The Other Jewish Question : Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity / Jay Geller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geller, Jay, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (530 p.) : 9 Illustrations, black and white

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Abbreviations

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Physiognomic Epidemiology of the Fetishized Jew

Chapter 1 ‘‘Feminization’’ and the Problem of Jewish Persistence

Chapter 2 Tailing the Suspect, or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference

Chapter 3 From Mohels to Mein Kampf Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identification

Chapter 4 Circumcision and a Jewish Woman’s Identification: Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Failed Assimilation

Chapter 5 Going to ‘‘Alimentary’’ School: Brotstudium, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the Dietetics of Antisemitism

Chapter 6 From Rags to Risches: On Marx’s Other Jewish Question

Chapter 7 A Future without Jews: Max Nordau’s Pre-Zionist Answer to the Other Jewish Question

Chapter 8 President Schreber and the Memoirs of a Wandering Jew(ess)

Chapter 9 Walter Benjamin Reproducing the Scent of the Messianic

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mrz 2022)

ISBN:

9780823293117

0823293114

OCLC:

1369663738