Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses 9783110339109, 9783110339031, 9783110395532

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Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler (Eds.) Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews

Europäisch-jüdische Studien Beiträge European-Jewish Studies Contributions

Edited by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam, in cooperation with the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg Editorial Manager: Werner Treß

Volume 23

Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses Edited by Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler

ISBN 978-3-11-033903-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-033910-9 e-ISBN (PUB) 978-3-11-039553-2 ISSN 2192-9602 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses   1 Achim Rohde Asians in Europe Reading German-Jewish History through a Postcolonial Lens  17 Hannah Lotte Lund Prussians, Jews, Egyptians? Berlin Jewish Salonières around 1800 and Their Guests. Discursive Constructions of Equality and Otherness  33 Kathrin Wittler “Good to Think” (Re)Conceptualizing German-Jewish Orientalism  63 Hildegard Frübis Ephraim Moses Lilien The Figure of the “Beautiful Jewess,” the Orient, the Bible, and Zionism  82 Axel Stähler Zionism, Colonialism, and the German Empire Herzl’s Gloves and Mbwapwa’s Umbrella  98 Jay Geller Kafka’s “Schakale und Araber” and the Question of Genre Gleichnis, Tiergeschichte, or dialektisches Bild?  124 Daniel Wildmann Desire, Excess, and Integration Orientalist Fantasies, Moral Sentiments, and the Place of Jews in German Society as Portrayed in Films of the Weimar Republic  137 Laurel Plapp Jewish Drag The Ostjude as Anti-Zionist Hero in Arnold Zweig’s De Vriendt kehrt heim  156

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Yaron Peleg Re-Orientalizing the Jew Zionist and Contemporary Israeli Masculinities  176 Ulrike Brunotte “All Jews are womanly, but no women are Jews.” The “Femininity” Game of Deception: Female Jew, femme fatale Orientale, and belle Juive  195 Anna-Dorothea Ludewig Between Orientalization and Self-Orientalization Remarks on the Image of the “Beautiful Jewess” in Nineteenth- and EarlyTwentieth-Century European Literature  221 Christina von Braun To See or Not to See The Gaze and Gender in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures  230 Tatjana Petzer Veils in Action The “Oriental Other” and Its Performative Deconstruction in Modern Fashion and Art  243 Sarah Dornhof Embodied Protest Nakedness and the Partition of Gazes   268 Works Cited   284 List of Contributors   313 Index   317

Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler

Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews

Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses

Context This collection of essays is the first multidisciplinary research output of the international research network “Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism, and Occidentalism” (ReNGOO). The network’s collaborative research addresses imaginative and aesthetic rather than sociological questions, with particular focus on the function of gender and sexuality in literary, scholarly, and artistic transformations, as well as in constructions of orientalist images both from without and from within. As ReNGOO’s first publication the collection documents the network’s initial engagement with this rich and wide-ranging field of research in a variety of interlinking approaches. It proposes to intervene in current debates on historical constructions of Jewish identity in relation to colonialism and orientalism, especially in the frequently ignored German context. More specifically, it explores the ways in which stereotypes of the external and internal other intertwine in modern German national discourse since the nineteenth century and examines the ways in which these borders are demarcated and transgressed by means of orientalist self-fashioning in Jewish cultural production. With its interrogation of the roles assumed in this interplay by gender, processes of sexualization, skin color, and aesthetic formations, the volume suggests new directions to the interdisciplinary study of gender, Jewish culture, antisemitism, and orientalism. Although it takes its cue from highly topical debates and current research projects, the collection is nevertheless primarily concerned with the intricate genealogies of contemporary discourses. Reflections on the (Hobsbawmian) long nineteenth century and the fin de siècle are therefore linked with explorations of the topical issue of neoorientalism with the objective of disentangling some of the entangled histories of gender, antisemitism, orientalism, and occidentalism in Europe.

Orientalism, Germany, and the Jews Orientalism arguably is one of the most dynamic research areas in contemporary cultural studies. Indeed, almost four decades after its first publication in 1978, the

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fierce debate initiated by Edward Said’s eponymous book has progressed to new levels of critical reflection. In particular Said’s blatant disregard of the German variety of orientalism has frequently been perceived to account for what has been criticized as the homogenizing and ahistorical tendency of his study. As a result Said’s entire project has been called into question.1 Alternatively, attentive to the imminent danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the study of orientalism has been shaped more productively by the increasing appreciation of the impact of German scholarship on oriental and Islam studies, as well as by the acknowledgement of the significance of Germany’s “colonial fantasies.”2 This dual interest paradoxically confirms, in what may be an unexpected twist, Said’s supposedly reductive assertion “that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in orientalist discourse.”3 In the wake of this claim, the German view of the orient in both the academy and the wider social context were accordingly ignored for almost a quarter of a century by scholars of orientalism and postcolonial studies, because Germany played only a relatively marginal role among the early colonial powers.4 Yet slightly rephrased and enriched with the acknowledgement of Germany’s colonial imagination, Said’s claim appears much less controversial and may still prove to be productive for further explorations. Indeed, to say that there is a confluence between scholarship and imaginary political power in orientalist discourse creates a framework that accommodates what might be designated German “colonial exceptionalism.” The very nature of this exceptionalism – its, in political and economic terms, largely illusory basis, no less than the decisive impact of the perception of a “racial” other within the contact zone of an internal colonial encounter which articulated itself in German antisemitism and its other, philosemitism – offers exciting new perspectives on the study of orientalism.5 Indeed, as Achim Rohde has observed, since the last decade of the twentieth century “a growing number of academic works have focused on the evolution of a specifically German colonialism.”6 These studies establish the decisive impact of 1 See e.g. Fuchs-Sumiyoshi, Orientalismus in der deutschen Literatur, 1984, p.  156; Ammann, Östliche Spiegel, 1989, p. 12. 2 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1997. 3 Pasto, “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer,’” 1998, 437. 4 See Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 1997, p. 8; Gerstle (ed.), Recovering the Orient, 1994; Franco (ed.), Beyond Orientalism, 1997. 5 The suggestion of the purely imaginary German national interest in colonial adventures before 1871 has been questioned by Berman, “K.u.K. Colonialism,” 1998, 6–8. The underlying similarities between antisemitism and philosemitism have been designated by Zygmunt Bauman as allosemitism, see Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 1998. 6 Rohde, “The Orient Within,” 2009, 150.



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German oriental studies as well as orientalist and colonial practices and fantasies on German identity politics in the long nineteenth century as “a contrasting foil and a stabilizing tool for the German national project of modernity.”7 As early as 1997, Susanne Zantop argued in her study on Colonial Fantasies. Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 that the absence of colonies did minimize neither Germany’s influence on orientalist discourse nor the bearing that colonial discourse had on German constructions of identity. In fact, as she convincingly demonstrates, the development of a national “imagined community” took place vis-à-vis “others both inside and outside Germany.”8 At the same time, the blind spot that has emerged in Said’s study with regard to German orientalism has been matched by a similar blind spot with respect to the epistemological potential of some of its less prominent suggestions. Thus, it has been pointed out by James Pasto that neither his critics nor his supporters “have given much attention to Said’s claim that there is a similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism.”9 It has of course been recognized that the specific German historical context of the twentieth century challenges the general usefulness of such a comparison. As Rohde notes, “The Holocaust as the monstrous climax of German anti-Semitism, outgrows the conceptual framework of Said’s Orientalism.”10 Some approaches in Jewish studies, in particular in the United States and in Canada, nevertheless have made productive use of the theoretical and methodological frameworks of postcolonial and oriental studies in order to analyze the orientalization of the Jews as a part of European colonial discourse and as a central trope of European antisemitism. Much of this is indebted to Hannah Arendt’s work, especially in her seminal study of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and in her account of the Eichmann trial in 1961, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Arendt in particular, transcending disciplinary boundaries, has become, as Bryan Cheyette has emphasized, “a common point of reference for much new work aiming to bring together the

7 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 2009, p.  151. See e.g. Friedrichsmeyer/Lennox/Zantop (eds.), The Imperialist Imagination, 1998; Pasto, “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer,’” 1998; Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005; Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne, 1997; Bogdal (ed.), Orientdiskurse in der deutschen Literatur, 2007. For overviews of more recent work in this context, see Perraudin/Zimmerer (eds.), German Colonialism and National Identity, 2011; Langbehn/Salama (eds.), German Colonialism, 2011. 8 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1997. 9 Pasto, “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer,’” 1998, 437. In his 1978 introduction, Said states, that in “addition and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism,” Orientalism, 1978, p. 27. 10 Rohde, “The Orient Within,” 2009, 151.

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histories of racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.”11 This has led, as observed by Michael Rothberg, to a “colonial turn” even in Holocaust studies.12 Yet especially in view of the long history of Christian anti-Judaism, whose legacy was adopted and transformed by antisemitism, the entangled history of internal and external boundary markers must also be read in dialectic terms because, as pointed out by Tudor Parfitt: From the very beginning of European expansion Judaism was employed in the decipherment of religions, and Jewish ancestry was used as likely explanation for the people Europeans encountered.13

More recently, as a counterpoint to explorations of Jewish victimization through colonialism and orientalism, the role of Jews in the German colonial enterprise has also been interrogated,14 as has the thorny issue of Zionism and colonialism. The latter has mostly been discussed in response to alleged colonial practices of Israel which have arguably led to the emergence of new manifestations of antisemitism cloaked in the guise of anti-Zionism.15 The historical dimension and the intricacies of the Zionist engagement with colonial practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the convergence of Zionist and colonial discourse with antisemitic and, more generally, with racial discourse, have also received some attention.16 Yet the interface of discourses on blackness and on Jewishness with one another and with colonial discourse in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Germany in particular still awaits a focused enquiry. Christian S. Davis’s study on Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (2012) suggests the productivity of an approach 11 Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind, 2013, p. 7. 12 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 2009, p. 70. For a comprehensive discussion of this development, see Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind, 2013, pp. 6–18. 13 Parfitt, “The Use of the Jews in Colonial Discourse,” 2005, p. 53. For a case study of colonial fantasies of the “Ten Lost Tribes” in Puritan discourse, see Brunotte, “Die Lost Ten Tribes in Amerika,” 2009; Susannah Heschel suggests that the Jews, especially in the German context, figured as a kind of “internal colony” in nineteenth-century discourse; see Heschel, “Jewish Studies as Counterhistory,” 1998, p. 101. 14 See e.g. Riegert, “Subjects and Agents of Empire,” 2009; Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany, 2012. 15 See Sicher, “The Image of Israel and Postcolonial Discourse,” 2011. 16 See e.g. Aaronsohn, “Settlement in Eretz-Israel,” 1996; Boyarin, “The Colonial Drag,” 2000; Golan, “European Imperialism and the Development of Modern Palestine,” 2001; Penslar, “Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” 2001; Stähler, Literarische Konstruktionen jüdischer Postkolonialität, 2009; Stähler, “Orientalist Strategies,” 2009; Stähler, “Constructions of Jewish Identity and the Spectre of Colonialism,” 2013.



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which broadens the scope of Said’s Orientalism, as previously suggested by Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar, toward “the study of colonialism in general as a discursive phenomenon.”17 As Axel Stähler’s contribution to the present volume demonstrates, the intersection between Jewishness and blackness occurs not only in antisemitic discourse with its predictably negative connotations. It is also appropriated into Zionist discourse in order to interrogate the racist, or anti-racist (as the case may be), impulse of Zionism and indeed the very nature of Jewish “colonial” adventures. The discursive identification with the black colonized subject then advances the searching (re)negotiation and potential (re)configuration of Jewish identities in relation to the colonial project and to the restoration of the Jews to the Promised Land, rather than to any other land promised for settlement. Identifications with and demarcations from the “other,” both from within and from without, have determined the image of “the Jew” for a long time. The “oriental” quality of this image emerges especially in the ways in which constructions of “the Jew” have been redirected toward the construction of images of the orient. Indeed, as Kalmar and Penslar argue, “the Western image of the Muslim Orient has been formed, and continues to be formed in inextricable conjunction with Western perceptions of the Jewish people.”18 That images of Jews and Muslims have been correlated since the Middle Ages, especially in Christian thought and Christian “politico-theology,” is explored in more detail by Achim Rohde in his contribution to this volume. Indeed, taking this early correlation as its starting point, his chapter proceeds to unravel the history of oriental studies in Germany and its relation to Jewish studies in the context of the debate on Edward Said’s conception of orientalism. Against this backdrop the persistent practice of identifying European Jews with biblical figures, no less than the ongoing self-identification of Diaspora Jews with the biblical land that permitted Jews, in the words of Kalmar and Penslar, “to be seen during the centuries as an ‘oriental people’”19 is traced in particular in the chapters by Hildegard Frübis, Laurel Plapp, Kathrin Wittler, and Anna-Dorothea Ludewig. The perception of the Jews as an oriental people and as “internal outsiders”20 in modern German national identity discourses originated in Christian thought, frequently of an anti-Judaic persuasion. German bible scholars and in particular Protestant theologians played a crucial role in subsuming Judaism under a hegemonic and colonizing Christian discourse. Rohde’s enquiry into these mech17 Kalmar/Penslar, “An Introduction,” 2005, p. xvii. 18 Ibid., p. xv. 19 Ibid. 20 Riechert, “Subjects and Agents of Empire,” 2009, 336.

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anisms is usefully read against James Pasto’s pioneering study of orientalism, Judaism, and the “Jewish Question” as Islam’s “Strange Secret Sharer,” a phrase taken from Said’s study.21 Moreover, the similarities and historical parallels between colonialist and anti-Jewish orientalism(s) “on the premise that European Jews were a kind of colonized population, subject to quasi-colonial domination by the Gentiles,”22 have been further explored by Susannah Heschel and Jonathan M. Hess. According to Heschel, the discussion in Germany of the “Jewish Question” can be read as indicative of a “proto-colonialist enterprise.”23 As such, her argument transcends Said’s more limited perspective which, as Heschel suggests, “tends to separate the projects and identities of colonizer and colonized.”24 Characterizing the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums as a “counter-narrative” to the hegemonic discourse of Protestant theology and as a “revolt of the colonized,” Heschel instead proposes the complex notion of a fluid and hybrid relation between colonizer and colonized, derived from Homi Bhabha’s well-known conception of hybridity.25 The central role of German Protestant theology for research on, and later the idealization of, a “textual” and “poetic” Hebraic orient as allegedly embodied in the so-called Old Testament, has been traced by Hess with particular reference to the example of the German Protestant theologian and orientalist, Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791).26 Hebraic studies traditionally dealt mostly with ancient Jewish history. Michaelis, however, was crucially engaged also in the contemporary debate on Jewish emancipation. Following Zantop and Heschel, Hess points out that some Protestant theologians, such as Michaelis, were responsible for the anti-Judaic orientalization of contemporary Jews. As Hess sums up, “Michaelis argued that Jews constitute an ‘unmixed race [ungemischte Rasse] of a more southern people,’ that ‘even in ten generations’ will never have the proper bodily strength to perform military service for a German state.”27 The conclusion drawn 21 Pasto even concludes that “German Biblical scholarship can thus be situated as the German ‘missing link,’ and Judaism as Islam’s strange secret sharer, in the Orientalism of the West.” Pasto, “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer,’” 1998, 467; cf. Said, Orientalism, 1978, p. 27. 22 Kalmar/Penslar, “An Introduction,” 2005, p. xvi. 23 Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999, 62–63. 24 Ibid., 64. 25 Ibid.; cf. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994. 26 For the significant role played by Protestant theology in German oriental studies and in the scholarly and romantic construction of a “historic” and “poetic” Hebraic Orient which became connected with “the topoi of cultural origin,” see Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005, pp. 157–196, 165. 27 Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary,” 2000, 58.



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from this observation by Michealis was that the Jews could never become German citizens and, as a “southern people,” should work in a German-controlled colony he called “sugar islands.”28 In view of its more bizarre blossoms, such as the colonial fantasies of Michaelis, the fact of the antisemitic or anti-Judaic orientalization of the Jews in Germany since the late eighteenth century seems hardly controversial. Its further promulgation can moreover be inferred from much less eccentric ascriptions of oriental otherness to the Jews, such as Bruno Bauer’s reference to their alleged oriental nature (“orientalische Wesen,” 1843) and, perhaps most (in)famously, Heinrich von Treitschke’s denigration of the Jews as German speaking orientals (“Deutsch redende Orientalen,” 1879).29 Obviously, the actuality of oriental studies and of oriental discourse in Germany, further explored in this volume in Wittler’s and Rohde’s chapters, was much more complex than these examples would suggest.

Jewish Self-Orientalization In particular, it needs to be noted that neither orientalism nor its practitioners were ever monolithic entities. Indeed, in her groundbreaking book, Der andere Orientalismus (2005), Andrea Polaschegg highlighted the weaknesses of Said’s homogenizing conception and advanced in its stead a pluralistic, relational, and dialectic conception of oriental and colonial discourses. Other new approaches similarly emphazise the entangled dimension of processes of identity building between representations of orient and occident. Orientalism and oriental studies have moreover both been recognized to be contingent on their respective historical contexts. From the romantic period onward, as Felix Wiedemann has observed, the (hi)story of the orient prepared the ground for the development of a culture-critical or even anti-Western counternarrative. Around the turn of the nineteenth century emerged orientalists who pursued a dedicated anti-classicist and anti-eurocentric agenda; scholars who, as Wiedemann has emphasized, were aptly described as “furious Orientalists” by Suzanne Machand.30 The nineteenth century had moreover witnessed a plurality of romanticpoetic orientalizations and self-orientalizations of the Jews,31 even – and perhaps 28 Hess, “Sugar Island Jews?,” 1998. 29 Bauer, Die Judenfrage, 1843; Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 1879, 576. See also Wiedemann, “Orientalismus,” 2012, 16. 30 See Wiedemann, “Orientalismus,” 2012, 14. 31 See Sigal-Klagsbald (ed.), Les Juifs dans l’orientalisme, 2012; Manor-Friedman/Zalmona (eds.), Kadima, 1998.

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precisely – in times of increasing antisemitism. However, these plural forms of Jewish self-orientalization did also open new creative spaces of self-reflection. This emerges, for instance, in novels, travel journals from Palestine, poetry, and Biedermeier art, as well as in the illustrations of reformed Jewish bibles and the magnificent synagogues built in Mudéjar Moorish style. By the turn of the century the tension between the romantic idealization and the colonial degradation of the orientalized other clearly shaped individual and national identities and became a vehicle of selffashioning for women, Jews, and European intellectuals alike.32

The spectrum documented in the chapters by Wittler, Ludewig, Frübis, and Plapp as well as in those by Hannah Lotte Lund and Ulrike Brunotte in this volume accordingly ranges from playfully ironic to affirmative and even idealizing Jewish self-orientalizations from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. In particular early Zionist appropriations of the idealized mystic “origin” of the Jews in the orient, and the alleged authenticity of the Ostjuden, were romantic re-visions of the oriental roots of the Jews. They were instrumentalized in order to authenticate the claim of the Jews to the Promised Land and to provide the ideological framework for the establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine. Martin Buber’s literary and philosophical efforts to bridge two millennia of exile with the construction of such an oriental pedigree and to tap into the sheer life force attributed by him to the Jews’ oriental heritage were perhaps the most influential in the German context.33 Yet similar attempts were also made in the artistic field, most conspicuously by the painter and illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien. Like Buber, with whom he collaborated in various projects, Lilien was a cultural Zionist and this is clearly reflected in his artistic portrayal of biblical figures. In particular the motif of the “beautiful Jewess,” as discussed in Frübis’s chapter in this volume, served the purpose of idealizing biblical Jews and biblical Palestine in preparation not only of defining the old-new “homeland” but also in order to suggest the lingering presence of the oriental past in the contemporary Jew. Zionist self-orientalizations can also be understood as counter narratives to colonial-orientalist and antisemitic discourses. In his chapter on “Zionism, Colonialism, and the German Empire,” Stähler discusses responses to the so-called Uganda plan of 1903–1905 and notions of Jewish colonization in Africa and elsewhere in relation to demarcations of Jewishness from, and identifications with, 32 Brunotte/von Stuckrad: “Unveiling the Orientalized Body,” 2012, p. 8. Kirschnick, Tausend und ein Zeichen, 2007. 33 See Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience,” 2010; Kalamar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005; Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” 1998.



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“blackness” in early twentieth-century German Zionist literature. More specifically, he investigates their impact on the Zionist imaginary vis-à-vis the colonial paradigm. Particular attention is given, in this context, to Max Jungmann’s “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland,” published in the Zionist satiric journal Schlemiel 1903–1907. With his fictitious account of the Zionist settlement of East Africa (which historically never happened) and with the creation of the black African Mbwapwa Jumbo and his conversion to Judaism, Jungmann articulates an intricate and critical response to colonial aspirations, Jewish or otherwise, and formulates a scathing and highly perceptive commentary on the convergence of Zionist, racial, and colonial discourses. Jay Geller’s new interpretation of Franz Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs,” conceived by the author as a “Tiergeschichte” and first published in 1917 in Buber’s journal Der Jude, offers a polemic against recent readings of the narrative as pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist. Geller bases his argument on his analysis of the triangulation (the figure of the Third) in this story between the “Arabs,” the “jackals,” and the narrator as the traveller from the North. In particular, he shows how this served Kafka to prevent the establishment of clear identities and subject-object relations in his story and especially of the antisemitic analogy of Jews and jackals. Much less indeterminate in their positioning of Jews within German society in the Weimar period are the two silent films discussed by Daniel Wildmann. In his comparative reading of Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920; dir. Paul Wegener) and Das alte Gesetz (1923; dir. E. A. Dupont), Wildmann offers an analysis in particular of the cinematic strategies employed to visualize gender in relation to ethnic and cultural affiliations. It emerges that while Wegener’s film employs images of excess and “unreasonableness” inscribed into Judaism and Jewishness by orientalist fantasies in order to argue for the separation of Jews and non-Jews, Dupont’s film suggests a new order which supports the integration of Jews and Judaism into modern German society. The usefulness of the theoretical framework of postcolonial approaches to Jewish studies is challenged by Wittler in her discussion of the orientalization and self-orientalization of Jews. Her chapter synthesizes recent theoretical approaches in oriental and German studies and offers an alternative perspective on the intersections between the (literary) history of Jews and of orientalism in Germany. More specifically, referring to Ronald Schechter, she introduces to the subject the notion of “good to think with,” originally applied by Claude LéviStrauss in his book on Totemism (1963) to the ways in which animal symbols may re-focus and elucidate human knowledge and social differentiation.34 Based on 34 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 1963, p.  89; see also Schechter, “The Jewish Question in Eighteenth-Century France,” 1998.

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her literary analysis of Fanny Lewald’s novel, Jenny (1843), Wittler argues that Jews participated in the creation of oriental tropes in German-Jewish history35 and created an aesthetic space of artistic self-fashioning in their literary production. She argues that the use of oriental styles, characters, and topoi by German Jews, commonly understood as an “internalization” of antisemitic and/or orientalist aggressions, may also be acknowledged as a self-determined contribution to the contested field of orientalism. Jewish orientalization and self-orientalization is also the topic of Lund’s contribution. Tracing the occurrence of these notions in the extensive (written and verbal) Berlin salon conversation around 1800, she extracts numerous allusions to erotic and exotic perceptions of the salonières. Her reading of the salon letters discloses the interplay between Jewish and gentile as well as male and female perspectives on the (orientalized) Jewish female body and draws a complex picture of contemporary tropes and stereotypes.

Gender, Sexuality, and Orientalism As outlined in the previous section, it is the objective of this volume to add to and to intensify the voices in the emerging conversation between studies on GermanJewish literary, visual, gender, and colonial history and the theory and history of orientalism.36 More specifically, it proposes to explore further the alternative perspectives on intersections between these fields of study. A particular example of this convergence and of its potential productivity is the enquiry into the role of gender and sexuality for notions of differences between, and the interchangeability of, “the Muslim” and “the Jew” in the pre-Holocaust Western imagination, which is a recent development in both Jewish studies and the study of orientalism. Significant contributions to this field have been made by Gil Anidjar in his study on The Jew, the Arab. A History of the Enemy (2003), in Kalmar and Penslar’s influential edited collection on Orientalism and the Jews (2005), and by Matti Bunzl in Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (2007). The 2012 exhibition Les juifs dans l’orientalisme at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris has mediated the topic also to a non-specialist audience. In debates on the place of Islam in secular, post-Christian Europe, considerable significance is attached to the public visibility of women. As Christina von 35 See also Malkin/Rokem (eds.), Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, 2010. 36 The first overview of the role of gender in modern German-Jewish history is forthcoming in Schüler-Springorum, Geschlecht und Differenz, 2014.



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Braun suggests in her chapter, “To See or Not to See,” the three monotheistic religions share a long-term entangled history which gave rise to contrasting constructions of the symbolic gender order in which the perceived nature of the (in) visibility of God continues to have an impact on modern societies. The contested veiling or unveiling of female bodies is, moreover, prominently inscribed into the history of colonial encounters and European orientalist discourse, in which the female body has for a long time been the site of a struggle over dominance, subjection, and subversion. As von Braun’s contribution shows, the topical role that the female body plays in recent constructions of a clash of Islam and (secularized) Western cultures by means of its visibility or its veiling has a long genealogy in the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Especially the Western obsession with un-veiling the “truth” and the symbolic role of the female body in the process of the production of knowledge are relevant in this context. Along with a critique of sexual permissiveness among Western women, the erotic or sexual gaze on Muslim women and the idea that they must be liberated from religious and cultural oppression have been perennial themes in the history of colonial and postcolonial encounters.37 Acts of veiling and unveiling are visible moments in this entangled tale of Europe and its others in which veiled and unveiled women have become symbolic figures and have, in effect, been turned into cultural tropes.38 A specific historical example of this development is the emergence of the socalled “Salomania” with which European and North American dancers and audiences were infected in the fin de siècle. Especially the parodistic self-unveiling and the self-staged nudity of female artists were major expressions of defiance in aesthetic politics and burlesque performance art.39 As Tatjana Petzer’s contribution shows, most of these actresses and artists, such as Sarah Bernhardt and Ida Rubinstein, were of Jewish origin or, in (mostly) antisemitic discourse, were presumed to be Jewish – the Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari and the Canadian dancer and choreographer Maud Allan are cases in point. As Petzer’s and Brunotte’s chapters elaborate, around the turn of the nineteenth century Salome was the most famous (un)veiled woman in Europe. As femme fatale orientale, the biblical 37 See Dennerlein/Frietsch/Steffen (eds.), Verschleierter Orient – Entschleierter Okzident?, 2012, p. 12. 38 This can be observed in orientalist paintings from the nineteenth century to the present day, see Frübis, “Orientalismus re-visited,” 2012. 39 Salomania refers to the various performances of “Salome” and her dance of veils. In the perception of Jewish avant-garde artists, such as Ida Rubenstein or Sarah Bernhardt, and imagined Jewish women, such as Maud Allan or Mata Hari, antisemitic imagery merged with a new form of British orientalism in which unveiling figured as a performance of female sexual agency and threatening desire, see Brunotte, “Unveiling Salome 1900,” 2012, p. 98 and the chapters by Brunotte and Petzer in this volume.

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 Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler

Jewish princess represented an imaginary or “inner” Jewish orient.40 Both she and her (in)famous performance of self-unveiling were linked to the history of women’s emancipation and were seen as shaping the idea of the New Woman.41 Marking out the significance of the veil as a reversible image of orientalism and as paradigmatic of the paradoxical fashion of modernism, Petzer moreover traces its function as an aesthetic form of intervention to the crucial role with which it has been imbued in the current headscarf debate. In her chapter on “Embodied Protest: Nakedness and the Partition of Gazes,” Sarah Dornhof continues this line of enquiry and argues for an entangled European-Arab history of the visual space and of the “pathos formulas” (Warburg) of female nudity and (self-)exposure. She analyzes self-staged nude photography by young women from Arab countries within a postcolonial visual space, focusing on images of naked Arab women which have circulated widely in the social media and have unleashed a fierce debate about the portrayal of women within the context of the recent Arab revolts. Their resistance, as Dornhof argues, “is not articulated in the slogans or in the symbolic use of the body, but resides in the individualized, the very act of self-exposure.”42 In a kind of mimicry of both colonial and Western feminist discourse, these young Arab women initiate, according to Dornhof, new visual constellations and counter images. With their embodied protest, they have opened a new chapter in an entangled history of the self-unveiling of women which can be read as a feminist challenge to gender identities across the West-East divide. Besides the issue of the (un)veiled female body as marker of difference, masculinity and homosexuality increasingly feature in debates on multiculturalism, citizenship, and Europeanness. As suggested in this volume by Yaron Peleg, Plapp, Rohde, and Brunotte, modern national identity politics as well as colonial, orientalist, and Zionist discourses are gendered and sexualized. Said’s distinction between manifest orientalism (i.e. academic research and political discourse) and latent orientalism (i.e. multilayered, often unconscious, fantasies of the orient in art and literature), opens up, according to Bhabha, heterogeneity and a liminal “third space.”43 Responding to these ideas from a feminist perspective, Meyda Yeğenoğlu has argued that “we need to subject Orientalist 40 See Rohde, “The Orient Within,” 2009. The “orient within” does not refer to the oriental other, but rather to an imaginary that threatens identity politics, to “an ambivalent and fluid third element that confounded the binary order of both ethnic German nationalism and patriarchy, as a threatening hybrid entity that endangered the vitality of the nation at large,” p. 11. 41 See Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 1990, pp. 150–152; Brunotte, “Unveiling Salome 1900,” 2012, pp. 102–103; Garber, Vested Interests, 1991, pp. 336–342; Glenn, Female Spectacle, 2000. 42 Dornhof in the present volume p. 270. 43 See Said, Orientalism, 1978, pp. 206–207; Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994.



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discourse to a more sexualized reading […] to understand how representation of otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation.”44 However, for Said and many of his followers the orient was nevertheless always depicted as woman. For a long time, this one-sidedness concealed the fact that the veil, as Marjorie Garber has emphasized,45 simultaneously always marks also a space of transgression. Recent research suggests that homoerotic fantasies and adventures have been linked with the Arab Mediterranean region since antiquity and – in the days of Rudyard Kipling or Lawrence of Arabia, during the heyday of colonialism – also with the Middle East and even with India. More recently, Joseph Massad, student of and successor to Edward Said, added orientalism in his seminal study on Desiring Arabs (2007) to the modern discourse on sexuality.46 His pioneering work closes the gap between the history of homosexuality and colonial desire in the Arab-European contact zone. As Plapp demonstrates in her discussion of a prominent example of Zionist cultural discourse, the double tradition of the orientalized Muslim and the orientalized Jewish other have also played a pivotal role for the impact of colonialism on the European history of (homo)sexuality. In her chapter, “Jewish Drag: The Ostjude as Anti-Zionist Hero in Arnold Zweig’s De Vriendt kehrt heim,” Plapp reads the 1932 novel as a challenge to orientalist tendencies within the contemporary Zionist movement. Inspired by the true story of Jacob Israël de Haan, Zweig uses the character of de Vriendt – a gay, Orthodox Jewish man engaged in a love affair with an Arab boy in Jerusalem in the early 1920s – to subvert the Zionist ideal of the muscle Jew (“Muskeljude”) by re-dressing the Orthodox Jewish protagonist in homosexual and oriental garb. De Vriendt’s “ethnic drag” serves to destabilize the binary categories of homosexual/heterosexual, orient/occident, Jew/Arab, and colonizer/colonized in British-occupied Palestine, and thereby offers the possibility of a mediation of them. The murder of de Vriendt by Zionists reveals Zweig’s criticism of the nationalist movement and crystallizes de Vriendt’s embodiment of a Jewish-Arab coalition that promotes a tolerant and ethical future for Israel/Palestine. The desire of the early Zionists to reinvent themselves in Palestine as “new Jews” and their ideological rationale are well known and widely researched.47 Equally well established are the oriental and colonial aspects of that process of

44 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, 1998, p. 26. 45 See Garber, Vested Interests, 1991. 46 See Massad, Desiring Arabs, 2007 and Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism, 2014. 47 See e.g. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997; Almog, The Sabra, 2000; Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, 2005; Brenner/Reuveni (eds.), Emacipation through Muscles, 2006.

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 Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler

reinvention.48 These involved the adoption of oriental insignia, of an imagined Biblicism, and of more immediate “native” Palestinian traits.49 Yaron Peleg’s chapter takes the Zionists’ construction of a new Jewish “muscular,” heterosexual masculinity as a national feature as its starting point. Drawing on Daniel Boyarin’s groundbreaking deconstruction of “New Hebraism” in his book Unheroic Conduct (1997), Peleg discusses recent constructions of Israeli masculinity which superseded the heroic figure of the “true Jew” that was established in contrast to the antisemitic stereotype of the degenerate, feminine, and orientalized Ostjude, or Eastern European Jew. As Peleg argues, the transformations of these earlier constructions and especially their legacy in contemporary Israeli culture have not yet received sufficient attention. In order to address this lack, Peleg’s chapter examines the development of post-1948 Israeli masculinities, especially the ironic recreation of an Israeli Mizrahi or Eastern masculinity in the present day that both continues and defies earlier cultural trends. By focusing on the powerful 2012 Israeli film God’s Neighbors (dir. Meny Ya’ish) Peleg explores the different cultural-historical layers which comprise the contemporary Israeli masculinity the film displays. He shows that the strong men in the film are amalgamations as well as dialectical constructs of the historical trends mentioned above. Nineteenth-century European nationalism, as argued by George L. Mosse, was connected to constructions of a virile hetero-normative masculinity, whereas the male Jew was stigmatized as “effeminate,” “hysteric,” “oriental,” and “perverse.”50 Since the late 1990s, Jewish cultural studies connected to queer studies as conducted by Daniel Boyarin, Sander Gilman, Jay Geller, Majorie Garber, and Ann Pellegrini, have revealed that Jews have been particularly vulnerable to stereotypical representations as decadent, “oriental,” hyper-sexualized, and culture-corroding “deviant” others. The Diaspora male Jew as “figure of the third (person)” merged with the “homosexual.”51 Brunotte’s chapter surveys how this new focus on gender and sexuality changed the field of Jewish cultural studies in the late 1990s and investigates the dominant role played therein by historical and postcolonial readings of Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexuality. Following Matti Bunzl, Brunotte examines to which extent these epistemological objectives offered an opportunity to situate theorizations of Jewishness “in ongoing discussions about race, ethnicity, nationness, diaspora, memory, religion, gender 48 See especially Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, 2005. 49 See the introduction in ibid. 50 See e.g. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997; Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body, 1993; Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender, 1993; Boyarin/Boyarin (eds.), Jews and other Differences, 1997; Brunotte, Zwischen Eros und Krieg, 2004. 51 See Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1985; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997.



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and sexuality.”52 Reflecting on the role of orientalizations in European constructions of the “Orient Within,”53 Brunotte traces the notion of the “beautiful Jewess” in its manifestation of the orientalized Jewish Princess Salome at the turn of the nineteenth century as a central trope for the discourse of the Jewess as a cultural “figure of the third.”54 In addition to Brunotte’s, another five chapters of this volume reflect in one way or another on the ambivalent and multilayered figure of the “beautiful Jewess” and her appropriations in processes of Jewish self-orientalization. It is nevertheless important to remember that Jewish women, as Barbara Hahn has argued on the basis of Bernard Picart’s Céremonies et coutumes religieuses (1727–1743), were rarely as clearly marked as Jewish as men were.55 Nevertheless, as Brunotte shows, along with the emancipation of the Jews and certainly by the early nineteenth century, the Jewish woman as the “beautiful Jewess” emerged as a literary, artistic, and theatrical figure in Europe.56 One of the antecedents or archetypes of the proliferating figure, as Lund’s chapter suggests, was the Jewish salonière of the late eighteenth century. The famous hostesses were often described, adored, and even pathologized as “(beautiful) Jewesses” and thereby marked with a fascinating but identifiable otherness. As Florian Krobb has demonstrated, the Jewish woman in literature in the German language before the fin de siècle embodied not so much a negative difference, but rather functioned instead as an ambivalent figure of mediation.57 As Ludewig and Brunotte argue in their contributions, the stereotypical, recurrent master narrative of the “beautiful Jewess” as the daughter of an often “tyrannic” father (a mother is rarely present) situates her between the Jewish and Christian worlds. As an object of Christian male desire, as a lover, or even as the wife of a Christian man, she acts as a bridge between the Jewish and the non-Jewish spheres and often loses her own female-Jewish identity. Jews, particularly in the perception of the nineteenth century, were defined as male; Jewish women were something in-between, an intermediate group without clear social and religious or even national affiliations. 52 Bunzl, “Jews, Queers, and Other Symptoms,” 323. 53 Rohde examines the pre-Holocaust connection between orientalism and (German) antisemitism in “Der Innere Orient,” 2005. 54 “Figures of the Third” are relevant in modern epistemologies and, as the concepts of hybridity and “third space,” mark liminal categories and states. See Eßlinger/Schlechtriemen/Schweitzer/Zons (eds.), Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma, 2010. 55 See Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena, 2005, p. 33. 56 See also Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011. 57 See Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993; see also Ludewig, “Schönste Heidin, süßeste Jüdin!,” 2008; Frübis, “Repräsentationen ‘der’ Jüdin,” 2005.

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Despite much current scholarly interest, the question of why it is that Jews at times came to orientalize themselves remains intriguing. Was the phenomenon only the consequence of an internalization of specific layers of hegemonic oriental discourse which has always been of a multilayered and ambivalent nature? To address this question, it is helpful, as suggested by Polaschegg, to consider orientalism in terms of an option that may or may not be activated, depending on whether it fulfils a distinct function through its application.58 Sometimes, as in the examples discussed by Frübis, Jewish self-orientalization in the guise of biblical figures can function as the idealization of a heroic past or as the invocation of a Zionist future. At other times, as Wittler demonstrates in her case study of Fanny Lewald’s novel, Jenny, self-orientalization has been used as a productive operational tool to negotiate the position of Jews in nineteenth-century discourses. In the novel, the eponymous protagonist transforms herself into the figure of on oriental Jewess. Lewald, as Wittler emphasizes, makes use “of oriental topoi and poetic traditions for her socio-political and aesthetic reflections on the position of a German Jewess […] in what she perceives as a tense stage of transition in the process of emancipation.”59

Instead of a Conclusion: Further Perspectives In contrast to earlier research on orientalism, more recent approaches, including the present volume, have generated a more differentiated, pluralistic, and ambivalent appreciation of European orientalisms. Focusing on the central role of sexual and gender tropes in orientalist, antisemitic, and nationalist discourse, ReNGOO will continue to open up third, or liminal, spaces within what Steven E. Aschheim has called Europe’s “Orientalist web,” a web “in which modern Jewish history in almost all its permutations has been – and continues to be – entangled and which has produced any number of ironic and debilitating, but also creative, moments.”60 In its further research ReNGOO aims to connect historical and more recent case studies of orientalization and self-orientalization with the ongoing epistemological debate on the advantages and disadvantages to Jewish studies of approaches of studies in orientalism and of postcolonial studies.

58 See Polaschegg, “Vom chinesischen Teehaus zu hebräischen Melodien,” 2007. 59 See Wittler’s contribution in this volume, p. 80. 60 Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience,” 2010, p. 6.

Achim Rohde

Asians in Europe Reading German-Jewish History through a Postcolonial Lens

German Orientalism German history has long been neglected by historians of Western colonialism and practitioners of postcolonial studies. This lack of attention to the German context is evident already in what could be termed the founding thesis of postcolonial studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978): As Germany played only a marginal role among the colonial powers, the German view of the orient both in the academy and the wider social context, according to Said, was hardly affected by this discourse.1 Some of Said’s critics point to the prestigious German orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an example for a value-neutral, “pure scholarship” and argue that by neglecting the German orientalist tradition, Said basically devalued his whole argument.2 Other scholars have criticized Said’s conceptual shortcomings, insisting that Western discourses on “the orient” were not simply a tool of European colonialism, but rather a multilayered and ambivalent ensemble of negative and positive references. According to this line of research, European orientalists interacted with the societies they studied in ways that proved mutually formative for both sides and did not constitute a colonialist one-way street.3 Said, too, implicitly acknowledged a certain heterogeneity of orientalist discourse by distinguishing between what he called manifest orientalism, i.e. academic research, and latent orientalism, i.e. fantasies of the orient in arts and literature that often remained unconscious and could carry a variety of meanings 1 Said, Orientalism, 1978, p. 19. 2 Irwin, The Lust for Knowing, 2006; see also, Johannsen, Politics and Scholarship, 1990; Hanisch, Die Nachfolger der Exegeten, 2003; Mangold, Eine weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft, 2004; Wokoeck, German Orientalism, 2009. Even during the Nazi era, oriental studies departments were never systematically mobilized for ideological purposes, and few of its representatives actively supported the regime. Wokoeck has aptly criticized the sweeping indictment of German oriental studies by Ellinger, Deutsche Orientalistik zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, 2006. See also, Rohde, “Elfenbeinturm Revisited,” 2000. 3 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 1997, p.  8; Gerstle, Recovering the Orient, 1994; Franco, Beyond Orientalism, 1997; Freitag, “Der Orientalist und der Mufti,” 2003. For a conceptual approach to Islamic studies based on the dialogical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, see Schöller, Methode und Wahrheit in der Islamwissenschaft, 2000.

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and connotations.4 In this sense, the “orient” was both an object of analysis and control and simultaneously also an uncontrollable and often threatening object of desire, a region open to intellectual penetration by modern science, but also a mysterious and confusing entity that remained incomprehensible for outside observers. While Said glossed over the implications of such differences for his overall argument, Homi K. Bhabha turned this ambivalent structure of orientalism into a point of departure for his analysis of the split character of colonialist discourse between a rational and a libidinal dimension.5 The ambivalence is most visible in the gendered and sexualized imagery that Western discourses have often associated with the “orient.” Along this line of thought, Meyda Yeğenoğlu argues for a feminist critique of orientalism that emphasizes its ambivalent structure by applying a gender perspective: To engage in an analysis of the unconscious site of orientalism should not be seen as an alternative to its historical analysis. Indeed, if the power of orientalism is not, as vulgar Marxism would have it, a mere reflection of an economic power, but is rather a power that is rooted in the production and dissemination of knowledge, concepts, and commonsense, then we must be able to root this knowledge itself in a certain libidinal economy that drives it. Therefore we need to subject orientalist discourse to a more sexualized reading. By doing so, we can understand how the representation of otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation. The western acts of understanding the orient and its women are not two distinct enterprises, but rather are interwoven aspects of the same gesture.6

Unlike Said, both Bhabha and Yeğenoğlu portray colonial power not as a homogenous discourse, but rather as a contradictory economy that struggles to dominate and control, but also desires its subjugated and/or impenetrable other, and that simultaneously sparks the latter’s resistance. My enquiry into the history of German colonialism and orientalism will show similar dynamics in the context of German-Jewish relations. Since the 1990s, numerous studies have shown that orientalist and colonial practices and fantasies formed an important part of German identity politics in the long nineteenth century, that they constituted a contrasting foil and a stabilizing tool for the German national project of modernity.7 The evolution of modern anti4 Said, Orientalism, 1978, pp. 206–207. 5 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994. 6 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, 1998, p. 26. 7 For early works, see Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1997; Friedrichsmeyer/Lennox/Zantop (eds.), The Imperialist Imagination, 1998. For overviews of more recent work in this context, see Perraudin/Zimmerer (eds.), German Colonialism and National Identity, 2011; Langbehn/Salama (eds.), German Colonialism, 2011.



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semitism in the German speaking countries, too, has been linked to the ideology of ethnic (völkisch) German nationalism.8 The lack of attention to the German context in Said’s oeuvre is remarkable, because he repeatedly pointed to a structural similarity between orientalism as perceived by him and Western antisemitism, but never elaborated on this claim.9 Towards the end of his life, in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz he provocatively declared himself a “Jewish-Palestinian,” comparing his existence as a Diasporic Palestinian intellectual fighting against orientalism in general, and the colonization of Palestine in particular, to the lives of Jewish intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, Georg Auerbach, and Theordor W. Adorno and their fight against antisemitism.10 The limitations of such a comparison become quickly evident by looking at the German context: The Holocaust obviously cannot be conceptualized in the framework of Said’s orientalism, and the Palestinian Naqba was a catastrophe of a different order of magnitude than the genocide of European Jewry.11 Moreover, the evolution of German oriental studies differs in important aspects from its British, French, and American counterparts, which are in the focus of Said’s critique. Still, a growing number of works published mainly within American Jewish and German studies points to a connection between Saidian orientalism or colonialism, and Western antisemitism by using the analytical categories developed by Said and later proponents of postcolonial theory in their discussions of German-Jewish history from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. My discussion in this chapter unfolds in dialogue with these works, by focusing on a specific trope in this context: Jews have often been linked to Muslims in Christian/European thought, and for centuries they have been ascribed an oriental, Asian character. I do not want to argue here for a linear connection between anti-Muslim or anti-Jewish discourses that evolved in different centuries and vastly divergent contexts. Nor do I subscribe to far-reaching assertions advanced by some scholars, according to which Jews and Muslims constitute mutually interchangeable ‘“others” in Western thought.12 But while it is important 8 See, for instance, Alter, Die Konstruktion der Nation gegen die Juden, 1999; Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus, 2001; Puschner, Antisemitismus im Kontext der politischen Romantik, 2008; Smith, The Continuities of German History, 2008; Rash, German Images of the Self and the Other, 2012; Horan/Rash/Wildmann (eds.), English and German Nationalist and anti-Semitic Discourse, 2013. 9 Said, Orientalism, 1978, pp. 27–28; Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 1985. 10 Ha’aretz, August 18, 2000. 11 For an attempt to transcend the exclusivity that often goes along with the memory of the Holocaust and link it to other traumatic experiences, e.g. in the context of European colonialism, see Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 2009. 12 Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab, 2003; Anidjar, Semites, 2008; Majid, We are All Moors, 2009. For an early and widely criticized example of this line of thought, see Cutler/Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim, 1986.

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to highlight the changing contexts in which we need to locate such linkages, it is still instructive to observe the longue durée of this trope, in order to understand its varying functions and meanings. The following section discusses the genealogy of such imagery and the institutional contexts in which narratives on Jews and Judaism evolved in Europe, in particular in the German speaking countries.

Studying Jews and Muslims: Historical Roots and Institutional Frameworks Jews and Muslims had been linked in Christian thought already in the Middle Ages. In Europe this idea became increasingly influential from the twelfth century onwards, mostly in the context of polemical literature; but the idea seems to have been articulated among Christian communities residing in the Middle East as early as the ninth century.13 Jeremy Cohen has situated the diminishing status of Jews in Christian theology and the surge in anti-Jewish polemics and policies in the course of the thirteenth century in the context of the Crusades. According to Cohen, it was in view of the military and religious challenge presented by Islam and Muslim rulers in this period that it became common to compare Jews and Muslims as two closely related groups of infidels who challenged Christian theology.14 From the fifteenth century onwards, as shown by Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Jews were depicted in Christian art exclusively in an orientalized fashion, whereas Christians, in particular Jesus, were always depicted in clothing marked as occidental.15 But this early distinction between orient and occident did not imply a complete separation between both spheres. It is important to stress in this context that in medieval Christian thought the orient was primarily perceived as the location of the Holy Land, where the biblical events unfolded, not as some distant place unrelated to Europe. While Jews suffered under Christian rule, they were not simply considered to be external others, but also as witnesses to God’s revelation who had deviated from the right path. The same was true regarding Islam and Muslims. While Byzantine rule still persisted in Anatolia and Muslims controlled parts of the Iberian Peninsula, as Kalmar and Penslar have pointed out,

13 Griffith, “Jews and Muslims in Christian Syriac and Arabic Texts of the Ninth Century,” 1988. 14 Cohen, “The Muslim Connection,” 1996; Lamm, “Muslims and Jews in Exempla Collections,” 2009; Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative, 2013. 15 Kalmar, “Jesus did not wear a Turban,” 2005.



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Islam was not imagined, either geographically or metaphorically, as completely outside the western world. The “imposter” Muhammad was not thought of as an outsider with no connection to Christianity but rather as a kind of schismatic who challenged, and therefore articulated with, the Church tradition.16

Following the Council of Vienne (1311), several universities across Europe established chairs for oriental languages, and this included Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic.17 After the reformation, in what was later to become Germany, many universities established chairs for biblical studies, which were often named oriental studies. The discipline included the study of biblical texts in their original Hebrew or Aramaic versions, and also the study of related languages like Arabic, based on the belief that the correct meaning of biblical texts could only be deciphered with recourse to other similar languages, like Arabic. The latter was thus initially a mere subsidiary to the study of the bible and the “lingua sacra,” i.e. Hebrew, which was considered to have survived the Babylonian confusion of tongues and to still closely resemble the divine language. This idea remained relatively unchallenged until the eighteenth century.18 By then scholars had gradually come to think of Arabic as the most authentic and original of all Semitic languages, which had preserved more traits of the first divine language than even Hebrew, thus reversing the traditional hierarchy between the two languages. This process marks a growing identification of Judaism with the orient, i.e. a hermeneutic approach to the Old Testament, which no longer addresses the text in purely eschatological terms, removed from its historical and cultural context. Rather, following the “humanisation,” “culturalisation,” and at times the polemical “degradation” of the Hebrew language and the Old Testament since the mid-17th century, the oriental context becomes more relevant for interpreting the scriptures, and thus an increasingly crucial field of study.19

16 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2004, p. xxv. The description in Dante’s Inferno of the pains inflicted upon Muhammad and Ali in hell illustrates the editors’ claim. See also, Kalmar, Early Orientalism, 2012, pp.  30–40; Roggema/Poorthuis/Valkenberg (eds.), The Three Rings, 2005; Goodwin, “Noting in Our Histories,” 2009; Berthelot, The Quest for a Common Humanity, 2011. 17 Müller, Das Konzil von Vienne 1311–1312, 1934. See also, Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, 1955; Burmann, “Wie ein italienischer Dominikanermönch seinen arabischen Koran las,” 2011. 18 Loop, “Kontroverse Bemühungen um den Orient,” 2005; Bourel, “Die deutsche Orientalistik im 18. Jahrhundert,” 1988; Bobzin, “Vom Sinn des Arabischstudiums im Sprachenkanon der Philologia Sacra,” 1997. 19 Loop, “Kontroverse Bemühungen um den Orient,” 2005, p. 60. See also, Rohde, “400 Jahre Orientalistik/Hebraistik in Hamburg,” 2013, pp. 200–202; Kalmar, “Arabizing the Bible,” 2012.

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This is where the groundwork was laid for the comparative philology that became the trademark of oriental studies in Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The allegation often reiterated by latter-day orientalists, that the discipline was able to develop into a modern science only after it emancipated from the confines of theology, is only partly correct. True, the institutionalization of oriental studies at German universities could only succeed once the field was no longer perceived to be a mere sub-discipline of Christian theology. But at the same time, the source-critical methodology which became the trademark of nineteenth-century orientalist philologists was first developed by theologians in the context of biblical studies, though in opposition to Church orthodoxy.20 As will be discussed below, Jewish scholars, too, with their solid command of the relevant languages and training in rabbinical theology were indispensable for the establishment of oriental studies in its modern form. For missionary purposes, however modern Christian orientalists/Hebraists had often been in contact with their Jewish peers and in their work dealt not only with the scriptures themselves, but also with post-biblical Jewish sources and rabbinical Judaism. The greatest Hebraist of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was the Hamburg based Protestant theologian, Johann Christoph Wolf (1683–1739), who also served as professor of oriental studies at the city’s academic college. During his lifetime he collected some 25,000 volumes of Hebraica from all over Europe, which formed the basis of his encyclopedic four-volume Bibliotheca Hebraea, an important source also for later Jewish historians.21 But at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, this earlier humanist theological tradition declined and Christian Hebraists began to limit the scope of their activities to the study of the Old Testament and ancient Jewish history up to the destruction of the Second Temple.22 This signaled a tendency to sever the links between Judaism and Christianity, or between European modernity and its perceived oriental heritage, which went along with enlightenment thought. An early key figure in this context is Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791), a Protestant theologian and an influential orientalist, who founded the chair in oriental studies at Göttingen University and helped to distance oriental/Hebraic studies from Protestant theology.23 One of Michaelis’s major works, a six-volume study 20 In this vein, see Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005, pp. 158ff. 21 For details on the tradition of Hebraic studies in Hamburg, which dates back to the early seventeenth century, see Rohde, “400 Jahre Orientalistik/Hebraistik in Hamburg,” 2013. See also, Miletto, “Leopold Zunz and the Hebraists,” 2004. 22 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 2009, pp. 105–113; Schulin, “Das ‘Ge­ schichtlichste Volk,’” 1997. 23 Löwenbrück, Judenfeindschaft im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, 1995. See also, Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment, 1996.



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on Jewish law (Mosaisches Recht, 1770–1775), was meant to expose the “foreign” and “Asian” character of Jewish law in the historical context of its emergence. By doing so, Michaelis wanted to liberate European law codes of what he saw as their oriental roots.24 An ardent opponent of Jewish emancipation, he considered contemporary Jews as physically and mentally degenerate and argued that as descendants of a “southern race” they could never be integrated into German society. Instead, he fancied the idea of deporting the Jews to – not yet existing – German colonies overseas, where they should be put to work in agriculture and production.25 In a more sublime fashion, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770– 1831), like numerous other scholars and philosophers of this period, “thought of Judaism and Islam as two of a kind,” and in contrasting both against Christianity, which he considered the only truly universalist and sublime religion, he “reformulated the old supersessionist faith and the traditional conflation of Jew and Muslim, in the language of his new grand narrative of history as the progressive self-revelation of the Spirit or Geist.”26 Critics of universalist enlightenment rationalism and proto-nationalists, like Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), shared the idea of Jews being an oriental people, but regarded the Hebrew Bible as authentic expression of a particular Volksgeist and Hebrew therefore well worthy of being included in the Bildungskanon along with Greek and Latin.27 Ideas such as those formulated by Michaelis continued to circulate also in the late nineteenth century, when Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1891) argued in the context of the Antisemitismusstreit of 1879 that the Jews’ oriental origins and other reasons prevented them from becoming part of the German nation. They would always remain strangers to some degree and would, through their disturbingly ambivalent presence, endanger the very existence of the nation.28 Among Michaelis’s successors as Dean of oriental studies at Göttingen University was Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891), who was also a nationalist politician and further

24 Schaffstein, “Johann David Michaelis als Kriminalpolitiker,” 1988. 25 Hess, “‘Sugar Island Jews’?,” 1998; Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary,” 2000. 26 Kalmar, Early Orientalism, 2012, p. 77. 27 Kalmar, Early Orientalism, 2012; Ilany, “In Search of the Hebrew People,” 2012; see also his “From Divine Commandment to Political Act,” 2012. 28 Treitschke, in his study of German literature from the time of the failed revolutions of 1848, claims that those days had produced a “distinctive half-Jewish literature,” through which Jewish writers had “cloaked their Oriental worldview and their inherited hatred of Christians in occidental forms.” See von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1896, p. 703. See also, Boehlich, Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 1965; Wyrwa, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” 2003.

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developed Michaelis’s ideas by arguing for the forced migration of German Jews to Madagascar.29 In view of the wide currency enjoyed by the association of Jews and Judaism with “the orient” over the centuries, it seems no coincidence that the study of Judaism at German universities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into the twentieth century remained firmly within the realm of oriental studies.30 The first chair for Jewish studies as an independent discipline was installed at the Free University of Berlin not before 1963. I will return to the intersections between Jewish and oriental studies later on in this chapter.

The Gender Dimension As argued by Bhabha and Yeğenoğlu regarding colonial relationships in general, applying a gender lens on the study of German Jewish history helps to render visible its contradictory and ambivalent character. In the following section I will briefly discuss the gender dimension of modern discourses on Jews and Judaism as well as its genealogy. Thus, the Christian doctrine of supersessionism, according to which Christianity had replaced Judaism as true religion and the only way Jews could be redeemed was by converting, was paralleled by a similar argument regarding women, who could transcend what was seen as their inferior corporeality by becoming true believers.31 Christianity is thereby marked as normatively masculine, and both “Jew” and “woman” are assigned inferior positions that need to be overcome in order to attain salvation. In fact, Judaism was frequently associated in medieval Christian thought with female prostitutes and women committing fornication.32 29 Sieg, Deutschlands Prophet, 2007. The so-called Madagascar plan was harbored for some time even by the Nazi regime. See, Brechtken, “Madagaskar für die Juden,” 1997; Jansen, Der Madagaskar-Plan, 1997. 30 Olender, Die Sprachen des Paradieses, 1995; Pasto, “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer,’” 1998. 31 Lampert-Weissig, “‘Frau’ und ‘Jude’ als hermeneutische Strategie,” 2009; see also her Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare, 2004; Akbari, Idols in the East, 2009; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997. 32 In his documentation of anti-Muslim art in church architecture in the Romanesque period, i.e. the times of the Crusades from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Claudio Lange has pointed to the strikingly sexualized imagery employed in church architecture to denounce the Muslim enemy, who was also often associated with Jews. See Lange, Der nackte Feind, 2004. In Renaissance Italy, Jews were often forced to wear clothes and other outward signs that linked them to prostitutes, see Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs,” 1986.



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The trope of the feminized Jew is visible also in later centuries. Thus, haemorrhoids were seen as a typically Jewish disease in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an image associated with their alleged hyperactive and perverse sexuality, with unhealthy food, lack of physical activity, and frequent loss of blood.33 Similar to women, Jews were said to be prone to melancholy, hysteria, and hypochondria. Michaelis opposed Jewish emancipation by pointing to the Jews’ alleged oriental character and by claiming that even after “ten generations” of equal rights they would not be fit enough to serve in a German army, i.e. to become real men and full members of the German nation.34 According to Sander Gilman, the religious rite of circumcision performed on Jewish boys was the most widely held sign for the castration and feminization of Jewish men, “the feminizing of the Jew in the act of making him a Jew.”35 Proponents of Jewish emancipation did not reject the notion of a pathological physical and mental state of Diaspora Jewry, but linked these deficiencies to the century-old oppression of the Jews and expected them to improve themselves once being granted the opportunity to do so. Such ideas remained relevant well into the twentieth century. The Viennese Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903) wrote a very influential thesis entitled Sex and Character that was published as a book shortly before his suicide and subsequently became one of the most widely debated studies on human sexuality for decades in both Europe and the United States. According to Weininger, a male and a female essence were embodied in each individual person to different degrees. Thus, he claimed to have observed similarities between women and Jewish men, both of whom he contrasted with Aryan men, calling his lifetime the “most Jewish and most effeminate” era in human history.36 Yet at the same time, several scholars point to linkages between Judaism and homosexuality in Western discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, associated, for instance, with the Jews’ alleged soft and effeminate voice and hyperactive sexuality.37 Indeed, Western perceptions of the orient contained a sexualized imagery that is more ambivalent than Said’s somehow static figure of the orient as the West’s feminized subservient other. The artistic representations of Salomé, e.g. by Oscar Wilde or Gustave Flaubert, to which Said alludes in 33 Already in ancient Greece people had linked male haemorrhoids to women’s menstruation. According to medieval typologies, male Jews menstruated, too. See Kassouf, “The Shared Pain of the Golden Vein,” 1998. 34 Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary,” 2000, 58. 35 Gilman, Sexuality, 1989, p. 265. 36 Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903. See also, Sengoopta, Otto Weininger, 2000. 37 Garber, Vested Interests, 1992, p. 226. See also, Blumenfeld, History/Hysteria, 1996; Boyarin/ Itzkovitz/Pellegrini (eds.), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 2003.

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Orientalism, are more complex than he suggested and contain a homosexual and gender ambivalent dimension. True, the veiled Muslim woman became a powerful symbol in Western perceptions of the orient’s backwardness and served to legitimize an allegedly civilizing intervention by European powers in the Middle East that was said to be aimed at liberating and modernizing the orient. But the veil was always more than just a symbol of backwardness and repression, it also signaled the invisibility and mystery of the orient to the Western observer, which seemed attractive and threatening at the same time.38 It was the negation of this ambivalence of modernity regarding both national and gender identities, which came to be expressed in orientalism and antisemitism alike. The ambivalent and multifaceted character of the discursive association of Jews with the orient becomes even more obvious when taking into account that Jews themselves actively constructed as well as contested such linkages and appropriated them for their own ends. This is the topic of the following section.

Jews and Orientalism Returning to the evolution of Jewish studies as part of oriental studies discussed above, it is important to recognize the contributions of Jewish scholars to the whole disciplinary field in the German speaking countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, early orientalist scholars such as Michaelis, or later on, Renan, Lagarde, and others, however lasting their impact surely was in shaping majority discourse regarding Jews and Judaism in Germany, were marginal figures in a field that was shaped by students and successors of the French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), and particularly the Leipzig school of orientalist philology founded by Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888). Flei­ scher had numerous Jewish students and colleagues, among them Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), a liberal Jewish theologian from Budapest who remains a towering figure in the field of Islamic studies to the present day.39 The department of Arabic studies at the University of Bonn was another center of the emerging field, where Jewish scholars played a prominent role.40 Jewish orientalists, “particularly in Germany, Hungary, and France, created a significant body of research on 38 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 1990; Schmidtke, “Die westliche Konstruktion Marokkos als Landschaft freier Homoerotik,” 2000; Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, 2003. 39 Preissler, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer,” 2006; Conrad, “Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan,” 1999. 40 This was mainly due to Georg Wilhelm Freytag (1788–1861), who became chair of Arabic studies at the University of Bonn in 1819; among his students were a number of Jews, e.g. Salomon



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the origins of Islam, the biography of Muhammad, and Jewish influences on the Qur’an as well as on the Hadith (the traditions about the Prophet Muhammad).”41 They were all influenced by the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a current of Jewish studies headed by a group of liberal Jewish theologians and historians who in 1819 founded the “Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden.” For decades, the Wissenschaft des Judentums evolved outside academia in competition with Christian dominated Hebrew and oriental studies. Their agenda was not merely scholarly, but political: Proponents of the Wissenschaft des Judentums were critical both of the work of Christian Hebraists and of the Jewish Orthodoxy. They aimed at modernizing Jewish culture and identity, thereby reproducing the widespread perception of the degeneracy of contemporary Diaspora Jewry, albeit from a different perspective. In the broader German context they strove to represent Jews as a thriving cultural tradition throughout the centuries of the Diaspora that contributed to the emerging bourgeois society of nineteenth-century Germany. Such works posed a challenge to much established wisdom developed by Christian Hebraists. Thus, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), a reform-minded rabbi and Islamic scholar, published some major and widely disseminated works that represented both Christianity and Islam as rooted in Jewish tradition. While Geiger’s contribution to the study of Islam was widely recognized by contemporary orientalist scholars, his claim that Jesus was merely a Jewish Pharisee provoked the fury of Christian theologians and scholars. Susannah Heschel argues that Geiger’s work constitutes a counter narrative challenging mainstream perceptions of Judaism, which served to reinforce the vision of a superior Western and Christian modernity: The process of gaining emancipation was not simply a matter of attaining political rights for Jews, but an emancipation of the Jewish presence within the Christian. That emancipation of Jewish presence, which functioned in Jewish theological literature as a kind of revolt of the colonized, marks the first generation of scholars in the field of Jewish Studies […] in mid-nineteenth century Germany and continued to influence the work of scholars into the Weimar era.42

As attempts in the mid-nineteenth century to establish Wissenschaft des Judentums as an independent discipline at German universities failed, its proponents were forced to look for employment in other departments of the philosophical facMunk (1805–1867) and Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), whose work is discussed below in more detail. 41 Heschel, “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam,” 2012, 93. 42 Heschel, “Theology as a Vision for Colonialism,” 2005, p.  149; see also her “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999; Lassner, “Abraham Geiger,” 1999.

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ulty.43 Many of them followed the path first taken by Geiger and took an interest also in Islamic studies. Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, who was the most eminent orientalist scholar of his time in the German speaking countries, has been credited with recognizing the significance of their scholarship for the field of oriental studies and for effectively helping to establish Wissenschaft des Judentums as part of that disciplinary field.44 Departments of Arabic and Islamic studies effectively became a haven for practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums, and in 1933 some 25 percent of all chairs in oriental studies departments at German universities were held by Jews.45 In contrast to many of their Christian colleagues, the works of Jewish orientalists often display a notably sympathetic attitude towards Islam and do not easily fit into the paradigm of orientalism as laid out by Edward Said.46 In order to appreciate the significance of their scholarship, we need to locate it within the historical context of the Jewish struggle for emancipation and acceptance in nineteenth-century Germany. In this vein, Susannah Heschel has noted: For so many German Jewish thinkers and historians […], Islam was not only an object of admiration but also a template for presenting Judaism to the European world. Through their studies of the rationality of Islamic law and ethics, their admiration for Islamic monotheism and rejection of anthropomorphism, and their explanations for the rise of Islam and the emergence of the Qur’an within the milieu of rabbinic Judaism, Jews were defending the rational and ethical basis of Judaism’s legal system and the importance of its commitment to monotheism and religious law.47

Heschel and others have argued that Jewish scholarship on Islam during the long nineteenth century was basically a vehicle for projecting a Judaism modeled on Enlightenment thought and liberal Protestantism, purged of what was perceived by proponents of Wissenschaft des Judentums as Judaism’s backward or “oriental,” i.e. apocalyptic or mysticist elements: “Islam’s function in nineteenth-cen-

43 Jospe, “The Study of Judaism,” 1982. The founding of the “Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums” in 1872 as a private academic institution was a direct result of this refusal to integrate the Wissenschaft des Judentums into a university framework. 44 Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 2010; see also, Hartwig/Homolka/Marx/Neuwirth (eds.), “Im vollen Licht der Geschichte,” 2008. For the case of Hamburg University in this context, see, Rohde, “Zur Geschichte der Islamwissenschaft an der Universität Hamburg,” 2008. 45 Hanisch, “Akzentverschiebung,” 1996. 46 Heschel, “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam,” 2012; Kramer, The Jewish Discovery of Islam, 1999; Hanisch, “Machen Sie mir doch unseren Islam nicht gar zu schlecht,” 2000. 47 Heschel, “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam,” 2012, 106.



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tury German Jewish discourse was not part of an agenda of orientalism; on the contrary, identifying Judaism with Islam was the tool to de-orientalize Judaism.”48 However, if we take Heschel’s earlier argument seriously, that German Jews during the long nineteenth century lived in a quasi-colonial situation, we need to study not only the patterns of interaction between Christians and Jews, but also the ways in which the dominant Euro-centrist modernism of that time formed both their respective self-perceptions. In colonial and related situations this relationship is best described as a contradictory pattern of attraction, rejection, and mutual dependence.49 Heschel points to precisely such a pattern when she portrays Geiger’s work on the Jewish origins of Christianity as a counter narrative to mainstream discourse on Jews and Judaism. Wissenschaft des Judentums was therefore not merely an assimilationist one-dimensional rationalist perception of Jewish history that stripped Judaism of its spiritual essence and mystic dimension.50 As Jonathan Boyarin argues, the ninetheenth-century German Jewish founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums […], through objectivist research modeled on colonial ethnological science, maintained ties to their Jewish identity while distancing themselves from their “primitive” contemporaries and forebears. Wishing to purify Judaism of elements of folkloric “superstition,” the proponents of Wissenschaft separated out those universal elements that could inform a modern Judaism compatible with ecumenical liberalism.51

Yet Boyarin also points to the need to consider the historical context in which Wissenschaft des Judentums evolved: Pending more detailed archaeology, especially of the German tradition, it is safe to assert that both Christian and Jewish scholars, whether studying ancient Jews or colonized peoples, were motivated in complex and semiconscious ways by images of the colonized savage and the superseded Jew. Moreover, such scholarship could be a technique of selfdefence as well as an aggression against the other. Thus, cultural folklorists arose in debate with, and partly as a defence against, the rise of physical/racialist anthropology.52

While German Jewish scholarship on Islam for the most part did not actively follow an orientalist agenda in Said’s sense, indeed often seemed to counter orientalist claims regarding Islam’s deficiency, it was nevertheless shaped by the 48 Heschel, “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam,” 2012, 107. See also, Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” 1989; Leicht, “Neu-Orient-ierung an Maimonides?,” 2011. 49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994, pp. 40–65. 50 Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999, 67–68. 51 Boyarin, “The Other Within and the Other Without,” 1994, p. 433. 52 Ibid., p. 434.

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very same Euro-centrist modernist premises that also characterized plain Saidian orientalism. This ambivalence is similarly visible in cultural production outside the academy. Romanticizing views of the orient like the image of Muslim Spain as a Jewish golden age also became a fashion among Jewish artists and intellectuals during the period under scrutiny here. Al-Andalus was revered in this context as a high point of Jewish culture and as a successful example of Jewish integration – not assimilation – into society. The most graphic example for this appropriation of the orient by German Jewry (and elsewhere in Europe, later also in the United States) were the many magnificent synagogues built in oriental style architecture in many cities between 1850 and the early twentieth century.53 When the New Synagogue in Berlin, an example of this style, was inaugurated in the presence of Bismarck in 1866, it was the world’s largest synagogue.54 This trend of synagogue architecture was particularly popular among reformist liberal communities. The same communities that “Christianized” synagogue services, e.g. by introducing an organ and praying in the German language, opted for an oriental, i.e. nonChristian, appearance of their temple.55 Thus, even while it adapted Judaism to majority culture, liberal Judaism was not simply an assimilationist trend. Rather, through synagogue architecture it openly displayed the “otherness” of Jewish culture in the emerging German nation, to which these communities simultaneously strove to belong.56 A number of Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries referred positively to orientalist imagery in their works, such as Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953), Franz Werfel (1890–1945), Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), and Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958). Arguably, these writers used the orient as a foil to negotiate their status in contemporary Germany as a formally emancipated but continuously exoticized and/or rejected minority. For Nina Bermann, this current amounts to a “self-affirmative minority discourse,” a conscious appropriation and mimicry of the orientalism these artists encountered amongst their contemporaries.57 It should be noted, however, that some of the examples cited by Bermann in support of her argument, such as some of the early works of Lasker53 Künzl, Islamische Stilemente im Synagogenbau des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, 1984. 54 For a virtual reconstruction of German synagogues destroyed during the pogrom of November 1938, see http://www.cad.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de/synagogen/inter/en_menu.html (last accessed October 7, 2013). 55 See Lerner, “The Narrating Architecture of Emancipation,” 2000. 56 Kalmar, “Moorish Style,” 2001. 57 Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne, 1997, p. 343; Heizer, Jewish-German Identity, 1996; Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” 1998.



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Schüler, might also be interpreted as expressions of a rather mainstream orientalist fashion popular in the Kaiserreich, adapted to form part of a specific GermanJewish subculture and not necessarily meant to posit the author as a conscious outsider of society.58 The same holds true for aspects of German-Jewish popular culture, like the middlebrow literature analyzed by Jonathan Hess.59 Of course, being part of German society, German Jews themselves also displayed colonialist worldviews, not least of all vis-à-vis their co-religionists in Eastern Europe or the Middle East.60 An interesting case in this regard is the ethnographic work of the Austrian novelist Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904) on Galician Jewry, whom he characterized as half-Asians in need of being raised up by civilized German Jews. Still, the careful re-reading of Franzos’s works by Leo W. Riegert demonstrates ambivalences and slippages in his writing that complicate his characterization as a plain assimilationist with colonialist attitudes towards East European Jews. Rather, according to Riegert, Franzos’ Halb-Asien texts are rife with “interstitial” moments: moments between particularist detail and universalist claims; moments between mimicking identification with minority cultures and mocking dismissal; moments between ethnographic facticity and literary embellishment; moments between insider expertise and outsider orientalism; moments between intercultural contact and cultural hegemony; moments between east and west; moments between the Jewish and the German.61

Conclusions The association of Judaism with Islam and the depiction of Jews as orientals is a well-established trope with a long history in the German context. The same holds true for the image of physical and sexual deviance associated with Jews and Judaism. Against this background, modern German antisemitism can be characterized as an attempt to de-orientalize and masculinize the evolving German nation. Jews were portrayed in this context not merely as Germany’s oriental others, but rather as an ambivalent and fluid third element that confounded the binary order of both ethnic German nationalism and patriarchy as a threatening hybrid entity that endangered the vitality of the nation at large.62

58 Kirschnick, Tausend und ein Zeichen, 2007. 59 Hess, “Beyond Subversion,” 2009; Hess, Middlebrow Literature, 2010. 60 Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen, 2005; Morris, “Reading the Face of the Other,” 1998. 61 Riegert, “Subjects and Agents of Empire,” 2009, 351. 62 Holz, “Die Figur des Dritten,” 2001.

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The orient discussed here was not a geographic location but rather a fantasy that served German identity politics of the time. But these fantasies were not aimed at achieving a mere intellectual authority over the orient, as Said claimed regarding German orientalist scholarship. Orientalist/Hebraist scholarship, some of which displayed manifest colonialist attitudes towards Jews, significantly contributed to the wider political debate regarding the character of the German nation. Proponents of Wissenschaft des Judentums and Jewish orientalist scholars created a discourse that emphasized the equal or even superior value of Judaism (and Islam) with regard to Christianity and Jewish contributions to European modernity. To a significant degree, this was a debate among German orientalist scholars themselves. The various conflicting “orientalist” discourses in this context reflected an ongoing domestic struggle regarding the character of the German nation, one between proponents of an ethnically and culturally homogenous German Volk and supporters of a more pluralist concept, thereby confirming Said’s original thesis concerning the comparability of antisemitism and orientalism in ways perceived neither by himself nor by those of his critics who pointed to German orientalist scholarship as an argument against his suggestions. The affirmative self-orientalization among German Jews in architecture, arts, and literature during the long nineteenth century entailed at least in part the conscious insistence on a hybrid position in society. The ambivalences visible in the Jewish engagement with orientalist tropes discussed in this chapter point to the in-between position of emancipated German Jews as both insiders and outsiders, colonizers and colonized at the same time, whose self-perception was shaped in multiple ways by the orientalist worldviews that characterized European societies in general.

Hannah Lotte Lund

Prussians, Jews, Egyptians? Berlin Jewish Salonières around 1800 and Their Guests. Discursive Constructions of Equality and Otherness “Most Jewesses, I’d like to say, show a certain Egyptian Style, a rigidity in silhouette, which makes the whole impression somewhat awkward; […] Our famous Levin is the best and truest example of this Egyptian Style.” Gustav von Brinckmann to Luise von Voss “As for the noble tattlers, it’s because of their very ‘nobleness’ I care even less for what they say, because I never treat such things other than with contemptous indifference.” Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Gustav von Brinckmann1

Ever since they flourished, around 1800, the Berlin Jewish Salons have been discussed as a symbolic space of the peaceful co-existence of enlightened individuals and, indeed, for a “Jewish-German” understanding.2 Despite the relatively small number of people involved, they have been credited with the power to foster acculturation. The salonières have been discussed as forerunners of emancipation3 or deserters of faith,4 respectively; their guests have been consid1 In this chapter I attempt a rereading of the “tone” of a particular period. Especially since many of the letters I work with are unpublished, longer quotes are given in the original German in the footnotes. “Die meisten Jüdinnen verrathen, möchte ich sagen, einen gewissen Egyptischen Styl, eine Härte der Umrisse, welche der ganzen Figur etwas unbeholfenes giebt; […] Unsere berühmte Levin ist das wahre Musterbeispiel dieses Egyptischen Styls.” Gustav von Brinckmann to Luise von Voss, October 2,1805, in: Goethe-und-Schiller-Archiv Weimar, Berg-Voss collections (subsequently referred to as GSA), 5/26,8. “Was die erhabenen Klatscher betrifft, so sind sie mir ihrer Erhabenheit halber noch gleichgültiger als anderer Klatscher, weil ich so was nie anders als mit völliger Gleichgültigkeit verachte,” Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Gustav von Brinckmann, July 15, 1794, in: Levin Varnhagen, Buch des Andenkens, 2011, vol. 4, p. 82. 2 For a critical summary of these attributions see Weckel, “Lost Paradise,” 2000, and Hahn, “The Myth of the Salon,” in: ibid.: The Jewess Pallas Athena, 2005, pp. 42–55. 3 While women’s history discussed their emancipation as women and Jewesses, the most recent collective biography of the Berlin salonières discusses them, with very good reason, as emancipating intellectuals and active participants of European Enlightenment. See Naiman-Goldberg, Jewish Women, 2013. 4 Especially during the nineteenth century Jewish writers blamed the salonières as “sinners” or disrespectful “daughters of Mendelssohn,” discussing to what degree they distanced themselves from the generation of Jews living the traditional Jewish lifestyle, in only one generation, and blaming them for having paved the way for an epidemic of baptisms as “schismatical creatures.”

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ered particularly liberal, at least for a certain period: “[T]he mere fact that such encounters took place has led some scholars to conclude that vices otherwise widespread in the German educated elite such as class snobbery, antisemitism and xenophobia […] were somehow temporarily suspended among those who frequented the salons.”5 Biographers of “great names,” on the other hand, always had difficulties in trying to explain the disparity between the frequent visits to Jewish houses and the ridicule of alleged Jewishness in their letters. Ludwig Geiger set the tone in describing Wilhelm von Humboldt as a progressive, who however “should not be called a philosemite.”6 The efforts of coming to terms with the Jewish salon women belonging either to the Jewish or the Christian world, or, metaphorically, to the orient or occident, can be shown in a single quote. One of the most persistent controversies in German-Jewish historiography was provoked by the self-positioning of Berlin’s now most famous salonière, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, in her “last words”: “What a history! … A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. […] The thing all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life – having been born a Jewess – this I should on no account wish to have missed.” The history of the Berlin Jewish Salon and its reception could be rewritten by tracing this quotation and its diverse interpretations in literature. The quote became almost symbolic of the German-Jewish historiography of the twentieth century, when Hannah Arendt centered her famous biography, Rahel. The Life of a Jewess (1957), on it. It has not always been taken into account, however, that this quote was only the first half of a “double legacy.”7 The last words continued: “I have thought of Jesus and cried over his passion; I have felt – for the first time so felt it – that he is my brother.”8 Historians, who have read only the first half, have seen Rahel Levin Varnhagen as a prodigal Jew. Researchers, who wished to emphasize her salon as a path to See Körner, “Mendelssohns Töchter,” 1928. “Schismaticals” (“Abtrünnige”) was the title of the chapter on salonières in Remy, Das Jüdische Weib, 1892. 5 Weckel, “Lost Paradise,” 2000, p. 311. 6 “[…] ein wirklicher Philosemit nicht genannt werden darf.” Geiger, “Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Juden,” 1912, 70. 7 Hertz, How Jews became Germans, 2007, p. 215. 8 Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Karl August Varnhagen, March 17, 1833 (on her deathbed), noted by him. Here cited after Hertz, How Jews became Germans, 2007, p. 215. The German original says: “Welche Geschichte!... eine aus Ägypten und Palästina Geflüchtete bin ich hier, und finde Hülfe Liebe und Pflege von Euch! […] Was so lange Zeit meines Lebens mir die größte Schmach, das herbste Leid un Ungück war, eine Jüdin geboren zu sein, um keinen Preis möcht’ ich das jetzt missen. […] ich habe an Jesus gedacht, ich habe gefühlt, zum ersten Mal es so gefühlt, daß er mein Bruder ist,” cited after: Meyer, Von Moses Mendelssohn zu Leopold Zunz, 1994, p. 131–132. Unless otherwise stated, all other translations in this text are my own.



