Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society) (Volume 8) - Softcover
Synopsis
In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis―studious, family-oriented―as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.
Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards.
Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.
Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel, this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (California, 1993) and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (California, 1994). Chapter 5 of Unheroic Conduct, "Freud's Baby, Fliess's Maybe; Or, Male Hysteria, Homophobia, and the Invention of the Jewish Man," received the Crompton-Noll Award of the Modern Language Association Gay and Lesbian Caucus.
From the Back Cover
"Daniel Boyarin's work has been instrumental in opening a way for me into Jewish thinking, Jewish history, and Judaism itself. . . . His is a thoroughly dazzling intellect: a scholar, a critical and political thinker, a wit, and a wonderful, passionate writer." ―Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America
"Few commentators on the vexed issue of Judaism and gender bring as much passion, courage, and audacity to their work as does Daniel Boyarin. . . . Whatever his or her religious and sexual identity, the reader of Unheroic Conduct cannot fail to be touched by the explosive power of what Boyarin impishly calls 'Jewissance.'"―Martin Jay, author of Downcast Eyes
"Whether citing the ancient Sage Johanon, taking issue with the Zionist Theodor Herzl, or approving the feminist Bertha Pappenheim, Boyarin invites his readers into a lively, generous, and often humorous debate. Here Orthodox Judaism is both celebrated and transformed." ―Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Women on the Margins
From the Inside Flap
"Daniel Boyarin's work has been instrumental in opening a way for me into Jewish thinking, Jewish history, and Judaism itself. . . . His is a thoroughly dazzling intellect: a scholar, a critical and political thinker, a wit, and a wonderful, passionate writer." Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America
"Few commentators on the vexed issue of Judaism and gender bring as much passion, courage, and audacity to their work as does Daniel Boyarin. . . . Whatever his or her religious and sexual identity, the reader of Unheroic Conduct cannot fail to be touched by the explosive power of what Boyarin impishly calls 'Jewissance.'" Martin Jay, author of Downcast Eyes
"Whether citing the ancient Sage Johanon, taking issue with the Zionist Theodor Herzl, or approving the feminist Bertha Pappenheim, Boyarin invites his readers into a lively, generous, and often humorous debate. Here Orthodox Judaism is both celebrated and transformed." Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Women on the Margins
"Few commentators on the vexed issue of Judaism and gender bring as much passion, courage, and audacity to their work as does Daniel Boyarin. . . . Whatever his or her religious and sexual identity, the reader of Unheroic Conduct cannot fail to be touched by the explosive power of what Boyarin impishly calls 'Jewissance.'" Martin Jay, author of Downcast Eyes
"Whether citing the ancient Sage Johanon, taking issue with the Zionist Theodor Herzl, or approving the feminist Bertha Pappenheim, Boyarin invites his readers into a lively, generous, and often humorous debate. Here Orthodox Judaism is both celebrated and transformed." Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Women on the Margins
Reviews
Boyarin (Talmudic culture, Berkeley) argues that modern Jewish culture has assimilated the macho male ethos of Western civilization. The result is the creation of the "muscle Jew," which divorces Jewish men from their emphasis on study, prayer, and gentleness. Ironically, in an effort to counter the anti-Semetic image of the so-called "Jewish wimp," Jewish men have abetted a process of internal colonization of Jewish culture by mainstream Christian culture and have adopted the anti-Semites' aggressive heterosexuality. Boyarin advocates a re-creation of the early Jewish male culture, based on the Talmud, which did not see inherent virtue in sports or aggressive behavior, and which he believes also lacked homophobia. In the process, he hopes traditional Jewish culture can also re-create itself without resorting to misogyny. A provocative work that will inspire controversy; strongly recommended for Judaica collections.?Frederic Krome, Northern Kentucky Univ., Highland Heights
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Unheroic Conduct
Rise Heterosexualtiy Invention Jewish MaBy Daniel BoyarinUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1997 Daniel BoyarinAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520210509
Goyim Naches
Or, the Mentsh and the Jewish Critique of Romance
Long live war. Long live love. Let sorrow be banished from the Earth.
Giuseppe Verdi, The Sicilian Vespers
I begin with a story, indeed one of the initiatory stories of modernity. In The Interpretation of Dreams , Sigmund Freud reports the following event from his early childhood:
At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show how much better things were now than they had been in his days. "When I was a young man," he said, "I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap and shouted: 'Jew! get off the pavement!'" "And what did you do?" I asked. "I went into the roadway and picked up my cap," was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.1
With all that has been written about this text connecting it with Freud's individual psychology, I think it has not been sufficiently em-
Freud, Interpretation , 197.
phasized how emblematic the story is of a historical moment, the parallel shift of Jews from "traditional" to "modern" and "eastern" to "western," and the ways that both are intimately implicated in questions of male gender. Freud's anecdote is, accordingly, not merely autobiographical but historiographical, and it will serve as the specimen text for this disquisition.
The historical shifts are, with Freud's characteristic rhetorical brilliance, indicated with deft and subtle strokes in the text. First of all, there is the signal that a historical shift is at stake in the father's declaration that he is about to tell a story that will indicate how much "better things are now." Second, there is the indication of the shift in space. The incident took place in "the streets of Freud's birthplace," that is, in the eastern place from which the Freuds had come to Vienna. Third, there is the indication that Freud's father had been, at that time, a very traditional Jew. He was wearing the shtreimel , the Sabbath fur hat of the East European Hasid, an emblem in Freud's world of the unreconstructed primitive Ostjude , the eastern or, particularly, Polish Jew2 (see Plate 2). All of these cultural forces are explicitly concatenated with issues of masculinity within the text. Freud's father, "a big, strong man," behaves in a way that Freud experiences as shameful, and Freud seems to know, although he does not explicitly say, that this "passivity" had to do with his father's Jewishness. The specificities of the incident reported by Freud are highly significant as well. The hat was certainly for him a symbol of the phallus. In at least two places in The Interpretation of Dreams , in which this story is reported, Freud writes as much explicitly.3 Thus, whether or not it is "true" that the hat symbolizes male genitalia, for Freud it was certainly the case. He would have interpreted this incident, then, as sexually as well as politically emasculatingcastratingfor his father, the paradigmatic traditional Jewish male.4
In fact, as Martin Bergmann has noted, the "feminine" response of Freud's father in this incident was not "unheroic" but antiheroic and indeed traditionally Jewish: "A Jew was expected to be able to control his anger, not to be provoked; his feelings of inner dignity were sustained by a belief in his own spiritual superiority which a ruffian and a
This point had been earlier remarked by Ernst Simon and otherwise ignored (and obscured by Freud himself) in the quite voluminous literature on this moment in Freud's texts (Simon, "Sigmund," 271).
Freud, Interpretation , 35556, 36062.
McGrath, Freud's , 64.
Plate 2.
Jew Wearing the Traditional Fur Hat. Selbstbildnis , 1920, by Lazar Krestin.
(Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.)
'Goy' can in no way touch."5 For traditional Jewry there were both alternative civilities, Edelkayt , and alternative paradigms of "manliness" that could be summed up in the relatively modern term mentsh .6 Edelkayt , which means "nobility," was a counter-ideal to many of the markers of the noble in romantic culture, in that its primary determinants within the culture were delicacy and gentleness, not bravery and courtliness.7
The behavior of Freud's father in the hat incident is the quintessence of Edelkayt . Marc Kaminsky has isolated two aspects in the construction of the mentsh . These two aspects, which to a certain extent pull in different directions, are both nevertheless significant and need equal attention:
Mentsh , as cultural ideal, proposes an ideal of person that is purportedly genderless, a norm to which both genders have to adhere. Now, we are accustomed to thinking of such ideals as erasures of difference, in which women were subordinated. No doubt this is an important line of analysis to follow and work through. But to let this monological concept monopolize interpretation would be a mistake. There are two points to be made. Within a certain ongoingness of tradition, exalted gender-free ideals are a starting point upon which conventional notions of the differences between genders are set to work in a scale of values that subordinates women. But the second point is more important for your project. The concept of mentsh in modern
Bergmann, "Moses," 12.
Marc Kaminsky argues that this term functions as a secularization and universalization of the traditional termJew ("Discourse," 29899)! For a relatively early usage of the term in a religious context, one could cite the following statement of the late nineteenth-century Lithuanian Rabbi Israel Salanter: "The Maharal of Prague, of blessed memory, created a golem. It is a great wonder, but it is far more wondrous to transmute the nature of the materiality of Man and to make out of it a mentsh " (Goldberg, Israel , 210). (Throughout this book, I shall be using Yiddishistic transcriptions of Yiddish words, such as mentsh , not Mentsch; Edelkayt , not Edelkeit , etc.) In a book that appeared too late to be integrated in any serious way into the present work, George L. Mosse has discussed the peculiar development of the "manliness" ideal since the first half of the eighteenth century, that is, the development that was ultimately to put so much pressure on the ideal of Edelkayt (Mosse, Image ).
At the same time, I should emphasize (following remarks to me by Marc Kaminsky) that this sermiotics, while reversing the definition of noble masculinity current in the European culture, nevertheless, maintains the class coding of the term. In other words what this culture takes to be noble may have shifted, but there is still a hierarchy whereby a privileged class gets to embody the cultural ideal. Furthermore, it should be added very clearly that, once more, while the cultural ideal is a reversal and contestation of European notions of the manly, it also explicitly leaves gender hierarchy in place, since the ignorant, virile, strong, and economically active male is frequently derided as being like a woman [Yiddene! ] in this culture (Weissler, "For Women"). In a future project, I hope to delineate Jewish responses to the chivalrous ideology at three crucial historical points: Rome and its ideals of andreia , the medieval period and chivalry proper, and the neochivalry of modern European manliness, for which see Mosse, Image , 18, 23, and throughout. For softness and delicacy as effeminate, see Mosse, 9.
Yiddish culture exalts an ethics of the household, of the extended family, of the sphere of the domestic, and, from the purview of the masculinist ideals of the alien cultures in which [Ashkenazi] Jews lived, refigured the feminization of Jewish men in ways that secular Jewish men had to be conscious of.8
Without vitiating critique of the subordination of women that Kaminsky as a feminist male properly emphasizes, he is correct, moreover, to maintain that we need to spotlight at the same time the consequence of the second, the ways in which Yiddishkayt , that is, Ashkenazi secular culture, exalts for men an "ethics of the household and a sphere of the domestic" as a secular continuation of the rabbinic opposition to European romantic "masculinism." The paradoxical role of Yiddish can be read as exemplary of this dual movement, for on one hand Yiddish was explicitly marked as the language of female spacesthe kitchen and the marketplace9 but on the other hand, it was the vernacular of the quintessentially male space of the Study-House. The texts were in "masculine" Hebrew, but the language of study was in the "feminine" Yiddish, thus marking the intimate connection between the Yeshiva-Bokhur male ideal (the later mentsh ) and the domestic and female.10
The Westernization process for Jews, clearly then not to be simply identified with modernization tout court ,11 was one in which mentsh as Jewish male ideal became largely abandoned for a dawning ideal of the "New Jewish Man," "the Muscle-Jew," a figure almost identical to his "Aryan" confreres and especially the "Muscular Christian," also born at about this time.12 Reversing the cultural process by which the late antique Jewish male and the Christian religious male got their self-definition in opposition to prevailing imperial modes of masculinity, in the Victorian era both of these groups sought to conflate their masculinity with that of "real men."13 I shall be concentrating here, of course, on
Kaminsky, letter.
Parush, "Readers," 5; Seidman, Marriage , 80.
While I have emphasized here Yiddishkayt, that is, Ashkenazi secular culture, it should not be understood as if I intended to exclude modern Sefaradic or Eastern Jewish culture. These simply must be made the object of study in their own right from this historical and theoretical perspective before any similar conclusions can be drawn.
Pace Cuddihy, as discussed below.
D. E. Hall, Muscular Christianity; Nordau, "Muskeljudentum ."
See Mosse, Image , 49, and literature cited there for the problems that Evangelical Christians had with manliness, including being vilified as effeminates. This was the background to the formation of "Muscular Christianity" just as the description of Jewish men as effeminates was to inspire "Muscle-Judaism." See also Garber, Vested Interests , 21114. For an extraordinary reading of Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness as a Christian rewriting of Othello , see Fletcher, Gender , 10912.
the Jewish side of this history, on the process that I refer to as "the invention of the Jewish man." Central to the concerns of this chapter as a whole is the notion of goyim naches , which might be translated as "games goyim play," a sometimes "racist" term of opprobrium for European Christian culture and its "masculine" values such as war-making, dueling, and adulterous courtly love affairs that end in Liebestod .14
Goyim Naches?
RUDOLPH : Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make you kaput, Leopoldlebkhen. You watch them chaps.
BLOOM : (Weakly.) They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I slipped.
RUDOLPH : (With contempt.) Goim nachez.
