Jewish Christian Queer (Queer Interventions)

Citation preview

Jewish/Christian/Queer Crossroads and Identities

Edited by Frederick Roden

Jewish/Christian/Queer

Queer Interventions Series editors: Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke University College Dublin, Ireland Queer Interventions is an exciting, fresh and unique new series designed to publish innovative, experimental and theoretically engaged work in the burgeoning field of queer studies. The aim of the series is to interrogate, develop and challenge queer theory, publishing queer work which intersects with other theoretical schools and is accessible whilst valuing difficulty; empirical work which is metatheoretical in focus; ethical and political projects and most importantly work which is self-reflexive about methodological and geographical location. The series is interdisciplinary in focus and publishes monographs and collections of essays by new and established scholars. The editors intend the series to promote and maintain high scholarly standards of research and to be attentive to queer theory’s shortcomings, silences, hegemonies and exclusions. They aim to encourage independence, creativity and experimentation: to make a queer theory that matters and to recreate it as something important; a space where new and exciting things can happen. Titles in this series: Queering the Non/Human Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird ISBN: 978-0-7546-7128-2 Cinesexuality Patricia MacCormack ISBN: 978-0-7546-7175-6 Queer Attachments Sally R. Munt ISBN: 978-0-7546-4923-6

Jewish/Christian/Queer Crossroads and Identities

Edited by Frederick Roden University of Connecticut, USA

© Frederick Roden 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Frederick Roden has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Jewish/Christian/queer. - (Queer interventions) 1. Christian gays 2. Jewish gays 3. Homosexuality Religious aspects - Christianity 4. Homosexuality Religious aspects - Judaism 5. Gays’ writings - History and criticism I. Roden, Frederick S., 1970270’.08664 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roden, Frederick S., 1970Jewish/Christian/queer : crossroads and identities / by Frederick Roden. p. cm. -- (Queer interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7375-0 1. Gender identity. 2. Homosexuality--Religious aspects--Judaism. 3. Homosexuality--Religious aspects--Christianity. I. Title. II. Title: Jewish, Christian, queer. HQ1075.R613 2009 205'.66--dc22 ISBN 978-0-7546-7375-0 eISBN 978-0-7546-9148-8

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Contents

Notes on Contributors  Series Editors’ Preface: Cross-Identifications  Acknowledgements  Introduction Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities  Frederick S. Roden 1

vii xi xvii 1



Paul on Exceeding Nature: Queer Gentiles and the Giddy Gardener  Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.

2

Sleeping with a Prophet: On the Erotic Adventures of Rabbi Meir 35 Daniel Boyarin

3

Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges  Steven F. Kruger

4 Anglican, Jewish and Pagan: The Queen Anne Churches as Queer Spaces  Chris Mounsey 5

Jews, Geniuses and the Rewriting of National History: Benjamin Disraeli’s Biography of His Father  Richard Dellamora

19

47

67

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Bottoming for the Queen: Queering the Jews in Protestant Europe at the Fin de Siècle  Steven Lapidus

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Marc-Andre Raffalovich: A Russian-French-Jewish-Catholic Homosexual in Oscar Wilde’s London  Frederick S. Roden

127

8

“Next Easter in Rome”: Freud’s Queer Longing  Alan Lewis and Goran Stanivukovic

6 7

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9 Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: Questions of Morality and Identity During the Third Reich  Bryan Mark Rigg 10 11

“A Roller-coaster of a Life with Everything in it”: Pamela Frankau (1908–67)  Caroline Gonda Faith of Our Fathers as Blood Sacrifice: Judaic Recovery and the Broken Christian Body in Michael Arditti’s Easter and The Celibate  Frederick S. Roden

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Index 

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Notes on Contributors Daniel Boyarin is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Rhetoric and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he directs the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures and the LGBT minor. Richard Dellamora (Departments of English and Cultural Studies, Trent University, Canada) writes at length about Benjamin Disraeli in Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (2004). Dellamora is also the author of Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (1995) as well as editor of Victorian Sexual Dissidence (1999), The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, co-edited with Daniel Fischlin (1997), and Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (1995). Caroline Gonda is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She is the author of Reading Daughters’ Fictions 1709-1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth and co-editor with Chris Mounsey of Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800; she has also published on contemporary lesbian writing, lesbian theory and lesbian feminist criticism. Her current research is on lesbian narrative possibilities from the eighteenth century to the present. Steven F. Kruger is professor of English and Medieval Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is currently Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center. He has written Dreaming in the Middle Ages, AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science, and The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, and he has coedited Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America (with Deborah R. Geis) and Queering the Middle Ages (with Glenn Burger). His current book project is tentatively titled Convert Orthodoxies. Steven Lapidus is a doctoral candidate at Concordia University in Montreal, where he is studying the history of North American Orthodox Judaism as well as the social history of human sexuality. He teaches courses in religion at Concordia, and is a former curator of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.

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Aside from completing his dissertation, Steven is also working on publishing his grandfather’s memoirs of life in a pre-World War I Ukrainian shtetl. Alan Lewis received his PhD in English from the University of British Columbia and has published on Shakespeare, psychoanalysis and queer theory. He is currently at work on theories of literary influence and the early modern dramatists. Chris Mounsey is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Winchester. The co-organizer, with Caroline Gonda of the successful “Queer People” conferences, Chris is now preparing their fourth collection of Queer People essays. Chris is also working on a book about the theology of queer authors, with Liz Stuart. Bryan Mark Rigg received his BA with Honors from Yale University and MA and PhD from Cambridge University. He has taught History at American Military University and Southern Methodist University and has also served in the Israeli Army and as an officer in the US Marine Corps. Rigg is the author of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military and Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Solders Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Currently he is founder and president of RIGG Wealth Management in Dallas, Texas. Frederick S. Roden is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture and Love’s Trinity: A Companion to Julian of Norwich, the editor of Palgrave Advances: Oscar Wilde Studies and co-editor (with Lowell Gallagher and Patricia Juliana Smith) of Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives. He is currently editing Marc-Andre Raffalovich’s Uranisme et Unisexualite (1896) with Philip Healy and William Peniston. Educated at Princeton, Tübingen, Rome, and Yale, Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He taught for twelve years at the University of Virginia and was Eli Lilly Visiting Professor at Princeton. He has held fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Lilly Foundation, the Center of Theological Inquiry, and the Center for the Study of Religion. He is author or editor of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, Sexuality and the Christian Body, Theology and Sexuality, After the Spirit, and The Holy Spirit. Goran Stanivukovic teaches English at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. His publications include a critical edition of Emanuel Ford’s Ornatus viii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and Artesia (2003), edited volumes Ovid and the Renaissance Body (2001), Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities, 1570-1640 (with Constance C. Relihan, 2003), and Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings (2007). He has also published on Shakespeare, queer theory, and English Renaissance literature of the Mediterranean.

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Series Editors’ Preface

Cross-Identifications It has always been our hope, as series editors of Queer Interventions, that the books we publish in the series will make some sort of real-world political intervention, that they will have some sort of purchase on events which are of global and local political significance, and that they will help us to make sense of the often senseless world which we inhabit. In short, as our rationale for the series boldly proclaims, we want to make queer theory a place and a space in which important things happen, to fashion a queer theory that matters. Frederick S. Roden’s collection Jewish/Christian/Queer answers that call by bringing together a range of scholarly, rigorous, meticulously-researched chapters from across a wide range of disciplinary locations, each of which tries, in its own way, to attend to the interconstitutive status of the three terms which its title conjoins and to meditate, in implicit and explicit ways, on what that articulation might mean ethically and politically, historically, and today. What Jewish/Christian/Queer shows us is that the deconstruction of seemingly mutually exclusive identities need not necessarily be a violent operation. Rather, it can make generous and generative space for a kind of openness: to others, to alterity, to racial, gendered, sexual and religious difference. If the Jew, the Christian, and the queer can be shown to neighbor each other, as each of the essays which follows demonstrates, then we can begin to foster ways in which it is possible, in the current politico-historical conjuncture, to love one’s neighbour. The very ethical stakes of the encounter the title of this collection stages hinge upon nothing less. It is the kind of inclusivity which Barack Obama, who carried such a heavy weight of left Messianic hope, displayed in his Presidential acceptance speech in November 2008: “It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.” We might supplement the words Jew and Christian to his inexhaustive list. In a 1994 special issue of Diacritics entitled “Critical Crossings,” Judith Butler and Biddy Martin emphasized the term “cross-identification” for the ways in which they tried to contest sedimented notions of “identity and political alignment.” Back then, “queer theory” was still placed in tentative, perhaps constraining quotation marks (rendering it static), but held the promise of   Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, “Cross Identifications.” Diacritics 24 (1994): 3.

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“complicating assumptions about routes of identification and desire.” By subtitling his collection Crossroads and Identities, Roden is signalling in a more confident fashion the ways in which an undisciplined (perhaps boundary-less) queer theory can “analyze critical, even surprising, boundary crossings.” The rationale for the term Butler and Martin deploy is worth rehearsing given the changed landscape in which we as queer theorists now work, largely thanks to the room for maneuver collections like theirs made possible:  The notion of “cross-identification” may seem paradoxical, for every identification presumes a crossing of sorts, a movement towards some other site with which or by which an identification is said to take place. But it is because this “crossing” is not well understood that we underscore it through redundancy here. “Crossing” may be conceived, on the one hand, as an appropriation, assimilation, or even a territorialization of another site or position, or it can be understood as a movement beyond the stasis attributed to “positions” located on a closed map of social power. In this second sense, then, crossing can be a movement that seeks to establish a connection or continuity. It can, of course, also constitute disavowal or defense and do all of this at once.

The title, Jewish/Christian/Queer contains all of these promises, risks, paradoxes. The slashes can at once seem boundary-reinforcing or boundary-fracturing, identity-making or identity-dislocating. But the aim, as is clear from the rationale behind the collection, is to encourage a kind of mobility across the various positions. The title is conjunctive: Jewish and Christian and Queer. But, like Butler and Martin, Roden and the contributors here, do not disavow the kinds of resistances such boundary traversing operations must necessarily meet with. The relationality set up across Jewishness, Christianness, and queerness is as tense as it is dynamic. Above all, the critical aim of the cross-identificatory moves each of the essays mortgages themselves to is a non-assimilating openness to alterity. Such critical and identificatory porosity is a huge risk, of course, because it gives up on what seem like hard-won identities in favor of impure, mongrel, hybridized identity positions. The pay-off is worth it however, because, as the authors demonstrate, the Jew, the Christian, and the queer require each other, are mutually inter-implicated—historically, culturally, socially, psychically. Roden certainly shares the same hope that Butler and Martin do, that the “mutual implication among the essays presented here we hope, will persuade readers of the critical promise of cross-identificatory, intersectional work for moving outside of simple ‘identities’ to a more expansive and more   Ibid.   Ibid.   Ibid. xii

series editors’ preface: cross-identifications

productive convergence of views.” The title Jewish/Christian/Queer cannot but remind us of Carla Freccero’s Queer/Early/Modern with its equally productive and expansive backslashes. Freccero’s slashes “inarticulable as they may be” share a similarly interruptive force to the ones employed here, and a historical perverseness, an anachronicity, which refuses supercessionary logic, a point which Steven F. Kruger’s The Spectral Jew, and many of the essays here make so persuasively. Freccero calls this a “prolepsis of queer,” a deliberate messiness and uncertainty, which she recognises might be deemed “illegitimate.” The way Roden takes up the disruptive, mestiza figure of the mischling is a courageously anachronistic, illegitimate and perversely performative gesture, much like the co-optation of queer as reverse discourse. The power of this literary-historical move cannot be underestimated. The way queer performs for Freccero also seems apposite in the contexts in which it gets taken up in the essays here: At times, queer continues to exploit its productive indeterminacy as a word used to designate that which is odd, strange, aslant…if this book can be said to have a position on queer, it would be to urge resistance to its hypostatisation, reification into nominal status as designating an entity, an identity, a thing, and to allow it to continue its outlaw work.

