The Jewish Decadence

Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity

Jonathan Freedman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780226581088, 9780226580920
• eBook ISBN: 9780226581118
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte moderna

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present.
 
The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.

Chapter 1

Qu’est-ce que c’est la décadence? And What Does It Have to Do with Jews?

Before going further, it’s important to specify the wide variety of practices and predilections that were bundled under the heading of “decadence”—and to delineate how the discourse of decadence affected Jews. Predications of “decadence” proliferated throughout “the long fin-de-siècle,” roughly 1870 to 1920, especially in the heyday of the so-called decadent movement, when advocates and critics stepped over each other publishing articles, books, polemics, and feuilletons describing something called “decadence” as a vast, if ill-defined, social phenomenon with specific literary and artistic instantiations. A rough-and-ready accounting of what these critics meant by the term would include some of the following: a sense of omnipresent social decay and degeneration; a diagnosis of worldwide enervation (or hyper-nervousness, which results in the same thing, a condition of febrile exhaustion); a falling away from physical, moral, and national rectitude and the expression of will on a trans-European if not global stage; and a cultural expression of anomie, degeneration, race-suicide, and other such conditions, manifested in falling rates of birth and rising rates of mental illness, hysteria, and other forms of distress. Subsidiary features would include a cultivation of these mental states, frequently induced by drugs like hashish or drinks like absinthe, and a predilection for the exotic and the erotic, the latter often conjoined with omnibus forms of non-normative erotic experience ranging from male homosexuality and lesbianism to, at the more extreme end, incest, fetishism, and even necrophilia. Among writers and artists, it would be marked by a correlative stylistic turn toward the excrescential, the ornamental, the useless. And superintending all of these, the predisposition to art for art’s sake, to valuing the aesthetic as an end in and of itself (the perfect end, writes Walter Pater, and perhaps the only one). An age of literary slogans and movements, many such—Aestheticism, Symbolism, Acmeism, Parnassianism—found their clearest articulation and widest circulation at the moment of decadence. So did many of the artists who either enlisted or were enlisted under its banner, from, say, Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the 1920s, all producing literature and art that ran the gamut from parody to high seriousness, affectation to achievement, silliness to beauty and even profundity.

The occasion for this book, and the centerpiece of its argument, is that in the mid- to late nineteenth century decadence formed a vital, if controversial, part of the landscape Jews encountered as they sought to enter the mainstream of European cultural life. For if, like the aspiring heroes of Honoré de Balzac’s early novels, Jews emerged into the middle classes in large measure via the professions, including the literary and artistic professions, they made their way into a world profoundly obsessed with aestheticism, degeneration, sexual alterity, and death—a cultural situation of which they were frequently accused of being either source or symptom, but to which they responded dynamically, indeed transformatively. Some reacted to this cultural ferment by entering into it. Fin-de-siècle fiction was influenced by now-neglected Jewish novelists who fully exploited the idiom of decadence, like Catulle Mendès in France or Reggie Turner in England; poetry and criticism were shaped by Jewish poets and critics who explored or explicated the avenues of aestheticist or Symbolist art, like Gustave Kahn in France or Georg Brandes in Denmark. Others continued the process in the twentieth century: Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Italo Svevo, S. An-Sky, to name five, were influenced at a significant point in their early careers by aestheticism and decadence and repurposed its topoi and imaginative structures to rich, if different, ends. And on a more material but no less consequential level, Jewish patrons, dealers, and gallery owners in Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna created the conditions in which Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist, and Postimpressionist art and Art Nouveau got produced and disseminated—a system that led to the ways in which modernist art (Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, et al.) sustained itself.

In what follows, I offer a partial rather than a synoptic map of the terrain of decadence considered as broadly as possible. Specifically, I focus on three loci: the idea of cultural decline, the privileging of non-normative, nonreproductive sexuality, and the ideal of art for art’s sake and its instantiations in literature and visual art. I’ll be generalizing about decadence in Europe and America on the basis of a number of local traditions, religious determinations, and cultural peculiarities. But I do not do so only because decadence is a phenomenon that was at once global and local, although it was. Rather, I do so to highlight those aspects which throughout the Western world assimilating and non-assimilating Jews alike would have experienced most immediately, and with which they had to deal as they encountered Western modernity in all its fierce contradictoriness—a contradictoriness that frequently worked itself out with relation to the figure of Jew and served as both a challenge and an opportunity for the Jewish decadent. To adopt David Nirenberg’s trope, the attachment of ideas of decline, decadence, and deliquescence to Jews is one of the ways in which the culture thought about itself through the Jew.1 But it needs to be added, it’s also one of the ways in which Jews rethought the terms and possibilities of the culture that was thinking through them. In so doing, they remade both that culture and themselves.

