44).19 Because he concluded the extract with these, the serial adulterer Brod’s, lines about his and Kafka’s own identification with the events,20 and because she would naturally have assumed that Kafka would have divulged to his best friend the name of the woman with whom he was becoming increasingly involved, Milena could have read the play of first-person-plural pronouns21 as referring to Kafka and herself. Enhancing this possible identification was that Kafka then repeated his own desire for Milena to leave her situation in Vienna and join him. A “shocked” (erschreckt; as Kafka characterized her in the July 5/6 letter [B3 207; LM 68]) Milena had wondered whether Brod’s letter was meant as a warning of the possible consequences if Kafka persisted in his relationship with her because she, too, was currently married to a Jewish writer from Prague, Ernst Pollak. She may therefore have identified this, in Kafka’s own earlier ( June 12) words, “terrible story” (schreckliche Geschichte [B3 179; LM 44]) of a triangle of two male Jewish writers and a Czech woman with their own. Kafka confessed that he thought that he had lied to her when he had denied any such intention on Brod’s part—for Kafka, too, had assumed that Brod knew that the new woman in his life was Milena and that he (Brod) had sent the letter as a warning. A mouse appeared, parenthetically, in mid-confession: “when I saw how frightened you were, I denied (I had to get up, somewhere [irgendwo] a member of that feared race of mice [aus dem gefürchteten Mäusevolk] is gnawing away) any connection in a conscious lie” (B3 207; LM 68, trans. modified).22 The parenthetical eruption into the letter of a mouse that was also indefinitely located outside (irgendwo) caused

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Kafka (in the German original) to pause before he specified both what he had denied and that the denial was a “conscious lie.”23

Making a Mousehole Out of a Molehill? Yet while Kafka was trying to render everything clear and distinct, that possibly heard but clearly not seen mouse left one aspect of that letter indeterminable: When did Kafka “ha[ve] to get up”? Was it in the midst of writing the letter of July 5?24 Or—since no surviving letter occasions or describes the “once” when a frightened Milena asked whether Brod’s letter was a warning— did it accompany his act of denial at some indeterminate time, possibly imagined? Could it have been in the two dreams he extensively recounted to her in a pair of letters he sent her several days after the 12th ( June 14 and 15)? Indeed, Kafka at times spoke of her letters as if they were delivered in person; in the June 23 letter, he wrote of spending the evening with her letter, the content of which appears to have been on their exchange over the Reiner affair (because in response he referred to the request he had made in the June 12 letter that she leave Vienna), and noted “you have a very penetrating gaze.” Or could this “conversation” have been the scene playing out in Kafka’s mind as he was writing the June 12 letter? If the conversation described in the July 5 letter was indeed played out while Kafka was writing the June 12 letter, then what intervened between Kafka’s proleptic confirmation of the conclusion she drew from Brod’s missive and his subsequent mendacious denial? Perhaps it was not the gnawing sound of a mouse, but instead a strange anecdote about a mole that he inserted into that earlier letter. After the long extract from Brod’s letter and insisting, as he had in previous letters, that Milena “cannot remain in Vienna,” that is, that she must leave Pollak, Kafka related how “once I caught a mole (Maulwurf ) and carried him into the hops garden. When I tossed him on the ground he plunged [stürzte er sich] into the earth like a madman, disappearing as if he had dived into water.” He then drew forth a moral: “That is how one would have to hide from the story” (or must dodge this fate; So müßte man sich vor dieser Geschichte verstecken [B3 179–80; LM 44]). Was this the conversation—an exchange that he imagined as he was writing the June 12 letter—and was the Maus in fact a Maulwurf? After this fable-like interpolation, Kafka then attempted to reassure Milena that the Reiner situation was not their situation (and/or that Brod was not implying that the Reiner situation was their situation) and that he

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would not lay his “dirty . . . clawlike” (schmutzige . . . krallige), molelike hand on her. No less proleptically he had opened the letter with a series of selfcharacterizations that also evoked moles or other mole-like vermin. First, he described how, when he reads Milena’s letters, he “burrows” (ich wühle mich) into them. Then he began his description of “as far as I’m concerned what’s happening is incredible [Ungeheurliches]” in language that virtually corresponded to the mole’s action: “My world [Welt] is tumbling down [stürzt ein] . . . ,” and he concluded its litany of complaints with how much he “lament[s] the light of the sun” (B3 178–80; LM 43– 44). Together these identifications and the anecdote suggest that the entire letter was written under the sign of the mole— or a couple of signs. On the one hand, this letter seems to harken back to a much earlier mole-infested missive (August 28, 1904) that he had written to Brod; on the other, it also seems to refract another mole anecdote that had been related to Kafka in November 1914 by another Pollak—Josef, Kafka’s brother-in-law and no relation to Milena’s husband, Ernst. The June 12 letter to Milena was marked by an allusive, indefinite play of pronouns and its mole-evoking language, by which Kafka characterized aspects of himself, lacked any accompanying specific animal (self-)identification; in his 1904 letter, however, Kafka explicitly identified himself with Brod and did so by means of a mole analogy. He wrote that both of them “burrow through [durchwühlen] ourselves like a mole and emerge blackened and velvet-haired from our sandy underground vaults, our poor little red feet stretched out for tender pity.” He then recounted how he and his dog had encountered a mole. After describing his initial amusement watching the dog playing cat-and-mouse with the mole, which “kept desperately and vainly looking for a hole in the hard ground,” the story took a different turn: “But suddenly when the dog again struck it a blow with its paw, it cried out. Ks, ks, it cried.” While it is unclear what sound Kafka was invoking with “ks,” its orthographic form evokes a plenitude of Kafka’s future protagonists who would bear as their moniker the initial of their author’s surname: “K.” This less aesthetic and more literal identification with moles becomes apparent when Kafka then added “that day my head started to droop so badly that in the evening I noticed with astonishment that my chin had grown into my chest” (B 40; LFr 17). He had burrowed into himself. The mole that surfaced in Kafka’s November 4, 1914 diary entry was not one that he himself had espied. Amid all the excitement that accompanied his safe return from the front, Josef Pollak shared with his brotherin-law how an uncanny encounter with a mole made possible this home-

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coming. He had observed a mole burrowing under him in his trench at the front and saw it as a divine sign to leave that spot. The next moment the soldier behind him took a sniper’s bullet and fell atop the burrowing mole (D2 96). This recounted anecdote, like the later letter, was both structured about the configuration of mole, Pollak, and (presumably) lifesaving departure and surrounded by an aura of (expressed, as in the letter, or unexpressed) Angst.

Unearthed from Kafka’s (Moleskin?) Notebooks Yet the significance of this report of a mole sighting may be less its possible biographical resonances six years later than the narrative it may have led to some six weeks later: Kafka’s never completed story about a mole that erupted into circulating discourses and social hierarchies. He referred to the story as “Der Dorfschullehrer” (The Village Schoolmaster) but when Brod published it seven years after Kafka’s death, he retitled it “Der Riesenmaulwurf ” (The Giant Mole). Aspects of this narrative will help situate “Little Fable” within the constellation of Kafka’s performances of the Jew-as-Animal. “Those . . . who find even a small ordinary sized mole disgusting, would probably have died of disgust if they had seen [gesehen hätten] the giant mole that a few years back was observed [beobachtet geworden ist] in the neighborhood of one of our villages . . . ” (NS 1.1:194; CS 168). The closest readers ever get to observing the giant mole is in the opening sentence, and even then it is couched in the subjunctive and the passive. In the remainder of the fragmentary narrative, the mole becomes more a matter of citing than of sighting. It is a tale of two authors and their pamphlets: the eponymous village schoolmaster who wrote one entitled “A mole, larger in size than ever seen before” (NS 1.1:199; CS 171) to defend the claim for the existence of the mole, “that it had actually been seen” (NS 1.1:198; CS 170); and the unnamed narrator who, having heard of a scholar’s rude dismissal of the mole’s singularity, wrote his to help the first pamphlet achieve “the wide publicity it deserves” (NS 1.1:201; CS 172) by defending its claims. In order to avoid being influenced by the schoolmaster’s pamphlet, however, the narrator wrote his own without either reading the pamphlet or contacting its author. As the “giant mole” circulates through the fragment, Kafka is continuously playing (grammatically, indicatively, narratively) on what has been seen, possibly seen, or not seen, whether because no one was in a position to see or because there was nothing to be seen, as well as on the discourses about the (un)seen and (not) seeing. The mole would seem

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to function as a figure for the ineluctable disjunction between word and thing, whether as a matter of ontology, epistemology, or the social location of the observer. Nicholas Royle observes: “The mole, it seems, exists only in the writings of this strange discoupled couple; and the pamphlets they write are themselves examples of the text in which they appear: the mole is textual, a writing-mole.”25 For Royle, the giant mole seems to function as a figure for écriture. Yet I would like to emphasize one particular moment in the narrative in which the figure (i.e., the phrase “giant mole”) functions both literally and materially. After a leading agricultural journal dismisses the narrator’s pamphlet as a reissue of the already dismissed earlier one, the narrator concludes that neither pamphlet had been read and that “the two perfunctorily scanned expressions, ‘giant mole’ and ‘village schoolmaster,’ were sufficient for these gentlemen, as representatives of publicly esteemed interest, to pronounce on the subject” (NS 1.1:205; CS 174 –75). In the “unpardonable confusion of identity” (NS 1.1:205; CS 174) between the schoolmaster’s pamphlet about the giant mole and the narrator’s pamphlet about the schoolmaster, Kafka appears to have anticipated what would happen to his own work when Brod replaced Kafka’s own designation of the “Village Schoolmaster” with the “Giant Mole” in his efforts to help give his late friend’s work “the wide publicity it deserves” (NS 1.1:201; CS 172). Brod’s decision suggests—in line with the discussion of “Josephine” in the last chapter— that whatever indexical functions Kafka might have had in mind with his proposed title, most readers would see the mole as the subject of the story. Moreover, within the narrative, the invocation of the “giant mole” mediates a variety of hierarchical social relations, such as those between individuals and between classes; however, Brod’s substitute title, “The Giant Mole,” implicates the narrative—as seen from without, that is, as what is read—in the performance of another kind of mediation that recalls commodity fetishism. That is, Kafka’s prose displays the way by which assumptions about the collective identification of at least one of the parties in an exchange condition their interactions in a relationship that is being, in the psychoanalytic sense, acted out (rather than self-consciously worked through). The operation of the structural relation between the parties is not readily distinguished by either the story’s characters or its readers from the relationship of each party to the (animal-)object that mediates their interaction. Hence, rather than as a narrative portraying non-homologous, hierarchical social relations (urban-rural, academic-nonacademic, neighbor-stranger, and so on), Kafka’s piece is more readily received as a tale about an animal. While the history of anti-Jewish animal representation is littered with such

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“disgusting” (NS 1.1:194; CS 168) creatures, I would not argue that either “The Giant Mole” ’s or “Little Fable” ’s animal protagonists performed the Jew-as-Animal as such. I cannot definitively assert that, in these two prose extracts from his Nachlaß, Kafka had sought to intervene in Gentile/Jewish relations that are mediated by the Jew-Animal, given that they were found among his Nachlaß. More, however, is going on than Kafka just musing about that animal or what it supposedly stands for—“the Jews” for instance. What I have endeavored in the preceding analyses is to call attention to the literalization of figures (including their material morphemic-orthographic signifiers) as well as a number of the mediations that are at work when Kafka, in other animal stories examined in this volume, did undertake that performance of the Jew-as-Animal.

Die Judenfrage: “What more proof do we need?” Kafka’s implicit and explicit conjoinings of moles and mice and—no parallel intended— of Gentiles and Jews were supplemented by the “Judenfrage” ( Jewish question).26 In a final postscript to that June 12 letter, Kafka wrote: “No [Ja], you really don’t understand me either, Milena, the ‘Jewish question’ was only a dumb joke” (B3 180; LF 44). He was referring to their earlier exchange in the letter of May 30 over the Judenfrage—specifically his discussion of the question she had asked him in Czech, “are you a Jew?” and, more generally, of Gentile (and Jewish) assumptions about Jews. In that letter, he had wondered whether her question was meant as a joke or if she was wondering whether he belonged to the variety of “anxious Jews” (ängstliches Judentum [B3 149; LF 20]—“Jews are threatened by dangers from the most improbable sides or, to be more precise, let’s leave the dangers aside and say: They are threatened by threats” [B3 150; LF 21]). Prior to invoking—provoking—this feared diagnosis, Kafka had offered a humorous anecdote drawn from the memoirs of Alfred Meißner, whom Kafka identified as “a German-Bohemian poet—not Jewish.” Annoyed by the outbursts of Heinrich Heine’s wife, Mathilde, against the Germans (Deutschen), that they are “malicious, pedantic, self-righteous, petty, pushy; in short, an unbearable people” (ein unerträgliches Volk), Meißner finally replied one day: “But you don’t know the Germans at all, after all, the only people Henry sees are German journalists, and here in Paris all of them are Jewish” (B3 149–50; LF 19, trans. modified). She begged to differ, though conceded that Seiffert [sic]27 may well be Jewish. Meißner responded that he was the only non-Jew. Every name she mentioned was met with variants of “Also a Jew.” An exasperated Meißner was rendered mute after

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Mathilde naively asserted “in the end you’ll even make out that Kohn is a Jewish name, but Kohn after all is Henry’s cousin and Henry’s a Lutheran” (B3 150; LF 19). Kafka’s detailed ethnic identification of Meißner as well as his decision to insert this particular story into his response to Milena’s Judenfrage indicated that he situated the question that he saw underlying her “Are you a Jew?”—that is, the question “What is Judentum?”—as inextricably conjoined with another question that he often asked of himself, “What is German?” (Deutschtum).28 Several factors render problematic whatever significance one might assume Kafka assigned to specific aspects of the story: including whether he accepted Mathilde’s unflattering characterization of the Germans, that is, of the Jews and, by extension, of himself. Putting any such conclusion in question are not only Mathilde’s cognitive deficiencies, her inability to distinguish German Gentile from German Jew, and the logic by which she declared Kohn to be a non-Jew, but also Kafka’s prefacing the anecdote with “I undoubtedly somehow harm myself, not by the story but by telling it.” That is, its meanings are generated by its immediate context, the letter in which it is embedded, and its intended recipient. Moreover, by emphasizing performance, Kafka recognized that he was transmitting affect and, of import to this study, proliferating ambiguous identifications: of Jew and German, of Milena and Mathilde, and, possibly, of Kafka and Heine (see the material that follows and Chapters 5 and 6). After relating the story of the naïve Mathilde and the German Jews who surrounded her, Kafka invoked the recent history of Gentile concern about an “innocent girl” becoming involved with Jews. That this may have been an allusion to the Hilsner Affair (the 1899 allegation of a ritual murder of a young Christian Czech woman in Polna, for which the young Jewish shoemaker Leopold Hilsner was accused and convicted)29 was reinforced three weeks later ( June 20) in a letter to Milena. Kafka allusively30 returned to the Reiner story for the first time since he shared Brod’s account on June 12. He suggested that the perception (by Milena?) of what precipitated the Reiner tragedy and the accusation against Hilsner shared “the conviction that the Jews are bound to fall upon Christians.” Kafka further elaborated upon how this assumption is sustained by an animal analogy: “just as predatory animals [Raubtiere] are bound to murder . . . ” While emphasizing the falsity of the “conviction” about the Jew-Animal, he also offered a truism, “people seeking salvation always throw themselves at women,” that may have contributed to this errant stereotype. In order to further distance the misperception from Jewish (personal?) actuality, he added “and these women can be either Christian or Jewish” (B3 189; LM 51).31

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The recent Czech presidential election may have led Kafka to triangulate these two similar romantic triangles (Reiner-Jarmila-Haas and Pollak-Milena-Kafka) and invoke the twenty-year past Hilsner affair. Czech President Tomas Masaryk had successfully won re-election that May; during the campaign, his still unpopular interventions in defense of Hilsner and against the blood libel during the 1899 trials were once again raised against him. The account of another blood libel accusation may also have influenced Kafka’s understanding of Gentile perceptions of the JewAnimal. He confessed in an October 28, 1916 postcard to Felice Bauer (B2 268–69; LF 530) that he was reduced to tears when he read Arnold Zweig’s tragic drama Ritual Murder in Hungary about the Tisza-Eszlar Blood Libel of 1882 and the subsequent 1883 trial of the fifteen Jews accused of the murder of Eszter Solymosi. In the climactic pretrial scene (Act 3, Scene 6), Zweig stages Hungary’s leading antisemitic agitator and parliamentarian Victor (Gyözö) von Istoczy rousing the crowd against the Jews by means of fable and analogy. He relates how there once was a farmer who sought out the rats who had devoured his lamb and found 72 of them sequestered in a hole. The agitator rhetorically asks his audience whether the farmer inquired of the rats “who among you devoured the lamb?” After providing the expected negative answer, von Istoczy relates, to the applause of his audience, how the farmer hauled over hot water and boiled the rats to death. He then asks if Hungary is dumber than the farmer? And the audience shouts: “No, no!” He poses another rhetorical question: “Is a sweet young maiden of less value than a lamb?” Amid the crowd’s shouts he then sets forth his deadly analogy: “And the officials ask for proof! You are a rat; that is enough proof, says the farmer. They’re Jews; what more proof do we need?”32 Is this perhaps the gnawing of a member of the feared Mäusevolk that caused Kafka to pause in the midst of his July 5–6 letter to Milena? That is, did the gnawing resonate with what he feared was a source of her fear (“when I saw how frightened you were”; B3 207; LM 68) and what he therefore sought to disavow (“I denied” [leugnete ich]): Judentum as configured by the Bestiarium Judaicum? Did the “race of mice” (Mäusevolk) function here in a manner like the “Mouse Folk” (Volk der Mäuse) of the “Or-Title,” as discussed in Chapter 2?33 For its writer as well as its intended reader?

Ratifying the Verein: Or How Judaism Became a Religion and Jews Rats The Meißner anecdote is one of the few occasions in Kafka’s writings that Heine is mentioned by name,34 and on this occasion “Heine” is, not unlike

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the “Giant Mole,” only present as a name. There are perhaps even fewer references to Heine in the critical Kafka literature, even though literary histories often comparably situate Heine’s and Kafka’s place in the canons of German-Jewish stylists of their respective centuries as well as note their shared fondness for weaving animal tales.35 The one principal exception is Max Brod36 in his psychobiography of Heine: “It seems to me that in Kafka’s description of the endlessly complicated misunderstandings arising between the mouse-people and its great representative [zwischen dem Volk und seinem großen Repräsenten—note that the translator supplements the original and species-fies the Volk as mice] Josephine, the tribe’s overspoilt star, and in his description of the frequent strains to which their relationship is subjected, we have the best possible biography of Heine.”37 Chapters 5 and 6 will examine other interweavings of Heine and Kafka, but here, without suggesting any necessary influence, one of Heine’s own cat-and-mouse, or rather Chatten-und-Ratten, tales is the focus: “Aus der Zopfzeit” (From the Age of Pigtails [DHA 3/1:339– 40; CP 777–78]). It is one of his very last poems (written between 1852 and 1855) and would not be published until fifteen years after the poet’s death in 1856. Though not one of Heine’s best known works, noted Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni did put it to music. Heine staged this tale of human and nonhuman animal (specifically rat) tails at the gates of Kassel during a period when Heine had been interacting with a different group of German Jews than those who figured in Meißner’s anecdote: the members of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (the society for the [promulgation of the] culture and scholarly study [or science] of and by Jews), the short-lived (1819–1824), Berlincentered association of secularly educated, primarily last-decade-of-theeighteenth-century-born, German-speaking Jews, such as Eduard Gans, Ludwig Marcus, Immanuel Wolf (Wohlwill), Leopold Zunz, and Heine. In his “fable,” as he (ironically) subtitled his poem, Heine performed the Jew-as-Animal in order to show the lived contradictions between the ideality of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the actuality of these Jewish Wissenschaftlers. Heine employed the Jew-Animal Ratte and such corporeal figures as Zopf (braid, pigtail, or queue)38 and Schwanz (tail), with which German-speaking Gentiles ascribed a negatively valued Jewish identity. Decoding these figures and other historical references in the poem will not reveal a Heine allegorizing the tragic fate of his generation of German-speaking, Jewish-identified individuals during the first half of the nineteenth century. Rather Heine adopted an alternative form of the Wissenschaft des Judentums: appropriating and transforming the debasing and

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dehumanizing images of Jews, including the Jew-Animal, in order to gain some agency in determining his situation in Gentile modernity.

Excursus: The Verein, or in the words of Mother Goose, “Birds of a feather flock together, and so will pigs and swine; rats and mice will have their choice. . . .” The Verein was the breeding ground for the Wissenschaft des Judentums that was announced in Immanuel Wolf ’s lead article to vol. 1, no. 1 of the Verein’s journal (1822). It bore the telling title “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums” (On the concept of a science of Judentum).39 With Begriff, Wolf was not only referring to a rational object of scientific study, but he was also signaling the Verein’s allegiance to Hegelianism, which then dominated German intellectual discourse. The term Wissenschaft, usually translated as “science,” referred to the disciplinary practice of knowledge acquisition, organization, and transmission. The use of Judentum reflected how, entering the nineteenth century, religion, culture, and peoplehood were not, as a general rule, clearly separated from one another in identifying an individual or practice as Jewish. The members of the Verein maintained this holistic notion when conceiving of Judentum as an object of study. By situating Judentum as a part of a nominal phrase that included Begriff and Wissenschaft and within a constative rather than interrogative, Wolf asserted its legitimacy as such an object. When speaking of the subject of Judentum, of the individual Jew, of the member of a large “class of human beings” (Menschenclasse)40 known as Jews, however, another notion was in play. In the semiannual report to the Verein, its president, Eduard Gans, called for “the Jews [to] completely incorporate themselves into [the social and cultural fabric of Europe]”—that is, he called for the Jews to subsume their particularity (“the artful convergence of their domestic, political and religious life”) under the European principle. But Gans—good Hegelian that he was—reassured his audience that “To merge does not mean to perish; that everything passes without perishing, and yet persists, although it has long been consigned to the past. That is why neither the Jews will perish nor Judaism [Judentum] dissolve.” Rather the Jews would become part of “the plurality whose unity can only be found in the whole.”41 Gans called for the mechitza42 between Jews and Christians to be lowered so that they would interact with one another as Europeans in the public sphere. But what would still allow one to speak of oneself as a Jew? The members of the Verein sought to identify (in the sense of “to construct”)

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and to identify with an ideal notion of Judentum that was compatible with the intellectual values (Wissenschaft) and historicist perspectives of contemporary educated bourgeois culture in the principally Protestant German states. Unfortunately and unexceptionally, Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky, in his contemporaneous antisemitic tract The Jewish Mirror, did “not deny in the least that Jews are able to acquire scholarly knowledge. But such knowledge never ennobles their spirit or feelings.” Jews, he asserted, made up “a class of morally and spiritually degenerate people [with, as a rule, identifiable] facial characteristics, odor, and haggler’s disposition.”43 Hence, while according to Wolf, “on the level [of Wissenschaft] the relationship of strangeness in which Jews and Judaism [Juden und Judenthum] have hitherto stood to the outside world must vanish,”44 on the level of the everyday, the Jew could not overcome the identification of persistent particularity rendered visible. This particularity not only separated the class of Jews from the other classes of human society, but may have separated them from (European) humanity. Not even baptism, Heine’s prized “entrée-billet to European culture,”45 would afford entry, as the proverb “a mouse is as likely to devour a cat as a Jew is to become a devout Christian” (discussed earlier) portended and as Heine himself learned. A few months after his baptism, he wrote to his friend Moses Moser ( January 9, 1826): “I deeply regret that I had myself baptized; I’ve yet to see that it’s gone any better for me since; quite to the contrary, since then I’ve had nothing but misfortune” (HB1 235).

Kasseling: Moving the King? In “Aus der Zopfzeit” (From the Age of Pigtails) Heine’s two Murinae protagonists are seeking admission to Kassel, the capital of the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. Under the autocratic reign of Landgrave Friedrich Wilhelm IX (later Elector Wilhelm I), Hesse-Kassel had devolved at the turn of the nineteenth century into one of the most unregenerate of German absolutist states. Perhaps most indicative of this situation were the rules restricting Jewish life in its capital. As late as 1799, the wealthy Jews who were afforded the privilege to live in Kassel could not be married without the (expensive) permission of the ruler; they were unable to own or rent homes on the streets of Gentile residents of comparable economic standing; and their daughters, once they had reached marriageable age, could no longer remain in Kassel.46

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Following Napoleon’s 1806 victory over Prussia, Hesse’s chief ally, Wilhelm’s realm was itself invaded by the French. The Elector fled, and Kassel became the capital of the new Kingdom of Westphalia ruled by Napoleon’s younger brother, Jerome. Among the many changes instituted by the new regime were freedom of religion and the awarding of equal citizen rights to the Jews of the Kingdom. The wealthy businessman Israel Jacobson and the Consistory, the newly formed governing body of Kassel’s Jewish community that he led, pioneered religious and pedagogical reforms of Jewish communal life. Following the defeat of Napoleon and the return of Elector Wilhelm, the requirement that his soldiers bear Zöpfe or queues was restored and all of the liberal legislation, especially those laws that had deregulated Jewish residency restrictions, was repealed.47 Elector Wilhelm also hoped to receive from the victorious powers, then busy redrawing post-Napoleonic Europe at the Congress of Vienna, the title of “King of the Chatti” (König der Chatten), a Germanic tribe that had resided at the turn of the eras on what would become Hessian territory. It was Wilhelm’s last nostalgic delusion of grandeur—the evocation of an even more ancien régime—that provided the entrée for Heine’s fable and its twining of braids and tails, for the tribal name occasioned a multilingual pun: “chat” is French for cat and what more appropriate rhyme for Chatten than Ratten, rats. Moreover, the rhyme allowed Heine to deploy, ironically, a verminous figure from the subfamily Murinae that had been strongly associated with the Jews, in order, in part, to represent the farcical original (i.e., post-Napoleonic Germany) as a commentary on history once again (i.e., in post-1848 Germany) repeating itself.48 That is, the removal of virtually all restrictions on Jewish life that accompanied the March 1848 revolution in Prussia did not survive the restoration of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV49 as they had not with the restoration of Elector Wilhelm after the liberation of Hesse-Kassel from French occupation. Moreover, Heine may have feared a repeat of Jewish responses to their disappointed hopes that their emancipatory advances would stay in place with the postrevolutionary return of the monarch. Heine’s fable follows two starving rats and their conversation in front of Kassel’s gate and its rifle- and Zopf-bearing guard. He is blocking their entry into the city and the consequent satisfaction of their hunger. Thus impeded, these “chosen creatures” (auserwählten Geschöpfe), whose distinguishing mark is their circumcised-penis-alluding Schwanz (tail), apostrophically seek the favor of the Elector, the lover of the good old days and of pigtails (Philozopf); this latest example of Heine’s remarkable talent for

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the production of portmanteau words also alludes to the Elector’s model, the would-be philosopher-king, Frederick the Great of Prussia.50 They beseech Wilhelm to overcome the opposition of the common Hessian, just as Schutzjuden (privileged Jews) had sought the protection of local sovereigns for centuries from their subjects. In his declamation, the second rat repeatedly ties (the ancient) Chatti’s braids to the rats’ tails. The rats would first ground their claim in history: The pigtails that the Chatti plaited Were like the rats they emulated. The pigtail’s [Zopf] but the symbol thus, For rattails [Des Schwanzes] Nature gave to us,

The mutual implication of Zopf and Schwanz recognizes that fraternal rivalry (die Chatten /Wetteiferten mit den Ratten) is not the source of hatred; rather, it is the source of their identity. Moreover, “From the Age of Pigtails” suggests that Jews are not excluded because of the human disposition to hatred but most immediately because of relations of domination, and most fundamentally due to the dominant’s desire to render the dominated predecessor (i.e., the Jews) into an always already deficient copy. As flawed and belated imitations, they could not undermine the rulers’ claims to autonomy and autochthony and thus to authority. In Kassel, this proposed shared cross-species genealogy proves an insufficient justification for either guard or prince to allow the rats entry.51 Ever persistent, they next invoke the logic of natural alliance (natürliche Bundesgenossen): We chosen [auserwählten] creatures—Nature designed us With built-in pigtails right behind us. O Prince, if you love the Chatti and such, Then you must love us rats as much; For us your heart must skip and dance, For Nature pigtailed [bezopft] us in advance.

Yet, in both instances, however profound the likeness, it would not matter. Finally, the two rats offer not only to serve the Elector with love and loyalty (Lieb und Treu), but also promise as final homage and proof their readiness to cut off their tails upon his death and braid them into a wreath that would coif the fallen prince like a laurel crown. The price of Jewish survival—the bitter pathos of Jewish willingness to sacrifice their identity

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(i.e., cut off their tails; Wir schneiden uns traurig die Schwänze ab) as well as the allusion to the humiliating annual tribute of “five thousand rat’s tails” (Rattenschwänze) once required of Frankfurt’s Jews that Heine recalled in his earlier (1840) novella-fragment The Rabbi of Bacherach52—is then ironized by its cost to the Prince: his death. Jews would never be accepted qua Jews but only as tail-less rats. With this recognition comes the ironic and literal rejoinder: “over your dead body.”

Excursus: A Freudian Rat iocination The identification of Jews and those cousins of mice, rats, stalked Sigmund Freud’s 1909 case study, Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, as well as his original case notes, the only such preserved record of one of Freud’s cases. In stark contrast to Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer,” a chain of animal-evocative phonemes, orthographs, and morphemes overran Freud’s case study and case notes53 of an obsessional neurotic, who went unnamed in the text. Though many decades passed before his name was revealed to be that of the Austrian Jewish lawyer Ernst Lanzer, from the moment (April 27, 1908) Freud presented his near four-hour report on the case to an enthralled audience at the First International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Salzburg, his patient and, following its publication less than a year later, his case study bore the sobriquet “The Rat Man” (“Der Rattenmann”).54 Lanzer was beset by “the great obsessive fear” that, because he had failed to pay a debt, “a person who was very dear to” him would have a pot filled with rats tied to her buttocks and that they would then bore into her anus. He had heard an account of this “specially horrible punishment used in the East” during the same military maneuvers that he had lost his pince-nez and had to order a new pair C.O.D. Not present when they arrived, someone else paid for them in his stead. It was his inability, as a consequence of events outside his control, to repay the debt promptly that excited this specific fear and was the immediate cause of his seeking out Freud (RMN 165–73). Throughout the case study and the preserved case notes (and marginalia) both Freud and Lanzer unleash a whole swarm of “rat[t]-/rät-” containing or sounding words. In his remarkable examination of Freud and the Rat Man, Patrick J. Mahony demonstrates how “Feeding on both semantic and phonetic similarities, [rat] symbolism had a self-generating momentum.”55 Beyond word-combinations that range from “Rattenabenteur” (rat-adventure) through “Rattenmamsell” (the Rat-Wife who leads Ibsen’s title character Little Eyolf to his drowning death) and Lanzer’s mother’s thin hair braid “Rattenschweif ” (rat tail) to “Rattenzahn” (rat tooth),56

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such permutations of the seme “rat-” as (in order of frequency) [ver] heirat[en] (marriage/marry), erraten (guess), geraten (came to [for example, a conclusion]), Rätsel[haft] (riddle/puzzling), verraten (betray), Spielratte (gambler), and Rat (advice) circulate through both Freud’s case study and his preserved case notes.57 Mahony comments that “Equally notable was [Lanzer’s] memory of his gambling father who was financially rescued by a comrade—the final d in the German term Kamerad is pronounced like a t [and] Lanzer even shortened the a of Raten (installments) so that the word was pronounced like Ratten (rats).”58 What Mahony, with his use of “even,” suggests is quite a phonetic stretch and hence an indicator that the force of Lanzer’s compulsion may also be an indicator of something else. Freud sees the anal eroticism aroused by hearing the story of the rat punishment as the root cause of Lanzer having included “money” as one of the meanings he ascribes to rats. Symptomatic of this is his59 reacting to the “Ratten” [“rats”] with the association “Raten” [“installments”]. . . . When . . . I told him the amount of my fee for an hour’s treatment, he said to himself (as I learned six months later): “So many florins, so many rats.” Little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of money interests which centred round his father’s legacy to him; that is to say, all his ideas connected with that subject were by way of the verbal bridge “Raten—Ratten,” carried over into his obsessional life and brought under the dominion of his unconscious. (RMN 213–14; cf. ON 548, 551; OR 288, 293)

The psychoanalyst Stanley S. Weiss argues that “To understand the importance of the association Raten, it is helpful to know that in south Germany and, most likely, in neighboring Austria, it was primarily the Jewish businessman who was beginning to develop installment buying as a legitimate business practice for the working middle class . . . a part payment agreement between the businessman and the customer.”60 As Mahony notes, without suggesting any possible motivation, Freud did not “address himself to the implications of the fact.”61 This is not surprising for a case study published in 1909. Between 1905 and 1915, Freud obsessively omitted any mention of Judentum from his discussion of case material; he also employed rhetorical misdirection to mask his or his patients’ Jewish identities.62 What makes these strategies so apparent in Ernst Lanzer’s case study is that the original case record (at least for its first 15 weeks, October 1, 1907–January 20, 1908) has been preserved. Yiddish and German-Jewish expressions permeate Freud’s

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notes as do discussions of conversion, intermarriage, antisemitism, and the Jewishness of Lanzer’s fiancée and later wife. Freud may well have feared that should he betray Lanzer’s Jewishness, the references to his patient’s moments of cowardice, possible homosexual object-choice, money concerns, and virtual identification with rats,63 would evoke anti-Jewish stereotypes and transform his case from a case study of obsessive neurosis into a field report on “the Jew.” Perhaps, the obsessive circulation of the Rattenidee was more than an unacknowledged countertransference;64 perhaps it was also a defense mechanism against any possible corroboration of the harm-provoking overcoding of the Jewish/Gentile opposition with the Animal/Human one. Perhaps what Freud recorded as Lanzer’s own recognition about “More rat-stories; but as he admitted in the end, he had only collected them in order to evade the transference phantasies which had come up” (OR 289) could be said of Freud oversowing his case study with “Rat-” semes.65 This defensive dissemination may have provided another obstacle to such overcoding of Jewish/Gentile opposition: By shifting “Ratte” to the phonemic and morphemic orders of (human) language, the animal/human one is de-naturalized and rendered indefinite.

Kasseling: Getting Rooked? The choice of Kassel as well as the language of Ratten, Chatten, Zöpfe, and Schwänze together with the allusions to Jews and circumcision in the poem may have been determined by more than the accidents of history and good verbal and visual puns. The fable seems to be echoing a number of concerns expressed (perhaps in the spirit of an Aprilscherz) in Heine’s 1823 letter to his friend and fellow Verein member Immanuel Wolf (Wohlwill) that he began on April 1 as well as in several of Heine’s subsequent writings that followed up on the life of a Jewish scholar discussed in the letter: Ludwig Marcus. The letter, written a little over two years before Heine’s resort to baptism, contrasts two opposing forms of Jewish response to the dominant Gentiles’ demands of assimilation to, as well as to the Jews’ own desires for integration in, a society that not only continued to restrict many facets of Jewish life, but also maintained its hegemonic determination of Jewish identification within it. One response is represented by the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden and by its attempt to construct Judentum as not only a culture, whose intellectual contributions did not end with the birth of Christianity and are of wissenschaftlich value to study and transmit, but also as the cultural ideal by which Jews would become self-

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conscious of themselves as members of a community that has been intrinsic to the development of European society.66 The other is represented by the movement, begun a generation earlier, to reform Jewish religion by delimiting Judentum to a private, denominational existence that followed liberal German Protestantism as the denominational model. Leaders of this group, including the banker David Friedländer, Mendelssohn’s foremost pupil and a prominent leader of Berlin’s Jewish community, and Israel Jacobson, who moved to Berlin after Wilhelm had disbanded Kassel’s Jewish Consistory upon his return to power, were also involved with the Verein as often unreliable sources of support, financial and otherwise, for the younger cohort, especially Ludwig Marcus. Heine’s later representations of Marcus would present another contrast in a society in which the continued constraints on Jewish life and livelihood led to another form of Jewish identification: the baptized Jew. That is, between an individual who purchased this so-called “ticket of admission” only to discover that it was neither as advertised nor refundable (Heine), and another individual who refused the offer (Marcus). Before discussing that contrast, it is necessary to address Heine’s April 1, 1823 letter to Wolf. In that letter, Heine first describes his visit to the exhibition of two Chinese scholars, along with yet another Verein member, Moses Moser. Though Heine makes no direct reference here to the Zöpfe (pigtails) of the exhibited, he does muse that they are perhaps costumed Austrians sent by the architect of restoration and reaction, Metternich, to work over the Verein’s statutes (“Constituzion”—yet another portmanteau word [HB1 71]), such as its membership prohibition for converts to Christianity. Strands of irony and self-irony interweave this reference: Perhaps the Jewish scholarship and scholars of the Verein are indulged simply for their exhibition value and not for the products of their labor by which they could claim access to the seats in front of and not in the exhibit—after all, the Chinese had long since been described in the travel literature and more recently analogized in philosophical literature as the Jews of the East.67 Faint echoes of Solomon Maimon’s “talking animal” may also be heard here. Further, Heine’s invocation of Metternich betrays the recognition68 that nothing short of conversion would allow the integration of Jewry. Heine’s association train then moves from noting that the foremost scholar, Wissenschaftler des Judentums, Leopold Zunz and his wife had not yet (noch nicht) seen the exhibition to commenting on Zunz’s wife constantly (noch immer genug) seeing her husband’s “repellant” pockmocks (Pockennarben)69 to invoking “those quacks (Friedländer & Co.) . . .” (HB1 71). The word translated as “quacks” is Hühneraugenoperateurs,

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which is a hybrid of the graphic German word for a corn on the bottom of a foot—Hühnerauge (lit. hen eye)—and the French term that is a cognate of the English “operator”; the term refers to a chiropodist, the archetypal quack who provides relief from the symptom (here the corn) but, by ignoring the cause, ensures returning symptoms and customers. By no means a Heine neologism, this monstrous mix of German nature and French civilization is here substituted for the usual German-German compound: Hühneraugenbeschneider—a corn clipper or circumciser (also see Chapter 6). Heine comments that these religious reformers have attempted to cure Judentum’s body from “its fatal boils [Hautgeschwür—inverting Zunz’s pockmarks] by drawing blood.” Heine adds, “through their klutziness [Ungeschicklichkeit] and gauzy rationalizations [spinnwebige Vernunftbandagen] [they] are bleeding Israel to death” (BH1 72). Then Heine makes several comments on their beardlessness. These con artists “do not have the strength to wear a beard,” which for centuries had distinguished Jews from beardless—and more recently bezöpft (Zopf-bearing)— Gentiles. Further, whereas a generation earlier, Jews seeking integration into German society would often exchange beard for Zopf,70 with the change in coiffeurial fashion, these assimilants substitute instead a Beffchen—that is, the little white clerical collar that reflected the appropriation of Protestant vestments and reverence by Reform Rabbis. This practice further suggests that they are no longer identifiable by their jüdischer Köpfe ( Jewish heads; idiomatically, intelligence). Finally and mockingly, Heine unveils the height of the reformers’ moralistic masquerade: “they wish to dress the Hercules atop Kassel’s Wilhelmshöhe (Wilhelm’s Height) with the brown shortcoat [Jäckchen] of little [Ludwig] Marcus” (BH1 72).

The Metamorphosis of Marcus Like so much of Heine’s work this image is overdetermined. The bronze statue of a naked Hercules leaning on his Nemean Lion skin– covered cudgel, built in the early eighteenth century, was at the time the largest in any German state. The sculpture of Hercules had been mounted because Tacitus had compared the ancient and autochthonous Germans to the demigod, and Kassel’s Hercules would become the model for the later towering, nationalist, sculpted monuments of Hermann and Bavaria. It was placed at the highest point in Kassel. The name Wilhelmshöhe had all the more significance to restoration Germany. When Kassel was incorporated in the Kingdom of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte renamed the entire castle park

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complex Napoleonshöhe.71 Among the first acts of Elector Wilhelm upon his return was the restoration of the park’s original name. Of more significance is the identity of the individual whose shortcoat has been appropriated. The “little Marcus” was Ludwig Marcus, Heine’s fellow classmate in Hegel’s lectures and a fellow member of the Verein. Marcus was born in Dessau, and in Heine’s affectionate 1844 eulogy of Marcus, written after his friend’s death among the other mad patients in Jean Pierre Casimir Pinel’s asylum on Paris’s rue de Chaillot, Heine noted that Marcus shared more than a common birthplace with Moses Mendelssohn (DHA 14/1:265–66). Like Mendelssohn, Marcus had the small stature of an eight-year-old boy and the countenance of an old man but without the hunchback of his celebrated predecessor. Both brandished a sense of justice with stoical patience, had an indomitable love for their fellow Jews, and manifested an intellectual omnivorousness. Coming from very modest circumstances and perpetually underemployed, Marcus was often in dire financial straits. Heine and other members of the Verein took it upon themselves to find support for their colleague among its wealthier ex officio members such as Friedländer or Jacobson. Their efforts at soliciting funds usually met without success.72 Hence it is bitterly ironic that these not always so generous reformers would be taking from rather than giving to Marcus. More ironic still is that the short Marcus’s shortcoat would not be able to cover the uncircumcised penis of the naked demigod; their assimilationist pretensions—and implicit acceptance of the Gentiles’ moral denunciation of traditional, caftan-wearing Jews—are easily seen through. A transfiguration of Hercules in Ludwig Marcus clothing figures prominently in Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (From the memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski), the novel fragment Heine published in 1833/34 (and may have begun to write as early as his Berlin years). It contains a character named Simson—that is, Samson, whose fabled strength and barehanded lion slaying led to his being labeled in the eighteenth century as the Jewish Hercules. Simson’s most un-Samson-like small stature, character, and passion for the Jewish people and their history have led a number of later readers to see him modeled after Ludwig Marcus.73 The never-completed novel breaks off at Simson’s deathbed. Having been stabbed in the lungs during a duel defending the honor of the god of Israel, Jehovah, against a Fichtean Philistine, Simson requests to spend his last moments listening to the story of his namesake living among the gentile Philistines. When his friend Schnabelewopski begins to read Judges 14:1, Simson insists that he jump to Chapter 16. Before Schnabelewopski can recount Samson’s naive self-betrayal and death, however, Simson sum-

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marizes the omitted passages with a list of victimized or exploited animals, including how the Philistines treated “us” like pigs as well as references to sheep, foxes, donkeys, horses, and goats.74 Alas Simson, who, like the Israelite judge after his braided locks (geflochtenen Locken) were shorn and his eyes blinded, would shake the pillars so that the Philistines would die with him, pathetically is unable even to move his bedposts. With only Schnabelewopski75 as a witness, Simson dies without effect, and the novelfragment comes to an abrupt stop (DHA 5:195). The final mediation between Heine’s earlier letter to Wolf and his later Kasseler76 fable was his 1844 memorial essay for Marcus. Marcus’s fate serves Heine as a case study of a tragic illness. This is not the incurable malady that Jews had suffered from for millennia, that is, das Judentum, as Heine reported in the poem “The New Jewish Hospital in Hamburg” (DHA 2:117; CP 398), also published that year, but rather another that had crippled and continued to cripple German Jewry. He is referring to the restrictions on Jews. The never-converted Marcus had been led to travel to Dijon, France in order to overcome the restriction that had frustrated the realization of a Judentum as envisaged by the would-be academics of the Verein. In France he assumed a professorship that would have been impossible in any German state. In the eulogistic essay, Heine recommends that rather than demand baptism, the German states should allow the Jews to maintain their indelible seal of identity, circumcision: “when faith is inscribed [eingeschnitten] in the flesh it no longer need be inscribed [eingeschnitten] in the spirit [Geist]” (DHA 14/1:271).77 It is by means of circumcision that Heine is able to connect Marcus’s earlier intense involvement with Jewish history to his last studies of Abyssinia. The memorialist notes Marcus’s contribution to the one volume of its journal that the Verein had published. In the article Marcus proposed a study of “the natural aspect of the Jewish state” to be modeled after the interrelationship among culture, topography, character, and knowledge that he sketched there of the Chinese. Heine limits his account of Marcus’s article to its discussion of circumcision among Abyssinian ( Jewish) women, first, to bear witness to the lengths Marcus went in order to pursue not only a career but also a wissenschaftlich agenda while never converting and, then, to risibly refer to one who chose conversion as his path to an academic appointment, Eduard Gans.78 At the end of his contribution, Marcus briefly suggested three directions he would like to undertake in such a study of those other Asians, the Jews. The first, which Heine discusses, concerned circumcision among Jewish women (as well as men) in Abyssinia. Marcus’s other two proposed projects insinuated the significant role the animal

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played in Gentile Jewish identification: Jewish animal sacrifice (which at the time of Heine’s obituary for Marcus was routinely and tendentiously tied to alleged Jewish child sacrifice and to its supposed symbolic substitute, circumcision)79 and Shechitah (in Hebrew letters in original), Jewish ritual animal slaughter or butchery, whose practitioners, especially in smaller towns, also served as the communities’ mohels, their ritual circumcisers.80 These two entailed Jews’ relations with animals, specifically with Jews killing animals, and, as part of a series, implied a connection with the primary marker of Jewish identification and the first of Marcus’s foci, circumcision. For Marcus the relationship among (nonhuman) animals, difference, and Jewish identification, that is, “the natural aspect of Judentum,” was other than the Bestiarium Judaicum. As this chapter comes to an end, the analyses of Kafka’s “Little Fable” and Heine’s “From the Age of Pigtails” seem to have become increasingly cat-, mouse- and rat-less among those, at times, ratlos (clueless) Jewish-identified individuals. Even as I take Schmidt to task for using Kafka’s story as a mere occasion for other historical presentations, I would like to claim that this chapter’s treatment of Kafka and Heine has been less cavalier. While I have not offered an interpretation of what “Little Fable” means in and of itself, neither have I left it by the wayside. Rather, the chapter sought to situate its emergence within a network of Kafka’s engagements with animals, with Jewish identification, with Gentile-Jewish relations, and with those discursive moments in which they have interpenetrated such that they provide some insight into Kafka’s performance of the Jew-as-Animal. Similarly, even as the discussion of Heine seemed to have ended with what he omitted to mention in his Necrolog of Ludwig Marcus, not only have I attempted to provide a thorough [eingehend], if not complete, analysis of Heine’s poem and his deployment of rats and their Zopf-like appendages, but I’ve also endeavored, by attending to the resonances of one of its elements, its setting in Kassel, to avoid reducing the poem to mere fable or allegory and instead draw forth a fuller picture of the world of asymmetrical, often Jew-Animal–mediated, German-Jewish relations in which the Verein and the Wissenschaft des Judentums emerged and that helped shape the lives of these Jewish-identified individuals. Purportedly Jewish mice make an appearance in the next chapter as Josephine once again pipes up. Mauscheling mice, however, give way to aping apes as it examines how both Jewish efforts at European integration and Darwinian analyses of the ability to blend into their environment (Umgebung), enhancing animal species survival, converged on “the Jew” ’s allegedly innate mimetic talent.

chapter 4

“If you could see her through my eyes . . .” Semitic Simiantics Jewish mimicry is anchored in the destiny of the race, that is, in the idea Jew. —hans blüher1

Chapter 2 examined the murine and Jewish identifications of Kafka’s Josephine the singer, that is, of Josephine the performer of other people’s creations. During the Era of the Jewish Question, Jews were usually assumed to be incapable of the authentic cultural production by creative artists; they could only be practitioners of the reproductive arts, such as acting, musical performance, and journalism. This pervasive linkage of Jews to imitation generated tremendous obstacles for Jewish integration into European societies, even after Emancipation. Individual Jewish strategies, such as acculturation and achievement, were met in the dominant culture by counter interpretations. Acculturating Jews were informed: Jews cannot become Europeans; they can only imitate them. And Jewish accomplishments were gainsaid since Jews cannot create; they can only either re-create or corrupt. Commenting in 1901 on the reaction of Gentiles to so-called Jewish assimilation, the Russian Zionist Max Mandelstamm observed that “they did not rightly know what was the more astonishing” about the process, including “their mimetic ability, that surpassed the achievements of the most developed apes.”2 This chapter portrays the naturalized association of Jews with the mimetic as an identifier of “the Jew.” While briefly revisiting 109

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“Josephine the Singer” to examine how such assumptions provided some subtle coloration of the work’s tone, this chapter focuses, in particular, on the association of Jews with the exemplary figures of natural imitation, apes and monkeys, and its apparent (ironic? ambivalent?) reinscription in Kafka’s Red Peter and his “Report to an Academy.” Yet prior to examining some Jewish responses to the identification of the animalized Jewish mimic, this chapter turns to the allegation that Jews innately lack creativity and then to naturalizations of their no less alleged mimetic or imitative faculty.3

A People without Genius . . . Standard accounts of modern Jewish history—indeed, of modern Euroamerican culture— discuss extensively the contributions of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and other figures popularly identified as Jewish. The influence of Jews, such surveys suggest, far exceeds the community’s percentage of the general population.4 One scholar has gone so far as to declare, “The modern age is the Jewish age and the twentieth century, in particular, the Jewish century.”5 The prominence of so many Jews among Nobel Prize winners has also led one leading psychoanalyst to conclude that the Jews typify the creative individual.6 These lists not only generate naches (pride) for Jews themselves but also produce a host of expectations, assumptions, and stereotypes among both Jews and Gentiles: For example, all “New York intellectuals” are popularly assumed to be “Jewish”;7 conversely, all Jews are supposed to be smart.8 Back in the 1990s these opinions were combined in Seattle, where “Being Jewish is a sign of East Coast coolness, so some Seattleites claim to be Jews for the image boost”; they called it “Jewish credibility.”9 But there is another tradition that disputes what is now taken for granted: a tradition, now largely dormant, that believes it knows what a Jew is; a tradition that denies Jews have ever had the capacity for creative, culture-enhancing work and that ascribes the lack to innate flaws in Jewish character; a tradition that credits the appearance of genius among Jews to their mimicry and market manipulation. The Jews, its adherents have argued, are by definition without genius; they can only imitate or destroy. This other tradition flourished as Jews were phlegmatically granted emancipation in Western and Central Europe. Where the baptismal certificate had been, in Heine’s soon-retracted phrase, “the entreé-billet to European culture,” now Jews sought entry through acculturation or achievement. By these strategies for social integration and acceptance

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they attempted to negotiate their way in a post-Enlightenment Europe that celebrated originality: The creative was associated with the god-like, with authorship, with autonomy, with the true. Genius and geniuses were the objects of personality cults— especially those Aryan geniuses such as Nietzsche and, according to a number of racist ideologues, that native of the non-Semitic hills of Galilee, Jesus.10 The denial of Jewish genius endeavored to counter Jewish acculturation and accomplishment as well as to perpetuate anti-Jewish stereotypes. The claim that Jews by nature may have certain talents but are incapable of genius permeated most of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature labeled antisemitic, and it infected as well the writings and self-identities of contemporary Jews: not just that exemplary self-hating Jew Otto Weininger, but also Freud,11 Ludwig Wittgenstein,12 and Max Nordau.13 While standard histories of modern Jewry regale the reader with the fruits of Jewish achievement, they have often already spat out the pits: In post-Emancipation Europe, the scientific and artistic work of Jews left many non-Jewish contemporaries with a bad taste in their mouths. Thus, rather than a science with universal applicability, Freud feared—with good reason—that psychoanalysis would be branded a “Jewish national affair” and dismissed as a mere manifestation of certain Jewish proclivities.14 His diagnosis of the sexual origin of neurosis, some held, was provoked by the typical obsession of the lewd, egoistic, and materialist Jews: Jews focus on the gutter, the bedroom, and the animal rather than the true universals of soul, spirit, and transcendence. Ironically, Carl Jung, whom Freud initially hoped would shield psychoanalysis from this accusation, came later to brand Freud’s work as a “Jewish psychology,” a “Semitic psychology” incapable of recognizing the Germanic peoples’ “creative and intuitive depth of soul.”15 Einstein’s theory of relativity provided another occasion for an attempted discrediting of a Jew’s scientific accomplishment. It was repudiated as the product of Jewish physics, not scientific principles, by the Nobel Prize winner Johannes Stark and the Third Reich academic Wilhelm Mueller. Rather than pursuing the truth, writes Mueller in his Jewry and Science, Einstein sought in typical Jewish fashion to transform the “living . . . into spectral abstraction in which all individual differences . . . are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survives which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws.”16 Rather than being universally hailed, the contributors to a so-called Jewish bacteriology—researchers such as Albert Neisser, the discoverer of the gonococcus bacterium; August Wasserman, who devised

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the test for syphilis; and Paul Ehrlich, who developed salvarsan, the first successful treatment for syphilis—were accused of infecting rather than treating their patients with venereal and other diseases.17 Such attacks on the scientific and philosophic accomplishment of Jews had an underlying assumption: Judentum lacked any culture-producing capacity. Being neither original nor creative, the Jewish genius was by definition an oxymoron and nowhere to be found. The founder of Semitic philology, Ernest Renan, instituted the absence of creativity as a key component of the Jews’ mental physiognomy. He began his general history of comparative Semitic languages by asserting that Semitic peoples “completely lack a creative imagination.”18 This characterization directly contrasted with the other great (linguistic) race, the culture-producing Indo-Europeans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the influential antisemitic racial historiography Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and son-in-law of Richard Wagner, also emphasized this purported lack: “In comparison with Rome and still more so with Hellas [the Jews’] intellectual horizon appears so narrow, their mental capacities so limited, that we seem to have before us an entirely new type of being.” He remarked upon the inherent absence of Jewish genius, their “narrowness and want of originality . . . the influence of the Jews—for good and for evil—lies in their character, not in their intellectual achievements.”19 The philosopher Eugen Dühring graphically depicted that narrowness and lack of genius in his vitriolic antisemitic opus, The Jewish Question as a Racial, Ethical, and Cultural Question: “The Jewish skull is no thinker’s skull—all the time the Lord God and business affairs have claimed all the space in it.”20 Those achievements that contemporary Jews—and later historians— would acclaim were instead mocked. In his 1879 “Our Prospects” (Unsere Aussichten), Prussia’s foremost historian, Heinrich Treitschke, reduced the value of Jewish creations to the product of publicists. Treitschke’s incendiary article offered Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews as an exemplar of Jewish arrogance and so-called genius by facetiously commenting that therein “it is proved with continuous satirical invective [beständigen hämischen Schimpfreden] that the nation of Kant was really educated to humanity by the Jews only, [and] that the language of Lessing and Goethe became sensitive to beauty, spirit, and wit only through [the Jewish-born writers] Boerne and Heine.” Treitschke continued: Among the leading names of art and science there are not many Jews. The greater is the number of Semitic hustlers among the third rank talents [die betriebsame Schaar der semitischen Talente dritten Ranges]. And

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how firmly this bunch of literateurs [Literatenschwarm] hangs together! How safely this insurance company for immortality works, based on the tested principle of mutuality, so that every Jewish poetaster receives his one-day fame, dealt out by the newspapers immediately and in cash, without delayed interest.21

According to Treitschke, the Jews’ one and only invention was their own good press. The most influential statement on Jewish genius— or its absence—preceded these contributions to the other tradition: the composer Richard Wagner’s infamous tract Das Judentum in der Musik ( Judentum in Music). First published anonymously in 1850, the essay was reissued—bearing its author’s name—in 1869 with a long supplement. Wagner there intoned, “The Jews have brought forth no true poet. . . . At the time when Goethe and Schiller sang among us, we certainly knew nothing of a poetic Jew” ( JM 99). Wagner’s invective was especially directed at Heine, whom he claimed lacked either true musicality or poetic genius and was responsible for the increasing Verjudung ( Jewification) of modern civilization.22 And what applied to poetry applied all the more to music: “[D]own to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jewish composer” ( JM 99). Only when German poetry and music began to ebb, did so-called poets and composers of Jewish descent such as Heine, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy emerge—and their work only mockingly pointed out the German dearth. For Wagner, this lack was not a historical anomaly; it was Jewish nature. He bluntly asserted that the Jew “is innately incapable of presenting himself to us artistically through either his outward appearance or his speech, and least of all through his singing . . . ” ( JM 87). When accomplishment seemed to belie this apothegm, when a Heine or a Mendelssohn-Bartholdy would produce verse or a violin sonata, then such work was denigrated as clever or derivative or technical. The only site of Jewish music was in the synagogue, but like Judentum itself, Jewish liturgical music had been fixed in form and substance for millennia; hence it was lifeless, without feeling, senseless, distorted. Wagner solicited confirmation of his observations about the Jews’ beastly cacophony and understanding for their seemingly nasty tone: “Who has not been seized with a feeling of the greatest revulsion, of horror mingled with the absurd, at hearing that sense-and-sound-confounding gurgle, yodel, and cackle, which no intentional caricature can make more repugnant . . . ?” ( JM 91). Accompanying Wagner’s assault on Jews and their music-making in the long 1869 appendix was an attack on the press that had wronged him; while

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they were lauding Jewish so-called geniuses, Wagner bemoaned, music critics had actively refused to recognize his own gifts. He characterized his journalistic enemies as either Jewish (even when they were not)23 or serving Jewish interests. By the time of the republication of Wagner’s diatribe, comparable accusations of the press’s specific Jewish character and concerns were becoming widespread. Assertions that the acclaim and genial judgment of artworks by Jews (whether baptized or not) were more products of their press than of their creativity at times complemented, at other times offered an alternative to, Wagner’s assumptions about Jewish nature. For example, in The Road into the Open Arthur Schnitzler, without intending to corroborate Wagner’s underlying essentialist assumptions about Jews, had one character comment that the baseless claims for musical genius of another character, the wealthy Jewish salonière Else Ehrenberg (see Chapter 2), would nonetheless be proclaimed by some “modern critic.” At one point, Edmund Nuernberger, an older Jewish novelist whose art and life enacted the great ideals of post-Emancipation liberalism and the subsequent recognition of their emptiness with its collapse, sardonically encouraged Else: “I am even convinced that there would very soon be found a modern critic who would declare you a great singer . . . precisely . . . because you possess no voice; who will discover, for example, some other gift instead that he finds characteristic of you.”24 The claim that the Jewish talent for marketing— especially the marketing of their own— and not Jewish genius was the actual source of their prominence became a commonplace that through a variety of routes, including via the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna, may have found its way, albeit in a new key, to Kafka. The Jewish-born Otto Weininger’s notorious 1903 treatise Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) was another major way station. It brought together Wagner’s denial of Jewish genius with the dismissal of the reputation-creating power of publicity. For example, Weininger commented, Spinoza “the most outstanding Jew of the last 1900 years . . . is hugely overrated everywhere, owing less to a deeper study of his works than to the accidental circumstance that he is the only thinker whom Goethe read in some detail” (SC 285). But Weininger placed his own spin on this particular Jewish want: It illustrated the intrinsic effeminacy of Jewish males: “Judentum like Woman is denied the highest degree of genius” (SC 285); “For musical productivity requires infinitely more imagination than that possessed by the most masculine woman [or Jew]” (SC 105). Weininger also held that their musical deficiencies, in particular, exemplified why Jews could never manifest genius. Sounding a somewhat different

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chord than his predecessor Wagner, he wrote, “the Jew does not sing . . . because he does not believe in his own singing” (SC 293–94). This proved to Weininger that they lacked the simplicity characteristic of music and of genius. Alas, Weininger’s view of himself as a genius ever remained clouded by his Jewish descent.25 Although he characterized the physical, moral, and intellectual attributes of Negroes and Mongols in race-specific terms that differentiated them from the Indo-European or Aryan (SC 273), noted that Jews have for millennia practiced inbreeding (SC 278), and argued, against the theory put forth by Chamberlain and others that Jewry and Jewishness are a product of racial mixing, that “the Jewish race indeed seems to me to be quite peculiar, uniform, and very distinct” from “the other peoples of the earth,” Weininger nonetheless asserted that Judentum was more an intrinsic human character flaw than a racial essence: “Judentum must be regarded as a cast of mind, a psychic constitution, which is a possibility for human beings and which has only found its most magnificent realization in historical Judentum” (SC 274; emphasis and italics in original). Even “Wagner . . . cannot be cleared of having a Jewish element . . . [H]is music . . . cannot be entirely cleared of a certain flashiness, loudness, and brashness” (SC 274). Everyone had some of “the Jew” within that needed to be extirpated, but for Weininger, who would commit suicide in the home of his archetypal Aryan musical genius Beethoven six months after the publication of Sex and Character, those of Jewish descent had a surfeit of the stuff.

But with a Talent for Imitation While the Jews were denied creativity, they were credited with an innate mimetic or imitative talent. Imitation was viewed as an essential part of Jewish nature. The acquisition of Bildung and other signs of acculturation as the pre-eminent strategy for social integration by Western- and Central-European Jews seemed to confirm the pervasive presumption of a strong relationship between Judentum and mimicry. With the advent of Emancipation, Jewish life undertook a variety of adaptations toward and adoptions of the dominant bourgeois national cultures: caftans were traded in for cravats;26 Talmuds for Tolstoy;27 fringes for fringe benefits. The economic historian Werner Sombart would also write in his massive indictment of Jewish character and participation in the development of capitalism, Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911): “that Jewish talent should so often have nothing Jewish about it, but be in accord with its environment, has curiously enough again and again been urged as evidence that

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there are no specifically Jewish characteristics [Eigenart], whereas in truth it proves the very opposite in a striking fashion. It proves that the Jews have the gift of adaptability in an eminently high degree [in einer übernormalen Anpassungsfähigkeit].”28 Even a polemical opponent of antisemitism like the French historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu noted this extra-human Jewish talent: “there is in every Jew a secret power of metamorphosis which has often amazed me. . . . He has the remarkable faculty of taking on a new skin, without at bottom ceasing to be a Jew. There is something Protean in him.”29 The assumption of this innate mimetic talent was conditioned by the long-term identification of Jews with usury—both Aristotle and Aquinas characterized the generation of money out of money as bad reproduction—and the conjoined allegation that Jews spurned any vocation that produced true value such as agriculture and craft work. Lending additional credence to the Jews’ mimetic predisposition was their increasing presence in those professions engaged in the reproduction of the creative works of others: theater, the concert stage, and journalism. Thus, in his 1925 diatribe on the role of those of Jewish descent in literary studies, Adolf Bartels wrote: “The Jewish people have always had the propensity for [the theater, because] the Jews have a very great talent for mimicry, they can imitate almost everything other” than themselves.30 The performing arts and the press were called “reproductive arts” since they reproduced the culturally productive work of others. As the Jewish-born Austrian philologist and philosopher Theodor Gomperz commented, “One encounters the question: Why is it that despite the Jews’ no doubt marked gift for producing artistic and above all scientific accomplishments, we find very few Jewish names next to accomplishments of the very first order. . . . Clearly in the arts that involve reproduction [reproducierenden Künste], acting and musical virtuosity, the Jewish gift displays no relative inferiority.”31 Moreover, acting, musical virtuosity, and journalism were not known in the nineteenth century for the realism of their re-creations. Rather, these occupations performed or exaggerated that which others had produced; they aped the real and the true. They also often deceitfully claimed for themselves the value or significance that properly belonged to the original. Jewish presence in these professions appeared to confirm yet again the Jews’ innate duplicity: Mimicry was just like those other stereotypical Jewish character flaws—lying, deception, trickery, rationalization, selfdelusion, and so on. In addition to denying Jewish creativity, Wagner also asserted their innate mimetic talent. While no one may want to imitate the Jews, according

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to Wagner (cf. JM 91), the Jews want to imitate everyone else. “In this Speech, this Art, the Jew can only mimic [nachsprechen, nachkünsteln]— not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings” ( JM 85; translation modified). While Wagner wasn’t exactly schepping naches with his array of characteristic Jewish “nach-” ’s, he was repeating a motif that had already adorned anti-Jewish polemic. Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky’s widely disseminated (and ironically titled?) Judenspiegel ( Jewish Mirror; 1819) asserted, “The children of Israel can only ape and imitate [nachäffen und nachahmen], [and] even their apings [Nachäffungen], like the Jews themselves, are crude, repulsive caricatures.”32 So similarly, even as Wagner credited—while also bestializing—Jewish musical virtuosi for performing “with quite distressing accuracy and deceptive likeness, just as parrots reel off human words and phrases, but also with just as little real feeling and expression as these foolish birds,” he nonetheless pointed out the distortion intrinsic to Jewish mimesis: “Only in the case of our Jewish music-makers this mimicked [nachäffende] speech presents one marked peculiarity—that of the Jewish style of talk in general” ( JM 89). For Wagner, Jewish singing could not be separated from Mauscheln, the “Jewish Jargon” ( JM 92), Yiddish, and the singsong way Jews reputedly spoke that language, indeed, to the way they spoke any language.33 This alleged Jewish ability to imitate particularly frightened German nationalists endeavoring to shape some form of pure völkisch identity.34 If the Jews living in German-speaking lands looked and sounded and acted like their Gentile neighbors, then who were the real Germans? Thanks to their mimetic talent Judentum’s victory over Deutschtum appeared inevitable. Yet this apparent inevitability was countered by the implicit contradiction between the antisemites’ construct of the Jewish chameleon and their presupposition of the visible and indelible moral and physical Jewish physiognomy. These Jewish attempts to ape European culture—their mimicry of language, dress, manners—would always fail, eventually; the true Jewish nature would necessarily break through the mask, disrupt the illusion, and produce a hybrid monster.35 Anti-Jewish writers viewed assimilating Jews as living caricatures who intentionally made a mockery of authentic Germanness. Jewish nationalists, too, viewed their confrères as having made no less a mockery of authentic Judentum. Both agreed: bad Jews made bad Germans.36 Darwin’s observations in Origin of the Species about nonhuman albeit natural mimesis had a more direct effect upon the connection between Jews and mimicry. He wrote of the use of mimicry in nature: “Insects often resemble for the sake of protection various objects, such as green or

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decayed leaves, dead twigs, [etc.] . . . The resemblance is often wonderously close, and is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves.”37 Darwin described how adapting to one’s surroundings—masking one’s true identity— often ensured evolutionary survival. A number of writers concluded from this discussion of mimicry in nature that the Jews’ ability to imitate was an animalistic talent evolutionarily hewn for their survival. Jews employed their innate gift for mimicry in order to live in a hostile world. In his analysis of antisemitism, the famed Italian Jewish forensic criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that the traits that had allowed the Jews’ survival during “constant centuries-long persecution, such as craftiness, industriousness, and”—manifesting an innate mimetic ability—“the appearance of wretchedness,” developed as a consequence of that threatening environment; it had “functioned, as one would say following Darwin, as a selecting factor for the race.”38 Where Lombroso saw dissimulating as a means of individual and “race” preservation, more often when analogies were drawn between the adaptation of animals to their environment and Jewish acculturation of, or assimilation into, European society, natural, value-free, animal behavior was equated with typical Jewish deceit.39 The geneticist Fritz Lenz, who helped develop racial hygiene, the German variant of eugenics, and sought to provide scientific legitimation for Nazi racial ideology, argued that if diasporic Jewry did not appear to look so different from their hosts, it was because those Jews with an innate talent for mimicry had a selective advantage for survival over those without this ability—as could be observed in several varieties of butterflies.40 The study of the mimetic Jew belonged to comparative zoology not anthropology.

Echoes of the Tradition Anti-Jewish and antisemitic polemicists were not the only ones to make connections between mimicry and Jewish desires for social integration and Gentile acceptance; a number of self-identified Jewish writers also appropriated the discourse of mimicry to discuss assimilation. In the Baths of Lucca (1828), Heine employed the malapropism-prone Hirsch-Hyacinth to deliver a mot-valise that encapsulated this tendency prior to the achievement of full Jewish Emancipation in Germany. Upon running into Heine, his old Hamburg acquaintance, in the Italian Apennines, HirschHyancinth nostalgically recalled strolling up Hamburg Hill and “sampling the sights, lions, bird flocks, Papagoyim, monkeys [Affen], outstanding men . . .” (DHA 7/1:92). Papagoyim combined the German word for

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parrots, Papageien, with the dismissive Yiddish term for Gentiles, Goyim; Heine thereby mockingly called out those Jews who parroted or imitated the surrounding non-Jews.41 More than sixty years later Herzl had offered a number of answers to the post-Emancipation Jewish Question before he arrived at Zionism: In addition to mass conversion, he also proposed Darwinian mimicry. Herzl suggested that the provocation of antisemitism would lead Jews to imitate European culture through radical assimilation: “[Antisemitism] represents the education of a group [i.e., the Jews] by the masses and will perhaps lead to its being absorbed. Education is accomplished only through hard knocks. Darwinian mimicry will set in. The Jews will adapt themselves.”42 After he developed the Zionist alternative Herzl dropped this idea, and at the First Zionist Congress (1897) his first prominent Western Jewish convert, Max Nordau, leading European cultural critic and author of the epochal Degeneration (1892), denounced those who assumed mimesis would provide at least a personal solution to the Jewish Question. In his plenary address to that gathering, Nordau decried those assimilating Jews who strove for a total “mimicry” of the goyim: “On the inside, they become deformed; on the outside, they become a sham and thereby always laughable and . . . repulsive.”43 But despite the Zionist critique, such mimetic practice remained a prominent strategy of European Jews. In his widely quoted,44 pseudonymously published 1897 essay, “Hear O Israel,” Walter Rathenau offered his mimetic solution to the Jewish Question. In the pages of publicist and critic Maximilian Harden’s influential journal of opinion and criticism, Die Zukunft (The future), Rathenau recommended: the conscious self-education and adaptation of the Jews to the expectations of the Gentiles. Adaptation [Anpassung] not as “mimicry” in the Darwinian sense—namely the art of certain insects to take on the coloration of their environment—but a shedding of tribal attributes which . . . are known to be odious to our countrymen, and a replacement of these attributes by more appropriate ones. If such a metamorphosis also brought about an improvement in the balance of our moral values, this would be all for the better. The final result of the process would not be Germans by imitation, but Jews of German character and education.45

In the end, molting did not do Rathenau any more good than mimicry; he was assassinated by antisemitic German ultranationalists in 1922. The Jewish writer and Zionist fellow traveler Theodor Lessing, in his 1930 analysis of “Jewish self-hatred,” described with telling irony how

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mimicry was one of the self-hating Jew’s foremost modes of both selfdefense and self-denial— Now the great transformation succeeds, all mimicry succeeds. You become “one of the others” and look marvelously genuine. Perhaps a little too German in order to be completely German. Perhaps a little too Russian to be completely Russian. And precisely because Christianity is a little new to you, you tend to overemphasize it a bit. But still: Now you are protected46—

but ultimately unsuccessful. As the Russian Jewish physician and anthropologist Samuel Weißenberg noted in 1910: “The Jewish type is as a rule so distinctive [prägnant], that no mimetic artifice [(Mimikri-)Kunststücke] helps to conceal it.”47 Jews who try to pass will eventually out themselves. Perhaps it was a different kind of irony that led Lessing to omit discussion of the notorious essay “Sem” (Shem) and its analysis of Jewish mimicry, that one of his prime examples of a self-hating Jew, Die Zukunft’s Maximilian Harden, born Felix Ernst Witkowski, had published under his well-known pseudonym “Apostata” (apostate or renegade).48 Harden’s supposed parody of antisemitic representations of Judentum, which does not come across all that parodistic,49 did not limit the talent for mimicry to Jews of the self-hating variety. He wrote that each of the three great Moseses of Jewish history (the prophet, Maimonides, and Mendelssohn), as it were, followed “a page from Darwin’s book” and took up the mimicry of the Hebrews: “their capacity and desire cleverly to adapt themselves in conformity to their surroundings.” He described the secret of Jewish persistence in terms that Lessing would, as evident above, virtually reproduce: “Mimicry: paying any price to assimilate to their environs, they would rather be even more authentic and correct [than their model].”50 Weininger, like Harden one of Lessing’s exemplary Jewish self-haters, took a similar slant on Jewish mimicry. He insinuated imitation into his virtual equation of Jewish and feminine character traits. He wrote: “The congruency between [Judentum] and femininity seems to become complete as soon as one begins to reflect on the Jew’s infinite capacity for change. The Jews’ great talent for journalism . . . the lack of any deeply rooted and original convictions—Do these things not prove that both the Jews and women are nothing and therefore can become everything.” He continued: the Jew “actively adapts [paßt . . . an] himself to different circumstances and requirements, to any environment and any race, like a parasite that changes and assumes a completely different appearance with any given host” (SC 289; emphasis in original).

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Excursus: Tone Deaf ? By the 1920s, mimicry became the hallmark of the Jewish menace to German identity. In Secessio Judaica, Hans Blüher, one of the foremost thinkers of the German youth movement and already well-known for his antifeminist and antisemitic writings, essentialized and demonized Jewish acculturation and assimilation. He considered the Jews’ foremost fault and greatest threat to be their drive to imitate their hosts: “The Jews are the only people who practices mimicry. Mimicry of blood, of name, of form . . . Jewish mimicry is anchored in the destiny of the race, that is, in the idea Jew.”51 As his title portended, Blüher argued that the only way to overcome this menace would be for the Jews to leave not only Germany but Europe as well. This book so outraged Kafka that he was unable to compose either himself or a review; he solicited his friends to publish critiques and combat this latest attempt to legitimate antisemitism.52 Whether Kafka ever read another antisemitic tome identifying the mimetic Jew, Weininger’s Sex and Character, cannot be ascertained;53 however, he did write to his friend Oskar Baum, after having read of his (February 14, 1921) lecture in Prague on Weininger, to request a copy of the talk. Moreover, Kafka possessed a copy of Juden in der deutschen Literatur in which Max Brod’s chapter, “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” is joined by Baum’s chapter on Weininger. The postnote from the volume’s editor, Gustav Krojanker—the only such in the entire collection—to Baum’s chapter would probably have arrested Kafka’s attention. Krojanker conceded that, strictly speaking, an essay devoted to Weininger did not belong in this biographical collection of Jewish-identified contributors to German literature; however, Weininger’s “sort of spirit [Art seines Geistes], the content of his thought and finally his destiny are so typical of a certain class of Western Jewry, that he appears to incarnate as it were that species [Gattungsbegriff] in its purist form.”54 And it would have been with similar starkness that Kafka would have encountered the first in Baum’s series of what he characterized as Weininger’s collection of “the most laughable of generalizations [based on the] chance encounters within his confined circle of experience: The Jew does not sing.”55 The claim that Jews were only capable, at best, of reproducing the work of others and the invective against Jewish genius, in particular Jewish musical genius, appear to have converged upon a story Kafka would write a year and a half later, the last he would complete, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” ( Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse). Chapter 2 already examined the entanglement of the assumed murine identification

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of Josephine with her possible Jewish one, but there is another aspect of that possible identification to consider. Throughout his account of the musical virtuoso Josephine, the narrator emphasizes that the Volk “are quite unmusical,” that they “are not in general a music-loving race,” and that Josephine is the “sole exception” (DL 350 –351, cf. 351, 365; CS 360, cf. 361, 369). Yet even as he credits her with a certain genius, he retracts it. For the narrator, as it was for Wagner, Weininger, and the genius cult of the time, genius consists in what “we have never heard before and which we are not even capable of hearing” (DL 351; CS 360). But the narrator concedes that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary. . . . So is it singing at all? Is it not just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic [i.e., nonartistic] expression of our life. We all pipe . . . (DL 351–52; CS 361)

Josephine’s virtuosity is thus more exemplary than exceptional: “here is someone making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing” (DL 353; CS 361). She is the reproductive artist par excellence: as a singer, she practices a reproductive art; as a piper, she reproduces the ordinary sounds of her people;56 as an exemplar,57 she projects all of the alleged negative qualities of that people—including their often ascribed feminization. With his choice of an ungenial and untalented performing virtuoso to exemplify this “unmusical” community, Kafka recalls the antisemitic commonplaces that Jews both lack musical genius and can engage only in reproduction. The very notion of a singer, especially one whose voice never rises beyond “our usual workaday piping” evokes Wagner’s picture of ordinary Jewish speech as a “creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle . . . [completely lacking in] purely-human expression” ( JM 85)—and therefore of his view of Jewish singing because, for Wagner, “Song is just talk raised to highest passion” ( JM 86).58 These correlations between, on the one hand, constructions of “the Jew” as imitator and incapable of cultural production and, on the other, Kafka’s depiction of Josephine and her Volk, were perhaps mediated by Karl Kraus.59 Kafka regularly and rabidly read until his death60 Kraus’s influential and largely self-written journal Die Fackel (The torch) that was modeled after and became the archrival of Harden’s Die Zukunft. Yet more significant than the possible refraction of Wagner’s and Weininger’s anti-Jewish determinations in the journal’s contents may well have been the form performed by the Jewish-born Kraus. He was exhibited in Blei’s Bestiarium as the Fackelkraus, a creature who was “nothing other than voice” (BL 34), which itself was produced by imitat-

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ing (nachahmen) the voices of humans. While the Fackelkraus defied species classification—Blei even characterized her (die Fackelkraus) as Antinatur because “she wants to destroy the excrement [Kote] from which she was born” (i.e., negate Kraus’s own Jewish descent; BL 33)—Kraus’s voice, according to an oft-cited June 1921 letter Kafka wrote to Brod, bore certain mouse-evoking and mimesis-invoking tones: “in this German-Jewish world hardly anyone can do anything else [but] mauscheln” including that celebrated denouncer of mauscheln, Karl Kraus.61 He could mauschel like “no one else can.”62 Kafka understood mauscheln in a “wider sense” that extended past Yiddish to incorporate the figure of the Jewish intellectual and the so-called Jewish gift for mimicry; as he continued: mauscheln “is an organic compound of bookish German and pantomime” (Br 336; LFr 288). In this letter, mauscheln came to incorporate all of the ambiguities, ambivalences, and irreconcilable dilemmas of being a German-Jewish writer— or a Volk-singer. Given the value ascribed to music in the cultivation of Bildung among Jews seeking integration63 as well as Josephine’s attempt to be the voice of the Volk, even as she would distinguish herself from their traditional practices, was Kafka’s story “of course, about the Jews”? Yet, as argued in Chapter 2, Kafka’s strategy of representation was anything but “of course,” whether in allowing the identification of the Volk as mice or not, as a particular people or as humankind.

Aping Apes Five years before Blüher’s tractate, Kafka may have already addressed the self-delusions of those more threatened than threatening Jews who pursued assimilation. In 1917, in Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude, Kafka published his apparent allegory about Jewish assimilation,64 “A Report to an Academy” (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie). Any determination of its genre, however, need be in the subjunctive. In response to Buber’s intention of labeling “Report” (as well as its fraternal twin “Jackals and Arabs”) a Gleichnis,65 whether translated as “allegory” or “parable,” Kafka suggested instead that it be identified as a Tiergeschichte, an “animal story.” Kafka was familiar with Jewish writers who had employed animal figures to allegorize Jews and their situation. He had read about such in Meyer Isser Pines’s 1911 Histoire de la littérature judéo-allemand (History of Jewish-German literature). Though Kafka did not specifically note Pines’s discussion of The Nag, or the Protection of Animals by Mendele MoykherSforim (Sh. Y. Abramovitsh) in his rather detailed reading notes that he

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inserted in his ca. January 26, 1912 diary entry (T 1:361–66; D1 224 –27),66 he would have read the following: The allegorical idea that presides over the composition of The Nag and that consists of presenting the Jewish people as a prince transformed into an animal is certainly not new. But what is admirable in this book is that powerful conception of the Jewish problem that it showed and above all the talent with which the author was capable, over the course of more than 100 pages, to present to us this singular being, sometimes human, sometimes animal, the one and the other at the same time, and who, in both word and bearing, always remains faithful to itself.67

Although the novella’s narrator was a young Maskil (a follower of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah) and the title character’s back story, bearing, beliefs, and persecution were unmistakably Jewish coded, the nag herself, was not explicitly identified as a Jew; there was no need. Nevertheless, for his part, Kafka abhorred the category of Allegorie. The only use of “Allegorie” in his extant writings was in a letter to Grete Bloch ( June 6, 1914) in which, commenting on her brother Hans’s play about Theodor Herzl, “Die Legende von Theodor Herzl,” Kafka wrote: “But I can’t get over the dryness of the entire allegory [Allegorie], which is nothing but an allegory which says all there is to say without ever delving deeper or drawing one deeper into it” (B2 81–82; LF 421). While Kafka would distinguish Gleichnis from Allegorie, he might well be concerned that the readers of Der Jude would conflate the two genres when encountering a narrative labeled as a “Gleichnis” and reduce his “Report” to “nothing but an allegory” of some aspect of Judentum.68 Hence, before subjecting “Report” to the constraints of a genre that Kafka did not lay claim to, one should acknowledge his descriptive classification of his narrative. Besides an “animal story” can include both human and nonhuman animals, and its protagonists need not conform to standards of zoological correctness. The report is presented by Red Peter, who is an ape, or Affe. Kafka’s was not the first German-language narrative told by an ape or about an ape taken for a human. Roughly one hundred years earlier (1814) E. T. A. Hoffmann published “Report [Nachricht] from an Educated Young Man” among his Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner; it principally consisted of a letter written to his simian beloved by Milo who included a self-description in his signature: “(formerly an Ape, now Free-lance Artist and Scholar).”69 Milo described his capture by a hunter that, he asserted, provided him

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(and “without doubt” his lady friend Pipi, who was captured along with him, but shipped to North America not Europe) the opportunity for the “greatest freedom”: the Bildung and speech that allowed him to distinguish himself from his “ignorant relatives.” He recounted the progress that he, a “most cultured genius” had made, including his efforts to purify himself of his “former uncouth condition.” It is generally assumed that Kafka was familiar with the story.70 Ironically, the music writer and Wagner enthusiast Johann Christian Lobe commented that the assumed-satiric intentions of the anonymous author of “Das Judentum in der Musik” would have been clearer had he only done as Hoffmann had when he undersigned his “Report” with Milo’s self-identification.71 Much closer in time to Kafka’s own writing was “Consul, der viel Bewunderte. Aus dem Tagebuche eines Künstlers” (Consul the Much Admired, from the Journal of an Artist) that appeared in the April 1, 1917 children’s supplement to the Prager Tagblatt.72 Its narrator having become acquainted with Consul, a trained ape of “extraordinary skillfulness and human-likeness,” who dressed in formalwear, smoked cigarettes, and constantly gazed in a hand mirror he held, offers the readers a passage, translated from its original “ape language,” of Consul’s diary (see Figure 13). The extract recounted his life from growing up in the jungle to his capture, his ship journey to Europe in a cage below deck, the beatings and other pedagogical means to which he was subjected, and finally to his role in the circus, which he performed to avoid any further violence. Consul also recognized that to keep both the spectators and, as a consequence, his handler happy, he must never reveal the brutality that formed the backdrop of his performance. Kafka’s story contains several similar elements. Red Peter recounts his life from his capture on the Gold Coast by representatives of the Hagenbeck Zoo through his acquisition of language to his pursuit of a career on the variety stage. It is an appropriate choice of vocation, because in Dawn, Nietzsche characterized the actor as an “ideal ape, and so much the ape that he’s not in the least capable of believing in ‘essence’ or the ‘essential’: for him, everything turns into play, tone, gesture, stage, setting, and audience.”73 The center point of the report is an account of his caged existence on board ship and his realization that his only means of escape was in imitating his captors. And this he was well suited to do. In English, “to ape” means to imitate or mimic; so too, do German speakers draw upon a simian-rooted verb form to signify mimetic action: nachäffen (literally: to ape after). Red Peter may simply be a cognate made flesh.

Figure 13. Consul, the Much Admired. From “Consul, der viel Bewunderte. Aus der Tagebuche eines Künstlers,” Prager Tagblatt (April 1, 1917), 13.

