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Internal Outsiders – Imagined Orientals?

Edited by Ulrike Brunotte – Jürgen Mohn – Christina Späti

BEITRÄGE ZUR RELIGIONSGESCHICHTE UND RELIGIÖSEN ZEITGESCHICHTE

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Ulrike Brunotte und Jürgen Mohn

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ERGON VERLAG Internal Outsiders – Imagined Orientals? Antisemitism, Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Jewish Identity

Edited by Ulrike Brunotte – Jürgen Mohn – Christina Späti

ERGON VERLAG Umschlagabbildung: © Wylius – iStock by Getty Images

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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ISSN 2198-2414 ISBN 978-3-95650-241-5

Table of Contents

Ulrike Brunotte / Jürgen Mohn / Christina Späti Preliminary Remarks...... 7

Colonialism, Orientalism and the Jews

Steven E. Aschheim The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism...... 11 Ulrike Brunotte “The Jewes did Indianize; or the Indians doe Judaize”: Philo-Semitism and anti-Judaism as Topoi of Colonial Discourse. A Case Study...... 35

Jewish Orientalization and Self-Orientalization

Hilegard Frübis The Figure of the Beautiful Jewess: Displacements on the Borders between East and West...... 61 Mirjam Rajner A Turbaned German of Mosaic Faith: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s Visual Self-Orientalization ...... 73

The Jew in Literature: Antisemitism, the Colonial Paradigm and the Orient

Cecilie Speggers Schrøder Simonsen Colonialism in the Ghetto: Reading Aus dem Ghetto as Self-Colonizing Literature ...... 87 Christine Achinger Orientalism, Occidentalism and Colonialism in Freytag’s Images of Jews and Poles...... 99 Axel Stähler The Author’s derrière and the Ludic Impulse: Oskar Panizza’s “The Operated Jew” (1893) and Amy Levy’s “Cohen of Trinity” (1889) ...... 111

6 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jewish Masculinity, Gender and Orientalism

Ofri Ilany Homo-Semitism: Jewish Men, Greek Love and the Rise of Homosexual Identity ...... 131 Gabriele Dietze Affective Masculinity: Queering Jewish Orientalism in Young Vienna...... 143 Karin Stögner Nature and Anti-Nature: Constellations of Antisemitism and Sexism...... 157

Jews as Orientals and De-Orientalization

Christina Späti Between Exoticism and Antisemitism: Orientalization of Jews in Switzerland in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries ...... 173 Dekel Peretz Franz Oppenheimer: A Pioneer of Diasporic Zionism...... 187 Jihan Jasmin S. Dean De-Orientalization of Jews after 1989 in Germany: The Relationship between Discourse and Subjects ...... 201

List of Contributors...... 213

Plates...... 217

Preliminary Remarks

Ulrike Brunotte / Jürgen Mohn / Christina Späti

This collection of essays will explore the possibility of applying perspectives developed in the context of Gender and Postcolonial Studies to Jewish Cultural Studies and Studies in Antisemitism. The volume is the third multidisciplinary research output of the international research network “Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism, and Occidentalism” (ReNGOO). The network’s collaborative research addresses imaginative and aesthetic rather than sociological questions, with particular focus on the function of gender and sexuality in literary, scholarly and artistic transformations as well as in constructions of orientalist images both from without and from within. The focus is on research concerning the orientalization and self-orientalization of Jews. Both processes are strongly intertwined and inter- act in various ways. Self-orientalization as a way of response to quests of self- identification in an age of antisemitisms based on nationalist exclusion was made possible because orientalism in itself is a very ambiguous concept. While orientalist discourse often relied on heavy stereotyping and negatively connoted representations of the oriental “Other,” it also sometimes took on positive connotations which referred to notions of exoticism, rendering the imagined East a mysterious and interesting place. Orientalism can thus be seen as a rather fluid concept which underwent many changes in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The present collection of essays explores the ways in which stereotypes of the external and internal other intertwine in modern national discourse since the nineteenth century and examines the ways in which these borders are demarcated and transgressed by means of Orientalist self-fashioning in Jewish cultural production. In so doing, orientalizing discourse was used in order to Judaize the East, a process that became more important with the rise of Zionism and the question of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Moreover, the very idea of self- orientalization poses a challenge to the Saidian paradigm of orientalism, in which orientalism is conceived of as a “strange secret sharer of Western Antisemitism.” The general theme is approached in a truly interdisciplinary manner, and the book is thus divided into several chapters that cover, amongst others topics, the interaction of colonialism, Zionism and orientalism, the Jew as a literary oriental trope, and the entanglement of orientalizing identities with gender and queer identities. Although it takes its cue from highly topical debates and current research projects, the collection is nevertheless primarily concerned with the intricate genealogies of contemporary discourses. Reflections on the (Hobsbawmian) long nineteenth century and the fin de siècle are therefore at the center of the book. The two longer opening chapters of Aschheim and Brunotte, which are both re-

8 PRELIMINARY REMARKS publications, offer a kind of introduction to the broad field of study, first the longue durée of the intertwinement of the figure of the Jews and indigenous or “foreign people” in Western colonial discourse and colonial enterprises, and secondly an introduction to the many varieties of orientalizations and the “Oriental web” (Aschheim) within European thinking.

Colonialism, Orientalism and the Jews

The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism*

Steven E. Aschheim

“My heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West.” Yehuda HaLevi (1085–1141)

Politics and the writing of history have always been interconnected realms. It is clear that the great political question of the present day — the so-called “clash of civilizations” — has highlighted, and rendered us more sensitive to, themes and problems of historiography that previously were not regarded as particularly central or urgent. This may explain why so much of contemporary post-9/11 scholarship is so intent on studying the origins, conflicts, connections, and constructed nature of categories such as Islam, Europe, the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, the “secular” and the “religious.” In related fashion, the study of Jewish history is increasingly focusing on the critical interplay of “East” and “West” as both a forma- tive and problematic force in the multivalent Jewish engagement with the modern world. Much of this work has been characterized by shrill polemics and dogmatic ideology, but new, often provocative, perspectives have also been opened up by viewing these matters through postcolonial paradigms. Rather than engage this debate in partisan manner or seeking to smooth out the ambiguities, I want to examine the ways in which these frameworks help us to illuminate the continuing, complex ironies and tensions of the “Oriental”–“Occidental” dichotomy and the seminal role that notions of the “East” and the “West” have played in modern Jewish politics, culture and identity. The “Oriental”–“Occidental” divide is, of course, a general ontological and epistemological cut that runs through millennia of Western history. The power- driven stereotype of the distinction between Asia and Arabia, the decayed, voice- less Orient, and the progressive, articulate Occident — a paradigm inextricably associated with the work of Edward Said and which, despite many critical necessary qualifications and modifications, retains some essential truths — has its origins as far back as antiquity. As a major (though certainly not exclusive) binary marker of identity, of self and Other, its roots go back deep into ancient times. Despite its longue durée, and apart from present political conflicts, its contemporary sting, our own particular inscriptions and encodings of the East-West dichotomy, cannot be comprehended without reference to the Enlightenment, in all its magnificence — and biases.

* This chapter was first published as a volume of Menasseh ben Israel Institute Studies nr. 4, Amsterdam, 2010. It is reproduced here with the permission from the Menasseh ben Israel Institute.

12 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM

It is against this larger backdrop that much of the modern Jewish experience can be framed as one of multiple, contradictory negotiations with “Orientalist” and “Occidentalist” discourses that were — and continue to be — constructed both against and by them. In numerous ways, Jews internalized and deflected these narratives as variously self-defining, self-deprecating and self-asserting instruments. Aziza Khazzoom has suggestively labeled these strategies and responses as “the great chain of Orientalism,”1 in which respectively “Westernizing” Jewish groups constructed and affirmed their own modern identity by appropriating secular, Enlightenment norms and creating negative mirror-opposites, foisting “Oriental” stereotypes and characteristics upon other Jewish groups, putatively lower in the “civilizational” line. There is much to be said for this scheme but it leaves little room for other more subtle deployments, the ways in which these discourses could be transformed, mediated, undermined or resisted.2 I would therefore prefer the image of an “Orientalist web,” a kind of all-enveloping thematic in which modern Jewish history in almost all its permutations has been — and continues to be — entangled and which has produced any number of ironic and debilitating, but also creative, moments. Why is this so? It flows almost inevitably from the ambiguous status of the Jews in the Western world. Jews were seen to inhabit a kind of liminal, hyphen- ated condition, regarded, as Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar have perceptively pointed out, “variably and often concurrently as occidental and oriental.”3 Here, I want to examine a few major strands of this dialectical tension.

1 My formulation has been inspired (albeit proceeding in a different direction and employ- ing other conceptual tools) by Khazzoom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Iden- tity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel,” 2003. 2 This, I hope, is in line with the emphases of the best in recent overall scholarship in the field, above all in the work of Suzanne L. Marchand and her remarkable German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, 2009. Marchand insists on the complexities and different contexts of orientalist practices. In salutary fashion, she questions the prevalent “definition of identity which presumes a primordial, binary distinction between ‘Europe’ and ‘the Orient’. … Surely at least some Europeans defined themselves by means of other sets of distinctions — male and female, Christian and Jew … German and French- man? … We cannot start with the belief that Europeans found the categories ‘European’ and ‘Oriental’ primordial or totalizing and hope to discover how complicated these cultural relationships might have been.” (pp. xxi-xxii). She argues that knowledge — including “Ori- entalist” knowledge — need not merely proceed in Saidian or Foucauldian manner as instruments of power and domination but can also “lead to appreciation, dialogue, self- critique, perspectival reorientation, and personal and cultural enrichment.” (p. xxv). More- over, “invoking the Orient has often been the means by which counter-hegemonic positions were articulated; ‘orientalism’ then, has played a crucial role in the unmaking, as well as the making of, western identities.” (p. xxvii). The present chapter aims to similarly capture some of these themes, complexities and ironies of Jewish orientalism. 3 See their “Introduction” to the invaluable collection of essays they edited, Orientalism and the Jews, 2005, p. xiii.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 13

Let us begin with the age of emancipation. As Western and Central European Jews were allowed to leave their ghettos, they were regarded in many ways as local foreigners, emerging from dark, mysterious and pre-civilized cultures. It would not be too great an exaggeration to state that as “French” or “German” Jews sought to enter into society, they were often represented as a species of internal Orientals. Their integration was predicated upon the demand that their alien Jew- ish traditions, their exclusive ghetto mentality and ugly disposition and manners undergo radical reform and regeneration in a manner consistent with progressive modern standards and the moral and aesthetic refinements of Bildung. There were, of course, many components to this transformative imperative but it was also certainly informed by an extant and broader orientalist discourse: Jews, amongst other things, could easily be represented as strangers to Europe, backward, Eastern and Asiatic (their own account, of course, located their origins in the biblical lands of the Middle East). These were widespread convictions. Jonathan Hess has recently shown that the anti-Semitic notions of the late eighteenth century Christian theologian, Johann David Michaelis, and his orientalist scholarship on Mosaic law were inseparable from his colonialist vision that Jews as an unmixed, degenerate, southern race, products of the climate of the ancient Orient, could not be temperamentally or physically Germanized and were essentially fit for work in German-controlled sugar plantations in the West Indies.4 Similarly, much of Christian theology was bent on severing the threatening connections between “Oriental” Mosaic law and Jesus’s Christianity. Such attitudes were similarly shared by some leading Enlight- enment and romantic thinkers. Thus, Herder called Jews “the Asiatics of Europe,” Voltaire designated the ancient Jews as “vagrant Arabs infested with leprosy” and even the champion of Jewish rights, Christian Wilhelm Dohm, spoke of Jews as “Asiatic refugees.” It can be fairly said that, by and large, modernizing German Jewry sought to overcome being designated as “Easterners” because, given its non-civilized, foreign connotations, this excluded them from the designated homogenous national polity. The internalization of cultivating “Westernizing” attitudes became a systematic self-conscious project of integration (made all the easier and powerful by the fact that they emerged from the mainstream of that putatively liberating force, Enlightenment humanism). Indeed, at times their moral, aesthetic and even corporeal, self-criticism, their dissatisfaction with their own insufficient occidentali- zation, was expressed in explicitly orientalist terms. In 1897, Walther Rathenau wrote (under a pseudonym) that his fellow German Jews with their weak, uncoor- dinated bodies constituted an “Asiatic horde,” a hopelessly conspicuous, foreign organism in the middle of German life. If Jews were to become proper Europeans, they had to decisively shed their Asian being and carriage. Some were even more

4 See especially Chapter 2, Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, 2002.

14 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM radical than that. As one indignant participant-observer declared: “Submerge yourselves, disappear! Disappear, along with your Oriental physiognomies, your character that is so incongruous with its surroundings …”5 Yet, there were ways in which the notion of the Orient was redirected, turned on its head, and transformed into a Jewish virtue, a marker of Jewish pride, even superiority. Benjamin Disraeli is only the most famous exemplar of this trend. This too followed a more general European nineteenth-century romantic fashion which, while still reproducing the essentialist East-West distinction, idealized the Orient, rendered it exotic. Jewish versions replicated many of these themes but also took their own interested turn. In these circles, “The Orient” (Der Orient) was not necessarily a term of opprobrium. Indeed, this was the proudly emblazoned name of an elite nineteenth-century German-Jewish liberal journal devoted to the scientific study of Jewish tradition, literature and culture, its Middle Eastern roots and the period of great Jewish cultural creativity under Islamic rule. In this way, Jewish Wissenschaftlers provided the tools to uncover a respectable and useable past, able to counter-Christian and anti-Jewish narratives. As Ismar Schorsch has shown, the emergent German-Jewish bourgeoisie — seeking models for its own “respectability” and cultural, aesthetic and intellectual creations — turned to what they presented as the superior legacy of rationalist Sephardic Jewry and the golden age of Moorish Spain (which also furnished an implicit critique of both Orthodox Judaism and medieval Christian fanaticism). It served as an exemplary model in numerous fields such as liturgy, synagogue architecture,6 literature, philosophy and scholarship, and fitted perfectly the new integrative ideals of an enlightened emancipation. If broader German Enlightenment culture looked to the classical ancient Greeks (and Romans) for their inspiration, Spanish Jewry in the Moorish age served to supply modernizing Jews with their own classicism. After all, was not Maimonides the great exemplar of secular knowledge and the rational exposition of Judaism — and thus in so many ways the exemplification of the image German Jewry sought to project of itself? These medieval Jews from Arab-Muslim society, Eduard Gans pointed out, were marked by “morality, purer speech, greater order in the synagogue, and in fact better taste.”7 There was noth-

5 Jakob Fromer (a product and critic of Polish Jewry who sought radical assimilation into German culture) wrote this in his Vom Ghetto zur modernen Kultur: Eine Lebensgeschichte, 1906, p. 234, quoted in Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749- 1939: Emancipation and its Discontents, 1999, p. 231. 6 The literature on the fashion of building synagogues in Moorish fashion is quite large. See most recently Ivan Davison Kalmar, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews and Synagogue Architecture,” 2001. See also the massive study by Harold Hammer-Schenk, Synagogen in Deutschland. Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1780-933), 2. vols., 1981, especially pp. 251–301, and Hannelore Künzl, Islamische Stilelemente im Synagogen des 19 und frühen 20. Jahhunderts, 1984, pp. 109–126. 7 See the illuminatingly perceptive and pioneering essay by Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” 1989, pp. 47–66. The Gans quote appears on p. 52.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 15 ing negatively “Oriental” about Spain’s Arabs and Jews — on the contrary, paradoxically, both were the guarantors of rational Western culture. As the great scholar, a Prussian expatriate writing from Paris, Salomon Munk put it: “Jews unquestionably shared with Arabs the distinction of having preserved and disseminated the science of philosophy during the centuries of barbarism and thereby having exercised on Europe for a long time a civilizing influence.” (In this context, the work of Leo Strauss who turned to medieval Arab-Jewish rationalism as a redemptive ideal and a means of critiquing Western relativism and instrumentality, seems less surprising than at first blush.) In 1854, Heinrich Heine developed this theme thus: “In Northern Europe and in America, especially in the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries, among the Germanic peoples … the Palestinian way of life has prevailed. … The genuine, the ageless, the true — the morality of ancient Judaism will bloom in these countries just as acceptably to God as once in the lands by the Jordan and the heights of Lebanon.” In characteristically idiosyncratic manner, Heine reproduced but inverted the usual oriental-occidental dichotomy: “Judea has always seemed to me a fragment of the West which has somehow gotten lost in the East.”8 However one wanted to figure the Jews, the East-West web was somehow implicated. This was also true for non-Jews. Thus, Heine’s great admirer, Friedrich Nietzsche, utilized the same binary but subverted it in even more stark, radical ways, rendering Jews as quintessential Europeans and Christians as Asians. Jews, he declared, not only “had the most grief-laden history of any people,” but had produced the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza) and the most efficacious moral code in the world … in the darkest periods of the Middle Ages, when the cloud of Asia had settled low over Europe, it was the Jewish freethinkers, scholars and physicians who, under the harshest personal constraint, held firmly to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence and defended Europe against Asia; it is thanks not least to their efforts that a more natural, rational and in any event unmythical eluci- dation of the world could at last again obtain victory and the ring of culture that now unites us with the enlightenment of Graeco-Roman antiquity remain unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to Orientalize the Occident, Judaism has always played an essential part in Occidentalizing it again …9 But what about specifically Jewish appropriations? It has by now been well established that for scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, far less of the patronizing Saidian brand of orientalism was to be found. Indeed, at times very close identification rather than supercilious distance applied. The (rather eccentric) and bril- liant Hungarian Semitic scholar Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) wrote of his 1890 stay in Damascus: “I truly entered in those weeks in the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was Muslim and

8 Heinrich Heine (1854), “Moses,” in The Prose and Poetry of Heinrich Heine, 1948, pp. 665–666. 9 “Aphorism 475,” in Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 1986, pp. 174–175 (the quote appears on p. 175).

16 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which, even in its doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophical minds.”10 Islam, in this case, became the basis for his critique of Judaism. Goldziher did not “cross over, ” but some highly colorful (if statistically unrep- resentative) characters in modern Jewish history did convert to Islam, and literally “Orientalized” themselves. Perhaps the first of these was the prolific Hungarian- born, Catholic-educated Orientalist Hermann Bamberger (1832–1913), or Ármin Vámbéry, alias Reshit Efendi, who was intrigued by the Ottoman Empire, became a full Osmanli, published — amongst various other things — a Turkish-German dic- tionary in 1858, and, disguised as a Sunnite dervish, was the first West European to travel the entirety of Central Asia from the Black Sea to Constantinople. Bam- berger converted to Islam in Turkey. True, he then later converted to Protestant- ism (an opportunist move enabling him to be admitted to the [Catholic] Univer- sity of Budapest in 1865!), and is remembered as a double dealer and double agent — he was employed as a spy by the British to combat Russian attempts at gaining ground in Central Asia. He even dabbled in Zionism, promising (but not delivering) in return for payment to arrange a meeting for Theodor Herzl with the Sultan. Symbolically, his letter-head consisted of a Crescent and Star of David. Yet another figure was Kurban Said, the author of the best-selling novel Ali and Nino (1937), an enchanting love story about a Moslem boy and Christian girl set in the tolerant world of old Azerbaijan, who went by the name of “Essad Bey,” and was actually the mysterious adventurer and ultimately tragic Lev Nussim- baum, a Jew born in Baku in 1905, and who died in 1942. Amongst other things, he was the biographer of the Russian czar and Stalin, a Weimar media star, a prominent Hollywood figure in the 1930s, and a shadowy figure who courted Mussolini. He converted to Islam in 1922, which had attracted him from childhood (after all he was actually from the “East”) and which, in addition to his desert romanticism, he regarded as the most inclusive and tolerant of all religions. He presented himself as a Muslim prince and in one of the many delectable ironies of the orientalist saga wrote his Middle East work Allah is Great: The Decline and Rise of the Islamic World (1936), with Wolfgang Weisl — a militant right-wing Zionist and close associate of the revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky (of whom a word later).11 This would have been unthinkable for another equally fascinating but far less mercurial figure, the Galician-born, scion of a long line of rabbis, Leopold Weiss (1900–1992) who, as the young Middle East correspondent for the Frankfurter Zei- tung, wrote in 1923: “in its political aspect, Jerusalem (and Palestine) is the land of uneasy conflicts, which work their way into the lungs like a fine dust, stifling all

10 See Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary, 1987, pp. 20 and 109, quoted in Efron, “Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze,” p. 90. 11 This story is compellingly told in Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught between East and West, 2006.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 17 breath; Zionism has bound itself irrevocably to outside, western powers; and, as such, is a wound in the body of the Near East.”12 He then travelled throughout the Middle East, became entranced with — and in 1926 converted to — Islam: “a perfect work of architecture … nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking … a structure of absolute balance and solid composure”; and changed his name to Muhammad Asad. A great supporter of national liberation movements and, especially, Pakistani independence, he became that country’s first ambassador to the United Nations and drafted the preamble to its Constitution. His translation of the Koran into English has been highly acclaimed. Always pleading for rationality and plurality in Moslem law — which he regarded as the real legacy of its founders — towards the end of his life he became disillusioned by the emerging fundamentalism and fanaticism of fellow Muslims, and moved to Spain where he died in relative obscurity.13 (It is perhaps not accidental that all these Jewish converts tended to liberal interpretations of the Islamic faith). It was our last, exotic figure, the Dutch-born Jacob Israel de Haan who was instrumental in obtaining Leopold Weiss his journalistic assignment in the Middle East. The flamboyant de Haan did not convert to Islam but he certainly can be considered as a kind of radically idiosyncratic orientalist. Born in Smilde in 1881, raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, he was a journalist, legal scholar, school teacher, Social Democrat, and author of some scandalous homoerotic novels which rendered him notorious and virtually unemployable. Perhaps as a result, he turned to Zionism and in 1919 was among the first Dutch Jews to immigrate to Eretz Israel. Very soon, he became disillusioned with Zionism and its treatment of Orthodox Jews and Arabs, joined the virulently anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel, and sought a legal basis for Jewish communal existence and protection under Arab jurisdiction. Indeed, his exposure of dishonest deals related to purchase of Arab lands, his negotiations with Arab elites, his attempt to re- conceive the Orient as an enclave for pious Jews, under the tutelage of British colonialism, and/or in close communion with the Palestine Arabs, rendered him the first victim of Zionist political assassination in 1924. This violence was perhaps rendered more “respectable” because of de Haan’s explicit homosexual oriental poetry, the accusation of being an “Arab lover” stemming directly from his poetry concerning Arab boys.14

12 See Weiss’s piece, “Jerusalem in 1923: The Impressions of a Young European,” 2007, p. 625. I thank Hanan Harif for this reference. 13 On Weiss’s early years see Gunther Windhager, Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad. Von Galizien nach Arabien 1900-1927, 2002. Ben David Amir has an interesting piece, “Leopold of Arabia,” 2001. A full-length documentary has also been produced: “A Road to Mecca: The Personal Journey of Muhammad Asad.” The Wikipedia entry is also informative. 14 The best, and most accessible, analysis, upon which I base my own account is to be found in Michael Berkowitz, “Rejecting Zion: Embracing the Orient: The Life and Death of Jacob Israel de Haan,” pp. 108–124 (notes, pp. 245–250). Berkowitz provides plentiful quotes from de Haan’s Oriental Quatrains poetry. Arnold Zweig’s 1932 novel, De Vriendt kehrt heim, made de Haan and his case famous.

18 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM

Although these are merely marginalia, exotica at the extreme fringes of mainstream Jewish choices, I have spent some time discussing them not only because they are intriguing cases but also because they illustrate a certain openness and fluidity of identitarian possibilities rather different from our own hardened ideologically driven times. We must now, however, turn to yet another, far more central and equally complex chapter of Jewish orientalism. This too sprung out of, and paralleled, more general tendencies, while taking on its own peculiar turns. For a while, as we have seen, the emancipating Western Jewry romanticized Spain’s “Golden Age” — this was a narrative taken from the relatively distant past. Jews who lived in contemporary Islamic countries, were dismissed as primitive; products of a decayed and stagnated civilization. Under the aegis of colonialism, Western and especially French Jews, would employ the universal principles of emancipation and the French Revolution, to undertake what they themselves had previously undergone — “the revolutionary transformative process of ‘regeneration’, a requisite for citizenship.” As Daniel Schroeter has pointed out, as the disparity of power between Europe and the Islamic world grew ever greater, emancipated West European Jewry began to regard the previously venerated Sephardi Jews of Africa and Asia not in terms of their Spanish heritage but as “Orientals,” victims of the unenlightened, oppressive societies in which they lived.15 Enlightened, civilized Jews would have to lift the Jews in the colonies off their bootstraps. This was most visible in the case of Algeria and the work of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, whose patronizing attitudes mixed with a sense of responsibility exemplified precisely the Jewish orientalist turn. But Asia and Africa were very much on the periphery. Of far greater and more immediate concern for modernizing West European Jewry, were their putatively threatening, traditional, un-emancipated brethren on the “East” of their own continent. We should not forget that the Enlightenment map of civilization did not merely apply to the traditional distinction between Arabia and the civilized Occi- dent, but equally to the internal division between Europe’s “backward” Eastern and “progressive” Western components. This was a relatively new disjunction. (During the Renaissance, we should remember, the essential European division was between North and South). But in the second half of the eighteenth century, Western Europe essentially invented Eastern Europe as its complementary negative mirror image. Tellingly, many in the French Enlightenment labeled Eastern Europe as l’orient de l’Europe, the “Orient of Europe.” There, too, the East and the “Orient” served as a generalized kind of metaphor for the alien Other, configured as the dark, backward symbolic antithesis, the necessary opposite for the identity and self-conception of the more powerful, progressive, civilized West.

15 See Daniel Schroeter, “From Sephardi to Oriental: The ‘Decline’ Theory of Jewish Civili- zation in the Middle East and North Africa,” 2008, pp. 125–148. The quote appears on p. 128.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 19

As Jewish “Germanization” or “Westernization” proceeded, increasingly pre- emancipated Polish “ghetto” Jewry became the convenient foil upon which to ex- ternalize and displace what were previously regarded as their own negative “East- ern” characteristics. At the same time, it became a kind of psychological reposi- tory onto which modern Jews could deflect antisemitic sentiments. With time, the very definition of being a German (or West European) Jew was dependent upon the distinction between modern and, what was called, backward and ignorant East European “Asian” forms of Judaism. This common rendering by German Jews of their East European (particularly Galician) brethren as Asiaten — their attempt to deflect and pass on negative characteristics previously attributed to them — does indeed fit Khazzoom’s metaphor of a “chain” of orientalism. Yet, this does not quite capture the ongoing web-like entanglement of the discourse, nor its much more complex, and occasionally even ironic character. For, while Western and Central European Enlightenment orientalism labeled Eastern Europe as a cradle of barbarism, and thus also legitimized German-Jewish negative images of the Ostjuden, they also provided the basis for their ongoing sense of (albeit patronizing) responsibility for their Eastern Jewish cousins. Western Jews would now assume the task of civilizing their brethren and taking them out of their misery on the basis of their own newly acquired Bildung and Enlightenment. (The same applied, too, as we have seen, to the Jews of Islamic countries, except in those cases the frame was explicitly colonial). To be sure, this patronizing, di- dactic moment — viewing other cultures through the spectacles, standards and narratives of one’s own putatively superior society — is an essential component of the orientalist impulse. Yet, here it was mediated and complicated by an ongoing dialectical tension between dissociation, on the one hand, and a nagging sense of solidarity, responsibility and identification, even nostalgia, on the other hand — aspects clearly absent from the conventional orientalist paradigm.16 This complexity is even evident in the work of Karl Emil Franzos, the person who perhaps articulated the liberal post-Enlightenment German-Jewish stereotype of the Ostjude, the East European Jew, in its most definitive literary, cultural and political form. On the one hand, Franzos articulated a clear brand of German cultural colonialism. Jews, like other peoples in Galicia and elsewhere, were products of what he called “half-Asia.”17 This was not merely a geographical designation but more a cultural state of mind, a strange amalgam of European forms and Asian barbarism. Franzos’s Jews lived unmistakably narrow, repressed and dirty

16 I deal with these questions in much greater detail, especially in Chapter 2, of Brothers and Strangers, 1999. See too Richard I. Cohen, “Nostalgia and ‘return to the ghetto’: a cultural phenomenon in Western and Central Europe,” 1992, pp. 130–155, and Jonathan M. Hess, “Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of German Jewish Ghetto Fiction,” 2007, 576–615. It should be stressed, however, that nostalgia is a condition afforded only because that past has been transcended. 17 Franzos’s stories of these areas was entitled Aus Halb-Asien (1876). See his foreword to vol. 1, 1914, by which time this had reached its fifth edition.

20 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM lives. His writings clearly reflected the Enlightenment distaste for “ghetto” life. There was no possibility of an equal relationship here — these poor creatures had to be educated and elevated to Franzos’s own condition of Bildung.18 This fitted both into a classical orientalist mind-set and a specifically Jewish commitment. For that commitment implied certain differences from more generalized forms of orientalism. Jews, for Franzos, were “half-Asian” because they lived within the larger oppressive cultural and political boundaries of Eastern Europe and were victims of their circumstances. Thus, his much-quoted, deli- ciously ambivalent dictum: “Denn — jedes Land hat die Juden, die es verdient.” (Every country gets the Jews it deserves). Moreover, through all this paternalism, his work does occasionally betray a certain identifying sympathy with his subjects, an empathy that threatens to crack his own putative ideological and conceptual framework. Perhaps this derives from the fact that Franzos’s own identity and position was itself unclear and unstable, “not comfortably in the middle of the German and the Jewish, the Western and the Eastern.”19 This, indeed, was a more general plight. Any kind of acknowledged Jewishness necessarily placed limits on a wholly stigmatizing orientalism, because for such Jews it entailed working out the complexities of an explicit ethnic or religious relationship and responsibility with their Eastern brethren. Indeed, the complicating, differentiating factor here derived from the emotional and existential dimension, the (albeit ambivalent) sense of family affinity. Thus, Franzos justified his activities regarding Eastern Jews as saving “our unfortunate brothers in faith” [emphasis mine]. Perhaps the most profound source of both attachment and resentment was contained in the statement of one observer who claimed that for West- ern Jews, Eastern Jews were simply “the images of our own fathers.” But, of course, towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, for some dissenting sections of Central European Jewry, there was not only a kind of reluctant acknowledgement of kinship but rather a serious counter-movement in which East European Jewry and the category of the “Oriental” itself seemed to merge in an impulse of radical affirmation. This Jewish turn, as always, paralleled a more general anti-positivist fashion of the time, one that sought inspiration in the mystic, the mythical and the occult, in the warm wisdom of Eastern religions putatively lost in the soulless, bourgeois, over- rationalized West.20 The “cult of the Ostjuden” — which involved mainly second-

18 One should note that Franzos’s ideal of Germanization was not one of political hegemony but rather a cultural ideal. Deutschtum represented a kind of humane standard by which nations could measure their own particular cultural progress. See my treatment of Franzos in Brothers and Strangers, 1999, esp. pp. 27–31. There, I was not sufficiently sensitive to Fran- zos’s own indeterminacies, a matter which I stress below. 19 This has been emphasized by Leo W. Riegert, Jr. in his “Subjects and Agents of Empire: German Jews in Post-Colonial Perspective,” 2009, 336–335. The quotes appear on p. 350. 20 On the general as well as Jewish aspects of this mood, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de Sié- cle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Self-Affirmation” in his Divided Pas-

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 21 generation Zionists but also such non-Zionist luminaries as Franz Kafka, Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig — similarly inverted the negative stereotype of the East as backward, narrow, obscurantist, and now portrayed Ostjuden as the em- bodiment of authenticity, community, spirituality. These now were the “genuine” Jews as opposed to their deracinated, superficial Western Jewish cousins. Eastern Jewish life in the ghetto was whole and organic, not torn, tortured and fragmented as were the assimilated Central European Jews. Of course, such post-liberal romantic idealizations were common to the positive side of other orientalisms. But what again set the Jewish variety apart, as the journal Ost und West put it, was the primordial conviction that all Jews “shared the same inherited characteristics.” Franz Rosenzweig indignantly insisted that the “cultural mania”21 of emancipation could not erase “something inside the individual that makes him a Jew, something infinitesimally small yet immeasurably large, his most impenetrable secret, yet evident in every gesture and every word — especially in the most spontaneous of them.”22 The most important figure in this trans-valuation, Martin Buber — who rendered the previously despised mystical Hasidism as the fount of the spiritual and genuine — (in keeping with other völkisch ideas of the time) now developed the idea of the “community of blood”; one that far from differentiating between Jews would unite them all (especially the deracinated Western ones) in a “deeper-reaching” unity. The Ostjuden were to be perceived “not merely as our brothers and sisters … every one of us will feel: these people are part of myself. … My soul is not by the side of my people; my people is my soul.”23 Buber portrayed Hasidism with its fervor and dedication as revealing “anew the limitless power of Oriental man,” an exemplar of “Asiatic strength and Asiatic in- wardness.” Yet, he went even further than that. In seeking a suitable counter- narrative of positive Jewish identity, he presented the whole of Judaism as emerging out of “the spirit of the Orient:” The “supreme sublimation of the Oriental’s motor character, the pathos of a divine command, attained its greatest intensity in Judaism.” The Jew, Buber insisted, had been driven out of his land and dispersed throughout the Occident, “yet despite all this, he has remained an Oriental.”24 Here was an invaluable gift that Jews could bring to an increasingly mechanized soulless Europe.

sions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity, 1991, pp. 77–132. The sudden popularity of Schopenhauer’s thought both fuelled and reflected this current. Symptomatically (see Mendes-Flohr, p. 77), a central charismatic sage of this orientalism was the flamboyant Omar al Raschid Bey — clad “in Bedouin robes, a bright yellow and green cummerbund, a red fez, and high leather boots” — a Jewish convert to Islam, Friedrich Arndt-Kürnberg. 21 Rosenzweig, 1955, p. 58. 22 Ibid. 23 Buber developed these ideas in his famous 1909 lectures to the Prague Bar Kochba group. See his talk “Judaism and the Jews” in Martin Buber, On Judaism, 1967, pp. 11–21. The quote appears on p. 20. 24 See Buber’s Bar Kochba Lecture, “The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,” op. cit., pp. 56–78.

22 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM

Freud’s photographic collection of “Oriental” types includes a striking portrait of his cousin Moritz in Arab garb. Keeping this, Leo Lensing has argued, may have been part of Freud’s interest “in the ways in which modern Jews could experiment with or at least fantasize about hybrid identities that undermined the rigid categories of anti-Semitism.”25 At any rate, in the face of increasing Weimar antisemitism, orientalist rhetoric became more widely diffused, even for people who were far removed from the organized Jewish community, let alone Zionism. Thus, famous though rather perplexed writers such as Jakob Wassermann26 and Lion Feuchtwanger27 loudly declaimed the privileged virtues of orientalism and their own identity as in some way embodying “Oriental” wisdom. This consciously mythologizing self-definition served as a rather non-persuasive and vain strategy, a consolatory alternative völkisch source of identity in a society that increasingly rejected them and which, in turn they could use as a means of either now critiquing the West or asserting one’s unique contribution to or even superiority over it. The paradox of all these Orientalisms consists in the fact that they were essentially European counter-myths, ideas conceived with a European context and in European categories and hardly meant as serious calls to actively de- Europeanize and “Orientalize” themselves. While all these manifestations belong to the history of Jewish orientalism, we must now turn our attention to where these issues remain urgently contemporary, at the fault line of international geo-politics and root existential dilemmas. For, clearly, it is with the ideology and practice of Zionism (and the State of Israel) that the problematic threads of occidentalism and orientalism were — and continue to be — most thickly, dangerously and dialectically entangled. We should begin by saying that from the outset, political Zionism’s relationship to both Europe and the “Orient” was dense and deeply ambivalent. Zionism, after all, is inconceivable outside the contours of European history. It was not only a reaction to that continent’s virulent outbursts of antisemitism, but derived the very model of its nationalism and related ideals and categories from Europe. It incorporated both the negation and the emulation of the — variously interpreted — European experience. It represented the simultaneous desire to leave its shores and yet, in many ways, to recreate and perpetuate it.28

25 See Leo A. Lensing, “Altered images” (a review of Mary Bergstein’s Mirrors of Memory: Freud, photography and the history of art), 2011, p. 13. 26 See Wassermann’s, “Der Literat,” Imaginäre Brücken: Studien und Aufsätze, 1921, p. 147. Wa s- sermann wrote repeatedly on this theme. See his “Der Jude als Orientale,” in Vom Judentum. Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Hans Kohn, 1913, and in Daimon, 1918, 28–32. Vom Judentum exemplified both the cult of the Ostjuden and this brand of orientalism, culled from a critique of bourgeois liberal positivism and rationalism and inspired by the revival of mysticism, myth and the discovery of primal “unconscious” drives. 27 For a very interesting exposition and critique of Feuchtwanger’s orientalism see Paul Levesque, “Mapping the Other: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Topographies of the Orient,” 1998, 145–165. 28 Arthur Hertzberg formulated this with great insight albeit a little differently. Zionism, he wrote, represented “the attempt to achieve the consummation of the freedom the modern

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 23

Political Zionism’s founding father Theodor Herzl embodied these tensions. Jews, he believed, had to be rescued from the (insufficiently recognized) barbaric potential of a murderous European antisemitism. Most Jews would have to get out of Europe. Yet, his vision of national liberation had very little that was traditionally Jewish or “Oriental” about it. His new society was to be an improved liberal, scientific and technological version of Europe, not a negation of it. German, not He- brew, was to be the privileged future language and society was to be organized not along clerical lines but as a kind of blend between progressive capitalist and collective principles. Additionally, the perception of Israel as a kind of colonial Western outpost derives partly from this vision and Herzl’s politicking with imperial powers. It was precisely this resentment of Herzl’s putatively “assimilationist” attitude that provided the pretext for early Zionism’s internal disjunction between Ostjuden and Westjuden. The leading East European Zionist, Achad Ha’am, voiced fears that Zionism had been so permeated with the standards of foreign culture, “that in the end the Jewish State will be a State of Germans or Frenchmen of the Jewish race.”29 In his angry, unabashed reply — made at a time before Eurocentricism was frowned upon — Max Nordau, Herzl’s most famous ally inverted Heine’s previous comment that “Judea has always seemed to me a fragment of the West which has somehow gotten lost in the East” by proudly proclaiming that “Altneuland is a piece of Europe in Asia.” “Achad Ha’am,” he acidly commented, “might see Euro- pean culture as foreign — we will make it accessible to him.” The future Jewish State was to be a liberal one, part of the cultural framework of Western and Central Europe, not derived “from an anti-cultural, wild Asientum as Achad Ha’am seems to desire.”30 If the first generation of Western Zionism sought to unite all Jews in a single nation, it also replicated the orientalizing distinction. As Franz Oppenheimer made utterly clear: We cannot be Jewish by culture because the Jewish culture, as it has been preserved from the Middle Ages in the ghettoes of the East, stands infinitely lower than modern culture which our [Western] nations bear. We can neither regress nor want to … Eastern Jews … must be Jews by culture for the medieval Jewish culture stands exactly as far above East European barbarism as it is beneath the culture of Western Europe.31

world promised the Jew as clearly as it is the blasting of that hope; it is the drive of Jewry to be part of society in general as much as, or even more than, it is the call to retreat; and it is the demand for a more complete involvement in modern culture, at least as much as it is the reassertion of the claim of older, more traditional loyalties.” See the “Introduc- tion” to his anthology, The Zionist Idea, 1975, p. 21. 29 For this quote see Brothers and Strangers, op. cit., p. 90. 30 Ibid., p. 91, note 34. See too Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin-de-Siécle: Cosmopol- itanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky, 2001, p. 17. 31 This represents a classic, specific form of German-Jewish orientalism, in that it both articu- lates a Western and German-Jewish superiority over the East, yet maintains an inner Jewish superiority when it comes to the East itself. See Oppenheimer’s “Stammesbewusstein und Volksbewusstein,” in Die Welt, 1910, and in Jüdische Rundschau, 1910. The present transla-

24 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM

One of the later great ironies of this entangled story is the fact that it was these very East European Jews who constituted the driving force in the creation of a new State with Western secular norms and institutions. As one observer causti- cally put it, “the Asians of Europe” became the “Europeans of Asia.”32 This of course naturally emerges from the fact that Zionism was constituted as essentially a modernizing movement. But from the perspective of the orientalist paradigm, Ostjuden (or, as they became known, Ashkenazim), now presented themselves, and were perceived as quintessential Europeans. It is these “Ashkenazim” who were the founding fathers, institution-builders and tone-setters of the new society. As a result, many of the negative, backward characteristics that were previously applied to these East European Jews themselves were now directed at the Jewish masses from Arab countries who after 1948 poured into the new State. Of course, it was not difficult to ascribe “Oriental” characteristics to these new immigrants because they were from Arab and Islamic countries. Moreover, as we have already seen, prior to their coming there already existed a crystallized stereotype of what were taken to be decayed and non-productive Asian and African societies. These immigrants were thus stigmatized as rather primitive people who were rescued from inferior cultures and in need of transformative “civilizing” measures according to Western norms. As Abba Eban put it: “the object should be to infuse [the Sephardim] with an Occidental spirit, rather than allow them to drag us into an unnatural Orientalism.”33 There is, indeed, a growing radical literature which argues that these Sephardim constitute the Jewish victims of Zionism.34 Their patronizing resettlement at the periphery, the cutting off of ear-locks, the humiliating treatment as possibly infectious creatures — including DDT delousing — remains a deep scar in their collective memory. Yet, again, the web of Jewish orientalism differed from, was thicker and more complex than the more general orientalisms which were based upon a superior brand of identity-defining distance. For “backward” as these Jews may have been held to be, they were still considered to have the same roots and heritage and slated to become part of the nation, integrated into the Jewish collectivity.35 Here

tion appears in Stephen M. Poppel, Zionism in Germany 1897-1933: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity, 1977, p. 58. 32 The formulation is that of Yehouda Shenhav. See his insightful The Arab Jews: A Postcolo- nial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity, 2006, p. 6. Aziza Khazzoom’s book, Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel, 2008, puts it even more bluntly: “Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual.” 33 See Eban, Voice of Israel, 1957, p. 76. 34 For a particularly forceful post-Zionist formulation of this position see Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” 1988, pp. 1–35. 35 There are other important differences to be noted. Both the general non-Jewish labeling of Jews in Europe as “Asian” or “Eastern” and the stereotyping by Western and German Jews of Ostjuden, took place within contexts that rendered their textures and consequences quite different from the Israeli case. Within Europe the fact of Jewish vulnerable minority status constituted the driving force. The fact of sovereign Jewish rule in Israel — in principle open

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 25 was a politics both of belonging and difference. Once again numerous hybrid moments in the East-West categorization applied: while oriental Jews were regularly regarded as a rather backward non-European Other, a Levantinizing threat unless educated in higher Western ways, for different purposes they were also portrayed as the authentic ancient Jews, primordial embodiments of a long historical textual tradition, exemplifying continuity and still colorful folkways and folklore.36 Most critically, however, if Jews from Arab countries were regarded with patronizing orientalist eyes, it was also deemed necessary, given the Israel-Arab conflict, to radically “de-Arabize” them, to decisively mark the gulf, the ontological differences between them and the Arabs, Zionism’s ultimate “Other.” Of this “in-between” status of the “Mizrachim” (“Easterners”), Yehouda Shenhav and Shohan Melamed have provocatively noted: “They were caught between promises of inclusion and practices of exclusion, between the Zionist West and the Arab East, between conflicting perceptions of them as ‘authentic’ Jews and primitive ‘others’.”37 To be sure, “Mizrachim” are far more integrated today in Israeli society than they were even 20 or 30 years ago. Many are — often indistinguishably — to be found at the commanding heights of the polity and the economy. “Mizrachi” music, which before was a suspect, virtually underground phenomenon, has deeply penetrated Israeli popular culture. Yet, despite these great integrative strides, at a more general level a certain “in-betweenness” persists. The Orthodox Shas party — a party that explicitly purports to represent the traditional and under privileged Mizrachim — is determinedly neither Arab nor Ashkenazi. Still, if certain tensions and resentments against Ashkenazim remain, far more powerful is the felt, urgent need to distinguish these so-called “Arab Jews” from the Arabs themselves. In the spirit of the deflective chain of orientalism, it should come as no surprise that it is this sector that explicitly voices some of the most anti-Arab political attitudes in the country. Indeed, the (now deposed) leader of the right-wing Orthodox “East- ern” Shas party, Eli Yishai, has recently taken this even further and ironically applied to immigrant workers the same attitudes previously foisted upon “Oriental” Jews themselves. These migrants, he declared, bring with them a “profusion of dis- eases: hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS and drug addiction.”38 (One does not, however, want to leave the wrong historical impression. Present attitudes do not accurately reflect the positions of numerous Sephardi intellectuals who sought to

to the “Mizrachi” population — constitutes a qualitatively distinctive conditioning ingredi- ent. See my “Introduction: Brothers and Strangers Reconsidered” in the paperback edition of Brothers and Strangers, op. cit., p. xxx. While I still hold to this proposition, I do believe that the orientalizing impulse is more important than I previously believed, and this chapter is an attempt to flesh out its dynamics, permutations, and complexities. 36 For a nuanced view of the complexities of the ways in which, specifically Yemenite Jewry, was perceived, see the doctoral dissertation by Noah S. Gerber, “The Cultural Discovery of Yemenite Jewry: Between Ethnography and Philology,” 2009. 37 Shenhav, The Arab Jews, 2006, p. 191. 38 See Niva Lanir, “The rabbi and the role of Big Brother,” 2010, p. 5.

26 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM bridge the widening gap between Zionist and Arab territorial designs in Palestine. Contrary to accepted wisdom, Brit Shalom, which advocated some kind of an equal bi-national solution to the conflict, was not made up entirely of Ashkenazi Jews. Moreover, the radical Mizrachi Black Panther movement of the 1970s had a very conciliatory attitude towards Israeli Arabs). Regardless of the mixed attitudes towards them, Jews from Arab countries were to become part of the nation, integrally absorbed into emerging Israeli society. But what can be said about the native population, the Arabs of Palestine? Perhaps surprisingly, significant aspects of early Zionism were negatively “Occidentalist” in the sense that their image of the Middle East and Arab society was based upon an idealization of the spiritual, fresh and emergent East and a radical rejection of Europe and the West as decadent, exhausted, materialist and alienated. Of course, these schemes inverted but nevertheless retained the terms of the ontological and epistemological dichotomy between the “Oriental” and the “Occidental” in the starkest way.39 Mainly (but not entirely) a pre-World War I phenomenon — when the Jewish presence in Palestine was still insignificant and before the Arab-Jewish divide had hardened and solidified into virtually hermetic categories of enmity — a kind of Zionist pan-Asian or pan-Semitic message emerged. As one figure put it, Zionism was about de-Europeanization, the transformative return of the Jew to his healthy, authentic Eastern essence, based upon the mystical power of the land common to Jew and Arab alike. Thus (admittedly marginal) figures such as Eugen Höflich radically rejected the Zionist colonial attempt to recreate Europe in Palestine — what he described as the attempt to create a “foreign body,” a homeland for “de- orientalized Orientals” — and proposed a kind of geographical and brotherly “an- archic” spiritual union of Asian cultures (Judaism, Arabia, India, China and Ja- pan), in which there would be an “Arab-Jewish Brüderstaat.” “I have dogged myself in the idea of an unconditional Asiatism of Judaism,” he wrote in 1917.40 Höflich’s Zionism differed from the aesthetic and mythical character of other orientalisms and its symbolically cosmetic definitions of identity; it did not seek to “save” Europe or to argue for a mediation or fusion between oriental and Euro- pean virtues, but rather preached actual existential transformation and real political action. For all that, it too reproduced the archetypal East-West cut and its ef- fectiveness was ultimately negligible. Höflich, to be sure, was hardly a representative figure. Still, pan-Semitic Zion- ism was not an exclusively fringe phenomenon. As late as 1923, a key establishment figure, Arthur Ruppin, the great land-settlement authority, imagined the nascent Jewish commonwealth as destined to become an integral, vital part of the

39 For an excellent exposition of these trends, see Saposnik, “Europe and its Orients in Zionist Culture before the First World War,” 2006. Once again, despite all the difference, this can also be located as part of a larger ongoing “European” rejection of Europe and the West. 40 Hoeflich, 1917/1999, p. 29.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 27 modern flowering of a greater Arab civilization on the basis of a common Semitic bond. “We must place ourselves again in the Oriental circle of peoples and together with our racial brothers, the Arabs (and Armenians) create a new cultural community of the near East. More than ever, it seems to me that Zionism can be justified only in terms of the racial belonging of the Jews to the peoples of the near Orient.”41 Other bi-nationalist figures such as Rav Binyamin (Yehoshua Rad- ler-Feldmann) concocted numerous future models upon the notion that the Jews were essentially an Eastern Volk, quite indigestible to the West and to Hans Kohn’s early desire to “overcome” Europe. His critique of European imperialism envisaged a major role that Jews in Palestine could assume within the nationalist “awakening of the Eastern peoples.”42 Some variations consisted of a strange blend of romanticism and hard-boiled political assessment. Thus the right-wing militant Zionist Wolfgang von Weisl — who often wandered in the desert in Muslim dress and who was dubbed “the Jew- ish Lawrence of Arabia” — recognized the upcoming force and vitality of the Mos- lem world, the decline of Europe and urged for a community of interests, dreaming early on of converting the Arabs to Zionism.43 Indeed, this was the period where it was not uncommon to see young Zionists clad in Arab garb and keffiyot. But this alleged appropriation of nativeness had its darker side. For rather than union and identification with the autochthonous population, as one critic has pointed out, this was a kind of claim to indigenous- ness leaving little voice “for the Arabs themselves, their contemporary reality and their rights.”44 Indeed, key Zionist leaders — such as Itzchak Ben Zvi, David Ben Gurion and Ber Borochov — insisted that the “native” Fellahin of Palestine/Eretz Israel were not of Arab origin but derived from the original Jewish agricultural inhabitants and thus bore witness to the Jewish claim to the land.45 Even Buber’s

41 See the entry for April 13, 1923, in Arthur Ruppin, Tagebücher, Briefe, Erinnerungen, 1985, pp. 347–348. I discuss Ruppin and others in a slightly different context in Chapter 1 of Be- yond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad, 2007. There is an additional component to Ruppin’s view within this “Orientalist” context. Thus, he rendered explicit his belief in the (racial as well as cultural) superiority of Ashkenazi over Sephardic-Oriental Jews. See Etan Bloom, “What The Father Had in Mind? Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), cultural identity, weltanschauung and action,” 2007, pp. 330–349, esp. p. 340. Bloom’s depiction of the nature and degree of Ruppin’s racial views have been seriously questioned by Amos Morris- Reich, “Ruppin and the peculiarities of race: A response to Etan Bloom,” 2008, pp. 116– 119. Moreover, (in a personal correspondence of January 2, 2011) Noah Gerber, while con- firming Ruppin’s theoretical views regarding Oriental, especially Yemenite Jews, argues that in practice they were not translated into Ruppin’s actual settlement policies. 42 See his “Der Geist des Orients” in Vom Judentum, op. cit., p. 10, and my Beyond the Border, op. cit., p. 34. 43 On this see Reiss, The Orientalist, 2006, esp. pp. 299–302. 44 See Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective,” 2005, pp. 162–181, esp. p. 169. 45 For the quotes from these three Zionist leaders, see Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009, esp. pp. 187–188. Of course, these convictions were different from the pan- Semitism with which we are here concerned, but based upon a myth of origin and the

28 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM orientalism — despite his later, admirable, bi-national vision of Arab-Jewish cooperation — was based upon a particular vision of the distinctive historical-ethical nature of the Jewish people. Of course, there were those who immediately grasped the unrealistic and romantic nature of many of these visions. Thus, the humanist Zionist Shmuel Hugo Bergman pointed out that actually the rise of Arab nationalism was a product of Western capitalism and modernization, not native Eastern thought. Given their peculiar placement, the role of Zionists, he argued, was thus to act as a mediating bridge between East and West. Moses Calvary most clearly articulated the middle ground. He was, he wrote, aware of the force of both the mindless influence of German nationalism on Zionists, on the one hand, and an exaggerated orientalism, on the other. What was needed was a critical and rational relationship balance between them. “It is clear,” he wrote, “that we are distinct from the German essence, but similarly in the modes that we have chosen as Jews, we also appropriate and perpetuate Western values as part of the European legacy.”46 But these critics too remained poised within the Occidental-oriental web and sought in some way to negotiate between the poles of “East” and “West.” In the insightful words of Arie Bruce Saposnik, in multiple ways early Zionism envisaged itself essentially as “a blend of East and West, members of a composite nation originating in the East, but now deeply influenced by the western civilization in which they had resided for so many centuries … intermediaries in a multi- directional tangle of the disparate and often conflicting meanings of East and West in European and Jewish discourses.”47 Yet, clearly, all the Jewish orientalisms we have been discussing, ultimately and paradoxically, sprung from predicaments and experiences that originated in Europe and were based upon Western categories. The young Gershom Scholem recorded his frustration with this entanglement thus: “It seems to be a paradox,” he wrote in 1916, “that I, a complete and untransformed enemy of Europe (Eu- ropafeind) and a devotee of the new Orient, who wants to be the bearer of a new Juda, must be content with making the move precisely as the teacher of European knowledge (Wissenschaft).”48

claim of priority and right to the Land. Moreover, as Reuven Amitai reports (personal communication, February 5, 2011) there is an ongoing claim that “among the present-day Palestinians are many whose forefathers and mothers were Jews who converted to Islam, although the converted Christians probably represent a much more significant number.” To add yet another dimension, one should mention the “Canaanites,” another stream of Zionism which based itself upon Urethnic origins — and which interestingly combined “Left” and “Right” ingredients. On this movement, see James S. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?: The Canaanite Critique of Israel, 1986. 46 M. C. (Moses Calvary), “Probe,” 1916, pp. 54–56. I am grateful to Adi Gordon for this reference. 47 Saposnik, “Europe and its Orients,” 2006, p. 1114. 48 See entry for January 4, 1916, in Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher 1913-1917, 1995, p. 226.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 29

The dilemmas and ironies remain with us to this day, thoroughly entangled in the perhaps unresolvable “Occidental-Oriental” myths and realities of our own time. Situated in the heart of the Middle East, Israel today stands at the very epi- center of the putative “clash of civilizations.” For some, it represents the embodi- ment, the most conspicuous outpost of the colonizing West in the oppressed, sul- len and resentful, East. For others, it stands as a beacon of democratic light in a dark sea of semi-feudal, authoritarian regimes. Indeed, these dichotomies have become even more stark in view of the apparently intractable Israel-Palestine conflict and the wider confrontation between the Arab-Muslim world and the “Judeo- Christian” West (this increasingly articulated notion is also an ideological construct designed to exclude the Muslim Orient from the legitimate occidental sphere). Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has correctly pointed out, that “real” Arabs could not be “included in the Zionist vision of redemption, and from the outset were considered alien, an opposition in relation to which the Zionist self-image took shape.”49 It is important to point out this was not purely the result of an inherent orientalism, but rather the fact that the Zionist brand of ethnic nationalism was oriented (to coin a phrase) to further the interests, specifically, of the Jewish people (just as Palestinian or Arab nationalism has great difficulty in incorporating Jewish interests), and that from the outset Arabs regarded this as an invasive violation of their land and natural rights. At base, the conflict may indeed be territorial; one of two warring national entities, perhaps even soluble through some kind of rational compromise, but, clearly, at a time of deepening global East-West conflict and the bitter continuation of Palestine-Israel hostilities, orientalist stereotypes reinforce the gulf in order to portray Arabs and Jews as implacable enemies, essentialist symbols of the East and West. I am a historian, not a politician or moralist. My task here, therefore, has been to map some of the major and complex ways in which the archetypal oriental- occidental, East-West axis has been constitutive, deployed, resisted and negotiated within the Jewish experience rather than attempting to provide solutions to the conflicts and problems to which it gives rise. What needs to be noted, however, is the degree to which its framework is shaping questions and positions that have taken center stage both within the international academy and within Israel itself. It is a debate that precisely reflects constant tensions of the wider Zionist inheritance, tied to fundamental dilemmas and quandaries regarding the identity and self-understanding of the State of Israel itself. In its light, some young scholars have radically questioned the prevailing national narrative: Many of us still dream, as did Theodor Herzl in his time, of a petit-bourgeois Central European colony that just happens to be located in the Levant. … Since Orientalism is basically a tool for defining identities, it enables us to imagine ourselves as part of the ‘Western, democratic, enlightened’ world which is locked in constant and irresolvable confrontation with the ‘Eastern, Islamic and primitive’ world and thereby entrenches it-

49 Raz-Krakotzkin, 2005, p. 169.

30 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM

self and justifies the surrounding of Israel with walls that isolate and separate it from, its immediate surroundings.50 Today, many of these Eurocentric assumptions are under question and, while they do not seem to have much immediate political impact, any number of mediating or more or less radical rival narratives are being proposed. In the last few years — and quite obviously related to contemporary political debates — there has been a clear revival of the thesis of the “culture of tolerance” in the Spanish and Islamic world and the Jewish contributions to it: “a counter-history to either the notion of Muslims and Jews as implacable enemies, or the ‘clash of civilization’ model, the supposed fault line between major civilizational entities in which Islam and the West figure most prominently, especially ‘post-9/11’.”51 Moreover, recently, historians have been emphasizing that the Western stereotype of the Muslim Ori- ent has been inextricably connected with images of the Jews and that this mutual “Otherness” constitutes another deep structural affinity. The medieval “classification of the Jews together with the Muslims,” Jeremy Cohen has written, are merely “subsets in a larger genus of hermeneutically constructed infideles who undermine the unity of Christian faith.”52 There has even been a recent attempt — by Gil Anidjar — to reread the entirety of European history as being structured by its relation to both Arab and Jew, in which the construction of its enemies, the Jews as theological enemy, and the Arab as political enemy, becomes inscribed into the very marrow of Europe’s self-definition. Europe is the site in which the two figures, “Arab” and “Jew,” emerge as enemies of the continent — but also of each other.53 There is no doubt that contemporary events have helped to sharpen such narratives just as the ideological counter to this has been the recent insistent assertion of a symbiotic and venerable “Western Judeo-Christian” tradition in

50 See the perceptive piece by Tom Segev, “Feuding Orientalists,” 2007, p. 13. The point here is not to agree or take issue with such a standpoint, but rather to underline the degree to which such questions are not merely academic, but rather urgently existential. Of course, many Israeli institutions — parliament, the rule of law, civil society, etc. — and much of its normative, intellectual and high culture remains in thrall to the liberal European model. Its constant self-invocation as “an enlightened” polity and society posits both an implicit and explicit negative contrast with its Middle Eastern neighbors and sometimes its own inhabitants. Much of this may have been patronizing and disdainful of other cultures. But one wonders if things could have developed otherwise. For the late-nineteenth- and twentieth- century business of modern state-building and the creation of a new national culture and identity went virtually hand in hand with European ideas and the (negative and positive) models it provided. Few, I think, would want such key institutions to be abandoned. 51 Aschheim, 2012, p. 37. 52 See Jeremy Cohen, “The Muslim Connection, or On the Changing Role of the Jew in High Medieval Theology,” in his From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Christians in Medieval Christian Thought, 1996, pp. 141–162; the quotation appears on p. 162. For an earlier study, see Allan and Helen Cutler, The Jew as the Ally of the Muslim, 1986. 53 See Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, 2003. Anidjar’s radical Schmit- tian-Derridean analysis contains some interesting and challenging insights but is marred by an insistence on an arcane, at times virtually incomprehensible, post-modernist jargon.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 31 which Muslims are conspicuously absent, implicitly or explicitly figured as the indigestible Other.”54 Radical re-readings of, and challenges to, the hegemonic Zionist narrative have of late also emerged in Israel. Raz-Krakotzkin argues that Jewish history “must be written from the place where the Jews were defined as such: from the Orient, from that ambivalent place that combines the perspective of the colonizer with that of the colonized. This means liberating the dialectics of East/West and colonizer/colonized from their binary prison.”55 Whether or not such a re-reading will take place, the very borders, cultural as well as geographical, the political directions, indeed the root self-definition of Israeli society — as variously (and sometimes exclusively) “Jewish,” a State of all its citizens, as multicultural, a “Mediterranean society,” an integral part of the Middle East, a Western liberal democracy — remain more than ever in basic contestation. The stakes are enormous and no quick or simple resolution is in sight. What is clear, however, is that the entanglement within the occidental-oriental web is as powerful as ever and regardless of the many attempts to undermine, soften, mediate, bridge, celebrate or reinforce the East-West dichotomy, it seems to remain at the contested, defining heart of the modern Jewish experience — and perhaps unwittingly, at the storm center of world political conflict.

