Transnationalism and the Jews by Jakob Egholm Feldt

Author:Jakob Egholm Feldt [Feldt, Jakob Egholm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, History, Jewish, Social History, Jewish Studies
ISBN: 9781783481415
Google: MubaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016-08-30T05:27:04+00:00

The Precariousness of Jewish Character

Jewish plasticity was dangerous to both Jews and their Christian surroundings. As we have seen with the operated Jew, plastic surgery if successful can actually hide the Jew from the Jew-spotting gazes of gentile society. This is obviously hazardous for the purity of the cultural and social habitat not being able to identify the strangers, the foreigners, because they have camouflaged themselves, imitated their hosts so closely that a potentially deadly pollution is hovering over the future of the social bond, over ‘us’. To the Jews, plasticity is also dangerous because it is precarious and volatile in its imitation of the hosts and constantly challenged by new changes and shapes but most of all by exposure through all the little signs of imperfect imitation. It is the prerogative of the hosts to lose their composition, their manners, their honour and decorum without losing their membership of the civil group. The strangers have to keep their face and not do like Faitel who galvanized his Jewishness by dissolving into an alcoholic pool of counterfeit Deutschtum. Imitation is dangerous because it is by implication not the same as the original unless even the hosts imitate, unless imitation is celebrated as a particular genius and as something else than assimilation, as we found it explained by Ahad Ha’am. This precarious genius of imitation not only emphasized the necessity of public civility and honour for Jews, but it also shone a strong light on its double-bind, namely that such frail constructions are not honourable and masculine in themselves. Drunkenness it not itself or necessarily a dishonourable thing but for Jews such as Faitel, it is awkward.

In Panizza’s play, Jewish character is monstrous, but not scary just peculiar, and strange before it begins its transformation into a German character. It is the transformation, the attempt to transform and hide Jewishness, that takes the monstrosity up a level. Now we not only watch in amazement but also in shock and fear that the artifice might be possible and then in disgust as it predictably turns out that Jewishness cannot be hidden behind cosmetic surgery. The theme of the monstrosity of Jewish imitative and transformative power, and fear of it, has produced an enormous literature until the Second World War. It not only flourished among anti-Semites, but it was thoroughly integrated into wide networks of concepts, images, political agendas and sciences that by their own definitions had nothing to do with Jews per se. Sander Gilman shows how animal rights groups associated Jewish ritual slaughter with particular bestiality, thus pointing to Jewish lack of civility and how research in sexuality discussed fantastic phenomena such as hereditary circumcision, Jewish male menstruation and other ‘chimera’.19 Jewish character or lack of it gradually through the nineteenth century turned into something that did not have its only source in Jewish religious or cultural traditions but stemmed from the Jewish body that in itself reflected something that could be equalled to a general transvestitism. The Jewish body was simply crooked, and it produced a crooked character.

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