James Joyce, Ulysses
In what I take as the most brilliant moment of a brilliant and highly influential (if disturbing) book, John Murray Cuddihy has also contributed to our understanding of the significance of the "hat incident" for Freud's thinking.15 This formative moment involved a father who was
For an eloquent discussion of some of these cultural entailments, see Kopelson, Love's , 2027.
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 5057. For a lengthier consideration of Cuddihy's book, see D. Boyarin, "Ipater ." Other writers also simply assume western European bourgeois social patterns as a norm against which others are seen as anomalous. In a very revealing moment, Madelon Sprengnether writes: "Looking at Freud's own preoedipal phase in Freiberg, for instance, we find a family structure that differs significantly from the one that characterized his subsequent years of development in Vienna. Freud appears to favor the latter, more conventional model a preference that has the effect of displacing or repressing questions regarding his mother's desire" (Spectral Mother , 13; emphasis added). This formulation is typical of a whole series of statements about Freud's parents in the critical literature that treats his family as an anomaly. The Viennese bourgeois nuclear family structuredominant father, passive motheris depicted as "the more conventional" in contrast to a traditional East European Jewish family structureactive mother, passive fatherwhich is marked then as "unconventional" with seemingly no questioning of who gets to own "convention." Furthermore, we will have to interrogate the very terms "active" or "dominant" and "passive" in this context, for they themselves represent a reading of Jewish family life from a European perspective. Robert Holt also, in an otherwise stimulating paper, refers to Jakob and Amalie Freud as "an atypical couple in that their actual personalities reversed a number of standard sex-typed expectations. In certain key ways, Freud did share his parents' characteristics, probably on the basis of fantasied incorporation or identification. Yet his conscious, verbalized ideas about what was male, what female, are transparently derived from general cultural sources and bear tittle relation to the traits of his own parents" (Holt, "Freud's" 1, emphasis added). Since the contrast drawn is between the seemingly singular characteristics of Freud's parents and "general culture," there is apparently no recognition that this "standard" and "general" set of expectations is itself culturally specific and culturally constructed. Kaminsky implicitly answers such writers when he describes his project as an attempt to "link the psychological and cultural formation of East European Jews in a description that translated the experience-near norms and terms of 'the cultural other' into 'our' experience-distant concepts without losing cultural difference in the translation; that is, without subtly stigmatizing and pathologizing alien ways of being, thinking, and acting, but rather taking them as the ground for a shift in evaluative perspective that crucially entailed renouncing the claim to universality of Western psychological ideas" ("Discourse," 29495). Kaminsky's work is, moreover, a beautiful demonstration of the capacity of a psychoanalytic theory of the psyche to grow beyond its universalistic (and scientistic) originsappropriate in its nineteenth-century provenienceand comprehend cultural diversity as an essential, intertwined, part and parcel of self-formation. Cf. also Hoberman, who writes, "This mutually critical dialogue between male groups would be better known if the traditional historiographical emphasis on German and Austrian opinions about Jewish deficiencies had not obscured contemporary Jewish critiques of the Germanic male type" ("Otto," 147). But of course, this "obscuring" is typical of the occlusion of the critique of colonizers by the colonized.
forced off the road because he would not stand his ground like a man.16 In the story that becomes foundational for Freud's thinking of gender, the Oedipus story, a father who refuses to be dislodged from a road is the center of action. By imagining himself as Oedipus, then, Freud gained a father he could respect, Laius, who stood his ground like a man and was killed for it. Laius, the "Aryan," even more than Hamilcar, the "Jew," was ultimately the father that Freud would have had.17
Cuddihy, however, writes from a position that fully accepts the mystifying European notion that there is only one civilization and only one civility, that of Protestant Europe.18 Knowing nothing of eastern European Jewish literature or "high" culture, of Edelkayt or the mentsh , he
Marc Kaminsky has drawn my attention to the topical character of this encounter, the scrimmage in the street between one who in the past had the right to force others into the gutter and an antagonist who will no longer suffer this, and thus paradigmatic for modernization tout court . Berman (All That Is Solid , 21719, a reference I owe to Kaminsky) has provided some marvelous discussion of this topos as it appears in an obscure Russian novel of 1863. Even more striking is the example from Dostoyevsky's The Underground Man , discussed by Berman (22128), wherein what is crucial in marking the Underground Man as a "'new man,' a 'man of the sixties,' is his desire for a head-on clash, an explosive encountereven if he turns out to be the victim of the encounter." Dostoyevsky (and Berman) raise this virtual cliche to the status of "primal modern scene" (Berman, 229), as it functions for Freud.
For Hannibal as a Jew in Freud's mind, see Interpretation , 196. Sprengnether's reference to the period of Freud's life in Freiberg as "preoedipal" takes on new meanings and new ironies as well. (See also Pellegrini, "Without You," for some more fascinating evidence linking Freud's developmental narratives with cultural differences of EastJewsand West.) For the "Aryanness" of the Oedipus complex, see no less an authority than Bronislaw Malinowsky who writes: "The complex exclusively known to the Freudian school, and assumed by them to be universal, I mean the Oedipus complex, corresponds essentially to our patrilineal Aryan family with the developed patria potestas , buttressed by Roman law and Christian morals, and accentuated by the modern economic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie" (quoted by Walton, "Re-placing," 777).
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 99.
imagines an Ostjude constructed more or less in the image known from the Borscht Belt. He thus accepts Freud's arraignment of his father as dishonorable and, moreover, produces an account of Freud's whole life as an attempt to escape the "coarseness" of the traditional Jewish culture. He sets up a stark binary opposition between the "modern" which is civil and the premodern which is then necessarily uncivil. In 1908 Freud wrote a letter to Karl Abraham in which he imparted that he had been in Berlin for twenty-four hours and been unable to see him and wished him not to misunderstand this as a sign of disfavor. Cuddihy glosses this passage by saying, "[T]o make oneself accountable for one's appearances before strangers is the first step to social modernization."19 Cuddihy finds it impossible, apparently, to imagine that an East European Jew (which he interprets Freud to have been) would have had "native" traditions of thoughtfulness to draw on. The Galician Jew, as a member of a "primitive" culture, could not possibly have cared that an associate might have been hurt through a misunderstanding.
What Cuddihy seems unable to imagine is that the conflict is not between the uncivil and the civil but between alternative and different civilities, that the cultures of the "East" and the past maintained their own civilities. One of the clearest instances of Cuddihy's "Orientalism" involves someone who will be the "heroine" of the final chapter of this book, the first psychoanalytic patient, "Anna O." Cuddihy describes Anna O.'s reticence on certain occasions as a result of the fact that "she wanted to be polite" (emphasis added) and then explicitly characterizes this as "a far cry from being polite."20 True politeness is clearly in his view something only a civilized person (read "Protestant") is capable of. Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), like Freud in the Abraham incident, only desires to appear polite. She and he could not possibly be sincerely motivated here, as the Protestant would be, by her "interiority and internalization."
The grand irony of Cuddihy's writing, and the reason it is finally so revealing, is that he naively (or perhaps not so naively) accepts the evaluation of East European Jewish culture that was current among the "evolved" Jews of western Europe (not to mention West European non-
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 42.
His own situation as an Irish Catholic lends a certain (partly represented) pathos and irony to the discourse. For a trenchant analysis of the complicity between the Parsonian sociology that Cuddihy espouses and the "liberal Protestant narrative" cum Spencerian racist evolutionism, see Milbank, Theology , esp. 126 and passim.
Jews), assumes its complete accuracy, and then interprets the discomfort of the West European Jews as a reasonable reaction to their "genuine" East European origins. This analysis provides the basic term for Cuddihy's account of Freud's theories of sexuality, which are summed up by his outrageous "the id of the 'Yid' is hid under the lid of Western decorum (the 'superego')."21 Hid under the lid of this droll formulation is a doubly Orientalist fantasy: the Jew as Oriental and eastern Europe itself as the Orient, the site of Dracula and his brethren: "Dracula may not officially have been one of those horrid inbred Jews everyone was worrying about at the time Stoker wrote his novel, but he came close, for he was very emphatically eastern European, and hence, like du Maurier's 'filthy black Hebrew,' Svengali (Trilby, du Maurier, 52) a creature who had crawled 'out of the mysterious East! The poisonous Eastbirthplace and home of an ill wind that blows nobody good."'22
All of the theoretical problems of his (and their) bizarrely reified notions of traditional premodern, shtetl Jewish life show up in the following crucial representation of Cuddihy's, in which Jews, like women, manage to be both crude animals and "puritans" at the same time:
Freud paid scant attention to sexual foreplay. It either maneuvered the partners toward orgasm, or it was perversion. To Freud's shtetl puritanism, forepleasurelike courtship, essentially, or courtesywas a form of roundaboutness, of euphemism. To play with sexual stimulation, to postpone the intense end pleasure of orgasm, was a form of goyim naches , of games goyim play, endlessly refining themselves. Freud had a choice here. If the rules of that game genuinely transformed the old coarse "fuck" into something "rare and strange," then he, Freud was missing out on something. "They" were experiencing something he wasn't. He, most of the time, bore a grudge against their claim.23
There is something truly grotesque in Cuddihy's claim that "[i]n bourgeois-Western lovemaking, foreplay'love play'foreshortens the ritual of courtly love into the space-time requirements of the bourgeois bedroom," from which it follows, according to him, that if "Freud and his psychoanalytical heirs make short shrift of the 'rules' of courtly love," and Judaism has no patience for these rules either, then this ade-
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 29.
Dijkstra, Idols , 343, and see also 335.
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 70.
quately explains an alleged Freudian disdain for foreplay.24 This "ritual of courtly love," however, was essentially a prescription for adultery, that is, for a sexual ideology that understood "love" to be the polar opposite of the intimacies of the coupled life. Is there, in fact, any evidence that Austrian gentiles engaged in more or different foreplay than Galician Jews did?25 " The term goyim naches refers to violent physical activity, such as hunting, dueling, or warsall of which Jews traditionally despised, for which they in turn were despisedand to the association of violence with male attractiveness and with sex itself, not to foreplay.
Thomas Luxon has reminded me of several examples from English literature within which images of warfare, and rape, are central to valorized descriptions of male "love," such as Phillip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" and John Donne's "Batter My Heart." As Luxon stunningly remarks, "Violence is foreplay in the misogynist imaginary."26 High European culture indeed invented romantic and courtly love, essentially misogynist formations,27 but not foreplay, if the latter we understand to be simply techniques used by partners to excite each other in preparation for intercourse, and not a reduced bourgeois form of courtly love. Thus, just for example, we find the following bit of talmudic advice to wivesa father is speaking to his daughter: "When he takes the pearl in one hand and the furnace in the other, show him the pearl and not the furnace, until you [plural] are suffering, and then show it to him," which Rashi, the eleventh-century French talmudic commentator, forthrightly glosses as: "When your husband is caressing you to get ex-
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 72.
Has Cuddihy made any attempt to learn anything at all about the prescriptions for foreplay that Jewish culture insists on, going back to the Talmud? The Talmud even explicitly permits oral and anal intercourse between husbands and wives, acts that Freud would presumably regard as "perversions," operating as he is, in part at least, with the teleological assumptions about sexuality that were current in his day. For the talmudic material and its ambivalences, see my Carnal Israel , 10922.
Luxon, letter. For romance as mystification of rape, see Gravdal, Ravishing , 4271. Once more, I refer to Havelock Ellis, who, according to Siegel, held that "men whose deepest sexual desire does not involve dominance of women must be in some way physically deficient" (Siegel, Male , 59). And as Anthony Fletcher remarks (following David Turner), "[M]en were described as aggressive, hunting creatures, lions and greyhounds, while women are described as prey to be hunted, as deers [sic ] or hares, or to be tamed and used in men's service as horses." And even more significantly, "Studies of church court records are revealing male sexual behaviour which is entirely consonant with all this material" (Gender , 94). Discourse is significant!
Fletcher, Gender , 9293; R. H. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny ; Gravdal, Ravishing , 1112.
cited for intercourse, and he holds your breast in one hand, and your vulva in the other, give him access to your breast, in order that his passion will be great, and not quickly to your vulva, in order that his passion and affection will be great, and he will feel suffering, and then give him access to it" (Babylonian Talmud Shabbath 140b). It is interesting to note the sexist shift in the axis of the discourse from the Talmud to Rashiin the former the desire sought is mutual, in the latter only the husband's is relevantbut it is certain that neither the Talmud nor this French Jewish contemporary of courtly lovers was ignorant or disdainful of foreplay and even of its "sweet suffering."28
To be sure, courtly love with its conventions (honored in the breach perhaps?) of chaste adultery would have seemed silly and immoral to Jews like Rashi, just as romantic notions of "love at first sight" did to their nineteenth-century descendants.29 In the process of "modernization," Westernization, and embourgeoisement, the "inability" of Jews to appreciate romance was considered a mark of the great deficiency of their culture. As John M. Hoberman so perspicaciously puts it with reference to typical Viennese thinking of the fin de sihcle: "Why, for example should the Jews' abstention from violent crime be a liability? How could their devotion to family life be a defect of character? What is implied in the claim that Jews are estranged from nature? Why does [Otto] Weininger allege that the Jews lack 'vibrancy'?"30 An antisemite wrote in 1911 that "[t]he Jews' whole being is opposed to all that is
For other relevant texts, see D. Boyarin, Carnal Israel , 12225.