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Simian Semites Kafka’s choice of an ape as the protagonist of his story can be correlated with a well-established tradition of associating Jews with apes and monkeys. Since the eighteenth century, Jews had been caricatured as orangutans and other apes.74 Perhaps the most humiliating instance was effected by a Prussian royal decree. To the consternation of Prussia manufacturers, the rival state of Saxony had mastered the secret of making porcelain in the early eighteenth century and begun reaping tremendous wealth by supplying the increasing European demand for chinoiserie. Prussia sought its share of the bounty and attempted to develop its own porcelain manufacture; however, in order to build up the industry to a level at which it could compete with the continentally prized products of Dresden and Meissen, the domestic market had to be developed. Friedrich Wilhelm I’s solution in 1733 was to require all Jews who desired the requisite permission to marry in Prussia to purchase a number of large ape figurines produced by the Prussian royal porcelain works.75 His son, the enlightened absolutist Frederick the Great, continued the practice—not even waiving the tariff for one of his most respected and prized resident philosophers, Moses Mendelssohn, when he married Fromet Guggenheim in Berlin in 1763.76 The appeal of these ape figures for purposes of humiliation was not simply that apes copied the human, but that they made such poor copies; they embodied the ugliness of that which was similar to the human but somehow deficient, distorted, or incompletely formed. Further, given that their appearance was a mockery of the properly human, that they should show themselves—bare themselves—before real human beings revealed their shamelessness. This absence of shame signaled their lack. In his Encyclopaedia Logic of 1830, Hegel wrote: “shame does testify to the severance of the human beings from their natural and sensible being. Hence animals, which do not get as far as this severance are without shame.”77 Darwin later (1872) came to a similar conclusion that it was exceptional to the human if not a sign of human exceptionalism78 through comparative physiology. He described blushing, the principal visible index of the feelings of shame, shyness, and modesty, as “the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush.”79 So when the most powerful German literary critic of the 1830s, Wolfgang Menzel, unleashed his denunciation of Heinrich Heine as “The Most Profound Corruption of German Literature,” he located the source for the Jewish-identified Heine’s shameless productions by staging

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a scene in which his fellow Jews “cried out of every dark corner, laying bare their teeth, grinning, and sticking out their tongues in an apelike manner [mit affenartigen Zähneblecken, Grinsen, und Zungenherausstrecken], ridiculing everything that up until then had been holy to the Christian.” He then compared Heine’s latest (1839) poetic publications to “volleys, thrown by any angry ape, of its own excrement [Kot].”80 This was echoed in Austrian dramatist and Menzel contemporary Franz Grillparzer’s attack on the Austrian Jewish critic Moritz Saphir in the epigram “Miscarriage” (Fehlgeburt), The devil wanted to create a murderer. So he put together some parts from different animals Like the wolf, fox, and jackal. But he forgot to add one thing: courage. Furious, he pulled on the creature’s nose and cried, Rascal, become a Jew and write reviews.

when the supplemental verse added in 1902 by Karl Kraus—no fan of Heine as will be discussed in the next chapter—is included: “Shamelessness [Unverschämtheit] he took from the ape: / [And created] a literary historian.”81 The ape continues to figure ugliness into the present, and so too does the representation of the Jew as ape continue to figure the Jew as ugly: whether confirmed by the often bowdlerized last line of the love duet “If you could see her [through my eyes]” that the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club sang to his gorilla-garbed partner—“She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”82— or the Jewish wedding staged by clowns in orangutan costumes, the groom in suit and kippah, the bride in wedding gown, at Moscow’s Circus Nikulina in 2009.83 Moreover, the ape mirrored the caricatured depictions of so-called Jewish physiognomy that became so pervasive as the body became more and more the “natural” locus of identity. For example, an 1883 cartoon, bearing the caption “Lament of a Jew, a migrant to Mainz from the countryside, who upon seeing a drawing of a gorilla believes he is seeing his friend,” depicted Jew and gorilla as virtual mirror images of one another: bowed legs, too long arms, big hands, sideburns, nose, posture, and so on.84 As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the ape as mimic became more prominent in simian analogies with and identifications of the Jew. In part this was due to the various ways that Jews adopted strategies of acculturation or assimilation in seeking greater integration into European societies. It was also due in part to the effect of epistemological

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shift in human understanding of the ape.85 The taxonomic imagination of eighteenth-century natural history could situate cognitively, ethically, and aesthetically a similarity between human and orangutan through their respective classification as homo sapiens and homo sylvestris, albeit hierarchically represented in the human’s favor. The hegemonic sensibility of the nineteenth century, however, changed from the spatial to the temporal or historical with its emphasis on discontinuities (even if the telos of historicism entailed their ultimate supersession) and emphasized difference. Paradoxically, this reversed emphasis belied the outrage of perceived continuity generated by the figure of “the descent of man” in Darwin’s title. When describing the relation between human and ape, the phrase “the appearance of similarity” shifted from the subjective to the objective genitive; that is, any similarity was an artifice produced by and not intrinsic to the ape’s nature. Instead, mimetic artifice was natural to the ape; it was itself a sign of the ape’s difference from and temporal— evolutionary— discontinuity with the human. Into the breach leaped Theodor Fritsch; this leading antisemitic publicist and publisher of the repeatedly “updated” Handbook of the Jewish Question (originally The Antisemitic Catechism) claimed that Gd created the Jew as a buffer between humans and apes.86 Another aspect of simian mimicry was correlated with the principle diacritic between human and ape: the presence or absence of language (see the Introduction). Mimicry was tied to the use of gestures instead of or as a necessary supplement to words. Repeated gesticulation was taken as a sign of primitiveness. During his 1832 encounter with the natives of Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin noted that in contrast to Europeans, “All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry.”87 The “savage” Fuegians had responded to the Europeans with faultless mimetic gestures because, it was assumed, they possessed a language without meaningful sounds or, at least, they lacked an adequate language. Similarly the hand and body movements that stereotypically accompanied Jewish speech were viewed as a necessary supplement to that hopelessly inadequate hybrid of German and Hebrew, Yiddish (or Judendeutsch). As noted previously, Kafka considered pantomime to be an intrinsic component of Mauschel. In his Memoiren (Memoirs), written during his last years, Heine composed an allegory of Jewish assimilation that drew upon the denigrating representation of the Jew as ape and ironically alluded to the deficiencies of Jewish language. In a remarkable series of associations that began with his father’s Hannover dialect— German at its finest claimed the son—then

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moved to evaluations of other German dialects and their Dutch cognates, and concluded with how each dialect views the others as corrupted versions of itself, Heine recalled a “cosmopolitan” zoologist’s claim that the apes are the ancestors of humanity, such that humans are but educated— overeducated—apes. He then speculated that if apes could speak then humans would be but corrupted or degenerate apes. Heine not only inverted the negative valuation ascribed to the allegedly apelike Jew, he subverted the German /Jew distinction that the human /ape one overcoded. The human-ape relationship then led to his suggesting a possible etiology for the fashion of wearing queues in the eighteenth century: “Our forefathers” instinctively realized that their overcivilized culture was but a veneer that glossed over the underlying rot and that it was necessary to return to nature, to draw closer to their primal ape nature. What distinguishes human from ape, he continued, with an argument paralleling that made in his roughly contemporaneous “From the Age of Pigtails” (see Chapter 3), is only the absence of a tail (Schwanz), and, as he claimed in the poem, the queue (Zopf) is a necessary supplement to remedy that fundamental lack (DHA 15:81–82). The Jewish imitation of European manners was perceived as but an extension of this penchant for mimetic gesturing. And Kafka, as an enthusiastic promoter of Yiddish theater, an avid reader of Die Fackel, and future author of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), would have noted the depiction of the simian performance by “the last actors,”88 the Yiddish theater troupe Budapester Orpheumgesellschaft led by Heinrich Eisenbach, in Kraus’s essay “My Proposal” that appeared the same year (1912) as Kafka’s own “Lecture on the Yiddish Language” (and the writing of Metamorphosis). What strikes Kraus as “a complete metamorphosis within the [original costume] change” (vollkommene Metamorphose innerhalb der Verwandlung) is Eisenbach’s having mimed someone miming another person or thing. Eisenbach demonstrated this talent with his imitation of an English artist who has to imitate the movements and demeanor of a chimpanzee (Schimpanse).89 Though lacking the simian references, an entry in Kafka’s diary a year earlier (September 30, 1911) tied metamorphosis to mimesis: “I too have a pronounced talent for metamorphosing [Verwandlungsfähigkeit] myself. How often I must have imitated [nachmachen] Max. Yesterday evening, on the way home, if I had observed myself from the outside I should have taken myself for Tucholsky.” He characterized the source for these metamorphoses (Verwandlungen) as “the alien being” (das fremde Wesen) within himself (T 1:46; D1 71).

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The Red Peter Principle? Red Peter could be seen to represent the Western Jew as European manqué. Kafka provides numerous other indicators of Red Peter’s possible Jewish identification besides his apeness. Red Peter makes giving up “being stubborn” (Eigensinn; DL 299; CS 250)—a stereotypical Jewish trait—his supreme commandment. He fights constantly against his “ape nature” (DL 301, cf. 310, 311; CS 251, cf. 257, 258); he is enjoined in the fight by his first trainer, or so he explains the rationale behind the trainer extinguishing the fire that he had set on Red Peter’s fur following an unsuccessful lesson. Thus, like many assimilated Jews, he appears to repudiate his origins even as he recounts them and then rationalizes the persecution he experiences along the way. Also like them, Red Peter repudiates his community; he is making it on his own. In his account of Red Peter’s capture and naming, Kafka also offers an allusion to Genesis 32, the account of the noted mimic Jacob’s fight with an angel at the river Jabbok and his consequent receipt of a new name, Israel. When he was taken, Red Peter received two injuries. A wound in his cheek leaves him with a red scar and the sobriquet Red. Yet before moving on to the associations generated by his name90 (as well as by the act of naming and a yet-to-be-described second wound) with scenes from the biblical book of Genesis, attention needs to be directed at the allusion that the cheek scar makes to a set of more contemporary Jewish situations. Many men who attended German and Austrian universities during the last third of the nineteenth century sought membership in dueling fraternities that would ensure them of enhanced social status and a network of influential contacts once they graduated. While officially illegal, these duels were tacitly sanctioned as tests of bourgeois honor, that is, of bourgeois masculinity.91 The sign of membership in this exclusive class was a fencing scar on the cheek known as a Schmiss. Theodor Herzl was extremely proud of the Schmiss he had received as a member of the dueling fraternity Albia while a student at the University of Vienna in 1881.92 In subsequent years, Herzl’s old fraternity and virtually all other such organizations excluded Jews from membership and denied all Jews, including members of either Jewish or the few less discriminatory fraternities, from giving satisfaction, that is, from being worthy and honorable enough to be engaged with in a duel.93 Red Peter’s scar thus possibly represents yet another signifier of the Jews’ desired inclusion in and respect from Gentile society that was belied by actual practice.

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Red Peter’s scar-generated nickname resonates with references to the Jacob story: Jacob spent the night by the Jabbok just prior to the feared reunion with his brutish brother Esau, who was also known as Edom or “Red” (Gen. 25:30). He had acquired that appellation after he had bartered away his, the elder son’s, birthright to his younger brother, Jacob, for some red (“edom”) pottage (in Heb., “the red red stuff ”); later in rabbinic literature “Edom” came to signify the Roman (bzw. Christian) Empire. Subsequently, Jacob finalized the transaction with Esau through an act of mimesis, by donning animal skins in order to smell and feel like his hairy twin and thereby deceive his blind father into bestowing the paternal blessing on him. The association of the ape’s naming with ethnic identity and problematic transformation is further reinforced by the other half of his eponym, Peter: It is the name given to the Jew Simon after he acknowledged Jesus’s divinity. Second, Red Peter receives a wound below his hip that leaves him with a limp. Jacob, too, received such a maiming wound while wrestling with an “angel” by the Jabbok; he also received a new name, Israel, by which his descendants would be known. Reading “Report” as an ironical allegory would find a Red Peter, after his struggle with the seemingly omnipotent European goyim, believing he is no longer a child of Israel. Yet, in a doubly ironical move, the character would be recognized as no longer any nationality but Jewish. The wounds and limp suggest castration and therefore recall the frequent devirilizing representation of the male Jew in European culture. Finally, despite the lame attempt to justify his seemingly unseemly pulling down of his pants to show the scar left by the shot to his hip—he claims it is necessitated by the demand for truth94—Red Peter not only seemingly demonstrates the retention of his animalness, he also appears to act the shameless Jew exhibiting the scar of his Jewishness: his circumcision.95 He may be making more than one such allusion, since he invokes his self-exhibition because he had “read an article recently by one of the ten thousand windbags [Windhunde]” who write about him in the newspapers. The Muirs’ translation of Windhunde is evocative but rather loose; it literally denotes “greyhounds,” but it is also a pejorative slang term for thoughtless, irresponsible individuals. Red Peter’s word choice may also point to another use of “Windhund”; in the same essay that he advises that Jewry take up mimicry, “Hear O Israel,” Rathenau also offers some fashion advice that draws upon other images from natural history and compares the Jewish parvenu in English dress to “a dachshund dressed up like a greyhound [Windhund].” Given the strong identification of journalism with Jews and

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Rathenau’s observation that “often the only recollection of the faith of the fathers that remains is a certain ironic atavistic externality, Abraham’s malicious stunt” (eine Malice Abrahams; i.e., circumcision),96 there may be a certain ironic edge when Red Peter challenges the writer of the article “to take down his trousers before a visitor.” He adds—in the conditional— that such would be “quite another story” (allerdings ein anderes Ansehen); further, he’ll “let it stand to his credit [als Zeichen der Vernunft] that he does not do it” (DL 302; CS 252)—if he’ll employ the same delicacy and get off Red Peter’s case. By means of this conditional allusion to the journalist’s possible circumcision97 and of his testimonial performance of reason (Vernunft), Red Peter discreetly renders any difference between himself and his (human) audience undecidable. When Red Peter then returns to the story of his capture, he again may be evoking this phallic diacritical mark. Red Peter, unlike the other members of the hominid family, apparently has a tail: He relates how he discovered a hole in the boards that made up the fourth side of his cage; however, “the hole was not even wide enough to stick one’s tail through” (DL 303; CS 252). By making Red Peter an ape, Kafka perhaps signals that the most significant trait of Jewish life in (Western) Europe is imitation.98 On the other hand, given the long association of Jews with apes in the Central European imaginary, let alone the story’s appearance in Der Jude, it is not unreasonable to assume that Kafka realized that many of its readers would identify Red Peter as a Jew: This star of the variety stage can no longer be taken to be some incontinent, flea-ridden animal who thereby embodies (the oppressors’ image of )99 the ugly, filthy, smelling (East European) Jew; instead, he appears as the performing ape who enacts (the oppressors’ image of )100 the self-deluded, assimilating (Western) Jew. Yet beneath the mask of the report is an indictment of a dominant culture that both requires and denies Red Peter’s—and the Jews’—move toward (Gentile) European bourgeois humanity. Red Peter concludes that the only “way out” (Ausweg; DL 304; CS 253) of the cage (of Jewishness?) is to imitate his tormentors: “it was only the mass weight of my observations [of them] that impelled me in the right direction. It was so easy to imitate these people” (DL 308; CS 255). He demonstrates the “wonderful shrewdness” that Pliny the Elder ascribed to all monkeys who “do as they see hunters do before them.” “Desperate to emulate” (DL 309; CS 256) them, he begins to adopt their vices, such as spitting: first to entertain them —they cannot beat him when they are convulsed in laughter—and second to prove that he is one of them. He undergoes a rote catechism in humanity and goyische naches101

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by way of repeated mock drinking from a bottle of spirits. This practice culminates in a communion-like scene with his first swallow and first human word, “Hallo”—the word that performs admission “into the human community” (DL 311; CS 257). Here Red Peter even apes a conversion; he is, as it were, born again. Kafka’s protagonist realizes when he lands in Hamburg that to imitate the worst in his European Gentile captors is insufficient: That path leads only to the zoo, in other words, to a new cage. Red Peter does not yearn for freedom —recognizing that its pursuit would only lead to the greatest disillusionment (Täuschung). Rather, he seeks only a “way out” (Ausweg),102 just as the Jewish characters in Schnitzler’s aptly titled novel sought “a road into the open” (der Weg ins Freie). Achieving autonomy for Red Peter (for Jews? for all inhabitants of modern European societies?) is an impossibility; the best he can hope for is a space in which he can have some minimal agency. So he opts for the only way out: Mimik (the variety stage) and attaining the “cultural level of an average European” (DL 312; CS 258).103 The story itself—a report delivered to a scientific academy—is the ultimate mimetic act: Although he is the object of the report, Red Peter is also its subject. He is reading in the guise of a race scientist. And his is quite a performance; in the account of his development he characterizes those models of Gentile human behavior, whom he calls his “teachers” (DL 310, 312; CS 256, 258), as nonvictimizers, even as his depiction of their actions belies such blandishments. At his story’s conclusion, by constantly performing—by aping the “civilized”—Red Peter is able to survive: “I do not complain, but I’m not satisfied [zufrieden] either” (DL 313; CS 258; trans. adapted). He has a female companion, but they do not yet form a properly bourgeois household; by the public light of day he cannot bear to see or be seen with the “half-trained little chimpanzee” who does not seem to him to have fully realized the domestic— domesticated (“half-broken”)— ideal (DL 313; CS 258). Besides, his “manager” resides in their apartment’s anteroom. Red Peter may have begun his report with the claim that “it is now nearly five years since I was an ape” (DL 299; CS 250), but in the end he remains to the implied scientific audience of the academy a talking ape—and to many readers, a European-aping Jew and a self-deluded one at that. Kafka may here be echoing Solomon Maimon’s recognition in his autobiography, a work read and recommended by Kafka,104 that he is seen as “a speaking animal.” Then again, perhaps it is Red Peter’s audience who is suffering from self-delusions. The academy’s invitation that occasioned Red Peter’s report itself manifests the self-delusion of the ethnographer: that the native

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informant provides objective knowledge of the Other. Asked to report on his life prior to capture and prior to language, Red Peter opens his report with the confession that he cannot fully comply with their request because my memory of the past has closed the door against me more and more. . . . And the opening in the distance, through which . . . I once came myself, has grown so small that, even if my strength and my will power sufficed to me back to it, I should have to scrape the very skin [Fell; fur or hide] from my body to crawl through. (DL 299–300; CS 250)

In other words, he would have to become a hairless ape, that is, become human like his hosts and hence no longer a native observer. Even as he appears to corroborate the Great Divide between human and animal, he frustrates his audience’s desire both to subsume him (and the animal) under its totalizing gaze and to identify him univocally as animal. After problematizing his audience’s (zoö-)ethnographic self-delusion, his identification as animal over and against their humanness, he then proceeds to problematize a second self-delusion: their identification as human over and against his animalness. In the account of his development, Red Peter portrays his “teachers” as the bestial tormentors they were. From the beginning of his report, Red Peter alerts Kafka’s readers as well as his listeners: To put it plainly—your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels: the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike. (DL 300; CS 250)

For some readers, Red Peter has reversed the moral hierarchy of human and animal. The Europeans are the true brutes, the loud oppressors of silenced victims.105 But would Kafka be seeking simply to change the referents of the hierarchical opposition (humans are beasts, and beasts human)? The distinction and its structural oppression would still remain. “Report” tells a different animal story. It is not simply about an ape; it is told by an ape. By allowing him to speak and to recount his history, Kafka has created a character who, in part, makes himself in his storytelling. While Red Peter’s inability to reconstruct his existence prior to his capture (as commissioned by the academy), to detail his simian origins and subsequent acquisition of language, may be an ironic commentary on the relationship between language and human-animal difference,106 it may also be a ploy: his repudiation of the effort to reduce him to, to define him by, his purported origins and/or as a “talking animal.” To return to his opening

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deflection of the request to corroborate the academy’s assumption of his genealogical difference, specifically to the “tickling of the heels” shared by “small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike” (DL 300; CS 250): The ape’s supposed absence of a heel was held to be yet another signifier of the human break from the simian line of development. Moreover, his human audience has pretensions of being as different from the animal as the gods are from the human, but like Achilles their exceptionality is always already compromised. Hence the reference to Achilles’s heel calls attention to how the seemingly absolute line between human and ape— Gentile and Jew?—by which the human—the Gentile?—proclaims its difference and consequent superiority, is vulnerable to erasure.

“Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us” Because Kafka’s animals share many of the characteristics ascribed to the Jews, they elicit perhaps the most troubling aspect of representations of Jewish genius. Do Kafka’s Kafkaesque stories undercut the denials of Jewish genius and the accusation of a Jewish mimetic nature? Or do they insidiously confirm them by literalizing the animalistic slurs against the Jews? The risk of accepting the identification ascribed by the oppressor and, consequently, of hating oneself and one’s people is especially acute when one’s own Judentum lacks positive content. Kafka often perceived in himself such a lack. In his famous and famously unsent “Letter to his Father,” Kafka complained that while his father always told him to be Jewish, the Jewishness that he saw practiced was apparently empty of meaning: “It was indeed, so far as I could see, a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke. Four days a year you went to the synagogue, where you were, to say the least, closer to the indifferent than to those who took it seriously. . . . This was the religious material that you handed on to me.”107 So what was left for Kafka the son? He had lamented in his notebook a year earlier: “I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live.”108 Lacking a positive model of Judentum in his father, there were more than a few derogatory figurations of the Jew, of the Jew-Animal, circulating in Prague, specifically, and in German (and Zionist) culture, more generally, that may have stalked him. In his letters and other writings, Kafka the insurance official favorably contrasted the productive labor of artisans and farmers with the sham and unproductiveness of typically Jewish professions like the one he himself pursued.109 Indeed, on occasion Kafka characterized himself as the living embodiment of the stereotype;

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even his anorexic, asthmatic, tubercular body and those famous ears reproduced the stereotype of Jewish physiognomy. Kafka described himself as “the crooked [krumme] West European Jew.”110 His word choice is significant; krumm is perhaps the buzzword of anti-Jewish representation.111 Is Jewish self-hatred then the ultimate confirmation of the assumptions about the uncreative, imitative Jew? Kafka’s texts can generate an alternative reading consonant with his own prescription for a literature that helps an ethnic minority like the Jews forge a national identity and a communal memory and that supports such a group “in the face of a hostile surrounding world.” One trait of this “minor[ity] literature” is “the presentation of national faults in a manner that is very painful, to be sure, but also liberating and deserving of forgiveness” (T 1:313, 313; D1 191, 192 [25 December 1911]). Therefore, Kafka’s performance of the Jew-as-Animal can be viewed both as an attempt to historicize those images—these characters are written in ink not in the genes—and as an attempt to reappropriate the cudgels that have been used against him and his fellow Jews.112 Kafka has not merely taken several of the reigning stereotypes of the Jew-Animal and reproduced them tout court. He has deployed them in such a way as to embed their identifications as Animal and as Jew in the co-constitutions of Animal and Human and of Jew and Gentile, thereby rendering those identifications undecidable. Even when this strategy fails, Kafka has insinuated a tragic dimension to such figures as Red Peter and Josephine. They either are sympathetic or are offered a moment’s respite and a hope, however deferred, for redemption: There is at least hope for, as Red Peter puts it, “a way out” of the worst situations. More significant, these stories are not simply about an ape or an assumed-to-be mouse; they are told by an ape and an assumed-to-be mouse—the Jewish animot. By allowing them to speak and to recount their histories, Kafka has created characters who, in part, make themselves in their storytelling.113 Red Peter, the talking ape, may be self-deluded, but perhaps because of this self-delusion, he appears all the more human. And the “mouse” narrator doesn’t squeak, but instead offers a voice of quiet self-recognition and resolve. Kafka’s creations do not present the Jews as the dominant antisemitic society’s “Other,” the monstrous animal-object constructed by Gentile, bourgeois fears and hatreds. Rather, he presents individuals and groups whose identifications are shaped by their interpellation into such a society. For all of the community’s faults his protagonists—Red Peter and Josephine—appear to represent, these individuals manifest those flaws when they set themselves apart from that community.

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At the end of “Josephine the Singer,” the narrator remarks that “soon [ Josephine] will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers” (DL 377; CS 376). Josephine will find redemption when she will have become absorbed into the collective memory of the Volk; this “will have become”—the future anteriority of the community’s memory— signifies the possibility of its redemption as well. Memory signifies that the community has a future; memory anticipates the future moment when the past will be brought forth. Ultimately it is not so much Josephine as it is the community itself (the Jewish people?) who rises. It rises above any particular ascribed trait or individual accomplishment or collective identification, and where Josephine disappears it endures. Should Kafka’s constructions of the Jew-as-Animal succeed in rendering the intersecting oppositions of Jew/Gentile and Animal/Human undecidable, they might deflect at least some of the destructive force of the Bestiarium Judaicum in the present and open up the possibility of such a future moment.114 Yet, is there not also a danger than in the forgetting they will forget that this survival is only an Ausweg—as was the case with the Samsa family in their effort to forget the Untier. The next chapter engages narratives by Kafka and Heine in which, the individual animal or animal-linked figure does not set itself apart from the community yet nevertheless manifests its singularity in its engagement with someone outside that community. Further, it is not the exception misrecognized as the exemplar of an undifferentiated other community but, by its very recognition as an individual, it is also the exemplar of a recognizably differentiated community.

chapter 5

Italian Lizards and Literary Politics I Carrying the Torch and Getting Singed The lizards seemed real to us as they scurried away, the sturdy battleworks a diversion. —max brod1

Philology . . . achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, even with every old or new book . . . —friedrich nietzsche2

In a diary entry written some time between March 26 and May 27, 1911, Franz Kafka appears to take his friend Max Brod’s new novel, Die Jüdinnen (the Jewesses), to task for failing to offer or even conjecture about a possible solution to the Jewish Question. Whether Kafka’s never-published delineation of the novel’s faults was a parody of its anticipated (or already published) critique by members of the Prague Zionist Student group Bar Kochba, an expression of solidarity with that judgment, or followed some other rationale altogether remains an open question among scholars. More perplexing, however, is his portended corrective.3 Despite Brod’s desire to depict a panoramic view of Jewish diversity, reinforced by his use of third-person rather than first-person narration, Kafka suggests that had the novel included a non-Jewish observer, one with whom Gentile readers could identify, its prospective audience would have been able to apprehend a self-confident Jewishness drawn up “in its full height.”4 To exemplify the desired result if Brod had adopted such a narrative strategy, Kafka employs a seemingly offensive eidolon, an Eidechse or lizard. Seeing through the eyes of a Gentile protagonist, Brod’s readers would have been moved to engage (“again and again we are moved to 139

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bow down”) the novel’s Jewish characters with immense delight: like that aroused in “[us] on a footpath in Italy” by the “the convulsive starting up of a lizard under our feet.” Instead, as the novel stands, they only see a bunch of Jews. The individuality of its characters, the variations among them, will strike readers as merely epiphenomenal: Brod’s motley crew is just a jumble. Against his friend’s aesthetic indifferentism, Kafka asserts the necessity of difference—not an in-itself (holistic) difference but a difference in relation—by which an exemplary singularity (i.e., a hybrid of Jew and individual in their mutual implication), and not merely the rule-confirming exception (e.g., Nathan the Wise), emerges. Kafka then renders his claim more graphic when he contrasts the unexpected encounter with a lizard to seeing lizards “at a dealer’s by hundreds crawling over one another in confusion in the large bottles in which otherwise pickles are usually packed.” Rather than generating significance, visitors to this exhibited conglomeration of creatures, so crammed together, cannot distinguish where one begins and another ends and therefore cannot distinguish one from the other (“then we don’t know what to do” [D1 55; T 1:160 –61]). This chapter explores Kafka’s and Brod’s diaries and writings for other encounters with Italian lizards. Then it turns to yet other Eidechsen encountered, like the one “on a footpath in Italy” in Kafka’s notebook, that may be no less analogically figuring Judentum: by Heine in the opening chapters of Die Stadt Lucca (City of Lucca) in his Reisebilder (Travel Pictures). But first it inquires whether locating Kafka’s lizard analogies in the occasional derogatory stereotyping of Jewish practices or body parts through reptilian associations in anti-Jewish and antisemitic discourse can aid in determining either the source or motive for their use.

Of Lizards, Labels, and Liabilities So was, as Iris Bruce claims in Kafka and Cultural Zionism, “reptile or lizard . . . a common anti-Semitic stereotype”?5 She fails to provide a single example of an Eidechse as Jew-Animal; her only support is a reference to Sander Gilman’s discussion of the Jew as “Oriental” and as lacking creativity that draws upon a passage from the French historian Anatole LeroyBeaulieu’s Israel Among the Nations. While illustrating his points, it also includes the following “Oriental” trait: “There seems to be something of the reptile in [the Eastern Jew], something sinuous and crawling, something slimy and clammy, of which not even the educated Israelite has always been able to rid himself.”6 The rarity of such specific associations of

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Eidechsen with Jewish-identified individuals is evidenced by their absence from Rainer Erb and Werner Bergmann’s inventory of the animal metaphors employed to dehumanize Jews in Germany between 1780 and 1860.7 Nor is it among the bestial epithets in Hortzitz’s survey of Reformation and early modern anti-Jewish texts.8 And though the occasional poisonous snake can be seen slithering about, no lizard leaps before the reader of Fritz Hiemer’s large 1942 inventory of sayings and proverbs in which Jews are viciously identified or analogized with animals (see Chapter 1). Does the inclusion in Leviticus (11:29–30) of the lizard (Eidechse) among the “creatures that swarm on the ground [and] are to be unclean to you” contribute to the assumption that Eidechsen would have had a prominent place in the Bestiarium Judaicum? While there may be very little prehistory to Bruce’s claim about antisemitic lizard representations, it has had a significant afterlife, but first it should be recalled that this entry, like all of Kafka’s diary entries, is a survivor of the Kafka-desired bonfire of his vanities, which his executor Max Brod extinguished. Brod’s control over Kafka’s Nachlaß recently led Kafka’s delightful Eidechse to be caught in the Kafkaesque maelstrom of Middle East cultural politics. It was invoked—albeit somewhat inexactly—in a major 2011 lecture by the philosopher, hate-speech analyst, and self-identified Jew Judith Butler.9 The title of her performance was “Who Owns Kafka?” and it was occasioned by a trial about to be held in an Israeli court over rival claims to several boxes of Kafka’s Nachlaß that had been retained by Brod. Upon his death in 1968, he had bequeathed them to his private secretary Esther Hoffe and, upon her death in 2007, left in the possession of her two daughters, who wished to put the stash up for sale. There were two major claimants to Kafka’s legacy: the German Literature Archive in Marbach, which views itself as entrusted with conserving the German literary and linguistic heritage,10 and the National Library of Israel, which, Butler noted, has inferior archival facilities.11 Marbach’s competitor views itself as entrusted with conserving the cultural “assets” of the Jewish people (and, as unmentioned by Butler, apparently entrusted by Brod, in writing, to be the ultimate archive of this material).12 Butler questioned the notions of Germanness and Jewishness (both in general and with regard to Kafka) respectively employed by these pretenders to the name (“Kafka”) and found them both problematic. Most of her onus, however, fell upon what she called Israel’s intended instrumentalization of the “Kafka” brand and its associated products. She suggested that not only does Israel seek to reinforce its reputation as a life-affirming Kulturnation

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(cultural nation), but it also seeks, most insidiously, to break up the movement by a number of non-Israeli academics and cultural figures (including Judith Butler) to boycott all cultural exchanges with Israel until its policy toward and treatment of Palestinians are changed. Butler suspected that Israel desires to possess the Kafka originals in order to place Kafka scholars in an ethical double bind: either observe the boycott and deny themselves access to this material or abandon the boycott and enter the archive. Unfortunately, neither the appropriateness nor even the efficacy of the boycott was ever questioned in her disquisition. Butler called upon the “lizards” (sic) in pursuit of her goal of undermining the Israeli claim that what makes Kafka’s work “Kafka’s work” is its Jewishness.13 She drew upon the authority of others, as well, “in order to cast light on [Kafka’s own] question of his belonging” to the Jewish people. She cited Hannah Arendt’s citation of Kafka’s quip, which is generally assumed to be about the Jewish people: “My people, provided that I have one.”14 Then Butler quoted from Louis Begley’s use (in his “quite candid biographical essay” on Kafka) of a January 8, 1914 diary entry of Kafka’s: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe” (T 1:622; D2 11). Then Butler added: “Sometimes [Kafka’s] own remarks on Jews were harsh, if not violent, when, for instance, he calls the Jewish people ‘lizards.’ ” With the enunciation of these lines, Butler was able to invoke in her auditors and readers a what-else-could-it-be assumption about Kafka’s opinion of the Jewish people and, here leaving the source unmentioned, to engender fantasies about the scene of its utterance. Her audiences may have been led to wonder whether Kafka would have allowed himself to be appropriated as an exclusively— or even a principally—“Jewish cultural asset.” Unlike the vast majority of her readers and auditors, who did not have access to the full diary entry, one can fend off her rhetorical excess because one can recognize from its context that Butler was inaccurately presenting as a debasing Jewish identification an indirect analogy (“in the same way”) to an “in at least one respect” universal (allgemein) feeling of delight when suddenly brought face to face with an individual in both her singularity and her exemplarity of the group to which she belongs. Yet, one need not follow Judith Butler’s example and engage in ad hominem ploys in order to generate doubt about her implied interpretation in her exploitation of Kafka’s diary entry.15 Instead, one can seek out Eidechsen.

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Eyeing Eidechsen While Kafka’s diary entries prior to Spring 1911 do not record any saurian sightings, Brod’s 1937 Kafka biography begins its account of the September 1909 holiday that Brod, his brother Otto, and Kafka enjoyed in the Italian resort of Riva by noting: “When I came back to Riva after the war I . . . no longer saw the gleaming lizards gliding over the garden that had led the way down the dusty road full of cars to the cool space of the spa.”16 Over a decade earlier, Brod had evoked Riva-dwelling lizards in a couple of non-Kafka-mentioning articles in the Prager Tagblatt. The first, “Warnungszeichen des Krieges” (Warning signs of the war), published August 17, 1924, that is, shortly after his best friend’s death, describes a prewar Riva in which the shadows of the coming conflagration were cast but, at the time, neither recognized nor, even if sensed, believed: “Those days of wine and roses, lizards lazing in the sunlit road, scurrying off to the shoulder as one approaches. We wore rose-colored glasses, its salutary now to realize. The lizards seemed real to us as they scurried away, the sturdy battleworks a diversion.”17 Two years later (August 1, 1926), Brod published “Nachruf auf eine Badeanstalt” (Eulogy for a spa). It begins with a recollection of “Eidechsen über den Weg” (lizards on the path) to the Bagni alla Madonnina’ beneath the Ponalstraße bei Riva. He then nostalgically relates: We imagined at the time that a lizard was on the city’s coat of arms, because the clever, coy little beasties lay about everywhere half-asleep, as though benumbed in the glory of summer warmth, lifting their nimble little heads when one came nearer, then scurrying quickly away. Indolence and liveliness combined, joy and health as well—there could be no better symbol for our swim [holiday], none better for the workyear, for which we thought the rejuvenating power of Lake Garda’s pure waters would prepare us.18

This iconic plenitude is then paired with a lamentable loss. As he would later repeat in his Kafka biography, Brod regrets not seeing any lizards “scurrying quickly away” during his postwar visit. He ironically comments that an accident of nature and not developments in either European culture or capital seemed to be responsible. Instead, he explains, this absence was an effect of the unusually rainy summer rather than either the changing times or new management at the spa. The lizards return at the end of the article to signal the falsity of both the naïve wonder of youth and the nostalgia of age (as well as to

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echo his earlier article) when he espies Riva’s coat of arms: “The joyful, pleasure-seeking lizards were not to be seen, instead the coat of arms bore two gravely threatening fortress towers. How is it, he asks, had he earlier, in those peaceful times of the then still-named Madonna Spa, so completely failed to notice the threat?”19 For his part, Kafka does make several brief lizard references subsequent to his 1909 vacation and 1911 diary entry.20 In a 1920 fragment posthumously published as the parable “Der Bau einer Stadt” (The Building of a City), the narrator is solicited to build a city by some people, who “like lizards their bodies darted upwards among the crevices in the rock” (NS 2.1:303; CS 474) to reach the treeless summit of a cliff where, despite the narrator’s questioning of its suitability, they would found their city.21 More relevant are the two brief references to Eidechsen Kafka jots in his diary of his late-summer 1911 travels with Brod to Oberitalien and Lake Lugano, specifically of his stay at a spa between Castagnola and Gandria. On 1 September Kafka notes “Shivery feeling at the sight of lizards wriggling on the wall” (D2 252); the next day he jots down “The heartbeat of lizards” (D2 254). In contrast, Brod’s diary entries of the trip are swarming with lizards. Brod first notes Eidechsen in the August 31 entry of his journal of their trip.22 The Eidechsen return in the next day’s entry (September 1): “Lizards: quick movement, then suddenly rigid [Erstarren] in the sun—not even a slow step.” They play an even more prominent role in the entry for the day after (September 2): “The noise of the lizards, suddenly disturbed from their rest: [they] crackle just like matches being struck. When they sit, head raised, legs spread apart, their chests quivering, heart palpitations . . . Dragonflies rigidly [erstarrt] resting on my skin—their flying, swift like the running of lizards.”23 By characterizing the dragonflies’ resting as erstarrt, Brod may well be drawing another analogy, here implicit, with the previous day’s lizards on the road.24 When Brod returns to this encounter with dragonflies for a sonnet that he dedicates to Kafka, “Lugano-See” (Lake Lugano; 1912), the aside about the similarity between the flight of the insects and the movements of Eidechsen, let alone the allusion to their shared torpor, is absent. In the poem the dragonflies assume a role not granted them in his diary account: observer. They observe Brod and Kafka dangling their feet in the lake, but mistake the friends for rocks or flowers.25 In contrast, in the diary entry, Brod describes the foot-bathing pair as hidden by the overgrowth from the eyes of passers-by. Moreover, the two friends are themselves positioned as observers; they take those driving past for “Italian scamps.” Because a

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couple days before the recalled scene, Brod observed that there is something Jewish about foot-bathing (“Fußbad hat doch etwas Jüdisches”),26 it may be significant that Brod and Kafka themselves avoid ethnic identification in the poem.

Editing Eidechsen Clearly Eidechsen somewhat fascinate Max Brod, and they seem to be connected to experiences he shared with Kafka as well as to the relationships of both to Judentum. This suggests that Kafka invokes the lizard because of its resonance to this constellation.27 Philology, too, can play a role in understanding Kafka’s use of Eidechsen. The textual history of Kafka’s diary critique of Brod’s novel adds an additional complexity, however, to the meanings and implications of his curious analogy. Kafka’s preserved diaries and notebooks actually contain three attempts to comment on Brod’s Jüdinnen, two of which appear in Brod’s edition of his late friend’s diaries. Those two begin with similar remarks on the depiction of the Jewish Question and its possible solution in Western European literature in general and on how, by evoking the former without addressing the latter, Brod weakened his novel’s narrative. Kafka implies that this fault was all the more avoidable because a remedy to that lack seemed to lie so close at hand in Prague Zionism. But where one of his critical efforts ceases at that point, the other continues with the delineation of other faults in Brod’s work and includes Kafka’s counternarrative of the lizard encounter. The shorter of these two efforts appears in the first notebook (Heft A), whereas the longer appears in the second notebook (Heft B; T 1:36, 159– 61). The editors of the critical edition of Kafka’s diaries take the entry in Heft A to have been written first (T 3:93–94).28 When Brod prepared his original edition of the diaries, however, he placed the longer version first under the rubric “26. März” (March 26). As published, that day’s entry begins with a few comments on a Rudolf Steiner lecture Kafka attended and a notation of having earlier gone to lectures by (Adolf ) Loos and (Karl) Kraus. The conclusion of Kafka’s Brod critique is immediately followed by a new calendrical rubric, “28. März” (March 28). Grouped under this date are some observations about Steiner and theosophy and an account of “Mein Besuch bei Dr. Steiner” (my visit to Dr. Steiner). Appended at the end of the Steiner commentaries is the shorter critique. The next entry is dated “27. Mai” (May 27) and bears the text of a postcard Kafka was sending (or had sent) to Brod on the occasion of his samedate birthday.

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There are more than editorial differences at play here. The shorter version does indeed appear on the page following the March 28 Steiner passages in the first notebook (in A; T 1:12–19). An undated fragment, next in a series of prose exercises that Kafka wrote between November 1910 and early January 1911 (in B; T 1:122–24, 125–26, 128–30, 141, 143) and then recommenced between February 19 and March 28, 1911 (in A; T 1:30), follows the shorter critique (in A). Kafka may have written it down here because of its resonances with his account of the ca. March 28 visit with Steiner that appears in A between the March 28 entry and the critique of Die Jüdinnen. Brod, however, only includes the fragment’s virtual reproduction that appears amid a series of somewhat discrete comments written between entries dated August 20 and 24, 1911 (in A; T 1:38) and inserts it and the rest of the series in the entry dated “20. August.”29 The longer version (in B) does follow the report of the Steiner lecture (bearing the date “26. März”) and the mention of the earlier talks (T 1:159), and it is succeeded by the birthday-postcard text; however, the last is left undated in this notebook (T 1:161). On that notebook’s next page (T 1:162), a virtual reproduction of the longer analysis of Die Jüdinnen begins but is interrupted in the middle of the second sentence of the second paragraph. That text is not included in Brod’s edition of the diaries.

Brod’s Encounters with Another Beast: die Fackelkraus So what may have motivated Brod’s editorial decisions? Kafka’s list of recently attended lectures that precedes the leaping-lizard critique in Brod’s edition, in particular the reference to the Karl Kraus30 lecture, may offer a clue. On March 15 at Prague’s Zentral-Saal, Kafka attended Kraus’s lecture on “Heine und die Folgen” (Heine and the Consequences), an indictment of contemporary Germanophone journalism and journalists and their supposed sources in the Jewish-identified writer Heine and his work.31 Kraus’s denunciation provoked years of controversy and internecine polemic in Germanophone literary circles over Heine, Kraus, and several of the writers whom Kraus wished to douse with Heine’s “eau de cologne.”32 It also had almost immediate collateral effects on Brod and the circle of Prague literati.33 In the first issue of Kraus’s journal Fackel to appear after his Prague visit not only did Kraus reprint the enthusiastic review from the Czech semimonthly Novina (March 24) of his Prague condemnation of the “sloppy journalistic prose,” “shabby polemic,” and “affectedly papered over banalities” of Heine and his contemporary imitators,34 but he also launched his

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first of a series of attacks on the critic Alfred Kerr. Kraus begins his attack on Kerr as an identifiably Jewish writer (and so-called moral exemplar) by asserting that, pace Kerr’s once and future defenders, his rival embodies the Heine-imitating feuilletonist Kraus denounced and derided in “Heine.” The immediate catalyst for Kraus’s fusillade was a campaign by Kerr in the journal Pan to humiliate publicly the moralizing, censorship-happy Chief of Berlin’s police, Traugott von Jagow. Kraus aptly entitles his anti-panegyric, “Der kleine Pan ist tot” (The little Pan is dead)—alluding not only to that journal’s suspension of publication, but also to Plutarch’s first-century, second-hand report of the sorrowing wail “Der große Pan ist tot” (The great Pan is dead); Heine famously recited it in his infamous memorial to the baptized Jewish critic of both the dramatic and the political stage, Ludwig Börne.35 “Der kleine Pan” was itself quickly panned in a rival journal, Aktion (April 10) by its editor Franz Pfemfert. Pfemfert conjoined his reproof, the anti-eulogy “Der kleine Kraus ist tot,”36 with a personal call (Umfrage) to all Germanophone literati to join in the defense of Kerr’s work against Kraus’s aspersions. The first series of solicited Kerr homages, including contributions by Frank Wedekind, Erich Mühsam, and Kurt Hiller, appeared in the April 27 issue of Aktion.37 Kraus struck back with a second round of reproaches directed at Kerr in the next issue of Fackel: “Der kleine Pan röchelt noch” (The little Pan hasn’t yet croaked). Also in that April 29 issue, several poems (“Die vielen Dinge” [The many things], “Kindersonntagsausflug” [Children’s Sunday outing], and “Der schöne strahlende Mensch” [The beautiful beaming man]) by a junior member of the Prague circle, a writer for whom Brod saw himself as presumptive mentor, Franz Werfel, appeared for the first time—that is, in the publication venue that Brod had long and unsuccessfully sought for his own work. Two days later a piece by Brod was published in Aktion; it was his contribution to the Kerr Umfrage. Of all of the contributors to the series— which continued into July—Brod alone38 referred to Kraus by name and called him a “mittelmäßiger Kopf ” (mediocre mind). Kraus responded in kind and certainly not kinder. In the June 2 entry to his anti-Kerr polemic, “Der kleine Pan stinkt schon” (The little Pan already reeks), Kraus contemptuously dismissed Brod’s writing (citing passages from Die Jüdinnen), Brod’s name-calling, as well as Brod’s pathetic efforts to get published in Fackel, and combined them with mocking plays on Brod’s own name. Brod responded in Aktion ( July 3) with an article vilifying Kraus and bearing that contested label: “Ein mittelmäßiger Kopf ” (A mediocre mind). Pfemfert placed Brod’s retort after the last series of responses to his Kerr Umfrage with only Heinrich Eduard Jacob’s poem “Kopf einer ägyptischen

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Königsmumie” (Head of a royal Egyptian mummy) separating those implicit Kraus broadsides from Brod’s explicit one; the poem’s title allusively conjoined the final supplement to Pfemfert’s Kraus anti-eulogy and Brod’s would-be coup de grâce. The final shot in this particular exchange came from Kraus a few days later in his “Selbstanzeige” (Self-advertisement) section of the July 8 issue of Fackel; it followed the last attack on Kerr: “Der kleine Pan stinkt noch” (The little Pan still reeks). Adding injury to insult, Kraus not only ridiculed Brod through more plays on his name,39 but he immediately followed his mockery of Brod with the publication of Werfel’s poem, “Nächtliche Kahnfahrt” (Canoeing by night). This was not just any poem written by Brod’s younger colleague; it arose out of an excursion Werfel had taken with Brod (and Kafka) and that was especially memorable for Brod.40 As noted previously, he mentioned that outing just prior to the evocation of Riva’s lizards in the Kafka biography. Indeed Brod portentously opens his own autobiography, Streitbares Leben (A combative life), by depicting the scene that occasioned the poem as foreshadowing Brod’s conflicted relationship with Werfel. On a day when Brod and Werfel had gone swimming together, Werfel developed a severe sunburn that led Werfel’s mother the following day to reprimand Brod even more severely.41 Perhaps not surprisingly, Brod asserts in his autobiography that an irreconcilable break with Werfel was instigated by the younger poet inviting and hosting Kraus for his “ersten” (first) lectures in Prague.42 Brod may well have been errantly referring to some of Kraus’s Prague lectures that were subsequent (in March 1912, January, March, and April 1913) to the March 15, 1911 (and still earlier December 12, 1910) lecture as “ersten.”43 Yet in the absence of any chronological references aside from those to the apparent tactical use of Werfel’s poetry in the Spring and Summer 1911 Aktion-Fackel polemical exchanges, Brod guilefully implies that Werfel played a treacherous role in Kraus’s 1911 visit to Prague.44 Werfel was in Hamburg at the time, however, and only made initial contact with Kraus in April when the editor of Fackel wrote the young poet of his intention to publish several of his poems; they would first meet in person in December of that year.45

A Flock of Literary Foils: Goethe, Heine, Kraus, Werfel, Kafka, and Brod Situating Kafka’s diary entry amid the literary-political interplay of Brod, Kafka, Kraus, and Werfel also points to some other crevices, out of which

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the lizard that startled Kafka may have darted, in addition to any found in Riva. There are two significant earlier literary encounters with Eidechsen in Italy.46 One appears in Goethe’s diary and subsequent account of his Italian trip. From his seat in the postal coach on his way from Bolzano to Trento, Goethe records: “Walls are covered with a luxuriant growth of dwarfelder, and thick-stemmed ivy clambers and spreads itself over rocks; lizards dart in and out of crevices, and everything that wanders about reminds me of my favorite pictures.”47 During the spring of 1911, Kafka was engrossed in Goethe’s diaries, and both he and Brod set up Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey), its style and method, as a foil for their own planned travel diaries and expected prose reworking of their upcoming trip to northeastern Italy.48 And following the trip, Kafka (in a September 29, 1911 diary entry) contrasts Goethe’s travel observations with those Kafka’s contemporaries would have made: Goethe wrote from the perspective of a slow postal coach, adopting “A calm, so-to-speak pastoral form of thinking. . . . Therefore there are few observations of the moment.” His few such encounters, Kafka notes, occurred indoors, “where certain people”—as opposed to Eidechsen—“suddenly and hugely bubble up before their eyes” (D1 68–69; T 1:42– 43). By referencing Italienische Reise, Kafka and Brod were following a long tradition of Italian travel writing produced in the wake of Goethe’s own. Perhaps the most famous of these appeared in the third and fourth parts of Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), written by the author whose alleged deleterious effects on much of contemporary German literature and criticism had been the object of Kraus’s March 15, 1911 Prague lecture: Heinrich Heine. Heine’s Travel Pictures were explicitly written over and against Goethe’s work.49 In the opening section of Die Stadt Lucca (The City of Lucca) that begins the fourth volume, Heine recounts his own encounter with lizards. Would Kafka have been familiar with this passage? As already noted (see Chapter 3), there are few direct references to Heine in Kafka’s letters or diaries and perhaps even fewer in the critical Kafka literature and none to this particular scene; however, Brod’s biographies of the nineteenth-century Jewish-identified poet and of his late friend as well as in his own autobiography repeatedly contrast Heine with Kafka while comparing Heine with Werfel. Also curious is how, in his Heine biography, Brod never mentions any of Kraus’s still famous anti-Heine polemics such as the one he delivered in Prague. The only direct reference to Kraus situates him as the parentheses-enclosed example of the “Jewish artist, who himself had little or no connection with the Jewish community,” a Jewish

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artist who was nonetheless the object of the community’s “profound, loving devotion.”50 Here Brod identifies Kraus’s relationship to the Jewish people in a way that echoes an earlier characterization of Heine in the text, a characterization that leads to the invocation of the not previously mentioned Kafka. Heine, Brod writes, “often appears on the surface to be a mocker and destroyer of Jewish values . . . as indifferent [als indifferent]”; nevertheless, “the Jewish people[’s] great love of Heine is undimmed.” Appearances aside, even Heine aside, Brod sees that Heine, unlike Kraus, “passionately desired to arouse, to reawaken Jewry.”51 Brod then makes a remarkable leap by characterizing Kafka’s depiction of Josephine and her relationship to her Volk as “the best possible Heine biography.” Brod goes on to identify—here implicitly, elsewhere extensively—Heine’s acute, albeit encrypted, discernment of the state of Judentum in his time with Kafka’s own historically specific observations: “just as Kafka, in fact, has recorded in his own secret cipher everything that needed saying about the Judentum of our age, its decline and its renaissance.”52 When Brod returns three years later to “Josephine the Singer” in the biography of his friend, Kafka is characterized as “an example of the opposite type” to Josephine— and hence to Heine, who, aside from a brief mention late in Brod’s narrative at the announcement of Kafka’s death, is otherwise absent.53 Kafka’s second mention in the Heine biography coincides with Werfel’s only appearance in the work. Brod cites Werfel as the author of a verse that exemplifies the universal quality of Heine as exemplary representative and representer of the diasporic Jew: “ ‘Fremde sind wir auf der Erde alle / und es stirbt, womit wir uns verbinden’ ” (We are all strangers on this earth and that which binds us together dies).54 Such recognition of the Everyman (“Mensch schlechthin”) in the Diaspora Jew explains the “universale Wirkung” (universal effect) that Kafka’s central characters K. and the Surveyor have on his readership.55 Throughout the biography what Brod characterizes as Heine’s mendacity is implicitly contrasted with Kafka’s truthfulness. Werfel, who as already noted plays a significant role in Brod’s autobiography, is also identified in that memoir with Heine. Brod notes that Werfel’s inability to restrain his quick wit as well as his incomprehension that it could offend reminds him of Heine’s similar flaws. He also parallels Werfel’s brief commercial apprenticeship in Hamburg, which overlapped with Kraus’s Heine lecture in Prague, with Heine’s similarly against-the-grain and hence unsuccessful venture into the world of business of the Hansestadt. He also lists Werfel with Heine in the gallery of authors Kraus subjected to unworthy attacks.56

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Luccan Lizards While Heine is clearly entangled with the characterizations of Kafka, Kraus, and Werfel in Brod’s writings from at least 1911 on, why might Heine’s encounter with a lizard on the way to Lucca specifically have left its trace on Brod’s editorial decisions and perhaps Kafka’s own image selection? It is a most curious company of lizards—“with their wise little tails and cunning little eyes [Aeuglein]” (TP 161; DHA 7/1:159) evoking the proverbial creatures of the Book of Proverbs (30:24, 28)—that Heine meets while clambering along among the Felsen (cliffs) of the Apennines in the first chapter of The City of Lucca. He prefaces their introduction with an apothegmic commentary that both problematizes the conventional opposition of nature and culture (Geist) as one between the ahistorical and the historical (a diacritical distinction that also marks the opposition between Judentum and modern [Protestant] Germans) and evokes the rethinking of wissenschaftlich history that his fellow Verein members Wolf and Gans proposed (see Chapter 3): “Nature, too, has its history, and it’s a different natural history from the one that is taught in the schools” (TP 161; DHA 7/1:159). Before Heine recounts his conversations with the lizards— before the reader learns that they can speak—he first invokes them by means of a general observation and a very specific allusion to the plight of Jews, even baptized Jews, who sought academic positions. He recommends that “one of those gray lizards,” who had been resident there for “thousands of years,” be appointed “an adjunct professor [außerordentliche Professorin— Eidechse is a feminine noun] at one of our universities, then we could learn altogether extraordinary things” (TP 161; DHA 7/1:159). Though Heine soon informs the reader that the lizards may be originally from Egypt, he mentions that they are not recently arrived alien interlopers; indeed, they came to this region before any Germanic tribe.57 This recalls the frequent rebuttal of a common justification for anti-Jewish sentiment. For example, when Freud examines the reasons for the “popular hatred of the Jews” in Moses and Monotheism, the first, “the reproach of [ Jews’] being aliens[,] is perhaps the weakest since in many places dominated by anti-Semitism today the Jews were among the oldest portions of the population or had been there before the present inhabitants. This applies, for instance, in the city of Cologne, to which Jews came with the Romans, before it was occupied by the Germans [Germanen; i.e., Germanic tribes].”58 The significance of the recommended position, “außerordentliche Professorin,” becomes allusively clear when he proceeds to explain why, based

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on the experience of a “canine” candidate, such an appointment would be unlikely. “But the pride of several gentlemen of our law faculty would foment opposition to such an appointment. Does not one or the other of them even now nurse a secret jealousy against the poor Fido Savant, fearing that the latter will one day replace him in learned canine retrieval” (gelehrten Apportiren; TP 161; DHA 7/1:159). Heine’s reference to Fido Savant is an allusion to the situation of Eduard Gans,59 former leader of the Verein and Hegel’s foremost student. Initially, Gans, on his mentor’s recommendation, was appointed a professor (ordentlicher Professor) at the University of Berlin; however, as a consequence of a petition to the Prussian sovereign opposing the appointment, a law (commonly known as the “Lex Gans”) was enacted that prohibited unbaptized Jews from attaining that academic level. Gans submitted to baptism and received an appointment as ausserordentlicher Professor; even so, his Jewish descent (aside from any resentment of his widely recognized brilliance) continued to generate opposition to his integration into Berlin academia. Perhaps he was no longer a goose (Gans); however, in the eyes of many he remained outside of their (human) community. That Heine speaks of Fido, a name implying a pet dog, rather than simply referring to a canine savant60 is tied to their personal history. For Heine, Gans’s decision to repudiate the Verein’s opposition to conversion and allow himself to be baptized, to be housetrained, in order to be let inside the academy was a betrayal. It was also a convenient screen upon which Heine could project his own self-loathing for having bought at around the same time an entrée-billet— except his did not provide him entry (also see Chapter 3). Heine then enters into a conversation with the lizards. They inform him that animals (including humans) “can speak, each species in its own fashion.” Heine characterizes the lizards as “an ironic species [who] like to make fools of the other animals [including humans]. . . . They told [him] tales of Atlantis” and proffer various soteriological theories. He asks himself (and his readers): “Do they perhaps comprise enchanted priestly clans, like those of ancient Egypt, who, likewise attuned to nature, lived in labyrinthine cliff caves?” (TP 162; DHA 7/1:160). The invocation of Egypt is not too surprising; on almost every occasion that Heine mentions Egypt in his corpus it is associated with reptiles: lizards, crocodiles, snakes. And on most of those occasions, the invocation of that land of crocodiles is also connected to a discussion of Judentum.61 For example, later in The City of Lucca Heine speaks of an unnamed Volk “out of Egypt, the fatherland of crocodiles and priests . . . its mummies are still as indestructible as ever, and everlasting is that mummified people who wander around the world

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enveloped in their ancient [uralten] lettered swaddling cloth” (DHA 7/1: 192–93; TP 192; trans. modified); admittedly, these Jewish mummies are swathed in letters and not hieroglyphs.62 Heine provides additional indices that led to his speculation of the lizards’ Egyptian origin: “Such wondrous signs and symbols sprout on their little heads, bodies, and tails just like on the hieroglyphic headdresses and hierophant robes of old” (TP 162). There is, however, a possibly telling failure to maintain parallel structure in Heine’s description. While the signs on the lizards’ heads pair off with those on the Egyptians’ caps, and those on their bodies with the Egyptians’ garments, there is no mention of an analogical complement to their little inscribed tails. Because Heine often employed tails to figure penises and characterized circumcision as an inscription63 and because the Jewish practice was said by Herodotus and, following him, the first century BCE historian Diodorus to have been learned from the Egyptians,64 the lizards’ supplemental site of signification suggests a possible linkage with Judentum. This rhetorical asymmetry may also find its answer in Heine’s next chapter when he engages in a philosophic conversation with one particular old lizard, “my hieroglyph-skinned natural philosopher” (TP 163). In response to the lizard’s request for his judgment of Germany’s reigning philosopher-rivals Schelling and Hegel, Heine responds: “Their teachings are essentially the same, the philosophy of identity, with which you are surely quite familiar; they differ only in their style of presentation” (TP 163). That is, they differ in how they represent and signify that philosophy. Traditionally, the dialogue between lizard and poet has been read as a moment in Heine’s reception of Schelling;65 however, the invocation as well as the claimed substantial identity and formal difference of the identity philosophies of Schelling and Hegel point to a third unnamed philosopher, the Jewish-identified Baruch Spinoza.66 It parallels Heine’s later discussions in Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany) and Die romantische Schule (The Romantic School) of Spinoza’s pantheistic theory in-itself and as the fons et origo of both Hegel’s and Schelling’s theories.67 In The Romantic School Heine mediates Hegel’s and Schelling’s rival claims for originality by stating: “All our present-day philosophers, possibly without knowing it, look through glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.”68 Spinoza also served as a model for being in and thinking about the world for a number of Heine’s never-baptized Jewish contemporaries, such as Berthold Auerbach and Moses Hess.69 Moreover, as a retort to Schelling’s self-aggrandizing comparison of his own philosophic work with Spinoza’s, Heine argues in Concerning the

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History: “nevertheless I must declare most emphatically that in his earlier period, when he was still a philosopher, Mr. Schelling did not differ in the slightest from Spinoza.”70 Whereas Schelling originally equated the rigidity (Starrheit) of Spinoza’s philosophy with that of the Cypriot Pygmalion’s statues (Bildsäule), Heine’s Schelling insists that his philosophy differs from Spinoza’s “as the perfection [ausgebildeten] of Greek sculpture differs from the rigid Egyptian [starrägyptischen] originals.”71 Heine’s paraphrastic quotation of Schelling relocates Spinoza’s originality from Cyprus to the land from which, Heine repeatedly states, the Jews came: Egypt.72 When Heine informs his inquisitor about the crowds that gather to hear those two philosophers, “the little natural philosopher seethed with gelben Neid”; rather than envy (Neid) the lizard’s jaundiced (gelben) countenance indicates his disdain for the pathetic presumption of the human animal. Mockingly, the lizard declaims: “no human thinks, no philosopher thinks, neither Schelling nor Hegel thinks, and as for their philosophy, it’s nothing but a lot of hot air and water vapor like the clouds in the sky.” Precluding any ground for comparison and with all finality, he then asserts, “there is but one true philosophy, and that one stands printed in eternal hieroglyphs on my own tail” (TP 164). At this point Heine’s companion turns his back on him, “and as he slowly slunk away, waving his tail, I noted the most wondrous characters displayed in brilliantly colored significance all the way to the tip of his tail” (TP 164). Combining the allusions to Gans and Spinoza with the characterization of their various physical, genealogical, and mental traits Heine’s construction of the lizards may well be, as the Jew-as-Animal, articulating the Jewish animot. Canines and saurians were not the only possibly Jew-and-animal-associated figures that Heine encounters in the Italian hills as will be seen in the next chapter as it surveys his cervine sightings as well as those of another Germanophone, Jewishidentified writer a century later: Felix Salten, author of Bambi.

chapter 6

Italian Lizards and Literary Politics II Deer I Say It A stag stays a stag, Whether he stands or runs. A Yid stays a Yid, Were he baptized a hundred times. —oberdonauer proverb1

“My dear Herr Hyacinth” While the lizard’s signifying tail is apparently without equal, the wise lizard is not without precedent. In Luther’s translation of the Book of Proverbs the Eidechse is one of “four things . . . which are smallest on earth yet wise beyond the wisest” (30:24). Several verses later it is described as what “can be grasped in the hand yet is found in the palaces of kings” (30:28).2 Closer in time to Heine’s writing were two works, in particular, that have been suggested as sources: for his references to Egypt and Atlantis, to hieroglyphs and their interpretation, as well as to mentors and disciples; for his evocations of a past golden age and an Adamic language that communicates across species, phyla, and even the organic-inorganic divide; and for his voluble and wise lizards.3 One is one of Hoffmann’s Märchen aus der neuen Zeit (Contemporary fairy tales), his “Der goldene Topf ” (The Golden Pot) with its mysterious salamander scientist; the other is Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs (The apprentices of Saïs), a novella about hierophants of the ancient Egyptian mysteries.4 In the middle of his narrative, Novalis embeds “Das Märchen von Hyacinth und Rosenblüthe” (The fairy tale of Hyacinth and Rose Petal). At one point, a lizard sidles up to Hyacinth,

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who is trying to disavow his would-be secret feelings for Rose Petal. It sits down, “waved its little tail” (wedelte . . . mit dem Schwänzchen), and sings a song that suggests Rose Petal reciprocates his love.5 In The Romantic School, Heine refers to the “goldnen Hyazinthenlocken” (golden jacinth hair)6 of the woman with whom he always associates Novalis; Heine also yokes his discussion of Novalis together with that of Hoffmann in a pairing of opposites.7 Heine not only hears echoes of Novalis’s singing lizard from the fairy tale of Hyacinth amid the Apennines’ rocky grottoes, but those of another Hyacinth too can be heard.8 In The Baths of Lucca, which precedes Heine’s account of The City of Lucca, readers are introduced to two of Heine’s old Hamburg acquaintances: the parvenu convert Gumpelino and his aide Hirsch-Hyacinth, a fascinating personage who, according to the narrator, “would more aptly have been named for a tiger lily [Feuerlilje]” (TP 103; DHA 7/1:91).9 When Gumpelino announces the approach of “my Hyacinth,” Heine floats a series of signifiers as they emerge in his visual field: “He was a wobbly, walking scarlet red coat embroidered with gold braid that shimmered in the sunlight. . . . And indeed, when I took a closer look at the pallid solicitous little face and the busily blinking little eyes [Aeuglein] I recognized someone whom I’d have sooner expected to meet on Mount Sinai than on the Apennines” (TP 103– 4; DHA 7/1:91). Like the soon-tobe-encountered lizards, this no-less variegated figure too bespeaks ancient Egypt. He, too, is more a bearer of ciphers than letters, although in his case numbers rather than hieroglyphs; yet, as he reminds his debtor Heine, numbers, like those Adamic glyphs, bridge the gap between signifier and signified: “If only the last time you’d played 1365 instead of 1364” Heine’s lot would have been different (TP 122; DHA 7/1:110).10 Heine’s creditor had in the interim substituted his given name Hirsch with “Hyacinth” (a translation of the Hebrew “Hirsch”), so that he would not be treated “wie einen gewöhnlichen Lump” (like an ordinary ragamuffin; TP 127; DHA 7/1: 116),11 that is, like a common Jew. Since under the Prussian and Austrian name laws a number of Jewish men with the Hebrew name of Naphtali adopted Hirsch, the German word for stag (or [red] deer), the emblematic animal of that eponymous tribe of Israel, he feared that, without the floral supplement, “Hirsch” would immediately identify him as a Jew.

Excursus: Is a Doe Sometimes Just a Female Deer? In 1922,12 possibly the most famous member of the Cervidae family in Euro-American culture13 “came into the world” (BE 9): the eponymous

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protagonist of Bambi. This world-wide bestseller was sired by the Viennabased novelist and journalist Felix Salten. Bambi, however, was no Hirsch, or red deer;14 he was a Reh, or roe deer. Salten, too, was born neither a “Hirsch” nor “in the middle of the thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades which seem to be entirely open but are really screened in on all sides” (BE 9); instead, he was born in Pest, Hungary 54 years earlier, as Siegmund Salzmann, son of Philipp Salzmann, who, though the descendent of a long line of rabbis, had chosen instead to become an engineer. His family soon moved to Vienna, anticipating by nine years the emigration of the family of another Pest-born Jew who would later serve Siegmund Salzmann, having by then become Felix Salten, as a model of Zionist vision and feuilleton creation: Theodor Herzl.15 Fifteen years after the publication of Bambi, the name change did not prevent Salten from being treated “wie einen gewöhnlichen Lump”; following the Third Reich’s Anschluß of Austria (March 12, 1938), his long career as a contributor and editor of feuilletons to Vienna’s leading liberal newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, came to an end. Moreover, as had already occurred in Germany by 1935, the sale of his many earlier novels and writings was forbidden as was any future publication in what had been Austria; the Gestapo even confiscated and destroyed all unsold exemplars as they had earlier in Germany.16 The consequent lack of income impeded emigration;17 however, after barely escaping arrest and “preventive detention” in a concentration camp on Kristallnacht, he managed to escape to Zurich in January 1939—thanks to his daughter, who had married a Swiss actor and obtained Swiss citizenship, and, more decisive, due to his agreeing to the vocational restrictions demanded by the Swiss Writers’ Union, including being “forbidden to work for any Swiss magazines or newspapers [nor] allowed to accept any position as editor, editorial staff member or writer.”18 Swiss officials did allow Salten to publish a sequel to Bambi, Bambis Kinder (Bambi’s Children), with the Zurich publisher Albert Müller in 1940. Given what Salten had already experienced, his present tenuous situation—permission to remain in Switzerland was subject to annual review and the plight of those who were unable to find refuge like his sister Rosalie, ever worsened19—and the Winter razzia in the original novel (BE 100 –17) that saw the slaughter of many forest inhabitants, including Bambi’s mother, and that echoed the pogroms that devastated many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe during World War I and the Russian Civil War,20 one might assume that the sequel would be a horror story, in which Er/He, the murderous invader of Bambi’s forest, would be perpetrating even worse atrocities.

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Er returns in the sequel. In the original, Er uncannily remained for both Bambi’s animal protagonists and its narrator as undifferentiated as the (case-appropriate) third-person singular, proper (pro)noun by which he was always referred, whether Er appeared singly or in numbers (see, for example, BE 107, 111; BG 120 –21, 123). In Bambi’s Children, however, Er shows a number of different faces. While still characterized as Er by the nonhuman inhabitants of the forest, the original’s seemingly unrelenting21 antagonist now “sometimes acts like the cruelest enemy, other times as the rescuer” (Retter; BK 133; cf. 34, 144) or “liberator” (Befreier; BK 95). Indeed, Bambi observes: “sometimes Er acts justly [übt Er Gerechtigkeit] . . . not always . . . still on occasion Er does so” (BK 34). Though the forest dwellers understand neither Er’s speech nor Er’s sounds (BK 89), Er is recognized as obeying a certain code. For example, the squirrel Perri informs Bambi’s children (with Faline), Geno and Gurri, that Er never fires at squirrels—not even during the “great Terror” (große Schrecken; BK 133)22 as the Winter razzia is called in the novel. Yet even that “murder event” (mörderische Veranstaltung; BK 91) is not presented as the capricious slaughter of the innocents, which might reoccur at any moment, depicted in the earlier work; rather, Er and his “troop” (Schar) undertake this hunt ( Jagd) only once a year in midwinter, as Bambi informs Faline (BK 79); moreover, in its wake Er leaves bales of hay to help the surviving forest creatures sustain themselves until spring arrives. Unlike in Bambi, Er is specifically identified by the narrator of the sequel as human; the narrator also includes the instructions that Er gave the troop at the beginning of the Winter hunt regarding which creatures they were allowed to shoot, which they needed to shoot, and which they were forbidden to shoot. Included among the last were “owls, screech-owls, [and] especially noble game [Hochwild; i.e., roe and red deer]” (BK 87).23 In addition, the narrator identifies and follows several specific individuals: “the Hunter” (der Jäger), his apprentice, a vagrant (Landstreicher), and a village mayor. The Hunter is a sometime liberator and rescuer; he saves Bambi’s daughter Gurri from the fox’s near-fatal bites to her throat, reassures “you poor little one” (Du armes Kleines; BK 33) that her wound would heal, brings her to his family home to recuperate, and, when he discovers the tracks of another deer (Bambi) who had apparently leapt over the enclosure fence to visit her, releases this “child of the forest, who needs to be in the forest [because] any other [habitation] would be unnatural” (BK 50). He later rescues another young deer from a poacher’s trap, forcibly preventing the man identified, by the narrator, as a vagrant (Landstreicher) from causing further harm; the vagrant is identified by the Hunter as varieties of “rogue”

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(Gauner, Lump, Halunke, Strolch, Schweinehunde [BK 65]), who has no right to be in the forest. The vagrant then pulls a pistol on the human Hunter, which Salten implicitly correlates with the wrongful24 setting of a trap for the nonhuman deer. The Hunter declares him to be an “Unmensch” (BK 66); that is, the Landstreicher is one who, unlike either a human (animal) or a (nonhuman) animal, transgresses both the order that operates in the forest—what Bambi characterizes as “the eternal law of the forest” (dem ewigen Gesetz des Waldes; BK 127)—and what is proper for the species (and for the human it is the law of the polis).25 To sustain the forest and its inhabitants the Hunter follows rules regarding which of its inhabitants can and should not be hunted. Der Jäger comports with Salten’s ideal of the responsible hunter, following his comment to John Galsworthy, the English novelist and author of the forward to the original Bambi: “To the hunter wild game is by no means a ‘sacrifice’ and he alone has a deep feeling of responsibility towards all living creatures. He kills, to be sure, but he is in fact the only one whose killing is like a mild form of fate.”26 Learning those rules and that responsibility requires an apprenticeship, and an apprentice hunter, like virtually all beginners—including the young deer in both Bambi and Bambi’s Children—is often afflicted with an excess of zeal that, in the case of the young man ( Jüngling) in the latter novel, leads to missed or errant shots. His mentor, the Hunter, recognizes that he is not yet ready to hunt solo—in part, out of concern that the youth would upset the deer (albeit before the proper time for hunting them; BK 143– 44)—and continues to accompany him during forays into the woods. Later in the novel, the apprentice breaches the peace of the forest—he kills a not-yet-fully-grown buck—and the Hunter sharply reproves him (BK 154).27 While exhibiting outwardly the expected amount of regret, inwardly the youth is proud of his marksmanship; while he now proclaims himself a “full-fledged marksman” (Schütze; BK 154),28 the narrator subsequently identifies him as “this murderer” (BK 159). Later, possessed by “hunt lust” ( Jagdlust), he goes out alone to stalk deer until Bambi knocks him out of commission. Inexperience and immaturity may explain the apprentice’s behavior, but neither justifies nor excuses his acting outside the law.29 Though not learning the actual cause of the injuries to his apprentice, for whom embarrassment replaced “hunting fever” ( Jagdfieber; BK 160),30 the Hunter realizes that he is still not ready to hunt properly and again forbids him from going out on his own. Order is restored—“the forest enjoys peace” (BK 161)—and remains so at novel’s end. The vagrant and the apprentice are not the only non-native, peacedisrupting, “forest-intruder[s]” (Eindringling; BK 109) and “murderer[s]”

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(Mörder; BK 133). An earlier savage killing of a deer is also labeled a “murder” and “wholly singular crime” when committed by the village mayor’s wolfhound Nero (BK 98).31 Such predation is not constitutive of the good (brav), obedient Nero’s place in the order of things; Nero’s lupine ancestry had overcome his canine self. He consequently acts the omega wolf (see Chapter 8) and becomes an outlaw who has to be stopped (BK 109).32 Earlier, another creature not native to the forest, a cat, begins to attack and “murder” its inhabitants. As would happen to Nero, the cat’s “original predatory nature” overwhelms it, and it becomes “a monster” (ein Ungeheuer; BK 83), a “kind of alien” (Art des Fremden; BK 98), that the Hunter must track down and destroy (BK 83–85). For Nero, the cat, and the apprentice, their respective primal biologies had overwhelmed their proper socialization and expelled them from the order of the forest (and the village beyond) by preventing them from fulfilling their respective naturalized social roles as domestic (nonhuman) animals and adult male human (animal). Further, Nero (BK 100, 104) and, if less so, the apprentice (BK 160 –61) experience shame for their transgressions. Several individual indigenous predators are also identified as outside the law of the forest:33 a marten, crazed by injury and infection after being shot by the apprentice, and a fox, maddened by revenge and resentment after being blinded in one eye by a heron’s beak and turned “bitter, feared enemy.” The peace of the forest is not breached, however, when, as is their nature, “an owl catches a mouse or a sleeping bird, a goshawk snatches a hare, a fox . . . bags a pheasant . . . [these] tragedies [are] mere happenstance, common, of the usual sort. Singularly awful for the victim. When they happen they cause some upset but no uproar. So it must be, so it has always been” (BK 85).

Assimilationist Cervids, Haggling Hares, and Other Herzlian Haserei While Bambi’s Children’s narrative would seem to resist any imputation of allegory about the situations facing Salten and his fellow European Jews in 1940,34 its 1922/23 prequel has been subject to several attempts.35 As the subtitle to the novel, “Ein Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde” (A life-story of a forest dweller), suggests, Bambi relates the development of its cervine protagonist: from his birth as a Prinz (prince) in a protected forest glade to maturity, when he assumes the role of his purported father, der Alte (“the old stag”) aka der alte Fürst (“the old Prince [Regent]”; BE 165). In the novel, all male roe deer (Rehe) are referred to as princes (Prinzen), and all of the

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larger, male red deer (Hirsche) are called kings (Könige).36 Salten apparently ascribed these titles not only as a consequence of the size of these cervids relative to the other inhabitants of the forest and the esteem with which they (Hochwild or noble game; BK 87) are held by human hunters, but also due to an anatomical index of cervine gender: The males of both species are distinguished by their Kronen (lit. crowns), as their antlers are called in German.37 While the deer and virtually all of the nonhuman animals communicate with one another in a mutually understandable language and are ascribed internal affective states generally associated with humans, they do not engage in behaviors that are atypical of their respective species.38 Salten has not so much anthropomorphized his nonhuman characters as humanized them in line with the epigraph of his 1929 novel about other animals inhabiting the forest with Bambi, Fünfzehn Hasen (Fifteen Rabbits): “Ever strive to humanize [vermenschlichen] animals; thereby you impede humans from acting beastly [vertieren].”39 The implied objects of such bestial acts are nonhuman animals, and Bambi’s Er is such a beast.40 The Winter razzia begins when “Twenty or thirty strong, He [Er] cried, ‘Ho! Ho! Ha! Ha!’ . . . He sprang up everywhere, struck about Him, beat the bushes, drummed on the tree trunks and shouted with a fiendish voice” (BE 107, 111; BG 120 –21, 123). Like the Animal of Western philosophic narratives as analyzed by Derrida et al. (see Introduction), Er lacks the capacity for meaningful speech, only making “savage noises” (tobende Lärm [BE 107; BG 121]) and is identified by the collective singular: “His smell differed each time in a hundred subtle ways and yet you could tell it in an instant” (BE 94; BG 106 –7). Er is depicted from the perspective of the nonhuman members of the forest community41 rather than described along normative human lines. When the younger deer do not know what the older deer are referring to when speaking of “His two hands,” Frau Nettla brings up what squirrels do (with their front paws) to help them understand (BE 94; BG 107). Further, Er is said to have a third hand (i.e., a rifle or shotgun) that “isn’t attached like the other two, but He carries it hanging over His shoulder” (BE 95; BG 108). The third hand is not always present; however, when it is and Er tears it off, “fire flashes,” “thunder cracks” (BE 98; BG 111), and death is delivered. Er exceeds any taxonomic classification; Er is never referred to as either Mensch (human) or Mann (man).42 Neither is Er designated by an occupational title;43 Er is never characterized as a hunter ( Jäger). Moreover, unlike ferrets or moles Er does not hunt ( jagen).44 Rather, Er pursues or persecutes (verfolgen) the inhabitants of the forest; “He’s murdered us ever since we can remember” (BE 98; BG 112).

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Some read Salten as betraying a Jewish subtext that would shape the entire narrative when he has the young deer, Karus, lament, “Will He never stop hunting [verfolgen] us?” (BE 98; BG 111).45 Whereas several readers (for example, Judith Butler and Jens Hanssen—see Chapters 5 and 7) would contort Kafka’s texts into a critique of a certain species of Zionism, others would reassemble Salten’s as a promotion of a different one. The principal evidence for such allegorical speculations is Salten’s Zionist activism, especially prior to World War I and after his visit to Palestine in Spring 1924, about which he wrote a 1925 travelogue cum “paean to Herzl’s Zionist dream,”46 Neue Menschen auf alter Erde (New Men on Old Soil). Salten was a star on the pre-war Zionist lecture circuit where he sought to mobilize Jewish self-consciousness and pride.47 For example, he gave a number of presentations in Prague at the invitation of the Bar-Kochba Circle, at least one of which Kafka attended ( January 21, 1914) and remarked upon in his diary.48 On January 15, 1909, Salten shared a Prague stage49 with Martin Buber, who delivered the first of his “Drei Reden über das Judentum” (three speeches on Judentum). Salten’s presentation, “Der Abfall vom Judentum” (the lapse from Judentum), called on his audience to refuse the trip to the baptismal font in order to secure the civil and intellectual positions that Emancipation had supposedly opened for Jews and to reject the antisemitic stance of Gentile toleration toward Jews as mere “guests” of whatever European country they reside. Emancipation was not a gift, he reminded them, for which they should be grateful. Instead, he exhorted his audience to resist carrying themselves with a deferential humility that shrinks before the arrogance of the Gentile establishment.50 Instead, they should recognize and draw upon the religious and moral force of their tradition, a tradition that is an integral part of Western culture, in order to shape that culture now and in the future. Consequently, some claim that, in the chapter that precedes the razzia, an extended exchange among the deer of different views of the nature of relations between Er and the members of the forest community—not just the deer51—replays several different accommodationist positions of assimilated Jews that Salten had addressed in his Zionist lectures and articles.52 For example, Bambi’s mother offers: “Some of Them53 aren’t dangerous; you can see that at a glance” (BE 96; BG 109), but acknowledges that she doesn’t stay around to find out. Then Marena, a “young half-grown doe,” utters utopian hopes: “They say that some time He’ll come to live with us. . . . And we’ll be friends with Him.” When Frau Nettla, having laughingly dismissed her naïvité and wished Er to “stay where He is and leave us in peace,” is then reproved—whether for discouraging the ideals of youth

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or for tempting fate—she doubles down and declares any talk of reconciliation with the once and future killer as nonsense (BE 98–99; BG 111–12). The subsequent razzia would seem to bear out her position. Later, Salten offers up a possible parable of the self-delusions of postEmancipation assimilation54 in his depiction of Gobo, the brother of Faline (later Bambi’s mate). Born frail and dependent, he is thought killed in the razzia, but suddenly reappears months later, singing the praises of Er. Gobo informs his fellow deer how Er picked him up after he had collapsed during the razzia and was surrounded by Er’s dogs, carried him to His home, where Er and His family fed and played with him. “If He loves anybody or if anybody serves Him, He’s good to him” (BE 161; BG 183). The others notice that Gobo has a halter [Band] about his neck that he proudly announces as the “greatest honor” that Er bestowed upon him (BE 162; BG 184). During his time with Er, Gobo assimilated Er’s schedule: “He slept at night when the others were awake. But in the daytime when the rest of them were looking for places to sleep in, he was wide awake and went walking” (BE 173; BG 194). He comes to view himself as superior to the other deer since he’s “more of the world and [he] know[s] more about life than anyone in the world” (BE 166; BG 187). When one day Gobo, along with Bambi, Faline, and Marena, encounter Er in the meadow, he dismisses their fears, ignores their warnings, confidently stands his ground, and “Then the thunder crashed” (BE 178; BG 201). Even mortally wounded by Er’s rifle shot, he still tries to rationalize his murder with his last words to Marena: “Er did not recognize me” (BG 201).55 Another who not only praises Er but also serves Er’s interests against those of the forest inhabitants is the unnamed dog. His motivation is not the gratitude of the weak having once been given succor; instead, fear and hate drive him (BE 212; BG 239). The response to the dog’s actions is also different. Where Gobo is viewed with either pity56 or esteem (after all, he safely returned from Er’s grasp), the dog is viewed not just as a useful idiot, but as a traitor. When the universally reviled fox is captured by the dog, accusations of “turncoat,” “renegade,” “blackguard,” “spy,” and “traitor” are not only tossed by the fox and other predatory creatures (magpie, jay, weasel, and ferret), but by the squirrel as well (BE 210 –11; BG 237–39).57 In sum, several scenes and characters in Bambi readily suggest several of Salten’s publicized observations of European Jewish life. Further, his unremitting depiction of Er as a murderous monstrous other, bearing no observable58 signs of the responsible hunter or other human interactions with nonhuman animals, such as those he describes in his other works,59 would seem to reinforce the impression of the forest denizens—not just

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the roe deer60—as a single historically persecuted community (identifiable as, if not only, the Jews), however differentiated its membership is.61 Vienna’s foremost anti-feuilletonist, Karl Kraus, read the animal novels of the frequent object of his satirical venom, Salten, less as allegories of Central European Jewish life than as performances of the typically Jewish. After the 1929 publication of Salten’s Fifteen Rabbits, Kraus provides his own gloss, “Jüdelnde Hasen” ( Jew-speaking rabbits). After allusively ascribing financial motives to Salten being “closer to the thick forest . . . than one would believe possible of a confessor of Moses,”62 Kraus explains that Salten mastered the language of the eponymous protagonists of his Fifteen Rabbits because they “speak in Jewish dialect [jüdeln].”63 Kraus employs here an equally pejorative synonym of his old bête noire, mauscheln (see Chapter 4), and illustrates his assertion with a discussion between the rabbits Iwner and Hops, during which the latter dismisses the danger posed by Er (see Figure 6 in Chapter 1). Rather than engaging in linguistic analysis of the extract,64 Kraus resorts to ad hominem arguments and Jewish stereotypes. First he notes that they talk like the characters in other books issued by Salten’s publisher Zsolnay—in addition to publishing Salten, the publishing house first gained prominence by publishing the Jewishidentified Franz Werfel, who in 1920 had fallen out of Kraus’s favor and been the target of one of his most vicious satires, Literatur oder Man wird doch da sehn (Literature or you ain’t seen nothing yet). He then argues that their Jewishness is not betrayed by their speaking in Jewish dialect but by speaking German: “But it is amazing how they assimilated the enemy’s speech. Perhaps mimicry as a defense against persecution? One easily gets used to Jewish dialect being used in time of danger”—supposedly when Jews are overcome by fear their linguistic mask drops, but given that in the passage Iwner tells Hops that Er is not dangerous, Kraus continues—“when they are among themselves, they know how to talk German.”65 For Kraus, these rabbits betray their Jewish identification when not jüdeln-ing.66

The Poacher as Outlaw In Bambi’s penultimate scene, after he and Bambi come across the dead body of the individual possibly responsible for setting the noose trap that earlier snared Friend Hare (BE 186 –89; BG 209–12),67 der Alte delivers a summary demystification of Er— He isn’t all-powerful as they say. Everything that lives and grows doesn’t come from Him. He isn’t above us. He’s just the same as we

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are. He has the same fears, the same needs, and suffers in the same way (BE 218; BG 246 – 47)—

before passing on the torch to Bambi. It is not, as Iris Bruce stages, the swan song of a Herzl-Messiah figure preparing “his ‘people’ for the time when he is no longer there” via his “Chosen Deer.”68 Nor is Bambi’s gloss on der Alte’s homily—“There is Another [sic] who is over us all, over us and over Him” (BE 218; BG 247)—a testimony of theistic faith,69 let alone a cervine Shema. Such a reading is exacerbated in English by Chambers’s mistranslation of the adjective “ein anderer” (an other [something or someone]), as the adjectival proper noun “Another.” The key to reading this scene otherwise is the narrator’s identification of the dead body as that of a “poacher” (Wildschütz). It is the only occasion in which Er is differentiated. A poacher is an outlaw; he is not a member of the forest community, all of whom, as Bambi affirms in the sequel, are “subject to the eternal law of the forest” (BK 127). Further, that he was shot suggests his outlaw status was recognized by a fire-hand (Feuerhand, as firearms are literally identified in Bambi’s Children) bearer like those included in the collective singular Er. Moreover, both the site of penetration and the wound’s description— the kill shot was to the throat (Hals) and left a wound “gap[ing] like a small mouth” (BE 217; BG 245)70— call attention to material causes for the index of humanity, language, and reinforce his outlaw status. This implicates Er and Er’s actions as neither generalizable nor generically human; moreover, Er’s transgressive, outlaw status is not simply in relation to particular nonhuman animals but to the (natural) order of the forest in which there is pain, suffering, and killing, but “So it must be, so it has always been” (BK 85). Though clearly informed by his experiences as a Jew living in post-Emancipation and pre-Shoah Central Europe, Salten’s narratives of Rehe, Hirsche, and other Tiere are better interpreted as explorations of human(animal) and (nonhuman)animal relations and of community formations that cannot be reduced to allegories or read as the performative metamorphoses of the Jew-Animal into the Jew-as-Animal.

