Part 1 ended with the following paragraph: And so on and so on, until the fundamental difference between the Jew and the woman. Neither believe in themselves; but the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a center of gravity, although it is outside her own being. The Jew believes in nothing, within him or without him.…The woman believes in the man, in the man outside her, or in the man from whom she takes her inspiration [Jesus], and in this fashion can take herself in earnest. The Jew takes nothing seriously; he is frivolous and jests about anything, about the Christian’s Christianity, the Jew’s baptism.
The Jew, in other words, is an even more debased woman than a woman is.
•
The Jew’s baptism. A Jewish joke: In the years before Vatican II, when Catholics were still prohibited from eating meat on Fridays, a Jewish man named Yankel converted to Catholicism. From that moment on, he insisted on being called only Jacob.
Jacob was a devout churchgoer, active in his parish and well-liked and respected by those who knew him. Still, Jacob was a new Catholic and old habits do die hard. So one Friday the parish priest decided to stop by Jacob’s apartment, just to make sure. As he walked up the stairs to Jacob’s floor, the priest could smell that someone was cooking pot roast. As he approached Jacob’s door, the smell got stronger, and when he knocked and Jacob appeared in the doorway, the priest’s worst fears were confirmed. The odor filling the hallway came from Jacob’s apartment.
“Jacob,” the priest tried to be circumspect, “you do realize it’s Friday, don’t you?”
“Of course, Father. Would you like to stay for dinner?”
“I’d love to stay, but it is Friday, you know, and we’re not supposed to eat meat.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Father,” Jacob’s voice was warm and reassuring, “I’m not serving meat.”
At this obvious lie, the priest got angry. “What do you mean you’re not serving meat! I can smell the pot roast!”
“Really, Father, don’t worry. It’s not pot roast.”
The priest pushed past Jacob into the kitchen. Sure enough, there, in the oven, was a pot roast. “Look,” he was pointing directly at the meat. “How can you tell me this is not a pot roast?”
“Well, Father, last Sunday I brought some holy water home from the church, and today, before I started to cook, I sprinkled some of the water on the meat and I said, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, you’re no longer a pot roast. You’re a poached salmon.’”
•
The book was called Sex and Character, and it was brilliant—all the critics on both sides of the Atlantic said so. Otto Weininger, the author, was a German Jew who converted when he received his doctorate. By arguing that Jewish men are essentially degenerate women—this is Sander Gilman’s line of reasoning in Jewish Self-Hatred—Weininger hoped to prove that he had left his former Jewish self behind for good, but it didn’t work. Weininger the Jew haunts the pages of Sex and Character the way the voice of any unwanted self haunts the person who tries to disown it. We are always, inescapably, at every moment of who we are, all of who we are, and to disavow that wholeness is to turn the part of ourselves we have rejected into a ghost.
•
The Jew’s baptism. I wish I could remember which rebbe it was who first explained to me that Jews cannot convert—or, more precisely, that Jewish law does not recognize as valid any conversion ritual to which a Jew might choose to submit. You could live the rest of your life in strict, definitively non-Jewish adherence to the principles of your new faith, adopting whatever label of identification that faith required, but, according to this rebbe, there was ultimately nothing you could do to wipe away the fact of your Jewishness. “When the day of judgment finally arrives,” I remember him telling my class, “God will judge these men and women as Jews, and it will be as Jews that they enter or are prohibited from entering olam haba, the world to come.”
The underlying Jewish reality of my existence, in other words—and I believed this, because in those days I believed almost everything about being Jewish that my rebbes told me—could not be changed. What it meant for me to be a Jew was as permanently written into the foundation of my Yiddishe neshama, my Jewish soul, as the fact of my circumcision had been permanently written into my body, because even though most of my non-Jewish friends were also circumcised, mine was different. My circumcision had been performed in the name of God—this is my grandmother talking, though I don’t remember why she felt the need to explain it to me—was proof of the covenant God had made with Abraham, of my inclusion in and obligation to fulfill that covenant. I could change about myself anything I wanted to; I could even become a woman—this is me; my grandmother would never have allowed such a thing to enter her mind—but I could never escape the fact that a divine cut had been made in my flesh, that the mark of God’s chosen people had once been visible on my flesh.
