The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity 9780823293117

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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