Israelite/Philistine Despite the name change from Hirsch, Hyacinth is a man of many Jewish-identified trades—“Kollekteur [(lottery) agent], Operateur [(chiropody) surgeon], Taxator [( jewelry) appraiser].” Hyacinth is a clipper of corns (Hühneraugen; rather than of either coins or foreskins) or clavi by

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profession—unlike those Jewish non-chiropodists, Friedländer and Co., whom (as seen in Chapter 3) Heine scornfully identifies as Hühneraugenoperateurs because that label also connotes scammer or quack.71 Hyacinth’s tales of his treatment of the corns of the rich and famous, including Salomon Rothschild, provide Heine with more than one opportunity to humble one of his favorite objects of ridicule: wealthy Jews. More significant, Hühneraugen, literally hen’s eyes, figure the societal stigma suffered by Jews, especially the efforts of those Jews to remove, through wealth, religious reform, or denial, those painful excrescences of Judentum that inhibited, de facto and de jure, their (social) mobility.72 Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, Heine’s contemporary and the critic who was the object of Grillparzer’s nasty epigram about a monstrous animal hybrid (see Chapter 1), said of himself: “I have no ‘crime’ to confess, only a ‘birth defect’ [Geburtsfehler]! Namely, I am by birth a—Jew. I could also say, an ‘Israelite’ or [of the] ‘Mosaic religion,’ but ‘Hühneraugen’ remain ‘Hühneraugen’ also when people call them ‘Leichdörner.’ ”73 As Saphir observed, each term in these series indicates that those so identified do not properly belong to the—respectively, social and individual—body. However, while the latter terms of each series are taxonomically situated as manifestly external entities that have penetrated corporeal boundaries,74 the former implies an allegedly external difference emerging from within—the Jew from within the Christian, the animal (i.e., hen’s eyes) from within the human—an abject, beastly excrescence. In his 1844 eulogy of Ludwig Marcus, Heine shifts the referent of Hühneraugen and points out, by means of analogy, that the Jews are not the only ones harmed by this stigmatization. He observes that just as an individual, no matter how headstrong, has to feel pain when his little toe suffers from corns, so too the state as an organic whole suffers whenever a single one of its parts ails and “the restrictions on Jews are such Hühneraugen on the feet of the German state” (DHA 14/1:271–72; see Chapter 3). Yet what may also catch the reader’s eye is the subsequent reflection of the Jewish Hirsch-Hyacinth’s “geschäftig zwinkenden Aeuglein” (busily blinking little eyes; TP 103– 4; DHA 7/1:91) in the “spitzfündigen Aeuglein” (cunning little eyes; TP 161; DHA 7/1:159) of the Egypt-spawned Eidechsen. Only one other figure in the Travel Pictures’s accounts of Heine’s trip to Italy has eyes referred to as Aeuglein. They are borne by the “Charlottenburger Philistine,” conversations with whom occupy the opening chapters of the first Italian section, Reise von München nach Genua ( Journey from Munich to Genoa). Although the individual is not explicitly identified as Jewish, the label of Philistine generates an immediate linkage— courtesy of Berlin’s Christian-German Eating Club for whom Philistines

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and Jews (together with women) were the named groups excluded from membership and subjected to regular ridicule.75 More significant is how Heine’s portrayal of the man from Charlottenburg points to a Jewish identification. After a discursus on the common use as a conversation starter with a fellow guest at table of “Es ist heute eine schöne Witterung” (nice weather today; DHA 7/1:15) by a man of commerce or (cheese) monger— that is, by one pursuing a typical career path of the Philistine (as well as of the unnamed Jews)—Heine comments that this Charlottenburger was no exception. Heine opens his next chapter, however, by transliterating the phrase as the Philistine had lisped it: “Es ist heute eine scheene Witterung” (DHA 7/1:16, emphasis added). While Heine ascribes the dialect to the speaker’s Charlottenburg descent (rather than residence—“these flowers sprout up in no ordinary sand [keinem gewöhnlichen Sande]”; DHA 7/1:16), this pronunciation of “schöne” is also characteristic of a number of Yiddish and Judendeutsch dialects. For example, in Oskar Panizza’s “Der operierte Jud’ ” (the operated Jew) “scheene” is characteristic of Itzig Feital Stern’s “Pfälzerisch, semitischem Geknängse” (Palatinate Semitic babble).76 Further, Charlottenburg was already known in the 1820s as a residential quarter for well-to-do Jews. Earlier still, in the late eighteenth century, the chronicler Johann Christian Gottfried Dressel expresses surprise that this retreat for wealthy Berliners in search of relaxation had also become a choice destination for Berlin’s Jews.77 Eyes also mediate an association of “Jude[n]” and “Eidechse[n]” that was contemporaneous with the Reisebilder. Carl Spindler, in his 1827 novel, Der Jude (The Jew), introduces his principal, and generally not unsympathetically portrayed, Jewish character Ben David with a physiognomic inventory that notes he had “lively eyes that would compete in liveliness and piercing focus with those of a lizard [Eidechse].”78 The novel apparently found quite a receptive audience, so much so that Heine’s publisher Julius Campe, in an effort to spur him to turn out a third volume of Travel Pictures and hopefully even a fourth, invokes the paucity of appealing prose works currently in the market—with the noted exception of Spindler’s—in a June 24, 1828 letter: “You underestimate the favorable situation we have now; aside from Spindler’s Der Jude no book speaks to people. Take my advice. Strike while the iron is hot” (HB3 41– 42). After several more pleas for the rapid production of a third volume and an inquiry as to whether Heine knew Spindler, Campe informs his correspondent, perhaps hoping that pride or jealousy might get his pen moving in the publisher’s direction: “From this man [i.e., Spindler] I would like to publish something good—because I surely believe that he would only submit good work for

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publication in order to preserve his reputation” (HB3 43). Whether Heine was familiar with Der Jude at the time is unknown; however, given that the novel is staged in the same century and, in part, the same location (Frankfurt) as Heine’s never completed Rabbi von Bacharach, the writing of which he had interrupted when he began writing the first of his Travel Pictures, Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey; 1824), Der Jude and the lizard-like eyes of Ben David may well have already come to Heine’s attention.79

Back to Kraus Beyond his Aeuglein is another thread that situates Heine’s fellow Hamburger in the constellation of Judentum, Kafka, and his Eidechsen. Heine’s characterization of Hirsch-Hyacinth as an individual of impeccable honesty and forthrightness provided Kraus in his Prague denunciato with one of his two prime victims of Heine’s hypocrisy (the second being the Ludwig Börne of Heine’s 1840 Memorial).80 In Hirsch-Hyacinth’s case, Kraus refers to Heine’s ad hominem (and homophobic) attack on the rival poet August von Platen,81 who had recently ridiculed Heine and his friend, the dramatist and satirist Karl Immermann, in the play The Romantic Oedipus.82 Heine entrusts the honest Hyacinth with the opening salvo in the assault on Platen as poet and person. As Heine moves to his next chapter, he hesitantly (“nur zaudernd” [DHA 7/1:134; TP 144]) offers to fulfill his obligation to the reader who would want further information on this figure that occupied the previous chapter’s discussion. Hirsch-Hyacinth created a way in for Heine to begin his own offensive of critique and innuendo, of ridicule and revanche.83 Regarding that assault, Kraus ironically comments: “And this from a polemicist who talks about his trusty Protestant kitchen hatchet [guten protestantischen Hausaxt]!” (HC 98/99). Heine speaks of his picking up the “gute protestantische Streitaxt” (good Protestant battleaxe [DHA 7/1:147; TP 155]) against the Catholic Platen, just as Luther, Lessing, and Voss earlier bore it against their Catholic opponents who had accused them of unbelief. Kraus recharacterizes Heine’s weapon because, as the proverbial house-axe signifies, if one has an axe at home one doesn’t need to bring in someone else to do the job. Kraus is suggesting that Heine has someone else do his own dirty work, since—and here Kraus mocks Heine’s conversion, his Jewishness, and his writing—Heine’s axe cannot “trim” [beschneiden; i.e., circumcise] a sentence (HC 98/99).84 But Hirsch-Hyacinth is also Heine’s mouthpiece for a disquisition comparing Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religions (DHA 7/1:114 –17; TP 126 –29). He serves as Heine’s external observer of the material social

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order, just as the lizards serve as Heine’s external observer of the material natural order. What the number-bearing Hamburger, glyph-skinned lizards, and letter-wrapped Hebrews have in common is the inscribed Schwanz (tail/penis). In contrast to those undifferentiated Schwanz-bearers whose origin Heine also traced to Egypt, the first two, Hirsch-Hyacinth and the saurian natural philosopher, are each a singular exemplar encountered in the Apennines such as Kafka believed his friend Max had failed to represent, but which would suddenly rear itself up sometime in Spring 1911 in Kafka’s diary. That the underlying motivation for Brod’s editorial choices was his conscious recognition of a lizard-mediated, Jewish-identified elective affinity between Heine’s and Kafka’s singular figurations is, at best, highly speculative. Nevertheless, literary politics and ressentiments of the first third of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may well have combined with Brod’s obverse identification of Heine and Kafka to create the conditions for the observation of an assumed unlikely conjunction of two Jewish-identified literary luminaries and their Jew-as-Animals.85 The next chapter examines yet another incidence of the literary politics and ressentiments of the second decade of the twenty-first century coming to screen Kafka’s performance of the Jew-as-Animal by serving up in its place the Jew-Animal.

chapter 7

The Raw and the Cooked in the Old/ New World, or Talk to the Animals [And the ass] said to Balaam, “What have I done? This is the third time you have beaten me?” Balaam answered, “You have been making a fool of me. If I had a sword with me, I should have killed you on the spot.” —numbers 22:28 –29

Ninety-five years after its composition and publication in Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude, Franz Kafka’s story of contemporary (1917) Zionism (?),1 Palestine (?), colonialism (?), diaspora (?), and orientalist (?) representations of Jews (?), Arabs (?), and Gentile Europeans (?), “Schakale und Araber” ( Jackals and Arabs) has recently been interpellated by Jens Hanssen into cultural-political contestations over contemporary (2012) Zionism, Palestine, colonialism, diaspora, and orientalist representations of Jews, Arabs, and Gentile Europeans. With its publication by one of the foremost American journals of academic cultural criticism and analysis, Critical Inquiry,2 Hanssen’s “Kafka and Arabs” joins Judith Butler’s 2011 British Museum lecture “Who Owns Kafka?” in engaging “Franz Kafka” as an institutionally sanctioned participant in the debates among European and American academics over Israel/Palestine. But can the symbolic authority of this Prague-born, German-speaking, Jewish-identified writer be invoked when the use and analysis of sources for that authority, that is, of his writings, are seriously flawed? Chapter 5 addressed infelicities in Butler’s appropriation of “Kafka” and his words to decry Israel’s legal efforts to appropriate them as a Jewish cultural asset; this chapter examines Hanssen’s enlisting them to decry so-called settler-colonialist Zionism in 1917 and today.

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Though Hanssen makes a number of contestable apodictic assertions about Israel and Zionism and proleptically wraps himself in an apotropaic defense against accusations of antisemitism3 by “Israel-right-or-wrongcircles,”4 it is his equivocal genre claims, tendentious readings, and lax literary scholarship that undermine his instrumentalization of Kafka and his animal (both human and nonhuman) figures for cultural-political polemics. After a discussion of the problems surrounding the determination of the genre (Gattung) of “Jackals and Arabs,” this chapter will turn to an analysis of Hanssen’s characterizations of the story’s protagonists, their genus (Gattung), and conclude with a discussion of how Kafka’s work contests Jewish identification. Before examining Hanssen’s reading of “Jackals and Arabs,” a brief synopsis of its plot may be helpful for those unfamiliar or no longer familiar with Kafka’s story: His Arab-manned caravan camped at an oasis, the firstperson narrator, a self-described traveler from the North, kept awake by the plaintive howling [Klagegeheul] of jackals, finds himself surrounded by the beasts. The oldest jackal initiates a conversation with him. The jackal relates the ages-old quarrel between his kind and their despised enemies, the Arabs, and informs the narrator of his portended role in its end: cutting the throats of his Arab traveling companions with an ancient pair of rusty sewing shears. Before the rather discomfited narrator can respond, the whip-wielding Arab leader of the caravan intervenes to provide his dismissive take on the ab-original bond between Arab and jackal. To corroborate his depreciation of “our dogs” (DL 274; CS 410), the carcass of a recently deceased camel is thrown before the jackals. They pounce upon the carrion until driven back by the leader’s whip. When the jackals try to return to the carcass, the narrator stays the Arab’s arm and the leader accedes to “leave them to their business [ihrem Beruf]” (DL 275; CS 411). Or as Hanssen sums it up: “To this day, ‘Jackals and Arabs’ represents a rare European account—fictional or nonfictional—in which the violent nature of Zionism’s designs on Palestine is countered by an Arab protagonist whose narrative of resistance, I will argue, Kafka renders empathetically” (KA 169).

What Species of Gattung? Hanssen proclaims the timeliness of his intervention by early on invoking Butler’s lecture on the juridical fight over the ownership of Kafka’s Nachlaß (KA 168). He concludes his article by returning to that trial:

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Israeli attempts to claim the last untapped manuscripts . . . are bound to gloss over the distinction between settler-Zionism with the precolonial Zionism’s emancipatory contributions to Jewish consciousness in Europe. As the binationalist solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beginning to gain ground again internationally . . . Kafka’s allegorical illuminations are important reminders that the roots of binationalism, also, need to be decolonized. . . . Rereading “Jackals and Arabs” can direct us to where this process of decolonization may need to begin: in the recognition of the other as equal and constitutive of the self. (KA 196)

In words implicitly recalling Walter Benjamin’s notions of “dialektisches Bild” (dialectical image) and “dialectics at a standstill,”5 Hanssen characterizes his approach to Kafka as “recuperating and redeeming the past in order to reconstitute . . . a dystopian present” (KA 196). While treating the story as a dialectical image, Hanssen also repeatedly categorizes it as an allegory (KA 170, 172, 174, 178–79, 196). To that end, Hanssen explicitly draws upon the authority—without direct quotation— of Benjamin (KA 172), specifically the two Kafka pieces collected in Illuminations (“Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” and “Some Reflections on Kafka”). Because Hanssen’s interpellation of Kafka into contemporary debates relies, in part, upon his claim for “Jackals and Arabs” as would-be dialectical image and “postcolonial allegory,” the Gattungsfrage (genre/genus question) needs to be addressed. First, it should be noted that Benjamin never characterizes Kafka’s works as Allegorien, but only as Gleichnisse, which English translators have rendered as “parables.”6 Moreover, Benjamin never directly refers to “Jackals and Arabs” in either work. As discussed in Chapter 4, Kafka had a rather specific and contemptuous understanding of “Allegorie” as superficial and monotonic. Further, in response to Buber’s intention of labeling “Jackals and Arabs” (as well as its fraternal twin “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” [A Report to an Academy]) a Gleichnis,7 whether translated as “allegory” or “parable,” Kafka suggested instead that it be identified as a Tiergeschichte, an “animal story.” Given this exchange between Kafka and Buber, interpreters, especially those of a historicist bent (old or new), engage in serious verbal contortions in order to identify the genre of “Jackals and Arabs.” For example, Dimitry Shumsky focuses on Kafka’s phrase “not really parables” (nicht eigentlich Gleichnisse) in the letter:

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the resistance on Kafka’s part, accompanied by an assertion that rejected a priori any sweeping allegorical interpretation of the two stories tells us that some of the figures he created in them represented no more and no less themselves, as they existed only in the reality of the author’s imagination. And as far as “Jackals and Arabs” is concerned, both the “Arab” and the “European traveler” are precisely this type of figure.8

Hanssen also mentions Kafka’s letter to Buber in the body of his article, but does not indicate that Gleichnisse is the term employed in the letter; instead, in an attached note he absurdly adds: “It is important to note that Kafka chose not to use the technical term Fabel. The literal term animal story appears to avoid the moralist baggage of fables” (KA 180 and n53).9 Hanssen then goes on to say that “Kafka’s rejection of the category of parable for his first [sic] two stories with animal protagonists suggests that he did really care about animals as animals—not just as masks . . . ” (KA 180).10 Clearly Kafka’s “animal story” depicts the jackals acting like jackals—right down to their loquaciousness and scissor schlepping. Moreover, the Arabs stand for Arabs, and the traveler from the far North stands for Europeans—pace Shumsky and Hanssen: not! Yet why shouldn’t the “animal” in “animal story” refer to both the human and nonhuman varieties? On the eve of the publication of “Jackals and Arabs,” Kafka writes in his penultimate letter to Felice Bauer: “I strive to know the entire human and animal community [die ganze Menschen- und Tiergemeinschaft] . . . In short, my only concern is the human [and animal] tribunal [das Menschen(- und Tier)gericht]” (B2 333; LF 545).11 Humans and animals together make up the one community and the one court. And, as is the case with its sibling story “Report to an Academy” (see Chapter 4), the protagonists of this animal story need not conform to standards of zoological correctness. After all, neither the European nor the Arab is surprised by jackals’ possessing a capacity for speech, the lack of which has historically been a primary emblem of (nonhuman) animals’ diacritical difference from humans.12 Nor do the jackals situate the Arabs, the traveler, or themselves on opposing sides of the human /animal divide. The allegory for Hanssen, one can only assume, lies in the relationship between the jackals and the Arabs and, perhaps, in the relationship between the jackals and the narrator. In these relationships the jackals are unmasked—although never officially identified—as the Jews bzw. Zionists, the third, along with Arabs and Europeans, of the historical groups that form the referential context for Hanssen’s analysis of the story.13

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In Imperial Messages, Robert Lemon pinpoints one crucial justification for those who would read “Jackals and Arabs” as allegory against Kafka’s claim: “paradoxically, the very absence of the word ‘Jew’ supports the allegorical interpretation, since allegory depends on the absolute separation of the diegetic sign from its extra-diegetic referent.” Yet rather than view any or all of the characters as allegorical substitutes, Lemon makes a second observation: “One aspect of the text, however, militates against the allocation of fixed identities. The triangulation in this story between the jackals, the Arabs, and the narrator prevents the establishment of clear subject-object relations, since every connection, is impinged upon by a third party or the other Other as it were.”14 So if we are witnessing à la Benjamin the dialectic at a standstill, the image is clearly moving in place. And the disruptive, if not necessarily redemptive, force of the Third (des Dritten) is compounded by Kafka’s choice of Gattung: for an animal story, like the Third, dislodges familiar identifications of subjects, objects, and their interrelations as well as suspends the assumed naturalness of both opposed pairs and the corresponding Great Divides that would maintain their opposed identifications.15

A Ménagerie à Trois The only one called a Fremder in the story, the only explicitly nonnative character, is the narrator. Rather than indigenous resident Arabs threatened by invading genocidal settler-colonists that, Hanssen repeatedly implies, are allegorically illuminated in the figure of the jackals, Kafka depicts two groups already and always intrinsically bound together “in a quarrel that divides the world” (DL 273; CS 409). But it is not a simple pas de deux; it is a ménage à trois, for this traveler is not the first to have engaged jackal and Arab; he is but one of a series. In Hanssen’s posited “triangular observer-tormentor-tormented plot” the traveler-narrator would seem to be the observer; he is not “master[] of the narrative . . . neither . . . omniscient [n]or beyond reproach” (KA 184). Yet, as will be seen, he functions in Hanssens’s reading as the adjudicator of claims. Where does the narrator-traveler come from? He himself indicates that he comes from “the far North” (DL 270; CS 408). The jackal indicates that he already knew that and refers to him as a Northerner— one of a series. Only the Arab refers to him as a European—also one of a series. The Northern reference has been correlated in a number of readings with the soteriological role that the jackals ascribe to the narrator.16 Several Jewish messianic traditions associate the Messiah with the North—as

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the location of his throne (for example, Isaiah 14) or as the location of the evil forces that the Messiah will overcome (Magog, the land of Gog in Ezekiel 38–39). Hanssen never refers to the traveler’s own characterization of his geographical origins; he does, however, bring up Kafka’s near contemporaneously written, but only posthumously published, story of China and northern nomads, “The Great Wall of China,” to indicate that Kafka’s critical relationship to orientalism and European stereotypes of non-Europeans, apparent in “Jackals and Arabs,” is not a one-time endeavor. Still Hanssen makes no connection between the traveler from the North and the more Magogic than messianic “eternal nomadic enemies to the north,” “the Chinese imperial myth” of which, Hanssen notes, Kafka’s Chinese narrator “dispels” (KA 183). Nor does he mention the companion piece to “Great Wall,” “An Old Manuscript,” an even briefer story, written between “Jackals” and “Report” and published with both in Kafka’s 1919 short-story collection A Country Doctor. In that story, Kafka also depicts travelers from the North; they have obtruded upon the space in which it is set. The narrator portrays how these invaders, unlike his fellow inhabitants of the overrun capital, besmeared the “clear distinction” between human and animal.17 These nomadic barbarians “hardly have a language of their own. They communicate with each other much as jackdaws [Dohlen—in Czech, kavka] do” (DL 264; CS 416) and, recalling the jackals’ piling on the camel carcass tossed to them by the Arabs, leap on an ox, “tearing morsels out of its living flesh with their teeth” (DL 266; CS 417).18 That Kafka has here left his signature (kavka and Kafka are virtual homophones) upon these other travelers from the North, who devour raw meat with the same enthusiasm as the jackals, may further complicate any attempt to ascribe fixed referents to any of the figures in “Jackals and Arabs.” According to the Arab, the jackals seek salvation via visiting Europeans. This can be correlated on the one hand, historically, with the (failed) efforts of Theodor Herzl to enlist both Kaiser Wilhelm and Pope Pius X to support Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine as well as with the attempts, then ongoing and regularly reported on in the Prague Zionist journal Selbstwehr that Kafka religiously read, by Chaim Weizmann and other Zionists in wartime London to secure British support.19 Then again, it is not surprising that the Arab would employ an ethnonym to characterize the foreigner from the North, given the intentional use, according to Hanssen, of the ethnonym Arab. For Hanssen wishes to make much of Kafka having crossed out “Bedouin” in his original draft and replaced it with “Arab” when the traveler’s companions are first mentioned. He argues: “Kafka’s non-Bedouin Arab, however, evoked a sense of land entitlement that the

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label ‘Bedouin’ would have denied” (KA 185). No doubt, that opening label of “Bedouin” would have tainted the ten subsequent occasions in which they were already ethnically denominated as “Arabs.”20 Yet the Arabs of the story are not native to the oasis; their caravan is only camped there for the night. Moreover, the Arab leader tells the narrator that the “pair of scissors goes wandering through the desert and will wander with us to the end of our days” (DL 274; CS 410).21 As for that narrator: unlike the doubly misleading English translation in which the traveler from the North informs the oldest jackal that he is taking “only a short tour of your country” (DL 271; CS 408; emphasis added), the original reads that he is taking a “kurze Reise” (short journey) but never indicates a destination or territorial boundaries. That a story includes “Arabs” and desert might well have led readers of Der Jude to think of Palestine and some of its inhabitants; yet no articles on Jew-Arab interaction in Palestine had appeared in the journal prior to the story’s publication. Further, if the setting is Palestine and the jackals are settlercolonizing Zionists, why do they characterize their location as one of exile? This does not disprove any claim for an association between the jackals and that species of Zionist, but it does call attention to how Kafka is destabilizing any attempt to set up one-to-one identifications. Within Hanssen’s “triangular observer-tormentor-tormented plot” (KA 184), the jackals would seem to be the tormentor, the Arabs the tormented. The jackals “defam[e]” the Arabs and “attempt to instrumentalize the European in order to cleanse Arabs from the land,” whereas the Arab in his “perspicacity . . . explains the situation” (KA 185). In contrast to the “tirades, lamentations, and flatteries” of the “blood-thirsty”22 jackals (KA 179), “Kafka’s Arab protagonist is characterized by a certain generosity and a good deal of Kafkaesque gallows humor” (KA 185). Against the jackals’ “murderous scheme” and “inhumane cause,” the Arab acts in selfdefense: “[T]he native . . . who talks back to the jackals”—actually he never addresses the jackals; he only speaks to the traveler-narrator—“is actually the one exerting corporal violence in self-defense against the jackals’ threat of murder, which would today be considered ethnic cleansing” (KA 184). It must be an example of the Arab’s “Kafkaesque gallows humor” when he (i.e., the Arab) characterizes the grave threat posed by the jackals as “they have the most lunatic hopes, these beasts; they’re just fools, utter fools” (DL 274; CS 410). And the “great” “cutting whip” with which the Arab “lashes crisscross over [the jackals’] backs” (DL 275; CS 411) is a wellknown weapon of self-defense.23 So perhaps it is a parapraxis when, in the only specific labeling of either tormentor or tormented, Hanssen describes the Arabs as “haughty tormentors” (KA 184).

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The inventory of denigrating Arab qualities, which, Hanssen asserts, resembles Herzl’s descriptions of Palestinians as a “ ‘dirty,’ poor and ‘sick people’ ” in Altneuland (KA 183–84), principally comes from the mouth of the oldest jackal. Hanssen’s citation practice, however, obscures a much more complicated picture. On the page in the English translation of Altneuland from which Hanssen claimed to draw, “dirty” qualifies the colors (unreiner Farben) of Jerusalem’s narrow lanes crowded with trades people, and “sick people” translates the German adjectival noun Kranke, one of the many varieties of street dweller: including beggars, hungry children, screeching women, and howling (heulende) merchants. Their ethnicity is left unnoted,24 unlike the repulsive (widerlich) Jewish beggars at prayer subsequently encountered on the way to the Wailing Wall. That Herzl harbored orientalist attitudes and prejudices toward the residents of Palestine cannot be doubted;25 however, these sentiments appear to be as much geographically as ethnically based. This can be seen in the dismissive characterization of the various local ethnics encountered by the Prussian aristocrat Kingscourt and Herzl’s chief protagonist, the Viennese Jewish doctor Friedrich Loewenberg, when they first set foot in “the old land of the Jews”: “poor Turks, dirty [schmutzige] Arabs, and timid Jews lounging about [1902 Jaffa]—indolent, beggarly, hopeless.”26 Because of its source—the jackal—Hanssen maintains that Kafka is subverting the validity of the defamatory characterization of Arabs. To support his claim, Hanssen asserts—without textual corroboration—that the vilification of the Arabs is “one of the reasons the traveler-narrator is ultimately turned off by the jackals’ murderous scheme.” Hanssen also emphasizes that “Kafka’s Arab stands—problematically ‘high [or tall; hoch] and white’—in the literary centre of a leading Zionist journal” (KA 184).27 The prominent placement of the only physical description of an Arab may indeed portend a subtle inversion of racial stereotype; however, Hanssen’s claim for Kafka’s exceptionality should be tempered. For example, the noted Jewish physician and anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg in 1905 approvingly cited French anthropologist Paul Topinard’s characterization of the “Arab type [as] one of the most beautiful in the world. . . . His complexion remains perfectly white when it has been subjected to the effects of the atmosphere.”28 Further, given that the scene takes place at night, the context suggests that the Arab would most likely have been entirely cloaked in white robe (thawb) and headcloth (kufiyya); hence the description may simply be phenomenological rather than ideological. Throughout his article, Hanssen situates Zionist writings as the only source from which Kafka could have drawn negative, respectively,

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orientalist Arab stereotypes: for example, “the complexity of his Arab character stands in stark contrast to the way Zionists in and outside of Palestine treated its native inhabitants” (KA 186).29 He does not consider, for example, travel literature, of which Kafka was quite fond,30 or Karl May’s extremely popular Orient Cycle (1881–88), the Wild East adventures of Kara Ben Nemsi (Karl, son of the Germans).31

A Jackal of All Trades Hanssen, with punning, would-be irony, characterizes Kafka as “Champion of Underdogs” (KA 194),32 whose illuminating “exceptionalism,” unlike the most “self-congratulating[ly] tolerant” (KA 196) of his Prague Zionist friends, allows him to “recognize the Arabs on their own terms” (KA 191). On the other hand, Hanssen concedes, “The animal figure of the jackal invokes the objectionable dog metaphor in European antiSemitism” (KA 187). It is the Arab’s characterization of the jackals as “our dogs” that I assume led Hanssen to situate the “jackals” within the history of canine representation.33 He also somewhat nonsensically suggests that the Arab’s “smug comparison” that his dogs are “finer [schöner] than [the Europeans’]” (DL 274; CS 410) distinguishes them from “the more docile” European ones. I doubt that it is canine “docility” that motivated the European antisemitic use of the “dog metaphor.”

Going to the Dogs With the possible exception of the opening sentence of The Metamorphosis, the most quoted passage from Kafka’s work is from the concluding line of Der Prozeß (The Trial): “ ‘Wie ein Hund!’ sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben” (“Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it must outlive him).34 Usually the quotation is limited to Josef K’s last words “Like a dog!” as his executioner plunges a double-edged butcher knife into his chest and twists it twice. K’s final reduction to canine status has often been taken as reflecting Kafka’s tendency toward disparaging himself—as both a man and a Jew. Two letters, one sent (to Brod in May 1907) and one famously unsent (to his father in 1919), are often invoked. Kafka informs his friend in the former that “My future is not rosy and I will surely— this much I can foresee— die like a dog [wie ein Hund zugrunde gehen]” (B 51; LFr 24), while in the latter he recalls his father saying of an employee suffering from tuberculosis that “The sooner he dies the better, the mangy dog” (er soll krepieren, der kranke Hund).35 As to the possible Jewish

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component of K’s canine self-abasement, rather than the long tradition discussed in Chapter 1 (also see Chapter 8) of tossing Jews and curs together in a heap of supposedly shared abject traits, any such claim usually takes its lead from a brief, early October 1920 entry in Kafka’s notebooks that was first published, without any clear indication of when it had been written, in Max Brod’s 1953 edition of Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (Wedding Preparations in the Country): The lament is senseless (to whom does he complain?), the jubilation is ridiculous (the kaleidoscope in the window). Obviously all he wants is to lead the others in prayer [Vorbeter sein], but then it is indecent to use the Jewish language [das Jüdische unanständig], then it is quite sufficient for the lament if he spends his life repeating: “Dog-that-I-am, dogthat-I-am” [Ich-Hund, ich-Hund] and so forth and we shall all understand him, but for happiness silence is not only sufficient, it is indeed the only thing possible.36

Karl-Heinz Fingerhut, in his encyclopedic inventory of Kafka’s animal figures, emphasized the repeated phrase “Ich-Hund” and concluded that this was an “old Jewish [ritual] formula of self-debasement” (alte jüdische Formel der Selbstniedrigung); it became the lens through which he read Kafka’s canine figures.37 In his widely consulted Kommentar to Kafka’s novels, Hartmut Binder picked up Fingerhut’s phrasing and proceeded to summarize Kafka’s view of Judentum as “especially inferior” (besonders minderwertig).38 Even though the so-called old Jewish ritual formula could not be traced elsewhere, this particular interpretive trajectory only collapsed when the critical edition of Kafka’s Nachlaß appeared in 1992–93.39 The phrase that Brod had transcribed as “das Jüdische” is corrected to read “das Indische”; the editor of the critical edition, Jost Schillemeit, argues that Brod’s errant transcription (parapraxis?) was unjustifiable, both graphically and substantively.40 The context for Kafka’s depiction of the wannabe leader of others in exercising their religion (of art) who indecently resorts to the mystical East (das Indische) is Franz Werfel’s 1920 verse drama Spiegelmensch: Magische Trilogie (Mirror man: magical trilogy) that follows Thamal and his refracted double, Mirror Man—at one point addressed “Du Hund” by Thamal—from a Tibetan Buddhist monastery to a kaleidoscope of other “oriental” locales and social roles. Kafka informed Milena Jesenskà in a ca. October 7, 1920 letter, that he had just finished reading it (B3 357; LM 209).41 More insight into the significance of K’s “wie ein Hund” emerges when it is restored to the novel’s remaining, usually elided, words: “he said, it

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was as if the shame of it must outlive him.” Paul Haacke constellates that line with Walter Benjamin’s observation that for Kafka “animals appear to represent the shame of being human” in order to argue that K is not lamenting that he “feels like a dog . . . , but rather that he feels like a human who is being treated like a dog (and an abject one at that).”42 That experience of shame paradoxically undermines his animalization,43 because the (in)ability to feel shame has been a prominent diacritic of the human / animal Great Divide since Hegel’s Logic (1830)44 and Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) (see Chapter 4). K dies an animalized human who, with his final utterance, both performs his humanness (as determined by the human /animal Great Divide) and, as indicated by the appended gloss, may testify to the ongoing animalization of other human (animals). K’s invocation of the shameful dog also betrays human /animal difference as an artifice. No explicit human /canine analogies or identifications mark Kafka’s late narrative “Investigations of a Dog”; the first-person narrator, Kalmus, identifies himself and the others that he meets as fellow members of the Hundeschaft (“canine community,” “dogdom”) in opposition to the other “sorts of creatures in the world, wretched, limited, dumb creatures who have no language but mechanical cries” (NS 2.1:425; CS 279). Yet there is one group of creatures, the seven musical dogs, that look like canines, but, because they make no reply to his greeting, lead Kalmus to the question: “Perhaps they were not dogs at all?” Their silence would have been canine appropriate, he reports, had they “remained silent from a sense of shame . . . But they had flung away all shame.” In this scene, Kafka ascribes to the Hundeschaft a pair of qualities by which the human distinguishes itself from the animal: verbal acknowledgment and shame. Yet what shameless behavior did they commit? “[T]he wretched creatures were doing the very thing which is both most ridiculous and indecent in our eyes; they were walking on their hind legs” (NS 2.1:432; CS 283–84). They were, as noted in the Introduction, engaging in what Freud characterized as the critical step that was taken in crossing the threshold from animal to human and in developing a sense of shame:45 an erect gait that “uncover[ed] their nakedness” (NS 2.1:432; CS 284). On a structural level, the story may also be read as refracting Kafka’s critique, discussed in Chapter 5, of Brod’s Die Jüdinnen (The Jewesses): The Jüdinnen lacks non-Jewish observers, the respectable contrasting persons who in other stories draw out the Jewishness [das Jüdische] so that it advances toward them in amazement, doubt, envy, fear, and

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finally, finally is transformed into self-confidence, but in any event can draw itself up to its full height only before them. (D1 55)

In “Investigations,” the researcher, Kalmus, addresses not the question of dem Jüdischen ( Jewishness) but of dem Hündischen (dogness), which he locates in “what the canine race nourished itself upon.” That question has “occupied us since the dawn of time, it is the chief object of all our meditation” (NS 2.1:436; CS 286). Like the narrative point of view in Die Jüdinnen, Kalmus’s perspective appears to be no less compromised by his belonging to the observed (vertraute hündische Verbindung); however, there are critical differences. While Kalmus emphasizes that the focus of his pursuit is uncovering the Hündisch (without calling it such), his narrative is replete with encounters with the particularities of the Hundeschaft qua Hunde. By contrast, in focusing on the encounters within the Judenschaft ( Jewish community) in order to betray das Jüdische, Brod’s Jüdinnen conveys neither the particularities of the Judenschaft qua Juden nor das Jüdische.46 More significant, although Kalmus only ever observes his fellow dogs, his quarry, the essential determinant of canine existence, is right before his eyes but invisible to him: the non-dogs, the unnamed human presence that the reader deduces. One can go the route of dog:(invisible) human::human:(invisible)deity along another Hegel and Darwin mediated trajectory. While Darwin theorized that dogs share with humans a “belief in unseen or spiritual agencies” and relate to humans as if to gods, Hegel dismissed Schleiermacher’s theory of religion as absolute dependence by suggesting that it might lead one to conclude that the dog is the most religious animal.47 One can also go the route of Kafka’s possible Judaizing the Hundeschaft by first noting the millennia-long tradition of identifying Jewish difference in their dietary habits and prohibitions as exemplified by Feuerbach’s “Eating is the most solemn [feierlichsten] act or the initiation of the Jewish religion. . . . their consciousness of God [lay only] in eating manna.”48 In “Disputation,” Heine spins the vilification of Judentum’s so-called “alimentary theology”49 differently. As discussed in Chapter 1, he follows up the vicious litany of bestial epithets that Friar José hurls at his Jewish opponents with a culinary exchange in which human /animal difference overcodes Christian /Jewish difference. Whereas Rabbi Judah invokes the great whale Leviathan upon whom all the saved will feast on the day of resurrection, Heine has the Friar recommend a different repast: Christ and the rest of the Jews.50 Heine most likely is less celebrating his nostalgia for Jewish cuisine than calling out the inhumanity, the bestiality, of the Christian

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oppressor as well as displacing the recently resurrected blood libel from the Jews of Damascus to the Friar that they allegedly ritually murdered.51 To this can be added the history of abject associations of Jews and dogs (chronicled in Chapter 1) together with Kalmus’s encounter with the Lufthunde as a canine allusion to those staples of shtetl life (or the coffeehouses of Central Europe), the Luftmenschen, their heads in the religious (or aesthetic) clouds.52 Another datum can be included in this configuration: Kafka’s encounter with Anton Kuh’s Juden und Deutsche ( Jews and Germans) the year (1921) before he began writing “Investigations.” In Kuh’s survey of contemporary German Jewry, originally delivered extemporaneously on stage, the relationship between the formation of Western European Jewry and the family dinner table figures prominently. For a number of years, Kafka regularly crossed paths with Kuh: in person, in performance, and in print. This work would have especially drawn Kafka’s attention because Kuh’s characterization of the typical son of the Western Jewish family includes an obvious allusion to the Metamorphosis: “Then you are sprung, unfree. You can neither lose the smell of the kennel [Geruch des Zwingers] nor the look of vigilant restlessness that grows there where one [Mensch], harshly squeezed and warmly embraced, self-obsessed and moved to tears, rubs up against other people [Menschen] and in the end, as one such brilliantly describes, transforms into a bed bug [in eine Wanze verwandelt].” The lingering stench of the kennel arises from his animalistic characterization of the Jewish family a few pages earlier: “They inhabited cages—‘family,’ they’re called—and gathered, a body with many heads, pondering whether or not to keep going on this way [Fang und Entgang des Daseins], about the dinner table.”53 A possible clone of Kuh’s creature surfaces in a letter Kafka wrote to his sister Elli Hermann in autumn of 1921: “The family, then, is [a single] organism . . . [which] to distinguish it from the individual human animal, might be called the family animal [Familientier]” (Br 344; LFr 294). Then again, if one would identify Josephine’s Volk as Jews because they are unmusical, what does one make of Kalmus’s comment (NS 2.1:428; CS 281) that “the canine race [Hundegeschlecht] alone is endowed [with] the creative gift for music”? Here, as elsewhere, Kafka’s animal figuration defies any attempt at determinate allegorical identification, let alone attempting to revalorize alleged Jewish caninity.

Jackal and Hide Not only does Hanssen fail to elaborate upon the European antisemitic use of the “dog metaphor,” he does not explore the implications of a story

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about jackals. Perhaps he assumes the jackal’s bad reputation speaks for itself. Jackals54 are opportunistic and feed on carrion (though not only or even primarily: these omnivores also hunt); further, they patrol the margins of human communities and can be pests. He could have, as others have,55 made reference to a passage from Heine’s “Disputation” (discussed in Chapter 1), in which the Franciscan Friar Jose castigates Jews as “jackals” or to Franz Grillparzer’s poem “Miscarriage” (Fehlgeburt) in which the Devil combines bits of jackal, other savage canid predators, and the Jew to birth the literary critic.56 Hanssen also could have invoked the extensive depictions of jackals haunting the desolate ruins of onetime Jewish abodes from the biblical books of the prophets (Isa. 13:22, 34:13, 35:7; Jer. 9:10, 10:22, 49:33, 50:39, 51:37; Ezek. 13:4; Mic. 1:8; Mal. 1:3; Lam. 5:18) to Heine, again,57 or to Adalbert Stifter’s Abdias.58 But he doesn’t—thereby saving the well-read Kafka from the taint of antisemitism while, perhaps, assuming that readers (Kafka’s? Hanssen’s?) presume the association of Jews and jackals that the few59 and far from unequivocal intertexts generate. While Kafka may be “invoking” metaphors employed by European antisemitism, for Hanssen the “exceptional” “Kafka” is certainly not promoting Jewish stereotypes. Without giving any specific examples of stereotypes qua stereotypes, he does quickly note: “Sander Gilman saw in the animal story a parody of Jewish stereotypes” (KA 180).60 Then again Hanssen does invoke non-parodically the jackals’ “tirades, lamentations, and flatteries” as well as their efforts to “incite” the traveler whom they “ensnared” (KA 179); he describes them as “blood-thirsty” (KA 179) and “inhumane” (KA 184), and on several occasions he quotes Kafka on their need to “cleanse” the land (KA 179, 184 –85), after having asserted the Zionists’ same need (KA 169–70). Indeed, most scholars have argued that Kafka had drawn rather extensively from the noisome reservoir of stereotypes that have been ascribed to Jews (if not only to Jews).61 Kafka, however, has distributed them in his characterizations of both Arabs and jackals. Both are characterized by fetid odors. The narrator comments about the “rank smell [that] streamed out of [the jackals’] mouths” (DL 271; CS 408), while the jackal’s description of how “when [Arabs] lift their arm, the murk of hell yawns in the armpit” (DL 273; CS 410) seems to be confirmed by Kafka’s narrative: The Arab is described as having “crept upwind toward” (DL 274; CS 410) the narrator, which suggests that the Arab’s smell would have betrayed his approach. Similarly, another “Jewish” quality, “cold arrogance” (DL 271; CS 408), ascribed to the Arabs by the jackal, appears to be confirmed later in the story by, in Hanssen’s words, the Arab’s “smug comparison” (KA 187) of their

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dogs to those of Europeans. Both Arabs and jackals are described as eternal wanderers. And the objectification and ill-treatment of animals that had been touted by Arthur Schopenhauer,62 among many, as intrinsic to Judentum is exemplified by the Arabs’ behavior—indeed, much of the animus of the jackals toward the Arabs is directed at their slaughter of animals. As noted earlier with regard to how Kalmus’s focus on the eating habits of the Hundeschaft often leads to its identification with Judentum, so too are the jackals frequently identified with Jews because of the Head Jackal’s tendential emphasis on the different dietary practices of Arabs and his own kind. While the importance of food preparation as a crucial index of social inclusion and exclusion is uttered by a jackal, many non-Jewish peoples, including (Arab) Muslims, erect such anathema-guarded boundaries. Indeed, differences in food preparation have long been a staple of the animal/ human Great Divide and is reproduced in Kafka’s story: the raw and the cooked, which as Lévi-Strauss has exhaustively demonstrated, is not limited to the comparative dietetics of Hesiod.63

Excursus: A Camel’s Lot One frequent rejoinder to any Jewish identification of the jackals is not their preference for raw food, but rather the final scene of the story. As day is about to break, after “one of [the jackals] . . . with its first bite had found the artery” in the dead camel’s throat, “right away all of them were lying there on the corpse” (DL 275; CS 411); devouring the camel’s carcass contravenes the Jewish prohibitions on consuming carrion. Several years prior to Kafka’s story, Sigmund Freud recorded an account of the consumption of a raw camel by a band of “Bedouins.” He cites the philologist and historian of religions William Robertson Smith’s classic description in his Religion of the Semites of St. Nilus’s fifth-century CE account of a Saracen Arab tribe’s shared sacrificial meal as the objective correlative to his theory of the origin of totemistic religion, the murder and consumption of the primal father by the band of brothers: The victim of the sacrifice, a camel, “is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when the leader of the band [Stammes] has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound . . . and in all haste drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of quivering flesh and devouring them raw with such wild haste, that in the short

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interval between the rise of the day star which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly devoured.”

There is no record of Kafka having picked up either Totem and Taboo64 or Religion of the Semites. His reading did include at least one exploration of the origins of religions, N. Söderblom’s Das Werden des Gotterglaubens (The nascence of the belief in gods). While Söderblom does not specifically mention Nilus’s account, Kafka’s notes to his reading ( June 2, 1916; T 1:787–88; D2 155) mention: “Other [tribes]: in primordial times men themselves created their totem animals [Totemtiere] by their ceremonies. The sacred rites thus of themselves begot the object of their veneration.” In modern times—well, seventeen months later—Kafka would imagine the obverse; his animals generate meanings: “leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.”65 Freud’s necessary resort to Robertson Smith’s account—there was no other account of a sacrificial feast or totemic origins in the ethnographic literature that comported so well with Freud’s theoretical construction— did create potential problems. Offering a Semitic tribe engaging in a ritual blood sacrifice as an exemplar could not but resonate with the accusations of Jews engaging in ritual murder; they had proliferated in Central Europe since the 1880s and were approaching a climax in Kiev, where Menahem Mendel Beilis was awaiting trial in prison for the alleged ritual killing of the thirteen-year-old Andrei Yuschinsky in 1911.66 Perhaps Freud, unlike his source, refers to them as Bedouins in order to provide some distance from any immediate association with Judentum. From 1905 to 1915, when he was endeavoring to establish and legitimate the psychoanalytic movement, Freud avoided any mention of Judentum in his published psychoanalytic writings. In On Freud’s Jewish Body, I demonstrate some of the rhetorical and substantive contortions to which Freud subjects his argument regarding the origin of Christianity in Totem and Taboo to keep it Judenrein (free of [ manifest references to] Jews). Totemism, by Freud’s definition, should not have caused any problems; he posits totemism as inextricably tied to exogamy, and the Jews were conventionally characterized as endogamous. Moreover, the Jewish prohibition on images of the deity as well as the commonplace opposition of the invisible god of the Israelites to the animal-headed deities of the Egyptians further distanced the Jews from

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any association with totemism. Unfortunately, Freud’s source, Robertson Smith, suggests that the development of Jewish religion was not free of its taint. In a passage not noted by Freud, Robertson Smith, drawing upon 1 Samuel 20, “infers”67 that “In the days of Saul and David all the tribes of Israel had long been united in the worship of Jehovah, yet the clans still maintained their annual gentile sacrifice, at which every member of the group was bound up to be present.”68 He carefully avoids, moreover, good Presbyterian that he was, suggesting any connection between the animals that are emblematic of many of the twelve tribes of Israel and totemism, as he immediately segues to “heathen” Arabia, from where “evidence more decisive comes.”

From Animadversions to Animal Versions Hence, if we wish to perceive Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs” as dialectical image and allegorical illumination, we must recognize that what is illuminated is the necessary indeterminacy of those seemingly determinate figures. So to return to the opening question of the genre of “Jackals and Arabs,” there are a number of supplements to the anti-“analogical parable” readings of Kafka’s animal story by Germanist Scott Spector 69 and others that call attention, inter alia, to: the multivalence of Judentum (for example, western assimilated, eastern hasidic, Sephardic/Mizrahi); the multiple oppositions (German /Jew, German /Czech, Czech/Jew) and triangulations (German /[German-speaking/Czech-speaking]Jew/Czech) of Kafka’s Prague; the shifting triangle of relations among jackal, Arab, and Northerner/European; the mix of Jewish and Gentile stereotypical and/ or customary attributes in Kafka’s characterization of both jackal and Arab. Kafka, Spector concludes, “jumbled the identification [of his human and nonhuman animal protagonists] to a degree that rendered them mutually inseparable and cryptically insoluble.” Like Spector, this complicating of the “Jewish jackal” would draw upon a different Benjaminian insight into Kafka’s work than does Hanssen: that “all Kafka’s short pieces,” “the ‘everchanging contexts and experimental groupings’ [he] engineered,” were “acts in [Kafka’s] Amerika’s ‘Nature Theater of Oklahoma,’ and therefore a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset.” I would invoke Benjamin’s “early (and unheeded) alternative to the setting of the stories into a grid of fixed correspondences,” but not just to put in question Hanssen’s “determin[ing] which of the myriad possible analogical assignments [of Kafka’s players] is the most plausible”70 for corroborating his own cultural-political positions. Rather,

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I would also suggest that Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs,” like other animal stories discussed so far in Bestiarium Judaicum, sought to undermine the authority of the dominant Gentile society’s demeaning and dehumanizing Jewish identifications by uncannily rendering their purported Jewish referent indefinite—as both human (animal) and (nonhuman) animal and neither, as both Jew and Gentile and neither. For Kafka, such a strategy would neither negate the demeaning identifications nor render them benign; nor would it lead to a reversal of the hierarchical power relations, but it might mitigate the murderous affect aroused by contact with the monstrous animal-object constructed by the dominant society’s own fears, hatreds, and identification practices as well as defer the deadly transformation of analogy into identity—to render the Jew as animal and therefore killable.

chapter 8

Dogged by Destiny “Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit” Even a man who is pure in heart And says his prayers by night, May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, And the autumn moon is bright. —curt siodmak

During the Enlightenment, the apprehension of the feared beast within1— that the animal lies beneath the veneer of our moral and rational comportment and thereby undermines our sense of ourselves as the exception to all other creatures that are taxonomically classified by genus and species— was stirred by tales of feral children and the discovery of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. In the nineteenth century, it was aroused by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde—and by the work that is said to have influenced him, Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man.2 Today on our video screens, we have werewolves (for example, MTV’s Teen Wolf, Twilight’s Jacob, and True Blood ’s Alcide) and other Wesen (creatures; cf. the NBC show Grimm) prowling, as well as evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists yapping, but between Darwin and Richard Dawkins3 there was Sigmund Freud, who had the Chutzpah to claim to have delivered the “third and most wounding blow” to the “naïve self-love of men.” After Copernicus’s displacement of the center of the universe from the earth to the sun and Darwin’s proof of humanity’s “descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature,” Freud’s psychoanalysis argued that the ego, the “I,” is “not even

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master in its own house.” Below our consciousness reigns, in the terms of Freud’s final mental topography, the id, the “it” (es) and its morass of drives, instincts, desires, and all things other than the properly human. Psychoanalysis reinforced the Darwinian assault upon human exceptionalism by mapping the entanglement of what is identified with the human— the moral, the rational—with what is identified with the animal. Not surprisingly, two of his most famous patients have long only been known by the human-animal hybrid sobriquets coined not by Freud in their respective case studies but by the auditors and readers of each: the “Rat Man” (see the discussion in Chapter 3) and the “Wolf-Man” (see discussion in this chapter). While Freud never devoted a case study to a werewolf, Jewish or otherwise, he did put in question the “Great Divide” between human and animal that such a creature would purportedly span. In his 1917 essay “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” Freud tied the Darwinian recognition that “Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them” to his Oedipal etiology of children’s animal phobias.4 Yet even as Freud, in the earlier Totem and Taboo, drew upon epigenetic theory to suggest correlations among children, neurotics, and so-called primitives in their inability to differentiate clearly between humans and animals, he also observed that children’s normal (non-neurotic) behavior demonstrates the constructed nature of that so-called “Great Divide”: “Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult, civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals.”5 The psychoanalyst Mark Solms described the anxious reception of Freud’s blurring human / animal difference, of “Freud’s concept of man-as-animal”: “Freud argued that the pleasure principle gave expression to primitive animal drives. To his Victorian contemporaries, the implication that human behavior was governed by urges that served no higher purpose than carnal selffulfillment was downright scandalous”6 and threatened their sense of their own exceptionalism. However, when those same Victorians reinterpreted “carnal selffulfillment” as individual and/or species self-preservation, the scandal was of a different sort: a social Darwinian justification for capitalist and imperialist exploitation in a dog-eat-dog world. Conversely, when efforts, both moral and political, would be made to regulate the excesses of capitalism or imperialism, a similarly assonant animal axiom, enshrined by Hobbes at the beginning of his Epistle Dedicatory to De Cive (On the Citizen), would be invoked: “Homo homini lupus” (man is a wolf to [his fellow]

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man). After Freud invoked it in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he apostrophically queried: “Who, on the face of his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”7 The funny thing about this truism is that its catachrestic and, broadly speaking, canine variant, Lupus lupo lupus (wolves are wolves to their fellow wolves), is patently as well as ethologically false: Wolves do not devour wolves.8 The so-called beast within is itself a product of the construction of the human /animal Great Divide. This chapter’s exploration of encounters between Judentum and humans transformed into wolves (and other canids) takes its lead from Plautus’s original phrase that Hobbes foreshortened: “Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit” (One man to another is a wolf, not a man, when he doesn’t know what sort he is). When strangers meet, they each assume that the other is outside their respective moral communities—and neither presumes that the other is a member of a moral community. Plautus codes this encounter by means of the human /animal distinction; however, where Hobbes’s pithy apothegm has come to signify how human beings act bestially toward one another, Plautus’s phrase can be read as referring to ascribed identifications in the face of the apparent absence of the symbolic marking of the human (socius). After charting how such ascribed identifications work their way through several European literary, legal, and folk traditions of the werewolf from before the Common Era to the advent of Jewish Emancipation—and the virtual absence of Jewish reference therein—this chapter turns to modern sightings by Jewish-identified writers of metamorphoses of the human into members of the Canidae family. While the Gentile figuration of the werewolf is shown to have been appropriated in some Yiddish9 narratives for exploring situations internal to particular Jewish communities, with particular attention to H. Leivick’s chronicle “Der Volf ” (1920), this chapter focuses upon the two foremost German-born, Jewish-identified diviners of werewolves and other were-canids prowling the other-than-territorial borders between European Jew and Gentile: Heinrich Heine and his characterizations of Shylock (1838) and the consort of “Princess Sabbath” (1851) and Curt Siodmak and his scripts for The Wolf Man (1941).10 Analysis finds the creatures that traverse these works mediating Jewish life and death in their respective historically distinct and distinctly hostile situations: a Gentile Europe resisting Jewish integration in the first-half of the nineteenth century and one increasingly threatening Jewish existence in the first-half of the twentieth. These hybrid constructions of Jew (explicit or implicit) and wolf (or canid cousin) call attention to how the intersections of Jewish and

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lupine (or canine) stereotypes differently function. This chapter argues that Heine rendered the purported Jewish referent of those interpellating identifications indefinite—that is, as both animal and human and neither; as both Jew and Gentile and neither—while Siodmak demonstrated the tragic consequences on individual lives of such oppressive identifications. Between those last analyses, the chapter questions whether or not to include Freud’s “Wolf-Man” case study “unter jüdischen Wolfsmenschen” (among Jewish wolf-men)11 and suggests that canine-centered readings of the case may have been barking up the wrong tree.

Where Wolves, There Werewolves In Europe the figure of the werewolf, of the human transformed into a wolf, either permanently or intermittently, reaches back to ancient Greece and Rome.12 In his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells how King Lycaon superseded his own history of evil deeds by serving up a feast of murdered human flesh to Jupiter. This last act was such an abyssal obliteration of the distinctions among gods, humans, and animals, upon which the world was ordered, that as punishment, Jupiter threatened to expel not just the king but humanity from the world of living creatures. Ultimately, the god expelled Lycaon from humanity by turning him into a wolf. Other tales relate a similar fate for those who consumed the entrails of sacrificed children. Adding to this mix of impiety, murder, and cannibalism were the accounts of chroniclers like the turn-of-the-era Greek geographer Strabo about the predatory Daker, a loose collection of stateless people who dressed as wolves.13 Several medieval Scandinavian saga cycles include stories about the Ulfhednir, a warrior band who channeled animal spirits (one assumes pharmaceutically) and went into battle wearing wolf skins. In the early modern period there was a rash of accusations of male lycanthropy— often complementing accusations of female witchcraft—as well as a number of court trials.14 Most notorious of these was the 1582 case of Peter Stubbe; he claimed that, thanks to a magic belt given to him by a female demon, he turned into a giant wolf that mutilated and devoured numerous victims in and around Bedburg, Germany. Stubbe asserted that he remained in human form during the trial because he had hidden his belt prior to his arrest. Various folk traditions also ascribed being born with a caul or born between Christmas and Epiphany as symptomatic of werewolves.15 In some of these traditions, werewolves were sorcerers or demons; in others they were the “hounds of God”16 and battled witches and demons.

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In the twelfth century, Marie de France initiated the literary tradition of noble werewolves. Her Anglo-Norman lay Le Bisclavret ( The Werewolf ) depicts a noble and good baron who transformed into a wolf for three days each week—no explanation for his transformation (such as being cursed) is provided. After the three days, so long as he recovered his clothes from their hiding place, he would return to human form: that is until his treacherous wife tricked him into revealing his secret and then sent her lover to steal the clothes—thus leaving the baron in lupine form. The wolf-baron flees to the forest, where he remains until he encounters his sovereign. Acting the companionate canine rather than the predatory wolf that he appears to be, the wolf-baron is brought under the king’s peace. Eventually, through the king’s intervention he is able to secure his clothes, his human form, and his position as well as have his wife and her lover punished. Variants of this noble werewolf, vicious wife, sovereign patron, and secret appurtenance necessary for the metamorphosis circulated throughout Europe, including in both Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and the Mayse-buch (a collection of early-seventeenth-century Yiddish folktales). One story from the Mayse-buch describes a very distinguished rabbi who is turned into a werewolf by his shrewish17 wife after she tricks him into handing over his magic ring. The rabbi-turned-werewolf is befriended by a king, with whose help he is able to return to both human form and his former social position; he is also able to punish his wife. The tale bears a moral ascribed to King Solomon: Husbands should not confide secrets to their wives. Though the story follows the general pattern, it contains several minor embellishments specific to its Jewish context: As a rosh yeshiva (leader of a rabbinical school), the protagonist, like a nobleman in Gentile society, is atop the corresponding social hierarchy. Rather than display the sin of lust, the adulterous, lineage-threatening vice ascribed to Gentile noble women, the Jewish wife suffers from greed, the female vice considered most corrosive to the proper function of conjugal and domestic life (shalom bayit or peace in the household) in Jewish society. Because the Jews are unable to draw upon sovereign-sanctioned violence, her punishment is not execution (or banishment by decree) but (magical) transformation into an overworked she-ass.18 The rabbi’s bestialization, however, is not due to Christian oppression or marginalization of Jews. Indeed, the story assumes the peaceful coexistence and interchange among Jews and Christians; further, the king summons a scholar who can read Hebrew in order to decipher the message the rabbi-cum-werewolf pawed in the snow. Besides literature and legend, the werewolf also entered medieval Germanic law. The wolf was the dominant predator of the forests of

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northern and central Europe, but unlike other large creatures dwelling in the territory outside human habitation, like deer and boar, the hunting of which was the prerogative of the nobility, the wolf could be hunted by anyone. Of particular concern was the omega wolf; because it was, for whatever reason, at the bottom of the wolf feeding hierarchy, it frequently left its pack to roam alone at the border of human settlements in search of food and preyed upon human property and person.19 Correlatively, he who acted the (omega) wolf among town or polis dwellers was adjudged the outlaw, the Friedlos; outside the general peace (Volksfrieden), he was banned from the polis, could be killed without legal consequences for the perpetrator, and came to be identified with the Warg (Wargus, Vargr) or wolf-man.20 Under the laws of the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England, Edward the Confessor, one who fled a judicial summons was said to bear a “wolfshead” (wluesheued); if this outlaw were found and attempted to defend himself, his head was to be sent to the king.21 Paradoxically, the determination of the wolf-man as the one who is outside the law of the polis presupposes the pre-existence of that law and that polis; yet, as noted earlier, it is the wolf-man, as enshrined by Hobbes’s “Homo homini lupus,” that necessitates the law and the polis.

Der Volf or the Jew as Out[side of the]Law The Jewish body has often been stereotyped as hirsute, and within the long history of the Bestiarium Judaicum the representation of Judentum has frequently crossed that of wolves. The Jew has been associated with the lupine in Christian discourse since at least St. John Chrysostom, for whom Jews were “more dangerous than any wolves.”22 The assumed behavior of wolves led to their use as figures for several traits that were either desired or repudiated by a human community as well as for what (and who) was to be included within or excluded from its bounds.23 While the fierceness ascribed to the wolf (and the wolf-pack) was a quality that might serve well for the warrior who extended the boundaries of the polis outward, for those within the polis, who might be subjected to the wolves’ (or the warriors’) predations, that attribute was translated as rapaciousness and cruelty. Though never identified with the positive, martial quality of wolfness, Jews, as outsiders within the polis, were associated with those negative lupine characterizations. More than a third of early modern antiJewish tractates examined by Nicoline Hortzitz analogized Jews with or identified them as wolves. For example, in the 1606 Juden Spiegel (Mirror of Jews) Vespasianus Rechtanus asserted, “Well what are Jews other than

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raging wolves.”24 Included among the many disparaging Jewish epithets from which Lessing’s title character was acquitted during the course of Nathan the Wise was that of a “Jewish wolf in philosophical sheep-skin.”25 In the modern period, the Prussian and Austrian laws that required Jews to adopt surnames (see Chapter 1) abetted the association of “the Jew” with the wolf. A number of Jewish men adopted as their surname variants of the tribal emblem traditionally associated with their given name of Benjamin, i.e., Wolf or Wolff (cf. Gen. 49:12: “Benjamin is a ravening wolf ”). These Jewish wolves became the occasion for derisive caricature.26 This lupine identification was also said to be asserted by the Jews themselves; the eleventh protocol of the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion declares: “The goyim [Gentiles] are a flock of sheep, and we are their wolves. And you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock?”27 The Jewish wolf appeared in various guises in Fritz Hiemer’s 1942 taxonomic collection of European anti-Jewish proverbs; for example, among the sayings that implore their hearers to guard themselves against the Jews he includes the following: “Every Jew has a lupine countenance, one need only be able to recognize it.”28 That same year, across the Rhine in Vichy France, this warning took the form of an illustrated children’s book, a retelling of Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Hood” entitled “Doulce France et Grojuif.” When Doulce France tells her grandmother, actually the wolf Grojuif in disguise, “what a big nose [she] has,” Grojuif responds in yiddishized French, “It’s better for sniffing out little deals [les bedides affaires = les petites affaires], my girl.” At tale’s end, a young member of the Milice française, Vichy’s Nazi-collaborationist militia, comes to her aid and slaughters Grojuif.29 Jews have long been associated with many varieties of fantastic bloodthirsty monsters (from eighteenth-century vampiric vilifications of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer30 through the descriptions of Dracula [and his nose]31 given by other characters in Bram Stoker’s eponymous novel to the recent surfacing of the Jewish vampire squid);32 yet Jewish lycanthropes were, until recently, absent from the millennia-long European (whether pagan or Christian) folk33 and literary34 traditions of the werewolf. Of late, the premetamorphosed identities of several screen werewolves are clearly marked as Jewish, including David Kessler in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981) and George Sands in the more recent BBC series Being Human (2009–13; Josh Levison in the subsequent U.S. version, 2011–14). These characters, however, are werewolves who happen to be Jews rather than werewolves because they are Jews.

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Although, as already noted, there is no Christian folk or literary tradition of Jewish werewolves, the widespread belief in the existence of werewolves did make its way into a legend told about the Baal Shem Tov (BeShT). For example, Martin Buber’s 1908 collection of the Legend of the Baal-Shem opens with a tale about the founder of Hasidism’s youth entitled “The Werewolf.” At the age of twelve (that is not yet bar Mitzvah, an adult member of the community) he encounters a Jewish collier.35 Already despondent over periodically turning into a werewolf, the charcoal burner becomes utterly desperate when his heart is replaced with Satan’s own and he begins to attack humans. The collier cum werewolf still fights the Adversary’s attempt to use him as a weapon against one particular human, the future BeShT, who could lead the community in the project of Tikkun, of redeeming the divine sparks from their exile. Ultimately, the youth removes the satanic implant from the werewolf, thereby allowing him to change back to human form and die at peace.36 Another human-lupine hybrid drives H. Leivick’s long 1920 Yiddish poetic narrative “Der Volf ” (The Wolf ). It chronicles the last days of a rabbi, the sole survivor of his decimated shtetl, who feels himself transformed into the eponymous “Volf.” Where Buber’s “Werewolf ” testifies to Judentum’s role in cosmic redemption, Leivick’s “Wolf ” bears a different witness. The association of the werewolf with the outlaw, with one who is outside the law, shapes the poem, and thereby implicates a Judentum both vulnerable to being thrust outside the Law and yet possibly possessing resources, beyond violent mediation, to (re)create a homeland for itself. Leivick, best known for his dramatic poem The Golem, was born Leivick Halpern in a Belarusian shtetl on December 25, 1888. At age seventeen (in 1906), he was exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary activities. Later smuggled out of Siberia, he came to the United States in 1913. While living in New York, he learned of the deadly pogroms that devastated Jewish communities across (the territories of present-day) Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine during World War I and the Russian Civil War. Though the mass murder of Jews by Gentiles frames “Der Volf,” Leivick’s protagonist is not directly confronting a ban by the law of the Gentile polis—he is not identified as a wolf by Gentiles—rather, he has been cast out from the Law through which observant Jews constitute community. “Der Volf ” opens on the third day after a pogrom in which an unnamed shtetl has been reduced to ash and rubble; amid the ruins, its sole survivor, the village’s rabbi, regains consciousness. This is no joyful resurrection or new dispensation. As he becomes aware of his situation he searches for

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the remains of his murdered neighbors so that he can bury them according to Jewish tradition (W 126). None can be found, and he is unable to fulfill his halakhik duty to the dead. He then tries in their absence to recite Lamentations, by which Jews recall the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (in 586 BCE and again in 70 CE) that marks the beginning of Galut (exile), yet by which (when read on Tisha B’Av) Jews are also able to situate exile within sacred history and its promise of redemption—but he has forgotten the words. He turns westward (that is, away from Jerusalem toward which Jews traditionally pray) and follows the road out of the devastated village as night falls. Having come to a stop and preparing to fall asleep, he realizes he had not yet performed the daily afternoon (Minchah) and evening (Maariv) prayers, let alone the nightly Shema, but his attempts fail as he has forgotten their melodies (W 128).37 He cannot even fulfill the mitzvah of crying upon the death of the righteous as his tears become “stuck in the middle of his throat” (W 128). In utter despair, as if he had abandoned and had been abandoned by the Law (and by Gd), “he ran deeper into the forest, / And the moment he crossed the border, / He felt his legs being grabbed / And entangled by dense barbed wires” (W 129). The Rabbi is ensnared by nets like those employed to entrap wolves before they enter areas of human habitation. Over the course of the following seven stanzas Leivick depicts, step by step, the Rabbi’s apparent transformation into a wolf. If this metamorphosis is provisionally seen in relation to the Rabbi being outside the Law, was it his inability to fulfill Halakhah that set him outside or did his (in)actions indicate that he was already beyond the pale? If the latter, how did that state come about? Because in Galut the community anchors the covenant with Gd, does the community’s annihilation indicate the termination of the bond? Does the Rabbi’s guilt for his survival— over he alone surviving? over his failure to save his community?—signify the breach? No explanation is provided. The second canto of “Der Volf ” describes how “Jews driven out from other areas / Began arriving in the town / And started rebuilding the ruined houses, / And before anything else,” though they have no rabbi, “the great synagogue” (W 131). They repair it in time for Erev Rosh HaShanah, the beginning of both the New Year and of the Yamim Noraim (or Asseret Yimei T’Shuva), the ten days of awe and repentance at the end of which is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and of the sealing of the Book of Life. That evening their prayers are disturbed by “the drawn out howling of a beast” that shifts from sounding like the roar of a creature being eviscerated to the lament of a dog baying to the moon and then to “a sobbing that sounded like human weeping” (W 132). As the howling stops

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and they make their way through the streets to their homes— ever fearful of what may be lurking in wait (they do not know that the source of the howls remains in the forest)—they come to realize that “the ruins were not theirs, / And that they, these Jews, were strangers here” (W 132). Instead of peace, terror reigns in their hearts and hearths. They, too, fear that they are outside the Law. The third canto opens upon the first day of Rosh HaShanah and the echoes of the blasts from the shofar, the ram’s horn, instead of the howls of the wolf. The congregation prepares to leave the sanctuary when into their midst a stranger enters, wearing a “silk coat and rabbinical fur hat” (W 134). As they look closer they notice the bedraggled condition of the outfit of this shoeless, silent, and very hairy stranger, who seats himself in the place honor by the eastern wall, next to the Holy Ark. By sensing his grief they come to recall their own grief. As they approach him, he first tells them to “Go away,” but then grievously asks: “Who told you to rebuild the ruins? / Whatever is ruined should remain ruined. / And who told you to become my heirs?” (W 135). He questions their right either to form a community where his had stood—such rebuilding would erase his destroyed community from memory— or to claim any relation to it. They too are trespassers, transgressors of the Law. He then beseeches them (W 135–36): Go get an axe or a knife and give me [ my due (mayn rekht)]— [My due (mayn rekht)], Jews, I beg you. ... [G]ive me [what is coming to me (vos es kumt mir)]— I deserve death, death from a stranger; . . . chop off my hands and throw them to the dogs.

In mid plea for a death due for one who is outside the community of moral and legal obligation—that is, a killing that is discharged by one outside his own (destroyed) community of moral and legal obligation and that results in the corpse being dismembered and not returned to the ground from which all humans come (thereby denying his possible redemption and resurrection)—he collapses. The Jews gather about him, but when they try to move him, he sinks his teeth into the hand of one of his would-be helpers—and they flee. In their absence, he goes down on all fours and first leaps, then crawls, and finally clambers toward the holy ark (aron kodesh). He embraces the ark before repeatedly ramming his head into its doors until they burst revealing the Torah scroll (ets ha-hayim). But upon seeing “the internal darkness beyond the Torah [scroll]” (W 138), he is compelled

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to withdraw and, bellowing, he bounds out of the synagogue and back to the forest. The next two cantos recount how the refugee congregation, from their return to the damaged synagogue that afternoon until the advent of Yom Kippur, repeats, as if ritually, the same scenario each day: praying, reciting psalms, and weeping during daylight hours, then returning home after evening prayers to await the midnight visit of the beast to the middle of the market. There during the course of the night the creature’s howling would shift from roar to bellow to bay to weeping-prayer-like to a rattling lament. When dawn arrives he turns silent and leaves the town. Though the townsfolk deploy the traditional defenses against invading wolves such as setting fires38 and (blindly) firing rifles, the wolf, unnaturally, would leap into the fire and, more unnaturally, neither pounce upon his attackers nor approach the homes where their families were hiding. The baying of the wolf undermines “their new hopes and dreams” (W 141); replacing them are stories of the wolf that spread throughout the land and “[p]revent the growth of the new congregation” (W 142). “And the Jews understood better than before / That something was wrong. Their fear of the wolf / Had changed into a fear of themselves” (W 141). They begin to embody their fear that this mixed multitude of refugees who had converged upon these ruins could not— does not have the right to—form a community. The sixth canto seems to promise them that their acts of penance have been received. It describes their relief when at midnight, they, having remained in the synagogue after Kol Nidre, are met with silence rather than the howling of the beast. Perhaps their recitation of the thrice-repeated stanza from this holiest of Jewish prayers, And may the entire congregation of the children of Israel, as well as the proselyte who dwells among them —be forgiven, for all the people acted unwittingly,

had been heard on high. Alternatively, with their recitation of Kol Nidre, the performative releasing of the speaker from all vows made between this Yom Kippur and the next, the congregation had perhaps commuted the punishment that Pirkei Avot (The Sayings of the Fathers 5:9) states is incurred by false oaths and the desecration of Gd’s name: carnage by wild animals. Yet the Book of Life is not signed and sealed until the final blast of the shofar hurls the Tekiah toward heaven and throughout the land at the conclusion of the N’eila prayers. That blast, in Canto 7, is met, not by the congregation’s shout of “Lashanah Haba’ah biYerushalayim” (next year in

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Jerusalem), but by the wolf, having clawed at the doors of the synagogue throughout N’eila, bursting through them, springing over the congregants, and leaping upon the prayer leader’s throat. And the terrified crowd made a dash for the door And nearly abandoned the prayer leader To a certain death inflicted by the wolf— But then one grabbed a lectern And with its sharp edge he smashed it into the wolf ’s head And split his brain apart . . . And the entire congregation, in turmoil and torment, ... . . . beat the wolf ’s neck and his back And kicked him in his belly and his knees. (W 145)

When a great “shout” (oy) then arises from beneath the earth, they halt their assault. As their victim turns over, “two human eyes shone through the darkness / And enveloped all the Jews, calmly and brightly / . . . / It was a Jew in a rabbinical fur hat, / And they all recognized the guest, the stranger” (W 145). With his last bit of strength, he comforts the congregation: “I’m fine now, very fine— don’t cry Jews” (W 146). So what restores the rabbi’s human form and allows him both to find consolation in his dying as well as to extend consolation to the Jews who had facilitated his imminent death? Is it by an act of forgiveness that both the Rabbi and the refugees are restored to communities of moral and legal obligation or has something else transpired? Elided from the second stanza in the preceding extract is the line “gekhapt alts, vos es hot zikh gemakht unter der hant,” which can be translated as “Grasped anything that came to hand.”39 Joachim Neugroschel draws upon an idiomatic usage of “unter der hant”—underhanded or in secret—in his translation: “Grasped everything that had occurred in secret” (W 145). This reading suggests, perhaps, that the Rabbi has somehow passed on his secret, his knowledge of his destroyed community, and the refugees have become his heirs. Yet the orgy of violence—aided by what was available for the Jews to grasp “at hand”—that follows the receipt of the secret would seem to render such an interpretation problematic. A Girardian reading, however, would argue that the implied secret is the realization that the formation of community and the restoration of order requires the violent sacrifice of a scapegoat that willingly accepts its own victimhood.40 Several works that Leivick was writing in 1920, The Golem and the narrative poem “The Stable,”41 explored the relationship of redemption to,

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on the one hand, violence and, on the other, suffering. Although during this period, Leivick often undertook this exploration in the context of Jewish messianic traditions, a better interpretation of “Der Volf ” would turn from Girard’s Christocentric theory of sacrifice that focuses upon a collective act of violence that defuses responsibility and instead attend to the individual who, rather than fleeing with the “terrified crowd” and being expelled from yet another area, picks up a lectern—that is, the stand upon which the Law, whether in the form of Chumash or Talmudic tractate, lies and is read—and strikes down the mortal threat to both the leader of congregational prayer and any possible creation of a community. This is the singular action that brings the remaining refugees to assume responsibility for themselves and to constitute themselves as a community of moral obligation to one another: That is, it is not simply a matter of clearing the deck, of severing the connection with the “murdered generation [in order to be able to] resume the construction of a new community.”42 Unlike the Rabbi’s assumed passivity as his community was annihilated, this individual, by his action, recognizes that assuming responsibility for the (formation and) survival of a community may require violence as it had in Judentum’s pre-exilic past. This may be the secret that the refugees come to realize—and the Rabbi, too, who could now find consolation. This was trumpeted by that “oy from beneath the earth” as it, instead of the traditional “Next year in Jerusalem,” announced the end of the fast and the beginning of a new year of life. While being placed outside the Law of the (Gentile) polis—making “the Jew” killable—may lead to the abandonment of the Law by which Judentum had sustained itself through the centuries of exile, the conclusion of “Der Volf ” indicates that Judentum has the resources to restore itself.