Given the frequency with which Jews were forced to convert to Christianity throughout much of European history—and as far as I know it was in Europe that the notion of the unconvertible Jew first took shape—it’s understandable that the rabbis who shaped Jewish law might see becoming a Christian as something one might do to survive, but not as an act one would choose willingly to perform. Indeed, the idea that there was such a thing as an immutable Jewish soul could be understood as a form of resistance, a way of drawing a line that the Christians could not cross under any circumstances. It’s ironic, therefore, that the medieval church also conceived of the Jewish soul as immutable, except that the church thought the impossibility of a fully valid Jewish conversion resulted from shortcomings with which the Jews were born and which could never fully be overcome.
Remember “the blood of Christ” versus “the blood of a Christian”? According to de Cantimpré, the mistake was made by a Jewish prophet who didn’t understand Latin well enough to get it right. No, more than didn’t. Couldn’t. Who couldn’t get it right because he was incapable, as all Jews were understood to be incapable, of commanding any language other than their own. In de Cantimpré’s time, this language was Hebrew, the tongue in which the Jews read and interpreted their holy texts, and it was in the nature of Hebrew, and therefore in the nature of the Jewish soul that perceived the world through Hebrew, that the Jews could not see, for example, the many prefigurations of Christ’s coming that their texts. To put it another way, the Jews had a limited and essentially false view of the world because they spoke Hebrew, and they spoke Hebrew because they had a limited and false view of the world. The Jews’ very existence, in other words, was based on false pretenses, and so even when a Jew claimed to have converted out of real conviction, the assumption among his new coreligionists was that he or she was most probably lying.
Since Jews in the middle ages could be condemned to burn at the stake for even the tiniest perceived slight against Christianity—and a false conversion was an offense neither tiny nor imaginary—Jews who converted had a vested interest in putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their own disavowed Jewishness. So, in the 1500s, when the converted Jew Johannes Pfefferkorn wrote a series of pamphlets attacking the Jews, he had first to convince his Christian readers of the validity and value of his own conversion. “My dearest Christians,” he wrote, “you should understand and appreciate the great value and bounty that the Jews will bring to the Christian Church.… Much as a hungry bear who has broken open a beehive will not be driven away because of the attraction of the sweets, so, too, will it occur with the Jews. When they taste the honey, they will say, This is a feast above all feasts, and I believe, as true as it is within me, that all of the worldly feasts are not to be compared with one who has understood the Old Testament in the light of the New.”1
Pfefferkorn wrote in vain. Victor of Karben, a rabbi who converted to Christianity and became a priest, and who was a contemporary of Pfefferkorn, summed up where converts like him fit into his new religious community’s world view: “And thus, says the Psalmist, one spends the entire day like a poor dog that has spent its day running and returns home at night hungry. For there are many uncharitable and ignorant Christians who will not give to you but will rather show you from their doors with mockery, saying, ‘Look, there goes a baptized Jew.’ And then others answer, ‘Yes, anything that is done for you is a waste. You will never become a good Christian.’.…And [still others say] with satisfaction, ‘Though you may act like a Christian, you are still a Jew at heart.’”2
You are still a Jew at heart. The cycle is vicious, because if Jews can never change, then conversion and its accompanying salvation are categorical impossibilities. And yet if you are a Jew who’s converted not only do the Jews have to be able to change, but they also have to be, at the same time, so radically and irreconcilably different that your becoming a Christian negates entirely the Jew you once were. Otherwise, how can you prove that your conversion is real? Or maybe your conversion was a lie after all, the result of a Jewish deceitfulness within yourself of which you had no knowledge. And yet you know how you feel. You know the joy you experienced when you were baptized. How could that have been false? And yet and yet and yet and yet, and yet again. The cycle is vicious, and it forms the core of all self-hatred—in this case Jewish self-hatred—and there is, ultimately, no way out of it.
•
Dear—,
I was glad to receive your letter the other day. It has been many months since you left and I welcomed the opportunity that reading your words gave me to hear again the sound of your voice. You ask how, after having lived most of my life as a Jew, I found it in myself to embrace as fully and with as much certainty as I have the light that is Christ. Indeed, it is a good story, worth telling. Perhaps you, or those with whom you share it, will find it instructive.
At first, it was strictly business, the way it always is with the Jews. I was in Mainz to keep an eye on Ekbert, the bishop of Mainz, to whom I’d been foolish enough to lend money without sufficient collateral. I went regularly to his sermons, standing at the edge of the crowd, pretending to be interested, but really I just wanted to let him know I was there, that it would not be easy for him to get out of paying me back. Slowly, though, I’m not sure exactly when or precisely why, his words started to mean something to me, and it was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes, a darkness cleared. Of course the binding of Isaac prefigured the crucifixion! And of course Isaiah’s prophecy about the virgin was really a foretelling of the virgin birth! How could I not have understood this before? Soon I was not only attending Ekbert’s sermons; I was also getting private instruction from him, though I had to use the pretense of going to collect my money so I could see him without arousing the Jews’ suspicions. Because they are a devious people, they trust no one, not even each other, and so I made sure to take from Ekbert just enough money to put my neighbors at ease. Of course I gave every bit of it back once my conversion was complete.
