Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (3 page)

The explicitly homoerotic theme of the last section of Rosenstock’s essay is not the least of his essay’s contributions to this volume. He also makes won- derful use of Sedgwick’s “homosexual panic,” as he analyzes the complex sit- uation of conversos. Rosenstock analyzes the messianic unions articulated by his subject both as an example and as a special case of the homoerotic themes so basic to medieval kabbalah (see Wolfson 369–77). This article, unique as such within the collection, articulates the virtues of some aspects of queer theory when addressed to distinctly premodern texts and problems of the Jew- ish question. Through judicious employment of queer theory and historical

contextualization, Rosenstock provides a novel answer to the origins of some striking and puzzling themes in Spanish kabbalah itself.

The issue of homoerotic love, its representation in and reverberations for a Jewish cultural context, are also at the heart of Naomi Seidman’s essay. In a close reading of the Yiddish theater classic
The Dybbuk
, Seidman argues that the play contains two love relationships: a doomed heterosexual romance as well as a thinly veiled love relation between the unhappy couple’s fathers. In a subtle reading, Seidman suggests that the play enacts a symbolic marriage between the two fathers,
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displacing the heterosexual relationship supposedly at the center of the tragedy. In fact, Seidman argues, the heterosexual narra- tive of
The Dybbuk
is epiphenomenal to the fathers’ ill-fated romance; it is the fathers’ love—with its tragic ending—that ultimately drives the young couple to their doom.

From here we take a big step forward into another modernity—the Unit- ed States in the final third of the twentieth century—and Stacy Wolf ’s medi- tation on a quintessential object of Camp cathexis, “Barbra Streisand’s ‘Funny Girl’ Body.” In arguing for the buoyant queerness of Streisand’s body, defi- antly marked as Jewish, Wolf here offers a riveting companion essay to Mar- jorie Garber’s earlier discussion of Streisand’s attempts to normalize— straighten out—Yentl’s gender trouble. Wolf ’s imaginative engagement with Streisand effectively (and affectively) articulates a space of desire at the cross- roads of this cross-cultural cross-gendering: Jew/Queer/Lesbian/Woman. Im- portantly, Wolf ’s essay also brings out the “Jewess,” giving her pride of place. In this, Wolf is an odd woman out in this volume, as she traces something of the stakes for Jewish women’s bodies and subjectivities of the queer-Jew con- nection.

Affect and performativity, which provide methodological touchstones for Wolf, are also critical to Michael Moon’s essay. Willing anachronism, he con- jures and imaginatively reconstructs Henry James’s apparent (and apparently queer) flirtation with Yiddish theater; Moon reflects on the Yiddish theater that at once attracted and appalled James, juxtaposing these reflections with a consideration of the latter-day theatrical turns of Charles Ludlam and Ethyl Eichelberger. After tracing the Yiddish/queer overlay in both Ludlam’s and Eichelberger’s bodies of work, in the end Moon lovingly indicates how such queer nexuses of desire and identification might powerfully contribute to an understanding of “protoqueer” childhood.

The final cluster of essays comes at the queer-Jewish connections from the perspective of non-Jewish fantasies about the Jew (fantasies also illuminated in Moon’s discussion of Henry James). Jacob Press sets a historicist stage for us in his reading of one of the founding texts of English literature and culture,

Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. Press focuses his attention on the “Prioress’s Tale,” connecting that text’s narrative to allegations of ritual murder that were first brought against Jews in medieval England and then spread to the continent. As Press details, “The tale of ritual murder is premised upon the viability of a parallel between the pure body of the boy and virginity of Mary.” Both in turn represent the vulnerable body of the Church, which is threatened by penetration at the hands of perfidious Jews. Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” is “by far the richest surviving medieval rendering of the narrative of ritual murder

. . . written in close imitation of the stylistic and narrative conventions and content” of literary and popular renderings of the ritual murder of Little Hugh of Lincoln. After teasing out the (for lack of better term)
homophobic
aspects of these narratives of ritual murder, as they are brought against Jews, Press goes on to advance the startling claim—important for the history of sex- uality as well as for Jewish history—that “Chaucer’s embedded story is the distant but direct ancestor of modern psychological master-narratives of the consolidation of male homosexual identity.”

