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Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews
Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews
Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews
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Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews

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Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals—pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize, and justify the persecution of Jews, Bestiarium Judaicum asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories?

Focusing on the nonhuman-animal constructions of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Gertrud Kolmar, Jay Geller expands his earlier examinations (On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions and The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity) of how such writers drew upon representations of Jewish corporeality in order to work through their particular situations in Gentile modernity. From Heine’s ironic lizards to Kafka’s Red Peter and Siodmak’s Wolf Man, Bestiarium Judaicum brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers’ engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species "Jew" were identified.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 14, 2017
ISBN9780823275601
Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews
Author

Jay Geller

Jay Geller is Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program, and has also taught at the University of Vienna, Bryn Mawr College, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Swarthmore College, and Wesleyan University. He is the author of On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007), The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (2011), and Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018), all from Fordham University Press; and the co-editor of Reading Freud’s Reading (New York University Press, 1994).

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    Bestiarium Judaicum - Jay Geller

    BESTIARIUM JUDAICUM

    Bestiarium Judaicum

    UNNATURAL HISTORIES OF THE JEWS

    JAY GELLER

    FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

    New York 2018

    Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

    Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

    Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

    Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.

    Printed in the United States of America

    20 19 18      5 4 3 2 1

    First edition

    CONTENTS

    List of Abbreviations

    Introduction. A Field Guide to the Bestiarium Judaicum

    1. O beastly Jews: A Brief History of an (Un)Natural History

    2. Name that Varmint: From Gregor to Josephine

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

    4. If you could see her through my eyes . . .: Semitic Simiantics

    5. Italian Lizards and Literary Politics I: Carrying the Torch and Getting Singed

    6. Italian Lizards and Literary Politics II: Deer I Say It

    7. The Raw and the Cooked in the Old/New World, or Talk to the Animals

    8. Dogged by Destiny: Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom quails sit non navit

    Afterword. It’s clear as the light of day: The Shoah and the Human/Animal Great Divide

    Acknowledgments

    Notes

    References

    Index

    ABBREVIATIONS

    BESTIARIUM JUDAICUM

    Introduction

    A Field Guide to the Bestiarium Judaicum

    [N]atural species are chosen not because they are good to eat but because they are good to think.

    —CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS¹

    In 1920, well-known writer and publicist Franz Blei, under the nom de plume Peregrin Steinhövel,² privately issued Bestiarium Literaricum, a collection of vignettes in which literary figures, mostly contemporary, were transformed into all manner of beast and the occasional animated object. This field guide to predominantly Germanophone Literatiere (literary animals; a play on Littérateurs, [would-be-seen-as] men of letters) achieved instant notoriety; every German writer both hoped and feared to find him- or herself included.³ Often Blei’s characterizations punnily—and nastily—played off his prey’s surname. For example, the entry for the Prague-born Expressionist poet, dramatist, and novelist Franz Werfel, whose surname is a virtual homophone of Würfel (a die or cube), ironically began "Unlike the hedgehog [Igel] the Werfel possesses its spherical rotundity not by rolling up into itself but rather by spreading out" (BL 72); the entry for the German dramatist Herbert Eulenberg, whose surname means owl mountain, described "The Eulenberg [as] a jinx [Pechvogel, lit. pitch bird]⁴ from a family of screech owls [Käuzchen]. He builds his elaborate nest in the ruins of baroque or rococo or Biedermeier palaces or other such chateaux" (BL 32–33). Though the Austrian writer Anton Wildgans, whose surname means wild goose, is characterized as "a completely tame domestic goose [Hausgans], willingly kept in small Viennese flats" (BL 74), the author whose surname is a virtual homophone of the Czech word for jackdaw (kavka) and for whose 1908 print debut Blei was responsible,⁵ Franz Kafka, is otherwise speciated: "The Kafka is a very rare magnificent moon-blue mouse [Maus] that does not eat meat but feeds on bitter herbs. It is a fascinating sight because it has human eyes [Menschenaugen]" (BL 45).⁶

    When Blei published an expanded edition in 1922 under his own name and with a new title, Das grosse Bestiarium der modernen Literatur (The great bestiary of modern literature) he added an entry on the viciously antisemitic literary historian Adolf Bartels to his menagerie (BL 23):

    Bartels is the name of a zoologist of German literary fauna, who became such only after he had been one of said animal species [ein Tier besagter Fauna]. It is hard to establish what he was overall before. In any case, he had little luck as a literary beast [Literatier], the blame for which he ascribed to the stables being so overfilled with Jewish literary animals [Literatieren] that a scraggy little Christian tail [Christenschwänzchen; i.e., a little Christian prick] couldn’t find a place. As a zoologist he invented a radiometer that detects noses he does not like.