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Christianity, quoted it in full. It has to be said, however, that while the religious identity of the salon women has continuously been a topic of debate, there is not much analysis to be found of their own writings on the question. What religion, religious tradition or texts meant to them at different stages of their lives, is still a question to be asked. As Barbara Hahn pointed out, salon research can be seen as paradigmatic of the research and understanding of Jewish history in Germany. Hannah Arendt, who had begun her book on Rahel Levin before 1933 but completed it in exile, pictured the salon as a failed attempt at acculturation, and Rahel’s garret became the symbolic place “outside of society.”9 The idyllic picture of the garret has been established as a cliché since 1945, when the search for moments of understanding became particularly popular in Germany after the Holocaust.10 This idealization of German-Jewish relations most famously came under attack with Gershom Scholem’s denial that “there has ever been such a German-Jewish dialogue in any sense whatsoever, i.e. as a historical phenomenon.”11 As we know, and as Scholem explained in much detail, he did not deny that there had been contacts, friendships, and conversation. He fought the idealization of the relations and claimed that Jewish people were accepted, but not as Jews. Since talking about a symbiosis has been considered too much of a conciliatory approach, the salon has more and more frequently been discussed as an extraterritorial or utopian space. In salon historiography today legends of a German-Jewish symbiosis still persist alongside critical scholarship on the salon as myth and its participants as carriers of early antisemitic stereotypes. So the question at hand still is, also and especially for the “heyday” of salon culture and for its participants: were the Jewish hosts and hostesses accepted as Jews or only as Jewish people on the path of acculturation? A careful reading of some of the main, if less well known, protagonists’ self-positionings, inside and outside the salon, offers a more complex picture of the diverse constructions of otherness and sameness of Jewish and non-Jewish salon participants. This chapter will examine the interplay of enlightened and nationalist thinking as well as gender and anti9 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 1997, p. 127. When Arendt had to go into exile, friends saved a manuscript of the book, which was published in English in 1957. Notably, for the German edition Arendt had to fight for a subtitle containing the word Jewess. For the history of this classic, see the “Introduction” by Liliane Weissberg in: ibid., pp. 3–69. 10 Hahn puts it even more sarcastically: “Like all research on the history and culture of German Judaism, studying salon culture is welcome in German universities only after the murder of the European Jews.” Hahn, Jewess Pallas Athena, 2005, p. 45. 11 “Ich bestreite, daß es ein solches deutsch-jüdisches Gespräch in irgendeinem echten Sinne als historisches Phänomen je gegeben hat.” Scholem, Wider den Mythos, 1995, p. 7.

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semitic concepts as they are displayed in the letters, published and unpublished, of a sample group of Jewish salon women and their male gentile guests in the decades around 1800. As many accounts of the salon utopia carefully erased less prominent Jewish hostesses and their family friends, some “neglected” salon participants will have their say in this chapter.12 After some methodological remarks on the “salon” as a retrospective concept and the sources for salon research, in this chapter the “salon tone” will be discussed, on the paradigmatically controversial topic of conversion. In a third step I will look at the correspondence of three lifelong friends and salon guests and the way they discussed their Jewish hostesses. As will be shown, a close chronological reading of these correspondences suggests that the discourse changed from that of a “natural” process of acculturation to that of an undeniably “visible” Jewish identity, which after 1800 became a negative feature. The last part, as a conclusion, confronts these findings with some reactions and self-positionings of the salon women.

Jewish Women in Berlin around 1800 and their “Salons” In his groundbreaking study on the “beautiful Jewess” in German literature, Florian Krobb has shown how the educated Berlin Jewess became “visible” to visitors of Berlin in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and was discussed as phenomenon and indicator of Jewish acculturation. The transformation of the Berlin Jewish community since the 1760s and 1770s was literarily reflected and the discourse was gendered in the way that mainly “the women of the Israelites” were credited with aspirations to refine their language and their social graces. As Krobb pointed out, the travelers judged mainly by observation from the outside, and a singular incident was more than once the basis for a generalization.13 In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, however, social intercourse between Jews and Christians became more common. Or, to quote the pioneering study of Jakob Katz, a new quality “in the field of social relations can be said to have been 12 As Barbara Hahn has pointed out and Ulrike Weckel reiterates, “the relevant accounts erase the close association between sociability and the Jewish families,” so that “Christians and converts also made up the clear majority of the guests mentioned. In this way, Jewish origins and culture appear to have been no more than something that those seeking emancipation needed to shed.” Weckel, “Lost Paradise,” p. 314. 13 Krobb, Schöne Jüdin, 1993, pp. 59–61.



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achieved when Jews and Gentiles began to meet each other in situations not governed by the immediate purpose of business.”14 This happened – if not exclusively – in the salons of educated Jewish families. The guests at these mixed gatherings at Jewish private homes in the 1790s could judge by experience. They might be witness to confessional, gender, or generational difference as they had social intercourse not only with salonières but with the whole families. And as they frequented different social circles, they communicated inside and outside salon society. As working on the vocabulary of acculturation has lately come to be seen as an important key to writing the history of Jews in Germany, an analysis of the initial impressions of these visitors might serve as an aid to interpreting the reception of otherness and its relevance in the Berlin social circles around 1800. Talking about reception processes in the “salon,” it cannot be emphasized too much that the term was applied to the mixed social gatherings in homes of Jewish hostesses only in retrospect, as initiated by comparative cultural history. Although later in the nineteenth century it became fashionable in Berlin’s bourgeois culture to entertain mixed societies at one’s home, the beginnings of this phenomenon were on a small scale, informal, and definitely not influential. The first Jewish open houses were, to use Hannah Arendt’s term, extraterritorial spaces in Prussia’s three-class system; they belonged neither to noble, nor to civic society, yet had business relations with both (or, as in the case of Marcus Herz, were the doctor and lecturer of both). Prussia’s policy to suppress the majority of Jews but tolerate the rich allowed some to build noble homes in the city centre; the daughters of these Exception-Jews (“Ausnahmejuden”) were very cultivated, privately educated women. Besides this exceptional gender relation, however, that educated women were central figures to mixed society, the “famous Jewish salons”15 of Berlin have not much in common with their high society and influential Paris or London counterparts. The Berlin “tea-meetings,” which met in the attics of the Jewish homes, in a theater box, or at a picnic together, were very informal and experimental. In a time when the roles in society both of women and of Jews were heatedly debated, and in a country where Jews had no civil rights, to invite gentile men to one’s home was an avant-garde thing to do. By non-participants, both of the Jewish and gentile communities, it was even considered “notorious.” Friedrich Schlei14 Katz, Out of the Ghetto, 1973, p. 42. 15 Even recent reviews of her correspondence would not refrain from calling Rahel Levin’s salon famous, e.g. in the Times Literary Supplement: “The list of those who passed through her salon amounts to almost a roll call of late German Romanticism.” Meinhardt, “Rahel Levin. Her Salon and Her Soul,” 2012.

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ermacher had to justify his acquaintance with Henriette Herz, then the wife of an honorary professor, to his superiors. Even if men like Friedrich Gentz could visit Jewish homes without risk, we know from his letters that his wife would not do so. The salons were neither well accepted in the 1790s nor were their visitors famous, yet. Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, for example, later to be world-acclaimed scholars and politicians, came to the home and salon of Marcus and Henriette Herz as students accompanying their tutor to a lecture on electricity. Friedrich Gentz was a penniless trainee looking for connections. The fact that most of the guests stayed in contact with the hostesses after they became famous is much more telling. The breaks and ruptures in these relations can give us an idea of the difficulties in upholding the notion of equality after the revolutionary period. The vocabulary found in the letters reflects a certain openness of the meetings: The participants themselves spoke of their “circle,” “tea-meetings,” and “night-teas” or refrained from finding a term for their encounters, which were not fixed to a certain date or place. As can be seen from the letters of any of the socalled salonières in the 1790s, their encounters with gentiles were not restricted to formal gatherings where habitués (regular visitors) read Goethe with a learned hostess, but consisted of a fine network of visiting each other, reading and writing practices, and a variety of meeting places. On the example of Henriette Herz and the brothers Humboldt: they attended the lectures of her husband and went to concerts together, met in different readings groups or à deux, when Alexander taught her dancing or she taught Wilhelm Hebrew script. They went for tea with the sisters Dorothea Veit and Henriette Mendelssohn and founded a secret “virtuous society” “Tugendbund”, which promoted intimate platonic friendship and confessions on basis of the familiar “Du” address. Only when returning to Berlin in 1819, Rahel Levin Varnhagen complained about the inflation of terms given to the now regulated societal events. Writing to a long-term habitué, she sums up the ingredients that characterized “their” sociability which she found now “atomized”: “the whole constellation of beauty, grace, coquetry, liking, love, wit, elegance, cordiality, urge to develop ideas, upright seriousness, unrestrained come and meet, light-hearted joking. […] There are quite a few clever people around and a rest of sociability that is unique in Germany but mine are gone.”16

16 “Die ganze Konstellation von Schönheit, Grazie, Koketterie, Neigung, Liebschaft, Witz, Eleganz, Kordialität, Drang die Ideen zu entwickeln, redlichem Ernst, unbefangenem Aufsuchen und Zusammentreffen, launigem Scherz, ist zerstiebt. […] Es sind noch unendlich viele gescheidte Leute hier: und ein Rest von Geselligkeit, der in Deutschland einzig ist. Aber Meine sind weg!”



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Taking a closer look at the specific social structures of the years around 1800, the group of people having been described as the Berlin salon much rather have to be considered a lively if fragile communication network with many meeting places and times and ever changing roles of host/ess and guest.17 Given the fact, that the participants never used a fixed term for themselves or their gatherings, “salon” and salonière are used in this text as research terms. What makes the salon society a particularly interesting research field for the contemporary “awareness,” or construction, of otherness is its place in contemporary discourse. The Berlin salons coincided with at least three international discourses on emancipation: the querelle des femmes, the debate on the emancipation or “civic betterment” “bürgerliche Verbesserung” of the Jews in Prussia, and the debate on inner-Jewish reforms initiated by the Haskala. All three discourses were built around issues of sameness or otherness (of men and women, Jews and Christians, religious and civic duties, etc.). Salon guests were not only aware of these debates, quite a few of them participated actively in these very discourses. Even if they went in different directions with their theories – such as Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt developing models of gender polarity and gender role play in their respective texts – it can be assumed that patterns of sameness and difference were part of their mental baggage when they visited salons.

Salon Letters and “Salon Tone” “Yes, in every letter, my dear friend, 3 fixed elements: 1. The Schlegels, 2. The Jews, 3. Our friend the ‘count’ [Gentz].” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann 18

The research objective to understand how the contemporaries and participants of the so-called Berlin Jewish Salon around 1800 “talked” about identity within their own society embraces at least three terms highly disputable in themselves: the “Berlin salon,” the topic of the “identity” of Jewish or non-Jewish male and Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Gustav von Brinckmann, November 30, 1819, in: Levin Varnhagen, Buch des Andenkens, vol. 4, pp. 196–197 (emphasis in the text). 17 For a detailed reconstruction and analysis of this communication network see my dissertation on which this chapter is based. Lund, Der Berliner “Jüdische Salon,” 2012. 18 “Ja in jedem Brief, lieber Freund, drei stehende Artikel: 1., die Schlegels, 2., die Juden und 3., unser Freund, der Graf.” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, February 10, 1802, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 136.

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female participants (not to mention their social backgrounds), and the problematic of “listening” to a long-gone conversation. Given the oral charm and functioning of the phenomenon of the “salon,” and despite all theorizing, we cannot tell how they “talked” about things and observed each other. This chapter and the research on which it is based follow another line of inquiry: the interpretation of letters and billets (short unsealed house-to-house notes) of which over a thousand from this period and circle have been found in diverse European archives.19 My assumption is that different formats of written conversation worked alongside those spoken in these Berlin intellectual circles around 1800. Hosts and guests continued tea talks in letters and in short notes, with which they sent books and commented on them or asked to talk about them later that night. Similarly, they evaluated discussions or analyzed people they had met the other day in their letters. In addition, the circles can be said to have been formed by written recommendations and invitations. A typical informal billet by Rahel Levin Varnhagen of the 1790s would run like this: “You’re back from the King, surely. We’ll hold a night-tea tonight. Do come or we won’t enjoy ourselves at all, and I offer you the best cake to boot. Do bring your neighbor, if he’s in. If he’s not, leave him a note. I am expecting you. R. L.”20 This short note not only shows some self-confidence on the side of the Jewish merchant’s daughter inviting an unknown aristocrat, but also it sets the tone for the meeting. Sharing a cake and some ideas with likeminded people had to mean more to enlightened beings than an official visit to the king. The neighbour mentioned in the note was the young aristocrat Wilhelm von Burgsdorf, who, following this billet, became a member of this circle and stayed friends for years. Especially when the hostess or the habitués left the city for the summer season, they would inform one another on the daily news and meetings. One example shall stand for many: While Rahel Levin Varnhagen was visiting a spa, her habitué, the Swedish diplomat von Brinckmann, continued to visit the family,

19 I was particularly lucky to get a chance to work with the Brinckmann Collections while it was held at the Carolina Redivia, Uppsala. “Brinkmanska Arkivet,” the letters and papers of the Swedish Diplomat Carl Gustav von Brinckmann, contains over 15,000 letters with several hundred correspondents. The collection is now kept in a private home in Sweden (subsequently referred to as BA, followed by a letter identifying the box). 20 “Sie sind gewiß schon vom König. Bei uns ist heut Nacht=Thee; Kommen Sie ja zu uns, wir haben sonst alle keine Ruhe, und Vergnügen schon gar nicht. Auch versprech’ ich Ihnen den schönsten Kuchen obenein. Bringen Sie doch Ihren Nachbar mit, wenn er schon zu Hause ist, und hinterlassen Sie’s ihm, wenn er’s nicht ist. Ich erwarte Sie. R. L.” Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Gustav von Brinckmann, undated, unpublished, Sammlung Varnhagen, Cracow, Box 38 (subsequently referred to as SV, Box Number).



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talking literature, theater, and famous actresses over dinner. As usual, he reports the table talk to his hostess, taking her right into the scene. His letter began: Berlin, 5th July 1793, ten o’clock at night, sitting at the writing desk of your brother. “Don’t start by telling her about the Unzelmann, better tell her about the Baranius” – this is what your mother just told me when I got up from the dinner table and said I would write to you this instance. Hereby you know what our dinner talk has been about. Indeed, my dear friend! how can you have a mother who prays to the wrong altar and in all earnestness prefers the B. to the goddess-like U.?21

Written and oral communication, even when intertwined as easily as in the quoted examples, naturally would have been different and no letter can be taken as a faithful record of a conversation. But the time overlap of visit and billet, letter and meeting, might give researchers today an idea what the points of discussion were, what was mentioned to whom, and the general tone in dealing with certain topics. Given the highly controversial debate among researchers on salons and acculturation, one might think that religious identity, or the change of it, must have caused some furor or at least led to discussions in the salon itself. According to the letters, however, it did not. Though the salon women received their guests in the homes of their families who were partially still living according to Jewish tradition, the notion of breaking the chains or of double identities was not to be found in the rather conversational tone of letters exchanged between Jewish women and their non-Jewish guests. The participants of the Berlin Jewish salons discussed, in a very educated, playful way, literature, philosophy, and human nature in general. What one rarely comes across, even during the critical periods of the French Revolution, are matters of politics and religion. More precisely, there are many references to both as they surfaced in literature, in quotations, witty metaphors or ironic allusions; but there appears to have been no down to earth discussion of these problems. Instead of direct references there would be seemingly gallant or witty phrases. The lack of debate should not, however, be taken as a sign that there was not much reflection of these topics – on the contrary, the salon women were struggling with existential issues, and their own political and spiritual conflicts still require a lot of research. What needs to be emphasized 21 “B. den 5. Juli 1793. Abends 10 Uhr an dem Schreibtisch Ihres Bruders. ‘Fangen Sie nicht mit der Unzelmann an, lieber mit der Baranius’ – So rief mir Ihre Mutter zu, als ich beim Aufstehen vom Tische den Entschluß fasste, Augenblicklich an Sie zu schreiben. Sie können hieraus also auf den Inhalt unseres Gesprächs schließen. In der That, meine liebe Freundin! wie kann man eine Mutter haben, die in einem solchen Götzendienst lebt, und die B. in allem Ernst der göttlichen U. vorzieht,” Gustav von Brinckmann to Rahel Levin Varnhagen, unpublished, July 5, 1793, SV, 38.

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here is that in the communication between Jewish hostesses and non-Jewish guests an “enlightened” attitude was (at least) affected. When he heard of two Jewish women friends in love with Christians, the Swedish Diplomat Gustav von Brinckmann asked with excitement: My dear good friend, would the whole temple of Solomon be breaking together, with all its columns and courts and tabernacles? […] Mrs Veit divorced! and, if I shall read what is written and not written between the lines in the letters, that almost talk explicitly about it, baptized with or without water from the river Spree etc. etc!! […] If that goes on, no Jew will stay put in Berlin.22

And Rahel Levin Varnhagen would answer: “Everything is topsy-turvy. No Jew stays put; but, alas, I alone stay wretchedly where I am.”23 This tone was applied to all religious topics. An invitation to both Jews and Christians to a picnic on Ascension Day read: “The weather seems to be splendid and I advise you to take a drive, if you feel on the mend. You shall anyhow be able to witness a pretty spectacle, as it is precisely today that Christ will ascend to the Heavens. The air is so clear and devoid of clouds that the One cloud on which he will ascend will be as easily visible as a Montgolfiere. It must be glorious sight.”24 Decisive moments in the life of the salon women, such as marriage and divorce, would be discussed in a similar way, sometimes almost aphoristically: “After all, for an intelligent person, marriage is like measles. The earlier the better, the fewer scars.”25 Symbolically, the holy language was also secularized in the salons: Henriette Herz 22 “Ma bien bonne Amie! Stürzt denn der ganze Tempel Salomonis mit alles seinen Säulen und Vorhöfen und Stiftshütten auf Einmal in Trümmern? […] Die Veit geschieden! und – wenn ich alles noch lesen soll was in den Briefen die davon beinah ganz deutlich reden, auf dem weißen Raum zwischen den Zeilen steht – auch noch mit oder ohne Spreewasser etc. etc.!!! […] wenn das so fort geht wird gewiß in Berlin bald – kein Jude mehr auf dem anderen bleiben.” Gustav von Brinckmann to Rahel Levin Varnhagen, January 7, 1799, SV, 38 (all emphases in the text). 23 Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Gustav von Brinckmann, February 11, 1799, quoted in: Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 1997, p. 103. In the printed version of this letter, Karl August Varnhagen exised the “Jew,” as he quite regularly did with traces of “Judaism” in Rahel’s letters. As the correspondence so far has only been printed one-sided (Brinckmann’s letters are unpublished), it reads cryptical rather than as the ironic answer to an ironic question which it was. 24 “[…] Das Wetter scheint prächtig u. ich rathe Ihnen auszufahren, wenn Sie sich etwas besser befinden. Sie werden ohnehin ein schönes Spektakel mit ansehen können, indem Christus gerade heute gen Himmel fährt. Die Luft ist so klar, u. unumwölkt, daß man die Eine Wolke, auf der er herufsteigt so deutlich wie eine Mongolfiere wird sehen können. Es muß sich prächtig ausnehmen.” Gustav von Brinckmann to Rahel Levin Varnhagen, May 9, 1793, unpublished, SV, 38. 25 “Allein für eine äusserst kluge Person ist es mit der Ehe doch im Grunde wie mit den Blattern. Je eher je besser, desto weniger Narben.” Gustav von Brinckmann to Rahel Levin Varnhagen, January 7, 1799, unpublished, SV, 38.



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and Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote their love letters in Hebrew. After she had taught him the letters, they used it as cryptography. The dates of many invitations also are significant. Rahel Levin’s billets were often written on Friday afternoons, inviting people to a “Nachtthee” (night-tea). The Herz gatherings, “die Herzschen Freitage,” were also famously conducted on Friday afternoons. One might ask to what extent the specific way of (not) talking about religion was due to the spirit of enlightenment generally attributed to the salon. The circles and relationships were certainly shaped by enlightenment encouragement, a common ideal of Bildung and humanity. Even when they made fun of the elder generation of Maskilim – like Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel painting a vivid picture in her letters of the “famous Herzschen Fridays” (“berühm­ ten Herzschen Freitage”) as “terribly boring” (“entsetzlich ennuyant”) and of Marcus Herz introducing his guests as “Mr …, a Kantian, too! (“Der Herr … auch ein grosser Kantianer!”) – they frequently reassured themselves of their shared concept of enlightened educated individuals beyond conventions of the church or the three-class-society.26 It may also be argued that participants of the salon society upheld a specific enlightened tone on purpose. A blend of irony, wit, gallantry, and gossip might have helped to deal with conflicts such as conversion, love affairs, or just difference in background. A prince might be told philosophical truths, but it was no use talking civic betterment with him.

Conversion and (No) Scandal in 1799 Natalie Naiman-Goldberg has recently argued that the secular light-heartedness of the salons was due to the fact that Berlin Jews of these elite circles underwent a specific gradual transition, and that for the generation growing up around 1800, conversion was seen as but one step in a long process of acculturation.27 The example of two Jewish hostesses, who both dissolved their arranged marriages with Jewish husbands in 1799, demonstrates how salon friends viewed their marriages as career, seeing them as an achievement and conversion as a natural development: Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel and Hitzel Fließ, née Bernhard, later Boye and then Sparre, both mingled in the same circles, invited

26 Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 25, 1791, in: Wieneke, Caroline und Dorothea Schlegel, 2011, pp. 275–276. 27 Naiman-Goldberg, Jewish Women, 2013.

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the same guests, were part of the same intellectual and social networks, and were both very good friends (and on a “Du”-basis) with Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Hitzel Fließ, nicknamed “die Doktorin” (the doctoress), as she was married to a Jewish doctor, was the daughter of the rich merchant Bernhard, the family for whom Moses Mendelssohn worked, and was from the beginning very well educated and networked. She was divorced and baptized in order to marry a Swedish aristocrat. When von Brinckmann suggested to visit her for a coffee and “to check the quality of the baptism of our friend, the doctoress,” Wilhelm von Humboldt agreed light-heartedly (and not too eager to welcome a new Christian): “But I won’t get up before three quarters to 11, even if it was to baptize all Jewish kids and women at once.”28 Within the Jewish community, Hitzel Fließ seemingly met with problems which were once again talked about ironically. As Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy wrote to the diplomat von Brinckmann: “What do you think about your friend the doctoress? Those who are afraid of water [the traditional Jews] made a lot of fuss, but by now they have turned to the next hundred problems.” Brinckmann responded: “The true servants of the old law seem to consider this marriage a proper death, as Fränkel, to whom I sent a letter for her […], returned it immediately to me with the words: the Doctoress Fließ no longer exists!”29 For Jews and Gentiles of that generation and circle, phrases like “those who are afraid of water” and “the true servants of the (old) law” refer to an earlier generation, which does not commit to (necessary) change. In a symbolic salon game, during which the guests had to characterize each other by book titles, someone called Hitzel Flippancy and Good Heart and she gave back: “No, I am the Freed Jerusalem.” This was again disseminated as a really witty remark among the younger generation.30 Years later, when Hitzel, then Countess Sparre, was men28 “[…]gemeinschaftlich die Güte der Taufe der Doctorin zu prüfen.[…] Aber vor ¾ auf um 11 Uhr kriegt mich niemand aus dem Hause , und wäre es auch alle Judenkinder und Frauen auf einmal zu wässern.” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 29, 1801, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 129. 29 “Was sagen Sie denn zu Ihrer Doktorin? […] Sie können denken, dass die Waßerscheuen schreien, oder geschrien haben, denn jetzt beschäftigen sie schon wieder hundert andre Gegenstände […].” Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 10, 1798, unpublished letter, BA, M. “Die ächten Diener des alten Gesetzes sehen diese Heirath wohl als einen förmlichen Tod an, denn Fränkel, der einen Brief an sie von mir bekam, […] schickte mir ich ihn gleich nach Paris zurück, mit dem bedeuten: Die Dr. Fließ sei nicht mehr!” Gustav von Brinckmann to Rahel Levin Varnhagen, April 26, 1799, unpublished, SV, 38. 30 “[…] freimüthig u hübsch von ihm, dass er ihr, in dem Spiel wo man einer Person den Titel irgend eines passenden Buches geben muß, Leichtsinn u Gutes Herz sagte, u recht witzig von ihr, die auch sich selbst das befreite Jerusalem so leicht hinwarf.” Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 10, 1798, unpublished letter, BA, M.



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tioned in a letter, Humboldt called it “so very human to marry three times without letting one husband die.”31 The salon society sometimes did sneer at Jewish women on the edge of conversion, but the act itself was considered something “normal.” It was accepted and expected, to an extent, that not getting converted was seen as not normal. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest daughter, fell in love with the romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel, moved out on her Jewish husband and was divorced in 1799. She did not, however, at this point, convert in order to marry Schlegel. However, she did live with him as a divorced woman; even in Berlin around 1800 this was a problematic status. Their unmarried way of life caused a scandal. Marcus Herz did not allow her into his home anymore, and Henriette Herz had to put up a fight to see her friend. The situation became worse when Schlegel published the erotic fragment Lucinde (1799), which by some was read as autobiographical and added to Dorothea’s reputation of being a loose woman. Their close friends, however, mainly wondered why she did not convert at once in order to marry him. Her reason for doing so was a liberal gesture by her former husband, who allowed the younger son to stay with his mother for as long as she would not remarry. Almost no-one in Berlin and none of her salon friends, however, really took her decision not to get baptized seriously. As she wrote to the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, her reasons not to get baptized and remarried were not accepted by her friends.32 The master narrative of the educated Jewish woman around 1800 included conversion – as Dorothea Mendelssohn herself put it: her Berlin acquaintances looked at her as at “a novel without ending (“einen Roman ohne geschloßenen Schluß”).”33 While nobody blamed Hitzel Fließ for finding new husbands, the case of Rahel Levin Varnhagen was different. When she married Karl August Varnhagen, Humboldt sneered: “there’s nothing a Jew cannot achieve. (“Es ist nichts, was der Jude nicht erreicht.”)”34 But, of course, Hitzel was married away in Sweden,

31 “Es ist so menschlich drei Männer zu heiraten ohne einen einzigen sterben zu lassen.” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, June 11, 1818, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 178. 32 When she did convert to Protestantism (in 1804) and Catholicism (in 1808), it was not without many years of religious thought and conflict, which however continues to be underestimated by her biographers who often portray her as overly romantic. 33 Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel to Friedrich Schleiermacher, October 11, 1799, in: Patsch, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 2009, p. 15. 34 Wilhelm to Caroline von Humboldt, October 12, 1814, quoted in: Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 1997, p. 238.

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and Mrs Varnhagen and he now had to face each other across a dining table at the congress of Vienna.

“A Cognition of Jewishness” – Salon Guests and the Jewish Body “When reporting about serious matters, you won’t forget the funny ones and carefully include something on the Circumcised, would you.”35

The liberal attitude towards conversion and “becoming a Christian” notwithstanding, differences were read into the body of the Jewish friends right from the beginning of the so-called salon period. Even guests known for liberal attitudes referred to their hosts as “piquant,” “dark-haired,” “the circumcised,” thereby marking them as identifiably different, if in a sympathetic tone. Being Jewish was not only seen as outdated but as exotic. Jewishness was something the participants found pleasure in mentioning, hinting at, or playing with ironically. The statesmen and writers Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gustav von Brinckmann, and Friedrich Gentz were connected by 40 years of friendship, dating back to 1790, when they frequently visited the homes of Jewish families and had good relationships with their daughters. In their letters they wrote about visits to salons, theaters, picnics, or brothels, often in one paragraph, as part of their city excitement. Later in their career all three men came in contact with legislation concerning Jewish emancipation, which urged researchers to make a quick equation of salon-guests as progressive, a connection that cannot be upheld when looking at the private letters of these life-long friends. What makes their correspondence an interesting source for salon-reception is the fact that Humboldt, Gentz, and Brinckmann stayed in contact until their old age and that the lives and deeds of their Jewish friends continued to be a topic of their triangular correspondence till the very end. When leaving Berlin, Humboldt made sure that Brinckmann would inform him regularly on “the Jews,” and in one of the last letters, Brinckmann told Gentz that he had just got into a

35 “Ueber diesen ernsthaften Dingen werden Sie hoffentlich die scherzhaften nicht vergessen und die Beschnittenen werden noch immer einen großen Theil Ihrer Sorgfalt fodern[!].” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckman, December 10, 1802, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 140.



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“scholarly dispute” with Humboldt “over the Jews.”36 Despite the shared interest in the topic, the three men developed very different views on the matter of Jews in society. In close contact and almost parallel careers in Austria and Prussia, Humboldt and Gentz underwent contrasting developments in their attitudes towards Jews. Humboldt was an integral part in the process of the Jewish emancipation in Prussia, as he wrote the most progressive essay on the topic for the ministry. In private life, however, he reduced his contacts with Jews as much as possible, famously stating: “I love the Jews only en masse, en detail I rather avoid them.”37 Gentz on the other hand was already known by his contemporaries to be rather ambivalent towards the “Jewish Question” and writing for whoever was paying him, but he stayed true to selected friendships. To weigh up the importance of Jewishness as a topic, a short sketch of the triangular correspondence must be given, central elements of discussion were politics and literature. Following and commenting on the latest developments, also internationally, all three men shared a common interest in and respect for the Enlightenment and its representatives and an initial skepticism about the poets of the romantic movement. A specific bond in their friendship was probably the reciprocal help with their own literary productions. While lengthier discussion of literary or personal matters are found in longer letters, the larger part of the short notes were dedicated to spontaneous witty remarks, and to the arrangements of sociability and entertainment. All texts show elements of irony, all contain compliments to the reader, often they assured each other about the pleasure they found in each other’s phrasing – emphasizing that they chose their wording with care. Practical matters were also often discussed in an ironic, witty way, even the short notes were polished. Given the openness of discourse, the nuanced differences between the close friends are of special interest. While Brinckmann and Gentz exchanged mostly political metaphors, Humboldt often drew upon Jewishness as a field for his comparisons and phrases, from the 1790s to the end of the correspondence. Comparing Humboldt’s and Gentz’s letters, it is striking that the latter hardly mentions their visiting Jewish friends, while Humboldt rather dwells on the topic and hardly mentions a Jewish friend without characterizing him or her as “the Jew X.” People are marked as Jews in additions in brackets or commas:

36 Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, September 3, 1802, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 136 (as quoted above); “in einen sehr gelehrten Briefwechsel über […] die Juden gerathen,” Gustav von Brinckmann to Friedrich von Gentz, September 13, 1818, in: Wittichen, Briefe, 1910, p. 323. 37 “Ich liebe eigentlich auch nur die Juden en masse, en détail gehe ich ihnen sehr aus dem Wege.” Wilhelm to Caroline von Humboldt, April 16, 1816, cited after Arendt, Origins, 1958, p. 30. Arendt points out that Humboldt thus stood in opposition to the fashion of the time.

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“Abrahamson is here (the Jewish, you see, are everywhere), […]”, or “please hand the note to Mrs. Veit; that one cannot get rid of the Jews!”38 Gentz, on the other hand, uses “Jewish” as a word for an annoying characteristic that can be found in gentiles, too. When a book was too expensive, he called it “Jewish trading” – a fault even his close friend Brinckmann occasionally was accused of. Friedrich Schlegel, whose influence he abhorred, was called the Jewish despot of literature.39 The background of his favorite hostesses, on the other hand, was never mentioned by him before, and characteristically, he fell out with them (see below). Ironic allusions to religion were commonplace in salon society. So it was not specific to Humboldt or anyone to introduce himself as “the antichrist.”40 In a similar tone, Henriette Herz told Brinckmann it was “not enough” to kiss her hand with “Christian charity,” when she introduced him to an important guest…41 Yet it is specific that, while openly and regularly enjoying mixed society at Jewish homes, in their letters they made a difference between Jews and Christians – if humorously: “For Sunday lunch- or dinnertime, please arrange a good party, a Christian one and, if not possible, a Jewish one?”42 Or, as quoted above, when he left for a time, Humboldt specifically advised friends to write letters about “the Circumcised” – which is to be understood as a (faulty) metaphor, as “the Circumcised” referred to men and women alike. Humboldt’s letters are generally peppered with eroticisms, like referring to the shortening of a text as a “castration,” but the references to Jews hardly ever go without body metaphors, such as: : “I had heard from you, but only in certain houses [“gewissen Häusern”]. […] I then decided to undergo a certain operation, to be in your favour again […]. But if you would accept me as Christian, I’ll come and see you today or tomorrow.”43 As for the entertainment part of the correspond38 “Abrahamson hier (Juden sehen Sie müssen überall dabey sein),” and “Geben Sie der Veit die Inlage; daß man die Juden nie loswird! –,” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, March 1796 and September 25, 1797, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, pp. 83, 106. 39 See Friedrich Gentz to Gustav von Brinckmann, September 30, 1797 and July 21, 1801, in: Wittichen, Letters, 1910, pp. 60, 76. 40 “Verbreiten Sie die Ankunft des Antichrists,” Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, July 9, 1792, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 17. 41 “Das wäre auch entsezlich(!) wenig mir mit Christlicher Liebe die Hand zu küssen wenn ich Sie G. sehen lasse.” To Gustav von Brinckmann, May 3, 1793, unpublished, BA, H. 42 “Für Sonntag Mittag, oder Abend arrangiren Sie doch eine vernünftige wo möglich Christen, wenn nicht anders Judenparthie.” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, July 20, 1790, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 18. 43 “Ich hörte zwar wohl von Ihnen, aber nur immer in gewissen Häusern; […] Endlich beschloss ich eine gewisse Operation mit mir vornehmen zu lassen, um Ihnen gefälliger zu werden[…]. Wollen Sie ich aber noch christlich wieder aufnehmen, so komme ich heute oder morgen.” Wil-



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ence, visits to Jewish homes were often mentioned in a sentence with brothels or visits to prostitutes which they called Nobles (“Edle”). Though often tactfully overlooked by many researchers, quite a few letters discuss erotic matters in a surprisingly open tone, often somewhat braggy. With Brinckmann in Sweden, Humboldt sent him detailed reports of “nightly expeditions” and “crazy nights with Gentz, often sharing the bed.”44 In one of these letters Humboldt describes his encounter with a Jewish prostitute. As Humboldt himself gives the “fantastic anecdote” much detail, it shall be quoted in length: I met a little, yellowish but cute and nicely rounded girl one morning in Jägerstraße, whom I soon realized to be a Jewess. As you know, it does not take much to make me follow, and so I followed this one, too. Although she had nothing that would characterize her as a “noble,” the look she gave me back when I looked at her, told me something. […] At the appointed time she sneaked into the house. […] No sooner had I started off, when I realized that, would the God of Israel not stand by me, I would drown like pharaoh and his army, in you know what sea. […] Although it seems strange that this one visit to my house should give her the reputation of being a “noble” and although her virtue was too purple to be challenged, I will most certainly – as the story will get out – be called the seducer of Jewish virtue, and I will add a new flower to my vicious collection.45

In this report Humboldt prides himself as a reader of different signs. He “knows” she is a prostitute even if it does not show, he “realizes” she is Jewish before he has even talked to her. He easily admits to the position of a “follower,” is not afraid of sexual contacts with Jewish women (and not too much of ruining his reputation – or hers). But he emphasizes the Jewishness of this conquest, if not without mentioning some of her other qualities. In a postscriptum he credits her helm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, February 13, 1802, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 130. 44 “Nächtliche Expeditionen,” and “Närrische Nächte mit Gentz, oft in Einem Bette verlebt,” November 9, 1790 and February 1, 1791, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, pp. 12, 15–16. 45 “Ich begegne einem kleinen, gelblichen, aber niedlich und hübsch gebauten Mädchen eines Morgens in der Jägerstrasse, die ich bald für eine Jüdin erkenne. Sie wissen, daß nicht viel dazu gehört, mich zum Folgen zu bringen und so folgte ich auch dieser. Zwar hatte sie nichts, was sie irgend als eine Edle karakterisirte, aber der Blik, den sie mir, als ich sie ansah, zurükgab, sagte doch mancherlei. […] Zur bestimmten Stunde schlich sie in die Tür herein. […] kaum hatte ich einige Anstalten gemacht, so sah ich, daß wenn mir der Gott Israel nicht beistände, ich wie Pharao und sein Heer, Sie wissen in welchem Meer umkommen müsste. […] Ob es nun gleich freilich sonderbar bleibt, daß dieser einzige Besuch bei mir sie in den Ruf brachte, eine Edle zu sein und obgleich ihre Tugend zu purpurfarben war, um sich zu entschließen, sie zu beflecken; so werde ich doch wahrscheinlich, da die Geschichte gewiß herumkommt, der Verführer der Judentugend heißen, und mir eine neue Blume in den Kranz meiner Ruchlosigkeit flechten.” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, 1792, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, pp. 25–27 (spelling in the original).

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with intelligence, as she knows how to rephrase Goethe, and recommends her worth a visit. One has to take into account, however, that these letters in the 1790s are written by three male friends of about 20–25 years of age, who visit salons, theaters, and brothels together on the same evening and whose letters contain many elements of young men challenging each other’s virility. Needless to say, in the letters of the same years to his fiancée, Wilhelm von Humboldt does not use these terms. Humboldt himself saw his erotic allusions as specific to this correspondence, as he confirmed several times in his letters to his friends. The overall discourse of the three men on the Jewish friends was gendered, in a way that generally the salon guests talked much more about the women and even made that a stereotype of the Jews: “The true Viennese are similar to the Jews: the men are no good, but they have some remarkable women.”46 Whenever they refer to the Jewish body, they mark it as fascinating but different: mentioned are yellowish skin, black hair, and, mainly with women, something “piquant.” When in Halle, Humboldt misses the Jewish element: “just plain Christians, nothing piquant, not a black hair.”47 Later, travelling in Spain, Humboldt would find himself reminded of Henriette Herz by the Spanish women with the black hair and their remarkable features. Not only did they “see” differences, or read them into their friends, they prided themselves to be able to do so: In Halle I met little [David] Veit, who is famous there for abandoning all Jewishness. I of course, knew better and saw the circumcision in every fingertip. But who, then, has taken so many risks (that of being known as too good-natured, at least), and so many troubles to acquire this cognition of Jewishness, like we have?48

While Humboldt was generally fond of erotic metaphors, with Friedrich Gentz and Gustav von Brinckmann it increased over time. When they started a (new) 46 “Mit den eigentlichen Wienern verhält es sich ungefähr wie mit den Juden; das heißt, die Männer taugen alle nichts, aber es gibt einige sehr ausgezeichnete Weiber.” Friedrich von Gentz an Gustav von Brinckmann, July 11, 1804, in: Wittichen, Letters, 1910, p. 203 47 “Lauter Platte Christen, nichts Piquantes, kein schwarzes Haar.” To Gustav von Brinckmann, October 7, 1796, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Biefe, p. 87. 48 “[…] als dass ich in Halle den kleinen Veit gesehen habe, der dort überall für seine Ablegung des Judentum sehr berühmt ist. Ich urhteilte freilich anders und sah die Beschneidung in jeder Fingerspitze. Aber wer hat auch mit so großer Gefahr (wenigstens in Absicht des Rufs der Gutmütigkeit) und so vieler Mühseligkeit sich solche Notion des Judenthums verschafft, als wir?” Wilhelm von Humboldt to Gustav von Brinckmann, October 7, 1796, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 87. The German term “Notion” can refer both to the knowledge of something, and to the ability to recognize things.



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career and moved into new, aristocratic circles, they tried to reason with the “foreign” race and style, of which – suddenly – they found too much in Rahel Levin’s circle or in the Arnstein house. In the 1790s Friedrich Gentz deliberately persuaded his friends to introduce him to the Itzig family, and to their daughter, the Viennese hostess Fanny von Arnstein. During one of her visits to Berlin, he gets acquainted with “the new Jews” and, in the tone of the time and correspondence he cannot decide what is more beautiful to him, the neck of Mrs Arnstein or the peace of Amiens.49 When he moved to Vienna, he praised the Arnstein salon, which he called “the greatest house,” “the greatest and only platform for newcomers.” He admittedly profited from its good connections, “the very Jewish relations, my dear B., which we underestimated often, and which I now deify daily.”50 Only a year later, however, Gentz found the most aggressive terms for his hostess, calling her “the vulgar Jewish creature (“einer gemeinen Judenkreatur”),” “diehard Jewess (“einer so eingefleischten Jüdin”),” and ends a letter with “Curse the Jews!” (“Der T. hole die Juden”)! 51 His being better established in Viennese society – or the reason he gives himself, that Fanny von Arnstein had treated a friend badly – might account for distance, but does not explain the proliferation of invectives, such as “true Jewish anger” (“mit wahrer Judenwut”) or “Jewish changeling” (“Wechselbalg von Judenkinde”).52 The short period between his praise and his damnation of the house Arnstein saw his reading of a spate of antisemitic publications. Friedrich Gentz’s lawyer was C. W. F. Grattenauer, who around 1803 became Prussia’s leading antisemitic publicist. Shocked at first, when he saw himself connected with that man, Gentz gave his publications a closer look – and changed his mind. As can be followed step by step in his correspondence with Brinckmann, Gentz first became fascinated with Grattenauer’s rhethorics and then was convinced by his argument. Grattenauer’s most successful pamphlet Wider die Juden (Against the Jews), published in 1803 with many editions soon to follow, was a warning against over-acculturated Jews and gave some recipes on how to “detect” them in society. Jewish women, he argued, were taught all sorts of talents, but did not 49 Friedrich Gentz to Gustav von Brinckmann, September 20, 1801 and March 1802, in: Wittichen, Letters, 1910, pp. 79, 91. 50 “Das Arnsteinersche Haus ist die größte und gewissermaßen die einzige Ressource aller hier ankommenden Fremden. […] Judenverhältnisse, die wir, mein lieber B., so oft gering geschätzt haben, und ie ich jetzt täglich im staube verehre[…],” Friedrich Gentz to Gustav von Brinckmann, August 11, 1802, in: Wittichen, Letters, 1910, pp. 97–98. 51 Friedrich Gentz to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 3 and 28, 1803, in: Wittichen, Letters, 1910, pp. 178, 180, 181. 52 Friedrich Gentz to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 28, 1803 and June 1804, in: Wittichen, Letters, pp. 181, 199.

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possess the true femininity to make use of them. “They show their culture […] everywhere, and even look for opportunities to show off, but in doing so they prove that they are not truly cultivated but only constructed.” Grattenauer uses the term appretirt, which referred to a piece of cloth that had artificially been brought to shine.53 Despite his ongoing dislike of “the Jews,” Gentz continued his friendship with other former Jewish hostesses. Hannah Arendt considered him a typical representative of early antisemites, who had their personal “Exception Jew.”

From Praising the Settee to the “Judensofa” Arendt’s theory certainly held true for Friedrich Gentz, but it does not explain the development of his and Humboldt’s close friend Gustav von Brinckmann. The Berlin-based Swedish diplomat has become personalized proof of the degree of emancipation lived by salon society. Interestingly enough, and rather typical for the ambiguous reception of the Jewish salon, Brinckmann quotes from different correspondences served as proof for a very liberal attitude of the guests as well as for their unmasked antisemitism.54 A parallel analysis of his correspondence with Berlin hostesses in the period in question can shed light on these ambiguities.55 As the liberal and antisemitic quotes derive from different correspondences, one might think that the diplomat separated or changed his Weltanschauung according to his correspondence partner’s background, and changed prejudices 53 “Sie zeigen ihre Kultur […] überall, […] dadurch zeigen sie aber, daß sie nicht gebildet, sondern nur appretirt sind;” C. W. F. Grattenauer, “Erster Nachtrag zu seiner Erklärung über seine Schrift Wider die Juden,” cited after Krobb, Beautiful Jewess, 1993, pp. 76–77. 54 Brinckmann’s statement that in Rahel’s salon “the noblemen and the great were rather excused than praised for their rank” (“den Großen und Vornehmen [wurde] ihr Stand eher verziehen, als zugute gerechnet”) is often quoted as proof of the openness of the salon. See e.g. Seibert, Literarischer Salon, 1993, p. 335. The quote is found in an obituary. Brinckmann, “Rahel,” 1854, p. 652. Brinckmann’s remarks to the countess von Voss on the “Egyptian Style” of his friends, from 1805, on the other hand, are referred to by Barbara Hahn as an example of a “perspective in which those women appeared from the start as alien, exotic beings.” Hahn, Jewess Pallas Athena, 2005, p. 38. 55 Brinckmann is particularly relevant for salon research due to three of his characteristic features: as a networker, letter writer, and collector. Not only was he a regular visitor and often family friend of every open house in Berlin around 1800, he was an active networker between the circles he frequented. Thirdly, and luckily for posterity, he seemed to have been a letter-maniac. Already to contemporaries he was known for his exceptional love of letter-writing. He collected samples of full correspondences of each of his correspondence partners and took them with him when touring Europe as diplomat.



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accordingly, but that is not the case. Reading through his letters to aristocratic friends of the time, Brinckmann quite regularly refers to his “old friends” like Rahel Levin Varnhagen or Henriette and Dorothea Mendelssohn and one does not come across a single mention of the Jewish background before the year 1800. Brinckmann’s tone does not change with his letter partners, but over time. In the research on which this chapter is based, four long-lasting correspondences were closely studied;56 with Rahel Levin and Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy (born Lea Salomon and part of the Itzig family) on the one side and with Luise von Voss and her mother on the other. The main topics of all correspondences were the same: literature – recent publications and favorite authors, other cultural events in society, acquaintances, and most of all, compliments to his readers. On all sides, a large part of all letters and billets served as a link to the respective correspondence partner, all sides continuously re/assured each other how much the writing and the particular understanding meant to him/her. Also the relation of speaking and writing, the possibilities and the desire to exchange minds, were frequently dwelled upon, as was the process of writing itself. Brinckmann encouraged all his female correspondence partners to write and develop their own opinion, e.g. by complimenting them as being his most intelligent and educated friend (“geistreiche Freundin”). Another interesting component of his writing is his openly expressed desire to make all his educated lady friends acquainted with each other. He encourages them to meet or take up a correspondence – he can be seen as the initiator of the contact between Luise von Voss and Henriette Mendelssohn, for which both sides express their thanks. On at least one occasion he organizes a tea at his house to bring all his female friends together. Having identified Brinckmann a networker between the circles, it is not to be overlooked that he always acted as a diplomat knowing the proper way of addressing people. While discussing the same topics, the tone of the letters to the aristocratic ladies is different from the salon tone he used in his letters to his old friends. These continued to be light-hearted and kept up an informal, conversational element, even over the Berlin–Paris distance. While a letter to Lea Mendelssohn could start with a question or with affected indignation, why he never heard from her…, no letter to the countess would lack the formal “gnädiges Fräulein” somewhere in the first paragraph. While discussing the alleged French national features with all Berlin hostesses and naming frivolity as one of its central features, Brinckmann would assure Luise von Voss that frivolity was

56 See Lund, Der Berliner “Jüdische Salon,” 2012, pp. 435–530.

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not in her character, but he credited Rahel Levin Varnhagen with the ability to deal with frivolities and worship Goethe properly.57 While Brinckmann continued all correspondences, after his return from Paris there was a noticeable shift in intensity. Many more letters were dedicated to the countess von Voss, of whose salon he prided himself to be a citizen now.58 It is only after 1800, that matters of Jewishness come (back) into his letters, if only, at first, by way of joke and metaphor. In 1802, when he found himself unhappily in love – a regular feature of his letters – he suddenly blamed his rival as being a Jew. Most visible is the change of tone in his description of the circle of Rahel Levin, which he continued to frequent. While he had written odes o her “moral settee” in the 1790s, it was now a “Jewish sofa” (“Judensofa”).59 In his letters to the countess he complained about the “secretion of vulgarity” in Rahel’s circle, and – though he still enjoyed her ways of talking – “realized” some element of awkwardness in her style, which he called Egyptian. However, reading the quote in context, gives a more complex picture of the elements of his criticism: “Please forgive my oriental ways of speech – it’s just that for days I have been in contact with the chosen people. Yesterday evening I gave a tea for about 20 people, on which occasion the baronet Dedem and I were the only Christened.” It is important to note that Brinckmann himself was the initiator of the meeting with people he called “oriental,” and not all of them were: “Most Jewesses, I’d like to say, show a certain Egyptian Style, a rigidity in outline, which makes the whole impression somewhat awkward, although, on the other side, they have more power and originality […]. Our famous Levin is the best and truest example of this Egyptian Style, of which her sister has hardly any trace.” While rigidity and originality are elements of the “oriental” stereotype, power is not. It is also striking that he finds two different types, one Egyptian sister and one with grace, in the same family.60 So it is not in the blood – yet. 57 “Aber Sie, Gottlob! verstehen sich doch auch auf Frivolität, ohne deswegen im ernsten Gespräch nicht zu gestehen, daß nur bei denjenigen ächtes Heil zu suchen sei, die Goethen’ in der Ursprache lesen können,” March 25, 1798; writing to Luise von Voss, Brinckmann compares the bad “frivolous ways of the French” to her, Voss’, “true Germanness” (“treffliche Deutschheit”), and promises her never to become French. Gustav von Brinckmann to Luise von Voss, November 28, 1799, unpublished, GSA 5/26,2. 58 He thanked his hostess for “Bürgerrecht” in the salon. Gustav von Brinckmann to Luise von Voss, September 2, 1801, unpublished, GSA 5/26,4. 59 To Rahel Levin Varnhagen, June 10, 1793, unpublished, SV, 38, and to Luise von Voss, October 10, 1802, unpublished, GSA 5/26,5. 60 “Verzeihen Sie mir meine orientalischen Redefiguren, denn seit einigen Tagen lebe ich einzig mit dem auserwählten Volke. Gestern Abend war bei mir ein Thee von beinah 20 Personen,



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Oriental figures of speech might have served to create a distance and explain a certain amount of fascination at the same time. Barbara Hahn has interpreted the references to Egypt in this context as means by which the first acculturated Jewesses are “catapulted into historically distant times and spaces, so that foreignness and difference can be discerned on their bodies.”61 The fact that Brinckmann talks in this letter about visible marks of origin (“Gepräge ihrer Abstammung”) to draw physiognomical conclusions (“einen fysiognomischen Schluss auf ihr Inneres”) might be explained by the rest of the letter, in which he talks about his latest reading, Gall’s book on phrenology. Yet, while this book might have inspired a closer look at heads, it does not account for the general change in Brinckmann’s perspective, the proliferation of terms such as “Judenwirtschaft” and “Judenkultur” in his letters after 1800. Asking what made him change his mind or style of writing, there are several explanations at hand: Like his friend Friedrich Gentz in the 1790s, Brinckmann is fascinated by the intellectual capacity of his Jewish acquaintances as well as of their wide-spread contacts. In 1801, Brinckmann had seen the great world and had been a guest of Mme Staël’s salon, he had been promoted, and he was confronted with the much wider range of sociability now available in Berlin. The new variety of entertainment after 1800, with regular tea parties at aristocratic or diplomatic houses, is frequently commented upon in contemporary letters. Brinckmann felt in need of a new self-positioning, which he acquired by a new “us” and “them”: “There is more wit lost in front of this Jewish sofa on one evening than in three of our assemblies,” he tells the countess.62 This gives him an excuse for enjoying the wit while at the same time positioning himself on the other side of “our assemblies.” Krobb argues that while Jewish women of these circles, such as Henriette Herz and Fanny Arnstein, were described as beautiful women by their contemporaries, the term “beautiful Jewess” was not used in the letters or memoirs before 1800 in a specific meaning. On the other side, gentile women could be marked as “Jewish” to disgrace them, such as Bettina von Arnim who was compared to wobei Baron Dedem und ich die einzigen Getauften waren. […] Die meisten Jüdinnen verrathen, möchte ich sagen, einen gewissen Egyptischen Styl, eine Härte der Umrisse, welche der ganzen Figur etwas unbeholfenes giebt; ob ich ihnen gleich von einer anderen Seite mehr Kraft und Eigenthümlichkeit zugestehe, […] Unsere berühmte Levin [erstmals!] ist das wahre Musterbeispiel dieses Egyptischen Styls, wovon ihre jüngere Schwester beinah keine Spur verräth” (emphasis in the text). Gustav von Brinckmann to Luise von Voss, GSA 5/26,8. 61 Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena, 2005, p. 38. 62 “Aufrichtig kann ich Ihnen versichern, daß vor diesem Judensofa an Einem Abend mehr Wiz,Verstand und Einfälle vergeudet wird, als in 3 unserer Asembleen.” Gustav von Brinckmann to Luise von Voss, October 10, 1802, GSA 5/26, 5.

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“a little Berlin Jewess” (“eine kleine Berliner Jüdin”) by Caroline Schlegel Schelling.63 Around 1800 a new quality of criticism comes into play. Friedrich von Gentz, for example, while still praising some Jewish women, after 1800 made a point of generalizing about Jewesses, and that “all of them” did not know true love.64 Humboldt, all of a sudden, in 1803, talks of Jews as “such people of Asian race” (“so etwas von Asiatischer Race”).65 This might have been an indirect quotation of the earlier public discourse on civic betterment, during which e.g. Christian Wilhelm Dohm had argued that even “unfortunate Asiatic refugees” i.e. the Jews, must get civic rights.66 Humboldt was well acquainted with the text, as Dohm had been his private teacher. Yet it is still striking that this notion of geographic distance reasserts itself after 1800, if not in a geographical sense. Indeed, while the difference of context is noticeable – Asia, Egypt – and the set of stereotype seems not fixed yet, it can safely be said that notions of race, foreign descent, and even oriental features return to the conversations shortly after 1800. Notions of exoticism and eroticism had been there all the time.

“This is not Jew-Hatred yet.” Reactions of the Salon Women While the comments of the salon guests have been frequently quoted, it has often been overlooked that the Jewish hostesses were fully aware of their ambivalent reception and the shift of preference. Already in the 1790s a Jewish hostess complained to Brinckmann about “the contempt that G.[entz] and H.[umboldt] showed for her nation as such on so many occasions.” Sophie Fränkel, a very popular salonière in the 1790s and a very close friend of Humboldt’s “knew for sure that H. talked even about those houses, where he was met with the warmest friendship, with mockery, calling them Jewish rabble.”67 63 Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 70. 64 “Noch nie hat eine Jüdin – ich spreche ohne Ausnahme – die whare Liebe gekannt!,” Friedrich von Gentz to GVB September 19, 1807, quoted in: ibid. 65 To Gustav von Brinckmann, April 30, 1803, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 149. 66 Christian Wilhelm Conrad von Dohm, Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781), cited after Hess, Germans, Jews, 2002, p. 2. 67 “[…] die Verachtung, die G. und H. bei so vielen Gelegenheiten, gegen ihre Nation an sich geäußert, [and that she] gewiß wüßte, daß H. auch von den Häusern, wo er am meisten Freundschaft genossen, gegen andre mit bittrem Spott über die jüdischen Rakers gesprochen hätte.” Sophie Fränkel to Gustav von Brinckmann, reported in his letter to Rahel Levin Varnhagen, April



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After 1800, when Brinckmann made himself scarce at the Jewish homes, Lea Mendelssohn challenged him, did he really have a toothache or rather “sweet reasons as Mrs Unzelmann, or sublime reasons as the countess Voss, or frivolous reasons as Madame d’Engstroem?”68 Rahel Levin hated to be lied to.69 When Brinckmann repeatedly declared himself to be too busy or too sick to visit, she offered her own explanation: “here once is the truth. I don’t want to treat you as ill; my distaste for untruthfulness is at its height […] you’re just psychologically finished with our little circle.” Confronted this openly, Brinckmann gave one of his rarer direct answers, on the same day: “On the contrary, with people like you I am never finished, but with your big circle all too soon.”70 Levin Varnhagen knew very well that Humboldt disliked the mixture of guests at her house to a degree that he could not stand being part of it. Their communication is characterized by phases of friendly intercourse and longer breaks, one of which she laconically commented upon: “Humboldt hates me again … (“Humboldt haßt mich jetzt wieder”).”71 That this is no reference to personal hatred becomes clear when looking at the 1790s, where Humboldt’s friends regularly commented on his “hating” her ways of sociability. Some remarks show that the hostesses were aware of different degrees of anti-Jewish or antisemitic attitudes. In 1802 Rahel Levin Varnhagen commented on a guest: “Don’t you think it’s funny how Mr. Pitaq falls from one anti-Jewish mockery – because it’s not Jew-hatred yet – into another?”72

15,1794, unpublished, SV, 38. Brinckmann prided himself on being different. The report continues: “This, she said (such mockery) she had at least not had from me!” (“Dies hätte sie von mir wenigstens nie gehört”)! (All emphases in the text.) 68 Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Gustav von Brinckmann, February 10, 1802, unpublished, BA, M. 69 “Hier ist endlich Einmal die Wahrheit! ich mag Sie nicht wie einen ‘Verwundeten’ behandlen! Mein Ekel vor aller Unwahrheit ist auf’s höchste gestiegen; und mich interessiert nichts mehr, etc:! […] Sie sind psychologisch mit dem kleinen Kreise fertig, und lassen sich nur soviel incomodiren, als es Ihre Geschäftspflicht Ihnen auflegt,” May 10, 1805, unpublished, SV, 38. 70 “Im Gegentheil mit Personen, wie Sie [sic] werde ich nie fertig; aber freil. mit Ihrem grossen Zirkel sehr bald.” May 19, 1805, unpublished, SV, 38. 71 “Finden Sie es nicht komisch dass H.v. Pitaq bey seinem Judenschimpf – denn Judenhaß ist es noch nicht – von einem Juden immer in den andern fällt?” Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 6, 1802, unpublished, BA V. Interestingly – and maybe intentionally she makes a difference between “Judenschimpf” and “Judenhass” in a letter to Brinckmann whose own letters just began to be filled with anti-Jewish mockeries. 72 Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Gustav von Brinckmann, December 6, 1802, unpublished, BA V. She talks of “Judenschimpf” and “Judenhass.” Interestingly – and maybe intentionally – she mentioned this to Brinckmann whose own letters just began to be filled with anti-Jewish mockeries.

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Maybe, by not reading too much into the changing attitudes of their guests, the hostesses tried to balance the transformation out in discourse. When in 1809 Wilhelm von Humboldt sent Rahel Levin Varnhagen a little present in the form of a rosary – years before she got baptized – she did not mention any religious implications in her letter of thanks. Very elegantly she thanked him for his fashionable present, turning what might have been an offense into a piece of fashion. In the same letter she reminded her distanced former guest of what they could and should have read and studied together, positioning herself as his intellectual equal. She ends the letter on a polite note, albeit with an ironic reference to his new position in the ministry, by asking the “Staatsrath” to have the streets in her beloved Prussia improved.73 The battle over the right of self-definition had not been lost yet. The years 1811/12 saw the culmination of the social integration of the Jews and its counter movement in Prussia. While the Emancipation Edict went through its last readings, the aristocrat and romantic poet, Achim von Arnim, founded the German Table Society, a patriotic men’s club, which deliberately excluded women, Frenchmen, Jews, and “philistines” from its meetings. Table society meant, according to their statutes, to meet in an exclusive setting fortnightly for good food, drink, and speeches. Their patriotism expressed itself in the ceremonies, e.g. the first meeting took place on the anniversary of the coronation of Prussia’s first king; poems were written and sung together to celebrate Queen Louise and Frederick II, whose birthdays were celebrated. While their historical references connected them to Prussia, in their speeches they emphasized their Germanness, which had to be “defended” especially against the French and the Jews.74 The table society has often been said to have been founded as counter-salon, but this might be an exaggeration, as “salons” were not official institutions, nor were they considered particularly influential at that time. It is remarkable, however, that some of the members of the exclusive table society were (former) salon guests or friends with Jewish hostesses, such as Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué or Schleiermacher. It is difficult to tell from the sources75 how often individuals attended the meetings, but we must assume that they were acquainted with its more popular antisemitic texts of Arnim and Brentano, which circulated or were even printed. Again, the Jewish hostesses knew of this society, and though their immediate

73 See Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s long letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt, June 28 and 30, 1809, in: Levin Varnhagen, Buch des Andenkens, vol. 2, 2011, pp. 127–133. 74 For the speeches held at the meetings of the Table Society, see Nienhaus, Texte, 2008. 75 All available sources are evaluated by Nienhaus, Tischgesellschaft, 2003.



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reactions did not come down to us, we know that Rahel Levin Varnhagen found Arnim’s texts “impertinent.”76 The year 1811 was also the year of the notorious duel between Achim von Arnim and Moritz Itzig. The latter, a nephew of the well known hostess, Sara Levy, found his aunt affronted by Arnim’s manners in her salon and demanded an excuse, then a duel. When Arnim refused, denying Jews the right to honour, Itzig attacked him with a stick in a public house. Arnim took the matter to court, but the court did not hand out a severe punishment against “the Jew,” and Arnim complained everywhere. When Ludwig Robert, Rahel’s brother, came to read the files, he decided to write about the story, to make Arnim’s lies public. In the very same year when some of her guests amused themselves with antisemitic speeches, another friend attributed Rahel Levin Varnhagen with the finest understanding for Prussian matters. Alexander von der Marwitz had met Rahel in 1809 and immediately started an intensive correspondence that lasted till his early death in war in 1814. While a large part of the correspondence is dedicated to the personal development of the young aristocrat, there is also much discussion of political literature and Prussian history. In her letters to Marwitz and Varnhagen, for a short time her rival suitors, Rahel enthusiastically talks about her eagerness to support her country, Prussia. Several times she calls herself indebted to Frederick II or even his spiritual daughter – “every good, every advantage […] can be ascribed to his influence” – and very proud of the Prussian soldiers.77 This was not just theoretical pride, but was turned into practical help. Having co-organized an army hospital in Berlin, Rahel Levin Varnhagen put all her efforts and contacts into setting up a help-office in Prague, where she had fled in exile. Here, almost for the first time in her letters, she expressed happiness in being a part of something. Many salon women acted as and declared themselves to be Prussian patriots during the Wars of Liberation: Fanny von Arnstein is known to have been watched by Austria’s secret police and reported as overly Prussian during the congress of Vienna; Sophie Meyer Grotthus wrote against Madame de Staël; and even Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel in her Paris exile followed the ups and downs of her “Fatherland” Prussia.78 76 See Hahn, “Eine Impertinenz!,” 2001. 77 To Karl August Varnhagen, December 28, 1808, quoted in Arendt, Rahel, 1997, p. 176. For a detailed discussion of Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s patriotism, see Wirtz, Patriotismus und Weltbürgertum, 2006, pp. 109–128. 78 See her diary entry of June 1807, in: Wieneke, Caroline und Dorothea Schlegel, 2011, pp. 392– 393. “Ich hatte die große Satisfaktion, unserem Lande im Ausland Ehre zu machen; was ich that, that doch eine Preußin: und ich war bescheiden, hülfreich, gut, sanft; und beliebt, und das kam auf die Rechnung der Preußinnen: ich hatte die große Satisfaktion, nicht zu Hause zu sein – wo

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Returning to Berlin, Rahel Levin Varnhagen sums up her pride and her difficulties on positioning herself as a Prussian: I had the great satisfaction to be a credit to my country when abroad; what I did was done by a Prussian woman: and I was modest, helpful, good, gentle; and well liked, and all Prussian women were credited with that; I had the great satisfaction not to be at home, where I still have to prove that I have the right to be noble, where every stone reminds me of this from the past, and where I am still required to play my old role.79

Conclusion From the very beginning the reflections of the salons were gendered in the way primarily Jewish women were seen as exceptional in matters of education, acculturation, and appearance. Also right from the start, talking among the gentiles about Jewish friends and relations was continuously related to their body: During the high-times of the salons, there are multiple references to be found to erotic and exotic notions of the salon women. Concurrence with enlightened ideals was propagated in official texts; in the letters, difference was marked as a factor of attraction. When public opinion turned negative, Jewish women were still discussed as avant-garde, or “over”-emancipation. Their “otherness” could now be “easily detected” in their skin-color or “Egyptian” figure. While among the gentile guests there is a continuous undertone of otherness, the salon women themselves avoided fixed terms of identity or worked with bridging notions, such as the cosmopolitan understanding of intellectuals, or gender role play. The years 1811–1813 made the development explicit: While Jewish women saw themselves and acted as Prussian or German patriots, they were at the same time discursively constructed as outsiders, also by former guests. The question of when the self-orientalization of Berlin Jewish women began remains to be answered and might be answered with a look at the Beer family. Rahel Levin Varnhagen was by no means the only salon woman active in the Prussian cause. Amalie Beer famously and restlessly helped in Berlin, for which initiative she was decorated by the Prussian king and became a member of the “Luisenorden.” The fact that Beer got the decoration in a different shape – the ich immer noch beweisen soll, daß ich das Recht habe edel zu sein: und wo jeder Stein mich an solches von sonst erinnert und ich durchaus die alte vorstellen soll!” To the Countess of Schlabrendorf, December 4, 1819, in: Levin Varnhagen, Buch des Andenkens, vol. 4, 2011, p. 202. 79 To the Countess of Schlabrendorf, December 4, 1819, in: Levin Varnhagen, Buch des Andenkens, vol. 4, 2011, p. 202.



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original would have been a Christian cross – has been interpreted controversially.80 Historians saw it as a sign of respect, members of the Jewish community saw it as a sign of the king disliking the idea of a Jewish women being awarded with a Christian symbol – as Marcus Robert, a brother, reports to Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Whatever the intention, as the ladies of the town had found no “worthier person,” Amalie Beer was officially honored as Jewish defender of the Prussian cause. Two generations later, her granddaughter Cornelia, also a successful hostess of society, had herself portrayed several times in oriental costume by her husband, the well-known artist Gustav Richter. Richter was a famous representative of the then fashionable oriental style and chose his Jewish wife to sit for many an “oriental setting.” Whether this is an instance of orientalization or an expression of the self-confidence of a fashionable couple is a question still under debate. Yet in the decade before and after 1800, there is no element of self-orientalization or marginalization to be found in the letters of the Berlin salon women. On the contrary, they confronted their former guests and their new or re-invented stereotypes in ironic or direct manner. And stereotypes were there with them, right from the beginning. It did not take the national awakening of the anti-Napoleonic wars to bring back notions of difference into everyday writing. As the close look at the correspondence exchanged between long-term male guests has shown, visiting Jewish homes and intermingling with Jewish women still was not the done thing around 1800, but something exciting. Even though some of these relations turned into longtime acquaintances, the salonières’ Jewishness remained an unacknowledged presence. Visits to Jewish friends had not to be legitimized among educated enlightened men, but would be ironized, played with, put into perspective. We are left with a kind of paradox: “Jewish” on the one hand was something outdated, something you could leave behind, as the women were expected to convert, and at the same time it was discussed as a quality that was definitely written into their bodies. Visiting Jewish homes often, Humboldt said, he and his friends acquired a notion of “Jewishness” and could now “recognize circumcision in a fingertip.” Stereotypes could be ignored for moments or transitory periods, or dealt with ironically in a certain salon tone, but they could also quickly be reintroduced by individuals in order to distance themselves from their (former) hostesses. The light-hearted tone amongst Jews and gentiles can tell us something about the “ordinariness” of conversion, or rather about how the Christians saw this as a natural phenomenon. The act of conversion was acceptable as a step for a Jew to get ahead socially. To seriously become a Christian or struggle with that question

80 For an image and debates on the design, see Kuhrau, Amalie Beer, 2004.

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was not discussed – or by others simply seen as impossible and unwanted, as the “delightful otherness” would get lost. At the end of his life Wilhelm von Humboldt complained about the loss of authenticity: I dare say no real Jews are born any longer. They all are born with a touch of Christianity, and the old ones die out one by one. The Little one [Rahel Levin Varnhagen] is useless after her marriage, the Herz and the Schlegel are very Christian in Rome, our Jette [Henriette Mendelssohn] in Paris is the last real one, whom I like to see, totally untouched by Christianity.81

81 “Aber ich behaupte, daß gar keine rechten Juden mehr gebohren [!] werden. Sie bringen alle schon ein Stück Christenthum mit auf die Welt, und die alten gehen aus nach und nach. Mit der Kleinen ist seit ihrer Verheiratung gar nichts mehr anzufangen. Die Herz und die Schlegel sind sehr christlich in Rom. Die Jette in Paris ist noch die, die ich zuletzt am liebsten gesehen habe. Vollkommene Reinheit von aller Christlichkeit.” To Gustav von Brinckmann, June 11, 1818, in: Leitzmann, Humboldts Briefe, 1939, p. 178.

Kathrin Wittler

“Good to Think” (Re)Conceptualizing German-Jewish Orientalism The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a perplexing variety of orientalizations of Jews and self-orientalizations by Jews which have lately received increasing scholarly attention1 and exhibition space.2 The most well-known – but by no means only – example in the German context is the fascination with the heyday of Jewish culture in al-Andalus, which found its most visible expression in Moorish-style synagogues from Budapest to Berlin3 and its most sophisticated literary articulation in Heinrich Heine’s poem “Jehuda ben Halevy,” published in 1851 as part of his Hebrew Melodies.4 Links such as these between the history of German orientalism and the history of the Jews in Germany put basic assumptions in both these fields of study to the test. While polemics from Grattenauer to Treitschke against the so-called “Asian” or “oriental” Jews provide ample evidence for an antisemitic, exclusionary orientalism,5 German-Jewish orientalism challenges the commonly held belief that orientalism is no more than just another variation or, as Edward W. Said claimed, a “strange, secret sharer”6 of Western antisemitism.7 German-Jewish orientalism indeed appears disturbing to the extent that many scholars have used labels such as “ironic,” “strange,” and “bizarre” to describe it.8 Ranen Omer-Sherman even saw a “perverse pride” in the Jews’ “fully embracing the odious essence they were accused of.”9 In such lines of argument, all forms of Jewish orientalism tend to be lumped together 1 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005; Aschheim, The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism, 2010. 2 Sigal-Klagsbald (ed.), Les Juifs dans l’orientalisme, 2012; Manor-Friedman/Zalmona (eds.), Kadima, 1998. 3 See still unsurpassed, Hammer-Schenk, Synagogen in Deutschland, 1981. See also the questionable assertions in Kalmar, “Moorish Style,” 2001. 4 Wittler, “Deutsch-jüdische Orientimaginationen,” 2010. 5 Grattenauer, Erklärung an das Publikum, 1803, p.  36; Treitschke, Deutsche Kämpfe, 1896, pp. 43–44. 6 Said, Orientalism, 2003, p.  27. See Pasto, “Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question,” 1998. 7 I use the unhyphenated spelling “antisemitism” to avoid the notion of an entity “‘Semitism” which “anti-Semitism” opposes. 8 Kalmar, “Jewish Orientalism,” 1999, pp. 307–308; Schroeter, “Orientalism and the Jews of the Mediterranean,” 1994, 189. 9 Omer-Sherman, “Stabilities and Instabilities of Jewish Orientalism,” 2006, 4.

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as expressions of Jewish self-hatred and as the blowback of assimilation. This model, however, does justice to the complexity of neither German-Jewish history nor the history of German orientalism. Starting with a literary analysis of Fanny Lewald’s novel, Jenny (1843), I will bring together recent theoretical revisions in both fields of study in order to open up an alternative perspective on the intersections between the (literary) history of Jews and orientalism in Germany, applying the phrase “good to think” as coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss.10

Orientalization as a Tool for Negotiating the Emancipation of Women and Jews in Fanny Lewald’s Novel Jenny (1843) Fanny Lewald was one of the most successful and prolific writers in nineteenthcentury Germany.11 Raised in a Jewish family in Prussian Königsberg, she converted to Christianity at the age of nineteen and embarked on her career as a writer some fifteen years later. Her second novel, Jenny, published in 1843, draws on numerous autobiographical elements and promotes the intertwined emancipation of women and of Jews.12 A sketch of the novel’s plot may illustrate its political stance. The protagonists are the two children of a wealthy Jewish banker called Meier. Jenny Meier, a lively and perceptive young woman, falls in love with her Protestant tutor, Gustav Reinhard. Her brother, Eduard Meier, a young doctor committed to the project of Jewish emancipation, falls in love with Clara Horn, the daughter of a Christian antisemitic merchant family. Both these ventures at love fail due to interreligious differences, social, and political impediments. Reinhard marries Jenny’s Christian housemate Therese instead, while Clara weds the Christian Englishman Hughes. Eduard thereafter commits himself entirely to his struggle for Jewish emancipation, while Jenny embarks on a second love affair several years later with the liberal nobleman Walter. Their wish to marry proves fatal: Lord Walter dies in a duel he himself has instigated to avenge an anti-Jewish insult to his betrothed Jenny, and Jenny pines broken-hearted at his deathbed. 10 This essay is based on research for my doctoral dissertation on the role of German Jews in nineteenth-century orientalism, in preparation at the Humboldt University, Berlin. 11 On Lewald’s life and work see Rheinberg, Fanny Lewald, 1990; Schneider, Fanny Lewald, 1996; Ujma (ed.), Fanny Lewald, 2011. 12 The interrelatedness of discourses on female and Jewish emancipation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is discussed in Lund, Der Berliner “jüdische Salon” um 1800, 2012, pp. 83–116.



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The novel ends with Eduard’s solemn declaration at Jenny’s grave: “We live […] to see a time in which no such sacrifices will bleed on the altar of prejudices! We want to live to see a future of freedom, of the emancipation of our people!”13 In the novel’s depiction of this crisis-laden transitional stage in the process of emancipation, all things oriental appear as residues of biblical origin, of age-old ancestry and of a “Southern” Jewish national character at odds with the German “Northern” present. Oriental remnants of this kind are frequently described as manifesting themselves in Jewish bodies, and especially in the body of a friend of the family called Steinheim, who stems from an Orthodox Jewish home. The narrator tells us that he had a big, sturdy physique and a full-blooded, red-brown complexion. His frizzy black hair, his dark eyes and the dense bluish beard could just as well belong to the southerner as to the Jew, and they caused many people to consider him a beautiful man, while others found the charcoal-black eyes petrifying and uncanny, the shoulders too high, the heavy neck too short and hands and feet too big, that all this rendered any claim on beauty impossible.14

By juxtaposing two different modes of perception in this passage, Lewald spells out the ambivalence that was common in the nineteenth century when assessing male Jewish bodies. Steinheim’s “southern” features (his “red-brown complexion,” the “frizzy black hair,” and his “dark eyes”) exert an exotic attraction on some, while others perceive him as ugly: the excessive shortness, bigness or length of individual parts of the body (“the shoulders too high, the heavy neck too short and hands and feet too big”) were standard elements in caricatures of Jews, hundreds of which were circulated in newspapers and magazines at the time.15 When introducing its fictive character Steinheim, the novel thus inscribes his body with an ethno-aesthetic value strongly resonant of contemporaneous stereotypic representations. As an anti-type to Steinheim, Jenny’s future fiancé Gustav Reinhard is introduced as a perfect “image of the German” (“Bild des Deutschen”), whose melan13 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 2, p. 322: “Wir leben, […] um eine Zeit zu erblicken, in der keine solche Opfer auf dem Altare der Vorurtheile bluten! Wir wollen leben, um eine freie Zukunft, um die Emancipation unsers Volkes zu sehen!” All translations from Lewald’s novel are mine. 14 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 32–33: Er hatte “eine große, kräftige Figur und einen vollblütigen, rotbraunen Teint. Sein krauses schwarzes Haar, die dunkeln Augen und der starke bläuliche Bart konnten ebenso gut dem Südländer als dem Juden gehören, und machten, daß er von vielen Leuten für einen schönen Mann gehalten wurde, während Andere die kohlschwarzen Augen starr und unheimlich, die Schultern hoch, den starken Hals zu kurz und Hände und Füße zu groß fanden, daß dieses Alles ihm jeden Anspruch auf Schönheit unmöglich mache.” 15 See Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur, 1921; Dittmar, Die Darstellung der Juden in der populären Kunst, 1992.

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cholic aspect only increases the harmonious beauty of his tall, slim, and athletic body, his fair and soft hair, big blue eyes, and regular features. Jenny’s mistyeyed perspective on her Christian tutor is firmly grounded in the invented tradition of medieval knighthood: This is how one used to imagine, we are told, “the knights of German antiquity” (“die Ritter der deutschen Vorzeit”).16 Reinhard thus embodies an ideal of fair and handsome masculinity, whereas Steinheim, the dark Jew, represents its exotic aberration and caricaturesque deformation.17 In a strikingly stereotypic juxtaposition which all too well suits the rather crude character portrayals of this novel, the ugly/exotic Jewish Southerner Steinheim and the handsome Nordic knight Reinhard are thus juxtaposed as two ethno-aesthetic prototypes, each of which appears as a projection with a pictorial tradition of its own, both omnipresent in contemporaneous popular culture. Steinheim’s presentation as a walking caricature is even further developed and specified when his clothing is described as very studied dress, which despite its exquisite elegance lacked all taste. On that morning, he wore a short dark green bavaroy that stood oddly in contrast to an equally green sateen waistcoat and even more so to a dark red Turkish shawl which he had crossed over his breast underneath the waistcoat and fastened with a big brilliant pin. Gloves, boots and hairstyle were chosen according to the latest fashion, but it all gave the impression that he had just put on fancy dress. To a delicate observer, there was something discordant in the whole appearance that stood out objectionably.18

Describing Steinheim’s dress, Lewald completes the cliché of an assimilationist Jewish coxcomb. The phrase “very studied dress” (“sehr studierte Toilette”), and the impression of “fancy dress” (“Verkleidung”) point to the parvenu’s mimicry and thereby to the theatrical, artificial element in Steinheim’s appearance. It becomes apparent here that the dynamics of acculturation may indeed be described, as Steven Aschheim has recently suggested, in terms of performative role transformations: “From the start, Jewish acculturation was an explicitly performative project based on emulating positive role models and unlearning nega16 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, p. 64. 17 For a broad survey, see Mosse, The Image of Man, 1996. 18 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, p. 33: “[Seine Kleidung wird als] sehr studirte Toilette [beschrieben], der aber bei gesuchter Eleganz jeder Geschmack abging. Er trug an jenem Morgen einen kurzen dunkelgrünen Ueberrock, zu dem eine ebenfalls grüne Atlasweste und mehr noch ein dunkelrother türkischer Shawl sonderbar abstach, den er unter der Weste kreuzweise über die Brust gelegt und mit einer großen Brillantnadel zusammengesteckt hatte. Handschuhe, Stiefel und Frisur waren nach der modernsten Weise gewählt, aber all das stand ihm, als ob er es eben wie eine Verkleidung angelegt hätte. Es war für den feinen Beobachter etwas Unharmonisches in der ganzen Erscheinung, das störend auffallen konnte.”



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tive ones.”19 Steinheim evokes a specific histrionic phenomenon that mocked this performative drive of Jewish acculturation. His appearance being somewhat “discordant” in the eye of a “delicate observer,” Steinheim reminds of the notorious antisemitic burlesques by Karl B. Sessa, Julius von Voß, and other early nineteenth-century writers who exploited the comic effects of allegedly Jewish language, gestures, and facial expressions erupting unwillingly from underneath the polished surface of acculturated Jews’ Bildung.20 While Steinheim thus embodies the first-generation assimilating Jew, his mother is introduced, representing the parents’ generation, as the histrionic stock character of a traditional old Jewess: She jabbers in Jewish “jargon” with a “rasping voice” (“schnarrenden Stimme”) while incessantly gesticulating.21 By presenting her novel’s fictive characters as contemporaneous comedic types, Lewald thus reflects the generational fractures between old habits and newly acquired behaviors, between inner and outer values, which are by-products of the emancipation process. It is in this context that characteristics deemed Jewish-oriental, allegedly lurking from behind emulated behaviors, come into play. At one point in the novel, Eduard feels obliged to explain Steinheim’s foible for jokes and quotes from the literary canon to a non-Jewish friend. Steinheim’s whimsy is “in a way national. Unmistakably, Oriental elements still dominate within us, and even today you find, in the Polish Jew, for example, a delight in little stories just like any Oriental might display.”22 In this interpretation, Steinheim’s proclivity for quotes that exhibit his Bildung compensates for his Jewish love of the tales and anecdotes of the Aggadah, which extends as an oriental relic into the present and potentially disrupts the process of emancipation. His compensatory whimsy for literary quotes is just as exaggerated and out of tune with general rules of taste as his dress, and thus deemed unpleasant or even repulsive by other characters in the novel. In a strikingly similar utterance, later in the novel, Reinhard’s mother claims that Jenny’s faults are “in a way national” (“gewissermaßen nationell”), and displays her mistrust in what she calls a “southern fire” peeking through Jenny’s liveliness.23 Both the acculturated Jewish doctor Eduard and the young Protestant 19 Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience,” 2010, p. 21. 20 Neubauer, Judenfiguren, 1994. 21 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 194, 197. 22 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, p. 206: “[Steinheims Marotte] ist gewissermaßen nationell. Es walten in uns unverkennbar noch orientalische Elemente vor, und noch heute finden Sie, bei dem polnischen Juden zum Beispiel, eine Lust an kleinen Erzählungen, wie nur irgend ein Orientale sie haben kann.” 23 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 181–182.