Efron (Defenders, 66 ) cites the Jewish anthropologist Joseph Jacobs who explains the high incidence of cousin-marriages among Jews as being the product of "the absence of any ideal of pre-nuptial love." This is not a claim about all Jews everywhere, of course, but about the dominant, hegemonic strains of Jewish culture. For intriguing evidence of Jewish awareness of the discourse of romantic, courtly love and even the possibility of its impact on traditional medieval Jewish life, see D. Biale, Eros , 6367 and notes there. Particularly fascinating is a text that Biale cites (7273) from the medieval pietistic work, Sefer Hasidim , which seems to be partially imitative of the discourse of courtly love. It is significant, however, that even there, the practice is cited only to condemn it. There was at least one later Jew, moreover, who engaged in practices somewhat similar in form (although different in ethos) to "courtly love." Leib Melamed was a radical mystical figure of eighteenth-century Poland who reported of himself that he was alone with a naked woman lying on a bed, who wanted him to sleep with her, but that he only contemplated her beauty until a "spirit of holiness came upon him." The mystic concluded that "therefore it is proper for a man when he sees a woman to have great desire for her, but nevertheless not to have intercourse with her, but rather to contemplate her and look at her intensely and he will pass the test and rise to great heights" (D. Biale, 126). I think I would be justified in referring to this as an exception that proves the rule. Even the radical pietists of the Hasidic movement were opposed to figures such as Leib Melamed (D. Biale, 130).
Hoberman, "Otto," 143.
usually understood by chivalry, to all sentimentality, knight-errantry, feudalism, patriarchalism ."31 In light of contemporary demystifications of the ideology of "romantic love," not to mention "knight-errantry, feudalism, patriarchalism," and in light of feminist demonstrations of its extreme misogyny incognito as regard for womenof the defining moment of romance being "the cultural habit of conceptualizing male violence against women as a positive expression of love"32 we need no longer continue such misrecognition of an asset as a defect.
Far from being a continuation of courtly love, there is much in post-Reformation European companionate marriage33 as opposed to the medieval Christian forms of marriage that predated itthat is similar to, and maybe even partly dependent on, for good or ill, talmudic marriage ideology as lived in medieval and early modern Judaism, in marriages such as Glikl's (see below). In this context, it is important to emphasize the growing Protestant condemnation of wife-beating in the seventeenth century and after.34 This similarity includes the estimation of foreplay, a practice entirely unlike the pseudocourtesies of courtly love, and one designed, after all, to increase mutual pleasure in the actual consummation of normatively married love, not in its deferral. (It is not for nothing that even today marriage is frequently represented as the endi.e., destruction, not telos of romance.)35 If we look for the successors to "courtly love," we find them perhaps in the modern rituals of adultery, as well as in the notion that married partners must inevitably ultimately find sex with each other unexciting. These are not "facts of nature" but inheritances of the culture of romance. Official Judaism indeed had no room for such "refinements"although the story of unofficial interactions of Jews and romance, as a genre and a culture from the Middle Ages on, remains to be told.
Cuddihy quotes Ernest van den Haag: "Love as 'an aesthetic exhilaration and as a romantic feeling' ... never made much of a dent on Jewish attitudes towards the body or towards the opposite sex. Love as
Werner Sombart, quoted in Hoberman, "Otto," 147, emphasis added.
Gravdal, Ravishing , 20.
Fletcher, Gender , 15472.
Fletcher, Gender , 118; but see the rather harrowing material cited there as well; see also chapter 4.
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest includes a telling reference to this topos: "ALGERNON . I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over" (Wilde, Importance, 3 ).
'sweet suffering' was too irrational. If you want her, get her."36 The quotation from van den Haag represents perhaps the silliest statement ever made about traditional Jewish culture. What on earth could "If you want her, get her" mean? Per chance: "Hit her over the head with your club and drag her to your cave"?37 In traditional Jewish upper-class culture the process of finding a spouse involved the efforts of a matchmaker who sought to discover a suitable pairing. Both members of the potential couple, after having met the "intended" or even "fated" one, had the absolute right to refuse the match. God himself was understood in Jewish folklore to pick out appropriate partners for people even before birth; indeed, according to the Talmud this is what God does for a full third of his time. How does such a pattern, only sketched out here, get translated into "if you want her, get her" as an imputed Jewish cultural ideal? As far back as the Bible, we are informed that after Isaac's father had picked out a wife for him, "[h]e took her into his tent and he loved her."38
A much truer generalization would be that traditional Jewish culture did not make the dualistic split between the body and the spirit that enabled such culturally peculiar practices as the adoration of unconsummated loves between men and women. Love is understood to be profoundly connected with and enhanced by the physical intimacy of the (always married, of course) lovers as well, including both the intimacies of living together and of intercourse.39 It is not love that is goyim
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 72.
Altogether, the idea of serious scholarly works turning to a vulgar popularization such as van den Haag's as a major source of information on traditional Jewish culture is simply staggering. As an example of the level of this book, I quote the following: "'Jewish girls are the world's most boring women,' a friend of mine who is something of a Don Juan recently remarked to me. 'They keep telling me that I'm not interested in their minds. They have a point, but when I tell them I'm interested in them as women, they burst into tears. Why don't they want to be women? Why do they want to be less than a woman? That's what a mind is, only part of a woman.'" The whole bookat least the chapter on sexis basically one long, humorless, JAP joke presented as pop sociology. Van den Haag's values, as, in many ways, those of Cuddihy, are the values anatomized (and anathematized) in Dijkstra's book. Referring to the misogynist writers of the fin de sihcle, Dijkstra writes, "They discovered the glories of the 'gratuitous act' as evidence of their power" (Idols , 204). Van den Haag notes, "Like a river that is regulated to avoid floods or drying up, love and even sex, carefully and usefully regulated, lose their wild, spontaneous, impractical beauty" (149). I suggest that this "impractical beauty" of which van den Haag speaks owes much to the "glories of the 'gratuitous act,'" that is, to the aesthetics of fascism.
On the biblical "patriarchs" as antithetical to "manliness," see Feldman, "And Rebecca."
D. Boyarin, Carnal Israel , 53.
naches but courtly, romantic love that would have been so stigmatized by traditional Jews.40
This point is rendered highly significant if we attend to the gender politics of romantic love as they have been analyzed by several recent writers, especially in their late nineteenth-century version. As Bram Dijkstra has made only too clear, much of the sexual imagining of "Anglicism" in this period involved fantasies of women ripe and available for rape at any time, and this was typically expressed in representations of primitives of one sort or another: cavemen, barbarians whose cultures allegedly permitted such "free" sexual behavior.41 Particularly telling is Dijkstra's summation of this ideology: "Many middle-class men dreamed of those simple times when the sight of a male was enough to make a woman cringe, and when, if you wanted a woman, you simply reached out and took her ."42 Whose fantasies are being played out then when van den Haag describes East European traditional Jewish sexual ethics as "if you want her, get her" and Cuddihy repeats this nonsense? This seems an almost embarrassingly classical case of racist projection. There is, of course, something seductively beautiful in romance, but it is far too late in the day for western European culture to still be granted its self-avowed superiority over traditional cultures in its treatment of women. Too often and too clearly has this false claim been adduced in support of colonialist projects. And especially the Western ideology and practices known as courtly and romantic love can no longer be read as "good for women" in any sense.43
It is astonishing to me how much recent writing is still firmly en-
Estelle Roith's critique of the androcentrism of traditional Judaism seems generally on the mark. There may be no doubt at all, of course, that women were extremely disenfranchised in traditional Jewish culture. But she correctly observes also that "contrary to some feminist opinion, assumptions that women's status has been generally lower in Judaism than in other religious and social systems, is without much foundation" (Riddle , 90).
Dijkstra, Idols , 10918. Dijkstra's exhaustive documentation of European fin de sihcle images of women in both discourse and visual arts demonstrates eloquently how unnecessary is the hypothesis of any direct influence of Jewish gender ideologies on Freud's theories of femininity.
Dijkstra, Idols , 111, emphasis added.
Recent writers have written eloquently of the virulent misogyny of the cultures of bourgeois romantic love. Among the most cogent on the subject are R. Howard Bloch and Bram Dijkstra. Bloch has particularly investigated the historical genesis of this ideology in certain Christian ideals of sexual purity: "The principled deferral of satisfaction synonymous with courtliness represents a striving for spiritual purity that is deeply beholden to a Christian notion of love, the poetic expression of a desire deferred in this world because it is deflected toward the next" (Medieval Misogyny , 11314). At the same time, Bloch shows how this poetic expression is deeply structurally wedded to misogyny: "The discourses of courtliness and misogyny conspire with each other" (114).
sconced within the Orientalist Whig tradition of perceiving Protestant male culture as some sort of ideal to which mankind [sic ] is progressing. This extends even to approbation of the violent performances of European masculinity. Thus, a recent Jewish commentator on Freud, Estelle Roith, manages to write: "Shtetl values held that physical superiority was appropriate only for goyim but even the far more sophisticated Berlin Jews, according to Theodor Reik, regarded military honours cynically as 'Goyim Naches ' (Reik 1962: 61)."44 Roith is at least more accurate than Cuddihy in her identification of "goyim naches ." Violence was, indeed, not particularly highly regarded in traditional Jewish culture. What is remarkable is her uncritical valorization of the opposing value-system of the Protestant bourgeoisie who saw fighting (e.g., dueling) as fundamental to manly honor. Thus she is surprised that "sophisticated" Berlin Jews are still "cynical" about military honors. Presumably she would not be so cynical. Her analysis, far from demystifying Freud's contempt for his "shtetl" father who refused to battle with the "goy," simply reproduces the terms of the malaise of the Jew in between.45
We begin to sense the ways in which the problem of male gender in the modernizing process of the Jews involves complex reformations of Jewish practices with respect to both sexuality and violence. Rather than see these effects as they doas the products of an inevitable and
Roith, Riddle , 132.
If Roith has fully assimilated the ideology of war as manliness and sophistication, then it is not at all surprising that she has also fully assimilated the ideological mystification that romantic love (even courtly love) are somehow more respectful of women than traditional culturesnearly allin which sexuality is understood as a matter of fulfillingnot sublimatingphysical desire and love, the product of such mutual fulfillment and other joint effort and activity. It is only thus that she can get to formulations such as the following: "On the other hand, the Jewish sexual ethos has been described by Max Weber as being characterized by 'the marked diminution of secular lyricism and especially of the erotic sublimation of sexuality' (Weber 1964: 257), whose basis he finds in the 'naturalism of the Jewish ethical treatment of sexuality.' This, I suggest, is closely related to the ancient Jewish perception of women as spiritually and intellectually inferior " (Riddle , 5, emphasis added). Unpacking Roith's comment a bit, we perceive that she is describing Weber's "naturalism of the Jewish ethical treatment of sexuality" as misogyny, presumably because it does not put women on a pedestal and represent them as angelic creatures above such "naturalistic," unsublimated forces as actual unlyrical sexual desire. One has to be peculiarly besotted by and with European romantic culture and totally oblivious to the feminist critique of the ideology of the "angel in the house" to imagine that it is less misogynistic than traditional Jewish "naturalism" around the sexual body, whatever the flaws of the latter formationwhich I do not, of course, downplay. While it may be open to question whether Judaism as a whole perceived women as "spiritually and intellectually inferior" to men, it may be asserted with confidence that traditional Judaism never fell into the misogynistic trap of perceiving women as superior to men.
desirable evolutionary processI would argue that these oppositions reproduce the terms of difference already set up for European culture at the outset of the split between Judaism and Christianity. As Charles Mopsik has written, "Modern societies tend more and more to separate the body that reproduces, a link in an immemorial genealogical adventure, from the body that desires, a lonely object, a consumer of briefly gratifying encounters. Thus, modern man has two distinct bodies, using one or the other as he pleases. This caesura is perhaps merely the persistence of a split opened two millennia ago by the ideological victory over one part of the inhabited world of the Christian conception of carnal relationand of carnal filiationas separate from spiritual life and devalued in relation to it."46
Bloch astutely argues that virginity is an Idea, and the loss of virginity then "seems closest to what the medievals conceived as the loss of the universality of an Idea through its expression."47 This relationship of the universality of the Idea to the particularity of its expression is, of course, the very relation between Christianity and the Jews with their particularist insistence on physical practices and disdain for mere spiritual faith.48 No wonder, then, that traditional Jewish culture had little use for merely spiritual loves between men and women as well.49 Traditional Jewish culture may not have had room for romance (and was cynical about it when encountered in either its medieval or modern forms), but it was not cynical about love between married couples: "Our Rabbis have taught: One who loves his wife as he loves his own body and honors her more than he honors his body and raises his children in the upright fashion and marries them soon after sexual maturity, of him it is said, 'And you shall know that your tent is at peace'" (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamoth 62b).