    Among the four German literary historians (Bartels, Eduard Engel, M. Richard Meyer, Max Koch), with whose works Bestiarium shared bookshelf space, as Blei mused in his forward to its fifth printing in 1924 (BL 9), Bartels was the only one on exhibit.⁸ Though never completing his university studies, this freelance writer and prominent member of völkisch associations wrapped himself in the academic cloak of Wissenschaft (science), both racial and literary;⁹ his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (History of German literature), from its initial publication in 1901–02 to 1919, established itself as a standard work, selling over fifteen thousand copies. With the resurgence of the völkisch movement after World War I Bartels’s Geschichte achieved an even wider reception and influence. It was a pioneering exercise in reading literature and its production through a racial lens: it detailed how works were the expression of the seelisch and geistig (spiritual, intellectual, and, therefore, moral) traits of their authors’ distinctive racial origin.¹⁰ It also foreclosed any Germanophone writer with even the suspicion of Jewish descent from inclusion in the German literary canon.

    Bartels employed the language of race rather than species and therefore distinguished his object—differentiation among human (animal) groups—from that of zoology—differentiation among (nonhuman) animal groups.¹¹ Moreover, Bartels was concerned with detailing racially distinctive intellectual, rather than physical, physiognomies and behaviors. Consequently, Blei’s labeling Bartels’s pretense of scientificity as zoology may simply have been the logical counterpoint to his own use of the medieval bestiary genre for his literary history. However, besides an implicit distinction of the human (animal) from the (nonhuman) animal, both Bartels and zoologists also shared certain epistemological presuppositions about their respective objects of study (texts and animal bodies). The contemporary racial theories, upon which Bartels based his interpretations, assumed the identity of mind (Geist) and body and therefore that the spirit (Geist) of the race—its essential nature—could be discerned in its physical products and actions.¹² Because much of contemporary zoology assumed the absence of Geist in nonhuman animals, observation of their bodies and (re)actions revealed their essential nature. Further, in his determination of any given population, Bartels adopted a quasi-zoological taxonomic perspective on its relations with other population groups: That the Swabian Friedrich Schiller had perhaps a drop of Celtic blood neither excluded him from the German canon nor negated the value of his work;¹³ however, the effect of any trace of Jewish descent or influence had debilitating consequences. For example, that the Artiste and Phänomen Hugo von Hofmannsthal descends from a Jewish family (his paternal grandfather, born Jewish, later converted to Catholicism) leads Bartels to conclude with regard to Hofmannsthal’s reworking of Greek dramas such as Elektra and Oedipus Rex that "there is no more trace of the Greek therein, [instead] the perverse, bloodthirsty, oriental Judentum is there."¹⁴

    With regard to the Jews and their works, Bartels engaged in pseudospeciation. That is, as Erik Erikson described this phenomenon: while man is obviously one species, he appears and continues on the scene split up into groups . . . which provide their members with a firm sense of unique and superior human identity—and some sense of immortality. . . . [However] in times of threatening technological and political change and sudden upheaval, the idea of being the preordained foremost species tends to be reinforced by a fanatic fear and anxious hate of other pseudospecies. It then becomes a periodic and often reciprocal obsession of man that these others must be annihilated or kept ‘in their places.’¹⁵

    From a positivistic perspective pseudo may be an appropriate qualifier of the speciation of the Jews; however, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno note, such specious speciation of the Jews needed no qualifying pseudo: "They who propagated individualism, abstract law, the concept of the person, have been debased to a species [Spezies]. They who were never allowed untroubled ownership of the civic right [Bürgerrecht] that should have granted them human dignity [Qualität der Menschheit] are again called ‘The Jews’ [sic; ‘Der Jude,i.e., ‘The Jew’] without distinction [ohne Unterschied]" (DE 143–44). Speciation is not about distinguishing one species from another; rather, it is about distinguishing one taxonomic group among those who are categorized according to species—for example, animals—from all of those who are not—i.e., humans. It is animalization.

    In his roughly contemporaneous Minima Moralia (ca. 1944–45) Adorno isolates the phrase only an animal as the telltale justification for the possibility of pogroms against savages, blacks, Japanese. Before offering his portent, Adorno speculates about how the victims traditionally associated with pogroms, i.e., Jews, have been perceived: Perhaps the social schematism of perception in anti-Semites is such that they do not see Jews as human beings at all. This aphorism is entitled "Menschen sehen dich an" (People are looking at you), by which Adorno is ironically playing on Juden sehen Dich an (Jews are looking at you), Nazi ideologue Johann von Leers’s 1933 antisemitic natural-historical taxonomy of the Jew. The latter includes illustrated chapters on the Lügenjude (liar-Jew; that is, the Jew as critic of National Socialism), Betrugsjude (swindler-Jew; that is, the Jew as profiteer), Zersetzungsjude (corrosion-Jew; that is, the Jew as teacher of immorality), and so on.¹⁶

