Read Online Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini - Free Book Online

deliberately adopted by participants in eighteenth-century English masquerades, obscuring gender identities and “suggesting comic emascula- tion,” 19 this auditory sign was taken as both an index of corruption and a sign of infantilism and bestiality. The voice became itself an indication of unman- liness, a kind of aural clothing that linked Jew and “woman,” Jew and emas- culated man, Jew and degenerate male homosexual.
    Marcel Proust, a homosexual and a half-Jew, explicitly compared the two conditions: each—homosexuality and Judaism—was in his view “an incur- able disease.” 20 Homosexuals, like Jews, were described by their enemies as discernibly members of a race, and each recognized fellow members of the “brotherhood” instinctively. Proust’s Charles Swann is a Jew in love with a courtesan; his homosexual Baron de Charlus is a gossip as well as an aesthete, an effeminate dandy and a snob. Proust himself exemplified the tendency of the persecuted to ally themselves with their persecutors, depicting his homo- sexual characters as both degenerate and feminine, and—at the same time— fighting a duel with another homosexual who had put Proust’s own manliness in question.
    How does this feminization of the Jewish man—the voice, the shrug, the small hands, the extravagant gestures, the “Oriental” aspect—manifest itself in the lexicon of cross-dressing? In part by the crossing of the dandy and the aesthete—in Proust; in Nightwood ’s Baron Felix Volkbein (“still spatted, still wearing his cutaway,” moving “with a humble hysteria among the decaying brocades and laces of the Carnavalet ” [9, 11]); in Radclyffe Hall’s figure of the artist Adolphe Blanc, who designed ballets and ladies’ gowns for a living, a ho- mosexual and a “gentle and learned Jew” ( The Well of Loneliness , 352)—with the Hasid.
    The traditional long gown (Shylock’s “Jewish gaberdine”) and uncut hair, the lively gesticulation (and wild, ecstatic dancing) of the Hasidic sect—all these could be regarded as woman-like or “feminine,” as well as simply for- eign or alien. Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf dramatically describes his en- counter with the phantom of Jewishness in the streets of Vienna—the same city where Freud was attempting to erase the visible signs of “Jewish effemi-
    nacy”: “Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City,” Hitler writes, “I sud- denly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.” 21 And the longer he “stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?” The “unclean dress and . . . generally unheroic ap- pearance of the Jews,” “these caftan-wearers,” convince Hitler that he is face to face with otherness—–with the not-self (which is to say, the self he fears). When he contemplates “their activity in the press, art, literature, and the the- ater,” he concludes that Jews have been “chosen” to spread “literary filth, artis- tic trash, and theatrical idiocy.” The chapter in which he sets out this conver- sion experience is called, straightforwardly, “Transformation Into an Anti-Semite.”
    As we have seen, Yentl —both the Streisand film and the Singer short story—allegorizes this subtext of the Jew as always-already a woman in a spir- it diametrically opposed to the vituperative claims of anti-Semitism. Yet the secret—open to the audience and the reader—of “Anshel”’s gender tells a double-edged story about the “manliness” of Torah study and scholarship. In Jewish tradition there is no higher calling for a man; as witness, for example, the tension in the film Hester Street (1975) between the assimilated husband, eager for commercial success, and the retiring scholar whom the heroine fi- nally marries. Which is the “real man” here? And in the case of Yentl, is the “real” story one