The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity [1 ed.] 9780823269075, 9780823233618

Citation preview

The Other Jewish Que stion

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T

he Other Jewish Question

Identifying the Jew and

Making Sense of Modernity

Jay Geller

fordham university press New York

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2011

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Copyright 䉷 2011 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Geller, Jay, 1953– The other Jewish question : identifying the Jew and making sense of modernity / Jay Geller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3361-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-3362-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Identity. 2. Civilization, Modern. 3. Antisemitism—History. I. Title. DS143.G356 2011 305.892⬘4—dc22 2011009665 Printed in the United States of America 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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contents

vii xi xiii

List of Abbreviations List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a Physiognomic Epidemiology 1 2 3 4 5

of the Fetishized Jew ‘‘Feminization’’ and the Problem of Jewish Persistence Tailing the Suspect, or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference From Mohels to Mein Kampf: Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identification Circumcision and a Jewish Woman’s Identification: Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Failed Assimilation

1 32 50 88 132

6 7

Going to ‘‘Alimentary’’ School: Brotstudium, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the Dietetics of Antisemitism From Rags to Risches: On Marx’s Other Jewish Question A Future without Jews: Max Nordau’s Pre-Zionist Answer

150 169

8 9

to the Other Jewish Question President Schreber and the Memoirs of a Wandering Jew(ess) Walter Benjamin Reproducing the Scent of the Messianic

212 233 256

Notes

303

References Index

421 487

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abbreviations

AB

Karl Marx. Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte. In MEW 8:111–207.

AP

Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

BC

Walter Benjamin. ‘‘A Berlin Chronicle.’’ In Representations, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 3–60. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

C

Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Random House, 1976.

CL

Max Nordau. Die conventionellen Lu¨gen der Kulturmenschheit. Leipzig: B. Elischer, 1903.

DE

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.

DI

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Die Deutsche Ideologie. In MEW 3.

EB

Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, trans. Richard Dixon et al., 11: 99–197. New York: International Publishers, 1975–.

EC

Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. George Eliot, from 2d German ed. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989. Trans. orig. published 1843.

EE

Max Stirner. Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845.

EO

Max Stirner. The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority. Ed. James J. Martin. Trans. Steven T. Byington.

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Abbreviations

New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Trans. orig. published 1907. GI

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. In Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, trans. Richard Dixon et al., 5: 5–539. New York: International Publishers, 1975–.

JQ

Karl Marx. ‘‘On the Jewish Question.’’ In Early Writings, ed. Quinton Hoare, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 211–41. New York: Random House, 1975.

K

Karl Marx. Das Kapital. In MEW 23.

LL

Henry Mayhew. London Labour and the London Poor. 4 vols. Expanded ed. London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861–62. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1968.

M

Daniel Paul Schreber. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Trans. I. Macalpine and R. A. Hunter. Intro. S. M. Weber. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Trans. orig. published 1955.

MEW

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx Engels Werke. 43 vols. Berlin, DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1956–90.

MF

Walter Benjamin. ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty.’’ In Representations, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 333–36. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

MK

Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. Trans. R. Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943.

OB

Walter Benjamin. ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.’’ In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 155–200. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

P

Max Nordau. Paradoxe. 3d ed. Leipzig: B. Elischer, 1885.

PT

Heinrich Heine. Pictures of Travel. Trans. Charles Godfrey Leland. 7th rev. ed. Philadelphia: Schaefer and Koradi, 1873.

PW

Walter Benjamin. Das Passagen-Werk. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. 2 vols. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982. Vol. 5 of Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenha¨user. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1972–.

SB

Artur Dinter. Die Su¨nde wider das Blut. 12th printing. Leipzig: Matthes und Thost, 1920.

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Abbreviations

SC

Otto Weininger. Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles. Ed. Daniel Steuer with Laura Marcus. Trans. Ladislaus Lo¨b. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Orig. published in German 1903.

SW

Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, with Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003.

TPH

Walter Benjamin. ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’’ In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

TTP

Baruch Spinoza. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. English trans. Samuel Shirley. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989.

WA

Walter Benjamin. ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility: Second Version.’’ In SW 3:101–33.

ZJ

Karl Marx. ‘‘Zur Judenfrage.’’ In MEW 1:347–77.

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illustrations

I-1 I-2

Ju¨discher Ha¨ndler (Jewish dealer) Silhouette of Mendelssohn by Johann Caspar Lavater

17 23

I-3 2-1 2-2 2-3

Portrait of Judas Iscariot A verstu¨mmelt or mutilated (pig)tail The Yellow Peril (German Version) The World Boxer

24 53 59 60

2-4 Chinese (Jewish) old-clothesman 2-5 The Emperor of China surrounded by queue-coifed Manchu warriors and conquered Chinese 2-6 Phallic-shaped Schwa¨nze or tails 2-7 2-8 3-1 4-1

63 66 70

A (Jewish) sow’s tail 71 The krumm or crooked Jew and the straight-braided Helen 85 ‘‘Whether written with Q or K, cholera stems from the Jews.’’ 97 Mendelssohn family porcelain ape 136

5-1 ‘‘No German would hold it against you, if you devoured your onions [Zwiebeln] in Zion.’’ 5-2 Judensau 6-1 Illustration from ‘‘Unser Verkehr: Eine kleine erbauliche

155 158

Bildergallerie aufgenommen nach dem Leben’’ (Our Crowd: A Small, Edifying Picture Gallery, Drawn from Life) by Johann Michael Voltz 7-1 Philistine and Jew

186 219

8-1 ‘‘Physiognomic Studies: Bru¨hl[strasse] in Leipzig during the trade fair [Messe].’’

249

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acknowledgments

The Other Jewish Question forms a diptych with On Freud’s Jewish Body (2007). Both volumes emerged from my very long engagement with a common set of corporeal and (post)colonial conundrums surrounding Jewish representation and the representation of Jews. Hence my gratitude continues to the many friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers, named in the earlier volume’s acknowledgments, who helped make this entire project a reality. A number of these longtime companions made direct contributions to this volume, including Delphine Bechtel, Kalman Bland, Jim Boon, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, Ranjit Chatterjee, Mal Diamond (z’’l), Rainer Erb, Marion Faber, Scott Gilbert, Sander Gilman, Valerie Greenberg, Barbara Hahn, Gregg Horowitz, James Hudnut-Beumler, Charles Long, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Bill Pietz, James Rolleston, Helen Tartar, Bob Weinberg, Liliane Weissberg, Meike Werner, and Carolyn Williams. I wish also to extend another salute to those talented facilitators of bibliophilic requests, Ed Fuller, Stephen Lehmann, and Jim Toplon, as well as to my students at Rutgers and Vanderbilt, who helped me work out in class some of the analyses that found their way here. There are additional individuals who made this particular volume possible. In 2007, when I turned to Marx’s ‘‘On the Jewish Question,’’ memories of marvelous conversations with Margaret Rose on Marx and parody at MLG summer camp almost thirty years earlier began to rematerialize as Marx’s other Jewish Question, as the question of how across his corpus Marx acted out (and/or worked through) being identified as a Jew. Lars Fischer picked up on my particular use of the ‘‘Other Jewish Question’’ in an early version of my Marx analysis and used the phrase to thematize the presentations and subsequent discussion at a 2009 German Studies Association session (in which a portion of what would become chapter 6 was delivered). The phrase qua Leitmotif resonated with the participants— and with me. I was already engaged in variants of that analysis of the problematic of Jewish identification in the other chapters of this work, albeit under diverse rubrics; upon my return home from the GSA, I recognized

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Acknowledgments

how threading this theme through all of the chapters would highlight their deep—if at times perhaps too implicit—interconnection and coherence. (At least, I believe it does.) Lars’s contribution to this work by no means ended there; his detailed readings of several of this volume’s chapters were so helpful. Earlier along the way, exchanges with Jane Caplan, Judith Farquhar, Christopher Forth, Willi Goetschel, James Hevia, Laura Levitt, Vincent Rosario, Ted Smith, and Angela Zito were invaluable. My research assistant Jennifer Pouya’s aid in the production of this volume was no less so. While the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture funded my pursuit of Freud at Rutgers back in 1990/91, I also found myself doing most of the initial work there for what would become chapters 2 and 8. Similarly, while the subsequent NEH-supported summer of Freud brought me to London, my concomitant visits to the British Library in its old digs, the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, and the Zentrum fu¨r Antisemitismusforschung at the TU-Berlin took me down unanticipated paths that would later lead to this volume. Specific to this book, a Lilly Theological Research Grant from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) allowed me to travel to Jewish libraries in New York (Leo Baeck, NYPL-Dorot, YIVO) again, to the archives of Marx’s papers at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and to Harvard’s libraries in Cambridge. Portions of several of the chapters were first given at annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the German Studies Association, Swarthmore College, Syracuse University, Rutgers University, Columbia University, Tulane University, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt University and Divinity School, E´cole des Hautes E´tudes des Sciences Sociales (Paris), University of Leiden, Sigmund Freud Museum–Wien, University of Sidney, and Monash University. And others appeared in American Imago, positions: east asia cultures critique, Revue germanique internationale, Fault Line, and Jewish Social Studies. I am grateful to those sponsors and editors who provided me with the opportunities to present some of what is about to follow. Beyond the various folks at Fordham University Press (in addition to Helen: Tom Lay, Ann Miller, Eric Newman, Katie Sweeney), the anonymous readers, as well as any and all whom I’ve neglected to mention, there are five people, as always, still to thank: my parents, Milton and Florence Geller; my daughter, Sarah; my son, Alexander; and my friend, companion, lover, and wife, Amy-Jill Levine.

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The Other Jewish Que stion

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introduction

Toward a Physiognomic Epidemiology of the Fetishized Jew

Saturday Night Live once produced a game-show parody called ‘‘Jew, Not a Jew.’’ As a picture of Penny Marshall flashed across the screen, the contestants muttered: ‘‘Must be Jewish: look at that nose; what about that accent.’’ ‘‘Jew,’’ they shouted. The host, played by Tom Hanks, built up their hopes—‘‘She was married to Rob Reiner . . .’’—then squashed them: ‘‘. . . but no. Not a Jew.’’ By what criteria did these ‘‘contestants’’ make their judgment? They recognized the face; they had seen it before. They knew her name, but unlike Cohen or Levy, or Geller for that matter, ‘‘Marshall’’ does not appear in the usual inventory of Jewish last names—nor in the list drawn up by Prussia in 1812, from which all Jews in the realm had to select.1 But then again, she’s in show business, and everyone knows that Issur Danilovich, the ragman’s Jewish son,2 goes by the moniker Kirk Douglas. They attempted to divine her identity—her essence? her origin? her religion?—by means of physical characteristics, the externals—nose, voice— that her body presented to the world. And they believed they had found confirmation by her associations: her Jewish-identified ex-husband. Alas, the signifiers ascribed to her had missed their mark. Of course, the questions behind the question of whether or not Penny Marshall was Jewish remained unasked: not only ‘‘what is a Jew?’’ but also

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‘‘why ask the question in the form of a universe-dividing binary, rather than pose a query after particularity, such as ‘what is her religious affiliation?’ or ‘where did her family come from?’ ’’ The indefiniteness of the first unasked question—does Jew refer to religion, nationality, disposition (the three aspects encapsulated by the German Judentum)?3—does not sufficiently explain the second. Jew not only characterizes one aspect— differently weighed at particular times, among particular peoples—among many that constitute a person; it also has functioned—at particular times, among particular peoples—as an index of both inclusion and exclusion. The Other Jewish Question examines such a particular time—principally between the ‘‘infamous birth’’4 of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771) and the unfortunate death of Walter Benjamin (1940)—and among such a particular people—principally Central European Germanophones—when the Jew’s body incarnated, and discourse about that body fleshed out, the icon ‘‘Jew.’’ Its focus is on the works of those identified as ‘‘Jews’’ and on those works—by both ‘‘Jews’’ and non-‘‘Jews’’—that engaged in the identifying, as they endeavored to mediate the processes and effects of Jewish identification. This work largely concerns the attempt by Jewish-identified individuals, whether acculturated or assimilated, observant, Confessionslos (creedless), or baptized, to staunch the threat to their public ‘‘European’’ identity while at the same time engaging in different forms of contesting, negotiating, and transforming the Judentum by which they were identified. I follow Rogers Brubaker in preferring the term identification in order to avoid the analytical, definitional, and ontological problems associated with identity. The shift to identification ‘‘invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying. And it does not presuppose that such identifying . . . will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded groupness’’ intrinsic to social life. Moreover, as categorization, ‘‘ ‘identification’ calls attention to complex (and often ambivalent) processes, while the term ‘identity’ designat[es] a condition rather than a process.’’5 As Michael Steinberg piquantly puts it: even when it is made kinder and gentler ‘‘in the guises of the multiple, the ever evolving, the diasporic, the negotiated, the performative,’’ identity cannot but leave the stench of sameness.6 Moreover, I adopt such a seemingly broad analytical rubric as ‘‘Jewishidentified individuals’’ because no single conventional criterion is sufficient for determining an individual’s Jewishness; attempts to be more selective lead either to outrageous exclusions or to troubling recollections. For example, neither ardent Zionists such as Theodor Herzl and Albert

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Einstein, who eschewed Jewish ritual and belief (let alone the untold numbers of assimilated figures whose only Jewish leanings took place at the Seder table), nor their output may be identified as Jewish per se when such identification is based primarily on the individual’s religious observance; their Jewishness is but an accident of birth. Further, whether one follows the Orthodox or the Reform movement on the genealogical transmission of Jewishness,7 there is now, inescapably, a taint of racialism attached to such biological determinations.8 The aura of offense is heightened by the memory of Nazi practice: in the Third Reich a single Jewish grandparent marked an individual as Jewish.9 Further, for every public affirmation of a certain je ne sais quoi Jewishness by a Sigmund Freud,10 there is a repudiation of any form of Jewishness by such converts as Karl Marx and Otto Weininger. Invocation of Marx’s ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ (‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’; 1844) continues to legitimate communist and socialist antisemitism11—let alone that of the ‘‘it takes one to know one’’ crowd. While Weininger’s turn-of-the-century philosophic treatise Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter; 1903), was a characterological cesspool into which all of the antisemitic as well as misogynistic effluvia of his time was deposited, many of his early readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, female and male, accepted it as legitimate and scholarly.12 Yet Marx and Weininger, as well as such less-derisive converts as Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Heinrich Heine, appear alongside other more manifestly ‘‘Jewish’’ geniuses such as Martin Buber and Nelly Sachs whenever lists of Jewish contributions to ‘‘civilization’’ are compiled. There is clearly nothing approaching a consensus on the topic of Jewish identity.13 Nor is there a consensus on either the origin or nature of ‘‘antisemitism’’—often seen as the codependent of Jewish identification in Western modernity. Should the label be limited to enmity toward an immutable, because descent-determined, Jewish essence both in the individual and the collective? If so, does this limit the term’s appropriateness to that antiJewish discourse rationalized either by a supposedly biologically based race science or by a religioethnological hybrid nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, or can one speak of an ‘‘early antisemitism’’ operating in the second decade of the nineteenth century? Rather than a recrudescence of medieval Judenhaß (Jew-hatred) and stereotype, antiJewish discourse and the understanding of Jewish-Gentile relations underwent at that time a revaluation and repositioning that held the taint of Judentum to be as indelible as it was assumed to be by those who seventy years later embraced so-called racial antisemitism.14 With this criterion, should fifteenth-century Spain and its pure blood law (limpienza de sangre)

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also be characterized as antisemitic?15 Gavin Langmuir would date the phenomenon several centuries earlier still by defining antisemitism as ‘‘chimerical hostility [whereby] large numbers of relatively normal people accepted beliefs that attributed to Jews characteristics and conduct that have never in fact been observed or empirically verified.’’16 Many others still would trace its origins back to the development of Christian supersessionism with its ‘‘teaching of contempt’’ and demonization of the Christkillers,17 since Christianity’s soteriological telos portended the end of all Jews qua Jews; hence, they simply differentiate between Christian and racial, traditional and modern, economic and political varieties of antisemitism. And as Peter Scha¨fer and others before and since have queried, what then is the status of the so-called pagan enmity toward Jews that preceded the Common Era? Was it but a variety of xenophobia, or, as they argue, is Judeophobia18 the most appropriate term to assign to ‘‘the longest hatred’’?19 Sometimes the problem of terminology is settled philologically. Antisemitism is made coeval with the coining of the term; consequently, its descriptive relevance begins in the winter of 1879–80 when a neologism, Antisemitismus, achieved currency in the circle of associates and sympathizers around Jew-hating polemicist and publicist Wilhelm Marr in order to distinguish their self-proclaimed science-based ultimate concern from earlier forms of Judenhaß.20 Yet even this strategy has come into question since recent scholarship has unearthed the employment of the adjective antisemitisch (antisemitic) by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider to characterize the judgments (antisemitische Urteile), the false ideas about the inferiority of so-called Semitic peoples to so-called Aryan peoples, promulgated by the philologist Ernest Renan.21 However, more than problems with terminology and their purported referents require The Other Jewish Question to be something other than an account of, as it were, the disease-entities22 Jew and/or antisemitism, the existence of which the text’s content would serve both to exemplify and to confirm. In this work, text-producing self- and other-identified Jews are discussed, and negative and negating representations of Judentum are extensively detailed; however, this work does not posit some essential Judentum—whether an unchanging entity across time and geography or an unfounded figment of the imaginations of its despisers—as necessary for either the individuals discussed or the images examined. This work is epidemiological;23 that is, it undertakes a mapping of the distribution of and possible interrelationships among particular material objects (images, morphemes [orthography], phonemes) in a population of verbal and visual

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texts at a specific historic moment and location. Densities will be attended to, conditions for specific emergences considered, correlations proposed, and inferences drawn. Hence, the chapters that follow examine the emergence of certain (in Bruno Latour’s terminology) ‘‘quasi-objects,’’24 primarily verbal and visual ascriptions of bodies, or rather of parts of bodies and the techniques performed upon them, and their associations with other such. When combined with what I call a physiognomic analysis, such an epidemiological study shows how these ascriptions not only identified ‘‘the Jew’’ but also became, for those to whom they were ascribed, building blocks. These ‘‘intellectual bricoleurs’’25 drew upon these quasiobjects for self-fashioning as well as for thinking through their social situation26 and for representing that thinking.27 Before addressing the nature of physiognomic analysis, however, a few more words need be expended on the ascribed bodies that will be mapped and analyzed. These bodies have histories; more, the body has a history. Not too long ago the latter phrase may have struck one as oxymoronic or, at the very least, paradoxical; the body was nature incarnate and distinguished from as well as opposed by (and to) soul, spirit, reason, culture, history. The body was a universal, ahistorical materiality—that is, when referring to the body of the man discoursing, whose discourse, of course, was other than his body. Such was not the case with the bodies of the others, both the indigenous heterogeneous populations of modern Europe (e.g., women, Jews,28 the Roma, the poor) and the different peoples contacted in colonial expansion. They had particular, albeit unchanging—that is, no less ahistorical—bodies that both expressed and determined their identities as always already gendered and sexual, ethnic and racial, and classed. As Donna Haraway writes: From the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the great historical constructions of gender, race and class were embedded in the organically marked bodies of woman, the colonized or enslaved, and the worker. Those inhabiting these marked bodies have been symbolically other to the fictive rational self of universal, and so unmarked, species man, a coherent subject.29

Being and being possessed by their bodies rendered them not only other, but also of less value and of at most onetime, now superseded, world-historical significance. Western modernity is marked by the increasing privileging of the body, inscribed with the imbricated marks of class, gender, race (ethnicity), sexuality, and so forth, as the principal30 form of identification and differentiation. The rise of the telltale body followed

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the collapses of the religious and the lineage/corporate (estate, guild, etc.) narratives of value and meaning and the institutions that sustained them amid the contemporaneous social dislocations, geographic relocations, economic destabilizations, and increasing bureaucratizations that unevenly occurred over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. European identities and hierarchies that could replace those eroded by the forces of modernization, secularization, and commodification needed to be created, maintained, and confirmed. In place of the traditional narratives, biological knowledges and national histories provided explanatory frames with the force of objective truth.31 The reproductive system provided a language by which ‘‘natural’’ gender difference was expressed,32 while a combination of language, geography, and, eventually, evolutionary history33 generated a grammar of ethnoracial differences that would become closely correlated with another opposition: between colonizer and colonized.34 Such differences were marked in, just as they were marked by, the separate spheres of the social body coded by gender—the masculine public sphere characterized by rationality (i.e., freedom from desire), autonomy, and health, opposed to the feminine private sphere of sexuality, dependence, and disease—and in the physiognomy of the physiological body.35 Coincident with the emergence of the notion of the nation, of a historically, territorially, and homogeneously embodied ethnos, was the emergence of the Jewish Question: how to identify (with) the foreign body (Fremdko¨rper) Judentum, whether by introjection or abjection. This question played out in the debates over emancipation: when and under what conditions the Jewish-identified individual might attain citizenship in the nation’s political incarnation as the state. Jews became less identified with their religious practices and beliefs, and discourse about Jews became less oriented toward either deicide or a Jewish dogma such as chosenness. Instead, such epistemic discourse became more engaged in a coming-togrips with the factuality of the persistence of those still claiming some form of filiation with Judentum. That there were Jewish bodies,36 still, required that they be judged and positioned.37 Semitic bodies were opposed to Aryan ones, as Adolf Jellinek presciently recognized in 1865, even as the imminence of full civil emancipation for Vienna’s Jews was readily apparent (it occurred less than two years later): ‘‘The Jew will be expelled anew into the Ghetto, where he is to remain in the name of an implacable and unchanging created nature. . . . Here, in this new Jewish question, it is not the question of a greater or smaller measure of political rights for the Jews, but of the whole human being, his intrinsic essence.’’38 And this

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was no opposition of equals, but a biologically determined ethnoracial hierarchy.39 By re-presenting those bodies, by rendering them visible for supervision and discipline as well as for providing confirmation, biologically informed disciplines answered the fundamental questions of where we come from, where we are going, and what is out to get us.40 Correlatively, specific corporeal ascriptions themselves—both as supposed signifiers of signifieds and in their morphemic/orthographic/phonemic materialities—functioned as ‘‘nodal points’’ where signifying chain and discursive practice, the representation of bodies and the body of representations, the ‘‘cultural’’ and the ‘‘natural’’ met. Meanings constellated about these material signifiers, especially when these ‘‘quasi-objects’’ constellated among themselves. In a manner perhaps analogous to Lacan’s points de capiton, they pinned the identity of the other to the telltale truth of the body.41 Hence in German-language texts and discourses beschneiden, to circumcise, and a field of related terms (e.g., die Beschnittene/the circumcised, verschneiden/to castrate, Schnitt/cut, Schneider/tailor) mediated Jewish identification. Consider the morphemic play in Leopold Zunz’s expression of fear during the German circumcision debates of the 1840s; while conceding that the uncircumcised sons of Jewish mothers are halakhically Jewish, Zunz argued that allowing the voluntary disavowal of the infant circumcision commandment could ultimately lead to the questioning or ignoring of all divine commandments and the emptying of Jewish religiosity: ‘‘Eine Abschaffung der Beschneidung schneidet das Leben des Judentums mitten entzwei; ein Selbstmord ist kein Reform’’ (An abolition of circumcision would cut the very life of Judentum down the middle; a suicide is no reform).42 And this was no less the case in non-Jewish representations of Jewish identity, especially since Beschneidung was an act performed on objects that already served, respectively, as iconic and indexical markers of difference: the penis, with regard to gender and sexuality, and the coin,43 with regard to social relationships. And unlike the other socalled identifying body parts of the ethnic or racial other that deviated from the idealized German norm—for example, the Gallic nose, the Roman nose, the Greek nose, the Jewish nose, and so forth44 —within Europe, the circumcision of the (male) Jew could alone function as an indubitable and indelible diacritical; this Jewish difference was singular in the European cultural imaginary of the time.

Western Modernity Before untangling these tufts of intertwined corporeal representations that emerge with modernity,45 a few questions need to be asked about that

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modernity. When did European modernity begin?46 Somehow I doubt there was scene like the one in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 film The Crusades where Richard the Lion-Hearted addresses his fellow knights, claiming: ‘‘Today marks the end of the Middle Ages.’’47 Nor did Columbus on 3 August 1492 address his sailors: ‘‘Today marks the beginning of modernity.’’ Still, if one were to isolate such an originating moment, 1492 would appear to be a good possibility—in Cornel West’s periodization, the Age of Europe, his frequent synonym for modernity, begins then.48 While by no means launching the first expansion of European dominion beyond the continent’s shores—the Portuguese had already made mercantile beachheads along the West and South African coasts—Columbus, with his mix of missionary zeal, imperialist greed, expropriatory intent, and genocidal effect, exemplified the values and powers that would mark the ensuing epoch. Moreover, 3 August 1492 is an important date for the Jewish and the Christian traditions (as well as the Islamic): on the one hand, it conveniently marks the coeval invention of the New World and the Old; and on the other, Columbus headed west the day after the ‘‘last’’ Jews sailed from Spain.49 But for this work, I will follow the contemporary and sometime-colleague of Marx and Heine, the radical socialist thinker known as the ‘‘communist Rabbi,’’ Moses Hess.50 This eventual path-breaking advocate for Jewish nationalism ascribed 1632, the birth year of Baruch Spinoza, the son of Marranos—Iberian Jewish converts to Christianity who, facing persecution, found refuge in Amsterdam—as the dawning of modernity. Hess rhapsodizes about Spinoza in his 1862 proto-Zionist work Rome and Jerusalem: ‘‘And finally, when after the long struggle between the pagan world of sensuality and barbarous force, on the one hand, and the spiritual, mystic, Jewish view on the other, the sun of modern humanitarian civilization shed its feeble rays upon a better and more perfect world, it was a Jew [Spinoza] who was able to signal to the world that the final stage of the process of human development had begun.’’51 My motives for situating the beginning of modernity with Spinoza are far less idealistic than Moses Hess’s. They find their basis in a work by another more contemporary Hess, Jonathan M. In Germans, Jews, and Modernity Jonathan Hess demonstrates, through brilliant textual analyses of leading late-eighteenth-century Jewish and Gentile discussions of Judentum, how ‘‘reflections on Jews and Judaism played in constructing modernity as a normative category,’’ and he chronicles the ‘‘provocation to modernity and its emancipatory project’’ presented by Judentum.52 Bryan

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Cheyette and Laura Marcus elaborate further on this insight: ‘‘The Jewish other is both at the heart of Western metropolitan culture and is also that which is excluded in order for ascendant racial and sexual identities to be formed and maintained.’’53 European modernity acted itself out in relation to Europe’s preeminent internal ethnic and religious other, Judentum. While such social processes of marginalization have led to the impression that discourse about Judentum, especially the more venomous and vitriolic sort, was some separate and separated extreme opposed to the normative, Judentum and its identification were in fact at the center of norm- and identity-determining practices and institutions. Stephen Frosh puts a psychoanalytic spin on this paradoxical necessity for, and repudiation of, the Jews in modern Western society: ‘‘Through its historically derived cultural pervasiveness [the figure of the Jew] is perpetuated as a representation of that which is needed yet despised, that which holds in place the otherwise potentially intolerable destructiveness of a social system founded on inequality and alienation. Such systems create their own psychic structures and psychological disturbances; thus, given the organization of Western society, anti-Semitism is as much an element in the unconscious of every subject as is any other psychosocial state—love, loneliness, or loss, for example.’’ The centripetal g-force of this spin, alas, leads to a bit of equivocation over historicity: ‘‘The Jew, and more generally the figure of the ‘other,’ is a constitutive feature of Western consciousness, an element out of which subjectivity is made.’’ Thus the happenstance of Jewish presence renders Judentum a potential day residue for the nightmare of reason called modernity.54 Spinoza, not the emblematic hybrid of the modern, the secular Jew, but the diagnostician of Jewish difference,55 had already recognized more than three hundred years earlier that Jewish persistence—Jews’ continued corporeal existence through history rather than their ever-present availability for representation—was in and of itself a conundrum. While ‘‘many great and illustrious nations, with which this pettifogging little nation,’’ as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer characterized the Jewish Volk, ‘‘cannot possibly be compared, such as the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Etruscans, and others have passed to eternal rest and entirely disappeared,’’56 world-conquering polities that the Europeans considered their predecessors, there still exist groups who call themselves Jews and who identify and are identified with the community that inhabited Palestine thousands of years earlier. And the ethnohistorical anomaly was mutually implicated with the specifically Christian sacred-historical assumption: ‘‘Since Christianity is the completion of Israel’s history, the

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persistence of Judaism after Christianity places Jews against the course of history.’’57 Complicating the riddle was that the Jews continued to exist without a state. By arguing in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that any claim for Jewish election became invalid once the Jewish state ceased to exist, Spinoza attempted to sever the assumed mutual implication of Jewish persistence and Jewish chosenness: the former as proof of the latter, the latter as rationale for the former. He explained Jewry’s persistence as a consequence, on one ironic hand, of the nations’ hatred of Judentum and, on the other, of its distinct ceremonial practices, in particular circumcision. Rather than seek explanation for their continued existence, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers were satisfied with uncanny figuration of it.58 The Jews were ‘‘living mummies’’ (lebendige Mumien).59 Concurrently, the nineteenth century witnessed an increasing proliferation of sightings and citings of the eternal or wandering Jew, such as Schopenhauer’s opening thrust to his discussion of the Jewish people (ju¨disches Volk) in ‘‘On Jurisprudence and Politics’’: ‘‘Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, is nothing but the personification of the whole Jewish race.’’60 In the wake of another emblematic modern, Charles Darwin, the curious matter of Jewish persistence was rendered all the more puzzling, since the continued existence of Jewry appeared to run counter to the notion that the fittest will survive the struggle for existence. As the great nineteenth-century German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz put it: ‘‘This inexorable law reaches its final expression in the formula Might before Right. But is there really exception to this fatality? Yes, the [‘ineradicable persistence’ of the] Jewish people, or Jewish race, offers a remarkable and imposing anomaly.’’61 Some post-Darwinian readers of Spinoza’s disarticulation of Jewish election and persistence proffered other solutions to the puzzle of Judentum’s continued presence. As the sociologist Alfred Nossig argued in Die Sozialhygiene der Juden (The Social Hygiene of the Jews), an 1894 work he claimed was inspired by the Tractatus, the social-hygienic advantage provided by Jewish ceremonial law and not persecution is responsible for Jewish persistence. In a subsequent article that examined Jewish election from a biological perspective, Nossig argued that Jewish persistence as well as the Jews’ ever-uncommon vitality and generativity indicated that the Jewish claim ‘‘of chosenness is something other and profounder than the usual [feeling of] racial pride that was unable to prevent the destruction of other, much more powerful peoples.’’ Nature rather than either narcissistic delusion or the deity has elected—selected— the Jews: ‘‘the biological consequences of their intellectual aims and moral

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laws.’’62 Yet apologetic explanation did not erase the problems presented by persistence; the first chapter of The Other Jewish Question examines the specific textual locus of Spinoza’s diagnosis and its reception between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. In this introduction, however, it is necessary to explore more generally the relationship among European contact with other peoples, the nature of the threat of Jewish persistence, and the construction of the stereotypical Jewish body. And that relationship is a fetishistic one. an excursus on fetishism Since its 1760 coinage in Charles de Brosses’s Cult of the Fetish Gods, the signifier fetishism (fe´tichisme) has been serially appropriated by numerous modernity-defining discourses: from de Brosses’s rationalist anthropology to philosophy (Kant, Hegel), to positivist sociology (Comte), to political economy (Marx), to sexology (Binet, Krafft-Ebing), to psychoanalysis (Freud), to aesthetics (Benjamin), to literary (Apter, Schor) and postcolonial analysis (Bhabha, McLintock).63 During its journey, fetishism64 has come to delineate a discursive space in which the—often misrecognized— attempt is made to mediate the simultaneous epistemic and value crises that persistent contact with otherness provokes. An inadequacy of the extant categories employed and a disproportion of values ascribed by the difference-encountering party distinguish this ongoing engagement and result in both an avowal and a disavowal of that otherness. The threatened party finds the ever-deferred resolution of these dilemmas by displacing the recognition of difference onto an object that in its material opacity embodies, even as it screens, the ambiguity. Correspondingly, ambivalent affect is directed at, even as significance is affixed to, the object. Thus localized and materialized, otherness can be marked and mastered while the marking individual’s or group’s identity is rendered the invisible (albeit never invulnerable) norm. The seemingly incommensurable differences between European and non-European, colonizer and colonized, capitalist and worker, male and female are articulated during contact in terms of hierarchical oppositions, including religion and nonreligion, science and superstition (the absence of science), rationality and irrationality, spirit and matter, necessity and accident, subject and object, order and chaos, culture and nature, human and animal, public and private, white and nonwhite, penis and vagina: in sum, us and them. While the label of fetishism facilitated an always-already marginalization of many of ‘‘them’’ as ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘primordial,’’ some of ‘‘them’’

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presented genealogical complications. The Hindu, Jew, and Chinese have occupied a peculiar place in the West’s cultural imaginary. Although they were generally perceived as older than Christian Europe, they had apparently been superseded by their Christian European rival for world hegemony—whether understood in material or philosophic terms—and divine election. Yet still they persisted.65 While their lack of control over their political and economic destinies insinuated a lack in their intrinsic cultural (or racial) makeup, their very persistence under conditions of European domination questioned the grounds of a Christian European culture that privileged (its own) sui generis constitution.66 Thus, the Berlin scholar and rabbi Abraham Geiger observed in his 1871 history of Judentum from the thirteenth through the seventeenth century: The continuation of Judentum in its earlier manner must necessarily appear to Christentum as a decisive protest against the truth [of its claims to have completed and superseded Judentum]. The tough durability of Judentum serves a knockdown punch to it, a denial of its self-justification. Each Jew’s existence bears witness against Christentum’s truth.67

The focus of The Other Jewish Question is on the problem raised by the persistence into modernity of Christian Europe’s principal proximate other, Judentum,68 and its fetishistic solutions.

The Fetishized Jew For some, explicitly for the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, implicitly for the philosopher Immanuel Kant,69 Judentum is itself fetishism. In the second edition of his major treatise Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith), Schleiermacher includes the Jews among the three historic communities to have achieved the highest level of monotheism; however, unlike the other two (Christianity and Islam), Judentum is not striving for world hegemony and is almost extinct (fast im Erlo¨schen). Perhaps it is not surprising when he then comments that by limiting Jehovah’s love to the tribe of Abraham, Judentum ‘‘still manifests an affinity [Verwandtschaft] with fetishism.’’70 And perhaps since Judentum was not completely extin¨ ber die Religion (On Religion) delimited the guished—though his 1799 U broader reference of Judentum by employing the German Protestant terminus technicus Judaismus, and called that a ‘‘long since dead religion,’’ there are, he conceded, those who ‘‘still bear its colors . . . actually sitting beside [this] undecaying mummy’’—Schleiermacher disavowed any

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historical connection and therefore any genealogical relation between Judentum and Christianity.71 These European perceptions of the Jew as other—as persistent and persisting unchanged through history, as particular and thus without internal differentiation (regardless of external variation)—are in themselves fetishized constructions that construct fetishes: the Europeans’ discursive fixation on a part of the other’s body and on the techniques practiced by the other upon that body part. As is the case with the circumcised penis—as well as the bound foot, the Chinese pigtail, the sati72—the fixated-on body part is often one that has been subjected to some discipline, practice, or technique. It supplements the body of the other: paradoxically it both adds to (the physical loss appends symbolic meaning to) and completes the embodied other. No less paradoxically, this overvalued mark or member uncannily conjoins the natural and the cultural. This ambiguous conjunction of two (culturally) differentiated orders of being contributes to both the fascination and the horror evoked by such body techniques. Moreover, that a people would ritually practice such corporeal mutilation was no historical accident: it suggested something perverse in their essential being. It was an index of their true nature. Ultimately, through such corporeal metonymies, discourses in which historical difference was naturalized as race and discourses in which natural difference was figured by sex73 combined to construct the ethnic and gender identity of the others74 —both Europe’s indigenous heterogeneous populations and the different peoples contacted in the course of colonial expansion—whose presence might undermine the narcissistic phantasy of European wholeness. The Jews presented a particular problem to the Christian inhabitants of what until 1806 made up the Holy Roman Empire of Germanic states. Since the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century little more than formality and vaguely related dialects connected the hundreds of principalities, duchies, free cities, and would-be empires beneath that banner. Nor did that imperial pretention secure them against boundary-transgressing nation-states such as France, which periodically invaded and under Napoleon occupied many of those German lands, and which had already long engaged in cultural colonialism. Moreover, the truth of biblical history—a Scripture-grounded common Semitic ancestry of people and language—constituted an obstacle to any German sui generis claims,75 leading Friedrich Schlegel to ask: ‘‘Does it matter at all to religion whether Enoch or Noah weren’t Hebrews but rather Indians?’’76 Entering the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), some Germanidentifying individuals sought to discover a collective identity—both material and ideal—within mythical ‘‘historical’’ boundaries that obviated

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these accidental political ones and provided an alternative to their only other preexisting boundary-crossing identification: as Protestant (or Catholic). They endeavored to recover the union of Geist, Blut, und Boden (spirit, blood, and soil) of an autonomous and autochthonous Volk. They found it in the vernacular and the territory in which it was spoken; they found it in philology and the past from which that language purportedly came.77 The German language in its purity and originality proved the index by which the Germans were defined over and against the nations without and, especially for the minority Germanophones in the vast multiethnic Hapsburg Empire or the Slavic reaches of Prussia, the other nationalities within.78 Coincident with this quest for national identity was the movement by many Jews already resident in these lands toward acculturation or assimilation,79 to adopt the ‘‘universal’’ culture (Bildung) of the Germanophone bourgeoisie that would help them secure the desired civil emancipation and social integration they had been denied, without necessarily subjecting themselves to baptism: caftans were traded in for cravats,80 Talmuds for Tolstoy,81 fringes for fringe benefits. As Eduard Gans argued before the gathered membership of the Verein fu¨r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Association for Jewish Culture and Scholarship) in his 28 April 1822 President’s Report: ‘‘Such is the demand of today’s Europe, one that necessarily derives from its own notion of itself, that the Jews must be completely assimilated into it [sich ihm ganz einverleiben].’’ But he then declared that such ‘‘absorption is not erasure [Aufgehen ist nicht untergehen].’’82 In other words, as the Gentile Germanophone endeavored to become ‘‘himself,’’ the resident Jew was perceived as striving to occupy the place of that same ‘‘self,’’ while still retaining a trace of the Jew’s supposedly superannuated difference. As the psychoanalyst Heinz Henseler has diagnosed the situation, ‘‘while Jews and non-Jews had become over the centuries more and more similar, the Jews’ retention of their own group identification became an annoyance, indeed a narcissistic crisis [zur narzißistischen Kra¨nkung], for the non-Jewish majority.’’83 To foreclose this danger, stereotypical gendered and ‘‘natural’’ Jewish bodies, both of particular individuals and of the collectivities they exemplified, provided symbolic substitutes for and objectified representations of the threatening other. By rendering the other visible—especially the other who sought in many instances to assimilate—the exchange of these fetishizing representations in a variety of scientific and popular discourses served simultaneously to disavow, affirm, and, above all, forestall the perceived threat

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presented by a persisting ethnic difference to the identification and authority of the autonomous and autochthonous subject-citizen of homogeneous European nation-states—white, bourgeois, (nominally) Christian or post-Christian, (avowedly) heterosexual, and male.84 This difference was generally indexed by the Jews’ (presumably) circumcised penis. In 1811 the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a member of Berlin’s Christian-German Eating Club, acknowledged his fellow members’ fear of Jewish-born dissemblers secreted within their Jew-excluding association, but because of his concern about deriding a member wrongly suspected of being Jewish in order to force him out, he advised prospective avenging wits from becoming themselves the butt of their own mockery: ‘‘Den Juden schiebt man sich wohl noch vom Leibe,/Man ist nicht beschnitten;—ergo ist man keiner’’ (The body still usually gives the Jew away./[If] one is not circumcised—therefore one is not a Jew).85 Yet like all fetishes, the inscribed Jewish body, that is, the iconic construct, uncannily preserved what it would disavow: the continued existence of a people whose world- and salvation-historical time had purportedly come and gone. Indeed Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, whose racialist philosophy of history and culture in his 1853–55 Essai sur l’ine´galite´ des races humaines (On the Inequality of the Human Races) would, once embraced by Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Circle, become foundational for the development of racial antisemitism, noted that ‘‘one must conclude—from the expressed words of Holy Scripture (Gen. 17:11–12)—that Israelite nationality resulted much less from descent than from the fact [du fait] of circumcision.’’86 Swiss prehistoric archaeologist and University of Berlin professor Otto Hauser, whose historiographic works achieved great popularity,87 declared in his 1921 defamatory Geschichte des Judentums that, racehistorically speaking, ‘‘indeed [in der Tat] circumcision is what most strikingly separates Judentum from Indo-Germans, and characteristically it remains the case vis-a`-vis ‘Mosaismus’ and us.’’88 Further destabilizing the situation, circumcision is a postnatal corporeal inscription that shame— what distinguishes the human from the animal, the bourgeois from the rabble, the civilized from the primitive—demands be veiled. Even as religioethical and cultural differences between reform Jew and liberal Christian became unrecognizable, baptism no longer provided a sufficient answer to the Jewish Question according to liberal commentator, industrialist, and later government minister Walther Rathenau. Even though the absence of a baptism had prevented him from receiving a commission in the exclusive Berlin Guards regiment—unbaptized Jews were still prohibited from becoming officers in the postemancipation Prussian military—Rathenau located the rationale for this obstacle to Jewish social acceptance and

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integration on the Jewish body, baptized or not. As he wryly put it in his savage 1898 assault on the assimilation possibilities of those aesthetic and physical ruins, his less-than-virile contemporaries of Jewish descent: ‘‘Often the only thing that still recalls the faith of the fathers is a certain ironic external atavism, Abraham’s malice [Abrahams Malice; i.e., his malicious bequest to his descendents]’’—that is, the (after-)birthmark that nevertheless remains hidden yet cannot be camouflaged by the Jewish talent for mimicry, that practice which Rathenau no less ironically alludes to but does not expressly name, the indelible index of Jewish embodiment, circumcision.89 In its ironic impossibility as what cannot be seen but must be shown and as what must be natural but is an effect of artifice—made all the more impossible by the tacit taboo of public discussion or depiction90 —‘‘circumcision’’ haunted the cultural imagination of Central Europeans, whether Jewish or Gentile.91 For example, if viewers did not recognize the Jew in Hugo Stro¨hl’s devilish and hook-nosed silhouette that appeared in an 1875 number of the Leipziger Illustrirten, they were helped by the sharply contrasting surgical scissors visible in his pocket (see Figure I-1).92 Even in its apparent unmentionableness, the mutual implication of circumcision and Judentum surfaced in German speech. ‘‘In contemporary German [c. 1843] one says ‘ju¨dschen’ or ‘ju¨dischen’ instead of ‘circumcise’; that means ‘to make [one] a Jew.’ ’’93 Conversely, the writer, philosopher, and, according to Theodor Lessing, paradigmatic self-hating Jew Arthur Trebitsch supported his claim for Aryan identity by asserting that, because his parents were not married according to Jewish law, he was not circumcised.94 Since it both pointedly encapsulated what it would disavow—the misrecognition of constructed differences by which hegemony enacts itself95—and remained inextricably attached to the (un)dead Jews,96 ‘‘circumcision’’ became both an apotropaic monument and a floating signifier that functioned as a dispositive,97 an apparatus that connected, inter alia, biblical citations, stories, images, fantasies, ritual murder accusations,98 laws, kosher slaughterers,99 ethnographic studies, medical diagnoses, usury,100 and ritual practices, among other deposits in that noisome landfill called Europe, in order to produce knowledge about and authorize the identification of Judentum— and of the uncircumcised. Yet just as not all of these naturalized signifiers of difference (as well as the unmarked attributes of the dominant group) could be rendered either readily visible or clearly unambiguous, neither were the naturalized fundamental values of autonomy and autochthony unproblematic. Man is born from woman, and the ancestors of the ‘‘indigenous population’’ did not

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Figure I-1. Ju¨discher Ha¨ndler (Jewish dealer). Illustration by Hugo Stro¨hl, from ‘‘Schwoazkerschaln: Silhouetten zu obero¨sterreichischen Schnadahu¨pfeln,’’ Leipziger Illustrirten 1689 (1875): 394. Reproduced in Michaela Haibl, Zerrbild als Stereotyp. Reprinted courtesy of Michaela Haibl.

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originally inhabit this specific piece of earth. Not surprisingly, with such comments as ‘‘As to the Germans themselves, I think it probable that they are indigenous and that very little foreign blood has been introduced either by invasions or by friendly dealings with neighboring peoples,’’ and ‘‘For myself, I accept the view that the peoples of Germany have never contaminated themselves by intermarriage with foreigners but remain of pure blood, distinct and unlike any other nation’’ the Roman historian Tacitus’s Germania was embraced by German nationalists.101 Moreover, older determinations of the religious and corporate world orders did not simply disappear. The supersessionist, soteriological filiation of Judentum with Christentum may no longer necessarily have been the primary determinant of the relationship between Jew and Gentile, but traces of that connection remained in those family Bibles and Sunday hymns, in proverbs and village shrines, and in the persistence of Jews—if only in the denial of those traces.

And What about the Fetishized? What happens when the visible properties of a proximate other and the structured relations with that other lose their once-assumed divine warrant and become fungible, that is, individual, voluntary, and private? Can the other become (recognized as) brother? Or will other sources of authority arise to secure individual and group identification? Beginning in the late eighteenth century such were the questions posed to many Western and Central European Jews. And they found themselves caught in a double (triple, quadruple . . .) bind. The European society into which Jews sought admission demanded complete assimilation of and into the dominant culture, even to the point of obliterating any traces of Judentum; yet, often accompanying the demand was the assumption that Jews were constitutionally incapable of eliminating their difference.102 The Jew’s impossible inclusion was complemented by the Jew’s necessary difference: the circumcised penis, the identifying inscription that is not visible, the sign that European society demands must be hidden. When circumcision was no longer required by either the German or Austrian state for official registration as a (male) Jew after 1871, because the (circumcised) penis was still necessarily hidden, it had the same undecidable existence as Schro¨dinger’s cat. This epistemological dilemma presented by circumcision found one resolution in the apotropaic representation of itself as always already

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present and other such mediations in fetishistic displacement. Consequently, circumcision was not the only instance of Jewish corporeality that endeavored to resolve the multiply bound Jewish Question by producing knowledge about and authorizing the identification of the Jew. This work will also examine a number of other such corporeally coded ‘‘quasiobjects’’ that supplemented, that helped make visible, the circumcised: noses, smells, voice, hair, mimicry, animality, rags, diet, disease and diseased reproduction. Because Jewish-identified individuals were immersed in the phantasmagoria of such figurations, assaulted every day—in the gutter and the garret salon, in medical treatise and dirty joke, in tabloid caricature and literary depiction—by such ascriptions, they had their own question, an Other Jewish Question. Perhaps no one has evoked the everyday shock of the Jew—ostensibly male and a member of the educated bourgeoisie like many of the individuals addressed by this work—more poignantly than the Austrian Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler in an observation appended to his 1913 autobiography, Mein Jugend in Wien. It was not possible, especially not for a Jew in public life, to ignore the fact that he was a Jew; nobody else was doing so, not the Gentiles and even less the Jews. You had the choice of being counted as insensitive, obtrusive and fresh; or of being oversensitive, shy and suffering from feelings of persecution. And even if you managed somehow to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin had been anaesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut into until the blood flows.103

The scenario that Schnitzler evokes is of the supposedly assimilated Jew seemingly inured to the slights, habitually parrying the blows, who wished to reveal neither his recognition of nor his reaction to those assaults, and yet, despite himself, on occasion, bore evidence of the attacks. More significant, beneath the surface he was infected by these wounds, and bandaging the point of entry did not prevent the poisoning of the entire corpus.104 Both the pathogens and the attempts at cure will manifest themselves as symptoms on the Jewish-identified body of work. While either breaking out in a fever of apologetic or covering oneself in a homeopathic salve of self-hatred indicates a response to the poison, neither necessarily has much of an effect on alleviating it or even containing its spread. Nor does that other homeopathic gesture in which the victim revaluates the poison as a gift (e.g., appropriating the signs of denigration and particularity and

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transforming them into universal goods). Further, the apparent absence of symptoms (e.g., leaving out either references to antisemitism or to Jews and Judentum-associated matters at sites where such eruptions have previously occurred) does not mean that no infection has taken root; indeed, it may indicate a desire not to be the agent of its spread. Since the symptom can be a consequence of either the poison or the defense against it, can the victim—an adherent to the European creed of the autonomous and authoritative subject—ever absolutely distinguish the alien within from the self? Are not these supplements, the poison and its effects, now parts of the embodied self that makes its way through, as it comes to know, the world? German and Germanophone Austro-Hungarian Jews, however, were not suffering from PEMD, post-extended-metaphor disorder.105 In On Freud’s Jewish Body, I have characterized their experience in terms of the persistent trauma of everyday antisemitism and analyzed different ways in which they—and Freud in particular—acted it out and worked it through in their writing. Nor is such characterization absent from this volume. Still, some may argue that psychoanalytic notions such as trauma and the unconscious provide for the scholar a black box out of which interpretations can be produced willy-nilly without explicit confirmation from the ‘‘authors’’ of those interpreted works. And even if such theoretical differences are accepted as irresolvable, the material problem of what qualify as pertinent data remains: what did she encounter and when did she encounter it? That a particular Jewish-associated image, proposition, or morpheme was in cultural circulation does not automatically mean that an author was in a position even to perceive it, let alone to be on its receiving end. Besides, very few of these phenomena were exclusively associated with Jews; hence the presence of such, especially an offensive one, in an author’s work does not necessarily mean that its use has been dictated by its Jewish connection. And what then of the seemingly conspicuous absences? Is it significant if a Jewish-identified author avoids mention of Judentum where it would be otherwise expected? For example, when Freud first plots the trajectory of religious development in Totem and Taboo, Christianity is shown to emerge out of cults of such youthful deities as Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Orpheus, Dionysus-Zagreus, and in competition with the Persian Mithras. He makes no mention of Judentum or the Jewish community of Palestine.106 Still, the psychoanalytic case history does not provide the only model for addressing such apparent anomalies. Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing has given readers warrant to plumb those silences

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with critical sonar and record echoes of a subtextual response to the historical conditions and constraints under which authors wrote. Such concerns also always surround any analysis, such as this one, that finds affinities with new historicism. While not necessarily accepting an unconscious (as variously understood by psychoanalysis), that critical practice assumes that the subject is interpellated into a network of diverse cultural discourses and asserts that texts need to be seen in part as products of tropes that transgress the assumed boundaries between supposedly distinct discursive fields such as the economic, the religious, and the aesthetic. The physiognomic analyses undertaken here of the Other Jewish Question posed by Jewish identification make comparable assumptions about both the emergence of texts and the kinds of close readings of them that are necessary.

A Physiognomic Analysis of a Fetish [T]he true collector detaches the object from its functional relations. . . . [F]or the collector the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects . . . according to a surprising and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection. . . . We need only recall what importance a particular collector attaches not only to his object but also to its entire past, whether this concerns the origin and objective characteristic of the thing or the details of its ostensible external history: previous owners, price of purchase, current value, and so on. All of these—the ‘‘objective’’ data together with the other—come together . . . to form a whole magic encyclopedia [‘‘of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes’’] whose outline is the fate of his object. Here therefore within the circumscribed field, we can understand how the great physiognomists (and collectors are physiognomists of the world of things) become interpreters of fate. (Benjamin, The Arcades Project)107

And not of character!108 While physiognomics, the would-be ‘‘science of discovering the relative connection between the interior and the exterior man; between the visible surface and the invisible spirit which it incloses,’’109 has been traced back to before the Common Era,110 it achieved its greatest European prominence in the 1770s with the theologian Johann Caspar Lavater’s publication of his Physiognomische Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy). Lavater had earlier achieved a more limited notoriety with his public call for the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to either

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refute the Swiss philosopher and naturalist Charles Bonnet’s ‘‘Investigation of the Proofs for Christianity,’’ or convert—for surely, Lavater believed, such a noble thinker as Mendelssohn, in particular a thinker who bore such a noble forehead, would recognize the Truth once it lay before him. Mendelssohn deftly stepped aside from this challenge. Instead of engaging in religious comparison and adjudication, the philosopher simply stated that he was as convinced of Judentum’s essential religious core as Lavater himself was of Christianity’s, and Mendelssohn embedded his confession within an homage to the Enlightenment principle of toleration. This public response, together with the subsequent outcry against Lavater’s breach of propriety by many in the German Gentile ‘‘republic of letters,’’ including Goethe, G. C. Lichtenberg, and Friedrich Nicolai, led the would-be proselytizer to rescind apologetically his importunate request. Still, in an edition of the Essays published after Mendelssohn’s death, Lavater included a silhouette of the philosopher’s head (see Figure I-2) with the following doubly self-vindicating commentary: ‘‘My gaze runs from the marvelous arch of the forehead to. . . . [A]ll this combines to make the divine truth of physiognomy palpable and visible. Yes, I see him, Abraham’s son, who . . . will surely recognize and worship the crucified Lord of Splendor!’’111 While as this passage testifies, Lavater did not assume a physiognomy common to all identifiable and identified Jews, his illustrations of and observations about the physiognomy of Judas—then often disparagingly figured as the archetypal Jew112—did draw upon the traditional inventory of negative stereotypes (see Figure I-3). Moreover, his contemporaries, such as the physician and comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who taxonomically differentiated among discrete varieties of humans, did draw on physiognomy. Although Blumenbach, in the expanded 1795 third edition of his influential racial taxonomy of humanity, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (first published in 1776),113 characterized the skull of an infant Jewish girl as Caucasian,114 he nevertheless asserted that the Jews ‘‘[u]nder every climate, remain the same as far as the fundamental configuration of the face goes; [they are] remarkable for a racial character almost universal, which can be distinguished at first glance even by those little skilled in physiognomy, although it is difficult to limit and express by words.’’115 Despite the derision of satirists then, the dearth of confirmation by systematic empirical experiment since, and the devastation rationalized by the physiognomic assumptions of race scientists by their adherents,116 physiognomics retains the public appeal of an assumed one-to-one correspondence between character and countenance and shares the quest, even

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Figure I-2. Silhouette of Mendelssohn by Johann Caspar Lavater, published in his Essays on Physiognomy (1789), 2:136. Reprinted courtesy of The Wellcome Library, London.

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Figure I-3. Portrait of Judas Iscariot, published in Lavatar, Essays on Physiognomy (1789), 1:168. Reprinted courtesy of The Wellcome Library, London.

with most of its debunkers, for a hermeneutic that discerns the necessary connection ‘‘between concealed cause and the apparent effect which it produces.’’117 Even when the bourgeois value of public discretion or modesty precluded certain telltale appearances, such as that of the (circumcised) penis, from being explicitly manifested or addressed, the conventional physiognomic attitude toward the meaning of appearance consequently generated other more visible indexical representations that

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could provide the necessary identification marks.118 Nevertheless, while legitimate ethical and scientific qualms abound over the truth-claims made for physiognomics, have we any other choice than to take as the objects of our epidemiological study the same as those taken by physiognomy: the surfaces of bodies, the bodies of things and the things that are bodies? Following perhaps the last great physiognomist, Walter Benjamin, a physiognomic portrait seeks to represent ‘‘the context within which the unique and the extreme stands alongside its counterpart.’’119 First the analyst surveys the face of German-Jewish modernity, its symmetries and irregularities, its clean lines and fractal edges, smooth planes and suppurating points, its rises, hollows, and shapes in-between. She then dislodges these phenomena from their surroundings—whether those surroundings are understood to be the rather cluttered but in essence blank setting in which the self-contained object displays itself, or the meaning-determinative background (paradigmatic past), context (syntagmatic present), or continuum (future narrative) in which the phenomena are apparently embedded. The physiognomic analyst seeks to avoid the problematic meaning-constructions that ensue from such assumptions about the relationship between an object and its location(s).120 This does not mean that the epidemiological cum physiognomic analyst ignores the surroundings within which the object is eventually found. That object only surfaces in the course of close and detailed attention to what is then recognized as its surroundings. Further, the physiognomic analyst, by taking these objects out of their surroundings, is not taking them out of their contexts per se, since those contexts—whether such seemingly autonomous and distinct totalities as science, literature, politics, popular culture, the antisemitic fringe, and so forth, or such seemingly self-contained identifications as gender, race, class, sexuality, and so forth, or the noless-seemingly self-contained totality as the authored text—are ideological constructs that are naturalized as sui generis. No less ideological are any totalizing claims made for those other contexts in which these objects find themselves: a Zeitgeist, an interpretive tradition, or a hegemonic discourse. While I posit, at least heuristically, the existence of a hegemonic Gentile European bourgeois discourse (albeit with national and local variations) as well as the existence of hegemonic disciplinary discourses, hegemony by definition implies that there are other voices both in the culture (or discipline) and in the canonical works. Hegemony can constrain both the production and interpretation of those works; it can devalue or repress the counterhegemonic elements. It cannot, however, eliminate them.121 Further, hegemonic values and representations often come into conflict with one another. Thus, the ostensive

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egalitarianism and the extensive negation of identification markers (because, among other problems, they interrupt the flow of capital) promulgated by a sometimes-hegemonic liberalism would appear to oppose the hierarchical differentiations that characterize antisemitism; yet such contradictions have long been chronicled in the history of Jewish emancipation.122 Nor does this mean that the epidemiological cum physiognomic analyst hypostasizes the dislodged object. Whether an auratic remainder of idealist aesthetics, an intrusion of commodity fetishism, an extension of the imperial museum, or the afterbirth of the modern fact, a familiar presupposition guiding research is that the object to be known is a discrete phenomenon displayed in its totality here and now before the observer. Yet the phenomenological and affective experience of the viewer often belies this portended objectivity. Unlike the rotating transparent cube of a computer simulation, the opaque box on the table before me elicits questions about its depths (i.e., its possible contents), about its interface with other supposedly discrete objects (i.e., its side that sits on the table), and maybe even about time and agency (i.e., how it got there). What one observer may experience as the object’s awe-full mystery that arouses anxiety and/ or astonishment, that strikes the observer dumb and testifies to the object’s own-selfness, another may experience as its resonance: ‘‘the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world.’’ The physiognomic analyst would, as Greenblatt advises, mobilize its resonance: ‘‘to illuminate the conditions of [its] making, to disclose the history of [its] appropriation and the circumstances in which [it] come[s] to be displayed.’’123 She neither unveils its essence nor reveals its telos; rather, her indiscreet apparent isolation of the object seeks to reduce its illusory isolation as a discrete thing.124 For example, among the exemplary witnesses to the figuration of the ‘‘feminized male Jew’’ are the accounts of Jewish male menstruation—whether of all male Jews or just the quarterly flows of the descendants of the lost tribe of Simeon—that have been traced back to thirteenth-century treatises but were also found in fin de sie`cle antisemitic pamphlets as well as, albeit without either onus or specific ethnic identification, in the correspondence of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. These iterations do not necessarily125 mean either the derivation of Jewish feminization from this topos in the thirteenth century or, even if such is intended, that such a characterization shares the matrix of associations in which that figure would be embedded six or seven centuries later. Rather than making a transhistorical claim for the ‘‘feminized male

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Jew,’’ such data indicate a reserve of topoi from which some may have later drawn. An analyst’s assumption of either self-contained objects or of totalizing contexts therefore impedes recognition of the linkages beyond the objects’ conventional boundaries, as well as recognition of their conditions for emergence126 at the intersections of the voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious, individual and collective, memory and history, as well as recognition of those ‘‘related extremes’’ (verwandten Extremen) that Benjamin described as ‘‘standing over and against one another’’: the German and the Jew.127 These ‘‘isolated’’ details are then grasped in a new ‘‘configuration pregnant with tensions’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ 262 [Thesis xvii]). Subjected to a shock—such as a cutting remark or a whiff of the foetor Judaicus, the Jewish stench128 —the constellated moments ‘‘crystalize into a monad’’ (TPH 262–63 [Thesis xvii]) and make present (in the senses of darstellen and vergegenwa¨rtigen)129 a meaningful ‘‘whole’’ for us, here, now. That is, we discern an apparatus at play, connecting images and narratives, individual fantasies and communal laws, anthropological tracts and religious rites, medical diagnoses and stock exchange rumors, gender roles and racially inscribed bodies that produced knowledge about and authorized the identification of Judentum. Perhaps no better physiognomic portrait of the German Jew—of GermanJewish physiognomy as what is portrayed rather than necessarily what is there to be displayed—has been produced than this one by Jacob Wassermann in his autobiography My Life as a German and a Jew: Imagine a laborer who, when he asks for wages, never receives them in full although his work in no way falls below that of his fellow, and whose question as to the reason of such injustice receives this answer [mit den Worten bescheidet]: You cannot demand full pay, for you are pockmarked [blatternarbig]. He looks in the mirror and sees that his face is entirely free of pockmarks. He retorts: What do you mean? I have no pockmarks whatsoever. The others shrug their shoulders and reply: Your record declares you to be pockmarked, so you are pockmarked.130

The studies that make up The Other Jewish Question pick up the laborer’s mirror and turn it on the record.

What the Traffic Will Bear The catalysts for each of these studies vary; they did not all originate as the sculpted facets of an uncut semiprecious stone called ‘‘The Book.’’

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Along with my On Freud’s Jewish Body (2007), it can be traced back to a research program begun long ago to track in their historical specificity and make some sense of the intertwining representations of Jews and women from The Merchant of Venice to Moses and Monotheism, a program that as it proceeded both recognized how many strands—sexuality, colonialism, class, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, body, performance—were part of this braid, as well as how ‘‘braid’’ may be a misleading figure.131 While the project seemed to narrow itself to Freud—to a Freud book—the happenstance of teaching, the demands of the profession, and the need for diversion all led me to stray. Chapter 1 is a direct result of my Freud pursuit: the necessity to trace a genealogy in order to justify (to myself, if no one else) the correlation I proposed between Freud’s Moses book and the unmentioned-by-Freud analysis of Jewish election and persistence by Spinoza. Origins aside, the chapter opens upon several key problematics that guide this entire work: including 1) how the discursive and other epistemic apparati by which persisting Judentum has been identified as the embodied Other-than-theEuropean shares elective affinities with other othering apparati that identified additional persistent threats, both proximate and distant; and 2) the various ways by which Jewish-identified individuals have acted out and worked through their encounters with such apparati. In addition, the first chapter’s focus on the morphemic and other discursive nodal points— primarily corporeal signifiers, especially circumcision, but also the signifiers of other abjected objects—upon which these diverse dispositives regularly intersect, and the specific emphasis on the gendering of Jewish identification, weave through the other chapters; however, the affinitive dispositive employed against the threat posed by the persistence of the gendered other, of woman, is not the only one addressed in The Other Jewish Question. Chapters 2 and 3 each track historically the relationship between Judentum and some of its affines, respectively, the Chinese and disease and/ or diseased reproduction. The second chapter surveys the morphemic/ semantic field Zopf-, most generally translated as queue, pigtail, or braid, in order to examine the overlapping representations of Jews and Chinese by which they were identified and known. Even as it undertakes a broad geographical and historical sweep, the chapter does particularly attend to the hairy Heine. The next chapter charts how Judentum shaped and was shaped by the emergence of the future-threatening disease-entity he´re´dosyphilis. The emphasis in this chapter is less on how Jewish-identified individuals dealt with this constellation than with how two of the most

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influential anti-Jewish works of the first third of the twentieth century, Arthur Dinter’s Sin against the Blood and Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, infected their identification of Judentum with syphilis. The six final chapters are principally chronotopically specific studies of outbreaks of Judentum-associated signifiers in the texts of particular Jewish-identified or Jewish-identifying figures. These more-or-less chronologically arranged examinations of various epidemics of signification point both to possible sociocultural conditions for their emergence and to their possible mediating function in the authors’ relationships to Judentum. They demonstrate that physiognomic scholarship devoted to these figures’ corpoi need not simply rely on stereotype or on overt indicators of their engagement with Judentum in order to analyze how Jewish identification affected the production of identity, text, and culture in the Germanophone modern. Even as my work sought from its outset to foreground the gendering of the Jew, my primary focus on male figures risked reproducing the gender blindness it sought to alleviate by implicitly rendering Jewish male forms of mediation, of acting out and working through Jewish identifications, as normative for modern Germanophone Jewish experience. The fourth chapter, on Rahel Levin Varnhagen, is both the principal exception and a special case. It examines how a Jewish-identified woman identifies herself as Jewish within a Gentile culture, for which the Jew is known as male. It shows how Levin Varnhagen, finding the possibilities for Jewish identification thus circumscribed, inflected the references to her own Jewishness with allusions to circumcision and the circumcised male. While chapter 5, in part, chronicles the long history of a central motif in Jewish representation, Judentum’s relationships with eating, it focuses on the construction of Judentum as ‘‘appetitive religion’’ (and its Englishlanguage reception) by a German philosopher best known for his critique of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach. It situates the only translated-intoEnglish edition of Feuerbach’s classic Essence of Christianity over and against both the other editions of the work and Feuerbach’s later ‘‘dietmaterialism.’’ Chapter 6 engages the work of Feuerbach’s one-time disciple and subsequent superseder Karl Marx. By means of an extensive analysis of the distribution and disposition of particular Judentum-associated morphemes, especially Lump- and Verkehr-, in Marx’s work and his world, this chapter shifts the focus on the relationship to Judentum of this Jewish-identified thinker from the near-exclusive attention paid to his early review of Bruno Bauer’s works, ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ (which during his lifetime was

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treated as rather marginal), and from the frequently accompanying deduction of Marx’s antisemitism and/or self-hatred, to how Jewish identification helped construct his entire corpus. While Max Nordau is best known for his pessimistic 1892 pathography of modernism, Degeneration, and for his later championing of Zionism and muscular Judentum, chapter 7 addresses his earlier work, written when Nordau was the very model of a major generalist (of Jewish descent). It examines how his all-but-Judenrein best-selling works of 1880s liberal cultural criticism just as productively ignored Judentum as his fellow Victorians had ignored the body when they upholstered the arms and legs of their overstuffed furniture. Chapter 8 returns to works identifying Jews rather than those by identified Jews. Unlike the diachronic convergence of a field of Jewish representation onto one particular representation in chapter 5, this chapter explores a synchronic slice of one of the leading incarnations of Judentum, the Wandering a.k.a. Eternal Jew (Ahasverus der ewige Jude). Three avatars of this figure—in a play, in a psychiatric treatise, and in a short story—and the return of chapter 3’s specter of syphilis chiasmically lead to an analysis of the ambiguous Jewish identification of their authors’ contemporary, one of the foremost exemplars of fin-de-sie`cle unmanned manhood, the Protestant Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (whose Memoirs of My Mental Illness remains today a font of historical, psychoanalytical, and sociocultural analysis) and of his vision of the unmanned non-Jewish wandering Jew. Schreber’s ‘‘writing-down-system’’ and subjected body of symptoms are seen employing the epistemic apparati by which Jewish identification was ascribed and inscribed. The final chapter noses about the (re)productions of the great Jewish physiognomist Walter Benjamin. Rather than seeking to display the optical unconscious at play in his corpus or to grasp its Adamic-alphabetadorned ‘‘old box of toys,’’132 chapter 9 sniffs out the olfactive and reproductive facets of two key Benjaminian notions, aura and mimesis, and how they exude the traces of alterity and Judentum in his and our everyday. And finds that Benjamin on erev Shoah found himself, like the others here examined in their own engagements with the contradictions of Jewish identification, repeating what he himself repeated: ‘‘Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.’’133 In my pursuit of the Other Jewish Question—how to mediate Jewish identification—posed by Benjamin and the other ‘‘similar’’ individuals at play in the Zweiheit of Deutschtum and Judentum between the Enlightenment

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and the Shoah, I have sought the secreted auras surrounding their bodies of work in which their responses were acted out and worked through. As epidemiologist, physiognomist, and ragpicker, in sum, as reader, I have attended to their singular, but not unique,134 appearances of a closeness, however distant they may be, to the scents of Judentum emanating from the at-times most goyisch of textual abodes. To that end, I have picked among the accretions of day residues, the corporeal remains of their (non-) Jewish everyday, including ‘‘what has been rejected and suppressed [and the] impressions which are indifferent and have for that reason not been dealt with,’’135 by which their texts are maintained and manifested.136 My collation of their peculiar quasi-objects, these pungent pickings of body parts and their like, now awaits your testing.137

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chapter 1

‘‘Feminization’’ and the Problem of Jewish Persistence

In the third chapter of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), ‘‘Of the Vocation of the Hebrews . . . ,’’ Spinoza argues that the claim that the Jews are Gd’s chosen people is no longer valid. Further, their former elected status was not a consequence of any qualities or religious beliefs particular to them, but due to their past political good fortune. The fall of the Jewish State marked the end of their chosenness: [T]he Hebrew nation was chosen by God before all others not by reason of its understanding nor of its spiritual qualities, but by reason of its social organization and the good fortune whereby it achieved supremacy and retained it for so many years and by which it kept [a state] for many years. . . . We therefore conclude (since God is equally gracious to all and the Hebrews were chosen only with respect to their social organization and their government), . . . no difference can be granted between Jews and Gentiles, nor therefore any special election of the Jews beyond that which we have already indicated. (TTP 91, 94, 99)

That the Jewish people still existed as a self-identified entity some 1,600 years after the fall of Jerusalem was not, therefore, a sign of divine election. Nor, however, was their continued disempowered existence an index of divine rejection. Such persistence was a curiosity and a consequence of the

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separation between Jews and Gentiles that had been maintained by hatred and the peculiarity of Jewish practices. Spinoza’s discussion of divine election and his analysis of the causes of Jewish persistence converge on a passage that Leo Strauss refers to as ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’: The mark of circumcision, too, I consider to be such an important factor in the matter that I am convinced that this by itself will preserve the nation forever. Indeed, were it not that the fundamental principles of their religion discourage manliness [effoeminarent], I would not hesitate to believe that they will one day, given the opportunity—such is the mutability of human affairs—establish once more their independent state, and that God will again chose them. (TTP 100)1

According to Strauss, this sentence delivered the coup de graˆce to any claims that the continued existence of the Jewish people was a sign of divine chosenness. Moreover, it concisely asserted Spinoza’s detachment of Jewry’s ethnic identity and practices (such as circumcision) from any religious claims and principles (such as messianic hopes); the passage also reinforced Spinoza’s political conception of Judentum in the face of the Jewish people’s current apolitical existence. For Strauss, this passage represents Spinoza’s final word on his relationship to Judentum; and, neither apology nor repudiation, Spinoza’s assertion was a testament to his neutral stance vis-a`-vis the Jews, their beliefs, and their practices. What else Spinoza may have intended by this combination of denigrating contemporary Judentum and opening the possibility of future statehood has been a frequent topic of speculation in the literature on the Tractatus. Is this sentence a response to the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi, or a final act of ressentiment directed at the community that had put him under the Herem (the ban) or, simply, a logical conclusion based upon his representation of Judentum and his understanding of the rational laws of history?2 My concern here, however, is less with Spinoza’s intentions than with the various receptions of his words. To borrow a figure from Heine, this chapter plots how this passage from the Tractatus has provided a lens through which leading Jewish and Gentile writers, and more broadly a variety of German (sub)cultures, ‘‘possibly often without knowing it,’’ have seen Jewish-Gentile relations and Jewish identity since the Enlightenment.3 This one sentence of Spinoza’s may not have shaped these authors’ understanding of modernity as much as his critique of scripture and revealed religion, his separation of reason and faith, and/or his ontologization of immanence, of this-world. By breaking the connection between

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persistence and chosenness/election, distinguishing the sociological fact of Jewry’s existence from its religious meaning, and opposing a political/legal conception of Judentum to its apolitical actuality, however, ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’ has, perhaps, had a greater effect on their perceptions of those interethnic relations and identities. For these relations and identities were shaped by another key component of modern consciousness: the emergence of nationalism in the late eighteenth century. While the question of which people were the true elect was pervasive, the growth and transformation of Judenhasß that accompanied nationalism’s frequent concurrent—the Jewish call for emancipation and integration—were less a function of rivalry among the chosen.4 Rather, this passage’s combination of Jewish body, gender, statelessness, and survival insinuated in later readers the specter of Jewish persistence and—with its assertion that ‘‘the principles of their religion make them effeminate (effoeminarent)’’—the equally uncanny ascription of embodied Jewish gender ambiguity and in-difference, especially after the first significant stirrings for Jewish emancipation in the late eighteenth century. What the seventeenth-century writer Spinoza may have been specifically referring to by his use of effoeminarent in this passage is another matter, and has also generated a wide range of interpretations: is he indicating an absence of warlike aggression or a lack of political will needed to secure a state? Is he referring to a passive waiting for Gd and the Messiah to usher in the Jews’ return to Zion and their blind, rote obedience to laws that are no longer binding, to the Law? Is he alluding to Machiavelli’s discussion of the deleterious effects of Christianity on the pagan state, or commenting on the luxus and indolence of the Amsterdam Jewish community (not unlike the picture of [future] Manchu court society that Spinoza juxtaposes with his testamentary statement)?5 Over a century later, however, effoeminarent and its translations into contemporary vernaculars would, as examined below, resonate with other associations. By the time the young Rahel Levin began writing to her friend David Veit in the early 1790s, for example, the ground of meaning and the source of European identities were shifting from religion and lineage to the nation (i.e., history) and the body (i.e., nature).6 When nations became organisms7 and bodies had gender, two monstrous Jewish topoi—the living dead and the feminized male—served as the legacy of Spinoza’s ‘‘Testament,’’ and they posed a threat to post-Enlightenment Europeans by questioning their simultaneously supersessionist and sui generis constitution as autochthonous, autonomous subjects, and by transgressing the

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gendered bifurcation of their societies that secured those identities. And, as exemplified by Julius Wellhausen’s appropriation of Spinoza and the third chapter of the Tractatus to herald the coming dissolution of Jewry,8 efforts had to be made to foreclose the menace posed by Judentum. For Jewish writers from Berthold Auerbach to Hermann Cohen, from Moses Hess to Sigmund Freud, Spinoza’s figuration posed other possibilities; it presented either an obstacle to Jewish admission into those virile societies that must be overcome, or the promise of an ‘‘old-new’’9 Jew. Still the danger and promise posed by this one sentence lay less in its condensation of tropes than in the authority embodied in its source. Of Spinoza, Manfred Walther has written that ‘‘besides Moses and Jesus, no other thinker of Jewish descent has made such an impression upon the non-Jewish world and has been so appreciated, especially in Germany since the so-called Spinoza Renaissance (Herder, Jacobi).’’10 Whether ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’ functioned as focusing lens or distorting mirror, provided a clarion call or generated signal anxiety, this passage became a site for the contestation of the role and representation of the gendered Jewish other in European culture that marked modernity. This chapter examines how, through direct citation of the passage or unmistakable allusion to it—often through the use of gendered language to describe Spinoza himself—modern Jewish identifications were articulated. While I will refrain from taking sides in the centuries-old debate11 as to whether Maledictus would have been a more appropriate Latinized form of the name Baruch than Benedictus, I will draw upon the history of the dispute over whether Spinoza was friend or foe of the Jewish people. Discussion of this passage emerges in these polemical exchanges as exemplary of the persona each disputant ascribes to Spinoza: renegade apostate, hater of Judentum, or traitor who gives aid and comfort to the enemy (e.g., as the source for Kant’s derogation of Judentum as a nonreligion); model of the emancipated Jew, of the secular Jew, of the possibilities and potentialities of the Jews, or, via Goethe’s Spinozism, of the so-called GermanJewish symbiosis; noble, selfless saint, Gd-intoxicated man, prophet of the possibility of a secular Jewish state, incarnation of a third way (i.e., the human) between observant Judaism and pious Christianity, or harbinger of modernity; Jew, Christian, or atheist.12 The opposition of Maledictus and Benedictus has, in any case, been less about Spinoza than about the people—the Jews—whom the disputants would or would rather not have him represent: for this, ‘‘the Spinoza Question[,] interwove through the debates about Jewish identity in modernity.’’13

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Spinoza and Redemptive Jewish (Hu)manization During the first half of the nineteenth century, while German Gentile philosophy was still playing out the Spinoza-intoxicated (betrunken) pantheist controversy spurred largely by his Ethics,14 the emancipation-desiring, acculturation-pursuing Jewish intelligentsia in German lands were abandoning Moses Mendelssohn’s relative silence about and silencing of Spinoza.15 With the appearance of Berthold Auerbach’s translation of Spinoza’s works and of his historical novel about Spinoza,16 the years 1837–38 mark a significant turn in the reception of Spinoza and his ‘‘Testament.’’ Perhaps gathering less notice was the publication of The Holy History of Mankind by a Young Disciple of Spinoza.17 The young disciple proved to be the often-forgotten kvatter of both German Socialism and theoretical Zionism, Moses Hess. Auerbach, described by many as the first modern Jewish novelist,18 chose an interesting word to translate effoeminarent: weibisch (womanish), rather than verweichlichen (render soft or effeminate), the term used in most subsequent German translations, including the standard Gebhardt edition. Auerbach’s choice leaves no doubt about the gender implications of ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament.’’ Auerbach also stages this passage in his novel about Spinoza.19 The scene commences just prior to the completion of the formal procedures for Spinoza’s Herem, or excommunication. Spinoza is engaging in a conversation with several Gentile friends. One, Meyer, wonders about the persistence of the Jews and hence about the incompleteness of their mission and the likelihood that they will once again act in history. Auerbach has Spinoza respond: Nothing is abnormal; everything has its definite cause, from which it must arise necessarily and logically in its destined order. If the ordinances [Einrichtungen] of their religion did not rob them of their manliness [Ma¨nnlichkeit], I should unhesitatingly affirm that the Jews, as is quite possible in the whirling wheel of human affairs, would one day when the opportunity occurred, again obtain their kingdom, and God would choose them anew. . . . But the mission of the Jews is fulfilled. There is nothing wonderful in their preservation; it is only the hatred of all the nations that has preserved them, and they have set themselves apart from all nations by their customs [, and especially by circumcision].20 These customs may disappear like all other laws of ceremonial, which have only a local signification, and the hatred of the nations may change to love.

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After this rehearsal of the concluding sentiments of the third chapter of the Tractatus—albeit with Auerbach replacing his translation’s feminizing Grundsa¨tze (fundamental principles) with the Jews’ feminizing Einrichtungen (practices, ordinances; the ritual of circumcision is such an ordinance)—Meyer draws the implications for the construction of a Jewish identity, an identification epitomized by Spinoza: ‘‘The free Jew, who has cut loose from his own already torn traditions is the only unbiased stranger in the world, armed with all the weapons of the masculine intellect.’’ Signaled by this strategic shift in terminology, the ‘‘cut[ting] loose’’ that apotropaically substitutes for the feminizing cut of circumcision, and the use of gendered language—‘‘manliness,’’ ‘‘masculine intellect’’—Auerbach’s characterization of Spinoza on the eve of emancipation portends the Jew as the model of the virile citizen of the world. Auerbach’s understanding of the Spinoza passage, as revealed in his substitution of Einrichtungen for Grundsa¨tze, of practices for principles, apparently generated other reverberations in his own life. By 1852, when Auerbach’s son was born, most of the debates both between reformminded and traditional Jews and among different communities of reformers over the meaning, healthfulness, primitiveness, and aesthetics of infant circumcision had gone somewhat into abeyance; the emerging general consensus supported the retention of the ritual—under medical supervision.21 Many German states and cities, including Saxony and its capital Dresden where Auerbach lived, still required the circumcision of male Jewish babies in order to register them as legal inhabitants. Following his son’s birth Auerbach took on Saxony’s Chief Rabbi Zecharias Frankel and insisted that the child not be circumcised; instead, Auerbach proposed a different Einrichtung, a ceremony at his home to welcome his son into the community of humanity, a community that included both Jews and Gentiles. Although a lower Saxon court initially ruled in his favor, the decision was overturned. Auerbach then returned to his native state of Wu¨rttemberg, where circumcision was not required for civil status, and registered his son there.22 Perhaps not surprisingly, Auerbach discreetly excised from the second edition of his Spinoza novel the reference to circumcision as the chief custom responsible for setting the Jews apart from the nations.23 As far as Auerbach was concerned, circumcision was one custom that at this time had already ‘‘disappeared.’’ When he published a second edition of his translation of Spinoza’s works in 1871, Auerbach appended a biography. It suggested psychological motivations for Spinoza’s characterization of the Jewish people that belie the novel’s saintly characterization of Spinoza—notably impetuosity,

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delight in the attack, and bitterness toward the Jews (hervorbrechende Angriffslust und Herbheit gegen die Juden).24 In the corresponding note, Auerbach remarks that Spinoza ‘‘allowed himself a mode of expression that does not correspond to his later developed, thoroughly temperate composure’’25 and cites passages from chapters 1 and 9 of the Tractatus. Auerbach also makes reference to the end of chapter 3, where Spinoza demonstrates little sympathy for the position of the Jews in Spain and Portugal. Then in an apparent non sequitur, Auerbach invokes Spinoza’s indication of a possible future Jewish state that concludes his ‘‘Testament.’’26 Could this reference be a synechdochal allusion to the rest of the ‘‘Testament,’’ those ‘‘furious traces of personal agitation’’27 that were too provocative to even provide page references for? Auerbach ascribes the source of Spinoza’s intemperate remarks to personal reasons (aus innern Gru¨nden) and to a polemical apologia against his excommunication. Auerbach’s judgment may also reflect his recognition that Spinoza’s criticism of the Jewish situation in and separation from the Gentile world had contributed to the appropriation of Spinoza by Gentile readers, not as the model for a third, human identity,28 but as a Judentumrepudiating Christian. For Moses Hess, as for Auerbach, Spinoza was the harbinger of modernity, of the third period of the revelation or knowledge of Gd of Hess’s Holy History. The first period—that of Gd the Father—follows the TaNaKh and extends from creation to Second Temple Judaism. During this period, which is guided by an orientation outward, fantasy (Phantasie) and representation mediate knowledge of Gd. The second period—the period of Gd the Son—reigns for the first 1,500-plus years of the Common Era. Knowledge of Gd is mediated by ‘‘feelings of the soul’’ (Ahnung der Gemu¨the), and humanity is oriented inward. The birth of Spinoza inaugurates the third age, of Gd the Holy Spirit. Gd is beyond representation. The revelation is neither Jewish nor Christian, but universal, and is apperceived by the clear light of the understanding. Unfortunately, Hess laments, Spinoza’s significance remains largely unrecognized or, worse, misrecognized and attacked. Each period of Hess’s history is gender coded. The age of Jewish fantasy is primarily characterized as passive and feminine, although, in one place, Hess writes, ‘‘So the holy, manly fantasy . . . proceeds constantly forward’’ (So schritt die heilige, ma¨nnliche Phantasie; emphasis added).29 The age of Christianity is largely described as active; indeed, when Hess provides a recap of his holy history in the second division of the text, which is addressed to the future, he describes Christianity as the manly

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principle.30 The age is characterized by the severing of manly, spiritual religion from effeminate, material politics, even though, curiously, the period commences with what the author characterizes as Christ’s passive yielding to his fate. For Hess, the third age reunites masculine and feminine, religion and politics, spirit and body. There and then the human proceeds with ‘‘a firm, quiet, manly stride’’ and clear consciousness on the path to ‘‘his’’ eternal life in Gd.31 This third age, the modern, has learned its lessons from the two great examples (Judentum and Christianity) of what not to do; drawing obviously from the conclusion of the third chapter of the Tractatus, in which Spinoza analogizes the recently conquered and queue-wearing Chinese with the stateless and circumcised Jews,32 Hess says that the Jews and the Chinese both died long ago, but like ghosts are still around. In chiasmic figurations of one another, Hess depicts the Jews as an ‘‘ethereal fog’’ (i.e., a spirit without a body), and the Chinese as a ‘‘rigid cadaver’’ (i.e., a body without spirit).33 Hess returns some twenty-five years later to the third chapter of the Tractatus in his vision of the revival of Israel, of Jewish nationality, Rome and Jerusalem. He takes his lead, as many future Zionists would with regard to the possibility of a secular Jewish state, from an overreading of the last clause of ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’: ‘‘some day when the opportunity arises [so changeable are human affairs] they will establish their state once more, and that God will chose them afresh.’’ Or in Hess’s rewriting: ‘‘Spinoza conceived Judaism [Judenthum] as nationality [als Nationalita¨t], and held (cf. the conclusion of the third chapter of his theological tractate) that the restoration of the Jewish kingdom depends entirely upon the will and courage of the Jewish people.’’34 Here Hess inverts Spinoza’s characterization of Jewish feminization by invoking Jewish will and courage. Spinoza remains for Hess the prophet of modernity, but like Spinoza in the third chapter, Hess has severed Jewish religiosity from the Jews: And finally, when after the long struggle between the pagan world of sensuality and barbarous force, on the one hand, and the spiritual, mystic, Jewish view on the other, the sun of modern humanitarian civilization shed its feeble rays upon a better and more perfect world, it was a Jew [Spinoza] who was able to signal to the world that the final stage of the process of human development had begun.35

Hess’s optimistic 1862 solution to a world in which the separation of Jew and Gentile is taken as a racial given but not as a violent reality is repeated by George Eliot. Nineteenth-century England’s most important mediator of German (largely anti-Jewish) religious critique through her

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translations of David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu/The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums/The Essence of Christianity,36 Eliot also worked for several years on a never-published translation of the Tractatus,37 and later on a posthumously published (1981!) translation of Spinoza’s Ethics. Her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda recounts her eponymous hero’s gradual coming to recognition of his Jewish identity and the responsibilities such an identity entails. It is a curious work, built around a silence: the virile Deronda’s never-mentioned circumcision.38 Spinoza explicitly emerges in a passage in the novel’s forty-second chapter that will later find its way into German Spinoza-reception (see below). It is an apparent allusion to that last clause of ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’39 by the character Mordecai, who would become Deronda’s guide to Judentum before the novel’s protagonist learns the secret of his own Jewish descent. Mordecai expounds: The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in the veins as a power without understanding. . . . Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion. Will any say, ‘‘It cannot be’’? Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his intellect at the breasts of the Jewish tradition. He laid bare his father’s nakedness and said, ‘‘They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.’’40

Mordecai’s opening figuration of Spinoza is remarkable in its possible allusiveness. Is Eliot here anthropomorphizing ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament,’’ where the ‘‘breasts of the Jewish tradition’’ are an allusion to the feminizing principles of Judentum and the father’s nakedness a reference to the hate-inducing circumcision? Is she thereby suggesting a new Holy Family consisting of mother Judaism, father Jewry, and little Baruch? Or is she picking up the contemporary echoes of Spinoza’s passage by depicting Judentum rather as an androgyne, as a feared and/or scorned transgressor of the sexual differentiation upon which European modernity is grounded?41 While one can only speculate about any specific reference to the ‘‘Testament,’’ Mordecai’s use of corporeal language clearly sets the stage, as did Spinoza, for a gendered vision of the Jewish people; they embody the male virtues necessary for the resurrection of their nation. Mordecai continues: Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed, he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are

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dead? Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames.

Without specifically referring to Spinoza’s discussion, Mordecai calls attention to the peculiarity of Jewish persistence. While he does not— unlike Spinoza—seek to explain that persistence, the discussion does then move to the topic that serves as Spinoza’s explanation: Gentile hatred of the Jews. To the response of Gideon, one of his auditors, that ‘‘[o]ur people have [also] inherited a good deal of hatred. There’s plenty of curses still flying about, and stiff settled rancor inherited from the times of persecution,’’ Mordecai adds: But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of the Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed—what wonder since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? . . . The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purifies, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?—only two centuries since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North American nation. The people grew like meeting waters—they were various in habit and sect—there came a time, a century ago, when they needed a polity. . . . Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes.

Mordecai’s solicitation of a heroic Jewry that transforms the memories of the past with a ‘‘vision of the better’’ in order to create a new polity contrasts with the representation in the German epigraph to Eliot’s chapter, a passage from Leopold Zunz’s Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters. According to the Zunz citation, Jewish heroes [Helden] have been, through the ages, not founders of new orders, but instead players in and chroniclers of a history of pain and suffering. Mordecai continues: They have the memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a better [polity] . . . a covenant of reconciliation. . . . I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign. . . . Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? That is the

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blasphemy of this time. The divine purpose of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world.

Clearly, Mordecai’s apparent commentary on ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’ is rife with the masculine language of heroism, action, choice, resolution, and will. In lieu of Spinoza’s picture of a feminizing religion impeding Jewry from being chosen again and reestablishing a state, Mordecai projects a vision of a virile race choosing and changing its national destiny.42

When the Nations’ Hatred May No Longer Ensure Jewish Persistence . . . Hess’s and Eliot’s visions contrast sharply with those of subsequent readers of Spinoza, who lived in a world where antisemitic political polemic and pogrom became endemic and ethnic/racial as well as gender identities even more ossified. The Russian Jewish physician Leo Pinsker, for example, was driven to despair over the fate of the Jewish people following the violent pogroms that ripped through the Pale of Settlement in 1881. He realized that they were instigated as much by inflammatory newspaper articles of the urban elite as by the assorted motivations of the ignorant rural rabble. When Pinsker came across that crucial third-chapter passage, he had a moment of enlightenment that eventuated in the call for the autoemancipation of the Jews: ‘‘they must become a nation.’’43 His resulting pamphlet, Autoemancipation, reflects not only the enthusiasm generated by the ‘‘wise and prudent’’ Spinoza’s assertion of Jewish national possibilities. It also offers a series of images that reflect how the Jews’ persistence after the loss of their state—and not their claims for chosenness—has brought upon the hatred of the people. ‘‘Among the living nations of the earth the Jews occupy the position of a nation long since dead.’’ Israel did not die after the loss of its state, of its actual existence; rather it has continued its spiritual existence. Pinsker then evokes the frightening image of ‘‘the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living.’’ This ‘‘ghostlike apparition . . . makes a strange and peculiar impression upon the imagination of the nations.’’44 Upon the ethnopsychological notion of an inborn fear of ghosts,45 Pinsker lays the blame for the long-festering prejudice against the Jews, hatred of the Jews, fear of the Jews. Race and gender are not sufficient explanations for this Judeophobia. While discrimination directed at Jews and their need for emancipation are

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comparable to the experience of blacks and women, Pinsker rather crudely notes that Jews are of a nobler race and include men of great stature (as well as important women). Beyond the positivistic distinctions Pinsker makes among groups is his attempt to separate the ‘‘real’’ Jews from the discourses that figure the Jew as Negro and/or as woman(ish). Further, all allegations against the Jews that blame them for their own victimhood are merely rationalizations to explain and justify the persecutors’ hatred as well as to quiet their consciences over their evil acts. Judeophobia is rooted and naturalized as demonopathy, but unlike other ghosts or the ghostimagery of Moses Hess, the Jew is ‘‘a being of flesh and blood, and suffers the most excruciating pain from the wounds inflicted upon it by the fearful mob who imagine it threatens them.’’46 Thus Pinsker’s call for Jewish autoemancipation not only was catalyzed by Spinoza’s deduction of a possible Jewish state, but also drew upon his connection between Gentile hatred and Jewish persistence. Pinsker, however, inverted Spinoza’s argument that such hatred had facilitated the persistence of the Jews, to read that Jewish persistence had itself generated that hatred. Another Spinoza-influenced counternarrative to the surge of antisemitic activity after 1879 came from a surprising source: a Christian musicologist at the University of Berlin. But Dr. Alfred Christlieb Kalischer was not your ordinary German-Christian academic; he was born Salomo Ludwig Kalischer, fourth son of Rabbi Zvi Kalischer, a leading religious proto-Zionist whose plans for the repatriation of the Jewish people to Palestine were extensively cited by Hess.47 With his second contribution to the Berliner Antisemitic Dispute, the 1884 Benedikt (Baruch) von Spinoza’s Stellung zum Judenthum und Christenthum: Als Beitrag zur Lo¨sung der ‘Judenfrage,’ Kalischer hopes to put an end to the assaults on Gd’s chosen people. He asks Christians to read Romans 9–11, and those of the ‘‘Mosaic confession’’ to attend to the long-neglected and/or maligned Benedikt von Spinoza, ‘‘the greatest creative Spirit of Israel since the birth of Christ.’’ Like Hess, Kalischer compares Spinoza to Christ—pure and stainless, having an air of the unexplainable, the spirit of the Hebrew prophets, and a breeze from the future about him.48 Kalischer argues that an understanding of the third chapter of the Tractatus is perhaps most important for his and Germany’s present situation. He writes that the idea of chosenness is the only thing that das Volk Israel has raised to a religious dogma; and because of maintaining this dogma, which is not without any kernel of truth, they have suffered ‘‘misery, wretchedness, anguish, and death pangs.’’49

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After citing the leading nineteenth-century German novelist Gustav Freytag on the heroic courage (Heldenmuth) of these weaponless folk,50 Kalischer expresses his disagreement with Spinoza’s judgment of Jewish chosenness as indexed by statehood. Instead he argues that the Diaspora is providential; its purpose is to further Gd’s goal of a united humanity. He then cites the last two pages from Auerbach’s translation of the third chapter (omitting only the paragraph on the Chinese), which Kalischer later describes as Spinoza’s ‘‘corpus delecti’’ that caused so much bad blood both among the Jews and between them and the Gentiles.51 Kalischer follows his extended Spinoza citation with Auerbach’s commentary on the passage, as well as with a longer version of the selection discussed above from Daniel Deronda (although he complains of its ‘‘sickening sentimentality’’). In line with the medical imagery that pervades late-nineteenthcentury discourse on the Jews,52 he calls Spinoza one of the ‘‘true physicians (echten Heila¨rzten) [who are prepared to provide] a fundamentally radical cure without any palliative’’ for having written these pages. He also speculates that if Spinoza were alive today (i.e., 1884) he would abandon his mistaken argument that the sign of ‘‘the highest tastelessness, uncleanness and aesthetic chaos’’—that is, circumcision—has preserved the Jews.53 Then Kalischer asks whether Spinoza would have achieved more fame had he kept silent about this ‘‘truth,’’ his truth. To answer his rhetorical question, Kalischer inverts Spinoza’s judgment of Judentum and applies it to Spinoza: ‘‘had he [not] opened his mouth, he would have manifested a very effeminate nature and not [been] that proud, heroic thinker valued by the world.’’54 With this move, Kalischer betrays a rhetorical trope that, as has already been seen and as will be seen again, was utilized by both Spinoza’s supporters and detractors—displacing the ascribed gendered identity from the Jews to Spinoza.

From Emancipation to Entmannung In an age of gender crisis, of concerns about individual and national virility, of effeminacy and degeneracy, ascriptions of effeminacy would render male Jews unfit for citizenship and a threat to the nation’s health.55 Consequently, Jewish critics after 1870 seek to defuse the force of Spinoza’s reference to Jewish feminization. Some describe this clause as, in the words of the philosopher Rabbi Manuel Joe¨l, the ‘‘poisonous addition.’’56 Others dismiss the explicit reference to the effeminacy of the Jews either cavalierly or with silence, and often make another move:

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they dwell upon the meaning of the ‘‘addition’’ in order to question Spinoza’s male qualities. Foremost among Spinoza’s despisers was the Jewish philosopher and neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), who unleashed diatribe after diatribe against Spinoza’s notions of the state and religion as well as against his understandings of Judentum and Christianity. Where Spinoza sees no necessary relationship between Jewish practices and Jewish religious principles, Cohen finds practice and principle, Gesetz and Geist, inextricably bound together in Judentum. Where Spinoza in his ‘‘Testament’’ distinguished a practice (there, specifically, circumcision) from feminizing principles, Cohen sees only the essence of Judentum in both references. Hence, he describes this clause as one of ‘‘demonic’’ irony. Cohen claims that Spinoza insists that the Jewish people must abandon what57 preserves them—and here is the irony—but that the now vernichtete Volk, the nowdefunct people, will thereby gain the possibility of a resurrected state. Cohen himself would indulge in such irony when he asserts that the contradictions in Spinoza’s argument indicate that the inborn love of one’s own people ‘‘overcame’’ (u¨bermannt—literally, overmanned) Spinoza’s hardness of heart.58 Was Spinoza’s sin then for Cohen a matter of logical contradiction, or was the sin one of confirming the anti-Jewish representations of the dominant culture? Exacerbating the situation for Cohen is the fact that Spinoza had been granted such authoritative status by Gentile culture. For figures such as Schopenhauer, Eugen Du¨hring, and Eduard von Hartmann (no friends of the Jews here),59 Spinoza was the exceptional Jew, the Jew who almost transcended his Jewishness. Spinoza’s assertion is both anti-Jewish—since one is known by the company one keeps or by which one is kept—and treasonous.60 Although avoiding an explicit citation of our passage—employing instead Rabbi Joe¨l’s phrase, ‘‘the poisonous addition’’—the philosopher Jacob Freudenthal mobilizes similar gender language in the first modern biography of Spinoza (1904). Freudenthal comments that Spinoza’s discussion of the singular responsibility of circumcision for the preservation of the Jewish people reveals that ‘‘despite often proving his courage [Spinoza] cannot be said to have been free of unmanly fear.’’61 Another fervent Spinozist of the early twentieth century, the philosopher and convert to Christianity Constantin Brunner (ne´ Leo Wertheimer), also endeavors to avoid discussing this passage. Yet as Siegfried Hessing points out in his 1977 prologue to the sequel to his original 1933 Spinoza Festschrift, this time marking the three-hundredth anniversary of Spinoza’s death, Brunner virtually reproduces the passage in his diatribe against

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Zionism in Die Judenhass und die Juden. Brunner’s passage is rife with the language of cutting/schneiden (Zerschneidung, zerschnittene)62 as well as with (now impotent) phallic imagery. Regarding Zionist ‘‘dreams’’ of reinstalling a Jewish state in Palestine, Brunner writes: ‘‘A nail sticks in the wall, but once taken out, it is no use to put it back into the old hole: it will not stay there anymore.’’63 In perhaps the most abrupt elision of this ‘‘poisonous addition,’’ Julius Wellhausen—Spinoza’s eventual successor in desanctifying the text of the ‘‘Old Testament’’—concluded his article on the history of ‘‘Israel’’ for the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica with a long extract from the work of Spinoza, a man Wellhausen called, at the conclusion of his classic Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, the great pathologist of Judentum.64 Here the reader encounters Spinoza’s discussion of Jewish preservation: from his lack of surprise over that peculiar fact to the first clause of our much-discussed sentence. In Wellhausen’s hands, Spinoza once again became prophet; this time, however, Spinoza prophesied the ‘‘extinction of Judaism.’’ Where Cohen saw in ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’ a logical contradiction between preservation and extinction, Wellhausen read an, alas, still-deferred desire: ‘‘The persistency of the race may of course prove a harder thing to overcome than Spinoza had supposed.’’65 Wellhausen had no desire to continue the passage, because to broach the feminization of the Jewish mind would also open up the possibility of the Jewish people abandoning their fundamental passivity and dependence and, if historical conditions so permitted, restoring their state. In 1924 the physician and Zionist Felix Theilhaber, who thirteen years earlier had raised the alarm against the coming demographic demise of German Jewry, sought such an opening up of possibility. He framed the depiction of Spinoza in his novel Dein Reich komme! with evocations of his Tractatus passage and its apparent gendering of Jewish chances for restoring their state. Just after introducing Spinoza to the novel as a young yeshiva bokher (c. 15 years of age) discussing the biblical and kabbalistic signs that would announce the advent of the messianic age with his mentor Rabbi Menasse ben Israel, Theilhaber has the young student encounter a challenge to his manhood from Don Nicolas de Olivar y Fullana, a Jewish/ Marrano soldier. When y Fullana calls upon Jewish men to take up arms and defend themselves rather than wait on the Messiah, the young Spinoza pleads, ‘‘I’m no hero [Held].’’ Y Fullana responds that ‘‘effeminate [weibische] youths prate sweet nothings and sing the day away, while a young fellow like you must be able to ride a horse, fire a musket, and go into battle.’’ Theilhaber begins the novel’s last chapter roughly ten years later,

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with Spinoza having authored a letter to his former mentor, in which he anticipates what would become his ‘‘Testament.’’ After discussing the role of circumcision in Jewry’s persistence and how their religious ‘‘fundamentals’’ (Grundsa¨tze) have ‘‘feminized’’ (verweichlichen) them, the letter closes with an invocation of the possibility of the restoration of the Jewish state— but not by following Menasse’s messianic dreams.66 Nor did the political philosopher Leo Strauss have such fear in confronting the feminization of Judentum.67 As a student in Weimar Germany he had turned to Spinoza in search of a more masculine Jewish philosophy.68 The perceived necessity of undertaking such a search thereby confirmed, if not Spinoza’s judgment, then the internalization of how the dominant culture saw male Jews of all persuasions and professions: as feminized, as a threat that might devirilize the male public sphere, and thereby as potential subverters of the world of fixed identities and traditional power relations. In his 1932 ‘‘Das Testament Spinozas,’’ Strauss concedes that the feminization line was ‘‘extremely questionable’’—and even ‘‘unintelligible.’’69 After rhetorically asking whether Spinoza had forgotten what consolation Judaism had given to the victims of the Inquisition, Strauss, as Spinoza’s porte-parole, responds: consolation is fine, but a state needs religion to edify and provide the force to command. Pace Cohen and Wellhausen, Strauss sees no contradiction at work in ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament.’’ For him, as discussed earlier, Spinoza is making a distinction between the practices of the Jews and the religious principles, doctrines, and beliefs that underlie Judaism. The rituals can remain to preserve the nation; that they have so far was no miracle, just historical law. The principles, doctrines, and beliefs are what impede the renewal of the state. The Jewish state has no need for Judaism, and Judaism has no need for the state.70 Unfortunately, Strauss was living at a time when the dominant culture recognized neither contradiction nor distinction. And ritual, ritual circumcision, reinforced the representation of the feminized male Jew—whether the sexless yeshiva bokher or the (like Woman) sex-driven, black-haired young Jewish truant stalking European maidenhood.71 One more heir to ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’ would appear before the descendants of Spinoza’s contemporaries would be deluged by the Shoah: Sigmund Freud. This passage may well have served as a palimpsest upon which Freud composed his only extended study of the skandalon of Judentum: Moses and Monotheism (1939). As I have argued in On Freud’s Jewish Body,72 Freud’s last completed work, like the third chapter of the Tractatus, knots together antisemitism, circumcision, gendered Jewish identity, and

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persistence. Reading Freud as one last stop in the reception history of ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’73 helps clarify many of the innumerable puzzling aspects of Moses and Monotheism, including the curious final paragraph of Freud’s text. There Freud concedes that while his investigation has shed some light on how the Jewish people came to acquire their characteristic qualities, less light (weniger Aufkla¨rung) has been shed on the problem (das Problem) of how the Jews ‘‘have been able to retain their individuality till the present day.’’74 Of course, the reader does not realize this was a problem for Freud until the opening lines of the second part of the third essay of Moses, when it emerges, like Harry Lime in the Third Man. And Freud’s text, despite his final protestation, has answered the question. From the extensive concern with his Leitmotif—what he refers to as the Leitfossil circumcision— followed abruptly by a virtual abandonment of it, to the gendered aspect of Freud’s construction of Jewish identity, he repeatedly emphasizes the masculine character of Judentum. Yet to acknowledge the question of Jewish persistence was also to recognize the threat and danger that answer posed. Unlike many of his predecessors in this reception history, Freud could not rhetorically elide this question, even if he managed to displace its answer; the times had changed. Tragically, Freud’s belated attempt in Moses and Monotheism to distinguish Gentile castration phantasies from Jewish masculine—albeit presumably circumcised—actuality was to no avail. And pace Spinoza, instead of preservation, revelation of the inscribed symbol of the covenant promised death.75 Yet, while Spinoza was no seer—and would not claim to be one, for by his own definition he privileged the intellect over the prophet’s power of imagination—the philosopher cum lensmaker did become both a focal point for and a site of contestation over Jewish identification, as acculturating Jewry crossed the boundaries into European modernity and its public sphere only to encounter an Other Jewish Question. This chapter has chronicled the reception history of ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’ and its combination of circumcision, gender, statelessness, and persistence by which Spinoza would explain the Gentile hatred of the Jews. Whether as spur or proleptic anticipation, its image of a threatening, persisting, circumcised, and feminized Judentum would emerge, not only in the discourses of Jewish identification by both Jew and Gentile, but also crystallized in the appropriations and repudiations of both Spinoza and his Tractatus. Consequently, these interpretations of the ‘‘Testament’’ were less mimetic rewrites than mirrors of European representation practices that, in the

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face of Jewish claims for human status, endeavored to abject the Jew as a gendered and sexualized (and racial) body. The next chapter takes up another set of representation practices that took as its index of the gendered identification of Europe’s others a more visible body part and the techniques performed upon it.

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Spinoza’s ‘‘Testament,’’ the focus of the preceding chapter, was not the philosopher’s last word on Jewish election in chapter 3 of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. He offers a historical analogy to corroborate his analysis of the ‘‘religious’’ signifier circumcision, the persistence of identity, and the possible restoration of Jewish sovereignty: The Chinese afford us an outstanding example of such a possibility. They, too, religiously observe the custom of the pigtail which also sets them apart from all other people, and thus have preserved themselves as a separate people for so many thousands of years that they far surpass all other nations in antiquity. They have not always maintained their independence, but they did regain it after losing it, and will no doubt recover it again when the spirit of the Tartars becomes enfeebled by reason of luxurious living and sloth. (TTP 100)

This first significant conjunction of the Jews and the Chinese in the European philosophic tradition isolates their respective, apparently singular, fetishizing and fetishized (male) corporeal practices: circumcision and the queue. In Spinoza’s analogy the (male) bodies of these two ancient peoples bear a marker that both signifies their persistent and distinctive identifications and has persistently effected those distinctions. This chapter follows

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the queue, the pigtail, in order to chronicle a history of interwoven representations, of explicit and implicit comparisons whereby a gendered ethnic difference is marked. Specifically, the German word for queue, Zopf, is seen to function as a ‘‘nodal point’’ where Jew, Chinese, and the discourses that would identify them meet. Meanings and associations converge upon its morphemic field. And Zopf- pins the identity of the other to the telltale truth of the body. Chinesenzopf, or Chinese pigtail, was until the early twentieth century a necessary if not always named constituent of the queue of markers by which Chinese identification was constituted in European discourses. It was also a condensation of all such markers: ‘‘the most outward sign of [Chinese] nationality, the pigtail . . . is the symbol of the Chinese spirit as it now exists, a mass of contradictions, opposed in almost every particular to the ideals of our civilization.’’1 Judenzopf, referring to the plaited hair of a filthy, vermin-infested Jew afflicted with plica, figured as a displacement of the foremost marker of Jewish difference, the circumcised penis. It made visible the supposedly hidden sign of the Jew. Such Zo¨pfe were the products of a fetishizing cultural logic that sought to tie these others together in a braid of ever-threatening, yet ever-contained, effeminate malevolence. This chapter will also attend to a third strand of Chinese and Jewish Zo¨pfe, one that twists its way through the work of the Jewish-identified writer Heinrich Heine. Before exploring these mediations of the Zopf, however, we must tease out some of the more familiar associations of Jew and Chinese.

A Queue of Practices While the pigtail may have been the most familiar Chinese identification mark, there was another Chinese corporeal custom that perhaps garnered more descriptive and prescriptive attention: the practice of foreshortening Chinese women’s feet. Footbinding, like circumcision, was among the series of mutilations that the civilized Christian masculine West invoked both to assert its own superiority and to justify its dominating intrusion into the lives of other peoples. Exemplary is the English missionary Rev. John Macgowan’s evaluation of the practice in his How England Saved China: ‘‘Many a savage tribe has shown barbaric ingenuity in the methods they have devised to disfigure and maim the human body, but it has been reserved for the Chinese people, with their great intelligence and civilization, to carry out such a system of mutilation as the world has never known in the long history of the past.’’2

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Both body techniques held a particular interest not just for historians and theologians, missionaries and imperial officials, and racists of various stripes, but also for the biologists of the late nineteenth century. As millennia-long-practiced techniques of body alteration, both circumcision and footbinding provided crucial tests for the competing paradigms in evolutionary heredity. That is, if acquired traits could be inherited, then the number of Jewish males born without foreskins and Chinese females born with smaller feet would be significantly greater than the norm. However, the failure of statistical data on Jewish and Chinese newborns to corroborate this assumption provided conclusive proof against the ‘‘supposed transmission of mutilations.’’3 Discussion of footbinding—but not, it seems, of circumcision—also appears in Freud’s ‘‘Fetishism’’ essay. He writes: Affection and hostility in the treatment of the fetish—which run parallel with the disavowal and the acknowledgment of castration—are mixed in unequal proportions in different cases, so that one or the other is more clearly recognizable. We seem here to approach an understanding even if a distant one, of the behavior of the ‘‘coupeur de nattes’’ [Zopfabschneider]. In him the need to carry out the castration which he disavows has come to the front. His action contains in itself the two mutually incompatible assertions: ‘‘the woman has still got a penis’’ and ‘‘my father has castrated the woman.’’ Another variant, which is also a parallel to fetishism in social psychology, might be seen in the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revering it like a fetish after it has been mutilated. It seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated.4

In this passage Freud claims that his new theory can explain two problematic fetishistic practices: Chinese footbinding, which exemplifies non-European sexual pathology, and the Zopfabschneider, the braid-or pigtail-cutter, who for Freud, following the founder of forensic psychiatry, Krafft-Ebing,5 is emblematic of the pathological end of the broad spectrum of (European) fetishistic behavior. Both fetishistic acts are associated with an act of cutting. While this is self-evident in the case of the Zopfabschneider, it may be no less so for pre-Disney German encounters with Freud’s Chinese example. Perhaps the foremost instance of foot shortening with which his early readers would have been familiar is from Grimm’s Fairy Tales: the amputation of Cinderella’s elder stepsister’s big toe and her younger stepsister’s heel. Besides, Freud does not refer to footbinding per se, but to the ‘‘custom of

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mutilating the female foot.’’ And the word translated as mutilating, verstu¨mmeln, conveys the sense of truncating or curtailing, as in the phrase verstu¨mmelter Schwanz, referring to a (dog’s) docked tail (see Figure 2-1),6 and has often been employed to characterize the circumcised penis. Further, just as the mention of castration explicitly evokes for Freud sexual difference, his two problematic examples of mutilation chiasmically evoke the signs of ethnic difference. For the Chinese hair (and dress) had long been the index of difference.7 Freud’s analyses had also associated hair-cutting with the principle mark of difference in the Christian West —at least through the eighteenth century8 —the cutting action of circumcision.9 This is noted by the neurologist and later psychoanalyst Ernst Blum, who records the following dream associations in the 19 May 1922 protocol of his analysis with Freud: ‘‘Haare abschneiden: Kastrieren, zum Juden machen’’ (cutting hair: to castrate, to make [into a] Jew).10 Hence, more than just another example of the commonplace conjunction of violence upon women with the feminizing violence of circumcision, this passage in ‘‘Fetishism’’ occasions the convergence, albeit in condensed form, of key topoi in the history of the fetishization of the Chinese and Jewish other.11

Figure 2-1. A verstu¨mmelt or mutilated (pig)tail. From Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, ‘‘Fragment von Schwa¨nzen’’(1783), 596.

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In line with these displacements, this chapter’s discussion of fetishized body parts as metonyms of ethnic difference now shifts from toe to head, or rather from foot to hair.12 That is, the correlation of Jewish and Chinese difference has been mediated by the Zopf, the pigtail, the queue.13 Just as the Judenzopf entailed a representation—displaced from circumcised penis to plaited hair—of the lack of virility ascribed to the Jewish male, so the queue, ‘‘the distinctive outward and visible sign of Chinese manhood,’’14 condensed the panoply of effeminate Chinese characteristics: ‘‘Their cracked whining voices, the peculiar twanging, guttural sound of their language, their effeminate dress, their exaggerated politeness, and their long queues [which] amused foreigners.’’15 But in my tale of these rather phallic forms I will not be suggesting that Western men crossed their legs—if not themselves—when they encountered either a male Jew or a Chinese man. Rather, these effeminate because bezo¨pft males threatened a cultural order founded upon the natural opposition of masculine and feminine. Against this threat, the cut needed to be cut down.

persistent signs The history of discursively braided types actually left a trace at the one other site in Freud’s collected works in which Zopfabschneider appears: his 1910 Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. In that earlier study Freud already connects foot and Zopf: But the fixation on the object that was once strongly desired, the woman’s penis, leaves indelible traces on the mental life of the child, who has pursued that portion of his infantile sexual researches with particular thoroughness. Fetishistic reverence for a woman’s foot and shoe appears to take the foot merely as a substitutive symbol for the woman’s penis which was once revered and later missed; without knowing it, ‘‘coupeurs de nattes’’ [Zopfabschneider] play the part of people who carry out an act of castration on the female genital organ.16

This passage immediately follows Freud’s reiteration of the famous footnote from the case history of Little Hans.17 There he suggests the connection among castration, circumcision, and the conjunction of antisemitism and misogyny. Incidentally, the Leonardo essay also happens to be one of Freud’s only two texts in which Spinoza is explicitly mentioned. And it was with Spinoza and his 1670 Tractatus, as noted at the outset of this chapter, that this knotty tale of Judenzopf and Chinesenzopf actually

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begins. While the explicit analogy of the circumcised penis with the Chinesenzopf is rarely met outside Spinoza’s Tractatus,18 direct or indirect comparison of the Jews and the Chinese subsequently becomes a topos in Western philosophic, literary, and psychological discourses. The millennia-long preservation of both peoples, remarked upon by Spinoza, is frequently the pretext for such comparisons and facilitates their function as types. For Voltaire the moneygrubbing Jewish middleman and the Chinese mandarin function as antipodes of civilization. The Jews are a venal people incapable of any creative production and represent a ritual-ridden primitivism in which no moral transgression is impossible. On the other hand, China is a venerable land in which art, science, and techne´ flourish; it exemplifies his ideal of enlightened deism and rational morality.19 In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the Jews and the Chinese are regularly compared in discussions of the inheritance of national character. For example, the botanist Alphonse de Candolle, in his 1873 study of evolutionary processes in human societies, compares the two ancient peoples and, unlike Voltaire, finds them both civilized.20 Even Wilhelm Schallmayer, one of the founders of the German eugenics movement, concedes that the veneration of parents and positive valuation of fertility that contributed to the high biological value of the ‘‘oldest living civilization,’’ the Chinese, were just as characteristic of the Jews—until their attempted assimilation to European ways.21 Nietzsche also compares these two ‘‘ancient peoples’’ (greise Vo¨lker) several times in his notebooks from1884–85; however, rather than comparing the heads of one with the, as it were, tails of the other, he notes that both share an ‘‘excitability of brains and genitals’’ (erreglich an Hirn und Schamteilen).22 Jung’s proposed theory of race-specific psychologies is a bit more problematic. In 1927 he wrote, ‘‘[I]t is a quite unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid. Nobody would dream of taking Chinese or Indian psychology as binding upon ourselves. The cheap accusation of antisemitism that has been levelled at me on the ground of this criticism is about as intelligent as accusing me of an antiChinese prejudice.’’23 Later, when discussing the theories of the unconscious propounded by the Jewish-identified psychoanalysts Freud and Adler in his 1934 essay ‘‘The State of Psychotherapy Today,’’ Jung writes: ‘‘As a member of a race with a three-thousand-year old civilization, the Jew, like the cultured Chinese, has a wider area of psychological consciousness than we.’’ But unlike the Chinese, the Jew ‘‘is something of a nomad, and has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or

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less civilized nation to act as host for their development.’’24 In addition to drawing upon the antisemitic commonplaces of the Jews’ nomadic character and their lack of creativity,25 Jung also contributed to the tradition of feminizing representations. Exemplifying the connection of ethnos and gender, he added, ‘‘the Jews have this peculiarity in common with women; being physically weaker, they have to aim at the chinks in the armour of their adversary.’’26 More comparisons, both direct and indirect, flourished when the exemplary status of China suffered in the wake of both romanticism’s Enlightenment critique and the European quest for self-authorizing origins. This new view of the always-already moribund Chinese began to overlap with that of the Jews, as their status too diminished in the repudiation of earlier emancipatory ideals and in the efforts to reroute Western cultural history from the biblical Hebrews to Indo-Aryan forebears. In the third part of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1787), Herder set the tone for the ensuing century. He describes Chinese culture as ‘‘incompatible with Western culture and like a peculiar embalmed mummy, painted with hieroglyphs and wrapped with silk; its circulation is like that of a hibernating animal.’’ In the previous chapter we saw this funereal figure repeatedly applied to Judentum. Mechanistic moral teachings, political despotism, and the ‘‘vain pride’’ that kept them from mixing with other peoples thwarted intellectual progress and left Chinese cultural development stuck as it were in childhood. Herder explicitly compares the Chinese to the Jews on the matter of a prideful refusal to intermix and interbreed with other nations. He draws the analogy after discussing how certain Chinese professions such as commerce and medicine epitomize their entire character because they employ the Chinese’s ‘‘cunning industriousness and their talent for imitating anything their greed finds useful’’ to further their desires.27 Their deceitful and dissemblance-aided commercial and medical practices—these are also the two premier occupations by which medieval Jewry interacted with other peoples and for which it was often castigated—illustrate the consequences of Jew-like separation. Such cultural isolation led to the decay (verartet) and corruption (verdarb) of both the Chinese and the Jews.28 This explicit comparison is accompanied by a number of implicit connections between Chinese and Jew including the singular roles of Confucius and Moses, limited scientific creativity, characteristic craftiness, slavish dependence on moral law, mediating role in commerce, and so forth. Herder also remarks on the Chinese ‘‘lack of masculine strength and honor.’’29

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The denigration of the Chinese by ascribing characteristics also attributed to the Jews continued with the brothers Schlegel. They considered Chinese culture ‘‘rigid [starr] and formalistic,’’ ‘‘a merely external system of good conduct without that inner soulfulness and without that feeling for divine revelation.’’ Hegel also found China to be ‘‘rigid, mechanistic [starrer Mechanismus]’’ and incapable of progressing to absolute freedom. The philosopher Karl Ludwig Michelet echoed these sentiments, and Schopenhauer’s self-proclaimed philosophic heir Eduard von Hartmann claimed that the Chinese lack ‘‘depth and profundity, without any real feeling for right and wrong.’’30 Reflecting the popular image of the Chinese is a passage from Karl May’s oft-published 1892 novel, Blauroter Methusalem: Right next to cowardice, among the bad qualities of the uncultured Chinese, is cruelty [Grausamkeit]. This . . . absence of feeling characterizes his relations with everyone except kin. [T]his culture is well advanced in years, hoary old: the arteries are hardened and the nerves deadened; the body is withered and the soul dried up. [In sports and games] emerge the selfishness and unscrupulous slyness that mark the Chinese. . . . They do not know from gymnastics; hence the lack of mettle and physical dexterity.31

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the phantasm of the ‘‘yellow peril’’32 also emerged amid accounts of Chinese secret societies, the growth of the coolie trade, and the millionfold emigration from the overpopulated Chinese mainland. The intended-as-denigrating comparison of Jewish migration into Germany with Chinese migration into the United States surfaced in the 1879–81’’Berliner Antisemitismusstreit.’’ In his response to ‘‘Unsere Ansichten’’ (Our Prospects), the first of several articles in the prestigious academic journal Preußische Jahrbu¨cher by its editor, the Berlin University history professor and Reichstag deputy Heinrich von Treitschke, that initiated the dispute, the noted German Jewish economist and publicist Ludwig Bamberger rebuffed Treitschke’s implicit comparison of the ‘‘incoming flood’’ (hereindringende Flut) of Ostjuden to that of ‘‘the Chinese in California.’’33 The American response to that ‘‘flood’’ also generated comparisons. In 1882 the United States enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act that effectively ended Chinese immigration to the U.S.; that law became a model for anti-Jewish immigration legislation in Europe. An article about the American bill appeared in the Unverfa¨lschten Deutschen Worten, the flagship periodical for the Austrian racial antisemite Georg Scho¨nerer’s German National party; the author of the article, Dr. Karl

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Beurle, recounted the bill’s description of Chinese residential patterns (e.g., taking over neighborhoods from the original residents) and business practices (e.g., willingness to undercut wages and prices) as well as a ‘‘disposition [Neigung] for commercial swindle and fraud.’’ He concludes that ‘‘one could substitute the word ‘Jew’ for the word ‘Chinese’ throughout the text,’’ since the many reasons that the bill offered for protecting the United States from Chinese were identical to those that undergirded his party’s call for protecting Austria from the Jews.34 At a political gathering (Wanderversammlung) in Baden on 7 November 1886, Scho¨nerer did exactly that. As a member of the Imperial Austrian Parliament he was not allowed to employ the word Jude (or refer to any other religious confession by name) or a phrase like Judenfrage at such venues; consequently, during the course of the discussion he made frequent reference to the United States’ ‘‘Chinesenfrage’’ and its attempted resolution of the problem.35 At a speech he delivered later that month in Vienna (26 November), he rendered the identification explicit by referring to the Jews as ‘‘our Chinese.’’36 In May of the following year, he finally requested Parliament to enact legislation that would severely restrict the immigration and settlement of foreign Jews in Austria, ‘‘following the model of the Anti-Chinese Bill enacted in the United States.’’37 The motion, however, was immediately tabled due to insufficient support from his fellow deputies. Not surprisingly, when Bernard Lazare moves in his 1894 history and analysis of antisemitism to its modern manifestations, he comments: ‘‘Among all nations [the Jews] are considered as the American regard the Chinese, as an aggregation of strangers who have secured possession of the same privileges as the native-born, but who refuse to give up their separate identity.’’38 The leading antisemitic publicist, Theodor Fritsch, was no less afraid of the effects of the Chinese and their self-satisfied ‘‘Zopftum’’ on the Germans. He fears that the German race, since they cannot compete with these ‘‘eternally sycophantic, dissembling, greedy, profiteering [wucherischen] Orientals,’’ will assimilate their ‘‘alien mode of being,’’ becoming Chinese at the cost of their Germanness.39 Just as Fritsch ascribed the same characteristics to the Chinese that he routinely assigned to the Jews in his prolific antisemitic writing, the antisemitic press, more generally, argued ‘‘that because of the unity of nationality, race, religion, and tradition that is constitutive of the Chinese as it is of the Jews, their integration into other peoples’ communities [anderen Vo¨lkerschaften] would lead to absolutely irresolvable difficulties and the worst state of affairs possible.’’40 German imperial and imperialist politics were also haunted by this yellow specter. To mobilize domestic public opinion and the opinion of the

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rulers of Russia and France in favor of Germany’s newly belligerent Far East policy, in the summer of 1895 Kaiser Wilhelm II designed a pictorial allegory bearing the subheading in German, French, and English, ‘‘Nations of Europe! Join in the defense of your faith and your home!’’ Drawn by H. Knackfuss, this illustration was reproduced throughout Europe and eventually bore the caption ‘‘The Yellow Peril’’ (see Figure 2-2).41 Antisemitic publicists would return this figuration to its origins in the wake of the 1901 Boxer rebellion. The last of the thirty-three ‘‘political posters’’ (politische Bilderbogen) produced and disseminated by the Dresden publishing house Glo¨ß is titled ‘‘The World Boxer’’ (see Figure 2-3). The central image is of a ‘‘Jew in the costume of a Chinese Boxer, standing triumphant upon the globe with a dagger in his right hand and a banner in his left upon which the Mosaic prophecy ‘You are to devour all the nations and show none of them mercy’ [Deut. 7:16] can be read. Beneath his talonned foot lies a dead Aryan.’’ A verse caption that accompanies the image, probably authored by the antisemitic publicist Max Bewer, reads: ‘‘The Boxers, who rage in China,/are not the worst in the world./Every country should

Figure 2-2. The Yellow Peril (German Version). Frontispiece to Arthur Dio´sy, The New Far East.

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Figure 2-3. The World Boxer. The banner reads, ‘‘You are to devour all the nations and show none of them mercy’’ [Deut. 7:16]. Politische Bilderbogen no. 33 (Dresden: Glo¨ß Verlag, 1901). Reprinted by permission of Sa¨chsische Landes-, Staats-, und Universita¨tsbibliothek Dresden.

guard itself/From being ruined by the Jews.’’42 These profiles of a mummified, formalistic, amorally cunning, cowardly, conspiratorial, and unmasculine people threatening to overwhelm Europe are the stock of the era’s depictions of the Jews. One dissenting voice within the European tradition is Karl Rosenkranz, who could be characterized as the executor of Hegel’s philosophic estate. He argued that conservatism and mummification are not inherent to the Chinese character. To exemplify this position he notes, ‘‘The Zopf was only lately introduced.’’43 The Zopf, the queue, the pigtail, thus appears to have been—even if the assumption was often unexpressed—the determinant mark of Chinese identity and to have embodied their religious, rigid, and reactionary character, until rendered historically contingent (though no less indexical) by Rosenkranz.

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The Jews of the East There was another tradition of analogizing Jew and Chinese that even antedated Spinoza. As the Dutch and the English began their mercantile expansion into Southeast Asia and the East Indies, they encountered communities of resident aliens, the overseas Chinese, who handled much of the commercial activity for the indigenous populations of the region. The Chinese distinguished themselves in other ways, as Sir Henry Yule, the nineteenth-century rediscoverer of Marco Polo, later commented: ‘‘Thinking of the Eastern people in the mass one was apt to class the Burmese and other kindred races with the Chinese, but when one saw the latter in the streets of Amarapura [Burma] his individuality was just as recognizable as it would have been in Hyde Park. [In the Chinese ward] every shop and house exhibited the unmistakable countenance and [pig] tail.’’44 These Europeans were less concerned, however, with the threat presented by the persistence of Jewish and Chinese populations than with the competition generated by their comparable position in local economies. As early as 1597 Dutch travelers to Bantam in West Java comment that the Chinese ‘‘are almost exactly like the Jews in our country: for they never go anywhere without taking a balance with them, and all things to their liking they pay close attention to any profit.’’45 Soon another visitor to Bantam drew a more invidious analogy. Edmund Scot wrote of ‘‘the Chinese who like Jewes live crooching under them, but rob them of their wealth and send it for China.’’46 Two decades later, Sir Thomas Herbert, travelling the Indies during the 1620s, also compared the Chinese of Bantam with the Jew: ‘‘The Chyneses . . . after they have lost their whole estate . . . in littel time, Jew-like, by gleaning heere and there, are able to redeem their loss.’’47 Thereafter the analogy becomes a commonplace in the narratives of travelers and traders, socialists and social analysts. In the German Ideology (GI) Karl Marx noted: ‘‘Small-scale commercial and industrial swindling flourishes only in conditions of restricted competition, among the Chinese . . . and Jews’’ (GI 369/DI 352).48 Later the political economist Wilhelm Roscher compared the Jews’ historical situation in Europe with that of the Chinese in Southeast Asia; in both cases, once the indigenous populations became more developed, they sought to reappropriate the control of commerce that was originally left in the hands of those ‘‘foreign, higher cultured peoples,’’ the Jews and the Chinese. Although Roscher did not himself draw the analogy, he then went on to describe the Chinese character in a manner analogous to the denigrating

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descriptions of Judentum; for example, ‘‘Many of the most important characteristics of the Chinese are caricatures of the common manifestations of [European] high culture; [they provide] for us Europeans and Christians a warning example of where the one-sided development and overvaluation of the understanding, of immediate practical utility, . . . have to lead.’’49 Eventually, among the agents of empire and their caricaturists at home these analogies began to become identifications. In his 1865 memoir Quedah, or Stray Leaves from a Journal in Malayan Waters, Captain Sherard Osborn wrote: A few Chinese, the Jews of the Eastern Archipelago, were there also. They were so obsequious, so anxious to attract the attention of a British midshipman. . . . The insolent contumely they endured at the hands of the Malays struck me very much. The . . . Chinese . . . bore it with cringing and shrinking; one could see, by the twinkle of their little glittering eyes that they only abided their time to bite the heel that bruised them.50

For the readers of the popular magazine Punch, the figure of the Chinese middleman had already assumed the features of the stereotypical Jewish old-clothesman: bent back, hooked nose, and stacks of hats (see Figure 2-4).51 Conversely, in New York theaters around 1880, audiences would have heard such songs as Frank Bush’s ‘‘My Son Moses,’’ with a verse that went: ‘‘My Mosey is a tough young man, he wears his hair like me,/His nose and chin they both do meet and he looks like a Chinee.’’52 Apparently only the presence or absence of a pigtail enabled Jews and Chinese to be distinguished from one another. A number of European colonial travel writers proposed a solution to the problem of Chinese national character, a solution that had often been suggested to the Jews. Only through intermarriage would a ‘‘nation [like the Chinese] which adheres to its national customs so obstinately’’ be changed.53 And the sign of that change would be the abandonment of the queue: ‘‘The offspring of unions between Chinese men and Burmese women were thought to have a great future. The sons were brought up Chinese. . . . But [they] were not suffered to wear the plaited queue.’’54 The commercial, characterological, and bodily identification of the Chinese with the Jew that emerged in a situation of mercantile and later colonial contact in Southeast Asia converged with the European tradition of cultural antisemitism and anti-Sinicism in the person of the Westerneducated King Vajiravudh of Siam. In a series of essays that appeared in both English and Thai, he articulated the implicit mediation of representations of the Jew in European depictions of Chinese by naming the Chinese the ‘‘Jews of the Orient.’’ This explicit and pejorative identification

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Figure 2-4. Chinese (Jewish) old-clothesman. From ‘‘A Lass of Wax,’’ Punch 15 (1848): 19.

of the Chinese as the Jew began to be widely disseminated throughout Europe following the 1914 appearance of his anonymously published pamphlet of the same name. After several chapters discussing the Jews, he described how, like the Jews, The Chinese also preserved their allegiance to their race, taking advantage of all the benefits of foreign citizenship but giving no loyalty in return. The Chinese [like the Jews were an ancient, unchanging race, who] also possessed the concept of racial superiority, regarding only Chinese as civilized and classifying all other peoples as barbarians. And, lastly, the Chinese shared the Jewish moneymaking instinct. . . . In their devotion to money

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the Chinese were without morals or conscience or pity. They would cheat, rob, or murder for money. . . . [I]n effect the Chinese were ‘‘like so many vampires who steadily suck dry an unfortunate victim’s life-blood.’’55

While King Vajiravudh draws upon the rhetoric of persistence, particularity, and parasitism of anti-Jewish discourse to depict the Chinese, corporeal comparisons are not manifest.56 But to the European the body of the other ever betrays essential difference. European rhetoric would eventually include a fourth P, perversion (and a fifth, predisposition), by which the identity inscribed upon the other’s body became codified as a medico-legal entity. It is necessary then to rejoin the queue to this theater of identification in order to examine the fetishized mediation of anti-Jewish and antiChinese representation. After discussing the historic, structural, and functional implications of Spinoza’s comparison of circumcised penis and Chinese queue, I will explore the transfiguration of this analogy in that displacement of circumcision, the Judenzopf. The fetishized Zopf figures a difference that renders visible a violence that both threatens as well as maintains gendered ethnic identifications and state authority.