Curtains Up Because Jews were often found within the Gentile polis, they were more associated with those domesticated cousins of wolves, dogs. Not the good dogs—the noble hunting dogs that accompanied the aristocracy or that guarded the boundaries of the polis—but the bad dogs: shameless, servile, and salacious curs. But the Jewish dog at times betrays the rapacious cruelty characteristic of another canid, the omega wolf, which, as Heine observes, may also be identified as a werewolf. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock, responding to the Venetian merchant Antonio’s animalization of him, plays the dog and intimates its betrayal when he ferociously spits back his would-be debtor’s canine slurs:

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You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, And all for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help: Go to, then; you come to me, and you say “Shylock, we would have moneys:” you say so; You, that did void your rheum upon my beard And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold: money is your suit What should I say to you? Should I not say “Hath a dog money? is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats?” Or Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this; “Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spurn’d me such a day; another time You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much moneys”? (Act 1, Scene 3)

At Shylock’s trial Gratiano accentuates the lupine quality of this Jew-Dog: O, be thou damn’d, inexecrable dog! And for thy life let justice be accused. Thou almost makest me waver in my faith To hold opinion with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous. (Act 4, Scene 1)

When Shylock scornfully acts out Antonio’s canid aspersions or when Gratiano testifies to Shylock’s inner lupinity, the play’s audiences may only have heard confirmation that the Jew is, like the wolf, outside the human community. Heinrich Heine opens his entry on Shylock’s daughter Jessica in his Shakespeare’s Maidens and Women (1838) by recalling Edmund Kean’s 1827 performance of Merchant he attended in London’s Drury Lane (see Figure 14). By this time, Shakespeare’s character has become, as Heine

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suggests the dramatist may have intended, the exemplar of Jewry in general and of the Jew as werewolf in particular: Perhaps Shakespeare wished to present an unmitigated werewolf for the amusement of the crowd, an abhorrent mythological creature that thirsts for blood, in the end loses his daughter and his ducats, and is made ridiculous in the bargain.43

Heine lycanthropically invokes the stereotype of the blood-thirsty Jew outside of the human community in order to draw upon the authority of Shakespeare’s “Genius” as arch discerner of human character and subverter of stereotype, for he continues: “his drama in reality presents neither Jews nor Christians. . . . In Shylock Shakespeare shows us nothing but a man.”44 Heine, in part, is referencing Shylock’s ever-cited humanizing speech before Salerio and Salanio: Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. (Act 3, Scene 1)

While Heine argues that the play does not depict Jews and Christians but only “oppressors and oppressed,” he goes on to characterize the Jews as a Volk among other Völker, a people among other people. Hence, Shylock does not represent the Jews as a religious community; rather, he exemplifies a consequence of the Jews having been historically an oppressed people who were “barred from all other trades” save the “business of money.”45 That, not deicide, Heine claims, was the source of the hatred directed at them. Shylock’s apparent monstrousness is a response to that animosity46 and shaped by the business sense that the Jews, by necessity, developed. While he claims to be aping his oppressors,47 his enemies see only the wolf or cur. Hence, for Heine, any lycanthropic signs borne by Shylock in Shakespeare’s comedy—the genre by which Merchant has been classified since the 1623 First Folio edition of his works—betray less the eruption of the beast within than a curse placed upon a human; Shylock’s accursed fate

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Figure 14. Edmund Kean as Shylock (1827). Reprinted by courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

may be why Heine situates “Jessica” (and another character from The Merchant of Venice, “Portia”) among Shakespeare’s tragic females in his work rather than among the comedic ones.48 Distinguishing between the bestial face Shylock presents to the Gentiles and his private human face, Heine claims, “though Shylock loves money, there are things he loves far more—among them his daughter” and his late wife, Leah. “Excluded from public life and Christian society, and thrust back into the narrow confines of domestic felicity, the poor Jew has nothing but family sentiments; and they manifest themselves with the most touching tenderness.” Heine tenders as proof of Shylock’s humanity his anguished cry that he would not exchange the turquoise ring Leah had once given him for a “wilderness of monkeys.”49 A decade earlier, Heine had already portrayed the Jewish home as a happy haven and site of normative Judentum in his Baths of Lucca, where his

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character Hirsch-Hyacinth relates the story of the poor Jew Moses Lump. The storyteller had just explained that he had changed his surname from the Jewish-identifying “Hirsch” to the German-sounding “Hyacinth” “so that nobody can treat me [‘with all my cultivation’ (TP 128)] like a common ragamuffin [gewöhnlichen Lump]” (TP 127), i.e., identify him as a lumpig (i.e., dirty, rascally) Jew. Hence the name of Hirsch-Hyacinth’s exemplary “common man” (gemeiner Mann), Moses Lump, serves to index his status as Every-Jew. In the tale Moses Lump returns home for Shabbat after yet another hard-scrabble week on the road where he struggles for subsistence as a traveling peddler. Hirsch-Hyacinth imagines him enjoying his fish “cooked in a nice white garlic sauce” with his “crooked wife and even more crooked daughter,” content in his “old Jewish religion” (altjüdische Religion; TP 128), and taking pleasure in the light of a seven-candle menorah when the exemplar of the wealthy Jew, (Nathan Mayer) Rothschild the Great, enters (see Figure 15). Confronted by Moses’s haymisch humility and Sabbath satisfaction, he exclaims: “If I wasn’t Rothschild, I’d want to be a Little Lump [Lümpchen] like this” (TP 129). Heine would return to Jewish home life and to the Jewish were-canid in the early 1850s in the first of his Hebrew Melodies, “Princess Sabbath.” In the interim, however, the stuff of medieval fairy tales (Märchen) that still occasionally surfaced in novels and poems—“witches, werewolves and Jews, for whose satanic service the blood of pious Christian children was necessary” (i.e., the blood libel)—had become daily fodder for newspapers in Paris and across Europe and would mediate the later convergence of these topoi in the poem. Heine, in the sixth of his correspondence collected in Lutezia (May 7, 1840), reported reading the first accounts of Jews in Damascus, “circumcised dogs,” accused of committing ritual murder.50 In late August, he lamented how, despite the intervention of Adolphe Crémieux and other European parties that had led to the end of the torture and, eventually, to the release of the remaining prisoners, the ultramontane press in France still regularly published “correspondence from the Orient” disseminating the “blood libel” (blutigen Unglimpf) to the credulous common folk. He also commented (albeit half ironically) that the knowledge of history among Germans now inured them to belief in the “old blood-fairy tale” (Blutmärchen).51 Yet, as Heine and the German author August Lewald would remark in a letter exchange the following year, Damascus was “truly no fairy tale [wahrlich kein Mährchen]” (HB2 427).52 “Princess Sabbath” opens by invoking the Arabian book of fairy tales (Arabiens Märchenbuche) in which an “enchanted prince” is magically restored from a hairy monster (behaarte Ungeheuer) to his original form

Figure 15. Nathan Mayer Rothschild or the origin of his billions. “No. 42 Nathan Mayer ou l’origine des milliards,” in V. Lenepveu, Musée des Horreurs (Paris[?]: G. Lenepveu, 1899–1900). Reprinted by courtesy of David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

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(Urgestalt), bedecked in all his finery, and transformed back into a monster (Ungetüm). The poet then turns to his song (Lied) and its protagonist Israel. Whereas Heine locates the magic in the prince’s restoration to human form, he shifts the locus of supernatural intervention in the case of Israel; Heine focuses upon his having been transformed (verwandelt) by a witch’s curse into a dog (DHA 3/1:125; CP 651): As a dog with doggish notions [Hund mit hündischen Gedanken], All the livelong week he piddles Through life’s slime and slops and sweepings, Mocked and jeered at by street-urchins. But on every Friday evening At the twilight hour, the magic Fades abruptly, and the dog Once more is a human being. Human now, with human feelings [Mensch mit menschlichen Gefühlen], Head and heart uplifted proudly, Dressed in clean and festive clothing . . .53

The poem takes Israel into the synagogue to celebrate Kabbalat Shabbat (the service to welcome Shabbat) and then back home, where at midday he feasts on cholent, Heine’s nostalgia-laden savory souvenir of a Judentum that is as haymisch as it is heavenly.54 As the shadow of dusk grows, Israel shudders as his cursed canine metamorphosis approaches. The last stanzas depict step by step the ritual of Havdalah (separation; marking the end of Shabbat): from sniffing the spices and drinking the wine to extinguishing the candle. The poem literally “goes out” (erlischt [DHA 3/1:129; CP 655])—it is the last word—at the critical point between Shabbat and the rest of the week, between the human and the (about to be turned) animal. Heine lives in a world where the animalization of “the Jew” remains the norm, yet by ending his poem at the threshold between states of being, he leaves a wistful— though his final “erlischt” signals it as dubious—trace of uncertainty about the (re)imposition of the human /animal divide overcoding Gentile-Jewish relations, which also is “wahrlich kein Mährchen” (HB2 427).55

Man’s Best Friend and Freud’s “Best” Patient, or “What a big nose you have, Dr. Freud.” Freud claimed that another of Heine’s dog tales— or rather Freud’s errant conflation of two anecdotes about cutting dogs’ tails—inspired him

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to conceive psychoanalysis’s “entrée-billet” to European acceptance. As he commented to his junior colleague Richard Sterba in 1930: “People say: ‘This Freud is an abominable person; however, he has one rope, with the help of which he can pull himself out of the sewer [Jauche—literally liquid manure] in which he dwells, and this is the concept of sublimation.’ ”56 In other words, by attending to the redirection of psychic energy toward nonsexual aims and objects, the concept of sublimation appears to redirect psychoanalysis’s aims—and objects as well—away from those sexual concerns that many opponents of psychoanalysis considered evident of its creator’s particularly Jewish character.57 In a 2009 article “ ‘Of Snips . . . and Puppy Dog Tails’: Freud’s Sublimation of Judentum,” I focused upon the evocation of castration in Heine’s two depictions of canine caudal caesura. Such incisive allusions to the “bedrock”58 of psychoanalytic theory alone may not have been sufficient to have spurred Freud’s parapractically reconstructed epiphany; that dogs were the ones subjected to such corporeal alterations may also have played a role. Freud’s affection for dogs is well known.59 In addition to a number of photographs of Freud in various settings with Lin Yug and her chow successors, Jofi and Lun, several “home movies” of Freud, taken between 1932 and 1938, have been preserved that show him relaxing in backyard gardens and petting them. The image of Freud and canine companion is so pervasive that it has occasionally led commentators to tread on a dog pile where no hound was to be found. The most influential misstep was Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of Freud’s Wolf-Man Case in their construction of “becoming-animal,” their alternative to the Oedipal algorithm of human development.60 The Wolf-Man, they write, “rose from the couch [and] knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves. . . . The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dog’s tail. . . . Freud only knows the Oedipalized wolf or dog,61 the castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in the kennel, the analyst’s bow-wow.”62 Deleuze and Guattari stage this scene in 1914 —fourteen years before Freud would be given his first “bow-wow,” Lin Yug,63 and almost four years before Freud would add some crucial canine material to the case study before its publication. Freud, as will be seen, may have been more concerned about a Wulff than either a wolf or a dog. According to the sociologist, cultural critic, and scholar of psychoanalysis, Philip Rieff, among many others, Freud’s “From the History of an Infantile Analysis” “may well be the greatest [case history] Freud ever wrote.”64 If that title sounds unfamiliar, it is because it is far more commonly known by the sobriquet that its analysand acquired within psychoanalytic circles soon after its publication in 1918: the case of the “Wolf-Man.” When

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Freud completed his account of the apparently successful psychoanalytic treatment (1910 –14) of that patient, the wealthy Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff, Freud believed that he had produced both the definitive confirmation of his own understanding of the nature and role of the unconscious and an effective rebuttal of the revisionist theories of those renegade analysts Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. When the then-twenty-three-year-old Pankejeff first traveled to Vienna to begin his analysis with Freud, he did not suffer from hypertrichosis (a congenital condition that leads to excessive bodily hair growth), nor did he suffer from clinical lycanthropy, from delusions of transforming into a wolf. Rather, his appellation “the Wolf-Man” derived from a dream that he had had at age four of waking up and seeing six or seven wolves sitting on a tree outside of his bedroom window. In the published case study, Freud’s apparent assiduous unpacking of each element of the dream becomes the key to unraveling his patient’s psychopathology and its precipitating primal scene (or phantasy). During its course, the analysis ranges from the story of “The Wolf and the Tailor” told by the patient’s grandfather to an illustrated book of Grimm’s tales shared by his English governess. It is not, however, the wolf of “Little Red Riding Hood” pictured lying in bed that caught Freud’s interpretive attention, but the image of the wolf standing upright in “The Seven Little Goats” (WM 31–33, 39– 41). To substantiate his claim for “The Seven Little Goats” playing a key role in engendering Pankejeff ’s wolf phobia Freud goes so far as to associate the whiteness of the wolves in the dream to the mother in the tale being “recognized by the white of her hand” (WM 43n). Then recalling Pankejeff ’s characterization of the dream wolves looking “more like foxes or sheep-dogs . . . they had their ears pricked like dogs” (WM 29),65 Freud speculates that the not-yetfour-year-old Sergei had watched the copulation of a pair of “large white dogs” (WM 58) on his parents’ estate. These recollections (and Freud’s reconstruction of the one-and-a-half-year-old Sergei possibly observing his parents at coitus a tergo, “more ferarum” [i.e., in the manner of wild beasts; WM 41; cf. 37–39, 47, 55–57, 59, 92–93]) lead Freud finally to that castration-threatening, wild animal substitute: the father.66 Once the case study shifts focus from Pankejeff ’s dream to the subsequent development of his neurotic symptomology, its possible source in the primal scene, and their convergence upon his ambivalence toward his father, the fairy tales have served their purpose and are left behind like so much day residue that the dream-work instrumentalizes. One possible reason for Freud’s preference for Urszenen (primal scenes) over Urerzählungen (primal narratives) is that Sergei’s grandfather’s story of the wolf that was

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“seized with fear as soon as it was reminded of the fact of its taillessness” (WM 31)—its tail had been pulled off by the tailor—implicates another possible source for the terror that awakened the young Sergei from the dream. He may have identified the wolf not only with the castrating father but also with the castrated mother: “ ‘If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father,’ we may represent him as saying to himself, ‘you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother’; but I won’t have it” (WM 47). Freud appears to be offering a counter narrative of masculine protest: “In short, a clear protest on the part of his masculinity!” (WM 47). Of course, because among the purposes of Freud’s study was to counter Adler’s psychological theories, including his notion of the masculine protest, and portray their inadequacy (see WM 53, 102–3, 110 –11), that tale, like the wolf ’s tail, must be removed to ensure the proper resolution of the therapeutic narrative.67 Later, after having asserted that his patient “must also have become acquainted, during the readings and discussions of the sacred story, with the ritual circumcision [Beschneidung] of Christ and of the Jews, in general” (WM 86) and then having characterized circumcision as a softened [ermäßigte] version of the punishment of castration, Freud identifies his patient’s “identification of his father with the castrator” (WM 87) and appends a note that mentions “Among the most tormenting, though at the same time the most grotesque, symptoms of his later illness was his relation to every tailor from whom he ordered a suit of clothes” (WM 87 n2). The editors of both the Gesammelte Werke and the Standard Edition then endeavor to remedy Freud’s failure to include what they assume to be a motivating factor behind Freud’s addendum as well as a corroboration of the significance Freud had given to the wolf dream: a reference to a caudally challenged canid. Hence, they ask the reader to recall “that it was a tailor68 who pulled off the wolf ’s tail” (WM 87n2). Questions abound about Freud’s methods, conclusions, his countertransference,69 or his claim for a cure; however, one consequence of the case is indubitable. Sergei Pankejeff may not have suffered from lycanthropy (clinical or otherwise), but as a result of this analysis, Freud transformed him into “The Wolf-Man” as the title of his originally anonymous autobiography bore witness: The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. It is as “the Wolf-Man” that Pankejeff would be known in Freud’s references in his own subsequent work to the now famous case as well as in the commentaries of generations of psychoanalysts and other readers of Freud. And it is as “the Wolf-Man” that Pankejeff returns to Vienna, after the combination of World War I and the Russian Revolution had divested him of home and fortune, to seek and eventually receive a regular subvention

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from “Professor Freud” and several of his Viennese colleagues because of his “great” contributions to psychoanalysis. Unlike the case study of the “Rat Man,” the Jewish lawyer Ernst Lanzer, in which Freud engages in a series of rhetorical ploys to suggest that his patient is a Gentile, “From the History of an Infantile Analysis” depicts a number of connections between Judentum and the manifestly Christian “Wolf-Man.” These include his obsessional preoccupation with both religious practices, such as icon kissing, and the story of Jesus, with whom he shares a birthday and with whom he consequently identifies. In part, that Freud airs such connections bears witness to his having ended by 1918 the moratorium on directly referring to Judentum in his published writings. Freud erects a generative matrix out of the configuration of castration, circumcision, and the wolf ’s tail that the tailor cut off.70

If Not a Jewish Wolf, Perhaps a Jewish Wulff Was Prowling about the Case Indeed, such a coincidental linkage of Jew and wolf had precipitated Pankejeff ’s decision to consult Freud. Odessa psychiatrist Dr. Leonid Drosnes, after reading an article by Dr. Moshe Wulff about Freud, informed his patient Pankejeff: “a certain Professor Freud in Vienna . . . had invented a miraculous method called psychoanalysis . . . ‘[H]e believes that some childhood experience, a trauma, is cause of an illness. And if one remembers this event, one gets one’s health back. In five minutes.’ ”71 Though it was closer to five years than five minutes when in 1914 both doctor and patient feel that the analysis has come to a successful conclusion, this Jewish Dr. Wulff may have served as more than an accidental contributor to the making of Freud’s Wolf-Man case study. Freud had written up the case during winter 1914 –15; however, he did not publish it until 1918 (WM 7n1). When preparing it for final publication, Freud added two long bracketed sections (WM 57–60, 95–97) in which he overcame his original intention of not “pursu[ing] the discussion of reality of ‘primal scenes’ any further in this place” (WM 57). It is in the first addition that Freud links Pankejeff ’s recollection of several visits to the family flock of white sheep (WM 58) and inserts the speculation of his probably thrice observing sheep-dogs copulating because it provided the necessary empirical catalyst for his “deferred” (nachträglich)72 recollection and/or the arousal of his phantasy of the primal scene of parental coitus. He also refers back to the sheep-dogs in the second addition (WM 97).73 It is only with these additions that Freud states “the fact that the wolves in

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the dream were actually sheep-dogs and, moreover, appear as such in the drawing” (WM 57–58). Not only were the copulating sheep-dogs absent from what Freud claims was the original version, but in his only discussion of “sheep-dogs” in that version Freud distorts Pankjeff ’s dream account— “The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something” (WM 29). In his virtual line-by-line analysis of the dream account in the long footnote spanning pages 42– 44, Freud ignores Pankejeff ’s associating the doggishness of the wolves to their ears and instead limits his discussion of the “sheep-dogs” to his own association of the white color of the wolves with an assumed white color of sheep-dogs (but not of foxes). This color might apply to Old English Sheep-Dogs, but it is rare among either German or Russian Schäferhunde that are better known in English as German Shepherds. Condensing the proverbially white “sheep” and the possibly white “dog” onto the compound word “sheep-dog” allowed Freud to find some additional means by which he could demonstrate how the dream-work allowed the sexual dream-thoughts (“the white of his parents’ bedclothes and underclothes”; WM 43) to evade censorship. In other words, when the Wolf-Man “rose from the couch”74 in 1914 and Freud went to his desk to write up his case study, he did not set down a shaggy dog story. Not only did he downplay the canine element of the manifest dream content, but he also omitted a canine detail that he had shared in a letter to his junior colleague Sándor Ferenczi (February 13, 1910) soon after Pankejeff had become his patient: “At the age of six years he experienced as his first symptom cursing against God: pig, dog, etc.”75 Because Freud characterized his patient’s childhood religiosity, whereby the Christmas-born Sergei identified as Christ the son of God the father, as “sublimating his predominant masochistic attitude toward his father” (WM 64), Freud’s exemplary symptom of the young Pankejeff ’s “compromise products” of his ambivalent feelings toward his father—betraying the concomitant hostile impulse against him that had earlier manifested itself in the anxiety dream of wolves—were “the blasphemous ideas, the compulsion which came over him of thinking ‘God-shit,’ ‘God-swine’ ” (WM 66; cf. 68 [‘God-swine’], 83 [‘God-shit’]). “God-dog” is never mentioned. The question is then: Why did Freud call off the copulating sheep-dogs and any other symptomatic canines until, having discussed the reality of primal scenes in the twenty-third of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (and by which he justifies his long bracketed supplements; WM 57),

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he adds them to his about-to-be-published study? With the return of the sheep-dogs,76 Freud could propose an alternative genesis for the “primal scene”—as spur to a four-year-old’s phantasy or deferred recollection of a one-and-a-half-year old traumatic experience—that would provide him with a subjunctive cover against those who may be incredulous about existence of such a memory (and those who may be morally outraged at the suggestion of wealthy parents not only copulating in front of their child but engaging in it more ferarum) and would consequently question the scientificity of psychoanalysis, writ large. It could also assuage his own doubts about the facticity of the primal scene.77 Going to the dogs, including that particular hybrid of deity and canid (“God-dog”), would have presented Freud in Winter 1914 –15 with a theoretical knot: Would allowing young Sergei to displace his anxiety by identifying the deity as more an abjected object than a threatening subject, the whelp, however miserable, also have recalled that other canid, the menacing wolf ? Still the answer may lie less with another canid, a wolf (Wolf), than with a Wulff, Dr. Moshe Wulff of Odessa, who, as noted earlier, played a role in Pankejeff ’s decision to seek out Freud. The fourth and concluding essay of Totem and Taboo, written and published while Pankejeff was still in therapy, is entitled “The Return of Totemism in Childhood.” Freud devotes only one section of the essay’s seven sections to that topic; however, its discussion of children’s animal phobias is critical, for it authorizes, via epigenetic homology, the psychoanalytic reconstruction of human social and religious development from the emergence of “primitive” totemism to the modern (a reconstruction that in turn authorizes psychoanalysis’s Oedipal theory). His first example is Wulff ’s case-history of a nine-year-old boy who suffered a dog-phobia at the age of four. Freud then notes: “Wulff adds a footnote which is in complete agreement with my views and at the same time bears witness to the frequent occurrence of such experiences: ‘Phobias of this type (phobia of horses, dogs, cats, fowls and other domestic animals) are, in my opinion, at least as common in childhood as pavor nocturnus [night terror(s)], and in analysis they almost invariably turn out to be a displacement on to the animals of the child’s fear of one of the parents.’ ”78 Moreover, when Brunswick notes in her case study that during the course of her treatment of Pankejeff that she consulted with Dr. Wulff about her patient, she mentions that Dr. Wulff had treated both Pankejeff and his parents79 (Pankejeff ’s father had died in 1908, i.e., prior to the son’s Vienna sessions). Given that this same Dr. Wulff visited Freud in Vienna in 1912,80 it remains an open question as to whether there was some theoretical cross-pollination.

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Perhaps Freud left those sheepdogs with the flock and those blasphemous curses to his correspondence out of his notorious fear of being accused of plagiarism and intellectual theft. Though little Sergei’s wolf phobia may have provided a necessary entry point for Freud to map out the contours of Pankejeff ’s neurosis, by 1918 infantile zoophobia as a universal phenomenon was more a corroboration and stage along the way (cf. WM 114: “the stage of the totemic fathersurrogate”) than cornerstone of either the case study or, more importantly, the psychoanalytic edifice. As a case study, “From the History” provided an exemplar for the role of ambivalence in subject formation within the Oedipal triangle (for example, WM 26, 128), for the negative Oedipus Complex, and for castration anxiety as well as occasioned the postulation of the primal scene and/or the primal phantasy.81 After the publication of his case, the “Wolf-Man” continued to make contributions to the development of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory in his subsequent analysis, prompted by delusions about disfigurement of his own nose, with Freud’s student Ruth Mack Brunswick. He would serve as the unnamed exemplar of the fetishist in Freud’s 1927 “Fetishism” essay. Since 1941, however, the symptomology of the Wolf-Man imagined by nonreaders82 of the case study has been shaped less by the “history of [his] infantile neurosis” than by Curt Siodmak’s screenplay for the Universal Pictures film The Wolf Man, which would premiere at the end of that year.

Curt Siodmak’s Wolf Man, or Wolfbane Made in Germany Similarly, while that Jew-wolf hybrid Shylock may be more associated with gold, it is the werewolf ’s association with silver that may be more familiar, courtesy of that same Siodmak screenplay. Siodmak was born in Dresden, Germany in 1902; his parents both came from Leipzig Jewish families. He, together with his brother, the director Robert Siodmak, achieved prominence in the cinema of Weimar Germany; however, with the Nazi seizure of power, he escaped first to France, then to England and ultimately, in 1937, to the United States where he eventually joined the stable of writers at the horror- and B-movie-factory that was Universal Studios. The Wolf Man would be Siodmak’s big break and make him the self-proclaimed “King of the Bs.”83 Before examining whether there is any connection among Siodmak, his screenplays, and Judentum aside from the accident of his Jewish descent and flight from the Third Reich, some observations about the film are necessary.

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In writing The Wolf Man (and its 1943 sequel, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man) Siodmak created many of the legends (for example, the sign of the pentagram and the exclusive role of silver in killing the werewolf ) we’ve come to associate with werewolves, including the famous verses: Even a man who is pure in heart And says his prayers by night, May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, And the autumn moon is bright.

Although not included in the final cut, Siodmak sought to screen his authorship of those lines with a shot of a doctored page from a ca. 1330 manuscript of the Book of Revelation (see Figure 16). The passage about the mark of the beast (Rev. 13:16 –18) is illuminated with a wolflike, albeit horned, bipedal creature, its groin cloaked, seated upon a hillock as humans from various estates pass before him with their marked right palms extended in his direction. Beneath the Gothic-script text lay Siodmak’s verses as the apparent translation of their supposed Latin84 original; they are written in a similar but more legible script and placed adjacent to the drawing of a dog that is leashed to the illuminated capital E (of Et faciet . . . ) that begins Rev. 13:16. Also absent from the final cut is the moon. In the film, the wolfbane blooms, but aside from the shape of the earrings worn by the film’s heroine, Gwen, the moon is never once shown—full or otherwise—nor is there any hint about monthly metamorphoses. That would not occur until the sequel Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.85 The Wolf Man is the only one of the great Universal monsters ( Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, Dracula, the Mummy) that did not originate from an earlier novel or play.86 Siodmak’s final shooting script follows Larry Talbot, who returns from America to Talbot Castle (its exact location is never indicated) to reconcile with his father, Sir John Talbot. After eyeing Gwen, the daughter of the local antiques dealer, through a telescope, he visits her shop, purchases a walking stick, its silver head shaped like a wolf and bearing a pentagram, and sets up a date with her that night. While out with Gwen, he attempts to rescue her friend, Jenny, from an apparent wolf attack; he kills the wolf with his silver-headed stick but gets bit in the chest as a result. The gypsy fortuneteller Maleva informs him that the animal was actually her son, Bela, who was a werewolf, and that because of this bite Larry, too, would become a werewolf. Pentagrams appear on Bela’s forehead and Larry’s chest (as they do on the palms of both Jenny and Larry before they were bitten). Every night for the remainder of the film, Larry becomes a wolf-human hybrid—unlike Bela who had transformed

Figure 16. The mark of the beast. Curt Siodmak’s pastiche of the Cloisters Apocalypse’s illuminated folio of Rev. 13:16 –18. Reproduced in Philip Riley, The Wolf Man, 12. Reprinted by courtesy of Philip Riley.

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into a wolf—stalking the village and killing when opportunity presents itself. When he wakes up from his nightly prowls, he has only vague memories of them, and he struggles against his assumed condition. Ultimately, Larry’s father bludgeons him, in the form of the Wolf Man, to death with the silver-headed walking stick that his son had given to him; however, when Sir John returns with the rest of the town’s protectors to show them that the threat is over, they find the body, not of a monster, but of Larry who has returned to his human form. Siodmak’s Wolf Man is neither the uncaging of the beast lurking beneath our civilized veneer nor its modern, psychoanalytically informed variant: the monster that emerges once the restraints produced by the subjection of human animal desires to repression and suppression by cultural practices and institutions have been lifted.87 Although being turned into a werewolf is often labeled a curse, Siodmak repeatedly states that Larry has not been cursed because of any evil or immoral act on his part or on the part of his ancestors. Instead Siodmak sees his transformation as a matter of “Destiny,” as he had once entitled his screenplay.88 In various autobiographical writings fifty years later, he emphasizes the role of “harmatia” (sic), which he characterizes as an intrinsic tragic flaw that “we all have . . . in us, and suffer in life’s mishaps and pain, without having been guilty of any misdeed.”89 Nor is Larry’s transformation a consequence of his pursuing self-aggrandizement and making some Faustian bargain. Quite the opposite: He is bitten by a werewolf while trying to save Gwen’s friend. Once bitten, he repeatedly attempts to protect others from the werewolf. He gives Gwen a protective amulet and his father the walking stick; he also tries to leave town, even though he would thereby forfeit his birthright. Unlike the other Universal Studios’ monsters, Larry is a tragic figure who evokes the sympathy of the audiences throughout the film. Based upon this summary there would appear to be no possible connection between Siodmak, the Wolf Man, and Judentum aside from the accident of the writer’s own destiny. When he tells an interviewer shortly before his death (in 2000) that I am the Wolf Man. I was forced into a fate I didn’t want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate. The swastika represents the moon. When the moon comes up, the man doesn’t want to murder, but he knows he cannot escape it, the Wolf Man destiny. Something happens that you know is going to happen, but you cannot escape it, like being sent to a concentration camp.90

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Siodmak is probably sharing a screen memory rather than a memory of the screen—given, as noted previously, blooming wolfbane and not the full moon occasions the lupine transformation in the original film. That is, rather than recalling the identifications and intentions of a thirty-nineyear-old screenwriter having just been given an assignment consisting of a title for a screenplay, “The Wolf Man,” and a deadline, this is more likely a post hoc testament to a life that had spanned the twentieth century. By identifying himself with his most famous creation and drawing upon the near coincidence of his pinnacle of personal achievement, The Wolf Man, with Europe’s fall into the abyss that was the Shoah, he transforms himself into the exemplary German Jewish refugee. Siodmak’s autobiography does emphasize that “Even though I was born and raised in Germany, I always felt like a secondary citizen among the Teutons. Anti-Semitism was always latent in German, especially in schools” (WMM 54).91 To corroborate his general claim he refers to the Brothers Grimm’s “The Jew among the Thorns,” “one of the most vicious anti-Semitic fables. That poison was ingrained in Germany’s conception of the Semitic race” (WMM 54). More specific to his own experience, he characterizes as “the story of my generation” Erich Glaeser’s 1928 international best-seller Jahrgang 1902 (Born 1902). Siodmak focuses on how the novel opens with a classroom scene in which a teacher ridicules a Jewish student by depicting him together with his department-store-owning father like antisemitic caricatures from Der Stürmer.92 Siodmak then recalls a 1913 encounter that his then six-year-old younger brother, Werner, had on the playground: One of Werner’s friends told him, “When I grow up, we’re going to kill all Jews, but not you, because I like you” (WMM 56). Biography aside, several facets of the film as well as Siodmak’s occasional subsequent offhand remarks suggest that the situation of Central European Jewry in modernity shaped his final script. For example, though several early scripts set the film in Wales, no specific location is named in the final cut of The Wolf Man. When asked where it took place, Siodmak is reputed to have, on occasion, responded: “Germany.”93 Second, there is the hidden mark—the pentagram —that reveals the gypsy Bela’s and the American Larry’s werewolf essence as well as the fate of future victims (see Figures 17 and 18). Although it is impossible to confuse that five-pointed figure with the six-pointed Magen David, Siodmak does lament early on, in both the English (1997) and German (1995) versions of his autobiography: “But I was born a Jew, wearing the invisible Star of David all my life” (WMM 3).94 The sign is borne, but kept concealed, by both the Eastern-Other– coded

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Figure 17. Bela’s pentagram. The Wolf Man, 1941, USA. D: George Waggner.

Figure 18. Larry’s pentagram. The Wolf Man, 1941, USA. D: George Waggner.

and the Western-Other– coded “wolf men.” Third, their manifest differences in appearance and accent may also be significant because the Ostjude, the Eastern European Jew, was perceived to differ visibly and vocally from the Western European Jew—save for their assumed shared hidden mark of Jewish (male) difference. Fourth, Larry is a wanderer with an estranged relation to any home, whom locals view as not belonging, as a threat—not just to local women of reproductive age, but—to all because werewolfness is passed by invasive contact. It is a contaminating, deadly plague that reproduces the fantasy of Jewish influence and contagion (Verjudung). In addition, several scenes that index Larry’s seemingly intrinsic otherness also correspond with common anti-Jewish tropes. Just like the common scene of anti-Jewish caricature depicting the Jewish tradesman or peddler attacked by dogs when visiting a Gentile town (see Figure 7 in Chapter 1), so too would Larry have been attacked, had not Gwen’s fiancé, the gameskeeper, held tightly on to the leash of his hound when they met. The Great Divide between Christian and Jew can also be read in the scene

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of Larry entering the back of the village church in mid-service. The camera pans across the assemblage as each congregant turns his or her eyes back at him, and, when a cross-shaped shadow is cast on the middle aisle he would have to traverse to reach his father’s pew, Larry suddenly flees. More possible refractions of the fate of the Jewish Other who sought integration into European modernity emerge in Siodmak’s earlier outlines and drafts.95 In these, Larry is not Sir John’s son—there is no Oedipal subtext—rather, he is an American technician, first named Don Hill and later Larry Gill, who comes to (spoiler alert!) Wolfendon, the manor home of the astrophysicist Sir John Talbot, to help install a telescope. More significant to a possible connection to Judentum is that, while in all script versions none of the film’s characters (aside from Maleva) witnesses the protagonist transform into the Wolf Man, in those earlier drafts neither would the audience. They would only see him with wolf-like features when he observes himself in a pool of water. In his first shooting script Siodmak added a “NOTE: The wolf-man’s face is never seen— ONLY IN THE MIRROR OF THE WATER—AS SEEN THROUGH LARRY’S EYES—AS HE IMAGINES HIMSELF.”96 Indeed, after the protagonist kills the werewolf that was Bela, the audience would see neither hide nor hair of any wolf or wolf-man until the climactic scene when a wolf attacks Gwen. Rather than Sir John striking the Wolf Man with the silver walking stick, Gwen’s fiancé, Frank, shoots him with a silver bullet. Mortally wounded, he limps alone back to the pool where he stares at his Wolf Man reflection and dies. The last scene would be shot as if through the eyes of the “dead” Larry, and the audience would view the faces of Sir John, Gwen, Maleva, and another character looking at the body. With Gwen’s final words, “Look. He’s smiling,”97 the audience would be led to assume that she and the others had been standing over the human body of the late Larry Gill. The audience was never to know whether he was actually a werewolf or simply delusional— or whether he simply internalized the negative identifications that the local community has ascribed to him: alien, a-moral, animalistic. In that first shooting script, Larry Gill is the foreigner, as Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History (7.1.7): “a foreigner is hardly a member of the human species!” He is the rational technician—the soul-less and god-less complement to the instinct-driven predator. Moreover, because in both film and first shooting script Larry tests the telescope not on the stars but on Gwen, whom he espies getting dressed in her bedroom above the shop, he is the transgressor of all boundaries. He is the interloper, who will disrupt traditional marital alliances and steal away the desirable women. Moreover, he allies himself with those other aliens, the gypsies.

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Yet, rather than confirming the animalizing stereotypes, in the end of all versions, as the film’s characters gather around his human corpse, Larry is presented as a sympathetic human figure. His tragic death—and that of millions of European Jews—may well have been the logical consequence of the pervasiveness of such animalization; however, when The Wolf Man finally makes its way to the screen, its possible Jewish connections are largely screened out. On December 9, 1941 The Wolf Man had its public preview in Los Angeles. Another gathering of largely B-listers was originally scheduled for that day at the guest house of the Sicherheitsdienst (security service or intelligence agency of the SS), 56 –58 Am Grossen Wannsee, Berlin, to discuss the “necessary organizational and technical preparations for a comprehensive solution of the Jewish question.”98 While the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor led to the postponement of the infamous Wannsee Conference (ultimately rescheduled for January 20, 1942), the film held its premiere as scheduled. An ominous coincidence? Only if one were to see the (un)natural histories of Jewish animalization and Jewish response detailed in the preceding chapters of Bestiarium Judaicum as necessarily culminating in and receiving their significance from the so-called Final Solution. This work is making no such teleological claim. That those identified as Jews in occupied Europe around that time could and did draw upon those histories to respond to and make some sense of their situations is where the Bestiarium Judaicum finally turns.

afterword

“It’s clear as the light of day” The Shoah and the Human /Animal Great Divide Hold it tight or else the “little animal” [“beestje”] will escape. —volksche aanal1

Tier[alp]träume: Animal Night[ mare]s Soon after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Berlin Jewish writer Gertrud Kolmar learned that her collection, Die Frau und die Tiere ( The woman and the animals), a selection of poems drawn from three of her verse cycles, Weibliches Bildnis (Female portrait), Das Kind ( The child), and Tierträume (Animal dreams), was rejected by the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Five years later (September 1938) a somewhat expanded collection (but without any poems from Das Kind) appeared under that title from the Jüdischer Buchverlag Erwin Löwe; it was among the last works to be issued by a privately owned Jewish publishing house in the Third Reich. Three months later, after Kristallnacht, all extant copies of Kolmar’s book were destroyed.2 Kolmar’s poems, taken as a whole and often individually, interweave depictions of those on the other side of Germany’s Great Divides: in particular, women, Jews, and animals. She draws upon her own intersecting identifications as woman, Jew, and one deeply engaged with the fauna and flora surrounding her in constructing verse cycles—for example, among

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the poems included in her Weibliches Bildnis cycle are “Die Jüdin” ( The Jewess)3 and “Das Tier” (The Animal)4—as well as in poems that confront the reader with the different faces presented and transformations undergone by women (qua women), animals (qua animals), and Jews (qua Jews) in the worlds, often hostile, that they inhabit. One apocalyptic animal dream not included in the 1938 collection—whether by editorial or authorial decision cannot be determined5—“Der Tag der grossen Klage” (The Day of the Great Lament [or Accusation]) reads, seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, like a horrifying and horrifyingly prophetic allegory. In the poem, Kolmar describes the resurrection of the “tormented-unto-death animals”: from the “mutilated flies creep[ing] with legs / Or wings” to “carps with slashed bodies,” from the “dissected rats and disfigured mice” of the “white rooms of science” to the “once-caged beasts of prey / Deadened by their desolate zoos”; “even the poor, humbled hounds, / Their licenses hanging like icons” are among the ranks of the returned. Neither self-abasement nor prayer nor wailing nor madness nor the intervention of dove or lamb—traditional Christian animal symbols of salvation— can “free Man from their murder.” In the last stanza, the deity, who allegedly gave “Man” dominance over animals, is named the “abettor” of the zoöcidal horror show that preceded this “Day of Judgment” and is “Shattered like glass with a monstrous crash” as a new God arises, spitting “flame toward a new horizon.”6 Rather than seeing the poem as the work of a Cassandra (Kolmar would perish at Auschwitz sometime in 1943), it should be read as the creation of a writer familiar with TaNaKh—she builds upon the prophet Habakkuk’s vision of what would beset the Judah-conquering Babylonians, “the havoc wrought on [Lebanon’s] beasts will shatter you, because of the bloodshed and violence you inflicted” (2:17)—and with Judentum’s history of realized persecution, its persistent presence even as the would-be world conquerors of the past have disappeared, and its tradition of promised redemption. She also evokes that past amid the Third Reich’s first waves of antisemitic legislation and state-condoned antisemitic violence in the poem “Wir Juden” (We Jews, DS 112–17), written September 15, 1933 as part of the Das Wort der Stummen (The word of the mute) cycle. Whatever implicit analogies with Jews and Judentum that may have been intermixed with the animal victims who arose on “The Day of Great Lament” become manifest in the poem and are inscribed in the bodies of “We Jews”: “The withered claw [dürre Kralle], the weary fist with veins like vipers [Vipernbrut] / Raised against the murderers from ropes and funeral pyres of ages, // . . . The mutilated ear, the wounded brow and fleeing eye.” And she brings it to her present when the poet wishes that she “could raise

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my voice to be a blazing torch / Amidst the darkened desert of the world, and thunder: Justice! Justice! Justice!” but her “ankles are in chains . . .” Still she vows: “one day your weary wandering shoes will stand upon the necks of all the mighty!” (DS 114 –17). Just as the victimization of animals helped her figure the experience of German Jewry after the Nazi seizure of power, so did the awareness of Judentum’s traditions and history provide her with a framework to howl that große Klage against the torture, to which animals are subjected, and to envision their possible (divine) redress.7 A Klage, or lament, is double faced: a cry of sorrow and/or of accusation. Who then in the earlier poem is lamenting? The desolate humans who are “wailing” or the once-ravaged animals showing “[Man] all their graves [and] torture cells”? Certainly the latter, but just as the former should not be overlooked, could not the title (i.e., “Der Tag der großen Klage”) also portend a cry of sorrow that will emerge beyond that “new horizon”? In naming the day of the raising up of the (nonhuman) animals in all of their diversity as the one of “großer Klage,” Kolmar appears to be alluding to the only two biblical passages in Luther’s Bible translation— which she claimed “clearly influenced [her language] as a poet”8—where the phrase appears: Zechariah 12:11–12 and Genesis 50:10 –11. According to the Book of Zechariah, following the triumph of the Lord at the end of days, each of Jerusalem’s families, together with the women of each, lament greatly over the destruction of their enemies. The scene in Genesis is different; it is not eschatological, nor does it entail the death of oppressors; however, as in Zechariah, taxonomically distinct groups together engage in great lamentation. Their cries are occasioned by the funeral of Jacob. Not only Joseph and his brothers, but also all of Pharaoh’s officials and the elders of Egypt, that is, both “Jews” and “Egyptians,” mourn over Israel. The trace of compassion for the oppressor beyond the horizon of justice may be glimpsed in a Bible-inspired work from Kolmar’s last preserved cycle of poems, Welten (Worlds). During the course of 1937, restrictions on all aspects of Jewish life in Kolmar’s Berlin continued to grow as the (non-Jewish) Germans, like the people of Nineveh, continued “their wicked ways and the injustice they practice[d]” ( Jonah 3:8). Sometime that autumn, she composed the poem “Die Tiere von Ninive” (The Animals of Nineveh, DS 226 –31); it bore the ambiguous subtitle “Jona, Schlußwort” ( Jonah, last word). Her source text, the Book of Jonah, is read on Yom Kippur afternoon, just before the Book of Life is sealed, because it recounts how, after the Assyrians—and their animals (3:8)—repented and abandoned their “wicked ways,” the deity manifested compassion and “did not inflict on them the punishment he had threatened” (3:10). The

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revocation of Gd’s punishment decree “greatly displeased” Jonah (4:1), and in the last chapter of the book the deity endeavors, by both experiential lesson and logic, to reconcile the prophet to the way of divine compassion. It concludes before Jonah could respond to Gd’s rhetorical question: “And should not I be sorry about the great city of Nineveh, with its hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, as well as cattle without number?” (4:11). Kolmar’s poem would then appear to provide Jonah’s response, his last word. The post-pardoned Nineveh of the poem, however, would seem little different than a pre-penitential one. While the poem opens with a rather precious night tableau of a “blue-gray cat with agate eyes” drinking up “moonmilk” from a copper cup (DS 226/227), it also stages a scene in which a sleeping vulture, with “ugly naked, yellow head . . . piercing claws, and . . . annihilating tearing beak” (DS 226/227), is perched over the object of its dreams, its future meal: a dead donkey, rotting and stinking, its eyes being eaten by worms. The vulture is sardonically named Racham, the Hebrew word for the divine attribute of mercy or compassion (see Jonah 4:2: rachum). While the poem later idyllically depicts a resting shepherd boy surrounded by the “soft white fleece” of his lamb flock (DS 226 –29), a less benign companionate embrace of human and animal then follows: a dirty, sore-covered orphan boy asleep, who in mid-dream punches his canine double (“As poor, as sick, as tormented as he”; DS 228/229) that is licking his cheek. As a great storm arises in the east, the poem turns to Jonah, striding away from his burden, his oracle, his mission,9 turning his back to Nineveh and to the deity. His last word is silence, an unspoken Klage, as he, both “frightened” and “merciless,” flees (DS 230/231). This dove (in Hebrew Yonah) does not believe that the wicked should be saved either. Yet the last word of Luther’s translation of the Book of Jonah is “Tiere”— animals—by which Gd referred to the animals of Nineveh. The only words uttered in Kolmar’s poem are the deity’s (DS 230/231): “For their sake! For the sake of all the animals, clean and unclean!” This voice calling out from the whirlwind explains why the inhabitants of Nineveh should not be destroyed. If her poem is an afterword to the biblical book, is this yet another divine attempt to rouse Jonah’s mercy and compassion? Or in light of “Der Tag der großen Klage” is this divine pronouncement instead the original burden that the prophet was to deliver to Nineveh and that Kolmar’s Jonah refuses to proclaim out of fear, mercilessness, and the knowledge that “you are a gracious and compassionate God, long-suffering, ever constant, always ready to relent and not inflict punishment” (4:2)?

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There is yet another possible reading. Given the poem’s inventory of Nineveh’s inhabitants, the referents of “animals” could be to both the human and the nonhuman kind as well as to both the pure and the impure (rein und unrein) varieties of each. In this case, a muted Jonah signals that without active human (animal) intervention the deity cannot secure their repentance and redress, cannot change this situation, whether in Nineveh or Berlin, where some enjoy blissful fantasies, while others either live in abject conditions or act out dreams of violence and destruction.

“But if one were to determine what attributes the Jews share with a beast, it would be that of the rat” (Hans Landa). In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “The Letter Writer,” the protagonist, Herman Gombiner, formerly of Kalomin (Galomin, Poland) and now of New York, delivers what proves to be a premature eulogy for Huldah, a mouse “who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had [he errantly believed] left this earth.” Huldah (meaning “mole”) was the prophetess who, during Josiah’s reign (late seventh century BCE), disclosed the coming fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple, i.e., the first Churban (2 Kings 22; 2 Chronicles 34). Gombiner, alone of his family to have survived der drite Khurbn (the Third Churban, as Yiddish-speaking survivors called the destruction of European Jewry), passes judgment upon humanity’s other than humane treatment of nonhuman animals when he apostrophically laments: What do they know—all those scholars, all those philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.10

The Treblinka Death Camp had been built to be the final solution to the so-called Judenfrage ( Jewish Question) of Warsaw, from where Singer had emigrated in 1935, as well as to the Jews of Galomin. Its invocation by Singer in relation to the so-called Tierfrage (Animal Question) has achieved apothegmatic status and has been widely disseminated by the Animal Liberation Front, PETA, and other animal rights groups. Rather than argue about the propriety of Singer’s and Gombiner’s comparison,11 I would suggest we consider its converse: Treblinka awaited der

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ewige Jude (the eternal or wandering Jew) and created the eternal animal. Nazi verminization of “the Jew” was not unique to Quentin Tarentino’s Colonel Landa.12 Six years after the appearance of “The Letter Writer” in New Yorker Magazine, Gitta Sereny published Into that Darkness, her interviews with Treblinka Kommandant Franz Stangl. When asked: “if [the Nazis and their collaborators] were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” Stangl responded that the Jews were dehumanized so that they could be made killable: “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.”13 Even though the animalization of Jews, the Jew-Animal, like the animalization of animals, the Animal, may be presumed as natural, it must be, as Stangl indicated, continuously reproduced in order to maintain the overcoding of the German /Jew distinction by the human /animal Great Divide that would allow Jews to be brutalized and killed with impunity. And it was reproduced throughout German-occupied Europe. A report to the Polish Government-in-Exile describes excursions through the Lodz Ghetto that the German government–run leisure agency Kraft durch Freude (strength through joy) sponsored for soldiers needing R&R: “Every day large coaches came to the ghetto; they take the soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild animals. Often soldiers strike out at passers-by with long whips as they drive through.”14 When many of those same soldiers returned to active duty they behaved as if these animalized Jews had escaped their cages. In summing up his analysis of reports on “Jewish actions” and the subsequent treatment of the surviving “laboring Jews” in German-occupied territory by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS’s tactical killing units, French historian Christian Ingrao concludes: “When the SS perceived the Jews as wild animals, the mode of killing they applied to them necessarily drew on images of hunting, which presupposed a strict respect for the ban on killing infants. The shift from images of hunting to pastoral images, made possible by the substitution of domestication [i.e., “confining, branding, and setting to work Jewish populations perceived as wild animals”], also changed the method of killing applied to the victims: hunting was replaced by slaughter, a mode of butchery that could encompass very young individuals, and even babies in very great numbers.”15 While explicit language of animalization was generated by the antisemitic propaganda mills of Julius Streicher (for example, Hiemer’s Pudelmopsdackelpinscher) and Joseph Goebbels (for example, Der ewige Jude) such figuration was infrequent—as either identification or disciplining

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practice—in the reports that Ingrao analyzes.16 Such is not the case, however, in memoirs, poems, and autobiographical novels of Jewish Shoah survivors who bore explicit witness to the efforts at transforming Jews into the Jew-Animal. Primo Levi signals this in the original title of his Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo; 1947), and in extensive detail in one of his last essays “Useless Violence” (Violenza inutile; 1986). The process of transforming Jews into animals began when he was loaded onto the Güterwagen (freight car) for transport to Auschwitz. Levi comments on why he and his fellow prisoners improvised a screen to separate those using the chamber pot from view: “we are not yet animals, we will not be animals as long as we resist.” Nevertheless, when their train stopped at an Austrian station and the car doors opened to allow him and the other prisoners out to squat “wherever they could . . . German passengers [at the station] openly expressed their disgust: . . . just look how they behave. These are not Menschen, human beings, but animals; it’s clear as the light of day.”17 Similarly, Emanuel Levinas, recalling his bondage in a “forestry commando unit of Jewish war prisoners in Nazi Germany,” describes how “the other men, called free, who had dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a smile—and the children and women who passed by and sometimes raised their eyes—stripped us of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes.”18 After Levi arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau he discovered that the collective latrine did not permit such improvisation to resist being disciplined into self-identifying as animal: “the discomfort [with using the open, crowded latrine] became attenuated, and then vanished; in its place came (not for everyone) habituation, which is a charitable way of saying that the transformation from human beings into animals was well on its way.” Before facing this systematic excremental assault, Levi was subjected to that autochthonous Auschwitz institution, the tattooed number: “Its symbolic meaning was clear to everyone: this is an indelible mark with which slaves are branded and cattle sent to the slaughter, and that is what you have become.”19 The conclusion that Terence Des Pres draws from the witness of Levi and others is that “Life itself depends on keeping dignity intact, and this, in turn, depends on the daily, never finished battle to remain visibly human.”20 The Czech Jewish survivor Jiri Weil stages the transformation of Prague’s Jews from human (animal) to killable (nonhuman) animal during the Shoah in his autobiographical novel Life with a Star (1964). The title already alludes to animalization; in his earlier (1958) Elegy for 77297 Victims he had commented “all Jews were ordered to bear on their left

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breast, there where the heart lies, this shameful insignia, this badge for livestock.”21 Throughout the novel, duly registered Jewish inhabitants of German-occupied Prague await the receipt of the letter from the occupierinstituted Jewish Council informing them to report for resettlement to Terezin, the so-called privileged ghetto better known by its German name Theresienstadt. In actuality, for most of those who survived its horrendous conditions it was a transfer camp to Auschwitz and other killing sites. The narrator initially evades deportation because someone with the same name received the letter destined for him. He records a conversation about what happens after the letter arrives: “They call people up, take away their [identification] documents, and hang a number around their necks. They take them somewhere east.” “Oh, I know. I was at the Radio Mart the other day. . . . So I think they’re using the Radio Mart in connection with these transports.” “Yes,” I said, “there are wooden pavilions, just nailed-together boards really. There’s no heating because the place would catch fire. They’ve brought straw there from the Community. They say they’re organizing a circus.”22

The narrator then recalls attending the circus as a child23 and contrasts his experience of the animals as a young spectator with what he later learned: “When I watched the seals pushing a ball with their snouts I didn’t know it was a bad thing to be an animal in the circus. It never occurred to me that it was something seals did not usually do.” He now realizes what it would mean for him “to perform in the circus[:] I didn’t like to remember the sound of the whip and the cries of the tamers. I didn’t want to remember the horses running around and around or the dog jumping through a large hoop.”24 Prague’s Jews go from their homes where they are individuals with names, recognized identities, to the streets where they are simply indicated by number. In the street they are less living creatures than notations in accounting books: Their numerical identification is not a means, in and of itself, to inflict suffering. Numbers can be deleted; however, numbers (or machines, whether inanimate or animate)25 do not suffer. The Jews bearing numbers about their necks are simply in transit, between statuses. In this zone one could, perhaps, escape, re-acquire a name like a human or become one of the hunted like a wild animal. Once they arrive at the deportation site, at the circus, however, they become animals; they become creatures who are perceived as having always already been animals and hence as brutalizable and killable.

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Weil’s portrayal of the three stages (the eponymous and situated human, the number in transit, and the captive animal) of the death cycle of Prague’s Jews enables us to begin to parse the distinction between “objectification” and “dehumanization” by which Jewish victimization during the Shoah has been identified. The frequent conflation of the two notions has made it difficult to determine any necessary relationship between the particularities of inflicting suffering on individual or aggregates of individual Jews and the teleological totality of genocide. Numerical identification is objectification, and it is dehumanization, in so far as an object does not have human status. Bestial identification is dehumanization, and it is also objectification, in so far as an animal is (often) in some instrumental relation with (and as determined by) the human. Even though “they do exist within overlapping spheres of meaning,”26 objectification and dehumanization should not be viewed as synonyms. While making instrumental is the paradigmatic practice in constructing human /object difference, making killable is the hallmark of constructing human /animal difference. Moreover, while affect may be directed toward an object, no affect is ascribed to the object in objectification; that is, it lacks a property (or a recognizable assumed index of such a property) of the animal, however objectified or instrumentalized, that indicates the possibility of affective response.27 The object also does not have the potential to look back—unlike the animalized human. Hannah Arendt observes that it is “easier to kill a dog than a man, easier yet to kill a rat or a frog, and no problem at all to kill insects, ‘it is in the glance, in the eyes,’ ”28 of the animalized human victim that could lead the killer to identify his or her belonging to the human community and thus to turn the violence into a violation. This returned gaze also leads Adorno to observe another possible interchange: The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—“after all, it’s only an animal”—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is “only an animal,” because they never fully believe this even of animals. In repressive society the concept of man is itself a parody of divine likeness. The mechanism of “pathic projection” determines that those in power perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of reflecting back the human as precisely what is different. Murder is thus the repeated attempt, by yet greater madness, to distort the madness of such false perception into reason: what was not seen as human and yet is human, is made a thing, so that its stirring can no longer refute the manic gaze.29

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Here the objectifying telos of dehumanizing animalization is fully realized. Here perhaps also is another source for the affect that elicits “the unease of historical interpretation” that Saul Friedländer foregrounds as ever haunting his reflection upon the “Final Solution”: that is, for the Rausch, the “irrepressible exaltation” that often accompanied Nazi Jew-killing and their talk about Jew-killing.30 The animal is animal in so far as it is or remains potentially animate, but even this trace is a threat to the misrecognized naturalization of the human /animal distinction that legitimizes the exceptionalism of the self-identified human.31 The danger needs to be eliminated, and one is permitted to eliminate it. Once killed, the animal— “the Jew”—is referred to in thing language: “the thing” (das Zeug) as the charwoman refers to the dead Gregor Samsa (DL 198; CS 138); or as Vilna survivor Motke Zaidl told Claude Lanzmann in Shoah: “The German even forbade us to use the words ‘corpse’ or ‘victim.’ The dead were blocks of wood, shit. . . . The Germans made us refer to the bodies as Figuren, that is, as puppets, as dolls, or as Schmattes, which means ‘rags.’ ”32 A block of wood, a piece of dreck, or a pile of rags is readily destroyed, but it is not killed, let alone murdered.33

Like Sheep to the Slaughter In 1940, Helmuth Koschorke, the press officer at the main office of the German order police, characterizes the subject population in occupied Poland as “no longer human! They are animals! No, they aren’t. That [identification] isn’t fair to the animals, since animals are far from being so bestially depraved as this pack of murders. They aren’t humans; they aren’t animals either; no, they are some misbegotten kind that do not belong to this world.”34 Accordingly, the Israeli poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, who had managed to escape Poland after the German invasion, describes, in his 1951 poem cycle “To God in Europe,” how the Jews remaining there had been rendered animalized humans that bore no analogical relation to humanized animals of either the companionate or consumable variety: We were not as dogs among the gentiles: a dog is pitied among them, fondled by them, sometimes even kissed by a gentile’s mouth; As if he were a pretty baby Of his own flesh and blood, the gentile spoils him and is forever taking pleasure in him. And when the dog dies, how the gentile mourns him!35

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Not like sheep to the slaughter were we brought in train loads, But rather— Through all the lovely landscapes of Europe— brought like leprous sheep To Extermination itself. Not as they dealt with their sheep did the gentiles deal with our bodies; they did not extract their teeth before they slaughtered them; nor strip them of their wool as they stripped us from our skins; nor shove them into the fire to turn their life to ashes; nor scatter the ashes over sewers and streams.36

In depicting how the perpetrators animalized Jews, Greenberg as well as Levi and Weil were writing against one particular analogical identification of the Jew-Animal: “like [a] sheep to the slaughter.” This image, found in Isaiah 53:7 to characterize the mute submission of the Suffering Servant to his fate, would be appropriated by Christian Scriptures (for example, Acts 8:32, Romans 8:36) to characterize the Passion of Jesus. It was not this ovine figure’s biblical appearances, however, that haunted these writers. Rather, it was its repeated use by the Vilna Ghetto Resistance Organization in its exhortations to fellow ghetto prisoners to rise up in revolt against the “German and Lithuanian butchers”: “We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter.”37 The phrase was also invoked by the Jewish Combat Organization to provoke the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto to take up its January 1943 call to arms—“not to give yourselves up like sheep to the slaughter”—and in historian Emmanuel Ringelblum’s lament that he recorded in his journal (October 15, 1942) after the Great Deportation of some 300,000 Warsaw Jews had concluded: “Why did they let themselves be led like sheep to the slaughter.”38 That phrase came to characterize apparent Jewish passivity, whether conceived as innate or the product of centuries of socialization, in the face of the “obvious” genocidal intentions of the Germans and their collaborators. More fateful, it insinuated the Jews’ complicity in their own murder. Lacking any consideration of the conditions in which the victims were being placed, that representation would come to taint both the collective memory and the historiography of the Holocaust for many years— even after, during his testimony at the Eichmann trial, Vilna Resistance Organization leader Abba Kovner shouted “I reject these charges” at chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner for his repeated question to prosecution witnesses, including Kovner, “Why didn’t you resist?” Kovner reproached him both for implying Jews went like sheep to the slaughter and for seeking Kovner’s

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(expected?) corroboration of that judgment.39 Kolmar, Levi, Greenberg, and Weil, like many of the other Jewish-identified writers examined in this volume sought to wrest from the Jew-Animal, wherever it roamed, its oppressive force whether by uncovering the conditions for its production in order to subvert its naturalization or by giving voice to the Jew-as-Animal and to the Jewish animot.

acknowledgments

I had always considered “bestial” to be simply one more accidental attribute—such as “amoral,” “arrogant,” “criminal,” “deceitful,” “egoistic,” “greedy,” “misanthropic,” and so on—that might be added to the identification of “the Jew” as abject other. I had read Derrida’s early writings on the “Question of the Animal” and Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of “Man and Animal” in Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as many early modern European accounts (for example, Sepùlveda) of their encounters with non-Europeans. Still, in my thinking about the construction of Jew/ Gentile difference, I did not see species as one of the imbricated structuring conditions for the emergence(s) of that difference and its coeval identification of “the Jew.” Hence, my discussion in earlier works drew instead upon Freud’s discussion of representation in the dream-work; that is, the construction of “the Jew” employed what was at hand—for example, dog tails—in order to say or display what could not be directly said or displayed: in particular, circumcised penises. Then during the Fall semester 2010, every paper my graduate student Ryan Brand submitted in our Religion and Film course focused upon the depiction of and discourse about animals in the particular week’s film. Having largely overlooked their presence during my own viewing, I had to take another look at each film in order to evaluate his papers properly. I was astonished by the zoological plenitude that I found populating the screen, often at the margins, and came to the realization that species, like gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, also structured essential identification of human individuals and groups in modernity. Catalyzed by my in-course rethinking, some of my earlier readings of the “Jewish body” in Freud, Heine, and Kafka began to show another face. I also realized that what I was then calling “Pictures at an Exhibition” would not be, as it were, simply a dog-and-pony show such as “The Jewish Bestiary” series I had earlier (December 2009) presented at Limmud UK. Instead, I began to chart the complex and perilous intersection of the Jewish Question and the Question of the Animal in Central European modernity. 233

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Along the way—a way that, I came to realize, had long preceded that 2010 Religion and Film course—a number of friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers have helped me in this investigation: Christine Achinger, Ellen Armour, Andrew Benjamin, Kalman Bland, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, Ulrike Brunotte, Paul Dehart, Sergey Dogolpolski, Steve Dowden, Marc Epstein, Lars Fischer, Scott Gilbert, Sander Gilman, Shai Ginsburg, Willi Goetschel, Valerie Greenberg, Aaron Gross, Jeffrey Grossman, Barbara Hahn, Martha Helfer, Charlotte Hempel, James Hevia, Klaus Hödl, Iris Idelson-Stein, Joela Jacobs, Shaul Kelner, Phil Lieberman, Sara Lipton, Vivian Liska, Jim McFarland, Leah Marcus, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Katherine Mershon, Stephen Moore, Diane O’Donoghue, Ann Pellegrini, Paul Reitter, Anne C. Rose, James Rolleston, Robert Segal, Michael Sells, Willa Silverman, Samuel Spinner, Axel Springer, Helen Tartar (z’’l ), Kerry Wallace, Nina Warnke, Bob Weinberg, Liliane Weissberg, Meike Werner, Isabel Wollaston as well as any and all whom I’ve neglected to mention. Thank you all. Further, being able to entrust one of your students with reading and commenting on your work is an occasion a teacher can take pride in. Being able to entrust one of your children with reading and commenting on your work is an occasion a parent can take pride in. In the final stages of preparing the manuscript, I was able to shepp naches on both accounts. I would like to thank my student, Ryan, and my son, Alex, for their helpful comments and suggestions. Portions of several of the chapters were presented at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations (Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK); Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Limmud UK (University of Warwick); Oberlin College; Penn State University; Sigmund Freud Museum — London; Sigmund Freud Museum —Wien; Tulane University; University of Aberdeen; University of Antwerp; University of Birmingham; and Vanderbilt University; as well as at the Research Network: Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism and Occidentalism Workshop (University of Maastricht); the Third and Fourth Biennial Duke German Jewish Studies Workshops; annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the German Studies Association; and the following conferences: Jews and the Ends of Theory (Duke University/ University of North Carolina); Undisciplined: German Jewish Studies Today (Leo Baeck Institute, London); Spiritual Homelands—Wahlheimat— Elective Exile (University of Virginia); Monsters, Demons and Wonders in European-Jewish History and Thought (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt); and Animal Mimesis: Intersections of Aesthetics and Anthropology

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(Ludwig– Maximilians–Universität München). I am very grateful for the collegiality and conversations provided by the host institutions, fellow participants, and audiences. I am also grateful to the editors of American Imago, Centennial Review, Critical Research on Religion, Journal of the Kafka Society of America, Nexus, positions, and transversal, in which some of the material herein earlier appeared. In addition, I benefitted from the opportunity to work through a number of the readings in this book in my seminar “Jewish Animals” at Vanderbilt. Visits to the collections of the Sammlung Eli Stern ( Jüdisches Museum Wien), David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Duke University; thank you, Kate Collins), British Library, Wiener Library (London), Leo Baeck Institute (New York and London) and, above all, to Vanderbilt’s Interlibrary Loan request page (thank you, Jim Toplon) greatly facilitated my inquiries. I would also like to thank VU Digital Image Specialist Henry Shipman and Jennifer Alexander (once again) for aiding the production of this monograph. The last email I received from Helen Tartar, just before her tragic death, informed me that she had gotten Fordham University Press’s acceptance for an advance contract. I am so grateful to Tom Lay for taking up interim responsibility for this volume in the immediate wake of the publishing world’s great loss. With his hiring as the new editorial director of the Press, responsibility passed to Richard Morrison. He successfully shepherded Bestiarium Judaicum through most generous readers, final Press approval, and publication. So my penultimate expression of gratitude is for you, Richard, and the Press’s staff (including Katie Sweeney, Will Cerbone, John Garza, Nancy Rapoport, and Eric Newman), and the individuals who gave their time and expertise to read my manuscript for the Press. Finally, since I’ve already mentioned my son, Alex, above, there are still four people, as always, to thank: my parents, Milton and Florence Geller; my daughter, Sarah; and my friend, companion, lover, and wife, Amy-Jill Levine.

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introduction. a field guide to the BESTIARIUM JUDAICUM Presentations at the “Jews and the Ends of Theory” (Duke/UNC, April/ May 2013) and “Undisciplined: German Jewish Studies Today” (London, September 2014) conferences as well as the Third and Fourth Biennial German Jewish Studies Workshops (February 2013, 2015) helped me work through some of the theoretical issues here. Comments and suggestions by my son Alexander Geller, my student Ryan Brand, and a February 2015 joint session of the Animal Studies and Jewish Studies Workshops at the University of Chicago helped transform this introduction into “A Field Guide.” 1. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89. 2. A peregrine is a raptor traditionally noted for its aggressiveness and speed and widely prized by aristocratic falconers; “Steinhövel” alludes to Heinrich Steinhöwel, the fifteenth-century Swabian humanist whose German translations of Aesop’s Fables and other fable collections were for centuries the model that inspired subsequent translations in other languages. 3. Segebrecht, “Unvorgreifliche Analekten.” 4. The idiom derived from the medieval practice of capturing birds by coating tree branches with pitch. 5. In the first issue of his bimonthly journal Hyperion (March 1908) Blei had hosted Kafka’s print debut by publishing his collection of eight short, untitled prose fragments under the heading “Betrachtung” (Meditation). A year later, two more of Kafka’s prose pieces were published in Hyperion (April/May 1909). And in February of that same year (1909), Kafka’s review (DL 381–83) of Blei’s own Die Puderquaste: Ein Damenbrevier (The powder puff: a woman’s breviary), which like Kafka’s first contribution to Hyperion consisted of a number of untitled, thematically very loosely connected sketches, appeared in the Berlin magazine Der neue Wege. 6. The original title page read: “Bestiarium Literaricum, das ist: genaue Beschreibung derer Tiere des literarischen Deutschlands, verfertigt von Dr. Peregrin Steinhövel. Gedruckt für Tierfreunde zu München diesem Jahr” (1920). Most likely, Blei’s characterization of Kafka as mouse was generated by Kafka’s rather prominent ears. Gustav Janouch, the less-than-trustworthy

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amanuensis of his Conversations with Kafka in 1921–22, recalls discussing the Bestiarium with Kafka; however, he writes that Kafka was characterized by Blei as a “peculiar bird” not a mouse and speaks of “bitter roots [Wurzeln]” rather than “bitter herbs [Kräutern]” (93). Moreover, Janouch reports that Blei’s work was serialized over three successive Sundays in the Prager Presse. Lensing (“ ‘Fackel’-Leser,” 285n75) confirms that excerpts of the Bestiarium were published in the Prager Presse; however, only one of three occasions was a Sunday (May 7, 1922), the others being a Wednesday (May 10) and a Friday (May 26). In an August 31, 1920 letter to Milena Jesenská (B3 326), Kafka queries whether she met Blei in Salzburg (or the nearby spa where she was staying); this inquiry may have been prompted by the July appearance of the Bestiarium. 7. There may have been another ironic subtext to Blei’s characterization of Bartels: the discussion of literary historians by Heinrich Heine, of whom Bartels proclaims “he is admittedly no German poet, rather a Jewish one who helps himself to the German language” (Geschichte, 327). In his literary history of German Romanticism, Heine wrote “Modern literary historians actually give us a literary history like a well-arranged menagerie and show us, always in separate cages, epic mammal poets, lyric aerial poets, dramatic aquatic poets, prose amphibians, who write both land and sea novels, humorous mollusks, etc.” (DHA 8/1:216; Romantic, 239). 8. The “Quellenschriften des Bestiarium” (Sources of the bestiary; BL 378) that he added to the 1924 edition lists the title of Bartels’s work as “Die Deutschen Literatiere nach ihren Nasen betrachtet” (German literary animals, considered according to their noses). 9. Bartels assumes the scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit) of race theory (Rassenlehre), the development of which he credits to Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, but also notes the contributions of Ludwig Woltmann, Ludwig Wilser, and Gustav Kossinna (cf. Geschichte, 677). 10. Bartels, Geschichte, 5: “that all literature, particularly all poetry, derives from life, that [literature] is borne by particular individuals [Persönlichkeiten], that the ethnos [Volkstum] underlies each development [in literature].” The distinctiveness of each origin was described by comparing a pair of peoples in close territorial proximity—for example, North vs. South German, Bavarian vs. Swabian, German vs. Celtic, and all (Indo-)European races vs. the Jewish. On Bartel’s völkisch literary criticism, see Berman, “Literary Criticism,” esp. 338– 40. 11. Prior to the twentieth century, the terminology of race, Rasse, was just as often applied to varieties within a particular animal species or of species within a particular genus (the German word Geschlecht, now generally limited

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to referring to “sex,” was historically applied to “familial lineage” and often also designated “genus”), hence the early-nineteenth-century völkisch writer Ernst Moritz Arndt held that it was now “accepted [that there are] various human races like [there are] various races of dog”; Einleitung, 209, cited in Sterling, Judenhaß, 125. Perhaps the leading French philologist of the fin de siècle, Salomon Reinach opens his argument that “There never was a Jewish race; there is not one now; there never will be one” by noting “razza may have come from another Germanic word, raki, meaning dog, from which we get race and racaille [riffraff ]. A racaille was, properly speaking, a family of dogs, or a pack, corresponding consequently to the word canaille (canaglia) [scoundrel, rabble], which also signified, originally, a pack of dogs. In Italian, razza di cane is still used as an injurious term as are kelb ben kelb, ‘dog, son of a dog,’ in Arabic, [and] canaille and racaille in French” (“So-Called Jewish Race,” 202, 191). Chapter 1 details how the distinction between noble breeds and mongrels shaped canine identifications of Jews. 12. The exemplary theoretician of this racial phenomenology was Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß beginning with his 1926 Rasse und Seele; see Breitenfellner, “Zwischen Opportunismus und Widerstand.” 13. Bartels, Geschichte, 13. 14. Bartels, Geschichte, 578–79. Rather than adopt the usual translation of Judentum, “Judaism,” I usually retain the German in pre-1945 texts (see note 22). 15. Erikson, “Pseudospeciation,” 214. Cf. Volkan, “The Need to Have Enemies.” 16. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 105. Jephcott references the natural historian Paul Eipper’s naturelogue Tiere sehen dich an (Animals are looking at you). The titles are similar; however, its content bears no correlation whatsoever with Adorno’s aphorism unlike Johann von Leers’s 1933 Juden sehen Dich an. The use of the singular in his chapter heads (other chapters were devoted to the Blutjude [blood-Jew, that is, “the Jew” as blood spiller], the Kunstjude [art-Jew, that is, the Jewish (so-called) artist or performer], and the Geldjude [gold-Jew, that is, Jewish financiers]) indicates that he is dealing with particular varieties of the species “Jew” rather than aggregates of Jewish-identified individuals engaged in these nefarious practices just as other non-Jews, albeit unmentioned, may well be. A year later, to mark the founding of Julius Streicher’s notorious antisemitic hate rag Der Stürmer’s publishing house, the tabloid’s leading caricaturist Philipp Rupprecht (aka “Fips”) issued Juden stellen sich vor ( Jews introduce yourselves). This field guide depicted the Jews, as Streicher put it in his forward, “as they are, as they always were and always will remain.” Among the caricatured Jewish types were the Schnorrer (moocher), the Hausierer (huckster), the Schmuser (gossip monger), and the Judenmetzger ( Jewish

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butcher); the last drawing was of the “nackter Wahrheit” (naked truth): a nude embodiment of male Jewish corporeal stereotypes with his hands covering up the one unquestionable piece of presumably every Jewish male’s anatomy, the circumcised penis. See Roos, Julius Streicher, 457–58. 17. Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” 153. 18. I adopt “Jewish-identified” because no single conventional criterion is sufficient for determining an individual’s Jewishness; attempts to be more selective lead either to outrageous exclusions or to troubling recollections of racial determinations. Further, “identified” points toward practices of “identification” rather than claims of “identity” with their analytical, definitional, ontological problems. The shift to identification, Rogers Brubaker offered, “invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying. And it does not presuppose that such identifying . . . will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded groupness”—intrinsic to social life, and as categorization “ ‘identification’ calls attention to complex (and often ambivalent) processes, while the term ‘identity,’ designates a condition rather than a process” (Ethnicity, 41, 44). 19. 6-Uhr-Abendblatt (May 8, 1939), 9; cited in Taschwer, “ ‘Lösung der Judenfrage,’ ” 162. 20. For example, before analyzing the functions of the figure of the Heuschrecke (locust or grasshopper) in post-1945 critiques of capitalism, Monica Urban (Ratten, esp. 59–144, 185–98) undertakes a genealogy of pejorative animal figuration in anti-Jewish discourses that long antedated the emergence of racial antisemitism and then situates the deployment of that specific figure, the Heuschrecke, from the Bible to the modern, alongside and within the tradition of what this study identifies as the Jew-Animal. 21. It must also be recognized that these “events” did not happen all at once and everywhere the same nor did they unfold uniformly. 22. Whereas contemporary English speakers primarily identify the referent of “Judaism” as Jewish religious practice and belief, prior to 1945 its German cognate, Judäismus, could only be heard in the classrooms and libraries of Protestant divinity schools. Outside these seminaries and their publications German speakers would refer to jüdische Religion or to Judentum. Judentum could also refer to Jewish culture or Jewishness as well as to the Jewish people or a national or ethnic entity and even when context would delimit its referent to one of these supposedly distinct categories it still bore the traces of the others. 23. Book 7, chapter 7; cited in Sax, Animals, 20. 24. On the history of natural history, see Lepenies, Ende der Naturgeschichte; Foucault, Order of Things, 128– 45; Jardine and Spary, “Natures of Cultural History.”

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25. Hiemer was also the author of the notorious antisemitic illustrated children’s book, Der Giftpilz (the toadstool; 1938). 26. Hiemer, Pudelmopsdackelpinscher, 89. Its contents included: Die Drohnen [drones] / Die Faulenzer [loafers]; Der Kuckuck [cuckoo] / Die Fremdlinge [aliens]; Die Hyänen [hyenas] / Die Bluthunde [lit. blood hounds; oppressors]; Das Chamäleon [chameleon] / Der große Täuscher [great deceiver]; Die Heuschrecken [locusts] / Die Geißel Gottes [Gd’s scourge]; Die Wanzen [bed bugs] / Die Blutsauger [bloodsuckers]; Die Sperlinge [sparrows] / Das Lumpenpack [riffraff ]; Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher [ mongrel/poodle-pug-dachshundpinscher] / Die Köterrasse [cur-race]; Die Giftschlangen [poisonous snakes] / Der Volksvergifter [people’s poisoner]; Der Bandwurm [tapeworm] / Der Völkerschmarotzer [people’s parasite]; Die Bazillen [bacteria/bacilli] / Die Völkerpest [people’s pestilence]. The poodle-pug-dachshund-pinscher is not only a mongrel, but each of the varieties in the mix were held at the time to be descended from the Mesopotamian jackal rather than the northern wolf, from which the German Shepherd was ascribed descent; Sax, Animals, 83–84, drawing on Stephanitz, German Shepherd Dog. 27. “The Jew” ’s alleged innate mimetic ability is elaborated upon in Chapter 4. 28. For Germanophone regions, in particular, see, inter alia, Dittmar, Darstellung; Fuchs, Juden in der Karikatur; Gold and Heuberger, Abgestempelt; Haibl, Zerrbild als Stereotyp; Hopp, “Zu Medialisierung”; Reg. Schleicher, Antisemitismus in der Karikatur; Wiesemann, Antijüdischer Nippes. For their pervasive presence elsewhere, see, inter alia, Aizenberg, Hatemail; Forman, Graphic History; Silvain, Images et traditions juives; Silvain and Kotek, La carte postale antisémite; Vogt, Historien om et image. 29. Dittmar, “Die antijüdische Darstellung,” 45. 30. Foucault, Order of Things, 134. 31. Agamben, The Open; Derrida, The Animal; Fontenay, Silence des bêtes; Haraway, When Species Meet; Wolfe, Animal Rites. Also see, inter alia, A. Benjamin, Of Jews; Calarco, Thinking; Tyler, Ciferae; K. Weil, Thinking Animals. On the question of the question, see LaCapra, “Reopening the Question.” 32. Borrowing from how Friedrich Nietzsche and, following him, Martin Heidegger, characterized the ever-present secret sharer of Western metaphysics: nihilism. 33. Kant, Logic, 15. 34. Though not labeled as his “other Jewish Question,” my analysis of Sigmund Freud’s work in On Freud’s Jewish Body could also be so characterized. 35. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, extensively chronicles the negative views of Yiddish and of Jewish speech.

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36. Joanna Bourke (What It Means) provides a historical account of the diverse ways, in addition to the capacity for speech, “to demarcate the territory of the human from that of the non-human” (5) in and out of philosophic discourse. 37. Derrida, The Beast, 68. Derrida conducted this seminar, his last, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales from Fall 2001 to Spring 2003. 38. Even when behaviors or dispositions are positively valued as “bestial,” that attribution still functions diacritically between the human group so labeled and other human groups. 39. See note 31 in this Introduction. 40. Agamben, The Open, 37. 41. See Wolfe, Zoontologies. 42. Agamben, The Open, 38. Incisive critiques of Agamben’s discussion of the anthropological machine(s) include A. Benjamin, Of Jews, 118–29; and LaCapra, “Reopening the Question,” 159–76. 43. Haraway (WSM 9–11) notes other Great Divides beyond Latour’s two and the human /animal, including the organic/technical and the wild/ domestic. 44. Latour, We Have Never, 99. 45. Aristotle, Politics, 1253, l.31; cited in Haacke, “Kafka’s Political Animals,” 145. The historical implications of this conclusion will be discussed in Chapter 8 with regard to “the Jew” as werewolf. 46. Other sources for the Christian human /animal distinction include Acts 10:11–13; 1 Corinthians 9:9; Augustine, City of God 19:15, 22:24; On Original Sin 46; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1–2, Q. 102, art. 6, obj. 8; see Cartmill, A View to a Death, 46 – 47 and nn. 47. Wise, Rattling the Cage, 18 (Augustine, City of God, 1:20), 19–20 (Aquinas, Summa Theologica Q.96, Art 1). 48. Bland, “Cain, Abel and Brutism,” 167. 49. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 31. 50. Chen, Animacies, 100. Whereas Erikson’s notion of pseudospeciation emphasizes the dehumanizing identification of one group by another, this study wishes always to remind its readers that the establishment of the distinction entails the construction of both the animal and the human. 51. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 44, 46 – 47. 52. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 47. 53. Chidester, Savage Systems, 14 –15. 54. Cited in J. Hess, “Jewish Emancipation,” 204. 55. As the Sergeant (played by Lee Marvin) responds to a young soldier’s question of whether, in war, killing enemy soldiers is murder in Samuel Fuller’s quasi-autobiographical 1980 film, The Big Red One.

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56. Chrysostom, Discourses, 7 (1.2.4); see Chapter 1. 57. Haraway (WSM 77–80) draws on Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ ” esp. 112–14. 58. Elmer and Wolfe, “Subject to Sacrifice,” 100 –1. 59. Elmer and Wolfe, “Subject to Sacrifice,” 101; also see Boggs, Animalia, 71–73. 60. “Companion species” is employed here in the narrow sense of “Historically situated animals in companionate relations with equally situated humans” and not the “less shapely and more rambunctious” meaning that Haraway (WSM 16) would have us understand it to entail. 61. Vialles (Animal to Edible) analyzes the various architectural designs, slaughtering techniques, and linguistic distinctions that surround the slaughtering of nonhuman animals for consumption and that are generated to maintain the distinction between the humanized human and the animalized human (human as brute) when engaging in meat production as opposed to when hunting down and killing wild beasts. Also see the discussion of disciplining the nonhuman animal performer (for example, Red Peter, Consul) in Chapter 4. 62. Boggs, Animalia, 66 –73. 63. Rosenberg, Mythus; Chamberlain, Grundlagen. 64. See Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular, 618–21 (s.v., “Untermensch”). 65. “Der Untermensch,” 217; cf. D. L. Smith, Less than Human, 154 –59. 66. Himmler, “Poznan Speech,” 178, trans. modified. 67. This ethical valuation developed from the early use of Anstand to refer to the establishment of a ceasefire between warring groups. 68. Freud, Civilization, 99n, 106n. Also see the discussion of Freud’s privileging of upright gait and erect posture in Geller, Other Jewish Question, 275. Confined to his “mattress-grave,” Heine “articulates his new self identity as a Jew” in an April 1849 article in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung: “I am no longer a divine biped . . . all I am now is a poor Jew sick unto death”; cited in N. Pines, “Life in the Valley,” 26. 69. Sereny, Into that Darkness, 101. 70. Rather than referring to either some transhistorical phenomenon or historical mo(ve)ment, “antisemitic” is employed here tautologically; that is, I am labeling as “antisemitic” those discourses that identify “the Jew” in order to maintain and justify the foreclosure of those so identified from the community or polis. On the problematic Begriffsgeschichte of “antisemitism,” see, inter alia, Geller, Other Jewish Question, 3– 4. 71. Derrida is drawing upon a ca. 1940 fragment that would be included in Adorno’s Philosophy of Music, 80. 72. Fontenay, “La raison du plus fort,” 71.

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73. Aside, that is, from Derrida’s acceptance speech for the 2001 Theodor W. Adorno Prize, published as “Fichus,” in which he imagined a book “interpret[ing] the history, possibility, and the honor of this prize” (177), the last chapter of which would be devoted to Adorno on animals. Rather than give voice to his possible debt to Adorno’s 1956 assertion that “philosophy is truly there to redeem what lies in the gaze of an animal” (cited in Mendietta, “Animal is to Kantianism,” 151), Derrida chooses to illustrate his projected chapter with passages from that 1940 Beethoven fragment and a reference to Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Man and Beast” (DE 203–12). Derrida repeats, verbatim from the earlier lecture (A 103), his citation of Adorno’s virtual homology of the hierarchical oppositions animals:idealism::Jews:fascism and Derrida’s own gloss, including “Animals [would be] the Jews of idealists, who [would be] thus just virtual fascists” (“Fichus,” 181). This is also the only mention of Jews in Derrida’s “TV Guide” (177) outline of his hypothetical opus. 74. See Derrida’s discussion of Levinas’s reflections on Bobby, as he and his fellow Jewish prisoners of war in Stalag 1492 called the benevolent guard (?) dog, in “Name of a Dog” (A 113–18). For other critiques of Levinas’s linguistic anthropocentrism and his inability to recognize Bobby’s nonhuman alterity, see, inter alia, Calarco, Zoographies; and Rohman, Stalking the Subject. In the essay, Levinas does comment on the identification of the Jewish prisoners as animal (as noted earlier in the Introduction and in the Afterword). 75. Fontenay (Silence des bêtes, 13) pointedly decries in her “Avant-propos” any effort either to identify the industrial farming/slaughterhouse with the Shoah (unlike Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, or, less stridently, Sax, Animals), or to correlate animal advocacy (such as vegetarianism, anti-vivisectionism, and so on) with misanthropy. 76. To overlay Haraway’s phrasing, by which the human secures the Great Divide with the animal, upon Agamben’s distinction of bare life from either animal or human life, as the in-different between animal and human life. 77. That is, extrapolating from Durkheim’s sociological distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, “mechanical solidarity” refers here to the observation of resemblances between (the treatment of ) Jews and animals rather than theorizing the possible interrelationship between the representations bzw. identifications of Jews and animals that I characterize in the next paragraph as “organic solidarity.” 78. Not unlike Horkheimer and Adorno’s deployment of “idiosyncrasy” that follows their discussion of the Enlightenment abjection of nature and its projection on to “the Jew” (DE 147–53). See Plug, “Idiosyncrasies.” 79. A. Benjamin, Of Jews, 118–29, argues that Agamben forgets that Jews must already be marked as “Jew” before they are transformed into bare life.

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LaCapra (“Reopening the Question,” 159–60) also calls Agamben to task for not addressing the figuration of “the Jew” in Nazi discourse as “powerful, world-historical, subversive force, a phobic, ritual containment,” that is, as “scapegoat.” 80. In her gloss on Derrida’s celebrated epiphany, his naked encounter with a cat (A 3– 4, 9–14) Haraway (WSM 20) writes: “He identified the key question as being not whether the cat could ‘speak’ but whether it is possible to know what respond means and how to distinguish a response from a reaction, for human beings as well as for anyone else.” 81. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22: “intensities overrun by deterritorialized sounds or words that are following their line of escape.” Their failure to historicize and to particularize Kafka’s animals in that text and not just those animals in A Thousand Plateaus, according to Haraway (WSM 27–30), extends to all animals whether the products of an author’s pen or those who dwell either inside or outside livestock pens. 82. The notion of “as” as a performative draws upon Wittgenstein’s examination of how the language of perception conflates with the act of interpretation: “I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’ ” (Philosophical Investigations, 193). To illustrate this experience, he draws upon one of gestalt psychology’s classic optical illusions: Joseph Jastrow’s duck-rabbit. Rather than dwelling on either epistemological or psychological explanations Wittgenstein asks “What does anyone tell me by saying ‘Now I see it as . . .’ What consequences has this information? What can I do with it?” (202). These Jewish-identified writers can be seen as implicitly both the subject of these questions and the object of the statement occasioning these questions. 83. Also see Boggs’s analyses of animal representations where “the literal and the symbolic meet and unsettle the terrains of modern taxonomization” (Animalia, 189). 84. Cf. Scott Spector’s comments on Kafka’s practice in “Jackals and Arabs”: He “jumbled the identification to a degree that rendered them (i.e., both jackals and Arabs) mutually inseparable and cryptically insoluble” (Prague Territories, 194). Also see Chapter 7. 85. Jewish animalization is so profuse in Karl Paumgartten’s viciously antisemitic pulp novel Repablick that Sigurd Paul Scheichl argues that its Jew-hating protagonist’s call “Hie Mensch—hie Tier” (here human—here animal; Repablick, 219) exemplifies its staging of the confrontation of non-Jew and Jew; “Judentum, Antisemitismus,” 70. 86. Spector, Prague Territories, 188. 87. Presner, Mobile Modernity, 4.

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88. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 110. 89. Stach, Decisive Years, 196, characterizing one motive for Kafka undertaking the “perspective of an animal” in his animal stories. 90. In a June 20, 1920 letter to Milena, Kafka notes that what he found most appalling about the public perception of the triangle between the Jewish poet and editor Josef Reiner, his Christian wife Jarmila, and her Jewish lover Willy Haas that culminated with Reiner’s suicide (see Chapter 3) was “the conviction that the Jews are necessarily bound to fall upon you Christians, just as predatory animals [Raubtiere] are bound to murder, although the Jews will be horrified [entsetzt] since they are not animals, but rather hyperalert” (B3 189; LM 51). 91. Heine, Memoirs, 179; DHA 15: 75. Also see the analysis of Fritzlar, Heinrich Heine, 207 and n149. 92. Even those who identify with that abject creature are thereby the subject of enunciation (or at least maintain that illusion, if not delusion) even as they are the enunciated. 93. See, for example, Swinford (“Portrait,” 215–16), drawing in part on Anderson (Kafka’s Clothes, 58), on Gregor Samsa and other Kafka figures. 94. Maimon, Autobiography, 216. Mendelssohn’s friend is the Berlin Jewish physician Marcus Herz. Here as would often be the case throughout the Era of the Jewish Question acculturated Western Jews in their relationship to Eastern European Jews— especially those who were impoverished, traditionally dressed, religious, and Yiddish-speaking/intoning or assumed to be— overlay the relationship of Gentiles to Jews. In the conclusion of his brief introduction Karl Phillip Moritz, the author and philosopher who had solicited and edited Maimon’s autobiography, implicates the human /animal difference as both overcoding Gentile/Jewish difference and sustaining human exceptionalism: “Such examples are instructive and important, not only because of the special fate of one singular man, but also because they bring to light the worthiness of human nature and call forth the confidence in the power of reason to work its way up”; Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, 66. The “true drive for knowledge” (echte Trieb nach Wissenschaft, 65) that Maimon’s life story exemplifies is what Maimon himself calls the “differentia specifica” between humans and “irrational animals” (Maimon, Autobiography, 227). 95. Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass, 17. In his appendix, he extensively excerpts entries from the diary of a Jewish woman, who despite all of the advantages of wealth, beauty, talent, health, social position, and so on, nevertheless flagellates herself with the most self-deprecating animal analogies and identifications to her “Jude-Sein,” her being a Jew (238– 47, here 244). Paul Reitter has recently undertaken a genealogy of the nonpathological emergence of the notion in Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred.

