Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2 page)

The new sciences of race and sex emergent in the nineteenth century were ef- fectively “secularizing” Jewish difference. It is not that Jewish religious prac- tices and identifications ceased to matter as identity markers of difference. Rather, race, which was held to be an objectively measurable, indelible differ- ence, rationalized Jewish difference. And it did so all the more powerfully for

being drawn through stock stereotypes of sexual difference. Thus claims abound in both popular and scientific literature in Europe and America in- sinuating the Jewish male’s sexual difference from other men. From Otto Weininger’s homology Jew = woman (Harrowitz), to Leopold Bloom’s preg- nancy (Reizbaum), to Leopold and Loeb’s murderous conjunction of Jewish difference and sexual deviance (Miller; and Franklin in this volume), modern Jewishness became as much a category of gender as of race. Moreover, because homosexuality was initially characterized as a matter of sexual, or gender, in- version (a characterization that understood the “bad” object choice as effect not cause), the Jew’s gender trouble was seen to bear more than a family re- semblance to the homosexual’s sexual inversion.

Significantly, this crossing went both ways, for a cluster of nineteenth- century stereotypes of the Jew came to circle around the homosexual as well. As Matti Bunzl has suggested, then, it is not just that the modern Jew was being secularized and homosexualized—the “homosexual,” whom
scientis sex- ualis
and its various practitioners were so busily identifying and diagnosing, was also being “raced” (“Jews, Queers, and Other Symptoms”).

And yet, connections between the construction of modern Jewish racial- ized identity and the construction of modern sexuality have been an under- theorized aspect of even the newly queered Jewish studies. We can certainly espy something of the racialized anxieties of sexology when Havelock Ellis complains, in his study of sexual inversion, about the infelicity of the “bas- tard term [
homosexual
] compounded of Greek and Latin elements” (
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, part 4: “Sexual Inversion,” 2). This discomfort with linguistic hybridity indexes worries over miscegenation so prevalent in Ellis’s own day.
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The invention of the modern homosexual may also index—and this is Bunzl’s particular pointer for this volume—worries over Jewish racial differ- ence. Thus, any project of tracing, in Bunzl’s words, the “racial contour of the modern homosexual” must engage the history of modern Jewish identity and ask “to what degree the codification of the modern homosexual was inflected by images of racialized Jewish difference” (338). His challenge—to reread founding texts of sexology and other “expert” discourses on homosexuality in order “to understand whether the ‘Jew’ may have been the original ‘Urning,’ the ‘Jewess’ the original ‘Urningin’” (338)—even finds one tentative answer in Jay Geller’s contribution to this volume. Geller outlines the stakes of the de- bate within the early twentieth-century German homosexual emancipation movement over the gendering of the model [male] homosexual. Where Mag- nus Hirschfeld proposed a third sex model of homosexuality, his fellow Jew Benedict Friedländer countered with a conception of manly desire purged of

any stain of effeminizing Jewish difference. Tragically, Friedländer’s metaphor- ic purging would shortly be literalized.

As even this cursory summary of the debate between Hirschfeld and Friedlän- der suggests, the sciences of sexuality and race, as they focused in on the “ho- mosexual” and the “Jew,” were largely male affairs. Both the “Jewess” and the female “sexual invert” (a predecessor of the twentieth-century “lesbian”) fig- ured far less frequently in the popular and scientific literature of the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. What the Jewess and the female sexual invert both shared was their alleged excess; both types went beyond the bounds of female virtue and sexual propriety; they were too active in their de- sires. That said, the female sexual invert was yet characterized less by her de- sire for other women than by her transgression of womanliness. This is be- cause theories of female homosexuality were consistently and notoriously unable to conceptualize the status of the “feminine” object of the female sex- ual invert’s desire. As the term
invert
suggests, the latter did her gender upside down. That she might desire other women, “like” a man, was the final proof of her inversion. However, the diagnosis might be made even in the absence of same-sex desire, which provided sufficient but not necessary warrant for the charge. Indeed, in some of the earliest documents on female sexual inversion, advocacy of women’s suffrage functioned as a telling sign. And, as George Chauncey Jr. has shown in his study of the transition from thinking and speaking of sexual inversion to thinking and speaking of homosexuality, the shift happened more gradually and more unevenly in the case of women. That is, the association between female same-sex object choice and female sexual inversion (female masculinity) outlasted, at least in the medical literature, the association between male same-sex object choice and male sexual inversion (male effeminacy).