Still, even though I am now Hermann, the abbot of this monastery at Scheda, even though the man I was, Judah ben David ha-Levi, is as foreign to me as if he’d never been born, even now, sometimes I hear in my dreams the words of the monk to whom I first confided my desire to accept Christ, before I asked Ekbert to be my teacher—“Get out! Get out, you heathen! You blind Jewish dog! Get out!” Just as they did when I first heard them, the words paralyze me, and I am overcome with fear that I remain beneath these monastic robes nothing more than a Jew, forever blind and, for that blindness, forever damned. Only prayer and the knowledge that Christ’s love is all-forgiving help me then. May you never know such doubts.
Yours in Christ,
Hermann
•
Hermann—yes, he really did exist3—did not write this letter, but I am guessing that he wrote or wanted to write one just like it, and so I have imagined for him an interlocutor to whom he could express his frustrations and fears not only without fearing reprisal, but also, and more importantly, with the hope that in speaking to this person he would be able to find some affirmation of what he understood to be true about himself. In this sense, Sex and Character was Otto Weininger’s letter to the world, but while the letter I’ve invented for my version of Hermann succeeds in the sense that he is honest about his doubts and the pain they cause him, Weininger’s left him blind.
•
“The pilpul,”—this is Sander Gilman—“is the quintessentially Jewish mode of argument. It is the basis for all Talmudic discourse. Suspending time and space, it confronts the opinions of all authority, seeking the moment of resolution hidden within seemingly contradictory positions.” The pilpul proceeds “based on analogy and approximation and not on the syllogism, the basis of classical logic.”4 So, for example, in Tractate Bava Metzia, when the rabbis take up the question of what kinds of found objects the finder is obliged to return and what kinds he or she may keep, everyone agrees that if the found object has some identifying mark on it, such that the object’s owner has a reasonable expectation of identifying and retrieving it, the finder cannot keep the object without first making a concerted and public effort to locate the owner. If, on the other hand, the found object has no identifying mark, then the finder can keep it without making that effort because we assume that the owner, since he has no expectation of identifying what he has lost, has given up hope of retrieving it.
In other words, if someone finds “scattered fruit” without any identifying mark, he or she is allowed to keep it. Rabbi Yitzhak wants to know, however, precisely how much fruit spread over precisely how much area qualifies as “scattered.” The rabbis then take a moment to define the context in which the fruit is found, deciding that they are not talking about a situation in which the fruit fell by accident or where there is some indication—even if there is no mark on the fruit—that the owner will return later to retrieve what he dropped. Rather, they are dealing with a situation in which grain kernels have been left behind on the threshing room floor, and since the effort required to collect the kernels would be greater than what the owner would gain by collecting them, we can assume the owner will not come back to do so. Anyone who finds the grain, therefore, is entitled to keep it. On the other hand, though, if the grain is spread over a small enough area such that the owner might consider the effort it would take to retrieve the grain worthwhile, then we have to assume that he or she will return for the grain, and so the person who finds it cannot keep it without first attempting to return it.
But another question still remains unanswered. The rabbis want to know the owner’s primary motive for abandoning part of his crop. Is it the fact that it will take too much effort to collect the scattered grain? Or is it because the value of the grain once it has been gathered will be too small? So Rabbi Yirmeyah poses the question of whether the same principles would apply to half the amount of grain scattered over half the area. The effort to gather the grain is smaller, but the value of the grain is less. Do we assume the owner would come back for the grain or not? So then the rabbis ask about twice the amount of grain spread out over twice the area, where the effort to gather the grain would be greater, but the value would be greater as well. The discussion then becomes even more complicated when the rabbis start to consider that different kinds of fruit are not only of different sizes, but they have different values. Sesame seeds, for example, are very small and exceptionally hard to pick up, but they were also, in Talmudic times, extremely valuable. Given that fact, someone might indeed be willing to expend the effort of gathering the seeds up, even a relatively small amount scattered over a relatively large area. So is the quantity and square footage that define “scattered” for sesame seeds different from, say, the measurements that define “scattered” for figs?
