Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (6 page)

In Singer’s story, Anshel sends Hadass divorce papers by messenger, and disappears. Avigdor, who had been married to someone else (but that’s an- other story), also obtains a divorce and, to the brief scandal of the town, he and Hadass are married. When their child is born, “those assembled at the cir- cumcision could scarcely believe their ears when they heard the father name his son Anshel” (Singer, 192).

One crucial difference, then, between the story and the film is that in the film “Anshel” disappears and Yentl escapes, travels, traverses a boundary—in

this case the ocean dividing Old World from New. In Singer’s story, “Anshel” is reborn as the child of Avigdor and Hadass. In both cases, however, “Anshel” is an overdetermined site of desire. Both Amy Irving and Mandy Patinkin de- clare their love to Streisand; she is
not
, as was the original plan, merely a trans- ferential object for Hadass, but is instead the chosen beloved. In Singer’s ac- count, both Avigdor and Hadass are full of sadness rather than joy on their wedding day. Speculation about why Anshel had left town and sent his wife divorce papers runs riot. “Truth itself,” observes the narrator, in a Poe-like statement that reflects directly on cross-dressing in the text, “is often con- cealed in such a way that the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find” (Singer, 192).

But what of the child, “Anshel”—
this
Anshel demonstrably a boy, since his naming occurs at his circumcision? This boy, both addition and substitu- tion, replaces and does not replace the absent Anshel who was brought into being by Yentl. Once again the transvestite escapes, and returns powerfully and uncannily as the “loved boy.” What is the relation between this boy and the transvestite?

Let us call him the changeling boy.

• • •

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman.”

—Morning service for Orthodox Jews, preliminary blessings
10

The German actor Curt Bois, perhaps best known to modern audiences as the pickpocket in
Casablanca
, appeared in a 1927 film,
Der Furst von Pappenheim
, as a vaudeville entertainer who performs in drag. In the film Bois’s character consents to a rendezvous after the show with a rich man (Hans Junkermann) who doesn’t know he’s a man. The results are predictably comic, the same old story of cross-dressed mistaken identity and double-take. But there was one complicating factor, not within the film itself but subsequent to its release. For Bois was a Jew. After he fled Germany during the Nazi regime, the Nazis excerpted clips from this film to “prove” that Jewish men “minced about in women’s clothes.”
11

Historically Jews in Europe—both men and women—had long been sub- ject to sumptuary laws of a stigmatizing kind. Yellow circles made of cord at least an inch thick had to be worn on the chests of Venetian Jews by an order

of 1430; Pisa a century earlier had required an “O of red cloth”; and Rome insisted that male Jews wear red tabards and Jewish women red overskirts.
12
Red or yellow clothing signs continued to be required of Jews in Italian city- states throughout the Renaissance, prefiguring the equally infamous yellow stars-of-David imposed by Nazi law. Other distinguishing signs, notably the earring, were traditional among Jews and also among prostitutes, so that the supposed “connection between Jews and prostitutes” could be enforced by sartorial fiat, as well as by a social and political rhetoric of pollution (Hughes, 37). By a deliberate and powerful campaign of degradation and re-marking, prostitutes and Jewish money-lenders, both construed as somehow necessary for the service of the state, were conflated into a single class: “loose women and Jews formed a single sumptuary category” (Hughes, 47).

Not only sartorially, but also “scientifically” and “theoretically,” the idea of the Jewish man as “effeminate” as well as “degenerate” has a long and unlovely history in European culture. Otto Weininger’s
Sex and Character
, perhaps the most influential work of pseudoscience written on the topic in the nineteenth century, was published after the suicide of the author, himself a Jew, in 1903. Weininger set out to prove that all Jews were, essentially, women. “Those who have no soul can have no craving for immortality, and so it is with the woman and the Jew,” wrote Weininger.
13
“As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word ‘gentleman’ does not exist amongst the Jews” (Weininger, 308). “Jews and women are devoid of hu- mour, but addicted to mockery” (Weininger, 319). “Judaism is saturated with femininity,” he declared (Weininger, 306). And, yet again, “The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew, because he, like the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of a free intelligible ego. Like women, Jews tend to adhere together” (Weininger, 307–8).