A Historical Tail Rosenkranz was quite right about the historicity of the queue. The Western identification of the Chinese with their allegedly ages-old coiffure is all but coeval with the institution of the custom. At the time of the publication of Spinoza’s Tractatus, the practice of wearing the queue had only been enforced for some twenty-five years. It was first in 1645 that the conquering Tartars or Manchus—whose recent climb to power Spinoza mentions—decreed, under pain of decapitation, that all conquered Han Chinese males shave their forehead and braid their remaining hair in the manner of a Tartar warrior. The queue would be an effective sign both of Han subjugation and of the Manchu-desired cultural homogenization of the population. Prior to the takeover, long, elaborately coiffed black hair had been a hallmark of Han cultural self-identity. The Han historically referred to themselves as the ‘‘black-haired race.’’57 Consequently images of pre-Manchu-conquest Chinese in the works of such Jesuits as Matteo Ricci were sans pigtail. The European image of the Chinese changed in 1650s and 1660s, when a number of illustrated texts were published in Spinoza’s homeland, the Netherlands. These included Martinus Martini’s (1654) account of the

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Manchu conquest of China, De Bello Tartarico Historia, and J. Nieuhof’s renowned1665 An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of China.58 These texts recounted how the Tartars had imposed their coiffure upon the conquered male population.59 Perhaps viewing the frontispiece of Nieuhof’s volume (see Figure 2-5), which depicted the Emperor surrounded by bezo¨pft Manchu warriors and conquered Han Chinese, Spinoza, like first-time European visitors to early-twentieth-century China, seems to have been ‘‘especially struck by three points to which he is not accustomed at home. The people will consist entirely of men; they will all wear their hair plaited in queues; and they will all be exactly alike.’’60 The queue-wearing Chinese male then became a fixture in the imagination of the West: whether on the page, on the stage,61 or in the gutter. Exemplifying the last is this racist American ditty, ‘‘Chink, Chink, Chinaman, sitting on a rail,/Along comes a white man and cuts off his tail.’’62 While the dialectic of the absence and presence of hair, on the one hand, and the relationship between cutting and power, on the other, reinforce Western interpretations, the Western fixation on the queue—with the usually tacit desire to cut it off—somewhat distorts the concerns of the Chinese themselves. What was most abject to the conquered Chinese was the tonsure, the shaved head that framed the queue. According to the Dutch surgeon Wouter Schouten, who travelled the East Indies in the mid-seventeenth century, ‘‘The worst disgrace that could happen to any Chinese . . . was, when he had lost everything else, to lose the hair of his head, which was very long. When at length it was cut off their whole countenance was changed and they were covered with infamy to such a point the other Chinese refused to speak to them or even to help them in their direst need, so that at last in an attempt to recover some money they even came to staking their own persons and freedom’’ rather than their hair.63 Shaving that black hair had long been associated with the humiliation and punishment of slaves and convicts. Further motivating their revulsion was the widely held belief that the Confucian injunction to preserve a parent’s progeny intact applied to their hair; and this general horror of bodily mutilation also justified the Chinese repudiation of circumcision.64 According to the Chinese historian Frederic Wakeman, the common folk ‘‘viewed the loss of their hair as tantamount to the loss of their manhood.’’65 His colleague Philip Kuhn echoed this assessment: ‘‘[W]hat for the Manchu warriors symbolized manliness, to the Chinese symbolized effeminacy.’’66 As a consequence of the correlation of hair with individual and corporate identity, ‘‘during the conquest of the South,

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Figure 2-5. The Emperor of China surrounded by queue-coifed Manchu warriors and conquered Chinese. From title page to J. Nieuhof, Het Gezantschap der Neeˆrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den grooten Tartarischen Cham, den tegenwoordigen Keizer van China (Amsterdam: Jacob Mo¨rs, 1669). Reprinted by permission of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries.

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headdress became the rallying point of a desperate Chinese resistance and certainly made the Manchu takeover many times bloodier than it would otherwise have been.’’67 Yet once in force, the tonsure decree led to the overvaluation of the queue. On the one hand, the length and beauty of the braid became for men a form of individual distinction.68 And on the other hand, since frontal hair growth is a slow process, the presence or absence of the queue became the symbol of support or defiance of the current regime. The history of the queue in China always followed a double-edged trajectory: off with your hair or off with your head. As one defiant Ming teacher put it: ‘‘To cut off my head is a small matter. To shave my head is a great matter.’’69 The Manchu decapitation decree would be inversely mirrored by the Manchus’ later opponents. Following their examination by one of the various rebellious secret societies—groups like the Triad Brotherhood, the Hung League, and the Tai Ping insurgents—potential members ‘‘who refuse to join [the secret society] are taken to the West Gate and have their heads cut off. The next thing, for those who are proceeding with the ceremony, is the cutting off of the queue, the queue being a sign of subjection to the Manchu rule,’’70 and allowing all of the hair to grow. Hence, to the imperial government the insurgents of the so-called Tai-Ping Rebellion were known as the ‘‘Long-haired rebels.’’71 Prior to open hostilities, however, since ‘‘it would be a sign of rebellion to be seen without [one,] a false queue [would often be] braided on again.’’72 Cutting off the queue, rather than being a sign of Western domination, was a sign of rebellion, if not liberation. Forty years later, following the initial failure of his reform movement, Sun Yat-Sen left China to save his life and to gain Western support for his movement: ‘‘At Kobe´, whither I fled from Hong Kong, I took a step of great importance. I cut off my cue, which had been growing all my life.’’73 Sun also hoped by this act to be mistaken for Hawaiian or Japanese rather than mainland Chinese—and, indeed, Americans and Europeans, even friends, at first glance were so deceived. Imperial Chinese detectives, however, were not, thereby underscoring the fetish character of the queue for the Western gaze. The detectives followed Sun throughout his journey to the United States, and they eventually kidnapped him in London in 1896. For the ethnic Chinese and their Manchu overlords, the queue always retained its historically overdetermined character; it represented both homogeneity and ethnicity, masculinity and effeminacy, subordination and sedition. Moreover, because of the queue, Chinese cultural and political identity was determined by a cutting. In both its polyvalent character and the relationship between identity and an act of cutting,

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the queue clearly bears certain structural similarities to circumcision. Indeed, the constellation of characteristics may well have infected the function of that displacement of the Jew-identifying circumcised penis: the Judenzopf.

Taking a Queue from Lichtenberg Zopf has a long history of signifying difference in German. In its entry on the word, Grimms Wo¨rterbuch tells an interesting story of gender and historical difference. Zo¨pfe had by the eighteenth century been displaced from women’s heads to men’s—only later to return again to women’s. Following a trajectory that parallels the Chinese history from military to mandarin to modernity, the Zopf was first imposed by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia to simplify hair care and facilitate the fighting capacity of the army. Eventually in the latter part of the eighteenth century it became customary among all Prussian men. The Zopf became so identified with the absolute despotism and sophistic philosophes of the time that its removal was viewed as a (rite of ) ‘‘passage into the future.’’ Calling someone an alter Zopf became a form of ridicule; it marked the victim as antiquated and evoked ‘‘obdurate inflexible pedantry.’’74 Although such scorn was directed at the contemporary representatives of an earlier and autocratic epoch, the sinophilic Zopfzeit—perhaps finding its ultimate expression at the October 1817 gathering of German liberals and students near Eisenach, the Wartburgfest, when they put to flames a soldier’s Zopf together with other symbols of reaction—it could just as easily be applied to those other Zopftra¨ger, the Chinese, as they were represented in the discourses of that post-Enlightenment time. Grimms’ dictionary also includes another derivative of Zopf: Judenzopf. Judenzopf is ‘‘a disgusting sickness of the scalp’’ otherwise known as plica polonica. In his early eighteenth-century study of possible environmentcaused disease, Friedrich Hoffmann, professor of medicine at the University of Halle and later physician to the Zopf-instituting Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, reported: In Poland and Lithuania the Disorder, called Plica Polonica, is endemial and well known. This consists in a preternatural Bulk of the Hairs, which, being firmly conglutinated and wrapt up in inextricable Knots, afford a very monstrous and unseemly Spectacle. When these are cut, the Blood is discharged from them, the Head racked with Pain, the Sight impaired, and

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the Patient’s Life frequently endangered. This Misfortune is principally incident to the Jews, who live in these Countries. Though it seems difficult to account for this Disorder, and assign its true Causes, we shall nevertheless make an Attempt of this Kind. What therefore contributes not a little to its Production is, the sordid and nasty Manner of Life to which these People are addicted; for they rarely comb their Hairs, sleep in low and moist Rooms, and drink large Quantities of Brandy.75

This would be echoed in the 1780s as Johann Pezzl, describing Polish Jews in Vienna, remarked that ‘‘their hair [was] turned and knotted as if they all suffered from the plica polonica.’’76 A number of texts by the middle of the next century began to describe the spread of plica among Jews.77 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the famed German physicist and satirist, drew attention to another Judenzopf. One of his best-known prose pieces is his parody of the physiognomists, ‘‘Fragment von Schwa¨nzen’’ (On Tails), published in 1783. This brief work swiftly moves from animal tails to queues with ready allusions to their phallic character (see Figure 2-6). But it begins with an analysis of a pigtail, more specifically a sow’s tail of explicitly Jewish nature (see Figure 2-7). The Jewish character of this Zopf is so obvious that Lichtenberg admonishes his readers: if you do not recognize in this Schwanz—he writes if you do not ‘‘smell, with your eyes, as if your nose resided in them, the lowly slime in which it grew up at d . . . you should stop reading right here.’’78 With a virulence exceeding that of a Voltaire—or a Julius Streicher— Lichtenberg goes on to describe the history of the sow to which this tail was once attached. This pig poisons the streets with her unspeakable stench of manure, desecrates a synagogue, and cannibalistically consumes alive her three piglets. Then when attacking a poor young child she is slaughtered and consumed half-cooked by a gang of young beggars. Beyond dredging up the monstrous centuries-old figure of the Judensau,79 this parody both of physiognomic claims and of the physiognomist Lavater’s anti-Jewish polemic implies that both Jewish physiognomy—here figured by a sow’s Schwanz, in psychoanalytic terms a maternal phallus— and what it reveals about Jewish character are self-evident. This impression is reinforced as Lichtenberg proceeds to the pigtails, or queues [Zo¨pfe], of young knaves [Pursche]—by contemporary hair styles, necessarily Gentile—with ready allusions to their phallic character. In between, Lichtenberg undertakes a physiognomic contrast between the tail of the Judensau and the completely masculine—nothing namby-pamby or hys¨ berall Mannterical about it (‘‘nichts weichlich . . . nichts damenscho¨ßiges . . . U heit’’)—tail of an English hound, specifically of Ca¨sar, Henry VIII’s guard

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Figure 2-6. Phallic-shaped Schwa¨nze or tails. From Lichtenberg, ‘‘Fragment von Schwa¨nzen’’ (1783), 597.

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Figure 2-7. A (Jewish) sow’s tail. From Lichtenberg, ‘‘Fragment von Schwa¨nzen’’ (1783), 591.

dog (Leibhund). The sow’s dismembered member clearly embodies bestial and nonmasculine Jewish identity.80 To follow the trajectory of this metonymy of Jewish identification, the story moves ten years from Lichtenberg to the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, from ostensive parody to political polemic, from an abgeschnittenen Zopf to an abgeschnittenen Kopf, from a cut-off pigtail to a cut-off

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head. In his 1793 Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment Regarding the French Revolution, Fichte writes that the bestowal of civil rights was only possible for that ‘‘state within a state,’’ the Jews, after a drastic operation in which the Jewishness of the Jews would be thoroughly extinguished and would thereby parallel the fate that awaits other antiquated institutions and ideas, as expressed in the then-contemporary idiom ‘‘alte Zo¨pfe abschneiden.’’81 Fichte confesses, ‘‘to give [the Jews] civil rights I see no other means than one night to cut off all of their heads [die Ko¨pfe abzuschneiden] and replace them with ones in which there is not a single Jewish idea.’’82 The first part of this procedure apotropaically recalls that other one which confers identity onto the male Jew: circumcision. Fichte’s surgical strike would substitute for the original operation. Only then, since no form of self-chosen displacement or disguise can extinguish the fetish character of their identification, can the (male) Jews undergo the epispasm of assimilation, bearing foreheads, if not foreskins, like their Gentile companions. Fichte’s fellow philosopher, the Kantian and ‘‘Enlightened Jew’’ Lazarus Bendavid, also invokes decapitation that same year when he figures what would be necessary to transform Jews into human beings (Menschen) and citizens; however, Bendavid directly associates Jewish ceremonial law (if not exclusively circumcision) with those needing-to-be-shed heads. In On Jewish Characteristics he calls upon his fellow Jews to abolish the ‘‘ceremonial laws,’’ the observation of which has ‘‘a truly harmful influence on the character of the Jew, and through him, on the state.’’ He fears that unless the abolition is universal, those who continue to observe the law will band together, be fruitful, and multiply. He proclaims, ‘‘[Judentum] is the hydra, all of whose heads must be cut off at once if two are not to grow back in place of every one severed.’’83 Bendavid’s concern that those who continue to observe the law will be fruitful and multiply recalls the original covenant between Gd and Abraham in Genesis 17: Abraham and all of his male descendants were to be circumcised in exchange for the divine promise of everlasting prolificacy. The connection of Jewish emancipation and decapitation would reappear in the ensuing decades. For example, an 1805 anonymous pamphlet was entitled Die Judenreformator, oder wie ko¨nnen die Juden vertilgt werden, ohne einem einzigen den Kopf abzuschneiden (The Jewish Reformation, or How the Jews Could Be Exterminated without Cutting Off a Single Head). A variant of this figuration had appeared in an 1803 pamphlet which conceded that it would be unchristian to break the neck of a Jew at birth, but recommended instead that after the first-born son, all future male children be castrated: ‘‘We’re only talking here about a couple more

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snips. But this couple more, what consequences they would have for the welfare of the state.’’84 This connection took a strange twist in an 1814 story by E. T .A. Hoffmann, the German fabulist, who along with Fichte was one of the frequent attendees of Berlin’s virulently anti-Jewish (and anti-French) Christlichdeutsch Tischgesellschaft (Christian-German Eating Club). In ‘‘Johannes Kreislers, des Kapellmeisters, musikalische Leiden’’ (The Kapellmeister’s Musical Sorrows), the first of the ‘‘Kreisleriana’’ published in Fantasiestu¨cke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner; 1814), Hoffmann describes a musical postlude by the guests at Privy Councillor Ro¨derlein’s fashionably elegant dinner party: Now all the talents that had formerly bloomed unknown begin to rain down in a chaotic swirl. Determined to commit musical outrages, they want to perform ensembles, finales, and choruses. The fellow with the Titus hair-style [der Tituskopf] remarks that everyone knows Canon Kratzer sings a divine bass. At the same time he [modestly] volunteers [selbst bescheiden anfu¨hrt] the information that, although . . . he is also a member of several singing societies, he is properly only a second tenor.85

Although no Jews are identified as such in this story, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich argues that the Titus hairstyle signified a Jewish parvenu, since it was associated in contemporary polemics with Jewish efforts to assimilate into Berlin society. Hartwich cites Johann Daniel Falk’s 1803 satire, ‘‘Das Jahrmarktfest von Plundersweilen’’ (The Annual Market Festival of Plundersweilen), in which an ‘‘unkempt, Titus-coiffed man [struppigen Tituskopf]’’ steps forth, the very image of ‘‘the modern Jewish-dilettantish aesthete [ju¨disch-a¨sthetischen Kunstrichter].’’ He also notes the negative-stereotypical Jewish figures, both assimilated and not, who populate other tales by Hoffmann, such as ‘‘Nachricht von der neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza’’ (A Report on the Latest Adventures of the Dog Berganza; also from Fantasy Pieces) and, most notoriously, ‘‘Die Brautwahl’’ (‘‘The Choosing of the Bride’’ from the third volume of his Serapionsbru¨der collection, published in 1820).86 The Titus coiffure, once the rage of the France of the Directory and early Napoleonic Empire, was a short, layered cut, supposedly modeled after the hairstyle on the surviving busts of Titus, the destroyer of the Second Temple who later became emperor of Rome. Although it was, at times, worn by both men and women, the Tituskopf was primarily identified as a woman’s hairstyle. Condemned as ‘‘masculinizing,’’ it provoked such diatribes as the 1809 Anti-Titus, ou Remarques critiques sur la coiffure

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des femmes aux XIXe sie`cle (Anti-Titus, or Critical Remarks on Women’s Coiffure in the Nineteenth Century).87 Consequently, those men who had their hair so cut would not only be identifying with the illegitimate pretense of the hated French, who had effected various degrees of Jewish emancipation in the German lands they occupied, but also would be seen as less than virile: the simulacrum of the simulacrum of a male. An alternative account of the coiffure’s origins renders the connection between questionable Jewish emancipation and decapitation more explicit. Following the end of The Terror, the aristocratic relatives of the guillotined would engage in cathartic revels known as bals des victimes (victims’ balls). The revelers had their hair shorn in such a way as to imitate the preparatory haircuts given by executioners that left the necks of the soon-to-be guillotined bare; this coiffure a` la victime (victim’s hairstyle) came to be more popularly known as the coiffure a` la Titus—the Tituskopf.88 Hoffmann’s apparent dismay over Jews secreting themselves in society and debasing German culture was more than shared by his tablemate at the Christian-German Eating Club, Achim von Arnim. For Arnim Jewish assimilation was but one face of their polyvalent talent for dissimulation. In his sardonic vade mecum for exposing any Jews, including baptized ones, ¨ ber die Kennzeichen des who might sit among fellow club members, ‘‘U Judentums’’ (On Judentum’s Identifying Marks), Arnim asserts that Jews are so proud of their art of dissembling origins that they write openly about it in their books. He then offers several examples of such narratives. The first he mentions entails the neutralization of hirsute and birthdaysuit marks of differentiation: ‘‘A Jewish lad, who first trafficked in pigtail ribbons [mit Zopfband], is said to have become the Turkish emperor.’’89 In that young Jew’s opening act, hair (or at least hair products) tied him to, rather than distinguished him from, the Christian. And in his crowning act, he, unlike the Christian merchant Arnim soon mentions,90 did not have to subject himself (again) to a circumcision in order to avoid detection as an infidel and do business in Moslem-ruled lands. These diverse images combined a concern about a secular substitute for baptism, a desire for delimiting the Jewish population—if not fantasies about its outright extermination—and a clear allusion to circumcision. For the Jews to be emancipated and enter modernity—at least for those who even entertained that possibility—meant they had to cut off their ties to their dirty, rigid, pedantic, bezo¨pft, beschnitten (circumcised) past. They had to cut off that cutting, what Hegel refers to as the ‘‘imposed physical peculiarity’’ (auferlegte ko¨rperliche Eigenheit)91 that cut them off from male European bourgeois Christendom.

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While by 1871 constitutional rather than corporeal change enabled Jewish emancipation to become law in the newly united Germany of the Second Reich, in 1893, as German Jewry became more acculturated and the construction of Jewish identification became more the product of scientific discourses about the Jewish body, a strange little story written by Oskar Panizza, writer, psychiatrist, and psychotic, appeared, and the Jewishassociated Zopf returned. Drawing upon the vast repertoire of antisemitic stereotype, ‘‘Der operirte Jud’ ’’ (The Operated Jew) narrates the efforts of Itzig Faitel Stern to construct himself as a German. Stern is subjected to every possible operation except one: an epispasm, the surgical restoration of the foreskin to the circumcised penis. The climax of the story occurs during his wedding feast, when just before the ever-alluded-to but never-mentioned circumcision would have been revealed to his blond German Christian wife, all of his constructions come undone. At the head of his tale Panizza provided an epigraph from Gottfried Bu¨rger’s famous folk ballad ‘‘Lenore’’;92 it is the stanza in which the nightrider, whom Lenore had presumed to be her fiance´, reveals himself as Death: Ha! Look! See there! Within a trice, Wheugh! Wheugh! A horrid wonder! The rider’s jerkin, piece by piece, Like tinder falls asunder. Upon his head no lock of hair, [Zum Scha¨del, ohne Zopf und Schopf,] A naked skull all grisly bare.

Panizza foreshadows his story’s denouement by citing a classic unmasking of a heroine’s virile lover as the very antithesis of virility. His allusive prefiguration, however, is very specific: it is the Zopf—or rather the absent Zopf—of Lenore’s uncanny German groom that immediately betrays the truth. The uncanny Zopf, functioning as a displacement from lower to upper, anticipates how Itzig Faitel Stern’s gendered, Jewish identification would ultimately be revealed.93 Like most of the misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and antisemitic effluvia—the series of gender, sexual, racial, and religious differentiations by which identification and hegemony were constructed and legitimated in modern European discourses—this Zopf-mediated chronicle of formal, functional, and substantial analogies between Jew and Chinese drained into that fin-de-sie`cle cesspool masquerading as philosophical anthropology, Otto Weininger’s best-selling Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character; SC). Prior to introducing his discussion of a Judentum ‘‘steeped in femininity’’ (SC 276), Weininger invokes the Chinesenzopf as the answer to

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the question: ‘‘For example, what are we to think of the Chinese, with their feminine lack of any needs and any form of aspiration?’’ In response he muses: ‘‘Here one even might be tempted to believe in the femininity of a whole nation. At least it cannot be a mere whim of a whole nation that the Chinese wear pigtails [Zopf]’’ (SC 273). With this anthropological ‘‘truism’’ about the gendered character of a ‘‘whole race,’’ Weininger sets up his characterization of the feminine nature of another race,94 albeit one, he claims, defined more characterologically than anthropologically: the Jews.95 And as was the case with the other Zopf-associated depictions of the Jews, the Jewishness of Weininger’s Judentum is radically differentiated from the rest of humanity and must be overcome. He ominously concludes his chapter, ‘‘Humankind once more has the choice to make between Judentum and [an Aryan-associated] Christianity. . . . These are the two poles: and there is no third realm’’ (kein drittes Reich; SC 300).

Hairy Heine, or Germany: A Winter’s Tail Between Fichte’s fantasized surgical solution to the Jewish Question and Panizza’s imagined surgical dissolution of any positive response, probably no one more acutely—if often ironically—interrogated the relationship between Jew and German than Spinoza’s ‘‘fellow unbeliever’’96 Heinrich (‘‘Harry’’ to his friends) Heine, and his inquiries were regularly punctuated by that frequently question-mark-shaped hairy extension. From his early work to his ‘‘mattress-grave’’ memoirs, Heine’s braiding of Zo¨pfe served as gender-and-ethnicity-imbricated indices of German-Jewish relations, as answers to his Other Jewish Question. In its few but telling iterations,97 the word Zopf, without ever losing its phallic associations—and by extension (or by diminution?) its circumcised associations—mediated the identities of German, Jew, and baptized German Jew for Heine. The Zopf first emerges in Heine’s ambivalently sympathetic portrayal ¨ ber Polen (On Poland), written when the not-yetof the Polish Jews, U baptized poet was immersing himself in Jewish culture, history, and life. In his report to the Verein fu¨r die Kultur und das Wissenschaft der Juden, the Judenzopf, albeit allusively, serves as a sign of the foul practices and primitiveness of the Jews. As his account of his 1822 journey makes its way eastward, Heine moves from a description of the strong and sturdy Polish peasants with their characteristic Weichselzopf (plica polonica) to that of the destitute Ostjuden with their no-less-characteristic louse-ridden beard, garlic breath, Gemauschel (a pejorative reference to spoken Yiddish), and

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their dirty, ‘‘barbaric fur caps, which covered their heads.’’ Heine makes several references to the last, these Streimel, and in particular focuses on what lay beneath them: if not the Judenzopf, then the ju¨discher Kopf. Ironically, perhaps, he favorably compares the integrity of these foul Jewish heads to the splendorous ones of the pompous, assimilated German Jews. In this early writing, the Zopf acts as a natural diacritical mark both between Jew and non-Jew and between Polish Jew and German Jew, as it had in the works of some of the most influential German writers of the previous generation, such as Goethe and Jean Paul. In The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, the eponymous hero is teased by his friend Werner that he will be taken for a Jew because he does not wear a Zopf: ‘‘Now you look like a human being [Mensch]; all you lack is a Zopf. Let me bind your hair; otherwise, once you get underway, you may well be stopped as a Jew, and [body-] tax and tribute [Zoll und Geleite] will be demanded of you.’’98 The humorist and ironist Jean Paul (Richter), in the voice of the Jew Mendel ben Abraham, introduces the readers of Auswahl aus den Teufels Papieren (A Selection from the Devil’s Papers) to its late and purported author, the scholar Hasus. After noting how the scholar’s desire to grow a long beard as well as purchase a copy of the Holy Scriptures betrayed his secret sympathy with Judentum, Mendel adds: ‘‘He did not wear his hair (einen Zopf und eine Frisur) like a Christian, and instead bore himself like one of Abraham’s seed from Frankfurt am Main [i.e., like an inhabitant of the Judengasse].’’ The absence/presence of the Zopf, the long hair extension that hangs from the upper back of the head, is paired with the presence/ absence of its obverse, the beard, the long hair extension that hangs from the lower front of the head. Mendel then repeats a recent conversation he had with the very traditional Rabbi Hurvitz. Trying to get a rise out of the rabbi, he reports how he prayed that the would-be proselyte (i.e., Hasus) would have his desire realized in the grave: that ‘‘a couple of worms circumcise him and that an Israelite beard begin to grow.’’ He then notes the rabbi’s retort: ‘‘That will happen in any case, but there’s nothing in the Gemara [i.e., commentary in the Talmud] about such happenings [effecting a conversion].’’99 Following Heine’s 1825 baptism, in particular its failure to be the ‘‘ticket of admission to European culture’’ that he had hoped for,100 the Zopf takes on a new function in his writing. While Heine lamented to Moses Moser some thirteen months after his baptism that ‘‘the mark of the Jew can never be washed off’’ (der nie abzuwaschender Jude),101 Heine had already, in Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey; 1824–26), painted the Zopf as the ornamental addition that reveals the Jewish origins of she who

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wears it, the wife of a military counselor, Frau von Steinzopf ne´e Lilientau. The Zopf bedecking the surname she acquired by marriage emblemizes her desire to assimilate. Her prebaptismal maiden name, Lilientau, means ‘‘dew (Tau) of the lilies,’’ but Tau may also refer to another kind of braid, a rope; and Lilientau is typical of the floral names many Jews assumed when they were required in 1812 to conform to Western naming practice.102 The two components of her new name, Stein (stone) and Zopf, together indicate the cultural rigidity of the members of the class into which she has married; that is, her married name suggests that a Jewess has married into the petrified Prussian aristocracy. More than offering an ironic commentary on social mobility via conversion and marriage, the scene Heine sets unfolds layer after layer of ethnic and phallic fetishization. Frau von Steinzopf is introduced during the course of Heine’s dinnertime depiction of a Berlin population concerned about appearances. Berliners desire an illusory reality that reflects their expectations. Just prior to invoking the former Fra¨ulein Lilientau, the table conversation had turned to recalling the two Chinese who had ‘‘displayed themselves’’ in Berlin two years before, and later became lecturers in Chinese aesthetics at Halle—their Zo¨pfe, incidentally, are not mentioned, but would be assumed by the reader. This exhibition is then inverted, with the imagined exhibition of an echt (genuine) Teuton in China. The inversion concludes when the implicit pigtails are paired with a castrating innuendo: ‘‘As a finale, visitors [to the exhibition] might be prohibited from bringing any dogs with them at twelve o’clock (feeding-time), as these animals would be sure to snap from the poor German the best bits [die besten Brocken].’’103 Returning to Berliner spectacles, the conversation focuses upon Berlin theatergoers’ disdain for anachronism or any divergence from proper time, place, or personhood: ‘‘this delusive care on the part of the general direction extends itself not only to aprons and pantaloons, but also to the within enclosed persons. So in future Othello will be played by a real Moor.’’104 Berliners desire an exact correspondence between the other and the signifers by which they typically identify that other. Frau von Steinzopf exemplifies this desire in name (a Prussian Christian name which nonetheless carries in the Zopf its own anachronism, its own difference), in marital status (to marry a non-Jewish aristocrat is to become one), and in viewing practice: ‘‘and if Lord Burleigh in a moment of forgetfulness [Versehen], should don the pantaloons of Henry the Fourth, then Madam, the military counselor Von Steinzopf’s wife . . . would not take her eyes off this anachronism all evening.’’105 More than sexual innuendo is at play in this image. Just as the anachronistic Zopf betrayed the former Fra¨ulein

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Lilientau’s desire to assimilate,106 so despite the (Jew’s) intention to assume the appropriate role (of Gentile), the telltale penis—by implication a circumcised one, an atavism if not an anachronism—will slip through. The following year (1827), during his walk through Frankfurt’s Judengasse with the critic and political publicist Ludwig Bo¨rne, Heine qualified the identification function of the diacritical Zopf—as well as of its obverse, the beard. Proverb-like he commented, ‘‘The beard does not make the Jew nor the Zopf the Christian.’’107 With this perhaps nostalgic coupling, the ironic poet indicated the disjunction between character and either ascribed group identity or the assumed physical signifiers of that identity. The Zopf still mediates the identities of German, Jew, and German Jew; however, these mediations are far from clear cut. In Heine’s poetry written during Vorma¨rz and the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Zopf figures the despised militaristic, tutelary, and absolutist Prussian Christian state filled with military men, monsters, and mandarins;108 however, it more significantly still crowns the baptized Jews who desire to be part of that state. In ‘‘Der Kaiser von China’’ (The Emperor of China) Heine writes: My mandarin nobility, Whose heads are not screwed tightly, Regain their youthful vim and glee And shake their pigtails [Zo¨pfe] lightly. The great pagoda’s built by prayer, Faith’s shrine from border to border; The last of the Jews are baptized there And get the Dragon Order.109

The assimilation-desiring, baptism-relying parvenu Jew becomes the Zopf bearer. ‘‘Der Kaiser von China’’ was not the only one of Heine’s Zeitgedichte (Poems of the Times) in which Zopf would make an appearance. For Heine, the coiffure initiated by this piously Christian and overtly reactionary king’s ancestor developed a new series of meanings. Zopf or Zo¨pfe appear in several of the poems, in addition to ‘‘Der Kaiser,’’ that are bracketed by ‘‘Das neue Israelitische Hospital zu Hamburg’’ (The New Israelite Hospital in Hamburg) on one side and ‘‘Kirchenrat Prometheus’’ (Church Councilor Prometheus) on the other. Not only do both of these framing pieces invoke the plagues (if not the Zo¨pfe) that accompany the

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Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, they both provide commentary on the Jewish situation in Germany and suggest thereby that German-Jewish relations are at issue in the poems that they enclose. In the first Heine employs the occasion of the opening of a Jewish hospital (largely funded by his uncle Salomon) to explode the trope of the diseased Jew, in a lament over Judentum as itself an incurable disease passed down from father to son to grandson.110 Whereas Jewish ethnic identity is transmitted by the mother at birth, male religious identity is not acquired until the eight-day-old boy is circumcised by his father (or father substitute). This ‘‘deep-seated’’ malady cannot be cured by (baptismal?) water (‘‘vapor bath or douche’’), by (homeopathic?) ‘‘medications,’’ or by (epispasmic?) ‘‘surgery.’’111 Jewish identity is indelible. The latter poem no less evokes Jewish associations beyond the reference to Egypt. The facetious ode ‘‘Kirchenrat Prometheus’’ is directed at H. E. G. Paulus, the Protestant theologian who a decade earlier had published a very widely distributed denunciation of the arguments for Jewish emancipation in the state of Baden, Die Ju¨dische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmethoden (The Jewish Nation’s Separation [from Other Nations] According to Origin, Consequences, and Methods to Better [It]; 1831). For Paulus the Jews could become good citizens only through conversion. In his polemic, he took specific issue with the Jewish practice of circumcision. Following the traditional Christian view, Paulus held that ‘‘the biblical commandment to remove the foreskin is to be interpreted spiritually, that is, to remove the foreskin of the heart and not the fleshly foreskin. [He] presented Christian baptism as a universal human symbol which exists in perpetuity, unlike physical circumcision which is appropriate only to the Jewish nation. If the Jews wish to merge with other nations, they must remove the signs of their isolation, first and foremost the seal of circumcision imprinted on their flesh.’’112 Of the six poems between ‘‘Dem neuen Israelitischen Hospital’’ and ‘‘Kirchenrat Prometheus,’’ three include Zopf or Zo¨pfe. The sixth poem of that series, ‘‘Der Kaiser von China,’’ has already been discussed; the first, ‘‘Georg Herwegh,’’ opens with ‘‘Mein Deutschland trank sich einen Zopf.’’ Here Zopf is employed in a figure no longer in common parlance and of supposed military origin:113 ‘‘My Germany drank itself boiled and blind.’’ There are any number of phrases to describe how the radicals, such as the poet Georg Herwegh, were intoxicated by their hopes and dreams when Friedrich Wilhelm IV assumed the crown—only to become disappointed with the Christian reactionary turn that his rule actually entailed. By choosing this now-defunct phrase, Heine was able to communicate that the delusion existed from the very start; as they were becoming

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‘‘besoffen,’’ drunk,114 Germany was becoming ‘‘bezopft,’’ bound in the braids of censorship and police supervision. The next three poems—‘‘Die Tendenz’’ (For the Cause), ‘‘Das Kind’’ (The Child), and ‘‘Verheißung’’ (Promise)—describe a trajectory of ethical and political compromises that must be made and that many writers, including many of Heine’s liberal one-time friends, were increasingly making in this new old and cold Germany. Then comes ‘‘Der Wechselbarg’’ (The Changeling). By depicting a changeling child with a ‘‘greisen Zopf’’ (gray pigtail), Heine ‘‘need not name’’ the subject of his allegorical portrait: Prussia.115 This poem in particular brought out the ire of one of Germany’s leading intellectual voices, Heinrich Treitschke,116 the appearance of whose anti-Jewish essay ‘‘Unsere Ansichten’’ (Our Prospects) would render Jewish denigrations respectable (salonfa¨hig) among the cultured bourgeoisie. Heine concluded his Neue Gedichte (New Poems)—a series of works, including the Zeitgedichte, which decried the state into which his native Germany had fallen—with Deutschland: Ein Winterma¨rchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale). Zopf makes an appearance here too as the disguised sign of militaristic and philistine German identity.117 In the ninth stanza of the third Caput, he writes: ‘‘Der lange Schnurrbart ist eigentlich nur/ Des Zopftums neuere Phase: /Der Zopf, der ehmals hinten hang,/Der ha¨ngt jetzt unter der Nase’’ (‘‘The long mustache is but a new form/Of pigtail that time discloses:/The pigtail that used to hang behind/Hangs down now under their noses’’).118 In part, Heine reworks the refrain from Chamisso’s 1822/26 poem, ‘‘Tragische Geschichte,’’ that had already become a geflugeltes Wort,119 an oft-quoted synechdochal allusion to fools and other tilters at windmills: ‘‘Der Zopf der ha¨ngt ihm hinten’’ (The pigtail that hangs behind him). The fashion may have changed, but the old values and preposterous aspirations have not. Further, these objects and aims have been internalized,120 but like any pathological condition, they symptomatically manifest themselves in distorted form on the body.121 In some of Heine’s last works, indeed in all three Hebraischen Melodien from the third book of Romanzerro—‘‘Prinzessin Sabbat’’ (Princess Sabbath), ‘‘Jehuda ben Halevy,’’ and ‘‘Disputation’’—the Zopf returns in ironic form. In the first, the Zopf returns to women, specifically to Princess Sabbath, the Jewish wife. This poem portrays how during the most Jewish of occasions, Shabbat, the curse of everyday Jewishness in a Gentile-dominated society is lifted; the (male) Jew becomes once again a human being, and his wife incarnates the bride of the Song of Songs. Heine pictures her modestly [sittsam] hiding her braids (Zo¨pfe) beneath her bonnet. Yet, as the poet knew well, it would take more than the magic of Shabbat for the

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observant Jewish wife to hide her braids: as the father of the Beautiful Sara commanded his daughter upon learning of her betrothal to Abraham, Heine’s Rabbi of Bacharach says, ‘‘Cut off your hair, for now you are a married woman.’’122 Traditionally, just before being escorted to the synagogue on her wedding day, the bride would sit for the shearing off of her maiden’s braid and its replacement with an embroidered cap.123 Is Heine merely reinforcing the view of the Jewish wife as restrained, if not uptight (‘‘equally unpleasant [fatal] to her’’ is the Passion and Pathos that leaves her ‘‘with disheveled hair aflutter’’ [das mit flatternd / Aufgelo¨stem Haar einherstu¨rmt’’]), or is he tying the Zopf to the ‘‘Geisteska¨mpfe’’ (polemics) and ‘‘Debatten’’ (disputations) over the entry of Jews into German society that she loathes?124 Does she, like the betrothed in the Song of Songs, figure the Jewish people who are confronted with the choice of the bestial reminders that aping the Gentiles will not work and that they must put aside those masks to restore their humanity; or is she indicating that the Jewish woman is always already a human being? In ‘‘Jehuda ben Halevy’’ the Zopf makes a brief appearance as so much useless knowledge learned by rote, facts that are employed to obscure the great cultural contributions of postbiblical Jewry. Girls are taught about ‘‘die Zopfmonarchen Chinas, / Porzellanpagodenkaiser’’ instead of the ‘‘großen Namen/Aus dem großen Zeitalter/Der arabisch-althispanisch,/ Ju¨dischen Poetenschule’’ (‘‘the pigtailed lords of China,/Porcelain-pagoda princes’’ instead of the ‘‘great figures/In the golden age of glory/Of the Arabic-Hispanic/Jewish school of poetry’’).125 In ‘‘Disputation,’’ the braids return to the goyim as Heine restages the Toledo debate between Capuchins and Rabbis, between the Franciscan Friar Jose´ and Rabbi Judah of Navarre, over the nature of Gd. These foreskinless knights (Diese Ritter ohne Vorhaut) argue that through Jesus their golden locks would be restored to their tonsured heads, ‘‘Allerliebste Jungfrauen flechten/Uns das Haar in hu¨bsche Zo¨pfe’’ (‘‘and lovely maids/Will be busily adorning/Our coiffures with handsome braids’’). The Rabbi concludes his rebuttal with the request that the monks undergo a tonsure of a different sort in order to enjoy an afterlife also of a different sort, one in which they would feast on Leviathan: little monks, ‘‘nimmt jetzt meinen Rat an/Opfre hin die alte Vorhaut/Und erquick dich am Leviathan’’ (‘‘Take my counsel with e´lan:/ Give them the old scrap of foreskin/And enjoy Leviathan’’).126 Throughout this last poem Heine is playing with what is cut and what is restored, as the friars’ tonsured scalp inversely parallels the Jews’ by-circumcisionbared glans.

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In his Memoiren (Memoirs), roughly contemporaneous with these poems, Heine composes an allegory of Jewish assimilation that draws upon the denigrating representation of the Jew as ape (the mimetic nearhuman), alludes to the deficiencies of Jewish language, and perhaps anticipates Kafka’s Red Peter and his ‘‘Report to an Academy.’’127 It ultimately finds its protagonist substituting a Zopf for the Schwanz, the mark of his origins and, as noted above, German slang for penis. In a remarkable series of associations that begins with his father’s Hannover dialect (German at its finest), moves to evaluations of other German dialects and their Dutch cognates, and concludes with how each dialect views the others as corrupted versions of itself, Heine recalls a ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ zoologist’s claim that the apes are the ancestors of humanity, such that humans are but educated—overeducated—apes. He then speculates that if apes could speak, then humans are but corrupted or degenerate apes. The human-ape relationship then leads to suggesting a possible etiology for the fashion of wearing queues in the eighteenth century: ‘‘our forefathers’’ instinctively realized that their overcivilized culture was but a veneer that glossed over the underlying rot and that it was necessary to return to nature, to draw closer to their primal ape nature. What distinguishes human from ape, he continues, is only the absence of a tail (Schwanz), and the queue (Zopf ) was a necessary supplement to remedy that fundamental loss.128 better a chinese silk zopf than a sow’s (r)ear Yet Heine’s tales of human and hirsute, German and germane origins cannot overcome the sadness that grips him when thinking of his dead—Zopfbearing—father. For there is another Judenzopf that even as it reinforces its diacritical character does not betray Jewish identity; rather, it establishes the conditions for every Jewish identity, or at least for Heine’s own: the Zopf his beloved father wore. In Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski, the father cuts off his Zo¨pfchen—the little Zopf or pigtail—and gives it (together with a code of behavior and money to be used as an investment) to his son to carry with him always. Rather than indulge in psychoanalytic interpretations—I leave that to the reader129 —I would rather note that the connection among the use of the diminutive, the action of cutting, the shape of this sign of identification and descent, its memorial function (zum Andenken), and its continuous possession by the son (ich besitze es noch) clearly evoke circumcision. The description of von Schnabelewopski pe`re and his hair anticipates the description of Heine’s

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own father that he would compose decades later in his own Memoiren (Memoirs). It should be noted, however, that in the later text Haarbeutel, hair bundle, substitutes for Zopf, since, one may assume, the latter signifier had been in the interim given over to the Prussians and to those Jews who sought to assimilate. By contrast, the Zopf that had been carried from von Schnabelewopski fils to Heine fils embodied a soft, effeminate bearing with Chinese inflections:130 ¨ berweiches], characMy father’s looks had something excessively soft [U terless, almost feminine [Weibliches] about them. . . . It is not my intention to suggest any lack of manliness [Ma¨nnlichkeit]: he gave ample evidence of this, especially in his youth, and I, after all, am living proof of it. This is not supposed to be an improper remark: I meant only the contours of his physique, which was soft [weich] and gently rounded rather than upright and burly. . . . [His hair was] softer [von einer Weichheit] than anything I know except Chinese silk.131

Although preferring the Zopf that was emblematic of the times of his youth, Heine’s father compromised with the ‘‘progressive spirit of the age.’’ Hence in an era in which the Zopf is no longer fashionable, its absence rather than its presence would appear—and, according to Heine, only appear—to signal assimilation and conversion: He sacrificed only the form, that is the little black bag containing his hair, but he wore his long locks [Haarlocken] like a loosely plaited [breitgeflochtenes] chignon attached to his head with tiny combs. Since his hair was so soft [Weichheit], and covered with powder, this plaiting [Haarflechte] was almost imperceptible, and so my father was not really a renegade [Abtru¨nniger] from the cult of the hair-bag [Haarbeuteltums], but like many cryptoorthodox believers [Krypto-Orthodoxe], he had merely complied outwardly with the harsh spirit of the age.132

The reference to the renegade and crypto-orthodox believers—Marranos —echoes with Heine’s discussion of Don Isaak Abarbanel in The Rabbi of Bacharach and of his idol Spinoza in On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany. In sum, Heine’s Zo¨pfe attracted the nostalgia, stereotypes, delusions, and anxieties that marked relations between Germans and Jews, their sought-for differences, and their no-less sought-for identifications.

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. . . And Puppy Dog Tails, That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of During the course of the nineteenth century the Zopf, the braid, returned to the coiffure of Gentile German maidens. Hence, as suggested by Heine’s midcentury recollection of his father, the Judenzopf more generally added lack of virility to its associations with rigidity, anachronism, and dirt. Moreover, as the work of the famed German writer and cartoonist Wilhelm Busch shows, braids came to signify German-Jewish difference. In the opening chapter of Die fromme Helene (Pious Helen), Busch created one of the most widespread derogatory images of the Jew: ‘‘And the Jew with crooked (krummer) heel,/crooked (Krummer) nose and crooked (krummer) legs/snakes his way to the stock market/profoundly corrupted and soulless.’’133 Busch illustrated this section with a diametrically opposed drawing of Helen, whose straight Zo¨pfe frame her face (see Figure 2-8). The opposition between German women’s braids and crooked or deviant Jews became a German nationalist slogan, later adopted by the Third Reich’s female youth organization, the League of German Girls: ‘‘Arisch

Figure 2-8. The krumm or crooked Jew and the straight-braided Helen. From Wilhelm Busch, Die fromme Helene (1872), 2–3.

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ist der Zopf—Ju¨disch ist der Bubikopf.’’ (The Braid is Aryan—The PageBoy Cut is Jewish).134 With the notorious success of Victor Margueritte’s 1922 La Garc¸onne (The Bachelorette), women wearing the page-boy cut became quite the rage among both young urban women and symbol-seeking would-be cultural critics. But already, the year before, the Berlin archaeology professor Otto Hauser had decried, as further evidence of Jewish biological gender ambiguity, of the unequaled percentage of masculine women (Mannweiber) among the Jews, that Jewish ‘‘women had made flat-breastedness and the Bubikopf fashionable.’’135 Arguing over the significance of the page-boy cut became a primary site of cultural contestation. ‘‘Conservatives saw the disappearance of long hair, the crown of true womanhood, as a sign of cultural decline, and held the inevitable masculinization of women responsible for everything from sexual perversions to social tensions.’’ For them, the fresh-faced young woman in braids, or the ‘‘Gretchen-look,’’136 —named after the braid-coifed heroine of Goethe’s Faust whose descent into madness after drowning her out-of-wedlock infant is marked by her shorn Zo¨pfe137—embodied, like Gretchen upon her spiritual return at the end of the work, the eternal feminine. By contrast, the leftist novelist Heinrich Mann praised the Bubikopf for both its practicality and its democratization of public space.138 Ultimately, as the Nazi slogan indicated, these hairstyles came to define each group and distinguish it from the other.139

From Sinai to Sinology? As this chapter has shown, from circumcision to the queue, the Zopf bridged the West’s identifications of Jew and Chinese, often of feminized male Jews and Chinese, and reinforced those constructions. It has also examined how the Zopf betrayed the conflicts and contradictions of contesting cultures in China and in the West. Although the relations of power and forms of knowledge that mediate (Han) Chinese and Manchu, on the one hand, and Christian and Jew, on the other, significantly differ, a number of structural similarities have been indicated. Hence ever embedded in a historical logic of Zopf- oder Kopfabschneiden, the Chinesenzopf, like circumcision or Beschneidung, served as a violent signifier, a signifier of violence. Further, the queue signified differential relations between Chinese and Manchu, as well as between China and Europe, just as circumcision— and its complement, the Judenzopf—did between Christian and Jew as well as between German and Jew.

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Tailing the Suspect, or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference

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Yet the genealogical question remains undecided: are European identifications of Jew and Chinese parallel effects of the West’s fetishizing logic, or is the Zopf a displacement from Sinai to Sinology? That is, is the differentiation between Jew and Christian—Europe’s construction of the proximate Jewish other—the ground for that between Europe and its more distant others such as the Chinese? Jonathan Boyarin, for example, has argued that medieval Christian discourse on the Jews was appropriated in Spanish representations of New World populations.140 This chapter’s tale, too, has drawn attention to a number of explicit and implicit analogies. Clearly, some network of relationship exists among Chinese, queue, Christian, Jew, violence, and threat, as the following, final example testifies. One Orientalist employs a rather curious analogy to illustrate the overvaluation of the queue: ‘‘In Mediæval Europe, if there was a failure of the crops, or an outbreak of the plague, the mob generally burnt a Jew; in Modern China, in case of any calamity, or any untoward event such as the loss of a pigtail, they stone a missionary.’’141 Still, genealogy remains unclear, since the representational strategies of othering by which the West has asserted hegemony over its colonial and post-colonial subjects have usually elided the West’s own gender, sexual, racial, religious, and class differences. Nor does Heine’s ironizing mobilization of such coiffurial strategies and of such elisions resolve either this question or his Other Jewish Question. While it remains difficult to parse the overdeterminations of the fetishized images of the Other—and of the West—this chapter has mapped a historical pattern of overlapping identifications. Through the deployment of the Zopf, as image and as morpheme, a hegemonic European culture generated fetishized identifications of the Jew as well as of the usual suspect, the Chinese.

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chapter 3

From Mohels to Mein Kampf Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identification ‘‘Syphilis’’ is one name only for the dissolution to which a man falls prey if he comes into contact with the external incarnation of his devouring, dead unconscious. But it is the corrosions of femininity, Jewishness, epidemic disease, criminality (the contagion is international), and emasculating death. —klaus theweleit, Male Fantasies

Jacob Katz describes the year 1879 as a turning point in Jewish history: ‘‘it marks the beginning of modern antisemitism.’’1 A constellation of events—publishing, speechifying, organizing, sloganeering—generated and to an extent made respectable (salonfa¨hig) widespread speech and action against Judentum. During that year, Wilhelm Marr’s best-selling pamphlet Der Sieg des Judentums u¨ber das Germanentum (The Victory of Judaism over Germanism) appeared. In October 1879 he followed up this publication with the establishment of a journal, Deutsche Wacht (German Guard), and the formation of an association that became known as the Antisemitenliga—the League of Antisemites. Within Marr’s circle of associates and sympathizers, a neologism—Antisemitismus—began to achieve currency. In the wake of Marr’s agitation, the court preacher Adolf Stoecker delivered his first ‘‘antisemitic’’ speech, ‘‘Unsre Forderungen an das Moderne Judentum’’ (What We Demand of Modern Jewry), before a Christian Social Workers’ Party rally on 19 September 1879. He began his speech by announcing that ‘‘for a long time the Jewish problem has been a burning question, but in the last few months it has burst out into an open conflagration.’’ This fevered activity arose because in Germany ‘‘there are symptoms of the presence of a disease: [every limb (Glied) of] our national body is plagued by social abuses, and social hostility never

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exists without reason.’’ This disease, this ‘‘cancer’’ (Krebs), he claimed, is the Judaization or Jewification (Verjudung) of the German spirit.2 A third moment was the appearance in November of Heinrich von Treitschke’s previously noted polemic, ‘‘Unsere Aussichten’’ (Our Prospects). Treitschke’s essay situated the formation of ‘‘antisemitic societies’’ (Antisemitenvereine) and the flood of ‘‘antisemitic [judenfeindlichen] pamphlets’’ as legitimate responses by the masses to the failure to assimilate by that newly emancipated ‘‘cosmopolitan power,’’ the Jews—especially by the invading Semites from the East. And this reaction, Treitschke asserted, was not limited to German peasants and workers: ‘‘Even in the best educated circles, among men who would reject with horror any thought of Christian fanaticism or national arrogance, we hear today the cry, as from one mouth, ‘the Jews are our misfortune!’ ’’ (die Juden sind unser Unglu¨ck—a slogan brandished across every issue of Julius Streicher’s notorious haterag Der Stu¨rmer).3 This 1879 emergence of political antisemitism with its often biological rhetoric coincided with four other developments that same year in the medical discipline of syphilology and its biopolitical discourse. The first was dermatologist Albert Neisser’s identification of the bacterium gonococcus as the causative agent of gonorrhoea. Following Neisser’s discovery, venereal disease entered the natural, invisible realm of bacteriological contagion and hence threatened to escape the cultural confines of individual, debauched behavior. Moreover, within the medical discourse of venereal disease itself the discovery of cause led to a shift in emphasis from pathogenic description—for example, the attempt to distinguish syphilis from other diseases with dermatological symptoms—to etiological determination.4 The insertion of a venereal ailment within the discursive parameters of the germ theory of disease facilitated discipline articulation in a culture that valorized the will to knowledge. That is, to possess the knowledge of origins and by implication of consequences—in medicine, the knowledge of (potential) cures—enables a discipline to brandish a discourse that can enhance its prestige with the public, aggrandize its own position among other medical disciplines, and regulate the behavior of the objects of its ministrations: the body of people (Volksko¨rper).5 With the emergence of this new medical categorization, the public representation of venereal disease changed: the rhetoric of morality and class began to be replaced by the discourse of medicine.6 Consequently, the newly emboldened disciplines sought through the construction of syphilis as an object of medical knowledge/power to shift the means to control it from moral and legal constraint to hygienic intervention.7 Venerological

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discourse expropriated the moral-pedagogical function of religious discourse:8 ‘‘The true method of prevention is what makes clear to all that syphilis is not a mysterious and terrible thing, the penalty of the sin of the flesh, a sort of shameful evil branded by Catholic malediction, but an ordinary disease which may be treated and cured.’’9 The second significant event of 1879 was a lecture by Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, nineteenth-century England’s foremost student of syphilis,10 before the Lancashire and Cheshire branch of the British Medical Association. He described syphilis as the ‘‘Great Imitator’’—noting, that is, that whenever anything pathological occurs to an individual’s inner organs, the possible syphilitic origin of this plaint should not be dismissed. Thus, syphilis is possibly all-pervasive but ever masked. Consequently, the construction of syphilis can generate a master narrative—the syphilologist can lift the veil and explain it all. The third event was the publication of Victor Augagneur’s E´tude sur la syphilis he´re´ditaire tardive. Augagneur’s work was the first explicitly to assert that the appearance of syphilitic symptoms in three-month-old infants indicated that the disease was inherited and not acquired postpartum.11 While what is now called prenatal syphilis was recognized much earlier in the century, Augagneur was the first to call attention to the possibly indefinitely delayed effects of the ‘‘sins of the father.’’ Indeed, he argued, the consequences of such behavior could even skip a generation—despite the long-standing categorical rejection of the idea by his fellow venerologists. This gap provided the space for the construction of a new diseaseentity: ‘‘he´re´dosyphilis.’’ The bacteriological, protean, and inheritable character of the disease made he´re´dosyphilis a proper object for a medical discipline. With the emergence of this new scientific category and the recognition that even innocent newborns could be afflicted, the public representation of venereal disease changed: the object of the discourse of syphilis shifted from a shameless, immoral, lower-class individual who required criminal punishment to a diseased body that needed treatment. The institutional correlate of this discursive shift marks the final major event of 1879. That year the first chair in dermatology and syphilology was inaugurated at the Hoˆpital Saint-Louis. With Dr. Alfred Fournier as its first incumbent, this chair embodied the ‘‘promotion of syphilis to the rank of a medical discipline.’’12 Indeed, under his leadership the Hoˆpital Saint-Louis would become the capital of syphilology from where Dr. Fournier would lead the crusade against the venereal peril.13 Fournier would also publish several treatises on he´re´dosyphilis between his appointment and 1891, including Syphilis et

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mariage (1880; expanded ed., 1890), La syphilis he´re´ditaire tardive (1886), and, with Paul Portalier, L’he´re´dite´ syphilitique: Lec¸ons cliniques (1891).14 Since he´re´dosyphilis, as an allegedly inherited disease inflicted on innocent babies,15 lacked the taint of immorality, a new narrative was needed. It was as if doctors were led to translate into a scientific language the phantasms which haunted the bourgeoisie of the time. . . . Better than any other morbid phenomenon, syphilis materialized the anxiety which the bourgeoisie cultivated over their descendants. [It] was capable of eviscerating the familial womb. The proof was in the frightening statistics concerning the miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant mortality of syphilitic origin. Even more serious in nature than syphilis [was] hereditary syphilis. . . . [T]he race—read ‘‘the bourgeois family’’—found itself menaced by a rot.16

This new narrative of diseased reproduction became the exemplar for the narrative of degeneration:17 the story of unnatural selections by progenitors who passed on their taint with their germ plasm, eventually resulting in a population of unfit monsters. Suddenly the future health of the descendants of the bourgeoisie became problematic—and hence threatened the very future of a bourgeois order18 that conceived itself as the culmination of a narrative of evolutionary descent, a narrative sustained by means of the transmission of the patrimony of accumulated eugenic as well as economic capital. He´re´dosyphilis insinuated disease at the root of the ideology of reproduction that maintained that order.19 Syphilis, in an 1872 image both anticipating the convergence of anti-Jewish and syphilitic representation and resurrecting the medieval blood libel, ‘‘poisoned [the nation; i.e., bourgeois society] at the very wellsprings of life.’’20 This heightened the anxiety precipitated by the medical re-construction of syphilis—and by the absence of a cure. The indeterminate character of he´re´dosyphilis, combined with the protean and theoretically bacteriological character of syphilis itself, became the object for a discipline whose members possessed the authority to know it when they saw it. These shifts in the narrative, discourse, and disciplinarity of syphilis facilitated the inscription of paternity and the preservation of separate, gender-coded spheres by means of the regulation of women’s bodies to ensure prenuptial virginity, for ‘‘fulfillment of this expectation was felt to be the only solid guarantee of a safe inheritance of property from father to son.’’21 The property in question was not only economic, but also symbolic and genetic. These two emergences—of the political movement of antisemitism, conditioning and conditioned by a biological rhetoric, and of syphilophobia, conditioning and conditioned by the biopolitical discourse of scientific

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disciplines—occurred among a bourgeoisie residing in a Central Europe that had not yet recovered from the Great Depression of 1873–79, even as the rapid industrialization that had commenced in the 1860s resumed. Radical restructuring was taking place in both Germany’s recently unified Second Reich and, if less so, in the German-speaking regions of AustriaHungary. While the Besitz- und Bildungsbu¨rgertum (educated, propertyowning middle class) would find new opportunities in the growing culture of expertise, the traditional Mittelstand (middle estate or class; that is, the petty bourgeoisie and the artisans) found itself in a less advantageous position. With massive, preeminently male migration from impoverished rural regions into the cities, urban overpopulation complemented agricultural stagnation. In addition to this population shift, the devastated economic conditions of the countryside, combined with pogroms beginning in 1878, motivated the movement westward of large numbers of East European Jews. As a consequence of this altered demography, traditional occupations, especially of the petit bourgeoisie, were displaced, as were the employment opportunities for lower-class women. And among the working-class, a period of ever-increasing unrest and organization ensued.22 The changes in the political economy had its consequences as well in what began to be viewed as the human economy. When the Great Depression revealed the inadequacy of liberalism, the administrative rule of expertise and welfare mechanisms embodied by public health policy came to the fore; sickness insurance both socialized workers and legitimated medicine. Professionals populated the corridors of the regime of expertise,23 which, especially in Imperial Germany, characterized both the state and the social—the latter being the space created by the intrusion of the male-coded public sphere into the nominally female-coded sphere of family, health, and reproduction.24 Having formed monopolies of scientific discourse out of medico-moral concepts of health and disease, these ‘‘experts’’ asserted themselves by targeting marginal or threatening social groups for their professional gaze and more generally regulating the behaviors of the subjects of the state. Further enhancing the authority of the biological gaze was both a shared belief that science could improve social conditions and the shared value attached to anything scientific. With bourgeois identification tied in part to the accumulation of symbolic capital—that is, the attainment of Bildung or culture—and with science as the reigning symbolic idiom, there was a broad fascination with scientific data and explanation, as they carried the force of objective truth. Beyond the bodies of the working class, women’s bodies—those of the unemployed, of the prostitute (preeminently drawn from the preceding group), and of

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the emerging bourgeois women’s movement—together with the bodies of the recently emancipated male Jews, attained a supervised public presence. Their entry into the public sphere amplified the crises of gender and national identity afflicting the German bourgeoisie.25 These crises were complemented by the medico-legal (re)inscription of fixed, gendered sexual identities and by the bio-anthropological construction of definitive racial identities.26 Consequently, by medically defining such others as agents of infection, threats to national health, and, consequently, challenges to the social order, the professionals maintained the subjection of such groups. Tied to the threat of these diseased, embodied others, the bourgeoisie saw their own bodies threatened by increased mortality and a declining birthrate. Intensely conscious of pervasive prostitution and seemingly epidemic venereal disease, of mass political movements by the other classes and the increasing presence of ethnically and/or racially identified others, bourgeois men (and women) perceived the (bodily) integrity of bourgeois women to be at risk. Further, fears that depopulation, or a population of (congenitally) enervated men, would undermine the nation’s military preparedness and its sense of national virility threatened the body social. ‘‘The nation, that, by culpable neglect of physical and moral corruption, has allowed the number of its children and the physical strength of each of them to diminish will necessarily become prey to nations who have maintained themselves in greater strengths and numbers.’’27 As the century moved toward its conclusion, these crises of a bourgeoisie preoccupied with heredity converged upon the specter of degeneration. The apocalyptic tenor was recorded in the opening to Max Nordau’s 1892 bestselling diagnosis of his times, Entartung (Degeneration): ‘‘in our days there have arisen in more highly developed minds vague qualms of the Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.’’28 To disavow, affirm, and above all forestall these perceived threats to German bourgeois identity and authority, those emergent antisemitic and syphilological discourses, both professional and popular, were inscribed upon the bodies of these others. This chapter explores the intersections of these two discourses and the development of a common narrative. After observing historical and structural connections between Judentum and syphilis, the focus turns to the representations of the Jewish venerologist, the blood-sucking mohel (ritual circumciser), and the disease-bearing, masquerading prostitute—ostensive causes for the epidemic

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threatening to ravage the bourgeoisie. The chapter concludes by examining this convergence of discursive formations and epistemic apparati in the two most exemplary and widely disseminated of Weimar-period antisemitic texts, Artur Dinter’s novel Die Su¨nde wider das Blut (The Sin against the Blood) and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As a consequence of these historical and textual analyses, the deployment of diseased figuration of Judentum in racial antisemitism is seen not as a mere displacement of biological concepts per se but as entailing an understanding of human biology and of Judentum in which gender, sexuality, race, and class are thoroughly imbricated.

Origins and Causes There were numerous historical and historically imagined connections between Judentum and syphilis. Many of the theories regarding the origin of syphilis pinpoint the eruption of a plague that we now associate with syphilis in Europe among the mercenary armies of Charles VIII laying siege to Naples in 1495 and connect it with other coincidental monumental events. First and foremost is Columbus’s voyage—and most accounts have adopted the so-called New World Theory.29 But another contemporary event, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, had also generated a theory of origin. Syphilis has been associated with what was known as the ‘‘Marranic Plague.’’ While historians give this theory little credence,30 it finds itself repeated in antisemitic writings.31 Oskar Panizza, in his 1894 ‘‘Celestial Tragedy in Five Acts,’’ Das Liebeskonzil (Council of Love), imagines syphilis as the child of Salome and the Devil, whose ‘‘features wear an expression that is decadent, worn, embittered. He has a yellowish complexion. His manners recall those of a Jew of high breeding.’’32 Salome had already been tied in the public imagination with the syphilitic- and semitic-branded actress Sarah Bernhardt,33 who was to star as the eponymous protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s Salome until the British government prevented its performance. Later celebrated author and early Nazi Party member Hans Zo¨berlein, in Der Befehl des Gewissens (Conscience Commands; 1937), depicts the Jewish seductress Mirjam suffering from a sterility-causing blood disease, ‘‘her Jewish pox [Judenpest] . . . syphilis’’;34 and in the officially promoted, Jew-baiting 1938 novel by the Nazi novelist Tu¨del Weller, Rabauken! Peter Mo¨nkemann haut sich durch (Bullyboys! Peter Mo¨nkemann Makes His Way), syphilis (the love-sickness, die LiebesKrankheit) is described as the ‘‘favorite disease [Lieblingskrankheit] of all Jews.’’35

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The tradition of the Jews as a dirty, disease-bearing people dates back at least to Hellenistic Egyptian and Roman historians such as Manetho, Tacitus, and Justinus; it was carried on by writers as diverse as Voltaire, Heine, and Schopenhauer, and seemingly confirmed by Egyptologist Richard Lepsius in the archaeological record that he uncovered during his royal-Prussian-commissioned expedition to Egypt in the early 1840s.36 According to that tradition, ‘‘Pharaoh would no longer tolerate in Egypt proper the Jewish people, a sneaking dirty race afflicted with filthy diseases (scabies) that threatened to prove infectious.’’37 A distinction between the skin disease—whether understood as scabies (Kra¨tze), leprosy (Aussatz), or, as discussed in the last chapter, Judenzopf, still characteristic of the Jews, as the anti-Jewish polemicists of the early nineteenth-century and their successors claimed38 —and syphilis, that other infectious skin-manifesting disease supposedly brought back with Columbus, was not always certain. Even among physicians,39 the debate continued as to whether syphilis was a mutation of leprosy40 or was what in pre-Columbian Europe went by the name of leprosy.41 Although Voltaire had earlier sided with those who denied any direct relationship between syphilis and leprosy, he opposed the two plagues in one of the most vituperative, anti-Jewish entries of his Dictionnaire philosophique. In ‘‘Le`pre et ve´role,’’ he discusses two ‘‘grandes divinite´s’’ that have been imported to Europe. Leprosy, he writes, is as emblematic of the Jews as are fanaticism and usury, and he associates it with other traits he codes as Jewish: dirtiness, ignorance, the arbitrary rule of priests and women, separation, what can and should be shunned, culture reduced to the animal level. Syphilis, by contrast, is a gift of Nature; he ties it to the source of life (‘‘source de la vie’’). Indeed it is emblematic of Nature: outside of human control, ironic (e.g., ‘‘si bonne et si me´chante’’), punishing even while fulfilling what is necessary—or pleasurable. The victim of syphilis is hence by implication innocent.42 The philosopher thus constructed an analogy in which leprosy was to syphilis as the unnatural and immoral Jew was to the natural order of the world. If the Jews generally escaped blame for the natural origin of syphilis, they did not evade responsibility for its scientific construction. Thus in the journal of the National Socialist Physicians League, Ziel und Weg (Goal and Way), Dr. Walter Grob listed August Wassermann (the designer of the first diagnostic test for syphilis), Paul Ehrlich (discoverer, in 1909, of the first effective cure), and the treatment of syphilitic lues as exemplary of the alleged positive Jewish contribution to medicine.43 But Jewish medical involvement with syphilis long antedated the work of these

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men. Dermatology was the medical discipline that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was responsible for the diagnosis of syphilis and out of which syphilology emerged.44 This specialty had a very low status within the rigidly hierarchized Central European medical profession, due in part to the nature of its object, the decaying, disgusting, and diseased surfaces (boundaries) of the body, and as a consequence it became one of the few medical branches in which Jews were officially and unofficially allowed to practice. Indeed, dermatology was known as Judenhaut, ‘‘Jew Skin.’’45 In 1892 Albert Neisser, the Jewish discoverer of the gonococcus, turned his attention to the other, more feared, venereal disease. Inspired by Emil Behring’s success with anti-diptheria sera, he injected young prostitutes (the youngest was age 10) with a cell-free syphilis serum in the hope that this would provide immunity. Not only did the experiment fail to make the young women immune, it infected some with syphilis. In 1898, he published his results in the professional journal Archiv fu¨r Dermatologie und Syphilis; picked up by the Munich Freie Presse, the story transformed Neisser’s failure into a fiasco that soon became a public scandal. The discoverer of an infecting agent had become the infecting agent himself. The Jews, it was generalized, were responsible for communicating syphilis to prostitutes.46 Neisser’s use of serum therapy also fed into another anti-Jewish trope. In racial antisemitic discourse, serum immunity was an oxymoron. Drawing on the observation that serum innoculation occasionally infects the patient with the disease it is meant to immunize against, it was concluded that the serum did not prevent the disease; rather, serum disseminated it. And since the Gentile inventor of serum therapy, Emil Behring, was married to a Jewess, and since the laboratories that produced diptheria sera were owned by Jews, serum innoculation was a Jewish plot both to spread disease and to contaminate the purity of Aryan blood.47 Hence in the wake of the cholera outbreak that devastated Hamburg in 1892, the ‘‘JudenABC,’’ an 1893 entry to the series of antisemitic posters printed and disseminated by the Glo¨ß Publishing House, illustrated the letter Q by depicting Ostjuden selling quacksalver cures (Quacksalberartikeln) to cholera victims (see Figure 3-1). The accompanying text, playing on both the phonemically similar K that appeared on packaging to certify a product as kosher and the homophonic Ch in cholera, read, ‘‘Whether written with Q or K, cholera stems from the Jews’’48 —and perhaps syphilis as well, since the conventional treatment for syphilitic infection at the time was the similarly spelled Quecksilber, or mercury. Arguing against the Pasteurean dictum ‘‘one microbe, one disease’’ and in favor of the local theory that the

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Figure 3-1. ‘‘Whether written with Q or K, cholera stems from the Jews.’’ From ‘‘Juden-ABC,’’ Politische Bilderbogen no. 8 (Dresden: Glo¨ß Verlag, 1893). Reprinted by permission of Staats- und Universita¨tsbibliothek Hamburg.

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predisposition or condition of the host organism determines susceptibility,49 this racial antisemitic discourse reached the conclusion, ‘‘The true cause of Diptheria: not bacilli, but infection of blood and soil [Verseuchung des Bodens und Blutes], ‘unhygienic’ [i.e., sexual] relations.’’50 Indeed, the only bacillus, and the cause of all disease, is the Jew.51 Thus, Jewish-connected medical practice was inscribed in a long history of figuration: the Jew as source and carrier of disease. The medieval representation of Jews as plague bearers52 found itself repeated in late-nineteenth-century France in connection with the spread of syphilis. ‘‘Jews were thought to transmit disease, and particularly venereal disease, to their sexual partners and their offspring’’; Edouard Drumont, France’s leading antisemitic publicist, ‘‘claimed, for example, that syphilis in Russia had been spread by Jews.’’53 This tradition, however, had by the latter half of the nineteenth century spawned several mutations. On the one hand, the ancient label—the ancient libel—had become transfigured by the new discourses of bacteriology and epidemiology. On the other hand, the representation of the Jew, as if it had fallen victim to these discourses of contagion, metonymically suffered an ‘‘epidemic of signification.’’54 Jewry now embodied what it bore: it became the disease-bearing bacillus (and its correlate, the parasite);55 it became the plague. Translation effects also contributed to the identification of Jew and parasite. When Belgian zoologist Pierre van Beneden’s study ‘‘Parasites’’ was translated in 1876 into German, it bore the title ‘‘Die Schmarotzer.’’ The historian of science Paul Weindling notes, ‘‘This term[,] hitherto used to deride freeloading spongers,’’ and already applied to the Jews, ‘‘became incorporated into biology and medical propaganda.’’56 The virulence of this figuration also infected Jewish apologetics, such as Cesare Lombroso’s 1894 Antisemitism and the Jews in the Light of Modern Science, in which the famous Italian Jewish forensic criminologist describes the ‘‘epidemic appearance of antisemitism.’’ In the chapter of the same name, he explicitly connects ‘‘fanatical antisemites’’ with a specific pestilence: syphilis. He cites extensively from a ‘‘very remarkable-sounding communication’’ from Dr. H. Foscanlance. This Romanian physician diagnosed vehement antisemitism as symptomatic of syphilitic infection— either acquired or inherited. Dr. Foscanlance based his conclusion on consultations with colleagues and with his syphilitic patients, as well as on ‘‘an exact statistic’’—that ‘‘all of [Bucharest’s] recently deceased antisemites died as a consequence of paralysis or syphilis-induced mental disorders.’’ While Lombroso concedes that these claims appear at first glance to be perverse, that they do not measure up to the standards of proof of

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modern scientific method, he asserts that they are nevertheless no laughing matter (nicht ins La¨cherliche zu ziehen). Lombroso suggests that ‘‘should in fact it turn out that an especially large number of syphilitics belong to the antisemitic party, to make a connection [between syphilis and antisemitism] would not be absolutely unthinkable, because many nerve, brain, and mental illnesses, like dorsal tabes, the paralysis of the insane, are directly caused or surely worsened by syphilis.’’ He then refers to his own work on political criminals or fanatics that had shown that syphilis contributes to or even causes their degenerative development. Finally, he concludes, ‘‘Without thus wishing to make the assertion of my remarkable correspondent my own, I believe, however, that one dare endeavor to subject it to [scientific] discussion and verification.’’57 In the absence of such a research effort, syphilis became by the early twentieth century inextricably associated with Jews rather than with their despisers. A year after the determination in 1905 of the spirochete as the causative agent of syphilis, a Jewish bacteriologist, August Wassermann, and his research group employed blood sera provided by Neisser (who, in the wake of the innoculation scandal, had been in effect exiled to Java to work on possible cross-species syphilitic infection) and developed a test for syphilis. The test, which came to be known as the Wassermann reaction, created new forms of visibility for the disease. On the one hand, syphilitic infection, even without manifest symptomology, became subject to the scientific gaze; moreover, the discourse on the protean character of syphilis shifted from dissimulation to etiology. For example, the moral taint of syphilis was no longer hiding behind tabes dorsalis; rather, tabes was recognized as a clinical symptom of tertiary syphilis. And in the process, syphilology won its territorial battle with neurology over the determination of tabes.58 On the other hand, this disease, whose names are so many displacements from the proper name of the eponymous blaspheming shepherd of Fracastoro’s 1530 poem, the plague whose public naming was ever displaced, found a new name that would evade the moral stain. Syphilis was often known as the Gallic disease, except in France, or the Spanish disease, except in Spain; it was referred to as the pox, shifting among any of a number of unrelated diseases; it was named lues, Latin for ‘‘plague,’’ a term without descriptive or explanatory value.59 And to nineteenth-century women infected by their husbands and then subjected to mercury treatments, it was not known by any name at all.60 Even organizations that endeavored to combat syphilis and other venereal diseases would only publicize themselves beneath the opaque initials of their names.61 In some

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dramatic presentations of the ‘‘reproductive’’ effects of the disease, it was left nameless. With the first productions in 1889–91 of Ibsen’s play Die Gegangenen (Ghosts), the horror of what everyone knew was hereditary syphilis was brought to theater audiences and to the readers of theater reviews. The unnamed consequence of his father’s sexual excesses reduces Alving, a talented young artist, to a headache-shriven, neurasthenia-weakened invalid who, as the play ends, cries out, ‘‘The sun, the sun!’’ and collapses into dementia and death. Other plays sought a euphemism that lacked the moral taint for the plaint, such as Brieux’s Les Avarie´s (Damaged Goods), which premiered in Paris in 1902.62 Following the development of Wassermann’s complement-fixation test, a ‘‘positive Wassermann’’ became synonymous with syphilis. From then on a Jewish name figured the hidden presence of the disease.63 A Jewish bacteriologist, Paul Ehrlich, was also responsible for the first effective treatment, the arsenic-based compound 606, or Salvarsan. Before Ehrlich had added his ‘‘magic bullet’’ to the store of armaments combating syphilis, anxiety over the debilitating mental and physical side effects of the then-conventional ‘‘cure’’—the symptomatic use of mercury, which often damaged the nervous system even before the disease worked its harm—was comparable to the fear of the consequences of syphilis itself. As the author Stefan Zweig recalled in his memoir of his Viennese youth: ‘‘Small wonder then that at that time many young people, once the diagnosis [of syphilitic infection] was made, reached for their revolvers.’’64 But the results of Ehrlich’s new therapy were, although a significant advance over its predecessors, ambivalent. There were numerous side effects, including in some cases death. Once again, the collateral effects became the focus of anti-Jewish polemic, and Dr. Ehrlich’s magic bullet was pictured as a murder weapon. Assorted antisemitic pamphlets and tabloids, such as Der Stu¨rmer, as well as the frequently antisemitic homeopathic societies, such as the Jaegervereine, campaigned against the use of Salvarsan.65 And in Mein Kampf (MK), Hitler, when alluding to Salvarsan, both questions its effectiveness and codes it as Jewish: ‘‘The invention of a remedy of questionable character [fraglicher Art] and its commercial exploitation [gescha¨ftstu¨chtige Anwendung] can no longer help much against this plague’’ (MK 247). The medical search for the cure of syphilis also set up the conditions for another conjunction of the representations of Jews and the disease. The scientific quest for the source of syphilis paralleled the racialist’s search for the marker of Jewish essence: in both cases, blood was key.

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Ludwik Fleck, in his 1935 analysis of the construction of syphilis as a disease-entity, found that because of the protean nature of syphilis the necessary condition for these developments was the focus on ‘‘befouled blood’’ as the site of the infection.66 Echoing the sexologist Iwan Bloch and syphilologist Alois Geigel, for whom syphilis ‘‘strikes humanity at the root of their being . . . poisoning the blood of the yet unborn, innocent fruit,’’67 Fleck describes a metaphorics of impure blood that connects blood with poison, human essence, and reproduction of the species (read class/gender). Such imagery resonates with the racial theorists’ obsession with poisonous Jewish blood.68 Both fields are sown by the ‘‘vox populi, ‘Blood is a causative agent’ ‘‘ that found its literary correlate in Goethe’s apothegm— and Der Stu¨rmer’s frequent sidebar—‘‘Blood is a very special juice’’69 and its legal correlate in the jus sanguinis (Latin, right of blood) by which German citizenship was determined and transmitted.70

Circumcising Identities Syphilis also impacted nineteenth-century Jewry’s attempts to forge its own identification or, at least, to negotiate it within the constraints of the double bind of hoped-for emancipation. In particular the threat of syphilitic infection affected the political, medical, and religious debates about the foremost marker of male Jewish identification: circumcision. Most German states and municipalities of the time required that the religious affiliation of each (male) child be determined and registered at birth; thus a son had to be either baptised or circumcised.71 To be circumcised was to become Jewish.72 The circumcision requirement began to come under scrutiny when, in 1805 Cracow, a syphilitic mohel infected several infants while performing metsitsah, the ritual procedure by which the ritual circumciser would take the newly circumcised penis into his mouth and suction off the blood. In Syphilis in the Innocent, L. Duncan Bulkley reports at least eight syphilis epidemics (including as many as 100 cases in 1833 Cracow) attributed to syphilitic mohels between 1805 and 1886 in Europe.73 The 1837 death of a young Viennese boy as a consequence of metsitsah performed by a diseased mohel led Dr. D. Wertheimer to consult the rabbi and talmudist Lazar Horowitz, who in turn consulted one of the leading Halakhists (experts on Jewish law) and opponent of religious reform, Moses Schreiber (Sofer) of Pressburg. The latter sacrificed metsitsah, arguing that in both Mishnah and Gemarra (the two principle components of the Talmud) metsitsah is

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prescribed on medical rather than legal grounds; other Talmud-prescribed hygienic procedures associated with circumcision are either no longer employed or no longer employed as described. Further, according to the Chacham Sofer (the honorific by which Rabbi Schreiber was known), even when the Mishnah specifically qualifies that metsitsah be performed ‘‘with the mouth,’’ only kabbalists—because they adhere to the concept of ‘‘mamtik ha-din’’ (the law is sweetened by mouth and lips)—are not allowed to substitute other reliable means.74 Despite the Chacham Sofer’s widely acknowledged authority on halakhic concerns, subsequent rabbinic rulings, including that of Joseph Ettinger, the chief rabbi of the large Jewish community in Altona, declared his responsum applicable only to this specific case.75 Against the tradition of public noninterference in Jewish religious—that is, private—life under the conditions of rabbinic corporate control of the community, these cases sparked interventions by state authorities into Jewish ritual practice.76 On the grounds of the exaggerated sanitary deficiencies of circumcision, the Berlin Ober-Collegium Medicum (1819), the royal government of Brombach (1824), and the Rhenish government (1830) all instituted regulations on mohel instruction and required the presence of a physician at the bris. Paralleling these hygienic interventions was a growing literature that sought, at least implicitly, to situate circumcision within medical discourse and under a physician’s supervision. Going beyond the Philonic tradition, which sought to justify and/or explain circumcision on hygienic or medical grounds, a new medical discourse endeavored to define circumcision as an ‘‘operation’’ belonging in the ‘‘domain of medical science.’’ Exemplifying this shift was Dr. M. G. Salomon’s 1844 Die Beschneidung, historisch und medizinisch beleuchtet (Circumcision, Historically and Medically Illumined). Salomon desired that circumcision be subjected to a doctor and his ‘‘examining gaze’’ (pru¨fenden Blick). He himself assumes a ‘‘health-regulatory viewpoint’’ (gesundheits-polizeiliche Gesichtspunkt) in the face of the ‘‘increasing supervision [wachsende und pru¨fende Auge] of the concerned authorities.’’77 While he is concerned with all matters related to the procedure, Dr. Salomon focuses on the medical and moral implications of circumcision. Thus he points out how German states were increasingly requiring mohels to be medically trained, ‘‘sittlich’’ (ethical) individuals. He also recommends that they be sanitary and lead moral lives. This hygienic and moral supplement signals that Salomon’s concern for a medical presence at the bris was not just provoked by the possibility of a hemophilic infant, a risk that the Talmud had already recognized. Indeed, the one exception to the

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commandment to circumcise authorized by the Talmud (Y.D. 263: 203; B. Yev 64b) applies to a male child who is born after his first two brothers have died from circumcision blood loss and who has demonstrated that he would be similarly affected. Rather, his concern insinuates the threat of venereal disease. This implication becomes explicit in Salomon’s discussion of metsitsah. Indeed, his graphic description of the procedure is the focal point of his entire work. In depicting metsitsah the moral, the proper, the bourgeois become interwoven with concerns about syphilis (Lustseuche, the plague of desire, contaminating lust) and about Jewish identification. Metsitsah becomes the site for all that was useless, disgusting, and dangerous in the ritual—and in the Jewish people. Salomon describes this abject, ‘‘disgusting’’ (ekelhaft) spectacle: the mohel is dirty; his skin is covered with sores; his sucking excites the infant to urinate in his mouth. And Salomon indicates that this procedure is observed, is visible. Because of this ‘‘most intimate contact’’ (innigste Beru¨hrung),78 the infant may pose a health danger—and Salomon indicates that this may very well be a venereal danger—to the mohel performing the metsitsah; however, the greater threat of venereal disease is to the child. The mohel is depicted as a prostitute: acting as a urinal (read seminal) drain,79 engaging in intimate, hence (implicitly) sexual, activity, and disseminating Lustseuche, syphilis. With the comment that it is no happy sight for the onlookers to watch this man (i.e., the mohel) from the lower classes, Salomon betrays both the visibility of the act and its possible subversion of German Jewry’s claims for membership in the cultured bourgeoisie. The public spectacle of the filthy, lower-class, syphilitic mohel sucking out (aussaugen) the blood, performing this disgusting culmination of the ritual inscription of Jewish identity, embodied Jewish difference, their abjection. This Jewish difference, which was not just sensorially offensive and de´classe´ but life threatening, must be expunged if the Jews wish to enter the European bourgeois community.80 Consequently, whereas Salomon suggests only hygienic changes in equipment and training for most of the circumcision ritual, with regard to metsitsah he states explicitly that it should be banned because it is dangerous (scha¨dlich). Indeed, he recommends that if a mohel is found performing metsitsah he should henceforth be forbidden to perform circumcisions. Similar concerns about circumcision’s threat to health very much motivated the discussions about the religious obligation to retain the ritual undertaken by various Reform rabbinic conferences during the 1840s in German-speaking lands.81 The Breslau Conference declared for the discontinuance of metsitsah, following in the footsteps of the ruling by the Paris Consistoire against the practice (1843).82 In a communication to the

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Frankfurt rabbinic conference, a Dr. Fr. Th. Baltz claimed that circumcision leads to sexual diseases; however, his view was countered by other opinions. Indeed an extensive literature on how circumcision—once one gets past the problem of diseased mohels—may have prophylactic value against syphilitic infection grew during the course of the nineteenth century: works such as J. K. Proksch’s Die Geschichte der venerischen Krankheiten (1895), P. C. Remondino’s History of Circumcision (1891), Alfred Nossig’s Die Sozialhygiene der Juden und des altorientalischen Vo¨lkerkreises (1894), and H. Martin’s work in Semaine medicale (1886).83 In his 1885 lecture to the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, ‘‘On the Racial Characteristic of Modern Jews,’’ Joseph Jacobs, ‘‘the first of the Jewish race scientists,’’84 argued, ‘‘Syphilis seems to be less prevalent among Jews; but this may be due to moral causes and in so far as it is the result of circumcision it is clearly not racial. The smaller proportion of congenital cases follows from this, and is thus only secondarily racial.’’85 Hutchinson, the great English syphilologist invoked earlier, became ‘‘one of the most influential advocates of universal circumcision in the nineteenth century’’ as prophylaxis against syphilis.86 Claims for circumcision’s prophylactic value increased in the twentieth century, such as Simon Bamberger’s contribution to Max Grunwald’s survey Die Hygiene der Juden (Jewish Hygiene) that was prepared in conjunction with the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden.87 In Die hygienische Bedeutung der Beschneidung (The Hygienic Significance of Circumcision; 1920), Carl Alexander compared the Mosaic legislation to compulsory vaccination,88 and the syphilologist Johan Almkvist, in his 1926 history of circumcision, also suggested that if doctors realized how circumcision lessens the incidence of syphilis they would be performing the operation much more frequently.89 Offering an explanation for the phenomenon, Otto Neusta¨tter claimed in the Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Disease (1905) that due to the thickening of the skin about the glans, ‘‘[t]here is no doubt that circumcision is to a certain extent a protective measure against syphilitic infection, whilst it does not in any way protect against gonorrhea.’’90 Statistical studies of Jewish populations regularly revealed lower rates of syphilis.91 Similar studies done by Breitenstein with soldiers in Java also claimed a lower incidence of syphilis among circumcised men.92 As a consequence of this relationship to circumcision, albeit a negative one, the discourse of syphilis continued to abut upon the Jewish Question. Whether in the context of the Jewish community’s relation to local and state authorities, to their religious confre`res, or to the medical community, the sign of the covenant bonded the Jews not just to

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Gd, to their community, and to their identification; it also contracted them to syphilis.

Syphilization/Civilization Key components of the identification of Judentum with various vectors of syphilis infection were the overlapping connections made between Jews and cities, cosmopolitanism, and civilization. As already mentioned, Treitschke identified the Jews as a ‘‘cosmopolitan power.’’ In so doing he perpetuated an ongoing tradition; for example, the mid-nineteenth-century French military physician Jean-Christian Boudin described the Jewish race as the only cosmopolitan one.93 In the nineteenth century Jews were perceived as inveterate city dwellers; thus within the reigning German vo¨lkisch view of the city, they lacked any connection to the now-paved-over soil. Not being an autochthonous people, the Jews were capable, therefore, of thriving anywhere on the surface of the earth—or nowhere. Paralleling the oppositions between city and country, urban Jew and rural German peasant, cosmopolitan Jew and autochthonous German, was the opposition between civilization and culture. As Norbert Elias writes: [I]n German usage, Zivilisation [comprises] only the outer appearance of human beings, the surface of human existence. The word through which Germans interpret themselves, which more than any other expresses their pride in their own achievement and their own being, is Kultur. . . . [T]he concept of civilization plays down the national differences between people. . . . In contrast, the German concept of Kultur places special stress on national differences and the particular identity of groups.

Elias situates the first articulation of this antithesis in Kant; in his ‘‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’’ civilization is sheer simulacrum: ‘‘The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization.’’94 This tradition found its culmination in Spengler’s opposition between organic, spiritual culture and materialistic civilization, which is ‘‘unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art [and] clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible success.’’95 Civilization is, in the eugenicist Friedrich Siebert’s terms, the ‘‘Unkultur des Marktes,’’96 the unculture of the market. And as the German cultural historian George Mosse puts it, ‘‘It is within this framework of thought

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[i.e., the opposition between culture and civilization] that the image of the Jew must be placed.’’97 Further as emblematic of the epitome of civilization, the modern city, the Jew was tied to all of the ills of urbanization, including the urban disease of syphilis. Therefore the identification of the Jew with all of the evils of civilization was no less infected with syphilis. Syphilis, the sexologist Havelock Ellis writes, ‘‘is like a merchandise . . . which civilization has everywhere carried.’’ When discussing the connection between syphilis and general paralysis, Ellis invokes Krafft-Ebing’s pun in which Zivilisation becomes Syphilisation: Syphilis is not indeed by itself an adequate cause of general paralysis for among many savage peoples syphilis is very common while general paralysis is very rare. It is, as Krafft-Ebing was accustomed to say, syphilization and civilization working together which produce general paralysis, perhaps in many cases, there is reason for thinking, on a nervous soil that is hereditarily degenerated to some extent. . . . Once undermined by syphilis, the deteriorated brain is unable to resist the jars and strains of civilized life, and the result is general paralysis.98

The Jew figured the urban, the cosmopolitan, the civilized, and consequently the modern. And in the heraldic order of modernity the Jew was joined by syphilis. Thus, Schopenhauer wrote that venereal disease was one of ‘‘two things [the other being knightly honor] that distinguish the social conditions of modern times from those of antiquity to the detriment of the former.’’ Thanks to that ‘‘poison’’ syphilis, ‘‘the relations between the sexes have assumed a strange, hostile and even diabolical element. In consequence thereof, a somber and fearful mistrust permeates such relations; and the indirect influence of such a change in the foundation of all human society even extends, more or less, to all other social relations.’’99 With Schopenhauer’s comment in mind, Iwan Bloch credited syphilis with a significant share in the development of individualism.100 The individualizing, corrosive effect on social relationships had also been credited to Jewish egotism. In an 1889 passage frequently cited in antisemitic literature,101 the Jewish bellettrist Conrad Alberti(-Sittenfeld) wrote: ‘‘No one can dispute, that Jews share prominently in the dissoluteness and corruption of all relationships.’’102 During the nineteenth century the notion of Zersetzung, the act of decomposition, shifted registers from the chemical to the cultural, acquired connotations of rottenness, wasting away (Tabes),103 and was appropriated by anti-Jewish discourse to characterize Judentum’s effect on social relations: it dissolves national boundaries and

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natural classifications (e.g., class, lineage [Stamm]) through both cultural critique and economic activity. Treitschke provided a glaring example of this (mis)appropriation. He firmly grafted the foul term on to the body of the Jew when he transformed the historian Mommsen’s positive valuation of Jewry’s historically progressive contribution to the decomposition (Dekomposition) of particular identifications—a move necessary for the formation of more universal identities (e.g., helping the Badisch, Schwabisch, Saxons, etc. become Germans)—into a negative determination of Jewish essence. Judentum’s zersetzende Charakter, the ‘‘corrupting power [zersetzende Kraft] of a people,’’ lay beneath the ‘‘masks of different nationalities it assumes.’’104 The effect of Jewish Zersetzung on the social body—placing a value on the individual entrepreneur that undermines traditional class (as well as ethnic and gender) hierarchies and identities—mirrored the effect of syphilis on the individual’s body. As Charles Bernheimer has said, ‘‘Insofar as it erodes the body, obscures differences between organs, rupturing membranes, causing abcesses and chancres, syphilis is the appropriate pathological analog of the collapse of gender differences.’’105

‘‘Business is Business’’ As already seen in Salomon’s diseased mohel, the connection between the discourse of syphilis and Jewish identification was also mediated by the historical (whether empirically based or imaginarily conceived) and structural ties of Jews with prostitution. The prostitute was represented— whether medically or morally, literarily or visually106 —as the source of syphilitic contagion infecting the male bourgeoisie.107 The father may sin, but it was the female prostitute who was blamed. According to Havelock Ellis, ‘‘in the eyes of many people, the question of prostitution is simply the question of syphilis.’’108 Often the disease-disseminating prostitute was represented as exotic, frequently as Jewish.109 The vast migrations of East European Jewry as a consequence of the poverty, agricultural stagnation, and pogroms afflicting them contributed to the perception of (Jewish) women leaving home and crossing borders.110 And in fact during the last decades of the nineteenth century there had been a large increase in Jewish prostitution in the wake of the horrendous conditions in the region. Bordellos that catered to the exotic tastes of their discriminating customers were staffed with at least one ‘‘beautiful Jewess.’’111 After all, as Jean-Paul Sartre would later comment in Anti-Semite and Jew: ‘‘There is in the words ‘a beautiful Jewess’ a very special sexual signification, one quite different

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from that contained in the words ‘beautiful Rumanian,’ ‘beautiful Greek,’ or. . . . This phrase carries an aura of rape and massacre. The ‘beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village.’’112 Antisemitic discourse also located another site of Jewish infection: white slavery (Ma¨dchenhandel), which during this period was second only to the venereal peril as a widely popular and greatly exaggerated topic in the tabloids.113 The press regaled readers with stories in which the syphilitic prostitute was herself a victim of vicious felons. In the antisemitic press the woman was usually represented as young, innocent, and Christian/Aryan; the white slaver, who kidnapped, deceived, and/or seduced her, as a Jew: The crowd of Jews who have installed themselves in the domain of bordellos pursue systematically and on a large scale the transformation into prostitutes of the female portion of the Aryan peoples. The entire affairs of prostitution and of the white slave traffic are almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews.114

The blood libel became sexualized.115 Covered by newspapers, respectable and otherwise, throughout Europe, the notorious 1892 Lemberg trial in which twenty-seven Jewish procurers from Galicia were convicted of trafficking in women, some of whom were non-Jewish, fueled these charges.116 Antisemitic deputies in the Austrian Reichsrat sought to capitalize on the trial by raising the specter of the daughters of their fellow legislators falling into the hands of such filthy traffickers and calling upon Parliament to protect Austria from further Jewish outrages. Alexander Berg also responded to the trial by supplementing his notorious 1890 expose´ on ‘‘Jewish bordellos’’ (Judenbordelle) with Judenhya¨nen vor dem Strafgericht zu Lemberg (Jew-Hyenas before the Bar of Justice in Lemberg), in which he repeats the refrain that the accused had snatched ‘‘thousands upon thousands of beautiful, innocent, and poor young girls’’ and condemned them to a demeaning slave existence in the Orient, where they were ‘‘broken body and soul and afflicted with the most disgusting diseases.’’117 Viennese tabloids held that most of those unfortunate creatures filling the ranks of the city’s prostitutes were there as a consequence of seduction by their former Jewish employers.118 Hitler’s account of his transformation into an antisemite in Mein Kampf demonstrates the persistence of this peopledefining calumny. The streets and alleys of Leopoldstadt, the predominately Jewish working-class district of Vienna, provided him an ‘‘object lesson’’ in evil: ‘‘the relation of Jews to prostitution and, even more, to the

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white-slave traffic.’’ As a consequence of his study of the ‘‘revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city . . . [Hitler] no longer avoided discussion of the Jewish question; no, now [he] sought it’’ (MK 59–60). By the time he had moved to Munich after the First World War, Hitler traced this relation of Jews to prostitution back to their ‘‘Erzvater Abraham,’’ who had ‘‘pimped out [verkuppelt] his wife,’’ and claimed, ‘‘throughout the world [and] across the centuries . . . all traffickers in women are solely Hebra¨er.’’119 This association, however, was not limited to the writings and rantings of self-proclaimed antisemites. The entry on prostitution contributed to the 1910 Handwo¨rterbuch der Staatswissenschaft (Pocket Dictionary of Political Science) by Alfred Blaschko, German-Jewish dermatologist and cofounder with Neisser of the League for the Fight against Venereal Disease in 1902 Berlin, stated: ‘‘The current center of white-slave traffic is New York, which, as a consequence of the colossal immigration of poor and uneducated Jews, provides an extraordinarily favorable breeding ground for this unclean occupation.’’120 Blaschko’s contemporary, the German criminologist Friedrich Sturm, argued that the intensive involvement of Jews in pimping, bordello operation, and white-slave traffic was due to an ‘‘intrinsic disposition’’ (innere Gru¨nden) and not just their exploitation of another income source.121 Prominent psychiatrists and sexologists concurred. Auguste Forel, then director of the leading Swiss psychiatric asylum, the Burgho¨lzli, commented in his scientific, psychological, and hygienic study of sexuality in society that the Jews’ ‘‘mercantile essence also permeates their sexual relations, and we find them frequently engaged in trafficking women and prostitution.’’122 The traits that adorn the typical denigrating representation of the female prostitute overlapped with many of those that characterized the stereotypical male Jew. Both of these contagion-carriers are mendacious and refuse to do productive work;123 they lack modesty and are shameless; they are both atavistic and ‘‘unproductive ‘invalids of civilization’ ‘‘; their physiognomies tend to that of the opposite gender.124 Lombroso’s masculine prostitutes find their complement in Frisch’s depiction of a particular diseased tendency of the Jews: the so-called ‘‘sexuelle applanation,’’ the leveling of sexual difference. ‘‘One finds among the Jews a great number of feminine men and masculine women. This goes for both body and soul.’’125 After the First World War a University of Vienna anthropology professor, Robert Stigler, located a biological source for Jewish sexual deviance and liberal gender politics in their ‘‘intersexual’’ physiognomies: The physical signs of the sexual characteristics are noticeably vague. Among them, the women are often found to have relatively narrow pelvis

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and relatively broad shoulders and the men to have broad hips and narrow shoulders. . . . It is important to note the attempt on the part of the Jews to eliminate the role that secondary sexual characteristics instinctively play among normal people through their advocacy of the social and professional equality of man and woman.126

Both the prostitute and the Jew were derogatorily depicted as masqueraders, like the syphilis (in Hutchinson’s words, the ‘‘Great Imitator’’) they both supposedly disseminated. The mask, like their allegedly innate mimetic ability,127 was an essential component in the nineteenth-century construction of Jewish identification—no less than the badge had been the visible mark in medieval Germany.128 The bourgeoisie underwent a semiotic frenzy. There was simultaneously concern about the external signs of internal degeneracy and fear about the absence of such signs. In the fin de sie`cle the maison de rendezvous was accused of seeking to mimic the bourgeois household, and its residents as well as many of their more mobile sisters endeavored to resemble bourgeois women (hoˆnnetes femmes, ‘‘honest women’’). More significant, just as the prostitute was defined by her makeup, so too was the Jewish parvenu by ostentation. The public spaces of haute bourgeois culture—the theater, the opera—appeared to be filled with femmes galantes (i.e., prostitutes) and Jews.129 Yet as a consequence of their dissimulation, they may both be everywhere in sight but no longer accessible to the normal male gaze. There is great anxiety about both Jews and prostitutes trying to pass. They threaten to subvert ethical, ethnic, and class distinctions as well as the necessary distinction between public and private.130 Hence the indexical construction of a visible syphilitic symptomology chiasmically unmasked those others, the Jew and the prostitute. Marcel Proust speaks of ‘‘ethnic eczema’’131 breaking out on Jewish faces, and the Decadent novelist J.-K. Huysmans describes the foreheads of syphilitic prostitutes ‘‘breaking out in gold pieces’’132—the sign of money (and the Jew). The ‘‘pieces of colored gold leaf’’133 covering her telltale syphilitic lesions revealed the prostitute’s identity, no less than a certain physiognomy peering out of the clothes covering his circumcised penis revealed the identity of the male Jew.134 The nose also became a pivot about which an economy of more-or-less determined identification developed. Opposing the prominent, arched, ‘‘hooked’’ Judennase was the ‘‘saddle nose,’’ or nose with a sunken bridge, characteristic of many congenital syphilitics and specially noted in the medical literature of the nineteenth century135—and ironically monumentalized by the suspected syphilitic poet Heinrich Heine in what is believed

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to be the last poem he wrote, ‘‘I Dreamed a Dream upon a Summer Night.’’ The dreamer is describing a vast landscape of Renaissance ruins, when, just before attention is drawn to an open sarcophagus with a man (soon identified as the dreamer himself ) lying dead within, he observes: And here lie many female forms in stone, Covered with grass and in the weeds’ embrace; And time, worst kind of syphilis yet known, Has robbed a piece of a nymph’s majestic nose [edlen Nymphennase].136

Opposing the phallic-symbolizing, circumcision-signifying Judennase137 is the suppurating emptiness that is a common occurrence in tertiary or late syphilis: [G]umma of the nose usually begins in the periosteum at the junction of the bony and cartilaginous portions of the septum. After the gumma has broken down the patient notices a foul-smelling discharge which even contains particles of bone. The process results in septal perforation and the destruction may extend to the small bones of the nose, causing a flattening of the nasal bridge (saddle nose). In unusual instances all the bony and cartilaginous tissue is destroyed, leaving a small fleshy nubbin.138

Moreover, the foul smell associated with the corporeal disintegration of late syphilis—as well, perhaps, as the stinking breath of the syphilitic undergoing mercury treatment139 —evoked the foetor Judaicus, the so-called Jewish stench. When the newly emancipated Jew left the private realm of ghettoized corporate society and entered the public sphere of the market, he became visible. Like the prostitute—a public (o¨ffentliche) woman—he ‘‘broke the barrier between home and market that, in much social thought, was regarded as the safeguard for human solidarities against the disintegrative forces of the market.’’140 Both prostitutes and Jews were tied to the economic forces that structured the market: exchange and the circulation of money. ‘‘Are not all prostitutes ‘Jews,’ usurers in their way, since what they lend, they only lend for a large sum of money[?]’’141 In the Victorian era, according to Catherine Gallagher, there was a marked hostility toward groups that seemed to represent a realm of exchange divorced from production: ‘‘The activities . . . of procuring illegitimate income [i.e., the almost-always-Jewish usurer], and of alienating one’s self through prostitution seem particularly closely associated with one another.’’142 Both threaten to drain the bourgeoisie of their money. They are parasites.143 Within socialist discourse, prostitutes are not so much threats to

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the capitalist as they are emblematic of the system. The development of prostitution is seen as parallel to the development of capitalism.144 Whereas prostitution exemplifies the victimized object of capitalism,145 the Jew represents the victimizing subject. Conventional readings of ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’/’’Zur Judenfrage’’ (JQ /ZJ) found Marx identifying the ‘‘real . . . empirical essence of Judentum [with] the market and the conditions which give rise to it. . . . The god of the Jews has been secularized and become the god of the world. Exchange is the true god of the Jew’’ (JQ 241/ZJ 377; 239/375).146 Subject and object converge when Marx proclaims: ‘‘What is present in the abstract form in Jewish religion . . . is the actual and conscious standpoint, the virtue, of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes a commercial object! Woman is put on the market [verschachert]’’ (JQ 239/ ZJ 375). Both the prostitute and the Jew will be emancipated—that is, there will be no more prostitutes or Jews left, as such—with the end of capitalism.147 Since the prostitute’s sexual labor was not performed in order to produce an heir, it produced nothing; it was sterile. ‘‘Jewish money-making, too, was rejected like pure sexuality because it produced nothing, because it was sterile.’’148 The concept of exchange shared by prostitution and usury also generated an association with sterility: the prostitute biologically, the Jew culturally. ‘‘Nothing is produced by [prostitution] because like usury it is pure exchange.’’149 Thomas Laqueur has traced the metaphorics of reproductive biology that have marked the history of the notion of exchange. The representation of exchange as barren goes back to Aristotle. Exchange is the antithesis to the natural, the productive, the household economy. For Aquinas the money generated by exchange, that is, by usury, is some monstrous product of an incestuous relationship: ‘‘Interest, which means the birth of money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. That is why of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.’’150

Diseased Reproduction Dame Syphilis, like the emancipated Jew, hides behind the mask of beauty or culture,151 but a more significant link between the representations is figured in the field of reproduction. Images of stillbirth and monstrous birth haunt the discourse of racial antisemitism and dovetail into syphilological discourse. The antisemite could easily substitute the word Judentum for the word syphilis in this passage from Ellis’s Sex in Relation to Society:

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There is no more subtle poison than syphilis. . . . It penetrates ever deeper and deeper into the organism. . . . And so subtle is this all-pervading poison that though its outward manifestations are amenable to prolonged treatment, it is often difficult to say that the poison has been finally killed out. The immense importance of syphilis, and the chief reason why it is necessary to consider it here, lies in the fact that its results are not confined to the individual himself, not even to the persons to whom he may impart it by the contagion due to contact in or out of sexual relationships: it affects the offspring, and it affects the power to produce offspring. It attacks men and women at the centre of life, as the progenitors of the coming race, inflicting either sterility or the tendency to aborted and diseased products of conception. . . . Thus syphilis is probably a main cause of the enfeeblement of the race.152

The reproductive consequences of both syphilitic and interracial sexuality are played out over the interpretation of the biblical Second Commandment: You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:4–6)

This commandment provided the imagery and religious sanction that structured much of the moral discourse of syphilis. Following the recognition of he´re´dosyphilis, the phrase ‘‘sins of the father(s)’’ ever recurs. Syphilis appeared to confirm the discursive construction of nonreproductive sexuality as idolatry, that is, as the adoration of a material body instead of Gd.153 In 1883 Theodor Fritsch, picking up on Gobineau’s claims about miscegenation effecting racial (and therefore cultural) degeneration,154 rewrote the commandment by explicitly relating idolatry to sexuality: Thou shalt keep thy blood pure. Consider it a crime to soil the noble Aryan breed of thy people by mingling it with the Jewish breed. For thou must know that Jewish blood is everlasting, putting the Jewish stamp on body and soul unto the farthest generations.155

Syphilitic infection and miscegenation thus reap the same reward. Both syphilis and the Jew threatened the sexual/reproductive integrity of the bourgeois woman. Perpetuating the domestic ideal, the woman was

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an innocent victim. But emphasis was not on the poisoning of the woman as much as it was on the poisoning of her womb. In any union in which at least one of the partners was diseased, the resulting product, afflicted with he´re´dosyphilis, was perceived as less than the original, as degenerate. Comparable views about the consequences of interracial mating were peddled by the race theorists. Unlike the superior product of animal breeding, the child born from human miscegenation, it was argued, always tends toward the mean and consequently is diminished by the qualities of the lower-race partner.156 In his contribution to the dispute over the legalization of Jewish-Christian intermarriage, Treitschke also drew upon the analogy to interspecies animal breeding: ‘‘Just as the product of mixing a horse with an ass bears the characteristics of the lower breed, so is it among humans.’’157 Many race theorists, such as Fritsch, held that Jewish blood, in particular, always dominated in inheritance.158 Or in a phrase redolent of the association of Judentum with money and bad reproduction: ‘‘Bad blood drives out good, just as bad money displaces good money.’’159 This view of the dominance of Jewish blood, of Jewish heredity, was not limited to antisemites. The relatively nontendentious German anthropologist Richard Andree wrote in his 1881 ethnographic analysis of the Jews: ‘‘Even relative strong admixtures of foreign blood were overcome [by the Jews]; these mixtures gave rise to the birth of no new type; no amalgam took place. Semitic blood achieved a decisive victory and the old and monumental Jewish body was preserved as well as the old Jewish spirit hereditarily transmitted by this body.’’160 Such a conclusion had earlier been drawn in Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem: ‘‘The Jewish race [is] endowed with the gift of retaining its peculiar type under all circumstances and of reproducing it. . . . Jews and Jewesses endeavor, in vain, to obliterate their descent through . . . intermarriage with the Indo-Germanic and Mongolian races, for the Jewish type is indestructible.’’161 In his classic of racial historiography, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain saw another, more insidious motivation behind such intermarriages, such ‘‘bastardization’’: world domination. Chamberlain’s fear though was not of the dominance of Jewish hereditary material in mixed marriages, but what he considered to be the consequence of such miscegenation: the bastardization and degeneration of the Aryan race.162 While maintaining the purity of its main racial stream by not allowing ‘‘a single drop of foreign blood’’ to dilute it, Judentum, he alleges, cuts off ‘‘thousands of its little side branches so that they can infect the Indoeuropeans with Jewish blood.’’ He fears that if this practice continues for another couple of hundred years, the Jews will remain the only

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pure race, while the rest of Europe will consist of a ‘‘horde of pseudoHebrew mestizos . . . an undoubtedly physically, spiritually, and morally degenerate people.’’163 Such syphililogical and antisemitic pronouncements drew upon a number of now-discredited theories of heredity to support their claims about he´re´dosyphilis and the consequences of miscegenation. In so-called sperm inheritance, the syphilis germ (Keim) was assumed somehow to alter or poison the progenitor’s seed (Keimvergiftung)164 without necessarily infecting a healthy potential genetrix during subsequent intercourse.165 In the scenario of a number of precautionary tales, just one encounter with a syphilitic woman and the man condemned himself and his wife to stillborn or monstrous offspring. Conversely, once infected by a man, a woman would pass on the disease to all future children, regardless of their progenitor. The venerologist Paul Diday posed the following hypothetical situation in 1854: ‘‘If, for instance, a woman who has contracted syphilis from her first husband becomes a widow and marries another man free from such antecedents, and if the children which she has by this second marriage present manifest symptoms of syphilis, does it appear evident that they can have derived it from the mother alone? [T]his concatenation of circumstances is frequently met with.’’166 The carnal scourge that harmed the individual became the family poison, a ‘‘racial poison.’’ The emphasis on the single contact sought both to regulate any deviation from the norm—to control women’s sexuality and keep them at home—and to undergird the inevitability of natural, that is, scientific, law, ‘‘that relentless law of Nature which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.’’167 In particular, it was the force of the singular occurrence that drew upon a theory of heredity that repeatedly returned in antisemitic narratives such as Dinter’s Die Su¨nde wider das Blut (Sin against the Blood): telegony. This notion held that ‘‘a woman’s children will carry the genetic imprint of her first lover.’’168 It drew upon the theory of maternal impression,169 Dr. Prosper Lucas’s L’he´re´dite´ physique (1847), Diday’s Traite´ de la syphilis . . . (1854), and accounts in animal170 and plant breeding literature about so-called ‘‘germinal infection’’ (Keiminfektion; also Durchtra¨nkung, literally, soaking). Breeding lore was rife with examples of a superior animal, having once been bred with an inferior one, always producing inferior descendants; most notorious was Lord Morton’s widely disseminated 1820 letter to the president of the British Royal Society about his mare, ‘‘which after giving birth to a hybrid by a quagga, was impregnated by an Arab stallion long after, but produced two foals with obvious characteristics of the quagga.’’171 Famed French historian Jules Michelet’s regurgitation of

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these conclusions provided added credibility.172 The French venerologist Diday generalized from his observation of the apparent effect of syphilitic insemination by one progenitor upon a woman’s future conceptions with other males to conclude that ‘‘a woman remains influenced for a very long time by the sperm of the first partner with whom she conceived to the extent that the children conceived with his successor bear the mark of the former [partner].’’173 In his Heredity: A Psychological Study of the Phenomena, Laws, Causes, and Consequences, one of the leading pioneers of psychology, The´odore Ribot, stated that ‘‘influence of a former alliance on the children born of a subsequent marriage . . . seems to be perfectly out of the order of things. . . . Still, among the lower and even the higher animals there are facts to show that heredity of influence frequently occurs.’’174 He drew upon the inventory of instances among mares, sows, and bitches in Karl Friedrich Burdach’s Die Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft (Physiology Considered as an Observational Science), but Diday remained skeptical when Burdach moved from documented animal instances to anecdotal generalities about children produced in second marriages.175 The biologist and social philosopher Herbert Spencer did not share this skepticism when he employed an instance of racial infection in his effort to refute the German biologist August Weismann’s ultimately vindicated understanding of the mechanics of heredity: I am much indebted to a distinguished correspondent who has drawn my attention to verifying facts furnished by the offspring of Whites and negroes in the United States. Referring to information given him many years ago, he says:—‘‘It was to the effect that the children of white women by a white father had been repeatedly observed to show traces of black blood, in cases when the woman had previous connection with [i.e., a child by] a negro.’’ . . . We are supplied with an absolute disproof of Professor Weismann’s doctrine that the reproductive cells are independent of, and uninfluenced by, the somatic cells.176

In his reply to Spencer, Weismann actually coined the term telegony to describe this so-called theory of conception at a distance.177 Despite its dismissal by the authoritative encyclopedia of the German educated middle class, the best-selling sixth edition (1902–08) of Meyers Grosses Konversationslexikon,178 the urbane reception of this rural legend exacerbated the anxiety over paternity, usurped filiation, and the concern about inheritance—genetic and otherwise. The privilege of the first lover is also manifest in the preoccupation with virginity. Anxiety about genetic/racial capital necessarily accumulates

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over the preservation of virginity since, for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, a woman’s virginity ‘‘was felt to be the only solid guarantee of a safe inheritance of property from father to son.’’179 Yet the overvaluation of virginity also gave the virgin a redemptive role in popular discourse about syphilis; consequently, the syphilitic man, believing that having sex with a virgin would cure him by displacing the taint onto her, sought out virgins.180 Race theorists marketed comparably overdetermined views about the consequences of the mating of male Jews and Aryan virgins. Here too the virgin played a salvific role. Male Jews are also always seeking Aryan virgins, not to cure themselves of syphilis, but to inseminate them and ensure that all future children will be Semitic in appearance and character. Such theories about the dangerous consequences of even a single sexual encounter with a male Jew were regularly promulgated in the works of a number of Dinter’s antisemitic contemporaries,181 including Theodor Fritsch, Karl Paumgartten,182 and Julius Streicher. Streicher, the editor of Der Stu¨rmer,183 propounded the theory of ‘‘artfremder Eiweiß’’ (alien albumen): The male sperm in cohabitation is partially or completely absorbed by the female, and thus enters her bloodstream. One single cohabitation of a Jew with an Aryan woman is sufficient to poison her blood forever. Together with the alien albumen she has absorbed the alien souls. Never again will she be able to bear purely Aryan children, even when married to an Aryan.184

He enlisted the Professor of Race Biology and Eugenics at the University of Munich, Dr. Lothar Tirala, in a research program (with foxes) to demonstrate the truth of telegony; it did not meet with success.185 The continued influence of the sperm that lead to interracial—though not specifically Jewish-Aryan—conception upon a woman’s future child, regardless of the race of its progenitor, had already been invoked by the Aryan mystifier Lanz von Liebenfels in Ostara, his journal devoted to heroic racialism and masculinity.186 Even earlier, spermatic persistence was exemplified by miscegenation in the classic obstetrics textbook Traite´ de l’art des accouchements by the leading French obstetrician of the second half of the nineteenth century, E´tienne Ste´phane Tarnier.187 The congenital relationship between syphilis and Judentum reached its medical-regulatory conclusion among Nazi doctors, for whom the consequences and prophylactic treatment of venereal disease became models for understanding how to deal with other races (read Jews). Dr. Martin Staemmler wrote in Ziel und Weg, ‘‘we know, that sexual diseases corrupt

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the race [and it’s been medically dealt with] . . . but we have forgotten that licentious behaviour [geschlechtliche Zuchtlosigkeit; i.e., breeding with other races] kills the feeling for the racial.’’ He suggested therefore that the exclusion of the venereally diseased from marriage be a model for a comparable prohibition against those racially unsuitable.188 Yet prior to the fatal conjunction of syphilology and antisemitism,189 the interweaving narratives of Jew, prostitute, and syphilis had already converged on two of the top five bestsellers of Germany between the World Wars: Artur Dinter’s Die Su¨nde wider das Blut (The Sin against the Blood)190 and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Both of these works focused on the threat of racial degeneration posed by the sexuality of the Jewish monster, the bastard race. They both figured a Jewry not unlike Elisabeth Roudinesco’s depiction of syphilis: ‘‘At the center of the question of hereditydegeneration stands the figure of a sexuality constituted of syphilis, occultism, and hysteria: by its means, monsters engender bastards.’’191

The Sin against the Blood Virtually the entire repertoire of anti-Jewish representation, especially the concern with diseased reproduction discussed in this chapter, makes its way into Dinter’s 1917 novel Die Su¨nde wider das Blut (SB) as it recounts Hermann Ka¨mpfer’s purifying rite of passage to a higher destiny: from his idyllic youth on the land to his becoming the deity’s modest instrument (bescheidenes Werkzeug) against the ‘‘Jewish Vampire’’ (SB 278) and for the German Volk. Hermann’s development is fatefully determined by a traumatic encounter with the Jewish broker Levisohn. Having foreclosed on the family farm, the Jewish agent is held responsible for the subsequent suicides of Hermann’s parents and sister. Hermann then retreats into the chemistry lab in an obsessive attempt to derive protein (albumen, Eiweis), ‘‘the bearer of all earthly life’’ (SB 3) out of inorganic material. In the face of what he mistakes as failure, and seeing the face of a ‘‘strikingly beautiful blonde’’ (SB 38), he decides to abandon the ascetic world of Wissenschaft, leave his research to a Jewish colleague, and return to the eroticized world of practice: he signs a contract with the industrialist Burghamer, diabolical-looking leader of international Jewry. Once he takes up employment with the business magnate, he begins and eventually wins his fight for the body and soul of Burghamer’s Mischling daughter, the ‘‘strikingly beautiful blonde’’ Elisabeth. Through ‘‘the honest love of [this] honest man’’ (SB 67) she breaks off her betrothal to the Baron, a converted Jew, and her

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divided consciousness becomes united in the pursuit of the maternal ideal. Unfortunately, consummating the marriage leads to Elisabeth’s atavistic reversion to Jewish/feminine sensuality (das sinnliche Begehren; SB 171), lying, deceit, and shamelessness. It also produces a child who looks Jewish, who is the image of his maternal grandfather—or, perhaps, of Elisabeth’s former betrothed. To understand this monstrous event—which problematizes paternity, which frustrates the ‘‘yearning of a thoroughly healthy [kerngesund] man to see himself carried on in his own flesh and blood, the cry of a soul for his own child who is his image and likeness’’ (SB 196)—Hermann begins his study of the Jewish Question. He also refuses to touch either mother or child. Eventually he reconciles with her, and they attempt again to have a child. When Burghamer suddenly dies, Hermann discovers that the industrialist had seduced hundreds of blond virgins; he had thereby both produced 117 children, most of whom were boys in the image of their progenitor, and racially poisoned the wombs of their birth mothers. Elisabeth learns of this too, collapses, goes into labor, gives birth to a dark, beautiful Jewish-looking boy, and then dies when she sees her new son, who soon follows her into the grave. Following this series of deaths, Hermann uncovers Burghamer’s correspondence, the contents of which reveal an international conspiracy rivaling the notorious forgery, the not-yet-translated-into-German Protocols of the Elders of Zion: ‘‘the fate of the world’’ (SB 210) is in the Jews’ hands. Through economic, cultural, and reproductive manipulations, ‘‘the German people are infected and poisoned’’ (SB 224). As ‘‘atonement for his sin against the blood’’ (SB 227), Hermann intends to use his inheritance to struggle against Jewry, but he eventually loses it all when ‘‘hydra’’-headed Alljuda (SB 259)192 thwarts his attempt to receive credit for the synthetic production of protein crystals. While broken by his travails, his yearning for wife and child is rekindled by the care of the nurse Johanna. But the child they produce is a ‘‘real Jew boy’’ (ein echtes Judenkind; SB 265), a result of the fact that ten years earlier, Johanna’s womb had been poisoned by a Jewish officer’s seduction. Hermann seeks out the officer and kills him—more to spark a show trial for his polemic against the Jews than to wreak revenge. Hermann is found innocent, and having received confirmation that his warnings can and will be heard, he vows to continue the deity’s work.193 a symptomatic engagement Throughout the novel Dinter draws upon the narratives and discourses of diseased sexuality, reproduction, and heredity, both as rhetorical devices

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and as authorization for his antisemitic polemic. Syphilis, however, only manifests itself once, and even then it remains—appropriately—nameless. Yet its appearance comes at a revelatory moment, filled with irony and symptomatic displacements that exemplify how the narratives of syphilophobia and antisemitism structure Dinter’s own. When the Baron and Elisabeth discuss their possible betrothal, she says that his past love affairs mean nothing; the important thing (die Hauptsache) is that he has ‘‘not yet needed to be vaccinated with Salvarsan’’ (SB 69). That is, he has never contracted syphilis. Elisabeth continues: ‘‘Everything else about your past doesn’t interest me. Well maybe something, but you can’t do anything about this.’’ She is explicitly referring to his name, Werheim, which was formed by removing the letter t from the first syllable Wert. The attempt to obviate his Jewishness was valueless (Wertlos), since ‘‘one perceives the circumcision [die Beschneidung] too much in this matter’’ (die Sache; i.e., in the foreshortened name; SB 70).194 A circumcised name no less than a circumcised penis betrays his Jewish origin.195 The Baron’s ‘‘name operation’’ (Namensoperation) thus was no more successful than the epispasmic attempts of an earlier generation of German Jews who converted to Christianity and sought to pass. When Hermann speaks of the inauthenticity and instrumentalism of Jewish conversion, Dinter inserts a note and offers confirmation of his protagonist’s claim: Heinrich Heine, in word and deed (SB 135, 305–6). Heine may also have provided Dinter with a model for the Baron’s nominal strategy. In the last section of his long narrative poem ‘‘Jehuda ben Halevy,’’ Heine interrupts his lament over the schlemihl-like fates of the great medieval Jewish poets, such as his eponymous hero as well as Ibn Ezra and Ibn Gabirol, in order to describe his own quest to find the origins of ‘‘Schlemihl.’’ He had inquired first of the author of The Wonderful Story of Peter Schlemihl, the French-born poet who had himself Germanized his birth-name to Adelbert von Chamisso when he took up residence in Berlin. Chamisso, in turn, directed Heine to the source of his hero Peter’s ‘‘family name’’ [Familienname], criminal court counselor Julius Edward Hitzig. Finding the once-Jewish, now-baptized jurist, Heine first recalls how one named Isaak Itzig at his bris was now known as ‘‘Hitzig’’: Itzig had dreamed a dream in which he Saw his name inscribed on heaven With the letter H in front. What did his H mean? He wondered— Did it mean perhaps . . . Herr Itzig,

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Or Saint [Heilger] Itzig? Saint [Heilger] is a fine title—but not Suited for Berlin. Brain-weary, Finally he made it Hitzig; It was only faithful friends who Knew a saint [Heilger] hid [steckt] in the Hitzig.196

Heine’s wordplay suggests how the addition of an opening phoneme (Vorlaut)—the Ha of /H/—sought to cover up the absence of a foreskin (Vorhaut). Yet by so doing Heine also calls attention to how ineffective this supplement was in covering up Hitzig’s Jewishness. Not only would Hitzig’s old acquaintances know that the sign of his Jewish descent, the absent foreskin, was hidden in his pants,197 but so would the Gentiles among whom he would pass. Historically, a word’s opening /H/ is often silent in German speech, and that phoneme is classified as a voiceless consonant. Consequently, the Christian ‘‘Hitzig’’ was ever called out as the Jew ‘‘Itzig.’’ But the play on circumcision continues in Elisabeth and the Baron’s teˆte a` teˆte, and with it the ironic concern with the consequences of origins. For example, alluding to Elisabeth’s own descent, the Baron remarks with ‘‘Bescheidenheit’’ about people who ‘‘live in glass houses. . . .’’ Out of discretion—Bescheidenheit—circumcision, Beschneidung, is circumcised; that is, the letter n, like Elisabeth’s Jewish origins, is hidden, cut off. She responds with ‘‘cutting coldness,’’ schneidender Ka¨lte, and he in turn with a ‘‘cutting,’’ schneidend, grimace (SB 70). The Baron reveals that her father too had ‘‘a small name operation’’ (eine kleine Namensoperation). These permutations of circumcision, seemingly displaced from the body, from biology, onto language, anticipate a threat to descent parallel to that presented by syphilis. The disfigured names are no more effective than make-up for disguising diseased bodies, poison-carrying penises. And there is no vaccination for Judentum, as Heine noted in ‘‘The New Israelite Hospital in Hamburg.’’198

a modest excursus The ironic play on bescheiden/beschneiden continues when Elisabeth’s mother recounts the story of her seduction by Burghamer. Twice she refers to her modest (bescheidene) situation (SB 76, 77). Pervading the novel are permutations of bescheiden and schneiden. For example, confronted with Elisabeth’s betrothal to the Baron, Hermann reconsiders his departure

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from the laboratory. To stay in science, which he describes as a Moloch, a deity who demands human sacrifice and is associated with the Israelite Jehovah cultus in antisemitic literature,199 he must ‘‘resign himself (sich bescheiden) to one-sidedness’’ and to the necessity to ‘‘carve out (herausschneiden) a niche’’ (SB 86; cf. SB 87, 89). Again, the nurse Johanna initially responds to Hermann’s proposal of marriage with a rejection, einem ablehnenden Bescheid, because in the past she had an illegitimate child after her seduction by a Jewish, that is, beschnitten, officer. Ultimately Hermann finds his destiny as Gd’s ‘‘modest instrument’’ (bescheidenes Werkzeug; SB 281) in the war against that ‘‘power from Hell,’’ the Jews. The allusive mediation of the inverse correlation between humility and assimilation-desiring Judentum by the interweaving of bescheiden and beschneiden does not originate with Dinter. The philosopher von Hartmann recalled in his diatribe against Judentum a time when Bescheidenheit obscured the truth of Beschneidung: ‘‘In my youth, for example, the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish school chums was thoroughly friendly and free from antipathy, because Jewish pupils made up a negligible minority and were already thereby given to understand [the virtue of] discretion [auf Bescheidenheit hingewiesen waren].’’200 Of more consequence is the first of the demands that Stoecker made of modern Jewry in the speech that mobilized the Christian Social party as an antisemitic movement: ‘‘please be a little more modest’’ (ein klein wenig bescheidener).201 The accusation of Unbescheidenheit as typically Jewish was already present in early nineteenth-century anti-Jewish polemics by, for example, HundtRadowsky when he describes ‘‘Jewish cockiness’’ (ju¨dische Keckheit) as ‘‘immodest arrogance’’ (unbescheidene Anmaßung).202 And antisemitic pamphlets continued afterward to testify to the lack of Jewish compliance with Stoecker’s demand. In his Esther: Die semitische Unmoral im Kampf wider Staat und Kirche (Esther: Semitic Amorality in Its Fight against State and Church), Carl Radenhasen decried how Jews should, but did not, behave ‘‘with appropriate humility [angemessener Bescheidenheit].’’203 The resonance Stoecker’s demand found in his German audiences was recalled by Hellmuth von Gerlach, the one-time press spokesperson for Stoecker’s Christian Social movement who then turned liberal politician and publicist. In his 1904 denunciation of German antisemitism, Gerlach recalled: ‘‘With one stroke [i.e., Stoecker’s ‘Demands’ speech] he became one of Germany’s best known men. The admonition that he directed at Judentum, ‘[demonstrate] somewhat more modesty [Bescheidenheit],’ echoed with incomparable force’’204 in Gentile German ears. For vo¨lkisch German ideologues the quality of Bescheidenheit was characteristic of the

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true Aryan.205 Among the ‘‘Holy Scriptures’’ of German peoples that Wilhelm Schwaner included in the multiple editions of the Germanenbibel is an extract from Goethe on humility and conceit (Bescheidenheit und Du¨nkel): ‘‘We find that as a rule those who are spiritually and physically the best endowed by nature are the most modest, while those especially spiritually deficient are of the rather conceited sort. . . . Conceitedness [Du¨nkel] is found among the narrow-minded and intellectually murky [Dunkeln], but never among the gifted and intellectually lucid.’’206 Hitler literalizes Schwaner’s Goethean implication in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the Aryan’s ‘‘self-effacing humility’’ (zuru¨ckhaltende Bescheidenheit; MK 47). He also inverts it for ironic effect. Hitler facetiously invokes the alleged Jewish Bescheidenheit when unmasking Jewish self-depiction as ‘‘benefactor and friend of mankind’’ (MK 313, 314) by mocking ‘‘the Jew’s’’ claims to selfsacrifice, ‘‘the Jew’s’’ sensitivity to the suffering of the masses: ‘‘With this ‘modesty’207 [Bescheidenheit], which is inborn in him, he blares out his merits to the rest of the world until people really begin to believe in them’’ (MK 313–14). Possibly to counter such assumptions, Jewish sociologist Alfred Nossig not only attempts to explicate the chosenness of the Jews in biological terms, but also comments that ‘‘the teachers of Mosaism in later epochs took the trouble to implant judiciousness and humility [Bescheidenheit] in the disposition of the people.’’208 lessons in human husbandry Elisabeth’s ‘‘strikingly beautiful blond’’ appearance seems to contradict the threat presented by Jewish heredity; the only telltale corporeal mark is a ‘‘slightly thickened and pendulous lower lip’’ (SB 74), a stereotypical signifier of Jewish—and feminine—sensuality. Hermann, however, would learn that appearance does not necessarily reveal the consequences of such diseased descent—echoing the not always manifest, but often graver effects of parental syphilis upon the next generation. Unfortunately, Elisabeth’s ‘‘German blood was defiled by alien, impure blood originating from the most shadowy chaotic mix of peoples’’ (dunkelsten Vo¨lkerchaos; SB 79). Her instinctual (Trieb) life is divided (Zwiespaltigkeit; SB 178), and the atavistic, Jewish half manifests itself in the same manner as in the born prostitute: ‘‘Passion and sensuality, pleasure-seeking and licentiousness, the hereditary remainder of our animal origins, were heightened by the cursed blood-mixing’’ (SB 139).209 Throughout the novel, Dinter draws upon theories of degenerate heredity to decipher the mystery of Elisabeth’s schizophrenic mental and

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physical makeup and the riddles (Ra¨tsel) presented by her children as well as by the progeny of Hermann’s second wife, Johanna. Thus the Jewish appearance of Heinrich, Elisabeth’s first child with Hermann, is explained in terms of atavism and degeneration—the theory of which, as already discussed, was modeled after the effects of hereditary syphilis. Hermann cites from an unnamed210 reference book: Atavism, regression, degeneration, the phenomenon where the qualities of earlier generations suddenly surface again in an individual, despite not appearing in the parents. For example, qualities are passed on from daughter to grandson, without them having been manifested in her. The phenomenon is especially striking when individuals of different species [Rassen] (also human races) are crossbred. While the first generation consists of mixed traits from both parents, in the second generation individuals take after one of the grandparents. (SB 182)

Hermann concludes that ‘‘a German man who marries a Jewess or a German woman who marries a Jew not only commits a crime against the German Volk but heaps endless misery on the bodies and souls of their children and their children’s children,’’ at which point the novel’s title phrase appears: ‘‘the sin against the blood frighteningly avenges itself on them’’ (SB 186). Elisabeth initially considers Heinrich’s appearance to be an effect of ‘‘maternal impression’’: that the image of the first love, or who- or whatever makes a sharp impression on the mother—in her case, ‘‘compulsive thought(s)’’ (Zwangsvorstellung, Zwangsgedanken; SB 188) about the Baron—shapes the development of the fetus. This theory, although rarely taken up as such in post-eighteenth-century scientific circles211—Weininger being a rare exception212—did find a believer in the telegony-skeptic and psychologist Ribot, who accepted that ‘‘all the physical and moral disturbances of uterine existence—all those influences . . . can act through the mother upon the foetus during the period of gestation; impressions, emotions, defective nutrition, effects of imagination,’’ including at the moment of conception. Drawing on the French naturalist Armand de Quatrefages’s Unite´ de l’e´spe`ce humaine (Unity of the Human Species; 1861), Ribot wrote, ‘‘[O]ne fact which fully proves the universality of the law of heredity is the frequent transmission from parent to child of the actual and momentary state of the former at the instant of conception.’’213 Such heredity under the influence or at a distance did circulate in the guise of ‘‘elective affinities’’ in much nineteenthcentury literature in the wake of Goethe’s famous 1809 novella that bore

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that title.214 Elective affinities and concerns about miscegenation already structured a notorious work of the antisemitic literary canon, Oskar Pannizza’s ‘‘Operated Jew.’’ Itzig Faitel Stern, the Jewish protagonist who subjects his body and mind to all sorts of operations in order to appear as an exemplary Aryan, finds his ideal affine in a beautiful, virginal German Ma¨del, Ottilie, with whom he hopes to conceive a pure Aryan child. As it would in Dinter’s novel, race wills out in Panizza’s tale.215 This theory, at heart the anxiety over the merest contact engendering permanent disfigurement, structures the imagination of all later conceptions in Dinter’s novel—so long as they are engendered by Jewish sperm. Thus when Elisabeth is confronted by Hermann’s request to try to produce a new heir, a being who will bear his likeness (cf. SB 196), she asks: ‘‘Haven’t you pointed out to me that the structure of the sex-cells [Artzellen] of noble creatures is much more complex and delicate and therefore more sensitive than are those of the ignoble, and therefore by mere contact with the latter they are changed, even destroyed?’’ (SB 197) Blinded by narcissistic desire and racial imperative, he endeavors to rationalize away the correctness (Das ist alles richtig) of her concern with appeals to the superiority of the German essence. The product of their union, however, ‘‘a dark, but this time beautiful, Jewish-looking baby boy,’’ confirms her fear and his theory. Similarly, Burghamer’s systematic and successful fecundation of ‘‘untouched’’ (unberu¨hrte) blond virgins seems to have been guided by this theory, and the results—the vast majority of his progeny bear his image216 —again testify to its truth as well as to Chamberlain’s feared Jewish conspiracy to mongrelize Europe. Burghamer’s efforts at ‘‘race poisoning’’ (Rassevergiftung) highlight the correspondence among impregnation, poisoning, and the latter’s frequent partner, infection (cf. SB 224: Durchseuchung und Vergiftung); miscegenation is diseased sexuality. Dinter supplements the theory of heredity by influence with the arrival of the German Johanna’s child by Hermann: ‘‘a real Jew boy . . . with black curly hair, dark skin and eyes’’ (SB 265). Confronted by this anomalous, monstrous birth, he feels himself cuckolded and calls Johanna a whore, Dirne.217 After Johanna confesses how ten years earlier, she had been deceived, seduced, and consequently impregnated by a baptized Jewish officer, that is, by an individual doubly removed from Jewry (both by religious ritual and by military service, by water and by uniform), Hermann generates an explanation. He conjoins heredity by influence with the practical experience (Erfahrung) of animal husbandry, that is, with telegony, and in the process replaces sperm with blood,218 diseased sexuality with race:

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[A] noble-raced woman becomes ever unfit for noble breeding, if she is fecundated even once by a man of less-valued race. Through one such pregnancy produced by ignoble male blood, the entire organism of the noble-raced creature is poisoned, taking after the ignoble race, so that it is only ever capable of bringing ignoble descendants into the world, even in the case of impregnation by a noble-raced man. The higher a life form is developed, all the more forcefully is this race law manifested, and its highest and most consequential effect naturally is achieved by humans. (SB 266)

The feared ultimate effect of miscegenation, against which Ka¨mpfer is fighting and which he hopes to publicize, is the degeneration, even the destruction, of the German people. In his eventually successful defense in court against the charge of murder for killing the officer who had ‘‘poisoned’’ Johanna’s womb, he argues that by satisfying their extramarital lust for blond German women, Germany’s half-a-million Jews ‘‘would suffice to ruin racially the German Volk so that in one hundred years the German race no longer would be spoken of’’ (SB 275). He wishes laws to be enacted that would ‘‘halt the racial infection of the German Volk by Jewish blood’’ (SB 275), forbid intermarriage, and imprison every Jew who ‘‘pollutes a German maiden.’’ He even rhetorically (?) suggests that ‘‘if, for the sin of rendering German maidens unsuitable for bearing German children, the Jews atone with their life, then there would be no more Jews in the German fatherland’’ (SB 274). The theories of diseased sexuality and heredity by which Ka¨mpfer justifies both his actions and his remedies (as does his creator, Dinter) find themselves already referred to and discussed by Hauser in his 1921 antisemitic history of Judentum: ‘‘[I]t’s been known for some time that a woman can bear children in her second marriage who look completely like her first husband.’’219 They found an even greater audience when they were repeated in the speeches and articles of Streicher: ‘‘Again and again Der Stu¨rmer reiterated in word and verse the argument presented in Dinter’s vo¨lkisch classic Sin against the Blood.’’220 Advertisements for Dinter’s works appear in virtually every issue: ‘‘Do you despair of yourself and your Volk, of God, freedom, and immortality, then read the timely novels of Dr. Artur Dinter.’’ Streicher’s theory of alien albumen, discussed above, does not quite reproduce Dinter’s theory. By explicitly referring to sperm and making the sex act rather than conception the minimal condition for infection, Streicher recovers the sexuality that Dinter’s idealist blood metaphysics obscures, if not represses.221 Indeed, Streicher’s emphasis on

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albumen, on Eiweiß, suggests that Hermann’s scientific pursuit of protein, Eiweiß, signals the always-already displacement of sexuality in Dinter’s belief structure.