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priest Reinhard’s mother regard oriental residues in the Jewish body as archaic elements that are deflected or less obvious in Jews who have attained Bildung, but that even there remain distinguishable as a disturbing reverberation of Jewish “southernness.” The novel’s ethno-aesthetic politics of the body, then, in reflecting the performative drive of the acculturation process, is distinctively structured by orientalist discourse. While it might seem at first that the text thereby conforms to the equation of orientalism and antisemitism, things turn out to be much more complex, as I will now show, by looking at one of the novel’s central scenes in which a painting by Eduard Bendemann is staged as a tableau vivant in the Meiers’ parlor. Pointing to the Jews’ origin in the ancient orient, Lewald’s novel here modifies the stereotypical ethno-aesthetics that her novel inherited from popular culture through a suggestive narrative dramaturgy. In 1832, the young artist Eduard Bendemann became a star virtually overnight when his monumental painting Captive Jews in Babylon was exhibited in Berlin. It was showcased in various German cities, widely circulated in the form of copperplate reproductions and proved so popular that it was reproduced on embroidery designs, tobacco boxes, and coloring pages.24 The canvas was perceived as a Jewish picture by a Jewish artist despite the fact that Bendemann, who had been baptized as a baby, displayed a firmly-grounded Christian belief and infused the scene with Christian symbols.25 In his picture, the dolorous Jews of Psalm 137 sit on the banks of the Euphrates in front of a weeping willow entwined with vine branches. The psychologically refined, static scene is dominated by an old man at the center. His hands in chains, holding a harp, he is surrounded by two young women and a mother with her child. In the background, the observer may discern the city of Babylon in a landscape sprinkled with idle palm trees and human figures. Bendemann showed Jewish grief in a sublime manner reminiscent of Renaissance art and Nazarene frescos and avoided an orientalist depiction, which guaranteed the painting’s success. With its sentimental, dignified scene of tempered lament, tranquillized in terms of both composition and color, the picture strongly appealed to Biedermeier taste.

24 Krey, Eduard Bendemann, 2003, pp. 88–89; Friedlander, “Sehnsucht, Ambivalenz und das jüdische Bild von Babylon,” 2008. 25 Krey, Eduard Bendemann, 2003, pp.  25–28; Börsch-Supan, “Zur Urteilsgeschichte der Düsseldorfer Malerschule,” 1985; Wille, “‘Die trauernden Juden im Exil’ von Eduard Bendemann,” 1995; Grewe,“Christliche Allegorie und jüdische Identität,” 2009.



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(Engraving by Ferdinand Ruscheweyh after Eduard Bendemann’s Captive Jews in Babylon, 1832) (© Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 489-128)

In Lewald’s novel, Bendemann’s painting is staged as a tableau vivant at a New Year’s Eve party in the Meiers’ residence. The hybrid and synesthetic art practice of creating living pictures was esteemed in nineteenth-century popular culture for its momentary matching of artistic imagination and real life. Both the original canvas and the friends and relatives who restage it, often accompanied by music and recitation, are seen in a different light.26 It is exactly this aspect that the novel plays out to full effect in the realm of orientalism. The fictive tableau vivant stands in explicit contrast to Bendemann’s iconic interpretation of Psalm 137 in that it is decidedly orientalist in outlook – with remarkable consequences for the ethnoaesthetics established in the novel up to that point, in particular for the evaluation of Steinheim. Instead of a willow entwined with vine branches, reminiscent of Christian allegory, as in Bendemann’s picture, the fictive tableau vivant is presented against the backdrop of a greenhouse adjacent to the parlor of the Meiers’ residence, whose tropical plants – at the time highly evocative of orientalist garden architecture27 – were established earlier in the novel’s narrative as a literary allegory

26 See, among others, Jooss, Lebende Bilder, 1999. 27 Koppelkamm, Künstliche Paradiese, 1988, pp. 19–20, 47–49.

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of Jewish exilic uprooting. Let us see then what happens to the walking caricature Steinheim, posing in this tableau vivant: Steinheim, representing the old man, was ideally suited to his role, with his heavy stature and his expressive face emphasized by the artificial beard and the Oriental headgear. A young relative of the family […] represented the young woman with the child. At Steinheim’s feet, Therese reclined, her face covered, and – with her right hand leaning against the lute, the beautiful head posed on the other arm, Jenny sat at Steinheim’s side. One could not have seen anything more sublime, more moving than the expression of hopeless sorrow in her youthful tender features.28

In Lewald’s ekphrasis, the oriental setting and costumes reveal the ‘actual’ character of the German-Jewish figures: Steinheim is “ideally suited to his role.” His “southern” facial features and his stature, the narrator notes, “are emphasized” by the oriental stage props and Jenny’s “beautiful head” shows to its best advantage in this setting. The Christian Therese, by contrast, appears with her face covered and is thereby made anonymous. The syntactic dramaturgy, too, slurs over Therese and culminates after a syntactic break marked by a dash with Jenny. The description leaves the reader in no doubt that the tremendous effects of this living picture, acclaimed by all the guests, are due to its being staged by Jews. This becomes even more obvious when one compares the ekphrasis of the tableau vivant with the previous description of Steinheim’s modern, fashionable dress. The oriental costume – unlike his modern apparel – is not described as a disguising “fancy dress” in odd contrast to his bodily features, but as an authentic and harmonious complement to his Jewish body. Trying to act like a modern elegant, Steinheim is unwillingly comical, silly, and unpleasant, whereas acting as a dolorous Jew sitting on the banks of the Euphrates, he regains an otherwise lost ancient dignity. In contrast to the aforementioned antisemitic burlesques, this living picture stages allegedly ineffaceable age-old Jewish peculiarities as beautiful in their own right by highlighting them through oriental costumes. The novel’s narrative dramaturgy thus transfers the assimilationist stock character of antisemitic burlesques into the dignified model of an ancient oriental Hebrew. Here, in the tableau vivant, the blatant incongruities in Steinheim’s appearance 28 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 252–253: “Steinheim, der den Greis darstellte, war durch seine kräftige Gestalt und sein ausdrucksvolles Gesicht, das durch den künstlichen Bart und die orientalische Kopfbedeckung an Bedeutung gewann, vortrefflich für seine Stelle geeignet. Eine junge Verwandte des Hauses […] repräsentirte die junge Frau mit dem Kinde. Zu Steinheims Füßen ruhte, verhüllten Angesichts, Therese, und – die rechte Hand auf die Laute gelehnt, das schöne Haupt auf den andern Arm gestützt, saß Jenny an Steinheim’s Seite. Man konnte nichts Edleres, nichts Ergreifenderes sehen, als den Ausdruck hoffnungsloser Trauer in ihren jugendlich zarten Zügen.”



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evaporate. By restaging Babylonian exile, the novel leaps back to the iconic starting point of Jewish history in the Diaspora, moving behind the allegedly “degenerate” expressions of rabbinic Judaism29 as symbolized in the novel by the Jiddish “jargon” of Steinheim’s mother. Dressed up as an oriental Hebrew of ancient times, Steinheim now equals the harmonious beauty of Reinhard’s looks, evocative of Nordic ancient times (“German antiquity”), by taking up the dignified tradition of Hebrew antiquity. Notions of purity and authenticity reign over this evaluation which harmonizes body and costume. Steinheim, as a Jew with “southern” features, is in a way miscast for a role in modern Germany, but the right choice for a historical play set in ancient Babylonian times. As residues and remnants colliding with allegedly German habits and bodily features, Jewish-oriental elements are deemed disturbing and threatening in Lewald’s novel. Freed from the hybrid status of incompletely concealed remnants and given full pride for a moment, however, they are considered beautiful. This ambiguous attitude highlights the novel’s engagement with what was perceived as a tense period of transition in the process of Jewish acculturation and emancipation, imagining the historical moment as an awkward position between ancient oriental and modern German times. While Bendemann had largely stripped his pictorial representation of Psalm 137 of its oriental connotations, the orientalist potential of the motif takes center stage in Lewald’s novel. For this reason, the ephemeral reproduction exceeds its original, as the guests acknowledge with admiration. This is thanks to its calculated direction by the Christian painter Erlau, who explains the effect as follows: “Today for the first time you have seen dolorous Jews, while Bendemann has painted Düsseldorfers in foreign dress!”30 Erlau’s exclamation again emphasizes the matching of body and costume as a prerequisite for sublime dignity and aweinspiring aesthetic effects. He goes on to elaborate on his artistic intentions with an extensive art critique echoing the aesthetic debates of the time: “I love the Jews; they are not like they may have been a thousand years ago, but there is as yet originality, race in them, and that’s why they are of interest to the painter. Now, I thought, if a Jew has the courage to paint Jews; if this painter is Bendemann, that must become a solid piece of work. I thought he’d choose luscious figures, voluptuous women with flaming eyes – well, no! This far his courage didn’t go. He takes a subject from Judaism, but he baptizes his Jews, he translates them into the Düsseldorf genre, and now the German

29 This narrative had been reinforced by Protestant theologians. See Stegemann, “Die Halbierung der ‘hebräischen Religion,’” 2001, pp. 87–95; Pasto, “Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question,” 1998, pp. 444–449. 30 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 257–258: “Sie haben heute zum ersten Mal trauernde Juden gesehen, während Bendemann trauernde Düsseldorfer in fremdartiger Kleidung gemalt hat!”

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housekeepers sit there and despite their prettiness simply look like Düsseldorfers in whose gardens the caterpillars have eaten up the cabbage.” Hughes laughed. “What is there to laugh about?” Erlau, who became all serious whenever art, which he held sacred, was discussed, asked. “[…] Look at Steinheim, at Jenny; […] can’t they compete with any Italian model? […] Look at the fine limbs, the eye! Even today you often find the lusciousness of the Orient among the Jews, and the mobility of their features recommends them to the painter. That’s why today I chose that picture and those persons for that picture; and I wish Bendemann himself had seen it. Since he is hopefully not ashamed of being a Jew, he may have taken from this sight the courage to paint Jews; because, between you and me, what cowards they are anyhow, the Jews!”31

Orientalist art critique here proves useful to articulate both national rivalry and contemporaneous debates about the “Jewish Question.” First, in his enthusiasm for the “lusciousness of the orient,” Erlau confronts the moderate style of the socalled Düsseldorf School, as represented by Bendemann’s painting, with the orientalist pictorial opulence of French romanticism and claims to have deliberately substituted Bendemann’s classic icon of tempered lament with the model of lavish erotic orientalism.32 Second, Erlau parallels Bendemann’s pictorial “translation” with the Jews’ baptism (“he baptizes his Jews, he translates them into the Düsseldorf genre”) and thus, moving in his lengthy speech from blatant philosemitism (“I love the Jews”) to essentializing prejudice (“what cowards they are anyhow”), exposes the tensions inherent in the “Jewish Question.” In tune with the novel’s ethno-aesthetics, in Erlau’s perspective the Jews’ age-old oriental character is at 31 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 258–260: “‘Ich liebe die Juden; sie sind nicht mehr Das, was sie vor tausend Jahren gewesen sein mögen, aber es ist noch Originalität, Race in ihnen, und darum sind sie für den Maler interessant. Nun dachte ich, wenn ein Jude den Muth hat, Juden zu malen; wenn dieser Maler Bendemann ist, da muß es ein Stück Arbeit werden, das Hand und Fuß hat. Ich dachte, er würde sich köstliche Gestalten, üppige Weiber mit Flammenaugen gewählt haben – nicht doch! so weit reicht sein Muth nicht. Er nimmt ein Sujet aus dem Judenthume, aber er tauft seine Juden, er übersetzt sie ins Düsseldorf’sche, und nun sitzen die deutschen Mamsellen und sehen, so hübsch sie sind, doch nur aus, wie Düsseldorfer Gärtner, denen die Raupen den Kohl aufgefressen haben.ʼ Hughes lachte – ʻWas ist da zu lachen?ʼ fragte Erlau, der ganz ernsthaft wurde, sobald es die Kunst galt, die er heilig hielt. ʻ[…] Sehen Sie einmal den Steinheim, die Jenny an; […] sind das nicht Köpfe, die sich mit allen italienischen Modellen messen können? […] Sehen Sie die feinen Glieder, das Auge! Die Ueppigkeit des Orients, die finden Sie heute noch oft bei den Juden und die Beweglichkeit ihrer Züge empfiehlt sie dem Maler. Darum wählte ich heute das Bild und diese Personen zu dem Bilde; und ich wollte, Bendemann selbst hätte es gesehen. Da er sich hoffentlich nicht schämt, ein Jude zu sein, hätte er an dieser Darstellung vielleicht den Muth gewonnen, Juden zu malen; denn, unter uns gesagt, feig sind die Juden doch!’” 32 See on the differences between French and German orientalist painting Rhein, Deutsche Orientmalerei, 2003.



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odds with the German present. Instead of representing fiery, lavish oriental Jewesses and age-old sorrow in an historical painting, Bendemann shows, according to Erlau, the triviality of the domestic German concerns typical of genre paintings, incongruent with his Jewish subject. Bendemann chose, Erlau claims, the wrong aesthetic register when he tried to “translate” Southern Jewish into Northern German types, historical painting into genre painting. Bendemann’s picture therefore – in Erlau’s parodic description of “Düsseldorfers in whose garden the caterpillars have eaten up the cabbage” – produces unintentionally comic effects (“Hughes laughed”), just as Steinheim is unwillingly and grotesquely comical in his fashionable contemporary dress. Both in Erlau’s view, praising the Jews for their exotic attractiveness, and in the novel’s suggestive narrative, which leads Steinheim’s character from the comical caricature of an assimilationist to the grand role of an ancient Hebrew, the Jews’ dignity depends upon their embrace of their oriental heritage which is deemed incompatible with assimilationist demands. Casting them back into ancient history, the novel imputes an oriental alterity to the Jews and asks for this alterity to be acknowledged as coequal and beautiful in its own right. This demand is further corroborated by an ensuing discussion in which Eduard articulates his assent to Erlau’s diagnosis that the Jews lack the courage to stand up for their own cause in contemporaneous political debates (“what cowards they are anyhow”). Michael Beer’s drama Der Paria (1823), which depicts the European Jews’ situation in the guise of the Indian pariahs’ fate, serves him as an example.33 The novel thus favors Erlau’s genealogical orientalism, which in the tableau vivant made the German Jews’ ancient biblical heritage visible, over Beer’s allegorical orientalism, which camouflages the German-Jewish cause on the basis of structural resemblance to Indian matters. These fictive discussions about the orientalist representation of Jews and their (lack of) courage to show pride in their oriental origins seem to have hit a nerve in Jewish reformist circles. The liberal Rabbi Ludwig Philippson decided to reprint the whole passage in his widely read Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums at the end of his review of Lewald’s novel. This passage alone was, he explained, of “greater interest” for his Jewish readers, while the novel itself, surely the work of a Christian author, lacked all intimate knowledge of Judaism’s beauty, strength, and dignified age, describing the life of a family sadly estranged from Judaism.34 Indeed, the affirmation of Jewish-oriental alterity in the scene which Philippson quotes at length in his journal stands in striking contrast to most other passages in Lewald’s novel. On the one hand, the text playfully considers the option of self33 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 262–263. 34 Philippson, “Jenny,” 1844.

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confidently embracing the oriental heritage allegedly manifest in Jewish bodies rather than abnegating it in an attempt at amalgamation. On the other hand, it upholds rhetoric of assimilation which proclaims to overcome all perceptible differences, differences which were deemed disturbing in modern Germany.35 To put it bluntly, Steinheim is after all not living in ancient Babylon. Outside the tableau vivant, it seems, there is no room for his Jewish-oriental alterity to be accepted as coequal and beautiful in its own right. Thus the central difficulty of nineteenthcentury debates on the “Jewish Question” – finding a balance between singularity and amalgamation – is in Lewald’s novel articulated through a nuanced intermedial interplay of orientalist (self-)depictions. In this sense a product of its time, the text exposes both the potential of (self-)orientalization and its limits in this specific historic and aesthetic instance. At the end of the novel, these tensions are amplified when, in a scene complementary to the staging of Bendemann’s Captive Jews at the New Year’s Eve party, the text-image representation of Psalm 137 is broadened into a text-music relation. Asked to sing a song at a festive evening event organized by a Christian friend of hers, Jenny decides, having overheard an anti-Jewish comment about her relationship with Lord Walter, to perform The Maid of Judah. A powerful performance ensues: Her strong, metallic voice seemed to gain a new charm from the rage in her bosom, the deepest sorrow resounded in her tones, and as she ended the second stanza with the words “O sweet fatherland, o my fatherland! When will Jehovah be your God of vengeance?” no one dared breathe, and all stood as if spellbound and mastered by the power of the pain that called for God and craved vengeance from him in these tones. Then the vocals shifted to wistful lament, Jenny’s voice became softer until it resounded forcefully again in the words “in the bondage of the enemy the Jew is ridiculed” and finally dimly faded away in the wish “O sweet fatherland, o my fatherland! I only wish I could be united with you in death!”36

Jenny is presented here as a resonating body; the disturbing charm of her singing stems from its emotional depth, from the “rage in her bosom.” Her voice develops

35 See, for example, Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 1, pp. 209–210. 36 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 2, p. 302: “Ihre starke, metallreiche Stimme schien von dem Schmerz in ihrer Brust einen neuen Zauber zu gewinnen, die tiefste Trauer klang aus ihren Tönen und als sie die zweite Strophe mit den Worten endete: ‘O Vaterland süß, o Vaterland mein! wann wird dir Jehovah ein Rachegott sein?’ wagte Niemand zu athmen, und Alle standen wie festgebannt und beherrscht durch die Gewalt des Schmerzes, der in diesen Tönen zu Gott rief und von ihm Rache erflehte. Dann ging der Gesang wieder zu wehmütiger Klage über, Jenny’s Stimme wurde weicher, bis sie nochmals mächtig erklang in den Worten: ‘in Knechtschaft des Feindes der Jude verlacht,’ und endlich matt in dem Wunsche erstarb: ‘O Vaterland süß, o Vaterland mein! könnt ich nur im Tode vereinet dir sein!’”



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from grim rage via soft lament and renewed rage to its performative fading away in lethal desire. The guests are, in contrast to these dynamic and emotional sound movements, “as if spellbound” and “mastered” by Jenny’s enraged conversation with God. The scene restages the setting of Psalm 137. There, the Jews are asked by their Babylonian oppressors to sing a song, just as Jenny has been asked to do here, and just as the Jews of Psalm 137 admonish themselves to always remember Zion and answer the demand to sing with a curse which had been voiced behind closed doors against the children of Babel, Jenny in the role of a “maid of Judah” evokes her remembrance of Zion and asks God for revenge. Countering the resentment against her planned marriage with a Christian lord and her plea for full acceptance in society, the baptized Jewess Jenny here acts out the literary archetype of Jewish Diasporic self-empowerment by confronting the foreign oppressors directly – in this case her audience at this festive evening which clearly figures in the role of the Babylonians. The reaction is, accordingly, a deeply disturbed one: “No clear sign of applause was to be heard, tears stood in the eyes of many; others looked at each other disconcerted.”37 Thus, in tune with the novel’s parallelization of female and Jewish emancipation, this powerful performance of a Jewish woman in the ancient guise of a “maid of Judah” for a moment overthrows the established power relations. This momentous subversion is made possible by a shift from the tableau vivant’s pictorial representation to a musical enactment which allows for a forceful emphasis on the lyrics’ performative potential, especially the psalmodic curse. Frozen in the tableau vivant, Jenny and Steinheim are caught as silent Jews both palpably in chains and figuratively in the non-Jewish gaze. Here, in contrast, Jenny governs the scene with her singing and exerts her power over the non-Jewish guests. Her song evokes the lyrical power of the psalms which, prominently promoted by Herder’s voluminous work Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie (1782/1783), had been understood since the eighteenth century as the epitome of oriental poetry.38 In this scene, then, Jenny’s body resonates with the archaic oriental lyrics of Hebrew antiquity, strained between the praise of refined German Bildung acquired by the Jewish protagonists and their bitter disappointment with their refused acceptance by Christian Germans, allowing for a momentous test of female Jewish-oriental power.

37 Lewald, Jenny, 1843, vol. 2, p. 303: “Kein lautes Zeichen des Beifalls war zu hören, in Vieler Augen standen Thränen; Andre sahen sich befremdet an.” 38 See Weidner (ed.), Urpoesie und Morgenland, 2008.

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(Re)Conceptualizing German-Jewish Orientalism In both Steinheim’s and Jenny’s performances, Lewald’s novel acts out the oriental heritage in Jewish bodies which is otherwise concealed and deemed disturbing. She does so with reference to the Hebrew poetry of Psalm 137: first in a living picture, then in a song. The novel thus challenges the power relations and tensions underlying the process of emancipation of both women and Jews by means of orientalism. The result of this literary analysis questions the validity and sufficiency of the usual definition of orientalism following Edward Said’s influential academic bestseller Orientalism. The case of the Jews in particular exposes the negotiability of orientalism, because Jews have been seen in the Western world, as Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar note, “variably and often concurrently as occidental and oriental,”39 and because they themselves actively participated in (orientalist) European discourses. To make sense of the uses of oriental topoi and styles observed in Lewald’s nineteenth-century novel, then, it is imperative to acknowledge that the orient is not to be understood as a static Western “image” or “construction” created in order to exert hegemonic power over it,40 but rather as a flexible concept which is both temporally and spatially constituted by differentiation and rivalry.41 Nineteenth-century orientalism, in this sense, was a highly contested field not only insofar as orientalizations could be ignored, rejected, varied, or affirmed, but also insofar as the concept of the orient itself – encompassing regions from China to Spain and time spans from antiquity to the present – offered various possibilities to define competing genealogies, identification markers, and memories. The effects of orientalist references, then, differed fundamentally according to what people, region, or time period of the orient they evoked and to whom they were adressed. While many European Jews developed strong reservations about the so-called “Polish Jews” or Ostjuden42 and after the Damascus affair (1840) endeavored to “educate” the contemporaneous oriental Jews living in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire in order to “raise” them to their own level of European education,43 their positive interest in the orient was mostly directed at past times and spaces, among them the heyday of Jewish philosophy and poetry in

39 Kalmar/Penslar, “Introduction,” 2005, pp. xiii–xiv. 40 For a critique of blind uses of the concept of “construction” see Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 1999. 41 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005, pp. 63–101. 42 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1982. 43 Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen, 2005; Schroeter, “Orientalism and the Jews of the Mediterranean,” 1994.



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al-Andalus and the culture and history of the ancient Hebrews. Lewald’s novel provides a case in point. The “Turkish shawl” that is part of Steinheim’s eclectic fashionable dress does not have an effect comparable to that of the “oriental headgear” and the tropical-oriental backdrop in the tableau vivant. The contemporaneous Ottoman Empire fits just as badly with the aesthetic logic of dignified Jewish features as sateen waist-coats and brilliant pins. The Babylonian orient of biblical times, however, fits all the better. The historical phenomenon of German-Jewish orientalism thus calls for a reconsideration of basic assumptions concerning (the links between) orientalism and antisemitism. Not only does German orientalism, with its specific forms and traditions due to the absence of an imperial and colonialist state policy before the end of the nineteenth century, resist the colonial scheme of orientalism that Said claimed to have observed in French and British orientalism.44 Not only are more complex models beyond the oriental-occidental binary needed.45 Even more essentially, the historical phenomenon of German-Jewish orientalism calls for a redirection of the questions that guide its scholarly examination. Much research on orientalism tends to take its existence for granted and limits itself to critically describing (mis)representations (“images”) of the orient. In the same manner, most scholars hold orientalist/antisemitic depictions of Jews to be self-evident and focus on the critical description of these “images” of Jews and their “internalization” by Jews. Descriptions of this kind, however, necessarily fall short of explaining the phenomena observed. Why it is that Jews at times came to be orientalized or to orientalize themselves and at other times did not, and what effects this had, remains an open and all the more urgent question. To tackle this, it is helpful to consider orientalism, as has been suggested by Andrea Polaschegg, as an option that may or may not be activated – each time depending on whether it fulfils a distinct function through its application.46 Things oriental, in other words, were deployed because and whenever they were of use. Similarly, the introduction of things Jewish into historical discourses may be understood as an option that could be taken up whenever it lent itself to the needs of the particular speaker. 44 For nuanced analyses of German orientalism, see Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 2009; Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005. 45 Homi K. Bhabha’s influential attempt at a theory of culture that emphasizes notions of hybridity in The Location of Culture, 1994, may be considered as such a more complex model, but in its distinctly postcolonial and postmodern shape it is unfit for an examination of nineteenth-century German-Jewish literature. It cannot do justice to the historicity of these texts and lends itself to anachronistic projection. 46 Polaschegg, “Vom chinesischen Teehaus zu hebräischen Melodien,” 2007. Cf. Hodkinson/ Walker (eds.), Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History, 2013.

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How is one to understand these functions and effects of oriental and Jewish elements in historical discourses? Developed from a phrase coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his study on totemism, scholars of cultural studies have suggested that specific things or groups of persons – like, for instance, women, Jews, and colonial subjects – in specific historical contexts were “good to think.”47 They could be deployed, that is, as (figurative) objects of discussion, serving as a means to enter arguments and concerns into discourses in which they would otherwise have played a marginal role at best. This train of thought has also been taken up – and borne fruit – in Jewish studies.48 On this basis, I argue that Jewish and oriental styles and topoi – as well as their combination – were historically “good to think.” Seen in this light, in many cases it was not hatred or sympathy vis-à-vis the Jews that motivated uses of Jewish and/or oriental topoi, but rather their handiness and convenience for illustrative or other purposes in, for example, political debates, national self-reflections, and aesthetic discussions. As soon as one inquires into the functions and effects of orientalist imputations instead of merely describing them, then, the seemingly self-evidential assumption that antisemitism and orientalism are quasi-identical forms of a more or less subtle aggression against Jewish and/or oriental “others” crumbles.49 Many of these instances are not primarily to be understood as (mis)representations of Jews or orientals aimed at exerting hegemonic power over them, but rather as uses of Jewish and/or oriental types and topoi for a range of different purposes in discursive acts addressed to European(-Jewish) audiences, each time depending on the aspects evoked, the individual speaker’s position and the contexts in which they were placed.50 It follows from this (re)conceptualization of orientalism that the question of power relations cannot be understood as superordinate, as in Said’s influential definition of orientalism as a Western, colonial way of dominating the orient. The interplay of orientalism with power relations should be one of the objects of an 47 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 1964, p. 89. While Lévi-Strauss modelled the phrase ‘bonnes à penser’ after the phrase ‘bonnes à manger,’ its current use in cultural studies is far removed from the ethnographical context of totemism which I cannot deal with extensively here. 48 See, among others, Lapin, “Introduction,” 2003; Schechter, “The Jewish Question in Eighteenth-Century France,” 1998; Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 2003, esp. pp. 238–248 for comparisons of the different symbolic functions that “others” such as Native Americans, Black Africans, women and Jews could (and can) have. 49 On the complex links and conflicts between orientalism and antisemitism in early modern times see Ginzburg, “Provincializing the World,” 2011, 144; in racial theory of the early twentieth century Wiedemann, “Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß and the Racial Cartography of the Orient,” 2012. 50 For two excellent case studies of different intentions, functions, and effects in view of orientalism see Haddad, Orientalist Poetics, 2002; Mayer, “Cultural Cross-Dressing,” 2012.



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open-ended analysis, not its pre-defined start. Otherwise the wide range of possible effects that different uses of all things oriental could historically produce may be lost on the retrospective observer. A decisive advantage of this understanding is that it allows for agency on the part of the Jews (and the “orientals”), because they, too, can potentially make use of Jewish and/or oriental topoi and styles for their individual ends. This approach thus allows researchers to circumvent one of the most sensitive weaknesses of the colonial concept of orientalism: The justly raised criticism that many studies in orientalism (and, for that matter, postcolonial studies) are inadvertently Eurocentric in that “orientals” are conceptualized as silent objects of discourse that could and can at best “react” or “write back.”51 Similarly, the historiography of German Jewry and of antisemitism for a long time hesitated to allow for agency on the part of the German Jews and instead conceived of them as mere objects of imputations, suggesting that Jews could at best react to imputations (in this case: of being an oriental people), but certainly not act as instigators, as players in a contested field. Following this logic, the figurative concepts of “inner colonialism,” and, in a similar sense, “inner orientalism,” seemed perfectly applicable to German-Jewish history.52 A look at how Jews interacted in nineteenth-century German discourses, however, creates an altogether different impression. The one-way-model of antisemitic/orientalist aggression and Jewish reaction, be it counter-aggression, self-aggression, or willful ignorance, cannot account for the complex forms of interaction and interdependency that visibly structured orientalist discourses in nineteenth-century Germany. Rather, as seen in Lewald’s novel, orientalism provided German Jews with precarious but productive operational tools to negotiate their own position in nineteenth-century discourses. The “Jewish Question” is in Lewald’s novel discussed by means of orientalism and in turn serves to negotiate, for example in Erlau’s juxtaposition of German and French painting, general questions of aesthetic representation and national competition. Furthermore, in view of the book market in nineteenth-century Germany, the reflections within the novel’s fictional realm on how to represent the Jewish cause serve to position Lewald’s literary work itself. Choosing to address the question of female and Jewish emancipation in her novel directly, Lewald’s presents her novel Jenny as an alternative to Michael Beer’s drama Der Paria which the fictive protagonists of the novel 51 See, among others, Varisco, Reading Orientalism, 2007, pp. 141–155; Schnepel, “Verschlungene Wege in den Orient und zurück,” 2011; Berman, German Literature on the Middle East, 2011, pp. 17–18. 52 See, for example, Efron, “From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East,” 2004; Rohde, “Der innere Orient,” 2005. For a critical survey of the concept see Hind, “The Internal Colonial Concept,” 1984, esp. pp. 553–554.

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deem an example of allegoric orientalism and proof of Jewish cowardice. Settling her plot in present-day Germany and directly pointing to the oriental heritage of her fictive German-Jewish characters, thus promoting a kind of genealogical orientalism as opposed to Beer’s allegoric orientalism, Lewald demonstrates her own courage as a female Jewish writer. There is no interest in (dominating) the orient itself to be found here. Rather, Lewald makes use of oriental topoi and poetic traditions for her socio-political and aesthetic reflections on the position of a German Jewess (both the fictional Jenny and herself as an author) in what she perceives as a tense stage of transition in the process of emancipation. In terms of writing German-Jewish literary history, the approach to the phenomenon of orientalism here suggested implies a shift in perspective. Following recent trends in Jewish studies to explore German-Jewish history in the light of the concept of co-creation53 and with a view to the active, even polemical roles Jews played in nineteenth-century German discourses,54 one may show that German Jews were actively involved in orientalist discourses rather than (only) being their victims.55 In this light, I suggest considering German Jews as instigators, as players in the contested field of orientalism. While Lewald has frequently been diagnosed with an internalization of antisemitic clichés on the basis of her literary work,56 following Sander Gilman’s influential model of “Jewish self-hatred,”57 my analysis suggests that Lewald’s novel can be read as an instance of original and elaborate self-orientalization. If one understands orientalism as a large set of topoi and styles that took on a slightly different coloring in each instance of implementation and thereby determined future options for usage,58 one might say that Lewald shaped German orientalism with her novel in that she inscribed notions of Jewish exile and Jewish ancient heritage into it. She made use of oriental topoi and styles available at the time and, by bending them to the needs of negotiating the emancipation of German Jews and women, in turn imprinted and transformed the repertoire of orientalism which would in the future be available to Jews and non-Jews alike. Lewald’s Jenny in her singing scene is not a powerless, silent victim of orientalist discourse. On the contrary, she draws power from and through orientalism, albeit temporarily, making the oriental poetry of the psalms heard, and thereby using it as a tool to leave the Christian guests, cast in the role of the Babylonian 53 Malkin/Rokem (eds.), Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, 2010. 54 Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, 2002. 55 In view of racial discourses, see Idelson-Shein, Difference of a Different Kind, 2014. 56 See, for example, Marci-Boehncke, Fanny Lewald, 1998, pp. 138–143. 57 Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 1986. 58 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005, pp. 276–287.



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oppressors, “spellbound.” The orientalist model of Jewish exile and Babylonian oppression thus helps to address and to criticize mechanisms of antisemitic exclusion rather than stabilizing them. Instead of being a posterior, defensive reaction to orientalist imputations resonating of “self-hatred,” Jenny’s fictive action is a self-determined part of German orientalism. And so is Lewald’s novel. That nineteenth-century Jewish orientalism has a strange and pathological ring to the ears of many scholars in our day, might in fact say little about the Jews’ historical options and choices. Rather, this pathologizing approach points to the fact that the colonial model of orientalism is ill-suited to the phenomenon of Jewish orientalism, and especially German-Jewish orientalism. Affirmative and inventive German-Jewish orientalism, to put it bluntly, seems “paradox” or even “perverse” only in the mindset of a theory which is unable to accommodate the nineteenth-century discourses in which German Jews were participating. Instead of analyzing so-called “images of Jews,” “images of the orient,” and Jewish “internalizations of antisemitic or orientalist clichés,” it seems a more fruitful challenge to grasp the discursive mechanisms and effects of Jewish-oriental connections. Instead of asking whether orientalism was good or bad for the Jews, it seems more adequate to evaluate in which ways German Jews co-created German orientalism as a contested field. The question to be asked, in other words, is not how non-Jews through orientalist imputations (mis)represented Jews and how Jews “internalized” or “rejected” these orientalist (mis)representations, but how Jews and non-Jews thought, talked and wrote about diverse topics using things Jewish and oriental to articulate their position.

Hildegard Frübis

Ephraim Moses Lilien The Figure of the “Beautiful Jewess,” the Orient, the Bible, and Zionism1 In 1906, graphic artist Ephraim Moses Lilien,2 born in Galicia, set out on his first trip to Ottoman Palestine, the first of three journeys he undertook before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.3 Lilien was among the founders of the Democratic Faction which, at the Fifth Zionist Congress, called for more active involvement in promoting culture in Zionism. His journey was intended to help fulfil the resolution passed at the Seventh Zionist Congress to found Bezalel, a Society for Establishing Jewish Cottage Industries and Crafts in Palestine.4 In late 1905, travelling via Lemberg and his hometown of Drohobycz as well as Sofia and Constantinople, Lilien arrived in Jerusalem for a stay of eight months. Originally, he intended to use the impressions gathered on his journey for, among other things, a book on Ottoman Palestine for which the Insel Press had already paid in advance; in fact, though, the book was never published.5 However, a multi1 Translated by Andrew Boreham. 2 Lilien was born in Drohobycz/Galicia in 1874 and died in Braunschweig in 1924. In 1892, after briefly visiting a Krakow art school, he moved to Vienna. Later, he went to live in Munich before finally settling in Berlin in 1899. There, his atelier became a meeting point for Zionist circles. He also came into contact with the artists’ group Die Kommenden, where he met Else Lasker-Schüler, Erich Mühsam and Stefan Zweig. Lilien became best known for drawings and prints striving to use “the visual arts to give Zionism a recognizable unifying appearance.” For an extensive biography, see Eine neue Kunst für ein altes Volk, 1991, p. 14. 3 Lilien traveled to Ottoman Palestine again in 1910, and for a third time in 1914. See E. M. Lilien, 2004, pp. 94–103. In the course of his duties during the First World War, Lilien made several journeys through Turkey and the Middle East. In 1917, he was assigned to the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier (KPQ) as a war photographer and, in that function, visited Constantinople, Aleppo, Damascus, and Nazareth. See Schmidl,“Der Künstler als Offizier – E. M. Lilien im Ersten Weltkrieg,” 1998, pp. 12–14. 4 See E. M. Lilien, 2004, p.  98. The name Bezalel was a clear statement of the organization’s agenda. Bezalel is the chief artisan who, because of his skills, God singles out to construct the Tabernacle together with all the fittings, utensils and vestments (Exodus 31:1–11). In adopting this name, the new organization of the Gesellschaft für jüdische Hausindustrie und Kunstgewerbe (Society for Establishing Jewish Cottage Industries and Crafts) deliberately located itself within biblical tradition. In 1906, artist Boris Schatz established the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, still considered one of Israel’s leading art schools today. 5 See E. M. Lilien, 2004, p. 99. He wrote the article “Eine Reise nach Jerusalem. Von einer künstlerischen Studienreise” for the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (No. 35), which was published with 12 photographs, see Painting with Light, 1990.



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volume edition of the Bible, published by Georg Westermann from 1908, proved exceptionally successful.

Fig. 1 E. M. Lilien, Women at the Wailing Wall, Etching, 1913



Fig. 2 E. M. Lilien, Esther, Etching, 1911



Fig. 3 E. M. Lilien, Esther and her Slaves, Etching, 1911

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After his return from Palestine, Lilien’s journey inspired him to produce a series of etchings in his Berlin studio which took biblical locations and figures as their subjects, including for example, the prints of Frauen an der Klagemauer (Women at the Wailing Wall, 1913, fig. 1) and Zugang zum Tempelplatz (Entry to the Temple Mount, 1911). These works evidence a tendency to rediscover the historical locations of biblical Judaism in Palestine’s present, a tendency also impressively visible in a series of female portraits with such titles as Ester (Esther, 1911, fig. 2) and Ester und ihre Sklavinnen (Esther and her Slaves, 1911, fig. 3). Through the titles for his prints, he superimposes the biblical heroine of Esther onto these anonymous portraits of women. Esther’s richly dramatic story is recounted in eight chapters in the biblical Book of Esther. She is the foster daughter of a Jew by the name of Mordechai who, in the past, uncovered a conspiracy against the Persian King Ahasveros. From all the young women of the country brought before him, the king chooses Esther to be his wife, making her the Queen of Persia. In this position, she is able to reveal a plot by Haman, a sworn enemy of Mordechai at court, against the Jewish people and prevent their destruction in the Persian Empire. In the process, though, she has to reveal to the king her kindred and origins, something she had previously kept hidden. Esther’s exemplary actions, later commemorated by the holiday of Purim, turned her into one of the heroic women in Jewish tradition. Similarly to Judith or Deborah, Esther risked her own life to secure the continuation of the Jewish people. In his images of Ester or Ester und ihre Sklavinnen (figs. 2 and 3), Lilien avoids all the narrative elements in the historical story, or any embellishment of it. Instead, he focuses entirely on Esther’s face, which clearly bears traces of the features of contemporary women; indeed, Lilien is said to have based the figure on the portrait of his wife Helene.6 Nonetheless, these images are not to be read as portraits of individual women; rather, in their style of depiction, they display the physiognomic characteristics of the “beautiful Jewess” as found in various artistic depictions and visual media since the nineteenth century.7 The image of female beauty produced is characterized by dark hair and dark eyes, shadowed and deep-set. This visual construction of a canon of idealized features aims at creating recognizable and identifiable features of a dark type of female beauty associated with the Jewess. In

6 See E. M. Lilien, 2004, p. 100. 7 For an extensive discussion of the development of this style of image, as well as the genealogy of the “beautiful Jewess” image, see Frübis, “Die ‘Schöne Jüdin’ – Bilder vom Eigenen und vom Fremden,” 1997.



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its historical context, this type of beauty with its erotic-oriental appeal stands for a (dark) type of female beauty different culturally as well as religiously.8 In his depiction of Ester, Lilien reshapes the individual features of a contemporary woman by superimposing the distinctive characteristics of the “beautiful Jewess” in an idealized form. The inclusion of just a few attributes – such as the orientalized headdress or the background figures of Esther’s handmaidens in Ester und ihre Sklavinnen – evokes an orient which is then concretized through the title’s reference to the biblical heroine of Esther. In particular, the biblical first name becomes part of a genealogical identification pointing beyond the individual figure to the biblical Esther. The name becomes a constitutive element in founding an ancestral line of biblical heroines who also include, apart from Esther, Rebecca, or Judith mentioned above.9





Fig. 4 E. M. Lilien, Head of a Jewess, Etching, 1913

8 For an extensive discussion of the connection between the “Oriental woman” and the “beautiful Jewess”, see Frübis, Die “Jüdin” als Orientalin oder die “orientalische Jüdin.” Zur Konstruktion eines Bild-Typus, 2014. 9 See Frübis, “Repräsentationen ‘der’ Jüdin – Konzepte von Weiblichkeit und Judentum in der Jüdischen Moderne,” 2005, p. 134.

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In contrast to the figure of Esther, in the 1913 etching Kopf einer Jüdin (Head of a Jewess, fig. 4) which can also be located in the context of his journeys to Palestine, Lilien abstracts from the biblical context of the “beautiful Jewess” figure. Here, he connects the idealized image with the portrait features of a contemporary woman. The bust portrait offers a frontal view of a young woman’s face looking out directly and openly at the beholder; she wears her hair hidden under a headscarf falling loosely over her head and shoulders. In contrast, the succinct lines of her dark eyes and shadowed eye areas with the dark hairline are significant. Whatever individuality this portrait presents is revoked by its title as Kopf einer Jüdin (Head of a Jewess). The portrayed features of beauty of an individual, contemporary woman can be read as the typical characteristics of the “beautiful Jewess”, whereby this depicts a further variation of the “beautiful Jewess” type. On the one hand, it references an individual, contemporary Jewish woman (in Palestine) and yet, on the other, transforms her – through the anonymizing title – into a representative standing for the Jewish woman per se. In the context of Lilien’s journeys to Palestine as well his leaning towards cultural Zionism,10 this etching can certainly be read as actualizing the “beautiful Jewess” type against the background of Zionist ambitions of developing the alternative of a Jewish state in Palestine. To give a more substantial profile to Lilien’s cultural Zionism, his involvement in the following serve as an example: in 1901, as a delegate and organizer of the Jüdischer Künstler (Jewish Artists) exhibition, he attended the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel. His drawing Vom Ghetto nach Zion (From the Ghetto to Zion), which was enormously popular and in which he developed key elements of a Zionist iconography, was taken as the congressional image.11 The cultural Zionist tendency to create a new modern Jewish culture and do so by referencing biblical tradition gains a more tangible visual form in Lilien’s major – publishing – project of producing a new set of illustrations for the Bible.12

10 While Zionism – inspired, above all, by Theodor Herzel’s Der Judenstaat (1896) – generated a political movement aimed at establishing a “Jewish State,” cultural Zionists sought to create an independent Jewish identity in the intellectual and cultural spheres. The leading proponents of cultural Zionism included Nathan Birnbaum, Martin Buber, and Ahad Ha’am (i.e. Asher Ginsberg). 11 See also Eine neue Kunst für ein altes Volk, 1991, pp. 11–14. 12 The project of a multi-volume illustrated edition of the Bible only culminated in three volumes published by Georg Westermann in 1908, 1909 and 1912, and edited by the Protestant Pastor Ferdinand Rahlwes, see E. M. Lilien, 2004, p. 99.



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Photography and Graphic Art – Authentication and Artistic Design Lilien was also an enthusiastic photographer, as is evident from the many shots he took on his journeys to Palestine.13 As he noted in his letters, he took these trips “to look and collect.”14 His photographs not only include street scenes, but also architectural shots of historic monuments as well as portraits. These subjects, which he observed at first hand and captured with his camera, can be rediscovered in the designs of the art works he produced in Berlin after returning from his trips. The etching Frauen an der Klagemauer from 1913 (see fig. 1), mentioned above, would be one of the many examples here; in this case, the image in the print draws strongly on his 1906 photo of Frauen beten an der Klagemauer (fig. 5).

Fig. 5 E. M. Lilien, Frauen beten an der Klagemauer, Photography, 1906

Fig. 6 E. M. Lilien, Young Man with a White Keffieh, Photography, 1906

13 See E. M. Lilien, 2004, pp. 94–103, Painting with Light, 1990. 14 See E. M. Lilien, 2004, p. 99.

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Fig. 7 E. M. Lilien, Joshua, Etching, 1908

This process of translation and transformation from photography into an artistically designed print is also evident in many of Lilien’s portraits. A photograph from 1906 entitled Junger Mann mit weißem Kopftuch (Young Man with a White Keffieh, fig. 6) taken during Lilien’s first journey to Palestine shows a young man in a seated position set against the background of a stone wall with his profile turned slightly to the left. His facial features, oriental clothing and headgear appear again in Lilien’s illustrations to Die Bücher der Bibel (The Books of the Bible) from 1908. The lithograph entitled Joshua (fig. 7) shows, in a bust portrait, the seemingly Middle Eastern features of the man on the photo with a dark beard (see fig. 6). The figure of Joshua is numbered among the biblical heroes of the people of Israel. The Book of Joshua describes how the son of Nun was appointed as Moses’s attendant and successor. Joshua becomes the head of the army leading the people of Israel through the desert to the Promised Land. In contrast to the photographs, the oriental facial features of the biblical heroes are intensified by the use of line in the etchings and accentuated white and black tones; similarly, the decorative elements of the clothing are highlighted (the headdress’ pattern of lines, the headband as an ornamental circlet crown set with jewels). In this



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way, the style is endowed with a certain aestheticizing quality underscoring the beauty of the Jewish people of the biblical age. Here, then, one can observe – in the words of Susannah Heschel – a counter-discourse15 utilizing an aesthetically sophisticated pictorial image to reverse the centuries-old negative picture of Judaism formed from an anti-Jewish standpoint. This process can be observed in general in cultural Zionism and in Lilien’s work in particular – in his highly artistic use of the medium of graphic art.





Fig. 8 E. M. Lilien, Young Woman, Photography, 1906

The use of photographic (model) images based on depictions of contemporary Bedouin, Arabs, or Jews16 taken by Lilien on his journey through Ottoman Palestine generates another level of meaning in the lithographs:17 Through Lilien transferring his travel photographs, which have a particular authenticity value, 15 On the idea of a counter-discourse, see Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” 1999. 16 Keffieh is both the term for the Arab headdress worn by, for example, the Bedouin as well as Arab Jews. See Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes, 1845, p. 394. 17 Painting with Light, 1990, juxtaposes and compares Lilien’s photographs taken on his journeys to Palestine with the prints based on them.

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into etchings, the biblical figures are informed by the features of the contemporary orient. In this way, the Bible is actualized in the Palestine of the here and now or alternatively – reversing this perspective – one looks back at the biblical age through the physiognomy of the contemporary orient.18



Fig. 9 E. M. Lilien, Cilla, Etching, 1918

This process of translating photography into prints can be further traced in Lilien’s depictions of female figures. The photograph of a young women with girllike features dates from 1906 (fig. 8). The half-length portrait shows her with her face slightly bending forwards and turned to a profile view against a blurred background, which is impossible to identify precisely. Her hair is not tied back and under her loose sweeping headscarf, there seems to be the visible lines of a light, long-sleeved robe. The girlish features of this young woman in her Middle Eastern garments appear again in the etching entitled Cilla (fig. 9), dated 1918. Here too, the print’s lines lend an intensified distinctiveness to her facial features and result in an aestheticizing of the portrait towards the ideal type of the “beautiful Jewess”. A very similar process is evident when one contrasts Lilien’s etching Jüdin aus Buchara (A Jewess from Bukhara) from 1915 (fig. 10) with his 18 This process – identifying the figures of the biblical past in contemporary Judaism or equating it with them – is a concept also found in, aside from Lilien, numerous works by artists, writers and scholars around the nineteenth century. See Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005; Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005.



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photo of Mädchen mit Kopftuch und Juwelen (Girl with Headdress and Jewels) from 1906–1914 (fig. 11), whereby the decorative headdress lends a strongly exotic note to the “beautiful Jewess” image.





Fig. 10 E. M. Lilien, A Jewess from Bukhara, Etching, 1915

To sum up, then, one can note that Lilien’s illustrations to the Bible, as in his photographs and their transformation to a print form, evidence a perspective allowing the Jews to become biblical orientals again – in other words, re-locating them in biblical Judaism and their ancestral home in Ottoman Palestine. Through this approach, cultural Zionism employed aesthetically designed portraits as a medium to create the political idea of (re-)locating the old and new home of the Jewish people in Palestine. This (self-)orientalization – also employed politically – can be identified in many different facets in the contemporary discourse on a new (assertive) positioning of Judaism.19

19 On this, see Martin Buber’s writings, such as “Juedische Renaissance,” published in the first issue of Ost und West in 1901, or paintings by Else Lasker-Schüler.

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Fig. 11 E. M. Lilien, Girl with Headdress and Jewels, Photography, 1906-1914

(Cultural) Zionism and the “Beautiful Jewess” Figure Cultural Zionism’s adaptation of the “beautiful Jewess” figure can also be identified in a far more concrete form in one of Lilien’s earlier drawings created as an illustration to Juda, a collection of biblically-inspired poems published in 1900.20 The illustrations to this book formed the basis for Lilien’s reputation as a Zionist artist whose work, over the following years, was placed nearly entirely at the service of the idea of a Jewish national state. For the book, Lilien designed a female figure called Prinzessin Sabbat, inspired by Heinrich Heine’s “Princess Sabbath” in his Hebräische Melodien (Hebrew Melodies, 1851). In Heine’s poem, one of the most important Jewish holidays celebrated every week appears in the guise of a bride or princess.21 In Lilien’s work, the princess has all the symbolic features of the “beautiful Jewess.” Wearing a crown and holding a Torah scroll, 20 The book is a collection of ballads by Börries von Münchhausen, a non-Jewish writer. 21 Heinrich Heine dedicated a 38-verse poem to her, published in the third book, Hebräische Melodien, of his Romanzero of 1851.



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she is shown sitting on a throne decorated with a Star of David. Beautiful, selfassured, and identified by the symbols of Judaism, she represents the hopes of Zionism and its notions of a new community ideal to be realized in a new state. In this style of depiction, a clear form is given to the possibilities offered by this figure as a representative for the collective of the Jewish people – and hence as a personification. By creating the positive self-image inherent in the figure as confident, proud, and bearing a vision for the future, another facet is added to the Zionist counter-discourse mentioned above. 22

Fig. 12 E. M. Lilien, An Allegorical Wedding

In 1906, Lilien returned to this figure again in the design for a decorative carpet at the Bezalel School workshops in Jerusalem (fig. 12).23 The carpet was to be woven in honor of the 25th wedding anniversary of Fruma and David Wolffsohn, Herzl’s successor as President of the World Zionist Organization. The three scenes of the triptych entitled An Allegorical Wedding are enclosed in a surrounding ornamental border with integrated Hebrew letters.24 A couple dressed in royal robes is set 22 See Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999, pp. 61–86. 23 An Allegorical Wedding, 185 cm x 305.5 cm, oil, charcoal and pencil on canvas, Jerusalem, Israel Museum. 24 The scroll above the image contains a quote from Psalm 24:7: “Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in” (English Standard Version); “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.” (Authorised Version) The names of the couple are underneath the image with

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at the center of the main panel, right at the heart of the triptych. The man, dressed in red robes, is placing his arm around a female figure, posed rather like a statue, directly facing the beholder. In this figure, one can not only identify the features of Prinzessin Sabbat from 1900, but also the features of the belle juive. As the title indicates, the triptych presents an allegorical depiction of a wedding. In their gesture of embracing, the two figures symbolize the wedding of the “daughter of Israel” with the idea of Zionism represented by the male figure. In this way, the individual married couple of Fruma and David Wolffsohn are elevated into an allegory of Zionism. There is a noticeable Egyptianesque style to the design: the posture of the figures, their clothing, accessories, and hairstyles evoke ancient Middle Eastern civilizations – as does in particular the style of the male background figures holding a kind of wedding canopy over the couple. The main figure dressed in a royal red and wearing a tiara-like crown has been identified with relief images of Tiglath-Pileser I (1115–1076 BCE), a king from the Assyrian royal dynasty.25 Even in this form of returning Jewish civilization to the oriental cultures of antiquity, cultural Zionism creates a new form of national pride. In contrast, the left and right panels framing this vision of a re-born Judaism represent the old and bowed Jewish Diaspora, trapped in thorn bushes.26 The various depictions of Lilien’s female figures can be described as developing a visual image from an internal Jewish perspective. In the various styles of depiction – in portraits of contemporary and biblical Jewesses as well in the personification of “Princess Sabbath” – the same visual symbols of a canon of female beauty are developed which delineate an iconography of the “beautiful Jewess” figure. The recourse to biblical narratives generates Judaism’s self-representation in the form of biblical heroines which, on the one hand, Lilien takes up and continues while, on the other, also translating this into the contemporary context of Zionism’s political ambitions and creating – as last noted above in the “Princess Sabbath” figure – the personification of a future Jewish state. Hence, the mode of repetition, employed as a means of identification, and the adaptation of the known as well as a simultaneous variation and re-signification are among the key principles of operation of the “beautiful Jewess” model, which then can be

the date of wedding “David Ben Izhak Wolffsohn – Fruma Bat Jehuda, Kaf Alef Tevet – Hatarma [1881].” My thanks to Anna-Dorothea Ludewig (Potsdam) and Rakefet Zalashik (Israel) for identifying and translating the Hebrew. 25 See Zalmona, “Vers les Confins de l’Orient. L’art sioniste naissant en quête d’une identité hébraique,” 2012, p. 33. 26 Elements of the iconography developed by Lilien can already be found in his congressional image Vom Ghetto nach Zion (1901) for the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, in particular, in juxtaposing young and old figures as symbolising an old and new Judaism.



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further developed and varied in ever new constellations – such as, for example, in cultural Zionism.

Horace Vernet: Revitalizing the Bible or the New Religious Painting of Orientalism Following the link between the Jewess and the oriental woman along a different route leads to nineteenth-century painting. Beyond the Jewish context, a wide range of variations on this theme can be observed in opulent and rich oil paintings – especially those in nineteenth-century French art. It seems reasonable to presume that the art of orientalism represents the central painterly instance in a pictorial development where the subject of the Jewess overlaps with the subject of the oriental woman. Here, combining biblical history painting with the “beautiful Jewess” motif creates one version of this from a non-Jewish perspective, that is, by painters from Christian backgrounds. This aspect is prominent in works by the French artist Horace Vernet (1789–1863).27 Vernet belonged to a generation of artists who completed their classical academic training in Paris and then, in the wake of French colonial policy, traveled to North African countries, in particular Algeria and Morocco. In the 1840s and 1850s, these artists stayed for longer or shorter periods in these “oriental” realms, taking them as the subject of their paintings in the following years. Horace Vernet’s oeuvre certainly contains depictions of biblical topics in the guise of an actualizing orientalism. The son of artist Antoine Charles Horace Vernet (1758–1835), Vernet gained a reputation as a history and battle painter. In 1833, following France’s successful military campaign in Algeria three years before, he traveled to Algeria for the first time with English artist William Wyld. He visited North Africa again in 1839–1840, this time with his pupil Frédéric GoupilFresquet. In his encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Algerian desert, he believed he was coming face to face with the biblical figures from Genesis. He noted enthusiastically: “Nothing can convey a better idea of our forefathers in the Land of Canaan.”28 At the Paris Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1848, he shocked his audience by presenting a lecture exploring, as the title put it, Des rapports qui existent entre le costume des anciens Hébreux et celui des Arabes modernes (“Some Analogies that Exist between the Costume of the Ancient Hebrews and that of 27 A second example would be Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856). 28 Ingamells, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures, II, French Nineteenth Century, 1986, p. 257.

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Modern Arabs”).29 As a result of his observations, he suggested “abandoning the pseudo-classical painting style dominant since the Renaissance and already ossified in the Baroque age, and pointed to the striking similarities between modern Arab dress and the garments of the Jews in the biblical age.”30 With such ideas, Vernet belonged to a circle of artists who saw themselves as called on to review and revise traditional religious iconography, a task triggered not only by the new possibilities of traveling through North Africa, but also by the archeological excavations in Palestine and Egypt and the religio-historical research this led to around the mid-nineteenth century.31 As Viktoria SchmidtLinsenhoff has noted, Vernet advocated: “At the same time as the historians and theologians’ positivist revision of the Bible […], a reform of biblical history painting – in his view, the appropriate dress was no longer the timeless ideal robes of classicism, but the contemporary clothing of the fellahin, Berbers, Arabs and Jews in North Africa.”32 In keeping with such ideas, in his 1837 oil painting Agar chassée par Abraham (Agar driven out by Abraham), Vernet then depicts Agar as a fellahin woman and Abraham as a Bedouin prince. For his Juda et Tamar (Judah and Tamar) from 1840 (fig. 13), exhibited in the 1843 Salon, Vernet chose one of the rarely illustrated episodes from Genesis – not only modernizing the figures, robes and landscape, but also transforming the biblical story into an almost obscene orientalized fantasy. The story of Tamar, Judah’s daughter-in-law, is recounted in Genesis 38. Tamar was still childless after being married twice; her husbands, two of Judas’s sons, had both died before producing any children. After Judah’s wife also dies, Tamar, dressed as a prostitute, seduces her father-in law and become pregnant. Here, in comparison to the figure of Esther, the theme of a Jewish woman securing future descendants is less informed by the heroic than the erotic. In his painting, Vernet creates a richly colorful ensemble with the figures of Tamar and Judah in the foreground dressed in elaborate Arab robes. The landscape suggests that Tamar, her face half-hidden under her white veil, has waited for her father-in law at the wayside. She is sitting on a rock and Judah standing at her side, his camel resting behind the couple. Tamar is holding out her open right hand to Judah who – in accordance with the biblical account – is about to pass her his seal, cord, and staff. Tamar is portrayed as a woman whose dark eyes and hair resonate perfectly with the “beautiful Jewess” figure. The work emphasizes the moment of seduction: While Tamar apparently attempts to hide her face from 29 Printed in L’Illustration, February 12, 1848 (translator’s note: translated from the German). 30 Lemaire, Orientalismus. Das Bild des Morgenlandes in der Malerei, 2005, p. 180. 31 See Warner, “The Question of Faith: Orientalism, Christianity and Islam,” 1984, pp. 32–39. 32 Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Ästhetik der Differenz, vol. 1, 2010, p. 75.



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shame behind her white veil, she looks up coquettishly at Judah. Her exposed right breast and her uncovered left leg protruding from her robe are obvious erotic accents. The depictions of garments and jewels, rich in details and colors, even down to the camel’s saddle, represent Vernet’s desire to show the orient as the orient he himself had seen. It was this that he wanted to take as a contemporary background to endow the biblical stories and figures with reality – as is equally evident in a naturalistic style that could almost be termed hyper-realistic.





Fig. 13 Horace Vernet, Juda et Tamar, 1840

Here, once again, this work is informed by the ambivalence of the “beautiful Jewess” figure. As a biblical-historical figure, she stands as exemplary for the Jewess who secures the continuation of the Jewish people; in contrast, orientalist art locates her near the femme fatale with clearly orientalized features which, in emphasizing the sexual, remain deeply ambivalent. If one then takes this as the background to view Lilien’s portraits of the “beautiful Jewess” figure, consistently idealized, or his illustrations of the Bible, their status as a counter-discourse – shaped with aesthetic means – becomes even more evident.

Axel Stähler

Zionism, Colonialism, and the German Empire Herzl’s Gloves and Mbwapwa’s Umbrella One imagines that it must have created quite a stir when the retired chieftain of Uganda, Mbwapwa Jumbo, made his entrance at a dance ball in Berlin organized by the Zionist satirical monthly Schlemiel in the early 1900s.1 Of course, Mbwapwa was not a real person but the creation of one of the editors of Schlemiel, the physician and satirist Max Jungmann,2 who was also the impersonator of the black African at the society event.3 Mbwapwa had come into being as a fictitious special correspondent for the satirical journal, supposedly reporting from East Africa on the, once again, fictitious Zionist colonization of a territory in the British protectorate, following the very real offer of this territory for Jewish settlement made to the Zionist Organization by the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in April 1903.4 In altogether nine missives, published between 1903–1907 as “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland,”5 or letters from New-Newland, Jungmann explores demarcations 1 See Gronemann, Erinnerungen, 2002, p. 261. 2 In his memoir, Erinnerungen eines Zionisten, 1959, Jungmann describes his early membership, alongside leading figures such as Theodor Zlocisti, Nathan Birnbaum, Willi Bambus and others, in the (proto-)Zionist movement and his attraction to political Zionism, see esp. pp. 16–33, 39–41. 3 The lawyer and writer Sammy Gronemann, co-editor of Schlemiel, describes the occasion in his posthumously published memoirs as follows: “Max Jungmann created in the likeness of the Negro Mbwapwa Jumbo an original character who sent staggering reports from the new fictitious Jewish state in Uganda. We once organized a big Schlemiel dance ball at which Jungmann appeared as this black orthodox Negro and stated, when invited to sit, that this was not possible because he was, after all, a ‘standing figure.’ [Max Jungmann schuf in der Gestalt des Negers Mbwapwa Jumbo eine originelle Figur, der aus dem neuen fiktiven Judentstaat in Uganda erschütternde Berichte sendete. Wir haben einmal einen großen Schlemiel-Ball arrangiert, bei dem Jungmann als dieser schwarz-orthodoxe Neger erschien und erklärte, als er zum Sitzen aufgefordert wurde, es ginge nicht, er sei ja eine ‘stehende Figur.’]” Erinnerungen, 2002, p.  261. The untranslatable German phrase “stehende Figur [standing figure]” connotes something akin to “catchphrase.” All translations from the German into English are my own, if not otherwise indicated. 4 The most comprehensive study of the historical context of the Uganda proposal is still Weisbord, African Zion, 1968. 5 Jungmann’s title is of course a pun on that of Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel, Altneuland (1902), or Old-Newland, which envisages the creation of a Jewish model state in Palestine. Eight let-



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of Jewishness from, and identifications with, “blackness” vis-à-vis the colonial paradigm.6 More specifically, with his fictitious account of the Zionist settlement of East Africa and with the creation of the black African Mbwapwa Jumbo and his conversion to Judaism, Jungmann articulates an intricate and critical response to any Jewish colonial aspirations. At the same time, he formulates a scathing and highly perceptive commentary on the convergence of Zionist, racial, and colonial discourses. A crucial element of the satirist’s critique, and arguably anticipating the notion of the instability and ambivalence of colonial discourse suggested by postcolonial theorists,7 is the deliberate collapse of the distinction between the supposedly immutable categories of black and white and of colonized and colonizer. Jungmann has Mbwapwa oscillate between them and makes him perform in effect what Daniel Boyarin has called “colonial drag,”8 though adding another dimension to this notion with the intricate color play to which he subjects his epistolarian.9 The historical moment at which Jungmann chose to engage in this “charade” is of crucial significance because it was fraught, in imperial Germany, with negative associations evoked by the colonial war against the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa since January 1904 and the ensuing change in the perception of black Africans in parliamentary and public discourse. No longer stereotyped as children that needed to be – and could indeed be – educated, even if they were unruly at times, the “Negroes” of South-West Africa had suddenly metamorphosed into bloodthirsty beasts in human shape, “blutdürstige Bestien in Menschengestalt,”10 that must be ruthlessly exterminated. To create, at this juncture, not only a sympathetic black character who invites the reader’s ters, partially numbered in Roman numerals, appeared in Schlemiel, 1903–1905; the last, unnumbered, letter of 1907 was entitled “Brief aus Texas,” or a letter from Texas. Further references appear parenthetically in the text as “Briefe” followed by the Roman numeral and the page number, including for ease of reference the ‘Texan’ letter as IX. 6 For a more detailed analysis, see Brenner, German-Jewish Culture before the Holocaust, 2008, pp. 30–33 and Stähler, “Constructions of Jewish Identity,” 2013, 253–275. For antisemitically motivated correlations between Jews with black Africans since the seventeenth century, see Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 1991, pp. 99–100, 171–176, etc. and, more recently, especially in imperial Germany, Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany, 2012, pp. 77–132. 7 See, e.g., Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994, pp. 90, 110–115. 8 The phrase was coined by Daniel Boyarin in “The Colonial Drag,” 2000. 9 For this “color play,” see Stähler, “Constructions of Jewish Identity,” 2013. 10 Thus the antisemitic delegate of the Deutschsoziale Partei (DSP), Ludwig Graf zu Reventlow, in a debate in the Reichstag on March 17, 1904, see Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, XI. Legislaturperiode, 1904, p. 1900 (C); subsequently referred to as StBR. For a thorough documentation of the parliamentary and public debates on the Herero War in

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empathy, but to go indeed so far as to suggest his particular affinity and identification with the colonizing Jews must be considered quite an audacious move. Indeed, as Christian S. Davis recently observed: “Acutely aware of their own delicate position as insider-outsiders in German society, some Jewish contemporaries recognized a danger to themselves in discourses on blacks.”11 What motives could Jungmann have had for such a positioning? What are its implications for constructions of Jewishness and the perception of the Zionist enterprise? And how does the satirist’s “racial ruse”12 relate to early Zionist discourse and the interrelated conceptions of territory, identity, and nationhood prevalent in this discourse? Finally, in which ways are “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland” and Jungmann’s black correspondent linked to constructions of nation, race, and empire in Germany?13 By contextualizing Jungmann’s “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland” and his “color play” with the contemporary colonial debate in Germany, I aim to explore some little known facets of the construction of Jewish identities and the perception of difference in early Zionist discourse.

Colonial Shibboleths The voluble Mbwapwa’s account of the frequently grotesque happenings in the Jewish colony includes, in the December issue of 1903, the arrival of an expeditionary force of reform Jews to revenge the murder of one of their own at the hands of the “black” Mizrachi Jews.14 They ally themselves with the Maasai but their declaration of war is rejected with irritation by the new colonial masters. Nor can the subsequent abduction of the rebbetzins, the “Raub der Rabbinerinnen” (“Briefe” II, 10), move the Orthodox Jews to a martial engagement. Their ire imperial Germany, see Schubert, Der Schwarze Fremde, 2003 and Sobich, Schwarze Bestien, rote Gefahr, 2006. 11 Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany, 2012, p. 132. 12 I have borrowed this term from Jonathan Wipplinger, “The Racial Ruse,” 2011. 13 The present chapter, like my previous “Constructions of Jewish Identity,” is part of an ongoing research project which enquires into demarcations of Jewishness from, and identifications with, “blackness” in the early twentieth-century German Zionist press and literature and their impact on the Zionist imaginary in relation to the colonial paradigm. 14 The Mizrachi, an acronym for Merkaz Ruhani, i.e. “religious centre,” was a religious Zionist organisation founded in Vilnius in 1902 which supported the Uganda plan. The traditionally sombre attire of its members explains Jungmann’s reference to the “black” Jews and his pun: “Africa for the blacks! Africa for the blacks! [Afrika für die Schwarzen! Afrika für die Schwarzen!]” (“Briefe” I, 2).



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to retaliate is sufficiently aroused only once their women are returned to them unharmed. The ensuing mock-heroic battle rages for a whole day but the conflict is finally resolved with the exhaustion of the combatants and a high-spirited feast to celebrate their reconciliation. The Maasai, meanwhile, treacherously use the occasion to trample the settlers’ fields and to take off with their cattle.15 The events described by Mbwapwa in his droll narratives, laced with Anglicisms and increasingly suffused with Yiddish, primarily address Jewish and Zionist concerns. However, they would have been recognized by a contemporary readership as relating in various ways also to the German colonial enterprise in German East Africa (present-day Tanzania) and, even more pertinently, in German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia). Jungmann seems to have been as well-informed about the colonial situation as could be expected. He not only named his fictitious character for a district in German East Africa and its eponymous administrative center, Mpwapwa (or Mpapua), which had been established by the German colonial administration in 1889. Further references to indigenous peoples moreover suggest his familiarity with issues arising from the German colonial enterprise which at the time when Mbwapwa made his first appearance were indeed beginning to inform public discourse on Germany’s imperial policy. Especially German South-West Africa had experienced recent unrest since October 1903 when the Bondelzwarts revolted against German colonial rule. Reports about the conflict appeared in the German press from November of the same year,16 the very month in which Mbwapwa was introduced in the first issue of Schlemiel. Further mutinies erupted in December 1903 and finally led to the war of the Herero and later the Nama (derogatively also called Hottentots) against the Germans which flared up in January 1904 and which eventually concluded with the almost complete annihilation of both peoples in 1907.17 In East Africa, German colonial rule was similarly challenged by the Maji Maji rebellion from July 1905 which was terminated in August 1907 following a catastrophic famine induced by the German Schutztruppe.

15 The association of the (reform) Jews with the Maasai is intriguing in particular because contemporary comparative ethnographic research proposed a close relationship between both peoples. In winter 1903, roughly at the same time this issue of Schlemiel was being prepared, the Africa explorer Carl Georg Schillings made reference in a lecture to Moritz Merker’s Die Masai. Ethnographische Monographie eines ostafrikanischen Semitenvolkes, which was to appear early in the following year. I will discuss the implications of this association in detail in my forthcoming study on Jewish Metamorphoses and the Colours of Difference. 16 See StBR (January 19, 1904), p. 364 (C). 17 For recent historical studies on the colonial conflict, see e.g. Olusoga/Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 2010 and Sarkin, Germany’s Genocide of the Herero, 2011.

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It is in particular the continuing war against the Herero which increasingly forms the backdrop to Jungmann’s development of Mbwapwa’s character and the fortunes of the Jewish colony in East Africa as read against potential Zionist aspirations toward Jewish colonialism. The satirist mentions the Herero and Bondelzwarts in one breath with the Maasai when, in his sixth letter of May 1904, he describes the growing discontent in the Jewish colony because of its cultural isolation and the fear of being entrenched among the barbarians. Jungmann’s insouciant confusion of tribal geography can easily be explained with the prominence of the Herero War and the earlier uprising of the Bondelzwarts in public awareness. It was indeed the Herero War and, to a lesser degree, the Hottentottenkrieg and the atrocities allegedly committed by the insurgents, which contributed crucially to the change of the image of the “Negro” in Germany. Germany, as has frequently been observed, was in many ways a late-comer to colonialism. Her overseas aspirations had been realized only after the foundation of the Empire in 1871 and its consolidation in the following years. Initially German colonialism consisted of individual enterprises which were secured from 1884 onwards, during the so-called European “scramble for Africa,” with the establishment of protectorates in Africa and colonies in the Pacific. The prioritization of setting the mostly land-bound empire on a firm footing, no less than the expense involved in the acquisition and upkeep of these territories, have been said to account for the initial reluctance of the German Empire to engage overseas. Eventually, however, its increasing interest was determined by further economic considerations (such as the creation of opportunities for capital investment, the protection of trade, the opening of export markets, and the all-important access to raw materials) as well as notions of what has been referred to as social imperialism (the deflection of domestic tensions); by the desire to protect German culture from depletion by channeling emigration to German colonies (rather than to America); and by the idea of a civilizing mission. More importantly in the present context, German colonialism and the prestige of colonial possessions were tied in public opinion to the emergence of the nation and its standing as a new player in the European power game.18 The uprising of the Herero, though neither the first nor the last colonial war to be fought by Germany, was an unexpected blow. Described by the Director of the Colonial Office, Oskar Wilhelm Stübel, as a force of nature, “eine elementare Gewalt,”19 it developed very quickly into a discursive event in relation to which subsequent colonial wars were mediated as after-effects, as Folgeerscheinungen.20 18 For a comprehensive and very useful overview, see Conrad, German Colonialism, 2011. 19 StBR (March 17, 1904), pp. 1895–1896. 20 Brehl, Vernichtung der Herero, 2007, p. 102.



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The immediately following Hottentottenkrieg against the Nama, albeit even more challenging in military terms, already occasioned much less media coverage and was mostly interpreted as subordinate in the context of the media event of the Herero uprising.21 Similarly, though difficult to suppress, the Maji Maji Rebellion, which demanded a much lesser toll of German victims, was not mediated with the same panic-stricken exaggeration as the Herero War. This had indeed generated a veritable flood of publications since early in 1904, beginning with reports in the daily press and in colonial papers, soon to be augmented by (frequently merely alleged) eyewitness reports, publications of the Reichstag, official statements, popular historiographical accounts, memoirs and diaries of settlers and soldiers, editions of letters from the front, and fictional texts, in particular for children and adolescents.22 Other media also participated in the frenzy and the event was mediated, for instance, also in photographs, postcards, and paintings. Many of these publications and other representations, inspired by the Herero War, were concurrent with other colonial wars for which its mediation provided not only an interpretive pattern, such as the Hottentottenkrieg or the Maji Maji Rebellion, but for which it was metonymically substituted. As is only to be expected, the Herero War gained much prominence also in satirical magazines of the Kaiserreich. In the early years of the war hardly a week went by in which not some reference was being made in Simplicissimus to the military engagement in South-West Africa. The enormously popular satirical weekly, established in 1896 and based in Munich, had developed into a forum for the artistic and literary avant-garde in Germany. It was decidedly anti-clerical and anti-feudal and espoused a fundamental democratic stance, which informed also its critical bias against the country’s colonial wars. Less references to the Herero uprising, though no less poignant, were included in the bi-weekly Der Wahre Jakob, which had been established in 1879 and was the most widely read satirical magazine at the time. As the mouthpiece of the Social Democrat opposition, it too was highly critical of imperialist expansion and colonial practices. Kladderadatsch, finally, perhaps to be explained with its political leanings, was much less interested in the African theater of war, though the conflict is addressed in some of its pages too. It had started in Berlin in 1848 as a moderately reform-oriented satirical weekly, but by the beginning of the twentieth century had transformed into a conservative enterprise which, though also very popular, had a much smaller circulation than its rivals.23 21 See ibid., p. 103. 22 See ibid., pp. 103–104. 23 For Simplicissimus and Kladderadatsch, see Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany, 1984.

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As another satirical magazine, Schlemiel must be understood in relation to these leading publications which, in part, it emulated and with which, at least to some extent, it competed, even though the Jewish humorous monthly (“Witz­ blatt”) was considerably less significant in the general scheme of things. Yet with a print-run of an estimated 5,000 copies with multiple readers in individual households, cafés and reading halls, Schlemiel must certainly be considered an important voice in Zionist discourse.24 More specifically, the cultural pervasiveness of the Herero War and its in retrospect very visible shaping powers of discourse, no less than its significance as a media event, indicate not only that Max Jungmann’s “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland” must be read as participating in this same discourse but that the nine letters, if obliquely, participate in the mediation also of this particular event. This is the case, even though Schlemiel and Jungmann’s contributions to the magazine are of course primarily determined by Zionist discourse and originate in response to a different historical occurrence – the Uganda plan. Nonetheless, even though, or rather precisely because, “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland” was not predominantly directed at a German readership but at a (German) Jewish one, it introduces to German colonial discourse another interpretive pattern which offers a distinctive perspective on the event and confronts it with an alternative conception of colonialism. That Jungmann’s “Briefe” appeared over the course of altogether three years which coincide almost exactly with the period of the Herero War but extend, with the concluding letter from Texas, far beyond the topicality of the Uganda proposal, which was finally rejected in 1905, is then also significant. Jungmann’s “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland” is, inter alia, the product of the convergence of both discourses. As such, it is a document of the synoptic perception of two different colonial ventures whose analysis promises insights not only into the intertwining of both discourses but also into the specificity of the Zionist approach and its potential subversiveness.

The Ambiguity of Mbwapwa’s Umbrella While Max Jungmann as well as others involved in Schlemiel would in all likelihood have been familiar with Simplicissimus, the same cannot be said with any degree of certainty of the contributors to this hugely popular magazine in relation 24 See Brenner, German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust, 2008, p. 35. According to Gronemann, Herzl himself suggested the creation of a Zionist satirical journal at a meeting with the writer and lawyer in the Café Spitz in Basel during the Sixth Zionist Congress in August 1903. See Erinnerungen, 2002, pp. 249, 255.



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to Schlemiel. Yet in February 1904 Simplicissimus carried a lithograph entitled the Herero before the battle, Der Herero vor der Schlacht, by Eduard Thöny (fig. 1) which exhibits a number of similarities with the portrait of Mbwapwa published some three months earlier. Of course most of these similarities originate in the ethnographic conventions of portraying “Negro” potentates as well as other indigenes in what, due to its illusory character, frequently appears to be an ironically subverted ruler iconography. They are nevertheless illuminating in regard to Jungmann’s positioning of Mbwapwa.





Fig. 1: Eduard Thöny, Der Herero vor der Schlacht (lithograph), Simplicissimus 8.46 (9 February 1904): 363.

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In Thöny’s lithograph, the Herero is shown in traditional costume, yet with two jarring attributes. In the parliamentary debate on the conflict in German SouthWest Africa, recurring mention is made of the natives’ consumption of alcohol unscrupulously encouraged and exploited by European traders. This may explain the bottle in the Herero’s hand as well as his vacant stare. The top hat imposed on the native’s headdress is representative of European civilization and its mission civilisatrice. Yet at the same time it demonstrates the superficiality of its success, it is literally “put on.” It is moreover, of course, an incongruous element which not so much invites ridicule but rather emphasizes the violation suffered by the stoic Herero. As such, the absurd top hat and the spirits bottle clash conspicuously with the iconography of the photograph of Hendrik Witbooi which I believe to have been the model for Thöny’s cartoon (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Unknown photographer, Hendrik Witbooi (b/w photograph, c. 1900). (Image in the public domain, taken from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Witbooi_Hendrik.jpg)

The image, produced around 1900, shows the in German colonial discourse notorious Kaptein of the Nama, who led his people in the war against the Schutztruppen until he was mortally wounded in October 1905. The differences to the lithograph



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are striking. Not only is the Kaptein shown in European dress, but instead of the emasculating bottle he carries a rifle; his hat, also covering a headdress similar to that in the lithograph, is anything but ridiculous and, altogether, Witbooi appears dignified and invested with authority without being ostentatious.25 What I would like to suggest is that this photograph, or one very similar to it, provided not only the inspiration for Thöny’s Herero, but also for the unsigned picture of Mbwapwa Jumbo which purports, after all, to be a photograph as well, and which was probably the work of Joseph Rosintal, a young student at Berlin’s Technische Hochschule who did much of the graphic work for Schlemiel (fig. 3).26 A “reading” of Mbwapwa’s portrait in comparison to the other two images indicates differences which have a bearing also on constructions of Jewishness in relation to conceptions of colonialism manifest in the text and in the pictorial representation.





Fig. 3: Joseph Rosintal [?], Mbwapwa Jumbo, Schlemiel. Illustriertes Jüdisches Witzblatt 1.1 (1903): 2.

25 More recently, after Namibian independence in 1989, the image has been further disseminated on the obverse of Namibian Dollar banknotes. 26 See Jungmann, Erinnerungen eines Zionisten, 1959, pp. 61–62.