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96. As Horkheimer and Adorno argue in their discussion of mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment (esp. DE 151–53). Also see Chapter 4. 97. Rathenau, “Höre, Israel!” 458. 98. Schmitt, “Eine Psychografie”; Rathenau later repudiated his essay. 99. Herzl, “Mauschel,” 1. 100. Stephan Braese discusses how Hebel, unlike most of his contemporaries, characterized the seeming peculiarities of Yiddish sound and grammar as neither a derelict language of the rabble nor a consequence of some intrinsic Jewish character fault; “ ‘Redendes Tier’ and ‘gläserner Jude,’ ” 194 –95. 101. Nabor, Shylock unter Bauern, 57; cited in Glenz, Judenbilder, 108. 102. “Wenn einer Kuh heißt und ernst genommen werden will, muß er so tun, als wäre er ein Stier” was Anton Kuh’s response to the reproving question of why he was always so aggressive; cited by Cziffra, Der Kuh im Kaffeehaus, 21. 103. Brazilians might answer Moacyr Scliar, perhaps after reading his marvelous novella Kafka’s Leopards. 104. W. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 802. 105. Tyler, Ciferae, 4. 106. “[B]ut if we see them at a dealer’s by hundreds crawling over one another in confusion in the large bottles in which otherwise pickles are usually packed” (D1 55; T 1:161 [March 26, 1911]). See the discussion in Chapter 5. 107. Singer, “The Letter Writer,” 233. 108. Lang, Act and Idea, 195; cited in Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions, 31. 109. On Deutschtum and Judentum as co-constituted, see, inter alia, Aschheim, “German History”; and Grossmann, “Auerbach, Heine.” 1. “o beastly jews”: a brief history of an (un)natural history Two series of lectures on “the Jewish Bestiary” at the Limmud Conference (University of Warwick, December 2009/2012) and their convergence on “ ‘O beastly Jews’: Jewish Responses to that Venerable Tradition” (University of Birmingham [UK], June 2013) blazed the path to this chapter. 1. Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy, 212. 2. In Heine, “Buch Le Grand,” 62; DHA 6: 189. Some sixteen years later in “Hymn of Praise to King Ludwig” of Bavaria, the apes and kangaroos returned as the Other of the Christian European. In this poem Heine, mocking Ludwig’s Catholic piety, imagines his future canonization and subsequent adoption as their patron saint by “the apes and kangaroos [after they] convert / To Christianity’s splendor” [DHA 2: 144; CP 540]. The dramatist Karl Immermann recognized the natural historical dimension of Heine’s prose in a December 26, 1832 letter to his friend. After congratulating Heine on the

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publication of Französische Zustände (French conditions) he conceded that he avoids discussing politics: “because in the long run it does not pay to write the natural history of the rabble [Naturgeschichte des Packs] which nowadays consists of both noble and plebeian characters” (HB3 150). 3. Though Heine is no doubt alluding to the stereotype of the “Jewish nose,” snout-like noses were a common medieval visual indicator of “evil” that neither derived from nor regularly characterized Jewish physiognomy; Lipton, Dark Mirror, 107–9. 4. Trans. JG. This litany is just one sortie in “Disputation” ’s fierce exchange of animal epithets, see the discussion that concludes this chapter. 5. Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy, 103, 211–12; also see Glick, Abraham’s Heirs, 142– 43. 6. Chrysostom, Discourses, 8 (1.2.5): “they failed to accept the yoke of Christ, nor did they pull the plow of his teaching. Another prophet hinted at this when he said: ‘Israel is as obstinate as a stubborn heifer.’ And still another called the Jews ‘an untamed calf.’ ” 7. Discourses, 25 (1.6.8): “Because of their licentiousness, did they not show a lust beyond that of irrational animals? Hear what the prophet says of their excesses. ‘They are become as amorous stallions. Every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife.’ He did not say: ‘Everyone lusted after his neighbor’s wife,’ but he expressed the madness which came from their licentiousness with the greatest clarity by speaking of it as the neighing of brute beasts.” 8. Discourses, 14 (1.4.1): “They live for their bellies, they gape for the things of this world, their condition is not better than that of pigs or goats because of their wanton ways and excessive gluttony.” 9. Discourses, 6, 7–8. 10. Discourses, 25, 72. 11. Lazarre, Antisemitism, 85. His sources are, respectively: Disputatio contra Judaeos, Opera, editio Basileensis, 180; Contra Judaeos, Lib. VI; Migne, P.L., Ch. CLIX. 12. Cited in Bronner, A Rumor, 22. Chapter Eight examines different trajectories in which Jews are associated with the lupine. 13. Strickland, “The Jews, Leviticus,” 204. This is not to argue that antiJewish polemic was the primary purpose for these works; nevertheless, as Wiedl (“Laughing at the Beast,” 330) rightly comments, “As much as treating any artistic denigration as primarily, even exclusively, anti-Jewish propaganda would reduce the complexity of medieval metaphorical and pictorial language, minimizing the at least mocking effect these depictions presented at the expense of the Jews would amount to ignoring crucial aspects.” Sara Lipton devotes her Images of Intolerance to another medieval piece of artistic

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anti-Jewish denigration, the Bibles moralisées, bibles with accompanying illustrated moral commentary for laypersons that first appeared in 1220s France and that disseminated a link, not found in bestiaries, between “the Jew” and the cat. In a number of illuminations the cat, representing either heresy or the devil as an object of heretical veneration, was placed next to, in the arms of, or exchanging a kiss with Jewish-identified human figures (88–95); also see her Dark Mirror, 7, 132. 14. That is, the same number of books, excluding the Wisdom Books and the Prophets, that make up the Catholic Old Testament canon. 15. Strickland, “The Jews, Leviticus,” 209. Cf. Livak, Jewish Persona, 75. 16. The owl returns to prominence in the advertisement for the bestselling antisemitic novel of interwar Germany, Artur Dinter’s 1917 Die Sünde wider das Blut (The sin against the blood) where a giant beak-nosed, horned owl bearing the countenance of the novel’s principal Jewish villain Burghamer is perched on the back of the prostrate hero Hermann Kämpfer. See, e.g., Fuchs, Juden in der Karikatur, 305 (fig. 303). 17. Miyazaki, “Misericord Owls,” 27. 18. Miyazaki, “Misericord Owls,” 33. 19. Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder, 157–63. Cf. Chrysostom, Discourses, 14 (1.4.1). 20. Wiedl, “Laughing at the Beast,” 353. 21. Der Itzig kam geritten / Auf einem Ziegenbock, / Da dachten all Juden, / Es wär der liebe Gott; Trachtenberg, The Devil, 46; Kynass, Jude im deutschen Volkslied, 77. Itzig commonly designated Every-Jew. 22. Jude und Bock stinken von Geilheit; Wie der Bock dem Garten bringt / Lauter Schaden, also dringt / Volles Unheil in die Stadt, / Wo man viel der Juden hat; Hiemer, Jude im Sprichwort, 16, 155. 23. Trachtenberg, The Devil, 46 – 48. The goatee may have achieved stereotypical status in order to distinguish it from the beard worn by lay Christians within the context of canon law that required clerics to be clean-shaven so as to be distinguished from laypeople. Kynass (Jude im deutschen Volkslied, 69) suggests that it was Jews’ beards that led to the identification of the goat as totemic for Jews. He lists at least eleven (42– 43, 62, 77, 88–89, 91, 93–94, 105, 116 –17, 123) songs that associate Jews with goats. Perhaps it was their beards that led Kafka, in a letter to Elsa and Max Brod, to describe the goats he met outside his Zürau sanitorium in early October 1917 as “look[ing] like thoroughly Jewish types, mostly doctors, though there are a few approximations of lawyers, Polish Jews . . . ” (B2 340; LFr 150). 24. Satires 14.98–99. A God-fearer was a Gentile synagogue sympathizer who was but a circumcision away from conversion, hence one who followed virtually all Jewish customs.

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25. Early-eighteenth-century German writers such as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, whose massive, widely read compendium of Talmudic misquotes and the history of alleged Jewish perfidy, Entdecktes Judentum ( Judentum unmasked), would become the source book of anti-Jewish discourse for the next two centuries, also finds the pork proscription fascinating. Eisenmenger reports that one of the many derogatory names by which Jews label Gentiles is “Pork Devourer” (Schweinefleischfresser). In his major work Mosaic Law, the leading eighteenth-century scholar of ancient Israelite religion, Johann David Michaelis, cites this particular Jewish label from Eisenmenger as illustrative of the contempt with which Jews hold Christians; cited in Feuerbach, “Geheimnis des Opfers,” 28. An assumption shared by some was that the proscription was so significant to Jewry’s separation from its neighbors that once the Jews begin to eat pork they would become like any other nation and thus no longer hate humanity. 26. Shachar, Judensau, 13. Also see Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, 92–94. 27. Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, 113–17. She also notes how until the sixteenth century measles (the skin disease endemic to pigs) and leprosy (the one traditionally associated with Jews) were viewed medically and linguistically as the same: “The word ladre—after Lazarus, the leper of the Gospels— was applied to them both, and so were its synonyms, the old French mesel and the Gascon gafet” (25). 28. Shachar, Judensau, 8–11; in addition, see Weidl, “Laughing at the Beast”; Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder, 28–31, 74, 157–63, 311–12; and Schöner, Judenbilder, 193–208, 254 –55. 29. Translation from Shachar, Judensau, 70n16. 30. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud observes that “Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or a negative” (353). He then gives it a second glance: “The ‘just the reverse’ is not itself represented in the dream-content, but reveals its presence in the material through the fact that some piece of the dream-content, which has already been constructed and happens (for some other reason) to be adjacent to it, is—as it were by an afterthought—turned round the other way” (361). Hence, for example, the manifest Jewish prohibitions against the consumption of pork and blood betray a necessary relation of the source of the former and—here a justification for the blood libel—a secret need to consume the latter. 31. Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, 123–24. She dismisses the philological tradition that derived “Marrano” from the malediction “anathema maranatha” (may they be cursed or outcast [at] the [Second] coming of the Lord)

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that derived from the juxtaposition of the antithetical invocations concluding I Corinthians (16:22). 32. Schöner, Judenbilder, 193. 33. The depiction of a Jew facing backward while astride the Judensau led Israel Jacob Yuval (Two Nations, 125–28) to suggest that the Judensau was a possible response to the Jewish messianic donkey (the donkey on which the Messiah will ride and bear the Jewish people)—itself, in the view of Christians, a response to the donkey ridden by Jesus into Jerusalem. 34. The bridge was also the site of another anti-Jewish bestial landmark, the Rattenhäuschen (the little rat house) the origin of which is recounted in Heine’s Rabbi of Bacherach (43); see the discussion of Rabbi in Chapter 2. 35. Schöner, Judenbilder, 193. 36. See, for example, Dittmar, Darstellung, 33, 53 (fig. 11). The picture transmogrifies Viehjuden (livestock-Jews; i.e., Jewish livestock merchants) into servants of the Judensau. 37. Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder, 28–30, 74. 38. Hopp, “Zu Medialisierung,” 36. 39. See Silvain and Kotek, La carte postale antisémite. 40. Malhotra, “Musée des Horreurs,” 201–10. 41. Incidentally, during the course of Heine’s tour of Jewish Frankfurt with Börne, the narrator observes: “The beard does not make the Jew nor the Zopf [queue] the Christian” (DHA 11: 19; BM 10). With this coupling, the ironic poet recognized the disjunction between both character and ascribed identity, on the one hand, and stereotypical physical signifiers of identity, on the other. The Zopf still mediates the identities of German, Jew, and German Jew in Lichtenberg’s parody; see Geller, Other Jewish Question, 68–71. 42. Lichtenberg, “Fragment,” 411–12. 43. Lichtenberg, “Fragment,” 414. 44. Lichtenberg, “Fragment,” 412. 45. In a June 18, 1823 letter to Moses Moser (HB1 96). Risches is the traditional Yiddish word for Jew hatred. 46. While paintings and sculptures of three hares chasing one another and forming a triangle with the ears that adorned a number of late medieval and early modern synagogues (as well as the Cathedral of Paderborn) suggest some symbolic significance to the pursuit of rabbits, it was the image of hounds pursuing hares in illuminated late medieval haggadahs, such as the fourteenth-century Rylands Haggadah, before or after the text of the Havdalah (the concluding prayer of the Sabbath) that led scholars and artists (for example, Joseph Semah) since D. H. Müller and J. V. Schlosser’s 1898 aside in their study of the Sarajevo Haggadah (in which the scene of Esau returning from the hunt bearing a hare was depicted with, but the hare-hunt motif

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was absent from, the Havdalah blessings) to speculate that underlying the symbolical classification of this animal figure (the hare) is a Talmudic mnemonic. It is composed of the Hebrew initials for the blessings, in the order of their recitation, when a Seder occurs on Saturday night: YaKiNeHaZ (yayin / wine, kiddush/sanctification [of the festival], ner/candle, havdalah/separation [of Shabbat from the rest of the week], and zeman /season [giving thanks for making it to the festival]). “In lands where Judeo-German was spoken, the sound of the mnemonic YaKiNeHaZ called to mind the German ‘jag den Has’ [hare-hunt]” (Epstein, Dreams of Subversion, 19). This widely used (and misheard) Hebrew mnemonic became so associated with its users that “the hare in Christian Europe became a code for the hunting down of Jews . . .” (Arkesteijn, “The Wandering Jew,” 26). 47. See, for example, Dittmar, Darstellung, 39, 70, 92; Fuchs, Juden in der Karikatur, 175; Wiesemann, Antijüdischer Nippes, 15, 19; Backhaus, “ ‘Friedliche Löwen,’ ” 216. Regarding the role of the umbrella in Jewish caricature see Aizenberg, HateMail, 72: “an interesting and lesser-known stereotype common in many anti-Semitic postcards from every country is the image of the Jew carrying an umbrella”; also see Haibl, Zerrbild, 248–60; and Schäfer, Vermessen, 38, 78–79, 241, 339n193. 48. Busch, Plisch und Plum, Chapters 15–16. 49. Miramon, “Noble Dogs.” Also see the discussion in the Introduction. 50. Hsia, “Religion and Race,” 271; for Schwartz, allowing Jews to live among Christians “means warming snakes in one’s bosom, and raising wolves at home” (272). 51. Consider the description by Dr. John Covel, at the time Chaplain to the Levant Company in Constantinople, of the housing offered the English Ambassador, Sir James Finch, in Adrianople in 1675: “it was a Jew’s house, not half big enough for my lord’s family; a mere nest of fleas, and bugs, and rats, and lice, and stench, surrounded by kennels of nasty, beastly Jews” (Bent, “Dr. John Covel’s Diary,” 482). 52. Translation from Shachar, Judensau, 70n16. 53. See N. Roth, Medieval Jewish Civilization, 132, 167. Wiedl, “Laughing at the Beast,” 329, cites the Decretum Gratiani requiring Jews, when considering conversion, to remain catechumens for eight months since they “tend to return to their vomit because of their perfidy.” Also see Stow, Jewish Dogs, 5, 210n17. 54. Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz, 144. 55. Michel, Holy Hatred, 46. 56. In various (auto)biographic writings, Marjorie Agosin recalls how, as a child in Chile, she (as well as her mother, father, and her friend Christine in their respective childhoods) heard school children sing: “How many loaves

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in the oven? / Twenty-one, all burned. / Who burned them? / The Jewish Dog”; Alphabet, 40. In A Cross and a Star (80 –81) the lyrics are a bit different: “ ‘Who stole the loaves from the oven? Who stole them?’ and an emphatic and enraptured chorus would respond with ‘the Jewish dogs.’ ” Also Stow, Jewish Dogs, 3. 57. Stow, Jewish Dogs, 31. Ruth HaCohen (Music Libel, 22), after citing the passage in full as well as referring the reader to Stow, pages 94 –95 and references, proposes a different reading: “Taken among its etymological descendents in Spanish (ulular), Italian (ululare), English (ululate), and maybe also German (heulen), this onomatopoeic verb denotes a rather mournful, howling sound describing the hooting of owls and other nocturnal birds and animals, as well as the sound made by strong wind.” (See the discussion of owls earlier in this chapter.) She does concede that this howling may also be tied to dogs via the coyote Canis latrans. Also see Livak, Jewish Persona, 74 –75. 58. See Marrow, “Circumdederunt me canes multi.” The dog-headed tormentors of Jesus sculpted into the central tympanum of the church in Vézelay, France are discussed by Katzenellenbogen, “Central Tympanum”; and Low, “ ‘You Who Were Once Far Off.’ ” I am grateful to Marc Epstein for calling my attention to this image. 59. Nirenberg, Communities, 222. 60. Evans, Criminal Prosecution, 153, cites two early modern legal authorities, the Belgian jurist Jodocus Damhouder (Rerum Criminalium Praxis [Antwerp 1562], 96n48] and Nicolaus Boer (Decisiones aurae Parlamenti Burdegalensis. Dec. 316 Nos. 3, 4, 6 [Lyon, 1620], 136n5), who argued that sexual relations with a Jew was “precisely the same” as copulating with a dog. Horowitz (“Circumcised Dogs,” 536) concedes that “it is notoriously difficult to connect literary images [of the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods] with historical reality”; however, “the canine epithet, which appears in both Jewish and Christian medieval texts (as well as in the autobiography of a Jewish convert to Christianity), does indeed seem to have been part of both street and literary discourse. But it did not always carry a theological subtext.” 61. Horowitz, “Circumcised Dogs,” 541. 62. The allusion to such events in Lichtenberg’s “Fragment” centuries later suggests that these were widely known and passed down. 63. In his autobiographical novel Kaputt, Curzio Malaparte describes a hanging ground in the Ukraine during World War II: “the rain-washed corpses of the Jews that had been dangling for days under the black sky, side by side with the dogs of the Jews that had been strung up on the same trees with their masters. ‘Ah, the Jewish dogs—die jüdische Hunde!’ said the

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German soldiers as they passed along” (222). Kaputt recounts the two years Malaparte accompanied the German invasion of the Soviet Union for Milan’s Corriere della Sera and his witness to the mass slaughter of Jews by the Germans and their collaborators. 64. Wise, Rattling the Cage, 37, drawing on Evans, Criminal Prosecution. According to Schnitzker, “Image Desecration,” 369: “As we know from contemporary court-house records or legal ordinances, it became a common practice from the thirteenth century onwards, lasting well into the seventeenth century.” 65. See Schnitzker, “Image Desecration,” 370, citing the 1560 Strasbourg edition, page 118r. Also see Resnick, Marks of Distinction, 151; Villanueva and Semah, “Tour round the University,” 121. 66. Wise, Rattling the Cage, 38. 67. Schnitzker, “Image Desecration,” 376. 68. Wiedl, “Laughing at the Beast,” 335. In another inversion, she notes that in drinking sow’s milk the Jews are drawing upon the only domestic mammal milk not consumed by humans (338); this may also be an inverted complement to Jewish abstention of pork consumption. 69. In addition to Narkiss, Hebrew; Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange; and Epstein, Medieval Haggadah; also see Shalev-Eyni, Jews among Christians; Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs; and Frojmovic and Epstein, “No Graven Image.” Epstein (Medieval Haggadah, 49–50) rightly questions Mellinkoff ’s assumptions that the illuminators had to be Christian and that their images were therefore (anachronistically speaking) antisemitic in intent, but not recognized by the Jewish patrons because they were inured to such pervasive bestializing representation. Shalev-Eyni (Jews among Christians, 83) suggests that there is a parodic and/or playful creativity evident in the illuminations that sought to blur the lines between the sacred and the profane as well as between decoration and illustration. 70. Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 61. Epstein returns to the “Griffins’ Head Haggadah” in “Focus” and does acknowledge alternative explanations that have been suggested for the heraldic hybrid of lion, eagle, and human in the Jewish figures, including the connection of these creatures to those that adorn the mystical Divine Chariot. 71. Agamben, The Open, 1–3. While waxing on about possible Gnostic and eschatological motivations for the illumination, he neglects to mention the virtual absence of human faces in the other illuminations—in addition to the hybrid forms mentioned previously, other opening word panels either have the figures’ faces whited out, backs turned, or, as in the opening illumination of Adam and Eve, hair covering their faces. Hence Agamben never need broach the possibility—irrelevant to his subsequent

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argument—that a pietistic understanding of the Second Commandment as mediated by Genesis 1:26 –27 (human beings created in the divine image) was at play. For example, Narkiss (Hebrew, 90) argues “This style was chosen to overcome the aversion to representing the complete human form that probably developed in southern Germany through the ascetic influence of R. Judah and R. Samuel, ‘the Pious,’ of the late twelfth century . . . [borrowed from iconoclastic Christian and Muslim practice]. Once this motif was adopted by Jewish illuminators, it became a specific Jewish characteristic used in southern German throughout the thirteenth and up to the beginning of the fourteenth century.” Shatzmiller (Cultural Exchange, 88–89) suggests that the mystical beliefs of German Ashkenazi Hasidim do not exhaust explanations of this practice because neighboring Ashkenazi communities in France did not adopt this aversion to depicting the human face, nor did the no less mystically fascinated Sephardic communities of Spain and Italy. Shatzmiller ties it to German Ashkenazim having a more anthropomorphic notion of the deity (107) than other contemporary Jewish communities. Epstein (in Medieval Haggadah and “Review Essay”) goes one step farther in warning against adopting monolithic halakhic/mystical interpretations and neglecting to explore why some human faces are left blank while other have animal heads. 72. Solomon Maimon (Autobiography, 26) recalls the pleasure provided in childhood (ca. 1760 in Poland) by “a Hebrew book of fables, in which the personages who play their part in the fables—the animals—were represented in . . . woodcuts.” 73. E. Katz, “Introduction”; also see Bland, “Liberating Imagination.” 74. Hortzitz, Sprache. Luther refers to Jews as Bluthunde and as “poisonous snakes” (giftigen Schlangen) in his 1543 notorious anti-Jewish diatribe, Von den Jüden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and their lies), 433, 446. Luther also said that Jews are like mad dogs (wie die tollen Hunde) that should be hunted down (541– 42). 75. See Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, esp. 195–216. 76. Hortzitz, “Sprache,” 25. The shift to verbs of threatening actions may indicate that in the post-Christian worldview the Jews no longer served as the exemplary abject that needed to be preserved in order to bear witness to the truth of Christianity. 77. Richter, Literature after Darwin, esp. 6 –16, 31–33. 78. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 114; cited in Youngs, Beastly Journeys, 25. Discussing “survival of the fittest” in his 1864 Principles of Biology, Spencer identified it with Darwin’s notion of “natural selection.” Darwin then employed the phrase as a synonym for natural selection in the 1869 fifth edition of Origin.

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79. See the discussion in the Introduction; I elaborate on the contours of this crisis in Other Jewish Question, esp. 13–14. 80. Rotteck and Welcker, Staats-Lexikon, 669; cited in Cobet, Wortschatz, 23–24. With the interpolation of Schudt they also implicitly distinguished their own Vormärz liberal positions from that worldview. 81. On Prussia and other German states, see Bering, Stigma; on Austria, also see Samuel, “Great Surname Hand-Out.” 82. Kessler (Familiennamen, 78–79) discusses how, following Joseph II’s 1787 law requiring Jews in the Austrian Empire to adopt surnames, some imperial administrators in Galicia assigned Ekelnamen (nonsensical, obscene, and other such names that were intended to humiliate their bearers) to the largely non-German speaking Jews; they also charged fees if one wanted a less awful name. Also see, Franzos’s 1880 “Namenstudien.” 83. Traditionally, Issachar was symbolized by the ass, an embodiment of strength for a farmer; however, the ass lacked such associations in northern Europe, so Jews there chose the bear to emblematize Issachar; Livingstone, “Some Aspects,” 174. Other emblems or translations include Asher = Lamm (lamb), Ephraim = Fisch (or the like: Karpf/carp, Kleppfisch/haddock, and so on), Jonah = Taube (dove), Joseph = Stier (bull), Joshua = Falke (falcon or hawk), Naphtali = Hirsch (stag or red deer), and so on. Kessler, Familiennamen, 20. 84. For example, Bering (Stigma, 55–58) provides a list of the top 36 family names chosen by Berlin Jewish households in 1812; less than ten percent of this group (84 out of 875) adopted animal-evoking names (such as Hirsch and Wolff ). 85. Heinrich Heine illustrates both the Gentile assumption that animalassociated surnames identify their bearers as Jews and the recognition by Jews (including baptized ones) of that assumption when his creation HirschHyacinth explains in The Baths of Lucca why he altered his name; see the discussion in Chapter 6. 86. Zunz (Namen der Juden, 106 –7) notes that all ancient peoples, including the German, bore various animal names; the animal names among German Jews are more noticeable because of the limited number of German names that Jews were able to assume. On the Wissenschaft des Judentums, usually translated as the Science of Judaism, see Chapter 3. 87. Bering, Stigma, 435n13 (Naud, Die Juden, 31), 125 (Marr, Wählet keine Juden! 13), 413n13 (Frisch, Antisemiten-Katechismus, 362). Also see the “Great Menagerie” reproduced on the book cover. The opprobrium attached to Jewish-identified animal surnames may be one of the contexts for Freud’s discussion in Totem and Taboo of Andrew Lang’s theory that (animal) totemic names derive from what one clan derisively calls another. Freud comments:

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“The fact that the names adopted in this way were borrowed from animals needs no special comment and there is no reason why they should have been regarded in primitive times as insulting or derisive” (112–13). He then provides three non-animal evoking names of (non-Jewish) groups: Les Gueux (the beggars; the name adopted by the seventeenth-century Dutch rebels against their Spanish overlords), the Whigs, and the Tories. 88. Liebenfels, Ursprung, 12–13. A 1919 election poster put out by German nationalist parties caricatured the leaders of Spartakus-Sozi[alistische], Unabhängige Sozi[alistische], Mehrheits-Sozi[alistische], and Deutschdemokratische parties in general as “Kohn Sorten” ( Jewish types); several individual leaders who bore animal-evoking surnames were drawn accordingly: (Hugo) Haase, a leader of the Unabhängige Sozis, was depicted as a rabbit with a human face, and (Paul) Hirsch of the Mehrheits-Sozis bore stag antlers. Th(eodor) Wolff of the Deutsch-demokratische party was not pictured as a wolf; instead, his torso was represented by a more significant icon, an inkwell inscribed with “Berliner Tageblatt,” the powerful Jewish-identified newspaper of which he was chief editor; Silvain, La Question juive, 256. 89. Wagner’s denunciations will be elaborated further in Chapter 4. 90. Fuchs, Juden in der Karikatur, 167 (fig. 174). 91. Der Jude hat wohl des Menschen Gestalt, / Doch fehlt ihm des Menschen innerer Gehalt; Hiemer, Jude im Sprichwort, 11. 92. Hortzitz, Sprache, 435. She notes that she found a seventeenth-century pamphlet, “Der Korn und Wein Jud,” that juxtaposed, if not combined, the objects of commercial activity with “Jud[e].” The 1922 edition of Grimms Wörterbuch had entries for more than thirty such word-combinations, from Betteljude ( Jewish beggar) to Zuckerjude ( Jewish sugar trader). Also see Hortzitz, “Sprache,” 36 –37; and Cobet, Wortschatz, for many other examples. 93. D. Friedländer, Akten-Stücke, 8n; the reference to the Gentile characterization of Jews as “sehr verderbt” is from page 6. In the remainder of the note, he indicates that even “the most unprejudiced Christian” when confronted by a “criminal of the Jewish religion” does not see “a horse thief, a homicidal arsonist,” and so on, but instead, “a Jew.” Even a man whom leading philosophers and scientists like Johann Heinrich Lambert and Johann Georg Sulzer had proposed to join them in the Berlin Academy of Sciences (an allusion to Moses Mendelssohn) is identified only as “the Jew” (8–9n). 94. Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch, 2:1443. 95. Hortzitz suggests that the development of these word-combinations may originally have been to distinguish normative activity performed by a Christian from the presumed deviation when performed by a Jew (Sprache, 435–36). She ties the function of “Jude-” in these word-combinations to that of “Un-” in “Ungeheuer” (monster), “Ungetüm” (monster), and

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“Ungeziefer” (vermin): beyond signifying what was outside the normal and proper, “Jude-” functioned in speech and writing as a stigmatic mark to isolate and separate out. 96. Didi Danquart’s film, the 1998 German-Swiss-Austrian coproduction Viehjude Levi ( Jew-Boy Levi), dramatically stages that contingency in mid1930s Germany. 97. These “copied from life” figures appear in the 1816 poster “Unser Verkehr. Eine kleine erbauliche Bildergalerie aufgenommen nach dem Leben” (Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Graphische Sammlung, HB 16259 and 16260/1279); Fuchs, Juden in der Karikatur, 96 –97 (Beilage), reproduced a same-titled but somewhat differently peopled poster. Also see Brednich et al., Symbole, 508–9. 98. Dittmar, “Die antijüdische Darstellung,” 46. 99. Liebenfels, Ursprung, esp. 2, 12–13, and Beilage. Liebenfels (2) cites A. K. van Berg’s false claim (Affenmensch und Menschenaffe, 26) of both Andrews and the head of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn, supporting descent from “bipedal dinosaur-forms.” The reconstructed dinosaur image was drawn by E.M. Fulda for Andrews’s On the Trail (between pages 202 and 203). The poster is reprinted in Silvain, Le Dossier Juif, 19. 100. In Goebbels, Das eherne Herz, 90, 89; cited in Hortzitz, “Sprache,” 37. 101. Taibbi, “Bubble Machine,” 52. Vampire squids do not have blood funnels. 102. First appearing in 2011, the blogs are all collected by Horse 237 as “Dedicated to the Vampire Squid Essays of Vidrebel.” Video Rebel added an author’s note to the “Vampire Squid Talmud” in which s/he claimed “not [to be] a racist as I believe Vampire Squids are made and not born. I believe Vampire Squids grew out of an earlier Jewish religion and culture just as the Jews devolved from their Canaanite brothers in ancient Palestine.” Although Josef Plank Seppla pictured an octopus haloed with a Star of David (but bearing the face of Churchill) sinking its tentacles into the globe for the Berlin journal Die Brennessel (the stinging nettle; ca. 1938), the figure of the all-grasping octopus or squid had previously been used to caricature the non-Jewish (or not specifically Jewish—for example an 1894 “The English Octopus” is captioned with a report from the Chicago Daily News that “The Rothschilds own 1,600,000,000 in gold”) threat of monopolists, bankers, free masons, Mormons. See Vulgar Army, “Octopus.” 103. The Brazilian Jewish philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote a remarkable study of the Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, in which he characterizes it as the culmination of an evolutionary development that inversely mirrors the human; Flusser and Bec, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis.

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104. Hortzitz, “Sprache,” 25. M. Jansen (Wissen vom Menschen, 348) notes that by 1880 the extermination of the Schädling (pest) became integral to its construction as a scientific object . 105. S. Jansen, “Schädling,” 114 –16. 106. Bey, Eroberung der Welt, 30; cited in M. Jansen, Wissen vom Menschen, 343. Similarly, a June 3, 1943 speech at the Berlin Sportspalast, Joseph Goebbels warned “Just as the potato-beetle destroys potato fields, indeed has to destroy them, so the Jew destroys nation-states”; cited in Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, 199n86. 107. S. Jansen, “Schädling,” 116. 108. Weindling, Epidemics, 97–102. Drawing on the work of S. Jansen, M. Jansen (Wissen vom Menschen, 201) argues that characterizing human groups as Schädlinge was not simply a transposition of the animal onto the human but a co-constitution of animal and human Others in the form of the material, political, cultural and historical object that bore the label Schädling. 109. Hiemer only lists two with pigs (Jude im Sprichwort, 12, 28). Also see Kynass’s 1934 dissertation, Jude im deutschen Volkslied. Wolfgang Mieder (“Proverbs in Nazi Germany,” 457) notes that none of Hiemer’s proverbs appears in one of the leading nineteenth-century lexicons, Wander’s Deutsches Sprichwörterlexikon. 110. Cobet, Wortschatz, 210, citing the 1892 edition of Fritsch’s Antisemitismus-Katechismus, 8. 111. Eitler, “ ‘Weil sie fühlen,’ ” 224 –25. 112. Schopenhauer, “On Religion,” 371, 370. Fontenay (Silence des bêtes, 227–37) notes how, while Schopenhauer (and the French historian Jules Michelet) focused upon Jewish Temple sacrifice as exemplifying the specifically Jewish character of the objectification and brutalization of animals, he (and Michelet) conveniently forgot the role of animal sacrifice throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. 113. Schopenhauer, “On Religion,” 375, 377. 114. Schopenhauer, “On Religion,” 370, 375, 376. 115. See Judd, Contested Rituals. Also see Möhring, “ ‘Herrentiere’ und ‘Untermenschen,’ ” esp. 232–33. 116. Judd, Contested Rituals, 116. 117. Hippler, Der ewige Jude (1940). The depiction of Jewish ritual slaughter also implicitly exemplifies the rationale for exterminating the Jews because it is followed, first, by reference to the law prohibiting ritual slaughter enacted immediately after Hitler came to power and to the subsequent passage of laws to free Germany from Jewish blood pollution and then by footage of Hitler’s January 30, 1939 speech in which he warns world Jewry that should they push Europe into another war it will not be the victory of Judentum but

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the extermination of Jewry from Europe. After watching Hippler’s preliminary footage, shot in newly occupied Lodz, Goebbels wrote in his diary (October 17, 1939): “so dreadful and brutal in their details that one’s blood freezes. One pulls back in horror at so much brutality. This Jewry must be exterminated.” Two weeks later (November 2), having joined the film crew in Lodz, he added: “These are no longer human beings, but animals. It is therefore also no humanitarian task, but a task for the surgeon. One has got to cut here, and that most radically. Or Europe will vanish one day due to the Jewish disease.” Cited in D. L. Smith, Less Than Human, 137–38. 118. He credits Aquinas with characterizing the Jews as carrion or carrion eaters (Aas) and as serving as barracks for the devil’s legions (Legionen; an allusion to Mark 5 in which the spirits possessing the Gerasene demoniac were transferred to a herd of swine). 2. name that varmint: from gregor to josephine An earlier version of these analyses of The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) and “Josephine the Singer” ( Josefine, die Sängerin), “The Jewish Animot: Of Jews as Animals,” was presented at the “Jews and the Ends of Theory” (Duke/UNC, April/May 2013) and has since benefited from the comments and suggestions of the conference organizers, Jonathan Boyarin, Shai Ginsburg, and MartinLand. 1. Die Juden seynd einem Land so nutz wie die Mäuß auf dem Getraideboden und die Motten im Kleid; Hiemer, Jude im Sprichwort, 36 (in the chapter “Ungeziefer der Menschheit” [vermin of humanity]). 2. Koelb, “Kafka Imagines His Readers,” 348. 3. To borrow the title of the first monograph of perhaps the foremost American Kafka interpreter, Stanley Corngold, his 1973 critical bibliography of extant interpretations of The Metamorphosis, Commentators’ Despair. 4. Brod, “Unsere Literaten,” 464. 5. Brod, Heine Artist, 150. Brod identified the Volk as diasporic Jewry in the context of his characterizing the story as the “best possible Heine biography” (also see Chapter 5). Brod’s identification is echoed (without acknowledgment) by Günter Hartung. Kafka’s decision to add “oder Das Volk der Mäuse” to “Josefine, die Sängerin” after its initial publication in the Prager Presse (see the discussion later in the chapter) led the Germanist to assert that “Appearing behind the ‘Volk der Mäuse’ with increasing clarity is that Jewish community, which already could first be called a Volk, namely the Eastern Jews in Galicia and the czarist ‘settlement district’ ” (Juden, 410). He then takes Kafka’s explanation for the supplement, as a balance to the original, to then read the character traits of Josephine in terms mirroring Brod’s characterization of Heine: as those of an “individuated Western Jewish artist, who

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only by maintaining his autonomy is capable of making something that is also of value for his Volk, even when they do not wish to accept the gift” (411). 6. Kafka was reputed to have characterized his tuberculosis, first diagnosed in 1917, as the beast within. The usual source is Walter Benjamin’s essay “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” (810), where he states, without providing a source, “But because the most forgotten source of strangeness is our body— one’s own body— one can understand why Kafka called the cough that erupted from within him ‘the animal.’ It was the vanguard of the great herd.” Leaving aside that Metamorphosis and a number of Kafka’s other animal tales antedated the emergence of his chronic cough, Benjamin’s source was a brief note to “Der Bau” (The Burrow) in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, the 1931 collection of narratives that Brod had culled from Kafka’s Nachlaß and that Benjamin had reviewed in a July 1931 radio talk. In his note, Brod intimates that many of the words in the story came from Kafka’s everyday use; his example is “das Tier = der quälenden Husten” (the animal = the agonizing cough); Beim Bau, 261n17. Such a beastly cough howls through a narrative fragment Kafka wrote on August 15, 1914, “Memoirs of the Kalda Railroad”; the narrator records: “I thought my coughing would terrify the train crew, but they knew all about it, called it the wolf ’s cough. After that I began to hear the howl in the cough. I sat on the little bench in front of the hut and greeted the train with a howl, with a howl I accompanied it on its way when it departed” (T 1:693–94; D2 90). Kafka, in a late April 1921 letter to Brod, also analogizes medicine’s efforts to control disease, of which the tuberculosis from which he suffers is but one variety of the species, to “hunting a beast [ein Tier] in endless forests” (Br 320; LFr 275). 7. W. Benjamin, “Kafka: Beim Bau”; see also “Franz Kafka” (1934); “Review of Brod” (1938). 8. The “as” in “Jew-as-Animal” does not function like the “as” in the “As-If animal” (Als-ob Tier), Karl-Heinz Fingerhut’s characterization of Kafka’s creatures as non-naturalistic “masks of the human” (7) in Funktion der Tierfiguren im Werke Franz Kafkas, which remains the most extensive monographic field guide to Kafka’s menagerie. 9. On the problems surrounding the visualization of the transformed Gregor Samsa, see Swinford, “Portrait.” 10. Kafka and Cook, Meowmorphosis, 7. 11. Glauben Sie Werfel nicht! Er kennt ja kein Wort von der Geschichte; letter to Wolff, March 24, 1913. 12. In an October 25, 1915 letter to Wolff (actually Georg Heinrich Meyer at Kurt Wolff Verlag), Kafka pleads “out of [his] deeper knowledge of the story”: “It struck me that [Ottomar] Starke, as an illustrator, might want

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to draw the insect itself. Not that, please not that! . . . The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance” (B2 145; LFr 114 –15). The original cover art foregrounds a man in a bathrobe, pants, and slippers, standing up, his slightly bent face covered by his clutching hands (in horror?) and his back turned to double doors, one of which is partially open, that lead to a darkened interior. 13. See Fingerhut, Funktion der Tierfiguren. 14. Jeder dumme Junge kann einen Käfer zertreten. Aber alle Professoren der Welt können keinen herstellen. This apothegm has been universally ascribed to Arthur Schopenhauer, but in response to my inquiry, the Schopenhauer Forschungsstelle at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz reports that it “cannot be found in Schopenhauer’s oeuvre”; email from Sinim Kilic (September 4, 2014). 15. Nabokov (“1961 Cornell lecture”) goes on to point out that the only thing Gregor has in common with cockroaches is that he is brown. So why is Gregor so often identified as a cockroach? In his metamorphosis of The Metamorphosis, Insect Dreams (263–64), Marc Estrin has Gregor make a less heroic and less optimistic analogy: “Jews are cockroaches, in a way. They must become hard on the outside from so much kicking around. But they are soft on the inside . . . Like cockroaches Jews represent everything not to be digested, everything otherness, everything getting in the way, everything that will not be expelled—just like other poor people, Orientals, Negroes—like cockroaches. We always reopen the wound of all-not-accomplished-by-society. So we are fit for only one thing: extermination.” Yet, I doubt any Jewish identification is at work in most imaginings of Gregor Samsa as cockroach. Marion Copeland’s entomological comparison may point to the principal motive: “Whereas knowledge of beetles and butterflies has been pursued because humans admire the rich variety and colour of those insects, cockroach study has been motivated by human hatred” (Cockroach, 56). Compared to certain species of beetles, cockroaches cause little damage to the general economy, but unlike other beetle species (and butterflies) they do not contribute to it. Animals without instrumental value are supposed to dwell outside the polis. The problem is that unlike beetles (or butterflies) they are always already border transgressors; they are uninvited cohabitants of human households, who consume human waste products and obdurately persist— even where they seem to be absent. There is no sanction against or apparent remorse in their extermination. These characteristics can also be ascribed to Gregor. 16. Similarly, when my brother was a young child, he was fondly called a “little vonts” (a little bed bug) by our aunt; also see the March 1913 exchange between Kafka and his future publisher Kurt Wolff mentioned previously. Janouch (Conversations, 32) alleges that Kafka viewed the publication of The

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Metamorphosis as an “indiscretion” since it talked about “the bugs [Wanzen] in [his] own family.” Also note the diary entry for September 18, 1912 with its account of the stories about Ungeziefer and Wanze told by his coworker Hubalek (D1 273; T 1:439). 17. Moreover, dung beetles, in Maeterlinck’s characterization, are “all clad in black” (“The Insect’s Homer,” 10). Perhaps speaking in favor of the dung beetle as contributor to Kafka’s construction is its lifecycle—the larva lives in the dung balls prepared by its parents and in which it was hatched; it then feeds on the surrounding dung—that may echo certain of Kafka’s comments on his own childhood, such as his excursus on the Familientier (familyanimal) to his sister Elli Hermann (in autumn 1921; Br 344 – 47; LFr 294 –97) and the famous unsent letter to his father. 18. The commentary in the critical edition of the diaries makes no such presumption. While providing explanatory notes for other items in the brief entry, it leaves this comment unremarked upon (T 2:146). The only other appearance of a beetle, in a 1920 letter to Milena, will be briefly discussed in the context of Kafka’s lizard encounters in Chapter 5. 19. Given that (1) the only description of Gregor that the narrator ascribes to the perception of someone besides Gregor, aside from the characterization of his voice (DL 131; CS 98), is an amorphous one—“the huge brown mass” (den riesigen braunen Fleck; DL 166; CS 119)—that (2) Gregor is metamorphosed into a creature that transgresses taxonomic specificity (a point already suggested by the qualification of the Ungeziefer as “ungeheuer”)—not simply as “gigantic,” but monstrous, unnatural, misshapen—and that (3) as noted earlier, Kafka implores that no insect appear on the cover of his published text, Kafka has left open the possibility that Gregor’s metamorphosis into an Ungeziefer is, empirically speaking, delusional. Most recently, see Fernando Bermejo-Rubio extensive series of (in my opinion unconvincing) positivistic articles, including “Does Gregor Samsa Crawl.” In his massive monograph study Kafkas Verwandlung (483–88) Hartmut Binder surveys the literature on Gregor’s metamorphosis as a delusion. Even if one were to accept the notion that, in Gregor, Kafka is presenting a case study in mental illness, Gregor’s narrated thoughts, affects, and actions literally act out the verminous identification. Also see G. Weiss, “Body,” 33–34. 20. Jensen, “Der Kondignog”; Binder, Kafkas Verwandlung, 63–66; also see Stach, Decisive Years, 195. Binder suggests that Kafka may have been a reader of März and hence of the story because Max Brod’s feuilleton, “Flugwoche in Brescia,” recounting the airshow that the two friends had both attended (and written about), had appeared in the preceding issue of the journal. And if not there, then, Binder notes (60 –63), Kafka’s attention may have been directed

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to Jensen’s collection, not only because Jensen was a frequent contributor to a journal Kafka frequently read, Die neue Rundschau, but also because of the prominent advertisement in the publisher S. Fischer’s Weihnachts-Katalog. Das moderne Buch des Jahres 1910, which exclaims: “no one has captured more intimate and distinctive [charaktervollere] snapshots” of animals. 21. Jensen, “Das Ungeziefer.” When writing to his fiancée, Felice Bauer (April 29, 1914), Kafka may well have flashed on the story when inspecting one of the apartments he visited in late April in his search for a home for the two of them once they were married: “vermin [Ungeziefer] hiding in holes waiting for night to fall” (LF 398; B2 48– 49). 22. Maeterlinck, “The Insect’s Homer,” 9–10. Stach (Decisive Years, 499) states that Kafka knew Maeterlinck’s “epic [1914] in Die neue Rundschau, which defended the intellectual prowess of horses.” Kafka mentions, in a September 13, 1913 letter to Felice (LF 319; B1 281), that Lise Weltsch, a cousin of Kafka’s friend Felix Weltsch, attended Maeterlinck’s play Monna Vanna on September 7. 23. Cf. Corngold (Franz Kafka, 56) on how the “Un-” renders the referentiality of “Ungeziefer,” specifically of Gregor Samsa as Ungeziefer, opaque and indeterminable. Hortzitz (Sprache, 435–36) ties the function of “Jude-” in word-combinations to that of “Un-” in such combinations as “Ungeheuer” (monster), “Ungetüm” (monster), and “Ungeziefer” (vermin); also see Chapter 1, n95. 24. Hortzitz, Sprache, documents its use (along with many other bestializing epithets) in the early modern period. Erb and Bergmann (Nachtseite) chart the association of Jews with Ungeziefer since the late eighteenth century in Germany as well as cite (199) an 1841 analogy of Jews with Käfern by Karl Stöber in his story “Dörrenstein: Einige Blätter aus der Chronik dieses Dorfes.” Hiemer entitled the third chapter of his Jude im Sprichwort, “Ungeziefer der Menschheit” (vermin of humanity; 34 – 40). 25. See, for example, Weindling, Epidemics, 97–100; M. Jansen, Wissen vom Menschen, 343– 48. 26. The mention of Trichinen or trichina worms is not surprising. Trichinosis, caused by the parasitic infestation by these vermin, is most commonly a consequence of the consumption of raw or undercooked pork; hence, it is a disease that would only affect Gentiles and not Jews. 27. Lagarde, “Juden und Indogermanen,” 339; cited in Lattke, Lagarde, 60 and n10. Lagarde repeats the analogy on page 344. 28. See Geller, Other Jewish Question, 96 –98. 29. S’ ist kein Wunder, wenn das Glück / Sich so innig dir verbunden, / Immer hat sich ja das Schwein, / Nur im Drecke wohlbefunden; Hornemann and Laabs, “ ‘Bär aus Galizien,’ ” 180 –81 and ill. 14.

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30. Kafka, Letter to His Father, 24 –25. Kafka describes his father’s reaction to Löwy in diary entries for October 31, 1911 and November 2 (3), 1911; in the latter he cites his father’s proverbial utterance: “Whoever lies down with dogs gets up with fleas” (T 1:223; D1 131). 31. Significantly, Kafka added the “immerhin”/“in any case” because in the preceding clause, also omitted by Brod, the hypochondriac Kafka reports Löwy’s confession that he was suffering from an illness that is not transmitted by contact with the hair of the sick: gonorrhea. In another (defensive?) elision of Kafka’s fear of lice, Brod does not include in his edition of Kafka’s travel diaries an entry written a month earlier in Paris (September 20, 1911): “Bettina and Colonel in theater: May Bettina lay her head on your arm? If she does not have lice” (T 1:991). 32. Brod, Heine Artist, 150, referring to Josephine’s Volk. 33. The Muirs’ translation reads: “That was no human voice.” Here and in several passages that follow I have modified their translation when it obscures the play of human /animal difference and have provided instead a more literal rendering. 34. Despite the chief clerk’s conclusion and although his words qua individual semes did not appear to be understood by those on the other side of the locked door, Gregor felt that he had communicated to them that “something was wrong with him” and “felt himself drawn in once more into the human circle” (menschlichen Kreis; DL 132; CS 99). 35. In German, “Wild” refers to game or wild animals; “ein Wilder” (a savage) like the nondomesticated animal occupies the space beyond the bounds of human community proper. See the discussion in the Introduction. 36. After the boarders move in, “many things [that] could be dispensed with [and] that it was no use trying to sell but that should not be thrown away either . . . [f ]ound their way into Gregor’s room. The ash can likewise and the kitchen garbage can” (DL 181; CS 128). In his “Notes on Kafka,” Theodor Adorno suggests that Kafka locates the possibility of hope amid the “nonexchangeable, useless” things, the Ladenhüter or “white elephants” that litter his narratives (238). 37. Kafka had already demonstrated earlier that year (1912), in his nowfamous “Speech on the Yiddish Language [Jargon],” how the deployment of pronouns both indicates and puts in question assumed antipodal identifications when he offered: “for example the Yiddish [Jargon’sche] mir seien develops more naturally out of the Middle High German sin than does the New High German wir sind (we are)”; cited in Liska, When Kafka Says We, 28. Would not Kafka’s Jargonphobic audience also have been unsettled by the use of the first person singular dative (mir) instead of the first person plural nominative (wir) as well as by the use of the first person plural subjunctive (seien)

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instead of the first person plural indicative (sind)? Kafka’s chosen exemplar thereby attempted to unsettle the distinction from Yiddish-speaking Eastern Jews that his acculturated, self-satisfied Germanophone audience desired to maintain. 38. Cf. Mayer, Kafkas Litotes, 143– 45. By reading “Untier” as a litote or double negation of the human (since the animal [Tier] is the not-human [Nicht-Mensch], the not-animal [Untier] is the not-not-human), Mayer sees the use of Untier in The Metamorphosis as possibly the key moment in Kafka’s “poetic of litotes” that seeks to destabilize any notion of norm or rule (of the relation of rule and exception), not just human-animal difference; consequently, he does not address Kafka’s play of pronouns. 39. Maeterlinck, “The Insect’s Homer,” 9. 40. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105–8. Agamben’s discussion of homo sacer in the eponymous second part of the eponymous volume revolves around the attempt to parse the paradoxical ban laid upon the “sacred man”: anyone can kill him —it is not considered murder—however, he can neither be executed by the state nor offered as a sacrifice. Agamben’s solution is the notion of bare life. That discussion culminates in the embodiment of homo sacer as the threatening wargus, outlaw and werewolf. After crossing a “Threshold” Agamben moves to the work’s third part in which the concentration camp is seen as “the ‘Nomos’ of the Modern” and its prisoners have been, like momo sacer, as homo sacer, reduced to bare life. Drawing upon Primo Levi, he concludes by situating the Muselmann as the epitome of modernity’s biopolitical “subject” as bare life (183–85). In his follow up to Homo Sacer, Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben identifies the Muselmann as the Jew. Beyond criticizing Agamben’s (tr)a(ns)historical reductionist universalism and his tendentious (mis)reading of Levi, LaCapra takes Agamben to task for failing in his identification of the Jew to address the complexity of the figure of the Jew in the Nazi imaginary, including as all-powerful threat; “Approaching Limit Events,” 155–56 n12. Had Agamben drawn upon his earlier discussion of homo sacer as wargus, some of that complexity may have entered his argument. See the discussion of werewolves and other were-canids in Chapter 8. 41. See, for example, Witte, Jüdische Tradition, 170 –76. This sacrificial logic may have been signaled by the narrator’s speculation that Grete, in her terror, may have been willing to sacrifice her mother in order to be free from Gregor as well as by the novella’s framing: in place of the verwandelt body of Gregor lying on his back and barely lifting (ein wenig hob) his head, which opens the novella, is the young aufgeblüht body of his sister Grete as she springs herself up (sich erhob) at its end. Both Beck (Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, esp. 135– 46) and Bermejo-Rubio (“Convergent Literary Echoes,” esp. 350 –52) read Gregor’s death as sacrificial and Gregor’s metamorphosis

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itself as mirroring Jakob Gordin’s Yiddish-language play, Der vilder Mensh (The savage one), a production of which Kafka had attended the year before. Peter Sprenger’s analysis of both Yiddish theater troupe practice and of the German transcript of the play, required by Berlin’s Theaterpolizei before it would be allowed to be performed (rpt. in Sprenger, Scheunenviertel-Theater, 211–24), renders their interpretation rather doubtful. It lacked the last act upon which their interpretation depended; Sprenger, “Kafka und der ‘wilder Mensch.’ ” 42. The phrasing appears to echo the title of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1908 encyclopedic depiction of Viennese Jews, Der Weg ins Freie (The Road into the Open). Though no fan of Schnitzler, Kafka may have no less appropriated both Schnitzler’s title and its ironic edge. While Kafka does not specifically mention this work in his extant writings, he was quite familiar, if not exactly taken, with many of Schnitzler’s other plays and prose. He writes to Felice Bauer (February 14/15, 1913) that “I don’t like Schnitzler at all, and hardly respect him; no doubt he is capable of certain things, but for me his great plays and his great prose are full of a truly staggering mass of the most sickening drivel [widerlichster Schreiberei]” (B1 91; LF 193). Kafka comments upon seven of Schnitzler’s works in the letter. Hartmut Binder (Kafkas Wien, 121) suggests that it is reasonable to assume that Kafka was familiar with the novel, “at least in part”; he bases this not just on Kafka having possessed an issue of Neue Rundschau ( January 1908) in which an excerpt appeared but also that “it could not be an accident” that his closest friends, Oskar Baum and Max Brod, conceived, respectively, Böse Unschuld (evil innocence; 1909) and Die Jüdinnen (the Jewesses; 1911), in which “Prague writers for the first time made the problems of contemporary Judentum the focus of their narratives,” soon after the publication of Schnitzler’s work. 43. Scholtmeijer (“What Is ‘Human’?” 138) reads Gregor’s death as selfannihilation, as a sacrifice to redeem his humanity—admittedly a humanity that would be unrecognizable (though as I note earlier, in death Grete restores his human genderedness). Consequently, Scholtmeijer suggests that this “sacrifice” functions as a critique of ontological/metaphysical humanness and an assertion of “the human” as a socially acknowledged performance. 44. Letter to Brod, November 23/24, 1917 (B2 367; LFr 170). 45. Letter to Brod, December 3, 1917 (B2 373; LFr 174). 46. Walter Sokel (Kafka, 508–9) sees Kafka’s Zürau companions resettled among Josephine’s Volk. 47. Sachar, Course, 484. 48. During the controversy generated by Sombart’s provocative work, Artur Landsberger solicited from leading Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals of the day, including Hermann Bahr, Heinrich Mann, Fritz Mauthner,

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Max Weber, and Sombart himself, their responses to a series of questions regarding the future disposition of the Jewish Question. Sombart slings this epithet in his response to Landesberger’s call ([Zur Frage], 16). Beyond the phonological associations generated by “Duckmäuser” are the etymological: “mäuser” derives from “mausen,” the German word for cats pursuing their murine prey; “Duck” derives from “ducken,” meaning to duck, that is, diving down and laying low; so conjoined Duckmäuser combines the desire not to be seen (or harmed) with predation while also evoking verminous mice. 49. Wie Mäuse und Ratten suchen die Juden, die staatliche Ordnung zu untergraben; Gräfe, Antisemitismus, 147. Though no author for the text is officially acknowledged, Gräfe credits the antisemitic writer and editor Max Weber (not to be confused with the noted sociologist). 50. “Sem,” 149. Incidentally, a crazy-drunk German usually sees “white” mice dancing (his American equivalent sees pink elephants flying). Harden probably omits the color of the mice because he immediately surmises that Ahlwardt’s hatred for Jews derives from a bad experience he had with a “schwarzen Manne” (lit. black man), a monster, and the consequent leap to the conclusion that all evil stems from this monster folk (den schwarzen Männern). 51. Marr, Goldene Ratten. 52. Cited in Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, 206n108. 53. Heine, Rabbi, 43; DHA 5: 121. Heine increases the redemption fee recorded in as well as provides the number of tails absent from his probable source, Kirchner, Geschichte 1:452. Arnim credits Kirchner’s then recently published account as his source. 54. Arnim, “Kennzeichen,” 373. 55. See Nienhaus, Tischgesellschaft, 231–33, on Arnim’s poem. 56. Arnim, “Kennzeichen,” 386 57. Lensing (“Tiertheater,” 84 –85) suggests that Josephine may be a composite of “die Kafka” with another figure from Blei’s collection, “die Fackelkraus” (i.e., Karl Kraus; BL 33–34), which has the capability of imitating the voices of prophets and poets as well as those of other humans (Menschen); the pertinence of this ascription of Kraus’s mimetic vocalism to Kafka’s story is discussed in Chapter 4. Other Kraus connections are noted later in this chapter. 58. On a couple of earlier occasions, Kafka identified himself with members of the Murinae family. For example, he signs “Die Ratte vom Palais Schönborn” (the rat of the Schönborn Palace; November 24, 1916) in the dedication to his sister of an offprint of “Das Urteil” (The Judgment), and in a (perhaps February 1917) letter to Felice he describes the object of his housing search as “a quiet hole [ein stilles Loch] in some attic in one of the old

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palaces” (B2 288; LF 540). When explaining, in an end of March 1923 letter to Robert Klopstock (Br 431; LFr 322), what “our alleged ‘inferiority’ ” (“Unebenbürtigkeit”) is, Kafka identifies himself and his correspondent as “desperate rats [verzweifelte Ratten], who hear the footsteps of the master of the house and flee in various directions”; such Unebenbürtigkeit (trans. in this letter as “inequality”) also exists among the component parts of the “family animal” (Familientier)—“that is to say the monstrous superiority of power vis-à-vis the children [including Kafka and the recipient of an autumn 1921 letter, his sister Elli] for so many years” (Br 344; LFr 294 –95; also see Chapter 6). These comments suggest that human /animal difference exemplarily figured unequal status. 59. This letter returns in Chapter 3. 60. Kafka was still living at Niklasstrasse 36 at the time. 61. In light of his reference to her and his synagogue attendance between this image and the subsequent mention of mice, could these seven empty chairs have been filled by the seven colored mice of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s like-named fable that had danced around a stone for thousands of years waiting for a pious mother to come on Good Friday and transform them into humans? Kafka may have scanned the article (“Der eherne Wächter am Rhein”) about the first model for a proposed monument honoring “Vater Arndt” in the bound volume containing all of Die Gartenlaube’s issues from 1863 that earlier in the letter he informs Felice he had been reading. The German nationalist poet Arndt held for the intertwined purity of the German language and Volk—in “Des Teutschen Vaterland” Arndt proclaims nonfiguratively that the German fatherland is wherever “the German tongue [Zunge] sounds” (cited in Wippermann, “Das Blutrecht,” 13; also see Kohn, “Arndt”)—and was no friend of the Jews. Though this arch-despiser of France once jokes in a letter to his sister Dorothea (April 20, 1814) that to call the French “badly civilized [schlechte verfeinerte] Jews” insults the Jews, he elsewhere describes the Jews as an “alien element” [fremde Bestandteil] of “foreign and Oriental descent” and a “rotten and degenerate people” (cited in Nienhaus, Tischgesellschaft, 340n7). 62. While perhaps true, this comment is a rather interesting mediation of two of the principle personal concerns of Kafka at the time: his Jewishness and the question of marriage. 63. The animal is as much gripped by fear as it is frightening for the women in the synagogue, who alone pay attention to it; yet, according to the first-person narrator, just as there is no actual objective threat that generates its fear, there is no actual subjective affect that generates theirs. 64. The “plague of mice” (Mäuseplage; letter to Max Brod, November 23/ 24, 1917, B2 367; LFr 170) infests virtually all of his subsequent preserved

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letters up to December 19: to Max Brod, November 23/24 (B2 367–69; LFr 170 –71), December 3 (B2 373–74; LFr 174 –75), December 4, (B2 375; LFr 176), December n.d. (B2 377–78; LFr 176 –78); to Felix Weltsch, November≈30 (B2 372; LFr 168–70); to Oskar Baum, November 24, (B2 370 –71; LFr 172); to Rudolf Fuchs, December 10/19, (B2 383). On December 20, he writes to Oskar Baum that what he had been writing about mice had been “only in fun” (natürlich nur Spaß). Of course, he adds that the joke would only first become serious, when “you [i.e. Oskar] [actually/ wirklich] heard the mice.” He then continues on with several more comments about mice (B2 389; LFr 178). Soon thereafter, Kafka returned to Prague. Also see Gilman, Kafka, 30 –32; and the discussion in Chapter 3. 65. Zakhor. Yerushalmi’s opposition between history qua history and collective memory is not uncontested; Funkenstein, Perceptions, esp. 10 –11, argues that Yerushalmi’s claim was too stark, in part due to his conflating historical research with historical consciousness. 66. Myerson, “Nervousness of the Jew,” 133. 67. Van Rahden, “Germans of the Jewish Stamm,” 29, 35. 68. Also see Anderson, “ ‘Jewish’ Music?” 205; and Gilman, Kafka, 30 –32. 69. Herzl, “Mauschel [English],” 163. See the discussion in the Introduction. 70. As many of Sarah Bernhardt’s detractors said of the Jewish-born and -identified actress; see Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt.” 71. See Kafka’s June 1921 letter to Brod (Br 334 –38; LFr 286 –89) and the discussion of it in Chapter 4. 72. Kraus, Fackel 608–12 (December 1922): 71; trans. Stach (Years of Insight, 642– 43n4). Stach notes the label largely explains Kafka’s homonymic choice of species for Josephine, given Kafka’s religious reading of Fackel and Kraus’s increasing use of “Mausi” from December 1922 on. Leo Lensing (“ ‘Fackel’-Leser,” 280 –87) discusses the various mediations—“Mausi,” Blei’s depiction of “die Fackelkraus” in his Bestiarium, Kafka’s comments on Kraus’s mauscheling—by which the critical literature have connected Kraus with Josephine; also see note 57 in this chapter. 73. Kafka specifically employs this phrase as a commonplace during his mouse-infested stay at the sanitorium in Zürau. He comments to Brod in a December 3, 1917 letter on the effectiveness of the cat that he brought in to combat the intruders: “To be sure, the room did not become ‘as still as a mouse’ [nicht ganz ‘mäuschenstill’], but none of them continued running around” (B2 374; LFr 175). 74. Garric (“Quelques hommes”) also notes the absence of explicit mouse references as well as the peculiar use of “mäuschenstill” and speaks of the identification games played out in the story, the going back and forth

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between tieromorphic and anthropomorphic. He offers a variant of Margot Norris’s non-species-specific coding of human /animal difference in the story, discussed later in the chapter, as the opposition between the singularity of the individual and the indifference of the folk. 75. The only source for this Kafka “quote” is one of Brod’s notes to his compilation of the “conversation slips” that were Kafka’s principle form of communication during his last weeks. Brod quotes Klopstock as quoting Kafka in Br 521n12; LFr 495n20. 76. In a September 3/4, 1920 letter, he bids Milena good night as a mouse “in the corner next to the bathroom door” makes a brief and not terribly traumatic return appearance—“How lively she is! [Kafka comments,] It’s been quiet for weeks.” When he returns to the letter the next morning, he records that, “when I took the sheets off the sofa, something dark and squeaky [ piepsend ] with a long tail fell out and immediately disappeared under the bed.” He surmises: “That very easily could have been the mouse, couldn’t it?” But then he poses to himself: “Even if the squeak [gepiepst hat] and the long tail were just in my imagination? In any case, I couldn’t find a thing underneath the bed (as far as I dared look)” (B3 334 –35; LM 186). 77. Schnitzler, Road, 17. Unlike either Wagner or Weininger (or perhaps even Kraus), Schnitzler is not making an essentialist claim about “the Jew”; rather, the disparaging judgment of Else voiced by another singer, the Gentile Anna Rosner, serves to display but a single aspect of a complicated and not unsympathetic portrait of one Jewish character among a variety of different Jewish personalities at a specific historic moment. Ehrenberg appears in many of the tableaux vivants of Jewish life and lives in fin-de-siècle Vienna that Schnitzler stages around his aristocratic Gentile protagonist, the composer Georg von Wergenthin. 78. See note 42 on Kafka’s probable familiarity with the novel. 79. As noted previously, there is only one preserved reference to murine piping by Kafka. Within the story itself there may be another rather tenuous allusion to the piping of mice. In order to try to understand the appeal of Josephine’s piping, the narrator wonders whether someone could make a “ceremonial performance out of doing [another] usual thing.” The simple everyday activity of the Volk that he chooses for his comparison is “nutcracking” (Nüsseknacken; DL 353; CS 361). His choice brings another story about mice to mind, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Nußknacker und Mausekönig” (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King). The piping (pfeifen) of the mice terrifies Marie when she first encounters them; Hoffmann’s mice defeat the Nutcracker and his forces. Though Hoffmann is not mentioned in Kafka’s letters or diaries, several of his works, including “A Report on the Latest Adventures of the Dog Berganza” and “Report from an Educated Young

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Notes to pages 74 –75

Man” (i.e., Milo, who identifies himself as “Formerly an Ape, now Free-lance Artist and Scholar”), have been frequently seen as possible sources or models for Kafka. Robertson (Kafka: Judaism, 279 and n14) endeavors mightily to minimize any difference between the piping of the Volk and the squeaking of mice and other animals so as to render the former as irrelevant to their species determination. 80. For its part, the narrator’s own physical description is limited to broad references to its “scratching paws” (Scharrpfoten; NS 2.1:621; CS 352), to its fur (Fell), to its eating and burrowing habits, and to its “claws and teeth” (Krallen und Zähnen; NS 2.1:630; CS 358), possession of which it also ascribes to the heard but unseen enemy that it calls “the beast” (das Tier). All of these together suggest some mole-like but otherwise indeterminate creature. On the other hand, the behavior that the narrator suspects the “klein Volk” is engaging in corresponds in many ways to how Kafka characterizes that of Ungeziefer in the November 1917 letter cited previously. 81. McFarland (“Mortal Whistle,” 9) comments: “The ‘or’ of the title fits awkwardly into the tradition of double-titles. Not, as Walter Benjamin observed about the Baroque affinity for such constructions, because ‘der eine [Titel geht] auf die Sache, der andere auf das Allegorische daran.’ Rather, the two halves are suspended against one another like scales.” The two titles are not dialectical; they have no synthetic telos. Mettler (Werk als Verschwinden, 290 –93) also emphasizes Kafka’s unbalanced balance, how the “sort of scale” (etwas von einer Waage), by which Kafka characterizes the title change, keeps both pans perpetually in motion. 82. Norris, “Kafka’s Josefine,” 371. 83. Norris, “Kafka’s Josefine,” 366. 84. Even as she argues that Kafka “empt[ies] rhetoric of its metaphorical residue” (Norris, “Kafka’s Josefine,” 382). See, Tyler (Ciferae, 22–29) and A. Benjamin (Of Jews) on how animals have functioned as ciphers and figures in Western philosophic discourse. 85. See Binder, Kafka-Kommentar zu Erzählungen, 326, where he also cites Kafka’s title-instructions and justification as reported in Brod’s Kafka biography. Fingerhut (Funktion der Tierfiguren, 200) comments that the “oder” could suggest the “undecidablility of a struggle”; however, while noting that within the story proper there is no specific indication that the Volk are mice, he locates the struggle as that between the artist and society. Because Kafka chose to add the phrase “das Volk der Mäuse” rather than the word-combination “das Mäusevolk” (Grimm’s Wörterbuch cites an earlier use of this word by Freytag) to the original title, I do not deny that the tensions between individual and community are also signaled in the altered title. On the other hand, Kafka employed that word-combination in a July 5, 1920

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letter to Milena Jesenská (B3 207; LM 68) when he apostrophically invokes the “feared race of mice” (dem gefürchteten Mäusevolk); see the discussion in Chapter 3. 86. Koelb, “Kafka Imagines His Readers,” 356 (emphasis added). As the quote indicates, Koelb perceives no taxonomic uncertainty and assumes that the title refers to the artist and her public. 87. See Mannoni, “Je sais.” 88. One might speculate that the identification of Josephine as the mouse singer following “Josefine, die Sängerin” ’s appearance in the Prager Presse led Kafka to insist upon the change in title. This is a more reasonable speculation than as a consequence of a failure of the story’s readers to realize that Josephine’s Volk were Mäuse motivated Kafka’s “clarifying” supplement. 89. Is there something like an “Oder-Satz” at play in a short prose piece about “a curious animal, half kitten, half lamb” (NS 1.1:372; CS 426) that Kafka composed the same year as those other animal stories “Jackal and Arabs” and “Report to an Academy”? This work, which has come down to us as “A Crossbreed” (eine Kreuzung; something that resulted from the conjoining of several lines), was initially called “A Legacy” (or heirloom [ein Erbstück]; i.e., something that descended from a single line). While physically the creature is said to be equal parts feline and ovine, its behavior at times is characterized as more canine and even human. The first-person narrator reflects on the problem of the origins as well as on the impossibility of this absolutely singular creature; such a being is neither a biological possibility nor a product of tradition, legend, or fable. It has no blood relatives (Blutverwandten), yet it may have innumerable in-laws (Verschwägerte). Neither nature nor nurture, biology nor culture can subsume it. Caspar Battegay (Das andere Blut, 257–67) situates the story in relation to Kafka’s ambivalence toward Zionism as it played out in the controversy among not only Zionists but also the Jewish community writ large over intermarriage. 90. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 2:161, 163, 163–64. Though situating, albeit by allusion, the mark of Cain upon A’s forehead, Kierkegaard is not identifying A with those other mark-bearers; instead, his “Hep” analogy anticipates—unintentionally—Horkheimer and Adorno’s observation that the antisemite mimics the (allegedly mimetic) Jew: “There is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape [nachzuahmen] what he takes to be Jewishness” (DE 151). 91. A principal cause of this outbreak of aggression against Jewish communities was that, despite the return of German sovereignty and the attempted reimposition of the ancien régime, many of the restrictions on Jewish civil and economic life that had been removed under French occupation were still only partially restored. The violent attacks on the Jewish population and

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Notes to pages 77– 80

their property also spread that year into Denmark, including Copenhagen where the then-five-year-old Kierkegaard was living, even though— or more likely because—the emancipation decrees were not rescinded. Either/Or appeared in 1843, more than two years before the so-called Corsair affair when, after the journal had subjected him to caricature and ridicule in January 1846, Kierkegaard unloaded against the journal and its Jewish editor with vituperative anti-Jewish rhetoric. Anti-Jewish rhetoric increasingly contaminated his diaries thereafter. See Peter Tudvad’s controversial monograph Stadier på antisemitismens vej: Søren Kierkegaard og Jøderne (stages on the way to antisemitism: Soren Kierkegaard and the Jews). 92. Though often said at the time to derive from the acronym “H E P” (for Hierosolyma est perdita [ Jerusalem is lost]) that emblazoned the banners of Crusaders as they blazed a trail of murder through medieval European Jewish communities, the doubled “Hep” may have originated as the cry of a goatherd to his flock or of a hunter to his dogs during the chase. The latter two possibilities reinforce the animalization of the Jews evident in the “Juda verreck” that accompanied the “Hep-Hep.” 93. Bein, “Jew as Parasite,” 27. In his Jewish Question, Bein cites Kluge’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch (19th ed. [Berlin 1963], 818): “To die rigidly stretched out—thus still in the literature of the seventeenth century, but since then limited to animals. Hence the crude sound when it is applied to people in modern speech” (714). The DWB (Deutsches Wörterbuch) website notes that dictionaries of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tie verrecken to the dying and killing of animals, but that “very frequently in everyday speech, while primarily employed with reference to livestock, also said of people when one desires to place them in a pointedly despicable way on the level of animals” (25:999). 94. For all of its claims for autonomy and autochthony, the selfdetermination of the nation necessarily presupposes both the absence of national difference within as well as the presence of what is not the nation without. Any internal difference is either repressed or abjected as other, while that which is posited as outside poses the narcissistic threats of either swallowing the nation or substituting for it, and these must all be combated. 95. Spiegelman, MetaMaus, 113–14. 96. Spiegelman, Maus II, 11. 97. Throughout Maus whenever a caudally equipped, quadrapedal nonhuman animal, be it feline, canine or rodent, enters the narrative, it is drawn as such. 98. There is one exception: the original portrait of the author as bipedal mouse with tail is absent not only from the subsequent editions of Maus I, but also from MetaMaus.

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3. (con)versions of cats and mice and other mouse traps Preliminary versions of diverse portions of this chapter popped up in presentations at the University of Antwerp (May 2011), Vanderbilt University (September 2011), Oberlin College (April 2012), and Penn State University ( January 2013), as well as at a Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge, June 2011) conference on my work. 1. Spiegelman (MetaMaus, 116) responding to the question “How did you decide to draw cats specifically and create the cat /mouse metaphor?” 2. “Little Fable” (Kleine Fabel), NS 2.1:343; CS 445. 3. See, for example, Kampits, “Parabel, Gleichnis,” 58, on the “Vergeblichkeit,” or futility, of this question. 4. They were the eponymous protagonists of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon regularly featured on the animated television series The Huckleberry Hound Show from 1958 to 1961. 5. Greenblatt, “Resonance,” 170; or as Henry Sussman (Task, 8) puts it: “the precipitous emergence of an image that magically both coalesces and ties together hitherto proliferating loops of association.” 6. Glagau’s “Der Börsen- und Gründungsschwindel in Berlin” would be followed by a series of related articles, which he collected and published in 1876 under that same title. On the increasing anti-Jewish tone of Glagau’s populist articles, see J. Katz, From Prejudice, 249–52. 7. The proverb would headline 1942’s twenty-seventh issue of Parole der Woche, the weekly Nazi Party propaganda poster; beneath it was a quote from the Daily Mail in which England’s Chief Rabbi Dr. J. Hertz, speaking at a London synagogue, admonished those Jews who, by breaking the wartime economic laws, defamed Judaism and the good name of the Jews in England. The poster ascribed Hertz’s motivation as an attempt to warn his racial comrades to be careful lest the English discover that they are infested with such lice. 8. Schmidt may also be implying that the double bind of assimilation (“Hausierer-Bürger-Doppelbindung der Emanzipationszeit”; KM 207) is but a secularized form of the older one. 9. Trachtenberg, The Devil, 218. Variations of this proverb are discussed by Adolph Jellinek in his 1881 Der jüdische Stamm; he notes (2:59) that such proverbs appear in Germanic and Slavic languages but not in Hungarian. Hiemer devoted a chapter on “the truth about Jewish baptism” in his proverb collection Jude im Sprichwort (97–104); he included two variations on the cat-and-mouse proverb (from Germany and Swabia; 100), but he cited eight in which “the baptized Jew” was analogized with a wolf as well as a number of others invoking the immutability of species: for example, “a hare remains a

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Notes to pages 84 – 88

hare even when it runs / A Jew remains a Jew even when he’s baptized a thousand times” (101). 10. Ungeheuer was one of Kafka’s most often used adjectives, including the month before this letter in the opening sentence of The Metamorphosis to qualify the Ungeziefer into which Gregor Samsa had found himself transformed (see Chapter 2). 11. Had Schmidt checked the volume he would not have found the phrase; however, he would have discovered this different conjunction of Katz(e) and Maus that accompanied an article (Brehm, “Die Zwergmaus”) about the Zwergmaus. The only predatory behavior described in that article was that of a mouse springing upon a fly, catching it, and bringing it to its mouth with the same speed and desire as a lion with a cow. 12. Again, had Schmidt consulted that bound volume of Gartenlaube issues from 1863, he would have come across two very positive articles about German Jews— one about Gabriel Riesser— emphasizing the professional limitations he endured by choosing not to convert (“Ein deutscher Jude”); the other about German Jews in London and how they were preyed upon by missionaries who received a bounty for each convert they made (“Die deutschen Juden in London”). Jellinek (Der jüdische Stamm, 1:17) also discusses the expenditure of thousands of English pounds to convert Jews. 13. Nor does Schmidt mention the July 14, 1912 travel diary entry (T 1:1045– 47; D2 305–6), in which Kafka discusses that encounter with the Christian proselytizing surveyor, let alone Kafka’s comment (apparently provoked by a baptized Jewish guest at the hotel where he was staying in Meran) in a letter to Brod and Weltsch, written (ca. April 8, 1920) several months before he jotted down “Little Fable,” about “what horrid Jewish energies live on close to bursting inside a baptized Jew” (B3 116; LFr 232). 14. Letter to Felix Weltsch (November 15, 1917). 15. Letter to Brod (November 23–24, 1917). 16. Letter to Weltsch (around November 30, 1917). 17. Letter to Brod (postmark: December 4, 1917). 18. Letter to Brod (postmark: December 10, 1917). 19. Letter of June 12, 1920. Given that Willy Haas edited the first edition of the letters to Milena, it is perhaps not surprising that all reference to the affair was excised from his edition. 20. Whether their mutual identification was as Jews qua Jews or as Jewish men involved with Schicksas in extramarital affairs was unclear, as Kafka’s subsequent ( June 20) letter to Milena suggests. In that letter, Kafka explains what was most horrible (das Schrecklichste) about the story: “the conviction that the Jews are necessarily bound to fall upon you Christians, just as predatory animals [Raubtiere] are bound to murder, although the Jews will be hor-

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rified [entsetzt] since they are not animals, but rather all too aware” (B3 189; LM 51). Other implications of the June 20 letter are discussed later in the chapter. 21. Perhaps adding to the confusion is that Kafka, as was his (but not Brod’s) practice in his letters, capitalized all second-person pronouns in the extract. 22. Paradoxically, in telling a “conscious lie,” he had been, in fact, telling the truth; Brod had not been allusively warning him about the dangers of entering into a mésalliance. Nevertheless, he insisted that at the time the illocutionary force of his mendacious utterance had trumped its belatedly recognized constative truth. 23. By exchanging the placement of the denying and the lying, Boehm’s revised translation elides Kafka’s rhetorical gesture. In the previous sentence he had begun to write that the Reiner story had originated in a letter from Mile[na] rather than from Max (Brod) and parenthetically informed her of the parapraxis. Hence the gnawing interruption may also have signaled his anxiety about slipping another parapraxis into the letter. 24. And therefore the gnawing mouse interrupted the letter writing and not the act of denying, which may have occurred either during their time together in Vienna or in a letter that has not been preserved. Later in the chapter I discuss another function that the “race of mice” may have performed in this letter. 25. Royle, “Mole,” 179. 26. Kafka may have been familiar with the coiner of the term “Zionism” (in 1890), Nathan Birnbaum’s characterization in his “Einige Gedanken über den Antisemitismus” (Some thoughts on antisemitism) of antisemites as “blind moles” (blinde Maulwürfe) rather than the Nietzschean “blond beasts” (blonde Bestien) they imagine themselves to be (159). Originally published in 1902 in Ost und West (vol. 2, no. 8), a periodical Kafka read on occasion (Kilcher and Kremer, “Genealogie,” 67), it was also included in Birnbaum’s 1910 essay collection. Also see Battegay, “Maulwürfe und Ackersleute,” 201. 27. In Meißner’s memoir, he himself mentions Seuffert, that is, the Paris correspondent for the Allgemeine Zeitung Heinrich Seuffert. Moreover, Meißner identified him as “the only [ethnically] proper German” (der einzige richtige Germane); he was neither correcting Mathilde nor did Mathilde express surprise upon specifically learning Seuffert’s correct ethnic identification (Geschichte meines Lebens, 2:165–68). Meißner’s ethnic identification of Seuffert as German is germane; Kafka elided the crucial distinction that Meißner makes between Deutschen and Germanen: Jews may be the former; they are not, however, the latter.

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Notes to pages 94 –95

28. For Milena, the question of the Jew is bound to the question of the Czech; yet, in a letter to Milena written almost a month later ( June 24), he ambiguously comments “And in regard to Milena, it [das] has nothing to do with Germanness [Deutschtum] and Jewishness [Judentum]” (B3 196; LF 58, trans. modified). It is unclear whether “das” is referring to the person, the name, or what immediately precedes the claim: He characterizes her recent Czech translation of Gustav Meyrinks’s story, referred to by the short Czech title “Ropucha,” or toad, as flowing like a millipede and therefore reads like a letter from “Milena J.” For Kafka, the primary pair is the Jewish and the German (see, for example, the famous June 1921 letter to Brod on “dieser deutsch jüdischen Welt” [this German-Jewish world; Br 336; LFr 288]); however, as will be discussed in Chapter 7’s analysis of his “Jackals and Arabs,” Kafka problematizes binary thinking, not only by contaminating each of the pair with aspects of the other, but also by recognizing that other players besides the opposed couple are in the game. 29. It generated much antisemitic fervor throughout Bohemia, including Prague, at the time of the trial. According to the not always reliable Gustav Janouch (Franz Kafka, 55), this led Kafka to first come to the recognition of the Jew as “a despised individual, considered by the surrounding world as a stranger, only tolerated”; cited in Löwy, “Franz Kafka’s Trial,” 154. 30. He appears to have been referring to the “terrible story” (schreckliche Geschichte) of June 12 when he wrote in this letter about “what most terrifies [Schrecklichste] me about the story [Geschichte]” (B3 189; LF 51). 31. Only then did he specifically refer to Haas and company, which he then further displaced onto himself and his on-again, off-again relationship with his former fiancée, the Jewish woman Julie Wohryzek. 32. Zweig, Ritualmord in Ungarn, 63. Zweig included several other animal analogies and identifications of Jews: von Istoczy had referred to the Jews as poisonous reptiles (Reptilien) before his rat fable (62); Bary, the investigating judge, characterized the accused as dogs (Hunde; 32); a Jewish peddler had earlier indicated how the villagers attacked Jews as they do stray dogs (Hunde; 13); in her interpretation of the victim Eszter’s mother’s dream of a hungry black raven with a crooked beak, a gypsy fortuneteller identified it as a Jew (24 –25); another gypsy then added that the cursèd Jews were worse than wolves (25). 33. Another anxious signal is that he had originally encased the interruption in parentheses, but then changed them to square brackets—thereby distinguishing this ambiguous comment from his parenthetical explicit confession earlier in the letter of having begun to write “Milena” (indexed by the crossed out “Mile”) when he meant to write “Max.” 34. Born (Kafkas Bibliothek) only lists Heine’s Buch der Lieder ( July 20, 1922 letter to Brod, Br 344; LFr 344) and the poem “Die Grenadiere”

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(entry for November 12, 1911; T 1:247; D1 148) by name, plus an unidentified book of his poems (in November 17/18, 1912 letter to Felice, B 242; LF 48) and a line from the dramatist Adolf Müllner that Heine employed as a motto (in Buch Le Grand; in a May 26, 1915 postcard to Felice, B2 136; LF 455). Though not mentioned by name, one of Heine’s works seems to have come to Kafka’s mind the month before this letter. In an April 1, 1920 letter to Minze Eisner, a young Jewish woman whom Kafka had befriended the previous November when both were vacationing at the same Schelesen inn and who had earlier sent him several photographs of herself including one in a Cleopatra pose, Kafka comments on a new photograph that she had sent him: “When I was a child we had a small album of pictures of women out of Shakespeare. One of the ladies, I think it was Portia, was always my special favorite. This photo reminds me of this long-forgotten picture. She too had her hair cut short” (B3 114; LFr 231). It had been assumed that the volume was the 96-page Neue Shakspeare-Galerie published by Brockhaus & Avenarius in the mid-nineteenth century; however, its portrait of Portia did not have short hair. When I compared a photograph of Eisner that I found on Daniel Hornek’s website (www.kafka-franz.com /kafka-Biography.htm; accessed June 22, 2012) it bore a remarkable resemblance to the pose and coif of Portia (from The Merchant of Venice) found in Heine’s 1838 Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen. Admittedly, Heine’s volume was neither “small” nor merely an “album”; however, in 1919, Hoffmann & Campe reissued the volume that was advertised as a new edition tied to Heine’s birthday. Perhaps Kafka had taken a look at Heine’s book and had conflated that image with childhood memories of the Neue Shakespeare-Gallerie. I shared my speculation with Hans-Gerd Koch who was then preparing the critical edition of Kafka’s letters covering the period 1918–20 (emails of June 22, June 23, August 7, 2012). On August 24, 2012, Koch wrote: “It seems, Kafka saw a Heine volume with the illustrations of the 1838 edition. Having had a look at some reprints, I find the resemblance quite convincing.” In his notes to this letter in his edition of the Briefe 1918–1920 (B3 504), Koch reproduced Eisner’s photograph and indicates that “Möglicherweise” (possibly) Kafka is referring to an edition of Heine’s work and references the illustration of Portia in the 1919 edition (Heine, Shakespeares, 163). I discuss Heine’s entry on Jessica, the other female character from Merchant that he portrayed, in note 51 of this chapter and in Chapter 8. 35. Heine’s name cannot be found in the “Sach- und Namenregister” to Caputo-Mayr and Herz’s exhaustive bibliography of Kafka criticism between 1955 and 1997. 36. This may be one instance where the misunderstanding of the saying “the exception proves the rule” applies. Brod is the Colonel Klink of postwar

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Kafka studies; when one of his interpretations is not simply ignored, it is taken as a sign that its negation would be the better reading. I have been unable to find another critic repeating Brod’s claim. 37. Brod, Heine Artist, 150; Heinrich Heine, 218. 38. I extensively analyzed how the “morphemic-(orthographic)phonemic-semantic” field generated by “Zopf-”—not just its various grammatical forms but also in idioms, aphorisms, and compound words (such as Chinesenzopf or Judenzopf)—not only mediated representations of Jews but also how those representations interwove with those of the Chinese since the seventeenth century in Chapter 2 of my Other Jewish Question, 50 –87. 39. On the problematic conventional translation of 1820s— or 1920s— usage of the German Judentum as “Judaism,” see note 22 of the Introduction. 40. Wolf, “On the Concept,” 219. 41. Gans, “A Society,” 216, 216, 217, 215. 42. The barrier that separates the seating arrangement of men from women in the synagogues of traditionally observant congregations. 43. Hundt-Radowsky, “The Jewish Mirror,” 312. 44. Wolf, “On the Concept,” 220; “Ueber den Begriff,” 24. 45. This (in)famous phrase can be found in his posthumously published collection Gedanken und Einfälle. Although often ascribed to 1823, no exact date can be determined for his apothegm; it is classed among his pre–May 1831 prose notes in the Düsseldorf historical-critical edition of the collected works. 46. Brenner, Jersch-Wenzel, and Meyer, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte 2, 18. 47. Brenner, Jersch-Wenzel, and Meyer, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte 2, 112–15; Kropat, “Emanzipation,” 325–31; Heinemeier, Hesse, 265–72, 275–77. The subsequent account of Kassel’s history is drawn from the latter two sources. 48. Heine here seems to be pointing toward a revision of his friend Karl Marx’s characterization in “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844; i.e., written when both he and Heine resided in Paris) of the anachronistic post-Napoleonic German regime as “the clown of a world order” and as confirmation that the “last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy [just as the] Greek gods, who already died once of their wounds in Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death— this time a comic one—in Lucian’s dialogues” (“Contribution,” 247– 48). Marx’s observation is perhaps better know in the pithy aperçu that opens his 1852 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte “Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (103).

