The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity by Jay Geller (review)

Jay Geller's The Other Jewish Question challenges any conventional way of reviewing a book. His densely written analysis of both iconic and arcane (mostly German-language) texts across a roughly two-hundred-year period is not for the intellectually faint-hearted. But it is a feast for the connoisseur who follows the evolution and morphing of ideas and uncovering how these ideas become markers for defining, defending, or regulating social relationships. Countless cross-references, ideational interpolations, phonemic allusions, psychoanalytic evocations, intertextual linkages, and morphemic conjectures—characteristic of both Geller's style and method—make up the bulk of the present work's 300-plus pages, followed by more than 200 pages of endnotes and references. Such an accomplished intellectual amalgamation dazzles in its virtuosity, at times revealing with stunning lucidity the textual genesis and decline of ideas, if at other times weaving a nearly impenetrable web of opaque connections.

What then is this book about? It is about the European discourse (and counter-discourses) on the "Jew" in the period from Rahel Levin Varnhagen's birth in 1771 to Walter Benjamin's death in 1940. The book stops, so to speak, just at the moment that European antisemitic ideology begins to reach its pinnacle, having moved from curious and spurious textual ideas about "Jews" to the material reality of physical annihilation. And thus The Other Jewish Question traces the possible outcome of an insidious discourse on what is perceived as "the Other": cultural assumptions spread widely and enduringly across discrete disciplines of knowledge, artistic expression, and social agencies.

Geller does not simply study known antisemitic texts, but associates with them a series of strategies by which Jewish writers have sought to counteract what German-speaking European culture has portrayed as "Jewish" (starting at the onset of the Enlightenment, or of "modernity" as Geller would say).¹ Yet, at the very moment of responding to the cultural (mis)representations of "Jews," the Jewish interlocutors get entangled in fictitious discourses from which they cannot free themselves, thus adding to their own marginalization while trying to prove the opposite, namely their rightful belonging as equals in mainstream society.

Who, then, is the "Other" in The Other Jewish Question? Regrettably, Geller remains elusive, with the result that early on readers struggle to find their entry into what seems an already ongoing conversation. Geller mentions in the opening that his book "forms a diptych with" (p. xiii) his earlier On Freud's Jewish Body (2007), but such acknowledgment ought to be followed up with a more reader-friendly pathway into such complex territory.

We need to look elsewhere to get a better sense of this conversation. In a long review article that includes an assessment of Geller's On Freud's Jewish Body, Lars Fischer writes: "What, to this day, is frequently referred to as 'the Jewish Question' is in fact fundamentally a Non-Jewish Question. . .. Since these perceptions/projections [of 'the Jew'] constitute a crucial prerequisite for non-Jewish self-understanding . . . these might be best described as 'other Jewish Questions.'" Yet, Fischer continues, "Jews have in fact felt compelled to respond to the Non-Jewish Question and to varying degrees have made it a Jewish Question after all."²

This is the academic context of Geller's new work. For Geller, the "other" Jewish Question does not refer to how "others" (i.e., non-Jews) portray Jews, but, instead, how Jews have made the "Other Question" their own, hence inadvertently participating in the very process that "others" them. Regardless of whether Jewish writers in modernity either identified themselves as Jews ("self-identified") or rejected their Jewishness ("other-identified"), by responding to distorted representations they contributed to the other Jewish Question. "In this work," Geller writes, "text-producing self- and other-identified Jews are discussed, and negative and negating representations of Judentum are extensively detailed [through] a mapping of...