Original Sin Next to the advertisements for Dinter’s novels in Der Stu¨rmer were those for a work by the leader of Streicher’s party, Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf. In Hitler’s programmatic memoir and call to action, Dinter’s idealized trope of the sin against the blood, die Su¨nde wider das Blut, becomes incarnate as the original sin of blood sin, ‘‘die Erbsu¨nde . . . die Su¨nde wider Blut.’’ Earlier studies of Hitler’s text have drawn attention to its biologistic and pestilential rhetoric;222 however, this rhetoric cannot be separated from its coding as gendered, racial, and sexual. Further, rather than engaging in speculation about Hitler’s medical pathology,223 this chapter concludes with an analysis of the convergence of the representations of syphilis and Judentum in Mein Kampf’s battle cry before the apocalyptic threat of diseased reproduction. Paradigmatic of this overdetermined representation, syphilis figures prominently in Hitler’s analysis of the causes of the collapse of the Second Reich: ‘‘It seemed as though a continuous stream of poison was being driven into the outermost blood-vessels of this once heroic body by a mysterious power, and was inducing progressively greater paralysis of sound reason and the simple instinct of self-preservation’’ (MK 154). After discussing how the ‘‘poison’’ of liberal, anti-militarist, anti-statist ideas promulgated by the Jewish press ‘‘was able to penetrate the bloodstream of our people unhindered and do its work [while] the state did not possess the power to master the disease’’ (MK 246), he faults the pre–World War I leadership for their no less half-hearted attempts at combating the ‘‘terrible poisoning of the health of the national body [Volksko¨rpers]’’ by that ‘‘frightening plague’’ of the big cities, syphilis. Syphilis is the objective correlate of the moral devastation wreaked by the ‘‘prostitution [Prostituierung] of love’’ (MK 247). He then racializes this medico-moral plague: ‘‘This Jewification [Verjudung] of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct will sooner or later destroy our entire offspring, for the powerful children of a natural emotion will be replaced by the miserable creatures of financial expediency which is becoming more and more the basis and sole prerequisite of our marriages’’ (MK 247). The distinction between the consequences of relationships with syphilitic prostitutes and wealthy Jewesses blurs as Hitler depicts the prostitution of love along class lines. The nobility are described as falling victim

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by one of two paths. Either aristocrats marry out of ‘‘purely social compulsion—that is, still caught up in the symbolics of blood they intermarry among themselves according to artificial class (or genealogical) rather than natural racial (or hereditary) reasons224 —or they marry Jews: ‘‘[E]very department store Jewess is considered fit to augment the offspring of His Highness—and, indeed, the offspring look it’’ (MK 247). The bourgeoisie, Hitler laments, are following similar, albeit class-specific paths. For ‘‘our big city population’’ the symbolics of blood and marriage is displaced onto sexuality and its consequences; implicitly, the aristocratic woman is replaced by the lower-class prostitute. Earlier in Mein Kampf Hitler had situated the Jew as the ‘‘cold-hearted, shameless and calculating director’’ of the white-slave traffic (MK 59), but by not naming in the later discussion the source ‘‘of the irresistibly spreading contamination of our sexual life,’’ no distinction is made between syphilitic prostitute and Jewess. The Jewess is now positioned as the prostitute, as the carrier of the plague and the agent of the consequent ‘‘complete degeneration’’ of the Volk: ‘‘The most visible results . . . can, on the one hand, be found in the insane asylums’’—the syphilitic origin of paresis and tabes dorsalis, confirmed by the Wassermann reaction, is conflated with the predisposition of Jews for mental illness that had long been a central tenet of antisemitic discourse225—‘‘and on the other, unfortunately, in our—children’’ (MK 248). As Hitler continues to describe the responses to this ‘‘godless plague,’’ the source of this plague remains indeterminate, until it is located in original sin: ‘‘Blood sin and desecration of the race [Die Su¨nde wider Blut und Rasse] are the original sin in the world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it.’’ The end result of this transgression is ‘‘avenged down to the tenth generation’’ (MK 249). In this formulation Hitler combines Fritsch’s revision of the Second Commandment with the Deuteronomic injunction, ‘‘No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord’’ (Deut. 23:2).226 He thereby reinforces his assertion that such relations exist outside the ‘‘natural requirements for marriage.’’ Hitler’s plan to combat this ‘‘syphilization [Versyphilitisierung] of our people’’ (MK 249) follows a signifying chain that eventually finds its rest in the racial problem—the Jewification of society—and its solution. He begins by stating: ‘‘The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution’’ (MK 251). After a series of false feints at social solutions—early marriage, education—Hitler gets down to basics: ‘‘No, anyone who wants to attack prostitution must first of all help to eliminate its

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spiritual basis. He must clear away the filth of the moral plague of big-city ‘civilization’ [‘Kultur’]. . . . This cleansing of our culture [Kultur] must be extended to nearly all fields. Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world’’ (MK 254–55). This spiritual-cultural miasma emanates from the excrescences of art bolshevism, which is itself a ‘‘Jewish disease’’ (MK 253), and from Jewish merchandising. The way to cure the diseased social body has a political and a medical dimension. First Hitler demands, in a language redolent of the olfactive and gender-identification marks of the Jew, that ‘‘[p]ublic life must be freed from the stifling perfume of our modern eroticism, just as it must be freed from all unmanly, prudish hypocrisy’’ (MK 255). Here Hitler echoes one of the leading antisemitic voices in Viennese politics heard during his apprenticeship in the Austrian capital, the Christian Social state parliamentarian and imperial councilor Monsignor Joseph Scheicher, who railed against ‘‘the penetrating stench of lasciviousness [Unzucht] and syphilis that emanated from the Orientals [i.e., the Jews].’’227 Second, he presents the ‘‘demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring’’ (MK 255). Hitler concedes that ‘‘for the unfortunate’’ involved it may appear ‘‘a barbaric measure’’; he counters, however, that such action will be ‘‘a blessing for his fellow men and posterity. The passing pain of a century can and will redeem millenniums from sufferings’’ (MK 255). This medical solution would later find echoes in the pages of Ziel und Weg and the euthanasia programs that were a ‘‘necessary condition’’ for the extermination process of Auschwitz.228 Hitler’s discussion of syphilis becomes the site, according to the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, where ‘‘the stereotype equating of ‘racial poisoning’ and ‘blood poisoning’ is immediately conspicuous.’’229 By drawing upon the discourse of syphilis and syphilophobia, Hitler delineates a space framed by the ‘‘prostitution of love’’ and the ‘‘syphilization of our people’’ in which to situate the sexual, reproductive, and gender problematics of the Jewish Question. The rhetorics of contamination, infection, and poison (Verpestung, Verseuchung, Vergiftung) that pervade Mein Kampf are desexualized, degendered displacements of a more original plague Versyphilitisierung; and the latter is itself symptomatic of a sexualized, gendered Verjudung. The syphilis-disseminating spirochete is reproduced by the Jew, the ‘‘typical parasite’’ (der ewige Parasit;230 MK 305). In Hitler’s narrative, however, the model has become the copy. The menace of diseased reproduction and problematic gender that marks the body of Alljuda threatens the German Volksko¨rper with a Dinteresque fate—unless

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appropriate measures are taken. In perhaps the most striking image (and one of the most frequently cited passages) from Mein Kampf, Hitler graphically illustrates ‘‘[h]ow close [the Jews] see approaching victory’’ with a scene of imminent sexual and racial violence. First he introduces the perpetrator: ‘‘With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait’’ (MK 325). Is Hitler here imagining Hermann’s black-haired ‘‘real Jew boy’’ (SB 265) son with Johanna grown up—that is, as if Johanna had not killed (euthanized?) him when she injected both her son and herself with fatal doses of morphine (SB 267)? The intended innocent victim, ‘‘whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people,’’ is a familiar one: ‘‘the unsuspecting girl’’ (MK 325). This would not be a random act of malevolence by an individual who happens to be Jewish, for the particular referent of ‘‘he’’ (der Judenjunge) who commits this act is then replaced by a collective referent (der Jude), when ‘‘he . . . with every means tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people,’’ including ‘‘systematically ruin[ing] women and girls’’ (MK 325; emphasis added). Nor is the invocation of Satan merely an indulgence of pulp-fiction prose. Hitler later restages this scene of fatal infection—‘‘This contamination of our blood . . . is carried on systematically by the Jew today. Systematically these black parasites of the nation [Vo¨lkerparasiten] defile our inexperienced young blond girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world’’ (MK 562)—in an effort to decry the blind indifference of ‘‘both Christian denominations’’ to the threat facing ‘‘the future of the earth,’’ as well as to provide divine legitimation for what, he asserts, needs to be done. ‘‘The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty . . . of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word [e.g., the Second Commandment in its various incarnations] be desecrated’’ (MK 562; emphasis in original). Or as Hitler, echoing Hermann Ka¨mpfer’s own vocational statement (SB 278) noted above, had claimed already when he concluded his account of his transformation into an antisemite: ‘‘Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord’’ (MK 65). In the final appearance of the Jew in Hitler’s tome, he indicates what the fulfillment of Gd’s will and work may entail. Perhaps anticipating the future trajectory of the Third Reich’s policy and methods toward those who threaten diseased reproduction, the earlier redemptive sterilization of ‘‘defective people’’ (MK 255) becomes, in the invocation of a regrettably missed opportunity, a justification for murder: ‘‘If at the

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beginning of the War and during the War . . . these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’’ (MK 679).231 The examinations of Dinter’s and Hitler’s work and their prehistory demonstrate that the intersections of Judentum with syphilis extend beyond the traditional image of the plague-bearing Jew, or the accidents of a scientist’s or pimp’s family background. Rather, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, a pattern of sometimes parallel, sometimes overlapping representations traverses a wide variety of cultural moments. Here, specifically, the symptomatic correlation of Versyphilitisierung with Verjudung as well as of the prostitute with the Jew, as the source and site of that which dissolved gendered identity and infected reproduction, are themselves symptomatic of the diverse constellations of race, gender, and (diseased) sexuality that constituted the apparati of Jewish identification—a.k.a the Jewish Question—by which Central European bourgeois society since the Enlightenment had sought to staunch its own multiple crises of identification. The chapters that follow examine the intersections of these diverse trajectories of representations of Jewish bodies with the bodies of work of diverse individuals, principally but not exclusively identified as Jewish, by which Jewish identification was not only constructed but also, as the Other Jewish Question, both acted out and worked through by those so identified.

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chapter 4

Circumcision and a Jewish Woman’s Identification Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Failed Assimilation

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach noted in On the Natural Varieties of Mankind that despite all of the differences among the Jewish faces depicted in Bernard Picart’s well-known Ce´re´monies et coutumes religieuses (Religious Ceremonies and Customs), ‘‘all bear the racial character, and [are] most clearly distinguished from the men intermingled with them of other nations.’’1 Pace Blumenbach and his projection of a cognizable but inexpressible,2 distinct Jewish character shared by Picard’s diverse portrayals of Jews, Barbara Hahn argues that what distinguishes Jews from non-Jews in the one volume in which they appear is that Picart ‘‘clearly distinguished,’’ although without individualizing, the facial features of the Jews and not of the others. What marked the Jew was that the Jew was marked. Hahn also notes a certain gender in-difference that characterizes the representation of Jewish and non-Jewish women when she describes two ritual scenes illustrated by Picart:3 the first, the occasion of the eight-day-old Jewish male acquiring the corporeal sign by which he is distinguished from the Christian male; the second, the annual Jewish commemoration of the Exodus, the meaning of which was thoroughly appropriated and transformed by Christianity into the unique Last Supper and its endless iteration in the Eucharist. Under the scene that depicts, not by chance, a circumcision, the caption explains that no Jewish women are present at the ceremony because they

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are in a side room with the mother of the child. The women in the picture who are observing the circumcision are, it follows, Christian. It is hardly surprising that these ‘‘Christian women’’ have the same faces as the women who in another picture are gathered on the Seder evening and are, it follows, Jewesses.

Whereas Jewish men are distinguished from non-Jewish men, Jewish and non-Jewish women are the same. How then, in the late eighteenth century, can the distinct identity of a Jewess qua a Jewish woman be represented? Such was the dilemma that greeted Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s ‘‘infamous birth.’’4

From Rahel to Levin Varnhagen Rahel Levin Varnhagen was born in Berlin in 1771, the eldest daughter of the wealthy jewel dealer Levin Markus and his wife Chaie. Her father was among the select group of Jewish men who possessed the Generalprivileg that allowed his entire family to live and work in Berlin. Soon after her father’s death (c. 1790), Rahel Levin Varnhagen continued his practice of holding an open house in which a diverse group gathered socially. What has come to be known as her ‘‘garret [Dachstube] salon’’ eventually became one of the leading gathering places for writers, intellectuals, and young aristocrats, Jewish and Gentile, male and female, and remained so until Napoleon’s 1806 occupation.5 In 1808 she met the literary dilettante Karl August Varnhagen (later von Ense), fourteen years her junior, whom she would marry in 1814 following her baptism and renaming as Antonie Friedericke. When she, together with her husband, reopened her salon in 1821, the character of Berlin’s intellectual life had long since changed. Echoes still remained of the nationalist and antisemitic tone that emerged during the Napoleonic Wars and was fostered by the exclusively male Christlich-deutsch Tischgesellschaft (Christian-German Eating Club; 1811–13) led by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Nonetheless, her intellect and insights still brought members of the liberal intelligentsia such as Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Bo¨rne, and Karl Gutzkow to her home. After her death her perceptions about contemporary social life and culture attracted an even greater audience through Varnhagen von Ense’s publications of selections from her letters and diary entries in Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens fu¨r ihre Freunde (Rahel: A Memento Book for Her Friends). Rahel, the name by which she was known to her friends and to the reading public, is how the literature on this salonnie`re, in particular, and

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Berlin Jewry, in general, usually identifies her. In this chapter, however, I will refer to her as Levin Varnhagen, a name she never bore, in place of her other names: Rahel Levin, Rahel Robert, Rahel Robert-Tornow, Antonie Friedericke Robert, Antonie Friedericke Varnhagen, Antonie Friedericke Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel Varnhagen, and Rahel.6 The practice of calling a writer by his, or more often her, first name is a variant on the sort of familiarity that breeds contempt. First-name calling suggests that the person concerned is not worthy of the respect, the distance, accorded the (primarily male) Olympian greats.7 Since at that time ‘‘Rahel’’ was almost exclusively a Jewish woman’s name, it indeed embodies a significant part of her character(ization), the Jewess. However, Levin Varnhagen, the artificial hybrid of Jewish patronym and Christian husband’s name, signals other factors that are crucial to understanding how she constructed her identity: normative Jewish identification figured by the male Jew, social integration through marriage, and the impossibility of Jewish acculturation into her contemporary Berlin (read German) society. Salon women such as Levin Varnhagen were engaged, proleptically, with the conflicts and contradictions of Jewish identification that would mark the relationship between European Jewry and modernity. These women no less than their brethren sought to mediate the paradoxes and contradictions of possible Jewish emancipation. Traditionally, studies have viewed Rahel Levin Varnhagen as a Jew and as a woman.8 But doing so reproduced the assumption that ‘‘Jew’’ was a gender-neutral category. More recently, critical approaches to Levin Varnhagen’s writings, especially now that more of them have become available, are attending to how she denoted her empirical Jewish existence, her ‘‘unfortunate birth,’’ as gendered: she was born a Jewess (eine Ju¨din) and not born Jewish (ju¨disch). Emblematic of this recognition is Liliane Weissberg’s restoration of the original subtitle in her edition of Hannah Arendt’s (auto)biography of Levin Varnhagen: instead of the 1974 edition’s ‘‘The Life of a Jewish Woman,’’ the subtitle to Weissberg’s edition reads ‘‘The Life of a Jewess.’’9 Further examination of Levin Varnhagen’s writings also indicates that she marked the gendered nature of the so-called generic Jewish destiny that she was attempting to identify and identify with. This chapter analyzes how Rahel Levin Varnhagen articulated her natal Jewish selfidentification in figures of circumcision and the circumcised Jewish man.

The Rags of the Richest If we adopt the still-too-common characterization of premodern Judentum ‘‘as a seamless garment . . . an identity cut from a whole cloth woven of

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tradition, intellection, and social ties [with an] unambiguous distinction . . . between being Jewish or Christian or Muslim,’’10 then many of the modalities of existence of Berlin’s very wealthy Jewish community covered by that rubric were during the last quarter of the eighteenth century in tatters.11 Unlike other German cities, Berlin had no ghetto; Jewish residences mingled with non-Jewish. Jews readily intermingled with non-Jews, both commercially and socially; the rules of Kashrut and Shabbat were honored more in the breach.12 Further, the leaders of the community were not the rabbis but the rich. Within this elite both women and men acquired secular education (Bildung), and neither women nor, to a large extent, men had a traditional Jewish religious education. They adopted the Enlightenment thinking that ruled Berlin intellectual circles: universal moral truths were posited as underlying both Judentum and Christianity, and the progressive convergence of Jews and Gentiles was optimistically portended. This privileged group of Jews considered itself different from its poorer, more traditional brothers and sisters in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe and sought to distinguish itself from these other Jews.13 Hence the immediate goal of the Berlin Jewish elite was less the attainment of civil equality (the usual understanding of emancipation) than social integration into and acceptance by high society and culture. Despite much intermingling, such integration was not yet the reality. Clear legal and social differences remained: besides levying special taxes, the state imposed strict limitations on who and how many Jews could reside or marry in Berlin. While Jews with the General Privilege, unlike those without, were not subject to the humiliation of paying the bodytariff (Leibzoll)—also required of each head of cattle—every time they passed through one of Berlin’s gates, they were subject to other shameinducing regulations. For example, to the consternation of the Prussian royal house, manufacturers in the rival state of Saxony mastered the secret of making porcelain in the early eighteenth century and began reaping tremendous wealth by supplying the increasing European demand for chinoiserie. Prussia sought its share of the bounty and attempted to develop its own porcelain manufacture; however, in order to build up the industry to a level at which it could compete with the continentally prized products of Dresden and Meissen, the domestic market had to be developed. Friedrich Wilhelm I’s solution in 1733 was to require all Jews—even those with the General Privilege—who desired the requisite permission to marry in Prussia to purchase a number of large ape or similarly kitschy figurines (see Figure 4-1) produced by the Prussian royal porcelain works.14 Porcelain purchases were also demanded with each birth. Wilhelm’s son, the

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Figure 4-1. Mendelssohn family porcelain ape. Reprinted by permission of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin/Art Resource.

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enlightened absolutist Frederick the Great, continued the practice—not even waiving the tariff for one of his most respected and prized resident philosophers, Moses Mendelssohn, when he married Fromet Guggenheim in Berlin in 1763.15 The porcelain requirement remained in effect until 1787. The Berlin Jewish elite thus formed a community in-between.16 Although the traditional fabric of Jewish corporate identity was shredded, it had not yet been replaced by the combination of religious reform and that Enlightenment-Romantic hybrid, the individual subject. In 1793 Levin Varnhagen could still write to her friend David Veit that ‘‘one can however do nothing other than wrap oneself with seemliness [Anstand] in one’s own cloak [Mantel] and remain a Jew.’’17 Gentile Berlin of the 1790s too was an exceptional city. It had undergone a period of remarkable demographic and commercial growth, and amid the contradictions of the old regime it flourished rather than floundered. The capital-short aristocracy began to build residences in the city in order to attend the Prussian court and fill the state administration. Berlin was also the center of the German Enlightenment, even though it lacked a university. Consequently, the second and third sons of the primogenitary Junker nobility flocked to Berlin, along with the underemployed university-trained sons of the bourgeoisie. Once in Berlin, this motley crew of aristocrats and intellectuals socialized at the ‘‘open houses’’ or, as they later came to be known, the salons of wealthy Jews. The Jewish women who presided over these gatherings in which members of different religions, classes, and genders mixed appeared to satisfy the conditions for achieving social integration. Most salonnie`res had wealth, acquired education (Bildung), and claimed the cultural ideal of the individual or unique personality. And they lacked the bodily inscription—circumcision—that distinguished male Jews from their Gentile confre`res.18 Among the Gentile men in attendance, the hostesses’ Jewish difference—that is, the identification of the individual as a Jew— enhanced these women’s roles as muses and objects of exotic desire. But outside these gatherings, the index of social status and acceptance for women was marriage. Since civil marriage was nonexistent and mixed marriage legally impossible, the Jewish difference that the Gentile community persisted in and insisted on ascribing to the salonnie`res remained the obstacle to their social inclusion. The ‘‘nature’’ of this Jewish difference posed a problem for the salon women, however. Jewish identification had been self-evident for those who had worn the seemingly seamless garment of premodern Judentum;

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halakhic observance may have varied along community, class, and gender lines, but there was no question of whether one was a Jew. By contrast, these Jewish Berliners were not sure where or upon whom to hang their frayed, not fringed, cloaks. Meanwhile, as Jewish corporate identity collapsed under modernizing and emancipatory pressures, as many of the criteria of Jewish identification that informed Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s brief for the ‘‘Civil Improvement of the Jews’’19 — Ought a multitude of sedulous and good citizens render the state fewer benefits simply because they descend from Asia, and distinguish themselves through beard, circumcision and a particular manner of honoring the highest being left to them from their ancestors?

—were rendered moot, intrinsic Jewish corporeal difference became more prominent. For the Gentiles who frequented the Jewish salons, circumcision distinguished Jew from non-Jew. Thus Wilhelm von Humboldt asked his fellow salon regular Gustav von Brinkmann to ‘‘extend his greetings to the Levy [i.e., Levin Varnhagen] and to remember him to whomever else, circumcised or uncircumcised.’’ In a later letter to Brinkmann, Humboldt commented that Levin Varnhagen’s friend, the recently converted (1796) David Veit, who regularly and publicly repudiated his Jewishness, still revealed ‘‘his circumcision in every fingertip.’’20 No less than their male counterparts, the Jewish salon women were identified as Jews despite identifying with the culture and values of Gentile Berlin high society. They continuously disavowed this ascribed difference; however, that disavowal was itself ascribed to the difference they would disavow. The letters of Rahel Levin Varnhagen exemplify such self-fashioning. Modeling her epistolary self after the J.-J. Rousseau of the Confessions, she sought in her letters to reveal her individuality, her ‘‘unique personality,’’ to the world,21 while at the same time hiding her Jewish particularity. Through literary acts of self-revelation she attempted to transform her life into a work of art for the acknowledgment, approval, and ultimately acceptance by the legitimizing dominant society. But her Bildung—understood as both the acquisition of culture and self-cultivation— failed as a means of social assimilation. Instead, her Gentile peers viewed her as a parvenu, a bad copy, thus confirming all the more her pariah Jewishness.22 Levin Varnhagen desired to be accepted as an individual. Ironically, the Jewishness that to a large extent distinguished her from other individual members of high society also defined her as a member of a group. Thus she found herself confronted by what she called ‘‘a little system of preconceived opinions which [people, like Count Egloffstein] made

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about me before . . . ever hear[ing] a single word from me.’’ Worse, after Egloffstein finally met her in public, she writes, ‘‘[He] does not perceive me: and therefore knows less of me than before because [able to claim personal acquaintance] he can now say to himself: ‘I really know her!’ ’’23 For Levin Varnhagen, Judentum mediated the disjunction between the self-revelation of her inner truth and the ‘‘I really know her’’ of a Count Egloffstein.

Inscribed Inscriptions In Levin Varnhagen’s letters her Jewish particularity is figured corporeally. Because she was unable to find her Jewish particularity in a communal identity—‘‘In Berlin, people deal with Jews as individuals, although not as a group’’24 —and because she assumed that the mind was both universal in form and individual in substance, she located Jewishness on the body, the male Jewish body. Levin Varnhagen depicts her own Jewish difference by allusions to circumcision and with fantasies of circumcisionlike inscriptions in her flesh. Her imagined defective body is marked with specific Jewish associations.25 Rahel Levin Varnhagen identified her indelible Jewish difference in representations of her own phantasmally circumcised body. Dedication to Bildung was supposed to overcome the accident of birth, but for Levin Varnhagen her imagined scar of circumcision could not be removed. In a 1793 letter to David Veit, then studying at the university in Go¨ttingen, Levin Varnhagen denies that she perceives herself as Jewish: ‘‘I shall never be convinced that I am a Schlemiel and a Jewess; since in all these years and after so much thinking about it [i.e., her Jewish identity], it has not dawned upon me, I shall never grasp it.’’26 She stresses her point by adapting a line from Goethe’s Egmont (act 5, scene 2): ‘‘That is why ‘the sound [Klang] of the executioner’s ax does not gnaw [naschen] upon my roots’; that is why I am still living’’ (emphasis added). This act of citation affirms her identification with German culture as well as testifies to her Bildung.27 But she alters the original, which reads: ‘‘[I]t is the sound [Klang] of the executioner’s ax, which is gnawing upon my roots’’ (emphasis added). Levin Varnhagen thereby implicates her own sense of identity as well as alludes to how German-Jewish difference is marked. In Egmont, Goethe’s Dutch Protestant hero utters this line as he awaits beheading by his Spanish Catholic jailers. The death sentence condemning him for his religious and national difference both confirms that difference and, upon

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execution, extinguishes it. By grafting a negation (the ‘‘ax does not gnaw’’) onto the original passage, Levin Varnhagen grafts herself upon German roots and denies her own difference from her Gentile peers. She is not Egmont. This appended negation also asserts that her nonrecognition of her own Jewishness is self-willed. It is not the consequence of the violent extinction of her Jewish particularity by Prussian society. Further by refusing the figure of the executioner’s ax, Levin Varnhagen undercuts the evocation of castration through decapitation, and undercuts its ‘‘symbolic substitute,’’28 the circumcision that identifies (male) Jews. The association of decapitation and the overcoming of Jewish difference—and hence of the mark of that difference, circumcision—circulated in the recommendation that same year (1793) by the philosopher Fichte: ‘‘[T]o give [the Jews] civil rights I see no other means than one night to cut off all of their heads [die Ko¨pfe abzuschneiden] and replace them with ones in which there is not a single Jewish idea.’’29 As detailed in chapter 2, during the following two decades, decapitation (Kopfabschneiden) and the extirpation of Jewish identification would be correlated repeatedly with circumcision (beschneiden) in anti-Jewish discourse. Despite the protests of the twenty-one-year old Levin Varnhagen, something was nibbling at her roots. It resounded in her denial and in her repeated return to the question of her connection to Judentum. Almost two years later, in another letter to David Veit, she replaces the thoughts that disowned a Jewish identity with a ‘‘fantasy’’ that acknowledges her desire to forget her Jewish origin. The refusal of martyrdom has been exchanged for an inevitable slow dying. First, Levin Varnhagen again alludes to Egmont’s prison monologue where he describes how ‘‘like the earth-born [erdgebornen] giant, we [i.e., humanity] spring higher aloft from every contact with our mother [Mutter].’’30 In contrast to the model of acquired Bildung, this passage connects natural origins with the development of greatness; contact with the source or roots of the self infuses the individual with power. Levin Varnhagen’s variant condenses the subject clause with a simple reiteration of earth: ‘‘nearer to the Earth [der Erde na¨her], like the earth-born [erdgebornen] giant.’’ She re-emphasizes the value of the autochthony that would become a primary constituent of German nationalism and anti-Jewish discourse: the natural right accorded the autochthonous German and forever denied the rootless Jew. Her emphasis upon earth as birthplace and its revivifying and empowering effects is then immediately inverted by an image of a different, a supermundane (außerirdisch) origin with quite different effects. She recounts her fantasy of an extraterrestrial who at her birth used a dagger to

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etch into her heart the words: ‘‘[Y]es, have feeling [Empfindung], see the world, as only few see it, be great and noble, nor can I deprive you of the capacity for eternal thinking.’’ This fantastic testament, unfortunately, bears a codicil that ties her unique individuality to a collective destiny. She adds that she forgot to mention a last inscribed command, ‘‘be a Jewess!’’ (sei eine Ju¨din). Levin Varnhagen’s genius and her Jewessness are coeval and mutually implicated. The consequences of this intrapartum impression are fateful: ‘‘And now my whole life is a bleeding to death; keeping myself still can prolong my life; each movement to still the bleeding is a new death; and immobility is only possible for me in death itself.’’31 It is unclear whether the death sentence was due to the entire bloody inscription or just the all-but-forgotten supplement, ‘‘be a Jewess!’’ But the corporeal marking generates the double bind that tragically rules her life. Because she is a Jewess, she is also a Kulturmensch, a cultivated, universal individual; because she is a Jewess, she can never be fully accepted as such an individual. Although this letter was not published during her lifetime, strikingly similar imagery was later employed by several Jewish-born figures with whom she had significant interaction in the salon life that filled her last fourteen years in Berlin: Ludwig Bo¨rne and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Although geographical distance prevented the Frankfurt resident Bo¨rne from frequenting Levin Varnhagen’s Berlin salon, she clearly desired to maintain close contact with the critic who was, like her, a baptized Jew. Their extensive correspondence bears witness to that, including this outburst in September 1825: ‘‘I miss you, you miss me. You are my pair [equal, peer] in the innermost soul, I could also say: I will, I can be like Kla¨rchen in Egmont, carrying the flag that leads all of you.’’32 Three months later, in his Memorial Address for the recently deceased writer and humorist Jean Paul Richter, who had himself been a leading attendee of Levin Varnhagen’s Ja¨gerstraße gatherings and an avid admirer of her writing, Bo¨rne remarked: ‘‘Every pulsation of the heart inflicts a wound, and life would be an endless bleeding [Verblutung], were it not for Poetry. She secures for us what Nature would deny.’’ Levin Varnhagen’s prote´ge´ Heinrich Heine also chose Bo¨rne’s comment as the epigraph for the 1826 Harzreise, his first major publication after his baptism. While not directly addressing Judentum, it shares both the endlessly bleeding heart-wound and the tension between the freedom of the cultural ideal and the constraints of biological descent found in Levin Varnhagen’s epistolary fantasy. The composer Giacomo Meyerbeer’s lament in a letter to Heine does, however, address just that. While Meyerbeer does not appear to have been

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a guest at Levin Varnhagen’s home,33 she was a regular attendee at his mother Amalie Beer’s musical soire´es,34 where he was often present, and she socialized with his wife Minna.35 More significant perhaps is that Levin Varnhagen’s letter to David Veit appeared in the first volume of the Buch des Andenkens that her husband published in 1834. In Meyerbeer’s 29 August 1839 missive, he allusively observes that ‘‘whoever does not die from blood loss [verblutet] on the ninth day, bleeds for the rest of his life, [and bleeds] still after death.’’36 Normally eight-day-old boys experience minimal blood loss during circumcision; however, when the infant suffers from undiagnosed hemophilia, death often follows the procedure. Being marked as Jewish not only diminishes an individual’s ability to act; it also reduces in the eyes of others the reputation of whatever the individual might thereby accomplish. Returning to Levin Varnhagen’s fantasy via its possible later citations leads to the recognition that her incised heart is not just a birth defect; rather the birth defect recalls the biblical circumcision of the heart (cf. Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Jer. 4:4; 9:26; Ezek. 44:7, 9). Paul had appropriated this biblical figure in Romans 2:29: ‘‘He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart.’’ Levin Varnhagen’s image, by asserting its Jewish content, ‘‘be a Jewess,’’ is substituting an inner sign of male-defined Jewishness for the outer sign that she as a woman lacks. Her fantasy enacts a circumcision: an act of cutting that inscribes Jewish identification. Levin Varnhagen’s Jewessness is written into her body. It maims her and names her—just as a Jewish male loses his foreskin and receives his Hebrew name at his circumcision. Whereas she had endeavored to forget the inscription of Jewessness and to deny her fate, now she seeks to render this hidden birth defect visible to her correspondent. Like Rousseau in the Confessions, Levin Varnhagen seeks to mediate before the court of public judgment the discrepancy between inner disposition and outer appearance (a discordance symbolized by the circumcised heart). Thus, she ‘‘translates’’ [u¨bersetzen] for Veit the fantasy of her birthmark, her circumcised heart, into a ‘‘parable’’ [Gleichnis] about a man born lame, the effects of lameness upon his life, and the world’s response to his handicap. In the analogy of Jewessness with lameness, Levin Varnhagen is not merely substituting an exotic defect for a more familiar one. She is also carrying over the associations with male Jewish identification and its formation.37 First, by embodying her ‘‘special misfortune’’ [besonder Unglu¨ck], Varnhagen adopts the persona of a man. She transforms the circumcised heart that determines her identification into a man’s congenitally lame foot that names him (he is known as ‘‘the lame man,’’ der Lahme). In fact,

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in order to be able to narrate this parable about Jewish identification, she assumes the name of her male Jewish correspondent: ‘‘I will answer myself in your name [in Ihren Name].’’ Some twenty-three years later—eight years after she had abandoned her patronym, Levin, the manifest sign of her Jewish descent, and four years after she had replaced her exclusively Jewish first name, Rahel—the woman now going by the name Antonie Friederike Varnhagen von Ense wrote to a recently baptized friend: ‘‘I hold this name changing to be of decisive importance. You will thereby to a certain extent become another person outwardly.’’38 The name change more than baptism removed the stigma of Judentum, for the name was the lingering outer mark that was coeval with the inner mark of Jewish identification.39 Second, the conjunction of supermundane beings, wounds, lameness, names, and Jewish identity is already found in Jacob’s wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32). Lameness also often functions as a euphemism for devirilizing damage—whether physical or psychological—to male genitalia. When Jacob limps away from his night-long struggle he bears a new name (Israel) as well as a wound in the hollow of his thigh where the angel had touched him. With its implication of powerlessness before one’s own fate—as well as its location—Jacob’s wound evokes, at least from a psychoanalytic perspective, castration. Conjoined with the bestowal of a name, the permanent wounding recalls circumcision. Levin Varnhagen’s account of her own origin retells the birth of Israel.40 Ironically this (auto)biography of a lame Jew hides its origin. In telling this parable such that its form recapitulates its content, Levin Varnhagen masks her authorship: the narrative ‘‘limps [hinkt] so much, that one would not be able to recognize my misfortune in it in the least, unless one would know it.’’ Like her confessional letters, this parable seeks to expose the universal individual, while simultaneously seeking to hide her particularity—and yet, nevertheless, it betrays her Jewish identity.

The Jew in the Little Red Hood Several months earlier, Levin Varnhagen had already explored this relationship amid a fateful commingling of contrarieties: her public persona, Judentum, identification, and cutting. The exploration occurred in response to a long missive by Veit in which he addresses the question of her identification generated by her letters.41 In her response, she rearranges Veit’s language and appends glosses in order to unveil how his rambling

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mix of anecdote and idealistic meditation on truth and honesty attempts to hide his (and her) real concerns about being Jewish. Veit reports that he had shown her critique of the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s novel Woldemar to the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, without first removing her ‘‘incorrect German’’ and stylistic infelicities, as he had done in the past when sharing aloud her literary judgments.42 They responded by dismissing it as ‘‘an insignificant letter written by an ignorant young woman.’’43 In order to validate his judgment of her true worth and worthiness as speaker of truth, Veit in his letter proffers a ‘‘parody’’ of Egmont on the heights she has attained and will attain (cf. act 2, scene 2).44 He then laments the ‘‘harmful mixture [scha¨dliche Mischung] of forthrightness and reticence’’ in people’s public utterances: their statements both belie what Veit believes to be their private—and true—feelings and vary depending upon the audience. He cannot understand why people do not fulfill the Enlightenment ideal and always tell the truth. Next he provides an apparent commentary on such duplicitous encounters—‘‘We [i.e., Veit and Levin Varnhagen] suffer from a sickness,’’ the nature of which he does not explicitly state. His meditation on truthfulness at an apparent end, Veit recounts his visit to a club in which normally separated cohorts—professors, women, and students like himself—intermix. He had previously avoided the club because of the expense [Kosten]; now he describes how he successfully outwitted a ‘‘professor [who] wanted to embarrass him’’ there.45 Levin Varnhagen answers his parody with a citation from another Goethe drama, Torquato Tasso:46 ‘‘What if you came upon a friend whom you/Thought rich and found him to be a beggar?/You are quite right, I am myself no longer,/And yet I am such just as much as ever.’’ Her deconstructive parody of Veit attempts both to understand the Humboldts’ response and to ignore the role of Veit’s (and her) Jewish difference in all interaction with Gentiles. She identifies with Tasso, who ‘‘in his awareness of his poetic gifts had made the perilous assumption that, as an aristocrat by merit, he is the equal of these aristocrats by birth.’’47 She too assumes that her Bildung can overcome the bias against her (Jewish) birth defect. Like Tasso—and unlike Veit—she too recognizes the gap between her own perception of herself and how others view her. Where Veit is concerned about her undervaluation, she addresses his overvaluation of her: she views herself as a nothing [Nichts] because she does ‘‘absolutely nothing’’ except write the truth. And then she proceeds to relate that truth. Unlike Veit she recognizes the stakes of their situation, the expense (Kosten) of their ‘‘sickness.’’ Their

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problem is not one of being truthful in a duplicitous world. Rather, they suffer from being Jews who want to join the club in which otherwise separated groups socialize; they suffer from being Jews who consist of the ‘‘harmful mix’’ of Bildung and Jewish birth. Consequently, she may take the position, ‘‘why should I lie, when the truth costs [kostet] nothing.’’ But, she apposes, this attitude makes her ‘‘the Jew in the little red cap’’ (der Jude im rothen Ka¨ppchen).48 This apposition shifts the Humboldts’ denigration of Levin Varnhagen from a matter of misogyny—‘‘ignorant young woman’’—to one of ethnoreligious identification defined as male—‘‘the [male] Jew’’ (der Jude). Her identification with the male Jew is, however, part of another harmful mixture formed by the male Jew and the ignorant young woman, Little Red Riding Hood. This hybrid formulation implies that if she, here figured by the male Jew, acts like Little Red Riding Hood, always tells the truth, holds nothing back, without awareness of the consequences, then she risks betraying herself (and her kin; i.e., the Jews) and being eaten by the wolves. Levin Varnhagen reminds Veit of the costs of his also acting like Little Red Riding Hood. She places Veit’s experience at the club explicitly in the context of Jewish identification: ‘‘So the professors still want to embarrass you! Indeed, one cannot escape Judenthum.’’49 Consequently, when at last she explicitly discusses the ‘‘harmful mixture’’ of honesty and discretion, she realizes that as much as she despises this (self-) damaging mode of being, ‘‘she cannot live without it’’;50 several months later, she would have a similar recognition about that odd pairing of Bildung-based originality and Jewish particularity. The Jew cannot afford to tell the truth all the time; there are indeed painful costs (Kosten) for a Jew to intermix. As a consequence of this double bind between the will to truth and the necessity to hide her inescapable Jewishness, she describes herself as ‘‘lame’’ [gela¨hmt].51 This image would anticipate her parable in the letter about the circumcised heart.

Uprooting the Rute of Identification Embodying this harmful mixture of honesty and reticence, of Jew and Berliner, still did not keep the wolves at bay. The problems of German-Jewish life and identification, of assimilation, conversion, and Gentile anti-Jewish attitudes—in general, as well as for Levin Varnhagen and her brother, the author Ludwig Robert (born Lipman Levin)—were also a regular topic in

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their correspondence. In a 1 July 1806 letter she again employs circumcision-inflected rhetoric by voicing her desire to ‘‘extirpate’’ or ‘‘root out’’ her Jewishness. As anti-Jewish chauvinism grew in Berlin during the losing war against Napoleon, as she felt increasingly insulted and ignored by society because of her Jewish identification, Levin Varnhagen wrote to her brother: I shall forget the humiliation [Schmach] for not one second. I drink it in the water, I drink it in the wine, I drink it with the air: therefore with every breath and I call out hail, and hail! that you are far away. That I do not see you really bent from being cast down [krumm, vor Gebeugtheit], because what else was it!—although I find it hard to be alone. I remain in order to get away better. But no de´tail! The Jew within us [Der Jude aus uns], must be extirpated [ausgerottet]; this is the holy truth, and should life go with it. . . .’’52

Once again Levin Varnhagen defines their individual fates using rhetoric that betrays associations with circumcision. To express the desire to cut off her Jewishness, even at the cost of her own life, she chooses the term ausgerottet—the sign of uncircumcision. Both Luther’s Bibel and Mendelssohn’s translation of Genesis counterpose ausrotten to circumcision (beschneiden) in their versions of the passage when Gd first makes his covenant with Abraham and sets circumcision as its sign: ‘‘Every uncircumcised male, everyone who has not had the flesh of his foreskin circumcised, will be cut off [ausgerottet] from the kin of his father’’ (Gen. 17:14).53 Indeed, whenever the covenant, which is signified by circumcision, is broken, the children of Israel are threatened with being extirpated (ausgerottet). The monument to nineteenth-century German philology, Grimms deutsches Wo¨rterbuch, ties this relationship between ausrotten and beschneiden to the tenet that ‘‘if one cannot uproot [ausrotten] a tree without harm, then one shall prune [beschneiden] . . . it.’’54 Ausrottung, extirpation, is also the preferred term of Levin Varnhagen’s contemporaries, such as HundtRadowsky, to describe their final solution to the Jewish Question: they would exterminate German Jewry by supplementing circumcision with castration.55 Shame and despair scream from Levin Varnhagen’s letter to her brother; it may have marked a turning point in her life. At least since Napoleon had begun his march toward Berlin, she realized that when she and other Berlin Jews had exchanged the traditional garb of medieval corporate Jewry for the modern dress of Bildung and individuality, they had donned the Emperor’s new clothes. The more original her intellect may

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have appeared, the more her empirical existence as the Jewess Rahel Levin was noted—to her discredit and humiliation. excursus: arnim caps off dinner at the eating club These both literal and figurative ties among adornment, circumcision, and Jewish identification that arose in Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s letters found themselves grotesquely mirrored in an address to that no-less-grotesque inversion of her Ja¨gerstrasse salon, the woman- and Jew-excluding Christlich-deutsch Tischgesellschaft by one of its cofounders, Achim von Arnim. Arnim delivered the Eating Club’s definitive statement on the nature of ¨ ber die Kennzeichen des Judenand threat presented by Judentum, ‘‘U thums’’ (On Judentum’s Identifying Marks), in the spring of 1811, the club’s founding year. Despite his talk’s title, Arnim was little concerned with providing a list of distinctive attributes that the Jew manifests, such that others will recognize the Jew in others (and in themselves). His primary task was to address the difficulty of recognizing acculturated Jews who have erected a blind [Blende] to conceal their Jewish otherness [Andersheit] from Gentiles—especially the difficulty of recognizing those dissemblers who would seek membership in their eating club.56 Circumcision, he argues, is not a certain sign of Jewishness. Initially, he offers a couple of rationales for this argument. Just as when one peels an apple in good society, the knife peels the skin so finely as to leave no visible waste (Abfall), so might a rabbi handle an infant such that the circumcision is all but invisible. The second rationale is more timely and less analogical.57 He refers to a recent article in the Allgemeine Zeitung about the young German Ro¨ntgen, who, like other Christians wanting to do business in Moslem areas, had himself circumcised before departing to serve in the Moroccan royal court.58 Yet his principle illustration of unveiling the dissembling Jew entails uncovering the Jewishness of one who self-evidently would be excluded from becoming a club member—as well as lacking a member that could be circumcised—a Jewess. It requires a kind of divining rod (Wu¨nschelruthe): If the suspected [Jew] has a pretty wife, go to her—while her husband is here among us—with a divining rod, like miners use to discover precious metals. If it raises itself near her then she is definitely a disguised [verkappte] Jewess, because, mostly out of precaution and superstition, she carries upon her gold and silver chains and other gems. Proceed then at your pleasure.59

Aside from arousing some sexual fantasy—which Arnim himself notes may happen in his auditors—this ‘‘Experiment’’ presumes even as it denies that

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the mark of circumcision fixes Jewish identification. While Rute had since the medieval period been a German euphemism for penis, whether circumcised or not, a divining rod is made from a specific kind of wood (usually from a hazel tree that has not yet borne fruit)60 that is ritually cut or broken off. That such a rod is forked also resonates with symbolic Jewish associations of deceit, as exemplified by the forked tongue of the liar and the serpent. So does one of the names by which a divining rod is also known: ‘‘Moses’ rod.’’ Just as (un)revealing is Arnim’s choice of adjective to indicate the ‘‘disguised’’: verkappte. The word derives from Kappe (cap or hood), which not only recalls Levin Varnhagen’s identification with ‘‘Rotka¨ppchen,’’ but is also a synonym for the foreskin (Vorhaut). Moreover, the German kappen means to cut, clip, or cap, such as may be done to the top of a tree; both biblically and horticulturally this practice is usually referred to in German as Beschneidung.

The Circumcision of Rahel (Levin) Varnhagen In the years that followed her 1806 letter to her brother, Levin Varnhagen sought many ways to cover ‘‘the nakedness of Jewishness’’: through name changes, baptism, and intermarriage.61 But on her death bed, as her husband reported in the first volume of his Buch des Andenkens, she confessed: ‘‘What for most of my life was to me the greatest shame, the bitterest misery and misfortune—having been born a Jewess—I would not now have missed for any price.’’62 Where Levin Varnhagen had ended, Hannah Arendt would begin. At the time Arendt began writing her biography, Levin Varnhagen and the other Berlin salonnie`res had been lumped together and officially exiled from Jewish history.63 As the great nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz summed it up: ‘‘These talented but sinful Jewish women [ju¨dischen Su¨nderinnen] did Judentum a service by becoming Christians.’’64 In large part, Arendt held Levin Varnhagen’s Gentile husband and executor of her writings, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, responsible for this portrait. The problem was less what he had epispasmicly added on than what he had cut off. In the three-volume Buch des Andenkens, among his selection of her written remains by which he would fix her identification for those who would have no personal memory of her, ‘‘mutilations are frequent,’’ Arendt notes. She continues, ‘‘The significant fact is that almost all his omissions and misleading codings of names were intended to

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make Rahel’s associations and circle of friends appear less Jewish.’’ Consequently, her deathbed words, which her editor-widower had included, would initiate her restoration to collective Jewish memory and contribute ‘‘to the history of German Jews.’’65 In order to kosher Levin Varnhagen’s return, however, Arendt had to perform a circumcision of her own: for that acknowledgment of Jewish origin was not Levin Varnhagen’s absolutely last word. She continued— although Arendt did not—‘‘Dear August, my heart is refreshed in its innermost depths; I thought of Jesus and cried over his passion. I have felt for the first time in my life, that he is my brother. And Mary, how she must have suffered! She witnessed the pain of her beloved son, and did not succumb, but kept standing at the cross! I could not have been able to do that; I would not have been strong enough. May God forgive me, I confess how weak I am.’’66 Ironically, in order to inscribe a Jewish identification on her biographical subject, the historian Arendt had to reproduce on the corpus of Levin Varnhagen’s work what that ‘‘German Jewess from the Romantic period’’ herself had repeatedly done: resort to the figure for male Jewish identity, circumcision, in order to describe how her birth had marked her as a Jewish woman. Thus, the irresolvable dilemma of Levin Varnhagen’s social situation led the assimilating Jewess Arendt, despite her own idealistic predilections, to assimilate German Gentile culture’s identification of Jewish character with the male, that is, circumcised, Jewish body.

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chapter 5

Going to ‘‘Alimentary’’ School Brotstudium, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the Dietetics of Antisemitism

Many historians of Jewish representation in the German philosophic tradition note Ludwig Feuerbach’s characterization of Judentum in his famous critique of religion, Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), in terms of utilism (der Utilismus), egoism (der Egoismus), instrumentalism, exclusive self-interest, and worldly materialism,1 especially because of its apparent influence on Marx’s essay ‘‘On the Jewish Question.’’2 A few, however, have also called attention to Feuerbach’s purported assertion that ‘‘[t]he Jews have an alimentary view of theology.’’3 Citing this passage,4 they have drawn conclusions about Feuerbach’s intention to demean Judentum from what is in fact George Eliot’s mistranslation of the German original, ‘‘der Israelite erhob sich nicht u¨ber das Brotstudium der Theologie.’’ A more denotatively accurate translation would be, ‘‘the Israelite did not rise above the exploitation of the study of theology in order to earn his bread.’’5 Consequently, Brotstudium confirms Feuerbach’s accusation of craven Jewish utilism; his statement describes Jews as reducing the sublime study of theology to the instrumental demands of material selfinterest.6 This chapter argues, however, that while Eliot missed the meat of the matter, she captured the aroma of Feuerbach’s stew of traditional derisive discourses on Jewish eating habits.7 One does not need to mistranslate, postulate a post-Christian trajectory,8 or neglect Feuerbach’s

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own revaluation of eating to recognize that Feuerbach is drawing upon other traditions. Jewish dietary practices, imagined and otherwise, have historically generated a number of largely negative reactions and tropes. Nor should Feuerbach’s complex of edible figures be surprising. Unlike the extensive discussion and analysis devoted to Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity and his anthropological materialism, Feuerbach’s later ‘‘Dietmaterialism’’9 has been marginalized, if not outright ignored.10 The Feuerbach who so influenced Marx by bringing the speculative dialectic from its transcendent perch down to earth by locating the working of the dialectic in the mystification, alienation, and objectification (or projection, Vergegensta¨ndlichung) of human sensibility and sensuousness is well known. Less well known is the thinker who shifted from seeing human interaction with the external world in the facultative terms of reason, will, and heart to seeing it in physiological terms such as digestion: the world is incorporated—digested—by the human and thereby transformed into human consciousness. In Feuerbach’s later work, ‘‘eating’’ (das Essen) replaces ‘‘love’’ (die Liebe)11 as the master trope of human species-being, of the relationship between body and mind, between self and other. Drawing on the insights of the Greeks before him, who defined animals, gods, and humanity (including peoples other than themselves) by what they ate—respectively raw food, ambrosia, and bread—Feuerbach would define the human by that fundamental physiological process and practice.12 Emblematic of this change was his punning coinage in 1850 of the apothegm, ‘‘You are what you eat’’ (‘‘Der Mensch ist, was er isst’’: literally, man is what he eats).13 Indeed, the anthropological critique of religion of Essence of Christianity so commands the reception of Feuerbach, especially among Anglophones, that his pithy phrase is often mistakenly ascribed to the French philosophical gourmand Anthe`lme Brillat-Savarin.14 Yet anticipating Feuerbach’s later writings, eating and food already play a significant role in Essence of Christianity, particularly in his discussion of Judentum. This chapter’s analysis of Feuerbach’s texts will demonstrate that presented with the rather unappetizing fact of Jews having ‘‘maintained their peculiarity [Eigentumlichkeit] to this day,’’15 Feuerbach then fed from an unsavory repast of past (and still present) Jewish representations, leaving in its wake his execrable, and anything but nostalgic,16 construction of a Judentum ruled by its stomach. Initially, I will set out several of the ingredients that went into this noisome recipe for Jewish identification. These include: 1) the notion of the Jewish stench, the foetor Judaicus that some Roman and later commentators associated with Jewish consumption of

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garlic and onions; 2) the pagan and Christian ascription of Jewish misanthropy and arrogant self-righteousness supposedly illustrated by their dietary laws, especially the prohibition on eating pork and the apparent lack of commensality that thereby ensued; and 3) accusations of Jewish ritual consumption of blood that were associated with the blood libel. Once this smorgasbord of anti-Jewish representations has been laid out, the chapter turns to Feuerbach’s discussions of Judentum within the context of his developing ‘‘Diet-materialism.’’

Onions, Garlic, and Leeks, Oh My! When I traveled to Passau, West Germany in 1977 to learn German, I rented a room in the house of a rather elderly couple. One day the hausfrau prepared an onion tart, and in the process of offering me a piece, she remarked: ‘‘Sie haben Zwiebeln gern, gell?’’ (You like onions, right?). I soon realized that this was her way of confirming that I was Jewish. Americans, she believed, did not like onions; for Jews, however, onions were supposedly a dietary staple. Onion consumption was a key sign of ethnic differentiation. Since before the turn of the eras, Jews have been associated with delight in the consumption of onions and other fragrant plants of the genus Allium, notably garlic and leeks. For example, in one of his Satires (3.292– 96), Juvenal stages the following encounter with a Jew: ‘‘Where are you from?’’ shouts he; ‘‘whose vinegar, whose beans have blown you out? With what cobbler have you been munching cut leeks and boiled wether’s chaps?—What sirrah, no answer? . . . Say where is your stand? In what prayer-house shall I find you?’’17

The noted nineteenth-century German ethnographer Richard Andree comments in Zur Volkskunde der Juden (On the Ethnography of the Jews; 1881) that the ancient Greeks and Romans—unlike contemporary Italians—hated garlic, and hence the odious ascription of an inherently foul odor may have become attached to those garlic eaters, the Jews.18 This culinary custom, he suggests, may well explain the locus classicus of the alleged Jewish stench (foetor Judaicus), Marcus Aurelius’s (in)famous comment on the ‘‘malodorous Jews’’ (foetentium Judaeorum) as reported by Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 22.5.5: ‘‘For Marcus [Aurelius], as he was passing through Palestine on his way to Egypt, being often disgusted with the malodorous and rebellious Jews, is reported to have cried with

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sorrow: O Marcomanni, O Quadi, O Sarmatians, at last I have found a people more unruly than you.’’19 In explicit contrast to such antisemitic polemicists as Andree’s contemporary Gustav Jaeger, who claimed that there were particular racial smells,20 the ethnographer writes that the probable origin of the fabled Jewish stench lies in the Jews’ ‘‘well-known preference for leeks and the like’’ (die bekannte Vorliebe nach Lauchspeisen).21 As evidence he cites Numbers 11:5, in which the wandering Israelites bemoan their diet of manna: ‘‘Remember how in Egypt we had . . . leeks and onions and garlic.’’ Andree continues with reference to talmudic and East European praises of garlic; the Mishnah, for example, advises the eating of garlic on Erev Shabbat (Friday evening). He could have added the testimony of the German-Jewish convert August Lewald from his 1836 autobiographical novel Memoiren eines Banquiers (Memoirs of a Banker). When preparing to attend a fancy dinner at a wealthy Jewish home with a number of prominent Christian guests, he anticipates ‘‘[w]hat faces those elegant ladies and gentlemen will make when they start to taste the food cooked in oriental manners, strongly spiced with garlic. . . . [T]he style of food [is] decidedly Old-Testament.’’22 Extensive use of garlic among medieval Jews is evident from Ashkenazic depictions of medieval Jewish couples with garlic as well as from recipes, such as a traditional French one for Passover chicken with forty cloves of garlic to represent the number of years the Jews spent in the desert. Moreover, the image of garlic represented the three leading centers of Jewish erudition in medieval Ashkenaz: Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. The first letter in each of these communities’ names formed an acronym, ShUM, which is the Hebrew word for garlic.23 The early-eighteenth-century compiler of mostly less-than-flattering Jewish oddities (Merkwu¨rdigkeiten), Johann Jakob Schudt, noted how the strong smell of garlic emanated from the homes of wealthy German Jews.24 Heinrich Heine provides an ironic romantic picture of such medieval Jewish dietary predilections in his prose fragment, The Rabbi of Bacharach, when the apostate Don Isaac Abarbanel comments, [M]y nose is not a renegade. When once, by chance I came at dinner time into this street, and the well known savoury odour of the Jewish kitchen rose to my nose, I was seized by the same yearning which our fathers felt when they remembered the fleshpots of Egypt. . . . I saw once more [in my mind] the steamed mutton with garlic and horseradish, fit to raise the dead.25

Garlic gravy also graced the meal of Leviathan that the thirteenth-century rabbis of Toledo promised the Franciscan friars in Heine’s poem ‘‘The

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Disputation.’’26 Heine too apparently shared such predilections—or at least was accused of them by his foe, the poet August Graf von Platen, who facetiously claimed to be Heine’s good friend, but ‘‘would not want to be his lover/since his kisses reek from garlic.’’27 Supporters of Jewish emancipation, such as the French liberal Abbe´ Gre´goire in his 1789 Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Reformation of the Jews, also sought to explain the contention that Jews exhale bad smells as an effect of diet. ‘‘Others ascribe these effects to the frequent use of herbs, such as onions and garlic, the smell of which is penetrating; and some to their eating the flesh of he-goats; while others pretend, that the flesh of geese, which they are remarkably fond of, renders them melancholy and livid, as this food abounds with viscous and gross juices.’’28 Others less kindly disposed toward Jews, such as Achim von Arnim, also noted the Jewish predilection for garlic. Arnim notes its reputed connection to the ‘‘interesting Jewish odor’’ (interessantes Judengeruch), but then offers other anecdotes that imply that the peculiar foetor of the Jews is no dietary accident: ‘‘It’s told that a lily is poisoned if it spends only one night in the bed of a Jewess; if this report is confirmed, then [the Jew’s] specific emanation cannot come from frequent consumption of leeks and the like, since lilies grow unharmed when they intimately share a garden bed with leeks.’’29 Late-nineteenth-century self-proclaimed antisemites regularly tied the Jews’ purported stench with their fondness for members of the leek family.30 For example, the widely disseminated ‘‘Song in Praise of Garlic’’ (‘‘Ehren- unn Lobleid oufn Knoblich’’) mockingly intones, ‘‘Garlic, garlic, bold herb/[you] strengthen your Jew’s heart and mind/and profits him with/the genuine, kosher Jewish stench.’’31 Glo¨ß also found an image of Jews buying garlic and onions (Zwiebeln) as the appropriate illustration of the letter Z in the eighth of his series of antisemitic posters, ‘‘Juden— ABC’’ (see Figure 5-1). Its caption reads, ‘‘No German would hold it against you, if you devoured your onions [Zwiebeln] in Zion.’’32

Pigs Wallowing in the Mud of Anti-Jewish Representation Alongside commentary on Jewish customary, if not prescribed, garlic consumption, speculations, implications, and accusations have also been drawn since before the Common Era about the Jewish prohibition against eating pork. This taboo fascinated ancient writers, who found it strange and unusual. They comment that transgressing the prohibition was what

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Figure 5-1. ‘‘No German would hold it against you, if you devoured your onions [Zwiebeln] in Zion.’’ From ‘‘Juden-ABC,’’ Politische Bilderbogen no. 8 (Dresden: Glo¨ß Verlag, 1893). Reprinted by permission of Staats- und Universita¨tsbibliothek Hamburg.

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Jews found most abhorrent. Juvenal (Satires 14.98–99) depicts a Godfearer for whom eating pork is comparable to cannibalism.33 A God-fearer was a Gentile synagogue sympathizer who was but a circumcision away from conversion, hence one who followed (virtually all) Jewish customs. Others, like the historian Tacitus, tie Jewish abstinence to the ‘‘recollection of a plague, for the scab to which this animal is subject, once afflicted them.’’34 Here Tacitus repeats the Hellenistic-Egyptian historian Manetho’s charge that the Jews were not liberated from Egypt but instead were expelled because they were dirty disease-bearers.35 The Jewish historian Josephus claims that the first-century c.e. Greek grammarian Apion denounces the Jews for not eating pork and therefore not partaking of civic sacrifices, hence failing to be good citizens, if not, in fact, being traitors.36 Thus the refusal to eat pork in part contributed to the millennialong belief that Jews would not be loyal to any Gentile government. Early-eighteenth-century German writers such as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, whose massive, widely read compendium of talmudic misquotes and history of alleged Jewish perfidy, Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Unmasked), would become the source book of anti-Jewish discourse for the next two centuries and a primary source for Feuerbach,37 also found the pork proscription fascinating. Eisenmenger reports that one of the many derogatory names by which Jews label Gentiles is ‘‘Pork Devourer’’ (Schweinenfleischfresser). Feuerbach notes in his major work of appetitive anthropology, ‘‘Das Geheimnis des Opfers, oder Der Mensch ist, was er ißt’’ (The Mystery of Sacrifice, or Man Is What He Eats), that Johann David Michaelis, the leading eighteenth-century scholar of ancient Israelite religion, cites in his major work Mosaisches Recht (Mosaic Law) this particular label from Eisenmenger as illustrative of the contempt with which Jews hold Christians.38 An assumption shared by some was that the proscription was so significant to Judentum’s separation from its neighbors that if the Jews would begin to eat pork, they would become like any other nation and thus no longer hate humanity. A widely disseminated Christian legend also arose to explain why Jews abstain from pork. According to the tale the Jews once tested Jesus’ omniscience by hiding a Jewish mother and her children in a pigsty (one of several variants on the hiding place). They asked him what lay hidden. When Jesus responded, ‘‘A woman with children,’’ his examiners mockingly retorted with the lie that only a sow and her piglets were wallowing there. Jesus then proclaimed, ‘‘If so, let them be sow and piglets,’’ and they were transformed. The conclusion drawn is that Jews abstain from pork for fear of engaging in cannibalism by eating a descendant of their fellow

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(transformed) Jews. Claudine Fabre-Vassas suggests another set of associations of Jews and pigs, surrounding not only the important role played by pigs in the rural diet, but also surrounding the action necessarily performed on pigs to ensure their growth and profitability: castration. Castration is as determinative of the pig as circumcision is of the (male) Jew.39 The anti-Jewish iconography of the Judensau, the Jewish sow or pig (and its insulting verbal counterpart Saujude—Jew pig or dirty Jew) that was displayed throughout German lands, may also have reflected this preoccupation with the kosher proscription on eating pork. By the dreamlogic that informs so much stereotype, the Jews were inextricably associated with pigs precisely because of this proscription. Isaiah Shachar in his monograph devoted to the Judensau places great emphasis on another site as the most likely source for this motif: Magnentius Hrabanus Maurus’s ninth-century popular encyclopedia De rerum naturis (On the Nature of Things), usually known as De universo, that formed the basis of many medieval bestiaries. Hrabanus’s discussion of the pig draws on an errant translation of Psalm 17:14 that appeared in the Psalm commentaries of Saint Augustine and Cassiodorus Senator: The pig similarly signifies the unclean and the sinners of whom it is written in the Psalm: ‘‘Their belly is full with your hid (things). They are sated with swine’s flesh [reading ‘Saturati sunt porcini’ rather than ‘saturati sunt filiis’—sated with sons—that both the Hebrew original and the Vulgate’s Latin translation dictate] and they leave what is superfluous to them for their children.’’ He [the Psalmist] says the Jews [are full] of unclean [things] which are hidden by the Lord, that is things which are known to be prohibited. By swine’s flesh he means polluted things which are named unclean among other precepts of the Old Testament. They [the Jews] transmitted however the remnant of their sins to their sons when they exclaimed: ‘‘His blood be on us and on our children’’ (Math. 27:25).40

Here Hrabanus draws the syllogism-like conclusion that, since swine symbolize the unclean and sinners, and since Jews are unclean and sinners, therefore swine can also symbolize Jews. The Judensau traveled from cathedral carving to anti-Jewish broadsheet to nineteenth-century caricatures of the signs of Jewish emancipation that had Jews feasting on pigs (see Figure 5-2).41 As detailed in chapter 2, another noteworthy image appears in one of the best-known prose pieces by famed German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, his 1783 parody of Lavater and the physiognomists, ‘‘Fragment von Schwa¨nzen’’ (On Tails). In sum, from fast to feast to the object of feasting, Jews and their abstinence from pork sparked the Gentile imagination.

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Figure 5-2. Judensau. Woodcut; late (c. 1700) print from a German fifteenth-century block. From Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau, plate 30.

The Lack of Commensality The accusation of Jewish misanthropy (misanthopia/misoxena nomina) that was related above to the proscription on the consumption of pork found yet more grounding in classical authors’ discussions of the Jews’ apparent lack of commensality. Sharing meals was a primary form of sociality in the ancient Mediterranean world. The community formed by strangers breaking bread together exemplified the guest-host relationship that mediated the potentially contentious relationship between self and other. To refuse to eat with another was perceived as an act of disrespect and contempt. Tacitus, for example, comments, ‘‘The Jews are extremely loyal toward one another, and always ready to show compassion, but toward every other people they feel only hate and enmity.’’ That the Jews ‘‘sit apart at meals’’ exemplifies his assertion.42 Eisenmenger devoted a chapter of his work to this traditional charge.43 The ethnographer Andree turns to Jewish dietary customs and how they have separated the Jews from other people after concluding that religious differences are an insufficient explanation for the widespread hatred of Jews. He begins his examination of this possible source of antisemitism by citing Heinrich Graetz’s classic History of the Jews. Graetz wrote,

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The withdrawal of the Judaeans [Juden] from the repasts enjoyed in common by their fellow-citizens, . . . their abhorence of the flesh of swine, and their abstinence from warm food on the Sabbath, were considered to be the outcome of a perverse nature, whilst their keeping aloof from intimate intercourse with any but their own coreligionists was deemed a proof of their enmity towards mankind in general.44

Andree also calls upon Isaak Markus Jost, whose history of the Jews Graetz superseded; Jost saw a proactive stance in keeping kosher. He comments that Jewish dietary proscriptions were ‘‘a powerful means by which the chosen people separated themselves from the surrounding heathens.’’45 Andree in his ethnography elaborates further on Jost’s and Graetz’s particular accounts by noting that ‘‘those who are not permitted to eat and drink together can also never befriend one another.’’ With reference as well to the uproar in the Jerusalem Church over Peter’s sitting at table with the uncircumcised (Acts 11:3) and to Shylock’s rebuff of Bassanio’s offer to dine, ‘‘I will not eat with you, drink with you’’ (Merchant of Venice 1.3), Andree concludes that such practices of separation can lead to arrogance and to viewing others as unclean. Correspondingly, not partaking of the meals and festivals of the Greeks and Romans led to the perception of the Jews as ‘‘a foreign element.’’ Thus the attitudes generated by Jewish eating practices provide, for Andree, the necessary supplement to any theory of antisemitism’s origins.46 This lack of commensality also figured prominently in arguments against Jewish emancipation. In response to the 1781 brief for initiating ¨ ber die bu¨rgerliche Verbesthe process of emancipation for Prussian Jewry, U serung der Juden (Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews) by Prussian court official Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, the biblical scholar Michaelis wrote: The purpose of the Law is to maintain the Jews as a people almost completely separate from other peoples, and this purpose is an integral part of all the laws, down to those concerning kosher and non-kosher food, with the result that the Jews have lived as a separate group during 1700 years of dispersion. As long as the Jews continue to observe the Mosaic Laws, as long as they refuse[,] for example, to eat together with us and to form sincere friendship at the table, they will never become fully integrated in the way that Catholics, Lutherans, Germans, Wends, and French live together in one state. (I am not discussing isolated cases, but rather the Jews as a collective entity.)47

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Blutwu¨rst and Worse The alleged Jewish dietary practice that may have most influenced Feuerbach’s depiction of Judentum, however, was the blood libel. This accusation held that Jews undertook the ritual murder of Christian children in order to secure the human blood necessary for the baking of matzah, among other culinary, ritual, and medical purposes. Although Jews had been accused of ritual murder of Christian children in the past, most notably the 1144 murder of William of Norwich (England), the blood libel proper emerged in the German town of Fulda in 1235. Accusations in German lands peaked in the late fifteenth century, but the blood libel continued to be invoked into the nineteenth century, especially in Eastern Europe. Eisenmenger devotes a chapter of his anti-Jewish encyclopedia Entdecktes Judenthum to the question of whether Jews are allowed to kill Christians. When taking up the issue, Eisenmenger does include arguments from Jewish converts as well as from Jewish texts that the charges of ritual murder are false; these include the Jewish view that blood is unclean and that all blood must be drained from meat when prepared for human consumption. Eisenmenger nonetheless lists a number of instances of the libel and concludes that since some reputable (wackeren) authorities claim that Jews need Christian blood—mostly on Easter—one can suppose that there is some truth to it.48 The 1840 Damascus Affair, the arrest and torture of fourteen Syrian Jews on the charge of ritually murdering a Catholic priest that resonated throughout European political and cultural life, played a prominent role in at least the second edition of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. Among the consequences of that particular libel was its role in instigating Feuerbach’s friend Georg Friedrich Daumer to extend his speculations about an ancient Israelite human sacrificial cult of Moloch/Jehovah to the contemporary blood libel accusations. In a January 1842 letter to Feuerbach he describes his forthcoming book, Der Feuer- und Molochdienst der alten Hebra¨er (The Fire and Moloch Cult of the Ancient Hebrews), with its discussion of Jewish blood consumption. In a postscript to that letter Daumer advises Feuerbach to read the even more vicious attack on Judentum by Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebra¨er (The Human Sacrifices of the Ancient Hebrews), as well as Eisenmenger’s notorious treatise.49 Daumer’s letter a year later (January 1843) elaborates on where his studies were taking him. While his first work focused on the Moloch cultus and its alleged identity with the cultus of the Hebrew deity Jehovah, it did suggest that, according to the accounts of several Jewish

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converts, the spirit of human sacrifice continued among the Jews; Daumer thereby tied the Damascus and other blood libels to the ancient cult. And in this later letter the suggestions of the earlier text are rendered explicit. Jews of all stripes—Karaites, followers of rabbinic/talmudic traditions, the Sabbatean sect of Frankists, and the Hasidim—engage in such bloody mysteries. He asserts, ‘‘[T]he Jews slaughter their own children and the children of other groups.’’ Then he describes Purim or ‘‘the Festival of Haman’’ as, at least into the medieval period, a wine-pressing festival; that is, ‘‘the Jews would stick people in winepresses and drink the pressed-out blood as holiday wine.’’50 The second edition of Essence of Christianity (EC) testifies to Feuerbach’s having heeded his friend’s advice. Although the original publication of the work (1841) and its determination of religion as anthropology, of human species-being as the foundation of religion and therefore of meaning and value, had been celebrated by his peers, Feuerbach reissued the work in 1843, having made a substantial number of changes. In particular, his text has acquired a significant anti-Jewish tone, to which he immediately alludes in a newly appended preface. Feuerbach concludes this new preface with a delineation of his approach in contradistinction to that of others. He references the work of Daumer and Ghillany51 as exemplifying ‘‘a merely historical analysis of Christianity,’’ whereas he is undertaking ‘‘an historico-philosophical analysis’’ (EC xxi). Feuerbach continues, The historical critic—such a one, for example, as Daumer or Ghillany— shows that the Lord’s supper is a rite lineally descended from the ancient cultus of human sacrifice; that once, instead of bread and wine, real human flesh and blood were partaken. I, on the contrary, take as the object of my analysis and reduction only the Christian significance of the rite, that view of it which is sanctioned in Christianity and . . . that significance . . . is also the true origin of that dogma or institution in so far as it is Christian. (EC xxi)

He is not disavowing the conclusions of those writers, that not only had the ancient Israelites practiced human sacrifice but that the practice had not been completely discontinued—quite the opposite. Feuerbach is simply doing something else with the information: finding corroborating evidence of his anthropological critique of religion. His choice of example of a merely historical analysis anticipates the classic site of the historicalphilosophic difference between Christianity and Judentum: the role of food. Feuerbach concludes his introduction (and opening two chapters) with a newly added contrast between the Christian and ‘‘Israelitish’’ religion. ‘‘In relation to the Israelitish religion the Christian religion is one

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of criticism and freedom. The Israelite trusted himself to do nothing except what was commanded by God; he was without will even in external things; the authority of religion extended itself even to his food’’ (EC 32).

They Eat, Therefore They Are In the first edition of Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach had remained true to his second chapter’s title: ‘‘The Essence of Religion, Considered Generally’’ (emphasis added). The original introduction had concluded with the figure of the perpetual systole and diastole of the human circulation system as a metaphor for the process that constitutes religion. ‘‘In the religious systole man propels his own nature from himself, he throws himself outward; in the religious diastole he receives the rejected nature into his heart again’’ (EC 31). The latter, perceived as the actions of Gd in, with, through, and upon the individual, is the principle of salvation and the source of religion’s attraction. In the second edition, Feuerbach adds a concluding correlative contrast between external- and internal-oriented religions, respectively exemplified by food in Judaism and freedom in Christianity. When discussing the essence of the Jews and their religion, as he did in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the first (and every subsequent) edition, Feuerbach had employed the terms Judentum and ju¨dische Religion. By contrast, when his primary focus in the first edition had been on the religious practices of the Hebrews or Israelites of the Bible (that is, of a particular historical community) he also employed Israeliten. When he revised and supplemented his introduction, however, the ‘‘israelitische’’ (following the German of the second edition) and not the ju¨dische Religion is contrasted with the christliche, the Israelit with the Christ. That his use of Israelit- here reflected his recent reading of the works of Eisenmenger, Daumer, and Ghillany, and therefore identified contemporary Jewry and Judentum with preserving the supposedly more primitive and blood-thirsty spirit of their ancestors, is indicated by a section added to the second edition’s appendices (§10): ‘‘Even the later Israelites, scattered throughout the world, persecuted and oppressed, adhered with immovable firmness to the egoistic faith of their forefathers’’ (EC 298; emphasis added). Feuerbach would omit this passage, like other tainted passages, from his third edition. The primacy given to food and eating in Feuerbach’s belittling determination of Judentum is anticipated in another, also somewhat incongruous, addition to the second edition’s introduction. When discussing the

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nature of religious sacrifice, as specifically manifested in the Virgin Mary and the Christian ascetics’ renunciation of sensuality, Feuerbach inserts a discussion that shifts the emphasis from the sacrifice to the value of what is sacrificed. ‘‘For whatever is made an offering to God has an especial value attached to it. . . . That which is the highest in the estimation of man is naturally the highest in the estimation of his God.’’ He shifts the emphasis from love to food—‘‘The Hebrew did not offer to Jehovah unclean, illconditioned animals; on the contrary, those which they most highly prized, which they themselves ate, were also the food of God’’ (EC 26)— before continuing with his discussion of ‘‘the heavenly virgin’’ (EC 27). The importance Jews allegedly ascribe to food and eating constitutes a significant part of Feuerbach’s only chapter exclusively devoted to Judentum in Essence, chapter 11, ‘‘The Significance of the Creation in Judaism [Judentum].’’ It is in this chapter that Judentum’s relation to nature—that is, rendering nature ‘‘the servant to his will and needs’’ (EC 112)— becomes the index of Jewish egoism. Paradigmatic of the Jewish relation to nature is eating. Feuerbach’s extended discussion of Jews and food consists of a string of witticisms and wordplays—it is one of the rare passages outside the introduction in which Feuerbach exercises his sardonic wit—at their expense. In contrast to the Greek audiovisual contemplation of nature, ‘‘the Israelites . . . opened only the gastric sense’’ (EC 114). Feuerbach’s comments then become even more biting: ‘‘[T]heir taste for nature lay only in the palate; their consciousness of God in eating manna’’ (EC 114). Following this comment, Feuerbach inserts a passage that in the new edition is all that remains of what had originally been but the beginning of an extended contrast between the humane, philosophic Greeks and the calculating, profit-oriented Jews, between the idealistic and the instrumental, that had followed the discussion of eating. ‘‘The Greek addicted himself to polite studies, to the fine arts, to philosophy; the Israelite did not rise above the alimentary view [Brotstudium] of theology’’ (EC 114). This reorganization, which grouped together the foodrelated passages, may have led George Eliot to her apparently inaccurate translation, since the retention of the phrasing helped sustain the derisive joke. After two food-related biblical citations (Exodus 16:12 and Genesis 28:20), Feuerbach declares, ‘‘Eating is the most solemn [feierlichsten] act or the initiation of the Jewish religion’’ (EC 114). Yet in sync with the tone of the passage, Feuerbach ultimately inverts the statement and renders it a profane joke: ‘‘Thus with them what the sight of the Supreme Being heightened was the appetite for food’’ (EC 114).

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Feuerbach does employ the dietary trope one other time in the chapter. This passage, obscured by Eliot’s translation, may also have a more malevolent significance than the mere repetition of a leitmotif. Feuerbach states, ‘‘Men used to suppose that insects, vermin [Ungeziefer], sprang from carrion and other rubbish’’ (EC 115). Where Eliot finds this ‘‘so uninviting a source,’’ Feuerbach finds a source that is so unappetizing [unappetitlichen]. The reference to Jews as vermin, Ungeziefer, had already become part of the menagerie of anti-Jewish representations.52 Hence, two babbling brooks of anti-Jewish discourse converge on this passage.

Communing with Consumption: Transformation or Merely Symbolic Not only would it appear that the belittling and derogatory tone that Feuerbach employs when he discusses the Jewish relationship to food is belied by his later work; it is also in seeming contradiction with Essence’s ‘‘Concluding Application.’’ The last paragraph of this last chapter commences with the statement, ‘‘Eating and drinking is the mystery [i.e., the underlying meaning and source] of the Lord’s Supper;—eating and drinking is, in fact, in itself a religious act; at least, ought to be so’’ (EC 277). After a litany of ritual-like proscriptions regarding bread and wine (‘‘Forget not . . .’’), Feuerbach situates his audience in a position that he himself seemed to have assumed when discussing Jewish dietary practices. And if thou art inclined to smile that I call eating and drinking religious acts, because they are common everyday acts, and are therefore performed by multitudes without thought, without emotion; reflect, that the Lord’s Supper is to multitudes a thoughtless, emotionless act, because it takes place often; for the sake of comprehending the religious significance of bread and wine, place thyself in a position where the daily act is unnaturally, violently interrupted. (EC 277)

He culminates his treatise with a (mocking?) paean to the religious import of these common acts of eating and drinking: ‘‘Therefore let bread be sacred for us, let wine be sacred, and also let water be sacred. Amen’’ (EC 278). What then is one to make of his earlier comments on Judentum? Since the ‘‘Concluding Application’’ had already appeared in the first edition, can one argue that he had not fully integrated systematically all of the additions to the second edition? Quite possibly. As noted above, a number of factors had led to the inclusion of the anti-Jewish passages in the second

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edition; most important were his readings of the work of his friend Daumer and those works suggested by him: those of Ghillany and Eisenmenger. The residual uproar over the Damascus Blood Libel as well as the reemerging debates over Jewish emancipation in liberal circles, the events that had catalyzed Daumer’s and Ghillany’s writings, may have also affected Feuerbach’s initially positive reception of their claims about human sacrifice among the ancient Israelites and its possible continuation to contemporary times. The tradition of dietary antisemitism discussed above would only have reinforced his conclusions. Between the appearance of the second and third editions, however, Feuerbach continued his research into the history of religious development. During this research Feuerbach encountered substantive critiques of Daumer’s and Ghillany’s writings in such works as Ca¨sar von Lengerke’s Kena´an (1844) and Ernst Heinrich Meier’s Urspru¨ngliche Form des Dekalogs (Original Form of the Decalogue; 1846); the latter in particular suggested as well that Feuerbach needed to evaluate the Hebrews’ relationship to nature more positively.53 Perhaps most decisive was his change in attitude toward his onetime friend Daumer. In 1844 Daumer published an attack on Feuerbach’s anthropologism, calling it ‘‘crazy’’ (im Zustande der Verru¨cktheit).54 Feuerbach expressed his displeasure with this ‘‘infamous’’ work in a letter to his brother Friedrich (8 December 1844); he described Daumer as a vain, vindictive, and small-minded obscurantist.55 As reflected in Feuerbach’s 1846 essay ‘‘The Essence of Religion’’ and its expansion in his 1848 Lectures on the Essence of Religion, this additional reading material also led to a reevaluation of the significance of sacrifice. Rather than a sign of the alienation, indeed of the negation of human species-being, sacrifice became viewed as an act of appeasement to and reconciliation with nature after the community had appropriated and consumed its fruits. Consequently, his initial afterthoughts on the value of eating and drinking, as reflected in his ‘‘Concluding Application,’’ became more central. Discussion of Jews and Judentum is all but absent, however; unlike in the Essence of Christianity, no mention of either appears in the discussion of creation.

To Coin a Phrase Although Feuerbach makes reference to a number of different groups— from the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa through the Greeks and Romans to the Christians and rationalists—in his 1847 essay

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‘‘Die Unsterblichkeitsfrage vom Standpunkt der Anthropologie’’ (The Question of Immortality from the Standpoint of Anthropology), an examination of why ‘‘all people believe in immortality,’’56 Jews and Judentum are similarly absent from the discussion. While the common but erroneous assumption that Jews do not have a belief in life after death may have created complications for his argument and therefore led to this omission, the essay also marks the first appearance in any form of his celebrated apothegm. In this call for directing human attention to the fulfillment of this-worldly existence, Feuerbach poses the question: ‘‘Is what man is independent from what he eats?’’ (‘‘Ist das, was der Mensch ist, unabha¨ngig von dem, was er ißt?’’).57 Feuerbach answers his question negatively when he unveils his alimentary materialism in ‘‘Die Naturwissenschaft und die Revolution’’ (The Natural Sciences and Revolution), his 1850 review of Jacob Moleschott’s Lehre der Nahrungsmittel (Theory of Nutrition). Feuerbach hoped with this new emphasis to continue the project he had begun with the ‘‘often castigated’’58 Essence of Christianity, namely, undermining the political and religious presuppositions of the nation-state through the replacement of the deity by diet. As Feuerbach facetiously remarks at the beginning of his review, the state, ironically, fails to censor that which is most subversive to arbitrary social divisions: the natural sciences and their universality. ‘‘Aristocratic and bourgeois stomachs are not different.’’59 Food and its consumption actualize his monistic speculations. ‘‘Food (Nahrung) alone is substance, the identity of spirit and nature . . . is the Spinozistic Hen kai pan (One and All). . . . Being is one with eating, to be means to eat.’’ With the exception of this allusion to Spinoza, however, reference to Judentum is, in light of the earlier characterizations, again surprisingly absent. Feuerbach is not only rendering philosophy in material terms, he is also calling for the materialization of this new philosophy. ‘‘A humane diet is the foundation of human development and disposition. Want to better the people, then give them better food instead of declaiming against sin.’’ It is at this junction of his own declamations that Feuerbach provides his punning apothegm, in what would be its most notorious form: ‘‘Der Mensch ist, was er ißt’’—‘‘You are what you eat.’’60 Feuerbach would continue his exploration of the political, religious, and epistemological implications of his ‘‘Diet-materialism’’ in ‘‘Das Geheimnis des Opfers, oder Der Mensch ist, was er ißt’’ (The Secret of Sacrifice, or Man Is What He Eats), which he first published in the 1866 edition of his collected works. While relishing the outrage directed at him because of his association with the anthropological and ontological claims made by

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his ‘‘scurrilous’’ saying, Feuerbach proceeds to analyze the most fundamental religious act: sacrifice. He defines sacrifice not in the ascetic terms of the Essence of Christianity but in culinary terms: sacrifice is about feeding the gods (Opfern heißt die Go¨tter speisen). Here the unity of ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘You’’ (Ich und Du) that constituted the essence of religion as well as the highest and ultimate principle of Feuerbach’s ‘‘Philosophy of the Future’’ (1843) is founded upon eating and drinking. These common practices ‘‘not only hold body and soul together, but also God and humanity, and I and You.’’61 Unlike in much of the work Feuerbach wrote during the last twentyfive years of his life, whether addressing eating or not, whether venerating egoism or not, Judentum is more than merely mentioned here. While he notes that Michaelis argued that Jewish dietary laws had led to bloody conflicts and Eisenmenger commented that by calling Christians ‘‘Pork Devourers’’ Jews expressed their contempt for them, Feuerbach also seems to go out of his way to separate the Hebrews from blood consumption, whether that of humans or of animals. But he also employs the Jews as a negative example of the fundamental import of commensality: ‘‘were not the Jews ridiculed and hated by the heathen because they (i.e., the Jews) scorned the foods that they, the heathens, loved[?]’’ He then pairs a line from an early-fifth-century c.e. poem by Rutilius Namantianus that describes a Jew as ‘‘a creature that quarrels with sound human food’’ with a passage from Synesius, a roughly contemporaneous Christian neo-Platonist, about the holiness of the table, ‘‘because upon it God honors love and hospitality.’’62 After this juxtaposition Feuerbach undertakes a series of inversions that betray another side to his apothegm. ‘‘Is not the opposite [of Synesius’s sentiments] the case, that the God of hatred and enmity is worshipped where commensality is annulled?’’ He follows up this question with another: ‘‘Who does not eat what we eat, is he also not what we are?’’63 The virtual absence of discussion of Judentum in Feuerbach’s later work may reflect how, once eating became the master trope and egoism positively reevaluated,64 his earlier condemnation of Judentum on these grounds would have been harder to assert. When the occasion arises, however, along with Feuerbach’s sardonicism and delight in the chiasmatic, Judentum as figure returns to provide the antipode of whatever is the object of his analysis. Where Judentum is the originary inversion of Christianity in Essence of Christianity, so in this late work the persistence of Judentum and its alleged refusal of commensality allows him to represent

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the social negation of as well as provide confirmation for his anthropological and ontological claim, ‘‘you are what you eat.’’ In effect, his ‘‘Dietmaterialism’’ with its dialectics of eating ultimately reproduces the tasteless history of the dietetics of antisemitism that was already served up in Essence of Christianity. The next chapter samples how Feuerbach’s onetime disciple Karl Marx found other means to incorporate the matter of Judentum into his analysis of material social relations and the human condition.

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In the first medical treatise on work-related ailments, the 1699/1713 De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (On the Diseases of Artificers), Bernardino Ramazzini, a professor of practical medicine at the University of Padua, devotes a chapter to the ‘‘Diseases of the Jews.’’ They are the only nonoccupationally defined group to whom Ramazzini allots one of his 43 chapters. Though he describes Jewry as without ‘‘parallel upon the Face of the Earth,’’ Ramazzini, in a move perhaps no less unique for the time, writes: ‘‘However, this unaccountable Nation is liable to various Diseases, which are owing not to their Extraction, as the Vulgar think, nor yet to their Way of Feeding, but to the Arts and Trades which they practice.’’ Even that most pervasive of allegations, that the Jews possess a ‘‘natural and national Stink,’’ is, according to Ramazzini, ‘‘falsely ascribed to the Jews.’’1 He then begins to detail their trades and occupations. ‘‘Sewing and fitting up old Cloths is an imployment they always follow.’’2 After describing the effects that a lifetime of sewing has on the eyes of Jewish women, he notes, ‘‘As for the Men, they either sit in their Shops all Day long patching up their old Rags, or stand waiting to catch Customers.’’ He describes them as ‘‘generally scabby; for there are but few, even of the richer Jews, who have not some Tincture of the Itch.’’ We’ve already encountered this ailment, the Kra¨tze, in the discussion of Judenzopf in

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chapter 2. And like others before and since, Ramazzini ties its endemic appearance to the skin-related diseases traditionally associated with Jewry: he refers to ‘‘the Elephantiasis which was formerly so familiar to their Nation.’’3 He then accounts for another disease frequently associated with Jewry, consumption.4 Jews, especially in his native Italy, mend old flock beds by ‘‘beating and working this old Wool which has been so often bepissed and dawbed with Filth,’’ during which they ‘‘suck in at the Mouth a great deal of nasty Dust.’’ Their lung ailment is a consequence of the inhaled ‘‘Impurities of People’s Bodies [that] lodge in’’ the old mattresses.5 Eventually Ramazzini describes the occupational source of the Jews’ ‘‘ugly Stench’’:6 their role in the production of writing paper out of old linen and canvas rags. This ‘‘covetous People (the Jews) have a Custom of crying these Rags up and down the Streets, and so buy them up at a small Purchase, till they have picked up great Heaps’’ that are initially stored in the rag collectors’ shops and warehouses before they are ‘‘sold to the Paper Merchants.’’ The good physician concludes this chapter as he does his other ones with suggested remedies to relieve the illnesses of those ‘‘imployed in gathering old Rags and cleansing Beds.’’7 Not surprisingly, Karl Marx invokes Ramazzini in Capital/Das Kapital (C/K) when he describes how the capitalist character of manufacturing, as it ‘‘attacks the individual at the very roots [Lebenswurzel] of his life . . . provid[ing] the materials and the impetus for industrial pathology’’ (C 484 and n. 50/K 384 and n. 73), ‘‘mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself’’ (zum Teilarbeiter verstu¨mmelt; C 482/K 382). Such ‘‘crippling of body and mind’’ is inflicted upon those whom the division of labor ‘‘peculiar’’ (eigentu¨mlich[en]; C 484/K 384) to capitalism had already ‘‘brand[ed]’’ (brandmarkt) as the ‘‘property of capital’’ (Eigentum des Kapitals; C 482/K 382). In one of his few direct allusions to Judentum in his masterwork, Marx compares the worker who has been so stamped (dru¨ckt . . . einen Stempel auf ) to the ‘‘chosen people [who] bore in their features [auf der Stirn geschrieben stand] the sign that they were the property of Jehovah’’ (ibid.). When questions—or more frequently assertions—about Marx’s Jewish identification are posed, however, the first place to which both scholars and lay readers turn is not Capital but rather his two-part article ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’/‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’(JQ/ZJ) that appeared over twenty years earlier. ‘‘On the Jewish Question,’’ published in the one and only number of the 1844 Franco-German Yearbook Marx coedited with Arnold Ruge, is in part a critique of the Critical Critic Bruno Bauer’s pamphlet Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question) and its follow-up, ‘‘Die Fa¨higkeit

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der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden’’ (The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free), and, in part, an apparent contribution on ‘‘the Jewish Question’’8 from a ‘‘different point of view,’’ and already envisioned a year earlier.9 In his article, Marx seems to have reduced Judentum to a range of crass and common anti-Jewish stereotypes. Hence, in a work that claims to ‘‘consider the actual, worldly [wirklichen weltlichen] Jew—not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew’’ (Alltagsjuden; JQ 236/ZJ 372)—Marx clearly belies his own actual personal encounters with Jewish-identified individuals and demonstrates a general lack of Jewish knowledge. His essay’s vilification of Judentum—at times, especially in the second part, surpassing in nastiness Bauer’s blatantly antiJewish original—when amplified by its later appropriation and use in Socialist and Communist circles and then combined with Marx’s frequent defamatory references to Jews qua Jews in his correspondence and in a few, primarily journalistic, pieces throughout his career, has generated a small cottage industry of speculation about his ‘‘Jewish self-hatred’’ and the potentially genocidal implications of his comments.10 It also has produced its share of apologists. For some, Marx’s hyperbolic representations demonstrate his ‘‘merely’’ metaphoric employment of the term Judentum (or the tautological variant that Judentum was synonymous in everyday speech with civil society [bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft] or commerce); for others, Marx was a child of his time who merely reproduced contemporary usage.11 These psychologizing, rhetorical, and historicizing arguments are not, of course, mutually incompatible. Nor do they, taken together, provide an adequate picture of the role of Judentum in the writings of this descendent on both his mother’s and father’s side of several generations of rabbis who, though registered as Jewish at birth, was baptized with his fellow siblings (and mother) in 1824 at age six. (Restrictions on Jewish civil and economic life had been reinstituted with the transfer of the family’s native Trier from French to Prussian control in 1815. Marx’s jurist father Heinrich was confronted then with the choice of baptism or the loss of his current livelihood; he alone became a Lutheran in 1816. But the restrictions seemed there to stay, and he had concluded that the future prospects for his children, should they remain Jewish, were limited.) Positing Marx as but another in a long line of porte-paroles of an eternal antisemitism is as methodologically invalid and theoretically lazy as positing an unchanging, essential Judentum,12 as antisemites routinely do—but not only antisemites. Yet to adopt the position that the field of Jud- assumes a figurative function in Marx’s writing neither denies nor excuses antipathy toward

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‘‘the Jew’’ on the part either of Marx or of those readers of ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ who have found confirmation or legitimation of their attitudes in the essay. Rather than add another exhaustive mining of Marx’s notorious essay or engage in moral condemnation, this chapter attempts to excavate other sites that will show ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ as but one node in a network of texts. As I demonstrate throughout this volume, the role of Judentum in the construction of an author’s works cannot be limited to its explicit mentions. Moreover, those mentions cannot be dismissed, however grotesque they may appear, as mere ornamentation or historicized dross. Judentum is no more discrete in a text than it is in everyday life. This chapter will address Marx’s own Jewish question, or rather his response to the Other Jewish Question that confronted all Jewish-identified individuals. Marx’s mediation of his Jewish identification will be seen to manifest itself as less theological-political dictum than philological-structural irruption; how several key signifiers associated with Judentum play out in his writings during his lifetime will be surveyed. Specifically, attention will be directed to particular textual sites in which the sheer concentration of these signifiers suggests that something else may be going on. While emphasis will be placed on the fields generated by the morphemes Lump- (signifying both ‘‘rag’’ and ‘‘rogue’’) and to a lesser extent Verkehr- (with meanings ranging from ‘‘relations’’ and ‘‘commerce,’’ through ‘‘traffic’’ and ‘‘intercourse’’— whether economic, communicative, or sexual—to the ‘‘inverted’’ or ‘‘topsy-turvy’’), other such nodal points will include one we’ve just engaged: Brotstudium, as well as Stirn (forehead), Schacher (haggling), Fetisch, and various descriptors associated with beschnitten (circumcised), such as verstu¨mmelt (mutilated). The significance of these morphemes will emerge as the chapter examines particular moments of Jewish economic and criminal history as well as practices of Jewish representation with which Marx would likely have been familiar. It also examines the rivalry between Marx and Max Stirner as it was played out in The German Ideology, a work that, although not published until 1932, has come to have a major influence on subsequent Marxist thought and, more significantly, on understanding the shifts in Marx’s understanding of both the nature of civil society and the role of language. Risches—the Yiddish term that came into extensive use during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, denoting a ‘‘hostility [toward Jews] which was considered residual, habitual, almost natural and taken for granted’’13—will prove to be more than one of Marx’s psychological states; rather, as endemic to both the everyday life

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and the discourses of his time, it played a significant role in the construction of Marx’s work.

a brief note on marx as rhetorician and revisionist Marx first emerged as a writer among a group of similarly overeducated and underemployed young men who, as a consequence of very specific historical conditions—common reading and training as well as political and professional constraints and conventions—believed in the omnipotence of words. These university bokhers—often grouped together as the Young Hegelians—had anticipated pursuing one of the professions of the Word. One such traditional vocation, the theological or ministerial, was precluded because they believed that they had, individually and collectively, transcended theology through their investment in Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophies. A second option, assuming a university position, was not widely available because there were far fewer openings than university-trained candidates. Moreover, since these were state positions in self-proclaimed Christian states such as Prussia, the abandonment of Christianity by these young men—whether suspected or avowed— rendered their prospects for academic advancement so much fantasy.14 Fortunately, a third choice emerged as market phenomenon, public venue, and site of employment (if not of much income) during this period: journalism (Kritiker, Publizist, Redakteur, Schriftsteller).15 In each of these professions exchanging words was the primary form of identification and status assertion. These young men might author and authorize themselves as both individuals and universal exemplars by proffering new systems, but given the limited professional opportunities and lacking access to the public means of power, they drew upon the one medium they appeared to control—at least before the state censors took possession—language: The critical-polemical journalism of this period draws its life from the consciousness that it represents the public; its struggle for freedom of opinion appeals to the principle of the public sphere. And yet it cannot in practice achieve what it claims to. . . . Even the Hegelian left, which inscribes on its banners the transition from philosophical theory to political practice, moves within the frame of an academic discussion which, because of its abstract terminology, remains inaccessible to the broader public. If they believe themselves to be representing . . . the general public, this belief is based on the conviction that reason, unfolding itself in history, will attain its goal in any case.16

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Both producers and consumers of these works were all part of the same academically trained class. However, in the battles for hegemony among these marginalized intellectuals, parody and ridicule were often employed in order to render both their rivals and their opponents ludicrous.17 In the combination of effective rhetorical violence and a university-learned commitment to the ideal of a language that is adequate to the world, language was ontologized. During the years 1843–45, as Marx was weaning himself from belief in the omnipotence of words and the primacy of philosophy, and as he began to distinguish himself from his early mentors such as Bauer and Feuerbach as well as from such rivals as Ruge and Stirner, he came to recognize that ‘‘phrases’’ were less the ontological entities or spectral autocrats projected by his contemporaries and rivals than they were tactical weapons to subvert the apparent naturalness of surface phenomena and the authority of the powers that be. As Marx would later famously characterize commodities in Capital, phrases have the appearance of actuality; however, they too emerge under particular conditions. How does one demonstrate that the ‘‘phrases,’’ these apparent meanings, are also constructs? By undermining their claims to adequation and naturalness.

On ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ Drawing on the long tradition of economic antisemitic stereotype, in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ Marx defines the ‘‘everyday Jew’’ in terms of ‘‘self-interest’’ (Eigennutz), ‘‘egoism’’ (Egoismus), ‘‘practical need’’ (praktisches Bedu¨rfnis), ‘‘haggling’’ (Schacher), ‘‘[bill of] exchange’’ (Wechsel), and ‘‘money’’ (Geld); this figure incarnates the dissolvent and dissolute homo œconomicus of modern bourgeois civil society. Yet Marx was not alone among his contemporaries in drinking from this reservoir of negative Jewish representations. Obviously, he had before him Bauer’s work, which he both extensively cites and paraphrases (e.g., Marx’s ‘‘chimerical nationality [chima¨rische Nationalita¨t] of the Jew’’ [JQ 239/ZJ 375; cf. JQ 213/ZJ 348] refracts Bauer’s ‘‘people of chimera’’ [Volk der Chima¨re]).18 Around the same time that Marx was writing his critique of Bauer, the journalist Moses Hess—selfproclaimed communist and still-registered Jew—was preparing an article that he hoped would also appear in that initial issue of the Franco-German Yearbook: ‘‘On the Essence of Money.’’19 A number of scholars—both sympathizers and antagonists of Marx20 —have argued that there are enough similarities between the second part of Marx’s essay and Hess’s, especially

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when combined with Marx’s failure to include Hess’s essay in the Yearbook,21 to suggest that Marx plagiarized Hess, especially in his depiction of the apotheosis of money as the god of both the Jews and, in Hess’s terms, the ‘‘modern Jewish-Christian peddler-world’’ (Kra¨merwelt). With regard to the plagiarism charge: most pertinent to this study of Judentum-associated rhetoric is that Marx, not one shy to engage in grotesque description, does not employ Hess’s gruesome bestiary of blood suckers (Blutsauger), predatory animals (Raubtiere), and gold-wolves (Geldwo¨lfe). Nor does he, in contrast to Hess, invoke that most horrifying of representations of the Jewish deity that, as noted in the last chapter, was widely circulating at the time of Marx’s composition: Moloch. Nor does Marx employ Hess’s language of the peddler-world. The relationship of Feuerbach’s work to Marx’s essay is perhaps more interesting, since Marx had not yet made his intellectual break with the author of Essence of Christianity. The last chapter analyzed Feuerbach’s representation of Judentum in that work and noted how his characterization of Judentum in terms of egoism (der Egoismus), exclusive self-interest, and worldly materialism may have found its way into Marx’s essay. Marx appears to have borrowed Feuerbach’s marvelous chiasm, ‘‘Judaism is worldly Christianity [weltliche Christentum], Christianity spiritual Judaism [geistliche Judentum]’’ (EC 120), for the formulation ‘‘Christianity is the sublime thought [sublime Gedanke] of Judentum and Judentum is the vulgar application [gemeine Nutzanwendung] of Christianity’’ (JQ 240/ZJ 376). Moreover he seems to have also generated several variants, with extensions. Thus, to ‘‘The Christian was from the beginning the theorizing Jew. The Jew is therefore the practical Christian,’’ Marx adds, ‘‘and the practical Christian has once again become a Jew’’ (ibid.).22 Similarly, in the opening of his soon-to-be-written ‘‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction’’ that would also appear in the Franco-German Yearbook23—‘‘For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed. And the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism’’24 —Marx recognized both his debt to Feuerbach and the necessity of supplementing his mentor’s work. In both Yearbook essays Marx portends a balance of theory and praxis that he adjusts when he turns his critical pen to Feuerbach in The German Ideology/Die deutsche Ideologie (GI/DI)25 and ‘‘Theses on Feuerbach.’’ In the first of the eleven theses that compose the latter, Marx marks his difference with a telling phrase: ‘‘In The Essence of Christianity, [Feuerbach] therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of

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appearance [schmutzig-ju¨dischen Erscheinungsform].’’ Marx too in a way concedes this point with regard to his own earlier work. He states in German Ideology that German theory too was confronted with the question which [Feuerbach] left unanswered: how did it come about that people ‘‘got’’ these illusions ‘‘into their heads’’? Even for the German theoreticians this question paved the way to the materialistic view of the world, a view which is not without premises, but which empirically observes the actual material premises as such and for that reason is, for the first time, actually a critical view of the world. This path was already indicated in the Deutsch-Franzo¨sische Jahrbu¨cher—in the Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie and Zur Judenfrage.

He adds, however, ‘‘But . . . at that time this was done in philosophical phraseology’’ (GI 236/DI 217). I would argue that at that time— specifically in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’—Marx lacked a critical language that could characterize material conditions beyond their ‘‘form of appearance’’ as dirty-Jewish. In order to upend the primacy of thought and its representation as fons et origo of actuality, which in Germany took the appearance of state-legitimating religion and its recent avatars (Hegelian idealism, Bauerian Critical Criticism, and, as Marx would soon claim, Feuerbachian anthropology), and assert the fundamental role of material social relations in the production of both civil society and its representations, he drew upon a ready-at-hand, everyday religious discourse (shared at the time, as discussed above, by Feuerbach) in which the depiction of a world of alienated and alienating materiality was ascribed to the inverted worldview of Judentum. That worldview itself was seen as the objectification (Vergegensta¨ndlichung) of relations, dispositions, and values that allegedly exemplified Jewish species-being. Employing the tactic of rhetorical ridicule, Marx turned this projection back on the projectionist. Otherwise put: Marx had argued that the problems of alienation and misery in civil society were generated—under the sign of the Jew—by money and commerce, which he would later come to recognize as merely the Erscheinungsformen of capitalism. And when the forms of appearance came to be recognized as mere forms of appearance, he moved on to their conditions of emergence. Since in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ Judentum is neither described as the string-puller nor as a group whose absence would redeem society,26 the Judentum by which those forms were depicted largely falls out of Marx’s analyses—or so it seems. As the rest of this chapter addresses, in Marx’s later texts, whose focus had moved beyond capitalism’s Judentum-associated ‘‘forms of appearance,’’ other associations of Judentum play a significant role.

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Jews Taking Their Lumps: Of Rag Fair and Not-So-Fair Rogues Once one moves beyond what Marx soon lamented as an inadequate form of representation, the ‘‘pedantic-farcical mask’’ (GI 236/DI 218) of abstraction betrayed by the use of stereotypes of Judentum that facilitated, indeed ensured, misunderstanding on the part of the representer and his audiences; once one moves beyond what Marx describes in that same first thesis of his ‘‘Theses on Feuerbach’’ as ‘‘the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism,’’ conceiving the Object (der Gegenstand) only in the form of the object (des Objekts)—that is, in the form of its (Jewish-coded) effects—rather than as generative ‘‘ ‘practical-critical’ activity [Praxis],’’27 the question must be asked: What were the Jews whom Marx may have encountered every day doing (and what were they said to be doing or to have done)? Following this, we can examine how these other activities may have affected the development of Marx’s corpus.

ragged origins Perhaps, chronologically, the place to begin is with the working world of Italian Jewry described by Ramazzini in the work that Marx cited. The Paduan professor notes the stench and dirt that overran the Jewish quarter; however, he connects them to the necessity of the Jewish workers to spend their days with rags and other excreta, as well as with their efforts to restore these ‘‘goods’’ to some semblance of life. The Jewish workers are engaged not so much in production as they are in a form of reproduction that hides its origins: ‘‘They are so expert, that they will patch up Woolen, and Silk, and any other Sort of Garments, so as to leave no Appearance of a Seam. . . . They palm such Garments made of a great many Pieces upon the ignorant Mob, and so gain a great deal of Money.’’28 That Ramazzini found Italian Jews occupied in rag collecting and other corners of the rag trade is not surprising; in 1555 Pope Paul IV, supplementing the broad range of restrictions on possible Jewish occupations already decreed by Pope Eugenius IV (in 1442), ruled that ‘‘Jews can only engage themselves in the work of street sweepers and rag pickers, and cannot be merchants in produce or in things necessary for human use.’’29 The Jewish commerce in rags was not limited to the Italian ghettos. After being expelled from many German cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most Jewish men had taken to the road, going from house to house (hence the German term for peddling, hausieren, from the

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German for house, Haus),30 where they earned their bare income as second-hand dealers (Tro¨dler) and ‘‘hawkers [as well as] small shopkeepers’’ (Hausierer . . . Kleinkra¨mer; GI 369/DI 352). Anti-vagrancy laws in eighteenth-century German states were frequently directed at these impoverished Jews forced to roam the countryside for any possible earnings.31 They were prohibited from selling new clothes in most German states until the nineteenth century.32 While such laws were largely the result of state support of guild monopolies, these and other legal limitations, such as on Jewish access to the land, were held to be an effect instead of a cause of the alleged innate Jewish aversion to labor ‘‘by the sweat of their noses’’33 as well as their perhaps constitutional incapacity to engage in any form of productive activity.34 Consequently, Jews became pre-eminently bearers of rags, whether those for sale in their bags35 or worn as garments on their bodies: ‘‘From head to toe, nothing but excrement, dirt, and rags [Lumpen].’’36 Like the chiffoniers of nineteenth-century Paris portrayed by Walter Benjamin, they were ‘‘ ‘ragtag’ in the double sense, clothed in rags and occupied with rags’’ (AP 349/PW 441 [J68, 4]).37 This led the historical economist Werner Sombart to suggest in his massive indictment of Jewish character and participation in the development of capitalism, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Modern Capitalism; 1911) that the Jews ‘‘could be called the fathers of the refuse trade’’ (Abfallindustrie).38 While as a consequence of the brief-lived lifting of most restrictions on Jewish economic life in the German states at the time of Marx’s birth, a Jewish middle class39 that served the growing governmental bureaucracies began to emerge and joined the select group of Court Jews and their descendants in the Gentile public sphere, the vast majority of Jews in the German states were impoverished and living marginal existences.40 Although generally negatively depicted in contemporary German literature, a very sympathetic—perhaps a bit schmaltzy—picture of these Jewish ragbearers was drawn by Marx’s collaborator on the Franco-German Yearbook, his mutual admirer and friend, the poet whose work he frequently read,41 and whom the foremost Austrian dramatist of the nineteenth century, Franz Grillparzer, referred to as being ‘‘deep-down inside a shabby [lumpige] fellow,’’42 Heinrich Heine. In the ‘‘Baths of Lucca’’ section of his Reisebilder (Pictures of Travel, 1826–31), Heine has his character Hirsch-Hyacinth relate an anecdote about the peddler Moses Lump (Moses Rag/Good-for-nothing, also known by the affectionate diminutive Lu¨mpchen). Lump, having traveled the roads all week for little gain, returns home to celebrate Shabbat with his family; surfeited with Shabbos joy, he imagines,

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if the [Shabbos] candles burn a little dim, and the snuffers-woman, whose business it is to snuff them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great were at that moment to come in, with all his brokers, bill discounters, agents, and chief clerks, with whom he conquers the world, and Rothschild were to say: ‘‘Moses Lump, ask of me what favor you will, and it shall be granted you’’;—Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would quietly answer: ‘‘Snuff me those candles!’’ and Rothschild the Great would exclaim with admiration: ‘‘If I were not Rothschild, I would rather be a Lu¨mpchen.’’

This story achieved great familiarity for English readers in 1863, when the leading contemporary cultural critic Matthew Arnold cited it in full in his essay ‘‘Heinrich Heine’’ as both an exemplary expression of the Hebraic side of Heine and Heine’s expression of the exemplary Hebrew.43 In that same chapter as his tale of Moses Lump, Hirsch-Hyacinth explains that his calling card reads ‘‘Hyazinth, Kollekteur, Operateur, und Taxator,’’ rather than simply ‘‘Hirsch’’ (that is, the Hebrew original of which ‘‘Hyazinth’’ [hyacinth] is the German translation), so that ‘‘he will not be treated like a common Lump.’’ Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy also engaged in displacing the onerous characterization of Jews as Lumpen, although he shifted the object, not the aim, of such defamations. In response to the 1833 imposition of additional restrictions on the nonnaturalized Jews of Posen, the poorest and most ragged Jewish community in Prussia, he referred to the decrees as ‘‘your shabby [lumpigen] Posen regulations.’’44 While rags signaled Jewry’s poverty, they were also part of the Jew’s representation as either parvenu or pariah: ‘‘The Jew is either dressed ostentatiously [prahlerisch] or shabbily [lumpig].’’45 In his 1816 brief against Jewish claims for political emancipation, the historian Friedrich Ru¨hs wrote that the Jews’ ‘‘loathsome neglect of their external appearance’’ was a consequence of their belief that they were ‘‘God’s first and most preferred people’’; consequently, the Jew ‘‘believes that cloaked in rags [in Lumpen gehu¨llt] at the Last Judgment [he] will appear more beautiful and more welcome than the cleanest Christian.’’46 Before the development of the mass-produced, ready-to-wear clothing industry in the early nineteenth century—pioneered in Germany by three Jewish brothers, David, Moritz, and Valentin Mannheimer, in late 1830s Berlin47—the sartorial needs of the vast majority of urban dwellers were provided not by expensive tailors and dressmakers but by the chain of second-hand trade: old clothing was passed from or sold by the original owner to the ragpicker, who then sold them to the fripperer, who would ‘‘clean, mend, dye, and refinish it, giving the garment a second life and the

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possibility of a second career, one less brilliant but still honorable’’ when resold through bargaining [Schacher] with the public, ‘‘unless its dilapidated condition classified it as a rag [whence it] headed for a radical transformation at the paper mill.’’48 In Prussia, most of the fripperers as well as many of the rag collectors were Jews, ever since they had been granted the right to trade in used clothing in 1671.49 a london calling The rag trade also pervaded the London that became Marx’s home for the last thirty-five years of his life. In 1845 he would have read in his lifetime collaborator Friedrich Engel’s Condition of the Working Class in England:50 And, if a working-man once buys himself a woollen coat for Sunday, he must get it from one of the ‘‘cheap shops’’ where he finds bad, so-called ‘‘Devil’s-dust’’ cloth, manufactured for sale and not for use, and liable to tear or grow threadbare in a fortnight, or he must buy of an old clothesdealer a half-worn coat which has seen its best days, and lasts but a few weeks. . . . But among very large numbers, especially among the Irish, the prevailing clothing consists of perfect rags [Lumpen] often beyond all mending, or so patched that the original colour can no longer be detected.

Four years later, when Marx transplanted to London, he would have found a particular ethnic coloring not only to the buyers, but to the sellers as well—albeit a different shade. The English social researcher, journalist, and contemporary of Marx, Henry Mayhew, described the life of the Jewish workers in his 1851 London Labour and the London Poor (and in more detail in the expanded four-volume 1861–62 edition; cited hereafter as LL). Mayhew writes: Across the ground [of the Old-Clothes Exchange] are placed four rows of double seats ranged back to back. Here meet all the Jew clothesmen, hucksters, dealers in second-hand shoes, left-off wardrobe keepers, hareskin dealers, umbrella dealers and menders and indeed buyers and sellers of leftoff clothes and worn-out commodities of every description. The purchasers are of all nations. . . . At a little before three o’clock the stream of ragsellers sets in a flood towards the spot [Barney Aaron’s]. . . . The stench of old clothes is overpowering. Every one is dressed in their worst [and not their worsted—JG]. . . . In fact in no other place is such a scene of riot, rags, and filth to be witnessed. (LL 1:368–69)

Like Ramazzini, Mayhew devotes each of the many chapters of his work to different categories of work or activity. Also like Ramazzini, Mayhew

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makes an ethnic exception. In the second volume he devotes a chapter to ‘‘Street-Jews.’’ Admittedly he does single out one other ethnic group for chapter-long attention, the ‘‘Street-Irish’’; however, as he notes in this natural history of working life on the English street, they are filling a niche formerly assumed by Jews in the London habitat. He describes how Irish immigrants began to replace Jewish street-sellers—not out of perseverance or skill, but out of desperation: for they both sell and work for less money.51 Engels had earlier testified to the situation of Irish immigrants in Condition of the Working Class, albeit in their role as competitors with the English:52 To this competition of the workers there is but one limit; no worker will work for less than he needs to subsist. If he must starve, he will prefer to starve in idleness rather than in toil. True, this limit is relative; one needs more than another, one is accustomed to more comfort than another; the Englishman, who is still somewhat civilised, needs more than the Irishman, who goes in rags [Lumpen], eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty. But that does not hinder the Irishman’s competing with the Englishman, and gradually forcing the rate of wages, and with it the Englishman’s level of civilisation, down to the Irishman’s level.

Mayhew details how Jewish economic activity follows the life cycle of clothes, once they have passed from their first owner: ‘‘at one time, people seemed to consider [the old-clothes trade] a sort of birthright among the Jews’’ (LL 2:119). Some Jewish entrepreneurs were becoming involved in the production of ‘‘shoddy’’ (cheap clothes made out of cloth generated ‘‘by adding a small amount of new wool to a quantity of shredded rags’’) in slop shops; however, until the second third of the nineteenth century Jews remained excluded from the ranks of English tailors, who were able to produce clothes out of whole cloth.53 Mayhew comments, ‘‘[A]nything like the Old Clothes Exchange of the Jewish quarter of London, in the extent and order of its business, is unequalled in the world’’ (LL 2:26). It consisted of a number of enterprises principally owned and run by Jewish entrepreneurs. The venue for the London used-clothes business had shifted from its earlier location at the ‘‘Rag Fair’’ on Rosemary Lane (due to fighting between the Irish and Jews). The primary Old Clothes Exchange was opened by L. Issac, and the second leading operation was known as Simmons and Levy’s Clothes Exchange. The exchanges were surrounded by retail shops that were closed on Saturdays because their owners were Jews. It was not only the hours of operation that betrayed the identity of the dealers: ‘‘The Old

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Clothes Exchanges have assuredly one recommendation as they are now seen—their appropriateness. They have a threadbare, patched, and secondhand look. The dresses worn by the dealers, and the dresses they deal in, are all in accordance with the genius of the place’’ (LL 2:27; emphasis in original). Mayhew follows the old clothes as they moved from the current Exchange: Such [black suits] as are too far gone are bought to be torn to pieces by the ‘‘devil.’’ And made up into new cloth—or ‘‘shoddy’’ as it is termed—while such as have already done this duty are sold for manure for the ground. The old shirts, if they are past mending, are bought as ‘‘rubbish’’ by the marine store dealers, and sold as rags to the paper-mills, to be changed either into the bank-note, the newspaper, or the best satin note-paper. (LL 1:369)

This material descent into ragdom remained largely in the hands of Jewish dealers. One of Mayhew’s informants reports, ‘‘The first year as I started I got hold of a few very tidy rags, coloured things mostly. The Jew I sold ‘em to when I got home again gave me more than I expected. O, lord no, not more than I asked!’’ The same individual then describes selling old clothes to ‘‘the Jew in Petticoat-lane’’ (LL 2:105). Complementing this haggling over second-hand clothes and other goods was moneylending, since the poor often pawned their clothes to get through the week, as Engels pointed out in Condition of the Working Class. Marx’s letters testify to how he was often forced to do likewise in order to pay his family’s latest batch of bills.54 Jews were also involved with the trade in various textiles that could not be used in the production of either clothes or bedding: ‘‘Burnt’’ linen or calico is also sold. . . . On the occasion of a fire at any tradesman’s, whose stock of drapery had been injured, the damaged wares are bought by the Jewish or other keepers of the haberdashery swagshops. . . . In Petticoat-lane, indeed, [second-hand sheets] are sold but it is mostly by the Jew shopkeepers, who also expose their goods in the streets, and they are sold by them very often to street-traders, who convert them to other purposes. (LL 2:13)

While Mayhew does not explicitly identify the rag-and-bone men, ‘‘the very lowest class of all the street-people’’ (LL 2:138), as necessarily Jewish, he does very closely associate them with the Jews: ‘‘In the neighborhood

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of Petticoat-lane and Ragfair, however, they are the most numerous on account of the greater quantity of rags which the Jews have to throw out’’ (LL 2:139). One of his informants supplements this conclusion: ‘‘[T]he Jews in this lane and up in Petticoat-lane give a good deal of victuals away on the Saturday. They sometimes call one of us in from the street to light the fire for them, or take off the kettle, as they must not do anything themselves on the Sabbath; and then they put some food on the footpath, and throw rags and bones into the street for us, because they must not hand anything to us’’ (LL 2:140). shoddy characters Mayhew implicitly recognizes the derogatory value ascribed to secondhand goods in their various permutations, and therefore the corresponding status awarded their purveyors, when he prefaces his second volume: ‘‘Before proceeding immediately with my subject I may say a few words concerning what is, in the estimation of some, a second-hand matter. I allude to the many uses to which what is regarded, and indeed termed, ‘offal,’ or ‘refuse,’ or ‘waste’ is put in a populous city’’ (LL 2:7). The language employed by Mayhew and his informants to describe second-hand goods—and the rags into which they eventually turn or to which they return—might generate a curious translation effect for a native German speaker like Marx. Throughout the discussion of these goods Mayhew describes them as ‘‘sold in a lump’’ or ‘‘by the lump.’’ Indeed, one category of grifter in the (second-hand) textile market was known as a ‘‘Lumper’’; about half of them, Mayhew notes, were Jews. Lumpers ‘‘sell linens, cottons, or silks, which might be really the commodities represented; but which, by some management or other, were made to appear new when they were old, or solid when they were flimsy’’ (LL 1:373). While Germanophone eavesdroppers on this rag-trade confidence game might associate the name with the fraudulent material, they might also generate another German association—and etymologically speaking it would be correct, for ‘‘Lumper’’ derives from a different Germanic semantic field, one shared with Yiddish and sown by Lump: a Lump (plural Lumpen) is a rascal or scoundrel, Lumpengesindel are ‘riffraff,’ and Lumperei refers to contemptible or slovenly, implicitly immoral, matters. These Lumps are all engaged in nonproductive activity: both alienated from labor and alienating the products of other people’s labor. And not only were the Jews associated with the trade in rags as well as long characterized as, whether by nature or culture, incapable of any

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productive activity; they were very often represented as criminals and blackguards. In his 1775 New and Universal History, Walter Harrison implies a necessary connection between Jewish second-hand clothes dealing and the fencing of stolen goods: Rosemary Lane ‘‘has been long noted for the sale of old clothes, and all sorts of wearing apparel. It is commonly called Rag Fair; and it is amazing to see the great number of Jews who resort to it every afternoon with such things as they have purchased during their morning walk through London.’’55 Both Patrick Colquhoun’s 1795 A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis and Joshua van Oven’s 1802 Letters on the Present State of the Jewish Poor in the Metropolis defined the Jews, in particular Ashkenazim, as criminal, since Jewish ritual observance rendered them, in these observers’ opinions, untrained and untrainable and hence limited to begging, indigence, or crime.56 And in the early nineteenth century peddling in that trade (and in general) was criminalized in numerous German states.57 Jewish peddlers in particular were associated with crime.58 The shoddy business was also considered a rather shady affair. Though the majority of English slopshops producing ready-to-wear clothes from shoddy were owned by Gentiles, Jewish firms like that of London’s E. Moses and Son were awarded notoriety when, for example in 1843, The Times accused them of engaging in white slavery59 by subcontracting out to Christian needlewomen, and of ‘‘revenging on the poor of a professedly Christian country the wrongs which their forefathers sustained at the hands of ours.’’60 A native German-speaking student of English economic life like Marx may well have noted in this confluence of Jews, rags, and rascals a rather large heap of Lumpen. And this would not have been the only Jewish pile that Marx could have encountered. Lump also came to characterize one of the foremost Jewish characters—caricatures—of the German popular stage during the first half of the nineteenth century, Jakob the son of the old-clothes dealer Abraham in Karl Boroma¨us Alexander Sessa’s notorious anti-Jewish farce, the ‘‘Musterposse’’ (exemplary theatrical farce)61 Unser Verkehr (Our Crowd) that was first staged in 1813.62 This would-be parvenu and self-declared ‘‘Schenie’’63 (Jakob’s Judeo-German dialect for the high-German Genie [genius]) is often addressed as ‘‘Lump’’ (good-for-nothing/rascal),64 at times paired with the designation ‘‘Schacherjude’’ (Haggler-Jew).65 With Jakob’s hopes for wealth, marriage, and assimilation having collapsed at the end, he delivers the play’s last line in Jewish-German: ‘‘My lords! Have you nothing to barter [schachern]?’’66 Sessa’s farce played throughout German lands in the years immediately after its controversial 1815 production in Berlin and

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was credited by contemporaries with preparing the ground for the 1819 anti-Jewish Hep-Hep riots in numerous German cities.67 While it is unlikely that Marx would have witnessed a staging of Unser Verkehr, he may well have been familiar with the theatrical successors of this ‘‘long popular play’’ (lange ein beliebtes Stu¨ck), as it was still described in 1848 by the literary critic Julian Schmidt in the leading national-liberal journal of the time, Die Grenzboten (Dispatches from the Border).68 Unser Verkehr spawned later imitators and helped institutionalize the ‘‘stage Jew,’’ who then assumed the Kasperl or Hanswurst role and its laughter-provoking abasement as a staple in (especially North) German popular plays of the first half of the nineteenth century.69 Moreover, posters with the play’s characters presented as exemplary Jewish types (see Figure 6-1), such as in the widely distributed and influential broadsheets by the No¨rdling illustrator Johann Michael Voltz,70 as well as images of various scenes from the play reproduced on bookplates and bric-a-brac, could be found throughout Germany during this period.71 Marx may have also read about the play in Ludwig Bo¨rne’s c. 1817 critique that was included in Bo¨rne’s collected writings (Gesammelte Schriften) published between 1829 and 183472—although it should be noted that Heine-friend Marx had far less enthusiasm for Bo¨rne than did his colleague-in-arms Engels. If he also had looked at Bo¨rne’s Nachlass, first published in 1844, he would have encountered an 1828 discussion of another ‘‘monstrous’’73 and more famous Jewish figure, Shylock, that included an irony-laced, as-it-were anticipation of the chiasmus of Judentum and Christentum74 and the facetious use of religious language in his own already-published ‘‘Zur Judenfrage.’’ Marx would also have heard echoes of his own frequent use of the Shakespearean character’s name to defamatorily label individual Gentiles. In ‘‘Der Jude Shylock im Kaufmann von Venedig,’’ Bo¨rne declaims against modern paper-trafficking riffraff: How would Shakespeare have depicted our Shylocks, the great Shylocks with Christian decorations upon their Jewish cloaks. How would he have drawn the papertrafficking [papierverkehrenden] Shylocks without [such] garments [i.e., not of Jewish descent], who possess the flesh and blood of entire peoples in bank notes [Scheinen] and who do not make paper out of rags, but ragamuffins by means of paper [nicht mit Lumpen Papier, sondern mit Papier Lumpen machen]. How would [Shakespeare] have painted these despicable ones, for whom God is a finance minister. . . . How would he have portrayed our stockbrokers, who call the Greeks ‘‘riffraff’’ [ein ‘‘Lumpenvolk’’]! . . . Three thousand real ducats against a measly pound of

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Figure 6-1. Illustration from ‘‘Unser Verkehr: Eine kleine erbauliche Bildergallerie aufgenommen nach dem Leben’’ (Our Crowd: A Small, Edifying Picture Gallery, Drawn from Life) by Johann Michael Voltz (c. 1815/ 20). Reproduced in Michaela Haibl, Zerrbild als Stereotyp. Reprinted courtesy of Michaela Haibl.

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Christian-flesh: this caprice was at the very least dearly paid. But our Shylocks, of both the Old and New Testaments, drown all of Hellas, as if it was a blind kitten, for pocket change [ein Achtelchen]. . . . History lies if it calls these men Christians because their ancestors ate sausage; but Shakespeare does not lie.75

Marx, like Bo¨rne before him, looked to Shakespeare for insight into the fiscal nature of contemporary society. Following a long citation from Timon of Athens on gold, Marx notes in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular: (1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion [Verwechselung und Verkehrung] of things; it brings about impossibilities. (2) It is the universal whore, the universal pimp [Kuppler] of men and peoples.76

As discussed above, both properties are also found in Marx’s discussion of Judentum in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage.’’

Trafficking in Lumps While Marx characterizes Schachern (haggling or bartering) as the ‘‘secular cult of the Jews’’ in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage,’’ the morphemic family of the Judentum-associated Lump- does not make an appearance. Lump had made a rather curious appearance in Marx’s first piece of political journalism, his 1842 ‘‘Bemerkungen u¨ber die neueste preußische Zensurinstruktion von einem Rheinla¨nder’’ (Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction by a Rhinelander). Amid proving his Young Hegelian bona fides with a series of sly ironic allusions77 to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right—for example, ‘‘I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest [bescheiden]. Grey, all grey [Grau in grau],78 is the sole, the rightful colour of freedom’’—his article takes a dialectical turn. Marx picks up on the law’s demand for modesty, Bescheidenheit: The essence of the spirit is always truth itself but what do you make its essence? Modesty [Die Bescheidenheit]. Only the mean wretch is modest [Nur der Lump ist bescheiden], says Goethe, and you want to turn the spirit into such a mean wretch [Lumpen]? Or if modesty [Bescheidenheit] is to be the modesty [Bescheidenheit] of genius [des Genies] of which Schiller speaks,

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then first of all turn all your citizens and above all your censors into geniuses. But then the modesty [Bescheidenheit] of genius does not consist in what educated speech consists in, the absence of accent and dialect, but rather in speaking with the accent of the matter and in the dialect of its essence. It consists in forgetting modesty [Bescheidenheit] and immodesty [Unbescheidenheit] and getting to the heart of the matter [die Sache herauszuscheiden; emphasis added]. The universal modesty [Bescheidenheit] of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter’s essential nature. (MEW 1:6)

While Marx would have feared that directly referring to Hegel could immediately draw the Prussian censors’ attention, he may have hoped that invoking the great German classicists Goethe and Schiller to prove (albeit in a Hegelian manner) the illegitimacy of the restraints on his journalistic endeavors might prove a successful distraction. (It didn’t, as publication of the article in the German states was prevented.) Marx seeks to undermine the command for ‘‘modesty’’ by demonstrating its indeterminacy. He cites the two foremost exemplars of the German Geist ascribing the quality of ‘‘modesty’’ to two opposed, indeed mutually exclusive, figures: the Lump and the Genie. He then dismisses the value of that quality (Bescheidenheit) and of its antithesis (Unbescheidenheit) as a standard, by an action (herausscheiden) that draws upon the same root, scheiden. For the purposes of this chapter, what is as striking as Marx’s rhetorical troping is his choice of examples: Lump, Genie, (Un)bescheidenheit. As argued above, there are numerous connections between Judentum and Lump-; the incapacity of a Jew to be a genius was also a commonplace of the time. Similarly, as has already been pointed out, Stoecker’s first demand upon ‘‘modern Judentum’’ was that it needed to be ‘‘a bit more modest’’ (ein klein wenig bescheidener) to counter the (misrecognized stereotype of ) arrogant belief in its chosenness, as well as the self-promotion of the so-called Jewish press and the gaudiness of the wealthy Jewish parvenu. Such calls for the moral improvement (Verbesserung) of Jewish public behavior and claims of privilege long preceded both Stoecker and Marx.79 Thus, from the start of his public career, Marx frequently wove together a number of signifiers whose conjunction drew upon a history of Jewish associations. Lump- does play a rather noisy and noisome role in The German Ideology, the work that confirmed, albeit rather belatedly, Marx’s supersession of Feuerbach, his evaluation of material social relations as the ground of both experience and social structures (e.g., property), and the flowering of historical materialist analysis that were all intimated by the earlier essays

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in the Yearbook, and still in development during the previous year’s demolition of Bauer and his fellow Critical Critics in The Holy Family. Soon after the completion of that last work, Marx was expelled from France and began his three-year residence in Brussels. During his little-over-fifteenmonth sojourn in Paris—the ‘‘most decisive in his life’’80 —his first child had been born, he befriended Heine, and he began what would be a lifelong collaboration with Engels. While still in Paris Marx received a letter from Engels (19 November 1844),81 alerting him to the recent publication of an ‘‘important’’ book that rejected Feuerbach and surpassed the Critical Critics, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (EE; first published in English as The Ego and His Own [EO]; the title could also be translated as The Ego and Its Own, or as The Ego and Its Property). The following September in Brussels Marx began what he anticipated to be a pamphlet announcing his break from the last of his mentors (i.e., Feuerbach) and the elaboration of his materialist Wissenschaft. The project metastasizes as soon as it begins to engage the work Engels had earlier recommended. Ego’s author, the thinker and gymnasium teacher Max Stirner,82 proclaimed the philosophic apotheosis of civil society by its election of the bourgeois ‘‘I’’ as the Weltgeist (Spirit of the World) that is no ghost, as the one material reality. Marx’s polemical text consists of numerous reproductions83 of Stirner’s Ego through quotation from Stirner’s text,84 followed by Marx’s commentary of parodistic paraphrasing, followed by more citation from Stirner’s work, as if it were itself a parodistic commentary on Marx’s glossing, ad infinitum. Moreover, Marx hyperbolically reproduces Ego’s own scriptural framework in presenting Stirner’s claims to have both recognized the underlying religiosity of Feuerbach’s anthropology (before Marx had done so)85 and transcended it in his own work. Thus, for starters, Marx divides his analysis into two sections, Old Testament and New Testament, thereby enacting, in the renaming of Ego’s primary divisions (respectively, ‘‘Man’’ [Der Mensch] and ‘‘I’’) and in the rest of the restaging of Stirner’s entire text, its underlying theologizing. He had performed a similar religious masking as an unmasking of the religious in his critique of Bauer and his circle in the aptly titled The Holy Family. Marx is also undertaking, it seems, another kind of ‘‘religious’’ doubling of Ego, as Judentum-associated morphemes, especially Lump- and Verkehr-, appear to traverse between the philosopher of radical egoism, Stirner, and the people of radical egoism, the Jews. This is especially evident in Marx’s analyses of two particular chapters of Ego. The first addresses Stirner’s chapter ‘‘The Free,’’ from the first part of Ego (or in Marx’s terms,

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the ‘‘Old Testament’’). There Stirner criticizes what he characterizes as ‘‘most modern among the ‘moderns’ ‘‘ (EO 98), the three movements that succeed but do not supersede Hegelian Idealism: political liberalism, social liberalism, and humane liberalism. In his riposte, Marx takes aim at Stirner’s determination of the ‘‘communists’’ and the ‘‘proletariat,’’ as well as his defamation of those so-named groups as ‘‘riffraff’’ (Lumpengesindel). The second chapter at issue is from Stirner’s second part (or New Testament), in which the ego (‘‘ich,’’ ‘‘I’’) emerges as the determinate negation of the abstract collective ‘‘man.’’ This chapter bears the heading ‘‘Mein Verkehr’’ (My Intercourse), and Marx characterizes it as ‘‘corresponding to communism, whereby the truth of society is brought to light and society . . . as intercourse mediated by ‘man’ is resolved in the intercourse of the ‘ego’ ‘‘ (GI 241/DI 223).

sins of omission: an excursus Before examining the Lumps that arise in The German Ideology and how they and other Jew-associated signifiers betray how the all-but-absent Judentum haunts—and helped to conjure—Marx’s text, two fascinating Lumpless passages need to be looked at. While Marx does not discuss any of Stirner’s many and various invocations of Jews in Ego, there are two moments in Marx’s analysis in which he interpellates the Jews into in-theseinstances judenrein arguments of Stirner.86 The first is from the analysis of that second chapter, in which Marx calls attention to Stirner’s failure, when discussing ‘‘competition,’’ to include mention of the Jews—the ‘‘practical Jews,’’ following ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’—who make up civil society. Marx reels in from the ‘‘ ‘barren ocean’ of Stirner’s ‘definitions’ ‘‘ the false opposition created by Stirner’s confusion between what political economists would claim is an inevitable side effect of competition and what they would see as its underlying motor. Stirner acknowledges the role of selfinterest, but rather than the Hobbesian war of each against all in bourgeois civil society,87 he paints the picture of pathetic civil servants—such as a ‘‘school-master’’ (to borrow Marx’s derisive label for Stirner) like himself—fearful of dismissal. In so doing Stirner employs a term, Brotstudium (EE 354), that (as discussed in the previous chapter) Feuerbach reserves for the Jews, and ascribes as well other behavioral traits frequently attached to Jews. Marx quotes—with interpolation—Stirner: ‘‘Competition is connected less’’ (Oh, ‘‘less’’!) ‘‘with the intention of doing a thing as well as possible, than with the intention of making it as profitable,

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lucrative, as possible. For that reason people study for the sake of a post (bread-and-butter study [Brotstudium]), cultivate obsequiousness and flattery [Schmeicheleien], routine and knowledge of business; they work for appearance [Schein].’’ (GI 368/DI 352)

Marx’s facetious insertion, ‘‘(Oh, ‘less’!),’’ is soon followed by his no-lessfacetious commentary: ‘‘Let our bonhomme discover a textbook on political economy where even theoreticians assert that in competition it is a matter of a ‘good performance’ or ‘of doing a thing as well as possible’ and not of making ‘it as profitable as possible’ ’’ (ibid.). He then points out a curious omission. Stirner does not even call attention to the usual suspects of self-interested and chauvinistic—and thus immoral—economic behavior, the bogeymen of pre- or nascent civil society rather than the real villains of modern capitalism. Marx writes, ‘‘Small-scale commercial and industrial swindling [Betrug] flourishes [wuchert] only in conditions of restricted competition, among the Chinese, Germans and Jews,88 and in general among hawkers and small shopkeepers [Hausierern und Kleinkra¨mern]. But even hawking [Hausierhandel] is not mentioned by our saint’’ (i.e., by Stirner; GI 369/DI 352). The second conjuration of Jews appears in Marx’s ongoing critique of Stirner’s notion that notions or ideas, in this case ‘‘the holy conception of the family,’’ exercise ‘‘despotism’’ over the ‘‘Ego.’’ Stirner’s solution here as elsewhere is that ‘‘[t]his despotism is broken when the conception, family, also becomes a nothing to me’’ (EO 88). Marx’s solution here as elsewhere is a queer version of Stirner’s: the ‘‘holy conception of the family’’ is indeed a nothing. ‘‘Here again our good man perceives the domination of the holy where entirely empirical relations dominate.’’ Marx then begins to illustrate his point with a rather curious analogy between the bourgeoisie and the Jews. While Stirner is addressing the cultured moderns, the members of the Bildungsbu¨rgertum, whom he cross-references with Bruno Bauer’s contemporary ‘‘middle-class’’ (EO 75), he exclusively addresses Christianity and its ideas. There is no mention of Judentum.89 More curious is that while in his critique of Bauer Marx had argued that Bauer addresses the religious Jew rather than the everyday Jew whom Marx identifies with the bourgeoisie, here he compares the avoidance behavior of the middle class to that of the religious Jew, indeed to that characteristic of Jewish religious practice that in ‘‘Capacity,’’ his follow-up to Judenfrage, gave Bauer such knipshins.90 Marx comments, The attitude of the bourgeois to the institutions of his regime is like that of the Jew to the law; he evades them whenever it is possible to do so in

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each individual case, but he wants everyone else to observe them. . . . [M]arriage, property, the family remain untouched in theory, because they are the practical basis on which the bourgeoisie has erected its domination, and because in their bourgeois form they are the conditions which make the bourgeois a bourgeois, just as the constantly evaded law makes the religious Jew a religious Jew. (GI 180/DI 164)

Marx follows this with a historicist critique of language: One cannot speak at all of the family ‘‘as such.’’ Historically, the bourgeois gives the family the character of the bourgeois family, in which boredom and money are the binding link, and which also includes the bourgeois dissolution of the family, which does not prevent the family itself from always continuing to exist. Its dirty existence [schmutzigen Existenz] has its counterpart in the holy concept of it in official phraseology and universal hypocrisy. (ibid.)