Before we dismiss this as the social psychology of a singular crackpot, of interest only to bigots and the morally deranged, we should note that, at the time that it appeared, Weininger’s book impressed Freud, a Jew—and Char- lotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist—as a major contribution to the understand- ing of human psychology.
14
It is even clear why this might be so. Freud and Breuer are singled out for praise in Weininger’s discussion of hysteria (Weininger, 267–77), and indeed Weininger’s explanation of what he means by Jewishness (“I do not refer to a nation or to a race, to a creed or to a scrip- ture . . . but mankind in general, in so far as it has a share in the platonic idea of Judaism”; Weininger, 306) sounds very like Freud’s own conflicted credo as expressed in the preface to the Hebrew translation of
Totem and Taboo
, where Freud refers to himself as “an author who is ignorant of the language of holy

writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion—and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his es- sential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature.”
15

Charcot, the Paris physician and theorist of hysteria after whom Freud was to name his eldest son, drew attention to “the especially marked predis- position of the Jewish race for hysteria”
16
and other kinds of mental illness— due, he thought, to inbreeding. Charcot had identified and charted an iconography of hysteria—a series of ritualized, dance-like gestures and gri- maces—to which, once again, could be compared the “gesticulation” of the Jew.
17
Here, too, was a model
against
which Freud was anxious to define him- self; he would be like the French doctor, whom he so much admired, not the (female or Jewish) patients.

As for Gilman, she would have found in Weininger’s book an entire chap- ter of praise for “Emanicipated Women,” with specific mention of Sappho, George Sand, Madame de Staël, George Eliot, and Rosa Bonheur, among oth- ers, as individuals who had transcended their debilitating condition of wom- anhood: “the degree of emancipation and the proportion of maleness in the composition of a woman are practically identical,” he wrote. “Homo-sexuality in a woman is the outcome of her masculinity and presupposes a higher de- gree of development” (Weininger, 66). Where emancipation movements in the mass are doomed to self-obliteration, individual women had it within their power to become like men.

“Manliness,” not gender, is Weininger’s chief concern. Like Freud’s friend Fliess he believed in the importance of periodicity, and noted that the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries, like (he thought) the tenth, fifteenth, and six- teenth, were marked by “an increased production of male women, and by a similar increase in female men.” The “enormous recent increase in a kind of dandified homo-sexuality” was a sign of the “increasing effeminacy of the age” (Weininger, 73)—of which, once again, the Jew-as-woman was also a preem- inent sign.

Furthermore, the
way
Jews supposedly spoke, with a break in the voice and a sing-song manner, set Jewish men apart, and linked them with femi- nized males or castrates. The Jewish “break in the voice,” like the “soft weak- ness of form,” “femininity,” and “Orientalism” of the Jewish man, were at- tributed by Walter Rathenau to inbreeding and separateness: “In the midst of a German life, a separate, strange race . . . an Asiatic horde.”
18
(Rathenau— another German Jew, who like Weininger sought to establish his own differ- ence within Jewishness—was later to become the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, thus repositioning himself as a quintessential insider rather

than a “foreign” Jewish outsider.) “The change of voice signaled the mas- culinization of the male; its absence signaled the breaking of the voice, the male’s inability to assume anything but a ‘perverted’ sexual identity” (Gilman,
Sexuality
, 266).

Indeed, the curious quality of the Jew’s voice was also one of the identi- fying stigmata of the
homosexual
according to nineteenth-century typologies, so that the connection between Jewishness and “perversion” was further “demonstrated” or “proven” by this alleged symptom. Like the “masquerade squeak” deliberately adopted by participants in eighteenth-century English masquerades, obscuring gender identities and “suggesting comic emascula- tion,”
19
this auditory sign was taken as both an index of corruption and a sign of infantilism and bestiality. The voice became itself an indication of unman- liness, a kind of aural clothing that linked Jew and “woman,” Jew and emas- culated man, Jew and degenerate male homosexual.

