Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History ed. by Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner (review)

Reviewing conference volumes is not always a pleasure, but this one, based on a 2005 conference held at the University of California in San Diego, is an exception. It assembles innovative, vivid, and inspiring inquiries into the intersection of Jewish history, German history, and gender history. By focusing on the male side of Jewish gender history, the book establishes a new field, profiting from a broad range of never (or rarely) before used primary sources, such as memoirs, letters, interviews, and obscure tabloids. There is already one outstanding and influential book on modern Jewish masculinities, of course: the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997), which hovers above this collection. According to Boyarin, the rabbis of the Talmudic era established 2,000 years ago a distinctive, nonphallic, gentle, timid, and studious mode of masculinity: Edelkayt, which resisted gentile norms of a martial manhood from ancient times to the twentieth century. This confirmed, in a way, European stereotypes of the feminized Jewish man. From this perspective, Zionist masculinities, as propagated in the late nineteenth century, are understood as the opposite of and, in fact, as a pathological deviation from, the “right” path. This volume, by contrast, illuminates the historical fluidity and diversity of Jewish masculinities in Germany from the seventeenth century through the Nazi period, while also shedding light on the overlap between Jewish and gentile constructions of manliness.

The bulk of the contributions focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and takes advantage of a few recent studies on German, gentile, middle-class masculinities that have dismissed the idea of a dominantly martial or aggressive cult of manliness. They show instead that men indulged in domestic masculinities, a cult of feeling, as well as a concept of wholeness, i.e., of balancing and uniting different, even opposing, sentiments, attitudes, and desires. This idea of maleness, however, is much closer to Jewish Edelkayt than Boyarin had assumed. Analyzing the writings of three Jewish leaders from different religious movements in the nineteenth century, Benjamin Maria Baader argues, for instance, only seemingly along Boyarin’s idea about Jewish men’s domestic, tender, and feminine virtues. Baader suggests that both Jewish and gentile nineteenth-century, middle-class masculinities furthered “male sensitivity and emotional expressiveness” (61). Stefanie Schüler-Springorum’s close reading of the detailed memoir of Aron Liebeck, a Jewish businessman born in 1856, produces similar results: Liebeck saw himself as a “soft hero” (90) fighting for his family and his business, adoring male Jewish beauty while opposing military masculinities. Robin Judd’s contribution on nineteenth-century Jewish ritual practices, and especially Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker’s comparison of Jewish and Catholic students’ response to the honor code and dueling standards at German universities around 1900, also question scholarly assumptions about distinctive Jewish masculinities. It was the Catholics who, following a papal ban, refrained from dueling and thus most deliberately opposed the martial version of manliness, whereas Jewish dueling fraternities continued to support it.

The fluidity of Jewish masculinities rather then their distinctiveness is also shown quite plainly in the remaining chapters, beginning with Ann Goldberg’s psychoanalytical reading of Friedrich Gundolf, the reactionary Jewish literature professor who, in the 1920s, was an enthusiastic member of the elitist homoerotic and misogynic circle around Stefan George—and who was, at the same time, deeply in love with the “New Woman” whom he eventually married. Sharon Gillerman offers a brilliant analysis of the Jewish strongman Siegmund Breitbart and his personification of both physical prowess and soft tenderness, which Gillerman analyzes, using Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory, as a kind of mimicry that appropriated and, at the same time, undermined the hegemonic norm. Even Etom Bloom’s exploration of the “firm” Hebrew handshake and simultaneous chapcha, the slap on the shoulder, questions—in this case more...