The Fabric of Jewish Coherence: From Glikl of Hameln to Franz Rosenzweig's Grandmother

Introduction

At the conference "Grammars of Coherence and Difference: Jewish Studies through the Lens of Gender Studies," we interrogated the apparent naturalness of the category "Jewish," in the manner in which gender studies in the 1970s began to denaturalize male and female, and we made this parallel between gender studies and Jewish studies explicit.¹ Yet at the conference and in follow-up discussions, examinations of the concept of Jewish difference have stood at the center of the project. Thus in this short essay, I argue that Jewish coherence is an equally crucial concept for theorizing Jewishness.

The move that I propose within Jewish studies, from investigating the workings of difference to exploring the operations of coherence, resembles a development in the history of gender studies. At its inception, gender studies as a field (at this time, it was exclusively called women's studies) was primarily concerned with examining the origins and the mechanics of gender inequality, and thus of gender difference. Why have women been considered different from and in fact inferior to men in most cultures and in most historical settings? What are the grounds for this hierarchy, based on constructions of difference, and how can the hierarchy be undone? And in the early days of gender theory, feminists called for overcoming gender altogether. In her iconic 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women," Gayle Rubin declared that she dreamed "of an androgynous and genderless (though not sexless) society," meaning a society in which the end of gender difference would bring the end of women's oppression.² The rise of the study of sexuality attenuated the call for the end of gender, however, claiming that gender differentiation was also a source of pleasure, including in lesbian and gay circles.

Yet it was Queer Theory, that arose in the context of the linguistic turn and postmodern theory, that moved the conversation about gender hierarchy and the patriarchal domination of women onto a new plane. Queer Theory argued that since women's inferiority seemed to be so endemically tied to the very concept of womanhood, it might be that hierarchy and inferiority are built into the very category of "woman" as the marked, inferior Other in the symbolic and social order of gender. Thus, rather than taking "man" and "woman" as foundational and as existing before and outside of language, social order, and constructions of difference, Queer Theory used Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that a human's personhood and gender (and with it his or her superior or inferior position in the social order) come into existence in a sequence of practices and identifications that establish the apparent coherence of the subject. According to Judith Butler, these identifications are in their core fantasies, and gender is essentially an enacted fantasy.³ Coherent gendered bodies perform this fantasy, "embody the fiction," and "words, acts, gestures, and desire" produce the effect of coherence, meaning "the effect of an internal core or substance … on the surface of the body. … The inner truth of gender is fabrication."⁴ Thus, "gender coherence is not the ground of politics but its effect," and liberatory feminist politics require that we undo the regulatory fiction of gender and with it gender hierarchy.⁵

In this essay, I am less interested in feminist politics, but I wish to examine the mechanics of difference and coherence,⁶ and before I move from gender to Jews, let me make a few more comments and lay out my terms. In another text by Butler, published in the first Transgender Studies Reader more than a decade after the seminal contributions to Queer Theory that I discussed and quoted above, she reflected on intelligibility, on "the conditions of intelligibility … by which the human emerges," the intelligibility that makes a human human.⁷ As trans people know, we invoke an "I" that is not grounded in anatomy,⁸ but in order to be subjects and human we must establish a coherence that attests to us being real and that makes us intelligible to ourselves and to others.⁹ Coherence and intelligibility are functions of...