The limitrophic, outlaw work this book does has of course been made possible by both psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies. The latter field has, in particular, schooled us to think more carefully about a nonidentitarian sense of Jewishness and of Christianness (and alloyed with queer theory in critical race studies to imagine a nonidentiarian sense of queerness). The idea of the Other who is a constitutive part of us yet which must, perforce, be expelled from us (at our own expense) is one which this volume anatomizes, and Roden exposes how it is our responsiveness to the Jewish, the Christian and the queer Other which is more “essential” to the formation of who “we” are. Edward Said, in his Freud and the Non-European, appeals to an understanding of Judaism which also foregrounds hybridity, impurity and mixedness. For Said, the complex challenge Freud poses for us is his “profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity—for him, this was the Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one Identity.” He goes on to assert that “the strength” of Freud’s psychoanalysis is “that it can   Ibid.   Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press), 3.   Ibid., 3, 4.   Ibid, 5.  Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (New York: Verso, 2003), 53. xiii

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be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well…as a troubling, disabling, destabilising secular wound.”10 This originary break at the site of Jewish identity clears a space for what Said calls a “politics of diasporic life,” a space where peoples live together, their identities constituted and attained only by, with, and through the Other. The precarious politics of diasporic life, besieged identities and solidarity which the contributors here envision is even more capacious, dissensual and life-affirming since it rests on the irresolute identities of the Jew, the Christian and the queer and all the others they have defined itself against (the Arab is a pertinent example), in the past and in the present. Daniel Boyarin’s Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism concerns itself with the cultural relations between Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity in the past (with obvious ramifications for seemingly purified identities in the present and future) and forcefully proclaims that the two coexisted up until the end of late Antiquity. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen glosses his argument, “separation of the faiths was a retrospective process engaged in by both communities, after both religions had ceased to be new and were settling into comfortable orthodoxies that projected keen difference into a past actually filled with interpenetration, ambiguity, messiness.”11 Boyarin avers, in terms that resonate with Said, that: For at least the first three centuries of their common lives, Judaism in all of its forms and Christianity in all of its forms were part of one complex religious family, twins in a womb, contending with each other for identity and precedence, but sharing with each other the same spiritual food, as well.12

Cohen understands the indifferentiation between Jewish and Christian identities as a “vexed” and complex “conversation,” one in which, for Boyarin, “the borders are fuzzy, and this has consequences. Religious ideas and innovations can cross borders in both directions.”13 It would be tempting to call these border-crossings and interpenetrations “dis-enclosures.” This is a term borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy’s magisterial Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, a book which points to the autodeconstruction of Christianity. Nancy explains that:

10  Ibid., 54. 11  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Flash Review III: Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God,” www. inthemedievalmiddle.com (December 2008). 12 Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 6. 13  Cohen, op. cit. xiv

series editors’ preface: cross-identifications

the deconstruction of Christianity comes down to this: an operation of disassembling…in a sense, as I have been saying, Christianity is in itself essentially the movement of its own distension, because it represents the constituting of a subject in the process of opening and distending itself. Obviously, we must say that deconstruction, which is only possible by means of that distension, is itself Christian. It is Christian because Christianity is, originally, deconstructive, because it relates immediately to its own origin as to a slack, an interval, some play, an opening in the origin.14

As we have already seen, Said, Freud, Roden, the contributors here, all deconstruct Judaism too by exposing the originary break at the site of its constitution, by opening it at its own origin, distending it. What is definitively queer about this deconstruction, and the way in which it highlights the JudeoChristian composition at the origin, is that for Nancy, “a deconstruction is always a penetration; it is neither a destruction, nor a return to the archaic, nor, again, a suspension of adherence: a deconstruction is an intentionality of the to-come.”15 Dis-enclosing, deconstructing, amounts then to an opening up, a blossoming. We might be reminded here of the etymology of the word religion: relegere (from legere: to pluck {flowers}, gather {flowers into a bunch}) and religare (from ligare: to tie, bind). If the authors here render the gaps, partitions and voids between the Jewish, the Christian and the queer visible it is only to re-tie and re-bind them in their mutual imbrications; to return them to the same neighbourhood. For both Judaism and Christianity the commandment in Leviticus 19.18 to “love your neighbor as yourself ” is canonical and an ethicomoral imperative. Alain Badiou has reworked the question of the neighbour in terms of what he calls “neighbourhood.” As Kenneth Reinhard explains it, “rather than a definition based on topological nearness or shared points of identification, Badiou describes neighbouring in terms of ‘openness.’ A neighbourhood is an open area in a world: a place, subset, or element where there is no boundary, no difference, between the inside of the thing and the thing itself.”16 For Badiou we choose, we decide, for the sake of universality, to construct a common open area, a “new place of universality.”17 This forcing open, this love, is “the decision to create a new open set, to knot two interiorities

14  Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 149. 15  Ibid., 44. 16 Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theory of the Neighbor,” in Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 66. 17  Ibid., 67. xv

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into a new logic of world, a new neighbourhood.”18 Roden’s knotting of the Jew, the Christian and the queer creates an even more expansive open set and for Reinhard “an unlimited number of open sets can be united without being closed or totalized. Hence, the neighbourhood opens on infinity, endlessly linking new elements in new subsets according to new decisions and fidelities.”19 Jewish/ Christian/Queer’s refusal to solidify identities, to promiscuously mix disciplines, theories, positions is a subjective act in the Badiouian sense, a decision to create a new logic of world, one which has never been so urgent as today.  Michael O’Rourke and Noreen Giffney

18  Ibid. 19  Ibid. xvi

Acknowledgements This volume comes to print due to the interest taken in it by many different people. The project began with an invitation from the editors of the Queer Interventions series, Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke. Without that suggestion, no collection would have been attempted at the early stage in my research on the subject with which this book is concerned. I am very grateful for their support and encouragement throughout the process. I am most appreciative of the excellent advice offered by readers of the book’s prospectus who pushed me to theorize and broaden my own interests. I can only hope that the outcome may live up to the extraordinary insights that numerous conversants offered me in the course of the project. To be sure, the contributors’ fine essays make connections that continue to teach me. I thank Neil Jordan, Jude Chillman, Gemma Lowle, and the staff at Ashgate Publishing for their support during the frenzied time of bringing together an edited volume. I also must acknowledge the many people – friends, students, teachers, colleagues, religious and non-religious – for sharing their queer spiritual journeys with me. The education I have been receiving concerning the themes of this book I hope will never cease. L’Chaim, to life, abundant life…

For all those past, present and future whose lives are lived at queer crossroads

Introduction

Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities Frederick S. Roden

As a scholar who has long been fascinated by the contradiction of where the homosexual and the religious intersect – the forbidden, contested nature of that space – where the Jewish and Christian meet (in body and discourse) strikes me as equally provocative. What does it mean to voyage into the queer borderlands where a Christian might also be a Jew, against law and definition to the contrary? These thoughts are shaped by the limits of several existing areas of study: perhaps most notably the limits of certain politics of identity (religious and otherwise) and of “interreligious dialogue.” To speak of the “Jewish/Christian/Queer” is to articulate the queerness of where the Jewish and Christian intersect. I use the term “queer” broadly to convey dissonance, rather than referring to specifically sexual deviance from some norm. I apply it for its implied disruption, but also for its publicness and brashness, as well as its pride. I do not abandon a commitment to the analysis of sexual queerness within these religious traditions. If the Jewish and Christian meet in a “queer” discursive space, their individual regulation of sexuality queers (as a verb) many experiences at the margins – even as each religious tradition stands in a particular relation to the other rhetorically. Christianity participates in a theology of supersession, that it is the “fulfillment” of Judaism. While numerous theologians have sought to re-write this relationship, it is a challenging task, at least within the realm of narrative given the scriptural story available. The Christian rhetorical gesture is reductive of the “Old” “Testament” (sic), making the relationship of covenant dependent on its erasure, or at least its ideological redefinition. Judaism serves the necessary role of being “other” to Christianity; and Jews the example of those who reject the Christ, as the Church became the “true” heir of Abraham. Taken without mediation or moderation, Christianity leaves Judaism discursively incomplete while it too is unfinished: awaiting a “second” coming even as Jews adapted to life in the exile of diaspora, living queerly within it but not of it. However much Christian narrative incorporates Jewish typology and Biblical story in its exegesis, compulsory Jewish participation in the Christian continuation story effectively negates Judaism, making it the precursor that enables the subsequent

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completion, while the texts themselves cannot be wrenched from either tradition’s ownership. Of course, in the two thousand years of Christianity’s construction, Judaism has built a complementary mutually-exclusive understanding of its relationship to idolatrous Christianity, particularly the rejection of a Trinitarian messianic theology within a still-broken world. There is a similar discourse of impossibility, a theologically incompatible co-existence, not to mention a broad array of Jewish responses to Jesus, the cross, and Christian culture. Indeed, in Ashkenazic Judaism, both the Yiddish language and Yiddishkeit broadly conceived overtly and covertly articulate a rhetoric (usually antagonistic, sometimes heuristic) counter and complementary to Christian universalism and triumphalism. Despite such juxtapositions, at times the Jewish and Christian do meet – in language and in body. Conversion narratives are one example of this phenomenon. Steven Kruger, writing in The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, notes that Jewishness is never so present as when Judaism is renounced in favor of Christianity. Conversion serves as a powerful contradiction to the “de/terminators” of identity. When and where the body is deemed Jewish by Jewish law, yet the discursive action challenges the definition of that body, which witness provides the correct evidence? The history of antiJudaism and anti-Semitism (with respect to persecution of bodies) can provide a particular answer; but so can catechetical interrogations of orthodoxy with respect to professions of belief. On the other hand, where does the Gentile convert to Judaism stand, while Jewish law forbids making distinctions between so-called “born Jews” and “Jews by choice”? All of these issues complicate the meaning of the question “Are you Jewish?” They probe what is meant by Jewish “identity” even as future vows can be declared always already cancelled. In a similar way, when asked “Are you a Christian?”, the limits and boundaries of such differences are owned by the questioner’s voice. In all of these cases we find a struggle between self-identification and the rhetorical construction of an identity as it is perceived rather than how it is lived. These operate with respect to both hidden identities and publicly professed ones, but they break down in those spaces where no easy model for identity can be claimed. The closet of Jewish representation can exist within a Christian culture just as the Christian can exist within a Jewish one; the LGBTQ closet is enclosed within and respect   See especially Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) and Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005). Sephardic Ladino also has its own culturally and historically specific expression of this struggle.   Steven J. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 

INTRODUCTION

to a homophobic world. But where can we locate the oxymoron of the Jewish/ Christian, lacking those discursive and experiential categories of identification that enable private recognition, the proverbial “coming out to oneself ”? In their book Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, editors Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini set their goal as the analysis of “the rhetorical and theoretical connections that tie together the constellations ‘Jew’ and ‘homosexual.’” They note that late nineteenth-century theories of racial difference essentializing the Jew as a type invented a particular kind of modern anti-Semitism in the same way that the late Victorian definition of “the homosexual” created modern homophobia. That volume of essays demonstrates through a variety of cultural phenomena the connections between Jewishness and queerness. It is a valuable contribution to this area of inquiry. But I am left to pose a more theologically inflected – perhaps more epistemologically Christian-directed – question. What is then the relationship between Christian theology, Jewish identity, and queerness? If the scholarship found in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question embraces a cultural identification of “the Jew” and explores its queerness in non-Jewish culture, can we pose a complementary space for the investigation of places where the Jewish and Christian meet – in identification and/or discourse – and examine their queerness? Can we hope to analyze within such a frame where the sexually queer meet the religiously queer: where the unspeakable sexual identity meets the unfathomable religious (or ethnic, cultural, racial) identity – such as the body of the LGBTQ-identifying individual who claims an element of both Jewish and Christian affiliation? There are high stakes for identity politics when we move into the area of Jewish and Christian law, and there are differences. For example, if Catholic Christianity offers a queer space for the virgin in Christ to vow her- or himself as God’s lover alone in holy celibacy, Judaism’s struggle is far more dependent on biological procreation in a post-Shoah, Jew-depleted world where public homosexual identities exists. As LGBTQ Jews parent Jewish children and make queer Jewish families, many members require conversions as they are not so-called “born Jews,” thus challenging biological determinism. There is also the challenge to reconcile the Abrahamic command to go forth and multiply with anxieties over who exactly qualifies as Jewish and what their obligations (and genders) are, particularly if they identify as sexually queer. Furthermore, since traditionally the procreative imperative is directed at males, lesbian Jews must take up that

  Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1.   Nowhere is this subject more sensitive than in contemporary Israel: for normative heterosexuals. Rabbinical courts have nullified some conversions, while the determination of Jewish identity (or not) of certain immigrants is contested. 

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patriarchal burden. This is to say nothing of transgressive marriages (whether nonheteronormative or “interreligious”). As essentialist notions of sexual identity have been challenged, so must we re-examine essentializing arguments about religious and indeed ethnic identification. Victorian sexology posited inversion as a “male soul in a female body,” or a “female soul in a male body.” As we have become more conscious of the social construction of the sexual self, we are obliged to deconstruct in a complementary way the essentialism of the religious self (as, for instance, Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen have done). Identities that challenge biological determinism are best scrutinized in this regard, such as the tradition of understanding the convert to Judaism as a Jewish soul that had inhabited a Gentile body making a return. An equally problematic Christian epistemology is the evangelical imperative that all souls are destined to be brought to Christ and the Church, for it presumes a universalism that is nothing more than a kind of spiritual essentialism. During the past twenty years the academy has reclaimed, invented, and evolved a notion of “queerness” that goes beyond its use as a slur on the playground. This gesture does not, however, negate the potential violence of that term. The “queer” intersection is always a potentially shocking one, rhetorically and physically. When used in hate speech, its verbal violence may also incite physical violence. In the preface to Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Daniel Boyarin writes: “the borders between Judaism and Christianity have been historically constructed out of acts of discursive (and too often actual) violence, especially acts of violence against the heretics who embody the instability of our constructed essences, of our terrifying bleedings into each other.” One of the aims of this book is to examine how “queerness” enacts such violence in a variety of arenas – sexual and religious – and how and where we bleed new life. When first invoked in academic discourse, “queer” was employed as a more disruptive code word for “homosexual” than “gay,” as it sometimes still is used. But the power of “queer” is its breadth, as I have suggested. Hence for the purpose of Jewish/Christian/Queer, the goal is to explore three different kinds of “queernesses,” which I reiterate here. I argued before that where the Jewish and Christian meet, there is rhetorical, theological, and discursive dissonance. That is a queer crossroads. Both religious systems have at least historical and scriptural prohibitions to their common ground, however much that may have been revised by readers at different times and places including our own. Likewise, the religious/homosexual meeting is   Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 2004).   Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), xiv. 

INTRODUCTION

always already queer. The Abrahamic traditions have historical and scriptural prohibitions against the public match of the homosexual and the religious, again regardless of however much readers at different times and places have sought to interpret their teachings. In both of these examples, bodies as well as texts get called into question. Jewish identity has its self-understanding; Christian, or perhaps more accurately Gentile, difference from Judaism is debated and eventually scripted in the Pauline epistles, often through codes of the body such as dietary laws or circumcision. Of course, that very Christian difference is neither Jew nor Greek: spiritually embodying a kind of “third gender,” a sort of categorical “intersex” that defies gender-like binaries. Therefore what can be queerer than where these two forms of queerness meet: where religiously queer of Jewish/Christian speech intersects with sexually queer of religious-identified homosexual discourse, as I have suggestion in the LGBTQ Jewish/Christian. Each of these separate queernesses is a site of much historical violence to bodies, in the form of Christian anti-Semitism/anti-Judaism and religiously sanctioned homophobia. What happens when the Jewish/Christian (however whitewashed in the etiquette of “interfaith dialogue”) crosses the religious homosexual juncture (equally sanitized for public consumption)? What occurs when the bodies in question are themselves policed – for their sexual or religious identification? What do bodies that do not signify in terms of defined religious or sexual identity convey in a post-identity world where neither Halakhah, Nuremberg law, nor sexology suffices in the articulation of the self ? Even if modern categories of identity lead to their post-modern destabilizations, ethnic Jewishness has paid its price from Domitian’s Fiscus Ioudaicus to compulsory conversismo – just as evangelical Christianity leaves no room outside of the Christian, heteronormative inn. That self is always contested, never more so than in the discursive binary where it speaks about the other. Boyarin’s preface to Border Lines uses queer speech: “Why does my book want me to ‘come out?’ Why do I need to tell about the love that (almost) would not dare to say its name, the love of this Orthodox Jew for Christianity?” Orthodox Jew Amy-Jill Levine describes the affective attraction she experienced as a child for the trappings of Roman Catholicism. To cite these Jewish examples is not to claim their speech acts as “Jewish Christian” (however “queer” they may be) or to essentialize their bodies as such. Rather, Boyarin’s choice of words – from the poem about which Oscar Wilde was   The historical reality of the Holocaust exists as an implicit subtext to every interrogation of Jewish identity I suggest here, with respect to who holds agency to define the self. Even this issue is complicated by the lived experiences of survivors: many of whom “passed” as Gentiles, and many for whom the Christian context for that survival left indelible marks on their psyches – not to mention their spirits.   Boyarin, Border Lines, op. cit., xi. 