He then invokes the group whose revolutionary practice will indeed bring not only the ‘‘phrases’’ of the bourgeoisie but their institutions as well to an end: the proletariat. ‘‘Where the family is actually abolished, as with the proletariat, just the opposite of what ‘Stirner’ thinks takes place. There the concept of the family does not exist at all, but here and there family affection based on extremely real relations is certainly to be found’’ (GI 181/DI 164). Marx employs the real, existent proletariat and its material practices like some dei ex machina to counter Stirner’s conceptions of both the bourgeoisie and its ephemeral theories of the world, its ‘‘phrases.’’ Other than in such cameo appearances as here, Marx’s object of analysis throughout his critique of Ego is Stirner’s phrase, ‘‘Proletariat,’’ and not the class Other of the bourgeoisie. As this discussion moves to that analysis and to the analysis of ‘‘Communist,’’ we will see that, just as Marx had restored the absent commonplace association of the middle class with the ‘‘Jew’’ to Stirner’s discussion in order to demonstrate its self-evident insufficiency, Marx deploys the Judentum-associated Lump to render as ludicrously inadequate Stirner’s notions of the class and party Others of bourgeois civil society.

Lumping Them Together According to Marx, Stirner not only has a faulty understanding of the ‘‘middle class’’ but of the ‘‘Proletariat’’ as well. It is in Marx’s engagement

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with Stirner’s discussion of the latter and of the group Stirner refers to as ‘‘Communists’’—so labeled in order to refute communism—that Lumpen proliferate.91 While Stirner distinguishes those he calls the ‘‘Proletariat’’ from those in whose name the ‘‘Communists’’ seek to transform society, the Lumpen or ragamuffins, Marx treats the opposition as if it were one of the ‘‘trashy distinctions’’ (lumpig[e] Distinktion[en]; GI 273/DI 254; GI 290–91/DI 271– 72) Stirner makes between philosophic notions, and ultimately between Stirner’s ‘‘materialist’’ understanding of the world and the system that Stirner claims to have superseded, Critical Criticism. Marx labels those distinctions as ‘‘trashy’’92 because they are, in his analysis, distinctions without a difference. Any distinction other than what is for Marx the crucial one, the one that Stirner does not recognize—between Stirner’s philosophic apotheosis of bourgeois civil society in the unique ego, and Marx and Engel’s own revolutionary overthrow of that society by the working class—is subject at most to parody, or else is ignored. Marx makes no mention of Stirner’s elaboration of Bauer’s critique of particularity, and of Jewish particularity in particular, by asserting the universality of ‘‘man’’ (nor does he mention Stirner’s subsequent reduction of that critique to the banality of substituting one idea for another; see EO 126–27). Nor does Marx address Stirner’s stepping aside from Bauer’s religious characterization of religious particularity to proffer instead the unique: ‘‘One is not to count himself as ‘anything especial’ [etwas Besonderes], such as for example a Jew or a Christian. Well, I do not count myself as anything especial, but as unique’’ (EO 138). Marx will indicate that neither of those two ‘‘trashy’’ groups—Stirner’s ‘‘Proletariat’’ and the Lumpen, the latter being the group within which Stirner dismissively situates the ‘‘Communists’’—refers to the population Marx himself designates as proletarian. The exclusive association of the label proletariat with the industrial working class had only first been made a few years before (1837) in the work of the economist and historian Jean Charles Le´onard Simonde de Sismondi.93 More common was the virtually ethnic delineation offered by Honore´ Fre´gier in his 1840 Des classes dangereuses de la population de la grand ville (Of the Dangerous Classes among the Big City’s Populace). These classes are characterized as a mass of different stock; hence, Fre´gier asserts, ‘‘we are wholly justified in using this term [i.e., proletarian] in speaking of the ragpicker and the nomad.’’94 After ironically noting how the ‘‘Stirnerian ‘unique’ proletariat (p. 148 [of EE])

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. . . consists of ‘rogues, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and murderers, gamblers, propertyless people with no occupation and frivolous individuals’ (ibid.),’’ Marx describes how the group designated as the ‘‘Proletariat’’ by ‘‘ ‘Stirner’ and his fraternity’’ expands in Stirner’s hands to be made up of ‘‘ruined bourgeois and ruined proletarians, of a collection of ragamuffins’’ (Lumpen; GI 201–02/DI 183). To describe Stirner’s gang, Marx coins a new word, Lumpenproletariat, to identify a group ‘‘who have existed in every epoch and whose existence on a mass scale after the decline of the Middle Ages preceded the mass formation of the ordinary proletariat’’ (GI 202/DI 183): ‘‘on pages 151 and 152 [of EE] the lumpenproletariat95 becomes transformed into ‘workers,’ into ordinary proletarians’’ (ibid.).96 Marx allows Stirner’s ventriloquized ‘‘social liberals,’’ whom Stirner claims are the proponents of ‘‘communism,’’ to share their ‘‘communist’’ vision of the apotheosis of Lumpen: ‘‘Because ‘we have seen ourselves made into servants of egoists,’ ‘we should’ not ourselves ‘become egoists . . . but should rather see to it that egoists become impossible. We want to turn them all into ragamuffins [Lumpen], we want no one to possess anything, in order that ‘‘all’’ should be possessors.’—So say the social [liberals].—Who is this person whom you call ‘all’? It is ‘society.’ ’’ (p. 153 [of EE]). (GI 207/DI 187)

Marx then provides Stirner’s own-voiced characterization of ‘‘trashy’’ communism: [A]ll the members of this society in his eyes at once become paupers and ragamuffins [Lumpen], although—even according to his idea of the communist order of things—they ‘‘own’’ the ‘‘supreme owner.’’—His benevolent proposal to the communists—‘‘to transform the word ‘Lump’ into an honourable form of address, just as the revolution did with the word ‘citizen.’ ’’ (GI 207/DI 188)

These newly addressed Lumpen of the ‘‘oppressed classes’’ were always already Lumpen for Stirner; however, Stirner detects a change in mentality, from religious to resentful, by drawing upon a Lumpen-laced passage from a noncommunist source, August Theodor Woeniger’s Publicistische Abhandlungen (Treatises on Public Affairs) as quoted by the Bauer-aligned Carl Ernst Reichardt: ‘‘[W]hereas formerly the beggar [Bettler] bore his fate submissively and regarded it as God’s will, the modern ragamuffin [der neue Lump] asks whether he is forced to drag out his life in poverty just because he chanced to be born in rags’’ (Lumpen; GI 220/DI 201; emphasis in original). And not only the ‘‘proletarians’’: Marx notes that Stirner, following

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the ‘‘example of Woeniger, whom Reichardt [used], takes delight in turning . . . also the communists into ‘ragamuffins’ ’’ (Lumpen; GI 232/DI 213). The communist Marx then returns the favor; he turns critique-by‘‘trash’’-talking back on the critic. Stirner, Marx says, defines his ‘‘ragamuffin’’ on page 362 [of EE] as a ‘‘man possessing only ideal wealth.’’ If Stirner’s ‘‘ragamuffins’’ [Lumpen] ever set up a vagabond kingdom [Lumpenko¨nigreich], as the Paris beggars did in the fifteenth century, then Saint Sancho [i.e., Stirner] will be the vagabond king [Lumpenko¨nig], for he is the ‘‘perfect’’ ragamuffin [‘‘vollendete’’ Lump], a man possessing not even ideal wealth and therefore living on the interest from the capital of his opinion. (GI 232/DI 213–14)97

Marx continues to paint Stirner with his own tattered brush by identifying what Stirner claims is the ego’s—and thus his ego’s—prized property, its peculiarity (Eigenheit), as Lumperei.98 ‘‘What the ordinary German petty bourgeois whispers to himself as a consolation, in the quiet depths of his mind, the Berliner [i.e., Stirner] trumpets out loudly as an ingenious turn of thought. He is proud of his trashy peculiarity and his peculiar trashiness’’ (lumpige Eigenheit und eigne Lumperei; GI 315/DI 296). In sum, Stirner is nothing else: In his ‘‘own’’ series of oppositions [i.e., the lumpig distinctions] this would assume the following form: as opposed to all real determination, he chooses absence of determination as his determination, at each moment he distinguishes between himself and the undeterminated, thus at each moment he is also some other than he is, a third person, and indeed the other pure and simple, the holy other, the other counterposed to all uniqueness, the undeterminated, the universal, the ordinary—the ragamuffin [der—Lump].99 (GI 291/DI 273)

Just as Marx turned back onto Stirner those indistinguishable ones who do not possess any private property or value of their own, not even their own peculiarity (Eigenheit), and whom Stirner labeled Lumpen, so Lumpen in the form of rags come to Marx’s aid too in refuting Stirner’s crowning refutation of ‘‘communism,’’100 the apparent contradiction at its heart: that ‘‘after the[ir] abolition of (actual) property,’’ Stirner ‘‘discover[s] all sorts of things [still existent] in communism, which can be included in [Stirner’s expanded] concept ‘property.’ ’’ Stirner includes under property anything that one ‘‘has’’—whether a ‘‘stomach-ache’’ or a ‘‘concept of property.’’ Moreover, Stirner ‘‘exploits’’ the etymological connection between Eigentum (property) and eigen (own, peculiar); hence, one’s Eigenes or own pain,

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that which is peculiar to oneself, is one’s private property. Marx counters ¨ konomen]: ‘‘In with the definition that he ascribes to all ‘‘economists’’ [O reality, I possess private property [Privateigentum] only insofar as I have something vendible [Verschacherbares], whereas what is peculiar to me [meine Eigenheit] may not be vendible [unverschacherbar] at all’’ (GI 230/DI 211). To demonstrate his point Marx draws upon a commodity that will serve him well in his opening discussion of value in Capital—as well as in its writing, as he regularly pawned the item to provide for his family101— his coat. ‘‘My frock-coat [Rock] is private property for me only so long as I can barter [verschachern], pawn [versetzen] or sell [verkaufen] it, so long [as it] is [marketable] [verschacherbar]. If it loses that feature, if it becomes tattered [zerlumpt], it can still have a number of features which make it valuable for me, it may even become a feature of me and turn me into a tatterdemalion [zerlumptes Individuum]’’ (GI 230/DI 211–12). Here Marx inverts all of Stirner’s valuations by means of lump-. Against Stirner’s assumption that ‘‘private property’’ includes what appears to be of no more use, Marx argues that something reduced to rags (zerlumpt) and unmarketable (nicht verschacherbar) may have private value (mir wertvoll), but it lacks the social relationship that is constitutive of private property. In the discussion of the chapter ‘‘My Intercourse,’’ Marx continues through the use of interpolated glosses rather than didactic analysis to identify Stirner and his ideational constructs with Stirner’s own most devastating slur: Lump. Thus he indicates that when Stirner talks about ‘‘a state of ragamuffins’’ (Staat der Lumpe), he is in fact referring to his own notion of ad hoc sociality, the only proper group formed in his desired world of unique egos, the ‘‘union’’ or Verein: ‘‘The question of property is decided only by force’’ (on the contrary, the question of force has so far been decided by property), ‘‘and since the state alone is the mighty one—irrespective of whether it is a state of burghers, a state of ragamuffins’’ (Stirner’s ‘‘union’’) ‘‘or simply a state of human beings—it alone is the owner’’ (p. 333 [of EE]). (GI 355/DI 339)

In Stirner’s ‘‘state of ragamuffins’’ the only ‘‘real property’’ would be ‘‘my thoughts,’’ and they are the sole objects of trade [Handel]. Regarding this desired state of affairs, Marx laments that ‘‘Stirner the ‘ragamuffin’ [Der ‘Lump’ Stirner], the ‘man of only ideal wealth,’ arrives at the desperate decision to carry on trade with the curdled, sour milk of his thoughts’’ (GI 358/DI 342), the lactic equivalent of the no-longer-marketable tattered (zerlumpte) coat.

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Lumping together Traffic, or Intercourse with Intercourse Lump- is not the only strongly Jewish-associated morphemic/semantic field contested in The German Ideology. While Marx engages this field when addressing the questions of value and use at their respective zerodegree, especially with regard to the value of people, the polysemic and no-less-Judentum-associated morphemic field Verkehr- addresses what generates the appearance forms of value. Verkehr is a term, often translated as ‘‘commerce,’’ ‘‘intercourse,’’ or ‘‘traffic,’’ that also implicates those engaged in the action (‘‘what the traffic will bear’’). Sessa actually changed the title of his antisemitic farce to Unser Verkehr from its original title ‘‘Judenschule,’’102 because the latter title was manifestly offensive to the wealthy Jews of Berlin and their liberal supporters. Instead, he chose the polyvalent ‘‘Unser Verkehr’’—because its general senses of ‘‘in what or with whom we traffic’’ could be conflated with its usually narrowed sense of commerce; as the stereotype so readily employed by Marx in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ indicates, commerce (i.e., Verkehr represented as Schachern) was the alleged nature of Jewish intercourse. Or to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge’s comment on the business of America: ‘‘the business of the Jews is business.’’103 And as the usual English translations of the title of Sessa’s play—‘‘Our Crowd’’ or ‘‘Our Gang’’—indicate, one is what one does. The value structure of this gang, according to Marx’s writings of this period, is verkehrt (inverted). For example, what in the Paris Manuscripts Marx describes as ‘‘the immediate, natural, necessary relation of human being to human being . . . the relationship of man to woman. . . . [t]his natural species-relationship [Gattungsverha¨ltnis],’’104 has become, according to Marx in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage,’’ a ‘‘commercial object’’105 [Handelsgegenstand]. Even natural (legitimate and properly attired?) Verkehr106 has become Verkehr: sexuality becomes commerce—sexual exploitation, prostitution.107 Similarly, the analyses of Verkehr by Marx’s German rivals and opponents are demonstrated to be an inversion (Verkehrung), an actuality that must be turned on its head (verkehrt) by Marx’s critique, as he, for example, notes in German Ideology with regard to the concept of the family: The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family. The family, which to begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new social relations and the increased population new needs, a subordinate one

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(except in Germany), and must then be treated and analysed according to the existing empirical data, not according to ‘‘the concept of the family,’’ as is the custom in Germany. (GI 42–43/DI 29)

In The German Ideology Marx employs Verkehr, understood as social relations, as both a primary motor and major variable in his materialist analysis of history that occupies the first part of the work: ‘‘Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production. This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse [Verkehr] is again determined by production’’ (GI 32/DI 21). By historicizing ‘‘intercourse’’ Marx not only historicizes the most ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘immediate’’ relationship, the species-relation, upon which Feuerbach would found his system, but he also allows it to become an object of analysis and critique.108 In the polysemic morphemic field of the Judentum-associated Verkehr- Marx found a means to dialecticize the unproductive opposition between ‘‘natural’’ relations (Verha¨ltnisse) and ‘‘unnatural’’ commercial exchange (Schachern). Rather than a naturalized ideal such as ‘‘species-being’’ that only allows philosophic speculation, moral criticism (i.e., a deviation from the humane standard that must be remedied), and/or soteriological hope, Marx’s transformation of Verkehr offers not only a genetic diagnosis of the historical situation, but also the recognition of the immanent dynamic that will rectify that situation. With the emergence of Verkehr- in The German Ideology, Marx, as he had in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage,’’ expropriated and redirected a Jewish-associated morphemic/semantic field to help him articulate his developing materialist analysis. Unlike the earlier text where Marx had displaced the opprobrium associated with Judentum onto its supposed antipode (Christentum), here he displaces what signifies the source of ill onto its solution: the horrors generated by commerce (Verkehr) will be subverted by the ongoing development of social relations (Verkehr). Moreover, since Stirner had also appropriated the morpheme, it was necessary to take its significance back. And as he had turned Lump- back on Stirner, so too with Verkehr-; Stirner’s misrecognition of the fundamental importance of social relations has resulted in Stirner’s verkehrt system. Yet Verkehr merely bridges the transition from Marx’s analytical emphasis on (the appearance form of ) exchange and money as the source of everyday misery and alienation to his final recognition of production as the motor of history. In The German Ideology, Verkehr has equal billing

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with Produktion. Relations and production are mutually implicated in historical and societal development.109 In Marx’s subsequent work, relations are subsumed under production, such that social relations or intercourse are defined as ‘‘relations of production’’ (Produktionsverha¨ltnisse).110 Although use of Verkehr was not completely abandoned by Marx’s discourse after The German Ideology, it no longer had a primary conceptual or analytical role. Hence, in Capital, Verkehr is employed with reference to the intercourse between commodities: how they interact with one another (Unser eigner Verkehr; C 176–77/K 97) as exchange values.111 Marx, however, is concerned with the production of those values, their conditions for emergence, not their mere appearance. The Judentum-associated Lump-, however, still played significant roles in Marx’s theoretical development after German Ideology, as the following analyses will demonstrate.

A Tale of Two Proletariats As already noted, another Marx essay appeared with the two-part ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ in the Franco-German Yearbook: ‘‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction.’’ The latter opens with a stark picture of the inverted world that has come to earth: ‘‘This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted [verkehrtes] consciousness of the world, because they [and not the heavens imagined by religion, but the state and society depicted in ‘Zur Judenfrage’] are an inverted [verkehrte] world.’’ In the May 1843 letter to Ruge that also appears in the Yearbook, Marx clearly indicates that ‘‘the topsy-turvy [verkehrte] world is the real [wirkliche] world.’’112 A group appears in ‘‘Contribution to a Critique’’ whom a number of Marx’s contemporaries had negatively depicted in a manner similar to derogatory ethnic characterizations of the Jews— describing the group as, for example, ‘‘a class of subhumans which sprang from the crossing of robbers and prostitutes’’; ‘‘a mob of nomads’’; ‘‘this heterogeneous mob, this mob of vagabonds with no avowed family and no domicile, a mob of persons so mobile that they can nowhere be pinned down’’113—that is, the proletariat. And several of Marx’s more recent commentators have seen this proletariat as either parallel with or as the obverse of the Jews as represented in Marx’s Bauer critique. For example, Dieter Just claims that not only did Marx, in contradistinction to Bauer, hold the Jews to be capable of human emancipation, but that ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ points beyond that—if one follows the logic of its concluding lines:

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As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism [Wesen des Judentums]—the market [Schacher] and the conditions which give rise to it—the Jew will have become impossible, for his consciousness will no longer have an object, the subjective basis of Judaism [Basis des Judentums]—practical need—will have become humanized [vermenschlicht], and the conflict between man’s individual sensuous existence and his speciesexistence will have been superseded. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism [Judentum]. (JQ 241/ZJ 377; cf. JQ 226/ZJ 361)

Just argues that Marx, in the end, infers that if the Jews pursue human rather than civil emancipation, they like the proletariat would be ‘‘the actual dissolution of that [world] order’’ that has generated such misery.114 Both classes—which are not classes as such115—provide the answer to Marx’s question in ‘‘Contribution to a Critique’’: ‘‘So, where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?’’116 Henri Arvon notes that the protagonists of Marx’s two essays, the Jew and the Proletariat, mirror one another, but as if observed in a camera obscura. Marx, he argues, represents with these ‘‘fictive’’ figures the two contradictory faces of alienated humanity. The Jew ‘‘seems to take pleasure in [the alienated state] and persists in [his] alienation because it conforms to [his] inner disposition, while [the proletariat] suffers through its alienation and all of its efforts are turned to putting an end to that intolerable division.’’117 This latter structural relationship of Judentum to the proletariat, the production of inverse doubles, is reproduced when Marx seeks to reclaim the determination of the proletariat from bourgeois polemics and knowledge production. As he had in ‘‘Zur Judenfrage,’’ Marx drew upon a Jewish-associated signifier to generate a double of his object of analysis that transforms even as it denigrates the original. Just as Marx had conjoined the label Jud- to bourgeois civil society in the early work, so too (as already noted above) does he attach Lumpen- to the amorphous bourgeois notion of the proletariat in order to preserve the signifier Proletariat for the selfdetermination of its signified class of productive workers, while at the same time displaying the commodified raggedness of the bourgeois notion. Marx’s most extensive description of the Lumpenproletariat appears in his 1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte/Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (EB/AB) and its account of Bonaparte’s farcical putsch and the no-less-farcical events and cast of characters that led to it. As announced by the text’s famous opening revision of Hegel, parody assumes its sensuous form in historical repetition, and it turns against itself

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to become a staged ‘‘Posse’’ or, as Marx originally described it, a ‘‘shabby [lumpige] Farce.’’118 The Lumpenproletariat first make their appearance in Marx’s text as he arrays the opposing contenders for power following the February 1848 overthrow of another Louis, Louis Phillipe. The party of order draws upon this ‘‘class’’ to form the Mobile Guard that crushed the Parisian proletariat’s June (1848) insurrection (EB 143/AB 154–55). In The Class Struggles in France that he had written the year before The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had characterized them as a ‘‘part of the proletariat,’’ although he immediately qualified that by speaking of ‘‘a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat.’’ He further specified that this ‘‘mass’’ consisted of ‘‘thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character.’’119 It consisted of those who eschew productive labor.120 In The Eighteenth Brumaire, however, subsequent events dictated that Marx make an additional distinction. The earlier label Lumpenproletariat and detailed characterization of the group will eventually be applied to the successor of the Mobile Guard, the Society of December 10, when Marx discusses how Bonaparte had mobilized a lumpig parody of a proletariat for his lumpig parody of a revolution. Though Marx wishes neither to interrupt the chronological flow of his account nor disrupt the narrative flow with an excursus setting forth distinctions that were not as yet operative chronologically among those Lumpen who inhabited the nonproductive margins of civil society, he does conclude the first section of his text with some Lump-alluding foreshadowing of events and groups to come: ‘‘the scum [Auswurf] of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order [i.e., the Society of December 10] and the hero Krapu¨linski [i.e., Louis Bonaparte] installs himself in the Tuileries as the ‘savior of society’ [Retter der Gesellschaft]’’ (EB 112/AB 123). The first allusion, ‘‘scum/Auswurf,’’ points to when Bonaparte later ‘‘constitutes himself [as the] chief of the Lumpenproletariat.’’ He achieves this by recognizing ‘‘in this scum [Auswurf] . . . of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally’’ (EB 149/AB 161).121 Further, by dubbing the self-crowned Louis Bonaparte Krapu¨linski, after one of the two knights (Crapu¨linski and Waschlapski) in the poem ‘‘Zwei Ritter’’ from Heine’s recently published collection of poems Romanzero,122 Marx makes another lumpig allusion. According to the editors of Heine’s Sa¨mtliche Schriften, the poet divined the name of the first of the poem’s

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two knights from the French crapule, which the editors translate as ‘‘Lumpenpack.’’123 Indeed, in Marx’s earlier analysis of the lead-up to the 1848 February Revolution and its aftermath, Class Struggles in France, one characteristic of the French financial aristocracy that led him to describe them as ‘‘the rebirth of the Lumpenproletariat’’ is that for them ‘‘pleasure becomes crapuleux.’’124 But again, allusions to the real Lumpen will have to suffice at this juncture in Marx’s narrative. So he immediately breaks off his rhetorical play and announces: ‘‘Let us pick up the threads of the development once more’’ (EB 112/AB 124). The Lumpen return in the fifth section of The Eighteenth Brumaire.125 There Marx describes Louis Bonaparte’s ‘‘revolutionary’’ army of lumpenproletarians. As opposed to listing the variety of exploited workers who make up the not-so-‘‘unique’’ proletariat, Marx populates this group with a broad spectrum of those outside the realm of production proper. Included in this motley Parisian crew are types that he no doubt had met some eight years earlier when he lived in Paris, such as ‘‘the archetype of stench,’’126 the Lumpensammler who still walked those streets ‘‘laden with different products plucked from the capital’s refuse, its fetid odor seeming to be so much identified with their persons that they themselves resemble veritable walking dunghills.’’127 Together they form a ragtag ensemble of decayed roue´s with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, . . . ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters [Taschenspieler], gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers [Lumpensammler],128 knife grinders [or scissor-sharpeners; Scherenschleifer], tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohe`me. (EB 149/ AB 161)

The Lumpenproletariat’s amorphous abjectness and lack of positive determination suggest that they assume an ethnic identification that the industrial proletariat had sloughed off. The ethnicization of the Lumpenproletariat also has more particular associations. Their membership recalls the first-century, garlic-reeking Jewish ‘‘peddlers, rag-pickers, valets-de-place and hook-nosed porters’’ creating a tumult in their Roman ghetto, portrayed, like a mirror of his late-nineteenth-century cityscape, by Edgar Saltus.129 This ragtag outfit also recalls the collection of rotten vermin about whom Hundt-Radowsky, in the most scurrilous and widely disseminated antisemitic pamphlet of

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the first half of the nineteenth century, Judenspiegel, rhetorically asks: ‘‘Where does one find more skillful tricksters, pickpockets, ‘horse-traders’ [Za¨hneputzer],130 quacks [Leichdornbeschneider],131 coin-clippers [Dukatenbeschneider], forgers, and frauds than among’’ the Jews?132 The quantitative prominence of Jews among the ‘‘riffraff’’ (Gesindel) had already been asserted by the leading eighteenth-century German Biblicist Johann David Michaelis in his public rebuttal of Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s 1781 proposal, ‘‘Civic Improvement of the Jews.’’ According to Michaelis, although Jews comprised no more than ‘‘one-twenty-fifth of the total German population . . . they supply at least the same number of riffraff [Gesindel] as the whole German people or even more.’’133 In a later reference to the December 10 Society in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx refers to this riffraff as ‘‘the secret society of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs, the society of disorder, prostitution and theft’’ (EB 150/ AB 162). Marx’s choice of exemplary names alludes to two of the most amoral, disloyal, dishonest, power-and money-grubbing villains in Friedrich Schiller’s drama The Robbers (Die Ra¨uber). Beyond embodying the most negative personality characteristics also ascribed to Jews, these figures are strongly coded Jewish in more direct if still allusive ways. The Jewishness of the chief rogue, the always-already-circumcised Moritz Spiegelberg, has long been assumed, despite the character’s denials;134 however, the name ‘‘Schufterle’’ has a number of Jewish connections as well. In German a Schuft generally refers to a rogue; however, in the first half of the nineteenth century it also referred to a miserable, rag-bedecked, vermin-laden beggar that the lexicographer Adelung ties to the English ‘‘scab.’’ This sense of shabbily dressed (zerlumpt) is maintained in its adjectival form; Grimms Wo¨rterbuch illustrates its meaning with ‘‘rags [Lumpen], even the shabbiest [schuftigste] plunderer wouldn’t want.’’135 Grimms also lists a number of predecessors who suggested that Schuft derived from the Hebrew ‘‘schophet’’ or ‘‘judge’’ and underwent a denigration similar to that of Papst (pope) in German Protestant lands. Further, while use of the diminutive suffix ‘‘–le’’ can be found in Schiller’s native Swabian, it would have been as familiar, if not more so, to German ears from its use by Yiddish and Ju¨disch-Deutsch speakers. Marx had already expanded the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat in Class Struggles in France, when he detailed there the conditions that led up to the events chronicled in The Eighteenth Brumaire: ‘‘The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the Lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.’’ He drew this conclusion from several of their characteristics. First, they ‘‘get rich not

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by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others.’’ Second, ‘‘at the top of bourgeois society . . . money, filth, and blood commingle’’ (Geld, Schmutz und Blut zusammenfließen). These are characteristics that they share with the stereotypical representations of the nonproductive Jews,136 who worship at the shrine of that same triune god of money, filth, and blood. Marx confirmed this implicit correlation when he added that ‘‘Paris was flooded with pamphlets—‘The Rothschild Dynasty,’ ‘The Jews, Kings of the Epoch,’—etc. in which the rule of the finance aristocracy was denounced and stigmatized [gebrandmarkt] with greater or less wit.’’137 He then refers to the ‘‘France of the stock-exchange-Jews.’’138 Further evidence of Marx’s association of Judentum with the Lumpenproletariat is provided by Marx’s vitriolic reply to Herr Karl Vogt’s pamphlet, ‘‘My Case [Prozeß] against the Allgemeine Zeitung,’’ and its defamatory comments. These included the accusation that Marx was the leader of a group known as the Schwefelbande [Brimstone Gang] from 1849 to1850—of whose existence, Marx argues, he had no knowledge at the time. Marx does not limit his refutation to citing in full a letter from one of the group’s members that recounts its Marxless history. Marx turns the tables by turning the Brimstone Gang into their purported opponents, the December 10 Society, through extensive citations from The Eighteenth Brumaire’s description of the latter collection of lumpenproletarians, ‘‘this scum, offal, refuse [Auswu¨rfe, Abfall, Abhub] of all classes’’ (EB 149/AB 161).139 The Gang’s sulfurous stench (Schwefel literally means sulfur) with which Vogt would perfume Marx is also displaced. Marx unleashes a torrent of olfactory and cloacal citations and figures as well as numerous references to preeminently Jewish noses140 onto Herr Vogt’s English coconspirator and fellow rascal (Mitstrolche), the Jewish publisher of the London Daily Telegraph and republisher of Vogt’s screed, Joseph Moses Levy. These numerous correspondences and juxtapositions of Judentum and the Lumpenproletariat in Marx’s work detailed above141 do not signify that Marx is identifying Judentum with the Lumpenproletariat or vice versa. Rather they reflect Marx’s assumption of an ongoing elective affinity between the morphemic/semantic fields Jud- and Lump- by which aspects of each help determine the depiction of the other. This is manifestly evident in one of the very rare occasions in his correspondence in which Marx identifies himself as a Jew. In a letter to his uncle Lion Philips (29 November 1864), he writes: ‘‘Our fellow tribesman [Stammesgenosse], Benjamin Disraeli, . . . gave himself airs as the guardian angel of the High Church [in

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English]. . . . He is the best proof of how great talent without conviction produces scoundrels [Lumpen], even though liveried and ‘right honourable’ [in English] scoundrels [Lumpen].’’142

A Capital Offense Marx begins his masterpiece Capital by engaging the world of appearances: ‘‘The wealth of those societies, in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself [erscheint] as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity’’ (C 125/K 49). Yet even before he can initiate that analysis, he must separate that unit, that thing, from the mass of its like. It is as a ‘‘bearer’’ (Tra¨ger; C 126/K 49) of properties (Eigenschaften) that one commodity can be compared with and distinguished from another. According to Marx the commodity bears value. Once he performs his analysis of the determination of value he returns to the commodity. ‘‘A commodity appears [scheint] at first sight [Blick] an extremely obvious [selbstversta¨ndliches], trivial thing’’ (C 163/K 85). Seeing may be believing, but it does not substitute for analysis. It is necessary to understand how this property can appear and be recognized as itself and as part of the commodity. When Hegel had made the corresponding move from ‘‘sense certainty’’ to ‘‘perception’’ and then to ‘‘force and the understanding,’’ he found himself confronted with a supersensible world that was the inverse of the sensible world. When Marx makes his journey he finds that the inverted world is here in actuality.143 Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing [ein ordina¨res sinnliches Ding], wood. But, as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent [ein sinnlich u¨bersinnliches Ding]. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was. (ibid.)144

Marx’s anthropomorphizing gesture illuminates how ‘‘the definite social relation between men themselves . . . assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’’ (C 165/K 87) that Marx calls the ‘‘fetishism of the commodity.’’ Marx had researched fetishism some twenty-five years earlier, reading among other texts Charles de Brosses’s classic Du culte des dieux fe´tiches (Of

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the Cult of the Fetish Gods). His studies quickly found their way into the young Marx’s journalism, where they from the beginning crossed paths with the Judenfrage. Marx first makes use of his reading on fetishism in his 10 July 1842 response to Karl Heinrich Hermes’s lead article in the Ko¨lnische Zeitung (28.6.42). Marx corrects Hermes’s depiction of Fetischismus that he had employed as proof that ‘‘religion [i.e., the stalking horse for Christianity] is the foundation of the state’’ whereby, in a figure that, as we’ve already seen, Marx makes frequent use of, Hermes ‘‘had turned history on its head [auf den Kopf gestellt].’’145 Although Marx makes no mention of it in his 10 July response to Hermes, four days earlier (6 July) Hermes had published the first of his lead articles, also in the Ko¨lnische Zeitung, on the Jewish Question. Asserting the same base assumptions as the earlier article, Hermes argued that giving Jews full equal rights would contradict the Christian foundation of the state. It was with regard to this and subsequent articles on the issue by Hermes that Marx, as noted above, had written later that summer to Dagobert Oppenheim announcing his intention to take the Jewish Question in a different direction. Jewish representation played a more direct role in another of Marx’s early reports of German fetishism. When reporting (3 November 1842) on the concluding debate in the Rhine Province Assembly over a law regarding the theft of, coincidentally enough, wood, the young journalist for the Rheinische Zeitung made an ironic concluding analogy between an observation reported by de Brosses—albeit without Marx’s acknowledgment of his source—and the proceedings that had transpired:146 The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders’ fetish?

The analogical usefulness of Marx’s readings for this article were not limited to de Brosses, as Shakespeare too made a sardonic appearance. To highlight the illogic and inhumanity147 of the forest owner’s right to the thief’s labor as compensation for the loss of wood that the new law would decree, whereby ‘‘we have, however, reached a point where the forest owner, in exchange for his piece of wood, receives what was once a human being,’’148 Marx cites from the court scene in act 4, scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice: Shylock. Portia.

Most learned judge!—A sentence! come, prepare! Tarry a little; there is something else.

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Gratiano. Shylock. Portia.

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood; The words expressly are ‘‘a pound of flesh’’: Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh; But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate Unto the state of Venice. O upright judge! Mark, Jew. O learned judge! Is that the law? Thyself shall see the act.

With the reenactment of (the frustration) of Shylock’s circumcising/castrating149 demand, Marx would thwart the law’s fetishistic exchange of the liveliness of a human life for the thingness of a piece of wood (and vice versa).150 This apparent juxtaposition of Judentum and fetishism returns, albeit strangely, in the discussion of commodity fetishism. After describing the ‘‘mysterious,’’ paradoxical appearance of the commodity, Marx is presented with another phenomenological mystery: ‘‘men . . . equat[e] their different products to each other in exchange as values’’; however, ‘‘Value . . . does not have its description branded on its [i.e., value’s] forehead’’ (auf der Stirn geschrieben; C 167/K 88). Such concealment is at the heart of commodity fetishism: ‘‘this finished form of the world of commodities— the money form— . . . conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly’’ (C 168–69/K 90). By contrast, ‘‘ancient social organisms of production are much more simple and transparent than those of bourgeois society,’’ where instead of the mediating commodity one found, for example—an example Marx shared with Bauer—the ‘‘Jews in the pores of Polish society’’ (C 172/K 93).151 Nevertheless, although value cannot apparently be distinguished from the commodity that bears it, this seemingly opaque hybrid offers itself to hermeneutic practice as a ‘‘social hieroglyphic’’; Marx reinforces the linguistic figuration when he adds that it is ‘‘as much men’s social product as is their language’’ (C 167/K 88). Prior to this discussion, Marx had already anticipated the social and semiotic character of the commodity with a quasi-whimsical phrase that both acknowledged the identification of bourgeois society with Judentum and thoroughly diluted it: ‘‘the language of commodities also has, apart from Hebrew, plenty of other more or less correct dialects’’ (C 144/K 67).

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While value may not reveal itself as such, the ‘‘formulas’’ [Formen] by which bourgeois political economists misrecognize it ‘‘bear the unmistakable stamp [auf der Stirn geschrieben] of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite’’ (C 174–75/K 95). Marx’s complementary repetition of this figure—auf der Stirn geschrieben/written on its forehead—should be triangulated with its other iteration in the first volume of Capital mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. When discussing the capitalist character of manufacture, Marx notes that ‘‘[a]s the chosen people bore in their features [auf der Stirn geschrieben] the sign that they were the property of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing worker as the property of capital’’ (C 482/K 382). The English translators render the placement of the sign that the Jews bear somewhat more ambiguously than Marx’s figure. After all, the identifying mark of the (male) Jew is inscribed not on the forehead but on that other head, the glans, as the place of the missing foreskin; and in any case, the Jew, no matter how he is dressed, is unlikely to be manifesting the sign in public. The various iterations of Marx’s Stirn152 phrasing implies an analogy between Judentum and the commodity: just as Judentum betrays itself in practice regardless of ethnic or religious countenance, so does the commodity regardless of its material form. More, it brings together the defining moments of Marx’s early and later analyses of bourgeois civil society: the individual and psychological characterizations of practical need, material egoism, and the Schachergeist153 figured by Judentum have been transformed into the laws of alienation and capital emblematized by the commodity. Marx had already identified the commodity through the ragged figure of the circumcised Jew: ‘‘The capitalist knows that all commodities, however tattered [lumpig] they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, are by nature circumcised Jews, and, what is more, a wonderful [wunderta¨tige] means of making still more money out of money’’ (C 256/K 169). There is more Jewish figuration here than just the Jewish-identified characterizations—lumpig, stench,154 circumcision—and explicit mention of Jews.155 Again the translators have obscured Marx’s figuration; what is translated as ‘‘by nature circumcised’’ reads ‘‘innerlich beschnittene,’’ literally internally circumcised. The true identity of the commodity—money (exchange value)—is cloaked to all but those who profit from it. Further, by translating wunderta¨tig as ‘‘wonderful’’ rather than as ‘‘miraculous,’’ they have substituted something natural for what Marx, following the Aristotelian ethical tradition, found wholly unnatural: the creation of value by nonproductive means, here money from money, not unlike usury.156

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On the other hand, there is a very well-known sign-bearing brow, the mark of that other ‘‘wanderer,’’ ‘‘fugitive of the earth’’ (Gen. 4:12), Cain, with which circumcision has historically been identified;157 hence, Marx may be drawing upon a more discrete tradition.158 Then again, the proprietary significance of the division (Teilung) of labor may be no more visible to bourgeois political economists than are the genitals (Schamteile) of the Jews. A more striking connection is between the language of mutilation that he associates with the capitalist character of manufacture and the division of labor, and that implied by circumcision. Earlier chapters of this book have already detailed numerous instances of the latter. Marx too had already associated circumcision with mutilation, specifically in relationship to gold (Gold) and money (Geld) in his 1859 Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy:159 Functioning as a medium of circulation, gold suffered all manner of injuries [Unbill], it was clipped [beschnitten] and even reduced [verflacht] to a purely symbolical scrap of paper [Papierlappen]. Its golden splendour [Herrlichkeit] is restored when it serves as money [Geld]. The servant becomes the master [Herr]. The mere underling becomes the god of commodities.

Marx is here playing on the double character of the commodity that he will later make throughout the opening chapter of Capital: it is both a natural thing and a social object. Gold, like any natural thing, can be subject to physical changes: pieces can be clipped off, and it can be flattened. Marx, however, is not describing these deformations merely as such. Gold that is beschnitten or that is reduced to paper has already assumed the double-character of the commodity money (Geld).160 Marx has also opted for rather loaded figures to embody the paradoxical nature of the commodity: the reference to clipping coins in German as beschnitten or circumcised never loses its association with Jews and with their immoral trafficking with money.161 Now consider the descriptive language Marx employs in the paragraph that is concluded with the analogy between the proprietary brandings: the worker is made ‘‘into a crippled monstrosity’’, ‘‘divided up,’’ becoming ‘‘a mere fragment of his own body.’’ The manufacturing worker’s natural ability to create products independently is incapacitated (C 481–82/K 381– 82). The litany of dividing and maiming continues in the next paragraph: manufacture ‘‘mutilates [verstu¨mmelt] the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself’’ (C 482/K 382). This portrait of ‘‘industrial pathology’’ reaches its rhetorical climax with images of severed body parts that arise from different sites of the rag trade:

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Modern manufacture . . . either finds the disjecta membra poetae [‘‘the scattered members of the poet’’; cf. Horace, Satires, I.4.62] ready to hand, and only waiting to be collected together, as is the case in the manufacture of clothes in large towns, or it can easily apply the principles of division, simply by exclusively assigning the various operations of a handicraft to particular men. In such cases, a week’s experience is enough to determine the proportion between the numbers of . . . ‘‘hands’’ necessary for the various functions. (C 485/K 385)

Not surprisingly, Marx cites Ramazzini amid this discussion (C 484 n. 50/K 384 n. 73). Marx later amplifies the damage wrought by these ‘‘shoddy’’ exemplars of industrial pathology, when he draws many of the horrors from stops along the rag trade in his discussion of ‘‘the revolutionary impact of largescale industry’’ on modern manufacture:162 Owing to the excessive labour performed by their workers, both adult and non-adult, certain London firms where newspapers and books are printed have gained for themselves the honourable name of ‘‘slaughter-houses.’’ Similar excesses occur in book-binding, where the victims are chiefly women, girls, and children. . . . One of the most shameful, dirtiest and worst paid jobs, a kind of labour on which women and young girls are by preference employed is the sorting of rags [Lumpen]. . . . They are used for manure, for making bed-flocks, for shoddy, and they serve as the raw material of paper [cf. C 464/K 364]. The rag-sorters [Lumpensortierer] are carriers for the spread of small-pox and other infectious diseases, and they themselves are first victims. (C 592–93/K 487)

The mutilated victims of such manufacture will return later in Capital when Marx describes that population who supplement the ‘‘actual Lumpenproletariat’’ of ‘‘vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes’’ in filling the ‘‘hospital of the active labour-army,’’ pauperism: ‘‘the demoralized [Verkommene], the ragged [Verlumpte] and those unable to work . . . the victims of industry . . . the mutilated [Verstu¨mmelte], the sickly [Verkrankte]’’ (C 797/DK 673). Thus, the identification of the Jew by the so-called mutilation of circumcision parallels in the world of Capital the identifications of the surplus reserve or zero-degree worker by the crippled and chronically ill and of the zero-degree commodity by the shredded and decomposed seeminglybeyond-any-use rag. In each case the remainder of a violent action becomes an unseen (supersensible?) sign of value. Do these correspondences indicate motivation, if not necessarily intention?

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Thinking in Jewish? A Case of Shoddy Thinking? Once one moves beyond ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ and its brief supplements in the Holy Family, discussion of Judentum per se largely falls out of Marx’s writing aside from the occasional rhetorical flourish or vitriolic denunciation. As I’ve argued above and as others have before, this shift in rhetorical object parallels developments in Marx’s own thinking about the nature of bourgeois civil society and capitalism. Yet, does this change signify that the morphemic/semantic fields surrounding Judentum and the everyday discourse about it play no roles in that thinking? It is unlikely that a Marx, who cut his political teeth on rhetorical exchange and performance, maintained those teeth in his journalism, and continued to employ incisive description and exemplar in his ‘‘scientific’’ works, believed like Kant that ‘‘the bright colouring of the illustrative material [merely] intervenes to cover over and conceal the articulation and organization of the system.’’163 I would also add that whether or not Marx accepted a rigid superstructural understanding of his figuration and that this material was merely ‘‘illustrative’’ and certainly not determinative, he would also argue that the objects with which one engages daily—including the phrases that populate our reading, writing, and conversation and the social interaction between Gentile (whether or not of Gentile descent) and Jew (whether or not the individual accepts such an identification)—are among the ‘‘circumstances that make men’’ (GI 54/DI 38), if not necessarily ‘‘in the last instance.’’ They may seem to be as merely incidental to Marx’s analyses as day residues seem to be to the content of dreams, but like those remains they prove to be not merely at hand; they shape the hand that would employ them.164 This chapter has shown how Judentum/Jud- and Lumpen/Lump- are inextricably intertwined, both materially and linguistically, in the world Marx inhabited. It has also shown how—whether in structural correspondences or in contiguous usage—these and related signifiers permeate key sites in Marx’s discourse. At times functioning as an ironizing double, at other times showing what cannot be said, and at still other times saying what cannot be shown, Marx’s figures perform a variety of tasks while also serving to adorn or demean, as, for example, in the several instances of Marx’s rhetorically reappropriating key notions associated with Judentum and Lumpen, including Verkehr and Proletariat, examined here. Judentum provided a way to think and to represent (darstellen) that thinking of the misery of modernity.165

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chapter 7

A Future without Jews Max Nordau’s Pre-Zionist Answer to the Other Jewish Question That antisemitism is a manifestation of a chief principle of the worldprocess, the struggle for existence, surely should not be disconcerting to a follower of Darwin. —freiherr v. von wasserschleben, Anti-Nordau

Analysis of how the Germanophone Jewish cultured bourgeoisie acted out and worked through their Jewish identifications by modern European society has traditionally focused on the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, and Otto Weininger.1 Discussion of the dilemmas intrinsic to their situation traversed their public writings as well as their private correspondence and journals. Indeed, they were more than observers; their efforts to mediate the Zweiheit, the duality, of German (European) and Jewish identities in many ways shaped their work. Yet their witness to and confrontation with the contradictions of Jewish existence was already anticipated by the early work of a figure several years their senior: Max Nordau. A bellettrist, journalist, physician, and social critic, Nordau was perhaps the foremost cultural icon of Jewish intellectual assimilation during the 1880s and early 1890s. When Freud went off to Paris in 1885 to work with Charcot, his friends insisted that he make a pilgrimage to visit Nordau there.2 Contemporaries held Nordau in such high esteem that his 1895 endorsement of Zionism conferred legitimacy upon Herzl’s idea. A further indication of his stature is his entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06); more column inches are devoted to him than to Herzl, let alone to Freud, Schnitzler, and the others

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named above, whose careers were still developing. Ironically, Nordau’s original prominence contributed to the virtual oblivion to which he is relegated today;3 as Herzl’s champion he took the fall for the Zionist leader’s unpopular Uganda resettlement plan, and as the author of the 1892 best-selling antimodernist polemic Entartung (Degeneration), he disparaged Ibsen, Nietzsche, Wagner, Zola, and others who today epitomize the heights of modern culture. The appeal of this polymath was in fact his representativeness. As the noted cultural historian George Mosse has remarked, Nordau ‘‘stood for . . . the beliefs and hopes which characterized so many of his class, profession and generation.’’4 As a trained physician and well-read critic Nordau provided the authoritative voice that legitimated their claims to hegemony. He validated their rationalist science and their masculinist bourgeois values in an era of perceived social upheaval and feared breakdown of ethnic, gender, and sexual identities. By diagnosing the new art forms and lifestyles of the modernists as symptoms of individual neuropathology, Nordau confirmed the apocalyptic qualms of his fellow cultured bourgeoisie. But he offered them as well the solace of a scientific explanation (and hence opened the possibility of a cure) for society’s apparent degeneration. Nordau also represented certain beliefs and hopes that some of his fellow Jews were less likely to acknowledge. In his life and in his writings he embodied the contradictions inherent to Jewish mediations of their identifications in postemancipation European societies. While his plenary speeches to the first Zionist congresses (1897 and 1898) and writings such as ‘‘Muskeljudentum’’ (Jewry of Muscle; 1903) clearly address the dilemmas of Jewish existence at this time and place,5 until his fortieth year (c. 1890) Nordau claimed that he had shunted aside any interest in, let alone identification with, Judentum; then, antisemitism’s intractability convinced him of the failure of assimilation as a modus vivendi for Jews in postemancipation Europe.6 Indeed, in his early cultural criticism, Die conventionellen Lu¨gen der Kulturmenschheit (The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization) and its sequel Paradoxe (Paradoxes), explicit discussions of Jewish matters appear to be minimal. Consequently, it has been argued by the historian P. M. Baldwin that Nordau’s interest in antisemitism and Judentum was negligible in his pre-Zionist writings.7 Nordau’s self-representations to the contrary, his earlier writings can be seen to be just as shaped, if less manifestly so than his later work, by the problems of Jewish identification in his European society. Conventionelle Lu¨gen and Paradoxe are more than the products of a well-read and well-connected cultural critic who fancied himself a stylist and who had a

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passion for puns. His pre-Zionist cultural criticism bears witness to his attempt to resolve the paradox that his fellow Jewish-identified public intellectuals confronted: to present a European persona to an audience —including himself—who could see only a Jew. The rhetoric of Conventionelle Lu¨gen and Paradoxe—the puns, wordplays, displacements, conspicuous omissions and inclusions—is replete with references to both Jewish attempts at assimilation and antisemitic depictions of Jews. In particular, examining his intentional use of a pun, Mieselsucht—a term that signifies both leprosy and gloominess—as a primary diagnostic category and investigating his continuous allusions to circumcision reveal Nordau’s persistent concern with Western European Jewry. This chapter analyzes how the miasmic8 matrix of Jewish identification and denigration left its trace upon, indeed helped produce, these works, as it had the other texts under analysis in this volume. It examines how Nordau’s Conventionelle Lu¨gen and Paradoxe form a diptych that hinged upon the Other Jewish Question. Out of a portrait of his times Nordau envisioned a utopian society governed by natural Darwinian truths and resolved cultural antinomies, a world in which all men are brothers, all women are wives, and all Jews have long since been radically assimilated.9 Nordau would project a future without Jews, but he was unable to overcome a present that was too filled with them.

The Conventional Lies of an Assimilated Jew In 1883 Max Nordau published his critique of the religious, political, economic, and sexual institutions of contemporary society, Conventionelle Lu¨gen (CL). Banned in Russia, confiscated in Austria, and included on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books, it achieved a succe`s de scandale that eventually resulted in over seventy editions and numerous translations.10 Nordau continued his assault on the conventional wisdom of his age two years later with Paradoxe (P), an examination of the reigning antinomies of cultural understanding, such as optimism and pessimism, individual and social, genius and philistinism, nation and state. In these works, Nordau brought his medical training and his Darwinist conviction to the analysis of the ‘‘civilized world’’ (Kulturwelt), which he viewed as ‘‘a single monstrous hospital ward’’ (CL 1). He diagnosed the rampant pessimism afflicting European society—‘‘This disease comes to light in every manifestation of the human spirit. Literature and art, philosophy and the positive sciences, politics and economy, all are infected by

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its taint’’ (CL 7)—as Mieselsucht, a term signifying both leprosy and gloominess (P 12). For Nordau the etiology of this plague lay in the failure of societal institutions to act in accordance with the evolutionary principles of natural selection (Zuchtwahl) and the struggle for existence (Kampf ums Dasein; CL 28). In the wake of Darwin, he found inexcusable and fatal to humanity the contravention of these natural laws; such action prevented the instincts of self- and species-preservation from attaining their ends. According to Nordau the civilized world thwarted the natural, progressive development of humanity by blindly ignoring evolutionary insight. Instead, counterfeit institutions—such structures of social differentiation as religion, politics, economics, and matrimony—produced the artificial identities of the priest, the monarch, the capitalist, the loveless prostitutespouse, and the virago. Nordau opposed these conventional lies and unnatural types with the natural differences engendered by obedience to evolutionary law, namely, the differences between the sexes and those among the races and nationalities. For Nordau, fixed, natural gender identities are the necessary vehicle for selection.11 Similarly, the telos of evolution is furthered by the struggle for survival, first between biologically differentiated higher and lower races (the lower races will be exterminated) and then among the linguistically differentiated nationalities of that higher, white race. Nordau’s discussion of conventionally pathological versus evolutionarily healthy differences all but avoids what appears in the last half of the nineteenth century as a paradigm of natural identity: the Jew. He implicitly distinguishes himself and his fellow cosmopolitan Jews from those types most vulnerable to Gentile criticism: the ancient, the Eastern, and the spießbu¨rgerlich Jews.12 His apparently marginal references to Judentum comport with the desire of a cosmopolitan European to avoid having the recognition of his Jewish descent interfere with his assimilation into Gentile high society. Typical of the would-be assimilated Jewry of his generation, Nordau seems to assume that extensive discussion of the Jewish Question would call attention to his Jewish particularity and thereby undermine his pretensions to speak from an objective, universal perspective. Worse, whether repeating the negative valuations of Jewish behavior or engaging in what would be perceived as apologetic, he risked being identified with regnant representations of the ethnic or racial Jew.13 Yet omission of such discussion would be no less conspicuous in texts claiming a global interpretation of Europe’s malaise. Nordau is writing at the height of the Berlin antisemitic dispute, the pogroms in Russia, the Rohling affair in Austria,14 and the Tisza-Eszlar blood libel in his native

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Hungary. Hence, he acknowledges the Jewish Question, but he argues that it is in and of itself inconsequential. While he lists German antisemitism among the first symptoms of the Kulturwelt’s unhealthy state, he regards it as epiphenomenal; antisemitism is merely a pretext (Vorwand) and a disguise (Verkleidung) for specific class and age-group passions (such as envy, ressentiment), ‘‘which do not venture to show themselves under their true name’’ (CL 2). He further defuses the question by not allowing one particular indexical morphemic field to show itself in his discussion of German antisemitism: Jud-. Nordau’s strategy leads one critic to retort, ‘‘With regard to antisemitism . . . all the reasons for its appearance are enumerated [in Nordau’s work]; only the chief one, the conduct of the Jews themselves, is not at all referred to.’’15 Nordau does mention contemporary Western Jewry explicitly, but in these few passages Jud- is a religious identification. Thus, according to the rationalist Nordau, for whom ritual is a primitive relic and belief in a god a priestly trick, Jewishness is artificial or conventional and not a matter of a people or Volk. In Conventionelle Lu¨gen, Nordau confines examination of contemporary Jewry to the chapter on the religious lie. Here Jews appear with Christians in his dismissal of the liturgies, because religious services are all interlaced with ancient barbaric cultic practices and beliefs (CL 60). In the chapter’s only other reference to Judentum, Nordau evokes Jewish identification to exemplify how religious designations enforce what are in fact artificial differentiations among people. He calls attention to those Austrians who choose the official designation ‘‘Creedless’’ (Confessionslos); they ‘‘deluded themselves that they could escape the prejudices which follow after their tribe [Stamm], if they were no longer officially classed with the Jewish religious community.’’ He then relates that in Austria ‘‘Creedless’’ had become almost synonymous with ‘‘Jewish’’:16 ‘‘When some candidate for admission to the University replied ‘Creedless’ to the then-usual question about his religion, the secretary of the University of Vienna used to remark with a good-natured smile, ‘Why don’t you say right out that you are a Jew!’ ’’ (CL 34). IIlustrating the artificiality of religious denomination with attempts by Jews to disguise, if not to repudiate, their origin, Nordau indicates that Judentum, like all conventional religions, has no positive content. Moreover, he differentiates himself from those self-deluding individuals who assume that designations such as ‘‘Creedless’’ or ‘‘Jewish’’ refer to natural (i.e., real) identities. Nordau may also be differentiating himself from the stereotype of the sly or deceitful Jew. Since in his 1880s diptych Jud- merely designates religious affiliation—it is an extrinsic attribute rather than some intrinsic national or racial character—Nordau can consistently avoid mention of Jews qua Jews

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in his treatment of the other conventional lies. On occasion he does invoke the ancient Hebrews, but modern Israelites like Nordau are not to be identified, pace Voltaire, with their alleged biblical forebears. Nordau describes the Hebrews as crude, lewd, and uncreative (CL 59). Further, in his comparison of French unpreparedness to inhabit the new world created by the Revolution to the incapacity of ‘‘that Egyptian-born generation’’ (CL 81) to settle Canaan, the ancient Hebrews serve only as a negative example. And contemporary political leaders such as Disraeli and Lassalle (CL 204),17 whose Jewish descent was well known but in these texts goes unremarked, are portrayed as motivated by individual, not tribal, psychology: they are unlike their purported Old Testament ancestors, who were barbarically governed by ‘‘national-Jewish-patriotic’’ (nationalju¨disch-patriotische; CL 59) sentiments. Such biblical antecedents were of less concern to Jews desiring acceptance and integration into European society than were the pervasive denigrating representations of their ‘‘coreligionists.’’ Consequently, more striking is Nordau’s general omission of the Jews from the chapters on economics, marriage, and the press. Contemporary critiques of capitalism assigned Jews a fundamental role. During the 1870s Otto Glagau wrote a series of notorious articles in that widely read bastion of the German Mittelstand, Die Gartenlaube, which blamed Jewish speculators, middlemen, and legislators for the crash of 1873 and for the ensuing travails of the peasantry and petit bourgeoisie: ‘‘Jewry is Manchesterism in the extreme. . . . Its center is the stock exchange. . . . As an alien tribe it fastens itself on the German people and sucks their marrow. The social question is essentially the Jewish question; everything else is swindle.’’18 But Nordau engages in neither apologetic for nor vilification of Jewish involvement in capitalism. Like the contributors to the critique of so-called Jewish financial capital, he describes speculators and the stock jobbers as villains and parasites (Schmarotzer; CL 203), but he does not identify these professions as Jewish.19 He lists Baron Hirsch and Rothschild among the superrich, but just as prominent are non-Jews like Krupp and Vanderbilt (CL 192). When Rothschild returns to Nordau’s argument, it is not to personify perverse capitalism but to exemplify the inability of the wealthy to prevent the deserved descent into poverty of their incompetent descendants (CL 246–47). While Jews were also prominent in contemporary discourse on the commercialization of marriage and the relationship between marriage and racial preservation (e.g., endogamy or inbreeding), they are absent from Nordau’s consideration of such aspects of the matrimonial lie.20 Finally,

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unlike the diatribes of Hartmann, Stoecker, and Treitschke, Nordau’s attacks on the new power of the press do not code the fourth estate as Jewish. Rather, he presents a general dissent with—without consideration of the ‘‘descent’’ of—journalistic practice and practitioners.21 Such omissions were striking to the author of Anti-Nordau, Freiherr V. von Wasserschleben. For him, the rationale for antisemitism lay particularly in the Jews’ role in the economy and in their refusal to intermarry. But Nordau’s situation required this silence. Ascribing to Jews any specific responsibility for the objects of his critique would have been read as supporting the assumption of an essential Jewish nature. For Wasserschleben, as well as for many Jews and Gentiles during this period, Jewishness was an essential, not an accidental, characteristic, whether the essence was understood to be grounded in an ontological or in a racial-anthropological definition of identity. The antisemitic critique of the social and economic crises of modernity did not blame individuals who happened to be Jewish; it blamed the indelible Jewish nature of those individuals. Thus conversion, let alone the statement of ‘‘creedlessness,’’ was usually insufficient for sloughing off Jewish identity. Had Nordau noted the Jewishness of the individuals in his critique, he would have, regardless of his intentions, provided tinder for antisemitic polemics and their assumptions about Jewish nature qua innate. Apologetic was an impossible alternative to silence; it would have been viewed as special pleading and thus would have compromised the universal perspective he claimed for himself as a scientist and as a member of the European bourgeoisie. Although discussion of contemporary Jewry is largely anecdotal in Conventionelle Lu¨gen, one particular Jewish type is extensively examined, albeit by allusion, in the sequel. In Paradoxe Nordau describes a group who unimaginatively and rather conventionally embody what they believe is proper European culture. His analysis of both ‘‘die Philister,’’ the modernday Philistines, and ‘‘the genius’’ deploys a number of Jewish markers to evoke a contrast between the spießbu¨rgerlich destiny of the ‘‘creedless’’ students of his earlier anecdote and those creative individuals, perhaps like himself, whose insights further the natural development of humanity. The elective affinity, if not identity, of Jew and Philistine, the embodiments (together with the French and women) of everything that the ChristianGerman Eating Club opposed, had become a commonplace since Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim had graced the founding of that fellowship in 1811 with their respective mocking diatribes, ‘‘Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte’’(The Philistine in Prehistory, Now, and ¨ ber die Kennzeichen des Judentums’’ (On When He Is History) and ‘‘U

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Judentum’s Identifying Marks).22 Brentano’s table talk was in part a commentary on the rebuslike drawings that accompanied it, such as one (see Figure 7-1) in which the opposing bodies of a Jew (with his head marked as the south pole) and a Philistine (his head marked as the north) are thoroughly intertwined.23 The modern-day Philistines appear in Nordau’s analysis of the antinomy between majority and minority. They are introduced as the ‘‘bogeyman’’ (schwarze Mann) of the genius (wohlgeborene Seele; P 33). Such characterization of the Philistine as black (schwarz) resonates with Jewish associations. Jews were often depicted as black by nineteenth-century Europeans.24 A more direct connection between that stock figure of German folklore the ‘‘schwarze Mann’’ and the Jew arises in consideration of Nordau’s historical context: his work appeared during a time when Jews were being accused of ritually murdering Gentile children; they were the archetypal bogeymen.25 Nordau next illustrates the opposition between the Philistines and the genius by contrasting ‘‘the children of Israel’’ with the ‘‘talented Old

Figure 7-1. Philistine and Jew. Illustration from Clemens Brentano, Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte (Berlin, 1811).

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Egyptian state engineer of the top rank’’ who designed the pyramids. Echoing long-standing stereotypes, he describes the former as ‘‘very vulgar’’ and connects their collective character to their ‘‘well-attested taste for onions and fleshpots’’ (P 34). By conjoining the extended meanings of fleshpots—the biblical reference (Exodus 16:3) to a pot in which meat is cooked and so to a life of luxury back in Egypt—with folklore about Jewish culinary habits,26 this ‘‘well-attested’’ image identifies the children of Israel with a caricature of modern Jewry. Nordau is doing more than distinguishing Jewish group from Gentile individual. The contrast between the common Jews and the creative Gentile initiates a series of hierarchical oppositions that marks the chapter. The children of Israel join the negatively valued determinations of the Philistine, the group, the majority, the typical, the hackneyed, the species, the primitive, and the female; the Egyptian architect is structurally affiliated with the genius, the individual, the minority, the special, the original, the individual, the civilized, and the male. The affiliations are more than structural. Their collective definition, for example, associates the children of Israel with women; in this chapter Nordau contrasts women and men by the same terms: ‘‘Woman is as a rule typical, the man individual’’ (P 50).27 By embedding the progenitors of the Jews within this network, Nordau thereby draws upon—and risks reinforcing (?)—other contemporary images of Judentum. With the addition of several nonbiblical stereotypes to his description of the Hebrews, Nordau intensifies his critique of philistinism at the expense of the Jews. Further, the overdetermined reference to the construction of the pyramids indicates that Nordau is as concerned with the stereotypical opposition between the gifted, first-rate Gentile and the vulgar and rank Jews as he is with his contrast between the genius and the Philistine. This conclusion is given added weight, ironically, by Nordau’s periodic description of the genius in Jewish terms. While he continually parallels the opposition of Jew and Gentile with that of Philistine and genius, the corresponding roles are sometimes reversed. In his distribution of characteristic Jewish traits, he accords the genius those that are universally desirable; this move would allow Nordau, without the onus of Jewish descent, to identify with both the positive traits and their bearer. The Philistines, however, receive those traits that an assimilated Jew would disavow. Thus Nordau displaces the Jews’ self-description as ‘‘chosen’’ (Auserwa¨hlten; P 35) onto the genius, while the Philistines retain one of the most troubling alleged characteristics of the Jewish people, their ‘‘staying power’’ (Beharrungsvermo¨gen; P 35), their unchanging persistence. By

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making ‘‘chosenness’’ indicative of the Egyptian engineer/genius rather than of the Jews/Philistines, Nordau shifts it from a parochial, religiously based self-ascription to a natural attribute; he thereby also renders ironic the stereotype that genius is alien to Jewish nature.28 Attribution of Jewish characteristics to the genius is repeated later in the chapter; Nordau writes: ‘‘In fact the Philistine is thus the lord of the land, and the obstinate odd one [der bockbeinige Sonderling; i.e., the genius] has to dance in step when the compulsory waltz is played’’ (P 60). Combined within the description of the genius as bockbeinig is a history of Jewish caricature: the crooked, goat-footed, stubborn (krumm, bockfu¨ßig, hartna¨ckig) odd-one-out.29 This genius is not a Jew; rather his situation in Philistine society mirrors that of the Jew in Christian Europe. The genius is a member of a marginal minority that is the light unto the nations— albeit one suppressed by the conventionality of the majority. Nordau concludes the chapter by depicting a monument (Denkmal) to the Philistine (P 74). The only specific aspect of its physiognomy he describes is its ‘‘truncated nose’’ (verstu¨mmelte Nase). This image condenses two particular traits that, as has been documented throughout this work, characterized the stereotypical Jewish male: the other-than-foreshortened ‘‘Jewish nose’’ and the circumcised—mutilated—penis.30 Nordau also depicts the memorialized Philistine’s dress: ‘‘I imagine the green turban over his sleeping cap, which marks him as a descendant of the Prophet’’ (P 34). By picturing this Philistine as a descendant of Mohammed, Nordau differentiates him from his nonsemitic, uncircumcised biblical namesakes and marks him, like the Jew, as semitic and circumcised. Nordau then names this, as he facetiously puts it, most honorable of Philistines (Ehrenphilister): ‘‘Tailor or Draper or something similar’’ (‘‘Er muß dem Namen nach Schneider oder Tuchscherer oder etwas a¨hnliches werden’’; P 74). In other words this Philistine would receive a name reflecting either a form of preeminently Jewish employment (tailoring) or the kind of labor that was historically held responsible for the sickly Jewish physiognomy (clothcutting or draping).31 Both tailor and draper also implicate one of the arch icons of circumcision: the scissor.32 Nordau was aware of the ascriptive and potentially stigmatizing power of names.33 He had redubbed himself to effect and signify simultaneously his assumption of a European rather than a manifestly Jewish identification: named at his bris Simon Maximilian Su¨dfeld, Max Nordau shifted from an identification with a southern (su¨dlich) people, the Jews, and a vulgar backgound (Feld, field) to one with a northern (nordlich) race, the Europeans, and more poetic surroundings (Aue, pasture).

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Through Nordau’s rhetorical plays and ploys the Philistines become associated with the typical parvenu Jews who bore themselves like poorly preserved memorials of the European past. They are wrapped in the ‘‘uniform of banality’’ (P 74), and they epitomize the values of Spießbu¨rgertum. From such Jews the cosmopolitan Nordau chose to differentiate himself.

Paradoxes of the Conventional Lie of Assimilation and a Plague of Mieselsuchtig Jews This analysis of the few explicit mentions of Judentum in Conventionelle Lu¨gen and of the one extensive, if allusive, discussion of it in Paradoxe demonstrates how Nordau’s rhetoric mirrored the desires of many Central European Jews to acculturate, if not assimilate, and in either case to distinguish themselves from those Jewish types derided by the Gentile majority. The celebrated author of these works may have thought then that he had escaped the contradictions that framed the Jewish Question, but the double bind that afflicted liberal Jewry had already betrayed the Other Jewish Question in Nordau’s 1880s diptych. Both his antisemitic opponents such as Wasserschleben and his latterday commentators such as Baldwin are wrong about the omission of a Jewish linchpin: the Other Jewish Question is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a structuring principle of Nordau’s texts. Conventionelle Lu¨gen and Paradoxe constantly allude to the Jews and summon a network of Jewish representations that pervade European culture. For instance, Nordau’s opening litany in Conventionelle Lu¨gen codes most of the manifestations of the illness gripping Germany with Jewish markers. Antisemitism, the second symptom he names, of course has Jewish associations, as does the third: the flow of emigrants ‘‘pour[ing] forth from the German seaports like the lifestream from a deadly wound in the body of the nation’’ (CL 2) consisted significantly of native Jews.34 Copious Jewish references also infest the initial symptom he describes: socialism. Many contemporary socialist leaders were of Jewish origin, and their descent was trumpeted by antisemitic agitators.35 Then, by drawing on the figures of mice, Nordau connects this symptom to a broad range of anti-Jewish representations. He depicts socialism ‘‘gnaw[ing] at the pillars of all state and societal institutions with a hundred thousand mouse-teeth’’ (Mausza¨hnen; CL 2). Jewish socialists had already been identified as mice36 a year earlier in the second number of Wilhelm Marr’s Antisemitische Hefte. His 1881 Goldene Ratten und rothe Ma¨use (Golden Rats and Red Mice)

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earmarked the growing social democratic movement, the red mice, as Jewish. Nordau’s description of the subversive gnawing of the mouse-teeth echoes Marr’s assertion that ‘‘the red mice must by natural necessity dig away the ground from under our feet.’’37 Nordau’s evocation of mice also recalls other animal imagery that fills nineteenth-century anti-Jewish discourse. ‘‘Jewish’’ fauna menace the imaginations of anti-Jewish writers: They are small and thereby hard to grasp; they devour much and multiply themselves rapidly. . . . They are dangerous, because at the beginning they don’t appear very threatening and their all-consuming and destructive character first unfolds in the course of time, so that a defense by the host organism is first stated too late.38

In addition, the ‘‘uncannily noiseless, underground work of destruction’’ (CL 2) by these mouse-teeth echoes the alleged destructive action of socalled Jewish vermin.39 Nordau’s reference to mice sows another field of anti-Jewish representation. Maus resonates with Mauschel. The derogatory term was applied to both the diseased, deficient, and decadent language of the Jews, Yiddish, and the no-less-diseased, deficient, and decadent identity of the stereotypical Jews who speak that language.40 The orthographic connection between Nordau’s Maus and the Jews’ Mauschel is more than fortuitous, since it is the absence of an indigenous language that denies nationality status to the Jews in Nordau’s work as well as in his native Austro-Hungarian Empire.41 Yiddish, Judendeutsch, Mauscheldeutsch is for Nordau but a degenerate form of German. Maus points as well to Mieselsucht (P 12). The affix Miesel of Mieselsucht denotes the blotches symptomatic of leprosy, but it can also refer to a Ma¨uschen (literally ‘‘little mouse’’). The polysemy of Mieselsucht is recognized and exploited by Nordau from the beginning; he remarks that the practical or sentimental pessimism (praktischer Pessimismus) gripping his age ‘‘is called Mieselsucht in the vernacular’’ (P 12). Besides its medical meaning of leprosy, in Austria, Mieselsucht popularly connoted ‘‘gloominess, ill feeling’’ (unmu¨tig). Although Mieselsucht could be readily found in medical dictionaries of the time,42 its use as a diagnostic label was rare; the preferred term for leprosy was Aussatz. Heinrich Heine’s 1854 Gesta¨ndnisse (Confessions) may well have been Nordau’s inspiration for the polysemic Mieselsucht. The Gesta¨ndnisse conclude with a self-identifying evocation of the poetcleric whose songs (Lieder) fill the Limburger Chronik of 1480. Heine’s

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‘‘Brother in Apollo’’ suffered from ‘‘Misselsucht,’’ and the text continues in great detail about ‘‘what a horrifying malady leprosy [Misselsucht] was in the middle ages and how the poor people who fell victim to such an uncurable pestilence were expelled from every civil society. . . . [The] living dead, they wandered along, wrapped like mummies from head to foot . . . and in their hands carrying a clapper, the so-called lazar’s clapper [Lazarusklapper].’’ With ‘‘the rattling sound of the lazar’s clapper’’ still echoing in his chambers, Heine brings Mieselsucht to the present by intoning that ‘‘there’s nothing new under the sun.’’ Ascribing the familiar line from Ecclesiastes to ‘‘the life-weary king of Judah,’’ Heine—who had enshrined Jewish skin diseases in his 1842 poem ‘‘Das neue Israelitische Hospital zu Hamburg’’43—also perhaps retrieves the disease from the cleric and restores it to that other, according to Heine, ‘‘mummy of a people’’ (Volkmumie), the Jews.44 Beyond its possible source in Heine, Nordau’s clinical term has other associations that intersect with largely pejorative representations of the Jews. Mieselsucht was the rarely used term for a disease rarely seen in Europe. But with the then-recent discovery of the mycobacterium leprae and the widely reported case of Father Damien, the Belgian missionary who contracted leprosy while caring for patients in Hawaii, Europeans again began to fear the disease not only as incurable and deforming, but also now as contagious.45 Further, perceived as ‘‘prevalent among and specific to populations and races considered by Western nations . . . to be inferior,’’46 leprosy stigmatized its victims as primitive, atavistic, or degenerate. And now leprosy threatened to return to Europe by two routes. The first path was imperial expansion into contaminated sites inhabited by socalled primitive peoples. This danger surfaces in Nordau’s concluding vision in which the Europeans overrun and colonize the tropics. The conquerors eventually degenerate because of an ailment indigenous to the region, as leprosy was imagined to be: ‘‘if through infertility and sickness [the white races] do not completely die out, they will nevertheless become so weak and withered, so stupid and cowardly, so defenseless against all vices and corrupt habits that they are soon hardly more than shadows of their fathers and ancestors’’ (P 411). The second entry point was the influx to the metropole of diseasebearing colonial peoples, especially, as depicted above in chapter 2, the Chinese and the East European Jews. The indentured Chinese in Hawaii were held to be responsible for bringing in leprosy and contaminating the indigenous Hawaiians with it; indeed, in their native tongue the Hawaiians

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called this new affliction mai Pake, the Chinese disease.47 In the early 1880s cries rang out from the antisemitic press, government officials, and academics to stem the invasion of those filthy, stinking sufferers of the leprosy-evoking skin disease clinically known as plica, but derogatively referred to as the Judenkra¨tze: those Urjuden from Poland and Russia.48 As noted earlier in chapter 6, the relationship of the Kra¨tze to leprosy had been assumed at least since 1699, when Ramizzini described the Kra¨tze as so characteristic of the Jews as to be considered ‘‘a Jewish disease’’ (eine Rassekrankheit); he then suggested that it may be a legacy (Erbschaft) of the earlier Jewish predisposition to leprosy (Aussatz).49 This European response marked the recrudescence of an anti-Jewish stigmatizing that originated with ancient Egyptian writers and found a more recent manifestation in Voltaire’s ‘‘leprous Jews.’’50 Reinforcing leprosy’s relationship to the Jews is Nordau’s continuous interchange of Mieselsucht and syphilis throughout his diptych. The symptoms and consequences he ascribes to the former share much in common with those generally attributed to the latter. For instance, both were seen as threatening the future of the bourgeois order.51 Further, Nordau claims that Mieselsucht is ‘‘always the concomitant symptom of a brain disorder’’ (Begleiterscheinung einer Gehirnerkrankung; P 12). The brain disorder he had in mind was that complication of syphilis, Gehirnerweichung or softening of the brain (a.k.a. general paralysis).52 And during the course of the nineteenth century, as already chronicled in chapter 3, the Jews had become increasingly associated with syphilis. That a trained physician like Nordau would connect leprosy with syphilis is not surprising: similarities in skin eruptions and tissue decay made distinguishing between leprous and syphilitic symptoms one of the foremost functions of nineteenth-century dermatologists.53 The venereal disease imparted its usual onus of immorality and degeneration to its constant companion: Jewish-identified leprosy. For example, Karl Marx connected leprosy and syphilis in an attack on his archrival, the Jewish socialist leader mentioned by Nordau, Ferdinand Lassalle: ‘‘Lazarus the leper is the prototype of the Jews and of Lazarus-Lassalle. But in our Lazarus, the leprosy lies in the brain. His illness was originally a badly cured case of syphilis.’’54 Thus, Nordau’s diagnosis of Mieselsucht is a multifaceted evocation of Jewish representations.55 Ultimately, through the use of this pun, Nordau continually returns to the Jewish Question—and hence to the Other Jewish Question. By insinuating a negative Jewish element into his understanding of the ‘‘malady of the century’’ he also problematizes the

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possibility of successful integration by those identified as Jews—including himself.

Circumcising Apostates The irresolvable antinomy between assimilationist desire and societal repudiation asserts itself yet again in Nordau’s only explicit mention of modern Jewry in Paradoxe. In his discussion of race and nationality he reduces Judentum to a collection of easily-dispensed-with externalities: customs, laws, and institutions that have merely accrued through the centuries. Such a denial of any intrinsic relationship between Judentum and either the individual or the order of the world (whether understood as natural or divine) was a precondition for assimilation. But this move generates constant allusions to the one external sign that could not be sloughed off: circumcision.56 Since the Jews appear in Nordau’s discussion of white European nationalities rather than in his examination of racial difference, they apparently do not constitute a race. For Nordau, nationality is above all a linguistic category, and race an anthropological (i.e., biological) one. Like Darwin, Nordau ascribed to the theory of polygenesis, which assumed that each race had descended from a different biological ancestor rather than from a common or monogenetic source. Hence, since he denies that blood determines national identity, the inclusion of the Jews within the examination of nationalities undercuts the familiar motif of racial antisemitism examined earlier in chapter 3: befouled Jewish blood.57 Yet after deferring the question of whether the Jews constitute a nation, he eventually also denies this possibility.58 Numbers do not determine such recognition; he lists several nationalities, such as the Albanians and the Basques, whose populations are significantly smaller than that of, again unmentioned, European Jewry (P 403). Nor does either shared territory or state membership define a nationality, and it is to illustrate this point that Nordau’s only explicit discussion of whether the Jews comprise a nationality occurs. For Nordau, the Jews’ alleged difference from surrounding populations is defined, again, by externals and not by that expression of a nation’s soul, its language. Jewry is merely a collection of individuals defined by their self-deluding, stubborn, and extrinsic attempts to keep themselves separate. These ties that separate preclude Jewish and Christian neighbors from claiming a single nationality; they also preclude the Jews taken as a whole from making such a claim:

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Certainly common laws and institutions, namely habits, customs, and usages, occasion a closeness [among people], which could awaken a certain feeling of belonging together, although the opposite could also just as likely occur. Take for example the Jews, who are above all seen as alien from the people among whom they live because they maintain with inconceivable blindness and stubbornness external customs, like time reckoning, the celebration of sabbaths and holidays, dietary rules, choice of first names, etc., which are wholly different from those of their Christian comrades and which must keep continually alive in their neighbors a feeling of antithesis and separation. But that common culture is in no case sufficient to create a folk out of a collection of people [um aus Vo¨lkern ein Volk zu bilden] and to confer nationality to the members of a state. (P 383–84; emphasis added)59

What Nordau conceals behind his ‘‘etc.’’ is that here-oft-discussed custom that, together with dietary laws and endogamy, had long been considered the chief cause for Jewish separatism: circumcision. The exclusion of this practice from his list of customs is curious, but understandable. Circumcision is certainly more emblematic of Jews, in any case of male Jews of his time, than the choice of first names. Jews could discard the various customs Nordau lists, but virtually all of his adult Jewish contemporaries, as well as the author himself—the former Simon Su¨dfeld—had been circumcised as infants, and could not abandon the sign of this ‘‘external custom.’’ For the cosmopolitan Nordau, die Juden could comprise neither an anthropological race nor a linguistic nationality; there could not be an inherent Jewish nature. Jewishness must consist rather of merely external attributes that can be discarded by any individual desiring assimilation. However, in a society that assumed that difference and pathology were inscribed on the body, circumcision, whether actual or assumed, made the Jewish body unassimilable. Even when circumcision was no longer required for the government registration of Jews qua Jews, it remained the never-said but always-alluded-to reminder that Jewish dreams of becoming European could not be fulfilled. After foreclosing any possible Jewish nationhood, Nordau then expands on how language determines nationality. Throughout the discussion, he again draws on analogies and images that insistently allude to circumcision and so to the Jewish Questions. This series of references culminates in his diatribe against those individuals who believe they can abandon their linguistically determined nationality as if it were a mere collection of externalities, who view their nationality in the same way as Nordau views Judentum. Nordau’s overdetermined argument complicates, even undermines, his denial of a Jewish nationality and his assumptions about assimilation.

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By tying nationality to language, Nordau joins the tradition first clearly articulated by Condillac, then redirected by Herder to form what in the nineteenth century would combine philosophic anthropology, religion, politics, and philology in Ernest Renan’s grand opposition of Aryans to Semites.60 But for Nordau, the son of a Hebrew grammarian, the Jews apparently lack a language that is coeval with its group identity. Although neither the Jews nor their language(s) are mentioned in his discussion of linguistic nationality, Nordau no doubt would have considered Hebrew to be a religious language and thus both a conventional lie and a primitive survival. He would view Yiddish (Judendeutsch, Mauschel) at best as a hybrid and at worst as a degenerate offshoot of another people’s language. Nordau’s silence on Jewish language bespeaks a double distancing from Renan’s rather amorphous understanding of the semites (i.e., the Jews) as a race: where for Renan they sometimes constitute a biological group and sometimes a linguistic one, for Nordau they form neither. This conclusion by the Hungarian-born Nordau appears to confirm the practice of his native multinational state:61 every nationality had the right to teach its children in the ‘‘language customary to the land’’—Croat, Czech, German, Magyar, and so forth.62 Austria-Hungary recognized eleven national groups and their languages, but the state did not confer such status upon either Jews or their languages, Hebrew and Yiddish.63 Yet when Nordau pithily summarizes his argument on how language defines national membership, he employs an image that has Jewish resonance: ‘‘The individual extremely rarely has his corporeal descent [ko¨rperliche Abstammung] inscribed on his forehead [auf die Stirne geschrieben] . . . [whereas] language is in reality the man himself’’ (P 384–85). Here Nordau argues against racial physiognomy in general, yet he chooses an image that, as we saw with its use by Marx discussed in chapter 6, evokes the mark of Cain and, by extension, the assumed mark of Jewish difference: circumcision.64 Although, as Nordau’s text suggests, the Jews have no nationality and no language, his rhetoric draws on the Jewish experience of postemancipa¨ berla¨ufer; tion Europe to describe ‘‘disgraceful apostates’’ (schmachvollen U P 391). To secure some advantage, such individuals deny their language; they thereby deny their nationality and so themselves. Nordau then employs an analogy that, by alluding to that never-mentioned circumcision, again undercuts his attempt both to deny Jews a linguistic nationality and to ensure himself and others the possibility of assimilation. If we bracket Nordau’s implicit denial of a Jewish national identity, then his description

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of the situation that might lead to the desertion of one’s nationality mirrors the situation of the Jews in his native land, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nordau’s depiction of a linguistic apostate can also be read as an inversion or denegation of his own valuation of his transformation from a Pest-born son of a Hebrew grammarian into a Paris-based author of French and German belles-lettres. He posits an individual ‘‘who would be born in a country where his nationality is in the minority and oppressed, where his language is not the official language and where he sees himself compelled to learn an alien tongue, which he however would only be able to use as a foreigner [would]’’ (P 389). Nordau notes how that as a consequence of such shackling an individual ‘‘feels himself crippled and mutilated’’ (fu¨hlt sich gela¨hmt und verstu¨mmelt; P 390). With this repetition of the codewords gela¨hmt and verstu¨mmelt, Nordau’s picture of the victim’s self-identification, like that of the Philistine statue, incorporates two of the dominant culture’s stereotypes of the Jewish body and soul as well as incorporates Richard Wagner’s notorious denial of the Jew’s ability to speak any European language (German in particular) in his notorious assault on Judentum, Judaism in Music (1850/1869).65 After this account of apostasy, linguistic incapacity, lameness, and mutilation, Nordau compares those ‘‘unspeakably repugnant’’ (P 390) individuals who would abandon their native language to the Russian-Christian sect of self-mutilators (Selbstverstu¨mmler), the Skoptzi. While the Skoptzi ‘‘emasculate themselves’’ (entmannen sich; P 391) out of religious conviction, the linguistic-national ‘‘renegades allow themselves to be castrated into intellectual eunuchs [geistigen Eunuchen] for the sake of gold’’ (P 391). With the analogy between the renegade and the Skoptzi, Nordau inverts the traditional opposition between the Jewish assimilator and those who maintain their Jewish identification: he compares the (linguistic) apostate to those whose religious identity is determined by genital surgery. The association of circumcised Jew and castrated Russian was not unfamiliar to Nordau’s contemporaries. In the third volume of his popular Darwinian ethnology of love, the 1885 Sexual Relations of Mankind, Paolo Mantegazza makes the connection explicit. He first describes in a chapter on the ‘‘Mutilation of Genitals’’ the rationale for Jewish circumcision: it is ‘‘felt to be necessary to imprint upon the human body a clear and indelible sign which would distinguish one people from another and, by putting a seal of consecration on nationality, would tend to impede the mixture of the races.’’ Mantegazza goes on to attack circumcision as ‘‘a sanguinary protest against universal brotherhood [that] to civilized peoples . . . is a

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shame and an infamy.’’ The practice of circumcision is what impedes Gentile willingness to accede to Jewish desires for emancipation and assimilation; thus, Mantegazza apostrophizes the Jews: ‘‘Until you do this [i.e., cease ‘imprinting upon flesh’ an ‘odious brand’], you cannot pretend to be our equal.’’ He then moves to the Skoptzi. After describing in great detail the stages of genital mutilation, he portrays these sectarians with attributes usually associated with Jews: ‘‘von Stein asserts that the [Skoptzi’s] character is also profoundly modified by castration, the outstanding traits among them being selfishness, craftiness, hypocrisy, and a thirst for gold.’’ Despite what for Mantegazza is its gruesome cost, conversion to the Skoptzi is attractive because they are ‘‘in control of enormous wealth, and . . . they employ all manner of seduction in attracting to themselves the poor in spirit, and even more, the poor in pocketbook, who by mutilating a single organ (however important it may be) of their body, thereby assure themselves of a lifelong [financial] competence.’’66 Mantegazza’s implicit parallel of the Jews and Skoptzi is unmistakable.

A Future without Jews As Nordau’s analogy of linguistic apostates and the Skoptzi implies, the Jews lack a nationality, and, by implication, they are at an evolutionary dead end. Thus they fall from his picture of the destiny of the white race. In Nordau’s utopian vision of human solidarity, the Jews of Europe apparently would have shed the externalities that alone constitute Jewishness, and they would have completely assimilated into the dominant European nationalities. ‘‘One tosses away the worn out husks and disguises [Verkleidungen] which surround the true kernel [of religion]’’ (CL 349). Instead of persisting in primitive ritual and irrational belief, the Jews would recognize the true source of religious feeling: the sense of belonging to humanity and its natural movement to higher development (CL 52–57, 347–48). This happy picture of ‘‘late-born generations [including the descendants of the former Jews], playfully tossed by the pure air of the future, bathed by its brighter sunshine, whose lot it will be [denen es beschieden sein wird] to live in this fraternal order, true, wise, free, and good’’ (CL 350) concludes Conventionelle Lu¨gen. But the vision turns dark at the end of the later Paradoxe. As Nordau developed his diagnosis of the times, his prognosis altered. Where the first volume predicted recognition of natural fellowship combining with evolutionary forces to lead humanity to greater heights, the second envisioned Malthusian limits combining with those

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same evolutionary forces to herald its demise. Nordau still posits a future of peace and solidarity among the white-raced nations, but the struggle for existence in a world of limited resources would find the white race exterminating peoples of color (P 410). And when resources were again depleted, the new evolutionist religion of natural morality would degenerate into the child-sacrifice cult of Moloch, the religion that the French Blanquist Gustave Tridon, in a work published the year before Paradoxe appeared, had conceived to be the origin and true kernel of Judentum.67 Nordau’s beatific vision of a future without Jews thus becomes a nightmarish simulacrum of an alleged Jewish past. In his account of Europe’s present morass and future possibility, Nordau deploys two contemporary Jewish types: the assimilated Spießbu¨rger, who try to pass for Gentiles, and the Ostjuden, who are bound together by primitive religious beliefs and rank customs. He dismisses the former as self-deluded Philistines and depicts the latter with familiar stereotypes. Since Nordau denies religious Jews both a racial and a national identity, their primitivism is a function of external practices and not an atavism intrinsic to their being. Thus, without directly confronting racial antisemitism, Nordau rendered it irrelevant to the Jewish Question—if not to the Other Jewish Question.68 Moreover, since the Jews are but a social grouping bound together by inessential externalities, individuals like Max Nordau, this Jew who ‘‘from my sixteenth year until my fortieth . . . [b]y conviction, by emotion, and by philosophic conception . . . was German through and through,’’69 can be among those model Germans (Musterdeutschen) whose embodiment of the national spirit belies both their origin and the general population’s assumption about their—his—racial descent (cf. P 381–83). And by universalizing a Jewish-associated notion like chosenness and displacing it onto the genius, he can liberate the chosen (Auserwa¨hlten) from the conventional lie of inbreeding (Inzucht).70 They can thereby submit to the evolutionary law of natural selection (Zuchtwahl) and so further the development of humanity. Titling his introduction ‘‘Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,’’ Nordau invoked the series of decreasing weight units written on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast that the biblical Daniel interpreted. And like some modern-day Daniel, Nordau began his diptych by taking the measure of his times and showing where European society was heading. But there was one inscription that Nordau had tried to overlook; he, like the ancient prophet, was an alien Jew in a Gentile court. Despite his persistent efforts to displace Judentum in these texts—as in his life—Nordau’s vision of European destiny betrayed its tainted, Jewish origins. The realization of his assimilationist

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desires could not escape the strictures of Jewish identification. His evolutionary ‘‘fairy tale’’ (P 414), indeed his entire diptych, is conditioned by the conventional lies and paradoxes of Jewish life in postemancipation Europe. Nordau’s work exemplifies how the attempt to construct a European identification in the 1880s could not be extricated from the construction—if not yet the destruction—of the Jewish Other.

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chapter 8

President Schreber and the Memoirs of a Wandering Jew(ess) The psychoanalytic investigation of paranoia would be altogether impossible if the patients themselves did not possess the peculiarity of betraying (in a distorted form, it is true) precisely those things which other neurotics keep hidden as a secret. —sigmund freud, ‘‘The Schreber Case’’

In 1903 Daniel Paul Schreber, Senatspra¨sident (or chief judge) of the Dresden State Superior Court and diagnosed paranoiac, privately published his Denkwu¨rdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (published in translation as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness in 1955), which chronicled his nine-year confinement in psychiatric institutions. Despite his family’s best efforts to destroy all extant copies of the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten, several managed to survive and circulate among the psychiatric and psychoanalytic communities. Eventually a copy fell into the hands of Sigmund Freud, who in 1911 published his ‘‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),’’ thereafter known as ‘‘The Schreber Case.’’ As a consequence of that analysis, virtually all subsequent readings of Schreber’s case until the 1980s had been mediated by Freud’s. Indeed, thanks to Freud, Schreber’s Denkwu¨rdigkeiten became the ‘‘mostquoted unread book of the twentieth century.’’1 In 1981 Han Israe¨ls’s biography Schreber: Father and Son appeared,2 employing exhaustive archival evidence to counterbalance the already-extant interpretations of Schreber’s case. Israe¨ls’s work, in the words of one reviewer, ‘‘chronicles that eight-decade carnival of negligence, carelessness, and plain fatuity, reducing the whole mess to silence.’’3 Since that publication a number of other

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works have appeared that have both expanded the available biographical database and the range of possible interpretations.4 Rather than offer a global interpretation of President Schreber’s cosmos, this chapter situates Schreber’s case at the intersection of a number of individual, social, historical, and intertextual trajectories in order to focus on one particular delusion that Schreber experienced in 1894 and that oddly had failed to register more than passing mention in the copious early literature on the case, and still remains underexamined:5 the Eternal Jew (der ewige Jude), who ‘‘had to be unmanned (transformed into a woman) to be able to bear children.’’ Schreber’s envisioned figure has another characteristic atypical of other representations of the Wandering Jew (der ewige Jude).6 When first introducing the ‘‘Eternal Jew,’’ Schreber immediately distinguishes him from the traditional bearer of this label: ‘‘This appellation has therefore a somewhat different sense from that underlying the legend of the same name of the Jew Ahasver.’’ Whether Schreber’s ‘‘somewhat different sense’’ arises from his characterization of the figure as the ‘‘single human spared’’ from the ‘‘destruction of the human race,’’ or from his parenthetical remark, ‘‘perhaps the relatively most moral’’ human, is unclear. While he first invokes past legendary survivors of world catastrophes—‘‘one is however automatically reminded of the legends of Noah, Deucalion and Pyrrha, etc.’’—he then adds: ‘‘Perhaps the legend of the founding of Rome belongs here also, according to which Rhea Sylvia conceived the later Kings Romulus and Remus directly of Mars the God of War, and not of an earthly father’’ (Memoirs, 73; M hereafter). What all of Schreber’s exemplars share is their non-Jewish descent.7 By attending to this seminal moment in Schreber’s text, a number of other conditions for the emergence of his narrative will be addressed: his ambiguous identification with the Jews, his syphilophobia, as well as a possible source text for this figuration. To undertake this genealogy I read Schreber’s work against three other contemporaneous works: Wolfgang Kirchbach’s 1890 fairytale for the stage, Die letzten Menschen (The Last Men); Henri Meige’s 1893 psychiatric monograph, Le Juif-errant a` la Salpeˆtrie`re: Essai nosographique sur les ne´vropathes voyageurs (The Wandering Jew in the Salpeˆtrie`re: Nosographic Essay on Ambulatory Neurotics); and Oskar Panizza’s 1893 short narrative ‘‘Der operirte Jude’’ (‘‘The Operated Jew’’). Other writings by Schreber and the remarks of his psychiatrists are also enlisted to situate Schreber’s curious reference.8 As a consequence of these analyses, the narratives of diseased sexuality, diseased reproduction, and problematic gender and racial identity that traverse Schreber’s corpus

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are seen as conditioned by the discourse of antisemitism and by a discourse with which (as discussed in chapter 3) it shared an elective affinity: syphilophobia. These narratives are then shown to converge in the figure of the unmanned, non-Jewish Eternal Jew.

Historical Intersections Schreber’s unmanned, non-Jewish Eternal Jew emerged as an effect of a historical conjuncture of contested classes, cultures, discourses, and identities. Germany in the 1890s had not yet recovered from the Great Depression of the 1870s, even as it was still undergoing radical restructuring as a consequence of rapid industrialization. Public discourse was preoccupied with the effects of these transformations, with what was known as die Sozialfrage, the social question. Thus, the Conservative party, fearing that the advent of universal suffrage would cost them control of the government, campaigned against the Social Democrats over that question. The answer that the Conservatives proffered was the Jews. Consequently, the 1893 national elections were marked by an openly antisemitic rhetoric. As the Conservative party program read: ‘‘We combat the widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life.’’ Their candidates called for restrictions of Jewish access to government and the civil bureaucracy. Together with the radical antisemitic parties, they garnered 42 percent of the vote in Schreber’s home state of Saxony; the radical antisemites themselves received 20 percent of the vote and elected six of their candidates. Although the number of Jews in Saxony was small, the antisemitic message found a resonance among the alienated Mittelstand (the traditional middle class of petty bourgeoisie and artisans) and some members of the cultured bourgeoisie.9 Schreber, as a former candidate for the Reichstag, was in all probability following the election with some interest.10 The changes in the political economy had their consequences as well in what began to be viewed as the human economy. Complementing the expanding reach of the administrative rule of expertise and welfare mechanisms embodied by public health policy were the medico-legal (re)inscription of fixed, gendered sexual identities and the bio-anthropological construction of definitive racial identities.11 As the century moved toward its conclusion and amid all of these crises, the bourgeoisie, as discussed in previous chapters, situated themselves and the world as they knew and ruled it within an apocalyptic narrative of their

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ultimate degeneration. Two new medical specialties in particular, medicalized psychiatry and syphilology, both inscribed the narrative of degeneration on people’s bodies. Unable to cure, they employed their disciplinary discourses to define themselves and to classify and control the individual. Such discourses inscribed the body of the individual with an identity as other, that is, as diseased, as gendered, and as ‘‘true’’ to his or her group character, be it that of woman, Jew, homosexual, primitive (Naturvolk), or some other like group. Psychiatrists sought to ground mental disorders both in degenerative heredity and in the psychophysics of the body. And they sought to define any deviance as a mental disorder. They generated a medical discourse of supervision coextensive with their situation as bureaucratic administrators of usually state-run asylums.12 On the one hand, neuropathology became a function of hereditary disposition and taint. For example, the case sheet for Schreber’s first institutionalization at the Leipzig University Psychiatric Clinic begins: ‘‘Previous History. Hereditary loading.’’ And the case sheet for his final institutionalization at the asylum at Leipzig-Do¨sen gives extensive coverage of his ‘‘Heredity.’’13 On the other hand, the patient’s body, offering itself up ‘‘as object of scientific observation for the judgment of experts’’ (M 251; emphasis in original)—as Schreber did his own corpus—was inscribed with the signs of degeneration sought out by the psychiatrist. Foremost among the signs of health and degeneration was gender identity. The Leipzig neurologist Paul J. Mo¨bius wrote in Geschlecht und Entartung (Sex and Degeneration): ‘‘the healthier the individual is, the more definitively he [or she] is male or female.’’14 The hereditarian bias and the claim to objectivity undergird a science not just of the individual, but also of the group, of gender and of race. Just as hysteria became definitive of woman’s constitution, so Jean-Martin Charcot, the nineteenth century’s foremost student of hysteria, could also say: ‘‘You know, of course, that Jewish families furnish us with the finest subjects for the study of hereditary disease . . . how in the [Jewish] race, nervous symptoms of all sorts . . . are incomparably more frequent than elsewhere.’’15 The psychiatry of degeneration provided a discourse for the inscription—and institutionalization—of all those who threatened the social order. Syphilological discourse, as extensively depicted in chapter 3, for its part tied the threat of degeneration to the bourgeoisie’s perception of pervasive prostitution and seemingly epidemic venereal disease. Together the discourses of hereditarian psychiatry and syphilology were inscribed on the bodies of these threatened and threatening others—and on the corpus of one Judge Schreber.16

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Displaced Identifications The text of a paranoiac provides a privileged arena for witnessing the way in which discourse articulates identity. As Sam Weber (with interpellations from Freud) writes, paranoiacs say only what they want to say—and yet in so doing they say (or write) something else: for they betray themselves . . . precisely because they say only what they want to say—‘‘in a distorted form.’’ That is, [citing Freud on textual distortion:] ‘‘we may nevertheless count upon finding what has been suppressed and disavowed, hidden away somewhere else, though changed and torn from its context.’’

That is, Schreber’s text works by displacement ‘‘from one representation to another, along a chain of associations. . . . The subject of [Schreber’s text] is no longer constituted by the identity and transparence of selfconsciousness. . . . [Rather, the subject] is mediated by irreducible heterogeneity, a foreignness. . . . [The text is] the necessary, if idiosyncratic, materialization and localization of a process of articulation.’’17 In other words, the voices that speak to Schreber, that write down all that he thinks, says, and does, are the voices of the other—of the disciplinary as well as the everyday discourses of diseased sexuality, diseased reproduction, and problematic gender and racial identity—all of which are articulated through the body of the paranoiac, through the body of the unmanned, non-Jewish Eternal Jew. Schreber describes the situation in which ‘‘the tendency, innate in the order of the world, to unman a human being’’ (M 72) is realized: Perhaps God was also able to withdraw partially or totally the warmth of the sun from a star doomed to perish . . . ; this would throw new light on the problem of the Ice Age [cf. M 97]. . . . In such an event, in order to maintain the species, one single human being was spared—perhaps the relatively most moral—called by the voices that talk to me the ‘‘Eternal Jew’’. . . . The Eternal Jew (in the sense described) had to be unmanned (transformed into a woman) to be able to bear children. . . . The Eternal Jew was maintained and provided with the necessary means of life by the ‘‘fleeting-improvised-men.’’ (M 73–74)

Although in the body of the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten Schreber never explicitly identifies himself as the unmanned Eternal Jew,18 his account supports such an identification. ‘‘During the latter part of my stay in Flechsig’s Asylum [i.e., early 1894] I thought the [last 212 years allotted to the earth]

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had already expired, and therefore thought I was the last real human being left, and that the few human shapes whom I saw apart from myself . . . were only ‘fleeting-improvised-men’ created by miracle’’ (M 85). The perception that he was the only one alive persists even after he is transferred to the Sonnenstein Asylum in July 1894 (cf. M 125, 143).19 Schreber provides other clues to his identification with the Eternal Jew. He notes, for example, that ‘‘the expression ‘rascal’ [Hundejunge] which was applied to the fleeting-improvised-man who had to serve the Eternal Jew was also applied to the attendants of the present Asylum in the first part of my stay’’ (M 107 n. 56). And in order to retain ‘‘the respect of other people whose opinion I value,’’ Schreber defends his feminine ‘‘nerves of voluptuousness’’ (Wollustnerven) by asserting that ‘‘[f]ew people have been brought up according to such strict moral principles as I, and have throughout life practiced such moderation especially in matters of sex, as I venture to claim for myself’’ (M 208)—echoing his earlier speculation about the Eternal Jew: ‘‘perhaps the relatively most moral’’ (M 73). The most significant sign of identification is of course the accounts of his unmanning. Immediately following the discussion of the Eternal Jew, Schreber almost offhandedly mentions that ‘‘I have myself twice experienced (for a short time) the miracle of unmanning’’ (M 74). Initially he views this assault on his manliness—namely, his becoming a woman—as punishment or persecution: his body was left ‘‘for sexual misuse and simply ‘forsaken,’ in other words left to rot’’ (M 75), ‘‘hand[ed] over . . . in the manner of a female harlot’’ (M 77; cf. 99).20 Only later could he see beyond doubt that the Order of the World imperiously demanded my unmanning, whether I personally like it or not. . . . Nothing of course could be envisaged as a further consequence of unmanning but fertilization by divine rays for the purpose of creating new human beings. [But he adds:] My change of will was facilitated by my not believing at that time that apart from myself a real mankind existed; on the contrary I thought all the human shapes I saw were only ‘‘fleeting and improvised.’’ (M 148)

In other words, his situation had to be identical to that of the Eternal Jew for him to accept his unmanning. After this shift in valuation, Schreber increasingly interprets his unmanning in a redemptive light: ‘‘For several years after I had changed my ideas . . . I lived in the certain expectation that one day my unmanning (transformation into a woman) would be completed; this solution seemed to me absolutely essential as preparation for the renewal of mankind,’’ and, after adding that ‘‘[u]nmanning for the

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purpose of renewing the race has in all probability actually occurred several times in earlier periods in the history of the universe’’ (M 212), he refers the reader back to the chapter on the Eternal Jew.

Epispasms of the Wandering Jew By ascribing a redemptive role to his unmanning, Schreber grafts onto his body one of the leading figurations of the Wandering Jew during the nineteenth century.21 The Wandering Jew either figures the culmination of Christian salvation history—in these narratives he is the Jew who, for having cursed Jesus on the way to Calvary, is condemned to wander the earth until his conversion and final rest at the Last Judgment—or he represents the perfection of romanticized human development, in which case he becomes the secularized revolutionary who represents all of humanity in its progressive march to individual and social perfection. But redemption is not the only—nor necessarily the preeminent—figuration of the Wandering Jew. The Wandering Jew more frequently was emblematic of a contemporary Judentum marked by its contemptible national or racial character that has persisted unchanged and unmoored for millenia. He became a figure of stubbornness and deceit, of egoism and incessant desire, of amorality and destructive negation. This Wandering Jew is encountered in Schopenhauer, in Wagner, in Du¨hring, and in numerous other German writings of the second half of the nineteenth century. This Wandering Jew would through its own (self-)destruction, through its becoming non-Jewish, liberate humanity: ‘‘One only thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasverus—Going under [der Untergang]!’’22 There was another resident of Dresden in the early 1890s, Wolfgang Kirchbach, who imagined a non-Jewish Wandering Jew. This figure too was the last man alive after the destruction of virtually all human life by an ice age caused by the withdrawal of the sun’s rays; and his telos, like that of Schreber’s figure, is the reproduction of the race. Although virtually unknown today, Kirchbach was a noted author and essayist during the fin de sie`cle. Kirchbach moved to Dresden in 1887, where he was a journalist and theater critic.23 In 1890 he published his Nietzschean fairy tale for the stage, Die letzten Menschen (The Last Men). This work evoked the sense of Da¨mmerung (dusk) and Untergang—and also some of the silliness—of the fin de sie`cle.

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The play opens with the Seer perched on a glacier describing a dead, frozen earth.24 Humankind is dead. Spirit has withdrawn from the world (Weltentru¨ckter Geist). The old sun desires extinction, but its ‘‘last ray’’ (der Sonne letzer Strahl) unleashes a transformation.25 Struck by the ray, the snow begins to melt and the creatures of classical fable appear, as do two humans—Ahas, whose name is clearly short for Ahasverus, and Eva —although in different places and unknown to one another. When Ahas— the sole survivor of the last people on the frozen earth, the Eskimo— awakens, his first question is whether he is the first man, from whom others will follow. He explicitly expresses his desire for children. In response the nonhumans neglect to inform him that he is the last and not the first man, nor do they divulge Eva’s presence. The remainder of the play follows, on the one hand, Ahas’s efforts to enforce his dominion and (re)populate the earth and, on the other hand, the nonhumans’ every move to thwart his possible success. In the course of his pursuit, Ahas is not literally unmanned; rather, he is feminized, rendered ohnma¨chtig, impotent, in his struggle with Proteus (literally, the first man) for hegemony.26 In the end Ahas’s womb does repopulate the world—with the dead. Proteus commands him to ‘‘Look/ now into the future, which out of your womb (aus deinem Schoße)/will bloom.’’ At that moment, all the generations and nationalities of the dead are raised. Eva’s dying words echo Ahas’s act: ‘‘My womb bears death’’ (Den Tod gebiert mein Schoß).27 Although Ahas’s body is not altered, there is one major corporeal transformation, to which the great god Pan is subjected. Pan observes Eva and falls in love with her. But she just laughs at his presumption: how could she love a creature with split-hooved goat legs, big ears, a tail—one who therefore lacks human virtue? She wishes to couple, that is, to reproduce, but only with a human. To be with her, Pan becomes, in a manner of speaking, an operated Jew (ich will mich menschlich bilden). He endeavors to strip off his savage appearance (ich will von mir streifen meinen Pelz, den Wilden) and to substitute proper dress for his inhuman pelt. He hopes, as it were, to circumcise his circumcision, his difference, by clipping his claws (Ich. . . / will meine Fingerkrallen mir beschneiden).28 And he changes his language: now he speaks of shame, morality, and sin. He desires to ‘‘humanize’’ the other nonhumans spiritually and corporeally, performing the latter by lopping off (verschneiden, which also means ‘‘to castrate’’) their tails.29 Needless to say, the other nonhumans view the humanly dressed— albeit without pants—Pan as crazy. And all his efforts come to nought when Eva smiles at him and his efforts. Humiliated, Pan threatens to rape

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her, but before he can force a new race on her he dies from having attempted to graft onto himself what was alien to his nature, what went against the order of the world.30 The thematic, linguistic, figural, and ideological similarities between Kirchbach’s play and Schreber’s delusions are at times startling. While Die letzten Menschen may not necessarily be a source for the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten,31 these parallels do shed light on a common culture. For instance, both draw on the catastrophic prophecies of contemporary natural historians,32 and their shared ray phenomena pervaded the literature of physics, metaphysics, and psychophysics.33 In addition, both call attention to the primacy of reproduction within the regnant masculinist ideology. Both also are very troubled by woman’s sexuality. In Kirchbach’s play human sexual reproduction is the source of mortality—understood ontologically, mythically, existentially, pragmatically, and misogynistically.34 Schreber, for his part, only feels comfortable with his transformation into woman, with his assumption of woman’s nerves of sexual passion (Wollustnerven), when his sexuality is domesticated, channeled into reproduction. And since he endeavors to disassociate his higher purpose from base sexuality, by continuing to define his reproductive femininity in terms of sexual pleasure, Schreber may be embodying the still-believed correlation between woman’s orgasm and the increased likelihood of conception.35 The questions then arise: does the Jew figure historical—that is, racial—difference in Schreber as it does in Kirchbach? And if so, is racial identity no less problematized than gender identity in the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten? Schreber’s relationship to and, I claim, his implicit identification with the (Eternal) Jew require a three-fold approach. First, Henri Meige’s 1893 case study/folklore analysis, ‘‘The Wandering Jew in the Salpeˆtrie`re,’’ serves to exemplify the construction of the Jew, especially in the guise of the Wandering Jew (le juif errant), as an object for psychiatric classification and supervision. Second, Oskar Panizza’s short story ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ which also first appeared in 1893, provides insight into the manner in which Jewish identification is narratively constructed. Third, Schreber’s own representations of the Jew are analyzed over and against his avowed Aryanism.

The Wandering Jew as Diagnostic The proliferation of narratives of the Wandering Jew in the latter part of the nineteenth century was in part motivated by the waves of impoverished

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westward-migrating East European Jews. For psychiatry, these threatening wanderers were stripped of their metaphysical onus and, when placed under supervision, they betrayed their neuropathology. The Wandering Jew typified the Jewish predisposition toward mental illness. Thus, in February 1889 at one of his famous lec¸ons at Salpeˆtrie`re, Charcot recounted the case of a Hungarian Jew by the name of Klein. This little man quickly acquired another patronym: ‘‘I introduce him to you as a true descendant of Ahasverus or Cartophilus’’—that is, of the Wandering Jew.36 Klein, it seems, was ‘‘constantly driven by an irresistible need to move on . . . without being able to settle down anywhere.’’37 Cases such as Klein’s were taken up by Charcot’s student, Henri Meige. In his 1893 study of the Wandering Jew in the clinic, which first appeared in Charcot’s house organ, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpeˆtrie`re, Meige focuses less on the ailment than on the race of the sufferer. A combination of racial traits converges on individuals such as Klein. Thus, echoing Charcot, Meige states that ‘‘the great frequency of nervous disorders in the Jewish race’’ reveals a hereditary predisposition to suffer from such neuropathological conditions as ambulatory neurosis. Moreover, Jews are particularly susceptible to this specific ailment, since ‘‘it is a characteristic of their race to move with extreme ease. At home nowhere, and at home everywhere.’’38 In his monograph Meige mixes psychiatric case studies with analyses of legends, finding in the folktale a historical kernel that betrays racial psychopathology. Thus he suggests that the Wandering Jew is a ‘‘sort of prototype of the psychopathic Israelite peregrinating around the world.’’ And conversely, the ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ Jews who pass through the clinic seem to be avatars of the Ahasverus of legend: ‘‘It is always more or less the same story; it is always more or less the same face.’’39 The Wandering Jew became emblematic of the Jew under psychiatric supervision, of Jewish physiognomy as constructed by psychiatric discourse. Just as race and mental health have replaced religion and piety in Meige’s narrative, so the redemptive role has also passed hands from Christ to the psychiatrist.40 This shift becomes evident as Meige tells of the ‘‘first Israelite traveller’’ whom Charcot ever encountered. It appears that the original Wandering Jew in the clinic also suffered from reproductive dysfunction. ‘‘He complained especially of genital impotence.’’ Yet thanks to his treatment, ‘‘not a year passed since that time that Mr. Charcot did not see Israelites from the same country come to him complaining of the same symptoms.’’41 Under psychiatric supervision, Jewish diseased

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reproduction can be cured and Judentum can be redeemed. Ironically, perhaps, the only public sign of this salve to the Jewish demographic future is the proliferation of diseased and impotent Jews.

The Operated Wandering Jew In his depiction of the grotesque lengths to which a Jew would go to be assimilated, Oskar Panizza—trained as a psychiatrist, buried as a psychotic, and in the interim a poet, essayist, dramatist, short story writer, and syphilitic42—wrote a narrative that drew on virtually the entire repertoire of anti-Jewish and antisemitic stereotype. ‘‘The Operated Jew’’ narrates the attempt of Itzig Faitel Stern, medical student and wandering Jew, to construct himself as a German. In this story Panizza has revealed the preand postemancipation, the popular and scientific constructions of the Jew. Initially in the story, Faitel embodies the excrescences of the stereotype: from his name43 to his ‘‘slightly yellow’’ skin, ‘‘most prominent’’ nose and crooked body (Ko¨rperkru¨mmungen), from his walk, wealth, and smell to his knowledge of Talmud and his perverse parody of the German language.44 Panizza emphasizes Faitel’s language as the telltale sign of race: for example, Faitel is predisposed to append meaningless sounds like ‘‘menara´’’ and ‘‘Derada´ng’’ to standard German phrases. He is a ‘‘monster’’ (Monstrum),45 the product of diseased descent. Faitel accepts the ridicule of everyone—their construction of his identity—until he encounters Dr. Klotz, a famous anatomist. Klotz asserts that according to his measurements Faitel is human: that is, he is capable of being emancipated from his Jewishness. After this declaration, Faitel endeavors to realize this scientific conclusion: to ‘‘resemble . . . a respectable human being . . . [to] pretend to be a normal human being.’’ In an age of technical reproduction, the Jew whose natural talent for and drive to mimicry, even as his own natural bearing defines ‘‘clown . . . imitator of dialects . . . mime,’’46 must resort to new forms of artifice. To achieve his goal, Faitel submits to a series of excruciatingly painful operations and is fitted with a number of no-less-uncomfortable medical appliances—all under Klotz’s direction and supervision. But that is insufficient: Faitel had heard about the chaste, undefined Germanic soul which shrouded the possessor like an aroma [i.e., the foetor Judaicus, Jewish stench, would be aryanized and deodorized]. This soul was the source of the

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possessor’s rich treasures and formed the Shibboleth of the Germanic nations, a soul which was immediately recognized by all who possessed one.47

To secure such a soul—the (un)speakable sign—he undergoes blood transfusions and a name change. He learns to ‘‘recit[e] pathetic and sentimental passages by poets.’’ The process seemed to have worked ‘‘[d]uring the day [—when] he was in the European corset, harnassed, supervised, under great surveillance. But in the evening [he] gurgl[ed] and bawl[ed]: ‘Derada´ng! Derada´ng!’ ‘‘48 The narrator adds: Only one thing was still missing. It was important to reproduce this human race, which it had cost so much to achieve. The new breed was to be grafted with the finest Occidental spirit. A blond Germanic lass had to help preserve the results which had been garnered through fabulous efforts.49

Faitel, like all bourgeois members of his generation, German and Jewish, was guided by the mandates of reproduction, the obsession with descent and the transmission of patrimony. His own personal conversion needed to be inserted within a narrative of racial renewal. Unfortunately, to fulfill his redemptive desire his surgical transformation had to combat the common belief in the dominance of Jewish heredity. Botanical metaphors and implied Lamarckianism were insufficient. Instead, Panizza drew on the German literary tradition to open the reader and Faitel to the redemptive possibilities: specifically Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). The name of Faitel’s betrothed is Othilia, an allusion to the homophonically named character in Goethe’s novel. In Wahlverwandtschaften the modest50 Ottilie enters the family circle of Eduard and her aunt Charlotte only to become the object of Eduard’s unsatisfied desire. Otto, the child whom Eduard and Charlotte conceive amid this alchemical me´nage, bears an uncanny resemblance to Ottilie. In other words, her image is imprinted upon the child without the mediation of biology or sexuality. And such is no doubt the chimerical hope of Faitel.51 The climax of Panizza’s tale occurs at the wedding feast. While still under the supervision of Dr. Klotz, Faitel comes undone. First, a few ‘‘Derada´ng! Derada´ng!’’ make themselves heard, signaling an uncontrollable process whereby his entire Jewish physiognomy is restored, replete with a ‘‘terrible smell.’’ The story concludes as ‘‘Klotz’s work of art lay before him crumpled and quivering, a convoluted Asiatic image in wedding dress, a counterfeit of human flesh.’’52

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What should be apparent even from this brief summary is what Panizza elided from his account of the multiple constructions of Jewish identity: the foremost identification marker of Judentum, that which inscribes difference on the body, specifically, on the organ of reproduction, namely circumcision. Instead of an epispasm, an operation to occlude this prime Jewish signifier, there is a narrative, ‘‘The Operated Jew.’’ Still, Panizza’s constructions of the Jew are structured by this overlooked marker.53 On the one hand, in the collection of natural attributes that makes up the Jew as stereotype, circumcision is the artificial supplement that proves the rule of Jewish difference. As this volume has already argued, the representation of the pre- and postemancipated Jew presupposes the (male) Jew as circumcised. And on the other hand, while the discourses of modernity interpellate the Jew into an assimilated identity, circumcision becomes the natural language that betrays the Jew who tries to pass, and to pass semen. ‘‘Circumcision’’ is Judentum’s Shibboleth. Hence, Panizza was confronted with a dilemma if he was to achieve his desire ‘‘to present a full picture’’ (Vollsta¨ndigkeit). In order to represent the stereotype of Jewish superstitiousness even as the assimilating Jew has embraced modern European rationality, he relates Faitel’s great fear of the toilet, of being possessed by spirits dwelling there when natural necessity demanded a visit to the latrine (Abort). While the traditional Jew could stave off the danger with the appropriate prayers, the deterritorialized assimilant no longer knows them. The alternative solution—‘‘dispos[ing] of such urgent business’’ in the presence of another—presented another danger for the Jew trying to pass. Faitel had no choice but to go accompanied to the toilet—‘‘naturally, only after he always provided for the proper conditions.’’54 In the face of the unsaid, the hidden language of the body is displaced onto the meaningless additions of Jewish language.55 In the privacy of his room, Yiddish comes to signify Faitel’s identity: when he looks in the mirror he abandons his German soul of empty sayings and reverts to the language of the yeshiva bokher.56 In public the enunciation rather than referent of the nonsensical ‘‘Derada´ng’’ reveals the speaker’s identity to those who have ears to hear, just as ‘‘Shibboleth’’ had in the biblical Book of Judges.57 His unmarked circumcision is also displaced onto the feminine, the unmanned, throughout the story: Faitel is introduced as beardless;58 even when he was ‘‘heroically’’ bearing the barb-wired and other pain-inducing orthopedic appliances to straighten his gait, his speech ‘‘was the mode of expression of an oily, base, cowardly character.’’ Later, during his transformation, he is transfused with the blood of women, apparently

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menstrual blood, in a scene evoking female suicide: laying supine in a warm bath he opens his vein and falls unconscious. ‘‘He wanted to shed his ‘Jewishness.’ ’’59 And, of course, the moment of consummation, of male domination, the moment that would require revealing his circumcision—his wedding night—becomes the moment of Faitel’s dissolution, his unmanning.

Wandering Chiasms Panizza’s medically supervised unmanning of the Wandering Jew suggests comparisons with Schreber’s figuration, but in contrast to the secreted circumcision of ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ unmanning as an embodied practice—that is, as a technique performed on the male genital—is explicit in the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten. Yet unmanning, too, structures Schreber’s text. Just as Faitel’s circumcision reveals the vanity of the redemption sought in assimilation,60 so, conversely, Schreber’s unmanning is ultimately accepted as leading to the renewal of the race. Yet is this chiasm of visibility that connects the construction of gender identity in Panizza and Schreber still inverted with regard to racial identification? Throughout his narrative Schreber, like Panizza, is gripped by the opposition, the conflict for domination, between German and Jew. Such a position is not surprising from a former member of the Wartburg, who, like his fellow Burschenscha¨ftler (fraternity members), no doubt idolized the Prussian nationalist historian Treitschke—he who made famous the cry, ‘‘The Jews are our misfortune.’’61 Schreber’s Aryan sympathies are apparent when he writes that ‘‘the Germans were in modern times . . . God’s chosen people. . . . God’s chosen peoples in history—as the most moral at a given time—were in order the old Jews, the old Persians . . . , the ‘Greco-Romans’ . . . and lastly the Germans’’ (M 50). Schreber goes on to define the souls’ use of the ascription ‘‘Aryan’’ in a note: The expression ‘‘Aryan’’ (‘‘Aryan’’ is another name for the Indo-Germanic peoples) was in general much used at that time; there was also an ‘‘Aryan’’ state of Blessedness, etc. By and large the expression was used to denote the leaning of a great part of the souls towards German nationalism; they wanted to retain for the German people the place of God’s chosen people, in contrast to the Catholicizing and Slavicizing efforts of other souls. (M 99 n. 49)

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There is also a scene in the text that reproduces a frequent trope in antisemitic literature: the dissembling Jew who attains control of the state apparatus.62 The voices speak of a baptised Jew who like Flechsig was ‘‘a nerve specialist [and] a kind of administrator of God’s interest, and who wanted to institute the rule of Judaism [Herrschaft des Judentums] in Germany’’ (M 71). Annunciations of the future hegemony of Germany continually recur throughout the remainder of the narrative, while allusions to the Jew appear limited to moments of hypochondriacal symptom formation: leprosy, bad odors, ‘‘the very inferior ‘jew’s stomach’ ’’ (M 133). The Jew is identified with the oppressor, the superseded, or the diseased. And of course, the ultimate redemptive figure, the Eternal Jew, is denied Jewish identification. Schreber even articulates the opposition between the lower and higher gods Ariman and Ormuzd in terms of Jew and German: ‘‘the lower God (Ariman) seems to have felt attracted to nations of originally brunette race (the Semites) and the upper God to nations of originally blonde race (the Aryan peoples)’’ (M 52). Yet since Ariman is the deity who unmanned Schreber, this last opposition secretes an apparent identification with the Jew.63 To be the harlot, to be the object of the psychiatrist’s gaze, to be debased, is also to be the Jew. Like Faitel Stern’s meaninglessly appended ‘‘Derada´ng’’ in ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ the site of the distortion and displacement of racial difference in the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten is, however, more linguistic than corporeal. The difference that is inscribed on the Schreberian body is above all sexual difference. Gender cross-identifications are written over the racial with the most graphic displacement—and the foremost graphic of displacement—occurring with the epispasmic retraction of ‘‘the (external) male genitals (scrotum and penis) [of the Eternal Jew] into the body’’ (M 73). In language, the figuration of identity and difference through the displacement of gender is replaced by displacement along a phonological chain of associations. For example, the difference between poison-laden rays that inflict the body and those that heal the damage, the difference between searing rays and blessed rays, is the difference between the Sehrende and the Segnende (M 98). Schreber’s sensitivity to the slightest phonological displacements is most apparent in his discussion of ‘‘the miraculously created birds.’’ They ‘‘do not understand the meaning of the words they speak; but apparently they have a natural sensitivity for similarity of sounds’’ (M 168). Schreber provides a series of near-homophonic pairings: for example, ‘‘Chinesenthum’’ / ‘‘Jesum Christum,’’ ‘‘Abendroth’’/ ‘‘Athemnoth,’’ or ‘‘Ariman’’/‘‘Ackermann’’ (M 168). Such sounds both excite the birds into states of voluptuousness and confuse them; such sounds render them susceptible to malicious manipulation.

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Schreber names these birds after young girls. But the linguistic incompetence ascribed to the birds and, implicitly, to women had also been ascribed to the Jews. The rote singing of empty phrases was the standard critique of Jewish liturgy circulating in the anti-Jewish chirpings of Richard Wagner and Otto Weininger,64 among others. The birds’ parody of a language—it sounds like a recognizable language but is essentially meaningless—coincides with frequent representations of the language of the Jews, Yiddish. But the language that most resembles Yiddish may well be the Grundsprache, the basic language of the rays. Schreber describes the basic language as ‘‘a somewhat antiquated but nevertheless powerful German, characterized particularly by a wealth of euphemisms (for instance, unholy [in the reverse sense] for holy)’’ (M 50). Yiddish, Ju¨disch-deutsch, is itself a derivative of late medieval German that recodifies euphemism back into profanity; take for instance Schmuck: the jewel becomes the prick— before its retraction.65 Could the voices that beset Schreber have been speaking Yiddish? Is Yiddish the ‘‘nerve-language’’ that ‘‘no human being as such can force another to use’’ (M 69), but that Schreber, because of his condition, was in fact forced to use? Could the overheard screams, the bellowing (Bru¨llen) and nonsensical utterances of Schreber be his Yiddish response? Schreber was likely familiar with the sounds of Yiddish. Israe¨ls has unearthed documents that attest to Schreber and his family’s having owned property on one of the major commercial streets of Leipzig, Bru¨hlstrasse, a street of Jewish fur dealers.66 This street was known throughout Germany as a Jewinfested area, as an anti-Jewish caricature titled ‘‘Physiognomic Studies,’’ published in the mass-circulation humor journal Fliegende Bla¨tter67 in 1868, bears witness (see Figure 8-1). It displayed a catalog of the variety of Jewish caricatures that the journal and other so-called satirical magazines had disseminated; the illustration indicated that the location of this mixed gathering of Jews was ‘‘Bru¨hl[strasse] in Leipzig during the trade fair [Messe].’’ Also housed on these Schreber-owned premises was a Hebrew book shop.68 As is quite apparent from a poem Schreber wrote for his mother’s ninetieth birthday in 1905, the disposition of this building generated a number of unpleasant associations with Jews: Although your heart is hardly set on fur and skins, And you have perhaps only moderate liking For those who eat kosher and for Poland’s Jews Let me, however, put a photograph of A building in Bru¨hl together with the others,

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Figure 8-1. ‘‘Physiognomic Studies: Bru¨hl[strasse] in Leipzig during the trade fair [Messe].’’ From Fliegende Bla¨tter 48 (1868): 76. Reprinted courtesy of Digitalisierungszentrum-Universita¨tsbibliothek Heidelberg. On which not seldom did your cares rest. . . . Yet sixty years it belonged to you and yours, And let one thing be said in its praise: When it was no longer ours, it was a loss That we cry over less than others.69

Did this loss, this dislocation of difference, repeat itself in the displacement of Bru¨hl onto Bru¨ll? Did the Sprache, the language, of Bru¨hlstrasse become the Bru¨llwunder or the bellowing miracle of the asylum? (See, e.g., M 165.) Taking that possibility one step further, I need borrow from Sam Weber’s analysis of the Schnittwunde, the cut on his face that Schreber chose to exemplify the nature of miracles, the Wunder, directed against him. For Weber this displaced phonological identification of inscribed difference—from wound/Wunde to miracles/Wunder—renders difference, and the absolute importance of difference, visible.70 Cannot the obverse be afoot, with the displaced phonological identification of Bru¨llwunder with the Bru¨hlwunde? That is, could the bellowing miracle be alluding to, even as it occludes, the mark of Jewish difference, the wound of the inhabitants of Bru¨hlstrasse, namely circumcision? Did Schreber identify with the

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circumcised, with the Beschnittenen? Did he, then, like Faitel, adopt a new name? Did he become Herr Schneider, the man whose name led Schreber to question the origin of all names, of all patronyms, of all identifications (M 179–80)? In contrast to his non-Jewish counterpart, Schreber’s Jewish Eternal Jew is not unmanned for any redemptive purpose. Either this figure is complicit with oppression—the circumcised is always also the circumciser71—or he marks a dead end. The finality of this incarnation can signify superseded Judentum, Jewry’s exclusion from the higher echelons of the state, the diseased dead, or transformations that lead either to humiliation (like Pan stripping off his fur) or commodification (the Jewish fur dealers of the poem) and do not lead to natural reproduction, to the production of a new race. Yet just as Schreber’s initial experience of unmanning as emasculation, as feminizing victimization, is transformed and revalorized through its insertion into a narrative of redemptive reproduction, so too is the negative valuation attached to Schreber’s implicit identification with the circumcised, with the unmanned Eternal Jew. That is, the means by which Schreber performs his identification with redemptive reproduction is by ‘‘cultivating voluptuousness’’ (Pflege der Wollust; cf. M 149, 207–10). This phrasing resonates with biblical reference: specifically, in Genesis 18:12 Sarah, overhearing the prophecy that she will bear children, remarks: ‘‘After I have grown old . . . shall I have pleasure.’’ In Luther’s translation this passage reads: ‘‘Nun ich alt bin soll ich noch Wollust pflegen.’’ Is Schreber identifying with the matriarch Sarah, who accompanied her husband Abraham on his wanderings and through whom Gd miraculously fulfilled his covenant with Abraham? Is the non-Jewish Wandering Jew a Jewess? In Schreber’s delusions the identities of difference merge and separate. He is at once Jew and German, male and female.

