Insectopedia (23 page)

Although the Nazis imposed the borders with unprecedented ferocity, they did not initiate the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom of humanity. In early-modern France, for example, “since coition with a Jewess is
precisely the same
as if a man should copulate with a dog,” Christians who had heterosexual sex with Jews could be prosecuted for the capital crime of sodomy and burned alive with their partners—“such persons in the eye of the law and our holy faith differ[ing] in no wise from beasts” (who were also subject to trial and execution).
⁶
In a minor key, long-standing German identifications of Jews with dogs (mongrels) and, sometimes, pigs, persisted through the Nazi era.
⁷

More destructive—and more insinuating—was the association of the Jew with the shadowy figure of the parasite, a figure that infests the individual body, the population, and of course, the body politic, that does so in both obvious and unexpected ways, and that invites innovative interventions and controls.

Three streams converged in the Jewish parasite—modern antisemitism, populist anti-capitalism, and the new social sciences (eugenics was one example)—streams that made sense of the world through the concepts and metaphors of biology. The historian Alex Bein tracked the figure of the parasite prior to its modern connection to race.
⁸
He found it in Greek comedy as a destitute person, a stock character who sparred wittily with host and guests intent on extracting humiliation in return for a meal. Bein then followed its entry into the European vernacular along with the early-modern humanist return to the classical texts. In this later incarnation, its comedic qualities flattened by the centuries, “parasite” reappeared as an expression of contempt for people who fawn on the rich and for people who profit without labor at the expense of those who sweat. It was in this moralistic form that the word was taken up by the eighteenth-century sciences: first botany, then zoology, and finally, fatally, by the sciences of man.

Bein argued that it was the physiocrats, liberal political economists of the mid-eighteenth century, who brought the parasite into European political philosophy. They sliced society neatly into three: the
classe productive
of agriculturalists,
the propertied class of landowners, and the unproductive
classe stérile
, made up primarily of merchants and manufacturers. It was, Bein argued, the introduction of the “parasitic”
classe stérile
into political discourse that would give antisemitism its populist base in anti-capitalism.

Parasites drain the lifeblood from the body politic. But in order for this commonplace to sustain violence, a decisive metamorphosis has to take place: a people must become vermin in fact as well as in metaphor.
⁹
“Every living being except Man can be killed but not murdered,” writes Donna Haraway.
¹⁰
And indeed, somehow, people must be made as killable as animals. Drawing parallels between the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda, the anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani talks about
race branding
(“whereby it [becomes] possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience”).
¹¹
“Ordinary” dehumanization of this type—“the Tutsi ‘cockroaches’ should know what will happen, they will disappear”
¹²
—requires two associations: the identification of a targeted group with a particular type of nonhuman life-form and the association of the being in question with adequately negative traits.

There is no doubt that this happened in the Holocaust. But something more happened, too. Explaining it is at the heart of understanding the fate of the Jews, who, after all, would be killed like insects—like lice, in fact. Literally like lice. Like Himmler’s lice. With the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers, with the same technologies.

Alfred Nossig, the sculptor of that assertive Wandering Jew, was seventy-nine when he was arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto by the ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization, the underground group that would lead the iconic uprising. It was February 1943, one of those dead days of terror between the Gestapo’s January incursion and the April revolt, and the details are confused. There was a secret trial, a conviction for treason, and a summary execution. After Nossig’s death, an incriminating document, a report he had prepared for the Germans on the impact of their
routed action, was found in his pocket, or perhaps in the desk drawer of his apartment, or perhaps not at all. No one could say for sure, and by that point it didn’t really matter.

Nossig was not only a sculptor. He was also a well-known writer of philosophical and political treatises, a poet, playwright, and literary critic, the author of an opera libretto, a journalist, a diplomat, a polymath trained in law and economics (in Lvov), philosophy (in Zürich), and medicine (in Vienna), and as the historian of Zionism Shmuel Almog puts it, “a conceiver of great schemes.”
¹³
He was a mysterious figure, and a tireless one, always organizing, always arguing, and somehow always on the losing side. For decades, he reveled in the furious center of early Zionism as Jewish intellectuals and activists wrestled bitterly to make sense of their situation in the midst of new ideologies, new possibilities, and unprecedented dangers. Other Jews—though not many—were executed by the ZOB, but none were as prominent as Nossig.
¹⁴
The untidy death of the elderly man at this moment of enduring redemption is still a moral, political, and historical problem.

Nossig’s vigorous statue of the Wandering Jew was premature in aligning the Torah with resistance and “fell quickly into oblivion.”
¹⁵
It was Hirszenberg’s image of suffering that captured the mood of a Jewish world undone by the vicious pogroms that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, a world soon to experience the explosions of 1903 and thereafter, cataclysms that sent 2.75 million Jews from the Pale of Settlement pouring west across Europe between 1881 and 1914. Still, as we know, the traces of Nossig’s vision would reappear in Szyk’s rendering of the theme some forty-three years later, a vision that found in suffering a wellspring of defiance.

But defiance can take strange forms. At the time of the pogroms, Nossig was arguing that emancipation and assimilation had directly provoked antisemitism by fomenting insecurity among Christians. Like Hirszenberg, he believed that Jews and Christians were fundamentally incompatible. Among Jews, historical “exile” had led to degeneration. “The average Jewish type,” he wrote in 1887, “exhibits strength in the struggle for survival but is morally on a lower level than the non-Jew; he possesses more shrewdness and endurance, but at the same time more ambition, vanity, and a lack of conscience.”
¹⁶

Nossig’s writings caused a sensation. But not through offense. Instead, his explicit call for the rededication of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as the only solution to the problem of the European Jews thrust him to the forefront of Zionist polemicists—a prominent rival to Theodor Herzl, whose famous manifesto,
Der Judenstaat
, would be published in 1896. Yet it is sentences like the one above, overlooked at the time, that now reveal the latent symptom.

It’s all so cinematic. Nossig’s arrest, the hurried trial, the secret execution, and—jump-cut—across the Soviet border, the
Einsatzgruppen
, the SS paramilitaries, unleashed, systematically butchering the frozen Ukrainians. The bleached-white landscape, the cabins engulfed in flame, black smoke pluming into an empty sky, red blood soaking out across the crisp snow. It is February when Nossig dies in Warsaw. The uprising begins on April 19, and the fighters are still holding out five days later as Himmler lectures on lice to his SS officers in Kharkov.

This is a difficult history, a story shadowed by the disaster about to fall. There are others, but the late-nineteenth-century words that matter most here are the following:
degeneracy, science, nation
, and
race.
There are Jews, Poles, and Germans. Soon, Europe and its colonies will burn in war upon war. The
Judenfrage
, the Jewish Question, is also the Jewish problem, and new solutions are beginning to appear. Nossig will travel. Before he comes back to die in the filth of the ghetto, he will crisscross the continent, studying; sculpting; writing books and plays; editing journals; organizing museums, exhibits, and research institutes; founding a Jewish publishing house and attempting to establish a Jewish university; addressing meetings and conferences in Paris, Vienna, London, Berlin, and many other cities; building a reputation as a social liberal and committed pacifist; doing anything he can to further the cause of Jewish emigration.

He channels his immense energy into the new cultural and political activism of
Gegenwartsarbeit
, the practical work of transforming the present. By his late thirties, he is one of the best-known Jews of his generation.
But he will end up barely a footnote, his name tied always to that worst of all words:
collaborator.
Could there be a more terrible fate?

Nossig will fall foul first of Herzl and the political Zionists, then of the Zionist Organization itself. But none of that stops him. He negotiates with the Ottomans, the British, the Germans, the Poles. He cultivates around himself the kind of mystery no one likes or trusts, something malign maybe; no one can say for sure. People know he’s driven. They’re no longer sure by what. It’s as if he sensed the disaster about to fall. (But did anyone really sense the disaster about to fall?)

People don’t know what to make of him. He has the kind of mystery no one likes or trusts. (Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Judenrat, the Jewish administrative council in the Warsaw Ghetto, calls him the
tausend Künstler
, the conjurer, the man of a thousand parts.)
¹⁷
When he appears in the ghetto, he is taciturn and haughty. (“A word from him was rare indeed.”)
¹⁸

Whatever else he may be, Nossig is a modern man of social science. He is a man who grasps the solidity of facts. As if the reality of facts could hold back whatever disaster may befall. He forms the Verein für jüdische Statistik, the Association for Jewish Statistics, and enlists many
of the most dynamic Jewish intellectuals of central Europe. They want Jews to know who Jews are and how they live; they want to reveal the corrupting effects of assimilation and the new antisemitism; they want to organize and regenerate.

So they publish surveys of Diaspora life and they produce statistics. It’s
Gegenwartsarbeit.
And Nossig (like others who are not Jews) realizes at once that survival will be a question of social hygiene. That the words that matter most are
degeneracy, science, nation
, and
race.

From Berlin, the center of German Jewish intellectual life, Nossig used his substantial organizational talents to found, in 1902, the Association for Jewish Statistics; to edit, in 1903, its initial publication,
Jüdische Statistik;
and to launch, in the following year, the Büro für Statistik der Juden. The bureau stood at the center of Jewish political and intellectual life in the pre-Nazi period, “the focal point of Jewish social scientific activity in Europe … until the mid-1920s.”
¹⁹

Jewish social science was a direct response to the Jewish question. The historian John Efron described this succinctly: “The question revolved around accounting for the physical, cultural, and social differences between Jews and Germans. The central issue was why, after their initial emancipation in 1812 in Prussia, their subsequent integration into German society, and their adoption of German culture, the Jews remained a distinct, visible, and easily identifiable group. Why had they failed to shed themselves of their Jewishness—that rarely described, but often observed, essence?”
²⁰

That this was also a preoccupying question for non-Jewish Germans can be seen in the scale and intensity of the research it provoked. Most famous, perhaps, were the comparative craniometric studies of almost 7 million German and Jewish schoolchildren carried out by Rudolf Virchow in the 1870s, which demonstrated the impracticality of distinguishing phenotypically between Aryans and Jews and, accordingly, of claiming that race and nation were one and the same.
²¹

Nossig argued that the loss of cultural distinctiveness through assimilation
was destroying the individual Jewish body and the body of the Jewish race. People in exile were subject to diseases of the flesh and the psyche and in need of physical and spiritual regeneration.
²²
Because both Jewish social scientists and antisemitic intellectuals were committed to the new logics of physical anthropology, evolutionary theory, and medicine, this was a crisis about which all could agree. Yet there were, obviously, crucial distinctions. In particular, Jewish scholars followed the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in emphasizing the role of the environment in evolution and argued for the social and historical rather than biological and racial determinants of national pathologies.
²³
For assimilationists, Lamarck provided a wedge between themselves and antisemitic attempts to roll back the gains of emancipation; for Zionists, he promised that a new land would produce a new Jew.