Works Cited

Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Aschheim, Steven E. At the Edges of Liberalism. Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Aschheim, Steven E. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Berkowitz, Michael. “Rejecting Zion: Embracing the Orient: The Life and Death of Jacob Israel de Haan.” In Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan D. Kalmar and

54 This notion too is partly, of course, an ideological construct. Deborah Dash Moore dates its emergence to the Second World War in which American Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers fought together and as a result the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish chaplains conducted joint services. Democracy and Judeo-Christianity formed a natural alliance or were seen as identical: “What had formerly been three distinct religious traditions were now part of a collective tradition.” See her GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, 2004. The quote appears on p. 123. There is no doubt that as the “clash of civilizations” has become a dominant theme so, too, has this ideology come increasingly to the fore. As a foundational narrative, this may indeed be new, but the seeds of notions combining Christian and Jewish values and traditions has an exceedingly long pedigree. 55 See Raz-Krakotzkin, 2005, p. 179.

32 STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM

Derek J. Penslar. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2005, pp. 108–124. Bloom, Etan. “What The Father Had in Mind? Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), cultural identity, weltanschauung and action.” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 330–349. Buber, Martin. On Judaism. New York: Schocken Books, 1967. Calvary, Moses. “Probe.” Der Jude 1/1 (1916): 54–56. Cohen, Jeremy. From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Christians in Medieval Christian Thought. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996. Cohen, Richard I. “Nostalgia and ‘return to the ghetto’: a cultural phenomenon in Western and Central Europe.” In Assimilation and Community: The Jews in nineteenth century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 130–155. Cutler, Allan and Helen Cutler. The Jew as the Ally of the Muslim. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. Diamond, James S. Homeland or Holy Land?: The Canaanite Critique of Israel. Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Eban, Abba. Voice of Israel. New York: Horizon Press, 1957. Efron, John M. “Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze.” In Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2005, pp. 80–93. Franzos, Karl E. Aus Halb-Asien. Stuttgart and Berlin, 1914[1876]. Fromer, Jakob. Vom Ghetto zur modernen Kultur: Eine Lebensgeschichte. Charlotten- burg, 1906. Gerber, Noah S. “The Cultural Discovery of Yemenite Jewry: Between Ethnogra- phy and Philology.” PhD diss., 2009. Hammer-Schenk, Harold. Synagogen in Deutschland. Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1780–933). Hamburg, 1981. Heine, Heinrich. “Moses.” In The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, trans. Frederic Ewen. New York: The Citadel Press, 1948 [1854], pp. 665–666. Hertzberg, Arthur. The Zionist Idea. New York: Atheneum, 1975. Hess, Jonathan M. “Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of German Jewish Ghetto Fiction.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 97.4 (2007): 576–615. Hess, Jonathan M. Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Hoeflich, Eugen. Tagebücher 1915 bis 1927. Ed. Armin A. Wallas. Wien: Böhlau, 1999. Kalmar, Ivan D. “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews and Synagogue Architec- ture.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 7.3 (2001): 68–100. Kalmar, Ivan D. and Derek J. Penslar. Orientalism and the Jews. Hanover and Lon- don: Brandeis University Press, 2005.

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE AND THE ENTANGLED WEB OF ORIENTALISM 33

Khazzoom, Aziza. “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Man- agement, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel.” American Sociological Review 68.4 (2003): 481–510. Khazzoom, Aziza. Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel. Stanford: Stan- ford University Press, 2008. Künzl, Hannelore. Islamische Stilelemente im Synagogen des 19 und frühen 20. Jahhun- derts, Frankfurt, 1984. Lanir, Niva. “The rabbi and the role of Big Brother,” Ha’aretz, February 8, 2010, 5. Lensing, Leo A. “Altered images,” review Mirrors of Memory: Freud, photography and the history of art, by Mary Bergstein, Times Literary Supplement, January 21, 2011. Levesque, Paul. “Mapping the Other: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Topographies of the Orient.” The German Quarterly 71.2 (1998): 145–165. Marchand, Suzanne L. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Moder- nity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Moore, Deborah D. GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Morris-Reich, Amos. “Ruppin and the peculiarities of race: A response to Etan Bloom.” History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 116–119. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Stammesbewusstein und Volksbewusstein.” In Die Welt 14.7, February 18, 1910. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Stammesbewusstein und Volksbewusstein.” Jüdische Rund- schau 15.8, February 25, 1910. Patai, Raphael. Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary. Detroit: Wayne State Uni- versity Press, 1987. Poppel, Stephen M. Zionism in Germany 1897-1933: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977. Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective.” In Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2005, pp. 162–181. Reiss, Tom. The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught between East and West. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Riegert, Leo W. Jr. “Subjects and Agents of Empire: German Jews in Post-Colonial Perspective.” The German Quarterly 82.3 (2009): 336–335. Robertson, Ritchie. The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749-1939: Emancipa- tion and its Discontents. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Rosenzweig, Franz. On Jewish Learning. Ed. N. N. Glatzer. Madison: The Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1955.

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Ruppin, Arthur. In Tagebücher, Briefe, Erinnerungen, ed. Shlomo Krolik. Königstein: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum, 1985, pp. 347–348. Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso, 2009. Saposnik, Arieh B. “Europe and its Orients in Zionist Culture before the First World War. ” The Historical Journal 49.04 (2006): 1105–1123. Scholem, Gershom. Tagebücher 1913-1917. Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995. Schorsch, Ismar. “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXIV (1989): 47–66. Schroeter, Daniel. “From Sephardi to Oriental: The ‘Decline’ Theory of Jewish Civilization in the Middle East and North Africa.” In The Jewish Contribution to Civilization: Reassessing an Idea, ed. Jeremey Cohen and Richard I. Cohen. Ox- ford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008, pp. 125–148. Segev, Tom. “Feuding Orientalists,” Ha’aretz, December 7, 2007, 13. Shenhav, Yehouda. The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Shohat, Ella. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims.” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin-de-Siécle: Cosmopolitanism and National- ism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. Oakland: University of California Press, 2001. Wassermann, Jakob. “Der Jude als Orientale.” Daimon 1.1 (1918): 28–32. Wassermann, Jakob. “Der Jude als Orientale.” In Vom Judentum. Ein Sammelbuch, ed. Hans Kohn. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1913. Wassermann, Jakob. Imaginäre Brücken: Studien und Aufsätze. Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921. Weiss, Leopold. “Jerusalem in 1923: The Impressions of a Young European.” In Europe’s Gift to Islam Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss), ed. M. Ikram Chaghatai. New Delhi: Adam Publishers, 2007, p. 625. Windhager, Gunther. Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad. Von Galizien nach Arabien 1900-1927. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2002.

“The Jewes did Indianize; or the Indians doe Judaize”: Philo-Semitism and anti-Judaism as Topoi of Colonial Discourse. A Case Study*

Ulrike Brunotte

In medieval Europe, and increasingly in the Protestant missionary literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Judaism already served as a template to describe foreigners and define the nature of non-Christians. However, “Old Israel” was also a vehicle for defining a new Christian identity, especially in the Puritan millenarian project of building a “New Jerusalem” in the American wilderness from the early seventeenth century on. In early New England, the “use of the Jew in colonial discourse”1 was to build an identity as God’s Chosen People, a process that converged in the notion that the “Indians” were descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Here, the New World became “the appointed site for the millennial encounter of clockwise and counter-clockwise Israelites: the Indian descendants of Shem and Eber bearing themselves eastward, their civil tabula rasa more and more degenerate, but uncorrupted by gentile civility; and the Puritan Israelites bearing westward the Hebrew Scriptures, with their heretofore undiscovered models for re- generate civility.”2 This chapter works with Puritan colonial writings,3 from Europe via the Ply- mouth plantation to the collapse of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s importance.4 Studies of the role of the Jews in European colonial discourse, to which Tudor Par- fitt5 added new insights, gain further inspiration from Bryan Cheyette, who brings

* A version of this chapter was first published as an article in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (Brunotte, Ulrike. “From Nehemia Americanus to Indianized Jews.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2015): 1–20, DOI: 10.1080/14725886.2015.1014215) and is reprinted with permission. Translated by Kate Sturge. 1 Parfitt, Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, 2005, p. 51. 2 Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-century England and America, 1987, p. 115. 3 For a more detailed treatment of these sources, see Brunotte, Puritanismus und Pioniergeist. Die Faszination der Wildnis im frühen Neu-England, 2000; also Brunotte, “Die Lost Ten Tribes in Amerika. Millenarismus, puritanische Identität und die endzeitliche Rolle der Juden,” 2009a. 4 Initiated in 1999 at John Carter Brown Library, the project has already led to several publications in German, in particular the monograph Puritanismus und Pioniergeist (Puritanism and the Pioneer Spirit) of 2000. This contextualizes the colonial trope of the lost tribes within Puritan millenarian theology and the complex historical colonial contact situation. 5 Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, 2002; Parfitt, “The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse,” 2005; Parfitt, Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, 2013.

36 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE together “the histories of racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.”6 Clearly, anti-Jewish discourse in the early modern period was based on religious and ethnic difference, rather than on biological difference as in modern racism. However, George Frederickson7 argues that the category of race was co-constituted with that of religion at an early stage, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, while Nasar Meer8 speaks of a pre-modern “racialization” associated with religion and James Thomas points out that not only do the discourses of modern racism “antedate the social taxonomies arising out of nineteenth-century scientific thought, but it was Christianity which provided the vocabularies of difference for the Western world.”9 Some 30 years ago, Edward Said10 noted the similarity between Orientalism and antisemitism. As has been suggested by Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar and underlined by Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig and Axel Stähler,11 the scope of Said’s Orientalism should be broadened to include “the study of colonialism in general as a discursive phenomenon.”12 The last 10 years have seen increased interest in the role played by the omnipresent discursive concept of Jew- ishness in early American constructions of otherness. Notably, in New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America, Michael Hoberman reconstructs the “history of proximity and often contradictory encounters”13 that took place more on the level of discourse than in lived experience. It was David Chidester who began to relocate the discipline of comparative religion in the context of colonial frontier discourses. While his first book, Savage Systems, explored comparative religion in one colonized periphery (the southern African frontiers) and his new study Empire of Religion focuses on the metropolitan center, both books apply the same fruitful methodological and theoretical approach. Savage Systems argued that “comparative religion was at the forefront of the production of knowledge within these new power relations,”14 and Chidester later showed that a “frontier comparative religion” was practised by European travellers, missionaries, settlers and colonial agents in “open frontier zones and closed systems of colonial domination.”15 With reference to Mary Louise Pratt’s

6 Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History, 2013, p. 7. 7 Frederickson, Racism: A Short History, 2003. 8 Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia, 2013, p. 1. 9 Thomas, “The Racial Formation of Medieval Jews: A Challenge to the Field,” 2010, 1738– 1739. 10 Said, Orientalism, 1978, p. 27. 11 Brunotte/Ludewig/Stähler (eds.), Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Trans- formations of European National Discourses, 2015. 12 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005, p. xvii. 13 Glasser, “Invisible Hebrews: Jews in Early America,” 2014, 207. 14 Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, 1996, p. 1. 15 Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion, 2014, p. x.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 37 concept of the colonial contact zone,16 Chidester proposed the term “colonial frontier” as a fiercely contested zone where knowledge was produced and im- pacted in both directions.17 Ever since the rise of merchant capitalism, knowledge of “alien” religions and indigenous civilizations had been inextricably linked to the project of European expansion, while also fostering discourses on similarity and difference. These were by no means homogeneous, and underwent dramatic ruptures in the course of colonial history. Thus, the early narratives of colonial hegemony, proposed by missionaries, travellers and colonial officials from around 1500 into the seventeenth century, revolved around the negation of indigenous religion — the claim that it did not exist.18 A proto-racist19 stigmatization arose from the inference that where there was no religion, there was also no culture: “In many cases, the diagnosis of an alien society without religion was delivered bluntly in the assertion that such people were brutes or beasts.”20 That, in turn, lent legitimacy to the colonial incursion. Another important topos found even in early colonial knowledge production, during the Catholic conquest of America, was the notion that the indigenous population originally consisted of Jews who had rejected the Christian gospel and thus become the allies of Satan. Sometimes, this anti-Judaic model also identified the American indigenous people with the savage warrior peoples of Gog and Ma- gog who, according to the Apocalypse of John, will be recruited by Satan for his battle against Christ at the end of days.21 As Parfitt has impressively demonstrated, images of Europe’s “internal colonized,”22 the Jews — also characterized in antisemitic discourses as an “Asiatic race” or people of “inner blackness”23 — served many colonial missions and writings as prototypes to represent a whole range of foreign peoples: “From the very beginning of European expansion Juda- ism was employed in the decipherment of religions, and Jewish ancestry was used as likely explanations [sic] for the peoples Europeans encountered.”24

16 Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992. 17 Chidester, 1996, p. xiv. 18 Ibid., p. 11. See also Brunotte, “Religion und Kolonialismus,” 2009b. 19 I use the term “proto-racism” in the sense set out by Benjamin Isaac (although his study focuses on classical antiquity), to refer to the deployment of stereotypical, naturalized ascriptions of “otherness” before the formation of modern biological racism (Isaac, The In- vention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, 2004). 20 Chidester, 1996, p. 14. 21 Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, 2002. 22 Jonathan Hess (Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, 2002) coined this term. 23 The practice of equating Jews and Black people has a long history, and the notion of “inner blackness” took shape within nineteenth-century antisemitic discourse. See Bruns, “To- wards a Transnational History of Racism: Wilhelm Marr and the Interrelations between Colonial Racism and German Anti-Semitism,” 2011. 24 Parfitt, “The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse,” 2005, p. 53.

38 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE

In her groundbreaking work “The Pastoral Impulse in American Writing, 1590– 1850,” American literary scholar Annette Kolodny25 showed that metaphors of the “virgin” land and its exploration were gendered through and through26 but the pairing of perfect community and empty, pure landscape also epitomizes the Puri- tan heterotopia.27 Ann Laura Stoler explains that in the system of Puritan governance, based on the concept of the social covenant,28 government and self- government were deeply imbued with connotations of gender, sexuality and race.29 In view of this, the intersectionality of religious, gender, and ethnic or “racial”30 at- tributions is highly relevant when reconstructing the complex processes by which the Puritans semanticized their own colonial venture and the North American space. These connotations took concrete shape in the idealization of the founding fathers, as synthesized by Cotton Mather in his monumental historical work Mag- nalia Christi Americana, first published in 1702. Through reference to Judaic prototypes, patriarchal masculinity and Puritan millenarianism entered an indissoluble union.

Nehemia Americanus: The American Founding Fathers

As Hoberman emphasizes, the Puritan leaders focused on Jewish tradition most strongly “when their own ideas and traditions were in a state of crisis,”31 and this certainly applies to Cotton Mather’s work. Mather was writing in the wake of an era of social upheaval, the Salem witchcraft persecutions and the brutal, still continuing “Indian Wars,” with the failure of the Puritan Revolution in England and, not least, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s loss of its liberal charter. By idealizing and mythologizing the period of colonial origins, Mather could issue a summons to self-scrutiny and moral improvement. After Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of 1654, Cotton Mather’s book was the second attempt to compile an

25 Kolodny, “The Pastoral Impulse in American Writing, 1590–1850: A Psychological Ap- proach,” 1969. 26 On modern reception, see Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender and American Envi- ronmentalism, 2005. 27 On Puritan constructions of space, see Brunotte, “Wüstenparadies. Die Wildnis als Nicht- Ort und heilige Leere im frühen Neu-England,” 2010. 28 For an analysis of methods of Puritan government and self-government based on a Fou- cauldian notion of governmentality, see Block and Brown, “Clio in Search of Eros: Rede- fining Sexualities in Early America,” 2003. 29 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, 1995. See also Brunotte, Puritanismus und Pioniergeist. Die Faszination der Wildnis im frühen Neu-England, 2000, esp. pp. 76–160. 30 The term “race” is used here not in the context of a fully developed biological racism, but that of proto-racism as described by Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, 2004. It refers to the Puritans’ theologically, ethnically and mythologically inflected speculations on the “origins” and “nature” of the Indians. 31 Glaser, “Invisible Hebrews: Jews in Early America,” 2014, 208.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 39 ecclesiastical history of New England and thereby also a chronicle of the early Pu- ritan colony that was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by the first governor, John Winthrop, after the Great Migration of 1630. The seven books of the Magnalia extend from the flight out of England, the passage across the Atlan- tic and the foundation of the colony all the way to those wars with the Indians still raging in 1702. The whole can be read as a chronicle, as an epic or as a collection of hagiographies of the founding fathers. A descendant of the famous immigrants Richard Mather and John Cotton, and the son of the political and spiritual leader of the Boston community Increase Mather, Cotton Mather (1663–1728) sprang from one of New England’s most influential families. The mission he ascribes to the era of flight and the first generation of founding fathers has both global historical relevance and deep religious significance: the religious refugees from England are the sacred remnant, those ultimately elected by God who, in His promised land, are destined to establish the true church and enter the millennium. Mather begins his epic of the Golden Years in this manner: I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand: And, assisted by the Holy Author of that Religion, I do, with all Conscience of Truth, required therein by Him, who is the Truth itself, Report the Wonderful Display of His Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faithfulness, where- with His Divine Providence hath Irradiated an Indian Wilderness.32 Mather’s biography of John Winthrop, the first leader of Massachusetts Bay Col- ony, gives him the title “Nehemia Americanus,” utilizing the typology of the liberation of the people of Israel from Babylonian captivity and the reconstruction of the temple under Nehemiah. The same is done for all the colony’s great men, using references to Moses, Joshua or David — but always with an emphasis on the qualifier “Americanus.” As Sacvan Bercovitch33 has shown, Mather is concerned with the construction of a representative American saint. As the antitype (in the sense of Christian typology) of Nehemiah, Winthrop is unique and removed from history, yet as “Americanus” he is representative and historical. Nationality may represent worldly destiny for other Christians, but for Winthrop, in his portrayal by Cotton Mather as an exemplum fidei, it is the national — and collective, socially integrating — identity that defines the individual biography as sacred history. Be- cause Winthrop is “Americanus,” the representative of the chosen “new Israel,” both his spiritual development and his political successes as governor, spiritual guide and judge constitute the salvational progress of the “holy commonwealth.” Here, Mather goes beyond the traditional Christian typology. Whereas traditionally events and figures from the history of Israel became allegories of the redemption achieved by Christ, Mather — like Edward Johnson and John Cotton before

32 Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2nd edition, 1820, vol. I, p. 23. 33 Bercovitch, The Puritan Origin of the American Self, 1975.

40 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE him — raises his own historical and local reality to a symbol of salvation. The current historical moment in New England becomes the focus for all significant histories and all expectations of future salvation. Writing from a political situation characterized by destruction and depression, Cotton Mather invokes the founding period as an era of fulfillment. In the patriarchal generation of the colonial beginning, he implies, the salvational plan “America” was already realized. Winthrop is situated in the dynamics of purifica- tion proper to the “last days,” and for that very reason can prove to be a superior Nehemiah. Mather’s specific, apocalyptic reworking of the Exodus tradition makes it possible to exalt America as a figure of redemption. The ambivalence between a cult of origins and a yearning for the apocalypse is symptomatic of his historical work. Precisely because the colonists, by traversing the “wilderness condition,” have attained spiritual purity, they are capable of transforming the wilderness into a second Eden. They came to America in search of the “pure and undefiled Religion,” and “within a few Years a Wilderness was subdued before them, and so many Colo- nies Planted, To w n s Erected and Churches Settled, wherein the true and living God in Christ Jesus is worshipped and served, in a place where time out of mind, had been nothing before but Heathenism, Idolatry, and Devil-worship.”34 As this example has shown, reference to Jewish tropes was a key component of Massachusetts Bay Puritan discourse. To understand this Judeocentrism and the ambivalent identification strategies of the early settler communities which accompanied their colonial project, it is worth looking at a particular attitude towards Jews in mid-seventeenth-century England: the cultural phenomenon referred to as Hebraism. Few assaults on the early modern European self-image left such lasting marks on views of Judaism as the relativization of the single Christian faith firstly by the Reformation and religious wars, secondly by the confrontation with religious and cultural plurality during early colonialism. The impact of both these shocks was severe in England. There, it was mainly religious and social outsiders — spiritualists, chiliasts and separatists — whose nonconformism and struggle for liberty brought forth not only “conversionary” but also “sympathetic” pro-Judaism35 and Hebraism. Strictly speaking, Hebraism refers to the use or peculiarities of the Hebrew language. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and New England Puritans rediscovered the Hebrew Bible, the past of the people of Israel, and thus also the Hebrew language. New England Puritans gave their children He- brew names, retranslated parts of the Bible and developed what can only be called a cult of the Hebrew language. This was particularly true in the Puritan colonies, where the founders of Harvard College (established in 1636) even “insisted that all

34 Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2nd edition, 1820, vol. I, p. 7. 35 Hillerbrand, “Philosemitismus — was ist das? Eine analytisch-kritische Begriffsanalyse,” 2009. Hillerbrand’s terms are bekehrender and verstehender philo-Semitism.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 41 graduates master the Hebrew language.”36 If, like David S. Katz37 and Richard H. Popkin,38 we regard this English — or more precisely, Puritan — pro-Judaism as a by-product of Christian millenarianism, then attention must turn to the identification of the American Indians with the descendants of the “ten lost tribes of Israel” whose story is told in one of the Bible’s historical books (2 Chron.).39 In the eighth century BCE, the Assyrians conquered the northern provinces of Israel, occupied the capital Samaria and exiled large parts of the Israelite population to Assyria. From that point on, these ten tribes were regarded as lost, and numerous legends took shape around their possible location.

The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel: Constructing a Shared Origin of American Indians and Puritans40

With the Mayflower the Pilgrim Fathers, and later the Puritans, brought the epi- thet “New Israel” from England via the Netherlands to North America, where they planned to build their colony as a shining example for the whole of Chris- tendom — as, in Winthrop’s words, a “City upon a Hill.” It was not long before the dynamics of religious and social tension led to the exclusion of dissidents, who set up their own plantations or townships in the wilderness. These frontier communities, bringing together reformers and heretics, often combined greater religious pluralism with attempts to approach the indigenous population. For example, the famous dissenter Roger Williams, who founded Providence and Rhode Island in 1636, was probably one of New England’s best-informed experts on American Indian culture at the time, alongside John Eliot and Edward Winslow. Williams had left the Massachusetts colony for the wilderness, banished by the authorities as a proponent of religious tolerance. He spent periods of time living with the Narragansett tribe and learned their language. In his early ethnographic report A Key into the Language of America, Williams insisted that the inhabitants of North America descended from Adam and Noah and “hold affinitie to the hebrews” in their customs and language.41 However, to his credit, he did ask the American Indians themselves about their descent and recorded their answer: “They say themselves, that they have sprung and growne up in that very place, like the very trees of the wilderness.”42

36 Feldman, Dual Destinies: The Jewish Encounter with Protestant America, 1990, p. 16. 37 Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655, 1982. 38 Popkin (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650–1800, 1988. 39 See Brunotte, Puritanismus und Pioniergeist. Die Faszination der Wildnis im frühen Neu- England, 2000; Katz, “Israel in America: The Wanderings of the Lost Ten Tribes from Mik- veigh Yisrael to Timothy McVeigh,” 2001. 40 For a fuller account of the study of archival sources on which this section is based, see Brunotte, Puritanismus und Pioniergeist. Die Faszination der Wildnis im frühen Neu-England, 2000. 41 Williams, A Key into the Language of America, [1643] 1973, p. 172. 42 Ibid., p. 175.

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Cleaving to the biblical doctrine of creation, the spiritual leaders of the Massa- chusetts Bay Colony rejected the notion of the American Indians’ autochthony. Yet if the theory that the Indians originated on American soil was not accepted, then the Puritans were forced to recognize them as the first colonists of the New World. And if the Indians — in whatever manner — were descended from an ancient civilization, such as the Greeks or the Hebrews, then their wild and uncivilized way of life could only be the expression of a radical degeneration. As early as 1612, the English author William Strachey, in The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, argued that the American Indians sprang directly from a seafaring descendant of Noah who had travelled to the extreme ends of the earth. Noah had three sons, Ham (Cham), Sem (Shem) and Japheth (Japhet). Strachey, like other authors before him, especially Marc Lescarbot,43 identifies Ham as the ancestor of the Indians on the grounds that, along with his son Canaan and all his descendants, Ham had been cursed and banished by Noah for failing to show sufficient honor to his father and not covering his eyes before his nakedness. The curse in Genesis 9:25 runs: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be under his brethren.”44 For Strachey, it is evident that the banished Ham and his family journeyed across the world as “far travellers and straglers into divers and unknowne countreys, searching, exploring, and sitting downe in the same.”45 Strachey saw the restless wanderer Ham with his son Canaan — outcast, cursed, deprived of ties to the culture of their fathers — as the very prototype of decay and falling off from God. The rhetorical figure of the “vagabond race” was to acquire various, and very ambivalent, meanings in the Puritans’ colonial discourse as well. On the one hand, the American Indians were declared uncivilized due to their non-sedentary lifestyle; they did not build on the land, had no fixed settlements and mainly lived from hunting. As a nomadic people, they stood outside the cultural order. On the other hand, the trope of the wandering people or the people in exodus offered much identificatory potential for the transatlantic travellers, through the religious reference to the Israelites. John Canup notes this inherent tension: The problem with Strachey’s theory was that the Hamitic fate seemed to bear far too close a correspondence to the English colonists’ own wayfaring habits. The Indians were not only part of “the scattering of Noah his children and Nephewes, with their famelies (as little colonies)” over the earth, but, as members of “the vagabond race of Cham,” they had been among “the only far Travellors, and Straglers into divers and unknown countries, searching, exploring and sitting downe in the same.”46

43 See Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729, 1967, p. 113. 44 Bible quotations here and throughout are from the King James Version. 45 Strachey, The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, [1612] 1849, p. 45. 46 Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England, 1990, p. 66, citing Strachey op. cit.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 43

Of course, as Parfitt reminds us, in medieval and early modern Europe with the Bible as the key source of knowledge, “ancient Hebrew ethnology was the best documented ‘primitive’ way of life people knew about and it was natural to use this knowledge to explicate the new territories they discovered.”47 However, the special complexity of mirroring between New England and Israel, and between the Puritan project and the Indians, intensified considerably with the growing interest in the theory that the Indians were actually descendants of the Israelites. In his encyclopedic Historical Collections of the Indians in New England of 1674, the “Indian superintendent in Massachusetts Bay,” Daniel Gookin, summarized the theories around the descent of the Indians that could already be documented and archived in his day.48 One of these theories located the Indians’ origins in the lost tribes of Israel abducted by the Assyrian king: First, some conceive that this people are of the race of the ten tribes of Israel, that Sal- manasser carried captive out of their own country, … and that God hath, by some means or other, not yet discovered, brought them into America … . Secondly, another apprehension is, that the original of these Americans is from the Tartars, or Scythians, that live in the north-east parts of Asia; which some good geographers conceive is nearly joined unto the north-west parts of America. … A third conjecture of the original of these Indians, is, that some of the tawny Moors of Africa … have put off to sea, and been transported over … unto the south part of America, where the two continents of Africa and America are nearest.49 Given such disagreement, in 1674 Gookin found that “there is nothing of certainty to be concluded.”50 A few decades earlier, between 1640 and 1660, he would have accorded much more importance to this question and its definitive resolution. At that time, shortly after the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe and during the English Civil War, the Puritans of England and New England were gripped by millenarian ideas and a feverish interest in the Apocalypse. They believed that God had chosen first England, then the virgin land of America, to realize a temporal millennium in line with the prophets’ predictions. George Herbert, the English poet and Anglican clergyman whose famous poem “The Church Militant” Gookin cited, declared: “Religion stands on tiptoe in our land, / Ready to pass to the American strand.” Puritan millenarianism drew not only on Old Testament prophetic sources (Ezek. 37:16; Isa. 11:11–21; Jer. 31:7) but also on the apocalyptic visions of Paul (for example Rom. 11). In these, Paul assigns the Jews and their conversion to Christianity a crucial eschatological role. As he puts it in Romans 11:1–2: “Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. … God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew.” And in verses 11 and 12, Pauls asks whether the Jews have

47 Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, 2002, p. 24. 48 See Cogley, “John Eliot and the Origins of the American Indians,” 1986/1987, 210. 49 Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England,” [1792] 1806, 144–147. 50 Ibid., 144.

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“stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?” In Romans 25–27, he continues the theme: For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written [Isa. 59:20–21], There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. The New England Puritans translated these prophecies into their own local and historical reality as part of a millenarian typology. From the beginning, the question of missionizing the heathens or Gentiles (that is, the Indians) implied the question of the conversion of the Jews, preparing the way for the millennium. Thus, in the colonial transfer of millenarian ideas from Europe to North America, and from the Old Testament into the wilderness of New England (now made an eschatological location), ethnological and theological knowledge converged with constructs of apocalyptic promise. For, as the English millenarian Thomas Thorowgood put it: “From the Jewes our faith began, / To the Gentiles then it ran, / To the Jewes returne it shall, / Before the dreadfull end of all.”51 Without the conversion of the Jews, the millenarians thought, the rule of Christ could not come to pass. But what role should the New England Puritans play in this process, given that the majority of Jews were in Europe? New England’s part in bringing about the millennium became increasingly important when, around 1640, the theory of the Hebrew descent of the American Indians began to gain ground. The discursive topos of the Indians’ descent from the ten lost tribes of Israel was nothing new. It can be traced back to the sixteenth century in Portugal and Spain, although there it bore a clearly anti-Judaic stamp. However, it attained real political importance only when the hopes of Jewish messianism became linked with those of Christian millenarianism. Some speculation on the routes to America taken by the ten tribes was based on the books of Kings and the Apocrypha (2 Esd. 13:40–50), but in Amsterdam in 1644 an incident became public that reinvigo- rated the theory of the Indians’ Hebrew descent for the contemporary context. Historian Lee Eldridge Huddleston has given the most detailed account of the events.52 In 1644 a Portuguese Jew named Antonio de Montezinos (Aron Levi) disembarked in Amsterdam after a journey to South America and reported that in 1641, travelling through Nuevo Granada (southern Ecuador), he had met an In- dian who told him of a “holy people” once ill-treated by the Indians, who were

51 Thorowgood, Jewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans Are of That Race, 1650, p. 24. This passage is preceded by the Latin quotation “Cæpit ab his, defetur ad hos, ref- eretur ad illos nostra fides, erunt sub mundi fine fedeles” (Raimundus Lullus), ibid., p. 23. 52 Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729, 1967, esp. pp. 33– 47.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 45 punished for their cruelty by storms and the Spanish invasion. At the time, Mon- tezinos recounted, he had paid no further attention to the matter. Shortly afterwards he had been captured by the Inquisition. At his prayers in captivity, thank- ing God for not having made him an Indian, he had suddenly reproved himself, “saying the “Hebrewes are Indians.” He interpreted this spontaneous statement as a sign, and after his release immediately returned to seek his Indian informant. When Montezinos revealed his Jewish identity, the Indian agreed to lead him to the holy people in the mountains. There, Montezinos heard and saw relics of He- brew language and ritual. Upon his arrival, members embraced him and said in Hebrew: “Heare O Israel the Lord our God is one Lord.” Asked about their fathers, they answered that these were “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Israel.”53 Montez- inos was now perfectly convinced that he was in the presence of descendants of the ten lost tribes. Unlike the various speculations current in Spain up to then, Montezinos’s narrative came with an insistence that he had witnessed everything personally. Through the intervention of Menasseh Ben Israel, a Portuguese rabbi living in Amsterdam, the account gave rise to two developments, one in Europe and one in New England. Menasseh was requested by the Scottish millenarian John Dury, a trusted adviser of Oliver Cromwell, to write down his version of the lost tribes theory. The result was Menasseh’s Spes Israelis, published in English in 1650 under the title The Hope of Israel, which adduces millenarian arguments in a petition to readmit the Jews to England, 360 years after their expulsion. Spes Israelis was also translated into many other languages and spread rapidly across Europe.54 Clearly, the rabbi was pursuing specifically Jewish concerns in his reconstruction of the lost tribes theory: he had no interest in conversion to Christianity but every interest in messianic hopes that, in the Jewish view, could not be fulfilled without reuniting the scattered tribes of Israel and Judah. This was the context in which Menasseh welcomed the appearance of the ten lost tribes in faraway America. England itself, he argued, could also be an important location for the Messiah’s arrival, which would only be possible once the Jews had been dispersed to “the four corners of the earth” (Isa. 11:12). In medieval Hebrew, wrote Menasseh, the word “Angle-terre” meant the end of the earth, and accordingly the readmission of Jews to England was necessary if the messianic and millennial schedule was to be fulfilled.55 Menasseh’s pamphlet — which he sent directly to the English parliament — thus carried a strongly political thrust. As Peter Toon56 emphasizes, its objective was first and foremost to secure the readmission of the Jews to Eng-

53 “The Relation of Master Antonie Monterinos, translated out of the French Copie sent by Manaseh Ben Israel,” in Thorowgood, Jewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans Are of That Race, 1650, pp. 129–138. 54 See the detailed account in Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729, 1967, pp. 129–130. 55 Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729, 1967, pp. 129–130. 56 Toon, “The Question of Jewish Immigration,” 1970.

46 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE land.57 This project was supported by the Puritan militants and by Cromwell himself, and in 1656, its gradual implementation began. Of special note for the issues discussed in this chapter is the similarity between Puritan and Jewish historical and salvific expectations, first studied by Richard Popkin. In much of seventeenth-century Europe, they converged in what Popkin calls the historical entanglement of “Jewish messianism and Christian millenarianism.”58

Millenarian Ethnography: Israel in America

In 1648, Thomas Thorowgood published his Jewes in America, building on Roger Williams’s ethnographic groundwork. Thorowgood’s short book attempted to define specific religious and cultural similarities between the ancient people of Israel and the North American Indians, in order to prove that “the Jewes did Indianize, or the Indians doe Judaize, for surely they are alike in many, very many remarkable particulars.” Importantly, he added that “if they bee Jewes, they must not for that be neglected.”59 To confirm his claims, Thorowgood listed the following areas of likeness: (1) similar myths, (2) purity requirements, (3) circumcision, (4) separation of women during menstruation (contact taboo), (5) mourning and funeral rituals, (6) kinship and tribal systems, (7) conviction of the soul’s immortality, (8) the institution of priests and prophets, (9) belief in a creating God and divine providence, (10) linguistic similarities. Thorowgood’s main focus was the conversion of the In- dians-cum-Jews and therefore their part in the millennial schedule. John Eliot, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s most committed missionary and known there as the “Apostle to the Indians,” learned of Thorowgood’s pamphlet and the lost tribes theory through Edward Winslow. Along with generous dona- tions from England and not least the founding of the New England Missionary Society, this knowledge provided new impetus for missionary activities. Where Thorowgood’s ethnography had been indebted more to theological constructs than to observation, Eliot was far more willing to engage concretely with the culture and language of the American Indians. There was no doubt in his mind that the American Indians descended from ancient Israel, and he saw the converted Indians as “a kind of first fruits of his [the Lord’s] (new) Creatures there.”60 Guided by his pro-Judaism and belief in the Noble Savage, Eliot encouraged civic organization in the “Praying Towns” he had established for converted Indians by introducing a form of self-administration, and translated the Bible into the language of the Wampanoag of Nantucket Island. With Eliot, the Puritanism of New England had acquired an element of postmillenarian belief in progress and the

57 See also Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655, esp. pp. 115–125. 58 Popkin, “Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism,” 1980, p. 67. 59 Thorowgood, Jewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans Are of That Race, 1650, p. a3. 60 Eliot, A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel in New England, 1655, pp. 2–3.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 47 idea of a “civilized savage,” to be created by means of nurture and education. At the same time, as Andrea Robertson Cremer has pointed out, the success of the Praying Towns could only benefit the colonial project: “The ecstatic claims of conversion helped to shore up the plantations’ surety of their providential purpose through colonization, while simultaneously encouraging continued political support and financial investment from abroad.”61 Furthermore, these places of education validated the concept of English Puritan governance, since the Praying Towns were crucial vehicles for normalizing Indian lifeways and adapting them to “English expectations about social order.”62 It is also important to note the limitations of Eliot’s notion of the American Indians as noble savages: from Eliot’s perspective, “the Indians are not anti-Christian and anticivil like popish Europe and prelatical England; they are pre-Christian and precivil. When organized into a rational, scriptural polity, they, like More’s Utopians, will undergo a rapid and rational conversion to Christianity.”63 The Puritan mission in New England, then, long remained conditional on the success of a social experiment highly charged with salvific anticipation. But in this case as in others, knowledge transfer worked both ways — for “whenever natives prompted Europeans to reflect upon, renew, expand, reinforce, revise, or rethink their Christian convictions, they influenced colonial theology, broadly defined, in early America.”64

Competition of the Elect: Old Israel, New Israel

There was a double-edged aspect to the Puritan rhetoric informed by pro-Judaism. In his comparative study of the myth of the ten lost tribes in European colonialism, Parfitt points out its role as a colonial stereotype and sees in the imagined Jew- ishness of the indigenous people an “essence of the construction of ‘otherness’” more generally.65 As I have shown, however, the construction of the self by means of the other was radicalized among the New England Puritans in a much less straightforward manner. All the Puritans’ attempts to define the origins of the American Indians were simultaneously attempts to consolidate their own English — and thus, unlike the wilderness, civilized and rational — masculine, “heroic” identity. At the same time, they were concerned to consolidate and expand their religious, political and economic mission in the wilderness. Yet by accepting the theory of the Indians’ Israelite descent and their pivotal role in the millenarian

61 Cremer, “Enemies Incarnate: Religion, Sex, Violence, and Contests for Power in New Eng- land, 1636–1638,” 2007, p. 189. 62 O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650– 1790, 1997, p. 32. 63 Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-century England and America, 1987, p. 115. 64 Pointer, Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion, 2007, p. 72. 65 Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, 2002, p. 21.

48 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE project, the Puritans placed themselves in a completely new state of salvific de- pendency: the conversion of the Indians, in other words missionary success, was required as the practical proof that the Puritans were the elect.66 Since the Puritan settlers’ religious and social identity rested on the assumption that they were the new chosen people and the New Israel, every one of the Indians — now apparently the fleshly representatives of ancient Israel — who converted to Christianity provided evidence of the Puritans’ status as God’s new chosen ones. Hoberman highlights the frequency with which Cotton Mather uses Israel and Jewishness to strengthen the Puritans’ sense of identity.67 However, Magnalia Christi Americana also demonstrates, more urgently than can be observed elsewhere in the Christian tradition, that the American Puritans needed the model of Old Israel and the Isra- elite history of exodus in order to cope with their own undertaking — the Atlantic crossing, survival in the wilderness, the foundation of a lawful society — and fur- nish it with meaning. Significantly, the Israel-referenced typology did not in itself imply any specific interest in the Jews of contemporary Europe (or of the colonies).68 The imaginary place of the Jews was the past. As Huddleston notes: By relegating the Jewish people to a mythical past, one which served no other purpose but to direct attention to a Christian future, the typological mind robbed the living Jews of their ancient roots, their unique history, and their meaningful existence. To some New England Puritans the Jewish past did not exist except insofar as it provided Chris- tendom with a mirror for its own time.69 In the polyphonic chorus of the New England Puritans’ tracts and sermons, the ever-present keynote is that the Puritan community is the true heir to the Cove- nant of Sinai, that the Puritans are a covenanted people. As noted above, the Puri- tan model of governance rested upon the social covenant, which in turn implied an individual Covenant of Grace, and its heroically portrayed leaders were often designated as a great “American Moses” or “Nehemiah Americanus.” In 1651 Peter Bulkeley, an influential English theologian and minister and the founder of Con- cord, offered a “Gospel-Covenant,” with allusions to John Winthrop’s speech, that brought together in concentrated form the rhetoric of election and of preservation: We are as a city set upon a hill, in the open view of all the earth; the eyes of the world are upon us because we profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with God! … let us study to walk, that this may be our excellency and dignity among the nations of the world, among which we live: That they may be constrained to say of us “Only this people is wise, an holy and blessed people,” that all that see us and know that the name of the Lord is called upon us, and that we are the seed which the Lord hath blessed.70

66 See Pointer, Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion, 2007, pp. 72–73. 67 Hoberman, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America, 2011. 68 Prior to the nineteenth century, Jews lived only in Newport and on Rhode Island. 69 Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729, 1967, p. 132. 70 Peter Bulkeley, The Gospel-Covenant; or the Covenant of Grace Opened (1651), quoted in Feldman, Dual Destinies: The Jewish Encounter with Protestant America, 1990, p. 18.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 49

In combination with the Protestant tradition of the paterfamilias, such self- stylization as the elect, the patriarchs and founding heroes of Old Israel clearly also both articulated and enforced the patriarchal disposition inside the settlements. This was a religiously founded gender order in which dissidents and rebellious women — such as Anne Hutchinson, who asserted the equality of the genders with respect to divine inspiration — were banished to the wilderness as heretics. It would go beyond the scope of the present chapter to discuss the discursive equation of (female) dissidents and American Indians, both of them disorderly and untamed groups, that marked the antinomian crisis triggered by Hutchinson.71

The Rhetoric of “fallen” Israel

It was not only dissenters who risked being condemned and demonized. The noble savages made out to be Old Israel could just as easily become demonic “enemy brothers” when philo-Semitic idealization tipped over into anti-Judaic sibling hatred. In a 1685 election day sermon, for example, the Reverend Samuel Wakeman, founder of Hartford, Connecticut, set out the order of things in no uncertain terms: “Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem.”72 But the lost tribes theory held quite other pitfalls. Those tribes had never known Jesus and had therefore not killed him, meaning that they had never been cast away from God. As Frederic Cople Jaher has put it: “How could Christianity have displaced Judaism, how could America be ‘God’s country’ and ‘the promised land,’ if the Jews were still closest to God and dreamed of returning to Israel?”73 Inherent to the pro-Judaic view of the Indians as descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, too, is the threat of degeneration (in the sense of falling from God’s grace) that permeates Puritan discourses of the wilderness. It underlies Puritan anxieties around contact and acculturation. To a certain extent, the typological identity of the Puritans more generally was fractured by the confrontation with the reality of the American Indians’ existence. On the one hand, the American Indians were excellently adapted to life in the wilderness; in order to survive, newcomers had to learn from them and to a degree try to resemble them.74 On the other, Puri- tan sermons portrayed them as barbarians, as wild animals, devotees of pagan cults and devil worshippers. Especially in the very last chapter of the seven-book first edition of the Magnalia Christi Americana, focusing on the “Indian Wars,” the indigenous people are referred to as “Indian Salvages,” driven by the devil:

71 Cremer, “Enemies Incarnate: Religion, Sex, Violence, and Contests for Power in New Eng- land, 1636–1638,” 2007, pp. 126–164. 72 Quoted in Herzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter, 1989, p. 33. 73 Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America, 1994, p. 7. 74 See Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, 2006.

50 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE

These Parts were then covered with Nations of Barbarous Indians and Infidels, in whom the Prince of the Power of the Air did Work as a Spirit; nor could it be expected that Nations of Wretches, whose whole Religion was the most Explicit fort [sic] of Devil-Worship, should not be acted by the Devil to engage in some early and bloody Action.75 If the American Indians were nevertheless the descendants of ancient Israel, they supplied a very potent example of how the American wilderness could change a civilized people. As long as the Indians remained “obdurate” and refused to acknowledge Jesus Christ, Old Israel continued to exist, but took on the shape of Ju- das and Canaan. This jolted the Puritans’ confidence in being simultaneously the better Jews and the only true Christians. It fuelled their anxiety and self-doubt all the more because they had already arrived in “God’s own country” and were working at building the kingdom of God. Setbacks to missionary activity, growing conflicts and minor wars with certain tribes, and the land rush of new settler groups and adventurers all reignited the old fear that the wilderness could exert an anti- moral effect on the settlers. The spectre of “Indianization” returned to sermons and tracts. Again, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana and his description of some frontier communities exemplify the point: “But a great part of the English there grew too like the Indians, among whom they lived in their unchristian way of living … [and did not] take a due course to preserve themselves from losing of Chris- tianity in Paganism.”76 Added to these external crises were economic, political and religious problems internal to settler society. In the fraught situation of the antinomian crisis and the first-generational conflict with the younger colonists who had grown up in the wilderness, the oligarchs of Massachusetts increasingly resorted to premillenarian notions of schism and catastrophe, and to the anti-Judaic motifs associated with these.77 In fact, Thorowgood’s text on the ten lost tribes had already done just that, by invoking the perils of degeneration. As discussed above, Thorowgood insists that Indians and Jews “are alike in many, very many remarkable particulars,”78 but after listing the similarities between the two groups, he moves on to the alarming signs of degeneration among the former. Thorowgood interprets the worship of idols and the practice of sacrifice, especially alleged human sacrifice and in particular cannibalism — traditional stereotypes of colonial discourse — as symptoms of an Israel that has fallen away from God. For Thorowgood, it is perfectly clear that “if the Jewes bee planted in that Westerne World, we shall soone find the accom- plishment of that Prophecie from Heaven [i.e., Ezek. 5:9–10], for there be Cani- balls and Man-eaters in great multitudes.”79 Fully in line with an older Christian

75 Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 1702, p. 41. 76 Ibid., p. 55. 77 On early Christian anti-Judaism and its continued effects, see especially Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics, 1995; McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil, 1996. 78 Thorowgood, Jewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans Are of That Race, 1650, p. a3. 79 Ibid., p. 18.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 51 anti-Judaism, he turns to the cardinal sins of the Jews, for which their Indian descendants must now suffer: “The Jewes were a very sinfull people. … Their fatall and most grievous crime was the denyall of the Holy one.”80 The Indians pay the price: they “were and are transcendent sufferers.”81 The self-denouncing Puritan sermons known as jeremiads responded to border disputes, social strains and generation conflicts with a growing rhetoric of barba- rization and degeneracy. More and more, accusations against the Puritan community itself deployed the old visions of the “barbaric savage” and the obdurate Jews who had fallen away from God and refused to acknowledge Jesus. The influential minister Increase Mather fulminated in 1679: “they have lived like Hea- then, without Sabbaths, without the word of Prayer, which are moral duties. … People are ready to run wild into the woods again.”82 The extent to which the naturalizing rhetoric of the wilderness was used to represent and distort social conflicts is most evident in Mather’s lamentation on the loss of authority and order in the colony: “As to the Generality of householders, Family Government is lost and gone; Servants do not fear their Masters, Children do not honour their Parents, in that respect the English are become like unto the Indians.”83

War Discourses: The Production of the American Frontiersman

In the middle third of the seventeenth century, several events and developments led to a decline in the popularity of the ten lost tribes theory with its postmillenarian coding: first the Pequot War (1636–1638),84 which ended the peaceful coexistence between the New England settlers and the Pequot people; then the collapse of an expanded “mission to the Indians”; and finally the outbreak of King Philip’s War, also known as the Great Indian War, in 1675. The lost tribes theory lost ground to an older proto-racist notion that the American Indians’ origins lay in the “wild” and “primitive” people of the Tartars or Scythians. With this move, the Puritans also took up a demonizing and anti-Judaic variant of the lost tribes theory that had long lain dormant: the theory that identified the ten tribes with the “savage hordes” of the Tartars and portrayed them as the children of Satan or as Gog and Magog.85 This depiction ruled out any conceivable kinship between the American Indians and the Puritan New Israel. It also served to alleviate the Puri- tans’ fear of degeneration, since an unambiguously barbarian origin for the Ameri-

80 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 81 Ibid., p. 26. 82 Mather, “A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy,” 1679, p. 75. 83 Ibid., p. 91. 84 See the collection and analysis of the war narratives of Mason, Underhill and others in Cave, The Pequot War, 1996; also Cremer, “Enemies Incarnate: Religion, Sex, Violence, and Contests for Power in New England, 1636–1638,” 2007. 85 See the detailed study of this myth in Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, 2002.

52 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE can Indians secured the autonomy of the Puritans’ own salvific project. As the prisoners and adherents of Satan, the American Indians were now clearly the antagonists of Christ’s chosen people. As I have shown in more detail elsewhere,86 the doubling of pure and sublime nature on the one hand, impure and demonic nature on the other now hardened in Puritan writings. Especially when the wilderness itself was condensed into a human body — its savage inhabitants — that actively combated the Puritan exodus, it became an utterly satanic space. At the same time, the apocalyptic visions of the jeremiads reinterpreted the terror emanating from America’s real and imagined wilderness as the terror of God and his wrath, and thus deified it. As personifications of this frightening wilderness, in the rhetoric of war the American Indi- ans became a distorting mirror for complexes apparently long since overcome: defined as idol-worshipping heathens, they took up the legacy of the hated Ca- tholicism.87 The American Indians — a “fallen Israel” — now became the Puritans’ demonic or‚ in René Girard’s sense, “monstrous double.”88 As Nathaniel Philbrick89 has shown for the case of King Philip’s War, alongside the rush for land and the founding of more plantations it was primarily the early Indian Wars that boosted the model of an expansion of the faith, and thus of an advancing frontier instead of the static hortus conclusus imagined by early Puritan- ism. The owners of the Massachusetts Bay Company had long been watching with disapproval the growth and uncontrolled lifestyles of the frontier communities, and notions of the border between civilization and wilderness acquired a new urgency. Frontier skirmishes were increasingly defined as divine tests. Through the wars, the constant struggle at the frontier and the associated “wilderness condition” of the combatants took on the function of a moral exemplar, for “success in the struggle might be a mark of grace.”90 Against this background, the Pequot War and its accompanying bellicose discourse may be considered an early watershed both in the Puritans’ relationship with the Indians and in their colonial project of self-formation more widely. The discourse of war very evidently fused proto-racist with gendered and religious attri- butions, so that the conflict appeared not only as a God-given trial, but also as a

86 Brunotte, Puritanismus und Pioniergeist. Die Faszination der Wildnis im frühen Neu-England, 2000, esp. pp. 225–234. 87 The notion of the Catholic “heathen degenerate” that prefigured the Native American featured importantly in the English colonization of Ireland and its religious justifications. See Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” 1973. 88 According to Girard, the twin or double — the enemy brother — is the fundamental figure of victimization and victim myths; the “monstrous double” protects the community from its own violence. In acute crises, the double “takes the place of those objects that held the attention of the antagonists at a less advanced stage of the crisis, replacing those things that each had sought to assimilate and destroy, to incarnate and expel” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 1979, p. 175). 89 Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, 2006. 90 Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” 1953, 379.

“THE JEWES DID INDIANIZE; OR THE INDIANS DOE JUDAIZE” 53 struggle between different styles of masculinity and rule. Thus, before their final defeat, the Pequot warriors were consistently portrayed by the Puritans as hyper- virile, brutal fighters. In contrast, as the war went on the discursive figure of the Puritan soldier shifted from a defender inexperienced in violence to an uncom- promising warrior who rationally appropriated the muscular masculinity of his savage opponents in order to annihilate them. During the Indian Wars, writes Philbrick, a “new American type came into being: the frontiersman.”91 According to Cremer, a tendency to naturalize and universalize began to dominate reporting of the war.92 Gradually, Puritan ideas that “Indians might be used by the Almighty to punish the sins of Christians fell from favor,” giving way to a “celebration of the frontier as the birthplace of uniquely American virtues.”93 The outcome of the English victory in the Pequot War was the more or less complete extinction of the Pequot and the expansion of the zone of Puritan control; at the same time, it led to a disempowerment of the survivors that was coded in proto-racist terms.94 Thus, the image of the white frontier man as the protagonist of “regeneration through violence”95 can be found in rhetoric even at an early stage of the Pequot War. Looking at the powerless captives, Roger Williams spoke of “another miserable drove of Adams degenerate seede.”96 The Puritan defeat of the Pequot also initiated North American slave trading with African labor, as English traders exchanged Pequot men for African slaves in Bermuda. The first forced African labor arrived in New England “as a direct result of the Pequot War. In 1641, less than three years after the war’s end, Massachu- setts established the first law in North America that recognized ‘slave’ as a legal status.”97 This victory, then, ushered in the next phase of the move from proto- racisms to racisms.

Closing Remarks

The complex and shifting appropriations of the biblical narrative of the ten lost tribes, moving from ancient Israel via England and South America into the North American colonies, vividly illustrate how discursive and geographical transfer of

91 Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, 2006, p. 357. 92 Cremer, “Enemies Incarnate: Religion, Sex, Violence, and Contests for Power in New Eng- land, 1636–1638,” 2007, p. 23. 93 Cave, The Pequot War, 1996, p. 174. 94 On the development of new, radical forms of othering and the annihilative violence of the Pequot War, see Kruer, “Red Albion: Genocide and English Colonialism, 1622–1646,” 2009. 95 This is the title of a groundbreaking study of pioneers: Slotkin, Regeneration through Vio- lence: The Mythology of the Frontier, 1600–1860, 1973. 96 Roger Williams to John Winthrop, 30 June 1637, in Forbes (ed.), Winthrop Papers 3, 1631– 1637, 1943, pp. 436–437. 97 Forbes (ed.), Winthrop Papers 3, 1631–1637, 1943, p. 30. See also Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1853.

54 ULRIKE BRUNOTTE older, religious figurations of the Other — such as the anti-Judaic construct of Gog und Magog and in this case the lost tribes legend — could amalgamate with proto- racist notions of the savage. It should be borne in mind that the myth of the lost tribes of Israel, as well as early biblical descriptions of Jewish rites, taboos and customs, had been deployed as stereotypes and models of the Other at a much earlier stage in the history of European colonialism, as Parfitt98 has shown. As well as a discursive and imaginary connection between antisemitism and orientalism, we may also infer a discursive exchange between, and entangled history of, anti- Judaism and colonialism.99 Here, the long-standing Christian image of the Jews as the savage murderers of Jesus, as adherents of Satan and not least as cannibals could act as the tertium comparationis in a negative genealogy of Jewish and indigenous ascriptions within colonial discourses. Among the New England Puri- tans, I have argued, the constant and volatile switches between anti-Judaism and pro-Judaism intensified the shifting constructions of the Self by means of the Other with a very particular ambivalence.

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Jewish Orientalization and Self-Orientalization

The Figure of the Beautiful Jewess: Displacements on the Borders between East and West

Hildegard Frübis

During the First World War, in the years 1914 and 1916, two anthologies of Jew- ish ghetto tales were published by the German-Jewish writer Artur Landsberger.1 Both volumes were graced with a cover at whose center was a female figure embodying that stock character of the Beautiful Jewess.2 On the cover of the 1914 anthology Das Gettobuch (The Ghetto Book) a young woman can be seen, depicted in three-quarters portraiture, her face in oblique profile, so that the black lines of the drawing emphasize the striking features of her countenance (fig. 1). From beneath her cap the long black tresses fall loose over her shoulders — this being a hallmark of unmarried Jewesses. Behind her is another figure, likewise drawn in black albeit in a spectral and suggestive fashion, which is an imitation of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses with the Tablet of Commandments.3 This “symbolic contrasting of the young Jewess with the strict laws of the Jewish rite”4 alludes to those contemporary conflicts of Jewry which are at the center of the ghetto tales and at whose center in turn is the figure of the Beautiful Jewess — conflicts over arranged marriages, obedience to the religious prescriptions, and generally conflicting loyalties with regard to one’s own heritage during the process of emancipation and assimilation. The drawing on the cover of the 1916 book Das Volk des Ghetto (Peo- ple of the Ghetto) (fig. 2) once again has a young Jewess dominating the picture’s foreground; although this time she is kneeling, she has “the same beauteous features of long hair, red lips and fine well-proportioned limbs.”5 Behind her stand two glowering soldiers in long army coats and Cossack hats and to whom she turns her torso in a gesture of entreaty. This depiction alludes to the pogroms in imperial Russia which since the 1880s had been on the increase, and the Jewess is portrayed as the victim of these violent rampages. In his study devoted to the Beautiful Jewess, Florian Krobb discerns a certain duality in German-language literature which is expressive of the figure’s simulta-

1 See Landsberger (ed.), Das Ghettobuch, 1914; and Landsberger (ed.), Das Volk des Ghetto, 1916. 2 Both drawings are signed on the book cover with the name Kainer. 3 Michelangelo Buonarotti, Moses, marble sculpture (1513–1515) San Pietro in Vincoli, Ro- me. 4 “[S]ymbolische[n] Kontrastierung der jungen Jüdin mit der Gesetzesstrenge des jüdischen Ritus.” Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 1. 5 “[M]it denselben Schönheitsmerkmalen der langen Haare, roten Lippen und feinen, wohlproportionierten Glieder.” Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 1.

62 HILDEGARD FRÜBIS neous otherness and attractiveness: “The phrase ‘The Beautiful Jewess’ seems to enunciate a non-Jewish, non-female, outsider’s view and thereby classifying her as different and alien from the speaker’s perspective. In short the phrase ‘The Beauti- ful Jewess’ was expressive of the conflict experienced by Jewesses in a Christian environment, as reflected in German-language literature.”6 The figure of the Beau- tiful Jewess is less researched in visual media than it is in literature. While the linguistic element is to the fore with regard to the sheer concept of the Beautiful Jew- ess and its narration throughout a text, pictorial depictions focused on the particularity of her beauty — on the deep-set dark eyes and the equally dark and mostly curly long hair. As stereotypical elements they are condensed into a visual canon and emerge as the signet of the Beautiful Jewess. She is possessor of a specific — exotic — beauty that distinguishes her from her non-Jewish surroundings and makes her visible in a way that connects her with the Orient, which marks her as alien and different.7 Herein lies that felt ambivalence which entails both fascination with and resistance to this divergent beauty who is physically and sexually attrac- tive but embodies the in-between situation of a border-crosser.8 On the one hand her strangeness is something that is identified with the alien Jewish society and on the other hand her fascination has its very source in this alterity. My thesis is that the Beautiful Jewess is to be regarded as a figure on the border- line — as a figure that in the historical development of this image motif paces off the terrain of Jewish conflicts in a non-Jewish environment. To return once more to the cover designs that we examined at the beginning, as Florian Krobb highlighted in his study of narrative prose, both depictions emphasize the beauty of the young Jewess. Her attractiveness becomes the “explanation for both her conflicts with the traditional environment and for her role as victim in pogroms and rape scenes.”9 With respect to her visual depiction one can assert that both female figures are metaphors for the ambivalence and potential for conflict entailed in drawing boundaries to delineate the foreign from the non-foreign. Insofar as the Beautiful Jewess specified no one individual person, she served proxy for Jewry as a whole. At the same time, in the pictorial designs, we can repeatedly observe tendencies to make her an agent of certain personifications.

6 “Die Sprachformel ‚Die Schöne Jüdin’ scheint eine nichtjüdische, nicht-weibliche Außen- sicht auszudrücken und damit die so Bezeichnete aus der Perspektive des Sprechers als fremd und anders einzustufen. Die Sprachformel ‘Die Schöne Jüdin’ erfasst somit in nuce den Konflikt der Jüdinnen in einer christlichen Umwelt, wie er in der deutschsprachigen Literatur wiedergegeben wird.” Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1993, p. 5. 7 For a more detailed exposition, see Frübis, Die “Jüdin” als Orientalin oder die “orientalische Jü- din.” Zur Konstruktion eines Bild-Typus, 2014. 8 There emerge here certain overlaps with the figure of the femme fatale, which enjoyed extreme popularity in the late nineteenth century. She is most vividly present in depictions of Salome, for instance by Gustave Moreau, Salome, 1871; and Salome Dancing before Herod, 1876. 9 “Erklärung sowohl für ihre Konflikte mit der angestammten Umwelt als auch für die Op- ferrolle in Pogromen und Vergewaltigungsszenen.” Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin, 1991, p. 2.