The imputed cynicism of Jews toward romantic love, the aspersion that it is goyim naches , needs, then, to be revalued in the context of the serious critique of that formation that has been mounted from feminist (and other critical) quarters. Rather than reading it as misogynist disdain for women, it should be taken as disdain for a cultural ideal that
Mopsik, "Body," 49, emphases added.
R. H. Bloch, Medieval , 114.
Briggs, "Images."
I have pursued this argument in various ways through my Carnal Israel , as well as mutatis mutandis through Radical Jew . To return to the argument of this book, the relation between virginity as Idea and sexual experience as loss of the universality of the idea is the relationship between the phallus and the penis and thus, paradoxically, between the masculine and the feminine.
was so uncomfortable with women that they had to be transformed into angels before men could imagine living with them. This transformation, however, was to be crucial in the production of the "modern" Jew.50
East European Jewish culture, far from being "primitive" and monovocal, was full of conflict and contentionlike, in fact, all other cultures.51 We must be allowed to hear the voice of the traditional Jew52 himself or, when we can, herself.53 The real point that needs to be made is that nineteenth-century East European Jewry was not a morally degenerate people , as Cuddihy seems to simply assume, thus reproducing, rather than criticizing, the cultural forces that he seeks to account for.54 As in any other human group, there were different forces and tendencies within this communityI am not proposing Fiddler on the Roof idealizationand much misery and degradation, of which widespread
For the reaction of one modern Jewish womanAnna O./Bertha Pappenheimto embourgeoisement and her analysis of its relation to traditional Jewish gender culture, see the final chapter.
David Biale is very good on this. Thus he notes that eighteenth-century Hasidism had developed in some of its disciple circles views of sexuality that were very similar to those of the ascetic church fathers. For these groups, he notes, "sexuality as a whole might be seen as feminine, since the feminine is connected to the material, while the masculine represents transcendence of the materialthat is, celibacy. While some Jewish Hellenists as well as early Christians sometimes advanced such an equivalence between men and renunciation of sexuality, one searches in vain for such an extreme position in any rabbinic or medieval Jewish text" (Eros , 137). As Biale shows, it was within these Hasidic circles that it first became possible for a woman to be "made mate" in a Jewish societysince the first century! We have then an exception that again proves the rule and, at the same time, makes it impossible to isolate any one strain as the authentic Jewish tradition. Hannah Rokhel, the "Maid of Ludmir," as described by Biale resembles nothing so much as a nineteenth-century Jewish Thecla. The strategy of my writing is to frankly admit such heterogeneity as Jewish and then seek to amplify those strains that I find most congruous in the service of a particular construction of a Judaism firmly rooted in tradition but more ethically compelling (in my view) than some other such constructions of modern traditional Judaisms. Note for the record that this does not comprehend picking and choosing parts of the Torah to accept or reject but rather choosing between particular interpretations of the Torah that subsist within the traditional sources of rabbinic Judaism.
See above, n. 51. By this, of course, I do not mean "the single, essential traditional Jew" but the many voices of different premodern Jews. I use the singular, because I can think of no other effective way to emphasize the gender imbalance of our access to such voices.
Michael Berkowitz makes the point of how surprised German Jewish soldiers were to discover "the intelligence, and depth and breadth of education" of East European Jewish women in comparison with the bourgeois Jewish women of the west, and "several soldiers' memoirs imply that the attention they received, and the level of intellectual engagement with the Russian and Polish Jewish women was beyond that to which they were accustomed at home with the Jewish women in their cohort" (Western Jewry , chapter 1) At the same time, Berkowitz does not fail to emphasize the degradation of this community as manifest in the widespread prostitution of Jewish women, even by their own, sometimes formally religious, families. Both are true, and this is the precise point of my comment.
Cuddihy, Ordeal , passim.
Jewish pandering and prostitution was only the most outstanding symptom,55 but this was also a time of the highest religious cultural creativity for East European Jews, both in the rationalist wing of Lithuania56 and in the mystical-literary wing of Galicia, Hungary, and farther east, as well as a time of widespread secular cultural production from poetry to politics.
Particularly telling is a comparison of the notions of modernity as the product of "differentiation," which Cuddihy emphasizes following Talcott Parsons,57 and the racist social Darwinism of a Herbert Spencer, as discussed by Dijkstra: "There is a clear correlation, for instance, between the notion that with the progress of evolution men and women had become more un like and Herbert Spencer's famous dictum, in First Principles , that 'evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity.'"58 Note also the affinities with Otto Weiningeran association that I am sure would repel Cuddihyfor whom, according to Dijkstra, "women [and Jews] were, in essence, human parasites. They could not live without men or without each other. In a sense they were interchangeable, undifferentiated beings, for the capacity to differentiate was a characteristic of the intellect, of genius. True genius yearned for true individualism and stood sternly and ruggedly alone,... all of which served to show that regressive, materialistic anti-individualistic political philosophies such as communism were basically the weak conceptions of benighted men who, like Karl Marx, were suffering from terminal cases of effeminacy."59
I do not, of course, mean to associate Cuddihy with Weininger's misogyny or Spencer's racism, only to show how deeply problematic the ideas of social evolution and "differentiation" to which he subscribes truly are. I would rather propose that it is, as we have seen, the colonizing eye that perceives "incoherent homogeneity" in the culture of the colonized, just as misogynists produce such incoherent homogeneity in their descriptions of women. Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin (like my grandmother) was just as capable of making differentiationsalthough to be sure different onesas the "modernized" people described by the sociologist are: "Differentiation on the level of the cultural system is the power to make distinctions between previously fusedconfused
Berkowitz, Western Jewry , chapter 1; M. A. Kaplan, Jewish Feminist Movement .
Etkes, Lita ; Dijkstra, Idols .
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 10.
Dijkstra, Idols , 16566 and 170 ff., esp. 171.
Dijkstra, Idols , 21920.
ideas, values, variables, concepts."60 There was a "native" tradition of "civility" among East European Jewish cultural elites that Cuddihy is totally incapable of realizing.61 The "ordeal" was not the product of conflict between coarseness and civility but between two different cultures of gendering, an ordeal, if you will, of virility.
In the present section, I wish to depict with some broad strokes what the masculine ideal of traditional European Jewry in the nineteenth century looked like, through both positive self-representations of the mentsh and his ideal characteristic of Edelkayt (nobility) and, somewhat more corrosively, through an exploration of the pejorative goyim naches , as a salient Jewish critique of European "manliness." As Paul Lawrence Rose has remarked in a related context, "To contest these unspoken [antisemitic] assumptions, which governed the attitudes even of those who were friendly to the Jews, required an acquaintance with subtle and difficult categories of Jewish thinking not easily accessible to most observersJewish as well as Christianbrought up in western Christian culture."62
The oppositions between the knight and the sage as respectively abjected and valued stereotypes of maleness remained alive in European Jewish culture throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. In the early Middle Ages, in glossing a passage that speaks of a "skillful knight [Reiter ]," Rashi feels that he has to inform the reader that this man was a Jew, in spite of the fact that this is entirely obvious from the context, precisely because it was so counterintuitive to Jews that there would be a Jewish knight (Rashi ad Yevamot 121b). As late as 1823, in a Haggada [the home liturgy for Passover eve] published in Vienna, the "righteous son" is depicted as a Middle Eastern scholar wearing a robe and carrying a scroll, while the "wicked son" is a sort of Roman soldier, with a long sword attached to his belt (see Plate 3). The iconographic tradition thus represents the continuity of the stereo-
Cuddihy, Ordeal , 11 (his emphases).
Justin Miller squarely diagnoses this fatal weakness in Cuddihy's book: "Among the many questionable points in Cuddihy's argument is the accuracy of his understanding of shtetl culture which had its own sense of social propriety reflecting a socially stratified structure of which Cuddihy appears to have been unaware" ("Interpretation," 368). It is difficult to recommend most of the rest of this rather weak article.
Rose, Wagner , 19.
Plate 3.
Illustration of the Four Sons from Vienna, 1823. In the traditional Haggada, the wicked son
is always signified by possession of a weapon. (Collection of the author.)
typing of the bad Jew as one who imitates the martial ideals of the prototypical "goy," the Roman, while the good Jew is a scholar, in dress more like an abbot than any other European male type.
In general, medieval and early modern Haggadas illustrate the wicked son as some form of martial figure, almost always, in fact, a knight in shining armor (see Plate 4).63 This, of course, establishes a direct and explicit contrast between the Jewish ideal and the models of "manliness" that the circumambient culture had developed. As George Mosse has remarked of nineteenth-century western Europe, "Manliness drew upon the aristocratic ideal of knighthood as a pattern of virtue in a changing world and a model for some of its behavior."64 As we have seen, however, for traditional Jewish iconography it was the ideal of knighthood that represented the negative ideal, the "wicked son," the antithesis of a pattern of virtue. For such traditional Jews the knight and all that he represented both on the field of battle and in the bedroom of courtly and romantic love were the essence of goyim naches . In a less caustic vein, this contrast could be brought out by citing the following contrast between the masculine ideal of Freud and that of a near contemporary Ostjude . The great Lithuanian rabbi and psychologist Israel Salanter had written that the ideal man is sensitive and the cure for a lack of sensitivity is "to revive emotion and to arouse [in oneself] constant concern and care,"65 while Freud for his part was to describe "the essence of great men" as "above all the autonomy and independence of the great man, his divine unconcern which may grow into ruthlessness."66
Mentsh; or, "The Perfect Pattern of a Pious Jew"
In the seventeenth century, a Jewish wife describes her husband:
However much my husband toiled, and truly the whole day he ran about upon his business, still he never failed to set aside a fixed time to study his daily Torah. He fasted, too, a great part of every day the Torah was read forth in the synagogue [Mondays and Thursdays], at least until he began to
Metzger, Haggada , 15256. See the insightful remarks by David Biale, who makes the excellent point that if the wicked Jewish son could be depicted as an armed figure, there must indeed have been Jews who bore arms (Power , 73).
Mosse, Nationalism , 23.
Goldberg, Israel , 278.
Freud, Moses , 10910.
Plate 4.
The Wicked Son as "Knight in Shining Armor." From a medieval Haggada manuscript.
[London Ms. Add. 14762; fol. 9 recto]. Courtesy of the British Library.
make his long business journeys, with the result that even in his youth he became sickly and needed much doctoring. Yet, for all that, he never spared himself, and shirked no pains to provide his wife and children a decent livelihood.
So good and true a father one seldom finds, and he loved his wife and children beyond all measure. His modesty had no like, throughout his life he never once gave thought to holding public office; on the contrary, he would not so much as hear of it, and he was wont to laugh at people who hankered after such things. In brief, he was the perfect pattern of a pious Jew, as were his father and brothers.
Even among the great rabbis, I knew but few who prayed with his fervour. If he were praying in his room, and someone came to fetch him forth where something could be bought up cheap, neither I nor any servant in my whole house would have the heart to go to him and speak of it. Indeed, he once missed a bargain in this way, to the loss of several hundred thalers. He never regarded these things, but served God faithfully and called upon Him with diligence; and He repaid him for all, two and threefold over. A man so meek and patient as my beloved husband will not be found again. All that he had to contend with, and often, from friends and strangers, he bore in patience.67
Glikl of Hameln, who wrote this description, was a woman of the Jewish trading class of Hamburg and Altona.68 Her life spanned the second half of the seventeenth century. In her description of her young husband as the ideal male Jew of her time, she emphasizes his inwardness, piety, and especially "meekness." Her book is suffused with descriptions, tender and delicately erotic, of her love for this man who forms in a sense the prototypical mentsh as husband, devoted, reliable, gentle, and emotionally warm (see Plate 5). These were not the characteristics of a "knight in shining armor." Indeed many of these traitsmeekness, patience, long sufferingwould be more likely to fit the damsel in distress or an anchorite friar than a husband and man of the world. Glikl herself, moreover, was mightily empowered in this marriage in the classic terms of socioeconomic autonomy and power. She will be playing an important supporting role in the drama of the last chapter of this book as well.
Analyzing a fascinating Jewish text of the nineteenth century brings many of these conflicts between the traditional Jewish culture of gender
Lowenthal, Memoirs , 3435.
