Jay Geller

Vanderbilt University, Divinity School and Program in Jewish Studies, Faculty Member

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The Jewish Animot

Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 29, 2018

The Jewish Animot: Of Jews as Animals

Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 4, 2018

This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominenc... more This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominence is attested by its many iterations not only in collections of Jewish jokes but also in works of philosophy and theory. Drawing together two seemingly unrelated terms such as Jews and elephants and pointing at their close proximity, jokes do not merely comment on the preposterous character of the “rumor about the Jews” that there is an inherent relationship between Jews and nonhuman animals. The joke also points to what escapes theory and calls out its limitations, for theory takes the Jew as well as the animal as categories, singular as they might be, that can be comprehended only vis-à-vis universals. The chapter then looks at how Jewish authors have called into question the human-nonhuman animal divide in their struggle to think through European modernity.

From Mohels to Mein Kampf: Syphilis and the Construction of Jewish Identification

Fordham University Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2011

The Other Jewish QuestionIdentifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity

The Jewish question (Judenfrage), discussed by both Jews and Gentiles, articulated the ways that ... more The Jewish question (Judenfrage), discussed by both Jews and Gentiles, articulated the ways that Jews could be integrated into society. Jay Geller provides the reader with a different approach the traditional discourse on the Jewish Question, particularly highlighting the 'other Jewish question', summed up as the way Jews sought to define themselves as public European individuals while at the same time contesting, negotiating, and to an extent, erasing their Jewish identity. The Other Jewish Question, articulates the negotiation and transformation of Judentum by assimilated German-Speaking Jews between emancipation and the Shoah. The other Jewish question mirrored the development of emancipation and indicated, according to Geller's analysis, the failure of assimilation. The nineteenth-century cultural ideal of Bildung, individual cultivation through neo-humanist education thought of as necessary to prove oneself as both citizen and human within the German-speaking middle class, was not enough for these Jews who constantly had to negotiate their public and Jewish identities. Geller examines the period between Rahel Levin Varnhagen's birth (1771) through to the death of Walter Benjamin (1940), particularly highlighting a period when the "Jew's body incarnated, and discourse about that body fleshed out, the icon 'Jew'" (2). The Jewish body, and the objects and discourses that surround it, i.e money, cloth etc. are the subject of this study. During the nineteenth and twentieth century, the body was the marker of difference. Racial and ethnic differences, such as those defined within the bodies of the Gentile and Jew, were charged with ideas of gender order. The body marked who was male and female as well as articulated the function of that individual. If the body was masculine it was social, if that body was female it was natural; bodies would then be assigned to certain spheres and regulated. Within this work the reader notices the interesting ways modern society was organized and divided following the construction of public and private spheres. As Geller points out in his definition of modernity, identities were crystallized and organized during this period while the Jewish body remained an anomaly (9). The Other Jewish Question is separated into nine chapters that highlight the themes of modernity, identity formation, gender ambiguity, and a desire to 'overcome' Jewishness. Chapters one and two provide the reader with an indepth exploration of the construction of gender ambiguity beginning with

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Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History eds. by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup

German Studies Review, 2018

The Freudian Orient: Early Psychoanalysis, Anti-Semitic Challenge, and the Vicissitudes of Orientalist Discourse