Marcel Proust, a homosexual and a half-Jew, explicitly compared the two conditions: each—homosexuality and Judaism—was in his view “an incur- able disease.”
20
Homosexuals, like Jews, were described by their enemies as discernibly members of a race, and each recognized fellow members of the “brotherhood” instinctively. Proust’s Charles Swann is a Jew in love with a courtesan; his homosexual Baron de Charlus is a gossip as well as an aesthete, an effeminate dandy and a snob. Proust himself exemplified the tendency of the persecuted to ally themselves with their persecutors, depicting his homo- sexual characters as both degenerate and feminine, and—at the same time— fighting a duel with another homosexual who had put Proust’s own manliness in question.

How does this feminization of the Jewish man—the voice, the shrug, the small hands, the extravagant gestures, the “Oriental” aspect—manifest itself in the lexicon of cross-dressing? In part by the crossing of the dandy and the aesthete—in Proust; in
Nightwood
’s Baron Felix Volkbein (“still spatted, still wearing his cutaway,” moving “with a humble hysteria among the decaying brocades and laces of the
Carnavalet
” [9, 11]); in Radclyffe Hall’s figure of the artist Adolphe Blanc, who designed ballets and ladies’ gowns for a living, a ho- mosexual and a “gentle and learned Jew” (
The Well of Loneliness
, 352)—with the Hasid.

The traditional long gown (Shylock’s “Jewish gaberdine”) and uncut hair, the lively gesticulation (and wild, ecstatic dancing) of the Hasidic sect—all these could be regarded as woman-like or “feminine,” as well as simply for- eign or alien. Adolf Hitler in
Mein Kampf
dramatically describes his en- counter with the phantom of Jewishness in the streets of Vienna—the same city where Freud was attempting to erase the visible signs of “Jewish effemi-

nacy”: “Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City,” Hitler writes, “I sud- denly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.”
21
And the longer he “stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?” The “unclean dress and . . . generally unheroic ap- pearance of the Jews,” “these caftan-wearers,” convince Hitler that he is face to face with otherness—–with the not-self (which is to say, the self he fears). When he contemplates “their activity in the press, art, literature, and the the- ater,” he concludes that Jews have been “chosen” to spread “literary filth, artis- tic trash, and theatrical idiocy.” The chapter in which he sets out this conver- sion experience is called, straightforwardly, “Transformation Into an Anti-Semite.”

As we have seen,
Yentl
—both the Streisand film and the Singer short story—allegorizes this subtext of the Jew as always-already a woman in a spir- it diametrically opposed to the vituperative claims of anti-Semitism. Yet the secret—open to the audience and the reader—of “Anshel”’s gender tells a double-edged story about the “manliness” of Torah study and scholarship. In Jewish tradition there is no higher calling for a man; as witness, for example, the tension in the film
Hester Street
(1975) between the assimilated husband, eager for commercial success, and the retiring scholar whom the heroine fi- nally marries. Which is the “real man” here? And in the case of Yentl, is the “real” story one of a woman who needs to “become a man” in order to study Torah—or the story of a Torah scholar who is “revealed” to be a woman? When at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 Max Nordau called for all Jews to become “muscle Jews” rather than pale, thin-chested “coffeehouse Jews,”
22
he was responding in part to this uncomfortable schism within Jewish identi- ty, as well as to the racialist cult of “manliness” then rampant in Germany.

One mode of Jewish “manliness” mandated a life of study; another ac- cepted a definition of “manhood” based upon martial values and physical per- fectionism. Here, too, definitions of “homosexuality” cross with stereotypes of Jewish male identity, for the “homosexual” could be either super-male, espe- cially manly and virile, and therefore associating only with other men (rather than with polluting and “effeminizing” women), or, on the other hand, a “de- generate” “aesthete,” blurring the boundaries of male and female—Carpen- ter’s
Intermediate Sex
, Symonds’ and others’ “Uranians.” Thus the popular English writer Hector Hugh Munroe, better known as Saki—himself a ho- mosexual—endorsed prevailing social prejudices against Jews and effeminate men, and spoke enthusiastically about male-bonding in wartime; he enlisted in the British Army during World War I, although he was forty years old, and was killed at the front.
23
Meanwhile yet another German Jew, Benedict