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Mbwapwa is presented in a similar pose, though in three-quarter profile. He wears a plaid caftan and a yarmulke, has side-locks and holds on to an umbrella. Significantly, he is not a caricature with exaggerated and distorted physiognomic racial markers. In this he is similar to the Herero, whose image Thöny accompanied with a caption which reads: “Will I be gathered, within a quarter, to my fathers or to the Berlin zoological gardens?”27 The Herero expects either to be killed or captured and, if captured, to be exhibited, possibly in the way in which 103 black Africans had been displayed as living exhibits at the Berlin Kolonialausstellung of 1896, among them also Friedrich Maherero, the eldest son of the Paramount Chief of the Herero, Samuel Maherero.28 In either case, he is portrayed as the dehumanized victim of German colonialism and, despite its satirical dimension, the picture reasserts the Herero’s contested humanity. Though not exhibited, Mbwapwa, too, is to some extent domesticated, yet not dehumanized: “As you can see in the photo, which I am sending you, I have myself become a member of the orthodox Mizrachi society.”29 (“Briefe” I, 2) He has undergone a complete metamorphosis which, strangely, does not seem incongruous – perhaps because the costume he wears is not connoted as “civilized,” but as “Jewish,” although this is a notion which is potentially subverted by the associations evoked by his last attribute. Indeed, the only element that remains ambiguous is Mbwapwa’s umbrella. Ariel Beaujot has recently shown for Victorian Britain that the umbrella became a significant object in the imperial metanarrative of the supremacy of Western civilization and its civilizing mission. I am not quite certain yet whether her findings can legitimately be applied to imperial Germany as well, but the very fact that Mbwapwa is invested with this attribute may indeed lend some credence to such a reading. As Beaujot shows, to the Victorians the umbrella was a symbol of “colonial backwardness”30 that denoted despotism and tyranny because traditional sumptuary laws in the East and in Africa restricted its use to persons of authority. As such, umbrellas signifying the sovereignty of native rulers were brought 27 Thöny, “Der Herero vor der Schlacht,” 1904, 363: “Werde ich über ein Vierteljahr zu meinen Vätern versammelt sein oder im Berliner zoologischen Garten?” See also Dreesbach, Gezähmte Wilde, 2005, p. 198. 28 See Meinecke et al. (eds.), Deutschland und seine Kolonien im Jahre 1896, 1897, p. 221. 29 “Wie Sie sehen auf dem Photo, ich schicke Ihnen, bin ich selbst geworden ein member von der orthodoxen Misrachi-society.” 30 Beaujot, “The Material Culture of Women’s Accessories” [unpublished PhD thesis], 2008, p.  36. Beaujot’s engaging original thesis is sufficiently different from her recently published book, Victorian Fashion Accessories, 2013, to warrant references also to this earlier, unpublished, work which is available at https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/26449/1/Beaujot_ Ariel_F_200802_PhD_thesis.pdf (last accessed August 23, 2013).



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“as imperial spoils to the metropole as symbols of British power over subjugated nations.”31 Conversely, in the colonies, the appropriation of the umbrella by the colonizer as a symbol of hierarchy aided in reinforcing the imperial structure.32 At the same time, the umbrella was also a symbol of “Western progress, democracy and civility.”33 If Mbwapwa were nothing but an African chief, his umbrella might simply signify his status as a despotic ruler. Matters are complicated, however, by the fact that he is retired, “Häuptling von Uganda a. D.” (“Briefe” I, 2), yet has been allowed to hold on to his umbrella. This would suggest a civilizing influence and a democratic principle. Yet not enough with this, Mbwapwa is also a Jew – if only by conversion. And by virtue of his having metamorphosed into a doubly black Jew – by his hue and by his Orthodox persuasion – he is simultaneously colonized and colonizer. As such, his umbrella connotes also his participation in the imperial metanarrative of Western progress and civilization, but on either side of the divide. The questions posed by the portrait of Mbwapwa, and prefixed in the form of his image to each of the nine letters, are therefore: where is the line between savage and civilized? Where are the Jews to be positioned in relation to both? And, what manner of entitlement and responsibility is carried by either notion? Moreover, in the historical context of the Herero War, the image simultaneously challenges current constructions of blacks as beasts in human shape, as “Bestien in Menschengestalt,” the implicit identification with Jews investing them with a dignity which is derived from biblical authority. There is, however, also another, less elevated paradigm suggested by the umbrella, and one which may have been recognizable more readily to Schlemiel’s German Jewish readers. Countless satirical and predominantly antisemitic postcards of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries portray in particular Eastern European Jewish peddlers with an umbrella.34 The specimen is then mostly a messy and bent one, negligently carried, which complements the unkempt appearance of its owner and reflects his low social standing.35 Much 31 Ibid., p. 22. 32 See ibid., p. 123. Cf. Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories, 2013, p. 105. 33 Beaujot, “The Material Culture of Women’s Accessories,” 2008, p. 127. 34 I am grateful to Jay Geller for directing my attention to representations of Jews with umbrellas on this type of postcard. A variety of samples of this iconographic tradition may be viewed at Bildindex der Kunst und Literatur, www.bildindex.de/obj20081419.html#|home (last accessed August 28, 2013). Since then, Aizenberg, Hatemail, 2013, has been published; the book includes a brief chapter on “Jews Carrying Umbrellas,” pp.  72–73, in which a short story by Scholem Aleichem is referred to as a literary source for the Jewish umbrella. 35 The shape, condition, and folding of the umbrella as a social marker in Victorian society have been explored by Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories, 2013, p. 131.

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less dignified than a staff, it is nevertheless an evocative attribute of the Wandering Jew, suggesting exile at the mercy of the elements, perhaps also the nomad’s tent, and, in a psychoanalytical reading, circumcision and the castration anxiety invoked by the physical “mutilation” of its bearer.36 In more stylish form it can, however, also appear, instead of the more aristocratic walking cane, as an attribute of the Jew as capitalist. It then indicates the inherent affinities between both (stereo)types of Jews and everything this entails. While Jungmann’s readers would have been familiar with the stereotype illustrated by the umbrella, in Mbwapwa’s hands this attribute appears much more decorous and its flawless shape distinguishes it markedly from its tattered relatives. The same distinction is arguably extended to Mbwapwa in relation to his European Jewish “kin.” Similar to his fresh-faced naivety and perceptive, if sometimes oblique, criticism of the ways of both Eastern and Western Jews as well as the Zionist and German colonial ventures, this emphasizes Mbwapwa’s exhortative character, but it also serves to heighten the ambiguity not only of the umbrella but also of its bearer.

The Ambivalence of Herzl’s Gloves In Schlemiel, the Uganda issue was addressed not only in Mbwapwa Jumbo’s letters from New-Newland. It in fact pervades the pages of the humorous monthly. This is hardly surprising; after all, the years of its short-lived success coincided with those of the heated debates on the proposal engaged in by conflicting factions in the Zionist Organization. It may be reading too much into this to suggest a causal relationship between the two. Nevertheless, as the fictitious stenographic minutes of the Seventh Zionist Congress, published in the April issue of Schlemiel in 1904 and presumably the work of Sammy Gronemann, seem to suggest,37 this was perceived as a time of unbridled schlemielity which is reflected in the proposal to establish an “Office for Schlemielities” (“Antrag auf Errichtung einer Centrale für Schlemieligkeiten” 3 8 ) made by Max Nordau in familiar strong language. The frantic response to the suggestion and the bizarre digressions recorded in the mock minutes merely prove the point. 36 The latter interpretation was suggested to me by Jay Geller. 37 Gronemann, “Stenographisches Protokoll des VII. Zionisten-Kongresses,” 1904, 32–33. For the attribution, see Gronemann, Erinnerungen, 2002, p. 261. In fact, in 1904 no Zionist Congress was held as it had been decided in the previous year to convene biannually rather than annually. The Seventh Zionist Congress was convened in 1905. 38 Gronemann, “Stenographisches Protokoll,” 1904, 32.



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No direct mention is made in the minutes of the Uganda scheme. Nevertheless, beyond the indiscriminate castigation of the personal idiosyncrasies of eminent delegates (Nordau among them as well as Davis Trietsch and Theodor Herzl himself), surreptitious mention is made of the Charkov conference, convened by Menahem Mendel Ussishkin in November 1903, at which Herzl was presented with an ultimatum to reject the Uganda proposal. However, of more significance in relation to the imperial and racial discourses suggested by the letters from New-Newland are the fictitious motions to introduce a compulsory national tie and white gloves. Like Mbwapwa’s umbrella, these are symbolically charged fashion accessories whose function – of articulating a sense of cultural (self-)positioning and of providing performative props in the formation of Jewish identities – is satirically interrogated in Schlemiel. The motion to adopt a national tie is proposed by the indignant Polish Jewish sculptor, writer, and Zionist Dr. Alfred Nossig: I would like to suggest to the schlemiel commission that is to be elected to embark at long last on the launch of the uniform compulsory national tie. (Applause). As an aesthetically sensitive human being it is almost impossible to attend this congress, to which men have the effrontery to present themselves who are wearing a white collar and a white cravat [called “Diplomat” in German] around the neck, (clamor) whose only relation to diplomacy this tie may possibly be (clamor), tasteless philistines, whose chutzpah (the further deliberations are drowned in the continuous uproar).39

Nossig, himself portrayed as arrogant and pedantic, challenges the delegates with displaying only the veneer of civilization but lacking a deeper understanding of both aesthetics and diplomacy – the mention of the white tie having a similar function to that of the top hat in Thöny’s lithograph. In effect, Nossig accuses the delegates of being tasteless philistines, impudent, and presumptuous. The motion is seconded and expanded by the English delegate, Sir Francis Montefiore, who evidently fails to appreciate its implications and inconsequentially evokes the memory of Sir Moses Montefiore: “More important than the tie are gloves, – white gloves! My late uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore (Roaring applause.

39 Ibid., 32: “Ich möchte der zu wählenden Schlemielkommission die Anregung geben, endlich die Einführung der einheitlichen obligatorischen Nationalkrawatte in Angriff zu nehmen. (Beifall). Als ästhetisch feinfühliger Mensch kann man kaum diesem Kongresse beiwohnen, dem Männer sich nicht zu präsentieren entblöden, die einen weißen Kragen und einen weißen Diplomaten um den Hals tragen, (Lärm) die in dieser Halsbinde vielleicht ihre einzige Beziehung zur Diplomatie besitzen (Lärm), geschmacklose Banausen, deren Chuzpe (die weiteren Ausführungen bleiben in dem andauernden Lärm unverständlich).”

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The assembly rises), wore gloves. (Vigorous applause and clapping. The speaker is congratulated.)”40 While there is a well-known portrait by George Richmond, RA, of Sir Moses, seated and holding gloves in one hand (albeit black ones) and a cane in the other,41 the satirical impact of the references by his grand-nephew Sir Francis to the elder Montefiore and to white gloves must be explained rather with his own peculiar habits. As Gronemann recalls in his posthumously published memoirs: Sir Francis Montefiore was of extremely beautiful and elegant appearance. At congresses he played more of a representative role. A particular peculiarity of his was that he always wore white gloves which he never seemed to take off. As a speaker he was not overly distinguished, but as soon as he mentioned the name of his famous uncle, which he never failed to do, he was always assured of receiving ovations.42

No less significant, because it indicates more serious connotations of the proposal, is its transient endorsement by a delegate modeled on Dr. Heinrich Loewe who, at the time (from 1902–1908), was editor of the influential Jüdische Rundschau: I am all for the launch of the uniform tie! One ribbon shall tie us all together! (Vigorous applause.) Multiply entwined are the paths of fate, – our tie shall be a symbol of this! – I am all for white gloves! Clean our hand must be, – and must remain so, even if we touch awful and nasty things. (Vigorous applause and clapping.)43

The ridiculous motion satirizes not only the obsession of the Congress with superficial and external detail and the individuals who support it. Its very nature indicates the desire to belong, to construct a group identity with its easily recogniz40 Ibid., 32: “Noch wichtiger als Shlips ist Handschuh, – weiße Handschuh! Auch mein verewigter Oheim, Sir Moses Montefiore (Stürmischer Beifall. Die Versammlung erhebt sich) hat getragen Handschuh. (Lebhafter Beifall und Händeklatschen. Redner wird beglückwünscht.)” 41 The portrait (oil on canvas, 1874) was also published as a woodcut, entitled “Sir Moses Montefiore, the Old Man Beneficent,” on the title page of Harper’s Weekly in October 1883. 42 Gronemann, Erinnerungen, 2002, p.  190: “Sir Francis Montefiore war eine überaus schöne und elegante Erscheinung. Auf Kongressen spielte er eine mehr repräsentative Rolle. Eine besondere Eigentümlichkeit bei ihm war, daß er stets weiße Handschuhe trug, die er nie abzulegen schien. Als Redner war er nicht allzu bedeutend, aber sowie er, was er nie verfehlte, den Namen seines berühmten Onkels nannte, war er immer eines Beifallssturmes sicher.” 43 Gronemann, “Stenographisches Protokoll,” 1904, 32: “Ich bin für die Einführung der Einheitskrawatte! Ein Band soll uns Alle umschlingen! (Lebhafter Beifall.) Vielfach verschlungen sind des Schicksals Pfade, – ein Sinnbild dessen sei unser Shlips! – Ich bin für weiße Handschuhe! Rein muß unsere Hand sein, – muß sie bleiben, auch wenn wir schlimme und häßliche Dinge anfassen. (Lebhafter Beifall und Händeklatschen.)”



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able accoutrements, but also – in so doing – to become like any other “club,” an institution of modern society, and, more specifically, to become a bearer of Europe’s mission civilisatrice. Indeed, in Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland (1902), white gloves are indispensable if one wants to behave like a civilized human being, “[will] man sich wie ein zivilisierter Mensch benehmen,”44 a notion which Ahad Ha’am, one of the most prominent cultural Zionists, took much pleasure in ridiculing.45

Fig. 4: David Wolffsohn [?], The Zionist Delegation in Jerusalem (b/w photograph, 1898). From left to right: Max Bodenheimer, David Wolffsohn, Theodor Herzl, Moses Schnirer, Joseph Seidener (Israel National Photo Collection, serial# 010246, photo code D131-004; image in the public domain, taken from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Zionist_Delegation_to_ Jerusalem_1898.jpg)

That most incongruous of photographs, showing Herzl and the Zionist delegation in the shrubs underneath the walls of Jerusalem, comes to mind (fig. 4)46 – seeing this, Ahad Ha’am must have been in convulsions, and one wonders whether it 44 Herzl, Altneuland, [1902], p. 109. 45 See Ahad Ha’am’s notorious review of Herzl’s novel, “Altneuland,” 1903, 227–244. 46 The delegation consisted of Max Bodenheimer, David Wolffsohn, Theodor Herzl, Moses Schnirer, and Joseph Seidener.

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may not have been this very photograph which also provoked the satirist’s spite in Schlemiel. The date is 1898, the occasion the state visit of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II to Palestine. The objective was to meet with the Kaiser to enlist his support for the Zionist cause and to survey the Promised Land on which Zionism had set its hopes. The clash, in this photograph, of the formal Western dress with the “oriental” setting seems to epitomize Herzl’s lofty vision of Jewish Europeans settling in Palestine as he was to express it most eloquently in Altneuland. In his diary, Herzl emphasizes that he checked the propriety of the sartorial arrangements of his fellow petitioners just before they set off to meet the Kaiser. Giving his companions “little instructions for the reception,” he told them, “to keep in mind that although he [i.e. the Kaiser] is a powerful figure, he is only a human being. They should be humbly deferential, but nevertheless remember that they are representing the renowned Jewish Nation at one of its historic moments.”47 Once again, he makes specific mention of their gloves: “I further inquired into whether their clothes, linen, ties, gloves, shoes, and hats were in order.”48 Herzl was deeply unhappy with Max Bodenheimer’s top hat and cuffs (on the far left), which he deemed inappropriate. His exasperation was arguably prompted by the apprehension that the incorrectly dressed Jew might be construed as uncivilized, in analogy to the perceived incongruity of the Herero with his absurd top hat; indeed, that “the renowned Jewish Nation” would be judged at a historical moment according to his fellow delegate’s failed sense of sartorial propriety: “Bodenheimer had a grotesque top-hat, and cuffs so big that his shirt-sleeves kept wriggling into view. At the last moment we had to hunt him up another pair.”49 47 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p. 286 and Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 683: “[Ich gab ihnen soeben] eine kleine Lehre für den Empfang. […] Sie sollten bedenken, dass er [i.e. der Kaiser] zwar ein mächtiger Mensch, aber doch auch nur ein Mensch sei. Sie sollten zwar demüthig sein, aber doch auch bedenken, dass sie das berühmte Volk der Juden in einem geschichtlichen Moment vertreten.” 48 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p. 286 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 683: “Ferner fragte ich, ob ihre Kleider, Wäsche, Kravatten, Handschuhe, Schuhe, Hüte in Ordnung seien.” 49 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p.  291 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 688: “Bodenheimer hatte einen grotesken Cylinder u. zu weite Manschetten, an denen die Unterärmel hervorrutschten. Im letzten Augenblick musste man ihm andere Manschetten hervorsuchen.” Bodenheimer remembers the incident in more detail: “Als wir zur Audienz aufbrachen, mißfiel Herzl mein Zylinder, den ich während meines Pariser Aufenthalts vor zwölf Jahren erworben hatte und der inzwischen unmodern geworden war. Aber in ganz Jerusalem war dieses Kleidungsstück nicht aufzutreiben. Ganz nebenher bemerkte ich dann, ich besäße auch einen Chapeau Claque, was Herzl zu dem Ausruf veranlaßte: ‘Das ist ja viel besser, warum haben Sie das nicht gleich gesagt? Den nehmen Sie einfach unter den Arm.’” Bodenheimer, So wurde Israel, 1958, pp. 103–104; for a translation into English, see Bodenheimer, Prelude to Israel, 1963, pp. 127–128: “Herzl was dis-



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The extent of his fastidiousness in regard to the proper outward demonstration of being civilized emerges also in an earlier episode in Herzl’s diary where he records with pride his efforts to dress correctly for his first preliminary meeting with Wilhelm II in Constantinople, specifically mentioning his, albeit light grey, gloves: “I dressed with care. The shade of my gloves worked out especially well: a delicate grey.”50 Yet Herzl also recalls with some mortification that he forgot to take the right glove off during the interview with the Kaiser, a convention of which he had been made aware at a previous occasion when meeting the Grand Duke Friedrich von Baden in 1896,51 in relation to which he had noted: “Appearances take on more importance, the higher the society we move in. For there everything is symbolic.”52 How serious Herzl was about the symbolic value of white gloves is illustrated also by his recollection of his first meeting with the Turkish Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. This was finally granted to the Zionist leader after much equivocation on May 21, 1901. On the same day, leaving the Bosphorus and explicitly emphasizing the integrity of his private observations safely aboard ship and away from prying eyes, Herzl noted with much disdain: I can see him before me now, the Sultan of this declining robber empire. Small, shabby, with his badly dyed beard touched up apparently once a week for the selamlik, the hooked nose of a Punchinello, the long yellow teeth with a big gap to the right in the upper set, the fez pulled low over his doubtlessly bald head, his stuck-out ears serving, as I say to my friends, as a pants protector – to keep the fez from slipping down below his waist, the feeble hands in their white over-size gloves and the loud-colored cuffs that don’t match his suit, the bleating voice, restraint [Beschränktheit] in every word and fear in every glance. And this rules! Only in show, of course, and nominally.53

pleased with my silk hat, which had been acquired during my stay in Paris twelve years before and which had meanwhile become unfashionable. But in all Jerusalem a silk hat was not to be found. I then remarked by the way that I also had an opera hat which made Herzl say: ‘That will be much better. Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Simply take it under your arm.’” 50 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p. 264 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 661: “Sorgfältige Toilette. Namentlich die Farbe meiner Handschuhe war gelungen: ein feines Grau.” 51 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p. 116 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 327. 52 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p. 115 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 325: “Die Aeusserlichkeiten werden immer wichtiger, je höher man steigt. Denn Alles wird symbolisch.” 53 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p. 351 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, III, 272–273: “Ich sehe ihn noch vor mir, diesen Sultan des endenden Räuberreiches. Klein, schäbig, mit dem schlecht gefärbten Bart, der wahrscheinlich immer nur zum Selamlik, einmal in der Woche frisch angestrichen wird. Die Hakennase eines Polichinells, die langen gelben Zähne mit der grossen Lücke rechts oben. Das Fez tief über die wahrscheinlich kahle Stirn gezogen, die abstehenden Ohren ‘dienen als Hosenschützer’ wie ich zur Belustigung meiner Freunde von solchen Fezträgern zu sagen pflegte: damit nämlich der Fez nicht bis auf die Hosen herunterrutsche. Die kraftlosen

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The sorry puppet Herzl describes is a mere mockery, a grotesque mask hiding the arbitrary power that is wielded behind its back: “But who is the real blackguard behind the grotesque mask of the poor Sultan?”54 Yet the earlier passage is intriguing more specifically because it engages in constructing an oriental other that in an unacknowledged inversion appears to be the negative mirror image of Herzl himself – as a civilized European oriental. As such the description of the Sultan arguably is an articulation of Herzl’s innermost anxieties of being mistaken for something similar to “this.” Herzl’s portrayal of the Ottoman ruler is highly charged in this sense. His hooked nose is clearly suggestive of but separated from the ubiquitous Jewish stereotype by the reference to the stock character of the Italian commedia dell’arte and the prominent beak-like nose of the traditional mask of the seemingly stupid but crafty Pulcinella. Besides, Herzl’s orientalist jibe at Abdul Hamid’s wayward fez suggests the notion of the ridiculous mimicry of the oriental affecting to be Westernised, but who is properly neither one nor the other.55 Finally, there is a suggestion of decay conveyed by Herzl’s description of the Sultan’s teeth and his badly dyed beard which conforms to common orientalist stereotypes.56 Herzl’s own luxurious black beard was Assyrian in style and – as recently argued by Artur Kamczycki – a deliberate orientalist allusion to ancient Jewish roots in the Middle East.57 It was as much a statement, and part of a carefully choreographed and iconographically fashioned masquerade, as were his white gloves, both combining to offer the image of an easily reconciled convergence of ancient oriental royal splendor58 with modern civilization and the entitlement carried by both. Indeed, the Sultan’s gloves are everything that Herzl’s are meant not to be. The ill-fitting, over-sized white gloves enveloping the Ottoman ruler’s feeble hands are a potent symbol of the piteous state (in both senses of the word) Hände in zu grossen weissen Handschuhen, u. die unpassenden groben bunten Manchetten. Die meckernde Stimme, die Beschränktheit in jedem Wort, die Furchtsamkeit in jedem Blick. Und das regiert! Allerdings nur scheinbar u. nominell.” To translate “Beschränktheit” with “restraint” is problematic as it does not capture the meaning of the German word which rather connotes narrow-mindedness and obtuseness. 54 Herzl, Diaries, 1956, p. 351 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, III, 273: “Aber wer ist der wirkliche Schuft hinter der grotesken Maske dieses armen Sultans?” 55 The fez was in fact initially a symbol of the modernization of the Ottoman Empire and had been introduced by law as substitute for the turban in 1829; it was, in turn, banned in 1925, for the connotations of uncivilized backwardness it had acquired by then, see Ilcan, The Cultural Politics of Settlement, 2002, pp. 28–29, 34n9. 56 See Said, Orientalism, 1995, p. 158. 57 See Kamczycki, “Orientalism,” 2013. For the use of Assyrian motives in early Zionist iconography, in particular in the work of E. M. Lilien, see the chapter by Hildegard Frübis in this volume. 58 See Said, Orientalism, 1995, p. 158.



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of this creature, who is further dehumanized by Herzl’s unreserved contempt: “And this rules!”

Fig. 5: David Wolffsohn, Theodor Herzl Meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II in Mikveh Israel (original b/w photograph, 1898). (The Herzl Museum, Jerusalem; image in the public domain, taken from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_7225_ Striped_image_the_meeting_ between_Herzl_and_Germa.jpg)

The German Kaiser, three years earlier, seemed an entirely different proposition to Herzl. Intriguingly, however, the ostentatious masquerade, then engaged in by Herzl and his fellow delegates underneath the walls of Zion, was mirrored by a similar masquerade on the part of Wilhelm II. While the Jews, frequently considered to form an oriental alien body in German society,59 project themselves as Europeans (notwithstanding Herzl’s beard), the German Kaiser favored an orientalized vision of himself: the distinctive white flowing gauze with which his helmet was wrapped gives the Prussian Pickelhaube the appearance of a medieval Saracen helmet (fig. 5). The Kaiser’s romantic impulse reached its climax when he laid down a bronze wreath on Saladin’s tomb in Damascus. The Arabic inscription on the wreath, which was captured by Lawrence of Arabia in 1918 and is now housed in the Imperial War Museum in London, demonstrates the rever59 See, e.g., von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 1879, 576 and “Herr Graetz und sein Judenthum,” 1879, 668, two texts which triggered what has become known as the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit.

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ence the Kaiser felt for the Sultan: “This crown was presented by His Majesty, the Emperor of Germany his presence Wilhelm the Second in memory of his pilgrimage to the tomb of his presence Salah el Din el Ajubi.”60 Wilhelm’s eulogy of Saladin, enthusing that he was “a knight sans peur et sans reproche, who often had to teach his adversaries the true nature of chivalry,”61 reveals not least the image he had of himself.62 I have given this so much space because it seems to me that the underlying impulse of both the Kaiser’s and Herzl’s masquerades is rather similar. Both attempt to conform to an imaginary which carries entitlement. Both attempts also suggest a certain dissociation from reality. But while the Jews in their uncomfortable evening dress remained at the margins, literally extra muros, the Kaiser, in an unfounded illusion of potency, entered Jerusalem like a conqueror on a white steed for whose passage a part of those very walls, next to the Jaffa Gate, had to be demolished.63 Strangely, nothing could illustrate the illusory quality of the imaginary more graphically than the commemorative photograph made of the first meeting of Herzl and the Kaiser in Palestine in the Jewish settlement of Mikveh Israel. The original image showed only a fraction of Herzl’s left foot and leg (see fig. 5)64 – 60 Imperial War Museum, London, catalogue number: EPH 4338. For a translation into English, see www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30083872 (last accessed October 20, 2012). 61 Klaußmann, Kaiserreden, 1902, p. 430: “Ein Ritter ohne Furcht und Tadel, der oft seine Gegner die rechte Art des Rittertums lehren mußte.” 62 Incidentally, the Kaiser’s admiration of Saladin had been satirized by Punch in a cartoon which also demonstrates his yearning for romantic chivalry and in which the Sultan once again wears a similar helmet. See Sambourne, “Cook’s Crusader,” 1898, 169. 63 Siberry, “Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” 1999, p. 367. When the British General Edmund Allenby entered the surrendered city in 1917 he specifically chose to do so on foot in order to distance himself from the pompous behavior of the German Kaiser, see Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917, 2005, p. 263. 64 Herzl gave an account of the meeting and the altogether two spoiled exposures taken by David Wolffsohn in his diary, Diaries, 1956, p. 282 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 679. Intriguingly, recalling his first meeting with Wilhelm II in Constantinople on October 18, 1898, Herzl used the simile of a blurred photograph to describe his sketchy memory of the audience with the Kaiser, see Diaries, 1956, p. 262 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1984–1996, II, 659. It is interesting to note that the official description of the imperial couple’s journey to the Holy Land makes mention neither of the meeting at Mikveh Israel nor of the audience given to the Zionist delegation in Jerusalem on November 2, 1898, see Mirbach (ed.), Das deutsche Kaiserpaar im Heiligen Lande, 1899. The Jewish settlements are only mentioned in passing: “On the more remote hills were some Circassian villages of mud houses with thatched roofs and the Jewish colonies established by Rothschild and Montefiore which catch the eye because of their whitewashed modern stone houses and red tiled roofs [Auf entfernteren Höhen lagen auch einige, aus kleinen Lehmhäusern mit Strohdächern bestehende Tscherkessen-Dörfer und die von Roth-



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Sander Gilman might have had a field day with this, writing another “foot-note” to the Jewish body.65 Herzl therefore had another photograph taken, of himself addressing the void where the emperor would have been, which was then used to retouch the botched attempt (fig. 6). The symbolism is uncanny: the Kaiser’s assurances indeed proved to be equally void and he soon withdrew his approval and support of the Zionist project. At the same time, the counterfeiters also took the liberty of remounting His Majesty on a dark bay rather than his white steed. This had been made necessary by the “marginal” position from which Herzl was to be rescued. The Kaiser, one imagines, would not have been amused by the notion of being shoved to the margins himself, and (presumably for technical reasons) darkened in hue and his features blunted, “Negrified” almost, in order to accommodate the Jew (fig. 7); but more importantly, the felicitous result of the early “photoshop experiment” documents another instance of a feeling of entitlement and the desire to belong. Even though in this case there are no white gloves, Herzl nonetheless poses in the appropriate colonial garb: pith helmet and tropical suit-for “everything is symbolic.” The white gloves, clamored for by the fashionable Sir Francis Montefiore and the rather excitable Dr. Loewe and so prominent in the photograph of the Zionist delegation are, of course, highly symbolic in themselves. Similar to the white mask visualized by Frantz Fanon to hide the black skin underneath,66 the white gloves conceal sweaty Jewish paws; they mask racial identity and smack of mimicry. On a more critical note, the white gloves are also exposed as the veneer

schild und Montefiore angelegten jüdischen Kolonien, welche durch ihre weißgestrichenen modernen Steinhäuser und roten Ziegeldächer in die Augen fallen]” (pp. 101–102). Otherwise, Jews are portrayed rather adversely. More or less subtly suggesting its insincerity, the welcoming speech delivered at the triumphal arch prepared by the Jewish community of Jerusalem for the emperor is characterized as infused “with effusive words [mit überschwänglichen Worten]” (p. 192); to say that Jewish orphans “sang a song whose contents would have been suitable rather for the salutation of the Messiah than that of the German Kaiser [sangen ein Lied, dessen Inhalt sich eher zur Begrüßung des Messias, als zu der des deutschen Kaisers geeignet haben würde]” has similar implications (p. 193); the same sentiment is once again articulated when the Jews lining the roadside are characterized as shifty and suspicious: “The people salute with waving hands and bows – the Mohammedans respectfully lowering their eyes to the ground, the Jews deeply and agitatedly bending up and down with an ingratiating, piercing gaze [Die Menschen grüßen mit den Händen winkend und sich verneigend – die Muhammedaner ehrerbietig zur Erde blickend, die Juden sich tief und unruhig auf und ab beugend mit einschmeichelndem, stechendem Blick]” (p. 112). 65 See Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 1991, p. 38. 66 See Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952 and, in relation to “Briefe aus Neu-Neuland,” Stähler, “Constructions of Jewish Identity,” 2013, 267–269.

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of civilization which is not only used to justify the colonial project, but also to hide dirty hands after dirty deeds.

Fig. 6: David Wolffsohn, Theodor Herzl on the Roof of his Hotel in Jaffa (b/w photograph, 1898). The figure of Herzl was to be inserted into the original spoiled exposure of the meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II at Mikveh Israel, see figures 5 and 7 (The Herzl Museum, Jerusalem; image in the public domain, taken from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_7227_ Photomontage_-_Herzl_on_the_roof_of_the_hotel_in_J.jpg)



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Fig. 7: David Wolffsohn, Theodor Herzl Meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II in Mikveh Israel (retouched b/w photograph, 1898), see also figures 5 and 6 (The Herzl Museum, Jerusalem; image in the public domain, taken from: http://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_7226_ the_photomontage-_Herzl_meeting_ with_the_German_C.jpg)

Gloves Off! – Showing their Hands That colonialism was indeed a dirty business which revealed, in August Bebel’s words, “all the brutality and callousness of which the heart of the modern capitalist is capable,” emerged early on during the Herero War.67 The ruthlessness of the German troops in South-West Africa had become a matter of parliamentary and public debate since early in 1904 when shocking reports by soldiers of the Schutztruppe began to appear in the German press. Quoting from such letters – 67 StBR (March 17, 1904), p. 1893 (A): “All [die] Brutalität und Herzlosigkeit, deren ein modernes Kapitalistenherz fähig ist.”

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for instance: “Whatever is alive and of black color is shot down”68 – the leader of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag castigated the manner of German colonial warfare: “[I]f this is indeed the manner of warfare of the Germans in South-West Africa, then it is not just barbaric but bestial.”69 The delegate’s choice of words is particularly revealing in this case because it suggests the reversal of perceived notions of civilization. Himself not entirely free of hegemonic preconceptions, Bebel variously referred to the Herero as culturally inferior. He nevertheless considered it to be imperative and a moral obligation to act towards the Herero in accordance with the alleged cultural superiority of the colonial power and to avoid the regression into barbarism: “If the Herero as a human being occupies one of the lowest rungs of culture and his manner of warfare corresponds to this, this does not mean by a long chalk that the European should make use of a similar manner of warfare against him, nor must he.”70 Bebel’s remarks are of particular relevance here not only because the politician was a perceptive observer who tenaciously intervened in the debate with a strong anticolonial bias. More significantly many of Mbwapwa’s observations, although they are additionally informed by, and intervene in, Zionist discourse, address the same issues and echo Bebel’s concerns. They also fill in the background to Schlemiel’s suggestion that colonialism is a dirty business and that Jews should not become involved in it. The Herero War was a fight with “gloves off” which insistently challenged received notions of what it meant to be civilized. The creation of the Jewish “Häupt­­ling von Uganda a. D.” and the satirical thrust of other contributions to Schlemiel not only take note of this circumstance but also intervene to varying degrees of subtlety in contemporary colonial discourse in Germany. The figure of Mbwapwa Jumbo, in particular, is poised forever in-between and with all its droll geniality is strongly exhortatory. Its very ambivalence, visually captured not least in its possession of an in itself unremarkable umbrella, demands an engagement with its ethnicity, its claim to civilization and, ultimately, its humanity. And as such it articulates – in word and image (though the former was given short shrift here) – a strong anticolonial bias which implicitly rejects constructions of the black other in Africa as “Bestien in Menschengestalt” by aligning blackness, whiteness, and Jewishness, in relation to the colonial paradigm. Simultane68 Ibid., p. 1891 (D): “Alles, was lebend ist und schwarze Farbe hat, wird niedergeschossen.” 69 Ibid., p. 1892 (A): “wenn das in der Tat die Kampfweise der Deutschen in Südwestafrika sein sollte, dann wäre sie nicht nur barbarisch, dann wäre sie bestialisch.” 70 Ibid., p. 1891 (C): “Wenn der Herero als Mensch auf einer der tiefsten Kulturstufen steht und eine diesem Kulturgrade entsprechende Kriegsweise führt, so ist doch nicht gesagt, daß der Europäer eine ähnliche Kriegsweise ihm gegenüber in Anwendung bringen dürfe oder solle.”



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ously, Schlemiel admonishes Zionism to learn from the mistakes of those it would emulate or ally itself with. It castigates German colonial practice no less than Theodor Herzl’s idolization of Western civilization and conceptions of culture. The unquestioning trust in and adoption of the model they provide are branded by implication as fallacies. Zionism, the suggestion seems to be, should have no need of gloves either to make its claim to culture or to hide its hands: no matter what the outward trappings, these hands should be clean.

Jay Geller

Kafka’s “Schakale und Araber” and the Question of Genre Gleichnis, Tiergeschichte, or dialektisches Bild? Ninety-five years after its composition and publication in Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude, Franz Kafka’s story of contemporary (1917) Zionism (?), 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 this past autumn by one of the foremost American journals of academic cultural criticism and analysis, Critical Inquiry,1 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 of that authority, that is, of his writings, are seriously flawed? As I have elsewhere 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,2 this chapter examines Hanssen’s enlisting them to decry so-called settler-colonialist Zionism in 1917 and today. 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-wrong-circles,”4 it is his 1 Page references to the article will appear in the text preceded by KA. The journal gave added prominence to Hanssen’s article by the issue’s cover art – a drawing of a lone jackal. 2 Geller, “Leaping Lizards Max,” 2011. 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 below). 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,” 2012.



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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 Gattungsfrage of “Jackals and Arabs” – the problems surrounding the determination of its genre – this chapter will turn to an analysis of Hanssen’s characterizations of the story’s protagonists and conclude with a suggestion about the role of Kafka’s work in the contestation over 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 first-person narrator, a selfdescribed 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 of the ab-original bond between Arab and jackal. To corroborate his depreciation of “our dogs,”5 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]” (JA 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: 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 5 Kafka, “Jackals and Arabs,” 1983, p. 410. Hereafter page references will appear in the text preceded by JA.

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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 “dialectical image” and “dialectics at a standstill,”6 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, 178–179, 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”; “Some Reflections on Kafka”).7 Since Hanssen’s interpellation of Kafka into contemporary debates relies, in part, upon his claim for “Jackals and Arabs” as would-be dialektisches Bild and “postcolonial allegory,” the Gattungsfrage 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”. Moreover, Benjamin never directly refers to “Jackals and Arabs” in either work. For his part, Kafka abhorred the category of “Allegorie.” The only use of “Allegorie” in his extant writings is 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,” he writes: “But I can’t get over the dryness of the entire allegory, which is nothing but an allegory which says all there is to say without ever delving deeper or drawing one deeper into it.”8 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,9 whether translated as “allegory” or “parable,” Kafka’s 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), have engaged in serious verbal contortions in order

6 Benjamin elaborated his notion in Konvolut N (N2a, 3 [dialectical image]; N3, 1 [dialectics at a standstill]) of the Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), 1999, pp. 462–463; for variants see his fifth and seventeenth “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1969, pp. 256, 262–263. 7 In Benjamin, Illuminations, 1969, pp. 111–140, 141–146. 8 Kafka, Letters to Felice, 1973, p. 421. 9 “Franz Kafka to Martin Buber” (May 12, 1917), in Kafka, Letters to Friends, 1977, p. 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’.”



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to identify the genre of “Jackals and Arabs.” For example, Dimitry Shumsky focused on Kafka’s phrase “not really parables” (nicht eigentlich Gleichnisse) in the letter: the resistence 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.10

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 n.53).11 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).12 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. Yet why shouldn’t an “animal story” include both human and nonhuman animals? And need the protagonists of an animal story conform to standards of zoological correctness? After all, neither the European nor the Arab is surprised by jackals’ possessing a capacity, speech, the lack of which has historically been a primary emblem of (nonhuman) animals’ diacritical difference from humans.13 Nor do the jackals situate the Arabs, the traveler, or themselves on opposing sides of the human-animal divide. The allegory for Hanssen, we 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, 10 Shumsky, “Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews,” 2009, p. 97. 11 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)” (Letters to Felice, 1973, p. 387). Kafka’s use here of Fabel is neither technical nor moralistic. Most would also argue that Kafka’s terse narrative “Kleine Fabel” – given its title by Max Brod, and not Kafka, it should be noted – also avoids such baggage. 12 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 179–180). 13 See Agamben, The Open, 2004, pp. 33–38.

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the third of the historical groups, along with Arabs and Europeans, that form the referential context for Hanssen’s analysis of the story.14 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.”15 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 our familiar identifications of subjects, objects, and their interrelations.16

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” (JA 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 […] 14 Actually, Hanssen plays an insidious game of naming names: e.g., he erases “Israel” when he writes “at the heart of their [i.e., ‘binationalist theorizers’] arguments is that the relationship between Palestinians, [European? – J. G.] 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). 15 Lemon, Imperial Messages, 2011, pp. 92, 95. 16 See the contrasting depictions of the Third by Holz, “Figur des Dritten,” 2001 (as threat); and Fischer, “Der Dritte,” 2000 (as opening); see also Eßlinger/Schlechtriemen/Schweitzer/Zons (eds.), Figur des Dritten, 2010.



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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” (JA 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.17 Several Jewish messianic traditions associate the Messiah with the North – as the location of his throne (e.g., 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,” was 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 “Great Wall”’s companion piece, “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. There Kafka also depicts travelers from the North, who have entered the space in which the story is set. These nomadic barbarians “hardly have a language of their own. They communicate with each other much as jackdaws [Dohlen – in Czech, kavka] do” 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.”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, by Chaim 17 See Rubinstein, “Kafka’s ‘Jackals and Arabs,’” 1967, pp. 14–15. This is not the only possible role he may play, since the head jackal rather appetizingly addresses him as “O noble heart and kindly bowels [edles Herz und süßes Eingeweide]” – edel and süß are the predicates awarded to the most select of white wines. 18 “An Old Manuscript,” pp. 416, 417. 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.”

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Weizmann and other Zionists in wartime London to secure British support. 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 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.” Yet the Arabs of the story are not native to the oasis; their caravan is only camped there for the night. As for the 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” (JA 408), the original reads that he is taking a “kurze Reise” but never indicates a destination or territorial boundaries. 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” (JA 410).19 That a story includes “Arabs” and desert might well have lead 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 settler-colonizing 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” 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 self-defense: “[T]he native […] who talks back to the jackals” – actually he never addresses the jackals; he only speaks to the European traveler – “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 19 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”; Kafka, Nachgelassene, I.2, 278.



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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” (JA 410). And, the “great” “cutting whip” with which the Arab “lashes crisscross over [the jackals’] backs” (JA 411) is a well-known weapon of self-defense. 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). 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 183–184), principally comes from the mouth of the oldest jackal. Hanssen’s citation practice, however, obscures a much more complicated picture. In the English translation of Altneuland from which Hanssen apparently draws, “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,20 unlike the repulsive (widerlich) Jewish beggars at prayer subsequently encountered on the way to the Wailing Wall. That Herzl harbors orientalist attitudes and prejudices towards the residents of Palestine cannot be doubted;21 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.”22 20 Hanssen apparently extracted these phrases from Levensohn’s English translation, Old-New Land, 1960, p. 44, as cited in its entirety by Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism,” 2001, p. 57. 21 Nor only those toward the residents of Palestine, since 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, 2012, esp. pp. 293–297. 22 Herzl, Old-New Land, 1960, p. 42; also cited by Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism,” 2001, p. 57. Similarly, Hanssen seeks to render Herzl’s vision of the Jewish-immigrant-shaped Palestine to which his protagonists return in 1923 as, aside from “the token Arab Reschid Bey” “Herzl had inserted […] merely to validate Zionist colonization,” as typical of “the way Zionists in and outside Palestine treated its native inhabitants.” There is another group tied to Palestine that Herzl mentions: the wealthy landowners, whom one assumes to be Arab or Turk but 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 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 Piter-

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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 – J. G.] and white’ – in the literary centre of a leading Zionist journal” (KA 184).23 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.”24 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, orientalist Arab steberg, Returns of Zionism, p. 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 is elided is how for Herzl poverty and class oppression, not 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, p.  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. 23 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, especially, during that time of world war. 24 Weissenberg, “Jewish Racial Problem,” 2011, p. 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, 1994, p. 110.



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reotypes: e.g., “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).25 He does not consider, for example, travel literature, of which Kafka was quite fond,26 or Karl May’s extremely popular Orient Cycle (1881–1888), the Wild East adventures of Kara Ben Nemsi (Karl, son of the Germans).27

A Jackal of All Trades Hanssen punningly characterizes Kafka as “Champion of Underdogs” (KA 194), whose illuminating “exceptionalism,” unlike the most “self-congratulating[ly] tolerant” (KA 196) of his Prague Zionist friends, allowed 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 anti-Semitism” (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.28 He also somewhat nonsensically suggests that the Arab’s “smug compari25 The only sources he cites for the “Orientalist literature” about Arabs are Gribetz, “Defining Neighbors,” 2010; LeVine, Overthrowing Geography, 2005; Said, “Zionism,” 1992); and Piterberg, Returns of Zionism, 2008. Also recall the Hanssen omission of non-Jewish European meanings noted in n. 14 above. 26 See, e.g., Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 2003. 27 Indeed, in a line left out of the published version of the story, just prior to his making the crucial distinction between Arab and Jackal, “They kill animals for food, and carrion they despise” (JA 408), the head jackal observed that the Arabs immediately insult anyone of their own who overvalue gluttony as “son of a Jackal”; Kafka, Nachgelassene, 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” (http://Gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/2329/3); and in Ein Gardeleutnant, 1902–1903, to the guard of the Arab official Harrar’s residence by the annoyed Graf (http://Gutenberg.spiegel. de/buch/6564/28). Although there is no extant Kafka reference to Karl May the recognition of certain affinities between the two was imagined in the 1994 novel Henisch, Vom Wunsch Indianer zu Werden. Kinship with jackals does appear in the Book of Job when the noted eponymous biblical Gentile refers to himself in his desolate plight as having “become a brother to jackals” (30:29). 28 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

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son” that his dogs are “finer [schöner] than [the Europeans’]” (JA 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.” Moreover, Hanssen does not explore the implications of a story about jackals. Perhaps he assumes the jackal’s bad reputation speaks for itself. Jackals29 are opportunistic and feed on carrion (though not only or even primarily: these omnivores also hunt); they also patrol the margins of human communities and can be pests. He could have, as others have,30 made reference to Heinrich Heine’s poem “The Disputation,” in which the Franciscan Friar Jose castigates Jews as “jackals,” among many other abject beasts, or to Franz Grillparzer’s poem “Miscarriage”/“Fehlgeburt” in which the Devil combines bits of jackal, other savage canid predators, and the Jew to birthe the literary critic.31 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 (Isaiah 13:22, 34:13, 35:7; Jeremiah 9:10, 10:22, 49:33, 50:39, 51:37; Ezekiel 13:4; Micah 1:8; Maleachi 1:3; Lamentations 5:18) to Heine, again, and Adalbert Stifter’s Abdias.32 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 few33 and far from unequivocal intertexts generate. While Kafka may be “invoking” metaphors employed by European antisemitism, for Hanssen he is certainly not promoting Jewish stereotypes. Without giving any specific examples of stereotypes qua stereotypes, he does quickly note “Sander “jackal-like.” Moreover, the 26 dogs in the filmed dream represent the 26 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 had shot. 29 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,” p. 346, to situate 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. 30 See Tismar, “Kafkas ‘Schakale und Araber,’” 1975, pp. 310–312. 31 In “Liebe Fackel!,” 1902, pp. 29–30, Karl Kraus recalls Grillparzer’s “epigram” and offers a supplement; he suggests that had the devil included the shamelessness (Unverschämtheit) of the ape to his concoction, he would have produced a literary historian (Literarhistoriker) rather than a mere literary reviewer – and a suggestive bridge between the protagonists of Kafka’s two Tiergeschichten: the jackals and the ape Red Peter. 32 Helfer has recently analyzed Stifter’s novella as antisemitic in The Word Unheard, 2011. 33 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, 1942, not a single one associates Jews with jackals.



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Gilman saw in the animal story a parody of Jewish stereotypes” (KA 180).34 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, 184–185) – after having asserted the Zionists’ same need (KA 169–170). Indeed most 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). 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” (JA 408), while the jackal’s description of how “when [Arabs] lift their arm, the murk of hell yawns in the armpit” (JA 410) seems to be confirmed by Kafka’s narrative: the Arab is described as having “crept upwind toward” (JA 410) the narrator, which suggests that the Arab’s smell would have betrayed his approach. Similarly, another “Jewish” quality, “cold arrogance” (JA 410), 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 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,35 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. 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.

From Animadversions to Animal Versions I will conclude by way of a return to the opening question of the genre of “Jackals and Arabs.” Complexifying the “Jewish jackal” supplements the anti-“analogical

34 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). 35 See, e.g., Schopenhauer, “On Religion,” 2000, II, 370–377.

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parable” readings of Kafka’s animal story by Scott Spector36 and others that call attention, inter alia, to –– the multivalence of Judentum (e.g., 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, –– 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 I would draw upon a different Benjaminian insight into Kafka’s work than does Hanssen: that “all Kafka’s short pieces,” “the ‘ever-changing 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 wish to invoke Benjamin’s “early (and unheeded) alternative to the setting of the stories into a grid of fixed correspondences” 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”37 for corroborating his own cultural-political positions. Rather, I would also suggest that Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs,” like his other animal stories, 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.

36 Spector, Prague Territories, 2000. Shumsky, “Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews,” 2009, p.  76, explicitly supplements Spector’s reading by adding Palestine to Prague as another referential venue for Kafka’s triangulations of subject positions. 37 Spector, Prague Territories, 2000, pp. 194, 192.

Daniel Wildmann

Desire, Excess, and Integration Orientalist Fantasies, Moral Sentiments, and the Place of Jews in German Society as Portrayed in Films of the Weimar Republic1 In this chapter I compare two German silent films from the early 1920s with regard to where they position German Jews within German society. How do these films tackle this issue? And to what extent are oriental fantasies about Jews and Judaism used in this process and turned into images in order to give the contemporary audience a visual answer to this question? As will be shown, the two films under discussion here, namely Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920) and Das alte Gesetz (1923), provide their German audience with two very different answers. My analysis focuses on how the personal relationships in these two films are being staged: the erotic desire of Miriam, the daughter of the Rabbi of Prague, and that of her Christian lover in Golem will be compared with the erotic desire of the Austrian Archduchess Elisabeth for Baruch, the son of a rabbi from Galicia, in Das alte Gesetz. These dramaturgical constellations may seem at first glance similar or related. But a closer analysis will show how different, indeed how contrary to each other, they really are. My analysis of the visual answer to the above questions is particularly concerned with the function of costume, body language, and topography. Furthermore, I will look at how gender is being visualized in order to describe certain affiliations, or rather, how certain forms of masculinity or feminity are being used as guarantors of such affiliations or as a danger to them. I am especially interested in the function of oriental fantasies as a device to signal danger. The aspect of danger is closely related to the question of moral values that appear to be threatened and also to the question of sentiments which, in turn, are tied to values as well as to dangers, as for instance in the case of shame and fear.2 Films can offer us excellent access to the analysis of emotions because they tell their stories primarily with the help of emotions – it is pertinent that many film genres are directly or indirectly named with reference to emotions: thrillers, weepies, romantic films, horror films. The cinema, in turn, may be understood

1 Translated from the German by Gabriele Rahaman. 2 Regarding the category “emotion” in historiography, see Plamper, Geschichte und Gefühl. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte, 2012.

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as a location where emotions can be shared. We can, for instance, enjoy or be annoyed by a character in a film.3 Shared emotions, as the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith said in 1759, point to the moral values society has agreed upon; one knows what is good and gives rise to enjoyment and one knows what is bad and gives rise to indignation.4 In other words, moral sentiments are contingent on culture and as such they are a historical phenomenon. We – the audience, the actors, the film-makers – come to an understanding, for instance, when we should feel ashamed or when it is appropriate to feel proud, or why we really are entitled to be furious. And we also learn how emotions can be translated into body language. Thus one could say that there exists, within a shared cultural context, a learned and practised, physical visualization of emotions that is closely connected to the legibility of the corresponding body language; one may therefore speak of culturally coded knowledge about emotions and their depictions and expressions. In particular, the analytical way of looking at the body language of actors allows us to draw conclusions about emotions and therefore also about values that a particular film puts up for debate at a particular time.5 If we follow the trace of the emotions that a film spreads out before our eyes and which enable it to tell its story, then we shall also find the moral concepts the film intends to share with its audience.6 The question of where Jews are placed within German society is ultimately also a question of the moral order which this particular society has declared valid for itself at a particular time. I base my analysis, which aims to trace some ideas about Jews and society in early Weimar Germany, on close descriptions of the plots and on the micro-analysis of central scenes in Paul Wegener’s Der Golem and E. A. Dupont’s Das alte Gesetz.

3 Regarding emotions and film genres, see, e.g., Kappelhoff, “Tränenseligkeit,” 2008, pp. 35–58. Generally for emotions, genre, and audience, see, e.g., Smith, Engaging Characters, 1995. 4 Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1759. Regarding the theory of moral sentiments, see in particular the contemporary philosopher Ernst Tugendhat, Vorlesungen über Ethik, 1997. 5 Regarding the historical dimension of the portrayal of emotions, see Fischer-Lichte, “Theater als ‘Emotionsmaschine,’” 2009, pp. 22–50; Riis, “Acting,” 2009, pp. 3–11. 6 Regarding the connection beween emotion and visual language as discussed in film studies, see Hediger, “Gefühlte Distanz,” 2006, pp. 42–62. For the connection beween emotion, film and political values, see Hake, Screen Nazis, 2012, pp. 3–31; although regarding the link between emotions and political values, this study does not follow the theoretical model established by Adam Smith and Ernst Tugendhat but rather that put forward by Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe.



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The Gaze of the Jewess: Eros and Death in Paul Wegener’s Film Der Golem (1920) In 1920 Paul Wegener’s film Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam had its triumphant premiere in Berlin. It was Wegener’s third Golem film and is the only one still extant today. While Wegener set the two earlier versions of the film – Der Golem (1914) and Der Golem und die Tänzerin (1917) – in the contemporary present, but without any reference to the War, his third Golem film was set in the past, in a rather distinct interpretation of premodernity, not easy to classify, but certainly at a time very much before the legal emancipation of Jews in Western Europe.7 Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam tells the story of deliverance and rescue. The Jews of Prague are threatened with expulsion; accused of practising black magic and of being after the property of the Christian inhabitants of Prague, they are told to leave their ghetto. Faced with this threat, Rabbi Löw brings the Golem, an articifial being made from clay, back to life. Thanks to the Golem’s immense physical prowess the decree of expulsion is revoked. In the course of the film the political drama about the future of the Jews becomes intertwined with a personal drama involving Miriam, Löw’s daughter. These two narrative strands are closely linked with each other by the figure of the Golem, by the intensive feelings and erotic desires between Jews and Christians, and by a number of physical altercations that result in the death of a Christian protagonist and a conflagration in the ghetto.8 Wegener’s film was an extraordinary critical and popular success. Screenings were sold out for months. Der Golem was also successful abroad, especially in the United States. The film was frequently referenced in later productions such as, for instance, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), or in Veit Harlan’s Jud Süss (1940), to name but a few contemporary examples. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam is today regarded as a classic of Weimar cinema.9 7 See Ledig, Golem-Filme, 1989 for a detailed account of the production history of Wegener’s Golem films. 8 The personal drama, i.e. the love affair between Esther and a knight, is not part of the original Golem legend. It was Gustav Meyrink who first added this narrative element to the legend in his novel Der Golem, published in 1915. The original Golem legend can be traced to the sixteenth century; it thematizes the creation of an anthropoid made of clay by Rabbi Elijahu Ba’al Schem of Chelm. Since the late eighteenth century the Golem is associated in Jewish folk tales with Rabbi Löw of Prague. The topic of rescue – Rabbi Löw rescues the Jewish community of Prague with the Golem’s help – becomes part of these folk tales in the nineteenth century. See Gelbin, The Golem Returns, 2011, pp. 7–13, 97–115. 9 For an assessment of Wegener’s third Golem film as a classic of Weimar cinema, see Isenberg, “Monsters and Magicians,” 2009, pp. 33–54.

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Florian The emperor asks a young member of his court, the Knight Florian, to deliver the decree of expulsion to the inhabitants of the ghetto. Florian leaves the royal household and rides to the ghetto. Topographically speaking these two worlds – that of the emperor (the Christian world) and that of the ghetto (the Jewish world) are separated in the film, not only by a wall but also by a great physical distance. The ghetto is isolated, surrounded by a huge wall, very much removed from the Christian world. Florian’s journey to the ghetto leads to his first meeting with Miriam and thus to a point where the drama of eros and death gains momentum. Riding a white stallion, Knight Florian finally reaches the ghetto. He asks to be admitted and is guided to the house of Rabbi Löw. At this first appearance the film presents Florian as a mildly bored, young, arrogant, dandy-like beau with a rose between his teeth, not much interested in Jews, indeed regarding physical contact with them as rather irksome. While he wears close-fitting clothes that show the outline of his body, such as tight trousers, the older Jews Florian encounters at that moment are dressed in a completely different manner. They wear loose clothes that hide the body, with white circles sewn onto their garments at chest height – a distinctive, visually haunting representation of the late-medieval colors and textiles used to mark out Jews. The shots showing Florian’s arrival in the ghetto are edited parallel to the shots showing how Rabbi Löw creates the Golem – forming with great physical and mental effort the last, still missing, part of the Golem’s body, namely the face – and parallel to the shots showing how Miriam, lost in her dreams and fantasies, takes pleasure in combing her hair whilst sitting at the window in her room. Visually the film emphasizes the huge wall and the tall buildings of the ghetto. Long shots, in particular, are used in the staging of Florian’s arrival and his first few steps when he enters the ghetto: Florian is small, the ghetto is vast. The film also emphasizes in a visual manner how intensively Löw has to work on the Golem and how lost in herself Miriam appears to be. These cross-edited intercuts consist of medium shots that make the audience feel in immediate, almost intimate, contact with what is happening on screen, transmitting, in close detail, the film characters’ emotional engagement with their activities through their body language. Their bodies and the intensity of their demeanor fill the screen completely.



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Miriam Miriam hears the voices of the clearly very agitated Jews who are guiding Florian to her father’s house. She looks out of the window, sees the approaching knight and is instantly enraptured. Whatever dreams and wishes she may have hitherto had, Florian now becomes the object of her desire. Called by Florian’s escorts, Miriam leans out of the window. Florian sees her for the first time and his defensiveness turns into interest: he instantly begins to flirt with Miriam. Miriam speaks with her eyes, while Florian mostly communicates by gesturing with the rose he carries, finally implying a kiss. The first meeting of the two – she looking out of the window of the second floor of her father’s house, which is full of nooks and crannies, Florian below on the street, waiting to be let in – culminates in medium close-ups of both faces. The medium close-up of Miriam’s face emphasizes a visual, physical, and textile marking of her ethnicity which one may call “oriental” or, to be more precise, a condensed vision and interpretation of “oriental” which is typical for Wegener’s films.10 The effect of the medium close-up is further intensified by Miriam’s head being framed by the brick wall of the house, and by the direction of the lighting, i.e. the precise cone of light that falls on her face from front left. Her long, black, curly hair, her jewellery, her make-up, and her headscarf are visual references to a world beyond that of the Christian emperor, but also beyond the world of the Prague ghetto which, in the film, appears to be rather dark and monochrome. The image of her face refers to another world, one that may be located in the world of European visual fantasies of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, namely in the Ottoman Empire which, by 1920, no longer existed. This was the world of the harem, the world of sensual abundance and erotic excess.11

10 The figure of Miriam may also be discussed within the context of the topos of the “beautiful Jewess,” yet I analyse the figure of Miriam rather in the context of discussions about Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews). For a seminal contribution to the topic of the “beautiful Jewess,” see Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993; Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005. For a discussion of the triangular dramatic constellation of Jewish father – Jewish daughter with oriental features – Christian knight in nineteenth-century literature, theater, and opera see Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005, pp. 168–177. 11 In the early Weimar Republic films set in locations outside Europe were very popular. Leading film makers, such as Ernst Lubitsch (Sumurun, 1920), produced successful adventure films which transferred contemporary concepts of femininity, excessively erotic desire and the “Orient” to the cinema screen in a lavish fashion. The visual portrayal of Miriam is to be located in this context. Regarding Lubitsch’s Sumurun, see McCormick, “Desire versus Despotism,” 2010, pp. 67–83.

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Hoping to avert the expulsion, Löw receives Florian in his house and asks for an audience with the emperor. At this meeting Miriam serves wine and fruit. Miriam’s appearance is again visually emphasized by the architecture of the room and the way the lighting is directed. The point of Miriam’s body language is to make a conquest of Florian. While walking through the room she not only presents food and drink but also herself, and her gaze is ardently fixed on the youth. Before offering Florian the wine she nips at the goblet and, seemingly in exchange for it, he presents her with the rose. The framing changes from a medium long shot to a medium close-up just at the moment when Miriam offers the goblet and nips at it with a meaningful glance in her eyes. The exchange of the wine and the rose, the eye-play, the gaze of desire between Miriam and Florian – at that point not noticed by Miriam’s father, Rabbi Löw – is emphasized by a medium closeup that brings the two protagonists physically close together. The so-called “first chapter” of the film then ends with a fade-out. The dramaturgical parameters have thus been set. With the aid of costumes, a visually complex system of relations indicating various kinds of affiliations and conflicts is being staged at this first meeting of Jews and Christians inside the ghetto. We see older Jewish men dressed in long, flowing garments and a young Jewish man – Löw’s assistant – who wears tightfitting clothes. Visually the Jewish men are connected to each other by the white circle on their chests and the black color of their garments. Tight-fitting clothes, emphasizing the outline of the body, visually connect the young Famulus with Florian, but the coloring of their respective dress marks a difference: Famulus is attired in dark clothes while Florian wears light-colored garments. While Jewish men, in contrast to the Christian world, are topographically situated simply in a different location, i.e. inside the ghetto, behind gigantic walls, Miriam is placed elsewhere in two locations at once: inside the ghetto and in the oriental world – the latter being visually symbolized by her dress, her ornaments, and her make-up.12

The Golem In the second chapter, Florian returns to the ghetto with an invitation for Rabbi Löw to attend the court.13 While Löw is away Florian smuggles himself into the 12 For an overview of visual traditions of orientalist fantasies in art and fashion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Thornton, Orientalist Painting, 1994; Maers, “Orientalism,” 2010, pp. 546–550. See also the chapters by Brunotte and Petzer in this volume. 13 The film is subdivided into five chapters.



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ghetto and spends the night with Miriam. Famulus, Löw’s young assistant, discovers the affair in the morning. The personal drama, fed by emotions that center on unattainable, forbidden desires, comes to a head. In a fit of jealousy Famulus wakes up the Golem and makes him attack Florian. The Golem kills the youth and sets fire to the rabbi’s house and thus, albeit unintentionally, to a part of the ghetto.14 The Golem, emotionally in turmoil, then seeks to leave the ghetto. Rabbi Löw, returned from his visit to the imperial court, manages to quell the flames using magical force and follows the Golem’s trail of destruction. The Golem breaks through the huge gate of the ghetto walls where he comes across a number of Christian children. His aggression wanes and, enchanted, he lifts up one of the small children, a girl, which then turns the star the Golem wears on his jacket. The magic word that awakens the Golem or makes him return to his inert clay-shape is engraved in this star, a mechanism only Löw and Famulus know about. By chance, the little girl turns the star in the right direction and the Golem instantly changes into a lifeless statue made of clay. Reassured, the Jewish men carry the Golem back to the ghetto. The expulsion is revoked, the fire extinguished, and the Golem once again under control. Famulus promises Miriam to keep quiet about her affair with Florian provided she marries him. Relieved, she agrees, the more so because she knows that her father wants Famulus to become his son-in-law and would oppose nothing more than a romantic liaison of his daughter with a non-Jew. The film ends in silence.

Order and Orientalism Wegener’s film tells a story of peril and of how various kinds of order, which have been threatened, must be reinstated. The political as well as emotional and gender orders are being targeted. The solution consists not of expelling the Jews but of maintaining separate ways of life. Rabbi Löw re-establishes the political order with the help of the Golem whom he presents at court. The stunned emperor guarantees the continued existence of the ghetto. But in the end it is the category of “gender” which is instrumental in establishing where the boundaries lie and to which extent integration of the Jewish world into the Christian one can be allowed to happen. Miriam’s and Florian’s feelings are pitted against the political order. Their desire for each other triggers a chain of catastrophes in the ghetto which can 14 This dramaturgical turn might remind those familiar with Goethe’s works of his ballad “Der Zauberlehrling” (1797); Goethe, in turn, might have been influenced by the Golem legend, see Gelbin, The Golem Returns, 2011, p. 37.

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only be counteracted by Florian’s death, Rabbi Löw’s magical powers, Famulus’s silence, and by the innocent action of a little Christian girl. Wegener stages these instances of desire, affection, jealousy, intimidation, and a sense of belonging by making good use of costumes and locations. Male action and Christian-female innocence reinstate societal order – an order which the film presents as being in accordance with the expectations and wishes of male Jewish society. Ultimately, the ghetto represents a Jewish world that is separate and is obviously meant to be kept separate. Rabbi Löw embodies the political, magical, and patriarchal authority and power which maintains the Jewish world as well as the topographical relations between the Christian and Jewish worlds. Miriam questions the separation between these two worlds. She embodies the transgression of boundaries – metaphorically speaking the breaching of the wall that divides these two worlds – and the danger which arises from such transgressions. Her visual appearance portrays and explains to the audience her desirability to Florian – a desirability which is the basic prerequisite for her to transgress boundaries. If Miriam is portrayed as an orientalized character in the film, then the Golem may be described as a figure in correlation to her. The archaic cut of his features, his Egyptian-looking hairstyle, his clumsy movements, may be read as the other side of orientalist fantasies, the one that features backwardness and brutality.15 What connects them both – the figure of Miriam and the figure of the Golem – are perceptions of threat, excess, and unreasonableness, which, however, are oriented and gendered in different ways. It is the message of the film that menace and excess, as well as Miriam’s ability to fascinate – perhaps expressed most vividly by her gaze – no less than the destructive qualities of the Golem have to be brought under control. Orientalist fantasies are ambivalent. They appeal to feelings of desire and fear.16 In the context of the 1920s, orientalist fantasies allow a glimpse of the then current ambivalent fantasies about Jews and Judaism in Germany – fantasies that point to a lost and far-away world and which, at the same time, are to be located in the close relationship to contemporary political debates.

15 For the visual portrayal of the Golem in twentieth-century art, theater, and film, see Bilski (ed.), Golem, 1988. 16 On the dual structure of orientalist fantasies in the context of this collection of essays, see also the chapters by Wittler, Ludewig, and Brunotte as well as the seminal texts by Kalmar/ Penslar, “Introduction,” 2005, pp. xiii–xl and Rohde, “Der innere Orient,” 2005.



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The Gaze of the Archduchess: Desire and Tradition in E. A. Dupont’s Film Das alte Gesetz (1923) Between 1916 and 1924 approximately a dozen feature films which focused on Jewish history and culture, such as Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam and Das alte Gesetz, were made in Germany.17 These films address in particular conflicts to do with Jewish integration into society, and many of them are set in Eastern European societies, especially in early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. In contrast, Ewald André Dupont’s film Das alte Gesetz is set in the 1860s, shortly before the legal emancipation of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its locations are the crownland of Galicia and Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg monarchy. Dupont tells the story of a cultural and familial reconciliation. Baruch Meyer, the son of a rabbi, dreams of becoming an actor. Against his father’s wishes he leaves his parents and his village in Galicia to seek his fortune in Vienna. He becomes the protégé of Archduchess Elisabeth who has fallen in love with him. Due to this as well as his considerable talent, Baruch manages, in a very short time, to become successful beyond his wildest dreams: he becomes a star actor at the renowned Burgtheater. But there is something missing in Baruch’s life: reconciliation with his father. Yet driven by longing for his son, the rabbi eventually decides to follow Baruch to Vienna, to accept his modern lifestyle, and to take him back into the family. In the last scene the family is reunited and the generations are reconciled – as are, by implication, traditional and modern Jewish ways of living as well. Das alte Gesetz had its premiere in Berlin on October 29, 1923 under the patronage of the mayor of Berlin; it was also linked to charitable activities: the takings from the first performance were donated to the municipal foodbank, an institution that made meals available to the poor of Berlin.18 It was certainly no coincidence that the premiere was set up in this way but was connected to contemporary debates about the immigration of Eastern European Jews into Germany, particularly to Berlin, and the accompanying social problems and cultural challenges for the German-Jewish community in particular and the German society of the Weimar Republic in general. The film, as well as its premiere, was intended as an intervention in this debate – the premiere within the context of the social problems of an economically weak group of immigrants, the film within

17 See Stratenwerth/Simon (eds.), Pioniere in Celluloid, 2004, pp. 220–245. 18 Comedia Film, “Einladung zur Uraufführung Das alte Gesetz,” October 1923, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (SDK), Schriftgutarchiv (SGA), F4678_OT.

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the context of fierce cultural and political discussions about this same group of immigrants. The social, economic, and political situation of Eastern European Jews in the Weimar Republic, especially in its first few years, was precarious. It was marked by economic insecurity, physical anti-Jewish aggression, politicial controversies, and juridical pressures in various regional parliaments aimed at rescinding the Jews’ right of residence – the wish to expel them was always present. Additionally, the situation of Eastern European Jews was marked by intense inner-Jewish controversies about their integration into German-Jewish society. The case of the Eastern European Jews in Germany very much crystallizes and clarifies the general discussions about ways of integrating Jews in the Weimar Republic or of excluding them from German society.19 German press reaction to the film was mostly positive. How well the film was received by the general public is not known – but those attending the Berlin premiere reacted positively to Das alte Gesetz. With the exception of its reception in England it is impossible to say whether the film was an international success as far as either the press or the public were concerned. The premiere in London, however, was most successful.20 Of course, premiere audiences, in particular those attending a film presentation influenced by political factors such as that in Berlin, should not be equated with the ordinary cinema-going audience, but it may safely be assumed that the film found a positive echo in Germany. The history of the struggle for a modern Jewish way of life is told by Dupont not only with reference to the professional career of the rabbi’s son from Galicia at the fashionable Burgtheater, but also with reference to various desires – that of the Archduchess for Baruch as well as Baruch’s desire for his first love, the daughter of a synagogue sexton back in his home village. These competing and conflicting erotic desires demand moral decisions from Baruch and set the dramaturgical parameters of a cinematic discussion about love, loyalty, and the possibilities of Jews transgressing social and cultural boundaries in the Habsburg Empire of that era – a discussion which, in essence, is of a political nature and which Dupont presents to an audience in the early years of the Weimar Republic.

19 On the topic of violence against Jews in the early Weimar Republic, see Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität, 1999, pp. 52–79, 97–150; Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft, 2007, pp. 69–80. Regarding the history of Eastern European Jews in the Weimar Republic see the still essential contribution of Maurer, Ostjuden, 1986. 20 For the German press reaction, see Stratenwerth/Simon (eds.), Pioniere in Celluloid, 2004, pp. 231–232. Regarding the premiere audience in Berlin, see Olimsky, “Das alte Gesetz,” (November 8, 1923). Regarding the London premiere, see “Wieder ein deutscher Filmerfolg in England,” (May 24, 1924).



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Journey to Vienna Baruch leaves his parents’ home by night. The house had been locked by his father to prevent him from doing so. He starts his journey to Vienna on foot. On the way he meets a touring company of third class actors who agree to take him in, provided he performs menial tasks for them. Finally he gets a chance to perform on stage when an envoy of the Archduchess Elisabeth and her court, hoping to find entertainment to relieve their boredom, convince the leader of the company to perform Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Baruch plays the role of Romeo. In a key scene of the play Baruch accidentally loses part of his costume and his sidelocks become visible. While the courtiers feel amused by the miserable provincial performance and in particular laugh at the recognizably “Jewish” Romeo, the Archduchess is completely smitten with Baruch and his acting skills. She invites him to her court, arranges for him to be dressed in the West-European manner and gives him a chance to audition at the Burgtheather. This endeavor is successful: Baruch is offered a contract to act at the theater and consequently cuts off his sidelocks.21 Baruch’s dress and hairstyle seem to indicate that he has found his place in modern Viennese society and that he has left his background – Galicia, traditional dress, Orthodox Judaism, and his first love – behind.22 In order to dramatize a potential conflict, Dupont cross-cuts medium shots of Baruch, showing how he cuts off his sidelocks with a large pair of scissors, with medium shots from his home village. Dupont also lets the audience observe a private discussion between Nathan, the synagogue sexton, and Esther, his daughter, both dressed in the traditional clothes of the rural Jewish villagers. The synagogue sexton tries to persuade his daughter to wait no longer for Baruch’s return and thus regain her eligibility for marrying someone else. Esther refuses to give up her hope that she will see Baruch again. Dress and hairstyle in Das alte Gesetz mark the differences between the ways of life in Galicia and Vienna – i.e. differences between Jewish and non-Jewish ways of life. As will be shown during the course of the film they do not, however,

21 In the version of the film available at present in the Bundesarchiv, this scene is placed before the audition. However, the “Zensurkarte” [the censorship office card] of the film, shows this scene to follow the one depicting Baruch’s successful audition. See Zensurakte, “Das alte Gesetz” (1923), Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (BA-FA), R9346/B/7801. On the discussion about the place of this scene, see also Weinstein, “Dissolving Boundaries,” 2005, pp. 496–516, esp. pp. 503–504; Walk, “Romeo with Sidelocks,” 2010, pp. 84–101, esp. pp. 90, 97. 22 On the history of Jews in nineteenth-century Vienna, see the still very useful contribution of Rozenblit, Die Juden Wiens, 1989; Hödl, Als Bettler in die Leopoldstadt, 1995.

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mark insurmountable boundaries of ways of life that are apriori mutually exclusive – at least not in the view of the film’s young Jewish protagonist. Clothes as worn by the Viennese emphasize the silhouette of the body: men’s trousers are tight, and ladies’ skirts and blouses draw attention to the waist and bust. Such clothes are not worn by the Jewish inhabitants of the small village where Baruch’s family is at home. Theirs are cut much looser and the coloring is muted, pointing to a way of life that has its own concepts of beauty but is restrained with regard to erotic matters.23 In the view of the court, dress and hairstyle signify differences which can also stand for insurmountable boundaries: Romeo must not look Jewish. Sidelocks, in the view of the court, are ridiculous; they are irreconcilable with ideas of dramatic manliness in art and culture; an orthodox Jewish man is for them unimaginable as part of their own scheme of life.24 From Baruch’s perspective, however, the question of difference, of the visibility of difference, and its bearability is treated in another way. Baruch cuts off his sidelocks, possibly because he tries to save himself from a humiliating experience similar to the one he suffered at the hands of the audience watching him on a provincial stage while he was a member of the touring company; but also he may do so in order to fully realize and re-enforce his newly established position for himself in this physcial way. The action of cutting is staged by Dupont as something that is not only marked by fear or uncertainty but also by enjoyment.25 Baruch cuts off his sidelocks slowly, almost irritatingly so, but the shot ends finally with Baruch looking at himself in the mirror, smiling and enjoying himself. Baruch’s action however does not mean, as becomes clear later in the film, that he wants to avoid being seen as a Jew and being recognized as such.

Erotic Desire Archduchess Elisabeth invites Baruch repeatedly into the private rooms of her palace in Vienna. She asks him to tell her about the theater and also enquires about any further wishes he might have – a question which is also of personal significance to the Archduchess. Baruch’s answers to these questions, however, are exclusively concerned with his acting on stage: e.g. which roles he hopes to 23 Regarding the gender-specific markings of nineteenth-century Hasidic fashion and conceptions of beauty connected with these, see Somogyi, Die Schejnen und die Prosten, 1982. 24 For the inner-Jewish debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about types of Jewish masculinity, see Bader/Gillerman/Lerner (eds.), Jewish Masculinities, 2012. 25 For the meaning of uncertainty, see also Buerkle, “Caught in the Act,” 2009, pp. 83–102.



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play. Elisabeth’s interest, desire, and wishes, however, are concerned with different matters. After the start of the new theater season, at their first private meeting, Elisabeth’s body language is very telling. Medium shots of the two protagonists as well as the light-setting are employed to structure the decisive moments of this conversation which makes Elisabeth’s desire and feelings obvious. Elisabeth sits on a chair and looks at Baruch, who is also present in the same room and is talking. Baruch is not visible in this take but, as we can tell from an intertitle, he admits: “Now I only have one more wish left …” The lighting is focused on Elisabeth’s face and upper body while the chair and the room itself lie in darkness. Her upper body begins to tremble, she breathes more quickly and turns toward Baruch – eagerly anticipating that her wishes might be fulfilled. The audience knows from the first take of this conversation – a medium long shot – that the distance between the two chairs on which Baruch and Elisabeth are sitting, facing each other, is quite large. In the imagination of the audience the physical distance between Elisabeth and Baruch seems to diminish – just at the moment when she is so intensely agitated; this is a visual effect of the actors’ expressive skills, the framing of the scene, and the way the lighting is directed. The gaze of the audience and the wishful thinking of the Archduchess seem to coalesce. But an intertitle presents the viewers with the anticlimactic ending of Baruch’s sentence: it is his wish to play Hamlet.26 Elisabeth gradually stops trembling, sinks back into her chair, looks down and closes her eyes. Her disappointment is visualized in the slowing down and in other changes of her bodily movements. During this same meeting Elisabeth tries once again to get physically close to Baruch – at this second time they both stand next to each other at a window – and to suggest to him through body language that he should kiss her. Baruch is conscious of the verbally unspoken but nonetheless visible desire of the Archduchess and tries to evade her advances by either putting physical distance between them or by reinterpreting her erotic desire as questions about his own professional aspirations. These gestures of rebuffing her advances are repeated in their last meeting; Baruch is once again evasive when Elisabeth indicates through her body language her desire for a kiss. From the court’s perspective the Archduchess’s desire threatens to undermine courtly etiquette, i.e. her desire transgresses the moral norms of the court. The court therefore intervenes and – in a dramatic scene – forbids her to meet Baruch again. She tearfully defers to the courtiers. The film leaves open the ques26 In the context of the film’s narrative the role of Hamlet represents the breakthrough to stardom, i.e. it stands for the actor’s desire for recognition, granted at last. And Baruch indeed becomes the star of the Burgtheater because of playing the role of Hamlet.

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tion of why exactly a possible liaison between the two would put court etiquette into question. Is it the fact that Baruch is Jewish? That he is not a member of the aristocracy? That he is an actor? Or is it a combination of all of these? From Baruch’s point of view a possible liaison also poses a threat but a completely different one, a threat that would not endanger the relationship between the court and the population of the Habsburg monarchy with regard to their moral order but a threat that, for Baruch, would put his Jewish legacy in question.

Longing, Shame, and Reconciliation What Baruch longs for, what he desires – apart from his career at the theater, and apart from what he does not want to give up – all this becomes clear in the scene immediately following the last meeting between Baruch and Elisabeth. Baruch is at home being fitted for the costume he will wear in the next play. His servant announces a beggar who does not want any money but who insists on seeing Baruch. The actor grants the beggar entrance and is confronted with a poorly dressed Jewish man whom he knows from his youth in Galicia: it is Ruben Pick. Pick is indeed a beggar who regularly came to his village, who brought news from the outside world, and who encouraged Baruch to become an actor. Baruch greets Pick enthusiastically, kisses him on the cheek and invites him to sit down next to him in his living room and puts his arm around him. While talking about home, Pick lets his hand rest on Baruch’s knees. These physical and intimate bodily signals of joy and close familiarity shock the servant into losing his composure. The Burgtheater costume maker too looks at the relationship between Pick and Baruch with complete incomprehension and irritated fascination – the servant tries to catch a glance of the kiss and then wipes his mouth several times as if he were ashamed to see what he has just observed, while the costume maker repeatedly stares, all too obviously, at the couple that to his mind is very odd, although, being in the position of a service provider, he should behave more respectfully and leave since the fitting session is finished by then. The incredulous loss of composure and the irritating lack of comprehension of those around him do not bother Baruch. During Pick’s visit the young Jew does not experience feelings of shame or, indeed, instances of insecurity, as occurred when he cut off his side-locks. Following the philosopher Ernst Tugendhat, shame may be understood as a moral sentiment. Tugendhat understands this as an emotion which results, or ought to result, from the transgression of moral norms which a community has agreed upon. One feels ashamed about one’s own behaviour, i.e. moral shame



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refers to one’s own person. The felt loss of self-esteem – when measured against communal norms – is being expressed here.27 In spite of the dismissive reactions of the people in his immediate professional as well as his private, non-Jewish environment, Baruch does not react to the danger that he might possibly have infringed norms shared by the members of Viennese society, norms that are meant to bind him to this environment. That these norms have indeed been transgressed becomes visible in the negative reactions, as is shown in the body language, of the non-Jewish persons who witness his close relationship with Pick. From Baruch’s perspective his growing connection with Jewishness, made visible and tangible by the physically close relationship with Pick, is not linked to transgressing the norms of non-Jewish, Viennese society. Difference and the visibility of difference, do not, in his view, lead to feelings of shame about himself or about his Jewishness. Baruch, sitting on a sofa, asks Pick to talk about home, listens intently to Pick’s report about his parents and Esther, and finally asks: “What do you think? May I come home again?” In his body language and his question it becomes manifest what the program leaflet of the film uses to encapsulate the meeting between Pick and Baruch: “the artist’s dormant longing for his parental home”;28 or, in other words, his unceasing desire, despite having fled from the village, not to give up the relationship to his parents and, despite the advances of the Archduchess, his patron at the Burgtheater, to remain true to his first love. Within the context of the film this represents his “longing” for his Jewish background and that he wishes to integrate this heritage with his presence in Vienna. Baruch returns to his village, accompanied by Pick. To start with, he is unsuccessful in resolving the conflict with his father regarding his decision to live as a Jew in Vienna. Esther, however, follows her beloved to Vienna where they marry and live together. Like Baruch, she changes the way she dresses and thus integrates visually into Viennese society. Eventually, Pick succeeds in convincing Baruch’s father to draw closer to his son. The rabbi reads the play that his son is acting in, namely Don Carlos, and travels to Vienna in the company of Pick. Completely overwhelmed by the production and the acting of his son as well as the message conveyed by Schiller’s play, the father reconciles himself with his son in the latter’s modern Viennese home – surrounded by family members either dressed traditionally, such as the mother or Ruben Pick, or in contemporary dress, like Baruch and Esther.