Schreber as Syphilophobe, or the Miscarriages of a Justice But the problematic of reproduction opens on another scene. Among the motives suggested for Schreber’s delusions of redemptive unmanning is that his marriage with Ottilie Sabine Behr had been childless. Since he was the last surviving male Schreber and since he was advanced in age, there was no one left to provide the patronymic.72 Consequently, he sought to substitute for his wife. Since she was unable to reproduce his name, he sought to reproduce hers. That is, each of her names evokes

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reproduction. The relationship between Ottilie and nonsexual reproduction has already been discussed with regard to Panizza’s story. Goethe’s elective affinities might find their analogue in Schreber’s ‘‘certain conviction that spontaneous generation (parentless generation, generatio aequivoca) does in fact exist’’ (M 185; cf. 191). His wife’s second name, Sabine, recalls the Sabine women, who were raped by Latin tribesmen under Romulus in order to ensure the reproduction and hegemony of their Roman descendants. And her maiden name, Behr, is a virtual homonym of the German verb stem for giving birth, geba¨ren. Schreber’s usurpation of his wife’s name, however, may have been in reaction to an ailment that went nameless, the plague nominated by euphemism and overcoded by Judentum: namely syphilis. That is, the couple’s childlessness had not been been due to the inability to conceive; rather, Sabine had experienced a series of miscarriages. According to the case history from the University Psychiatric Clinic, she had had two prior to his first institutionalization.73 Further, Schreber writes: ‘‘After recovering from my first illness, I spent eight years with my wife, . . . marred only from time to time by the repeated disappointment of our hope of being blessed with children’’ (M 63). This passage suggests that she may have had several more miscarriages or stillbirths. Robert White concludes that she may have had as many as six.74 By the 1880s doctors were asserting that there was a very strong correlation between miscarriages and syphilis, especially when at least one of the parents suffered from hereditary syphilis. Alfred Fournier, the leading syphilologist of his era, suggested that ‘‘women who had miscarried several times be subjected to mercury treatment as a precautionary measure during pregnancy.’’75 Could Schreber have had syphilis or have been the child of a syphilitic, or did he fear that either was the case?76 The case history from his first institutionalization at the Leipzig University Clinic reads, ‘‘Was given Pot[assium] Iod[ide] since syphilis was suspected.’’ Since this comment is immediately followed by the remark, ‘‘His wife had had two miscarriages,’’77 the person who drew up this case history appears to have drawn the connection among Schreber’s behavior, his wife’s problems with reproduction, and his possible syphilitic infection. Was Schreber also aware of the treatment with potassium iodide78—or of the dissemblance of the treatment—and its implications? When he discusses his original stay at Flechsig’s clinic in the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten, Schreber questions the doctor’s ‘‘white lie’’: ‘‘Professor Flechsig wanted to put down my illness solely to poisoning with potassium bromide’’ (M 62).79 Does Schreber betray his awareness of the possible diagnosis of syphilis

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through the substitution of bromide for iodide, and of cause for cure? Is sodium bromide one of the basic language’s famous euphemisms? analysis of a paralysis Another connection lay with Schreber’s brother Gustav, who had committed suicide in 1877. In the report on Paul Schreber’s hereditary background, his brother is described as paralytic. The probable source for this remark was the letter written by his sister Klara to Paul’s psychiatrist in 1900. In this note she reported ‘‘that the progressive paralysis of our dear eldest brother had already been recognized at that time.’’80 Although the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten makes no mention of Gustav’s suicide, let alone of his paralysis, still it can be assumed that Paul knew of his brother’s condition as well.81 The diagnosis of progressive paralysis usually signified that one suffered from tertiary syphilis, although this connection did not go uncontested until the Wassermann test cast aside all skepticism.82 One source that affirmed the tie was Emil Kraepelin’s textbook on psychiatry—a work that Schreber readily consulted while preparing his memoir-brief (e.g., M 89–90). Kraepelin writes: ‘‘If the clinical picture leaves us very uncertain about the great group of paralytic mental disturbances, it is from now on doubtless that at least the majority of these stand in some causational relationship with syphilis.’’83 He later amplifies this conclusion: ‘‘Among the causes of paralysis we must first of all consider syphilis. We find this [disease] remarkably often in the past of paralytics, even if at present syphilitic symptoms relatively seldom make an appearance.’’ After examining the statistical evidence, he concludes, ‘‘In any case the connection between syphilis and paralysis stands up to any doubt.’’84 While Schreber does not complain that he is suffering from some paralytic disorder when he reenters Flechsig’s clinic in 1893, he does make other complaints. When Schreber comments that ‘‘the inner table of my skull was lined with a different membrane in order to extinguish the memory of my own ego’’ (M 99 n. 49A), he may be alluding to syphilis, since inflammation of the cerebral or spinal membranes (with the consequent psychopathological effects) was already identified as another of tertiary syphilis’s many complications.85 Dr. Weber, Schreber’s psychiatrist during his second stay at Sonnenstein, writes in his report to the court: ‘‘At the beginning of his stay [at the University Psychiatric Clinic, Schreber] . . . complained that he was suffering from softening of the brain’’ (Gehirnerweicherung; M 267). According to the entry on ‘‘softening of the brain’’ in the classic medical reference work Black’s Medical Dictionary,

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when people who have been the subjects of gout, alcoholism, or syphilis, especially elderly persons, become gradually dull in intellect, drowsy, absent-minded, emotional, and finally demented, these symptoms are also attributed to ‘‘softening of the brain.’’86

More pertinent is the reference in the index to the second volume of Kraepelin’s textbook. Under Gehirnerweichung it reads ‘‘see progressive paralysis.’’87 Kraepelin also remarks that such paralytic ailments are not localized to the head but generate ‘‘very profound and general disturbances to the entire body.’’88 Many of the ailments that Schreber describes—the ‘‘very multifarious . . . miracles enacted against the organs of the thoracic and abdominal cavities [and] directed against my head and the nerves of my head’’ (M 132, 135)—could be ascribed to syphilis. Indeed, Schreber’s ‘‘body without organs’’ made famous by Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari,89 as well as the problematization of gender identity, can be ascribed to ‘‘the Great Pretender.’’90 To cite Charles Bernheimer again: ‘‘Insofar as it erodes the body, obscures differences between organs, rupturing membranes, causing abcesses and chancres, syphilis is the appropriate pathological analog of the collapse of gender differences.’’91

naming names That Schreber fails to name syphilis as the cause of or as in any way connected with his dementia is not too surprising. Syphilis was the disease that went unnamed.92 But syphilis is mentioned once in the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten. ‘‘Another time I traversed the earth from Lake Ladoga to Brazil and, together with an attendant, I built there in a castle-like building a wall in protection of God’s realms (Gottesreiche) against an advancing yellow flood tide: I related this to the peril (Gefahr) of a syphilitic epidemic’’ (M 87). Clearly Schreber was familiar with the rhetoric of the ‘‘venereal peril’’ that populated both popular press and medical discourse.93 Moreover, his repeated references to and identifications with the harlot, the whore, and the prostitute invoke the discourse on syphilis. As extensively discussed in chapter 3, the prostitute was represented—whether medically or morally, literarily or visually—as the source of syphilitic contagion. If Schreber had indeed contracted syphilis from a prostitute94 —or even if his father or brother had done so—then he may have pinned on the prostitute the blame for his failure to reproduce and other miseries. Thus when he called out, ‘‘The sun is a whore’’ and ‘‘God is a whore,’’95 he was identifying the sources of his current victimization with the ultimate source of his

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predicament. Moreover, when he bemoaned his own reduction to harlot status, this shameful insult to his hypermasculine honor, he was not only figuring his victimization, but also assuming blame for his syphilis-induced inability to pass on the patronym. And was his filial failure Jewish-tainted as well? For to return to Schreber’s paradoxical identification with the Jews: the disease-disseminating prostitute was frequently represented as Jewish. Every bordello had its ‘‘handsome Jewess.’’ And as discussed in chapter 3, during the last decades of the nineteenth century there had been a large increase in Jewish prostitution as a consequence of the vast migrations of East European Jewry. Moreover, the Jews were figured as the leaders of the white slave trade, both inside Europe and outside it—in particular in Latin America. The recent, widely publicized Lemberg trial (1892), in which twenty-seven Jewish procurers from Galicia were convicted of trafficking in women, fueled these charges.96 The yellow tint of the flood also suggests some connection with Jews. Yellow skin like Faitel’s was often represented as characteristic of Jews. Moreover, the requirement for Jews to wear a yellow badge was instituted in the thirteenth century to help Christian prostitutes avoid having intercourse with Jews.97 There may not have been Jewish brothels on the shores of Lake Ladoga, but Jewish prostitutes and pimps could be found pursuing that valued yellow metal, gold, from Lemberg or Lahore to Rio. This worldwide, prostitute-borne disease, too, acted like a Wandering Jew. Huysmans, in his 1884 Against the Grain, wrote: Never wearying, [syphilis] had traveled down the ages; to this day it was raging everywhere, disguised under ordinary symptoms of headache or bronchitis, hysteria or gout; from time to time, it would climb to the surface, attacking for choice badly cared-for, badly-fed people breaking out in gold pieces, setting, in horrid irony, a Nautch-girl’s parure of sequins on its wretched victim’s brows, inscribing their skin, for a crown to their misery, with the very symbol of wealth and well-being.98

The connection among syphilis, the Jews, and Schreber’s body indirectly erupts with the next epidemic, a disease whose spread, we’ve seen, was tied to the yellow peril of Chinese immigration that according to the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten confronted Europe: leprosy, ‘‘the signs of which were visible on my own body’’ (M 97). As already detailed in previous chapters, the delineation of the relationship between syphilis and leprosy, whether one of virtual identity or definitive difference, played a constitutive role in the scientific, historical, and philosophic/anthropological construction and diagnosis of the disease-entity syphilis.

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And after leprosy the next disease to afflict Europe and Schreber was the plague, die Pest, which in all of its varieties would emit a variety of disgusting smells (M 98) that were suggestive of the foetor Judaicus, the Jewish stench. The name of this affliction, die Pest, would in the antisemitic narratives of the decades to come hook up with the prefix Juden, and as Judenpest would become another term for syphilis.99 Did Schreber suffer from either syphilis or hereditary syphilis?100 The sincerity of Schreber’s claim to moral principles and sexual moderation need not be doubted. But with a paralytic elder brother and a father who, beginning when his son Daniel Paul was eight years old, suffered severe headaches, depressions, and personality changes for the last eleven years of his life, reputedly as a consequence of falling off a ladder, the idea that Schreber fils should fear that he might be a hereditary syphilitic cannot be dismissed. Syphilophobia too was considered ‘‘one of the most depressive of afflictions, particularly when it occurs in neurasthenic subjects; it is accompanied by melancholia, loss of appetite and even a strong tendency towards suicide’’101—symptoms to which Schreber fell victim. Since an autopsy performed after his 1911 death found no traces of syphilitic infection,102 Schreber’s hallucinated body may well have been constructed by the Judentum-associated discourses of syphilology and syphilophobia. By focusing on Schreber’s lamentably neglected figuration of the unmanned, non-Jewish Eternal Jew, this chapter has located his Denkwu¨rdigkeiten at the historical conjuncture of contested classes, cultures, and identities. The corpus of Schreber is traversed by contemporary narratives of diseased sexuality, diseased reproduction, and problematic gender and racial identities, while his body is inscribed by historical (i.e., racial) and natural (i.e., sexual) difference through the discourses of antisemitism and syphilophobia. Schreber’s ‘‘writing-down-system’’ and subjected body of symptoms mirrored the epistemic apparati by which Judentum was identified.

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chapter 9

Walter Benjamin Reproducing the Scent of the Messianic [D]as Ju¨dische war vielleicht oft nur ein fremdla¨ndisches, su¨dliches (schlimmer: sentimales) Aroma, in unserer Produktion und in unserm Leben. [Jewishness was perhaps often only a foreign, southern (worse: sentimental) aroma, in our productive work and in our life.] —walter benjamin, letter to Ludwig Strauss, 11 September 1912

Throughout the course of his life Walter Benjamin recognized that he could not repress either extreme of the dialectic, the duality (Zweiheit), of German Jewishness: ‘‘German and Jew stand opposite one another like related extremes.’’1 This self-characterized ‘‘last European’’2 realized that he could not escape his ‘‘Jewish self.’’3 So how does one characterize the German Jewish physiognomy of Benjamin, that perhaps last great physiognomist of our times? Based on the purported content of his work, debates have raged between its so-called theological or Jewish and materialist or non-Jewish extremes: should his life be periodized or dialecticized or constellated about these poles?4 Motifs and allusions are weighed; intents and iterations are divined. What qualifies him as Jewish: Zionism, messianism, exegetical ingenuity, concern with the ethical or the kabbalistic, marginality, exile, the networks of parents and friends, his status as a ‘‘prophet’’ of modernity? His Jewishness, however, is not delimited by the matrix of psychobiography: the contradictions of being raised in an upper-class, assimilated Jewish household whose persistent presence was repudiated by the dominant antisemitic culture. Neither is it confined to the schemata of intellectual history or social network analysis: his interaction with Jewish friends, thinkers, and writings. However, rather than analyzing Benjamin’s physiognomy—his Jewish identity—

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this chapter undertakes a physiognomic analysis of Benjamin’s body of work—its traces of his identification as Jewish. This assay into aspects of Benjamin’s response to the Other Jewish Question follows that strange, almost queasy aroma that Benjamin associates with Jewishness in his letter to the poet and Zionist Ludwig Strauss. But the smells exuded by Benjamin’s corpus leave by definition an elusive trail. According to Benjamin, smell preserves but is not preserved in memory; it is amorphous and formless, indefinite and weighty.5 Moreover, while olfaction can evoke the collective experiences that in part constitute prehistory or temps perdu—and Jewish smelling had a collective component in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the figure of the stinking Jew, incarnating the ‘‘hatred for the physical nature of the one who is hated,’’6 was a part of that period’s collective experience—the apperception of odor per se is an apparently nontransmissible individual experience. Consequently, Benjamin’s aroma of Jewishness should not be able as such to contribute to a physiognomic analysis. Perhaps what, according to his letter to Strauss, Benjamin senses that scent suffuses provides additional perspective: ‘‘our productive work [Produktion] and our life.’’ Within the cultural imaginary of the time, das Ju¨dische was not some eau de cologne7 spritzed on the production of the Jewish-identified; rather, the smell emanated from the thing itself. This Jewish supplement betrayed every such production as a reproduction—an inauthentic copy. Benjamin’s past, his Jewish prehistory, is, as he explains by quoting Proust, ‘‘unmistakably present in some material object’’ (‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’’ [OB], 158). The object in question is Benjamin’s corpus, its production of sentences and use of names. His sentences are the ‘‘entire muscular activity of the intelligible body.’’8 They bear names, the archives of ‘‘nonsensuous similarities, nonsensuous correspondences’’ (‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty’’ [MF], 335), between words and worlds; and hence ‘‘what the name preserves but also predesignates [is] the habitus of a lived life’’ (The Arcades Project/Das Passagen-Werk; AP 868/PW 1038 [Q, 24]). This chapter’s physiognomic examination of Benjamin’s engagement with the Other Jewish Question focuses on two of his key names,9 morphemicsemantic fields, that frequently intersect with one another as well as with the olfactory: Aura, ‘‘the associations which . . . tend to cluster around the object of perception’’ (OB 186), and Mimesis, ‘‘the powerful compulsion . . . to become and behave like something else’’ (MF 333). As seemingly antipodal as the opposed extremes of the unique and the copy, both aura and mimesis entail relations with otherness—the one rendering it distant,

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no matter how near, as distant as the sacred or the ideal; the other rendering it near, no matter how distant,10 as near as the woman or the Jew—and they are particularly conditioned by, inhaling and reproducing, the emanations of his antisemitic era. And in the presentation (Darstellung) of his work, social discourse about the stinking Jewish mimic seeped past his conscious intention and left mimetic traces there that shaped his historiographic task and his entire corpus. Perhaps because scent is less implicated in the domination of vision, following Benjamin’s trail of odors rather than the more frequent trope of ‘‘image,’’ especially as those odors cross with other chronotopes of smell, may aid us in recovering the ‘‘generative and inconspicuous experiences [Erfahrungen]’’ lying ‘‘closed in the hard shell of incommunicability.’’11 ‘‘And since similarity is the organ of experience, this means: the name can only be recognized in contexts of experience [Erfahrung]. Only there, is its essence, that is, its linguistic essence, knowable’’ (AP 868/PW 1038 [Q, 24]). Just as the names Aura and Mimesis were interwoven in Benjamin’s body of work, so this chapter examines how they were conjoined with a number of other phenomena that filled the landscape that Germanophone Jews traversed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the popular and scientific identifications of Jewish difference with stench and with the mimetic and/or reproductive; the contradictory demands of German bourgeois integration; a Jewish redemptive tradition correlated with scent. It airs how Benjamin’s language was repeatedly suffused with the social discourse of smells, his texts with the problematic of reproduction. Further, his corpus is juxtaposed with contemporary writings familiar to him, including those of Freud and Klages, that render these connections both more explicit and more explicitly. Then, reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s olfactory analysis of antisemitism as a triangulation of Freud’s theory of the repression of smell and Benjamin’s discussion of mimesis and reproduction brings the correspondences between Benjamin’s names and his situation as a German Jew more to the fore. Finally, the chapter explores whether Benjamin’s commerce with the Other Jewish Question was ‘‘endowed with a weak Messianic power’’ (‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ [TPH], 254 [Thesis ii]; emphasis in original). With each iteration of the smell-laden, Jewish-tainted names Aura and Mimesis, Benjamin’s writings emitted a symptomatic scent of his times as well as sought to recoup smell and reproduction from their antisemitic identifications and release, if not recuperate, their redemptive possibilities. Indeed, they secreted the ‘‘ambiguous’’ (zweideutige)12 ‘‘third thing’’ (etwas

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Drittes)13 by which Benjamin sought the ‘‘always anew, never in the same way’’ (AP 470/PW 587–88 [N7a, 1]) dialectical mediation of his GermanJewish duality (Zweiheit)—otherwise put, by which Benjamin took up his Other Jewish Question. In sum, this chapter examines how the atmosphere of Judentum—the identifying emissions (and omissions) of Jews and non-Jews alike—infused Benjamin’s corpus. Further, by such a historical reconstruction the chapter seeks to decant from Benjamin’s corpus how his ‘‘lifework [Lebenswerk] is preserved [aufbewahrt] in this work [Werk] and at the same time canceled [aufgehoben]; in the lifework, the era’’ (TPH 263 [Thesis xvii]). Whether by acting out or working through, Benjamin’s mimetic mediations of these denigrating Jewish representations shaped his body of work and framed his engagement of the Other Jewish Question in their olfactive image.14

The Shock of the Jew The bourgeois, western Berlin, fin-de-sie`cle neighborhood in which Benjamin was raised may not have been the Pale of Settlement, but it bathed in a pall of anti-Jewish s(c)entiment. Political antisemitism may have been in abeyance as Benjamin was reaching maturity, but neither Jewish Question was.15 In Germany the everyday antisemitic attitudes of the nonJewish population met the self-deluding nonrecognition of liberal assimilationist Jewry; where the former held for Jewish difference, a belief founded on a panoply of particular characterological and physical traits, the latter publicized Jewish sameness, a notion based on Enlightenment ideas and economic self-confidence. Benjamin, like other German Jewish intellectuals of his generation, rejected both his elders’ self-delusions and what he took as their nostalgic, inconspicuous religiosity that passed for Judentum.16 Benjamin, like his peers, also knowingly maintained a rarely requited love affair with German culture.17 As early as 1912 Benjamin, playing both historical object and subject, began to discern within himself the monadological structure created by the tension between these dialectical extremes, the Zweiheit of the German and the Jewish. This recognition arose during Benjamin’s profound intellectual involvement in the 1911–12 controversies over the nature of Jewish identification and the possibility of a German-Jewish symbiosis.18 At this time the historical economist Werner Sombart followed up his massive indictment of Jewish character and participation in the development of

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capitalism, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, with an even more controversial discursus on the future of the Jews, Die Zukunft der Juden. There he offered his solution to the ‘‘greatest problem for humanity . . . the Jewish problem.’’19 Because the Jews by nature are not suitable to enter the higher ranks of society, he suggested a separate but equal co-existence between Western Jews and Germans. Numerous Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals responded to Sombart’s authoritative pronouncements, and many of those responses were collected in Artur Landsberger’s 1912 Judentaufen (Baptizing Jews). Soon thereafter came another round of debate, with the appearance of Moritz Goldstein’s ‘‘German-Jewish Parnassus.’’ In a distinguished, nonJewish-identified, nationalist journal, Der Kunstwart, Goldstein offered a Zionist response to the Jewish Questions and hectored his readers to recognize the reality of antisemitism and to repudiate all forms of assimilationist self-denial. But just as Sombart had asserted that the Jews dominated the economic and the political, so Goldstein asserted they monopolized the intellectual and cultural life of Germany. And his solution was not dissimilar: the Jews should abandon illusory hopes for integration, renounce what they cannot properly do—write in German as Germans— and instead (re)turn to Jewish (self-)identifications, Jewish sources, and, eventually, Jewish languages. While Benjamin did not participate in the series of responsa that soon ensued, he did report to Ludwig Strauss that he had been following the controversy and had read all of the articles. That September 1912 letter is also the source of this chapter’s epigraph; Benjamin’s characterization of his relations to Judentum was preceded by: ‘‘If we are two-sided, Jewish and German, then we were until now totally and affirmatively focused upon the German. . . .’’20 Until these debates forced him to begin thinking through what it meant to be a German Jew— the Other Jewish Question—and thus to make ‘‘Judentum important and problematic to me,’’21 the Jewish extreme of this child of assimilated parents was, ‘‘until now,’’ just an atmosphere, an aroma, always already generated by Gentile representation. As he later wrote to Strauss, until this new problematizing of the Jew in himself, what he knew of Jewishness consisted ‘‘only of antisemitism and an indefinite piety.’’22 Smell would become the codeword for Benjamin’s ‘‘Jewish’’ childhood. In ‘‘A Berlin Chronicle’’ (BC) he records an odor-laden reminiscence of reading the New Companion of German Youth just after receiving its latest volume as a gift—as he did each Christmas as a child. ‘‘There was nothing finer than to sniff out [auszuwittern], on this first tentative expedition into the labyrinth of stories, the various drafts, scents, brightnesses and sounds

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that came from the different chambers and corridors. . . . And what did it matter if the aromas [Aromata] that rose from the tunnels high into the air . . . mingled with the smell of the Gingerbread’’ (BC 56) in the Christmas room? That scene typified the hybrid existence of assimilated German Jews: they marked their Germanness by sharing the festivity, if not the piety, of their Gentile neighbors.23 Such celebrations also emphasized the largely negative character of their Jewishness: their Judentum was its distinction from that of their ‘‘coreligionists’’ in Poland and Russia. The smells that exude from young Walter’s book also are indicative of German-Jewish identifications. They emanate from adventures in a Mediterranean past: ‘‘the smell of the gingerbread joined with that of a Sicilian sulfur mine that suddenly burst upon us in a full-page illustration’’ (BC 56). When assimilated German Jews like Benjamin’s parents would trace their ancestry, they tended to turn their noses toward the southern24 climes of the aristocratic Sephardim, and certainly away from the east of the stinking Urjuden (primal or primitive Jews). And these odors intermix with the smells of bourgeois holidaymaking. In a recollection adjacent to this one, more sentimental scents come to the fore. Fragrance, the ‘‘sweet lavender scent’’ of sachets hanging in a linen cupboard, signals the ‘‘paradise’’ of the bourgeois home (BC 53– 55).25 But this nostalgic idyll is divided against itself. The clearly detailed image of the sweetly scented home is contiguously opposed by a dark, inaccessible space in which his mother’s dressing gowns were hung. Benjamin then evokes the uncanny breath of his own prehistory that surrounds this reminiscence of the bourgeois phantasmagoria of possessions and sensations. He recalls how the young Walter dreams of a ghost who arises from the dark reaches of that inaccessible corner of the home in order to steal the paradise of goods. The ghost takes these possessions without removing them; Benjamin compares this to a spirits’ banquet in which the dead consume everything yet nothing seems to be eaten or drunk. The well-lit warehouse of domestic tranquility and goods is possessed; the silks and the sweet-smelling sachets are doubled. This doubling suggests that it may be more accurate to describe the aroma from his youth as two scents, one noisome and one more salubrious. During the next several years, and to different degrees throughout the remainder of his life, Benjamin endeavored to discover the positive content of Jewish life and spirit rather than simply inhale the negative and evanescent aromas that surrounded him in his youth. Yet, while the odor of piety might have evaporated, the stench of antisemitism would trail after him—first contributing to his 1915 decision to sever ties to the youth

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movement with which he was so involved at the time of the Kunstwart controversy, and ultimately poisoning him at the French-Spanish border in 1940. Where Benjamin the critical historian sought out the messianic sparks, the now-times of the past, in the present, he continually encountered the mythic repetitions of an unredemptive antisemitism. Antisemitism inhabited the life of the assimilated German Jew. Yet its everydayness had a doubly deodorizing effect. On the one hand, the routinization of antisemitic attitudes and expressions reduced them to background noise all but beyond conscious recognition. On the other hand, because the persistence of antisemitism did not harmonize with the belief that the Jews of Benjamin’s parents’ generation were—or at least were on the verge of being—fully accepted by their Gentile neighbors, they generated rationalizations to silence the dissonance. They represented antisemitism as either a class-determined atavism that was breathing its last, a reflex that once rationally reflected upon would be overcome, or either a pretext or disguise for other problems and concerns, such as political mobilization and class conflict.26 Hence they endeavored to fend off with excuses or a forced, seemingly overindulgent smile or even, as Schnitzler famously depicted (see the introduction), an indifferent countenance—with what Benjamin would call ‘‘mimetic shock absorber[s]’’ (OB 176)—the recognition that antisemitism was intrinsic to Jewish/ non-Jewish relations as well as to any particular manifestation of antiJewish sentiment. These responses by German Jewry to their antisemitic surroundings were much like those of individuals to an urban crowd as described by Poe in ‘‘The Man of the Crowd’’ and cited by Benjamin (OB 171) to illustrate the experience of shock: By far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied businesslike demeanor, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. Their brows were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering, but redoubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon the lips, the course of the persons impeding them. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion.

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Moreover, for writers ranging from Kant, who considered stench as emblematic both of crowds and of the olfactive sense itself—‘‘there are more disgusting objects [Gegensta¨nde des Ekels] than pleasant ones [especially in crowded places]’’27—to Benjamin himself, who recalled on another occasion the invasion of odors emitted by the ‘‘herd’’ of schoolmates in the hated stairways of his old school—‘‘defenselessly exposed to the bad odors emanating from all the bodies pressing so closely against mine’’ (BC 52)— the crowd stinks. ‘‘The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd’’ (OB 176) is a smell. Consciousness could attempt to parry off shocks. As Benjamin, drawing on the work of Freud and other psychoanalysts, points out (OB 160–62), such defense against external stimuli is a primary purpose for consciousness—that is, for the Enlightenment ego in which German Jewry placed such faith. But ego defenses such as denial or fright or rationalization do not always succeed. Sometimes such shocks are traumatic, immobilizing the individual as they are repeatedly and unconsciously acted out until the traumas begin to be consciously worked through and laid to (uneasy) rest. More often these repeated shocks serve to discipline their victims by eliciting mimetic responses. To illuminate how the seemingly chaotic plethora of modern stimuli serve to train the individual, Benjamin resituates Poe’s characters in the factories described by Marx. Poe’s ‘‘pedestrians act as if they had adapted themselves to the machines and could express themselves only automatically. Their behavior is a reaction to shocks.’’ Benjamin then repeats the line from ‘‘The Man of the Crowd’’: ‘‘If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers’’ (OB 176). If not intended as an allegory of the Jewish condition, Benjamin’s citation of Poe does evoke a number of Jewish associations.28 For instance, such jostling had been an everyday occurrence for Jews in Poe’s time.29 Like all shock, Jew-hatred (Judenhaß) threatens to overcome the individual (ego): it both denies self-determined existence to the Jews and seeks to impose its own determinations of Jewish identification upon them. In an oppressive society, filled with legal, administrative, and social obstacles as well as physical ones to self-determination that constantly remind the oppressed of their status, victimizing shocks become a form of discipline, servility a trained response. The oppressed become the image their oppressors seek to impose upon them. In the wake of emancipation the legal conditions and the forms of jostling may have changed, but Gentile Judeophobia remained an ongoing shock-experience. If the newly emancipated were now acting the self-righteous German rather than the ‘‘passive Jew,’’ the shock of everyday antisemitism still shaped the behavior, experience,

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and identities of these German Jews. If they had imagined that the Jewish Question had ebbed, its mimetic double, the Other Jewish Question, remained in its wake.

The Screaming Mimik, or Imitation Is the Hebraist’s Form of Falsity It was perhaps no accident that those shocked Jews, in particular, spawned mimetic shock absorbers. Imitation was viewed as an essential part of Jewish nature. As the Austrian Jewish philosopher Theodor Gomperz commented, ‘‘One encounters the question: Why is it that despite the Jews’ no doubt marked gift for producing artistic and above all scientific accomplishments, we find very few Jewish names next to accomplishments of the very first order. . . . Clearly in the arts that involve reproduction [reproducierenden Ku¨nste], acting and musical virtuosity, the Jewish gift displays no relative inferiority.’’30 The acquisition of Bildung and other signs of acculturation, such as religious reform, as the preeminent strategy for social integration, if not necessarily for total assimilation, by Western European and Central European Jews seemed to confirm European assumptions about a strong relationship between Judentum and mimicry. Even a polemical opponent of antisemitism like the French historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu noted that ‘‘there is in every Jew a secret power of metamorphosis which has often amazed me. . . . He has the remarkable faculty of taking on a new skin, without at bottom ceasing to be a Jew. There is something Protean in him.’’31 Lending additional credence to the Jews’ mimetic predisposition was their increasing presence in theater, on the concert stage, and in journalism. The Jews were adopting European customs and entering these professions not, so anti-Jewish writers said, because of a desire to be accepted, to improve their lifestyles, or because there were openings or opportunities in this or that field; rather, the Jews were simply demonstrating the latest manifestation of their chameleonlike nature. For example, in his invidious tractate against das Judentum the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann characterized the Jews as experts in disguise and the reproductive arts such as ‘‘acting’’ (Mimik, literally mime) and musical virtuosity, that is, those in which ‘‘nothing more than reproduction is demanded.’’32 The performing arts and the press were called ‘‘reproductive arts’’ since they reproduced the creative work of others. The Jews also continued both in the European cultural imagination as well as in actuality to be associated

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with that most monstrous and unnatural reproduction of all: capital, making money from money, getting something from nothing.33 Indeed, all forms of mimicry and reproduction as well as their practitioners34 were devalued and ascribed a variety of socially undesirable traits. The so-called reproductive arts and professions were tied to the feminine in general, and to prostitution in particular.35 Moreover, acting, musical virtuosity, and journalism were not known in the nineteenth century for the realism of their re-creations. Rather these occupations performed or exaggerated that which others produced; they aped the real and the true. They also often deceitfully claimed for themselves the value or significance that properly belonged to the original. Consequently, the notion of the Jew as natural mimic reinforced a number of derogatory stereotypes about Jewish character. The Jews’ intrinsic mimetic talent was contrasted with, as already noted in chapter 7, the authentic, virile, original genius of the Gentile. Further, Jewish presence in these professions appeared to confirm yet again the Jews’ innate duplicity: mimicry was just like those other stereotypical Jewish character flaws—lying, deception, trickery, rationalization, self-delusion, and so forth. Mimicry and the imitation-disposed Jews were hence viewed as both womanlike and immoral.36 The image of the Jew as a natural mimic naturally engaged in theater and journalism became a leitmotif of late-nineteenth-century, often antisemitic polemical discussions.37 In part because the Jewish actress Sarah Bernhardt was virtually synonymous with the dramatic, if not the melodramatic, and was viewed as an exemplar of the Jewish personality,38 the Jews became identified as predisposed toward acting.39 Nietzsche in his Gay Science described them as ‘‘the people who possess the art of adaptability par excellence, . . . a world-historical arrangement for the production [Zu¨chtung, breeding] of actors, a veritable breeding ground [Brutsta¨tte] for actors.’’40 Yet Nietzsche’s praise may have been less a function of historical happenstance than of gender identification. The French Swiss crusader against freemasonry, William Vogt, also draws the connection between women and Jews based on this shared mimetic capacity in his 1908 polemic Le sexe faible (The Weak Sex), speaking of ‘‘a propitious adaptability for the cunning invasion of places and structures’’—they subvert the existing masculine order by appearing to be socialized.41 In turn, the alleged omnipresence of the Jews in the press was a dominant theme of the Berlin political antisemitic movement from its inception in 1879. That year, the Kaiser’s court preacher, Adolf Stoecker, declaimed to his Christian Social Workers’ party faithful: ‘‘Even if we presume for once that this lofty mission [of bringing salvation to the world] really is

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Israel’s permanent task, who then are those thinkers and poets, who, inspired by the divine spirit, preach, praise and honor the living God? Perhaps the editors of the Tageblatt? Or the scholars of the Kladderradatsch?’’ Many of the journalists on these liberal papers were to some degree of Jewish descent, if not self-identified Jews. Stoecker goes on to accuse the Jews of using the power of ‘‘their’’ press ‘‘to bring misfortune to the nation.’’42 Stoecker’s diatribe would be echoed several months later by Treitschke’s ‘‘Our Prospects’’: ‘‘The greatest danger [to God and nation] . . . is the unjust influence of the Jews in the press. . . . [Jews were] the first to introduce into our journalism the peculiar shameless way of talking about the fatherland [in an] off-hand [manner] and without any reverence, like an outsider, as if mockery of Germany did not cut deeply into the heart of every German individual.’’43 These deceitful mimes posed a threat. Jews made knockoffs—and not only of designer clothes.44 They also copied the people wearing those clothes. This alleged Jewish ability to imitate was particularly frightening to German nationalists endeavoring to shape some form of pure vo¨lkisch identity. If the Jews living in German-speaking lands looked and sounded and acted like their Gentile neighbors, then who were the real Germans? Thanks to their mimetic talent Judentum’s victory over Germandom appeared inevitable. This pessimism is evident in the so-entitled first major broadside in the development of German political antisemitism: Wilhelm Marr’s 1879 Der Sieg des Judenthums u¨ber das Germanenthum. Yet this apparent inevitability was countered by the implicit contradiction between the antisemites’ construct of the Jewish chameleon and their presupposition of the visible and indelible moral and physical Jewish physiognomy. These Jewish attempts to ape European culture—their mimicry of language, dress, manners—would always fail, eventually; the true Jewish nature would necessarily break through the mask, disrupt the illusion, and produce a hybrid monster.45 Anti-Jewish writers viewed assimilating Jews as living caricatures who intentionally made a mockery of authentic Germanness. Jewish nationalists too viewed their confre`res as making no less a mockery of authentic Judentum. Both agreed: bad Jews made bad Germans.46 Ironically, the Jews’ attempts to enter European modernity reinforced another component of the antisemitic stereotype: mimesis was a sign of primitiveness. During his 1832 encounter with the natives of Tierra del Fuego Charles Darwin noted that, in contrast to Europeans, ‘‘All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry.’’47 The ‘‘savage’’ Fuegians had responded to the Europeans with faultless mimetic

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gestures because, it was assumed, they possessed a language without meaningful sounds or, at least, they lacked an adequate language. The Jewish imitation of European manners was similarly perceived as a mediation made necessary by primitive linguistic skills. The Jews’ language, that hopelessly inadequate hybrid of German and Hebrew, Yiddish (Ju¨dischdeutsch), required supplementation with hand and body movements. The seemingly assimilated Germanophone Jews’ retention of this primitive penchant for mimetic gesturing betrayed their underlying Jewish nature. Darwin’s later observations about natural, albeit nonhuman, mimesis had a more direct effect on the connection between Jews and mimicry. In his landmark Origin of the Species, he wrote of the defensive use of imitation in nature: ‘‘Insects often resemble for the sake of protection various objects, such as green or decayed leaves, dead twigs, [etc.]. . . . The resemblance is often wonderously close, and is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves.’’48 Darwin described how adapting to one’s surroundings—masking one’s true nature—often ensured evolutionary survival. A number of writers concluded from this discussion of mimicry in nature that the Jews’ ability to imitate was an animalistic talent evolutionarily hewn for their survival; Jews employed their innate gift for mimicry in order to live in a hostile world. In his analysis of antisemitism, the famed forensic criminologist Cesare Lombroso lists the characteristics necessary for the Jews’ survival that ‘‘constant centuries-long persecution’’ had selected out: ‘‘craftiness, industriousness, and’’—manifesting an innate mimetic ability—‘‘the appearance of wretchedness.’’49 Or, Jews sought to secrete their presence in that world. To turn again to Andree’s ethnography of the Jews, it describes Jewish reform and emancipation as merely external attempts to adapt to German culture; they are screens shielding their true spirit. ‘‘Therefore the Jews, so long as they wish to be [considered] Germans, can be designated with the term borrowed from minerology: ‘pseudomorph.’ ’’50 Usually, though, analogies were drawn from zoology. On the one hand, when analogies were drawn between the adaptation of animals to their environment (as described by Darwin) and Jewish acculturation or, as the case may be, assimilation into European society, natural, valuefree animal behavior was recoded as typical Jewish deceit.51 On the other hand, Darwin’s work was a primary source for analogies between the Jews and those tiny animals that camouflage or otherwise hide themselves among us—insects, vermin, rodents. Earlier travel and zoological writings had already provided a natural bestial mimic to analogize with the Jews: the monkey or ape. Hardt von Hundt-Radowsky’s widely disseminated

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(and ironically titled?) Judenspiegel (A Mirror of the Jews; 1819) asserts, ‘‘The children of Israel can only ape and imitate [nacha¨ffen und nachahmen], [and] even their apings [Nacha¨ffungen], like the Jews themselves, are crude, repulsive caricatures.’’52 Such likenesses were drawn by writers as diverse as the apostle of the Aryan Jesus, Paul de Lagarde, and the controversial psychologist, philosopher, and antisemite Ludwig Klages. In his graphological writings, which have been credited with influencing Benjamin’s thinking about mimesis as well as aura, Klages described the Jews as ‘‘the apes of culture.’’53 Through his characterization of the mimicking Jew, however, Klages called forth a notion of mimesis different from what he would ascribe to handwriting, different from the graphological notion that ‘‘has taught us’’—as well as Benjamin, as many so credit—‘‘to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it,’’ and thus had led Benjamin to recognize script’s mimetic dimension as ‘‘an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences’’ (MF 335). Klages racially coded mimesis. For him, the Jew, like the hysteric, is in his essence never at home with himself, always other than himself.54 The Jew ‘‘partakes of the customs and practices of his hosts to awaken the appearance of essential likeness.’’ Klages concludes his diatribe by declaring that ‘‘an imitation humanity appears to arise, where the old inhabitant races fall on decay.’’55 Complementing the assumptions of the Jews’ mimetic talents and innate predisposition for the so-called reproductive arts was the claim that they were constitutionally incapable of engaging in such productive arts and crafts as literature, musical composition, and farming. Germans produce culture; Jews can only reproduce it. When accomplishment seemed to belie this apothegm, when a Heine or a Mendelssohn-Bartholdy would produce verse or violin sonatas, then such work was denigrated as clever or derivative or technical. So, for example, Richard Wagner argues throughout his diatribe Judaism in Music. And so the Jewish-identifying philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, having internalized this argument, selfdenigratingly noted, ‘‘[E]ven the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth to my idea that I really only think reproductively [reproduktiv]. I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else.’’ He then returns to the more general ascription of ‘‘Jewish reproductiveness’’: ‘‘It may be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass

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that has grown in the soil of another’s mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture.’’56 In his denunciation of Jewish music Wagner also asserted the Jews’ innate mimetic talent—while no one may want to imitate the Jews, according to Wagner, the Jews want to imitate everyone else. ‘‘In this Speech, this Art, the Jew can only [imitate; nachsprechen, nachku¨nsteln]—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.’’ Even as Wagner credits—while also bestializing—Jewish musical virtuosi for performing ‘‘with quite distressing accuracy and deceptive likeness, just as parrots reel off human words and phrases,’’ he nonetheless points out the distortion intrinsic to Jewish mimesis: ‘‘Only in the case of our Jewish music-makers this mimicked speech presents one marked peculiarity—that of the Jewish style of talk in general.’’ For Wagner, Jewish singing cannot be separated from Mauscheln. This derogatory term refers both to the ‘‘Jewish Jargon,’’ Yiddish, and to the singsong way Jews reputedly speak that language, indeed, to the way they speak any language.57 Mimicry is their one, evermanifest talent, as the economic historian Werner Sombart would also write in his massive indictment of Jewish character and participation in the development of capitalism, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben: ‘‘that gifted Jews so often appear to have nothing Jewish about them has been adduced, strangely enough, as evidence that there exists no specifically Jewish property [Eigenart], yet it actually constitutes definitive proof of such a property, insofar as this property manifests itself in an abnormal ability to assimilate [in einer u¨bernormalen Anpassungsfa¨higkeit].’’58 Anti-Jewish and antisemitic polemicists were not the only ones to make connections between mimicry and Jewish desires for social integration and Gentile acceptance; a number of self-identified Jewish writers also appropriated the discourse of mimicry to discuss assimilation. Herzl was typical. He had offered a number of answers to the Judenfrage before he arrived at Zionism: in addition to mass conversion, he also proposed Darwinian mimicry. Herzl suggested that the provocation of antisemitism would lead Jews to imitate European culture through radical assimilation: ‘‘[Antisemitism] represents the education of a group by the masses and will perhaps lead to its being absorbed. Education is accomplished only through hard knocks. Darwinian mimicry will set in. The Jews will adapt themselves.’’59 And Herzl was not alone. The publicist and critic Maximilian Harden, born Felix Ernst Witkowski, published the notorious essay ‘‘Sem’’ (Shem) and its analysis of Jewish mimicry under his well-known pseudonym ‘‘Apostata’’ (apostate or renegade) in 1891.60 Harden’s supposed parody of antisemitic representations of Judentum does not come across as all that

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parodistic.61 He writes that the three great Moseses of Jewish history (Moses the prophet, Moses Maimonides, and Moses Mendelssohn) each followed, as it were, ‘‘a page from Darwin’s book’’ and took up the mimicry of the Hebrews: ‘‘their capacity and desire cleverly to adapt themselves in conformity to their surroundings.’’ He describes the secret of Jewish persistence in terms that Jewish writer and Zionist fellow traveler Theodor Lessing would, as discussed below, virtually reproduce: ‘‘Mimicry: paying any price to assimilate to their environs, they would rather be even more authentic and correct [than their model].’’62 In a widely quoted 1898 essay,63 ‘‘Hear O Israel!’’ (Ho¨re Israel, the opening words of the German translation of the Shema), the Jewish writer, industrialist, and eventual Weimar foreign minister Walter Rathenau offered his mimetic solution to the Jewish Question. In the pages of Harden’s influential journal of opinion and criticism, Die Zukunft (The Future), the model for and eventually one of the archrivals of Kraus’s Die Fackel (The Torch),64 Rathenau, no doubt with his editor’s earlier article in mind, not only requests an end to the unnatural mimicry undertaken by assimilating Jews— refrain from donning the costumes of the lean Anglo-Saxons, in which you look like a dachshund [Teckel] dressed up like a greyhound [Windhund]

—but also recommends the conscious self-education and adaptation of the Jews to the expectations of the Gentiles. Adaptation [Anpassung] not as ‘‘mimicry’’ in the Darwinian sense—namely the art of certain insects to take on the coloration of their environment—but a shedding of tribal attributes which . . . are known to be odious to our countrymen, and a replacement of these attributes by more appropriate ones. If such a metamorphosis also brought about an improvement in the balance of our moral values, this would be all for the better. The final result of the process would not be Germans by imitation, but Jews of German character and education.65

In the end molting did not do Rathenau any more good than mimicry; he was assassinated by antisemitic German ultranationalists in 1922. Herzl’s first leading Western European Jewish convert, Max Nordau, whose own pre-Zionist responses to the Jewish Question and its Other were examined earlier, in chapter 7, also denounced at the First Zionist Congress (1897) those who assumed that imitating Gentiles would provide at least a personal solution to the Jewish question. In his plenary address to that gathering Nordau decried those assimilating Jews who strive for a

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total ‘‘mimicry’’ of the goyim: ‘‘On the inside, they become deformed; on the outside, they become a sham and thereby always laughable and . . . repulsive.’’66 But despite the Zionist critique, such mimetic practice remained a prominent strategy of European Jews. Lessing, in his 1930 analysis of ‘‘Jewish self-hatred,’’ Der ju¨dische Selbsthass, described with telling irony how mimicry is one of the self-hating Jew’s foremost modes of both self-defense and self-denial: Now the great transformation succeeds, all mimicry succeeds. You become ‘‘one of the others’’ and look marvelously genuine. Perhaps a little too German in order to be completely German. Perhaps a little too Russian to be completely Russian. And precisely because Christianity is a little new to you, you tend to overemphasize it a bit. But still: Now you are protected.67

And he described it as ultimately unsuccessful.68 As the Russian Jewish physician and anthropologist Samuel Weißenberg noted in 1910, ‘‘The Jewish type is as a rule so distinctive [pra¨gnant], that no mimetic artifice [(Mimikri-) Kunststu¨cke] helps to conceal it.’’69 Jews who try to pass will eventually out themselves. Otto Weininger, one of Lessing’s exemplary Jewish self-haters, took a similar slant on Jewish mimicry. He insinuated imitation into his virtual equation of Jewish and feminine character traits. He wrote in Sex and Character, ‘‘The congruency between [Judentum] and femininity seems to become complete as soon as one begins to reflect on the Jew’s infinite capacity for change. The Jews’ great talent for journalism . . . the lack of any deeply rooted and original convictions—Do these things not prove that both the Jews and women are nothing and therefore can become everything?’’ He continues: the Jew ‘‘actively adapts [paßt . . . an] himself to different circumstances and requirements, to any environment and any race, like a parasite that changes and assumes a completely different appearance with any given host’’ (SC 289; emphasis in original). By the 1920s mimicry became the hallmark of the Jewish menace to German identity. In Secessio Judaica, Hans Blu¨her, one of the foremost thinkers of the German youth movement and already well known for his antifeminist and antisemitic writings, essentialized and demonized Jewish acculturation and assimilation. He considered the Jews’ drive to imitate their hosts to be their foremost fault and greatest threat: ‘‘The Jews are the only people who practices mimicry. Mimicry of blood, of name, of form. . . . Jewish mimicry is anchored in the destiny of the race, that is, in the idea Jew.’’70 Blu¨her argued that the only way to overcome this dangerous mimesis would be for the Jews to leave not only Germany but Europe

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as well. This book so outraged Kafka that he was unable to compose either himself or a review; he solicited his friends to publish critiques and combat this latest attempt to legitimate antisemitism.71 Kafka, though, had already portrayed, in Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude, the centrality of mimicry for Jewish survival in the hostile environment of postemancipation Europe.72 In ‘‘A Report to an Academy’’ (1916), the ape Red Peter does not yearn for freedom, recognizing that its pursuit would only lead to the greatest disillusionment [Ta¨uschung]; rather, he seeks only a ‘‘way out’’ (Ausweg).73 So he opts for the only way out: Mimik, the variety stage and attaining the ‘‘cultural level of an average European.’’74 The story itself—a report delivered to a scientific academy—is the ultimate mimetic act: although he is the object of the report, Red Peter is also its subject. He is reading in the guise of a race scientist. And so Benjamin says of Kafka’s world, ‘‘For him, man is on stage from the very beginning. . . . The law of the theater is contained in a sentence tucked away in ‘Ein Bericht fu¨r eine Akademie’: ‘I imitated people because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason.’ ’’ Benjamin then changes the stage of Kafka’s world from a theater to a village, the village of Kafka’s novel The Castle. He thereby grounds any assumption of Kafka’s so-called pure aestheticism or mysticism that may have been suggested by Benjamin’s theater motif in the miasmic actuality75 of Jewish-Gentile disjunctive gesturing, as well as recognizes that mimicry isn’t necessarily salvation, but neither does it preclude that possibility. Benjamin renders Kafka’s Dorf exemplary through the mediation of ‘‘a Talmudic legend told by a rabbi in answer to the question why Jews prepare a festive evening meal on Fridays. The legend is about a princess languishing in exile, in a village whose language she does not understand, far from her compatriots. One day this princess receives a letter saying that her fiance´ has not forgotten her and is on his way to her.’’ Benjamin’s mediation then exudes a connection between smell and messianism that, as is discussed below, wefts through the Jewish tradition: ‘‘The fiance´ . . . is the Messiah; the princess is the soul; the village in which she lives in exile is the body. She prepares a meal for him because this is the only way in which she can express her joy in a village whose language she does not know. . . . The air of this village blows about Kafka. . . . The pigsty which houses the country doctor’s horses; the stuffy back room in which Klamm, a cigar in his mouth, sits over a glass of beer . . .—all these are part of this village. The air in this village is permeated with all the abortive and overripe elements that form such a putrid mixture.’’76

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A Noisome Gnosis These noxious and anything but nostalgic smells recall the repulsive, feminized, and often sexualized ‘‘odor’’ that pervaded the popular and scientific imagination of postemancipation Europeans: the innate stench of the Jew, the foetor Judaicus. As noted in chapter 5, the tradition of an odor peculiar to the Jews has been traced back at least to Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps the most respectable modern disseminator of the foetor Judaicus was the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who talks repeatedly of being overcome by it.77 The attempts to develop racial sciences repeatedly exhale the reputed stench of the Jews, whether in the racial biochemistry and olfactive metaphysics of Gustav Jaeger,78 the racial psychology of Edgar Berillon,79 or the racial anthropology of Hans Gu¨nther.80 And even when denying any inherent cause of Jewish noisomeness other than dietary predilections and the ‘‘uncleanness . . . that since ancient times has often clung to the Jews,’’ the prominent nineteenth-century German ethnographer Richard Andree attests that the ‘‘bad smell of the Jewish quarters in North Africa and the Orient, in Poland, Hungary, and Prague’s Josephstadt is well known.’’81 It was known, for example, to Nietzsche, who in the Anti-Christ betrays his shock at the smell of the East European Jew: ‘‘One would no more choose to associate with ‘first Christians’ than one would with Polish Jews. . . . Neither of them smells very pleasant.’’82 The smelly Jew was also a routine figure in German literature, where, for example as discussed earlier, the ‘‘terrible smell’’ of the protagonist Itzig Faitel Stern in Oskar Panizza’s ‘‘The Operated Jew’’ signals that the attempt to transform this Jew into a German has come undone.83 Heine, whose work we’ve already seen drawing on the image of the stinking Jew, concludes his last Hebrew Melody, ‘‘The Disputation,’’ with a line that seems to have found its echo in Nietzsche. Donna Bianca intones: ‘‘I don’t know which one is right—/But I’ll tell you what I think/Of the rabbi and the friar: Both of them alike, they stink.’’84 Heine was not the only Jewish writer who appropriated this stereotype. Lacking Heine’s irony, several generations of German Jewry also promulgated this characterization; however, as illustrated earlier, they displaced it onto the East European Jews from whom they would distinguish themselves. The stereotyping of the Jews in terms of the Jewish stench coincided in the nineteenth century with a more general olfactive heuristic. Smell figures all that is opposed to the bourgeoisie’s public persona. For the European bourgeoisie, smell is ‘‘the sign of the lower social strata, lesser races, base animals,’’ and of sexuality: the odor di feminina and the aura seminalis.85

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Because from a phenomenological perspective, a smell and its perceiver become united,86 odor came to symbolize what imperils the clearly delineated (lumpig?) distinctions, such as those between races, genders, classes, species, and between public and private, upon which bourgeois identification seems to depend. The utopian vision of a scent-free public space, that is, of a space free of the stinking masses—the crowd—who threatened to inundate that space, was already projected by the philosopher who propounded the ideal of a public sphere emptied of all obstacles to interaction, Kant. For Kant, ‘‘smell is contrary to freedom and less sociable than taste.’’87 Consequently, Kant considered smell ‘‘the most dispensable’’ sense. Smell’s association with the feared loss of clearcut identities was reinforced linguistically; in German (as in English) riechen (to smell) signifies both the emission and the perception of an odor. This semantic ambiguity also connected smell to the primitive, since for some nineteenth-century language theorists the failure to distinguish between objective and subjective perspectives was a sign of primitiveness.88 Olfaction, like its object, was tied to animality. Whereas smell is highly developed in animals, it has become almost rudimentary in the human, a biological fact that nineteenth-century comparative brain anatomy proved—at least for the European. According to one of the leading anatomists of the time, G. Eliot Smith, ‘‘sometimes, especially in some of the non-European races, the whole of the posterior rhinal fissure is retained in that typical form which we find in the anthropoid apes.’’89 Smell lies in a ‘‘most ancient . . . a remote and almost disused storehouse of our minds.’’90 The bourgeoisie’s repression of smell differentiated them from both their primitive ancestors and the atavistic survivals indigenous to the colonies, the proletarian precincts, Poland, and the Pale. Consequently, discourse on the primitiveness of olfaction helped maintain the evolutionary superiority the European bourgeoisie claimed for themselves on their Darwinist ascent to world hegemony. excursus: upright and stuffed up One work written contemporaneously with Benjamin’s early formulations of the aura manifests a configuration of elements—sex and sight, memory and shock, the primitive and the bourgeoisie’s self-identification with civilization—that overlaps with both the social representation of smell and Benjamin’s analysis of the nineteenth century. This most symptomatic discussion is secreted in a pair of footnotes to Freud’s discussion in Civilization and Its Discontents of the correlation between the civilizing process and

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the renunciation of (sexual) instinct. There he situates the repression of smell at the crux of phylo- and ontogenetic development. On the species level, the ‘‘devaluation of olfactory stimuli’’ is coeval with crossing the threshold between animal and human. This repression of smell ‘‘is the organic defense of the new form of life achieved with man’s erect gait [aufrechten Gang] against his earlier animal existence,’’ of which the smell of a female in heat was emblematic. Yet as vision now comes to dominate sexual life (and by implication civilization itself ), this defense against smell is almost too effective: it threatens to render the ‘‘whole of [genital] sexuality’’ utterly repugnant. Indeed, Freud speculates that the repression of smell is ‘‘the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization.’’91 Although Freud laments the loss of sexual satisfaction in the development of human culture, his discussion of smell and its repression certainly seems to manifest the bourgeois moralism of which Benjamin accused psychoanalysis when he was reviewing another speculator about sexuality and the origin of human culture, Eduard Fuchs.92 Both Freud and Benjamin consider the assumption of an upright gait (aufrechten Gang) or erect posture (Aufrichtung) as a, if not the, threshold of human development, but Freud’s insistent repetition of aufrecht and its cognate Aufrichtung goes beyond marking an evolutionary juncture and appears to superimpose a moralistic perspective. The terms’ connotations suggest that with the raising of the bent-over human posture came the ascendancy of the manly, bourgeois values of honesty, sincerity, uprightness. The moralistic bourgeois dimension of the repression of smell comes explicitly to the fore in Freud’s discussion of smell and individual development. Were it not for the organic repression of smell, the necessary reversal of a child’s values from narcissistic to moral, from animalistic to social would ‘‘scarcely be possible.’’ Because of the primordial depreciation of the sense of smell, olfactory stimuli are usually not noticed by consciousness. Hence when smells go unperceived, they fill the reservoir of the me´moire involontaire, often bringing all contiguous stimuli with them. But when they are perceived—and for Freud the stench of excreta is the primal odor—the individual undergoes a shock experience that both arouses feelings of disgust and begins a process of shock-discipline. With the aid of such phylogenetic supplementation, a proper upbringing teaches children that their strong-smelling excreta are ‘‘worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable’’93 and inculcates in them the cultural virtue of cleanliness. Civilized people know to hide their own stinking excreta; they repress the aromas of their youth.

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For Freud, the significance and the experience of olfaction are depreciated both phylo- and ontogenetically; smell signifies what is rejected— animality and sexuality—as well as what was never consciously perceived: the memory of that prehistory. As a consequence of organic repression and the cultural values it helps to develop, smell and smell-related terms signify the gravest offenses to the social contract. Those persons who smell like ‘‘substances that are expelled from the body’’94 are themselves expelled from the social body. Conversely, a civilized society consists of individuals who have adopted the values of uprightness and anosmic cleanliness. No dirty, stinking, crooked Jews need apply.95 Freud’s analysis does not explain the particularities of Benjamin’s discussions of odor; rather, it complements them. Freud displays the offal he does not or cannot say; he releases the threatening odors that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie did not deign to sniff. And Horkheimer and Adorno would eventually constellate this discussion of smell with Benjamin’s notions of both the ritual dimension of aura and mimesis in order to develop a hermeneutic of antisemitism . They thereby elicit the implicit concern of both Freud and Benjamin with Jewish identification and its olfactive dimension.

An Ideal Reading of Smell As can be seen by the title of Susan Buck-Morss’s The Dialectics of Seeing, her classic study of the Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), Benjamin’s reconstruction of nineteenth-century Paris from its gathered-up remains, the visual rather than the olfactive dimension has been perceived to have primacy in Benjamin’s work. After all, seeing, seeing resemblances, is something the bespectacled Benjamin claimed to be very good at: ‘‘The gift of perceiving similarities is, in fact, nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. In me, this compulsion acted through words.’’96 This privileging of the optical is coeval with the reception of Benjamin in the United States; the first two collections of his essays bear the titles Illuminations and Reflections.97 Even a cursory glance at the critical literature shows a plethora of ocular images employed about and in his work. That literature is rife with references to dialectical images, the flash, phantasmagoria, and the optical unconscious. Cultural materialist analyses focus on Benjamin’s late work on the visual media of photography and film. When discussing Benjamin’s notion of ‘‘aura,’’ attention is directed at its visual aspect. For example, Benjamin

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glosses the image from Baudelaire’s poem, ‘‘Correspondances’’—‘‘Man wends his way through forests of symbols/Which look at him with their familiar glances’’ (cited in OB 181, 189)—with the remark, ‘‘To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return’’ (OB 188). Or: on another occasion Benjamin himself defines aura as ‘‘the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’’ (‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’’ [WA], 104–05). Due, albeit passing, mention is made of the synaesthetic component of (auratic) experience—for example, the smell of colors—and an occasional commentary on Benjamin’s discussion of the modern sensorium locates a dialectical relationship between vision and touch, the visual and the tactile (or haptic) that generates a transgressive knowing.98 Yet vision remains paramount. Images as both captivating and, potentially, liberating are seen to make up both the object—whether of nineteenth-century Paris or Berlin nineteen-hundred—and subject of Benjamin’s critical practice. These snapshots that Benjamin has passed down to us have an aura of their own—even as we hold them in our smudgy hands. They seem to confirm our own ocular view of the catastrophic history of capitalist society: from the modernist panopticon to the postmodernist circulation of simulacra. ‘‘The sense of sight,’’ Buck-Morss writes, ‘‘was privileged in this phantasmagoric sensorium of modernity,’’99 but Benjamin’s images also tell us another history, one that his commentators and perhaps he too was unconscious of.100 Marianne Stoessel begins her analysis of Benjamin’s notion of aura: ‘‘In Greek and Latin [aura] signifies air and breath. . . .’’101 Aura begins with smell. According to the first definition in Webster’s New World Dictionary, an aura is ‘‘an invisible emanation or vapor, as the aroma of flowers.’’ More to the point, when Benjamin first introduces aura to his argument in ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ the term is appositively defined as a ‘‘breath of prehistory [that] surrounds’’ a thing (OB 185). An aura envelops the object with a perceptible—smellable—air of mystery; the verb translated as ‘‘surrounds,’’ umwittert, conveys the sense of something mysterious or uncanny that is tacitly sensed, and it stems from the verb wittern, which means ‘‘to scent.’’ Or, again with reference to a passage from Baudelaire, here from ‘‘Le Gouˆt du ne´ant,’’ the connection is indicated negatively: ‘‘Baudelaire’s spleen is the suffering entailed by the decline of the aura. ‘Adorable Spring has lost its perfume’ ’’ (AP 343/PW 433 [J64, 5]).102 Despite the primacy afforded vision in discussions of aura, odors play more than an etymological role as the heterogeneous residue of scent wafts its way through Benjamin’s analysis of aura and the me´moire

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involontaire, experience (Erfahrung) and art, Baudelaire and Proust. Is Benjamin’s discussion of smell just the accident of the sensory predilections of Baudelaire—his predilection for odors is described in the Passagen-Werk as a ‘‘strong fixation’’ and as probably a ‘‘fetishism’’ (AP 348/PW 440 [J67a, 3]), and while smell per se is not treated as a distinctive motif in ‘‘Some Motifs,’’ it is profusely represented—and of Proust? Or, similarly if less biographically, is it merely residue—of the facticity of olfactive phenomenology?103 Conversely, does the play of scents that perfume his presentation have a clear-cut intent, such as the elaboration of an osmics, a science of smell? Benjamin always fought and thought against the merely contingent and the purely intentional. Olfaction offers a necessary interpretive key to the utopian elements of Baudelaire and Proust, contributes to Benjamin’s critiques of Kant’s aesthetic and bourgeois culture, and gives intimations of redemptive practice. The aroma secreted by Benjamin’s notion of aura evokes both what is prehistoric and what is outside of history. Because olfactory emanations from the aura elicit the really disgusting and the disgustingly real, attending to them would redeem a material dimension that had been shrouded over by a phantasmagoria of perfumes, evacuated by the urban renewal instituted by the likes of a Parent-Duchaˆtelet or a Haussmann, or rendered indifferent to a subject subjected by a ‘‘complex kind of training’’ (OB 175) into anosmia. But more, the telltale smells that hover about these sites are the textual effects of Benjamin’s German-Jewish prehistory; they are transmogrifications of the smell of the Jew: the ‘‘foreign . . . sentimental aroma’’ of Jewishness and the foetor Judaicus, the Jewish stench that has already been released in several earlier chapters. Smell does make up a significant portion of the data of the me´moire involontaire that Benjamin arrays. In the Proust essay Benjamin comments that the ‘‘bottommost’’ stratum of the me´moire involontaire is one in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way as the weight of his net tells a fisherman about his catch. Smell [Der Geruch]—that is the sense of weight of someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu.104

Years later the smells of Proust would return in Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire’s lyric chronicle of shock, the loss of experience, and the decline of aura in the modern world: ‘‘The scent [Der Geruch] is the inaccessible refuge of the me´moire involontaire’’ (OB 184). This inaccessibility

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recalls the unapproachable aspect of the auratic and thereby confirms his comment that the data of the me´moire involontaire correspond to auratic experience. Smell, traditionally considered one of the proximate senses, seems polar opposite to an experience described as a certain pathos of distance.105 Even the Kantian description of smell as ‘‘taste at a distance’’106 is insufficient mediation. Smell’s solicitation of the me´moire involontaire provides aura with a temporal dimension, a distance, such that it promises redemptive possibilities beyond mere nostalgia for a ‘‘certain hour in one’s life’’ (Erlebnis; OB 163). In his discussion of the interconnected correspondences elicited in Baudelaire by fragrance, Benjamin describes how smell effects on the individual level of memory what he elsewhere ascribes to vision on the collective level of history: a scent ‘‘will ally itself only with the same . . . [it] deeply drugs the sense of time [Zeitverlaufs]. A scent [Duft] may drown years in the odor [Dufte] it recalls’’ (OB 184). In this passage Benjamin describes how smell anesthetizes homogeneous serial time, the rationalized temporality of modernity; this enables the individual to recognize ‘‘a memory as it flashes up’’ (TPH 255 [Thesis vi]) and leap across the years to salvage the past. As Benjamin’s depiction of olfaction’s workings indicates, not only does the me´moire involontaire provide the closest analog to the critical historian’s experience of the Jetztzeit, the messianic ‘‘time of the now’’ (TPH 261, 263 [Theses xiv, A]), but this discussion of remembered smells provides a mirror of, if not a model for, his determination of the form of the historical object as a dialectical image. Like the recollection of an odor, the historian ‘‘rescues’’ the image by blasting it out of the ‘‘homogeneous course of history’’ (Verlauf der Geschichte; TPH 263 [Thesis xvii]; cf. AP 473/PW 592 [N9, 7; 9a, 3]). Such apperceptions of the similar take place in a ‘‘moment of danger’’ (TPH 255 [Thesis vi])107 by someone who is, in a Baudelairean passage cited by Benjamin ‘‘in all the corners sniffing [flairant] out the dangers or dodges’’ (OB 164). Yet such appropriations are called forth by the object: smell solicits smell, and the mimetic character of ‘‘the monadological structure’’ of the image demands its recognition (AP 475/PW 594 [N10, 3]). The objective character of such olfactive and visual cognitions extends beyond such solicitation; each apperception opens up a realm of objectivity. The scent of a woman or a cookie simmering in tea opens upon another scene: an objective realm. Thus we cannot, like a Kantian subjectivity armed with its schemata, its infusions of meaning, possess the smell, but it can, like Vale´ry’s fragrant flower, possess us (cf. OB 186–87; and see below). The smell

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is embedded in an experiential continuum (Erfahrung) of contiguous relations with memory traces that may never have been registered by individual consciousness, as well as with the repetitions of ritualized collective life such as the cliche´, common sense, and the calendrical festival. The objective character of the image is different. Unlike olfaction, vision is tied to a notion of intention: ‘‘vision does not enter into the form of existence . . . which is devoid of all intention and certainly does not itself appear as intention.’’108 But Benjamin eventually reconfigures the historian’s purview such that the constellated ruins of a culture dispersed seemingly haphazard across the historical landscape crystallize to form the monadic image. In the Passagen-Werk images of images far outnumber references to smells. Smell and vision are opposed in a series of antinomies that, at least with regard to these senses, are more deductive than dialectical: prehistory vs. the modern, use value vs. commodity, Erfahrung vs. Erlebnis, memory vs. memento, and so forth. Benjamin sketches the contours of the opposition between smell and vision in a chiasmic series of notes that were written during his earliest efforts on the project: The arcade as temple of Aesculapius. Medicinal spring. The course of a cure. Arcades (as resort spas) in ravines. At Schuls-Tarasp, at Ragaz. The ‘‘gorge’’ as landscape ideal in our parents’ day. As with the impact of very distant memories, the sense of smell is awakened. To me, as I stood before a shop window in Saint-Moritz and looked on mother-of-pearl pocketknives as ‘‘memories,’’ it was as though at the moment I could smell them. The things sold in the arcades are souvenirs [Andenken]. The ‘‘souvenir’’ is the form of the commodity in the arcade. One always buys only mementos of the commodity and of the arcade. Rise of the souvenir industry. As the manufacturer knows it. The customs-house officer of industry. How visual memories emerge transformed after long years. The pocketknife that came to me as I chanced upon one in a shop window in SaintMoritz (with the name of the place name inscribed between sprigs of mother-of-pearl edelweiss) had a taste and odor.109 (AP 864/PW 1033–34 [O75–77])

In this sequence Benjamin opposes past memories and present souvenirs, accidental recollections and manufactured (intentional) mementos, the personal and the impersonal, landscapes and arcades, ideals and industries, experiences and commodities, unchanging odors and transformed sights. Smell is associated with imbibing, not buying; with familial relations—‘in

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our parents’ day’’ (zur Zeit unserer Eltern), ‘‘mother-of-pearl’’ (perlmutternem)—not the relations of production in which the manufacturer and the custom-house officer are interpellated. Benjamin prided himself on his own writing because he never employed the first-person pronoun except in letters (BC 15–16). Such a personal sensory faculty as smell hence had no place in a critical analysis of the Parisian arcades. After this moment, smell largely fades from his attention. In the over nine-hundred published pages of notes and quotes that followed these first notebook jottings, the sense of smell is mentioned only once, as an urban problem, and then only to be displaced onto the visual register. Benjamin quotes from an 1823 history of the shawl: It is by the tendency of mind called reminiscence that the wishes of the man condemned to the glittering captivity of the cities incline . . . toward a stay in the country, toward his original abode, or at least toward the possession of a simple, tranquil garden. His eyes aspire to rest on some greenery, sufficiently far away from the stresses of the shop counter or the intrusive rays of the living room lamp. His sense of smell, continually assaulted by pestilent emanations, longs for the scent of flowers. A border of modest and mild violets would altogether ravish his senses.110 (AP 505/PW 630 [O8a, 2]; emphasis added)

In this passage the urban dweller, the bourgeois proper, manufactures apotropaic images, floral designs, the imagined scents of which serve to counter the poisonous odors of the city and restore the viewer to heights of nostalgic ecstasy. Pleasant smells do not exist as part of the urban landscape. Such odors are only a part of the bourgeoisie’s prehistory, its family romance; the exhalations of the pictured violets transform the founding fantasies of the cultured bourgeoisie—the male bourgeois individual imagining himself as a moral aristocrat leisurely enjoying his country garden amid a scene of domestic bliss—into idyllic memories111 or, with sufficient capital, a drawing room: ‘‘In 1839, a ball is held at the British embassy. . . . ‘The garden,’ so runs an eye-witness account, ‘was covered by an awning and had the feel of a drawing room. . . . The fragrant, well-stocked flower beds had turned into enormous jardinie`res, the gravel walks had disappeared under sumptuous carpets’ ’’ (AP 220/PW 291 [I4, 1]).112 This singular reference to the stench of the nineteenth century, indeed one in which the stink is delimited to an appositive clause that is overcome by the urban dweller’s vision of smell, suggests that Benjamin has succumbed to the bourgeoisie’s own olfactive division of the world: the deodorized public sphere and the perfumed nostalgia of the private.113

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Still, when Benjamin reworks his Berlin Childhood in 1938, instead of the image-rich vignette, ‘‘Mummerehlen,’’ of a ten-year-old Benjamin most himself when mimicking the objects of the world and most distorted when posing for a photograph that opened his 1934 version, he begins with a scene, ‘‘Loggias,’’ in which, he wrote Gretel Adorno, he ‘‘sees a sort of self-portrait.’’ He tells her he would probably place this self-portrait in the book’s first position rather than the photographic one (of him and his younger brother Georg posing before a painted Alpine prospect) that ‘‘Mummerehlen’’ contained.114 ‘‘Loggias’’ opens upon the ‘‘dark loggia’’ that rose above the courtyard of his first Berlin West End home and, ‘‘shaded by blinds in the summer,’’ cradled the infant author. Sounds and smells color this scene. The caryatids sing their ‘‘lullaby . . . through which the air of the courtyards had forever remained intoxicating to me.’’115 Here his first unformed dreams were ‘‘traversed by the sound of running water or the smell of milk.’’ Through the linkage of pleasant smells to prehistory—whether this configuration is understood as aura or as nostalgia— and the virtual avoidance of unpleasant ones, Benjamin is not just recuperating bourgeois fantasy, he is acting out the memory of his specifically German-Jewish bourgeois upbringing. Yet after examining the shocking contradictions intrinsic to that origin and some of the responses they generate, the seemingly one-sided determination of smell will become more complicated.

The Trace of an Aura The foetor Judaicus left its trace on Benjamin’s discussion of aura as well. At the conclusion of ‘‘Some Motifs,’’ Benjamin writes that Baudelaire ‘‘paid dearly for consenting to this disintegration [of the aura in the experience of shock]—but it is the law of his poetry, which shines in the sky of the Second Empire as ‘a star without atmosphere’ ’’ (OB 194).116 The trail left by the smell of the Jew begins at the source of Benjamin’s concluding citation. It is from a passage in Nietzsche’s ‘‘History in the Service and Disservice of Life’’ that anticipates a number of the characteristic traits of Benjamin’s notion of aura: ‘‘If this shroud is removed, if a religion, an art, a genius is condemned to move like a star without atmosphere, no wonder they soon harden up, dry up, and cease to bear.’’ The ‘‘shroud’’ or ‘‘atmosphere’’ to which Nietzsche refers draws upon aura’s etymological origins in air, breath, vapor: ‘‘Every living thing needs a surrounding atmosphere,

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a shrouding aura of mystery’’ (geheimnisvollen Dunstkreis; literally, mysterious circle of vapor). The immediate context is a discussion of how contemporary historiographic practices contribute to the disintegration of the ‘‘aura’’ that (should) surround religious events: ‘‘their cold, pragmatic curiosity,’’ if applied to the birth of Christianity or the Reformation, ‘‘would be just enough to render every spiritual actio in distans quite impossible.’’117 Nietzsche’s conclusion clearly extends beyond the religious—or rather, it suggests the religious aspect as well as the import of distance to all auratic phenomena. By capping off his discussion of Baudelaire with a reference to Nietzsche, Benjamin is doing more than evoking a fellow analyst of the loss of aura; he is also calling upon a writer who shared Baudelaire’s preoccupation with olfaction. Where Baudelaire overvalued smell erotically, Nietzsche transvalued it philosophically.118 In Ecce Homo, he credited the nose as the source for his analysis of the nineteenth century: ‘‘I was the first to discover the truth . . . to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.—My genius is in my nostrils.’’ He described the results: ‘‘This sensitivity furnishes me with psychological antennae with which I feel and get a hold of every secret: the abundant hidden dirt at the bottom of many a character . . . enters my consciousness almost at the first contact.’’119 Nietzsche was able to ‘‘scent from a distance.’’ Testifying to this claim was his apparent ability, noted earlier, to smell Polish Jews from his residence in Sils-Maria. Other researchers have found traces of another influence on Benjamin’s discussion of aura that is even more suffused with the foetor Judaicus: the graphological and other writings of Ludwig Klages. The extent of Klages’s influence is contested but sufficiently visible for Adorno to excoriate Benjamin for his insufficiently critical appropriation of Klages’s mythic mentality in the first version of the Baudelaire essay.120 Subsequently, Roberts claimed that Klages’s theory of the image is a primary source for Benjamin’s discussion of aura: ‘‘Benjamin’s theory of ‘aura’ was taken directly from Klages.’’121 Other genealogies of Benjamin’s notion of aura by Werner Fuld and Marianne Stoessel also concede certain affinities.122 For their part, however, Fuld gives more credit to Klages’s elder colleague/mentor Alfred Schuler, whose lectures on Roman antiquity continuously invoke both the auratic glow that transformed things into artworks and its eventual loss,123 while Stoessel locates the beginnings of Benjamin’s understanding of aura—if not his use of the particular term—a number of years prior to Klages’s work on the archaic image. Both Klages’s theory of the image (and later of the symbol) and Benjamin’s notion of the aura downplay the role of the intellect and critique the Kantian subjective origin of

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meaning. Further, both relate the appearance of the object/image in terms of a synaesthetic epiphany and a mythic world of natural correspondences, as well as ascribe an eros or pathos of distance to that experience. Like the auratic objects of the me´moire involontaire, Klages’s archaic images are, he claims, real, material events recovered through ecstatic, hence nondeliberate and momentary, anamnesis. In addition, Klages describes a ‘‘nimbus’’ about the object of insight.124 But the effect of Klages on Benjamin’s work is less problematic as an intellectual historical matter, a genealogy of ideas, than it is as an ethicohistorical matter, an accounting for the impact of social actions and attitudes. That is, Klages was a notorious antisemite. Although his most execrable work, the rabidly anti-Jewish introduction to Schuler’s Nachlaß, finally appeared in 1940, Klages had, as noted above, aired his sentiments toward Jews many years earlier in the graphological articles and treatises that first attracted Benjamin to him. Odor played a very prominent role in the works of both Schuler and Klages—just as it had in an earlier Jew-hating mentor-disciple pair, Fourier and Toussenel; whiffs of their olfactive cosmology can be encountered in the Passagen-Werk (AP 622–23/PW 767[W2, 2]; 634/780 [W8, 6]; 639–40/787 [W11a, 9]).125 In a mythicizing variant of Benjamin’s own critical discussion of allegorical ruins and the dialectical appropriation of images of the past, Klages describes how Schuler used to visit archaeological sites where he would perceive ‘‘an indescribable odor . . . emanating from the ruins just as they break through the surface.’’ The incense-loving Schuler spoke of how this intoxicating aura (Hauch) about the preserved soul of the past immediately dissipates while unleashing visions in him of lives long ago reduced to shards. Throughout his introduction to Schuler, Klages emphasizes the aromas of both dead and living souls as auratic indicators of soul-full mimesis. As corroboration of Schuler’s in-scents, Klages draws on Gottfried Keller’s depiction in Green Heinrich of a pubescent working-class girl who embodied ‘‘the aroma of the Munich soul’’ and the novelist’s gloss on setting his characters Heinrich and Anna’s kiss in the cemetery. These authorial commentaries signify that ‘‘the breath [Anhauch] of the already ‘glorified’ ancestors had inspired the embryonic love in the still half-childlike souls to the risk of uncertainly groping tenderness.’’126 Schuler’s and Klages’s suffusion with scent was even mocked by their critics; Friedrich Wolters wrote that they were ‘‘drunk with foreign scents and poisons, where they believed to breathe the air of a landscape that felt like home.’’127 And in the one quasi-explicit reference to Klages’s views on Jews, Benjamin once again smells the aroma of antisemitism and employs

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the language of olfaction: ‘‘these important scholars [Klages and also Bachofen] scent [wittern] the archenemy and not without cause’’ in Jewish theology.128 The history of fulminations against the Jewish stench culminated in a scene in Mein Kampf. Hitler writes: ‘‘The cleanliness of [the Jews], moral and otherwise, I must say, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan wearers’’ (MK 57). This passage is a key moment in Hitler’s self-described ‘‘transformation into an antisemite’’ (MK 55–61). The failed painter conjoins Kant’s anti-aesthetic of smell (see below) with Wagner’s anti-aesthetic of the Jew—the ‘‘outward appearance [of the Jew] has something disagreeably foreign to [whomever observes him and hence] can never be thinkable as a subject for the art of re-presentment’’129 —to initiate his own critique of judgment. Hitler’s olfactive anti-epiphany perversely evokes the depiction of the Davidic Messiah in the talmudic tractate B. Shabbat 93b: And further it is written, And He will let him have delight in [hariho, literally ‘‘will let him scent’’] the fear of the Lord [Isa. 11: 3].130 R. Alexandri said: ‘‘This teaches us that they burdened him with commandments and sufferings like millstones’’ [assuming hariho derives from rehayim, millstones]. Rava said: ‘‘[This teaches us that] he will scent [the truth] and will adjudicate, as it is written, and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears, yet with righteousness shall he judge the poor’’ [Isa. 11:3–4].131

By arousing instinctive revulsion toward the Jew, smell allows Hitler to bridge the phenomenal and the noumenal. He smells and judges. With the release of certain Jewish-associated scents into Benjamin’s work, the air-freshening breath of nostalgia that suffused his discussion of smell begins to turn. In the olfactive metaphysics of a Nietzsche, a Klages, or a Hitler the stench of the Jew serves as the paradigmatic index of moral and ontological taint. Their image of the foetor Judaicus as a negative aura provides definition to the aromas of Judentum that Benjamin had inhaled. Because it transforms the subjective genitive into the objective, because it is negative, and because it is an object of social discourse, the representation of the smell of the Jew as the foetor Judaicus contrasts with the sentimental aromas of Benjamin’s personal remembrance.132 This noisome extreme of the olfactive imagination is anything but sentimental, and if foreign, it nonetheless would be ascribed to him by the likes of a Klages

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or a Hitler. The aura of the Jewish stench that surrounds Benjamin’s perception of aura implicates a more critical, less utopian, function for smell in his texts. This ‘‘collection of associations’’—the memory-fragments mediating Benjamin’s German-Jewish Zweiheit together with the social history of the foetor Judaicus—disrupts the self-determining idealities of remembrance and allows the critical reader to sniff a splenetic reading of smell; Benjamin’s apparent deodorization may secrete his effort to catch the scent of the unscented. Obversely, the relationship between odor and redemption in the Jewish tradition no less redounds upon Benjamin’s smell-suffused notion of aura.

Toward a Splenetic Reading of Smell As has been noted, Benjamin all but excludes nineteenth-century olfactive experience from the Passagen-Werk. In the one reference to smell in his early notes to the project he appears to oppose diametrically the nostalgic, personal character of smell to the (potentially) redemptive, collective one of vision. Yet in ‘‘Some Motifs,’’ the relationship between these senses realizes the chiasmic structure his project notes had suggested but apparently never developed. Although the olfactive and the visual are distinctive, they are not isolated from one another. On a number of occasions Benjamin juxtaposes the two sensory fields to unveil and unleash the dialectical tensions that exist between them. Such sites include childhood recollections and the synaesthetic correspondance in which ‘‘a woman’s smell, for instance, in the fragrance of her hair or breasts’’ yields Baudelaire such lines as ‘‘the azure of the vast vaulted sky’’ or ‘‘a harbor full of flames and masts’’ (OB 183). The appropriation of such positive correspondances set up a contrast that allowed Baudelaire ‘‘to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing’’ (OB 181). This last disjunctive effect of smell suggests that in addition to an ideal aspect, odor also assumes a splenetic one in Benjamin’s work. He takes the title of the first section of Fleurs du Mal, ‘‘Spleen and Ideal,’’ to reflect the dialectic of extremes that characterizes Baudelaire’s experience of modernity: ‘‘The ide´al supplies the power of remembrance; the spleen musters the multitude of the seconds against it’’ (OB 183). Emblematic of the latter, notes Benjamin, is a line from Baudelaire’s poem ‘‘Craving for Oblivion’’: ‘‘The beloved spring has lost its scent’’ (cited in OB 183). The loss of scent indicates the ‘‘present state of collapse’’ (OB 184) of the ideal; its aura dissipated, the world has become a one-dimensional or anaesthetized

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phantasmagoria. In these splenetic times the poet no longer ‘‘wends his way through forests of symbols’’ (OB 188); rather, he is like the ‘‘fantastic’’ fencer who stumbles through Baudelaire’s poem ‘‘The Sun.’’ Benjamin focuses upon its lonely poet trying to parry off the shocks of modern life: ‘‘I go, alone, to practice my curious fencing.’’ He cites, without comment, the line that follows: ‘‘In every corner smelling out [flairant] the dodges [hasards] of rhyme’’ (OB 164). The sense of smell has not been lost; it just assumes a new form. Instead of recuperating prehistory it noses about for trouble amid the panoptical desolation of the present, inspiring what chances by. Through the evocation of smell Benjamin sets these extremes of spleen and ideal in ironic tension. Benjamin also rubs his nose against another reading of smell: the critical olfactive perception that is stench. He collects his data for his PassagenWerk under its misrecognized sign. In the N folder he describes ‘‘the method of this work’’: ‘‘I have nothing to say. Only to show . . . the rags [Lumpen], the refuse [Abfall]’’ (AP 460/PW 574 [N1a, 8]).133 With this statement Benjamin the collector (Sammler) becomes Benjamin the ragpicker (Lumpensammler).134 Baudelaire depicts the ragpicker in a poem translated by Benjamin, ‘‘Ragpicker’s Wine,’’ ‘‘poking with his stick at the ragged ends of speeches and scraps of language . . . in the gray dawn of the day of revolution.’’ Benjamin had already rendered this figure as emblematic of the politicized intellectual at the conclusion of his 1930 commentary that preceded his review of Siegfried Kracauer’s White Collar Workers.135 The ragpicker later resurfaced in ‘‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’’ to highlight the ‘‘commerce in garbage’’ and to epitomize the (lumpen)proletariat.136 Yet these aggregations of material and human waste products are more than sore sights for the eye; they stink. Baudelaire too draws upon the olfactive register. He describes the ragpicker as ‘‘reeking of sour wine’’ and ‘‘staggering under enormous sacks of junk/—the vomit of surfeited Paris.’’137 But beyond a paraphrase of Baudelaire, in which the ragpicker seeking numbness is ‘‘surrounded by the aroma of wine casks,’’138 the emanations—the aura—of this ‘‘refuse’’ are all but absent from either Benjamin’s Baudelaire essays or the PassagenWerk’s folders.139 Similarly, the prostitute, who functions as an allegory of objectification and modernity for Benjamin and whose smell pervades Baudelaire’s poetry, remains deodorized.140 In a work extensively extracted by Benjamin in the J folder, Le´on Daudet’s ‘‘Baudelaire: Le malaise et ‘L’aura,’ ’’ the argument—one omitted, however, by Benjamin—is made that neither Hugo, Lamartine, nor Musset can compare to Baudelaire in

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comprehending ‘‘the odor of misery and despair.’’ Daudet later concludes—and Benjamin also fails to include—‘‘in his Parisian poems, Baudelaire extracts the quintessence, toxic and salubrious, of that immense laboratory of stone, where the worst instincts smoke, where lofty aspirations blaze. . . . [H]e made its scent breathe out hot and doleful.’’141 Indeed, throughout the Passagen-Werk Benjamin betrays a remarkable anosmia, olfactive blindness. While he oversees an archaeology of the visible and touches upon the recovery of the tactile in nineteenth-century Paris, as Alain Corbin has said, Benjamin apparently is not attuned to the ‘‘other dialogues [that] were taking place . . . ; heavy animal scents and fleeting perfumes [that] spoke of repulsion and disgust, sympathy and seduction.’’ Corbin concludes The Foul and the Fragrant, his masterly study of odor and the French social imagination, lamenting that ‘‘discourse on odors was interdicted,’’ and previous historians had ‘‘neglected these documents of the senses.’’142 While Benjamin notes the import of hygiene in several of the preliminary sketches of the Passagen-Werk, there is no folder to indicate any plan of research. In contrast to the emphasis on the biopolitical understanding of nineteenth-century Europe that conditions contemporary historiography, Benjamin’s historical materialist stress on capitalist modernity (see AP 456–488/PW 570–611 [N]) leads him to focus on a Haussmann who plotted the boulevards, and to totally ignore the locus of much contemporary historiography, the Parent-Duchaˆtelet who toured the sewers.143 Smell is not completely ignored, but, as the analysis above of the rare olfactive references and allusions attests, it does not escape the parameters of certain bourgeois pseudo-aristocratic nostalgia. Yet, let us reconsider Benjamin’s confession of his methodological intentions for the Passagen-Werk: I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulation. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own; by making use of them. (AP 460/PW 574 [N1a, 8])

Rather than registering, refurbishing, and repackaging the returns of his ragpicking through nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin displays them. By volatilizing Benjamin’s rank Darstellung together with his identification with that ragpicker people,144 the Jews, who allegedly bear a scent that pejoratively codes them as marginal, we may, nevertheless, be able to sniff or interpolate the stench of a splenetic reading of smell. Benjamin diagnosed ‘‘the decline or disintegration of the aura’’ as a major symptom of the breakdown of experience that marked the modern.

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Yet, he noted a corresponding apotheosis of an auratic aesthetic, the Kantian ‘‘l’art pour l’art’’ movement. Fragrance is synonymous with the auratic work of art. Benjamin cites Paul Vale´ry: We recognize a work of art by the fact that no idea it inspires in us, no mode of behavior that it suggests we adopt could exhaust it or dispose of it. We may inhale the smell of a flower whose fragrance is agreeable to us for as long as we like; it is impossible for us to rid ourselves of the fragrance by which our senses have been aroused, and no recollection, no thought, no mode of behavior can obliterate its effect or release us from the hold it has on us. (OB 186–87)

The insistence of this fragrant flower, however, ironizes Vale´ry’s in-otherrespects rather Kantian reverie. By exhaling its aura, the work of art undercuts its claim to be art. That is, for Kant smell characterizes what cannot be art. In contrast to the universal communicability of beauty, smell exemplifies the form of pleasure that is incommunicable.145 Moreover, smell is associated with disgust (Ekel). In his Anthropology, Kant asserts, ‘‘Filth seems to arouse nausea [disgust, Ekel] not so much through what is repugnant to the eyes and tongue as through the stench that we presume it has.’’146 Even agreeable fragrances such as Vale´ry’s flower arouse disgust because, forced upon the perceiver, they interfere with the freedom necessary for aesthetic pleasure. All smells are in effect disgusting, and the disgusting is the ‘‘[o]ne kind of ugliness [that] is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight, and consequently aesthetic beauty [because] the artificial representation of the [disgusting] object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object in our sensation.’’147 The disgusting is too real, too close; it both has an aura—in the etymological sense (i.e., it reeks)—and has no aura—in the conventional Benjaminian reading (i.e., it is not art). Yet the disgusting smell does not so much put in question Benjamin’s analyses of aura as it evokes other dimensions of experience and analysis.148 The distance that characterizes the aromatic aura of the disgusting is not the spatio-temporal separation between the audience and the work of art; it is the negated space between the perceiver and what lies behind and outside of that work. The secret(ed) scent of Vale´ry’s flower, of auratic art amid the disintegration of aura, arises from other dialectical extremes Benjamin analyzes in the ‘‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [or Technical Reproducibility].’’ With the increase in the cultic value of art came a corresponding development in its opposite, in its exhibition value. ‘‘Cult value as such even tends to keep the artwork out of

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sight,’’ but instead it is open to the public. And in another dialectical reversal, the public exhibition of the work of art first wrenched it out of the ‘‘context of tradition’’ and everyday life and then resituated it in temples to the cult of beauty—museums and exhibition halls—as the authentic work of the creative individual (WA 106, 105). Such exhibited art is defined by its aura, but this aura is artificially induced and institutionally sustained.149 On the one hand, the work of art became a fetishized commodity; its exhibition value was built upon the sweat-producing labor of others. On the other hand, fetid odors threatened to seep through the doorways of these temples. The distance generated by these ritual sites was the distance of exclusion—what the sanitized bourgeois sensibility must be spared: ‘‘the refuse of the physical world,’’150 the ‘‘pestilent emanations’’ of the cities (AP 505/PW 630 [O8a, 2]), the miasma of urban life, the barbaric stench of the oppressed, the noisomeness of the masses. Whereas smell, the smell of incense and sacrifice, would reinforce the ritual and transcendent elements normally associated with the concept of aura, smell was also the trace of the silenced, the forgotten, and the invisible—the victims of the deritualized human sacrifice inflicted by the modern capitalist system. The splenetic olfactive critic can sniff out these simulacra of aura that are suffused in the stench of modernity, just as a Proust or a Benjamin inhales the scent of prehistory from the aura surrounding a flower or a mother-of-pearl pocket knife.

A Coeval Pair Benjamin intertwines aura with another notion that evokes—and, in its influences and inheritors, renders explicit—Jewish representations of the often odorous and frequently odious kind.151 That notion in its natural or prehistorical form is called mimesis, and in its modern form, reproduction. Benjamin posits the existence of a human mimetic faculty. More than the perception of similarities, it is ‘‘a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else’’ (MF 333). In his first self-contained foray into mimesis, the ‘‘Doctrine of the Similar,’’ astrology, presumably arising out of the imitation of celestial processes and assuming a natural correspondence between human life and cosmic events, is his prime example. The image of stars returning our glance, looking down upon us, leads Benjamin to speculate in a fragment from his Nachlaß that the experience of the aura and the development of the mimetic faculty are coeval. ‘‘Do relations exist between the experiences of

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the aura and those of astrology[?] Are there earthly creatures as well as things which look back from the stars? Which from the heavens actually return their gaze? Are the stars, with their gaze from afar, the prototype of the aura? May one assume that the look was the first mentor of the mimetic faculty?’’152 While Benjamin does not have his mimetic hermeneuts such as the astrologer sniff out correspondences, smell does appear in ‘‘Doctrine of the Similar.’’ Smells are the essences to which language as mimetic and allegorical correspond: Language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty—a medium into which the earlier perceptual capacity for recognizing the similar had, without residue, entered to such an extent that language now represents the medium in which objects encounter and come into relation with one another. No longer directly, as they once did in the mind of the augur or priest, but in their essences, in their most transient and delicate substances, even in their aromas.153

The formula for this connection between the mimetic character of language and aroma had emerged two years earlier at the site of a parallel transformation of religious experience: the hashish trance. While modernity had both disenchanted the world and offered in its stead a benumbing phantasmagoria, Benjamin concluded that drug intoxication, rather than necessarily contributing to this anaesthesia, could paradoxically offer an introduction to ‘‘profane illumination,’’154 a sudden insight into the mystery of the everyday. The hashish trance provided access to the experience of both the aura and the mimetic: it ‘‘volatilizes representations into verbal aromas [Wortaromen] in which the actual representation-substance in the word . . . is completely vaporized.’’ During this particular drug experiment Benjamin acted out this profane illumination about the mimetic character of language with a word redolent with mimetic associations: ‘‘the root: ape’’ (der Stamm: Affe) generated ‘‘komm A¨ffchen,’’ ‘‘der Affe a¨fft,’’ and ‘‘a¨ffen, nacha¨ffen, vora¨ffen.’’155 By speaking of the aromata of objects and words in these contexts of transformed religiosity, Benjamin is not so much perfuming his language as suggesting a worldlier, yet still explicitly religious, mediation of aura and mimesis. Odors contour the ritual dimension characteristic of both the aura and the pre(linguistic)history of mimesis. The olfactive dominates the sensorium in the primary ritual performed by the augurs and priests: sacrifice. According to Pirke Avoth 5.5, the first of the ten wonders done for ‘‘our fathers in the Temple [was that a] woman never miscarried on

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account of the stench of the meat of Holy Things.’’156 The scent of the offering not only goes directly to the gods but is also perceived immediately by the officiants.157 The eyes may be a window to the soul, but the nose was the gateway to the brain.158 cut off one’s nose to spite one’s faith Although Benjamin associates aromata with essences, the scent is not the bearer of ‘‘images’’ in his discussions of the mimetic faculty. In the fragment in which he speculates about the common origin of aura and mimesis Benjamin explicitly excludes the nose as a center of the mimetic faculty: ‘‘In this context a polarity is produced in the center of the mimetic faculty of man. It shifts itself from the eyes to the lips, thereby taking a detour around the entire body.’’159 With this formulation, Benjamin has constructed his own rather curious constellation. The usual astrological representation would draw a line connecting the polarities, the extremes. The passage from eye to lip normally would traverse the nose, but according to Benjamin the mimetic faculty takes a long detour. Its circumambulation would miss the nose. The eyes perceive similarities, and the lips produce them. By contrast, the nose neither generates signs nor recognizes them. Benjamin usually represents smells either as signs of themselves—‘‘of all sensual impressions it will ally itself only with the same scent’’ (OB 184)—or as symbols of Jewish bourgeois life. Although this analysis has uncovered both splenetic and redemptive aspects of Benjamin’s discussion of smell and the olfactive emanations of aura, his smells do not engender critical similarities but rather remain, on the surface, ideal, nostalgic, and personal simulacra of dialectical images. Benjamin’s phylo- and ontogenetic history of the mimetic faculty suggests another reason for the omission of the nose. At its origin mimesis is the drive to become the other, yet Benjamin’s discussion of the visual, the vocal, and their conjunction in the written leaves a residue of difference: the mimetically producing and comprehending self that smell threatens to overcome. The nose becomes the other; it becomes itself a sign. The nose is a sign of the Jew that, until the development of rhinoplasty, no assimilation could remove. The Jewish nose was the visual correlate of the Jewish stench. In Moses Hess’s Rom und Jerusalem, a work Benjamin read and respected,160 the Jewish nose blew the belief held by many Jewish reformers that the German perception of Jewish religion as ritualistic and atavistic was the primary obstacle to emancipation. Hess wrote that the German ‘‘objects less to the Jews’ peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar

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noses. . . . Jewish noses cannot be reformed.’’161 And unlike that indubitable and indelible diacritical ‘‘circumcision,’’ the nose is present and visible in both Jewish men and women. The traditionally comic character of such noses and other stereotypically Jewish physical features played a role in speculations about a physiological predisposition toward mimetic behavior that predated Benjamin’s own. Freud’s 1905 discussion of comedy focuses upon an ‘‘impulsion . . . to imitation’’ (Drang . . . zur Nachahmung) and an ‘‘ideational mimetics’’ (Vorstellungsmimik). Comedy arises from the recognition of the difference between another person’s exaggerated and/or inexpedient movement and ‘‘the one that I should have carried out myself in his place.’’ This mimesisbased comedy of movement is the source of all other comedy, such as that of ‘‘bodily shapes and facial features . . . for they are regarded as though they were the outcome of an exaggerated or pointless movement’’ that the audience imagines itself imitating. Freud’s examples of such comedy— ’’Staring eyes, a hooked nose hanging down to the mouth, ears sticking out, a hump-back’’162—fill the repertoire of Jewish caricature. The compulsion to imitate hence results in the construction of the stereotypical Jew. dialectic (of enlightenment) at a standstill Freud too appears to evoke the assimilating Jew who tries to pass for a Gentile—along with the figure of the gesticulating or miming Jew—when he explores the visible effects of the reactivated memory-traces, which he calls ‘‘ideational mimetics’’: If . . . a member of certain races, narrates or describes something, it is easy to see that he . . . also represents its subject-matter in his expressive movements: he combines the mimetic and the verbal forms of representation. . . . He may have broken himself of the habit of painting with his hands, yet for that reason he will do it with his voice; and if he exercises self-control in this too, it may be wagered that he will open his eyes wide when he describes something large and squeeze them shut when he comes to something small.163

Freud’s examples of the mimetic response, like Klages’s aping Jew, snare antisemitism into the signifying web of Benjamin’s notion of mimesis: the Jew is the imitator, the imitated, and the difference between. This conclusion becomes more explicit in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE). For Horkheimer and Adorno the Third

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Reich and its attempted extermination of the mimetic Jews is the culmination of the twin histories of Europe: ‘‘a well-known, written history and an underground history. The latter consists in the fate of the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by civilization. . . . The relationship with the human body is maimed from the outset’’ (DE 231). These histories begin with a theory of the repression of smell and its consequences that has been discussed earlier: ‘‘The compulsive urge to cruelty and destruction springs from the organic displacement of the relationship between mind and body; Freud expressed the facts of the matter with genius when he said that loathing [Ekel] first arose when men began to walk upright and were at a distance from the ground, so that the sense of smell which drew the male animal to the female in heat was relegated to a secondary position among the senses’’ (DE 232–33).164 These speculations help Horkheimer and Adorno to explain the contradictions, ambivalences, and distortions that shape (Western) civilization’s relationship to nature in general. By constellating Freud’s discussion of smell with Benjamin’s focus on mimesis,165 Benjamin’s fellow travelers at the Institute of Social Research become able to develop a construct for the analysis of antisemitism in particular. By this conjunction of extremes, Horkheimer and Adorno read the Jewish physiognomy that marks Benjamin’s terms. Benjamin opens his essay ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty’’: ‘‘Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry’’ (MF 333). But where Benjamin then jumpshifts to concerns of epistemology and linguistic philosophy, Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis begins with the natural substrate of mimesis in order to address domination and politics. Their focus is less on the decay or transformation of the mimetic faculty than with civilization’s successful or failed attempts to repress it. With their examination of the role of mimesis in protection and defense—on how, for example, the mimetic body stiffens like ‘‘circumambient, motionless nature’’ (DE 180) before any threat to survival—they thereby emphasize, like Darwin, how ‘‘imitation belongs to the realm of nature rather than culture, to the inhuman as well as the human, that its practice might be organic, unconscious, and involuntary, that its teleology might be political rather than aesthetic, and that it may serve as a pivot of historical change.’’166 The languagefocused notion of mimesis Benjamin presents is not opposed to the more corporeal one of his colleagues; rather, their notions provide complementary readings of the phenomenon: Benjamin from the perspective of messianic time, Horkheimer and Adorno from the perspective of the empirical history of modernity. Indeed, their shift to the political does not so much diverge from Benjamin’s initial analyses of mimesis as it correlates with

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the contours of Benjamin’s later developed notion of the ‘‘mimetic shock absorber’’ and the adaptation processes of the factory worker (cf. OB 175–78). Horkheimer and Adorno also shift the sensory register in their discussion of mimesis from the visual and aural to the olfactive. Smell, for them, provides the basis for the mimetic faculty. The multifarious nuances of the sense of smell embody the archetypal longing for the lower forms of existence, for direct unification with circumambient nature, with the earth and mud. Of all the senses, that of smell— which is attracted without objectifying—bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the ‘‘other.’’ . . . When we see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by otherness. (DE 184)

Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis releases the olfactive dimension implicit to Benjamin’s discussion of mimesis. By arguing from Freud’s phylogenetic discussion of smell’s repression that the olfactive sense betrays the ‘‘memory of prehistory’’ (DE 71), they also implicate smell in the recovery of the lost world of experience—the aromata—that mimetic language mediates. They also fill in the gap in Benjamin’s topography of the mimetic body when they point out several ‘‘mimetic ciphers,’’ including ‘‘the nose—the physiognomic principium individuationis, symbol of the specific character of an individual, described between the lines of his countenance.’’ The context for their invocation of the nose indicates that Horkheimer and Adorno are, however, more concerned with the response to mimesis than to mimetic response. And it is one of many that tie the Jews to mimesis. Horkheimer and Adorno argue, ‘‘There is no antisemite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jew, which is composed of mimetic cyphers: the argumentative movement of a hand, the musical voice painting a vivid picture of things and feelings irrespective of the real content of what is said, and the nose’’ (DE 185). Implicit to this characterization is the assumption that the Jews, perhaps more than any other people, bear the traces of insufficiently repressed mimesis: ‘‘Undisciplined mimicry is the brand of the old form of domination, engraved in the living substance of the dominated and passed down by a process of unconscious imitation in infancy from generation to generation, from the down-at-heel Jew to the rich banker’’ (DE 184). The assumption of the mimetic Jew belongs to the antisemite: ‘‘This machinery [of using suppressed nature in the service of the domination which suppresses it] needs the Jews. . . . The gentile sees equality, humanity, in his difference from the Jew. . . . It matters little whether the Jews as individuals really do still have those mimetic

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features which awaken the dread malady, or whether such features are suppressed’’ (DE 185, 182, 185). Like Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno discern that the antisemites justify their hatred of the Jews on spurious notions of instinct and racially different physiology; they also concur with Benjamin’s speculation that the repudiation of the physical nature of the Jews is part of a general turning against nature in the modern.167 As part of this analysis of antisemitism, Horkheimer and Adorno examine how the rationalized body, disciplined against nature, reacts with disgust, embarrassment, and ultimately violence before any manifestation of mimetic behavior: be it a gesture or an odor. Benjamin’s colleagues evoke the foetor Judaicus when they tie smell to the ‘‘disinfecting’’ intentionality of antisemitism that led to the Shoah: The sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization. . . . As a despised and despising characteristic, the mimetic function is enjoyed craftily. Anyone who seeks out [wittert] ‘‘bad’’ smells, in order to destroy them, may imitate sniffing to his heart’s content, taking unrationalized pleasure in the experience. The civilized man ‘‘disinfects’’ the forbidden impulse by his unconditional identification with the authority which prohibited it; in this way the action is made acceptable. . . . This is the schema of the antisemitic reaction. (DE 184)

They describe this schema as ‘‘deeply imprinted . . . a ritual of civilization’’ (DE 171). Antisemitism and its image of the Jew as embodied mimesis are coeval with civilization. In an apparent reversal of Klages, Horkheimer and Adorno depict the relationship of antisemite and Jew as one of antitype and type. Antisemites mimic the mimics rather than nature; they endeavor not to become one with nature but to dominate it— above all, in themselves. Antedating this mimesis of mimesis is a false projection. It is the counterpart of true mimesis. . . . Mimesis imitates the environment, but false projection makes the environment like itself. For mimesis the outside world is a model which the inner world must try to conform to: the alien must become familiar; but false projection confuses the inner and outer world and defines the most intimate experiences as hostile. (DE 187)

Antisemitism transforms the Jew into the feared mimetic nature: ‘‘The mere fact that a person is called a Jew is an invitation forcibly to make him over into a physical semblance of that image of death and distortion’’ (DE 186).

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Horkheimer and Adorno’s histories of mimesis and of smell are inextricably tied to the history of Judentum in Europe. As ‘‘civilization’’ developed through its ongoing struggle against humanity’s mimetic nature, the Jews became the projection screen for the dominant culture’s fears of uncontrolled mimesis. And with the advent of emancipation, assimilating Jews recapitulated that same history: But especially where a nation (the Jews, for example) was brought by its own destiny to change to a new form of social life, the time-honored customs, sacred activities, and objects of worship were magically transformed into heinous crimes and phantoms. . . . From the reflex of disgust [Ekel] at excrement or human flesh to the suspicion of fanaticism, laziness, and poverty, whether intellectual or material, there is a long line of modes of behavior which were metamorphosed from the adequate and necessary into abominations. (DE 92)

Having abandoned their old world of Erfahrungen, the stinking Jews became disgusting to themselves.

The Forces, Means, and Relations of (Re)Production, or . . . To read what was never written. —Benjamin, ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty’’

Just as Benjamin had endeavored to reappropriate the notion of the commodity by blasting it out of the homogeneous course of events and then both resituating and revalorizing it within a new configuration,168 so he also sought to rescue mimesis (reproduction) and aura-affiliated smell from their antisemitic associations and release their ‘‘image[s] of redemption.’’ Did Benjamin simply ignore the antisemitic utterances, the social discourse of the stinking mimetic Jew, that traverses the work of Klages and others, and instead rescue what he could from them for his own critical configurations?169 Or was he traumatized by the catastrophic configuration of social representations of smell, mimesis, and antisemitism that those splenetic critics Horkheimer and Adorno would sniff out during that state of emergency for the Jewish people, the Shoah, such that this olfactive image did not so much ‘‘flit by’’ or dissipate as leave its mimetic (rather than semiotic) traces on his corpus? Or finally, did he, however unconsciously and however contradictorily, embrace these allegations and revalue them? Even as this chapter has mapped out Benjamin’s olfactive shock experiences and their consequences, even as it has recovered from

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his part-ideological, part-traumatic anosmia the seemingly ‘‘inconsequential and buried’’ (AP 364/PW 460 [J77, 1]) scents that configure his work, a case can be made for this last redemptive possibility. In writing about aura, Benjamin had also sought to configure the idea of redemption in a profane age. Yet, for Benjamin, aura is absent from the modern world except in the intimate gaze of a (nature) lover or in the me´moire involontaire of a Proust; or rather, aura is ever present in such grotesque simulacra of itself as the fetishized commodity and the Fu¨hrer. The name Aura in Benjamin’s critical vocabulary does not so much describe what is as much as it embodies the difference between the modern and prehistory. And it is doubly emblematic of the great gulf between the noumenal and the phenomenal that characterizes the modern: in its utopian-nostalgic form, aura endeavors to satisfy our longings for a world before separation and difference, a world suffused with the noumenal, a world of unmediated mimetic interaction. And conversely, in its illusory form, aura severs all ties with the sacred even as it simulates the ritual relationships of distance and domination; moreover, it occludes its own unsaid conditions of production beneath the veils of the natural and the supernatural. Redemption, for this modern ersatz aura, is death. Moreover, restoring the prehistoric aura and its noumenal effusions as the basis of material social life appears impossible. Yet just as aura was paired with mimesis in prehistory, it was also opposed, in the ‘‘Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,’’ to ‘‘reproduction.’’ Just as the development of language led to transformations in the disposition of the mimetic faculty, modern technological change has also had its effects. In his response to the 1936 version of Benjamin’s theses on art, Adorno dismissed the revolutionary possibility of reproduction—its production of a more critical and thereby a dominationresisting audience—that it announced.170 He also failed to recognize Benjamin’s notion of ‘‘reproduction’’ as portending mimesis’s second nature, a transformation by the hybridization of nature with technology that will ‘‘overcome’’ (u¨berwindet) capitalist relations of production.171 Benjamin generated this essay in order to define the tendencies of the development of art under then-present conditions of production and how these ‘‘neutralize a number of traditional concepts [that had been denied to Judentum], creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.’’ The first thesis begins by invoking Benjamin’s materialist forebear: ‘‘When Marx undertook his analysis of the capitalist mode of production. . . .’’ Benjamin then argues that Marx’s approach allowed him to demonstrate how capitalist production would lead to ‘‘the creation of conditions which would make

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it possible for capitalism to abolish itself.’’ In the remaining theses the morphemic/semantic field of Reproduktion takes over. When ‘‘production’’ returns in the essay, it becomes reproduction. Just as the Dadaists abolished the aura when ‘‘they branded [their works] as reproductions with the very means of [their] production’’ (WA 119), so too will technological reproduction, Benjamin appears to imply, generate the political conditions for the abolition of capitalism. New forms of reproduction have facilitated the possible triumph of a new objectivity in which the (non)sensuous similarity of the reproducible fact would become truth and supplant both the aura and mimesis. In ‘‘Work of Art’’ Benjamin examines the new forms of reproductive art such as photography and film. Such art contravenes the values of auratic art because it subverts the authority and authenticity of the original, erases distance, undermines tradition, and opens access. Rather than denigrating these arts, he analyzes how they offer access to regions that are elided in the auratic arts: they can bring out aspects that are accessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint) but not to the human eye; or [they] can use certain processes . . . to record objects which evade natural optics altogether. . . . [They] can place the copy of the original in places that the original itself cannot attain. (WA 103)

Technological reproduction can undercut the authority of the simulacra, the unoriginal originals of commodified art, and reveal the phenomenological and the structural conditions for representation; that is, it can betray the disjunction between appearance (mimetic/realistic semblance) and its production (assemblage). This is not simply demystification: countering the veiling of the forces, means, and relations of production by the forms of appearance by eradicating (vernichten) those veils. Rather, the revaluation of reproduction could engender a transformation of the subject’s engaged perception that mirrors the aesthetic portrayed in Benjamin’s discussion of Ottilie in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities: ‘‘For the beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil.’’172 Although Benjamin privileges photography and, especially, film in the essay, he recognizes that ‘‘the tasks which face the human apparatus at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means. . . . They are mastered gradually—taking their cue from tactile reception—through habit’’ (WA 120; emphasis in original). Technological reproduction can generate new forms of sensory appropriation of the world by which the receptor

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begins to embody, that is, to mime,173 the otherness of the world. It can explode the ‘‘prison-house’’ of the modern everyday—‘‘Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories’’—and ‘‘bring to light entirely new structures of matter . . . disclose quite unknown aspects within’’ familiar movements. A ‘‘space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious’’ (WA 117). Such reproduction presents the redemptive possibility of providing a countervailing force to the culminating appearance of the ersatz aura: fascism. With its ties to smell, however, the name Aura itself implicates a different configuration that escapes the ideologically constrained intentionality of Benjamin’s language. Since all language is, by definition, imbued with the noumenal ‘‘aromata’’174 as well as with the historical unsaid (i.e., with the conditions for its production, such as exclusion), every linguistic act has an objective—olfactive—character. Readers, by following their noses, may recover another dimension of experience, the other language emanating from Aura. While fragrance recalls the nostalgic idyll of childhood prehistory, the redemptive character of such sweet smells is compromised by this idyll’s all-too-personal character and by its inner contradiction: childhood memory draws upon a phantasmagoria generated by bourgeois artifice, self-delusion, and expropriation. But the odorous remainder emitted by aura also suggests that a derogatory Jewish identification—the telltale stench of the miming Jew—as well as a particular strand of Jewish messianic thinking are being reworked in Benjamin’s work. In writing about Aura and Mimesis Benjamin did not generate an analysis of the Jewish Question; rather, he was engaging the Other Jewish Question. That is, as a mediation of his situation, Aura also entailed a transfiguration of Jewish identification that contributed to the redemptive possibilities opened by the term. And Aura, in particular, represents a redemptive moment in which olfaction, as the sense of materiality and as the character of that which the dominant class fears and thus seeks to foreclose, escapes the optics of discipline and control. Adorno, who with Horkheimer had released the odorous dimension of mimesis in order to analyze antisemitism, concluded his introduction to the first edition (1955) of Benjamin’s Schriften by invoking an olfactive reverie of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to describe the redemptive power of Benjamin’s thought: ‘‘And a new scent, one bringing salvation, already surrounds [the earth]—as does a new hope.’’175 This profane stench, as the trace of otherness in the everyday, seeps by means of reproduction through the ‘‘strait gate’’ (TPH 264 [Thesis xviiiB]) of the redemption from the forces of totality and identity.

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Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. —Benjamin, ‘‘Some Reflections on Kafka’’

As this and the preceding chapters have shown, engaging the Other Jewish Question is a dangerous business: these Jewish-identified individuals made themselves vulnerable to legitimating the views of the oppressors and to yielding to self-hatred,176 as well as to internment in ‘‘historicism’s bordello’’ (TPH 262 [Thesis xvi]).177 The problems of Jewish identification in Europe since the Enlightenment could not be overcome by either acculturation or achievement. Each individual Jewish strategy was met in the dominant culture by a counter interpretation. Acculturating Jews were informed: Jews cannot become Europeans, they can only imitate them. And the accomplished Jews were told: Jews cannot create; they can only either re-create or corrupt. In this hostile environment, the Jews may not have been completely self-determining, but neither were they totally at the mercy of their enemy’s power to define and represent, not just themselves as Jewish-identified, but also the means, especially the corporeal signifiers, by which that power was exercised. It is the genius of the individuals examined in this work that has granted insight into the complex forms, institutions, and practices of identification of this particular time and place. While the present reader already knows—as those examined in The Other Jewish Question eventually learned—that redemptive self-fashioning and utopian social integration by the Jewish-identified were not realizable in their present, he or she has been able to observe how they endeavored to effect a Stillstand and defer any of the Endlo¨sungen to the Jewish Question that would result in their nihilation178 —alas, not indefinitely, as the reader also knows. More, he or she has also recognized another set of responses by these individuals to their Other Jewish Question: how those shards of representation, by which they (and all the Jewish-identified) would be excluded, had been, in part, subjected to acts of bricolage, gathered up and reassembled so as to portray the rise and possible demise of those forces, means, and relations of exclusion called modernity. During the course of The Other Jewish Question and its epidemiological collation and physiognomic examination of diverse Jewish corporeal identifications, those quasi-objects mediating the Zweiheit of Deutschtum and Judentum between the Enlightenment and the Shoah, the reader may have ‘‘set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris’’ (Benjamin, WA 117), but found him- or herself repeatedly banging into the apparent flotsam of catastrophic representation (‘‘the pile of debris’’/Tru¨mmerhaufen; TPH 258 [Thesis ix]), while hoping these remains were instead

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the jetsam of messianic recuperation. And at the conclusion of its presentation (Darstellung), he or she may then expect a resolution or at least a distillation of this conflux. Instead, the reader and I find ourselves standing before one of Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history, one drawn from the paraliponema that were included in the editorial apparatus for the Gesammelte Werke’s republication of the canonical selection and arrangement of the ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’’ This extract draws upon a syntagm of a ‘‘nodal point,’’ a ‘‘quasi-object,’’ already engaged in this work: Zopf (queue). Found among Benjamin’s Nachlaß, the passage comes from ‘‘New Theses C’’; one can only speculate whether it would have been added to and thereby completed some ‘‘final’’ collation: Only when the course [Ablauf] of historical events runs through the historian’s hands smoothly, like a thread, can one speak of progress. If, however, it is a frayed bundle [Strang] unraveling into a thousand strands that hang down like unplaited hair [aufgelo¨ste Flechter], none of them has a definite place until they are all gathered up [aufgenommen] and braided [geflechten] into a coiffure.179

Or rather, like any good supplement—or a fetish such as the Zopf—this thesis might substitute for the disavowed, phantasmically whole original. The beauty of this braid—Benjamin’s prose remainder? what it depicts?— implicates the apparently manifest truth of this historiographical extension, but the violence it both conceals— just as . . . no document of civilization . . . is not at the same time a document of barbarism . . . barbarism taints also the manner in which it is transmitted from one owner to another (TPH 256 [Thesis vii])

—and calls forth—that is, whether like the Zopfabschneider, for whom ‘‘the need to carry out the castration which he disavows has come to the front’’180 or those who are initiated to rebellion by ‘‘cutting off of the queue, the queue being a sign of subjection’’181—betrays the truth of its construction. Yet is the only alternative, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, may a thousand strands unravel? Yet another Jewish question.

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introduction: toward a physiognomic epidemiology of the fetishized jew 1. See Bering, Name als Stigma. 2. Douglas titled his autobiography The Ragman’s Son. 3. The German term Judaismus (or Juda¨ismus) was almost exclusively limited to the works of Protestant theologians until the end of the Third Reich. There is no entry for it in Grimms deutsches Wo¨rterbuch, the German equivalent of the OED. Throughout this work, I will employ Judentum whenever more than one of its aspects—Judaism (i.e., Jewish religion), Jewry, Jewishness—may be in play. 4. This phrase from a 25 January 1806 letter of Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Rebecca Friedla¨nder (Levin Varnhagen, Freundin, 99) serves as a constant refrain in Hannah Arendt’s (auto)biography of Levin Varnhagen and postmortem of German Jewry; see Arendt, Rahel, 89, 124, 138, 167, 174, 241, 254; also see chapter 4 of this volume. 5. See, in particular, Brubaker, Ethnicity, 41, 44. An immense literature exists on national/ethnic identity, identification, and the usefulness of any such notion; in addition to Brubaker’s work, Karner, Ethnicity, helped the critical engagement with this literature. 6. M. Steinberg, Judaism, 21. 7. Orthodox Halakhah accords Jewishness to the child of a Jewish mother, while the North American Reform movement accepts the child of a Jewish parent. This discrepancy over ‘‘who is a Jew’’ has created severe strain in Israeli-diaspora relations since 1989, when Orthodox parties in the Knesset sought to amend the Law of Return (granting that every halakhically determined Jew—i.e., any individual with a Jewish maternal grandmother—has the right to settle in Israel) to exclude Jews who trace their descent through the father. 8. See Michaels, ‘‘Race,’’ and the response by D. Boyarin and J. Boyarin, ‘‘Diaspora.’’ On this and the other questions of Jewish identity, see also J. Boyarin, ‘‘Self-Exposure.’’

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9. Initially, the reigning administrative distinction in the Third Reich was Aryan/non-Aryan. Any individual with at least one grandparent who had been registered as a Jew was classified as a non-Aryan. The first of the Nuremberg Laws instituted several changes. Race now determined citizenship, not merely the rights and privileges of citizenship. There was no grandfather clause; however, there was a refinement of the grandparental determination of racial status: a full Jew had three or four Jewish grandparents; a Mischling first degree had two; a Mischling second degree had one. See Friedla¨nder, Nazi Germany, 27–33, 141–44, 148–50. 10. See the discussion, inter alia, in Geller, On Freud’s, and Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses. 11. See, inter alia, Fischer, Socialist Response; Haury, Antisemitismus von links; Traverso, Marxists; Wistrich, Socialism; and chapter 6 of this volume. 12. See Harrowitz and Hyams, Jews. Even now, the academic legitimacy, if not the truth claims, of Weininger’s work has its defenders, including Janik, Revisited, and Sengoopta, Weininger—and, in terms of fin-de-sie`cle academic practice, they present a good argument. 13. See, e.g., Goldberg and Krausz, Jewish Identity; Gitelman, Religion or Ethnicity. 14. Moßman, ‘‘Das Fremde ausscheiden’’; also see Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite; Hortzitz, ‘Fru¨h-Antisemitismus’; and Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder. 15. Cf. Yerushalmi, ‘‘Assimilation.’’ Notions of an immutable otherness attached to Jewish descent even pre-existed the Spanish moment; however, they did not achieve the hegemonic status that such a notion held in Inquisitorial Spain. See J. Boyarin, ‘‘Introduction,’’ on the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) as symptomatic both of this trajectory and of the institutional and ideological contradictions throughout Christian Europe that impeded its domination, as well as his discussion of Cohen, Living Letters; Elukin, ‘‘From Jew to Christian?’’; Rubin, Gentile Tales; and Abulafia, Christians and Jews. Boyarin thereby conveys the diverse and shifting (albeit generally negativetrending) representations of Judentum in late medieval Northern and Western Europe and their relationship to the universalizing processes of rationalization, regulation, and legitimation as well as to economic and social transformations. 16. Langmuir, Definition, 351. Langmuir holds that this phenomenon is observable, at the latest, in the thirteenth century. 17. E.g., Isaac’s classic Teaching. 18. See Scha¨fer, Judeophobia. 19. The title of Robert Wistrich’s popular chronicle, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, itself signals two of the most problematic assumptions of such

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thinking on the topic: that underlying the various manifestations is an unchanging essence, and that the source of antisemitism’s force is an affect (such as hate or resentment) combined with a psychological condition (such as psychosis or prejudice). The psychological explanations either reduce the phenomenon to an irrational state, which defies direct treatment (aside from isolating or removing the pathogen-afflicted) and ever threatens, or to a set of wrong ideas that are susceptible to enlightenment. See Geller, ‘‘Tolerating Prejudice’’; also Langmuir, Definition; Braun, Ewiger Judenhass. 20. On the ‘‘emergence’’ of the term Antisemitismus from the circle about Wilhelm Marr in 1879, see Ru¨rup and Nipperdey, ‘‘Antisemitismus,’’ esp. 101–03. Also cf. Fritsch, Handbuch, 18: ‘‘Der von Wilhelm Marr 1879 gepra¨gte Ausdruck ‘Antisemitismus.’. . .’’ 21. Engel, ‘‘Concept,’’ 122–23 n. 2. 22. See Fleck, Genesis, on ‘‘disease-entity’’ as a historically specific conceptual constellation of recognized symptoms, assumed or hypothesized cause(s), and affected populations. Also see Haraway, ‘‘Biopolitics.’’ On the characterization of Judentum and Antisemitismus as diseases, see, e.g., respectively, Heine’s poem ‘‘The New Israelite Hospital in Hamburg’’ (Complete Poems, 398–99) and Lombroso’s Antisemitismus. 23. Unlike the anthropologist Dan Sperber’s notion of an ‘‘epidemiology of representations,’’ I am not offering a necessary causal explanation of the appearance of these objects, nor am I considering these objects as representations, as simple unquestioned descriptions of the world. See Sperber, ‘‘Anthropology.’’ 24. Latour, Modern, esp. 51–55: ‘‘Quasi-objects are in between and below the two poles [of nature and society], at the very place around which dualism and dialectics had turned endlessly without being able to come to terms with them. Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective that the ‘hard’ parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society. On the other hand they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society—for unknown reasons—needed to be ‘projected’ ’’ (55). 25. In Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss typifies the bricoleur as one who ‘‘make[s] do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no’’—I would interpellate ‘‘necessary’’—‘‘relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions’’ (17). The antiJewish landscape that these Jewish-identified individuals traversed was littered with these quasi-objects that were left for and at their disposal.

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26. In his recently published Language of Nazi Genocide, Thomas Pegelow Kaplan not only examines how ‘‘state-organized linguistic violence,’’ the formation and propagation in the press of key categories of ‘‘Germanness’’ and ‘‘Jewishness,’’ ‘‘helped create a political culture that enabled genocide’’ (14), but also how ‘‘Germans of Jewish ancestry . . . drew extensively on the language of the press . . . to make sense of their worlds [as well as to] reaffirm and renegotiate their sense of self’’ (8). 27. Such ‘‘thinking in Jewish’’ is not the same as ‘‘thinking Jewishly,’’ whether the latter is understood as a particular style of thought about and approach to the world or as indicative of the content and concerns of that thinking. Nor is this phrase, as employed in Jonathan Boyarin’s wonderful collection that bears that title (Thinking), an embrace of the varieties of modes by which self-identified Jews engage Judentum and the world. 28. See, e.g., Gu¨nthier, ‘‘Wider der Natur,’’ on the naturalizing of the Jewish body. 29. Haraway, ‘‘Biopolitics,’’ 210. Also see Judith Butler’s work, e.g., Gender and Bodies. 30. I emphasize privileging and principal, because, as the subsequent chapters will evidence, there has been a long history of Jewish corporeal identifications from which modern identification discourses drew; however, these earlier images and practices were more syntagmatic than paradigmatic of Jewish identity. 31. Cf. Presner, on modernity: ‘‘[O]n the one hand, it built upon and disseminated certain universalist values stemming from the Enlightenment; it facilitated the attendant ideals of progress through modernization and the production of a strong, autonomous rational subject; and it engendered new possibilities of emancipation and freedom, which had a decisive positive effect on the course of Jewish assimilation in Europe. On the other hand, modernity fostered the growth of disciplinary power and surveillance, the fragmentation of the subject, the capacity for destruction and mass death on a scale never before possible, and the creation of ever newer ways of constricting freedom and administering social control’’ (Muscular Judaism, 15). 32. As Foucault, Order and History; Laqueur, ‘‘Orgasm’’ and Making Sex; Frevert, ‘‘Bu¨rgerliche Meisterdenker’’ and Mann und Weib; Honnegger, Ordnung; Planert, ‘‘Der dreifache Ko¨rper’’; and others have shown, the determination of difference underwent a marked transformation with the advent of the modern episteme and/or the bourgeois epoch. Difference shifted from a hierarchical relationship to a binary one. This is graphically displayed in Thomas Laqueur’s analysis of the shift in the normative scientific representation of genitalia. By the late eighteenth century female sexual organs are no longer principally represented as deficient models of the male; they now

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embody difference. Micheler, Selbstbilder, esp. 23–44, discusses the modification of Laqueur’s influential conclusion that in the late eighteenth century the earlier one-sex model (woman as a lesser man that is also reflected in anatomy) was replaced by a two-sex model of natural biological difference, in which heterosexuality was also inscribed as natural (like magnetism: that opposites attract is a natural law), and thus for a man to desire a man or a woman a woman indicated, respectively, femininization or masculinization. Rather than seeing a paradigm shift, Micheler draws upon early modern historians to argue that the two-sex theory was not a new invention but one of a variety of theories and notions about human gender, but that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century it became hegemonic. These changes are correlated with the development of sexual stereotypes as identity determinants; cf. Hausen, ‘‘Family.’’ According to Poovey, Uneven Developments, sexual difference, theorized as grounded in nature, became the zero degree of all difference. 33. Yet if men were different from—and superior to—women, how did men differentiate themselves from one another? How were the relations of power represented? Men as the makers of history, bourgeois men as the creators of historical consciousness, instituted historical differentia; see White, Metahistory; Lyotard, Differend; Certeau, Writing. The racial other had no history (see, e. g., Hegel on Africa in World History); the history of the religious other had been superseded (see below); and the class other was either overthrown in history (the aristocracy) or, again, outside of or at an earlier stage in history (the peasantry, the mass[es], the proletariat, the Volk). With the development of the teleological narrative of evolution these histories became naturalized. 34. As Jonathan Hess’s analysis of the Do¨hm-Michaelis dispute in the 1780s over the possible civic improvement of the Jews makes clear, colonialism was at work inside as well as outside a nation-state’s boundaries (‘‘Colonial Imaginary’’). 35. On the separate spheres, among numerous works see Hausen, ‘‘Family’’; Nicholson, Gender and History; Landes, Women. Frevert, ‘‘Einleitung,’’ 4ff., draws on Carl Welcker’s 1847 lexicon article as paradigmatic of the bourgeois understanding of the intimate connection among male-female relationships and the legitimation of the bourgeoisie’s separate gender-specific spheres of activity: ‘‘the most universal and important relationship of human society,’’ ‘‘a fundamental relationship upon whose just and wise regulation the beneficial development of society totally depends.’’ For Frevert and for Gerhard, ‘‘Andere Ergebnisse,’’ which provides some conclusions at the end of Frevert’s edited volume Bu¨rgerinnen und Bu¨rger, sexual inequality has been a necessary part of bourgeois society since its articulation; it represents the hidden obverse of the formal equality of rights that the bourgeoisie proclaim as the fundamental principle of society.

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36. That the Jewish body—the represented Jewish body, in general, and the body as gendered and sexed, let alone racialized, specifically—should be an object of historical analysis as well has been recognized for some time. See the work of Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (e.g., ‘‘Corporeal’’), Ann Pelligrini (e.g., Performance), and Naomi Seidman (e.g., ‘‘Carnal’’), among a number of others whose studies are referenced in this work, such as David Biale, Daniel Boyarin, Bryan Cheyette, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, Sander Gilman, Klaus Ho¨dl, and Jacques LeRider. 37. Birnbaum, Mythe politique, describes the association of women and Jews, of the feminization or bisexualization of the Jew as a commonplace in the nineteenth century; cf. Le Rider, Der Fall, e.g., 191–93; Poliakov, L’Europe suicidaire, 19. Julius Carlebach, ‘‘Forgotten,’’ describes how at the time of the articulation of bourgeois society Jews and women were perceived together as making a common plea for entry into the public sphere. Images of effeminate Jews litter the texts of such secularized Jews of the fin-de-sie`cle as Herzl, Nordau, Rathenau, and Weininger; see, e.g., D. Boyarin, Unheroic. 38. A.J. [Adolf Jellinek], ‘‘Eine neue Judenfrage’’; cited in and translated by Stourzh, ‘‘Age,’’ 23–24; translation adjusted. 39. See in particular Planert, ‘‘Der dreifache Ko¨rper’’; Bublitz, Seier, and Henke, Gesellschaftsko¨rper; and Geulen, Wahlverwandte, who draw upon a Foucauldian notion of biopolitics and trace the biologization of the German body politic and the confluence of nation and race. On the crises of ethnic and gender as well as sexual and national identity during this period, see among others Maugue, L’Identite´ masculine; Le Rider, Modernity; and Fout, ‘‘Sexual Politics.’’ 40. See Stepan and Gilman: Science ‘‘began to replace theological and moral discourse as the appropriate discourse with which to discuss nature. Science also encroached heavily on political discourse, as many political issues were transposed into the realm of neutral ‘nature,’ the scientists’ province’’ (‘‘Appropriating,’’ 175). 41. See Freud on ‘‘nodal points’’ (Knotenpunkte): ‘‘[T]he elements ‘botanical’ and ‘monograph’ found their way into the content of the dream because they possessed copious contacts with the majority of the dreamthoughts, because . . . they constituted ‘nodal points’ upon which a great number of the dream-thoughts converged, and because they had several meanings in connection with the interpretation of the dream’’ (Interpretation, 283). On ‘‘points de capiton’’ (quilting points or anchoring points), or signifiers which block the infinite slide of signification by seeming to anchor discourse in the real, see Lacan, ‘‘Quilting Point.’’ In ‘‘Ethnos,’’ 197, Julia Lupton draws on Lacan’s later definition of the quilting point—as a primal or master signifier that fastens the subject into the symbolic order through a real

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trauma—when she analogizes the function of ritual circumcision in the Jewish community to a point de capiton. 42. Zunz, Gutachten; cited in Hauser, Geschichte, 387; emphasis added. See Judd, Contested Rituals. 43. As Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky observed in his widely disseminated anti-Jewish polemic Judenspiegel, ‘‘The Jew is compelled to circumcise; if he has no children to circumcise, then he takes ducats or talers, or even smaller coinage’’ (85). 44. Indicative of the difficulty of identifying Jews by their ‘‘characteristic’’ nose, the entry on the organ in the 1901–06 Jewish Encyclopedia (9:338–39) notes that, beyond the statistical analyses of the predominance of straight over aquiline or arched noses in all Eastern European Jewish communities, it is a caricaturist’s focus on ‘‘Jewish nostrility’’ that distinguishes the Jewish from any comparably shaped noses ascribed to other ethnic or racial groups. 45. Admittedly, cutting this Gordian knot would be more thematically apropos. 46. By asking this question, I do not posit either a singular modernity or rival modernities. 47. All the more doubtful since the print of DeMille’s film that I have recently viewed did not have the scene that I recalled. 48. West, ‘‘New,’’ 121. Also see Dussel, ‘‘Beyond Eurocentrism,’’ 15: ‘‘modernity begins in 1492.’’ 49. The significance of this coincidence was already signaled by Columbus. In the prologue to the log of his first voyage to the New World he ties his own commission in January 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella to find the sea route to India as the logical next step ‘‘after having banished all the Jews from all [the king and queen’s] kingdoms and realms.’’ Of curious significance is that Columbus errantly situates the expulsion order in January rather than the 31 March date when it was issued (Log, 4, 5 n). 50. Hess has recently left his relative obscurity thanks to Pat Robertson’s revival of antisemitic conspiracy theory in his antimodern book The New World Order—there Robertson sees Hess’s 1840 tract, The European Triarchy, as a harbinger of the (once?) notorious Trilateral Commission and argues that ‘‘the precise connecting link between the German Illuminati and the beginning of world communism was furnished by the German [read Jewish] radical named Moses Hess’’ (New, 69–70). Robertson’s text often virtually plagiarizes Nesta Webster’s 1921 antisemitic diatribe, World Revolution, although he does excise virtually every reference by Webster to an individual’s ‘‘Jewishness.’’ On Robertson and Hess, see Lind, ‘‘Reverend.’’ 51. Hess, Revival, 211. Twenty-five years earlier (1837), Hess had already made this claim in Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit, which he had published

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under the sobriquet of a ‘‘young disciple of Spinoza’’ (Heilige Geschichte, 72). That same year, Berthold Auerbach concluded his historical novel Spinoza with a comparable annunciation, delivered in a vision to Spinoza by a dying Ahasuerus, the ‘‘ewigen Juden’’ (298–300). These works are discussed in chapter 1. Also see Skolnick, ‘‘Writing.’’ 52. J. Hess, Germans, Jews, 20, 23. 53. Cheyette and Marcus. ‘‘Introduction,’’ 3; one can assume for Cheyette and Marcus (and for this author as well) that the ‘‘Jewish other’’ is not the only excluded figure that helped form and maintain that order. 54. Frosh, Hate, 196; like the variations of the social-scientific or Girardian theories of the scapegoat, that Judentum is the object of persecution is largely accidental in this account. 55. Reading Julius Wellhausen’s invocation in the Prolegomena (425) of the ‘‘great pathologist of Judaism’’ as referring to Spinoza; see the discussion of this identification in n. 64 of chapter 1 of this volume. 56. Schopenhauer, Parerga, 2:262. 57. Pasto, ‘‘ ‘Strange Secret Sharer,’ ’’ 447. 58. Compounding the anxiety about Jews was the intersection of Jewish burial practice (customarily within 24 hours of death and without embalming) and the emergence of an obsessive fear of premature burial that emerged in the late eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth. See Katz, Out, 144; Efron, Medicine and German Jews, 97–104. 59. It is against such superstitious figurations, as Eduard Gans, Hegel prote´ge´ and then-president of the Verein fu¨r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden declared at the 28 October 1821 meeting of the organization, that the Wissenschaft des Judentums must and does do battle; Gans, ‘‘Erstlinge,’’ 37. On the pervasiveness of such imagery also see Newman, ‘‘Death.’’ 60. Schopenhauer, Parerga, 2:261. Also see chapter 8 for additional sources and discussion of Ahasuerus/Ahasver/Ewiger Jude/juif errant/Wandering Jew/ Eternal Jew. 61. Graetz, ‘‘Historic Parallels,’’ 4–5; cited in Hart, Healthy Jew, 130, 131. 62. Nossig, ‘‘Auserwa¨hltheit der Juden,’’ 4. 63. Brosses, Du culte; Kant, Religion; Hegel, Religion and World History; Comte, Positive; Marx, Capital; Binet, ‘‘Le fe´tichisme’’; Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia; Freud, Three Essays and ‘‘Fetishism’’; Benjamin, ‘‘Work of Art’’; Apter, Feminizing; Schor, Reading; Bhabha, ‘‘Other Question’’; McLintock, Imperial. 64. Bill Pietz’s remarkable genealogical studies in ‘‘The Problem of the Fetish’’ have demonstrated that whereas the term fetishism (fe´tichisme) was coined by de Brosses, the purported practices and beliefs to which the term referred as well as the family of Portuguese words related to feiticaria (or witchcraft) from which the signifier emerged had long been in circulation.