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interrogated on the witness stand for crimes of homosexuality – is telling. That work, written by Wilde’s lover, has become synonymous with post-Wildean and particularly post-Stonewall articulations of public, out gay identity. At the same time, when Levine reminisces about her Barbie doll receiving communion from her Ken doll (in The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus), I am reminded of Wilde’s discussion of his character Dorian Gray’s fondness for ecclesiastical vestments: the ritual performance, the queer exoticism of what he called the “Scarlet Woman” (that is, the Roman Church) that led so many late Victorian and Modernist homosexuals to Catholicism.10 Coming out about attraction to the other is only necessary in a culture that polices those borderlines of identity, and in which transgression is grounds for discipline or exile. The closet of representation of that desire for the other is as necessary as where the sexual desire itself is queer – homoerotic, desire for the sexual same rather than the sexual other. It is worthwhile to observe the explosion over the past four decades of scholarship concerned with homosexuality and religion. Although much of this production literally “came out” of gay and lesbian communities of faith, work in the academy has resulted in a range of subdisciplines and intersecting fields, from body/sexual theology to liberation theology.11 As in the humanities, the language of “gay/lesbian” has often moved to that of “queer.”12 It is important   Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves,” The Chameleon: A Facsimile Edition, ed. John Francis Bloxam (anon.) (London: The Eighteen-Nineties Society, 1978). Originally published 1894. 10  See Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: HarperOne, 2006). Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Centenary Edition, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1999). Originally published 1891. See the chapter on Wilde in Frederick S. Roden, SameSex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 11  Key congregations and organizations are part of the long history in this process, a phenomenon that has been chronicled in scholarship online and in print: for instance, Beth Simcha Torah (CBST) of New York, Sha’ar Zahav of San Francisco, Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and Dignity. To attempt to cite the intersections of gay/ lesbian theologies and related areas would require a book, rather than a note, of its own. 12  Since the breadth of gay/lesbian theologies goes beyond the scope of this book, here I offer a few comments on and references to queerness in Jewish and Christian thought and self-construction. The websites jewishmosaic.org and nehirim.org provide a range of queer Jewish resources. The work of Jay Michaelson, who moves from the experiential to the scholarly, demonstrates an attempt to articulate a queer Jewish theology: see his website metatronics.net. The word gets deployed in the titles of two recent books of essays: David Schneer and Caryn Aviv’s edited volume Queer Jews (New York: Routledge, 2002) and Angela Brown’s collection Mentsch: On Being Jewish and Queer 

INTRODUCTION

to note that not every gay/lesbian approach is necessarily compatible with a queer one. Certain attempts to reconcile a “tradition” with contemporary categories of identity can be limited, particularly if the idea is to locate the nonheteronormative person too literally within the history. Scripture, law, and practice will inevitably contradict any insertion that fails to be mindful of how desire and identity are experienced differently across time and space. Queer theology’s strength is its use of metaphor to authorize and explain difference rather than to make accommodations between past and present. In this volume I call for a similar stance towards history in order to release limits of fixed identity politics for both Jewishness and Christianity. I read these traditions not as they speak literally regarding boundary transgressions (sexual or religious) but rather for how those very “crossings” have always played key roles in experiential definitions of the self and the traditions’ articulation of difference. A well-known voice on Jewish homosexual concerns once called me a “Judaeophile.” While of course this expression hearkens back to the old term “philo-Semite,” it fails in its reliance upon binaries and lack of recognition of the queer. The limitations on the classification of the “Jewish” or “Christian,” despite legal or creed-based definitions of identity, easily break down in bodies. Boyarin in Border Lines responds to Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, querying its usage in the formations of Judaism and Christianity.13 While hybridity is a complicated formulation in its postcolonial inflection (with respect to colonizer and colonized), it should not be rejected outright based on the relationship of power it implies. Certainly, its meaning and value vary based on the time and space wherein it is employed. As in the many studies of the invention of heterosexuality (in late nineteenth-century definitions of homosexual deviance, effectively scripting normative sexuality), the limen is that which determines distinctions between opposites. The power to blend, to pass, the capacity to (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1990). While many books on Judaism and homosexuality have been published, perhaps the most visible and controversial is gay Orthodox rabbi Steven Greenberg’s Wrestling With God & Men: Homosexuality and the Jewish Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Christianity offers a plethora of specifically queer theologies. Some are specifically named (such as Marcella Althaus-Reid’s The Queer God (New York: Routledge, 2003) or Elizabeth Stuart’s Religion Is A Queer Thing (New York: Continuum, 1998)) while others are shaped by queer approaches or thought (Mark D. Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) or works by James Alison: see jamesalison.co.uk). Both Judaism and Christianity offer many more queer-inspired inquiries than those listed here. It is significant that in Christian contexts the queer is much more often named, suggesting how Jewish thought is always already queer in the normative Christian, non-Jewish world. 13  See also Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 

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be either/or: these are familiar qualities invoked in postmodern theories of identity that underscore fluidity as opposed to the fixedness of dichotomous categories. Trans or intersex defies binaries of gender; bisexual challenges easy pigeonholing of homosexual versus heterosexual. The spaces between poles (however relative in power) are inhabited and inhabitable. Whereas postcolonial theory has explicitly compared the less powerful, the submissive, the colonized to the female, such simplistic power relations between Judaism and Christianity are inadequate. For example, we may accept that the female, like the Jew in Christianity or the same-sex desiring subject in heteronormative culture, is decidedly other in a patriarchal world. Nevertheless, as countless studies have demonstrated, gender and power are not easily mapped out in religion and culture as they are lived. For instance, the patriarchal nature of Judaism is undercut by what some would argue to be the feminized space of Jewish study, to say nothing of the effeminacy that has been shown to be associated with the Jewish male body in western society.14 With respect to identity politics, the Halakhic maternal determination of traditional Jewish identity is but another layer of this complexity. Similarly, for all its power in western culture, the effeminizing ideal of the submissive Christ (and those Christian male bodies prostrate before their God) intersect the many ways that women have historically found empowerment through indirection, by the claim to a Christian religious voice for those “born again” in Mother Church. Neither the Law of the Father nor the Christian articulation of the conquest by the Son (on behalf of the Father) gives a final word to understanding the place of gender in either Judaism or Christianity. Just as gender cannot be easily scripted with respect to power in either Judaism or Christianity, neither can those religious discourses or identities be plotted simplistically with respect to one another on a continuum of power. This line of thought leads me to the queer mestiza borderlands of Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldua.15 Her analysis of Spanish colonialism is ever mindful of her feminist, hybrid, sexually deviant subject position. Without appropriating her conceptualization for the Jewish/Christian crossroads, her language inspires me to suggest we reclaim another term: that of the mischling. In Jewish/Christian intersections, the mischling offers a “third gender,” insofar as it colonizes a queer space that neither the Christian nor the Jewish alone effectively or adequately represents. The mischling represents reproduction gone awry, disrupting both racial and sexual imperatives of religious procreation: Halakhic determinism and Christian spiritual rebirth. Mischlingkeit can articulate the uneasy presence of the Jewish contained within the Christian and the 14  See Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and essays in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, op. cit. 15  Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987. 

INTRODUCTION

Christian contained within the Jewish – both discursively and bodily. I suggest that mischlingkeit provides a means for engaging, exploring, probing, and debating the borderlines between the Jewish and the Christian. Under Nazism the mischling individual was not simply “mixed” but was tainted: neither Jewish nor Aryan, affirming the racial divide between the two.16 In name and critical practice, mischlingkeit can reclaim an oppressive category, a slur even, with the pride of the queer and thus signal not division but embrace: here not between Jewish and “Aryan,” but with the religious Gentile – the Christian – that the “Aryan” once stood in for. I do not deny the sensitivity, volatility, and indeed danger of my terminology with respect to historical usage and precedent, even as this term is still used in contemporary Germany with connotations different from Nazi parlance. Rather, I cite that space of past violence as crucial for its signification. I claim mischlingkeit not for the purpose of re-inscribing a strictly ethnic understanding of identity, but in order to interrogate that place where cultural/racial social labeling intersects and conflicts with religious articulations. Pauline Christianity offers a salvation in which there is “neither Jew nor Greek”: biological and cultural markers of identity disappear in the redemption effected by the Word that is the Logos (the body, the temple of the spirit; the spiritual body, not flesh and blood). This ideal is as problematic as Halakhic policing of who is and is not classified as a Jew. Both of these religious categories are subject to other agents of power whose strategic manipulation of a politics of identity can effectively negate those theological/legal arguments and definitions. Beyond specifically Jewish/Christian crossroads, wherever religious intersections and cultural identities are subject to interrogation, the mischling can operate queerly, to disrupt. Given the ways in which religious categories prescribe and proscribe gendered and sexual identities, the sexual politics of the queer and the religious can be expressed through mischlingkeit and its representations. Theoretical formulations always have practical implications. The critical practice I am suggesting here could seem to imply an erasure of both the Jewish and the Christian, in quite the same manner that Paul’s formulation is troublesome. In “Jewish-Christian dialogue,” this is as unhelpful as the muddled ways that religious people avoid speaking about difference. The difference I allude to here is both the experience of the other within the individual religion and religious discourse, as well as those cultural and discursive differences that are sacrificed for a rhetoric of sameness failing to represent any forced sense of mutual understanding. If postmodern thought about the other has taught us anything, it is recognition rather than ignorance of difference. Categories 16  I am inspired by the iconoclastic historical scholarship of Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). Rigg beautifully synthesizes the religious and cultural issues shaping Nazi-era mischling identity. 

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break down in areas of shared concern: for example, the rejection or welcome of LGBTQ people within individual religious traditions. Perhaps more than any other issue, we see at this historical moment how LGBTQ rights and rites are bringing religiously-identified people together (for or against). Of course, there is also the reality that neither the Pauline proclamation nor Halakhah recognizes: the actual existence of Jewish Christian bodies. By this I mean not the “Judaeophilic” or “Christian-loving” speech of the other, but Christians of Jewish descent and perhaps even some “Christian” converts to Judaism (despite the contradiction, or strictly speaking the negation, posed by theological renunciation). Judaism’s failure to recognize the queer diaspora of Jewish blood into bodies that identify as Christian is as lamentable as Christianity’s dishonor or disregard for the Jewishness (however queer) of the Christian of Jewish heritage. Many of the historical issues the essays in this volume raise have later implications. Kruger’s project arrives at a time when crypto-Jewish identity and Judaic recovery have become an important element in Latin American redefinition and of a literal recovery of lost Sepharad, Jewish Spain. Mounsey’s examination of synagogue and church architecture should not be separated from the birth of the Jewish Enlightenment and the beginnings of modern Liberal/Reform Judaism with its choir, vernacular language, and Protestantlike service. Such modernity is even now being overturned as “Reformodoxy” reclaims its lost liturgical and linguistic heritage. Of course, to speak of medieval Spain and contemporary Western culture points to the absent presence in this queer volume seeking to challenge dichotomies: the importance of Islam then and now as we come to sit at some Abrahamic trinity table. Because the essays in this book primarily concern historical and cultural contexts where Judaism stands at the margin of some Christian center, Islam is hardly mentioned at all. However, we cannot escape the irony that so much of the theoretical and methodological apparatus developed to talk about Otherness has been shaped by analysis of Western encounters with the Muslim. This phenomenon, rather than demonstrating a blind spot in the “Orient-ation” of this volume, indicates all the more clearly the blurred boundaries of Christian/Jewish cohabitation, both geographic and discursive, that evolved into the creation of modern Western culture. When I began planning this collection of essays, my goal was to actively seek out rhetorical and material places where the Jewish and Christian meet. Some of the points examined in this book are specifically sexually deviant spaces; others are not. Yet the queerness of the Jewish/Christian contradiction is real even as the greater challenge would seem to be finding places where the two are not somehow intertwined. For instance, even Boyarin’s rabbinic hagiographies are generically and generatively reminiscent of saints’ legends while they hearken back to pre-Christian literary models. 10

