Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823275595
- eISBN:
- 9780823277148
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823275595.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), ...
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Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), this work asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers employ such figures in their narratives and poems? Bringing together Jewish cultural studies (examining how Jews have negotiated Jew-Gentile difference) and critical animal studies (analyzing the functions served by asserting human-animal difference), this monograph focuses on the writings of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. It ferrets out of their nonhuman-animal constructions their responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted. Along with close textual analysis, it examines both personal and social contexts of each work. It explores how several writers attempted to subvert the identification of the Jew-animal by rendering indeterminable the human-animal “Great Divide” being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations as well as how others endeavored to work-through identifications with those bestial figures differently: e.g., Salten’s Bambi novels posed the question of “whether a doe is sometimes just a female deer,” while Freud, in his case studies, manifestly disaggregated Jews and animals even as he, perhaps, animalized the human. This work also critically engages new-historical (M. Schmidt), postcolonial (J. Butler and J. Hanssen), and continental philosophic (G. Agamben) appropriations of the conjunction of Jew and animal.Less
Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), this work asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers employ such figures in their narratives and poems? Bringing together Jewish cultural studies (examining how Jews have negotiated Jew-Gentile difference) and critical animal studies (analyzing the functions served by asserting human-animal difference), this monograph focuses on the writings of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. It ferrets out of their nonhuman-animal constructions their responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted. Along with close textual analysis, it examines both personal and social contexts of each work. It explores how several writers attempted to subvert the identification of the Jew-animal by rendering indeterminable the human-animal “Great Divide” being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations as well as how others endeavored to work-through identifications with those bestial figures differently: e.g., Salten’s Bambi novels posed the question of “whether a doe is sometimes just a female deer,” while Freud, in his case studies, manifestly disaggregated Jews and animals even as he, perhaps, animalized the human. This work also critically engages new-historical (M. Schmidt), postcolonial (J. Butler and J. Hanssen), and continental philosophic (G. Agamben) appropriations of the conjunction of Jew and animal.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823275595
- eISBN:
- 9780823277148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823275595.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, ...
More
This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, identified, and denigrated by non-Jews—and maps the historical and theoretical contexts for both these puzzling deployments and the efforts at making sense of them. It situates the socio-political Jewish Question in Germanophone lands, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society. It points out how the need to render purported Jewish difference visible drew upon natural history—the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human—as mediated by the Bestiarium Judaicum. It provides an overview of contemporary theoretical and historical engagements with the Question of the Animal and with the representation of human (animals) as (nonhuman) animals. It then turns to how the scholarly literature has inadequately examined the associations of Jews and Animals, the Jew-Animal, and instead proposes to turn critical attention to the Jew-as-Animal—how Jewish-identified writers appropriated and reworked these Jew-Animals and gave voice to the Jewish animot. It briefly discusses several of the strategies that are elaborated in subsequent chapters.Less
This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, identified, and denigrated by non-Jews—and maps the historical and theoretical contexts for both these puzzling deployments and the efforts at making sense of them. It situates the socio-political Jewish Question in Germanophone lands, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society. It points out how the need to render purported Jewish difference visible drew upon natural history—the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human—as mediated by the Bestiarium Judaicum. It provides an overview of contemporary theoretical and historical engagements with the Question of the Animal and with the representation of human (animals) as (nonhuman) animals. It then turns to how the scholarly literature has inadequately examined the associations of Jews and Animals, the Jew-Animal, and instead proposes to turn critical attention to the Jew-as-Animal—how Jewish-identified writers appropriated and reworked these Jew-Animals and gave voice to the Jewish animot. It briefly discusses several of the strategies that are elaborated in subsequent chapters.