And so on and so on and so on, until the rabbis pronounce teiku, which means they have concluded that the questions raised by Rabbi Yirmeyah must remain undecided.
And that’s it. They just leave it there. The text records no uneasiness that they have not been able to resolve this question, no frustration at Rabbi Yirmeyah for posing an unsolvable problem. They seem to be content that the problem has been articulated, and they move on to the next issue, which is a good deal more complex and has to do with what it means to say that someone who has lost an object has given up hope of finding it—and remember that we are talking here about objects that have no identifying mark. The rabbis want to know the precise moment at which this loss of hope takes effect, freeing the finder of any obligation to locate the owner. Is it from the moment the loss occurs, whether or not the owner is aware of the loss? Or is it from the moment the owner becomes aware that he has lost something? The question may seem silly, but there is an important underlying principle at stake: Is it possible, or even desirable, to consider as having already occurred events that have not yet taken place, but that will without a doubt occur in the future? Here’s another variation of the same question: How does one distinguish legally between something that happens of its own accord (a storm, say, that knocks a tree from your yard onto your neighbor’s property and damages your neighbor’s roof) and something that happens because of human action (the same tree damages the same roof, but this time it’s because you were cutting the tree down and it fell in the wrong direction)?5
•
The Jew takes nothing seriously. So imagine you’re a man walking down the road at the time of The Malleus Maleficarum. Not far ahead something that looks like the largest worm you’ve ever seen is trying to crawl across the road. When you get closer, you realize it’s a penis, probably just escaped from the cage it was kept in by the witch that stole it. Which portion of the law should apply? Is finding the penis the same thing as finding, say, a lost sheep? (Or in this case perhaps a horse, since the witches, you’ll remember, feed their stolen penises barley and oats?) Or is it like finding a piece of food that fell from the bag of the person who bought it? Or suppose instead of one penis, you happen across an entire cage’s worth scattered along the road? Does it matter precisely how scattered they are? Do we assume that a man who has lost his penis will be able to identify it and so, by definition, cannot be said to have given up hope of finding it? Or is it all moot because the penises were stolen? And since we’re talking here about penises that have become unattached to the men whose bodies they used to adorn, we know, I mean, we really know, they had to have been stolen. Must you announce what you’ve found? How, assuming someone comes to claim what you’ve found, will you identify its rightful owner? Under what circumstances, if any, can you keep a penis you have found for yourself? Why on earth would you want to?
Well, if you were an eighteenth or nineteenth century man of medicine or science, you’d want one in your specimen collection, specifically a Black one, because the study of comparative anatomy pretty much demanded that you have one. Founded by Johan Friedrich Blumenbach, this new scientific field treated the body as a text even more revealing of the differences between and among groups of people than their languages or culturally determined behaviors, especially when the differences in question were racial. “Every peculiarity of the body has”—this is the nineteenth century anatomist Edward Drinker Cope, quoted by David M. Friedman in his book, A Mind Of Its Own—“…some corresponding significance in the mind, and the causes of the former are the remoter causes of the latter,” a principle understood in practice to mean that larger physical or physiological features conferred superiority on the race that possessed them. With one exception. The larger penises that Black men were understood to have—the myth actually dates at least as far back as the ancient Romans—conferred on them not sexual superiority but the bestiality that white people believed defined Black inferiority. 6
Even in the early years of the twentieth century, the idea was widespread that the genitals of Black men precluded any possibility of equality with whites. In “The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization,” published in 1903, Dr. William Lee Howard developed this idea at some length, arguing that because “all intellectual development [in Black men] cease[d] with the advent of puberty,” and because Black men possessed “enormously developed” genitals that compelled them to devote their entire lives “to the worship of Priapus,” resulting in the corresponding enlargement of the sexual centers of their brains, the only way Blacks could be “elevated” by education—the phrasing that was common at the time—was if that education managed somehow to “reduce the large size of the African’s penis.”7
Throughout history, in other words, people have believed that what they think they know about the nature of a man’s penis somehow bespeaks the true essence of his character.
Cross posted on The Poetry in the Politics and the Politics in the Poetry
- Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews 36. [↩]
- ibid. 40-41 [↩]
- Adapted from ibid. 29-31 [↩]
- ibid. 90 [↩]
- My summary here is taken entirely from Rabbi Israel V. Berman, ed., Tractate Bava Metzia, Part Ii, vol. 2, The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition (New York: Random House, 1990) 3-10. [↩]
- David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (New York: Penguin Books, 2001) 106-07. [↩]
- Quoted in Ibid. 120-21. [↩]
