Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller (review)

Over the last few years, a growing number of scholarly works in Jewish Studies have brought into focus a new area of research that addresses the question of "the Jew and the animal," as Bruce Rosenstock put it in a recent essay.⁵ This body of works deals with the various ways in which animality is figured in Jewish texts, from the Talmud to modern literature in Hebrew, German, and English. In this emerging scholarly canon, Jay Geller's book claims a position of prominence by offering the reader a veritable catalogue—or more precisely, a Bestiarium—of various animal figures that populate the writings of German-Jewish authors who lived in the "Era of the Jewish Question" (5), from the middle of the eighteenth century to the Shoah.

In his analysis, Geller is not primarily concerned with the non-Jewish, antisemitic imaginary in which the pejorative designations of animality came to be associated with the stereotypical figure of "the Jew." Rather, his main concern is to show how certain Jewish writers (first and foremost among whom is Franz Kafka), subverted the pejorative designations of animality ascribed to the nonspecific figure of "the Jew" by performing animality and Jewishness in their particularity. In these terms, Jewish writers articulated their resistance to the "societally figured identifications" (21) encapsulated in the abject stereotype of the "Jew-Animal," and offered instead a subversive performance of Jewishness and animality implied in the various manifestations of the "Jew-as-animal." Such manifestations include, for example, Kafka's stories "The Metamorphosis" and "Josephine the Singer," where the precise species designation of the protagonists is deliberately obfuscated, thus evoking a negative Jewish stereotype and at the same time undermining its oppressive force by preventing closure around the question of Jewish and animal identity.

According to Geller, the central tension that informs the textual practice of writers such as Kafka revolves around the slippage from the stereotypical figure of the "Jew-Animal" to the subversive performance of the "Jew-as-animal." This point is well demonstrated in the fourth chapter of the book, on "Simian Semantics," where Geller argues that "Kafka has not merely taken several of the reigning stereotypes of the Jew-Animal and reproduced them tout court. He has deployed them in such a way as to embed their identifications as Animal and as Jew in the co-constitutions of Animal and Human and of Jew and Gentile, thereby rendering those identifications undecidable." (137) Thus, Kafka and other German-Jewish writers sought to undermine the prevalent stereotypes of the "Jew-Animal" either by denaturalizing them, that is, by exposing their artificiality, or, alternatively, by converting the stereotypical image (in the categorical singular) into a textual practice that performs the particular—a practice that Geller calls "giving voice to the Jewish animot." (232)

Geller adopts from Derrida the neologism animot—a designation that challenges the anthropocentric assumption regarding the muteness of animals—but he proceeds to locate it within the purview of the Jewish/Gentile distinction. Consequently, the articulation of "Jewish animot" disrupts the figural construction of both Jew and Animal, not by squarely contesting the conjunction of the two, but rather by demonstrating how the individual performance of the Jew "as-animal" (for example, as a mouse) remains incompatible with, and ultimately undermines, the general construction of the "Jew-Animal" as a figure possessing inherent mouse-like qualities.

Thus, in Geller's account Jewish literature itself assumes a socially redeeming role by defamiliarizing prevalent racial stereotypes. It introduces the mediating "as," a term that both conjoins and separates "Jew" and "animal." However, the question remains to what degree this strategy of defamiliarization can be considered part of modern Jewish literature, indeed of the modern Jewish canon, or is it rather a characteristic feature of a "minor literature" written in a major language? Despite the rich historical background that Geller offers in his book, he ultimately avoids this question, since the scope of his analysis...