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49. Even those restrictions on Jewish life that had been removed in the post–Elector Wilhelm Hesse-Kassel of the 1830s were restored in the conservative reaction to the 1848 revolutions; Brenner, Jersch-Wenzel, and Meyer, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte 2, 279, 299–300. 50. On Frederick’s maintenance of restrictions and humiliating demands on Jewish life, see Chapter 4. 51. Similarly, in his discussion of the deep affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft) of Germans and Jews, Heine also finds “history” (auf historischem Wege) to be an insufficient explanation; his example: “it was not due . . . to the fact that the Bible, the great family chronicle of the Jews, served as the textbook for the whole Germanic world” (DHA 10:25; “Shylock,” 90). 52. Heine, Rabbi, 43; DHA 5:121. See Chapter 2. 53. In addition to “rat” words, bird imagery also hovered about the case as Lanzer’s fiancée’s surname was Adler (eagle)—a surname shared with the cofounder of the Austrian Socialist party and preceding occupant of Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19, Viktor Adler, as well as with one of the (at the time still) leading psychoanalysts in Freud’s circle, Alfred Adler. Lanzer also mentioned that his siblings had nicknamed him Leichenvogel (carrion crow) because he would make a big show of sympathy whenever someone died and would “religiously” [pietätvoll] attend the burial (RMB 452; cf. ON 526, where Freud glosses Lanzer’s [rejected] offer to join his fiancée when she was visiting her ill grandmother), and that the greatest scare of his life occurred when at age six he was running with the stuffed bird from his mother’s hat and its wings moved (ON 562–63); cf. Mahony, Freud, 74. 54. From the moment Freud began preparing the case for publication he referred to his patient as “Der Rattenmann” (the Rat Man). In a June 3, 1909 letter, Freud informs Jung that “he feels like writing about the Salzburg rat man”; Freud/Jung Letters, 227 ( June 3, 1909); cf. Freud’s June 13, 1909 letter to Sándor Ferenczi, “I am now writing down the Salzburg Rat-Man for the Jahrbuch [für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen],” where it would appear later that year; Freud/Ferenczi Correspondence, 1:67. 55. To explicate why “rats” could symbolize babies, Mahony (Freud, 51n23) notes: “In Viennese dialect, Ratz designates a rat as well as a young child; and in Austria at large, Rätsche means a ‘child’s rattle.’ ” Mahony also addresses the extensive use of “kriechen-” and “biß-” words that evoke respectively, the creeping and biting characteristic of rats (61). 56. Rattenabenteur (ON 540), Rattenmamsell (RMB 434 and n), Rattenschweif (ON 549, 565), Rattenzahns (RMB 434n). Other compound words include two that appear in both the case study and case notes, Rattenidee (rat idea; RMB 421; ON 548, 564) and Rattenwährung (rat currency; RMB

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Notes to pages 101–3

433; ON 548); nine appear in the notes alone (Rattenformel [rat-formula; 554m{argin}], Rattengeschichte[n] [rat-story/stories; 549, 554, 558], Rattenlös[un]g [rat-solution; 564m, 565m], Rattenrede [{the Captain’s} rat speech; 554], Rattesanktion [rat-sanction; 551, 555], Rattenschwanz [rat tail; 564], Rattenszene [rat scene; 569], Rattentheorie [rat-theory; 565], Rattenwünsche [rat wishes; 561]; and six appear only in the case study (Rattendelirium [rat delirium; 433, 438], Rattendiskussion [rat discussion; 434], Rattenerzählung [rat story; 430, 432], Rattenfänger [lit. rat catcher, Pied Piper of Hamlin; 434n], Rattenstrafe [rat punishment; 393, 432, 434, 435, 437, 438{2}], Rattenvorstellung [rat idea; 429, 443, 444]). 57. [ver]heirat[en] (RMB 387, 406, 407 [2], 408, 419, 420, 421, 422, 434, 443 [2], 453; ON 522, 524 [3], 525 [2], 526, 535 [4], 536 [3], 539, 544 [2], 547 [2], 549, 551 [3], 565 [3], 566), erraten (RMB 391, 392, 402, 404, 458; ON 512, 521, 523, 545), geraten (RMB 400, 423, 426 [2]; ON 519, 530), Rätsel[haft] (RMB 400, 409, 415, 430, 456; ON 519), verraten (ON 536, 554, 569), Spielratte (RMB 430, 433), and Rat (ON 526, 565). 58. Mahony, Freud, 52 (emphasis added). 59. This instance apparently catalyzed Freud’s recognition that “The connections which exist between the two complexes of interest in money and of defecation . . . appear to be most far-reaching” in his brief contemporaneous (1908) study of “Character and Anal Eroticism,” 173–75. 60. S. Weiss, “Reflections and Speculations,” 209–10. Weiss cites a 1973 personal communication from his fellow analyst and historian of psychoanalysis W. Niederland. Werner Sombart, in his notorious 1911 anti-Jewish tractate The Jews and Modern Capitalism, also ascribes the origin of this “new trick” in Germany to the Jews: “An innovation of no little importance in the organization of retail trading at the time of its introduction was the system of payment by installments [Ratenzahlung] when goods in large amounts or very costly goods were sold. In Germany, at any rate, it is possible to say with tolerable certainty, that in this, too, Jews were pioneers” (151–52). 61. Mahony (Freud, 96) himself stretches his source, Weiss’s “fact,” to entail “Jews were particularly linked with the introduction of installment buying into the Viennese commercial world.” 62. During this period Freud was pursuing public recognition and scientific legitimacy for the psychoanalytic movement and, as his correspondence with his colleagues testify, he was especially anxious about reminding the intrinsically antisemitic establishment of the Jewish identifications of Freud, many of his fellow psychoanalysts, and a number of his patients. See Geller, On Freud’s, 114 –15 (on the Rat Man case) and passim. 63. When the camera cuts away from a crowd of Jews in the Lodz ghetto to a swarm of rats in a sewer, the narrator of Fritz Hippler’s 1940 Goebbels-

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commissioned antisemitic documentary Der Ewige Jude intones: “Wherever rats appear they bring ruin, by destroying goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel, and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious and underground destruction, just like the Jews among human beings”; cited in D. L. Smith, Less than Human, 139. Curzio Malaparte described a scene outside the walls of the Cracow ghetto where, in the company of GovernorGeneral Hans Frank, he encounters two soldiers firing toward the wall. When asked at what they were firing, they reply: “At a rat.” A moment later: “ ‘Achtung! Look out!’ said the soldier aiming. A black tuft of tangled hair popped out of the hole dug under the wall; then two hands appeared and rested on the snow. It was a child”; Kaputt, 182. 64. Künstlicher, “Horror,” 128–29, 144 – 46, 148, 151–52. 65. My On Freud’s Jewish Body examines Freud’s transferential phantasies catalyzed by his Jewish identification always being en jeu. 66. See Zunz, “On Rabbinic Literature.” 67. See reference in note 38 of this chapter. 68. And perhaps also the wishful forgetting of the anti-Jewish GermanChristian Eating Club (Tischgesellschaft), some of whose former members played leading roles in the culture and society of Restoration Prussia. The Tischgesellschaft’s prohibition of baptized Jews from membership was refracted in the Verein’s own prohibition; converts were neither authentic Christians nor authentic Jews. 69. Regarding pockmarks: a century later German Jewish novelist Jacob Wassermann included a parable in his autobiography My Life as a German and a Jew: “Imagine a laborer who, when he asks for wages, never receives them in full although his work in no way falls below that of his fellow, and whose question as to the reason of such injustice receives this answer [mit den Worten bescheidet]: You cannot demand full pay, for you are pockmarked [blatternarbig]. He looks in the mirror and sees that his face is entirely free of pockmarks. He retorts: What do you mean? I have no pockmarks whatsoever. The others shrug their shoulders and reply: Your record declares you to be pockmarked, so you are pockmarked” (150). Unlike Wasserman’s protagonist, Zunz would proudly retain and exhibit his pockmarks, his Judentum, throughout his career as rabbi and scholar. 70. When clarifying why his opposition between Hellene and Nazarene does not necessarily map onto the opposition between the Christian and the Jew, Heine apothegmatically observes: “The beard does not make the Jew nor the pigtail [Zopf] the Christian” (DHA 11:19; BM 10). 71. See www.wilhelmshoehe.de.

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Notes to pages 106 –7

72. In 1823, Heine was particularly annoyed with Jacobson for failing to provide employment for Heine’s younger brother Maximilian (Meyer) despite his pleas (conveyed by Moses Moser); see, for example, his letters to Moser, HB1 117 (September 30), 123 (November 6), 128–29 (November 28). 73. Other commentators assumed that Simson is modeled after Ludwig Börne. Börne like Heine’s character Simson (and unlike Marcus) was born in Frankfurt. Such was also the concern of Heine’s publisher Julius Campe, who, in the December 3, 1833 letter that announced the imminent publication of Heine’s novel-fragment in the first volume of his Salon, wondered whether Heine had tapped [anzapfen] Börne for his characterization of “the little Simson” as a vindictive rejoinder to Börne’s comments in his Briefe aus Paris (also published by Campe) about Heine. Heine’s possible answer to Campe’s query has not been preserved; however, it has been inferred from Campe’s letter of January 21, 1834 (HB3 245– 46) that Heine had sent him a letter on January 16 in which he was still grumbling about Börne and asked whether Campe intended to publish any more of his rival’s Briefe (the answer was yes). 74. The lion was not mentioned. 75. He was no doubt still carrying the memento given to him by his parents when he left home, his father’s cut-off Zöpfchen (DHA 5:152). The circumcision-evocative severed body part—Simson mentioned the cut-off fox tails from the Samson story—served as a leitmotif in Heine’s uncompleted novel. 76. The Kasseler process of smoking, curing, and preserving pork was not invented until 1880 —in Berlin, by a butcher named Cassel. 77. The allusive play on circumcision cuts even deeper. Since Heine figures the restrictions on the integration of the circumcised into civil society as harmful Hühneraugen (corns) on the “feet of the German state,” the removal of the restrictions would, by extension, be like the excision (Beschneidung; aka circumcision) of corns from feet (also see Chapter 6). 78. This terse summation allows Heine to make a triple pun: “How hearty the late [Eduard] Gans laughed as he pointed out where in the essay the author [Marcus] had expressed the wish for someone to work on this subject [Gegenstand], who is besser gewachsen [with] it” (DHA 14/1:267). While Marcus modestly conceded that these three topics would be better treated with one more familiar (besser gewachsen) with the material, Heine conjoined these with an allusion to Marcus’s shortness (besser gewachsen as one better grown) and to possible impotence (besser gewachsen as one better able to become erect) when working on these circumcised Abyssinian women. And there is the added irony of invoking the brilliant Hegelian scholar Gans. Unlike

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Marcus, Heine’s no-less admired friend Gans opted for baptism at the end of 1825 in order to secure a university appointment. Gans’s conversion also allowed Heine to project onto “the light of Exile,” as Heine once characterized this paragon of the Verein and the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the moral onus and character questions generated by Heine’s own baptism earlier that year. Hence the phrase “besser gewachsen” returns several pages later, with Heine imagining Marcus uttering it about Gans: “Marcus could here just as well complain that Gans nicht besser gewachsen war—was not up to his task” (DHA 14/1:270). 79. Daumer, Feuer- und Molochdienst (1842); Ghillany, Menschenopfer (1842). 80. Marcus, “Ueber die Naturseite,” 417–18. 4. “if you could see her through my eyes . . .”: semitic simiantics What flowed from a Rutgers classroom (Spring 1991) through a Tulane University lecture (April 15, 1993) and into a Centennial Review 38 (1994) article, “Of Mice and Mensa: Antisemitism and the Jewish Genius” (361–85), has resurfaced in an extensively rethought and revised, as well as expanded, copy here. 1. Blüher, Secessio Judaica, 19. 2. Mandelstamm, “Eine Ghettostimme,” 587; cited in Kilcher and Kremer, “Genealogie,” 67. They note that Kafka had a copy of this issue in his possession. 3. In the Other Jewish Question (256 –302), I examine another response to this allegation, Walter Benjamin’s examination of the “mimetic faculty.” 4. “In every country of the world during the past generation [i.e., during the first half of the twentieth century] Jews made contributions to the arts out of all proportion to their comparatively small numbers”; Grayzel, History, 757. Also cf. C. Roth, Short History and Jewish Contribution; Runes, Hebrew; Goldberg, Jewish Connection; Sachar, Course. 5. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 1. 6. Arieti, Creativity. In Jewish Century Slezkine tropes this supposed Jewish particularity as “the Mercurian.” 7. Cf. Bloom, Prodigal Sons. Then again, so are the “neo-cons”; this has led many Jews to out the goyim among that crew; cf. Brooks, “Era of Distortion”; and Lieber, “Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory.” 8. See Gilman, Smart Jews. 9. “Buzzwords,” 6. Does this partly explain the recent 70 percent growth of Seattle’s Jewish population since 2001 ( Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Study”)?

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Notes to pages 111–13

10. For example, Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus (1863); Paul de Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften (1878–81); and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Grundlagen (1899). See Heschel, Aryan Jesus, esp. 26 –66. For Renan, the sign of Jesus’s genius was his ability to overcome his Jewish birth and milieu. 11. Sander Gilman (“Jewish Genius”) addresses Freud’s response to this tradition that denied Jews the capacity for genius. Gilman emphasizes the history of medical discourse on the Jews rather than the context of the Jewish situation in post-Emancipation Europe that is the focus in this chapter. 12. In 1931, Wittgenstein (Culture and Value, 18–19) observes: “Amongst Jews ‘genius’ is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented.” Wittgenstein parenthetically includes himself, “(Myself for instance.),” and then adds: “I think there is some truth to my idea that I really only think reproductively [reproduktiv]. I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else.” Wittgenstein although born and raised a Catholic nevertheless perceived himself as a Jew because of his Jewish forebears (three born-Jewish grandparents)—his mental picture became officially recognized under the Nuremberg Laws in his native Vienna after the Anschluss. 13. See the discussion in Geller, Other Jewish Question, 212–32. 14. Freud employs the phrase, “Jewish national affair” in a letter (May 3, 1908) to his colleague Karl Abraham; Freud and Abraham, Psycho-Analytic Dialogue, 34. Yerushalmi (Freud’s Moses, esp. 40 –60) extensively discusses these accusations. Also see Chapters 3 and 8. 15. Jung, “ Relations,” 149n8; “State,” 165, 166; cf. Jung, “ Rejoinder.” In the May 3, 1908 letter to Abraham, Freud suggests that the adherence of Jung to the psychoanalytic movement shields it from the accusation of ethnic particularity; Freud and Abraham, Psycho-Analytic Dialogue, 34. 16. Cited in Clark, Einstein, 638. See Gimbel, Einstein’s Jewish Science. 17. See Geller, Other Jewish Question, esp. 95–100. 18. Renan, Histoire génerale, 11. 19. Chamberlain, Foundations, 1:254. 20. Dühring, Judenfrage, 61; cited in Pulzer, Rise, 53. 21. Treitschke, “Unsere Ansichten,” 11; “A Word,” 344. Treitschke is referring to Graetz’s claim that opens his (i.e., Graetz’s) chapter on Börne and Heine in History, 5:536 –37. 22. As discussed later in the chapter, Wagner found it impossible for any Jew—and therefore impossible for Heine—to “truly make a poem of his words [redend dichten], an artwork of his doings” (JM 85). While Wagner finds “no need to first substantiate the be-Jewing [Verjudung] of modern art” (JM 82), he discusses Heine specifically at the end of the 1850 essay (JM 99–100).

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23. Wagner characterized the “Viennese jurist [and] great friend of Music” Dr. Hanslick as “—albeit charmingly concealed—[of ] Judaic origin” (JM 104). The 1894 English translation notes Hanslick’s proud claim to being the descendant of a long line of “arch-Catholic peasant sons” in an article in the Deutsche Rundschau (JM 104n). 24. Schnitzler, Road, 55. 25. Le Rider, Modernity; and Harrowitz and Hyams, Jews. 26. See Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, Chapter 3 (“Caftan and Cravat”). 27. For example, Stach (Die frühen Jahre, 232–38) discusses Kafka’s membership during his university studies in the liberal Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten in Prague, which, unlike the other German student organizations that self-characterized as “deutschnational” and excluded Germanidentifying Jews, was inclusive and carried the slogan “deutschfreiheitlich,” promoting attachment with the greater German cultural realm “which even cultured [gebildete], tradition-conscious Jews from the [Prague] Altstadt milieu [like Kafka] could rightly share” (233). Stach suggests that Kafka’s participation in its literature and art division would have led to his engagement with “Zola, Schnitzler, Wilbrandt, Tolstoy, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Ibsen: . . . the Hit List of most borrowed belletristic books” (235) from the organization’s library. 28. Sombart, Wirtschaftsleben, 325; Jews and Modern Capitalism, 271–72. 29. Leroy-Beaulieu, Israel, 178. 30. Bartels, Jüdische Herkunft, 37; cited in Kilcher, “Theater,” 212. 31. Gomperz, “Über die Grenzen,” 384, 386; cited in Reitter, The AntiJournalist, 49. 32. Hundt-Radowsky, Judenspiegel, 90 –91. 33. For more on Mauscheln, also see the Introduction and Chapter 2. 34. Horkheimer and Adorno also address the threat presented by the identification of the Jew with mimesis; however, their understanding of mimesis and its threat differs from that characterized previously. For them, mimesis is the organic survival mechanism that entails the physical adaptation to nature; rather than separate from the external world of nature it is in intimate contact with it. Moreover, it is outside of organized (in what they refer to as the magical phase) and (eventually in the bourgeois mode of production) rational control. As such, mimesis undermines human domination of nature, not only in practice but also in its presumptuousness. Hence uncontrolled mimesis is suppressed and repressed. The repressed mimetic function is falsely projected upon the Jews—and in seeking to suppress the mimetic Jew, the antisemite is able to transgress the prohibition against the mimetic by miming the purportedly mimetic Jews along the model of “Anyone who

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Notes to pages 117–19

sniffs out ‘bad’ smells in order to extirpate them may imitate to his heart’s content the snuffling that takes its unrationalized pleasure in the smell itself. Disinfected by the civilized sniffer’s absolute identification with the promoting agency, the forbidden impulse eludes the prohibition. . . . It makes little difference whether the Jews as individuals really display the mimetic traits that cause the malign infection or whether those traits are merely imputed. . . . [T]he fact that someone is called a Jew acts as a provocation to set about him until he resembles that image [of ‘the Jew’]” (DE 151–53). 35. Oskar Panizza’s 1893 short story “The Operated Jew” (Der operirte Jude) graphically depicts the inevitable failure of Jewish mimicry. See the discussion in Geller, Other Jewish Question, 243– 46. 36. Cf. Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, 162–65. 37. Darwin, Origin, 205; cited in Norris, “Darwin,” 1232. 38. Lombroso, Antisemitismus, 53; cited in Hart, Healthy Jew, 120 –21. 39. Margot Norris (“Darwin,” 1233–34) writes that for Nietzsche “certain organic processes (protective imitation, camouflage, adaptive behavior, morphological resemblance) and intellectual acts (deception, lying, trickery, rationalization, self-delusion) are treated as homologous and analogous.” 40. In Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre, 753; see Essner Nürnberger, 53–54. 41. In the Harzreise (Harz Journey), the first of his Reisebilder (Travel Pictures) Heine stages an encounter with a traveling salesman. Although, the importunate young man is not referred to as a Jew, Heine’s characterization of him strongly suggests that he is Jewish. Like the Jewish used-clothes peddlers who traveled Germany’s back roads of the time, he is wearing “twentyfive brightly colored vests and as many gold signet and engagement rings, broaches, etc.” (DHA 6:92; TP 21). He then not only is said to look like an ape (Affe), but he is also distinguished by the talent most frequently associated with apes: imitation. Incapable of true creativity, “simians” merely copy what they see and hear without awareness of the original’s proper meaning. So Heine comments that the young salesman knew by heart a slew of riddles and anecdotes “which he always cited at the least appropriate moment” (DHA 6: 92; TP 21). 42. Herzl, Complete Diaries, 1:10. 43. Nordau, “I. Kongressrede,” 51. 44. Perhaps initially more by antisemitic writers than Jews; however, in recent years, the article’s depiction of the Western European Jew’s “unathletic [unkonstruktiven] build . . . narrow [hohen] shoulders . . . clumsy [ungelenkte] feet . . . sloppy [weichliche] roundish shape” (Rathenau, “Hear,” 268; “Höre, Israel!” 458) has been repeatedly cited (from Gilman [Jewish SelfHatred, 223] through Boyarin [Unheroic Conduct, 279] to Presner [Muscular

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Judaism, 190 –91]) as an exemplary illustration of the representation of the “feminized Jew.” 45. “Hear,” 267; “Höre, Israel!” 457. 46. Lessing, Jüdischer Selbsthaß, 50; “Jewish Self-Hatred,” 274. 47. Weissenberg, Jüdischer Typus, 329; cited in Omran, Frauenbewegung, 49. 48. Lessing, Jüdischer Selbsthaß, 174, mentions the eponymous collection, Apostata, in which “Sem” appeared, but not the essay itself. 49. See the not-incorrect literal reading of Robertson, “Jewish Question,” 305–6. 50. Harden, “Sem,” 147, 154. 51. Blüher, Secessio Judaica, 19. 52. See his June 30, 1922 letter to Robert Klopstock (Br 380; LFr 330). 53. Let alone familiar with one of the most vicious dismissals of Weininger and his work, in the psychiatrist and pathographer Paul Julius Möbius’s Geschlecht und Unbescheidenheit (Sex and immodesty). In his pamphlet, Möbius suggests that Weininger draws upon the only variety of people, including himself, whom he knows, and that they stand in relationship to healthy, normal people as “white mice do to the grey” (15); cited in Omran, Frauenbewegung, 63. See the discussion of possibly Weiningerian mice later in the chapter. 54. Krojanker, Juden, 138. 55. Baum, “Otto Weininger,” 130. 56. Is pfeiffen the ordinary sound made by Jews? Wilhelm Hauff, in his story “Abner der Jude, der nichts gesehen hat” (Abner the Jew who saw nothing), plays on the preterite form of the verb, “pfiff.” Jews, like Abner, are pfiffig or clever—a talent, particularly in its less savory modality as slyness or Verschlagenheit, that has been hewn by their mistreatment—and it is as consequence of his Pfiffe or whistle that he comes to harm; cited in Griem. Monkey Business, 68. 57. That is, she is not merely an example of one of the Volk, one particular member who could be replaced by any other to illustrate a type. 58. On this connection also see Anderson, “ ‘Jewish’ Music?” 197–99. 59. See, for example, Anderson, “ ‘Jewish’ Music?” 201–2. Anderson sees Kafka’s Kraus reception as his prime mediator of Wagner and Weininger, especially in his “Josephine the Singer,” albeit in a different manner than here. 60. See Kafka’s February 29, 1924 letter to Robert Klopstock (Br 477; LFr 408–9); cf. Anderson, “ ‘Jewish’ Music?” 203– 4. 61. See Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 283–84, on mauscheln, Kraus, Kafka, and this letter; also see Reitter’s critique of Gilman’s reading and his own

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more differentiated analysis of Kafka’s letter in The Anti-Journalist (8–10, 109–11). Perhaps not incidentally, what occasioned Kafka’s reflections on Kraus’s mauscheling was the critic’s Literatur, oder Man wird doch da sehn, his polemic against Franz Werfel’s verse drama Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man) in which the protagonist’s reflection steps out of the mirror and follows/leads him on his subsequent journeys. One of Kafka’s depictions of Werfel’s drama is discussed in Chapter 7 (n40). 62. Kraus’s capacity to mimic mauscheln would lead him to be identified with another literary animal, “Zarathustra’s Ape,” the “foaming fool” who had “gathered something of [Zarathustra’s] phrasing and cadences” and stalked him (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 289). In a notorious and long impromptu lecture performed at Vienna’s Konzerthaussaal (October 25, 1925), Der Affe Zarathustra, Anton Kuh not only vivisected him in the manner that Kraus himself in his public lectures and Fackel articles had other writers, but also indicated how Kraus had in the process aped them —including Heine (26 –27; see the discussion of Kraus’s “Heine” in Chapter 5) and Moritz Saphir (48). 63. “As part of their general Jewish pursuit of German high culture or Bildung, Jews flocked to art music as an avocation and eventually as vocation from the early decades of the [nineteenth] century” (Loeffler, “Wagner’s ‘Jewish Music,’ ” 4); also see J. Katz, “German Culture and the Jews”; Mendes-Flohr, German Jews; Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism. 64. In an essay (“Monkey Business,” 5) accompanying the Theatre for a New Audience’s 2013 production of “Kafka’s Monkey,” an adaptation of “Report,” Timothy Frawley notes, “the story has often been interpreted as an allegory of Jewish assimilation. But . . . ” That tradition began just a few months after its publication when Max Brod, writing in the Prague Zionist weekly Selbstwehr, characterized his best friend’s story as “the most brilliant [genialste] satire of assimilation ever published”; “Literarischer Abend,” 5. 65. Letter to Martin Buber (May 12, 1917), B2 299; LFr 132: “May I ask you not to call the pieces parables; they are not really parables. If they have to have any overall title at all, the best might be: ‘Two Animal Stories.’ ” 66. Nor does Kafka mention M. Pines’s discussion (Histoire, 430 –31) of two of Sholem Aleichem’s animal stories that he found comparable to Abramovitsh’s The Nag: “Methuselah— A Jewish Horse” and “Robchik (A Jewish Dog).” 67. Histoire, 186. As corroboration of his claim that this “allegorical idea” was not new, Pines notes Heine’s “Princess Sabbath.” Heine’s poem is discussed in Chapter 8. 68. Also see Iacomella, “Auswege,” 73–74. 69. Hoffmann, “Educated Young Man,” 272. Roughly contemporaneously the fabulist Wilhelm Hauff published “Der Affe als Mensch (Der junge

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Engländer)” in his 1827 Märchenalmanach. In it a recently arrived stranger (Fremder), whom the petit bourgeois residents of the South German village of Grünwiesel suspect of being either crazy, a Jew, or a magician decides to demonstrate to them how narrow, superficial, and self-satisfied they actually are by introducing into their society a dressed-up orangutan as his nephew from England. The “nephew” is welcomed as a prospective match for their daughters, his incomprehensible utterances rationalized away as English, and his orangutan-true behavior taken as cosmopolitan sophistication to be imitated. Gerhard Neumann, “Affe als Ethnologe,” calls attention to a story written by a sixteen-year-old Gustave Flaubert, “Quidquid volueris,” in which an ape-human hybrid also plays a prominent role and that, in Neumann’s reading, also navigates the human-ape divide to explore the pathology of European social relations and identifications. Neumann (89) concedes that though Kafka held Flaubert in high esteem, he is quite unlikely to have been familiar with the story. 70. See Bridgewater, “Rotpeters Ahnherren,” 458. While Red Peter’s account and his assessment of himself and humans are much less sanguine, Hoffmann’s commentary (Fantasy Pieces, 3) on Jacques Callot’s paintings (and preface to the collection that included Milo’s letter) points to a darker subtext more in line with “Report” ’s sardonic tone: “Irony, which mocks mankind’s wretched endeavors by juxtaposing the human and the animal, resides only in a profound intellect. To serious penetrating views of Callot’s grotesque manbeast figures, irony reveals all the secret meanings that lie hidden beneath the veil of farce.” This statement suggests that the news Milo is transmitting is the hypocritical justification for European colonialism and slave trading. 71. Lobe, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” 54. 72. Kafka wrote “Report” during May and June of that year. 73. Nietzsche, Dawn, 196 (§324); see Kilcher, “Theater,” 207. 74. Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, 208–10. 75. Zweig, Bilanz, 7. 76. Knobloch, “Judenporzellan”; Knobloch includes a photograph of one of the porcelain apes preserved by Mendelssohn’s descendants. Also see Tewarson, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, 19. 77. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, 62 (§24, Add. 3). 78. “The belief that blushing was specially designed by the Creator is opposed to the general theory of evolution, which is now so largely accepted; but it forms no part of my duty here to argue on the general question”; Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 1242. 79. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 1228. 80. Menzel, “Die tiefste Korruption,” 335 (cf. Weiner, Richard Wagner, 253), 337. Menzel then goes on to characterize the physiognomy of the “host

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of [Heine] imitators,” the non-Jewish authors aggregated under the rubric “Young Germany” (junges Deutschland) as that of “an impudent and impotent [durch Lüderlichkeit entnervten] Jewish youth out of Paris, dressed in the latest fashion, totally bored with it all, with a particular stench of musk and garlic” (338). In his 1835 denunciation of “so-called” Young Germany, “Unmoralische Literatur” (348), he characterizes it as “actually a young Palestine” (eigentlich ein junges Palestinä) and a “brood of nasty [gemeiner] Jewish youths.” Exemplifying the Young Germans in both essays are Karl Gutzkow and his 1835 novel Wally die Zweiflerin. In his initial 1835 review of the novel, Menzel asserted that in publishing the novel Gutzkow “took it upon himself to transplant to Germany this French Affenschande that [while] in the arms of prostitutes blasphemes God” (“Wally,” 273). Spalding, Historical Dictionary, 25, credits Menzel with this neologism (but without providing its specific meaning for Menzel) that would eventually be incorporated into an idiomatic phrase “es ist eine Affenschande” or “it’s a crying shame.” Gutzkow’s “scandal” or “shame” of the (notoriously and innately shameless) ape correlates with Menzel’s identification of the Christian-born Gutzkow with those he had characterized as affenartig, the Jews. Also see Steinecke, “Gutzkow,” 122. 81. Trans. Dennis, Inhumanities, 99–100; and Kraus, in Fackel 111 (1902): 29–30. Could Kraus’s supplemental conjunction of jackal and ape have offered a bridge between the protagonists of Kafka’s two Tiergeschichten: the ape Red Peter and the jackals of “Jackals and Arabs”? 82. The 2012 London revival of Cabaret replaced the less offensive line, “She isn’t a meeskite at all”—she isn’t ugly-looking—that had long been substituted for it. 83. Slater, “Russian circus goes ape.” 84. Der Jux (monthly humor supplement), Die Wucherpille 10 (March 10, 1883): 2; cited in Reg. Schleicher, Antisemitismus in der Karikatur, 65. 85. See Griem, Monkey Business. Also see Münch, “Affen und Menschen.” This shift roughly corresponds to Agamben’s distinction between the premodern and modern anthropological machines (see Introduction). 86. According to Mosse, Crisis, 143, Fritsch made this claim in his 1881 work Leuchtkugeln (Fireballs); Hiemer (Jude im Sprichwort, 11) cites a comparable saying from South Germany: “Daß der Mensch nicht sinke herab zum Affen, / Hat Gott zwischen beiden den Juden erschaffen” (Gd created the Jews [so] that mankind does not sink to the level of apes). 87. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 141; cf. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 75. 88. As they were redubbed when the essay was reissued in 1922. 89. Kraus, “Mein Vorschlag,” 20. See the discussion of Kraus’s article as well as its relation to Kafka’s famous comments to Brod about Kraus’s “Mauscheln” in Reitter, The Anti-Journalist, esp. 111–16; also see Lensing,

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“Tiertheater,” 81–82. Eisenberg may also have been offering an inverse allusion to Hauff ’s story (see note 69 in this chapter). 90. The name “Rotpeter” (Red Peter) may also recall the “Schwarze Peter” (Black Peter), the devil-figured card that all the players want to avoid or, if possessed, to get rid of in the like-named game. The central image of “dem Schwarzen Peter”—the fifteenth of the Glöß Verlag’s 31 antisemitic posters that circulated through Europe from the 1890s on—is a card game, in which a number of caricatured European leaders (including from Italy and France) are engaged. The German representative is drawing a card from the Russian’s hand. It is the Black Peter; however, written on it is “Jude” (Gräfe, Antisemitismus, 118). 91. Hence, Adolph von Kleist, then-president of the Berlin Supreme Court, argued in 1864 that the only rational justification for a duel is “manly dignity,” which “requires above all manliness, that is, the consciousness of personal courage. The demonstration of this characteristic seems to us to be the principal aim of the duel”; cited in Frevert, “Bourgeois Honor,” 270; cf. McAleer, Dueling, 145–52. 92. Pawel, Labyrinth, 66 –67. Boyarin (Unheroic Conduct, 307) characterizes the Schmiss, including Herzl’s, as “a mimicry of inscription of active, phallic, violent, gentile masculinity on the literal body, to replace the inscription of passive Jewish femininity on that same body.” I am grateful for Professor Boyarin for taking me to task in the note attached to that passage (307n114) for missing the possible connection between Red Peter’s cheek scar and the Schmiss in my earlier article on the Kafka story. 93. Pichl (Schönerer, 4:427–37) provides an extensive account of the discussion, at the second Waidhofen convention of Burschenschaften ( June 6 –7, 1891), of whether Jews were worthy of “ritterliche Genugtuung” (chivalrous satisfaction) and the official declaration that Jews were unworthy of receiving satisfaction from members of the sixteen Viennese dueling fraternities at their gathering (March 7–11, 1896). 94. Rather than demonstrating that his “ape nature is not yet under control,” it reveals the bestiality of his captors when he informs his audience that the scar was caused by a “wanton shot” (frevelhaften Schuß; DL 302; CS 252); he emphasizes, however, that his word choice is deliberate, perhaps to reassure them that he is judging the shooter and not, as the audience of “Report” may well infer, humankind. 95. The Hebrew word (vav-yod-gimel-ayn) that is translated as the “hollow of [ Jacob’s] thigh” in Gen. 32:25 (or 26) is the same word that is translated as Moses’s (or his son’s) genitals in that nighttime encounter with the Lord that results in Zipporah circumcising their son in Ex. 4:25. 96. “Höre, Israel!” 458, 456.

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97. That is, if one were to read Red Peter as figuring the Jew and to recall that the regnant assumption of the time that circumcision was universal among male Jews—an assumption belied by contemporary practice of many Western and Central European Jews—but would be nonetheless invisible in public spaces hence rendering Jewish or Gentile identification uncertain, any identity of or difference between Red Peter and that journalist would be undecidable. 98. Robertson (Kafka: Judaism, 164 –69) also argues that the application of Darwinian “mimicry” to the discussion of Jewish assimilation relates to Kafka’s story. In his discussion, Robertson notes how earlier criticism by Sokel (Kafka) and Norris (“Darwin”) had acknowledged the importance of imitation to the story but had failed to recognize the specifically Jewish provenance of Kafka’s concern. 99. But not only the oppressors’ image, since this stereotype was shared by, among others, a number of Western acculturated Jews; see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. 100. But not only the oppressors’ image, since this stereotype was shared by, among others, a number of Zionist-leaning Jews; see Bruce, Kafka, 130 –37. 101. Many physicians and social critics, as well as the general public, assumed that Jews by nature lacked any predilection toward what was also a particular form of Gentile male display: alcohol abuse and drunkenness. Jews were not assumed to be able to hold their liquor better than non-Jews; rather they were seen as generally abstemious— especially in the company of Gentiles. See Efron, German Medicine, 108–17. 102. Red Peter repeats Ausweg alone or as part of a construction (“Menschenausweg”) at least eleven times in the course of the story: DL 304 (3x), 305 (2x), 306 (2x), 311 (3x), 312 (1x); CS 253 (4x), 254 (2x), 255 (1x), 257 (1x), 258 (3x). What Hoffmann’s Milo would claim as the “greatest freedom” (“Educated Young Man,” 267), i.e., Bildung, is recognized by Red Peter as but an Ausweg. 103. Leo Lensing (“Tiertheater,” 83), following Andrew Barker, suggests that this human-ape on the variety stage is not just any Jew, but the Jewishborn and Catholic-convert, alcoholic and outré bohemian writer and poet Peter Altenberg. In the January 20, 1910 issue of Schaubühne, a journal known to Kafka, Altenberg published a sketch entitled “The Ape Peter” in which Altenberg and an ape named Peter share the stage. 104. Kafka, letter to Felix Weltsch (end of November 1917; “Report” was published in November 1917): “When you read Maimonides, you might want to supplement it with Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography (edited by Fromer, published by Georg Müller), an excellent book in itself, and a

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harsh self-portrait of a man haplessly torn between East and West European Judaism. But it also summarizes the teachings of Maimonides, whose spiritual child he feels himself to be. But probably you know the book better than I do” (B2 371; LFr 173). The extract is from Maimon, Autobiography, 216; also see the Introduction to this book. 105. On the problematic reversal of the human /animal hierarchical opposition, see Boggs, Animalia, 71. For Margot Norris (“Kafka’s Hybrids,” 23), Red Peter’s “report dramatizes that becoming human and civilized also requires the disavowal of the brutalities of the civilizing process. . . . The ape’s animality is inscribed negatively in his talk, in its silences and omissions, in what he cannot or refuses to articulate rather than in what he actually says.” 106. See Agamben (The Open, 33–38) on how historically the possession of language served as the diacritical difference between human and animal. Also see the discussion in the Introduction to this book. 107. Kafka, Letter to his Father, 77, 79. 108. Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks, 52 (February 25, 1918). 109. See, for example, his “Brotherhood of Poor Workers” (Die besitzlose Arbeiterschaft) (Blue Octavo Notebooks, 56 –57; NS 2:105–6) and his letter to Robert Klopstock (beginning of December 1921; Br 364 –65; LFr 313). 110. Letter to Max Brod (mid-April 1921; Br 317; LFr 273; translation altered). 111. Wilhelm Busch’s 1871 Fromme Helene (Pious Helen) popularized the image of “the Jew with crooked (krummer) heel, / crooked (Krummer) nose and crooked (krummer) legs / snakes his way to the stock market / profoundly corrupted and soulless” (2). 112. See Chapter 2 on how Spiegelman sought to resolve the quandary with which the ethnic and species essentialist reception of Maus confronted him. 113. See Y. Weiss, “Identity and Essentialism,” 50 –51. 114. Walter Benjamin’s comment that heads this section signals this future anteriority; W. Benjamin, “Some Reflections,” 144. Benjamin’s source is Brod, “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” 1213. 5. italian lizards and literary politics i: carrying the torch and getting singed Drawing upon earlier presentations at the German Studies Association annual meeting (October 2010), the University of Graz (April 2011), and the University of Antwerp (May 2011), portions of this chapter appeared as “Eidola or Eidechsen? Kafka Asks Brod Asks Kraus Asks Heine a Jewish Question” (Journal of the Kafka Society of America 33/34 [2009–10; pub. 2011]: 8–18) and as “Leaping Lizards Max: Kafka Asks Brod Asks Kraus Asks Heine a Jewish

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Question: and Not Judith Butler’s” (transversal 12.1–2 [2011]: 75–82). Along the way, Lars Fischer offered helpful comments. 1. “Warnungszeichen,” 5. 2. Dawn, 6 –7 (Preface, 2d ed.). 3. Bruce, Kafka, 30 –33; Liska, When Kafka, 16 –20. 4. Such was the strategy that Schnitzler engaged in The Road into the Open by making the German Gentile composer Georg von Wergenthin the central character, with whom a variety of Viennese Jewish personalities interact and unfold, critically but not unsympathetically, in their complex individuality; see Bruce (“Which Way Out?” 108–9), who also invokes Schnitzler’s novel as a complement to Kafka’s critique of Brod’s novel. On Kafka’s probable familiarity with the work, see Chapter 2 (note 43). 5. Bruce, Kafka, 32. 6. Leroy-Beaulieu, Israel, 194; cited in Gilman, Kafka, 17. It should also be noted that, while lizards are reptiles, not all reptiles are lizards. 7. I did uncover a passage from Carl Spindler’s 1827 novel Der Jude (on this passage, Spindler, and Heine, see Chapter 6). 8. Hortzitz, Sprache; see Chapter 1. 9. She delivered the lecture, sponsored by the London Review, at the British Museum on February 7, 2011. Citations of “Who Owns Kafka” are drawn from the online version. 10. A month after the publication of Butler’s lecture, a separate Konvolut of Kafka’s correspondence with his sister Ottla was purchased for a halfmillion Euros by that self-same Marbach Archive, with a little help from the Baden-Württemberg government and a lot of help (some 50 percent) from Oxford University. 11. Perhaps not coincidentally, as Marbach announced its acquisition of the Konvolut, Israel’s National Library announced a $200 million project to upgrade its facilities to world-class standards. The following May, the Library’s director pledged that, should the court rule in its favor, the Kafka manuscripts would be accessible online. The Court ruled in favor of Israel’s National Library in October 2012, but that decision remains under appeal. 12. See Elif Batuman’s widely discussed and cited (if not by Butler) 2010 New York Times Magazine article, “Kafka’s Last Trial.” 13. The German genitive original, Eidechsen, could literally be translated as “lizards”; however, as all English translations attest, the sense of the phrase dictates the use of the singular in English. Most likely, Butler is paraphrasing Bruce (Kafka, 32): “Kafka’s unflattering analogy . . . likens the Jews to lizards.” 14. Drawn from an October 13, 1917 letter to Brod—although usually cited, by Begley (Tremendous World, 72) for instance, from Hannah Arendt’s citation of it in her “Introduction” (36) to her edition of the English transla-

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tion of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations—the identity of the Volk is not explicitly indicated. After declaring that the task Brod has assigned for him —to make himself well—is utopian, Kafka suggests that it would more likely be accomplished by “an angel hovering over my parents’ marriage bed or even better: over the marriage bed of my people [meines Volkes], assuming I have one” (B2 347; LFr 156). 15. For example, one can also question her authority to make any claims about Franz Kafka after she here betrays the shallowness of her familiarity with the author’s work with this embarrassing admission and insinuating quip: “Apparently, on 25 February 1912, Kafka delivered a lecture on Yiddish, though I have not been able to find a copy. Perhaps it is stuffed in a box in Tel Aviv awaiting legal adjudication.” In fact, the transcript of Kafka’s February 18, 1912 lecture has been available in English since at least 1954 —incidentally from the same volume (Kafka, Dearest Father) in which Kafka’s famous “Letter to His Father,” that Butler frequently invokes, was published for the first time. 16. Kafka: Biography, 101–2; Kafka: Biographie, 126. Incidentally, Brod prefaces that account with a recollection of the day “the young Franz Werfel” accompanied Brod and Kafka for a swim and became terribly sunburned (Kafka: Biography, 100; Kafka: Biographie, 125). See the discussion later in this chapter of the community of fate possibly formed by Brod, Werfel, Kafka, and Kraus. 17. Brod, “Warnungszeichen,” 6. 18. Brod, “Nachruf,” 3. 19. Brod, “Nachruf,” 4. 20. The paucity of “lizard” references in Kafka’s extant writings as well as in critical attention to them is borne out by Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri’s recent edited collection, Kafka’s Creatures, in which “lizard” fails to make the collection’s index, let alone its table of contents. Yarri’s listing of animal references in the English editions of Kafka’s writings records a total of six “lizard” mentions (Index, 282). 21. Earlier that year (1920), during his stay at the Pension Ottoburg in the northeastern Italian spa town of Meran, Kafka reports lizard sightings in two of his earliest preserved letters to his then-new Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, whom he had not yet met. In the first (April 12), the description of his setup becomes a come-on when he observes the local fauna: “lizards [Eidechsen] and birds, unlikely couples [ungleiche Paare], come visit me: I would very much like to share Meran with you” (B3 120; LM 3). In a letter written upon his arrival at the Pension (April 6, 1920) to Max Brod and Felix Weltsch, he had already noted this animal pairing (“birds and lizards [Eidechsen] come close to me”; B3 116; LFr 232), without either the descriptive apposition or

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accompanying solicitation. Kafka, in a brief fragment written in March/April 1917, also paired lizards with snakes in the resting place they made of a long neglected bullfighting arena: “here overgrown with grass, playground for children, there searing with bare stones, resting place for lizards [Eidechsen] and snakes” (NS 1.1:378; Abandoned Fragments, 202). Kafka’s second lizard sighting that he reported to Milena (ca. May 19) was also of an odd couple, a lizard and a beetle. He identified with the latter; however, the lizard’s intervention positively transformed the meaning and implications of that identification: “While I was lying there a beetle [Käfer] had fallen on its back one step away and was desperately trying to right itself; I would have gladly helped—it was so easy, so obvious, all that was required was a step and a small shove— but I forgot about it because of your letter; I was just as incapable of getting up. Only a lizard [Eidechse] again made me aware of the life around me, its path led over the beetle, which was already so completely still that I said to myself, this was not an accident but death throes, the rarely witnessed drama of an animal’s natural death; but when the lizard slid off the beetle, the beetle was righted although it did lie there a little longer as if dead, but then ran up the wall of the house as if nothing had happened. Somehow this probably gave me, too, a little courage; I got up, drank some milk and wrote to you” (B3 144 – 45; LM 12–13). One may wonder how the future Czech translator of Die Verwandlung received this most un-Gregor Samsa–like scene. 22. Brod, Freundschaft 1:86. 23. Brod, Freundschaft 1:90, 91. 24. These sunstruck lizards would also return in Brod’s “Nachruf ” article. 25. Brod, Freundschaft 1:219. 26. Brod, Freundschaft 1:91, 87. 27. That is, more is going on than, as Hartmut Binder (Mit Kafka, 34 –35) has recently suggested, Kafka conjuring this lizard out of his anticipation of Brod and him repeating later that year the idyllic experience they had shared in lizard-infested Riva. 28. Each notebook contains entries written both before and after the March–May window that I’ve suggested for the Brod commentaries; hence these placements in and of themselves do not demonstrate the order of writing. 29. While therefore justifiable, this editorial decision seems all the stranger given that, on the next sheet in Heft A (T 1:37), a comment on the time that had passed since he had last made an entry in the notebook bears the date “15. August” (also included in Brod’s edition) and precedes the “20. August” entry. 30. Franz Blei’s satiric depiction of Karl Kraus as the anti-natural creature “die Fackelkraus” in Bestiarium Literaricum (BL 33–34) achieved much noto-

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riety and wide appropriation— especially among those less kindly disposed to the Viennese critic—after it first appeared in 1920. Also see Lensing, “ ‘Fackel’-Leser”; and the discussion of the Kraus entry in Chapter 2 (note 57) and Chapter 4. 31. Kraus reprinted his lecture both in Die Fackel and as a self-contained publication. 32. Concluding his polemic Kraus facetiously observes: “Heine war ein Moses, der mit dem Stab auf den Felsen der deutschen Sprache schlug. . . . das Wasser floß nicht aus dem Felsen, sondern . . . es war Eau de Cologne” (Heine was a Moses who tapped his staff on the rocks of the German language. . . . The water didn’t flow from the rock, [instead] . . . it was eau de cologne; HC 130/131). While possibly alluding to either what initiated Heine’s attack on Platen in Baths of Lucca, Heine smelling Gumpel’s autographed copy of Platen’s poetry (“scented with that curious perfume not in the least related to eau de cologne”; DHA 7/1:128; TP 139), or to Rathenau’s comment in “Höre Israel” that “two thousand years of misery cannot but leave marks [on the Jews] too deep to be washed away by eau de cologne” (“Hear,” 268), this characterization illustrates Kraus’s answer to the self-posed question of “Was war es bei Heine?” (Which was it for Heine?): “Nicht Tat und nicht Ereignis, sondern Absicht oder Zufall” (Neither deed nor event but intention or accident; HC 130/131). 33. For another instance in which Brod’s relationship with Karl Kraus may have affected his redaction of Kafka’s diaries, see note 41 in this chapter. 34. Kraus, “Selbstanzeige 319–20,” 65: “saloppe journalistische Prosa . . . schäbige Polemik . . . posiert übertünchten Banalitäten.” He also reprinted the relevant sections from the Prager Tagblatt’s very favorable report (“Selbstanzeige 319–20,” 64 –65). The previous issue (no. 317–18) has a February 28 publication date. 35. In the Börne Memorial (DHA 11:43, 47, 50, 52; BM 36, 40, 43, 45) the ancient report functioned as a recurrent lament to the repression, by the Nazarene attitude he saw incarnated in Börne, of the pagan and pantheistic sensibility that Heine himself championed. Indeed, the allusion may well have been to Heine’s specific use of the report because the immediate catalyst for Kraus’s article was Kerr’s attacks on the police chief ’s alleged sexual scandal with the actress wife of the journal Pan’s owner Cassirer that mirrors one of Kraus’s examples of Heine’s “rootlessness” (i.e., Jewishness) and hypocrisy (HC 100 –3): Heine’s innuendos in the Memorial about Börne’s long-term relationship with Jeanette Wohl, the wife of Salomon Strauß. Additional aspects of Kraus on Heine on Börne are discussed in Chapter 6. 36. Or rather a eulogy to the now superseded pose and prose of the “Karl Kraus” he once praised. Also see Halliday, Karl Kraus, 56 –57.

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37. Brod’s poem “Welt-Erleben” (world-experience) appeared on the page opposite the conclusion of what proved to be the first round of responses to Pfemfert’s Kerr Umfrage. 38. Cf. Halliday, Karl Kraus, 58. Responses appeared in Aktion 1.10 –14, 20 (299–303 335–38, 369–71, 397–99, 430 –32, 619–22); Anselm Ruest, who also participated in the Kerr Umfrage, attacked Kraus by name in a separate article “Um Heine” in the June 19 issue of Aktion as well as wrote a favorable review of Die Jüdinnen in Aktion’s next issue. 39. “Brod” is the German word for “bread,” so when characterizing Brod’s intellectual and literary pretensions as fatuous, Kraus observed: “Geist auf Brod geschmiert ist Schmalz” (Kraus, “Selbstanzeige 326,” 36). This may also have been an implicit play on Brod’s Jewish identification. Not all Schmalz that is smeared on bread is lard, but outside kosher circles that would be the assumption. 40. Nothing in Werfel’s poem would have clued in Kraus to Brod’s relationship to this specific work. 41. Brod (Streitbares Leben, 29–30) refers to the “unsterbliche” (immortal) poem by its first line and not by the title it bore in Fackel. In Decisive Years (50), Reiner Stach refers to this juxtaposition and to Brod’s discussion in Streitbares Leben. He also mentions Brod’s manipulation of Kafka’s diaries with regard to an event related to the ménage à trois formed by Brod, Werfel, and Kraus. Kafka notes (on December 18, 1911; T 1:299) that Brod altered a review by Alfred Ehrenstein, a friend of Kraus, of Brod’s December 15, 1911 Berlin performance. Ehrenstein praised the Werfel poems Brod had recited that evening much more than Brod’s own, which he had also read during the performance. Brod elided the discussion of the review from his edition of the diaries (Stach, Decisive Years, 51 and n7). For his part, Brod dismisses Krauspartisan Ehrenstein’s account of the evening in Streitbares Leben (50). Later in his memoir Brod doubly misremembers how his Werfel-mediated feud with Kraus played out in Fackel (96 –97). Brod claims that Werfel’s poems, which had appeared in the same issue as Kraus’s second Kerr polemic (April 29), followed Kraus’s first takedown of Brod. None of Werfel’s work appeared in that June 2 issue of Fackel. Moreover, Brod ascribes to them the placement that “Nächtliche Kahnfahrt” assumed in the July 8 issue—apposite Kraus’s second Brod critique “Zum Vergleich, zur höheren Glorie Werfels” (by comparison, to Werfel’s greater glory). 42. Brod, Streitbares Leben, 98. 43. See Leubner’s commentary in Kraus, “Literatur . . . ” (234 –35); Leubner does not comment on Brod’s reference to the lectures as the “ersten.” 44. Brod writes that Werfel invited Kraus to Prague “without taking into consideration that open opposition existed between Kraus and [himself ]”

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(Streitbares Leben, 98); open hostilities, however, did not begin until some six weeks after the March 15, 1911 lecture. 45. Kraus, “Literatur . . . ,” 232–35; cf. Jungk, Franz Werfel, 25–26. Binder, however, errantly claims (Kafka’s Wien, 190 and n404) that the first meeting may have been as early as the December 1910 Kraus lecture in Prague; he mistakenly dates the letter from Kraus to Otto Stoessl as December 9, 1910 rather than December 9, 1911, as cited in his source, Leubner’s commentary to Kraus’s Literatur oder Man wird doch da sehn (Literature or you ain’t seen nothing yet; 234). In Kafkas Wien, Binder extensively details the quarrel between Brod and Kraus (189–205); he presents his discussion as indicative of one factor shaping Kafka’s “gloomy picture” (düstere Bild) of Vienna. 46. Was there perhaps another literary encounter with lizards, although not in Italy, with which Kafka may have been familiar. Could Kafka’s love of travel accounts have led him to hitch a ride on Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle? In that work, Darwin describes his encounter with one member of the “remarkable genus” (Voyage of the Beagle, 260) of burrow-dwelling lizards Amblyrhynchus in the Galapagos: “I watched one for a long time, till half its body was buried; I then walked up and pulled it by the tail; at this he was greatly astonished, and soon shuffled up to see what was the matter; and then stared me in the face, as much as to say, ‘What made you pull my tail?’ ” (262). While Kafka does not specifically mention the work, he does recommend to Oskar Baum in a January 1923 letter (Br 428; LFr 368) that if his son Leo does not like the books that he sent him on the occasion of becoming Bar Mitzvah, then Leo could exchange them for others in that series of travel and adventure books. He mentions Darwin by name, and an abridged German translation of Voyage of the Beagle (Eine Reise um die Welt) was in that series. 47. Goethe, Italian Journey 22; Italienische Reise, 26. 48. Kafka’s estimation of Goethe’s travel account is also reflected in a letter to his sister Ottla, written from Riva on September 28, 1913. Kafka glosses his visit to nearby Malcesine by referring to Goethe’s adventure there: “You would know about it if you had read the Italian Journey, which you ought to do soon” (B1 287). 49. “In this regard, I would like to hold up Goethe’s Italian Journey as an example, seeing as we all know the land of Italy either through our own observations or through secondhand reports. And so we can readily observe how everyone perceives the same through his own subjective vision, . . . Goethe takes in everything with his clear Greek eyes, the darkness and the light, never coloring things with his state of mind and portraying land and people in their true outline and coloring, the hue with which God dressed them” (DHA 6:147; TP 75–76).

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Notes to pages 150 –52

50. Brod, Heine Artist, 228. 51. Brod, Heine Artist, 150 (translation modified); Heinrich Heine, 217. 52. Brod, Heine Artist, 150. 53. Brod, Kafka Biography, 192. Brod compares the last letter that Kafka wrote his parents from his deathbed to the letters Heine had sent to his mother from his “final sickbed” (Matratzengruft; Kafka Biographie, 209). 54. Brod, Heine Artist, 187; Heinrich Heine, 270. The English translation included the original German verses. 55. Brod, Heine Artist, 187–88, cf. 238; Brod, Heinrich Heine, 270 –71, cf. 343. 56. Brod, Streitbares Leben, 36 –37, 40, 86. 57. That the lizards be recognized as (virtually) indigenous to the region was apparently quite important to Heine. According to the critical apparatus of the Düsseldorfer Heine Ausgabe (7/1:660), the lizards were initially scheduled to make their appearance immediately after Heine crossed the border into Italy and was struck by the nobility of those Teutonic totems, pine trees (Tannen), rising from the depths of the valley up the mountain face. Lizards were to emerge from faults in the cliff at night and mock the presumption of these relatively ephemeral pines to compare themselves to the mountains that would long outlast them. The lizards were replaced with another Jewish-associated beast, “die hämischen Käutzlein” (malicious screech owls; DHA 7/1:26). Ironically, the Yiddish homophone of hämisch signifies what is homey or familiar rather than what is malicious. 58. Freud, Moses, 90. 59. Heine may also be alluding to that less domesticated philosopher, Solomon Maimon, who, as quoted in the Introduction, saw himself viewed by other learned persons as “a speaking animal” (ein redendes Tier) and played with “as one is apt to do with a dog or a starling [Star] that has been taught to speak a few words” (Maimon, Autobiography, 216). Nearly a century later, Kafka delivers the portrait of another animal who had entered the ranks of the professionally engaged Promovierten, “the new advocate” Dr. Bucephalus, of whom “There is little in his appearance to remind you that he was once Alexander of Macedon’s battle charger” (DL 251; CS 414 –15). Conditions perhaps have changed, since “With astonishing insight people tell themselves that, modern society being what it is, Bucephalus is in a difficult position, and therefore, considering also his importance in the history of the world, he deserves at least a friendly reception.” Though there are still “plenty of men who know how to murder people [and] many carry swords,” the narrator adds: “but only to brandish them.” Nevertheless, he imagines, “perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done”: retreat into the study and just “read[] and turn[] the pages of our ancient tomes” (DL 252; CS 415). Un-

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like Maimon (or another famous horse, Mr. Ed) Bucephalus is not heard speaking. 60. The allusion would be to an earlier literary canine savant, the eponymous protagonist of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Nachrichten von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza” (A Report on the Latest Adventures of the Dog Berganza; 1814 –15/1819). 61. The exodus from Egypt (minus the crocodiles) is of course invoked during the seder scene in “Rabbi von Bacherach” (DHA 5:112, 114; Rabbi, 25, 28), as it is in the account of Moses Lump’s Shabbat dinner in Baths (TP 128–29; DHA 7/1:117) and “Das neue Israelitische Hospital zu Hamburg” (The New Israelite Hospital in Hamburg) (DHA 2:117); in Concerning the History (DHA 8/1:77; History, 364 –65), it is Jehovah who is reared among Egypt’s crocodiles before becoming “a little god-king in Palestine among a poor shepherd people.” In the Englische Fragmente (English Fragments) that he published along with The City of Lucca, Heine paraphrases this passage and specifically mentions the two thousand years that they have, playing on his characterization of them as the seemingly living dead, sich vermummen (masked themselves) in every land (DHA 7/1:263). During his walk through the Judengasse in Frankfurt that opens the Börne Memorial, old lice rather than crocodiles are tied to the Egyptian origins of the Jews (DHA 11:30; BM 21); however, Heine later contrasts the Jews for whom the Bible is their Vaterland (fatherland; DHA 11:38; BM 31) with hieroglyphenwimmelnde Egypten (hieroglyph-swarming Egypt; DHA 11:39; BM 31). 62. It was my encounter with Willi Goetschel’s discussion of these hieroglyph-sprouting lizards (“Nightingales,” 142– 46) that helped crystallize this configuration of Kafka and Heine, lizards and Jews. 63. See Chapter 3; also see Geller, Other Jewish Question, esp. 76 –84. 64. Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 154. Though Herodotus (Histories 2.104.3) refers to the Syrians of Palestine, Josephus understood him as referring to the Jews. 65. Käfer, Versöhnt ohne Opfer, 100 –10. 66. See Pabel, Heines Reisebilder, 209–15. Pabel also ties this section to Goethe’s indifferentism, which, incidentally, was the foil for Brod’s own aesthetic stance while writing Die Jüdinnen in 1911. 67. Heine, DHA 8/1:57; History, 334 –35. 68. Heine, DHA 8/1:187; Romantic, 203. 69. On the function of Spinoza as a model, see Geller, Other Jewish Question, 32– 49. Also Goetschl, Spinoza’s Modernity, 253–76; Rose, Jewish Philosophical Politics, 200 –71; and Schwartz, First Modern, 55–79. 70. Heine, DHA 8/1:57, cf. 111; History, 334, cf. 408. 71. Heine, DHA 8/1:57; History, 334.

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72. Pörnbacher (“Kommentar zu Zur Geschichte,” 953) references Schelling’s 1809 Philosophische Untersuchungen, 445, as the object of Heine’s paraphrase. 6. italian lizards and literary politics ii: deer i say it After my presentation on Kafka’s Eidechsen at the 2010 German Studies Association annual meeting, a member of the audience asked me what I thought about the animal protagonist of another German Jewish writer: Felix Salten’s Bambi. This chapter is in large part a follow-up to my response then: “Say what?!” 1. Ein Hirsch bleibt ein Hirsch, / Ob er steht oder lauft, / Ein Jud’ bleibt ein Jud’, / Wenn man ihn hundertmal tauft; Hiemer, Jude im Sprichwort, 101. 2. Pabel (Heine’s Reisebilder, 209–15) also references Proverbs in his discussion of the lizard chapters. 3. See Hildebrand, Emanzipation und Versöhnung, 177–84. Hildebrand (180n24) sees his reading as an extension of Ralph Martin’s excavation (Wiederkehr der Götter) of a Novalis stratum beneath this encounter in the Apennines; however, Martin focuses on Novalis’s Hymnen der Nacht (Hymns of the Night) and leaves Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs unmentioned. 4. It is in the ancient Egyptian town of Sais where, according to Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, that the Greek legislator Solon learns the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. Novalis’s work (written 1798–99) drew from Plutarch’s account of the shrine of Isis that was built about her veiled statue as mediated by Friedrich Schiller’s 1790 essay “Die Sendung Moses” (The legation of Moses; it contended that Moses derived the Law from the Egyptian Mysteries and not Sinai) and 1795 poem “Das verschleierte Bild zu Saïs” (The veiled statue of Isis). 5. Novalis, Die Lehrlinge, 92. 6. Heine, DHA 8/1:195; Romantic, 217. Though the hyacinth comes in various colors, that Heine characterizes her hyacinth tresses as golden is yet one more piece to be added to this configuration of Hirsch-Hyacinth, Eidechsen, Novalis, Judentum, and so on. 7. Heine, DHA 8/1:192–97; Romantic, 213–19. 8. Susanne Lüdemann (“ ‘Ganz wie seinesgleichen,’ ” 232–33) connects the naming of Hirsch-Hyacinth to Novalis’s fable but neither of them to the Luccan lizards. She also sees the rationale of Heine’s transgression of category-boundaries (Gattungsgrenzen), especially between identified opposites, in the Baths of Lucca as indicating that Jewish assimilation can only produce monsters rather than, as suggested in this study, intervene tactically in the oppression that practices of identification promote and maintain.

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9. Charles Godfrey Leland, the translator of the 1855 English edition, picks up Heine’s specifically Old Testament allusion with his translation of Feuerlilje as ‘burning bush’ (Pictures, 308). 10. Later, Hirsch relates the tale of “Nummero 1538” and how, even when he will meet his Maker, it would iconically testify to his honesty (Ehrlichkeit; TP 143– 44; DHA 7/1:132–33). 11. Hirsch-Hyacinth then proceeds to contrast himself with the everyday religious and unreflective Hamburg Jew. His self-differentiation culminates with a humorous anecdote about a humble peddler who typifies Hamburg Jewry, Moses Lump (TP 128–29; DHA 7/1:117). This anecdote is discussed in Chapter 8. 12. Bambi initially appeared as a series of chapters in Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse beginning August 15, 1922 before its 1923 publication by Ullstein. 13. At least before Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” topped the Billboard charts in 1949. Incidentally, both the song and the story from which it was adapted were written by American Jews: the brothers-inlaw Johnny Marks and Robert L. May, respectively. 14. The English translator, Whittaker Chambers (now mostly remembered for the infamous “Pumpkin Papers,” five strips of microfilm purportedly containing evidence of Alger Hiss’s espionage activity, that helped propel the first-term U.S. Representative Richard Nixon to national prominence) translated Hirsch as elk, a North American cervid that at the time was thought to be a subspecies of the European red deer Salten was familiar with. 15. On Salten’s admiration of Herzl, see Eddy, Felix Salten, esp. 64 –68; Neubauer, “Felix Salten,” 132–34; Rem. Schleicher, “Felix Salten,” 34, 38–39. 16. Eddy, Felix Salten, 270, 281. 17. He had sold the film rights to Bambi to the American film producer Sidney Franklin in 1933 for a thousand dollars; Franklin in turn passed the rights to Walt Disney in 1937. Disney, in promising to pay Salten an additional four thousand dollars, also acquired the film rights to his other animal novels; however, for a variety of reasons, payment was delayed. And after the phenomenal success of the cinematic adaptation of Bambi in 1942, Disney reminded Salten that it was no longer his as “after Felix Salten” flashed on the margins of the film and subsequent print publications of “Walt Disney’s Bambi.” 18. Eddy, Felix Salten, 288. Since 1933, the Swiss Writer’s Union (Schweizerischer Schriftsteller-Verband) had, in order to limit the competition, virtual veto power over the employment conditions and therefore the residency possibilities of would-be immigrant non–Swiss German writers. Writers of Jewish descent such as Albert Ehrenstein, Alfred Polgar, Richard

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Notes to pages 157–59

Beer-Hoffmann, and Else Lasker-Schüler were either denied asylum outright or expelled after brief stays; Rutschmann, “Felix Saltens,” 86 –88. 19. Eddy, Felix Salten, 299–300. 20. Eddy, Felix Salten, 178–79. 21. The reader only learns of his “rescue” by Er during the razzia from Faline’s brother Gobo when he returns to the forest months later (BE 153; discussed later in the chapter); it is not depicted in the account of the razzia itself. 22. Perri is responding to Geno and Gurri’s conclusion that any possible reason behind Er choosing one time to be a curse and another to be a blessing for the forest creatures ever remains a mystery. Rutschmann (“Felix Saltens,” 88–89) sees this as possibly reflecting the refugees’ perspective on the unpredictability of Swiss decisions to offer or not to offer asylum. 23. Deer were to be spared because the hunters were employing shotguns rather than the weapons appropriate for Hochwild: rifles. 24. Because of the suffering (Quälerei) they cause to the captured animal, traps are characterized by the Hunter as abusive means for the hunt unless absolutely necessary—for example, to capture a predator that has been behaving outside the law of the forest (bzw. outside the conduct proper to the species) like the one-eyed fox (BK 146). 25. This was already implicit in the narrator labeling him a Landstreicher, a wanderer without a fixed abode and always already assumed to be disorderly and criminal. 26. In Salten, Gute Gesellschaft, 19; cited by Eddy, Felix Salten, 168; cf. 167–68, 200 –1, on Salten’s love of both animals and the hunt. 27. On the other hand, as part of his apprenticeship the young man is allowed to hunt squirrels and other small creatures that the Hunter does not allow himself to pursue. Moreover, the motives behind some of the prohibitions appear to be more commercial than ethical: When the apprentice kills a ferret (Marder), the Hunter points out, on the one hand, its summer fur is worthless, but, on the other hand, had it been allowed to live until winter, it could have unfortunately led to the death of several beautiful pheasants (BK 144). Whether, the latter cost would have been to the forest ecosystem or the Hunter’s income is unclear. 28. As opposed to hunter (Jäger). 29. There is, indeed, a correlation between the actions of Nero (and the cat; both discussed later in the chapter) and the young man; however, it is not as Bruce (“Which Way Out?” 119) suggests: that “The analogy to the abuse of power by young Nazi brutes in the late 1930s is obvious.” Salten never indicates that the apprentice is possessed by the “Wolfstrieb” (BK 100) and “Blutrausch” (BK 104)—phrases that apparently evoke the Nazis for

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Bruce—that overcome Nero; rather, he is an adolescent male overcome by self-importance, the desire to prove himself, insecurity, and testosterone. 30. Earlier in the novel, Nero is described as “fiebernd vor Jagdeifer” (feverishly eager for the hunt; BK 109). 31. Cf. BK 115: Faline labels him an “alien murderer” when he chases after her son Geno. 32. The Hunter decides that killing Nero is a waste of good dog flesh and instead sprays him with enough buckshot to lightly wound and put the fear of Gd in him. 33. When the marten dies, the narrator announces that peace (Ruhe) is restored to the forest (BK 144). 34. Bruce (“Which Way Out?” 118) takes her lead from Bambi’s “All of us here in the forest are refugees when Er comes” (Wir alle hier im Wald sind Flüchtlinge, wenn Er kommt; BK 149, emphasis added) to argue that Bambis Kinder is commenting on “times like these,” i.e., 1940. Yet, not only does her original citation omit “im Wald” thereby implicating a “here” outside the novel and drawing upon associations more generated by the depiction of “Er” in Bambi than in Bambi’s Children, but its context is ignored. In that scene, Bambi is immediately responding to the one-eyed fox’s whining justification for his vicious, unconscionable acts: “I am nothing but a poor refugee [nichts als ein armer Flüchtling]!” He further amplifies this pathetic defense in his response to Bambi: “But I, I am ever hounded [gehetzt], ever pursued [verfolgt]!” (BK 149). Bambi rejects that persecution complex and its affective companion hate as bad modes of being in the world. As he prepares to enter his apprenticeship with his father Bambi, Geno reminds her sister: “we need not always flee. Agreed, we are defenseless; there are good reasons for us to stay alert and to consider flight. Still, on occasion there is rescue; we brave the danger” (BK 163). 35. Bruce, “Which Way Out?” 112–17; Kafka, 192–93: “an allegory of Jewish history with a Zionist message.” Also see Reitter’s far more nuanced “Bambi’s Jewish Roots.” Cartmill (A View to a Death, 166) suggests a different Judentum-associated shading to Bambi with his citation of John Chamberlain’s 1928 New York Times review: “Throw away your Spinozan tomes on pantheism and read Bambi.” 36. In Bambi’s Children, a female Hirschin is also called a Königin (queen; BK 73). 37. Hence while “In Zionist discourses, the idolized leader Theodor Herzl was often referred to as ‘the King’ or ‘the Prince,’ ” and while “Salten greatly admired Herzl,” the text belies Bruce’s inference that “Bambi replaces his father and becomes the King of the Forest himself ” and is an “idealized Herzl figure” (Kafka, 193). Another aspect of Salten’s autobiography may also have

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Notes to pages 161– 62

been at play; the bourgeois journalist and writer frequented the aristocratic social circles of class-conscious imperial Austria. This experience (rather than Zionist utopian ideals suggested by Bruce [“Which Way Out?” 114]) may well have been refracted in the frustrated encounter between Bambi and one of the Könige, where the stag’s stand-offishness is perceived as haughtiness by Bambi but is revealed, via the stag’s internal monologue, as motivated by custom (“How stupid never to speak to people we don’t know”) and fear that he’d “say something stupid and make [him]self ridiculous” (BE 141). 38. Salten drew not only upon his extensive hunting experience in forests but upon Alfred Edmund Brehm’s widely popular natural historical 10-volume work Tierleben; Lehnemann, Motivgleiche Tierromane, 219–26. 39. Salten’s concern about human bestiality toward animals led to his opposition to abuses of and the unnecessary suffering caused by animal experimentation; Ehneß, “Zur Anthropomorphosierung,” 97–98. 40. See Chapter 8’s discussion on the “bestial” as specifically characteristic of the human animal. 41. Correspondingly, the nonhuman animals are not depicted by the terms employed by hunters; Lehnemann, Motivgleiche Tierromane, 84. 42. Pace Bruce (“Which Way Out?” 114), where she suggests otherwise: “ ‘MAN,’ ‘HE,’ ‘Er,’ as he is called.” 43. With one implicit exception that is discussed later in the chapter. 44. “A ferret had caught [gejagt] a mouse” (BE 17; BG 18); the moles “when they are in good humor . . . chase [jagen] one another” (BE 49; BG 55). 45. Bruce, “Which Way Out?” 113 and n51; cf. Reitter, “Bambi’s Jewish Roots,” 39. Verfolgen, however, is also a common hunting term. In Bambi’s Children, when the Hunter, in order to maintain the balance of the ecosystem, begins hunting down the one-eyed fox that had been viciously preying on all of the forest’s inhabitants, the narrator comments (BK 146): “the pursuer [Verfolger] of defenseless creatures became one of the pursued [Verfolgter].” 46. Eddy, Felix Salten, 212. See Rem. Schleicher, “Felix Salten.” 47. Dickel, “Ein Dilettant des Lebens,” 176 –85; Eddy, Felix Salten, 143– 44; Bruce, Kafka, 24 –25. 48. See the entry of January 23, 1914 (T 1:626; D2 13) on “the girls’ enjoyment of the Salten-Schildkraut lecture.” They were not alone; it was the best attended and judged by the organizers as the most successful such event that year (Neubauer, “Felix Salten,” 136). Kafka also planned on attending the January 16, 1913 Bar Kochba–hosted evening in which Salten shared the stage with Buber; January 16, 1913 letter to Felice (B1 42; LF 157). 49. Perhaps even upstaged Buber: “As one participant wrote, ‘the evening was successful . . . mostly because Salten gave a brilliant performance’ ”; cited by Reitter, “Bambi’s Jewish Roots,” 38.

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50. Dickel (“Ein Dilettant des Lebens,” 179): “the servility, that shrinks before the arrogance of the cultural establishment.” 51. Herzog (“Vienna Is Different,” 116) ignores how Er is indiscriminate in Er’s object of persecution and killing when she delimits as a possible “cipher for the Jewish people, with a shared history of persecution” to the deer. 52. Bruce (“Which Way Out?” 115) finds resonances of these critiques in Salten’s subsequent account of his trip to Palestine, Neue Menschen auf alte Erde. 53. This singular use of the third-person plural pronoun to refer to Er would appear to have escaped the proofreader’s eyes. 54. See Herzog, “Vienna Is Different,” 116 –17; Völpel, “1928 The first issue,” 490. 55. Chambers translation, “He did not recognize her [i.e., Marena]” (BE 179), not only errantly presents Gobo’s last words as narrative description, he also transforms Gobo’s deluded attempt to understand why he was shot into a statement of his catastrophic condition. 56. Der Alte sadly addresses him as “You poor thing” (Unglücklicher; BE 162; BG 184); cf. BE 171–72; BG 193. 57. By contrast, the Hunter’s dog in Bambi’s Children (84 –85) is given a name, Hektor, and is not characterized in any of these negative ways when he is fulfilling his role of helping the Hunter track down and capture the cat. 58. The reader is only informed of Er’s home life and “compassionate” side from the naïve and dependent Gobo’s account and not by the narrator. 59. In addition to Bambi’s Children, see especially Gute Gesellschaft. 60. Or their “noble relatives” (BE 87; BG 99), the red deer: Reitter (“Bambi’s Jewish Roots,” 40) suggests that Bambi’s characterization of the mating call of the male red deer—”Their deep voices rolled towards him like the mighty moaning of noble maddened blood whose primal power [Urkraft] was giving utterance to longing rage and pride” (BE 87; BG 98)—invokes the call to deracinated Western Jewry for “greater self-consciousness and spiritual renewal” made by Buberian cultural Zionism. 61. While, with the exception of the pheasant couple Jonello and Jonellina, the roe deer are the only nonhuman animals in Bambi that have personal, non-species-identifying names, other prominent nonhuman animal characters, the Hare (aka Friend Hare), the Screech-Owl, and the Squirrel, are individualized. Yet, given that the fox is as subject to the predations of Er as the other forest dwellers, where would he be positioned in an allegorical reading? 62. Kraus, “Rabbits,” 107. Kraus then adds: “In any case, he’s there because of the greenery [des Mooses wegen],” to which the editor notes “An untranslatable pun in the original . . . Moos (moss) in German slang also mean

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Notes to pages 164 – 66

‘money’ ” (108). Kraus thereby evokes the traditional anti-Jewish stereotype that pecuniary gain underlies any Jewish endeavor. 63. Kraus, “Rabbits,” 107. 64. In an extraordinarily fanciful line-by-line analysis of the conversation from Fifteen Rabbits, a portion of which Kraus extracted in his “Glosse,” Widar Lehnemann (“ ‘Jüdelnde Hasen’ ”) finds numerous possible correlations between its language use and grammar and Yiddish and Hebrew speech patterns as well as apparent allusive identifications of rabbits and Jews (such as the Yiddish tradition of the “Hasenklage,” in which persecuted rabbits symbolize the plight of the Jews; on the medieval iconography of the hare-hunt /Hasenjagd see Chapter 1 [n46]) as well as to Psalm 90:10. Though Lehnemann observes that the rabbits may be taken for “petty bourgeois Jews in exile” (462), he does not view the novel, taken as a whole, as an allegory. Dickel (“Ein Dilettant des Lebens,” 401–2) rightly critiques Lehnemann for, if not sharing its proscriptive intent, uncritically accepting Kraus’s claim about the Jewish character of the passage as well as questioning whether Salten, who neither had a traditional Jewish education nor sufficient familiarity with Hebrew and Yiddish, was in a position to mimic such a “Jewish” exchange. 65. Perhaps it was out of recognition of the subtlety of any possible Yiddish inflection to Iwner’s exchange with Hops that led Gilman (Jewish SelfHatred, 234 –35) to translate Kraus’s title as “Yiddish-accented Hares” even as he included the piece in the canon of works indexing “the idea that the Jews possess a special, base language.” Reitter (The Anti-Journalist, 224 –25 n126) takes Gilman’s deployment of his interpretive algorithm on Kraus’s gloss to task. 66. See Chapter 4’s discussion of Judentum and mimesis. 67. No firearm was observed next to the body of the dead poacher (BE 217–18; BG 245– 46). 68. Bruce, “Which Way Out?” 116. 69. See, for example, Lehnemann, Motivgleiche Tierromane, 69. 70. Chambers’s translation, unlike the original (Der entblößte Hals des Wildschützen war von einer Wunde durchbohrt; BG 245), errantly displaces the wound site (“The poacher’s shirt, open at the neck, was pierced . . .”). 71. Heine letter to Wolf/ Wohlwill (April 1, 1823), HB1 71–73. 72. Scheithauer, “Land der Philister,” 288–89. 73. Saphir, Humoristische Schriften, 1:22; cited by Scheithauer, “Land der Philister,” 299–300. 74. “Israelite” refers to the descendent of the Israelites of the Old Testament and thus other than the Gentile to whom the Gospel is eventually brought, while the “Mosaic religion” is the other of the Christian religion.

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Similarly, “Leichdörner” comes from the Middle High German and refers to “thorns in the flesh.” 75. On the Christian-German Eating Club, see, for example, Nienhaus, Tischgesellschaft; also Geller, Other Jewish Question, 218–19 (on Clemens Brentano’s “Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte”), 147– 48 (on Achim von Arnim’s “Über die Kennzeichen des Judenthums”). 76. Panizza (“Der operirte Jud’, ” 268, cf. 268; “Operated Jew,” 50; cf. 51): “a scheene Hut” (“a bootiful hat”). Also see the discussion in Althaus, Mauscheln, 147–55. 77. Metzger, “300 Jahre Charlottenburg.” 78. Spindler, Der Jude, 1:21; cited by Gubser, Literarischer Antisemitismus, 131. 79. Heine may have encountered another Jewish-associated Eidechs(e)— Karl Boromäus Alexander Sessa initially hid his authorship of the anti-Jewish Posse (farce) Unser Verkehr (Our Gang) beneath the Jewish-ish pseudonym “Samson Eidechs” that implicated the author in the title’s use of the firstperson plural (Unser or our) and therefore provided a veneer of verisimilitude to the farce. It was only after Sessa’s death, soon after his play’s first (February 11, 1813) performance and quickly curtailed run in a Breslau theater, that his actual name became attached to his work (M. Richter, Sprache jüdischer Figuren, 158). Heine’s familiarity with Sessa’s work, if not with his pseudonym, is apparent from Heine’s own commentary on the Berlin theater scene in Harz Journey. In the first edition (but not subsequent ones), Heine refers to an actor by the name of “Angeli,” who is loved by the masses for uttering such trademark lines (from Unser Verkehr) as “Jeder Zoll ein Lump” ([he’s] every inch a scoundrel). He insists that the substitution of “Angeli”—the famed Berlin comic actor whom Heine claims not to have yet seen perform —for (Albert Aloys Ferdinand) “Wurm,” who was very well known for his performance of Sessa’s “protagonist” Jacob, was strictly accidental (DHA 6:347, 577, 639). In Baths of Lucca (DHA 7/1:150; TP 158), Heine recommends that Wurm play “Oedipus” in any staging of The Romantic Oedipus, August von Platen’s attack on him and Karl Immermann—in other words, if Platen cast the role with a character like Platen himself, that is, with an inverted Oedipus. 80. Kraus (HC 99, 101) claims that Heine primarily cites extensive passages from Börne’s writing in order to convey, instead of content, the impression that he is primarily a prolix prattler—a characterization Kraus finds much more fitting of Heine. Kraus also objects to the moralizing tone the “immoral” Heine takes about Börne’s relationship with Jeanette Wohl. 81. Kraus (HC 99) also faults Heine for ascribing to Hirsch-Hyacinth the “ganz famillionär” (DHA 7/1:112; TP 124) relationship with Rothschild

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rather than to another bearing the initials H. H., Heine himself, who had endeavored to pal around even more with the wealthy financier. 82. Immermann contributed several epigrams (some employed) to Heine’s second volume of Travel Pictures; the appearance of a poem, employing the genre (ghazal) that Platen favored, written by a well-known satirist and embedded in a work by an even more notorious satirist was the purported catalyst for Platen’s vitriol. Soon after the appearance of The City of Lucca (May 2, 1831), Immermann wrote Heine (HB3 82) that “Über das Gespräch der Eidexen schrieb ich Ihnen ja wohl schon früher meinen Jubel; diese Bestien sind klüger als die meisten Kosmogonisten” (I should have written to you earlier about my jubilation over the conversation with the lizards; these beasties are cleverer than most cosmogonists [i.e., than those self-proclaimed philosophers who would explain how the universe began and how it works]). Immermann included a parody, Waldmärchen, of German Romantic fairytales, including Novalis’s tale of Hyacinth and Rose Petal, in his epic satiric novel Munchhausen (1839). Immermann’s forest fable even included a singing lizard that, like Novalis’s, “mit dem Schwänzchen wedelte” (waved its little tail). 83. Heine’s publication of his acid-tossing response to Platen’s antisemitic caricature fills the concluding chapters of Baths. The splashback probably harmed Heine’s reputation more than his target, and he began feeling it almost immediately after its publication. 84. Kraus’s witticism also plays on Heine’s mocking of Platen’s slander that Heine, “after spending several hours writing love songs, I sit myself down and hasten to circumcise [beschneide; that is, clip] ducats” (DHA 7/1: 149; TP 157–58). 85. Kraus’s “Heine” may have mediated another “unlikely conjunction” of Kafka, Heine, and lizard. Could Kafka have caught Kraus’s allusion to a passage from Heine’s Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski in Kraus’s answer to the self-posed question of “Was war es bei Heine?” (Which was it for Heine?), namely that it was “Nicht Tat und nicht Ereignis, sondern Absicht oder Zufall” (Neither deed nor event but intention or accident; HC 130/131)? The latter pair of options arise in a scene in the novel-fragment’s seventh chapter. Heine’s eponymous narrator is in Amsterdam attending the play Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), the protagonist of which he appositely characterizes as “den ewigen Juden des Oceans” (the wandering Jew of the ocean; DHA 5:172). Hartmut Binder comments that Kafka knew Heine’s work well (Schaffensprozeß, 268–69 n186) and emphasizes, when discussing Kafka’s use in “The Hunter Gracchus” of a motif best known from Wagner’s opera, The Flying Dutchman, that the composer acknowledged he directly drew upon Heine’s dramatic presentation in Aus den Memoiren. More

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intent on demonstrating a strong, albeit circumstantial, connection between Wagner and Kafka, Bernd Neumann (Gesellschaftskrieger) curiously also notes Heine as Wagner’s source every time he attempts to tie The Flying Dutchman to Kafka’s work (80, 443, 448; cf. B. Neumann, Aporien, 216 –17)—as if alluding to a strong, albeit even more circumstantial, connection between Heine and Kafka. If Kafka’s knowledge of Heine’s novel-fragment extended beyond the resonances invoked by these scholars, then he would be familiar with how, while watching the play, Schnabelewopski becomes distracted by the laugh of a female spectator, an Eve-like temptress holding not an Apfel but an Apfelsine (orange). Instead of “symbolically” offering him half the orange, “she merely metaphorically [bloß metaphorisch] threw the rind at his head”; this leads him to ask: “War es Absicht oder Zufall?” (Was it intentional or coincidence; DHA 5: 173). Looking up he notices curled about the left side of her upper lip something like “das Schwänzchen einer fortschlüpfenden Eidechse” (the little tail of a lizard slipping out of one’s grasp; DHA 5:173). This excites in his own lips what he characterizes as a “Wahlverwandtschaft” (elective affinity), specifically “ein kramphaftes Zucken” (a convulsive twitching; DHA 5:173). The phrase, “Nicht Tat und nicht Ereignis,” that Kraus contrasts with the Schnabelewopski paraphrase (“sondern Absicht oder Zufall”; HC 130) at the end of the polemic is drawn from his preceding paragraph, where he asserts that Heine’s attacks on Platen (in Baths) and on Börne (in the Börne Memorial) were but two sides of the same coin. According to Kraus, Heine toggled his opposition of Talent and Charakter (respectively of the poet [Dichter] and the author [Schriftsteller]; HC 128/129) in such a way that whichever of the two qualities he accused his victims of lacking was presented as their fundamental flaw. 7. the raw and the cooked in the old / new world, or talk to the animals This chapter expands and revises “Kafka’s ‘Schakale und Araber’ and the Question of Genre: ‘Gleichnis,’ ‘Tiergeschichte,’ or ‘dialektisches Bild’?” (in Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, ed. Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015], 124 –36) that reworked, with the helpful mediation of Ulrike Brunotte and Axel Stähler, my presentations at the June 2013 Research Network: Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism and Occidentalism workshop (University of Maastricht [NL]) and the Association for Jewish Studies annual meeting (December 2013). 1. See, inter alia, Bruce, Kafka, 154 –57, 185–88; Tismar, “Kafkas ‘Schakale und Araber.’ ” 2. The journal gave added prominence to Hanssen’s article by the issue’s cover art—a drawing of a lone jackal.

