The Jewish Closet in Europa, Europa

This essay will explore the representation of the Jewish closet in Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europa [Hitlerjunge Salomon] (Germany/ France/Poland, 1990). Based on the autobiography of Salomon Perel, the film traces the succession of masquerades assumed by the hero in order to survive the Holocaust. In so doing, the film delineates the epistemological space of the Jewish closet and reveals its structural affinities with the gay closet. That is, the incoherences of Jewish difference serve to establish its analogy with gay identity, and, paradoxically, the visible stigma of circumcision transforms the relation of the closets from one of analogy into one of "masked repetition."

The concept of masked repetition derives from Jeffrey Mehlman's reading of three Freudian texts that reveal the operation of the same displacement process that is "masked" insofar as its function changes radically with each text. Thus the genesis of jokes in Der Witz [The joke]is a masked repetition on the one hand of Anlehnung, or anaclisis, the process by which sexuality is generated in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and, on the other hand, of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, the process by which sexuality is repressed in Project for a Scientific Psychology. ¹ In other words, Mehlman's notion of masked repetition offers a model of intertextuality in which one text simultaneously repeats and transforms the structures of other texts and is in turn transformed by them. Such transformation occurs because the repetition of a structure (rather than repetition of a theme or content) always yields difference.

My analysis borrows the concept of masked repetition to describe the transposition of the terms that construct sexual difference into terms that construct Jewish difference. My reading, therefore, projects terms used by Mehlman to define intertextual relations onto a different terrain, the construction of identity through an iterative process. Such a move is facilitated by the conception of identity as performative, specifically in Judith Butler's definition of identity as "the repetition or citation of a prior authoritative set of practices." ² Since these practices can include textual practices or conventions, the definitions of identity and intertextuality overlap. Because of this overlapping, the juxtaposition of male sexuality and Jewishness in Europa, Europa results not only in the destabilization of the gender system but also in the queering of the film's representation of the Holocaust as historical event. The interrogation of "identity" and historical "event" are inextricably linked.

Part I:
Sexuality As Masquerade

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's comparison in Epistemology of the Closetof gay self-disclosure and the drama of Jewish self-identification in the biblical story of Esther furnishes the impetus for this investigation. However, I will challenge Sedgwick's "simplified" reading of the latter and her positing of its relation to the gay situation as analogy even while drawing on her delineation of the epistemology associated with the closet. The problem with many analyses of Esther's story, including Sedgwick's, is that although they may recognize the convergence of racial and gender categories in Esther's identity, they tend to read both components in a reductive way. I will argue that Esther's identity, and more generally Jewish difference, must instead be read in terms of the concept of masquerade.

Sedgwick argues that the story of Esther, in its "clear ancestral linearity and answerability, in the roots . . . of cultural identification through each individual's originary culture of ... the family," offers a "simplified" model of coming out, different from the gay version, whose distinctiveness derives from the "plurality and the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualizing same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity." ³ In Sedgwick's account, other differences derive from this key distinction between gay and Jewish identities. For instance, the solidity of Esther's identity and the certainty of her communal ties make it possible for her to control others' knowledge of her as well as to set limits on the effects of her self-disclosure. Such...