Bestiarium Judaicum

Unnatural Histories of the Jews

Jay Geller

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780823275595
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823275601
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

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.

CHAPTER 1

“O beastly Jews”

A Brief History of an (Un)Natural History

I lead then, the monstrous beast [iumentum] out from its lair, and push it laughing onto the stage of the whole world, in the view of all peoples.

—PETER THE VENERABLE¹

Heinrich Heine recalls his school days in his brilliant prose pastiche Ideen. Buch: Le Grand (1827): “One has an easier time with natural history, not so many changes can occur there, and we have accurate copper engravings of monkeys [Affen], kangaroos, zebras, rhinoceros, etc. Because such pictures stuck in my mind it later happened very often that many people looked to me right away like old friends.”² This chapter chronicles instances of the less jocular and far less benign practice of identifying human animals with images of nonhuman ones—the fabrication of the Jew-Animal—that Jewish-identified writers such as Heine engaged. The subsequent chapters of this volume will address a number of those diverse engagements, but here I will turn again to Heine, who almost twenty-five years after he shared that childhood memory, would invoke—in part, to render both the practice and its practitioners ridiculous—Jewish bestialization.

In “Disputation,” the last of his Hebrew Melodies (1851), Heine stages a fictional fourteenth-century debate over the true religion between Rabbi Judah of Navarre and the Franciscan Friar José. At one point in their back-and-forth the Christian plaintiff unleashes a swarm of bestial epithets against the Jews (DHA 3/1: 163). They are grouped together in (un)natural historical taxa: first, as carrion-eating canids, then as snouty creatures,³ then as flying predators and scavengers, and, lastly, as cold-blooded, slimy, slithering, and poisonous vermin:

Jewish people, you are hyenas,

Wolves, jackals, who grub around

Graves, driven by blood thirst

To unearth the corpses of the dead.

Jews, Jews, you are sows,

Baboons, horned-nose beasts

Called rhinoceri,

Crocodiles and vampires.

You are ravens, hoot owls, eagle owls,

Bats, hoopoes,

Corpse-eating vultures, basilisks,

Gallow’s birds, night creatures.

You are vipers and blind worms,

Rattlesnakes, poisonous toads,

Serpents and adders . . .⁴

As creative as Heine was, he did not have to invent such beastly Christian invective. This chapter rehearses the prehistory of Heine’s bestiary and then maps out some of the transformations of that tradition in Central European modernity as Jews sought integration into societies that were increasingly shaped by a biologistic worldview.

A Venerable Tradition

Had Heine picked up Peter the Venerable’s mid-twelfth-century treatise Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, he would have read:

For how long, O Jews, will this bovine intellect [bovinus intellectus] possess your hearts. . . . The ass hears but does not understand; the Jew hears but does not understand. . . . I lead then, the monstrous beast [iumentum] out from its lair, and push it laughing onto the stage of the whole world, in the view of all peoples. I display that book of yours to you in the presence of all, O Jew, O wild beast, that book, I say, that is your Talmud, that egregious teaching of yours . . .⁵

Peter was just one more contributor to a venerable tradition that found sanction in the potentially deadly glosses of biblical passages in St. John Chrysostom’s late-fourth-century Eight Homilies Against the Jews in which he corrals a mixed herd of Jewish fauna—including bovines,⁶ horses,⁷ pigs,⁸ and these:⁹

Christ said: “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and to cast it to the dogs.” Christ was speaking to the Canaanite woman when He called the Jews children and the Gentiles dogs. But see how thereafter the order was changed about: they became dogs, and we became the children. Paul said of the Jews: “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the mutilation. For we are the circumcision.” Do you see how those who at first were children became dogs? (1.2.2)

You Jews broke the yoke, you burst the bonds, you cast yourselves out of the kingdom of heaven, and you made yourselves subject to the rule of men. Please consider with me how accurately the prophet hinted that their hearts were uncontrolled. He did not say: “You set aside the yoke,” but “You broke the yoke” and this is the crime of untamed beasts, who are uncontrolled and reject rule . . . Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter. (1.2.4, 6)

For Chrysostom, it is not just that Jews are like animals or even that they are animals; animals have their proper places in the cosmic order, even wild beasts, and they are all naturally subject to humankind and its needs. That creature, “the Jew,” however, does not fit. “The Jew” is the human who has become animal or the domestic animal that breaks away. “The Jew” is wilder than the wildest beast:¹⁰