    Drawing upon the experience of him and his fellow Jews in a German prisoner of war camp, Emanuel Levinas observes, We were beings entrapped in their species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language. He then concludes: Racism is not a biological concept; anti-Semitism is the archetype of all internment. . . . It shuts people away in a class, deprives them of expression and condemns them to being ‘signifiers without a signified’ and from there to violence and fighting.¹⁷ As is the practice with nonhuman animals, the Jewish-identified¹⁸ individual is merely an instantiation of the species Jew; any seemingly distinguishing negative trait is ascribed to the specific (base) property by which one of the several varieties of the species Jew manifests itself, any positive one to accident. Thus, an article on the May 1939 opening of The Mental and Racial Manifestation of the Jews exhibition at Vienna’s Natural History Museum reports: "The exhibition concerned itself with all of those appearances of Judentum, which are typical for this race. We see in a great number of images, which were produced from Vienna police department photos, that the telltale marks of the original racial character, regardless of any mixing with European races, is always recognizable."¹⁹

    (Un)Natural Histories and the Era of the Jewish Question

    The animalization of the Jew did not begin with the biologization of Jew hatred by racial antisemitism. Rather, over the past two millennia a vast menagerie of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, and so on) has been disseminated to debase and bestialize Jews. Analogies and/or identifications of Jews with either particular animals or animality in general, almost always derogatorily, had long accompanied discourse about and iconography of the Jew.²⁰ These forays into the wild often appropriated their figuration from scriptural sources or subsequent Christian midrash (legend), although everyday practice was no less a source (for example, Jewish dietary prohibitions, the routine castration of pigs, distinctions between mongrels and pure-bred dogs). While the history of that unnatural Jewish bestiary, the provisioning of the Bestiarium Judaicum with Jew-Animals, will be sketched in Chapter 1, it is not the primary object of this monograph. Instead, this study focuses on the deployment of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone, writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire, given this history, about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems.

    That era, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, was shaped by the asking of such questions as: when and under what conditions unbaptized Jews might attain citizenship in the nation’s political incarnation as the state? whether and how to alleviate, even remove, the numerous impositions and restrictions on the economic, residential, political, and even conjugal lives of such individuals? and whether or not those identified as Jews (unbaptized or not) can be or are even able to be integrated into the dominant society? This was the era in which the last question remained open even after unbaptized Jews achieved emancipation from virtually all civil, economic, and political limitations.

    These questions arose concurrently with the collapses of the religious and the lineage/corporate (estate, guild, and so on) narratives of value and meaning and of the institutions that sustained them amid the social dislocations, geographic relocations, colonial expansions, economic destabilizations, and increasing bureaucratizations that were also occurring.²¹ European identifications and hierarchies that could replace those eroded by modernization, secularization, and commodification needed to be created, maintained, and confirmed. In place of the traditional narratives, biological knowledges and national histories provided explanatory frames and moral valuations with the force of objective truth. Naturalized signifiers of categorical difference (gender, race, class, species, and so on) as divined by the natural-scientific and historico-philological disciplines imbricated the bodies of individuals and groups. The ascription of intersecting identifiers not only enacted both the subordination or marginalization of those so marked and the dominance of the unmarked markers, it also (re)constructed the authority of hierarchical oppositions indexed by each identifier. Hence, to analogize or identify Jews with animals not only maintains the hierarchical opposition of Jew and Gentile but that of Animal and Human as well. Such intersections also maintained the normativity of hierarchical determinations within each identifying category as well as reinforced the stigma (or prestige) of each categorical identification.

    Beyond rendering difference visible, a body of aggregated identifiers settled into the already assumed distribution of accidents, properties (visible or hidden, actual or potential), and essence. For example, where some saw a female Jew, others saw a Jewish Woman, and still others saw a Woman who happened to be wearing a six-pointed-star necklace. Where differentia may have been observed among identified members of a specific population, only a variety of accidents were seen. For example, the cravat-wearing, German-speaking individual over here and the caftan-wearing, Yiddish-speaking individual over there were both identified as Jews; and the individual was but an instantiation of the collective or categorical singular: the Jew, the Woman, the African, and so on. Otherwise put, these groups underwent (pseudo)speciation.

    As I argued in The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, Jewish identification like that for all identified populations was inextricably tied to the articulation of European modernity as a normative category and to the formation and continuous maintenance of the intersecting identifications and hierarchies it subsumed. The Other Jewish Question insisted, however, that the emergence, dissemination, and ascription of the ethnicity-, race-, gender-, and sexuality-coded representations, preeminently corporeal, which produced knowledge about the Jew in Germanophone Central Europe, were conditioned by the specific situation of Jews in each land. As Jews increasingly engaged in acculturation to further social integration, their host societies were concurrently undergoing their own processes of identity formation; identifiable constructions of the Jew sought to forestall, if not foreclose, the two-fold narcissistic crisis presented by the increasing difficulty to distinguish German from Jew and by the persistence of supposedly superseded Judentum (that amalgamation of Jewry, Jewishness, and Jewish religious belief and practice).²² In sum, the Era of the Jewish Question was an era that begged the question of Jewish difference: for the Central European societies, into which Jews sought admission, demanded complete assimilation of and into the dominant culture, even to the point of obliterating any traces of Judentum; yet, often accompanying the demand was the assumption that the Jew was constitutionally incapable of eliminating its difference.