David Hirsch also takes historicist aim at the English literary canon, read- ing Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
in the light of the development of British “family values” in the early part of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the mainstream of Dickens scholarship, Hirsch indicates “how [Dickens’s] depic- tion of the ‘love of families’ extends itself quietly and subtly into a nationalist and even racist ideology.” For Hirsch,
Oliver Twist
’s “story of an orphan’s dis- covery of familial identity serves as an allegorical history of the ascendant middle class in England, which is defined not only though opposition to the deviant familial orders of the working and upper classes but also through a racial-religious opposition to the queerly atomized familial order of Fagin ‘the Jew.’” Hirsch here exposes yet another nexus between the Jew and the queer: both are outsiders to the order of the middle-class family.
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Compellingly, disturbingly, Fagin “the Jew” also recalls aspects of Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.” Hirsch recounts associations between Fagin and the Jews of Chaucer’s story, associations that would not have been lost on Dickens’s contemporary readership. Indeed, in an interpretive move that dovetails with Press’s reading, Hirsch explicitly connects Fagin’s character with the pederastic Jews of the narratives of William of Norwich, Simon of Trent, and Hugh of Lincoln. In so doing, Hirsch persuasively explains why Fagin
must
be a pederastic Jew, that this is, indeed, not an isolated speech act of an- tisemitism on Dickens’s part but central to the project (an incoherent one, as Hirsch shows) of the production of “Christian” family values.

In his essay on Proust’s Jewish and queer question, Jonathan Freedman ar- ticulates yet another aspect to the persistent association in modern European

culture between Jews and sexual deviance. To theoreticians of the Metropole, the Jews in their midst were a conundrum: not a religious group per se (for many were freethinkers or converts), not a language group, not a race, not a nation. In the face of such a “semiotic void,” Freedman suggests, “a language of sexual aberration could serve to ground the radically amorphous figure of the Jew: the simultaneously emerging terminologies of sexual perversion could provide a definition for a Jewish identity that was increasingly under- stood as pliable, metamorphic, ambiguous.” This developing language, with its scientistic heft, offered at least “one tidy box” in which to contain Jews’ “proliferating indecipherability.”

But this “discursive cross-referencing,” as Freedman calls it, could be put to multiple uses, sometimes even subversive ones. Freedman marks Proust’s
Recherche
as the richest example of a project that enlists this “discursive cross- referencing” not to disenfranchise (or worse) Jews and homosexuals but to queer identity, to question “the adequacy of race and sexuality—those two problematic taxonomies with which the nineteenth century has endowed us—to define essential properties of being.” Where Hirsch exposes the man- ifold dangers of this cross-referencing when it is put to work for “the” nation, Freedman indicates something of its destabilizing potential. He reveals how Proust’s cross-referencing of the Jew and the sodomite may point “to a more expansive understanding of the intimate relation between Jewishness and id- ioms of race and nation at the emergence of all these fraught and consequen- tial reifications.” In an essay full of exciting suggestions, one of the most ex- citing is this: For Proust’s Belle Epoque France, Freedman argues, Jewishness was more problematic than homosexuality, such that in Proust the latter is in part the cipher of the former (a reversal of the relation we frequently find in American texts of the twentieth century).

Together, Jacob Press, David Hirsch, and Jonathan Freedman demonstrate the culture- and history-making potentialities of literary texts. Their historicist analyses reveal the literary text not as the product of its times, nor as the au- thorial signature of individual “genius,” but as one of the producers of its times, part and parcel of the discursive structures that it both inhabits and cre- ates.
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Daniel Fischlin continues the French connection but looks at a very dif- ferent sort of text, Jean Cocteau’s
La Belle et la bête
, wondering why Cocteau, in immediate postliberation France, thought it worthwhile to create a film with distinctly antisemitic moments. Fischlin cites an attack on Cocteau by a certain Laubreaux—lauded by Céline no less—that accuses him of producing “Jewish theater,” and suggests that “the rhetoric of antisemitism evident in Laubreaux’s attack . . . may well be a displacement for an attack on his sexual- ity . . . thus confirming yet again the discomfiting homologies between these

