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Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body, and Incest

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Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body, and Incest Chapter 3 Carnal Jews of the Fin-de-Siècle: Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body, and Incest “The secret of Jewry lies in the fact that there exists what is purely Jewish, pure-blooded Jewish, and around it a ‘skin’ of other peoples that is judaized with incredible speed. In the world now there is not a single people completely free of Jewish blood, and there is Jewry with blood that is absolutely unmixed. So there are Jews, half-Jews, quarter-Jews, fifth-part Jews, hundredth-part Jews and so on. And every year every people increases its percentage of Jewish blood, i.e. has its original identity diluted” Pavel Florensky, 1913.1 “Evil tongues were saying that [Rozanov] was smitten by his step- daughter and at the same time ‘up to his ears’ in love with his wife” Alexandre Benois.2 Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919), the controversial turn-of-the-century writer and philosopher, can be regarded as the first ideologue of body politics in Russia in general, and of the Jewish body in particular.3 Rozanov created his own generic brand of the philosophy of the body, a brand that he termed his “sermon of sex” (132).4 He chose the Jew’s body as an exemplary body, one that could be studied as an exhibit because of its long history of physical survival. He saw this body as rudimentary and archaic, and defined his mission of sex as part of the struggle between Christianity and Judaism: “Further denial of sexuality by Christianity will lead to the increase of Jewry’s triumphs. This is why the start of my sermon of sex is ‘so timely’”(132). The twenty-year span of Rozanov’s work on human sexuality was marked by alternating periods of attraction to Jews and Judaism and fervent Judeophobia. This protracted schema of acceptance/rejection involved an identification with the exotic Other, the separation of the Self from this Other and the transformation of the Other into an object of loathing and rejection.5 As a constant theme in Rozanov’s work, the subject of incest serves to illustrate these dynamics of this prolific writer’s interaction with the issue 6464 Carnal Jews of the Fin-de-Siècle: Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body and Incest of the Jewish body and sexuality. Indeed, ideas about incest form a structure around which Rozanov builds his entire politics of Jewish sexuality.6 This chapter discusses Rozanov’s manipulation of incest as a marker of Jewish sexuality, and his fluctuating evaluation of this category of behavior. It puts Rozanov’s approach into the context of those theories on incest held by authors contemporary to him, both Jewish (Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank) and non-Jewish (Edward Westermarck), and explores the formative influences underlying Rozanov’s quasi-political, subjective views. In order to understand Rozanov’s obsession with Jews it is necessary to consider the general racist mode of Russian fin-de-siècle discourse. Russian philosophers and theologians such as Nikolai Berdiaev (1874– 1948) and priest-theologian Father Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), as well as the highly influential adventuress of a theosophical bent, Madam Elena Blavatsky (1831–1891), all articulated racist views on Jews.7 The writings and teachings of each of these personalities reflected the turn-of-the-century preoccupation with race. Berdiaev saw a link between Karl Marx’s Jewish origins and the materialism of his method and the materiality of Jews;8 Florensky was preoccupied with the eschatological advantages of the Jews as the only chosen people who were guaranteed physical resurrection; and Blavatsky expressed her preferences for Aryan people over Jews, whom she considered to be relics of obsolete root races.9 The philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) put forward the concept of “sacred corporeality” (45) as a characteristic of Jews in response to the ideas prevalent in popular European culture on the materialism of Jewry.10 Whereas popular antisemitic myths linked Jewry with a disposition towards material accumulation, and looked for an explanation for this in Judaism, Soloviev “theoreticized” this view with the intention of finding a scientific explanation for the Jewish “national character.” He stressed Israel’s concern for bodily cleanliness, manifested in the ritual observance of washing and kosher practice, and the metaphysical intensity of Jews’ preparation for life beyond the grave in trying to ensure not only clean souls, but also clean flesh: “One may say that the whole religious history of the Jews was directed towards preparing for the God of Israel not only holy spirits, but also holy bodies” (45). In Soloviev’s writing Jews become “people of the body”.11 Rozanov himself was influenced by biological sciences to a much greater extent than these mystically inclined personalities of his day. This is evidenced by his original research interests in the field of natural sciences