THE FIGURE OF THE BEAUTIFUL JEWESS 63

Crossing Borders between East and West

By contrasting the figure of the Beautiful Jewess with the Cossack soldiers, the cover design for the book Das Volk des Ghetto makes reference to the historical situation of Jews in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the murder of Czar Alexander II in March 1881, bloody pogroms were unleashed and it was in May 1882 that his successor Alexander III issued the anti-Jewish laws. The impact of this on the Jewish communities was not only a new edition of what was well-known to them as a potential threat but also caused and intensified migration of Eastern European Jews to the West and thus dissolution of the structural order of Jewish communities. It was only now that Eastern European Jewry, which had hitherto been regarded as a nuisance factor by Western European Jewry, again became increasingly visible for the latter which regarded its “brothers in the east” as backward and unenlightened.10 Since the late nineteenth century the term Ost- judentum, or “Eastern European Jewry,” had been a catch-all phrase used to desig- nate the Jews of Russia, Galicia and Poland. The writer Karl Emil Franzos had employed the pejorative “half-Asian” in describing the Jewish population stratum in these regions. It was only with advent of the First World War that there emerged an altered perception of the Ostjuden on the part of Western Jews who constituted the bourgeois and cultivated elements of Jewish society. The Ghettovolk and their artistic merits were paid greater heed, there were translations from Yiddish and Hebrew — the languages of Eastern European Jewry — and their “latent assets” were now regarded as a cultural bequest to which German Jewry could also lay claim.11 Lands- berger’s anthology Das Volk des Ghetto is thus paradigmatic, the author in his foreword expressing the wish to “help Eastern Europe’s ‘recent Jewish literature’ to finally obtain recognition in German-language regions as well as to help establish Yiddish as a language of the civilized world [Kultursprache].”12

10 On the dialectical concept of Eastern and Western European Jews, see Aschheim, “Spie- gelbild, Projektion, Zerrbild. ‘Ostjuden’ in der jüdischen Kultur in Deutschland,” 2008, 67–81; and Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1982. 11 See Glasenapp, Eine neue und neuartige Epoche, 2001, p. 45. 12 “[D]er ‚jungjüdischen Literatur’ Osteuropas im deutschen Sprachraum zur endgültigen Anerkennung zu verhelfen sowie die Etablierung von Jiddisch als Kultursprache.” Glase- napp, Eine neue und neuartige Epoche, 2001, p. 45; and Landsberger, Das Volk des Ghetto, 1916, pp. ix–xvi. Glasenapp draws attention to the fact that most of the tales were translated from Yiddish and Hebrew, which constituted an improvement. “And so both anthologies are a kind of culmination of a literary development which had been adumbrated a good quarter century previous, namely a growing interest on the part of German Jews in the literature and authors emerging from Eastern European Jewry.” (“Damit bilden beide Anthologien gleichsam den Kulminationspunkt einer literarischen Entwicklung, die sich seit bereits gut einem Vierteljahrhundert angedeutet hatte: einem ständig wachsenden Inte- resse des deutschen Judentums an der osteuropäischen jüdischen Literatur und ihren Auto- ren.”) See Glasenapp, Eine neue und neuartige Epoche, 2001, p. 45.

64 HILDEGARD FRÜBIS

The content of Landsberger’s ghetto tales is mostly from the nineteenth century and insofar make only indirect reference to events of the day, namely the First World War, which perforce caused reexamination of the Ostjuden question. The new edition of these old stories, such as “Kaddish in the Old New Synagogue” (L. Kompert) and “Wedding in the Ghetto” (M. Gorki), tend to signify German Jewry’s reawakened interest in an Eastern European Jewish literature that till then had been little esteemed.13 By contrast, the conception behind the cover of the 1916 anthology has less to do with the content of the ghetto stories than it does with the current threatening circumstance, which the First World War had intensified. The dangerous situation of Eastern European Jewry is made explicit through the soldiers in Cossack apparel and their unambiguously threatening stance, which insinuates both the motif and motive of rape. The figure of the Beautiful Jewess before them represents Eastern European Jews — and she above all brings public awareness to the West of the danger with which these Jews are threatened. More- over, the negative connotations that Ostjuden carried for acculturated Jews of the West had in the meantime given way to assumption of a paternalistic attitude toward the former. Western Jews increasingly perceived the Jews of Eastern Europe as being victims of Russian politics due to the restrictions placed on them.14 As with the book cover, particularly through the figure of a young and Beautiful Jewess, the previous victim role is transformed into a plea for compassion linked to a cry for help. The figure of the Beautiful Jewess thus is discussed in the context of the changing relationship between Eastern and Western European Jewry, serving as metaphor for a shift in boundaries. A 1914 lithograph by Max Liebermann (fig. 3) also appeared against the backdrop of the First World War. It bears the title “Kischinew” (Kishinev, present-day Chisinau) and was published in the illustrated magazine Kriegszeit, which was issued by the publishing house of Paul Cassirer.15 In the drawing’s foreground is the figure of a woman who has her head thrown back in a gesture of lamentation and who gazes forlornly heavenward. We have a side view of this upright figure carrying a small child on her right arm, the child in turn with its arm around the woman’s neck. On the woman’s left side is another child who is clinging to the woman in a way to impede her stride. In the background are some sketchily drawn houses and in front of them is a battle scene of armed men on horseback. It is very

13 As Glasenapp says, the stories of ghetto life are a “representative cross-section of Jewish ghetto literature both past and present.” (“repräsentativen Querschnitt durch die jüdische Ghettoliteratur der Vergangenheit sowie jene der Gegenwart.”) See Glasenapp, Eine neue und neuartige Epoche, 2001, p. 45. 14 This attitude had its social-political manifestation in the founding of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Benevolent Society of German Jews). It was founded in Berlin in 1901 at the instigation of Paul Nathan. It was through the financial contributions of German Jews that the cultural condition of Jews in Eastern Europe was to be improved. 15 See Kriegszeit, 1914, no. 5. Liebermann contributed a number of drawings to the magazine, which appeared in Paul Cassirer’s publishing house from 1914 to 1916, and all of them paid tribute to the current Hurrapatriotismus, or jingoism.

THE FIGURE OF THE BEAUTIFUL JEWESS 65 likely that “Kischinew” was expressive of Liebermann’s attitude toward the pogroms which erupted in Eastern European countries in the late 1880s and had intensified just prior to outbreak of the First World War. In April 1903, during the Easter holidays, there were antisemitic excesses committed in the municipality of Kishinev in Moldavia.16 The accusation of ritual murder had been raised. In Octo- ber 1905 there was another pogrom in the city. The longhand caption to Lieber- mann’s drawing reads: “To my dear Jews (the Czar)” — which was the artist’s sarcas- tic commentary on the czar’s Jewish policy in imperial Russia. The figure of the mother in Liebermann’s drawing is expressive of the Beautiful Jewess, also serving as a metaphor for Jewry in general. She symbolizes the danger being imposed from the side of the “Czar,” and in her depiction as a mother she demands protection and help — not least from her relatives in the West. For Western European Jews the czarist policy, and thus that of Russia, was one of their central arguments for becoming soldiers in the First World War. Also in the case of Liebermann the First World War was an occasion for him to take up the theme of the dangerous situation facing Eastern European Jewry. It was by entitling the drawing “Kischinew” that Liebermann combined this danger with the pogroms a decade earlier. The figure of the Beautiful Jewess as adorned with the title “Kischinew” was thus placed in a national context — she became the personification of Jewry and represented the Jewish self-conception as a nation in contradistinction to imperial Russia, while also embodying the developing conflicts both here and in the midst of the First Wor ld War.

Zweig/Struck: The Eastern European Countenance — a Counter-draft

Conditioned by late-nineteenth-century antisemitism, the self-conception of German Jews in those years before the First World War was above all the result of crises and conflicting identities.17 Added to their experience of Eastern European Jewish immigrants was now that of Jewish soldiers’ being directly confronted with Ostjuden in the easterly theater of operations. As we have already seen in images of the Beautiful Jewess, these alterations in Western Jews’ perception of Eastern Jewry had become integral to the figure of the Beautiful Jewess. The development of political and cultural Zionism was revolutionary for the traditional East-West relationship. From a Zionist point of view the Eastern European Jews were a strong- hold of spiritual and cultural inspiration; they came to epitomize a lived Jewish folklore which West European Jewry had largely lost owing to their assimilation. Paradigmatic of all this was the book Das ostjüdische Antlitz (The Eastern Jewish

16 Along with Chernivtsi the town of Kishinev was one of those cities in the Russian empire with a high proportion of Jews and serving as a center of Jewish culture. During the pogroms Jews were murdered and businesses and households were plundered and destroyed. 17 See Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland 1780–1918, p. 122.

66 HILDEGARD FRÜBIS

Coutenance) which appeared in 1920 with the Berlin publishing house Welt- Ve r lag. 18 This was a shared undertaking of the writer Arnold Zweig and the artist Hermann Struck, who had made a name for himself primarily as a graphic artist.19 Struck illustrated Zweig’s text with 52 lithographs that had their original source in a portfolio of stone drawings which Struck had published during the war in the years of 1917–1918 and entitled Ostjuden (Eastern Jewry).20 The drawings had their origin in Struck’s deployment during the First World War. Like many thousands of other Jews, and in the general popular enthusiasm for the war, at its outbreak Struck had volunteered for armed service. After brief duty on the front, he was in- stalled in the press bureau of the Eastern High Command, which was stationed in Lithuania, first in Bialystok and then Kaunas. Here he functioned as censor and was a translator of Yiddish. According to Arnold Zweig, the plan for the book emerged directly after appearance of the portfolio. In a letter to Martin Buber in 1918, Zweig wrote that insofar as I could acquaint myself with them by way of the Lithuanian Jews, I will be writing at length about the Eastern Jews and availing myself of an already existing opportunity, as it were, namely some fifty new lithographs by Struck. And in this text I will substantiate my judgment, which I’m just dashing off here, that the Jewish individual is indestructible, not to be deformed and not to be diverted from the path of goodness, warmth and sincerity.21 The book’s central purpose is to summon a kind of authentic Judaism which was believed to be found in the culture of Eastern European Jewry. Despite their direct confrontation with Eastern European Jews, whose life was one of poverty and squalor, the writer Zweig and the graphic artist Struck put forward an idealized and romanticized image of the Ostjuden which was instrumental to the cultural Zionist

18 There was a second edition in 1922. It was illustrated with 52 lithographs. In the second edition’s preface the congruence between text and image was emphasized. This edition was reprinted in Wiesbaden (Fourier Verlag). My statements are regarding the 1922/1988 edition. Before appearance of the book there were individual parts of it featured in the magazine Der Jude, which was published by Martin Buber. 19 In the years 1895 to 1900 he studied at the Berliner Kunstakademie where he learned the art of etching, which was the basis of his later success. Arnold Zweig was born in Glogow in 1887 and died in East Berlin in 1968. He was a cultural Zionist with socialist leanings. In 1948 he returned from Palestine to East Berlin and became a member of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) Cultural Council. In contrast to Struck, Zweig’s agenda was of a much more political nature. In this regard, see Zweig’s critique of Struck’s portfolio which appeared in the Vossische Zeitung (October 29, 1918) and Die Jüdische Presse (Berlin 49/1918, 44, 417ff.). 20 The printing company Ober-Ost produced 50 copies of the portfolio for the first edition which was published by Joh. Baer in Frankfurt. 21 “Ich werde über die Juden des Ostens soweit ich sie an den litauischen kennenlernen konnte, bei einer schon feststehenden Gelegenheit ausführlich schreiben: in einem Text zu etwa 50 neuen Lithographien Strucks. Und ich werde dort das Urteil begründen, das ich hier nur hin- schreibe: der jüdische Mensch ist unzerstörbar, unverzerrbar und unablenkbar auf Güte, Herzlichkeit und Offenheit gerichtet.” Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, 1972, p. 534.

THE FIGURE OF THE BEAUTIFUL JEWESS 67 program.22 A second and slightly altered 1922 edition was also published by the Welt-Verlag in Berlin. The Zionist publishing house, which promoted the idea of a cultural renewal of Jewry as particularly expressed and even initiated by Martin Buber’s notion of a Jewish Renaissance,23 was a fit place for publishing Das Ost- jüdische Antlitz.24 The book is divided into five chapters along lines of gender and age — a schema that is also followed by the full-page illustrations of men, women and children and with these categories subdivided into old and young. The individual and discrete portraits are juxtaposed with the text and finally serve to con- jure the group portrait of a family encompassing both sexes and all ages and which represents an ideal image of Eastern Jewry. Taken as a whole the illustrations’ dramaturgical composition creates a static and cohesive tableau of a self-regenerat- ing community stylized as model for a new Jewry. In their structure and focus on the eye area of its subjects, the lithographs are reminiscent of Rembrandt’s work. This kind of depiction — augmented through the notion of “countenance” — attempts to thwart those negative stereotypes of Ostjuden frequently seen in contemporary photographs from Jewish quarters in cities like Berlin and Vienna. These portraits are expressive of an alteration in Western Jewry’s view of the Ostjuden — an alteration that emanates in a mythical exaltation of the lives of Eastern European Jews. In the book’s fourth chapter the life of Jewish youth is described and the figure of the Beautiful Jewess once more appears. A total of nine lithographs portray young women in idealized fashion (fig. 4). Each of these female figures accords with the typology of the Beautiful Jewess — for instance the bust portrait of a young woman with headscarf (fig. 5). Against a light background her face, in oblique profile, exhibits dark melancholy eyes; her headscarf evinces full dark hair. The accompanying text describes those “racial traits” of “black eyes” and “black hair” as well as the “melancholy of the slanting eyebrows.”25 In taking each individual picture on its own we can see that they almost all have the same structure. Each image — predominantly head and bust portraits — stands alone, is separated from the text, and takes up an entire page. The body, shoulders and neck are only sketchily

22 Struck committed to his diary the direct experience he had of the poverty and misery in which Eastern European Jews lived. See Schröttner, Hermann Struck im Ersten Weltkrieg, 2007, p. 148. 23 It was with Buber’s programmatic essay “Jüdische Renaissance” that Ost und West, a monthly journal devoted to modern Jewry, was inaugurated in the year 1901. See Ost und West 1, 1901, columns 1–4. 24 The enterprise was launched by Alwin Löwenthal and was informed by the intent to “create a Jewish cultural zone within that of German-language culture which is as autonomous as possible” and to draw attention of the German public to Jewish cultural values as “un- disguised Jewish values without any artificial assimilation.” (“den jüdischen Kulturbezirk innerhalb des Bezirkes der deutschsprachigen Kultur möglichst autonom zu gestalten”; “ohne Verkleidung und künstliche Assimilierung, als jüdische Werte.”) See Schütz, Kunst aus jüdischen Verlagen, 1989, p. 144. 25 “Schwermut zwischen den schrägen Brauen.” Zweig/Struck, 1922/1988, p. 107.

68 HILDEGARD FRÜBIS suggested if at all, and on the whole the drawing style is not preoccupied with de- tails. The figures almost never make eye contact with the observer, thus intensify- ing the impression of their isolation. The depictions focus on the eye area — the face and head are modeled solely through black lines and their painterly reading of the subject as well as through smudged grays, and the omnipresent omissions are made conspicuous through the white background of the page. With only a few exceptions the pictures were signed by Struck, thus demonstrating his own artistic presence and authority over the drawings and also in the sense of their being illustrations. The likenesses are neither captioned so as to identify the subject nor are there any other indicators regarding when and where they might have had their provenance. The images thus take on the quality of timeless apparitions. And just as the artwork is of a timeless and placeless nature, so too does Zweig’s text always invoke that universalizing topos of the Jewess who is labeled both an Oriental and identified with female figures from the Bible.26 Thus reads the text opposite the picture of a young woman with a child (fig. 6): “Young Jewess … she does not know that she is our matriarch Leah, once more at work for her people.”27 The figure of the Beautiful Jewess is linked to her biblical ancestors — a conflation that can be repeatedly found in the history of the figure and which has emerged as one of her defining elements.28 It is in particular with reference to biblical first names such as Lea and Sara and Judith and Debora that the attempt was made to indicate a kind of genealogical foreordainment that would have the Beautiful Jewess joining the ancestral line of biblical matriarchs and heroes. But the actual intention in- forming the figures — in tandem with Zweig’s narration — is an adumbration of the dangers that threaten the Jewess and thereby the Jewish people as a whole. It is not only soldiers and bordellos29 but the “East-European Jewish youth movements,”30 i.e. socialism and revolution, that remove her from her actual destiny as Jewess.31 In its overarching conception Das Ostjüdische Antlitz puts forward the image of a new Jewry with Zionistic leanings and which can be read as a counter-draft to the negative stereotypes propagated with regard to the Ostjuden. The series of Beautiful Jew- esses thus represents the outside dangers threatening Eastern European Jewry, namely the promises of assimilation; she has become a metaphor for those zones of danger and demarcation in the Zionists’ conceptions of Jewish identity.

26 Zweig/Struck, 1922/1988, p. 94. 27 “Junge Jüdin ... sie weiß nicht, dass sie unsere Stammutter Leah ist, wieder am Werke für das Volk.” Zweig/Struck, 1922/1988, p. 111. 28 See Frübis, Die “Schöne Jüdin,” 1997, pp. 112–125. 29 Zweig/Struck, 1922/1988, p. 113. 30 “[O]stjüdischen Jugendbewegungen.” Zweig/Struck, 1922, p. 117. 31 Ibid.

THE FIGURE OF THE BEAUTIFUL JEWESS 69

National Demarcations: Personification of the Beautiful Jewess in the Context of Early Zionism

The drawing entitled “Princess Sabbath” (fig. 7) is a paradigm of the Beautiful Jew- ess’s various personifications. She was created by Ephraim Moses Lilien, an artist from Drohobych in Galicia. The likeness is to be found in the last chapter of Bör- ries Freiherr von Münchhausen’s book of ballads Juda, which Lilien was entrusted with illustrating.32 The picture refers to the special place occupied by the Sabbath and its celebration as the feast of feasts. In his 1851 Hebräische Melodien (Hebrew Melodies) Heinrich Heine had already developed this central and weekly celebrated Jewish institution into the literary metaphor of “Princess Sabbath.” Lilien takes up Heine’s metaphor in his depiction of the Sabbath as a female figure vested with the insignia of a princess. The figure is seated on a throne adorned with the Star of David, she wears a crown and holds in her hands the Torah scroll. The symbolic character of the Star of David motif is enhanced through the Hebrew letters grac- ing the princess’ dress. Beautiful, self-assured and denoted through the symbols of Judaism, this figure represents the hopes of Zionist Jewry and its ideals regarding a newly founded state and community. This type of depiction clearly reveals the latent possibilities in this character as proxy for the Jewish collective and thus a personification of the nation. Inherent to the figuration is creation of a positive self- image that is not only proud and self-confident but furnished with a vision of the future and thus helping to create a Zionist counter-discourse, which stood in opposition to the centuries-old negative imagery of Jewry from an anti-Jewish perspective.33 It was particularly in those symbols of the throne, Torah scroll, Star of David and Hebrew letters that the figure symbolizes the new self-conception of the Jewish-Zionist nation and thereby demarcated itself from non-Jewish nations. This figure’s national facet of meaning can also be observed in a photograph bearing the title “Lea as the Mourning ‘Daughter Zion’” (fig. 8).34 It is to be found in a 1907 issue of the periodical Ost und West and is part of a piece by Theodor Oschinsky in which he reports on his trip to Palastine.35 Oschinsky is invited to a performance with dancing and theatrical pieces at the Eveline von Rothschild Girls School in Jerusalem where he sees the biblical character Ruth portrayed by a

32 Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen, Juda. Gesänge, illustrations by E. M. Lilien (Berlin: Lattmann, 1900), 96. B. von Münchhausen forged a career under the National Socialists and was appointed to the “cleansed” Deutsche Akademie der Dichtung. With invasion of the American troops in 1945 he committed suicide. 33 On the notion of a counter-discourse, see Heschel, Revolt of the Colonized, 1999, pp. 61–86. 34 Anonymous, “Lea als trauernde ‘Tochter Zion’,” Rothschildschule in Jerusalem, photograph, Ost und West, 1907, column 350. 35 Oschinsky, “Mein Aufenthalt in Palästina,” 1907, columns 337–354. In the report Oschin- sky is introduced as a businessman from Breslau and member of the Deutsche Conferenz- Gemeinschaft der Alliance Israelite Universelle (German Conference Community of the Alliance Israélite Universelle).

70 HILDEGARD FRÜBIS young girl upon whom all eyes fasten: “As the bereaved daughter of Zion her ra- diantly white face in the black widow weeds was eminently prominent.”36 The black-and-white photograph underscores this contrast of black eyes and hair with fair skin and makes her the ideal figure of a Beautiful Jewess. As stated in the text, bent over a tombstone she gives “vent to her anguish.”37 The stone adorned with Hebrew letters and the Star of David shows parallels to those attributes of “Prin- cess Sabbath” as imagined by Lilien. And in a similar way the configured photograph of “Lea as the Mourning ‘Princess Zion’” is Jewry’s personification. The fact that the picture appeared in Ost und West — the authoritative journal of cultural Zionism — likewise emphasizes the national significance of the figure. The fact that the Beautiful Jewess is not solely a figure on the dividing line between Jewish and Christian milieus can be seen with regard to the figure’s development in the context of the Ostjudenfrage, which was taken up afresh at the start of the twentieth century and became central to Jews in terms of their self- conception in the modern world. She became a figure in which were negotiated the new relations between East and West with respect to their significance for Jewry. As such she became a counter-draft to her original meaning. No longer does she stand for the external view of Jewry but for Jewish-national conceptions of identity in terms of Jews’ own self-understanding, and she represents the demarcation of Jewish from non-Jewish from a Jewish perspective.

Works Cited

Aschheim, Steven E. “Spiegelbild, Projektion, Zerrbild. ‘Ostjuden’ in der jüdi- schen Kultur in Deutschland.” Osteuropa. Impulse für Europa. Tradition und Mo- derne der Juden Osteuropas 58.8/10 (2008): 67–81. Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness (1800–1923). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Buber, Martin. “Jüdische Renaissance.” Ost und West 1 (1901): column 1–4. Buber, Martin. Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten. Band I, 1897–1918. Heidelberg: Schneider, 1972. Frübis, Hildegard. “Die ‘Schöne Jüdin’ - Bilder vom Eigenen und vom Fremden.” In Projektionen: Rassismus und Sexismus in der visuellen Kultur, ed. Annegret Fried- rich, Birgit Haehnel, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhof, and Christina Threuter. Marburg: Jonas, 1997, pp. 112–125.

36 “Als trauernde Tochter Zions trat ihr blendend weißes Gesicht in der schwarzen Witwen- kleidung ganz besonders hervor.” Oschinsky, “Mein Aufenthalt in Palästina,” 1907, 348. 37 Oschinsky, “Mein Aufenthalt in Palästina,” 1907, 348.

THE FIGURE OF THE BEAUTIFUL JEWESS 71

Frübis, Hildegard. “Die Jüdin” als Orientalin oder die “orientalische Jüdin”. Zur Kon- struktion eines Bild-Typus. Vorlesungen des Centrums für Jüdische Studien Graz: Leykam, Bd. 8, 2014. Glasenapp, Gabriele von. “Eine neue und neuartige Epoche. Ostjüdische Literatur in deutsch-jüdischen Zeitschriften und Almanachen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Literaturvermittlung um 1900: Fallstudien zu Wegen ins deutschsprachige kulturelle System, ed. Florian Krobb and Sabine Strümper Krobb. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopoi, 2001, pp. 45–61. Heschel, Susannah. “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy.” New Ger- man Critique 77 (1999): 61–86. Krobb, Florian. Die schöne Jüdin. Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Er- zählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Landsberger, Artur (ed.). Das Ghettobuch. Die schönsten Geschichten aus dem Ghetto. München: Georg Müller, 1914. Landsberger, Artur (ed.). Das Volk des Ghetto. Unter Mitwirkung von S. Blumen- thal und J.E. Poritzky. München: Georg Müller, 1916. Mahlke, Lutz S. (ed.). Europäische Moderne. Buch und Graphik aus Berliner Kunstver- lagen 1890–1933. Berlin: Reimer, 1989. Münchhausen, Borries Freiherr von. Juda. Buchschmuck von E. M. Lilien, Berlin: Lattmann, 1900. Oschinsky, Theodor. “Mein Aufenthalt in Palästina. Aus Reiseerinnerungen von Theodor Oschinsky.” Ost und West 7 (1907): column 337–354. Schröttner, Bea. “Hermann Struck im Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Hermann Struck 1876– 1944. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin — Centrum Judaicum/ Open Museum Tefan Industrial Park, ed. Ruthie Ofek and Chana Schütz. Tefan and Berlin: Industrial Park und Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin– Centrum Judaicum, 2007, pp. 147–196. Volkov, Shulamit. Die Juden in Deutschland 1780–1918. Enzyklopädie Deutscher Geschichte, Bd. 16. München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994. Zweig, Arnold and Hermann Struck. Das ostjüdische Antlitz. Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922. Reprint Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1988.

A Turbaned German of Mosaic Faith: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s Visual Self-Orientalization*

Mirjam Rajner

In visual arts, under the category of Orientalist painting, one usually thinks of a product of nineteenth-century academic art, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s well- known painting Slave Market, (ca. 1866), imbued in imaginary Middle Eastern eroticism, cruelty and barbarism.1 To today’s viewer, however, identifying with postcolonial pluralism and feminism, such works are strongly offending. In the light of Edward Said’s book, they were critically examined by Linda Nochlin in her well-known essay “The Imaginary Orient.”2 As powerfully shown by this well- known American art historian, they present and nowadays inspire heated criticism of Western white male exploitation and dominance over the “Other” — the East, women, and people of color. But the picture is more complex, and while politically motivated canvases such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Snake Charmer (ca. 1870) (used for the cover of the 25th edition of Said’s book),3 do justify in the eyes of Western colonial policy makers “intervention,” some orientalist works show appreciation of the new, rich, and beautiful worlds that resulted in genre paintings depicting everyday life, calm domesticity, or religious piety. Travel and prolonged visits to the Middle East and North Africa by artists such as Eugène Delacroix, the leading French romanticist, or John Frederick Lewis, a British Victorian orientalist, resulted in works of art such as the well-known A Jew- ish Wedding in Morocco (1841) or Courtyard of the Painter’s House, Cairo (1851),4 which revealed to the Western viewer the richness of foreign, non-European cultures and eventually inspired new art movements, from art-nouveau to abstraction. Likewise, the new art historical approach revealed that orientalist art does not include only the Western, European construction of the “Other, ” but also the “Ori-

* The text of this chapter is a shorter and revised version of my article published originally in Hebrew as “Artists, Orientalism, and the Jewish Connection: the Works of Moritz Oppenheim” in Ezra Mendelsohn and Eli Lederhendler (eds.), Picturing the Past: Essays in Honor of Richard I. Cohen, Jersualem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 2017. 1 See Gérôme, Slave Market, ca. 1866: http://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-leon-gerome/slave- market 2 Said, Orientalism, 1978; Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” 1983, 118–131; 187–191. 3 See Gérôme, Snake Charmer, ca. 1870: http://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-leon-gerome/the- snake-charmer 4 For Delacroix’s painting, see http://www.wikiart.org/en/eugene-delacroix/a-jewish-wedding- in-morocco-1841; for Lewis’s http://theredlist.com/wiki-2-351-861-414-400-507-view- orientalism-profile-lewis-john-frederick.html

74 MIRJAM RAJNER ental” — in this case Ottoman — response to Western culture and modernization.5 Similarly, scholars exploring the Jewish experience point out that although belonging to European culture, within this same culture the Jews were throughout centuries considered as the “Other” — the “Asians of Europe.”6 Eventually, primarily in the wake of emancipation, Jews began to deliberately display their oriental, non- European origin, most significantly — as demonstrated by Ivan Kalmar — when building magnificent, oriental-looking, “Moorish-styled” synagogues.7

Self-Orientalization among Jewish Artists: Encountering Oppenheim’s Temptation

While such blatant statements by European Jewish communities presenting themselves through the “Oriental” Islamic style of their synagogues attracted historians of architecture, the “Oriental” theme and self-orientalization among Jewish artists has attracted less attention. Usually linked to Zionist ideology and the creation of Jewish national art in Palestine,8 orientalism among the artists of Jewish origin active in various parts of Europe was largely overlooked. Self-fashioning as an expelled Moorish aristocrat from the legendary Alhambra in Granada, as an Arab warrior, or an oriental prince by such diverse artists as Maurycy Gottlieb or Jules Pascin; or portrayal of Jewish artists as orientals by their non-Jewish friends and colleagues as in a photograph of Simeon Solomon by David Wilkie Wynfield, or a portrait of Isaac Levitan by Mikhail Nesterov, offer themselves as examples.9 How- ever, rather than seeing their exploration of the oriental theme as a self-generated statement of their Jewish “otherness” and non-belonging, I would argue that it actually led to those artists’ alignment with modernism and universalism. The case in point which is an early example and the theme of this chapter is, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, the “first Jewish artist” Moritz Daniel Oppen- heim (1800–1882) and his contribution to the subject of our interest. Scholars usually give two reasons for labeling Oppenheim in such a way. He was the first Ger- man painter of Jewish origin who did not convert to Christianity in order to pursue his career as an artist and who became known due to his visual responses to contemporary German-Jewish acculturation processes. His popularity as a “Jewish” artist increased even more due to his late, nostalgic and idealized depictions of

5 Hackforth-Jones/Roberts (eds.), Edges of Empire, 2005, pp. 1–19. 6 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005, pp. xiii–xl; and Hasan-Rokem, “Ex Oriente Fluxus: The Wandering Jew — Oriental Crossings of the Paths of Europe,” 2000, pp. 153–164. 7 Kalmar, “Moorish Style” 2001, 68–100. 8 Manor, “Orientalism and Jewish National Art: The Case of Bezalel,” 2005, pp. 142–161. 9 To date only Ezra Mendelsohn has elaborated on this theme with respect to Maurycy Gottlieb. See his Painting a People, 2002, pp. 49–50, 84–94. See also Gottlieb’s Self-portrait in Arab Dress, 1876–1877: http://www.wikiart.org/en/maurycy-gottlieb/self-portrait-in-arab-dress

A TURBANED GERMAN OF MOSAIC FAITH 75 vanishing, traditional Jewish family life.10 However, Oppenheim’s painting entitled Temptation created in 1844 (fig. 9), that I propose to examine here, remained almost unnoticed. When compared to a “typical” orientalist painting, such as Gérôme’s earlier mentioned Slave Market, Oppenheim’s image clearly projects an entirely different atmosphere and message. In this work a young turbaned and dark-skinned Islamic scholar is drawn away from his pious reading by a tempting, fair-haired, cross- wearing Christian beauty who is offering him a glass of forbidden wine. The artist seemed even to “include” himself in the painting by placing his monogram on the pitcher from which the very wine was poured. Moreover, although the presence of a Muslim youth suggests that this unusual meeting may have occurred in the Ori- ent, the thick woods in the background are European. Similarly, the clay pitcher containing the wine is apparently of a local Westerwald tradition, used in Frankfurt for serving the apple-wine that was just at that time gaining in popularity. Much less intoxicating than grape wine, it adds a humorous touch to the painting and turns the young temptress into a contemporary Eve offering a product of “the original” apple. Mutatis mutandis, clearly aware of the classical tradition in art, the wooded scene also appears as a mocking reverse of a Dionysian theme, in which a young Maenad now hopes to intoxicate the mythological god of wine.11 Such frivolousness and erotic overtones encouraged by the prospect of drinking wine actually follow the atmosphere of Oppenheim’s painting entitled Crossing the Bay of Naples, created two years earlier, in which he, now over forty and comfortably settled in Frankfurt, recalled his youthful art-student days in Italy.12 The merry party shown in this work sits in a boat crossing the bay, drinking and playing music. There is a tipsy German poet and a painter, their Italian models and girlfriends, and a brooding Franciscan monk. It actually looks as if one of the young Italian women on the boat reappeared in Te m p t a t i o n — wearing a white top displaying her shoulder, adorned by a wreath of leaves and flowers, with a necklace and cross made of Mediterranean corals — having indeed a “southern” appearance. Still, while Crossing the Bay remains a genre piece, Temptation appears to be not only an amusing “Orientalist” scene, but also an allegory that for German Jews touches upon such politically impregnated notions as inter-faith relationship, quest for religious tolerance, acceptance and equality.

10 Oppenheim’s often discussed painting The Return of the Jewish Volunteer (1833–1834) and Scenes from the Traditional Jewish Family Life series created between the late 1860s and 1870s, are among the best known examples. See exhibition catalogues: Cohen, Moritz Oppenheim, 1983, with a groundbreaking article by Schorsch, “Art as Social History: Oppenheim and the German Jewish Vision of Emancipation,” pp. 31–61; and Heuberger/Merk (eds.), Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1999. 11 I would like to thank Ulrike Brunotte for this inspiring observation. 12 For the reproduction of this painting see Heuberger/Merk (eds.), Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1999, p. 93 fig. V.15.

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In Quest of the Equality

To pursue his artistic career, young Moritz Oppenheim left Germany in 1820, first for Paris and then for Rome. Only a year before his departure, Frankfurt (close to his native Hanau) and several other cities were affected by the infamous “Hep- Hep” anti-Jewish riots. The riots took place during a time of heightened political and social tension and summed up the post-Napoleonic reactionary wave. Despite enthusiastic voluntary participation of young Jews as soldiers in the German Lib- eration War, the post-1815 restoration of the “old order” meant for many German Jews partial withdrawal of the freedom and rights bestowed upon them during the earlier period of Enlightenment and French occupation. Caught between the often blatantly anti-Jewish German nationalistic movement opposing Jewish emancipation, on the one hand, and Jewish religious traditionalism and separateness, on the other, young liberal and acculturated Jews struggled to define for themselves a new position in a society from which they expected full recognition as equal citizens.13 One way of achieving such equality was by joining the Freemasons. An elaborate, well preserved Masonic travel passport issued by the French mother lodge, the Grand Orient de France, on June 21, 1821 (fig. 10), was intended to help Oppen- heim establish himself in Rome, his next destination. The idea to join the Freema- sons while in Paris most probably originated from his older brother Simon Daniel (1786–1860), a Freemason himself and a well-established jewelry merchant, who helped Moritz financially during the early years of his art education. The flowery text of the passport, introducing the travelling “brother Maurice Oppenheim,” an apprentice of the Pythagoras lodge in Paris, stresses the central credo of the Grand Orient de France: “the spirit of freedom, harmony, and fraternal friendship.” Clearly reminiscent of the French Revolution’s “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” it became a driving force for a number of German liberal Jews like the Oppenheim brothers in their struggle for acceptance and equality in the gentile world. Belong- ing to the Masonic movement made them feel included.14 However, Oppenheim’s Masonic travel passport was not only meant to be helpful in establishing new contacts among fellow Masons in the lodges he would visit on his way to Rome; it also must have strongly impressed him with its visual symbolism. This richly decorated engraving includes numerous Freemason symbols and emblems. During young Oppenheim’s apprenticeship in the Masonic order, he was obliged to learn their secret meaning, moreover their visual language and iconography must have interested him both as an artist, and, due to their Old Tes- tament roots, as a Jew. The most prominent elements are indeed two columns flanking the text of the passport. According to Masonic tradition, these are Jachin and Boaz, the mythical columns associated with the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings

13 Meyer/Brenner (eds.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2, pp. 27–42; 251–276. 14 See Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1970.

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7:21). In Oppenheim’s travel document they stand on either side of a flight of seven steps, which are both the steps leading to the temple and symbolical levels that the Mason has to pass on his way to becoming the master. The spatial positioning of this imaginary temple dictates its West-East orientation. This explains the position of columns as standing on the North (the left one) and on the South (the right one). Following the Freemason belief that the light (and enlightenment) emanates from the East, such a design also referred to the East as morning, the West as evening, the North as midnight, and the South as noon. The columns appear decorated with an array of symbolic objects and are topped by female allegories. Thus, the northern column represents an early level of an apprentice. The right, southern, column refers to the next level of a journeyman. The central scene above them in the sky, on the East, is of the highest Masonic level.15

Abraham’s Family

Once in Italy, as he must have soon discovered, Oppenheim’s Masonic passport’s iconography curiously matched the themes developed by the works of German artists he met in Rome. In the course of the nineteenth century, for a number of North European artists Rome and its surroundings gradually lost its past classical grandeur and instead became cherished for what it was — the colorful European South. Moreover, its picturesque sites, dark-haired inhabitants, and Mediterranean climate often offered a substitute for those artists’ search for an “authentic” world of imaginary biblical scenes. A group of German romantic artists actually permanently moved to Rome, living in a commune resembling early Christians. Soon known as Nazarenes, they developed new iconography that not only revived biblical themes but also sought to reconcile opposites: Gothic tradition with Renais- sance art, North and South, West and East, the New and Old Testaments.16 The reconciliation and union of such opposites was especially developed as a visual dialogue between two artists — Franz Pforr and Johann Friedrich Overbeck — when they created types of female allegories meant to represent their friendship. Pforr’s 1811 Shulamite and Maria (fig. 11), Old and New Testament feminine characters, introduced such counterparts that were further unified by Overbeck in his well- known friendship painting entitled Italy and Germany (1811–1828).17 Such innovative works encouraged Oppenheim, at the time close to Nazarene circles, to create in early 1820s an unusual scene showing Abraham’s Family which

15 About Freemasonry and its symbolism, see Binder, Die diskrete Gesellschaft, 1995, esp. pp. 214–221. 16 See Schindler, Nazarener, 1982; and Grossman, “Unwilling Moderns,” 2003: http://www. 19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn03/73-autumn03/autumn03article/273-unwilling-moderns- the-nazarene-painters-of-the-nineteenth-century 17 Overbeck, Italy and Germany, 1811–1828: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Friedrich_Overbeck_008.jpg

78 MIRJAM RAJNER refers to the dualities tackled by his German colleagues. The preserved 1821–1822 sketch of the presently lost painting shows a contemplating Abraham as he observes his wife Sarah on the left, with little Isaac holding a ram (the symbol of his future sacrifice), and his young concubine Hagar on the right, who is reprimand- ing his other son, Ishmael (fig. 12). The scene seems to refer to the text in Genesis 21:9–13: Sarah saw the son, whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham, playing. She said to Abraham, ‘Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.’ The matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned a son of his. But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you. As for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.’18 Oppenheim’s choice of text allowed him to elaborate on the theme of dilemma and dichotomy, expressed throughout his innovative composition. Abraham stands above two women with two young children and together with them forms a balanced triangular composition. Although aged Sarah stands bending down to hold Isaac’s hand, and is thus somewhat taller than sitting Hagar, Ishmael appears standing and thus taller than Isaac, who crouches on one knee. What is even more puzzling is the similar age of the two half-brothers, which deviates from the biblical text, according to which Ishmael was the older sibling. Such symmetry recalls the work of Nazarene artist and a friend of Oppenheim, Johann David Pas- savant, who in 1818–1819 painted The Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and John the Baptist (fig. 13). In the New Testament, Elizabeth, whom God made fertile in old age, like Sarah in the Old Testament, conceived with her husband Zacharias a child, the future John the Baptist. The painting therefore shows Elizabeth, an older, turbaned woman on the left, with her brunette, curly-headed baby John holding a cross as a sign of the future Crucifixion, and young Mary on the right, with a blond baby Jesus. Above them, creating a triangle stands Joseph, Mary’s husband. Oppenheim adapted this well-known New Testament iconography to his Old Testament scene. Thus, the older Sarah (as Elizabeth) is placed on the left; however, her son is not brunette, but blonde — like the baby Jesus, while the small ram parallels the cross held by John the Baptist and refers to the future sacrifice that both of them — Isaac and Jesus — will undergo. On the right sits Hagar. However, she is not fair-haired like Passavant’s Maria, but dark-haired, as is her son Ishmael. As noted, in Nazarene iconography blond women were associated with the Gothic North, Germania, and spirituality, and dark ones with the Ren- aissance South, Italy, and sensuality. Moreover, as shown, Pforr gave them the roles of sensual and maternal Shulamit of the Old Testament, and the virginal and devotional Mary of the New Testament. In Oppenheim’s Abraham’s Family, dark-haired Hagar is the sensual young mother who bore Ishmael due to her car-

18 Plaut (ed.), The Torah, A Modern Commentary, 1981, p. 139.

A TURBANED GERMAN OF MOSAIC FAITH 79 nal encounter with Abraham, thus recalling the Old Testament sensual Shulamit, while Sarah who bore Isaac as a result of God’s promise and intervention has a blond son, recalling the New Testament spiritual Mary and her immaculate conception of Jesus. Ishmael, traditionally perceived as the father of the Arab nation, is thus shown as closer to the sensual, dark-haired oriental inhabitants of the Ren- aissance South and the Old Testament, while blond Isaac recalls the spiritual New Testament of the Christian Church and the Gothic North. The light-haired Sarah and the brunette Hagar and Ishmael actually do appear in traditional representations of the two biblical women in European art.19 Such a choice of hair color for them follows the Christian interpretation elaborated in St. Paul’s allegory of flesh and spirit (Galatians 4:21–31), where Hagar and Sarah are presented as “law” and “grace” respectively, and compared to the “earthly city,” i.e., the sinful, unredeemed condition of humanity (Hagar who bore Ishmael due to human intercourse) and the “heavenly city,” the sinless redeemed condition (Sarah who bore Isaac through God’s intervention). Hagar’s offspring are thus not Arabs, but rather adherents of the Old Testament, i.e., the dark-haired Semites, while Sarah’s are future light-haired Christians. Thus, by using the Nazarene Freundschaft paintings and their polarity of South and North, sensual and spiritual, Old and New Testament, Oppenheim in Abraham’s Family portrayed the two women and their children as a polarity between Judaism and Christianity. By blur- ring the distinction between “Jewish” and “Egyptian” Hagar, Oppenheim turned her into a representative of the Semitic, non-European, oriental race, while Sarah became a symbol of the Arian European race. Further deviating from the Nazarene unity of opposites, Oppenheim’s composition includes Abraham, the progenitor of both lines, contemplating the conflict developing below him between the two women and their children. Finally, Sarah and Hagar also parallel Northern and Southern female allegories depicted on the Masons’ Temple columns in Oppen- heim’s passport (fig. 10). Following such reading, Abraham between and above the two women would then correspond to the Grand Master Mason positioned on the East. 20 Monotheism as the unifying force behind the three Abrahamic religions originating in the East was the main theme of another striking and little known painting by Oppenheim, created upon his return from Italy to Germany in 1827 (fig. 14). Here Moses, standing in front of a ruined pagan temple, presents the Ten Commandments — not to the biblical people of Israel, but to a colorful group comprised of monks and peasants, soldiers, fashionable women, nursing children,

19 For instance in Il Guercino’s (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri’s), Abraham Casting out Hagar and Ishmael, 1657, presently in Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. See http://www.artbible.info/ art/large/82.html 20 In light of the Arab-Israeli conflict and feminist theories, the subject of Hagar, Sarah and Abraham recently has received renewed attention, making Oppenheim’s work up-to-date and calling for its re-examination. See Zion and Israel, The Troubling Triangle, 2004; Gordon, The Woman Who Damned God, 2009.

80 MIRJAM RAJNER and turbaned and bareheaded elderly men. Among them appear representatives of all three religions: a dignified Muslim and a Catholic cardinal (standing on the left), and Jesus himself involved in a discussion with an Orthodox Jew, accompanied by a Christian monk and a Wandering Jew who listens carefully, appearing on the right. This is an enthusiastic universal message of mankind’s equality and call for mutual acceptance.

A Turbaned German of Mosaic Faith

Oppenheim’s adult life in Frankfurt, where he settled upon his return, the struggle to establish himself as an artist and provide for his young family, as well as an urge to find the right balance between his Jewish and German identities, delegated much of such idealistic aspirations to the background. However, one violent event seemed to again trigger his youthful aspirations. In 1840 he took renewed interest in the dialogue between the three religions, most probably resulting from his involvement with the infamous Damascus Affair that evolved that year. This staged blood-libel trial brought against the members of the Damascus Jewish community and the resulting anti-Jewish violence echoed throughout the Jewish world.21 When Adolphe Crémieux, the well-known French-Jewish lawyer and defender of human rights, passed through Frankfurt on his return to Paris after successfully participating in negotiations on behalf of the Jewish community of Damascus, he received honors from the city’s Jewish Masonic lodge “Zur aufgehenden Morgen- röthe,” Frankfurt’s Jewish community, and the Rothschild family. Oppenheim, as both a member of this lodge and the local Jewish community, was involved in preparations for the festivities and commissioned to design the goblet presented to Crémieux as a mark of appreciation. Stylized in a “Gothic” style, the goblet bears an image of a medieval knight trampling upon the dragon. However, instead of a sword he holds above his head a torch as a source of light. Crémieux, himself a Mason, must have understood such iconography. 22 In addition, Frankfurt’s Jews intended to present a similar gift to Sir Moses Montefiore, who also negotiated successfully on behalf of Damascus’s Jews. Today, only two 1840–1841 sketches are known which suggest designs for a goblet and a centerpiece. Initially, Oppenheim designed for Montefiore a goblet with a scene depicting representatives of all three religions and an angel mediating among them. The oriental turbaned character is an axe-wielding Muslim; a Christian appears as a medieval knight trying to stop him; while a Jew kneels on the ground begging for mercy. Once united as biblical Orientals, now a Muslim and a Jew are shown as perpetrator and victim, while the Christian tries to bring peace. The idea is further developed in the design for the

21 See Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 1997. 22 Katz, Jews and Freemasons, 1970, pp. 152–153. For a photograph of the goblet, presently in a private collection, see Weber, “Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and the Rothschilds,” 1999, 177, fig. 6.

A TURBANED GERMAN OF MOSAIC FAITH 81 table centerpiece that was chosen to be executed as a present for Montefiore (fig. 15). The Christian knight no longer appears, and the iconography even further stresses the martyrdom of the Jews under the threat of Islam, divine intervention in the form of an angel, and the role of Moses — the biblical one (kneeling on the top and mentioned in the biblical verses inscribed below, Exod. 3:9; 4:12; 17:11), and also an allusion to the contemporary one, Moses Montefiore — as his people’s sav- ior. The violence and clear division between the adherents of different religions contrast strongly with Oppenheim’s earlier egalitarian and universalist approach. Oppenheim, who never travelled to the Middle East or North Africa, may have seen such political involvement with the contemporary Orient and its reflection in art during his trips to Paris and London in 1835 and 1837. Among the paintings he saw there were works by Horace Vernet, one of the most prolific academic French artists who accompanied the French army to Egypt and Algeria. Vernet’s contrasting pieces — Massacre of the Mamlukes at the Citadel of Cairo, a massacre perpetrated by Muhammad Ali Pasha, and his monumental Portrait of an Arab, both of 1819,23 seemed to have left a lasting impression. However, Oppenheim probably paid even closer attention to Vernet’s illustrations for the then-popular French novel by Sophie Cottin, Mathilde, or Memoirs from the History of the Crusades (1805), a romantic love story between Mathilde, King Richard Lion Heart’s daughter, and Malek Adhel, Sultan Saladin’s brother (fig. 16). The novel and Ver- net’s illustrations certainly recalled for Oppenheim German Enlightenment’s fa- vorite inter-faith drama preaching religious tolerance and acceptance — Lessing’s famous Nathan the Wise, whose plot, as in Cottin’s book, takes place in oriental Je- rusalem during the Crusades. However, in contrast to Cottin’s novel stressing Christian superiority and Vernet’s depiction of a tragic outcome accompanying this inter-religious and inter-racial romantic encounter, Oppenheim, especially after depicting violent confrontation on Montefiore’s centerpiece, seemed to have a need to counterbalance it. The painting Temptation (fig. 9), discussed at the beginning of this chapter, offers itself now indeed as such more peaceful and harmonic scene, in tune with Less- ing’s work and Oppenheim’s own Masonic principles of egalitarianism and tolerance. In it, once again, North and South and West and East coexist: an Italian, white, Christian girl sitting in a German forest offers an oriental, turban-wearing, dark-skinned, pious Muslim a glass of local Frankfurt Apfelwein. As noted, the fact that Oppenheim put his own initials on the clay pitcher humorously includes Ju- daism as well: it becomes the source of a binding force between them, similarly to Moses who in the 1827 painting brings the Tablets of Law and monotheism to all the people (fig. 14). Moreover, the youthful Muslim is reminiscent of some of Oppenheim’s self-portraits. In 1840, Oppenheim and Philip Veit, who was Moses

23 See Ve rne t, Massacre of the Mamlukes at the Citadel of Cairo, 1819: http://www.deyim.com.tr/ tr/urunlerimiz/oryantal-tablolar/13; and Vernet, Portrait of an Arab, 1819: http://artmight. com/Artists/Horace-Vernet-1789-1863/Horace-Vernet-Portrait-Of-An-Arab-52162p.html

82 MIRJAM RAJNER

Mendelssohn’s grandson and a well-known Nazarene painter whom Oppenheim befriended while studying in Italy, created together a playful drawing (fig. 17). It shows a portrait of their mutual friend Gabriel Riesser, a German-Jewish politician and activist promoting Jewish emancipation (drawn by Veit) and a caricatured Op- penheim with a pronounced “Jewish nose,” thick lips, and sidelocks, shown painting a portrait of himself as a beautiful young man, lacking any pronounced Jewish features. Both friends signed it, and while the German inscription is a common- place dedication “in remembrance of happy hours,” the Hebrew one placed close to the portrait in the canvas is the biblical verse “Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30). Veit and Oppenheim, now in their forties, seemed to have had a private humorous moment of bittersweet mourning over their lost youth. The dark, charming Oriental resembling Oppenheim and his Italian fair-haired temptress — possibly reminding the aging artist of his youthful Italian summers — also seem to indicate that. Such embracing of an “Oriental” identity was thus for Oppenheim a long and gradual process, initiated by a dialogue with Nazarene dichotomies of North and South, Germany and Italy, Christianity and Judaism. While the Italian Mediterra- nean sites and local people reminded Oppenheim of the non-European, oriental biblical Semites, he also, as a newly initiated Mason, felt liberated and free to imagine an ideal egalitarian society. For Oppenheim its origins lay in the ancient wisdom of the East that Moses and Solomon offered not only to Jews, but to all of humanity. Thus for Oppenheim, as an enlightened Jew, the turbaned, beautified, and young Oriental he imagined himself to be offered a new identity he was seeking to embrace — one of an emancipated and equal member of a multicultural, liberal, tolerant, and humanist society: a turbaned German of Mosaic faith.

Works Cited

Binder, Dieter A. Die diskrete Gesellschaft: Geschichte und Symbolik der Freimauer. 2nd enl. ed. Graz, Vienna, and Cologne: Styria, edition Kaleidoscope, 1995. Cohen, Elisheva. Moritz Oppenheim, The First Jewish Painter. Exhibition catalogue. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Autumn 1983 (Jerusalem, 1983). Frankel, Jonathan. The Damascus Affair: ‘Ritual Murder’, Politics, and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gordon, Charlotte. The Woman Who Damned God: Abraham’s Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths. New York: Little Brown and Co., 2009. Grossman, Lionel. “Unwilling Moderns: the Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth Century Visual Culture, e-journal, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn03/73-autumn03/ autumn03article/273-unwilling-moderns-the-nazarene-painters-of-the-nineteenth- century (accessed November 14, 2015).

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Hackforth-Jones, Jocelyn and Mary Roberts (eds.). Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture. New Interventions in Art History Series, University of South- ampton. Malden, Oxford, and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Hasan-Rokem, Galit. In L’orient dans l’histoire religieuse de l’Europe: L’invention des origins, ed. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and John Scheid. Turnhout: EPHE & Brepols, 2000, pp. 153–164. Heuberger, Georg and Anton Merk (eds.). Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art. Exhibition catalogue. Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frank- furt am Main, 16 December 1999–2 April 2000. Frankfurt a. M.: Wienand Ver- lag, 1999. Kalmar, Ivan D. and Derek J. Penslar (eds.). Orientalism and the Jews. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2005. Kalmar, Ivan D. “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architec- ture.” Jewish Social Studies 7.3 (2001): 68–100. Katz, Jacob. Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Manor, Dalia. In Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2005, pp. 142–161. Mendelsohn, Ezra. Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002. Meyer, Michael A. and Michael Brenner (eds.). German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” Art in America (May 1983): 118–131; 187–191. Plaut, Wolf Gunther. (ed.). The Torah, A Modern Commentary. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Schindler, Herbert. Nazarener, Romantische Geist und Christliche Kunst im 19 Jahrhun- derte. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1982. Schorsch, Ismar. In Moritz Oppenheim. The First Jewish Painter, Elisheva Cohen. Ex- hibition catalogue. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Autumn 1983 (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 31–36. Weber, Annet te. In Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art, ed. Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk. Exhibition catalogue. Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, 16 December 1999–2 April 2000. Frankfurt a. M.: Wienand Verlag, 1999, pp. 170–186. Zion, Noam and Steve Israel. The Troubling Triangle: Sarah, Hagar and Abraham: In- terdisciplinary Bible Study for Genesis 16 and 21. Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Insti- tute, 2004.

The Jew in Literature: Antisemitism, the Colonial Paradigm and the Orient

Colonialism in the Ghetto: Reading Aus dem Ghetto as Self-Colonizing Literature

Cecilie Speggers Schrøder Simonsen

In the midst of nineteenth-century emancipation and assimilation debates about the future of Western European Jews,1 German-Jewish journalist and writer Leo- pold Kompert (1822–1886) published a collection of ghetto stories that appeared to be looking backwards on previous ways of Jewish living. These short fictional tales portrayed his childhood home in a Bohemian ghetto describing the everyday life, traditions and rituals of ghetto Jews. They focused almost exclusively on Jews isolating Jewish life from the surrounding society. This chapter explores the poten- tials of reading nineteenth-century ghetto literature as Jewish self-colonization. Kompert’s stories were widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike in his time, and they quickly became part of a cultural discussion about Jewish modernization and assimilation.2 With Kompert’s first collection of ghetto stories as its basis, this chapter discusses the possibilities and challenges of reading Jewish ghetto literature as self-colonizing literature and regarding the cultural discussion about Jewish de- ghettoization as a postcolonial process. When in 1848 Kompert published his first collection of ghetto stories, Aus dem Ghetto. Geschichten (Scenes from the Ghetto: Studies of Jewish life), he was clearly addressing a German-reading audience. The six stories that made up the collection were written in German with Yiddish expressions translated in brackets and Jewish customs explained in footnotes for non-Jewish or assimilated modern Jewish readers.3 Furthermore, they were in line with the Western European cultural preoccupation with history that took place in the first half of the century. Kompert was following in the footsteps of writers such as Berthold Auerbach and Heinrich Heine.4 With his fictional tales he was writing his way into modern Western and Central Euro-

1 The terms “Western European Jews” and “Western European culture” used throughout this chapter refer here to the areas in which Jewish ghetto literature emerged in the nineteenth century: Denmark, France and the German duchies. 2 See e.g. Iggers, “Leopold Kompert, Romancier of the Bohemian Ghetto,” 1973; or Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity, 2010, pp. 72–110. 3 The six ghetto stories of Aus dem Ghetto. Geschichten (Scenes from the Ghetto: Studies of Jewish life) were: “Judith die Zweite” (“Judith the Second”), “Alt Babele” (“Old Babele”), “Schle- miel,” “Die Kinder des Randar’s” (“The Randar’s Children”), “Ohne Bewilligung” (“With- out Authorisation”), and “Mährchen aus dem Ghetto” (“Fairy Tales from the Ghetto”). 4 Heinrich Heine’s medieval tale about a Jewish couple, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (The Rabbi of Bacherach), was published as a fragment in 1840. Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Stories) was published in 1843 and set the standard for village tales at the time.

88 CECILIE SPEGGERS SCHRØDER SIMONSEN pean culture carrying his Jewish heritage with him. Thus, he had a modern Euro- pean readership in mind for his stories. By historicizing Jewish life in ghetto communities, Kompert made clear a distance between modern Jews and traditional Jews and showed German readers that Western European Jews had advanced. His writings affirmed a process of change or modernization among Western and Central European Jews by describing Jewish ghetto life at a distance — in historical terms — as part of the past. Modernization was a prerequisite for historicizing or idealizing Jewish ghetto life. Progress and change were thus what enabled assimilated Western and Central European Jews to look back at previous states and glorify past life in ghetto communities.5 Accord- ingly, the revival of Jewish history in the nineteenth century took place where processes of emancipation and integration into European societies were developed the most. Kompert’s stories allowed Jewish readers to connect with a common past life, with a strong emphasis on the past.6 To Jewish readers, ghetto literature responded to their societal status as modern assimilated Jews in Western and Central Europe. This chapter turns first to two studies of Kompert’s writings that apply postcolonial theories or are inspired by them, before discussing what this approach does to a reading of Kompert’s first collection of ghetto stories. In these stories, Jews typically lived according to tradition in secluded ghetto and village communities. Contact with the surrounding society was limited and often led to conflict and controversy. In line with the two studies, this chapter will show how the Jew- ish communities that Kompert described had features comparable to colonized people living isolated from the surrounding world. The chapter will argue, however, that there were features pointing away from isolation and that the conflicts presented in the stories were just as much conflicts between Jewish tradition and modernity, as they were conflicts between a Jewish minority and a Christian majority.

Approaching Ghetto Literature from a Postcolonial Perspective

Within the last two decades in particular, the cultural and political implications of nineteenth-century ghetto literature have been scholarly scrutinized from various angles. In 1991, Kenneth Ober made a plea for academic attention on this ne-

5 Richard Cohen made this important point in his study of nostalgia among nineteenth- century Jewish writers and artists. See Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, 1998, pp. 154–185. 6 Whereas Kompert obviously addressed German readers in his stories, there were no visible signs in the text that he was also addressing Jewish readers. In the foreword to Geschichten einer Gasse (Tales from the Street), his 1865 collection of ghetto stories, Kompert addressed the German people indicating that the stories were written with them in mind. Neverthe- less, his stories were read by Jews and non-Jews alike. See Iggers, “Leopold Kompert, Ro- mancer of the Bohemian Ghetto,” 1973.

COLONIALISM IN THE GHETTO 89 glected literary genre,7 which was answered most extensively by Gabriele von Glasenapp in her study of nineteenth-century German ghetto literature.8 In 2001, Ober followed up on the work he had initiated with an account of nineteenth- century German ghetto stories and their writers.9 Jewish ghetto stories and historical fiction were being rediscovered as sources of nineteenth-century Jewish and Western European culture. Numerous studies of their content and context have appeared with different approaches and understandings of their cultural and political intentions.10 Inspired by Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, Florian Krobb introduced a postcolonial perspective on ghetto stories in the 1999 work Ghetto Writing.11 He compared the process of de-ghettoization with that of de-colonization and approached Leopold Kompert’s works from a postcolonial theoretical angle. Krobb saw establishments of colonized communities inside national territories as a form of “internal colonization.”12 First, he pointed out the obvious differences between Central European ghettos and overseas colonies; the Jews were not a majority, but a minority surrounded by a dominant Christian majority, and the geographical distance between the ghettos and the surrounding society was minimal. Further- more, ghettoization had happened for religious reasons and de-ghettoization was not a revolutionary event, but a gradual emancipation process that aimed at integration, not at independent national institutions. At first glance, the odds of a successful postcolonial examination of ghetto stories seemed unfavorable. Nevertheless, Krobb convincingly examined Kompert’s ghetto stories as postcolonial literature. He justified his theoretical approach by pointing out the similarities between de-colonization and Jewish emancipation: In both instances, there is a powerful, culturally and politically dominant side to the equation, the sheer existence of which exerts on the weaker side a certain pressure to conform to its standards (linguistic and cultural, amongst others), and a weaker thwarted or oppressed side that previously could, and in fact did, maintain its cultural distinctiveness mainly by minimising its contact with the surrounding majority culture.13

7 Ober, “Meir Goldschmidt og den tysk-jødiske ghetto-fortælling,” 1991. 8 Glasenapp, Aus der Judengasse: zur Entstehung und Ausprägung deutsch-sprachiger Ghettoliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert, 1996. 9 Ober, Die Ghettogeschichte: Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Gattung, 2001. 10 See e.g. Hyman, “Traditionalism and Village Jews in Nineteenth-Century Western and Central Europe: Local Persistence and Urban Nostalgia,” 1993; Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, 1998; Witteman, Draußen vor dem Ghetto: Leopold Kompert und die ‘Schilderung jüdischen Volkslebens’ in Böhmen und Mahren, 1998; Sazaki, “The Assimilating Foul? Berthold Auerbach’s ‘Der Tolpatsch’ and Leopold Kompert’s ‘Schlemiel’,” 2003; Glasenapp and Horch, Ghettoliteratur. Eine Dokumentation zur deutsch‐jüdischen Literaturge- schichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, 2005; Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France, 2010. 11 Krobb, “Reclaiming the Location: Leopold Kompert’s Ghetto Fiction in Post-Colonial Per- spective,” 1999, pp. 41–53; subsequently referred to as “Reclaiming the Location.” 12 Krobb, “Reclaiming the Location,” 1999, p. 42. 13 Ibid., p. 43.

