Abstract
This work rummages among the responses to the unresolved question of whether and how Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) could be integrated into Germanophone societies between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. It examines how these modernizing societies, undergoing processes of identity formation, were confronted by the increasing difficulty to distinguish “German” from “Jew” and the persistence of the supposedly superseded Judentum, which threatened their own claims to autonomy and universality. To counter these threats popular and scientific discourses rendered difference visible by means of fetishizing ethnicity-, race-, gender-, and sexuality-coded representations of “the Jew”'s body (e.g., nose, hair) and body techniques (e.g., circumcision). But those identified as Jewish and immersed everyday in derisory and dehumanizing ascriptions had their own question and other answers. Those denigrating identifications became for some Jewish-identified individuals building blocks for working through their situations and constructing their responses. This book maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among signifiers of Jewish corporeality in Jewish-identified authors, such as Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, and Walter Benjamin, as well as “Jew”-identifying writers, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Daniel Paul Schreber, Arthur Dinter, and Adolf Hitler. It also traces the gendered trajectory of Spinoza reception, “Zopf-” (braid) as a nodal-point mediating German Gentile-Jewish relations, and the poisonous correlation of Jews with syphilis and diseased reproduction. The book portrays how Jewish-identified individuals moved beyond introjection and disavowal to appropriate and transform this epidemic of signification to make sense of their worlds and our modernity.
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