N. Z. Davis, Women , 562.
Plate 5.
"The Perfect Pattern of a Pious Jew." The painting Sabbath Rest , eighteenth century, by Moritz Oppenheim.
(Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.)
and its European context to light.69 This analysis will have the perhaps surprising result of revealing Hasidism as a movement of at least partial accommodation of Jewish culture to romantic culture.70
At the beginning of the volume of legends and sayings of "the Besht," Rabbi Israel of the Good Name, who founded Hasidism, the modern Jewish Pietistic movement, there is a remarkable legendary account of the origins of this figure, covering his birth, childhood, and marriage up until the point when he "revealed" himself to the world. Moshe Ros-
In the general German society at this same time, "[f]or a boy to establish himself as a man meant engaging fully in a youth culture where manhood was learnt by drinking, fighting, and sex" (Roper, Oedipus , 107; see also Fletcher, Gender , 92).
For an illuminating account of closely related ways that Hasidism involves accommodations of the sexual ideology of European Christian culture, see D. Biale, Eros , 12148.
man has argued quite persuasively that this text represents a move in a nineteenth-century controversy among different Hasidim to establish different models of leadership and authority within the movement.71 Paradoxically, this very "defect" of the text as a historical source about the founding of Hasidism magnifies its significance for my purposes, for the text seeks to "reduce" the subversiveness of the image of the Besht and to make him over in the image of the classical Talmud scholar.72 In other words, there is tension within the text itself between two "redactional" levels that can be read as sociocultural conflict within the communities that produced the composite text, one in which traditional Jewish masculinity was being reformed by Hasidism and one in which it was being reinstated. I am not suggesting by this, however, that lives as they were lived necessarily actually followed these models, but the models themselves are a significant cultural fact. Moreover, since the Besht was for much of eastern European Jewry in the nineteenth century a hegemonic figure, to the extent that this text was accepted as canonical (and it was), it would have been effective in reproducing certain gendered roles, whether or not those roles had been actually practiced before. Exploring this text carefully gives us, then, some insight into the effectiveness, the materiality, of the talmudic model in informing the gender practices of early modern traditional Jews.
The text begins with a fantastic narrative of the birth of the hero, elements of which will be entirely familiar to many readers. The father of the Besht was captured by pirates who took him away to another country where there were no Jews and sold him. Rabbi Eliezer, the father, served his master so well that the latter appointed him overseer of his house, allowing him to keep the Sabbath. Afterward, Eliezer was given as a gift to the viceroy of the kingdom. The only task that the
Rosman, Founder , chapters 9 and 12.
For this shift toward a more conservative, mainstream rabbinism within Hasidism, see D. Biale, Eros , 122. Rosman for his part has thoroughly demystified the legendary and popular accounts of Hasidism and shown that within his own context the Besht was hardly subversive. The very contrast between the eighteenth-century "reality" exposed by Rosman's careful research and the images in the later legendary text only enhances the value of the latter as a historical source for cultural conflict in the later period. Rosman remarks, "As primarily ideological reifications, most descriptions of the Baal Shem Tov [Besht] over the past two hundred years or so tell relatively little about him, but very much about the issues confronting Jewish culture in the Western world beginning at the end of the eighteenth century.... With continual re-invention, the Baal Shem Tov can authoritatively epitomize or serve as a counterpoint to one cultural trend or another." My analysis here would have been impossible without his prior work, and I am grateful to him for sharing it with me prior to publication.
slave had was to wash the master's feet when he came home. Otherwise he spent all of his time studying Torah and praying in his special chamber. At a later date, the viceroy was unable to help the king in a matter of military strategy until his Jewish slave (whom he did not know was Jewish) dreamed the appropriate advice. The king forced the viceroy to reveal whence his information had come, and upon hearing the truth elevated the slave to battle commander. According to the story, "[h]e won every battle that the king sent him to fight."73 The king gave him the viceroy's daughter as a wife, but he did not touch her, finally revealing to her that he was a Jew, in spite of the fact that in that country all Jews were immediately put to death. She gave him gold and silver and helped him escape, but on the way home all was stolen from him. He arrived home and found his wife still alive, and "[t]he Besht was born to them, when both of them were close to a hundred."74
Aside from the obvious elements of biblical intertextualityEliezer is a combination of Joseph, Moses, and Abrahamthis story has other meanings for a politics of Jewish maleness. It is a sort of allegorical wish-fulfillment fantasy of threatened Jews.75 Like the biblical Joseph, Eliezer is able to arrive at political power through dreams afforded to him by God. He also manages to keep his Jewishness in a world which is the limit case of hostile gentile society: no other Jews and Jewishness punishable by death. Moreover, as in the case of Joseph, this retention
Ben-Amos and Mintz, In Praise , 10.
Ben-Amos and Mintz, In Praise , 11.
In another sequence of the same cycle, which will not be treated here, an anti-semite puts his hand into his pocket and pulls it out covered with excrement. He is informed by a Jewish mystic that his hand will not become clean unless it is urinated on by a Jew: "When he put his hand in his pocket, he dirtied his hand, and he took it out filthy with human dung. There was a terrible stink and the kaiser ordered him to be removed. He washed his hand with water, but it did not do any good, and he appealed for mercy to Rabbi Adam. Rabbi Adam said to him: 'If you swear never to be a Jew hater it will be all right. If not, your hands will be filthy all your life.' He swore, and Rabbi Adam told him: 'There is only one remedy for youa Jew must urinate on your hands. You will wash in it and this will help you.' And so it happened" (Ben-Amos and Mintz, In Praise , 14). One of the most interesting aspects of this entire sequence of the Besht's training in mystical matters by "Rabbi Adam" is that it is almost impossible to imagine such a figure actually existing, not least because Adam is a name almost never (if ever) used by Jews. For discussion of the scholarly literature on "Rabbi Adam" and possible identifications with a heretical Jewish mystic of the seventeenth century, see Ben-Amos and Mintz, In Praise , 30910.
As will be seen throughout this discussion, the text is exploring the boundaries of Jew and gentile at the same time that it is treating gendered boundaries as welland this is not accidental. For a much earlier version of such Jewish wish fulfillment, compare the texts discussed in chapter 3 below.
of Jewishness is signified in part by his avoidance of sexual intercourse with a non-Jew. He thus achieves wealth, power, and sexual access to a princess, all of the signifiers of gentile masculine success, but he refuses all of them. He returns to his humble Jewish existence poor, weak, and married to a poor old Jewish woman.76 This is how he achieves his true vocation as father of a great mystic. This true Jewish existence had been maintained throughout in the domestic, private, "female" space of his own room, where he engaged in the nonmanly, quintessentially Jewish pursuit of the study of Torah.77 At the same time, the story signals that his passion for this inner, "passive" space is owed not to his inability to perform in the world of manliness but to his commitment to the alternative values of Jewish male gendering.78 There is, accordingly, nothing radical or even critical in this sequence vis-`-vis the traditions of Jewish masculinity.79
This will begin to change in the continuation. The gendered overtones of this narrative become palpable in the next sequence, where we
This text functions, then, as a virtual counter-romance, rejecting the values of a society within which, as Perkins emphasizes for a much earlier period, beauty and power were equated with virtue (Perkins, Suffering , 5455). This is, of course, not simply a contrast between Jewish and Christian, for there are many such Christian counter-romantic texts as well. Early Christianity is itself, as Perkins's book demonstrates, entirely an oppositional movement to Hellenistic romance culture. The complex of relations between romance, Jewish, and Christian culture in Europe remains to be fully explored.
The text signals some of this as well through a curious statement cited in the name of the Besht himself that "it had been impossible for his father to draw his soul from heaven until he had lost his sexual desire" (Ben-Amos and Mintz, 11). David Biale has discussed this notion of procreation without desire as typical of Hasidism (D. Biale, Eros , 130). This comment seems almost readable as a justification for the practice of young Hasidic married men spending years away from their wives until their sexual desire was overcome and then returning home to "produce offspring, fulfilling this commandment of their Creator just like any other, filled with love of God and with nothing extraneous," an almost Augustinian vision of sexuality. The quotation is from Menachem Nachum of Tschernobyl, one of the most important of the early Hasidic masters.
Contrast the view of Cantor, who maintains that "the downgrading of providing was thus not the result of an authentic belief in its inappropriateness as a male activity. This is borne out, for instance, by the haste with which East European men who immigrated to America reestablished themselves on the work turf once they saw its doors open to them" (Jewish Women , 112). This argument is clearly invalid, since by its lights one would come to the conclusion that eating pork was also not "the result of an authentic belief in its inappropriateness," since that prohibition was also abandoned with great haste upon arriving in America. Second, is there any reason to believe that it would have been harder in Europe for Jewish men than for women to work?
The great opponent of the Hasidim, the Vilna Gaon, wrote that "true heroes are men of noble heart with the fullest trust in God, constantly doing mitzvoth and meditating on the Torah day and night even though their home be without bread and clothing" (Vilna, Commentary on Prov. 23:30, "Who is a hero? He who conquers his desire."). See also Etkes, "Marriage," 154.
find explicit textual marking of its intertextuality, of the cultural heterogeneity that has produced the text:
The boy grew up and was weaned. The time came for his father to die, and he took his son in his arms and he said, "I see that you will light my candle, and I will not enjoy the pleasure of raising you. My beloved son, remember this all your days: God is with you. Do not fear anything." (In the name of Admor , I heard that it is natural for a son and a father to be closely bound, for as our sages, God bless their memory, have said: "The talk of the child in the market place is either that of his father or of his mother" [Sukka 56b]. How much closer then are ties between parents and children who are born to them in their old age. For example, Jacob loved Joseph because he was born to him in his old age, and the ties between them were very great, as it is said in the holy Zohar. And it was true here. Although the Besht was a small child, because of the intensity and sincerity of the tie, the words were fixed in his heart.)80
This is actually quite an extraordinary passage, the meaning of which is not entirely obvious at first glance. The editor/compiler of the legends about the founder of Hasidism has received a tradition within which the father spoke to the child upon the former's impending death, holding him in his arms and describing raising the child as a pleasure, and he provides a gloss explaining this tradition. The gloss marks the site, I would surmise, of a cultural gap between the textual source and the editor of the text, that is, presumably between an eighteenth-century Ukrainian source and a nineteenth-century Lithuanian editor, although I do not know whether the chronological or the geographical parameter is the important one.
The gloss, apparently, functions as a justification for what the redactor expected would seem as strangely intimate behavior of a father toward his son. This interpretation is further borne out by the citation from the Talmud. The talmudic text, after all, does not indicate that sons are particularly close to their fathers; rather it indicates equal intimacy between children and either of their parents. Its function here, then, must be to support the point that sons are intimate with their fathers as well as with their mothers, and especially when the son is born to the father in his old age. I derive from this two sorts of information. One is that, at least in the cultural world of this editorearly nineteenth-century Lithuanian Hasidismfathers were not necessarily physically and emotionally close to their children. The passage also in-
Ben-Amos and Mintz, In Praise , 11.
dicates that such intimacy was being promoted by the rabbinical leaders, at any rate by the highly significant Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Ladi, the founder of Habad Hasidism (Admor in the text), and, moreover, supports this norm by citing the Talmud. The explicit rupture in the passage marked by the parenthetical gloss provides a key to the stresses within the representations of gender in the narrative as a whole.
The sense of conflict around the role of the Jewish male continues in the next section of the text as well:
AFTER THE DEATH OF HIS FATHER THE CHILD GREW up. Because the people of the town revered the memory of his father, they favored the child and sent him to study with a melamed [Hebrew teacher for children]. And he succeeded in his studies. But it was his way to study for a few days and then to run away from school. They would search for him and find him sitting alone in the forest. They would attribute this to his being an orphan. There was no one to look after him and he was a footloose child. Though they brought him again and again to the melamed, he would run away to the forest to be in solitude. In the course of time they gave up in despair and no longer returned him to the melamed. He did not grow up in the accustomed way [1112].
The curious contradiction between "and he succeeded in his studies" and the immediately following running away to the forest marks, once more, the site of a tension within this text between two norms. It would seem that the tradition that the redactor has received is invested in a Besht who was not a student of Talmud in the classical sense but a nature-mystic, one who ran away from school and spent time alone in the forest like a Ukrainian Pietist.81 We should note the thematization of the opposition between the indoor space of traditional Jewish piety versus the (gentile) outdoors of this radically idiosyncratic figure.82 In a sense, the "original" text seems to represent a significant breech of the inner cultural boundaries that separate Jew from gentile. A new form of pietistic, nature-oriented, antischolarly, outdoors-oriented Jewish leadership is being produced. Our redactor, however, apparently a devotee of the Besht but at the same time a member of the unique Lithuanian, scholarly branch of Hasidism (whose members other Hasidim considered not true Hasidim because of their devotion to study), cannot
Some have speculated, indeed, that Hasidism is in significant fashion a product of the "influence" of Ukrainian Pietism on Judaism at this time (D. Biale, Eros , 124). This would explain the identity of the Besht's teacher, Rabbi Adam. (See above n. 74.)