27 Tugendhat, “Zum Begriff und zur Begründung von Moral,” 1992, pp. 315–333, esp. pp. 317– 322; see also Demmerling/Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 2007, pp. 219–244. 28 Lloyd-Filmvertrieb, “Programmheft. Das alte Gesetz,” Berlin 1923, SDK, SGA, F4678_OT.

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Difference and Dual Integration or Der Golem versus Das alte Gesetz Regarding the question of which place Jews should occupy in German society, Das alte Gesetz offers a completely different answer from Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. The former tells the story of an Eastern European immigrant who manages to integrate into Viennese society and to establish himself there without having to give up basic moral values to which he feels he owes allegiance and which he associates with his Galician home. Baruch gets together without feeling in the least ashamed with the representatives of his cultural and familial background: Ruben Pick, the beggar, his father, the rabbi from his village in Galicia, and his mother, the embodiment of halachic affiliation to Judaism. Their dress and the rather cumbersome way they move are in stark contrast to the elegant, almost dance-like demeanor of the Viennese; this makes Baruch’s background transparent on many levels, namely his Jewish background, his orthodox past as well as his rural origin – the contrast par excellence to the fast-moving, modern city. It should also be noted, however, that the city of Vienna is not presented visually either as “Jewish” in the antisemitic sense, or as “Christian,” or “German” in a culturally or politically exclusive sense. In the film Baruch manages to achieve a dual integration: he becomes part of Viennese society – professionally, socially, and topographically – as is evident from his dress, his place of work, and his home. And he also manages to integrate his background, his traditional Jewish heritage, into his life in Vienna, as can be seen by the fact that he marries his first love and is reconciled with his father in his Viennese home. While the first scenes of Das alte Gesetz are set at the beginning of the day in a Jewish village in the countryside, the film finishes depicting a scene set late in the evening in Baruch’s modern home in Vienna. In this last scene, Baruch’s home becomes the setting for the attainment of this dual integration – it is a setting that could simultaneously serve as the stage for his professional life as well as for his personal hopes and aspirations. Elisabeth’s palace is depicted quite differently, namely with ambivalence, as a place of protection but also as a place of danger. Baruch has to resist the Archduchess’s advances which, were he to succumb, would put into question his dual integration; he would break his promise to Esther to stay true to her and to marry her. The film argues in favor of Baruch’s life plan, i.e. in favor of his model of dual integration. Baruch realizes his life plan against all resistance and in the end Das alte Gesetz – the term itself alludes to the religious traditions of Eastern European



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Judaism as embodied by the figure of Baruch’s father and the way he inhabits his religion as well as by Baruch’s Jewish marriage – becomes part of the new Vienna. Dupont’s film favors a liberal, integrative way of looking at the place of Jews and Judaism in German society – not on the margins but in the center, as an integral part of German society. And, with the figure of Baruch, he presents a different model of how to deal with difference in modern times, a model that runs counter to courtly etiquette. Das alte Gesetz is not the only German film of the 1920s maintaining a liberal position with regard to Jewish integration. It is, however, the only film that is set in a Western European city whose Jewish protagonists are committed to Eastern Europe as well as to a very traditional religious Judaism.29 It is exactly for this reason that contemporary critics were aware of the politically explosive nature of the film. Positive films in which (Eastern European) Jews are portrayed as equal partners in an enlighened society, i.e. in this context in German society, were not necessarily met with a favorable response. On the contrary, they could provoke severe antisemitic reactions.30

Cinema as Moral Laboratory Das alte Gesetz never shows Jews to be ugly or Judaism to be secretive or immoral. Dupont is guided by an almost ethnographically enlightened interest when portraying, in a precise and loving manner, the Jewish holy days of Purim, Pessach, or Yom Kippur, as celebrated in the rabbi’s village. Details such as, for instance, the way families sit together at the Pessach table – on cushions – or the prepration of special baked goods for Purim are witness to Dupont’s intimate knowledge of Jewish holy days and their various traditions. He also uses certain liturgical and ritual key moments of these holy days in a dramaturgically elegant way to tell the story of the father-son conflict about their different ways of life in a dramatic way – without morally denigrating these feast days. In Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam Wegener portrays the Jewish religion quite differently. Jewish prayer and liturgy is not comprehensible for the audience even though the reason why the Jews gather in the synagogue – to implore God

29 For a basic analysis of the position of Jews and Judaism in Germany from liberal and integrative perspectives in Weimar film production, see Ashkenazi, Weimar Film, 2012. 30 Olimsky, “Das alte Gesetz,” (November 8, 1923); Aschau, “Juden-Filme,” (March 27, 1924). In their reviews Olimsky and Aschau remind their readers of threats of antisemitic riots in Munich linked to the screening of Manfred Noah’s film Nathan der Weise (1922). For this antisemitic campaign, as well as antisemitic violence in the early 1920s in general, see Stasny, Hass-Liebe, 2011, pp. 35–52, esp. pp. 47–50; Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität, 1999, pp. 97–110.

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to help them – is quite obvious. With the exception of the rabbi, the individual members of the synagogue congregation are not discernible or distinguishable as individuals. When the Jews celebrate or pray outside the synagague – for instance in the streets of the ghetto – they are shown to carry hugely oversized, mysticalarchaic objects, such as, for instance, wind instruments that resemble gigantic shofars. The synagogue is presented as a mysterious place, the liturgy remains inaccessible, and the Jewish congregation appears to be nothing more than an amorphous mass of people.31 Topographically speaking, the Jewish and Christian communities stay separated. The visual presentation of the ghetto and its inhabitants offers no arguments in favor of abolishing this separation – on the contrary, the visibility of the Jews as Jews supports the main argument put forward by the film, namely that it is essential to maintain separate ways of life. Their visibility makes apparent their difference and, simultaneously, its unbridgeability. This difference is an obstacle to their topographical and social integration. One may accuse Dupont of having a far too rosy view of the political situation of the Jews in Germany, and some contemporary reviewers did indeed say so.32 Baruch’s career takes an unexpectedly more fortuitous turn, for instance, than that of the nineteenth-century Jewish actor Bogumil Dawison – a figure Dupont might have used to model his story on, but whose life was marked by exclusion.33 Yet, in spite of this, Dupont’s view found a positive resonance since it contains, as even some critical reviewers noted, a promise of positive and pleasant sensory perceptions.34 The visual language of Das alte Gesetz, a language that, according to the film reviews, is linked to pleasant emotions, connects these pleasant emotions with completely different political concepts than those to be found in Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. Baruch’s successful career, his happy love life, and the reunion of the family, which are likely to arouse pleasant emotions in the audience, are also linked to a political program that takes a liberal view of the position of the Jews and of Judaism in Germany. The film may be interpreted as an attempt to transfer the potentially positive emotions aroused in the viewers by the portrayal of the private and personal moments of happiness experienced by the Jewish characters in the film to a political program which advocates dual integration. If, in the audi31 For the portrayal of the ghetto inhabitants as an amorphous mass, see Isenberg, Redemption and Doom, 1999, pp. 77–104. 32 Schacht, “Das alte Gesetz,” (October 30, 1923); Eik, “Das alte Gesetz,” (October 30, 1923). 33 For Bogumil Dawison, see Prawer, Between Two Worlds, 2005, pp. 22–23, 26. 34 See, e.g., Effler, “Das alte Gesetz,” (November 3, 1923); Anonymous, “Das alte Gesetz,” (November 5, 1923).



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ence’s view, Baruch’s actions are right and good, then the political program he embodies is morally justified. The different answers to the question of where Jews are placed within German society offered by the two films to their audiences are also reflected in the portrayal of gender. In both films danger emanates from women and they threaten the concept of societal order – in Wegener’s film it is a Jewish woman, in Dupont’s film a Christian one, the Archduchess Elisabeth. Miriam questions the separation of the two cultures; Elisabeth, in contrast, questions the dual integration of Jewish society into German society. In both films the male protagonists are depicted as the guarantors of the desired order. In Wegener’s film the rabbi represents a conservative, exclusionary response to the initial question of where Jews are to be located within German society. In Das alte Gesetz Baruch is the representative of a very liberal response to the same question. Cinema can, as the film scholar Vinzenz Hediger maintains, be understood as a “moral laboratory”35 in the sense that it enables the audience to experience moral conflicts, while offering at the same time emotional engagement in the solution of these conflicts. If one were to understand political conflicts, as stated at the outset, as arguments involving moral values, then the sphere of emotions may also be understood as a location of political debate. Being part of the cinema audience enables viewers to experience various moral positions and to experiment with these for themselves. The two films under discussion here present two different possibilites of a morally right order. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam works with images of excess and unreasonableness inscribed into Judaism and Jewry by orientalist fantasies. The film deals with the transformation of excess and unreasonableness into a rational order. The exclusion of Jews is part of this rational order. This exclusion is being justified in particular by orientalist notions insofar as the excess inherent in them is an obstacle to any rational order. The feelings of desire and the fear that these might become attached to oriental images turn into moral sentiments linked to the felt correctness of an order that insists on separation. The moral legitimation strategies employed by Das alte Gesetz are very different. Its audience is meant to share feelings for a liberal program which supports the integration of Jews and Judaism into German society and which makes it possible to regard this new order as right and desirable.

35 Hediger, “Gefühlte Distanz,” 2006, pp. 42–62, esp. p. 53.

Laurel Plapp

Jewish Drag The Ostjude as Anti-Zionist Hero in Arnold Zweig’s De Vriendt kehrt heim1 The founding of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century has been ironically conceived as an attempt to create a Jewish counterpart to German nationalism. This nationalist movement, as envisioned by Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, was intended to resist negative stereotypes of the Jews in Europe that stemmed from the waves of impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants who fled to Berlin, Vienna, and other Western cities from the 1880s onward. The Zionist movement attempted to reinvigorate the image of the Jews through the Muskeljuden (‘muscle Jews’), who would be the “true Jews,” in contrast to the stereotype of the degenerate, feminine, and orientalized Ostjuden, or Eastern European Jews.2 This assimilation into European ideals of masculinity meant not only forming a nation but also becoming colonizers, resulting in “masquerade colonialism, parodic mimesis of colonialism, Jews in colonialist drag. Jewish ‘women’ dressed up like ‘men,’” as Daniel Boyarin argues.3 The objects of colonization would not only be the Arabs in Palestine but also the Ostjuden themselves, who would be transformed by the labor to build a Jewish state.4 The implication of Zionism in colonialist enterprises has had a retroactive effect on historical understandings of the Jews in relation to orientalist discourse about the Middle East. As Ivan Davidson Kalmar and David J. Penslar have observed in their edited volume Orientalism and the Jews (2005), the Jewish people have been regarded as the “perpetrators of orientalism” because of Zionism, which has been understood as an “orientalist ideology in the service of Western colonialism.”5 Kalmar and Penslar, however, argue that the close affinity between orientalist views of Muslims and antisemitism within Europe suggests that Jews may instead be “targets […] of orientalism.”6 I would argue that Jewish 1 A longer version of this chapter was published in Chapter 2 of Plapp, Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature, 2008, pp. 69–82. Permission from Taylor & Francis is gratefully acknowledged. 2 Nordau, Zionistische Schriften, 1923, pp. 424–432; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, pp. 274– 276, 279, 296–299. 3 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 309. 4 Ibid., p. 303; Herzl, The Jews’ State, 1997, p. 146. 5 Kalmar/Penslar, “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction,” 2005, p. xv. 6 Ibid.



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writing of the twentieth century may actually have elements of the perspectives of both the “perpetrator” and the “target.” Drawing on Lisa Lowe’s concept of many “orientalisms,”7 I suggest that Jewish writing should be analyzed in terms of the internally complex and contradictory interactions of Zionism, orientalism, and antisemitism.8 This multifaceted and self-contradictory relationship to the “East” is nowhere more fascinatingly expressed than in Arnold Zweig’s novel De Vriendt kehrt heim (De Vriendt Goes Home) (1932), which subverts Zionist ideology by redressing the Jewish hero in oriental garb. The hero of Zweig’s novel developed out of the writer’s earlier exploration of the image of the Ostjude through his friendship and correspondence with Martin Buber. In his essay from 1916, “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum” (“The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism”), Buber outlined the idea that the Jewish people were “oriental” in nature, that the Ostjuden were particularly connected to this spiritual essence, and that the Ostjuden therefore should be central to the founding of a Jewish nation in Palestine.9 Zweig read this essay while serving in the German army on the Eastern front during World War I, and like some of the other German-Jewish soldiers, he was enraptured by the authenticity and spirituality represented by the Eastern European Jews.10 In his letters to Buber from the front, Zweig proclaimed his infinite trust in the Eastern European Jewish children as both spiritual leaders and active participants in the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.11 The oriental spirituality symbolized by the Ostjuden, which conflicted with Herzl’s ideal of European masculinity, was viewed by Buber and 7 Lowe, Critical Terrains, 1991, pp. 4–9. 8 The debate over the nature of “Jewish orientalism” continues in Kalmar and Penslar’s Orientalism and the Jews. John M. Efron argues that nineteenth-century Jewish interest in the Orient was not about domination but “celebratory,” “a search for roots, for authenticity, and for oriental role models,” “Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze,” 2005, p. 80. In his critique of Zionism as a form of orientalism, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin states the opposite about the same Jewish scholars: “It seems to me, however, that Jews did not really offer an alternative approach to orientalism […] Jews did not necessarily challenge the dichotomies (or the classification itself) and in fact often reproduced them through an identification with the images and ideals attributed to the ‘West,’ distancing themselves from negative characteristics attributed to the ‘East.’” “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective,” 2005, p. 165. Neither of these approaches seems to accurately account for the complexity of Zweig’s own approach to Zionism and orientalism in the novel. 9 Buber, “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum” [1916], 1995, pp. 56–78. 10 Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, 1972–1975, I, 427–428. For the reactions of other German-Jewish soldiers, see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1982, pp. 143–150; Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom, 1999, pp. 54–58. 11 Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Arnold-Zweig-Archiv (AZA), Zweig to Buber, February 8, 1918 (AZA 6268); see also Zweig to Buber, October 31, 1917 (AZA 6266).

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Zweig as the source of their potential as leaders of a Zionist movement. Zweig’s idealized, stereotypical conception of the Ostjude, crystallized in his book Das ostjüdische Antlitz (The Eastern European Jewish Face) (1920), and his faith in the Zionist movement had begun to break down by the time he wrote De Vriendt kehrt heim in 1932. Out of the pieces of the ideal of the Ostjude, Zweig instead constructs an unusual, controversial leader as an alternative to Zionism. The inspiration for the novel was Zweig’s own visit to the Middle East in 1932, during which he heard that Jacob Israël de Haan, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish journalist who had been negotiating with Arab leaders in Palestine, had been murdered by radical Zionists in 1924.12 Zweig’s novel fictionalizes de Haan’s story for his own purposes, but his eponymous character Isaac Josef de Vriendt continues de Haan’s own struggle to mediate between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.13 De Vriendt opposes the direction of Zionism and advocates Arab sovereignty to the British colonial authority in Palestine. In spite of his religious affiliations, he is, simultaneously, a closeted gay man, carrying on a secret love affair with an Arab school-boy, which results in threats to his life from the boy’s family. De Vriendt’s identifications with spirituality, the orient, and homosexuality hence connect him with the Ostjude stereotype and put him in exact opposition to Herzl’s manly, European Muskeljuden. At the same time, de Vriendt is implicated in a stereotypical colonial relationship: the older, European man who takes the young Arab boy under his wing. De Vriendt’s positioning between Jews/Arabs, orient/occident, homosexuality/heterosexuality, colonizer/colonized places him in an intermediary category that resembles Marjorie Garber’s concept of the “transvestite,” a figure who allows for “border crossings from one […] category to another” and thus disrupts the boundaries between binary constructions.14 Katrin Sieg alternatively uses the term “ethnic drag” to describe a figure which destabilizes binary categories, recognizing however that this performance may be used to both support “hegemonic racial discourses” and “challenge essentialist notions of identity.”15 Border crossings in the orient, whether related to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or geography, 12 Michael Berkowitz points out that in 1932, Zweig would have believed that de Haan was murdered by a group of “right-wing” Zionists, and Zweig’s version of events is based on this premise. Berkowitz has uncovered, however, that de Haan was actually assassinated by the Haganah (the Jewish Defense Forces of Israel) with the knowledge of the Labor Zionist party because he was exposing corruption in Zionist fund-raising efforts, see “Doubled Trouble,” 1999, pp.  112–115; “Rejecting Zion,” 2005, pp. 115–116. 13 Berkowitz explains that de Haan saw himself as “the mediator par excellence between Arabs and Jews.” “Rejecting Zion,” 2005, pp. 110–111. 14 Garber, Vested Interests, 1992, pp. 11, 16. 15 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, 2002, p. 3.



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necessarily elicit both fascination and fear from the European male colonizer. De Vriendt’s categorical crisis as a form of resistance to imperialism has precedence in Jewish history. Boyarin points out that the designation of femininity was often co-opted by Jewish men in rabbinical tales as a form of resistance against Roman imperial authority.16 Their “gender bending,” he argues, “thus mark[ed] their own understanding that gender itself is implicated in the maintenance of political power.”17 Effective resistance, in other words, must acknowledge the investment of gender and ethnicity in power and authority. To counter the Zionists in “colonialist drag,” de Vriendt dons the trappings of their greatest enemy, a gay, religious, Jewish man with connections to the Arabs. His precarious positioning thus disrupts the opposing ethnic groups and political parties that divide Palestine, but he also offers mediation between them by striving to create a coalition between Jews and Arabs. The following discussion will first defend my reading of the character de Vriendt in the context of Zionism, nationalism, and ideals of masculinity, which has hitherto been denied, by using materials from the ArnoldZweig-Archiv (AZA). It will then demonstrate how Zweig manipulates orientalist discourse on homosexuality and Zionist views of the Ostjuden to construct his own revolutionary vision of the future of Jewish-Arab relations.

Zionism, Gender, and Sexuality The collusion of European nationalism with ideals of masculinity developed in the late nineteenth century with the birth of new nationalist movements, which adopted the masculine ideals of self-control, moderation, strength, and virtue as the basis for their ideology. The construction of the Jews in opposition to the masculine norm, which has roots in the Middle Ages, if not the Roman occupation of Palestine, culminated in the discussions of sexuality in late nineteenth-century Vienna, where Otto Weininger developed his theory of gender that equated Jews with women. The resulting accusation that the Jews were not “manly” enough to found a nation served as the impetus for Herzl’s Zionist movement to reclaim masculinity for the Jews.18 Furthermore, the uncertain gender attributed to Jews led to an intersection with stereotypes of homosexuality, which also supposedly occupied an intermediate position between ideals of masculinity and feminini-

16 Boyarin, “Masada,” 1997, pp. 306–311; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 12. 17 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 6. 18 Mosse, Image, 1996, pp.  7–9; Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1985, p.  17; Luft, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna, 2003, pp. 36–42; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, pp. 277–304.

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ty.19 By the early twentieth century, the anti-liberal account of homosexuality, as represented by Hans Blüher, instead depicted male-male desire as masculine, nationalist, and militaristic, and excluded Jews because they were supposedly incapable of the male-bonding necessary to create a state.20 Herzl seems to be responding to these stereotypes in his novel Altneuland (1902), which depicts a younger, Jewish man being paired with an older, Prussian aristocrat in order to transform him into an assimilated, masculine man. The homosocial bond between the two symbolizes a way to masculinize the Jews to prepare them for founding a nation. In Jacob Press’s interpretation, the Jewish man is “led away from homosexualization […] and into homosocialization.”21 For both Herzl and Blüher, homosocial nationalism thus relies on the fulfillment of the ideal of masculinity as a prerequisite for nationalism. In contrast, Zweig depicts a same-sex relationship between an Arab boy and an Ostjude, the masculine Muskeljude’s object of hatred, onto which the stereotypes of Jewish femininity and homosexuality had been projected.22 Zweig is thus not drawing on Herzl’s formulation of a masculine nationalism but instead undermining Herzl’s agenda and calling into question the orientalist and antisemitic assumptions that inform it. Zweig’s concerns about the direction of Zionism were already apparent in his writings preceding De Vriendt kehrt heim. In his letters to Buber in 1918 and 1919, Zweig emphasizes the need for Jewish nationalism to be different from other nationalisms because it must not be oppressive and reactionary, but rather humanitarian and ethical.23 In “Das jüdische Palästina” (“The Jewish Palestine”) (1921), Zweig calls for a socialist nationalism and economic reforms that will protect the fellahin, allowing for a better rapport between Jewish and Arab workers.24 In Das neue Kanaan (The New Canaan) (1924), Zweig further criticizes the developing chauvinism of Zionism, as well as expressing distress at the possibility that Zionists murdered de Haan.25 Zweig’s anxiety about the direction of political Zionism hence pre-dated his visit to Palestine in 1932.26 However, Zweig 19 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1985, p. 36. 20 See Hewitt, Political Inversions, 1996, pp. 120–129; Tobin, “Making Way,” 2002, pp. 322–326; Tobin, “Why is Tadzio,” 1994, pp. 218–219. 21 Press, “Same-Sex Unions in Modern Europe,” 1997, 323. 22 For stereotypes of the Jews or Ostjuden and sexuality see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1982, pp. 3–31; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 296; Brenner, Marketing Identities, 1998, p. 15; Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 1986, pp. 270–286; Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de Siècle Orientalism,” 1991, pp. 81–83; Mosse, Image, 1996. 23 Buber, Briefwechsel, 1972–1975, I, 534; II, 34–35. 24 Zweig, “Das jüdische Palästina und der Orient,” 1921, 83–84. 25 Zweig, Das neue Kanaan, 1929, p. 220. 26 See Arnold Zweig’s journal from the year 1932 (AZA 2620).



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writes to Sigmund Freud after returning from his visit to Palestine in 1932 that his plans for the novel De Vriendt kehrt heim were drastically altered during his stay when he learned that Zionists and not Arabs had murdered de Haan, which he claims to have believed for seven years: “Today I know how terrible that seemed to me; at first I did not realize it.”27 This shocking discovery has generally been considered to have transformed Zweig’s view of Zionism; Robert Cohen claims that Zweig viewed the murder of de Haan as “the Fall of the Zionist movement.”28 However, Zweig’s writings over the preceding fifteen years indicate that he had long been concerned about Zionism as a nationalist movement, and in this way, De Vriendt kehrt heim serves to heighten his earlier criticism of the internal strife within Zionism and the situation of the Arabs after his visit to Palestine in 1932. The fact that Zweig’s inner struggle with Zionism is missing from a letter to Buber in 1932 about De Vriendt kehrt heim, however, has led some critics to disconnect de Vriendt from the Zionist focus of the novel. Zweig writes to Buber of his plans for a novel that will become De Vriendt kehrt heim, describing the novel as the struggle of an Orthodox Jew between life and God’s law.29 This account suggests that the central issue in the novel is the difficulty faced by Orthodox Jews in negotiating between strict rabbinical laws and their own natural impulses. Such an interpretation supports a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the character of de Vriendt as one who is struggling with homosexuality, which has been convincingly developed elsewhere.30 While this psychoanalytic interpretation of de Vriendt logically stems from Zweig’s close interaction with Freud and his familiarity with Freud’s work, Zweig maintained the importance of his attack on Zionism in the novel in an essay published in the same year, “Modell, Dokument und Dichtung” (“Model, Document and Poetry”). He explains his task in writing De Vriendt kehrt heim as “criticism from modern nationalism of Jewish national27 Freud, Briefwechsel, 1968, p. 53: “Ich weiß heute, wie furchtbar mich das traf; erst merkte ich es nicht.” All translations are my own. 28 Cohen, “Arnold Zweig und die Araberfrage,” 1993, p. 128: “[…] der Sündenfall der zionistischen Bewegung.” 29 Letter from Arnold Zweig to Martin Buber, July 1, 1932. Buber, Briefwechsel, 1972–1975, II, 443–444. 30 Sigrid Thielking and Ursula Schumacher both remove de Vriendt from the Zionist narrative because of his sexual orientation and instead argue that minor characters who embrace Marxism or socialism actually represent the heroes of Zweig’s novel, see Thielking, Auf dem Irrweg ins “Neue Kanaan”?, 1990, pp.  174–175, 233, 250–252; Schumacher, Die Opferung Isaaks, 1996, pp. 182–184, 191–195. Thielking in fact argues that the de Vriendt story line is “völlig abkoppelbar” [completely separate] from the Zionist issues presented in the text (p. 233). Jost Hermand has particularly explored homosexuality in Zweig’s writings, but not in relation to the Zionist movement, see “Polygame Ehe,” 1995. And there has been resistance to such an approach from other critics, see Walter, “Nachwort,” 1995, p. 419.

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ism, criticism from the post-war world of our Jewish post-war world, clarification of the struggles of ideas in our shattered epoch,” such as “the ideas and principles of our Jewish Zionist and socialist epoch.”31 Therefore, I maintain that the main character must be greatly influenced by Zweig’s understanding of Zionism and the work of Buber, and my interpretation of the de Vriendt narrative is within the context of Zweig’s critique of Zionism. The centrality of the gay character de Vriendt to Zweig’s criticism of the Zionist movement in the novel is further supported by the history of Zweig’s own rebellion against bourgeois morality, which certainly did not begin with De Vriendt kehrt heim. In fact, several of Zweig’s other works present same-sex relationships, and he also contributed to the call for the repeal of Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing same-sex relationships.32 In Zweig’s letter to Freud in 1932 in which he discusses De Vriendt kehrt heim, Zweig admits the relevance of the same-sex relationship in the novel to his own life: “I was both: the Arab (Semitic) boy and the Godless-Orthodox lover and writer.”33 Love affairs between men and young boys or boyish girls, whom he called “Knäbinnen,” surface in Zweig’s writing throughout his career, and this rejection of the limitations of bourgeois marriage extended into his personal life. During the course of the dictation of De Vriendt kehrt heim between May and June of 1932, Zweig fell in love with a “Knäbin,” his secretary, Lily Offenstadt, who was twenty-two years his junior.34 Zweig dedicated De Vriendt kehrt heim to her. In the months that followed, Zweig carried on an affair with Lily with the full knowledge of his wife, Beatrice, who was studying painting in Paris. In his unpublished letters to Beatrice in early 1933, he defends their polygamous marriage as necessary for improving his creativity and productivity. It was, in fact, Freud himself who assured Zweig of the incompatibility of bourgeois marriage and intellectual productivity.35 In contrast to Jost Hermand’s representation of the affair with Lily as a departure from marriage to Beatrice,36 Zweig’s own letters to Beatrice indi31 Zweig, “Modell, Dokument und Dichtung,” 1994, p. 283: “Kritik des modernen Nationalismus am jüdischen Nationalismus, Kritik der Nachkriegswelt an unserer jüdischen Nachkriegswelt, Aufhellung der Ideenkämpfe unserer geschüttelten Epoche,” such as “die Ideen und Prinzipien unserer jüdischen zionistischen und sozialistischen Epoche.” 32 Hermand, “Polygame Ehe,” 1995, pp. 64–67. 33 Freud, Briefwechsel, 1968, p. 5: “Ich war beides, der arabische (semitische) Knabe und der gottlos-orthodoxe Liebhaber und Schriftsteller.” 34 The dates of the dictation are clearly evident in Arnold Zweig’s journal from the year 1932 (AZA 2620). See Hermand, “Polygame Ehe,” 1995, pp. 67–69, for a discussion of his relationship with Lily Offenstadt. 35 Letter from Arnold Zweig to Beatrice Zweig, February 17, 1933 (AZA 3451). 36 Hermand, “Polygame Ehe,” 1995, pp. 68–69.



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cate that he viewed the affair as an extension of their marriage. In a letter in late February 1933, Zweig writes of both his happiness with Lily and his love for his wife.37 Zweig fails to recognize the seeming contradiction in his own statements, suggesting that he did not consider his affair with Lily to be inconsistent with his love and marriage to Beatrice.38 The discussion of their marriage is mixed with Zweig’s concerns about the rise to power of the Nazi party,39 and it was eventually the threat to Zweig’s life and freedom that forced the two to reunite by the late spring of 1933 to flee to the south of France, accompanied by Lily, as evidenced by his journal entries.40 In September of 1933, Lily returned to Berlin to marry her fiancé, Hans Leuchter, and Zweig at this point comments in his journal about his reunification with his wife.41 By the end of 1933, Zweig, Beatrice, Lily, and her husband had all settled in Palestine, and Lily continued to help Zweig with his work for several years. The coincidence of Zweig’s affair with the “Knäbin” Lily and the writing of De Vriendt kehrt heim suggests that he was particularly open at the time to the potential of alternative sexualities to promote change, which supports an interpretation of de Vriendt’s homosexuality as central to his heroism. As a result, the unwillingness to recognize de Vriendt as the hero of the novel particularly because he is gay overlooks the importance of Zweig’s questioning of bourgeois morality at the same time that he was writing De Vriendt kehrt heim.

Border Crossings: Ostjuden, Orientals, and the Return to Origins The setting of De Vriendt kehrt heim, Jerusalem, is characterized as a meeting point between West and East, just as Buber describes Jerusalem as the “time-

37 Letter from Arnold Zweig to Beatrice Zweig, February 25, 1933 (AZA 3455). 38 Beatrice’s responses to Zweig’s affair as expressed in her letters are telling, since she barely seems disturbed by the affair or his letters, dismissing his attempts to psychoanalyze her and their marriage and insisting that she wants everyone to be happy. Letters from Beatrice Zweig to Arnold Zweig, February 12, 1933 (AZA 3663), February 23, 1933 (AZA 3666), March 15, 1933 (AZA 3675). 39 Letters from Arnold Zweig to Beatrice Zweig, March 5, 1933 (AZA 3458), March 11, 1933 (AZA 3460). 40 Arnold Zweig’s journal from 1933 (AZA 2621). 41 Arnold Zweig’s journal entry from September 21, 1933 (AZA 2621). For excerpts from unpublished letters and diaries about the relationship between Beatrice, Lily, and Zweig, see Hermand, “Polygame Ehe,” 1995, pp. 68–69.

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less passageway between Orient and Occident.”42 Zweig depicts Jerusalem as a “fascinating piece of naked rock that builds a bridge between the desert and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa.”43 Jerusalem is the link between East (desert) and West (Mediterranean) as well as between the two continents which make up the orient (Asia and Africa). Furthermore, Jerusalem is the point at which people of many different origins and faiths come together (De Vriendt, p. 12). The merging of West and East in Jerusalem is also mirrored in the diverse and complex characters of the novel. The central character, Isaac Josef de Vriendt, is an ultra-Orthodox Jew from the Netherlands with anti-Zionist politics. Although de Vriendt comes from Western Europe, his religious devotion leads him to be associated with the Orthodox of Eastern Europe within the text. This connection replicates Buber and Zweig’s positive association of the Ostjuden with oriental religiosity. The link between Eastern Europe and the Orthodox Jews is apparent when de Vriendt talks to Rabbi Seligmann, the fictional equivalent of Rabbi Sonnenfeld, who led the ultra-Orthodox Agudah Israel in Palestine.44 De Vriendt tells Rabbi Seligmann that he will travel to Eastern Europe to bolster support for the Orthodox Jewish position in Palestine in opposition to the secular Zionists. He describes the Polish rabbis with whom he will speak as ascetics and Jews of the East in general as “shy and retiring” (De Vriendt, pp.  63–64).45 The greatly religious nature of these Eastern European Jews, and their ties to de Vriendt’s Orthodox position, is made clear by these references. The hatred that de Vriendt inspires in the Zionists, who conspire to murder him, also partly stems from their stereotypes of Orthodox Jews in the East. Three Chalutzim, or Jewish pioneers, who have recently arrived in Haifa from Eastern Europe to work the land, plot de Vriendt’s murder (De Vriendt, p. 123). One of them, Bar Bloch, describes the Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe with hatred: “Oh, I hated them, when back at home they ran to synagogue with their black clothes, sidelocks, and boots, their eyes moving as they shook, gurgled, and howled oidedoi! […] and a boy is not allowed to play or learn a craft; instead, he has to sit in school […]” (De Vriendt, pp. 125–126).46 42 Buber, “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum” [1916], 1995, p. 78. 43 Zweig, De Vriendt kehrt heim [1932], 1994, p. 12: “[…] faszinierende[s] Stück nackten Felsens, das zwischen der Wüste und dem Mittelländischen Meer die Brücke von Asien nach Afrika bildete.” Subsequently parenthetically referred to in the text as De Vriendt. 44 Marmorstein, A Martyr’s Message, 1975, pp. 6–7. 45 “[…] schüchtern und zurückgezogen.” 46 “Ach, wie ich sie gehaßt habe, wenn sie daheim in ihren schwarzen Röcken, ihren Pejes und hohen Stiefeln immerfort ‘in Schul’ liefen, ihr Augenverdrehen, sich Schütteln, Gurgeln und Heulen: oidedoi! [...] und spielen darf ein Junge nicht und Handarbeit lernen darf er auch nicht, nur im Cheder sitzen.”



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Bloch’s characterization resembles the negative stereotype of Ostjuden as religious, oriental, and physically weak. The Chalutzim are therefore clearly identified with Herzl’s political, or “western,” Zionism. Another Chalutz argues that these Orthodox Jews are of the past, but the narrator admits: “A father’s home in a Slovakian village apparently cannot be so quickly eradicated” (De Vriendt, p.  126).47 The immigrants’ experiences with Orthodox Jewish traditions of the East color their dislike of de Vriendt, and moments later their conversation turns to murder (p. 127). Zweig’s earlier idealization of the Ostjude as the source of spiritual rejuvenation for all Jews in a Jewish state is deconstructed in the novel, as Zweig draws attention to the stereotyping of the Ostjude, whether positive or negative. At the same time, de Vriendt is linked to the orient. From the beginning, he is described as “a European and an Oriental,” and he considers taking on Bedouin dress (De Vriendt, pp. 34–35).48 The relationship between the religious de Vriendt and the “oriental” boy Saûd further associates him with the orient. In Saûd’s first appearance in the novel, he is described as wearing the exotic clothing of the Middle East: “a childish figure with a red tarboosh on his head, a white shirt, red belt, and naked dark brown legs in wide pants” (De Vriendt, p. 52).49 Saûd’s description seems modeled after the young Arab boys who serve as objects of desire in orientalist literature.50 In addition to their sexual relationship, Saûd is also de Vriendt’s student; he is learning Dutch (De Vriendt, p. 46). Hence, de Vriendt wears the guise not only of a self-consciously stereotypical image of a religious Ostjude but also of a European male colonizer who has a pedagogical relationship with an “oriental” boy. In this way, de Vriendt engages in “ethnic drag” in Sieg’s sense as a border figure between both Western and Eastern Europe and the orient and occident. While he comes from the Netherlands, de Vriendt exemplifies the stereotype of the religious Ostjude, and he therefore remains in between Western and Eastern European Jews. Simultaneously, he is Jewish, with the connotation of oriental connections, and a European who engages in a relationship with an Arab boy, therefore associating him both with the orient and occident. By taking on the role of both a colonizer and the colonized, de Vriendt

47 “Ein Vaterhaus im slowakischen Dorf läßt sich offenbar nicht so schnell ausrotten.” 48 “[…] ein Europäer und ein Orientale.” 49 “[…] eine kindliche Gestalt, den roten Tarbusch auf dem Kopf, in weißem Hemd, rotem Gürtel, die dunkelbraunen Beine nackt aus den weiten Hosen.” 50 Boone, “Vacation Cruises,” 1995, 99–100, 102.

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destabilizes these categories and hence the hierarchical structures of Zionism and imperialism.51 While Zweig appropriates Zionist and orientalist images to create an unlikely Jewish hero, the novel also relies on the orientalist characterization of sexual desire in the orient as both a “promise” and a “threat.”52 At the same time that Zweig seems to draw on this orientalist model, however, he modifies it by using same-sex desire to clarify de Vriendt’s “oriental” nature through the account of his relationship with Saûd. The positive nature of de Vriendt’s relationship with Saûd is that it rejuvenates him and, I argue, symbolically fosters a connection between himself and his “oriental” heritage. De Vriendt’s relationship with Saûd, therefore, diverges from orientalist accounts because he does not use the boy merely for his own indulgence and fantasies, but to connect spiritually with the Arabs and the orient itself. The love scene between de Vriendt and Saûd, which significantly ends a chapter devoted to the Arab leaders’ decision to cooperate with de Vriendt, indicates that the love affair between the two signifies more than just same-sex desire or orientalist fantasy. Zweig writes: “One who loves a child with passion as an adult looks for him in himself […] The little one must be there again […]” (De Vriendt, p. 97).53 De Vriendt’s love for the boy involves the process of becoming young again as part of his passion. This return to youthfulness has been interpreted through psychoanalysis as a regression to de Vriendt’s own, literal childhood through the figure of Saûd.54 However, this interpretation erases the presence of Saûd, hence removing the cultural meaning of their union. Zweig continues: “in a strange way a circle was here closed, an ‘I’ had returned and found his ‘I,’ the hated current of life had to flow backwards; he embraces his source” (De Vriendt, p. 97).55 The relationship with the boy allows de Vriendt access to the source of his life, which implies not only his own youth, but also the childhood of his people, the Jews. De Vriendt has traveled to Jerusalem to be reconnected to his ethnic roots in the Middle East, and the young Arab boy, who has grown up in Jerusalem, is representative of these origins. The “gehaßte Strom des Lebens,” the hateful rush and force of life and change, redirects back51 For a comparison between De Vriendt kehrt heim and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig on the theme of homoeroticism and the orientalist imaginary, see Plapp, Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature, 2008, pp. 64–84. 52 Said, Orientalism, 1979, p. 188; Boone, “Vacation Cruises,” 1995, 93–102. 53 “Wer als Erwachsener ein Kind mit Leidenschaft liebt, sucht in ihm sich selbst [...] Es muß wieder das Kleine da sein […].” 54 Thielking, Auf dem Irrweg ins “Neue Kanaan”?, 1990, pp. 209–211. 55 “[…] auf ungemeine Art hat sich hier ein Kreis geschlossen, ein Ich hat zurück zu seinem Ich gefunden, der gehaßte Strom des Lebens, einmal mußte er rückwärts fluten; nun umschlingt er seine Quelle wie mit Armen […].”



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wards, returning to its home and origins. The “Quelle” that de Vriendt embraces through the form of the Semitic boy represents his Semitic religious and cultural beginnings. This interpretation of their love affair is supported by the nature of de Vriendt’s apparent colonizing instruction of the boy, which in fact involves teaching him about a more harmonious time in the history of Jewish-Muslim coexistence. Saûd later describes a book de Vriendt gave him: “It’s about the time […] when the Arabs and Jews in Spain lived together in harmony” (De Vriendt, p. 150).56 Saûd seems to refer intertextually to Zweig’s “Das jüdische Palästina,” in which Zweig envisions harmony between Jews and Arabs through the model of the “spanisch-maurischen Zeit” [Spanish-Moorish period].57 In other words, de Vriendt’s tutelage of the boy, which associates him with the image of the European colonizer, focuses on teaching him about an equal relationship between Jews and Muslims, hence participating in a critique of imperialism itself. Zweig’s depiction of de Vriendt and Saûd’s relationship clearly draws on Buber’s ideas, but his statement is unique and provocative. The spiritual rejuvenation of the Jewish people through the example of the Ostjuden and by means of a return to Palestine appears at the heart of Buber’s message in “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum.”58 Buber and Zweig’s idea of rejuvenation through the religious, “oriental” Jews of Eastern Europe takes on a unique appearance in De Vriendt kehrt heim, however, because rejuvenation is represented through a personal union between a religious “Ostjude” and an Arab in Palestine. The connection between de Vriendt and Saûd resembles the colonialist relationship of a European man and an Arab boy, but Zweig simultaneously interrupts this assumption by depicting the relationship as one which is about deconstructing colonialism and forging historical and cultural ties between Jews and Arabs. Buber and Zweig had both advocated the importance of a return to Palestine as a means of reinvigoration and the need for a socialist Zionism that recognizes the rights of the Arabs,59 but the use of a same-sex relationship as a metaphor for a spiritual and cultural connection between the Jewish and Arab peoples themselves is entirely new. Zweig co-opts the Muskeljude’s enemies, the Ostjude and the gay Jewish man, and creates a vision of a tolerant connection between Jews 56 “Es handelt von der Zeit […] da die Araber und die Juden in Spanien miteinander lebten.” 57 Zweig, “Das jüdische Palästina,” 1921, 85. Berkowitz notes de Haan’s similar interest in this time period: “there are prominent homosexual and homoerotic motifs in Jewish mysticism and poetry, particularly that of the ‘Golden Age’ of the Jews in Spain romanticized by De Haan,” “Rejecting Zion,” 2005, p. 123. This additional intertextual reference to de Haan’s poetry further underscores the connection between Jewish-Arab cooperation and same-sex relationships thematized in Zweig’s novel. 58 See Buber, “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum” [1916], 1995, p. 77. 59 Zweig’s essay Das neue Kanaan (1924) particularly expresses both of these goals.

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and Arabs by means of a gay Jewish character. In this way, de Vriendt’s rejuvenation through the boy is linked to Buber’s call for a reinvigoration of the “oriental” roots of the Jewish people through a reconnection with the orient, but Zweig portrays this idea through reconciliation between Arabs and Jews themselves, hence challenging both orientalist models of same-sex desire and political Zionist interests in Palestine. In this manner, Zweig transforms an antisemitic assumption that Jews are in need of regeneration into a means of undermining orientalist views of homosexuality and the Middle East. While same-sex desire symbolically provides de Vriendt with the possibility of reconnecting with his roots, homosexuality is also thematically linked to destruction and death. Following the discussion of the possibility of youthfulness through same-sex love, the narrator describes homosexuality as also leading a man “over the boundary of human life, toward annihilation” (De Vriendt, p. 98).60 De Vriendt’s connection with Saûd offers rejuvenation but also threatens his life; since their relationship represents a return to origins, as I argue, the threat of homosexuality thus symbolically foreshadows the dangers of the Zionist movement itself, which served to return the Jews to Palestine. Within the plot of the narrative, de Vriendt’s life is actually threatened because of his affair with the boy. The British Secret Serviceman Irmin learns that two Arab men have been overheard plotting to kill de Vriendt (De Vriendt, p. 19). The explanation for their hatred of de Vriendt is: “We aren’t in Egypt. The friendship of a grown man and an Arab boy is not an everyday occurrence here, and some families look unkindly at the actions of their offspring” (De Vriendt, pp. 19–20).61 De Vriendt’s relationship with the boy is offensive to his family, and they threaten to kill him. In this case, the orient itself is connected with the danger of homosexuality, because it is the “orientals” who want to murder the European man for his relationship. In fact, it becomes clear later that the menace comes from Mansur, Saûd’s brother, who has been intending to murder de Vriendt because he has brought shame on his family (De Vriendt, p. 96). Furthermore, the threat to de Vriendt is also embodied in an image which de Vriendt associates with himself: the biblical figure of Jizchak (Isaac), the boy who is ordered by God to be sacrificed at the knife of his father, Abraham, on Mount Moriah. This association emerges in de Vriendt’s first conversation with Irmin, who has come to warn de Vriendt that his life is in peril. The two stand at the window of de Vriendt’s apartment, which looks out over the Dome of the Rock, 60 “[…] über die Grenze des menschlichen Lebens, in den Anhauch der Vernichtung.” 61 “Wir sind nicht in Ägypten, Herr, die Freundschaft eines erwachsenen Mannes mit einem arabischen Knaben ist nicht alltäglich hier, und manche Familien sehen ungern, was ihre Sprößlinge treiben.”



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the holy Muslim site that stands on the traditional location of both the Temple Mount and Mount Moriah (De Vriendt, pp. 35–36). Irmin reminds de Vriendt of his sense of identification with Isaac, whose father almost sacrificed him, and de Vriendt responds that Abraham “was a strict critic” (De Vriendt, p. 36).62 De Vriendt alludes to the fact that he has strayed from Orthodox Jewish religion by having an affair with Saûd and therefore has disobeyed his forefathers. Through these words, de Vriendt associates the image of Isaac’s sacrifice with his own concerns about being gay. Homosexuality becomes connected with death, and particularly, death by stabbing. De Vriendt later returns to his thoughts about his identification with Isaac after Irmin informs him that others know of his relationship with Saûd; he ponders his struggle with God over his sexual orientation and links his feelings of being persecuted by God with Isaac being sacrificed on Mount Moriah (De Vriendt, pp. 46–48). His anxiety about the relationship also extends to his fear that his poetry will be discovered, and that this writing will be used to destroy his reputation (De Vriendt, p. 68). De Vriendt’s rebellious and blasphemous writings, which mirror de Haan’s own poetry,63 reflect his religious crisis as an ultra-Orthodox Jew and a gay man, and he protects and defends this expression of his struggle with his faith by carrying the manuscript around with him everywhere (pp. 72–73). Significantly, de Vriendt is moved to write poetry after his encounter with Saûd (p. 98), but the blasphemous nature of de Vriendt’s poetry indicates that homosexuality causes anguish rather than joy and beauty for de Vriendt. Same-sex desire thus takes on a paradoxical signification in the novel, both providing a means of reconnecting with one’s religious and cultural heritage but also leading to conflict with God and, potentially, to death. While the representation of homosexuality as a means of reconnecting with one’s heritage undermines orientalist conceptions of sexual desire in the orient, the emphasis on religious struggle as one of the difficulties of homosexuality also significantly interrupts the orientalist model. In addition to the personal consequences of homosexuality, the representation of same-sex desire in the novel includes a political dimension that is also both beneficial and dangerous. The political atmosphere in Jerusalem at the time is depicted as one in which there is antagonism between the Zionists, who are the secularized Jews who want to create a Jewish state, the Arabs, who want to be freed of imperialist control, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are opposed to the formation of a political Jewish state (De Vriendt, pp. 14, 60–61, 95–96). As a member of the latter, de Vriendt, along with his allies, decides to submit a proposal to the British Governor of Jerusalem presenting their desire for a coalition 62 “[…] war ein strenger Kritiker.” 63 Thielking, Auf dem Irrweg ins “Neue Kanaan”?, 1990, p. 125.

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with the Arabs, which will subvert the secular Zionists’ claim to be representatives of the Jews in Palestine (De Vriendt, pp.  64–66). In his discussion of the political struggle in the novel, Cohen remarks that the love between de Vriendt and Saûd is a paradigm for love between all Jews and Arabs.64 For de Vriendt, his love for the Arab boy has another positive aspect in that it symbolizes political union and solidarity between Jews and Arabs. Zweig’s new political coalition highlights not only the connection between the Arabs and those associated with the Ostjuden, which Zweig has uniquely emphasized, but also the promise that cooperation between these two groups will form the basis of the future of Palestine. Therefore, he extends Buber’s ideas by emphasizing that the “oriental” nature of the Ostjuden offers a foundation for cooperation between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. However, de Vriendt’s attempts at creating a political coalition between the ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Arabs, hence uniting the two “oriental” sides, are unsuccessful and eventually kill him. The Zionists view de Vriendt as a political threat to the formation of the Jewish state, especially after de Vriendt’s proposal to the British Governor of Jerusalem is reported to the public (De Vriendt, pp. 21–22, 124). One of the Chalutzim who is plotting de Vriendt’s murder, Mendel Glass, compares de Vriendt’s lack of loyalty with that of those who started pogroms in Poland earlier in the century. He complains: “This one here [de Vriendt] belongs to us; he knows very well that this is our last chance, but he sells us out to the Arabs anyway” (De Vriendt, p. 127).65 Glass sets the struggle of the Zionists against the background of the persecution from which the Eastern European Jewish immigrants are fleeing. In the face of such oppression, the Chalutzim believe that the Jews should be united in creating a nation, and the Arabs and any Jewish dissenters become associated with the antisemites of Eastern Europe. As a result, the Chalutzim decide they must murder de Vriendt (De Vriendt, p. 125). Hence, de Vriendt’s life is threatened on both sides: by the “orientals,” who resent him because of his relationship with an Arab boy, and by the “Western” Zionists, who distrust him because of his political ties with the Arabs. Ultimately, however, the ties between the two “oriental” sites are stronger than the ties between Jews; crying “Treason kills!”66 it is Zionists who murder de Vriendt (De Vriendt, p. 136).

64 Cohen, “Arnold Zweig und die Araberfrage,” 1993, p. 132. 65 “Dieser hier [de Vriendt] gehört zu uns, er weiß ganz genau, dies ist unsere letzte Chance, und trotzdem verkauft er uns den Arabern.” 66 “Verrat tötet!”



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The Sacrifice of Isaac: Envisioning a Jewish–Arab Coalition At the moment that the gunshots enter his body, de Vriendt feels hit by “three exploding stabs,”67 alluding to the stabbing of Isaac, and he then becomes immersed in a dream-like state in which he imagines that he is Isaac (De Vriendt, p. 136). This dream passage provides key insights into Zweig’s argument about the significance of de Vriendt for the future of Palestine. In the dream, de Vriendt becomes Isaac, and he is traveling to Damascus: “will his secret wish to see the magical city once again be fulfilled […]?” (De Vriendt, p. 136)68 The desire to return to Damascus had been expressed by de Vriendt himself during travels in northern Palestine with Irmin: “I would like to fulfill my old dream with you: the dream to once again dream of Damascus” (De Vriendt, p. 121).69 Irmin refused and insisted they turn back at Safed, and de Vriendt actually dreams of traveling to Damascus the night before his murder, pining for “his beloved royal city, the powerful Damascus, that had already seen Abraham within its clay walls” (De Vriendt, p. 129).70 In the dream, the beauty of Damascus is described fondly as a paradise: “the meadows washed by the sweet water of Damascus, the blue boughs of the plum trees, the elegantly proportioned bridges” (De Vriendt, p. 137).71 The importance of the return to Damascus also appears evident in the title of the chapter in which de Vriendt dies, “Home to Damascus,”72 which suggests that the “Heim” [Home] of the title of the novel refers to Damascus. Damascus, however, never served as a home for Abraham, who merely passed through Damascus on his way from Ur to Canaan, so the reason for Isaac’s desire to “return” to Damascus remains unclear. Damascus, in fact, had become a traditionally Muslim city, and Zweig had been to visit the mosques there during his visit to Palestine in 1932.73 De Vriendt’s dreamed journey to Damascus unfolds the importance of this city as his “home.”

67 “[…] drei knallenden Schlagstichen.” 68 “[…] ging sein verschwiegener Wunsch in Erfüllung, die zauberische Stadt noch einmal zu sehen?” 69 “Ich möchte mit Ihnen meinen alten Herzenswunsch erfüllen: den Traum Damaskus noch einmal träumen.” 70 “[…] sein[e] geliebt[e] Königstadt, d[as] mächtig[e] Damaskus, die schon Abraham in ihren Lehmmauern gesehen hatte.” 71 “[…] die süßen Wasser von Dameschek umspülten Wiesen, das blaue Geäst der Pflaumenbäume, das Ebenmaß der Brücken.” 72 “Heim nach Dameschek.” 73 See Arnold Zweig’s journal from the year 1932 (AZA 2620).

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In the dream, de Vriendt, as Isaac, travels northward on his father’s camels, and he watches the changing scenery and the changing groups of people he encounters. As he approaches Damascus, he witnesses a scene out of history: “Gliding by was the town of the Epiphany: there indeed on the street walked the white shape of the Galilean, to whom no greeting or look was offered, and at whose feet Rabbi Saul of Tarsus – the rebel – knelt, he who would inflict the incurable wounds on the Lord of Hosts” (De Vriendt, p. 137).74 Isaac sees Jesus walking through the streets of a village outside of Damascus, and at his feet crouches Paul, who strayed from Judaism and spread Christianity throughout the Mediterranean, hence wounding God in the eyes of Judaism. Paul’s epiphany, which led to his decision to become a Christian, occurred just outside of Damascus.75 De Vriendt is symbolically connected to Paul, since he has also rebelled against God through his poetry. In Damascus, Isaac looks for his father, Abraham, “the destroyer of the idols,” whom he finds in the “courtyard of the mosque, in the temple of the false gods” (De Vriendt, p. 137).76 In this temple, in which Abraham has apparently once again destroyed the idols, thousands of people are praying. The temple of idols, which Abraham could have historically destroyed, however, could not have been an Islamic temple, so the reference makes it unclear whether Abraham is challenging Islam or an ancient Canaanite religion. The dream continues, claiming that earth is the mother, and “the great sun-god Baal is the father; his house looms above, surrounded by mountains, in the shadow of the shadowland, in Baalbeck, the city of Baal. And there, in the throne of the devastated temple, sat Abraham” (De Vriendt, p. 138).77 Even in the destruction of the temple of the idols, the Canaanite god Baal is described with reverence, as the father, the great sun-god. The simultaneous appearance of both Baal and Abraham creates an uncertainty about which religion rules in the temple. Thus, Damascus is associated with the ancient Canaanite religion of Baal, with Christianity, in the form of Jesus, with Islam, in the form of the mosque, and with Judaism, in the form of Abraham. Damascus, Isaac’s “home,” therefore represents a place that unifies all of these religions, such that they coexist across thousands of years. The city is his home not because Abraham or Isaac historically called Damascus home, but 74 “Vorüber glitt das Dorf der Erscheinung: da wandelte ja auf der Straße die weiße Gestalt des Galiläers, dem kein Gruß und kein Blick entboten ward, und ihm zu Füßen krümmte sich Rabbi Saul von Tarsus, der Abtrünnige, er, der dem Herrn der Heerscharen die unheilbare Wunde schlagen sollte.” 75 Thielking, Auf dem Irrweg ins “Neue Kanaan”?, 1990, p. 226. 76 “[…] der Zerstörer der Götzen […] im Hofe der Moschee, im Tempel der falschen Götter.” 77 “[…] die Sonne ist der Vater, der große Sonnengott Baal, dessen Haus sich auftürmt, wo rechts ein Gebirge steht und links ein Gebirge, in der Höhlung des Hohllandes, in Baalbeck, der Stadt des Baal. Und da, in der Verwüstung des Tempels, thronte Abraham.”



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rather because the city embodies the home of the Semitic peoples, where all of their past and present religions originate. Isaac’s interaction with his father Abraham seems to provide further challenges to Judaism as the sole religion, at least within de Vriendt’s mind. In the biblical story, Isaac is not sacrificed by Abraham because God provides a ram at the last moment; Abraham has proven his faith through his willingness to sacrifice his own son, so God relieves him of this task. The test of faith, which is the meaning of the story, remains central to the dream, since de Vriendt’s own faith in God is being questioned. In the dream, in contrast to the biblical story, Isaac has actually been sacrificed: “he, Isaac, sacrificed on Mount Moriah and then healed” (De Vriendt, p. 137).78 He has endured the sacrifice at his father’s hand and thus has been betrayed by his father, but he has healed. The narrator claims that the earth mother “had allowed Isaac to be sacrificed on her breast, which was called Moriah, circumcised, his blood taken away from him with a stone knife” (De Vriendt, p.  138).79 While de Vriendt might see the sacrifice or circumcision simply as necessary elements of Judaism, the antagonism between Abraham and Isaac in the dream suggests that the sacrifice/circumcision has led to enmity between the two. The description of Abraham clearly associates him with God: “Abraham […] with a fire-colored beard, from which the sunlight came, and with blue laughter around the eyes, which gave the sky its color, and he was him, the creator of everything” (De Vriendt, p. 138).80 Abraham’s large form and blazing beard and eyes represent not a man, but the creator of the universe. Isaac’s reunion with this god-like father does not appear joyful, but rather, Isaac trembles in fear: “He wanted to hide from the look of his father, but his father had already seen him, and he was overcome with vertigo as he crawled toward his father” (De Vriendt, p.  138).81 In contrast to Isaac’s fond memories of Damascus and his longing to return there to see his father, the actual reunion with his father is more of a confrontation, and he becomes small, weak, and child-like before him. He seems to be returning to the boy he was at the time of the sacrifice itself. Isaac crawls towards his father underneath an “archway […] that had stayed together since the beginning of human thought,” but the archway suddenly begins to shrink around 78 “[…] er, Jizchak, geopfert auf Moriah und nunmehr genesen.” 79 “[…] geduldet hatte, daß man ihn, Jizchak, geopfert hatte auf ihrer Brust, die Moriah hieß, beschnitten, sein Blut ihm entrissen mit steinernem Messer.” 80 “Abraham […] mit einem feuerfarbenen Barte, von dem das Sonnenlicht ausging, und dem blauen Gelächter um die Augen, denen der Himmel seine Farbe entlieh, und er war es, der Schöpfer des Alls.” 81 “Er wollte sich verstecken vor dem Blick des Vaters, aber schon hatte der ihn gesehen, und Schwindel umkreisten ihn, da er zu ihm hinkroch.”

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him: “The archway sank down upon him, his sides were pressed by the stone, his hands and feet dug into the earth […] it was hard to breathe” (De Vriendt, p. 139).82 The ancient archway in the temple of the idols suddenly begins to collapse in order to crush Isaac underneath. While Isaac lies under the stones, he hears the laughter of “the terrifying father.”83 Abraham/God then challenges Isaac: “Won’t you finally love me, Isaac, my son, as I am?” Isaac responds, “No!”84 And this is the last word de Vriendt says as people run to help him (De Vriendt, p. 139). De Vriendt, in the form of Isaac, has in the end rejected God and hence Judaism. Damascus has become a location of rebellion against religion throughout the ages: Abraham’s destruction of the temple of Baal, Paul’s rejection of Judaism in favor of Jesus, and now, Isaac, the forefather of the Jewish people, rejects God, as well. Damascus is therefore not only a place where all Semitic religions simultaneously coexist, but also the city where these religions have been challenged. De Vriendt/Isaac’s yearning to return to Damascus appears to be a desire to confront God, and hence, a need to transform the beliefs of the Jewish people. In spite of this potential for change, however, the sacrifice of de Vriendt could only have negative connotations for Zweig. De Vriendt embodies the hope of the cooperation of Arabs and Jews, which Zweig also calls for in Das neue Kanaan; de Vriendt represents the orientalized, religious Ostjuden, who Buber and Zweig believed would serve as models for Jewish settlers in Palestine; and de Vriendt’s murder represents the violence within Zionism, which Zweig condemns in Das neue Kanaan. When de Vriendt is murdered, even though the political Zionists are at fault, the possibility of harmony between Jews and Arabs seems to fall apart. Saûd, confronted with the news of de Vriendt’s death, talks of the book de Vriendt had given him about Jews and Muslims coexisting in Spain and laments: “It was a long time ago and will never be again” (De Vriendt, p. 150).85 The rebellion of the Arabs and the ensuing disharmony between Jews and Arabs that, in the novel, occur as a result of the murder supports his comment. The murder of de Vriendt by political Zionists therefore seems to signify Zweig’s concerns about the possibility of achieving a peaceful coalition between Jews and Arabs, although de Vriendt’s death does not negate the potential for resistance that he represents. The dream therefore indicates Zweig’s vision of the unity of Jews and Arabs, his

82 “[…] Torbogen […], der seit Menschengedenken zusammenhielt […] Die Wölbung senkte sich auf ihn hernieder, seine Seiten preßte der Stein, seine Hände und Füße gruben sich in den Boden […] Atmen war schon schwer.” 83 “[…] des fürchterlichen Vaters.” 84 “‘Willst du mich denn nicht endlich lieben, Jizchak, mein Sohn, wie ich nun einmal bin?’ […] ‘Nein!’” 85 “Das ist lange her und wird nicht mehr sein.”



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call for the reinvigoration of Jewish religiosity, and his demand for a rejection of the masculine nationalist tendencies of Zionism. In conclusion, the figure of de Vriendt serves as Zweig’s unique response to the colonizing efforts of the Zionists. Superficially, Zweig’s text appears to follow models of same-sex desire in the orient and the colonizer/colonized relationship. However, diverging from both orientalism and Zionism, Zweig depicts an Ostjude in a relationship with an Arab boy, which represents not only the spiritual and cultural rejuvenation of the Jewish people through their re-association with their “oriental” roots, but also the possibility of a coalition between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The eponymous character represents a culmination of Zweig’s exploration of the Ostjude image, both by combining elements of his former ideal of the Ostjude as oriental, religious, and rejuvenating and by using this figure to resist the Muskeljude of Herzl’s Zionism. De Vriendt’s “ethnic drag,” in direct opposition to the Zionists in “colonialist drag,” affords him a particularly subversive position. De Vriendt, precariously located on the borders between Jews/Arabs, orient/ occident, Western/Eastern European Jews, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and colonizer/colonized, disrupts these binary categories and offers the possibility of mediation across them. The fact that de Vriendt is murdered by political Zionists, who ascribe to the ideals of European, masculine nationalism that uphold these binary categories, appears logical since de Vriendt embodies all that is threatening to Zionist ideology. De Vriendt instead incarnates the possibility of a different future for Israel/Palestine that promotes tolerance and ethical treatment of gays, Jews, and Arabs. Ironically, De Vriendt kehrt heim, which was finished in late 1932, barely preceded Zweig’s flight to Palestine in 1933 and his expressions of disillusionment with Zionism in 1934.86 The novel had a German audience only briefly before the National Socialists burned Zweig’s books in mid-1933, and Zionists of the time rejected his criticism of Zionism and portrayal of de Haan.87 Zweig’s revolutionary model of Jewish-Arab cooperation, however, provides a message of reconciliation and harmony that remains relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. Zweig’s words echo across the twentieth century as he tries to resist the cycle of vengeance and violence that had only just begun.

86 Freud, Briefwechsel, 1968, p.  68; Alt, “Zur Rezeption Martin Bubers durch Arnold Zweig,” 1995, p. 26. 87 Bernhard, “Nachwort,” 1994, pp. 293–294.

Yaron Peleg

Re-Orientalizing the Jew Zionist and Contemporary Israeli Masculinities

New Models, Old Patterns In 2012, the young Israeli film director, Meny Ya’ish, made an extraordinary film called God’s Neighbors.

Fig. 1: Jewish Power: Avi (Ro’ee Assaf) in Meny Ya’ish’s God’s Neighbors (Israel, 2012).

Focusing on a violent gang of three Mizrahi men, new converts to the Breslov Hasidic sect,1 the film follows their attempts to impose the religious laws of their 1 Breslov is a branch of Hasidic Judaism founded by Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) a greatgrandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Like many Hasidic sects, members of the Breslov branch emphasize intense, joyous relationship with God. Despite a lack of central leadership, Breslovers, as their members are called, are very visible in Israel and in various Jewish communities abroad where they make public efforts to recruit Jews to their movement, usually by playing loud music and fervently dancing in the streets.



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strengthened faith on members of their working class, urban neighborhood of Bat-Yam, near Tel-Aviv. Having been members of a criminal gang before, there is not much difference between their violence then and now, except that it is now sanctioned by religion. Yaniv (Itzik Golan) and Koby (Gal Friedman), led by Avi (Ro’ee Assaf), beat up drunks who disrespect the Sabbath, threaten local businesses to keep the Sabbath as well, force neighborhood women to dress more modestly, and fight a rival Arab gang. The only force that finally stops them is love. When Avi falls in love with a young woman who moves into the neighborhood, he mends his ways somewhat and calms down, making his two friends follow him too. God’s Neighbors is extraordinary not only because it is a very well made film. It is remarkable also for its construction, or reflection, of a contemporary Jewish Israeli masculinity that is informed by the past even as it defies and negates it. That Avi is what is commonly referred to as a “manly man“ or macho-man is very clear from his rugged, good looks, his rough working class occupation (he is a grocer), his cultivation of boxing as a sport, his broad, forthright mannerisms, the exclusive male companionship he keeps, and his aggression and violence. These traits mark Avi, as well as his two mates, not only as “manly men,” but especially as Mizrahi men, Israeli Jews whose family background is non-European. Their Mizrahi identity does not only come from those associations, as well as from their darker complexion and the lower socio-economic Hebrew they speak,2 but especially from their religiosity, which usually marks Mizrahim in Israel.3 I want to juxtapose the masculinity of Avi and his mates in this chapter with some of the earlier models of Jewish masculinity, models that were developed by early Zionism under the New Hebraism imprimatur, with a particular focus on antisemitism, effeminacy and orientalism, in order to describe some of the changes that these models underwent with the passage of time. I will also try to show how men like Avi represent a contemporary kind of Israeli masculinity that in many ways defies earlier Jewish masculine models and in some ways even inverts them. While Avi is decidedly a manly, daring, aggressive, and even violent Jew – all traits cultivated by New Hebraism, he is also oriental, that is, Arab-like, and religious – traits which were not favored by the early New Hebrew manly model, as I explain below.

2 On this fascinating linguistic phenomenon, see Henshke, “On the Mizraḥi Sociolect in Israel: A Sociolexical Consideration of the Hebrew of Israelis of North African Origin,” 2013, 207–227. 3 See my article on this film, Peleg, “Marking a New Holy Community: God’s Neighbors and the Ascendancy of a New Religious Hegemony in Israel,” 2013, 64–86.

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The Modern Discourse on Jewish Sexuality, Effeminacy, and Orientalism The construction of a new Jewish masculinity by Zionism in the early part of the twentieth century is a well-established cultural phenomenon which has been explored fairly widely in the last few decades.





Fig. 2: Cover of the literary periodical Hakeshet, Vol. 1.2, 1903, issued in Berlin.

The studies of Daniel Boyarin from the 1990s, and the debates they engendered, make up some of the most interesting literature on the subject.4 Boyarin’s chief innovation has been his critique of New Hebraism, which for most of the twentieth century has been regarded in Zionist historiography as one of the most significant and revolutionary aspects of the movement and its ideology.5 Motivated by the deconstructive spirit of postmodernism and influenced by some of the excesses of Israeli military politics toward the end of the 1980s, especially in response to the first Intifada in 1987, Boyarin’s critique and that of others focused on the aggressive aspect of New Hebraism.6 As is well known, when they first developed 4 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997. 5 On the invention of the New Hebrew, see Almog, The Sabra, 2000. 6 On the impact of the Intifada on Israeli culture, see Peleg, Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas, 2008, as well as Taub, Hamered Hashafuf, 1997.



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toward the end of the nineteenth century, ideas about a new Jewish masculinity, later known as New Hebraism, were part of an internal Jewish critique of negative images of Jews in the European national imagination.7 Two of the most negative traits that were associated with Jews at the time, and which later figured in the construction of a new Jewish masculinity, were effeminacy and orientalism.8 The new Jewish masculine model that was advocated by Max Nordau and others was deeply informed by these aspects, which later on, as the Jewish society grew and expanded in Palestine after the 1930s, determined the profile of the New Hebrew Man as well. Effeminacy and orientalism were related, of course, since during the colonial era Eastern cultures were regarded as more effeminate in comparison to Western cultures. Both the economic and eventually also the political subjugation of countries in the Near and Far East, as well as the different gender roles within those cultures, made them appear more effeminate in Western eyes.9 Boyarin’s critique was probably written as a response to the mutation of these aspects in Israeli manhood later on, especially after 1967.10 By reconstructing a gentler, more effeminate Jewishness from Roman times onward, which supposedly (still) existed in Eastern Europe in the pre-Zionist era, Boyarin set up a counter model to the Zionist one. Using the alleged failure of the latter as epitomized by Israel’s increasingly harsh treatment of the Palestinians after 1967, Boyarin elevates the “losing” model of Jewish masculinity, faint remnants of which found their way to the United States with the Jewish immigration there, while the rest of it disappeared forever in the Holocaust, “I start,” he says in his preface to Unheroic Conduct,

7 See Mosse, Confronting the Nation, 1993, pp. 161–175; Zimmermann, “Muscle Jews versus Nervous Jews,” 2006, pp. 13–26; Reuveni, “Sports and the Militarization of Jewish Society,” 2006, pp. 44–61. 8 The two were conflated in the antisemitic imagination, which regarded Jews as both oriental and effeminate in comparison to Western, European social models, even before the imperial era with its own associations between orientalism and effeminacy. See the introduction to my study on the subject, Peleg, Orientalism, 2005. 9 See Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, especially the introduction and chapter 1. 10 I am making a conjecture here based on the time of Boyarin’s critique, on its academic context, and the responses it engendered in the years that passed since then. Boyarin published his alternative Jewish masculine model during the 1990s, when the critical pendulum swung against Israel in its conflict with the Arabs, in Israel and abroad. Several post-Zionist critics in the 1990s, who were critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and lambasted the abuse of its power, cited Boyarin as an influence. For representative examples of such critique, see the journal Te’oria uvikoret 20 (Spring 2002), as well as Azoulay and Ophir, “100 Years of Zionism, 50 Years of Jewish State,” 1998, 68.

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with what I think is a widespread sensibility that being Jewish in our culture renders a boy effeminate. Rather than producing in me a desire to ‘pass’ and to become a ‘man’, this sensibility resulted in my desire to remain a Jew, where being a sissy was all right. To be sure, this meant being marginal, and it has left me with a persistent sense of being on the outside of something... but the cultural and communal place that a sissy occupied in my social world was not one that enforced rage and self-contempt. […] I want to use the sissy, the Jewish male femme as a location and a critical practice.11

In doing so, Boyarin also made use of the victimhood discourse that is part of postmodernism to elevate the status of passive Jewish masculinity, which until then was regarded as having lost to the Zionist model in the historical battle for cultural survival.12 It is impossible to say, whether Boyarin would have developed such a model had Zionism failed. What is certain is that the establishment of the State of Israel as well as its survival and success are due in large part to the endurance of New Hebraism, irrespective of its eventual metamorphosis. As mentioned before, in order to grapple with their negative portrayal as effeminate and oriental, European Jews responded by calling for the cultivation of traits that would correct these so-called aberrations and make Jewish society correspond more closely to contemporary national models.13 Both critiques emanated from cultural trends that developed in Europe at the time, which involved the gendering of the middle classes and the forging of distinct national communities out of the gendered bourgeoisie.14 Gendering involved the socialization, really, of the growing middle classes according to clearer and more distinct patterns that were based on the nuclear family. A novel idea at the time, the nuclear family became the foundation stone of a better defined and stable society which was also easier to govern and control. The division of society into distinct masculine and feminine realms served to create the nuclear family as a stable social unit, where men as husbands and fathers would be responsible for the family’s external affairs, including providing for and protecting the family; the women as wives and mothers would manage the family’s internal affairs, including raising and educating the children in the spirit of the new, middle class national com11 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, pp. xiii–xiv. 12 By the so-called victimhood discourse I am referring to the rise of the concept of “Other,” or Subaltern, which figured prominently in the 1990s as part of the more general postmodern discourse, where it was used to undermine regnant or hegemonic discourses. Alain Finkielkraut writes evocatively about the Jewish aspect of it and from a very personal perspective in his, The Imaginary Jew, 1980. 13 See Mosse, Confronting the Nation, 1993, as well as Brenner and Reuveni, Emancipation through Muscles, 2006. 14 For a lucid description of this fascinating process, see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 1987.



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munity. Later, as that spirit developed it was often defined negatively against non-European cultures which provided a useful contrast, allowing Europeans to extend their advancement in technology to the social, cultural, and finally also to the mental, spiritual, and moral realms. Finally, at the height of the imperial era, most if not all countries outside of Europe, certainly countries under the economic and political control of its colonial powers, where deemed inferior in some fashion in comparison to Europe.15 For various reasons, religious, cultural, and historical, Jews did not easily fit into these parameters or models. Firstly, a stable nuclear family as the basis of a “national” community was an old and integral component of Jewish communal organization since late antiquity, made necessary, among other things, by the precariousness of life as a minority.16 And while this could have recommended them to the new European national-social order, the gender divisions within the Jewish nuclear family did not correspond neatly to general, patriarchal European ones. While Boyarin exaggerates the agency and status women were given in traditional Jewish communities, the precedence given to religious study in those communities created a cultural ideal which, at least in principle, kept men studying indoors and women providing for the family without.17 This could have been one of the major reasons for the associations of Jewishness and effeminacy, as well, of course, as the general lack of Jewish political power and the inferior legal status of Jews in Europe and elsewhere.18 The oriental associations, while more difficult to deal with, are easier to explain, as Jews never denied their Eretz-Israeli roots, that is, their Levantine origin, to use colonial parlance, which were deeply engrained in Jewish religious practices.19 This pride of uniqueness was very useful as long as Jews maintained separate and distinct communal structures, providing a source of pride for a discriminated minority. But when a majority of Jews sought integration into the emerging national communities across Europe in the nineteenth century, the “oriental” distinction became more problematic. Zionism offered a practical solution to what came to be regarded as the essentialist “otherness” of Jews in Europe by suggesting to utilize this difference constructively and calling for the establishment of a separate Jewish state.20 The idea of constructive difference was also 15 This is essentially Edward Said’s argument in his well-known Orientalism (1978). 16 For a general overview of this, see Biale, Eros and the Jews, 1997. 17 Boyarin, “Massada or Yavneh? Gender and the Arts of Jewish Resistance,” 1997, pp. 306–329. 18 See Brenner/Reuveni (eds.), Emancipation through Muscles, 2006. Circumcision may be yet another factor, as Freud pointed out, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 232. 19 Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 1–13. 20 A well-known early modern reference to Jews as Orientals is found in Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s 1781 treatise, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Rights of the Jews, 1957, p. 1. A more

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what Theodor Herzl had in mind, except that Herzl’s Jewish nationalism involved a fairly exact reproduction of European Western liberal nationalism on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, conducted in the German language and clad in an evening suit. Zionism, as it developed on the ground, chose other ways that dealt more practically with the oriental challenge.21 But while even the more pragmatic Zionists came to Palestine in the name of the Jewish “oriental” difference, they were thinking more of the biblical associations of Jews than any real connection to the Arab Levant.22 As Europeans, they came to Palestine as harbingers of its culture, even if they meant to create their own unique version of it there. And yet the Arab culture they encountered in Palestine, especially that of the Bedouins, inspired early Zionist pioneers to adopt some of its features in their attempts to forge a New Hebrew culture from scratch. Of those features, the Bedouin culture of combat, the Bedouin dress code as well as the Arabic language, were especially attractive to Zionist pioneers, who regarded the latter two as signs of biblicism and nativeness and the former as an inspiration for their own model of a “native” Jewish manly culture. It was at this juncture that the two Jewish anxieties, the oriental and the masculine, met.23 The charge of effeminacy, while not as simple to explain as the oriental one, was easier to deal with, because “all” it required, essentially, was for Jews to create their own national society and then mold it according to bourgeois national European gender models. The process was not simple, of course, and required a lot of so-called social engineering. Even prior to the establishment of an actual national Jewish society in the Land of Israel, sports clubs and para-military organizations were set up in Jewish communities across Europe as a way to “rehabilitate” Jews, “mend” their ways, make them “healthier” according to the then regnant national ideals.24 Initially, these frameworks were established with a view to acculturate Jews to European nationalism and pave their way into it. When, later on, a viable problematic association is found in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), where Jews are denigrated as both effeminate and oriental. 21 Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 1–13. 22 A number of Zionist writers, thinkers, and politicians dabbled in these ideas at the time, including the publicist and activist R. Binyamin, journalist Hemda Ben-Yehuda, as well as wouldbe politicians, the Ben-Tzvis and David Ben-Gurion, see Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 34–35. 23 See, for example, the opening to my book, Orientalism, where I describe an enthusiastic reception Theodor Herzl met with on his arrival at one of the Jewish agricultural settlements, moshavot, he visited on his Palestinian trip in 1898. A bunch of young men from the moshava jumped on horses and galloped toward Herzl’s carriage, showing off some of the local Bedouin riding customs they adopted. Herzl was greatly impressed and later recorded the event in his diary, commenting on the metamorphosis of Eastern European Jewish peddlers into bold Jewish “cowboys.” Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 1–3. 24 See Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997.



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Jewish community developed in Palestine, these traits were more naturally incorporated into it as part of the natural life of the nation on its ancestral soil.25 Palestinian Bedouin culture had an important acculturating effect on this process early on by setting up an attractive model for Zionist pioneers that combined oriental biblicism and the spirit of combat. In a seminal essay about the Zionist immigration model, Itamar Even-Zohar sets it up as a unique model against that of the cultural export and cultural absorption models.26 The Zionist pioneers did not wish to export their Eastern European Jewish culture and reproduce it in Palestine because they rejected it. Neither did they consider the Arab culture of Ottoman Palestine as an example for emulation. However, in their attempts to create their own new Jewish culture, elements from the local Bedouin culture did initially inspire them to some extent, as I noted above.27 The direct influence of Bedouin culture did not last long after the new Jewish community in Palestine grew to a size that was sufficiently large to antagonize local Arabs and instigate what later came to be known as the Arab-Israeli Conflict. The more the national character of the Yishuv developed, the more local Arabs began to occupy a similar role to that of the Jews in national Europe, an “Other” against which the emerging Hebrew community defined itself – Hebrew, not Jewish anymore.28 At the same time, anxiety over orientalism and effeminacy remained enduring aspects of New Hebraism. An often mentioned literary instance of it occurs in Amos Oz’s first novel, My Michael (1968), when the heroine, Hannah Gonen, fantasizes about being raped by two Arab twins with a mixture of anxiety and titillation: Two men appeared and carried me off in their arms. They were hidden in their flowing robes. Only their eyes showed, glinting. Their grasp was rough and painful... I was pushed down a long flight of stairs into a cellar lit by a dirty paraffin lamp... I was thrown to the ground […] Suddenly the twins threw off their robes […] They were dark and lithe. A pair of strong gray wolves... I was dumb. A darkness washed over me. The darkness wanted Michael [her husband] to come rescue me only at the end of the pain and the pleasure.29

25 See Almog, The Sabra, 2000. 26 Even-Zohar, “The Emergence of Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1884–1948,” 1981, 167–184. 27 See note 23. 28 See Hillel Cohen’s book on the emergence and development of these tensions and rivalry, Tarpat, shnat ha’efesh basichsuch hayehudi-Aravi [1929, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict], 2013. 29 See Oz, My Michael [1968], 1972, pp. 46–47.

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From Jewish to Israeli Masculinity In looking at the continued development of Israeli masculinity and its metamorphosis over the years, both of these anxieties remain important factors; important also for understanding Avi’s image in a film such as God’s Neighbors, that was made almost a century after this process began. I would like to suggest that the image of Avi is constructed as a response not only to the origins of Hebrew/Israeli masculinity, but also to the various ways it evolved since its emergence during the Yishuv period and in the way it was burnished in the War of Independence. The successful outcome of the 1948 war as the first trial of Israeli manhood helped to establish it more securely, rooted it in the culture, disseminated it and began to mythologize it as well.30 But it was no doubt Israel’s next big war, the 1967 war with its spectacular military victory, which contributed more than any other single event to fix that image in the public’s mind in Israel and beyond. In other words, the military, aggressive traits of the New Hebrew man, which began to be cultivated already in Europe, which migrated to Israel with the Zionist pioneers, and which slowly developed there also as a response to the escalating conflict with the Arabs, finally came to epitomize Israeli manhood more than any other trait. So much so, in fact, that this process of masculinization was almost a necessary stage in the evolution and legitimization of two other underprivileged Israeli communities, the Mizrahi community and the national religious or settler community, as I show below. An integral part of that New Hebraism was a strong anti-religious sentiment that was animated by the negative associations of traditional Judaism which in their turn encouraged the cultivation of typically non-Jewish occupations in the first place.31 Boyarin calls them Goyim-naches, using the derogatory Yiddish term for games non-Jews play, such as sports and war, which from the perspective of a religiously scholastic society are all a waste of time, of course.32 Israeli masculinity as an expression of New Hebraism was therefore also a very secular identity, which eventually came to epitomize Zionism’s animosity toward religion. The soldier was juxtaposed with the Yeshiva student, with the first representing the

30 See Almog, The Sabra, 2000. The image was mythologized after the 1948 War of Independence in stories, songs, illustrations, etc. Poet Natan Alterman’s famous poem about that war, Magash Hakesef [The Silver Platter], epitomizes this adulation. See Dan Miron’s analysis of the poem and its reception in Miron, “Magash Hakesef,” 1992, pp. 63–87. 31 See Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 1995, pp. 269–332. 32 “Goyim Naches” is literally the name of the first chapter in his book, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, pp. 33–80.



