More Than Skin Deep: Histories of the Modern Jewish Body

When the medieval historian Caroline Bynum assessed the merits of a decade's worth of scholarship on the body in her 1995 essay "Why All the Fuss about the Body?," the field of Jewish studies was just beginning to feel the impact of these new kinds of research questions.¹ This JQR forum suggests not only that a significant corpus of literature has accrued since then but also that the growth of the field has undoubtedly garnered the attention of its critics. The upsurge in scholarly attention to the Jewish body is thus worth considering both for its potential to offer new interpretations of the past and for what the reaction to such shifts may illustrate about the trajectories of Jewish studies itself. Owing to its allegiance to the textual tradition, Jewish studies has been particularly slow to integrate the insights of feminist scholarship, scholarship on the body, and other methodological approaches that would appear to shift the focus away from the "text." But an increased interest in the body within Jewish studies should by no means lead one to conclude that there has in fact been a shift away from the text, or that there is any unified analytical approach to the study of the body. By now, the "body" has come to be applied to such a wide range of phenomena that it defies easy definition.

In considering the significance of the "corporeal turn" for Jewish scholarship, we would perhaps best situate this new subfield at the crossroads of cultural studies and feminist scholarship. The embrace of new research methods and the accompanying shift in topics for investigation, of course, always have a history. In the particular case of the body, the confluence of feminism and Foucault provided the most powerful stimulus for the growing scholarly attention to the body since the 1970s.² In both its academic and political configurations, second-wave feminism viewed the body as part of the history of the oppression of women.³ Even before Foucault's work achieved its far-reaching influence in the academy, feminist scholarship had already introduced the distinction between sex and gender, viewing the female body as a surface upon which women's difference was inscribed and from which the cultural construction of gender has historically proceeded.⁴ As scholars historicized such universal categories as woman, sexuality, and the body, it is perhaps not surprising that some within Jewish studies also began to rethink the category of "the Jew" and "the Jewish body," recognizing that such concepts are generally constructed through the reciprocal influence of Jewish and non-Jewish cultural ideals. The appearance of new methodologies is sure to elicit counterreaction, and the history of the body is no exception to the rule. Those critiques originating from within Jewish studies tend to share the conservative concern that any shift in research foci runs the risk of displacing a corpus of morally and aesthetically valuable knowledge in favor of a jumble of idiosyncratic and relatively inconsequential texts and ideas. But within modern Jewish historiography, to which I will limit my discussion for reasons of space and clarity, histories that take the body as a subject of investigation have been anything but peripheral to the field. Indeed, many of these works have provided a key point of entry into the problematic that lies at the heart of modern Jewish historical writing: that is, the central and ongoing tension between difference and sameness that constitutes the experience of Jewish modernity. This body of literature demonstrates, for example, how the Jewish male body had become a locus of pathology in the Western tradition, and thus at once a primary marker of Jewish difference and a basis for articulating a modern racialized anti-Semitism. Reading cultural signs that marked the Jew as "other," the pathbreaking work of George Mosse and Sander Gilman opened up a field of research that has extended well beyond Europe and the Jews to a more general consideration of the relationships between the meanings of the human body and the larger frameworks of class...