Jewish Masculinities

Description

The lives, experiences, and identities of German-Jewish men

Read an excerpt from the book

Stereotyped as delicate and feeble intellectuals, Jewish men in German-speaking lands in fact developed a rich and complex spectrum of male norms, models, and behaviors. Jewish Masculinities explores conceptions and experiences of masculinity among Jews in Germany from the 16th through the late 20th century as well as emigrants to North America, Palestine, and Israel. The volume examines the different worlds of students, businessmen, mohels, ritual slaughterers, rabbis, performers, and others, shedding new light on the challenge for Jewish men of balancing German citizenship and cultural affiliation with Jewish communal solidarity, religious practice, and identity.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: German Jews, Gender, and History \ Paul Lerner, Benjamin Maria Baader, and Sharon Gillerman
1. Respectability Tested: Male Ideals, Sexuality, and Honor in Early Modern Ashkenazi Jewry \ Andreas Gotzmann
2. Jewish Difference and the Feminine Spirit of Judaism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany \ Benjamin Maria Baader
3. Moral, Clean Men of the Jewish Faith: Jewish Rituals and Their Male Practitioners, 1843–1914 \ Robin Judd
4. A Soft Hero: Male Jewish Identity in Imperial Germany through the Autobiography of Aron Liebeck \ Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
5. Performing Masculinity: Jewish Students and the Honor Code at German Universities \ Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker
6. Whose Body Is It Anyway? Hermaphrodites, Gays, and Jews in N. O. Body's Germany \ Sander L. Gilman
7. Toward a Theory of the Modern Hebrew Handshake: The Conduct of Muscle Judaism \ Etan Bloom
8. Friedrich Gundolf and Jewish Conservative Bohemianism in the Weimar Republic \ Ann Goldberg
9. A Kinder Gentler Strongman? Siegmund Breitbart in Eastern Europe \ Sharon Gillerman
10. Family Matters: German Jewish Masculinities among Nazi Era Refugees \ Judith Gerson

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Men's Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Gender
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 18 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253002211
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jewish Masculinities
Jewish Masculinities
German Jews, Gender, and History
Edited by Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2012 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jewish masculinities : German Jews, gender, and history / edited by Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00213-6 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00206-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00221-1 (e-book) 1. Jewish men-Germany-History-Congresses. 2. Jews-Germany-History-Congresses. 3. Jews-Germany-Identity-Congresses. 4. Subculture-Germany-Congresses. 5. Masculinity-Germany-Congresses. 6. Germany-Ethnic relations. I. Baader, Benjamin Maria. II. Gillerman, Sharon, [date] III. Lerner, Paul Frederick.
DS134.23.J49 2012
305.892 4043-dc23
2011049672
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
To our fathers:
Gerhard Baader, Joseph Gillerman, and Jack Lerner
CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction
German Jews, Gender, and History
P AUL L ERNER , B ENJAMIN M ARIA B AADER, AND S HARON G ILLERMAN

1. Respectability Tested
Male Ideals, Sexuality, and Honor in Early Modern Ashkenazi Jewry
A NDREAS G OTZMANN

2. Jewish Difference and the Feminine Spirit of Judaism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany
B ENJAMIN M ARIA B AADER

3. Moral, Clean Men of the Jewish Faith
Jewish Rituals and Their Male Practitioners, 1843-1914
R OBIN J UDD

4. A Soft Hero
Male Jewish Identity in Imperial Germany through the Autobiography of Aron Liebeck
S TEFANIE S CH LER -S PRINGORUM