    While working on The Other Jewish Question, I repeatedly encountered zoological images and analogies and came to realize that modern knowledge-producing disciplines (from medicine to anthropology, psychiatry to racial hygiene) were not the only sciences to contribute to the noisome reservoir of anti-Jewish representations and that there was another hierarchical categorical opposition by which Jewish difference was identified: human(animal) / (nonhuman)animal. In line with Pliny the Elder’s comment in his Natural History that a foreigner is hardly a member of the human species,²³ the identification of the Jew for most Central Europeans had also drawn upon the millennia-old tradition of natural history and its practices: the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human.²⁴ As Jew/German difference appeared to become less self-evident, the need increased to render the assumed under lying, hidden difference of the Jew visible and to depict it as always already having been visible. As Ernst Hiemer, Der Stürmer’s resident author of antisemitic works for children,²⁵ warned in Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pinscher (see Figure 1), his collection of eleven fables about different animals that threaten other similar species and/or humans and eleven conjoined lessons about the corresponding variety of the Jew:

    Just as it is often hard to perceive bacteria, so, too, it is often impossible to recognize the Jew. Not every Jew has the same racial characteristics! Not every Jew has a crooked nose or protruding ears! Not every Jew has a protruding lower lip or black, curly hair! Not every Jew has the typical Jewish eyes and flat feet! No! It is often hard to recognize a Jew. One must look very carefully to avoid being fooled. The variety in the Jew’s appearance is a great danger for other peoples.²⁶

    Even the absence of difference became a sign of Jewish difference; it bore manifest witness to the Jew possessing an innate mimetic capacity like the chameleon and other such creatures.²⁷ Not only did stories and feuilletons, poems and polemics, stock an entire menagerie of nasty Jewish-identified nonhuman animals, but there were picture posters (Bilderbogen) and other visual media (postcards, tchotchkes [bric-a-brac]) in which the varieties of the species Jew, partes extra partes, were taxonomically displayed (see Figure 2).²⁸ These images were widely disseminated; for example, cultural historian Peter Dittmar observed that the picture poster, issued in quantities of one thousand, was the only visual medium in the first half of the nineteenth century that reached diverse social strata, above all the urban bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie.²⁹ The implicit goals of such representation, of such rendering wholly visible, were that confronted with the same individual entity, everyone will be able to give the same description; and, inversely, given such a description everyone will be able to recognize the individual entities that correspond to it.³⁰

    Figure 1. Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher (The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pinscher). Front cover of Fritz Hiemer, Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher.

    Figure 2. Illustration from Unser Verkehr. Eine kleine erbauliche Bildergallerie aufgenommen nach dem Leben (Our gang. A small, edifying picture gallery, drawn from life) by Johann Michael Voltz (ca. 1815/20). Reproduced in Michaela Haibl, Zerrbild als Stereotyp. Reprinted by courtesy of Michaela Haibl.

    Along side these bestial answers to the Jewish Question, I encountered another question long posed across Europe that has come under renewed examination by scholars such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Élisabeth de Fontenay, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe: the question of the (nonhuman) animal(s).³¹ They have observed how, in the answers proffered by European scholarly traditions, nonhuman animals are denied the capacity to speak and are all but inevitably referred to in the categorical singular of the Animal. Those responses foreclosed both the diversity of animal species and the singularity of individual nonhuman animals. Further, they served a number of anthropocentric purposes including the exclusive determinations of the (hu)man, of the (human) subject, and of the universal (over and against the particular). The question of the animal has been the unheimliche Gast (uncanny guest)³² of what Immanuel Kant in his 1800 Introduction to Logic came to recognize as the fourth and, ultimately, ultimate question that philosophy must address: What is man?³³

    In that earlier monograph, I analyzed what I referred to as the other Jewish Question of Jewish-identified individuals (e.g., Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, and Walter Benjamin): that is, how and under what conditions they appropriated those denigrating ascriptions, principally of the Jewish body, by which the Jew had been identified and the Jewish Question answered, and then employed them as building blocks for working through their situations and constructing their own responses.³⁴ The present work undertakes analyses of nonhuman-animal constructions of such Jewish-identified writers as Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. Their other-than-silent responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and Animal questions converged and varieties of the species Jew were depicted and classified constituted a constellation of diverse and diversely motivated public interventions. Where in my earlier monographs I demonstrated how corporeal rhetoric—both as signifiers of their supposed signifieds and in their morphemic/orthographic/phonemic materiality as components of other words—mediated Jewish identification, in this work I attend to the zoological. For example, pronunciations or letter-sequences that could evoke associations with a particular nonhuman animal, such as Maus (mouse) in Mauscheln (the derogatory designation of the sounds, rhythms, and constructions of Yiddish/Judendeutsch and its assumed-to-be native speakers),³⁵ implicate the Gentile/Jew divide with that of the human/animal one; invocations of a human(animal)/(nonhuman)animal diacritic, such as the presence/absence of a tail (Schwanz/Zopf [queue]), perform this function as well. Moreover, by overcoding the Gentile/Jew divide with the human/animal one, both of these apparatuses for identification and domination are maintained. But it is necessary to explore the question of the animal and its intersections with the Jewish Question before undertaking analyses of exemplary animal tales and poems generated by these writers in their wake.

