Passing as a Man: Narratives of Jewish Gender Performance

Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.

--Oscar Wilde

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.

--William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

Playing with a definition of identity that goes something like "you are who you aren't," in this essay I read the biblical episode of Jacob masquerading as Esau as one origin story of Jewish gender ambiguity and performative masculinity. Jacob, the son who is allied with his mother, dresses in animal skins to pass as Esau, and so, to pass as the kind of man who can inherit the patriarchy. Reading backwards from our own cultural moment--by which time the categories of "Jew" and "woman" have an overlapping history--the deception that earns Jacob the patriarchy reads as a story of his ability to fool his old blind father into believing that he possesses the requisite virility, signified by a metaphoric assumption of animality, to be a patriarch.

My focus here is on the example of Genesis 27, after which I discuss more broadly the trope of identity masquerade in the biblical stories of Joseph, Moses, and Esther, concluding with some speculation about how this biblical legacy has been reinscribed in modern conceptions of Jewish masculinities since the nineteenth century. Identity performance, it turns out, is central to the myths of the Hebrew patriarchy and matriarchy, both in biblical narrative and in the narrative traditions that elaborate on Hebrew Scriptures. Situating this story in its context among other biblical tales of masquerade and also at the beginning of cultural myths of Jewish gender identity, I read this small episode as an instance of Jacob acquiring the narrative future by successfully passing as a man. The donning of animality (an artificial assumption of virility), the particular pretense of hunting an animal for fresh meat, Jacob's distinctive voice (which has also become susceptible to the interpretation of compromised masculinity), and patriarchal blindness (a Freudian figure for castration or male impotence) become gender-marked features by the middle of the nineteenth century. Similarly, other politically motivated Hebrews in biblical narrative assume roles of power using strategies that suggest both passing and mimicry (Joseph and Moses passing, for example, as Egyptians). ² The term "man," without positive content of its own (in Judith Butler's words, an "ontologically consolidated phantasm" [313]), acquires in these contexts a set of related negative definitions: man means "not woman," "not Queer," and "not Jew."

This essay thus represents a response to the question with which Judith Butler closes Gender Trouble. She asks, "What other local strategies for engaging the 'unnatural' might lead to the denaturalization of gender as such?" (149). Behind that question is the explanation that immediately precedes it:

The deconstruction of identity . . . establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated. . . . The internal paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very 'subjects' that it hopes to represent and liberate. The task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible. . . . Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness. (148-49)

I attempt such a redescription here based on biblical passing narratives, narratives which at once depend on and confound sets of alternating oppositions among the identity categories "man," "Jew," "woman," and "queer."

What exactly is going on when Jacob puts on hairy animal skins and pretends to be Esau? In Genesis 27, Jacob, who will become the last of the three patriarchs, receives his father Isaac's best blessing by successfully passing himself off as his older twin Esau. It is a campy sort of masquerade: Jacob covers his...