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The ghetto was a secluded and safe site for practicing Judaism and Jewish living, Krobb claimed, whereas emancipation brought changes and adaption to the Chris- tian majority. Becoming an accepted member of the majority culture, Jews would have to adapt to its linguistic, political, social and cultural ways. This process of acculturation Krobb saw as de-colonization. Krobb drew on Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha in studying the de- colonization of ghetto Jews as an abandonment of a religiously defined cultural identity. Anderson’s notions of imagined communities and Bhabha’s perspectives on negotiating identities elucidated the cultural function Kompert’s stories had. The process of abandoning religiously defined cultural communities and identities left a void that could only be filled by leaning on the majority culture in order for acculturation to succeed. Kompert’s stories were indeed a product of the majority culture and could serve as a medium for an imagined community for modern acculturated Jews. They reminded Jewish readers of common traditional or religious bonds while at the same time strengthening their relations to a new cultural community. They represented a period of transformation going from enclosed Jewish communities to modern European societies. Thus, they contained elements associated with both past and future life for European Jews. Ghetto stories enabled Jewish writers to narrate their lost identity and to overcome a sense of estrangement in a new cultural community, “In this respect, Kompert’s literary ghetto is not a location of unproblematic inherited identities but a place where, in Homi Bhabha’s sense, orientation and identifications are negotiated; that is topical issues are highlighted and tested for their relevance to the context of the contemporary debate on Jewish identity.”14 Krobb argued that Kompert’s ghetto writings negotiated a collective experience of community interest or cultural value. Kompert’s stories were an imagined past creating a common cultural heritage as the basis for Jewish entrance in a new cultural community. Krobb’s postcolonial examination of Kompert’s stories was groundbreaking and a source of inspiration for recent scholars of ghetto literature such as Jonathan Hess.15 Krobb paved the way for approaching Jewish ghetto literature with recent theories and new perspectives. In Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German- Jewish Identity (2010) Jonathan Hess’s study of Kompert’s ghetto stories followed Krobb in understanding Kompert’s ghettos as “imagined locations” for “imaginary ideals.”16 Hess wanted to show how German-Jewish fiction of the nineteenth century formed German-Jewish identity and argued that this literature played an important role in balancing multiple identities. He also included Benedict Anderson

14 Ibid., p. 48. 15 Hess, “Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia: Ghetto Fiction and the Creation of a Usable Past,” 2010, pp. 72–110; subsequently referred to as “Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia.” See also Fuchs, “Mimicry und Assimilation. Leopold Komperts Ghettogeschichte in postkolonialer Perspektive,” 2000, pp. 497–508. 16 Hess, “Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia,” 2010, p. 228.

COLONIALISM IN THE GHETTO 91 and his idea of communities imagined through the medium of print. Ghetto literature was an important medium of print that created a novel sense of Jewish community and played a crucial role in imagining German-Jewish social relations in nineteenth-century Germany, Hess asserted. Building on some of Krobb’s postcolonial ideas about ghetto literature and the process of de-ghettoization, Hess proposed that Kompert’s ghetto stories had the therapeutic function of literarily articulating and acknowledging the Jews’ feeling of disorientation and displacement in abandoning the ghetto and entering new cultural communities. Kompert’s stories were a product of alienation and addressed Jewish readers who had experienced the isolation and loneliness that followed from leaving traditional Judaism behind. In line with Krobb, Hess thus emphasized Jews’ societal advancement and defined Kompert’s Jewish readers as modern emancipated Jews. Hess applied Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” in explaining more specifically the job ghetto literature performed for Jews in modern European culture. Ghetto literature established a cultural respectability for German Jews that could serve as a marker of their newly found middle-class status according to Hess. It presented a usable past that was compatible with contemporary Jewish aspirations towards middle-class respectability. Kompert wanted to show the German reading public what he had left behind with the aim of entering the German bourgeoisie, “he seeks to create a new home for Jews like himself, a literary community where Jews and non-Jews might come together as members of a German reading public consumed with sentimental compassion for Jewish suffering.”17 Hess thus argued that ghetto literature was an important common denominator for Jews and non-Jews alike, and a cultural capital for German Jews pursuing entrance into middle-class society. Krobb and Hess’s works were important contributions to the scholarly field of German ghetto literature. Their approaches were innovative and shed new light on the cultural and political dimensions of Jewish ghetto stories as well as the cultural position of the writers. They both perceived ghetto literature as an important medium for negotiating the identity of modern Western European Jews and a foundation for making new cultural connections. Krobb focused on the de-colonization features that he saw in Kompert’s ghetto stories whereas Hess emphasized their ability to create cultural respectability and middle-class status. Their studies inspired other approaches and perspectives on Jewish ghetto literature and opened up new discussions of German-Jewish cultural relations.

17 Ibid., p. 90.

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Self-Colonization as De-Ghettoization — The Advantages of a Postcolonial Reading

In both Krobb and Hess’s works, Kompert’s ghetto literature functions as a cultural tool working to improve the situation of previously ghettoized Jews. Accord- ingly, the stories aimed to ease the process of acculturation and to argue for Jews’ social inclusion. Certainly, the stories were not just a cry for preserving a Jewish ghetto culture about to disappear with the rise of modernity and Jewish emancipation, as has previously been claimed.18 They were intended as contributions to the ongoing debate about Jewish emancipation and modernization. What speaks in favor of reading Kompert’s ghetto writings as self-colonizing literature is not just the cultural function they had. The content of the stories, Kompert’s portrayals of ghetto communities, also seem to support a postcolonial understanding of de-ghettoization. In the stories, the ghetto often seems an enclosed place where Judaism prospers undisturbed by outside influences. It is described as an isolated place, incompatible with the surrounding Christian society. In this way, the stories cast the Jews in the role as the colonized and the Christians as the colonizers. Kompert’s portrayal becomes a form of self-colonization of ghetto Jews, with the ghetto as a distant island society with a different culture and religion. The most significant story in Kompert’s 1848 collection, “Die Kinder des Ran- dar’s” (“The Randar’s Children”), illustrates the difficulties of merging ghetto life with Christian society. The story revolves around two children, Hannele and Moschele, who grow up in a traditional Jewish family. Their childhood home is described as a merry and lively place and their father, the Randar who runs the village tavern, is an important man in the village.19 His house is the finest, his fields are the best cultivated, and his animals are the healthiest. The Randar’s house is famous for its hospitality and his tavern is popular among Jews and gentiles alike. Day-to-day living in this Jewish house is joyous, and the narrator of the story in- tentionally describes the Randar, Rebb Schmull, and his wife Rachel, using idealized and historical phrases, “Good Rachel, good Rebb Schmull! Even now after so many years, when you pass before my memory, I seem to feel on my forehead, the mysterious wings of the Sabbath, and my soul, however agitated, becomes filled

18 In his 1991 article about Danish-Jewish writer Meïr Aron Goldschmidt and the German- Jewish ghetto stories, Kenneth Ober makes this claim referring to the writers’ own statements about their works. In 2000, however, Ober has reconsidered and with ghetto writer Nathan Samuely as his case study he reaches the conclusion that ghetto stories were an attempt to bridge the Jewish past with a new cultural world trying to gain acceptance by explaining to the new world the customs, religion, and culture of the old. See Ober, “Nathan Samuely: A Forgotten Writer in a Neglected Genre,” 2000. 19 The word “randar” is a corruption of “arrendator,” Kompert explains. It is a name given to a tenant such as that of a village tavern as is the case in Kompert’s story. Kompert, Scenes from the Ghetto: Studies of Jewish life, 1882, p. 79; subsequently referred to as Scenes from the Ghetto.

COLONIALISM IN THE GHETTO 93 with peace.”20 In the village the Jewish family lives a happy, harmonic and pro- tected life. In “Die Kinder des Randar’s” Judaism features as a significant way of life in the Randar’s house. Jewish values are practiced and taught with precision and several times Judaism is sentimentally depicted, as in the following description of the Randar who opens his house to wandering schnorrers on the Sabbath: It was on Friday that you should have seen the Randar, from three o’clock in the afternoon, just shaved, with a velvet cap on his head, standing at the outer gate and waiting for his guests. … One might then have taken him for a king, to whom his different es- tates were sending him addresses. In the evening he sat at table in the midst of his guests. Then how the Sabbath exhaled its perfumes and its flowers throughout the whole house, and how the schnorrer felt their hearts inundated with joy!21 The weekly holiday turns the Randar into a king and the schnorrers his court. Eve- ryone takes part in a joyous celebration of the Sabbath and Judaism appears a happy and welcoming religion. Its laws and traditions are conscientiously obeyed in the Randar’s house, and its significance upheld. This harmonic village life for the Jewish family is disrupted when the children become acquainted with life beyond the ghetto walls. The brother, Moschele, re- ceives a secular education and learns German culture, politics and food while he is away from the ghetto. He returns to his family bearing a new Christian name, Moritz, but with his religious faith intact. The sister, Hannele, considers converting to Christianity for her friend Honza, who is a priest, but her brother Moritz pre- vents her conversion at the last minute by reminding her of her religious bonds to their Jewish parents. Both siblings remain devoted to Judaism and ghetto life, but the story ends on a sad note leaving the reader in doubt as to whether they will ever fully recover from their youthful adventures. In the story, life in traditional Jewish villages and life in Christian societies are two very different and irreconcil- able things. Kompert’s story, thus, also included features that challenge a postcolonial reading. The story presents a non-isolated Jewish family where outside influences find their way into the family and interfere with their traditional village life. Moschele’s secular education and Hannele’s interrupted conversion are but a couple of features pointing away from a postcolonial understanding of the family as a secluded Jewish community towards a more diversified reading of the story, as the next part of the chapter will show.

20 Kompert, Scenes from the Ghetto, 1882, p. 85. 21 Ibid., p. 89.

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Judaism and Christianity in Unison — The Challenges of a Postcolonial Reading

“Die Kinder des Randar’s” was in fact a good example of a fruitful collaboration between Jews and Christians. The Randar runs the village tavern with success, serving primarily Christian peasants. When the peasants enter the tavern they sa- lute him with a Christian greeting, “‘Blessed be Jesus Christ’,’ and the Randar re- plies, ‘For ever and ever, amen’.”22 The Jewish family and the Christian peasants live peacefully side by side and show respect for each other’s religious beliefs: For the rest, in religious matters Rebb Schmull and the peasants made concessions to one another. He accompanied the glorification of Jesus Christ with his amen; but that did not prevent him from giving himself up in their company to his devotions. Often he could be seen walking about among the peasants with his phylacteries tied round his head and his arm; and it will perhaps be thought strange that it occurred to none of them to laugh.23 Kompert implies here that the peasants’ respect of the Randar’s religion is not a matter of course. But in the village, religious diversity does not pose a problem and although the story continues to point out a gap between Christians and Jews, the Jewish family lives harmonically surrounded by Christian peasants. The contrast of the story is thus not so much between the Jews living as an isolated minority and a Christian majority trying to dominate them, as it is a contrast between modernity and Jewish tradition. Kompert’s stories commented explicitly or implicitly on Jewish modernization, assimilation and emancipation. When Moschele is sent away for education, he is exposed to new and different ideas and he begins to question the traditional Jew- ish ways of life. He adapts to the manners taught at his Christian school, goes by the name Moritz, and finds it difficult to explain traditional Judaism rationally. Arguing with his Jewish landlord he becomes torn between the landlord’s Talmu- dic knowledge and his own reasoning. The landlord turns into Moschele’s counterpart, the superstitious traditional Jew who would have his books burned if what they taught him was lessening his appreciation of Jews and Judaism. He believes that the seemingly well-intended Christians really want to strip Jews of the little Judaism that is left in them, “But these learned men, if they were allowed, would change us Jews, according to their fancy. It must be admitted, alas, that they are every day becoming more influential; and if we are not careful they will take away the little of the Thora which still remains to us.”24 The landlord’s accusation is not unknown in nineteenth-century emancipation and assimilation debates. From the way he is portrayed in the story it is clear, though, that the landlord is uttering an extremity. Kompert is not out to charge intellectuals with emancipation fraud. In-

22 Ibid., p. 113. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 161.

COLONIALISM IN THE GHETTO 95 stead, he shows how Moschele slowly changes on his own with the help of various outside influences. The transformation that Judaism is going through is hap- pening not because of Christian takeover, but because Jews are leaving ghetto and village communities and taking part in the surrounding society. With “Die Kinder des Randar’s” Kompert appeared to be sending the message that life in the ghetto should stay in the ghetto. But as Krobb also pointed out, his stories were ambivalent because they originated in a period of transition and uncertainty for German Jews. Jewish emancipation had been on the political agenda in German intellectual circles for almost a century, but the 1848 revolutions, which Kompert’s collection incidentally collided with, added to the political insecurity that prevailed among German Jews. While seemingly placing Jewish ghetto life firmly in the past, the stories also conveyed community feeling and Jewish solidarity and can be read as a defence for traditional Judaism and a warn- ing against Jewish assimilation. They pointed in multiple directions and related to the past as well as the future for German Jews. Kompert’s stories were ambiguous, and their cultural and political aim was not clear-cut. Their inconclusive nature becomes even clearer when seen in light of his later work and that of other ghetto writers. Kompert published Böhmische Juden. Geschich- ten (Bohemian Jews. Tales) in 1851, Neue Geschichten aus dem Ghetto (New Tales from the Ghetto) in 1860, and Geschichten einer Gasse (Tales from the Street) in 1865. In the meantime, German-Jewish publicist Aaron David Bernstein had published two works containing ghetto stories, Vögele der Maggid in 1858 and Mendel Gibbor in 1859. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Kompert and Bernstein were joined by numerous Jewish ghetto writers such as Daniel Stauben, Michael Klapp, Leo Herzberg-Fränkel, Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, Nathan Samuely and Karl Emil Franzos, contributing with various perspectives on Jewish ghetto life.25 Some of the stories included sentimental elements (Kompert, Bernstein), while others were written on a humoristic note (Klapp, Goldschmidt), and a third group of stories was critical and rebellious in its portrayal of Jewish life in the ghetto (Herzberg- Fränkel, Samuely, Franzos). With many different and at times opposing views on ghetto life, this literature was anything but one-sided. Writers of ghetto literature entered into a community of Jewish writers who inspired and affected each other’s writings across decades and national borders. The theme of intermarriage, for example, was common among Leopold Kompert, Aaron David Bernstein and Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, who also shared the literary framework for their stories. Goldschmidt’s Danish ghetto stories of the 1860s,

25 Besides preceding ghetto writers with his medieval novel fragment, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (The Rabbi of Bacherach), Heinrich Heine wrote an essay about his travels in Poland, Über Po- len (1823) (On Poland), where he idealized traditional Polish village Jews. Heine’s essay marked the beginning of a cultural turn towards traditional Jews, ghetto and village communities. See Robertson, “Enlightened and Romantic Views of the Ghetto: David Friedländer versus Heinrich Heine,” 1999, pp. 25–40.

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1870s, and 1880s are similar to Kompert’s collections. And French-Jewish writer Daniel Stauben translated several of Kompert’s works to French, praising him in forewords. In 1860, he published Scènes de la vie juive en Alsace (Scenes of Jewish Life in Alsace) about traditional Jewish life in Alsace. Some of the writers also met in Ber- lin to discuss their work and situation.26 From Leopold Kompert to Karl Emil Franzos, ghetto literature was a way of discussing Jews’ societal status and advancement in Western Europe.27 Kompert’s first collection of ghetto stories, Aus dem Ghetto. Geschichten (Scenes from the Ghetto: Studies of Jewish life), was a contribution to this cultural discussion. He presented a fictional ghetto universe where Jews lived according to tradition. This traditional way of living was difficult to combine with modern society, as he shows in “Die Kinder des Randar’s,” and Kompert juxtaposed the two, tradition and modernity, to illustrate the difficulties involved with Jewish assimilation. In this particular story the Jews were not portrayed as living in isolated communities, and Judaism and Christianity were thriving in unison.

Concluding Remarks

Reading ghetto literature as self-colonizing literature highlights it as a medium for the discussion of Jewish assimilation and stresses the political, social and cultural situation of the Jews in Europe. It focuses on differences as well as similarities between a Jewish ghetto minority and a Christian majority. However, ghetto literature was just as much a presentation of the challenges that Western European Jews were facing at the encounter of modernity. This was an internal problem for Jews that did not necessarily involve a Christian majority but revolved around the ob- servance of Jewish laws and the significance of Jewish tradition among other things. Kompert’s story “Die Kinder des Randar’s” illustrates a happy union between Judaism and Christianity, but once removed from its village surroundings, traditional Judaism shakes to the core. The story describes a collision between Jew- ish tradition and modernity and the challenges that traditional Jews met in modern European society. Kompert had experienced these challenges first-hand when he left his childhood home for education and employment outside the ghetto. And he stated himself that the idea for his stories originated at a time when “the ghetto appeared far away

26 It is evident from letters and journals of Danish-Jewish writer Meïr Aron Goldschmidt that he met Leopold Kompert and Aron David Bernstein in Berlin. They had both read his first novel, En Jøde (A Jew) (1845), about the religious struggles of a Danish Jew. Kenneth Ober thus names Goldschmidt the forerunner of ghetto literature. Ober, Die Ghettogeschichte: Entste- hung und Entwicklung einer Gattung, 2001, pp. 29–36. 27 See e.g. Glasenapp, Aus der Judengasse: zur Entstehung und Ausprägung deutsch-sprachiger Ghettoli- teratur im 19. Jahrhundert, 1996; Ober, Die Ghettogeschichte: Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Gat- tung, 2001; Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity, 2010; Samu- els, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France, 2010.

COLONIALISM IN THE GHETTO 97 and lost, as if I were thousands of miles, hundreds of years away from it — and suddenly this sentiment lent it its poetic significance for me, much to my surprise.”28 In his stories, Kompert was looking back at the Bohemian ghetto and his own feeling of distance was projected onto fictional ghettos that were portrayed as remote traditional communities. The ghetto and village communities of his stories were created in hindsight, which he made no attempt of hiding. Reading Kompert in a postcolonial light foregrounds his cultural aim with the stories. Kompert wanted to emphasize the transformation that he and other assimilated European Jews had underwent to become part of European culture and society. His literature illustrates the transitional period that mid-nineteenth-century Western European Jews experienced, and shows how Jewish writers related to the political, social and cultural changes that followed. Postcolonial reading or not, ghetto literature was an important medium for the discussion of Jewish assimilation and modernization, and continued to progress as a literary genre among Jew- ish writers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. In his fictional stories Kompert merged particular Jewish elements with modern European culture, an imagined Jewish past with hopes for the future for European Jews.

Works Cited

Cohen, Richard I. “Nostalgia and The Return of the Ghetto.” In Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Fuchs, Anne. “Mimicry und Assimilation. Leopold Komperts Ghettogeschichte in postkolonialer Perspektive.” In Das schwierige 19. Jahrhundert: Germanistische Ta- gung zum 65. Geburtstag von Eda Sagarra im August 1998, ed. Jürgen Barkhoff, Gilbert Carr, and Roger Paulin. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000, pp. 497– 508. Glasenapp, Gabriele von. Aus der Judengasse: zur Entstehung und Ausprägung deutsch- sprachiger Ghettoliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996. Glasenapp, Gabriele von and Hans O. Horch. Ghettoliteratur. Eine Dokumentation zur deutsch-jüdischen Literaturgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Tübin- gen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2005. Hess, Jonathan M. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Hyman, Paula E. “Traditionalism and Village Jews in Nineteenth-Century Western and Central Europe: Local Persistence and Urban Nostalgia.” In The Uses of Tra- dition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer. The Jewish

28 Kompert in Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity, 2010, p. 82.

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Theological Seminary of America. Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 191–201. Iggers, Wilma. “Leopold Kompert, Romancier of the Bohemian Ghetto.” Modern Austrian Literature 6.3/4 (1973): 117–138. Kompert, Leopold. Scenes from the Ghetto: Studies of Jewish Life. London: Remington and Co.,1882. Krobb, Florian. “Reclaiming the Location: Leopold Kompert’s Ghetto Fiction in Post-Colonial Perspective.” In Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to Hilsenrath, ed. Anne Fuchs and Florian Krobb. Columbia: Camden House, 1999, pp. 41–53. Ober, Kenneth H. “Meir Goldschmidt og den tysk-jødiske ghetto-fortælling.” Ram- bam. Tidsskrift for jødisk kultur og forskning 1 (1991): 82–93. Ober, Kenneth H. “Nathan Samuely: A Forgotten Writer in a Neglected Genre.” SHOFAR 18.2 (2000): 70–81. Ober Kenneth H. Die Ghettogeschichte: Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Gattung. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001. Robertson, Ritchie. “Enlightened and Romantic Views of the Ghetto: David Friedländer versus Heinrich Heine.” In Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to Hilsenrath, ed. Anne Fuchs and Florian Krobb. Columbia: Camden House, 1999, pp. 25–40. Samuels, Maurice. Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Sazaki, Kristina R. “The Assimilating Foul? Berthold Auerbach’s “Der Tolpatsch” and Leopold Kompert’s “Schlemiel”.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 39.1 (2003): 1–14. Witteman, M. Theresia. Draußen vor dem Ghetto: Leopold Kompert und die ‘Schilderung jüdischen Volkslebens’ in Böhmen und Mähren. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1998.

Orientalism, Occidentalism and Colonialism in Freytag’s Images of Jews and Poles

Christine Achinger

Gustav Freytag’s bestseller Soll und Haben, published in 1855, offers a range of different images of the “East,” from the underdeveloped, almost extra-historical space of Eastern Europe via a biblical past to the alluring Orient.1 These ideas inform the novel’s racializing images of Poles as well as the highly problematic representation of the Jewish characters, and serve in various ways as projection screens and contrast foils for imaginations of German identity. The text thus offers particularly rich material for an investigation of the interrelation of racism and antisemitism, and of the interplay between what could be called “orientalizing” — or: “easternizing” — and “westernizing” features in the image of the Jew. Characteristically for German nineteenth-century discourses, the Jews appear in this text both as strangers and as all-too-close, as members of an ancient race with an archaic culture, and as nesting at the heart of modernity, thus complicating a simple subsumption of antisemitism under forms of “Orientalism.” The book’s historical significance seems hard to dispute. It was by all accounts one of the most widely read novels of the second half of the nineteenth century, its author one of the leading liberal writers of his day, a successful novelist, play- wright, journalist, literary theorist and co-editor of the Grenzboten, one of the most influential liberal journals for culture and politics of the time. Freytag’s political af- filiations, together with the fact that later in life, he explicitly attacked the growing antisemitism of his day, also make the novel an interesting object for an investigation of the characteristic ambivalences of German liberals regarding what was then called the “Jewish Question.”2 Soll und Haben is chiefly a Bildungsroman, i.e. a novel of education, tracing the development of its hero, Anton Wohlfart, from romantic youth to sober and steadfast merchant. Early on in the narrative, on his way to the capital to take up his first employment as an apprentice in the merchant house of Traugott Schröter,

1 I would like to thank Barbara Breysach for valuable comments and references. 2 On the ambivalence of many liberals towards Jews and antisemitism, see also Dagmar Herzog’s seminal study Intimacy and Exclusion. Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden, 1996. See also Judson, “Rethinking the liberal legacy,” 2001; Katz, Vom Vorurteil bis zur Ver- nichtung, 1990, pp. 148–152; Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland, 1988, pp. 68, 115ff.; Mosse, Germans and Jews, 1970, p. 70; Rürup, “German liberalism and the emancipation of the Jews,” 1975, p. 59; Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, 1978, pp. 47ff.; Vol k ov, Antisemitismus als kultureller Code, 2000, pp. 63ff.; Achinger and Stoetzler, “German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-seeking Jews: The Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals,” 2013, subsequently referred to as “German Modernity.” On Freytag’s later explicit opposition to antisemitism, see Achinger and Stoetzler, “German Modernity,” pp. 743ff. 100 CHRISTINE ACHINGER

Anton encounters the young noblewoman Lenore von Rothsattel, who will hence- forth be the object of his secret desires, which shall threaten to lead him astray on his way to a solid middle-class existence. On the same journey, Anton also meets the future anti-hero of the novel, the young Jew Veitel Itzig, who travels to the capital to start a new life in the services of the Jewish trader Ehrenthal. The lives of the two young men will from now on take an outwardly parallel, but morally markedly different course. Itzig and Ehrenthal, in league with an assortment of Jewish cronies, succeed in swindling the von Rothsattels out of their fortune, and the family is forced to relocate to their last remaining property, a dilapidated estate in Poland under Prussian rule. Anton joins them to take care of their financial affairs, supported by the young aristocrat Fritz von Fink. The recurring conflicts and battles with the rebellious Poles strengthen Anton’s national and middle-class identity, and he eventually turns his back on the temptations of the life of the nobility. Back in the capital, he manages to find the von Rothsattels’ mortgage deeds that Itzig had stolen and saves the family from ruin. Unable to withstand the pres- sures of the investigation, Itzig murders his accomplice and eventually drowns himself, driven to madness by his feelings of guilt. Anton’s return into the fold of the middle classes is finally sealed by a marriage proposal from Schröter’s younger sister Sabine and an offer to become an associate in the merchant house. In one of the many side-plots of the novel, we also learn about Anton’s friendship with Ehrenthal’s son Bernhard, a young orientalist scholar and the only positive Jewish character of any substance in the novel. This friendship is, however, brief, as Bern- hard succumbs, barely halfway into the text, to his unrequited passion for the un- attainable Lenore, his dismay about his father’s dishonest business practices, and his own sickly disposition. The various oppositions that structure the novel — middle class and nobility, Germans and Poles, Germans and Jews — and the somewhat more complex gender discourses the novel develops all come together in the construction, by way of contrast, of a “German” way to modernity that is allegedly free of conflict and alienation. This picture is governed by what the novel calls “labour in the German way”3 as a form of concrete mediation that is productive, morally guided and community-building. None of the other groups in the novel are able to work in this way; the Poles and the nobility because they do not work at all, and the Jews because their labor is not morally guided but motivated by egoism, not productive, but destructive, and not community-building, but fragmenting.

3 Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol.1, p. 302, my translation. The wider context of Freytag’s political views as expressed in his literary work as a whole is analyzed instructively in Schofield, Private Lives and Collective Destinies, 2012. ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM AND COLONIALISM ... 101

The Polish East

The backwards and rebellious Poles appear in two important roles in the text. Firstly, the lurid descriptions of chaos and destruction brought about by the Pol- ish rebellion — recognizable as the Greater Poland uprising of 1848 — could be seen as a kind of displaced engagement with the contemporaneous German revolution of 1848–1849, which is only once indirectly alluded to in passing.4 As I will further discuss below, this displacement can be seen as emblematic for the various constructions of alterity that structure the text. Despite their crucial differences, all of them can be understood as ways of dealing with immanent tensions, contradictions and ambivalences produced by capitalist modernity. By projecting one pole of these contradictions outside the national community and as- sociating it with, variously, the Poles, the Jews or America, internal contradictions are symbolically represented as an external threat; socially and historically produced features of modernity appear as rooted in trans-historical ethnic or national characteristics. Secondly, Poland appears as a colonial space, a barren land outside of history that has to be made productive and dragged into modernity by the Prussian colonizers. In this way, the text is also an example for the fact that German colonialist discourses even before the late nineteenth century do not just appear in the form of “colonial fantasies.”5 While German colonies in the southern hemisphere were indeed of a younger date, the much older process of German settlement in East- ern Europe and Prussian rule over parts of Poland produced its own quasi- colonial discourse.6 This fact seems to have been partly obscured in German cultural studies until fairly recently due to the dominance of imperial rule over Af- rica, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as paradigms of colonialism in scholarly debates.7 These colonialist patterns in the novel are vividly illustrated in the description of the town of Rosmin, for example, one of the German settlements on Polish soil, which is presented as seed crystal of a productive and progressive social order in a feudal, pre-modern space. Rosmin is described as one of the “knots in a firm net that the German has laid over the Slav, artful knots tying together innumerable threads through which the small laborer of the field is con-

4 See, e.g., Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol.1, pp. 360, 371, 390, 393ff. 5 Cf. Zantop’s important work Colonial Fantasies, 1997. 6 On German colonial discourses of the East, see e.g. Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism,” 2005; Kopp, “Gray Zones: On the Inclusion of ‘Poland’ in the Study of German Colonialism,” 2011, and specifically on Soll und Haben mehrere Beiträge in Biskup, ed., Gustav Freytag (1816-1895); Kopp, “‘Ich stehe jetzt hier als einer von den Eroberern’,” 2005, “Reinventing Poland as German Colonial Territory in the Nineteenth Century,” 2009, and Germany’s Wild East, 2012; Surynt, Das “ferne”, “unheimliche” Land, 2004; and Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne, 2007, pp. 131–165. 7 For a new approach systematically analyzing the specific (post)colonial German perception of Poland, i.a. drawing on the example of Freytag, see Joachimsthaler, Text-Ränder, 2011, i.a. Bd. 1, pp. 179ff. 102 CHRISTINE ACHINGER nected with other people, with education, with liberty and a civilised state.”8 The paternalist justification of Prussian quasi-colonial rule is here condensed in a paradoxical but telling image of liberation through captivity.

“Western” Jews

Not only the Poles play an important role in developing, through opposition, an image of German identity that is associated with middle-class values, productivity, order and community-building. The same is true for the Jews, but they do so in very different ways. Despite — or perhaps because of — the belated character of Prussia’s social and economic modernization in the European context, the novel constructs good, Prussian-German modernity through the contrast to bad, Polish pre-modernity. The contrast between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, on the other hand, introduces a split in the image of modernity itself. Rather than being an- tipodes of Anton and Schröter, Itzig and Ehrenthal can be seen as their negative mirror images. Every German middle-class virtue finds its correspondence in a Jew- ish vice: where the German Bürger is economical, the Jew is stingy; where the German is industrious, the Jew is restless; the German spirit of enterprise is transformed into Jewish greed and bourgeois rationality into Jewish cunning. The parallel development of Itzig’s and Anton’s careers reveals the lives of both as alternative variants of the same modern existence. The majority of the Jewish characters hence pose a completely different kind of threat to the German national community than the Poles. Whereas the Poles simply represent another, albeit hostile, nation and seem to be part of a global order divided into nations and nation-states,9 the Jews embody a threat to the very principle of the nation itself. They represent those forces of modernity that undermine the imagined community from within, and “within” not just in a geographical sense. The Jewish characters in the novel are associated with abstract forms of social mediation through commodities and the market rather than concrete and conscious forms of cooperation and collaboration, they are motivated by egoism and greed rather than moral considerations and the welfare of the whole, and in general represent the negative sides of capitalist modernity: social fragmentation, alienation, disenchantment and loss of meaning. This opposition between a “German” and a “Jewish” dimension of modernity is evident in many aspects of the social world depicted in the text. Consider the im-

8 Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol. 2, pp. 197ff., my translation. 9 This representation of Poland as a hostile national power is all the more noteworthy as Po- land under Prussian rule had in fact lost its independence as a state. We might therefore ask if an element of fearful colonialist projection asserts itself here. This loss of statehood is also justified in biologizing ways by merchant Schröter when he claims that the Poles “have no more right [to found a state] than this population of sparrows in the trees.” Frey- tag, Soll und Haben 1923, vol. 1, p. 371. ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM AND COLONIALISM ... 103 age of the city as an emblem of modernity: whereas Rosmin was a place of order, structure and permanence, the face of the city associated with Itzig is that of the modern metropolis, dirty, chaotic, fragmented and ruled by antagonism and self- interest.10 Similarly, Freytag contrasts two types of industry. On the one hand, we encounter descriptions of a “natural,” productive industry, presented as a quasi-organic continuation of the improvement of agricultural methods, that seems to grow out of the soil, its pipes mimicking the stems of the plants.11 On the other hand, industry built on credit and for profit interests — the kind of industry Ehrenthal and Itzig entice the Baron von Rothsattel into establishing on his estate — enslaves its owner, imposes external economic imperatives that run counter to the inherent developmental laws of nature, and leads to failed harvests, proletarianization and social decay.12 Like production, distribution also has two faces: Itzig’s and Ehrenthal’s business is solely concerned with exchange value and profit. Veitel only buys in order to sell, to turn money into more money in unending, breathless activity.13 His activity is not governed by specific human needs, but directed towards ever more of the same, measured in purely quantitative terms; it knows no natural end point, thus mirroring the movement of capital.14 To Itzig, concrete, material qualities, those of his merchandise as well as the specific character of his own activities and the identity of his customers, become insubstantial. The German merchants, on the other hand, only seem to be engaged in the distribution of use values. Freytag’s text features long descriptions of all the different exotic commodities in the cellar of the German merchant’s house and their sensual qualities, their colors, shapes and smells, as well as where, how and by whom they have been produced.15 This evo- cation of a global community of producers renders both the immediate violence of colonial relationships and the abstract compulsion of the market invisible. In conversation with Bernhard, who despairs about his father’s dubious business practices, Anton Wohlfart extols the virtues of German trade: “Whenever I put a sack of coffee onto the scales, I am tying an invisible thread between the colonist’s

10 Ibid., p. 42. 11 Ibid., p. 447. 12 Ibid., pp. 449ff. 13 Ibid., pp. 116ff. 14 It is noteworthy that in Soll und Haben, the German middle-class world is presented through metaphors of equilibrium, measure and circular trajectories. Even the flow of money — in the rare cases where money is even explicitly mentioned in this world — is compared to blood circulation, the national economy to a human body; Freytag, Soll und Haben, vol. 1, p. 360. The Jewish and the American world, on the other hand, are governed by metaphors of a boundless dynamic beyond human control and without natural end point, e.g. when the subject-less imperatives of American speculation is compared by Fink to the icy force of an avalanche, sweeping humans along towards the abyss; Freytag, Soll und Haben, vol. 2, p. 14. 15 Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol. 1, pp. 70ff. 104 CHRISTINE ACHINGER daughter in Brazil who has picked the beans and the young farmhand who is having the coffee for his breakfast.”16 Bourgeois economic activity German style is here presented as creating conscious and concrete connections between producers and consumers, rather than as blind and abstract mediation through money and the market. In a world where supposedly different stages of social development are mapped onto the European space as backwards, pre-modern Polish East and modern, progressive “German” or Prussian West, then, Itzig and Ehrenthal clearly do not belong to the East in terms of their social role and the kind of society they represent. They call into question attempts to understand antisemitism as a variant of Ori- entalism that sees the “other” in contrast to Western modernity. On the contrary, they represent an excessive form of capitalism that is unrestrained by moral con- trols or by what is imagined as a grown, quasi-natural form of community and mutual obligation. They represent the threatening underside of a supposedly good, productive form of modern society. It is hence no coincidence that they also have much in common with what is presented as the ruthlessness, materialism and unstoppable dynamic of American culture, which is introduced into the novel through Fink’s foreign adventures, a connection that would become a sta- ple of German presentations of Jewishness in the decades to come. On the other hand, though, even the Jews in the capital remain strangers whose origins lie in the East. While the Polish external enemy outside the Prus- sian borders serves to define the German nation through opposition, the Jews take on the role of an enemy who is simultaneously within and without and thus undermines stable geographical, national and social boundaries, as will be further discussed below.

Schöne Fremde — the Orient as a Space of Poetry

Poland as inert, barren, empty space, as landscape of a dismal past is, however, not the only guise in which the “East” appears in the novel. In the margins of the narrative we also encounter fleeting images of the Orient as an almost utopian space of poetry and sensuality. This Orient likewise appears as a counter-image to the sober world of German labor, but one that holds out a promise that cannot be fulfilled in that world. This image of the East and its charms is associated with Ehren- thal’s son Bernhard, who is in every respect the opposite of the other members of his family. Rather than a hardnosed businessman like his father, he is an idealist who abhors the cutthroat world of money and trade, and rather than being a social climber like his mother and sister, he is unworldly and shy. Even though he is a scholar, he also has nothing in common with the stereotype of the Jewish intellectual that emerged at the time, to whom nothing is holy and who uses his critical,

16 Ibid., p. 268, my translation. ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM AND COLONIALISM ... 105 skeptical, purely negative intelligence in destructive ways (illustrated, e.g., in the contemporary discourse on Heine).17 Instead, Bernhard is a romantic soul, a phi- lologist and Orientalist who enthuses about Persian love poetry. Unlike the Polish East, this oriental East is not characterized by a lack of civilization and creativity, but by a rich and alluring, albeit foreign, culture. Its connection to Bernhard’s Jewishness remains visible, his way has led him, he says, “through Hebrew to the other Asiatic languages” whose “strange beauty” fascinates him.18 This strange beauty is also visible in the objects that surround him in his dark study, such as the Persian manuscript of a poem he shows to Anton, whose silken cover is “wrought with golden thread in strange ways” and whose “intricate form and heightened expression made a great impression” on Anton.19 For some few paragraphs, then, Bernhard’s life as a scholar appears as rich and meaningful even to the sober Anton. In this way, the friendship between Anton and Bernhard seems to gesture, at least briefly, towards a conception of German- Jewish coexistence beyond either exclusion or assimilation, in which difference is not conceived as a deficit, in which scholarship seems reconciled with labor and practical sense, and in which Jewish and German culture seem to mutually enrich each other. Against this ephemeral vision, though, the paradigm of German efficiency and discipline soon asserts itself again. Bernhard’s enthusiasm increasingly appears as a withdrawal from the here and now, his love of poetry motivated by desperation about the prosaic and ugly character of his father’s world. In spite of the diamet- rical opposition between Bernhard and his father, the relationships of either to the world thus ultimately appear as two sides of the same coin. Both crude materialism and romantic escapism appear as grounded in the same inability to find poetry, meaning and moral values in the bourgeois world as it is. Ehrenthal actively destroys these dimensions in his obsessive hunt for profit, and Bernhard can therefore only find them in distant climes. Against Bernhard’s despair about the “prosaic” nature of a merchant’s activity, though, Anton maintains that with the right attitude, it is possible to experience the “Poesie des Geschäfts,” the “poetry of business,”20 in the world of work and in the multiple connections to exotic places and foreign people it creates — we have already heard about the “invisible threads” that the merchant ties. According to Anton, his profession knows “no lack of passion and great emotions,” and “great and beautiful things” can also be found in the world of trade.21 On a more abstract level, the positions of Bernhard and his father seem to mirror different literary approaches to the world that Freytag equally condemns in his

17 Cf. Peters, Heinrich Heine ‘Dichterjude,’ 1990. 18 Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol. 1, p. 266, my translation. 19 Ibid., p. 267, my translation. 20 Ibid., p. 366. 21 Ibid., p. 269, my translation. 106 CHRISTINE ACHINGER theoretical work: on the one hand, a romanticism that he criticizes as subjectivist and escapist, and on the other hand what he calls “false Realism” or “Naturalism,” and describes as a view that only sees the ugly and fragmented surface of modern society and presents a world devoid of moral values and meaning. Freytag’s literary theory opposes both these literary traditions to “true” literary realism, which is able to grasp the truth and meaning of the bourgeois world underneath its surface of conflict and fragmentation, just as Bernhard’s romantic and Ehrenthal’s prosaic views are opposed to Anton’s ability to find realistic poetry in the world of work. The conversations between the two friends could thus be seen as an exposition of the poetical program of the novel itself. Bernhard’s position is not just presented as limited, though. In the end he himself explicitly condemns his entire existence as a scholar as lacking in substance. After he has fallen ill, he says to Anton: “You will be a man who will fight his way through life and, in spite of the wounds you may receive, your task is to struggle with fate. I, Anton Wohlfart, I will be scattered by the wind.”22 Even on his deathbed he still hopes: “If I should recover, I want to advance through my own labor in future, I want to learn how to trust in myself,”23 but this hope will be in vain. This end is particularly poignant given that the text even hints in passing at the fact that it is actually anti-Jewish laws that make it impossible for Bernhard to “advance through [his] own labour” — he mentions that “for a young man of my confession, it is not easy to find employment with the state,”24 i.e. an academic career is closed to him. But rather than making these social restrictions a topic in any way, Bernhard — and with him the novel — exclusively focuses on his individual inability to help himself, seen as a personal failure. By thus rejecting his life as a scholar as insubstantial prey of the winds, Bern- hard himself devalues the only attempt in the text to portray Jewish difference as something positive and to envisage a meaningful Jewish existence that does not demand the renunciation of Jewish particularity and that is not subject to the dominant paradigm of “German labor.” Moreover, Bernhard, the “good Jew,” ultimately even turns into the principal witness against the Jewish way of life as represented through all the other Jewish characters. It is ultimately his desolation about his father’s greed and dishonesty that propels Bernhard towards an early death, and he seems to curse the father with his dying breath. His last words di-

22 “Sie werden in ihrem Leben [ein Mann] sein ..., welcher sich durchschlägt, und wenn er auch Wunden erhält, seine Aufgabe ist, mit dem Geschick zu kämpfen. Mich, Anton Wohlfart, mich wird der Sturmwind verwehen.” Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol. 2, p. 33. These words could also be seen as an early gesture towards the later image of the Jewish “Luftmensch, ” cf. Berg, Luftmenschen, 2008. 23 “Wenn es mir beschieden ist, wieder gesund zu werden, so will ich mir durch eigene Arbeit forthelfen, ich will lernen auf mich selbst vertraun.” Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol. 2, pp. 56ff. 24 Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol. 1, p. 266, my translation. ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM AND COLONIALISM ... 107 rected at Ehrenthal are: “It is enough, you are hurting me,”25 and when Ehrenthal falls to his knees at the bed of his son, “a white hand was lifted threateningly once more, then a dead body sank back.”26 In this way, the role of the Orient as a corrective or positive counter-image of the disenchantment of modernity is ultimately revoked in the narrative, just as the ability of the character of Bernhard to correct the otherwise almost uniformly negative presentation of Jews is undermined, if not turned into its opposite.

Orient and Occident

The different images of the East apparent in the novel are thus all counter-images of German modernity, but they have very different functions and inform images of very different “others.” This fact calls into question approaches that see such discourses within a simple binary framework of German “self” and invented “other,” of “West” and “East.” Furthermore, with its depictions of the colonial space of Eastern Europe and the alluring Orient, the text seems to separate out two different imaginaries of the East that in other colonial discourses are frequently fused in ambivalent ways. Most of the Jewish characters, and in particular Veitel Itzig and Hirsch Ehren- thal, stand in opposition to both these images of the East. They represent bad modernity versus bad pre-modernity in the case of Jews and Poles, and immoral, excessive pragmatism as against escapist poetry in the case of father and son Ehrenthal. Yet in other ways they nevertheless remain connected to the East, or the “Easts,” through an implicit and explicit narrative of origin. The panorama of Jewish figures presented in the novel illustrates a continuum from the unassimi- lated Eastern Jew with side locks and caftan who constantly crosses the border to make small business deals, to the assimilated Jews in the capital, Ehrenthal and Itzig who, towards the end of the novel, “can in bad lighting hardly be distinguished from an elegant gentleman any longer.”27 The text thus offers a kind of synchronous presentation of what, in other parts of the text, is described as dia- chronic stages of a history of migration and assimilation. The novel suggests that the true origins of even the most assimilated Jew lie in the shtetls of Poland. In a similar way, the “oriental” orient also makes an appearance every now and then in passing allusions to the even more distant biblical and Middle Eastern origins of the Jewish people. Despite its points of contact, this representation of the Jewish characters, then, is clearly distinguishable from “classical” colonial and orientalist discourses. Anne

25 Freytag, Soll und Haben, 1923, vol. 2, p. 58, my translation. 26 As “der Vater am Bett seines Sohnes niederfiel, hob sich noch einmal eine weiße Hand drohend in die Höhe, dann sank ein toter Leib zurück.” Ibid., p. 61. 27 Ibid., p. 158. 108 CHRISTINE ACHINGER

McClintock describes nineteenth-century colonial narratives as a projection of the “axis of time … onto the axis of space.”28 Assumed stages of a linear, directional developmental process are associated with the inhabitants of different geographical areas, whereby Western societies, or more specifically German, French or English society, are imagined as representing the supposedly latest stage. The “oriental” elements in the representation of the Jewish characters in Soll und Haben, though, work in a different way. Here, alterity in terms of geographical origin is not aligned with alterity in terms of the type of society these characters represent. German modernity is not defined here through a simple opposition against an oriental and backwards “other” outside. Instead, what the Jews come to stand for are the threatening features of the very same capitalist modernity whose positive features are claimed as the core of “Western” or “German” identity. Through their association with the Jews, these negative features are apparently externalized — if not outside in a strictly geographical sense, then at least “outside” of the national community defined and united by origin. This effects a kind of projection or purgation. This process also serves to symbolically turn the opaque dynamics and abstract imperatives, the social fragmentation and the loss of immanent meaning that are necessary aspects of capitalist modernity, into nothing but the contingent — and hence avoidable — effects of a faulty Jewish attitude. At the same time, by projecting the origins of this “Jewish character” back to biblical times and far away to Poland or the Orient, these features of modernity do not even appear as historically specific features of modern society at all any more, but as expressions of an ancient and foreign culture. What is social appears as cultural or even racial “essence.” This combination of “occidentalist” and orientalist elements in the presentation of the Jews turns the threat of dissolution at the heart of German bourgeois society into something that comes from outside, declares the negative sides of modernity to be relics of an ancient culture, and presents the social as cultural or racial, as capitalism orientalized.

Works Cited

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28 McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’. Gender, Race and Nationalism,” 1997, p. 92. ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM AND COLONIALISM ... 109

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The Author’s derrière and the Ludic Impulse: Oskar Panizza’s “The Operated Jew” (1893) and Amy Levy’s “Cohen of Trinity” (1889)

Axel Stähler

The German writer Oskar Panizza’s literary grotesque “The Operated Jew” (1893) has been denounced as “the explosion of a furious antisemitism, its acerbity equaled only by the Stürmer.”1 While critical discourse on “The Operated Jew” has not always been as damning, this appraisal is nevertheless paradigmatic of the way in which the text has been received. Even Arnon Hampe’s recent entry on the frequently maligned grotesque in the latest edition of the Handbuch des Antisemitismus (2015) — while acknowledging in a half-sentence its potential critical impetus — reverts without further hesitation to the predictable antisemitic reading: “To be sure, the text may also be understood as a criticism of the individual impositions of assimilation — yet by using virulently antisemitic imagery and by pejoratively applying contemporary discourses on ‘race’ and the pathology of the Jews, it attuned them to a readership with an antisemitic bias.”2 The fact that “The Operated Jew” was reprinted in 1927 in a local (Bavarian) supplement to the Völkischer Beobachter may lend credibility to such an evaluation.3 After all, this was the main organ of the snowballing National Socialist movement. Yet it seems to me that the attempt of the otherwise media-savvy Nazis to appropriate the author’s work was in fact a gaffe. Certainly, the text was discarded by the propaganda machine after this initial attempt, and my sense is that this is largely

1 Fischer, “Deutschsprachige Phantastik,” 1978, p. 102: “[die] Explosion eines wütenden An- tisemitismus, wie er in dieser Drastik nur noch vom ‘Stürmer’ erreicht worden [ist].” If not otherwise indicated, all translations from the German are my own. 2 Hampe, “‘Der operierte Jud’’ (Kurzgeschichte von Oskar Panizza, 1893),” 2015, p. 375: “Zwar kann der Text auch als Kritik an den individuellen Zumutungen der Assimilation verstanden werden — indem der Autor sich aber einer virulent antisemitischen Bildersprache bediente und zeitgenössische Diskurse über ‘Rasse’ und Pathologie der Juden in pejorativer Weise auf- griff, machte er sie für eine antisemitisch gesinnte Leserschaft anschlussfähig.” 3 Introduced by a short biography of the author in which an attempt was made to appropriate Panizza to the ideological agenda of the Nazis, see Völkischer Beobachter [Bavarian edition], November 8, 1927, 2, the text of the “novella” was published in six instalments in the Münchener Beobachter from November 10 to 16 (on p. 3) as a filler between instalments of Gustav Renner’s novel Der Schrei aus dem Osten (1927) and Ludwig Tieck’s novella Dichterleben (1825). As Michael Bauer has shown in Oskar Panizza, 1984, p. 24, the bio- graphical note is riddled with factual errors, such as the date of Panizza’s death (in 1921 and not in 1922), and misrepresentations which are calculated to portray the author as a persecuted exile yearning to return to his fatherland: “Der Dichter flüchtete ins Ausland, kehrte aber schließlich, von Heimweh gepackt, doch wieder nach Deutschland zurück,” Völkischer Beobachter [Bavarian edition], November 8, 1927, 2.

112 AXEL STÄHLER due to the perhaps unexpected resistance of Panizza’s grotesque to such demagogi- cal arrogation — contrary to what Hampe suggests. Panizza (1853–1921) undoubtedly was an unlikely candidate for Nazi exploitation. As one of the Munich Moderns, he associated with writers such as Frank Wedekind, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Max Halbe. Today, Panizza is probably best known for his provocative tragicomedy The Love Council (1894),4 a radically anti- Catholic and, once again, allegedly antisemitic play which suggests that syphilis was visited on the Renaissance court of the popes as punishment for its moral de- pravity.5 Though the text had been published in Switzerland, the writer was nevertheless accused of blasphemy on various counts in a spectacular trial in Munich. Sentenced to 12 months in prison, Panizza was styled by sympathetic contemporaries “the first martyr of modernism.”6 In his expert testimony to the court, the writer Michael Georg Conrad emphasized Panizza’s recourse to what he describes as “the baroque, the tasteless, the bawdily grotesque”;7 yet he insisted nevertheless in conclusion that The Love Coun- cil was a work of art and that to understand it as tendentious blasphemy was to demean it.8 In a similar vein, in a literary portrait of Panizza predating his trial, the writer and critic Otto Julius Bierbaum characterized his friend’s two collections of literary grotesques as “spookily intricate books, hell-breughellings of a madly bur- lesque imagination — each a series of grotesque roly-polies which mostly exhibit the esteemed author’s quattre lettres.”9 If couched in the politely distancing French translation of a German euphemism for the posterior, the graphic description nevertheless aptly captures the playful and frequently irreverent nature of Panizza’s artistic and artful contortions. In fact, Panizza’s ludic impulse as it was perceptively described by Bierbaum and as it emerges from his writings, not least from his controversial “The Operated Jew,” corresponds compellingly to the categories of mimicry and ilinx suggested by Roger Caillois in his influential study on the ludic, Les jeux et les hommes (1958). Mimicry as an element of role play is understood by the sociologist as the play of “incessant invention,” as an evasion of all rules in order to create an unchallenged illusion.10 While the context envisaged by Caillois obviously is a different one, narrative in general exhibits an affinity with the inventive and illusionary, i.e. effec-

4 See Panizza, Das Liebeskonzil, 1895. 5 For the latter reading, see Sander L. Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt,” 199–203. 6 See Dobijanka-Witczakowa, “Auf dem Weg zur Moderne: Der Auftakt in München,” 2002, p. 19: “[d]er erste Märtyrer der Moderne.” 7 Panizza, Psichopatia criminalis, 2015, p. 21: “… das Barocke, Geschmacklose, Derb-Groteske.” 8 Ibid., p. 24: “Panizzas ‘Liebeskonzil’ ist ein Kunstwerk, und es wäre eine Herabwürdigung, in ihm eine tendenziöse Lästerschrift erblicken zu wollen.” 9 Bierbaum, “Oskar Panizza,” 1893, 984: “gruselig verzwickte Bücher, Höllenbreugheleien von einer toll-burlesken Phantastik, — jedes eine Reihe von grotesken Purzelbäumen, bei denen man zumeist die quattre lettres des verehrten Herrn Verfassers zu sehen bekommt.” 10 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, [1961] 2001, p. 23.

THE AUTHOR’S DERRIÈRE AND THE LUDIC IMPULSE 113 tively poietic, potential ascribed by him to mimicry. Yet the “hyperbolization” employed by Panizza in “The Operated Jew” pushes the boundaries of what may remain “unchallenged.” It in fact builds up and then capsizes the creative force of mimicry into its virtual inversion, ilinx, which represents the unsettling and potentially destructive impetus of the ludic. In Caillois’s system, ilinx signifies the attempt “to destroy the stability of perception” in the “pursuit of vertigo.”11 This, to me, seems to encapsulate the writer’s practice perfectly. Intriguingly, the relevance of ilinx for the appreciation of Panizza’s oeuvre was anticipated by Bierbaum long before the ludic category was defined by Caillois. The critic identifies as Panizza’s preferred satirical method the adoption of an unusual and bizarre perspective from which the whole world appears in monstrous foreshortening.12 It is crucial, as observed once again very astutely by Bierbaum, that the perception of the world as a whole is distorted through this kaleidoscopic shift and that, in order to make sense of the writer’s grotesques, the reader must be intellectually nimble enough, and willing, to follow him to the same vantage point.13 For Bierbaum “The Operated Jew” accordingly was a “virtuoso piece of the art to describe what is most extraordinary”; it is, moreover, in the critic’s words, “the only antisemitic work of art known to me,” and he maintained that its “eminent art makes one forget the brutality of its tendentiousness.”14 The intrinsically ludic character of Panizza’s oeuvre emphasized by Bierbaum, no less than the controversial and contrary character of the writer as it similarly emerges from Conrad’s testimony, are, I think, crucial also to understanding “The Operated Jew.” The purpose of this chapter is therefore not so much to exonerate Panizza from the accusation of being an antisemite, though I hold it to be misguided. Rather, I aim to inquire in how far Amy Levy’s roughly contemporary short story “Cohen of Trinity” (1889) may have been an intertext for “The Operated Jew.” More specifically, my objective is to explore the implications of Panizza’s — as I would suggest — largely ludic engagement with the earlier text. The suggestion is of course not entirely arbitrary, though the connections between both texts may seem less obvious at first glance than I think them to be. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, a comparison of Panizza’s grotesque with Levy’s short story has not yet been attempted, and positive proof of this intertextual relationship is indisputably elusive.

11 Ibid. 12 Bierbaum, “Oskar Panizza,” 1893, 986: “Denn das ist Panizzas Art gerne: sich einen recht vertrackten Standpunkt zu wählen, von dem aus die ganze Welt in monströser Verkürzung erscheint.” 13 Ibid.: “Diesen Standpunkt muß der Leser mit einzunehmen verstehen, sonst bleibt ihm alles unverständlich.” 14 Ibid.: “das einzige antisemitische Kunstwerk, das ich kenne. Hier läßt die eminente Kunst die Brutalität der Tendenz vergessen.”

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Yet Panizza, a voracious reader, was particularly well acquainted with English literature. In order to overcome the depression from which he suffered following a brief spell as resident psychiatrist in a state-run “Irrenanstalt” (lunatic asylum) in Munich, the writer had left in autumn 1885 for London and the British Mu- seum.15 In preparation for his sojourn, Panizza had immersed himself, under the tutelage of a Mrs. Callway, in English language and literature.16 This interest is reflected in a number of his own works which indicate also his intimacy with the cultural scene of the British metropolis.17 There is no reason to assume that he would have abandoned his pursuit after his return via Berlin to Munich a year later in autumn 1886, and he may well have come across “Cohen of Trinity,” which was prominently placed in the May issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1889. Similar to her story’s eponymous protagonist, Amy Levy (1861–1889), a promising young Jewish writer, who moved in the circles of Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee, committed suicide — only weeks after the publication of “Cohen of Trinity.” While not too much significance should be afforded to the biographi- cal analogy, it may nevertheless have been another factor to recommend her short story to Panizza’s scrutiny. He, too, was a troubled mind and ended his days in 1921 in an asylum, after he had enforced his compulsory hospitalization in 1904.18 Like “The Operated Jew,” the “Jewish” fiction of the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy — her novel Reuben Sachs (1888) and her short story “Cohen of Trinity” — has been denounced as antisemitic. Intriguingly, in this instance the writer was attacked most ferociously from within the Anglo-Jewish community, of which she herself was a part, but which felt it was misrepresented in her work, a pattern that was to recur in British Jewish writing.19 More specifically, as a Jewish writer, Levy has been accused of Jewish self-hatred.20

Jewish — No Mistake, and No Escape

Oskar Panizza’s “The Operated Jew” was first published in 1893 in the writer’s second collection of grotesques, Visionen, republished in 1914 as Visionen der Dämmerung. It records in retrospective narration of a medical student the frantic attempts of a Jewish fellow student, Itzig Faitel Stern, to turn himself into a goy, by fair means or foul. Clearly marked as an oriental other, the Jew eventually de- cides to have his misshapen body surgically transformed, “so he could become

15 Panizza, Psichopatia criminalis, 2015, p. 152. 16 Ibid. 17 See, e.g., his Londoner Lieder, 1887; Legendäres und Fabelhaftes, 1889; the grotesque “Eine Negergeschichte,” [1893] 1914; and the essay “Der Klassizismus und das Eindringen des Variété,” 1896. 18 See Bauer, Oskar Panizza, 1984, pp. 217–221. 19 See, e.g., the case of Brian Glanville whose novel The Bankrupts (1958) “provoked a prolonged and hostile communal disdain.” Cheyette, “Introduction,” 1998, p. xxvii. 20 For a discussion, see Jusová, The New Woman and the Empire, 2005, pp. 153–160.

THE AUTHOR’S DERRIÈRE AND THE LUDIC IMPULSE 115 the equivalent of an Occidental human being.”21 He suffers traction, breaking and resetting of bones, a spiked corset and more. This is the notorious nose job blown out of all proportion, and Sander Gilman naturally does not fail to mention Panizza’s story in his book on the Jewish body.22 Yet in order to complete his transformation, the Jew needs to exchange his soul for a Germanic one. The first question, of course, debated at length by his advi- sors, is whether Faitel in fact has a soul. Undeterred, the Jew himself, having heard about the nature of the Germanic soul, is determined to have one just like it: “Faitel had heard about the chaste, undefined Germanic soul, which shrouded the possessor like an aroma. This soul was the source of the possessor’s rich treas- ures and formed the shibboleth of the Germanic nations, a soul which was immediately recognized by all who possessed one. Faitel wanted to have this soul.”23 However, the most recent scientific research suggests to Faitel that it will not be possible to adapt his own inferior soul and eventually, convinced that the soul re- sides in the blood, he resolves to purchase Christian blood and to have a blood transfusion. Crowing in glee, he chants: “Kaaf ich mer ä christlich’s Blut! Kaaf ich mer ä christlich’s Blut!”24 The translator’s best efforts are not equal to rendering this adequately: “I gonna buy me sum Chreesten blud! I gonna buy me sum Chreesten blud!”25 Invoking Yiddish inflection, the accent in the German original is atrocious and suggests the stereotypical image of the sinister Jew of antisemitic provenance, cackling and rubbing his hands; the repetition is, moreover, reminiscent of fairy-tale Rumpelstiltskin dancing around the fire and gloating in his illicit desire. The dangerous operation works but its long-term success is doubtful: “[Faitel] never allowed himself to be thoroughly questioned about its success and the psychological effect. It appeared that it had not been very great, for after a few weeks we found him again making new attempts to gain possession of the Ger- man soul.”26 With this powerful image, Panizza shrewdly alludes to and ridicules the blood libel, the perennially resurfacing allegation of ritual murder and unholy mystic practices of the Jews.