INTRODUCTION

My single greatest regret about the present book is the lack of extensive exploration of women in the Jewish/Christian queer space, for certainly if there is a queerness in those religious and cultural traditions it is found historically in the experience of being female (biologically or otherwise). The late twentiethcentury explosion of feminist theological scholarship and activism in both Judaism and Christianity is a testament to this heritage. Indeed, without such feminist work, no specifically “queer” religious inquiry would be possible. I hope that this volume might nevertheless honor feminist Jewish and Christian studies, and certainly raise awareness about the practical imperatives outside of the academy in relation to the book’s themes. For example, the reality of Jewish/ Christian unions and their queer place in both Judaism and Christianity – a struggle of invisibility, rejection, and coming-out – can no more be denied than the queer kinds of theologies and communities that emerge from them. This history is as old as the invention of Christianity, as real as the converso heritage (and perhaps religious thought and experience) of Spanish Saints Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. Body of Christ, Kol Yisrael; standing together at Sinai or Calvary, questions of individual and collective identity cannot be easily reduced to dichotomies. As world religions struggle with the place of LGBTQ people at their tables, alliances are formed that traverse affiliations, creating queer crossroads of faiths and selves. At points of intersection there is new life. To consider the breadth of issues raised by the essays in this volume, procreation and its potentials are gravely, even gravidly, explored throughout. This comes as no surprise given the book’s concern with sexuality. However, these metaphors are complicated as much by contemporary queer parenting – and marrying – discourses, as they are concerned with theories of futures, futurity, and children.17 As much as we dare to be Lot’s wife looking back at the Sodom of a Jewish/Christian past, it is impossible to talk about these queer intersections without also considering apocalyptic fears of – and hopes for – endings. These are articulated in Jewish biological and Christian spiritual concerns about extinction, as well as eschatology, given each religion’s messianic sense of expectancy and waiting (and their accompanying changes: literal or figurative, theological con-versions). Despite the lack of feminist scholarship, the essays in this volume nevertheless speak to one another with respect to gender as well as religious and sexual difference. In Rogers, the policing of sexuality in Romans is difficult to distinguish from a policing of Jewish, ultimately Christian, identity – and where that may lead. The early Christian question of circumcision underscores the experience of other non-circumcised Jews: women. In Boyarin, the relationship 17  See also Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 11

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between men and women in rabbinic literature (and classical precedents, and Christian hagiographies) should not be separated from what becomes traditional Halakhic understanding of maternal determination of Jewish identity. Where does this leave the Christian who is “born again” in Mother Church? I thus return to the question raised by an examination of “convert” voices, before and after “borderlines” are drawn: an issue that has implications for the queer sexual and religious categories this volume engages. The Evangelical Protestant idea of being “born again” in Christ Jesus has little connection to the almost biologically determined sense of Catholic identity found among certain ethnic groups. Even as this book prominently examines Catholic or Anglican perspectives, it seeks to deconstruct the “born that way” mantra of a particular kind of modern gay identity as much as it strives to counter a biologically deterministic understanding of Jewishness. Almost no Roman Catholic rhetoric, however homophobic and limited by pre-modern understandings of the self, imagines that it is possible to alter an “intrinsically disordered” personal homosexual identity. Yet Catholic queers are “called” to be celibate – not unlike priests and professed religious, however different their “vocations” may be. Acts are distinguished from identities in a way that religious (and humanistic) Judaism does not distinguish “being Jewish” from the compulsion to “behave Jewishly.” The belief that somehow homoerotic orientation can be changed – the work of Protestant ex-gay ministry (coming out of an evangelical context and theological understanding of fallenness and God’s grace) – calls for being born again once more in Christ to a new self.18 Such conversions – subjective, individual, personal, and interior – are the mark of the modern, and, paradoxically, the queer: even as essentialist narratives of emotion, the coming out of one’s real self, potentially defy the signification of the bodies that speak them. When the Gentile claims “I am a Jew,” where the Jew claims “I am a Christian”: these stand with the voices articulating sexual and gender difference from the corporeal imperatives they are meant to convey. Are these “mixed up,” or even mischling (again, “disordered,” pejoratively), in the sexological or religious sense of accident, that somehow placed souls in the wrong bodies (a woman’s soul in a man’s body and vice versa; a Jewish soul in a Gentile body – and potentially the inverse as well?), or are they defiant voices that choose where they stand? If, as the contemporary axiom goes, in secular modernity and beyond every Jew is a Jew-by-Choice, and since Christ every Christian is in need of that second birth, is every rhetorical self-definition of sexuality or religious/ 18  Jewish “reconciliations” of homosexuality run the gamut from full inclusion and rabbinical ordination of LGBTQ people (from the left to the center) to limited acceptance (from the center towards the right; along the Roman Catholic model of unchangeable “disorderedness” distinguishing sexual identities from sexual acts) to reparative therapy (along the fundamentalist Protestant ex-gay model). 12

INTRODUCTION

cultural identity a coming-out against some normativity (hetero-, religio-, or otherwise?)? Is every coming-out a born-again experience? “Conversion” is a loaded word, particularly when considering sexual identity. It describes both the homophobic stereotype of the predatory homosexual as well as the aversion therapy used to transform bodies that do not accurately perform compulsory heterosexuality – not to mention seroconversions in the age of HIV. As in religious conversion, at times bodies (and bloods) fail to represent the socially constructed meanings one might assign to them – whether the discretionary agency is the self or the community. As Lapidus’s work shows, the baggage we carry from nineteenthcentury inventions continues to impact contemporary religious, and secular, understanding. Psychoanalytic paradigms remain important, as the abundant bibliography on Freud in Lewis and Stanivukovic’s chapter demonstrates. Dellamora’s essay, Gonda’s, and my own chart the struggle between parents and children – including the coming-out into a new self: a truer, more authentic one. Since modeling neither fathers/sons nor mothers/daughters creates effective paradigms for queer futures – religious or sexual – we are left to seek other genealogies. Perhaps the revival of interest in mysticism during the last decades of the twentieth century suggests a Holy Spirit, a ruach ha-kadosh that can defy both sexual and religious determinacy. Jewish/Christian/Queer showcases an array of queer means of transgressing the boundaries of gender, generation, and categories of identity. Whether we find that experience in the collapse of easy distinctions between Christian and Jew, the collapse of easy separations between the sexual minority and the religious minority, or both, we nevertheless reside in the postmodern “by-Choice”: the agency of bearing oneself (again) in the definition of the self. As the Word is carried over in “trans-lation” – theories of trans[sexual, -gendered] identities that inform so much of the work of this volume preoccupied with “trans”-religious identity – that central metaphor of crossing-over defines the queer crossroads of our research. The place where body and spirit meet – experience – is the only orthodoxy imaginable: religious, sexual, or other-wise. **** The chapters of this volume fall into several categories. Some are concerned with reading sacred scripture and commentary. Others look to history, philosophy, literary theory and/or criticism. Eugene Rogers opens the book with an essay on how Christianity constructed Judaism and gender alike. Rogers notes that Paul’s account of same-sex relations in Romans 1 identifies queer sexualities as both para phusin (in excess of nature, i.e. queer) and characteristic of Gentiles. He recovers this term as positive in relation to the salvation of Gentiles: that the Holy Spirit is always para phusin – alongside of, parallel to, while also exceeding 13

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the physical. Next, Daniel Boyarin examines the disruptive potential of Jewish/ Christian intersections as well as sexuality. He writes on gender inversions in rabbinic literature that combine temptations of encoded homosexual acts with translated Christian narratives. Boyarin’s focus is “the saintly Rabbi Meir,” whom he calls a “virtual Jewish Saint Jude.”19 Steven Kruger explores “Convert Orthodoxies,” how conversion and converts remain crucial to Christian self-definition even in the later Middle Ages, when we tend to think of the project of “converting Europe” as largely completed. Of course, Jewish communities continued to inhabit much of Europe (even as expulsions – 1290 from England, 1306 from France – began to limit the spaces in which Jews might live) and, beginning in the twelfth century and accelerating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, Christian pressure toward Jewish conversion increased. Kruger argues that this engagement with Judaism and Jewishness is not marginal to medieval Christendom but instead constitutively shaping of it. As a religion whose origins lie in the experience of conversion and whose major early theological voices – most notably, Saul/ Paul and Augustine – are often convert voices, Christianity remains intensely concerned with what it means to be (that is, to become) Christian. And, in a period when Christianity had firmly established itself as a major force in most of Europe, the question of being/becoming Christian frequently worked itself out in relation to Judaism and the (im)possibility of Jews becoming fully Christian. The essay focuses particularly on texts written by and/or about Jews (like Peter Alfonsi, Guillaume de Bourges, Pablo Christiani, Paul of Burgos, and Geronimo of Santa Fe) who converted to Christianity and became orthodox spokesmen for their new religion. Thus, for instance, Guillaume writes explicitly as a convert against both Judaism and Christian heresy, and he argues that his position as convert provides him with a voice particularly well suited to this polemical task. Kruger analyzes the complex rhetorical position from which converts speak Christian orthodoxy to consider how and why their “convert orthodoxies” serve medieval Christian ideology so effectively. While this rhetorical position is orthodox, it is also in many ways queer (not-Jewish, but at the same time, not-quite-Christian). The paradoxes of a queer orthodoxy are at the center of Kruger’s analysis. Chris Mounsey’s essay inquires into Jewish/Christian intersection through the literal material “constructions” of modernity: English synagogues and churches. Mounsey’s chapter suggests architecture as Jewish/Christian rhetoric. Queen Anne’s project to build fifty new churches to house the ever-increasing population of London in Anglican foundations is usually read with respect to the Dissenters’ annoyance that they were capable of gathering up those who could not find space in a state church. Some note has been given to Nicholas 19  Email to the editor, 30 October 2006. 14

INTRODUCTION

Hawksmoor’s use of non-Christian symbolism in his seven contributions to the project. But little attention has been given to the fact that the architects of the classical churches built took their dimensions not from Roman or Greek sources, but from the Bible. The ambiguity of those shapes – with dimensions taken from the schechina, Aaron’s pectoral, the Israelite army camp or the Temple of Solomon – is their ability to signify Judaism as they are deployed by Christianity. These constructions were clearly queer spaces with respect to the Gothic churches that preceded them. The architectural argument is all the more corporealized when we consider that for Christianity the “temple” is analogous to the human body – Jesus’s body: the site of sacrifice. Moving from bodies of the Church/church to bodies of men, Richard Dellamora delves into the queer homosociality of the Jewish Christian converts Disraeli père and fils. Locating the Victorian novelist and prime minister within a patriarchal familial line of male-male desire, Dellamora points to a politics of English Christian identity in relation to foreign Jewishness. The figure of the dandy or fop – indeed, the artist – plays a key role in shifting from a continuum of Jewish male difference to normative Victorian masculinity. Steven Lapidus further pursues this focus on gender and identity with an examination of nineteenth-century inventions of the Jewish body. Scholars have observed that an important nexus for modern European nationalism and respectability was in the arenas of sexual health, rigidly defined gender roles, and a clear sex-based division of labor. As national health became equated with social conformity and homogeneity, the greatest menaces to respectability were the outsiders – Jews, and the sexually unhealthy – homosexuals, and often Jews, again. Additionally reinforcing the otherness of Jews and homosexuals was the commonly held belief that sexual health is plainly visible in physicality and bodily health. However, as these medicalized differences borrowed extensively from Christian theological history and perspective, religious differences were significantly represented within this discourse, if at a subtler level than the obvious physiognomic differences. Medical definitions were often loosely based upon Christian morality. Physiognomy, sexual deviance, and social exclusion were intertwined with religious beliefs and teachings in the Victorian era. The distinctive and reprehensible sex acts of both Jews and queers were manifestations not just of unhealthy desires but of deeply flawed religious thought. According to this reasoning, the Jews’ rejection of Jesus and the homosexuals’ rejection of appropriate Biblically approved behavior marked each of these people as untouchable. Their religious failures were no less serious than their sexual deviance. Thus religious opprobrium comes disguised in medical terms. The body and soul of the Jew and homosexual offend both society and religion. Sexual sin had been transformed through medicalization from a religious violation to a health-related social problem. Although Jews were excluded because they failed to recognize Christ and homosexuals 15

Jewish/Christian/Queer

because of their disregard for Biblical law and moral ethics, the experiences reflect a common process: the segregation of the morally and religiously unhealthy from Victorian society. Both Jews and homosexuals had to be “othered” in order to maintain the integrity of the body of the faithful (and behaviorally appropriate). Through examination of the imagery projected onto Jews and sexual queers of this era within the context of European nationalism, Lapidus illuminates the process of differentiation – of othering in specifically religious terms – analyzing both Christian theology and Jewish ritual practice that resulted in similar experiences of exclusion for disparate social groups. I provide a brief example of the phenomena Lapidus showcases in a short essay that charts the vexed relationship between Marc-Andre Raffalovich – a Russian Jew from France, a Roman Catholic convert – and Oscar Wilde. Both Raffalovich’s experiences in England in the 1880s and 1890s and the biographical construction of him from that time to the present have been shaped by racialized anti-Semitism. Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to the notorious fin-de-siecle Irish homosexual (and fellow Catholic convert) Wilde, whose attitudes towards Jews are exceedingly ambiguous and surprisingly underexamined. Their friendships with John Gray – if once “Dorian” to Wilde, later “Father Gray” to Raffalovich – provide insight into Jewish, Catholic, and homosexual politics at this cultural moment. Goran Stanivukovic and Alan Lewis move forward on this theme with “‘Next Easter in Rome’: Freud’s Queer Longing.” Taking its cue from recent work investigating the importance of Freud’s Jewishness to his development of psychoanalytic theory, this essay unpacks the Rome motif in his early corpus. Stanivukovic and Lewis demonstrate how both the oedipal and political aspects of Freud’s imagination of Rome – the subject of orthodox Freudian criticism – are subtended by homoerotic fantasy. Rome is variously figured as a trope for the divided subject, for memory before repression, for the unconscious, and for the locus of an archaic, always already lost homosexual presence. Sexuality takes its cue from politics and religious piety when “Next Easter in Rome” becomes Freud’s repeated fond adieu to and epistolary seduction of his colleague Wilhelm Fliess. As topos of an impossible longing, Rome substitutes here for Jerusalem (the Passover phrase “Next year in Jerusalem”), and Christian myth serves to stage the fantasy of a resurrected (homosexual) body at Easter, a vexed redemption of a political and religious loss now parlayed into the sexual. Freud’s turn to Rome serves as an index of his identity at a crossroads of politics and sexuality where each impacts the other, describing the author’s psychic life that is to double business bound. Freud’s initial fantasy road to Rome elucidates an opposition to Catholic hegemony and anti-Semitic discourses of the Jewish male as hysterical, carnal and given to homosexual tendencies. However, this political road of founding the discourse of psychoanalysis through apotropaically rewriting the Jewish male’s imputed castration as universal, a symbolic conquest 16

