The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity by Jay Geller (review)

Taking as his starting point the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European discourse surrounding the Jewish Question, or the emancipation of the Jews and their integration into European society and culture, Geller argues that another Jewish question simultaneously arises. This Other Jewish Question, according to Geller, is the negotiation of Judentum, broadly defined under the rubric of “religion, nationality, disposition” (2), by individuals marked as Jewish with their own place in European culture. Distinguishing between identity as a fixed construct and identification as processes of multiple, ever-changing constructions, Geller defines his Other Jewish Question as that of “how to mediate Jewish identification” (30) or “what it meant to be a German Jew” (260). Entrenched in the ascension of the evolutionary and biological discourses, as well as racial anti-Semitism, Geller argues, is the trope of the Jewish body as figured by the corporeal nature of Jewish identity. Geller’s analysis of the marking of Jewish difference on the body touches on the topics of circumcision, braids, noses, syphilis, and scent. Geller maps the body of work surrounding the Jewish body.

Geller traces the vestiges of such discourses in the works of “exemplars that portend the whole, the mediation(s) of Jewish identification” (319), and covers a historical time frame beginning with Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx through Max Nordau and Daniel Paul Schreber, and ending with Walter Benjamin. Although his analysis centers primarily on Jewish-identified individuals (2), Geller also incorporates other works by non-Jews that helped structure the discourses to which the Jewish-identified individuals responded, both consciously and unconsciously. While the first three chapters focus on broader trends in Jewish identification as Other, such as feminization and disease, the remaining chapters focus on specific individuals. Recognizing the predominant presence of male writers in his analysis, Geller’s study on Levin Varnhagen argues that she focuses her Jewish identification through the lens of the male Jewish body. The chapter on Feuerbach deals with Feuerbach’s characterization of Jewish dietary practices in The Essence of Christianity as a precursor to his views of eating and food in his later work. In the chapter on Marx, Geller examines the use of Lump and Verkehr, Judentum-associated signifiers (172), in Marx’s work after his essay “Zur Judenfrage” (“On the Jewish Question”). The chapter on Nordau describes Nordau’s pre-Zionist work and its struggle with Jewish identification despite the lack of explicit mention of Jews. In the chapter on Schreber, Geller investigates the figure of the “unmanned, non-Jewish Eternal Jew” (235) in Schreber’s writings. The chapter on Benjamin considers the olfactory resonances in his work, particularly through the words “mimesis” and “aura,” in contrast to scholarship’s focus on the primacy of the visual realm in Benjamin.

Perhaps the most illuminating section of the book occurs in Geller’s discussion of the similar means used to code the Jews and Chinese as Other in which he examines the trope of the braid in depictions of feminizing portrayals of male Jews and male Chinese. One of the overall strengths of Geller’s writing lies in its parsing of specific words used in texts written by both Jews and non-Jews about the Other Jewish Question. Geller’s focus on the role of plays on words in the writings of Jewish-identified individuals underscores his primary argument that the “role of Judentum in the construction of an author’s works cannot be limited to its explicit mentions” (172). Geller’s own extensive and creative plays on words in his own analysis (e.g., “Hairy Heine, or Germany: A Winter’s Tail” [76]) makes his writing accessible and understandable for those with either an in-depth or cursory knowledge of German Jewish history, literature, and culture. Although there is no one chapter devoted to Heine, Geller mentions him in each, whether in a section, paragraph, or...