Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

Notes

187  Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. A detailed account of the trial, and events leading up to it, can be found in Hoke Norris, “‘Cancer’ in Chicago,” Evergreen Review 6 (July–August 1962): 40–66. See also Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992), 371–83. 2. Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity: The Trials of “Lady Chatterley,” “Tropic of Cancer,” and “Fanny Hill” (New York: Random House, 1968), 114. 3. De Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere, 325. 4. On Haiman’s biography, see the Franklyn S. Haiman Papers, 1927–2003, at Northwestern University Archives. For Gertz’s account of the trial, see Elmer Gertz, A Handful of Clients (Chicago: Follett, 1965), 229–304. On Gertz’s childhood in a B’nai B’rith orphanage in Cleveland, see his memoir, “Poor Little Orphan,” Panorama (January 1935): 6–7; as an adult, among many other affiliations, Gertz served as president of the Greater Chicago Council of the American Jewish Congress. Rosset’s father was Jewish, and his mother was an Irish non-Jew; he identifies himself as Jewish in Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s biographical documentary film Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press (New York: Arts Alliance America, 2009). Ellmann’s father, James Isaac Ellmann, was a lawyer and justice of the peace in Highland Park, Michigan, who had also served as president of the Jewish Community Council of Detroit; see the Ellmann Family File in the Rabbi Leo M. Franklin Archives, Bloomfield, Michigan. On the Epstein family, see Mark Bauman, Harry H. Epstein and the Rabbinate as Conduit for Change (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). 5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove, 1961), 187, 3. 6. Circumcision was understood by both Jews and non-Jews in the ancient world to be the primary marker of Jewish difference. As Peter Schäfer reports, the Roman satirist Rutilius Namatianus referred to “the obscena gens (‘obscene, filthy people’) of the Jews ‘that shamefully cuts off the genital head’ (quae genitale caput propudiosa metit), that is, practices circumcision.” Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 102. As early as the 5th century, then, many centuries before the “reinvention of obscenity” that brought that concept to bear on the culture of early 188  Notes to the Introduction modern Europe—see Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)— Jews were already regarded as an “obscene people.” Aside from circumcision, the characteristics ascribed to Jews by Romans and early Christians that contributed to this perception included their alleged sexual aggression and theological comfort with both marriage and polygamy. In one poem, quoted by Schäfer, that is revealing in its portrait of specifically Jewish sexual aggression, Martial criticizes a Jewish colleague who has seduced his own young lover: “even though you were born in Jerusalem itself, / you bugger my boy, circumcised poet” (96). On the topic of marriage, meanwhile, Justin Martyr attacked Jewish polygamy and the license that the Torah’s narratives offered for men’s lust: “If anyone see a beautiful woman and desire to have her, they quote the doings of Jacob,” he complained. Justin Martyr, “Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew,” in Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Anti-Nicene Christian Library, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1868), 85–278 (quote on 269). Moreover, according to the eighteenth demonstration of Aphrahat, written in 4th-century Persia, some Jews attempted to convince early Christians to eschew celibacy: “I have written to you, my beloved ones, on the issue of virginity and sanctity,” Aphrahat explained, “because I heard of a Jew who embarrassed one of our brethren of our community and said to him: ‘You are impure because you take no wives, whereas we who procreate and increase the world are holy and excellent.’” Quoted in Isaiah M. Gafni, “The Institution of Marriage in Rabbinic Times,” in David Kraemer, ed., The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 20. Publius Cornelius Tacitus effectively captured the spirit of these views in his description of Jews as “prone to lust,” and Augustine concurred in his characterization of “the Jews” as “indisputably carnal.” Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 43; Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading...