The Other Jewish Question

This book examines how modernizing German-speaking cultures, undergoing their own processes of identification, responded to the narcissistic threat posed by the continued persistence of Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) by representing the Jews bodyor rather parts of that body and the techniques performed upon them. Such fetish-producing practices reveal the question of German-identified modernity to be inseparable from the Jewish Question. But Jewish-identified individuals, immersed in the phantasmagoria of such figurationsin the gutter and garret salon, medical treatise and dirty joke, tabloid caricature and literary depiction, church faade and bric-a-brac souvenirhad their own question, another Jewish Question. They also had other answers, for these physiognomic fragments not only identified the Jew but also became for some Jewish-identified individuals the building blocks for working through their particular situations and relaying their diverse responses. The Other Jewish Question maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among these corporeal signifiers in Germanophone cultures between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. Its analyses of ascribed Jewish physiognomy include tracing the gendered trajectory of the reception of Benedict Spinozas correlation of Jewish persistence, anti-Semitism, and circumcision; the role of Zopf (braid) in mediating German GentileJewish relations; the skin(ny) on the association of Jews and syphilis in Arthur Dinters antisemitic bestseller Sin against the Blood and Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf; as well as the role of Jewish corporeality in the works of such Jewish-identified authors as Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin, as well as such Jew-identifying writers as Ludwig Feuerbach and Daniel Paul Schreber. The Other Jewish Question portrays how Jewish-identified individuals moved beyond introjection and disavowal to appropriate and transform this epidemic of signification to make sense of their worlds and our modernity.