    The Question of the Animal

    Among the appended Notes and Drafts to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is a consideration of Man and Beast (Mensch und Tier). It begins:

    Throughout European history the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction to the animal. The latter’s lack of reason [Unvernunft] is the proof of human dignity [Menschenwürde]. So insistently and unanimously has this antithesis been recited by all the earliest precursors of bourgeois thought, the ancient Jews, the Stoics, and the Early Fathers, and then through the Middle Ages to modern times, that few other ideas are so fundamental to Western anthropology. The antithesis is acknowledged even today . . . Humans possess reason, which pitilessly follows its path; the animals from which they draw their bloody conclusions have only unreasoning terror, the impulse to take flight on a path which is cut off.

    The lack of reason has no words. (DE 203–4)

    Some forty years later, in a 1997 lecture, later collected in the eponymous The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida (re)initiates an analysis of the question of the animal, the deployment of the figure of the Animal in the Western carnophallogocentric philosophic tradition. In Animal, Derrida introduces animot, a homophonic play on the French plural of animal, animaux, and the French word for word, mot. Derrida’s neologism ironically points to how nonhuman animals in that tradition are denied the capacity to speak and are all but inevitably referred to in the categorical singular of the Animal.³⁶ Derrida argues that this foreclosure of both the diversity of animal species (aside from the opposed human [animal] and [nonhuman] animal) and the singularity of the individual nonhuman animal has served a number of anthropocentric purposes including the assertion of human exceptionalism. Derrida also reminds the attendees of his subsequent seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign of the obverse determinations of the animal: that human behavior characterized as animalistic, as bestial, is not characteristic of actual nonhuman animals. In French, it "is never said of the beast that it is bête [stupid] or bestial. The adjective, epithet, attribute bête, or ‘bestial’ is never appropriate for animal or beast.³⁷ Rather than the fruit of naturalist or zoological description, those characteristics and behaviors that garner the label bestial" are often³⁸ drawn from what one would abject from the determination of the human—of one’s self or community as the human—and anyone so labeled is located outside the bounds of moral obligation.

    A number of other scholars³⁹ have recently addressed this question. For example, in The Open, Giorgio Agamben characterizes this determination of the human through opposition to or exclusion of the animal (or nonhuman) as the anthropological machine or, rather, machines. He distinguishes the modern machine from the premodern one. The anthropological machine of the moderns functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human.⁴⁰ By symmetrical contrast, the earlier machine functioned by humanizing an animal; exemplifying the animal in human form were, on the one hand, the enfant sauvage and the homo sylvestris (orang-outang), and, on the other, the slave and the barbarian. Intrinsic to the functioning of either machine, to the articulation of the opposition as disjunctive, is determining and securing the absolute differentia(e). This becomes particularly acute with regard to the human / animal opposition because that stark differentiation has to be compatible with reigning zoontologies:⁴¹ since before the Common Era, with a notion of the great chain of being or, since at least Darwin’s Origin of the Species, with an evolutionary narrative that would include the human animal with the nonhuman ones. Whereas the earlier model could call upon a divine plan to, at least superficially, resolve any seeming incompatibility, the evolutionary narrative could not find its resolution from either a deity or some necessary outcome of natural laws.

    Agamben discusses the German popularizer of Darwinism Ernst Haeckel’s aporia-rife efforts to salvage the modern anthropological machine. Drawing upon the tradition, which went back at least to Aristotle, that named language as the essential diacritic—humans have it and animals do not—Haeckel endeavored to plot the development from anthropoid ape to human. Into the breach in 1874 he postulated the onetime existence of Pithecanthropus alalus, the speechless ape-man, that he also referred to as the sprachloser Urmensch or speechless primal human. To ground the notion of human exceptionalism, Haeckel had to create an animalized human as earlier generations had generated humanized animals—those creatures whose ability to speak would nevertheless not grant them human status nor erase the human/animal opposition. Despite Agamben’s overgeneralized periodization, his overformalized algorithm by which he generates his machines—an exclusion (which is always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is always already an exclusion)—and his logical positing of a perfectly empty zone of indifference in which the articulation between the human and the animal . . . must take place,⁴² his notion of the anthropological machine has heuristic value. It calls attention to the necessary misrecognition both of the artificiality of any clear, distinct, and natural boundary between human (animal) and (nonhuman) animal and of its intrinsic instability and porousness. Agamben’s construct also recognizes the necessity for discursive strategies by which that alleged disjunction must be continuously (re)constructed.