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apogee of the Zionist revolution and the future of Jewishness and the latter representing its pitiful, ebbing remnant. The oriental associations which were cultivated earlier as part of New Hebraism were completely abandoned at this stage, primarily because of the escalating conflict with the Arabs and the increasingly negative associations with them as a corollary.33 When Jews from Arab and Muslim countries began arriving in Israel after 1948, they, too, suffered from similarly negative associations. They were disparaged for being Arab-like, that is, primitive, uneducated, coarse, uncivilized, in other words, “non-European.” As a result, a competing Mizrahi masculinity emerged in Israel as a way to deal with the absorption pangs of Mizrahim and to compensate for the emasculating immigration experience.34 The loss of control over individual, family, and community life was channeled instead into the construction of an alternative fantasy of control, that of the macho male. Most elaborately articulated in the so-called Bourekas films – ethnic comedies that were produced in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s and were practically the only public outlet of Mizrahi culture at the time – the Mizrahi masculine version combined a deliberate exaggeration of negative masculine traits, such as bravado, machismo, male chauvinism, and sometimes violence and criminality. These so-called “arsim” (sing., ars) came to represent an oriental counter-image of the wholesome Sabra (read: Ashkenazi), a “black” “Other” to the hegemonic “white” culture. Surprisingly perhaps, religious affiliation was part of that image as well. Since most Mizrahim arrived in Israel after its establishment and were neither revolutionary socialists nor anti-religious, they suffered from none of the Ashkenazi anxiety over Jewish religious practice. And while the establishment of the new state frowned upon it, Mizrahim retained their religious affiliation nevertheless. The additional benefit that accrued to them from it was that it mitigated or countered their Arab associations in a Jewish state and established them as bona-fide Jews in the eyes of the absorbing Ashkenazi culture. Eventually, the hegemonic culture suffered their religiosity, which was accepted as one of the only legitimate forms of Israeli Judaism until the rise of the settler movement and the growth and acculturation of the Israeli orthodox community from the 1980s onward.35 The emergence or cultivation of an exaggerated Mizrahi masculinity should also be seen in another context – the decline of the image of the heroic New Hebrew as exemplified by the Sabra after the establishment of the State and especially the transition into a more normal, national existence. As the old, Ashkenazi, Zionist, pioneering masculinity waned between 1960 and 1980 a new Mizrahi masculin33 Peleg, “From Black to White, Changing Images of Mizrahim in Israeli Cinema,” 2008, 122–145. 34 Peleg, “From Black to White,” 2008, pp. 126–141. 35 Peleg, “Marking a New Holy Community,” 2008, pp. 68–69.

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ity challenged it.36 It is worth noting, how both exhibited surprisingly similar patterns of development in which an image that is first formed as a response to adversity – antisemitism in the New Hebraic case and anti-Arabism in the Mizrahi case – eventually shapes culture and then history in a much more tangible sense. The rise of the settler movement in the 1980s changed this dynamic again and was yet another stage in the development of Israeli masculinity. The settlers saw themselves as inheritors of the early Zionist pioneers, with one exception.37 They replaced the virulent anti-religiosity of the New Hebrews with messianism. But as mentioned above, New Hebraism had evolved by then, shedding its former farming associations and retaining mostly its military, aggressive aspects, epitomized by the image of the soldier. Thus, the new combination articulated by the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was a combustible concoction of religious fervor and military aggression which came to represent the next stage in the development of masculinity in Israel. For more than twenty years, from the 1980s to the 2000s and beyond, the most visible strand of masculinity in Israel was that which the settlers exhibited. From the perspective of the original they claimed to inherit, that was of course a gross distortion. Unlike the Zionist pioneers, the settlers by and large did not work the land, they simply built on it and populated it. Neither did they defend the country from its enemies but arguably jeopardized its security by antagonizing Palestinians and perpetuating the conflict with the Arabs. In other words, the settlers betrayed original Zionism twice, first by abandoning its secularity, and second by exposing it to danger rather than defending it. It is precisely against these excesses that Boyarin suggested his alternative, more benign model of Jewish masculinity. As we shall presently see, the character of Avi in God’s Neighbors is the next, contemporary stage in the evolution of Israeli masculinity, because during the twenty or so years of settler reign, Mizrahi masculinity as a cultural idiom was relatively inconspicuous. Having forged their identity during the heady times after Likkud’s rise to power in 1977, Mizrahim began to be slowly incorporated into Israeli culture as part of a natural absorption process.38 As a result, some of the more radical expressions of Mizrahi masculinity as epitomized by the Israeli Black Panther movement, for instance, eventually lost steam, mitigated by 36 Peleg, “Marking a New Holy Community,” 2008, pp. 131–134. 37 On the ideological origins of the settler movement, see Aran, Kookism, 2013. 38 The degree of integration is a controversial issue in Israel. Mizrahim have certainly made inroads into the country’s politics, as evidenced by the popular SHAS party, for instance, as well as into its culture, as evidenced by the legitimacy and popularity of Mizrahi music, for instance. For a critical view of Mizrahi integration, see Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, 2013. On the advent of Mizrahi music, see Regev and Serousi’s, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, 2004.



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acceptance and cultural inclusion.39 An important exception to this process was the development of a distinct Mizrahi orthodoxy, represented from the mid-1980s onward by the rapidly expanding SHAS movement. Modeled after Ashkenazi Hasidism, the SHAS phenomenon was an attempt by the religious authorities of the Sephardi/Mizrahi community in Israel to confront the religious crisis brought on by immigration as well as the continued discrimination of Mizrahim in Israel.40 Promising to restore the old Sephardi glory (‫)להשיב עטרה ליושנה‬, SHAS offered a closely-knit communal support system that bypassed the state even as it used state money to do so. It also developed a curious hybrid model of masculinity, which offered former “arsim” a way back to a better or more fully integrated citizenship in the Jewish nation-state by becoming orthodox but remaining Mizrahim at the same time. For Shasniks, as they are called, are in fact “black” Hasidim, a native Israeli Mizrahi version of an originally Eastern European Ashkenazi phenomenon that underwent a unique development in Israel after the Holocaust. But if the original “ars” was politically identified with the Right in Israel, most often Likkud, Shasniks were initially unaffiliated politically. Their main agenda was cultural and economic, to help Mizrahim get a bigger portion of the national pie. It was only later, when they grew substantially and SHAS became a major political player from the early 1990s on that they threw their lot more often with the Likkud, motivated by the political affinity of a majority of their voters as well as by political expediency. Compared to the settlers, however, who were intensely political and shrewdly used politics for gains that far exceeded their electoral power, the power of SHAS came first and foremost from its popularity, a popularity that was augmented by the movement’s vague, or “opportunistic” political affiliation. The 1990s, then, saw two major and very different models of Israeli masculinity. The first model was the one offered by the settlers, a mutated model of New Hebraism, whose two main features now were aggression and religious fervor. Or phrased historically, the allegedly timid and cowardly Jew of yore, who recreated himself in Palestine as a forthright and brave Hebrew, was now a religious “soldier” for the causes of his state. The second model was that offered by SHAS, a mutated model of the “ars,” whose main feature was a return to faith comple-

39 The picture is more complex than this. For more on this, see Smooha, “Jewish Ethnicity in Israel: Symbolic or Real?,” 2004, pp. 47–80. See also, Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, 2013. The book looks primarily at Israeli cinema but has useful socio-historical insights on Mizrahim in Israel. 40 See Peled, “Aryeh Sha’ag, Mi Loh Yirah?: SHAS Vehama’avak al Hayisre’eliyut” [SHAS and the Struggle for Israeli Identity], 2002, pp. 272–287, as well as Leon, “Dat Vechiloniyut” [Religion and Secularity], 2006, pp. 63–87.

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mented by a retreat from national politics. Speaking historically again, the oriental “Otherness” of the non-Ashkenazi Jew was toned downed and “Jewified” by clothing it in Ashkenazi garb and “defanging” it politically, as is demonstrated in the image of Avi in God’s Neighbors.

The Continued Evolution of Jewish-Israeli Masculinity One of the most interesting aspects of the film God’s Neighbors for this discussion is its display of yet another stage in this gender evolution that combines or binds masculinity and Jewishness in a more positive way that leaves out militarism.

Fig. 3: The new “muscular Jew”: athletic, muscular AND religious. Ro’ee Assaf as Avi in Meny Ya’ish’s film, God’s Neighbors (2012).

The director, Meny Ya’ish, replaces the kind of problematic Ashkenazi masculinity as epitomized by the settlers with a more benign and “genuine” Mizrahi masculinity that lacks overt nationalistic characteristics. Avi, the intense hero of God’s Neighbors, is a simple guy, an unsophisticated street thug, who relates to the God he recently found as a kind of gang leader, whose command(ment)s must be loyally obeyed. At the same time, his religious beliefs do not seem to inform his political opinions or stand in the way of his natural physical urges. As opposed to Pini, for example, a young Yeshiva student and a settler in the religious action-



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adventure film, Time of Favor (dir. Joseph Cedar, 2000), who plots an anti-Muslim terrorist attack after he is spurned by the girl he loves, when the girl Avi fancies rebuffs him in God’s Neighbors, he simply woos her, like the “real” man he is, until she accepts him. I would like to suggest that this seemingly superficial analogy nevertheless exemplifies the differences between the two masculinities and their relationship to Zionism. Against the fraught Israeli Ashkenazi masculinity, forged in the crucible of European antisemitism, changed by the country’s prolonged state of emergency into overt military machismo and finally mutated into the settlers’ evil super-Jew, the Mizrahi masculinities in Ya’ish’s film seem uncomplicated and benign by comparison. As former street gang members, with their menacing looks, masculine bravado, and adolescent group behavior, Avi and his friends may play homage to the stereotype of Mizrahi men as criminals. At the same time, their religious affiliation tames them. But this is not anymore the Mizrahi traditionalism of previous decades. In order to break out of this mold, Avi and his friends adopt a form of ostensibly Ashkenazi religiosity – Hasidism. In some ways, the three former gang members have simply changed one gang for another. Instead of a group of thugs who deal drugs and collect protection money, they attend Torah study and then go out and impose on their neighbors the Jewish laws they learn. The film’s opening scene is a chilling demonstration of their ruthless vigilantism, an example of their personal interpretation of God’s laws. The film begins on a peaceful Friday evening with Avi, a rough-looking but attractive young man, who performs the ritual of Kiddush, or sanctification of the wine, that ushers in the Jewish Sabbath. When he is done eating alone with his father, Avi retires to his room to study scripture, basking in the sweetness of the Torah and relishing the peace and quiet of the holy day after a long week of hard work. But his blessed reverie is soon interrupted by loud music that comes from the street below. Looking down, he sees a group of young Russians drinking and making merry in the yard to the sound of booming music. Faint cries by neighbors in surrounding flats to keep the music down in honor of the Sabbath are rebuffed vulgarly and dismissively by the carousing Russians. This incenses God’s first neighbor, Avi, who calls on God’s two other neighbors, his friends Koby and Yaniv, to help him drive the Russians out. What follows is probably one of the most articulated action scenes in Israeli cinema to date, a rapid action sequence, in the course of which the Russians are violently beaten and forced to leave, bleeding and humiliated, to the sound of cheering neighbors. This jihadist mode repeats itself several times in the film, as they break the bones of a porn CD seller, shut down a local hairdresser who stays open after sundown on the Sabbath, and bully a young woman to dress more modestly.

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But their religious affiliation also holds the promise of amelioration and, eventually, the laws they purport to uphold indeed tame them. Essentially, Avi and his friends are in a religious group therapy. They are pretty wild at the beginning of the film, but by the end of it, Avi certainly improves and mends his ways somewhat. He avoids killing a rival Arab gang member during a vendetta, and gets together with his girl at the end, disbanding in effect the piety patrol he ran throughout the film. Comparatively speaking, then, Judaism seems to have different effects on these two different masculinities, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. Or put another way, the two kinds of masculinities interpret and incorporate Judaism in different ways. Whereas in the case of the settlers, religion seems to bring out the meanness and aggression that was inherent in the [Ashkenazi] New Hebrew, religion seems to contain and tame the aggression inherent in the stereotypical Mizrahi “criminal” masculinity. At the end, Jewish religion becomes the most identifying characteristic of these three young men, which defines them as Israelis. This is not an identity created as a reaction to a negative impetus in the way Zionism’s New Hebraism was a reaction to antisemitism, and the settlers’ neo-Hebraism or neo-Zionism was a reaction to a crisis of faith.41 Rather, it is an identity that combines a subjective or personal particularity (Mizrahi) with a bigger communal identity (Jewish and national). That it is Hasidism, a specific Ashkenazi kind of Judaism, that forms the basis for this identity, is all the more important, for it may suggest a genuine hybrid form of Israeli Judaism, one that is not divided by ethnic or sectarian differences anymore. By joining a Hasidic sect, Avi and his Mizrahi mates transcend the narrower definitions that always stood in the way of true integration. Their ascendancy in the film may perhaps also mark the final death of mamlachtiyut, or statism, and its discourse of ethnicity, which religion seems to have usurped as a national organizing principle.42 In fact, the film distances itself also from the kind of Mizrahi antagonism that animates sectarian parties like SHAS, in that it does not set up a state apparatus against which the characters in the film rail, as was usually the case before, in the 1970s and 1980s. In the absence of a “gripe,” then, it is difficult to see them as fighting or reacting against an alleged discrimination. Their religiosity is perceived in the film as an attempt to fill the void of a grand, national narrative, 41 The term “neo” is not used in the discourse. I use it here in the sense of “revived,” “modified,” following its sense in “Neoconservative.” 42 Mamlachtiyut or Statism is the Israeli version of what George Mosse called the “civic religion of nationalism” and which was defined and promoted by Israel’s first prime-minister, David BenGurion, in an attempt to forge a distinct civic culture in Israel during the first decades of statehood, see Mosse, Confronting the Nation, 1993, pp. 121–130.



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which seems to have disappeared by the 2000s.43 The entire ethnic infrastructure of yore is discarded in this film, as we see in one of the most amusing scenes in the film: Avi and his gang-mate, Koby, discuss inter-Mizrahi ethnic supremacy while playing backgammon one evening. Naming pop culture Mizrahi celebrities, they compete for the most accomplished ethnic minority. This is a farcical scene, of course, that makes light of the very premise and dismisses it through humor, and significantly, too, by centering it on a backgammon game in an outside cafe. Playing backgammon has epitomized Mizrahi slothfulness since the early 1960s: grown men idling away hours of each day in a cafe playing games instead of working and feeding their families.44 The film amplifies these associations only to toss them aside as amusing references to a bygone past that no longer dictates either image or reality.45 To the extent that it is consciously retained in the film, Mizrahi identity is constructively folded into Avi’s image as a romantic hero. Moreover, Avi’s obvious sexuality is not problematized anymore, as the sexual nature of Mizrahim was in the past.46 The problematic Mizrahi sexuality (oversexed, promiscuous, vulgar) has now turned into sexiness, which is something completely different. This is precisely the shift suggested by the film. In the forty years that have elapsed since the 1970s, attitudes toward sex and sexuality have undergone big changes. This is especially true for businesses like the film industry, which relies on the sexiness of stars and cultivates a celebrity culture to maximize profits. Avi’s oozing sexual appeal is no longer a stumbling block on the way to acceptance, as it was regarded in an earlier and different Israel. It has now become a pronounced aspect of his personality, and his beautiful physique is deliberately put on display in the film. Thus, toward the end of it, we see him 43 The film was very well received in Israel and attracted a lot of chatter, in the daily press as well as the blogosphere. Many of the reviews referred precisely to this point, to the ultimately positive role of religion to control, tame, appease, and fulfill. Although they do not say so explicitly, I would like to suggest that such assessments flag the absence of responsible or more meaningful national frameworks. For a selection, see, Anderman, “Extreme violence in the service of God: Coming soon to a theater near you,” Ha’aretz, June 9, 2012, http://www.haaretz. com/culture/arts-leisure/extreme-violence-in-the-service-of-god-coming-soon-to-a-theaternear-you-1.449802; Hochner, “Hamashgichim – tsa’ir ve’achshavi” [God’s Neighbors – Young and Contemporary], Seret.co.il Portal, November 13, 2013 http://www.seret.co.il/critics/moviereviews.asp?id=1184; Raveh, “Hamashgichim, bikoret” [God’s Neighbors, A Critique], Sinemaskop, July 13, 2012, http://cinemascope.co.il/archives/10327. 44 This happens in the seminal film Sallah Shabati (dir. Ephraim Kishon, 1964). 45 Avi is portrayed as a hardworking man who runs a fresh produce stand together with his father. References to the work of other members of the gang are not made. 46 Raz Yosef dedicates considerable space to what he defines as the sexualization of Mizrahim in many bourekas films, to their portrayal as essentially invigorating mates to listless Ashkenazi women, see Yosef, Beyond Flesh, 2004, 84–117.

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actually taking his clothes off, stepping naked into the sea after praying to God for guidance. Avi and his pronounced working class (i.e. Mizrahi) features are exposed to viewers in all their glorious authenticity, muscles, scars, tattoos, and all. Except – and this is an important difference – they are connected here not only to the Zionist culture of the body as it was inherited from European youth movements, but also to a Jewish ritual, that of purifying oneself by dipping in a Mikve, a ritual bath.47 God’s Neighbors also makes a political statement by staying out of politics, by stripping Avi and his vigilante-mates of any overt political affiliation, despite the combustible potential for it. Toward the end of the film, two of Avi’s mates summon him to join them in a vendetta against Arabs from a rival gang. Getting all worked up, they pack weapons, get into a car, and speed away to Jaffa. When they spot members of the Arab gang on one of the streets, they hurl a Molotov cocktail at them, and then jump out of the car with drawn guns, ready to kill. But this is where the story suddenly takes an unexpected turn. Trembling with rage and pointing a gun at one of the Arabs, who is lying down, expecting his life to end any second, Avi deliberately misses and shoots at the ground next to him. He has chosen not to kill his enemy, despite the eager calls from his surrounding gang members to do so, to go ahead and pull the trigger. Avi’s motivation is not immediately clear because he has been portrayed as hot-headed and violent up to that point. One of the most obvious explanations for the change in his behavior, which is the last in a series of gradual changes, is his strengthening relationship with his girlfriend, Miri. This is, again, a generic cliché: the girl as a mitigating factor, a beast charmer after the manner of Delilah. Avi’s burgeoning romance is certainly a softening factor. But it is only part of the picture. A bigger part of it, and certainly narratively more significant, is the little space given to the rivalry between Arabs and Jews in the story. Already before we get to this point in the plot, the Chekhovian gun, so to speak, looms intermittently and ominously in the shape of a car full of defiant Arab gang members. Driving occasionally by the kiosk where Avi and his mates hang out and play backgammon, the Arabs slow down and crank up the volume of their ethnic music, which spills onto the street, and look provocatively at the Jews. This annoys Koby at one point, who begs Avi to go after the bastards and get them and their “ugly music.” But Avi is not interested, dismissing both the Arabs and Koby’s childish antics. 47 On the connections between early Zionism and contemporaneous European youth movements, such as the Wandervogel, see an illuminating article about male bonding and Zionist pioneering by Kafkafi, “Misublimatzia shel hanashiyut lesublimatzia shel ha’imahut: shlabim beyachaso shel hashomer hatza’ir lenashim” [The Attitude of the Shomer Hatza’ir Youth Movement to Feminism], 2001, pp. 306–349.



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Coming, as it does in the story, before the clash with the Arabs, this scene prepares us perhaps for the subsequent twist that occurs when the proverbial gun is finally used. Cinematic gang conventions appear to lead us toward yet another articulation of the seemingly endless Middle Eastern conflict, as portrayed in countless Israeli films. Yet with a heroic gesture, taken from the conventions of another genre, as we shall presently see, Avi passes his “trial,” curbs his urge to kill, and by doing so terminates the cycle of violence. Given the dramatic makeup of the story, Avi’s abstention should not really be surprising. Since the Arabs do not figure in the drama significantly, it would make little sense for him to kill one of them now and upset the story’s narrative balance. The fact is that the story has marginalized the Arab presence to such an extent that it constitutes a minor and insignificant part of it. Does the minor role of Arabs in the film point to the ascendancy of a new Jewish religious ethos over the older Zionist one? Perhaps Avi’s refusal to participate in the gang war, and symbolically the bigger Middle Eastern conflict, represents a disengagement of sorts from the Israeli here and now, an attempt to suspend “Zionist” historical time and return, at least partly or temporarily, to Jewish religious time. Does God’s Neighbors suggest a new religious national ethos, in which national politics lose some of their centrality, making more space for the politics of religion instead? This claim is powerfully made already in the opening scene of the film, mentioned earlier. The fight with the Russians, who represent aggressive secularism and a disconnection from Israel, stages an Israeli show of force, during which the invading and polluting outsiders are repelled from the midst of the “holy” community. The Russians exhibit aggressively un-Israeli behavior, as Friday evenings are among the most peaceful times on the Israeli calendar, when many Israeli Jews get together with their families and eat a festive meal. Public drinking of alcohol is also a rarity in Israel, or at least was so until fairly recently. Speaking Russian loudly, drinking alcohol in public, and especially disrespecting the eve of Sabbath all paint the Russians as foreign and alien to the Israeli space. Avi’s fight against them and their defeat are readily perceived, therefore, as a triumph not necessarily of a religious agenda but of a civic Israeli one. Despite being religious, Avi is fully integrated into the community and his religiosity is not regarded as an obstacle to social integration as it is often the case with the Orthodox in Israel, as can be seen in such recent films as Ushpizing (dir. Gidi Dar, 2004) and Fill the Void (dir. Rama Burstein, 2012), to name a few recent ones. If anything, and especially after the terrific violence he displays in the opening scene, religiosity is seen as calming and therapeutic. His religious schooling provides a positive framework that curbs his violent tendencies and harnesses his negative energy. Better a Hasid, as it were, than a gangster. Moreover, Avi’s Hasidic affiliation also gives him a leadership role. Since the working-

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class Mizrahi community he lives in is already traditional, studying Torah elevates him and adds a value to him that he formerly lacked. Toughened and sexualized by a Mizrahi masculinity, and ennobled by the study of Torah, Avi is not simply a leader but also a Jewish leader. This is another reason why it is not only his love for his girl Miri that tames the shrewish Avi but religion as well. The local neighborhood beauty would probably not have considered the menacing gangster as a lover had his religious observance not evoked in her a gentle nostalgia for her own traditional upbringing, as she confesses to him one night when the two sit and coo lovingly on a park bench. So in spite of her unpleasant encounter with him at the beginning of the film, when he exhorts her to dress more modestly, religion is also what brings them together. At the end Miri too becomes enthralled by religion, and she finds a respite from her troubled life in its comforting bosom. Finally, then, the Hasidic or naïve narrative elements in God’s Neighbors become a story for and of the nation at large, not just a simple tale about the faith of one righteous couple in a small and exotic religious community. The trials Avi is put to, his clash with the Arabs, and his happy union with Miri at the end make up the naïve elements of the tale as well as the modern love story. Generally speaking, such narrative features are unusual for Israeli cinema, where most ethno-national clashes end badly, and where happy endings are an even greater rarity. God’s Neighbors flouts this pattern and breaks it, and in so doing proposes a different national pattern, one in which Jewish religious time and Jewish religious practices figure more prominently as determining factors than political reality. These new parameters are elegantly suggested in the film, whose closure neatly complements its opening. Whereas the film opens with the ritual of Kiddush, the sanctification of the wine that ushers in the Sabbath, it ends with the ritual of Havdala, which announces the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of the new work week. The opening scene “sanctified” Avi and anointed him as a kind of local Jeanne d’Arc, who goes out to fight for god and country. The concluding scene shows that he has matured and learned to differentiate – to literally make a havdala, which means separation in Hebrew. Both scenes take place around the Sabbath table. In the opening scene, Avi and his father dine alone. In the concluding scene, Miri has joined them as Avi’s bride-to-be. This neat and happy ending is a reward for Avi’s good behavior and a fulfillment of his quest for meaning and purpose. That it is the Jewish religion and not the Israeli state that provides both is certainly ironic. And whether it is a wish or a warning remains an open question until the very end.

Ulrike Brunotte

“All Jews are womanly, but no women are Jews.” The “Femininity” Game of Deception: Female Jew, femme fatale Orientale, and belle Juive1 This chapter surveys how the focus on gender and sexuality changed the field of Jewish cultural studies in the late 1990s and investigates the role played by the historical and postcolonial readings of Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexuality. It asks to what extent these epistemological intentions offered an opportunity that “grants theorizations about Jewishness a place in ongoing discussions about race, ethnicity, nationness, diaspora, memory, religion, gender and sexuality.”2 The chapter starts by examining the surprising impact of androcentrism3 in these earlier approaches and points out the emphasis on “female” Jewish masculinity, especially the overdetermined significance that femininity – “effemminization” (Boyarin) – is given in antisemitic and inner-Jewish identity discourses. Following Ann Pellegrini the text criticizes the absence of the Jewish “woman” from the initial scholarly discussions, and puts an analytic focus on interarticulations of race and gender in the construction of the Jewish female body. Taking up the role of “orientalization” in European constructions of an “Orient Within,”4 and based on the figure of the orientalized Jewish princess Salome around 1900, the second part concentrates on the “beautiful Jewess” as a central trope for the discourse of the Jewess as a cultural figure of the Third.5 “In the collapse of Jewish masculinity into an abject femininity, the Jewish female seems to disappear.”6 Pellegrini directs this question clearly also to her male colleagues, who largely focused on the “Jewish man” when speaking of the cultural production of Jewishness. In its 1 Translated by Allison Brown. The title quote is from Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 118; see also Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 28 which includes portions of the article “Whiteface Performances,” but in revised and expanded form. 2 Bunzl, “Jews, Queers, and Other Symptoms,” 2000, 323. 3 Boyarin/Itzkovitz/Pellegrini (eds.), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 2003, p. 3. 4 Rohde investigates the pre-Holocaust connection between Orientalism and (German) antisemitism in “Der Innere Orient,” 2005. 5 “Figures of the Third” are relevant in modern epistemologies and, as the concepts of hybridity and “third space,” mark liminal categories and states, see Eßlinger/Schlechtriemen/Schweitzer/ Zons (eds.), Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma, 2010. 6 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 109, see also Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 18.

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concluding sections the chapter returns to the great significance of Freud’s psychoanalysis for the early gender/sexuality discussion in Jewish cultural studies.

Jewish Cultural Studies, Feminism, and Queer Theory In Miriam Peskowitz’s and Laura Levitt’s 1997 anthology with the provocative title Judaism since Gender, feminist authors had already suggested a shift in emphasis in Jewish studies from “women” to “gender.” The authors of the articles in the book, including Susan Shapiro and Susannah Heschel, argued the case using a more or less constructionist approach in considering Jewish religious and cultural history with respect to gender. This meant using gender as a “useful category of historical analysis”7 and “the primary way of signifying relationships of power,”8 and thus understanding it as a basic category of knowledge. In a way the issue of Jewish masculinity occasionally arose out of historical antisemitism around the end of the nineteenth century, when “non-Jewish commentators began to express serious concern about inappropriate gender expressions among Jewish men and women, and the trope of the effeminate Jewish man became the target of pervasive and vicious anti-Semitic critique.”9 The surprising impact of androcentrism10 in the connection drawn in the 1990s between Jewish studies and gender and queer studies and the emphasis on antisemitic constructions of “soft” Jewish masculinity, homosexuality, and homophobia in the initial discussions were partially caused by the historical discourse itself. There scholars were interested “in exploring the complex of social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerge as traces of each other.”11 Jewish studies and queer studies were first brought together in the 1997 anthology Jews and Other Differences. Following Jay Geller and Sander Gilman, here the editors Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin postulated an entangled history of modern constructions of gender/sexuality and antisemitism. In addition to taking up the approaches to the history of sexualities of Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Marjorie Garber, they also particularly address the

7 Scott, “Gender,” 1986. 8 Ibid., 1067. 9 Baader/Gillerman/Lerner (eds.), Jewish Masculinities, 2012, p. 2. 10 Boyarin/Itzkovitz/Pellegrini (eds.), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 2003, p. 3. 11 Ibid., p. 1.



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pioneering studies of George Mosse on nationalism, gender, sexuality, and antisemitism.12 In Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997), Daniel Boyarin claimed that the antisemitic stereotype of the “feminized Jewish male” is also a product of the hegemonic concept of Western European heterosexuality. Especially this book “helped open up such new interpretive possibilities with [Boyarin’s] provocative and controversial claim that Jewish culture has fostered a distinct Jewish gender order and a unique Jewish mode of masculinity that resonated from ancient times into the twentieth century.”13 He puts Jewish constructions of “female masculinity” in a postcolonial perspective, beginning with the Roman Empire. Moreover, he links the rhetorical and theoretical constructions of the “homosexual” to the development of modern sexuality. Boyarin’s point of reference is the modern construction of heterosexuality, which he asserts is homophobic at its roots, and which since its emergence in the nineteenth century no longer allows any latitude or ambivalence whatsoever: “‘Heterosexuality,’ as its tenets have been ventriloquized by David Halperin, involves the strange idea that a ‘normal’ man will never feel desire for another man.”14 Historian Wolfgang Schmale, who, like Boyarin, refers to Foucault’s concept of a regime (dispositif) of sexuality in his book Geschichte der Männlichkeit in Europa (1450–2000) (History of Masculinity in Europe, 1450–2000), shifts “the norming of the man as heterosexual,” which he says necessarily implies homophobia, all the way back to the eighteenth century.15 If the Jewish man was then characterized as “female” due to his having been circumcised, as occurred in the antisemitic discourse of the late nineteenth century,16 then he was also placed within proximity of a pathologized homosexuality, even though at the same time he was marked as fixated on family: “Still, Jews were not thought to endanger society by their supposed homosexuality but rather by their evil heterosexual drives. […] But while family life was intact among the Jews themselves, it was, so racists asserted, directed against the family life of

12 Geller, “The Unmanning of the Wandering Jew,” 1992; Geller, “A Paleontological View,” 1993; Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 1991; Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1993; Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 1978; Sedgwick, Between Men, 1985; Garber, Vested Interests, 1992; Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1985; Mosse, The Image of Man, 1996. 13 Baader/Gillerman/Lerner (eds.), Jewish Masculinities, 2012, p. 3. 14 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 212. See Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” 1986, 44. 15 Schmale, Geschichte der Männlichkeit, 2003, p. 207. 16 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1993; Geller, “A Paleontological View,” 1993; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997.

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others.”17 As Susannah Heschel has emphasized, it was precisely the fluctuation in antisemitic discourse that made the Jewish man appear “both as a man in the most extreme sense, a sex-obsessed predator […], as well as an abnormal man, one who is effeminate and even menstruates.”18 Without referring to early discussions in Wilhelmine sexology, Sander Gilman speaks of a “third sex” 19 with respect to the Jewish man.20 All of these authors, even if they theoretically draw totally different conclusions from this, nevertheless underline the effeminization of Jewish men derived from circumcision as a central aspect of the discourse. Thus Gilman summarizes his comprehensive medical history studies on the syndrome of circumcision in the cultural discourse of the nineteenth century as follows: “The circumcised Jew became the representative of the anxiety-provoking masculine. […] The very body of the (male) Jew became the image of the anxiety generated by the potential sense of the loss of control.”21 This loss of control was also understood in sexual terms and in older colonial discourses had already been projected upon colonized groups such as the autochthonous populations of India, Africa, or the Americas.22 The masculinist imaginary was a target of Daniel Boyarin’s 2003 essay, “Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science.’” He compares constructions of “blackness” and Jewishness and brings together two postcolonial subjects, Freud and Fanon. Jan Nederveen Pieterse had already indicated that the processes of “Othering” did not advance in only one direction, but were instead, in the sense of an entangled history, an interplay of overseas and inner-European colonial discourses: “While ‘others’ mirror Europe’s negative self or split-off shadows, European hierarchies re-emerge with the internal ‘others’reconstructed in the image of the overseas shadow. […] Indeed, virtually all the images and stereotypes projected outside Europe in the age of empire had been used first within Europe.”23 Particularly in view of the long history of Christian anti-Judaism, whose legacy was taken up by antisemitism, the historical chronology of internal and external boundaries must also be read in a reversal of the chronological course of events, as Tudor Parfitt has stated: “From the very beginning of European expan17 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1985, p. 142. 18 Heschel, “Sind Juden Männer?,” 1998, p. 86. 19 The term Drittes Geschlecht (Third Sex) was originally coined in early sexological discourses on “homosexuality” and “inversion” in Wilhelmine Germany by authors such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld. 20 Gilman, Franz Kafka, 1995, pp. 156–157. 21 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1993, p. 9. 22 On this see Schülting, Wilde Frauen, Fremde Welten, 1997; McClintock, Imperial Leather, 1995; Lewis, Gendering Orientalism, 1996; Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, 1998. 23 Nederveen Pietersen, White on Black, 1992, pp. 212, 215.



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sion Judaism was employed in the decipherment of religions, and Jewish ancestry was used as likely explanations for the people Europeans encountered.”24 Susanne Zantop, Susannah Heschel, Jonathan Hess, and Achim Rohde25 – to name only a few scholars – reconstruct the discourse and the “colonial fantasies” around the “Jewish Question” in Germany within a postcolonial theoretical frame, Aamir R. Mufti opens up a European and global perspective.26 By 1900, at a time of highly sexualized antisemitism, the cultural practice of circumcision brought the Jewish population (again) within proximity of the “primitive” peoples overseas. This was due especially to the new, comparative studies in the fields of ethnography and the sexual sciences, such as those of Wilhelm Wundt and Paolo Mantegazza, who were referred to also by Sigmund Freud.27 Circumcision, that “uncanny” sign on the male genitalia,28 became the medium of othering; “it suggested something perverse.”29 In his later studies on circumcision Geller viewed it as an apparatus (Foucault: dispositif) that determined discourses and practices in European identity- and alterity-formation: “‘Circumcision’ became both an apotropaic monument and a floating signifier that functioned as a dispositive, an apparatus that connected biblical citations, stories, images, phantasies, laws, kosher slaughterers […], ethnographic studies, medical diagnoses, and ritual practices […] in order to produce knowledge about and authorize the identity of Judentum – and of the uncircumcised.”30 Precisely the relative, at least public, invisibility of circumcision certainly generated at the same time an antisemitic politics of visibility, which focused on the body – especially the nose – of the male Jew: By the end of the nineteenth century the body of the Jew came to be the body of the male Jew, and it was the immutability of this sign of masculine difference that was inscribed on

24 Parfitt, “The Use of the Jews in Colonial Discourse,” 2005, p. 53. For the case study of the Puritans’ colonial fantasies of the “Ten Lost Tribes,” see Brunotte, “Die Lost Ten Tribes in Amerika,” 2009. Susannah Heschel saw the Jews, especially in the German context, figuring as a kind of “internal colony” in nineteenth-century discourse; see Heschel, “Jewish Studies as Counterhistory,” 1998, p. 101. 25 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1997; Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999; Hess, German Jews and the Claims of Modernity, 2002; Rohde, “Der innere Orient,” 2005; Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 2007. 26 Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 2007. 27 “Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1901), one of the standard “ethnological” sources in the late nineteenth century for the nature of human sexuality, decried the “mutilation of the genitals” and “savage tribes,” including the Jews, see Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1993, p. 57. 28 See Geller, “A Paleontological View,” 1993, 54. 29 Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body, 2007, p. 26. 30 Ibid., p. 11.

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the psyche of the Jew. The fantasy of the difference of the male genitalia was displaced upward – onto the visible parts of the body, onto the face and the hands where it marked the skin with its blackness.31

Along with the aspect of cultural masculinity, to be sure the sociability of the (male) Jew also became a problem. As analogous to the woman, as Gilman stresses, or coded as “queer female,” as put by Boyarin and Geller, the Jewish man moved culturally into the realm of the homosexual, who was defined as deviant.32 As an ultimately indefinable gender that oscillated between an abject, male, or oversexed femininity and a homosexualized or “less-than-virile” masculinity,33 Jews challenged the bourgeois gender order as a whole. In contrast to this antisemitic effeminization of the Jewish man, Talmud expert Daniel Boyarin claims and reconstructs a centuries-old “positive sense of self-femminization within [mostly premodern Eastern] rabbinic representations.”34 Boyarin’s idiosyncratic spelling (double m) of “effemminization” is significant. He does not intend to ascribe “some form of actual or essential femininity to certain behaviors or practices [… nor] to reify or celebrate the ‘feminine’ but to dislodge the term.”35 He concentrates his argumentation on the analysis of the gender/sex system of traditional Ashkenazic culture of premodern Eastern Europe. Thus he sees two different models of masculinity that opposed each other in European civilization since the Roman Empire and the Jewish Diaspora: on the one hand, the Romancoded “heroic” model with its emphasis on “male” values such as honor, valor, a readiness for war, and physical fitness; and on the other hand the traditionally “unheroic” “Ashkenazic model of a gentle, nurturing masculinity, exemplified in the eroticized figuration of the Yeshiva-Bokhur, the pale and meek student of the Talmud.”36 This Jewish-feminine model of masculinity, in Boyarin’s view, was conceivable in the Christian-influenced culture only for the career of a monk, but not that of a sexually active father of a family, as it is in Judaism. However, with the parallel development of the modern, antisemitic stereotype of the “female Jew” and that of the “homosexual” as “deviant” and “degenerate,” these discourses ultimately merged at the fin de siècle and produced, according to Boyarin’s radical thesis, “a perfect and synergistic match between homophobia and

31 Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender, 1993, p. 21. 32 See Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1985, pp. 133–152. 33 Ibid., p. 8. 34 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 143. 35 Ibid., p. 4. 36 Bunzl, “Jews, Queers, and Other Symptoms,” 2000, 328.



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antisemitism.”37 Based on this cultural analysis, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin proposed in the introduction to Jews and Other Differences a methodological renewal of Jewish cultural studies by appropriating methods and questions of gender, queer, and postcolonial studies. In this they ascribe key significance to the history of sexuality, in particular the scientific “invention” of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century: “Basic theoretical questions about the history of sexuality will be central to any endeavor in Jewish cultural history. A question as central to contemporary cultural studies most broadly conceived as whether ‘homosexuality’ has always existed or is a specific historical cultural phenomenon will take its place as a central issue for Jewish cultural studies as well.”38 As Geller, Boyarin, Gilman, and Ann Pellegrini have demonstrated in their works in very different ways, in the history of antisemitism, racial difference has always been entangled with sexual difference. “For Jewish male bodies, marked for an antisemitic imaginary by overlapping layers of blackness, effeminacy, and queerness, the sexualization of ‘race’ and the racialization of ‘sex’ are constitutive features.”39 As Matti Bunzl has emphasized, these early studies “have a significant blind spot, which suggests the need for further work at the intersection of Jewish and queer studies. […] While the interpretive move uncovers the queer valence of modern Jewish identities […] Boyarin never addresses possible Jewish inflections in the constitution of homosexuality.”40 In the 2003 anthology Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, Daniel Boyarin, Pellegrini, and Daniel Itzkovitz react to Bunzl’s intervention and exemplify the queer studies and postcolonial approach to Jewish studies through historical case studies that follow the queerJew connections in literary examples, in the history of homosexuality, and in new readings of Freud’s theory of sexuality. The both antisemitic and homophobic ascriptions, however, were internalized also by Jewish authors and sometimes, as often demonstrated41 by Otto Weininger, for example, even intensified.42 In his 1903 study Sex and Character, 37 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 209. Boyarin’s thesis is indeed radical. Certainly it risks losing sight of the complexity of social discourses on homosexuality around 1900, as there was an influential group of activists and theorists, such as Gustav Jäger, Benedikt Friedländer, and Hans Blüher, for whom a “male eros” and “heroic invert” understood as “Aryan” was defined in opposition to the “effeminate” Jewish homosexual as hypermasculine. See Brunotte, Zwischen Eros und Krieg, 2004 and Brunotte, “Masculinities as Battleground,” 2010. 38 Boyarin/Boyarin, “Introduction/So What’s New?,” 1997, p. x. 39 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 108; see also Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 17 and Bruns, Bilder der eigenen Geschichte im Spiegel des kolonialen ‘Anderen,’ 2009. 40 Bunzl, “Jews, Queers, and Other Symptoms,” 2000, 337. 41 See Arens, “Characterology,” 1995. 42 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1993; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997.

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which rapidly became a popular science best-seller, the homophobic, antisemitic, and misogynous trends in Vienna’s fin de siècle were linked in a symptomatic as well as diagnostic way. For Weininger, who converted to Protestantism, it was certainly threatening that “Man has everything within him. [...] He can reach the greatest heights or degenerate most profoundly, he can become an animal, a plant, he can even become a woman, and that is why there are female, effeminate men.”43 He saw the same possibility of adaptation with regard to being Jewish. Judaism, for him, was neither a “race” nor a “people,” but a psychological opportunity for every individual: “Judaism must be regarded as a cast of mind, a psychic constitution which is a possibility for all human beings and which has only found its most magnificent realization in historical Judaism.”44 Just as the virile man stands opposite the effeminate one, the modern “Aryan man” opposes the Jew, according to Weininger, as a psychological possibility of his self. The tertium comparationis of the Jew and the homosexual, however, is their “femininity.” In the introduction to chapter 13, “Judaism,” Weininger ties the Jews even more to “femininity”: “If one thinks about Woman and the Jew one will always be surprised to realize the extent to which Judaism in particular seems to be steeped in femininity, the nature of which I have so far only tried to explore in contrast to masculinity as a whole without regard to any differences within it.”45 At the end of his book Weininger views the woman and the Jew, both of which he says have “no personality”46 or “intelligible self,”47 as coming together in secular, liberal modernity: “The spirit of modernity is Jewish.[…] Our age is not only the most Jewish, but also the most effeminate of all ages.”48 It is not so much Weininger’s mental disposition – he committed suicide shortly after his book was published – that makes his work so fascinating, but the fact that Sex and Character became so popular and consolidated the “spirit” of his times. This overdetermined mixture of homophobia, antisemitism, and misogyny was a distilled concentration of “the ordinary thought of his time and place.”49

43 Weininger, Sex and Character, 2005, p. 162. 44 Ibid., p. 274; here and in the following, the emphasis is in the original. 45 Ibid., p. 276. 46 Ibid., p. 278. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 299. 49 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 237. See also Arens, “Characterology,” 1995.



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Between the Poles of Oriental Femininity and Jewishness: the “Beautiful Jewess” In view of the crucial role played by the effeminization of the Jewish man in antisemitic discourse, according to Pellegrini, the difference of the Jewish woman also is made up of external ascriptions in which gender, sexualization, religion, and race played a role. Yet as Barbara Hahn has argued on the basis of Bernard Picart’s Céremonies et costumes religieuses (1727–1743), Jewish women were seldom as clearly marked as Jewish men were.50 Along with the emancipation of the Jews – yet in the early nineteenth century at the latest – however, the Jewish woman, as the “beautiful Jewess,” became a literary, artistic, and theatrical figure in Europe: “This figure, which was born in the [nineteenth] century, forcefully expanded into the European imaginaries [Castordiadis],”51 wrote Éric Fournier, also explaining the seismographic role of this cultural invention: “More than other representations of the Jewish world, this ambivalent figure of the Other did in fact appear with an intensified plasticity, which was capable of expressing, in a frenetic manner, the entire range of judgments and opinions about Judaism, from philo-Semitism to antisemitism.”52 As Florian Krobb has shown, in the first and thus far only German-language book on the “beautiful Jewess,” the Jewish woman in (German-language) literature before the fin de siècle embodied not so much a negative difference, but functioned instead as an ambivalent mediating figure.53 In the stereotypical, repeated master narrative of the “beautiful Jewess,” as the daughter of an often antisemitically exaggerated father (a mother is rarely present), she stood between the Jewish and Christian worlds. As an object of Christian male desire, as a lover, or even as a later wife of a Christian man, the completely assimilated Jewish woman ultimately also converts to Christianity.54 This litmus test between the cultures and religions, however, often ended for the “beautiful Jewess” with her sacrificing her own identity, self-denial, or even with her death. This has been presented in different ways, but always connected with serious consequences, by Sir Walter Scott 50 Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena, 2005, p. 33. 51 Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011, p. 7. 52 Ibid., p. 9. 53 See Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993; see also Ludewig, “Schönste Heidin, süßeste Jüdin!,” 2008; and Frübis, “Die ‘Schöne Jüdin,’” 1997. 54 This master narrative of the “beautiful Jewess,” that is reproduced today regarding Muslim women, depicts some similarities to the oft-cited sentence by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the imperial narrative of salvation (in Spivak with reference to the Hindu practice of suttee): “White men are saving brown women from brown men,” in Spivak, “Can the Subaltern speak?,” 1988, p. 297.

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in Ivanhoe in 1820, Eugène Scribe in his libretto to Fromental Halévy’s opera, La Juive (The Jewess) in 1835, and Franz Grillparzer in his play, Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo) of 1872. Florian Krobb considers the literary motif of the “beautiful Jewess” to be a “pan-European phenomenon,” in which the characterization does not always have clear-cut distinctions between “the Jewish and the feminine.”55 At the same time the fascinating ambivalence of the figure raises the question as to precisely how her Jewishness and her femininity work together in each case. Even for Otto Weininger, the Jewish woman personified the essence of “femininity” or the “eternally female.” In Sex and Character he wrote that “No woman in the world represents the idea of Woman as perfectly as the Jewess [...]. But the Jewess can seem to represent more fully both poles of femininity, as a housemother with many children and as a lustful odalisque, as Cypris and as Cybele.”56 To describe the double difference of the imaginary Jewess, a tertium comparationis of her femininity and her Jewishness has to be found. Her orientalization served this purpose.57 The physical beauty and sensuality of the Jewish woman, and sometimes even her clothing, were almost always described using orientalizing tropes and characteristics. Fournier reconstructed this process as it pertains to France: “The beautiful Jewess inscribes herself forcefully into the invention of the orient by the fascinated scholars, both as a discursive matrix and through a feeling of foreignness. […] In the middle of this long list of exotic beauties – the Turkish, Egyptian, Greek, Moorish, Armenian, Abyssinian, Coptic – the Jewess appears as the most troubling of them all.”58 As Andrea Polaschegg demonstrated in her comprehensive, pioneering work on German orientalism – which offers a critique of Edward Said and at the same time exceeds Said’s scope – also in German oriental studies and aesthetics of the orient, this cultural field had already been tapped starting in the late eighteenth century as a referential reservoir for representations of biblical and contemporary Judaism. The appropriation of orientalizing traits followed traditional images and narratives, but the process developed a complex dynamic of its own, “as these […] acts of reference always produce a surplus of meaning.”59 In view of the fact that in the eighteenth century the Hebrew Bible was already recognized as a literary text and had thus undergone a “poetic, historical, and oriental […]

55 Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 192. 56 Weininger, Sex and Character, 2005, p. 289. 57 See Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011, pp. 27–29. 58 Ibid., p. 27. 59 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005, p. 284.



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transformation,”60 it is not surprising that it was biblical figures of women and girls that inspired the imaginations of modern authors. Although Krobb does not go into the intertextual and historical phenomenon of the orientalized “beautiful Jewess,” he often cites precisely from relevant passages in novels in which the Jewish woman is introduced via orientalized biblical figures: for example, from a short passage from Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn’s story Maria Regina of 1850, which lacks any explicit mention of the name Judith: “She had that special something, as if she could cut off the head of a Holofernes if need be.”61 In another example, the novel Esthers Ehe (Esther’s Marriage, 1886) by Hermann Heiberg, a number of orientalizations are combined with antisemitic tropes of the “salon Jewess.” When Baroness Christine’s son presents the young Jewish woman Esther as her future daughter-in-law, the Christian mother of noble pride contradicts him with the words: “A Jewess? Her? Oh! […] The black oriental whose great grandfather […] lent gold for a usurer’s interest. […] And the future association with […] smart and hot-blooded women with low décolletés and with all the darkly colored young male disciples of gold […]! [ellipses from Krobb]”62 This even carried over to the likable figure of Lenore in Eugenie Marlitt’s novel Das Heideprinzesschen (The Little Moorland Princess). The story, “with its Jewish title character, with which the best-selling author attempted in Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Arbor) magazine in the jubilee volume of 1871 to offer a liberal appeal for tolerance against the emerging chauvinism,”63 also makes reference in describing the young Jewish woman to the figure of Salome of all things: “Now I know where my little favourite got her oriental face. Yes, yes, it must have been just such a black-haired girl, with feet of quicksilver, who beguiled Herod to give her the head of John the Baptist!”64 In contrast to Judith, whose murder of the tyrant Holofernes was long passed down – after it appeared in the Septuagint and the Protestant Apocrypha – as a heroic, patriotic act of assertiveness and as “a paragon of self-sacrificial martyrdom for a noble cause,”65 Salome was regarded very early on as a canonical figure of anti-Judaism.66 It is known that she was not only a beautiful Jewish princess who was connected to the beheading of John the Baptist, but already as a biblical figure she performed a seductive dance that Oscar Wilde was later to call the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” 60 Ibid., p. 166. 61 Hahn-Hahn, Maria Regina, vol. 1, p. 252, cited in Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 188. 62 Heiberg, cited in Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 189. 63 Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, pp. 192–193. 64 Eugenie Marlitt, cited in ibid., p. 186, translated into English as The Little Moorland Princess, 1898, p. 337. 65 Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 1986, p. 377. 66 See the collection of sources on the reception of Salome, as early as the Church Fathers, in Rohde (ed.), Mythos Salome, 2000; see also Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 2013.

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All in all, the modern “beautiful Jewesses” appeared often enough in European literature as singers, actresses, dancers, or even as prostitutes67 and courtesans, as in Balzac’s novels,68 or were associated with masquerade balls, parties, or dance events.69 The imaginary proximity to seduction, sexuality, theater, and dance, as well as to masquerade and costumes, certainly had just as much to do with their femininity – situated outside of bourgeois gender roles – as with their Jewishness.70 At the same time, Polaschegg infers from the increased presence of these characters on the stages of European theaters and opera houses that “the prominence of said oriental figure device on the opera stages does in fact suggest a specific affinity of this west-eastern subject for dramatic or even music-theatrical art forms and aesthetics.”71 However, in the nineteenth century Jewish women played a pan-European role not only as fictive actresses, dancers, or singers, but also as real ones. With reference to highly visible Jewish actresses such as Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Ann Pellegrini reiterates her question about the cultural space occupied by Jewish women in the nineteenth century. “The French stage was dominated and dazzled by Rachel in the first half of the nineteenth century and then, in the latter half […] by Sarah Bernhardt.[…] Jewishness – as performatively constituted and publicly performed – clearly needs to be thought through the female Jewish body, no less than through the male.”72 Like no other actress of her time, Sarah Bernhardt, who had in fact been baptized and was raised in a convent, was made into the epitome of the “beautiful Jewess,” and the embodiment of a modern Salome. The fantasized links between Sarah Bernhardt and Salome were so great that “Oscar Wilde wrote his Salome for her.”73

67 On the connections between Jews and prostitutes and human trafficking, see also Geller, The Other Jewish Question, 2011, pp. 109–112. 68 See Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011, p. 33: “13% of Balzac’s thirty demimonde figures are Jews: The author invented a main character of the genre: the courtisan.” 69 See ibid., pp. 33–35. 70 With reference to Klaus Hödl, Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz points to the often antisemitic subtext of these literary figures, which combined Judaism, prostitution, and trafficking in young women: “The problems of ‘Jewish prostitution’ were exploited in the tabloids of the late nineteenth century […] and pseudoscientific studies reported statistics on the ‘high’ proportion of Jewish women and girls involved in prostitution.” Kohlbauer-Fritz, “‘La belle juive’ und die ‘schöne Schickse,’” 1998, p. 109. See also Hödl, Die Pathologisierung des jüdischen Körpers, 1997. 71 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005, p. 173n110. 72 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 110; see also Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 19. 73 Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011, p. 249.



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Salome: femme fatale Orientale or belle Juive?* In his 1993 essay, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” which Ann Pellegrini also refers to, Sander Gilman examines the discursive production of the Jewish woman around 1900, asking “under what circumstances does her ‘Jewishness’ and under what circumstances does her ‘femininity’ become her defining moment?”74 However, because in the antisemitic discourse of the time the Jewish man is coded as “female,” Gilman begins his study with a vexatious paradox: “When Jewish women are represented in the culture of the turn of the century, the qualities ascribed to the Jew and to the woman seem to exist simultaneously and yet seem mutually exclusive.[…] When we focus on the one, the other seems to vanish.”75 In order to grasp this simultaneous appearing and vanishing of gender and race regarding the Jewish woman, Gilman broadens the thesis of the deceptive correlation between antisemitic and sexualizing tropes to include the construction of the Jewish woman. According to Gilman it also applies for the Jewish woman that to a certain extent she becomes a container for transgressive images of (“female”) sexuality/identity or those repressed by – and which threaten – the normative ideal: “Central to the arbitrary but powerful differentiation between the stereotype of the Jewish man and that of the Jewish woman is the different meaning of male and female sexuality at the fin de siècle.”76 Just as the Jewish man is seen as effeminized and thus the negative “Other” of the strictly heterosexual-male “Aryan,” Gilman says, the Jewish woman, too, is constructed as the “exclusionary feminine” or the countertype to the normative ideal of the passive and passionless housewife, as was still defended by the Moral Purity Movement around 1900.77 This “exclusionary” feminine contains all figures of female otherness, from the sexually active “phallic” woman and the courtesan to the “intellectual woman” to the bluestocking.78 Sometimes, according to Gilman, the “beautiful Jewess” disappears entirely behind and in the stereotype of the femme * See Ulrike Brunotte, Kocku von Stuckrad, “Unveiling the Orientalized Body of Knowledge: Gender, Anti-Semitisms, and (Self) orientalization in Dutch and European Identity Discourses,” NWO Research application 2012. 74 Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” 1993, p. 197. 75 Ibid, p. 195. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid, p.  197. John Fout has shown how around 1900 the Christian Values or Moral Purity Movement fought to defend this bourgeois gender order; see Fout, “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany,” 1992. 78 Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” 1993, p. 196. See also Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 355.

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fatale, and sometimes her Jewishness is emphasized as a source of seductive and destructive energy. It is no coincidence that Gilman chooses the figure of Salome, “one of the master narratives of this stereotype at the fin de siècle,” as the object of his study.79 Admittedly, he studies Salome as she is presented by non-Jewish, European – especially German – authors as “the essential ‘woman,’” whose femininity is used to “simultaneously evoke […] the essential ‘Jew.’”80 Until today, as Shelley Salamensky states, a “near complete absence of scholarship on Wilde visà-vis the Jew” creates difficulties, because “Wilde’s conflicted uses of the figure of the Jew are key to understanding central issues not only in Salomé.”81 What Gilman does not examine, however, is the complex task that the wide spectrum of orientalizations of Salome82 assumed in the late nineteenth century in this game of deception between “femininity” and Jewishness. Decisive configurations of the Salome story before and around 1900, which would later influence Oscar Wilde, were linked in France to names such as Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Moreau, and finally Joris-Karl Huysmans. Starting with Flaubert’s story Herodias (1877), continued in Moreau’s paintings Salomé (1871) and L’Apparition (1876), and culminating in Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours (Against Nature), Salome is entirely separated from her (historical) Jewishness. As a dancer just as erotic as deadly, she is instead transformed into the epitome of the “femme fatale Orientale.”83 What began as Flaubert’s attempt to create a Salome, who “is nothing more than a paradox of an eternal femininity,”84 culminated in Huysmans’s fiction of a “superhuman, strange Salome”85 that no longer had any trace of a “beautiful Jewess,” but all the traces of a fascinating, artificially created female evil, as was widespread in the imagery at the fin de siècle.86 To be sure it was Oscar Wilde who first fixed Salome’s gruesomeness in literature; Flaubert had still portrayed her as simply a tool of her mother Herodias.

79 Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” 1993, p. 196. 80 Ibid. 81 Salamensky, “Oscar Wilde’s ‘Jewish Problem,’” 2012, p. 215. 82 This section of the chapter is based on my in-depth research on Wilde’s figure of Salome and the Salomania around 1900 in Europe; see Brunotte, “Unveiling Salome 1900,” 2012 and Dämonen des Wissens, 2013. 83 Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011, p. 197. 84 Ibid., p. 199. 85 Huysmans, Against Nature, 1998, p. 46, cited in Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011, p. 200. 86 See Praz, Liebe, Tod und Teufel, 1970.



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Oscar Wilde’s and Maud Allan’s Salome as a Figure of the Third87 It all began in 1891 with the play published in French by Oscar Wilde, in which a new figure of Salome took the stage. The author presented her for the first time as a desiring woman and as the independent choreographer of her legendary “dance.” When the rehearsals for the play were already well underway in 1892 with Sarah Bernhardt – Wilde’s favorite Salome – it was banned for all British stages by the Lord Chamberlain, the chief censor, with the justification that in it biblical characters were acting within a “secular” scene. Four years later the play celebrated its premiere in Paris. Oscar Wilde was unfortunately unable to attend the performance, as he was at the time serving a two-year prison sentence for his homosexuality. In 1901, a year after Wilde’s death, the play premiered in Berlin. Nevertheless it was not until Richard Strauss’s operatic version of the material and the premier of his Salome in Dresden in 1905 that Salome began her triumphal march, continuing to the present day, on opera stages around the world. Even before Salome’s dance was in fact presented as a dance on opera stages, the “Dance of the Seven Veils” had developed a life of its own. Since 1907 the Canadian “barefoot” dancer Maud Allan had been performing her own Salome choreography with growing success in London music halls, bringing the “Salomania” of the times to a pinnacle. By combining oriental fantasies and Greek ritual figures with gymnastic and dance elements from the Life Reform Movement, the dancer opened up for many women “a set of codes for female bodily expression that disrupted the Victorian conventional dichotomies of female virtue and female vice and pushed beyond such dualisms. Allan used the ‘orient’ as a register for female sensual expression.”88 This controversial dance performance was scandalous not only because a “white” woman was adopting supposedly oriental forms of bodily expression, but in particular because Allan’s Salome did not simply dance around the head of John the Baptist as her “reward,” but with the severed head of the saint. Shortly after Allan had taken on the role of Salome in 1916 in a private staging of Wilde’s banned play, Noel Pemberton Billing, an advocate of the right-wing Movement for Purity in Public Life, accused her in his paper The Vigilante, under 87 The figure of the Third refers historically to the concept of the “third sex,” as used in Germanlanguage sexology and by sexual activists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld. However, it also refers to the generally queer and transgressive potential of the figure of Salome around 1900. On this see Garber, Vested Interests, 1992; Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity, 2011; Eßlinger et al. (eds.), Die Figur des Dritten, 2010. 88 Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome,’” 2003, 6.

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the headline “The Cult of the Clitoris,” of “illicit sex” and “political intrigue.”89 Allan filed libel charges against Pemberton Billing. Once she lost the case, her career also came to an end. Not only Maud Allan, but also Oscar Wilde’s Salome was cross-examined during the trial. Passages from the play were read aloud and doctor’s expert reports drew attention to the “perversions” it contained. At the trial, which in 1918 held all of London in suspense, it proved to contribute to Allan’s undoing that she was familiar with the word “clitoris,” as her denouncer Pemberton Billing claimed that “the word clitoris is only known to medical experts or to the initiated,”90 that is, to such women who had already been corrupted by immoral influences of obvious origins. The trial was generally an expression of a moral backlash that had been preceded by an increasing sexualization of the Salome figure. The focus on the dance of the veils became all the more obsessive, and the dance itself was described all the more loosely and lasciviously, the more decidedly the sexualizing critiques and interpretations attempted to define Salome as an evil femme fatale. Furthermore, the unveiling dance and the contemporary notion of the ability to expose (unveil) the last remaining secret of female sexuality91 corresponded in many ways around 1900 with the fascinating pathology of hysteria. The figure of Salome, however, was also connected with homosexuality, especially as a result of the humiliating trial against Oscar Wilde in 1895. One can only speculate how lasting this scandal – which long made homosexuality an object of public debate – also shook both the heteronormative façade and the tabooed homophile undercurrent of the colonial empire.92 Authors who saw Wilde’s Salome as his alter ego and her being rejected by the morally pure prophet John the Baptist as Victorian resistance to homosexual desire tended to interpret the material as border-crossing. Thus Elaine Showalter poses the question, “Is the woman behind Salome’s veils the innermost being of the male artist? Is Salome’s love for Jokanaan a veiled homosexual desire for the male body?”93 And Katherine Worth, who has examined the motif of veiling and unveiling in Wilde’s works, concludes that “unveiling was an appropriate image for the activity which Wilde regarded as the artist’s prime duty: self-expression and self-revelation.”94 Other authors, such as Marjorie Garber, view Salome’s gender-border-crossing, queer dance as the actual taboo breach. Not the intensified sensuality, but the “paradox 89 Cited in Cherniavsky, The Salome Dancer, 1991, p. 16. 90 Ibid. 91 See Sanyal, Vulva, 2009. 92 See Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, 2003, p. 6. 93 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 1990, p. 151. 94 Worth, Oscar Wilde, 1983, pp. 66–67.



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of gender identification, the disruptive element that intervenes, transvestism as a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture. That is the taboo against which occidental eyes are veiled.”95 Still, the 1923 American film, Salomé, which was co-directed by and starred the bisexual Jewish actress Alla Nazimova, was rumored to have featured an all-gay cast. For Wilde, a former Oxford student of ancient philology, who was greatly influenced by Walter Pater, the influential art critic and a source of inspiration for aestheticism, the play was a tragedy, and Salome a heroine to be taken seriously, with whom he sympathized. The claim that he himself once donned the costume of Salome, however, as Garber also supported based on a photograph published in Richard Ellmann’s 1987 biography of Wilde, has meanwhile been refuted.96 As can only be sketched here briefly, the discursive nodal points surrounding Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Maud Allan’s performance around 1900 include many themes that also belonged to cultural antisemitism, but there were no direct links between them. A lone exception to this was a diatribe at the end of Allan’s trial: A particularly phobic line of argumentation by Pemberton Billing culminated in his blatantly antisemitic description of Allan as a spy and aligned with “‘GermanJewish’ interests who promoted Salome productions and who were protected by the present government.”97 As Bram Dijkstra emphasized in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, his comprehensive, comparative study of literary and visual interpretations, the Salome figure underwent a transformation around 1900. Her murderous fascination was increasingly tied to her virginity. At the same time the “virgin dancer,” according to Dijkstra, epitomized more and more the “perversity of women: their eternal circularity and their ability to destroy the male’s soul even while they remained nominally chaste in body.”98 In Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1864 poem “Hérodiade,” Salome “murmurs contentedly as she gazes 95 Garber, Vested Interests, 1992, p. 342. Garber certainly based her interpretation of the story of Salome on Ken Russell’s eccentric filming of the Wilde play (Salome’s Last Dance, USA/GB 1988), which doubles Salome at the precise moment of her unveiling, and in a flash lets both a naked male and a female body appear. 96 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 1987; Garber, Vested Interests, 1992. Helen Davies, “The Trouble with Gender in Salome,” 2011, p. 55, offers evidence of the true identity of Salome in the photograph as follows: “In a letter to the London Review of Books in February 1992, John Stokes queries the picture’s authenticity and in an article published in the Times Literary Supplement on 22 July 1994, Merlin Holland and Horst Schroeder finally confirmed that the photograph was actually of the Hungarian opera singer, Alice Guszalewicz, taken during the 1907 Leipzig run of Strauss’ Salome.” 97 Pemberton Billing, as cited in Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome,’” 2003, p.  35; see also Walkowitz, Nights Out, 2012, p. 89. 98 Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 1986, p. 384.

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fixedly at herself in the mirror: ‘The horror of my virginity/Delights me […].’”99 Dijkstra also mentions examples of French portrayals of Salome as a Jewish woman, although verification of this in the sources is relatively meager. Except for an unknown author named Charles Besnard, who published a poem “The Jewess Salome” in a Parisian magazine in 1897, Dijkstra refers only to an anonymously written 1917 work entitled Famous Pictures Reproduced from Renowned Paintings by the World’s Greatest Artists. Therein, according to Dijkstra, the author emphasized while commenting on a Salome painting by Jules Lefebvres, “that the master had succeeded in portraying in his painting of the daughter of Herodias, ‘an essentially Semitic type of the antique period, with the sensuous and soulless beauty of the tigress rather than the woman.’”100 As evidence of pronounced antisemitic depictions of Salome, he offers only Max Slevogt’s 1895 painting, Salome’s Dance.101 However, in the painting it is not Salome but only the men gazing at her dancing who are portrayed in a racist manner as Jewish. Regarding the French reception of the subject matter in the early twentieth century, Éric Fournier made a significant observation. He wrote that at the time the figure of Judith, who beheads Holofernes, and that of Salome, who demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward for her dance, merge into a single monstrous figure: that of an actively murderous seductress. According to Fournier her Jewishness is “so evident that there is no need to mention it explicitly.”102 Precisely because their Jewishness is integrated into the dangerous, transgressive, virginally “phallic femininity” of Judith and Salome to such a degree that it is (un) recognizable, Fournier asserts, they are “the most horrifying ‘beautiful Jewesses’ possible.”103 Analyzing the German commentaries to Strauss’s opera Salome, Gilman comes to similar conclusions to those of Fournier. Even in extremely antisemitic interpretations, such as the one by Hans F. K. Günther in Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes,104 in which the Jewish manner of speaking (“mauscheln,” that is, Yiddish, or German with Yiddish intonation and vocabulary) is described based on the five Jews who appear in the opera as the “special nature of the Jew’s body,” Gilman says that “only the males, the five argumentative Jews and King Herod, [are] seen to be the racial representatives of the world of the Jews in Richard Strauss’s opera.”105 There must be something very special about their 99 Ibid., p. 385. 100 Ibid., p. 387. 101 See ibid., pp. 386–388. 102 Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011, p. 210. 103 Fournier, La ‘belle’ Juive, 2011. 104 Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” 1993, p. 210; Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes, 1930. 105 Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” 1993, p. 198.



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sexuality that lets the Jewishness of Salome and Judith disappear behind their “femininity.”

The Psychoanalytical Theory of Femininity and the Omission of the “Jewish female” from Early Scholarly Discourse In the concluding sections we return to the great significance of Freud’s psychoanalysis for the early gender/sexuality discussion in Jewish studies. Geller, Boyarin, and Gilman examine Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexuality, also as an expression of “Freud’s Jewish Question.”106 This chapter aims to explore the theoretical absence of the “Jewish female” in these approaches by referring to the traces of repression of the Jewish woman in Sigmund Freud’s theory of femininity. As Ann Pellegrini states: “In the collapse of Jewish masculinity into an abject femininity, the Jewish female seems to disappear.”107 Pellegrini directs this question clearly to her male colleagues, who largely focused on the “Jewish man” when speaking of the cultural production of Jewishness.108 In very different ways, Daniel Boyarin, Geller, and Gilman analyze Freud’s theory of “normal” – that is, “heterosexual” – masculinity as the main example of the effect of antisemitic effeminization at the fin de siècle. Whereas Gilman interprets Freud’s concept of masculinity as the product of a universalizing shift and Boyarin sees it as a homophobic reaction, Geller makes out a defensive and exaggerated action in Freud’s “ideal of the fighting Jew – of masculine Judaism.”109 For all three, psychoanalysis is also the struggle of an assimilated Jew for “heroic” – that is, Gentile – masculinity. Placing psychoanalysis historically within the context of the antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny that prevailed at the time does not amount for these authors to a biographical reduction; instead, to use Daniel Boyarin’s words, this is a matter of

106 Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body, 2007, p. 17. 107 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p.  109; see Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 18. See also Susannah Heschel’s question: “What space is attributed to Jewish women in a legal and theological system that equates the Jew with the man?” In Heschel, “Sind Juden Männer?,” 1998, p. 87. 108 Jay Geller was self-critical in referring to this gender blindness within Jewish cultural studies when he confirmed that virtually all studies “examining the role of gendered representation and self-representation in German-Jewish cultural history […] focused almost exclusively on men.” Geller, The Other Jewish Question, 2011, pp. 359–360. 109 Geller, “The Queerest Cut of All,” 2008, p. 159.

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putting “psychoanalysis itself on … a Foucauldian couch of cultural poetics and critique.”110 Gilman reconstructs how, in Freud’s theory of sexuality, the antisemitic stereotype that marks the Jewish man as “castrated” and thus “feminine” is transmuted into the characterization of the woman in general. It is no longer the Jewish man, concludes Gilman, who in the psychoanalytical gender theory thus runs the risk due to his “flawed” genitals of being considered an “effeminate Jewish male,”111 as hysterical, or even as “castrated”; instead, now all women are “castrated,” tend toward hysteria, and suffer from penis envy. Gilman explains: “In Freud’s scientific writing this set of images was transferred exclusively to the image of women.”112 In this way, the threatening “racial-physical” difference between the Jewish and the Gentile man is excised and at the same time shifted, according to Gilman. As gender difference it returned in the body of the woman. Geller is correct in rejecting this reading of Freud’s gender theory, as Gilman “has let the indigenous misogynist discourses of Europe off the hook by ‘explaining’ Freud’s often stereotypical and misogynist discourse on women as his defensive displacement of the discourses of racial antisemitism.”113 Geller and Boyarin also assume Freud’s “fight” for “heroic” masculinity; Boyarin says “Freud accepts the characterization of Jews as differently gendered, as indeed female, and tries to overcome this difference.”114 Thus Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex can be reinterpreted, in particular the assumptions based on it, that castration anxiety is the lynchpin of universal “masculine” subjectification and that the woman in her constitution is a deficient being.115 However, when Gilman claims that Freud’s theory of femininity is just a reflection of his defense against the antisemitic stereotype of an effeminate, “castrated” male Jew, that is, a transformation of the difference of race between the Jewish and the Gentile man into a generalized difference of sex, between all men and all women, then he is at the same time implying, according to Pellegrini, that “masculinity has no gender and femininity, no race, [and] he treats race and gender as discrete, rather than mutually informing, structures.”116 With that, in addition to his denial of the real (also for Freud), effective misogyny around 1900, this reveals another blind spot in Gilman’s analysis, so that I would like to cite Pellegrini in asserting that “the Jewish woman cannot appear in Gilman’s analy110 Boyarin, “Freud’s Baby, Fliess’s Maybe,” 1995, 137. 111 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 27. 112 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1993, p. 37. 113 Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body, 2007, p. 19. 114 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 239. 115 See von Schnurbein, “Sander L. Gilman,” 2005. 116 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 118; see also Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 28.



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sis except in drag: as a Jewish man or as a ‘whitened’ and presumptively Gentile woman: All Jews are womanly, but no women are Jews.”117

The Trace of Repression of the Jewish Woman in Freud’s Psychoanalysis My point of departure in the following is the hypothesis that in the development of psychoanalysis the repressed or concealed “Jewish” woman – that is, most of Freud’s female patients and the women in his Eastern European family of origin – can be discovered at the margins of the psychoanalytical theory of femininity itself. According to Freud, in order for the girl to materialize118 into the “normal” specimen of “properly passive femininity”119 with a basically desexualized120 vaginal female sexuality, she has to go through a number of painful processes. His theory that the (not adult) vagina as an erogenous zone remains undiscovered in the so-called phallic stage of infantile sexuality121 can be considered a cornerstone of the Freudian castration model of “femininity.” “Normal” adult femininity, however, as Freud gives far greater emphasis, is based on a radical repression: The pre-Oedipal sexuality of the girl, he asserts, “is of a wholly masculine character.”122 A girl, fantasizing and experimenting in a polymorphous perverse manner just as actively as a young boy, must renounce her masculinity, as associated with the clitoris, in order to achieve adult femininity: “Women change their leading erotogenic zone […] together with the wave of repression at puberty, which, as it were, puts aside their childish masculinity.”123 In a text on hysterical attacks, the psychoanalyst even spoke of “the typical wave of repression, which by doing away with her masculine sexuality, allows the woman to

117 Ibid. 118 Materialization refers to Judith Butler’s concept of performative production also of “sex” as processes of materialization; in Butler, Bodies that Matter, 2011 [1993]. 119 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 119; see also Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 29. 120 Schlesier, Konstruktionen der Weiblichkeit, 1981, p.  149: “Freud allows no doubt that the main feature of the female Oedipus Complex – in contrast to the male one – is its desexualization. Clitoral sexuality disappears through repression, and under the conditions of the Oedipus Complex the vagina could not yet be discovered.” 121 On this see Schlesier, Konstruktionen der Weiblichkeit, 1981. 122 Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” 1953, p. 219. 123 Ibid., 221.

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emerge.”124 Freud’s theory of femininity is thus based not only on the theory of the infantile nondiscovery of the “vagina as a woman’s erogenous zone,”125 but it also assumes that the “coexistence or even coincidence of clitoral and vaginal sexuality”126 is impossible. According to Sander Gilman, Freud’s definition of the clitoris as a “truncated” penis and thus as almost “male” was in keeping with a “popular fin de siècle […] view of the relationship between the body of the male Jew and the body of the woman.” 127 They resemble each other through the “truncated” penis. In addition, Gilman continues, Freud must have also known that “the clitoris was known in the Viennese slang of the time simply as the ‘Jew’ (Jud).”128 If for a moment we pursue this thesis,129 which is disputed in current scholarship, the “flawed” body of the (circumcised) Jewish male thus reappears in the body of the woman. But the Jewish women and patients in Freud’s life are more than merely the reflection or mirror, before and in which the drama of masculinities takes place. The generalized “neutral” ideal of the domestic, passive, and ultimately desexualized woman that Freud establishes in his theory is also a product of assimilation. It is “white, Christian, reproductive and hidden from view.”130 Normal, that is, Western bourgeois “femininity,” is for Freud the product of a painful performance, an achievement of repression that can also be read geographically and culturally. Precisely the requirement to repress early childhood clitoral masculinity, which is at the core of the performative theory of femininity, reveals traces “of Jewish female difference,”131 according to Pellegrini. Jay Geller, too, says that it was in particular Jewish women who were characterized as phallic or masculine. As evidence Geller cites an antisemitic text, the Handbuch der Judenfrage (Handbook of the Jewish Question, 1936) by Theodor Fritsch: “One finds among the Jews a great number of feminine men and masculine women. This goes for both body and soul.”132 Daniel Boyarin also emphasizes that “there is strong evidence, however, that just as Jewish men were perceived as feminized – and 124 Freud, “Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks,” 1955, p. 234. 125 Schlesier, Konstruktionen der Weiblichkeit, 1981, p. 159. 126 Ibid., 158. 127 Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1993, p. 39. 128 Ibid. 129 See the presentation of the discussion and criticism of Gilman’s thesis in Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body, 2007, pp. 29, 228n125. 130 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 121; see also Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 31. 131 Ibid. 132 Geller, The Other Jewish Question, 2011, p.  109, citing Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage, 1936, p. 31.



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queer – by European gentile culture, Jewish women were perceived as virilized, indeed as viragos.”133 Moreover, according to Pellegrini and Boyarin, in Eastern European Jewish family structures, which of course also influenced Freud, the mother played a far more dominant role than in bourgeois Viennese society. The American Jewish studies scholar Susannah Heschel has drawn attention within this context to another aspect of Jewish tradition. With respect to the niddah laws and the purity of the vagina as treated therein, Heschel claims that the vagina is the human body part “discussed most in classical Jewish literature.”134 In order to assimilate to the bourgeois gender order, the Eastern European Jewish family structure, with its dominant mothers and women, had to be forgotten and “civilized.” Pellegrini and Boyarin now read the Freudian myth of the repression of male sexuality in girls (albeit not his theory of the infantile nondiscovery of the vagina) as yet another allegory in an effort to “escape from Ostjüdische gendertrouble.”135 The girl’s passage from active, preadolescent masculinity to passive, mature femininity […] also recalls the historical movement of Jews from Eastern Europe into the urban centers of Western Europe.… In Freud’s subterranean geography of Jewishness, gender, and race, East is to West as phallic women are to angels in the house.136

Even in the inner-Jewish and Zionist discourse, as shown by Daniel Boyarin in “Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science’”137 and Unheroic Conduct, Eastern European Jews, the so-called Ostjuden, and their “fundamental ways of the shtetl become conflated with those of the Orient.”138 They thus served, to the extent that they appeared to embody “Judaism’s oriental character and foreignness to Europe,” as a negative model.139 At this point the oriental character of Jewish femininity is identical to a paradoxical image: the Jewish woman, 133 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 354. 134 Heschel, “Sind Juden Männer?,” 1998, p.  95. Susannah Heschel was prompted to ask, “Whose vagina is it? Or should the vagina be understood as a symbol, perhaps in parallel to the phallus, namely a symbol laden with the emotional significance that shapes gender identity? […] The laws of niddah turn the vagina into a transcendental sign of gender identity and Jewish status.” The implications of this remark unfortunately cannot be pursued in the present text. 135 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 354n152. 136 Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 1997, p. 29; see also Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 119–120. 137 Boyarin, “Homophobia,” 2003, p. 178. 138 Isenberg, “To Pray like a Dervish,” 2009, p. 101. 139 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p.  280, where he quotes Kornberg, Theodor Herzl, 1993, p. 24. In other Zionist writing the Eastern Jews could also be idealized and turned into a source of cultural revitalization; see Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005.

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on the one hand, as a strong mother, then as femme fatale and sexual predator; and on the other hand as a transgressive, “masculine” virago.

Judith or the Taboo of Virginity In order to shed light on the “ambivalent position occupied by Jewish women”140 in Freud’s works, it is important to examine the fissures in the concept of the passive, unthreatening femininity. Wherever Freud’s mythos of the castrated woman shows flaws, according to my hypothesis, and where he himself speaks of a femininity that is anxiety-inducing or even threatens castration, it is possible to observe a return of the repressed material. First and foremost is the obvious mythicization of the woman, which is reminiscent of colonial images, such as the overdetermined formula of femininity as the “dark continent” whose mystery cannot be understood.141 Aside from his posthumously published essay “Medusa’s Head” (1922), Freud is concerned with a threatening femininity, especially in “The Taboo of Virginity” (1918). In this text, which seems like a belated afterthought to Totem and Taboo (1913), the psychoanalyst works with ethnographic reports on the wedding rituals and taboos of the “primitive peoples” in Africa and Australia, and with stories of “his” neurotic patients. However, he also makes references to modern literature. All of the texts revolve around the fear that emanates from the virgin, and around the taboos connected with her. Freud very quickly broadens the scope of the fear of the virgin into the man’s fear of female sexuality and women in general, when he writes: “The taboo of virginity is part of a large totality which embraces the whole of sexual life” and at its core is a “generalized dread of women. One might almost say that women are altogether taboo.”142 Just as in Totem and Taboo Freud does not only draw parallels between the imaginary and ritual world of the “primitive man” and that of modern anxiety neurotics; instead he stresses that nothing of the principal fear and dread of the woman is obsolete, but rather that it is “still alive among ourselves.”143 Upon closer examination as to what makes up the fear and what “imaginary” dangers are connected with the woman, Freud asserts the following: “This dread is based on the fact that woman is different from man, forever incomprehensible and mysterious, strange 140 Pellegrini, Performance Anxiety, 1997, p. 29; see also Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 119. 141 See Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” 1959, p. 212. On the over-determination of the “dark continent,” see Doane, “Dark Continents,” 1991. 142 Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” 1957, p. 198. 143 Ibid., p. 199.