INTRODUCTION

of Rome and appropriation of western Christian culture, is also a compromise of Jewish identity through cultural assimilation. If the stigma of effeminacy and homosexuality ascribed to the Jewish male is somewhat deflected, it remains a fundamental tenet of the emerging theory of the divided subject, while the sacrifice of homosexual attachment to secure a melancholic authority is a deeply problematic redemption. Drawing mostly on letters to his compatriot Fliess and the Roman dreams in the Traumdeutung, the argument shows how these contrary currents at work in his scene of writing contribute to the constitutive and dynamic place of homosexuality, and homosexual desire to the early theory of the divided subject and unconscious. Freud’s queer longing for Rome captures the “perverse” impetus of his theoretical ruminations about a subject cut off from himself via a fundamental repression. As any student of Ashkenazic culture knows, the assimilation of the Germanspeaking and – identified jews like Freud poses problems and questions to the easy distinctions that racial or religious authority might like to script. Bryan Mark Rigg offers a historical reconsideration of the borders between Gentile and Jew in “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,” which includes his research on Germans of mixed ancestry who served in the Nazi military – another vulnerability for some already criminalized as homosexuals. In a telling vignette, the open secret of mischling identity – war buddies confiding in the historian their knowledge of an old comrade’s Jewish heritage – is reminiscent of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” politics of sexual identity in the U.S. military. The reality of Holocaust genocide and the increasing vulnerability of the mischlinge as the war progressed made this contested site of identity – Jewish or not – a matter of life or death, as it has so often been in the long history of anti-Semitism. Modern Jewish identity posed different questions in England than in Germany. Caroline Gonda’s essay focuses on the twentieth-century AngloJewish novelist and Catholic convert Pamela Frankau (1908-67). Both Catholicism and homosexuality are important recurring themes in Frankau’s work, and Jewishness is never far from the scene: an early novel, The Devil We Know (1938), written before her conversion to Catholicism, deals squarely with anti-Semitism and the rise of Fascism. One particular late novel to which queer sexuality is central, The Bridge (1959), represents Frankau’s highly individual engagement with the idea of Purgatory. Her final completed works are a trilogy of novels, Clothes of a King’s Son (1963-67), in which queerness and spirituality come together against the background of the Second World War. In a chapter entitled “Faith of Our Fathers as Blood Sacrifice: Judaic Recovery and the Broken Christian Body in Michael Arditti’s Easter and The Celibate,” I explore Jewish/Christian intersections in two works by a contemporary British novelist. In both The Celibate (1993) and Easter (2000) the resolution of Jewish/Christian identity parallels a sexual integration that rejects dualism. In The Celibate, a Rothschildesque mischling not considered Jewish by Halakhah 17

Jewish/Christian/Queer

undergoes a spiritual/homosexual awakening as he pursues the Anglo-Catholic priesthood in the age of AIDS. In Easter a kindertransport pensioner reclaims her Jewish heritage during a Good Friday breakdown/breakthrough. A church’s modern Stations of the Cross made with HIV-infected blood tells the story of the journey to the concentration camp in her imagination, while an HIVpositive parishoner experiences the Passion of Christ as death from AIDS. Arditti’s work has been excerpted in the Jewish Quarterly and was shortlisted for the Wingate Award. He has also preached at Anglican churches on World AIDS Day. Arditti maintains that “Judaism is an important part of [him] and it’s an important part of Christianity.”20 **** The holy is often defined as a space where two meet in intimacy: the self and the other, the I and the Thou. What could be queerer, what could more effectively reject binaries, than where blending and passing take place, where recognition (discursive or otherwise) ceases to be tangible or effable? The queer is that sacramental moment, that place of holiness. We are all Yisrael who struggle with the Unseen. As we have begun to acknowledge the theological potential in queer sexualities, I suggest that we explore the meaning of religious crossroads as queer. We have nothing to lose except our identities.

20  Interview, 12 February 2006. 18

Chapter 1

Paul on Exceeding Nature: Queer Gentiles and the Giddy Gardener Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.

“Jewish-Christian-Queer.” Why join those things together? Christianity has connected the distinction between Jews and Gentiles with gender from the very beginning. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which concerns Jews and Gentiles, opens with the assumption that Gentile sexuality is excessive, or para phusin (Romans 1). Its argument about Jews and Gentiles concludes with the assertion that God’s salvation of the Gentiles is also excessive, para phusin (Romans 11). The phrase has run a checkered career in the history of exegesis, early but not universally translated “contrary to nature” and applied at least since Peter Damian to same-sex relationships. Both its association with Gentile stereotype and the irony of Paul’s turning it to a positive use have however gone almost unremarked. Ten years ago, when I circulated an essay about Karl Barth on Jews and gender, a critic regarded linking Barth’s views on those subjects as “a strategy designed to fail.” It was designed to fail, he thought, because the coupling of   For a companion account, in trinitarian theology, of the Holy Spirit as para phusin in relation to Jesus—that is, the Holy Spirit characteristically accompanies and exceeds the Son—see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., “The Spirit Rests on the Son Paraphysically,” in The Lord and Giver of Life, ed. David Jenson (Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox, 2008). Both that essay and this grow out of my After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005). An opposition to supersessionism arises from its account of the resurrection (85-97), while a recovery of para phusin language arises from its account of the virgin birth in Romanos the Melodist (98-104). A constructive proposal recovers the “excessive” meaning to describe the “paraphysical” action of the Holy Spirit in accompanying, resting on, and befriending matter.  The remark came in personal correspondence from George Hunsinger. The essay appeared as “Supplementing Barth on Jews and Gender: Identifying God by Anagogy

Jewish/Christian/Queer

disfavored groups marked modern American politics, not classical Christian theology. Even though Christian theology had almost always favored Gentile men, it favored Gentileness and maleness, the critic thought, for unrelated reasons. To yoke them together was an anachronism, an obvious anachronism, and one that could only hide the real differences and complications of the matter. The self-evidence with which “Jewish/Christian/Queer” announces itself to contemporary readers appears not to be shared by their predecessors. And that self-evidence suffers from more than anachronism, if it is heard as the self-evidence of enlightened Christian privilege, allowing Christianity to represent a universalizing religion, ready to overlook ethnicity (in its mainline Protestant forms) gender, and even (in its more progressive forms), sexual orientation—while making Judaism represent the particularity that Christianity claims to supersede. But what if the anachronism is instead the self-congratulatory or self-critical presumption that only the last few decades could link religion and gender? Even granting that “religion” and “gender” are both constructed here as modern terms, one can still discern that Paul (and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th C., and Karl Barth in the mid-20th, each in his own way) related their differently constructed observance with their differently constructed gender. It turns out that Christian theology does have good reasons for linking its views on Judaism and gender: namely that Paul did. More specifically, Paul’s account of same-sex relations in Romans 1 identifies what we might now call queer sexualities as both para phusin (in excess of nature, or queer) and characteristic of Gentiles. Not only did Paul construct the keeper of Torah as Jewish and male: he tarred the Gentile with same-sex stereotype. If nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe regarded Jews as soft and queer, as Eilberg-Schwartz and Boyarin have argued, then Paul did the opposite: he regarded Gentiles that way. Or not exactly “that way,” since he didn’t have the same “that way” to go by. Then, in any case, he took it back, and queered God—turns in his argument often missed. And what if Paul regarded the universalizing tendency of Christianity not as self-evident, but as a problem, almost a betrayal, to be resisted and explained? and the Spirit,” Modern Theology 14 (1998): 43-81, recast as Chapters 6-8 in Sexuality and the Christian Body (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 140-92.   For one example at random, see Katharina von Kellenbach, Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings, American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticisms Series, 1 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1994).  Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, “Introduction” and “The Problem of the Body for the People of the Book” and Sander Gilman, “The Jewish Body: A Foot-Note,” in EilbergSchwartz, ed., People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 1-46, 223-42; and Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 20

Paul on Exceeding Nature: Queer Gentiles and the Giddy Gardener

It’s crucial to note this difference in the modern and Pauline questions right away: Modern Christianity tends still to be asking a question about Jews, in the ugly German word, a Judenfrage. Jews were not the mystery for Paul. Despite two millennia of Christian readings to the contrary, Paul did not primarily worry about Jews and Jesus. He worried about Gentiles and Jesus. Why on earth were Gentiles coming to worship the God of Israel, someone else’s God—and if they insisted, did they need to convert and keep kosher in order to do so? Paul asked what we might call a “Gentile question.” Paul’s contemporaries constructed Gentiles, like slaves and women, as having trouble keeping the law; as labile, not law-abiding; as easily led into temptation, especially sexual temptation. They ought, therefore, to be discouraged from taking it on. Paul’s polemics against “the law” do not disparage Torah as such—they seek to discourage Gentiles, as rabbis do today, from taking on a burden to which they are apparently not called, probably don’t really want, and cannot really keep. It wasn’t so much that Paul linked Jews and gender: he linked Gentiles and gender, because Gentiles and women did not or could not keep the commandments that free Jewish men did. And he joins Gentiles and gender because he regarded—or pretended for polemical purposes to regard—Gentiles as liable to same-sex desires that exceeded the call of nature. It was not that Gentiles tended to have a homosexual orientation, because Paul had no modern notion of sexual orientation to go by. Their sexuality did not “reverse” or “invert” the “normal.” Rather, it exceeded the normal; it was, in a word, kinky. The thing was, God himself seemed to be acting kinky lately, in pouring out his grace upon those same Gentiles. It was almost as if God, the lover of Israel, was sleeping with the enemy. To get down to texts: Paul joins Gentiles and gender most prominently in two passages. I put the shorter first, even though I treat it last:

  For three samples of a vast literature, see Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1977); Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and Douglas Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids, MI: 2003). In what follows, I rely mostly on Stowers.   Michael Satlow, “‘Try to Be a Man’: The Rabbinic Construction of Masculinity,” Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996): 19-41.  In short, Paul shared with much of Greco-Roman antiquity a one-sex, twogender theory. There was one true sex, male, and two gendered ways of expressing it, better and worse: women were inadequate men. See Dale Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18-32,” Biblical Interpretation 3 (1995): 332-55 (reprinted in Sex and the Single Savior, cited below), and The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).   Martin, “Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1,” op. cit. 21

Jewish/Christian/Queer

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:28, New Revised Standard Version)

The second passage runs longer. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up to degrading passions [so that they would die out: dead idols lead to dead peoples]. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural [why women first? because women are more labile], and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error. [Why does Paul single out men to receive this penalty and not women? Because women have already received it—the penalty is womanishness.] And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. [Idolatry is the crime, same-sex behavior is the punishment.] They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things [listed sins against God and neighbor: not sexual sins] they deserve to die [i.e., die out, punished by non-procreative sexual behavior]. (Rom. 1.18-23, 26-27, 32)

This is clearly a sermon. It’s written in the third person, in the “they” form, separating the hearers from the subjects. It’s an anti-Gentile sermon. That obvious feature caused a generation of historical critics to assume—against other evidence in the text—that Paul imagines a Jewish-Christian audience. But the rhetorical situation is more complex, because Paul has explicitly identified his readers as Gentiles (vv. 1.13; 9.3ff; 10.1f; 11.13, 23, 28, 31; 15.15; 16.4). This is the first of Paul’s dramatic or tortuous rhetorical turns: identify your hearers as members of a group, then stereotype them to their faces. According to the 22

Paul on Exceeding Nature: Queer Gentiles and the Giddy Gardener

best readings so far, Paul represents his audience in the text as Gentile hearers who are coming to worship the God of Israel and therefore confused about their Gentile status. They overhear, in the letter, a debate between Paul and another Jewish teacher of Gentiles who expects them to keep more of the law. Can the JewGentile binary survive, or does it get queered? However Paul intends to end up, he begins by stating the binary in its strongest, most stereotyping form. It’s an anti-Gentile sermon quoted or rehearsed to those who know all too well how it goes, and who are waiting with discomfort, amusement, or both to see how Paul will escape. He’s a preacher who has never been accused of avoiding risks. “Paul launches into an account of gentile morals and religion (1:18-32) that later passages in the letter identify as having once also been characteristic of the letter’s audience (6:17-22; 7:4-6; 8:1-17). The initial connection between the readers described as Gentiles in 1:1-17 and the people depicted in 1:18-32 requires only the assumption that Gentiles are characteristically idolators, an assumption that other texts from Paul’s letters show was obvious to him.”10 It’s a sermon that seems at first designed to get self-hating or pretentious Gentile hearers nodding their heads: those dirty idolators, they get what they deserve, God makes them die out, because they worship dead idols with their pointless sexual practices. What they do is unnatural, worship idols; how God punishes them is unnatural, deliver them to non-procreative sex. But that’s already ironized by the audience, which is not, or at least not straightforwardly, antiGentile, although they are Gentiles coming to worship a God not their own, but the God of another people, the God of Israel. “Paul’s perspective ... is not philosophical anthropology, the human essence, but what moderns would call ethnic cultural stereotype.”11 Paul then takes back his stereotyping of Gentiles, not too slowly, in the second of his rhetorical switchbacks. Addressing the audience, the “you” newly constructed by the stereotyping repeated from a rival teacher, Paul exclaims, “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgment upon him you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (2:1). Gentiles coming to worship the God of Israel by adopting anti-Gentile stereotype are caught in the trap. Paul’s letter to the Romans reveals itself as a struggle about the ethics of invasion and inclusion, about how Gentiles are to worship the God of Israel. Is it by getting circumcised, becoming Jews and keeping kosher? Or by doing a new thing, worshiping the God of Israel as Gentiles? Paul’s anti-law polemic is in fact designed to retain something distinctively Jewish against the Gentile invasion: Jews may continue to keep Torah; Gentiles will be firmly discouraged. The  Stowers, op. cit., 37-41, 143-58. 10  Ibid., 44. 11  Ibid., 108-9. 23