21 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 57; for the original text, see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 224: “um ein gleichwertiger abendländischer Mensch zu werden.” 22 Gilman, The Jewish Body, 1991, pp. 203–205. 23 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 59; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 226: “Faitel hatte von jener keuschen, undefinierbaren, germanischen Seele gehört, die den Besitzer wie einen Duft umkleide, aus der er [sic] das Gemüt seine reichen Schätze be- ziehe, und die das Schiboleth der germanischen Nationen bilde, jedem Besitzer beim anderen sofort erkennbar. Faitel wollte diese Seele haben.” 24 Ibid., p. 227. 25 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 60. 26 Ibid., p. 61; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 228: “Aber über den Erfolg, den psychischen Erfolg, wollte er sich nie recht vernehmen lassen. Allzu groß schien der- selbe nicht gewesen zu sein, denn nach mehreren Wochen fanden wir ihn schon wieder bei neuen Versuchen, sich in den Besitz der deutschen Seele zu setzen.”

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After his initial success — as Siegfried Freudenstern Faitel passes as a scion of the Hanoverian landed gentry — the ultimate abject failure of the Jew to pretend to be a normal, i.e. an occidental, human being is the more devastating. At the end of the story, during the celebration of his wedding to a German maiden, his body — and presumably also his soul — inexorably reverts to its essence. What remains, exposed to the disillusioned gaze of his “creator” (the surgeon Klotz, who transformed his body), of the narrator, and of the reader, is the violated body of the Jew in total collapse, writhing and exuding the horrible foetor judaicus: “A terrible smell spread in the room, forcing those people who were still hesitating at the exit, to flee while holding their noses. Only Klotz remained behind. And finally, … [his] work of art lay before him crumpled and quivering, a convoluted Asiatic image in wedding dress, a counterfeit of human flesh, Itzig Faitel Stern.”27 The narrator’s recurring insistence on the Jew’s simulacrum character, which he emphasizes also earlier in the text,28 is particularly striking. Even after the reversion of his transformation, Faitel is a “vertracktes asiatisches Bild.” The first adjective, beyond the translator’s choice of “convoluted,” suggests more specifically the “distorted” (“verzerrt”) condition of this image, like the reflection in a distorting mirror.29 In conjunction with the failed efforts to fashion the Jew into a work of art, another imitation game, this reinforces the imaginary character of this counterfeit piece of human flesh which, in the distorting mirror of the occidental mind, cannot be seen for what it is and which therefore is not comprehensible on its own. It is always measured against some preconceived and, as the second adjective reveals, orientalist category as an other that is invariably determined by its construction as an imagined non-occidental alien. On the surface, the evidence would certainly seem to suggest that a text such as this cannot be but the product of a rabid antisemitism. As such, Panizza’s grotesque appears to be much more obviously incendiary than Levy’s short story which, by comparison, is at most mildly provoking. Her “Cohen of Trinity” is about a Jewish writer expelled from Cambridge because he “had entirely failed to follow up [his] preliminary distinction”30 and who eventually kills himself a few years later at the peak of his unexpected literary success. As in her earlier novel Reuben Sachs, if more subtly, Levy castigates in her story the materialism of Anglo-

27 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, pp. 73–74; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 242: “Ein fürchterlicher Geruch verbreitete sich im Saal, der die noch am Ausgang Zögernden mit zugehaltenen Nasen zu entfliehen zwang. Nur Klotz blieb zurück. Und schließlich, als auch die Füße des Betrunkenen vor Mattigkeit nicht mehr standzuhalten vermochten, lag zuckend und gekrümmt sein Kunstwerk vor ihm auf dem Boden, ein vertracktes asiatisches Bild im Hochzeitsfrack, ein verlogenes Stück Menschenfleisch, Itzig Fai- tel Stern.” 28 See, e.g., Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, pp. 55–56 and “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 223. 29 See Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 1854–1961, s.v. “vertrackt”; other connotations include “cursed” (“verflucht”) and “infernal” (“verteufelt”). 30 Levy, “Cohen of Trinity,” 1889, 418.

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Jewish society as well as its internal divisions and Jewish (“tribal”) characteristics. While Cohen’s fierce individuality is emphasized, he is nevertheless perceived in relation to the imagined sleazy chaos of his family home and his characterization, like Faitel’s, is so conformed to prevalent antisemitic stereotypes as to challenge them: “A curious figure; slight, ungainly; shoulders in the ears; an awkward, rapid gait, half slouch, half hobble. One arm with its coarse hand swung like a bell-rope as he went.” The trencher cap “pushed to the back of his head revealed clearly the oval contour of the face, the full, prominent lips, full, prominent eyes, and the curved beak of the nose with its restless nostrils.”31 The impact of this characterization — which is in fact echoed and expanded in “The Operated Jew”32 — is reinforced by the explicit non-Jewishness of Levy’s narrator whose ambivalent response to Cohen as an object of distantly amused scrutiny is further provoked by the Jew’s behavior: “His unbounded arrogance, his enormous pretensions, alternating with and tempered by a bitter self-depreciation, overflowing at times into self-reviling, impressed me, even while amusing and dis- gusting me.”33 In addition to his physical defects, the psychological deformation of the Jew manifests itself in “the most vulgar desire for recognition,”34 an observation which echoes and amplifies the narrator’s earlier comment that “[a] desire to stand well in one another’s eyes, to make a brave show before one another, is, I have observed, a marked characteristic of the Jewish people.”35 However, what may speciously appear to be manifestations of the author’s Jew- ish self-hatred should rather be seen as the desire for a frank and unbiased characterization, untainted by the allosemitism decried much later by Zygmunt Bauman and which posits the Jew as the perpetual other: whether perceived as positive (philosemitism) or negative (antisemitism), the Jew is construed as different in either case (allosemitism).36 In an essay on “The Jew in Fiction” (1886), Levy had reprimanded George Eliot for eliding the complexity of Jewish life in her Daniel Deronda (1876) and for failing to do justice to the “surprising virtues and no less surprising vices” of the Jew.37 Her own Reuben Sachs is clearly conceived as a corrective to the earlier novel. “Cohen of Trinity” is arguably a further step in the same direction. By assigning the criticism, in her novel still articulated from an implicitly Jewish perspective, to the similarly ambivalent non-Jewish narrator persona, Levy externalizes the insider’s perception: Cohen is just such a mixed character with virtues and vices — warts and all.

31 Ibid., 417–418. 32 See Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, pp. 47–52 and “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, pp. 214–219. 33 Levy, “Cohen of Trinity,” 1889, 420. 34 Ibid., 423. 35 Ibid., 420. 36 See Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 1998, pp. 143–156. 37 Levy, “The Jew in Fiction,” 1886, 13.

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Yet the story prominently projects the narrator’s failure of fully understanding Cohen’s complexity. This is emphasized by its almost paradoxical denouement when he reflects on the Jew’s suicide: “In his hour of victory the sense of defeat had been strongest. Is it, then, possible that, amid the warring elements of that discordant nature, the battling forces of that ill-starred, ill-compounded entity, there lurked, clear-eyed and ever-watchful, a baffled idealist?”38 The final tentative suggestion of Cohen’s hidden idealism adds a redemptive facet to the representation of his character which nevertheless emphasizes the narrator’s, and the world’s, failure of understanding him both as an individual and as a member of his “tribe.” It is, simultaneously, also indicative of the disappointed hope of belonging which implicitly vindicates the alleged Jewish materialism in a wider social context as overcompensation. Perhaps even more importantly, his un- detected internal depth counters the almost entirely external characterization of the Jew — his corporeal and physiognomic peculiarities complemented by the narrator’s prejudiced imaginings of Cohen’s Jewish family life, based on very little information: I seemed to see it all before me: the little new house in Maida Vale; a crowd of children, clamorous, unkempt; a sallow shrew in a torn dressing-gown, who alternately scolded, be- wailed herself, and sank into moody silence; a fitful paternal figure coming and going, de- pressed, exhilarated according to the fluctuations of his mysterious financial affairs; and over everything the fumes of smoke, the glare of gas, the smell of food in preparation.39 The narrator is well aware that Cohen would not want to be determined by such a string of stereotypical imaginings: “naturally enough, it was as an individual, not as the member of a family, that Cohen cared to discuss himself.”40 This does not, however, dissuade him from elaborating Cohen’s individual traits within a sub- liminally, yet recognizably antisemitic discourse on allegedly Jewish characteristics. Indeed, the story to a large degree builds up, and is built on, this dichotomy of clichéd outer and ultimately unknowable inner person. It is predicated on Cohen’s desperate desire to make himself known as an individual. “[H]e was so fond of explaining himself,” the narrator remarks en passant in the introductory section. “They shall know, they shall understand, they shall feel what I am,”41 Cohen later explains his literary aspirations in retrospect to the narrator, only to acknowledge after his publication success the futility of the attempt — hence also the significance of the narrator’s recognition of no more than a “dim, fleeting sense” of what may have motivated Cohen’s suicide.42 Ultimately, Cohen’s most salient characteristic is his unknowability both as an individual and as a Jew as opposed to the supposed knowability suggested by the imaginary fill-ins supplied by the narrator and

38 Levy, “Cohen of Trinity,” 1889, 424. 39 Ibid., 420. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 423; emphasis in original. 42 Ibid., 424.

THE AUTHOR’S DERRIÈRE AND THE LUDIC IMPULSE 119 generously complemented by a proliferation of stereotypical descriptions of the Jews as a “versatile race,”43 as loud and uncouth, as moody, “according to the fluctuations of … mysterious financial affairs”44 — and so on and so forth. This manner of clichéd thinking is exposed in the story as foreclosing any deeper understanding of the other. The narrator is, in fact, aware of the complex nature of Cohen’s personality which he superciliously describes as marked by “a most unattractive lack of sim- plicity.”45 Like the book on which his eventual success is based and which is arrogantly entitled Gubernator,46 Cohen inadvertently resists easy categorization. As such he poses an implicitly anarchical threat to a society relying on stratification and conformity. Yet Cohen conforms not even to the subset of the Jewish community which replicates the societal strictures of the majority group. “Little Leuni- ger,” the only other Jew in the story, who “was the fashion at that time” among a particular set of “young puritans, aristocrats and scholars,”47 turns a cold shoulder to the recognizably alien Cohen and the narrator reports him saying “that Cohen’s family were not people that one ‘knew’”48 — the willful neglect of “knowing” the other perfectly articulated in the ubiquitous phrase of social arrogance. Leuniger is a constant in Levy’s “Jewish” fiction. The assimilated young man of affluent and socially refined, but arriviste, Jewish background has been read by Linda Hunt Beckman, and by others before her, as a partial alter ego of Levy.49 In the parlance of postcolonial theory, Leuniger presents another, if less obvious, threat to society: he is a “mimic man”50 and as such ambivalently embodies “at once resemblance and menace,” as articulated by Homi Bhabha with reference to the fraught relationship between colonizer and colonized.51 The “other” trying to become like the “self” in a process of assimilation or mimicry poses an existential threat because it challenges essentialist notions of identity and superiority and subjects the self to the other’s scrutiny as well as, perhaps more frighteningly, to its own. Though the latter course is not taken by Levy’s narrator, it is nevertheless in- sinuated to the perceptive reader. In “Cohen of Trinity,” the ambivalence of mimicry as “almost the same, but not quite”52 is a recognition ultimately shared by “little” Leuniger, as he is patronizingly referred to by the narrator.53 It is also the motivation for his rejection of Cohen

43 Ibid., 417. 44 Ibid., 420. 45 Ibid., 418–419. 46 Ibid., 421–422. 47 Ibid., 419. 48 Ibid., 420. 49 Beckman, “Leaving ‘the tribal duckpond’,” 1999, 199. 50 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 1994, p. 87. 51 Ibid., p. 86. 52 Ibid.; emphasis in the original. 53 See Levy, “Cohen of Trinity,” 1889, 419.

120 AXEL STÄHLER because the Jewish Jew suggests to him another “almost the same, but not quite” which alienates him even further from the dominant social group and potentially aligns him with a purely Jewish and putatively oriental essence. After all, his social position is precarious, as the narrator surreptitiously suggests with the temporal qualifier of Leuniger’s popularity: “at that time.”54 Indeed, as Beckman observes about Levy’s unpublished early short story “Leopold Leuniger: A Study” (1880):55 “What stuns Leopold into despair is the recognition that one cannot stop being a Jew: that self-transformation, self-reinvention, is impossible.”56 Yet tracing the sense of self-hatred embodied by Leuniger in the Anglo-Jewish writer’s fiction, Beckman charts “a developmental process in which self-hatred was a way-station, but not an endpoint” to her.57 Beckman argues that by the time Levy completed her novel and final short story, she “had developed literary tech- niques that allowed her not only to write with extraordinary sophistication about Jewish anti-Semitism but also to address effectively the larger problem of how to represent Jews in fiction.”58 As Beckman astutely observes, “Levy’s most daring technique, one that is vulnerable to misinterpretation by the reader, is that she puts the very ideas and assumptions that make up the dominant culture’s distorted image of the marginalized group into the remarks made by the mainstream voice.”59 Although not openly satirical, her story employs in this manner the satirical technique of confronting the reader with a mirror of their folly. The recognition that one cannot stop being a Jew is of course shared by Faitel in Panizza’s grotesque, if on a very different level from Leuniger’s internal reflection in response to an overheard slight. The internal process of recognition in Levy’s early narrative is externalized in “The Operated Jew” to the extent that Faitel’s essence forcefully reasserts itself almost like an inescapable force of nature. If anything, Panizza’s grotesque is, as I would suggest, even more vulnerable to misinterpretation. Yet in relation to Levy’s story, it emerges as a radicalization and as a ludic “hyperbolization”60 not only of its main narrative constituents of narrator and Jew but also of its subtle satirical potential.

54 Ibid. 55 The unpublished text of “Leopold Leuniger: A Study” has been reproduced in the appen- dix of Beckman, Amy Levy, 2000, pp. 69–74. 56 Beckman, “Leaving ‘the tribal duckpond’,” 1999, 188. 57 Ibid., 199. 58 Ibid., 195. 59 Ibid. 60 Though used in a slightly different manner in its original context, I have used Mikhail Bakhtin’s term here, which usefully suggests one of the main characteristics of the grotesque; see his Rabelais and His World, [1965] 1984, p. 322.

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Ludic Hyperbolization and the Grotesque

In their respective attempts to vindicate Panizza, both Conrad and Bierbaum ac- centuated specifically the grotesque quality of his writing. The latter, more importantly, sympathetically explained Panizza’s preference for this style with the writer’s irreverent disposition and well-nigh compulsive ludic inclination. In contrast, Thomas Mann, who was also acquainted with Panizza, was anything but sympathetic toward him. The eminent writer’s reflections on the nature of satire and the grotesque may nevertheless help to elucidate the ludic impulse so prominent in Panizza’s work and, more particularly, in his “The Operated Jew.” In his preface to the 1926 German translation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), Mann maintained that the grotesque, because modern art had “ceased to recognise the categories of tragic and comic,” was its “most genuine style,” that it was, in fact, the “genuine anti-bourgeois style.”61 Panizza, anti- bourgeois to the core, might have agreed with the latter statement. Yet Mann, in turn, did not appreciate the other’s approach to the grotesque, though he took some inspiration from his work;62 three decades earlier — similar to the other, i.e. Michael Georg, Conrad — the young Mann had accused the author of The Council of Love of tastelessness in his perplexing vindication of the prison sentence passed on him.63 Even though the older Mann may have seen the grotesque as “the only guise in which the sublime may appear,”64 he clearly did not recognize manifestations of the sublime in Panizza’s grotesques. To him, as he expounded in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), the grotesque was “the supratrue and the exceedingly real, not the arbitrary, false, antireal, and absurd.”65 He declared that satire was “of necessity grotesque art” or, in other words, “expressionism,”66 which “most deeply despises the imitation of reality” and “resolutely dismisses all obligation to reality and replaces it with the sovereign, explosive, ruthlessly creative decree of the intel- lect.”67 As such he perceived the danger “of degeneration into mischief” to be inherent in satire because, as he added, “a distorted picture without basis in reality

61 Mann, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’,” [1926] 1933, p. 241. 62 Mann’s novella “Gladius Dei” (1902) is based on Panizza’s “Der Korsetten-Fritz” (1893), see Lieb, “Window Dressing,” 2014, p. 315. See also Vaget, “Thomas Mann und Oskar Pa- nizza,” 1975, 231–237. 63 See Dobijanka-Witczakowa, “Auf dem Weg zur Moderne,” 2002, p. 20. 64 Mann, “Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’,” [1926] 1933, p. 241. 65 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983, p. 417; see Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpoliti- schen, [1918] 1956, p. 557: “Das Groteske ist das Überwahre und überaus Wirkliche, nicht das Willkürliche, Falsche, Widerwirkliche und Absurde.” 66 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983, p. 417; see Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpoliti- schen, [1918] 1956, p. 557: “Satire [ist] notwendig Groteskkunst, das heißt: Expressionismus.” 67 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983, p. 416; see Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpoliti- schen [1918] 1956, p. 556: “Expressionismus … ist jene Kunstrichtung, welche … die Nach- bildung der Wirklichkeit aufs tiefste verachtet, jede Verpflichtung an die Wirklichkeit ent- schlossen kündigt und an ihre Stelle den souveränen, explosiven, rücksichtslos schöpferischen Erlaß des Geistes setzt.”

122 AXEL STÄHLER that is nothing other than an ‘emanation’ is neither distortion nor image, but mischief”68 — or, perhaps, ilinx? Such writing, according to Mann, is the product of a “ruthless estheticism.”69 Panizza clearly is not above some mischief in his grotesque. Yet is “The Oper- ated Jew” the kind of mischief denounced by Mann? Is it the product of such a ruthless estheticism? I suspect Mann would have thought so. Yet the putative intertextual relationship with Amy Levy’s “Cohen of Trinity” suggests that there may be another dimension to Panizza’s grotesque. While “The Operated Jew” clearly is not a direct re-writing of the earlier story, the hyperbolic elaboration to which it was subjected by Panizza may give an indication of the creative process of which his own narrative was the outcome. This process suggests that Panizza’s mischief, if mischief it is, is an expression of his ludic impulse and, more particularly, an emanation of mimicry (in Caillois’s sense) and of ilinx. Levy’s story must have piqued the writer’s interest, whose Visionen includes two other grotesques about racial outsiders — “Eine Negergeschichte” (1893; “A Negro’s Tale”) and “Indianergedanken” (1893; “Indian Thoughts”).70 Like “The Operated Jew,” these stories contain an element of subversion and discomfiture in the per- sonas of their increasingly unsympathetic and unreliable narrators and ultimately, if stealthily, take sides with the abused or misunderstood object of the narrators’ scrutiny. Panizza would have recognized the same technique in “Cohen of Trin- ity”; and he would then also have appreciated the potential it offered to his ludic impulse. Indeed, Panizza’s grotesque emanates a ludic delight in excess that almost verges on the obscene and that finds perfect expression in the hyperbolization to which he subjects his Jew. The writer afflicts Faitel with a plethora of antisemitic stereotypes, many of them of orientalist provenance, which it would be difficult to exaggerate any further. As such Panizza hyperbolizes widely disseminated perceptions of the Jew as an oriental other in contemporary German society but also, and more specifically, I would suggest, Levy’s own much more subtle and deliberately stereotypical construction of the alterity of the “Jewish” Jew who is nevertheless almost imperceptibly enveloped in an oriental miasma as well. Yet the foundational conundrum remains the same also in Panizza’s grotesque: both Jews — Cohen and Faitel — are ultimately forced into an inescapable impasse which, in each instance, leads to their destruction. In Cohen’s case, this derives from his urge to fight against stereotyping — a battle which, like Faitel, he is des-

68 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983, p. 417, emphasis in the original; see Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, [1918] 1956, pp. 557–558: “… die Gefahr nämlich der Entartung zum Unfug (denn ein Zerrbild ohne Wirklichkeitsgrund, das ist nichts, als eine ‘Emanation’, ist weder Verzerrung noch Bild, sondern ein Unfug).” 69 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983, p. 417; see Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpoliti- schen, [1918] 1956, p. 558: “Ruchloser Ästhetizismus.” 70 See Panizza, “Eine Negergeschichte,” [1893] 1914, pp. 243–253, and “Indianergedanken,” [1893] 1914, pp. 347–356.

THE AUTHOR’S DERRIÈRE AND THE LUDIC IMPULSE 123 tined to lose. In the latter’s case, amplified through the author’s vertiginous use of ilinx, the battle and the Jew’s defeat are of course much more spectacular and more controversial for the grotesque hyperbolization with which Panizza invests Levy’s figural constellation and in particular the Jew. The literary productivity of Cohen as a (futile) means of explaining himself is transmuted in “The Operated Jew” into a transformational impulse. Unlike Cohen, Faitel does not seek to make himself known in order to deflect stereotyping. Rather, he attempts to turn himself into the “other” by confronting each stereotype and thus rendering stereotyping mean- ingless. As a result of the contradictory impulses of transformation and its precipi- tating reversion, Cohen’s internally motivated suicide is therefore transmogrified in “The Operated Jew” into Faitel’s externally imposed total collapse. Both signal the Jews’ failure to overcome stereotyping. In each text this Sisyphean endeavor is dispassionately observed by its respective narrator whose detached relationship with “their” Jew is crucially similar, though once again Panizza hyperbolizes the constellation prefigured in Levy’s story. In “Cohen of Trinity,” the narrator nonchalantly observes about his relationship with the Jew: “There never indeed existed between us anything that could bear the name of friendship. Our relations are easily stated: he liked to talk about himself, and I liked to listen.”71 Indeed, like Panizza’s, Levy’s Jew emerges in the course of the narrative as the object of the narrator’s distanced scrutiny. Beckman emphasizes that Levy’s narrator studies Cohen “in a manner that is peculiarly clinical.”72 Yet underneath his polished veneer and his volubility, this narrator is clearly deficient in true understanding and empathy. His opinions are riddled with clichéd imaginings and he is certainly no better equipped to make real friends than Cohen.73 In “The Operated Jew,” the “clinical” stance of the narrator is articulated even more explicitly as pseudo-scientific. It serves the author more specifically to taint the persona of his narrator who takes on a much more active role in goading on the object of his interest, like another Mephistopheles. Faitel emerges in the narrative as the operated-on victim, the product of a crippling societal antagonism and of debilitating medical and psychological experiments. Indeed Faitel’s initial attempts to transform himself intensify only in response to the suggestions of the devious narrator74 who professes to have befriended him mainly because of a purely medical or rather anthropological curiosity:

71 Levy, “Cohen of Trinity,” 1889, 419. 72 Beckman, “Leaving ‘the tribal duckpond’,” 1999, 197. 73 See Levy, “Cohen of Trinity,” 1889, 419. 74 Indeed, with the potentially warped temporal representation of the narrator, the text suggests that even those initial attempts may have been stimulated by the narrator who at a later point says: “Soon after the beginning of our acquaintance, I made some suggestions to Faitel in regard to changing him and making him more modern, and I found that he was receptive to these remarks.” Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 53; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 220: “Gleich nach den ersten Tagen unserer Bekannt-

124 AXEL STÄHLER

Now, I no longer want to keep the reader in the dark as to how I became associated with this remarkable figure. Nor do I want to cloak my purposes in mystery and mislead the reader who might suppose that it was pity which moved me to make the close acquaintance with this dreadful piece of human flesh named Itzig Faitel Stern.75 This address to the reader introduces for the first time the notion of the “piece of human flesh.” The unusual and disconcerting phrase — perhaps even more so in the German compound “Menschenfleisch”76 — reduces Faitel to somewhat less than a human. It strips him of any individuality, cultural ties, and social belonging to mere meat. Moreover, with “Menschenfleisch” reverberates also that other word, unspoken and unspeakable: Menschenfresser, or cannibal. The savagery it suggests is transferred by implication to the cold dissecting glance of the narrator who, in his own way, turns into a kind of Menschenfresser in relation to Faitel, whose humanity he indeed devours over the course of his narrative up to its concluding sentence in which he once more refers to the Jew as human meat, cruelly deriding all his aspirations as “verlogen” and with a certain amount of Schadenfreude reasserting his narrative disciplining of the other’s failed attempt at mimicry.77 The depersonalization of the Jew appears to be the result of the narrator’s mali- cious effort to dissociate himself from this outsider. He moreover describes his interest in Faitel in explicit analogy to source material and methods of contemporary ethnographic and anthropological study which in addition invoke colonial discourse, thus extended by implication to the Jew: There was certainly a great deal of what I would call medical or rather anthropological curiosity in this case. I was attracted to him in the same way I might be to a Negro whose goggle eyes, yellow connective optical membranes, crushed nose, mollusk lips and ivory teeth and smell one perceives altogether in wonderment and whose feelings and most secret anthropological actions one wants to get to know as well!78

schaft machte ich Faitel Vorschläge hinsichtlich seiner Umwandlung in etwas modernem Sinne und fand damit bei ihm die entgegenkommendste Aufnahme.” 75 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 52; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 219: “Ich will den Leser darüber nicht länger im unklaren lassen, wieso ich zu diesem merkwürdigen Umgang kam, will mir nicht ein Mäntelchen umhängen, welches mir schlecht stehen würde, indem ich den Leser auf die Vermutung kommen lasse, es sei Mit- leid gewesen, das mich in die Nähe dieses grauenhaften Stückes Menschenfleisch, genannt Itzig Faitel Stern, brachte.” 76 Zipes’s translation is problematic in that the German “Menschenfleisch” suggests in this context not so much “flesh” in English, but “meat.” 77 Again, Zipes’s translation — “a counterfeit of human flesh” — is problematic here. The original — “ein verlogenes Stück Menschenfleisch” — may historically potentially carry the connotation of “counterfeit,” but may more plausibly be understood in the sense of “hypocritical,” “dishonest,” “fraudulent”; literally, it means “lying.” The meaning is accordingly radically narrowed if not outright changed in Zipes’s translation which suggests Faitel’s inhumanness as opposed to the more obvious reference to his efforts to transform his identity. See Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 74, and “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 242. 78 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 52; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” p. 219: “Es war gewiß viel, wie soll ich sagen, medizinische oder besser anthropologische Neugierde dabei; ich empfand ihm gegenüber, wie etwa bei einem Neger, dessen Glotzaugen, dessen gelbe

THE AUTHOR’S DERRIÈRE AND THE LUDIC IMPULSE 125

Ultimately denying the Jew his humanity, the narrator explains arrogantly from his supposedly scientific vantage point: “I observed with astonishment how this monster took terrible pains to adapt to our circumstances, our way of walking, thinking, our gesticulations, the expressions of our intellectual tradition, our manner of speech.”79 This narrator — I have called him devious, but he might just as well be described as “verlogen” — is indeed no friend to the object of his curiosity. When he calls Faitel in the first paragraph of the story “my best friend at the university,”80 this adds in retrospect only to the reader’s doubts about his emotional stability and social competence and consequently also his reliability as narrator. In the course of his narrative, he not only spurs Faitel on toward his cataclysmic end, but the alleged anthropological vantage point claimed by him is clearly indebted to contemporary pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference which provided the grounds also of “scientific” modern antisemitism.81 As such the text either valor- izes anthropological racialism together with its adherent or — as would seem more plausible, given the unsavory aspects of its narrator — it in fact discredits both. Ul- timately, the narrator is becoming more and more monstrous himself and increasingly inhumane in the way in which he progressively dissociates himself from the Jew as the abused object of his psycho-anthropological experiment. Accordingly, the final glimpse of the unexpected profundity of Cohen’s character afforded to Levy’s narrator is excised by Panizza and instead turned into a mad danse macabre during which all the external markers of Faitel’s Jewishness reassert themselves. Indeed, the external determination by stereotyping resisted by both Jews in vain is similarly reasserted in both texts. In Levy’s story, it is emphasized with the tantalizing glimpse on an undiscovered and now eternally lost internal dimension; in Panizza’s grotesque, the mere idea of such another dimension is forcefully — and, as the reader should realize, implausibly — eliminated. Ultimately, both narratives share the recognition that the individuals who have become the objects of the narrators’ scrutiny and who happen to be Jews remain unknowable from the inside. The stereotypical antisemitic pyrotechnics employed by Panizza only serve to emphasize his narrator’s — and by implication also the reader’s — blindness towards the humanity and the individuality of the Jew. Again,

Augenbindehaut, dessen Quetschnase, dessen Molluskenlippen und Elfenbeinzähne, dessen Geruch man mit Verwunderung wahrnimmt, und dessen Gefühle und geheimste anthropologische Handlungen man ebenfalls kennen lernen möchte!” 79 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 52; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” p. 219: “Mit Verwunderung beobachtete ich, wie dieses Monstrum sich die grauenhafteste Mühe gab, sich in unsere Verhältnisse, in unsere Art zu gehen, zu denken, in unsere Mimik, in die Äußerungen unserer Gemütsbewegungen, in unsere Sprechweise einzuleben.” 80 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 47; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 214: “mein bester Freund auf der Hochschule.” 81 For the contemporary development of anthropology in Germany and its links with colonialism and antisemitism, see Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, 2010.

126 AXEL STÄHLER

Panizza would have found this pre-formed in Levy’s story. But through his exaggeration the effect is exploded; it is re-invested with a different kind of subtlety and contributes to the author’s strategy of satiric hyperbolization and, as in Levy, of making the reader realize their complicity in the abjection of the Jew. Panizza is laying it on so thick that his text in effect deconstructs itself — as witnessed by its resistance to the attempted appropriation by the Nazis.

The Ludic Exposure of Antisemitic Stereotyping

In conclusion, I would like to return briefly to Thomas Mann. Panizza, as if he were anticipating — and, in fact, playing with — Mann’s much later theorizing of the grotesque as the style of expressionism, has his narrator outline his literary aspirations in the first paragraph of his story. Explaining that to apprehend the complexity of Faitel’s nature would require the aid of “a linguist, a choreographer, an aesthete, an anatomist, a tailor, and a psychiatrist,”82 he concedes: Thus, it will not be surprising after what I have just said, when my sketch presents only bits and pieces. I must rely on my five senses which, according to today’s prevailing school of literature, should completely suffice for creating a work of art — without attempting to ask too much about the why and how and without attempting to provide artificial motivation and superficial construction. If a comedy should originate instead of a work of art, then the school of literature bear the responsibility.83 This is not only another confirmation of the unknowability of the other whose internal nature, even if all the experts mentioned were enlisted, would still resist easy classification. After all, as the narrator acknowledges, Faitel “was a phenomenon.”84 The narrator moreover situates his account within the purview of impressionism, the very style against which Mann had pitched his conception of expressionism and satire and which he characterized in contrast as passive, humble and realist.85 Yet in spite of his narrator’s claims, and in fact undermining them, Panizza adheres to what Mann would later identify as expressionism. From the outset the satire of

82 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 47; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 214: “Ein Linguist, ein Choreograph, ein Ästhetiker, ein Anatom, ein Schneider und ein Irrenarzt wären nötig, um die ganze Erscheinung von Faiteles, was er sprach, wie er ging und was er tat, vollständig zu begreifen und zu erklären.” 83 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 47; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 214: “Daß nach dem Gesagten mein Vorwurf nur Stückarbeit liefern wird, ist nicht zu verwundern. Doch ich verlasse mich auf meine fünf Sinne, die nach der gegenwärtig herr- schenden literarischen Schule vollständig genügen, ein Kunstwerk zu liefern; ohne viel nach warum und wie zu fragen und ohne künstliche Motivierung oder gar transzendentale Konstruktion zu versuchen. Wenn statt des Kunstwerks eine Komödie entsteht, so mag sie, die Schule, die Verantwortung tragen.” 84 Panizza, “The Operated Jew,” 1991, p. 47; see Panizza, “Der operierte Jud’,” [1893] 1914, p. 214: “Faitel … war ein Phänomen.” 85 Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983, p. 416; see Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpoliti- schen, [1918] 1956, pp. 556–557.

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“The Operated Jew” thus gives the lie to its narrator’s pretensions. It also challenges the ruthlessness of the estheticism attributed by Mann to expressionism by the ludic elaboration of what emerges nevertheless as a very serious purpose: the exposure of rampant antisemitic stereotyping as it had, less explosively, also been criticized by Levy.

Works Cited

Anonymous. [Biography of Oskar Panizza.] Völkischer Beobachter [Bavarian edition: Münchener Beobachter] 40.257 (November 8, 1927): 2. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1984 [1965]. Bauer, Michael. Oskar Panizza: Ein literarisches Porträt. Munich: Hanser, 1984. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern.” In Moder- nity, Culture and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus. Cambridge: Polity, 1998, pp. 143–156. Beckman, Linda H. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Beckman, Linda H. “Leaving ‘the tribal duckpond’: Amy Levy, Jewish Self-Hatred and Jewish Identity.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 185–201. Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man.” In The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 85–92. Bierbaum, Otto J. “Oskar Panizza.” Die Gesellschaft. Münchener Halbmonatsschrift für Kunst und Kultur 9 (1893): 977–989. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1958]. Cheyette, Bryan (ed.). “Introduction.” In Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland: An Anthology. London: Halban, 1998, pp. xiii–lxxi. Dobijanka-Witczakowa, Olga. “Auf dem Weg zur Moderne: Der Auftakt in München.” In Avantgarden in Ost und West: Literatur, Musik und bildende Kunst um 1900, ed. Hartmut Kircher, Maria Kłańska, and Erich Kleinschmidt. Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2002, pp. 13–21. Fischer, Jens M. “Deutschsprachige Phantastik zwischen Décadence und Faschis- mus.” In Phaïcon 3: Almanach der phantastischen Literatur, ed. Rein A. Zonder- geld. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1978, pp. 93–130. Gilman, Sander L. “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess’.” The German Quarterly 66.2 (1993): 195–211. Gilman, Sander L. The Jewish Body. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–1961.

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Hampe, Arnon. “‘Der operierte Jud’’ (Kurzgeschichte von Oskar Panizza, 1893).” In Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Vol. 7: Literatur, Film, Theater und Kunst, ed. Wolfgang Benz. Berlin, Munich, and Boston: de Gruyter/Saur, 2015, pp. 375–377. Jusová, Iveta. The New Woman and the Empire. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Levy, Amy. “Cohen of Trinity.” The Gentleman’s Magazine 266 (1889): 417–424. Levy, Amy. Reuben Sachs. London: Persephone, 2001 [1888]. Levy, Amy. “The Jew in Fiction.” The Jewish Chronicle (June 4, 1886): 13. Lieb, Claudia. “Window Dressing: Fetishistic Transactions in Fictional Prose by Oskar Panizza and Thomas Mann.” In Communication of Love: Mediatized Inti- macy from Love Letters to SMS, ed. Eva Lia Wyss. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014, pp. 307–320. Mann, Thomas. Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1956 [1918]. Mann, Thomas. “Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’.” In Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker, 1933 [1926], pp. 231–247. Mann, Thomas. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris. New York: Ungar, 1983 [1918]. Panizza, Oskar. Das Liebeskonzil: Eine Himmels-Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen. Zurich: Schabelitz, 1895 [i.e. 1894]. Panizza, Oskar. “Der Klassizismus und das Eindringen des Variété: Eine Studie über zeitgenössischen Geschmack.” Die Gesellschaft. Münchener Halbmonatsschrift für Kunst und Kultur 12 (1896): 1252–1274. Panizza, Oskar. “Der operierte Jud’.” In Visionen der Dämmerung, ed. Hanns Heinz Ewers. Munich: Georg Müller, 1914 [1893], pp. 213–242. Panizza, Oskar. “Der operierte Jud’.” Völkischer Beobachter [Bavarian edition: Münchener Beobachter] 40.259–264 (November 10–16, 1927 [1893]): 3. Panizza, Oskar. “Eine Negergeschichte.” In Visionen der Dämmerung, ed. Hanns Heinz Ewers. Munich: Georg Müller, 1914 [1893], pp. 243–253. Panizza, Oskar. “Indianergedanken.” In Visionen der Dämmerung, ed. Hanns Heinz Ewers. Munich: Georg Müller, 1914 [1893], pp. 347–356. Panizza, Oskar. Legendäres und Fabelhaftes. Leipzig: Unflad, 1889. Panizza, Oskar. Londoner Lieder. Leipzig: Unflad, 1887. Panizza, Oskar. Psichopatia criminalis und andere Schriften, ed. Karl-Maria Guth. Ber- lin: Hofenberg, 2015. Vaget, Hans-Rudolf. “Thomas Mann und Oskar Panizza: Zwei Splitter zu ‘Budddenbrooks’ und ‘Doktor Faustus’.” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift N.F. 25 (1975): 231–237. Zimmerman, Andrew. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Zipes, Jack. The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge, 1991.

Jewish Masculinity, Gender and Orientalism

Homo-Semitism: Jewish Men, Greek Love and the Rise of Homosexual Identity

Ofri Ilany

Over the last few decades, numerous studies in history have discussed the complex relations between antisemitism and perceptions of sexuality within modern Euro- pean culture. In this context, several scholars have highlighted the link drawn by European psychiatrists, physicians and intellectuals between Judaism and homosexuality. Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, and recently Benjamin Maria Baader, have demonstrated the prevalence of the notions regarding the “queerness” of the Jews, namely the alleged femininity of the Jewish man’s body, in fin de siècle antisemitic discourse.1 Robert Dean Tobbin has also shown the common association between Jews, homosexuals and sexual inversion.2 This chapter approaches the question of Jews and the discourse of sexuality in a somewhat different way. It sur- veys the emergence of homosexual subjectivity and cultural consciousness during the first two decades of the twentieth century and investigates the place of Jews and Jewishness within this emerging discourse. In the first part of the text, I will focus on Benedict Friedländer — one of the most militant and controversial activists of the homosexual movement during the late Kaiserreich. In the second part I will survey the legacy of Friedländer, especially his impact on Jewish authors who tried to formulate their own version of Jewish or “Semitic homosexuality.”

The Death of a Masculinist

On June 14, 1908, Dr. Benedict Friedländer completed his last and most notorious essay, titled “Seven Propositions.” The text begins with the following argument: “The white race is becoming ever sicker under the curse of Christianity, which is foreign to it and mostly harmful: that [i.e. Christianity] is the genuinely bad “Jew- ish influence,” an opinion that has been proven true, especially through the conditions in North America.”3 Friedländer, a zoologist, founded together with Adolf Brand the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen — known as the “right-wing” flank of the German homosexual movement in the early twentieth century. He was the intellectual authority in this group, and published numerous essays, among them Die Renaissance des Eros Uranios,

1 Gilman, “Jewish Madness and Gender,” 1991, pp. 93–168; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997; Baader, “Jewish Difference,” 2012. 2 Tobbin, Peripheral Desires, 2015, pp. 83–111. 3 Friedländer, “Seven Propositions,” 1992, 219–220. 132 OFRI ILANY

Männliche und weibliche Kultur and Die Liebe Platons im Lichte der modernen Biologie. His theory of erotic attraction between men was one of the most influential sex- ological theories in his time and was the main source of influence for Hans Blüher’s idea of the Männerbund. Along with other topics, “seven propositions” sketches the framework of an antisemitic-homoerotic theory. Friedländer’s essay ends with the fatal words: The continuing misunderstanding of these truths must harm the entire white race to the benefit of the yellow. Behind the 40 million Japanese stand 400 million Chinese. It is questionable whether an effective spreading of these truths is still possible and thereby can halt the relative decline of the white race. No Time has ever lacked seers, but they were not listened to.4 As argued by Magnus Hirschfeld, these lines were actually Friedländer’s political testament.5 A few weeks later, on July 20, 1908, he was found dead in his apart- ment in Berlin’s Schöneberg district, aged 44. In a letter he had left before he shot himself, he explained that the only motivation for his deed was poor health condition. Indeed, in 1899 he participated in a scientific expedition to Ceylon and con- tracted a severe tropical disease, from which he did not recover. “With everything else I could get along with the time,” he wrote.6 What did the phrase “With everything else” refer to? Obviously, this could be a general statement about the difficulties of life. A more specific guess is that Friedländer referred to his homosexuality — a fact that had serious legal implications in Germany of the time, as in other countries. Numerous men took their own lives after their homosexuality was exposed, or out of fear that this might happen. The prevalence of homosexual suicides was one of the main arguments raised in favor of the abolition of the ban on homosexuality — paragraph 175.7 But this did not seem to be the case with Friedländer, who considered erotic love towards men as much higher and nobler love than love towards women. In fact, Friedländer expressed pity towards those men who did not share “Plato’s love,” namely erotic attraction towards men. He considered this “physiological friendship,” i.e. attraction between males as the foundation of the human community.8 But some observers who commented on Friedländer’s suicide speculated that the reason could be his own Jewishness. Born in Berlin Tiergarten in 1866, he was the third generation in a wealthy family of Jewish scholars and physicians.9 He was definitely viewed by his contemporaries as a Jew. This view was shared, for example, by his close friend Bruno Wille, who married Friedländer’s widow and was afterwards buried beside him. In a text dedicated to Friedländer, Wille characterized

4 Ibid. 5 Hirschfeld, “Einleitung und Situations-Bericht,” 1909, p. 12. 6 Friedländer, Die Liebe Platons, 1909. 7 Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe, pp. 63–65. 8 Friedländer, “Seven Propositions,” 1992, 219. 9 On Friedländer family see: Treß, “Friedlaender — Rieß,” 2015, pp. 180–191. HOMO-SEMITISM 133 his friend’s background in a typical manner: “Both lines of his ancestry hosted the highest culture; and the critical mind of the Jewish race fused with the valiant sincerity of blue-eyed Germanness.”10

Fin de siècle Homonationalism

In her Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick equates the “epistemological distinctiveness” of gay identity with that of Jewish identity. According to Kosofsky, the two identities are analogous “in that the stigmatized individual has at least no- tionally some discretion” over other people’s knowledge of her or his membership of the group.11 Like homosexuals, and unlike women or people of color, Jews theo- retically have the option of living “in the closet.” Applying this terminology, Friedländer may be considered “a semi-closeted Jew.” However, beside Friedländer’s Jewishness, Wille refers also to his antisemitism: “Friedländer was not Anti-Semite in the party sense, but fought passionately against those traits through which the evil representatives of Judaism brought disrepute to their race.”12 Friedländer was a fanatic follower of the antisemitic socialist Eugen Dühring, to whom he dedicated one of his books. Theodor Lessing spread the story that Friedländer had bequeathed his great property to Dühring, out of admiration of this antisemitic theory.13 This story, which contributed to Friedländer’s discredit within Jewish circles, is not supported by any other source that I could find; but undeniably, to use Lessing’s terms, it seems that in the weeks preceding his death, Friedländer had gone through a severe outburst of self-hate. Some contemporary antisemitic commentators inferred that Friedländer decided to commit suicide as he realized the impossibility to come out of the spell of his own race.14 Indeed, one cannot overlook a certain similarity between Friedländer’s act and the famous suicide of another antisemitic Jewish masculinist, Otto Weininger, in 1903. There is much affinity between Fridländer’s and Weinninger’s systems of thought, both bearing the characteristics of fin de siècle racism and misogyny. Soon after its foundation, the homosexual movement split into two camps: the liberal group headed by Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who described the intermediate forms of sexuality as a “medical-genetic” phenomenon; and a second group, headed by Friedländer and Adolf Brand, which can be termed as Kulturho- mosexualismus. As Claudia Bruns has pointed out, Friedländer attempted to link the biological and the socio-cultural levels.15 Based on the zoological theory of

10 Wille, “Benedikt Friedländers Persönlichkeit,” 1930, p. 35. All translations are mine, if not noted otherwise. 11 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1990, p. 75. 12 Ibid., p. 36. 13 Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthaß, 1930, p. 107. 14 Buch, 50 Jahre antisemitische Bewegung, 1937, p. 24. 15 Bruns, Politik des Eros, 2008, pp. 152–158. 134 OFRI ILANY

Gustav Jäger, he maintained that social bonds are grounded in smells — a phenomenon he termed “chemotaxis.” Maritha Keilson Lauritz suggested that Friedländer’s interest in smells had to do with the fact that his grandfather had a perfumery.16 He argued that the “normal man” feels attracted to other members of his sex, an attraction which varies between friendship and sexual contact. Accord- ingly, even mere friendship essentially has a biological-erotic element that he called physiologische Freundschaft. Like other members of his group, he was also an ardent nudist, a lifestyle which was coupled with an ideology of racial hygiene. Re- jecting bourgeois morality, Friedländer also strongly detested Hirschfeld’s medical theory of homosexuals as “the third sex.” Contrarily, Friedländer considered erotic ties between men as the foundation of male socialization and of civilization in general. In recent years, there has been considerable discussion about homonationalism, i.e. the association of gays with nationalist ideology and the usage of gay liberation as avatars of European culture against Islam by right-wing politicians, e.g. Geert Wilders.17 This term, which was coined by Jasbir Puar, is used for example to describe right-wing, anti-Islamist gay activists.18 This phenomenon actually has, as Ulrike Brunotte emphasized, precedents already in the non-liberal homoerotic circles of the early twentieth century.19 Among others, Friedländer can be described as the man who invented homonationalism. Married to a woman and father to a child, he was the leader of the Bund für männliche Kultur — a small association of men which endeavored to enhance male–male love, viewing it as a basic aspect of virile manliness rather than a sexual minority.20 Another propagator of male eros, Blüher, described the group this way: As a scientist, Friedländer disapproved the pathographic conception of inversion [i.e. homosexual inclination], and gathered some young men around him who adopted his interpretation of intermasculine eroticism. The Bund’s agenda was more far-reaching than mere struggle for the liberation of the oppressed Männerhelden. He was, first of all, anti-feminist, aiming to curb the overevaluation of women [by the male sex] and the gynecocratic rule in contemporary Europe.21 Friedländer detested the current social situation, in which love towards boys was pathologized. He wondered what a contemporary physician would have said to Socrates when the latter would turn to him to be cured of the “perverse” or con-

16 Keilson-Lauritz, “Benedict Friedlaender,” 2005, 311–331. 17 See e.g. Mepschen and Duyvendak, “European Sexual Nationalisms: The Culturalization of Citizenship and the Sexual Politics of Belonging and Exclusion,” 2012. 18 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 2007. 19 Brunotte, “National masculinities between Homophobia and Homophilia,” 2014. 20 Among the members were: W. Jansen, Herbert Stegemann, Bill Forster (Hermann Breuer, author of the novel Anders als die Andern), Friedrich Dobe, C. Maass and Walter Ehrenfried (Walther Heinrich). Keilson-Lauritz, Emanzipation hinter der Weltstadt, 2000, p. 153. 21 Blüher, Die Rolle der Erotik, 1962, pp. 303–304. HOMO-SEMITISM 135 trarian love for beautiful young men. He speculated that the doctor “will try to treat him by potassium bromide, cold water and suggestion therapy, i.e. by con- vincing him that Xanthippe is nicer, more amiable and more entertaining than the thriving youth Alcibiades.”22 As shown by Robert Beachy, one of the main aims of Der Eigene’s cultural endeavor was to create what can be called a “gay literary canon.”23 Anthologies like Elisar von Kupffer’s Lieblingsminne und Männersliebe in der Weltliteratur were “de- ducing male eroticism in the works of Goethe, Kleist, Hölderlin and others, as well as the alleged sexual character of many of their same-sex relationships.”24 The “outing” of great historical figures — a practice which enjoys popularity till today — began to be institutionalized in this period.

“Greek Love” and Misogyny

However, especially important is the strong link between homosexuality and philhellenism. The emergence of homosexuality as a positive social identity was tightly related to the cultural context of Hellenism. As argued by Tobbin, since the early modern period, the only way to talk about same-sex desire was in terms of “Greek love.”25 Within masculine elitist circles, like Der Eigene and Stefan George’s Geheimes Deutschland, erotic ties between men were legitimized as “Greek love.” In her book Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994), Linda Dowling has demonstrated how liberal reformers’ search in Plato and Greek literature for a transcendental value that might substitute for a lost Christian theology, led them to develop a homosocial culture and a language of moral legitimacy for homosexuality. A parallel process took place in Germany. Ever since Winckel- mann in the eighteenth century, the adoration of same-sex eros as a cultural ideal was based heavily on the Apollonian Greek model. Simon Richter argued that “[the] powerful vision of Greece … of a time that privileged male friendship and incorporated it into its social and political institutions, that celebrated the beauty of the male body — this vision generated the entire movement of German Neo- classicism.”26 Since the classics still enjoyed greater social and cultural authority than they do today, the classical past was used as a conscious strategy for a sexual politics through art.27 The dominance of the Greek model can also be seen in visual representations of homoeroticism, for example by artists like Fidus and Sascha Schneider.

22 Friedländer, Renaissance des Eros Uranios, 1904, p. 57. 23 Beachy, Gay Berlin, 2014, p. 106. 24 Ibid., pp. 106, 108. 25 Tobbin, “Twins! Homosexuality and Masculinity,” 2011, p. 133. 26 Richter, “Winckelmann’s Progeny,” 1996, p. 38. 27 Mader, “The Greek Mirror,” 1992, p. 388.; see also Brunotte, Dämonen des Wissens, 2013. 136 OFRI ILANY

Indeed, Friedländer envisioned a “Uranian Renaissance” which will “bring ancient and modern culture into harmony with each other by reviving the Greek eros and overthrowing the monopoly which the woman has, of being loved and beautiful.” But what hinders the realization of the male erotic renaissance? Besides the female sex itself, Friedländer blamed the influence of Christianity: “[T]he erotic and social pretension of women is the enemy; with it are also often bound the tricks of a caste of priests … which cunningly use the influence of the superstitious sex … to the contrary of all of this rested the greatness of the Hellenes in their best, pre-Periclean period.”28 It is worth mentioning that in most of his writings, Friedländer’s anti-clericalism was even more dominant than his antisemitism. However, the discourse of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen was to a large extent racialized and marked by clear völkisch leanings. Brand, the editor of Der Eigene, published a series of nude photos titled “Deutsche Rasse,” which had scientific pretensions but looked more like soft por- nography.29 Ironically, the collection was confiscated by the Nazi authorities in 1933 and led to Brand’s interrogation.30

The Jewish “Negation of Eros”

In antisemitic discourse of the fin de siècle, Jews were depicted as “feminine,” full of sexual desire and prone to homosexuality.31 Within the discourse of the Gemein- schaft der Eigenen, however, benign virile homosexuality was identified with the Ar- yan race. But besides the racial characterization, the group around Friedländer characterized Judaism as the cultural enemy of male eros, being the source of Christian asceticism. “The women’s movement leads us back to ancient Jewish ideals, while the men’s cultural movement — to ancient Greek ones,” wrote Edwin Bab, the co-founder of Der Eigene.32 While Athens was seen as the ultimate source of influence for European homosociality, Jerusalem, or more specifically the biblical law prohibiting homosexual intercourse, was depicted as the primal cause for the negation of male eros. According to Friedländer, “[t]he religion that was im- ported to Europe in the first centuries of our era was a Palestinian religion, primarily Jewish, but probably with displaced Buddhist, that is, Aryan-Indian elements.”33 He goes on to argue that “already in its earliest extant documents [this religion] contained a certain ascetic tendency.”34 It is no wonder, then, that the Jews are the most exclusively heterosexual group in Europe:

28 Friedländer, “Seven Propositions,” 1992, 220. 29 Brand, Deutsche Rasse, 1915. 30 Grau and Schoppman, Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit, 1993, p. 65. 31 Gilman, “Jewish Madness and Gender,” 1991, pp. 93–168; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997. 32 Bab, “Frauenbewegung und männliche Kultur,” 1981, p. 407. 33 Friedländer, “Der Untergang des Eros,” 1909, 99. 34 Ibid. HOMO-SEMITISM 137

The Hebraic Race, among all the races settled in Europe, is least prone to physiological friendship … with regard to the prevalence of homosexuality, there can be no doubt that the Aryan races lead … . Next come the Anglo-Saxons of the Old World and the New, together with numerous Slavs of pure or mixed blood. At a considerable remove follow the Latin races, and the rear is brought up by the Jews.35 Blüher and Brand differentiated between the super-virile Aryan homosexual and the “effeminate” type which they identified with Hirschfeld and his dominantly Jewish circle, including the sexologist himself who was labeled by them “die Tante” (the aunt).36 However, it is noteworthy that the division between the groups was not distinct. Some members of Hirschfeld’s institute, like Kurt Hiller, contributed to Der Eigene as well. Hirschfeld struggled to refute Friedländer’s racial classifications, arguing that there is no scientific evidence “to justify any sweeping conclusions as to the comparative frequency or infrequency of homosexuality” among Jews.37 He also downplayed the centrality of the Greek model, stressing instead a medical perception of homosexuality as an inborn intermediate sexual stage. The dispute over Jewish sexual character became even more loaded in the next years, following the publication of the Männerbund theory by Hans Blüher, the ideologue of the German Youth Movement. In his book Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (1917), Blüher made a great effort to distance himself from the zoologist, who viewed him as his successor. But Blüher clearly owed major parts of his theory to the former, with whom he held correspondence for two years, until Friedländer’s death. Young Blüher was disappointed to see that Friedländer’s Bund für männliche Kultur did not survive his leader’s death, and attributed the failure to lack of erotic attachment between the members. As shown by Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Blüher’s theory was heavily based on Friedländer’s, who provided the two basic elements of his socio-erotic theory: the super-virile Männerheld, and the Männerbund.38 Ofer Nur has demonstrated the impact of the theory on Hashomer Hatsair Zionist youth movement, quoting passages by the group’s members which struggled with Blüher’s assertion that Jews were incapable of forming male society, and insisting that ancient Greek male bonding had a Jew- ish equivalent: “[B]oth among the ancient Greeks and the Jews … an association of Men formed erotic bonds and therefore became a cultural nucleus.”39

35 Friedländer, Mitteilungen, 1908, p. 3. 36 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1985, p. 41; Brunotte, Zwischen Eros und Krieg, pp. 108– 110; Bruns, Politik des Eros, p. 329. 37 Hirschfeld, Racism, p. 163. 38 Hergemöller, “Hirschfeld und Blüher,” 2004, pp. 117–136. 39 Quoted in: Nordheimer Nur, Eros and Tragedy, 2013, p. 158. 138 OFRI ILANY

The Quest for Jewish Männerbund

However, within the central European Jewish cultural sphere, there were other attempts to appropriate the male-erotic ideal and later the Männerbund theory, in order to forge a Jewish equivalent: “Semitic” “virile” male eroticism against the prevailing antisemitic discourse. In the field of visual art, Ephraim Moshe Lilien’s illustrations took distinctive homoerotic nature.40 In his representation of the book of Genesis, the angel guarding Paradise appears as a naked powerful, masculine Herzl, reminiscent of “Assyrian ancient Semitic regal look.”41 This seems like an equivalent of the Greek-oriented homoerotic art by Fidus and his like. Within the theological field, the most distinctive attempt to form a Jewish homoerotic system was carried by the poet Georgo Mordechai Langer. Born in Prague in 1894, Langer is known mainly as “Kafka’s Hebrew teacher.” But he was also a poet, Yeshiva student and psychoanalyst. He was the first modern Hebrew poet to overtly express homoerotic passions and feelings. As argued by Shaun Halper, Langer was “the first to introduce homosexual experience into Jewish literature and create a Hebrew gay aesthetic.”42 Langer was born to an assimilated, liberal Jewish family. In his youth he became interested in mysticism and religion, and, influenced by a classmate, began to immerse himself in Judaism. He learned Hebrew, began studying Talmud on his own, grew side-locks and put on phylacteries. At 19, he travelled east to Belz (now in Ukraine), a place regarded by most Prague Jews as remote and godforsaken, and joined the Hassidic Yeshiva there. Af- ter a few years, towards the end of the First World War, he returned to Prague dressed as a Hassid. In 1923, he published in Prague his The Eroticism of Kabbalah (Die Erotik der Ka- balla), which was an attempt to revive “the tradition of manly love” that existed in ancient Judaism, until, according to Langer, it was superseded by the love of women.43 He tried to prove that Judaism contained deep homoerotic underpin- nings, contrary to the accepted notion that the religion completely rejects homosexuality. He interpreted the commandment, “ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha” (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”) as calling for ‘ahavat re’a,’ i.e. Freundesliebe — erotic love between men. In his view, in early Judaism the erotic stream of love between men prevailed, but over the generations “love of woman” prevailed. However, he concluded that the harsh prohibition of sexual relations between men constitutes proof that the tendency toward it was common among Jews. He also argued that

40 Cohen, “Representation of the Jewish Body,” 2001, p. 273–274. 41 Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, 2001, p. 113. 42 Halper, “Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the Birth of the Modern Jewish Homosex- ual,” 2013. 43 On Langer’s Kabbalistic and homoerotic conceptions, see Ilani, “I Am Come to Awaken,” 2008; Langer, Die Erotik der Kabbala, 1923. HOMO-SEMITISM 139 an erotic relationship, which not actualized in the form of intercourse, is what connects Yeshiva students to one another and to their rabbi. Langer’s ambition in life was to reawaken “love of the friend,” that “lofty and sublime human emotion that was extinguished in the hearts of the Hebrews in their bitter and biting exile.” Langer was clearly influenced by Blüher, whom he explicitly mentions. But unlike Blüher, he sought to show that Jews were capable of positive male eroticism. He also viewed Judaism as an expression of Eastern sexuality, in contrast with the repressed and wilting Western, European sexuality. Thus, he took antisemitic notions about Jewish sexuality and orientalist notions about oriental sexuality and tried to give them positive meaning: an act of erotic self-orientalization. In Langer’s understanding, one of the only places where the masculine erotic element remained intact was the Hassidic court, which he describes as “a calm isle of purest Orient within the ocean of Eastern European civilization.” He describes “Jewish- Oriental” lifestyle and sexuality as simpler and healthier than the ones characteristic of European civilization. Thus, for instance, he writes about the mikveh (ritual bath): At least once a week, on Friday afternoon before Shabbat enters, all the men of the eastern European shtetl get together for communal bathing, where the boys see all the men and youths absolutely naked. In those places it is forbidden to hide the ‘covenant of pa- triarch Abraham.’ Therefore all the bad sentiments of shame disappear, as well as the European child’s infamous voyeuristic curiosity.44 Well versed in psychoanalysis (as he had published writings on the subject), Langer formulates here a kind of Jewish-orientalist variation on the Freudian theory of sexual urge suppression within modern Western civilization. As shown by Paul Mendes-Flohr, German-speaking Jewish intellectuals at the turn of the century criticized the “soulless rationalism and materialism” of the bourgeois West, contrasting it with the mysterious authenticity of the Orient. As part of this discourse, the Ostjuden were described as unspoiled Orientals.45 As part of his intellectual project, Langer retold Jewish history as a tale of the struggle between two erotic strains: the love for a man and the love for woman. In a letter he wrote to Yaacov Rabinovitzch in 1921, Langer stated his desire to rouse in “this our generation, so full of hate … that brotherly love” so prevalent, according to him, among the Hebrews of the past: Can it be [ha-yitakhen] that in our present generation, which is all hate and all rage and animosity, a man appears and sings lyric of comrade-love [ahavat re’a]?! Has this abomination not been done in Israel since the days of [King] David who eulogized his friend Jonathan: ‘I grieve for you, my brother, Jonathan. Very dear you were to me. More wondrous your love to me than the love of women!’ How strange this elegy [ki- nah] rings in our cold age, an elegy of sublime and exalted human feeling that has been

44 Langer, Die Erotik der Kabbala, 1923, p. 112. 45 Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, pp. 77–80. 140 OFRI ILANY

extinguished from the Hebrew heart in the tragedy of their bitter exile, may it be swift ... And now here I come, upon my soul, to awaken this feeling again, this comrade-love [ahavat re’a] in these, our enlightened days — can it be [ha-yitakhen]?46 The homoerotic ideal is posited as a transgression of modernity and European civilization. Moreover, the renaissance des Eros Uranios, envisioned by Friedländer, is revoked — this time in Jewish clothes.

