A Horse is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course,” or Some Nagging Suspicions about Some Jewish Writers

The essay examines the interrelationship of Jewish identification (self and/or ascribed) and the fashioning of human-horse hybrids in Primo Levi (“Quaestio de Centauris”), Bernard Malamud (“Talking Horse”), and Moacyr Scliar (The Centaur in the Garden). It begins its interrogation of the appeal of the centaur to several Jewish writers after the era of human-equine symbiosis ended by tracing how distinctions between horse and donkey as well as judgments of horsemanship had previously mediated gentile/Jewish difference. Then, while noting the possible influences of earlier Jewish literary constructions of Judentum-associated horses or horse-human hybrids on Levi, Malamud, and Scliar, the essay turns to their particular works. Mounted upon their respective human-horse hybrids, these three writers explore the supplemental character of Jewish identification in Western modernity, by which the dominant gentile society’s ascribed Jewishness supplemented and often superseded the thus-identified individual’s own diverse identifications. These writers examined this Jewish condition in relation to the modern Western (male) individual’s experiences of doubleness, as well as to whether there was a place for any hybrid subject that may emerge out of—and be distinct from—the identifications by which Jews were interpellated into or out of the “human” community.