The German Quarterly, Jul 1, 2016

Scherer, Frank F. The Freudian Orient: Early Psychoanalysis, Anti-semitic Challenge, and the Vici... more Scherer, Frank F. The Freudian Orient: Early Psychoanalysis, Anti-semitic Challenge, and the Vicissitudes of Orientalist Discourse. the History of Psychoanalysis series. london: karnac Books, 2015. xlvii + 160 pp. $35.76 (paperback).endeavoring to introduce edward said's critique of orientalism to the study of freud's Jewish identifications, frank scherer seeks to demonstrate "freud's construction of an 'occidental' self as a male-scientist, as a Jew, and as an orientalist to reverse and thereby to resist the anti-semitic stereotype of 'the feminized Jew as oriental'" (72; cf. 38, 103). further, by focusing upon freud's direct and indirect lexical references to the "orient," scherer seeks to remedy the failure of earlier studies to address explicitly freud's orientalism, generally, and "his internalization of the anti-semitic stereotype of the [male] 'Jew as feminized oriental'" (xix; cf. xxiii, xxxiv, 47, 111-13), specifically.in setting forth his object and argumentation, scherer employs conflicting labelings of the "internalized" stereotype that serves as his leitmotif. He cites Jacques le rider's 1991 article, "Wien als 'Porta orientis'" (Austriarca33:110) as his source for both the "Jew as feminized oriental" and the "feminized Jew as oriental." these two topoi, however, imply different analytical assumptions: in the first, the male Jew is feminized because he is associated with the oriental; in the second, the male Jew is associated with the oriental because, at least in part, he is feminized. Compounding the confusion created by scherer's careless phrasing, le rider only refers to "'Juden als orientalen.'" Given this problematic use of his source, scherer's excavation of freud's "archaeorientalism" (a compost of "archaeological metaphor, orientalist discourse, and anti-semitic stereotype" 72) less uncovers a leitfossil-as freud identifies "circumcision" in Moses and Monotheism's quest for the egyptian Moses-that betrays freud's ambivalences toward his own Jewish identifications than digs up a Cardiff Giant of scherer's own making.scherer's explanation of the "internalization" of the stereotype of the "[feminized?] Jew as [feminized?] oriental" in terms of "the splitting of the ego" misunderstands freud's notion (and scherer's references [J. laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis's explanation]). this defense process does not entail "the object, with both erotic and destructive instincts directed towards it, split[ting] into 'good' and 'bad'" (xxix; cf. 32), but rather "the coexistence at the heart of the ego of two psychical attitudes towards external reality" (laplanche/Pontalis, The language of Psychoanalysis [1973], 427).in mapping freud's orientalist discourse, scherer argues that, when freud referenced the non-directly-identified-as-Jewish "orient," he was always also referencing the "Jew as oriental." He decries what he calls the "de-'orient'alisation" (xx; cf. xlii-iv) of the 23volume standard Edition, whereby direct references to "orient" words were often translated with "east" words (on ten of twenty-one possible occasions) as an attempt to obscure the orientalist (and therefore also the Jewish) implications of freud's references to the orient bzw. oriental when "orient" words are absent.scherer all but ignores the historic anti-Jewish and antisemitic uses of synonyms of "orient"-including "east." When drawing upon ritchie robertson's "urheimat Asien" (German life and letters [1996]) as an archive of the "Jew as oriental" stereotype (xxxiiiii), he includes robertson's citation of J. G. Herder's 1804 characterization of the Jews as a "foreign asiatic people"; but, having established the venerability of Jewish orientalization, scherer immediately returns to exclusive focus on the use of "oriental" in that and all subsequent sources. With one dismissive exception (see below), he makes no reference to freud's use of "asia" words. Given that such words course through (six occurrences) freud's one extended study of both Jews and antisemitism, Moses and Monotheism, to characterize what is not Jewish (including his assertion that the Jews are not "asiatics of a foreign race"; s. …

From Rags to Risches: On Marx's Other Jewish Question

Fordham University Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2011

The Other Jewish Question

Fordham University Press eBooks, Mar 15, 2022

Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew. Moshe Gresser

The Journal of Religion, Jul 1, 1996

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“Feminization” and the Problem of Jewish Persistence

Fordham University Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2011

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933, Robin Judd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), xiv + 283 pp., cloth $45.00

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Dec 1, 2008

Life in Germany, 1843–1933, Robin Judd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), xiv þ 283 pp... more Life in Germany, 1843–1933, Robin Judd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), xiv þ 283 pp., cloth $45.00. Robin Judd’s study of circumcision and kosher butchering in Germany prior to the Nazi seizure of power is an attempt at what Michael André Bernstein calls “sideshadowing” (p. 18). It offers an alternative to the “apocalyptic” or “backshadowing” histories of German Jewry, decried by Bernstein, that plot the trajectory of that community’s life during the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries as ineluctably headed along a well-marked—for those who had eyes to see—path to the ovens. Instead, she outlines for her readers a series of local, regional, and national confrontations between various constellations of forces whose interests and motivations are not simply determined by the labels Jew or Gentile, antisemite or liberal, rabbi or judge. By focusing on the public debates over specific Jewish ritual practices and on the changing tenor of those debates, the author seeks— successfully—to “complicat[e] and de-exceptionaliz[e] the Jewish experience in Germany” (p. 11). Further, her examination of the political deployment of these questions provides an important supplement to previous research on such “ritualized markings of difference” (p. 3) that focuses on them only as discursive phenomena. Professor Judd discerns four periods, distinct in terms of both players and priorities, during which questions of ritual were politicized in Germany. She first addresses a series of disputes about circumcision that commenced in Frankfurt in 1843 and faded out by 1857. Rather than rehearsing the reformer/traditionalist disputations that earlier historians have addressed, she focuses on how some Jewish fathers as well as the radical reformers “rejected circumcision as a marker for Jewish belonging” (p. 49) and called for membership in a Jewish community to be determined by descent. Their arguments initiated a series of contestations whereby the borders between Jewish communal and secular government authority, as well as between state and local governmental authorities, were renegotiated. Further, Judd shows how these debates contributed to internal and external redefinitions of membership in the Jewish community and to realignments of status among educated Jewish elites—especially between the university-trained physicians and the traditionally trained rabbis. Above all, she emphasizes the variety of resolutions reached. Moving on to the period of German unification and Jewish emancipation, the author shows how these developments, including the enactment of a nationwide ruling that the obligatory denominational registration was sufficient for Jewish community membership, changed the issues and arguments in public discussions of ritual. Her primary focus here is on demonstrating that technological developments in the meat industry (stunning the animals before slaughter) and increased governmental attention to the health conditions of the population contributed to the salience of public debates over kosher butchering. The tension between the constitution’s guarantee of legal equality for all religions and the no less