Conclusion

In this chapter I argued that in spite of the centrality of Jews in the leadership of the early homosexual movement (among them Magnus Hirschfeld, Kurt Hiller and Friedländer himself), the modern ideal of male–male eros has been constructed upon the model of “Greek love,” and was accordingly seen as inherently antitheti- cal to Jewish sexuality. Thus, Jews were regarded feminine, but were stigmatized within the emerging group of self-conscious men-lovers. I presented some Jewish intellectuals’ reaction to this stigmatization, and their attempts to rehabilitate Jew- ish homoeroticism. From our current perspective we view homosexuals as a sexual minority, which fights for its rights after being oppressed throughout history. In this respect, Mag- nus Hirschfeld has won: we consider homosexuality as inborn sexual identity. However, although the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were coined in the German language, the adjustment of the German culture to this sexual dichotomy was never easy, and love towards men continued to be seen as a cultural and social phenomenon.47 In this respect, early-twentieth-century Germany was not essentially different from contemporary societies, for example in the Middle East, whose discourse of sexuality differs from the modern-Western gay/straight dichotomy. In a similar way, in the modern Middle-European culture, homosexual identity was linked to a much broader and more dominant discourse of “männlichen Kultur” and “Freundesliebe.”

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46 Halper, “Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the Birth of the Modern Jewish Homosex- ual,” 2013, p. 245. 47 See Anderson, “Kafka, Homosexualität und die Ästhetik der ‘männlichen Kultur’,” 255–279. HOMO-SEMITISM 141

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Hirschfeld, Magnus. “Einleitung und Situations-Bericht.” Vierteljahrberichte des WhK 10 (1909): 1–30. Ilany, Ofri. “I Am Come to Awaken Again This Sentiment of Brotherly Love in Our Enlightened Times [Hineni ba leorer shuv et haregesh hazeh shel ahavat hare’ah beyameinu hane’orim],” Ha’aretz, Culture and Letters Section, 15.02.2008. Keilson-Lauritz, Marita. Emanzipation hinter der Weltstadt: Adolf Brand und die Ge- meinschaft der Eigenen. Berlin: Rolf F. Lang, 2000. Keilson-Lauritz, Marita. “Benedict Friedlaender und die Anfänge der Sexualwis- senschaft.” Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 18.4 (2005): 311–331. Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1990. Langer, Georg M. Die Erotik der Kabbala. Prag: J. Flesch, 1923. Lessing, Theodor. Der jüdische Selbsthaß. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930. Mader, Donald H. “The Greek Mirror: The Uranians and Their Use of Greece.” Journal of Homosexuality 49 (1992): 377–420. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Moder- nity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 77–133. Mepschen, Paul, and Jan W. Duyvendak. “European Sexual Nationalisms: The Culturalization of Citizenship and the Sexual Politics of Belonging and Exclu- sion.” Perspectives on Europe 42.1 (2012): 70–76. Mosse, George. Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Nordheimer Nur, Ofer. Eros and Tragedy: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Richter, Simon. “Winckelmann’s Progeny: Homosocial Networking in the Eight- eenth Century.” In Outing Goethe and his Age, ed. Alice A. Kuzniar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 33–46. Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and National- ism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Tamagne, Florence. A History of Homosexuality in Europe. New York: Algora, 2006. Tobbin, Robert D. “Twins! Homosexuality and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” In Masculinity, Senses, Spirit, ed. Katherine M. Fau. Lanham: Bucknell University Press, 2011, pp. 133–151. Tobbin, Robert D. Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Treß, Werner. “Friedlaender — Rieß. Grundlegung zur wissenschaftlichen Biografie einer jüdischen Gelehrten- und Mäzenatenfamilie.” In Was war deutsches Judentum. 1870-1933, ed. Christina von Braun. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 180–191. Wille, Bruno. “Benedikt Friedländers Persönlichkeit.” In Philosophie der Liebe. Pfullingen: Johannes Baum, 1930, pp. 35–37.

Affective Masculinity: Queering Jewish Orientalism in Young Vienna

Gabriele Dietze

“Ein Mann zu sein ist ein Drama; ein Jude zu sein ist ein anderes.” Cioran

Introductory Remarks

“Der Jude ist männlich im Geist. Seine alte Religion hatte zum Unterschied wohl von allen anderen, nie eine weibliche Gottheit,” writes Alfred Wolfenstein in his 1922 essay “Das neue Dichtertum der Juden.”1 He describes the love affair of Jew- ish poets with the German language and also talks about the “Orient:” “Es ist Frühling im Abendlande. Die Dichtung mit zwei Gesichtern singt Untergang und Aufgang. Vielleicht verkündet sich hier eine Vereinigung von Orient und Okzident.”2 These two statements map the two poles of the investigation: It will deal with masculinity, more precisely with “affective masculinity,” and it will deal with Jewish fantasies assigned to some ideas of “Orient.” The metaphor of a love affair has to be taken literally because homoerotic dimensions in the works of Jew- ish and German authors of the fin de siècle will be at the center of the investigation.3 The idea of a self-evident virility of Jewish men was — in contrast to Wolfen- stein’s confident claim — quite a challenged concept. In his study Unheroic Con- duct (1997), Daniel Boyarin outlined a significant degree of Jewish “masculinity trouble” at the fin de siècle. Jewish masculinity was torn between the new Zionist self-authorized discourse of the “Muscle-Jew” and the persistent notion of the Jew as an “eroticized Jewish male sissy.”4 Incidentally, disputes concerning “New Mas- culinities” were not at all a uniquely Jewish privilege.5 In particular around and af-

1 “The Jew is male in spirit. In contrast to every other religion his own did never have a female goddess.” My translation. Wolfenstein, “Das neue Dichtertum der Juden,” 1922, pp. 333–334. 2 “It is springtime in the occident. The literature with two faces sings sunset and dawn. May be a unification of occident and orient is proclaimed here.” My translation. Ibid., p. 357. 3 I am aware that the opposition “Jewish” versus “German” carries an antisemitic subtext, as the Jews I talk about carried at that period full German or Austrian citizenship with all legal rights involved. I choose to stay with this “wrong” binary nevertheless, as they were en- trenched in Jewish and non-Jewish language at that time. See, e.g., Kuh, Juden und Deutsche, 1921. 4 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. xxi. 5 Concerning masculinity, Vienna, Jews and Gentiles alike, see the chapter “Krisen der männlichen Identität” in Jacques Le Rider’s famous cultural study Ende einer Illusion, 1990,

144 GABRIELE DIETZE ter the turn of the century, Wilhelmine or Habsburg militarized masculinities were attacked by young intellectuals. New literary styles and art movements promoted compassionate and expressive masculinities: Young Vienna’s aestheticism emphasized sensibility and introspection, the circle around Stefan George appreciated male adolescent beauty and L’ a r t p o u r L’ a r t , or a decade later Berlin expressionism searched for a “New Pathos.”6 The chosen examples of literary masculinities in Vienna modernism I decided to group under the umbrella term “Affective Masculinity.” In this respect, affect means testimony of inner emotional turmoil as well as outward declamatory and theatrical expressivity. Another part of “affective masculinity” is the bodily dimension that, as Patricia Clough writes in her introduction to the anthology The Affec- tive Turn, “treat[s] affectivity as a substrate of potential bodily responses, often automatic responses.”7 This relation of emotional turmoil, expressivity and bodily response often realizes itself in dreams. There is also an auto-affection, which — following Clough — enables the self-feeling of being alive.8 And, finally, the term affective masculinity shall portray the emotional revolt of mostly young Jewish authors, who could not fit or did not want to fit into the dominant “emotional regime”9 of Habsburg and Prussian autocratic monarchies but form rather “marginal emotional communities.”10 The discussed groups of authors and their work contain both homosocial11 as well as homoerotic elements. Homoerotism had a certain charisma and legitimacy in the era discussed. Within the Youth Movement (Jugendbewegung) and Wa n d e r v o g e l , and in the so-called Männerbünde (clubs of “bonded manhood”),12 eroticized closeness between “same-sex” participants was promoted. The George-Circle celebrated openly intimacy between grown men and adolescents, and also the aestheticism of Young Vienna reveled in gender ambivalences. Special attention will be given to eroticized friendships between Jews and Gentiles, which could be delicate in a period of massive political antisemitism in

pp. 83–228, and Nike Wagner’s work Geist und Geschlecht. Karl Kraus und die Erotik der Wie- ner Moderne, 1987. For German debates not focused on Jews, see Bublitz, Das Geschlecht der Moderne. Genealogie und Archäologie der Geschlechterdifferenz, 1998; Brunotte and Herrn, “Statt einer Einleitung. Männlichkeiten und Moderne–Pathosformeln, Wissenskulturen, Diskurse,” 2007. 6 Zweig, “Das neue Pathos,” 1909. 7 Clough, The Affective Turn, 2007, p. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 2. 9 Reddy, “Emotional Liberty. Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions,” 1999. 10 Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” 2010. The terminology used here is inspired by the study of history of emotion and the most influential works Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotion by William T. Reddy, and Emo- tional Communities in the Early Middle Ages by Barbara Rosenwein. 11 For the term “homosocial” as exclusively male but not sexual bonding, see Sedgwick, Be- tween Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 1985. 12 For German homosocial and homoeroticized Männerbünde, see Brunotte, Zwischen Eros und Krieg. Männerbund und Ritual in der Moderne, 2004, pp. 78–117, and Bruns, Politik des Eros. Der Männerbund in Wissenschaft, Politik und Jugendkultur 1881-1934, 2008.

AFFECTIVE MASCULINITY 145 the Prussian and Habsburg Empires. Here is not the place to develop the term “Jewish Orientalism” or to map this large field of scholarly debate in detail.13 It should be noted, though, that my use of “Jewish Orientalism” is informed by concepts of “romantic self-orientalizing”14 geared against “orientalizing Judaism” by anti-Semites. Both Orientalisms, the self-orientalizing one as well as the antisemitic orientalizing of Judaism, are understood as “mutually determining discourses,”15 whereupon Jewish orientalism is perceived as “self-affirming minority discourse.”16 My project, however, does not focus on debates in the tradition of Edward Said’s orientalism concerning occidentalist constructions of superiority in modern colonialism towards Islam,17 or the “Orientalization” of Eastern Jewry.18 My investigation is concerned with a more German brand of “orientalism” called lately “Der andere Orientalismus,”19 referencing pre-Christian “Orients” in Asia Minor. In contrast to France and England, where people studied things Oriental, e.g. Islam or India to prepare for travelling to their colonies, German oriental sciences, not connected to any German colonies, have been an academic philological enterprise according to Polaschegg, dealing with extinct cultures and dead languages.20 Con- sequently, the field is called in German Alt–Orientalistik, meaning literally “old oriental sciences.” Though the English term for the field would be “Ancient Near East,” I prefer the scientifically “incorrect” term altorientalistisch in order to ease the connection to orientalism in general. Concerning the examined literary material, I will make a distinction between two kinds of old-orientalist fields. The first field I call “Archaic Orientalism,” which goes back to archaic Jewish origins, deriving from “oriental” territories in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula. The second field I call “Dionysian Orientalism,”21 dealing with dream visions of Babylonian festivities and pleasures.

13 For recent gender-sensible mappings of the field, see Brunotte/Ludewig/Stähler (eds.), Ori- entalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Dis- courses, 2014; Rohde, “Der Innere Orient. Orientalismus, Antisemitismus und Geschlecht im Deutschland des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” 2005. 14 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005, p. xix. 15 Hess, 2000, p. 93. 16 Berman, 1997, p. 343. 17 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews, 2005; Pasto, “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer’: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question,” 1998. For postcolonial gendered occidentalism, see Dietze, “‘Okzidentalismuskritik’. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer For- schungsperspektivierung,” 2009. 18 Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de Siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self- Affirmation,” 1984. 19 Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus, 2005. 20 Marchand, “German Orientalism and the Decline of the West,” 2001, 466. 21 For a “Dionysation”’ of the Orient in nineteenth-century religious studies, see Brunotte, “Große Mutter, Gräber und Suffrage. Die Feminisierung der Religionswissenschaft bei J. J. Bachofen und Jane E. Harrison,” in Brunotte/Herrn (eds.), Männlichkeiten und Moderne, 2008, pp. 208–219.

146 GABRIELE DIETZE

The material in question consists of a small corpus of novels written in the early days of Young Vienna: a now forgotten, short novel by the homosexual Jewish aristocrat Leopold von Andrian, Im Garten der Erkenntnis (1895); nowadays a not widely read but at the time controversial novel of the Jewish Viennese aesthete Richard Beer-Hofmann, Der Tod Georgs (1900); and the novel Alexander in Babylon (1905) by the Jewish novelist of German citizenship, Jacob Wassermann, who happened to live in Vienna at the time and was closely connected to the Young Vi- enna group of aesthetes surrounding Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hof- mannsthal. The aim of the investigation is not first and foremost writing cultural history of homoerotism and/or orientalism of the chosen era, but it is more driven by the interest for collapsing binaries and the mutual destabilization of gender and cultural positioning in the wake of structural discrimination, such as the growing antisemitism around the Fin de Siècle and specific concepts of affective masculinity developing out of these tensions.

Leopold von Andrian — Homoerotism and the Fatherland

At the age of only 19, Leopold von Andrian published the short novel Garten der Erkenntnis (1895). The author originated paternally from Habsburg nobility and was educated as strictly Catholic and conservative in the Jesuit Convert Kalksburg. His mother was a daughter of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and was brought up in orthodox Judaism. Because of his Catholic background and his peerage, his Jewish origins did not play an important role at first. But eventually he was reached also by the inescapable antisemitic interpellation. In an exchange of letters with his close friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Andrian wrote in the year Garten der Erk- enntnis was published, that he feels as the “Allereinsamste und Allerunglücklichste,”22 because he sees himself as well as Hofmannsthal as products of a “hastigen Vermis- chung zweier sehr avancierter Rassen … Deswegen verstehen die Leute mich wenig und Dich garnicht.”23 In a kind of Werther effect, the novel developed within a short time into a cult book for a young generation immersed in the atmosphere of Jugendstil aestheticism and decadence of the day, which identified with the passionate and thorough soul- searching of the protagonist Erwin.24 The hero — obsessed with an erotically unrequited friendship with classmate Clemens — meanders in the largely action-free

22 “Most lonesome and unhappy person.” My translation. 23 “Hasty mixing of two very advanced races … that is reason why people do understand me only slightly, and least of all you.” My translation. Letter by Adrian from March 23, 1895, to Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal and Andrian, Briefwechsel: Hugo von Hofmannsthal [und] Leopold von Andrian, 1968, p. 45. Cited in Klieneberger, “Hofmannsthal and Leopold An- drian,” 1985, 620. 24 Until 1915, five editions of the novel were released. Scheible, Literarischer Jugendstil in Wien, 1984, p. 43.

AFFECTIVE MASCULINITY 147 novel for some time with a private tutor in Bolzano and drifts finally to Vienna. The attractions of the city do not really touch him, because he is fully occupied with some “urge for the other” (Drang nach dem Anderen), which he however never really enjoys. A promising encounter with a man from Vienna’s darker side is pre- maturely interrupted by Erwin himself: “Der Fremde fragte ihn, wohin sie gingen; das wußte Erwin nicht, und er bekam Angst und wandte sich der Stadt zu.”25 Psy- choanalytically inspired literary criticism — concerned with the simultaneity of literary revolutions of Young Vienna and the development of Freud’s studies of drive and psychology — points to Andrian’s lifelong struggle concerning his repressed homosexual desire.26 I myself am less interested in if the friendship was sexually consummated or not, but rather in the “ideological commitment” that connects Erwin and Clem- ens.27 Listening together to Wiener Walzer “mit ihrem ewigen Einerlei von Süße und Gemeinheit,” Erwin muses: “kam ein einschmeichelndes Gefühl dumpfen Glückes über Clemens und über Erwin: Eine Liebe ihrer selbst und eine Liebe zue- inander, oder eine Liebe zu allem, was sie geliebt hatten, oder eine Liebe zu diesem österreichischen Vaterland, das ja alles gab und vor dem kein Entrinnen war.”28 Here, we can see that the center of the eroticized friendship is not the sex — or the “inner Orient” of the unconscious, as Andrian’s best friend, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, would say in the wake of Freud — but an assemblage of narcissism, cult of male friendship, and love for the nation. Through love for his (probably non-Jewish) friend, Clemens seeks entry into the imagined community of the nation. Habsburg Austria is then seen on the one hand as “alles” (“everything”) but also as a “Moloch vor dem kein Entrinnen war” (“no escape thinkable”). These quotes show, besides the euphoria for friendship and the Fatherland, the existence of a structural threat. The latter consists of the fact that Austria had been afflicted by a wave of political antisemitism in the late nineteenth century. This wave was promoted by the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, who channeled the political and economic discontent of the lower classes with the Habsburg system into antisemitic propaganda.29 Lueger hereby targeted the mostly Jewish liberal upper

25 “The stranger asked him, whereto they are going; Erwin did not know, and he got scared and turned back to the city.” My translation. Andrian, Der Garten der Erkenntnis, 1990, p. 38. 26 One example of such an interpretation is the work of Ursula Renner which focused in a classical Freudian manner on a super strong mother: Renner, Leopold Andrians “Garten der Erkenntnis.” Literarisches Paradigma einer Identitätskrise in Wien um 1900, 1981. For further psychoanalytic interpretations regarding Young Vienna, see Scheible, Literarischer Jugendstil in Wien, 1984; Scherer, Richard Beer-Hofmann und die Wiener Moderne, 1993, pp. 354–358. 27 Klieneberger, “Hofmannsthal and Leopold Andrian,” 1985, 623. 28 “Clemens and Erwin had been overwhelmed by a disarming feeling of dull happiness. Love for oneself, love for each other, or love for everything what they have loved before or love for this Austrian Fatherland which provided for everything, and no escape from it was thinkable.” My translation. Andrian, Der Garten der Erkenntnis, 1990, pp. 26–27; own emphasis. 29 For political antisemitism in Austria, see Pulzer, Die Entstehung des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Österreich 1867 bis 1914, 2004.

148 GABRIELE DIETZE class which had perceived itself by then as one of the leading classes of the empire and the cultural elite of the nation. But after the stock exchange crash of 1873, the mayor used them as scapegoats. In doing so he took the attention of the lower classes away from socialist ideas and flirtation with revolution and redirected their energy into hustling supposedly Jewish ventures and financial market capitalists.30

Archaic Orientalism

Although the homoerotism of the Clemens story is the center of energy in An- drian’s novel, the descriptions of Clemens remain short and vague. They frequently descend into impressionistic self-reflection and Erwin’s impressions of the city. The figuration of the friend as an “absent referent”31 is even more consistent in Richard Beer-Hofmann’s Der Tod Georgs (1900). While Paul, the narrator, dreams two big dreams (and narrates them), his friend Georg suffers from a deadly heart attack the same night. In the process of the very flimsy plot without significant action, Paul brings the dead body by train to the funeral in Vienna. Georg himself does not appear in the narrative present. He is either a memory or starting point for extended considerations. A couple of sections refer to happy days as youngsters (Jünglingstagen), where Paul and Georg appear as “Lieblinge der Götter.”32 Paul remembers Georg, in the memories still alive, in a homoerotic key: “Dessen junges weiches Haar, dunkel über dem Antlitz wellte … dem noch sein eigenes Leben ge- hörte, schwellend in seinem Saft, wie ein junger Baum an Wasserbächen gepflanzt: fähig zu greifen, zu umklammern und zu zermalmen … ein wundervolles Werk zeug, s ein Wo llen erfüllend.”33 In the architecture of the narrative, Georg’s death has the function of a catharsis for the protagonist wanting “irgendetwas, was er wirr und häßlich empfand, von seinem Wesen abzusondern.”34 After a period of mourning Georg’s death (Trauerarbeit), Paul felt “New life” (Neues Leben): “Leuchtend wie im Märchen, im Morgenlicht, die große ersehnte Stadt erstrahlt, zu der man durch Wunder und Gefahren gewandert ist.”35

30 See Häusler, “Toleranz, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Das österreichische Judentum des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (1782–1918),” 1988; Scheible, Literarischer Jugendstil in Wien, 1984, p. 23. 31 Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler, 2009, p. 88. 32 “Darling of the Gods.” My translation. Beer-Hofmann, Der Tod Georgs, 1900, p. 165. 33 “His young smooth hair waved around his visage … [He is the one] who owned his own existence, who swelled in his lifeblood, just like a young tree, planted along brooks: capable to seize, to clutch, and to crush down. A wonderful tool, fulfilling his will.” My translation. Ibid., p. 188. 34 “He wanted to disassociate himself from anything which appeared to him as mazy and ugly.” My translation. Ibid., p. 175. 35 “One has to wander through miracle and dangers to reach the great desired city, radiating like a fairy tale in morning light.” My translation. Ibid., p. 202.

AFFECTIVE MASCULINITY 149

The image of the radiant city — alluding to Jerusalem — introduces the surprising finale of the novel: an emphatic move of former agnostic Paul to Judaism. If you look closer at this religious turn, it does not really emphasize God or transcendence. It is more the exploration of some new/old “blood ties” with Jewish people from the olden days. These imaginary ties replace the painful loneliness of the modern individualist Paul with a connectedness to a mental heritage.36 Concerning this figuration, I refer to the term “Archaic Orientalism” introduced above. Paul explains that Judaism, which he never names as such, has developed from primitive shep- herds’ religion37 and was strengthened by the hate targeted at Jewish people. Paul celebrates his re-conversion as follows: “Ein Wort nur hatte sich herabgesenkt, aller Glanz ging von einem aus: Gerechtigkeit.”38 The re-conversion of the hero has to be doubtless read from the background of the above mentioned omnipresent antisemitism of the time. It is a reaction to the suffering that, despite perfect assimilation, nothing leads to the recognition in society, even so one occupies upper class bourgeois status, as somebody “same.”39 Nonetheless, Beer-Hofmann’s archaic Jew- ish orientalism was criticized by his peer group. Hugo von Hofmannsthal even called Beer-Hofmann’s work “chauvinistisch” and “nationalstolz.”40 The German-Jewish Author Jakob Wassermann was not in danger to return to archaic Judaism, but he supported as well a romantic perception of ancient oriental Jewry in his novel Alexander in Babylon (1905). In this work — being an epitome of orientalism of the pre-Christian period –a passage appears that refers to a story from the Old Testament about Daniel in the Lion’s Den.41 Hebrews working as slaves in Babylonian Captivity asked Alexander the Great for the permission not to work on the Sabbath, in order to serve their God. After their plea was denied, Daniel approached the Macedonian and “spie zum Entsetzen aller Zuschauer verächtlich auf den Schemel vor dem Thron. Er riß sein Gewand vom Leib und verfluchte Alexander und sein Geschlecht.”42 Wassermann staged this unique act of

36 Beer-Hofmann, Der Tod Georgs, 1900, p. 206. With the chapter heading “How a Modernist became a Jew” the literary scholar Abigail Gillman shows how irritated other protagonists of that time like Arthur Schnitzler were by this return to the simple and true belief: Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler, 2009, p. 80. 37 Beer-Hofmann, Der Tod Georgs, 1900, p. 216. 38 “Only one word has descended. All brightness was coming from only this one word: justice.” My translation. Ibid., p. 204. 39 The gender theorist Judith Lefkovitz compares such a futile struggle for unchallenged and therefore invisible membership in dominant society with the process of Passing into White- ness, where African American people with fair skin color, tried to drop the stigma of their ‘race.’ Correctly, she calls the efforts of Jewish men to do the same “Passing into Privilege.” Lefkovitz, “Passing as a Man. Narratives of Jewish Gender-Performances,” 2002, 98. 40 Cited in Rieckmann, “(Anti-)Semitism and Homoeroticism: Hofmannsthal’s Reading of Bahr’s Novel Die Rotte Kohras,” 1993, 213. 41 The biblical history is located in Daniel 6: 1–29. 42 “To the great horror of onlookers he spit on the footstool before the throne. He teared his clothes off and cursed Alexander and his dynasty.” My translation. Wassermann, Alexander in Babylon, 1986, p. 145.

150 GABRIELE DIETZE insurgency by a “primitive” slave populace in contrast to an oriental despotism where everybody is subjected to the charismatic power of the king.

Dionysian Orientalism

Young Vienna authors, returning to legends of archaic nomadic origins of the people of Israel, were doing so at the same time the Zionist movement was gaining influence. So one could imagine that they supported Zionism, but this was not the case at all. Most of the Young Vienna circle feared that this dream of settler colonialism could be used as a pretext to deport Jews against their will to their alleged homeland of choice. They also viewed the idea of a nation-state, as Herzl’s Judenstaat (1896) suggested, as an old-fashioned and dangerous political concept. Jacob Wassermann speaks of the “Nationalitätenwahnsinn” (“madness of nationalism”). He fears that one more jealous and troublesome nation-state will threaten world peace even more than is already the case with the trigger-happy empires of Old Europe.43 So Wassermann’s primitive orientalism does not celebrate a geographical understanding of homecoming to the Promised Land, but propagates archaic Judaism as a possible role model for democracy via Jewish traditions that are critical of inappropriate authority.44 In contrast to the tiny but impressive passages on “Fighting Jews,”45 Wasser- mann creates for the most part of his Alexander novel elements of charismatic power in oriental costume. He describes the decline of the Macedonian imperator Alexander the Great in the walls of Babylon. Celebrating festivities and orgies until total exhaustion, and desperately mourning the loss of his friend and lover Hephaistion, he meets his fate. Wasserman reconstructs the first meeting with Hephaistion from the point of view of Alexander, who was shaken from the first brotherly kiss and fell into an “ocean of love.”46 Hephaistion would be the one to announce the death of Alexander’s father and thereby give the departure signal for his king’s gigantic war of conquest which led him as far as India: “da kam Hephaistion, in der Hand das nackte Schwert, das Gesicht entflammt von großar- tiger Begierde … und warf sich vor Alexander nieder und gab ihm das Schwert und schwor, er wolle vergessen, dass sie Freunde gewesen, damit Alexander umso mehr sein Herr sein könne.”47

43 Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, 1921, p. 189. 44 Volker Ebersbach does draw the connection to democracy in his epilogue of the Alexander novel: Ebersbach, “Hybris, der Alexander-Roman Jakob Wassermanns,” 1986, p. 197. 45 Geller, “The Godfather of Psychoanalysis: Circumcision, Antisemitism, Homosexuality, and Freud’s ‘Fighting Jew’,” 1999. 46 “Haphaiston appeared, his sword unsheathed, his face radiating with grandiose desire … [he] prostrated before Alexander, submitted the sword, and conjured that he would forget that the two of them have ever been friends in order to make it easier to Alexander to become his master.” My translation. Wassermann, Alexander in Babylon, 1986, p. 18. 47 Ibid., p. 19.

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The homoerotic bond of friendship with Hephaistion becomes then the founding moment of a world-historical departure. Wassermann does not shy away from reveling into the pansexual festive atmosphere of his Babylonian scenarios. Jan Cölln contextualized this process as “Dionysian reanimation of Greek antiquity via orientalization.”48 Under the influence of Nietzsche and Bachofen, Cölln states, the orientalism turned Dionysian has condensed into a paradigm for the departure into modernism. Following Brunotte, in Oxford, it was Walter Pater who connected an explicitly Dionysian aestheticism with a homoerotic revival in which the young Oscar Wilde participated as a student. She wrote: “Der Pater’sche Dio- nysos … fungiert als Medium einer homoerotisch-ästhetisierten Antike und als Symbol einer exklusiven homosozialen Welt.”49 Jan Cölln sees the combination of modern aesthetics and Dionysian revival especially fulfilled in the literature and culture in Vienna around 1900. Consequently, Dionysian references concerning Babylon can be found in all texts discussed here on central positions. Originally, Leopold von Andrian wanted to call his novel “Fest des Lebens” (“Celebration of Life”). His hero Erwin fantasizes about and dreams of “die großen Feste der maßlosen Freude, die heilig ist wie der Schmerz, … die Feste Alexander des Großen zu Persepolis und zu Babylon.”50 Richard Beer-Hofmann stages in Der Tod Georgs in the so-called “temple-dream” the definitely most opulent old-oriental dream — the text spreads over 25 pages. The hero Paul reconstructs in this dream the building of a temple through slave work, and then he dwells in the magnificent interior of the edifice. Afterwards, the dreamer dives into an orgiastic feast honoring the goddess Astarte. The priests tending the ritual are described as androgynous beings with “pfirsichfarbenem Flaum der Frauenhüften und den hart sich ballenden Muskeln der Männer.”51 This description echoes his friend Georg’s temples, where likewise appears a “leichte[r] helle[r] Flaum wie auf Früchten, die in der Sonne gereift.”52 The temple dream then dissolves in an orgy, “eine heiße Flut von liebeszitterndem Fleisch.”53 The dreaming Paul does not realize: “dass unter seinen Küssen halbgeöffnete Lip- pen langsam erkalteten und — nicht Wollust — gebrochene Augen starr nach oben

48 Cölln, “Alexander als Orientale. Zur Konstruktion eines Kulturtypus für die Moderne in Jakob Wassermanns ‘Alexander in Babylon’ (1905),” 2004, 212. 49 “The Dionysos of Walter Pater … functioned as medium for homoeroticized antiquity and as symbol of an exclusively homosocial world.” My translation. Ulrike Brunotte, Dämonen des Wissens.Gender, Performativität und materielle Kultur im Werk Jane Ellen Harrison, 2013, p. 188. 50 “… the great celebrations of orgiastic elation, which is holy like pain, the celebrations of Alexander the Great in Persepolis and Babylon.” My translation. Andrian, Der Garten der Erkenntnis, 1990, p. 41. 51 “… peach colored fluff of women’s hips and the strongly clenched muscles of the men.” My translation. Beer-Hofmann, Der Tod Georgs, 1900, p. 49. 52 “… easy light fluff, like the one covering fruits which ripened in the sun.” My Translation. Ibid., p. 218. 53 “… a hot flood of flesh trembling in love.” My translation. Ibid., p. 57.

152 GABRIELE DIETZE sahen.”54 The narrated dream parallelizes the present time of the narration. While Paul was dreaming, Georg died. So the pansexual Dionysian orientalism is connected to the “real” history of an unfulfilled desire that ends with the death of Georg.

Mixtures and Fusions

Beer-Hofmann’s Georg-Roman supports in an ideal way the thesis I want to con- vey. A young assimilated Jew, involved in an internal fight concerning the truth of his feelings, is passionately connected with a Gentile, Georg. That Georg was not Jewish one can conclude from the fact that he was able to attain a fast and unim- peded career, becoming a professor in the German university system.55 These kinds of careers were normally closed for Jews or only possible in lengthy processes of overcoming all kinds of antisemitically motivated obstacles. The homoerotic dimension of the relationship with Georg, fantasized in the temple dream, stands in for the desire to connect wholeheartedly and on a bodily level with dominant society. The desire for Georg — and therefore also Georg himself — has to die, in order to emancipate the narrator from the unsatisfiable wish for total assimilation, and to make room for his reconversion to Judaism. The here-developed patterns of Archaic and Dionysian orientalisms in some works of Young Vienna can be understood as relaying negotiating tensions. Ar- chaic orientalism, broaching the issue of archaic Judaism, stands in for the desire of belonging to a group with which one is connected “naturally.” Dionysian orientalism, on the other hand, deals with the wish to immerse into the pomp and gran- diosity of self-celebration and get lost in the refinement of artistic exuberance. The latter corresponds indeed with key terms Young Vienna is indexed with alternately: decadence, art nouveau, aestheticism, impressionism or symbolism. All labels evidence an art that has arrived at the top or at the end point of its refining capacities and thus represents the grandest and best of its culture. But what is a claim of cultural elitism in fact worth, if the affiliation to the true elite of the nation is disputed? What does an avant-garde do which might not command any rank and file? Here comes homoerotism into play as an affective pattern with performative and bodily aspects. The desire to link the delicate and threatened relation between nation and Jewish cultural elite translates into male bonding with gentile friends. This love being unrequited reflects in essence the failed, i.e. not rewarded, assimilation. The driving forces of the novels are not so much non-heteronormative desires but the proudly hidden wooing for the love of the non-Jewish Austria, the Fatherland.

54 “… that beyond his kisses half-parted lips slowly cooled down. It was not lust why half- broken eyes looked up fixedly.” My translation. Ibid., p. 58 55 Robertson, “‘Urheimat Asien’. The Re-Orientation of German and Austrian Jews 1920- 1925,” 1996, 186.

AFFECTIVE MASCULINITY 153

The queer reading promised in the title of the chapter is fed by two sources. The first is the queerness of the material itself. The heavily embroidered Jugendstil narrative — here represented by Andrian and Beer-Hofmann — will be coined as queer aesthetic in Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” (1964), some generations later. The second source for a queer reading taps into the homoerotism even so homosexuality is pushed off-center. If one uses queer theory as a methodology focusing on structures where binaries of gender (and “race”) dissolve,56 the homoerotism of Young Vienna gains an explanatory force. It stands in for the desire of amalgamation for leveling out difference with the gentile world. This desire engenders consequences for masculinity. Because these novels are devoid of any significant female figure, the masculinity of the protagonists is not constructed via the common gendered binaries of rational versus emotional and hard versus soft. It is now the Gentile who inhabits the rational hard part, and the Jewish is left with the affect, with Fe- male Masculinity as Judith Halberstam would have it,57 or with affective masculinity, as I prefer to say.

Works Cited

Andrian, Leopold. Der Garten der Erkenntnis (1895). Zürich: Manesse, 1990. Beer-Hofmann, Richard. Der Tod Georgs. Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1900. Berman, Nina. Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900. Berlin: M & P, Verlag für Wiss. und Forschung, 1997. Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Brunotte, Ulrike. Zwischen Eros und Krieg. Männerbund und Ritual in der Moderne. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2004. Brunotte, Ulrike and Rainer Herrn. “Statt einer Einleitung. Männlichkeiten und Moderne–Pathosformeln, Wissenskulturen, Diskurse.” In Männlichkeiten und Moderne. Geschlecht und Wissenskulturen um 1900, ed. Ulrike Brunotte and Rainer Herrn. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, pp. 9–23. Brunotte, Ulrike. Dämonen des Wissens. Gender, Performativität und materielle Kultur im Werk von Jane Ellen Harrison. Würzburg: Ergon, 2013. Brunotte, Ulrike, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler. Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, Vol. 23. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. Bruns, Claudia. Politik des Eros. Der Männerbund in Wissenschaft, Politik und Jugend- kultur 1881-1934. Wien: Böhlau, 2008.

56 For queer as methodology, see Michaelis, Dietze and Haschemi Yekani, “The Queerness of Things not Queer,” 2012. 57 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 1998.

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Bublitz, Hannelore (ed.). Das Geschlecht der Moderne. Genealogie und Archäologie der Geschlechterdifferenz. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1998. Clough, Patricia (ed.). The Affective Turn. Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 2007. Cölln, Jan. “Alexander als Orientale. Zur Konstruktion eines Kulturtypus für die Moderne in Jakob Wassermanns ‘Alexander in Babylon’ (1905).” Literaturwissen- schaftliches Jahrbuch 45 (2004): 199–214. Dietze, Gabriele. “‘Okzidentalismuskritik’. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer For- schungsperspektivierung.” In Kritik des Okzidentalismus. Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)Orientalismus und Geschlecht, ed. Gabriele Dietze, Claudia Brunner, and Edith Wenzel. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009, pp. 23–55. Ebersbach, Volker. “Hybris, der Alexanderroman Jakob Wassermanns.” In Alexan- der in Babylon, ed. Jakob Wassermann. Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1986, pp. 192– 204. Geller, Jay. “The Godfather of Psychoanalysis: Circumcision, Antisemitism, Ho- mosexuality, and Freud’s “Fighting Jew”.” Journal of the American Academy of Re- ligion (1999): 355–385. Gillman, Abigail. Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler. University Park: Penn State Press, 2009. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Häusler, Wolfgang. “Toleranz, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Das österrei- chische Judentum des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (1782–1918).” In Das österreichische Judentum. Voraussetzung und Geschichte, ed. Anna Drabek. Wien: Neue Gesell- schaft, 1988, pp. 83–140. Hess, Jonathan M. “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary. Orien- talism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Ger- many.” Jewish Social Studies 6.2 (2000): 56–101. Kalmar, Ivan D. and Derek J. Penslar. “Orientalism and the Jews. Introduction.” In Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2005. Klieneberger, Hans R. “Hofmannsthal and Leopold Andrian.” The Modern Lan- guage Review 80.3 (1985): 619–636. Kuh, Anton. Juden und Deutsche. Ein Resumé. Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, 1921. Le Rider, Jacques. Das Ende der Illusion. Die Wiener Moderne und die Krisen der Identi- tät. Wien: ÖBV, 1990. Lefkovitz, Lori H. “Passing as a Man. Narratives of Jewish Gender-Performances.” Narrative 10.1 (2002): 91–103. Marchand, Suzanne. “German Orientalism and the Decline of the West.” Proceed- ings of the American Philosophical Society 145.4 (2001): 465–473. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. “Fin de Siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 1 (1984): 96–139.

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Michaelis, Beatrice, Gabriele Dietze, and Elahe Haschemi Yekani. “The Queerness of Things not Queer. Entgrenzungen - Affekte und Materialitäten - Interven- tionen.” feministische studien 30.2 (2012): 184–197. Pasto, James. “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer’: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jew- ish Question.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.3 (1998): 437–474. Polaschegg, Andrea. Der andere Orientalismus: Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagi- nation im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. Pulzer, Peter G. J. Die Entstehung des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Ös- terreich 1867 bis 1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Reddy, William F. “Emotional Liberty. Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions.” Cultural Anthropology 14 (1999): 256–288. Reddy, William F. The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Renner, Ursula. Leopold Andrians “Garten der Erkenntnis”. Literarisches Paradigma einer Identitätskrise in Wien um 1900. Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1981. Rieckmann, Jens. “(Anti-)Semitism and Homoeroticism: Hofmannsthal’s Reading of Bahr’s Novel ‘Die Rotte Kohras’.” German Quarterly (1993): 212–221. Robertson, Ritchie. “‘Urheimat Asien’. The Re-Orientation of German and Aus- trian Jews 1920-1925.” German Life and Letters 49.2 (1996): 182–192. Rohde, Achim. “Der Innere Orient. Orientalismus, Antisemitismus und Ge- schlecht im Deutschland des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts.” Die Welt des Islams 45.3 (2005): 370–411. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Rosenwein, Barbara H. “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions.” Pas- sions in Context 1.1 (2010): 1–32. Scheible, Hartmut. Literarischer Jugendstil in Wien. München: Artemis, 1984. Scherer, Stefan. Richard Beer-Hofmann und die Wiener Moderne, Vol. 6. Berlin: Wal- ter de Gruyter, 1993. Sedgwick, Eve K. Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. von Hofmannsthal, Hugo and Leopold von Andrian. Briefwechsel: Hugo von Hof- mannsthal [und] Leopold von Andrian. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1968. Wagner, Nike. Geist und Geschlecht. Karl Kraus und die Erotik der Wiener Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. Wassermann, Jakob. Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1921. Wassermann, Jakob. Alexander in Babylon. Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1905/1986. Wolfenstein, Alfred. “Das neue Dichtertum der Juden.” In Juden in der deutschen Li- teratur, ed. Gustav Krojanker. Berlin: Welt Verlag, 1922, pp. 333–359. Zweig, Stefan. “Das neue Pathos.” Das literarische Echo 11 (1909): 1701–1709.

Nature and Anti-Nature: Constellations of Antisemitism and Sexism*

Karin Stögner

Introduction

Analyzing the relation of antisemitism and sexism, particularly after Auschwitz, necessitates a sensitive and thoughtful approach in order to avoid any simplistic equation. It is not about comparing antisemitism and sexism with regard to how Jews and women are suffering. Rather it is about closely examining the relationship of antisemitism and sexism as ideologies on the structural, functional and motivational level. Given that antisemitism and sexism have nothing to do with how Jews and women actually are, the guiding question is: What are the characteristics of “Jewishness” and “femininity” as drawn in antisemitism and sexism?1 And can we depict similarities between them that might deepen our understanding of their structures, functions and motivations? It is my aim to analyze antisemitism and sexism as distinguished ideologies, which — in praxis and discourse — intermingle in contradictory but effective ways. We encounter sexism and antisemitism in the form of ideologies, hardened discursive strategies, ingrained stereotypes, and deeply rooted habitual patterns — as reified social facts. The constructions of Jew and woman connected to these ideologies occur disguised as eternity, therefore as quasi-ontological constants and anthropological givens — in antisemitism and sexism Jews and women are “by nature” different. Thus, when analyzing the interrelatedness of antisemitism and sexism, it is not least about critically permeating this particular construct of nature. By means of this analysis it is possible to advance to the core of both antisemitism and sexism, to a constellation of nature, anti-nature, mastery of nature and revolt of nature where, this is my assumption, both ideologies are closely related in functional, structural and motivational terms. Finding out how antisemitism and sexism are related to each other also implies an understanding of their particular specificities. Similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities, equally contribute to the broader ideological system of which antisemitism and sexism,

* This chapter is based on my recently published book Antisemitismus und Sexismus. His- torisch-gesellschaftliche Konstellationen, 2014. I should like to thank Ulrike Brunotte, Christine Achinger and Robert Fine for most helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. All remaining errors are of course my own responsibility. 1 By sexism we understand not only attitudes and practices directed against women qua gender, but broadly a socially institutionalized derogation of and defensiveness against the whole range of what is stigmatized as female or feminine. Thus, sexism targets not only women but also groups and individuals deemed effeminate in one or another way.

158 KARIN STÖGNER but also racism, nationalism, anti-gypsyism, homophobia and class resentment, are part. Adorno called this broader ideological framework the “anti-democratic ideological syndrome.”2 By centrally referring to Critical Theory, particularly to the ideas brought forward by these two theorists Dialectic of Enlightenment, I will elaborate on the contradictory moments of the image of nature that is manifest in antisemitism and sexism.

Nature–Anti-Nature

When we look at how Jews are represented in the imaginary archive of modernity, we observe that they are predominantly associated with urbanity and modernity; with intellectuality, cosmopolitanism and internationalism.3 Connected to this are the stereotypes of rootlessness, bloodlessness, of lacking authenticity and identity; in one word, Jews are viewed as unnatural. The antisemitic stereotype of the Jew says that this is someone without bonds and limits, be they national or natural (the two intermingle in ethnic nationalism), someone who crosses borders and is not clearly assignable in at least three ways: Jews are viewed as ambiguous with regard to social class position, with regard to gender and with regard to national belonging. In the nineteenth-century ideology of authenticity, however, these three components were distinctive moments of social inclusion and exclusion. Considered as alien to the nation4, Jews were also accused of disregarding the bourgeois gender regime and of promoting women’s emancipation5, which was seen as a violation of the natural order of things.6 Thus, in antisemitism the “Jew” is representative of anti-nature rather than of nature.7 In contrast to this, if we view the image of woman through the history of patriarchal societies, and particularly in bourgeois society, we observe a rather blunt identification of woman with nature. This is primarily due to her being reduced to the procreative function of child bearing and caring for the family members. But the identification of woman with nature is also ambivalent and can take on an openly derogatory (when identified with nature as filth) as well as a superficially worshipping stance (when identified with an idea of innocent and pure nature). The latter is

2 Adorno, Guilt and Defense, 2010. 3 On antisemitism and anti-cosmopolitanism, cf. Rensmann, “Against Globalism,” 2011; Fine, Cosmopolitanism, 2007. 4 Cf. Samuel Salzborn, “Antisemitismus und Nation,” 2010; Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 1978. 5 Cf. Volkov, “Antisemitism and Anti-Feminism,” 1993; Frevert, “Die Innenwelt der Außen- welt,” 1994. 6 Cf. Boyrin, Unheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, 1997. 7 Cf. Mayer, Außenseiter, 2001; Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 1986; Das Böse ist eine Frau, 1999; Günther, Der Feind hat viele Geschlechter, 2012; Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne, 2007; Gilman, Freud, race, and gender, 1993.

NATURE AND ANTI-NATURE 159 a manfestation of benevolent sexism8 and needs to be viewed against the background of a general devaluation of femininity and the contempt towards particular women associated with race, sexuality, corporeal deficiency, sickness and filth. So we have this first contrasted view of women being identified with nature on the one hand, and Jews being associated with anti-nature on the other hand. But this contrast, if seen as exclusive, is deceptive. A closer look at the ideological construct of nature and how it is represented in the antisemitic and sexist images elu- cidates a much more complex relation: nature and anti-nature are intermingled in both antisemitism and sexism. The reason for this is that nature itself, far from being a unitary construct, entails all the ambivalences ingrained in modern society. The contradiction that antisemitism associates Jews not only with anti-nature but also simultaneously with nature becomes evident in the discourses on Jewish sexuality and the widespread images of the Jewish body, including noses and the smell by which antisemites pretend to discern Jews immediately.9 However, the relationship between Jews and sexuality as drawn in antisemitism is again contradictory. The Jewish body, be it male or female, is mainly imagined as deficient in the sense of not corresponding to “normalcy.” Thus, the male Jew is viewed as hyper- sexual and impotent at the same time; on the one hand as extremely heterosexual (i.e. hyper-male) and on the other hand as effeminate and homosexual (i.e. not “male” at all). Jewish women are de-feminized (viewed as materialistic and hyper- intellectual) and at the same time viewed as hyper-fertile. The antisemitic imagery combines the extremes in one image also here, with reference to sexuality, and becomes so efficient not in spite of these manifold contradictions, but rather because of them: they allow the antisemites to act out their own ambivalence with regard to gender identity. This implies of course that Jews — in the antisemitic view — do not comply with what is thought to be ideal masculinity or femininity. Jews are said to cross the gender borders and to inhabit a sphere somewhere beyond the binary gender principle and serve as a foil against which völkisch/nationalistic gender ideals are drawn.10 The antisemitic image of the male Jew implies a lack of identity and male subject formation, a lack of stringent ego borders, thus an affinity to the non- identical.11 The indefinite position of the non-I/non-self, which is characterized by ambiguity, was not only ascribed to women, but also, though differently, to Jews. Connected to his fears of homosexuality, this purported lack in subjectivity was Otto Weininger’s point when he insisted that “the real Jew, like woman, has no ego and therefore lacks any intrinsic value.”12 Jewishness and femininity are both associated with the undifferentiated, diffluent manifold, i.e. with unrestrained nature.

8 Fiske and Norris, “Sexism and Heterosexism,” 2009. 9 Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 1991. 10 Cf. Mosse, Nationalism and sexuality, 1985. 11 Cf. Gilman, Freud, race and gender, 1993. 12 “Der echte Jude hat wie das Weib kein Ich und darum keinen Eigenwert,” Weininger, Ge- schlecht und Charakter, 1920, p. 418. Cf. Harrowitz/Hyams (eds.), Jews and Gender, 1995.

160 KARIN STÖGNER

Both are thus opposed to the definite unity and a restricted concept of the identical self — the very characteristic that in Western civilization differentiates human beings from nature. Identification with nature regularly implies dehumanization — individuals are treated like mere material in the face of total domination, with which one can operate ad libitum. This nature-like position of certain target groups coincides with the non-identical and with a lack of male subjectivity — all this degrades individuals to specimens; they are considered as objects rather than subjects: “When man is assured that he is nature and nothing but nature, he is at best pitied. Passive, like everything that is only nature, he is supposed to be an object of ‘treatment,’ finally a being dependent on more or less benevolent leadership.”13 Or, as Adorno put it in Minima Moralia: “Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation.”14 Under these circumstances, nature becomes ideology, split into two sides: on the one hand there is nature as omnipotence and strength — and with this aspect of nature the völkisch collective is identified; on the other hand there is nature as epitome of all that is detested, of filth and disgust that needs to be eradicated — an aspect of nature with which Jews (and other socially marginalized groups) are associated. While the völkisch collective represents nature in the shape of particular masculinity (associated with strength, purpose-directedness, coldness, audacity and boldness), all those who do not belong to the völkisch in-group are attributed what might be called “lower nature”. To be identified like this implies objectification and the eradication of subjectivity and individuality. Auschwitz is the epitome for this. The Nazis deported Jews in wagons like cat- tle, sheared them like sheep, and gassed them like parasites — the most extreme form of violently reducing human beings to nature as mere material. Certain forms of victim-perpetrator reversal that were taking place after 1945, e.g. the accusation that Jews let themselves be led to the slaughter like sheep, reproduce this identification of Jews with nature.15 But what is behind this identification of Jews with nature? Antisemitism primarily detests the bourgeois culture and the intellectuality as represented in the “Jewish elite”, i.e. a particular individuality and subjectivity that corresponds to abstract bourgeois rights and society in opposition to a concretist idea of the nation as an ethnic community. In Auschwitz, the bourgeois individual, the subject and his/her freedom is violently smashed. The Jews are violently reduced to mere nature not because they are nature, but rather because they are representatives of civilization — and this shall be knocked out of them. Again, referring to the image of femininity that civilization has produced, we detect ambiguities. Woman, like the Jew, is denied the identical self. In the bour-

13 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 1947, p. 170. 14 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 2005, p. 95. 15 Cf. Lustiger, Zum Kampf auf Leben und Tod, 1994.

NATURE AND ANTI-NATURE 161 geois society she is furthermore viewed as restricted to procreation, associated with caring rather than production. This makes her appear closer to nature, an ascrip- tion that serves as a basis of patriarchal gender regimes. But in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women’s emancipation movement challenged this gender regime. Women demanded equal rights and opportunities, and when they tried to liberate themselves from narrow family bonds, antifeminist and antisemitic protagonists constructed female emancipation as a Jewish conspiracy against the well-established gender order of the “Aryan nation”. The corresponding image of femininity was deemed unnatural, not complying with the purportedly natural female gender character, as lacking naturalness and authenticity.16 Eventually an image of anti-nature is drawn. Figures like the gunwoman during the First World War, radical women libbers, prostitutes, intellectual women who demanded access to universities, women taking part in revolutionary uprisings, etc., are just a few examples.17 In the view of antifeminists, they all lack a natural feeling of true wom- anhood, they are not natural, but artificial, unauthentic, intellectual, and exaggerated in putting the ruling order, the natural order of things into question, and crossing well established borders. Isn’t it interesting that the same characteristics: artificiality, unnaturalness, exaggeration, unauthentic character and lack of (natural) identity are ascribed to Jewishness and deviant femininity alike? Apparently, the extremes touch upon each other: nature and anti-nature amalgamate in one image. Of course we have both, Jewishness and deviant femininity, represented in the “modern Jewess.”18 In late-nineteenth-century art and literature, the figures of Ju- dith, Salome, Delilah, and Lulu become very prominent. It is the time when the “Beautiful Jewess” — a figure dominant already in conversion literature at the beginning of nineteenth century — becomes evermore ambiguous and thus incorpo- rates not only the beauty and allure but also the disgust and fear of deviant femininity.

Mastery of Nature

How are we to understand this entanglement of nature and anti-nature? Simply to analyze antisemitic and sexist images separately will not lead us to a substantial explanation. Rather we need to read these contradictory images as manifestations of a broader contradiction by which modern Western society itself is infused: the social antagonism that is veiled by ideologies like antisemitism and sexism. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno elaborate on the relationship between antisemitism and sexism, and thereby particularly refer to the socially prevailing concept of nature and to the dialectic of

16 Mayer, Außenseiter; Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity. 17 Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2001. 18 Cf. Brunotte, “All Jews are womanly, but no women are Jews.” 2015. p. 211.

162 KARIN STÖGNER mastery of nature. In a perhaps irritating bluntness, they state that women and Jews are hated for the same motives, namely for being regarded as weaker, for not having ruled for thousands of years, and, in connection to this, for the greater affinity to nature produced in them by perennial oppression: The explanation for the hatred of woman as the weaker in mental and physical power, who bears the mark of domination on her brow, is the same as for the hatred of the Jews. Women and Jews show visible evidence of not having ruled for thousands of years. They live, although they could be eliminated, and their fear and weakness, the greater affinity to nature produced in them by perennial oppression, is the element in which they live. In the strong, who pay for their strength with their strained remoteness from nature and must forever forbid themselves fear, this incites blind fury. They identify themselves with nature by calling forth from their victims, multiplied a thousandfold, the cry they may not utter themselves.19 So how do we have to understand this purported affinity to nature that is a common feature of the images of women and Jews, and, furthermore, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, a motive for the hatred they are subjected to? Apparently, we need to start with the particular concept of nature that serves as background for Horkheimer and Adorno’s social critique. In critical theory, the concept of nature is not unitary and does not recur onto an imagination of “primal nature.” What nature is and what is deemed natural is rather elaborated with regard to its meaning for and within society.20 Nature is not conceptualized as pre- social, but as deeply entangled in the social and historical dialectics of progress and regression, enlightenment and myth, of domination and freedom. Nature cannot be viewed independent from its mastery in the historical development of human labor. Rather, nature and its mastery are intrinsically and dialectically entangled. We cannot say what primal nature is, since the simple act of naming already turns the allegedly natural into a cultural and social issue. In a society based on the mastery of nature, the idea of primal nature serves as an ideological device to disguise social relations as natural relations and thus protect them from change. For critical theorists, nature is a result of human relations, particularly of socially organized labor. Horkheimer and Adorno elucidate this relationship explicitly by reference to the prevailing gender regime and the image of woman as nature: “Woman as an allegedly natural being is a product of history, which dena- tures her.”21 This also gave rise to feminist critique: the two male authors would take the identification of woman and nature for granted and thus reiterate it.22 But in my view this critique misses the direction of the passage in question, where

19 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2002, p. 88. 20 Thus, Judith Butler’s prominent idea that not only gender but also sex is socially constructed, can be traced in nuce in Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory, although here nature as material basis of human development is not neglected. 21 Ibid., p. 87. 22 Cf., e.g., Becker-Schmidt, “Identitätslogik und Gewalt,” 1989; Kulke, “Die Kritik der instrumentellen Rationalität — ein männlicher Mythos,” 1989.

NATURE AND ANTI-NATURE 163 the identification is explicitly named a product of history, i.e. a result of domination as human praxis. For Horkheimer and Adorno, it is the sign of a distorted relationship to nature that is the very basis of civilization in its dominating form, and not a sign of “female nature.” The image of woman as nature is deeply rooted in this order and bears a legitimizing function. Nature is bound to the way labor is socially organized, and the organization of labor is explicitly gendered: The division of labor imposed on her by the man was unfavorable. She became an em- bodiment of biological function, an image of nature, in the suppression of which this civilization’s claim to glory lay. To dominate nature boundlessly, to turn the cosmos into an endless hunting ground, has been the dream of millennia. It shaped the idea of man in a male society.23 Thus, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the gender-specific division of labor that re- stricts women to the sphere of reproduction is the reason for her being identified with nature. Correspondingly, reproduction and care-work are socially not acknowledged as productive work, i.e. it is not paid, not based on a contract, and for this reason it does not serve as the basis of subjectivity. Women are thus denied “the self — the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings.”24 The female character is not a natural thing, and the male character is not restricted to men. As soon as women are admitted to the production sphere, they take on the same characteristics: “In the form of skilled work the autonomy of the entre- preneur, which is over, is spreading to all those admitted as producers, including the ‘working’ woman, and is becoming their character. Their self-respect grows in proportion to their fungibility.”25 Thus, Horkheimer and Adorno analyze a historical process of femininity being identified with and reduced to nature. The social organization of labor, labor division, has vital consequences for the shape of human beings’ inner nature, i.e. their instincts. Herbert Marcuse for instance applies a social and political reading of Freudian psychoanalysis in order to analyze the relationship between nature, society and individual. He depicts domination as threefold, based on the repressive transformation of the instincts as the basis of civilization: “[F]irst, domination over one’s self, over one’s own nature, over the sensual drives that want only pleasure and gratification; second, domination over the labor achieved by such disciplined and controlled individuals; and third, domination of outward nature, science and technology.”26 And this threefold mastery of nature is simultaneously precondition of a threefold freedom: [F]irst, freedom from the mere necessity of satisfying one’s drives, that is, freedom for renunciation and thus for socially acceptable pleasure — moral freedom; second, freedom from arbitrary violence and from the anarchy of the struggle for existence, social freedom characterized by the division of labor, with legal rights and duties — political

23 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 206. 24 Ibid., p. 26. 25 Ibid., p. 84. 26 Marcuse, “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of the Instincts,” 2007, p. 169.

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freedom; and third, freedom from the power of nature, that is, the mastery of nature, freedom to change the world through human reason — intellectual freedom.27 This dialectical relationship between domination and freedom is intrinsic to any civilization and culture hitherto. It entails the transformation of the human organism “from a subject-object of pleasure into a subject-object of work. This is the social content of the overcoming of the pleasure principle through the reality principle.”28 Thus, socially organized work — in Marxian terms the active involvement with nature — is the medium through which sociation, i.e. the process of integration of individual and society, takes place. And this process is intrinsically gendered. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory, the unequal gender relations that we know in modern society are a result of gender-specific division of labor. This division also resulted in productivist ideology viewing reproductive work as non-productive. Civilization has replaced the mimetic impulse through labor, but life under the conditions of threefold domination (over outer nature, inner nature, and the labor of others) can never completely control this impulse.29 The self is forced to quell the manifold demands of inner nature that could distract from the linear path of instrumental progress; and it does so by constructing systematic unity that repres- sively integrates the manifold, thereby cutting its particular specificity and blinding out the possibilities of an alternative reality principle that would be more reconciled with the demands of the instincts, i.e. reduce the hardship and admit the individuals’ wishes and desires. But since this is not sufficiently the case, since the needs and desires of the individuals constantly suffer from denigration in the labor process, the self is reduced more and more until it resembles nature as the mere material to be mastered and exchanged. Due to over-consequent mastery of nature, the product of this mastery, namely the autonomous self, vanishes again in undifferentiated nature: As the end result of the process, we have on the one hand the self, the abstract ego emp- tied of all substance except its attempt to transform everything in heaven and on earth into means for its preservation, and on the other hand an empty nature degraded to mere material, mere stuff to be dominated, without any other purpose than that of its very domination.30

Revolt of Nature

Certainly, labor as active involvement with nature is a precondition for civilization and cultural development. And according to Freud, civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts.31 But, and this point is a pre-

27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 164. 29 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 151. 30 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 1947, p. 97. 31 Freud, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur”; “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” both 1999.

NATURE AND ANTI-NATURE 165 requisite for understanding the dialectic of mastery of nature, if labor is organized under the alienating conditions of the capitalist performance principle, the mimetic impulse is neither reconciled nor pacified. It re-emerges as the “mimesis of death”32 — individuals experience themselves as the dead and interchangeable things into which nature has been transformed. Efficiency criteria seize the whole personality: “The self … learned about order and subordination through the subjugation of the world,” wrote Horkheimer and Adorno.33 The subject encounters nature, also inner nature, only under the aspect of its manipulation and mastery. Since they are entangled in the very domination to which they subject nature, the individuals themselves take on the characteristics of mere nature: they are subjected to a mode of production that leads to various alienations: alienation from the product of their work as well as alienation from their wishes and desires, from their longing for happiness, eventually, alienation from the idea that it could be different, i.e. from the possibilities for real change that this society produces and blocks at the same time. It is all about banning the desire to fall back in an imagined state of nature associated with giving in to immediate desires. But this desire, the mimetic impulse, gains strength with the intensity to which the drives are suppressed, at times when due to technical innovations society would be able to reduce the load of hardship on each individual. This dialectic, that through the ever more consequent domination at times when it could actually be reduced, man himself increasingly resembles nature as dead and interchangeable material, is decisive for understanding discriminatory practices on the ground of ethnicity and gender — they serve as an outlet. In antisemitism and sexism, Jews and women serve as a projection screen for desires and fears the individuals are forced to suppress. In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer calls this complex phenomenon “The Revolt of Nature.”34 Even though sexism and antisemitism are not new in history, they are likely to take on a particular vehemence and destructiveness at times when domination could actually be reduced — this is one of the major theses in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical theory of society. Individuals develop idiosyncratic loathing against what they have learned to suppress — their wishes, drives and desires. Still they feel secretly attracted to whatever represents these suppressed desires and un- consciously associate it with happiness. Nature that has gone through the logic of civilization entails contradictory meaning: on the one hand, it is reduced to mere material and to the dead form — and this corresponds to the shape the individuals as interchangeable social atoms have eventually taken on. But on the other hand, nature, or rather the idea of nature, contains a secret Promesse de Bonheur and is likely to take on the appearance of powerless happiness.35 And this Promesse de

32 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 44. 33 Ibid., p. 10. 34 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, pp. 92–127. 35 Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 141.