For the outdoors as the realm of the "Other" in quite a different but related context, see D. Biale, Eros , 67.
imagine a Jewish religious leader who would not be a scholar, so the child Besht becomes a successful student who nevertheless runs away from schoolundoubtedly, as the continuation will certify, for reasons of modesty.
In any case, it is the conservative, talmudically oriented revisionist wing of Hasidism that I am interested in here specifically because it is closer to what might be called, for want of a better term, the normative traditional Judaism of nineteenth-century East Europe. In the continuation of the narrative, which describes the further adventures of the Besht's youth, we see the same conflicts being played out:
He hired himself out as the melamed's assistant, to take the children to school and to the synagogue, to teach them to say in a pleasant voice, "Amen, let His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity, kedushah, and amen." This was his workholy work with school children whose conversations are without sin. While he walked with the children he would sing with them enthusiastically in a pleasant voice that could be heard far away. His prayers were elevated higher and higher, and there was great satisfaction above, as there was with the songs that the Levites had sung in the Temple. And it was time of rejoicing in heaven. And Satan came also among them. Since Satan understood what must come to pass, he was afraid that the time was approaching when he would disappear from the earth. He transformed himself into a sorcerer. Once while the Besht was walking with the children, singing enthusiastically with pleasure, the sorcerer transformed himself into a beast, a werewolf. He attacked and frightened them, and they ran away. Some of them became sick, heaven help us, and, could not continue their studies. Afterwards, the Besht recalled the words of his father, God bless his memory, not to fear anything since God is with him. He took strength in the Lord, his God, and went to the householders of the community, the fathers of the children, and urged them to return the children to his care. He would fight with the beast and kill it in the name of God. "Should school children go idle when idleness is a great sin?" They were convinced by his words. He took a good sturdy club with him. While he walked with the children, singing pleasantly, chanting with joy, this beast attacked them. He ran toward it, hit it on its forehead, and killed it. The corpse of the gentile sorcerer was found lying on the ground. After that the Besht became the watchman of the Beth-hamidrash. This was his way: while all people of the house of study were awake, he slept and while they slept, he was awake, doing his pure works of study and prayer until the time came when people would awaken. Then he would go back to sleep. They thought that he slept from the beginning until the end of the night.83
Ben-Amos and Mintz, In Praise , 1113.
As above, the text here manifests a powerful cognizance of the tension between its valorization of "Diasporic" models of Jewish masculinity and the inability of such men to "protect" Jewish children from antisemitic violence. The Jewish boy who did not grow up like other Jewish boys is able to protect the children from the gentile sorcerer who wishes to eat them up. The "original" level of the text thus promotes a revisionist model of masculinity, one closer in certain of its parametersprotecting dependents84 to the chivalric, romantic ideal of manliness than to the scholarly ideal of the Yeshiva-Bokhur. However, within the scholarly community that is promulgating this particular version of his life, it is not this ability that brings him praise but, once more an endeavor in which he resembles his father, his secret studies of Torah. In other words, while the original Hasidic text emphasizes the overturning of traditional Jewish norms of masculinity in the Hasidic movement, the revised version of the text wishes to preserve those very norms through the same text and the same exemplary figure. A delicate semiotic code opposing indoors to outdoors is mobilized throughout this text. Indoors is the place of the (Jewish) male, while outdoors symbolizes the world of gentiles with its threats and practices. The unusual, subversive (but also protective) aspects of the Besht are all placed in the outdoors, but his true nature as a Jew is revealed in the secret activities that he carries on in the Beth-hamidrash. The message is clearly that on the surface he is somehow more like "them," but truly he was a real Jew.
Moreover, and for my purposes most significant, it is not his prowess in battle against antisemitic demons that will win him a wife, as would be predicted by versions of chivalric culture, but again his devotion to the indoor pursuit of Torah study: "When the people of the community saw that our teacher Israel was studying with Rabbi Adam's son, they said that it was probably on account of Israel's father that Rabbi Adam's son came here to care for Israel. It seemed to them that Israel was behaving in the right way. And so they gave him a wife."85 The very qualifications that would render a young man fit to be a monk within European Christian culturescholarliness, quietism, modesty, and a spiritual aptitudeare those that qualify him to be a husband in this Jewish culture. This is almost explicitly contrasted with the qualities
Bullough, "On Being," 34.
Ben-Amos and Mintz, In Praise , 17.
that certified his father as appropriate spouse for the daughter of the gentile viceroy in the sequence discussed above. There, of course, it was winning battles that made him a desirable husband, as was more typical of early modern European narratives of love, such as the chapbook version of St. George, in which "the noble hero never failed of carrying the prize at tilts and tournaments, quelled monsters, overcame giants and slaughtered beasts," and then ended up with a "happy-ever-after marriage with the Egyptian princess he rescued."86 The point is not that Christian cultures lacked similar valorized models of femminized masculinity, but that they assigned this male type an entirely different place within the erotic economy of the society.87 In Christian culture, speaking very broadly, the feminized male was de-eroticized, while in Jewish culture he was projected as the husband par excellence, and even, as we shall see in the next section, as favored object of female desire. Indeed, a major part of the "biography" of the holy Rabbi is devoted to making an appropriate match for him.
This point will be borne out further in analyzing the detailed account of the Besht's marriage that follows:
Our master, Rabbi Gershon of Kuty, was head of the rabbinical court in the holy community of Brody. His father, our master Abraham, had a law-suit to settle with one of the people in the community where the Besht was staying, so he went there. He asked his opponent to travel with him to the holy community of Brody to settle the issue between them according to the law of the Torah. But the man said to him: "There is with us here a teacher, eminent in the knowledge of Torah, who is a righteous judge. Whenever a case is brought before him both sides agree completely with his decision because he clearly explains the verdict. Let us go to him and present our arguments, and, sir, if you are not satisfied with his decision, then I will go with you to the holy community of Brody." He accepted his advice and they went to him. When our master and rabbi, Rabbi Abraham, came before the Besht, he immediately was inspired with the holy spirit and perceived that his daughter was to be the future wife of the Besht . At that time it was the custom of great scholars that when a worthy guest came he would give an explanation of a difficult passage. And the Besht clarified a complex point in the Rambam with great subtlety. He continued to do so until Abraham's soul became attracted to the Besht's soul and their souls were in accord [19, emphasis added].
Fletcher, Gender , 88.
This parallels my reading of late antiquity as well, within which the Christian ascetic demasculinized male is also desexualized and rewarded with saintliness, while the femminized Rabbi is rewarded with a wife, as we shall see in chapter 2.
The narrative goes on to relate how the Besht returned such a just decision in the case that had been brought before him that once more, as in the past, both sides went away satisfied. His future father-in-law had so fallen in love with him, moreover, that he offered him the hand of his daughter, which the Besht accepted on condition that he not be revealed in Brody as the great scholar that he was. For all its apparent subversiveness, this narrative is characterized by the remarkable continuity between its norms of masculinity and ones that go back as far in Jewish culture as the Babylonian Talmud itself, as will be brought out in the next two chapters.
The sequence that follows is almost a direct reversal of romance, in that the daughter keeps insisting that she will follow her father's wishes in the marriage plot, however surprising they may seem. The question is never whether she will be willing to marry the intended but whether her brother will fall in love with him as her father had. The father, having died in the meantime, has left behind a document indicating that his daughter is to marry someone named Israel, without background or family lineage. His son, the brother of the prospective bride, is shocked, but the daughter says, "If our father thought the match was proper, we shouldn't doubt his decision" (21).
The Besht, of course, as is his way, exacerbates the situation by showing up to claim his bride in "clothes like those worn by loafers. He put on a short coat and a broad belt, he changed his demeanour and manner of speech" (21). The short coat signifies two things, both encompassed in the term "bat lanim ," translated "loafers"; it indicates modernity and aping of gentile fashions. The appropriate clothing would be a long robe more similar to the robe of a Christian monk than to the short coat of a doctor, soldier, or businessman.88 Once more, we have the near topos of the Besht as openly disdainful of traditional Jewish social norms but secretly in full harmony with them. The daughter, notwithstanding the fact that according to Jewish law she has every right to refuse a match, chooses once more to follow her father's desire. He reveals himself in secret to the bride and swears her to secrecy as well. They are married and her brother, who is also a great rabbinic scholar,
The ironies of this term in this context are fabulous. People who work as doctors or businessmen are called "loafers," while those who spend their time in study are not. However, in talmudic times the term is used for those who devote their entire lives to study and prayer, but it is there a positively coded signifier. We see the multilayered heterogeneity (class-inflected) of any given term of cultural discourse, and the same is true for gendered terms.
endeavors to teach his brother-in-law Torah. But the latter pretends both ignorance and inability to learn, whereupon the brother drives both the sister and her husband away. After several years of living as a semi-hermit in the mountains, digging clay that his wife sells in town, the Besht returns with his wife to the town of the brother, where the brother takes pity on his sister.
The following description of their lives follows:
AFTER THAT OUR MASTER AND RABBI , RABBI GERSHON , rented a place for the Besht in a certain village where he would be able to earn a living. And there he achieved perfection. He built a house of seclusion in the forest. He prayed and studied there all day and all night every day of the week, and he returned home only on the Sabbath. He also kept there white garments for the Sabbath. He also had a bathhouse and a mikveh. His wife was occupied with earning a living, and God blessed the deeds of her hand and she was successful. They were hospitable to guests: they gave them food and drink with great respect. When a guest came she sent for the Besht and he returned and served him. The guest never knew about the Besht [27].
The points do not need belaboring. First of all, as was frequently the case in eastern European elite (and ideal) Jewish culture at this time, a wife is working successfully at some trade or business in order to support a husband's religious and scholarly activities.89 This issues in a reversal of the topoi of public and private that encode male and female within European culture. Although, to be sure, those topoi are themselves seriously open to question, they are nevertheless active as commonplaces and as norms, and much of upper-class Jewish culture reverses them exactly, offering the private spaces of study and prayer as most appropriate to the male and the public spaces of getting and spending to the female.90 In some traditional communities, men even
Of course, this pattern was (and could be) only a minority pattern and an ideal model, since in most families both members of the couple worked to support the family. Similarly, the commonly held picture of very early marriages among East European Jews of the nineteenth century has been contested on demographic and archival grounds (Stampfer, "Gender"); however, it remains the case that this was the common pattern for the scholarly elite. It is this elite that represents the discourse of ideal masculinity that I am studying in this book.
The class stratification is, of course, highly important, and were I intending to discuss social history, it would be crucial. However, it is the play of elite cultural modelsunderstood as social practice in their own rightwith which I am concerned here. It must not be forgotten, nevertheless, how problematic the connections between these representations and "reality" are.
did housework while their wives supported them by working outside the home or by maintaining a business.91
Once more, we observe within this short paragraph the contradictions that mark this text as a site of conflict over these ideals. In the first sentence, we are informed that the Besht was installed in a village where he was to be able to earn a living, but then it turns out that what he was really doing was praying and studying, while only pretending to be a householder. It was his wife who was entirely supporting him economically. Thus where early Hasidism seems to have been anxious to recreate an economically productive male ideal, as well as resisting the disdain for such men within elite Ashkenazi culture,92 the redactor's level of the text reinstates this ideal as such. This is indicative of a virtual reversal in the traditional Ashkenazi ideal of gendered positions vis-`-vis the general culture, except, of course, for monks.93 The most remarkable aspect of this narrative however is simply that it is a story of a "married monk," a story, I repeat, within which a man fit to be a celibate religious according to European Christian mores is married.94 It seems, then, that while we can learn very little of the history of the founding of Hasidism in the eighteenth century from such a clearly legendary text, we can derive some knowledge of social norms and ideals that informed its authorship in the nineteenth. This bears out anthropologist Percy Cohen's observation, cited and discussed below, that "the values and status inhering in the physically passive, scholar idea safeguarded the pre-emancipation Jew's sense of masculinity." The Besht finally "reveals" himself as an appropriate marriage object for his
Stampfer, "Gender," 85.
Kaminsky, "Discourse," 302.
Cf. the distinctly negative reading given this reversal by one "enlightened" nineteenth-century Jew who describes his sexual problems upon early marriage as having been exacerbated by the fact that he was a "feminine male" while his bride was a "masculine female" (Mordecai Aaron Guenzburg, quoted in D. Biale, Eros , 155). One wonders whether this was his judgment at the time or only after extensive exposure to "European" culture. One hint that the latter might be true is Guenzburg's further praise of "the customs of countries where men work and women stay at home" (D. Biale, 160), which suggests that having adopted the gender ideology of the European bourgeois he was bound to see traditional Jewish gender practice as a reversal of the proper and natural order. This is obviously not a definitive argument but seems to me suggestive, nevertheless.