and philosophy. His first voluminous work O Ponimanii: opyt issledovaniia prirody, granits i vnutrennego stroeniia nauki kak tsel’nogo znaniia (On Understanding: A Study of Nature, Science’s Limits and Its Internal Structure 6565 Chapter 3 as Holistic Knowledge [1886]) was written as a formal treatise providing an overview of the scientific literature and opinions on the topic of cognition in the physical world, and was an attempt to systematize knowledge of natural phenomena and metaphysics. His interest in academic scientific discourse cannot, therefore, be undermined or disputed. An overview of Russian biological and anthropological science reveals that in the context of the late nineteenth-century Russian empire with all its numerous nationalities, it was Jews that, mutatis mutandis, exemplified the very notion of race. As one researcher points out: “When one talks about the presence of the racist discourse in the politics of the Russian Empire (as well as racism in science and culture), as a rule, one has in mind racial antisemitism of the turn of the nineteenth century, i.e., the notion of ‘race’ in the Russian context is linked in one way or another to the notion of the ‘Jews’” (116).12 Scientific discourses represented the Jews as a primitive people who had managed to evade the forces of acculturation in their various places of residence and so survive the “civilizing” influence of Christian culture. The parallels drawn between the Jewish body and that of a “tribal savage” meant that, for the purposes of study, Jews in Europe were regarded as valuable examples of a primitive and unrestrained sexuality.13 As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi demonstrates in Freud’s Moses (1991), the association between biology and the “nature” of Jews was so pervasive in European racial science that even Jewish physicians and psychoanalysts such as Freud and Rank felt compelled to address the biological aspects of Jewish “nature” as a serious topic in their work.14 In the literature known to Rozanov, the notion of the excessive sexuality of the Jew, signifying a diseased body and psyche, was widely disseminated, particularly in the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Accusations of Jewish involvement in sex crimes and the prostitution trade prompted the belief that this supposed excessive sexuality was a force that must be restrained.15 Rozanov’s politics of the Jewish body, however, were much more complex. He was attracted to the idea of a Jewish sexuality in his search for rudimentary and atavistic phenomena; he held to the belief that Jewish bodies had an inherently mystical quality because, thanks to their ethnic purity, Jews were the surviving remnant of a time when bodies were created in the likeness of the body of God. In his arguments against the hierarchical separation between celestial and earthly bodies, and his belief in the transcendental nature of sex/ sexuality (transtsendentnyi kharakter pola), as seen in Brak i khristianstvo (Marriage and Christianity),16 he maintained that the very essence from which sexual organs (“that place”) was made was not of a “phenomenal” but of “supra-natural” (sverkhestestven) and even cosmic origin: 66 Carnal Jews of the Fin-de-Siècle: Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body and Incest Quite often, the thought occurred to me, and still occurs to me, that the very “clod of earth” from which that place is made has a totally different origin from the other parts of the body (this is why, during the usual, phenomenal time and with the usual eye, we cannot even look at it) and it is to other parts of the body the same as iron from a meteorite is to ordinary iron. (Marriage and Christianity, 119) Alongside Rozanov’s interest in religion and metaphysics, and his unusual consideration of the Jewish body as a special, metaphysical one, there is also present an anxiety around the contamination of this body that would stand in the way of the Jews’ eschatological mission. If, in Rozanov’s view, Florensky was right about the Jews’ eschatological mission (that Jews will have literal physical resurrection), then Jews as the chosen people had to remain in their original physical form until the Day of the Last Judgment.17 Any contamination of Jews’ bodies with non-Jewish blood would therefore spoil the plan of Providence. Incest and the Jews as a Theme in Scientific Discourse In his seminal studies on the perception of Jewish sexuality in the work of turn-of-the-century European thinkers, Gilman established that incest is one of the most significant of all the sexual perversities that have been assigned to Jews in (quasi-)scientific discourses. Whereas criminal statistics reveal a very low incidence of incest among Jews, Gilman shows that a belief in the incestuousness of Jews was remarkably persistent in the forensic and anthropological literature of the time. This can be partly explained by the fact that Jewish levirate marriages, (i.e., the marriage between a man and the widow of his dead brother who has died childless),18 as well as marriages between first cousins, were viewed as examples of brother-sister incest.
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