Bestiarium Judaicum : unnatural histories of the Jews / Jay Geller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geller, Jay, 1953- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Identity--History--19th century.

Jews.

Jews--Identity--History--20th century.

Antisemitism.

Metaphor in literature.

Animals--Symbolic aspects.

Animals.

Jews--Identity.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

ix, 404 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals - pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize, and justify the persecution of Jews, "Bestiarium Judaicum" asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories? Focusing on the nonhuman-animal constructions of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Gertrud Kolmar, Jay Geller expands his earlier examinations (On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions and The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity) of how such writers drew upon representations of Jewish corporeality in order to work through their particular situations in Gentile modernity. From Heine's ironic lizards to Kafka's Red Peter and Siodmak's Wolf Man, this book brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers' engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species "Jew" were identified.

Contents:

1 "O beastly Jews": A Brief History of an (Un)Natural History 29

2 Name that Varmint: From Gregor to Josephine 57

3 (Con) Versions of Cats and Mice and Other Mouse Traps 81

4 "If you could see her through my eyes ...": Semitic Simiantics 109

5 Italian Lizards and Literary Politics I: Carrying the Torch and Getting Singed 139

6 Italian Lizards and Literary Politics II: Deer I Say It 155

7 The Raw and the Cooked in the Old/New World, or Talk to the Animals 170

8 Dogged by Destiny: "Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit" 188.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 341-384) and index.

ISBN:

9780823275595

0823275590

OCLC:

965617498