A Glance at the Nose : Freud s Inscription of Jewish Difference

This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 1992. " A Glance at the Nose : Freud s In... more

“O beastly Jews”

Bestiarium Judaicum

Framed by Heine’s staging of the fictional exchange of animal epithets between Rabbi Judah and Fr... more Framed by Heine’s staging of the fictional exchange of animal epithets between Rabbi Judah and Friar José in “The Disputation” this chapter depicts the provisioning of the Bestiarium Judaicum. It first traces its development in the patristic and scholastic Adversus judaeos traditions through medieval bestiaries and church iconography (e.g., Judensau) to early modern anti-Jewish polemics, broadsheets, and proverbs. The chapter then charts the changes in the figuration with the emergence in modernity of the biologistic worldview (the shift in reference from the satanic to the diseased and parasitic), the development of new media (such as the postcard, the mass-produced picture poster, and the illustrated humor magazine), the laws requiring while circumscribing Jews’ adoption of surnames (e.g., German equivalents of animals emblematic of the twelve tribes), and the taxonomic determinations of the “Jude” (Viehjude, Geldjude, Kornjude, etc.). It also addresses the use of animal-human hyb...

On Freud's Jewish Body

Fordham University Press eBooks, Mar 15, 2022

Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, Eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies

This work was originally published as Geller, Jay. 2012. "Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, Eds.... more

The Godfather of Psychoanalysis: Circumcision, Antisemitism, Homosexuality, and Freud's "Fighting Jew

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jun 1, 1999

STUDIES OF SIGMUND FREUD'S Jewish identity trace a trajectory from the "ten-or-twelve-year-old" s... more STUDIES OF SIGMUND FREUD'S Jewish identity trace a trajectory from the "ten-or-twelve-year-old" son's shame over his father's submissive response to an antisemitic assault that Freud recalls in his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900:197), to the opening filial gam bit of his last completed work, the only one devoted to an extensive analy sis of Judaism and antisemitism, Moses and Monotheism. 1 Often attemp ting to psychoanalyze the father of psychoanalysis, these works render that identity as symptomatic of a son dutifully acting out his own ambiva lent Oedipal scenario whether with Jacob Freud, Judaism, or European modernity (cf., inter alia, Cuddihy; Robert; Rice; Geller 1997). Unlike that vast literature, this article examines the impact of Freud's Jewishness from his position as a father and not as a son. The focus of this analysis is one of Freud's classic case histories, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy," popularly known as the Case of Little Hans. This case, with one notable exception-a footnote in which Freud speculates

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Tailing the Suspect, or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference

The Other Jewish QuestionIdentifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, 2011

Circumcision and a Jewish Woman's Identification: Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Failed Assimilation

The Other Jewish QuestionIdentifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, 2011

A Future without Jews: Max Nordau's Pre-Zionist Answer to the Other Jewish Question

The Other Jewish QuestionIdentifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, 2011

(Con)Versions of Cats and Mice and Other Mouse Traps

Bestiarium Judaicum

This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse and cat-rat pairi... more This chapter examines the possible connections between the staging of cat-mouse and cat-rat pairings by Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine, on the one hand, and the asymmetrical and often violent power relations between Gentiles and Jews, on the other. It first, by means of a deconstruction of Michael Schmidt’s new-historicist article on Kafka’s “Little Fable,” interpellates Kafka’s posthumously published piece into a number of intertextual (including his letters to Milena Jesenská and the fragment “The Giant Mole”) and extratextual networks in order to suggest linkages between it and his situation as a Jew in Germanophone Central Europe in the early twentieth century. It then situates a late (c. 1852–55), also posthumously published, poem by Heine, “From the Age of Pigtails,” that he labeled a “fable” over and against the Jews’ acquisition and subsequent partial loss of civil rights in the first quarter of the nineteenth century as well as in relation to the tragic fate of Ludwig Marcus that accompanied the rise and fall of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Bridging these two analyses is a discussion of the swarm of “Rat-” phonemes and morphemes that plagued Freud’s “Rat Man” case study and notes.

Jay Geller

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