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and therefore apparently hostile. The man is afraid of being weakened by the woman, infected with her femininity and of then showing himself incapable.”144 In Freud’s analysis, fear of the woman appears as a general male fear. It is not culturally or historically specific; it is expressed among the Australian Aborigines as well as modern neurotics. In fact, the fear comes closer, since “in all this there is nothing obsolete, nothing which is not still alive among ourselves.”145 As Pellegrini correctly emphasizes, the specific masculinity that – according to the antisemitic stereotype – is particularly threatened by an infectious femininity, was definitely culturally defined around 1900. This masculinity that feels threatened by femininity can only be masculinity “in which male Jews, within Freud’s own historical experience, were dangerously implicated.”146 As if to avoid this association, however, Freud quickly shifts to the “general” gender difference as the reason for men’s narcissistic rejection of women: “Psychoanalysis believes that it has discovered a large part of what underlies the narcissistic rejection of women by men, which is so much mixed up with despising them, in drawing attention to the castration complex and its influence on the opinion in which women are held.”147 As we know from his famous sentence, for Freud “the castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism.”148 His essay “The Taboo of Virginity” (1918) does concentrate, however, on gender difference. It does not settle down with the reference to the castration complex as the reason for men’s revulsion of women; instead it goes so far as to claim that the danger emanating from the virgin is in fact real, though the only evidence provided for this “real” danger are fantasy images. As an example, Freud offers the dream of one of his patients, in which she wants to castrate her groom on their wedding night. Freud takes his second example from modern literature, that is, the tragedy Judith (1840) by Friedrich Hebbel, which tells the story of Judith and Holofernes. Freud wrote: “The taboo of virginity and something of its motivation has been depicted most powerfully of all in a well known dramatic character, that of Judith in Hebbel’s tragedy Judith and Holofernes.”149 Clearly following Hebbel’s sexualizing tendency, “Freud recasts the biblical heroine as a femme fatale who beheaded Holofernes not as an act of Jewish patriotism, but of sexual refusal.”150 Freud supports Hebbel’s 144 Ibid., pp. 198–199. 145 Ibid., p. 199. 146 Pellegrini, Performance Anxiety, 1997, p. 33; see also Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 122. 147 Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” 1957, p. 199. 148 Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” 1955, p. 36n1. 149 Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” 1957, p. 207. 150 Pellegrini, Performance Anxiety, 1997, p. 33, see also p. 45 and Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 1997, p. 129.

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transformation of the heroic Jewish widow Judith, who kills the tyrant to save her people, into a fascinating, beautiful virgin who beheads the tyrant, whom she desires, in a mixture of sexual paroxysm and revenge. He follows the sexualizing reinterpretation of the material without hesitation, even viewing it as the reiteration of “an ancient motive,” elevating a Judith “purged” of all historical, biblical qualities to the archetype of “dangerous femininity”: “Beheading is well known to us as a symbolic substitute for castrating; Judith is accordingly the woman who castrates the man who has deflowered her.”151 Through his sexualization of Judith, Freud unwittingly reproduced the mainstream antisemitic discourse, in which the mediating figure of the belle juive, which was clearly still ambivalent around 1900, became a “fusion of the virgin and the whore” that “is inflected by a racialized difference.”152 It is precisely in Freud’s orientalization of Judith that the repressed Jewish context returns. Elements of the antisemitic discourse, of misogyny and homophobia, were inherited from the mainstream culture. In the context of a postcolonial approach, Freud’s essentializing of misogyny, castration anxiety, and penis envy “appear as an elaborate defense against the feminization of Jewish men.”153

151 Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” 1957, p. 207. 152 Pellegrini, Performance Anxiety, 1997, p. 33. 153 Boyarin, “Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science,’” 2003, p. 186.

Anna-Dorothea Ludewig

Between Orientalization and Self-Orientalization Remarks on the Image of the “Beautiful Jewess” in Nineteenthand Early-Twentieth-Century European Literature The European literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers a multiplicity of female Jewish characters and images yet, significantly, they are more defined by their commonalities than their divergences. Without disregarding historical differences both in literature and culture, this contribution seeks to elaborate the common traits making the “(Beautiful) Jewess/(Schöne) Jüdin/ (Belle) Juive” a European figure. The focus lies on “orientalization” as well as, to a certain extent, the “self-orientalization” of Jewish women in literature since “the figure of the Jewess often seems drawn from the same set of fears and fantasies that generated nineteenth-century Orientalism.”1 Hence, the (literary) amalgamation of orientalism and female Judaism has a crucial overall impact on the image of Jewish women.

Images of Jewish Women Sander Gilman has stated that “in Europe, the Jewish body served as model for the body of the alien,” and continued: “This fantastic body of the Jew is marked by its ugliness, his visible and invisible otherness.”2 This conclusion refers to the Jewish man and cannot, however, be applied to the Jewish woman, at least not without modifications. The female Jewish body is no less fantastic and virtual, similarly serving as an object for majority society projections. “The ‘Jew’ is always defined as a masculine category”3 – which is the pivotal point: Jewish women are not identified as Jews, they are a kind of intermediate group4 characterized by an exotically

1 Valman, The Jewess, 2007, pp. 3–4. 2 Gilman, Die verräterische Nase, 1999, pp. 31–32. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine. 3 Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” 1998, p. 67. 4 See Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena, 2005, p. 30: “[…] the word ‘Jew’ increasingly refers to men alone. ‘Jewess’ by contrast resists classification; Jewish women seem to fit comfortably in neither the category of ‘Jew’ nor the category of women. ‘Jewesses’ – this word indicates indeterminacy, recalcitrance toward any classification.”

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erotic otherness. This depiction of Jewish women is rooted in the Bible as female Jews are identified far more as biblical figures than their male counterparts. And this perception is an ambivalent one – Eve, first woman and therefore first Jewish woman, is both the mother of humanity and mother of sin. Portrayed as a being complementary to man, she is also man’s temptation, the cause of their expulsion from paradise. This conflict of devotion and seduction, of beauty and boldness, of eros and dependency becomes a leitmotif in the reception of biblical women. The story of Abraham’s wife, Sara, taken to the Pharaoh’s harem on their journey to Egypt can be viewed as representative. In this episode, Sara is portrayed as an object of contention between the two men, while she herself remains passive, or at least her (potential) actions are literally not worth mentioning: When he [Abram] was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, “I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my live may be spared for your sake.” When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And for her sake he dealt well with Abram […]. But the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abrams wife. So Pharaoh called Abram and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her, and go. And Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had. (Genesis 12:11–20)

The focus is on Sara’s appearance, her beauty, and her impression on non-Jewish men, represented in this constellation by the Pharaoh. Although he has already gathered a number of beautiful women in his harem, it is a Jewish woman, a “stranger”, who most captivates him. The consequences of his fascination are ambivalent for the woman concerned, as she pays for her alleged social rise with the loss of her Jewish female identity. What is implied in the story of Israel’s matriarch will return in various guises, as is evident in the example of Ester, Hadassah in Hebrew. She has to pay a high price for her eventual triumph, the king’s favor and her victory over Haman, having to hide her origins to become queen and thus save her people from perdition, persecution, and expulsion. Through her marriage to a non-Jew, she becomes a stigmatized outcast whose sacrifice is only legitimized and honored through her stepfather Mordecai. The story of Ester is commemorated every year at Purim, with the queen herself, dressed in fantastic oriental costumes, at the center of the burlesque masquerades staged in the course of the Purimspiel. Rather than a person, a personality, Ester is an object of projection, her individuality and her Jewishness literally being veiled. Ester, and many other Jewish women with



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her, acts as a bridge, as an intermediary between the Jewish and the non-Jewish world. She can thus be trusted to endure what seems intolerable to men: To wander between the worlds, to mask herself and break the commandments.

Orientalization These conflicts reemerge in the lives of a number of Jewish women, both real and literary. In plays and novels by non-Jewish authors, Jewish women are cast in the role of oriental beauties: “using the representational techniques of ‘orientalism’,” the mostly male Christian writers “depicted their heroines as dark, sensuous, malleable, and amenable to persuasion.”5 In such stories, the exotic appeal of the Jewish protagonists proves irresistible to almost every man, their ultimately tragic existence at the borders of society, between the worlds, an essential part of their allure. Honoré de Balzac’s novel, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838–1847), describes the beauty of the courtesan Esther: “Esther had come from this cradle of the human race [Greece and Asia Minor]; the native land of beauty: her mother was a Jewess,” adding a few pages later: “Esther’s birth betrayed itself in this oriental contour of her eyes.”6 Although eventually baptized, Esther remains a stranger, a pariah to Parisian society, which regards her solely as an exotic beauty, and only grants her the status of an accomplished courtesan. Having preserved a naïve innocence most apparent in her deep affection for her lovers, Esther is unable to cope with the schemes and power games of the male world around her. Irrevocably lost between these worlds, she finally takes her own life; her suicide provides a striking image of her loss of identity as Esther, a Jewish courtesan, dies as a Christian, posed Madonna-like at the foot of a cross. Two decades earlier, for his novel, Ivanhoe (1819), Walter Scott created another “oriental” woman with biblical associations: The figure of Rebecca might indeed have compared with the proudest beauties of England, even though it had been judged by as shrewd a connoisseur as Prince John. Her form was exquisitely symmetrical, and was shown to advantage by a sort of Eastern dress, which she wore according to the fashion of the females of her nation. Her turban of yellow silk suited well with the darkness of her complexion. The brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearl, and the profusion of her sable tresses, which, each arranged in its own little spiral of twisted curls, fell down 5 Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, 1996, p. 39. 6 Balzac, Splendors and Miseries, 1895, pp. 55, 57. Original quotations: “Esther venait des ce berceau du genre humain, la patrie de la beauté [Grèce et Asie Mineure]: sa mère etait juive.”/ “l’Orient brillait dans les yeux et la figure d’Esther.” (Balzac, Splendeurs et misères, 1999, pp. 66, 68.)

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upon as much of a lovely neck and bosom as simarre of the richest Persian silk, exhibiting flowers in their natural colours embossed upon a purple ground, permitted to be visible. – all these constituted a combination of loveliness which yielded not the most beautiful of the maidens who surrounded her.7

Rebecca, the virtuous and pious daughter of a Jewish merchant, also serves as an object of projection for male fantasies: she enters the scene dressed like an odalisque arousing – and how could it be otherwise? – the passion of all knights present. Her beauty is only further enhanced by her firm defense of her chastity and her extraordinary intelligence employed just at the right moments: “her allure seems to be mostly made up of combining virgin and courtesan in a mixture of inviolability and oriental exoticism.”8 There are obvious parallels to Balzac’s courtesan Esther. Both courtesan and virgin are portrayed as “beautiful Jewesses” and “beautiful orientals,” suggesting a unique amalgamation of innocence and eros. This male (Christian) perspective was to be repeatedly confirmed throughout European cultural history: One observes the beauty of their women and daughters, though, no matter whether they live in prosperity or poverty. One feels one is a good Christian when one says: You have beautiful eyes, but look Jewish. Yet despite a certain harshness and austere charm, their beauty recalls that of the Greeks. All these oriental creatures, though, surpass the women of our lamentable and vulgar Occident, which in my opinion seems to have very few charms.9

These remarks by Charles de Ligne (1735–1814), taken from his advice for the “civil improvement” of the Jews, again underscore the Jewish woman’s exceptional position. As Florian Krobb points out, “the phrase ‘Beautiful Jewess’ itself seems to be conveying a non-Jewish, non-female external position, classifying the Jewess as other and different from the speaker’s perspective.”10 Furthermore, as Hildegard Frübis demonstrates, these literary and artistic depictions mostly “construct a differing type of beauty, charged with exotic and erotic associations, which emphasizes not only their religious otherness, but also the foreignness of their geographic and cultural origins.”11 This phenomenon is also noted by JeanPaul Sartre: “There is in the words ‘a beautiful Jewess’ a very special signification, one quite different from that contained in the words ‘beautiful Romanian,’

7 Scott, Ivanhoe, 1994, pp. 82–83. 8 Gubser, Literarischer Antisemitismus, 1998, p. 110. 9 Ligne, Neue Briefe, 1924, p. 191; translated by Andrew Boreham. 10 Krobb, Die Schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 5. 11 Frübis, Repräsentationen der Jüdin, 2005, p. 134.



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‘beautiful Greek,’ ‘beautiful American,’ for example. This phrase caries an aura of rape and massacre.”12 Sartre’s definition pins the Jewish woman down to her sexuality and its impact, a distinguishing feature that proves problematic to maintain. After all, sexuality in general and its combination with violence in particular are common ingredients in the construction of the widely accepted phenomenon of “otherness”, the existence at the borders of society. “Gypsies” and black women, for instance, have been the objects of male colonial fantasies and assaults as well. Often the focus is on the exoticism per se, while the actual ethnic and religious background becomes irrelevant. In a telling passage in Prosper Mérimée’s novella, Carmen (1847), the protagonist’s speculations about the origins of the foreign beauty culminate in the final assumption: “‘Then you must be Moorish,’ or … I stopped, hardly daring to say ‘Jewish’.”13

Wilhelm Ebbinghaus: Salome (around 1925) © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum Europäischer Kulturen / Ute Franz-Scarciglia

The figure of Salome is a prominent representation of a Jewish femme fatale.14 The daughter of Herodias may be the most dangerous female biblical character. She 12 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 1948, pp. 48–49. Original: “Il y a dans les mots ‘une belle Juive’ une signification sexuelle très particulière et fort différente de celle qu’on trouvera par exemple dans ceux de ‘belle Romaine,’ ‘belle Grecque,’ ou ‘belle Américaine.’ C’est qu’ils ont comme un fumet de violet de massacres. La belle Juive, c’est celle que les Cosaques du tsar traînent par les cheveux dans les rues des son villages en flammes; et les ouvrages spéciaux qui se consacrent aux récits de flagellation font une place d’honneur aux Israélites. […] Il n’en faut pas plus, je crois, pour marquer la valeur de symbole sexuel que prend la Juive dans le folklore.” (Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 2001, pp. 56–57.) 13 Mérimée, Carmen, 1998, p.  13. Original: “Alors, vous seriez donc Mauresque, ou […] je n’arrêtai, n’osant dire: juive.” (Mérimée, Carmen, 1984, p. 52.) 14 See Gustav Moreau’s painting Salome (1871) or Oscar Wilde’s influential drama Salome (1891), as well as Ulrike Brunotte’s chapter in this volume.

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has a dark sexuality written into her body, brings pain and corruption, but has an erotic allure irresistible to (non-Jewish) men. Her seductive dance before Herod brings her the reward of the head of John the Baptist, and came to epitomize bloodlust and perversion. The figure of Salome is mostly presented in oriental settings, as for example Wilhelm Ebbinghaus’s painting, Salome, of a richly adorned odalisque lounging on a tiger skin: a promising vision for the (male) beholder. But “if such dreams break, the exotic captivated image of these women converts into a xenophobic demonized.”15 And Ebbinghaus’s odalisque is such a “broken dream.” A distinct Jewish symbol links her highly sexualized femaleness and Jewishness – the menorah in the background augurs badly for her seduced “victims.” The Jewish woman is perceived as the most extreme example of “otherness,” but also of a mysterious and erotic appeal, a combination seemingly confirming Sartre’s assumption.

Self-Orientalization The texts discussed above are all examples of an outside male (Christian) perspective or, more neutrally, the perspective of a male-dominated, non-Jewish majority society. Yet the same discourse is reflected in the writings of Jewish authors, men as well as women, since “both Jewish and non-Jewish writers use similar literary devices to create their image of ‘the Jew,’ resorting to the same genres and to a jointly established arsenal of figures (therefore easily lapsing into the stereotypical). Their common interest is the conditio judaica in the civil society and the construction of an overall civil identity.”16 Fanny Lewald’s novel, Jenny (1843), explores the loss of identity evoked by the Jewish woman’s negotiable social position, found in nearly every aspect of life. Lewald, born in 1811 into a Jewish family and later converting to Christianity, describes the fate of her protagonist who initially seems to be looking forward to a happy marriage to Gustav Reinhard, a young Protestant theologian. The couple’s engagement is announced at a sumptuous New Year’s Eve celebration in the home of Jenny’s parents. During the festivity tableaux vivants were arranged and Jenny, the bride, appears in the costume of Rebecca from Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe: There was no end to the questions, the expression of admiration, the congratulations, and many a young man gazed enviously at Reinhard who passed through the room with Jenny on his arm, still dressed in her costume as Rebecca. She was dazzlingly beautiful in her 15 Hürlimann, Zur Ausstellung: Fremdkörper – Fremde Körper, 1999, p. 110. 16 Krobb, Scheidewege, 2000, p. 5.



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magnificent robes, with diamonds woven into her hair, and the flame-colored turban pressed onto her dark curls […].17

Jenny’s self-orientalization defines the tableau and places the protagonist at the margin of the picture, foreshadowing the course of her life. Far from her conversion allowing her to access the center of society, it turns her into an outcast, restless until her premature death, her solitary grave in a Christian cemetery reflecting the fate of assimilated Jews in the nineteenth century.18 Thus, in these self-representations the Jewish woman again constitutes a link between Christian and Jewish worlds, “her beauty combined with her intellect opening a way out of the restricted ancestral environment.”19 The ensuing loss of identity is one of the subjects central to Jewish writing in the nineteenth century.20 Love between a Jewish woman and a Christian man may initially seem to overcome social barriers, but it can only survive if the woman abandons her Jewish identity.21 Finally, a brief glance at the twentieth century reveals fresh departures and disruptions that establish a new female Jewish self-awareness between tradition and transformation. Else Lasker-Schüler’s poem, “Esther,” first published in 1912, offers one example of this new awareness. In contrast to the external perspective of a Christian male in Balzac’s novel, this poem offers an internal, female Jewish view on the subject, facilitating an entirely new way of viewing the figure of Esther. Here, Esther is not a tragic character, a “wanderer between the worlds,” but a female Jewish “role model”: Esther ist schlank wie die Feldpalme Nach ihren Lippen duften die Weizenhalme Und die Feiertage, die in Juda fallen. Nachts ruht ihr Herz auf einem Psalme Die Götzen lauschen in den Hallen.

17 Lewald, Jenny, 1967, p. 128; translated by Andrew Boreham. 18 The controversial term “assimilated” is deliberately used in this context, since Lewald’s novel focuses precisely on the loss of identity arising from adapting to the social majority. 19 Frübis, “Die ‘Schöne Jüdin’ – Bilder vom Eigenen und vom Fremden,” 1997, p. 118. 20 Scott’s novel Ivanhoe had a considerable influence on contemporary literature and especially on early Jewish literature in England, with a series of similar romances published subsequently. The figure of Rebecca inspired Jewish woman writers to literary reflections on their own role in an Anglo-Protestant majority society. See Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, 1996, pp. 39–58, 105–133. 21 See Kathrin Wittler’s chapter in this volume; she interprets the tableaux vivants differently: as the “powerful performance of a Jewish woman.”

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Der König lächelt ihrem Nahen entgegen – Denn überall blickt Gott auf Esther. Die jungen Juden dichten Lieder an die Schwester, Die sie in Säulen ihres Vorraums prägen.22

The poem is part of Else Lasker-Schüler’s cycle, Hebräische Balladen (1913), which references various biblical characters,23 and can be read as the author’s attempt to inscribe herself into a Jewish mystical context. This self-contextualization was not confined to her literary works. She also played with role and gender models, creating such alter egos as Yussuf, Prince of Thebes. In different (androgynous) roles, her renowned self-stagings / self-conceptions explore the limits of imagination. “I am born between Europe and Asia […],”24 she wrote in 1910, leading the contemporary press to directly correlate her Jewish background and the oriental fantasies of her “shows” with the Bible.25 Localizing – or even mythologizing – herself in this way proved ambivalent, since it turned the author into the Jewish poet, “expected both by Jews and non-Jews to correspond to the image of the Jewish woman and poet speaking a ‘Hebrew’ German, being the natural, sensual and capricious, the oriental, passionate and idiosyncratic ‘other’ that cannot be controlled.”26 This attempt at a female Jewish reception of female biblical characters dramatically shows the subtleties of self-orientalization, since it forces an “alien” perspective on to her own image of herself. Thus, self-localization sometimes turns into self-destruction.

Conclusion The literary images of Jewish women portrayed in this article reflect both the loss of as well as the struggle for female Jewish identity in the European Diaspora. Their influence can be felt far beyond the period discussed here as is evident, for instance, in a chapter on “the Israeli woman” in a work entitled Die Orientalin, published in 1958 as part of the series, Frauen fremder Völker (“Women of Foreign Cultures”): 22 Lasker-Schüler, Die Gedichte, 1997, p. 306. 23 The cycle Hebräische Balladen comprised 15 poems in its first version (1913), and 20 poems in its final edition. Aside from Esther, the poems include a number of female biblical characters such as Ruth and Abigail. 24 Quoted from Kirschnick, Tausend und ein Zeichen, 2007, p. 162. 25 See ibid., p. 161. 26 Leuenberger, Schrift-Raum Jerusalem, 2007, pp. 115–116.



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The world of women in Israel has the most diverse elements in a single state. There, you not only find Arab fellahin women, some clinging to nothing short of medieval beliefs, but also university graduates emigrated from Europe living next to them. One reckons that it will take two generations at least before these diverse types of women have formed a type which can be described as the “Israeli woman.”27

Such comments still resonate with a loss of female Jewish identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries largely reflected in an amalgamation of the “Jewish” and “oriental” woman. Even though such depictions and self-portrayals draw on the Bible or the Tanach, they still remain (male) projections – and hence frail fantasies. Madeleine Dobie notes that “the foreignness ascribed to the Oriental woman can be read as a displaced representation of ‘otherness’ ascribed to women in Western culture,”28 pointing a finger at the problem which such images raise. The fascination felt for “the oriental woman” is the same fascination felt for “the other,” “the alien,” and the individual displaced by the loss of differentiation this entails. To return once again to the Purim plays, what is desired and supposedly loved is the larva, the mask.

27 Burghardt, Die Orientalin, 1958, p. 313; translated by Andrew Boreham. 28 Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 2004, p. 2.

Christina von Braun

To See or Not to See The Gaze and Gender in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures1 An “identity” always emerges in dialogue with others. It is neither a given nor something static; instead it changes in the context of historical and social relationships. To that extent it is not inborn and immutable, as claimed by populists and clung to by identity seekers. “Ethnicity” as well, as anthropologists have explained for a long time, “has no existence apart from interethnic relations.”2 The same also applies to images of “the other,” which influence the construction of one’s self, and vice versa. This mutability pertains to both collective and individual identities, but the construction processes follow different paths. Collective identities are marked by myths of origin, historical experiences, and/or social necessities, whereas individual identities are perceived as part of one’s self and one’s psyche. The construction character of individual identities is more difficult to recognize than is the case with collective identities. However, this does not prevent collective identities – such as those of national or religious communities – from becoming a constitutive factor in the individual, often unconscious identity. This transfer from a collective to an individual identity requires efficacious symbols, including gender images. They help to “naturalize” the constructions of the collective identity. No area is as emotionally charged as the body of rules that determines gender relations. This applies for the three “religions of the book,” which also have a lot of other common ground: All three religions view themselves as monotheistic, all three originated in the Eastern Mediterranean region, are based on alphabetic systems of writing, and invoke Holy Scripture, in which the later ones make reference to the earlier ones. Nevertheless, there continue to be stark demarcations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the gender order is often at the heart of these conflicts. On the one hand, this is due in part to the fact that sexuality and reproduction trigger powerful emotions: in both the individual and the community, which is – still – dependent on sexuality and reproduction for its continued existence. On the other hand, it also has to do with the fact that a specific understanding of the relationship between God and man is reflected in the 1 Translated by Allison Brown. Excerpts from this text have been published in German in von Braun, “Bild und Geschlecht in den drei Religionen des Buches,” 2011. 2 Cohen, “Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology,” 1978, p. 389.



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gender order. From the perspective of religions this generally appears to be one of the functions of the symbolic gender order, at least in the three monotheistic religions: The roles of man and woman (whose coexistence forms the nucleus of the community and the sense of shared identity) should reflect the relationship between God and the believer. This means that the symbolic gender order is actually derived not so much from the biological conditions of the male and female bodies. If that were the case, the gender orders of the different religions would hardly vary. Instead, they serve to make “visible” a divine order – in whatever form imagined – or “inscribe” it into the world. That is, the symbolic gender order also deals with the notion of immortality on which the religions are based. This is the actual explanation for the highly charged conflicts concerning the gender order. Symbolic or cultural assignments to either the male or female body, in turn, have an effect on sexuality itself. That makes it difficult to obtain a distanced view of the basic, underlying structures. Every group equates its own understanding of sexuality with what it considers “natural,” which imparts a semblance of “unnaturalness” or even “degeneracy” to the sexuality of the other. A comparative perspective is helpful in this regard. I will begin by examining the close relationship between the symbolic gender order and the theological doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and then attempt to show that the theological premises on which these are based have continued their impact into modern societies, that is, they are also relevant where religious thought has apparently lost significance and been replaced by “culture.” The shift from religion to culture can be seen in a number of symptoms – ranging from science to the economy and political structures. I would like to present them as based on the gaze – the problem of seeing and concealing, which has played such an important role in the debates on the veil and the gender order.

Religion and Gender Order Both the Jewish religion and Islam fundamentally assume an insurmountable distinction between God and humanity: God is eternal; human beings are mortal. God is invisible; human beings can be perceived through the senses. God is complete; human beings are imperfect. The Christian God, in contrast, is eternal, yet the doctrine of the incarnation has lifted the distinction between God and humanity. God takes on a worldly, visible form in Jesus Christ, through which devout Christians share in God’s immortality. The effects of these differences between the three religions are reflected in Judaism and Islam in the strict prohibition of giving God a visible form, whereas Christianity has a long tradition of iconolatry.

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It focused mainly on the Crucifixion, but did not even shy away from portraying the image of God, the father. The iconoclasm that some Christian schools of thought emphasize in fact is ultimately another, albeit inverted, acknowledgment of image worship. This fundamental difference between the three religions, which gains contours in their relationship to images, is repeated in the structural differences between the symbolic gender orders. It is characteristic that in presenting these differences I can show images only for the Christian religion. When in the following I compare the symbolic gender orders of the three monotheistic religions, of course I use an ideal-typical approach. Neither regional influences on the respective forms of the religion nor the many theological distinctions within the three religions can be taken into consideration. This simplification makes it easier to elucidate the structural differences between the three religions. It is these structural characteristics that are considered the symbolic gender order. The gender order in Judaism does not include the condemnation of sexual gratification that has dominated many eras of Christian thought. “Jewish culture gives no merit badges for celibacy,”3 as David Biale put it laconically in his book Eros and the Jews. Sexuality is viewed as part of the conditio humana. It offers – as a condition of procreation (and thus referring to heterosexuality) – a means of countering the sting of death. In the Kabbalah and in Chassidic teachings, sexuality is even one of the “gateways” for encountering God and the sacred. A Chassidic text says of the prayer of a man who becomes engrossed in his study of the Torah, “in my flesh I shall see my [sic] God.”4 The text expressly compares coitus, “the greatest of all pleasures,” with intensive study of the Torah. In a similar vein, the ambiguity of the Song of Songs leaves open whether real sexual relations are discussed or love between believers and the Bible. This ambiguity is taken up in many Talmudic stories. On the other hand, sexuality is also what distinguishes human beings from God. Gender is considered a symptom of human imperfection and of the difference between human beings and God. According to Tikva Frymer-Kensky, the late Jewish studies scholar and professor at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago: The God of Israel is only male by gender, not by sex. He is not at all phallic, and cannot represent male virility and sexual potency. Anthropomorphic biblical language uses body imagery of the arm, right hand, back, face and mouth, but God is not imagined below the waist. […] God is asexual, or transsexual, or metasexual (depending on how we view this phenomenon); but he is never sexed.5

3 Biale, Eros and the Jews, 1997, p. 217. 4 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, cited in Piekarz, “Hasidism as a Socio-religious Movement,” 1997, p. 225. Jacob Joseph cites from Job 19:26: “In my flesh I shall see God.” 5 Frymer-Kensky, “Law and Philosophy,” 1995, p. 4; Frymer-Kensky, Studies in Bible and Feminist Criticism, 2006, p. 240.



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God also does not behave sexually. Although “God is the ‘husband’ of Israel, a powerful marital metaphor,”6 this sexual metaphor refers to his relationship to the community – Israel as “God’s bride” – not his relationship to the individual. Chassidic Jews comparing their study of the Torah with sexual images informs the positive connotation of sexuality, not a crossing of the boundary between human corporeality and divine eternity. The “imperfection” of mortal human beings, which distinguishes them from God, is in turn expressed through the emphasis on sexual difference. Sexual difference as continually practiced both ritually and culturally underscores the strict separation of human beings and God. Circumcision serves to symbolically inscribe male imperfection and vulnerability into the male body, while the niddah laws relating to female blood (menstrual and post-partum bleeding) emphasize the specialness of the female. Both serve fundamentally to highlight the difference between man and woman. The word niddah, which is of Aramaic origin and means “expelled, excluded,” has the same root as nadad, or “removed, separated.”7 It “reflects the woman’s continuous wandering from one state of being to another over the time of her life cycle.”8 The niddah laws are often interpreted by non-Jews as a degradation of the female body during menstruation and following childbirth. However, it makes no sense to assume that in a religious tradition in which offspring and procreation are among the greatest goods and, at least in Orthodox interpretation, unmarried men are not allowed to serve rabbinical or liturgical functions in the synagogue, that a woman would be degraded precisely when she has given birth or her body displays signs of her fertility. The fact that married men live within the rhythm of female separation, and that rabbis are intimately familiar with the functions of the female body, has prompted the American Jewish studies scholar Susannah Heschel to ask: “Whose vagina is it? Or should we understand the vagina as a symbol, perhaps a parallel to the phallus? […] The niddah laws turn the vagina into a transcendental sign of gender identity and the Jewish status.”9 From that perspective, sexuality in the Jewish religion appears not simply as a “function” of procreation; instead, procreation is also seen as a function of sexuality. While sexual difference serves to emphasize the imperfection of humanity and the difference between human beings and God, both man and woman are reminded of their incompleteness through reproduction. On the one hand this puts the strict ban on homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible in a different light; on the other hand, the relaxation of these rules in modern times must also be seen 6 Ibid. 7 See Rockman, “Sexual Behaviour among Ultra-Orthodox Jews,” 1995. 8 Polak-Sahm, The House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh, 2009, p. 60. 9 Heschel, “Sind Juden Männer?,” 1998, p. 95.

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differently. These evidently also have to do with reproduction techniques. Invitro fertilization, sperm banks, and frozen fertilized eggs are presently enjoying great popularity in Israel and have received express approval of rabbis, which is an indication that the biblical condemnation of homosexuality and masturbation referred primarily to the sins of “spilled seed.” Frozen sperm, however, is not “spilled seed,” and not only the rabbinate has drawn conclusions from that. Many homosexual couples, including many Jews, are taking advantage of in-vitro fertilization in order to conceive their own children without having to subject themselves to the norms of a heterosexual sexual drive. Although chronologically speaking Christianity would come next, I will discuss Islam first, because its differences to Judaism are not as great as those to Christianity. The symbolic gender order of Islam emphasizes gender difference, as does the Jewish religion. This is apparent, for example, in the requirement that modesty be guarded between the sexes, as is demanded of both men and women in the Qur’an (see sura 24:30). Ludwig Ammann interprets the segregation or separation of women in Islam as the female body having been declared a “sacred space.”10 The harem and the veil are expressions of the sacred quality ascribed to the female body. Similar is true for Judaism, as demonstrated by the statements by Susannah Heschel. However, whereas in Judaism the difference is inscribed in the body itself – via circumcision and the laws of niddah – Islam has an “extra-corporeal” separation of the sexes, as symbolized by the veil. The word for veil, hijab, actually means “curtain.” The symbolic significance of the veil is no less powerful than an inscription in the body. At the same time, however, it is clearly also a symbolic gender code. Segregation of the sexes in Islam draws on a completely different justification than it does in Judaism, and its connection with social order – in law as well as in urban space and residential architecture – also has to do with the fact that from the outset Islam gave rise not only to a religious community but also a political one. This was Muhammad’s express aim – and in later eras of Islam the political aspect often assumed a higher profile than the purely theological perspective. According to Egyptian historian Leila Ahmed, who wrote a sophisticated work about the history of the Islamic gender order: “There appear [...] to be two distinct voices within Islam, and two competing understandings of gender, one expressed in the pragmatic regulations for society [...], the other in the articulation of an ethical vision.”11 With respect to gender relations, therefore, there can indeed be contradictions between the law and the religious message contained in the Qur’an. Many passages in the sacred scripture display an egalitarian notion of gender, such as sura 33:35, in which women 10 Ammann, “Private and Public in Muslim Civilization,” 2006, p. 96. 11 Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 1992, p. 65.



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are addressed on an equal basis with men as the vanguard of the faith. As Ahmed notes: “The unmistakable presence of an ethical egalitarianism explains why Muslim women frequently insist, often inexplicably to non-Muslims, that Islam is not sexist. They hear and read in its sacred text, justly and legitimately, a different message from that heard by the makers and enforcers of orthodox, androcentric Islam.”12 It was not until the formulation of the “Islamic codex” – i.e., the political interpretation of the Qur’an, which took place several generations after Muhammad – that women’s rights were substantially restricted. During the actual formative period of Islam, conditions were different. For example, Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was a wealthy widow who dictated her terms of marriage to Muhammad, including the condition that he not take a second wife or concubine as long as she lived. The high estimation accorded Muhammad’s later wives after his death, including the much younger Aisha, also attests to a role for women than was very different from that which subsequently became established in Islam. Aisha and the other widows received considerable monetary support from the community and were viewed as authorities; more of the “authenticated” (sahih) Hadith come from Aisha than from any of the Prophet’s other companions. Under Muhammad there were female imams, and he even called one to his own home. Aisha’s father, a companion of Muhammad, made her responsible for distributing his property after his death.13 Such functions indicate a role for women that can hardly be reconciled with the ensuing gender hierarchy in Islam. Leila Ahmed grew up in Egypt and today teaches at Harvard University. She describes traces of this other Islam in her memoirs, recounting the close correlation between gender order, oral history, and religion during her childhood. In the home of her grandmother in Alexandria the women had their own understanding of Islam, which differed from that of the men, the “official Islam,” which became established in written form. What it was to be Muslim was passed on through the women, she said, which was marked not by “threats or decrees or dictates,” but “a touch, a glance, a word”: And all of these ways of passing on attitudes, morals, beliefs, knowledge – through touch and the body and in words spoken in the living moment [...]. They profoundly shape the next generation, but they do not leave a record in the way that someone writing a text about how to live or what to believe leaves a record. Nevertheless, they leave a far more important and, literally, more vital, living record. Beliefs, morals, attitudes passed on to and impressed on us through those fleeting words and gestures are written into our very lives, our bodies, our selves, even into our physical cells and into how we live out the script of our lives.14

12 Ibid., p. 66. 13 Ibid., p. 74. 14 Ahmed, A Border Passage, 1999, pp. 121–122.

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This orally transmitted Islam enabled the adoption of cultural features across the Muslim world. In contrast, the “textual” and “male” form of Islam was erected by a minority: “The Islam they developed in this textual heritage is very like the medieval Latinate textual heritage of Christianity. It is as abstruse and obscure and as dominated by medieval and exclusively male views of the world as are those Latin texts.”15 Ahmed sees the Arabic alphabet as responsible for the living tradition of Islam: “A set of consonants can have several meanings and only acquires final, specific, fixed meaning when given vocalized or silent utterance (unlike words in European script, which have the appearance, anyway, of being fixed in meaning). Until life is literally breathed into them, Arabic and Hebrew words on the page have no particular meaning.”16 This Islam of oral traditions speaks of a “truth only here and now, for this body.” It is progressively being erased, Ahmed writes, and countered by a simultaneous, ever-greater dissemination of written Islam, which has brought the spread of fundamentalist Islam, “textual Islam’s narrower and more poorly informed modern descendant.”17 Therefore, literacy has led to the spread of Islam, on the one hand, but to the erasure of oral and living forms of the religion, on the other. Leila Ahmed points out that Western scholars of Islam, too, are contributing to the legitimacy and authority given to textual Islam and the silencing of oral traditions by limiting their research largely to texts and official institutions such as mosques.18 In brief: the symbolic gender order of Islam lends itself to a strict segregation of the sexes, which, as in the Jewish religion, reflects the strict distinction between human beings and God. Symbolic gender relations in Christianity are based on quite different premises. Because the Christian God assumed a human body in his son, the difference between God and human beings is eliminated. This is the Christian message of salvation, which is solemnly celebrated in the Eucharist, the union of the divine and human body at the Last Supper. This transcendental message of salvation, too, is reflected in gender relations. This can best be demonstrated through the dispute between the medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum and the art historian Leo Steinberg on the “Sexuality of Christ.” In order to elucidate their arguments, I will first briefly address the general symbolism of the cross.

15 Ibid., p. 126. 16 Ibid., p. 127. 17 Ibid., pp. 127–128. 18 Ibid., pp. 128–129.



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The cross is found as a symbol in all religions. Generally speaking, it represents the encounter or intersection between earth and heaven, the here and the hereafter, the worldly and the transcendent. Christians hesitated for a long time before accepting the cross as the symbol of their faith because in antiquity it was the most ignominious form of execution, used almost exclusively for rebellious slaves. It was not until the fourth century, after Constantine the Great abolished this form of execution, that the symbol of the cross gradually started appearing in Christian places of worship. One does not find any portrayals of the Crucifixion in early churches, only the simple cross. Occasionally combined with the tree of life from Genesis it symbolized both death and resurrection. This conflicting symbolism is known as the “paradox of the cross.” In this form the symbol of the cross was accepted by Christians. Around the middle of the first Christian millennium portrayals of the Crucifixion started becoming established, with a focus on the suffering of Christ. This in turn led to a development that I would like to illustrate through the dispute between the two American scholars. It shows that the image of the Christian savior – in contrast to that of the God of Israel – by no means ends at the waist. In a series of texts and images from the Middle Ages, Bynum shows that the crucified body featured the full insignia of femaleness. The sacrificial blood was shown as a female lactating breast. Such images corresponded to statements by religious women and nuns, such as Saint Catherine of Siena, who wrote: We must do as a little child does who wants milk. It takes the breast of its mother, applies its mouth, and by means of the flesh it draws milk. We must do the same if we would be nourished. We must attach ourselves to that breast of Christ crucified, which is the source of charity, and by means of that flesh we draw milk.19

In many images, the wounds of Christ also took the form of a bleeding vulva. The Crucifixion was presented as the moment of parturition, in which the selfsacrifice of Christ becomes a delivery. Thus Marguerite of Oingt wrote: My sweet Lord […] are you not my mother and more than my mother? […] For when the hour of your delivery came you were placed on the hard bed of the cross […] and your nerves and all your veins were broken. And truly it is no surprise that your veins burst when in one day you gave birth to the whole world.20

19 Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, 1913–1922, letter 86, vol. 2, pp. 81–82, cited in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 1991, p. 96. 20 Marguerite of Oingt, Les Oeuvres, 1965, pp.  77–79, cited in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 97 [ellipses from Bynum].

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The figure of Jesus was therefore accorded the female, maternal traits of fertility and nurturance. This meaning was later extended to a secular context; especially national allegories often depict the nation as a nurturing female figure. By contrast, the art historian Leo Steinberg presents numerous images of the Crucifixion that emphasize the maleness of the Christian savior. These accentuate the genitals. As the story of the Passion progressed, these images displayed the male “potency” of the crucified Christ with increasing clarity. Steinberg speaks in this context of an equation between “erection” and “resurrection.”21 He concludes that these images transfer the meaning of the phallus in antiquity – as a symbol of power, fertility, and transcendence of death – to the figure of the Christian savior,22 albeit in altered form. On the one hand this was about the spirit transcending the body; on the other, the image of sexual potency also served to show a generative power of the spirit, which could overcome death itself. The spirit, however, had been equated with masculinity since antiquity: The phallic representation thus symbolizes the transcendence of death. The symbolism of the cross as empowering and as transcending death is also transferred to worldly, secular space. Already during medieval times the cross became a symbol of military, royal, or judicial power. The Crusaders carried it on their shields, kings and emperors on their crowns and scepters, and it stood before the judges as they pronounced their judgments. This symbolism of empowerment and authority as expressed by the cross, and closely tied to the Crucifixion, retains its validity to the present day. The first symbol that was erected on the debris at Ground Zero in New York City was a cross. Steinberg’s and Bynum’s interpretations of the gender symbolism in Crucifixion images are in principle irreconcilable. Yet if viewed from the perspective of the paradox of the cross, it is clear that death, mortality, suffering, and the wound are associated with femaleness, whereas resurrection and transcending death are viewed as signs of male potency. The two sides form a unity in the figure of Christ and complement each other. Thus also in Christianity the sexes are assigned distinct roles. Yet instead of reflecting the difference between God and human beings, here they reflect an ideal union of opposites, in which divine eternity and human mortality enter into a symbiosis, as symbolized by the cross and intensified by the symbolic gender order. Simply put, one can say that in Christianity it is marriage that is sanctified, whereas in Judaism and Islam it is the female body (which in Christianity has anything but “sacred” status). Paul expressly compares the relationship between Christ and the church with that of the institution of marriage. As Christ is the 21 Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, 1996, p. 83. 22 Ibid., p. 46.



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head of the church and the believers are its body, so the man forms the “head” and the woman the “body” in marriage: “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” (Ephesians 5:28) The law of the indissolubility of marriage – found in Christianity alone among all of the world’s religions – can hardly be expressed more clearly than in this image of a head that marries its own body. Parallel to the doctrine of transubstantiation in the thirteenth century – in which the host and the wine, which were initially considered symbols of the crucified Christ’s body, become his actual body and blood – Christian marriage was elevated to a sacrament. For the Protestant church, marriage was then no longer considered a sacrament, but the ideal of the symbiosis nevertheless did not lose its influence on the life of the sexes. The ideal of the symbiotic couple was a determining factor for the Protestant parsonage and it was maintained in the process of secularization: Demands for a “marriage for love,” which developed around 1800, followed directly from the sacred nature of marital union in Christianity. We simply tend to forget the long Christian history that preceded it. The elevation of marriage to a sacrament, the indissolubility of marriage in the Catholic Church, the Pauline notion that not only Christ and the church, but also man and woman, appear as the inseparable body: All of these are expressions of the Christian idea that transcendence and worldliness form a unity and should reflect the divine in the here and now. For the two other religions of the book, however, the divine cannot be mirrored in the here and now – it remains hidden.

Religion and Image These ideas anchored in religion developed further within a secular context and unfolded a new efficacy. This is true for the Christian religion in general, and it was no coincidence that this was where the process of secularization first emerged. I shall discuss three examples in demonstrating this: the invention of the mechanical clock, that of letterpress printing, and the development of technological visual devices. A lot of what the Western world owes to the new scientific impulses of the Renaissance originally came from the Arab world. However, in these three – decisive – areas the West also offered a lot on its own. These innovations became the driving force in the process of secularization, but this was due more to the “secularization” or “realization” of Christianity that to transcending it.

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The mechanical clock was first introduced in monasteries, because the monastic clergy, with their six or seven daily (and nightly) offices, needed a way to measure time that remained regular throughout the year.23 From the monasteries, the clock gradually took hold in village life. It later wandered into individual households until, finally, it was carried on the person, inscribing the sense of time into every individual: It was this possibility of widespread private use that laid the basis for time discipline, as against time obedience. One can, as we shall see, use public clocks to summon people for one purpose or another; but that is not punctuality. Punctuality comes from within, not from without. It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.24

The mechanical clock made it possible to synchronize major population groups and new, industrial working conditions emerged.25 The process of industrialization would not have been conceivable without the mechanical clock, and Lewis Mumford was correct in writing that the key machine of the modern industrial age was not the steam engine, but the clock.26 But it was first invented in the monasteries for the needs of the monks. Letterpress printing, instrument par excellence of scientific and academic innovation in the Renaissance, emerged because there was a theological need for this tool. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, many monasteries had virtually become duplicating factories for manuscripts, and the demand grew steadily. This trend-setting technology, too, was not invented in opposition to religion, but rather it emerged from it. What we today consider the beginning of the scientific modern age was a product of the needs of religious thought. Regarding the third example, visual devices, not only were the historical origins in the monastery, but religious thought was also transposed onto the secular level. Both Judaism and Islam assume an invisible God that cannot be portrayed in images, therefore remaining veiled. Believers cannot come in direct contact with the divine truth. Both Moses and Muhammad cover their heads before they receive God’s words. Christianity, as a religion of “un-veiling,” follows a different logic. The Greek word for revelation is apokalypsis ‘uncovering,’ a combination of kalypta ‘cover’ and the prefix apo ‘away, from.’ The Latin term revelatio also views the revelation as a symbolic act of unveiling (velum ‘veil, curtain’).

23 Landes, Revolution in Time, 2000, p. 56. 24 Ibid., p. 6 [emphasis in original]. 25 Ibid., pp. 75–77. 26 Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 2010, p. 14.



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The idea of unveiling implies that the truth of Christ, that is, the mystery of God, can be seen and understood directly, uncovered. This Christian topos of revelatio – as access to the truth and the mystery – was to become a determinant for Western science: In search of scientific “truth” the Western world developed a wealth of visual techniques and devices – central perspective, telescope, microscope, camera obscura, and later photography – which made is possible to “dis-cover” new things. It shifted the scientific focus to the paradigm of sight as exploration or investigation of the truth. The drive to expose or unveil as expressed by Western science also revealed sexual aspects. Renaissance painting (such as Titian’s Venus portrayals) served as a means for realizing the fantasy of penetrating the female body with the eyes. This idea was furthered in the anatomical pictures of the seventeenth century, which made the secret of secrets visible to the eyes and shed light on the “dark continents.” No matter whether the subject was the human body, nature, or foreign continents, the object of knowledge was always imagined as a female body that was to be deflowered and “dis-covered” by science. Such sexual fantasies had already accompanied the witch hunts of the inquisition, as forbidden sexual desire became voyeuristic, and they were a determinant of post-Renaissance scientific thought. Carolyn Merchant demonstrated this through works of Francis Bacon, author of the scientific utopia New Atlantis (1624). In a treatise of 1623, he advocated “entering and penetrating” nature, and that it be “bound into service”; it was necessary, he said, “to examine nature herself.” Citing Bacon, Merchant wrote, “the new man of science must not think that the ‘inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden.’” In Bacon’s words, “Nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexation of art [mechanical devices] than when left to herself” [emphasis and insert by Merchant].27 The images of the sexes in Bacon’s system of knowledge served the function of delineating a dark continent that was to be penetrated and “dis-covered,” or unveiled. This impetus would be decisive for the production of knowledge over the following centuries and it was gradually internalized. Just as the clock influenced our perception of time, giving rise to voluntary punctuality, this art of seeing led to the idea of a voluntary “unveiling” of nature – or of women – before the eyes of science, as corresponded to enlightenment thought. Starting in the mid–nineteenth century – or more precisely with the advent of photography, the eye that can see without being seen – this unveiling was no longer thought of in allegorical terms, but led to the exposing of the individual female body. With the birth of photography around 1850, the disrobing of the female body began in the Western

27 Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1990, pp. 168–169.

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world. It has become such a given for us today that we consider it “natural” and no longer wonder how it came to be. This reached its pinnacle with the invention of the bikini; when this article of clothing appeared in public it revealed more flesh than it covered. This uncovering and exposing of the female body is understood as a sign of female emancipation and freedom. In reality, however, it serves to arm the eye; it expresses the power of a gaze and its ability to recognize – and even to create – the “truth.” Just as the positive is developed from the negative in the darkroom, the female body becomes a “print” of a male spirit. When Paul demanded of the women of Corinth that they cover their heads, photographic technology had not yet even entered the human imagination, but his explanation for this commandment reads like a description of the power of modern visual devices: Paul says that the man does not need to cover his head in a house of prayer, “forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man.” (1 Corinthians 11:7) The role of visual technology and the notion that it is possible to see the “truth” explain the Western commotion about women wearing headscarves and the equating of a veiled female body with the rejection of progress. However, one should instead ask why the topos of unclothing in the West has become a paradigm of advancement, freedom, and female emancipation. Precisely the debates on the oppression of veiled women could prompt Western societies to reflect upon the dis-covering and un-veiling of the female body as a historical phenomenon of Christian society. It is necessary above all to clearly show that the concealed or exposed female body imply very different messages: This is about issues such as the power of the gaze, of the armed eye. In the new Kulturkampf (culture war), the “honor” of the woman will oppose her freedom. But in this debate the female body is only of symbolic significance. In reality it is about the power of interpretation and the definition of what determines sight, knowledge, and insight. This means that we are still in the midst of the old religious discourse, except that now theology appears in a new guise as technology.

Tatjana Petzer

Veils in Action The “Oriental Other” and Its Performative Deconstruction in Modern Fashion and Art Fashion is the “inner orient” of modernism. The fashion theoretician Barbara Vinken has presented fashion as the oriental-female connotation of “the Other” in modernism, standing in dichotomic opposition to the Western male (vestimentary) order. Fashion symbolizes – with or without borrowings from the orient – a threatening alien space which runs counter to the Enlightenment and to middleclass modernity. In that vein, this chapter seeks to explore an ambiguous and mutable object that exemplifies the paradoxical fashion of modernism: the veil. As a reversible image of orientalism, the veil is a substitute for a subjugated as well as subjugating subject constitution. Furthermore, the veil fashions of aesthetic modernism and its protagonists illustrate the oscillation between in- and exclusion, having sought their prototypes not only in space, but also in time – in antiquity. Already in focus at the dawn of the twentieth century against the background of an emerging interest in veiled dance and evening wear à l’oriental, the veil’s crucial role in the headscarf debate once again lent it new topicality in fashion discourse, as well as in performance art, which interacts with fashion. Since the early twentieth century, reciprocity has existed between fashion and the stage, between the material veil and ethnic-aesthetic action, and between the artifact and the performativity of vestimentary signs. Whereas it initially evolved into a theatralization of orientalism and its transformation into a modernist art of living, which staged itself not least through fashion, contemporary veil art’s field of action increasingly encompasses art, politics, and law. From the beginning, modern veil fashion – as I would argue – has deconstructed the extropy, or outsideness, of “the Other” and has thus increasingly advanced to becoming an aesthetic form of intervention.

In-between: The Performativity of Vestimentary Signs In fall 2010, two female students protested in the French capital against the ban on full-body veils with a two-part get-up: wearing a short çarşaf top and niqab to

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the waist, they were nylonless in hot pants and high heels below.1 The ambivalent veil-minis worn by the “Niqabitches” (one of the two anonymous women is Muslim) exemplify the clash between uncovered and covered which the various social, ethnic, and religious groups in pluralistic societies have always seen themselves exposed to. The highly charged controversy over the legality of the (un)covering of the female body, head, face, and hair is part of a political debate in which reductionist front lines are often drawn between Islam and the West.2 In the process, little difference is made between the varying veil forms and the conventions and motivations for wearing a veil. Critics view the desire by many European Muslim women to maintain religious and cultural traditions as outdated when it comes to the intimacy and morality of displaying the body, head, and face in public. The origins of the headscarf controversy, however, are no longer to be found solely in critiques of religion and civilization that denounce compulsory veiling as a despotic norm. In reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, full-body veiling in public was banned not only in France, with the “Bill Prohibiting Facial Dissimulation in Public Places,” but also in Belgium and the Netherlands. Veils, as the argument goes, contradict European values and should also be banned for security reasons. The veil-mini’s shortened cut is an ironic take on the promise of progress made by the fashionable adaptation of the veil, revealing this supposed advance as a surgical intervention – with disconcerting effect. Veiled, but nude, the Niqabitches reveal quite clearly that the performative power of vestimentary symbols persists in secular dress codes – between the sacred and the profane, between concealment and exposure, and between tabooization and eroticization. In this regard, Christina von Braun and Bettina Mathes point out in their book Verschleierte Wirklichkeit (Veiled Reality) that a fundamental difference exists between different religious cultures. There is, on the one hand, the Christian culture of visibility, as represented by the Son of Man, who is evidence of God’s glory, and, on the other, the Muslim culture of invisibility, which in Islam represents itself in the concealed countenance of God. However, it is not unproblematic to differentiate between the various practices of veiling and unveiling the (female) body on this basis,3 for it may lead to further polarization. In view of the history of clothing conventions, also those of Christian provenance, and their symbolism – above all of hoods and veils – the pointed interpretations coming from both sides are simplistic and polemic. Whereas Islam, with its separation of the female and male 1 See the NiqaBitch on facebook: https://fr-fr.facebook.com/Niqabitch. 2 See Engel/Scholz (eds.), Kopf- und andere Tücher, 2006; Giannone, “Streit um die Kleidung,” 2005. 3 See von Braun/Mathes (eds.), Verschleierte Wirklichkeit, 2007, pp. 60–66.



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spheres, sacralizes the female body, i.e. veils it, Christianity feels itself provoked by the deliberate denial of visibility. From this secular perspective, the formless, seamless fabrics that conceal the European clothing often worn by Muslim women – to make both the person and her clothing invisible – can only be seen as a means of camouflage. From an Islamic point of view, however, the display of the head and clothes – a person’s “second skin” – is tantamount to nakedness and exposure. The Parisian Niqabitches, who presented themselves “bottomless,” appear to be confronting the polarizing effect of veiling and permissive display in this sense exactly. In their video, they conceal the eyes of passers-by behind black censor bars. From a twofold perspective, they thus refer ironically to demands for unveiled heads and bodies as a prerequisite for a “free” personality or European identity and identification. The veil-mini moreover brings to mind a discourse which, like the restrictive political argument, can be read as a reaction to the religious-cultural dress code. This is because the fashion-performance adaptation of oriental clothing is often excluded from the secular and legal-political discourses surrounding the bans – not least, for example, by references to “Islamic” veils. Throughout history, oriental scarves have repeatedly found their way onto European heads, for example during the Arabian and Ottoman conquests, the Crusades, Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign, and the romantics’ journeys to the orient.4 Head coverings à l’oriental have not only decorated heads, but also provoked and shaped the European self-image, the recent headscarf debate being not the first instance. As argued by Barbara Vinken, without “the Other” (Asian, Byzantine, oriental) as driving 4 The gothic style which appeared to be inspired by the Arabs, in the twelfth century spread out quickly from the Provence and Burgundy throughout Europe. On the history of the oriental influence on European costumes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Boucher, 20,000 Years of Fashion, 1987, pp. 176–179. Around 1430, noblewomen wore the hennin, a high, pointed hat accompanied by a veil that usually emerged from the top of the cone and fell onto the woman’s shoulders, while men of the nobility were used to wearing turbans with the ends falling over the shoulders. Henceforth, the conical and spiral forms of oriental headdresses affected European head fashion: the clerical and majestic forms being stiff, dignified, high-rising, the secular and especially the female forms being smooth, playful, alterable. Those acquisitions of other vestimentary codes were accompanied by the conversion of their protective, decorative, and stimulative function. What happened on or, even more importantly, within the heads – be it effects of triumphant exoticism, or collective coping with anxiety, or fanciful fashion experiments – is documented in medieval panel paintings and in the orientalist portrait masquerades of the baroque and romantic periods, in the European turqueries in general and the modern costuming since Louis XIV in particular. See Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism, 2013, especially chapter 2: “1690–1815: Chinoiserie, Indiennerie, Turquerie”; Trauth, Maske und Person, 2009. On the interrelation of exoticism and eroticism, colonialism and the battle of the sexes under the banner of the desire for the Other, see Kohl, “Cherchez la Femme d’orient,” 1989.

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force in exotic threat into the heart of modernism and middle-class values of the Enlightenment, fashion would not exist.5 Based on a mutual exchange between design and dance around 1900, fashion experienced an “oriental turn” similar to other cultural turns, which, in my opinion, marked a fundamentally and functionally new orientation toward costumes and clothing influenced by oriental styles. The veil played an essential role. Orientalism, with its harem fantasies (including those in the sense of Edward Said6), was in this case not just a simple reference, but a structural prerequisite: “Fashion is declared an internal colony, standing in contradiction to the aesthetic and ethical ideals of the Enlightenment and Modernism.”7 The affirmative gesture of the fashionable, which bears within itself such an “oriental Other,” foils modern gender and clothing conventions with, for example, ancient transparency and cross-dressing. “The Other” has itself already been deconstructed by the “oriental” garments, because these often incorporate borrowings from occidental traditions of dress. European veil fashion has symbolized an aesthetic intervention in representations and discourses of otherness since the early twentieth century. Roland Barthes, who conducted a structuralist analysis of fashion by means of fashion magazines, located dressing oneself on the level of speech utterance, of parole.8 Bodies are coded through vestimentary symbols; identities are constructed and made visible as constructs. The general complexity of a garment and of a veil in particular – as part of the material culture, as a method of social distinction, and as an aesthetic ideal – derives from its function separating or connecting inside and outside, unseen and seen, and own and foreign. The material veil, and not just its metaphorical, symbolic potential, represents this performative in-between.

Veiling/Unveiling: Dance and Design around 1900 Initiated by Léon Bakst (born Leib Chaim Rosenberg, 1866–1924), the Russian Jewish costume maker and stage designer for the Ballets Russes, and Paul Poiret (1879–1944), the French couturier, the early twentieth century saw Paris become 5 See Vinken, Angezogen, 2013, pp. 80, 83 and 112. 6 See Said, Orientalism, 1979, p. 190. Said discusses the embourgeoisement in nineteenth-century Europe and the institutionalization of sex, which evoked the search for a libertine type of sexuality, “oriental sex,” and which were mirrored in the narratives of European writers who travelled to the orient after 1800. 7 Ibid., p. 112. 8 Barthes, Système de la mode, 1967.



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the central venue of the oriental turn in fashion and interior design. In what follows, their creations are understood to be indicative of that creative exchange between dance and fashion which in modernism would become a revitalized stage of the fascination with the orient – while at the same time in the East, contrary tendencies, even processes of de-orientalization, were observable.9 The development of design followed concepts of body and space that sometimes had very different motivations, as is evident in the dissimilar approaches taken by Bakst and Poiret. The success of Bakst’s costume and stage design for Cléopâtre, which concluded the Ballets Russes program in March 1908 (originally named Une Nuit d’Egypte), would establish the oriental core of the Russian Ballets Russes. Indeed, it represented, as it were, its culmination, with the Russian-Jewish artist Ida Rubinstein (1885–1960) unveiling herself in the mimic role of a Cleopatra that overshadowed even prima ballerina Anna Pavlova’s dance art. On the surface, the exotic, fantastic orient appeared to be a marketing strategy. But the orientalism, presenting itself with permissive, excessive sexuality and decorative, luxurious design was more than that for both its creators and the artists. For Rubinstein, who was from a wealthy family, the extravagant performances represented liberation from the educated Jews’ prejudices about the theater, which to the outrage of Rubinstein’s relatives would become her passion. Bakst, whose grandfather achieved a certain level of prosperity as a military tailor in the Russian capital, came from a modest background and Orthodox milieu. He studied painting, against his parents’ wishes, but had to end his studies at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art prematurely. His reworking of the Madonna motif for a contest at the Academy, a painting showing Madonna surrounded by Jews, was considered a provocation. For him, the activity with the Ballets Russes was a determined engagement with the prevailing antisemitism;10 it also signified his liberation from Jewish ghetto

9 In Turkey, as part of Kemal Ataturk’s modernization project, the Hat Law (Şapka kanunu) of 1925 banned the wearing of the fez and headscarves as signs of anachronistic backwardness. This law replaced Mehmet II’s regulation of 1828 which banned the turban, and introduced the fez as a sign of modernity. In the Far East, especially Japanese fashion was affected by a wave of de-orientalization, see Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism, 2013, pp. 124–129. 10 The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 set an end to the longstanding more liberal policy toward Jews. A member of the terrorist group, Jessie Helfmann, a woman with Jewish background who did not play a leading part, was nevertheless used as a pretence for claiming the assassination to be a Jewish plot. In subsequent years, life for the Jewish communities grew worse. Pogroms occurred throughout the country and repressive laws were enacted. Among the few Jews still holding important positions was Baron Dimitri de Gunzburg, Diaghilev’s principal patron.

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mentality and, possibly, from his father’s Talmudism.11 The Paris success was ultimately a stroke of luck because any steady work in St. Petersburg was made impossible for Bakst after he was refused permanent residency in 1912.12 Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), a Russian dandy, met Bakst through the circle of artists around the Benois brothers. Together with Alexandre Benois (1870– 1960), they would found the grandiose art magazine, Mir isskustva (World of Art, 1899–1904). Bakst was the only Jew among the artist friends. The fact that his otherness was emphasized by Benois who wished to see the latent oriental who was different from the other Russians behind the mask of exoticism 13 may also have been connected to do with the professional rivalry regarding originality and the authorship of ideas that emerged during their collective work for the Ballets Russes. Bakst’s collaboration with Rubinstein began in 1903–1904 with Antigone and developed independently of their engagement with the Ballets Russes.14 Rubinstein, who took private lessons with choreographer and dancer Michel Fokine (1880–1942), had her debut as a dancer in 1908 with a private solo performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891), wearing a costume by Bakst (see fig. 3). The piece was choreographed by Fokine with stage music by Alexander Glazunov (1865– 1936) and was directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940). Subsequently, she was also taken on by the newly formed ballet ensemble without having completed her dance studies. In her first (mimic) role as Cleopatra in the eponymous piece (after Alexander Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights and fully in the Russian oriental tradition15), she was to be divested of not only seven veils, but freed – like a mummy – of twelve differently colored ones, removing the last dark-brown veil herself with a graceful circular movement. Rubinstein was the prototype of the belle juive, as we might assume on the basis of a study by Bakst from 1912 (see fig. 1), and – in analogy to contemporary painting, opera, and music – an exoticized figure.16 11 See Spencer, Leon Bakst, 1995, pp. 12–27 (“St Petersburg – The Early Years”). 12 In 1903, Bakst converted to Lutheranism in order to marry Liubov Gritzenko, daughter of Pavel Tretiakov, the founder of the major Moscow art museum – the Tretiakov gallery. In 1910, Bakst divorced his wife, and ended the “religious masquerade.” He returned to Judaism and was consequently expelled from the Russian capital, see “Léon Bakst tells of his Expulsion,” 1912. 13 Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, qtd. in Spencer, Leon Bakst, 1995, p. 24. 14 Spencer, Leon Bakst, 1995, pp. 146–163 (chapter “Ida Rubinstein”). 15 Russian orientalism was broadly present in romantic poetry, in folklore and folk art, in music (Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov) and in painting. Most likely Bakst was influenced by the symbolist artist Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910) and his watercolors of oriental figures and clothes as well as Egyptian costumes, especially by the painting, An Oriental Tale (1886), showing a Shah in his harem. 16 See in this volume Anna Dorothea Ludewig on embodiments of the belle juive and Ulrike Brunotte on Salomé as an intermediary figure between the belle juive and orientalism. See also



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The extroverted, cool beauty with almond-shaped eyes was transformed on stage through oriental fabrics and decorations into something dark and secretive – to then be unveiled layer for layer. Bakst achieved this “textile” enigma in his stage design – and subsequently in his fashion design as well – through the hybridization of traditional Jewish elements with oriental, classical, and modernist ones. This also applied to the veil itself, which Bakst styled not only into an attribute of the belle femme orientale, or that of the dancing femme fatale orientale, but more generally into an ambiguous and mutable object representing “the Other.” Veils were en vogue on the stages of Paris when the veiled Rubinstein in the role of Cleopatra was less dancing her unveiling than miming or literally modeling and performing it.17 After her unveiling, the element of the veil was taken up in the pas de deux danced by Vatslav Nizhinsky/Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950) and Tamara Karsavina (1885–1978),18 and differently veiled performers also appeared on the stage for the (anachronistic) “Jewish dance” (see fig. 4)19. The most aesthetically sophisticated veil dances were created by the American Loïe Fuller. Her body disappeared behind the oversized veil, with the fabric’s seemingly autonomous movements and vibrancy intensified even more by the light effects projected onto it. In 1892, she became a star of Art Nouveau and Symbolism with her “Serpentine Dance” at the Parisian Folies Bergère.20 In Paris, where Fuller would also settle, she performed two productions of Salomé.21 There were many imposing presentations of Salomé ranging from the performances of the Jewish-French actress Sarah Bernhardt, for whom Oscar Wilde originally wrote the one act play Salomé, and the Canadian-American dancer Maud Allan, to the Armenian dancer and actress Armen Ohanian (1887–1976), and the “breathtaking culmination of the Salome icon,”22 i.e. Rubinstein. They all made not only the dance of the veil Brunotte, “Unveiling Salome 1900,” 2012; Anglet, “Die orientalischen Schleier der Modernität im Paris und London des Fin de siècle,” 2006. 17 The Ballets Russes introduced new hybrid forms such as the “ballet-pantomimes,” “poème dansé,” “tableau choreographique,” and “esquisses-choreographique,” all of which mark the beginning of modern dance theater. For an historical overview on the Balletts Russes, see Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929, 1953, pp. 263–272. 18 See Buckle, Nijinsky, 1971. 19 In 1909, Bakst had already designed a very similar costume for Cléopâtre, intended for the “Syrian dance.” 20 See Brandstetter and Ochaim, Loïe Fuller, 1989; Bahr, “Loie Fuller,” 1999. Fuller’s sensational light scenographies did not only break with contemporary conventions of stage dance. They would lead to a transfiguration and apotheosis of the moving body. Thus, another (fantastic) reality would appear and transgress ordinary world and space. See Fischer-Lichte, Verklärte Körper, 2006, p. 151. 21 Performed in 1895 at the Comédie Parisienne and in 1907 at the Théâtre des Arts. 22 Wollen, “Salome,” 1987, p. 107.

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“fit for the stage,” but also conveyed an ambivalent image of double dissonance – of female eroticism and power, cruelty, and politics.

Fig. 1: Study of Ida Rubinstein by Léon Bakst, 1912

Fig. 2: Armen Ohanian performing in Paris, 1914

The omnipresence of popular Salomé interpretations and the resounding success of Bakst and Rubinstein – whose Jewish background was well-known to Paris and London audiences and both of whom were perceived as “semi-oriental” artists23 – also contributed to the modernist veil being connoted as oriental-Jewish. Rubinstein’s tall, androgynous appearance and powers of seduction marked her as a

23 The erotic fantasies which placed oriental odalisques on the dancing stage were later confronted with a different image of oriental dance performance by the ensemble of the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher and choreographer of sacred dances, George Gurdjieff (1872–1949), who had left Russia with his pupils after the revolution and settled, after stay in Georgia and Turkey, in France. Contrary to Diaghilev’s opulently decorated dancers and ballerinas, they danced in traditional dervish costumes with turbans or high pointy felt caps (sikke). In 1923, the Gurdjieff ensemble staged a magical, mystical orient of rigorous geometrical forms and discipline inspired by dances and ceremonies by the Whireling Dervishes of Istanbul at the Théâtre des ChampsElysées.



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“phallic woman of the Decadence”24 and an object of desire as well as a threat to men and middle-class civilization, a perception that later would play a role in her and other Jewish – but also non-Jewish – veil dancers being targeted by antisemitic prejudice.25

Fig. 3: Costume for Salomé designed by Léon Bakst, 1908

Fig. 4: Costume for the “Jewish dance” in Cléopâtre designed by Léon Bakst, 1910

This discursive limitation, however, does not correspond to the experimental diversity explored by the veil, initially on the stage and subsequently in fashion. It ranged from the Dutch Mata Hari’s inventive costume and veil compositions, 24 This is a figure that is both “petrifying and petrified, castrating and castrated,” Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,” 1987, 20. 25 On the context of transgenderization and the gender norms of antisemitic discourse, see Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” 1993, and, also following the latter, Ulrike Brunotte’s theoretical chapter in this volume on the cultural production of Jewishness and femininity. Rubinstein’s otherness was an issue because of her eccentric style of clothing and life, including her transsexuality. Besides playing male roles, she was part of the lesbian milieu and aquainted with Gertrude Stein, the female counterpart to Diaghilev and the male dominated gay world. The US-American painter Romaine Brooks, who had an amorous relationship with Ida Rubinstein, spoke of her as a “third sex,” qtd. in Spencer, Leon Bakst, 1995, p. 149.

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which she traced to Indian temple dances, to the “nostalgic Islam” of Ohanian’s Persian dances with costumes that in no way simply served the image of the odalisque (see fig. 2).26 That the suggestive power of the veil dance continued unabatedly was not only connected with this variety drawing on the visual and textual culture of the orient. Modernism’s veil was in fact a product of cultural overlays and reciprocal transformations. Bakst, whose figurine watercolors exhibit hybridizations of orient and occident in their design techniques and costume motifs,27 drew explicitly on the European tradition, on the cultural cross-roads of antiquity.28 In 1907, Bakst made detailed sketches while traveling in Greece with his friend, the painter Valentin Serov (1865–1911). These images would serve as the basis for his costume and stage designs.29 In his journal, he describes particular fascinations: the statues in the museum on Crete (where he climbed up onto Niobe, to touch her marble shoulders and breasts);30 his meeting with the belly dancer Patsa-Patsa; and the Mediterranean atmosphere with its winds, colors, and light. Interestingly, Bakst’s costumes, as well as his light effects, were seen in connection with his Jewish descent.31 Bakst’s inspirational source, however, lay in Mediterranean Greece and his encounter with the Hellenic culture – in the Mycenaean art discovered by Schliemann, with its creative stimulus in the Egyptian, Persian, Buddhist, and Muslim cultures of the Middle and Far East, as well as Minoan

26 After having lived in Baku and Moscow, Ohanian moved to Iran where she performed and perfected her skills in Persian and oriental dances. In 1911, she toured Europe starting with a performance in London and in the following year settled in Paris where her choreographies and costumes attracted much attention, see Escholier, “Armène Ohanian,” 1914; however, the latter sometimes led to misunderstandings, as is also indicated by Escholier’s final: “Vous eussiez reconnu avec émotion, sur le corps fragile de la Danseuse du Déclin, le suaire étincelant de l’Islam...!” (ibid., p. 80) In the second part of her four volume autobiography, Dans les griffes de la civilisation (1921), she describes her life as a show dancer in European metropolises reflecting the prevalent orientalism. On exotic dancers like Mata Hari and Ohanian, and orientalism in choreography at their time see Anne Décoret-Ahiha, Les danses exotiques en France: 1880-1940, 2004. 27 For sources of inspiration see Fedosova, “Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst,” 2009. 28 The cultural symbolic function of (erotic) veiling is diverse and ambivalent. Besides Egyptian (Isis) and biblical figures (Ishtar) ancient goddesses and hetaerae adorned themselves with veils. Purity and innocence were also associated with the veil. In ancient Rome, only virgins were allowed to veil themeselves, and according to marriage rituals in many cultures, the bride’s head was covered a last time before her wedding. Based on this, a specific rite for consecrated virgins, the “veiling of virgin emerged in early Christianity:” to express their marriage to Christ. 29 Bakst, Serov i ia v Gretsii, 1923. 30 Ibid., p. 26. 31 Reau, “Leo Bakst,” 1927, p. 44.



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Crete, which was excavated by Arthur Evans around 1900.32 Like the historians of antiquity, Bakst used an archaeological approach in his designs to uncover “the Other” within the own, i.e. European fashion practices.

Fig. 5 : Postcard “La danse” by Jean Théophile Geiser, ca. 1905

Fig. 6: Costume for Schéhérazade by Léon Bakst, 1910

Bakst had previously traveled extensively in Europe, beginning in the 1890s, and had been staying in Paris for extended periods since 1893 (for art studies and because of an affair with a French actress), where he may already have found inspiration for his later veil aesthetic. At the end of the nineteenth century, a particular penchant emerged in France for erotic postcards by the prize-winning Swiss colonial photographer Jean Théophile Geiser (1848–1923). The Muslim women and girls were presented with their faces covered by traditional veils, but with their bodies often naked to the waist. With such poses, these images were projection screens for the sexual fantasies of Europe’s colonial rulers (see fig. 5). 32 In addition, Bakst travelled to Georgia, Russia’s inner orient, where he took his inspirations for the set and costume design for the ballet Thamar. See Martin-Finnis, “The return of Léon Bakst,” 2013, 288.

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Despite certain similarities to Bakst’s dancers (see fig. 6),33 on the level of an aesthetic claim, there is a greater affinity with Minoan art (which typically portrayed priestesses with bare breasts34). Bakst revolutionized the ballet costume, freed the dancers from tutu and pointe shoes (as did other dance artists), and transformed the sterile Ballet blanc into the dark, perfumed, intensely colored atmosphere of the harem dance. These scenographies did not fail in their aesthetic shock effect. Ballerinas on pointe were no longer the allure of dance. The entire weightiness of physicality, the unleashed passions, and scenes of violence were kept in abeyance by just one accessory – the veil. Its sexual connotations were made particularly explicit in Nijinsky’s choreography for L’après midi d’un faun (1912) – which drew on ancient depictions but in Bakst’s set design nevertheless appeared orientalized35 – when, while dancing the role of a young faun, Nijinsky enacted sex with the veil of a young nymph. In 1910, the Paris opera presented the successful premier of the ballet Schéhérazade with choreography by Fokine to the symphonic suite of the same name, Shekherazada (1888), by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), though it omitted the composition’s third movement and dispensed with the original literary program. The production was a culmination of a fantasy-inspiring sensuality stimulated by a visual culture and literature saturated with orientalism, in particular by Antoine Galland’s successful translation – or better re-narration – of the Arabian Alf laila wa-laila, the Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, published in Paris from 1704–1717 in twelve volumes. Scheherazade, after whom the ballet is named, plays no role in its plot. The production offers the antecedents of the story, i.e. the infidelity of Zobeide, the head wife of the Persian king Schahriyar, and that of the women in his harem, whom he discovered indulging themselves with the slaves. Zobeide (Rubinstein) danced exaltedly and libidinously with the “golden slave” (Nijinsky), an aspect, incidentally, which deviates from the literary text. Intensifying from mysterious eroticism to ecstatic dance, the encounter ends in violence, with death and suicide. The transgression of the forbidden (entering the harem), the unveiling of the female body (sharing the secret), and the eroticized violence are ambivalent figures of the occidental self-

33 This costume design for Schéhérazade is also among the illustrations included by Barchan, “Leo Bakst,” 1912, 819; it is tellingly subtiteled “Jewish danseuse.” 34 See Boucher, 20,000 Years of Fashion, 1987, p. 78. 35 Note that Bakst’s set designs for the Greek ballets – besides L’après midi d’un faun, the ballets Daphnis and Chloé (1910/1911) and Narciss (1911) – as well as the ballet Zhar-ptitsa (The Firebird) from 1910, which was based on Russian folk tales, were without exception antiquity-inspired orientalist. See Martin-Finnis, “The return of Léon Bakst,” 2013, 282.



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othering. Consequently, the hidden tensions and potentials of the orient within European modernism were represented through the radical aesthetics of the “oriental ballets.”36 Bakst’s veil design stands for this inner orient, a figure of occidental self-othering par excellence,37 as characterized by its dialectic approach to the afterlife of antiquity and its transcultural transfers.38 The pieces modeled by Bakst during the Ballets Russes breakthrough phase from 1908–1914 had a lasting impact on the decorative arts and the glamorous lifestyle of the cultural elites.39 Were it not for Bakst, Poiret’s turbans might have been considered decadent modifications of the oriental textiles that were seen swathing the heads of highly placed personalities in “portraits à la turque,” and that were regarded as the most important accessory in women’s clothing in the Empire style of fashion.40 The French couturier, son of a cloth merchant, had a special fondness for the flowing lines of oriental garments and head coverings as well as for freedom from corsets.41 Even if Poiret denied that he was influenced by

36 Besides Cléopâtre and Schéhérazade, the ballets Les Orientales (1910), Thamar (1912), Le Dieu Bleu (1912), and the “Polovtsian dances” from Prince Igor (1909) are counted among the “oriental ballets.” For the latter Bakst created costumes composed of harem trousers, and almost bare-chested, which hardly referred to the traditional clothes of a nomadic people of the Eurasian steppe. Fokine borrowed from the Caucasian dances for his choreography putting long veils on the heads of the dancers. He was aware that their “oriental dances” were far from oriental, and that an oriental performance would first and foremost demand musicians who could create the oriental melodics and tonality, see Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master, 1961, p. 154. Schérérazade remained in the repertoire of the ensemble until Diaghilev’s death in 1929. Today, it belongs to the canonical dancing pieces with exotic atmosphere and setting which was introduced by the romantic ballets of the nineteenth century, La Corsaire (1826) and La Bayadere (1845). 37 See Rohde, “Der innere Orient,” 2005 for new theoretical approaches to a classification of the modes of self-orientalization. 38 With “inner orient” I specifically refer, in accordance with contemporary fashion theory, to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who, in a 1926 speech, called upon the legacy of classical antiquity represented as “unser wahrer innerer Orient, offenes, unverwesliches Geheimnis.” Von Hofmannsthal, “Vermächtnis der Antike,” 1980, p. 16. 39 In Paris, it was fashion which was influenced by Bakst, see Mourey, “Le Robes de Bakst,” 1913; in London, it was predominantly interior design, see Martin-Finnis, “The Return of Léon Bakst,” 2013, 289. 40 The victory over the Turks at Vienna (1683) was a new starting point of diplomatic and cultural exchange with the Ottoman Empire, which entailed a vast influence of oriental ornamental art and mysticism on occidental aesthetics. See Schwarz, Der Orient und die Ästhetik der Moderne, 2003; Pappe, “Turquerie im 18. Jahrhundert und der ‘Recueil Ferriol,’” 1989. Nobility and bourgeoisie, scholars and artists alike were impressed by the oriental garments. In the wake of orientalism, fashion developed various non-Western styles. See Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism, 2013, pp. 85–113 (chapter “1815–1871: Turkophilia, Afromania and the Indes”). 41 On the couturier’s creations and way of life see Deslandres, Poiret, 1987.

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Léon Bakst,42 he was certainly inspired by the latter and, as a good businessman, took advantage of the Ballets Russes enthusiasm in his creations. Both shared an affinity for antiquity, which was “reborn in oriental apparel.”43 With the bias cut, the shape of the body was swathed in flowing fabric as if from a veil. The uncorseted garments à la grèque already existed around 1800. As an expression of bucolic antiquity and sensual Southern atmosphere, this fashion was connected to the name of Mme Récamier (1777–1848). The unpowdered simplicity, which was soon derided as the “naked fashion,” found its continuation with Les Merveilleuses, who dressed in thin muslins and colorful silks in all weathers.44 These “oriental customs” in the gendered and eroticized fashion were revived and turned into performative expression with Bakst and Poiret around 1900. On 24 June 1911, Poiret gave a soirée for 300 selected guests that, with the title La mille et deux nuits (The Thousand and Two Nights), promised to be a sequel to Scheherazade’s nocturnal narratives. His luxurious villa on the Seine’s right bank was furnished with oriental carpets and exotic animals, and Poiret had the champagne served by black servants with bare torsos. Anyone whose costume did not match the evening’s dress code had to don a turban and jupe-culotte or jupe-sultanes, in the style of the harem trousers, from Poiret’s collection.45 The Gesamtkunstwerk, or artistic synthesis, of clothing, interiors, sounds, scents, and dances served as a backdrop for Poiret to stage himself as a “sultan of fashion.” A comparison of Poiret’s evening dress design on the theme of Salomé from 1914 (see fig. 7) with Bakst’s costume (see fig. 3) reveals the essential difference between the stages of the theater and of fashion, whose boundaries were nevertheless frequently blurred. Poiret’s designs dressed; Bakst’s undressed. They worked with different textiles, with Poiret’s fashion – although tailored softly and revealingly – generally not reaching the ultimate in motion and transparency. Bakst’s Salomé designs46 brought a prosperous Israel to life and ornamented the body with jewels, transparent silk garments, and veils. Poiret’s design, which appeared in Lucien Vogel’s fashion magazine, Gazette du Bon Ton,47 joined the 42 Poiret rather refers to his studies at the École spéciale des Langues orientales in Paris and his visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Asian collections in 1908. He claimed that especially Indian miniature paintings and Indian turbans as well as his travel to Northern Africa in 1910 were the source of inspiration. See Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,” 1987, 12. 43 Vinken, Angezogen, 2013, p. 82. 44 Ibid., pp. 80–81. 45 In the mid-nineteenth century, Amalia Bloomer, an early American advocate of women’s rights, already tried to introduce the so-called Bloomers – also known as “Turkish trousers.” 46 For another of Bakst’s Salomé designs, see Spencer, Leon Bakst, 1995, p. 155 (fig. 234). 47 “Salomé. Robe du soir de Paul Poiret,” drawn by Sim[one] A. Puget, Gazette du Bon Ton 2.3 (Mars 1914), plate 28. See Spencer, Leon Bakst, 1995, p. 179, who claims it was designed for Ida Rubinstein.