Wild beasts oftentimes lay down their lives and scorn their own safety to protect their young. No necessity forced the Jews when they slew their own children with their own hands to pay honor to the avenging demons, the foes of our life . . . Because of their licentiousness, did they not show a lust beyond that of irrational animals? . . . [They] are more dangerous than any wolves. (1.6.8, 4.1.2)

Scholastic apologists, in particular, appropriated “the Jew” as wolf motif; they “set themselves against that judaizing which the church, its doctors, philosophers and apologists had always feared, imagining ‘the Jew’ as a sort of wolf that prowled around the sheepfold in order to carry the sheep away from a happy life. These were the sentiments that guided, e.g., Cedrenus and Theophanes when they wrote their Contra Judaeos, and Gilbert Crépin, abbot of Westminster, in his Disputatio Judei cum Christiano de fide Christiana.”¹¹ This lupine identification would later be claimed to have been asserted by the Jews themselves; the eleventh protocol of the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion declares: “The goyim [Gentiles] are a flock of sheep, and we are their wolves. And you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock?”¹²

A Bestiary Beast Without Its Own Chapter

Scholastic tractates were not, however, the most widely disseminated source of anti-Jewish animal figuration in the European Middle Ages. As medieval art historian Debra Higgs Strickland notes: “the bestiaries . . . should be ranked among the most popular and widely disseminated of Christian polemical texts directed against Jews.”¹³ These were illustrated compendia of various animals and birds that, by combining description and moral lesson, illuminated the symbolic meaning each creature, by its inclusion in Gd’s creation, necessarily embodied. The two primary sources for these bestiaries were Magnentius Hrabanus Maurus’s popular ninth-century encyclopedia De rerum naturis (On the nature of things), usually known as De universo, and the Physiologus, an early Christian text (2d–4th c.) written in Alexandria, then a center of the Adversus Judaeos (against the Jews) literature. In its twenty-two¹⁴ volumes, De universo drew upon then-extant works of natural history (for example, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder) together with the canon of allegorical Christian biblical exegesis (including Augustine, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville) in order to describe the characteristics and mystical meanings of everything in the visible and invisible worlds. The Physiologus had less global ambitions. It consisted of a series of chapters, most devoted to a single, occasionally legendary, creature that would be described and then embedded in a moralizing anecdote. Beyond drawing upon classical natural history literature, it often employed allegorical exegeses of biblical passages that mentioned the particular animal. It devoted particular attention to Leviticus 11. Because the practice of Jewish dietary law was perhaps the most visible sign of Jewish literalism and intransigence as well as of Jewish carnality, exegesis of that chapter’s discussions of the use of animals for food and sacrifice and their determination as clean or unclean provided a ready site for discrediting Judentum.

Medieval bestiaries had entries for many of the animals invoked in Heine’s beastly breviary, such as the hyena and the two kinds of owl, and ascribed to them symbolic meanings supplemented by denigrating analogies with Jews. According to Guillaume le Clerc’s bestiary (1210), “The hyena also changes sex; sometimes it is male, and sometimes it is female,” which leads Strickland to argue: “It is the characteristic of sexual perversity that provides Guillaume with a link between the hyena and the ‘duplicitous Jews’ who first worshipped the true god . . . but were later given over to idolatry. . . . Like the hyena, who is neither male nor female, the Jew is double-minded and weak and lying: he desires to serve both you and me, but will not keep faith with any.”¹⁵ The nocturnal habits and virtual day blindness of owls¹⁶ generated a series of different invidious analogies with Jews “who prefer the darkness of ignorance to the light brought by Christ.”¹⁷ Another aspect of owl life detailed by Pliny the Elder and reproduced in bestiaries bore anti-Jewish significance: Rendered vulnerable by its near blindness, the owl was reputed to be attacked by other birds should it show itself during the day. Often sculpted in church entablatures, the image of the harassed owl became “a symbol of the righteous indignation of Christians against the wickedness of the Jews”¹⁸ and could be used to justify attacks on Jews who defied canon law–prescribed restrictions on travel outside ghetto walls.

Another source of medieval animal figuration of Jews was their assumed ties to their “father . . . the devil” (John 8:44) and the devil’s beasts, especially those emblems of immoderation and licentiousness: the goat and the pig.¹⁹ The goat achieved iconic status in medieval and early modern depictions of Jews: from the thirteenth-century Bible moralisée picturing Je...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 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