Readings in Jewish History: Jews and Race

It turns out I haven't done nearly as much writing this term for my Readings in Modern Jewish History course. Below is only the second writing assignment for this term and might be the last before I submit my term paper. That paper is due in the first week of May. In the meantime, I'll probably post my annotated bibliography.

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Elaborate on the connection between Jews and sexual activity according to Gillman. What is the significance of this connection in terms of the larger discourse on the Jewish body and the way in which it is viewed as sick, black etc. Muse on the way in which Gillman makes use of images. How do these images help to answer his question as to “how the representation of the Jewish body is shaped and, in turn, shapes the sense of Jewish identity.” (170)

Gilman's treatment of the connection between Jews and sexuality fits into the pattern already established in our course in the works of Hyman, Seidman, and Yerushalmi (when considering the topic vis-à-vis Freud's musings on the topic). Each of these authors has engaged the matter of the perception of Jewish men being in some way depraved, effeminate, or deranged. Seidman actually cites Gilman directly in this regard, writing that increasing visibility of homosexuality in Central Europe "coincided with the entry of Jews into the Central European bourgeoisie" (p. 97). However, whereas these authors' discussions of the intersection between Jews and sexuality remains muted and marginal to their primary exigeses, Gilman pushes these associations to their greatest extents. Remarkably, he does so without having to move the clock forward to the 1940s, demonstrating not only that the seeds of Nazi antisemitism's preoccupation with Jewish lechery began decades earlier but also that the overt association of Jews with sexually criminal behavior was already in circulation in the 1880s and well outside Central Europe.

Gilman accomplishes all this by pointing out how suspects in the Jack the Ripper case -- particularly "Leather Apron," an Eastern European Jew -- were characterized as Jewish in the public imagination. In this way, the Whitechapel murders become a synecdoche for the whole of Jewish perversion. The corpses mutilated by Jack the Ripper are likened to the phallus mutilated by circumcision and to the livestock butchered by the shochet, and the suspicion that the murderer was killing prostitutes as revenge for contracting a venereal disease is expanded to consider the common belief that Jews were carriers of syphilis. Finally, the association of Jews and prostitutes generally allows for the association of the sexually pathological to intersect with the far better established stereotype of the Jewish obsession with money. Thus, the sexualized image of "the Jew" does not replace earlier monetary or even religious motives for anti-Semitism; rather, it complements them and renders them more biological.

Arguably, the ability to communicate the visceral nature of these themes would be hampered without visual representations, which is perhaps why Gilman includes numerous plates providing examples in the chapter on the Ripper. It also becomes easier with these images -- as well as with those presented in the chapter "The Jewish Nose" -- to see the linkages between the popular art of late 19th century Europe and Der Stürmer. Moreover, Gilman uses the sexual othering of Jews to show how it coincides and intersects with racial othering. On the topic of syphilis, e.g., he writes, "It is marked upon his face as 'ethnic eczema.' It is a sign of sexual and racial corruption as surely as the composite photographs of the Jew made by Francis Galton at the time revealed the 'true face" of the Jew" (p. 125).

In this same section of the book, Gilman focuses on the internalization of these tropes by Marcel Proust, who wrestled with both his own Jewishness and his own homosexuality. The protagonist of À la recherche du temps perdu, created by a gay writer, is a Jew who marries a prostitute. Complicating these relationships further is Proust's French citizenship at a time when Jewish membership in the French nation felt tenuous but was not yet as publicly dispute as during the Dreyfus affair. In a way, how Proust negotiates his internalization of the complex relationships among sex, race, and nation is to externalize them in the form of Swann. In so doing, he creates an "arch-Jew" who is "visibly marked … as the heterosexual syphilitic, as that which Proust was not (at least in his fantasy about his own sexual identity)" (p. 126). Of course, Proust is only one example. Freud is another, but it is likely that neither of their cases was "typical." That said, the two men's conflicts of sexualized representations of Jews could indicate a larger phenomenon of self-loathing imposed by external anti-Semitism, regardless of how these conflicts are ultimately expressed or resolved.