5. Performing Masculinity
Jewish Students and the Honor Code at German Universities
L ISA F ETHERINGILL Z WICKER

6. Whose Body Is It Anyway?
Hermaphrodites, Gays, and Jews in N. O. Body s Germany
S ANDER L. G ILMAN

7. Toward a Theory of the Modern Hebrew Handshake
The Conduct of Muscle Judaism
E TAN B LOOM

8. Friedrich Gundolf and Jewish Conservative Bohemianism in the Weimar Republic
A NN G OLDBERG

9. A Kinder Gentler Strongman?
Siegmund Breitbart in Eastern Europe
S HARON G ILLERMAN

10. Family Matters
German Jewish Masculinities among Nazi Era Refugees
J UDITH G ERSON
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our shared interest in masculinity, difference, and German Jewry stretches back many years, and we began to engage intensely with the topic in the late 1990s when all three of us were in Los Angeles. Several years later, together with Stefanie Sch ler-Springorum, Deborah Hertz, Steven Lowenstein, and Monika Richarz, we formed a working group on gender and German Jewish history, and starting in 2003, after a conference in Hamburg on gender and women, the group turned its attention to masculinity. Deborah Hertz generously agreed to host a conference on Jewish masculinities at the University of California, San Diego, which allowed us to bring our ideas and vision to fruition. In addition to the other members of the working group, we would also like to express our gratitude to Atina Grossmann, Paula Hyman, and Marion Kaplan for inspiring our work and for supporting this project from its early stages.
The San Diego conference in December 2005 was a great success, still memorable for its absorbing, thought-provoking, and often heady discussions and for the unique dialogue it created between scholars of rabbinic studies, modern German history, and gender studies. In addition to those already mentioned, we are deeply grateful to David Biale, Darcy Buerkle, Ute Frevert, Sander Gilman, David Myers, Ofer Nur, Todd Presner, Gideon Reuveni, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, and Miriam R rup for their participation. We would also like to acknowledge the extremely helpful input we received from Till van Rahden, Stefanie Sch ler-Springorum, and Daniel Wildmann as we set about conceptualizing this volume, and we thank the volume s contributors for their openness to critique and their patience throughout this process.
USC Dornsife College and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion provided important financial assistance. We are especially grateful to Stephan Haas, vice dean of USC Dornsife, and Michael Marmur, vice president for academic affairs at HUC-JIR. We also thank Shayna Kessel and Evan Bernier for their editorial assistance with the manuscript.
At Indiana University Press, Peter Froehlich has been extraordinarily helpful, responsive, and gracious, and we thank June Silay for skillfully shepherding the manuscript through the publication process. Warm thanks to our copyeditor, Merryl Sloane, for her infinite patience and keen judgment. The two anonymous referees gave us many useful comments and suggestions, and we are enormously grateful to our editor, Janet Rabinowitch, for taking this project on and guiding us with her incisive comments and thoughtful advice.
Benjamin Maria Baader, Winnipeg
Sharon Gillerman, Los Angeles
Paul Lerner, Los Angeles
September 2011
Jewish Masculinities
INTRODUCTION
German Jews, Gender, and History
PAUL LERNER, BENJAMIN MARIA BAADER, AND SHARON GILLERMAN
This volume, an exploration of maleness and manliness among German Jews, presents innovative historical investigations of the lives, experiences, and identities of Jewish men. Its chapters stretch from the early modern period through the late twentieth century and treat German Jews in Germany, as well as in exile and emigration in North America, Palestine, and Israel. Its contributors engage with traditional Jewish texts, Jewish and non-Jewish social and religious practices, and anti-Semitic discourses on Jews; at the same time, Jewish Masculinities focuses closely on German and German Jewish cultures and contexts. The book builds on a growing body of scholarship on gender and Jewish culture and uses the categories of gender, Jewishness, and Germanness to offer new perspectives on identity, community, and difference in German Jewish history and beyond.
The idea that Jewish men differ from non-Jewish men by being delicate, meek, or effeminate in body and character runs deep in European history. In the thirteenth century, for example, the French historian Jacques de Vitry reported that his contemporaries believed Jewish men suffered from a monthly flux of blood and had become unwarlike and weak even as women. 1 It is not clear how widespread this notion was in the Middle Ages or how much of a role gender played in discourses on the Jews in that period, but by the sixteenth century, various images-such as the sinful Jew who bled annually during Easter, and the melancholic, passive Jew whom medical treatises described as suffering from hemorrhoids-had coalesced into a common belief that Jewish men were deficient as men and possessed some womanly characteristics. 2 Even Abb Gr goire, a renowned defender of Jewish rights, noted that Jewish men almost all have scanty beards, a common mark of effeminate temperaments. 3 Still, Gr goire, in his pro-emancipation treatise of 1789, Essai sur la r g neration physique, morale et politique des Juifs (Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Regeneration of the Jews), forcefully denounced the notion of male Jews menstruation as an unfounded prejudice.
The notion that Jewish men suffered from a distorted masculinity or carried certain female traits did not figure prominently in the intense debates about Jewish emancipation and Jewish civil rights of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth. The issue of Jewish masculinity arose only occasionally, when contemporaries-generally opponents of Jewish emancipation-argued that Jewish men were unfit for military service. Likewise, German Jewish men were at times excluded from manly practices such as duels. 4 On the other hand, some non-Jews considered Jewish populations well prepared for civil society, and significant numbers of Germans and other Western Europeans came to believe that Jews possessed an exemplary family life, in which faithful spouses, devoted fathers and mothers, and obedient sons and daughters formed tightly knit units. 5
The tone changed toward the end of the nineteenth century, when racialized anti-Semitism spread through Central and Western Europe. Soon, non-Jewish commentators began to express serious concern about inappropriate gender expressions among Jewish men and women, and the trope of the effeminate Jewish man became the target of pervasive and vicious anti-Semitic critique. Two decades after the founding of the German empire, many Germans turned to an increasingly aggressive and exclusivist nationalism, which together with the enhanced status of militarism, Germany s emergence as an imperial power, and the spread of reactionary forms of military masculinity shaped the peculiar gender and cultural order of the Wilhelmine period.
At least since Carl Schorske s pathbreaking essays of the 1970s, historians have been fascinated by the many contradictions of this era in Germany and Austria-Hungary: the breathless experimentation and cultural innovation that occurred alongside growing demagoguery, colonial brutality, and x