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

Jay Geller

Published by Fordham University Press 2011

The Other Jewish Question

Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity

Jay Geller

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823293117

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book examines how modernizing German-speaking cultures, undergoing their own processes of identification, responded to the narcissistic threat posed by the continued persistence of Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) by representing “the Jew”’s body—or rather parts of that body and the techniques performed upon them. Such fetish-producing practices reveal the question of German-identified modernity to be inseparable from the Jewish Question. But Jewish-identified individuals, immersed in the phantasmagoria of such figurations—in the gutter and garret salon, medical treatise and dirty joke, tabloid caricature and literary depiction, church façade and bric-a-brac souvenir—had their own question, another Jewish Question. They also had other answers, for these physiognomic fragments not only identified “the Jew” but also became for some Jewish-identified individuals the building blocks for working through their particular situations and relaying their diverse responses. The Other Jewish Question maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among these corporeal signifiers in Germanophone cultures between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. Its analyses of ascribed Jewish physiognomy include tracing the gendered trajectory of the reception of Benedict Spinoza’s correlation of Jewish persistence, anti-Semitism, and circumcision; the role of Zopf (“braid”) in mediating German Gentile–Jewish relations; the skin(ny) on the association of Jews and syphilis in Arthur Dinter’s antisemitic bestseller Sin against the Blood and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf; as well as the role of Jewish corporeality in the works of such Jewish-identified authors as Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin, as well as such “Jew”-identifying writers as Ludwig Feuerbach and Daniel Paul Schreber. The Other Jewish Question portrays how Jewish-identified individuals moved beyond introjection and disavowal to appropriate and transform this epidemic of signification to make sense of their worlds and our modernity.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction: Toward a Physiognomic Epidemiology of the Fetishized Jew Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1 ‘‘Feminization’’ and the Problem of Jewish Persistence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	32
Chapter 2 Tailing the Suspect, or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	50
Chapter 3 From Mohels to Mein Kampf Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identification Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
Chapter 4 Circumcision and a Jewish Woman’s Identification: Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Failed Assimilation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
Chapter 5 Going to ‘‘Alimentary’’ School: Brotstudium, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the Dietetics of Antisemitism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	150
Chapter 6 From Rags to Risches: On Marx’s Other Jewish Question Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Chapter 7 A Future without Jews: Max Nordau’s Pre-Zionist Answer to the Other Jewish Question Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	212
Chapter 8 President Schreber and the Memoirs of a Wandering Jew(ess) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Chapter 9 Walter Benjamin Reproducing the Scent of the Messianic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	421
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	487

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 530
Illustrations
- Other: 9 Illustrations, black and white

eBook

Published: March 24, 2022
ISBN: 9780823293117