Jewishness as Gender

138 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 of the issues raised by the book. In addition to addressing the question of what knowledge is of most worth, teachers of gender and Jewish studies must address the question of what form of pedagogy is of most worth. Pedagogy: The Question ofImpersonation begins to answer that question. }ewishness as Gender by Ann Pellegrini Department of Women's Studies Barnard College Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, edited by Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. 341 pp. $24.95 (P); $54.~5 (c). In the framing essay for this special issue ofShofar, Miriam Peskowitz criticizes the "peculiar and problematic" master codes-"Women in X," "Women and X," and, more recently, "Gender and X"-employed to add women (and stir) to the study of Judaism. The additive logic of these formulas masks, as it also reproduces, the gendered masculinist terms by and through which Judaism and "Jewishness" have been produced and framed as objects of a "properly" historical knowledge in the first place. In light of Peskowitz's cautions, the title of Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams' new anthology can only appear ominous: Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger. Yet, this fascinating anthology complicates and unsettles what it means to say ofJudaism, Jewishness, or "Jewish knowledges": that they are always already gendered. Taking as their shared point of departure Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger's infamous 1903 text Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and CharaCter), the nineteen essays assembled by Harrowitz and Hyams offer fresh historical inSights into not "just" Jewishness and gender, but Jewishness as gender. In Sex and Character, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, Weininger lays out "absolute" maleness and "absolute" femaleness, giving to each a pseudo-scientific formula, "M" and "W," respectively. Putting forward a theory of universal bisexuality (which he may have plagiarized Review Essays 139 from Freud's one-time collaborator cum best friend Wilhelm Fliess), Weininger hypothesized that neither principle was ever present in its pure form in a single individual. Rather, every person was, both biologically and metaphysically, a mix of "M" and "W"-a claim that might at first glance seem to open up radically emancipatory possibilities. .As Jeffrey Mehlman suggests in his provocative staging of "Weininger in a Poem by Apollinaire ," if there were something of the male in every woman and something ofthe female in every man (p. 190), then men as a class could not 'be posed as "natural" superiors of women as a class. In fact, from this perspective, identifying "men" and "women" as social and even natural classes becomes a self-defeating exercise. Yet, as several ofthe contributors to the volume also observe, Weininger's conflation of the female principle with "woman," read alongside his wholly negative estimate of femaleness, ultimately reasserts the claims of [some] men over [all] women. In the penultimate chapter of Sex and Character, "Judaism," Weininger joins the "woman question" to the "Jewish question." Analogizing "the" Jewish character to femaleness, he represents Jewish "racial" difference under the aspect of sexual difference. Moreover, as in the case of femaleness and women, Weininger fails to keep distinct his abstract principle ofJewishness from Jews (not, ofcourse, that maintaining this distinction would exempt him or his book from the charge of antisemitism). In an age Weininger calls "not only the most Jewish but the most feminine," Jewishness is a "tendency of mind," latent in all mankind, but "actual in the most conspicuous fashion only amongst the Jews.,,1 In bringing together the "eternal feminine" and the "eternalJew," Sex and Character responds to the anxieties ofWeininger's day. Harrowitz and Hyams note in their helpful introduction that Sex and Character doubles as an attack on two nineteenth-century emancipation movements, for Jews and for women (p. 4). Gerald Steig does not put too fine a point on it when he writes, in his essay on "Kafka and Weininger," that Weininger could "tolerate [these emancipation movements forJews and for women] in one single form: as emancipation from Judaism andfrom femaleness" (p. 198; emphasis in original). The facts of Weininger's biography suggest just how far he would go to achieve personal liberation from both. Born...