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3. First, Hanssen aligns his work with “Judith Butler and other Jewish critics . . . in particular [with] the many dissident Jewish voices” (KA 168); second, he asserts that Kafka’s “jackals” “contained neither the common German, Austrian, and Czech anti-Semitism nor that [i.e., the antisemitism] of dogmatic Zionists who felt that the Eastern Jews were parasites . . . who needed to be civilized” (KA 187); and, third, even if the “jackals” are seen as wearing antisemitic clothing, Hanssen never explicitly identifies the “jackals” as “the Jews” (see discussion later in the chapter). It appears that Hanssen’s disavowal of both antisemitism and islamophobia is interwoven with a projection of both antisemitism and islamophobia onto Jews. 4. As he refers to them in an interview published in the Arab Studies Institute’s ezine Jadaliyya: Hanssen, “New Texts Out Now.” 5. W. Benjamin elaborated on his notion in Konvolut N (N2a, 3 [“dialectical image”]; N3, 1 [“dialectics at a standstill”]) of the Passagenwerk (Arcades Project, 462–63); for variants see his fifth and seventeenth “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256, 262–63. 6. The only translated work of Benjamin in which Kafka is associated in English with “allegory” is “Notes from Svendborg” (784); however, in that piece it is “Gleichnis” that has been translated as “allegory” (to distinguish it from “Parabel”). Also see Born (“Symbol und Allegorie,” 30) on Benjamin, who, having revalued the “Allegorie-Begriff,” never spoke of “Allegorie” in any of his writings on Kafka. 7. Letter to Martin Buber (May 12, 1917; B2 299; LFr 132): “May I ask you not to call the pieces parables [Gleichnisse]; they are not really parables. If they have to have any overall title at all, the best might be: ‘Two Animal Stories.’ ” 8. Shumsky, “Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews,” 97. Unfortunately, Shumsky’s rationale for opposing a reading of the story as allegory—that the Arab, for example, stands for the Arab of Kafka’s imagination instead of something else—argues that Kafka has created what are, in effect, zero-degree allegorical figures. 9. The term “Fabel” appears only once in any of Kafka’s extant writings, in an April 16, 1914 letter to Grete Bloch: “To this day I still maintain that I don’t want any strangers around, but in the same breath I maintain that I shall be delighted with every moment you spend with us (today, however, this ‘us’ [i.e., Kafka and Felice Bauer] is little more than a fable)” (B2 29; LF 387). Kafka’s use here of Fabel is neither technical nor moralistic. Most would also argue, including the analysis in Chapter 3, that Kafka’s terse narrative “Kleine Fabel”—given its title by Max Brod, and not Kafka, it should again be noted—also avoids such baggage.

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10. In his usual move, Hanssen shifts from suggesting that they are masks of Jewish identifications and instead refers to Sokel’s reading of Kafka’s texts as examinations of Kafka’s “own character traits” (KA 179–80). 11. In this September 30 / October 1 letter, Kafka only refers to the “Menschengericht” as does his transcription of the passage in his ca. October 1, 1917 diary entry (T 1:839– 40; D2 187–88); however, when he transcribes it in his ca. October 7 or 8, 1917 letter to Brod he writes “Menschenund Tiergericht” (B2 343; LFr 152). 12. See Agamben, The Open, 33–38, and the discussion in the Introduction. 13. Actually, Hanssen plays an insidious game of naming names: for example, he erases “Israel” when he writes: “at the heart of their [i.e., binationalist theorizers’] arguments is that the relationship between Palestinians, [European? Ashkenzi? Nonindigenous?] Jews, and Arab Jews ought to be based on the recognition of their equality and affinity” (KA 170). The Gentile European also disappears (as well as cementing the identity of Jew and Zionist) when he describes one of the principal aims of his article: “to illuminate the dialectic in ‘Jackals and Arabs’ and affiliated texts between Jewish and non-European meanings” (KA 173). 14. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 92, 95. 15. See the contrasting depictions of “The Third” by Holz, “Figur des Dritten” (as threat); and Fischer, “Der Dritte” (as opening); see also Eßlinger, Schlechtriemen, Schweitzer, and Zons, Figur des Dritten. 16. See Rubinstein, “Kafka’s ‘Jackals and Arabs,’ ” 14 –15. This is not the only possible role he may play. The narrator may have feared that he would be serving a different function after two young jackals held him down with their teeth and the Head Jackal rather appetizingly addresses him as “O noble heart and kindly bowels [edles Herz und süßes Eingeweide]” (DL 273; CS 410)—edel and süß are the predicates awarded to the most select of white wines. 17. See Horn (“Ungestalt des Feindes,” 661–62), who emphasizes the threat to the possibility of a sovereign modern order (re)presented by a group that collapses the distinction. 18. Also pace Hanssen, the Chinese scholar of “Great Wall” is not the “only non-European human narrator” (KA 183), a Chinese cobbler narrates “An Old Manuscript.” 19. Though he concedes that the Balfour Declaration was not issued until after Kafka had written the story, Hanssen does his best to make the declaration and its long-term as well as near-term effects as optics for reading “Jackals and Arabs” (KA 188–94).

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Notes to pages 175–77

20. If Hanssen would make much of Kafka’s possible rationales for the few corrections he made to the notebook draft of the story, why not speculate about how the originally untitled story was first listed by Kafka under “Die Schakale” before a final addition of “und Araber”? If, as Günter Hartung (Juden, 327) suggests, Kafka’s original focus was on the jackals, could the title change have indicated, as I argue here, that the story’s emphasis is on how relationships shape and denaturalize identifications? 21. The published version does leave out an intensification (the italicized phrase) of the Arabs as eternal desert wanderers: “will wander with us until we leave the desert at the end of days” (NS I.2:278). 22. Clearly, the jackals do ask the traveler to slit the Arabs’ throats, but are they thirsty for blood? It is unclear whether they simply drain the blood from their prospective carrion meal or drink the carcass dry. The Head Jackal says it should be “drained empty” (leergetrunken; DL 273; CS 409) by them; however, the jackals are not observed drinking the blood of the camel; rather, its blood is said to have shot out like water from a fire hose and collects in puddles. 23. Moreover, it appears that the Arabs regularly engage in such acts of “self-defense” because, when the narrator first sees the jackals, he observes that their movements appear to have been conditioned by whipping. 24. Hanssen apparently extracted these phrases from Levensohn’s English translation (Old-New Land, 44), as cited in its entirety by Khalidi (“Utopian Zionism,” 57). If Hanssen had intended that his mention of “dirty” was extracted from Herzl’s characterization of Arabs observed in Jaffa, then perhaps he should have paid more attention to Khalidi’s source citation and referred to page 42, not page 44; see note 26 in this chapter. 25. Nor only those toward the residents of Palestine because his descriptions of abject Palestinian life prior to the New Society reproduce Western Jewish representations of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires’ internal colonized populations of Eastern Jews. See Peck, Im Labor der Utopie, esp. 293–97. 26. Herzl, Old-New Land, 42; also cited by Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism,” 57. Similarly, Hanssen seeks to render Herzl’s vision of the Jewishimmigrant-shaped Palestine to which his protagonists return in 1923 as, aside from “the token Arab Reschid Bey [whom] Herzl had inserted . . . merely to validate Zionist colonization,” typical of “the way Zionists in and outside Palestine treated its native inhabitants” (KA 186). There is another group tied to Palestine that Herzl mentions: the wealthy landowners, whom one assumes to be Arab or Turk but who are never identified as such, and who, as Kingscourt and Loewenberg learn when they return to Palestine twenty years later, had very willingly at great profit or very wilily at greater profit

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sold their property to the Jewish immigrants of the New Society. (Had Hanssen mentioned them, they too would probably have been dismissed as one more attempt to “validate Zionist colonization.”) Indeed, by citing Piterberg (Returns of Zionism, 39) on the “disappearance of the Arabs in the novel,” Hanssen would lead the reader unfamiliar with Altneuland to imagine that its utopian Palestine was ethnically cleansed of non-Jews (KA 186). What he elides is how for Herzl poverty and class oppression, not (or, assuming underlying Orientalist biases, much more so than) ethnicity, generated those negative qualities he ascribed to the indigenous population. When asked “what happened to the old inhabitants of the land who possessed nothing,” that is, to the disenfranchised tenant farmers who had worked the property the wealthy land-owners had sold, Rechid Bey responds: “Those who had nothing could only gain. And gain they did: employment, better food, welfare. There was nothing more wretched than an Arab village of fellaheen at the end of the nineteenth century. The tenants lived in buildings not fit for cattle. The children were naked and uncared for, their playground the street. Today things are changed indeed. . . . people are far better off than before; they are healthy, they have better food, their children go to school. Nothing has been done to interfere with their customs or their faith—they have only gained by welfare . . . ” (Altneuland, 100). Although Herzl is referring to Arab, specifically Arab Muslim, tenant farmers, that is, to fellaheen, their characterization as such is by the English translator not Herzl. 27. I assume it is “problematic” in so far as the phrase is in, as Hanssen notes (KA 190), a Zionist journal. However, at the time, Der Jude was not primarily a Palestine-oriented Zionist journal but one concerned with bringing together the varieties of German-speaking Jewry as well as, especially, Western with Eastern European Jews, during that time of world war, as a Volksgemeinde (a [single] ethnic community); see Gelber, “1916 The first issue.” 28. Weissenberg, “Jewish Racial Problem,” 77. Although committed to a viable diasporic Jewry—whether in Eastern Europe or in Palestine—Weissenberg was sympathetic to Zionism and held it to have been “a catalyst in the rise of Jewish national feeling” (see Efron, Defenders of the Race, 110). 29. The only sources he cites for the “Orientalist literature” about Arabs are Gribetz, “Defining Neighbors”; LeVine, Overthrowing Geography; Said, “Zionism”; and Piterberg, Returns of Zionism. Also recall the Hanssen omission of non-Jewish European meanings noted in note 13 of this chapter. 30. See, for example, Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels. 31. Indeed, in a line left out of the published version of the story, the Head Jackal comments, just prior to his making the crucial culinary distinction between Arab and Jackal (“They kill animals for food, and carrion they

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Notes to page 178

despise” [DL 271; CS 408]), that the Arabs immediately insult any of their own who overvalue gluttony as “son of a Jackal” (NS I.2:276). This phrase was actually popularized by Karl May in several of his Wild East novels: in Durch die Wüste (1892), in which Kara Ben Nemsi is called by his Arab opponent Abu el Nassr/Hamd il Amasat “Du Sohn eines Schakals” (Chapter 3); and in Ein Gardeleutnant (1902–1903), to the guard of the Arab official Harrar’s residence by the annoyed Graf (Chapter 27). Although there is no extant Kafka reference to Karl May, the recognition of certain affinities between the two is imagined in Peter Henisch’s 1994 novel, Vom Wunsch Indianer zu Werden; the title alludes to a very short story, “The Wish to be a Red Indian,” that Kafka included in his first published collection of prose, Betrachtung (Meditation; 1913). Kinship with jackals does appear in the Book of Job (30:29) when the noted eponymous Gentile refers to himself in his desolate plight as having “become a brother to jackals.” 32. Though appearing in Der Jude ( July–September 1917) after the writing of “Jackals and Arabs” (ca. February 1917) but before its October publication in that journal, Gustav Landauer (“Heine,” 266) notes Heine’s characterization of Shylock as, if not underdog, then under-werewolf: the “fabulous [fabelhafte] werewolf . . . who is by nature mentally and emotionally the significant representative of a put-upon, oppressed class” (also see the discussion in Chapter 8). 33. Leaving aside the problem of “metaphor” and his reference to Andrew Benjamin’s work, Of Jews and Animals, which, in fact, does not address the “objectionable dog metaphor in European anti-Semitism.” In his conclusion, Hanssen inverts the jackals’ allusion to dogs when he gratuitously and infelicitously invokes “Ari Folman’s recent [2008], award-winning animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, which comes to terms with the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in Lebanon during the summer of 1982, [that] opens with jackal-like dogs scampering through the nocturnal streets of Tel Aviv” (KA 195). The accompanying still actually shows a dog pack composed of a number of canine varieties, perhaps one of which may be identified as “jackal-like.” Moreover, the twenty-six dogs in the filmed dream represent the twenty-six dogs that were guarding the homes of a Lebanese village that his IDF platoon was entering during the First Lebanese War and that the dreamer shot. 34. Kafka, Der Proceß, 312; The Trial, 286. 35. Letter to His Father, 54/55. His father’s recalled words are virtually reproduced in “Jackals and Arabs” when the Head Jackal asserts that rather than suffering slaughter, “every beast [should] die a natural death” (ruhig krepieren; DL 273; CS 409). Kafka would be diagnosed with tuberculosis a couple of years after he stopped working on The Trial and almost half a year after he had completed “Jackals and Arabs.”

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36. Kafka, Wedding Preparations, 326; Hochzeitsvorbereitungen, 331. 37. Fingerhut, Funktion der Tierfiguren, 45. 38. Binder, Kafka-Kommentar zu den Romanen, 260 –61. 39. Apparently too late for Dietmar Goltschnigg and his 1993-published “Never-Ending Shame,” which cites Binder’s commentary (256). 40. Schillemeit, Kafka-Studien, 298n33. Revelatory of the contortions Brod undertakes to justify (to himself ?) his transcription is the note he attaches to the parenthetical “kaleidoscope in the window”: it “seems to refer to the stained glass window in a certain synagogue in Prague.” Instead, “window” is the principal conceit of Werfel’s play: Thamal seeks a window into a higher reality, but when he looks out he only sees his own reflection. That act releases that reflection, the Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man), who then takes Thamal away from the monastery and into the diversity of this-world possibilities. The third part of the drama, in which Thamal is working through his attachments and karma that he had played out with his double, is entitled “The Window.” Moreover, the only other occasions in his diaries and notebooks that Kafka employed “Jüdisch” as an adjectival noun are in his Spring 1911 critique of Brod’s Die Jüdinnen (see Chapter 5) and, on two occasions, to characterize the content of Yiddish plays he saw at the Café Savoy: On October 6, 1911, he observes that the character Seidemann, a wealthy Jew who twenty years earlier “had himself baptized,” “continually expresses great disgust for everything Jewish [Jüdischen]”; and in a January 6, 1912 entry regarding the content of Feimann’s Vicekönig he confesses that “My receptivity to the Jewishness [das Jüdische] in these plays deserts me” (T 1:61, 349; D1 82, 215). 41. So (a chastened?) Binder notes in Kafkas Wien (230). 42. Haacke, “Kafka’s Political Animals,” 142 (Haacke’s paraphrase of W. Benjamin, “Letter to Gershom Scholem,” 327), 143. 43. Cf. Löwy (“Franz Kafka’s Trial,” 158): “One can read this last sentence as an appeal for resistance.” 44. Kuzniar (Melancholia’s Dog, 67–71) also notes Hegel’s determination of shame as presupposing self-consciousness and therefore as a human / animal diacritic in her discussion of The Trial’s conclusion. 45. Civilization and Its Discontents, 99n. 46. The novel’s four principal characters are the wealthy Prague Jewish siblings Irene and Alfred Popper and the less-well-off Olga Großlicht and Hugo Rosenthal, who have made their separate ways into the Popper family circle from Kolin via Teplitz. For the superficial siblings, Jewishness is delimited, on the one hand, to the inconvenient gender-specific limitations of Jewish integration, socially for Irene, politically for Alfred (Jüdinnen, 46, 173). On the other hand, Jewishness is the dismissive identification of others

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as Jewish: Irene dismissively describes Olga, her potential rival for Hugo’s attention, as “a regular Jewish country girl [with] hips like a big heifer” (Das richtige jüdische Landmädchen . . . Hüften wie ein großes Kalberl; 57); whereas Alfred, an enthusiastic, superficial reader of Weininger, is described as “one of those young Jews, who has a strong inclination toward everything Aryan while finding everything Jewish contemptible” (172), and who finds the number of Zionists in Prague’s Germanophone milieu discomfiting. When asked why he doesn’t get baptized, Alfred lamely responds: first that it would be the cowardly way out; second, because he doesn’t hold much for religion, baptism would not mean anything to him; and third, his parents. Hugo concedes that he has little knowledge or experience of Jewishness, but that he does often feel a strong identification as a Jew though not in any particularistic sense. Aside from this brief reflection (175), the only other sign of his feeling Jewish is when he later admires Olga as a “Tochter Zions” (daughter of Zion; 203). 47. See Chidester, Empire of Religion, 98–103; Chidester notes how the comparative religionist Max Müller criticized Darwin’s claims about canine religiosity in terms analogous to Hegel’s critique of Schleiermacher (103); also see Kohlenbach, “Religious Dogs.” 48. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 114. 49. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 114. Following George Eliot’s mistranslation of Feuerbach’s reference to the Israelite unable to rise above “das Brotstudium der Theologie,” that is, above the exploitation of theology in order to earn his living, his bread. See Geller (Other Jewish Question, 150 –51, 162–64) on how Eliot mistranslated but did not misread Feuerbach’s representation of Judentum. 50. “Christ’s my favorite dish, much better / Than Leviathan-in-a-pot, / Even with white garlic gravy / Made by Satan, like as not. // Oh! Instead of wrangling, I would / Rather roast you on a fire, / Stew you and your comrades with you / On the hottest funeral pyre” (DHA 3/1:171; CP 687–88). 51. It can also be read as a commentary on Christianity following what Derrida calls a “logic of sacrifice” (Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ ” esp. 112–14) that renders its others as animal. 52. These “soaring dogs” seem to hang in the air because, the reader deduces, they lie in invisible human laps. 53. Kuh, Juden und Deutsche, 25, 22. See Kilcher, “Anti-Ödipus im Land der Ur-Väter,” esp. 84 –85. Kuh’s essay was reviewed by Elias Hurwicz in Der Jude in March 1921. 54. Given the description of their eyes as “gleaming dull gold,” one might conclude that, rather than an allusion to Jewish stereotype, Kafka is drawing upon another German appellation for jackals: Geldwölfe. That designation led Moses Hess in his 1845 “Über das Geldwesen” (on money; 346) to situate

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them alongside the Jews, predatory beasts, and bloodsuckers that make up the cruel, exploitative animal world (Thierwelt) of civil society—it points, natural historically, to golden jackals [Canis aureus], which are indigenous to North Africa and the Middle East. 55. See Tismar, “Kafkas ‘Schakale und Araber,’ ” 310 –12. 56. See the discussion in Chapter 4 of Grillparzer’s epigram. 57. In Heine’s “Jehuda ben Halevy” (DHA 3/1:139) jackals join werewolves, forest-devils, and other despicable creatures living in the desolate ruins of Jerusalem. 58. Martha Helfer has recently analyzed Stifter’s novella in relation to antisemitic discourse in The Word Unheard, 113– 41. 59. For example, in the hundreds of proverbs and sayings, more than seventy of which drawing connections between Jews and animals, that make up Der Sturmer’s leading antisemitic publicist, Fritz Hiemer’s collection Der Jude im Sprichwort, not a single one associates Jews with jackals. 60. But even in this one example, Hanssen frees Kafka from the onus of affirming such stereotypes by having Gilman separating their deployment from a commentary on the Jews: They are both self-descriptions of Kafka’s singular personhood and symptomatic expressions of European antisemitism. “He also considered it indicative of both Kafka’s self-hatred and his projection of European anti-Semitism onto his Arab protagonist” (KA 180). 61. For Caspar Battegay (Das andere Blut), the story is so overstocked with various, ironically employed Jewish motifs that it becomes a “caricature of caricature” (280) and a “kind of carnival of Zionism” (281); perhaps, that is why Kafka described the “outbursts of vanity and complacency” upon reading his story in Der Jude as an “orgy” and “[l]ike a squirrel in its cage. Bliss of movement. Desperate about constriction, craziness of endurance, feeling of misery confronted with the repose of what is external. All this both simultaneously and alternatingly, still in the filth of the end” (NS 2.1:30; Blue Octavo Notebooks, 14 [ca. October 19, 1917]). 62. See, for example, Schopenhauer, “On Religion,” 370 –77, and Chapter 1 of this book. Feuerbach describes one consequence of the Jewish sacralization of eating as “declaring Nature as an insignificant object” (an sich nichtiges Ding; Essence of Christianity, 114). 63. See Lévi-Strauss, Raw and the Cooked; Vernant, “At Man’s Table.” According to Hesiod, whereas humans are distinguished from animals by eating cooked as well as raw food, the gods are distinguished from both by subsisting on nectar, ambrosia, and the smoky savor of sacrifices. 64. In a1920 letter to Milena, assumed to be written October 7, he refers to psychoanalysis “maintain[ing] that religions have the same origin as ‘diseases’ of the individual” (B3 355; LM 216).

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65. “Leopards in the Temple” (NS 2.1:46; CS 472). The brief narrative is found in Kafka’s Oktavheft G in an entry dated 10 November (1917). This “parable” has served as the launching point for reflections on ritual by historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith (“Bare Facts of Ritual,” 53–55) and a hilarious “kafkaesque” novella by the Brazilian Jewish master of animal stories, Moacyr Scliar, Kafka’s Leopards. 66. The public awareness of contemporary ritual murder accusations against European Jews plays a prominent role in his exemplary interpretation of a young man’s parapraxis in Freud’s 1901 Psychopathology of Everyday Life (9–11); see Geller, On Freud’s, 53–57. In the nineteenth century, several “historical-critical” studies connecting the alleged ongoing Jewish practice of ritual murder with the alleged practice of human sacrifice by the ancient Hebrews were widely circulated. After the 1840 Damascus Blood Libel, Ghillany’s Menschenopfer and Daumer’s Feuer- und Molochdienst appeared and were referenced by Feuerbach in the second edition of Essence of Christianity. Following the 1882 Tisza-Eslar accusation, Triadon’s Molochisme was published. 67. W. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, 275): “that the earliest sacrificial feast among the Semites were of the nature of sacra gentilicia is a matter of inference rather than of direct evidence, but is not on that account less certain.” A sacra gentilicia, or gentile sacrifice, entails “kinsmen and their kindred god [‘a being of the same stock with his worshippers’] . . . seal[ing] and strengthen[ing] their fellowship by meeting together from time to time to nourish their common life by a common meal” (275), the main course of which was provided by the sacrificial slaughter of an animal victim. 68. W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 276. 69. Spector, Prague Territories, 191–94. Shumsky (“Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews,” 76) explicitly supplements Spector’s reading by adding Palestine to Prague as another referential venue for Kafka’s triangulations of subject positions. 70. Spector, Prague Territories, 194, 192, 192. 8. dogged by destiny: “lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit” Some portions of this chapter began as a lecture at the University of Aberdeen (fortunately near the summer solstice) and were further developed in the article “German Jews Dogged by Destiny: Werewolves and Other Were-Canids in the Works of Heinrich Heine and Curt Siodmak” (Nexus 3, forthcoming). Other portions were worked through in my graduate seminar “Jewish Animals” (Spring 2014 and 2015) and in presentations at the Spiritual Homelands—Wahlheimat—Elective Exile (University of Virginia) and the Monsters, Demons and Wonders in European-Jewish History and Thought (Goethe Universität—Frankfurt) conferences.

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1. Cf. Bourgault du Coudray, Curse. 2. Or, following Agamben (The Open, 33–38), the sources of apprehension—in the cognitive rather than the affective sense—were, respectively, the premodern and the modern anthropological machines; see the Introduction. 3. See, for example, Dawkins, Devil’s Chaplain, 12: “Stand tall, Bipedal Ape.” 4. “Difficulty,” 141. Also see Freud, “Fixation to Traumas,” 284 –85. 5. Totem and Taboo, 126 –27. Nevertheless, Marder (The Mother, 60) sees Freud’s incorporation of the castrating/threatening animal figure as preserving “an uncanny trace” of and thereby maintaining human /animal difference. 6. Solms, “Freud Returns,” 32. 7. Civilization, 111. 8. Vogl and Matala de Mazza, “Bürger und Wölfe,” 207. Rossello (“Hobbes and the Wolf-Man”) sees Hobbes’s notion of political sovereignty shaped by the question of the human /animal distinction in sixteenth-century English culture and politics, his challenge to human exceptionalism, and his restoration of the distinction, albeit as implicitly unstable. 9. An even earlier (pre-Yiddish) Jewish appropriation of Gentile werewolf traditions appeared in the thirteenth-century Tosaphist Rabbeinu Ephraim ben Shimshon’s commentary on Genesis 1:27. He implicitly proposed an etiology of the tribe of Benjamin’s emblematic wolf: “There is a type of wolf that is called loup-garou (werewolf ), which is a person that changes into a wolf. When it changes into a wolf, his feet emerge from between his shoulders. So too with Benjamin—‘he dwells between his shoulders’ (Deuteronomy 33:12) . . . [F]or a wolf is born with teeth, which indicates that it is out to consume the world. . . . And likewise, Benjamin destroyed (literally ‘ate’) his mother, who died on his accord, as it is written, ‘And it was as her soul left her, for she was dying, and she called his name ‘the son of affliction’ (ben oni) (Genesis 35:18)”; cit. Slifkin, Sacred Monsters, 220 –21. Slifkin (219) also notes two other brief mentions of humans who transform into wolves in rabbinic works: Rabbi Yehudah HaChassid’s early-thirteenth-century Sefer Chasidim and Rabbi Yechiel Halpern’s mid-eighteenth-century Seder HaDoros. 10. Felix Salten’s 1923 Der Hund von Florenz (The hound of Florence) is another were-canid by a Jewish writer, but, unlike the principal works analyzed in this chapter, it was, at most, indirectly engaged with the problematic situation of Jewish life in Gentile Europe. The tendency to read Salten’s animal novels as allegories of Jewish life (see Chapter 6) has even extended to that novel, published the same year as Bambi and like that work bestknown through its Disney transmogrification (the 1959 box-office success The Shaggy Dog). It follows young Lukas Grassi who, yearning to escape his

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impoverished Viennese situation and realize his artistic ambitions in Renaissance Florence, seizes his chance when, through magic, he incarnates the words of the fictional Hermit of Amiata that serve as the novel’s epigraph, “If you are poor here on earth you must be a dog for one half of your life, then you will be permitted to spend the other half as a human being.” Having been transformed into the hound Cambyses, he secures his adoption by a wealthy Archduke on his way home to Florence. Every other day, Lukas changes back into a human, which allows him to pursue his art; however, he must strain to keep his dual lives separate; otherwise, all will be lost. The novel culminates with Lukas, as hound, observing his human beloved with the Archduke, attacking his rival, and being stabbed in return. It ends with a grievously wounded Lukas the next morning, once again in human form, at his beloved’s door. To read this novel as more allegory of Austrian Jewish life or enactment of the Jew-as-Animal than parable of the dilemmas of the artist-patron relationship with infusions of natural historical observation, adolescent angst, and self-proclaimed autobiography would be an unjustifiable imposition; cf. Eddy, Felix Salten, 195. 11. Curt Siodmak entitled his German-language autobiography Unter Wolfsmenschen, “among wolf-men.” 12. This summary is drawn, in part, from Mank, Riley, and Turner, “Werewolf,” 17–21. Robert Eisler (Man into Wolf, 33–34, 148–62) tracks the “ethnology of the werewolf ” globally. 13. Strabo contrasts the savage wolf-skinned Daker with the barbarian bear-skinned Berserkers. Whereas savages are savage in relation to other savage groups, the barbarians are not savage toward the socii of their own kind; they are defined only in the oppositional relation to civilization; Vogl and Matala de Mazza, “Bürger und Wölfe,” 213. 14. Kenan Holger Irmak (“Verurteilt”) argues that the werewolf was the male complement to the female witch in late medieval and early modern Europe and claims that tens of thousands were accused of being lycanthropes into the eighteenth century (37). He then argues that, following the demythologization and dechristianization of the demonological tradition during the Enlightenment, the pathological notion of lycanthropy emerged in its place (39). On the demonological tradition, see Jacques-Lefèvre, “ ‘Such an Impure . . . Beast’ ”; on the tradition of lycanthropy as pathological physiology, see Rossello, “Hobbes and the Wolf-Man,” esp. 255–56 and nn. 15. Ginzburg, “Freud, the Wolf-Man,” 146 – 49. 16. Not to be confused with those other noted Domini canes (hounds of God) as the Dominican Order are also, courtesy of both pun and practice, familiarly known.

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17. In his translation of “The Rabbi Who Was Turned into a Werewolf ” Neugroschel repeatedly characterizes the wife as a shrew or as shrewish. His motivation may be that, while she is generally characterized as wicked (beyz) or evil (shlekhtes) in the original, at one point she is called a Breken (“wicked shrew”; 36), which derives from the (feminine form of the) German term for “bloodhound” Brake; this figuration was perhaps tied to the use of dogs to pursue and hound Jews (see Chapter 1) as well as to her sniffing out (the secret of ) her prey. 18. The transformation rendered her as subject to a form of sovereignty that was permitted the Jewish community: that over domestic animals. Bertha Pappenheim (aka Anna O.) translated this story (303–13) and the entire Mayse-buch into German (Allerlei Geschichten Maase-Buch). 19. Higley, “Finding the Man,” 337. 20. In his 1842 Das Strafrecht der Germanen (The Criminal Code of the Germans), Wilhelm Eduard Wilda elaborated on the notion of Friedlosigkeit (the status of being outside the general peace) in early Germanic law and drew an essential link between the legal determination of the Friedlos and the figure of the Wargus that appeared in numerous medieval German and Anglo-Saxon sources. Agamben (Homo Sacer, 104 –5) annexes Wilda’s work for his own determination of the homo sacer. Also see N. Pines, “Life in the Valley,” 35. Sarah Higley (“Finding the Man”) surveys a number of medieval Germanic languages (including Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Norse) and concludes that the relationship between the werewolf and the outlaw was more likely a convergence than an ab-original identification: “the term ‘werewolf ’ is not used of an outlaw in early writings. And warg is not, except in late medieval Icelandic, used to mean a werewolf. . . . The late tradition of the warg, then, is related to the tradition of the werewolf only in that it is the evil wolf, the omega, that has become its context; the warg, critically speaking, is a wolf in the wrong circumstances (in the sanctuary), a berserk who has turned against his own people, an anomaly, a monster, unrecognizable and without identity” (356, 369). 21. Higley, “Finding the Man,” 369–70. 22. St. John Chrysostom, Discourses, 72 (4.1.2). Also see Chapter 1. 23. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 104 –11. 24. Juden Spiegel, 69; cited in Nicoline Hortzitz, Sprache, 201; other tractates included are by Hans Folz (1491), Johann Pfefferkorn (1511), Georg Nigrinus (= Georg Schwarz; 1570), Samuel Friedrich Brentz (1614), Jakob Martini (1636), as well as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s 1711 Entdecktes Judenthum, which would remain a primary source of and authority for antiJewish and antisemitic claims into the twentieth century; also see Hortzitz,

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“Sprache,” 22–23. On Nigrinus’s identification of the Jewish wolf, also see Hsia, “Religion and Race,” 271. 25. G. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, 149 (Act 4, Scene 4). 26. See Silvain and Kotek, La carte postale antisémite, 118; Silvain, Images et traditions juives, 85; Wiesemann, Antijüdischer Nippes, 106 –11. 27. Cited in Bronner, A Rumor, 22. 28. Jeder Jude hat ein Wolfsgesicht, man muß es nur erkennen können; Hiemer, Jude im Sprichwort, 160; cf. 49–51, 99, 103, 135, 162, 198. 29. Published by NEF (probably Nouvelles Etudes Françaises), signed by “N” and illustrated by “JB,” it is reproduced in its entirety in Silvain, La Question juive (61–64). Judith Proud (Children and Propaganda, 25) notes that this exchange over noses does not appear in either Perrault’s or the Brothers Grimm’s versions of the fairy tale. 30. Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder, 131–35; also see Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, 200 (including Kant’s identification of the Jews as “die Vampyre der Gesellschaft”). 31. Dracula’s nose according to Jonathan Harker was “high aquiline,” to the zookeeper a “[h]ook nose,” and to Mina “a beaky” one; Stoker, Dracula, 27, 146, 179. 32. Beginning in 2011, the blogger Video Rebel—picking up on the reference, from the opening lines of Matt Taibbi’s provocative 2009 Rolling Stone article about the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, a company bearing the surnames of its Jewish founders, as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money” (“Bubble Machine,” 52)—published a series of blogs, including the “The Vampire Squid Talmud,” “The Vampire Squid Protocols” (paraphrasing portions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and “The Vampire Squid Anti-Defamation League Parts I and II,” in which “vampire squid” serves as the poisonous placeholder for “Jew”; see Horse 237, “Dedicated to the Vampire Squid Essays of Vidrebel.” 33. A custom, however, that originated in Czarist Russia, became enshrined in Argentine law since the 1970s, and was then extended to include non-Catholics in 2009, that the head of state adopt a family’s seventh son (if no daughters had been born in between) in order to avert his possible transformation into a werewolf has taken on a Jewish aspect. It was revealed in December 2014 that Argentina’s then president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had adopted the Jewish adult male Yair Tawil as her godson; Melamed, “ ‘Werewolf ’ Adoption Story.” 34. For example, aside from a brief mention of Heine’s invocation of werewolves in “Jehuda ben Halevy” (see note 53 in this chapter), no Judentum-associated werewolves appear in Stiegler, Vergessene Bestie.

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35. In European feudal societies, charcoal burners were usually the only persons, aside from the local nobility and their agents, allowed to reside in the often-wolf-inhabited forests. 36. Buber, Legend, 51–55. 37. Given that the poem concludes after N’eila, the concluding prayer service of Yom Kippur, Leivick appears to be alluding to another well-known Hassidic tale about the BeShT and the son of a villager, who does not know the words of the N’eila service but feels compelled to blow his whistle. As the rest of the congregation angrily endeavors to silence him, the BeShT commands them to leave the child alone, explaining that thanks to the sincerity of the child’s prayer, “The judgment is suspended, and wrath is dispelled from the face of the earth”; Buber, Legend, 30 –31. 38. Drawing upon French traditions about the loup-garou, or werewolf, the thirteenth century Tosaphist Rabbeinu Ephraim ben Shimshon notes in his commentary to Genesis 1:27 that “The solution for [dealing with] this wolf is that when it enters a house, and a person is frightened by it, he should take a firebrand and thrust it around, and he will not be harmed”; cited in Slifkin, Sacred Monsters, 220. 39. Leyvik, “The Wolf,” 233. 40. See, for example, Girard, Violence. 41. The eponymous stable of Leivick’s poem is a synagogue that had been desecrated by German soldiers during World War I and turned into a horse barn after the community that it had served had been destroyed in a pogrom. The second epigraph of this Yiddish poem is the Hebrew inscription from Pirkei Avot (5:23), “Be swift as a deer, strong as a lion, bold as a leopard, and light as an eagle,” that adorned, with accompanying depiction of the four animals, the ceilings of many Eastern European synagogues. At one point, one of the town’s surviving refugees, choosing to return to the synagogue in hope of redemption, looks to the heavens and offers in a lament-cum-prayer to “stare the joy in grief.” These four animals—refugees and survivors as well— come to rest at his feet bearing the revelation of a cosmic harmony that includes suffering: “life is beauty and life is horror.” His older brother seeks solace in violence that turns from the Schochet’s ritualized slaughter that provides meat for the community to “Victory and blade and song of slaughtering knives”; see the discussion in Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 102– 4. The wolf, unlike these animal indices of possible redemption in “The Stable,” is not sanctioned by the Oral Law, whether found in the opening tractate of the Mishna or the Laws of Kashrut. 42. Liptzin, A History, 302. 43. Heine, “Shylock,” 83; DHA 10:119. 44. Heine, “Shylock,” 83–84; DHA 10:119.

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45. Heine, “Shylock,” 93; DHA 10:128. 46. Gustav Landauer (“Heine,” 266) observes how, for Heine, the “disruption and threat” presented by that “sinister, uncanny, hellish force . . . the fabulous werewolf ” is strictly “reactive.” See Gross, Shylock, 257– 64. 47. Heine observes that in his own present it is the Christians who are aping the worst qualities of the Jews; “Shylock,” 93–94; DHA 10:128. 48. Cf. Heine (“Shylock,” 83; DHA 10:119): “But when I think of [the “pale British beauty who wept violently at the end of the fourth act and frequently cried out, ‘The poor man is wronged!’ ”], I am forced to include The Merchant of Venice among the tragedies.” 49. Heine, “Shylock,” 88; DHA 10:123. Shylock is alluding to Jessica having exchanged this cherished keepsake for a monkey after she had spirited the ring away when she fled her father’s house (Act 3, Scene 1). 50. Heine, Lutezia, 46. 51. Heine, Lutezia, 82 (XVIII; dated August 25, 1840). 52. Heine to August Lewald (October 13, 1841); cf. August Lewald to Heine (September 15, 1841), HB4 340 (“es sind keine Mährchen”). 53. Translation slightly modified. In the next of his Hebrew Melodies, “Jehuda ben Halevy,” Heine has the Wandering Jew observe how, instead of Jews, “werewolves” (together with forest-devils, jackals, snakes, and nocturnal birds) now inhabit the desolate ruins of Jerusalem (DHA 3/1:139; CP 662). 54. By explicitly transmogrifying the “Ode to Joy” of Friedrich Schiller, the idealized hero of gebildet (educated, i.e., acculturated) German Jewry, to sing the dish’s praises Heine signals this yearned-for ideal Judentum (DHA 3/1:128; CP 653–54). 55. Heine to August Lewald (13 October 1841). I do not accept N. Pines’s conclusion that “Heine’s return to Judaism . . . Should be seen as an outcome of a process of metamorphosis, a ‘fall’ from a meaningful existence to a degraded, dehumanized state. In other words, the story of the Jewish people as well as that of the poet himself are both conceived in Heine’s late writings in terms of a narrative of degradation, a demotion on the scale of created beings” (“Life in the Valley,” 28–29). 56. Sterba, “Discussions of Freud,” 190. 57. Perhaps the most notorious expression of this was offered in 1934 by Freud’s one- time, would-be successor Carl Jung (“State,” 166): “In my opinion it has been a grave error in medical psychology up till now to apply Jewish categories—which are not even binding on all Jews—indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom. Because of this the most precious secret of the Germanic peoples—their creative and intuitive depth of soul—has been explained as a morass of banal infantilism, while my own warning voice

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has for decades been suspected of anti-Semitism. This suspicion emanated from Freud.” 58. Freud, “Analysis: Terminable and Interminable,” 252. 59. See Kugler, Freuds Chimären, 232–39; Molnar, “In Hündisch”; Rheinz, “Unentdeckte Obsessionen.” 60. A better step may have been one to the side: via Totem and Taboo, which Freud wrote while Pankejeff was under treatment. In Thousand Plateaus they first exemplify their claim that “A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band . . .” with “The Wolf-Man fascinated by several wolves watching him” (239). Freud’s reconstruction of the development of human culture begins with the Urhorde, the primal horde, which is channeled over time into the Oedipal triangle. There Freud references Darwin’s Descent of Man. 61. Or fox, since Freud does not question his patient’s vulpine characterization of the tails of his dream wolves. In his long footnote-embedded analysis of his patient’s verbal account of his wolf dream, he claims that wolves having tails like foxes “must be a contradiction of [the] conclusion” that the dreamer had reached: “ ‘So there really is such a thing as castration’ ” (WM 44n2). Though unstated, Freud probably based his claim on the convergence of his noting (in the analysis of the next dream element) that Pankejeff said that the wolves’ vulpine aspect initially did not cause him to be afraid (WM 44n2) and Freud’s earlier mention (WM 25) of young Sergei having “heard the story (out of Reynard the Fox) read aloud” of a wolf whose “tail was broken off in the ice” when it went fishing in winter (WM 25). 62. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 26, 28–29. The greater threat to the hegemony of Oedipal theory posed by animal symbolization of the parent is when the patient identifies the bigger animal rather than the crumpled one with the mother rather than the father; this can be observed in Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, when Freud and his later editors (both in the Standard Edition and the Collier edition of Freud’s collected papers) had to gloss over the significance of Little Hans telling his father that the bigger of the two giraffes in his phantasy reminded him of his mother; Freud, Analysis, 40, 122 and n1; also see Geller, On Freud’s, 125 and n55 (on the Collier unmarked substitution of “father” for “mother” in Little Hans’s initial interpretation). 63. Amid her critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becominganimal as reproducing philosophy’s traditional use of animals as figures, Donna Haraway notes their mean-spirited jibe at Freud that she assumes refers to “Freud’s famously irascible chows, no doubt sleeping on the floor during the Wolf-Man’s sessions” (WSM 29). Deleuze and Guattari may also have conflated Freud’s original treatment of Pankejeff, which concluded in 1914

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and was the basis of his case study, with Pankejeff ’s visits to Freud’s office in late 1926 that were mentioned by Ruth Mack Brunswick in her “Supplement to Freud’s ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis.’ ” During the latter he encountered Anna Freud’s (not her father’s as Brunswick suggests) “large grey police dog, which looked like a domesticated wolf,” that, though unmentioned by Brunswick, was aptly named “Wolf.” The first dream he shares with Brunswick is of grey wolves; this led her to assume that the Alsatian was among the day residue contributions to that dream; dreaming again of wolves led Pankejeff to see it as “corroboration . . . that all of his difficulties came from his relation to the father” (280). Reading Brunswick with Freud may have facilitated Deleuze and Guattari’s misrecognized mashup that Haraway then reproduces (WSM 29). In implying but not explicitly stating that the French schizoanalysts conflated this later scene with “That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch,” Gary Genosko (“Freud’s Bestiary,” 611–12) seems to have led others to errant assumptions about pet canine participation in Freud’s original case, such as Tyler (Ciferae, 39– 41) and Oliver (Animal Lessons, 268). 64. Rieff, “Introduction,” x. 65. On the other hand, Freud does not include the earlier mentioned (WM 25) story from Reynard the Fox about the wolf whose tail was broken off in the ice while fishing in winter in his analysis of the dream, although that mention (together with Pankejeff ’s education in the gelding of horses) had led Freud to comment, “Thus he was occupied with thoughts of castration, but as yet had no belief in it and no dread of it” (WM 25). Carlo Ginzburg (“Freud, the Wolf-Man,” 146 – 49) takes Freud to task for failing to consider folk traditions regarding those vulnerable to becoming werewolves as possibly playing a role in Pankejeff ’s specific wolf-phobia: being born with a caul or between Christmas and Epiphany. Freud does note that Pankejeff had (like himself ) been born with a caul; moreover, he invokes Pankejeff ’s Christmas birthday throughout the case study (for example, WM 15, 35–37, 64, 115) due to its relationship both to the timing of the wolf-dream and to his patient’s subsequent religious obsessions. Traditions about werewolves, however, are never mentioned. 66. Pankejeff may not have informed Freud about the wolf hunts that took place in White Russia when he spent his summer holidays at the family’s estate there. He describes such hunts in his “Memoirs” (12) without explicitly stating that he participated in them; however, family photographs in the Pankejeff Collection held at Library of Congress picture him with his sister, Anna, amid the peasant wolf-hunters, including one in which a trophy of the successful hunt, a wolf carcass, is displayed (Dimock, “Anna and the WolfMan,” 63–67). Though his recollected participation in such hunts postdated his wolf dream, that does not preclude his having been told of such when he

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was younger nor does it preclude the power of deferred action to recast his famous dream. 67. Freud begins walking back from this conclusion immediately after the exclamation point: “Let us, however, plainly understand [Machen wir übrigens klar] . . .” (WM 47). 68. In addition, the English editors feel compelled to note the fact that “The German word for ‘tailor’ is ‘Schneider,’ from the verb ‘schneiden’ (‘to cut’)”; WM 87n2. 69. Whitney Davis (Drawing the Dream, 193) suggests a countertransferential connection between Freud having dubbed his patient the “Wolf-Man” and Freud “changing his own name from Sigismund to the more Germanic Sigmund[:] he probably recalled that Sigmund and Sinfjotli [who were, unbeknownst to each other, father and son], in the story of the Volsungs, donned wolfskins with a ‘weird power’ which enabled them to howl like wolves and understand the sound of the beasts.” 70. In that editorial addition to WM 87n2, the editors of the Standard Edition also inform English-language readers that “a compound of [‘schneiden’], ‘beschneiden,’ means to circumcise” prior to including the reference to the “The Wolf and the Tailor,” thereby rendering explicit connections that Freud kept tacit. I extensively map out these connections in Geller, On Freud’s, esp. 106 –9. 71. Werbert, “Where the Horsetails Grow,” 192. The citation is from Obholzer, Wolf-Man, 30. Pankejeff did not mention this in his 1938 “Memoirs” (cf. 79–80). 72. It is in this case study that Freud first works through his important theory of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit; WM 45n1), whereby a present experience leads to the (re)interpretation of and reaction to an earlier repressed or forgotten experience that at the time could not, like trauma, be adequately reacted to (understood) and therefore cannot be integrated into one’s (narrative) account of self and world. 73. The footnote on page 79, “Or so long as he did not grasp the sense of the copulation between the dogs,” is also most likely a late addition because it serves the same function as do the two bracketed additions to the body of the text. Freud adds this note in order to render his claim that one-and-ahalf-year-old Sergei was a spectator to the primal scene, which he here had repeated in the body of the text, is, according to psychoanalytic theory, conditional. He therefore is able to maintain psychoanalysis’s claims to empirical conscientiousness and defend it against those who out of considerations of “credulity” (WM 57–58)— or “morality”—would reject his theory as well as against his own concerns. It is the latter, Freud’s “complex conviction” (Cries, 99–134), that drives Mahony’s close reading of the case study, including

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closely attending to the back-and-forth style of the first addition (and itself as addition) as performing the knots of temporality (past-present-future and the subjunctive, the inconsistencies and the impossibilities) in chronological life, psychical experience (including memory), and Freud’s narrative (86 –88). 74. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 26. 75. Freud/Ferenczi Correspondence, 138. 76. The English translation, but not the German original, seems to reference the earlier reduction of the sheep-dogs to symbols of color (white), when it re-introduces them with the phrase “Colour is lent to this view” (i.e., that the child may have observed copulation between animals and parents; WM 57). 77. See Werbert, “Where the Horsetails Grow,” 217–18. 78. Totem and Taboo, 128; citing Wulff, “Beiträge,” 16. Dr. Wulff had already begun a correspondence with Freud in December 1909; Mahony, Cries, 8. 79. “Supplement,” 301. 80. Kugler, Freuds Chimären, 182. 81. The sheep-dogs play only an incidental role when they return in the second 1918–added supplement on the primal scene; they function simply as referent of the wolves in Sergei’s anxiety dream. Sergei’s fear of the wolf is supplemented by a subsequent “in every respect analogous” (WM 96) anxiety scene with a butterfly (itself a deferred recollection of another scene with the servant girl Grusha at approximately the age of two-and-a-half ) that shifts the focus from the father-substitute animal to the universal import of castration. Also see Abraham and Torok, Wolf Man’s Magic Word. 82. Including Siodmak: “Many learned dissertations, even by Sigmund Freud, have been written about the Wolf Man” (WMM 262). 83. Siodmak, “Introduction,” 13. 84. Because of the Gothic scripts of both the hard-to-read original (from The Cloisters Apocalypse, folio 25 recto) and its more legible purported translation, Siodmak (“Introduction,” 14) assumed that the (monolingual American) spectators would imagine the source to be an “old German saga.” One can only speculate whether Siodmak made the connection among the illumination, the accompanying text about the “mark of the beast,” and the association of the latter with the Star of David and the Jews. 85. This move necessitated his changing the last line in his legendary ditty from “The autumn moon is bright” to “The moon is full and bright.” 86. There had been an earlier werewolf film, the 1935 English Werewolf of London, but it was an exercise in orientalism: The protagonist Wilfred Glendon goes to Tibet to seek a rare plant, the mariphasa, that only blooms under a full moon. Waiting for it to bloom he is bitten by a werewolf. He

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returns to London with the exotic plant and learns from the “Tibetan” Dr Yogami (whom he later realizes was the creature that bit him) that he will become a werewolf at the same time; he also learns that the only preventive to the transformation is the flower of that botanical specimen when it blooms under the full moon. In the end, transformed into a werewolf Glendon slays Yogami (played by the Sweden-born and U.S.-raised Warner Oland, who was already famous for playing both the Chinese villain Dr. Fu Manchu and the Chinese detective Charlie Chan) and is in turn slain by Col. Forsythe of Scotland Yard. 87. The case of the serial murderer who butchered his male lover-victims’ corpses, Fritz Haarmann, dubbed the “Werewolf of Hanover,” captivated Siodmak’s Weimar Germany. Theodor Lessing’s trial reportage turned case study, Haarmann. Die Geschichte eines Werwolfs (The story of a werewolf ), was widely read; he characterized “wolf society” (Wolfstum) and “wolf humanity” (Wolfsmenschheit) as a product of the “wolf heart[lessness]” (Wolfsherzen) and “wolf morality” (Wolfsmoral) in the aftermath of World War I. Lessing concluded that Haarman was a product of such a society’s discipline and its cages, including those most literal ones, prisons. See Poole, “Der Fall Fritz.” Fritz Lang drew upon the Haarmann case in the making of the 1931 film classic M. Siodmak recounts visiting the set during its filming though makes no connection with Haarmann (WMM 77). 88. His script underwent a number of revisions and this title change before returning to the original title, The Wolf Man, in the final cut; Riley, The Wolf Man, 31. 89. Siodmak, “Introduction,” 14; cf. WMM 262: “while writing the screenplay, I became aware that all of us are subject to the whim of Harmatia [sic], a predestined fate.” Yet how much subsequent events shaped his recollection is unclear. On the preceding page, Siodmak makes reference to a letter he received from a Professor Walter Evans of Augusta College in Georgia that included his lecture on the relation among Aristotle’s Poetics, Greek tragedy, and Siodmak’s film (WMM 241). In the Poetics, Aristotle notes the role of hamartia in the tragic hero’s fall. Siodmak then adds, “When the moon is full, the Wolf Man knows that he is destined to murder” (WMM 242); however, that facet was not added to the Wolf Man’s fate until the sequel. He then mentions how “the beast’s father exercises an ultimate power over the son”; yet, this oedipal dynamic was sparked by changes to the penultimate (October 9, 1941) script requested by Claude Rains who played Sir John Talbot. As discussed later in the chapter, the film’s possibly species-shifting protagonist had no filial relation to Sir John in the earlier scripts. 90. Melvin Matthews (Fear Itself, 133) cites this extract from Patrick Sierchio’s 1999 interview with Siodmak (accessed July 26, 2002) and concludes

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“the Wolf Man . . . represented screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s experiences as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany—a man aware of his fate but powerless to alter it”; however, Siodmak sought to and succeeded in altering his fate, having left Germany long before Jews qua Jews were sent to concentration camps let alone to death camps. 91. Nor, he earlier states (WMM 15), was the United States, when he arrived in 1937, much different—aside from the film industry in Hollywood. After noting the quota on Jewish students at many American universities, Siodmak also mentions the Chrysler Corporation’s ban on Jewish employees as well as the “rabid anti-Semite” Henry Ford. 92. Siodmak’s characterization of this novel—at the time celebrated and decried for its pacifist tendencies, critique of social conditions, and depiction of sexuality and later included among the books that the Nazis put to the torch—as exemplifying latent German antisemitism is colored by the novelist’s subsequent transformations. Glaeser, a German-Communist-Partysympathizer when writing the novel, had to emigrate from Germany in 1933; however, after returning to Germany in 1939, he became a “rehabilitated” journalist for several Nazi and military newspapers. 93. Wexler, “Should Jews Save the Werewolf,” 12; Weaver, “Commentary,” @ 0:01:57. 94. Cf. Unter Wolfsmenschen, 9. The lament continued: “I would have liked to have been a Greek, and not a member of a minority which, though its number consists of only one-third of 1 percent of the world population, is the most persecuted tribe in history. God, by divine neglect, hasn’t found time to replace his chosen people with another race whose destiny is to suffer” (WMM 3). Later, without explicitly connecting his destiny with that of the tribe into which he had been born, he recalled: “Though I had nothing to work with but the title The Wolf Man, the story fell into shape like a jigsaw puzzle. I saw in it the fight of good and evil in man’s soul, and the inescapable working of fate, which had also shaped my life” (WMM 261). Nevertheless, in his discussion of the film he never claims, unlike Patrick Sierchio (“Why”): “It is also no coincidence that the pentagram —a five-pointed star—resembles the Star of David, and those who bear the sign are marked for death by the wolf.” (It isn’t a coincidence, because Sierchio also claims that “the swastika is represented by the moon.”) Constantine Nasr, who produced the documentary material that accompanied the then-just-released new two-disc DVD reissue of The Wolf Man also claimed the pentagram to be a “very obvious substitute for the Star of David, and if you had that symbol you were going to be cursed”; cited in King, “ ‘Wolf Man’ writer.” The assumed identification of the pentagram with the Star of David also led Christian Stiegler (Vergessene Bestie, 150 –51) to elide Siodmak’s Jewishness

Notes to pages 217–22

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while ascribing such an elision to Siodmak himself: “Indeed Siodmak lived in the States, but was a German émigré who originally wanted the Wolf Man to represent humanity as lupine in order to show the drama and brutality of the war undertaken by the human race. Here the pentagram, which is in fact the Jewish star that, however, as such was made unrecognizable in the film, also gains its significance. It represents the sign of the devil and thereby places the werewolf in the sphere of the satanic.” If the Wolf Man represents the murderous warriors, then wouldn’t the pentagram that identified him be an unrecognizable mystification of the swastika? 95. Beyond the chronology of the various transformations of Siodmak’s script and their contexts, Mank, Riley, and Turner (“Screen Development,” 31–33) provide summaries of specific scenes that either never made it to or were significantly altered in the final shooting script as well as several extensive extracts. 96. Cited in Mank, Riley, and Turner, “Script Development,” 32; the caps are in the original. 97. Cited in Mank, Riley, and Turner, “Script Development,” 32. 98. Cited in Roseman, Wannsee Conference, 81. afterword. “it’s clear as the light of day”: the shoah and the human /animal great divide Some of this material was previously aired in December 2014 at a Theology/German Studies faculty seminar at the University of Birmingham (UK) and at sessions devoted to Jewish Studies and the New Posthumanities (2014) and New Work on German Jewish Culture (2015) at the Association for Jewish Studies annual meetings. 1. Caption for the image of a powerful hand, wearing a swastika-engraved ring, grabbing a coiling snake just below its fork-tongued, caricatured-Jewish head that appeared on a postcard issued by the Flemish antisemitic journal Volksche Aanal produced by the Belgian Nazi collaborationist group Volksverwering; in Silvain and Kotek, La Carte postale antisémite, 240. 2. H. A. Smith, “Gertrud Kolmar’s,” 42– 43. 3. Though not identifying herself with or assuming the persona of any specific creature or creatures, animal analogy and figure permeate her habitus (“girded with towers”): for example, “And birds with raw and wrinkled craws / Lie burrowed deep in caves. // Inside the halls of sifting sand / Crouch lizards hiding speckled breasts” (DS 108/109). 4. In “The Animal” (Gedichte, 150) the poet speaks the animot: “Come here. And watch my death . . . / And don’t ask if I am a hare, a squirrel or a mouse. // ’Cause we’re all the same [to you] . . . . // The humans that you ripped to shreds [zerfetzt; alluding to World War I’s slaughtering fields] / In

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suffering they were turned to saints. . . . // when we drop dead [verrecken], we’re carrion, / But you are stricken with the grief you can no longer murder us.” Though the gender of the first-person narrator is not indicated, the three species named are, respectively, grammatically gendered masculine (Hase), neutral (Eichhorn), and feminine (Maus)—and the eponymous Tier is grammatically neutral (as is das Mädchen, young woman), the poem’s embedding in the Female Portrait cycle signals the manifest overlap of animal and female identifications. Further, see Chapter 2 on the appropriation of verrecken, a term generally referring to the sudden perishing of beasts, by the perpetrators of the 1819 Hep-Hep pogroms to describe the fate they desired for the Jews. 5. Kolmar, Das lyrische Werk 3, 174. 6. Kolmar, Gedichte, 204 –5. 7. It should be noted that in “Wir Juden,” the poet’s sense of her own inability to play the prophet or judge who can call upon “God’s towering heaven” (DS 112/113) to end this history of persecution (“My lips are sealed in glowing wax. / My soul is like a swallow fluttering helpless in its cage. / And I can feel the fist that drags my weeping head toward the hill of ashes”; DS 114/115) also implicates a divine impotence that leaves the eventual salvation of “we Jews” to “you Jews”—to “my people” (mein Volk; DS 116 –17). The only individual invoked in Kolmar’s earlier portrait of the Jewish woman, “Die Jüdin” (DS 108–11), was the Hebrew Judge Deborah—not by name but by her role as judge (Richterin)—who has left her spark in the Jewish woman since “before great Rome and Carthage were” (DS 110 –11). That spark is there still at the time of “Wir Juden” ’s composition: “Because in me the altar fires ignite / Of the judge [i.e., Deborah] and her host” (Der Richterin und ihrer Schar; DS 110 –11). Though the Jewish woman who calls out “Wir Juden” is silenced before she can act the judge and “thunder: Justice! Justice! Justice” (DS 114/115), her host, “my people,” will ultimately prevail without her (DS 116 –17). On “Die Jüdin,” see Bormanis, “1932 Gertrud Kolmar,” 494 –97. 8. Letter of December 16, 1941; cited in Smith, “Gertrud Kolmar’s,” 38. 9. Kolmar speaks of “die Last über Ninive, die er geschaut” (DS 228), which recalls the openings of the books of Nahum and Habakkuk in Luther’s translation. The German Last like the Hebrew massa’ can refer to either a burden or an omen. 10. Singer, “The Letter Writer,” 233. Gombiner then concludes his eulogy with “And yet man demands compassion from heaven.” This post-Shoah lament casts its shadow back upon Kolmar’s “Tag der großen Klage.” 11. That is, when it is extracted from Singer’s story and transformed into an apodictic statement. Singer’s awareness that Gombiner would soon learn that Huldah had not died, that he had not “killed her” (“The Letter Writer,”

Notes to pages 225–27

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233), should be considered when endeavoring to understand the author’s decision to insert this eulogy into his narrative. While the Hebrew publishing house that employed Gombiner as a translator was closing and its “editors and writers would have nowhere to go [because] Judaica was becoming a vanishing specialty in America” (215), while the archive of his past, the “books, newspapers, and magazines [that] lay everywhere, piled in stacks,” book cases, and cabinets, “would fall apart if they were moved” and were vulnerable to mouse infestation (207), while Gombiner’s only community, aside from Huldah, consisted of dispersed individuals who only communicated with those who are absent—the dead and the readers of their letters about the dead—and while Gombiner became stricken by a potentially fatal ailment, during which Huldah appeared to have been starved to death, in the end, just as Judentum had persisted after the First Churban that Huldah had presaged (and the subsequent churbanim) came to pass, so too both Gombiner and the prophetess’s namesake thwart the genocidal telos indexed by “Treblinka.” The last image in the story is of his books “momentarily bathed in a purplish light, illuminating the old bindings and the last remnants of gold-engraved and half-legible titles” (239). Perhaps because in helping a nonhuman animal (Huldah) to survive, the human animal (Gombiner) had helped to preserve himself (that is, he had begun to feed Huldah so that she would not consume his books)— combined with their prospective co-habitation with Rose Beechman, a member of his letter-writing collective of ever-absent souls, whose unexpected appearance, like some deus ex machina, “saved not one life but two” (237)—“It all had,” as “The Letter Writer” concludes, “the quality of a revelation” (239). 12. Nazi “Jew Hunter” Colonel Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz) to Perrier LaPadite, a French farmer hiding a Jewish family, in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. 13. Sereny, Into that Darkness, 101. 14. Cited in D. L. Smith, Less than Human, 138, who cites from Goldhagen, Worse Than War, 386. 15. Ingrao, Believe and Destroy, 255; cf. 151. He draws primarily on the head of Einsatzkommando 3, Standartenführer Jäger’s December 1941 report. The animalization of the enemy structures Curzio Malaparte’s quasi-autobiographical account of the “murderous” actions and attitudes of Germans and their collaborators in the aftermath of the invasion of the Soviet Union; the titles of each of Kaputt’s six parts are types of animals (horses, mice, dogs, birds, reindeer, flies). 16. Ingrao (Believe and Destroy, 314n62) acknowledges this when providing the source (a June 1941 leaflet given to Wehrmacht soldiers in Norway) for his analytic of “Jewish bestiality.” In that absence, Ingrao generates his

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rather problematic explanatory distinction between the killing undertaken by hunting and that under conditions of domestication. Sparing the young may be the custom among those hunting for sport or for sustenance, but not when the objects of the hunt are either threatening predators or so-called vermin (255). 17. Levi, “Useless Violence,” 111, 111. 18. Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” 152–53. He goes on to describe how, like animals, he and his fellow Jewish prisoners were treated like languagelacking animals and laments (153): “How can we deliver a message about our humanity which, from behind the bars of quotation marks, will come across as anything other than monkey talk?” 19. Levi, “Useless Violence,” 112, 119. 20. Des Pres, Survivor, 64. 21. Weil, Elegie, 21. Recalling Greenberg’s poem (see discussion later in this chapter) he wrote about the Red Cross visit to Terezin: “During those days there was also enough meat available, but the people received none; the meat too was only for appearance sake. It was allocated to the kennel because dogs are entitled to have meat” (30). 22. Weil, Life with a Star, 129. 23. “I knew all about the circus. My aunt and uncle had taken me to the circus several times”; Life with a Star, 131. 24. Life with a Star, 131, 132. 25. Including the animal-as-machine of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophies. 26. Chen, Animacies, 42. 27. Also see D. L. Smith, Less than Human, 93–94, discussing the work of social psychologist Nick Haslam (“Attributing and Denying”). 28. Des Pres, Survivor, 61, paraphrasing a lecture Arendt delivered at the New School (New York) in 1974. 29. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 68. For Adorno, to return the gaze of the animal and of the animalized human would be to recognize both their shared animality (embeddedness in nature) and that (animal) difference is other than the negation of the (human) same; the exchange of gazes thereby undermines the presumption of human exceptionalism and forestalls its harmful consequences; see Mendieta, “Animal is to Kantianism.” Mendietta cites from a 1956 letter in which Adorno writes “philosophy is truly here to redeem what lies in the gaze of an animal” (151). Derrida’s The Animal pivots about this exchange of gazes; for example, “something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself—[the cat] can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through the absolute

Notes to pages 229–32

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alterity of the neighbor or of the next[-door] than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat” (A 11). 30. S. Friedländer, “The ‘Final Solution,’ ” 27. 31. Cf. Agamben’s discussion of homo sacer as “bare life”—who can be neither religiously sacrificed nor politically executed [state-sanctioned murder], but can be killed by anyone in the polis—and the sovereign, for whom all others are (potentially) bare life, in Homo Sacer. The Muselmann, the camp inmate who, as a consequence of disease, starvation, exhaustion, brutalization, and so on, was reduced to sheer apathy toward his/her person and surroundings, without self and subjectivity, is his exemplar of bare life under the biopolitical regime of the modern anthropological machine. 32. Lanzmann, Shoah, 9. 33. In distinguishing between objectification and dehumanization D. L. Smith (Less Than Human, 94) contends that when bureaucrats and militaries engage in the former (without the latter), it does not necessarily lead to genocide. 34. Koschorke, Polizeireiter, 58; cited in Kühl, Ganz normale Organisationen, 113. Kühl (esp. 211–21) elaborates how the German order police produced the (prospective) victim as dehumanized. 35. See Shapira, “Why did the Nazis like Dogs?”; the conceit of Nazi canine adoration frames the narrative of Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk’s 1969 tale of a traumatized Shoah survivor, Adam Resurrected. 36. “To God in Europe,” 574 –75. In the previous canto, Greenberg had deployed traditional ovine imagery that frequently figures the relationship of the Jewish people to their deity; the poet called upon “God of Israel, Shepherd-Seer” to “count your sheep,” his “dead flock” of Europe’s Jews (573). 37. “The Proclamation of the Vilna Ghetto Resistance Organization— January 1, 1942” and “The Manifesto of the Command of the Jewish United Partisans Organization, FPO, in the Vilna Ghetto—September 1 1943,” in Berenbaum, Witness (154, 156 –57). The “Manifesto” (156) refers to the “German and Lithuanian butchers.” 38. Cited in Engelking, Holocaust Memory, 18. 39. Jewish Telegraph Agency, “Moscow Accused.”

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index

abjection (disavowal, repudiation), 12, 15, 17, 24, 55, 61, 66, 80, 131 135, 156, 166, 179–80, 182, 193, 212, 244n78, 246n92, 274n94, 295n105, 314n3, 316n25; “the Jew” evoking, 21–22, 24, 53, 55, 111, 179, 182, 233 Abramovitsh, Sh. Y. (Mendele MoykherSforim), 123, 290n66 Abu Ghraib, 17 Achilles, 136 Adorno, Theodor, 3– 4, 11, 19–21, 229, 239n16, 244nn73,78, 247n96, 265n36, 273n90, 287–88n34, 338n29 affect: 17, 21, 66 –68, 94 –95, 161, 187, 202, 229–30, 263n19, 269n63, 307n34, 318n32, 323n2; and the distinction between objectification and dehumanization, 229–30; force of, 5, 22, 28, 55, 76, 102, 106, 122, 138, 150, 174, 232. See also abjection; ambivalence; compassion; desire; disgust; fear; hate; humiliation; shame; shamelessness Agamben, Giorgio, 10, 12–13, 17, 20, 45, 242n42, 244n76, 244 – 45n79, 254 – 55n71, 266n40, 292n85, 295n106, 323n2, 325n20, 339n31 agency, of the subjected, 20, 97, 134; working-through, 10. See also intervention, public: by Jewish-identified writers; performance and performativity: of the Jew-as-Animal; readers: identification of the Jew-animal/“the Jew,” strategies against Agosin, Marjorie, 252n56 Ahlwardt, Hermann, 69, 268n50 Alexander II, Pope, 43 allegory, 21–22, 32, 46, 81, 96, 108, 123–24, 129–30, 132, 160 –62, 164 –65, 172–74, 182, 186, 222, 272n81, 290nn64,67, 307n35, 309n61, 310n64, 314n8, 323–24n10; “Allegorie” and Kafka, 172, 314n6; anti-allegorical, 22, 27, 186. See also Gleichnis; parable

Altenberg, Peter, 294n103 ambivalence, 23, 73, 110, 123, 208, 211, 213, 240n18, 273n89 American Tail, An (Spielberg/Bluth), 68 amphibian(s), 238n7; and the French, 78; frog (toad), 229, 278n28; and Jews, 30, 39; salamander, 155 analogy: animals, Jews, and women in Kolmar’s poetry, 222–23, 335n3, 335–36n4; becomes identity, 186 –87; in Either-Or (Kierkegaard), 76 –77, 273n90; of Jews and animals, 5–7, 19–20, 22, 24, 32–33, 41, 43– 44, 46 – 47, 53–54, 60, 69–70, 85, 94 –95, 118, 128, 140 – 42, 145, 193–94, 222, 230 –31, 246n95, 262n15, 264n24, 275–76n9, 278n32, 296n13; of Jews and Chinese, 104; of Kafka with mole, 90; of lizards and Egyptians, 153; of Nazis and animals, 306 –7n29; of others and animals, 15–16 Andrews, Roy Chapman, 51, 258n99 Animal, the, 3, 10 –20, 23, 54 –55, 75, 111, 135–36, 161, 180, 188–89, 226, 229–30, 242n50, 244n76, 259n108, 266n38, 291n70; “das Tier = der quälenden Husten,” 261n6 Animal, Question of the, 10 –13, 19, 225 animal: domesticated, 2, 15–16, 31, 134, 160, 200, 212, 226, 254n68, 325n18, 330n63, 338n16; humanized, 12–13, 16 – 17, 230 –31; “the Jew” as, 30, 48, 94, 183, 246n90, 276 –77n20, 321n54; predatory, 15, 30, 43, 48, 94, 160, 163, 183, 192–93, 219, 265n35, 276n11, 306n24, 321n54, 338n16; use as figure/cipher, 20 –21, 45, 75, 91–92, 193, 272n84, 294n97, 329n63; wild, 14 –15, 30 –31, 159, 183, 198, 208, 226, 228, 243n61, 265n35. See also animalization: of Jews; Bestiarium Judaicum; arachnids/ bacteria/bat /bird/camel/ hyena/mongrel/reptile:basilisk /rodent / snake/species/Ungeziefer/vermin /worm: “the Jew” as; amphibian:frog/ape/bear/

385

386 animal: domesticated (continued ) cat /deer/dog/ donkey/fox /goat /horse/ insect /jackal/livestock /lizard/mouse/ pig/rabbit /rat /reptile/wolf: and Jews animal exhibitions: circus, 16, 125, 338n23; Circus Nikulina, 128; deportation site as, 228–29; the “Great Menagerie,” 256n87; zoo, 48, 134, 226; Hagenbeck Zoo, 125; menagerie, 2, 37, 49, 71, 80, 87, 104, 238n7 Animal Liberation Front, 225 animal story (Tiergeschichte), 25, 58, 61, 93, 123–24, 135, 172–74, 183, 186 –87, 246n89, 273n89, 290nn65–66, 322n65. See also allegory; fable animalization: animalized human, 12–13, 16 –17, 180, 229–30, 243n61, 338n29; of animals, 19, 75, 226; and “bare life,” 339n31; of Jews, 4 –5, 19, 22–24, 27, 46 – 49, 53–55, 77, 80, 110, 187, 200, 206, 220, 226 –27, 230 –31, 245n85, 274n92; of others, 12, 15–17, 24, 62, 180, 229, 320n51, 337n15. See also bestialization; dehumanization animot, 11, 335–36n4; Jewish, 20 –22, 28, 137, 154, 232 anthropological machine: critique of Agamben’s notion, 13, 242n42; modern, 12–13, 20, 292n85, 323n2, 339n31, premodern, 12–13, 292n85, 323n2 antisemitic (and anti-Jewish) media: bestiaries, 22, 32–35, 248n13; bibles and psalters, 43, 249n13; blogs, 53, 258n102, 326n32; 258n102; bric-a-brac (tchotchkes), 7, 36 –37, 40; broadsheets, 36 –37, 36 (fig.), 250n33; caricatures, 36 –37, 40, 49, 113, 127–28, 194, 217–18, 239– 40n16, 252n47, 257n88, 258n102, 293n90, 312n83, 335n1; cartoons, 40, 128; church decoration, 33, 35–36, 43, 84, 251n53, 253n58; epigrams, 128, 166, 183; essays, 39– 40; fairy tales, 194, 217; field guides, 17, 51, 53, 103, 239– 40n16; films, 55, 259–60n117; from Glöß Verlag, 69, 293n90; Jews as (self-) caricatures, 24, 117, 119; legends, 34, 226 –27, 312n85; in Musée des horreurs, 37, 38 (fig.), 205 (fig.); novels, 24, 217, 245n85, 249n16, 321n58, 334n92; plays, 51, 168, 200 –2, 311n79; postcards, 7, 37 (fig.), 40, 42 (fig.), 49, 62, 63 (fig.), 252n47, 335n1; posters (Bilderbogen), 7–8, 37, 51, 69, 69 (fig.), 257n88, 258nn97,99, 275n7, 293n90, 335n1; proverbs/sayings, 33, 54, 63, 83–84, 141, 194, 259n109, 275–76n9, 321n59; song, 54, 249n23, 252–53n56; treatise/tractate/ pamphlet 7–8, 17, 30 –32, 36, 46, 48, 51, 117, 193–94, 248n3, 250n25, 251n36,

Index 255n74, 257n92, 282n60, 325–26n24. See also Bestiarium Judaicum antisemitism (Antisemitismus), 5, 7, 19, 21, 27–28, 37, 48– 49, 55, 62, 69–70, 85, 95, 98, 102, 111–12, 118–22, 137, 140 – 41, 162, 171, 178, 183, 217, 222, 226, 240n20, 254n69, 277n26, 278n29, 282n62, 283n63, 314n3, 321nn58,60, 325n24, 334n92; defined, 243n70; French, 37–38, 80, 194, 204; as neologism, 48; racialist, 2– 4, 7, 17, 112, 115, 118, 177, 239n12, 239– 40n16, 240n18 ape(s), monkey(s) (Affe), 25–26, 29, 118, 124 –37, 126 (fig.), 203, 227, 271–72n79, 290 –91n69, 292nn80 –81, 293n94, 323n3; Affenschande, 292n80; in antiJewish proverb, 54, 292n86; and Jews, 5, 12, 20, 22, 37, 46 – 47, 49, 50 (fig.), 54, 108–10, 127–28, 247n2, 288n41, 290n64, 292nn80 –82,86, 294n103; chimpanzee, 130, 134 –36; orangutan (homo sylvestris), 12, 127–29, 291n69; porcelain monkeys, 127, 291n76. See also Kafka: “Report to an Academy”; nach-: äffen Apennines, 118, 151, 156, 169, 304n3 Apion, 34 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 14, 56, 116, 260n118 Arab(s), 170 –78, 183–84, 186, 204, 245n84, 314n8, 315n13, 316nn20 –24, 316 –17n26, 317n29, 317–18n31, 321n60; contrasted with Bedouin, 175–76. See also Kafka: “Jackals and Arabs”; stereotype: of Arabs, orientalist arachnid(s), “the Jew” as: scorpion, 47; spider, 46; tarantula, 47 Arendt, Hannah, 142, 229, 296 –97n14 Aristotle, 12–14, 32, 116, 33n89 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 239n11, 269n61 Arnim, Achim von, 70, 268n53 Augustine, Saint, 14, 31 Ausweg, search for, 133–34, 138, 294n102; into the open (ins Freie), 67, 134, 267n42 Baal Shem Tov (BeShT), 195, 327n37 bacteria (bacilli), “the Jew” as, 7, 62, 111, 241n26 baptism, 70, 85–86, 98, 103, 107, 110, 162, 320n46; in anti-Jewish proverb, 83–85, 275–76n9; baptized Jews, 5, 28, 70, 114, 147, 151–52, 256n85, 276n13, 283n68, 285n78, 319n40; as entrée-billet, 98, 110, 152, 207; Jews as badly baptized, 43, 84 –85, 155, 275–76n9; unbaptized Jews, 5, 28, 114, 152. See also conversion Bar-Kochba Circle, 139, 162, 308n48 bare life, 20, 66, 244nn76,79, 266n40, 339n31

Index Bartels, Adolf, 2–3, 116, 238nn7–10 bat(s), “the Jew” as, 30 Battegay, Caspar, 273n89, 321n61 Batuman, Elif, 296n12 Bauer, Felice, 71–72, 83–85, 95, 173, 264n21, 268–69n58, 269n61, 314n9 bear(s), and Jews, 39, 48– 49; German-Jewish emblem of Issachar, 48, 256n83 Beck, Evelyn Torton, 266 –67n41 becoming-animal, 21, 207, 329n60 Bedouin, 175–76, 184 –85 Beer-Hoffmann, Richard, 305–6n18 Beethoven, Ludwig, 113, 115 Begley, Louis, 142 Benedict XII, Pope, 43 Benjamin, Andrew, 20, 244n79, 272n84, 318n33 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 25, 58, 172, 174, 180, 186, 261n6, 272n81, 285n3, 295n114, 297n14, 314nn5–6 Bering, Dieter, 256n84 Berlin, 23, 26, 96, 104, 106, 127, 152, 166 –67, 220 –21, 223, 225, 246n94, 256n84, 257n93, 259n106, 267n41, 284n76, 300n41, 311n79 Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando, 263n19, 266 –67n41 Bernstein, Michael André, 27 Berserkers, 324n13, 325n20 bestialization, 5, 21, 29, 60, 117, 192, 254n69, 264n24 Bestiarium Judaicum, 5, 21–22, 27–28, 56, 95, 108, 138, 141, 193 bestiary, 1–3, 5, 22, 25, 30, 32–33, 71, 249n13; De universo (De rerum naturis), 32, 34 –35, 42, 249n14; Physiologus, 32. See also Blei, Franz: Bestiarium Literaricum bête (beast, stupid), 12; bête noir, 164 Bey, Osman (Frederick Millingen), 54 Bible, 35, 222–23, 240n20, 281n51, 303n61, 310n74; Luther’s trans., 155, 223–24, 336n9; Ambrosian Bible, 45; Bible(s) moralisée(s), 33, 248– 49n13; Chumash, 200; TaNaKh, 45, 222; books of: Genesis, 14, 48, 55, 131–32, 194, 223, 249n14, 255n71, 293n95, 323n9, 327n38; Exodus 46, 293n95; Leviticus, 32, 141; Numbers, 170; Deuteronomy, 323n9; Judges, 106 –7, 336n7; 1 Samuel, 186; 1 Kings, 45; 2 Kings, 225; Isaiah, 183, 231; Jeremiah, 183; Ezekiel, 183; Jonah, 223–25; Micah, 183; Nahum, 336n9; Habakkuk, 222, 336n9; Malachi, 183; Psalms, 34 –35, 43, 45, 198, 310n64; Job, 318n31; Proverbs, 151, 155, 304n2; Lamentations, 183, 196; 2 Chronicles, 225; Matthew, 35, 43; Mark, 260n118; John, 33; Acts, 231,

387 242n46; Romans, 231; 1 Corinthians, 46; Revelation, 214, 215 (fig.) Big Red One (Sam Fuller), 16, 242n55 Bildung, 115, 123, 125, 290n63, 294n102, 328n54; and Wissenschaft, 96 –98, 103, 107, 246n94. See also integration, Jewish social Binder, Hartmut, 61, 179, 263n19, 263–64n20, 267n42, 272n85, 298n27, 301n45, 312n85 biopolitics, 20, 62, 266n40, 339n31 bird(s), 297n21; in Bambi and Bambis Kinder, 158, 160, 306n27, 309n61; carrion crow, 281n53; cuckoo, 241n26; eagle, 327n41; gallow’s, 30; goose, 39; “the Jew” as, 54, 328n53, 335n3; owl, 1, 30, 32–33, 39, 44, 249n16, 253n57, 302n57; parrot, 46 – 47, 117–19 (Papagoyim); Pechvogel, 1, 237n4; peregrine, 237n2; in proverb, 54, 97; Raubvogel, 48; raven, 30, 278n32; sparrow, 241n26; starling, 23, 302n59; turkey, 39; vulture, 30, 224; and German-Jewish names: eagle (Adler), 49, 281n53; falcon (Falke), 256n83; goose (Gans), 152; and Kafka’s names: blackbird (Amsel), 57; jackdaw (kavka; Dornen), 2, 57, 175, 238n6 Birnbaum, Nathan, 277n26 Blei, Franz, 1–3, 71, 87, 122–23, 237n5, 237–38n6, 238n7, 268n57, 270n72, 298n30; Bestiarium Literaricum (BL), 1–2, 71, 87, 122–23, 237–38n6, 238n8, 268n57, 270n72, 298–99n30 Bloch, Grete, 124 Bloch, Hans, 124 blood, and descent, 3, 24, 40, 121, 230, 259n117, 273n89, 309n60; blood-thirsty (blood-sucker), jackals as, 176, 183, 316n22; cold-blooded, Jews as, 30; “the Jew” as, 3, 30, 53, 194, 201–2, 241n26, 321n54, 326n32; prohibition on consuming, 250n30 blood libel (ritual murder), 36, 39, 56, 94 –95, 182, 185, 204, 239n16, 250n30, 322n66; Beilis trial, 185; Damascus Affair, 56, 182, 204, 322n66; Hilsner Affair (Polna), 94 –95; Ritual Murder in Hungary (Zweig), 95, 278n32; Simon of Trent, 36 (fig.), 39; Tisza-Eszlar, 95, 278n32, 322n66 Blüher, Hans, 109, 121, 123 body, Jewish, 7, 17, 39, 49, 117, 128, 137, 167, 248n3; as crooked (krumm), 7, 137, 204, 278n32, 295n111; as effeminate, 288–89n44, 293n92 body dysmorphic disorder, 60 body parts, Jewish: beard, 22, 62, 70, 105, 201, 251n42, 283n70; countenance as lupine, 194; as diacritic, 283n69; ears,

388 body parts, Jewish (continued) 7, 222; eyes, 7, 17, 72, 166 –68, 320n54; feet, 7; and fur hats, 197, 199; hair, 7; as Gentile/Jew diacritic, 105, 249n23, 251n42, 283n70; goatee (Ziegenbart), 33, 249n23; Kafka’s ears, 137, 237n6; die Kafka’s eyes, 2, 72, 87; lips, 7; nose, 2, 7, 30, 128, 194, 206, 238n8, 248n3, 249n16, 295n11, 326n29, 326n31; pockmarks, 105; Schmiss, 130, 293n92; Zöpfchen, 284n77. See also circumcision; penis; tail: pigtail (Zopf); visibility: and Jewish identification Börne, Ludwig, 147, 168, 251n41, 284n73, 286n21, 299n35, 311n80, 313n85 Boggs, Colleen Glenney, 17, 245n83 Born, Jürgen, 278–79n34 bourgeoisie, 8, 11,18, 28, 73, 131, 133–34, 137, 287n34, 308n37; educated (Bildungsbürgertum), 28, 86, 98, 115; petit, 8, 83, 291n69, 310n64; bourgeois values as the human: decency/upstanding (anständig), 18, 77; dignity, 4, 11, 227; honor, 106, 131, 293nn91,93; indecency (unanständig), and das Jüdische, 179; respectability, 131, 180; standing up as indecent, 180; tied to erect posture (Aufrichtung), 18, 243nn67–68, 323n3 Boyarin, Daniel, 288n44, 293n92 Brod, Max, 16, 58, 60, 63, 68, 75, 81, 86 –92, 94, 96, 121, 123, 139– 41, 143–51, 169, 178–81, 249n23, 260n5, 261n6, 263n20, 265n31, 267n42, 271n75, 277nn21–23, 279–80n36, 290n64, 296n4, 296 –97n14, 297n16, 298nn27–28, 300nn37,39– 41,43– 44, 301n45, 302n53, 303n66, 314n9, 319n40; Colonel Klink of postwar Kafka studies, 279–280n36; Die Jüdinnen, 26, 139, 145– 47, 180 –81, 267n42, 300n38, 303n66, 319n40, 319–20n46 Brubaker, Rogers, 240n18 Brunswick, Ruth Mack, 212–13, 330n63 Buber, Martin, 58, 123, 162, 170, 172–73, 195, 308nn48– 49, 309n60 Budapester Orpheumgesellschaft, 130 Butler, Judith, 27, 141– 42, 162, 170 –71, 296nn10,12–13, 297n15, 314n3; “Who Owns Kafka?” 170 Cabaret, 128, 292n82 Cain, mark of, 77, 273n90 camel, 171, 175, 184 –85, 316n22; “the Jew” as, 39 Campe, Julius, 167–68, 284n73 cannibalism, 34, 39, 191; Christian, 56 capitalism, 189; Jews and, 70, 115–16, 240n20, 282n60

Index Cartmill, Matt, 307n35, 316n22 castration, 5, 34, 76, 132, 207–10, 213, 323n5, 329n61, 330n65, 332n81; and circumcision, 34, 210. See also tail, Schwanz: tailless; Wolf-Man Case cat, 24, 70, 78, 81–87, 90, 96, 98–99, 108, 160, 212, 245n80, 268n48, 270n73, 273n89, 274n97, 306n29, 309n57, 338–39n29; cat and mouse, 26, 81–87, 90, 96, 98–100, 268n48, 275nn1,9; Chatten-und-Ratten, 96, 99; and Derrida, 86, 338–39n29; and Jews, 249n13; Mr. Jinks, Pixie, and Dixie, 82; in proverb, 24, 54, 83–84, 87, 275n9. See also Heine, Heinrich: “From the Age of Pigtails”; Kafka, Franz: “Little Fable”; Spiegelman, Art: Maus Chatti, 99–100 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 17, 112, 115, 238n9 Chambers, Whittaker, 165, 305n14, 309n55, 310n70 Chidester, David, 15, 320n47 chosenness, 72, 99–100, 165, 334n94 Christian-German Eating Club, 70, 166 –67, 283n68, 311n75 Christian /Jewish difference, 166, 283n70; overcoded by human /animal difference, 30 –31, 36, 46, 166, 181 Chrysostom, St. John, 16, 30 –31, 42, 193, 248nn6 –8 circumcision (Beschneidung), 31, 34, 39– 40, 99, 103, 105, 107–8, 132–33, 153, 168, 209–10, 233, 240n16, 249n24, 284nn75, 77–78, 293n95, 294n97, 312n84, 331n70; of Christ, 209; “circumcised dogs,” Jews as, 204; circumciser (Mohel), 105, 108, 165; of coins, 165, 312n84; and Jewish male difference, 108, 133, 218, 294n97; uncircumcised, 39, 106. See also castration; Hühneraugen: -operateur; penis; visibility: and Jewish identification colliers, 195, 327n35 compassion, 223–24, 309n58, 336n10 Consul the Much Admired, 125, 126 (fig.), 243n61 contamination (contagion), 21, 62–63, 218, 274n91, 278n28; Jews as, 62–63, 218. See also Verjudung conversion, 3, 70, 82–86, 102, 104, 107, 152, 156, 168, 247n2, 252n53, 253n60, 283n68, 285n78, 294n103; analogized with dogs returning to their vomit, 42– 43, 252n53; coerced, 86; to Judaism, 80, 198, 249n24; lapsed, 43; mass, as solution to Jewish Question, 119; proselytization, 56, 276nn12–13; Red Peter’s, 134; refusal of, 107, 276n12. See also baptism