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Feiticaria derives from the Latin facticius (i.e., manufactured) that also had the occasional negative connotation of artifice or something factitious (without an original). In medieval Christian discourse such objects were associated with the manufactured amulets, images, and potions employed for witchcraft (as opposed to the talismans, remedies, relics, and other sacramental objects that were given legitimacy by the Church); in medieval Portuguese these came to be known as feitic¸os. Feitic¸os were distinguished from idolos as witchcraft was from idolatry, or more generally as magic was distinguished from those religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and paganism or idolatry—that could sustain an orderly society. Further, unlike idolos, feitic¸os were concerned with material bodies rather than souls. In contradistinction to such magical objects, the object of idol worship was the immaterial demon or false god that the idol represented and who acted upon the soul of the worshipper. As the Portuguese established a trade zone along the west coast of Africa from what is now Senegal to Angola, feitic¸o rather than idolo came to be the dominant Portuguese ascription of the ‘‘religious’’ practices of the cultures encountered in this series of spaces of cross-cultural contact and exchange. As trade grew, the related pidgin term fetisso became affixed by all involved parties to sacramental objects, traded commodities, political emblems, medical preparations, and women’s ornaments that circulated among the various populations who peopled these areas of cross-cultural exchange. By the eighteenth century, as the ‘‘fetisso’’ began its migration from the exclusive reserve of travel literature—written by Europeans and describing encounters with non-European others—to adorning the emergent Enlightenment critique of clericalism and superstition by Europeans about other Europeans, it was rechristened as the ‘‘fe´tiche’’(fetish). Also see Geller, ‘‘Fetishism.’’ 65. I have excluded what some, such as the late cultural critic Edward Said, might consider to be the preeminent other of the Christian West, Islam. Islam too is figured by the practice of circumcision, but the focus on the internal or proximate other as well as the criterion of antiquity, of antedating—according to Christian European chronology—Christianity, precludes Islam’s inclusion among the complications to the fetish-producing mechanism examined here. See Pasto, ‘‘ ‘Strange Secret Sharer.’ ’’ 66. Another factor that contributed to the overvaluation of the sui generis is signaled by Foucault, ‘‘Author.’’ The devaluation of the Bible—and the people of the Bible—as source of European culture was coincident with the shift from the book to the author. Such self-authorizing discourse was borne by a triumphing bourgeoisie that understood itself as a universal class and proprietorship as a universal value. 67. Geiger, Judenthum, 96. 68. However, the Chinese and, to a much lesser extent, the Indian problems will be shown in this work to intertwine periodically with the Judenfrage. On the latter, see, e.g., the posthumously published 1905 attempted

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transvaluation of Weininger’s analogization of Jews and women by Freud’s junior colleague, Otto Rank. In ‘‘Essence,’’ Rank offers another ethnic example of a people who, like the Jews, ‘‘are, so to speak, women among the people and must above all join themselves to the masculine life-source if they are to become ‘productive’ ’’: ‘‘the Indians, whose affairs derive from the distant past and who have preserved themselves to this day’’ (171). 69. In his 1793 treatise Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant analogized clericalism to fetishism in order to distinguish between true moral religion and false religion, between autonomy and heteronomy. Such labeling allowed Kant to discredit his opponents, render them ‘‘irrational,’’ without ascribing either evil intent or demonism to them. ‘‘Now the man who does make use of actions, as means, which in themselves contain nothing pleasing to God (that is, nothing moral), in order to earn thereby immediate divine approval of himself and therewith the attainment of his desires, labors under the illusion that he possesses an art of bringing about a supernatural effect through wholly natural means. Such attempts we are wont to entitle sorcery. But (since this term carries with it the attendant concept of commerce with the evil principle, whereas the above mentioned attempt can be conceived to be undertaken, through misunderstanding, with good moral intent) we desire to use in place of it the word fetishism, familiar in other connections’’ (Religion, 165). By extending materiality from particular objects to all means, fetishism, or ‘‘fetish-faith,’’ came to extend beyond the borders of Africa to encompass everything in the realm of religion—including, in a clear allusion to Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, the Jews—except for ‘‘purely moral’’ religion (ibid., 181–82). 70. Schleiermacher, Glaube, 70. 71. Thus he adds: ‘‘Moreover, I speak of it, not because it is somehow the forerunner of Christentum; I hate that type of historical reference in religion’’ (Schleiermacher, On Religion, 211). On Schleiermacher’s foreclosure of Judentum as alien to Christianity, see Beckmann, Fremde Wurzel; Wolfes, ‘‘Schleiermacher’’; also Gerdmar, Roots, esp. 61–76. 72. On sati or suttee as mediator of the colonizer’s enunciation of authority, see Spivak, ‘‘Subaltern’’; Mani, Contested Traditions. On footbinding’s role in colonial discourse, cf. Zito, ‘‘Secularizing’’ and ‘‘Bound.’’ In his brief against accusations of Jewish ritual murder, Menschenopfer und Ritualmorde, the classicist Rudolf Kleinpaul introduces his discussion of circumcision as the always-already-substitute satisfaction of any Jewish infanticidal desires by comparing the use of widow-silencing music during sati with the (sometime) custom of instrumental play during a bris (11–12); he had just ascribed the name for the assumed cultic site of Israelite child sacrifice, Topheth, to the sound of drumming. The Chinese pigtail is examined in chapter 2 of this volume.

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73. Cf. McClintock, ‘‘Family Feuds’’: ‘‘All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationalism’s ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference’’ (62); also see Hawthorne, ‘‘Origins.’’ 74. Chapter 7 examines how Nordau sought to nuance such a construction of the Jew even as he accepts as natural the presuppositions of that construction. 75. Jensen, ‘‘Into the Spiral’’: ‘‘In mythical fantasies about original languages, original peoples or original religions, bourgeois Protestants increasingly encountered a paradigm which appeared to embody originness itself: Jewish identity. Its timeless quality—exemplified by the age of the Hebrew language, by the persistent existence of the Jewish people and by the eternity of the Mosaic religion—was ideal as the opposition to Protestant identity’’ (358; emphasis in original). 76. Schlegel, Orientalia, 74; cited in Polaschegg, Anderer Orientalismus, 202. See Benes, Babel’s Shadow, 95–96, on the attempts by some nineteenthcentury German theologians to demonstrate the linguistic affinity of German and Hebrew in order to preserve the literal truth of the Old Testament while also asserting the privileged position—the chosenness—of German and its speakers. 77. Olender, Languages; Lincoln, Theorizing; Hawthorne, ‘‘Origins’’; Benes, Babel’s Shadow; also see J. Boyarin, ‘‘The Other.’’ 78. The chapters in this book address a rather long period of time— principally from the first moves toward Jewish emancipation in the late eighteenth century to the Shoah—in which massive changes occurred in all sectors of everyday life, and a fairly wide geographic area that, while preeminently Germanophonic, nevertheless includes different polities with different political and religious traditions and institutions. Consequently, every effort will be made to address the chronotopic specificity of each text within the crisis of national identity detailed above. 79. Drawing on Gordon, Assimilation, historians of nineteenth-century European Jewry have adopted the distinction between acculturation and assimilation. See Kaplan, Making, and Frankel and Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community. In contrast to the implied disavowal of Jewishness in assimilation’s mimetic appropriation of European identity, acculturation recognizes that numerous forms of Jewish communal cohesion and practice existed, indeed thrived, despite the public adoption of many of the manners, appearance, and attitudes of the Gentile majority. Synagogue attendance does not necessarily define a Jew; nor are the public practices and self-conceptions of male Jews necessarily normative for Jewish women. While ‘‘acculturated’’ Jews generally intermingled with other Jews professionally and socially, they

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often sought to distance themselves from national, cultural, and ethnic markers of Jewishness before the Gentile world. For many such Jews, Jewishness was strictly a religious designation—‘‘of the Mosaic persuasion’’ or ‘‘of the Jewish faith’’—and hence reserved for the private sphere. Jews such as Max Nordau, as discussed in chapter 7 of this volume, did not wish to disappear, but quite the contrary—so long as their public visibility was not compromised by stereotyping. 80. See Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, chapter 3 (‘‘Caftan and Cravat’’). 81. See Born, Kafkas Bibliothek. 82. Gans, ‘‘Drei Rede,’’ 112. His assertion proved ironic; three years later he converted in order to assume a still-forbidden-to-Jews professorship at the University of Berlin. 83. Henseler, ‘‘Einige Gedanken’’; cited in Hirschmu¨ller, ‘‘Psychoanalyse,’’ 43. 84. As Presner writes: ‘‘[A]ll these ‘global’ hopes—the desire for unification, the reduction of distance, the freedom of exchange and mobility—shared a dialectical counterpart, namely, the anxiety over the potential sublation of nationality, the breakdown of the distinction between foreign and domestic, and the loss of German identity through a hybridization of people, languages, and customs’’ (Mobile, 174). Also see Baudrillard, In the Shadow, 20–22. 85. Cited in Becker, Fichtes Idee, 218. 86. Essai, 269 n. In Gobineau’s initial vision of white racial superiority, the so-called inferior yellow and black races as well as Aryan breeding with those races posed the greatest threats. Jews, as his note indicates, were a side issue. 87. Hauser’s work also achieved great repute, including with Dietrich Eckart, the editor of the NSDAP’s Vo¨lkischer Beobachter and Hitler’s mentor until his death shortly after the Munich putsch; see Eckart’s 1924 de facto testament, Bolshevism, where he describes Hauser’s text as ‘‘an excellent source of fascinating illuminations regarding the Jews’’ and from which Eckart then and there extensively drew. 88. Hauser, Geschichte, 96. 89. Rathenau, ‘‘Ho¨re Israel!’’ 456. The importance of Rathenau’s characterization of the devirilized male Jewish body is testified to by the explicit invocation of his remarks by Gu¨nther in his influential (and notorious) Rassenkunde, 150–51. 90. An impossibility rendered absurd by George Eliot in Daniel Deronda (see the discussion of the novel in chapter 1), the discretion-demanded elision of circumcision is exemplified by the changes made for publication in the correspondence between Carl Friedrich Zelter, the director of Berlin’s Singakademie and composition teacher of Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Johann

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Wolfgang Goethe. When Zelter’s 26 October 1821 letter expressing skepticism about the artistic potential of ‘‘the son of a Jew, [but] no Jew himself,’’ Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, appeared in print some twelve years later, his explanation of the distinction—that Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s ‘‘father at significant personal cost had not allowed his sons to be circumcised and educated them as is proper’’—had been altered to read, ‘‘at significant personal cost had allowed his sons to learn some things’’; Bilski and Braun, ‘‘Power,’’ 46 and n. 40. 91. Cf. Lupton, ‘‘Ethnos’’: ‘‘Physical yet not physiological, genealogical but not genetic, circumcision marks the Jews off as a distinct people without being a ‘racial’ indicator in the modern sense of an inherited trait . . . In European Christendom, increasingly distanced from the Jewish grounds of Paul’s life and thought, the ethnos flagged by circumcision increasingly came to denote a preserve of atavistic, dangerously literalist rites whose resistance to sublation challenged the dialectical narrative of Western history’’ (195). 92. The illustration is reproduced in Haibl, Zerrbild, 79–80 (fig. 22). As the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s foremost drafter and cognoscente of heraldry, Stro¨hl would attend to the indexical significance of every detail in his graphic work. Other examples of circumcision scissor iconography include Edward von Steinle’s 1860 drawing, ‘‘Ein Dukat wird beschnitten’’ (Frankfurt, Sta¨delsches Kunstinstitut, Graphische Sammlung), in Dittmar, Darstellung, 447 (fig. 297), who discusses it and several other scissor-sharing drawings (258, 448–49 [figs. 298–99]); ‘‘Die Beschneidung,’’ a drawing of a scissor-bearing caricatured Jew clipping a coin that appeared in the Austrian satirical magazine Kikeriki in 1912 (Fuchs, Karikatur, 194); and the accompanying illustration to the opening stanza of Eduard Schwechten, Lied vom Levi, 3. 93. Bar Amitai, Beschneidung, 12. He tied this contemporary usage to the history of the Septuagint and subsequent translations of Esther 8:17, whereby ‘‘many of the people of the world professed Judaism’’ was read as ‘‘had themselves circumcised.’’ 94. Trebitsch, Geist, 186. In any case, circumcision was no longer mandatory for the officially required registration of all citizens in a staterecognized religious community when Trebitsch was born in 1880. Lessing devotes a chapter to Trebitsch in Ju¨discher Selbsthass, 101–31. 95. See, e.g., Cooper and Stoler, ‘‘Between Metropole’’: ‘‘the otherness of colonized persons was neither inherent nor stable; his or her difference had to be defined and maintained’’ (7). 96. On the return of the foreskin to the resurrected Jesus, see Steinberg, Sexuality; conversely, on Jesus’s foreskin as relic, see Shell, ‘‘Holy’’; Mu¨hlbauer, ‘‘Sanctum.’’ 97. On the notion of dispositive or apparatus, see Foucault, ‘‘Le Jeu’’; Deleuze, ‘‘Dispositif’’; Bu¨hrmann, ‘‘Normalisierung.’’ Heiden, Der Jude, esp.

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225–27; Walter, La Shoah; and Geulen, Wahlverwandte, 199, employ a notion of dispositive in their analyses of the German Jewish Question, but identify the apparatus as either ‘‘the Jew’’ or ‘‘antisemitism.’’ On ‘‘circumcision’’ as dispositive, see Geller, On Freud’s. 98. The depiction of the 1475 ritual murder and circumcision of Simon of Trent, for example, was often reproduced, from the medieval woodcut by Michael Wohlgemut in Hartman Schedel’s extremely popular Chronicle of the World (Nuremberg, 1493; see, e.g., Abramson and Hannon, ‘‘Depicting’’) to nineteenth-century accounts, such as Ghillany, Menschenopfer, 683–87, which presented it as historical, or Kleinpaul, Menschenopfer, 11–15, which presented it as myth; also see chapter 5 in this volume. 99. Mohels were also referred to as Schochets (i.e., ritual slaughterers), and in small Jewish communities one individual often assumed both positions. 100. Not only is the German term for coin-clipping ‘‘Beschneidung’’ (circumcision), but in denunciations of usury the Jewish and Gentile practitioners were referred to as ‘‘beschnittene und unbeschnittene Juden’’ (circumcised and uncircumcised Jews). 101. Tacitus, Germania, 2.1 and 4.1–2. 102. See, among others, Bauman, Modernity, esp. 102–59, for an extended analysis of the Sisyphean fate of Jewish hopes and desires for assimilation. 103. Schnitzler, My Youth, 6–7. 104. The figuration of Jewish identification as a not-necessarily-obvious, chronic wounding long precedes Schnitzler. In chapter 4 Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s image of her heart bleeding from her inscribed Jewessness and its resonances are discussed. 105. For an alternative extended metaphor derived from Benjamin’s analysis of shock, see chapter 9. 106. In setting forth this particular genealogy, Freud may well have been following the lead of Solomon Reinach, a Jewish classicist and historian of religions who classified both Judentum and Christentum as barbaric and viewed the Talmud and those backward Jews who followed it with disdain, but who nonetheless played leading roles in both the Alliance israe´lite universal and the Societe´ des e´tudes juives. To make his case in Totem Freud extensively drew upon several of the studies collected in Reinach’s Cultes. For example, the competition between Christianity and Mithras is discussed by Reinach in his essay, ‘‘Morality,’’ 72–73. In another study, the 1909 Orpheus, 228, Reinach writes that ‘‘Christianity belongs to a group of religions quite different from the official creeds of Judæa, Greece and Rome . . . [s]uch were the religions of Osiris, Dionysos, Orpheus, Adonis, Attis and the like.’’ Reinach, however, omits neither Judentum nor Judaea when discussing Christian origins. On Freud’s strangely judenrein reconstruction of Christian origins in Totem and Taboo, see Geller, On Freud’s, 115–16.

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107. The Arcades Project (AP), 207 (H2, 7)/Passagen-Werk (PW), 274 ( H2a, 1); embedded quotation is Benjamin, AP 205/PW 271 (H1a, 2). 108. See Benjamin, ‘‘Character and Fate,’’ against the reading of ‘‘character’’—the ongoing dialectical interrelation of subject and world—as fate, i.e., as a fixed, natural, and necessary identity. Benjamin’s ‘‘fate,’’ too, lacks the moralizing judgment and determined futurity of the traditional notion. The past cannot be changed, nor is it mourned; rather, it can be reappropriated in the present to effect another possible future. 109. Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 12. 110. Lavater lists Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, Galen, Pliny, and Cicero among his predecessors (ibid., 38–39). Aristotle too had been credited with a missing treatise devoted to the study of physiognomy. 111. Lavater, cited in Elon, Pity, 49. 112. See Gubar, Judas. 113. The single mention of the Jews in the first edition of Natural Varieties (122) placed the Jews among the peoples of Europe; when Blumenbach discusses circumcision, he merely refers to ‘‘The Scriptures’’—as well as to Herodotus’s cohort of the Colchians, Egyptians, and Ethiopians (126). 114. Blumenbach, Natural Varieties, 157. Two other Jewish skulls are noted among his remaining collection (nos. 31–32); however, they follow two German skulls and are in turn followed by at least another 36 skulls of elsewhere classified as Caucasian peoples, before Blumenbach lists otherwise nonCaucasian classified skulls. 115. Ibid., 234; see J. Hess, ‘‘Jewish Emancipation,’’ 203–12; also see Hahn, Jewess, 32–33; and chapter 4 of this volume. 116. Such as the best-selling antisemitic writer Artur Dinter, discussed in chapter 2, who asserted in his contribution to the 1932 anthology of essays on the Jewish Question, Der Jud ist Schuld (The Jew Is Guilty), ‘‘The outer appearance of a man is the fully corresponding (adequate) expression of his inner being’’ (Dinter, ‘‘Rassen- und Judenfrage,’’ 95). 117. Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 12. 118. See Carpenter, ‘‘ ‘A Bit of Her Flesh’ ’’; on the productivity of repression, see Foucault, History. 119. Benjamin, Origin, 35. 120. The physiognomic analyst often encounters scenes of persecution and oppression but does not engage in a moral critique that is satisfied with labeling a particular representation as misogynistic, antisemitic, etc. Such moralizing does not address the important questions of how this particular textual moment relates to other moments in a text (let alone outside the specific text). The tautological moralizing explanation that an antisemitic speech is spoken because the speaker is an antisemite does not address the

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specificity of the utterance, its relationship to where it is uttered, the resonances it may find with its receivers’ histories and structures of experience, or even what those receivers may later encounter. 121. On canon, hegemony, repression, and dialogism, see LaCapra, Representing; also see Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation, esp. 19–27. 122. For example, Napoleon’s ‘‘infamous decree’’ of 1808 placed a ‘‘tenyear’’ restriction on the residency rights of and the debt repayments to the more traditional, preeminently Ashkenazic, and already emancipated Jews of Alsace, but not on the more assimilated, preeminently Sephardic Jews of Paris. Alsatian Jews were differentiated from both other French Jews and other nonJewish Alsatians, because they hadn’t sufficiently undifferentiated themselves. 123. Greenblatt, ‘‘Resonance,’’ 170. Or as Sussman, Task, 8, puts it, ‘‘the precipitous emergence of an image that magically both coalesces and ties together hitherto proliferating loops of association.’’ 124. The physiognomic analyst assumes these things to be motivated signs but makes no absolute claims about their motivations, let alone authorial intentions. That something appears here and now also means that something else does not appear here and now. Whether the selection of this versus that is significant or not, it means that this material object (e.g., a phoneme or a morpheme) was available for iteration. And questions remain: How could this ‘‘quasi-object’’ become available? Since the analyst also assumes that any thing is overdetermined—after all, a cigar is also a good smoke—that is, that many factors may have lead to its emergence at all, why give primacy to one factor or factors rather than others, and what are the consequences of such a choice? And if we want to ascribe significance to the choice of this rather than that, what are the criteria? Have certain avenues of knowledge construction been foreclosed or opened up by both the use of this ‘‘quasi-object’’ and the set of possible determinations to which it points, rather than another such and the set of possibilities it may indicate? Moreover, the analyst neither reduces the ‘‘quasi-object’’ to a trope nor deduces a code that can be superimposed upon it. For example, the German Verkehr is employed in discourses about a variety of different fields of activity, and people often engage in a variety of fields; however, can I argue that Verkehr is a trope that organizes a specific text if there is no material trace, that is, if the morpheme Verkehr itself does not appear? Or what if that trace is employed in one of the fields addressed by the text but not in the rest? And is the import of the notion of Verkehr simply that it can connect these fields? Are there no other possible tropes that perform this function? See the analysis of Verkehr in chapter 6 as opposed to the use of Verkehr as trope and code in Mark Anderson’s ornamental analysis (see ‘‘Traffic’’) of Kafka’s early writings. 125. Matthew Biberman’s theosexual matrix, the imposition of the malefemale imposition on that between the Christian and the Jew-Devil in Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature, does indicate some

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fascinating correspondences. Still, even if such ‘‘gendered’’ accounts can be traced back to 1503, no claim for identity or origin or prooftext should be made, such as Willis Johnson (‘‘Myth,’’ 274 and n. 2) quite rightly critiques in my 1992 ‘‘(G)nos(e)ology.’’ 126. I hope that this work has avoided what, coincidentally (see chapter 6’s analysis of rags), Benjamin proffers as an ‘‘[e]xample of a ‘cultural historical’ perspective in the worse sense’’: ‘‘Huizinga speaks of the consideration displayed for the life of the common people in the pastorals of the late Middle Ages. ‘Here, too, belongs the interest in rags and tatters which . . . is already beginning to make itself felt. Calendar miniatures note with pleasure the threadbare knees of reapers in the field, while paintings accentuate the rags of mendicants . . . here begins the line that leads through Rembrandt’s etchings and Murillo’s beggar boys to the street types of Steinlen.’ J. Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters (Munich 1928), p. 448. At issue, of course, is actually a very specific phenomenon’’ (AP 482–83/PW 603 [N15, 4]). 127. Benjamin to Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem, 22 October 1917, in Briefe, 1:151. 128. See the extended discussions in chapters 5 and 9. On the literature of ¨ ber den heutigen this and other such alleged Jewish pathologies, see Gutman, U Stand, e.g., 38–39 (on the ‘‘Fabel’’ of the foetor Judaicus); and the American physician and anthropologist Maurice Fishberg’s The Jews, e.g., 314–16 (on the foetor judaicus), the New York Times review of which bears the title ‘‘A Study of the Jewish Race; Dr. Maurice Fishberg Seemingly Denies Their Claim to be a Peculiar People.’’ As the review’s title suggests, the anonymous reviewer was somewhat skeptical of the contents and conclusions of a book ‘‘that has been collected rather in the interest of a particular theory or tendency’’ and whose author ‘‘seems most anxious to make his own people as commonplace as possible and to rob them of all claim to the title of a peculiar people’’ (‘‘A Study,’’ BR 75). 129. See Salzani, Constellations. 130. Wassermann, Life, 150; cited in Judd, ‘‘German,’’ 279. 131. See my introduction to On Freud’s, and chapter 9 of this volume. 132. Benjamin, ‘‘Toys and Play,’’ 120. 133. Benjamin, ‘‘Some Reflections,’’ 144. Benjamin’s source is Brod, ‘‘Dichter,’’ 1213. 134. That is, I am not offering mere examples, particulars that could be replaced by any other members of a general set and that serve merely to illustrate; nor am I presenting universal tropes that are endlessly iterated across diverse corpoi. Rather they are exemplars that portend the whole, the mediation(s) of Jewish identification; they ‘‘exceed’’ the particular without being subsumed by the universal and ‘‘step out of’’ the universal without being

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reduced to a mere particular thing or absolute other; see Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness. 135. Freud, Interpretation, 524. 136. Admittedly a tautology, but that does not preclude significance. 137. On testing as a kind of performance, see Benjamin, ‘‘Work of Art,’’ 111. 1. ‘‘feminization’’ and the problem of jewish persistence Earlier forays into this material were presented to the graduate honors class ‘‘Religion and Culture’’ under the auspices of the Faculty of Theology, University of Leiden, May 2000, and to the Sigmund-Freud-Gesellschaft at the Freud Museum in Vienna, April 2001, prior to the publication of a version titled ‘‘Spinoza’s Election of the Jews: The Problem of Jewish Persistence,’’ in Jewish Social Studies 12 (2005): 39–63. That version persists, albeit with substantial supplementation, in this chapter. 1. Spinoza is not suggesting a new religious covenant between Gd and the Jewish people; the reestablished state is not a consequence of renewed election. Rather the existence of the state is an index of the chosenness that Gd awards any people, Jew or Gentile. 2. For the variety of responses, see, inter alia, Strauss, ‘‘Introduction,’’ ‘‘The Testament,’’ ‘‘Das Testament’’; Yovel, ‘‘Epilogue’’; Levy, Baruch or Benedict. 3. Cf. Heine, Romantic, 208: ‘‘All our present-day philosophers, perhaps without knowing it, look through glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground’’; Romantische Schule, 178. 4. While Franz Rosenzweig never directly addressed ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament,’’ he did examine the relationship among persistence/chosenness, Judentum’s relationship to the political, and European nationalism in the posthumously published essay ‘‘Atheistic Theology’’ that he wrote in 1914. Following Dana Hollander’s analysis in Exemplarity and Chosenness, Rosenzweig can be seen as reading what he viewed as ‘‘the Jewish wrong-headed abandonment of the fundamental Jewish dogma of Jewish chosenness as a response to the question of why the Jews still exist. European Jews assumed that the Jews’ stubborn refusal to abandon chosenness (a claim to absolute otherness that affronted the universal), and in its stead recognize itself as one example among many (as one of the different instances that made up the whole), generated hatred against them. They hoped that notions of Jewish essence would provide a counter to the telos of the fundamental philosophic question of the relationship between particular peoples and universal humanity: the necessary dissolution of the former into the latter. Their mistake: thinking that persistence was a sign of Jewish chosenness and that

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removing the purported signified would save the signifier-bearing people. The answer for Rosenzweig, however, was not to assume a semiotic relationship between persistence and chosenness, but to recognize this relationship as a synthetic a priori one whereby gentile-perceived persistence was an abiding in eternity’’ (Geller, Review of Exemplarity and Chosenness). 5. See sources cited in n. 2 above, as well as Zac, ‘‘Spinoza’’; and Brykman, ‘‘L’e´lection.’’ Pines, ‘‘Spinoza’s Tractatus,’’ 506–08, cites the discussion in Pulgar’s Ezer Ha-dat of the Jewish pursuit of peace instead of war as a ‘‘natural explanation’’ of their wretched plight as well as Machiavelli’s analysis of how a particular understanding of Christianity had rendered Christendom effeminatio in his Discourses on Livy (I.6.4, II.2.2). 6. While perhaps glossing over the uneven developments across the European continent, the continued role of religious identification whether implicit or explicit, and my research focus on Germanophones, as well as eliding other identity markers, most notably class, this characterization nevertheless holds for the general shifts in European self-identity. See Michel Foucault, History, and work inspired by it, such as Stoler, Race, and McClintock, Imperial, as well as the introduction to the volume. 7. Philologists led the search in the first half of the nineteenth century for national identity, especially German national identity, by determining the genealogical origins of the Volk-shaping Sprachorganismus (linguistic organism) and mapping its historical development as well as its possible divagations, deformations, and decline. See Benes, Babel’s Shadow, esp. 76–83 (on the very influential theories and terms of Franz Bopp). In the second half of the nineteenth century, national identity formation drew more upon the emerging discipline of anthropology and the discourse of evolution (and its obverse, the theory of degeneration). 8. See Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 425, and the discussion below. 9. This is an allusion to Theodor Herzl’s utopian vision of a Zionist Palestine, Altneuland. 10. Walther, ‘‘Spinoza und das Problem,’’ 284. 11. Debates (plural) would be more appropriate, both within the Jewish community and among the Gentiles, as Walther (‘‘Spinoza und das Problem’’) points out. See Altkirch, Maledictus; Levy, Baruch or Benedict and Baruch Spinoza. 12. See sources cited in nn. 2 and 5, as well as Novak, Election, and Klausner, ‘‘Ju¨discher Charakter.’’ The indirection of this paragraph is modeled upon Klausner’s rhetoric. 13. Walther, ‘‘Spinoza und das Problem,’’ 285. Echoing this claim from a very different perspective than that assumed here is Schapkow, Freiheit. 14. See Beiser, Fate; Yovel, Adventures; and Heine, Zur Geschichte, 92–93, among many.

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15. During the eighteenth century Moses Mendelssohn and other members of the German Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) movement primarily sought to distance themselves from any association with the name Spinoza as much as, if not more than, any part of his writings. Spinoza’s work was read by a number of Gentile philosophers, and among the primary activities of Haskala members was engagement both with the Gentile literary and philosophic tradition and with their German contemporaries about that tradition; however, the general identification of Spinoza with atheism and hence with the assumed negation of the beliefs and values shared by the Christian, pious and rationalist alike, on the one hand, and the appropriation of Spinoza’s work for anti-Jewish discourse by a number of the Haskalists’ prospective dialogue partners, on the other, contributed to the de facto continuation of the Herem. Although Mendelssohn early in his career defends his fellow Jew Spinoza, he later goes to some length to distance his great friend, the writer and philosopher G. E. Lessing, posthumously, from identification with Spinoza, following Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s initiation of the pantheism controversy. Further, in his last and premier work, Jerusalem, completed after the controversy, Mendelssohn mentions Spinoza only once. Even so, in his ‘‘Golgatha and Scheblimini!’’ Johann Georg Hamann still attacked the author of Jerusalem as ‘‘a circumcised brother-in-faith in the spirit and essence of heathen, naturalistic, atheistic fanaticism’’ (‘‘Golgatha’’ E, 199/ ‘‘Golgotha’’ G, 315); see Levy’s ‘‘Hamann’s Concept.’’ Hamann’s derisive Spinozan identification of Mendelssohn is more than the projection of a pietistic Counter-Enlightenment thinker upon a philosophic adversary; the current consensus holds Spinoza, and in particular the Tractatus, as a significant, if unacknowledged, influence on and foil for Mendelssohn’s work, not the least because of its apparent cooptation by Kant for his depiction and denunciation of Judentum; cf. Walther, ‘‘Spinoza und das Problem,’’ 290–93. Hamann’s exchanges with Mendelssohn implicate familiarity with the Tractatus and its third chapter. Hamann employed circumcision—the ritual and the result—as the principal differentiating trope of Judentum from Abraham to his present: the Jews still wield the circumcision knife—‘‘to everything that carries a purse’’ (‘‘Golgatha’’ E 200/G 316). He ties Jewish law to the existence of a state and compares its actuality after the state to a ‘‘Mumie’’ (E 188/G 308), and alludes to Mendelssohn’s validation in terms of natural law of the significance of Jewish ritual and ‘‘eternal perdurance’’ as a ‘‘Wolffian divining rod’’ (Wu¨nschelruthe—a euphemism for penis and an object that shares traits with circumcision; see chapter 4) that ‘‘revealed a vein of Chinese ceremonial’’ (E 186/G 307). Hamann’s reference to Jewry’s ‘‘extraordinary taste for law-giving and the Royal luxuriance in it’’ (E 186/G 307) suggests that effoeminarent did not yet evoke gender identifications as it would among

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readers the following century. More, Hamann is here drawing upon Luther’s translation of Exodus 32:25, since he elaborates upon the ‘‘lax babbling of Aaron by which he intended to make it elegant.’’ Yet even as the reference to luxus connects with the Machiavellian origins of Spinoza’s use of effoeminarent to characterize the Jews, the alternative translations of the Exodus passage (e.g., in the KJB ‘‘for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies’’), as well as the extensive play with circumcision and uncircumcision in Hamann’s polemic against Mendelssohn, reinforces the Spinozan mediation. 16. Spinoza 1837; Spinoza 1854. 17. Hess, Heilige Geschichte 1837; Holy History. 18. Skolnick, ‘‘Writing.’’ 19. In the chapter ‘‘Confessionen’’ (Confessions); translation from Auerbach, Spinoza English, 341–42. 20. ‘‘[U]nd vornehmlich durch die Beschneidung’’ appears only in Spinoza 1837 (2. Teil, 182–83) and neither in the 1854 edition nor in the English translation. 21. Cf. Efron, Medicine and German Jews, esp. 222–33; Judd, Contested Rituals; and chapter 3 in this volume. 22. Katz, ‘‘Struggle,’’ 349. 23. See n. 20 above. 24. Auerbach, ‘‘Lebensgeschichte,’’ xl. Cf. Kalischer, Benedikt (Baruch), 40. 25. Auerbach, ‘‘Lebensgeschichte,’’ xl n.1. 26. Ibid., xl n. 2. Auerbach ties it to the mass movement following the false messiah Sabbati Sevi. 27. Ibid., xl n. 1. 28. In the epilogue to the novel Spinoza envisions an encounter with the Wandering Jew, who, thanks to the emergence of the ‘‘free Jew’’ that Spinoza embodies—‘‘a Savior to mankind’’ (Auerbach, Spinoza English, 443)—can now stop his wandering, die in peace, and take with him ‘‘that doom of that Israel which slew Jesus Christ on the Cross’’ (ibid., 444). 29. Moses Hess, Heilige Geschichte 1837, 79 (Holy History, 19); the explicit addition of ma¨nnliche also pre-empts any gender associations evoked by the feminine-gendered noun Phantasie. 30. E.g., ibid., 333 (91). 31. Ibid., 176 (43). 32. See chapter 2 in this volume on the possible sources and afterlife of Spinoza’s analogy of the Jews with the Chinese. 33. Moses Hess, Heilige Geschichte 1837, 339–40 (Holy History, 94). Pinsker’s ‘‘Auto-Emancipation,’’ the Spinoza-inspired 1882 pamphlet that catalyzed the formation of secular ‘‘Zionist’’ organizations in Central and

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Eastern Europe, also employs this haunting metaphor to describe the Jewish people; however, that ‘‘ghostliness’’ is not an existential category but an ascription by the oppressive, dominant culture (see below). 34. Moses Hess, Revival, 64; translation altered, and Hess’s translatorelided parenthetical reference to the TTP restored; see Moses Hess, Rom und Jerusalem, 15. 35. Moses Hess, Rom und Jerusalem, 211. 36. Cf. Shaffer, ‘‘Kubla Khan,’’ 225–91 and nn.; and chapter 5 of this volume. 37. While we have little knowledge of Eliot’s methods of translation of the TTP, we do know that she consulted the other extant translations of the Ethics in French and German. Hence it is not unlikely that she had consulted Auerbach’s 1837 translation of the TTP. 38. As many commentators have noted, Eliot could only sustain her narrative of Daniel Deronda’s quest to learn of his origins so long as neither he nor Eliot note his circumcision. Cf. Marcus, ‘‘Human Nature.’’ 39. There is no explicit reference to the Tractatus, let alone to the ‘‘Testament,’’ in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda notebooks. The markings in her copy of volume 10 of Graetz, Geschichte, however, indicate that she read his chapter on Spinoza; see Irwin, Notebooks, 356 n. 2. 40. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 596–98. Prior to this commentary, Mordecai had remarked that ‘‘the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality’’ (594). 41. On the terror and anger induced by a more familiar, barrier(boundary-)breaking figure of overdetermined gender, the French icon of revolution Marianne, see Hertz, ‘‘Medusa’s Head.’’ 42. By having her exemplar of masculinity Daniel Deronda discover threequarters of the way into the novel his Jewish descent—but not his circumcision—and then in the end leave for Palestine to fulfill Mordecai’s vision, was Eliot refusing the fetishistic transaction as an answer to the Jewish Question employed by a number of the German authors, such as Strauss and Feuerbach (see chapter 5 of this volume), whom she had translated, and proposing an alternative? Mufti, in Enlightenment, clearly suggests that she was offering such an alternative solution: ‘‘If . . . Nathan the Wise may be treated as the ‘first’ text of the era of emancipation, then Deronda might be considered its ‘last,’ bringing to a conclusion of sorts a century of concern with the manner of existence of the Jews within the newly national European societies, releasing into view the paradox that the fullest flowering of assimilation would mean not the disappearance of the Jews as a separate people but rather their reorientation and resettlement as a separate (and ‘equal’) nation. This manner of

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settling the Jewish Question is thus the first instance historically of those modes of thinking that seek resolution of the minority crisis of the (majoritarian) nation-state through a partition of society . . .’’ (110). 43. Levy, Baruch or Benedict, 74. 44. Pinsker, ‘‘Auto-Emancipation,’’ 77, 77, 77–78. Pinsker’s language of uncanny form (unheimliche Gestalt) and strange and peculiar impression (eigentu¨mlichen, fremdartigen Eindruck) recalls Freud’s discussion in Moses and Monotheism of how circumcision, by recalling the feared castration, is one of the deeper motives for the hatred of the Jews: ‘‘a disagreeable, uncanny impression’’ (einen unliebsamen, unheimlichen Eindruck; 91). While Pinsker does not explicitly refer to circumcision and, indeed, refrains from referring to Jewish practices at all (perhaps to keep the blame for the persecution where he felt it belonged—on the persecutors), he does employ cutting and circumcision- (or castration-)suggesting figuration to describe the Jews: ‘‘clipped wings’’ (abgeschnittenen Flu¨geln) and ‘‘maimed limbs’’ (mit verstu¨mmelten Gliedern; das Glied regularly signifies the penis); ‘‘Auto-Emancipation,’’ 86, 91 (cf. Autoemanzipation, 16, 19). 45. See D. N. Smith, ‘‘Judeophobia,’’ on possible ethnopsychological and ethnological sources for Pinsker’s notion. 46. Pinsker, ‘‘Auto-Emancipation,’’ 78. 47. Moses Hess, Revival, 173–75. 48. Kalischer, Spinozas Stellung, 4, 11; in the latter passage Kalischer is paraphrasing Heine’s description of Spinoza in Zur Geschichte, 48. 49. Kalischer, Spinozas Stellung, 26. 50. Since the highly reputed Freytag’s negative depiction of the Jewish merchant Veitel Itzig in his very popular novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855) was repeatedly cited in antisemitic literature, Kalischer may have felt compelled to employ Freytag taking a contrasting position on the Jews in his polemic. Cf. Mosse, ‘‘Image.’’ 51. Kalischer, Spinozas Stellung, 39–40. 52. Even Pinsker begins with an extended discussion of antisemitism as a sickness; cf. Pinsker, ‘‘Auto-Emancipation,’’183ff. Plague imagery also permeates the antisemitic diatribes of the Kaiser’s court preacher Adolf Stoecker, such as ‘‘Unsre Forderungen.’’ See chapter 3 of this volume for a more extensive discussion of this figuration. 53. Kalischer, Spinozas Stellung, 44. 54. Ibid., 43. 55. See the work of Robert A. Nye, e.g., Crime and Masculinity. 56. Joe¨l, Spinozas, 42–43. Joe¨l’s writing had a dual purpose: to demonstrate Spinoza’s reliance on Jewish sources and to contribute to Joe¨l’s ongoing examination of Jewish influences on the non-Jewish world.

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57. Cohen perhaps misread practical principles for principal practices. In any case, since Cohen does not separate practice from principle, to give up one is to give up the other. 58. Cohen’s language recalls that of Schopenhauer in Parerga, 1:73, where he wrote how Spinoza in part 4 of the Ethics ‘‘speaks [with regard to animals] in accordance with the first and ninth chapters of Genesis, just as the Jew knows how to, so that we others, who are accustomed to purer and worthier doctrines, are here overcome [u¨bermannt] by the foetor Judaicus [Jewish stench].’’ 59. Repeating his rhetorical strategy of citing a philosemitic statement by an author commonly associated with anti-Jewish discourse, as noted above with regard to Freytag, Kalischer cites extensively from these philosophers in the last section of his pamphlet to support his claims about Spinoza. 60. Cohen, ‘‘Spinoza u¨ber Staat,’’ 333. 61. Freudenthal, Spinoza, 201. In Geschlecht und Charakter published the year before (1903), Weininger did not draw on Spinoza for his notorious virtual identification of Judentum and Woman. Nonetheless he lacked, like any Jew according to Weininger, the necessary genial authority: Spinoza, ‘‘the most outstanding Jew of the last 1900 years, . . . [i]s hugely overrated everywhere, owing less to a deeper study of his works than to the accidental circumstance that he is the only thinker whom Goethe read in some detail’’ (SC 285). 62. Again, in German circumcision and circumcised are, respectively, Beschneidung and beschnitten. 63. Brunner, Judenhass, 113; cited by Hessing, ‘‘Prologue with Spinozana,’’ 32, in a parallel column to Spinoza’s statement on the persistence of the Jews and their possible re-election. In his ‘‘intermezzo on circumcision as viewed and previewed by Spinoza,’’ Hessing prefaces the extended citation of Brunner by remarking, ‘‘I have to mention on such historical occasion as this homage to Baruch de Spinoza, that a contemporary pupil of Spinoza, although so eager to revive his spiritual legacy, could not face and endure such dilemma and discrepancy. . . . Constantin Brunner did back and support Spinoza with much enthusiasm in his essential basic teachings save only when it came to such a super-delicate crux latent in Spinoza’s prediction of the re-establishment of the lost Jewish homeland’’ (ibid., 31; telling ellipsis in original). 64. Pace Smend, ‘‘Wellhausen,’’ 198, and Rendtorff, ‘‘Ju¨dische Bibel,’’ 109, who, drawing upon the description of the Law (but without mention of either the cultus or the Mosaic theocracy) as paidagogus in Galatians 3:24, assume that the pathologist is Paul; the ‘‘great pathologist’s’’ diagnosis that ‘‘in the Mosaic theocracy the cultus became a pedagogic instrument of discipline’’

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follows the depiction of ceremonial observances in the theocratic state in chapters 5 and 17 of the Tractatus; cf. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 425. 65. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 548. 66. Theilhaber, Dein Reich komme! 37, 168. 67. But Strauss seems to have felt some trepidation about employing the word feminizing. He appears to be employing the Auerbach translation of the Tractatus, rather than the already-standard Gebhardt translation, when he finally cites the passage he claims as Spinoza’s testament; effoeminarent is translated as weibisch (womanish), rather than as verweichlichen (render soft or effeminate). His analysis of the passage, however, shifts to the less manifestly gendered language of ‘‘softening’’ (Verweichlichung) and ‘‘enfeebling’’ (‘‘Testament,’’ 220). 68. Strauss, ‘‘Introduction.’’ Cf. Steinberg, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 12. 69. Strauss, ‘‘Testament,’’ 220. 70. Ibid., 221. 71. Cf. Hitler, MK 325. 72. See Geller, On Freud’s, 206–07. 73. Did Freud have access to that text? A bit of a problem, insofar as according to the concordances to both the Standard Edition and the Gesammelten Werken, Spinoza appears only twice in Freud’s corpus—and one of the appearances is a witticism from Heine about their ‘‘fellow unbeliever Spinoza.’’ Further, the extant holdings of Freud’s library do not contain a copy of the Tractatus. There is, however, one record of his possessing a work that contained the Spinoza citation in its entirety, a work that, based on his letter expressing gratitude to its sender, Freud had at least skimmed: Joseph Klausner’s essay ‘‘Ju¨dische Charakter der Lehre Spinozas,’’ in Spinoza: Dreihundert Jahre Ewigkeit (125) edited by Siegfried Hessing, a collection to which Freud had been invited to submit a chapter, but in which only his gracious letter of refusal appears (Hessing, Spinoza: Dreihundert, 196–97). Freud’s thank-you letter to Hessing appears in its entirety in Hessing, ‘‘Freud’s Relation,’’ 229. Of the Festschrift, Freud writes, ‘‘It produces an impression by its rich content and by the many sided points of feeling.’’ 74. Freud, Moses, 136–37. 75. The threat to male Jews hiding or fleeing from the Nazis and their collaborators that was posed by the discovery of their circumcision is a major topos of the memoir literature of the Shoah, from Jakov Lind’s Counting My Steps and Sally Perel’s Europa, Europa (Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon) to Michael Skakun’s On Burning Ground and Ruth Klu¨ger’s Still Alive (weiter leben); it is no less prominent among the ‘‘fictions’’ of survivors such as Arnost Lustig’s Night and Hope, Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies, and Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky.

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2. tailing the suspect, or the braiding of gender and ethnic difference This chapter itself braids a number of strands of earlier work. First begun as my contribution to the ‘‘Fetishism’’ panel that I organized for the Critical Theory Group at the 1991 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, it then assumed expanded and varied manifestations in lectures at UNC–Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University, and then publication as ‘‘Judenzopf/Chinesenzopf: Of Jews and Queues’’ in positions: east asia cultures critique 2,3 (1994): 500–37. Its initially limited discussion of Heine underwent mutation to become ‘‘Hairy Heine, or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference,’’ in Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (London: Rowman and Littlefield, Lexington Books, 2005), 105–22, and has been re-fused with the earlier variants and infused with much new information and rethinking to generate this version. 1. Dio´sy, New Far, 70; emphasis in original. This work by the vice president of the Japan Society in London was widely reprinted in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War. 2. Macgowan, How England, 19; cited in Zito, ‘‘Secularizing,’’ 8. Macgowan appears to draw upon the cultural evolutionary scale in which humanity moves from the savage and crude to the civilized and refined across the bridge of barbarism; just as the ignorant and uncreative savages seem to transcend their level of development through their ingenious body techniques, so the barbaric practice of footbinding belies the Chinese claim for cultural attainment. 3. Weismann, Essays, 434 and n. Weismann employs this statistical observation to supplement the results of his own experiment, in which he cut off the tails of 901 young mice produced by five generations of artificially mutilated parents, without a single example of any abnormality of tail (431–33). 4. Freud, ‘‘Fetishism,’’ 157. It is perhaps ironic that Freud’s speculation about male Chinese gratitude appears after all Chinese men have shorn their pigtails (Zo¨pfe) as a consequence of Sun Yat-Sen’s revolution (see below). On the epistemology of fetishism, see Mannoni, ‘‘Je sais.’’ 5. In the 1891 revision of Psychopathia Sexualis, fetishism is designated as the general form of pathological sexuality, and hair fetishism is the first and foremost example of physiological fetishism, i.e., that form of sexual objectification which does not preclude procreation as the ultimate aim of sexuality. See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia, 36–41 (on physiological fetishism), and 211–17 (on pathological hair fetishism, including hair-despoilers [Zopfabschneider; cases 100–101]); cf. his Contra¨re Sexualempfindung, 166–69 (cases 78–79). Krafft-Ebing here draws upon the German classical tradition: Goethe. In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (201), Wilhelm ‘‘discretely [bescheiden] asks

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[his secretly beloved Countess], ‘Do I then actually possess [a locket] of your hair in this precious ring?’ ’’ 6. See the discussion of Lichtenberg below. I have explored the relationship among various accounts of dog-tail-cutting and Freud’s notion of sublimation in Geller, ‘‘ ‘Of Snips. . . .’ ’’ 7. Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 648 n. 183: ‘‘The identification of barbarism with strange dress and hair styles goes back at least to the Analects.’’ 8. It may be argued that in the eighteenth century color replaced circumcision as the generalized index of difference between the West and the Rest. As Sander Gilman has described, Jews too were colored by this shift; see, e.g., Body, 173–77. Nonetheless, circumcision/uncircumcision still maintained its primacy as the Jewish/European difference. 9. Whether the opposing groups are Christian/Jew or Christian/Muslim. Circumcision also assumed diacritical dimensions outside of Europe; in ‘‘Of Foreskins,’’ Boon has brilliantly described the force of this opposition in the Muslim/Hindu contact situation in Indonesia. 10. Pohlen, Freuds Analyse, 170. Freud had already set forth this chain of associations among castration, circumcision, and cutting hair—without explicit acknowledgment of the connection among the three—almost a decade earlier in Totem and Taboo (153 n. 1); see the discussion of this passage in Geller, On Freud’s, 115–16. 11. As I’ve argued in On Freud’s, these two instances of female mutilation are complemented by the (hidden) circumcised penis in Freud’s essay; ‘‘Fetishism’’ itself was generated through the attempted foreclosure of a circumcision-defined gendered Jewish identity as much as by analysis of the maternal phallus. Perhaps not coincidentally, Chinese footbinding, (hidden) circumcision, and Jewish identification converge at a pivotal scene in one of Freud’s favorite novels—a novel already encountered in chapter 1—Daniel Deronda. In the Princess’s meeting with the son she bore, Daniel Deronda, and her revelation of their common Jewish descent, the Princess characterizes what being a Jewish woman had meant to her. She incisively describes it as a product of cutting action and analogizes the result to that of Chinese footbinding: ‘‘To have a pattern cut out—‘This is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet . . .’ ’’ (Daniel Deronda, 694). On Deronda’s ‘‘circumcision,’’ see Newton, ‘‘Circumcision,’’ and Geller, On Freud’s, esp. 40–42 and 230–31 n. 58. 12. In European culture, hair, cut hair, has been more a symbol of violence and desire, of licit male mastery and illicit female sexuality, of devirilized men and reified women, than a sign of ethnic difference. On the one hand, there is Samson; on the other, Guy de Maupassant’s story ‘‘La Chevelure’’ (literally,

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the head of hair), in which an antique dealer’s discovery of an enormous strawberry blond plait (natte) of hair in a seventeenth-century Italian chest sends him into an erotic delirium: Yes, a head of hair, an enormous plait [natte] of blond hair, almost red, which must have been cut off against the skin and tied together by a gold cord. I remained stupefied, trembling, perturbed! An almost anesthetizing perfume, so old that it seemed to be the soul of an odor, flew from this mysterious drawer as well as from this amazing relic. I picked it up, gently, almost religiously, and I took it from its hiding place. Immediately, the tress unfurled, spilling its gilded wave which fell to the ground, thick and light, supple and brilliant, like the fiery tail [queue] of a comet. (Contes et nouvelles, 2:110; trans. Apter, Feminizing, 108)

13. As with dreams about the nose (cf. Freud, Interpretation, 387), the sexual focus upon the Zopf entails a displacement from lower to upper. See Wittels, Sigmund Freud, 146; also see Freud, Introductory, 306. 14. Dio´sy, New Far, 73. 15. Mason, ‘‘Western Concepts,’’ 143, drawing upon Power, Recollections, 103ff; and Cunynghame, Aide-de-Camp, 1:85ff. To Western eyes, Chinese hair always already feminized its bearer. For Gautier (Wouter) Schouten: ‘‘The hair . . . is plaited and fixed behind the head like that of our women. . . . It is their hair which is their principal ornament: its tresses are rubbed with coconut oil, or some other oil, to make it more lustrous and smooth. They also wear on their heads a needle of gold or silver, ivory, brass &c. In fine, those who have never seen Chinese before do not fail at first to take them for women, and it has often happened that lascivious sailors have seized them in error.’’ Schouten, Oost-Indische voyagie; cited in Purcell, Chinese, 461–62. 16. Freud, Leonardo, 96. 17. Though the passage appeared in Freud’s original 1910 version of Leonardo, the footnote did not appear until the essay’s second edition (1919). This curious instance of Freudian deferred action is examined in Geller, On Freud’s. 18. As discussed in n. 15 of the preceding chapter, the rhetorical uses of circumcision in Hamann’s parodistic rebuttal of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, ‘‘Golgotha’’ (E, 186) reflected his apparent familiarity with Spinoza’s Tractatus and, specifically, its third chapter. 19. On Voltaire’s veneration of China, see Berger, China-Bild, esp. 66–81. 20. Cited in Ribot, L’he´re´dite´, 127. 21. Schallmayer’s comparison appears in the third edition of his Vererbung und Auslese as a concession to a critic of the original edition, which had won the 1903 worldwide Krupp competition for best response to the question ‘‘What can we learn from the theory of evolution about internal political

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development and state legislation?’’; Vererbung, 287 n. 3. Schallmayer drew upon Ribot’s L’he´re´dite´ for his paean to Chinese biological stock. On Schallmayer, Ribot, and the Chinese, see Weiss, Race Hygiene, 49, 82. 22. In Nietzsche, Notebooks (Juli 1882–Herbst 1885), 31 (44), 32 (8); also see 29 (1) and his contemporaneous poem fragment ‘‘Jenseits der Zeit’’ in 28 (23). 23. Jung, ‘‘Relations,’’ 149 n. 8; cf. idem, ‘‘Rejoinder.’’ 24. Jung, ‘‘State,’’ 165, 165–66. 25. On these stereotypes, see, respectively, chapter 8 and Geller, ‘‘Of Mice.’’ 26. Jung, ‘‘State,’’ 165. Might Jung’s opposition of Jew and Chinese, and not simply an English idiom, have subliminally led his translator’s word choice in translating the ‘‘Lu¨cken [in der Ru¨stung]’’ as ‘‘chinks [in the armour],’’ rather than the more common translation of Lu¨cke as ‘‘gaps’’? 27. Herder, Ideen, 13, 10, 9. 28. Ibid., 10, 67. Curiously, notes Dio´sy, New Far, 70–72, the one custom otherwise culturally insular Chinese wholeheartedly adopted from another culture was the queue. 29. Herder, Ideen, 11. 30. Ernst Rose, Blick, 69 (the Schlegels quotation), 102 (Hegel quotation), 98 (Michelet and Hartmann quotations). Also see Dawson, Chinese, and Goebel, ‘‘Constructing.’’ 31. Cited in Schuster, China, 57–58. 32. On the history of this slogan, see Gollwitzer, Gelbe Gefahr; also see the unsigned article ‘‘The ‘Yellow Peril.’ ’’ 33. Bamberger, ‘‘Deutschtum,’’ 19; cf. Stoetzler, State, 55. Treitschke himself does not employ the ‘‘incoming flood’’ image; however, in ‘‘Unsere Ansichten’’ he had invoked the frightening image of ‘‘a horde [Schaar] of assiduous pants-selling youths out of the inexhaustible Polish cradle invading across our eastern border year after year.’’ He had in the previous paragraph differentiated himself from the ‘‘flood [Fluth] of anti-Jewish libels [that] engulf the book market,’’ streaming out of and for the vulgar masses, and later depicted German Jews as ‘‘German-speaking Orientals’’ (‘‘Unsere Ansichten,’’ 9, 9, 14; translation, Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 343, 343, 345). Appearing in the 15 November 1879 issue of Preußische Jahrbu¨cher, the article was soon published, together with Treitschke’s immediate public rejoinders to his critics, separately as Ein Wort u¨ber unser Judenthum (A Word about Our Judentum). Bamberger employs ‘‘Chinese’’ rather than ‘‘Orientals’’ because he, unlike Treitschke, considers German-speaking Ostjuden as imbued with German culture and patriotism, and hence not to be lumped in with the Occidental German’s Oriental antitype; for Bamberger and his readers there is no question about the Oriental nature of the Chinese.

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34. Cited in Pichl, Scho¨nerer, 1:321; the essay appeared over the course of issues 21–23 in late 1886. 35. Ibid., 2:101. 36. Ibid., 3:330. 37. Ibid., 1:323; the bill was proposed on 22 May 1887. 38. Lazare, Antisemitism, 362. 39. Fritsch, ‘‘Kultur,’’ 266. 40. Puschner, Vo¨lkische Bewegung, 104, re: E.P., ‘‘Juden-Frage, ChinesenFrage.’’ 41. Dio´sy, New Far, 327–36 and frontispiece. An ironic Dio´sy (331–35) analyzes the crudity and naivete´, if not base ignorance, that produced the particulars of the Kaiser’s design. This image is discussed further in n. 56 below. 42. Gra¨fe, Antisemitismus, 151–52. 43. Cited in Ernst Rose, Blick, 100, from an 1866 lecture republished in Rosenkranz, Studien. Rosenkranz is drawing upon the negative characterization of eighteenth-century German Zopf-bearers and their contemporary emulators, both literal and figurative, who had developed among nineteenthcentury ‘‘moderns’’; see the discussion of the semantic shift in German linguistic use below. 44. Yule, Narrative; cited in Purcell, Chinese, 80. 45. Verhael van der reyse, 2: 26 n. 2; cited in Lach and Van Kley, Asia, 1349. 46. Scot, ‘‘Discourse,’’ 2:443. The discussion of Chinese-Jewish comparisons in Leonard Blusse´’s 6 March 1992 presentation at Princeton University’s Shelby Collum Davis Center, ‘‘Expansion or Diaspora? The Chinese Maritime Trade Network and Its Effect on Southeast Asian State Formation,’’ led me down the footnote trail to this and the following analogical statements. 47. Herbert, Itinerie; cited in Purcell, Chinese, 455 (via Crawfurd, History, 1:136). Purcell (Chinese, 452) cites other comments from European agents in Bantam that implicitly draw upon the analogy, e.g., George Bell of the English East India Company wrote to Richard Cocks at Bantam on 9 June 1617, ‘‘for never yet, having dealt with many, could I find an honest and faithful Chinesa’’; Letters Received by the East India Company, 6:13. 48. Marx also adds the Germans to this group of swindling peoples. The passage is discussed from a different perspective in chapter 6 of this volume. 49. Roscher, ‘‘Stellung,’’ 24–26. 50. Captain Osborn, Quedah, 216ff.; cited in Purcell, Chinese, 124. 51. On the stereotype of the Jewish old-clothesman, see Evans, ‘‘ ‘Ole Clo.’ ’’ Evans includes the cartoon of the Jewish-coded Chinese oldclothesman in his presentation. I would like to thank Rainer Erb, then of the Zentrum fu¨r Antisemitismusforschung of the Technische Universita¨t, Berlin, for calling my attention to Evans’s lecture and to this picture in particular.

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52. The verse from Frank Bush’s play O! Moses is reproduced in Erdman, Staging, 164. 53. Gu¨tzlaff, Journal; cited in Purcell, Chinese, 123. 54. Ferrars and Ferrars, Burma; paraphrased in Purcell, Chinese, 89. 55. Vella and Vella, Chaiyo! 194–95. King Vajiravudh’s diatribe, Jews, originally published in four parts in the Siam Observer (July 1914), later appeared in a pamphlet from Bangkok’s Siam Observer Press as well. The latter two parts on the Chinese are retranslated in Landon, Chinese, 34–43. Sixteen years earlier H. Warington Smyth, a director of Great Britain’s Royal Department of Mines, had already referred to the Chinese as the ‘‘Jews of Siam’’ in Five Years, 1:285–86. This association was reinforced by the educational advisor to the Thai government, J. G. D. Campbell, in his Siam, 270–74; cf. Skinner, Chinese Society, 160–61. Another turn-of-the-century voice that compared the Chinese to the Jews was that of Rev. Arthur J. Brown. Following a concise distillation of most of the (unacknowledged as such) stereotypes of Jewish character and power, Brown writes: ‘‘And yet this race [of Jews], which has so abundantly demonstrated its ability to cope with the Greek, the Slav, and the Teuton, finds itself outreached in cunning, outworn in persistence and overmatched in strength by an olive-complexioned, almond-eyed fellow in felt shoes, baggy trousers, loose tunic, round cap and swishing queue who represents such swarming myriads that the mind is confused in the attempt to comprehend the enormous number’’ (New Forces, 42). 56. Moreover, while King Vajiravudh constructs point-by-point parallels between the Jews and the Chinese, one characteristic that does not find its equivalent is that unlike the Chinese, the Jew ‘‘may conform to every custom, or adopt every outward habit of the nation amongst whose people he dwells’’ (Jews, 5). For the King ‘‘the Thai are not even as much like the Chinese as Europeans are like Jews’’ (32). He does not recognize the hidden sign of difference: the circumcised penis. While King Vajiravudh, unlike Spinoza, does not explicitly correlate body parts, he is very much concerned with representation. He comments on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s famous depiction of the danger of the ‘‘Yellow Peril’’ as a giant Buddha looming on the horizon. He protests the blasphemous use of the Buddha, the inclusion of all the ‘‘races of Asia,’’ especially the Thai, within this generic image, and the nonidentity of this icon with the countenance of the true threat, the Chinese (50–51). 57. Cf. Williams, Middle Kingdom, 1:761. 58. Cf. Berger, China-Bild, esp. 44–48. 59. Cf. Martini, Bellum Tartarium, 32–33, 198–99; and Nieuhof, Embassy, 85. 60. Gilles, China, 179. 61. Cf. Berger, China-Bild, chap. 6, ‘‘Chinesen auf dem Theater.’’

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62. Isaacs, Images, 110. 63. Oost-Indische voyagie; cited in Purcell, Chinese, 460. 64. Cf. Gao, ‘‘Concerning.’’ He comments on the Jesuit Gozani’s observation of circumcision among the Jews of Kaifeng (letter of 25 August 1704, in Dehargne and Leslie, Juifs, 54, 56, 59): ‘‘Yet of circumcision, to which Judaism attaches much importance, the three inscriptions [i.e., the three stellae commemorating various rebuildings of the synagogue] say not a word. This is understandable. Circumcision is in direct contravention of the Confucian injunction against ‘harming the body bestowed by one’s parents.’ It would have been unwise for the Kaifeng Jews to publicly proclaim it. But they did in fact observe the ceremony for many years’’ (Gao, ‘‘Concerning,’’ 122; echoed in Leslie, Survival, 96; cf. 100). He also includes Matteo Ricci’s testimony from Chinese Jews, that ‘‘circumcision . . . impeded their relations with others, especially for those who wanted to become officials’’ (Dehargne and Leslie, Juifs, 32; letter of 26 July 1605) and ‘‘circumcision . . . seemed very cruel to their gentile wives and relatives’’ (ibid., 34; 1608 diary extract). 65. Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 1:650. 66. Kuhn, Soulstealers, 58. Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 1:648–49, makes similar claims for the gender-coding of Chinese hair. Kuhn bases his assertion on Edmund Leach’s classic study of Indian ascetics, ‘‘Magical Hair.’’ Leach’s double move of symbolically identifying hair with the phallus and foreclosing this ‘‘private’’ (i.e., ritual) symbol from the public sphere has been criticized from an anti-psychoanalytic perspective by Hallpike, who writes in ‘‘Social Hair,’’ ‘‘Cutting the hair equals [i.e., is symbolically associated with] social control’’ (261); and on methodological grounds by Hershman, who in his article ‘‘Hair’’ shifted hair’s symbolic referent from sexual organ to sexual strength (and fertility), and its realm of symbolic effectivity, when placed in the context of social control, back to the public. Also see the more methodologically and theoretically self-critical work of Ganath Obeyesekere; his Medusa’s Hair synthesizes these approaches by exploring the cultural effects of castration-evocative hair in Sri Lanka. Against interpretations of Chinese culture based on universal gender categories—whether psychoanalytic ones or not—the Chinese historian James L. Hevia, drawing on Barlow, ‘‘Theorizing,’’ has suggested in conversation that it may be inappropriate to apply unproblematically European sex binaries to Chinese coiffure. Such transpositions perpetuate the often Zopf-mediated representation of the Chinese as effeminate; cf. Hevia, ‘‘Loot’s Fate.’’ 67. Kuhn, Soulstealers, 54. 68. Cf. Williams, Middle Kingdom, 1:765. 69. Wakeman, Great Enterprise, 1:649. 70. Ball, Things Chinese, 649 (s.v. ‘‘Secret Societies’’).

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71. Williams, Middle Kingdom, 2:581. 72. Ibid. 73. Sun’s account is reported in Cantlie and Jones, Sun, 40. 74. Grimms Wo¨rterbuch, 16:80 (s.v. ‘‘Zopf’’). 75. Hoffmann, Dissertation. Coincidentally, the publication of the English translation was bound together with that of Ramazinni, Diseases, discussed in chapter 6 of this volume. 76. Pezzl, Skizze, 108; cited in Gilman, Body, 172. 77. Cf. Fishberg, The Jews, 316. When discussing the Jewish predilection to plica, Fishberg refers to it as Weichselzopf. Also see Russell, Tour, 2:140–44; Kowalewsk, ‘‘Researches’’; Derblich, Plica, 6–9; Hamburger, Irrlehre, 31–63. Bo¨nisch-Brednich, ‘‘Weichselzopf,’’ records numerous accounts of this ailment and its relation to the dirty living conditions among Jews and non-Jews. 78. Lichtenberg, ‘‘Fragment,’’ 117. 79. The Judensau or Jew Sow was a medieval anti-Jewish icon that adorned numerous churches in German lands as well as, until demolished in 1801, the tower on the bridge that crossed the Main River to Frankfurt’s principal harborside gateway. See Shachar, Judensau, esp. 35–37, 52–61, and nn.; R. Cohen, Icons, 57–58; and chapter 5 of this volume. 80. Lichtenberg then tosses in his analysis of a third tail, that of a ‘‘most promising young pig. . . . Not completely weaned’’ that is rife with ambivalent ethnic identification and valuation. I return to Lichtenberg’s menagerie, and this piglet in particular, in ‘‘Pictures at an Exhibition: (Un)Natural Histories of the Jews,’’ my current research on how Jewish identifications also drew upon the millennia-old tradition of natural history—the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of animal life—to generate an entire menagerie of Jewish creatures: apes, parasites, rats, vermin, vipers, and vultures. This project maps and analyzes these efforts at promoting or subverting—and often both—the bestialization of the Jew in the Central European cultural imagination. 81. Literally ‘‘to cut off old pigtails.’’ See Fu¨llmann, Alte Zo¨pfe, in which the author extensively maps the diverse ways Zopf, as motif and as symbol, mediated Germanophone discursive as well as coiffurial engagements with the question of epochal difference and change precipitated by the French Revolution. Fu¨llmann examines a number of the Heine texts that I also address below; however, he attends to Heine’s use of Zopf to instantiate cultural/ political rather than Jewish/Gentile difference. 82. Fichte, Beitrag, 144n. 83. Bendavid, Etwas, 54–55. See Sven-Erik Rose, ‘‘Lazarus.’’ 84. In Judenspiegel (1819), Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky repeated the anonymous pamphleteer’s recommendation, albeit more directly: ‘‘In order to

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prevent the Jews from further reproducing themselves, one could also in the future castrate [verschneiden] instead of circumcise [beschneiden] what of theirs p[i]d[dle]s on the wall’’ (144). Such passages lead Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, 175–78, to conclude that non-Jews were fascinated by the ‘‘mystery’’ (Mysterium) of circumcision and that it underlay ‘‘the anti-Jewish pornography that quite often conflated circumcision with castration’’ (178). 85. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Fantasy, 19. On the alleged Jewish inability to sing well, see, inter alia, Wagner, Judaism in Music, and Weininger, SC; also see chapter 9 in this volume. 86. Hartwich, Romantischer Antisemitismus, 130. The Falk text is drawn from the collection Schmitz, A¨sthetische Pru¨geley, 90. To support his interpretation Hartwich also draws on Hoffmann’s frequenting, between 1811 and 1813, of the musical-literary salon of the Jewish assimilant Fanny Mark (Marcus), for whose daughters he also served as music tutor. 87. Rifeli, ‘‘Language,’’ 83. 88. Jackson, French Court, 207; Uzanne, Frenchwoman, 13–14. 89. Arnim, ‘‘Kennzeichen,’’ 364. 90. Ibid., 365. 91. Hegel, ‘‘Spirit,’’ 186. 92. Panizza, Der Korsettenfritz, 265. The epigraph is omitted from the English translation of ‘‘Operated Jew’’; the translation of the epigraph is from Bu¨rger, ‘‘Lenore,’’ 55. 93. Further discussion of Panizza’s story appears in chapter 8 of this volume. 94. This characterological triangulation of Jews, women, and Chinese would be repeated by the Italian philosopher and anarchist Camillo Berneri; in Juif anti-se´mite he comments that the Jews are ‘‘gifted with the painstaking patience [characteristic] of woman and the Chinese’’ (33–34). 95. Also see Ho¨dl, ‘‘Genderkonstruktion.’’ 96. Heine, Pictures, 156. This characterization of Spinoza by Heine in his travel narrative ‘‘The North Sea Part III’’ appeared only in the first edition of the second volume of his Reisebilder; see Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 318 n.1, 321n. 26. 97. The search engine at the Heinrich-Heine-Portal, covering the Du¨sseldorfer Heine-Ausgabe (Hamburg, 1973–97) and the correspondence contained in the Heine Sa¨kularausgabe (Weimar, 1970–84), lists thirty-two appearances (including one in a letter) of Zopf combined with its variants—Zo¨pfe, Weichzelzopf, Zo¨pfchen(s), Zopfmonarchen, Zopftum, Steinzopf, Zopfzeit, bezopft, Philozopf—in Heine’s writings. 98. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 501. 99. Richter, Auswahl.

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100. Heine, Aufzeichnungen, 622. 101. Heine to Moses Moser, letter of 14 October 1826, in Heine, Prinzessin, 112. 102. Cf. Bering, Name als Stigma. 103. Heine, Harz, 98/99; translation altered. 104. Ibid., 98/99–100/101. 105. Ibid., 98/99; translation altered. 106. Cf. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish, 107–08. In the first act of Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Lord Burleigh, seemingly impervious to the sensuality of the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots, is compared (by association—she refers to the coterie of aristocratic court officials to which he belongs) to a eunuch who guards the Sultan’s harem. On stage Burleigh is usually cloaked in the imposing robes of the Lord High Treasurer that conceal not only the lower half of his body but also any doubts about whether he is impervious to her charms. Shakespeare’s Henry IV by contrast wears pants that are more revealing. Heine’s reference to the actor’s ‘‘Versehen’’ anticipates the work on the psychopathology of everyday life by one of his greatest devotees, Freud. 107. Bo¨rne, 114. 108. Testifying to the importance of the Zopf in Heine’s social and political commentary of the time is a quote from the poet’s contemporary, the writer Heinrich Laube, on how Heine ‘‘often so bitterly ridiculed his [German opponents] in German simply by holding up their thick, long, and rigid Zopf before [his reader’s] eye’’ (cited by Brod, Heine, 310). 109. Heine, WuB 1:333; Complete Poems, 403. 110. The next chapter explores the intersection of discourses about Jews and disease. 111. Heine, Complete Poems, 399. 112. Summary of Paulus, Ju¨dische Nationalabsonderung, 74–79, in Katz, ‘‘Struggle,’’ 325. 113. Or perhaps from its German cognate, Zapf or tap (as in a beer tap). What Zapf and Zopf share is a shape; thus, in German the uvula is called a Za¨pfchen. 114. Heine, Complete Poems, 399; Heine, WuB 1:328: ‘‘Das Volk wie katzenja¨mmerlich,/Das eben noch so scho¨n besoffen!’’ (ll. 7–8). 115. Heine, Complete Poems, 402. 116. Editor’s ‘‘Kommentar,’’ in Heine, Sa¨mtliche Schriften 4:928. 117. For Heine’s friend Karl Marx, the anachronistic absolutism indexed by the German Zopf extended beyond the displaced coiffures of Wilhelm IV’s Prussian Christian state: ‘‘Even the negation of our present political situation is a dusty fact in the historical junk room of modern nations. If I negate powdered wigs [Zo¨pfe], I am still left with unpowdered wigs [Zo¨pfe]’’ (Marx, ‘‘Contribution,’’ 245).

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118. Heine, WuB 1:440; Complete Poems, 487. 119. The poem’s refrain would make the German Bartlett’s Quotations, Georg Bu¨chmann’s ‘‘treasury of citations of the German people,’’ Geflu¨gelte Worte, 140. Its contemporary familiarity (i.e., in the 1840s) is evidenced by Marx’s use of the refrain, without acknowledgment, in German Ideology (GI 318/DI 299) as a critical tu quoque gloss on Max Stirner’s own allusion to Chamisso’s poem in Stirner’s critique of idealist political philosophy and its ide´es fixes in The Ego and His Own. 120. As Heine writes in the preceding stanza of the disciplining rod, ‘‘Ja, ganz verschwand die Fuchtel nie,/Sir tragen sie jetzt im innern. . . .’’ (‘‘Yes, the rod has never quite disappeared,/But now they bear it inside them’’); WuB 1:440; Complete Poems, 487. 121. This still identifiable and identifying diametrical displacement of the Zopf recalls the diametrical relationship between Zopf and beard that Heine observed, discussed above. 122. Heine, Rabbi, 39. 123. ‘‘Am Hochzeitstag wird die Braut in einen immer dafu¨r benu¨tzten Sessel gesetzt. Man schneidet ihren Zopf ab und ersetzt ihn durch einegestickte Kappe’’ (On her wedding day the bride is set in a chair that is always used for this occasion. Her braid is cut off and a cap is put in its place); from the history of the Radok family by the German-Australian physicist Rainer Radok. Originally found, but no longer available, on the Mahidol Physics Education Centre website, http://mpec.sc.mahidol.ac.th/Radok/KAP1.htm. 124. Heine, WuB 2:128; Complete Poems, 653. 125. Heine, WuB 2: 154; Complete Poems, 671. 126. Heine, WuB 2:169–72; Complete Poems, 679–85. 127. Kafka, ‘‘Report.’’ See Geller, ‘‘Of Mice.’’ My current project, ‘‘Pictures at an Exhibition: (Un)Natural Histories of the Jews,’’ greatly expands that analysis 128. Heine, Memoiren, 215–16. The Zopf as the symbolic substitute for a Jewish-associated animal’s Schwanz makes another appearance in one of Heine’s very last poems that I also analyze in my current project, the fable ‘‘From the Age of Pigtails’’ (‘‘Aus der Zopfzeit’’; Complete Poems, 777–78) about two very hungry rats standing before a rifle- and Zopf-bearing guard at Kassel’s city gates. Heine relates their dialogue, which concludes with an apostrophic offer to Elector Wilhelm, addressed as a ‘‘noble Philozopf’’ (an ironic play on, among others, pigtail lover, philosophe, philosopher king) to cut off their tails as a final act of homage. 129. Especially when the gift is conjoined with the dream of the sea and Panna Jadviga that immediately follows his receipt of this paternal memento; see Heine, Aus den Memoiren, 56–57, and the biblical narrative of Samson with which the novel ends.

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130. Aus den Memoiren is also rife with Chinese references, although they are not specifically attached to the father. They decorate the Inn of the Red Cow (heifer?) where the very Jewish Simson dwells and—after being fatally wounded in a duel over the existence of the deity at the inn—dies, in the extended death-bed scene that closes the work. 131. Heine, Memoiren, 208. 132. Ibid., 210. In Memoiren Heine does note that his mother’s brother, his uncle Simon de Geldern, maintained his Zopf and/or Zo¨pfchen; however, in contrast to his brother-in-law, this custom was in direct opposition to current style. Indeed, Heine emphasizes both how his uncle’s ‘‘unseemly even foolish’’ outer appearance—his Zopf swaying ‘‘from shoulder to shoulder as he traipses through the street’’ (196)—rendered him open to ridicule, as well as the long nose (for Heine, a characteristic Jewish marker) that along with his queue, he constantly ‘‘tugged’’ or ‘‘picked’’ (zupfte—zupfen shares a common etymology with Zopf ) on. However, Heine also observes that despite his uncle’s ‘‘peculiar’’ outer guise, inside he bears a much more respectable mien. Heine writes that his uncle bore the most upright and noblest heart he ever met. In contrast to Heine’s postbaptismal representation of either the assimilated Jews or the militant mandarinate, this depiction of his uncle’s Zopf marks a disidentification between outer and inner. 133. Busch, Fromme Helene, 2. According to Sander Gilman, Busch designed the layout of his volumes. Perhaps significantly, this stanza crowns the verso page, while Helen’s braids command the lower half of the opposing recto leaf (3). 134. Cited in Brainin, Legeti, and Teicher, Vom Gedanken, 130. They comment that this originally German nationalist slogan ‘‘expresses the superiority of the German, volkish Woman over and against the decadent, urban(e) Jewess. If we understand the braid [Zopf] as a phallic symbol, then this slogan, with its apposition of the ‘phallic’ German woman and the castrated, circumcised Jewess, indicates how feelings of superiority can serve as the defense against castration anxiety. For in actuality the page-boy cut [Bubikopf—lit. ‘boy’s head’] was historically the symbol of a real increase in women’s power. With the page-boy cut ‘outdated’ [verzopfte] ideas were set aside. When the blonde, German braid would again be proffered, this is to serve above all the calming of women’s fears of punishment for desiring emancipation too much. . . . Thus the slogan arouses, via the Aryan braid, desexualized images of a blonde, grounded naturalness, a ‘racial purity’ that predestines the preservation of the ‘purity of the entire folk.’ It has nothing in common with the allegedly sexual dirt and decadence of urban luxuriousness.’’ 135. Hauser, Geschichte, 322. 136. Makela, ‘‘Rise and Fall,’’ 183.

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137. F. W. Murnau dramatically stages this scene in his 1926 silent film masterpiece and box-office success Faust. 138. Hake, ‘‘Mirror,’’ 186. 139. See Georg Simmel, ‘‘On Fashion,’’ esp. 296–301. 140. See J. Boyarin, Unconverted Self. 141. Dio´sy, New Far, 72. 3. from mohels to mein kampf : syphilis and the construction of jewish identification The research for this chapter was initially performed under the auspices of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture (CCACC), Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Subsequent research was performed at London’s Wellcome Institute of Medicine. Shorter versions of the original manuscript were presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, History of Judaism section, 19 November 1990, in New Orleans; published in English as ‘‘Blood Sin: Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identity’’ in Fault Line 1 (1992): 21–48, and in French as ‘‘Le pe´che´ contre le sang: La syphilis et la construction de l’identite´ juive,’’ Revue germanique internationale 5 (1996): 141–64. This version returns to even as it rethinks, revises, and revitalizes the original sources. 1. Katz, From Prejudice, 245. The following account is drawn from Katz’s work. 2. Stoecker, ‘‘Unsre Forderungen,’’ 143, 154; trans. Massing, Rehearsal, 278, 287. 3. Treitschke, ‘‘Unsere Aussichten,’’ 9, 9, 14, 13; trans. Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 343, 343, 345, 345. 4. Fleck, Genesis; cf. Ellis, Sex in Relation, 324: ‘‘In 1879 a new stage of more precise knowledge of the venereal diseases began with Neisser’s discovery.’’ 5. On the effects of the germ theory—that a specific bacillus causes a specific disease—on the German populace and medical profession, see Weindling, Health, 16ff., and, most recently, Neumann, ‘‘Phenomenology.’’ 6. See Hart, Healthy Jew, 17, following Aleida Assman on ‘‘transcodification’’: ‘‘A code of beliefs and behaviors that had been fixed or categorized as ‘religious’ was translated into the realms of science and medicine.’’ 7. See Hull, ‘‘Bourgeoisie,’’ 259ff., on sexology/sexuality as fields in which doctors contested with lawyers and judges for jurisdiction; in particular, she focuses on how Krafft-Ebing distinguished ‘‘perversion’’ from ‘‘perversity,’’ that is, body/person from behaviors that deviate from the norm. The body belongs to medicine. 8. Corbin, Women, 281.

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9. Ellis, Sex in Relation, 335, citing the crusading novelist/journalist brothers Paul and Victor Margueritte (c. 1900). 10. Hutchinson was also discoverer of the so-called Hutchinson triad—the trio of symptoms whose presence indicates prenatal syphilis. Hutchinson’s ‘‘Address’’ is discussed in Crissey and Parish, Dermatology, 217. 11. Corbin, ‘‘L’he´re´dosyphilis,’’ 138, 141. 12. Que´tel, History, 136. Que´tel continues: ‘‘and its subordination—a rich source of future ambiguities—to a branch of pathology which was, after all, only relevant to the disease’s most obvious manifestations.’’ 13. On Fournier’s crusades, see Que´tel, History, esp. chaps. 6 and 7; Corbin, Women, ‘‘Le pe´ril ve´ne´rien,’’ and ‘‘L’he´re´dosyphilis’’; and Harsin, ‘‘Syphilis.’’ 14. Fournier, Syphilis; idem, La syphilis he´re´ditaire; Fournier and Portalier, L’he´re´dite´ syphilitique. 15. On heredity in the nineteenth century, especially the nondistinction between inherited and congenital, see Rosenberg, ‘‘Bitter Fruit,’’ esp. 191–201. 16. Corbin, ‘‘L’he´re´dosyphilis,’’ 146–47. 17. Roudinesco, La Bataille, 208, sees Be´ne´dict Auguste Morel’s 1857 Traite´ des de´ge´ne´rescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’epe`ce humaine, which initiated the discourse of degeneration, as a response to syphilis, ‘‘a major scourge (fleau) of modern society.’’ 18. Que´tel, ‘‘La syphilis,’’ 330. 19. Cf. Foucault, History, 124: ‘‘the bourgeoisie . . . looked to its progeny. . . . The concern with genealogy [of potential spouses] became a preoccupation with heredity; but included in bourgeois marriages were not only economic imperatives and rules of social homogeneity, not only the promises of inheritance, but the menaces of heredity.’’ 20. Du Camp, Paris, 3:490; cited by Corbin, Women, 24. 21. Richard Evans, ‘‘Prostitution,’’ 107. 22. This brief discussion of the social, economic, and professional developments in late nineteenth-century Germany is drawn primarily from the work of Weindling, Health; Pulzer, Rise; Cocks and Jarausch, German Professions; and R. Evans, ‘‘Prostitution.’’ Weindling’s work and the Cocks and Jarausch collection both find in the development of professionalism a third alternative to the Sonderweg debate. 23. Jarausch, when arguing for the specificity of the German professional, writes: ‘‘More appropriate to a state-controlled environment is Ju¨rgen Kocka’s suggestion [in the introduction to Conze and Kocka, Bildungsbu¨rgertum] that ‘profession means a largely non-manual, full-time occupation,’ requiring ‘specialized, systematic and scholarly training’ and elaborate examination,

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relying on a ‘monopoly of services as well as freedom from control by others,’ and providing economic rewards and higher social prestige based on ‘competence, professional ethics and the special importance of [its] work for society and common weal’ ’’ (German Professions, 11). 24. On the social, see Donzelot, Policing. 25. On the crisis of gender identity, cf. Wendy Brown, Manhood, 5: ‘‘The quest for manhood as freedom from constraint, as domination of men and the environment, and as thought and action liberated from sensual and emotional aspects of being, results in a bureaucratic and capitalist machinery in which man is utterly ensnared, unfree, and by Weber’s own account, inhuman’’; see also Maugue, L’identite´ masculine. On the crisis of national identity, still of historical value are Mosse, Crisis; and Stern, Politics. 26. On the reinscription of fixed, gendered sexual identities, cf. Foucault, ‘‘Introduction,’’ viii: ‘‘Biological theories of sexuality, juridical conceptions of the individual, forms of control in modern nations, led little by little to rejecting the idea of a mixture of the two sexes in a single body, and consequently to limiting the free choice of indeterminate individuals. Henceforth, everyone was to have one and only one sex. Everybody was to have his or her primary profound, determined and determining sexual identity; as for the elements of the other sex that might appear, they could only be accidental, superficial, or even quite simply illusory.’’ On the construction of definitive racial identities, see Weindling, Health; and Gilman, ‘‘Degeneration.’’ 27. Dr. Mougeot; cited by Corbin, Women, 23. 28. Nordau, Degeneration, 2. 29. See Iwan Bloch, Ursprung. Interestingly, both New World and Old World theories make their claims based on the skeletal remains of nasal destruction (ibid., 1:7, 119). 30. In Ursprung, 1:56, Bloch suggests that the Marranos imported typhus or the bubonic plague. Although he dismisses the theory that Jews were responsible for spreading syphilis, connecting the European appearance of syphilis with the Spanish ‘‘discovery’’ of America cannot but evoke the expulsion of Jews from Spain (ibid., 1:5). Also see Friedenwald, ‘‘Hebrew Reference,’’ 531. Yet even as Buret, Syphilis, 2:183–84, dismisses the theory, he cites Lady Jackson’s 1881 The French Court and Society on how the Marranos introduced the big disease or the disease of women into Morocco by allowing the native inhabitants to sleep with the Jews’ daughters and wives. Buret legitimates Jackson’s theory by reporting how even in his own time (the 1890s)—according to the accounts of Buret’s patients—Moroccan Jews willingly (‘‘for money, of course’’) prostitute their virginal daughters to European Christian businessmen. As Buret notes, ‘‘Business is business’’ (2:184 n. 2). Thus even as they escape the blame for syphilis, they are nevertheless marked with the taint of sexual-economic immorality.

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31. Bloch (Ursprung, 2:15) suggests such motivation in the discussions of the Marranic plague by Heidenheimer, Petrus Martyr, 141 and n. 5; and Simon, Kritische Geschichte. 32. Council, 79. In Panizza’s play, the holy family—a decrepit God, a consumptive Christ, and a lascivious Mary—fearing their powers usurped by the outrages of the Borgia pope Alexander VI (who reigned from 1492 to 1503), his court, and country people, commissions the Devil to ‘‘Stick your nose into your witch’s kettle’’ (95) and create a punishment both ‘‘libidinous and destructive.’’ 33. See the discussion of Kikeriki, Sarah’s Reisebriefe, in Gilman, ‘‘Salome.’’ 34. Zo¨berlein, Der Befehl, 495; cf. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2:15. 35. Weller, Rabauken! 103; cited in Glenz, Judenbilder, 65. 36. See Lepsius, Chronologie and Denkma¨ler. Far from being confined to specialists, Lepsius’s work was readily thumbed through by members of the German educated bourgeoisie such as Karl Marx; see his 10 May 1861 letter to Frederick Engels, in Letters, 459. 37. Schopenhauer, Parerga, 2:357n. Heine alludes to this tradition of skindisease (‘‘Hautkrankheiten’’) afflicted Hebrews in Stadt Lukka, 192; cf. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish, 160–61. Voltaire discusses the eviction of the leprous Jews from Egypt in ‘‘Des Juifs et de leur origine’’ (Jews and Their Origin), chapter 14 of Dieu, 159: ‘‘Plus d’un ancien auteur dit que c’e´tait une troupe de le´preux qui fut chasse´e de l’e´gypte par le roi Amasis.’’ 38. Grattenauer, Wider die Juden, 12: ‘‘because the entire nation has Kra¨tze and Aussatz’’; Naudh, Die Juden, 25: ‘‘King Amenophis decided to clean the land of all aussa¨tzigen, unclean [unreinen] persons’’; Hundt-Radowsky, Judenspiegel, 54: ‘‘Due to their disgusting and unnatural vices, the Jews . . . had acquired an extremely frightening disease, Aussatz (favus), according to others elephantiasis.’’ Arnim, ‘‘Kennzeichen,’’ 381, plays with the figure by describing how Jews suffer from ‘‘Aussatz der Kleider and Ha¨user,’’ by which they render the finest and costliest clothes and furnishings dirty and unfit. Also see discussion of leprosy in chapter 7 of this volume. 39. See, e.g., Cooper, Syphilis; Crissey and Parish, Dermatology. 40. Or vice versa, that leprosy was the fourth stage of syphilis; see Edmond, Leprosy, 33, 148. 41. I. Bloch, Ursprung, argues against the connection; his Jewish apologetic tendencies (cf. his dismissing of the so-called foetor Judaicus, in Odoratus Sexualis) may have in part motivated his effort to deny that syphilis derived from a Jewish-associated disease. 42. Voltaire, ‘‘Le`pre et ve´role.’’ Rationalist morality dictates that the individual should be rewarded for performing what is necessary for the good of humanity and/or what is natural. As a venereal disease syphilis punishes for

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fulfilling what is necessary (for the reproduction of the species) and what is naturally pleasurable. Syphilis is amoral. 43. Grob, ‘‘Arzt und Judenfrage,’’ 188. 44. Crissey and Parish, Dermatology, 80ff., discuss the long intertwined history of dermatology and venerology or syphilology, an association that persists to today; cf. Becker and Obermayer, Modern Dermatology. What unified the disciplines were the limitations of medical intervention; the function of the physician was diagnosis, the ability to distinguish syphilitic eruptions from other skin diseases. 45. Gilman, ‘‘Struggle,’’ 299. The bacteriologist Reiter, in ‘‘Nationalsozialistische Revolution,’’ 424, also suggested to the readers of Ziel und Weg that the broad foreign infiltration into the ranks of dermatologists (as well as gynecologists and psychoanalysts) was influenced by the instinctual life peculiar to their race. 46. Elkeles, ‘‘Menschenversuche.’’ See also, Weindling, Health, 169; and Crissey and Parish, Dermatology, 179–81. 47. See F. Hahn, Lieber Stu¨rmer. Already on 22 March 1896, the antisemitic periodical Deutsche Reform was writing of the ‘‘Jewification of innoculation’’ (Verjudung des Impfwesens); cited by Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, Antisemiten-Spiegel, 96. 48. Gra¨fe, Antisemitismus, 94. 49. On bacteriology’s competing etiological paradigms, see Coulter, AIDS, 1–2; and Weindling, Health, 158ff., on ‘‘alien bacteria’’ and ‘‘racial poisons.’’ 50. Dr. Bayley, ‘‘Die Immunisierung gegen Diptherie,’’ in F. Hahn, Lieber Stu¨rmer, 87. 51. F. Hahn, Lieber Stu¨rmer, and Hitler, MK 305, for example. 52. Cf. Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews. 53. Wilson, Ideology, 586; cf. Birnbaum, Mythe politique. 54. This phrase, if not its significance, is borrowed from Princeton professor Diana Fuss, who in turn has acknowledged her debt to Paula Treichler’s ‘‘AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.’’ This epidemic of meanings is to be distinguished from the epidemiological survey of signifiers undertaken in this study. 55. Alex Bein traces the word parasite from Herder to Hitler, from its use as a simile or comparison to its ‘‘establishing the identity of Jews with parasites . . . bacilli’’ (‘‘Jew as Parasite,’’ 24). The Jews ‘‘through the medium of the image of the ‘parasite’ [became] purulent bacteria and bacilli’’ (24). He cites Paul de Lagarde’s 1887 Juden und Indogermanen, 347, as a primary site for the identification of the Jews with ‘‘trichinae and bacilli’’ (‘‘Jew as Parasite,’’ 32). 56. Weindling, Epidemics, 35. The vituperative opponent of Jewish Emancipation Jakob Friedrich Fries had already employed the term Schmarotzer as

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a botanical variant in his 1816 anti-Jewish polemic Ueber die Gefaehrdung, 16. He refers to Jews as Schmarotzerpflanze, or weeds. 57. Lombroso, Antisemitismus, 17, 18, 19, 20. His third chapter is entitled ‘‘The Epidemic Appearance of Antisemitism.’’ Also see Nordau, Degeneration, 209: ‘‘German hysteria manifests itself in antisemitism, that most dangerous form of persecution mania, in which the person believing himself persecuted becomes a savage persecutor.’’ 58. On the struggle for the determination of tabes, cf. Crissey and Parish, Dermatology, 22–23; Harsin, ‘‘Syphilis,’’ 93. Also see chapter 8 of this volume on the possible role of this debate over syphilis’s connection to mental illness in some of Schreber’s delusions. 59. See the exhaustive list of names appended to I. Bloch, Ursprung, 2:297–305. 60. Cf. Harsin, ‘‘Syphilis’’; Corbin, Women; Brandt, No Magic Bullet. 61. In his 1908 essay ‘‘Initials,’’ Karl Kraus lampoons the Oesterreichische Gesellschaft zur Beka¨mpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten (Austrian Society for the Prevention of Venereal Disease), which represented itself by its initials, O.G.Z.B.D.G. and had sought him out as an expert on the subject. The publicist wished that ‘‘they saw in me the writer who had the everlasting merit of having been the first, in an age that dared to have venereal disease but not to name it, to utter the word ‘syphilis’ ’’ (19). Yet given its form of self-advertisement—which Kraus ridicules by suggesting other possible names for which the initials could stand, and that reflect the hypocrisy of both the organization and Austrian society—and its use of variants of the euphemistic phrase ‘‘a particular group of diseases’’ (20) in its own literature, he knew otherwise. 62. The carrier of the plaint, the ‘‘prostitute fatale,’’ however, was not so spared; see K. Johnson, ‘‘Damaged Goods.’’ 63. Gilman, ‘‘Plague,’’ 1148, citing Frisch, Handbuch, 408. 64. Zweig, World, 88. 65. Cf. Dennis Showalter, Little Man, 198. 66. Fleck, Genesis, 12, 13: by 1872 the search for the syphilitic agent entailed ‘‘the examination of the blood of syphilitics with all available chemical and microscopical aids.’’ Cf. Foucault, History, 149, on the perseverance of the ‘‘symbolics of blood’’ in an era marked by the ‘‘analytics of sexuality.’’ 67. I. Bloch, Ursprung 1:5, citing Geigel, Geschichte. 68. The scientific verification of the poisonous character of Jewish blood was a regular feature of Der Stu¨rmer headlines: e.g., ‘‘Judenblut: Wissenschaftliche Blutforschungen und ihren Ergebnisse’’; and ‘‘Blut und Rasse: Der Mischling folgt der a¨rgeren Hand’’; see F. Hahn, Lieber Stu¨rmer!, 84ff. 69. Fleck, Genesis, 1; the editors call attention to the Goethe line. 70. See Wippermann, ‘‘Das Blutrecht.’’

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71. Salomon, Beschneidung, 73; Trier, Rabbinische Gutachten, xv. See the discussion in chapter 1 of Berthold Auerbach’s efforts to have his Jewish-born son evade the requirement. During the course of the nineteenth century the governmental circumcision requirements for Jewish registration was relaxed throughout Germanophone Europe. For example, circumcision was no longer required in Vienna after 1871. 72. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 157 n. 1: ‘‘In Yiddish ‘to [become] Jew[ish]’ means to circumcise’’ (Beschneiden heisst in Ju¨dendeutsch ‘ju¨dischen’). 73. Bulkley, Syphilis in the Innocent, 117–22 (Table VI), lists outbreaks of circumcision-communicated syphilis in Silesia, Prussia, Rhineland, Austria, and England, as well as Poland. 74. Bryk, Circumcision, 55. Also see Fraenkel, ‘‘Ueber die Meziza,’’ 154–55. Curiously, among the causes for the syphilis of the innocents that Ellis, Sex in Relation, 336–37, cites is the ‘‘knife’’ employed in ritual circumcision. Less specific about the immediate means of infection was Dr. L. Fiaux, La police, 340, who mentions rabbis passing syphilis during circumcisions; cited in Bernheimer, Figures, 313 n. 5. 75. Dr. Bernard Homa, Metzitzah, 9, drawing upon Dr. Sinai Schiffer, ‘‘Ausu¨bung der Mezizoh.’’ 76. When in 1843 the Frankfurt Health Department, employing language that suggested circumcision was voluntary for Jews, announced its intention to require that physicians alone could perform circumcisions, Frankfurt’s Orthodox Rabbi Salomon Abraham Trier, in a curious reversal of the tradition of avoiding state intervention in Jewish community concerns, appealed directly to the Frankfurt Senate. He petitioned it to decree that circumcision was a requirement for membership in Frankfurt’s Jewish community in order to counter the regulation’s wording, which he perceived as a threat to the integrity of the Jewish community. The Senate responded that it was neither its intention to abolish religious ordinances through such regulation nor to make religious ordinances; see Philipson, Reform Movement, 182–84. Robin Judd extensively details the nineteenth-century synagogue-state exchanges over circumcision and their consequences in Contested Rituals. Indeed, she opens her study with an account of mohel-transmitted syphilis in 1881 Baden and its consequences for synagogue-state relations in that German state (1–2, 93, 105). 77. Salomon, Beschneidung, viii–ix. 78. There is no explicit concern about possible analogizing of metsitsah to fellatio. This and subsequent depictions of the mohel are from Salomon, Beschneidung, 63–64. 79. Dr. L. Fiaux coined the phrase ‘‘seminal drain’’ to describe the imagined function of the regulated brothels; cf. Corbin, Women, 53.

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80. Franz Kafka framed his Christmas 1911 diary entry (Diaries 1910– 1913), in which he outlined what he called a ‘‘literature of small peoples or minor literature’’ (191–95), with two circumcision narratives. Kafka immediately followed his literary-critical reflections with a story about a traditional circumcision in Russia (195–96), the proceedings of which would have left Dr. Salomon aghast, but Kafka simply described it. On the other hand, his preceding diary entry presented an account of his nephew’s rather proper bris that he had attended the day before (190–91). Dr. Salomon would have been satisfied, but Kafka felt as if he had witnessed the transitional character of Western Jewry, performing its religious rites as if they were historical reenactments. These accounts exemplified, as such a literature should, the respective ‘‘national consciousness’’ of two small peoples: Eastern Jewry and Western. Also see Gilman, Kafka, esp. 33–40. 81. Cf. Philipson, Reform Movement, 181ff., 260, 305; Meyer, Response, 138–39, 163, 166. 82. Ricord, Letters, 114 (letter 13), writes: ‘‘Even in certain religious customs . . . proofs of secondary contagion have been sought. In this category have been traced the syphilitic accidents transmitted to children by the process of Hebrew circumcision. But these accidents find their natural explanation in the presence of primitive accidents in the mouth of the peritomist [i.e., the mohel]. Allow me to say here that I have been among those who have most contributed towards inducing the Israelitish Consistory of Paris to reject the ancient and dangerous practice of sucking.’’ 83. Cf. Bryk, Circumcision, 95–96; Remondino’s History, in particular, is a hyperbolic paean to the medical benefits of circumcision. Also see the discussions in Hart, Healthy Jew, who beyond an extensive analysis of Nossig’s work also discusses a broad range of contemporaneous non-Germanophone studies of the hygienic value of circumcision (but, curiously, not Remondino). Also see Efron, Medicine and German Jews. 84. Efron, Defenders, 58. 85. Published as an appendix to his Studies, ix–x. Jacobs concedes that there had been at that point little academic investigation of the circumcision’s effects on venereal disease; he does note the work of Richard Andree, the German ethnologist and author of the one first anthropological studies of Jews (‘‘Beschneidung’’). 86. Hart, Healthy Jew, 182. 87. See Simon Bamberger, ‘‘Hygiene,’’ on the possible transmission of syphilis—in either direction—when metsitsah is performed (108). 88. Alexander, Hygienische Bedeutung, 20. 89. Almkvist, ‘‘Zur Geschichte,’’ 163. 90. Cited in I. Bloch, Sexual Life, 376. Similar arguments have arisen over the prophylactic value of circumcision against HIV/AIDS; see, for example,

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Simon, Ho, and Karim, ‘‘HIV and AIDS’’; and Van Howe, ‘‘Circumcision and HIV.’’ 91. Gilman, Sexuality, 260, cites a number of such early twentieth-century studies. In addition to biological/physiological—race, circumcision—reasons to explain this difference, social reasons are proffered: a lower rate of abuse of two thoroughly intertwined social vices, inebriation and frequenting prostitutes. This negative relationship to prostitutes was complemented by far more positive ones: as metonym—the procurer, pimp, white slaver, agent of infection—and as metaphor—a range of corresponding sex-economic traits and bodily signs. On the relationship between Jew and prostitute, see ibid., 258–60 and below. Gilman also discusses the Jews’ doubly inscribed relationship with syphilis—both more and less diseased—in ‘‘Plague,’’ 1148–55, and ‘‘ ‘I’m Down on Whores.’ ’’ 92. I. Bloch, Sexual Life, 376. 93. E.g., Boudin, ‘‘Du non-cosmopolitanisme’’; cited in Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 70. 94. Elias, Civilizing Process, 4–5, 8; trans. from Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 21. 95. Spengler, Decline, 1:32; cited in Mosse, Germans and Jews, 36. Cf. Hitler, MK 257–58. Lars Fischer’s presentation ‘‘Humanism, Structuralism, and ‘the Jew’: The Case of Karl Marx’’ at the German Studies Association Annual Meeting (11 October 2009) reminded me that sociologist Ferdinand To¨nnies’s 1887 would-be value-free social typological distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) became a broadly popular and popularized gloss on the contradictions of modern life that generally reproduced the moral and ethno-racial opposition evident in the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation discussed here; also see, e.g., Brenner, Renaissance, 40–41. 96. Siebert, Vo¨lkischer Gehalt, 196. This text receives a ringing endorsement in the bibliographic supplement to Dinter, SB 341: ‘‘Who ever wishes to educate himself on practical race hygiene and its biological presuppositions should read [this] absolutely superior and significant work.’’ 97. Mosse, Germans and Jews, 36; the Kultur-Zivilisation dichotomy also structures Dinter’s novel; cf. Dinter, SB 109: ‘‘Wir haben ja gar keine Kultur! Wir haben ja nur eine Zivilisation.’’ See also his distinction between ‘‘big-city ‘Kultur’ ’’ and ‘‘our Kultur’’ (SB 254–55). 98. Ellis, Sex in Relation, 320, 326. 99. Schopenhauer, Parerga, 1:389. 100. I. Bloch, Ursprung, 5. 101. Cf. Stauf von der March, ‘‘Der Feind,’’ 89; and Dinter, SB 315 n. 23. 102. ‘‘Niemand kann bestreiten, daß in hervorragender Weise an der Versumpfung und Korruption aller Verha¨ltnisse Anteil nimmt’’; Alberti (-Sittenfeld), ‘‘Judentum und Antisemitismus,’’ 1723.

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103. R. Scha¨fer, ‘‘Zur Geschichte,’’ 61, found this association in Karl Ernst Georges’s 1874 Ausfu¨hrliches Deutsch-Lateinisches Handwo¨rterbuch, where zersetz werden, sich zersetzen is translated as ‘‘tabescere coepisse or tabescere (to become a liquid mass, in a pejorative sense ⳱ to become rotten).’’ 104. R. Scha¨fer, ‘‘Zur Geschichte,’’ 61ff. Scha¨fer emphasizes the cutting (‘‘einschneidene Scha¨rfe’’) character of this inscription of Jewish difference, implying perhaps some connection with the identification of Jewry with circumcision. On Treitschke’s appropriation and transformation of Mommsen’s text, see Boehlich, Antisemitismusstreit, 63–66. 105. Bernheimer, Figures, 272. 106. See ibid; also see Sander Gilman’s corpus. 107. On male responsibility in women’s literature, see Elaine Showalter, ‘‘Syphilis’’; on the abolitionist/feminist attack on the double standard of medico-legal regulation, see Walkowitz, Prostitution; Corbin, Women; and R. Evans, ‘‘Prostitution.’’ 108. Ellis, Sex, 319. 109. E. g., Esther Gobseck the prosititute with the heart of gold in Balzac’s 1847 Splendeur et mise`res des courtisanes; cf. the discussion in Bernheimer, Figures, chap. 2. 110. Cf. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. 111. Cf. Huysmans, Against, 75: ‘‘a brunette had interjected, a girl with prominent eyes and a hook nose who filled at Mme. Laure’s establishment the indispensable role of the handsome Jewess.’’ 112. Anti-Semite and Jew, 48–49. More generally on this topos in literature, see Krobb, Scho¨ne Judin; Gro¨zinger, ‘‘Scho¨ne Judin’’; Kohlbauer-Fritz, ‘‘ ‘La belle juive.’ ’’ 113. On the exaggerated statistics on venereal morbidity/mortality, see Corbin, ‘‘Le pe´ril ve´ne´rien,’’ 253; Maugue, L’identite´ masculine, 30. 114. Berg, Juden-Bordelle; cited in Herszlikowicz, La philosophie, 10, on ‘‘Ethnie putain.’’ Cf. D. Showalter, Little Man, chap. 4 (‘‘The Jew as Sex Offender’’). 115. Cf. Bristow, Prostitution, 82. 116. Ibid., 73; Corbin, Women, p. 292. Turn-of-the-century Jewish apologetics acknowledged Jewish participation in such affairs, but cited the general opposition of the Jewish community, asserted the ecumenical nature of the business, and argued that individuals should be considered as individuals and not as representative of a people; cf. Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, Antisemiten-Spiegel, 98–102. Still, white slavery remained a staple of the antisemitic press; cf. the analyses of Julius Streicher and his organ, Der Stu¨rmer, by Dennis Showalter and Fred Hahn. Typical of the Stu¨rmer treatment is the lead story on no. 30 (1926), ‘‘Ma¨dchenfleisch Handel.’’

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117. Berg, Judenhya¨nen, 11–12, 24. 118. See the facsimile of the lead article of the 19 December 1897 issue of the Christliche Extra-Zeitung, ‘‘Juden und Weiber,’’ in B. Hamann, Hitlers Wien, 414. 119. Hitler’s speech in the Munich Hofbra¨uhaus, 13 August 1920; Aufzeichnungen, 198. 120. Blaschko, ‘‘Prostitution,’’ 1233. 121. Sturm, ‘‘Bedeutung,’’ 342. 122. Forel, Sexuelle Frage, 220–21. 123. In von Hartmann’s discussion of Jewish reticence to work: prostitution too entails a ‘‘production [or performance, Leistung] which is not labor’’; Das Judentum, 101–2. 124. On the characteristics of the ‘‘born prostitute’’ see Corbin, Women, 300–09. 125. Frisch, Handbuch, 31. He goes on to add that this explains why Jewish women play such a great role in politics, especially the women’s movement. 126. Stigler, ‘‘Rassenphysiologische Bedeutung,’’ 6–9, 7; cited in Gilman, ‘‘Freud and the Sexologists,’’ 60. 127. See chapter 9 of this volume; and Geller, ‘‘Of Mice.’’ 128. According to Bullough and Bullough, Women, 127: ‘‘One of the reasons that badges had to be worn by Jews under Church ordinance was so that the Gentile prostitute could recognize her visitor and thereby avoid him.’’ Also see Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. ‘‘Badge, Jewish.’’ The prostitute as a public woman was on the margins of society, at the limit between Christian and Jew. Her sexuality was the moment of contact, of contamination: the Church did not fear the import of disease and immorality as much as it feared apostasy. The connection between sexuality and blasphemy led to this visible encoding of the Jew. 129. Cf. Corbin, Women, 133–34; Bernheimer, Figures; and Dinter, SB 195: ‘‘From every seat the incarnated [black shadow of Hermann and Elisabeth’s unnatural child] laughed in their faces, because the theaters and concert halls of the big city seemed filled with this uncanny species [/sex; unheimlichen Geschlecht].’’ 130. Cf. Bernheimer, Figures, 26–28. 131. Proust, Remembrance, 1:326, cited in Gilman, Sexuality, 260, and in ‘‘Plague,’’ 1169 n. 27. Gilman writes of the Proustian passage, ‘‘The need to ‘see’ and ‘label’ the Jew at a time when Jews were becoming more and more ‘invisible’ in Germany made the association with socially stigmatizing diseases which bore specific visible ‘signs and symptoms’ especially appropriate’’ (‘‘Plague,’’ 1151). 132. Huysmans, Against, 98, cited by Bernheimer, Figures, 234. Huysmans’ description (cited in full in chapter 8, page 254) resonates with allusions to the dissimulating, inverted Wandering Jew.

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133. Corbin, Women, 80 (emphasis added). The choice of gold leaf is perhaps an ironic signifier of the connection with money—and Jews—as well as a distraction from the yellow tinge of a mercury salve. 134. Cf. Gilman, ‘‘Struggle,’’ 301; and Bernheimer, Figures, 246, on the tie between castration and syphilitic lesion. 135. Harsin, ‘‘Syphilis,’’ 78. See also Gilman, Creating Beauty, esp. 32–36. 136. Heine, Complete Poems, 821–22; translation altered. Heine then starkly contrasts the marble sarcophagus with the stone sculpture: ‘‘An open marble casket, still uncracked,/Still whole amongst the ruins, can be seen.’’ The characterization of the casket as ‘‘uncracked’’ and ‘‘whole’’ is how Draper translates ‘‘Ganz unverstu¨mmelt,’’ which opens the stanza’s second line. A number of references to the Jewish circumcised penis as ‘‘verstu¨mmelt’’ or ‘‘mutilated’’ have already been indicated in this study. 137. See Geller, On Freud’s; in addition see Gilman, Creating Beauty, esp. 72–82. 138. Becker and Obermayer, Modern, 846. Ironically perhaps, a nubbin of a nose is the desired rhinoplastic goal of many Jews. Indeed it was the repair of the syphilitic nose that motivated the development of rhinoplasty in the last decade of the nineteenth century; cf. Rogers, ‘‘Early Historical.’’ 139. See Gilman, Sexuality. 205. 140. Laqueur, ‘‘Social Evil,’’ 340. In Das Judentum (104–05), philosopher Eduard von Hartmann implicitly analogizes the social location of Jewish ¨ beractivity to that of the prostitute: they engage in ‘‘a broad liminal stratum [U gangsschicht] of activities, which along with [causing] an undoubtedly vast amount of harm to the community also secure a more or less large core of economic advantages for that community, and which also continue only in so far as they prevent worse evils (one thinks, e.g., of Frederick the Great’s remark about prostitution).’’ 141. L’Hermite, L’Anti-Pape, cited by Wilson, Ideology, 92. 142. Gallagher, ‘‘George Eliot,’’ 43. 143. Fle´vy d’Urville, Les ordures, 26; cited in Corbin, Women, 4; cf. Bein, ‘‘Jew as Parasite.’’ 144. Corbin, Women, 235; citing Social Democratic leader August Bebel and the labor historian Eduard Dolle´ans, among others. 145. R. Evans, ‘‘Prostitution,’’ 124. 146. Socialist discourse generates another parallel determination of prostitute and Jew by connecting the former with the contractual formation of the bourgeois family, i.e., the necessity of a dowry and related material requirements. This material picture of the family is, within bourgeois romantic literature, identified with the Jews. Cf. Weininger, SC 40: ‘‘[T]he physical degeneration of modern Jewry may not least be caused by the fact that among

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Jews . . . much more often than anywhere else in the world, marriages are made by marriage brokers and not by love.’’ 147. These passages are discussed in a somewhat different context and hence with a somewhat different interpretation in chapter 6 of this volume. 148. Wilson, Ideology, 597. All Jewish economic activity is represented as sterile, outside the realm of production. Indeed, they are incapable of engaging in any fruitful activity, such as farming. Cf. Dinter, SB 185: They ‘‘cannot themselves produce anything of fruit-bearing and constructive value.’’ 149. Laqueur, ‘‘Social Evil,’’ 338. 150. Cited in ibid., 339. How this tradition infected Marx’s understanding of capitalism and Benjamin’s of modernity is explored in chapters 6 and 9 respectively. 151. On the iconography of syphilis, see Gilman, Sexuality, 212–13, 238–41; ‘‘AIDS,’’ 96–98; and ‘‘ ‘I’m Down on Whores,’ ’’ 160–64. 152. Ellis, Sex in Relation, 324–25. 153. On the history of the notion of idolatry, see Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry. 154. See O. White, Miscegenation, 93–95. 155. ‘‘Ten German Commandments of Lawful Self-Defense,’’ in Fritsch, Antisemiten-Katechismus, 358ff.; trans. Massing, Rehearsal, 306. Fritsch may also be implying the essential idolatrous character of the male Jew, since circumcision is, by definition, an idolatrous act. Cf. Pietz, ‘‘Problem, II,’’ 28, summary of the Augustinian notion of idolatry: ‘‘Willful alteration of material bodies for religious purposes was idolatrous insofar as it disfigured their Godgiven natural forms, turning them into images of a fraudulent spirituality.’’ 156. Siebert, Vo¨lkischer Gehalt, 140–41. 157. Treitschke, Politik, 1: 274. 158. Rutgers Professor George Levine reminded me that the relationship between blood and inheritance was more than metaphoric in nineteenthcentury theories of heredity. In his 1868 theory of pangenesis, Charles Darwin theorized that every kind of cell secreted gemmules, practically invisible corpuscles that carried the genetic attributes of that cell, into the bloodstream, by which they made their way to the reproductive organs. His idea that genetic material was transported by the blood had a long tradition—Darwin himself lists numerous forerunners, including Buffon and Spencer—and, although experimentally refuted by Galton, the connection between blood and heredity no doubt retained a popular currency. On Darwin’s theory, see Mayr, Growth, 693–97. 159. Georges Vacher de Lapouge; cited in Poliakov, Aryan, 282. 160. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 24–25; cited in Poliakov, Aryan, 370 n. 99. 161. Hess, Revival, 60, 61. Also see the discussion of Hess in chapter 1 of this volume.

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162. In eugenics-colored parliamentary debates on whether to outlaw mixed marriages between German and the indigenous inhabitants of their African colonies, the Jewish press tended to oppose the prohibition. Cornelia Essner suggests that this stance might reflect their concerns about comparable anthropological arguments being employed against Jewish-Christian intermarriage ‘‘ ‘Wo Rauch ist,’ ’’ 150. On the other hand, a racial hygienist such as Eugen Fischer allowed ideology to trump both his own findings and economic interests. Even though his own study of the so-called Rehoboth bastards (the children of German-African conceptions) showed that on all social criteria the Mischling were superior to the natives—and thus advantageous for colonial development—he nevertheless steadfastly repudiated any attempt to suggest that this supported mixed marriages, since this would allow blood of less value into the German race; see ibid., 159–60. 163. Chamberlain, Grundlagen, 1:383. 164. Mayr, Growth. 165. Cf. Diday, Traite´; mentioned by Crissey and Parish, Dermatology, 92. 166. Diday, Treatise, 24, illustrating this concatenation with the story of widow C——— (24–25). 167. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 15, citing Dr. Prince Morrow (‘‘Blindness,’’ 81), the dermatologist, syphilologist, and leading polemicist of the degenerative threat venereal disease presented to the ‘‘race.’’ 168. Bernheimer, Figures, 271; cf. Faguet, Le feminisme, 252: ‘‘[T]he children of the successor [the later inseminator] almost always resemble ‘Monsieur le premier’ ’’; cited in Maugue, L’identite´ masculine, 24. Also see Poliakov, Aryan, 282–83 and nn. 169. See discussion below. 170. The Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck also drew upon animal crossbreeding when discussing integrating the Jews into the German population, albeit with far more sanguine (equine?) expectations, as reported in M. Busch, Bismarck, 1:452 (January 10, 1871): ‘‘ ‘I am of the opinion,’ continued the Minister [i.e., Bismarck], ‘that to prevent mischief, the Jews will have to be rendered innocuous by cross breeding. The results are not bad.’ He then mentioned some noble houses, Lynars, Stirums, Gusserows: ‘all very clever, decent people.’ He then reflected for a while and, omitting one link from the chain of thought, probably the marriage of distinguished Christian ladies to rich or talented Israelites, he proceeded: ‘It is better the other way around. One ought to put a Jewish mare to a Christian stallion of German breed. The money must be brought into circulation again, and the race is not at all bad. I do not know what I shall one day advise my sons to do.’ ‘‘ 171. Weininger, SC 206. In his appendix, Weininger cites Lord Morton’s letter in its entirety (395–96) among other accounts, including Wilhelm

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Olbers Focke’s 1881 theory of plant hybridization (397) and Darwin’s diverse speculations (393–94, 396–97). Also see Burkhardt, ‘‘Closing the Door.’’ 172. Michelet, L’Amour, 226–29. 173. Cited by Corbin, ‘‘L’he´re´dosyphilis,’’ 35. Fournier and Portalier, L’he´re´dite´ syphilitique, 316, also projected broader implications from so-called contaminated sperm; see Que´tel, ‘‘La syphilis,’’ 343. 174. Ribot, Heredity, 174. 175. Ibid., 175–78. Ribot cites the French translation (Traite´, 2:243) of Burdach’s 1835 original. 176. Spencer, ‘‘Inadequacy,’’ 454–55; cited in Geulen, Wahlverwandte, 82–83 and n. 26. 177. See Weininger, SC 206 and 396. 178. S.v. ‘‘Viehzucht’’ (livestock breeding; 20:149–50); cited in Conte and Essner, La queˆte, 122–23. Almost a quarter of a million sets of the 20-volume encyclopedia were printed before the First World War. 179. R. Evans, ‘‘Prostitution,’’ 107. 180. Cf. Harsin, ‘‘Syphilis.’’ 181. See Henschel, Neidgeschrei, 39–42. 182. A character in Paumgartten’s novel Repablick warns: ‘‘If a purebred bitch [Rassehu¨ndin] was mounted by a different breed of dog [fremdrassigen Hund] only once, even without issue, she is useless for any future breeding [Reinzucht]’’ (164); and to ensure the purity of the Aryan race, he recommends that any non-Aryan who has sex with an Aryan should be punished for this transgression with castration (165). 183. See Streicher, ‘‘Deutsche Volksgesundheit,’’ 3. Such headlines as ‘‘Schu¨tz die deutsche Frau vor dem Tier im Juden’’ (Protect the German Woman from the Beast in the Jew; no. 48, Nov. 1925) and ‘‘Der Jud im Familienbad: Ein Kapitel zur Rassenfrage’’ (The Jew in the Community Pool: A Chapter in the Race Question; no. 37, Sept. 1926) regularly appeared in Der Stu¨rmer. 184. Streicher, ‘‘Deutsche Volksgesundheit,’’ 1, continues: ‘‘Now we know why the Jew uses every artifice of seduction in order to ravish German girls at as early an age as possible; why the Jewish doctor rapes his patients while they are under anesthetic. He wants the German girl and the German woman to absorb the alien sperm of the Jew’’; excerpted in Poliakov and Wulf, Das Dritte Reich, 424; trans. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, 117. According to Berning, ‘‘Die Sprache,’’ 82 (s.v. artfremd), artfremd is what ‘‘stands in contradiction to the essence of one’s own race, [what] has a corrupting effect’’ [zersetzend wirkt]. This moment in Streicher’s discourse is singled out by F. Hahn, Lieber Stu¨rmer! as revealing the ‘‘narrowmindedness’’ (Borniertheit) of National Socialist race ideology (19), the ‘‘absurdity’’ of National Socialist theory (81);

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also cf. D. Showalter, Little Man, 196. Still, during the party and government debates over the Nuremberg Laws, both the NSDAP and the Racial Policy Office dismissed Streicher’s theory as unscientific and potentially destabilizing, since it might put in question the Germanness of Volksgenosse otherwise in good standing; Essner, Die ‘‘Nu¨rnberger Gesteze,’’ 39. This limit of National Socialist discourse may thus be at the crux of its antisemitic content: diseased sexuality as indicative of perverse reproduction and problematic gender. Women can no longer be mothers; men can no longer produce. 185. Conte and Essner, La queˆte, 130–31. 186. Lanz von Liebenfels, ‘‘Rassenwirtschaftliche Lo¨sung,’’ 1; discussed by B. Hamann, Hitlers Wien, 313–14. Whether Lanz von Liebenfels’s writings were widely read outside of racist German vo¨lkisch circles and influential outside his narrower circle of Nordic occultists remains questionable. 187. Malinas, Zola, 79, cites Tarnier, Traite´, 1:172. 188. Staemmler, ‘‘Aufgaben,’’ 417, 421. 189. There is another crucial component in the development on German notions of and policy toward miscegenation (Rassenschande): the German colonialist venture, both in Africa and in the Pacific; see Essner, ‘‘ ‘Wo Rauch ist,’ ’’ and Die ‘‘Nu¨rnberger Gesetze,’’ esp. 22–25; Przyrembel, ‘Rassenschande’; Ruault, ‘Neuscho¨pfer’; also see n. 162 above. 190. At least 260,000 copies and more than fifteen impressions and editions were produced between the novel’s first appearance in December 1917 and the final printing of 10,000 books in 1934; it had a readership estimated at over 1.5 million, making it one of the four or five best-selling novels of the time according to Wilcox, ‘‘Construction,’’ 10. Henschel, Neidgeschrei, 297–99 n. 3, details the range of publication estimates that permeate the literature on Dinter’s novel. 191. But even hysteria is structured by syphilis: ‘‘In spite of the introduction of the concept of neurosis, the uterine hypothesis is maintained in the green phantom of syphilis’’; Roudinesco, La Bataille, 214–15; cited in Bernheimer, Figures, 254. 192. Compare Bendavid’s discussion of hydra-headed Judentum in the previous chapter. 193. After a character in Zo¨berlein’s novel Der Befehl learns that his lover previously had been intimate with one of Jewish descent, the narrator observes that every German man ‘‘feels his own blood has been befouled by the Jews when he just has an encounter with a lass who earlier had doings with a Jew’’ (343); cited in Glenz, Judenbilder, 69. Neither Dinter nor his character suggest that Ka¨mpfer too had been poisoned by Johanna; however, his decision after his acquittal to renounce wife, child, and earthly happiness to serve Gd and fatherland, in order, first, to make Germany aware of the Jewish menace and

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then, when the start of the First World War intervenes before his crusade can begin, to give his life on the battlefield against that other menace to Germany on Christmas Eve, suggests that Ka¨mpfer has transformed himself into a sinoffering to expiate his unintentional impurity. 194. Dinter’s discussion of the Baron’s original surname may well have influenced Zo¨berlein’s discussion of Jewish name changes in Der Befehl. ‘‘[A Jew] must adapt his name for the sensitive ears of the Goys,’’ or for the eyes: ‘‘If [a Jew] changes residence again or otherwise has to register officially, then he employs bad penmanship . . . the ‘heim’ in the name ‘Wertheim’ is so smooshed together that the family name looks like ‘Werther.’ ’’ (Der Befehl, 533). 195. No less than the protagonist’s name reveals his Aryan pedigree and bona fides. Hermann the Cherusker commanded the Germanic tribes when they utterly overwhelmed Varus’s Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 c.e.; moreover, a Ka¨mpfer is a fighter or warrior. 196. Heine, Complete Poems, 674. 197. If the reader did not catch Heine’s ironic allusion, he then describes Hitzig, perhaps afraid that admitting his knowledge of the Hebraic origins of Schlemihl would betray his own Jewish origins, giving him the run-around: ‘‘piled up/One excuse upon the other, /Always Christianlike—until I/Finally burst all the buttons/On the breeches [Hosen] of my patience.’’ As his tolerance slacks, Heine acts out in a most unchristian manner: ‘‘And I started roundly swearing/With such blasphemies and curses.’’ 198. See the discussion of the poem in chapter 2 of this volume. While Dinter does not cite this Heine work in his appendix, he does quote from Heine’s Stadt Lukka (192–93) and its references to the Jews bringing skin diseases out of Egypt and, as that ‘‘mummy of a people’’ (Volkmumie) wander the world, remaining unchanged (SB 308). 199. See the discussion of Georg Friedrich Daumer’s and Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany’s Moloch-studies in chapter 5 of this volume. 200. Von Hartmann, Das Judentum, 87–88. Von Hartmann is probably playing on his mentor Schopenhauer’s comment on ‘‘the well-known faults attaching to the Jewish national character, of which a surprising absence of all that is expressed by the word verecundia [modesty, shyness] is the most conspicuous’’; Schopenhauer, Parerga, 2:263; cf. Weininger, SC 419. 201. Stoecker, ‘‘Unsre Forderungen,’’ 146; trans. in Massing, Rehearsal, 281. 202. Hundt-Radowsky,Judenschule, II 120. Cf. the illustration in the popular humor magazine Fliegende Bla¨tter of a caricatured Eastern European Jew besieging a well-dressed Gentile gentleman in a Prague cafe´ with a ‘‘Bescheidene Frage’’ (modest question) that consists of a barrage of noxiously

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ingratiating inquiries about his fellow patron’s business affairs. See Wasserman, ‘‘The Fliegende Bla¨tter,’’ 121, 130–31 (plate). 203. Radenhasen, Esther, 76. 204. Gerlach, ‘‘Antisemitismus,’’ 146. 205. A possible reference to the tradition that the Jewish character lacks humility can be found in the title of Paul Mo¨bius’s dismissal of Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter: Mo¨bius’s work is titled Geschlecht und Unbescheidenheit (Sex and Immodesty). While Mo¨bius asserts that he cannot judge the validity of Weininger’s characterization of the femininity of Judentum, he characterizes Weininger’s chapter as an act of ‘‘prostitution’’ (28)—one of the antipodes of Weininger’s spectrum of female possibility—and ever refers to Weininger as W, which is also Weininger’s index of a person’s femininity, rather than by name. Not only is immodesty displaced from the antisemite to the Jew, but the rules of linguistic discretion demand a displacement that doubly marks immodesty as Jewish. Also see Omran, Frauenbewegung, 63–64. 206. Schwaner, Germanenbibel, 169. For a rather different characterization of Bescheidenheit by Goethe, see chapter 6 and its discussion of Marx’s ironic appropriation of Goethe. 207. The translator appended the scare quotes—apparently to signal irony. 208. Nossig, ‘‘Auserwa¨hltheit der Juden,’’ 4. Also see the discussion of Nossig in this book’s introduction. 209. Dinter continues: ‘‘[E]verything great and good, pure and true, noble and deep, [everything] striving to rise from animality to spirituality, was lowered, crippled, or totally stiffled. This was the curse of the sin against the blood for which she could thank her being’’ (SB 138–39). On Lombroso’s theory of sexual excitement revealing innate feminine perversity, that is, the theory that for a woman to be excited is to be active, to be masculinized, see Olrik, ‘‘Le sang impur,’’ 170ff.; and Bernheimer, Figures, 259. 210. Although Dinter provides extensive endnotes (some 70 pages worth) in support of his antisemitic assertions, the title of this reference work never appears. 211. See Huet, ‘‘Living Images,’’ esp. 73–78; P. K. Wilson, ‘‘ ‘Monsters’,’’ Bondeson, ‘‘Maternal Impressions.’’ Poliakov refers to a ‘‘psychic interpretation of telegony’’ (Aryan, 284) adopted by the Nancy School psychologist Lie´bault, No title a, 694–95; idem, No title b, 19ff., and by the Nazi jurist Karl Beyer, who claimed in his 1936 Familie und Frau that the impression (Versehung) of the genitor’s racial soul affected the physical development and inheritance of the fetus; see Conte and Essner, La queˆte, 125. On popular nineteenth-century notions of heredity that locate hereditary influences on child development in the sexual intensity and intoxication of the conceiving partners until the moment of weaning, see Rosenberg, ‘‘Bitter Fruit.’’ Also see

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Opie and Tatem, Dictionary of Superstitions, 193 (s.v. ‘‘hare-lip’’) on the belief that when a hare crosses a pregnant woman’s path the child will be born with a hare-lip; and 317–18 (s.v. ‘‘influences during pregnancy’’) detailing accounts of maternal impression, from Scot’s 1584 Discoverie of Witchcraft through Dickens 1844 Martin Chuzzlewit to the 26 August 1983 issue of Farmer’s Weekly. 212. See SC 191–92, 206–7. For Weininger, the presence or absence of the maternal instinct (which includes heightened uterine susceptibility to impressions) is what determines the two poles of womanhood—the mother and the prostitute (see esp. chap. 10, 214–35); cf. Reich, Mass Psychology, 106. This distinction also structures Dinter’s characterization of Elisabeth. That the German maternal gaze should fix on the Jewish image is a curious chiasm, which appears to be a variant of the poisoned womb. 213. Ribot, Heredity, 203. 214. Such as Henrik Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea. Essner, Die ‘‘Nu¨rnberger Gesetze,’’ 33, suggests that Ibsen’s play influenced Dinter’s presentation of maternal impression. Weininger (SC 192) mentions both Goethe’s novella and Ibsen’s play in his account of maternal impression, and he discusses the works in more detail in his appendix’s array of sources on maternal impression (384–88). 215. Also see the extended discussion of Panizza’s story in chapter 8 of this volume. 216. As the constant references to image and to the mirroring relationship of body and soul indicate, there is a great concern about the problem of visibility and identity. 217. Dinter is drawing on Weininger’s oppositional pairing of Mutter and Dirne, mother and prostitute. 218. Dinter may be drawing on the theory of humors that conceives of sperm as superheated blood; cf. Laqueur, ‘‘Orgasm.’’ 219. Hauser, Geschichte, 477–78. He cites ‘‘reliable reports’’ that the Bolsheviks gathered up young bourgeois women in order to rape them and contaminate their wombs. 220. D. Showalter, Little Man, 196. 221. On Dinter’s idealism, see Wilcox, ‘‘Construction.’’ 222. E.g., Winckler, Studie. 223. See Hayden, Pox. 224. Cf. Foucault, History, 24: ‘‘[T]he aristocracy had also asserted the special character of its body, but this was in the form of blood, that is, in the form of the antiquity of its ancestry and of the value of its alliances; the bourgeoisie on the contrary looked to its progeny and the health of its organism when it laid claim to a specific body. The bourgeoisie’s ‘blood’ was its sex. . . . The concern with genealogy became a concern with heredity.’’