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Bonheur may negatively be projected onto particular figures and groups who stand outside the inner circles of the national and productivist in-group: Jews, and women (along with other visible groups like the gypsies) have traditionally served this function. In the view of those who constantly suppress their wishes, they seem to be spared from the burdens of civilization, i.e. they are suspected not to work but live at the expense of others. The assumption that they would not work or produce is of course an evil projection. The real characteristic, though, which these groups do share, is, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, that for centuries they have not ruled: “Women and Jews show visible evidence of not having ruled for thousands of years.”36 Connected to their non-ruling position and the corresponding identification with nature is that they were forcefully kept away from the source of surplus value, i.e. they were not allowed to possess the capitalist means of production, and before capitalism, in European feudalism, they were denied access to the property of land.37 They were situated outside the immediate production sphere: Jews in the sphere of circulation, women in the sphere of reproduction — the work of both is not acknowledged as productive. Those who do not produce, says the ideology that veils domination in production, do not cultivate male subjectivity, “the self — the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings.”38 In Hork- heimer’s theory, subjectivity is consequently perceived as a characteristic of the rulers and is therefore denied to Jews and women.39 Nature is situated at the opposite of this form of male subjectivity. To be denied subjectivity and identified with nature is one process that simultaneously implies a certain image of femininity as the counter-image of masculinity in an exclusively binary system. It is thus hardly surprising that in antisemitism Jews are viewed as effeminate.40 In antisemitism and sexism, race, gender and nature are part of one constellation. Like “race,” also gender is not “an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal.”41 Thus, particular individuals or groups are viewed as standing closer to nature not because of “natural” characteristics but because they are objects of perennial domination. Nature itself, “wholly encompassed by male logic,” is the “substrate of never-ending subsumption on the plane of ideas and of never-ending subjection in that of reality.”42

36 Ibid., p. 88. 37 Cf. Claussen, Grenzen der Aufklärung, 1994, pp. 51–84. 38 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 26. 39 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 105ff. 40 Cf. A.G. Gender-Killer (ed.), Von effeminierten Juden und maskulinisierten Jüdinnen, 2005. 41 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 138. 42 Ibid., p. 86.

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Conclusion

The image of the Jew as nature and anti-nature serves a particular function in modern society: it is a defense of nature that needs to be suppressed and of civilization that is in itself contradictory and thus not wholly integrated into the personality. The amalgamation of nature and anti-nature in one image is therefore a sign of what Freud called the discomfort not only with but in culture.43 While the identification of Jews with nature takes place in a very contradictory and ambiguous way, this is different with regard to women. While the female gender norm is constructed rather unambiguously as representing nature, the images of deviant femininity, however, are characterized by the amalgamation of nature and anti- nature. Jewish femininity, in fact, is always and entirely viewed as deviant, while the “racially pure” woman is portrayed as the proper comrade of the “Aryan” man. In contrast to this, the antisemitic images are always ambiguous, they always amalgamate the opposites, and this is exactly why they are so effective. They re- volve around an idealized midway and combine anxieties concerning unrestrained nature as well as discomfort and loathing of civilization. Both belong to the distorted relationship to nature on the social as well as psychological level. Antisemitism’s answer to this objective relationship consists in a particular ideology of authenticity and instinctiveness44 which is located halfway between unrestrained nature and civilization. The image of Jewishness is construed in such a way that it would never correspond with authenticity and instinctiveness, and also not with the ideal of the center. In the antisemitic world-view, Jews are always regarded as exaggerated, unnatural, unauthentic, extreme, disturbing, disintegrating und unsettling: opaque nature and consequent civilization both merge in this image of the Jew. Women, in contrast, are viewed like this only in case they deviate from the norm. One motif of antisemitism is to overcome the extremes, and in doing so it asserts its own extremism.45 The “ideology of the center,”46 deeply rooted in the “anti-civilization, anti-Western undercurrent of the German tradition,”47 is one major background of the consistent ambiguity in antisemitic imagery: Jews are simultaneously associated with capitalism (in the first place finance capitalism) as well as with bolshevism and communism (which they would finance with the money gained from capitalist exploitation). Similarly, antisemitism combines nature and civilization (viewed as anti-nature) in the image of the Jew in order to fight off both.

43 Freud, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” 1999. 44 Cf. Le Rider, Das Ende der Illusion, 1990; Pulliero, Le désir d’authenticité, 2005. 45 Cf. Lenk, Rechts, wo die Mitte ist, 1994. 46 Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung, 1987, p. 161. 47 Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 2005, p. 97.

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So the image of the Jew does not directly imply nature, but rather lacking authenticity and instinctiveness due to an alleged superfluity of civilization perceived as decadent and declining. The notion of decadence and decline implies a relapse into the suppressed, loathed, feared and desired nature. Summing up, Horkheimer and Adorno depict an intrinsic structural and motivational relationship between antisemitism and sexism particularly with regard to the relationship of nature and society. They both fulfill a similar function in terms of system enhancement and maintenance of the status quo in times when domination (of nature, individuals, and society) could actually be reduced, were it not for upholding the status quo and thus the privilege of some against the right- ful demands of the majority. Through antisemitism and its amalgamation with sexist moments, the dissatisfaction and fury on the part of the non-privileged, or those who feel unprivileged, can be compensated, and the propaganda of the ruling classes, disguised as Volksgemeinschaft, regularly applies these ideologies in order to prevent the real qualitative change. Psychologically as well as politically, antisemitism and sexism are a manifestation of the revolt of nature that reinforces its very reasons: mastery of nature that turns everything, also human beings, into mere material to be operated with. The weird ambiguity in the perception of nature and civilization cannot be dissolved. It is exactly this contradictory shape — expression of an antagonistic society — that serves as one of the bases of modern antisemitism. Due to senseless mastery, nature is without substance and resembles an abstract field deprived of any meaning — and therefore it is an object of any ruling interest. Individuals do not sensually experience nature — neither the inner nor the outer — but operate it. It is thus abstract nature that is concretized in the images of the Jew and of woman. Ideologically, those who serve as representatives of nature are vilified as diverting from the linear path of progress that consists primarily in the organization of the human body as an instrument of alienated labor. That way, antisemitism and sexism show negatively and in a distorted manner that the reduction of domination is long overdue.

Works Cited

A.G. Gender-Killer (ed.). Antisemitismus und Geschlecht. Vom “maskulinisierten Jüdin- nen,” “effeminierten Juden” und anderen Geschlechterbildern. Münster: Unrast, 2005. Achinger, Christine. Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben. Nation, Ge- schlecht und Judenbild. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Adorno, Theodor W. Guilt and Defense: On the legacies of National Socialism in postwar Germany. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Jeffrey K. Olick and An- drew J. Perrin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia. Reflections from damaged life. London: Verso, 2005.

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Adorno, Theodor W. “The Meaning of Working Through the Past.” In Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 89–104. Becker-Schmidt, Regina. “Identitätslogik und Gewalt. Zum Verhältnis von Kriti- scher Theorie und Feminismus.” Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 24 (1989): 51–64. Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Brunotte, Ulrike. “’All Jews are womanly, but no women are Jews.’ The ‘Feminin- ity’ Game of Deception: Female Jew, femme fatale Orientale, and belle juive.” In Ori- entalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European Na- tional Discourses, ed. Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014, 195–220. Claussen, Detlev. Grenzen der Aufklärung. Die gesellschaftlichen Genese des modernen Antisemitismus. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1994. Dijkstra, Bram. Das Böse ist eine Frau. Männliche Gewaltphantasien und die Angst vor der weiblichen Sexualität. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Fine, Robert. Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge, 2007. Fiske, Susan and Alyssa L. Norris. “Sexim and Heterosexism.” In Handbook of Prejudice, ed. Anton Pelinka, Karin Bischof, and Karin Stögner. Amherst: Cam- bria Press, 2009, pp. 77–118. Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.” In Gesammelte Werke XIV. Frank- furt a. M.: Fischer, 1999, pp. 419–506. Freud, Sigmund. “Jenseits des Lustprinzips.” In Gesammelte Werke XIII. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999, pp. 1–69. Frevert, Ute. “Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt. Modernitätserfahrungen von Frauen zwischen Gleichheit und Differenz.” In Deutsche Juden und die Moderne, ed. Shu- lamit Volkov. Munich: Oldenburg Verlag, 1994, pp. 75–94. Gilman, Sander L. Freud, race, and gender. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Gilman, Sander L. The Jew’s Body. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Günther, Meike. Der Feind hat viele Geschlechter. Antisemitische Bilder von Körpern. In- tersektionalität und historisch-politische Bildung. Berlin: Metropol, 2012. Habermas, Jürgen. Eine Art Schadensabwicklung. Kleine Politische Schriften VI. Frank- furt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. Harrowitz, Nancy and Barbara Hyams (eds.). Jews and Gender. Responses to Otto Weininger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

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Kulke, Christine. “Die Kritik der instrumentellen Rationalität — ein männlicher Mythos.” In Die Aktualität der Dialektik der Aufklärung. Zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, ed. Harry Kunneman and Hent de Vries. Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus, 1989, pp. 128–149. Le Rider, Jacques. Das Ende der Illusion. Zur Kritik der Moderne. Wien: Österreichi- scher Bundesverlag, 1990. Lenk, Kurt. Rechts, wo die Mitte ist. Studien zur Ideologie: Rechtsextremismus, National- sozialismus, Konservatismus. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1994. Lustiger, Arno. Zum Kampf auf Leben und Tod. Das Buch vom Widerstand der Juden 1933–1945. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. A philosophical inquiry into Freud. London: Sphere Books, 1969. Marcuse, Herbert. “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of the Instincts.” In The Essential Marcuse. Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, ed. An- drew Feenberg and William Leiss. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007, pp. 159–183. Mayer, Hans. Außenseiter. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. Mosse, George. Nationalism and Sexuality. Middle-class morality and and sexual norms in modern Europe. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Pulliero, Marino. Le désir d’authenticité. Walter Benjamin et l’héritage de la Bildung al- lemande. Paris: Bayard, 2005. Rensmann, Lars. “‘Against Globalism’: Counter-Cosmopolitan Discontent and Antisemitism in Mobilizations of European Extreme Right Parties.” In Politics and Resentment. Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union, ed. Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011, pp. 117–146. Salzborn, Samuel. “Antisemitismus und Nation. Zur historischen Genese der so- zialwissenschaftlichen Theoriebildung.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissen- schaft 39.4 (2010): 393–407. Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin. “Konstellationen der zweiten Natur. Zur Ideengeschich- te und Aktualität der Dialektik der Aufklärung.” In Gesten aus Begriffen. Konstella- tionen der Kritischen Theorie. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1997, pp. 19–50. Stögner, Karin. Antisemitismus und Sexismus. Historisch-gesellschaftliche Konstellatio- nen. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014. Theweleit, Klaus. Männerphantasien 1+2, München: dtv, 2000. Volkov, Shulamit. “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23.1 (1978): 25–46. Volkov, Shulamit. “Antisemitism and Anti-Feminism: Cultural Code or Social Norm.” Zemanim. A Historical Quarterly 46/47 (1993): 134–143. Weininger, Otto. Geschlecht und Charakter. Wien: Braumüller, 1920.

Jews as Orientals and De-Orientalization

Between Exoticism and Antisemitism: Orientalization of Jews in Switzerland in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Christina Späti

If Germany played only a relatively marginal role among the colonial powers, this is even truer in the case of Switzerland. Recent research has shown, however, that Switzerland, too, has been involved in European colonialism, not only through the economic entanglement of Swiss merchants, but also in the production of a colonial knowledge, not least by Swiss scientists and missionaries. Thus, it is not surprising that Switzerland, along with other European countries, participated in the construction of an orientalist system of knowledge.1 One important aspect that until now has been researched poorly is the fact that several Zionist congresses took place in Swiss cities between 1897 and 1946 and played an important role in this orientalist discourse. For example, the notion of Zionists as the epitome of “Orientals” was often to be found in Swiss newspapers reporting on these events. This chapter will explore the ways in which such orientalist assumptions were linked to other topics in antisemitic discourse. Why was it the Zionists in particular who were described as “Orientals?” In what way was orientalist thinking linked to antisemitic discourse? And how did Swiss Jews react to this discourse of Orien- talization?

Orientalism and Jewish Arts and Sciences

As Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar have noted, the relationship between Jews and orientalism has many facets,2 from which just a few examples will be mentioned. Apart from their “orientalization” through their biblical “oriental” past in Chris- tian theology, one particular interest linking orientalism to Jews lies in their scholarly engagement in Oriental Studies, which was, as John M. Efron has pointed out, “often tantamount to a search for roots, for authenticity, and for oriental role models.”3 Scholars such as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz and Ignaz Goldziher are to be mentioned from among the prominent Jewish academics that were particularly interested in Islam. It being their goal to modernize Judaism by pointing

1 Polaschegg, “Der andere Orientalismus,” 2004. 2 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), “Orientalism and the Jews,” 2005. 3 Efron, “Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze,” 2005, p. 80.

174 CHRISTINA SPÄTI to links between Judaism and Islam, they did not so much take part in the regular German orientalist discourse, believing instead that “identifying Judaism with Is- lam was the tool to de-orientalize Judaism.”4 Medieval Islam and the Jewish golden age in medieval Spain played a particular role in these constructions, since it could be depicted as an ideal of dialogue and tolerance between civilizations and thus as a counterpart to Christian antisemitism and intolerance towards Jews at the end of the nineteenth century.5 It is not surprising, therefore, that works of these Jewish orientalists — unlike those of their Christian counterparts — were often quite sympathetic towards Islam, albeit that they were nevertheless “shaped by the very same Eurocentrist modernist premises that also characterized plain Saidian orientalism.”6 Another well-known example of a positive response to orientalist allegations towards Jews in the nineteenth century was the adoption of a so-called “Moorish style” in the construction of synagogues.7 If this style combined European structures — a façade with two towers, for example — with elements from various Is- lamic epochs,8 its effect was nevertheless that outsiders often perceived it as genuinely Islamic. When the synagogue in Zurich, built in the Moorish style, was opened in 1884, one journalist reported in the local newspaper that it was very similar to a mosque, and in particular, to mosques as they were built in Egypt.9 Further links between orientalism and Jews were expressed in art and literature. For example, as Kathrin Wittler has shown, the figure of the “Beautiful Jewess” in the European literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often bears traits that can be perceived as orientalizing and sometimes even as self-orientalization with biblical references, as is the case, for instance, of Fanny Lewald’s novel Jenny, written in 1843.10 Zionist Hebrew literature, in particular, took a great interest in orientalist trends, albeit for political reasons only until the end of the 1920s. The writers of the Hebrew Revival between 1900 and 1930 sought to construct a modern nationalism by internalizing the attraction to the East and “judaicizing” it, thus trying to attain a metamorphosis of negative Jewish images. As Yaron Peleg put it, “the great power that Hebrew literature offered during this initial period of nation-building was a longing not only to the East but also for an East.”11

4 Heschel, “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Tool for De-Orientalizing Judaism,” 2012, 107. 5 Simon-Nahum, Le mort saisi le vif, 2013, p. 56. 6 Rohde, “Asians in Europe,” 2014, pp. 29–30. 7 Kalmar, “Moorish Style,” 2001. 8 Künzl, Islamische Stilelemente im Synagogenbau des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, 1984. 9 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 10, 1884. 10 Wittler, “‘Good to Think’,” 2014. See also Ludewig, “Between Orientalization and Self- Orientalization,” 2014. 11 Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, 2005, p. 24.

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Orientalism and Antisemitism

While these links between Jews and orientalism were often fostered by Jews themselves — as a response to their orientalization by Christians and in order to construct a positive image of an “oriental Jew” — other orientalist links to Jews were used in a clearly antisemitic fashion. In Switzerland, these antisemitic allegations could take on a variety of connotations. They were part of an antisemitism considered to be more moderate than was the case in the neighboring countries, particularly in Germany and Austria. The general assumption of the time was that the so- called “Jewish Question” was not as pressing in Switzerland as it was in Germany and that, therefore, antisemitism was less widely spread. In the nineteenth century, Swiss antisemitism resulted mainly from the notion that Switzerland was a Christian nation. Those who did not belong should not be granted equal status. As a result of such thinking, Jewish emancipation in Switzer- land occurred relatively late and only after pressure from neighboring countries. Moreover, one of the first popular initiatives, after this instrument of direct democracy had been introduced, successfully called for the banning of ritual slaughter in 1893. In the first half of the twentieth century, antisemitism was mostly expressed with allusions to a so-called “fear of over-foreignization” and showed itself accordingly in harsh citizenship practices and limitations of residential rights for Jews. With the rise of racist antisemitism, the typical Swiss position would be to refute the so-called “Rassenantisemitismus” for being too harsh and too extreme, while ad- vocating typical expressions of modern antisemitism with regard to allegations that the Jewish influence was too strong in economic and cultural matters, and in the media.12 As in other Western European countries, the “East” held a particular significance with regard to Jews. So-called “Ostjuden” had a very negative image. They were considered to be “doubly foreign,” on the grounds of their religion as well as their origin.13 In this context, “East” generally meant Eastern Europe. However, there are also indications that the “East” was sometimes used synonymously with the “Orient.” Allusions in an antisemitic context to Jews having an allegedly “oriental” origin were mainly used in order to describe or depict a particular “foreignness” of Jews. This foreignness appears to have been even stronger than an Eastern European origin. Typically, it was expressed when referring to Jewish practices. For instance, during the campaign in favor of the initiative for a ban in 1893, ritual slaughter was described as an “oriental” or “Asian” practice, and thus as barbaric and inhuman.

12 Späti, “Erosion of a Taboo,” 2010. 13 Kury, Über Fremde reden, 2003.

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Shechitah was accordingly pronounced as an oriental ritual that was incompatible with Christian values and therefore had to be strictly rejected.14 Other allusions to the alleged oriental origin of Jews were made by depicting them as an “Asian nomadic people”15 or “Asian people foreign to Europe,”16 referring to Palestine as their homeland,17 or by repeatedly calling Jewish warehouses “bazars” or their owners “Bazar Jews.”18 The latter was part of a typical antisemitic discourse, which claimed that all the big warehouses belonged to Jews and that they would threaten the survival of smaller Christian shops.19 As in Germany, opponents of warehouses used the notion of “bazar” synonymously with “warehouse” in order to delegitimize them in an orientalist fashion.20 Orientalist discourse on Jews also went along with typical racist theories from the second half of the nineteenth century. The terms “Asians,” “Orientals,” and “Semites” were often used synonymously. The notoriously antisemitic newspaper Berner Volkszeitung stated in 1893 when writing about ritual slaughter: “A Jew stays a Jew, because of his Asiatic and unadulterated descent, just as a Chinese stays and always will stay a Chinese.”21 Other commentators, such as the Christian Missionary and advocate of Zionism, Carl Friedrich Heman, differentiated between these notions without making clear on what the differentiation was grounded, when he wrote: “One forgets, that the Jew is firstly Jew, and only then Semite and further Oriental and only lastly human, and not the other was around.”22 As is shown in this citation, even though most Swiss refuted racist antisemitism, they did not hesitate to use racist terminology.23 Following a journey to Palestine, another protestant pastor, Konrad Furrer, wrote a treatise on the oriental character of the Jews. Even the noblest representatives of this people, he wrote, reflected the “general Oriental character”24 and it should be the scientists’ task to show that the Jew was not the “stranger … in

14 Krauthammer, Das Schächtverbot in der Schweiz 1854-2000, 2000, pp. 75–76. 15 For instance, Berner Volkszeitung, August 26, 1893. On the Berner Volkszeitung and its antisemitism, see Maurer, “Die Berner Volkszeitung.” 16 “[E]in Europa fremdes, asiatisches Volk.” Schollenberger, Politik in systematischer Darstellung, 1903, p. 88. 17 Israelitisches Wochenblatt, May 26, 1916. 18 For instance, Intelligenzblatt, September 14, 1903; Der Samstag, May 6, 1911; Centurion, De- cember 11, 1926; Le Ligueur, March 14, 1925. 19 Kamis-Müller, Antisemitismus in der Schweiz 1900-1930, 1990, pp. 158–167. 20 Lindemann, “Der Basar als Gebilde des hochkapitalistischen Zeitalters,” 2007. 21 “Jud bleibt Jud, schon seiner asiatischen und unverfälscht erhaltenen Abstammung wegen, gerade so wie ein Chinese immer Chines [sic!] bleibt und bleiben wird.” Berner Volkszei- tung, August 12, 1893. 22 “Man vergißt, daß der Jude zuallerst Jude und dann erst Semite und weiter Orientale und erst zuletzt Mensch ist und nicht umgekehrt.” Heman, Das Erwachen der jüdischen Nation, 1897, p. 20. 23 Altermatt, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus, 1999. 24 “[D]er allgemein morgenländische Charakter.”

BETWEEN EXOTICISM AND ANTISEMITISM 177 one’s own house,” but a “true son of the Orient.”25 While Furrer used the notion of “Oriental” in a neutral way, Max von Sachsen, a Professor of Theology at the University of Fribourg, combined the alleged “oriental” character of the Jews with typical antisemitic stereotypes such as materialism, greed and exploitation.26 However, this insistence on the “oriental” traits of Jews was rather an exception among Swiss antisemitic discourse. Even though allusions to the “oriental origins” of Jews are to be found, they do not constitute an integral part of antisemitism in Switzerland. The usage of oriental references was sporadic and by no means systematic. There is one exception, however, to this statement: in connection with Zion- ism, such references were much more common. Interestingly, and contrary to the examples that have been presented so far, these references could also have positive connotations.

Antisemitism, Orientalism and Zionism

Switzerland played an important role for the early Zionist movement, albeit not in terms of politics, as Swiss neutrality would not allow for a clear statement from the federal government in favor of Zionism. On an idealistic level, however, many Swiss who came to be involved with the Zionist movement saw similarities between the Zionists’ goal of nation-building and Swiss history. When invited to address welcoming words at Zionist congresses, Swiss government representatives found friendly words for the Zionist movement. This was the case, for example, when the Councilor of the Canton of Lucerne, Heinrich Walther, stressed in 1935 how the Swiss people would fully sympathize with the Zionist movement, since they knew what it meant to struggle for liberation. Thus, when addressing the as- sembled Zionists, even Catholic-Conservative Politicians, who were usually rather negative about the Zionist movement, evoked allegedly shared experiences between the Swiss and the Zionists.27 The enthusiasm that many non-Jewish Swiss expressed for Zionism was mutual. Zionist representatives did not tire of applauding the Swiss for their sense of freedom as expressed in their history. They also frequently pointed out the importance that Switzerland had played for the Zionist movement ever since the First Zionist Congress that had taken place in Basel in 1897. The passion for Switzerland and its alleged function as a role model for a future Zionist state stands in some contrast to the Zionists’ claims of affinity with the Orient and could only be brought together in the idea, as it was allegedly often expressed by Zionist leaders, that Pales-

25 “Fremdling … im eigenen Hause, sondern als treuer Sohn des Morgenlandes sich darstel- le.” Furrer, Israel als Volk des Morgenlandes, May 1, 1867, p. 146. 26 Sachsen, Vorlesungen über die orientalische Kirchenfrage, 1907, p. 58. 27 Späti, “Die Schweiz und die zionistische Bewegung 1917-1948,” 2010.

178 CHRISTINA SPÄTI tine should become “the Switzerland of the Orient.”28 This claim shows, as Kalmar and Penslar have pointed out, that Zionist ideas related to its kinship with the Ori- ent were “steeped in European perspectives and reflexive projections of Judaic- orientalist fantasies onto the Palestinian landscape.”29 The fact that the majority of the Zionist congresses between 1897 and 1946 were held in Switzerland provided Swiss journalists and other observers with a great opportunity to experience direct contact with Zionists. It was an opportunity that was often taken since the congresses were usually well covered by the media, particularly in those cities where they were being held, but also elsewhere.30 Even though the greater part of the media coverage consisted of rendering the speeches and summarizing the proceedings, the journalists — who were themselves sometimes Jews or even Zionists, as was the case with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung — also felt obliged to render the general atmosphere of the congress and describe their impressions of the people who attended them. On the whole, one can say that the attitudes in Switzerland towards Zionism were rather diverse, but tended to be negative. Within the Catholic-Conservative milieu, opinions on Zionism were not only affected by its antisemitism. This antisemitism rejected racist antisemitism on theological grounds, but consisted of stereotypes and prejudices that were typical for modern or national antisemitism. Opinions on Zionism were therefore linked, for instance, to conspiracy theories about Jewish dominion, which would be strengthened by the Zionist movement. Moreover, following the proliferations of various popes, Catholics feared for the fate of the holy sites in Palestine under Jewish power.31 Social-Democrats would usually show some interest in socialist aspects of Zion- ism and the Yishuv, for instance, the trade union movement, or the growth of the Kibbutzim. On the other hand, influenced by internationalist theories of the time, some Swiss socialists rejected Zionism as a nationalist movement, even though, in particular after 1933, they might see the need for a national refuge for persecuted Jews.32 The liberals also showed some interest in the Zionist movement and the setup of the Yishuv. This interest, however, could also be accompanied by antisemitic allegations. For instance, in the most important liberal newspaper of the time, one reporter wondered about whether Jews could succeed in agriculture, or work as ar- tisans.33 Among Protestants, it was missionary circles in particular who strongly supported Zionism. They frequently collaborated with local Zionists and took a deep interest in the Zionist congresses. However, they did not really share the Zi-

28 Jüdische Presszentrale, “Sondernummer zum 16. Zionistenkongress 1929 in Zürich.” 29 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), “Orientalism and the Jews,” 2005, p. xxxvii. 30 Späti, “Die Schweiz und die zionistische Bewegung 1917-1948,” 2010. 31 Späti, “Heilige Stätten, Freiheitsgeist und Antisemitismus,” 2003. 32 Späti, “Die Schweiz und die zionistische Bewegung 1917-1948,” 2010. 33 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 22, 1935, (Mittagsausgabe).

BETWEEN EXOTICISM AND ANTISEMITISM 179 onists’ goals: in their view, it was important to support Zionism because it would hasten the return of the Messiah. Moreover, their opinions on the Zionist movement were frequently accompanied by antisemitic discourse, not only referring to anti-Judaist stereotypes, such as the Jews as deicides, but also the widespread cultural and economic prejudices of modern antisemitism.34 Zionism and orientalism converged at the several Zionist congresses that were held in Switzerland and which allowed visitors an in-depth view and experience of Zionist ambitions. Orientalist discourse was actually quite frequent in the render- ings and descriptions of Zionist congresses. Visits to Zionist congresses often left a deep impression on non-Zionist observers. Even though they used orientalist and sometimes antisemitic stereotypes, they also often expressed genuine admiration for the Zionists’ enthusiasm for their movement. In the Appenzeller Sonntagsblatt, a report on the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 stated: The majority of the people present were dressed in tailcoat and white necktie, but already at first sight, one had the impression of being not in European, but in Asian company. The eyes, the nose, the lips, the hair, all of this denoted the Jew, the Oriental. And oriental, or at least Mediterranean was also their comportment, their emotional out- breaks, … which are to us completely uncommon and foreign.35 The description ended on a positive note: “The enthusiasm is not artificial, but authentic and coming from the deepest heart.”36 In a similar vein, Max Nordau, whose speeches generally found great applause among the non-Zionist observers, was described as showing “authentic oriental spiritedness.”37 Or, to give another example, the President of the City of Zurich, Emil Klöti, in his welcoming address to the Zionist congress of 1929, remembered how he had felt high esteem for the idealism and optimism of Theodor Herzl, because such great optimism had in those materialistic times appeared like a “miracle from the Orient.”38 An entanglement of antisemitic and orientalist discourse also appeared in a short notice in the Schaffhauser Nachrichten: it described long tables that had been set up at the location of the Zionist congress and where memorabilia were sold,

34 Metzger, “Zwischen heilsgeschichtlichen Erwartungen und Judenfeindschaft,” 2010. 35 “Die Mehrzahl der Anwesenden trug Frack und weiße Halsbinde, aber trotzdem stand man beim ersten Blick schon unter dem Gefühl, nicht in einer europäischen, sondern in einer asiatischen Gesellschaft zu sein. Die Augen, die Nasen, die Lippen, die Haare, alles kennzeich- nete den Juden, den Orientalen. Und orientalisch oder doch zum wenigsten südländisch war auch das Benehmen, die Gefühlsausbrüche …, die völlig ungewohnt sind und uns fremdlän- disch anmuten.” 36 “Die Begeisterung war aber nicht etwa künstlich, sondern eine ächte, aus tiefstem Herzen kommende.” Appenzeller Sonntagsblatt, September 11, 1897. Similarly, the Revue Chrétienne wrote of the “exubérance tout orientale des sentiments ou, peut-être plus exactement, des sensations des délégués” of the Zionist congresses. Revue Chrétienne, 1899, p. 35. 37 “[M]it echt orientalischer Lebendigkeit.” Christlicher Volksfreund, September 12, 1903. 38 “[E]in Wunder aus dem Morgenland.” Schweizer Stimmen zum Zionismus, Schriftenreihe des Schweizerischen Zionistenverbandes, issue 3, 1944, p. 16.

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“similar to a Turkish bazaar.”39 By headlining the notice with the words “Immer s’Geschäft!” [Always business!], it also took on an antisemitic connotation.40 Inter- estingly, this notice in the Schaffhauser Nachrichten was a short excerpt from a much longer report on the Zionist congress in Basel in the Aargauer Nachrichten which in spite of the orientalist reference to the Turkish bazaar lacked any other antisemitic connotations and took a rather positive stance towards Zionism.41 This shows that orientalism and antisemitism did not necessarily go hand in hand. Another example for orientalist antisemitism is the following citation from a notoriously antisemitic journal, Der Samstag, describing Zionists in front of the location of the Zionist congress of 1905 in Basel: “They stand and pace in groups, discuss their feverish affairs with nervous gesticulation, and many of them, male and female, lie between the socles of the columns and along the walls according to their oriental habits.”42

The Zionist Response

As Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar have noted, the Jewish response to anti-Jewish orientalism could take three different courses: firstly, a full rejection of orientalism; secondly, a form of self-orientalization by idealizing and romanticizing the Orient; and thirdly, the contrasting of traditional “oriental” Jews with modernized “Western” Jews.43 In order to acknowledge the complexity of these responses and the subtlety of their deployments, Steven E. Aschheim has coined the term of an “entangled Orientalist web,” “a kind of all-enveloping thematic in which modern Jewish history in almost all its permutations has been and continues to be entangled and which has produced any number of ironic and debilitating but also creative moments.”44 For instance, leading political Zionists such as Theodor Herzl or Max Nordau adopted a discourse according to which the “Ostjuden” represented the “Asian” element in Judaism, which the acculturated Western Jews had left behind.45 Martin Buber, on the other hand, stands as an example for a Zionist who attempted to recast the stereotype of Jews as orientals by ascribing them positive values and by calling for an alliance between Jews and Arabs of Palestine, criticizing imperialist stances within Zionism.46

39 “[Ä]hnlich wie im türkischen Bazar.” 40 Schaffhauser Nachrichten, September 1, 1903. 41 Aargauer Nachrichten, August 27, 1903. 42 “Sie stehen und gehen in Gruppen, diskutieren mit nervösen Gebärden ihre fieberhaften Angelegenheiten und viele von ihnen, Männlein und Weiblein, lagern nach orientalischem Brauch den Säulensockeln und den Mauergesimsen entlang.” Der Samstag, July 29, 1905. On the review “Der Samstag,” see Debrunner, “Der Samstag,” 1998. 43 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), “Orientalism and the Jews,” 2005, p. xvii. 44 Aschheim, At the Edges of Liberalism, 2012, p. 22. 45 Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 2008, pp. 145–168. 46 Plapp, Zionism and Revolution, 2008, pp. 14–43.

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In Switzerland, the Zionist response to anti-Jewish orientalism was not especially widespread. There are several reasons for the almost complete lack of Zionist references to orientalism. Firstly, the Zionist movement was rather weak in Switzer- land. Even though the Swiss Zionist Association was founded in direct connection with the first Zionist congress in Basel in 1897, it was only in the 1930s, as a reaction to the rise of National Socialism, that Zionism gained momentum. The peak was reached during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The Fed- eration of Swiss Jewish Communities assumed a neutral position towards the Zion- ist movement.47 A second reason for the far-reaching absence of Swiss Zionist responses to orientalism is probably, as I have shown above, the fact that antisemitic discourse was less common in Switzerland than in other European countries, and even less so in connection with orientalizing allegations. David Farbstein was possibly the most prominent among Swiss Zionists. As a Social-Democrat who had successfully run for office as a National Councilor in 1922 and stayed in this position until 1938, Zionism to him meant primarily an economic solution for the underprivileged Jews in Eastern Europe, as well as a means of emancipation with regard to the widespread antisemitism in those countries.48 His various writings completely lack any references to the Orient or to orientalisms.49 The same holds true for other publications by Swiss Zionists.50 It seems as if, to Swiss Jews, the idea of themselves as Orientals was a very distant one indeed. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule. These are of the second kind in Kalmar and Penslar’s typology: a romanticization of the Orient, expressed as a way of self-orientalization. A good example of this is a novella by Lea Lilien that was published in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt. It consisted of a description of the participants at a Zionist congress. One of them was a tall girl, wearing a beautiful purple dress. Her face was “of the strictest oriental beauty … a face that as a model for an odalisque would have delighted every artist.”51 However, this was only partly a kind of self-orientalization, since the goal of this particular passage was to describe how different the appearance of Jews could be. Other types were depicted as “teutonic” with blond hair and blue eyes, or as a match to Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings of the head of Christ.

47 Picard, Die Schweiz und die Juden 1933-1945, 1994, pp. 250–253. 48 Zweig-Strauss, David Farbstein (1868-1953), 2002. 49 See, for instance, Farbstein, Der Zionismus und die Judenfrage ökonomisch und ethisch, 1898; id., “Die Organisation der jüdischen Arbeiter in Palästina,” 1923, 90–95. 50 Rafael Ryba, “Zur Judenfrage nach dem Krieg,” 1945, 194–195; Anna Siemsen, “Vom Zio- nismus,” 1945, 363–365; J. E. Stillmann, “Kollektivsiedlung in Palästina — ein Versuch sozialistischer Gemeinwirtschaft,” 1947, 314–318. 51 “[V]on strengster orientalischer Schönheit unter den kurzgeschnittenen tizianblonden Lo- cken; ein Gesicht, das als Modell für eine Odaliske jeden Maler begeistert hätte.” Beilage des Israelitischen Wochenblattes, February 28, 1902.

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A second example of such self-orientalization could be found in a treatise on the Zionist movement by a journalist based in Switzerland, Lazar Felix Pinkus. In romanticizing fashion, he wrote about the Palestinian Arabs, the “tribal kinsmen”52 of the Jews who together would lead the Orient to a new heyday.53 Here again, though, this passage should not be overestimated, as it was very short within the whole treatise and the only reference to an orientalist vision of Jews.

Conclusion

Edward Said has famously described orientalism as “the strange secret sharer of Western antisemitism.” Even though Jews, at least in Switzerland, were not fully objects of orientalization, my chapter has shown several occasions where Jews were described as “Orientals” or ascribed with characteristics and traits that can be connected to the “Orient.” It is interesting that this should have happened primarily when non-Jewish observers were confronted with actual Jews, as was the case during the Zionist congresses. The percentage of Jews among the Swiss population was less than one per cent at the time and they were mainly concentrated in urban areas. Thus, it is reason- able to suspect that some of the journalists who travelled to the locations of the Zionist congresses and reported to their readers — in the Appenzeller Sonntagsblatt, for example, which was published in a very rural area where almost no Jews lived — were confronted for the first time with what they consciously perceived as “Jews.” What they perceived was primarily “foreign,” and in their quest to categorize, they depicted it as “oriental.” It has to be pointed out, however, that these ascriptions were not wholly negative. On the contrary, they sometimes bore the expression of a fascination in what can be seen as “exoticism,” similar for instance to the fascination that emanated from the human zoos or ethnological exhibitions that were popular in many European countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generally speaking, these orientalizing descriptions were in line with the general perception of Zionism in Switzerland among non-Jews, which oscillated between fascination, on the one hand, and rejection on antisemitic grounds, on the other.

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Kury, Patrick. Über Fremde reden. Überfremdungsdiskurs und Ausgrenzung in der Schweiz 1900-1945. Zurich: Chronos, 2003. Le Ligueur, March 14, 1925. Lindemann, Uwe. “Der Basar als Gebilde des hochkapitalistischen Zeitalters. Über das Verhältnis von Orientalismus, Geschlechterpolitik, Konsum- und Modekri- tik zwischen 1820 und 1900.” In Orientdiskurse in der deutschen Literatur, ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2007, pp. 243–271. Ludewig, Anna-Dorothea. “Between Orientalization and Self-Orientalization. Re- marks on the Image of the ‘Beautiful Jewess’ in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth- Century European Literature.” In Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, ed. Ulrike Brunotte, An- na-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler. Oldenburg: de Gruyter, 2014, pp. 221– 229. Maurer Theres. “Die Berner Volkszeitung von Ulrich Dürrenmatt.” In Antisemi- tismus in der Schweiz 1848-1960, ed. Aram Mattioli. Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1998, pp. 241–263. Metzger, Thomas. “Zwischen heilsgeschichtlichen Erwartungen und Judenfeind- schaft: Der judenmissionarische ‚Verein der Freunde Israels‘ 1870 bis 1945.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 104 (2010): 335–363. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 22, 1935, (Mittagsausgabe). Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 10, 1884. Peleg, Yaron. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Picard, Jacques. Die Schweiz und die Juden 1933-1945. Schweizerischer Antisemitismus, jüdische Abwehr und internationale Migrations- und Flüchtlingspolitik. Zurich: Chro- nos, 2nd edition, 1994. Pinkus, Lazar, Felix. Vor der Gründung des Judenstaates, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1918. Plapp, Laurel. Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. Polaschegg, Andrea. Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagi- nation im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. Revue Chrétienne, 1899. Rohde, Achim. “Asians in Europe. Reading German-Jewish History through a Post- Colonial Lens.” In Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transfor- mations of European National Discourses, ed. Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Lu- dewig, and Axel Stähler. Oldenburg: de Gruyter, 2014, pp. 17–32. Ryba, Rafael. “Zur Judenfrage nach dem Krieg.” Rote Revue 24 (1945): 194–195. Sachsen, Max von. Vorlesungen über die orientalische Kirchenfrage, Fribourg: Universi- täts-Buchhandlung, 1907. Saposnik, Arieh B. Becoming Hebrew. The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ot- toman Palestine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Schaffhauser Nachrichten, September 1, 1903.

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Schollenberger, Jakob. Politik in systematischer Darstellung, Berlin: Haering, 1903. Schweizer Stimmen zum Zionismus, Schriftenreihe des Schweizerischen Zionistenver- bandes, issue 3, 1944. Siemsen, Anna. “Vom Zionismus,” Rote Revue 24 (1945): 363–365. Simon-Nahum, Perrine. “Le mort saisit le vif. La place des Juifs dans les études ori- entales aux XIXe et XXe siècles.” In Passeurs de l’Orient. Les Juifs dans l’orientalisme, ed. Michel Espagne and Perrine Simon-Nahum. Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2013, pp. 49–65. Späti, Christina. “Die Schweiz und die zionistische Bewegung 1917-1948: Zwi- schen Bewunderung, Gleichgültigkeit und Ablehnung.” In Europa und Palästina 1799-1948: Religion — Politik — Gesellschaft. Europe and Palestine 1799-1948: Religi- on — Politics — Society, ed. Barbara Haider-Wilson and Dominique Trimbur. Wien: OEAW, 2010, pp. 315–338. Späti, Christina. “Erosion of a Taboo: Antisemitism in Switzerland.” In Politics and Resentment. Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union, ed. Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps. Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 363– 396. Späti, Christina. “Heilige Stätten, Freiheitsgeist und Antisemitismus: Das viel- schichtige Verhältnis der Katholiken zum Zionismus.” In Katholische Denk- und Lebenswelten. Beiträge zur Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Schweizer Katholizismus im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Urs Altermatt. Freiburg: Academic Press, 2003, pp. 187–207. Stillmann, J. E. “Kollektivsiedlung in Palästina — ein Versuch sozialistischer Ge- meinwirtschaft,” Rote Revue 26 (1947): 314–318. Wittler, Kathrin. “‘Good to Think’. (Re)Conceptualizing German-Jewish Oriental- ism.” In Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, ed. Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler. Oldenburg: de Gruyter, 2014, pp. 63–81. Zweig-Strauss, Hanna. David Farbstein (1868-1953). Jüdischer Sozialist — sozialistischer Jude. Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2002.

Franz Oppenheimer: A Pioneer of Diasporic Zionism

Dekel Peretz

Germany’s first full tenured professor of sociology, Franz Oppenheimer, believed in hybridity on the borderlines as the key to innovation. As a scientist, he tried to unify the natural sciences with the humanities, and theory with practice. As an economist, he synthesized capitalism and socialism into a new theory of liberal socialism and was one of the intellectual pioneers of the Soziale Marktwirtschaft of the Federal Republic of Germany. As a political thinker, he sought out a synthesis between democracy and strong leadership. And as a German Jew, he sought to inte- grate his brethren as a group into a new European order. Since hybridity in the fields of science, economics and politics is easily acknowledged,1 this chapter will focus on Oppenheimer’s concept of hybridity of identity. The basic intention un- derlying Oppenheimer’s plan was to break the hegemony in all three areas of the national differentiation discourse of his time: language, territory and biology.2 Paradoxically, Oppenheimer chooses Zionism, a national movement aimed at separation from Europe, to serve in the integration of Jews into Europe. He hoped that a distinct Jewish project within the framework of European colonialism would bring pride to the Jews and support an ethnic Jewish identity. By emphasizing the universal emancipatory characteristics of the Zionist project, Oppenheimer hoped to prove Jewish capability and, hence, the importance of retaining a unique Jewish identity.

Racial Purity, Eugenics and the Class-State

Like other German-Jewish doctors whom John Efron named “defenders of the race,”3 Oppenheimer’s first public appearances were as a Jewish gladiator in the arena of scientific race discourse. As an important co-founder of academic sociology in Germany, Oppenheimer tried to undermine the legitimacy of the category of race in this new field. Nevertheless, he did not totally deny the influence of race. “On the contrary: race … continues to have an effect long after the environmental conditions that brought it about disappear. We can see that clearly. But, I turn with all scorn against the crude way in which one slogan attempts to solve all mysteries of history.”4 Oppenheimer emphasized the natural and historical conditions that

1 Solveig, “Transdifferenz und Hybridität,” 2005, p. 436. 2 Ibid., p. 437. 3 Efron, Defenders of the Race, 1994. 4 “Im Gegenteil: Rasse … wirkt fort, vielleicht noch lange fort, nachdem die Bedingungen der Umwelt längst verschwunden sind, die sie erschufen. Das sehen wir deutlich. Aber ich

188 DEKEL PERETZ created and are still creating what is considered to be races. He argued that anthro- pometry failed to prove the existence of any consistent racial features like noses or skulls and, since Darwin, the notion that races are a divine creation with consistent physical and spiritual characteristics cannot be seriously advocated. Science, according to Oppenheimer, has also shown that the physical and psychological composition of a race can be altered within just a few generations. On the basis of these conclusions, Oppenheimer advanced the idea of a “plasticity of race.”5 Oppenheimer was not alone in his dynamic view of race. With the populariza- tion of the notion of evolutionary progress at the end of the nineteenth century, race became a promise for the future and an experimental subject for breeding utopias. Even when Oppenheimer clearly disparaged plans for human stud farms, he did not totally dismiss eugenic breeding utopias focused on sterilization and marriage prohibitions to engineer a future race. His argument against them was that they are almost impossible to implement and mistaken in their focus.6 Re- verting to the example of the animal breeder to point out the mistake, Oppen- heimer claimed that the breeder focuses on regulating copulation because social conditions such as housing, nourishment and treatment were constant, whereas in the historical development of supposed human races they differed immensely.7 In order to be able to scientifically ascertain the influence of race and the necessity of eugenic measures, social engineering should focus first on stabilizing these fac- tors. Oppenheimer’s argumentation is a good example for the utopian proximity between racial theorists and socialists in the late nineteenth century.8 In the nature or nurture debate central to the anthropological racial question Oppenheimer, like many Jewish involved in race science,9 was a strong supporter of the latter. According to Oppenheimer, any current hierarchy of races was temporal and prejudicially supported by the Eurocentric construct of world history.10 In fact, Oppenheimer viewed the influence of culture on race to be by far larger than that of race on culture, thus making the hierarchy into one of culture as opposed to race.11 Unlike cultural Zionists like Martin Buber, Oppenheimer did not consider a people’s art to be an expression of natural predisposition but of its cultural progression and, more specifically, of its organization of (food) production.

wende mich mit aller Schärfe gegen die plumpe Art, mit dem einen Schlagwort alle Rätsel der Geschichte lösen zu wollen.” Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphi- losophie,” 1969, p. 139. All translations of German citations in this chapter are my translations unless a secondary work is cited. 5 “Plastizität der Rasse.” Ibid., p. 120. 6 Ibid., pp. 100–101 and 112. 7 Ibid., p. 120. 8 Weingart et al., Rasse, Blut und Gene, 1988, p. 114. 9 Efron, Defenders of the Race, 1994, pp. 29–30. 10 Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie,” 1969, pp. 99 and 124. However, in comments in his early writings, e.g. about Africans’ limited potential for progress, Oppenheimer took a Eurocentric position himself. 11 Ibid., p. 128.

FRANZ OPPENHEIMER: A PIONEER OF DIASPORIC ZIONISM 189

Furthermore, Oppenheimer emphasized that peoples and nations should not be confused with races. With his genealogy of the state, Oppenheimer diluted the category of race even further. For Oppenheimer the key characteristic of a state was class division not racial homogeneity. Mass migration and integration of different ethnic groups were fundamental elements in state formation. Mixed marriages, or more precisely the trade in women, paved the way for merchandise trade and was the first step towards the peaceful integration of peoples, ultimately leading to the formation of states.12 Strongly influenced by his medical training, Oppenheimer compared society to an organism. The state as a complex organism cannot be racially pure, since the state … comes into being through sexual propagation. All bisexual propagation is accom- plished by the following process: The male element, a small, very active, mobile, vibrat- ing cell — the spermatozoon — searches out a large inactive cell without mobility of its own — the ovum, or female principle — enters and fuses with it. From this process, there results an immense growth; that is to say, a wonderful differentiation with simultaneous integration.13 In its essence, Oppenheimer’s state was an expansionist instrument of subjugation, with the process of sexual reproduction being an analogy for the domination of a masculinized minority over the feminized majority in a class state. On the one hand, separation between the sexes representing classes is maintained, yet on the other hand, out of real sexual contact between the classes, “A race of bastards thus develops, sometimes taken into the ruling class, sometimes rejected, and then because of the blood of the masters in their veins, becoming the born leaders of the subject race.”14 This hybrid “third sex” would be the main agent of class and consequently state disintegration. Class and not race was the main influence on a group’s typology. Oppen- heimer’s “plasticity of race” and his adherence to Lamarckian hereditability of acquired characteristics underscored his belief that a people’s future physique and character can be altered in the present. Nevertheless, superiority of lineage, symbolized above by blood, still has a long-lasting influence. In his refutation of Werner Sombart concerning the origin of Jewish character, Oppenheimer wrote that “the racial character allegedly formed through desert wanderings is the typical character of a multilingual, urbanized former master class.”15 Oppenheimer was in agreement with Sombart on the character of Jews, but saw its origin in a sociological mix of past and present. Oppenheimer’s unusual concession to the past was apologetic, confronting internalized antisemitic slander by implying that the Jews can shake off the dust and become masters once again.

12 Oppenheimer, The State, 1922, p. 133. 13 Ibid., pp. 87–88. 14 Ibid., p. 81. 15 “Der angeblich aus der Wüstenwanderung mitgebrachte Rassencharakter ist der typische Charakter einer vielsprachigen, verstädterten ehemaligen Herrenklasse.” Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie,” 1969, p. 129.

190 DEKEL PERETZ

The tension between past and present permeated Oppenheimer’s autobiogra- phy, in which he seemed obsessed with alternatively affirming and denying racial features. Right at the outset, he talked about how his “Hittite nose” made him immediately recognizable to the blond Berliners.16 Oppenheimer noted that it is not known where the Hittites came from, but that their language was distantly related to Indo-Germanic.17 Was this an insinuation that his “Jewish” nose actually symbolizes his Aryan origins? Oppenheimer argued that even the prominent antisemitic theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain accepted that Jews are a mix of “real Semites, Hittites, and maybe ‘Aryans’.” Germans were also a mix of Slavs, Celts and Germanics at the very least, according to Oppenheimer, and all other supposed races were mixed too.18 Oppenheimer actually recognized a potential to transcend national boundaries in his contemporaries’ evolutionary use of the concept of race and Chamberlain’s broadening of the term Aryan into a “homo eu- ropaeus.” He deplored the fact that Chamberlain nevertheless lapsed into national chauvinism.19

Sociology as a Decolonizing Counter-Science

“The intellectual agenda of Jewish race scientists was to wrest control of the anthropological discourse on Jews from gentiles.”20 With his involvement in the racial discourse, Oppenheimer targeted the scientific foundation of the historical and mythological narratives at the core of German colonialism since the eighteenth century. As described by Susanne Zantop: “Since a colonial discourse could develop without being challenged by colonized subjects or without being tested in a real colonial setting, it established itself not so much as ‘intellectual authority’ (Said) over distant terrains, rather than as mythological authority over the collective imagination.”21 Jews were the first subject of the German colonizing “intellectual authority,” and as Susannah Heschel has shown: “part of the German orientalist project included the scholarly investigation of Judaism, whose political ramifica- tions entailed not an overseas colonization, but a domestic one.”22 Oppenheimer was undermining the “intellectual authority” of scientific antisemitism by turning the microscope against racial theories and theoreticians. He demonstrated how the anthropometric and psychological methods endorsed by racial theorists were

16 Oppenheimer, Erlebtes, Erstrebtes, Erreichtes: Lebenserinnerungen, 1964, p. 16; subsequently parenthetically referred to in this chapter as Lebenserinnerungen. 17 Ibid, p. 210. 18 Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie,” 1969, pp. 102–103. 19 Ibid., pp. 113–114 and 118–119. 20 Efron, Defenders of the Race, 1994, p. 29. 21 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1997, p. 7. 22 Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” subsequently parenthetically referred to in this chapter as “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999, 62.

FRANZ OPPENHEIMER: A PIONEER OF DIASPORIC ZIONISM 191 pseudo-scientific and needed to be replaced with sociological methods in order to establish the scope of racial influence. Furthermore, he made antisemites instead of Jews into the subject of scholarly investigation in the emerging science of sociology. Through this reversal, he attempted to wrest the imperious power of interpretation away from them. With a dash of humor, Oppenheimer exposed the influence of the respective milieus of different racial theorists on their contradictory suppositions. From the emphasis Chamberlain put on the fact that there are dark-haired Germanic families, Oppenheimer could surmise his complexion. The fact that Arthur de Go- bineau was an aristocrat and Ludwig Woltmann a socialist-inclined bourgeois led the former to declare the aristocrats and the latter revolutionaries for the pure- blooded Germanics fighting the ignoble Romano Celts in the French revolution. For the pious protestant Chamberlain, Jesus could not have been Jewish. He must have descended from the “predominantly blonde” Amorites of European origin. Whereas Eugen Dühring, who regraded Christianity as a destructive influence on Aryan culture, declared Jesus a pure Semite. Lastly, for the Catholic Gobineau, the Reformation was the work of non-Germanic spirit.23 In his criticism of the arbi- trariness in which the race of Jesus was imagined, Oppenheimer was continuing “the subversive quality of the WJ [Wissenschaft des Judentums], directed as it was at undermining the configurations that mark the history of the Christian West — the values that govern it, the powers that shape it, the judgment of its significance.”24 Oppenheimer understood the intricate relationship between scientific antisemitism and Jewish emancipation, between racism and the enlightened recognition of humanity. As a co-founder of German sociology, Oppenheimer was trying to prevent the influence of racism on the sociological discourse by expounding its dangerous potential as the legitimizing ideology for authoritative regimes. Ideologi- cal constructs like racism and “Germanomania” were required to rationally and ethically legitimatize and justify the continued violence, repression, robbery, exploitation and control of the hated and envied neighbor whose claim for human rights can no longer be ignored.25 Fellow sociologist Werner Sombart tried to invalidate Oppenheimer’s argument by consciously reclaiming “intellectual authority.” He argued that, just like there were ideologies of rulers, there were ideologies of the oppressed. Oppenheimer’s class analysis was such an ideology of the oppressed. So even though he concurred with Oppenheimer’s argument that race theories still lack a scientifically satisfying foundation, Sombart appreciated their contribution to restoring scientific complexity to a sociology dominated by historical materialism.26

23 Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie,” 1969, pp. 137–138. 24 Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999, 70. 25 Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie,” 1969, pp. 132–136; and The State, 1990, p. 39. 26 Sombart’s reply to Oppenheimer’s lecture at the second conference of German sociolo- gists in Ibid., pp. 185–186.

192 DEKEL PERETZ

Zionism and the United States of Europe

The desire to restore Jewish mastery within an Aryan — European — order combined with his ridicule of his fellow Jews’ futile attempts to completely assimilate eventually led Oppenheimer to Zionism. He was a desirable recruit for the young movement seeking recognition due to his scientific prestige and his synthesis of theory and practice. However, he still needed to prove his merit as a Jewish nationalist. Martin Buber, then editor of the Zionist organ Die Welt, formulated a re- served welcome for the social theoretician who wants to implement his ideas on us. Zionism appears to him as the possibility for a huge social experiment. Men who come to us like that, usually without a proper understanding of the whole beauty of our national idea and incapable of penetrat- ing it, are nevertheless a powerful stimulus. They bring new elements into our discussion that force us to find a positive stance towards the biggest movements of our time.27 Oppenheimer contributed to the movement by urging for beginning practical settlement and fusing it with universal socialist ideals.28 He saw in Zionism a chance to experiment with the reshaping of an entire people. During the Ninth Zionist Congress in Hamburg in 1909, he was commissioned to implement his cooperative model in Palestine, and Merchavia was founded the following year. In his speech at the congress about “Agrarian Colonization in Palestine,” Oppenheimer reminded the delegates of Herzl’s endorsement of his cooperative model shortly before his death. He reiterated the benefit of his plan to what he understood as the purpose of Zionism: the transplantation of Ostjuden into Palestine without them assimilating and becoming Arabs or Turks.29 Oppenheimer was not conde- scending towards Arabs, but regarded them romantically as noble nomads, possibly of a higher culture than the Ostjuden if these were in danger of assimilation. He described Herzl’s appearance not as resembling Moses, like many in Eastern Europe did, but rather Harun al-Rashid.30 To prevent assimilation, Oppenheimer planned to settle the Ostjuden in the countryside not as manor owners or agricultural laborers, but as farmers. The cooperative would create an environment in which they could learn the necessary farming skills as well as the values necessary for national cohesiveness and citizen-

27 “Socialtheoretikers, der seine Ideen an uns realisieren möchte. Der Zionismus erscheint ihm als die Möglichkeit eines riesigen, socialen Experiments. Die Männer, die so zu uns kommen, gewöhnlich ohne rechtes Verständnis für die ganze Schönheit unserer nationalen Idee und unfähig, zu ihm vorzudringen, sind dennoch eine befruchtende Kraft. Sie bringen neue Ele- mente in unsere Discussion, sie zwingen uns, zu den großen Strömungen unserer Zeit eine positive Stellungsnahme zu finden.” Buber, “Wege zum Zionismus,” 1901, 6. By placing his article right before the second part of Oppenheimer’s first article in a Zionist paper “Jüdische Siedlungen,” Buber gives the impression that he is commentating it. 28 Kressel, Franz Oppenheimer, 1972, p. 10. 29 Oppenheimer, “Ländliche Kolonisation in Palästina,” 1909, 914. 30 Oppenheimer, Lebenserinnerungen, 1964, p. 210.

FRANZ OPPENHEIMER: A PIONEER OF DIASPORIC ZIONISM 193 ship they allegedly lacked. Furthermore, in his opinion, the history of the state had shown that with the merging of the gentry with the lower classes into one society, the language of the gentry was more likely to disappear if a new hybrid language did not emerge.31 Since farmers were the backbone of nationalism, Oppenheimer concluded that a country could only be nationalized with the plow and not with the sword. Oppenheimer argued that Arabs should not be excluded from the farmer class lest they fall into the hands of nationalist Arab bourgeois instigators. Oppenheimer is then a rare Zionist promoting a plan not only for the integration but also for the assimilation of Arabs into a future Jewish people. Due to their exclusion in the past, the Jews, of all people, should include others in their future so- ciety32 and prove to Europe that an inclusive nationalism was possible, thus ironically furthering the integration of Jews into their European nations. So, for Oppenheimer, the main aim of Zionism was not mass immigration to Palestine or the founding of a Jewish state, but to counteract assimilationist pressure in Europe.33 At the root of Oppenheimer’s resentment for assimilation is its comicality and futility. For him, the absolute worst were baptized Jews who had adopted the cultural code of antisemitism to pretend to be Aryan.34 In this regard, Oppenheimer held different views than Theodor Herzl, who parachuted him to an official position in the Zionist Commission for the Research of Palestine founded at the Sixth Zionist Congress. Herzl envisioned a complete, albeit progressive, migration beginning with the working classes of Eastern Europe and culminating with the wealthier Jewish classes of Western Europe once the living standard in Palestine improved. Only those migrating would be entitled to proudly continue calling themselves Jews. For the “Israelites” remaining in Europe, the way was now free to fully assimilate into their respective nations. With their decision to stay, they would have unquestionably proven their loyalty to their fatherlands. The di- version of Jewish migration to a Jewish state would be a further benefit for those wanting to assimilate, since the appearance of the Ostjude in Western countries was fueling antisemitism.35 Oppenheimer, on the other hand, doubted that the bulk of German Jewry would immigrate as long as their lives were not made too miserable. But that did not mean that they could not remain Jewish and even consider themselves Zionists. On the contrary, “every Western [European] Jew who still wants to be called Jewish” must be a Zionist to avoid assimilation while remaining in the diaspora.36 The Zionist movement was “the master blood of our race, the pride in our past, the feeling of the holiness of our accomplishments and the defiance that stiffs our necks against unjust violence,” rising up against an imperialism trying to

31 Oppenheimer, The State, 1922, p. 89. 32 Oppenheimer, “Bodenbesitzordnung in Palästina,” 1918–1919, 511. 33 Oppenheimer, “Zionismus und Kosmopolitismus,” 1903, 3. 34 Oppenheimer, “Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein,” 1910, 139. 35 Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 2006, pp. 18–23. 36 “[J]eder Westjude, der noch Jude heißen will.” Oppenheimer “Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein,” 1910, 142.

194 DEKEL PERETZ strangle utopian hopes for world peace and social consolidation with the false banner of world civilization.37 It is not that Oppenheimer was against the establishment of a world civilization with a united people. According to him, Zionism as a movement “striving to revive again all eternal human values that the past of our nation created” could not be opposed to this idea, as it was originally a Jewish one formulated by the prophets of Israel.38 Borrowing from Herbert Spencer, Oppenheimer described the expansion of the state as an organic process of differentiation and integration of groups forming, metaphorically speaking, different organs of society.39 For organic evolution into a world civilization individual nations must specialize on unique tasks for the purpose of cooperation. Therefore, Zionism resisted a hierarchical imperialism founded on slavery and domination in the name of an alternative utopian union of equal and proud master nations. A Zionist success in creating “colonies … that will realize humanities’ dream of fraternal equality in freedom and happiness, colonies that we hope will bear witness once again to the messianic mission of Judaism”40 could be the first step towards a new world order and a fourth Jewish gift to the world.41 In equating Jewish uniqueness with universality, Oppenheimer was again continuing the struggle of the Wissenschaft des Judentums to undermine the ghettoization of Judaism.42 Yet, when linked with his opinion on the role of religion in state formation, Oppenheimer’s numerous messianic references took the struggle one step further. In the course of state formation, culture, language and religion were hybridized. The god of the master class was the most revered, with the gods of the subjugated either serving him in a pantheon or becoming his enemies.43 Oppenheimer’s emphasis on the religious legacy of the Jewish people gifting the world three religions and that Jewish moral law and biblical land division could be the foundations of a future world unity fulfilling the messianic faith, connoted Jewish universality with belonging to the elite European master nations.

