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

Description

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 Gthe JewGGs bodyGor 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 figurationsGin the gutter and garret salon, medical treatise and dirty joke, tabloid caricature and literary depiction, church fa+ade and bric-a-brac souvenirGhad their own question, another Jewish Question. They also had other answers, for these physiognomic fragments not only identified Gthe JewG 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 SpinozaGs correlation of Jewish persistence, anti-Semitism, and circumcision; the role of Zopf (GbraidG) in mediating German GentileGJewish relations; the skin(ny) on the association of Jews and syphilis in Arthur DinterGs antisemitic bestseller Sin against the Blood and Adolf HitlerGs 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 GJewG-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.