The manliness and self-promotion with which the female sexual invert was charged also featured in some of the stereotypes of the “Jewess,” who was sometimes portrayed as pushy, unladylike in her entry into and activity in the world of paid labor. But the Jewess was perhaps associated above all with ex- cessive femininity and sexuality: the
belle juive
was a dangerous seductress who might lead [Christian] men to their doom: a kind of fifth columnist, in- filtrating the enemy camp—like Judith—and intermarrying (beheading the purity of blood). Yet, in her sexual aggressiveness and deceit, the Jewess’s fem- ininity was all show, a cover for femininity’s failure, hence the paradox that

the Jewess could be at once too much and not enough of a woman. In this we also see—as with the workings of misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism more generally—that contradictions, far from incapacitating stereotypes, may actually energize and enable them (Bloch; Sedgwick,
Epistemology
).

American Jewish studies has taken its cue—generally, a recuperative one— from the project of
Wissenschaft,
the science of Judaism, that also developed during the very mid-nineteenth-century moment in which Jewish emancipa- tion movements built steam against an emerging antisemitism. The focus, that is, has largely been on the genius and persistence of the Jewish people. Simi- larly, much of the gay and lesbian studies that developed later, in the 1970s and early 1980s, was animated by an imperative to discover and make visible what had earlier been obscured and denied. While we recognize the importance of these projects, which constitute life-affirming and field-clearing responses to long histories of institutional marginalization and silencing, nonetheless the project of this volume is not a recuperative one. The work in this volume is in- debted to recent developments in the fields of Jewish cultural studies and queer theory.

Both Jewish cultural studies and queer theory find an alternative impetus, grounded less in the positivism of identities than in the shifting terrain of dis- course; these dynamic new fields of interdisciplinary inquiry open possibili- ties that cross disciplines, cultures, identifications, and identities. That said, it is not as if Jewish cultural studies and queer theory are strangers to the polit- ical claims that energized Jewish studies and lesbian and gay studies in their earlier incarnations. We want to recognize the ongoing pull of identity and identity politics, even as we mark the necessary trouble and incitement of identities that refuse to come clean or become simple.

We also must mark the risks in making too simple a move from Jewish to queer or from queer to Jewish. For, in the very gesture of making difference newly visible, analogy may flatten difference. We begin by reprinting two cel- ebrated essays—by Marjorie Garber and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—that are foundational to this volume. Each begins to show what such an analogy (Jew- homosexual and Jew-queer) might look like, and together they provide a

springboard for the rest of the volume. We lead off with two excerpts from Garber’s magisterial 1992 study
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
, because in some ways they most clearly articulate the queer gender- ing of Jews that is the beginning, it seems, of their queer sexualization.

In the first excerpt Garber analyzes Barbra Streisand’s filmic version of the Isaac Bashevis Singer story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” in which an eastern Eu- ropean Jewish girl cross-dresses as a boy in order to gain access to Torah study. For Garber, the Jew functions as the sign of cultural category crisis: “the im- migrant, between nations, forced out of one role that no longer fits. . . and into another role, that of stranger in a strange land.” Moreover, that category crisis is doubled, in Garber’s view, by another, namely, that of Barbra Streisand herself, “a Jewish musical star, with unWASPy looks, a big nose, and a reputation in the business for shrewdness (read, in the ethnic stereotype, ‘pushy’).” Streisand’s presence thus “redoubles this already doubled story.”

Garber here touches, of course, on a crucial moment in the construction of Jewish gender implied by Yentl. If a Jewish woman can pass as a man, this is because, at least according to stereotype, she is already something of a man. (As Mandy Patinkin’s character says of the girl-boy Yentl, “She was a guy, pe- riod.”) Or, perhaps, and just as well, a Jewish girl can be a Jewish boy, because Jewish boys are already girls? Both work, and they work together at the level of cultural discourses that the film
Yentl
embodies and represents.

As also shown in other works of American pop culture (Woody Allen, Philip Roth), the sensibility that Jews do gender differently (queerly) is very clearly thematized in Streisand’s film and her persona both in the film and outside it. Garber powerfully articulates Streisand’s role as phallic American Jewish woman, thereby providing us with the female partner to Allen’s femi- nized American Jewish man. At the same time, as Garber emphasizes, Streisand aggressively insists on Yentl’s (and her own) heterosexuality. Not only does this double insistence straighten out Singer’s short story, Streisand’s source material, it also foregrounds the gender/sex anxiety that Jewish alter- native gendering continues to raise for modern Jews. Garber’s concluding ob- servations on Singer’s original story, which had its own very different and powerful inscription of transvestism, open up new angles from which to con- sider earlier moments in the cultural history of Jewish cross-gendering.

This is not an easy history to consider. As Garber makes clear in the sec- ond excerpt from
Vested Interests
, there is a disturbing complicity between the female-to-male cross-dressing embodied by Yentl and antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as always already womanly. Given the ugly and even genocidal histo- ry of these stereotypes, is it possible, Garber wonders, to recuperate and re- politicize the “feminization” of the Jewish man?