37 “[D]as Herrenblut unserer Rasse, der Stolz auf unsere Vergangenheit, das Gefühl der Hei- ligkeit unserer Errungenschaften und der Trotz, der gegen ungerechte Gewalt den Nacken bäumt.” Oppenheimer, “Zionismus und Kosmopolitismus,” 1903, 4. 38 “[A]ll dasjenige wieder herzustellen strebt, was die Vergangenheit unserer Nation an ewigen Menschheitswerten geschaffen hat.” Ibid., 1. 39 Ibid., 2. 40 “Kolonien …, welche den Traum der Menschheit verwirklichen werden von brüderlicher Gleichheit in Freiheit und Glück, Kolonien von denen wir hoffen, daß sie noch einmal von der messianischen Sendung des Judenthums Zeugnis ablegen werden.” Oppenheimer, “Ge- nossenschaftliche Kolonisation im Dienste der osteuropäischen Juden,” 1901, 261. 41 Oppenheimer, “Zionismus und Kosmopolitismus,” 1903, 5. 42 Heschel draws on Amos Funkenstein’s differentiation between the notion of uniqueness as being different in pre-modern Jewish self-understanding and being universal in Jewish modernity, Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized,” 1999, 66. 43 Oppenheimer, The State, 1922, pp. 89-90.

FRANZ OPPENHEIMER: A PIONEER OF DIASPORIC ZIONISM 195

However, in his focus on Jewish antiquity Oppenheimer was not trying to promote Jewish myth, nor did he derive his ideas from Mosaic law. The messianic overtones of his colonial fantasies aimed at fighting assimilation by cultivating pride in Jewish heritage. In the words of Zantop: “The ‘colony’ thus became the blank space for a new beginning, for the creation of an imaginary national self freed from history and convention — a self that would prove to the world what ‘he’ could do.”44 Oppenheimer and other members of the Zionist Commission for the Research of Palestine dedicated to the scientific preparation of settlement in Palestine and the establishment of “intellectual authority” over the land were imagining themselves as German colonizers. “We need only refer to how the Ar- yan peoples colonize. I refer to the Germans in the African colonies,” writes Selig Soskin.45 Like Oppenheimer, Soskin emphasized the anti-imperial aspect of Jew- ish colonization distinguishing and even raising the Jews above other European nations: “to us Palestine is not a distant breadbasket but a homeland.”46 And by criticizing other colonial projects they were imitating yet another element of the German colonial imagination.47 After the First World War, Oppenheimer allied himself with Buber and other German-speaking Zionists in a literary struggle against “imperialism and mercantilism” in British Palestine.48 Oppenheimer’s aspirations to bring Semites and Aryans onto equal footing was reflected in his description of Herzl as “a handsome, tall man of the noblest type of pure Semite, as it is still realized today in the highest classes of noble Arabs unmixed with Negro [sic] blood, the type that even strongly völkisch-minded ‘Ary- ans’ of today have learnt to regard as a race closely related and almost equal to them.”49 In spite of his opposition to race, Oppenheimer remained prone to racial romantics in his defense of the Jews.

Differentiation and Integration in Oppenheimer’s Identity Model

One of the essential principles of Zionism was that Jews were one nation and not merely coreligionists. However, the relationship between German Jews and Ost- juden was complex.50 In Oppenheimer’s recollection, it was at the Zionist congresses that he encountered for the first time Ostjuden who “were not beggars.”51

44 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1997, p. 7. 45 Cited after Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, 1991, p. 66. 46 Cited after Ibid., p. 68. 47 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1997, p. 7. 48 Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, 1972, Letter 387. 49 “[E]in schöner, hochgewachsener Mann vom edelsten Typus des reinen Semiten, wie ihn heute noch die mit Negerblut nicht vermischte obere Klasse der vornehmen Araber ver- wirklicht, der Typus, den heute sogar stark völkisch eingestellte „Arier“ als eine der ihren nahe verwandte und fast gleichwertige Rasse zu betrachten gelernt haben.” Oppenheimer, Lebenserinnerungen, 1964, p. 210. 50 One of the best works on the East-West complex is Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1999. 51 Oppenheimer, Lebenserinnerungen, 1964, pp. 213–214.

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Prior to his joining Zionism, Oppenheimer acted as a member of the board of the “Society for the Promotion of Agriculture amongst German Jews” whose main focus was, contrary to the designation, on the occupational “normalization” of Ost- juden. He was astonished by the (albeit partial) transformative powers of farming on the Ostjuden: When you visit the gardening school in Ahlem and see the young people there coming from the field with their tools on their shoulders, you are confronted with a physiological puzzle at first sight. You see the large saucer eyes of the Galician Jews but nevertheless you miss something in the features … Although Jewish, these Jews don’t look ‘Jew- ish’. It is the agricultural worker type! This people with their calm, steady gaze, giving evidence to the absence of nervousness, with their long striding gait, have partially lost the so-called racial characteristic of the Jews.52 Like many in his time, Oppenheimer believed in an intrinsic connection between physique and character.53 As a social engineer, Oppenheimer did not believe that individual Bildung could succeed in educating the masses. Physical education and cooperative farms would be much more effective in “creating citizens of the future community” and instilling the formerly oppressed with the necessary masculine “master virtues” for their self-liberation.54 German Zionists could help the Ostjuden, the primary agents of Zionist colonization, by creating a system to cultivate these virtues. At the Zionist congresses, Oppenheimer became aware of the enormous gaps in the Jewish world. He considered the diverse appearances of the delegates he encountered to be empirical evidence of the Jews’ extreme physical adaptation to their nation and the “ages” between their mentalities. With great foresight, he re- marked that the real challenge in uniting all these different groups would surface once they all lived together on one land.55 However, the integration of East and West required a recognition of the differences between these two “organs” and their differing Zionisms. While the former sought in Zionism their redemption from physical annihilation, the latter were looking for redemption from assimilation.56 In order to successfully cooperate, each party needed to respect the aims of

52 “Wenn Sie in Ahlem die Gartenbauschule besuchen, und dort die jungen Leute sehen, wenn sie vom Felde kommen, ihre Geräthe geschultert, so stehen Sie im Augenblick des ersten Ansehens vor einem physiognomischen Räthsel. Sie sehen die großen Kolleraugen der galizischen Juden, und trotzdem vermissen Sie etwas in den Zügen … diese Juden sehen, trotzdem sie Juden sind, nicht „jüdisch“ aus. Es ist der Landarbeitertypus! Diese Leute mit ihrem ruhigen, steten Blick, der von Abwesenheit von Nervosität zeugt, mit ihrem weit ausgreifenden Gang haben die sogenannte Rasseneigenthümlichkeit der Juden zum Theil verloren.” Oppenheimer, “Genossenschaftliche Kolonisation im Dienste der osteu- ropäischen Juden,” 1901, 258. 53 Oppenheimer, “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie,” 1969, p. 126. 54 Oppenheimer, “Sport,” 1901, 342–343. 55 Oppenheimer, Lebenserinnerungen, 1964, pp. 213–214. 56 The distinction between materielle Judennot and geistige Judennot was widespread among German Zionists and Oppenheimer was not alone in distinguishing between two different Zions. Poppel, Zionism in Germany, 1977, pp. 28–29.

FRANZ OPPENHEIMER: A PIONEER OF DIASPORIC ZIONISM 197 the other. Specifically, Oppenheimer insisted that the Zionists of Eastern Euro- pean creed respect the wishes of German Zionists to be in the movement without intending to immigrate, as their contribution of capital and “intelligence” was crucial for the successful transformation of the Ostjude into a “human being.”57 They would serve as technical managers, as “enlightened despots,” until their brethren were ready for self-administration.58 Kurt Blumenfeld remembers Oppenheimer making the distinction between the roles in a comment made to him at the Ninth Zionist Congress: “You must know, that Zionism is a project in which we direct and the Ostjuden must be the actors.”59 Oppenheimer’s differentiation between West- and Ostjuden was best articulated in his article “Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein” published in 1910, sparking a heated debate among German Zionists. While many first-generation German Zionists shared his views, the second generation pushed for dissimilation from Germany as well as a clear declaration of intent from all Zionists to immigrate to Palestine.60 Oppenheimer took a stand against this radicalization and asserted that, for the most part, German Jews could not become national Jews. Only Ostjuden could possess a Jewish Volksbewusstsein (“people consciousness”) based on a common language, shared customs, professions and a culture which could be transplanted to Palestine to create a new Jewish people. Western Jews could only possess a Stammesbewusstsein (“tribal consciousness”), a recollection of a magnificent past which is not inferior to current German culture.61 According to Oppenheimer, the Jews of Germany did not completely assimilate, because as culturally advanced as Germany was, it was still lagging behind America, England and France in its adherence to liberal values. To explain this, Oppenheimer divided the concept of Volksbewusstsein into the subcategories Kul- turbewusstsein (“cultural consciousness”) and Nationalbewusstsein (“national consciousness”), thus creating a modular and graded model of identity that was open to further forms of consciousness, e.g. Reichsbewusstsein (“imperial consciousness”). Even though educated German Jews were Western European in their Kulturbe- wusstsein, antisemitism in Prussia made it only a step-fatherland for German Jews, limiting their Nationalbewusstsein. In contrast, the extreme antisemitism in Eastern Europe made it impossible for an Ostjude to develop any Nationalbewusstsein besides a Jewish one. They also retained a Jewish Kulturbewusstsein, since their Jewish culture, according to Oppenheimer, was still more developed then the supposed barbarism of their immediate surroundings:

57 Oppenheimer, “Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein,” 1910, 142. 58 Oppenheimer, “Ländliche Kolonisation in Palästina,” 1909, 917. 59 “Sie müssen wissen, daß der Zionismus eine Aktion ist, bei der wir die Regie führen und die Ostjuden die Akteure sein müssen.” Blumenfeld, Erlebte Judenfrage, 1962, p. 52. 60 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1999, pp. 96–97. 61 Oppenheimer, “Stammesbewusstsein und Volksbewusstsein,” 1910, 139.

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We cannot be Jewish by culture because the Jewish culture, as it has been preserved from the Middle Ages in the ghettoes of the East, stands infinitely lower than modern culture which our [Western] nations bear. We can neither regress nor do want to. But it would be impossible for the Eastern Jews to be Russian or Rumanian. … They must be Jews by culture … for the mediaeval Jewish culture stands exactly as far above East European barbarism as it is beneath the culture of Western Europe.62 In a good prediction of the German-Jewish identity complex in the State of Israel, Oppenheimer argued that a German Zionist immigrating to the future society, once it has attained a higher cultural level, will adopt a Jewish Volksbewusstsein but will now possess a German instead of a Jewish Stammesbewusstsein.63 Even though Oppenheimer argued that Western Zionists act altruistically towards their brethren in the East, he saw in Zionism a potential for transforming not only the Ostjuden but also German Jews to an active force in world history, as aristocrats on an equal level with the antisemites slandering them. As a social engineer, Oppenheimer was seeking a collective redemption and not an individual one. The Zionist project should promote Jewish Stammesbewusstsein amongst German Jews without threatening their German Volksbewusstsein. Western Zionists were “thinking … about the good name of the old tribe that is today defiled and should be restored to glory through a national creation that will irrefutably prove the high cultural value of its blood to all haters and enviers.”64 Oppenheimer focused on Jewish history and pride to negotiate with majority society on opening up a space for the integration of Jews as a differentiated minority in Germany and Europe. As Solveig suggested “hybrid agencies … deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy.”65 The hybridity of German Volksbewusstsein and Jewish Stammesbewusstsein made him and other German Zionists members of a “race of bastards” leading the revolution of all oppressed starting with the Ostjuden. That Oppenheimer’s cause was universal was emphasized in his insistence on opening up Zionism for support from non-Jews. He was a founding member of the Ger- man “Pro-Palestine Committee” after the First World War, a lobby group whose

62 “Wir können nicht Kulturjuden sein, denn die jüdische Kultur, wie sie in den Ghetti des Os- tens aus dem Mittelalter herübergerettet ist, steht unendlich tief unter der neuzeitlichen Kul- tur, deren Träger unsere Völker sind. Wir können nicht rückwärts und wollen nicht rück- wärts; … Die Ostjuden aber können unmöglich Kulturrussen, Kulturrumänen … sein. … Sie müssen Kulturjuden sein … denn die mittelalterliche jüdische Kultur steht gerade so hoch über die osteuropäische Barbarei, wie sie tief unter der westeuropäischen Hochkultur steht.” Ibid., 140. Oppenheimer introduces Ottoman Reichsbewusstsein on p. 143. Translation and addition by Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1999, p. 97. 63 Ibid., 141. 64 “Sie denken … an den guten Namen des alten Stammes, der heute geschändet ist und der glorreich wiederhergestellt werden soll durch eine Volksschaffung, die den hohen Kultur- wert des Blutes vor allen Hassern und Neidern unwiderleglich beweist.” Ibid., 142. 65 Solveig, “Transdifferenz und Hybridität,” 2005, pp. 435–436.

FRANZ OPPENHEIMER: A PIONEER OF DIASPORIC ZIONISM 199 members were both Jewish and non-Jewish. In order to mediate a Jewish identity as a German hybrid to non-Jewish Germans, the “Committee for the East,” from which the “Pro-Palestine Committee” spawned, manipulated the image of the Ost- juden. Oppenheimer, one of the founders of the committee, rejoiced in his newly found acquaintance with German dignitaries of the likes of Paul von Hindenburg, to whom the committee now tried to tout Yiddish as a German dialect to prove their historical affinity with German culture.66

Conclusion

Oppenheimer was a utopian thinker with a plan for creating a world civilization in which local cultural identity would not be lost. His sovereign communities of the future would be small, multilingual and multiethnic, but united in a federation of communities with no hierarchical world government. In creating the first utopian community of the new world order, Zionism would prove to both Gentiles and Jews on the verge of assimilation that the once great Jewish nation had not lost its capability to be a historical player. In his Zionist activity, he was looking to provide a unique place in the future world for all Jews regardless of where they chose to live. With this ambition and his modular identity structure, Oppenheimer, who was famous as an intellectual pioneer of the Soziale Marktwirtschaft, was also a pioneer of thinking about diasporic Jewish identity in relation to a future Jewish homeland.

Works Cited

Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Blumenfeld, Kurt. Erlebte Judenfrage. Ein Vierteljahrhundert deutscher Zionismus. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1962. Buber, Martin. “Wege zum Zionismus.” Die Welt 51 (1901): 5–6. Buber, Martin. Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, Vol. 1: 1897–1918, ed. Grete Schaeder. Heidelberg: Lamber Schneider, 1972. Efron, John. Defenders of the Race: Jewish doctors and race science in fin-de-siècle Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Herzl, Theodor. Der Judenstaat. Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage. Munich: Manasse, 2006.

66 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 1999, pp. 157–160.

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Heschel, Susannah. “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy.” New Ger- man Critique 77 (1999): 61–85. Kressel, Gezel. Franz Oppenheimer. Zionist Activity and the Merhavia Cooperative during the Second Aliya. Tel-Aviv: Yavne, 1972 (Hebrew). Oppenheimer, Franz. “Sport.” Neue Deutsche Rundschau (Freie Bühne) 12 (1901): 337–361. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Genossenschaftliche Kolonisation im Dienste der osteuro- päischen Juden.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 22 (1901): 257–261. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Zionismus und Kosmopolitismus.” Die Welt 51 (1903): 1–5. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Ländliche Kolonisation in Palästina.” Die Welt 42 (1909): 913–918. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Stammesbewußtsein und Volksbewußtsein.” Die Welt 14 (1910): 139–143. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Die rassentheoretische Geschichtsphilosophie.” In Verhand- lungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages, vom 20.–22. Oktober 1912 in Berlin. Frankfurt a. M.: Verlag Sauer und Auvermann KG, 1969, pp. 98–139. Oppenheimer, Franz. “Bodenbesitzordnung in Palästina.” Der Jude 3 (1918/1919): 499–511. Oppenheimer, Franz. The State. Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically. 2nd edition. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922. Oppenheimer, Franz. Erlebtes, Erstrebtes, Erreichtes. Lebenserinnerungen. 2nd ed., ed. Ludwig Yehuda Oppenheimer. Düsseldorf: Melzer, 1964. Penslar, Derek J. Zionism and Technocracy. The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Pales- tine, 1870–1918. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Poppel, Stephen M. Zionism in Germany, 1897–1933. The Shaping of a Jewish Iden- tity. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977. Solveig, Mill. “Transdifferenz und Hybridität: Überlegungen zur Abgrenzung zweier Konzepte.” In Differenzen anders denken. Bausteine zu einer Kulturtheorie der Transdifferenz, ed. Lars Allolio-Näcke, Britta Kalscheuer, and Arne Manzeschke. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2005, pp. 431–442. Weingart, Peter, Juergen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz. Rasse, Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988. Zantop, Sussane. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Ger- many, 1770–1870. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

De-Orientalization of Jews after 1989 in Germany: The Relationship between Discourse and Subjects

Jihan Jasmin S. Dean

In the aftermath of the German “unification” and the fall of the Iron Curtain, we are facing a new discursive formation that hit its peak after the 9/11 attacks. Not orientalization, but rather the “de-orientalization” of Jews is arising: the myth of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of the Occident. This takes place in the context of European identity re/formation — an identity that is being constructed in opposition to Islam/the Orient. In this chapter, I want to address two sets of questions: 1. What impact did this discourse have on Jewish communities as early as in the 1990s? The “exclusionary incorporation”1 of Jews in the German society was accompanied by overt and violent exclusionary practices against “foreigners,” some of them also considered as “Orientals.” In this discourse, Jews have to be defined as “non-Orientals.” I would like to explore these tendencies in (1) memory politics (Jews as the collective, to which memory practices have to be targeted) and (2) migration politics (the quota refugee law for Jews from the former Soviet Union). 2. What about subject formation under these new conditions? How far have Jews been adopting the hegemonic discourse? Is there a tendency towards “self-de-orientalization”? I am going to use theories of subjectivation by Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler to identify the complex relationship between discourse and subjects. In order to show the different tendencies towards self- or self-de-orientalization, I will con- centrate on the more complex examples: (1) the “Jewish Cultural Association” (“Jüdischer Kulturverein,” abbreviated JCA), and (2) communities of post-Soviet migrants.

A Shift in Discursive Formations

Anya Topolski2 addresses the genealogy of the “Judeo-Christian” signifier and starts with a reference to Talal Asad.3 Asad reminds us that “until just after World War II, European Jews were marginal too, but since that break the emerging discourse of a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ has signaled a new integration of their status into Europe.”4 Similarly, Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar argue that in the course of the

1 Partridge, Hypersexuality and Headscarves, 2012, p. 21. 2 Topolski, “A Tale of Europe’s Identity Crisis by Way of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ Signifier,” 2016. 3 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 2003. 4 Ibid., p. 168. 202 JIHAN JASMIN S. DEAN twentieth century, “as a result of Jewish-Arab strife in the Middle East,” Jews are not seen as “Orientals” any more.5 They identify a “postcolonial period,” in which Jews became involved in the imperialist agenda. Ashkenazi Jews then were not the target of orientalism any longer.6 So the rise of the “Judeo-Christian” signifier must be seen in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as in the context of what Frank Stern called “postwar philo-Semitism.”7 Kalmar and Penslar also acknowledge that historically and even sometimes today, “Jews have been seen in the Western world variably and often concurrently as occidental and oriental.”8 The myth of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition became even more relevant after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the unification of the two Germanys. During the Cold War, the discourse of the “communist” or “socialist” East as backward and emotional versus the capitalist West as progressive and rational was hegemonic. Af- ter the decline of the so-called “Eastern Bloc,” especially in the course of the Gulf War of 1990–1991, a new discursive formation arose: Islam, or “the Islamic world,” became Europe’s new/old Other.9 We have to be aware of the shifting meanings of the terms East/West and Orient/Occident within these different contexts.10 Nation-building is always accompanied by a shift of borders between what is being included and excluded. In the course of the German unification, there has been an increased tendency towards the symbolic and material inclusion of Jews, while at the same time exclusionary elements remain. I am going to demonstrate this point by taking a closer look at two fields: migration politics and memory politics.

Exclusionary Incorporation of Jews in the 1990s

In the field of migration politics, Jews were treated differently than other groups. After an intervention by Jews from the German Democratic Republic in 1990, the last government of the East German state was the first to decide on the admission of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union. After a debate within the new all- German government in 1991, the so-called “quota refugee law” was adopted. It allowed for the mass immigration for anyone from the Soviet Union who could prove his or her Jewish ancestry. Why was there such a huge interest in the admission of post-Soviet Jews, while at the same time other asylum seekers and migrants were actively prevented from staying in Germany? The quota refugee law must be seen in the context of the German unification. It was needed in order to

5 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction,” 2005, p. xiii. 6 Ibid., p. xxxv. 7 Stern, Im Anfang war Auschwitz, 1991. 8 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction,” 2005, p. xiii. 9 Schulze, “Vom Anti-Kommunismus zum Anti-Islamismus,” 1991. 10 Stuart Hall has argued that “West” and “East” are geographic and above all historic constructs. Hall, “Der Westen und der Rest,” 1994. DE-ORIENTALIZATION OF JEWS AFTER 1989 IN GERMANY 203 prove that the new Germany had recovered from its genocidal past. Like one speaker in the parliamentary debate said: “In its hour of birth, the new German state should not reject those people, who have been persecuted and exterminated by the old state.”11 This was the precondition for the Allied agreement to a unification of the two Germanys. Therefore the German government took several steps in order to prove its reliability — one of them allowing the immigration of post-Soviet Jews, while at the same time it was possible to put an end to the generous post-World War II — and also Cold War12 — refugee policy.13 In the parliamentary debate on this issue, as Franziska Becker shows, fantasies also appeared about the revival of Jewish cultural life, symbolized by the recrea- tion of Jewish communities in Germany.14 Several authors have problematized this fantasy that is motivated by the desire to virtually undo the Shoa through fill- ing the gaps that it left. According to Karen Körber, the idea that Jews from the former Soviet Union would easily merge into the German-Jewish communities is driven by the discourse of multiculturalism — the belief that every “ethnic” group “has” its own unique and common culture.15 The fact was ignored that Jewishness in the Soviet Union meant something completely different from that in Germany: It was not perceived as a cultural-religious identity, but rather as a nationality in the Soviet sense of the term, as well as a visible biological feature — an aspect that Julia Bernstein points out.16 This hegemonic discourse, that ascribed cultural and religious belonging to post-Soviet Jews as well as belonging to the collective of Holocaust victims, often contradicted the self-perception of the Jewish migrants. This second expectation leads me to the field of memory politics. In the “new Germany,” another means to gain legitimacy was seen in memory practices that signaled a historical break with the genocidal past. In 1988, the first plans for the creation of a Holocaust Memorial were made by a group of non-Jewish Germans. From the beginning, it was exclusively intended for the murdered Jews. Despite interventions by the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, the German government took up the idea in its limited form. Every discourse tends towards simplifications, towards the construction of a single, catchy narrative. In this case, Jews are seen as the victims of Nazi persecution and therefore the collective at which memory practices have to be targeted. In order to maintain the narrative of the recovered German nation it is sufficient to address the Jews. This contains certain identity expectations and a standardization of the Jewish experience. Par- tridge also emphasizes, that the Shoa is being set as the standard for what should never happen again, which in turn means that other forms of violence and exclu-

11 Jüdische Allgemeine, November 15, 1990. Cited after Becker, Ankommen in Deutschland, 2001, p. 47. 12 Bade/Oltmer, Normalfall Migration, 2004, p. 106. 13 Partridge, “Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial),” 2010, 834. 14 Becker, Ankommen in Deutschland, 2001, p. 47ff. 15 Körber, Juden, Russen, Emigranten, 2005, p. 61. 16 Bernstein, Food for Thought, 2010, p. 280ff. 204 JIHAN JASMIN S. DEAN sion are acceptable. Therefore it is possible to maintain exclusionary racist and antisemitic practices, to establish new forms of the camp (the asylum camp), while at the same time denying contemporary racisms.17 The memorial is one example of that form of gathering legitimacy. In both fields — memory and migration politics — Jews were given an exceptional status, “Jewishness remains an exceptional subject position.”18 In the first case other victimized groups like the Roma and Sinti had to be excluded from this particular memorial. In the second case it was necessary to create a special law just for the immigration of Jews: the quota refugee law, that constructed post- Soviet Jews as a special category of refugees, a status that was not given to other refugee groups, e.g. to post-Soviet Roma, who were in a very similar situation in the Eastern European countries after the decline of the Soviet Union. The same argument of former Nazi persecution would also have been true for them, but Roma remain in the position of the Other and are still being orientalized.19 So how can we identify the status of Jews in the 1990s — right after German unification? Yasemin Soysal coined the term “incorporation regime”20 that appears in the form of an “administrative paternalism”21 that means the planning, regulation and institutionalization of inclusion processes. I draw here upon Par- tridge’s critical engagement with and modification of the concept: while migrant and minority communities on the one hand are incorporated, on the other hand they are excluded — subjected to a permanent process of “becoming noncitizens.” Partridge uses the term “exclusionary incorporation.”22 Post-Soviet Jews in the 1990s were on the one hand provided with an exceptional status — allowed to immigrate, privileged against other groups of refugees in their living conditions and protection from Nazi harassment — but on the other hand suspected as be- trayers, their Jewish identity was constantly questioned and so was their right to be in Germany. Also the central position that is assigned to Jews in the memory discourse is highly ambivalent, as is the postulate of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of Europe. On the one hand it is inclusive and offers recognition, on the other hand, Jewish presence is being relegated to the past. Furthermore Jews are being appropriated and made complicit in the exclusion of other violent histories or, as in the discourse of “Judeo-Christianity,” the exclusion of Islam.

17 Partridge, “Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial),” 2010, 827. 18 Ibid., p. 835. 19 Historically, Sinti and Roma have been orientalized in Germany in a very similar way to the Jews. Disciplines like anthropology and ethnology were busy to uncover their “true origin,” namely India, to explain their alleged “foreignness.” Leidgeb/Horn/Roma-Union Frankfurt, Opre Roma!, 1994, p. 16; Randjelović, “‘Zigeuner_in,’” 2011, p. 673. 20 Soysal, Limits of Citizenship, 1994. 21 Körber, Juden, Russen, Emigranten, 2005, p. 53. 22 Partridge, Hypersexuality and Headscarves, 2012, p. 21. DE-ORIENTALIZATION OF JEWS AFTER 1989 IN GERMANY 205

Ambivalent Subjectivities

Kalmar and Penslar identify three Jewish response strategies to orientalism: (1) complete rejection, (2) affirmation, which appears in the form of self- orientalization, and (3) introduction of an “internal orientalism,” an intra-Jewish division between traditional/“oriental” Jews and modern/“Western” Jews.23 Using theories of subjectivation by Bhabha and Butler I want to show how complex the relationship between discourse and subjects unfolds. These two theorists follow Michel Foucault in the way they conceptualize power, that is interwoven with discourse, as something not simply oppressive, but also productive in the sense that it produces subjects. According to Butler, the subject is dependent not only on the discourse, but also on other subjects and their recognition.24 The term “subjectivation” means subjection under the norms of a discourse and subject formation at the same time. Butler also uses the concept of interpellation that was first introduced by Louis Althusser. She modifies it in some relevant aspects. Not just authoritative figures like the policeman in Althusser’s example, but also discourses can be the source of interpellation.25 The act of interpellation also does not presume a subject that turns around to be constituted as such. We can also imagine a situation in which that subject is absent and does not even know in what form it is being addressed, or another situation in which the subject turns around, but just in order to protest, because the interpellation does not fit its self-perception by any means.26 To r e j e c t the interpellation is one form of agency, however it holds the risk not to be constituted as a subject and thus not to be recognized. This is also the reason why we sometimes prefer to be addressed in a negative form than not be addressed at all, because it provides at least any form of social and discursive existence.27 How can we conceptualize agency and especially the power of a subject to resist the hegemonic discourse or even to transform it? We can find similarities between the theories of discursivity, subjectivation and agency in Butler’s and Bhabha’s work.28 Both of them closely follow Foucault’s arguments. Bhabha is searching for transgression of the two following models: the idea of an autonomous and self- conscious subject (as used e.g. by Frantz Fanon), as well as the view that a subject is merely the effect of a discourse and has no agency (as used e.g. by Said). He asserts, that the hegemonic power itself is insecure and thus unintentionally enables resistance. Strategies that were intended for strengthening the hegemonic authority can be used for destabilizing this same authority, too.29 Both, Bhabha and Butler,

23 Kalmar/Penslar (eds.), “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction,” 2005, p. xviiiff. 24 Butler, Kritik der ethischen Gewalt, 2007, p. 35ff. 25 Butler, Hass spricht, 2006, p. 55ff. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 48ff. 28 See also Castro Varela/Dhawan, Postkoloniale Theorie, 2015, p. 245. 29 Ibid., p. 238. 206 JIHAN JASMIN S. DEAN assert that the purpose of power can be subverted.30 Both of them adopt the concept “reiteration” from Jacques Derrida, which means “repetition in context- dependent variation,” in order to depict the logic of language. Thus language is always unstable and can be redefined.31 Butler uses the term “performativity” for the principle how “reality” is constructed: institutions and discourses, including the norms contained therein, are not statical entities but have to be re/produced constantly. This is possible through permanent repetition and citation of these norms.32 The fact that norms have to be repeated again and again shows their in- stability and therefore openness for variation and reinterpretation. The most effective politics of resistance — in the eyes of both theorists — have not been counter- strategies but rather small interventions, slight changes or shifts. What does that all mean for the concept of self-orientalization? The discourse of orientalism cannot merely be “internalized.” Rather the subjectivity of Jews is constituted through that discourse. Against this backdrop I want to analyze two examples of Jewish subjectivation after 1989.

Subject Formation under the New Conditions

The Jewish Cultural Association

The Berlin-based JCA was founded in 1990 by Jews from the declining German Democratic Republic. While the Jewish community of East Berlin was absorbed by that of West Berlin, this particular group established its own association. The act is significant in one important point: It violated the principle of the German- Jewish “Einheitsgemeinde,” that had been effective since the end of the Second World War. Those East German Jews thus rejected their interpellation as potential members of the regular Jewish community and therefore their incorporation into a structure that was also suggested by the German state — despite the risk of not being recognized as a “proper” Jewish subject. But instead of completely rejecting a cultural-religious Jewish identity, they created something new, a third mode of Jewish existence in Germany. According to Alexander Jungmann, the JCA in this regard became a role model for several other Jewish activities.33 Like the acts of resistance in Bhabha’s analysis, the act of founding the JCA does not simply resemble counter-identification. Rather, it is an act of reiteration and thereby it contributes to a significant shift in the hegemonic as well as in the intra-Jewish discourse. Though not explicitly intended as an act of resistance by its members, the creation of the JCA was perceived as a provocation by many

30 Butler, Psyche der Macht, 2001, p. 20. 31 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994, p. 99. 32 Butler, Körper von Gewicht, 1997, p. 22. 33 Jungmann, Jüdisches Leben in Berlin, 2007, p. 465. DE-ORIENTALIZATION OF JEWS AFTER 1989 IN GERMANY 207 others. From the perspective of existing (West) German-Jewish communities, the adoption of the word “Jewish” in the name JCA was wrong, because lots of its members were not Halakhic Jews. The JCA members thus did not reject the interpellation as Jews, but reclaimed and redefined the identity “Jewish” and thereby challenged the norms of the intra-Jewish discourse. Following Butler, we begin to challenge the norms of an existing discourse, when we repeatedly are not being recognized under those norms or fail to recognize others.34 The JCA also particularly resembles the post-socialist condition — the cultural and religious estrangement from Judaism. In this respect the early JCA members had some commonalities with post-Soviet Jews. The JCA was also one of the first organizations that committed itself to the admission of Jews from the declining Soviet Union, directing a demand to the last government of the German Democ- ratic Republic in February 1990.35 Soon after the adoption of the quota refugee law, the JCA inherited a “pilot function”36 in the integration of post-Soviet Jews — it was the first to organize German language courses and common events, its publications were bilingual (in German and Russian). Throughout the 1990s, more and more post-Soviet Jews became members of the JCA. In 2004, the group was a co- founder of the “Migrationsrat Berlin-Brandenburg,” an umbrella of migrant organizations for the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Nevertheless, East German Jews remained to be the hegemonic force in the organization, as the most important positions were occupied by them.37 Boris Rosenthal was one of the few post-Soviet Jews who also held such a position for some time. In retrospect, he asserts that the JCA missed opening itself to the new members from the Soviet Union, who did not feel equal to the former members.38 So the JCA politics can been seen as an ambivalent practice. On the one hand it supported the migration process of post-Soviet Jews, was part of international net- works and formed alliances with other migrant and minority groups. However, on the other hand, in its attempt to include post-Soviet Jews it maintained exclusive patterns at the same time. Through its separation from the official Jewish community, its redefinition of Jewish identity, and its adherence to socialist ideas the JCA on the one hand takes the position of the “abjected” and thus orientalizes itself, but contributes to its own self-de-orientalization on the other hand, namely by ex- cluding the post-Soviet members from key positions, thereby reproducing practices deployed by the state.

34 Butler, Kritik der ethischen Gewalt, 2007, p. 36ff. 35 Runge, “Wunder und Zufälle,” 2009, p. 16. 36 Jungmann, Jüdisches Leben in Berlin, 2007, p. 466ff. 37 Ibid., p. 451ff. 38 Rosenthal, “So ist der Lauf der Dinge,” 2009, p. 70. 208 JIHAN JASMIN S. DEAN

Post-Soviet Jews

Post-Soviet Jews themselves were addressed as taken for granted future members of the German-Jewish communities and part of a collective of Holocaust victims.39 Thus, an exceptional subject position is offered to them; they are being in- terpellated as Jews and have the opportunity to accept or reject it, while the former promises recognition and the latter holds the risk of not becoming a subject. Some of them accepted this mode of existence and joined the Jewish communities, but most of them somehow contested it through adding elements of their former Russian identity — e.g. through the reinterpretation of May 8 by celebrating it as “Victory Day” in the Soviet tradition.40 Some stayed away from Jewish communities out of protest or disinterest.41 On the one hand, they were visible as a group through their legal status and collective housing, on the other hand, in interactions with non-Jews they often had the choice whether to call themselves Jews or Russians.42 There was another kind of interpellation within the everyday discourse: ordinary people often did not know the difference between post-Soviet German nationals43 and post-Soviet Jews, they subsumed them all under the term “Russians.” Bernstein found out that post-Soviet Jews tend to represent themselves as “Russians,” too. She explains this with the negative feelings most of them have regarding their Jewish identity. In the Soviet Union, Jewishness had nothing to do with culture or religion. It was conceptualized as a nationality that was registered in the passport. There was also the idea that Jewishness was a biological, primordial feature, with visible physical characteristics.44 In addition, they were subjected to everyday antisemitism as well as institutional discrimination, like for example their limited access to universities and certain jobs.45 These elements constituted an antisemitic discourse within that Jews were biologically racialized and because of the process of subjectivation also identified themselves as Jews in a biological sense. Thanks to the suppression as Jews the identity “Jewish” always remained important in the Soviet Union — Bernstein confronts the widespread idea, that Jewish identity was absent there.46

39 Körber, Juden, Russen, Emigranten, 2005. 40 Bernstein, Food for Thought, 2010, p. 329ff. “Victory Day” had been celebrated in the Soviet Union on May 9. 41 Ibid., p. 285. One reason for protest was that family members, whose Jewishness was passed over the patrimonial line, were not accepted as “real Jews” by German-Jewish communities. Different definitions of Jewishness clashed: The Jewish communities used a religious-cultural one in line with the Halakhah, while the Soviet definition had been biological, and included complexion as well as behavior. 42 Ibid., p. 305ff. 43 The German term that was officially used was “Spätaussiedler” (“late repatriates”). 44 Bernstein, Food for Thought, 2010, p. 280ff. 45 Ibid., p. 293. 46 Ibid., p. 39ff. DE-ORIENTALIZATION OF JEWS AFTER 1989 IN GERMANY 209

There are also ruptures within the hegemonic migration discourse — it also contains the permanent interrogation of the migrants’ presence. They were often confronted with the question why they had immigrated to Germany, which points in two directions: the living conditions in the former Soviet Union, including antisemitic harassment, and the decision for Germany as a decision against Israel. Be- hind this lies the essentialist assumption that Israel must be the country where they “really” belong — an understanding of religion, culture and nation that is also promoted by the Israeli government itself. Körber as well as Bernstein, found that some post-Soviet Jews answered the question why they did not migrate to Israel by establishing a clear boundary. They declared that Israel was an “Oriental state” with a hot and exhausting climate, difficult living conditions and permanent danger of war, while they themselves were Europeans.47 According to Bernstein, some of her interview partners also mentioned the “Oriental language,” Hebrew, that is being written from right to left, as foreign to them, as something they could not get used to.48 Their self-positioning as European or occidental must be seen in the context of the hegemonic discourse, which permanently challenges and contests their belonging, and orientalizes them by relegating them to Israel. By using the counter-argument, post-Soviet Jews try to justify their “right” migration decision. They de-orientalize themselves in order to be accepted as full members of the German society — a strategy that was not always successful as they very often remained to be seen first of all as Jews who belong elsewhere or as “Russians.”

Conclusion

As I showed in the first part of this chapter, the hegemonic discourse in Germany after unification shifted between incorporation and exclusion of the Jews. Since this discourse itself is highly ambivalent, also forms of reaction are ambivalent. Bhabha points to the fact that the hegemonic discourse itself and the enclosed stereotypes are highly ambivalent and that ambivalence is “one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power”49. Ambivalence ensures the currency and repeatability of stereotypes in changing historical and discursive conjunctions. Following Foucault’s notion of power as productive, he asserts that the ambivalent discourse also produces ambivalent subjectivities.50 In the second part of this chapter, I have shown these ambivalent practices within Jewish communities. Jewish individuals or groups used strategies that often transformed reality, but sometimes at the same time reinforced hegemonic discourses. Their practices can neither be regarded as pure resistance nor as pure affirmation. East German as well as post-Soviet Jews used strategies of reinterpreta-

47 Körber, Juden, Russen, Emigranten, 2005, p. 95; Bernstein, Food for Thought, 2010, p. 324. 48 Bernstein, Food for Thought, 2010, p. 398. 49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994, p. 66. 50 Ibid., p. 66ff. 210 JIHAN JASMIN S. DEAN tion regarding their interpellation as new members of the West German-Jewish communities. While the JCA was in a marginal position within the German society and in relation to the official Jewish community, it also produced its own “internal others” by remaining exclusive towards post-Soviet Jews — despite other intentions. The common socialist background was covered by the division between “Eastern” and “more Eastern” Jews, allowing the JCA leaders to maintain their power and the status quo. Some post-Soviet Jews, in turn, use orientalist stereotypes in order to claim their belonging to the German nation. This argument can be seen as an “internal orientalism” in the sense of the third response strategy suggested by Kalmar and Penslar. At the same time it resists exclusion from the national collective. Whether strategies of self-orientalization or self-de-orientalization can be regarded as subversive, depends highly on the context in which they occur. Following Butler, one single act can update and reinforce the subjection under power and resist it at the same time.51 From this perspective, complete rejection of a discourse is simply not possible. In this regard, I would like to complement the concept as suggested by Kalmar and Penslar, and argue that these processes are even more complex. A division between the three response strategies is in most of the cases not possible, as they occur simultaneously and overlap each other. For a future work with that concept I find it necessary to delve further into the topic of ambivalence.

Works Cited

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51 Butler, Psyche der Macht, 2001, p. 18. DE-ORIENTALIZATION OF JEWS AFTER 1989 IN GERMANY 211

Castro Varela, María do Mar and Nikita Dhawan. Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einführung. 2nd ed. Bielefeld: transcript, 2015. Hall, Stuart. “Der Westen und der Rest: Diskurs und Macht.” In Rassismus und kulturelle Identität, Ausgewählte Schriften 2, Stuart Hall. Hamburg: Argument, 1994, pp. 137–179. Jungmann, Alexander. Jüdisches Leben in Berlin. Der aktuelle Wandel in einer metropoli- tanen Diasporagemeinschaft. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007. Kalmar, Ivan D. and Derek J. Penslar. “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduc- tion.” In Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005, pp. xiii–xl. Körber, Karen. Juden, Russen, Emigranten. Identitätskonflikte jüdischer Einwanderer in einer ostdeutschen Stadt. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2005. Leidgeb, Ellen, Nicole Horn, and Roma-Union Frankfurt. Opre Roma! Erhebt Euch! Eine Einführung in die Geschichte und Situation der Roma. München: AG Spak, 1994. Partridge, Damani J. “Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial): Monumental Memory amidst Contemporary Race.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52.4 (2010): 820–850. Partridge, Damani J. Hypersexuality and Headscarves. Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Randjelović, Isidora. “’Zigeuner_in.’” In Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht. (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache. Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk, ed. Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard. Münster: Unrast, 2011, pp. 671– 677. Rosenthal, Boris. “So ist der Lauf der Dinge.” In WIR. Der Jüdische Kulturverein Ber- lin e. V. 1989 — 2009, ed. Ralf Bachmann and Irene Runge. Mannheim: Wellhö- fer, 2009, pp. 69–71. Runge, Irene. “Wunder und Zufälle. Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland bleibt ein Dauerthema.” In WIR. Der Jüdische Kulturverein Berlin e. V. 1989 — 2009, ed. Ralf Bachmann and Irene Runge. Mannheim: Wellhöfer, 2009, pp. 11–29. Schulze, Reinhard. “Vom Anti-Kommunismus zum Anti-Islamismus. Der Kuwait- Krieg als Fortschreibung des Ost-West-Konflikts.” In “Wir sind die Herren und ihr unsere Schuhputzer!” Der Nahe Osten vor und nach dem Golfkrieg, ed. Norbert Mattes. Frankfurt a. M.: Dağyeli, 1991, pp. 207–219. Soysal, Yasemin. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Stern, Frank. Im Anfang war Auschwitz. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus im deutschen Nachkrieg. Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte. Universität Tel Aviv. Bd. 14. Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1991. Topolski, Anya. “A Tale of Europe’s Identity Crisis by Way of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ Signifier.” In Is there a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective, ed. Anya Topolski and Emmanuel Nathan. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 267–284.

List of Contributors

C h r i s t i n e A ch i n g e r is Associate Professor of German Studies at the Univer- sity of Warwick (UK). During the academic year 2013–2014, she was a Research Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, and spent the winter terms 2009, 2012 and 2015 as a Visiting Scholar / Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in literary studies, critical social theory, the history of antisemitism, and the construction of gender, race, Jewishness and German national identity and their interrelations. Her publications include Distorted Faces of Modernity: Racism, Antisemitism and Islamophobia, New York: Routledge, 2015 (ed. with Robert Fine); European Societies 14: 2, 2012; Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben - Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild [Split modernity: Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit - nation, gender and the image of the Jew], Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Her current research project investigates the interrelations between ideas of Jewishness, gender and capitalist modernity in German culture between the Enlightenment and the early twentieth century in a series of case studies. Steven E. Aschheim is Professor Emeritus of Cultural and Intellectual His- tory at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He was the Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre for German Literature and Cultural and Intellectual History at Hebrew University. He has spent sabbaticals at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley; the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and in 2002–2003 was the first Mosse Exchange Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Research interests: European Cultural History, German-Jewish-History and Literature. He is author of numerous books on German and Jewish history over the last thirty years, including Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923, 1982; The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, 1992, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperere: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times, 2001, Hannah Ar- endt in Jerusalem, 2001; Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Intellectual Legacy Abroad, 2007. His writing regularly appears in publications such as The Times Liter- ary Supplement and Ha'aretz. He has also held visiting professorships at such schools as Columbia, the University of Michigan, and Trinity College Dublin. U l r i k e B r u n o t t e is Associate Professor at the Center for Gender and Diver- sity (Maastricht University, the Netherlands), and since 2013 has chaired the international research network ReNGOO “Gender in Orientalism, Occidentalism and Anti-Semitism,” (www.rengoo.net). In 2008 she became adjunct professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Brunotte earned her PhD in religious studies at the Free University Berlin, and her professorial qualification (Habilitation) in cultural studies at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Research interests: colonial history, Orientalism and anti-Semitism, history of knowledge and religion, gender studies, postcolonial studies, ritual theory. Publications include: Orientalism, Gen-

214 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS der, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses (with Ludewig and Stähler), 2015; Das Wissen der Dämonen. Gender, Performativität und materielle Kultur im Werk Jane E. Harrisons, 2013; Masculinities and Modernity, 2008; Zwischen Eros und Krieg. Männerbund und Ritual in der Moderne, 2004; Puri- tanismus und Pioniergeist. Zur Faszination der Wildnis im frühen Neu-England, 2000. J i h a n J a s m i n S . D e a n obtained a diploma in Social Science from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2006 and worked as a lecturer in Gender Stud- ies, Educational and Political Science in Bielefeld and Berlin. Currently she is a PhD student in Contemporary History at Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung (Technische Universität Berlin) and Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies (FRCPS). She is working on a dissertation about individual and collective processes of subjectivation within several racialized communities in Germany since 1989. Research interests include: migration, diaspora, gender, postcolonial- ism, oral history, and discourse analysis. Gabriele Dietze is Research fellow in a VW project “Sexual Exceptionalism” at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. After habilitation diverse visiting professorships in the United States, Switzerland and Austria, and recently, 2009–2015, fellow in the research network “Kulturen des Wahnsinns” of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Fields of research: gender studies, critical race- and migration studies, cultural studies, history of knowledge and psychiatry. Related publications: Metropolenzauber. Sexuelle Moderne und Urbaner Wahn um 1900. (Metropolitan Enchantment. Sexual Modernism and Urban Mad- ness) Introduction, edition with Dorothea Dornhof. Köln: Böhlau 2014; Kritik des Okzidentalismus. Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)-Orientalismus und Geschlecht. (Cri- tique of Occidentalism. Neo-Orientalism and Gender). Introduction and edition together with Claudia Brunner and Edith Wenzel, Bielefeld, transcript 2009, 2nd edition 2011); Feministischer Orientalismus und Sexualpolitik — Spuren einer un- heimlichen Beziehung. (Feminist Orientalism and Sexual Politics) In: ‘Beyond Impe- rialism’ — Diesseits der Imperialen Geschlechterordnung, Karin Hostettler, Sophie Voegele (eds.), Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, 241–276. Hildegard Frübis is Lecturer (Privatdozentin) at the Humboldt University Berlin. She completed her PhD with the Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen in 1993 (Die Wirklichkeit des Fremden. Zur Entdeckung Amerikas in den Bildprägungen des 16. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Reimer 1995). Subsequently she was a research assistant at the Faculty for Cultural Sciences, University of Tübingen, and from 1996 to 1997 postdoctoral fellow at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt a. M. From 1998 until 2004 she was assistant professor at the Seminar for Art History, Humboldt University Berlin; there she habilitated with a work to Max Liebermann and his illustrations to Heinrich Heines “Rabbi von Bacherach.” From 2004 to date she has held several visiting professorships in art history, gender and Jewish studies

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 215 in Germany (Hamburg, Frankfurt a. M., Tübingen u.a.) as well as in Vienna and Graz. Currently she has a research fellowship of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. O f r i I l a n y studied history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University, where he completed his doctorate, titled “In Search of the Hebrew People: Bible Research in the German Enlightenment.” The study examines the role of the Hebrew model in the formation of German national culture. Currently he is a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. D e k e l P e r e t z is currently a fellow of the Walther Rathenau Kolleg affiliated to the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam and is an associate of the Berlin-Brandenburg Center of Jewish Studies. His dissertation with the title “In Search of Europe: Franz Oppenheimer’s Nation-Building, Zion- ism and Utopia” focuses on questions of race, science, nationhood and colonial fantasies amongst German Jews during the imperial era. He is author of Franz Op- penheimer. Wegbereiter der sozialen Marktwirtschaft together with Elke-Vera Kotowski, Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, 2016. Mirjam Rajner is a senior lecturer in the Jewish Art Department of Bar-Ilan University and one of the editors of Ars Judaica, The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art. Her research and publications deal with the reassessment of Marc Chagall’s early artistic period and with the “peripheral” art created in Central, East and South- East Europe by artists of Jewish origin, active during the nineteenth century, the interwar period and the Holocaust. Presently, she is completing the book Fragile Images: Jews, Art and Wars in Yugoslavia, 1918-1945 and working, together with Prof. Richard Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on a monograph re- examining the art and life of the Polish-Jewish artist Samuel Hirszenberg. Her interest in Jewish artists’ self-orientalization includes as well the article Orient in Jew- ish Artistic Creativity: the Case of Maurycy Gottlieb’s Self-Portrait in Arab Dress, to be published in Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society, ed. Richard I. Cohen, Stud- ies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 30, 2017. C h r i s t i n a S p ä t i is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Uni- versity of Fribourg, Switzerland. In 2001–2002, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin and in 2008–2009 at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada in Montréal. Her research focuses on processes of dealing with the National Socialist past, anti- Zionism, antisemitism and Orientalism, language politics in multilingual states, and 1968 in Western Europe, with a particular emphasis on Switzerland. Her publications include: Language and Identity Politics: A Cross-Atlantic Perspective, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2015 (ed.); Sprache als Politikum. Ein Vergleich der Schweiz und Kanadas seit den 1960er Jahren, Augsburg: Wissner, 2015; Imaginaries of the Other: Past and Present Expressions of Islamophobia, Special Issue Patterns of Preju- dice 48.5, 2014 (ed. with Damir Skenderovic and Daniel Wildmann); Die 1968er Jahre in der Schweiz. Aufbruch in Politik und Kultur, Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2012 (with

216 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Damir Skenderovic); Die zweisprachige Universität Freiburg. Geschichte, Konzepte und Umsetzung der Zweisprachigkeit 1889-2006, Freiburg: Academic Press, 2009 (with Urs Altermatt); Die schweizerische Linke und Israel. Israelbegeisterung, Antizionismus und An- tisemitismus zwischen 1967 und 1991, Essen: Klartext, 2006. Cecilie Speggers Schrøder Simonsen is External lecturer at the De- partment of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, Denmark. She obtained her PhD at Roskilde University in 2016. Her work approaches an understanding of modern Jewish spaces by exploring the cultural significance of home in nineteenth-century Western European sources. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth-century Western European art, music and literature, particularly Euro- pean-Jewish literature such as ghetto literature, historical novels and village tales. Recent publications: “A Spatial Expansion of a Pocket-Size Homeland. Heinrich Heine’s Construction of Jewish Space,” Partial Answers, 2016; “Between Nostalgia and Utopia: The Construction of Jewish Cultural Space in Early Nineteenth- Century Europe,” Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe (with Jakob Egholm Feldt) (ed. by Hannu Salmi, Asko Nivala, Jukka Sarjala), Routledge, 2016; “Den Jødiske Forbindelse: En ny vurdering af Theodor Herzl og zionismens tilknytning til jødisk kultur i 1800-tallet” (with Jakob Egholm Feldt), Historisk Tidsskrift, 2015. A x e l S t ä h l e r is Reader in Comparative Literature in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has published widely on Jewish writers from the Anglophone and German-speaking diasporas and from Israel as well as on representations of the Holocaust, fundamentalism and literature, the eighteenth-century novel, and early modern festival culture. Among his most recent publications are The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (2015; co-edited with David Brauner); Writing Jews and Jewishness in Contem- porary Britain (2015; co-edited with Sue Vice); Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews (2015; co-edited with Ulrike Brunotte and Anna-Dorothea Ludewig); and edited collections of articles on Jewish Magic Realism (2013) and on Anglophone Jewish Lit- erature (2007) as well as a monograph on literary constructions of Jewish postcolo- niality in fiction on the British Mandate for Palestine (2009). His current research concentrates on the interface of Zionist, race, and colonial discourses in early twentieth-century German-Jewish literature and culture. K a r i n S t ö g n e r, PhD, teaches social theory at the University of Vienna. From 2009 to 2011 she was Marie Curie-Fellow at the Central European University, Bu- dapest; between 2013–2014 Schrödinger-Fellow at Lancaster University and Georgetown University, Washington DC. In 2016 she was Visiting Professor for Critical Theory at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen. Recent book publications: Antisemitismus und Sexismus. Historisch-gesellschaftliche Konstellationen, Nomos 2014; Religion, Säkularisierung und Geschlecht (with K. Bischof and F. Oberhuber), Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung 2014.

Plates

PLATES 219

Das Volk desDas Volk Georg Landsberger. Georg Landsberger. , München: Georg Müller, 1916 (archives of (archives 1916 Georg Müller, München: , Ghetto the author). cover, Fig. 2. Book

, Das Ghettobuch Das Fig. 1. Book cover, Georg Landsberger. Georg Landsberger. cover, Fig. 1. Book of the author). 1914 (archives Georg Müller, München: 220 PLATES

Fig. 3. Max Liebermann, Kischinew, Lithography, 1914, Kriegszeit, no. 5/1914, Berlin: Verlag Paul Cassirer (archives of the author). PLATES 221

. Berlin 1922 (Fou- Das ostjüdische Antlitz ostjüdische Das . Arnold Zweig, . Arnold Jewess Portrait Struck. Fig. 5. Hermann Struck. Hermann of the rier 1988),author). p. 109 (archives

. Arnold Zweig, Her- . Arnold Jewess

Portrait Struck. Fig. 4. Hermann Antlitz. Berlin 1922 (Fourier ostjüdische Das mann Struck. of the author). 1988), p. 101 (archives 222 PLATES

. Berlin 1922 (Fourier 1988), p. 1988), 1922 (Fourier Berlin . Das ostjüdische Antlitz ostjüdische Das Struck. . Arnold Zweig, Hermann Jewess 110/111 (archives of the author). of the 110/111 (archives Portrait Struck. Hermann Fig. 6. PLATES 223

, Roth- Ost und West und Ost Lea als trauernde ‚Tochter Zion’ ‚Tochter Lea als trauernde schildschule in Jerusalem. Photography. Jerusalem. in Photography. schildschule Fig. 8. Anonym, author). of the Jg. VII,column 350 (archives 1907,

. Juda . Prinzess Sabbath herr von Münchhausen, herr von Münchhausen, Buchschmuck von E. M. Lilien, Berlin: Lattmann, Buchschmuck of the author). 1900 (archives Gesänge von Borries, Frei Lilien. Ephraim Moses Fig. 7. 224 PLATES

Fig. 9. Moritz Oppenheim, Temptation, 1844, oil on canvas, 56 × 42 cm, © Historisches Mu- seum Hanau, Schloss Philippsruhe PLATES 225

Fig. 10. Moritz Oppenheim’s Masonic Passport, The National Library of Israel, Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Arc. Ms. var. 388/2 226 PLATES

Fig. 11. Franz Pforr, Shulamit and Maria, 1811, oil on wooden panel, 34,5 × 32 cm, © Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt PLATES 227

Fig. 12. Moritz Oppenheim, Abraham’s Family (oil sketch for now lost painting), 1821-1822, oil on cardboard, 18,5 × 15,5 cm, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Bequest of Alfred N. Op- penheim, London, Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Avshalom Avital

228 PLATES

Fig. 13. Johann David Passavant, The Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and John the Baptist, 1818-1819 oil on canvas, 136,5 × 99 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, © U. Edelmann – Städel Museum-ARTO- THEK

Fig. 14. Moritz Oppenheim, Moses Presenting the Ten Commandments, 1827, oil on canvas, 18 × 24 cm, © Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt PLATES 229

Fig. 15. Moritz Oppenheim, Design for a Centerpiece for Sir Moses Montefiore, 1840-41, ink and pen on paper, 16,8 × 11,6 cm, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Bequest of Alfred N. Oppen- heim, London, Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Sara Kopelman-Stavisky 230 PLATES

Fig. 16. Horace Vernet, Mathilde and Malek Adhel, 1817, lithograph, 17,4 × 25,2 cm, © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Felix Man Collection, Special Govern- ment Grant 1972

Fig. 17. Moritz Oppenheim and Philip Veit, Riesser and Oppenheim Painting Himself, 1840, pencil on paper, 25,5 × 36,2 cm, Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York DISKURS RELIGION BEITRÄGE ZUR RELIGIONSGESCHICHTE UND RELIGIÖSEN ZEITGESCHICHTE ISSN 2198-2414 Herausgegeben von Ulrike Brunotte und Jürgen Mohn

1 | Luiselli, Maria Michela – 6 | Hermann, Adrian – Mohn, Jürgen – Mohn, Jürgen (Hrsg.) Gripentrog, Stephanie (Hrsg.) Orte der europäischen Kult und Bild. Die bildliche Dimension Religionsgeschichte des Kultes im Alten Orient, in der 2015. 528 S. mehr. Abb. Fb. € 75,00 Antike und in der Neuzeit ISBN 978-3-95650-077-0 2013. 245 S. 63 Abb. Fb. € 39,00 ISBN 978-3-89913-957-0 7 | Brunotte, Ulrike Helden des Todes. Studien zur Religion, 2 | Brahier, Gabriela – Ästhetik und Politik moderner Johannsen, Dirk (Hrsg.) Männlichkeit Konstruktionsgeschichten. 2015. 230 S. Fb. € 35,00 Narrationsbezogene Ansätze ISBN 978-3-95650-087-9 in der Religionsforschung 2013. 428 S. 14 Abb. Fb. € 58,00 8 | Trein, Lorenz ISBN 978-3-89913-945-7 Begriffener Islam. Zur diskursiven Formation eines Kollektivsingulars und 3 | Brunotte, Ulrike zum Islamdiskurs einer europäischen Dämonen des Wissens. Gender, Wissenschafts- und Religionsgeschichte Performativität und materielle Kultur 2015. 197 S. Fb. € 32,00 im Werk von Jane Ellen Harrison ISBN 978-3-95650-132-6 2013. 288 S. 14 Abb. Fb. € 42,00 ISBN 978-3-89913-960-0 9 | Bigalke, Bernadett Lebensreform und Esoterik um 1900. 4 | Egeler, Matthias Die Leipziger alternativ-religiöse Szene Perspektiven aus dem Reich der Toten. am Beispiel der Internationalen Gedanken zu einem etruskischen Theosophischen Verbrüderung Felsengrab, der Religionsästhetik und 2016. 579 S. Fb. € 75,00 der historischen Religionswissenschaft ISBN 978-3-95650-143-2 2014. 206 S. 33 Abb., 2 Tab. Kt. € 34,00 ISBN 978-3-95650-051-0 10 | Lehmann, Karsten – Jödicke, Ansgar (Hrsg.) 5 | Kühler, Anne – Hafner, Felix – Einheit und Differenz in der Mohn, Jürgen (Hrsg.) Religionswissenschaft. Interdependenzen von Recht Standortbestimmungen mit Hilfe eines und Religion Mehr-Ebenen-Modells von Religion 2014. 197 S. Fb. € 32,00 2016. 233 S. Fb. € 39,00 ISBN 978-3-95650-068-8 ISBN 978-3-95650-142-5

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11 | Leege, Oliver 13 | Ulrike Brunotte – Jürgen Mohn – Walter F. Ottos Studie »Dionysos. Christina Späti (Eds.) Mythos und Kultus«. Antike-Forschung Internal Outsiders – Imagined Orientals? und moderne Kultur Antisemitism, Colonialism and Modern 2016. 285 S. Fb. € 44,00 Constructions of Jewish Identity ISBN 978-3-95650-209-5 2017. 230 S. 17 Abb. Fb. € 48,00 ISBN 978-3-95650-241-5 12 | Gripentrog, Stephanie Anormalität und Religion. Zur Entstehung der Psychologie im Kontext der europäischen Religionsgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts 2016. 331 S. 15 Abb. Fb. € 48,00 ISBN 978-3-95650-174-6

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