Jewish/Christian/Queer

point was not for Gentiles to supersede Israel by ending or replacing the law, but for Gentiles—somehow!—to join Israel. But the point was also not, either, to swamp Israel by outnumbering it and diluting Torah observance, making both invisible—even if, as it turned out, only Jewish resistance to Christianity kept those things from happening. This series of switchbacks has its roots in Paul’s reading of the eschatologies available to him. To oversimplify, imagine that Paul had two theories of the end times to choose from.12 In Plan A, the end would come, the Messiah would arrive, and, in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham about “all nations,” all the nations of the earth would be circumcised, become identifiably Jewish, keep Torah, and acknowledge the God of Israel as the one true God. But Paul does not claim this. Paul thinks the end—at least the beginning of the end—has come, the Messiah has arrived, and that Gentiles are coming to worship the God of Israel without becoming circumcised or Torah-observant. The problem for Paul is not why don’t Jews follow Jesus. The problem for Paul is why are Gentiles worshiping the God of Israel without keeping kosher? But the possibility of Gentile God-fearers was not unheard of, and Paul had both an alternate eschatology and a pre-existing social situation with which to try to make sense of it. According to Plan B, the Messiah would come, and, in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham about “all nations,” the Gentiles would acknowledge and worship the God of Israel as the one true God, but without becoming circumcised, keeping Torah, or losing their Gentile identity. To his great surprise, Paul thinks he has empirical, observable, first-hand evidence that God is following Plan B. According to Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, Jesus, the Messiah, has come; according to his experience as an observer and a preacher, Gentiles are coming to acknowledge and worship the God of Israel as the one true God. But they seem to be doing this—and the Spirit is being poured out on them, their baptism seems to “take”—without their needing to be circumcised, keep kosher, or lose their goyishness. What was beginning to happen already with Paul’s ministry—that Gentile Christ-followers would swamp Jewish ones—Paul regarded as the anomaly of only one generation. Of what would happen later—that Gentile Christ-followers would see the Torah observance of Jews, whether Christ-following or not, as illegitimate or even threatening—Paul had not yet a glimmer. Paul therefore sometimes fell into a rabbinic anti-legal rhetoric that was never designed to undermine the Torah for

12  Obviously, it’s more complicated than two theories. For some complications, see, e.g., Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 149-50; Paula Fredriksen, “Torah-Observance and Christianity: The Perspective of Roman Antiquity,” Modern Theology 11 (1995), 198-99 and Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 212-21. 24

Paul on Exceeding Nature: Queer Gentiles and the Giddy Gardener

Jews, but only for Gentile God-fearers who had come to believe that the God of Israel was the one true God. That limited and context-dependent anti-legal rhetoric was available because Paul knew of a social location for this eschatology before the Jesus-movement. Communities of Gentile hangers-on already frequented the synagogues and differed in Torah observance. Greek-speakers called them phoboumenoi, sebomenoi, or theosebeis; Latins metuentes; Hebrew-speakers yirei shamay’im. English-language scholarship calls them “God-fearers.”13 With the category-confusing eschatology of Plan B, the possibility of nonTorah-observant Gentile worshippers of the God of Israel, and the explosive growth of actual Gentile God-fearers under Paul’s preaching of the Messiah, Paul started to worry about the character of God. What kind of excessive God would welcome such worshippers? Much later in the same letter Paul brings back that startling stereotype, para phusin, “in excess of nature”; as before, he connects it with Gentiles. This time, however, and in accord with the audience rather than in its face, Paul flips the valence. This time, the excess does not condemn, but saves. It is the excess of the God of Israel, who loves even those dirty Gentiles. For if you [Gentiles] have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, in excess of nature [para phusin], into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree. (Rom. 11:25, NRSV modified)

Now, the cultivation metaphor of Romans 11 sounds much milder than the sexual stereotyping in Romans 1. The grafting back, for example, reflects Paul’s confidence that (contrary to supersessionism) God’s promise to Israel is reliable. But the charged phrase para phusin will not have been overlooked or forgotten by any reader or hearer to whom Paul has applied it. It is a phrase that can ring across eleven chapters without trouble, and the echo of which will still shock. In both cases, the seesaw is between wild and domestic, whether it’s wild sexuality or wild olive trees, domestic sexuality or domestic olive trees. In this passage, however, it’s God, rather than the Gentiles, who does a kinky thing. Normal horticultural practice would graft a domestic fruit—especially, now, a seedless one, like a naval orange—onto a vigorous, “wild” rootstock (like rough lemon). Paul portrays the God of Israel as doing the opposite—like grafting crabapples onto the tree that first produced the Golden Delicious. That’s beyond, even against, sensible horticulture. This time, God plays the mad gardener, crazy with the clippers and even giddier with the grafting, promiscuously inserting stocks into unaccustomed clefts where they don’t seem 13  Fredriksen, “Torah-Observance,” op. cit., 195-204. 25

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to belong. In Romans 11, Paul portrays the God of Israel as saving Gentiles in an excessive, imprudent, promiscuous way. Paul turns the stereotype around: if Gentiles are characterized by excess, then so is God, showing solidarity with them in precisely that characteristic, by a kind of “cultic irony.”14 And yet by this excess the God of Israel does not cease to be the God of Israel, does not supersede or replace but queers himself. “Supersessionism” claims that God has replaced God’s people, has ceased to be the God of Israel and become the God of Christians or Muslims, and remains the God of Israel only for Jews converted to the superseding group. Supersessionism claims that the only way to be a good Jew is to be a Christian (or Muslim). Supersessionism claims that the God of Israel has converted, and that therefore Jews have to. Kendall Soulen has identified three forms of supersessionism: Punitive supersessionism claims that God is punishing the Jews for disobedience and unbelief. Replacement supersessionism claims that God has replaced the chosen people of Israel with the chosen people of the Church. Those two forms, however they may linger among Christian believers, have been officially rejected by Catholics and mainstream Protestants (Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, United Church of Christ, among others). The third form, which Soulen calls “economic supersessionism”15 or “Israelforgetfulness,” refers to the Christian tendency to tell the story of salvation by proceeding from creation and fall directly to the coming of Christ, skipping the history of Israel or reducing it to prophecy. That form of supersessionism has yet to fall to the critique. The doctrinal difficulty for Christians is to say both that God wills Israel to be identifiable as such, and Christ is the savior of all. As a rule, conservatives stress the latter at the expense of the former, and liberals stress the former at the expense of the latter.16 But Paul rejects the Jewish supersessionism of eschatology plan A (where Gentiles would become Jews) and adopts the Plan that confuses the categories—not for Jews, of whom Paul says “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11.26) and whose election he calls “irrevocable” (Rom. 11.29), but for Gentiles, who worship the God of Israel without circumcision: and does that leave them Gentiles or not? If “to queer” the terms of a discourse means “not to negate or refuse” them but “to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from contexts where they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power... to mobilize the signifier in the service of an alternative 14 I owe the phrase to Timothy Radcliffe, who used it in a different context, “Christ in Hebrews: Cultic Irony,” New Blackfriars 68 (1987): 494-504. 15  “Economic” refers to the “economy,” or dispensation, of salvation, God’s household management. 16 To here, this paragraph has followed Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). 26

Paul on Exceeding Nature: Queer Gentiles and the Giddy Gardener

production,”17 then that is exactly what Paul is trying to do in introducing the stereotype of excessive Gentile sexuality and then applying it to God’s salvific purpose. Boldly and perhaps regrettably, Paul continues to use para phusin, but (to paraphrase Butler) to subvert and displace it from a context where it has been deployed as an instrument of oppressive power and to mobilize the signifier in the service of an alternative production, God’s salvific action on the behalf of labile Gentiles. We are now in a position to state how supersession and sexuality relate in Paul. With both Gentiles and gender, Paul regards God as overcoming binaries and doing a queer thing. Here the prospectus for this volume raises an objection: Christian theology, at its best, participates in a theology of supersession, that Christianity is the “fulfillment” of Judaism. This rhetorical gesture is, of course, reductive of the “Old” “Testament” (sic), making the relationship of covenant dependent on its erasure. In effect, Christianity always leaves Judaism incomplete, discursively. Likewise, however much Christian narrative incorporates Jewish typology and indeed Biblical story in its exegesis, Jewish participation in the Christian continuation narrative effectively negates Judaism, making it nothing but the precursor that enables the subsequent completion.

Here I dispute the claim that Christianity is supersessionist at its best—while I affirm the underlying premise that both Christianity and Judaism relate Jewishness and gender in a very deep way. The reason why the two claims come apart is that both Christianity and Judaism associate queerness with Gentiles. The trouble for Christianity is that it doesn’t know who Gentiles are. Most Christians have forgotten that they are mostly goyim, and they have confused Gentiles with Jews. For Jews, the goyim are non-Jews. But for Christians, the goyim ceased to be non-Jews, and become non-Christians. When that happened, Christians could hardly read the Bible anymore—not the Hebrew Bible, not the Gospels, not Acts, and not Paul.18 This still leads, even for Christians who have rejected punitive and replacement supersessionisms, to the supersessionism of fulfilment and Israel-forgetfulness. This is what a few Christian theologians are now trying to overcome. The usual move, of stressing Christianity’s claims to universalism, just completes the erasure. Part of the solution has been to remind Christians that in Paul’s terms almost all of them are goyim. So the most promising current movement comes from students of a Christian theologian, Karl Barth 17  Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Seyla Benhabib, et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 35-57; here, pp. 51-52. 18 See e.g., Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, 78-96; Stowers, op. cit., 12-15. 27

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(Swiss Calvinist, 1886-1968), and a Jewish thinker, Michael Wyschogrod (1928-, husband of Edith), who both stress particularity, and who both help Christians recover the sense that almost all of them are goyim, that they are worshipping not goyische gods (Zeus, Wotan), but someone else’s God, the God of Israel.19 But what happens when the insistence on Christian particularity meets the insistence on Jewish particularity—when Wyschogrod meets Barth? Well, they did meet, in person; and when they met, they talked about fulfilment. Wyschogrod tells the story: On a sunny morning in August 1966 I visited Barth in his modest home on the Bruderholzallee in Basel. He had been told that I was a “Jewish Barthian,” and this amused him to no end. We spoke about various things and at one point he said: “You Jews have the promise but not the fulfillment; we Christians have both promise and fulfillment.” Influenced by the banking atmosphere of Basel, I replied: “With human promises, one can have the promise but not the fulfillment. The one who promises can die, or change his mind, or not fulfill his promise for any number of reasons. But a promise of God is like money in the bank. If we have his promise, we have its fulfillment and if we do not have the fulfillment we do not have the promise.” There was a period of silence and then he said, “You know, I never thought of it that way.”20

19  Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (New York: Seabury, 1983); reprinted several times with unchanged text but subtitle God in the People Israel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983; HarperCollins, 1989; Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). See also Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. Kendall Soulen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). Barth is problematic, both philo-semitic and anti-Judaic, but all post-Holocaust, twentieth-century Christian accounts of Israel have dealt with him. Recent contributors to Christian accounts of Judaism and Jewish accounts of Christianity reacting to Barth and Wyschogrod include the following: Soulen, God of Israel and Christian Theology; George Lindbeck, “Response to Wyschogrod’s ‘Letter to a Friend,’” Modern Theology 11 (1995): 205-10 and “Confession and Community: An Israel-Like View of the Church,” in The Church in a Postliberal Age (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 1-9; Bruce Marshall, “Christ and the Cultures: The Jewish People and Christian Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 81-100; Peter Ochs, et al., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000); and myself. The issue of Modern Theology cited here (“Symposium on ‘Jewish Christians and the Torah,’” 11:2(April 1995)) is devoted to Wyschogrod and responses to him. 20  Michael Wyschogrod, “A Jewish Perspective on Karl Barth,” in How Karl Barth Changed My Mind, ed. Donald McKim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), 156-61; here, p. 161. 28

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George Lindbeck has proposed this solution: both Judaism and Christianity will be superseded and fulfilled by the coming (again?) of the Messiah. That is, both are in potential to the eschaton when the whole world will worship the God of Israel.21 Even Paul would insist that he is writing only at the beginning of the end. The end of the end is yet to come. So Christianity is not the fulfilment, but both Judaism and Christianity are in potential to the fulfilment of the kingdom of God. So far I have talked about the beginning and the end of Romans, leaving out the middle: the beginning, where Paul stereotypes Gentiles for rhetorical effect; and the end, where Paul delivers the sting of his scorpion’s tail, attributing those disfavored characteristics to God himself. But there is also a complicated middle. The middle is complicated because Paul moves from a binary opposition between flesh and spirit to a three-point inclusion among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The genre of the binary opposition is hortatory, commanding, a police action: Paul exhorts the hearer to choose. The genre of the three-point inclusion is narrative: Paul explains that the hearer is already taken up into a community. This is not the community, as Christian supersessionism would have it, that Jews “must” join in order to be “saved.” This is the community that the God of Israel has prepared “like a table before me in the presence of my enemies” for Abraham’s children—a community that Paul observes, to his great surprise, opening out in the valley of the shadow of death. The dead are Gentiles: those who worship not the living God, but dead idols; those whose excessive sexuality does not procreate, but will lead them to die out; those who, out of communion with the living God, are condemned to die. But in an extraordinarily complicated passage, Paul explodes the binary oppositions of life/death, Jew/Gentile. It happens in part because a third of those oppositions—law/Spirit—is even more unstable than the other two, because law (which goes with Jew) is not really opposed to Spirit (which does not go with Gentile except by sleight of hand); rather, law and Spirit belong together. Thus we get “the law of the Spirit of life,” which begins, deep in the middle of Romans (Chapter 8) to unravel the whole rivalry. And yet Paul gets distracted, as preachers admittedly do in oral or written performance, because “flesh,” despite the story of the incarnation, usually contrasts with Spirit instead of being allied with her. For the next few paragraphs, the delight of contrast carries Paul away. It carries him away from the more difficult, more creative, more innovative theme, the theme in which he is trying to say something new, not quite formed, the fainter theme in which he is just finding his way. It is a Trinitarian theme, not a twofold one; a theme of inclusion, not exclusion; a theme of the redeployment and surprising remobilization of the flesh, rather than its rejection: a theme, that is, of incarnation and 21  Lindbeck, “Response to Wyschogrod,” op cit. 29