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ranks of trendsetting leisure wear from Parisian fashion houses for wealthy customers. The veil motif is transposed into the fall of the folds in the half-transparent skirt and the body jewelry into the ornamentation of the strapless top, with the effect appearing detached from the oriental semantic. With Bakst, on the other hand, one sees an attempt to integrate the veil into modernist design. In his dress “Dione” from 1913 (see fig. 8), a hybrid creation of oriental, ancient, and Art Nouveau elements, geometric and large-patterned ornaments in the encompassing veil form a unity and recall the Rubinstein study from 1912. This actually was a preparatory sketch for her costume for the role of Helen of Sparta in the eponymous ballet based on Emile Verhaeren’s play and staged at the Théâtre du Chatelet in May of the same year. It was also in Bakst’s case that only the stylized body from the dance stage could approximate the ideal of absolute nudity, which, like his well-known nudes The Pink Sultana (1914) and The Yellow Sultana (1916), intimate the mysterious “Origin of the World.” Seen in this way, the dance stage embodied for Bakst a transitional space between everyday life and art, between the secular and the sacred. This proved effective in irritating and influencing the reigning vestimentary order.

Fig. 7: Robe du soir “Salomé” created by Paul Poiret, 1914

Fig. 8: Modern dress “Dione” created by Léon Bakst, 1910

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In Poiret’s collection, the veil played no essential role, and remained – as in the theatrical space of his oriental soirée – primarily an accessory in the hands of the performing dancer.48 He did, however, create a voluptuous female fashion, which had the turban with feather as its trademark (for the man as well).49 The turban, however, would be displaced from the center of the fashion debate (which at its core was a gender debate) by pastel-colored harem trousers in lightweight fabrics. Harem trousers became the epitome of lascivious intimacy within the urban space. They were a subtle provocation to the gender order. Trousers, which women had been barred from wearing by decree since the French Revolution,50 called into question the strict middle-class gender order with its separation of femininity and masculinity. As a result, it was initially only possible to advertise the harem trousers by highlighting their use in the domestic sphere. In the oriental borrowings, the antagonism between concepts of body and design within modernism takes effect, as is evident in the antinomies of masculine/feminine, active/passive, work/leisure, production/consumption, West/ East, and so forth.51 The relationship between fashion and life is not purely reciprocal. The physical, decorative, and individualistic lifestyle with its inspirations from oriental interiors was diametrically opposed to the functional uniform clothing of the middle-class public sphere. From its very beginning, this “fashion after the fashion” embodied a new dandyism, femininity, sexual difference, individuality, and hybridity of styles.52 The oriental turn in fashion and lifestyle which, in addition to the new materiality in interior design, also encompassed the imag-

48 The Russian ballerina Natasha Trukhanova (1885–1956) performed a dance with a veil during the soirée, see “Une fête persane chez un grand couturier,” 1911. There are several prominent exceptions among Poiret’s creations focusing on the veil: “Albertine la Femme-Liane” (1910), designed after the model of a harem women; this motif was taken for a decorative collectible plate of the Women of the Century series by Henri D’Arceau-Limoges in 1976. In 1914, Poiret presented an evening cape named after Greek mythology “Danaé,” a figure that had some impact on the discussion and construction of gender and sexuality in modernism. For his creation, Poiret chose the signal color red and black lining. Furthermore, he added an oversized veil held in the hand vertically like an instrument assuming a hook-like shape. See “Cape du soir de Paul Poiret,” drawn by Charles Martin, in Gazette du Bon Ton 2.5 (Mai 1914), plate 47. 49 It should, however, be noted that in Christian orientalist art, as for instance in the works of Rembrandt, the turban played an important role in the representation of the biblical Jews. See Kalmar, “Jesus did not wear a Turban,” 2005. 50 It was only in 2013 when France finally repealed the law dating from 1799 which banned women from wearing trousers in public. 51 See Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,” 1987; Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism, 2013, pp. 136–146 (chapter “Couture, Art and Costume: From Poiret to the Ballets Russes”). 52 See Vinken, Mode nach der Mode, 1993.



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ined eroticism and otherness of the evening parties thus represented a position which defied the contemporary middle-class (vestimentary) order. The development of the European haute couture orientale, which Bakst and Poiret essentially helped to support, coincided with the deterioration of the political situation in orientalized Southern Europe after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a situation that subsequently escalated into the Balkan Wars, the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne in Sarajevo, and eventually the First World War. Against this background, the oriental borrowing in the arts may have been a sign of sympathetic curiosity – the identification, as previously observed, with the cultural “Other”, or a flight from reality into an imaginary, intermediate world. Seen through a psychoanalytic lens, the new theatrical orientalism in dance and design also reacted to the emerging obsessions and visions that mirrored the darker sides of Europe’s subconscious which was theatrically unfolded on contemporary artistic, cultural, and political stages. In view of the fashion discourse of the Enlightenment after Rousseau, which perceived Paris as a harem, and the modern social order, which sought to free itself from the tyranny of feminine-oriental, submissive fashion,53 the veil (garb) takes on the function of a red flag in the middle-class arena. A xenophobic reaction was inevitable. It was directed collectively against the “Other,” the oriental in modernism, which ran counter to the natural gender and affected women, artists, dandies, and transsexuals. The fact that European-Jewish participants, in particular, explicitly availed themselves of the visual codes of orientalism and antiquity in choosing the veil and harem fashion, suggests a vestimentary practice of over-identification, a veiled revolt against antisemitic discourse, which was entangled with orientalism.54 Fashion is ultimately always mirror and mask of society.55 With Bakst and Poiret’s successors, such as the fashion designers Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Pauline Adam de la Bruyère, elegant and practical head coverings would become fit for the salon as well as for every day use. Headwear seen on the covers of fashion magazines from Paris to New York consistently recalled modernism’s iconic creations.56 And the art patrons and couturiers once again brought the imagined glamour of the orient back into the ballrooms of high society, for instance in 1951, with the Bal oriental hosted by the eccentric art collector and interior designer Carlos de Beistegui. In 1956, Alexis de Redé put on a 53 See Vinken, Angezogen, 2013, p. 103. 54 For the response of European Jewry to contemporary anti-Jewish orientalism, including the romanticizing the Orient, see Kalmar/Penslar, “An Introduction,” 2005, p. xviii. 55 For the ambivalence of fashion, see Simmel, “Philosophie der Mode,” 1905, 26. 56 An example of this is Sophia Loren’s cover picture of Vogue magazine (United Kingdom, July 1965), in which she wears an opulent turban reminiscent of Poiret.

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comparable event, the Bal de Tête, for which Yves Saint Laurent, at the time still an unknown Dior assistant, created the head glamour à l’oriental. Its ongoing reinterpretation in the form of turbans, head scarves, and veils would sustain it as a focus in his collections right up to the time of his death. Like other fashion designers, he also melded two worlds – by combining the oriental veil with the continental European headscarf tradition. As a trendy accessory, scarves and veils of every size and shape – whether knotted on the forehead, under the chin, or behind the neck, as well as fabrics wrapped several times around the head into a turban – increasingly lost their social, ethnic, geographic, and religious designation to become an expression of the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century.

Hijabising: Contemporary Veil Art and Performance Around the turn of the last millennium, the veil has once again become a focal point in art and fashion discourses. However, aesthetic modernism’s general Eurocentric, folkloric curiosity has been replaced with a discussion driven by questions of religion and migration culture and has induced the artistic statement based on the appropriation of the oriental veil. Although, or perhaps precisely because, the creations are also sewn of opaque fabrics and similar in design to traditional Islamic clothing (the abaya, baltu, çarşaf, tschador, burka, hijab, khimar, alamira, niqab, and so forth), the focus continues to be the tension between veiling and nudity. What does this appropriation of vestimentary codes and the recoding of the veil (as ornament, instrument, or demarcation) mean in today’s pluralized and globalised culture? As the following examples show, the fashion world and art activism influence each other and alter the form of clothing in similar ways, although their intentions and statements can be quite heterogeneous. In 1996, the London designer and conceptual artist Hussein Chalayan of Turkish Cypriot background (b. 1970) caused a furor with his show Between. A procession of young models appeared on the catwalk: the first was fully veiled and the following women’s abayas were ever shorter: knee length, mini, to the waist (exposing the pubic area), to the shoulders, shoulder-length (revealing the breasts as well), with the face covered throughout by a niqab. The last model appeared completely nude, except for a golden mask, which is often worn with the black abaya.57 For Chalayan, who grew up along the demarcation line between the Greek Christian and Turkish Muslim worlds, this sampling oscil57 See Quin, “A Note: Hussein Chalayan, Fashion and Technology,” 2002.



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lating between nature and culture represents concealment and presentation, protection and disclosure, as well as the constant readiness for fight or flight. Between may have inspired the veil-minis of the Niqabitches.

Fig. 9-10: Tanja Ostojić: “Integration Impossible?” lecture-performance, 2005

Using veiling and disrobement, Tanja Ostojić (b. 1972), a performance and interdisciplinary artist born in Belgrade and now living in Berlin, grapples with the European Union policy of inclusion and exclusion from a feminist perspective. Her art work recontextualises and reformulates migration and its representational politics, especially through bodily experience. Herself a migrant, she exposes her body in various, often discriminative situations of urban and political nomadism – naked, shaven, veiled, and masked – as one way to examine social configurations and relations of power.58 In her 2005 performance “Integration Impossible” within the framework of the exhibition Prologue: New Feminism, New Europe in Manchester, she traveled through the city to the auditorium dressed in a military burka, which she then removed in the course of the lecture, to reveal herself as a red-masked femme fatale (see figs. 9 and 10).59 This vestimentary transformation, a repetition of erotic phantasms, questioned the survival strategies of and the expectations toward migrants from Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe who made their way 58 See Grižinić/Ostojić (eds.), Integration Impossible?, 2009. 59 Ibid., pp. 107–115.

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to the West after Europe’s “east expansion.” The burka’s military fabric connoted the crossing of the demarcation line as a terrorist act by “the Other.” Also in 2005, Ostojić und David Rych’s photographic work known under the title EU-Panties challenges prevailing orientalism and its construction of female passivity. It shows Ostojić in the pose of the torso in Gustave Courbet’s painting, L’origine du monde (1866), but wearing underwear displaying the European Union’s symbol of a circle of stars. Courbet painted the nude for the Turkish diplomat Halil Şerif Pascha’s (1831–1871) private erotic art collection, which also included The Turkish Bath, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1862). The collection was sold in 1868 and Courbet’s painting, locked away behind a decorative wooden construction, was not discovered until the end of the nineteenth century. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who last owned it, had a moveable landscape painting mounted in front of the canvas, so that the naturalistically painted female groin could be covered and uncovered. Ostojić, the “foreign woman” from the Balkans – an area, which represents the inner orient and suppressed “unconscious of Europe”60 – refers with her erotic gesture to these mutual processes of appropriation as well as to the figure of desire and the dark zones of the European self-image which seem to perpetuate themselves in current gender and migration discourse.61 Art’s ironic accessment of the veil comes into view in Europe especially in those areas of (public) perception where distortion has already occurred. This has been inspired by artistic nomads between the orient and occident through the use of veil art, as is evident in the photographic work of exile, Iranian Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), who came to the United States as a 17-year old and now lives in New York; of Boushra Almutawakel (b. 1969), who returned to her native Yemen after studying in the United States; and of Parastou Forouhar (b. 1962) from Teheran who has lived in Germany since 1991. In their veil works, these artists portray the political object in an aesthetic light – as insiders – if also at a varying spatial and temporal distance. Vestimentary, fashion-related aspects, however, 60 Based on a close reading of Sigmund Freud’s references to the Balkans, the Slovene Lacanian scholars Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek argue that the European unconscious is structured like the Balkans, and in the otherness of the Balkans the European disguises the “stranger in itself,” Žižek, The Parallax View, 2006, p. 377. In 2001, Žižek himself posed like a patient of Freud on a couch wrapped in oriental rugs with a copy of Courbet’s L’origine du monde (1866) hanging on the cabin wall. For this concept and the mechanism of sublimation, see Zimmermann, “Rituals of (Un)veiling,” 2008. 61 The photograph was selected for a poster campain to publicly promote Austria’s presidency of the Council of the European Union and the EU’s Eastern expansion. A scandal ensued when the artwork was denounced by jounalists and politicians as pornographic. The poster was subsequently withdrawn.



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seem to retreat into the background. The veil garment informs the majority of the portraits, appearing in seriality as a precarious permutation of fashions (political ones as well). The photographic works represent the vestimentary orders as aesthetic performative figurations of politics and culture, which are inseparably linked to affective, pictorial, and textual orders.62 Their impact is based on the tension between language, body, and power. Neshat, who achieved her international breakthrough with the black and white photo series Women of Allah63 worked with photographs taken during a return visit to her homeland in 1990, 11 years after Iran’s revolution. In the photographs, she is seen in a tschador with a weapon; the non-covered portions are like a transparent ornamental veil, inscribed with Persian calligraphy, including poems by contemporary Iranian feminists. The calligraphy reveals ancient Persian culture, which has been reshaped by restrictive Iranian culture. In addition, Neshat translates the illustrated visual foreignness into an internationally compatible language, as is seen, for instance, in the innocently erotic gesture of a hand touching the lips (a Man Ray citation).64 The words and gestures of the revealed parts of the body (face, eyes, and hands) mark the woman as an active social force. The weapon makes the title ambivalent and shows the woman as both a defender of Allah (embodying absolute obedience) and a defender of her own private sphere in public life (canceling out the image of the veiled woman as an object without will). In this way, the complex “body writing pictures” emphasize the conflict between femininity and violence, between the readiness to defend and defenselessness, between poetry and daily reality. In her large-format photographs, Almutawakel addresses, among other things, changes in the Yemeni dress code that followed unification in 1990 – including the introduction of the niqab from the Gulf region – as conservative regulations instituted from outside. In Mother, Daughter, and Doll, three subjects are photographed as they are veiled step by step, with the niqab first replacing the hijab and the baltu (Yemeni: ‘long coat,’ similar to the abaya), the outer wear, until finally all visible skin is covered. In the eighth frame, the threesome disappears completely under a large black veil. Her work What if also provokes with its representation of a Yemeni couple’s hypothetical gender exchange. The first image shows a man dressed traditionally in white linen and shawl sitting next 62 For this terminology, inspired by Michel Foucault and developed at the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) Berlin, see Treml, “Einleitung,” 2013, pp. 23–32. 63 As in 2005, in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, works from this series are usually part of Neshat’s solo exhibitions. 64 See Mameghanian-Prenzlow, “Zwischen Wort und Bild,” 2006, pp.  104–105. See also von Rosen, “Verschleierungen,” 2005.

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to a woman veiled in the strict conventional manner. In the following five photographs, she appears ever more liberally dressed, first without the niqab, then without a head scarf, and finally without the baltu – in a dark dress with traditional patterns and ornaments. The man, on the other hand, is successively covered, until his white garment and head vanish entirely beneath the full veil. Many of her photographs are not exhibited in Yemen because the deconstructive perspective of veiling and unveiling bodies would be exposed to twofold criticism: the depiction of the female body and the scrutiny of the veil. Almutawakel, however, does not even call the covering of the head as such into question and has directed her work at Western audiences all along, in hopes of breaching secular veil stereotypes.65 The artist Parastou Forouhar also addressed the gender question in Blind Spot and Behnam,66 two series of black and white photographs from 2000. Viewed up close, the aesthetically beautiful shape with its formal veil arrangement of poses and fabric folds disintegrates. Instead of a face, an ambivalent emptiness is visible. The viewer sees only the back of a male head, showing the stubble of hair, with the face and body completely covered in a black-in-black, flowered tschador. Displayed against an empty, abstract white space, the veiled figures in prayer poses deconstruct the perception of veils distorted by orientalism, as well as by 9/11.67 Islamism fomented collective fears in Europe; full-body veiling was increasingly perceived as a vestimentary sign of terrorism. Corresponding debates and bans, however, have only succeeded in initiating a fashion trend characterized by exoticism and pluralism – along the lines of the Niqabitches.68 “Hijabizing” now emerges as a performative technique of alienation which produces a vestimentary in-between in the discussion surrounding religious-cultural and political debates, as well as fashion discourse. This also applies, in particular, where such an involvement is denied, as in the case of “Princess Hijab,” an anonymous, female street-artist, who “hijabizes” scantily clad advertising posters with graf65 Also, if figures of the veil do not exoticize, they run the risk to reproduce orientalist stereotypes, see Alviso-Marino, “Boushra Almutawakel,” 2010. 66 See Forouhar, Werke. 67 For Forouhar’s artistic involvement with mechanisms of perception and visual strategies of representation of the oriental in occidental mass media, drawing on veils, see Karentzos, “Unterscheiden des Unterscheidens: Ironische Techniken in der Kunst Parastou Forouhars.” In 2003, a personal exhibition titled Thousand and one day was shown in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. 68 To name only two examples which have to be taken as immediate reactions of fashion designers to the burka ban in France: At Paris Fashion Week in Spring 2011, Hussein Chalayan opened his show with refreshingly irritating burka-alike cloths over the model’s heads, and Marithé & François Girbaud presented models fashioned in dresses above the knee but masked in sheer veils.



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fiti. This unconventional confrontation with concepts of visibility in today’s fashion and consumer society illustrates quite graphically the impact of oriental foreign objects. In Western, non-veiling societies, a veil draws far more attention to itself than the absence of a veil – and the hijabized objects have a much higher visibility than standard advertising techniques.69 This is strengthened even more by the threat alluded to by the black-masked visages. The artist’s own masking adds a pinch of subversive terrorism to the underground art action. Today’s “oriental” subject is another, but equally despotic one. The veil in fashion also bridges the gap between East and West in other ways when, for example, the tschador is declared the ultimate piece of black garb or a design for a male burka appears. In a project by Farhad Moshiri (b. 1963, studied in California) and Shirin Aliabadi (b. 1973, studied in Paris) with the title “Every Woman has one: that perfect, goes with anything number that turns out to be the ultimate weapon in her fashion arsenal,” the West’s “little black dress” is transformed into the East’s revered black get-up. The same reasons listed under “why I love my little black dress” apply to the Eastern garment, from figure-accentuating and confidence-building to inner release, safety, and a perfect heirloom.70 This not only plays with the cultural semantics of the veil, but also frees the garment from moral and religious affects. The second tendency can be observed in the work of Marije de Haan, whose ready-to-wear collection of veil fashions for men won the Lichting Prize for Best Graduate in Amsterdam in 2010.71 De Haan’s crossdressing picks up on the concept of oriental-female fashion. The male models appear feminine in the shirts with integrated head and face veils or veiling wraps. At the same time, the head apparel, which covers even the eyes, appears to be an ironic masking of identity. Against the background of the Dutch government’s 2012 ban prohibiting women from wearing full-body veils in public, the catwalk thus becomes the site of a subversive vestimentary response to an official dress policy. 69 See Krahe, “Spraydosen-Terroristin: Schleierhaft.” See also the street-artist’s statements about herself in “Princess Hijab’s ‘veiling art.’” On the variety of meanings of the veil in the different contexts of today’s global everyday and pop culture (advertising, erotica, arts, politics, military) see Shirazi, The Veil Unveiled, 2001. 70 The banners read: “It makes my figure the main attraction,” “This rock-on-roll dress gives me confidence,” “It releases my inner diva,” “This ‘safety outfit’ works for every occasion,” “It goes beyond pregnancy,” “It’s the perfect emergency dress,” “It’s an heirloom.” Printed in Bidoun Magazine. Art and Culture from the Middle East, from the project on Freedom is boring, cencorship is fun. The work was probably inspired by Marie Claire (US, January 2003), 62. 71 De Haan graduated from die Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague in 2010. Her burka collection is documented on youtube, see Myshko, “Marije De Haan @ Lichting 2010 – AIFW s/s 2011.” The examination of the burka is an inspiration for her fashion design to the present day.

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Hijabizing – more fabric than less – is now seen regularly, as a reaction (of solidarity, identification, or scrutiny) of fashion designers and conceptual artists to political othering in general. The veil is not automatically an expression of a phobia or philia of an “Other” situated beyond culturally marked borders, as the case of Princess Hijab clearly illustrates. Most of these examples confirm that hijabizing tends to be at odds with displayed nudity.72 This is not comparable with modernism’s veiled transparency, which highlighted the female body as fetish, and is only, if at all, still to be found in popular culture. Today’s nudity is more direct and, like veiling, more aggressive with regard to women’s role in the constellation body-gender-sexuality-power-politics, regardless of the shift of ressentiments from the racist to the religious. Material culture since 1900 is an ambivalent indication of this. As a characteristic of a distinctive style of clothing, the veil is predestined for a (temporary) self-othering, which can serve as a subversive over-identification with the role of the oriental subject. As a vestimentary symbol, it marks a variable, intermediate space, which is constantly re-(de)-constructing itself. Those fashion creations that constructively address Euro-American fashion orientalism (counter-orientalism) regularly challenge the perceived dichotomy of a sexually connoted, feminine-passive orient and a masculine-active West.73 Supported by the performative significance of the “oriental” veil and the female subject (of the active body) acting with it, European veil fashion has been able in a century of exponential proliferation to transform into a performance art manifesting the reciprocity between politics and aesthetics in a manner that is sophisticated and the reverse of othering.

72 In European fashion, as for instance in the Maison Martin Margiela spring-summer 2007 ready-to-wear collection, nudity is constructed by using skin- or flesh-colored cloths. This makes the erotic body appear rather prosthetic-plastic. See Vinken, Angezogen, 2013, pp. 225–235. In the Middle East, the spectrum of provoking artistic stagings of nakedness ranges from the uncovered head in Almutawakel’s portraitures to the performative self-exposure of the Egyptian blogger Alia Magda Elmahdy who posted nude photographs of herself. For experimental forms of public nudity, see Sarah Dornhof in this volume. In the Middle East, there are not only tensions in the vestimentary/discursive order in Islamic cultures; Israel faces another extreme reaction to the secular society. A number of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, known as the Haredi burqa sect, started to dress in full-body veils, also called Frumka, a wordplay on “frum” (Yiddish for devout) and “burqa.” 73 See Narumi, “Fashion orientalism and the limits of counter culture,” 2000, 313.



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List of illustrations and acknowledgements Fig. 1:

Leon Bakst: Study of Ida Rubinstein as Helen, from the programme for Hélène de Sparte, 1912. In Charles Spencer. Leon Bakst and the Ballets Russes, 147. London: Academy Editions, 1995. Fig. 2: Armen Ohanian performing in veil costume, drawn by Valentine Gross. Gazette du Bon Ton. 2.3. (Mars 1914): 80 Lev Bakst: The dance of the seven veils. Costume design for Salomé of Oscar Wilde’s Fig. 3: play Salomé, 1908. In Léon Bakst. Bühnenbild- und Kostümentwürfe, Buchgrafik, Malerei und Grafik, transl. Gennadi Kagan. Irina Prushan and Sergej Djatschenko (eds.), s. p. (fig. 13). Leningrad: Aurora-Kunstverlag, 1986. Lev Bakst: Costume design for the “Jewish dance” in blue and gold for the ballet Fig. 4: Cléopâtre, 1910. Collection of Nina and Nikita D. Lobanov-Rostovsky, London (last accessed March 1, 2014), http://www.artsait.ru/foto.php?art=b/bakst/img/34. Jean Théophile Geiser: La danse, Alger, No. 41, motif for postcard, about 1905 (last Fig. 5: accessed March 1, 2014), http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Geiser_-_41_-_La_danse.jpg. Léon Bakst: Costume for Schéhérazade, 1910, in: Charles Spencer. Leon Bakst and Fig. 6: the Ballets Russes, 147. London: Academy Editions, 1995. Robe du soir “Salomé” designed by Paul Poiret, drawn by Sim[one] A. Puget. Gazette Fig. 7: du Bon Ton 2.3 (Mars 1914): plate 28. Modern dress “Dione” designed by Léon Bakst, 1910, The Bridgeman Art Library, In Fig. 8: Cally Blackman. 100 Years of Fashion Illustration, 18. London: Lourence King Publishing, 2007. Fig. 9–10: Tanja Ostojić: “Integration Impossible?,” performed for the first time at “Prologue: New Feminism, New Europe,” Manchester 2005. Photo: John Jordan. In Integration impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, Marina Grižinić and Tanja Ostojić (eds.), 112–113, Berlin: Argobooks, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

Sarah Dornhof

Embodied Protest Nakedness and the Partition of Gazes

Introduction In the early twenty-first century, images of the female body retain a symbolic status that is vehemently contested when determining cultural policies and demarcations. In debates about whether Islam has a place within secular, postChristian Europe, considerable significance is attached to the public visibility of women. The Muslim headscarf and niqab are objects of continuing legal debate, cultural border discourse, and identity claims in European countries. In Muslim countries, meanwhile, the veiled body and woman’s sexuality have acquired a new importance in discourses of political culture and identity. The recent changes associated with the Arab Spring have moved this dynamic in different directions, both claiming and challenging women’s presence in political public spheres. The contested visibility of women’s bodies, including perceptions of the veil, is inscribed within the history of colonial encounters, where the female body has been a site of struggle over dominance, subjection, and subversion. Along with a critique of sexual permissiveness among Western women, an erotic or sexual gaze on Muslim women, and the idea that they must be liberated from religious and cultural oppression have been perpetual themes in the history of colonial and postcolonial encounter.1 Acts of veiling and unveiling are visible moments in this entangled tale of Europe and its others, where veiled and unveiled women have become symbolic figures and cultural tropes.2 This chapter considers challenges to these figures and tropes that have taken the form of artistic citation, parody, and irony during the recent Arab uprisings. It focuses on images of naked Arab women that have circulated widely in social media and unleashed fierce debate about women’s portrayal within Arab revolts. With their embodied protest, a number of young Arab women have opened a new 1 See Dennerlein, Frietsch, Steffen, Verschleierter Orient – Entschleierter Okzident?, 2012, p. 12. 2 This can be observed in Orientalist paintings from the nineteenth century until today (see Frübis, “Orientalismus re-visited,” 2012; Lanwerd, “Religiöse Differenz,” 2012), as well as in the politics of forced and public unveilings of women, e.g. in Algeria under colonial rule, and in the symbolic representation of Afghan women removing their burqa following NATO interventions since 2001 (see, e.g., Wenk, “Verschleiern und Entschleiern,” 2012; Mahmood and Hirschkind, “Feminism, the Taliban, and politics of counter-insurgency,” 2002).



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chapter in a crossed history of women’s self-unveiling which can be read as a feminist challenge to gender identities across the West-East divide. In the Mediterranean region, there are ancient examples of women protesting through performances of unveiling,3 and there were major expressions of defiance in politics and performance art around 1900, when European and North American dancers and audiences were overcome with Salomania.4 At that time, European debates about performances of unveiling were responses to a historical context of colonial orientalism, and the veiled female body was conceived as an imaginary “Inner Orient,”5 highly ambivalent in terms of race, sexuality, and gender. Not only did orientalist and antisemitic images blend in fantasies about the secrecy of the veil; gender and sexual differences were similarly confused and undermined.6 When young women uncovered themselves during the recent Arab uprisings, they did so in a quite different context from those performances of unveiling in Europe around 1900, which were associated by both performers and spectators with orientalist fantasies of excessive, homoerotic, threatening, or destructive sexuality. The nude images published by the Egyptian student Aliaa Elmahdy in her blog “A Rebel’s Diary” during the fall of 2011, like those posted by the Tunisian activist Amina Tyler (Sboui) on her Facebook page in the spring of 2013, are also transgressions of dominant gender and sexual norms. Here too, images and fantasies of the other are appropriated and embodied in a manner that generates ambiguities and confuses cultural demarcations. In the pictures by the young Egyptian and Tunisian, however, there is no ironic appropriation of orientalist stereotypes. Instead, they latch on to attributes, images, and ways of seeing associated with Western emancipation and freedom. They do not play upon the veil, its mysteries or ambiguity. Rather, Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler employ their nakedness to protest against normative gender images and sexual morality

3 See Gsell, Die Bedeutung der Baubo, 2001. 4 Salomania refers to the various performances of Salome and her dance of veils. In the perception of Jewish avant-garde artists, such as Ida Rubenstein or Sarah Bernhardt, and imagined Jewish women, such as Maud Allan or Mata Hari, antisemitic imaginaries merged with a new form of British orientalism in which unveiling figured as a performance of female sexual agency and threatening desire, see Brunotte, “Unveiling Salome 1900,” 2012, p. 98; and the chapters by Brunotte and Petzer in this volume. 5 See Rohde, “The Orient Within,” 2009. The “Orient within” does not refer to the oriental “other,” but rather to an imaginary that threatens identity politics, to “an ambivalent and fluid third element that confounded the binary order of both ethnic German nationalism and patriarchy, as a threatening hybrid entity that endangered the vitality of the nation at large” (p. 11). 6 See Showalter, “Sexual Anarchy,” 1990, pp. 150–152; Brunotte “Unveiling Salome 1900,” 2012, pp. 102–103; Garber, Vested Interests, 1991, pp. 336–342; Glenn, Female Spectacle, 2002.

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in their own countries and produce new ambiguity about liberal representations of women’s bodies. Aliaa Elmahdy, dressed in nothing but black-speckled stockings and red ballerina pumps, a red flower in her loose hair, looks straight at the viewer. In her blog, under the heading “Nude Art,” she refers to this picture and others as “echoing screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy.”7 In March 2013 Amina Tyler published a nude image depicting her naked from the waist up. Written across her body in Arabic is: “My body is my own and not the source of anyone’s honor”. She posted this picture on her Facebook page, which she declared a “Femen – Tunisia fan page” in support of the feminist (or self-professed “sextremist”) movement founded in Ukraine in 2008, which has made sensational topless spectacles the hallmark of its political protests. Only a few months later, Amina Tyler revoked this self-declared association with Femen (then under her real name of Amina Sboui), accusing the movement of Islamophobia and dubious financial support from Israel. It is not only the reversal of the gaze, or the new political and cultural context, that distinguishes the way nakedness has been staged during the Arab uprisings from the orientalist performances of European dancers at the turn of the last century. Aliaa Elmahdy’s blog and Amina Tyler’s Facebook pictures attracted millions of hits and wide-ranging comments, and they were reproduced through many other channels: in Western newspapers, worldwide solidarity campaigns, and Arab graffiti art. Both women received verbal abuse and threats, while some sections of the Arab protest movement, like the April 6 Movement in Egypt, distanced themselves from these actions, which they felt undermined the revolutionary agenda. Western media responded positively, especially to Aliaa Elmahdy’s pictures in fall 2011, and described the campaign as courageous, if somewhat naïve.8 After the young women began to suffer verbal abuse and threats, there were many expressions of solidarity,9 which increased when Amina Tyler was arrested in Tunisia in May 2013. My aim is to place the embodied protests by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler within their specific contexts, which likewise conditioned the spectrum of reactions. Within the recent political changes known as the “Arab Spring,” the nude images posted by these young women constitute a protest against gender and sexual norms in those countries. They may also express criticism of the gender 7 Elmahdy, “A Rebel’s Diary,” Internet Blog: http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.de, October 23, 2011. 8 See for example Sarkis, “Ohnmächtiger Schrei nach Freiheit,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, November 24, 2011. 9 See for example Gierke, “Unterstützung für ägyptische Bloggerin,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 21, 2011.



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imagery used by the revolutionary protest movement itself, thereby expanding both its agenda and its visual repertoire. Within the framework of these uprisings, amid social media and global chat forums, the nudes by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler compete with other images of protest to represent the political changes and the cultural and social character of the uprisings. The nude photographs by these two women are not, however, confined to an Egyptian or Tunisian setting. In addition to picking up Western imagery of emancipation and freedom, Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler latch onto a feminist discourse that has been very much subject to postcolonial criticism because of its entanglement with colonial and imperial practices. This discourse is founded on a polarity between, on the one hand, gender equality and sexual liberty in Western democracies and, on the other, gender inequality and repressive sexual morality in Muslim countries. This historical discourse is reflected in various symbolic visualizations of the naked female body, from the forced unveiling of Algerian women by a colonial power10 to the most recent campaigns by Femen in solidarity with Muslim women.11 By disassociating itself culturally from Islam, this discourse sets up a feminist subject, predicated on secular views of the body and liberal ideas of freedom12 and on the imperative to release women from normative coercion and from repression exercised by the state and by patriarchy. Today Femen offers a new manifestation of this discourse, symbolized through the naked female body itself. Its feminist protest is directed against the coercive pressure of all religions, but also against patriarchal and capitalist structures which subjugate the female body as a fetish, an item of property or a commodity. The baring of breasts by Femen activists can be viewed as symbolic acts of liberation in defiance of such coercion. Their naked bodies are rebellious in the sense that they cannot be controlled as bodies belonging symbolically to the community or as commodities. With their self-determined acts of aggres-

10 In “Algeria Unveiled,” 1967, Frantz Fanon shows how the veil is connected to patriarchal structures as well as to colonial fantasies of power. But the veil was also transformed into a means of camouflage and struggle when Algerian women took up revolutionary combat. In a number of situations, the veil allowed women agency and empowerment, yet it always remained bound to patriarchal and colonial power. 11 A similar narrative is found in German literature around the figure of the “schöne Jüdin” (“beautiful Jewess”). The recurrent trope of “rescue” (assimilation) in this case is the narrative of the Jewish daughter who is saved from her despotic Jewish father by marrying a Christian man, see the chapters by Ludewig and Brunotte in this volume. 12 Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting, Liberty Leading the People (La liberté guidant le peuple, 1830), shows how this idea of liberty is embodied by a half-naked woman symbolizing the egalitarian and secular ideals of the French Republic.

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sive undressing,13 targeting enactments of official power or national culture, the Femen activists strip the female body of all clear-cut national, political, economic, and cultural symbolization. This raises questions, however, about the extent to which such protest can be generalized, or rather, what difference cultural and postcolonial settings make to the way the naked body is seen. It would be a mistake to conclude that the naked bodies of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler operate solely within the visual setting of a completely different culture. These nudes cut across the divide between a Western and an Arab context, embodying instead a postcolonial discourse of entangled perspectives. Their pictures entail criticism of both Islamic sexual mores and capitalist commercialization of the body. It is unclear how far these nude photos by Arab women are intended as ironic, playful appropriations of stereotypical Western images of liberty: on the one hand, the pictures appear to be naïve imitations of liberal clichés, while on the other they might be seen as mimicry of the imagery of Western freedom, albeit with a difference that harbors subversive potential. The nudes by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler can hardly be considered in isolation from a historical mesh of feminist and secular ideas, (neo)liberal, imperial politics and (post)colonial structures. And yet there is something unique about them that defies hasty absorption into hegemonic discourse. This resistance is not articulated in the slogans or in the symbolic use of the body, but resides in the individualized protest, the very act of self-exposure. Unlike Femen with its aggressive militancy, the pictures by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler convey a vulnerability and intimacy combined with an aspiration to be seen as political, feminist subjects. Although the imagery is discursively compatible with that of a secular, liberal feminism, there are undertones here of a different take on emancipation that cuts across not only representations of the Arab Spring, but also the discourses of liberal feminism.14 I would prefer, therefore, to situate the nude photography of these young Arab women within a postcolonial visual space which is currently enabling new images of liberty, feminist empowerment, and political subjecthood to emerge. This visual space might be conceived as a space where collective images, discourse formations, and historically informed ways of seeing cross and reflect one another, are appropriated by mimicry, and enter into new visual constella13 Femen activists train physically and mentally for their protests, adding a deliberate aggressive note to their nakedness and slogans. 14 This recalls the historical parallel of performances by Salome and her dance of the veil around 1900, interpreted by avant-garde female artists as an ambivalent play on fantasies of otherness, but also by suffragettes, as clearly ideological, see Brunotte, “Unveiling Salome 1900,” 2012, p. 100.



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tions.15 An additional hallmark of a postcolonial visual space is that any attempt to pinpoint clear-cut power relations, interpretations or ways of seeing things is thwarted and sabotaged by appropriations and counter-images. We might regard the nudes by these young women as an attempt to appropriate the power of interpretation over the visual presence of their bodies and to counter various monopolizations of their visibility. Their nakedness is not simply a symbol of their liberation; they are using their bodies as a protest in order to place the role of gender and sexuality on the agenda in a period of transformations. Quite possibly, their principal aim is to position themselves as subjects of the representation of the female body and of women’s participation in political change in Arab countries, rather than making themselves the objects of other people’s gaze. I will attempt to unravel some of the tangled web of this postcolonial space in which Elmahdy’s and Tyler’s pictures operate, and to highlight their subjective appropriation of the gaze directed at the female body and the way in which, by playing with the erotic, they potentially subvert imagery of the social order and of political participation.

“My body belongs to me” First of all, we must ask how these self-staged nude photographs articulate protest, what they seek to challenge, and in what sense the authors lay claim to political subjecthood and make use of a freedom to achieve that goal. While it may not be easy to nail the precise target of criticism in forms of protest such as this, we can nevertheless deduce that Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler pursue a liberal idea of self-determination and body politics. Amina Tyler formulates this idea explicitly by inscribing on her naked torso, in Arabic, the words: “My body belongs to me and is not someone’s honor.” She thereby confronts a cultural discourse around honor with a likewise culturally coded discourse about the body as an expression of self-determination, as an item of personal property over which the owner freely disposes. The claim to self-determination is not merely expressed in the words on her body, but also in the props – short hair, cigarette, book, close-fitting jeans, red lipstick, black eye make-up, bandaged wrist, posture (not fully visible) with legs apart and knees drawn up, and a black backdrop with a sign sprayed in white paint which we cannot quite make out (perhaps an anarchist A). Enactments of 15 This idea of a historical visual space has an affinity with Aby Warburg’s concepts of collective image memory and “pathos formula,” see Warburg, Aby Warburg: Werke in einem Band, 2010; Tom Holert’s notion of “Bildraum,” see Holert, Regieren im Bildraum, 2008; and the idea of “ReSaVoir,” see Bartl/Hoenes/Mühr/Wienand (eds.), Sehen, Macht, Wissen. ReSaVoir, 2011.

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rebellion against sexual norms merge here with erotic enactments. The young woman has turned away from the viewer to look at her book, and this lends her nakedness an intimate rather than a spectacular touch. There is no doubt that the image is set up to provoke, and yet the voyeurism in the viewer’s gaze has also been factored into the arrangement. On a visual level, then, the act of selfexposure is associated both with liberal ideas of self-determination and with a voyeurist regime and erotic game. The Arabic lettering on the body reinforces the polyvalence of this nakedness. For a viewer unable to read Arabic, the meaning of the words is supplied by translation in the relevant media. The Arabic letters add an exotic component, while at the same time drawing on an apparently intelligible aesthetic of protest which Femen is able to deploy universally16. The pictures that Aliaa Elmahdy was already publishing on her blog in October 2011 are not so readily translated into a language of protest and rebellion. The attributes Elmahdy uses – the red flower in her uncovered hair, the speckled stockings and red pumps – tend to imply an artistic gaze that exposes and desires, and the images interwoven here suggest the girlishly natural, erotic, and exotic. Unlike the picture of Amina Tyler, the nude photograph of Aliaa Elmahdy does less to convey a symbolism of rebellion than to uncover the youthful female body as a fetish. On the other hand, the texts in the blog do formulate a language of protest, as the title, “A Rebel’s Diary,” already indicates. Elmahdy’s personal comments turn the nude photos into a protest against the “censoring of our knowledge, expression and sexuality,” into “screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy.” At the same time, the blog has attracted many more comments which respond to her images with anger, threats, or solidarity, or which take up Elmahdy’s invitation to use her blog to share experiences. Under the heading “Society’s pressure on women to make them veil,” we find contributions on veils and oppression. Elmahdy urges other women to document how they discarded their veil17 or to submit their reasons for supporting the uprising of women in the Arab world18. Whereas the written comments speak the political language of oppression and liberation, clearly naming 16 Together with the picture that shows Amina with a cigarette and book, where the script on her body is in Arabic, Amina Tyler also published a second picture of herself on the Femen Facebook page, where the English slogan “Fuck your morals” is written on her naked body. This became one of Femen’s most famous and widely reproduced slogans. 17 Elmahdy wrote in her blog: “Women who were veiled and took off the veil and women who are veiled and want to take off the veil, send me all or some of these items... if you agree to publish them,” http://echoingscreams.blogspot.de/2012/02/societys-pressure-on-women-to-makethem.html (last accessed September 27, 2013). 18 http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.de/2012/10/i-am-with-uprising-of-women-in-arab.html (last accessed September 27, 2013).



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political agents and options, the images articulate a visuality associated more with subordination. Her photos of her own naked body convey a speechlessness and a lack of control over the ways Muslim women are all too rapidly seen in the conflict between Islamist and secular discourses. In both types of discourse, it is essential to control the visibility of the female body and to channel the gaze it attracts into specific directions. The nakedness of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler makes reference to images of oppression and liberation, and at the same time there is an idea of freedom manifested here that resists discursive control. Their acts of self-exposure are ethical appeals rather than gestures of political resistance, moments of positive freedom rather than acts of liberation. In the first analysis, the photographs that Aliaa Elmahdy posted on her blog in October 2011 need to be seen in the context of the elections in Egypt19 and the persistent street protests, as the demonstrators on Tahrir Square lost political influence, and the armed forces used violence to quell them.20 Elmahdy’s images can hardly be disassociated from these political events, which brought the Islamists to power and forced the political presence of women onto the back foot. Within this framework of political change, Elmahdy’s pictures are to be regarded as a protest against the appropriation and objectivization of the female body in religious and political tussles, with both the Islamist and secular camps declaring the protection of women and regulation of the gender order to be pivotal themes of their campaigns. Over time, however, Elmahdy’s blog is dominated increasingly by images which counterpose the naked female body as a symbol of freedom against the veiled body as a symbol of the lack of freedom and of sensuality. Today there are about 50 photographs, most of which reflect this kind of binary symbolism, under the headings “Nude Art,” dated October 23, 2011 (although many were added in the course of 2012), and “Nude Art 2,” dated October 2012. They declare the act of unveiling to be an act of emancipation, equating the veil with coercion.

19 Elmahdy’s blog appeared a few weeks before the first round of elections, when the Islamists (in particular the Muslim Brotherhood, or rather their Freedom and Justice Party, and the Salafist party al-Nur) were to gain a clear parliamentary majority. In March 2011, as a direct result of the revolution, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces announced fresh elections, dissolving the Egyptian People’s Assembly that had emerged from the undemocratic elections of 2010 and appointing a new Cabinet (Sharaf), which resigned before the elections in protest at the violent tactics used against demonstrators by the armed forces. The elections took place between November 28, 2011 and January 28, 2012 and brought Islamist parties to power with 70% of the seats: the Muslim Brothers’ Freedom and Justice Party obtained about half the votes (37.5% and 45.7% of seats), the Salafist party al-Nur took 24.6%. All in all, 15 Islamist parties stood candidates. 2% of the deputies (10) are women, most of them Islamists. 20 From November 2011 the army repeatedly used violent methods to control demonstrations, and the military courts convicted many protestors (without a fair trial).

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Aliaa Elmahdy’s pictures contain a number of quotations from art, and in the light of these her nakedness appears less as an instrument of politicized femininity or an echo of colonial liberation discourse, and more as a manifestation of artistic and cultural portrayals of the female body. Nakedness, in a sense, becomes an art, or an artistic performance of freedom. As a contrast to ideological and religious coercion, to censorship and regulation of the female body, the uncovered body embodies artistic perspectives on womanhood and scope for creative presentation. Elmahdy emphasizes this link between art and corporeality: “the photo is an expression of my being and I see the human body as the best artistic representation of that.”21 These artistic references are not drawn from orientalist nineteenth-century painting, which stages the naked body as a coveted object in the eye of a Western viewer. Rather, there are possible associations here with burlesque performances of self-unveiling by avant-garde dancers, with modern art and postmodern photography, which articulate not only the fetishization of the female body, but also desire, sexuality, and vulnerability, aspects which cannot be directly attributed to a specifically cultural or gendered subject or gaze. Apart from the links to politics and the arts that can be inferred from visual quotations, and from titles such as “Nude Art” and “A Rebel’s Diary,” Elmahdy’s blog addresses themes of creative formulation and subjective speech which do not always seek primarily to articulate political demands. This heterogeneous, often very ill-defined and playful character of the blog complements her images of liberal rebellion and secular liberation, and many viewers may feel that the former undermines the latter. Maya Mikdashi highlights this openness or ambiguity in Elmahdy’s pictures as something that could prompt new debate about sexuality in today’s Egypt: Alia’s picture does not play by the rules, and this is why both liberals and Islamists have condemned her. She is not “waiting” for the “right moment” to bring up bodily rights and sexual rights in post-Mubarak Egypt. […] She is not selling anything, and she is not trying to turn us on. Her nudity is not about sex, but it aims to reinvigorate a conversation about the politics of sex and the uneven ways it is articulated across the fields of gender, capital, and control. She is staring back at us, daring us to look at her and to not turn away. Daring us to have this debate.22

21 Elmahdy in an interview with CNN, quoted in Mourad, “The Naked Bodies of Alia,” 2013. 22 Mikdashi, “Waiting for Alia,” 2011.



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Naked Protest and Critique of Islam In December 2012, a year or more after publishing her first nudes, Aliaa Elmahdy played a leading role in an action by the feminist movement Femen. As with all Femen actions, the protesters appeared naked, scrawled feminist slogans on their naked bodies, and staged a media event. Aliaa Elmahdy protested along with Femen activists outside the Egyptian Embassy in Stockholm against amendments to the Egyptian Constitution which, among other things, curtailed women’s existing rights. The action in Stockholm drew on explicitly anti-religious slogans which the women inscribed on their bodies in English: “Sharia is not a constitution,” “Religion is slavery,” and “No Islamism, yes secularism.” Aliaa Elmahdy had already been criticized for her unquestioning proximity to a neocolonial manifestation of feminism that frames itself in contradistinction to Islam. The criticism was further encouraged by this Femen action outside the Stockholm Embassy. In the Femen context, Aliaa Elmahdy’s nakedness came across as a protest which found its political tongue in secularist, anti-religious slogans. According to an article by Sara Mourad about how the act of unveiling has been altered, in a YouTube clip about the protest in Stockholm: In the video, Alia is no longer a naked Egyptian female body; it is the naked body of an Arab Muslim woman, painted with an anti-Islamic message in English, in an Islamophobic Europe. […] the staged unveiling of Alia, sponsored by her European sisters, bears an unsettling resemblance to the symbolic unveiling of Algerian women by their French sisters in public squares to the cries of “Vive l’Algérie Française!” FEMEN’s call “Muslim women unveil!” is an invitation that is at the same time a prescription for what these women should want. It is this prescriptive tendency that conjoins FEMEN and imperial feminism.23

Through this association with Femen, Elmahdy’s protest assumes a dimension that clearly transcends the Egyptian context and becomes part of a feminist discourse strongly constituted by its repudiation of Islam and the Islamic veil. Even for Femen’s founders, protest against the veil was new and only appeared on their political agenda when they left Ukraine and began operating from Paris. Other actions by the movement attack the commercialization and fetishization of the female body (“Ukraine is not a brothel,” “Heidi Horror Picture Show”), corrupt politics and social injustice (“Poor because of you”), right-wing populism, despotism, and domestic violence. Their naked bodies were primarily a means for focusing attention on certain political issues. In 2012 Femen set up a training center in Paris with support from activists in the French movement Ni putes ni soumises. They demonstrated together on the streets of Paris and by the Eiffel Tower against 23 Mourad, “The Naked Bodies of Alia,” 2013.

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the burqa and in solidarity with Muslim women. The slogans for these actions assume a different character, with the naked body no longer appearing simply as a medium of protest, but as a generalized form of being. Slogans like “Nudity is liberty,” “Naked Truth,” and “Muslim women let’s get naked” mark the change. Amina Tyler, who in March 2013 had styled herself on Facebook as a founder of Femen in Tunisia, distanced herself from the movement in August, accusing it of Islamophobia and dubious (Israeli) donations. These accusations related above all to some images of the many actions organized by Femen in support of Amina Tyler. When, after publishing her first nude photos, Amina was held by her family in a remote place and her whereabouts remained unclear for a while, Femen declared April 4, 2013 a day of international solidarity, to be marked in many cities around the world as “Topless Jihad Day.” Women demonstrated naked from the waist up sporting slogans such as “Free Amina,” “Bare Breasts against Islam,” “No Islamism,” and “Fuck your Morals” – often in front of mosques and Tunisian embassies. Many of these enactments, including one of a praying Muslim with a false beard, a towel as a turban, and a star and crescent painted on naked breasts, were very soon being perceived as racist. In Paris, a flag with the profession of Islamic faith was burned during protests outside a mosque. Since this campaign in April 2013, Femen has been exposed to accusations of Islamophobia. Amina Tyler, who now appears in public under her own name of Amina Sboui, objected to hurtful and insulting images like this. The problem, in her opinion, is not Islam or the participation of Islamists in government, but those structures in Tunisia that discriminate against women.24 The case of Amina Tyler is a clear illustration of how different pictures are perceived when they migrate through different geopolitical spaces and social contexts. When the topic is Arab women, feminist discourse seems to be coupled inextricably with discourse that is critical of Islam, and from a non-Western perspective this is often perceived as imperialist discourse.25 Against this backdrop, criticism of the pictures of “Topless Jihad Day” is not necessarily aimed at racist and Islamophobic depictions so much as at a Western feminism that defines itself in contradistinction to Islam and is frequently experienced as maternalistic.26 24 See Amina Sboui in an interview for the Huffington Post Maghreb, August 20, 2013. 25 Saba Mahmood explores this discursive link between the oppression of women in the Muslim world and the normative secularism of liberal discourse on feminism and democracy by drawing on literary reports by Muslim women of their personal suffering due to misogynist practises regarded as Islamic, “Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror,” 2008. 26 Sara Mourad made this point about the Femen campaign with Aliaa Elmahdy in Stockholm, “The Naked Bodies of Alia,” 2013. It is also reflected in the slogan “Breasts feed revolution,” which three Femen activists from France and Germany inscribed on their bodies when demonstrating outside the Palace of Justice in Tunis following Amina Tyler’s arrest.



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Amina Tyler’s attempt to extract her image from the Femen context was accompanied by a new name – Sboui rather than the English-sounding Tyler – and visual symbols of radicalism: the suggestion of a Molotov cocktail close to the burning cigarette, the flaming red hair, and the pink anarchist emblems over her breast. The English lettering on her naked torso – “We don’t need your dimocracy” [sic!] – evidently targets Western feminists and challenges the universalism of a bare-breasted feminism of the kind Femen represents. Whatever the (Western-backed) ideological thrust of Amina Sboui’s protest, she makes it very clear that she does not intend to be appropriated by a liberal project that is hostile to religion. But there are limits to the extent these pictures of naked protest can be subjected to a one-dimensional critique of a feminism that seems inextricably linked to normative secularism27 and idealized liberalism. Ultimately, the photographs by Amina Tyler/Sboui and Aliaa Elmahdy are exposed to a variety of gazes and perceptions; they circulate in different contexts and are appropriated, quoted, recombined, and expanded in different ways.

Travelling Images What the nudes of Amina Tyler/Sboui and Aliaa Elmahdy are not is an expression of some hegemonic feminist discourse. The pictures do not make it clear what idea of freedom is associated with these naked protests. Sara Mourad talks in the plural of “the naked bodies of Aliaa”28 whose political significance changes over time and space. A naked body does not exist in absolute terms, but needs to be read continually against the background of social norms and conditions of transgression. The pictures by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler/Sboui assume their transgressive character above all in the context of current politics in Egypt and Tunisia, whereas Femen operates on a different political stage. The bare bodies of the Femen women, like those of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui, show how contentious it is, both there and here, for female bodies which cannot be possessed and controlled to be seen in public. They also show how a naked body changes its political meaning, depending on the visual spaces where it appears and the other images with which it competes. First and foremost, the pictures by Elmahdy and Tyler/Sboui acquire their transgressive character in the framework of debates currently being conducted in Arab countries about sexuality and gender politics. As AbuGhazal describes, for many their pictures serve as the epitome of the femi27 Mahmood, “Feminism, Democracy, and Empire,” 2008. 28 Mourad, “The Naked Bodies of Alia,” 2013.

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nist scourge and an expression of the moral crisis it entails. Like Femen activist Inna Shevchenko, AbuGhazal attributes reactions and judgments of this kind to a widespread fear of having to face uncontrolled nakedness: [W]e shouldn’t be really provoked to the extent of denying Alia’s right to do what she needed to do to break free. We must not engage in it if we aren’t planning to deconstruct the attacking choirs and bringing them to face their own demon: their fear of seeing the female body free from their possession. Whatever the arguments are, Islamist or radical leftists, we should be steadfast, this is our body on the line here. These are the times where many of us have a great understanding that the only reason why patriarchy has been reproducing itself is because our bodies haven’t risen up to the challenge, we haven’t radicalized our bodies as much as we have radicalized our minds.29

In response to Aliaa Elmahdy’s pictures, Nicola Pratt sees this kind of radicalization in the context of rival claims to represent womanhood and women’s revolutionary self-empowerment in present-day Egypt.30 In any country, representations and symbolizations of gender and sexual norms play their part in defining the nation and marking historical shifts. There is a particular paradox at present in Egypt, where – since the end of the Mubarak regime – women have increasingly found themselves elbowed out of political life, while images of women and female bodies are in evidence everywhere.31 Aliaa Elmahdy’s pictures are part and parcel of this new, complex visibility for women with its competing images of agency, empowerment, sacrifice, and emancipation. The Western media have contributed in their own way to turning these competing images into an over-simplistic orientalist cliché, presenting the involvement of large numbers of women in the protests as an exception to the normal gender order in Egypt – an exception both in the context of the Mubarak regime and in the context of the organized attacks – more often in the spotlight since 2013 – that have sought to force women out of public life. The way this is often depicted has reactivated orientalist ideas of the Muslim woman as victim – a figure that seems indispensable to “Western” notions of the Arab world.32 The problem with this portrayal, from the standpoint of many women activists, is that the revolutionary empowerment of women is presented as a brief, exceptional episode, which ultimately merely reinforces the discourse of victimization. Culturalizing the violence against women33 ignores the complexity of feminist agency: not only feminist struggles and the achievements of the Mubarak years, 29 AbuGhazal, “Who is afraid of Alia’s Nudity?,” 2011. 30 Pratt, “Egyptian Women,” 2013. 31 See ibid. 32 See ibid. 33 See, for example, Mona Eltahawy’s Foreign Policy article, “Why do they hate us?,” 2012.



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when the secular regime enjoyed the support of the West, but also common struggles during the uprisings since 2011 and the continuing commitment to rights for women, e.g. by opposing organized, politically motivated violence designed to intimidate women.34 Rather than reducing diverse images to a figure of sacrifice from this culturalizing perspective, we might ask how images of women can symbolize political protest or a national idea of womanhood. In this light, we might note a tension between Aliaa Elmahdy’s nudes and other pictures which have attracted widespread attention, such as the video still of the “woman in the blue bra.” This shows a half-naked woman being kicked by soldiers on Tahrir Square and dragged along the ground with her veil wrapped around her head. This image is from a short YouTube clip and has been disseminated all over the world and in every media format. Elmahdy’s blog has a collage consisting of this photograph and her own nude image, setting up a contrast between her own self-uncovering and the way the woman in the blue bra has been forcibly exposed by the soldiers. Whether this collage is intended as an indictment or an expression of solidarity or simply as a contrast, it situates the image showing the woman in the blue bra as a victim within a new framework of significance and possibly also attaches new meaning to her naked condition. By the same token, Aliaa Elmahdy’s image is placed in new frameworks of significance when, for example, it is juxtaposed in a piece of wall graffiti with an image of Samira Ibrahim. Samira Ibrahim acquired a name for herself when she appeared on YouTube talking about the so-called “virginity tests” to which female demonstrators were being subjected in Egypt’s military prisons. The broad section of the public to whom Samira Ibrahim reached out with her video helped to ensure that this form of sexual violence was ultimately condemned by the courts. The image of Samira Ibrahim is a positive one of a young woman in a headscarf who denounces sexual violence, indicts those responsible and refuses to be removed from the political arena. For many, her picture symbolizes courage and resistance in the face of military coercion, without transgressing any normative orders. Unlike Aliaa Elmahdy, Samira Ibrahim is seen by many as representing a role for women that is largely compatible with Islamic and traditional Egyptian values. In the eyes of many Egyptian men and women, Elmahdy’s violations of sexual norms go too far. In the graffiti, she contrasts negatively with Samira Ibrahim, who fought her victimization on “political terrain” without violating sexual norms.35 34 See Pratt, “Egyptian Women,” 2013. 35 See ibid.

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Western media have deployed the contrast between these two images in the opposite sense. They have been able to translate Aliaa Elmahdy’s protest – not least because of her close, continuing links with Femen – into a universal discourse of liberal self-determination, where her wilful act of exposure is often interpreted as a symbolic rebuttal of Islam. Although Samira Ibrahim has been widely praised for her courage, she hardly supplies Western media with an enduring symbol of the fight for women’s rights in today’s Egypt, and is associated with her one-off act of publicizing the “virginity tests.”36 These migrations, meetings and mutual modifications to images illustrate how an embodied protest against sexual norms is not merely articulated via spectacular and in many eyes transgressive depictions of nakedness, and that images of uncovering can by no means lay hegemonic claim to feminist commitment. The pictures by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler are not just controversial, but are countered by other images, such as those on the Facebook page “Muslim Women against Femen.” The photograph of a young woman in a headscarf with a handwritten placard that reads “Nudity does not liberate me and I do not need saving” is one of many responses to the recent Femen actions in support of Amina Tyler. With this placard, the woman in the headscarf picks up a discourse in the critique of orientalism that Gayatri Spivak sardonically formulated 25 years ago in the words “white men saving brown women from brown men.”37 Instead of equating self-determined uncovering with freedom, the woman with the handwritten placard demonstrates a different understanding of freedom that is compatible with Muslim piety or implicit within it.

Conclusions I have tried here to show how the nude images of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler/ Sboui are situated within a Bildraum that permits different interpretations of the picture and constantly generates new images and visual references. Different viewer perspectives, norms and visual references come together within this pictorial space, resulting in different ideas of freedom, transgression and critique. The Bildraum in which the nude photos of the two young Arab women are circulating is a postcolonial space where Western notions of freedom and feminism are modified, undermined and expanded, but ultimately cannot be superseded or 36 The International Women of Courage Award that was to be awarded to Samira Ibrahim by the US administration was ultimately denied her because of tweets in which she voiced criticism of America and Israel. 37 See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern speak?,” 1994, 66–111.



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discarded. An orientalist gaze and dualist perspective are preserved in particular by the entanglement of the nudes from Egypt and Tunisia and the European women’s movement Femen. Nevertheless, I also wanted to show that the pictures by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler/Sboui cannot simply be subsumed within a Femen discourse. Reducing the pictures to the latest neocolonial symbolism adopted by Femen runs the risk of forcing these precarious visibilities – precarious for Arab women themselves and precarious in the sense that the imagery is easily appropriated by others – out of our range of vision. In the context of the changes witnessed by Arab countries, however, these images continually undergo re-signification and reinterpretation, competing with other pictures seeking to represent protest as well as with other pictures of Arab, Muslim, and national gender orders. By tracing the migrations such pictures undertake, I have sought to indicate how these images constantly create space for new images and how they can alter existing notions because the constitution of their meaning is never complete. In this sense, I regard the nudes by Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Tyler/Sboui as a form of embodied protest where the greatest stake is the very concept of freedom. In these pictures, self-determination and freedom are not merely abstract ideas, but are linked to dimensions of desire, vulnerability, and eroticism. There is something girlish about Elmahdy’s pictures, combining in ironic play with heteronormative female attractions. Amina Tyler’s enactments appeal to other erotic associations linked with youthful rebellion. In each case, there is something about the pictures that distinguishes them both from projections about the suppression of Muslim women and from symbolic imagery of generalized freedom. Recognizing those differences and the contexts in which they set something in motion challenges ways of seeing that come to be taken for granted. It implies an awareness of the different visual contexts in which the images circulate, compete, and overlay or expand one another.

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List of Contributors Christina von Braun (Berlin) is Professor for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University in Berlin and visiting professor at different universities in the United States, Israel and France. From 1996–2005 she was Head of the Department of Gender Studies at Humboldt University; since 2012 she is co-director of the newly founded Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin Brandenburg (Center for Jewish Studies). In 2013 she was awarded the Sigmund Freud Kulturpreis by the German Psychoanalytical Association. Fields of research: gender; media; religion and modernity; history of antisemitism. Author and director of more than fifty films (documentaries, essays and fiction), twenty books and numerous essays on cultural history, religion, and gender. Recent publications include: Der Preis des Geldes, Berlin 2012; Glauben, Wissen und Geschlecht in den drei Religionen des Buches, Wien 2009; co-authored (with Bettina Mathes), Verschleierte Wirklichkeiten. Die Frau, der Islam und der Westen, Berlin 2007. Ulrike Brunotte (Maastricht) is Associate Professor for Gender and Cultural History at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and at the Center for Gender and Diversity of Maastricht University. From 2001–2006 she was Associate Professor at the Institute for Cultural Studies and the Graduate school “Gender as a category of Knowledge” at Humboldt-University in Berlin; since 2008 she is adjunct professor at the Humboldt University. Ulrike Brunotte is also the chair of the international research network ReNGOO: www.researchnetworkaoo.wordpress.com. Fields of research: gender (masculinity); queer studies and psychoanalysis; postcolonial and religious theory; performativity and ritual theory. Recent publications include: Das Wissen der Dämonen. Gender, Performativität und materielle Kultur im Werk von Jane Ellen Harrison, Würzburg 2013; co-ed. (with Rainer Herrn), Männlichkeit und Moderne. Geschlecht in Wissensdiskursen um 1900, Bielefeld 2008; “Unveiling Salome 1900 –Entschleierungen zwischen Sexualität, Pathos und Oriental Dance,” in Bettina Dennerlein/Elke Frietsch (eds.), Verschleierter Orient – entschleierter Okzident? Inszenierungen in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Zürich 2012, pp. 93–116. Sarah Dornhof (Berlin) received her PhD in cultural studies/anthropology from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (Germany). Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Research Training Group “InterArt” at the Freie Universität Berlin. Fields of research: visual culture; orientalisms; secularity and gender studies; transnationalism and postcoloniality in contemporary art and cultural politics in Morocco. Recent publications include: Alternierende Blicke auf Islam und Europa: Verletzung als Rationalität visueller Politik, Munich 2015 (forthcoming); co-ed. (with Frank Peter and Elena Arigita), Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe. Memory, Aesthetics, Art, Bielefeld 2013. Hildegard Frübis (Berlin) is Associate Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 1998–2004 she was Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History at the Humboldt University. Since 2004 she is visiting professor at different universities in Germany and Austria. Currently she is Research Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Fields of research: early modern and modern art; gender and postcolonial studies in the visual arts; art and art discourse of Jewish modernity; history of art history. Recent publications include: “Die Amazonen in der ‘Neuen Welt.’ Die visuelle Repräsentation des kulturell Anderen im Mittelalter und der Frühen Neuzeit,” in: Charlotte Schubert/Alexander Weiß (eds.), Amazonen zwischen Griechen und Skythen. Gegenbilder in Mythos und Geschichte, Berlin/Boston 2013, pp. 57–72; “Orientalismus re-visited.

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Zur Repräsentation des Orients in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in: Bettina Dennerlein/Elke Frietsch (eds.), Verschleierter Orient – entschleierter Okzident? Inszenierungen in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Zürich 2012, pp. 137–162. Jay Geller (Nashville) is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program. From 1984–2011 he was visiting professor at different universities in Austria, United Kingdom, and the United States. In 2001 he was the Fulbright/Sigmund Freud Society Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna), since 2011 he is Affiliated Senior Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Fields of research: modern Jewish culture; Sigmund Freud; Shoah; Jewish identification. Author of numerous articles on Freud’s Jewish identity, and on the relationship between antisemitism and modern European Jewish identity formation. Recent publications include: Bestiarium Judaicum. (Un)Natural Histories of the Jews, New York (forthcoming); The Other Jewish Question. Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, New York 2011; On Freud’s Jewish Body. Mitigating Circumcisions, New York 2007. Anna-Dorothea Ludewig (Potsdam/Berlin) is a researcher at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, and affiliated with the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg (Center for Jewish Studies). Fields of research: history of literature and gender (nineteenth/ twentieth century); literary construction of identities; Jews and Judaism in European popular fiction; (Restitution of) Nazi-looted art. Recent publications include: co-ed. (with Joachim H. Knoll and Julius H. Schoeps), Der Dandy. Ein kulturhistorisches Phänomen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Munich 2013; Im Anfang war der Mord. Juden und Judentum im Detektivroman, Berlin 2012; co-ed. (with Julius H. Schoeps and Ines Sonder), Aufbruch in die Moderne. Sammler, Mäzene und Kunsthändler in Berlin, 1880–1933, Köln 2012. Hannah Lotte Lund (Berlin/Frankfurt/O.) is Research Fellow at the Kleist Museum, Frankfurt/ Oder and affiliated with the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg (Center for Jewish Studies). Since 2001 she is Lecturer in History and Gender Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin and at IES Abroad Berlin. She is also a researcher for Holocaust Documentary with Yad Vashem Germany and for the Centre of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies, Berlin. Fields of research: literary and intellectual sociability; transnational networks; women publicists; historiography and memory politics. Recent publications include: Der “Berliner Jüdische Salon” um 1800. Emanzipation in der Debatte, Berlin/Boston 2012; co-ed. (with Anna-Dorothea Ludewig and Paola Ferruta), Versteckter Glaube oder doppelte Identität? Das Bild des Marranentums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Hildesheim 2011. Yaron Peleg (Cambridge) is Kennedy-Leigh Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Cambridge. Formerly, he taught at Brandeis University, Princeton University and George Washington University. Fields of research: Israeli cinema; Hebrew language; Hebrew literature; modern Hebrew gender, masculinity, ethnicity and religiosity. Author of numerous articles on various topics, including the concept of Land in modern Hebrew prose, attitudes toward militarism, homoeroticism in biblical as well as more modern Hebrew literature, and a comparative study on Hebrew literature written by Jews and Arabs. Recent publications include: co-ed. (with Miri Talmon), Identities in Motion. Israeli Cinema Reader, Austin 2011; Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas. A Brief Romance, Austin 2008; Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, Ithaca, NY 2005.



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Tatjana Petzer (Berlin/Zürich) is Dilthey Fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin. She is also Senior Research Assistant at the Slavic Department of the University of Zurich. Fields of research: Slavic literatures, arts and cultures; the aesthetics of transformation in modernism; the epistemic history of synergy. Recent publications include co-ed. (with Zaal Andronikashvili, Andreas Pflitsch, and Martin Treml), The Order of Plural Cultures. Figurations of European Cultural History, Seen from the East, Berlin 2013; co-ed. (with Sylvia Sasse, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, and Sandro Zanetti), Names. Naming – Worshipping – Effecting. Positions in European Modernism, Berlin 2009; History as a Palimpsest. Memory Structures in the Poetics of Danilo Kiš, Frankfurt/Main 2008. Laurel Plapp (San Diego) is Commissioning Editor at Peter Lang. She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Recent publications include: Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature, New York 2008. Achim Rohde (Marburg) is Research Assistant at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Philipps-Universität Marburg and Coordinator of the research-network “Re-Configurations. History, Memory and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa”. He studied in Hamburg, Birzeit, and Tel Aviv and received a PhD in Islamic Studies from the Free University, Berlin. Fields of research: gender studies; postcolonial studies; Middle East history; history of Oriental Studies in Germany. Recent publications include: co-ed. (with Samira Alayan and Sarhan Dhouib), The Politics of Education Reform in the Middle East. Self and Other in Textbooks and Curricula, New York 2012; State-Society Relations in Ba’thist Iraq. Facing Dictatorship, London/New York 2010; “Der Innere Orient. Orientalismus, Antisemitismus und Geschlecht im Deutschland des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Die Welt des Islams 45 (2005): 370–411. Axel Stähler (Canterbury, United Kingdom) is Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Fields of research: intermediality and the literary construction of identities; the convergence of Zionist, racial, and colonial discourses in early twentieth-century GermanJewish literature and culture. He has published widely on Jewish writers from the Anglophone and German-speaking Diasporas and from Israel as well as on fundamentalism and literature, the eighteenth-century novel and early modern festival culture. Recent publications include: ed., Jewish Magic Realism, Berlin/Boston 2013; Literarische Konstruktionen jüdischer Postkolonialität: Das britische Palästinamandat in der anglophonen jüdischen Literatur, Heidelberg 2009; co-ed. (with Klaus Stierstorfer), Writing Fundamentalism, Newcastle 2009; ed., Anglophone Jewish Literature, London/New York 2007. Daniel Wildmann (London) is Alternate Director of the Leo Baeck Institute London and Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary College, University of London. Fields of research: GermanJewish history of the twentieth century; history of National Socialism; history of masculinity; history of the body; emotion, antisemitism and visuality. Currently he is working on a new research and book project: A history of visual expressions of antisemitism, emotions and morality (working title). Recent publications include: Der veränderbare Körper. Jüdische Turner, Männlichkeit und das Wiedergewinnen von Geschichte in Deutschland um 1900, Tübingen 2009; co-ed. (with Lukas Straumann), Schweizer Chemieunternehmen im “Dritten Reich,” Zürich 2001; Der Begehrte Köper. Konstruktion und Inszenierung des “arischen” Männerkörpers im “Dritten Reich,” Würzburg 1998. Kathrin Wittler (Berlin) is currently pursuing a doctoral dissertation project on German-Jewish literature in the context of orientalism (1781–1918) at the Humboldt University, Berlin. After working

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as an ARSP volunteer at the Leo Baeck Institute London (2004–2005), she studied German and Arabic Literature in Berlin and Tel Aviv (2005–2011). Fields of research: theory and history of orientalism; German-Jewish cultural and literary history; loneliness in the eighteenth century. Recent publications include: “‘Muselmann.’ Anmerkungen zur Geschichte einer Bezeichnung,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 61 (2013): 1045–1056; “Einsamkeit. Ein literarisches Gefühl im 18. Jahrhundert,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 87 (2013): 186–216.

Index AbuGhazal, Sara Emiline 279, 280 Ahad Ha’am (i.e. Asher Ginsberg) 86, 113 Ahmed, Leila 234, 235, 236 Aliabadi, Shirin 265 Allan, Maud 11, 209, 210, 211, 249, 269 Almutawakel, Boushra 262, 263, 264, 266 Arendt, Hannah 3, 34, 35, 37, 42, 45, 47, 52, 59 Arnim, Achim von 58, 59 Arnim, Bettina von 55 Arnstein, Fanny von 51, 55, 59 Auerbach, Georg 19 Bacon, Francis 241 Bakst, Léon 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259 Balzac, Honoré de 206, 223, 224, 227 Barthes, Roland 246 Bebel, August 121, 122 Beer, Amalie 60, 61 Beer, Michael 73, 79, 80 Bendemann, Eduard 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74 Benjamin, Walter 126, 128, 136 Benois, Alexandre 248, 252 Bernhardt, Sarah 11, 206, 207, 208, 209, 212, 221, 249, 251, 269 Bhabha, Homi 6, 12, 18, 24, 29, 77, 99, 287 Biale, David 181, 232 Bodenheimer, Max 113, 114 Boyarin, Daniel 14, 99, 156, 159, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 186, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 213, 214, 216, 217 Boyarin, Jonathan 29, 196, 201 Braun, Christina von 244 Brinckmann, Gustav von 33, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 62 Buber, Martin 8, 9, 86, 91, 124, 126, 127, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 170, 174 Bunzl, Matti 10, 14, 15, 195, 200, 201 Butler, Judith 124, 125, 215 Bynum, Caroline Walker 236, 237, 238

Cedar, Joseph 189 Chalayan, Hussein 260, 264 Chamberlain, Joseph 98 Courbet, Gustave 262 Dawison, Bogumil 154 Diaghilev, Sergei 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 255 Dijkstra, Bram 205, 211, 212 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm (von) 56, 181 Dupont, Ewald André 9, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153, 154, 155 Ebbinghaus, Wilhelm 225, 226 Elmahdy, Aliaa 266, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283 Fanon, Frantz 119, 198, 271 Feuchtwanger, Lion 30 Flaubert, Gustave 25, 208 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht 26, 28 Fließ, Hitzel 43, 44, 45 Fokine, Michel 248, 254, 255 Forouhar, Parastou 262, 264 Foucault, Michel 196, 197, 199, 263 Fournier, Éric 15, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212 Franzos, Karl Emil 31 Freud, Sigmund 14, 19, 161, 162, 175, 181, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 262 Fritsch, Theodor 216 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva 232 Fuller, Loïe 249 Galland, Antoine 254 Garber, Marjorie 12, 13, 14, 25, 158, 196, 197, 209, 210, 211, 269 Geiger, Abraham 27, 28, 29, 89 Geiger, Ludwig 34 Geiser, Jean Théophile 253 Gentz, Friedrich (von) 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56

318 

 Index

Gilman, Sander 14, 25, 80, 99, 119, 135, 160, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 207, 208, 212, 213, 214, 216, 221, 251 Glazunov, Alexander 248 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (von) 33, 38, 50, 54, 143 Goldziher, Ignaz 26 Grattenauer, Carl Wilhelm Friedrich 51, 52, 63 Grillparzer, Franz 134, 204

Kafka, Franz 9, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 198 Kalmar, Ivan 5, 6, 10, 20, 21, 23, 30, 63, 76, 90, 144, 156, 157, 217, 258, 259 Karsavina, Tamara 249 Katz, Jakob 36, 37 Kipling, Rudyard 13 Krobb, Florian 15, 36, 52, 55, 56, 141, 203, 204, 205, 224, 226

Haan, Jacob Israel de 13, 158, 160, 161, 167, 169, 175 Haan, Marije de 265 Hahn, Barbara 15, 33, 35, 36, 52, 55, 59, 203, 205, 221 Hahn-Hahn, Ida 205 Hanssen, Jens 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 Hebbel, Friedrich 219 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 23 Heiberg, Hermann 205 Heine, Heinrich 63, 92, 134 Herder, Johann Gottfried 23, 75 Hermand, Jost 161, 162, 163 Herz, Henriette 38, 42, 45, 48, 50, 55 Herz, Marcus 37, 43, 44, 45, 62, 129, 227 Herzl, Theodor 93, 98, 104, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 126, 129, 131, 132, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 175, 182, 217 Heschel, Susannah 4, 6, 27, 28, 29, 89, 93, 196, 198, 199, 213, 217, 233, 234 Hess, Jonathan M. 6, 7, 23, 25, 31, 56, 80, 134, 199 Humboldt, Alexander von 38 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 208

Lagarde, Paul de 23, 26 Lasker-Schüler, Else 30, 31, 82, 91, 227, 228 Lawrence, Thomas Edward (“Lawrence of Arabia”) 13, 117 Levin Varnhagen, Rahel 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 9, 64, 78 Lewald, Fanny 9, 16, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 226, 227 Ligne, Charles de 224 Lilien, Ephraim Moses 8, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 116 Loewe, Heinrich 112, 119

Ibrahim, Samira 281, 282 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 262 Itzkovitz, Daniel 25, 195, 196, 201 Jungmann, Max 9, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 110

Mallarmé, Stéphane 211 Mantegazza, Paolo 199 Marguerite of Oingt 237 Marlitt, Eugenie 205 Mata Hari (i.e. Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) 11, 251, 252, 269 May, Karl 133 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Lea 53 Mendelssohn, Henriette 33, 34, 38, 43, 44, 45, 53, 57, 59, 62 Mendelssohn, Moses 44 Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Dorothea 38, 42, 43, 45, 48, 50, 53, 59 Merchant, Carolyn 241 Mérimée, Prosper 225 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 248 Michaelis, Johann David 6, 7, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Montefiore, Sir Francis 111, 119 Montefiore, Sir Moses 111 Moreau, Gustave 208, 225

Index 

Mosse, George L. 14, 66, 159, 160, 179, 180, 190, 197, 198, 200 Mourad, Sara 276, 277, 278, 279 Muhammad 21, 27, 234, 235, 240 Nazimova, Alla 211 Neshat, Shirin 262, 263 Nijinsky, Vaslav 249, 254 Nordau, Max 110, 111, 156, 179 Offenstadt, Lily 162 Ohanian, Armen 249, 252 Ostojić, Tanja 261, 262 Parfitt, Tudor 4, 198, 199 Pasto, James 2, 3, 6, 24, 63, 71 Pater, Walter 211 Pavlova, Anna 247 Pellegrini, Ann 14, 25, 195, 196, 201, 203, 206, 207, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220 Pemberton Billing, Noel 209, 210, 211 Penslar, Derek 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 20, 21, 63, 76, 90, 144, 156, 157, 217, 259 Philippson, Ludwig 73 Picart, Bernard 15, 203 Poiret, Paul 246, 247, 255, 256, 258, 259 Polaschegg, Andrea 3, 6, 7, 16, 22, 76, 77, 80, 90, 141, 204, 206 Richmond, George 112 Richter, Gustav 61 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 248, 254 Rubinstein, Ida 11, 129, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 254, 256, 257 Sacy, Sylvestre de 26 Said, Edward 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 25, 28, 29, 32, 63, 76, 77, 78, 116, 133, 166, 181, 204, 246 Saint Catherine of Siena 237 Salome 8, 11, 12, 15, 195, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 221, 225, 248, 249, 251, 269, 272 Sartre, Jean-Paul 224, 225, 226 Schlegel, Friedrich 39, 43, 45, 48, 59, 62 Schlegel Schelling, Caroline 56

 319

Schleiermacher, Friedrich 38, 45, 58 Scholem, Gershom 35, 109 Schopenhauer, Arthur 135 Serov, Valentin 252 Shevchenko, Inna 280 Smith, Adam 138 Spivak, Gayatri 203, 282 Steinberg, Leo 236, 238 Strauss, Richard 209 Thöny, Eduard 105, 106, 107, 108, 111 Topinard, Paul 132 Treitschke, Heinrich von 7, 23, 63 Tyler, Amina (Amina Sboui) 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 278, 279, 282, 283 Varnhagen, Karl August 34, 42, 45, 59 Vernet, Antoine Charles Horace 95 Vernet, Horace 95, 96, 97 Vinken, Barbara 243, 245, 246, 256, 258, 259, 266 Voss, Luise von 33, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57 Wassermann, Jakob 30 Wegener, Paul 9, 139, 141, 143, 144, 153, 155 Weininger, Otto 25, 159, 182, 201, 202, 204 Weissenberg, Samuel 132 Weizmann, Chaim 130 Werfel, Franz 30 Westermann, Georg 83, 86 Wilde, Oscar 25, 108, 198, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 225, 248, 249 Wilhelm II 114, 115, 117, 118 Witbooi, Hendrik 106, 107 Wolf, Friedrich 30 Wolffsohn, David 93, 94, 113, 118 Wolffsohn, Fruma 93, 94 Wolf, Johann Christoph 22 Wundt, Wilhelm 199 Ya’ish, Meny 14, 176, 188, 189 Yeğenoğlu, Meyda 12, 13, 18, 24, 198 Zweig, Arnold 13, 82, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175 Zweig, Beatrice 162, 163