The sense of this term is reversed from the sense in which I used it in Carnal Israel . There it indicated a married man who is away from home for years to study Torah, while here it represents a mystic adept who remains living at home (at least on Sabbaths) with his wife and certainly sleeps with her as well. At any rate, they have children later on.
brother-in-law, that is, as scholar and mystic, as he had done earlier for his father-in-law and all is peaceful once he takes on his mantle of leader of the Hasidim, the sect of the pious.
The "Effeminate" Talmudist as Erotic Object for Women
In order to construct my proposition, however, that the passive, pale, gentle, and physically weak Yeshiva-Bokhur was an object of erotic desire, I shall have to show him as desirable to female subjects as well, not only to fathers and brothers. Otherwise it is too easy to "demystify" the eroticism of the homosocial attachment as being a mere effect of the seeking of cultural capital on the part of the male "lovers" of the scholar and not a truly affective, erotic attachment, in spite of the phraseology of "souls loving souls" that the texts embrace. Two genres of Yiddish folk literature, however, represent the pale, gentle scholar as favored love-object for women as well, not only for their fathers and brothers. One genre consists of legends, lullabies, and songs representing the desire of the young woman to be married and whom she chooses as her ideal partner. The other genre is memoirs of nineteenth-century Ashkenazic life.
Not atypical of these folk texts is the following:
I sit on a stone
and think and cry:
All the girls have become brides,
And I remain alone.
If my mother were a good one,
She would have found me a match,
She would have traveled to Wolkemir;
and brought a little bride-groom for me,
With black hair and blue eyes,
Let him be fit for Torah.
And Torah as the Torah prescribes,
He must learn day and night;
let him write me a little letter,
Let him remain a good little Jew.95
This is clearly a folk text and not the production of a learned eliteone can hardly imagine old bearded Rabbis singing such songsand if
Ginzburg and Marek, Yiddish Folksongs , 198.
it does not definitively represent a woman's voice in its production (although it plausibly does), it is certainly the type of song that young Jewish girls in Lite (roughly Lithuania, Latvia, Beloruss) would have been singing in the nineteenth century. Another such song from the same collection plaintively imparts that:
I am certainly a pretty girl,
I spin red thread,
I certainly have a rich father,
Today what do I still lack?
Poppa, Poppa, go to the Ben-sochor 96
And pick me there a beautiful bokhur ,
With long side-curls, with black eyes,
For Holy Torah he must be fit.97
In yet another of these texts, a girl asks her father specifically for a Rabbi to marry.98 Moreover, these texts clearly inscribe the young man as an object of desire for the young woman: in addition to his scholarliness, we find his black (or blue) eyes, his beauty, his black hair, his long side-curls (see Plate 6). There is, it seems, sufficient evidence to make it plain that the notion of the pale, thin, side-curled, studious Yeshiva-Bokhur as erotic object for young women is not a mere nostalgic construction ` la Fiddler on the Roof .99 "For Holy Torah he must be fit" is thus the structural equivalent in these romantic narratives of female desire that would be played by deeds of derring-do in another culture. As we will see, such a "reversal of values" in the construction of the male object has its precedents in the Babylonian Talmud, the very "Torah" for which these young heartthrobs were entreated to be fit.
A semidocumentary text, taken from the autobiography of a Polish Jew, Yehiel Yeshayahu Trunk (18871961) and relating the story of the marriage of his great-great-grandmother at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is highly evocative.100 This story is all the more revealing
This is a very rare Yiddish expression borrowed from Hebrew. In the Hebrew its literal meaning is "boy-child." I believe that in the local dialect of Yiddish in which this song is written, it refers to a men's party to celebrate the birth of a male infant, known in other communities as a "Sholom Zokhor""Welcoming the male." The daughter is suggesting that her father look over the young men at such a party and choose one for her.
Ginzburg and Marek, Yiddish Folksongs , 199.
Ginzburg and Marek, Yiddish Folksongs , 202.
I am grateful to Galit Hasan-Rokem and Dov Noy for helping me to find this material.
For information on Trunk and his great work, see Roskies, Bridge , 31218.
in that it reveals the desire of a socially and economically independent woman:
His mother, Devora, was a poor and simple orphan, who came from Plotsk. She had a stall in the market, and from this labor supported herself. When she had gathered an amount of money from her standing in the market for long days in sweltering heat and freezing coldand she had for some time been sexually matureshe came to the local Rabbi, Rabbi Leibush the Brilliant, showed him the fund of gold coins that she had gathered through her toil, and requested that he, Rabbi Leibush the Brilliant, would provide for her a husband who was a Talmudic scholar. Rabbi Leibush answered her that he knew in Plotsk a Jew, somewhat advanced in age, who was a great Talmudic scholar, and who was supporting himself through teaching children. The man was poor and destitute, but an outstanding sage....
The damsel Devora asked Rabbi Leibush the Brilliant: "Is this poor schoolmaster truly a great Talmudic scholar?"
"Yes, my daughter," answered her Rabbi Leibush, "he is an outstanding Talmudic sage."
"If so," said the orphan Devora, "I agree."
From this union was born only one son, he was Rabbi Yehoshuale Kutner.101
This is truly a remarkable story in many ways and paradigmatic of rabbinic culture. We have here several reversals of the gendered expectations of bourgeois European culture. First of all, the dominant, desiring subject is clearly the female one. It is she who seeks to find a husband. It is important to emphasize, moreover, that she is totally independent of father and brother and any other male who could directly control her desire. To be sure, her desire is constructed by her cultural formation, but then so is all desire. The point of my research is to inquire as to what sort of desire this culture constructed or sought to construct. Second, in order to find the sort of husband that she desires, she must be economically well established. She accomplishes this task, presumably starting from nothing, through great effort.
The prospective bridegroom, on the other hand, is working as the Jewish equivalent of a governess. I do not mean, of course, to imply that he is doing women's work from the point of view of Jewish culture; he is not. However, in terms of a western European marriage plot, it would be a young woman who would be supporting herself through the honorable but somewhat humble work of taking care of others' children until an economically established man would come along to rescue her
Trunk, Polin , 67.
Plate 6.
A Groom Fit for Torah. The Zaddik's Son , 1912, painting of a young Yeshiva-Bokhur, by Lazar Krestin.
(Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.)
with marriage. Although the text does not make this explicit, we should understand that from now on the husband will devote himself entirely to study, no longer forced to waste his time on the teaching of children and no longer oppressed by grinding poverty. He now has a proper wife to support him. At least for the narrative's purposes, it is simply assumed that he would agree. Finally, the story has a happy end, because
although only one child was born of the union, he was a very famous talmudic sage and rabbi in his own right, the eminent Rabbi Yehoshuale Kutner. In a sense, that is the whole point of the story, to narrate the birth of the hero. Also important, this same Rabbi Yehoshuale's wife came from a similar family structure. As Trunk describes his other great-great-grandmother, "Ratza was the central figure in the management of the business and the household. Her name appears in the place of honor in the family history. Her husband, Grandpa Haim, remained obscure."102 To be sure this is also a story that has been filtered through a male textuality, yet it is not entirely imaginary that within this cultural formation such a man, a slightly aging, economically ineffective but brilliant talmudic scholar would be desired as an object for marriage on the part of a young, nubile, and independent girl.103
Nothing could be more directly in opposition to the ideals of masculinity of romantic, "civilized" society. What we observe here is not, however, a "primitive" unawareness of the evolved norms of western European culture but a principled and deliberate reversal and rejection of those norms. Not so, however, for the "emancipated" Jew of Vienna, the Jew living a life "in between," to adopt the evocative terminology of Leo Spitzer (the younger). For the emancipated Jew this representation would have been transvalued into something negative and shameful, especially as two discourses were intensifying at the fin de sihcle, the discourses of misogyny and homophobia.104 These two discourses
Trunk, Polin , 7.
For a sensitive and nuanced account of the problem of writing Jewish women's history on the basis of the autobiographical accounts of male relatives, see Parush, "Readers," and especially the following: "Most of the testimonies about female personalities come from male members of the family. Only toward the turn of the century do we begin to find memoirs and autobiographies portraying women born in the second half of the nineteenth century from a feminine point of view. Regrettably few of these contain evidence from a firsthand source. Perusal of such books can indeed yield valuable tidbits of information about the education and reading habits of these women, and perchance even something about their outlook on life. But rarely do they offer a glimpse of their inner world" (23). The same promise and problem attend my own project (which depends, in part, on the same texts as Parush's).
E. Cohen, Talk ; Senelick, "Homosexual." Estelle Roith has also sensed how decolonization and modernization produced a crisis in Jewish masculinity in the fin de sihcle but also seems to assume "enlightened" Protestant culture as a norm to which Jews needed to accede: "It has been suggested that the whole question of masculine gender identity is likely to be problematic in populations and communities that have become marginal and that the traditional Jewish emphasis on scholarship and prayer might have posed additional and specific problems for the emancipating Jewish male. Percy S. Cohen has proposed that the emphasis on the 'culture of learning' enabled Jewish males to sustain a cultural identity as well as permitting a sense of superiority that effectively complemented and compensated for their sense of vulnerability. Thus the values and status inhering in the physically passive, scholar ideal safeguarded the pre-emancipation Jew's sense of masculinity (P. S. Cohen, 1979, personal interview)" (Riddle , 10). She has further argued that "[t]he Jew aiming at citizenship of the world outside ghetto and shtetl , however, found that he lacked a tradition or cultural stereotype for the model of masculinity employed by that world" (10). Roith here describes Jewish masculinity in terms similar to those which Freud would employ to describe femininity, that is, as a lack and a response to a lack, whereas I have been trying to account for this form of male subjectivity as the positive production of a cultural knowledge that obtains under certain conditions, namely the status of being politically nondominant. Although, then, Roith herself is strangely uncritical (even this is an understatement) of the "model of masculinity" that "the Jew aiming at citizenship of the world" was forced to adopt, this account itself has much merit.
were, moreover, profoundly related at this time, owing to the associations of male homosexuality with passivity, that is, with femaleness; hatred of femaleness was raised to a fever pitch seemingly unknown before this time.105 It is no surprise then to discover that a "New Jewish Man" was being invented within this sociocultural matrix and under the pressure of these developments. The strange phenomenon known as Jewish Wagnerism. and its undeclared and surprising connections with other Jewish cultural developments were symptoms of this disorder among Jews, so a brief look at one aspect of this phenomenon will provide a precis of the narrative of this book.106
My only recreation was listening to Wagner's music in the evening, particularly to Tannhduser , an opera which I attended as often as it was produced. Only on the evening when there was no opera did I have any doubts as to the truth of my ideas.107 Theodor Herzl
Among the most prominent avatars of romantic manhood that Europe produced in the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner was certainly representative. That paragon of the "New Jewish Man," Theodor Herzl, has provided us with extremely precious information on the cultural/psychological condition of the Jews among whom "the invention of the Jewish man" took place. He has invited us to see Wagner and
Dijkstra, Idols ; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy .
For an analysis of the most recent forms of this cultural phenomenon, see Mass, Confessions .
Herzl, Zionist Writings , 17, on the writing of his book The Jewish State . See also Elon, Herzl , 3. I thank Jonathan Boyarin for reminding me of this passage.
especially the Tannhduser as the most relevant of intertexts for his thought. To corroborate this point and indicate that it was not a passing fancy, I adduce the fact that at the Second Zionist Congress, Herzl ordered the music of Tannhduser to be played.108
Steven Beller has recently produced a compelling reading of Tannhduser as Zionist allegory, as Herzl might have experienced it, thus accounting for its effect on him. After carefully allowing for the possibility that it was just the glorious music that inspired Herzl, Beller suggests that for him there was more there, that Tannhduser himself is a symbol of "the Jew" who has spent "a long time in the arms of Venus in her grotto. Now he wants to be freed from the grotto (ghetto) and achieves his wish, reentering human society."109 Unfortunately, the fact that he has been released from the ghetto has not freed our hero from his moral faults; he remains a Jew, caught within the walls of the new (spiritual) ghetto.110 He goes to Rome in an attempt to achieve absolution and thus final assimilation back into German Christian society. Beller stunningly associates this moment with Herzl's former plan to go to the Pope and offer to convert all of the Jews in return for his aid against the antisemites. Coming back from Rome, having failed in his attempt to win acceptance from the Pope, the Jew seeks to return to his grotto/ghetto of sensuous, material, effeminate indulgence and corruption; however he is saved by that figure of pure womanhood, Elizabeth, who translates him into another worldZion. Beller concludes: "Tannhduser can thus be seen as a great acting out of the redemption of the Jews from their own degeneracy and from their rejection by Western society. Whether or not one believes that they were degenerate [but Herzl did], the fact remains that it was quite possible for Herzl to be inspired by Wagner's Tannhduser in a way quite in keeping with his newfound Zionist faith...."111
Beller, "Herzl," 128. The contortions that Steven Beller puts himself through in apologizing for his exploration of the palpable ideological connection between Wagner's antisemitism and Herzl's are arresting (Beller, "Herzl," 2728). The general adoration of Herzl borders on idolatry. It is characteristic that Beller refers to Herzl as being "the man who gave Jews back their pride," assuming that Jews in general were ashamed of their Jewishness and that getting back their pride was of value to them. For most East European Jews who eventually followed the Zionists, it was not pride but survival that motivated them. Similarly, Ernst Simon, usually a sober and balanced analyst, suddenly decided that Herzl's plan for all of the Jews to convert to Catholicism (see chapter 7 below) "causes no dishonour to him" (Simon, "Sigmund," 278).