two forms of alien otherness.” Fischlin further suggests that “Cocteau’s own ambivalent antisemitism may well” represent a kind of bait and switch. By fo- cusing negative attention on what he was not—Jewish—perhaps Cocteau hoped to turn the censor’s gaze away from what he was, homosexual. Paradox- ically, Fischlin observes, “breaking the signifying chain that linked Jew to ho- mosexual . . . was necessarily reinforcing the connections between the two.”
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However, Fischlin goes far beyond this initial interpretive gambit, subtly moving “to put pressure on the very signifying structures of the film itself as a symptomatic and historicized instance of the way in which antisemitisms operate and circulate.” Fischlin does not ignore Cocteau’s personal agency and affect in the production of the filmic text, but neither does he make them the meaning of the film. He thus expands rather than contracts the field of inter- pretation. Once more, we find the queer-Jew nexus central to the project of bourgeois nation building via the displaced othering of a sexual “deviant”: the (male) Jew. And once again we benefit from the critical energies of a close and contextual reading operated under the sign of a queer theory that is also his- toriography.

In a moving and deeply personal coda to this volume’s questions and con- cerns, Judith Butler takes us back to Germany, scene of so many losses for Jews and a range of other queers in the century just past. She does not only recount two different trips she made to Germany, one pre- and the other pos- tunification, she also records differences in the way she “experienced being a Jew” in these two recollected Germanys. The new and newly reunified Ger- many that Butler recalls in her essay is a Germany yet riven by the “problem” of difference and haunted by the Jewish question. Vitally, her reflections on Germany—and on what Germany in some way made of her—open onto a larger set of questions about the historical and affective burdens of memory, identification, and difference. Among other things, Butler illuminates the dis- orienting power of the past as it flashes up into the present.

On the one hand, Butler suggests, the struggle of contemporary Germans to account for violence against “foreigners” is overburdened by an earlier his- tory of National Socialism and its genocidal violence against Jews (and other “Others”). Publicly to acknowledge and grapple with the larger social and cul- tural frames of neo-Nazi violence in the present seems to promise only the re- turn to paralyzing guilt for the violences of the past. Accordingly, Butler sug- gests, in an anguished defense against the flashing up of past into the present, newspaper accounts of racist attacks on refugees tended to focus on the in- jured psyches of the
perpetrators
of violence, asking what happened to them, how are they so damaged, that they act out their wounded masculinity on the body of nameless others?

On the other hand, and alongside the deflections of what she terms a “popular therapeutic conservatism,” the new Germany Butler visited in 1994 was also celebrating Jewish contributions to German culture. For example, Butler details a 1994 Berlin exposition commemorating Jewish resistance to Nazism. “Postwall,” she explains, such a celebration of Jewish resistance and agency serves at once “to deflect from the present crisis of racist division and to enact its imaginary resolution.” Monument to memory and amnesia at once, then, the exposition promised a different kind of flashing up of past into present. As Butler explains, “The exposition was structured by a certain nostalgic utopia in which ‘the past’ furnished the resources for elaborating a multicultural ideal for Berlin, except that it is precisely Berlin’s past that is rhetorically cast as the obstacle to such a collaboration.”

In her essay’s concluding anecdote, Butler herself becomes the anxious site/sight for the overlay of past and present, Jew and queer, foreigner and cit- izen. There is no simple resolution to the series of displacements (analogies run amok) Butler charts in her essay—and which she herself comes to em- body in her dizzying final scene. We are left rather with a cautionary tale about the work of analogy.

The volume thus comes full circle to the question and questioning of anal- ogy: “Jews are like queers, aren’t they?” It is worth recalling, with Janet Jakob- sen, the considerable risks of analogy. To the extent that analogies demand like- ness (Jew = woman, Jew = queer, queer = Jew), they also produce it. Thus the very analogical thinking that strives to open up fresh insights may foreclose spaces for difference. These risks are more than academic. The larger project of this volume is how to hold open a space (the space of analogy?) for other pos- sible futures. These are queer and Jewish questions worth pursuing.