Cultural Decline

At the end of the nineteenth century, lamentations rang throughout Great Britain and Europe asserting that corruption and decay had befallen the lands, instancing, variously, perverse cultural production, declining fitness of soldiers, pestiferous urban environments, dissolute urban elites, financial scandals, and homosexuality as signs of a widespread social malaise. But this woe-crying was nothing new. Diagnoses of the decadence of current times have been foundational to the most potent imaginative structures governing the cultures of the West at least since Genesis. The habit of viewing Jews as the active agents of cultural decline had long since become entrenched in the imaginative system of Christian Europe. Reified, in Jonathan Boyarin’s resonant terms, as the “other without”—described from the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) forward as cursed, devilish enemies of the Christian state rather than just another minority within it—Jews were installed in late medieval and early modern discourses as the other within, as subversive presences whose very being contaminated the state and the body politic.2

The Jew/decadence conflation became further entrenched as the collocation of phenomena we have come to call modernity assembled and defined itself. To understand this we have only to look at Shakespeare, in so many ways a gathering point of medieval and early modern attitudes, in so many ways the first avatar of the modern. Shakespeare’s plays are full of gloomy evocations of cultural loss and social chaos—think of Hamlet’s description of the rottenness of the state of Denmark, soon to be full of corpses as it falls into the hands of its Norse foe Fortinbras; or think of the corrupt kingdoms in Measure for Measure and the ironically named All’s Well That Ends Well, not to mention in the late romances like The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest. Shakespeare was also a central maker of attitudes toward Jews: arguably no single work of art has had a more consequential effect on attitudes toward Jews and Jewishness than has The Merchant of Venice. But Jews are the least of it when it comes to problems in this proto-problem play. Its new gentile mercantile order conflates affect and economics, love and money, in ways that exceed the triumph over the archetypal Jew Shylock, staged by the likes of Portia and Bassanio. The Jewish moneylender may cry out, in comic pathos, “My daughter! O, my ducats!” but his economic lust is trumped by a more primitive yearning for revenge—after all, Shylock refuses to accept money in lieu of his loan, seeking the soon-to-become-proverbial pound of flesh in its place.3 To the Venetian gentiles, by contrast, money is everywhere and everything, true value wavering and indecipherable. Bassanio cleverly solves the riddle of the casket by choosing the leaden one over glittering gold or caskets made of silver, but he, like the rest of the Venetian yuppies, is quite happy to accept portions of Shylock’s fortune, the quarrelling over which occupies an unseemly amount of time after the trial proper has been concluded with Portia’s famous appeal to the quality of mercy that never really gets shown. And in the fifth act, Bassanio’s marriage to Portia is reaffirmed by tricks having to do with gold rings, not those made of brass or lead. It is as if the negative stereotypes that attach to the Jew are being split, the primitive ones attaching to the figure of Shylock, the “modern” ones—the connection to commerce, avarice, mercantile enterprise, greed—to the gentiles.

The jumble of affects about money, commerce, desire, and sexuality isn’t so much resolved by Shakespeare as displaced out of the corrupt, Jew-ridden Venice to Belmont, with the result that Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness get invoked in odd and overdetermined ways, as shadows of that which is most troubling about the new, emergent order, even as they are seen as evocations of an older, more primitive, more “degenerate” order being left behind. The function of the Jew in this central and ramifying representation, in other words, is to serve as both an expression of and a cure for a perceived corrupt, declined modern city-state—a cure, it should be added, effected only by the Jews’ humiliation and extirpation. It’s a twofold function Jews have been called upon to perform ever since, as the discourse of decadence in the face of the immanence of modernity creates dual and contradictory roles for them to step into, and be constrained by. No wonder they sought to transform those roles through their imagination, wit, and creativity.

The Jewish Idiom of Cultural Decline

To perceive the roles that European decadence thrust upon them, however, is not to ignore the complicated part that the idiom of decadence and the narrative of social deliquescence have played in Jewish life itself.

Much of the Torah is taken up with stories of recurrent decline and catastrophe: the Fall; the egyptianization of the Hebrews before Pharaoh hardens his heart against them; their worshiping of false idols while wandering in the Sinai wilderness; the corruption that preceded the Babylonian exile, lamented so beautifully by the angry prophet Jeremiah: “my people were lost sheep; their shepherds caused them to stray . . . they forgot their resting place” (Jeremiah 50:6). This vision of the Jews was perversely echoed in the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment of the early nineteenth century, which turned away from biblical ways of knowing but unwittingly underscored the prophetic denunciations by defining the majority of the Jewish people as hopelessly primitive, immured in a cultural, linguistic, and social backwardness. Its figures saw the poverty-stricken traditional world of the shtetls (shtetlakh, small towns in Eastern Europe) or the ghettos of the West, the intellectual sterility of rabbinic Judaism, and especially the enthusiasms of the Hasidic movement as standing in stark contrast to the new European culture emerging around them.