    Along the Great Divide

    Those philosophic and scientific discourses discussed by Derrida, Agamben, and others, both presume and enact—and thereby maintain—what primatologist and cyborg theorist Donna Haraway has called the Great Divide between human and nonhuman animals that sustains human exceptionalism.⁴³ Haraway develops her notion from historian of science Bruno Latour’s analysis of the Two Great Divides that mark Western modernity: the Great Divide between Us (the modern West) and Them (the premodern rest) and that between the human (society, the knower) and the nonhuman (nature, the known). He argues that it is our ability to recognize the latter Great Divide and the concomitant assumption of their inability to do so that accounts for and justifies the former Great Divide.⁴⁴

    Haraway does not ascribe primacy, whether historically or logically, to the human(animal)/(nonhuman)animal Great Divide; there is no greatest or original divide nor are they identical homologies of one another; nevertheless, they are mutually implicated and often employed intersectionally. Forms of this opposition emerged, however, before any postulated onset of the modern. Though Aristotle classified the human as an animal, specifically a zoon politikon or political animal, he made a fundamental distinction between humans and other animals. Political sociability, however, was not what made humans unique among animals; bees, after all, were social animals. Rather, humans were simply more political than other animals because the human ability to speak or think with reason (logos) enabled the development of a city-state or polis. Conversely, in the Politics, Aristotle wrote: But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. . . . For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.⁴⁵ The human (animal) is opposed by the (human) animal.

    The Church Fathers and the medieval scholastics interpreted Gen. 1:26—Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness, to have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, all wild animals on land, and everything that creeps on the earth’—to ground humanity’s fundamental difference in status.⁴⁶ In his City of God, Augustine also argued how the Sixth Commandment, thou shall not kill, applied only to humans: of the irrational animals that fly, swim, walk, or creep, since they are dissociated from us by their want of reason, and are therefore by the just appointment of the Creator subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses. According to Aquinas, while enemies in a just war must be treated as human beings, that is, with love and charity, because animals are naturally subject to man . . . the hunting of wild animals is just and natural.⁴⁷ The combination of Christian exegesis with the medieval Aristotelian tradition, by which the human/animal opposition was mediated by both their visible commonalities (and differences) and the invisible human difference of reason (and soul), enable[d] the thought that not every living human body is actually a human being.⁴⁸ Historian Keith Thomas notes: What all such definitions [of ‘man’ and ‘animal’] have in common is that they assume a polarity between the categories ‘man’ and ‘animal’ and that they invariably regard the animal as the inferior. After this gloss, he draws an important inference: In practice, of course, the aim of such definitions has often been less to distinguish men from animals than to propound some ideal of human behavior.⁴⁹

    Better, differentiation and self-definition/-idealization are necessarily co-implicated. Distinguishing one’s own human group from another no less engages such self-definition and self-idealization as well as often promotes the assumption that any apparent outer commonality does not preclude fundamental inner difference. Another factor is also operative; the bodies of human individuals and groups are imbricated with categorical human identifiers such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and so on, each of which, at a given historical moment and location, consists of particular internal distinctions and hierarchies. When encountering the human other, the confluence of human identifiers, its mix of the desired and the abjected, may be so dissonant and undecidable that the dynamic of human definition and differentiation shifts. These factors may result in the overcoding of group difference with the human/animal distinction.⁵⁰ Then, Thomas observes: Once perceived as beasts, people were liable to be treated accordingly. The ethic of human domination removed animals from the sphere of human concern. But it also legitimized the ill-treatment of those humans who were in a supposedly animal condition. . . . [T]he ideal of human ascendency, therefore, had implications for men’s relations to each other, no less than for their treatment of the natural world.⁵¹ The animalization of the human other set up its own taxonomic hierarchy from useful beasts, to be curbed, domesticated and kept docile [all the way down to] vermin and predators, to be eliminated.⁵²

    Historian of Religions David Chidester, drawing on Thomas’s work, elaborates further on the relationship of the animal to human community that became formalized in seventeenth-century Europe and on how it informed the European engagement with the indigenous peoples they encountered beyond the Eurasian landmass:

    Animals can have no right of society with us, according to the seventeenth-century English theologian Lancelot Andrewes, because they want reason. With respect to land, animals had no rights, Andrewes concluded on biblical grounds, because God had given the earth to humans, rather than to sheep or deer. Since they had no rights animals could be exterminated, both in the sense of being driven from land settled by humans and in the sense of being killed, because biblical commandments against theft or murder did not apply to nonhumans. Independent of biblical or theological basis, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes concluded that human beings had no moral or legal obligations to animals because to make covenants with brute beasts is impossible. Animals therefore had no right to life or land; neither did the indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Africa, or the Pacific Islands, who were classified as beastly or brutal because they lacked religion. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, this implication in the correlation between animals and indigenous people was made explicit in 1609 by the Reverend Robert Gray. Most of the earth was possessed and wrongfully usurped by wild beasts, Gray complained, or by brutish savages, which by reason of their godless ignorance, and blasphemous idolatry, are worse than those beasts.⁵³