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225. Among others, see, e.g., Gilman, ‘‘Jews and Mental Illness’’; and Jan Goldstein, ‘‘Wandering Jew.’’ 226. This injunction is a variant of Deut. 23:1 that excludes from the community males whose reproductive organs have been physically mutilated (crushed testicles, castrated penis). Those who cannot father obviously will have no descendants; those who cannot legally know their father can. Both are transgressions of the masculine filiative order; both are removed from the male ritual community. In effect, the bastard, like the castrato, and by Hitlerian implication, the circumcised, is not a man. The relationship between blood sin and bastardry also creates an interesting double chiasm in Dinter’s novel. Whereas Hermann’s two sons—Heinrich, the monstrous product of his ‘‘sin against the blood,’’ and young Hermann, his child with the German Ro¨schen Brunne—represent the absolute opposition between Jews and Germans (cf. SB 184, 242ff.), as representatives of racial and legal bastardry they are curiously intertwined (and not only in death). Whereas Hermann successfully frees young Hermann ‘‘from the stain [Makel] of his illegitimate birth,’’ he is unable to redeem Heinrich of his blood sin—to educate the race out of him (cf. SB 193). In a similar vein, what finally convinces Hermann of Heinrich’s legitimacy is the discovery of a birthmark, a Muttermal. Ironically, the Muttermal is the only thing that Heinrich does not inherit from his mother. 227. Scheicher, Erlebnisse; cited in Heer, Glaube, 104 (Heer’s notes fail to correlate specific quotes with the 20 listed citations from Scheicher’s sixvolume memoirs). 228. Cf. the recommendation of Dr. Staemmler cited above. Also see Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, 255; Lifton, Nazi Doctors; and Weindling, Health, esp. 541ff. 229. Reich, Mass Psychology, 81. Reich adds, ‘‘The irrational fear of syphilis constitutes one of the major sources of National Socialism’s political views and its antisemitism’’ (82). But for Reich the fears aroused by syphilis and the ‘‘interbreeding of alien races [lie in] the idea of sexual intercourse with members of the suppressed class’’ (93). 230. Literally, the eternal parasite that recalls the more common label, der ewige Jude. 231. Admittedly, Hitler here argued that ‘‘twelve or fifteen thousand’’ (MK 679) would have sufficed. 4. circumcision and a jewish woman’s identification: rahel levin varnhagen’s failed assimilation The roots of this chapter can be traced back to attempts to confront my own possible gender blindness by addressing Rahel Levin Varnhagen in a course

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examining the role of gendered representation and self-representation in German-Jewish cultural history that—the at-the-time severe limitations of available material in English aside—focused almost exclusively on men. That engagement resulted in my article ‘‘Circumcision and Jewish Women’s Identity: Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Failed Assimilation,’’ which appeared in Laura Levitt and Miriam Peskowitz’s collection Judaism Since Gender (New York: Routledge, 1997), 174–87. Since then the amount of available material in English—and German—on Germanophone Jewish women, in general, and on Rahel Levin Varnhagen, in particular, has greatly increased and has shaped this reworking of the earlier essay. 1. Blumenbach, Natural Varieties, 234 n. 2. 2. Ibid., 234. 3. Barbara Hahn, Jewess, 33. The translation is from Bendyshe’s 1865 edition. 4. This phrase from a 25 January 1806 letter from Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Rebecca Friedla¨nder (Freundin, 99) served as a refrain in Hannah Arendt’s biography of Rahel Levin Varnhagen; see Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life, 89, 241, 254. Cf. Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s deathbed testimony, ‘‘[D]as herbste Leid und Unglu¨ck war, eine Ju¨din geboren zu sein’’; Levin Varnhagen, Rahel, 1:43. This passage is discussed below. 5. In ‘‘The Myth of the Salon,’’ B. Hahn (Jewess, 42–55) argues that neither ‘‘garret’’ nor ‘‘salon’’ is an appropriate label for what took place at Ja¨gerstraße 54, the home Levin Varnhagen shared with her mother and siblings. Levin Varnhagen never referred to her home or the social gathering that took place as a ‘‘salon’’; the term itself was only first applied to any of the Berlin Jewish open houses in the 1840s. Hahn also debunks the image of attic gatherings that still fill the academic as well as the public imagination. There was a tiny garret at Ja¨gerstrasse 54; however, it was reserved for private teˆte-a`-teˆtes. Guests gathered and socialized about the ‘‘green sofa’’ that presided over the main room of her family home. Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun provide a description of the room in ‘‘Power of Conversation,’’ 28. 6. See Weissberg, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 12 and n. 30. 7. See Goodman, In the Shadow. The one exception of the time was Charlotte Stieglitz, a woman who killed herself to call attention to her late husband’s unrecognized poetic genius and was commemorated as one of the three Fates presiding over German culture after the deaths of the Olympians in the liberal writer Karl Gutzkow’s 1839 essay, ‘‘Rahel, Bettina [von Arnim], die Stieglitz.’’ 8. Arendt’s biography with its focus upon Levin Varnhagen’s perceptions of her own pariahhood as a Jew and, although of secondary consideration for her biographer, as a woman, both revived interest in and greatly influenced

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modern perceptions of the salonnie`re. Among the studies in English, see Weissberg, ‘‘Writing,’’ ‘‘True Confessions,’’ ‘‘Stepping Out,’’ ‘‘Changing Weather,’’ and ‘‘Turns’’; Barnouw, ‘‘Society’’; Tewarson, ‘‘German-Jewish Identity’’ and Rahel Levin Varnhagen; B. Hahn, Jewess; D. Hertz, ‘‘Coming of Age.’’ 9. Weissberg provides a fascinating account of cultural differences and changing times, historical references and political correctness, as well as the interests of publishers, when she relates the history of the titling of Arendt’s book in ‘‘Introduction,’’ 44–50. 10. Seltzer, Jewish, 515. While the historiography of premodern, as well as modern and postmodern, Judentum has long abandoned any picture of a homogeneous community, such remains the popular view outside the academy. 11. The following description of late-eighteenth-century Berlin and the wealthy, privileged elite who made up a significant percentage of its Jewish community is drawn from Deborah Hertz, Jewish High Society; Lowenstein, Berlin; and Meyer, Origins. 12. The twenty-three-year-old Levin Varnhagen describes the frisson of riding on the Sabbath in a 15 December 1793 letter to David Veit (Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 1:76). See Lowenstein, Berlin, 99–100, 105, on the transgression and abandonment of ritual practices within the Berlin Jewish community. 13. See Lowenstein, Berlin, 81–82 and nn.; Meyer, Origins, 60–70. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life, 250–51, describes Levin Varnhagen’s feelings of condescension, shame, and alienation regarding the poor Jews of Breslau during her 1794 visit there; also see Tewarson, ‘‘German-Jewish Identity,’’ 12–13. Levin Varnhagen’s description of how she felt upon arriving at a marriage ceremony during that visit, while obviously a standard Orientalist figure, may also point to a number of motifs in this chapter and in this volume as a whole. She writes to her brother Markus Theodor Robert (27 August 1794) that she was greeted ‘‘as if the Grand Sultan were entering a longneglected seraglio’’ (Rahel, 1:99). Not only does she position herself as a circumcised male, but she represents the Polish Jews as all but abandoned, locked in, and female. It must be conceded—even though Levin Varnhagen does not specify—that she may be referring only to her entrance to the women’s fete, since as a presumably traditional Jewish wedding, the male and female guests would have celebrated separately. 14. A. Zweig, Bilanz, 7. 15. Knobloch, ‘‘Judenporzellan.’’ Knobloch includes a photograph of one of the porcelain apes preserved by Mendelssohn’s descendants. Also see Tewarson, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, 19.

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16. See Spitzer, Lives In-Between. 17. Letter to David Veit (18 November 1793); Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 1:56. 18. Upon learning of the birth of a daughter to Rahel’s brother Markus and his wife, David Veit writes to her that her brother has one more thing to be happy about, that ‘‘at least [his daughter] can maintain religious neutrality a while longer’’ (ibid., 1:24; 9 October 1793). In other words, Levin Varnhagen’s niece will not be indelibly marked as Jewish on her eighth day of life. 19. Dohm, Bu¨rgerliche Verbesserung, 16. 20. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Briefe an Brinkmann, 80 (3 November 1794), 87 (7 November 1796; cited in Meyer, Origins, 110); cf. 131 (29 May 1802): ‘‘Regarding the Levi one can now say that she is in fine form, let no one, who is not circumcised [nicht beschnitten], speak otherwise.’’ In the 1796 letter to Brinkmann, Humboldt prides himself and Brinkmann on their positive view of the Jews; he prefers the company of Jews to ‘‘noisy, trite Christians [who have] nothing sharp about them [nichts Piquantes], no black hair’’ (Briefe, 87). Humboldt’s phrase, ‘‘nichts Piquantes,’’ refers not only to tart, pungent conversation but also implicates the stereotypes of a strong Jewish stench, the foetor Judaicus, and of Jewish fondness for garlic and onions (as discussed in the next chapter). The identification of the Jew with his body is especially prevalent in the anti-Jewish pamphlets that circulated in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century; see especially Grattenauer, Wider der Juden. D. Hertz, Jewish High Society, 259–64, and B. Hahn, Jewess, 34–36, discuss Grattenauer’s attacks on the Berlin salons. 21. Letter to David Veit (16 October 1794), in Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 1:240. 22. The term, of course, is Arendt’s. In Rahel Varnhagen, 238, Arendt cites Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘‘I hear . . . that Varnhagen has now married the little Levy woman. So now at last she can become an Excellency and Ambassador’s wife. There is nothing the Jews cannot achieve.’’ 23. Letter to Rebekka Friedla¨nder (summer 1806), in Kemp, Varnhagen im Umgang, 273; cf. the 19 September 1804 letter from Friedrich von Gentz to Karl Gustav von Brinkmann, in Kobler, Juden und Judentum, 149–50; cited in Barnouw, ‘‘Society,’’ 56. 24. Letter to David Veit, (16 November 1794), in Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 2:15. This is more a commentary on the exceptional social and sumptuary conditions of the Berlin Jewish elite to which she belonged. 25. Previous studies have emphasized different aspects of Levin Varnhagen’s rhetoric about her Jewishness. For Arendt, the salonnie`re and bellettriste could only recognize a personal dilemma; she perceived her Jewishness as a ‘‘fate’’ which one cannot fight but only hope to escape unless

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the long-awaited change in the social constellation takes place. More recently, Liliane Weissberg has focused upon Levin Varnhagen’s ruminations about her Jewish birth as a fateful blemish, as one marginalizing birth defect among others, such as blindness or lameness. See Weissberg, ‘‘Stepping Out.’’ 26. Letter to David Veit (2 April 1793), in Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 1:13; trans. in Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: A Life, 89. The translation of Goethe’s original line and Levin Varnhagen’s adaptation are mine. 27. Whether this citation testifies to her knowledge of the Gospels is doubtful. Goethe’s line recalls Matthew 3:9–10 (cf. Luke 3:8–9) in which the necessary relationship between truth and (ethnic) origin is negated. In that passage John the Baptist, confronted by Sadducees and Pharisees whom he claims justify their authority and truth by asserting, ‘‘We have Abraham for our father,’’ tells them, ‘‘Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree there that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.’’ 28. Freud, Moses, 122. 29. Fichte, Beitrag, 144 n. 30. Goethe, Egmont, 361. 31. Letter to David Veit (22 March 1795), in Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 2:79, 80, 80, 80. 32. Cited in Tewarson, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, 190. Clearly, the drama and dramatis personae of Goethe’s Egmont provided resources for constructing selfidentifications throughout her life. 33. She does mention spending time with him in her 21 June 1832 letter to her brother Ludwig Robert; Levin Varnhagen and Robert, Briefwechsel, 587. 34. Wilhelmy-Dollinger, Berliner Salons, 150. In a 29 August 1827 letter to her husband Levin Varnhagen reports about one of Amalie Beer’s musical evenings in which Beer’s son was present; Levin Varnhagen and Varnhagen von Ense, Briefwechsel, 6:124. 35. In an 8 August 1831 letter to her brother Ludwig Robert, Levin Varnhagen mentions Minna Meyerbeer joining her on a Sunday outing to Scho¨neberg; her 17 April 1832 letter to her brother reports on Minna going on and returning from an errand for her; Levin Varnhagen and Robert, Briefwechsel, 548, 581. 36. Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel, 196. 37. Although Weissberg notes in passing that there may be some connection between Levin Varnhagen’s figuration of the lame (Jew) and the medieval representation of the diabolical, cloven-hoofed Jew, she does not attend to this conjunction of gender and Jewishness in her otherwise extensive analysis of the parable in ‘‘Stepping Out,’’ 148–50. 38. Letter to an unknown addressee (16 May 1818), in Kobler, Juden und Judentum, 184. The addressee is now known to have been Ernestine Goldstu¨cker. Unfortunately, neither the opening nor concluding sections have

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been preserved; hence, we know neither by what name Levin Varnhagen addressed Goldstu¨cker, nor with what name (or initial) she signed off. 39. See Bering, Name als Stigma. 40. When Veit responds to her (23 April 1795), he picks up on her identification of lameness with Jewishness as well as how, at least at this point, even baptism will provide only a manifestly artificial prosthesis and not a complete cure. He speaks of his intention to go to France after he converts to Catholicism in Italy: ‘‘True we are lame and yet must walk, and that’s why I want to go to France, where the only good wooden legs are being manufactured just now; that’s probably all the Jews can expect of the Revolution’’ (Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel 2:99; cited in Tewarson, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, 63). 41. 20 December 1794 letter from Veit to Levin Varnhagen and 26 December 1794 letter from Levin Varnhagen to Veit, in Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 2:40–47, 48–57. 42. See, e.g., his letter to Levin Varnhagen, 1 December 1794, ibid., 2:22. 43. Ibid. 2:41. 44. ‘‘One must but have a lot of courage [viel Muth] to parody Egmont’’; ibid., 2:41. The parody consists of his substituting ‘‘Sie’’ (you; i.e., Levin Varnhagen) for ‘‘ich’’ (I; i.e., Egmont). 45. Ibid., 2:45. 46. ‘‘I have the chutzpah [gra¨nzenlosen Mut] to answer Egmont with Tasso’’; ibid., 2:41, 52. The passage is from Torquato Tasso, act 4, ll. 1252–55; cited in Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 2:53. 47. Passage, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 485. 48. Levin Varnhagen and Veit, Briefwechsel, 2:53 (emphasis added). 49. Ibid., 55. 50. Ibid. 51. Her two accounts of the costs of being a Jew are bridged with a reference to a similarly placed Veit non sequitur about his pen: ‘‘[A]lso I have no pens [Federn]; and soon—soon I can sharpen [schneiden] some.’’ Here Levin Varnhagen writes: ‘‘You want me to carve the nibs [die Federn schneiden]?’’ This exchange between Levin Varnhagen and Veit arose over the question of Levin Varnhagen’s identification constructed by her letters instead of through action in the world. She has proffered both an identification and a life that only exist by an act of cutting; by cutting a little off the point of the quill she becomes the truth-telling letter-writer, ‘‘the (male) Jew.’’ See ibid., 2:55. 52. Ibid., 57. Tewarson, ‘‘German-Jewish Identity,’’ 16, from which the translation derives, states that the exact circumstances that motivated the plaint cannot be determined. 53. Spalding, Historical Dictionary, 148 (s.v. ‘‘ausrotten’’), credits Luther with having shifted the referent for ausrotten from the vegetable to the human world with his translation of this verse.

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54. Grimms Wo¨rterbuch, 1:940 (s.v. ‘‘Ausrotter’’), suggests another fruitful association between ausrotten and beschneiden: ‘‘When anguish [der Ausrotter; kpdh (Hebrew)/eksilasmos (Greek)] comes, they will seek peace’’ (Ezek. 7:25). Luther’s translation of this hapaxlegomenon is then glossed by the Wo¨rterbuch as a ‘‘device for pruning [beschneiden] nonfruitbearing branches from the tops of trees.’’ 55. The possibility of extirpating the Jews from Prussia reached into the state apparatus that same year. A 6 January 1806 memo to privy councilor Sack reads: ‘‘Let us not extirpate [Ausrotten] them [i.e., that unfortunate race of men, the Jews], only restrict and better them, and this for the good of the Christians, and themselves, otherwise an unhappy destiny still stands before them, from which no government will be able to save them. We despise them only out of principle, the greater part of the nation however hates them out of instinct’’; cited in Erb and Bergman, Nachtseite, 178. 56. See Nienhaus, Geschichte, 216–37; also Erdle, ‘‘Rhetorik der Unterscheidung.’’ 57. Arnim, ‘‘Kennzeichen,’’ 364–65. 58. Allgemeine Zeitung 99 (9 April 1811): 316; cited in Nienhaus, Geschichte, 222 n. 355. 59. Arnim, ‘‘Kennzeichen,’’ 381. 60. Hazelnuts (Haselnu¨sse) are frequently associated with testicles (Hoden) in German. 61. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: A Life, 175. 62. As Levin Varnhagen’s husband recounts in his forward to Rahel, 1:43. 63. Another possible reason for the salonnie`res’ stigmatized place in Jewish history at the time may have also been their appropriation as emblematic of the alleged unfeminine (unweibliche) character of Jewish women; Glenz, Judenbilder, 76–77. 64. Graetz, History, 5:425. See B. Hertz, Jewish High Society, 9–10; Lowenstein, Berlin, 109 and n. 65. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: A Life, 80, 82. 66. Levin Varnhagen, Rahel, 1:43; trans. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 261. 5. going to ‘‘alimentary’’ school: brotstudium , ludwig feuerbach, and the dietetics of antisemitism This chapter is a spiced-up version—with the addition of a few sides (and asides)—of my article ‘‘It’s ‘Alimentary’: Feuerbach and the Dietetics of Antisemitism’’ that appeared in Christopher Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne’s collection Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion, and Fat in the Modern World (London: Palgrave, 2005), 127–46.

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1. Feuerbach, Essence, 120–21: ‘‘Judaism is worldly Christianity [weltliche Christentum], Christianity spiritual Judaism [geistliche Judentum]. . . . Christianity has spiritualized [vergeistigt] the egoism of Judaism into subjectivity.’’ 2. Such influence is assumed, for example, by Low, Jews in the Eyes, 281. See my discussion in the next chapter of possible sources for Marx’s essay. 3. Feuerbach, Essence, 114. 4. Cf. Carlebach, Karl Marx, 104–08; P. L. Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism, 253–55. To illustrate Feuerbach’s ‘‘obsession with Judaism as a stomach religion’’ (254), Rose cites an English version of this passage. What is curious about Rose’s citation is that, although he notes George Eliot’s translation of Essence, the historian lists his source as Jacob Katz’s discussion of Feuerbach in From Prejudice, ‘‘whose translation is amended and partly quoted here [i.e., in Rose’s text]’’ (254 n. 4). Rather than reproducing Katz’s more denotatively accurate version, as I have in this chapter, Rose has restored Eliot’s mistranslation of the German original. Feuerbach, according to Rose, proffers his own demeaning ‘‘eccentric view of Judaism’’ that draws upon a ‘‘lunatic theory’’ of Judaism as ‘‘originally a cannibal-cult’’; the ‘‘lunatic theory’’ and its relationship to Essence is discussed below. 5. Translation from Katz, From Prejudice, 164. 6. Unfortunately, Feuerbach’s double-edged irony is usually missed. Essence is structured about the opposition between the essence of religion, anthropologically defined as human species-being, and the practice of theology, contradiction-laden and responsible for the ongoing misrecognition of religion’s essence. 7. Unfortunately, though, Eliot’s translation of the 1843 second expanded edition is the only version of the entire Essence of Christianity available for Anglophones. Since Feuerbach excised some of his most virulent comments in the 1849 third reworked and expanded edition, Eliot’s translation allowed the stench of his anti-Jewish rhetoric to linger with his English-speaking readership. 8. See P. L. Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism. 9. The term is borrowed from Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 416. 10. Cf. the dismissive Kamenka, Philosophy; and the absence of discussion in Harvey, Feuerbach. 11. Cf. Feuerbach, Grundsa¨tze. 12. E.g., in ‘‘Geheimnis des Opfers.’’ 13. Feuerbach, ‘‘Die Naturwissenschaft,’’ 367. 14. The fourth of the twenty ‘‘Aphorisms of the Professor’’ that preface Anthe`lme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 treatise, Physiology of Taste, reads instead: ‘‘Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you are’’ (3). Wartofsky, Feuerbach, 451 n. 6, cites an interesting earlier play on ‘‘ist’’ (is) and ‘‘isst’’ (eats) from the

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¨ ber ißt und ist: Eine late eighteenth century: Friedrich Dicke’s pamphlet ‘‘U Erkla¨rung des Ursprungs des Opfers’’ (Concerning Eating and Being: An Explanation of the Origin of Sacrifice), a title not unlike Feuerbach’s 1862, ‘‘Die Geheimniß des Opfers oder der Mensch ist was er ißt’’ (The Mystery of Sacrifice, or Man Is What He Eats). 15. Feuerbach, Essence, 114. Feuerbach’s claim of a persistent and unchanging Judentum would find itself re-cited by Fritsch in Handbuch; see Just, Gestoerte Weltbild, 58. 16. See the discussion of several of Heine’s Jewish-identified characters below and any number of Jewish-American stories, films, and sitcoms over the last sixty years. 17. Cited in Stern, Greek and Latin, 2:98–99. 18. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 68–69. Though obviously not a source for Feuerbach, Andree’s 1881 work serves as a reasonable indicator of the availability of these antipathetic-toward-Judentum representations and discourses to an educated non-Jew of the nineteenth century such as Feuerbach. 19. Cited in Stern, Greek and Latin, 2:605–06. The American physician and anthropologist Maurice Fishberg’s The Jews, e.g., 314–16, suggests a more fortuitous cause (or a Fortunatus one—since the patristic author is the one who called attention to this text when asserting the power of baptismal water to remove the Jewish odor): a copyist’s error—one can only speculate whether intentional or accidental—in which the ‘‘foetentium’’ of this passage replaced the original ‘‘poetentium’’ (turbulent). Also see Fishberg’s possible source, Lazarre, Antisemitism, 168. 20. Cf. Jaeger, Entdeckung, 113; also see Sombart, Wirtschaftsleben, 356. 21. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 68. 22. Cited in Diemling, ‘‘Garlic,’’ 227. 23. Ibid., 218–19. ‘‘Ashkenaz’’ is the Jewish term for Germany; geographically it encompasses the lands that surround the Rhine and Rhone rivers. 24. Schudt, Ju¨dische Merkwu¨rdigkeiten, 349. 25. Heine, Rabbi, 76. Another character created by Heine who would screen his Jewish identification from his public persona—in this case, through a name change on his business card—(Hirsch) Hyacinth, ‘‘sincerely confess[es] [aufrichtig gestehen]’’ that ‘‘I like to eat onions’’ (Ba¨der von Lukka, 129). 26. Heine, Complete Poems, 685. 27. Platen, Der romantische Oedipus, 226; cited in Kolb, ‘‘Freud’s Double,’’ 145; see also Diemling, ‘‘Garlic,’’ 215. 28. Trans. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 52. 29. Arnim, ‘‘Kennzeichen,’’ 384. 30. Wilhelm Marr worried about whether his own clarion call against the menace of Judentum would find an echo, since ‘‘[t]he word ‘garlic’ [Knoblauch]

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already suffices to accuse us Germans of prejudice [des Glaubenshasses]’’ (Sieg, 24). 31. Knoblich, Knoblich, toffes Gwarz/Sta¨rkst dien Ju¨den Sinn unn Harz,/Unn giebst ihn die ganze Wuch/Aechten, koschern, Ju¨deng’ruch; cited in Fuchs, Karikatur, 282. 32. Gra¨fe, Antisemitismus, 96. 33. Cited in Stern, Greek and Latin, 2:102–3. 34. Histories 4.2; cited in Stern, Greek and Latin, 2:18, 25. 35. This oft-repeated bobbemyseh is further discussed in chapter 3 and chapter 7. 36. Contra Apion 2.137; cited in Stern, Greek and Latin, 1:415. 37. See especially appendix 10, which Feuerbach added to the second edition of Essence (and as in the main body of Essence, as noted below, the major part of the most inflammatory material here was excised from the third edition). 38. Feuerbach, ‘‘Geheimnis,des Opfers,’’ 28. 39. Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, 92–94. 40. Translation from Shachar, Judensau, 70. 41. Shachar, Judensau, illustrates this trajectory with over one hundred images of Jews with and as pigs. 42. Histories 5.5.1–2; cited in Stern, Greek and Latin, 2:19, 26. 43. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, vol. 2, chap. 12. 44. Graetz, History, 2:203. 45. Jost, Geschichte des Judenthums, 1:129. 46. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 169–72. 47. Michaelis, ‘‘[Arguments against Dohm]’’; trans. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 42–43. 48. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judentum, 2:227. 49. Letter 282, in Feuerbach, Briefwechsel II, 150–52; Daumer, Feuer- und Molochdienst; Ghillany, Menschenopfer. 50. Letter 347, in Feuerbach, Briefwechsel II, 243–47. This accusation of the necessity for the consumption of the blood of non-Jews during Purim was reiterated in a 10 March 2003 column in the Saudi government-supported newspaper Al- Riyadh. Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faisal University discussed the use of blood in Purim pastries. 51. All mention of Ghillany, whose animus toward Judentum grew in intensity even as Daumer recanted his earlier position, is removed from the third edition of Wesen des Christentums. Feuerbach also omits from his appendix many of the anti-Jewish claims of Eisenmenger. 52. Exhibited in Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite. 53. Cf. Feuerbach’s 28 June 1844 letter to his brother Friedrich (in Briefwechsel II, 361); and Tomasoni, ‘‘Heidentum und Judentum,’’ esp. 157–63.

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Notes to pages 165–71

54. Daumer, Anthropologismus und Kriticismus. 55. Feuerbach, Briefwechsel II, 420–21. 56. Feuerbach, ‘‘Unsterblichkeitsfrage,’’ 192. 57. Ibid., 230. 58. In Feuerbach, ‘‘Vorwort,’’ 191, to the second volume of the 1866 edition of his collected works. 59. Feuerbach, ‘‘Die Naturwissenschaft,’’ 351. 60. Ibid., 358, 367. 61. Feuerbach, ‘‘Geheimnis des Opfers,’’ 27, 41. 62. Ibid., 43, 44; Eng. trans. of Rutilius Namantianus and Synesius from Stern, Greek and Latin, 2:662, 663. 63. Feuerbach, ‘‘Geheimnis des Opfers,’’ 44. 64. Cf. Harvey, Feuerbach, esp. 175–79. 6. from rags to risches : on marx’s other jewish question 1. Ramazzini, Diseases, 217, 217. 2. Ibid., 218. 3. Ibid., 219, 219, 219. Also see the discussions of the association of Jews with skin diseases in chapters 3 (see n. 38, specifically on elephantiasis) and 7. 4. Historically, Jews have been ascribed either extraordinary susceptibility to or extraordinary immunity from tuberculosis. Gilman, Kafka, esp. 54–61, addresses this paradox. This association was a frequent topic of medical inquiry from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first third of the twentieth; see, Hart, Healthy Jew, esp. chap. 5: ‘‘TB or Not TB, That was the Jewish Question.’’ 5. Ramazzini, Diseases, 220, 220, 220. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 221, 221, 221. 8. If there is one thing that ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ is not really on, it is the ‘‘Jewish Question’’—whether Jews, who are resident in a given jurisdiction, should be granted civil and political rights, including the removal (or significant reduction) of restrictions on employment, residence, and government service (although, as will be adduced below, later interpreters have quite reasonably asserted that Marx’s argument in the essay unconditionally supports the formal emancipation of Jewry). Nor for that matter is the essay about capitalism, insofar as Marx’s developing understanding of the workings of the capitalist mode of production, of a political economy that generated misery and alienation and impeded human emancipation, was still, as he admitted in the German Ideology written some two years later (GI 236/DI 217), inchoate and superficial. Cf. Fischer, Socialist Response, esp. chap. 2. 9. Letter to Dagobert Oppenheim, c. 25 August 1842; Marx, Letters, 18.

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Notes to pages 171–74

10. Most vociferously, Silberner, ‘‘Marx an Anti-Semite?’’; Runes, World without Jews; Wistrich, Socialism; Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism; Carlebach, Karl Marx; Birnbaum, ‘‘Karl Marx.’’ 11. See McLellan, Marx; and, to an extent, Leopold, Young Karl Marx. 12. Nor is it correct to ascribe to Marx this Bauerian presupposition. When Marx returns to Bauer’s essays in The Holy Family, not only does he enlist Bauer’s Jewish critics in refuting Bauer’s assertions, he comes to their defense as he turns the rhetorical figures that Bauer proffered as rebuttals into confirmations of their argument (see 88–89). Ultimately, Marx adopts the Jewish critics’ historicist position: ‘‘Jewry has maintained and developed through history, in and with history’’ (109; emphasis in original). 13. H. Wassermann, ‘‘Risches, Judenhaß and Antisemitism,’’ 189, explains, ‘‘During the modern era another term gained wider usage [than Haman]. It was Yiddish, but Hebrew in origin and with no little theological background: Risches or Rischus. Rascha simply meant ‘evil’ or ‘evildoer,’ an adjective often used in conjunction with Haman. Risches was the expression which crystallized in the traditional, secluded and segregated Jewish Ashkenazic society.’’ He adds that the basic Jewish attitude was that ‘‘from Goyim [i.e., Gentiles] one should not really expect anything except Risches, and the exceptions prove the rule’’ (ibid.). 14. For example, Bruno Bauer was initially awarded a license to teach theology in 1834 and held positions at Berlin and Bonn; however, once his public writing turned from apology for orthodox Hegelian theology to its repudiation, his license was revoked and after 1842 he was never again to hold an academic position. 15. Hohendahl, ‘‘Literary Criticism’’; also see Lo¨wenthal, Erza¨hlkunst und Gesellschaft. 16. Hohendahl, ‘‘Literary Criticism,’’ 190, 240. 17. On the uses of parody by the Young Hegelians in general and Marx in particular, see Margaret A. Rose’s brilliant Reading the Young. 18. Bauer, Judenfrage, 47, cf. 61; see Haury, Antisemitismus von links, 176. 19. Carlebach’s reconstruction of the composition of Marx’s essay suggests that it was completed prior to Hess’s. Lars Fischer called to my attention that MEGA’s editorial apparatus regarding the essay, ‘‘Zur Judenfrage: Apparat’’ (650–51), suggests a later provenance for Marx’s text than does Carlebach. Consequently, Marx having access to Hess’s manuscript before completing his own essay cannot be precluded. 20. Carlebach, Karl Marx, esp. 261–358 (‘‘Part 4: Marx and the Problem of Anti-Semitism’’), discusses Silberner and McLellan among other representatives of the respective attitudes toward Marx and/or ‘‘On the Jewish Question.’’ Also see Elisabeth de Fontelay’s comparisons of Marx and Hess in Les figures juives, 61–65.

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Notes to pages 175–76

21. Regarding the speculation about the failure of Hess’s essay to appear: in his exhausting study Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, Julius Carlebach shows that Hess was paid for his would-be contribution; more significant, he points out the political and theoretical differences between the two young writers. Marx had not yet made the move that Hess had dogmatically insisted upon: the absolute necessity to adopt communism. 22. Just, Gesto¨rtes Weltbild, 58, sees Marx’s reworking of Feuerbach as enacting the logic of an old Jewish joke in which two friends converse: First: Second:

You ass! I probably am an ass. The problem is: am I an ass because I am your friend, or am I your friend because I am an ass?

23. Several letters to his co-editor of the Yearbook, Arnold Ruge, were also included. 24. Marx, ‘‘Contribution,’’ 243. 25. Although The German Ideology was coauthored by Marx and Engels, Marx was responsible for most of the writing, and for the purposes of this chapter I will speak only of Marx. 26. Fischer, Socialist Response, 87–88, compares the last line of ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’—‘‘Die gesellschaftliche Emanzipation des Juden ist die Emanzipation der Gesellschaft vom Judentum’’ (‘‘The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism’’; ZJ 377/JQ 241)—with the comparable passage about the necessity to transcend ‘‘das Judentum der bu¨rgerlichen Gesellschaft’’ (the Jewish character of civil society) in Marx’s return to the critique of Bauer in The Holy Family, 110. Although Fischer claims that of Judentum’s three-fold field of reference (religion, people, characteristics), ‘‘Jewishness’’ cannot possibly be meant in the first piece, although certainly primary in the second, he argues that the latter writing articulates and clarifies the earlier attempt’s still-in-flight trajectory toward ‘‘Jewishness’’ (what is characteristic of Jews) as the proper translation for understanding the relationship between Judentum and the bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft. Consequently, despite the nonManichaean perspective of the earlier essay, there is a certain ambiguity in the end about whether or not Marx thought the presence or absence of some entity is necessary for bourgeois civil society as it exists. When I queried Fischer electronically about this, he stated that his conclusion was a simple matter of normative German expression: had Marx intended the ‘‘Jewishness of society,’’ usage would dictate ‘‘von ihrem Judentum’’ and not ‘‘vom Judentum.’’ Nevertheless, since ‘‘Judaism’’—like all terms that refer to a ‘‘religious tradition’’—has a very narrow and very modern and Protestant meaning (on the emergence of the modern notion of religion, see among many King, Orientalism, and J. Z. Smith, Relating Religion), especially for an Anglophone readership, ‘‘Judaism’’ does not convey what historian Derek Penslar refers to

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as ‘‘the characteristics that had long typified Jewish religious culture’’ (Shylock’s Children, 44). While the grammar may dictate the exclusion of ‘‘Jewishness’’ as an appropriate translation in this passage, the role played by rhetorical force in the earlier essay (e.g., the necessity to avoid phrasings such as Penslar’s that here would appear clumsy) and Marx’s particular fondness for chiasm there—more than a specific referent in his mind’s eye—may have led to the specific phrasing of his still-incomplete analysis. Leopold abjures such grammatical nuances and simply asserts the ‘‘clear’’ identity of these two passages (Young Karl Marx, 167–68). 27. Marx, ‘‘Concerning Feuerbach,’’ 421–22. 28. Ramazzini, Diseases, 218. 29. See Pranaitas, ‘‘How the Popes.’’ 30. Baron and Kahan, Economic History, 262. 31. Penslar, Shylock’s Children; see also Glanz, Gaunertum, 138–39. 32. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 193; Westphal, Berliner Konfektion, 11–12. 33. Nasenschweiß. The official American edition of Luther’s collected works translates the phrase as ‘‘sweat of their brow’’; Luther, ‘‘Jews and Their Lies,’’ 272. On the view that Jews are innately averse to agriculture, see Pulzer, Rise, 66–67. 34. J. Hess, Germans, Jews, 177, cites from an anonymous pamphlet, ‘‘Political-Theological Exercise on the Treatment of Jewish Converts,’’ published by a leading Berlin journal in 1799: ‘‘One has to assume that an inherited mixture of fluids has lamed or slackened [the Jews’] bodily powers; that the forms of education and learning propagated by their ancestors have mutilated the higher faculties of their soul and given them an adverse direction.’’ The founder of Semitic philology, Ernest Renan, instituted the absence of creativity as a key component of the Jews’ mental physiognomy; he begins his general history of comparative Semitic languages by asserting that Semitic peoples ‘‘completely lack a creative imagination’’ (Histoire ge´nerale, 11). This lack functioned as a leitmotif in the anti-Jewish writings of Wagner, Treitschke, and Weininger, among many. 35. For example, Hundt-Radowsky, Judenspiegel, 116, refers to the Jewish daughter of a ‘‘rag-, book-, or clothes peddler.’’ 36. Pezzl, Skizze, 170; cited in Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, 209. 37. Benjamin is here characterizing the chiffoniers (Lumpensammler, ragpickers) of nineteenth century Paris. The characterization of ‘‘ragtag’’ is ‘‘Lumpenproletarier’’ in Benjamin’s original. 38. Sombart, Wirtschaftsleben, 177. 39. Members of this group, like Marx’s father, by necessity converted to some form of Christianity once they were threatened with loss of position by the reimposition of the restrictions.

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Notes to pages 178–84

40. On the growing impoverishment of large segments of the Jewish population and the increased visibility of the ‘‘beggar Jew’’ (Betteljude) during the course of the eighteenth century, see Breuer, ‘‘Early Modern,’’ 245–50. Also see Guggenheim, ‘‘Ju¨dische Armut.’’ 41. Prawer, Marx and Literature, esp. 65–67. 42. Cited in Jasper, Deutsch-ju¨discher Parnass, 164. 43. Cited from Arnold, ‘‘Heine,’’ 139. The essay appeared in Cornhill Magazine 8 (August 1863) and was reprinted in Essays in Criticism, 1st series, 1865. Arnold apparently missed the irony of this concluding scene. The English translator’s substitution of ‘‘Moses Lump’’ for the final ‘‘Lu¨mpchen’’ in Arnold’s essay did not help. ‘‘Lu¨mpchen’’ has been restored to this English translation to preserve Heine’s punning punchline; the German original could refer to either Moses Lump’s name of endearment or to a small-time rogue. 44. Cited in Sposato, Price of Assimilation, 28. 45. Naudh, Die Juden, 54; cited in Hortzitz, ‘Fru¨h-Antisemitismus’, 161. 46. Ru¨hs, Ueber die Anspru¨che, 25. 47. Makela, ‘‘Rise and Fall,’’ 186; also see Westphal, Berliner Konfektion, 14–24, on the Jewish preeminence in—although not the exclusive responsibility for—developing the industry in Berlin. 48. Perrot, Fashioning, 51. 49. Makela, ‘‘Rise and Fall,’’ 186. Heer, Glaube, 104, summarizes Scheicher’s economic history of the Jews (in Erlebnisse): ‘‘The day before yesterday they were refugees from the ghetto, yesterday ragpickers [Lumpensammler], today shoe manufacturers, tomorrow hotel and bordello proprietors.’’ 50. Engels, Condition, 367–68; MEW 2:298. 51. Marx comments in the 1844 Manuscripts (360) that ‘‘[t]he Irishman has only one need left—the need to eat, to eat potatoes, and, more precisely, to eat rotten potatoes [Lumpenkartoffeln], the worst kind of potatoes.’’ He continues, ‘‘But England and France already have a little Ireland in each of their industrial cities’’ (emphasis added). 52. Engels, Condition, 376–77; Marx and Engels, MEW 2:307. 53. See Kershen, ‘‘Trade Unionism,’’ 31; and Pollins, Economic History, 100–01. 54. E.g., Engels, Condition, 367–68; MEW 2:298. Marx’s letters are rife with accounts of the periodic to and fro of the family’s clothing in order to make ends meet. 55. Harrison, New and Universal History, 549; cited in Pollins, Economic History, 66. 56. Discussed by Pollins, Economic History, 66. 57. Baron and Kahan, Economic History , 262.

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58. Berkowitz, Myth of Jewish Criminality, 11 and n. 45, notes treatises by nineteenth-century law enforcement officials such as Carl Philipp Theodor Schwencken and, especially, Friedrich Christian Benedict Ave´-Lallement, who devote attention to the Jewish component of Gaunertum (the criminal class). 59. Making a connection between the alleged Jewish involvement in the sex trade and Jews’ purported dominance of the ready-to-wear trade would remain a trope of antisemitic discourse. In his 1890 Verzweiflungskampf der arischen Vo¨lker mit dem Judentum, the antisemitic Reichstag deputy Hermann Ahlwardt commented that ‘‘Berlin hat keine Bordelle mehr, aber es hat die Konfektion’’ (Berlin no longer has bordellos, but it does have clothing manufacturers). This trope would be reproduced in the notorious encyclopedia of antisemitic lore, Ekkehard and Stauff, Sigilla Veri., s.v. ‘‘Konfektion’’ (3:642ff.). 60. The Times, 27 October 1843, 4; cited in Pollins, Economic History, 101. Marx mentions this firm in Capital 3, in the chapter on precapitalist forms of interest-bearing capital (i.e., usurer’s capital and ‘‘its twin brother’’ [MEW 25:607], merchant’s capital). He suggests that such figures as Sir Josiah Child, the ‘‘father of English stockjobbing,’’ in screaming about ‘‘the monopoly of usurers,’’ or the East India Company’s defending its monopoly ‘‘in the name of free trade,’’ are as hypocritical as are those manifestly Jewish wholesale clothing manufacturers in complaining about the monopoly held by ‘‘private tailors’’ (MEW 25:616). 61. Bayerdo¨rfer, ‘‘Judenrollen,’’ 330 n. 21. 62. See Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 156–58. Sessa hid his authorship beneath a Jew-ish pseudonym, Samson Eidechs, that implicated the author in the title’s use of the first-person plural (Unser/our), and therefore provided a veneer of verisimilitude to the farce. 63. Sessa, Unser Verkehr, 18, 47. Jakob’s failure to provide the proper pronunciation of ‘‘Genie’’ both undercut his claim for genius and demonstrated that genius was not proper to the Jews, that Jews were by nature incapable of genius. On a speculative note, the near homophone ‘‘sheeny,’’ a vulgar, opprobrious label for Jews among Anglophones, is according to the OED of obscure origins; however, its first appearances were contemporaneous with the production of Sessa’s play. Leo Rosten draws upon Weekley’s 1957 Etymological Dictionary to suggest that it ‘‘is derived from the way Jews pronounced the German word scho¨n (‘pretty,’ ‘beautiful’) in describing the merchandise they offered for sale’’ ( Joys of Yiddish, 334). In the play, Jakob articulates scho¨n- as schain-. 64. Sessa, Unser Verkehr, e.g., 14, 47 (in Polckwitzer’s counter to Jakob’s self-justifying self-identification—‘‘ich bin a¨ Schenie’’—when soliciting the wealthy man to marry his daughter), 47.

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65. Ibid., 47 (by Polckwitzer), 47. 66. Ibid., 110. This conjunction of Lump-, Verkehr, Schacher, Jew, and farce anticipates the discussion below of the German Ideology and the Eighteenth Brumaire. 67. H. Wasserman, ‘‘The Fliegende Bla¨tter,’’ 109. 68. J. Schmidt, ‘‘Theater-Juden,’’ 20; cited in Richter, Sprache ju¨discher Figuren, 162; cf. 178. Richter provides an extensive analysis of the play and its reception (155–82). Schmidt coedited Die Grenzboten with the soon-renowned author Gustav Freytag. 69. Scheit, Verborgener Staat, 204–09; and Bayerdo¨rfer, ‘‘Judenrollen,’’ 330–32. 70. Haibl, Zerrbild, 281, 336–38. 71. Wiesemann, Antiju¨discher Nippes, 18–19, 152; also see H. Wassermann, ‘‘The Fliegende Bla¨tter,’’ 109–10. 72. Bo¨rne, ‘‘Unser Verkehr.’’ 73. Bo¨rne, ‘‘Der Jude Shylock,’’ 500, recalls how the actor who played Shylock described him at the end of his performance as ‘‘such a monster . . . as one luckily never encounters in actuality.’’ 74. Also see Heine’s 27 August 1816 letter to a fellow student: ‘‘I call all Hamburgers Jews, and those also called in the vernacular Christians, I dub baptized (getaufte) Jews in order to distinguish them from the circumcised ones’’ (Beschnittenen); cited in Hirsch, ‘‘Karl Marx,’’ 208. Also see Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder, 94, and their discussion of the identification of ‘‘Juden’’ with usury and financial chicanery regardless of whether or not the miscreant is of Jewish descent. They cite from J. Mo¨ller’s 1693 Nu¨tzlicher Discurß, 56, and his reference to ‘‘circumcised (beschnittene) Jews’’ and ‘‘baptized (getaufte) Jews’’; the latter, Mo¨ller indicates, does not refer to converts. 75. Bo¨rne, ‘‘Der Jude Shylock,’’ 504–05. In his editorial notes to Bo¨rne on Shylock, Ritchie Robertson also sees, albeit more perniciously, the critic anticipating an even more pernicious Marx (German-Jewish Dialogue, 69). In one of the aphorisms [§228] that Bo¨rne published in the first edition of his collected works (1829–34), he also ironized the association of Jewry with the thirst for wealth that preoccupied his contemporary society. He chides Christianity that it will be quite embarrassed come the Last Judgment. Since the only ‘‘riffraff’’ (Lumpenvolk) who will escape the devil’s clutches are the poor, he opines, they owe their salvation to the Jews because, like stereotypical Jews, everyone else in society will have spent their lives pursuing Mammon. 76. Marx, Manuscripts, 377. 77. On role of allusion in Marx’s writing, see Harries, Scare Quotes, esp. chap. 2, ‘‘Homo Alludens: Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.’’

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78. The English translation of this and the subsequent extract from Marx, ‘‘Comments,’’ 112–13. Hegel famously concludes the penultimate paragraph of his preface to Philosophy of Right: ‘‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey [Grau in Grau], a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey [Grau in Grau] of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk’’ (23). 79. Admittedly for Marx Bescheidenheit is more associated with restriction and narrowness. Hence in ‘‘Contribution,’’ 254–55, he writes, ‘‘The main feature of German morality and honour, not only in individuals but in classes, is that modest egoism [bescheidene Egoismus] which asserts its narrowness [Beschra¨nktheit] and allows that narrowness to be used against it.’’ While the call for Jewish modesty is absent from ‘‘Zur Judenfrage,’’ what is not absent is frequent citation and appropriation of Bauer’s characterization of Jewish Beschra¨nktheit (JQ 214/ZJ 349; 217/352; 227/362; 229/364; 236/371; 241/ 377): thus Marx concludes the antepenultimate paragraph of the essay, ‘‘but also in present-day society we find the essence of the modern Jew . . . not only as the narrowness (Beschra¨nktheit) of the Jew but as the Jewish narrowness (Beschra¨nktheit) of society’’ (JQ 241/ZJ 377). See the ‘‘Modest Excursus’’ on Bescheidenheit in chapter 3 of this volume. 80. Berlin, Karl Marx, 80. 81. Engels to Marx, 19 November [1844], in Marx and Engels, Letters 38, 9–13. 82. Marx often cited the name of Ego’s author in quotes because its own reputed author was merely a phrase—‘‘Stirner’’ was the nom de plume of Johann Kaspar Schmidt—that like all phrases must be, according to Ego, empty of truth and reality. Other implications of Marx’s rhetorical ploy are discussed in n. 152 below. 83. Behind this endless doubling, writes Derrida, ‘‘is that Marx scares himself[;] he himself pursues relentlessly someone who almost resembles him to the point that we could mistake one for the other: a brother, a double, thus a diabolical image’’ (Specters of Marx, 139). Alternatively (to psychologize the psychologizer?), Derrida may be seeing in this particular specter of Marx his own double, if Marx’s rhetorical strategy is understood as a form of immanent critique not unlike what Derrida himself has practiced. By reading Ego against itself, Marx uncovers aporia that would lead all future readers to disown Stirner’s claims. 84. Marx draws upon an 1845 edition of Stirner’s Der Einzige. 85. This is evident from this spectral characterization of that anthropology in Stirner, EO 41: ‘‘The ghost has put on a body, God has become a man, but now man is himself the gruesome spook which he seeks to get behind, to exorcize, to fathom, to bring to reality and to speech; man is—spirit’’; cited by Lewis, ‘‘Politics of ‘Hauntology,’ ’’ 140. See Eßbach, Gegenzu¨ge, esp. 55–62.

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86. Actually there are three. The third appears in Marx’s exegesis of Stirner’s claim that liberalism, rather than overcoming Christianity, had actually been its culmination with its apotheosis of ‘‘man.’’ Rather than refer to Christian egos as what the ‘‘most moderns’’ had replaced in the firmament, Marx gratuitously describes what had been ‘‘ ‘originally,’ namely ‘in truth,’ in essence, in heaven, as hidden Jews’’ (GI 146/DI 129). 87. That war, according to Engels in Condition, characterizes life in ‘‘the great towns.’’ He adds: ‘‘Just as in Stirner’s recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains’’ (Condition, 329; MEW 2:257). 88. In addition to that frequent pairing of Chinese and Jews to which chapter 2 has already attested, Marx’s inclusion of the Germans among these ‘‘usual suspects’’ might appear odd. Yet given Marx’s recognition of the ‘‘socio-political reality’’ of German states, which still resided in ‘‘protective tariffs . . . a system of prohibitions of national economy’’ and lagged historically well behind English and French capitalism, and of the ‘‘philistine . . . narrowmindedness’’ of the German middle class (‘‘Contribution,’’ 248, 255), his situating the Germans along with the Chinese and Jews is consistent. 89. Marx may also have been making a Hegelian association, since in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel argues that Judentum finds its substantial end in the family; see Geschichte, 262–63. 90. Yiddish for ‘‘little knots’’; i.e., obsessively concerned about it to the point of blathering. 91. According to Stirner, Lumperei or ragamuffinhood is completed in ‘‘humane liberalism,’’ a.k.a. Critical Criticism, that most modern of moderns that Stirner’s system supersedes. Yet even as humane liberalism sees itself transcending the communist ideal of the ‘‘ ‘laborers’ or ‘ragamuffins’ society’ ’’ (EO 128) with the ideal of ‘‘Man,’’ Stirner claims that the humane liberals do not recognize that ‘‘Man’’ is the ‘‘last rag’’ (EO 139). Although Stirner argues that it is necessary for this last rag of Critical Criticism ‘‘to fall off’’ for his own ideal of ownness to arise, in German Ideology Marx virtually ignores Stirner’s genealogical self-understanding; Marx’s primary concerns are the opposition between his own granting of primacy to material social relations and Stirner’s primacy of the claimed-as-materialist self (‘‘I’’), as well as the opposition between the industrial proletariat and Stirner’s Lumpengesindel (riffraff ). 92. Marx describes the distinctions as lumpig because of Stirner’s own use of Lump in his analysis of ‘‘humane liberalism’’ (see previous note); also cf. GI 274/DI 255: ‘‘diese Lumperei der Distinktion.’’ 93. Simonde de Sismondi, Etudes; see Thoburn, ‘‘Difference in Marx,’’ 439.

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Notes to pages 193–95

94. Cited in Chevalier, Laboring Classes, 364. In ‘‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’’ (9–10), Benjamin also connects the ragpicker to a racial discourse via a contemporary of Fre´gier and Marx, Charles Baudelaire—albeit differently and more sympathetically than do either of the first two. First Benjamin identifies the ragpicker with the ‘‘Race of Cain,’’ which is opposed to the ‘‘Race of Abel’’ in Baudelaire’s poem, ‘‘Abel and Cain.’’ Then he ties these descendants of Cain to the race of ‘‘peculiar commodity-owners’’ (citing Marx, C 275/K 186), i.e., the proletariat whose only property is their own labor. 95. The word Lumpenproletariat also appears in the Feuerbach section’s discussion of ‘‘the role of violence (conquest) in history.’’ Although appearing earlier in the published versions of the German Ideology, the section was composed later, and its mention of Lumpenproletariat is historically specific: ‘‘The plebians [of ancient Rome], midway between freemen and slaves, never succeeded in becoming more than a proletarian rabble’’ (Lumpenproletariat; GI 84/DI 23). On Marx’s diverse definitions of the Lumpenproletariat, see Draper, ‘‘Concept’’; Stallybrass, ‘‘Marx and Heterogeneity’’; and Thoburn, ‘‘Difference in Marx.’’ On the compositional history of the German Ideology, see Rose, Reading, 117–19. 96. Later in Capital, Marx relates the ‘‘just-so story’’ of ‘‘economic original sin’’ that guided the Stirner-echoing understanding of class held by the bourgeois discipline of political economy: ‘‘Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals [Lumpen], spending their substance, and more, in riotous living’’ (C 873/K 741). By referring, in his version of the bourgeois myth, to the progenitors of the ‘‘great majority’’ as Lumpen, Marx will again signal his distinction between the Lumpenproletariat and the industrial proletariat who have ‘‘nothing to sell except their own skins’’ (ibid.). After arguing that primitive accumulation ‘‘plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology’’ (C 873/K 741), Marx then compares ‘‘the legend of theological original sin’’ that provides an etiology (‘‘tells us certainly how’’) of the necessity for human labor with ‘‘the history [Historie] of economic original sin’’ that ‘‘reveals to us’’ that for some this is by no means necessary. Reinforcing the implications of the seemingly oxymoronic couplings of, on the one hand, theology and explanatory power and, on the other, political economy and revelation is Marx’s employment of the word Historie rather than Geschichte. Historie merely provides a descriptive narrative, whereas Geschichte seeks explanations; hence, this particular ‘‘history,’’ like all forms of appearance, is a mystification—or as Marx then characterizes it, ‘‘insipid childishness’’ (C 873/K 742). 97. Cf. GI 358/DI 342 and below on other characterizations of Stirner as Lump.

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98. ‘‘Ownness [Eigenheit] includes in itself everything own [Eigene], and brings to honor again what Christian language dishonored. But ownness [Eigenheit] has not any alien standard either, as it is not in any sense an idea like freedom, morality, humanity, and the like: it is only a description of the— owner [Eigners]’’ (Stirner, EO 171). 99. Beyond emphasizing the irony that he who would tar his opposition with the label of Lump is himself one, Marx’s German original also demonstrates graphically his characterization of ‘‘Stirner’’ as one who has chosen the ‘‘absence of determination’’ by separating the direct article from the substantive. 100. In the never-completed planned second volume, the critique of socalled ‘‘true socialism,’’ Marx directly addresses Stirner’s confusion between Lumperei and the communist desire to abolish private property: ‘‘If one takes the antithesis of communism to the world of private property in its crudest form, i.e., in the most abstract form in which the real conditions of that antithesis are ignored, then one is faced with the antithesis of property and lack of property. The abolition of this antithesis can be viewed as the abolition of either the one side or the other; either property is abolished, in which case universal lack of property or destitution [Lumperei] results, or else the lack of property is abolished, which means the establishment of true property. In reality, the actual property-owners stand on one side and the propertyless communist proletarians on the other. This opposition becomes keener day by day and is rapidly driving to a crisis’’ (GI 469/DI 457). 101. Also see Stallybrass’s brilliant commentary (‘‘Marx’s Coat’’) on Marx’s ironic situation: by pawning his coat Marx transformed it into (paper) money so that he could pay for paper (itself the product of discarded coats turned to rags) in order to write; however, without his coat, he could not enter the British Museum to perform the research upon which his writing depended. Stallybrass notes, ‘‘As late as 1860, rags still formed 88 percent of the total papermaking material’’ (‘‘Marx’s Coat,’’ 200). 102. Literally, ‘‘Jewish school.’’ The word draws upon the homophony of the German word for school (Schule) and the Yiddish for synagogue (Shul). Because the congregation’s behavior in a traditional Jewish service appeared to respectable (and ignorant) German Gentiles as the very opposite of the orderliness and solemnity of proper (Protestant) worship, the term Judenschule derogatorily referred in everyday German speech to any scene of noise and disorder. 103. When Hundt-Radowsky lists the bases for the Jewish connection to money, he adds in a manifest allusion to Sessa’s play that in addition to the Jews’ Schachergeist and greed, there is ‘‘above all ‘our trade’ [‘unser Verkehr’]’’ (Judenspiegel, 82).

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104. Marx, Manuscripts, 347. Although here in the Manuscripts Marx still writes of ‘‘man as a species-being,’’ he is in the process of recognizing the historicization of nature: ‘‘[T]his relationship reveals in a sensuous form, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature for man or nature has become the human essence for man. It is possible to judge from this relationship the entire level of development of mankind.’’ 105. ‘‘The species-relation [Gattungsverha¨ltnis] itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes a commercial object! Woman is put on the market [verschachert]’’ (JQ 239/ZJ 375). 106. That is, (hetero)sexual relations and practices. Engels imagines the ragged life of the agricultural proletariat in Condition, as follows: ‘‘their food scanty and bad, their clothing ragged [zerlumpt], their dwellings cramped and desolate, small, wretched huts, with no comforts whatsoever; and, for young people, lodging-houses, where men and women are scarcely separated, and illegitimate intercourse [illegitimem Verkehr] [is] thus provoked’’ (552; MEW 2:477). 107. And the commercialization of sexuality, prostitution, becomes the figure for modern society. In the Paris Manuscripts, after copying out a series of passages describing the abjection of the non-owning class from Pecqueur, The´orie nouvelle, 409–22, that culminates with ‘‘Prostitution of the nonowning class in all its forms,’’ Marx adds, ‘‘Rag-and-bone men’’ (Lumpensammler; Manuscripts, 292); also see Wohlfahrt, ‘‘Et Cetera?’’ 150 n. 7. 108. As Marx wrote in the fourth of his theses on Feuerbach, Feuerbach’s ‘‘work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular [weltliche] basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the cleavages and selfcontradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice’’ (‘‘Concerning Feuerbach,’’ 422). 109. Although, as the citation above suggests (GI 32/DI 21), Marx is already thinking of production as determinative in the last instance. 110. Iorio, Karl Marx, esp. chap. 3, argues that when Marx shifts to Produktionsverha¨ltnisse he does not abandon the more general significance found in his discussion of the role of Verkehr in historical materialist analysis in the German Ideology. Iorio draws on Marx’s 28 December 1846 letter to Pawel Wassiljewitsch Annenkow in which Marx offers ‘‘privilege, the institution of guilds and corporations, the regulatory system’’ (MEW 27:453; cited in Iorio, Karl Marx, 65) of the Middle Ages as an example of the Verkehr

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specific to that historic social formation. Since the Verkehr of the capitalist epoch are the ‘‘relations of production,’’ Iorio argues that their generality as social relations is missed by those who read Marx as exclusively an economic determinist. 111. Indeed, it may be argued that Marx is here drawing on the rhetorical force of Verkehr’s familiar (and disparaging) Jewish associations that are discussed above. 112. Marx to Ruge, May 1843, ‘‘Letters,’’ 203; MEW 1:340. While it would appear that Marx is directly inverting the ‘‘inverted world’’ that Hegel describes at the moment that mediates the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness in Spirit’s self-development in Phenomenology of Spirit (see discussion on the inverted world in Capital, below), Leopold emphasizes that ‘‘visual representations of topsi-turviness were hugely popular, and Die verkehrte Welt (The World Turned Topsy-Turvy) was the title of both a wellknown humorous play by Ludwig Tieck and a brilliant satirical poem by Heine, published in Vorwa¨rts! in 1844’’ (Young Karl Marx, 50). 113. The first description, from Granier de Cassagnac’s 1838 Histoire des classes ouvrie`res et des classes bourgeoises, is cited by Benjamin (‘‘Paris,’’ 9–10); the latter two, by, respectively, the civic planner Baron Haussmann and the French politician and historian Adolphe Thiers, are cited by Chevalier, Labouring Classes, 365, 364. 114. Just, Gesto¨rtes Weltbild, 75. Also see Paul, ‘‘Marxist Views of Race,’’ 133. 115. Compare ‘‘a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society’’ (Marx, ‘‘Contribution,’’ 256) with Thoburn, ‘‘Difference in Marx,’’ 441, on the Lumpenproletariat as a ‘‘non-class,’’ a ‘‘class without a definite trace.’’ 116. Marx, ‘‘Contribution,’’ 256; MEW 1:391. 117. Arvon, Les juifs, 114. 118. The qualifier lumpige was omitted in the second and subsequent editions of The Eighteenth Brumaire; see Marx, ‘‘Der 18. Brumaire: Apparat,’’ 706. Cf. ‘‘als Farce,’’ Marx, EB 103/AB 115. 119. Marx, Class Struggles, 62; MEW 7:26. 120. Among Marx’s unpublished supplements to his examination of surplus value that he undertook between 1861 and 1863 is the hilariously facetious ‘‘Abschweifung u¨ber productive Arbeit’’ (Digression on Productive Labor), in which he argues that crime is the most productive of all professions. 121. Louis Bonaparte therefore is not only endeavoring to reproduce his uncle Napoleon and the Paris of his Eighteenth Brumaire, his overthrow of the Directory; Louis is also reproducing an earlier Paris. In German Ideology, as discussed above, Marx saw the political telos of Stirner’s thought leading to a ‘‘vagabond kingdom [Lumpenko¨nigreich], as the Paris beggars did in the

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fifteenth century,’’ at the head of which would sit a Lumpenko¨nig; cf. GI 232/ DI 213–14. And what he saw ‘‘Stirner’’ projecting onto modernity, Marx saw realized by Bonaparte. 122. Although a 14 January 1852 letter from Wilhelm Pieper to Engels (Marx and Engels, Briefwechsel, 213) indicates that Engels had already ordered Heine’s Romanzero for Marx from the Hermannschen Buchhandlung in Frankfurt (by way of Pieper and Hermann Ebner), Engels’s letter to Marx of 20 April 1852—written, that is, after the purported completion of The Eighteenth Brumaire—indicates that the order was still in transit (ibid., 9). Nevertheless, since this particular poem was first published only in that collection, these rather self-evident allusions indicate the likelihood that Marx had earlier access to the work. 123. Heine, SS 6.2: 45. 124. Marx, Class Struggles, 51; MEW 7:14. I wish to thank Professor Lars Fischer for alerting me to this passage. Heine included a cycle of twenty poems within ‘‘Lamentations,’’ the second part of Romanzero, in which Lumpplays a prominent role. The eponymous protagonist of this series is Lazarus, a combination of two figures, the leper in the Lukan parable (16:19–30) and Martha’s brother whom Jesus brought back to life according to John (11: 1–6). They are clearly identified as Jewish both in the Gospels and in Heine’s poems. In the first poem in the cycle, ‘‘Weltlauf’’ (The Course of the World), Heine employs Lump- the way Marx had employed the Proletariat in his earlier writings (e.g., ‘‘Contribution,’’ 256; Manuscripts, 322), as the absolutely exploited who do not even possess their own lives: Wenn du aber gar nichts hast, Ach, so lasse dich begraben— Denn ein Recht zum Leben, Lump, aben nur die etwas haben. (Heine, ‘‘Weltlauf,’’ SS 6.1: 105) [If you have absolutely nothing Then you may as well give up the ghost Because a right to life, Lump, Belongs only to those who have something.]

The fifth poem in the series is simply entitled ‘‘Lumpentum.’’ It describes the narrator’s reduced state of being: prostrate in the dust and muck, bereft of pride and property, his only hope for sustenance in an ever-pricier world lies in fawning (the Jewish-coded Schmeicheln) on those who have. Professor Margaret Rose of Cambridge alerted me to the use of Lump in these poems as well as to her own prescient analysis in Die Parodie, esp. 83–91. She also notes (93–94) possible connections between ‘‘Weltlauf’’ and the analysis of Stirner in The German Ideology.

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125. The word Lumpenproletariat makes a brief, unadorned appearance in the fourth section, where ‘‘donations and loans’’ are referred to as the content of ‘‘the financial science of the lumpenproletariat’’ (Marx, EB 143/AB 154–55). 126. Corbin, Foul, 146. 127. From an 1831 report by the sanitary commission of the Jardin des Plantes; cited in ibid., 141. The report went on to comment, ‘‘Can it be otherwise in view of the nature of their activity in the streets, their noses continually in dunghills?’’ 128. Ragpickers also led an earlier parody of a revolutionary force that attempted its own parody of a revolution, ‘‘a little counterrevolution’’ (Konterrevolution; 453) during the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. In Article 6 (19 April 1832) of his Franzo¨sische Zusta¨nde, Marx’s friend Heine had described how the Parisian ragpickers (Lumpensammler; Heine also refers to them by the French chiffoniers in his account) together with the old female second-hand dealers (alte Tro¨delweiber, revendeuses), and to the cheers of the Karlisten (supporters of the last Bourbon king, the recently dethroned Charles X) rose up, not to restore the ‘‘Salubrite´ publique’’ (public health; 453) as had the ‘‘comite´s de sante´’’ had during the French Revolution, but to secure the ‘‘salete´ publique’’ (in Heine’s French version, HkG 12.1: 352; o¨ffentlichen Schmutz, 453; public dirt), and were quickly put down. Professor Willi Goetschel drew my attention to Heine’s account. 129. Saltus, Anatomy, 66. 130. Literally, ‘‘teeth-cleaners’’; figuratively, the term evokes the ‘‘sellers of gift-horses,’’ as German, like English, adopted St. Jerome’s proverbial ‘‘Do not look a gift horse in the mouth.’’ 131. Literally, ‘‘corn-clippers,’’ referring to those who had recently (c. 1785) factitiously combined Greek words for ‘hand’ and ‘foot’ to designate themselves by the seemingly ‘‘professional’’ title of ‘‘chiropodist.’’ Perhaps the foremost literary corn clipper is the Jewish lottery-agent Hirsch-Hyacinth, who in Heine’s Ba¨der von Lucca not only relates the story of Moses Lump’s meeting with the great Nathan Rothschild, but earlier boasts about his own, ‘‘when he had the honor to cut [Baron Rothschild’s] corns [die Hu¨hneraugen zu schneiden]’’: ‘‘And while I was cutting his corns [Hu¨hneraugen] I thought in my heart, ‘Now you’ve got in your hands the feet of the man who holds all the world in his hands, and you too are a man that’s somebody, for if you cut too deeply he’ll be angry, and if you don’t cut enough he’ll be all the madder at the kings’;—it was the happiest moment of my life!’’ (Heine, PT 327). 132. ‘‘Wo findet man geschicktere Taschenspieler, Beutelschneider, Za¨hneputzer, Leichdorn- und Dukatenbeschneider, Kipperer und Wipperer, als unter ihnen’’; Hundt-Radowsky, Judenspiegel, 89. Also see German Jacobin Georg Friedrich Rebmann’s description of the population inhabiting a quarter

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by Amsterdam’s harbor as a Po¨bel and a Gesindel, which rings like Marx’s description of the Lumpenproletariat and is heavily inflected as Jewish; cited in Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder, 96. There was a nineteenth-century Dutch-Jewish saying to describe the occupations of most Dutch Jews of the time: ‘‘In Dutch, hak, pak, and sak mean the butcher’s ax, the peddler’s pack, and the rag picker’s sack. At the start of the nineteenth century a majority of the Jews of the Netherlands made their livings as butchers, peddlers, and rag pickers’’ (Stephen Lewis, ‘‘About Hak Pak Sak’’). The last two would have found their like in Marx’s census. 133. Michaelis, ‘‘Arguments,’’ 42. Also see Penslar, Shylock’s, 36; Berkowitz, Myth of Jewish Criminality, 5. Also see n. 58 above. 134. See Veit, ‘‘Strange Case.’’ 135. Marx offers, as it were, a paraphrase of this exemplary phrase in The Eighteenth Brumaire. He describes a Bonaparte who, ‘‘precisely because he was . . . a princely lumpenproletarian, had the advantage over a rascally [schuftigen] bourgeois’’ (EB 157/AB 169). 136. Thoburn, ‘‘Difference in Marx,’’ 443: ‘‘The basis of the lumpenproletariat’s reactive relation to history lies in its relation (or lack thereof ) to productive activity.’’ In a notorious footnote to his Anthropology, Kant explains why the Jews in Poland engage in cheating [Betrug] ‘‘the people under whom they find protection’’: ‘‘It could not be otherwise with an entire nation of nothing but merchants, as non-productive members [nichtproducierenden Gliedern] of society’’ (100 n). See Bermann, Produktivierungsmythen. 137. Marx, Class Struggles, 51, 51, 51, 51; MEW 7:15, 14, 14–15, 15. 138. Marx, Class Struggles, 51; MEW 7:15. This reference is obscured in the standard English translation, where Bo¨rsenjuden is translated as ‘‘Bourse jobbers.’’ The pamphlets by the utopian socialist and Fourier disciple Alphonse Toussenel (and others) may well have been the source of much of Marx’s description of the upper tier of the French bourgeoisie; however, he thoroughly repudiated their antisemitic explanations of the French situation. 139. The putrescence is clearly more pervasive than described in the Communist Manifesto, where the Lumpenproletariat is described as ‘‘that passive rotting mass [passive Verfaulung] thrown off by the lowest layers of the society’’ (Manifesto, 48; MEW 4:472). 140. Invocations of Tristram Shandy and its fictional character, Slawkenbergius, the author of a prominent treatise on noses (prominent and otherwise), are also there. 141. The characterization of Bonaparte and his lumpenproletarians as farcical reproductions without historic basis also mirrors the denigrating characterization of Jewish mimicry that is extensively addressed in chapter 9

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of this volume. Hundt-Rundowsky, who was certainly no supporter of Louis Bonaparte’s uncle and one-time conqueror of Germany, Napoleon Bonaparte, also reports—to the advantage of neither Napoleon nor the Jews—that the then-exiled former emperor was reputed to be of Jewish descent (HundtRadowsky, Judenspiegel, 146–47). 142. Marx, Letters, 189 and n. 2 (translation adapted). In an earlier letter that year to his uncle (25 June 1864), Marx refers to their shared Israelite descent, when he ironically comments that hardly ‘‘any shock whatever’’ (in English in original), such as Dutch Orientalist Reinhart Dozy’s claim to have proved that the Pentateuch was an invention of Ezra, ‘‘could shake ‘our ancestral pride’ ’’ (186); also see Leopold, Young Karl Marx, 173 and n. 397. 143. Cf. Capital 3 (817; MEW 25:838): ‘‘It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world (die verzauberte, verkehrte und auf den Kopf gestellte Welt), in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things.’’ 144. The English translation unfortunately elides how Marx’s rhetoric reproduced the dialectic to which it referred. 145. Marx, ‘‘Leading,’’ 189; MEW 1:90–91. 146. Marx, ‘‘Debates,’’ 262–63; MEW 1:147. As if such ridicule were inadequate, Marx added one last analogy: ‘‘But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human beings.’’ 147. ‘‘It is that the interests of the forest owner shall be safeguarded even if this results in destroying the world of law and freedom. . . . This firm wooden foundation of your argument is so rotten that a single breath of sound common sense is sufficient to shatter it into a thousand fragments’’ (‘‘Debates,’’ 256; MEW 1:141). 148. Marx’s observation and his subsequent Shakespeare citation are from ‘‘Debates,’’ 256. 149. Rather than suggesting some anticipation of the Freudian appropriation of ‘‘fetishism’’ by Marx, I would rather call attention to a possible orthographic connection of Judentum and fetishism that is mediated by circumcision in his 1842 notebooks. Among Marx’s citations from de Brosses that he copied into those notebooks (Exzerpte, 322) is one about the nonreligious practice of circumcision among the natives of Ouidah: ‘‘Afrikaner von Juidah [my emphasis] die Beschneidung [Marx’s emphasis], aber nicht als Religionshandlung’’ (de Brosses, pp. 30–31). Earlier in his notebooks (Exzerpte, 248) Marx had also excerpted the discussion of circumcision and its worldly effects such as the nation-preserving hatred of Jews by other nations, from Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Philosophicus.

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150. In an earlier article on these debates (dated 27 October), Marx had already juxtaposed a citation from that scene in Merchant of Venice with another unacknowledged citation from de Brosses. Marx doubly illustrates his conclusion that ‘‘the legislative interest knows only fear of the consequences of rights, fear of the evil-doers against whom the laws are made’’ (‘‘Debates,’’ 236; MEW 1:121). First he offers the psychological insight that ‘‘[i]nterest, however, is practical, and nothing in the world is more practical than to strike down one’s enemy. ‘Hates any man the thing he would not kill?’ we are already told by Shylock’’ (‘‘Debates,’’ 236; MEW 1:121). He supplements this with an ethnographic observation that draws upon the contiguous logic of the fetish: ‘‘When the Samoyeds kill an animal, before skinning it they assure it in the most serious tones that only Russians have done it this injury, that it is being dismembered with a Russian knife, and therefore it should revenge itself only on Russians. Even without any claim to be a Samoyed, it is possible to turn the law into a Russian knife’’ (‘‘Debates,’’ 234; MEW 1:122). 151. This image also affirmed the structural similitude and historical differentiation of Judentum and capital. Marx concludes his discussion of the ‘‘genesis of the industrial capitalist’’ with a comparison: ‘‘If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital [natu¨rlichen] blood-stain on one cheek’ [another mark of Cain?], capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore [Poren], with blood and dirt’’ (C 925–26/K 788). 152. One other striking association is how the topoi and themes that surround this phrase repeat similar ones from Marx’s discussion of Max Stirner in The German Ideology. ‘‘Stirner’’ was, as noted above, already a rhetorical figure in the earlier work. Schmidt had adopted the pseudonym ‘‘Max Stirner’’ because of the very pronounced forehead (Stirn) that is evident in Friedrich Engels’s famous caricature of him at a meeting of ‘‘Die Freien’’ (The Free Ones), the Berlin club of Young Hegelians. Consequently, at one point in Marx’s parodistic enactment of Stirner’s theologism that he had claimed to have superseded, Marx pairs Revelation 17:5 (‘‘And upon her forehead was a name written [an ihrer Stirn geschrieben den Namen], Mystery, Babylon the Great’’) with what Marx claims Stirner ‘‘ought to have said’’: ‘‘and upon his forehead was a name written [an seiner Stirn geschrieben den Namen], Mystery, the unique . . .’’ (GI 147–48/DI 131); also see Rose, Reading the Young Marx, 124–25. 153. After 1848 the word-field Schacher- disappears from Marx’s works, except when translating an English word or phrase. 154. Marx is also playing on the Latin saying that ‘‘money has no smell’’/ pecunia non olet that he also employs in Capital: ‘‘Since every commodity, on becoming money, disappears as a commodity, it is impossible to tell from the

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money itself, how it got into the hands of its possessor, or what article has been changed into it. Non olet, from whatever source it may come’’ (C 205/K 124). In his discussion of the metamorphosis of commodities in circulation (C 198–209/K 118–28) from which this citation has been drawn, Marx offers as his first example ‘‘linen—money—Bible.’’ Beyond the delight in the blasphemous materialization of the Bible (the Word) into a bible (a commodified book) and the allusion to the material conditions underlying religion, there is another possibly pertinent association. As we’ve seen, money is not the only mediator of this metamorphosis of linen into book; so is the rag. Marx’s sacrilegious play evidently continues with his second example. He proffers a spirit(ual) exchange, whereby his Bible seller uses his earnings to purchase brandy. Here too is another possibly pertinent association, since Jews were the leading producers and sellers of brandy in Central and Eastern Europe. 155. Brumlik, Deutscher Geist, 314–15, also notes that the characteristics here ascribed to the commodity are also ascribed to ‘‘Bettel- oder Tro¨deljuden’’; however, as opposed to the interpretation offered in this chapter, he sees this passage as figuring a historical and structural relationship: the commodity form is to the money form as Judentum is to Christentum. This figuration betrays for Brumlik Marx’s position as the culmination of German philosophic idealism. 156. See Laqueur, ‘‘Social Evil,’’ 338–39; and chapter 3 of this volume. 157. Mellinkoff, Mark; among other sites, she refers to Saint Augustine’s commentary on the first part of Psalm 59, in Exposition, 241; also see Fredriksen, Augustine. 158. Cf. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 204–05. 159. Marx, Political Economy, 359; MEW 13:103. 160. Further ironizing the association of Gold and Geld with the lordly series of Herrs that includes Gott is that the last is usually referred to in German as Der Herr, the Lord. 161. Further, by making the paper bills mere ‘‘scraps,’’ he has through Lappen employed a historical form of the word Lumpen. 162. In the Passagen-Werk (AP 383/PW 484 [J89a, 4]), Benjamin advises, ‘‘On the subject of the ragpicker, compare the conditions in England described by Marx in the section ‘Die moderne Manufaktur,’ in Das Kapital,’’ the section from which the following has been extracted. 163. In the preface to the first edition of the First Critique, 13. 164. That is, once these ‘‘quasi-objects’’ emerge, they affect the possible directions that an argument or analysis can pursue: constraining or even foreclosing some, expanding or opening up others. 165. Cf. Kosik, Dialectics.

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7. a future without jews: max nordau’s pre-zionist answer to the other jewish question My analysis of Nordau’s early cultural criticism initially emerged as an invited presentation at the ‘‘Colloque Max Nordau,’’ Maison des Sciences de l’Homme of the E´cole des Hautes E´tudes des Sciences Sociales, Paris, July 1992. Subsequent revision resulted first in a French translation for the collection generated by the Colloque, ‘‘Un avenir sans Juifs: Les e´crits pre´zionists du jeune Nordau,’’ in Max Nordau (1849–1923): Critique de la de´ge´ne´rescence, me´diateur franco-allemand, pe`re fondateur du sionisme, ed. Delphine Bechtel, Dominique Bourel, and Jacques Le Rider (Paris: E´ditions du Cerf, 1996), 225–43, and then in a further expanded English version, ‘‘The Conventional Lies and Paradoxes of Jewish Assimilation: Max Nordau’s PreZionist Answer to the Jewish Question,’’ that appeared in Jewish Social Studies n.s., 1, 3 (1995): 129–60. This chapter leans especially upon that last premonograph version. 1. Consequently, cultural analysts have taken the writings of these individuals, usually listed among those Isaac Deutscher dubbed ‘‘Non-Jewish Jews,’’ as representative of the situation of postemancipation Jewry. Cf., inter alia, Schorske, Fin-de-Sie`cle Vienna, on Herzl, Schnitzler, and Freud; Robert, Franz Kafka and From Oedipus; Ritchie Robertson, Kafka; Le Rider, Modernity, on Weininger, Freud, et al.; Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred; Arendt, ‘‘Introduction’’; Nike Wagner, Geist und Geschlecht; and Reitter, The Anti-Journalist. Since the onset of our own fin-de-sie`cle the range of studies addressing the diverse mediations of Jewish identifications have thankfully expanded to include their contemporary, as it were, ‘‘Jewish Jews’’ such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem; see, e.g., Mendes-Flohr, German Jews. More recently, the work of German Jewish individuals of earlier generations not named Heinrich Heine has also been receiving the serious attention of Anglophone cultural historians, including Heschel, Abraham Geiger, and Jonathan Hess, Middlebrow. 2. Cf. Jones, Freud, 1:188. Freud, however, was disappointed by the encounter; he described Nordau as ‘‘vain and stupid.’’ 3. Until the publications of Bechtel, Bourel, and Le Rider, Nordau (1849– 1923), and Schulte, Psychopathologie, one rarely found references to Nordau aside from occasional ones to his role in the early Zionist movement, and brief mentions of him introducing discussions of fin-de-sie`cle European culture. On Nordau’s Zionist activities, see Avineri, Making of Modern Zionism; and Vital, Origins and Formative Years. Works employing Nordau to open analysis of the fin-de-sie`cle apocalyptic sensibility and medico-ethical rhetoric include Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 1–2; and Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 24–26. More typically, Nordau appears on those lists of names that often pass for

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thick description of the epoch: e.g., ‘‘Within a few years of each other, we find Durkheim’s ‘suicide,’ Freud’s ‘unconscious’ and ‘dreams,’ Max Weber’s ‘charisma,’ Bergson’s ‘memory,’ Nordau’s ‘degeneration,’. . . All these ideas were widely different from each other in implication and emphasis and yet nevertheless were associated with each other as part of the movement in opposition to ideas of scientific and material progress’’ (Karl, Franz Kafka, 103), or else in discussions of fin-de-sie`cle Jewish masculinity, such as Presner, Muscular Judaism. Moreover, today Nordau’s fiction and drama are still largely ignored, and his early cultural criticism is discussed only in nostalgic attempts to resuscitate a certain humanistic liberal ethic; cf. Ben-Horin, Max Nordau and ‘‘Watchman.’’ With the 2003 publication of Petra Zudrell, Kulturkritiker und Schriftsteller, Hans-Peter So¨der’s ‘‘Disease and Health’’ and ‘‘Les juifs’’ no longer remain the major exception to the neglect of Nordau’s belletristic output. 4. Mosse, ‘‘Max Nordau,’’ 565. 5. Cf. Nordau, Zionistische Schriften. 6. In an 1896 letter to Reuben Brainin, Nordau wrote that when he was forty, ‘‘Anti-Semitism opened my eyes and turned me back to the Jewishness which I had forgotten. The hatred of others for us taught me to love our people’’; cited by Lipsky, Gallery, 18. In their biography of him, Nordau’s widow and daughter argue that when he learned of the 1882 Kishinev pogrom he ‘‘instantly grasped’’ that antisemitism was ‘‘an endemic illness old as the dispersion, always latent, prone to break out in bloody and fevered form at the slightest provocation’’; but only when he himself became victim of an antisemitic assault in 1893 did he truly ‘‘awaken’’ to his Jewishness. While vacationing at the North Sea resort of Borkum, the cosmopolitan Nordau began receiving anonymous letters stating, ‘‘ ‘We do not wish to see Jews here.’. . . He pretended not to see them, but to be busy with his friends. They were now delivered to his room, more grossly vulgar, in verse or prose, from day to day, a very web of persecution. He tried to stick it out to save the feelings of his friends. But at the end of ten days he left’’ (Nordau and Nordau, Max Nordau, 115, 117–18). 7. Nordau’s ‘‘references to the problem of antisemitism and to Judentum in general before he became a Zionist are few and of no particular importance’’; Baldwin, ‘‘Liberalism,’’ 108. To support his claim, Baldwin cites Nordau’s friend Ludwig Stein (‘‘They Have Prevailed,’’ 31), who places Nordau’s ‘‘conversion’’ in 1895, on or about the time of his meeting with Herzl (Baldwin, ‘‘Liberalism,’’ 109). For an alternative chronology of Nordau’s conversion, see the preceding note. 8. Koonz, ‘‘Genocide and Eugenics,’’ 163. 9. See Levenson, ‘‘German Zionism,’’ according to which radical assimiliation signifies the apostasy, intermarriage, and/or communal secession of individual Jews that portend(s) the demise of the Jews as a collectivity.

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10. Indicative both of the work’s popularity and its representativeness of a certain late-nineteenth-century (Jewish) liberalism is an anecdote that significantly contrasts with the more familiar account of Sigmund Freud’s feelings about Nordau (see n. 2 above). Chaim Bloch reports that during a visit with Freud in 1925, some forty-two years after the first publication of Conventionelle Lu¨gen, Freud not only favorably invoked Nordau’s discussion of the Bible in the book but also produced what he referred to as the latest edition of Nordau’s work. Bloch, ‘‘Encounter’’; cited in Ben-Horin, Max Nordau, 87–89. 11. See esp. the chapters ‘‘Zur Naturgeschichte der Liebe’’ (On the Natural History of Love; P 272–89) and ‘‘Evolutionistische A¨sthetik’’ (Evolutionary Aesthetic; P 290–310), as well as the anecdote about the child who, when viewing other children bathing, did not know whether they were boys or girls because they were undressed (P 368). 12. As Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, has amply demonstrated, cosmopolitan Jews such as Nordau especially sought to distance themselves from the reigning representation of Jewish particularity: the Ostjude, the Eastern Jew who incarnated all of Jewry’s alleged primitive or degenerate Jewish traits. 13. Negative depictions of Jewry would tar Jewish writers—whether they identified themselves as Jewish or not—with their own brushes, but there was also a taboo against flaunting the extensive Jewish presence in European cultural life; cf. Gary Smith, ‘‘Benjamins fru¨he Auseinandersetzung,’’ 324. On liberal, assimilationist Jewry’s ‘‘politics of silence,’’ see Wistrich, Jews of Vienna, esp. chap. 6, ‘‘Parvenus, Patriots, and Protected Jews.’’ 14. In 1871 August Rohling, professor of Semitic languages at the University of Prague, cribbing extensively from Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judentum, published a compendium of mistranslated and out-of-context Talmud passages, Der Talmudjude, that constructed the Jews as bloodthirsty, amoral, criminal Christian-haters. His work and his testimony were employed—ultimately unsuccessfully—to bolster the allegations of ritual murder against the Jews in Tisza-Eszlar. In 1885 Rohling was successfully exposed as a liar and forger in a suit brought in a Viennese court by Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch; see Wistrich, Jews of Vienna. 15. Wasserschleben, Anti-Nordau, 12. 16. Or ‘‘married to a Jew’’; the other instance in which one opted for the designation ‘‘Creedless’’ was when one had married across faiths (CL 34). 17. Nordau also mentions Le´on Gambetta, who was falsely assumed to be Jewish by Wilhelm Marr in Der Sieg des Judentums u¨ber das Germanentum; Eng. trans. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 332. 18. Bankerott des Nationalliberalismus, 71; cited in Massing, Rehearsal, 11. 19. Cf. Bein, ‘‘Jew as Parasite.’’ 20. On the commercialization of marriage as described by Marx, see chapter 6 in this volume. On Jewish inbreeding/endogamy, see Andree, Zur

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Volkskunde, and Jacobs, Studies. For later discussions on the problematics of Jewish marriage, see Theilhaber, Untergang. On the conflation of Unzucht (sexual license), Inzucht (inbreeding), and Inzest (incest) in discussion of Jewish marital practices, see Gilman, Case of Freud. Also see Efron, Defenders, and Hart, Healthy. 21. Hartmann, Das Judentum, 175; Stoecker, ‘‘Unsre Forderungen,’’ 144–47; and Treitschke, ‘‘Unsere Aussichten,’’ 12. Also see Geller, ‘‘Of Mice.’’ 22. See Nienhaus, Geschichte. 23. Discussed and pictured in Dittmar, Darstellung, 254, 363 (fig. 213). 24. Gilman, Jew’s Body, 99–101, 171–75. The widely disseminated image of the Jew as black or nonwhite may have shaded Nordau’s treatment of Jewish nationhood within the context of the different nationalities comprising the white race. See below. 25. A decade later one of the darkest of all bogeys would appear, coded Jewish: Dracula. See Dijkstra, Idols, 343. 26. Cf. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 68–69, on the so-called Jewish love of onions. See also the extensive discussion of representations of the Jewish diet in chapter 5 of this volume. 27. Nordau was quite cognizant of the image of the feminized male Jew. In his 1887 novel Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts (The Malady of the Century), for example, his Jewish protagonist Wilhelm Eynhardt is called by ‘‘Aryan’’ comrades ‘‘Das Fra¨ulein’’; cited in So¨der, ‘‘Disease and Health,’’ 478. Conversely, after his turn from cosmopolitan to Zionist, Nordau exhorted the Second Zionist Congress to ‘‘pull up your socks’’ (literally ‘‘make men of yourselves’’; Ermannt euch) and create again a ‘‘Jewry of muscle’’ (Muskeljudentum); ‘‘II. Kongressrede,’’ 74, 75 (cf. 72). Then he set about organizing Jewish Turnvereine (gymnastic associations) to transform the nonvirile Jews who had long left the ghetto into ‘‘deep-chested, sturdy-limbed, sharp-eyed . . . muscle-Jews’’; ‘‘Muskeljudentum,’’ 380. See, among many, Eisen, ‘‘Zionism’’; Spo¨rk, ‘‘L’image du juif’’; Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct; Presner, Muscular Judaism; Berkowitz, Zionist Culture, esp. 99–109; and Stanislawski, Zionism, esp. 91–97, on the concerns about Jewish masculinity that mark Nordau’s speeches to the Turnvereine and elsewhere. 28. See the discussion of Spinoza’s ‘‘Testament’’ in chapter 1 of this volume for a different disaggregation of Jewish chosenness and persistence and its implications. 29. See Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder. 30. On the relationship between the Jewish nose and the circumcised penis in both the popular and psychoanalytic imagination, see my On Freud’s Jewish Body.

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31. Cf. Ramizzini, Diseases, on the relationship between Jewish employment and illness. Ramizzini, like Nordau some two hundred years later, suggested that Jews take up physical exercise to remedy their historically conditioned weak physiognomy (Ramizzini, ‘‘Krankheit,’’ 139); also see the discussion of Ramizzini and the Jews in various rag trades in chapter 6 in this volume. 32. As noted earlier, the German word for circumcision, Beschneiden, shares a common root with Schneider, tailor. Tuchscherer, draper, literally means ‘‘cloth cutter’’; a Schere is a scissors. See Figure I-1. 33. On name as a sign of Judentum and as a form of stigmatization, again see Bering, Name als Stigma. 34. Moreover, Jews who fled the Russian pogroms but, because they were unable to remain in Germany, also departed from German harbors contributed to the impression of hemorrhaging emigration. The number of Jews leaving the port of Hamburg, while not the majority of all emigrants, increased fourfold from 1880 (8,000) to 1882 (31,000) according to KaplanKogan, Die ju¨dischen Wanderbewegungen, 20; also see Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden, 5. Borkai, ‘‘German-Jewish Migration,’’ 207, argues against earlier studies that, because of a focus on the movements of East European Jews, claimed that German-Jewish emigration declined rapidly during the 1880s. 35. See Fischer, Socialist Response. 36. While the historical identification of Jews with rats has often been noted (see, e.g., Bernatzky, ‘‘ ‘Juden—La¨use—Flecktyphus,’ ’’ 393 and n. 61), the history of mice in anti-Jewish representation has not; however, see Geller, ‘‘Of Mice.’’ The history of murine figuration of the Jew is being more extensively examined in my current project, ‘‘Pictures at an Exhibition: (Un)Natural Histories of the Jews.’’ 37. Marr, Goldene Ratten, 32. The ‘‘golden rats’’ of Marr’s pamphlet refer to Jewish capitalists. 38. Erb and Bergmann, Nachtseite, 198–99. While Erb and Bergman do not explicitly refer to mice, Marr’s description of the plague of red mice ‘‘breeding in silence’’ (24) and desiring ‘‘to suck society dry’’ (15) in Goldene Ratten clearly coincides with their typology. 39. Cf. R. Scha¨fer, ‘‘Zur Geschichte.’’ 40. Theodor Herzl formalized the widespread identification of the stereotypical Jew with mauscheln in an article he first published in Die Welt (15 October 1897), ‘‘Mauschel.’’ Although Herzl is writing in the context of a Zionist/antizionist opposition, he is projecting the entire tradition of negative Jewish characteristics away from his vision of what a Jew is and onto the figure of Mauschel. Also see Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred. 41. See discussion below.

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42. E.g., Ho¨fler, Krankheitsnamen-Buch. 43. While not specifically citing Aussatz, the line ‘‘The plague they carried from the grim Nile valley’’ is a clear reference to this commonplace ascription. See the discussion of this tradition in chapter 3 in this volume. 44. Heine, Gesta¨ndnisse, 57. I would like to thank Professor Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier for calling my attention to this passage. Some twenty-five years earlier in Die Stadt Lukka (193) Heine had referred to the Jews as a Volkmumie. As detailed throughout this work, Heine was not alone in drawing upon the uncanny tropes of the undead to characterize Judentum. 45. Gussow and Tracy, ‘‘Stigma and Leprosy,’’ esp. 430–47, describes how these events and others in the 1860s and 1870s brought leprosy into increasing Western prominence. Also see Edmond, Leprosy, 57. 46. Gussow and Tracy, ‘‘Stigma and Leprosy,’’ 442. 47. Edmond, Leprosy, 146. 48. See Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, esp. 58–62; and Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 11–74. 49. Ramazzini, ‘‘Krankheiten,’’ 135. Symptomatic of the long association of Jews and leprosy is Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s selection of Nega’im, the Mishnaic tractate on leprosy, as one of the two exemplary translations appended to his grammar Ju¨disch-Teutsche Red- und Schreibart; cf. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 70–76, and Jew’s Body, 172–73. 50. The third-century b.c.e. Greek-Egyptian historian Manetho and later writers such as Lysimachus and Apion argued that the Hebrew exodus was in fact the Egyptian expulsion of a group of lepers; see Gager, Moses; Assmann, Moses. Voltaire’s account of the leprous Jews draws especially upon Apion; see Dieu, 157–59 (chap. 14, ‘‘Des juifs et de leur origine’’); also see his ‘‘Le`pre et ve´role’’; and chapter 3 of this book. 51. See Corbin, ‘‘Le pe´ril ve´ne´rien.’’ In Paradoxe Nordau describes the ‘‘sickly degenerate individuals’’ (krankhaft entarteten Menschen) of the big city who die out after four or five generations; his references to Zola’s Nana and Ibsen’s Ghosts, both works in which syphilis plays a prominent role, signal the syphilitic origin of the degeneration of his mieselsu¨chtigen contemporaries (P 269–70; cf. 281 on sexual disturbances and illnesses). 52. The medical etiology of ‘‘softening of the brain’’ is discussed in more detail in chapter 8 of this volume. In a preview of his later analyses in Entartung, Nordau recounts the syphilitic fates of the great poets of Weltschmerz to buttress his diagnosis of the sickness of the age: Nikolaus Lenau ‘‘died mad.’’ Although unmentioned by Nordau, the syphilitic origin of Lenau’s illness was common knowledge. The second poet, Giacomo Leopardi, ‘‘suffered from certain sexual aberrations, which are well known to the alienist’’ (Irrenarzt). Heinrich Heine, the third in the series, ‘‘first became

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gloomy and overcast as his tabes [Ru¨ckenmarkskrankheit; i.e., tabes dorsalis, a symptom of tertiary syphilis] worked its never-failing effect upon his brain’’ (P, 13). In the nineteenth century Heine figured the (Jewish) poet as syphilitic; cf. Windfuhr, Heine, 109; Ho¨hn, Heine-Handbuch, 114; and Gilman, ‘‘Nietzsche’s Other,’’ esp. 113–17. And finally, Lord Byron ‘‘had that eccentricity of character, which the psychiatrist labels as psychosis’’ (der Psychiater als Psychose etikettirt; P 13). Byron, too, because of the licentiousness of his verse and of his life, did not escape suspicion of syphilis; cf. Marchand, Byron, 1:276, 2:724; 3:1234 n. 3. 53. See Crissey and Parish, Dermatology. 54. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, letter of 10 May 1861, in Marx, Letters, 459. Even the sainted Father Damien’s fatal case of leprosy was slanderously attributed by the Honolulu Protestant clergyman Charles McEwan Hyde to his ‘‘having sexual intercourse with native patients on Molokai’’; Edmond, Leprosy, 148. 55. An ironic consequence of Nordau’s use of a term signifying both a moody pessimism and the Jewish-associated disease of leprosy is that, although Schopenhauer—for whom Nordau held no little contempt (cf. CL 12, 40–42)—castigated the Jews as an optimistic people, Nordau implicitly codes them as the carriers of the leprous plague of pessimism. 56. Except by epispasm, or the surgical reversal of circumcision. After his Zionist turn Nordau has no problem embracing Jewish circumcision and in his now oft-cited article ‘‘Muskeljudentum’’ directly attacks those who would attempt such a supplemental sloughing. Our new muscle-Jews, he says, ‘‘already stand at a higher plane morally than those old Jewish wrestlers in the Palaestrae who were embarrassed about their Judentum and sought by means of a surgical knife to conceal the sign of the covenant, as we know from the condemnations of the outraged rabbis, while the members of the ‘Bar Kochba’ Association freely and loudly confess to belong to the tribe’’ (381). 57. Also see Yerushalmi, ‘‘Assimilation.’’ 58. On pre-Zionist Jewish nationalism, see Vital, Origins, and the discussion of Hess and Pinsker in chapter 1 of this volume. 59. In Die Juden, his official history of the Austro-Hungarian empire, published two years before Paradoxe, Wolf describes the Jews as a people but not a nation: ‘‘The Jews do not form a nation because not a single one of the ties that one recognizes as characteristics of a national community bind them with one another’’ (169); cited in Pollak, Vienne 1900, 84. 60. See Olender, Languages, and Benes, Babel’s Shadow. 61. Nordau was quite conscious of the nationality question in his native land; cf. P 391–92, 400, on his concern about strife among nationalities in Austria and Europe.

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62. See Kann, Multinational Empire, 1:196–200, 2:36; also Macartney, Hapsburg Empire, 529–30 (on Hungary), 562–63 (on Austria). 63. Kann, Multinational Empire, 1:359; 2:299–300. 64. On circumcision as the mark of Cain, see again Mellinkoff, Mark, esp. 92–98. 65. Wagner writes: ‘‘The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien . . . the Jew talks the modern European languages merely as learnt, and not as mother tongues’’ (Judaism in Music, 84). The powerful afterlife of Wagner’s allegation is as evident in Nordau’s comment as it would be later in the writing of many Jewish-identified individuals, such as Moritz Goldstein’s ‘‘Deutsch-ju¨discher Parnaß’’ (1912) that will be discussed in chapter 9, and in Kafka’s’s four ‘‘impossibilities’’ of writing (in his June 1921 letter to Max Brod; Kafka, Letters to Friends, 289). 66. Mantegazza, Sexual Relations, 98, 98–99, 99, 108, 110. A German translation appeared in 1886. 67. Tridon, Du Molochisme Juif. He drew on the earlier work of Ghillany, Menschenopfer, and Daumer, Feuer- und Molochdienst. Daumer and Ghillany are also discussed in chapter 5 of this volume. 68. Nordau’s later Zionist turn may be understood, at least in part, as a recognition that the implicit strategy employed in Conventionelle Lu¨gen and Paradoxe to combat modern antisemitism—i.e., his attempt to empty Judentum of either racial or national identity—was ineffective. 69. Nordau’s 1896 letter to Reuben Brainin, cited by Lipsky, Gallery, 18. 70. Naudh, ‘‘Professoren u¨ber Israel,’’ 379, on three thousand years of Jewish Inzucht; and as Weininger commented with mock surprise: ‘‘There is no Jewish nobility, which is all the more remarkable as Jews have practiced inbreeding for thousands of years’’ (SC, 278; emphasis in the original). 8. president schreber and the memoirs of a wandering jew(ess) Schreber’s unmanned Wandering Jew grabbed my attention while teaching the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten at Rutgers University in spring 1991 and led first to a lecture to the Graduate Humanities Program of Syracuse University (April 1991) and then to ‘‘The Unmanning of the Wandering Jew,’’ in American Imago 49, 2 (1992): 227–62. In the interim there has been a boomlet of Schreber studies; in its shadow this chapter expands upon my earlier research and article. 1. Kendrick, ‘‘God Must Be Crazy,’’ 33. 2. It was published first in Amsterdam; its 1989 publication in the United States accrued more attention. 3. Kendrick, ‘‘God Must Be Crazy,’’ 33.

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4. Schreiber, Schreber und Zeitgeist; Busse, Suche nach dem Vater; Lothane, In Defense; Santner, My Own; Devreese, Lothane, and Schotte, Schreber revisite´. Much of this recent work has been geared toward providing alternatives to Freud’s diagnosis of the causes of Schreber’s fantasies of world construction/destruction. In late 2009 Klaas Huizing published a biographical novel about Schreber, In Schrebers Garten, that draws on the expanding literature. See also Butler, ‘‘Revisited.’’ 5. The only extensive treatment is Prado de Oliveira, ‘‘Trois e´tudes,’’ which suggests a number of parallels between the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten and Euge`ne Sue’s 1845–47 novel Le juif errant. Prado’s match-game argument is on the whole unconvincing: e.g., the number 212 figures in both works, a character in both is institutionalized in a psychiatric asylum, the Jesuits are heavies in the two narratives. Besides, he makes no case for Schreber’s familiarity with the novel; cf. Israe¨ls, Father and Son, 44–45. Lukacher, ‘‘Schreber’s Juridical Opera,’’ also evokes the Eternal Jew when portraying Schreber’s world-destroying delusions as a prolepsis of the Shoah. In her painstaking search for the sources of Schreber’s visions, Schreiber (Zeitgeist, 129 n. 57) concedes that the model for his Eternal Jew cannot be determined; nevertheless, she does note some affinities between Robert Hamerling’s Eternal Jew in the1866 Ahasverus in Rom and the Roman analogies that Schreber employs to identify his figure. While Lothane, in his massive work, devotes a long note to antisemitism in Germany (In Defense, 100–02 n.45), it is not until his 1993 postscript—first published (in French translation) in Devreese, Lothane, and Schrotte, Schreber revisite´—that he addresses the figure. Lothane (‘‘Pour la defense,’’ 21–22) merely finds it ‘‘remarkable’’ that Schreber disassociates his vision of the eternal Jew from Ahasver, and instead he focuses on the footnote that Schreber places at the end of his account of the figure, in which he notes that there ‘‘might even have been a number of Eternal Jews’’ in the past, including one whose name sounded like that of ‘‘a Polish Count Czartorisky’’ (M 74 n. 30). Lothane ties this reference to a Polish prince, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, who died in the same year as Schreber’s father and who was involved in occultist circles in which Gnostic and Kabbalistic notions of androgynes and circles of world creation, destruction, and recreation circulated. Santner, My Own (106–16 and nn.), mentions Lothane’s then-unpublished paper and goes on to address both my original discussion in ‘‘Unmanning’’ and Gilman’s discussion in Freud, 153–54. 6. In the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten the German phrase that is usually translated into English as ‘‘Wandering Jew’’ is ewiger Jude. Ewiger Jude literally means—and, in Macalpine and Hunter’s very literal translation of Schreber, reads—‘‘Eternal Jew’’; however, since ‘‘Wandering Jew’’ is the more familiar, I use that phrase unless specifically referring to Schreber’s text.

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7. Given anti-Jewish stereotype and Schreber’s observation earlier in the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten (M 50) that the ‘‘old Jews’’ were once but are long since no longer the ‘‘most moral’’ of the time, is Schreber’s speculation that the last human is perhaps the most moral yet another indication that the ‘‘Eternal Jew’’ is not to be assumed to be Jewish? 8. I do not here address Freud’s once hegemonic interpretation; I offer a reading of Freud’s case study—including his studied avoidance of Schreber’s account of the Eternal Jew—in chapter 5, ‘‘Freud v. Freud,’’ of On Freud’s. 9. On the 1893 election see Pulzer, Rise, 118–26. Pulzer excerpts F. Salomon, Parteiprogramme, 2:71–72, for the Tivoli Program citation. 10. In My Own, Santner brilliantly situates Schreber’s breakdown as, in part, acting out Germany’s (Europe’s) late-nineteenth-century legitimation crisis, what Santner refers to as Schreber’s crises of ‘‘symbolic investiture’’ that accompanied both his earlier parliamentary run and his subsequent assumption of the position of Supreme Court president. 11. Also see chapter 3 as well as the introduction to this volume. 12. This discussion draws from, among others, Gilman, ‘‘Struggle’’; Weiss, Race Hygiene, esp. chapter 1; Kittler, Discourse Networks, esp. the chapter ‘‘Rebus’’; and Busse, ‘‘Schreber und Flechsig.’’ 13. Cited in Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 61, 62. 14. Mo¨bius, Entartung, 5. 15. Lec¸ons, 1:10; cited by Goldstein, ‘‘Wandering Jew,’’ 536. 16. Kittler’s Discourse Networks focuses instead on the technological discourses of modernity that are inscribed on Schreber’s body and corpus. Although the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten is but one of the technology-human interfaces discussed by Kittler, he adopted for the original German title and as the general rubric for the objects he analyzed Schreber’s term Aufschreibesystem (plural: Aufschreibesysteme), ‘‘the writing-down-system,’’ by which ‘‘all my thoughts, all my phrases, all my necessaries, all the articles in my possession or around me, all persons with whom I come into contact, etc.’’ (M 118–19) are transmitted and recorded elsewhere. Kittler’s evocation of a disciplined and supervised modernity is somewhat muted by the English translators’ title choice of ‘‘Discourse Networks.’’ 17. Weber, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xix–xx; interpellated passage is from Freud, Moses, 43. 18. Please note that in his account, the voices that ‘‘talk to me’’ called the ‘‘one single human being spared’’ the ‘‘Eternal Jew,’’ and not ‘‘me’’ (i.e., not the first-person subject, Schreber). In footnote 30, appended to the end of this extensive characterization, Schreber does appear, again not without some ambiguity, to so identify himself; the author adds that he had ‘‘had some indications that before my own case [vor meinem Falle; emphasis added] . . . there

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might even have been a number of Eternal Jews’’ (M 74 n. 30). When he later (M 212) asserts his implicit identification—again, he never explicitly says ‘‘I am the Eternal Jew’’—with the Eternal Jew, he refers back to the contents of this footnote. The note thus reads back an eventual identification that at this earlier time (i.e., the time of his initial apocalyptic vision) he did not consciously make. 19. Only in 1896 could he ‘‘no longer doubt that a real race of human beings in the same number and distribution as before did in fact exist’’ (M 163; cf. 212). 20. Cf. the case history from his second admission to the University Clinic, in Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 62: ‘‘1 March [1894]. Maintains that he is a young girl frightened of indecent assaults.’’ A question that needs to be asked, but apparently has been neglected, is whether Schreber was sexually assaulted by the attendants. 21. On the figuration of the Wandering Jew, see Hasan-Rokem and Dundes, Wandering Jew; Rose, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism; G. K. Anderson, Legend; Edgar Knecht, Le mythe; Rouart, Le mythe; Muse´e d’art, Le juif errant; Birnbaum, ‘‘Le retour’’; and Bodenheimer, Wandernde Schatten. 22. Wagner, Judaism in Music, 100. 23. Prior to his move from Munich, Kirchbach was a member of the circle around Michael Georg Conrad and his literary organ Die Gesellschaft. Other members of this circle included the author and critic Karl Bleibtreu, whose 1904 Der Fackel review of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter enthusiastically echoed its depiction of Jewry, the Jewish writer Conrad Alberti (born Conrad Sittenfeld), who wrote a notorious vilification of Jewishness, ‘‘Judentum und Antisemitismus,’’ and Oskar Panizza, whose story ‘‘The Operated Jew’’ is discussed in a subsequent section of this chapter. Biographical information from Kirchbach, ‘‘Selbstbiographie,’’ and Killy, Literaturlexikon, 6:330 (s.v. ‘‘Kirchbach, Wolfgang’’). On his reputation, see Striedieck, ‘‘Wolfgang Kirchbach,’’ 42–43. 24. Kirchbach’s introduction of the Seer (Seher) to describe the destruction of the world recalls the ‘‘seer of spirits’’ (Geistesseher) who was, according to Schreber, connected with the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in the same manner as Schreber himself is connected with his ‘‘vision’’ of the end of the world (M 97). 25. Die letzten Menschen, 10. Like Schreber’s memoir, Kirchbach’s play is marked by an extended rhetoric of rays and radiating. For instance, the sirens sing that ‘‘the earth shines in the ice’’ (Es strahlet die Erde im Eise; 19); how ‘‘the lovely human woman’s untouched body shines forth’’ (scho¨ner noch am unberu¨hrten Leib/erstrahlt das liebliche, das Menschenweib; 27) and is more beautiful than how ‘‘the light of intellect radiates in man’’ (im strahlt des Geistes

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Licht; 27); and Proteus’s incarnation is compared to a ‘‘lightning bolt’’ (Blitzstrahl; 70), etc. 26. Ibid., 68. 27. Ibid., 69, 97. 28. Ibid., 40. 29. Ibid., 66. See chapter 3 for an extended discussion of this tail-cutting motif. 30. Ibid., 75–78. 31. Kirchbach did not produce the play in Dresden due to the great expense such a production would have entailed. In his ‘‘Selbstbiographie,’’ Kirchbach laments: ‘‘The stage production of this work is very expensive: I can only hope, perhaps one evening in my life, to see it on stage—if I should live so long’’ (7). Jo´zsa Savits, the head director of Munich’s Hoftheater, expresses his regret both that he is unable to afford underwriting a play he compares with Midsummer’s Night Dream and Manfred, and that others will not underwrite it because they are reluctant to support any living playwright; letter of 3 February 1890, in Becker and Levetzow, Wolfgang Kirchbach, 343–44. Kirchbach finally found backing; when he was directing plays in 1899 Berlin, his repertory consisted of Aristophanes’s The Birds and Lysistrata, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Kleist’s Amphitryon, and one of his own plays: Die letzten Menschen. In his review of the Berlin production, Rudolf Steiner (‘‘Review’’) reported that this play about a frozen, dying world left him cold. This production apparently escaped the attention of Adalbert von Hanstein; his 1901 literary history of Michael Georg Conrad’s Munich circle ‘‘ju¨ngstes Deutschland’’ (Das jungste Deutschland, 142–43) discusses Letzte Menschen in a chapter titled ‘‘Die Dramatiker ohne Bu¨hnen,’’ dramatists without stages. Despite the failure to find a theater, the published version of the play apparently received, as Kirchbach puts it, ‘‘great recognition.’’ In addition to the comparisons provided by Savits, Kirchbach cites Max Kretzer, the author of the first German naturalistic novel, who commented that Letzte Menschen was ‘‘the most original [das Eigenartigste] play written by a German poet in the last decade’’; Kirchbach adds that Maximilian Harden, literary critic and editor of the influential political weekly Die Zukunft, and others had made similar comments (Kirchbach, ‘‘Selbstbiographie,’’ 7). Von Hanstein also speaks of the play as the ‘‘most audacious concept’’ (ku¨hnste Einfall) devised by any of the ‘‘stageless dramatists’’ (Das ju¨ngste Deutschland, 142). Still it is possible that Schreber may have read about, if not read, the play. The Denkwu¨rdigkeiten clearly attests to his being a Kulturmensch, familiar both with classic drama and with Wagner. More intriguing still is that Schreber’s wife Sabine was daughter of the former artistic director of the Leipzig city theater. 32. For Kirchbach, see Hanstein, Das ju¨ngste Deutschland, 142; and Schreber provides a listing of some of his reading in natural science (M 80 n. 36).

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Notes to pages 241–42

33. For example, Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic radiation in 1887; Professor Ned Lukacher in conversation reports of the proliferation of rays (e.g., the so-called N-Strahlen) and emanations (Austrahlungen) in spiritualist, theosophic, and other quasi-Eastern, quasi-occultist circles; cf. Kittler’s discussion of Flechsig’s psychophysics (Discourse Networks, 290–304). 34. Cf. Amymone, responding to Ahas’s question about the ‘‘nameless one’’: The human female (Menschenweib) The dreadful, the unfathomable! And through you [i.e., Ahas] comes death-impregnated woe! It is woman, the maternal horror, Out of whose womb monstrous life Emerges. Your other ‘‘I’’ [Dein andres Ich], the abyss, In which your self will once more be dashed to pieces. The human female, made in your image Who quickens the world through mortality And ever creates dying upon the earth. (Letzte Menschen, 50)

35. Cf. Laqueur, ‘‘Orgasm.’’ 36. Hacking, Mad Travelers, 120–21, takes an earlier version of this chapter (Geller, ‘‘Unmanning’’) and others to task because they allegedly treat Schreber’s ‘‘text as a mirror of his culture[,] invoke Meige on the side[,] and tend to take for granted that the Wandering Jew had identical meanings’’ in France and Germany. Hacking points out that ‘‘the very name of the Jew is different in the two languages; ‘le juif errant’ is not the same as ‘der ewige Jude.’ ’’ This denotational difference is why, Hacking suspects, ‘‘the wandering Jew’’ did not become part of the German medical literature on Wandertrieb. Aside from the obvious—that the qualifier errant, unlike ewig, functions as a ‘‘natural’’ icon that correlates disease and diseased—Hacking himself cites Meige, saying that the Wandering Jew is essentially a German legend (122); that is, Meige drew upon the demonizing German tradition rather than the positive French tradition represented by the eponymous character of Euge`ne Sue’s best-selling 1844 novel Le juif errant. 37. Charcot, Lec¸ons, 348 (19 February 1889); cf. Meige, ‘‘Wandering Jew,’’ 191. 38. Meige, ‘‘Wandering Jew,’’ 193, 192. 39. Ibid., 194, 191, 191. In antisemitic discourse, the alleged cosmopolitanism of the Jews was frequently opposed to the natural ties to Blut und Boden of the indigenous Volk. 40. Similarly, the doctor has replaced Christ as the source of authority and grace. Thus the skepticism of these Jewish neurotics about the physician’s opinion is analogized to the sin of the Wandering Jew: the ‘‘refusal to believe

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in medical power was tantamount to the fateful refusal to believe in the divinity of Christ.’’ Cited by Goldstein, ‘‘Wandering Jew,’’ 542. 41. Meige, ‘‘Wandering Jew,’’ 193. 42. On the life of Panizza, see P. D. G. Brown, Oskar Panizza. 43. Itzig Faitel Stern recalls Friedrich Freiherr von Holzschuher’s nearidentical pseudonym, Itzig Feitel Stern, which he adopted for his antisemitic parody of Jewish emancipationist claims, the 1834 Die Manzipaziuhn der houchverehrliche kienigliche bayerische Juedenschaft: En Edress an die houchverehrliche Harren Landstaend. The name of Panizza’s protagonist also alludes to the foremost representation of the perverse, egoistic, moneygrubbing Jew in nineteenth-century German literature, Veitel Itzig from Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben; cf. Mosse, ‘‘Image.’’ 44. Panizza’s opening ‘‘sketch’’ of the ‘‘bits and pieces’’ that make up his ‘‘monument’’ to Faitel are in ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 47–52. It is perhaps appropriate that Panizza’s fetishistic description should be reprinted in Der Korsettenfritz. 45. Panizza, ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 52. 46. Panizza, ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 56, 48. See the discussion of Jewish mimetism in chapter 9. 47. Ibid., 59. Panizza appears to be drawing on the olfactive metaphysics of Gustav Jaeger that in Entdeckung also served to racialize and denigrate Judentum. 48. Panizza, ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 61, 63. 49. Ibid., 64. 50. Prior to her arrival Ottilie is characterized as ‘‘ever modest’’ (nach wie vor bescheiden); Goethe, Wahlverwandtschaften, 263. See the earlier discussion of the diverse connections between Judentum and bescheiden/Bescheidenheit, esp. in chapter 3. 51. Perhaps as chimerical as the ‘‘elective affinity’’ of Jew and German that Heine posits in ‘‘Jessika,’’ in Shakespeares, 125. 52. Panizza, ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 72–74. 53. See chapter 1 of this volume for a discussion of another narrative constructed about an unsaid circumcision, George Eliot’s much more respectable Daniel Deronda. 54. Panizza, ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 63, 63, 63. 55. That is, perhaps what was removed from the tip of the Jewish penis was symptomatically returned to the tip of the Jewish tongue. On the relationship between the Jewish body and Jewish language, see Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred. 56. Panizza, ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 63. 57. Ibid., 72–73.

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58. As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, even when the presence or absence of a beard no longer functions iconically as a diacritical mark of ethnic or religious difference, its absence assumes a different signifying function: it becomes an index of the Jewish man’s lack of virility. 59. Ibid., 56, 72–73. 60. Vanity at the very least, from the perspective of antisemitism. 61. ‘‘Unsere Aussichten,’’ 13; translation from Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 282. On Schreber’s student membership in the Wartburg and father and son’s adoration of Treitschke, see Israe¨ls, Schreber: Father and Son. 62. Cf. Hermann Go¨dsche’s 1868 novel Biarritz, which was a primary source for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; cf. Bernstein, Truth. Also see Dinter, Su¨nde, and the earlier discussion in chapter 3. 63. Even Schreber’s adoption of Zend/Zoroastrian deities to populate his heavens may also betray a Judaizing influence: in his discussion of religion in Parerga, 2:379, Arthur Schopenhauer writes: ‘‘Just as Jehovah is a transformation of Ormuzd, so is Satan the corresponding transformation of Ahriman.’’ 64. In Judaism in Music, Wagner wrote, ‘‘Who has not had occasion to convince himself of the travesty of a divine service of song, presented in a real Folk-synagogue? Who has not been seized with a feeling of the greatest revulsion, of horror mingled with the absurd, at hearing that sense-andsound-confounding gurgle, jodel and cackle, which no intentional caricature can make more repugnant than as offered here in full, in naive seriousness?’’ (90–91). And Weininger rhetorically asked, ‘‘Do I need to elaborate on the nature of Jewish prayer, stressing its purely formal character and its lack of the kind of fervor which the moment alone can produce[?]’’ (SC 292). 65. On the psychoanalytic association of Schmuck/jewelry and Schmuckka¨stchen/ jewel-case with genitalia, see Freud, Dora, 64. 66. Israe¨ls, Father and Son, 187. Not only did the family own property on this thoroughfare, but when Moritz and Pauline Schreber were first married they lived in an apartment at the corner of Bru¨hl and Theaterplatz (later renamed Richard-Wagner-Strasse), and it was there that Paul’s elder brother and eldest sister were born; cf. ibid., 25–26. 67. On the journal as well as its increasing popularity and its parallel—if not correlated—peak use of Jews as objects of humor and ridicule between 1870 and the mid-1890s, see Wasserman, ‘‘The Fliegende Bla¨tter,’’ esp. 110–38. 68. Israe¨ls, Father and Son, 147. The Hebrew bookshop is mentioned in the 1866 Leipzig directory that also lists Schreber’s brother Gustav’s chemical business.

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69. Schreber, ‘‘[Poem],’’ 260. 70. Weber, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xlv–il. 71. On this folding of the object of circumcision into the subject, see Wilson, Ideology, 588. 72. Cf. Freud, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 57–58. 73. Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 61. 74. Whereas Israe¨ls speaks of (six) miscarriages, drawing on Baumeyer’s 1973 essay ‘‘Nachtra¨ge,’’ R. B. White, ‘‘The Mother-Conflict,’’ 60, estimates six to eight stillbirths. His source, by way of Niederland, was probably Kurt Schilling, a one-time horticultural advisor to the Schreber Associations. In a 1964 account of Moritz Schreber’s life and family, Schilling refers to ‘‘stillborn children’’; cited in Israe¨ls, Father and Son, 277. Lothane, In Defense, 368 n. 37, speculates on Sabine’s having had one or more abortions. 75. Harsin, ‘‘Syphilis,’’ 67. 76. Or—and I thank Rutgers University professor Carolyn Williams for recalling to me this question—could Sabine have been the (hereditary) syphilitic? Her original class situation might have motivated such an assumption. Whereas the bourgeois woman was pure, the lower-class woman, the public woman—prostitute, actress—was the source of infection. And Sabine came from such a background. Her father Heinrich Behr was artistic director at the Leipzig city theater. He had earlier been an operatic singer. Her mother was the daughter of the comic dramatist Roderich Benedix. Within the Schreber family tradition Sabine was recalled as having come from a circus background, while her father was remembered as a singer and a dancer; Israe¨ls, Father and Son, 153, 277. In any case she was never really accepted by Schreber’s close-knit family. 77. Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 61. 78. Panizza’s syphilis, too, was treated with potassium iodide; see Que´tel, History, 45. 79. Bromkalivergiftung. Indeed, such poisoning is what the case history of his first institutionalization at the Leipzig University Clinic suggests, although it lists bromide as part of a series of abused medications: ‘‘Subsequently he was in Sonnenstein Asylum for treatment, having taken large quantities of morphine, chloral, and bromide for several weeks’’; cited by Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 61. 80. Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 68. Cf. Israe¨ls, Father and Son, 151. 81. Did the Denkwu¨rdigkeiten’s elided third chapter contain this information, albeit wrapped in delusions of soul murder? Klara’s letter would seem to suggest so, in Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 67–68. 82. Cf. Fleck, Genesis, 14; and chapter 3 of this volume. 83. Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, 1:19.

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84. Ibid., 2:286, 287. 85. Lothane, In Defense, 24, 55; cf. 37. Lothane later notes that syphilitic meningitis was the topic of Flechsig’s doctoral thesis (202, also 55), but, considering the role of Flechsig in Schreber’s delusional system, Lothane surprisingly does not tie this fact into that system. 86. Black’s Medical Dictionary, 139. 87. Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, 2:604. 88. Ibid. 1:39. 89. Anti-Oedipus, §1.2 and passim. 90. See the earlier discussion in chapter 3. 91. Figures, 272. 92. On the unutterable name of syphilis, see Harsin, ‘‘Syphilis’’; Corbin, Women; and chapter 3. 93. Cf. Corbin, Women and ‘‘Le pe´ril ve´ne´rien.’’ 94. Or from someone whose profession, such as his wife’s profession of actress, was at the time frequently associated with prostitution. 95. These phrases do not come from Schreber’s pen; rather, Schreber’s uttering of ‘‘ ‘the sun is a whore’ and suchlike’’ is mentioned by his psychiatrist Dr. Weber at Sonnenstein in the ‘‘Medical Expert’s Report to the Court,’’ which Schreber included in his edition of his memoirs (M 270). Both phrases are recorded in the Sonnenstein case sheet under the date ‘‘September, 1896’’; cited by Baumeyer, ‘‘The Schreber Case,’’ 64. 96. Cf. Bristow, Prostitution; and Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. 97. See chapter 3, n. 129. 98. Huysmans, Against, 98–99. And it acted like an unmanning, if not unmanned, Wandering Jew at that. 99. Zo¨berlein, in Der Befehl, depicts the Jewish seductress Mirjam suffering from a sterility-causing blood disease, ‘‘her Jewish pox (Judenpest) . . . syphilis’’; cited by Theleweit, Male Fantasies, 2:15. 100. Oskar Panizza certainly did, and he viewed himself as victimized by syphilis. Throughout his life he obsessed on its telltale sign, a gumma on his right leg. In his finest and most notorious work, the 1893 play Das Liebeskonzil (The Council of Love), Dame Syphilis is the child of Salome and the Devil, whose ‘‘features wear an expression that is decadent, worn, embittered. He has a yellowish complexion. His manners recall those of a Jew of high breeding’’(Council, 79). Syphilis is born after the holy family—a decrepit Gd, a consumptive Christ, and a lascivious Mary—fearing their powers usurped by the outrages of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, his court, and country people, commissions this very Jewish Devil to ‘‘[s]tick your nose into your witch’s kettle’’ (95) and create a punishment both ‘‘libidinous and destructive.’’ 101. La vie me´dicale (March 1901), citing a Dr. Kieman in the New York Medical Journal; cited in Que´tel, History, 297 n. 30. 102. Lothane, In Defense, 55.

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9. walter benjamin reproducing the scent of the messianic The ‘‘precious but tasteless seed’’ (TPH 263 [Thesis xvii]) of this chapter was produced as a response to a series of papers on Walter Benjamin for the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Consultation at the 1989 AAR annual meeting. My thanks to Ned Lukacher for supporting that original dissemination, to James Rolleston for his aid during all of its preliminary stages, and to Jonathan Boyarin for his contribution to its initial germination as ‘‘The Aromatics of Jewish Difference: Or, Benjamin’s Allegory of Aura,’’ in Jews and Other Differences, ed. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 203–56. That essay is here ‘‘reproduced’’—that is, transplanted, in part pruned (beschnitten), and in part grafted upon: a hybrid that was itself subject to genetic alteration, thanks, in part, to a timely intervention by Ted Smith. 1. Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem (October 22, 1917); Correspondence, 98. 2. Cf. Arendt, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 17–18. 3. Benjamin, letter to Florens Christian Rang (18 November 1923); Benjamin, Correspondence, 215. 4. These opposing interpretations of Benjamin, most prominently represented by Scholem and Adorno, respectively, are summarized by Jennings, Dialectical Images, 5–11. 5. See Benjamin, ‘‘Image,’’ 214. 6. Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem (22 October 1917); Briefe, 1:153; Correspondence, 99. 7. In concluding ‘‘Heine und die Folgen’’ (Heine and His Consequences), an indictment of contemporary Germanophone journalism and journalists and their supposed sources in the Jewish-identified writer Heine and his work, a denunciation that provoked years of controversy and polemic in Germanophone literary circles, Karl Kraus observes: ‘‘Heine was a Moses who with his staff struck the rock of the German language . . . water did not flow out of the rock . . . but rather Eau de Cologne’’; translated in Reitter, The Anti-Journalist, 105. Originally published in Die Fackel 329–30 (August 1911): 6–33 and as a ¨ ber separate pamphlet; the essay has been republished in Goltschnigg, Kraus U Heine (165–88), along with other writings on Heine by Kraus. 8. Benjamin, ‘‘Image,’’ 214. 9. This chapter focuses on the specific names Aura and Mimesis (as well as their mimetic correlates A¨hnlichkeit and Reproduktion); I engage a more extensive analysis of Benjamin’s problematic of the ‘‘name’’ in Geller, ‘‘Aromatics.’’ 10. Unlike Benjamin’s similarly characterized ‘‘trace’’ (see n. 105 below), while we may have preserved only a trace, a remnant, of our mimetic ability, mimesis itself does not originate with the remnant, the trace, of the object.

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11. Benjamin, ‘‘Theologische Kritik,’’ 275. 12. See Salzani, Constellations, esp. 28–29, on the making-present (in the senses of both darstellen and vergegenwa¨rtigen) of what cannot be ‘‘pinned down’’ (deuten). 13. Benjamin, ‘‘Image,’’ 205. 14. Benjamin’s olfactive organ apparently eluded Gerhard Richter’s recent physiognomic study, Benjamin and the Corpus. Not only did it not make the series of chapter-heads ‘‘Corporeality,’’ ‘‘Face,’’ ‘‘Body,’’ ‘‘Ear,’’ and ‘‘Eye,’’ but ‘‘Smell’’ failed even to rate an entry in the index. 15. As Pulzer notes in Rise of Political Antisemitism, ‘‘The decline of the overtly antisemitic organizations after 1900 is deceptive. In Germany the various parties quarreled and vegetated; at the same time antisemitism was more openly accepted than before by several other parties, an increasing number of political and economic interest groups, and many nonpolitical bodies, such as students’ corps. . . . [Hence] a decline in sectarian fanaticism and in the vehemence of antisemitic propaganda combined with the widespread acceptance of mild, almost incidental antisemitic opinions’’ (189). In his ‘‘Third Thoughts’’ published some forty years later, Pulzer intensified his earlier observation: ‘‘The ideological component of nationalism and of the more popular vo¨lkisch organizations, to the extent that they were increasingly accepted in the population, should have received greater attention. This would have helped in better understanding the spread of ‘secondary antisemitism’ as one component of a larger cluster of political emotions’’ (‘‘Third Thoughts,’’ 168). 16. In ‘‘A Berlin Chronicle,’’ Benjamin describes wandering the streets of Berlin on Rosh Hashanah in search of the Reform synagogue when ‘‘an immense pleasure filled [him] with blasphemous indifference toward the service [Gottesdienst], but exalted the street in which I stood as if it had already intimated to me the services of procurement [Kupplerdienste] it was later to render to my awakened drive’’ (BC 53). Dienst performs a metonymic service of conjoining sect and sexuality. Scholem had reservations about the retention of this section, now titled ‘‘Sexual Awakening,’’ in Berlin Childhood: ‘‘I urgently advised [Benjamin] to delete this section because it was the only one in the whole book in which Jewish matters were explicitly mentioned, thus creating the worst possible associations’’; cited in Scholem, ‘‘Benjamin and His Angel,’’ 206. Also see Kafka, Father, 74–85, and Scholem, From Berlin. Schnitzler, Road, brilliantly depicts the comparable situation of Germanophone Austrian Jews. 17. See M. Goldstein, ‘‘Deutsch-ju¨discher Parnaß,’’ 192; cf. Arendt, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 30–31, and Scholem, ‘‘Jews and Germans,’’ 88–89. 18. Cf. G. Smith, ‘‘Benjamins fru¨he Auseinandersetzung,’’ and Rabinbach, ‘‘Between Enlightenment.’’

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19. Sombart, Zukunft, 6; cited in G. Smith, ‘‘Benjamins fru¨he Auseinandersetzung,’’ 321. 20. Briefe, 1: 61–62; cited in G. Smith, ‘‘Benjamins fru¨he Auseinandersetzung,’’ 329. 21. Letter to Ludwig Strauß, 10 October 1912; Briefe, 1:69. 22. Letter to Ludwig Strauß, 10 October 1912; Briefe, 1:69–70. 23. Scholem, From Berlin, 28–29; cf. Scholem, Friendship, 35: ‘‘even his [i.e., Benjamin’s] grandparents celebrated Christmas as a ‘national festivity.’ ’’ 24. Or western: Benjamin believed that he was related on his father’s side to the Van Gelderns, a family of Dutch court Jews which included among others Heinrich Heine’s mother and Salomon van Geldern who was famous in the eighteenth century for his travels in North Africa; cf. Scholem, Friendship, 18. 25. Cf. Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, 100–103. Benjamin stocks his memory with details from Schiller’s nationalist ode to the German bourgeois household, ‘‘Das Lied von der Glocke’’ (The Song of the Bell). Benjamin’s family, like many assimilated Jews, may well have endeavored to prove their Germanness by mimetically reproducing the stock self-images of the German bourgeoisie offered up by their national poet. As Scholem observed, ‘‘The significance of Friedrich Schiller for the formation of Jewish attitudes toward Germany is almost incalculable. . . . For to generations of Jews within Germany [Schiller] represented everything they thought of, or wished to think of, as being German—even when, in the last third of the nineteenth century, his language had already begun to sound hollow’’ (‘‘Jews and Germans,’’ 79). 26. Representative of these views is the discussion in Nordau, CL 2–3 (see chapter 7 in this volume); cf. Arendt, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 30–34, and Klein, Jewish Origins, ch. 1. 27. Kant, Anthropology, 50, 50–51; cf. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 139–40. 28. Other evocative references include the depiction of the pedestrians’ restlessness and gesticulation, which were a part of the standard inventory of Jewish caricature; the image of servility too was a frequent component. Buttressing the implicit analogy is Benjamin’s qualifier and renewed citation that follow this passage: ‘‘One might think [Poe] was speaking of half-drunken wretches. Actually, they were ‘high-class people, merchants, lawyers, and stock-jobbers’ ’’ (OB 171; translation modified). 29. One of the most famous accounts appears in Interpretation of Dreams where Freud recalls his father’s account of his assault as a young man (c. 1830s) by a Christian lout on the sidewalks of Freiberg (Interpretation, 197); on Freud’s acting out and working through see Geller, On Freud’s. ¨ ber die Grenzen,’’ 384, 386; cited in Reitter, The Anti30. Gomperz, ‘‘U Journalist, 49.

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31. Leroy-Beaulieu, Israel, 178. 32. Hartmann, Das Judentum, 168. 33. Cf. Gallagher, ‘‘George Eliot,’’ and chapters 3 and 6 of this volume. 34. Including women and their necessary role in human reproduction. Indeed, that necessity as prima facie evidence of the ‘‘autonomous and autochthonous’’ male’s unavoidable dependence and derivativeness engendered an all-the-more extensive structure of representations and institutions to keep these irreplaceable actors in their appropriate and separate place. See Planert, ‘‘Der dreifache Ko¨rper’’; also see Schaser, ‘‘Einige Bemerkungen,’’ 70, drawing on Planert’s work; and Geller, ‘‘Hegel’s Woman.’’ 35. In Das Judentum, amid his characterization of the Jews as experts in disguise (Verhu¨llung, 178) and the reproductive arts, von Hartmann implicitly analogizes the Jews who readily enter journalism to indecent actresses: since ‘‘[d]ecent natures [Ansta¨ndige Naturen] resolve to put themselves at the service of the press only with difficulty and reluctance, just as a decent [ansta¨ndiges] young woman only resolves to go on stage with difficulty and reluctance’’ (171). On writing for money as prostitution, see Gallagher, ‘‘George Eliot.’’ 36. On the millennia-old moral critique of mimesis, also see Derrida, ‘‘Double Session’’; Agacinski, Mimesis; and Jay, ‘‘Mimesis and Mimetology.’’ 37. And it remained a leifmotif on into the twentieth: in his 1925 diatribe on the role of those of Jewish descent in literary studies, the leading vo¨lkisch and later National Socialist literary critic and historian Adolf Bartels wrote, ‘‘The Jewish people have and always had the propensity for [the theater, because] the Jews have a very great talent for mimicry, they can imitate almost everything other [than themselves]’’ (Herkunft, 37); cited in Kilcher, ‘‘Theater,’’ 212. 38. Characterized as a prostitute of problematic gender by the Viennese satirist Kikeriki in his Sarah’s Reisebriefe, Sarah Bernhardt epitomizes the mimetic Jew. Cf. Gilman, ‘‘Salome,’’ and Ockman, ‘‘Jewish Star.’’ 39. Ockman, ‘‘Jewish Star,’’ 123 and n. 6, discusses the Jewish identification of both Bernhardt and Rachel (born Elisa-Rachel Fe´lix), who was generally considered as the other great French actress of the nineteenth century, as well as the identification of the Jews with the theater, best exemplified by French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau’s antisemitic screed, ‘‘Le The´aˆtre juif.’’ 40. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 317. 41. Cited in Maugue, L’Identite´ masculine, 37. 42. Stoecker, ‘‘Unsre Forderungen,’’ 147, 153; English trans. in Massing, Rehearsal, 281, 287. 43. Treitschke, ‘‘Unsere Aussichten,’’ 11–12; English trans. in MendesFlohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 344.