Category crises are also very much at the heart of Eve Sedgwick’s project. In reprinting her already often reprinted essay “Epistemology of the Closet” in this volume we hope also to resituate it. That is, we aim to bring out even more sharply the galvanizing force of Sedgwick’s forays into the intersections jewish-queer as well as Jewish studies–queer studies. Certainly her book- length study
Epistemology of the Closet
helped to make lesbian and gay schol- arship central to academic inquiry, particularly in the humanities, by showing how the demarcation homo/heterosexual has itself been central to the making of modernity.

If Sedgwick’s essay and the book-length study that shares its name helped to incite paradigm shifts in queer scholarship on sexuality and in literary and cultural studies in general, they have also had vital implications for Jewish cul- tural studies. What makes the excerpt from
Epistemology of the Closet
so im- portantly pivotal to the work of this volume is that Sedgwick goes on to il- lustrate her thesis—“I think a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are conse- quentially and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of ho- mosocial/homosexual definition, notably but not exclusively male, from around the turn of the century”—via a fascinating analysis of the “Jewish clos- et” and “the drama of Jewish self-identification” as it is represented in two retellings (Racine’s and Proust’s) of the Book of Esther.

“The story of Esther,” Sedgwick suggests, “seems a model for a certain simplified but highly potent imagining of coming out and its transformative potential.” Sedgwick goes on to tease out parallels between Esther’s attempt to manage knowledge of her Jewishness and the dizzying swirl of anxieties around knowing and “unknowing” that encircle the homosexual closet. Sedg- wick pushes her analogy quite far indeed—and with very telling and reveal- ing effect; at the same time, she seeks sensitively to delineate important spaces of difference between the Jewish and the gay closets.

As many of the essays in this volume will attest, both Garber’s and Sedg- wick’s work have been enormously generative—and risk taking. In the first of the new essays written for this volume, “Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” Janet R. Jakobsen takes on the task of theo- rizing the risks attendant to analogical thinking: “Jews are like queers.” Jakob- sen’s riveting essay shows that even as “the logic of equivalence,” or analogy, has been effective in making space for new varieties of “human rights” dis- courses and political movements, it has, in fact, provided little basis for coali- tion between such movements. In making likeness or similarity the ground of political coalition—or academic inquiry, for that matter—we may inadver- tently write over, erase, difference.

The challenge for this volume, then, is that of forging connections be- tween Jewish cultural studies and queer theory, between Jew and queer, be- tween Jew and transgendered, and between Jew and homosexual without clos- ing down differences between, among, and within each point of comparison. We need not give up analogies altogether, but, as Jakobsen suggests, we must work to develop a language that can recognize the “multiple social relations” at once named and, too often, elided in the work of analogy.

Along the way she puts pressure not just on the analogy between Jews and queers but on the extension of the term
queer
itself. “What does queer mean if it is not simply a multiculti version of sexuality?” This is a vital question, and one pursued in various ways throughout this volume. If
queer
is to be more than a simple replacement term for
homosexual
—and if queer theory is to be more than a fancy way of saying more of the same—then it is necessary to work at the in-between spaces in which no one difference is elevated above all others. These seem to us some of the promises, and some of the challenges, of thinking at the intersection “Jew-queer.”

From Jakobsen’s programmatic essay the collection moves on to a group of essays that interrogate the political economies of the dominating analogy homosexual/Jew in various ways and at various (related) historical sites. The first of these is Jay Geller’s “Freud, Blüher, and the
Secessio Inversa: Männer- bünde,
Homosexuality, and Freud’s Theory of Cultural Formation.” In a fas- cinating exploration of an underexamined historical encounter, Geller de- scribes the very specific, very historical entanglements of Freud with sociologist Hans Blüher, the theoretician of homoeroticism in the German youth movement, the
Wandervogel,
to the greater illumination of the cultur- al entailments and meanings of both.

In the light of Matti Bunzl’s challenge to queer theory to consider how the racialization of the Jew may have affected the production of the modern homosexual, Geller’s discussion of the little-known Blüher is especially in- triguing. Geller illuminates the crucial role played by Blüher in the “public dissemination of a racial typology of homosexualities: the opposition be- tween the healthy inversion characteristic of manly Germanic men and the decadent homosexuality of effeminate Jews.” Blüher’s typological distinction would later be taken up and institutionalized, though in very different di- rections, by German Jews. Magnus Hirschfeld embraced effeminacy under the banner of a third-sex model of male homosexuality, whereas Benedikt Friedländer, a convert to Christianity and an important source for the Freikorps (Theweleit) and the SS, rejected the effeminate, “Jewish” model of homosexuality, instead promoting the homosexual man as the purest expres- sion of Aryan manhood.