    Such analogies were employed in the philosophic discourses on race that emerged in the late eighteenth century and were extended to include the Jews. In his 1799 Moses and Christ, Gottlob Benjamin Gerlach wrote:⁵⁴ But these philosophers [e.g., Christoph Meiners] go so far as to claim that moral character—that noble proclivity that first makes all humans human—is lacking in the poor creatures of these peoples. . . . These people, like animals, are not capable of feeling moral duty and have thus no rights . . . , an argument that comes up in England to justify the slave trade and in Germany the oppression of the Jews.

    We don’t murder, we kill . . . You don’t murder animals, you kill them.

    Yet, as Haraway points out, the Great Divide is not simply a matter of human dominion over what is identified as animal; it is about who is or is not killable:⁵⁵ only human beings can be murdered. . . . Every living being except Man can be killed but not murdered (WSM 78). As St. John Chrysostom noted in the first of his Eight Homilies Against the Jews, when the useful beast strays from its place, its killability comes to the fore⁵⁶—so, too, when its place is on the human food chain. Derrida describes a logic of sacrifice undergirding the Great Divide whereby human exceptionalism requires the noncriminal putting to death of the nonhuman—including slaughter for consumption—its sacrifice, to legitimate itself.⁵⁷

    Jonathan Elmer and Cary Wolfe⁵⁸ developed a species grid that sought to account for the various positions in the human-animal relationship and for the apparent exceptions to human exceptionalism, whether the pet schnauzer Fritz or the female slave. At opposing ends are the humanized human, endowed with subjectivity and dominion, and the animalized animal, without subjectivity, outside of the political order—and killable. This brute beast is legitimately subjected to human brutality. They add: That the ostensibly ‘pure’ categories of ‘animalized animal’ and ‘humanized human’ are the merest ideological fictions is evinced by the furious line drawing at work in the hybrid designations.⁵⁹ Between the two are the humanized animal and the animalized human. Humanized animals include members of a companion species,⁶⁰ for example pet dogs with names. Also included in this category are domesticated or otherwise subjugated animals that serve determinate functions within and occupy (as well as stay within their) determinate places in human society such as being a source of food on the farm, security at the gate, or spectacle in the circus. The brutality to which these animals are subject in their instrumental use and slaughter is often disguised or distanced, and, generally, regularized.⁶¹ The humanized animal can be employed to distinguish the humanized human from the animalized human, to render one human as animalized and their master as the humanized human. Subjected to dominion by an animal the animalized human falls out of the political order and the community of moral obligation; denied subjectivity, it can be brutalized and is killable. For Americanist Colleen Glenney Boggs, the conditions to which prisoners at Abu Ghraib were subjected exemplified the animalization of the human.⁶²

    The identification of a killable and (un)naturally monstrous animalized human emerged—well before these qualities were theorized, respectively, by Elmer/Wolfe and Agamben—in the form of the Untermensch or underman/subhuman. A term that emerged in the 1890s as simply the logical antipode to Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch or overman/superman, Untermensch became a topos of the racial-biological imaginary in 1922 when U.S. historian and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard published his The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man. When translated into German three years later, its characterization of Bolshevism as the Weltanschauung of the Untermenschen found great resonance with leading National Socialist ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. Incorporated into Rosenberg’s 1930 Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), a massive supplement to Chamberlain’s foundational 1899 racial historiography Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century),⁶³ the notion of Untermensch began to be widely disseminated and soon pervaded National Socialist geopolitical imagination and propaganda.⁶⁴ The Untermensch made its most graphic appearance in the lushly illustrated eponymous pamphlet widely distributed domestically by Himmler’s SS Main Office in 1942.

    This field guide warned:

    This creation of nature, seemingly wholly of the same sort [gleichgeartet] biologically [as the human], with hands, feet, and some sort of brain, with eyes and a mouth, is all the same a totally different, a terrifying creature. . . . Not all those who appear human are in fact so. . . . The beast [Bestie]—