Index Cook, Coleridge, 59 Copeland, Marion, 262n15 Copernicus, Nicolai, 188 Crémieux, Adolphe, 204, Czech Question, the, 93–95, 186, 278n28 Daker, 191, 324n13 Darwin, Charles, 12, 47, 54, 117–18, 127, 129, 180 –81, 188, 255n78, 291n78, 301n46, 320n47, 329n60, 331n70; Darwinian, 108, 189; Darwinism, 12, 54; Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 180, 291n78. See also evolution Davis, Whitney, 331n69 Dawkins, Richard, 188, 323n3 Deborah, 336n7 deer (Reh), 15, 193, 305n14, 327n41; antlers (Kronen), 161, 257n88; in Bambi, 27, 156 –58, 160 –65, 306n21, 309nn51, 60 –61; in Bambis Kinder, 157–61, 165, 306n23, 307nn31,34; as Jewish surname, 48; and Jews, 309nn51,60; Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, 305n13. See also Hirsch dehumanization, of Jews, 21, 23, 49, 55, 97, 141, 187, 226, 229–30, 328n55, 339n34; of others, 242n50; versus objectification, 229–30, 339n33 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 21, 207, 245n81, 329nn62–63 demons, 62, 191, 324n14; demonization, of Jews, 31, 121 Derrida, Jacques, 10 –13, 16, 19–20, 86, 161, 242n37, 244nn73–74, 245n80, 320n51, 338–39n29; The Animal That Therefore I Am, 11, 19–20, 86, 244nn73– 74, 245n80, 338–39n29 Des Pres, Terence, 230 desire, 14, 17, 33, 48, 66, 74, 76, 80, 88, 100, 103, 118, 120, 127, 131, 135, 139, 141– 42, 150, 189, 193, 201, 216, 266n37, 268n48, 274n93, 276n11, 307n29, 336n4 Deutschen/Germanen distinction, 277n27 dialectical image, 172, 186, 314n5 Dickel, Manfred, 310n64 dictionaries and lexicons: Adelungs Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch, 51; Deutsches Sprichwörterlexikon (Wander), 259n109; Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Kluge), 274n93; German Lexicon of Proverbs, 84; Grimms Wörterbuch (Deutsches Wörterbuch), 61–62, 267n92, 272n85, 274n93; Historical Dictionary of German Figurative Usage (Spalding), 292n80; Der Jude im Sprichwort (Hiemer), 54, 141, 194, 259n109, 264n24, 275–76n9, 292n86, 321n59; Der jüdische Stamm in nichtjüdischen Sprichwörten ( Jellinek),

389 275n9, 276n12; Staats-Lexikon (Rotteck and Welcker), 47, 256n80 difference: as hierarchical, 5–7, 14, 20, 44, 47, 67, 91–92, 129, 135, 187, 244n73, 295n105; as order maintaining, 5–6, 11, 13, 19, 62, 66 –67, 77, 129, 174, 226, 243nn61,70, 304n8; obviating internal, 77, 274n94; in relation versus in-itself, 140 dinosaur-form, bipedal, Jews as descended from, 51, 52 (fig.), 258n99; Protoceratops, 51 Dinter, Artur (Die Sünde wider das Blut), 249n16 Diodorus, 153 disease: -bearers, Jews as, 34, 46, 53, 62, 112, 283n63; gonorrhea, 265n31; Judentum as, 107, 260n117; leprosy, 231, 250n27; mental illness, 209–10, 263n19, 321n64 (see also Rat Man Case; Wolf-Man Case); syphilis, 112; trichinosis as nonJewish, 264n26; tuberculosis, Kafka’s, 68, 137, 178, 261n6, 318n35; typhus, 62, 112 disgust (repulsion), 61–62, 91, 93; “the Jew” evoking, 47, 62, 117, 119, 177, 227, 244n78, 255n76, 319n40 Disney, Walt, 305n17, 323n10; adaptation of Bambi, 305n17, 323n10 Dittmar, Peter, 8–9 dog(s) (Hund, Canidae), 5, 16, 23, 25, 27, 31, 40, 41– 44, 90, 171, 178–84, 190, 192, 196 –97, 207, 214, 218, 222, 224, 228–29, 230, 273n89, 274nn92,97, 320nn47,52, 323–24n10, 325n17, 337n15, 338n21, 339n35; in Bambi, 163; in Bambis Kinder, 160, 307nn29–30,32, 309n57; blood hounds, Jews as, 46, 241n26, 255n74; Bobby, “the last Kantian,” 19, 244n74; Cäsar, 40; “circumcised dogs,” 204, 207; dachshunds, Jews as, 24, 132; dogdom (Hundeschaft), 180 –81, 184; dog ears, 208, 211; Fido, 152; Freud and, 191, 207–8, 210 –13, 330n63, 331n73, 332nn76,81; greyhounds (Windhunde), 24, 132; dog-headed Jews, 43, 263nn58,60; hounds of God, 191 (werewolves), 324n16 (Dominicans); Huckleberry Hound Show, 275n4; Jew-dog (Judenhund), 40, 42; and Jews, 5, 20, 23, 31, 37, 40 – 44, 41– 42(figs.), 46, 48, 54, 154, 178–79, 182, 200 –1, 204, 205 (fig.), 206, 218, 230, 241n26, 251–52n46, 253nn56 –57,60,63, 255n74, 278n32, 302n52, 318n33, 325n17; and Jewish execution ( Judenstrafe), 43– 44, 253–54n63; in proverb, 42– 43, 54, 63, 189, 252–53n56, 265n30; and race, 239n11; “Robchik (A Jewish Dog),” 290n66; sheep-dogs, 208, 210 –13,

390 dog(s) (Hund, Canidae) (continued) 332nn76,81. See also Gans, Eduard; Heine, Heinrich: “Princess Sabbath”; Kafka, Franz: “Investigations of a Dog,” The Trial; mongrel(s); Salten, Felix: Hound of Florence donkey (ass), 224; emblem of Issachar, 256n83; and Jews, 30, 37, 107, 170, 192, 251n33 double bind: ethical, 142; and Jewish integration, 83–84, 275n8 Dracula, 194, 214, 326n31 dream(s), 89, 162, 222, 224 –25, 278n32, 318n33; in Metamorphosis, 59; in the Wolf-Man Case, 208–9, 211, 329n61, 330nn63, 65, 330 –31n66 Dressel, Johann Christian Gottfried, 167 Dreyfus, Alfred, 37 Drosnes, Leonid, 210 Dühring, Eugen, 112 Edward the Confessor, King (England), 193 Egypt, Jews and, 34, 151–56, 169, 185, 223, 303n61, 304n4 Ehrenstein, Alfred, 300n41, 305n18 Ehrlich, Paul, 112 Eipper, Paul, 239n16 Eisenbach, Heinrich, 130 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 250n25, 325n24 Eisler, Robert, 324n12 Eisner, Minze, 279n34 Elmer, Jonathan, 16 Emancipation, Jewish, 5, 26, 28, 37, 46, 85, 109, 110 –11, 114 –15, 118–19, 162–63, 165, 190, 274n91 entomology, 53–54, 61, 262n15 Ephraim ben Shimshon, 323n9 epigram, 128, 166, 312n82 Epstein, Marc Michael, 44 – 45, 252n46, 253n58, 254nn69–70 Erb, Rainer, and Werner Bergmann, 141, 264n24 Erikson, Erik H., 3, 242n50 Esau, 132, 251–52n46 Escherich, Karl, 54 Estrin, Marc, 59, 262n15 Eulenberg, Herbert, 1 Evans, E. P., 253n60 Evans, Walter, 333n89 evolution, 12, 129, 188, 258n103, 291n78; degeneration, and Jews, 54, 98, 258n102, 269n61; evolutionary mechanisms: adaptation, 47, 115–20, 287n34, 288n39; natural selection, 47, 54, 118, 255n78; struggle for existence (Kampf ums Dasein), 47, 54, 118; “survival of the fittest,” 47, 255n78; humans as degenerate apes, 130;

Index and Jews, 54, 115–20, 287n34, 288n39; mimicry/camouflage, 118–19, 287n34, 288n39, 294n98. See also Darwin, Charles exclusion, of Jews, 3, 70, 100, 131, 167, 203, 283n27; exclusion /inclusion, 12–13, 184, 193. See also Law: legal restrictions on Jews exemplarity, and singularity, 10, 26, 91, 124 138, 140, 142, 271n74; and the exception, 122, 138, 140, 167, 266n38, 280 –81n36 fable, 7, 21, 40 – 41, 45, 81–82, 89, 95–96, 99, 103, 107–8, 173, 217, 237n2, 255n72, 269n61, 273n89, 278n32, 304n8, 312n82; Aesop’s Fables, 45, 237n2; “Fabel,” 82, 173, 314n9; Ku-Bukh, 45; Maqama, 45; Meshal ha-Kadmoni, 45; Mishlei Shu’alim, 45; Sefer Meshalim (Wallach), 45. See also animal story Fabre-Vassas, Claudine, 34, 250n27, 250 –51n30 fairy tale (Märchen), 155–56, 204 –5, 208–9, 217, 312n82, 326n29. See also wolf: in fairy tales farce (Posse), 51, 291n70, 311n79 fear (phobia, Angst), 3, 28, 31, 34, 62, 68, 72, 77, 87–88, 91, 95, 99, 101–2, 111, 132, 137, 152, 156, 160, 163–65, 180, 187, 89, 197–98, 224, 245n79, 265n37, 277n23, 278n33, 307n32, 308n37, 315n16, 324n10; of animals (zoophobia), 19, 187–89, 212–13, 269n63; anthropological anxiety, 46 – 47, 189 (see also Ungezieferangst); “anxious Jews,” 93, 282n62; of contamination, 62–63; Freud’s fear of plagiarism accusation, 213; homophobia, 168; Islamophobia, 314n3; of “the Jew,” 7, 31, 46 – 47, 54, 62, 68–70, 73, 121, 187, 193, 218, 230, 266n40, 287–88n34, 328n46; of lice, 63–64, 265n31; of loss of difference, 77; of mice, 68, 273n85; of wolves, 198, 208–9, 211–12, 330n65, 332n81 Ferenczi, Sándor, 211 fetishism, 76, 213; commodity, 92 Fingerhut, Karl-Heinz, 179, 261n8, 272n85 Flaubert, Gustave, 291n69 Flusser, Vilém, 258n103 Flying Dutchman, The (Wagner), 312–13n85 Foetor Judaicus ( Jewish stench), 36, 39, 55, 98, 183. See also smell: of Jews Fontenay, Élisabeth de, 10, 19–20, 244n75, 259n112 food as diacritic: carrion eating, 30, 171, 183–84, 260n118, 316n22, 317–18n31; cuisine, 56, 321n63; in “Investigations of a Dog,” 181–82; in “Jackals and Arabs,”

Index 317–18n31; preparation, 175, 184 –85, 321n63 fox(es), 61, 107, 284n75; in Bambi, 158, 160, 163, 306n24, 307n34, 308n45, 309n61; as German-Jewish surname (Fuchs), 48; and Jews, 37, 45, 54, 128; Reynard the Fox, 329n61, 330n65; in Wolf-Man Case, 208, 211, 329n61, 330n65 Franklin, Sidney, 305n17 Frederick the Great, Prince (Prussia), 100, 127 Freud, Anna, 330n63 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 18, 26 –27, 101–3, 110 –11, 151, 180, 184 –86, 188–91, 206 – 13, 250n30, 256 –57n87, 281nn53–54, 282nn59, 62, 283n65, 286nn11,14 –15, 322n66, 323n5, 328–29n57, 329nn60 – 63, 330nn65–66, 331n67,69–70,72–73, 332nn78,82; works: Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, 329n61; Civilization and Its Discontents, 18, 190; Totem and Taboo, 185, 189, 212, 256 –57n87, 323n5, 329n60. See also Rat Man Case; WolfMan Case Friedländer, David, 49–51, 104, 106, 166, 257n93 Friedländer, Saul, 230 Friedlosigkeit (breach of peace), 43, 159–60, 192–93, 325n20. See also outlaw Friedrich Wilhelm I (King of Prussia), 127 Friedrich Wilhelm IV (King of Prussia), 99 Fritsch, Theodor, 48, 54, 129 Galut (exile), Jews in, 77, 176, 195–96, 200, 285n78, 310n64. See also Wandering Jew Gans, Eduard, 96 –98, 107, 151–52, 154, 284 –85n78; “Lex Gans,” 152 Garric, Henri, 270 –71n74 Gattung (genus, genre): 19, 121, 171, 174, 304n8; Gattungsfrage (genre/genus question), 172; Merchant of Venice as comedy or tragedy, 202–3, 280n48. See also genre; species genius, and the Jews, 110 –15, 121–22, 125, 136, 286nn10 –12; versus talent, 111, 115, 286n12; 313n85 (see also “Jew, the”: lack of creativity); Shakespeare’s, 202 Genosko, Gary, 330n63 genre, 3, 27, 123–24, 171–72, 186, 202, 312n82. See also allegory; animal story; bestiary; dialectical image; epigram; fable; fairy tale; farce; Gattung: Gattungsfrage; Gleichnis; parable; proverb Gentile/Jewish, difference (opposition), 6, 10 –11, 20 –22, 28, 45, 47, 54 –55, 58, 62, 77–78, 82, 103, 105, 130, 136 –38, 186 –87, 246n94, 294n97; co-constitution (mutual implication) of Gentile and Jew

391 as different, 28, 137; overcoding, with human /animal difference, 11, 15, 19, 22, 62, 75, 103, 130, 181, 206, 226, 246n94; relations, 21, 26, 76 –77, 82, 87, 93, 108, 162, 206, 246n94; toleration, 162, 278n29 German (European)/Jewish, difference (opposition), 6 –7, 19, 21, 46 – 47, 49, 53, 93–94, 99–101, 117, 130, 151, 185, 226, 238n10, 277n27; co-constitution (mutual implication) of German and Jew as different, 28, 247n109; elective affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften) of Jews and Germans, 247n109, 281n51; Jewish mimesis as threat to maintaining, 121; mediated by Zopf and Schwanz, 100; overcoding, with European /Chinese difference, 280n28 (see also Gentile/Jewish, difference: overcoding, with human / animal difference); relations, 51, 108 German Literary Archive (Marbach), 141, 296n10 Germany, Nazi, 24, 213, 221–23, 334n90; Nazi discourse and ideology, 4, 17, 24, 55, 111, 118, 245n79, 266n40, 275n7, 334n92 (see also Hiemer, Fritz; von Leers, Johann); Nazi zoophilia, 19, 339n35; Nazis, 18, 226 –27, 230, 306 –7n29; the SS, 17–18, 220, 226; collaborationist groups: Milice française, 194; Volksverwering, 335n1. See also Holocaust Geschlecht (sex, race), 182, 238–39n11 Gilman, Sander, 140, 183, 241n35, 286n11, 288n44, 289–90n61, 310n65, 321n60 Ginzburg, Carlo, 330n65 Girard, Réné, 199–200 Glaeser, Erich, 217, 334n92 Glagau, Otto, 83, 275n6 Gleichnis, 123–24, 172–73, 314nn6 –7. See also allegory; parable goat(s), and Jews, 33, 39, 47, 54, 107, 208, 248n8, 249n23, 274n92; in anti-Jewish proverb, 33; “The Seven Little Goats,” 208. See also body parts, Jewish: goatee God-fearer, 34, 249n24 Goebbels, Josef, 53, 226, 259n106, 260n117, 282–83n63 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35, 112–14, 149, 301nn48– 49, 303n66 Gomperz, Theodor, 116 Gordin, Jakob, 266 –67n40 Goyim, 32, 118–19, 132–33, 194, 250n25, 285n7 Graetz, Heinrich, 112, 286n21 grammar, 76 –78, 280n38, 296n13, 336n4; collective (categorical) singular, 4, 6, 10 –11, 20, 26, 91, 161, 165, 239n16 (see also Animal; Human; “Jew”); “Er” in Bambi, 158, 161, 164 –65, 308n42,

392 grammar (continued ) 309n53; “I,” 26; in Metamorphosis, 65–66; pronoun use, 88, 90, 158, 265–66n37, 277n21; Yiddish, 247n100, 265–66n37, 310n64 Great Divide(s), 13, 242n43; Christian / Jew, 218–19; German /Jew, 19, 174, 221; human (animal)/(nonhuman) animal, 13–16, 19, 47, 49, 56, 66, 135, 174, 180, 184, 189–90, 221, 226, 244n76; male/ female, 221; modern West /premodern rest, 13; society (culture)/nature, 13, 151, 273n89 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 28, 230 –32, 338n21, 339n36 Greenblatt, Stephen, 82, 86 griffin (lion, eagle), 45, 254n70. See also Haggadah: Birds’ Head Grillparzer, Franz, 128, 166, 183 Grimm, Brothers, 217, 326n29; “The Jew among the Thorns,” 217 Guggenheim, Fromet, 127 Gutzkow, Karl, 292n80 Haacke, Paul, 180 Haarmann, Fritz, 333n87 Haas, Willy, 88, 95, 246n90, 276n19, 278n31 Haase, Hugo, 257n88 Haeckel, Ernst, 12–13 Haggadah, 44 – 45, 251–52n46, 254n69, 255n71; Birds’ Head, 44 – 45, 254n70; Rylands, 41 (fig.), 251n46; Sarajevo, 251–52n46 Halpern, Rabbi Yechiel, 323n9 Hanssen, Jens, 27, 162, 170 –78, 182–84, 186, 313n2, 314nn3– 4, 315nn10,13,18– 19, 316nn20,24, 316 –17n26, 317nn27,29, 318n33, 321n60; “Kafka and Arabs” (KA), 27, 170 –78, 182–84, 313n2, 314n3, 315nn10,13 18–19, 316 –17n26, 317nn27,29, 318n33, 321n60 Hanslick, Eduard, 287n23 Haraway, Donna, 10, 13, 16, 242n43, 243n60, 244n76, 245nn80 –81, 329– 30n63; When Species Meet, 16, 242n43, 243n60, 245nn80 –81, 329–30n63 Harden, Maximilian (Felix Ernst Witkowski), 69, 119–20, 122, 268n50 Hartung, Günter, 260n5, 316n20 hate, 3, 19, 60, 62, 82, 137, 163, 187, 250n25, 262n15, 307n34; of “the Jew,” 5, 19, 28, 40, 100, 137, 151, 187, 202, 239n16, 268n50. See also “Jew, the”: misanthropy; self-hatred, Jewish Hauff, Wilhelm, 289n56, 290 –91n69, 293n89 Hausner, Gideon, 230 –31

Index Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 97, 106, 127, 152–54, 180 –81, 280n48, 319n44, 320n47 Heine, Heinrich, 10, 22, 26 –27, 29–30, 32, 40, 55–56, 62, 70, 82, 93–94, 98–101, 103–8, 110, 112–13, 118–19, 127–30, 138, 140, 146 – 47, 149–56, 166 –69, 181, 183, 190 –91, 200 –7, 243n68, 247– 48n2, 248n3, 251n41, 256n85, 260 –61n5, 268n53, 278–79n34, 279n35, 280n48, 281n51, 283n70, 284nn72–73,75,77– 78, 286n22, 288n41, 290nn62,67, 299nn32,35, 302nn53,57,59, 303n61, 304nn2,6,8–9, 311nn79–81, 312nn82– 85, 318n32, 321n57, 326n34, 328nn46 – 48,53–55; works: Baths of Lucca, 27, 118–19, 156, 165–69, 203– 4, 256n85, 299n32, 303n61, 304n8, 305nn9–11, 311n79, 312n84; City of Lucca, 26, 140, 149, 151–54, 156, 303nn60,66, 304n1, 312n82, 313n85; Concerning the History of Philosophy and Religion in Germany, 153–54, 303n61, 304n72; “Disputation,” 29–30, 55–56, 181, 183, 248nn3– 4, 260n118; English Fragments, 303n61; “From the Age of Pigtails,” 26, 82, 96, 98–101, 108, 130, 280n48; From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski, 106 –7, 312–13n85; Harz Journey, 168, 288n41; Hebrew Melodies, 29, 204, 328n53; “Hymn of Praise to King Ludwig,” 247n2; Ideen: Buch Le Grand, 29; “Jehuda ben Halevy,” 321n57, 326n34, 328n53; “Jessica (Shylock),” 200 –3, 281n51, 318n32, 328nn46 – 49; Journey from Munich to Genoa, 166; Ludwig Börne Memorial, 147, 168, 251n41, 299n35, 303n61, 311n80, 313n85; “Ludwig Marcus,” 106 –8; Lutezia, 204; Memoiren, 129–30; “The New Israelite Hospital in Hamburg,” 303n61; “Princess Sabbath,” 190, 204, 206, 290n67; Rabbi of Bacherach, 70, 101, 251n34, 303n61; Romantic School, 153, 156, 238n7; Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen, 279n34; Travel Pictures, 140, 149, 166 –68, 288n41, 312n82 Heine, Mathilde, 93–96 Helfer, Martha, 321n58 Henisch, Peter, 318n31 Henry III, King (England), 43 Hep-Hep pogroms, 77, 273–74n91, 336n4; “Hep,” 77, 273n90, 274n92 Hercules, 105–6 Hermann (née Kafka), Elli, 182, 263n17 Herodotus, 153, 303n64 Herz, Marcus, 23, 246n94 Herzl, Theodor, 24, 73, 119, 124, 131, 157, 162, 165, 175, 177, 293n92, 307n37,

Index 316nn24 –26; “Mauschel,” 24, 73; OldNew Land, 177, 316nn24 –25, 316 –17n26 Herzog, Hilary Hope, 309n51 Hesiod, 184, 321n63 Hess, Moses, 153, 320 –21n54 Hiemer, Fritz, 7–8, 40 – 41, 49, 141, 194, 226, 241nn25–26, 259n109, 264n24, 275n9, 292n86, 321n59; Der Giftpilz, 241n25; The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund Pinscher, 7, 8 (fig.), 41, 241n26 hieroglyphs, 153–56, 169, 303nn61–62; and Adamic language, 155–56; and letters, 153; and numbers, 156 Higley, Sarah, 325n20 Hildebrand, Olaf, 304n3 Hiller, Kurt, 147 Hilsner, Leopold, 94 –95 Himmler, Heinrich, 17–18 Hippler, Fritz, 55, 259–60n117, 282–83n63 Hirsch (stag, elk, red deer), 27, 257n88; in anti-Jewish proverb, 155, 304n1; in Bambi and Bambis Kinder, 160 –61, 164 –65, 305n14, 307n36, 308n37; emblem of Naphtali, 48, 156, 256n83; as GermanJewish name, 27, 42 (fig.), 48– 49, 156 –57, 204, 256nn83–84, 257n88 (see also Hirsch-Hyacinth); Hirschkäfer (stag beetle), 60. See also deer Hirsch, Paul, 257n88 Hirsch-Hyacinth, 27, 118, 156, 165–66, 168–69, 204, 256n85, 304nn6,8, 305nn10 –11, 311–12n81 Hitler, Adolf, 19, 119, 259–60n117 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 189–90, 193, 323n8 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 70, 124 –25, 155–56, 271–72n79, 291n70, 294n102, 303n60 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 3 Holocaust, the (Shoah, Churban, Final Solution), 27–28, 68, 80, 217, 220 –32, 244n75, 336n10, 337n11, 339n35; analogy with (in)human treatment of animals, 27, 225, 244n75; Auschwitz, 27, 78, 222, 227–28, 266n40; Terezin, 228, 338n21; Treblinka, 18, 27, 225–26, 337n11 Homo homini lupus, 189–90, 193; Lupus lupo lupus, 190 homo sacer, 266n40, 325n20, 339n31 homology, 20, 92, 212, 244n73, 288n39; of Jews and mice, 76, 78; non-homologous oppositions, 13, 20, 92, 244n73 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment, DE), 3– 4, 11, 244nn73,78, 247n96, 273n90, 287–88n34 Horn, Eva, 315n17 Horowitz, Elliott, 253n60 horse, 107, 212, 228, 264n22, 330n65, 337n15; and Jews, 31; as German-Jewish name (Roß), 49; “Methuselah—A Jewish

393 Horse” (Sholem Aleichem), 290n66; Mr. Ed, 303n59; The Nag (Abramovitsh), 123–24, 290n66; thief, 257n93 Hortzitz, Nicoline, 141, 193, 257n92, 257–58n95, 264nn23–24 Hrabanus Mauras, Magnentius, 32, 34 –35, 42 Hühneraugen (Leichdörner, corns), 104 –5, 165–66, 284n77, 311n74; -operateur (-beschneider, chiropodist), 104 –5, 165–66 Human, the, 3, 10 –19, 24, 28, 49, 54, 61, 75, 127–30, 135–36, 154, 165–66, 180, 189, 191, 207, 229–30, 233, 242n50, 244n76, 258n103, 259n108, 261n8, 266n38, 267n43, 291n70. See also grammar: collective (categorical) singular human (animal)/(nonhuman) animal diacritics: bipedalism, 51, 78, 214, 243n68, 258n99, 274n98, 323n3; eyes (gaze), 2, 86 –87, 199, 229, 244n73, 338–39n29 (see also Hühneraugen); heel, 135–36; language, 4, 10 –14, 22–23, 64, 125, 129–30, 134 –35, 137, 151–52, 161, 165, 175, 180, 245n80, 246n94, 248n7, 291n69, 295n106, 302–3n59, 338n18; Pithecanthropus alalus, 12–13; reason /logos, 11, 14 –15, 23, 31, 133, 188–89, 229, 246n94, 248n7; shame, 127, 180, 319n44; smell, 55; “speaking animal,” 23, 134, 302n59 (see also animot) human (animal)/(nonhuman) animal difference (opposition), 2– 4, 6 –7, 10 –16, 19–22, 44, 47, 49, 55–56, 58, 62, 64 –66, 103, 129–30, 133, 135–36, 138, 166, 173, 175, 180 –81, 184, 187, 189–90, 227, 229–30, 242nn46,50, 243n61, 246n94, 265n33, 266n38, 269n58, 271n74, 315n17, 323n8, 338n29; co-constitution (mutual implication) of human and animal as different, 13–14, 28, 137, 229, 242n50; and Genesis 1:26, 14, 255n71; of human and animal parasite (Schädling), 54, 259n108. See also Great Divide(s): human (animal)/(nonhuman) animal human exceptionalism, 11–13, 15–16, 31, 47, 127, 188–89, 230, 246n94, 338n29. See also fear: anthropological anxiety human /Jewish difference (opposition), 7, 11, 17, 20 –22, 46, 49, 51, 54, 95, 136, 227, 230 –31, 287–88n34. See also animalization: of Jews humiliation, 16 –17, 147– 48, 166 –68, 274n91. See also Jews, humiliating Hundt-Radowsky, Hartwig von, 36, 46, 98 hunting, 14, 124, 131, 133, 183, 200, 226, 243n61, 338n16; analogy with disease, 261n6; and Bambi, 157, 159, 161–63, 306n21, 308nn41,45; and

394 hunting (continued ) Bambis Kinder, 158–61, 306nn23– 24,27–28, 307nn30,32; and Jews, 40, 41 (fig.), 226, 228, 251–52n46, 255n74, 274n92, 310n64, 337n12 (see also rabbit: Hasenjagd); and Salten, 306n26, 308nn38,45, 309n57; wolf hunt, 193, 330n66 Hyacinth: Novalis character, 155–56, 304n6, 312n12; translation of Hebrew “Hirsch,” 156, 204 hybrid, human-animal, 12–13, 16 –17, 44 – 45, 56, 117, 166, 1, 89–91, 195, 212–14, 254n70, 254 –55n71, 291n69; of Jew and individual, 26, 140. See also exemplarity, and singularity hyena, “the Jew” as, 30, 32–33, 39, 44, 241n26 identification: essentialist, 25, 58, 78,114, 271, 295n112; forms, institutions,and practices of, 5–8, 10, 13–14, 28, 48, 187, 240n18, 304n8; identification, negatively valued, 4, 22–24, 46, 51, 96, 122, 130, 177–78, 307n26; internalization of, 28, 219 identifications, intersection of, 6, 11, 13–17, 21, 62, 138, 189–91, 221–22, 229, 336n4 (see also Gentile/Jewish, difference: overcoding, with human /animal difference; German (European)/Jewish, difference: overcoding with European /Chinese difference; homology: non-homologous oppositions; overcoding of oppositions as reinforcing the normativity of the intersecting identifications); multiple, of the subject, 78–80, 186 Immermann, Karl, 168, 247– 48n2, 311n79, 312n82 indifference, 77, 150, 271n74; Agamben’s zone of, 13 indifferentism, aesthetic: Brod’s, 140; Goethe’s, 303n66 Inglourious Basterds (Tarentino), 225–26, 337n12 Ingrao, Christian, 226, 337–38n16 insect(s), 54, 58–61, 66, 117–19, 144, 222, 229, 252n51, 262nn12, 15, 262–63n16, 263n19; in anti-Jewish proverb, 54, 57; bed bug (Wanze, vonts), 59, 182, 241n26, 262–63nn16,17; bees, 13, 241n26 (drones); beetles, 59–61,63, 259n106, 262n15, 265n31, 298n21; butterfly, 262n15; dung beetle, 60 –61, 263n17; cockroach, 59, 262n15; and Jews, 46, 54, 56 –57, 60 –64, 63 (fig.), 118–19, 241n26, 252n51, 259n106, 262n15, 275n7, 303n61; ladybug, 63; locusts, 240n20,

Index 241n26; louse (lice), 54, 56, 60 –64, 63 (fig.), 252n51, 275n7, 303n61; moth, 54, 57; proverbial dogs and fleas, 63, 265n30. See also Ungeziefer integration, Jewish social, as desire/goal, 5–6, 26, 30, 46 – 47, 50, 85, 101, 103–5, 108–11, 115, 118, 123, 128, 152, 190, 207, 219, 284n77, 319n46; strategies: acculturation, 6, 18, 23, 63, 109–11, 115, 118, 121, 128, 246n64, 266n37, 294n99, 328n54; assimilation, 7, 37, 69, 83–84, 103, 106 –9, 117–21, 123, 128, 129, 131, 133, 162–64, 186, 275n8, 290n64, 294n98, 304n8, 320n46. See also Bildung; evolution: evolutionary mechanisms, adaptation; mimesis interpellation, 28, 33, 65, 82, 137, 170, 172, 191. See also subjection intervention, public, for Jews, 95, 192, 204; by Jewish-identified writers, 10, 22, 49–51, 58, 93, 97–98, 103, 204, 225, 304n8 Irmak, Kenan Holger, 324n14 irony, 1, 4, 11, 22, 53, 55–56, 60, 70, 86, 96, 99–101, 104, 106, 110 –11, 117, 119–20, 125, 129, 132–33, 135, 143, 152, 168, 178, 204, 238n7, 251n41, 267n42, 284 –85n78, 291n70, 302n57, 321n61 Israel (nation-state), 141– 42, 171, 318n33; ancient, 223; erasure of, 315n13; “Israelright-or wrong-circles,” 171; Israel/ Palestine, 27, 170; twelve tribes of, 48, 72, 186 Israel (protagonist, “Princess Sabbath”), 206 Israel, National Library of, 141, 296n11 Istoczy, Victor (Gyözö) von, 95, 278n32 jackal, 27, 30, 128, 171, 173–78, 183–84, 186, 241n26, 245n84, 292n81, 313n2, 314n3, 315n16, 316nn20,22–23, 317–18n31, 318nn33,35, 320 –21n54, 321nn57,59, 328n53; and Jews, 27, 30, 128, 173–76, 178, 183–84, 186, 241n26, 314n3, 320 –21n54, 321nn57,59, 328n53; “son of a jackal,” 318n31. See also Kafka: works, “Jackals and Arabs” Jacob, 131–32, 223, 293n95 Jacobson, Israel, 99, 104, 106, 284n72 Jagow, Traugott von, 147 Janouch, Gustav, 237–38n6, 238n7, 262–63n16, 278n29 Jansen, Markus, 259n104,108 Jensen, Johannes V., 61, 263–64n20 Jellinek, Adolph, 275n9, 276n12 Jerome Bonaparte, 99, 105 Jesenská, Milena, 59–60, 71, 87–90, 93–95, 179, 238n6, 246n90, 271n76, 276nn19– 20, 278nn28,33, 297–98n21

Index Jesus, 34, 43, 55–56, 111, 132, 210, 231, 251n33, 253n58, 286n10 “Jew, the” (“der Jude”), 4 –7, 10, 17, 19–20, 23, 26 –28, 31, 35–36, 40, 42, 46 – 47, 49, 51–55, 70, 108, 115, 122, 194, 200, 206, 226, 230, 233, 239n16, 243n70, 244n78, 244 – 45n79, 249n13, 257n93, 271n77; as Asiatic, 73 (see also animalization, of Jews; grammar: collective singular; Jews, types of; species); cowardice, 62, 68–69, 103, 283n63, 320n46; versus cultureproducing peoples, 110 –12, 328–29n57; and disguise, 70, 117–18, 164, 194, 303n61; duplicity, 4, 33, 49, 116, 118; effeminacy, 114; Geldjude, 50 –51, 239n16; haggling (Schachern), 40, 49, 98; innate traits of, 46 – 47, 49; lack of creativity (originality), 109–13, 115–16, 137, 140; licentiousness, 31, 33, 42, 200, 248n7; marketing, 115; mimesis, 7, 108, 110, 115–18, 120, 241n27; misanthropy, 55, 250n25; misozoony, 54 –55, 259n112; and money, 49–51, 53, 102–3, 116, 194, 201–3, 309–10n62, 320 –21n54, 326n32; Münzjude, 51; passivity, 231; reproductive thinking, 286n12 (see also genius, and the Jews); servility, 42, 200; shamelessness, 127–28, 132, 179, 200, 292n80; stubbornness, 131, 248n6; unmusical, 43, 113–15, 117, 122; usury (Wuchern), 49, 51 116. See also Shylock Jew-Animal, 5, 19–25, 28–29, 55–56, 58, 67, 76, 82, 93–97, 108, 136 –37, 140, 165, 169, 226 –27, 231–32, 240n20. See also animalization, of Jews; Bestiarium Judaicum Jew-as-Animal, 21–22, 26, 28, 56, 58, 67, 82, 91, 93, 96, 108, 137–38, 154, 165, 169, 232, 261n8, 324n10. See also literalization of animal figures; metamorphosis: of animal figures; performance and performativity: seeing “as” Jewish-identified, as qualifier, 240n18 Jewish Question (or Problem, Judenfrage), 5, 10 –11, 26, 47, 53, 93–94, 119, 124, 139, 145, 220, 225, 268n48; Era of, 5–7, 83–84, 109, 246n94; “the other Jewish Question,” 10 Jewish religion, 29, 50, 97, 99, 166, 168–69, 181, 204, 240n22, 250n25, 257n93, 259n112, 320n46, 321n62; ancient Israelite, 186, 250n25, 258n102, 322n67; Hasidism, 186, 195, 255n71; Haskalah, 124; Havdalah, 206, 251–52n46; Jerusalem Temple, 196, 225, 259n112; Kabbalat Shabbat, 206; Kol Nidre, 198; as “Mosaic religion,” 164, 166, 310n74; N’eila, 198–99, 327n37; Pirkei Avot, 198;

395 redemption, 58, 195–97, 199–200, 222, 327n41; reform, 70, 99, 104 –6, 166; Rosh HaShanah, 196 –97; Second Commandment, 254 –55n71; seder, 252n56, 303n61; Sephardic, 186, 255n71; Shabbat, 204, 206, 251–52n46, 303n61; Shalom bayit, 192; the Shema, 24, 165, 196; Talmud, 30, 48, 51, 115, 200, 250n25, 252n46; Tikkun, 195; Tisha B’Av, 196; Yamim Noraim, 196; Yom Kippur, 196, 198, 223, 327n37. See also Bible; Haggadah; Law, the: Jews and; synagogue Jews, humiliating (debasing, rendering ridiculous), 5, 18, 22–23, 29, 35, 37, 39, 46 – 49, 100, 127, 166 –68, 202, 217, 226, 256n82, 281n50; of ridiculers, 56, 168 Jews, persecution of, 33, 43, 70, 118, 124, 131, 164, 222, 278n32, 309n51, 310n64, 334n94, 336n7. See also blood libel; HepHep pogroms; pogroms Jews, types of, 4, 7, 9 (fig.), 10, 49–53, 165, 193, 239– 40n16, 241n26, 249n23, 257nn88,92, 317n27; beggars, 50, 177, 257n92; court, 50, 70; journalism, 109, 113–14, 116, 120, 132–33, 146 – 47; judeo-bolsheviks, 17, 48– 49, 51, 52 (fig.); Luftmensch, 182; musical virtuosity, 73–74, 109, 113, 116 –17, 122; peddler, 27, 36 –37, 40, 42 (fig.), 62, 63 (fig.), 204, 218, 278n32, 288n41, 305n11; in the reproductive arts, 109, 116, 122; theater, 63, 109, 116, 125, 130, 133–34, 270n70, 294n103. See also “Jew, the”; livestock: Viehjude; word-combinations: formed with -jude John, King (England), 43 Jonah (prophet), 224 –25; Hebrew for dove, 224, 256n83 Josephus, 34, 303n64 journals/newspapers: Aktion, 147– 48, 300n38; Critical Inquiry, 170, 313n2; Die Fackel, 122, 130, 146 – 48, 270n72, 290n62, 299n31, 300n41; Die Gartenlaube, 83–85, 269n61, 276nn11–12; German Life and Letters, 83; Der Jude, 58, 123–24, 133, 170, 176, 317n27, 318n32, 320n53, 321n61; Neue Freie Presse, 157, 305n12; Die neue Rundschau, 61, 264nn20,22, 267n41; Novina, 146; Pan, 147– 48, 299n35; Prager Presse, 74, 238n6, 260n5, 273n88; Prager Tagblatt, 125–26, 143, 299n34; Puck, 49; Selbstwehr, 175, 290n64; Der Stürmer, 7, 40, 217, 239– 40n16, 321n59; Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 97, 107–8; Die Zukunft, 119–20, 122 Judenstrafe, 43– 44, 253–54n63; as ritualized exclusion, 44. See also animalization, of Jews

396 Judentum (religion [ Judaism], people [ Jewry], character and customs [ Jewishness]), usage, 239n14, 240n22 Jung, Carl, 111, 208, 281n54, 286n15, 328–29n57 Juvenal, 34 Kafka, Franz, 2, 10, 19, 21, 25–27, 57–64, 66 –68, 70 –78, 81–96, 101, 108–10, 114, 121, 125, 127, 129–31, 133– 46, 148–51, 162, 168–87, 233, 237n5, 237–38n6, 245nn81,84, 246nn89–90, 249n23, 260n5, 261nn6,8, 261–62n12, 262–63n16, 263nn17–19, 263–64n20, 264nn21–22, 265nn30 –31,36, 265– 66n37, 266n38, 266 –67n41, 267nn42,46, 268n57, 268–69n58, 269nn60 –62, 269–70n64, 270nn72–73, 271nn75–76, 271–72n79, 272nn80 –81,84 –85, 273nn88–89, 276nn10,13,20, 277nn21– 23,26 –27, 278nn28–31, 279n34, 285n2, 287n27, 289n59, 289–90n61, 290n66, 291nn69,72, 292nn81,89, 294nn98,103, 294 –95n104, 296nn4,10 –11,13, 296 –97n14, 297nn15–16,20, 297– 98n21, 298n27, 300n41, 301nn46,48, 302nn53,59, 308n48, 312–13n85, 314nn 3,6,8–9, 315nn10 –11,19, 316nn20 –21, 318nn31,35, 319n40, 320n54, 321nn60 – 61, 322n69; on Brod’s Die Jüdinnen, 26, 139– 40, 145– 46, 180 –81, 319n40; “Kafka” (the brand), 25, 141, 170, 181; die Kafka, 2, 7, 72, 87, 268n57; Nachlaß, trial over his, 141– 42, 171–72, 296nn10 – 12; relationship to Heine, 26, 93–94, 140, 146 – 47, 149–151, 168–69, 277n27, 278–79n34, 279n35, 302n53, 303n69, 312–13n85; works: “Animal in the Synagogue,” 61, 71–72, 269n63; “The Building of a City,” 144; “The Burrow,” 61, 74, 261n6, 272n80; “A Crossbreed,” 273n89; “The Giant Mole (The Village Schoolmaster),” 91–93, 96; “Great Wall of China,” 175; “The Hunter Gracchus,” 312–33n85; “Investigations of a Dog,” 180 –82; “Jackals and Arabs,” 27, 123, 170 –78, 182–84, 186 –87, 245n84, 292n81, 314nn3,8, 315nn13,16,19, 316nn20 –23, 317–18n31, 318nn33,35, 320 –21n54, 321n61, 322n69; “Josephine the Singer,” 25–26, 57–58, 68, 71–78, 92, 96, 101, 109–10, 121–23, 137–38, 150, 182, 260 –61n5, 267n46, 268n57, 270n72, 270 –71n74, 271n79, 272n81, 272–73n85, 273nn86,88, 289n59 (as “best possible biography of Heine,” 150, 260 –61n5; on its title change, 74 –77, 272nn81,85, 273n88); “Letter to His Fa-

Index ther,” 63, 136, 263n17, 265n30, 297n15, 318n35; “Little Fable,” 25, 81–83, 86 –87, 91, 93, 108, 276n13; “Memoirs of the Kalda Railroad,” 261n6; Metamorphosis, 25, 57–61, 64 –67, 85, 130, 178, 182, 260n3, 261n6, 262n15, 262–63n16, 263n19, 266n38, 276n10, 298n21 (cover illustration, 59, 261n9, 261–62n12); “An Old Manuscript,” 175, 315n18 “Report to an Academy,” 26, 110, 123–25, 131–36, 172–73, 273n89, 290n64, 291nn70,72, 293n94, 295n105; “Speech on the Yiddish Language,” 265–66n37; The Trial, 178–80; “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” 60 Kafka, Ottla, 296n10, 301n48 Kaniuk, Yoram, 339n35 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 19, 112, 326n30 Kassel (Hesse-Kassel), 96, 98–100, 103–8, 280n47, 281n49 Kean, Edmund, 201, 203 (fig.) Kerr, Alfred, 147– 48, 299n35; Kerr Umfrage, 147– 48, 300nn37–38 Khalidi, Muhammed Ali, 316n24 Kierkegaard, Soren, 76 –77, 273n90, 274n91; Either-Or, 76 –77, 273n90 killable: animals as, 16 –17, 20, 62, 187, 193, 200, 226 –29, 339n31; Jews as, 17–20, 187, 200, 217, 220, 226 –29. See also suffering, license to inflict Kirchner, Cristina Fernandez de, 326n33 Koch, Hans-Gerd, 279n34 Koelb, Clayton, 57, 75, 273n86 Kolmar, Gertrud, 10, 28, 221–24, 232, 336n7, 336nn9–10; works: “The Animals of Nineveh,” 223–25; “Die Jüdin,” 222, 336n7; “Der Tag der grossen Klage,” 222–23, 336n10; “Das Tier,” 222; “Wir Juden,” 310n7 Koschorke, Helmuth, 230 Kovner, Abba, 231–32 Kraus, Karl, 26, 73–74, 122–23, 128, 130, 145–51, 164, 168, 268n57, 270n72, 271n77, 289n59, 289–90n61, 290n62, 292nn81,89, 298–99n30, 299nn31–36, 300nn38– 41,44, 301n45, 309–10n61, 310nn64 –65, 311nn80 –81, 312nn84 –85; die Fackelkraus, 122–23, 146, 268n57, 270n72, 298–99n30; “Heine and the Consequences,” 26, 146 – 47, 168, 299nn32,35, 311n80, 311–12n81, 312–13n85. See also journals/newspapers: Die Fackel Kube, Wilhelm, 18 Kühl, Stefan, 339n34 Kuh, Anton, 24, 182, 247n102, 290n62 Kuzniar, Alice, 319n44 Kynass, Fritz, 249n23

Index LaCapra, Dominick, 245n79, 266n40 Lagarde, Paul de, 62 lamb(s), 56, 95, 222, 224, 273n89; emblem of Asher, 256n83. See also names, German-Jewish: Lamm; sheep, to the slaughter Landauer, Gustav, 318n32, 328n46 Lang, Fritz, 333n87 language, as German-Jewish diacritic, 6, 10 –11, 73, 112, 117, 129–30, 137, 164, 167, 246n94, 265–66n37, 302–3n59, 310n65. See also animot: Jewish; Mauschel(n) Lanzer, Ernst (the “Rat Man”), 101–3, 210, 281nn53–54; acquires the sobriquet “Rat Man,” 101, 189, 281n54. See also Rat Man Case Lanzmann, Claude, 230 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 306n18 Latour, Bruno, 13, 242n43 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 39 Law, the, 14, 44, 159–60, 192–93, 195; canon, 33, 249n23; “eternal law of the forest,” 159–60, 165, 306n24; Halakhah, 196; Jews and, 3, 58, 111, 195–200, 304n4, 327n41; Jewish dietary rules (Kashrut), 5, 32, 34, 55, 181, 184, 250nn25,30, 300n39, 327n41 (see also pork, prohibition); laws requiring Jewish surnames, 48, 156, 194, 256nn82,84,86; legal restrictions on Jews, 5, 33, 47, 72, 98–100, 103, 107, 166, 223, 259n117, 273n91, 281nn49–50, 284n77; medieval Germanic, 192–93, 325n20; natural, 12, 47; Nuremberg laws, 286n12; Torah, 45. See also outlaw Lehnemann, Widar, 310n64 Leivick, H. (Leivick Halpern), 10, 27, 190, 195–200, 327nn37,41; The Golem, 195, 199–200; “The Stable,” 199–200, 327n41; “Der Volf,” 27, 190, 195–200, 327n37 Lemon, Robert, 174 Lensing, Leo, 71, 238n6, 268n57, 270n72, 294n103 Lenz, Fritz, 118 Leroi-Beaulieu, Anatole, 116, 140 Lessing, G. E., 112, 168, 194 Lessing, Theodor, 23, 119–20, 246n95, 289n48, 333n87 Leubner, Martin, 300n43 Levi, Primo, 28, 227, 231, 266n40 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1, 184 Levinas, Emmanuel: 4, 19, 227, 244n74, 338n18 Lewald, August, 204 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 39– 40, 251n41, 253n62

397 Liebenfels, Joerg Lanz von, 51, 258n99 lion, 45, 105–6, 254n70, 276n11, 327n41; emblem of Judah, 48. See also names, German-Jewish: Löw(e/y) Lipton, Sara, 248n3, 248– 49n13 literalization of animal figures, as rhetorical strategy, 21–23, 49, 91–93, 136, 206, 245n83, 263n19, 293n92 Literatier(e), 1–2, 87 livestock (Vieh, cattle), 14, 34, 55–56, 224, 276n11, 317n26; Auschwitz tattoo as badge for cattle, 227; “bovine intellect” of Jews, 30; bull, emblem of Joseph (via his son Ephraim), 256n83; cattle cars, 27; Jews as, 24, 30 –31, 39, 247n102, 248n6; Jewish star as badge for livestock, 227–28; Viehjude, 49, 51, 251n36; Viehjude Levi (Danquart), 258n96. See also Kuh, Anton; names, German-Jewish: Stier; ritual slaughter, Jewish lizard(s) (Eidechse[n]), 26 –27, 139– 45, 148– 49, 151–56, 167–69, 296nn6,13, 297n20, 298n24, 301n46, 302n57, 304n8, 312n82, 312–13n85, 335n3; and HirschHyacinth, 168–69, 306n8; and Jews, 139– 42, 145, 151–54, 167–69, 296n13, 303n62, 311n79, 335n3; Kafka’s encounters with, 143– 45, 297–98n21, 298n27. See also Heine, Heinrich: City of Lucca; Kafka, Franz: “The Building of a City,” on Brod’s Die Jüdinnen Lobe, Johann Christian, 125 Löwy, Yitzhak, 63, 265nn30 –31 Lombroso, Cesare, 118 Loos, Adolf, 145 Lüdemann, Susanne, 304n8 Lump, lümpig, 156 –57, 159, 204, 311n79; Lumpenpack, “the Jew” as, 241n26 Lump, Moses, 204, 303n61, 305n11 Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit, 188, 190 Luther, Martin, 46, 84, 168, 255n74. See also Bible: Luther’s trans. lycanthropy, 191, 208–9, 324n14; lycanthrope, 194, 202, 324n14. See also werewolf Lycaon, 191 Maimon, Solomon, 23, 104, 134, 246n94, 255n72, 294 –95n104, 302–3n59; viewed as “speaking animal,” 23, 134, 302n59 Maimonides, 120, 294 –95n104 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 61, 66, 263n17, 264n22 Mahoney, Patrick J., 101–2, 281n55, 282n61, 331n73 Malaparte, Curzio, 253–54n63, 283n63, 337n15

398 Manetho, 34 Marcus, Ludwig, 96, 103–8, 166, 284n73, 284 –85n78 Marder, Elissa, 323n5 Marie de France (Le Bisclavet), 192 Marr, Wilhelm, 48, 69–70 Martin, Ralph, 304n3 Marx, Karl, 10, 280n48 Masaryk, Tomas, 96 masculine protest, 209 masculinity (bourgeois) Gentile, 40, 131, 133–34, 293nn91–92; versus (male) Jewish feminization, 40, 114, 120, 122, 132, 288–89n44, 293n92 Maus-, 2, 10, 22, 24, 48, 67–75, 83–85, 87–89, 123, 268n48, 270 –71n74, 276n11; mäuschenstill, 24, 73; Mäuseplage, 68, 71–72, 269–70n64; Mäusevolk, 88, 95, 272–73n85, 270nn73–74; Duckmäuser, 69, 268n48. See also Herzl, Theodor: “Mauschel”; Mausi Mauschel(n) (Mauscheldeutsch), 10, 22, 24, 73–74, 108, 117, 123, 129, 164, 270n72, 289–90n61, 290n62; and “little Moses,” 24, 73; Mauscheljude, 73. See also Herzl, Theodor: “Mauschel”; Maus-; Yiddish Mausi, 73–74, 270n72 May, Karl, 318n31 Mayse-buch, 192, 325n18 Meißner, Alfred, 93–94, 277n27 Mellinkoff, Ruth, 254n69 Mendelssohn, Moses, 106, 120, 127, 246n24, 257n93 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 113 Menzel, Wolfgang, 127–28, 291–92n80 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 191 metamorphosis (transformation), 1, 57, 59, 67, 130, 190 –92, 194 –96, 204, 206, 208, 214 –17, 219, 263n19, 266n41, 269n61, 324n10, 328n55, 332–33n86; of animal figures, as rhetorical strategy, 20 –21, 96 –97, 165, 209, 298n21, 336n11; conversion /assimilation as, 86, 119–20, 132; of Jews into animals, 23, 36, 124, 182, 206, 227, 244n79, 251n36, 323n9, 325n18, 326n33. See also Heine, Heinrich: “Princess Sabbath”; Kafka, Franz: Metamorphosis; Leivick, H., “Der Volf ”; mimesis: and “the Jew”; Siodmak, Curt: The Wolf Man Metternich, Prince Klemens von, 104 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 113 Meyerson, Abraham, 72 Meyrink, Gustav, 278n28 Michaelis, Johann David, 250n25 mimesis (imitation): antisemites miming mimetic Jew, 273n90; and apes, 127, 129, 288n41; and bad reproduction

Index (copy), 116 –17; Christians aping Jews, 328n47; and the Fackelkraus, 268n57; and Fuegians, 129; and Jacob, 132; and “the Jew,” 7, 22–23, 26, 46, 49, 100, 108–10, 115–23, 125, 129–30, 133–34, 136 –37, 202, 241n27, 249n96, 286n12, 287–88n34, 288n41, 294n8, 319n46; usury as bad reproduction (offspring as copy), 116. See also evolution: evolutionary mechanisms; mimicry/camouflage; nachmodernity, Western (Central European), 6, 13, 21, 30, 46 – 47, 97, 217, 219, 233, 240n20, 266n40. See also anthropological machine, modern; narcissistic crisis of Central European identity Möbius, Paul Julius, 289n53 moles (Maulwürfe), 25, 61, 89–92, 96, 161, 272n80, 308n44; antisemites as blind, 277n26. See also Kafka, Franz: “The Giant Mole” mongrel (cur), 5, 40 – 42, 47, 239n11, 241n26; “the Jew” as, 40, 179, 200 –2, 213, 241n26. See also dog(s); Hiemer, Fritz: The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund Pinscher monster, 51, 160, 204 –6, 214, 216, 257–58n95, 264n23, 325n20; assimilated Jew as, 304n8; “the Jew” as, 51, 117, 194, 257–58n95, 264n23, 268n50 more ferarum (coitus a tergo), 208, 212. See also Wolf-Man Case morphemic-orthographic-phonemicsemantic field, 1–2, 10 –11, 22–24, 49, 73, 93, 101–3, 108, 175, 270n72, 280n38, 302n57. See also Maus-; nach-; rat(t)-; Un-; word-combinations: formed with -jude Moritz, Karl-Phillip, 246n94 Morte d’Arthur, Le (Malory), 191 Moser, Moses, 98, 104, 284n72 Moses, 24, 73, 299n32, 304n4. See also Jewish, religion: as “Mosaic religion” mot-valise (portmanteau word), 55, 99–100, 104, 118 Mother Goose, 97 mouse (mice, Maus), 20, 22, 57, 68–72, 74, 76, 78, 80 –90, 95–98, 160, 222, 225, 269n61, 270n73, 271–72n79, 273n88, 274n98, 276n11, 289n53, 308n44, 335n4, 337n11; and Jews, 10, 24, 68–70, 72–73, 76 –80, 79 (fig.), 83, 108, 123, 137, 268nn48,50, 269n61; die Kafka as, 2, 71, 237–38n6; Kafka’s encounter with, 68, 71–72, 85–89, 95, 269–70n64, 271n76, 277n24; in proverb, 57, 83, 87, 98, 275n9. See also Kafka, Franz: “Josephine the Singer”; Mauschel(n); Spiegelman, Art: Maus Mousekevitz, Fievel, 68

Index Mühsam, Erich, 14 Müller, Albert, 157 Müller, D. H., 251–52n46 Müller, Max, 320n47 Mueller, Wilhelm, 111 Müllner, Adolf, 279n34 mummy, 147– 48; “the Jew” as living, 152–53, 303n61; The Mummy, 214 Murakami, Haruki, 59 Muselmann, 266n40, 339n31 Nabokov, Vladimir, 59–60, 262n15 Nabor, Felix, 24 nach-, 117; äffen, 22, 117, 123, 125; ahmen, 117, 123, 273n90; künsteln, 117; machen, 130; sprechen, 117, 273n90. See also mimesis naches, 110, 117; goyische, 133 Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), 210 –12, 331nn66, 72, 332n81 name: and “Brod,” 147; change, and Jewish identification, 156 –57, 165, 204, 256n85, 331n69; desecration of divine, 198; as floating signifier, 91–92, 95–96; Jacob/ Israel, 131–32; and “Kafka,” 57, 90, 141; Simon /Peter, 132; of the Wolf Man, 219. See also Lanzer, Ernst; Pankejeff, Sergei names, German-Jewish, 94 (Kohn), 256nn83–84, 86, 257n88; animal names assigned to humiliate, 48, 257n88; as indicative of Jewish bestial nature, 48– 49, 256 –57n87; derived from Biblical animal symbols: 256nn83–84, 257n88; Bär/Beer (bear), 48; Falke (falcon), 257n88; Fisch (fish), 256n83; Hirsch (stag/elk), 48, 257n88; Lamm (lamb), 256n83, Löw(e/y) (lion)), 48; Stier (bull), 256n83; Wolf(e/f ) (wolf ), 48, 194, 323n9; derived from Hebrew animal terms: Huldah (mole), 225; Jonah (dove), 224, 256n83. See also Law, the: laws requiring Jewish surnames naming: and animalization, 56, 60, 65–66, 101, 141, 152, 181, 208, 228, 248n4, 256 –57n87, 264n24, 281n53; and animalization of “the Jew,” 24, 29–30, 46, 48–51, 70, 228, 253n60, 256nn82–86, 257n88, 311n79, 326n32; of animals in Bambi and Bambis Kinder, 309nn57,61; of Goyim, 250n25; and Jewish identification, 24, 48, 57, 93–94, 131–32, 156 –57, 165, 194, 204, 257n88, 293n90; naming names, 53, 147– 48, 315n13 Napoleon Bonaparte, 47, 99 narcissistic crisis of Central European modernity, 6, 46 – 47, 274n94 Nasr, Constantine, 334n94 Nathan (Nathan the Wise), 140, 194

399 natural history, 4, 7–8, 17, 29, 32, 46, 48– 53, 129, 132–33, 151, 220, 239– 40n16, 240n24, 247– 48n2, 308n38, 321n54, 324n10 Naudh, W. ( J. Nordmann), 48 Neisser, Albert, 111 Neugroschel, Joachim, 199, 325n17 Neumann, Bernd, 313n85 Neumann, Gerhard, 291n69 new historicism, 26, 82, 86, 172 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 111, 125, 139, 241n32, 277n26, 288n39, 290n62 Nilus, Saint, 184 –85 Nordau, Max, 10, 111, 119 Norris, Margot, 75, 271n74, 288n39, 295n105 Novalis, 155–56, 304nn3– 4,8, 312n82 Oder-Satz (-Titel), 75–76, 95, 272n81, 273n89; and Either-Or, 76 –77 Oedipal structure, 21, 189, 207, 212–13, 219, 329nn60,62, 333n89 Offenbach, Jacques, 49, 50 (fig.) Oland, Warner, 333n86 Olsen, Lance, 59 Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), 18, 21, 23, 53–54, 58, 62–63, 133, 140, 218, 246n94, 260n5, 266n37, 314n3, 316n25, 317n27. See also Westjuden: view of Ostjuden outlaw (outside of the law), 27, 66, 160, 164 –65, 193, 195–200, 266n40, 325n20; in Bambi, 164 –65, 306n25; in Bambis Kinder, 159–60, 306n24, 307n31. See also homo sacer; Siodmak, Curt: The Wolf Man; warg overcoding of oppositions (difference) as reinforcing the normativity of the intersecting identifications, 6, 11, 13, 19, 56, 103, 174, 226, 246n94, 274n92. See also Gentile/Jewish, difference: overcoding, with human /animal difference; identifications, intersection of Palestine, 162, 170 –71, 175–78, 309n52, 316n26, 316 –17n26, 317nn27–28, 322n69; ancient, 64, 258n102, 303nn61; “Young Palestine,” 292n80 Panizza, Oskar, 167 Pankejeff, Sergei (the “Wolf-Man”), 27, 208–13, 329nn60 –61, 329–30n63, 330nn65–66, 331n71; acquires the sobriquet “Wolf-Man,” 189, 207–9, 331n69. See also Wolf-Man Case Pappenheim, Bertha, 325n18 parable, 21, 123, 144, 163, 172–73, 186, 283n69, 290n65, 314n7, 322n65, 324n11; “Parabel,” 314n6

400 parasite, “the Jew” as, 47, 54, 120, 241n26, 314n3 Paumgartten, Karl, 245n85 penis, 2, 39, 76, 99, 106, 133, 153, 169, 233, 240n16. See also castration, circumcision; tail, Schwanz: phallic associations pentagram, 214, 217, 218 (figs.); compared with Star of David, 217, 334 –35n94 performance and performativity, 6, 13, 28, 44, 56, 67, 77, 80, 82, 91–94, 108, 114, 122, 130, 133–34, 137, 164 –65, 169, 198, 206, 265–66n37, 267n43, 277n22, 293n92, 324n10; of the Jew-animal, 23; of the Jew-as-Animal, 21, 26, 28, 82, 91, 93, 96, 108, 137, 154, 165, 169; seeing “as,” 21, 245n82. See also Jews, types of: in the reproductive arts; mimesis persecution (verfolgen): in Bambi, 161, 309n51; in Bambis Kinder, 307n34, 309n45; by Gregor Samsa, 66. See also Jews, persecution of persistence, Jewish, 6, 97–98, 120, 222, 337n11; of the cockroach, 262n15 pest (Schädling), 54, 60, 183, 259nn104,108; “the Jew” as, 54 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of animals), 225 Peter the Venerable, 29–30 Pfemfert, Franz, 147– 48 Philip V (France), 43 Philistines, 106 –7, 166 –67 philology, 6, 27, 112, 139, 145, 239n11, 250 –51n31 pig(s), 43, 97, 211; boar, 39 (Erymanthian), 193; and the Gerasene demoniac, 260n118; and Jews, 5, 31, 33–39, 37 (fig.), 42, 44, 47– 48, 56, 63, 107, 248n8, 250n27, 259n109; Judensau, 34 –36, 36 (fig.), 39, 84, 251nn33,36; in Maus, 78; Saujude, 35 Pines, Meyer Isser, 123–24, 290nn66 –67 Pines, Noam, 288n35, 328n55 Pius X, Pope, 175 Platen, August von, 168, 299n32, 311n79, 312nn82–84, 313n85 Plautus, 190 Pliny the Elder, 7, 32–33, 133, 219 pogroms, 4, 53, 77, 157, 195, 229, 273– 74n91, 327n41, 336n4; Kristallnacht, 157, 221. See also Hep-Hep pogroms Polgar, Alfred, 305n1 polis (community of moral obligation), 14, 17–18, 22, 159, 190, 193, 195, 197, 200, 243n70, 262n15, 339n31. See also outlaw Pollak, Ernst, 88–89, 95 Pollak, Josef, 90 –91 pork, prohibition, 33–35, 37, 250nn25,30, 254n68, 264n26

Index postcolonial criticism, 170 –72 Prague, 1, 26, 60, 63, 88, 121, 136, 139, 145–50, 162, 168, 170, 175, 178, 186, 227–29, 267n42, 270n64, 278n29, 287n27, 290n64, 300 –1n44, 301n45, 319n40, 319–20n46, 322n69 Pressner, Todd, 21, 288n44 primal scene, 208, 210 –13, 331n73, 332n81; of critical animal studies, 86 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 280n48 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 32, 53, 194, 326n32. See also Video Rebel Proud, Judith, 326n29 proverb (saying, Sprichwort), 26 –27, 33, 49, 54, 57, 59, 63, 65, 82–87, 98, 113, 141, 151, 155, 168, 190, 194, 211, 225, 259n109, 262n14, 265n30, 275n7, 275–76n9, 279n36, 280n45, 283n70, 292n86, 321n59. See also ape/baptism / goat /Hirsch/insect /rabbit /wolf in antiJewish proverb; bird/cat: cat and mouse/ dog/mouse in proverb Pygmalion, 154 rabbit, hare (Hase), 78, 160, 164, 309n61, 335–36n4; in anti-Jewish proverb, 275–276n9; duck-rabbit, 245n82; as German-Jewish surname (Haase), 257n88; Hasenjagd, 40, 41(fig.), 251– 52n46, 310n64; Hasenklage, 310n64; and Jews, 39– 40, 44, 54, 164, 251–52n46, 275–76n9, 309–10n62, 310nn64 –65. See also Salten, Felix: Fifteen Rabbits racial hygiene (eugenics), 7, 17, 118 Rains, Claude, 333n89 rat(s), 74, 97, 99–102, 222, 229, 268–69n58, 281n55, 281–82n56; and Jews, 69 (fig.), 69–70, 78, 95–97, 99–100, 103, 108, 225, 251n34, 252n51, 278n32, 282– 83n63. See also Heine, Heinrich: “From the Age of Pigtails” rat(t)- (rät-; rat-semes): in Heine, 96, 99; in Rat Man Case, 101–3, 281n55, 285– 86n56, 286nn57,60 Rat Man Case (Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis and Original Record; ON, OR, RMB, RMN), 26, 101–3, 189, 210, 281nn53–54, 281–82n56, 282nn57,62. See also Freud, Sigmund; Lanzer, Ernst Rathenau, Walter, 24, 119, 132–33, 247n98, 288–89n44, 299n32 readers: assumption of Zionist subtexts, 162, 170 –72, 176 –78, 307nn35,37, 315n13, 316 –17n26, 317n27; expectations/assumptions, 22, 76, 83–84, 92, 106, 162, 168, 176, 213, 317n26; identification of the Jew-Animal, 39, 62, 70, 142, 296n13;

Index identification of the Jew-Animal, strategies against, 25, 58, 60 –61, 64, 67–68, 75–76, 78, 95, 124, 133–34, 136, 183, 273n88; identification of “the Jew,” strategies against, 139– 40, 222, 296n4 Rechtanus, Vespasianus, 193–94 redemption, 137–38, 172, 267n43; and the animal gaze, 244n73, 338–39n29. See also Jewish religion: redemption Reinach, Salomon, 239n11 Reiner Affair, 88–89, 94 –95, 246n90, 277n93; Jarmila Reiner, 88, 95, 246n90; Josef Reiner, 88, 95, 246n90. See also Haas, Willy Renan, Ernest, 112, 286n10 reptile(s): as allegedly common Jewish stereotype, 140 – 42; basilisk, “the Jew” as, 30, 46; chameleon, and Jews, 7, 117, 241n26; crocodile, 30, 39, 46, 152, 303n61; and Jews, 46, 140, 152, 278n32; and lizards, 296n6 Rieff, Philip, 207 Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 231 Risches (hatred of Jews), 40, 251n45 ritual slaughter, Jewish (Schechitah), 55, 108, 259n117; Schochet (practitioner), 108, 239– 40n16, 327n41. See also Law, the: Jewish dietary rules; sacrifice: in Jerusalem Temple Riva, 143, 149, 298n27, 301n48 rodent(s), “the Jew” as, 5, 54; in Maus, 80, 274n97 Rosenberg, Alfred, 17 Rossello, Diego, 323n8 Rothschild, family, 258n102; Henri, 38 (fig.); Nathan Mayer, 104, 105 (fig.); Salomon, 166, 205, 311–12n81 Ruest, Anselm, 300n38 Rupprecht, Philipp (aka “Fips”), 239n16 Rutschmann, Verena, 306n22 sacrifice, 16, 32, 34, 62, 66 –67, 74, 100, 107–8, 159, 184 –86, 191, 199–200, 266nn40 – 41, 267n43, 321n63, 322nn66 – 67, 339n31; in Jerusalem Temple, 259n112; logic of, 16, 320n51. See also blood libel; Girard, Réné; homo sacer; Ungeziefer: etymology Salten, Felix (Siegmund Salzmann), 10, 27, 154, 157–65, 305nn14 –15, 306nn17,26,29, 307–308n37, 308nn38– 39,48– 49, 309n52, 310n60, 323–24n10; works: Bambi, 27, 156 –65, 305n12, 306n17, 307n35, 308nn37,41,44, 309nn51,53,55–56,58,60 –61, 310nn67,70; Bambis Kinder, 27, 157–61, 165, 307nn30 –34,36, 308n45, 309n57; Fifteen Rabbits, 161, 164, 310n64; The

401 Hound of Florence, 323–24n10; Neue Menschen auf alte Erde, 309n52 Salzmann, Philipp, 157 Samson, 106, 284n75 Saphir, Moritz, 128, 166, 290n62 Satan (devil), 195, 335n94; and “the Jew,” 33, 46, 128, 183, 204, 320n50 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 153–54, 304n72 Schillemeit, Jost, 179 Schiller, Friedrich, 3, 113, 304n4, 328n54 Schlosser, J.V., 251–52n46 Schmidt, Michael, 26, 81–87, 108, 275n8, 276nn11–13; “Katz und Maus” (KM), 81–86, 275n8 Schnitzker, Norbert, 254n64 Schnitzler, Arthur, 74, 114, 134, 267n42, 271n77, 296n4; Road into the Open, 74, 114, 134, 267n42, 296n4 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 54 –55, 184, 259n112, 262n14 Schudt, Johann Jakob, 35, 47 Scliar, Moacyr, 247n103, 322n65 self-hatred, Jewish, 20 –24, 119–20, 131, 137, 152, 246n95, 321n60 Semah, Joseph, 251n46 separatrix, 11–12, 21, 45, 129, 133, 151, 173, 180, 242n38, 295n106, 319n44. See also circumcision: and Jewish male difference; food as diacritic; human (animal)/ (nonhuman) animal diacritics; language, as German-Jewish diacritic Sereny, Gitta, 226 Sessa, Karl Boromäus Alexander, 51, 311n79 Seuffert, Heinrich, 93, 277n27 Seuss, Dr. (Theodore Geisel), 81 Shakespeare, William, 201–3, 203 (fig.), 279n34 shame 127, 160, 178–80, 319n44; in Bambis Kinder, 160; and Brod’s mistranscription, 179; guilt, 196; and Jews, 228 shamelessness: and apes, 127–28, 132, 292n80; and dogs, 27, 178–80, 200; and Jews, 127–28, 132, 200 sheep, to the slaughter, 27, 230 –32, 339n36; Goyim as, 31–32, 48, 194 Sholem Aleichem, 290n66 Shumsky, Dimitry, 172–73, 314n8, 322n69 Shylock, 24, 190, 200 – 4, 203 (fig.), 213, 318n32, 328n49. See also Heine, Heinrich: “Jessica (Shylock)” Sierchio, Patrick, 334n94 Singer, I. B., 19, 27, 225, 336 –37n11; “The Letter Writer,” 225, 336n10, 336 –37n11 Siodmak, Curt, 10, 27, 188, 190 –91, 213–20, 324n11, 332n84, 333nn87–90, 334nn91–92, 334 –35n94; Frankenstein

402 Siodmak, Curt (continued ) Meets the Wolf Man, 214, 332n85; The Wolf Man, 27, 190, 213–20, 218 (figs.), 332n85, 333nn88–89, 333–34n90, 334 –35n94, 335n95 Siodmak, Robert, 213 skin: animal skin as disguise, 132, 194; bearskinned, 324n13; human versus animal (fur, hide), 131, 135, 204, 272n80; wolfskinned, 191, 324n13 Slezkine, Yuri, 110, 285n6 Slifkin, Nosson, 323n9 smell (stench): of animal, 33, 39, 72, 132, 182–83, 252n51; of Arab, 183; of Jews, 33, 53, 133, 182, 252n51, 287–88n34, 292n80, 299n32, 326n32; eau de cologne, 146, 299n32; of Er, 161; of Pan, 147– 48. See also Foetor Judaicus; human /animal diacritic: smell Smith, David Livingstone, 339n33 Smith, Jonathan Z., 322n65 Smith, William Robertson, 184 –86, 322n67 snake(s), “the Jew” as, 30, 46 – 47, 54, 141, 152, 222, 241n26, 252n50, 255n74, 298n21, 328n53, 335n1; adder, 30, 46; serpent, 30; viper, 30, 46, 222 Söderblom, Nathan, 185 solidarity, mechanical, 20, 244n77; organic 20 –21, 244n77 Solms, Mark, 189 Solymosi, Eszter, 95, 278n32 Sombart, Werner, 68–69, 115–16, 267–68n48, 282n60 sovereignty, 100,152, 192, 273n91, 315n17, 323n8, 325n18, 339n31; sovereign decision, 66. See also homo sacer; Law, the; outlaw speciation, 3– 4, 6; pseudospeciation, 3, 6, 242n50 species, 2– 4, 6, 16, 19–20, 24 –25, 45– 47, 57–61, 67, 75, 96, 100, 121, 123, 152, 155, 159, 161, 188–89, 219, 225, 233, 238– 39n11, 243n60, 261n6, 262n15, 270n72, 271n74, 272n79, 275–76n9, 295n112, 305n14, 306n24, 309n61, 333n89, 336n4; companion species, 16, 24, 36, 192, 207, 224, 230, 243n60; “the Jew” as, 3– 4, 6 –11, 19–21, 53, 108, 162, 176, 239– 40n16. See also animal: humanized; grammar: collective (categorical) singular species identification, the question of: for Gregor Samsa, 25, 57–61, 64, 262n15, 263nn17,19, 264n23; and for Gregor’s visual representation, 59, 261n9, 261–62n12; for Josephine the Singer, 25, 57–58, 68, 72–77, 270 –71n74; for other Kafka figures, 61, 71, 74, 272n80

Index Spector, Scott, 11, 186, 245n84 Spiegelman, Art, 25, 68, 78–82, 275n1, 295n112; Maus, 68, 78–81, 79 (fig.), 274nn97–98 Spindler, Carl, 167–68, 296n7 Spinoza, Baruch, 114, 1534, 303n69, 307n35 Stach, Reiner, 246n89, 264n22, 270n72, 287n27, 300n41 Stangl, Franz, 18, 226 Star of David (Magen David), 6, 217, 227–28, 258n102; and the mark of the beast, 332n84 Stark, Johannes, 111 Starke, Ottomar, 261–62n12 Steiner, Rudolf, 145– 46 Sterba, Richard, 207 stereotype, stereotyping, 22, 24, 35, 51, 72–73, 80, 94, 103, 110 –11, 132, 136 –37, 140, 164, 175, 183, 190 –91, 193, 202, 220, 240n16, 248n3, 252n47, 294nn99,100, 309–10n62, 320n54, 321nn60 –61; of Arabs, 177–78; dream-logic of, 35, 250n30; orientalist, 170, 175, 177–78, 317n26, 318n31, 332–33n86; of wolves, 190 –91. See also “Jew, the”: innate traits of Stevenson, Robert Louis, 188 Stiegler, Christian, 334 –35n94 Stoddard, Lothrop, 17 Stow, Kenneth, 43 Strabo, 191, 324n13 Streicher, Julius, 226, 239– 40n16 Strickland, Debra Higgs, 32–33 Stubbe, Peter, 191 subjection, 11, 14 –17, 33, 46 – 47, 86, 100, 111,125, 134, 167, 216, 223, 227, 230, 266n40, 325n18. See also interpellation Süss Oppenheimer, Joseph, 194 suffering, license to inflict, 17–20, 86, 193, 200, 226, 228–29, 259n112, 306n24, 308n39, 335–36n4, 339n31. See also killable Switzerland: restrictions on Jewish residency, 157, 305–6n18, 306n22; Swiss Writers’ Union, 157, 305–6n18 synagogue, 36, 39, 43, 61, 71, 113, 136, 196, 198–99, 206, 251n46, 269nn61,63, 280n42, 319n40, 327n41; Synagoga, 33. See also Jewish religion Tacitus, 34, 105 Taibbi, Matt, 53, 326n32 tail, Schwanz (Schwänzchen), 2, 11, 35, 39– 40, 56, 78, 80, 96, 103, 130, 133, 151, 153–56, 169, 233, 268n53, 271n76, 274n98, 284n75, 301n46, 312n82, 313n85, 329n61, 330n65; dog, 40, 206 –11; Judenzopf, 280n38; phallic

Index associations, 2, 39, 99, 169, 207, 209; Philozopf, 99–100; pigtail (Zopf, Zöpfchen, queue), 11, 39, 96, 99–100, 103–5, 108, 130, 251n41, 280n38, 283n70, 284n75; rat (Rattenschwanz, Rattenschweif), 70, 99–101, 282n56; tailless, 100 –1, 130, 133, 206 –7, 209; wolf, 208–11 tailor (Schneider), 208–10, 331nn68,70. See also circumciser taxonomy (classification), 3– 4, 7, 15, 25, 51, 53, 56 –58, 60 –62, 76, 129, 161, 166, 188, 194, 223, 245n83, 263n19, 273n86; categorization, 4, 6 –7, 14, 16, 19, 23, 80, 240nn18,22, 304n8; Jewish categories, 328–29n57. See also genre; Jews, types of; species Tengler, Ulrich, 44 theriomorph/zoomorph, 44 – 45, 254n79, 254 –55n71. See also hybrid, humananimal Third, the, 174, 315n15 Thomas, Keith, 14 –15 totemism, 184 –86, 212–13; totem animal, 184 –85, 249n23, 256 –57n87; totemic pines, 302n57. See also Freud, Sigmund: Totem and Taboo Treitschke, Heinrich, 112–13 Tucholsky, Kurt, 130 Un-, 67, 257–58n95, 264n23; ungeheuer/Ungeheuer, 59, 67, 84, 90, 160, 204, 257n95, 263n19, 264n23, 276n10; Ungetüm, 206, 257n95, 264n23; Untier, 65–67, 138, 266n38, 276n10. See also Ungeziefer undecidable (indeterminate), rendering identification,15, 20 –21, 25, 57–58, 61, 75–78, 94, 133, 137–38, 186, 189, 206, 264n23, 265n37, 272nn80,85, 273n86, 278n28, 294n97. See also literalization of animal figures, as rhetorical strategy; metamorphosis: of animal figures, as rhetorical strategy; performance and performativity: seeing “as”; species identification, the question of Ungeziefer, 59–64, 263nn16,19, 264n21, 272n80; etymology, 61–62, 67; “the Jew” as, 62, 64; “Das Ungeziefer” ( Jensen), 61, 264n21; Ungezieferangst, 68 Unser Verkehr (Sessa), 9 (fig.), 51, 258n97, 311n79 Untermensch, 17–18 Urban, Monica, 240n20 vampire (bloodsucker), “the Jew” as, 30, 194, 239n16, 241n26, 321n54; living dead, 303n61 (see also blood libel; Dracula); vampire squid, 53, 194, 258nn101–3, 326n32. See also Video Rebel

403 Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Juden, 26, 82, 95–98, 103– 4, 106 –8, 151–52, 283n68, 285n78 Verjudung (jewifying), 51, 113, 218, 286n22 vermin, 15, 20, 30, 53, 59–64, 68, 90, 268n48, 338n16; “the Jew” as, 5, 20, 24, 30, 46 – 47, 53, 56, 59–60, 62–63, 99, 226, 257–58n95, 260n1, 263nn16, 19, 264n24; leech, 46; slime, 46. See also arachnid(s); insect(s); mouse; rat(s); rodent(s); Ungeziefer; worm(s) verrecken, 77, 274nn92–93, 336n4; “Juda verreck,” 77, 274n92. See also killable: Jews as Vialles, Noilie, 243n61 Video Rebel, 53, 258n102, 326n32; “The Vampire Squid Anti-Defamation League,” 53, 326n32; “The Vampire Squid Protocols,” 53, 326n32; “The Vampire Squid Talmud,” 53, 258n102, 326n32 Vienna, 4, 26, 71, 87–89, 114, 131, 157, 164, 208–10, 212, 271n77, 277n24, 286n12, 290n62, 301n45 visibility, 6 –7, 14, 18, 32, 64, 91–92, 106, 127, 134, 144 – 45, 229, 338–39n29; of deity, 181; of Freud’s patients, 102–3, 282n62; human, to be seen as, 227 (see also antisemitic [and anti-Jewish] media; body, Jewish); invisibility (hidden), 181, 219, 264n21, 268n48, 291n70, 320n50; and Jewish identification, 6 –10, 14, 17–18, 32, 47, 51–52, 70, 74, 91–92, 98, 104, 106, 117, 120, 217–18, 239– 40n16, 268n48, 273n90, 283n69, 294n97; wrongly assumed by Wagner, 287n23. See also “Jew, the”: innate traits of, and disguise, duplicity; mimesis Volk, völkisch, 2, 93, 117, 238n10, 239n11, 269n61; Jews as Volk, 24, 152, 202, 317n27, 336n7; Josephine’s, 58, 68, 72–77, 95–96, 122–23, 138, 150, 182, 260 –61n5, 265n32, 267n46, 271–72n79, 272nn80,85, 273n88, 289n57; Kafka’s, 296 –97n14; das Volk der Mäuse versus das Mäusevolk, 95, 272–73n85; as Stamm (tribe), 72–73 Von Leers, Johann, 4, 239n16 Wagner, Richard, 49, 72, 74, 112–17, 122, 125, 271n77, 286n22, 287n23, 289n59, 312–13n85; Judaism and Music ( JM), 49, 113, 117, 122, 286n22, 287n23 Waltz with Bashir (Folman), 318n33 Wandering Jew (Ewige Jude), 17, 77, 152–53, 184, 218, 223, 225–26, 328n53; Der ewige Jude (Hippler), 55, 226, 259–60n117, 282–83n63; of the ocean, 312n85

404 Wannsee Conference, 220 warg (wargus, vargr), 27, 193, 266n40, 325n20. See also outlaw; werewolf Wasserman, August, 111 Wassermann, Jacob, 283n69 Wedekind, Frank, 147 Weil, Jiri, 28, 227–29, 231–32, 338n21; Life with a Star, 227–29, 338n23 Weininger, Otto, 72, 111, 114 –15, 120 –22, 271n77, 289nn53,59, 320n56; Sex and Character (SC), 114 –15, 120 –21 Weiss, Stanley S. 102, 282nn60 –61 Weissenberg, Samuel, 177, 317n28 Weizmann, Chaim, 175 werewolf (wolf-man), 27, 189–95, 200 –2, 213–19, 266n40, 318n32, 323n9, 324nn12,14, 325n20, 326nn33–34, 327n38, 332–33n86, 333n87, 335n94; hypertrichosis, 208; loup-garou, 323n9, 327n38; in popular culture, 188, 194; were-canid, 190, 204, 206, 323–24n10; were-beast, 66; and witches, 191, 204, 324n14. See also Haarmann, Fritz; lycanthropy; Marie de France; Mayse-buch; Morte d’Arthur, Le; outlaw; warg Werewolf of London, 332–33n86 Werfel, Franz, 1, 59, 147–51, 164, 179, 290n61, 297n16, 300nn40 – 41,44, 301n45, 319n40; Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man), 179, 290n61, 319n40 Westjuden (Western and Central European Jews), 23, 28, 57–58, 63, 115, 119, 121, 131, 133, 164, 182, 217, 246n94, 260 –61n5, 294n97, 309n60, 316n25; view of Ostjuden, 23, 63, 246n94, 316n25 Wiedl, Birgit, 44, 248n13, 252n53, 254n68 Wild Boy of Aveyron, 188 Wilda, Wilhelm Eduard, 325n20 Wildgans, Anton, 1–2 Wilhelm I (Elector of Hesse-Kassel aka Landgrave Friedrich Wilhelm IX), 98–100, 104 –5, 281n49. See also tail: Philozopf Wilhelm II, Kaiser (Germany), 175 Wise, Steven, 44 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 48, 96 –98, 104, 107–8, 151, 285n78 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 111, 245n82, 286n12 Wohryzek, Julie, 278n31 wolf (wolves), 188–93, 198, 241n26, 261n6, 327nn35,38, 330n66, 331n69; in antiJewish proverb, 54, 275–76n9; “Doulce France et Grojuif,” 194; as emblem of Benjamin, 48, 194, 323n9; in fairy tales, 330n65; and Jews, 27, 30 –32, 46, 48, 54,

Index 128, 200 –2, 252n50, 275n9, 278n32, 326n24, 327n41; “Little Red Riding Hood,” 194, 208; modern society as wolflike, 333n87; omega, 160, 193, 200, 325n20; “The Seven Little Goats,” 208; “Wolf ” (Anna Freud’s dog), 330n63; “The Wolf and the Tailor,” 208, 331n70. See also Leivick, H.: “Der Volf ”; names, German-Jewish: Wolf (e/f ); Siodmak, Curt: The Wolf Man; Wolf-Man Case Wolf-Man Case (“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” WM), 27, 207–13, 329nn60 –61, 329–30n63, 330n65, 330 –31n66, 331nn67–70, 72, 331–32n73, 332nn76,81–82. See also Freud, Sigmund; Pankejeff, Sergei Wolf (Wohlwill), Immanuel, 96 –98, 103– 4, 107, 151 Wolfe, Cary, 10, 16 Wolff, Kurt, 59, 262n16 Wolff, Theodor, 257n88 word-combinations: formed with -jude, 4, 49–51, 257n92, 257–58n95, 264n23; as identifiers, 53, 101, 272–73n85 worm(s), 224; “the Jew” as, 30, 46 – 47, 224; tapeworm, 241n26; trichinae, 62, 264n26 Wulff, Moshe, 207, 210, 212, 332n78 Wurm, Albert Aloys Ferdinand, 311n79 Yarri, Donna, 297n20 Yehudah HaChassid, Rabbi, 323n9 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 72, 270n65, 286n14 Yiddish (Judendeutsch, Jargon), 10 –11, 24, 51, 73, 102, 117, 123, 129–30, 167, 194, 241n35, 246n94, 247n100, 265–66n37, 266 –67n41, 302n57, 310nn84 –65; and German, 24, 123, 129, 164, 265–66n37. See also Mauschel(n) Zaidl, Motke, 230 Zionism, 23, 73, 119, 136, 139– 40, 277n26, 294n100, 314n3, 315n13, 316 –17n26, 317nn27–28, 320n46; anti-Zionism, 23, 27, 73; and Kafka, 27, 58, 73, 170 –73, 175–78, 183, 273n89, 277n26, 314n3, 321n61; and Salten, 157, 162, 307nn35– 36, 309n60. See also Bar-Kochba Circle; journals/newspapers: Selbstwehr zoology, 2–3, 12, 48– 49, 53–54, 60, 118, 130; zoological correctness, 124, 173 Zsolnay Verlag, 164 Zunz, Leopold, 48, 96, 104 –5, 256n86, 283n69 Zweig, Arnold, 95, 278n32