Turning to roughly the same historical period in the United States, Paul B. Franklin offers a detailed excavation of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case to show how the homosexual and the Jew were implicitly and explicitly under- stood in terms of one another in early twentieth-century American popular culture. In the antisemitic and homophobic terrain of the American 1920s, “Leopold and Loeb were two Jewish boys whose Jewishness ‘naturally’ predis- posed them to homosexuality, a ‘crime against nature’ that incited them to fur- ther crimes against humanity.” Franklin’s meticulous analysis demonstrates how the American public came to understand itself against the multiple “crimes” that emerge in the case: not only the crime of murder but, more in- sidiously, the overlapping crimes of homosexuality and Jewishness. This essay thereby unearths astonishingly straightforward analogies between Jew and ho- mosexual (such as Edward Stevenson’s, who in 1908 challenged, “Show me a Jew and you show me a Uranian”). Even more significant, Franklin shows how a systemic set of associative interconnections between gays and Jews functions in public discourse.

In her contribution to this volume Alisa Solomon traces the ongoing life of associations between Jewishness and queerness and their effect on the po- litical imaginary of the state of Israel. Solomon shows how Zionism’s exalted
Muskeljuden
, or “muscle Jews,” cast their shadow not only over Israel’s politi- cal mainstream but also over the fledgling gay rights movement in Israel. As she indicates, the contemporary political debate, in which an antigay religious right is pitted against a secular and “tolerant” liberalism lately welcoming of homosexuality, is still staged within the boundaries of an exclusively Jewish, masculinist—that is, a Zionist—mentality. Solomon challenges the limita- tions of this vision, suggesting that a truly queer internationalism—which she believes the Israeli drag queen Dana International emblematizes—is not real- ized in the contemporary Israeli gay movement.

A masculinist imaginary is also the target of Daniel Boyarin’s essay, “Ho- mophobia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science.’” In this essay Bo- yarin turns his attention to the masculinist fantasies—and signal blind spots—of Freud. How, Boyarin asks, are we to make sense of the misogyny, racism, and homophobia that, as it were, color Freud’s thinking? As Boyarin suggests, some of the most deeply reactionary moments in Freud—such as his attribution of penis envy to all women and castration anxiety to all men— trace the faultlines of a subject divided against himself. Boyarin’s critical in- tervention here is to reread Freud’s explanation of the etiology of the castra- tion complex. In Freud’s
Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy
, also known as the case of Little Hans, Freud asserts both that the castration com- plex is the “deepest unconscious root of anti-semitism”
and
, in the next

breath, that “there is no stronger unconscious root for [men’s] sense of supe- riority over women.” Boyarin goes on to reveal a link between antisemitism, misogyny, and fantasies of phallic wholeness and phallic lack: the gender trou- ble of the Jewish male. It is the troubling difference of the Jewish man that Freud sought continually to keep at bay, in large part by projecting the specter of difference elsewhere and onto the bodies of some other others.

The displacement and divided consciousness Boyarin perceives in the case of Freud are not unique to Freud, of course, as Boyarin also demonstrates. In fact, to make this point and its implications clearer, Boyarin stages an en- counter between Freud and another paradigmatic postcolonial subject, Frantz Fanon. By bringing together Freud and Fanon—rereading each in the light of the other—Boyarin is able to return psychoanalysis to history and thus to sug- gest the conditions of emergence not just of an influential body of theory but also, and more crucially, to show something of the way bodies get formed and deformed in the crucible of a colonial race/gender system.

With its shuttling between the historical and the textual, Boyarin’s essay provides a neat bridge to our next cluster of essays, which concern themselves with Jewish responses to the stigmatized linkage of Jewishness to dangerous sexual difference. Bruce Rosenstock’s essay reads the Messiah fantasies of seventeenth-century Spanish converso Abraham Miguel Cardoso as a signal moment in the history of Jewish homoeroticism. Cardoso’s fantasy resitu- ates—and potentially “outs”—the homoeroticism of Jewish religious practice. While earlier stages of the rabbinic
imaginaire
understood God’s subjects to be in a feminine position with respect to the masculine deity, preserving a male-female erotics even in its breach, Cardoso deploys a phallic male-male model. In his fantasy he is one of the two Messiahs projected in rabbinic lit- erature, the Messiah ben Ephraim (or ben Yoseph), while the much more fa- mous Shabbetai Zevi was the Messiah ben David. As Rosenstock argues, Car- doso then goes on to project the homoerotic joining of these two Messiahs in “unabashedly sexual” terms, imagining himself “the human analog of Yesod, the divine phallus.”