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befriending of the flesh, of God working—to coin a word—paraphysically. Now the Spirit pours out on flesh; rests on flesh, indwells flesh, befriends flesh. Warming to this theme, Paul eventually returns to the language of contrariety to nature, ringing the changes on it this time to a new purpose. This time it shows the distance he has come, so that the Spirit becomes especially the Spirit of adoption of Gentiles. This was in Paul’s mind all the time, of course, to overturn the sermon against the Gentiles. That was always the big subversion in waiting, the overarching form of the sermon. The anti-Gentile Gentiles who were nodding their heads at the beginning would be taken up short, would get stung, because that’s where God would work, among Gentiles, among the dead. At first, Paul wrote as though Gentiles would die out because God would punish their idolatry with non-procreative sexual desires: but by the end, Paul has God bringing them to acknowledge God and crowning God’s gift with resurrection. Paul renders procreation now irrelevant to the continuation of bodily life, guaranteeing it now by resurrection. Paul queers procreation by resurrection to the extent of commending the non-procreative practice of celibacy, and changing the rationale for marriage from child-raising to the channeling of desire (1 Cor. 7.9). The Gentiles, who did not procreate, now receive “the Spirit of adoption.” Flesh and spirit return us at last to the short quotation with which I began. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.28). Here Paul parallels “Jew or Gentile” with “male and female.” Or almost parallels them, since one pair has “or” and one pair has “and.” Exegetes often point out that Genesis 1.27 says, and Galatians 3.28 correctly quotes, not “male or female” but “male and female.” (Even the Revised Standard Version gets that wrong; the New Revised Standard is correct.) The correction tends to mark its maker as a pedant noting a curiosity of the text or a nicety of quotation. If interpreters credit the “and” at all, they take it (perhaps anachronistically) to affirm the full humanity of women. Occasionally, interpreters ancient and modern considered the possibility that “male and female” marked the original creature of the dust of the earth—ha Adam, the earthling—as an androgyne.22 Neither of those attempts to read the “and” did much to undermine the heterosexual dimorphism that almost everyone heard in the passage. Both the elevation of “and female” to the add-on humanity of

22 Wayne Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a. Symbol in Earliest Christianity,” History of Religions 13 (1974): 165-208, sparked a long discussion reviewed recently in Dale B. Martin, “The Queer History of Galatians 3.28: ‘No Male and Female,’” in Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 77-90. 30

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“women, too,” and the neat splitting of the androgyne into the heterosexually dimorphous couple upheld the image of male and female as exhaustive types. But what if “male and female” represent two ends of a spectrum? What if they mark inclusive parameters rather than exhaustive types? That benefits from reading the “and” against the absent “or.” To substitute “or”—“male or female”—shows a tendency to read in a binary. The lectio difficilior—the reading with “and” that readers find difficult and unconsciously miscorrect—includes the extremes non-exhaustively. Because the “and” is not “or,” it queries, it queers the exhaustive either-or that translators try to read in. It undermines compulsory heterosexuality. It holds open room for diversity—unsurprising, really, for a human being made in the image of a threefold God. What does it mean to negate the “and”—“In Christ there is no ‘male and female’”? Well, no procreationism. The resurrection of the body, not procreation, is what guarantees continued embodied human life. And the Christ-directedness of desire: it does not just undermine compulsory heterosexuality, it founds new social forms—communities of monks and nuns—devoted to new ways of generating community apart from and in addition to “male and female.” Christ can be the spouse of male and female—they need not each be the spouse of the other. This reading need not supersede Jewish ones, because Genesis and the Song of Songs support similar moves about God. “Male and female created He them” means that God created male and female as the inclusive extremes of sexual polymorphism, not as ideal types, but as parameters including everything in between. If God loves difference, then God loves the different extremes, to be sure—but not in such a way as to exclude the less dimorphic differences in between. “In Christ there is no ‘male and female’” makes Christ the unlimited object of desire for male, female, and everything in between—the object of all orientation. It is the characteristic office of the Holy Spirit to vary and diversify devotions to Christ, so that if Christ is to “satisfy the desire of every living thing,” those lives may diversify abundantly, and he may satisfy them “in many and various ways.” If male and female mark extremes of bodily variation, all of which Christ orients to himself; if Israel and the Church are both communities in potential to the Kingdom of God; if in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female,” then Paul allows God—for short periods!—to queer religion, gender, and class (where “queer” means to query the significance of social roles). Sometimes arguments that relativize heteronormativity by reference to Christ can seem supersessionist, since Christians suppose Judaism unlikely to relativize heteronormativity that way. Christian liberationists have often given in to the temptation to step on Judaism on their way up, making Judaism look less feminist, more heteronormative, and so on. But precisely here the Christian rejection of supersessionism becomes important for showing Christian thinkers 31

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how to interpret their own claims. Just if Christ is, according to Christian principles, the one who polymorphously satisfies the desire of every living thing, who relativizes sexual orientation by receiving the desire of men as well as women and of everyone in between, that can only be because Jewish readings of the Song of Songs have taught Christian readers to make isomorphic moves. It is first of all the God of Israel who draws all creatures to himself, and only because Christians identify Jesus with him that they make and embody such a move. In the supersessionist version of Christianity, Judaism leads to Christianity and Christianity leads to the Kingdom of God. In the straight version of Christianity, female leads to male and male leads to God; “male and female created He them” leads to children. In the linear, subordinationist Trinity of Christianity, the Spirit leads to the Son and the Son leads to the Father. All those lines need not to lead up and down, but to turn, include, and embrace. In the non-supersessionist (Lindbeckian) version of Christianity, both Judaism and Christianity are incomplete and in potential to the Kingdom of God. In the queer version of Christianity, desire leads to God; “male and female created He them” marks extremes of variation along the way; the priest models gender diversity (bending the female extreme to God’s male, the male extreme to the church’s female, and many more iterations); and Christ models the polymorphous object of multiple orientations, orienting all desire to himself.23 In the assumptive Trinity, Son and Spirit interact on earth, while Father, Son, and Spirit make up a community to join. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.28). For Paul these three categories hang together: Jew/Gentile, free/slave, male/female. They hang together religiously, because Paul regards only free Jewish men as able to keep Torah. They hang together sociologically, because Paul’s society regards Gentiles, slaves, and women as alike in their inability to keep the law. They hang together sexually, because Paul’s society regards the inability of Gentiles, slaves, and women to keep the law as manifesting itself especially in sexuality—regards all three as especially sexual, excessively sexual, or sexually labile24—a sexuality Paul describes as para phusin. They hang together theologically, because Paul regards all three as coming into relationship with the God of Israel in spite (or just perhaps because) of their differences. In spite of their differences, since Paul does not see the differences as being overcome but queered. Because of their differences, since Paul insists on describing God himself as taking on their characteristic excessiveness in saving Gentiles (and presumably women and 23 I owe this way of thinking to Gerard Loughlin. See his Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 24 Satlow, op. cit. 32

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slaves) explicitly para phusin. In saving the Gentiles, God acts like a Gentile— excessively, promiscuously (and by extension, perhaps, like a woman or a slave). Deeply implicated in all of this is Paul’s critique of idolatry—an idolatry that Gentiles (and perhaps women and slaves) were thought particularly prone, and a critique that Christians would later turn against Jews and queers. Like the Hebrew Bible, Paul operates by what Timothy Radcliffe has called “cultic irony.” Defiling things and defiled human beings become sources of salvation, not because the laws of cultic defilement are bad, but because they identify places of marginal power. Blood is defiling, blood is life. Women are defiled, they give life. Gentiles are defiling, in Paul they receive life. Slaves cannot keep Torah, Paul becomes slave to Christ. Gentiles worship dead idols; a dead man is revered as God and becomes the source of life. Paul plays at these cultic reversals even with the phrase para phusin. It’s not only a label for same-sex sexuality. It’s also a label for the salvation of the Gentiles. Desire is for God, who attracts Jews and Gentiles, “male and female,” with all their variation to Godself. Therefore desire cannot be bypassed; it must be trained. Because God Godself committed Godself to desire for Israel, desire cannot be trained in solitude, but only with others. The productive question is how to train desire in community.25

25 A question that Sexuality and the Christian Body, op. cit., tries to answer. 33

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Chapter 2

Sleeping with a Prophet: On the Erotic Adventures of Rabbi Meir Daniel Boyarin

In a typical hagiographical account written for pious Israeli children, we find the story of how Rabbi Meir, arguably the greatest of the tannai’im (2nd century CE), became known as Rabbi Meir the Wonderworker, a name and status that he bears until this day. It seems that his sister-in-law was in prison, and he went to rescue her, discovered that she had not sinned in prison, and performed miracles to get her out. Upon being pursued by soldiers, Rabbi Meir entered a treyf restaurant, stuck his finger in the food, licked another finger, and by this ruse convinced his pursuers that he couldn’t possibly be the great Rabbi. He then ran away to Babylonia to escape his oppressors. No sex, or even much gender, in this story for youthful modern ears. The version in the Babylonian Talmud (c. 6th century CE) is considerably juicier: Beruria, the wife of Rabbi Meir, was the daughter of Rabbi Hanina. She said to him: It is painful to me that my sister is sitting in a prostitute’s booth. He took a tarqeva of dinars and went, saying if she has done nothing wrong [i.e., if she is sexually innocent], a miracle will take place for me, and if not, there will be no miracle. He dressed up as a soldier and solicited her. She said: I am menstruating. He said: I can wait. She said: There are many here more beautiful than I. He said: I understand from this that she has done nothing wrong. He went to her guard: Give her to me! The guard said: I am afraid of the king. He [Meir] took the tarqeva of dinars, and gave it to him, and said: Take the tarqeva of dinars. Keep half and use half for bribing anyone who comes. He [the guard] said: What shall I do when they are gone? He [Meir] said: Say “God of Meir answer me; God of Meir answer me,” and you will be saved. He [guard] said: How do I know that this will be so? He [Meir] said: [Now you will see.] There came some dogs that eat people. He shouted to them, and they came to eat him. He said: God of Meir  N. Ts. Gotlib, Rabbi Hananya Bar Hama; Rabbi Ishmael Ben Elisha; Rabbi Meir the Miracle Worker, Adire Ha-Torah (Yerushalayim: Mekhon “Bet Yehi’el”, 1983), 130–34.

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answer me; God of Meir answer me, and they let him go. He gave her to him. In the end, the story was heard in the House of the King. They brought him [the guard] and hung him on the cross. He said: God of Rabbi Meir answer me; God of Meir answer me! They took him down, saying: What was that?! He said: This is what happened. [They wrote it on a bull of the state], and they engraved the image of Rabbi Meir on the gates of Rome, declaring: If a man comes with this feature and that feature, arrest him! When Rabbi Meir came there, they wished to arrest him. He ran away from them and went into a whorehouse. Elijah came in the guise of a whore and embraced him. Some say that he put his hand in Gentile foods and tasted them. They [the Romans] said: God forfend! If that were Rabbi Meir he wouldn’t do such a thing. Because of these events [Rabbi Meir] ran away to Babylonia. [Avoda Zara 18a-b]

The narrative incorporates themes familiar from late antiquity and especially the narrative patterns of the adventure story and the erotic tale. David Stern has already noted how little attention has been paid to the impact of Greco-Roman narrative on rabbinic literature, and begun in his article to provide a major corrective to this fault, focusing especially on one of the genres so important for this story, the erotic and adventure narrative. As Stern has pointed out the Greco-Roman novel is “actually a love-and-adventure story.” The story of Rabbi Meir is both of these as well, and thus can be seen as part of the great literary movement of the first through the sixth centuries that brought us the Greek and Roman novels and the literature known as Menippean satire. In this short narrative we find packed an incredible number of themes and  I have produced a composite text from two excellent Sephardic witnesses: Ms. Paris 1337 and JTS 15. The Paris ms. has some excellent readings from a literary point of view but is corrupt in other places, where I have filled in from the JTS ms. Nothing in this argument would suffer if only one or the other of the texts were adhered to.  David Stern, “The Captive Woman: Hellenization, Greco-Roman Erotic Narrative, and Rabbinic Literature,” Poetics Today 19.1 (1998), 91–92. At about the time that Stern was publishing his article, Joshua Levinson made the same point, writing that “the adoption and adaptation of Greco-Roman literary models in midrashic literature” had received little attention, Joshua Levinson, “The Tragedy of Romance: A Case of Literary Exile,” Harvard Theological Review 89.3 (1996), 228.  Stern, op. cit., 93.  In the longer article from which this text was excerpted (and then expanded in its own right), this point will be argued at length (Daniel Boyarin, “Patron Saint of the Incongruous: Rabbi Meir, The Talmud, and Menippean Satire,” Critical Inquiry, forthcoming). The “genres”—if they are that—are not in any way exclusive of each other. Nor do they exclude others. Petronius’s Satyrica, just to take one example, is both a classic example of an ancient novel, a Menippean Satire, and a Symposium all together. 36