    the Untermenschstands lower than the animal.⁶⁵ It manifests itself in various forms, including the Mulatto, the Gypsy, the Slav, and the African as well as the Jew; any differences among the taxa are essentially happenstantial. Der ewige Jude (the eternal Jew), however, emerges out of the mire (dem Sumpf) as primus inter pares, as the leader of this beastly horde, as the exemplar. Such efforts to mobilize abject affect among the public toward the Untermensch by rendering it visible, however, proved at times an obstacle to its desired removal from the human community of moral obligation. For example, after the Germans occupied Belarus (Weissruthenien) in 1941, so-called Reichsjuden, thoroughly acculturated Jews living in Germany, began to be deported to the newly formed ghettos there. As the last ghettos began to be liquidated in 1943, the SS order to exterminate those gleichgeartet individuals—cultured, German-looking—with the rest of the Eastern Jewish rabble concerned Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar of Belarus since October 1941. Kube, a Nazi party member and official since the early 1920s, had as Generalkommissar already overseen the murder of virtually all Jews in the region; however, he initially obstructed the execution of the order. Such a traitorous attitude in part led Himmler in his infamous October 4, 1943 speech to SS Officers in Poznan to comment that, while every party member will readily agree that "the Jewish race is to be exterminated . . . Each one has his decent [anständige] Jew. Of course the others are swine [Schweine], but this one is a first-class Jew."⁶⁶

    The anständige Mensch (decent [hu]man) was an Enlightenment ideal type who in his bearing and behavior respected the humanity of others.⁶⁷ For the post-Enlightenment bourgeoisie, decency remained a principal virtue; however, the set of others to whom one should be decent, the community of moral obligation, was circumscribed by the assumption that that other was always already capable of such bearing and behavior, i.e., that that other possessed humanity—and that other others did not. Hence to have a decent Jew both identified all other Jews as animal and confirmed one’s own decency, one’s own humanness. Situating anständig etymologically supports this inference: being in a standing position had a long association with identifying the human over and against the animal. For example, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud speculated that "with man’s adoption of an erect posture [Aufrichtung] . . . the chain of events would have proceeded through the devaluation of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of the menstrual period to the time when visual stimuli were paramount and the genitals became visible, and thence to the continuity of sexual excitation, the founding of the family and so to the threshold of human civilization. Freud went on to suggest that the deepest root of sexual [and olfactory] repression . . . is the organic defense of the new form of life achieved with man’s erect gait [aufrechten Gang] against his earlier animal existence."⁶⁸

    These decent Jews, it appeared, had to be made animal so that they could be brutalized and killed, a practice to which the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, Franz Stangl, confessed when asked if [the Nazis and their collaborators] were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty? His answer: To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.⁶⁹ Even though the animalization of the Jew like the animalization of the (nonhuman) animal may be presumed as natural, it had to be continuously reproduced in order to mutually maintain the human / animal Great Divide and the German/Jew distinction that it overcoded.

    Of Jews as Animals: From the Species Jew-Animal to the Genre (Gattung) Jew-as-Animal

    Analogizing or identifying Jews with animals does not exhaust the history of bestial anti-Jewish representation (see Chapter 1). Antisemitic⁷⁰ discourses deploy the Jew rather than the Animal and some conceptual category of human (animal) collectivity—not excluding species—to maintain and justify comparable foreclosures and serve comparable ends as those of animalization. At one point in The Animal, Derrida return[s] for a moment to Adorno [on the] Kantian or idealist hatred of the animal, this zoophobia. . . . [F]or an idealist system, he [i.e., Adorno] says, animals virtually play the same role as Jews did for a fascist system (A 102–3).⁷¹ Derrida then cites the historian of philosophy Elisabeth de Fontenay, first, in order to present another Jewish-accented relation to the animal question:

    Those who evoke the summa injuria [an allusion to Nazi zoophilia and Hitler’s vegetarianism] only in order to better make fun of pity for anonymous and mute suffering are out of luck, for it happens that some great Jewish writers and thinkers of this century were obsessed by the question of the animal: Kafka, Singer, Canetti, Horkheimer, Adorno.

    And second, Derrida erects both her observation that these Jewish-identified individuals had insistently inscribed this question in their interrogation of rationalist humanism and of the solid ground of its decisions and her claim about the ethical grounds for this inscription—that Victims of historic catastrophes have in fact felt animals to be victims also, comparable up to a certain point to themselves and their kind⁷²—as a double foil against which he can interrogate the relative absence of the animal question in the Jewish thinker who, no doubt with justification, passes in this [twentieth] century for the most concerned with ethics and sanctity, Emmanuel Levinas (A 104–5). In this and subsequent publications Derrida does not return, with one brief exception,⁷³ to analyze those Jew-inscribed sites in Fontenay’s canon.

    Though Bobby, the dog that Levinas dubbed the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, is but tangential to it,⁷⁴ there is indeed a critical tradition of analyses of the Jew and the Animal, in which, for example, both have been situated in virtually homological hierarchical oppositions within the dialectic of enlightenment (as Derrida situates Adorno); or both have functioned as figure, especially the figure of the particular, in philosophic discourses (A. Benjamin and, differently, Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment); or the diverse but in any case deadly assaults suffered by Jews and animals have been analogized with one other, whether the emphasis is on shared suffering (Fontenay)⁷⁵ or on the making killable⁷⁶ of bare life by

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