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44. On Jewish participation in the clothes trade, see chapter 6 in this volume. 45. Oskar Panizza’s 1893 short story ‘‘The Operated Jew’’ (‘‘Der operirte Jude’’) graphically depicts the inevitable failure of Jewish mimicry; see the earlier discussion in chapter 8. 46. Cf. Robertson, Kafka. 47. Darwin, Journal of the Beagle, 206; cited in Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 75. 48. Darwin, Origin, 205; cited in Norris, ‘‘Darwin,’’ 1232. 49. Lombroso, Antisemitismus, 53; cited in Hart, Healthy Jew, 120–21. 50. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 153. 51. Cf. Norris, ‘‘Darwin,’’ 1233–34, who writes that for Nietzsche, ‘‘certain organic processes (protective imitation, camouflage, adaptive behavior, morphological resemblance) and intellectual acts (deception, lying, trickery, rationalization, self-delusion) are treated as homologous and analogous.’’ 52. Hundt-Radowsky, Judenspiegel, 90–91. 53. Klages, ‘‘Typische Ausdruckssto¨rungen,’’ 60. 54. See Klages, ‘‘Einleitung,’’ 81; citing Klages, ‘‘Typische Ausdruckssto¨rungen,’’ 60–62; Graphologie, 78–80 and nn. 55. Klages, ‘‘Einleitung,’’ 81, 81. 56. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 18–19. Wittgenstein, although born and raised a Catholic, nevertheless perceived himself as a Jew because of his Jewish forebears (three born-Jewish grandparents)—and his mental picture became officially recognized under the Nuremberg Laws in his native Vienna after the Anschluss. At some point between 1939 and 1940 Wittgenstein would return to this botanical image when describing the lack of genius in himself and in that of another ‘‘Jewish thinker,’’ Sigmund Freud: ‘‘I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil. Freud’s originality too was like this, I think. I have always believed—without knowing why—that the real germ of psycho-analysis came from Breuer, not Freud’’ (ibid., 36). Whether Wittgenstein was making a claim for Josef Breuer’s genius or merely adopting a different rhetorical strategy to diminish Freud is unclear, since he had earlier wondered, given that Breuer too was Jewish: ‘‘Can one take the case of Freud and Breuer as an example of Jewish reproductiveness?’’ (ibid., 19). 57. Wagner, Judaism, 85, 89, 92; cf. 91. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, extensively chronicles the negative views of Yiddish and of Jewish speech; also see the discussion in chapter 7 of this volume.

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58. Sombart, Wirtschaftsleben, 325. 59. Herzl, Complete Diaries, 1:10. Although the entry is dated Whitsuntide, 1895, Herzl is recalling a conversation from the previous summer with Ludwig Speidel. 60. Lessing, Ju¨discher Selbsthaß, 174, mentions the eponymous collection, Apostata, in which ‘‘Sem’’ appeared, but not the essay itself. That essay, like its companions, had been published originally in the influential journal Die Gegenwart (The Present) that he obviously sought to supersede with the appearance of his own journal, Die Zukunft (The Future), the following year. 61. See the not-incorrect literal reading of Robertson, ‘Jewish Question,’ 305–06. 62. Harden, ‘‘Sem,’’ 147, 154. 63. Perhaps initially it was quoted more by antisemitic writers than by Jews; however, in recent years the article’s depiction of the Western European Jew’s ‘‘unathletic [unkonstruktiven] build . . . narrow [hohen] shoulders . . . clumsy [ungelenkte] feet . . . sloppy roundish [weichliche Rundlichkeit] shape’’ (Rathenau, ‘‘Ho¨re, Israel!’’ 458; English trans. adapted from Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 268) has been repeatedly cited as an exemplary illustration of the representation of the ‘‘feminized Jew.’’ Also see the discussion of this essay in the introduction to this volume. 64. Among the perfidious effects of the Jewish-identified Heine on Germanophone journalistic imitators claimed by Kraus in Heine und die Folgen (Heine and His Consequences; see n. 7 above) was the transformation of contemporary writing into an ornament that masquerades as what it allegedly adorns. See Reiter, The Anti-Journalist, esp. 96–105 65. Rathenau, ‘‘Ho¨re, Israel!’’ 458, 457. English trans. adapted from Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern, 268. 66. Nordau, ‘‘I. Kongressrede,’’ 51. 67. Lessing, Ju¨discher Selbsthaß, 50; English trans. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 274. 68. Perhaps it was a different kind of irony that led Lessing to omit discussion of an essay by one of his prime examples of a self-hating Jew, Harden’s ‘‘Sem,’’ discussed above. 69. Weissenberg, Ju¨discher Typus, 329; cited in Omran, Frauenbewegung, 49. 70. Blu¨her, Secessio Judaica, 19. Fritz Lenz argued in Baur, Fischer and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre, that if diasporic Jewry does not appear to look so different from their hosts, it is because those Jews with an innate talent for mimicry had a selective advantage for survival over those without this ability—as can be observed in several varieties of butterflies; see Essner, Die ‘‘Nu¨rnberger Gesetze,’’ 54–55.

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71. Letter to Robert Klopstock, 30 June 1922, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, 330. 72. Cf. Robertson, who also argues (Kafka, 164–69) that the application of Darwinian ‘‘mimicry’’ to the discussion of Jewish assimilation relates to Kafka’s story. In his discussion Robertson notes how earlier criticism by Sokel (Kafka) and Norris (‘‘Darwin’’) had acknowledged the importance of imitation to the story but had failed to recognize the specifically Jewish provenance of Kafka’s concern. 73. The search of early-twentieth-century Germanophone AustroHungarian Jews for any way out (‘‘Weg ins Frei’’), including mimesis, is the principal theme in Schnitzler, Road. 74. Kafka, ‘‘Report,’’ 258. 75. In ‘‘To Scholem on Kafka,’’ Benjamin notes: ‘‘Kafka’s work is an ellipse; its widely spaced focal points are defined, on the one hand by mystical experience (which is, above all, the experience of tradition) and, on the other hand, by the experience of the modern city dweller. . . . The citizen of the modern state’’ (325). Benjamin offers an alternative characterization of the ‘‘experience of the modern city dweller’’: the world according to the modern physicist also ‘‘displays the characteristic Kafka-gestus’’ (325). 76. Benjamin, ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’ 804, 805–06. 77. E.g., Parerga, 2:370, 375–76. 78. See Jaeger, Entdeckung. 79. See Berillon, ‘‘Psychologie de l’olfaction.’’ 80. See Gu¨nther, Rassenkunde. 81. Andree, Zur Volkskunde, 68. 82. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, 161. 83. Benjamin was quite familiar with the work of this now rather obscure writer. In 1930 Benjamin composed a radio talk in which he discussed Panizza’s work along with that of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Although Benjamin does not specifically refer to this story, he does refer to others from the collection in which it appeared (‘‘Hoffmann und Panizza,’’ 645, 647). Moreover, one of Benjamin’s favorite authors, Mynona (Salomo Friedla¨nder), had earlier written a parody of ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ ‘‘The Operated Goy,’’ a translation of which can be found in Zipes, Operated. 84. Heine, Complete Poems, 688. Then again, by doubling the source of Donna Bianca’s olfactive discomfort, Heine deploys the stereotype in order to undermine its alleged Jewish specificity. 85. Horkheimer and Adorno, DE 184; cf., inter alia, Corbin, Foul; Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics; Rosario, Erotic Imagination; Rindisbacher, Smell of Books; Le Gue´rer, Scent; Gray, ‘‘Dialectic of ‘Enscentment’ ’’; Howes, ‘‘Olfaction’’; and Classen, Howes and Synnott, Aroma.

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86. Howes, ‘‘Olfaction.’’ 87. Kant, Anthropology, 50; also see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 139–40. 88. Cf. Jaeger, Entdeckung, 108. 89. G.E. Smith, Comparative Anatomy, n.p.; cited in Ellis, Sexual Selection, 46. 90. Ellis, Sexual Selection, 55. 91. Freud, Civilization, 99 n., 106 n., 106 n., 106 n. 92. Benjamin, ‘‘Eduard Fuchs,’’ 495–500; in his discussion of upright gait in the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin (AP 80–81/PW 131–32 [B10, 2—B10a, 1]) shifts the terminology from the implicitly moral (i.e., ‘‘a kind of perversion’’) to the mechanical (i.e., vertical and horizontal) and also cites Wilhelm Lotze, who questions the significance usually placed on the shift in orientation. Already in a 1920 fragment, ‘‘Wahrnehmung und Leib’’ (Perception and Body; 67) Benjamin had mused in a general way about the transformation in perception with the assumption of an upright gait. 93. Freud, Civilization, 100 n. 94. Ibid. 95. Not surprisingly, these last implications are not expressly argued by Freud. Whether motivated by ambivalence, identification, or disciplinary demands—especially the fear that psychoanalysis would be dismissed as an outgrowth of particular Jewish predilections rather than accepted as universal science—Freud rarely directly engaged antisemitism, yet his arguments were often deformed around unacknowledged racial representations. In his work he endeavored to undercut the presuppositions of antisemitic discourse, to appropriate and transform (or at least mitigate) its negative valuations, or to repress its conclusions, and, on occasion, he acted them out. See my On Freud’s. 96. From the original version of his vignette ‘‘Mummerehlen,’’ in Berlin Childhood, 130. Cf. Stoessel, Aura, 178. Benjamin suggested the primordiality of such resemblance-seeing in a fragment found in his Nachlaß: ‘‘May one assume that the look was the first mentor of the mimetic faculty?’’ (‘‘[Das Ornament],’’ 958). 97. While Illuminations was a translation of Illuminationen, a German collection of selected works, Reflections had no corresponding German volume or title. 98. ‘‘For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means—that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually—taking their cue from tactile reception—through habit’’ (Benjamin, WA 120; emphasis in original). See, inter alia, G. Richter, Benjamin and the Corpus; Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity; Paterson, Senses; and Frisby, Fragments of Modernity. This citation from Benjamin’s ‘‘Work of Art’’ is recontextualized below.

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99. Buck-Morss, ‘‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,’’ 24. 100. Buck-Morss does, however, acknowledge that ‘‘sight was not exclusively affected. Perfumeries burgeoned in the nineteenth century, their products overpowering the olfactory sense of a population already besieged by the smells of the city’’ (ibid.). She then cites Benjamin on smell drugging the sense of time (OB 184). While her comment on olfactive anaesthesia is quite accurate (see Corbin, Foul), as I discuss below her illustrative quote moves in a contrary direction. 101. Stoessel, Aura, 11. 102. When this verse emerges in ‘‘Some Motifs’’ it serves as a gloss on the notions of correspondances and me´moire involuntaire in the section (x) preceding Benjamin’s introduction of the notion of the aura. See the discussion of this particular citation below. 103. Cf. Howes, ‘‘Olfaction’’; Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma. 104. Benjamin, ‘‘Image,’’ 214. 105. Indeed, this aspect of smell bears a similarity to the trace which Benjamin opposes to the aura: ‘‘The trace is the appearance of proximity, however remote the object that left it behind. Aura is the appearance of distance, however close the object that evokes it’’ (AP 447/PW 560 [M16a, 4]). Yet the overcoming of the Proustian and the Kantian subject by smell is more characteristic of the effect of aura: ‘‘In the trace we take possession of the object; in aura it takes possession of us’’ (ibid.). Also see Rolleston, ‘‘Politics of Quotation.’’ 106. Kant, Anthropology, 50. 107. That moment, Augenblick, literally translates as ‘‘eye glance’’ (one that is, apparently, a blink of the eye in duration), suggesting how the German language may constrain the understanding of epistemology to visual metaphors. 108. Benjamin, Origin, 35. 109. Benjamin’s synesthestic evocation and sign of paradise sharply contrast with the confusion of senses, ‘‘smell, with your eyes, as if your nose resided in them,’’ in Lichtenberg’s parodistic representations of the abysmal discussed in chapter 2 of this volume. 110. Cited from Rey, Fabricant de cachemires, 201–02. 111. For one such fantasy, see Schlegel, Lucinde, 61–63. 112. Benjamin prefaces this entry with ‘‘The bourgeois who come into ascendancy with Louis Philippe sets store by the transformation of nature into the interior.’’ 113. Benjamin had earlier yielded to such a bourgeois ‘‘nostalgic utopia’’ when he employed a vision of smell to mediate the romantic bourgeois opposition between city and nature. In his 1927 essay on Gottfried Keller, the

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nineteenth-century German-Swiss realist novelist whose work enshrined as well as olfactively coded that opposition, Benjamin writes that Keller’s ‘‘vision of the world’’ can be characterized by two odor-laced lines from the old Swiss national anthem: ‘‘Loveliest rose, although all others faded/you still smell sweetly on my barren shore’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘Keller G,’’ 292; ‘‘Keller E,’’ 58). On Benjamin’s essay as a ‘‘nostalgic utopia’’, see Witte, Walter Benjamin, 106. On the olfactive dimension of Keller, see Rindisbacher, Smell of Books, 72–86; and the discussion of Klages below. 114. Undated letter, Briefe, 2:591; also see Fittler, Kosmos der A¨hnlichkeit, 340, n. 424. 115. He continues: ‘‘I believe that a whiff of the air was still present in the vineyards of Capri where I held my beloved in my arms’’ (Berlin Childhood, 39). 116. On the relationship between stars and aura in Benjamin’s work, also see Mose`s, Angel of History. 117. Nietzsche, ‘‘History,’’ 121, 121, 121. 118. On Nietzsche’s privileging of olfactory perception for his genealogy of culture, see Blondel, Nietzsche, 113–24. Blondel writes, ‘‘Genealogy is properly speaking Otorhinology, a listening to an olfactory perception of the distant or profound body’’ (113), and then proceeds to cite an extensive selection of passages from Nietzsche’s work that draw upon an olfactive hermeneutic. 119. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 326; 233. 120. Letter of Theodor W. Adorno to Benjamin (2 August 1935); Benjamin, Correspondence, 497–98. In response, Benjamin argues for the retention of Klages as part of a critique of his and Jung’s notions of the archaic image. Cf. the editorial notes to ‘‘Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,’’ which include Benjamin’s correspondence with Adorno, Horkheimer, and Scholem on this matter; Tiedemann and Schweppenha¨user, ‘‘Anmerkungen,’’ 1066–92, esp. Benjamin’s letters to Adorno (23 April 1937 [1067] and 10 July 1937 [1070]), to Scholem (5 August 1937 [1070]), and to Horkheimer (28 September 1938 [1091]). 121. Roberts, Walter Benjamin, 178. 122. Fuld, ‘‘Die Aura’’; Stoessel, Aura, 11 and n. 123. Just as Robespierre looked to ancient Rome in a time of crisis (TPH, 261 [Thesis xiv]), so too Benjamin—to the Rome imagined by Alfred Schuler. Although delivered during World War I, the lectures were not published until World War II (1940). 124. Roberts, Walter Benjamin, 104–09. 125. Also see Le Gue´rer, Scent, 196–97. 126. Klages, ‘‘Einleitung,’’ 8–9, 20–21.

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127. Wolters, Stefan George, 138; cited in Klages, ‘‘Einleitung,’’ 83. Klages apparently confirms the privilege of aroma, if not the judgment about his discernment of the native and the foreign, since he emphasizes this odorous—for him odious—passage. In ‘‘Einleitung,’’ Klages omits its author’s name, claims the born-Protestant Wolters is Jewish (although under 1940 German law he could be so classified, since he was the grandson of a RussianJewish poet and translator), and changes the title of Wolter’s book to The Book of Vengeance. 128. Letter to Scholem, 14 January 1926; Correspondence, 288; emphasis added. Also see Ziege, ‘‘Bedeutung,’’ 153–56, on Klages’s antisemitic reading and reception of Bachofen. In a later letter to Scholem (15 August 1930), Benjamin alludes to Klages’s antisemitism while praising his new philosophic tract, The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul: ‘‘It is without doubt a great philosophical, regardless of the context in which the author may be and remain suspect’’ (Correspondence, 366). 129. Wagner, Judaism, 83. 130. Luther’s Bibel is more literal: ‘‘mein Riechen wird sein bei der Furcht des Herrn.’’ 131. Cited in Patai, Messiah Texts, 28–29. This talmudic passage is part of a tradition that ties smell to judgment and redemption. It was the smell of the sacrifice that bound Gd to humanity, and incense was perpetually burned at the Temple (cf. Exod. 30:7–8). Such aromatic offerings were a sign of a redemptive covenant. After the flood waters subsided Noah left the ark and ‘‘built an altar to the Lord . . . and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man’ ’’ (Gen. 8:20–21). Conversely, the censers of incense that Korah and his follow rebels wrongfully carried set them apart from the remainder of the Israelites and distinguished them alone for Gd’s punishment (Num. 16:16–35); whether these censer-bearers would ever be redeemed remained a matter of much rabbinic debate (Patai, Messiah Texts, 198). This scene also shaped Benjamin’s understanding of messianism. In his ‘‘Critique of Violence’’ Benjamin sees an image of the messianic end of human history (as well as of revolutionary change) in Gd’s expiating annihilation of the odorous company of Korah (297–300). 132. While Benjamin plays upon the typicality and kitschiness of the lavender sachets of his reminiscence, he personalizes the experience. 133. Cf. his description in ‘‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’’ (48; ‘‘Das Paris,’’ 583) of the poet as the one who ‘‘comes to a halt every few moments to gather up the refuse he encounters.’’ 134. Cf. AP 349–50/PW 441 (J68, 4), in which he quotes Baudelaire, ‘‘Of Wine and Hashish,’’ describing the ragpicker as one who not only collects the

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refuse of the city but catalogues it as well. Benjamin claims that Baudelaire the poet identifies with the ragpicker. Irving Wohlfahrt (‘‘Et Cetera?’’) depicts Benjamin the historian as ragpicker. 135. Benjamin, ‘‘Aussenseiter,’’ 225. See Witte, Walter Benjamin, 118. 136. Benjamin, ‘‘Das Paris,’’ 521; cf. ‘‘Paris,’’ 8. Also cf. AP 349–50/PW 441–42 (J68, 3—J68a, 6); Benjamin focuses on the ragpicker as proletarian, garbage as objects to be collected, and wine. See the discussion of the proletariat, lumpen and otherwise, in chapter 6 of this volume. 137. Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal, 114. 138. ‘‘Das Paris,’’ 522; cf. ‘‘Paris,’’ 8. 139. The one quasi-exception (AP 343/ PW 433 [J64, 5]), in which Benjamin correlates a Baudelairean lament over the loss of spring’s fragrance with the loss of aura in the modern, is discussed above. 140. Corbin, Foul, 146, 178, 185–86, 205–06. 141. Daudet, ‘‘Baudelaire,’’ 213, 254–55. 142. Corbin, Foul, 229, 229. 143. Cf. Harsin, Policing Prostitution; Bernheimer, Figures; Corbin, Women. 144. Again, see the discussion in chapter 6. 145. Cf. Kant, Judgment, 48–49 (§39). 146. Kant, Anthropology, 50; also see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 139–40. 147. Kant, Judgment, 173–174 (§48). 148. Because it indicates even as it repudiates the real, the material, the detritus left over from history’s victorious swath through the past—in sum, the objective realm that Benjamin hopes to redeem, to have redeemed—the disgusting smell embodies the ambivalent value-determinations that the word Ekel had long had for Benjamin. In his memoir of his friendship with Benjamin, Scholem recounts how ‘‘Ekul, which in contrast to Ekel was used in a highly positive sense’’ (Friendship, 55) was a favorite pet name shared between Benjamin and his wife Dora. 149. See Benjamin, WA 105–06, on the cult of beauty. 150. Adorno, ‘‘Actuality,’’ 128. 151. Among the other traits that were coded Jewish and played significant roles in Benjamin’s work are atavistic ritual, urbanism, and France. 152. Benjamin, ‘‘[Das Ornament],’’ 958. 153. Benjamin, ‘‘Doctrine,’’ 697–98. 154. Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ 179. 155. Benjamin, ‘‘Protokolle,’’ 588; 598. And with possible Jewish associations. During the early twentieth century, ‘‘[e]ven when betraying its closest affinity with other contemporary discourses, Jewish-national rhetoric favored this botanical metaphor [i.e., Stamm] over the preferred volkisch figure of

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‘blood.’ . . . [T]he concept of Stamm was generally used to identify the Jews as non-Germans’’ (Spector, Prague Territories, 162–63). 156. Neusner, Torah, 155. 157. And does not interfere with human reproduction. 158. Cf. Gonzalez-Crussi, Five Senses, 73. 159. Benjamin, ‘‘[Das Ornament],’’ 958. 160. Benjamin, ‘‘Juden,’’ 809. Cf. Scholem, Friendship, 36, 138. 161. Hess, Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, 58–59. 162. Freud, Jokes, 192, 191, 191, 190, 190. 163. Freud, Jokes, 192–93; emphasis added. 164. If these twin histories began with the repression of smell, then the return of smell—like mimesis and aura—offers Horkheimer and Adorno, if not a whiff of redemption, then a pessimistic commentary on humanity’s dialectical fate. The concluding note of their work, ‘‘The Genesis of Stupidity,’’ begins with an allusion to Goethe’s Faust I (cf. ‘‘Walpurgisnacht,’’ ll. 4067–68): ‘‘The true symbol of intelligence is the snail’s horn with which it feels and (if Mephistopheles is to be believed) smells its way’’ (DE 256). If it scents any obstacle, it recoils, ‘‘becoming one with the whole’’ (ibid.). This oscillation of progress and petrification continues both ontogenetically and phylogenetically with a crucial dialectical shift: if mimetic defense impedes intellectual progress, the defense against mimesis distorts it. In an earlier discussion of the myth of Odysseus and Circe, Horkheimer and Adorno (DE 71 and n. 41) had already noted speculations about the relationship between smelling and reason. Having determined with the aid of Freud’s footnotes from Civilization that ‘‘in the image of the pig the pleasure of smell is already reduced to the unfree snuffling of one who has his nose to the ground and renounces his upright carriage,’’ they cite a note from Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Heimkehr, 191: ‘‘Schwyzer has quite convincingly related noos [autonomous reason] to snorting and snuffling’’ etymologically. Smell, the zero-degree sense of intelligence and of mimesis, comes to symbolize, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the horn(s) of humanity’s dilemma. 165. While Jay (Dialectical, 269–70) provides only the most incidental of genealogies for Horkheimer and Adorno’s use of the term mimesis, Susan Buck-Morss (Origin, 87–88) at least mentions its long-playing role in the history of aesthetic speculation, from Plato and Aristotle on. In invoking Horkheimer and Adorno’s adoption of the term, she discusses Benjamin’s understanding of the notion; she does not relate that adoption to their application of the term to the analysis of antisemitism, nor in fact does she pay any but the most indirect attention to its use in that analysis. 166. Norris, ‘‘Darwin,’’ 1233. These consequences of Darwin’s study of animal imitation for later understandings of mimesis are clearly borne out by Horkheimer and Adorno (DE 180–82).

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167. Cf. letter to Scholem (22 October 1917): ‘‘A principal component of vulgar antisemitic as well as Zionist ideology is that the gentile’s hatred of the Jew is physiologically substantiated on the basis of instinct and race, since it turns against the physis. . . . that whatever basis and grounds [this principal component] may have, in its most primitive and intensive forms it becomes hatred for the physical nature of the one who is hated’’ (Benjamin, Correspondence, 99). 168. Cf., inter alia, Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity; Stoessel, Aura; Roberts, Walter Benjamin. 169. For example, one of Benjamin’s biographers, Julian Roberts, serves up apologetic in the face of Benjamin’s failure to explicitly repudiate their antisemitic positions, if not their work: ‘‘He knew perfectly well that Klages was an antisemite and near Fascist, and, what is more important, he wove Klages’s ideas brilliantly into his own critique of that position’’ (Walter Benjamin, 218); also see McCole, Antinomies, 178–80. A more problematic view of such appropriation can be found in Adorno’s response to Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk expose´; letter of Theodor W. Adorno to Benjamin (2 August 1935); Benjamin, Correspondence, 494–503, esp. 497–98. Among other problematic influences on Benjamin, Carl Schmitt has been and remains contentious; cf. Weber, ‘‘Taking Exception’’; Brederkamp, ‘‘From Benjamin.’’ 170. See Adorno’s 18 March 1936 letter to Benjamin; Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 127–34. In Dialectic, ‘‘reproduction’’ functions as the ‘‘reproduction of the same thing’’ (DE 134). 171. Benjamin describes this second nature in the concluding section, ‘‘To the Planetarium,’’ of an earlier work (completed 1926), One-Way Street: ‘‘In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families’’ (487). While Benjamin did not employ ‘‘[technische] Reproduktion’’ in that work, he did mobilize the language of so-called natural reproduction to characterize the means by which the current situation will be overcome. Benjamin concludes the section and therefore the work with the following incantation: ‘‘Living substance conquers [u¨berwindet] the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation [Zeugnis]’’ (487). The opening dedication to One-Way Street already signaled this as a transformed and transformational reproduction: ‘‘This street is named/Asja Lacis Street/after her who/as an engineer [Ingenieur] /cut it through the author [im Autor durchgebrochen hat]’’ (444). The text and its trajectory resulted from a woman, characterized as a male technologist (Benjamin wrote Ingenieur, not Ingenieurin), having penetrated, broken the hymen of (durchbrechen is the German verb usually employed to describe the act of defloration) the male author.

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172. Benjamin, ‘‘Goethe’s,’’ 251. 173. To illustrate the new forms of apperception that take up these tasks, such as the recognition of the relation between appearance and production, Benjamin (WA 127 n. 22) invokes the mime: ‘‘[M]imesis [is] the primal form of all artistic activity. The mime [Nachahmende] presents what he mimes merely as semblance. And the oldest form of imitation had only a single material to work with: the body. . . . The mime presents his subject as a semblance. One could say that he plays his subject [Sache].’’ Also see Hansen, ‘‘Room-For-Play.’’ 174. Cf. Benjamin, ‘‘Doctrine’’ and ‘‘Mimetic.’’ 175. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 189; cited in Adorno, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 16. 176. There is a not-dissimilar risk in my exhibiting the connections among anti-Jewish representations. By discussing such material—by reproducing the slurs of a Weininger or a Wagner—I navigate between the dual threat of the pornographic and the kitschy. I subject myself and my reader to the imagistic onslaught of verbal violence against the Jews. Yet I also risk trivializing those utterances and attitudes that would have such tragic consequences. But this material, even though it is obscene, is hardly trivial. 177. See, for example, the discussion in chapter 4 of historian Heinrich Graetz’s denigrating depiction of the Jewish salonnie`res of an earlier generation. 178. Also see Y. Weiss, ‘‘Identity and Essentialism,’’ 50–51. 179. Benjamin, ‘‘Paraliponema,’’ 403. 180. Freud, ‘‘Fetishism,’’ 157; cf. chapter 2 of this volume. 181. Ball, Things Chinese, 649; cf. chapter 2 of this volume.

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Abraham (patriarch), 12, 16, 22, 72, 77, 82, 109, 146, 250, 322n15, 363n27 acculturation. See assimilation or acculturation; Bildung Adler, Alfred, 55 Adorno, Theodor, 258, 276, 282–83, 293–98, 300, 405n4, 417n164, 417n165, 417n166, 418n169. See also Horkheimer and Adorno Ahasuerus (Ahasverus). See Wandering Jew Ahlwardt, Hermann, 374n59 Alberti(-Sittenfeld), Conrad, 106, 398n23 Alexander, Carl, 104 Al-Jalahma, Umayma Ahmad, 368n50 Almkvist, Johan, 104 Anderson, Mark, 318n124 Andree, Richard, 72, 114, 152–53, 158– 59, 267, 273, 347n85, 367n18, 390n20, 391n26 antisemitism (Antisemitismus): etymology and other origins, 3–4, 88, 305n20; terminology: early antisemitism 3, 133; Judenhaß (Jew–hatred), 3–4, 18, 263; Judeophobia (demonopathy), 42–43; Judeophobia (pagan), 4, 263; risches, 172, 370n13; theories of, 3–4, 33–34, 42–43, 54–55, 87, 98–99, 158– 59, 171, 212, 216, 218, 242, 258, 262, 293–97, 304–5n19, 305n22, 310n54, 325n52, 345n57, 370n13, 389n6, see also crises, persistence: of Judentum; Christianity’s relation to, see blood libel/ritual-murder; Christianity: supersessionism; representations of Judentum: as deicides; Jewish responses to, 10–11, 19–20, 22, 27, 30–31, 98– 99, 215, 260, 262–63, 301, 310n59, 343n41, 349n116; persecution and pogroms, 8, 10, 19, 41–43, 92, 107, 162,

215, 267, 300, 304n15, 304–5n19, 310n54, 314n120, 325n44, 345n57, 389n6, see also blood libel, Hep-Hep riots; and misogyny, 3, 54, 145, 317– 18n20; as respectable (salonfa¨hig): 81, 88 antisemitism (Antisemitismus): in Austria (and Vienna): 6–7, 19, 57–58, 108–10, 129, 215–16, 315n92, 390n13, 408n38; in France 98, 204, 242, 284, 318n122, 384n138, 408n39; in Germany, 15, 27, 57–58, 74–75, 80–81, 85–86, 88–89, 122–23, 133, 140, 156–57, 222–23, 248, 259–60, 262, 275, 339n124, 345n57, 355–56n193, 406n15, see also Berliner Antisemitismusstreit anti-Sinicism, 56–59, 61–64, 86–87, 333nn55–56; American, 57–58, 65 Apion, 156, 395n50 Apter, Emily, 11 Arendt, Hannah, 134, 148–49, 303n4, 360n4, 360–61n8, 361nn9, 13, 362n22, 362–63n25 Arnim, Achim von, 74, 133, 147–48, 154, 218, 343n38 Arnold, Mathew, 179, 373n43 Arvon, Henri, 200 Aryan, 4, 6, 56, 59, 86, 96, 108, 113–14, 117, 122–25, 228, 241, 246–47, 268, 314n36, 354n182, 356n95; Aryan/nonAryan (Semite) opposition, 4, 6, 56, 86, 228, 247, 304n9, 339n134 Aschheim, Steven E., 390n12 assimilation/acculturation: defined, 313– 14n79; assimilation, 14, 16, 18–19, 72– 74, 78–79, 83–84, 89, 138, 145–46, 212–15, 222, 226–31, 243, 245–46, 259–62, 266–67, 269–71, 292–93, 297, 306n31, 316n102, 324–25n42,

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390n13, 407n25, 411n72; acculturation/integration, goal of, 14–16, 34, 36, 48, 58, 75, 134–35, 137–38, 141, 147, 159, 217, 222, 226, 258, 260, 262, 264, 267–69, 271, 301, 353n170 Auerbach, Berthold, 35–38, 44, 310n51, 323nn26, 28, 324n37, 327n67, 346n71 Augagneur, Victor, 90 Augustine, Saint, 157, 387n157 aura, 26, 30–31, 257–58, 268, 274, 276– 79, 282–92, 297–300; 405n9, 413n105; relation to mimesis, 257–58, 290–91, 297–99, 413n105 autochthony (sui generis), 12–16, 34–35, 311n66, 408n34; problem of biblical (Hebrew or Semitic) origins, 13–14, 56, 313nn75–76; Jews an nonautochthnous, 105, 140 autonomy, 6, 14–16, 20, 34, 306n31, 408n34, 414n116, 416n139 Ave´-Lallement, Friedrich Christian Benedict, 374n58 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 285, 415n128 Baldwin, P. M., 213, 222, 389n7 Balzac, Honore´ de, 349n109 Bamberger, Ludwig, 57, 331n33 Bamberger, Simon, 104, 347n87 baptism, 2, 14–16, 74, 76–80, 101, 133, 141, 143, 148, 171, 267, 364n40, 367n19; Christian usurers as baptized Jews, 185–86, 316n100, 375n74. See also conversion, uncircumcision Bar Amitai, 315n93 Bartels, Adolf, 408n37 Baudelaire, Charles, 277–79, 282–83, 286–88, 378n94, 415–16n134, 416n139 Bauer, Bruno, 29, 170–71, 174, 176, 189, 191, 193–94, 199, 207, 370nn12, 14, 371n26, 376n79 Beer, Amalie, 142, 363n34 Behring, Emil, 96 Bein, Alex, 344n55 Bendavid, Lazarus, 72, 355n192 Benes, Tuska, 313n76, 321n7 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 11, 25, 27, 30, 178, 212, 256–63, 268, 272, 274–302, 317n108, 319n126, 320n137, 372n37, 378n94, 387n162, 405n10, 406nn14, 16, 407nn24–25, 28, 411nn75, 83, 412nn92, 96, 98, 413nn102, 105, 109,

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112, 413–14n113, 414nn115–16, 120, 415nn128, 131–32, 415–16n134, 416nn136, 139, 148, 151, 417n165, 418nn167, 169–71, 419n173; and Dora, 416n148; Arcades Project/Passagen-Werk [AP/PW], 21, 178, 257–59, 276–81, 284, 286–88, 290, 298, 319n126, 387n162, 412n92, 413n105, 415–16n134, 416nn136, 139, 418n169; Berlin Childhood 1900, 282, 406n16, 414n115; ‘‘A Berlin Chronicle’’ [BC], 260–61, 263, 281, 406n16; ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’’ [OB], 257, 262– 63, 277–79, 282–83, 286–87, 289, 292, 295, 407n28, 413n100; ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty’’ [MF], 257, 268, 290, 294, 297; One-Way Street, 418n171; Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ [TPH], 27, 258–59, 279, 300–2, 414n123; ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’’ [WA], 277, 289–90, 299–301, 320n137, 412n98, 416n149, 419n173 Berg, Alexander, 108 Berillon, Edgar, 273 Berkowitz, Michael, 374n58 Berlin salonnie`res and their ‘‘open houses,’’ 133, 137, 148, 360–61n8, 365n63, 419n177 Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, 43, 57, 215, 349n104, 365n63. Berneri, Camillo, 336n94 Bernhardt, Sarah, 94, 265, 408nn38–39 Bernheimer, Charles, 107, 253 Bescheidenheit, bescheiden (modesty, modest), 73, 118, 121–23, 187–88, 328– 29n5, 356n200, 356–57n202, 357nn205–06, 376n79, 401n50; as displacement of beschneiden (to circumcise), 121–23; as Beschra¨nktheit (narrowness) 376n79; Unbescheidenheit (immodesty), 188, 357n202 Beschneidung, beschnitten, beschneiden (circumcision, circumcised, to circumcise). See chiropodists; circumcision; coin–clipping; Schneid– Beurle, Karl, 57–58 Bewer, Max, 59 Beyer, Karl, 357n211 Biberman, Matthew, 318n125 Bible (Holy Scripture), 13, 15–16, 46, 77, 80, 113, 142, 146, 148, 163, 217, 220–

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Index 21, 231, 245, 250, 310n64, 311n66, 317n113, 338n129, 390n10, 415n131; New Testament 187; Old Testament, 46, 153, 157, 187, 313n76; Pentateuch, 385n142; Septuagint, 315n93; TaNaKh, 38; Song of Songs, 81–82; Luther’s Bibel, 146, 250, 323n15, 364n53 365n54, 415n130; Mendelssohn’s translation, 146; other: Germanenbibel, 123; Old Testament and New Testament (Marx’s division of Stirner’s Ego), 189–90 bibles, 18, 487n154 Bildung (education), 14, 92, 135, 137–40, 144–46, 264, 315n90. See also bourgeoisie: educated or cultured [Bildungsbu¨rgertum] Bilski, Emily D., and Emily Braun, 360n5 Binet, Alfred, 11 Bismarck, Otto von, 353n170 Blaschko, Alfred, 109 Bleibtreu, Karl, 398n23 Bloch, Iwan, 101, 106, 342n30, 343nn31, 41, 345n59 Bloch, Joseph Samuel, 390n14 Blondel, Eric, 414n118 blood: importance of, 100–1, 125, 207, 226, 244–46, 352n158, 358n218, 416– 17n155; impure (befouled, diseased, foreign, poisoned), 18, 94, 96, 101, 114, 116–17, 123, 126–27, 129–30, 204, 214, 355n193; Jewish, 113, 226, 345n68, 353n162, 355n193; pure, 18, 113; symbolics of, 128, 345n66, 358n224; and soil (Geist, Blut und Boden), 14, 98, 105–6; jus sanguinus (right of blood), 101; limpienza de sangre (cleanliness of blood), 3; blood libel/ritual murder, 16, 91, 108, 152, 160–61, 165, 215, 312n72, 368n50, 390n14; accusations: Damascus, 160–61, 165; Fulda, 160; Simon of Trent, 316n98; Tisza-Eszlar 215, 390n14; William of Norwich, 160. See also food, Jewish prohibitions: blood; religion, Jewish: sacrifice, human; representations of Judentum blood sin (sin against the blood, Rassenschande), 119–31, 355n189, 357n209, 359n226; The against the Blood (SB; Dinter), 94, 115, 118–26, 130, 348nn96–97, 350n129, 352n148,

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355n190, 356n194, 357n209, 359n226. See also reproduction: miscegenation Blu¨her, Hans, 271 Blum, Ernst, 53 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 22, 132, 317nn113–14 body: ‘‘body without organs,’’ 253; Chinese, 39, 51, 57; corporeality, 1, 5–7, 13, 30, 34, 51, 64, 81, 113, 121, 150– 51, 209, 236, 240, 257, 292, 308n36, 337n106, 340n7, 342n26, 358n24, 376n85; crippled/abused, 170, 209, 230, 238, 240, 247, 294, 334n64; diseased, 90, 96, 107–8, 127, 236–37, 253–54, 340n7; Jewish, 2, 11, 15–16, 20, 30, 34, 39, 49, 51, 75, 107, 109, 114, 125, 129, 139, 142, 149, 227, 229, 237, 243, 245, 306n28, 308n36, 316n89, 362n20, 401n25; mimetic, 294–95, 419n173; rationalized (‘‘operirt’’), 6–7, 92–93, 115, 243–45, 296, 397n16; Volksko¨rper (body of the people), 88–89, 127, 222, 308n39 body parts: 6, 13, 31, 49, 54, 333n56; feet, 13, 51–54, 142, 329n11, 383n131, 410n63; forehead (Stirn), 22, 170, 172, 207–08, 228, 386n152; foreskin, 52, 72, 75, 80, 82, 121, 142, 146, 148, 208, 315n96; genitals and reproductive organs, 11, 54–55, 140, 209, 246–47, 306–7n32, 402n65; gesture, 267, 293, 295–96; legs, 54, 240, 364n40; lip, 1, 102, 123, 192, 342n211; mouth, 101– 03, 170, 347n82; nose, 7, 81, 110–11, 283, 292–93, 300, 309n24, 330n13, 383n127, 384n140, 417n164; posture (erect, upright gait), 175–76, 245, 276, 294, 367n25, 408n35, 412n92, 417n164; skin (color): black, 116, 130, 219, 314n86, 391n24; dark, 119, 125; white, 15, 65, 116, 215, 224, 226, 230– 31, 314n86, 391n24; yellow, 94–95, 243, 254, 314n86, 404n100; stomach, 151, 247, 366n4. See also body techniques; circumcision; footbinding; hair; Judennase; penis; syphilis: saddle nose body processes: defecation (Abfall. excretion), 69, 170, 177–78, 182–83, 204, 210, 275–76, 297; sexual excitability (orgasm), 55, 103, 241, 247, 357n209; sweat, 178, 290, 372n33; urination,

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103, 170. See also smell, sense of; touch; vision body techniques: 13, 49–52, 328n2; inscriptions (branded [Gebrandmarkt], stamped), 5, 15, 18, 27, 30, 48, 93, 103, 113, 137, 139, 141–42, 170, 204, 207– 09, 227–28, 235–36, 239, 245, 247, 249, 256–57, 295, 316n104, 342n26, 349n104, 397n16; heart (inscribed), 141–42, 145, 316n104. See also Cain, mark of; circumcision; footbinding Bo¨rne, Ludwig, 79, 133, 141, 185, 375nn73, 75 Bonnet, Charles, 22 Boon, James, 329n9 Boudin, Jean-Christian, 105 bourgeoisie: educated or cultured (Bildungsbu¨rgertum), 14–15, 19, 25–26, 81, 91–94, 100, 103, 107, 110–11, 117, 128, 137, 191–92, 212–13, 218, 222, 235–36, 273–76, 281, 307, 311n66, 341n19, 341–42n23, 343n36, 358n224, 384n138; Bildungsbu¨rgertum, Jewish, 19, 103, 212–13, 260–61, 407n25; Mittelstand (petty bourgeoisie), 92, 195, 217, 235; as civil society (bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft), 101, 104, 171–72, 174, 176, 189–93, 200–1, 208, 211, 371n26; and experts/expertise, 92, 235–36, 404n95 Boyarin, Jonathan, 87, 303n8, 304n15, 306n27 Brainin, Elisabeth, Vera Legeti, and Samy Teicher, 339n134 Breitenstein, H., 104 Brentano, Clemens, 133, 218–19 Breuer, Josef, 409n56 Brieux, Euge`ne, 100 Brillat-Savarin, Anthe`lme, 151, 366n14 Brinkmann, Gustav von, 138, 362n20 Brosses, Charles de, 11, 205–6, 310n64, 385n149, 386n150. Brotstudium (learning for profit’s sake), 29, 150, 163, 172, 190–91, 366n4 Brown, Arthur J., 333n55 Brown, Wendy, 342n25 Brubaker, Rogers, 2, 303n5 Bru¨hlstrasse, 248–49, 402n66. See also Schreber, Paul David: family; Yiddish: Bru¨llen Brumlik, Micha, 387n155

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Brunner, Constantin (ne´ Leo Wertheimer), 45–46, 326n63 Buber, Martin, 3, 272 Buck-Morss, Susan, 276–77, 413n100, 417n165 Bu¨rger, Gottfried, 75 Bulkey, L. Duncan, 101, 346n73 Bullough, Vern, and Bonnie Bullough, 350n128 Burdach, Karl Friedrich, 116 Buret, Fre´de´ric, 342n30 Busch, Wilhelm, 85, 339n133 Bush, Frank, 383n131 Byron, Lord, 394n52 Ca¨sar (Henry VIII’s guard dog), 69–70 Cain: mark of, 209, 218, 386n151, 395n64; race of, 378n94 Candolle, Alphonse de, 71 Carlebach, Julius, 308n37, 370nn19–20, 371n21 Cassiodorus Senator, 157 castration (verschneiden, entmannt), 7, 240, 302; and Chinese, 52, 65, 78, 329n10, 334n66; and Jews, 207, 48, 52–54, 72, 140, 143, 146, 207, 325n44, 329n10, 336n84, 339n134, 354n182; of nonJewish Eternal Jew, 234, 237–38; of pigs, 157; of Skoptzi, 229–30; relation to circumcision, 10, 48, 54, 143, 207, 229–30, 325n44, 329n10, 336n84, 341n44, 359n226; syphilis as, 351n134. See also circumcision; decapitation; fetish and fetishism Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 114, 125 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 120 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 212, 236, 242 Cheyette, Bryan and Laura Marcus, 8–9, 310n53 Child, Josiah, 374n60 China: 57–59, 328n1; Han Chinese, 64–65; Han-Manchu difference, 65– 67, 86; Manchu conquest, 64–67; overseas Chinese, 61–62. See also Confucius and Confucianism; representations of Chinese; yellow peril chiropodists, corn-clippers (Hu¨hneaugen– or Leichdornbeschneider), 203, 383n131 chosenness/election: German, 246, 313n76, see also German (language and national identity); of the Jews, 10, 12, 28, 32–34, 40, 42–44, 50, 72, 123, 159,

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Index 170, 188, 208, 220–21, 231, 320n1, 320–21n4; relation to persistence, 10– 11, 28, 32–34, 42, 320–21n4. See also persistence; ‘‘Spinoza’s Testament’’ Christian-German Eating Club, 15, 73– 74, 133, 147, 218–19 Christian Social Workers’ Party, 88, 122, 129, 281 Christianity: liberal, 15; religion, 38–39, 161–63, 191; supersessionism (salvation history), 4, 9–10, 12–13, 22, 239, 312n71, 313n75. See also antisemitism: Christianity’s relation to; Jesus; religion, critique of circumcision: 7, 10, 15–19, 29, 33, 40, 45, 47–48, 132–33, 227, 317n113, 324n38, 327n75, 329n11; as act of violence, 316n98, 334n64; as anti-Confucian, 65, 334n64; as atavistic/primitive, 16, 37, 79, 216, 230, 274, 292, 315n91, 416n151; as body technique, 13, 15, 50–52, 245–46, 311n65; as diseasecausing, 101–02, 346nn73–74, 347n83; as dispositive (epistemic apparatus), 16, 27–28, 315–16n97; as feminizing/devirilizing, 45, 47–48, 54, 143, 245, 359n226; as Gentile disguise, 74, 147; as making a Jew, 16, 33, 101, 139, 149, 346n72, 361n13; as making a Jewess a Jew, 19, 149, 339n134; as prophylactic: against HIV/AIDS, 348n91; against masturbation, 347–48n90; against venereal disease, 104, 347nn83, 85, 348n91; as religious ordinance, 36–37, 346n76 as ritual (brit, bris), 3, 13, 16, 37, 47, 101–04, 120, 132–33, 148, 221, 306n15, 312n72, 322n15, 334n64, 346n74, 347n80, 352n155; of the heart (or spirit), 80, 141–42, 145, 229; circumcision: and fetishism, 385n149; and infanticide, 312n72; and Jewish extermination 64, 72, 140, 146, 327n75, 335–36n84; and Jewish identification, 80, 138, 227, 322n15, 362n20; and Jewish separatism, 15, 33, 227, 229–30; and money, 309n43, 322n15; and Verblutung (blood loss)/hemophilia, 102–3, 142; medicalization of, 102–4; rabbinic debates (1840s) on, 7, 37, 103–4; state requirement for Jewish registration, 18, 37, 101, 171, 227,

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315n94, 346nn71, 76. See also castration: relation to circumcision; metsitsah; mohel; uncircumcision circumcision, figures of: carving nib, 364n51; circumcised names, 120–21, 250, 356n194; scissor, 16–17, 186, 221, 315n92, 392n32; parallels/correspondences, 82, 110, 143, 157, 240, 293, 391n30. See also Cain: mark of; castration: pig; hair: cutting; phallus, symbols: animal tails; Verstu¨mmel– circumcision as signifier (inscription, mark), 15–18, 28, 50, 51, 80, 86, 137, 139–42, 146–48, 226–28, 245, 250, 315n91, 394n56; as diacritical, 7, 15– 16, 18, 36, 132, 137–38, 221, 227, 293, 322–23n15, 329nn8–9; as point de capiton, 309n40; as saying what cannot be shown, showing what cannot be said, 211; as sign of the covenant, 48, 72, 104–5, 146, 394n56; as (in)visible, 15– 16, 24, 51, 75, 147, 208 ; as (un)said and/or (un)sayable, 24, 40, 120–21, 214, 245, 314–15n90, 324n38, 325n44, 349n104, 351n136, 401n53. See also body techniques: inscriptions Cohen, Hermann, 35, 45–47, 326nn57–58 Coin-clipping (Beschneidung), 7, 203, 209, 309n43, 315n92, 316n100, 383n132 colonization/colonialism, 5–6, 11, 13, 18, 62, 87, 224, 274, 307n24, 312n72, 315n95; German, 353n62, 355n189; and empire, 8, 13, 46, 58–59, 224 Colquhoun, Patrick, 184 Columbus, Christopher, 8, 94–95, 309n49 commodity, 174, 196, 199, 205, 208–9, 280, 386–87n154, 387n55; fetishism, 26, 205, 207, 278m 290, 298; owners, 378n94; zero-degree, rag as, 210; and commodification, 6, 290; as ‘‘by nature [innerlich] circumcised Jews,’’ 208 communists, 3, 8, 171, 174, 309n50, 371n21, 379n100; Stirner on, 190, 192–95, 377n91, 379n100 Comte, Auguste, 11 Condillac, E´tienne Bonnot de, 228 Confessionslos (creedless), 2, 216, 218, 390n16; and Jewish identification, 18, 62, 114, 126, 137, 148, 353n162, 389n9. See also intermarriage

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Index

Confucius and Confucianism, 56, 65, 334n64 Conrad, Michael Georg, 398n23 conversion/apostasy (Abtru¨nniger, renegade): Jews, 3, 8, 22, 45, 77–79, 80, 84, 118–20, 125, 138, 141, 143, 145, 153, 160–61, 218, 228–30, 239, 244, 269, 314n82, 366n40, 372nn34, 39, 375n74; Skoptzi, 229–30. See also baptism Corbin, Alain, 288 criminality (Gaunertum), Jewish, 109, 172, 184, 202–3, 373n43, 374n58, 383– 83n132, 390n14. See also prostitution; representations of Judentum crises: identity, 11, 44, 93, 131, 218, 235, 308n39, 342n25; narcissistic, 13–14, 20; of ‘‘symbolic investiture,’’ 413n10 Critical Criticism (Bauer et al.), 176, 189, 377n91 Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy, 396n5 Damascus Affair. See blood libel: Damascus Damien, Father, 224, 394n54. See also leprosy Daniel (prophet), 231 Darwin, Charles, 10, 212, 215, 226, 266– 67, 294, 352n158, 354n171, 417n166. See also evolutionary discourse; mimesis: natural Daudet, Le´on, 287–88 Daumer, Georg Friedrich, 160–62, 165, 356n199, 368n51, 395n67 de Geldern, Simon, 339n132 De Mille, Cecil B., 8, 309n47 decapitation (Kopf abzuschneiden): Chinese, 64, 67; Jewish, 69, 72–74, 140 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 253 degeneration, 91, 99, 106, 113–15, 118, 123–24, 126, 128, 213, 224–25, 231, 235–36, 321n7, 341n17; antisemitism as sign of, 262; Degeneration/Entartung (Nordau), 30, 93, 213, 345n57 dermatology, 90, 96, 344n44; as Judenhaut (Jew–Skin), 96. See also syphilology Derrida, Jacques, 376n83 Deucalion and Pyrrha, 234. See also Wandering Jew Deutscher, Isaac, 388n1 Dicke, Friedrich, 366–67n14 Diday, Paul, 115–16, 353n166

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INDX

difference, naturalization (biologization, medicalization) of, 3, 6–7, 13–16, 22, 43, 54, 77, 86, 215, 245, 255, 306n28, 306–7n32, 307n33, 308n39, 348n91 Dinter, Artur, 29, 117–20, 122–23, 125– 27, 129, 131, 317n116, 348n96–97, 355n193, 356n198, 358nn212, 214, 217–18 Dio´sy, Arthur, 59, 328n1, 331n28, 332n41 disease: disease-entity, 4, 24, 101, 254, 305n22; epidemic, 88, 93–94, 101, 236, 253–54; ‘‘epidemic of signification,’’ 29, 344n54; specific diseases: cancer 89; cholera, 96–97, 383n128; diptheria, 96, 98; gonorrhea, 89, 104; neurasthenia, 93, 100, 255; plague: 79–80, 87, 94–95, 98–100, 103, 156, 255, 325n52, 393n43; bubonic, 342n30; moral, 129–30; syphilis (lues) as, 99–100, 255; plica polonica, 51, 68– 69, 76, 225, 335n77, see also Zopf-: Judenzopf, Weichselzopf; scabies (the Itch, Judenkra¨tze, Kra¨tze), 95, 169–70, 225, 343n38; tuberculosis, 170, 369n4; contagion, infection 19–20, 29, 68, 93, 100–1, 104–8, 113–16; antisemitism as, 98, 216, 345n57; Judentum as, 79– 80, 121, 305n2; Judentum and skin diseases, 95–96, 103, 170, 224–25, 343n37, 356n198, 369n3. See also leprosy; syphilis disgust (Ekel), 96, 108, 263, 275, 278, 288–89, 296–97, 416n148; and art 288–89 dispositive (epistemic apparati), 16, 24, 28, 30, 94, 131, 255, 315–16n97. See also circumcision: as dispositive Disraeli, Benjamin, 204–5, 217 Do¨hm, Christian Wilhelm von, 138, 159, 203 Douglas, Kirk (Issur Danilovich), 1, 303n2 Dozy, Reinhart, 385n142 Dracula, 391n25 dress, Jewish, 53, 270, 343n38; caftan, 285; Marx’s coat, 196, 379n101; rags, 178–80; Streimel, 77; and concealment, 110, 146, 266. See also ornament Du¨hring, Eugen, 45, 239 eating (digesting), 29, 59–60, 69, 150–60, 162–68, 207, 232, 334–32, 366–

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Index 67n14, 367n25, 368n50, 373n51; cannibalism 69, 156, 366n4. See also Feuerbach, Ludwig: ‘‘Dietmaterialism’’ eating away at or dissolving (Zersetzung, tabescere), agents of: Jews, 106–7, 131, 174, 235, 354n184; syphilis, 88, 106, 111, 269, 339n103 Eckart, Dietrich, 314n87 effoeminarent (feminizing), 33–34, 36, 322–23n15, 327n67 Egloffstein, Count, 138–39 Egypt, 9, 63–64, 80, 95, 152–53, 156, 220–21, 343n37, 356n198, 395n50 Ehrlich, Paul, 95, 100 Einrichtungen vs. Grundsa¨tze (practices vs. principles), 33–34, 36–37, 45, 47, 326n57 Einstein , Albert, 3 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 156, 158, 160, 162, 165, 167, 368n51, 390n14 elective affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften), 12, 28, 124–25, 204, 218, 235, 244, 251, 283, 299, 401n51, 416n155. See also Goethe Elias, Norbert, 105 Eliot, George, 39–42, 44, 150, 163–64, 314n90, 324nn37–40, 42, 329n11, 366nn4, 7, 401n53; Daniel Deronda, 40–42, 44, 314n90, 324nn39–40, 324– 25n42, 329n11 Ellis, Havelock, 106–7, 112, 340n4, 341n9, 346n74 emancipation: human, 199, 369n8; Jewish, 6, 14, 26, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 72, 74–75, 80, 101, 118, 154, 157, 159, 165, 179, 199–200, 230, 263, 267, 292, 297, 306n31, 308n37, 324n42, 344n56, 369n8, 401n43; and its double (etc.) bind, 18, 101, 141, 145, 222; women’s, 92–93, 308n37, 339n134, 350n125 Engels, Friedrich, 181, 185, 189, 343n36, 371n25, 377n87, 380n106, 382n122, 386n152 Enlightenment, the, 22, 131, 133, 135, 137, 144, 259, 263, 306n31, 311n64; critique of, 56, 338n15. See also Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment) epidemiology: as discipline, 98; as research strategy, 4–5, 25–26, 31, 301,

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344n54; ‘‘epidemiology of representation,’’ 305n23 epispasm, 72, 75, 80, 120, 148, 245, 248, 394n56. See also uncircumcision Erb, Rainer, 332n51; and Werner Bergmann, 336n84, 392n38 Essner, Cornelia, 353n162, 358n214 Eternal Jew. See Wandering Jew Ettinger, Joseph, 102 Eugenius IV (pope), 177 Evans, Mark, 332n51 evolutionary discourse, 6, 55, 91, 215, 230–32, 267, 274–75, 307n33, 328n2, 330–31n21; Darwinism and Post– Darwinism, 10, 214–15, 226, 229, 266–67, 269–70, 274, 296, 352n158, 354n171, 411n72, 417n166; Lamarckism, 253; natural selection (Zuchtwahl, sexual selection) 215, 231; struggle for existence (Kampf ums Dasein, survival of the fittest), 215. See also Darwin exclusion/inclusion, mutual implication of, 18, 214, 300–1 experience (Erfahrung/Erlebnis), 257–58, 278–80, 288–89, 291, 295–97, 300, 411n75. See also trauma: shock Fabre-Vassas, Claudine, 157 Faguet, E´mile, 353n168 Falk, Johann Daniel, 73, 336n86 family: bourgeois, 91, 192, 307n35, 351– 52n146; Jews and, 234, 377n89, 351– 52n146, 407n25; notion of, 191–92, 197–98, 380n108; proletariat and, 192, 199; ‘‘Holy Family,’’ 40, 343n32, 380n108, 404n100 fetish and fetishism, 11–15, 19, 50–54, 64, 67, 72, 78, 87, 205–6, 302, 310–11n64, 311n65, 312n69, 324n42, 328n4, 328– 29n5, 329n11, 401n44; as apotropaic, 16, 18–19, 37, 72, 281; cognitive ambiguity and, 11, 335n80, 412nn92, 95, 416n148; disavowal (Verleugnung), 11– 16, 52, 93, 138, 220, 237, 302, 313n79; ‘‘Fetishism’’ (Freud), 52–53, 328n4, 329n11. See also circumcision; commodity: fetishism; footbinding; hair; penis, maternal; ZopfFeuerbach, Friedrich, 165 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 29, 40, 150–52, 156, 160–68, 174–76, 188–90, 198, 324n42, 366nn1, 4, 6–7, 367nn15, 18,

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Index

368nn37, 51; ‘‘Diet–materialism,’’ 151–52, 166–67; and Marx, 29, 150– 51, 174–76, 188–89, 198, 371n22, 380n108; Essence of Christianity/Wesen des Christentums (EC) 29, 40, 150–51, 161–68, 175, 366nn1, 4, 6–7; 368nn37, 51; ‘‘Das Geheimnis des Opfers, oder Der Mensch ist, was er ißt,’’ 156, 166, 367n14 Fiaux, L., 346nn74, 79 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 15, 71–73, 76, 140 Fischer, Eugen, 353n162 Fischer, Lars, 348n95, 371n26 Fishburg, Maurice, 319n128, 335n77, 367n19 Flechsig, Paul, 237, 247, 251–52, 400n33, 404n85 Fleck, Ludwik, 101, 305n22, 345n66 foetor judaicus (Jewish stench), 27, 69, 111, 129, 151–54, 170, 177, 204, 208, 243– 44, 255, 258, 273, 278, 282–86, 292, 296, 300, 319n128, 324n58, 343n41, 362n20 food: bread, 150–51, 158, 161, 164; Jewish: garlic, 76, 90, 152–54, 202, 362n20, 367–68n30; horseradish, 153; leek (Allium), 152–54; Leviathan, 82, 153; manna, 153, 163; matzah, 160; onion, 152–55, 220, 362n20, 367n25; Jewish prohibitions: blood, 152, 160– 61, 167, 368n50; pork, 152, 154, 156– 58, 167; and Jewish separatism, 158–59; Kashrut, 16, 96, 135, 154, 157, 159, 248. See also Feuerbach: ‘‘Dietmaterialism’’ footbinding, 13, 51–52, 312n72, 328n2, 329n11. Forel, Auguste, 109 Fortunatus, 367n19 Foscanlance, H., 98–99 Foucault, Michel, 311n66, 317n118, 321n6, 341n19, 342n26, 345n66, 358n224 Fourier, Charles, 284 Fournier, Alfred, 90–91, 251; and Paul Portalier, 91, 354n173 Fourth Lateran Council, 304n15 Fracastoro, 99 Franco-German Yearbook, 170, 174–75, 178, 199

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INDX

Frederick the Great (Prussia), 136–37, 351n140 Fre´gier, Honore´, 193 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 11, 20, 26, 28, 35, 47– 48, 52–55, 212, 233, 237, 258, 263, 274–76, 293–95, 308n41, 316n106, 325n44, 327n73, 328n4, 329nn6, 10– 11, 330nn13–17, 337n106, 385n149, 388n2, 389n3, 390n10, 396n4, 397n8, 402n65, 407n29, 409n56, 412n95, 417n164; Moses and Monotheism, 28, 47–48, 140, 325n43, 327n73 Freudenthal, Jacob, 45 Frevert, Ute, 307n35 Freytag, Gustav, 44, 325n50, 326n59, 375n68 Friedrich Wilhelm I (Prussia), 68, 151 Friedrich Wilhelm IV (Prussia), 95–96 Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 344n56 Fritsch, Theodor, 58, 113–14, 117, 128, 305n20, 350n125, 352n155, 367n15 Frosh, Stephen, 9, 310n54 Fuchs, Edward, 275 Fu¨llmann, Rolf, 335n81 Fuld, Werner, 283 Gallagher, Catherine, 111, 408n35 Gambetta, Le´on, 390n17 Gans, Eduard, 14, 310n59, 314n82 Gao, Wangzhi, 334n64 Geigel, Alois, 101 Geiger, Abraham, 12 gender: biologized, 5–6, 13, 86, 93–94, 112, 215, 235–36, 306–7n32, 308n39, 342n26; coding (and constructing): 6, 14, 38, 42, 49, 51, 73, 91–93, 235–36, 246–47, 313n73, 323n29, 324n41, 327n67, 408n38; of Chinese, 51, 64, 87, 329n11, 334n66; of Jews, 7, 28–29, 34–38, 40, 44–49, 51, 56, 64, 75–76, 129, 134, 265, 308n36, 318–19n125, 329n11; ‘‘sexuelle applanation’’ (lack of clear differentiation), 70, 86, 93, 107, 109–10, 131–33, 292n37. See also public/private spheres: gender bifurcation; smell, emitted Gerhard, Ute, 307n35 Gerlach, Hellmuth von, 122 German (language and national identity), 6, 13–14, 227–29, 243, 395n65, 405n7; and philology, 4, 14, 146, 228, 321n7, 372n34

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Index German-Jewish: difference, 85, 139; duality, 259, 286; relations, 3, 32, 76, 80, 272; symbiosis, 35, 259–60 Ghillany, Friedrich Wilhelm, 160–62, 165, 316n98, 368n51, 395n67 Gilman, Sander, 329n8, 339n133, 348n91, 350n131 Glagau, Otto, 217 Glo¨ß Verlag, 59, 96, 154 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur Comte de, 15, 113, 314n86 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 22, 35, 77, 86, 101, 123–24, 139, 141, 144, 187–88, 244, 251, 299, 315, 326n51, 328n5, 357n206, 358n214, 363nn27, 32, 417n64 gold: and Jews, 110, 147, 175, 187, 209, 222–23, 254, 351n133, 392n37; and money, 110, 147, 175, 209, 387n160; and syphilis, 110, 254, 351n133; as a fetish, 206. See also money Goldstein, Moritz, 260, 395n65 Gomperz, Theodor, 264 Gordon, Milton, 313n79 Gozani, Jean-Paul, 334n64 Graetz, Heinrich, 10, 148, 158–59, 324n39, 419n177 Granier de Cassagnac, Bernard Adolphe, 199, 381n113 Grattenauer, Karl Wilhelm F., 343n38, 362n20 Greenblatt, Stephen J., 26 Gre´goire, Abbe´, 154 Grillparzer, Franz, 178 Grimms deutsches Wo¨rterbuch, 68, 146, 203, 303n3, 365n54 Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 52 Grob, Walter, 95 Grunwald, Max, 104 Gu¨nther, Hans, 273, 314n89 Guggenheim, Fromet, 137 Gutzkow, Karl, 133, 360n7 Hacking, Ian, 400n36 Hahn, Barbara, 132–33, 360n5 Hahn, Fred, 354n184 Haible, Michaela, 18, 186 hair: Bubikopf (page-boy cut), 86, 339n134; chignon, 84; diseased, 51, 68–69, see also disease: plica, Zopf-: Judenzopf, Weichselzopf; ‘‘the Gretchen-look,’’ 86; queue (braid, pigtail, plait, Zopf ): 28,

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62, 65, 69, 83–84, 302, 339n132; Chinese (Chinesenzopf ), 13, 39, 50–52, 54– 55, 60, 64–68, 75–76, 78, 86– 87, 328n4, 331n28, 333n55; German, 51, 81, 85–86, 338n128, 339n134; woman’s, 81–82, 85–86, 330nn12, 15, 339nn133–34; cutting off: by Chinese, 67–68, 87; coupeur de nattes, see Zopf-: Zopfabschneider; at Jewish wedding, 338n123; as diacritical: between Chinese and Jew, 62; between Han and Manchu, 65–67, 86; Tituskopf (aka coiffure a` la victime), 73–74; tonsure, 65, 67, 82; Chinese as the ‘‘black-haired race,’’ 64–65; Chinese overvaluation of hair, 64–68, 87, 330n15; Jews as black haired, 47, 125, 130, 362n20; beard, Jewish, 76–77, 79, 138; vs. German Zopf, 138, 338n121; beardlessness as nonvirile 245, 402n58; mustache, 81. Hallpike, C. R., 334n66 Haman, 161, 370n13 Hamann, Johann Georg, 322–23n15, 330n18 Hamerling, Robert, 396n5 Hanstein, Adalbert von, 399n31 Haraway, Donna, 5 Harden, Maximilian (ne´ Felix Ernst Witkowski, ‘Apostata’), 269–70, 399n31, 410n60 Harrison, Walter, 184 Hart, Mitchell, 340n6, 347n83 Hartmann, Eduard von, 45, 57, 122, 218, 264, 350n123, 351n140, 356n200, 408n35 Hartwich, Wolf-Daniel, 73, 336n86 Harvey, Van A., 366n10 Hausen, Karin, 307n32 Hauser, Otto, 15, 86, 126, 314n87, 358n219 Haussmann, Georges Euge`ne, 199, 381n113 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 11, 57, 60, 74, 175, 187–88, 200, 205, 307n33, 310n59, 376n78, 377n89, 381n112 Hegelian(s), Young, 173, 187, 370n17; ‘‘Die Freien,’’ 386n152 Heine, Heinrich (Harry), 3, 8, 28, 33, 51, 76–85, 87, 95, 110–11, 120–21, 133, 141, 153–54, 178–79, 185, 189, 201–2, 223–24, 268, 273, 305n22, 320n3, 325n48, 327n73, 335n81, 336nn96–

INDX

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Index

97, 337nn106, 108, 338nn120–21, 128–29, 339n132, 343n37, 351n136, 352n96, 356nn197–98, 367n25, 373n43, 375n74, 381n112, 382nn122– 24, 383nn128, 131, 388n1, 393n44, 393–94n52, 401n51, 405n7, 410n64, 411n84; Hebrew Melodies, 81–82, 120– 21, 153–54, 273, 356n197; Pictures of Travel (PT), 77–79, 141, 178–79, 336n96, 343n37, 356n198, 367n25, 383n131, 393n44; Rabbi of Bacharach, 82, 84, 153 Heine, Salomon, 80 Henseler, Heinz, 14 Hep-Hep riots, 185 Herbert, Thomas, 61 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 35, 56, 228 heredity, 52, 93, 114–19, 123–26, 244, 341nn15, 19, 352n158, 357n211, 358n224. See also identification, Jewish: by descent; reproduction Hermes, Karl Heinrich, 206 Herodotus, 317n113 Hershman, P., 334n66 Herwegh, Georg, 80 Herzl, Theodor, 2, 212–13, 269–70, 321n9, 389n7, 392n40, 410n59 Hess, Jonathan M., 8, 307n34, 372n34 Hess, Moses, 8, 35–36, 38–39, 42–43, 114, 174–75, 292, 309nn50–51, 323n29, 324n34, 370n19, 371n21; and Marx, 174–75, 370n19, 371n21 Hessing, Siegfried, 45, 326n63, 327n73 Hevia, James L., 334n66 Hirsch, Baron, 217 Hitler, Adolf, 29, 94, 100, 108–9, 118, 123, 127–31, 285–86, 314n87, 344n55, 359n231; Mein Kampf, 29, 94, 100, 109, 118, 123, 127–31, 285 Hitzig, Julius Edward (Isaak Itzig), 120– 21, 356n197 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 73–74, 336n86, 411n83 Hoffmann, Friedrich, 68, 335n75 Hollander, Dana, 320n134 Holocaust, the (the Shoah), 30, 47, 297, 396n5; circumcision narratives about, 327n75 Holzschuher, Friedrich Freiherr von, 401n43 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment; DE), 258,

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INDX

276, 293–97, 300, 417nn164–66, 418n170 Horowitz, Lazar, 101 Hrabanus Maurus, Magnentius, 157 Hull, Isabel V., 340n7 Humboldt, Alexander von, 144–45 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 138, 144–45, 362nn20, 22 Hundt-Radowsky, Hartwig von, 122, 146, 202–3, 267–68, 309n43, 335n84, 343n38, 372n35, 379n103, 385n141 Hutchinson, Jonathan, 90, 104, 110, 341n10 Huysmans, J.-K., 110, 254, 349n111, 350n132 hysteria, 118; antisemitism as the German, 345n57; Jews and, 69, 236, 268; syphilis and, 254, 355n191 Ibn Ezra, 120 Ibn Gabirol, 120 Ibsen, Henrik, 100, 213, 358n214, 393n51 identification(s): 2–3, 5–6, 9, 13, 16, 18– 19, 25, 49, 75, 148, 173, 218, 236–37, 317n108; defined, 2, 303n5, 321n36; corporeal markers, 5–7, 11, 25–26, 79, 83, 110–11, 129, 143, 148, 151–52, 210, 245, 300, 321n6, 349n104, 362n20, 364n40 identification, Chinese, 51, 60, 64–65, 67, 72; with Jews 58, 61–64, 329n11 identification, gender, 5–6, 13, 25, 42, 44, 76, 86, 107, 129, 213, 215, 236–37, 246–47, 253, 265, 306–7n32, 307n33, 313n73, 324n41, 326n25, 334n66, 342n25, 408n38; and sexual, 342n26. See also gender: coding identification, German, 13–15, 81, 266, 271, 314n84, 321n7, 342n25 identification, Jewish: 1–3, 6–7, 9, 19–20, 22, 26–30, 33, 35, 37, 40, 47–51, 71– 72, 75, 80, 101, 103, 110–11, 131, 134, 137–38, 140, 142–43, 145–49, 151, 211, 213, 215–16, 241, 243, 247, 259, 263, 276, 300–1, 306n30, 316n104, 319–20n134, 329n11, 335n80; by descent, 3, 7, 15, 16, 30, 35, 40, 80, 83, 121, 134, 141, 171, 185, 204–5, 215, 217, 220, 222, 228, 230–31, 234, 266, 324–25n42, 329n11, 355n193, 385nn141–142, 408n37; and the Israeli Law of Return, 303n7; and the Jewish

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Index badge, 110, 254, 350n128; strategies and tactics of avoiding, 19–20, 30, 74, 77–80, 110, 119–21, 125, 130, 137–40, 143, 146–48, 179, 215–16, 231, 243– 46, 266, 269–71, 293, 367n25. See also circumcision, figures of: circumcised names; performative: passing; representations of Judentum: masking, pariah, parvenu identification, Jewish: with the bourgeoisie, 92–93, 131, 207, 261, 274, 296, 407n25; with capitalism (homo œconomicus, Manchesterism, materialism), 112, 150, 174–78, 191, 217, 259–60, 269, 386n151, 392n37; with circumcision, 16, 349n104; with communism and socialism, 129, 222–23, 309n50, 314n87, 358n219; with the German/ European, 139, 232, 313n79; with the male, 133, 142–43, 145, 149, 364n51; with the modern, 104, 127–30, 175– 76, 218, 245; normative, the Ostjuden as, 77, 135, 178–79, 248–49, 356– 57n202, 390n12; with usury, 375n74, see also Shylock; with women, 56, 326n61. See also leprosy: and Judentum; prostitute: and Judentum; syphilis: and Judentum identification, Jewish: and Jewish-identified: 2, 6, 19–20, 28–29, 171–72, 214, 301, 305n25, 379n65; Benjamin’s, 256–57, 288; Freud’s, 412n95; Heine’s, 83; Levin Varnhagen’s, 134, 139–45; Marx’s, 170, 172; Nordau’s, 213, 215, 218–21, 229, 232, 395n66 imitation (nach-): as inauthentic, 138, 257; as primitive, 266–67; as resistance, 299; as threat, 129, 266, 271, 367n19; Chinese engaging in, 56; Jews engaging in, 82, 243, 264–72, 293, 301, 408n37, 410n64, 411nn72–73; of ‘‘Jew’’ by antisemite, 295–96. See also mimesis; representations of Judentum: as animal (ape); representations of Judentum: reproductive reproduction inbreeding (endogamy), 217–18, 227, 390–91n20; of the aristocracy, 128 India (Hindu): 12–13, 55, 311–12n68, 334n66, 409n9. See also sati Indo-Aryan (–European, -Germanic), 15, 56, 114, 246. See also Aryan

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intermarriage, 18, 72, 114, 126, 148, 353n162, 389n9; and the Chinese, 62. See also Confessionslos Iorio, Marco, 380–81n110 Irish, ‘‘Street-Irish,’’ 180–81, 373n51; replacing the Jews, 181 Islam, 8, 12, 311nn64–65 Israel/Palestine (land of Jewish habitation), 9, 20, 43, 46, 168–69, 303n7, 321n9, 324n42 Israe¨ls, Hans, 233, 248, 402n61, 403n74 Jackson, Lady Catherine Hannah Charlotte, 342n30 Jacob (Israel), 143 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 144 Jacobs, Joseph, 104, 347n85 Jaeger, Gustav, 153, 273, 401n47 Janik, Allan, 304n12 Jarausch, Konrad H., 341n23; and Geoffrey Cocks, 341n22 Jay, Martin, 417n165 Jean Paul (Richter), 77, 141 Jellinek, Adolf (A.J.), 6 Jensen, Uffa, 313n75 Jesus, 35, 43, 82, 149, 156, 239, 242, 315n95, 343n32, 383n124, 400–1n40, 404n100; as Aryan, 268 Jew, Christian as, 175, 366n1 Jewess, 78, 96, 124, 128, 133–34, 139, 141–42, 147–49, 154, 250; as masculine 86, 109, 339n134, 350n125, 357n209, see also hair: Bubikopf; ‘‘beautiful Jewess,’’ 107–8, 137, 254, 339n134, 349nn109, 111; Jewessness, 316n104 Jewish Encyclopedia, 212, 309n44 Jewish Question (Judenfrage): 15, 88–89, 109, 119, 131, 171, 206, 215–17, 222, 225, 227, 231, 260, 263–64, 317n116; defined, 6; parliamentary prohibition on saying ‘‘Judenfrage,’’ 58; solutions, 76 (Fichte), 146 (Hundt–Radowsky), 260 (zionist), 269 (Herzl, pre–zionist), 270 (Rathenau), 270 (assimilated Jews), 324–25n42 (George Eliot); Die Judenfrage (Bauer), 29, 170–71, 174, 191, 193, 199, 207, 370n12, 371n26, 376n79; ‘‘Zur Judenfrage’’ (Marx), 3, 29, 112, 150, 170–72, 174–76, 185, 187, 190, 197–200, 211, 369n8, 370nn19–20, 371–72n26, 376n79,

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Index

380n105; and Chinesenfrage, 57–58; and syphilis, 104–5, 129; ‘‘new Jewish question’’ (post–emancipation), 6; the Other Jewish Question: 19, 30–31, 48, 131, 172, 264, 301–2; Benjamin’s, 257–60, 300; Heine’s: 76, 87; Marx’s 172; Nordau’s 225, 231 Jewish self-hatred, 16, 19, 30, 171, 271, 301, 410n68. Jews, economic role of: brandy production, 371n154; clothing: ready-towear, manufacture and sale (Konfektion), 178–79, 184, 373n47, 374n59; old-clothes dealer, 62–63, 169–70, 177–184, 191, 202, 248–50, 332n51, 372n35, 373n40, 384n132; shoddy manufacture, 181–82, 184; tailor 7, 179, 181, 221, 374n60; financial sector (banker, financier, speculator, stockjobber), 85, 112, 153, 174, 185–86, 200, 202–4, 217, 295, 374n60, 375n74, 407n28; hak, pak, and sak (ax, pack, and sack), 384n132; peddler/haggler/ hawker (Bettel–, Schacher– und Tro¨deljuden, Hausierer), 175, 177–78, 180, 184, 187, 196–97, 202, 384n132, 387n155; prostitution and procuring, see prostitution, Jewish involvement in; rag trades (fripperer, lumper, mattress stuffer, rag-and⳱bones-collector), 169–70, 177–84; shopkeeping, 178, 181–82, 191; usurer (middleman, money lender, pawnbroker), 14, 55, 95, 111–12, 174, 182, 185, 187, 196, 207, 217, 316n100, 374n60, 375n74, 379n101, 386n151, see also Shylock Jews, group designation: Ashkenazim, 153, 184, 318n122, 367n23, 370n13; ‘‘children of Israel,’’ 146, 219–20, 268; Hebrews, ancient (biblical), 13, 32, 43, 56, 160, 162–63, 165–66, 217, 220, 343n37, 393n50; Hebrews (race), 115, 131, 179, 270; Israel (people), 9–10, 39–43 265–66, 270, 323n28; Israelites, ancient, 79–80, 122, 153, 156, 160–63, 165, 312n72, 415n131; Israelites, modern (as distinct from ancient), 217; Israelites (nationality), 15, 77, 150, 162–63, 242, 353n170, 385n142; Muskeljuden (muscle Jews, fighting Jews), 213, 391n27, 394n56; Sephardim, 261, 318n122; Stamm (Abstammung, tribe, descent), 107, 216, 228,

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INDX

291, 416–17n155; ‘‘Street-Jews,’’ 181–83; and nationality question in Austria-Hungary, 228, 394nn59, 61; as race: Caucasian, 22, 317n114; distinct, 130–31; mixture, 114–15, 123–24, 372n34; black, 43, 116, 314n86; not nonwhite: 43, 391n24. See also Ostjuden Joe¨l, Manuel, 44–45, 325n56 John the Baptist, 363n27 Johnson, Willis, 319n125 Josephus, 156 Jost, Isaak Markus, 159 Jud-, 171–72, 200, 204, 211, 216–17 Judaismus, as terminus technicus, 12, 303n3 Judd, Robin, 346n76 Judennase (Jewish nose), 1, 7, 16, 19, 62, 85, 110–11, 153, 162, 202, 204, 221, 243, 261, 292–93, 309n24, 339n132, 343n32, 349n111, 351n138, 391n30; Jewish nostrility, 309n24; rhinoplasty, 292, 351n138. See also identification: Jews Judensau (Jew-sow), 69, 157–58, 335n79; Saujude (dirty Jew), 157 Judenschule (Jew-synagogue), 197, 379n102 Judentum (religion [Judaism], people [Jewry], character and customs [Jewishness]). See assimilation; chosenness: of the Jews; circumcision; dress: Jewish; food: Jewish; identification, Jewish; Jews, group designation; persistence: of Judentum; religion, Jewish; representations of Judentum; ‘‘Spinoza’s testament’’; Yiddish Jung, Carl, 55–56, 331n26 Just, Dieter, 199–200, 371n22 Justinus, 95 Juvenal, 152, 156 Kafka, Franz, 30, 83, 212, 272, 301, 318, 347n80, 395n65, 411nn72, 75 Kalischer, Alfred Christian (ne´ Salomo Ludwig Kalischer), 43–44, 325n48, 325n50, 326n59 Kalischer, Zvi, 43 Kant, Immanuel, 11–12, 35, 105, 211, 263, 274, 278, 285, 289, 312n69, 322n15, 384n136 Kapp-, 145, 147–48, 338n123; rote Ka¨ppchen (Little Red Riding Hood), 145. 148

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Index Katz, Jacob, 88, 340n1, 366n4 Keller, Gottfried, 284, 413–14n113 Kikeriki (aka Ottokar Franz Ebersberg), 315n92, 408n38 Kirchbach, Wolfgang, 234, 239–41, 398nn23–24, 398–99n25, 399n31 Kittler, Friedrich A., 393n16, 400n33 Klages, Ludwig, 258, 268, 283–85, 293, 296–97, 414n120, 415nn127–28, 418n169 Klausner, Joseph, 321n12, 327n73 Kleinpaul, Rudolf, 312n72, 316n98 Knackfuss, H., 59 Kraepelin, Emil, 252–53 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 11, 52, 106, 328n5, 340n7 Kraus, Karl, 212, 270, 345n61, 405n7, 410n64 Kretzer, Max, 399n31 Krupp, Alfred, 217 Kuhn, Philip, 65, 334n66 Kultur/Zivilisation opposition, 105–06, 129, 348nn95, 97 Lacan, Jacques, 7, 308n41 Lagarde, Paul de, 268, 344n5 Landsberger, Artur, 260 Langmuir, Gavin I., 4, 304n16 language, materiality of: cognates, 83, 275, 337n113; homophones, 96, 244, 247, 374n63, 379n102; phrases: xiii, 5, 45, 53, 58, 80, 101, 108, 113–14, 124, 151, 166–67, 174–76, 192, 207, 211, 237, 243, 245, 248, 268–69, 303n4, 306n27, 344n54, 345n61, 346n79, 360n4, 362n20, 372n33, 376n82, 384nn132, 135, 386n152, 386–87n154, 396n6, 397n16; coinage of, 4, 11, 116, 151, 194, 310–11n64, 346n27; puns/polysemy/word–plays, 78–79, 106, 120–22, 151, 163, 166, 214, 223–25, 250, 270, 322–23n15, 338n128, 366–67n14, 373n43, 385n149, 413n107. See also morphemic–orthographic–phonemic– semantic–field; ‘‘nodal point’’; performative tropes Lanz von Liebenfels, Jo¨rg, 117, 355n186 Laqueur, Thomas, 112, 306–7n32 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 217, 225 Latour, Bruno, 5, 305n24 Laube Heinrich, 337n108

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Lavater, Johann Caspar, 21–23, 69, 157, 317n110 Lazare, Bernard, 58 Lazarus, 225, 382n124 Leach, Edmund, 334n66 League of German Girls, 85–86 Lenau, Nikolas, 393n52 Lengerke, Ca¨sar von, 165 Lenz, Fritz, 410n70 Leopardi, Giacomo, 393n52 Leopold, David, 372n26, 381n112 leprosy (Aussatz, favus): 95, 214–15, 223– 25, 247, 254, 393nn43, 45, 394n54; and Chinese (mai Pake, the Chinese disease), 224–25, 254; and elephantiasis, 170, 343n38, 369n3; and Judentum, 95, 224–25, 240, 343nn37–38, 41, 343–44n42, 393nn49–50, 394n55; and/as Mieselsucht, 214–15, 223–25, 393n51; and syphilis, 95, 225, 254, 343n40–41, 343–44n42 Lepsius, Karl Richard, 95, 343n36 Lessing, Gotthold, 322n15 Lessing, Theodor, 16, 270–71, 315n94, 410nn60, 68 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 305n25 Levin Varnhagen, Rahel (aka Rahel Levin, Rahel Robert, Rahel RobertTornow, Antonie Friedricke Robert, Antonie Friedricke Varnhagen, Antonie Friedricke Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel Varnhagen, Rahel), 2, 29, 132– 34, 137–49, 303n4, 316n104, 360nn4–5, 360–61n8, 361nn12–13, 362nn18, 20, 22, 362–63n25, 363nn33–35, 37, 364nn38, 40, 51; Ja¨gerstraße or garret (Dachstube) salon, myth of, 133, 141, 147, 360n5; Rahel: A Memento Book for Her Friends, 133, 148–49. See also Berlin salonnie`res and their ‘‘open houses’’ Levy, Joseph Moses, 204 Lewald, August, 153 liberalism (value and policy orientation): 26, 30, 81, 90, 92, 122, 165; as Jewishidentified stance, 30, 222, 259, 266, 389n3, 390nn10, 13; in Stirner, 190, 194, 377nn86, 91–92 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 22, 53, 68–71, 157, 335n80, 413n109 Lie´bault, Ambroise, 357n211

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Index

Lombroso, Cesare, 98–99, 109, 267, 305n22, 345n57, 357n209 Lothane, Zvi, 396n5, 403n74, 404n85 Louis Bonaparte, 200–2, 381–82n121, 384n135, 384–85n141; as Krapu¨linski, 201 Louis Phillipe, 201 Low, Alfred, 366n2 Lucas, Prosper, 115 Lukacher, Ned, 396n5, 400n33 Lump- (rag, ragamuffin, rascal, rogue; -engesindel, -enko¨nig, -envolk, -er, -erei, ige Distinktionen,—lumpige Farce): 29, 172, 178–85, 187–90, 192–205, 208, 210–11, 274, 375nn66, 75, 377nn91– 92, 378nn96–97, 379nn99–100, 380n108, 381n118, 381–82n121, 382n124,387n161;Lump,Moses(Lu¨mpchen), 178–79, 373n43, 383n131; Lumpenproletariat, 194, 200–4, 210, 287, 378nn95–96, 381n115, 383n125, 383–84n132, 384nn136, 139, 416n136 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 308n41, 315n91 Luther, Martin, 146, 178, 250, 323n15, 364n53, 365n54, 372n33. See also Bible: Luther’s Bibel Lysimachus, 393n50 Macgowan, John, 51, 328n2 Machiavelli, 34, 321n5, 323n15 Maimonides, Moses, 270 Manetho, 95, 156, 393n50 Mannheimer Brothers (David, Moritz, and Valentin), 179 Mann, Heinrich, 86 Mantegazza, Paolo, 229–30 Marcellinus, Ammianus, 152 Marcus Aurelius, 152, 273 Margueritte, Victor, 86 Marianne (revolutionary icon), 324n41 Mark (Marcus), Fanny, 336n86 [Markus], Chaie, 133 Markus, Levin, 133 Marr, Wilhelm, 4, 88, 222–23, 266, 305n20, 367n30, 390n17, 392nn37–38 marrano, 8, 46, 84, 94, 342n30, 343n31 Martini, Martinus, 64 Marx, Heinrich, 171 Marx, Karl, 8, 11, 29–30, 61, 112, 150–51, 168, 170–78, 180, 182–85, 187–211, 225, 228, 263, 298, 332n48, 337n117, 338n119, 343n36, 352n150, 357n206,

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INDX

369n8, 370nn12, 17, 19–20, 371n21, 371nn22, 25, 371–72n26, 373n51, 373n54, 374n60, 375nn75, 77, 376nn78–79, 82–84, 377nn86, 88–89, 91–92, 378nn94–96, 379nn99–101, 380nn104– 5, 107–9, 380–81n110, 381nn111–12, 115, 118, 120, 381– 82n121, 382nn122, 124, 383n125, 384nn132, 135, 138–39, 385nn142– 44, 146–49, 386nn150–53, 386– 87n154, 387nn155, 162, 390n20; family, 182, 196, 373n54; Capital (C/ K), 170, 174, 196, 199, 205, 207–10, 374n60, 378nn94, 96, 385n143, 387n154;’ ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction,’’ 175, 199–200; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (AB/ EB) 200–04, 381n118, 382n122, 384n135; The German Ideology (DI/GI; with Engels), 61, 172, 175–78, 188, 190–99, 211, 338n119, 369n8, 377nn86, 91–92, 378n95, 379nn99– 100, 380nn109–10, 381–82n121, 382n124, 386n152 Maupassant, Guy de, 329n12 Maus-: mauscheln (ascribed Jewish way of speaking), 92, 223, 269, 392n40, 395n65, 402n64, 409n57. See also leprosy: Mieselsucht; representations of Judentum: as animals (mice); Yiddish (Gemauschel, Mauscheldeutsch) May, Karl, 57 Mayhew, Henry (London Labour and the London Poor; LL), 180–83 medicine, Jewish practice of, 56, 95–96, 99–100; doctor–patient relationship, 99, 236, 247, 251, 354n184, 400–1n40; medical gaze/supervision, 7, 37, 92, 99, 102, 236, 241–44, 246; Spinoza as ‘‘great pathologist of Judentum,’’ 46, 310n55, 326–27n64 McLintock, Anne, 11, 311n63, 313n73 McLellan, David, 370n20 Meier, Ernst Heinrich, 165 Meige, Henri, 234, 241–42, 400n36 Mendelssohn, Moses, 21–23, 36, 136–37, 146, 270, 312n69, 322–23n15, 330n18 Mendelssohn–Bartholdy, Felix, 3, 179, 268, 315n90 metsitsah (blood suctioning by mohel), 101–03, 346nn74, 78, 347n87; banned, 103

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Index Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 141–42, 314n90 Meyerbeer, Minna, 142, 363n35 Michaelis, Johann David, 156, 159, 167, 203, 307n34 Micheler, Stefan, 307n32 Michelet, Jules, 115 Michelet, Karl Ludwig, 57 mimesis([non]sensuoussimilarity,A¨hnlichkeit): as human faculty, 30, 257–58, 276, 278–79, 290–92, 294, 299–300, 417n165; 419n173; natural, 247, 267, 294–96, 409n51, 417n166; vs. ‘false projection,’ 296; and smell, 417n164; and trace, 405n10; in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 293–97, 417nn164–66; ideational mimetics, 293; sublation in Reproduktion (as human practice), 290, 297–300, 418n71. See also aura; Darwin; imitation Mithras (Osiris, Dionysos, Orpheus, Adonis, Attis), 20, 316n106 modernity (Western, European), 3, 5–9, 11, 33, 35, 38–40, 48, 211, 277, 278, 286–91, 301, 306n31, 308n39, 309nn46, 48, 381–82n121, 397n16; German–Jewish modernity, 25, 48, 74, 134, 266, 316n102, 388n1; modernism, 30; modernization, 6, 92–93, 306n3; ritualization in, 276, 280, 290, 296, 298 Mo¨bius, Paul Julius, 236, 357n205 mohel (ritual circumciser), 88, 93, 101–4, 107, 316n99, 346nn76, 78, 347n82; state regulation of, 101–2, 346n76. See also Schochet Moleschott, Jacob, 166 Moloch, 122, 160, 175, 231, 395n67 Mommsen, Theodor, 107, 349n104 money, 192, 198, 204, 207–09; paper, 209, 379n101, 387n61; as divinity, 175, 187, 387n60; as whore 187; and bad reproduction, 111–12, 114, 208, 265, 353n170, 386n151, 386–87n154; and Chinese, 63–65; and dirt/smell, 204, 208, 386–87n154; and Jews, 55, 63–64, 110–12, 114, 174–77, 182, 203, 208, 342n30, 353n170, 379n103, 387n155, 401n43; Mammon/mammonization, 127, 375n75. See also coin-clipping; gold Morel, Be´ne´dict Auguste, 341n17

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Morphemic-orthographic-phonemicsemantic field, 4, 7, 20, 28–29, 51, 87, 172, 183, 189, 197–98, 204, 211, 216, 257, 299, 316n124, 386n153. See also Bescheidenheit; Beschneidung; Jud-; Lump-; Maus-; Schach-; Schneid-/Schnitt-; Schuft-; Verkehr-; Verstu¨mmel-; ZopfMoser, Moses, 77 Moses (prophet), 35, 56, 148, 270, 405n7 Mosse, George, 105, 213, 342n25 Mufti, Aamir R., 324n42 Murnau, F. W., 340n137 Mynona (Salomo Friedla¨nder), 411n83 Namantianus, Rutilius, 167 names, 86, 244, 250–51, 257–58, 298, 356n95, 376n82, 396n5; and Chinese, 62–63; and Jews, 1, 78, 100, 134, 142– 43, 148, 156, 185, 203, 221, 227, 234, 242, 250, 264, 271, 322n15, 357n205, 386n152, 392n33, 400n36, 401n43; and Levin Varnhagen, 133–34, 143, 148–49; and syphilis, 88, 94–95, 99– 100, 103, 255, 345nn59, 61, 404n99; as unnamed, 100, 120, 251, 253, 404n92; name–changing, and Jews, 78, 120–21, 143, 148, 221, 244, 356n194, 367n25, 415n127 Napoleon Bonaparte, 13, 133, 146, 381n121, 385n141; empire, 73; ‘‘infamous decree,’’ 318n122 narrative, construction of, 25, 91, 93, 129, 143, 201–2, 243–45, 247, 324n38, 378n96, 401n53; master, 90–91, 234– 236, 250, 307n33, 315n91 National Socialism (Third Reich), 3, 76, 86, 94, 117–18, 304n9, 306n26, 343n75 Neisser, Albert, 89, 96, 99, 109, 340n4 Neusta¨tter, Otto, 104 Nicolai, Friedrich, 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 55, 213, 239, 265, 273, 282–83, 285, 300, 331n22, 409n51, 414n118 Nieuhof, J., 65–66 Noah, 13, 234, 415n131 ‘‘nodal point’’ (Knotenpunkt), 7, 28, 51, 172, 302, 308n41; point de capiton (quilting point), 308–9n41. See also ‘‘quasiobject’’ Nordau, Anna and Maxa, 389n6

INDX

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Index

Nordau, Max (ne´ Simon Maximilian Su¨dfeld), 30, 93, 212–32, 270, 308n37, 313n74, 314n79, 345n57, 353n167, 388n2, 388–89n3, 389nn6–7, 390nn10, 12, 17, 391nn24, 27, 392n31, 393n51, 393–94n52, 394nn55–56, 61, 395nn65, 68, 407n26; Conventional Lies of Our Civilization (CL), 213–17, 222– 23, 230, 390n10, 394n55; Paradoxes (P), 213–15, 218–32, 393n51, 395n68 Norris, Margot, 409n51 Nossig, Alfred, 10, 104, 123, 347n83, 357n208 Nuremberg Laws, 304n9, 355n184, 409n56 Obeyesekere, Ganath, 334n66 OesterreichischeGesellschaftzurBeka¨mpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten, 99, 345n61 Oppenheim, Dagobart, 206 ornament (adornment, ostentation), 77– 78, 109–10, 147, 179, 211, 311n64, 330n15, 335n79, 410n64; mere ornamentation, 172, 318n124. See also epispasm; supplement Osborn, Sherard, 62 Ostjuden (East European Jews, Polish Jews, Orientals, Asians, Urjuden [primal] Jews), 57, 68–69, 76–77, 96, 129, 135, 138, 153, 179, 207, 224–25, 231, 248–49, 261, 273–74, 283, 309n44, 331n33, 356–57n202, 361n13, 384n136, 390n12; migrations of, 57, 92, 107, 224–25, 241–42, 254, 292n34, 331n33; as primitive, 76–77, 274, 390n12. See also identification, Jewish: normative; representations of Judentum Oven, Joshua van, 184 Panizza, Oskar, 75–76, 94, 125, 234, 241, 243–47, 251, 273, 336n93, 343n32, 358n215, 398n23, 401nn43–44, 46– 47, 403n78, 404n100, 409n45, 411n83; ‘‘The Operated Jew,’’ 75, 125, 234, 241, 243–47, 273, 336n32, 401nn44, 47, 50, 53, 55, 409n45, 411n83 Paper-making and -trafficking (papierverkehrend), 170, 180, 182, 185, 209 Parent-Duchaˆtelet, Alexandre, 278, 288

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INDX

parody, farce, satire (Posse), 1, 22, 69, 71, 144, 157, 174, 184, 189, 193, 197, 200–1, 211, 243, 248, 269–70, 330n18, 364n44, 370n17, 374n62, 382n124, 383n128, 386n150, 401n43, 411n83, 413n109; caricature, 19, 62, 157, 184, 220–21, 248, 266, 268, 293, 309n44, 315n92, 356–57n202, 386n152, 402n64, 407n28 particularity and Judentum, 2, 19, 64, 138–40, 143, 145, 193, 215, 319– 20n134, 390n12 Paul (apostle), 142, 326n64 Paul IV (pope), 177 Paulus, H. E. G., 80 Paumgartten, Karl, 117, 354n182 Pegelow Kaplan, Thomas, 306n26 penis, 7, 11, 52, 54, 121, 247, 325n44, 359n226; circumcised, 13, 15, 18, 24, 51–53, 55, 64, 68, 75, 78, 101, 110, 120, 148, 221, 329n11, 333n56, 351n136, 391n30, 401n55; glans, 82, 104, 208; maternal, 52, 54, 69, 329n11, 334n66. See also body parts: foreskin, genitals; castration; circumcision Penslar, Derek, 371–72n26 performative act, 2, 7, 28, 103, 189, 211, 250, 318n124, 320n137, 347n80, 406n16; betrayal as, 44, 75, 77–78, 103, 120, 143–45, 167, 181–82, 190, 208, 222, 231–32, 237, 242, 257, 267, 288, 299, 302, 356n197, 387n155, 402n63; etymology as, 183, 195, 277, 282, 289, 339n132, 374n63, 375n66; passing as, 110, 120–21, 231, 245, 259, 261, 293, see also representations of Judentum: masking performative tropes: chiasm, 30, 39, 53– 54, 110, 167, 175, 185, 187–88, 198, 246, 280, 286, 302, 358n212, 359n226, 372n26, 385n144; displacement, 7, 19, 44, 48, 51, 54, 64, 68, 72, 75, 87, 99, 120–21, 127–29, 179, 198, 204, 214, 220, 231, 237–38, 245, 247, 249, 273, 281, 296, 330n13, 337n117, 338n121, 357n20; supplement, 13, 19–20, 83, 102, 121, 141, 146, 210, 245, 257, 267, 275, 302, 394n56; translation effects, 29, 34, 36–37, 91, 98, 142, 146, 150, 157, 163–64, 179, 183, 197, 208, 285, 322–23n15, 324n34, 327n67, 331n36, 336n92, 357n207, 364n53, 366n4,

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Index 366n7, 371–72n26, 372n33, 373n43, 384n138, 385n144, 390n14, 396n6, 397n16; uncanny (unheimlich), 10, 34, 42, 75, 250, 261, 277, 325n44, 350n129, 393n44; rhetorical strategies to avoid censorship, 20–21, 81, 166, 187–88 persistence: of antisemitism, 20, 108, 246, 262; of Chinese, 50–51, 61, 64, 333n55; as threat, 54, 61, 86; as unchanging, 63; of Judentum, 6, 9–15, 18, 28, 32–34, 36, 41–43, 45–48, 50– 51, 61, 64, 72, 151, 159, 167, 220, 239, 256, 270, 313n75, 320–21n4, 326n63, 367n15; as threat, 11, 14, 28, 34–35, 48, 54, 61, 87; as unchanging, 4–6, 12– 13, 63, 114, 151, 161, 165, 171, 220, 239, 356n198, 367n15, 370n12; of others, 11–12, 28, 50; as threat, 14–15; spermatic, 117 Peter (apostle), 159 Pezzl, Johann, 69 phallus: imagery, 46, 54, 69–70, 76, 78, 111, 339n134; symbols: animal tails, 53, 65, 69–71, 83, 240, 328n3, 329n6, 330n12, 335n80, 338n128; (divining and other) rods, 147–48, 322n15, 338n120 Philips, Lion, 204–5 Philistine/Philistinism (spießbu¨rgerlich), 81, 214, 377n88; Jews and, 215, 218– 22, 229, 231 physiognomy, 6, 21–25, 69, 157, 228, 242, 295, 317n110; Jewish, 22, 69, 109–10, 221, 244, 256, 266, 372n34, 392n31; physiognomic analysis, 5, 25–27, 29– 31, 257, 278, 301, 317–18n120, 406n14; and context, 25, 27, 237, 258; ‘‘Physiognomic Studies,’’ 248–49 Picart, Bernard, 132 Pietz, William, 310–11n64, 352n155 Pinsker, Leo, 42–43, 323n33, 325nn44– 45, 52 Platen, August Graf von, 154 Poe, Edgar Allen, 262–63, 407n28 poison: antisemitism as, 19–20; potassium bromide as, 251, 403n79; smell as, 281, 284; syphilis as, 91, 101, 106, 113–15, 127; racial, 115, 117, 119, 121, 125–27, 129, 154, 344n49, 345n68, 355n193; womb, poisoned,

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91, 114, 119, 126, 357nn212, 219; Spinoza’s ‘‘Testament’’ as ‘‘poisonous addition,’’ 44–46 Poliakov, Le´on, 357n211 Polo, Marco, 61 Poovey, Mary, 307n32 poverty, Jewish, 76–77, 109, 177–79, 184, 241–42, 361n13, 373n40 Prado de Oliveira, 396n5 Presner, Todd Samuel, 314n84 press, Jewish, 127, 129, 188, 218, 264–66, 271, 353n162, 405n7, 408n35, 410n64; anti-Jewish press, 58, 108, 217, 225, 306n26, 349n116 Proksch, J. K., 104 proletariat, composition: agricultural, 380n106; as ethnos/race, 202, 307n33, 378n94; as industrial working class, 193; as rabble, 193–94, 200; ragpickers, 416n136; Marx on, 192–94, 199– 201, 377n91, 378n96, 379n100, 382n24; Stirner on, 190, 192–94, 202, 377n91, 379n100; analogy with Judentum, 199–200, 211. See also Lump-: Lumpenproletariat. property, and bourgeois determination, 91–92, 116; Steiner’s notion and Marx’s critique, 188–89, 192, 194–96, 379n100; of Jehovah, Jews as, 170, 208 prostitute, 92–93, 96, 103, 107–12, 118, 193, 199, 210, 215, 253, 254, 342n30, 345n62, 348n91, 350nn124, 128, 351n140, 358nn212, 217; as allegory of modernity, 287; as Jew, 111; as masculine, 109; as masquerading, 93, 110, 121; actress as, 403n76, 404n94, 408nn35, 38; and Judentum, 109–12, 123, 127–28, 131, 199, 254, 348n91, 350n123, 351nn140, 146 prostitution (‘‘white slavery’’), 93, 107–9, 111–12, 127–29, 196–97, 203, 236, 253–54, 265, 350n123, 357n205, 380nn105, 107, 404n94; bordellos, 107–9, 254, 285, 373n49, 374n59; maisons de rendezvous, 110; Jewish involvement, 107–9, 128, 131, 184, 254, 348n91, 349nn109, 111, 116; seducing Gentile women into, 108, 130; Lemberg Trial, 108, 254; procurer (pimp), 109, 112, 202, 342n30, 406n16; usurer as, 111; ‘‘prostitution of love,’’ 127, 129; writing for money as, 408n35

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Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 119, 402n62 Proust, Marcel, 110, 257, 278, 290, 298, 350n131, 413n105 psychoanalysis, 9, 11, 14, 20–21, 30, 53, 55, 69, 83, 129, 143, 233, 263, 275, 334n66, 344n45, 391n30, 402n65, 412n95 public/private spheres, 6, 11, 102, 110– 11, 274, 281, 314n79, 334n66; gender bifurcation and division of labor of, 6, 35, 54, 91, 307n35, 308n39, 359n26. See also bourgeoisie; family; gender Pulgar, 321n5 Pulzer, Peter, 372n33, 397n9, 406n15 purity: of blood/race, 3, 18, 96, 113–15, 125, 266, 339n134, 354n182; moral, 43, 357n209, 403n176; purifying/ cleansing, 41, 118, 129, 275–76, 343n38 ‘‘quasi-object,’’ 5, 7, 19, 31, 301–2, 305n25, 317n114, 318n124, 387n164; defined, 305n24. See also language, materiality of; ‘‘nodal point’’ Quatrefages, Armand de, 124 Rachel (Elisa-Rachel Fe´lix), 408n39 Radenhasen, Carl, 122 ragpickers (Lumpensammler; chiffoniers; rag-and-bone-men), 1, 170, 179, 193, 202, 287, 372n37, 380n107, 383n128, 387n62, 399–400n134, 400n136; Benjamin as, 21, 287; Jews as 179–80, 202, 288, 373n49, 399–400n134; reader as, 31 rags (tatters, Lappen): and Jews, 3, 135, 169–70, 172, 177–84, 203, 208; and papermaking, 182, 185, 209–10, 379n101, 387n161; and poverty, 178– 79, 181, 194, 319n126, 364n106, 387n154; and refuse (garbage), 164, 178, 182–83, 202, 204, 287–88, 290, 415n133, 415–16n134, 416n136 Ramazzini, Bernadino, 169–70, 177, 180, 210 Rank, Otto, 312n68 Rathenau, Walter, 15–16, 270, 308n37, 314n89, 410n63 Rebmann, Georg Friedrich, 383–84n132 Reichardt, Carl Ernst, 194–95 Reinach, Solomon, 316n106 Reiter, Hans, 344n45

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religion, critique of, 29, 33–34, 39–40, 150–51, 161, 175–76, 189, 199, 214– 16, 248, 310–11n64, 312n69, 366n6, 371–72n26, 380n180, 387n154 religion, Jewish (Judaism): 10, 32, 35, 38, 40, 45–47, 162–63, 165–67, 175, 191– 92, 216, 231, 292, 303n3, 310n58, 311n64, 315n93, 320–21n4, 322n15, 334n64, 366n4, 371–72n26; (non)observance of, 2–3, 35, 72, 82, 135, 138, 159, 184, 327n64, 361n12, 406n15; belief in afterlife, 82, 166; Halakhah (Jewish law, the Law), 7, 34, 101–2, 104, 138, 156, 159, 303n7, 326–27n64; Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), 322n15; Passover, 3, 132–33, 153, 160; Purim, 161, 368n50; sacrifice (offering), 156, 160–63, 165, 167, 290–92, 312n72, 356n193, 415n131; sacrifice, human, 122, 161, 165, 231, 290, see also blood libel/ritual murder; Shabbat, 81–82, 135, 153, 159, 178, 181, 183, 227, 272, 290–92, 361n12. See also circumcision: as ritual religion, rhetoric of, 164–65, 175–76, 189, 280, 282–83, 290–291, 324n40, 378n96, 386n152, 387n154 religion, state-required registration, 18, 37, 101, 171, 216, 227, 313–14n79, 315n94, 346n71 Remondino, P. C., 104, 347n83 Renan, Ernest, 4, 228, 372n34 Rendtorff, Rolf, 326n64 representations of Chinese: as alien (fremd, other), 58, 61; amoral, 60, 64; commercial talent, 56, 61; cruelty, 52, 57, 328n2; cunning (crafty, deceitful, swindler), 56, 58, 60–61, 64, 333n55; disgust-evoking, 68, 103, 343n38; disloyal, 63; effeminate (weak, nonvirile), 51, 54, 56, 65, 67, 75–76, 84, 86, 330n15, 334n66; generic Oriental, 67; honor, lack of, 56; as lepers, 224–25; mandarin, 55, 79, 339n132; as mimetic dissemblers, 56, 58, 333n56;; mummified, 39, 56, 60; obsequious, 54, 58, 62; refusal to intermix and interbreed, 50, 56; rigidity (moribund, static, unchanging, formalistic) 39, 56–57, 60, 63, 74; superiority (racial), 63; as vampire, 64; venality (greed) 55–56, 58, 61, 63–64; veneration of family, 55;

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Index dress, 53–54; hair, see hair: chinese, Zopf-; voice, 54; analogized with Judentum (‘‘Jews of the East’’), 39, 50–51, 55–64, 191, 332nn46–48, 51, 333nn55–56, 377n88; contrasted positively with the Jews, 55–56. See also anti-Sinicism; footbinding; leprosy: mai Pake; yellow peril representations of Judentum: as alien (fremd, other), 33, 42, 58, 61, 74, 114, 159, 217, 227, 229, 231, 256, 278, 285, 312n71, 344n45, 395n65; as animal: ape, 83, 135–36, 267–68, 272, 291, 361n15; dog, 53, 71, 73, 78, 270, 329n6, 335n80, 354n82; insects/vermin, 51, 164, 202, 223, 251; mice/rats, 222–23, 392n36; parrot/bird, 248, 269; pig, see Judensau; predator, 175; as Asiatic (Oriental), see Ostjuden; as Chinese–like, 59–63, 84, 306n15, 339n130; as Mauschel, 392n40; as parasite, 64, 98, 129–30, 217, 271, 344n55, 344–45n56, 359n230; as ‘‘sheeny,’’ 374n63; as un/dead (mummy, ghost), 10, 12, 39, 42–43, 224, 240, 310n58, 323–24n33, 356n198. See also antisemitism; fetish and fetishism; Jews, group designation representations of Judentum: as bogeyman (der schwarze Mann) 191, 219, 391n25; as conspiratorial, 59–60, 119, 125, 309n50; as deicide, 4, 6; as threat, 43– 44, 47–48, 59, 64, 103, 110, 113, 118– 19, 121, 123–31, 147, 223, 266, 287. See also blood libel/ritual murder; persistence of Judentum: as threat representations of Judentum: as appetitive (ruled by stomach), 29, 150–51, 162– 64, 366n4; as arrogant, 10, 56, 74. 122, 152, 156, 158–59, 167, 188, 217, 385n142; as cosmopolitan/urban, 89, 105–7, 215, 222, 227, 242, 339n134, 390n12, 400n39; as crooked (krumm) or bent, 62, 85, 221, 243, 276; as dirty, 51, 76–77, 95, 103, 129, 156–57, 169– 70, 177–78, 180, 335n77, 343n38; as immodest, see Bescheidenheit; as lame, 142–43, 145, 229, 363n37, 364n40, 372n34; as stinking, see foetor Judaicus; as stubborn, 221, 226, 320n4, 323– 24n33; as sycophantic (Schmeicheler),

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58, 62, 191, 382n124. See also body: Jewish; identification, Jewish representations of Judentum: genius, lack of, 184, 187–88, 214, 218–21, 231, 282–83, 374n63, 409n56; as masked (disguised, passing), 72, 74, 82, 104, 107, 110, 112, 120–21, 123, 138, 143– 45, 147–48, 156, 216, 231, 245, 264, 266–67, 269–71, 293, 350n132, 408n35; as nonproductive, 109, 112, 178, 183–184, 204, 208, 264–65, 268, 312n68, 372n34, 384n136, 409nn56–57; reproductive production, only capable of, 177, 264–65, 268, 271, 408n35, 409n56; reproductive professions and activities (journalism, performing arts), only engaged in, 94, 112–13, 183, 185, 201, 208, 264–65, 268, 381n120, 384n136, 408nn35 39. See also imitation, Jews engaging in; press, Jewish representations of Judentum: commensality, lack of, 152, 158–59, 162, 167; egoism, 106, 150 162–63, 167, 174– 75, 189, 208, 239, 366n1, 401n43; misanthropy, 152, 156, 158, 200; as pariah, 138, 179, 360n8; separation, maintaining, 15, 32, 38, 56, 58, 80, 114, 156, 158–59, 226–27, 324n40, 324–25n42; as ‘‘state within a state’’ (disloyal), 63, 72, 152, 158, 203. See also eating away at, agents of: Jews representations of Judentum: ‘‘dirty-Jewish’’ (schmutzig-ju¨disch), 155–56, 176; and money, 55, 63, 110–12, 174–76, 203–4, 208–09, 351n133, 353n170, 379n103, 387n155; as parvenu, 73–74, 77–79, 110, 138, 179, 184, 188, 222; as rich/wealthy, 39, 127, 135, 137, 153, 184, 188, 197, 203–4, 243, 295, 361n11, 374n64, 375n75; as vampire (Blutsauger), 64, 93, 103, 118, 175, 217, 392n38. See also Jews: economic role of representations of Judentum: as asexual, 47; as cowardly, 38, 46–47, 60, 245; as feminized/non–virile male, 16, 34–37, 40, 42, 44, 46–48, 51, 53–54, 56, 60, 71, 74–75, 84–86, 143, 265, 273, 308n37, 311n67, 312n68, 314n89, 320–21n125, 327n67, 386n3, 391n27, 402n58, 410n63; as masculine, 47–48,

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324n42; as menstruating male, 26; as perverse, 13, 64, 159, 355n184, 401n43; as sexual predator (seducer), 94, 108, 119, 121–22, 125, 129, 354n184, 404n99; as weak 56, 392n31. See also gender: coding of Jews; inbreeding representations of Judentum: bacteria/trichinae, 344nn49, 55; as degenerated, 351–52n146, 390n12; as diseased, disease-carrier, 95–98, 109, 128, 131, 346n76, 347n82, 393n43, 394n55; as neurotic 128, 236, 242, 400–1n40; as primitive (atavistic, savage), 55, 76, 109, 119, 123–24, 162, 216, 224, 228, 230–31, 240, 261, 267. See also disease; hysteria: Jews; leprosy, and Judentum; syphilis, and Judentum; Wandering Jew: of the clinic reproduction: diseased, 19, 28, 91, 112– 18, 127–30, 234, 243, 251, 403n74; miscarriages (abortions, stillbirths), 91, 112–13, 251, 291, 403n74; sterility, 94, 112–13, 352n148, 404n99; sterilization, 130; miscegenation, 113–15, 117, 125–26, 355n189, see also blood sin; and bastardization, 114, 118, 359n226; and the Rehoboth bastards, 353n162; of monsters, 112, 115, 119, 125, 243, 265, 357n211, 359n226, 400n34; inbreeding (Inzucht, endogamy), 217, 231, 390–91n20, 395n70; crisis of falling, 46, 93, 242–43; ideology of 91; language of, as grammar of truth, 6 reproduction: animal (and plant) breeding, 114–16, 125, 353n170, 354n182; telegony, 114–16, 124–25; and Lord Morton’s mare, 115, 353–54n171; maternal impression (gaze, instinct), 99, 124, 357–58n211, 358nn212, 214; hare-lip, 342n211; sperm inheritance (artfremder Eiweiß, alien albumen), 115–17, 125–26, 354n184; reproduction, bad or unnatural, 91, 112, 114, 208, 265 restrictions and regulations, Chinese immigration to the U.S., 57–58 restrictions and regulations, Jewish: preEmancipation (occupation, residence, marriage), 56, 96, 171, 177–79, 235, 264–65, 318n122, 365n55, 367n8,

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372n39; General Privilege, 135; taxes and tariffs: body tax (Leibzoll), 77, 135; porcelain purchase, 135–37; postEmancipation, 235; on immigration, 58; Prussian officer corps, 15–16 Ribot, The´odore, 116, 124 Ricci, Matteo, 64, 334n64 Richter, Gerhard, 406n14 Ricord, Philippe, 347n82 Robert, Ludwig (ne´ Lipman Levin), 145, 363nn33, 35 Robert, Markus Theodor, 361n13, 362n18 Roberts, Julian, 283, 418n169 Robertson, Pat, 309n50 Robertson, Ritchie, 375n75, 410n61, 411n72 Robespierre, Maximilien, 414n123 Ro¨ntgen, Heinrich, 147 Rohling, August, 215, 290n14 Romulus, 251; and Remus, 234 Roscher, Wilhelm, 61 Rose, Margaret A., 370n17, 382n124 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 366n4 Rosenkranz, Karl, 60, 64, 332n43 Rosenzweig, Franz, 320–21n4, 388n1 Rothschild, Nathan, 179, 383n131; family, 204, 216, Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 118, 341n17 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 138, 142 Ru¨hs, Friedrich, 179 Ruge, Arnold, 170, 174, 199 Rute, Wu¨nschelruthe (rod, divining rod). See phallus, symbols: rods Said, Edward, 311n65 Salomon, M. G., 102–3, 107, 347n80 Saltus, Edgar, 202 Salzani, Carlos, 406n12 Samson (judge), 329n12, 338n129 Santner, Eric, 396n5, 397n10 Sarah (matriarch), 250 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 107 sati (suttee, widow immolation), 13, 312n72 Savits, Jo´sza, 399n31 Schach- (bargain, commercialize, haggle; ergeist, -erjude), 172, 174, 180, 184, 187, 196–98, 200, 208, 375n66, 379n103, 386n53; verschachert sexuality, 112, 380n105 Scha¨fer, Peter, 4

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Index Schallmeyer, Wilhelm, 55, 330–31n21 Schapkow, Carsten, 321n13 Scheicher, Joseph, 129, 359n227, 373n49 Schiller, Friedrich, 187–88, 203, 337n106, 407n25 Schilling, Kurt, 403n74 Schlegel, Friedrich, 13, 413n111; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, 57 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 12, 312n71 Schlemihl (Schlemiel), 120, 139, 356n197 Schmidt, Julian, 185, 375n68 Schmitt, Carl, 418n169 Schneid-/Schnitt- (abschneiden, beschneiden, verschneiden, zerschneiden, cut): 7, 46, 121–22, 240, 349n104, 364n51; Schneider (tailor), 7, 221, 392n32; Schneider, as name, 250; Schnittwunde, 249. See also castration; chiropodist; circumcision; coin-clipper; decapitation; hair: by fetishist (Zopfabschneider) Schnitzler, Arthur, 19, 212, 262, 316n104, 406n16, 411n73 Schochet (ritual slaughterer): 16, 316n99, 384n132. See also mohel Scho¨nerer, Georg, von, 57–58 Scholem, Gershom, 405n4, 406n16, 407nn23, 25, 415n128, 416n148 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 9–10, 45, 57, 95, 106, 239, 273, 326n58, 356n200, 394n55, 402n63 Schor, Naomi, 11 Schouten, Gautier (Wouter), 65, 330n15 Schreber, Daniel Gottlob Moritz (Schreber pe`re), 253, 255, 403n74; and Pauline, 402n66 Schreber, Daniel Paul (Judge Schreber. Schreber fils), 30, 233–39, 241, 246– 55, 345n58, 396nn4–6, 397nn7–8, 10, 16, 397–98n18, 398nn19–20, 24–25, 399nn31–32, 402nn61, 63, 403nn74, 79, 404nn85, 95; family, 233, 248, 402n66, 403nn74, 76; Memoirs of My Mental Illness (M), 30, 233–34, 236–39, 246–55, 400n36, 403n81 Schreber, Gustav, 252–53, 255, 402nn66, 68 Schreber, Ottilie Sabine, 250–51, 399n31, 403nn74, 76 Schreiber, Elisabeth, 396n5 Schreiber (Sofer), Moses, 101–2 Schudt, Johann Jakob, 153 Schuft-, 203, 384n135

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Schuler, Alfred, 283–84, 414n123 Schwaner, Wilhelm, 123 Schwanz (tail), animal. See phallus, symbols: animal tails Schwencken, Carl Philipp Theodor, 374n58 Scot, Edmund, 61 Second Commandment (idolatry), 113, 128, 130, 311n64, 352n155 Sengoopta, Chandak, 304n12 Sessa , Karl Boroma¨us Alexander (aka Samson Eidechs), 184–86, 197, 374n62, 374n63, 379n103 sexuality: heterosexuality: compulsory, 15; as ‘natural, 112, 197–98, 307n32; homosexuality, 236; diseased, 118–19, 125–26, 131, 234, 237, 255; enervating, 93; impotence, 242; reproductive aim, 112, 241, 328n5; as idolatry/blasphemy, 99, 113, 350n128; sexual practices: fellatio, 346n78; human speciesrelation, 112, 197–98, 380n105; incest, 112, 391n20; Jewish licentiousness (Unzucht) 118, 123, 129, 354n184, 391n20. See also blood sin; fetish and fetishism; identification, gender: and sexuality; prostitute; prostitution; smells, emitted Shachar, Isaiah, 157, 368n41 Shakespeare, William, 159, 185, 187, 206, 337n106 ShUM (Speyer, Worms, and Mainz.), 153. See also food, Jewish: garlic Shylock(s), 185, 187; The Merchant of Venice, 28, 159, 185–87, 375n73, 386n150 Siebert, Friedrich, 105 Simonde de Sismondi, Jean Charles Le´onard, 193 ‘‘sins of the fathers’’ (the other blood sin), 157 Skoptzi, 229–30 smell, emitted: aroma, 243–44; aroma and aura, 257, 277–78, 284, 286–87, 289– 90, 292, 413nn102–5; aroma (smell) and mimesis, 291–92, 295, 417n164; aromata, 261, 291–92, 295, 300; disgusting (noisome, noxious, reeking, stinking, etc.), 111, 169, 225, 255, 273, 275, 285, 287, 289; of crowds, 263, 274; group-specific smells, 273; incense, sacrificial, 284, 290, 415n131; Jewishness, scent of (Benjamin), 256–

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57, 260–61, 278, 285; stench of, see foetor Judaicus; of money, 208, 386–87n154; the other of the bourgeoisie, 273, 296; perfumes of modernity, 129, 277–78, 281, 288, 413n100; and sexuality 273, 283; aura seminalis, 273; odor di feminina, 273, 286; unmanned by, 326n58; what is not art, 289 smell, sense of (olfaction): 257–58, 263, 273–90, 293–97, 300, 413n105, 413– 14n113, 414n118, 415n127, 417n64; ‘‘taste at a distance,’’ 279; of animals, 274–75; repression of, 258, 274–76, 294–95, 417n164; anosmia, 276, 278, 288, 298, 413n100; and experience, 257, 297, 413n100; and identification of Jews, 69, 129, 244, 415n131; and introjecting otherness, 274; and memory (me´moire involuntaire), 257, 275, 278– 79, 282, 295; and prehistory, 257, 261, 276–78, 281–82, 287, 290, 295, 298, 300; and redemption, 285–86, 290, 415n131; and vision, 276, 280, 286; olfactive image: 259, 279, 284–85, 292; osmics (olfactive critical hermeneutic): 278, 283, 287, 290, 300, 414n118, 417n164; ideal, 276–82; splenetic, 286–90 Smend, Rudolf, 326n64 Smith, G. Eliot, 274 Smyth, H. Warington, 333n55 Sokel, Walter, 411n72 Sombart, Werner, 178, 259–60, 269 Spencer, Herbert, 116, 352n158 Spengler, Otto, 105, 348n95 Sperber, Dan, 305n23 Spinoza, Baruch, 8–11, 28, 32–48, 50, 54–55, 61, 64–65, 76, 84, 166, 309– 10n51, 310n55, 320nn1, 3, 321n5, 322–23n15, 323nn28, 32–33, 324nn34, 37, 39, 325nn48, 56, 326nn58–59, 61, 63, 327n64, 67, 73, 330n18, 333n56, 336n96, 344n55, 385n149; Spinoza’s ‘‘Testament,’’ 33–36, 38–40, 42, 45–48, 50, 320n4, 324n29, 327n67, 391n28 Staemmler, Martin, 117 Stallybrass, Peter 379n101 Stein, Ludwig, 389n7 Steinberg, Michael P., 2 Steiner, Rudolf, 399n31 Steinle, Edward von, 315n92

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Steinschneider, Moritz, 4 Stern, Itzig Faitel, 75, 125, 243, 247, 273, 401n43 stereotype, 3, 9, 11, 14, 22, 29, 62. 73, 75, 84, 109, 123, 129, 171, 174, 177, 188, 197, 204, 216, 220–22, 229, 231, 243– 45, 265–66, 273, 293, 314n79, 332n51, 333n55, 362n20, 375n75, 392n40, 397n7; dream-logic of, 157; sexual (gender), 14, 85–86, 134, 137, 307n32, 339n134, 403n76; subverting, 166, 174, 273, 335n80, 411n84; Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), 10, 32–33, 35, 37–40, 43, 46–48, 50, 54–55, 64, 321n5, 322–23n15, 324nn34, 37, 39, 327n64, 67, 73, 330n18, 385n149 Stigler, Robert, 109 Stirner, Max (Johann Kaspar Schmidt), 172, 174, 189–96, 198, 338n119, 376nn82–83, 85, 377nn86–87, 91–92, 378n97, 379nn98–100, 381–82n121, 382n124, 386n152; The Ego and His Own (EE/EO), 189–96, 376n85, 377n91, 379n98 Stoecker, Adolf, 88, 122, 188, 218, 265– 66, 325n52 Stoessel, Marianne, 277, 283 Strauss, David Friedrich, 40, 324n42 Strauss, Leo, 20–21, 33, 47, 327n67 Strauss. Ludwig, 256–57, 260 Streicher, Julius, 69, 89, 117, 126–27, 349n116, 354–55n184 Stro¨hl, Hugo, 16–17, 315n92 Der Stu¨rmer, 89, 100–1, 117, 126–27, 345n68, 349n116, 354n183 Sturm, Friedrich, 109 Sue, Euge`ne, 396n5, 400n36 Sun Yat-sen, 67, 328n4 Sussman, Henry, 318n123 Synesius, 167 syphilis (Gallic disease, Judenpest, LiebesKrankheit, lues, Lustseuche, pox, Spanish disease, etc.): 28–30, 88–131 passim, 225, 236–37, 251–55, 340–59nn passim, 393n51, 393–94n52, 404nn85, 92, 100; the ‘‘Great Imitator’’ 90, 110; tertiary or late, 99, 111, 252, 394n53; he´re´dosyphilis (hereditary syphilis), 28, 90–91, 100, 108, 113–15, 236, 251–52, 255, 403n67; ‘‘syphilis of the innocent,’’ 90–91, 95, 101, 346nn73–74; saddle nose, 110–11, 342n29,

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Index 351n138; tabes dorsalis (general or progressive paralysis, paresis, softening of the brain), 98–99, 106, 127, 225, 252– 53, 349n103, 393–94n52; spirochete, 99, 129; treatments (mercury, potassium iodide, potassium bromide, ‘‘magic bullet’’ [Salvarsan], copulate with virgin), 96, 99–100, 111, 117, 120, 251, 351n133, 403nn78–79; and civilization, 106–7; and Judentum, 29, 94–96, 98–101, 105–06, 343n41, 344nn47, 54, 348n91, 404n99; Versyphilitisierung (syphilization), 128–29, 131. See also names: and syphilis, [syphilis] unnamed; Wassermann reaction syphilology (venerology), 89–91, 93, 96, 99, 101, 104, 112–13, 115–16, 118, 236, 251, 255, 344n44, 353n167. See also dermatology syphilophobia, 91, 120, 129, 219, 234–35, 250–55 Tacitus, 18, 95, 156, 158 Talmud (Mishnah and Gemarra), 14, 77, 101–3, 153, 156, 161, 243, 272, 285, 316n106, 390n14, 415n131; Mishnah, 101–2; Gemarra, 77, 101; B. Shabbat, 285, 415n131; Pirke Avoth, 291–92 Tarnier, E´tienne Ste´phane, 117 Theilhaber, Felix, 46 Thiers, Adolphe, 199, 381n113 Tieck, Ludwig, 381n112 Tirala, Lothar, 117 Titus (Roman Emperor), 73 To¨nnies, Ferdinand, 348n95 Tolstoy, Leo, 14 touch (haptic, tactile), 277–78, 288, 299, 412n98 Toussenel, Alphonse, 284, 384n138 trauma, 20, 263, 297–98; acting out and working through, 28–29, 31, 131, 212, 259, 263, 282, 291, 407n29; shock (Schockerlebnis), 19, 27, 262–64, 273– 75, 278, 282, 287, 295, 297, 385n142 Trebitsch, Arthur, 16, 315n94 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 57, 81, 89, 107, 114, 218, 246, 266, 331n33, 349n104, 372n34, 402n61 Tridon, Gustave, 231, 395n67 Trier, Salomon Abraham, 346n76

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uncircumcision: Jewish, 7, 16, 37, 315n94; Gentile, 16, 138, 146, 159, 221; Gentile as uncircumcised Jew, 185, 187, 316n100, 375n74; god-fearers, 156 Vajiravudh (King of Siam), 62, 64, 333nn55–56 Vale´ry, Paul, 279, 289 van Beneden, Pierre, 98 van Geldern, Salomon, 407n24 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 217 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 133, 148 Veit, David, 34, 137–40, 142–45, 362n18, 364nn40, 51 Verein fu¨r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, 14, 76, 310n59 Verjudung (Jewification, judaization), 89, 127–31, 344n47, 402n63 Verkehr- (Verkehrung, verkehrt), 29, 172, 184–90, 197–99, 211, 318n124, 375n66, 380n106, 380–81n110, 381nn111–12, 385n143; Unser Verkehr (Sessa), 184–86, 197, 374nn63–64, 379n103 Verstu¨mmel- (mutilate), 13, 51–53, 65, 148, 170, 172, 209–10, 221, 229, 325n44, 328n3, 329n11, 351n136, 359n226, 372n34 visibility (supervision), 7, 11, 14, 16, 18– 19, 21–22, 24, 37, 49, 51, 54, 64, 67, 69–71, 93, 99, 102–3, 110–11, 128, 142, 147, 187, 209, 241–44, 246, 249, 254, 266, 283, 288, 293, 314n79, 330n15, 350nn128, 131, 358n216, 373n40, 397n16, 416–17n155; smell rendering, 69, 290. See also physiognomy vision, 30, 205, 275–77, 279–81, 286, 292, 295, 299–300, 412nn96, 98, 413n107, 413–14n113 Vogt, Karl, 204 Vogt, William, 265 Volk (folk, people), 14, 118, 124, 126, 128, 216, 227, 307n33, 321n7, 339n134, 354n184, 400n39 Voltaire, 55, 69, 95, 217, 225, 330n19, 343n37, 393n50 Voltz, Johann Michael, 185 Wagenseil, Johann Christoph, 393n49 Wagner, Richard, 15, 213, 229, 239, 248, 268–69, 285, 336n85, 372n34, 395n65, 399n31, 402n64, 419n176

INDX

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Index

Wakeman, Frederic, 65, 329n7, 334n66 Walther, Manfred, 35, 321n11 Wandering Jew (Eternal Jew, Ahasuerus, Cartophilus, der ewige Jude), 10, 30, 237–43, 246–47, 310n51, 323n28, 397–98n18, 400nn34, 36, 400–01n40; of the clinic, 239, 241–42, 400n36; non–Jewish, 233–35, 237–39, 250, 255, 396nn5–6, 397nn7–8; syphilis as, 254, 350n132, 404n98; unmanning of, 240, 245–46, 404n98 Wartofsky, Marx, 366n9, 366–67n14 Wassermann, August, 95, 99 Wassermann, Henry, 370n13, 402n67 Wassermann, Jacob, 27 Wassermann reaction or complementfixation test, 95, 99–100, 128, 252; ‘‘a positive Wassermann,’’ 100. See also syphilis Wasserschleben, V. von, Freiherr, 212, 218, 222 Weber, Dr. Guido, 252, 404n95 Weber, Sam, 237, 249 Webster, Nesta, 309n50 Weindling, Paul, 98, 341n22 Weininger, Otto, 3, 75–76, 124, 212, 248, 271, 304n12, 308n37, 312n68, 326n61, 351–52n146, 353–54n171, 357n205, 358nn212, 214, 217, 372n34, 395n70, 398n23, 402n64, 419n176; Sex and Character (SC), 3, 75–76, 271, 326n61, 351–52n146, 353–54n171, 358nn212, 214, 395n70, 402n64 Weissberg, Liliane, 134, 361n8, 363nn25, 37 Weißenberg, Samuel, 271 Welcker, Carl, 307n35 Weller, Tu¨del, 94 Wellhausen, Julius, 35, 46–47, 310n55 Wertheimer, D., 101 West, Cornel, 8 White, Robert B., 251, 403n74 Wilamowitz–Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 417n164 Wilde, Oscar, 94 Wilhelm (Elector of Hessen-Kassel), 338n128 Wilhelm II (Kaiser of Germany), 59, 333n56 Wissenschaft des Judentums (scientific study of Judentum), 310n59

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INDX

Wistrich, Robert, 304–5n19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 268, 409n56 Woeniger, August Theodor, 194–95 Wolters, Friedrich, 284, 415n127 yellow peril: Chinese as, 57–59, 254, 314n86, 331n32, 333n56; Jews as, 95, 243, 254, 404n100; syphilis as, 253–54; ‘‘The Yellow Peril’’ (painting), 59, 333n56 Yiddish (Jargon, Gemauschel, Mauscheldeutsch, Judendeutsch, Ju¨disch-deutsch), 76, 183, 203, 223, 228, 245, 248, 267, 269, 346n72, 370n13, 374n63, 379n102; bird-chirping as, 248; Bru¨llen, nervelanguage, Grundsprache as, 248; menara and Derada´ng as index of, 243–45; as primitive, 267–68 Yule, Henry, 61 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 314–15n90 zionism (and its antecedents), 2, 8, 30, 36, 39, 43, 46, 212–13, 256, 260, 269–71, 321n9, 323–24n33, 388n3, 389n9, 391n27, 392n40, 406n68, 418n167 Zo¨berlein, Hans, 94, 355n193, 356n194, 404n99 Zola, E´mile, 213, 393n51 Zopf- (braid, queue, pigtail), 28, 50–87 passim, 302, 330n13, 332n43, 334– 39nn passim; Judenzopf (Weichselzopf ) 51, 54, 64, 68–69, 76–77, 83–86, 95, 319n77, see also disease: plica; Zopfabschneider (braid-cutter), 52–54, 75, 302, 328–29n5; Zopf (-band, -¨chen, tum, -zeit), 58, 68 74, 81, 83, 336n97, 338n128, 339n132; in phrases, 68, 72, 81, 85–86, 335n81, 339n134; cognates of (Zapf, zupfen), 337n113, 339n132; and German (Prussian) absolutism, 68, 79–81, 338n128; Frau von Steinzopf (ne´e Lilientau), 78–79; in Die fromme Helene (Busch), 85, 339n133 Zoroastrianism, Ormuzd and A(h)riman, 247, 402n63 Zudrell, Petra, 389n3 Zunz, Leopold, 7, 41 Zweig, Stefan, 100

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