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

The “Jewish question” (Judenfrage) has referred to pressing concerns about the political status and fate of European Jewry since roughly the 1770s. In German and Austrian lands, Jewish emancipation, acculturation, and secularization gave rise to a slippery understanding of Jewishness (Judentum) among both Jews and non-Jews. Who should be considered a Jew was determined according to increasingly antisemitic and so-called racial (rather than religious) specifications; many came to regard Jewishness as indelible.

The “other” Jewish question of Jay Geller’s significant contribution to cultural studies addresses the roles physiognomic and bodily constructs have played in processes of Jewish identification and self-identification. Geller explores how a number of prominent “text-producing self- and other-identified Jews” (4) from Baruch Spinoza to Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin “mediated” Jewish identification; that is to say, how they approached the ascription (or denial) of Jewish identity. Masterfully, Geller grapples with issues of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual difference—but also with physiology, pathology, nationalism, and antisemitism—as they pertain to Jewishness. Though this book nominally spans Germanophone texts produced from 1771 to 1940 (the birth of Rahel Levin Varnhagen to the death of Walter Benjamin), it also deals intensively with seventeenth-century Spinozan claims and their reception, thereby locating 1632 (Spinoza’s birth) at the dawn of German-Jewish modernity.

Geller’s central methodological move is the shift from the study of Jewish “identity” to the study of “identification.” Drawing on the work of sociologist Rogers Brubaker (Ethnicity Without Groups, 2004), which is increasingly present in Jewish cultural studies today, Geller updates our understanding of processes of identifying the Jewish body. In departing from fixed notions of “identity,” Geller opens up a broader range of texts, including many that are not easily read with respect to Jewishness. Indeed, some can be downright problematic: after all, it is difficult for scholars of (German-) Jewish studies to draw on works such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Artur Dinter’s Die Sünde wider das Blut without digressing into a study of antisemitism. Yet in its supremely careful and erudite readings of texts produced by Jewish writers, as well as texts and discourses that emerged from concurrent antisemitic climates, The Other Jewish Question provides fascinating interpretations of cultural motifs and their effects on identification within cultural and historical contexts.

An impressive number of texts receive close attention in Geller’s quest to trace a genealogy of ascriptions (and inscriptions) of Jewishness. Whereas his analysis concentrates on representations of the circumcised Jewish body, Geller goes beyond Beschneidung to include “other such corporeally coded ‘quasi-objects’ that supplemented, that helped make visible, the circumcised: noses, smells, voice, hair, mimicry, animality, rags, diet, disease and diseased reproduction” (19). In an introduction and nine chapters that proceed more or less chronologically (plus over 100 pages rich with interesting notes), he analyzes: (1) the persistence of circumcision (Spinoza, Moses Hess, Berthold Auerbach), (2) interrelationships of Chinese and Jewish hair (Heine; German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Achim von Arnim), (3) figurations of diseases including syphilis and leprosy (primarily in texts by antisemitic writers, including Mein Kampf), (4) gender difference (Varnhagen), (5) food, particularly onions and garlic (Ludwig Feuerbach), (6) Marx’s use of the terms Lump- and Verkehr-, including topics such as the rag trade and prostitution, (7) Max Nordau’s conspicuous pre-Zionist omissions, (8) paranoiac Daniel Paul Schreber’s vision of a non-Jewish Wandering Jew (Schreber, Freud), and (9) Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the “Jewish aroma” (Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno). Despite his emphasis in these chapters on well-known works and authors, Geller never ceases to cull additional arcane cultural tidbits that few before him have unpacked.

This book also advances the field of Jewish gender studies in several ways. Building on the work of scholars such as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin...