Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (61 page)

1. Jacobs remarks that, even at the end of the nineteenth century, “I have been surprised to find in conversation with [English] Christian friends, who have not the slightest taint of Anti-Semitism, how general is the impression that there must be something at the bot- tom of all these charges” (
   Jewish Ideals and Other Essays
   , 198).
   

   1. Maria Edgeworth,
      Harrington
      , in
      Tales and Novels
      (London: Routledge, 1893), 9:2–3.
      

   2. Felsenstein,
      Anti-Semitic Stereotypes
      , 156.
      

   3. See, in this regard, Allen Edwardes,
      Erotica Judaica
      (New York: Julian, 1967), esp. p.
      

1. The association of Jews and sodomites has a long history in English culture, and the par- ticular notion of Jewish men as fellators of children seems to be related to eastern European circumcision rituals, especially the ritual of
   metsitsah
   , in which the
   mohel
   would drink from a ceremonial wine cup and then place his lips around the baby’s newly circumcised penis, a practice undertaken for anesthetic and antiseptic reasons. See Gilman,
   The Jew’s Body
   , 93–94. The collapse of Jewishness, sodomy, and the blood libel is not a historical relic, as recent pub- lications of Gordon Winrod, an American antisemitic propagandist, make clear: “Every Jew is a pervert by religion. . . . Judaism is the devil’s religion based on hatred for God, and per- petuated by the dark secret Talmudic doctrine of incest and sodomy of infants. Then all Jews are devoted secret missionaries of sexual perversion to all children whom they can molest.” Flier, February 2000. See the ADL website for background on Winrod and additional quo- tations from his writings: www
   .adl.org/special reports/winrod/winrod words.asp.
   

   1. As in many of Dickens’s novels,
      Oliver Twist
      makes occasional reference to West In- dian colonialism and the slave trade, yet most critics fail to recognize these passing references as signifi to Dickens’s construction of his English middle-class heroes and heroines. It was common during the Victorian period to assimilate the poor “in Darkest England” to African slaves under colonialism, much as Mr. Grimwig seems to do when he comments on Oliver’s having a fever: “Bad people have fevers sometimes; haven’t they, eh? I knew a man who was hung in Jamaica for murdering his master. He had had a fever six times” (149). Similarly, the young thief Master Bates is implicitly burdened with the exploitative economics of West In- dies colonialism, when he steals “a pound and a-half of moist sugar that the niggers didn’t work at all at, afore they got it up to sitch a pitch of goodness” (349). Dickens’s collapse of London criminals and West Indian slavery differs signifi from the rhetorical pattern of early Victorian philanthropists, who fought to end both the slave trade and domestic manu- facturers’ exploitation of the working class; instead, Dickens’s polemic works to displace onto Jews and London felons the crime of the English middle class’s profi through colo-
      

      nialism. For a provocative reading of
      Oliver Twist
      ’s symptomatic silence on the issue of colo- nial exploitation, see Paul Sharrad, “Speaking the Unspeakable: London, Cambridge, and the Caribbean,” in Chris Tiffi and Alan Lawson, eds.,
      De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality
      (London: Routledge, 1994), 210–17.
      

   2. See Sol Roth,
      The Jewish Idea of Community
      (New York: Yeshiva UP, 1977), 58–75.
      

   3. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Statement of the Civil Disabilities and Privations Affecting Jews in England,”
      Edinburgh Review
      53 (January 1831): 363–74, 367.
      

   4. Sir Robert Inglis before the House of Commons, 22 May 1833,
      Hansard’s Parlia- mentary Debates
      , 3d series (London: Hyman, 1830–91), 18:50. On the history of early nineteenth-century struggles for and against Jewish emancipation in England, see the con- temporary essay “Emancipation of the Jews,”
      Westminster Review
      19 (1 July 1833): 215–30; as well as M. C. N. Salbstein,
      The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain
      (Ruther- ford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1981); Abraham Gilam,
      The Emancipation of the Jews in England, 1830–1860
      (New York: Garland, 1982); and Israel Finestein,
      Jewish Society in Victorian England: Collected Essays
      (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993), 1–153.
      

   5. Beatrice Potter [Webb], “The Jewish Community,” in Charles Booth, ed.,
      Labour and Life of the People
      (London: Williams and Norgate, 1889), 1:578–79.
      

   6. Gertrude Himmelfarb makes a similar claim in “The Jew as Victorian,” chapter 7 in
      The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values
      (New York: Knopf, 1995), 170–87, which also references Webb’s 1889 essay. Himmelfarb cites the East End Jewish population as a model community grounded in individualism, free trade, “family values,” and privatized charity (conservative values that Himmelfarb champions), and it is clear that her interest in nineteenth-century Jews is somewhat disingenuous: Him- melfarb’s book is less an “objective” history than a conservative critique of the modern wel- fare state and postsixties liberalism. Of course, my own attention to Victorian representa- tions of “the Jew” might be considered equally disingenuous: by suggesting a historical continuity between the deployment of (self-contradictory) Christian family values in the 1830s and 1980s and 1890s, I mean in part to challenge Himmelfarb’s conservative ap- propriation of a “golden” past and am therefore as invested as she in using nineteenth- century history for present political ends.
      

   7. Cf. Heinrich Heine, in an 1823 letter to Moses Moser: “Juden sind hier, wie über- all, unaussthliche Schachere und Schmutzlappen, christliche Mittelklasse unerquicklich, mit einem ungewöhnlichen Rischeß, die höhere Classe ebenso im höheren Grade. Unser kleiner Hund wird auf der Straße von den andern Hunden auf eigene Weise berochen und maltraitirt, und die Christenhunden haben offenbar Rischeß gegen den Judenhund” (
      Briefe
      , ed. Friedrich Hirth [Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1950], 1:89); “Jews are here, like everywhere, considered intolerable hagglers and dirt-rags unpleasing to the Christian mid- dle class, and the upper classes feel even more loathing. Our little dog is sniffed and abused on the street—Christian dogs apparently have their own type of loathing for the Jewish dog”; my translation.
      

   8. D. A. Miller,
      The Novel and the Police
      (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 10.
      

   9. Walder,
      Dickens and Religion
      , 61.
      

   10. Cates Baldridge, “The Instabilities of Inheritance in
       Oliver Twist
       ,”
       Studies in the Novel
       25.2 (Summer 1993): 187. Furthermore, Oliver’s incorruptibility despite his experi- ences on the streets contradicts the novel’s championing of blood family love and nurture as the necessary safeguard of children’s innocence.
       

   11. Waters,
       Dickens and the Politics of the Family
       , 31.
       

   12. Edward Leeford’s pseudonym “Monks” ironically indicts this “Christian” brother’s Cain-like, antifraternal plotting against Oliver—and might also serve to align him with that Anglican bogeyman, the Catholic “Papist.” A fuller analysis of Dickens’s anti-Catholic sentiments lies outside the scope of this essay but might very well lead toward a more mul- tifaceted study of how the collapse of religious and “racial” difference (Catholicism in early Victorian England being primarily associated with the “black” Irish, who appear briefly in the vicinity of Fagin’s den as stereotypical drunks) is instrumental in the development of a familial, national, and racial model of English citizenship.
       

   13. Anny Sadrin,
       Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens
       (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 40–1.
       

   14. Sadrin (ibid., 35) notes Oliver’s naming as “Tom White” by a court officer early in the novel, although she limits the significance of this patronymic to connotations of inno- cence and purity.
       

   15. René Girard,
       Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
       , trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987), 26.
       

Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust

JONATHAN FREEDMAN

In among the many ways I do identify as a woman, the identification as a gay person is a firmly male one, identification “as” a gay man; and in among its tortuous and alien- ating paths are knit the relations, for me, of telling and of knowing. (Perhaps I should say that it is not to me as a feminist that this intensively loaded male identification is most an embarrassment; no woman becomes less a woman through any amount of “male identification,” to the extent that femaleness is always (though always different- ly) to be looked for
in
the tortuousness, in the strangeness of the figure made between the flatly gendered definition from an outside view and the always more or less crooked stiles to be surveyed from an inner. A male-identified woman, even if there could thor- oughly be such a thing, would still be a real kind of woman just as (though no doubt more inalterably than) an assimilated Jew is a real kind of Jew: more protected in some ways, more vulnerable in others, than those whose paths of identification have been different, but as fully of the essence of the thing.)