Acculturating Jews responded multiply. On the one hand, many sought to claim their due as vital philosophers and moral thinkers: it was not for nothing that Moses Mendelssohn entered a contest run by the Berlin Academy for the best essay on metaphysics, and won—Immanuel Kant placed second. But on the other, they frequently sought to critique Christian culture as limited in its own right. Thus Mendelssohn reverses the Christian typological insistence on Christianity’s supersession of Jewishness by suggesting that Judaism, a religion of laws and ethics, is compatible with rationalism in a way that Christianity, which depends on revelation, is not.

Despite these defensive maneuvers, the sense that Jews—largely Eastern European Jews—were irrevocably primitive endured in (Jewish) theorizing of the later years of the nineteenth century. In the work of fin-de-siècle criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, for example, Jews become examples of his theory that evolutionary progress is accompanied by evolutionary atavisms:

We are often struck, on a very rapid glance at the condition of even an advanced nation, by noticing, amidst all its civilisation, distinct retrograde characteristics, which take us back to the prehistoric world. Thus the Hebrews in Moses’ time got as far as monotheism, and with Marx—may we not say with Jesus?—reached the idea of socialism. They invented bills of exchange. In the Middle Ages they were the very kernel of the capitalist bourgeoisie; and today in many countries they furnish the apostles of the Fourth Estate. So that in the progress of civilisation we see them very far advanced. Yet they still religiously retain the Peruvian quippa, or knot-alphabet in their talith (the sacred garment which they wear in their synagogues); and they use stone instruments for the rite of circumcision—a rite which is itself a survival of cannibalism. They have hardly established themselves in any country for any length of time without preserving among themselves its customs, and even its dress and language, though all these have disappeared among the people with whom they originated.4

But like the haskalah intellectuals a century before him, Lombroso did not hesitate to indict his society at large for the same atavisms he decried in Hebrews, particularly its criminals, who represented regression par excellence. One can—critics have—seen this as an anti-Semitic move on Lombroso’s part; or one can—as I would—view it as anti-anti-Semitic, as part of a rhetoric of reversal, adopting cultural aspersions commonly circulating in scientific discourse about Jews but extending them outward to the social order at large.5 As Lombroso concludes:

No people, however lofty its position, can boast too much over the lowest savage, or the unhappy criminal, who so often reproduces the savage type, for in some respects, it may be their inferior. Nature, the pitiless leveller, teaches us all to be humble and modest. (“Atavism and Evolution,” 49)

The same strategy of reversal is central to the work of Max Nordau, prominent Zionist and author of Degeneration (1892). Nordau was unsparing when detailing the condition of his coreligionists, to put it mildly. For him, the overwhelming intellectualism of traditional Jewish life combined with the enervating effects of modernity to create the weak, unmanly Jewish (male) body; the solution was a cultivation of sport and physical labor, preferably in Palestine, to create the figure he calls “the Muscle Jew.” But he also turned his energies to critiquing the culture at large, cataloging and castigating the many manifestations of a putatively degenerated social sphere, focusing particularly on cultural production as indices and transmitters of this rot. He turns especially to the twinned phenomena of aestheticism and decadence, and his prime example becomes Oscar Wilde, who united these with sexual transgression. As I’ve argued elsewhere, what Nordau thereby does is to shuttle the culturally loaded charge of degeneracy from Jews to gentiles—except that the former have at least the option of a kind of regenerative work, while the latter are lashed with the full force of Nordau’s scorn.6

Nordau’s influential critique shaped the ways that Jews and gentiles alike thought about aestheticism and decadence, although many critics noted that Nordau went into such exaggerated detail in his denunciations that his work could be thought of as a breviary of decadence as well as a denunciation. And it reflected an intra-Jewish critique in the years to come. As Hamutal Bar-Yosef has reminded us,

Captivated by [European idioms of] Decadence, [Hebrew-revivalist poet I. M. Bialik] conferred decadence upon Jews even when they were victims of cruel anti-Semitism. The decadent mood of inner death—indifference, cynicism, depression, the death wish—appears as personal experience. . . . Characteristic of Bialik’s poetry is the complete harmony between personal and national experiences, including the decadent mood and Jewish decadence. Thus Bialik gave literary e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface, Daniel Hack and Amy Hungerford
• Introduction: “Our Two-Step Is the Modern Decadence!”
• 1   Qu’est-ce que c’est la décadence? And What Does It Have to Do with Jews?
• 2   Oscar Wilde among the Jews
• 3   Salomania and the Remaking of the Jewish Female Body from Sarah Bernhardt to Betty Boop
• 4   Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust
• 5   Pessimism, Jewish Style: Jews Reading Schopenhauer from Freud to Bellow
• 6   Walter Benjamin’s Paris, Capital of Jewish Aesthetic Modernity
• 7   Dybbuks, Vampires, and Other Fin-de-Siècle Jewish Phantasms
• Conclusion: The Deca-danse; or, The Afterlife of the Jewish Decadent
• Notes
• Index