- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: found
The Beautiful Jewess as Borderline Figure in Europe's Internal Colonialism: Some Remarks on the Intertwining of Orientalism and Antisemitism
Abstract
European Orientalism had different societal and cultural frames in France and Great Britain. These were the main objects of investigation in Said's book Orientalism, a process which Said treats as an explicit political-colonial setting and colonial discourse. According to Said's widely criticized thesis, Germany, a country without many colonies, played no important role in the scholarly and political enactment of orientalism. Referring to the prestigious German orientalist and biblical scholarship, and also to processes of internal orientalization as tools of Germany's “colonial fantasies” and minority politics, this contribution explores discourses on the “Orient” as a prominent way in which to form a discursive construction of the Jews as internal Others. Moving beyond Said's dictum that orientalism is “a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism,” I investigate the plural history of topical discourses, hybrid figures and recurrent narratives that symbolize internal religious and cultural differences. The Jews have often been regarded in the Western world as occidental and oriental. The liminal position of the Jews in European imagination is all the more relevant when it comes to the gendered dimension of orientalist discourse. This article focuses on the figure of the “beautiful Jewess,” analyzed as the gendered and affective embodiment of the Jewish Question. Starting from the presupposition of her situatedness on a border zone between religions and cultures, I focus on her depiction in literature. I analyze how literature explores the ambivalences of the stereotype and opens up third spaces of reflection. Narrative and scenic discourses on the “Orient” are analyzed as a multi-layered and ambivalent ensemble of relational references. A special focus is on the role of gender in the representation of the Jews as “internal Orientals.”
Content
Author and article information
References
Aschheim, S. E. (2017) The modern Jewish experience and the entangled web of orientalism. In Brunotte, U. et al. (eds.). Internal Outsiders—Imagined Orientals? Antisemitism, Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Jewish Identity. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 11-34.
Bauman, Z. (1998) Allosemitism: Premodern, modern, postmodern. In Cheyette, B. and Marcus, L. (eds.). Modernity, Culture and “the Jew.” Stanford: Stanford University Press, 143-56.
Bhabha, H. (1994) Location of Culture. New York; London: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (1997) The other question: The stereotype and the colonial discourse. In Newton, K. M. (ed.). The Twentieth Century Literary Theory. A Reader. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 293-301.
Brunotte, U. (2012) Unveiling Salome 1900. Entschleierungen zwischen sexualität, pathosformel und oriental dance [Unveiling Salome 1900: Unveilings between sexuality, pathos formulas and oriental dance]. In Dennerlein, B. and Frietsch, E. (eds.). Verschleierter Orient, entschleierter Okzident. (Un-)Sichtbarkeiten in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur [Veiled Orient, Unveiled Occident: (In) visibilities in Politics, Law, Arts and Culture]. Munich: Fink Verlag, 93-116.
Brunotte, U. (2015) “All Jews are womanly, but no women are Jews.” The “femininity” game of deception: Vexierspiel “Weiblichkeit.” Female Jew, femme fatale Orientale und belle Juive. In Brunotte, U. et al. (eds.). Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses. New York; Berlin: de Gruyter, 195-220.
Brunotte, U. (2019) Seeing, hearing and narrating Salome: Modernist sensual aesthetics and the role of narrative blanks. In Meyer, B. and Stordalen, T. (eds.). Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 245-260.
Brunotte, U. et al. (eds.) (2015) Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter.
Case, J. S. (1998) The wandering Jew and the hand of God: Wilhelm Hauff's Jud Süss as historical fiction. The Modern Language Review. 93 (3), 724-40.
Dijkstra, B. (1986) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de Siècle Culture. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eßlinger, E. et al. (eds.) (2010) Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma [The Figure of the Third. A Paradigm in Cultural Studies]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Fournier, É. (2011) La “belle” Juive [The Beautiful Jewess]. Seyssel: Champ Vallon.
Frübis, H. (2017) The figure of the beautiful Jewess. In Brunotte, U. et al. (eds.). Internal Outsiders—Imagined Orientals? Antisemitism, Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Jewish Identity. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 61-72.
Gilman, S. (1998) Love + Marriage = Death, and Other Essays on Representing Difference. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gilman, S. (1999) Die verräterische Nase: Über die Konstruktion von “Fremdkörpern” [The tell-tale nose: On the construction of “foreign bodies”]. In Hürlimann, A. et al. (eds.). Fremdkörper—Fremde Körper: Von Unvermeidlichen Kontakten und widerstreitenden Gefühlen [Foreign Objects—Foreign Bodies: Inevitable Contact and Conflicting Emotions]. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 31-47.
Hahn, B. (2005) The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hauff, W. ([1827] 1905) Jud Süß [Süß the Jew]. In Hauff, W. and Stern, A. (eds.). Sämtliche Werke [Complete Works], Vol. 1. Leipzig: Max Hesses Verlag, 46-103.
Heschel, S. (1999) Revolt of the colonized: Abraham Geiger's Wissenschaft des Judentums as a challenge to Christian hegemony in the academy. New German Critique. 77, 61-85.
Hess, J. (2012) German Jews and the Claim of Modernity. Yale: Yale University Press.
Kalmar, I. D. and Penslar, D. J. (eds.) (2005) Orientalism and the Jews. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press.
Krobb, F. (1993) Die schöne Jüdin. Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg [The Beautiful Jewess. Jewesses in German Narrative Literature From the Seventeenth Century to the Great War]. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Ludewig, A. D. (2015) Between orientalization and self-orientalization. Remarks on the image of the beautiful Jewess in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature. In Brunotte, U. et al. (eds.). Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 221-9.
Mufti, R. A. (2007) Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Polaschegg, A. (2005) Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert [The Other Orientalism: Principles of German-Oriental Imagination in the 19th Century]. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter.
Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books/Random House.
Scott, J. (1986) Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. The American Historical Review. 91 (5), 1053-75.
Sicher, E. (2017) The Jew's Daughter. A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative. Lanham; Boulder; New York; London: Lexington Books.
Spivak, G. C. (1988) Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 271-313.
Tasso, T. ([1574] 2009) The Liberation of Jerusalem. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.
Turner, V. (1967) Betwixt and between. The liminal period in rites de passages. In Turner, V. (ed.). Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 93-111.
Valman, N. (2007) The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittler, K. (2015) Good to think. (Re)conceptualizating German-Jewish orientalism. In Brunotte, U. et al. (eds.). Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses. Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 63-81.
Zantop, S. (1997) Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870. Durham: Duke University Press.