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written”

There have been few more powerful—and fraught—predications of identity than those Eve Sedgwick juggles in this quotation, the sexually transgressive and “the Jew.” Her words suggest two things: that each term bristles with con- notations, contradictions, and complexities and that relations between the two become yet more fraught the moment they are brought together. Thus, for Sedgwick, Jewishness initially functions as a kind of stabilizing agent in the quest for an identity yet to be known, a vehicle for indeterminacy whose tenor remains yet more indeterminate: we at least know what assimilated Jews are, even if we don’t quite know what that knowledge means. But the term
as- similated Jew
reveals new possibilities of indecipherability the moment it is pressed into definitional service. What does it mean, exactly, to say that a male-identified woman, much less a gay-male identified woman, stands in a more “inalterable” position than that adopted by an “assimilated Jew”? What does one do with that verb
alter,
with its unwitting reminder that, in many

antisemitic idioms, the sign of Jewish masculinity, circumcision, is a signifier of castration and that the male Jew is frequently identified in antisemitic id- ioms as either castrated or feminized or both—in other words, as a man iden- tified as woman? And how does one understand the words
real kind of Jew
? Does Sedgwick mention the “
real
kind of Jew” in the same (ironic?) spirit as does Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, who tells her boyfriend that he is what her Grammy “would call a ‘real Jew’”? Or does she mean a “real
kind
of Jew”—a certain species or typology of Jew? Is the former a perverse fate, or a stabiliz- ing comfort? And is the latter a sociological datum, or a historical construc- tion? Or are both, as Sedgwick’s language seems to suggest, a racialized essence that no amount of assimilation can (luckily?) undo?

For Sedgwick, in other words, the relation between
Jewishness
and
queer- ness
is a powerfully charged chiasmus in which each term comes to gloss, illu- minate, displace, transume, each other, all at one and the same time.
1
And her work suggests that although these two may be fated to be paired, their juxta- position can often prove as problematic as it seems inevitable. The term that seems to be the stablest,
the Jew,
turns out to be as susceptible to a multiplici- ty of meanings and possibilities and definitional improvisations as the one (the gay male-identified woman) it is designed to gloss and hence stabilize. In what follows I want to look at the implications and complications of this phenom- enon by focusing on the text Sedgwick uses to make her argument, Marcel Proust’s
À la Recherche de Temps Perdu
. Proust’s great novel is obsessed with the relation between the figures it knows as “the Sodomite” and “the Jew”: like Sedgwick, it brings them together initially as a species of metaphorical equiv- alence in which the latter is designed to gloss the former by means of its more obvious racial, religious, or cultural characteristics, but in which the vehicle comes to seem as mysterious as the tenor, the signifier as veiled, mysterious, or just plain confusing as the signified. And this confusion, I think, is significantly understated not only in much of the criticism surrounding Proust’s novel but in much of contemporary criticism itself, which, like Sedgwick, knows what Jewishness
is
—frequently even uses Jewishness as a trope for that which
can be known
about the nature of sexuality, identity, culture, knowledge itself—but keeps tripping over the discovery that Jewishness is as multifarious as the terms (and identities) it is invoked to define and hence stabilize.

More specifically, I begin with the now familiar recognition that at a cru- cial historical moment—the moment of the fin de siècle and early years of the twentieth centuries—Jewish and sexually transgressive identities were molded in each other’s image; but I do so to show that, while in Proust—if not his culture at large—this process is accomplished by similar processes, it led to remarkably diverse predications. Thus recent post-Foucaldian critics

have reminded us that the figure of “the homosexual” came into full crystal- lization in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in psychiatric and sexological discourses. The same, it must be added, was true of that new social type, “the Jew”: for, at this moment, Jews got redefined not as mem- bers of a religion (however debased or privileged) or a culture (ditto) or even as inhabitants of a region or a nation but in pathological terms that served the purpose of managing the proliferation of ambiguities from which the very concept of “the Jew” emerged.