Beller, "Herzl," 150.
For the term "The New Ghetto," the title of Herzl's most famous play, see discussion of this text in chapter 7.
Beller, "Herzl," 150.
Beller's reading can be corroborated from a source that he apparently did not see, namely, Wagner himself, for as Paul Lawrence Rose has pointed out, "Wagner himself referred to the Flying Dutchman as an 'Ahasverus of the Ocean', while the parallelism of Tannhduser and the Wandering Jew would have been impressed on him by his friend and mentor in German myth, the Dresden librarian J. G. Grasse, who recognized the correspondences between the Tannhduser and Ahasverus legends."112 As ambivalent as the Wandering Jew is-vis-`-vis "real" Jews, this association could certainly have impressed itself on a Jew such as Herzl in a way that would further the Zionist reading of the opera, particularly insofar as Heinrich Heine and Byron for instance had used the Ahasverus myth as a symbol for Jewish vitality.113
Beller, however, both ignores and explicitly discounts the gendered aspects of this appropriation of the Tannhduser myth as an allegory of Zionism. This text represents a distillation of German Romantic ideals of masculinity and thus, in the eyes of Jews (and others) who would be critical of such ideals, manifests itself as the apotheosis of goyim naches . Let me begin with a moment that Beller discounts openly, the fact that Tannhduser's redemption is bought at the price of his death.114 Yet in The New Ghetto , the very play of Herzl's that Beller invokes as a source for his interpretation of Herzl's feeling for Wagner, this ideology of redemption through death is clearly promoted. As I shall claim in chapter 7, this was of a piece with other aspects of Herzl's thought, both "prezionist" and Zionist. Second, Tannhduser certainly promulgates that very notion of love as more spiritual than sexual, of sweet sorrows and extended, if not permanent, deferment of gratification that Cuddihy and Roith define as the very soul of civility. We should remember at this point R. Howard Bloch's analysis of this very discourse, which found it deeply, structurally misogynist in character. Third, and perhaps most relevant, the specific human activity that Tannhduser wishes to return to, his reason for desperately wanting to escape the grotto/ghetto, is war-making, to be readmitted to the homoerotic world of the martial Mdnnerbund , Band of Men.115 It was especially through violenceduelingthat Herzl imagined that the "honor" of the Jews would be restored (see chapter 7 below). It is really no wonder
Rose, Wagner , 37.
Rose, Wagner , 33.
Beller, "Herzl," 15152.
Cf. also Berkowitz, Zionist Culture , 137, on the mythic or symbolic aspect of the friendship of Herzl and Nordau.
at all that Tannhduser , as no other text, inspired him to write The Jewish State .
Beller argues: "Given that we know Wagner saw the present world of 'life and art' as controlled by 'modern Jews,' whose 'sensual' forms of (linguistic) expression disgusted him, it can well be argued that the world that Wagner, the Ahasverian artist, is trying to escape in Tannhduser is precisely the perverse world of 'Jews in music.' Elizabeth, 'the woman who, as a heavenly star, leads Tannhduser up from the hedonistic den of the Venusberg,' is in effect redeeming Wagner from an Ahasverian existence in a Jewish world."116 Perceptively reading the nexus between Herzl's adoration of this text and his Zionism, Beller argues for a threefold Wagnerian analysis of the "Jewish Question" that was identical to Herzl's: (1) the Jewish problem was caused by the fact that there were Jews, that is, in Beller's language, by "an insufficiently thorough, perhaps impossible, integration"; (2) mixtures of German and Jewish culture were "pernicious"; and (3) the only solutions were either the complete disappearance (Untergang! ) of the Jews through total assimilation or their exit from Europe to somewhere else. Beller writes: "From our perspective this might appear quite horrendous, but, with a few very minor changes, this was also the diagnosis and prescribed remedy that Herzl proposed in 1895, except that by then he had come to the conclusion that the only true remedy was not complete assimilation but rather Wagner's other option, the exit or emigration of the Jewsin Herzl's version, to the 'Promised Land.'"117 It is not clear to me how Herzl, having adopted such a view, would make it appear any less horrendous, and, moreover, the bit of intended amelioration at the end is hardly valid, since Herzl in 1895 was not dreaming of any Promised Land at all but only of a Wagnerian exit of the Jews from Europeto Africa, in point of fact. Careful study of Herzl's writings will show how thoroughly he, like other half-assimilated Jews of the fin de sihcle, was possessed of the ideology of "manliness" that, as the crescendo of a millennia-old European gender ideology, had overrun European culture at that time.118
It is well known that Max Nordau, the second in command of the Zionist movement in the early decades, longed for the creation of
Beller, "Herzl," 138.
Beller, "Herzl," 139.
Dijkstra, Idols ; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy . Beller's attempt to rewrite Herzl's repugnance for traditional Ostjuden as cultural critique of assimilated bourgeois Jews is totally unconvincing to me. In chapter 7 below, I shall discuss Herzl at length.
Plate 7.
The Wicked Son as Muscle-Jew. This image is from a Budapest Haggada, 1938.
(Collection of the author.)
Muscle-Jews, the very antithesis of the Jewish ideal that I have just been describing.119 As late as 1938, in a Haggada published in Budapest, such a Muscle-Jew is portrayed as the "Wicked Son" (see Plate 7). Now it is fascinating to note that there is no attempt to render this figure as non-Jewish or even as nonreligious. He clearly has a yarmulke on his head. What marks him as the "wicked son," is only one composite characteristic, the muscularity of his body and his "modern" clothing.120 Such bodily development is deployed in this icon as the virtual equivalent of
How delicious the irony that the "scientists" invoked by Stoker to confirm the criminality of the visage of Dracula the crypto-Jew (Dijkstra, Idols , 343), namely, Lombroso and Nordau, were themselves Jews, a fact discreetly left unmentioned by Dijkstra. (On Nordau, see Baldwin, "Liberalism," and George Mosse's introduction to Nordau, Degeneration ; on Lombroso, see Harrowitz, "Lombroso.") Degeneration was dedicated to Lombroso, and Freud expressed pride in the fact that Lombroso was a fellow Jew. This irony, though delicious, was not rare. As Mosse remarks, "[Nordau's] concepts of degeneration and manliness were taken up by European racism" (Mosse, Nationalism , 36). About Lombroso, Mosse says: "Lombrosian psychology, elaborated, chiefly during the 1860s, made the accusation of Jewish criminality still more meaningful" (147). This should not be mistaken for a "backshadowing" claim that would make Nordau or Lombroso responsible for racism.
Charlotte Fonrobert has emphasized this to me. Cf. the "short coat" in which the Besht dressed to hide his holy identity as discussed above in this chapter.
the martial knightliness of the earlier symbols of a dystopian Jewish masculinity, as an epitome of goyim naches .121 Goyim naches can now be defined as the contemptuous Jewish term for those characteristics that in European culture have defined a man as manly: physical strength, martial activity and aggressiveness, and contempt for and fear of the female body.
Significantly, then, we see that this is not a racist representation, however contemptuous of the surrounding "goyish" culture. Another very rich passage from Trunk's memoirs describes in detail the ways of a Jew who represented the antithesis of the Talmud scholar as male ideal. Trunk's grandmother rented for a time an apartment of a Jewish farmer, a certain Simcha Geige. Here is how the man is described:
As I remember him, Simcha Geige walked around all day, in the manner of peasants, in an undershirt and trousers. He would get up with the goyim and the chickens. An odor of the barn was exuded from him. Simcha Geige was friendly with the peasants and used to curse them in accord with their custom. His language was authentically peasant-like and the company of peasants was more pleasant to him than the intimacy of the Rabbi of Strikev. Simcha Geige was never separated from the pistol in his pocket and used to have a wild pleasure when he was shooting a few rounds among the trees. The echo of the shots in the wood, the voice of the cuckoo all around, the lowing of the cattle, the calls of the chickens and the geese, the mysterious humming of the ancient and massive oaks in the forests of Laginsky, the song of wind and rain, aroused in the crude and primitive heart of Simcha Geige, a sweeter echo than the delicate and fragile sighs of the study-tables of the righteous to which grandpa Baruch used to drag him on occasion. Similarly to the peasants, Simcha Geige had a certain contempt for the delicate and pale city-Jews.... His wife, Sore-Bina, a small and corpulent Jewish woman with an old-fashioned yellow wig, was deathly afraid of him, and thus, in trembling terror, became pregnant by him and bore him his sons, who were like him, crude and healthy of body.122
Such is the romantic hero in the eyes of the elite Jewish culture of eastern Europe of the nineteenth century. Many of the features of this Simcha Geige are in fact endemic to that romantic tradition, wild pleasure in physicality, love of weapons, fierce attachment to nature and to locale, healthy body, and hard work. All of these features are encoded within the Jewish text, however, as features that mark him not as an
A recent haggada put out by very traditionalist groups in Palestine/Israel shows the wicked son as a soccer player!
Trunk, Polin , 2021.
example of a high form of masculine humanity but as a very low, crude, primitive, violent, and cruel onea Jew who, like gentiles, has contempt for the effeminately marked scholars and for his wife whom he terrorizes as well.123
In the romantic ideology of manliness that Wagner promulgates in texts like Tristan und Isolde and Tannhduser we can discover the ultimate development of what Jews had derisively called goyim naches . At the fin de sihcle, and especially in the Viennese milieu, many Jews were desperately seeking their own naches (peace, as well as satisfaction) in becoming just as male and just as Aryan as Tannhduser himself and his creator. Herzlian Zionism is only one of the manifestations of this transformation in the gender of the Jewmale and female. Although it is perhaps easy to "exonerate" Jews who, in the early part of this century, considered these deformations of Jewish masculinitythe substitution of Muscle-Jew for mentsh as an ideal, it is much harder to do so in the second half of that same century and particularly after such writers as Dijkstra and Klaus Theweleit have demonstrated the near direct connections between these masculinist ideologies and Nazi genocide.124 This does not, I stress, constitute a hideous accusation of complicity with or responsibility for a not-yet-born Nazism, any more than would, for instance, pointing out the use of the swastika as emblem by Jewish followers of Stefan George. It implies rather that with hindsight we can see the dangers of a certain line of ideology and practice whose horrors were, of course, unforeseeable at the time, and we can emphasize, moreover, the imbrications of misogynist masculinism with racism against Jews. Goyim naches can be interpreted now not as a primitive
Natalie Kampen has pointed out to me what should certainly have been obvious, namely, the class dimensions of these representations. This is the view of a Jewish peasant from the perspective of another class, but the question I would raise is: from the perspective of precisely what other class? In a social system within which penurious scholars supported by their wives are the elite, and wealthy peasants are the "underclass," some form of class analysis other than the one appropriate for European industrial society seems necessary. Very tentatively I wish to suggest that the most salient two classes of rabbinic society are "men" and "women," and that Simcha Geige belongs to the class of "women" within rabbinic society! See chapter 4 below. David Roskies has discussed the emergence of this social and economic Jewish type, the baal guf , or physical Jew, as a new kind of heroone who can defend other Jewsin modern Jewish literature at around the time that the real Simcha Geige was alive (Against the Apocalypse , 14143). I have already discussed the story of the Besht as being an early, ambivalent reflex of this cultural development. The stories analyzed by Roskies do emphasize the distinction as one of economic class in the Marxian sense. See also the discussion by Paul Breines, Tough Jews , 13334.
Theweleit, Male .
inability to perceive the virtues of Western civilization so much as a sign of prescient awareness of the devastating defects and effects of that cultural formationeven if, of course, the crematoria could hardly be foreshadowed.125
In the next two chapters, I am going to jump back in time a millennium and a half to the Talmud, the reading of which was the most valued practice of rabbinic Jewish culture, in search of a textual genealogy for the mentsh as the ideal type of male Jew.
I emphasize this last point in order to avoid the epistemological error of backshadowing so shrewdly exposed by Michael Andre Bernstein.
Continues...
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