Introduction
Introduction
A Field Guide to the Bestiarium Judaicum
This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, identified, and denigrated by non-Jews—and maps the historical and theoretical contexts for both these puzzling deployments and the efforts at making sense of them. It situates the socio-political Jewish Question in Germanophone lands, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society. It points out how the need to render purported Jewish difference visible drew upon natural history—the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human—as mediated by the Bestiarium Judaicum. It provides an overview of contemporary theoretical and historical engagements with the Question of the Animal and with the representation of human (animals) as (nonhuman) animals. It then turns to how the scholarly literature has inadequately examined the associations of Jews and Animals, the Jew-Animal, and instead proposes to turn critical attention to the Jew-as-Animal—how Jewish-identified writers appropriated and reworked these Jew-Animals and gave voice to the Jewish animot. It briefly discusses several of the strategies that are elaborated in subsequent chapters.
Keywords: antisemitism response, Jacque Derrida, Great Divide, Donna Haraways, identification, Jewish question, Jews and Animals, killable, natural history, Question of the Animal
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