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motifs that characterize the kind of late ancient literature called menippea as characterized by Mikhail Bakhtin: sex, fantasy, and religion all together. Bakhtin has written of the menippea, “A very important characteristic of the menippea is the organic combination within it of the free fantastic, the symbolic, at times even a mystical-religious element with an extreme and (from our point of view) crude slum naturalism. The adventures of truth on earth take place on the high road, in brothels, in the dens of thieves, in taverns, marketplaces, prisons, in the erotic orgies of secret cults, and so forth.” The reason that this story crowned Rabbi Meir with his saint’s crown in the Jewish tradition is owing to its several elements of miracle working. Rabbi Meir’s sainthood, however, was not won in a pious and lofty, edifying tale, but rather in a riotous hodgepodge of a parodic mixture of novelistic sexual incident, slum-realism—to use Bakhtin’s pungent term—, parodic Gospel and other comic elements. The sexual incident in Rabbi Meir’s story connects his legend with other Hellenistic literature, to such texts as Parthenius (along the lines of that which Stern has shown for other rabbinic passages in his article), Philostratus, and Milesian tales. There is an important parallel in Philostratus, namely a reported slander in which Apollonius the holy man allegedly runs away to Scythia owing to a sexual slander against him, “though he never once visited Scythia or fell prey to sexual passion,” closely paralleling Rabbi Meir’s absconding for Babylonia under rather similar circumstances. It is entirely legitimate to inquire into the significance and import of such incidents recurring in the lives of holy men. Unless we take the reductive route of assuming that erotic material is there primarily and simply to provide titillation, to maintain the reader’s interest and keep her reading, this type of incident ought to be seen as carrying some important ideological baggage in the literary practices of narrative during this period. In the present piece, I would like to unpack some of that freight. Comparing Parthenius’s The Love Romances to rabbinic literature, Stern suggests that in the former, “the erotic ordeal is the primary mode of contact through which their leading characters engage the larger world, a world that is explicitly represented as both sexually charged and dangerous.” He goes on  The term, “menippea,” as opposed to Menippean Satire, is, I think, Bakhtin’s own coinage, referring to what is for me the most useful notion of a trans-genreing or transtextual collection of Menippean elements, modified through time and place.   M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl. Emerson, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 115.  Arkady B. Kovelman, “The Miletian Story of Beruria,” Vestnik Evreyskogo Universiteta 1.19(1999): 8–23, in Russian.   Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, ed. and trans. C. P. Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), i, 61. 37

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to say that, “it is precisely these elements of the erotic narrative that became for the Rabbis the essential building blocks of a cultural narrative, a kind of myth or foundational story that helped them explain to themselves their place in the pagan world and their uneasy relationship to that world; indeed, in its transformed shape, this narrative became for the Rabbis one through which they represented their understanding of cultural influence itself.”10As Laurie Davis memorably put it, “The Rabbis portrayed themselves as virgins in a brothel.”11 Making a point similar to that of Stern but focusing much more specifically, Virginia Burrus writes that, “in both the pagan and the Christian novel, I suggest, the presentation of a virginalized eroticism reflects deep ambivalence about the violence of imperial rule.”12 How does the “virginalized eroticism” of our own Rabbi Meir anecdote work out (of) its own ambivalences? The plot of this little novella of Rabbi Meir and his sister-in-law turns on three incidents of miraculous escape: The first is a miracle done for the sake of the damsel in distress, the second to save the prison-guard, and the third to save Rabbi Meir’s skin. Turning first to the second of the miracles, I find evidence that one of the areas of pressure or cultural tensions that is being confronted in our romance written small is indeed the place of Rabbis in a Christian world. This miracle by which the guard is saved seems deeply parodic of the passion narratives. As shown by Naomi Koltun-Fromm, the passion narratives are built in a not insignificant way on a Christological midrash on Psalm 22.13 Our little story of the guard being hung on the cross, saying some strange words in a foreign language, and being taken down from the cross suggests, in turn, a parody of the Gospel passion accounts. Indeed, I would circumspectly suggest that this text is closely related to the Babylonian Aramaic parodic Gospels known of as Toledot Yeshu, the story of Jesus. Although best known from the gaonic period, slightly later than the Talmud, their earliest forms are to be found in the Talmud (mostly self-censored) as well. There is a strong argument for this 10 Stern, op. cit., 99. See too Levinson, op. cit.,  233–34 for an interpretation in which it was the separation/reunion plot that particularly appealed to the Rabbis as a way of articulating their own historical position with respect to God. 11  Laurie Davis, “Virgins in Brothels: A Different Feminist Reading of Beruriah,” paper presented at Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, 1994). See too Rachel Adler, “The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies: Character and Context in the Legend of Beruriah,” Tikkun 3.6(1988), who doesn’t consider the political, “colonial” context of the trope. 12  Virginia Burrus, “Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence and the Ancient Romance,” Arethusa 38(2005): 56. 13 Naomi Koltun-Fromm, “Psalm 22’s Christological Interpretive Tradition In Light of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.1(1998): 37– 57. 38

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parodic appropriation in the curious incident of the dogs. This is based on a verse in the chapter of Psalms of which the Christological midrashists could make nothing: 21, “Deliver my life from the sword; my soul from the power of the dog.” It is almost as if our parodic narrator says to the Christians, I see you and I raise you one. I will produce a midrash on that verse too, on the verse that “stumped” you. The words that the guard is taught to say, “Eloah dMeir, answer me” may certainly embody a parodic allusion to the following wellknown sequence in Mark’s passion narrative (15) or a version close to it: “Ha! You who destroy the temple, and build it in three days, (30) save yourself, and come down from the cross!” (31) Likewise, also the chief priests mocking among themselves with the scribes said, “He saved others. He can’t save himself. (32) Let the Christ, the King of Israel, now come down from the cross, that we may see and believe him.” Those who were crucified with him insulted him. (33) When the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. (34) At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (35) Some of those who stood by, when they heard it, said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” (36) One ran, and filling a sponge full of vinegar, put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Let him be. Let’s see whether Elijah comes to take him down.” (37) Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the spirit. (38)

There is, as I have remarked, sufficient sound parallel, at least to suggest, that the talmudic phrase is a parody of the Aramaic of Jesus’s cry from the cross. The guard, instead of saying, of course, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” says “Eloa dmeir aneni.” The sonar echo is, I reckon, just close enough to set up the parodic allusion, an allusion amplified by the presence of Elijah as well in the story of Rabbi Meir’s own miraculous escape in the brothel.14 Just as Jesus was misunderstood, so the guard’s strange words were also not understood, but while in the case of Jesus it did not avail him, in the case of the guard it is precisely these strange words that lead to his salvation in a highly comic manner. It is not inapposite to see here also a self-ironizing comment in which the appearance of the “miracle” wrought by the “saintly” Rabbi Meir is explained by the most rationalistic and comic of means. There is, perhaps, some further evidence for this conjecture in another tale closely related to Rabbi Meir if not quite about him. In a further sequence of tales, Rabbi Meir’s heretical teacher, the famous Elisha the son of Abuya, is the protagonist. In that story, Elisha seeks to know his fate by using a typical Jewish form of oracle: he asks a child studying to read out the verse which he 14 As pointed out to me by Virginia Burrus. 39

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is studying at the moment. The child reads: “And to the wicked one God says; What business have you with declaring my statutes or taking my covenant in your mouth?!” (Psalms 50. 16). The child, we are told, however, stuttered, so instead of hearing the word “to the wicked one,” larasha, our Elisha hears “to Elisha,” lelisha and, since the previous verse reads “And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me,” our Elisha despairs forever of his salvation. In the Gospel story it is one prophet’s name that is misheard and in the Talmud, another prophet’s name, one that, moreover, is so closely related: Elijah and Elisha. Is it too much of a conjecture to argue from here that the Babylonian Rabbis were aware of this Gospel tradition, if not, surely, of the Gospels themselves, and parodied them here? The picture of Rabbi Meir inscribed on the gates of Rome is reminiscent of the Ecce homo of the Gospels as well. Without pushing the point too far, I think it is not by any means out of the question that our little sequence is a parodic appropriation of the Gospel account. In general, of course, we would take such a text as a moment in a bitter polemic—a description that cannot be discounted—, but the work of Galit Hasan-Rokem suggests a different direction to go in, one that sees a lighter, dialogical (which is not say necessarily irenic) interplay of intertexts, allusions, parodies and other forms so typical of the period of the Babylonian Talmud.15 A text such as this, however, is located in several cultural, discursive, literary contexts at one and the same time, in this case according to my suggested reading, a parody of the Christian midrashic appropriation of Psalms 22, as well as other folk and elite international cultural sources. We find a fascinatingly, tantalizingly related story in Apuleius. In the Metamorphoses 9.17-21, we find the tale of a certain slave named Myrmex. Myrmex had been commanded on pain of his life to guard the chastity of Arete, the young and beautiful wife of the public figure Barbarus, while the latter was away on business. Determined out of fear and loyalty to carry out his charge, he even held on to the hem of her robe on the way to the bathhouse. Unfortunately the clever rake Philesitherus saw her on one of those excursions and inflamed by her beauty and the obstacles in his path, became determined to “have” her. Approaching Myrmex with the offer of a significant bribe to be divided between the guard and the woman herself, he tried to get his way. 15  Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Narratives in Dialogue: A Folk Literary Perspective on Interreligious Contacts in the Holy Land in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land First-Fifteenth Centuries CE, ed. Guy Stroumsa and Arieh Kofsky (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1998), 109–29. See too Galit Hasan-Rokem, The Web of Life—Folklore in Rabbinic Literature: The Palestinian Aggadic Midrash Eikha Rabba, trans. Batya Stein, Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 40

Sleeping with a Prophet: On the Erotic Adventures of Rabbi Meir

Myrmex was at first horrified at the thought, but over time became himself so inflamed with lust for the money that he gave in and easily persuaded the young woman to comply as well to receive her significant share of the money. Naturally the husband came home unexpectedly in the middle of the fateful night but being held off by a ruse of Myrmex did not become aware of what was going on. However, the adulterer had left his slippers under the bed, and upon discovering them in the morning, the husband figured out what had happened and determined to carry out the death penalty for Myrmex, the guard. A funny thing happened on the way to the execution. Philesitherus himself encountered Barbarus with Myrmex in tow in chains and quickly thinking and figuring out what had transpired, accused the slave of having stolen his slippers at the bathhouse the previous day. It had a happy end. Without suggesting any form of dependence between the two stories, I would argue that there are, nevertheless, sufficient elements shared by them to relate them one to the other. In both, the protagonist is a guard appointed to protect the “owner” of the woman (in one case from unchastity, in the other, from chastity, as it were). In both cases, not only is there a bribe (a rather commonplace detail; after all, guards are there, as it were, to be bribed), but specifically a bribe to be divided in two in order to enable Die Entführing aus dem Serail. In both cases, the compromised guard ends up in danger of his life, and in both he is saved by a funny sort of strategem or miracle. I think it is not too much to conclude that the talmudic story comes out of the same cultural well from which Apuleius drew as well, and it is highly significant in my view that this lubricious tale has been adapted for the life of a Jewish saint. In turning now from the second to the first and third of the miracles, we move from the direct encounter with Christianity to issues of sex and gender in the Hellenistic milieu inhabited by the Babylonian Rabbis as well.16 The rabbinic text is more like than unlike the water in which it swims. There are elements in the story, for instance the chastity test, that are strikingly like topoi of the Hellenistic novels, for instance Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon. In that novel, both protagonists (male and female) can be said to have passed such tests.17 In the case of the male protagonist, it is a particularly striking parallel to our tale of Rabbi Meir’s sister-in-law, for it is a third party (his lover Leucippe) 16 Daniel Boyarin, “Hellenism in Rabbinic Babylonia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabbinic Literature, ed. Charlotte Fonrobert and Martin Jaffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 17 See recent discussions in Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Cambridge Classical Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 212–14, especially relevant in that the discussion is of virginity in a brothel, and Burrus, op. cit., 62–63. For further on the chastity test in this novel and its pre-history, see Kathryn Chew, “Achilles Tatius and Parody,” The Classical Journal 96.1(2000), 63–64. 41

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who becomes convinced of her intended. Clitophon’s sexual innocence upon hearing from the woman he is living with that she has not satisfaction from her “husband,” since he is constantly complaining of (feigning, as we the readers know) illness. Leucippe herself undergoes virginity tests in the novel as well.18 Indeed, in another of the Hellenistic novels, Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale, the heroine is sent to a brothel and avoids her brothel duties through feigning sickness,19 and in Tatius, the heroine avoids violation through the excuse that she is menstruating, just as in our story,20 a defense that Simon Goldhill reminds is unique in Greek literature.21 The sexual incident in Rabbi Meir’s story thus connects his legend multiply with Hellenistic novelistic literature. It does not seem to me far-fetched to read this story of Rabbi Meir’s apparent sexual activity in this novelistic context. The successfully maintained chastity in brothels of both Rabbi Meir and his sister-in-law would form a kind of doubling of this theme, analogous to the doubly maintained chastity of Leucippe and Clitophon in their tale. Let us look more closely, however, at this “doubling,” reading for gender difference this time, not similarity.22 In the first rescue, the damsel in question has to prove, in fact, that she is a damsel in order for there to be a miracle. Otherwise, no miracle. Having passed the chastity test devised by her tricky brother-in-law, she is vouchsafed the promised miracle, but in a rather indirect manner. Rabbi Meir produces a miracle to prove to the guard that he will not be endangered if he is caught out for letting her go. And indeed, the miracle happens, twice. The first time, as just said, to convince the guard, and the This topos was, it seems, trasmitted to Latin Europe via Seneca the Elder’s controversia of the Sacerdos Prostituta (I owe this last reference to Simon Goldhill). 18 Achilles Tatius, “Leucippe and Clitophon,” trans. John J. Winkler, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. F. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 272–73, 280–81. For another spectacular and novel virginity test, see Heliodorus’s Ethiopean Tale (10.9) adduced by Burrus, op. cit., 78. 19  Xenophon of Ephesus, “An Ephesian Tale,” trans. Graham Anderson, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. F. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 163. And see Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 57–58. For such illness turned to other narrative purposes, i.e., not feigned, see Tatius, op. cit., 226–27. Moreover, in yet another Greek novel, The Story of Apollonius of Tyre, “the motif of evasion of a prostitute’s duties plays a major role,” Xenophon of Ephesus, “An Ephesian Tale,” 163n23. 20  Mobilized actually by a friend and ally of her lover, not she herself; Tatius, op. cit., 225. 21 Simon Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality, The Stanford Memorial Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 116. 22  For the spectacularly different versions of virginity for Leucippe and Clitophon respectively, see Burrus, op. cit., esp. 61–63. 42

Sleeping with a Prophet: On the Erotic Adventures of Rabbi Meir

second time to actually save him. It is instructive, however, to compare the conditions for the miraculous intervention (both Rabbi Meir’s and that of the Auth-r of Miracles himself, as it were) to take place. In a situation of potential rape simpliciter, the virgin must prove that she has maintained her virginity, or she would not be deemed worthy of a rescue at all. Now we can compare it to the instance of Rabbi Meir’s own miraculous escape (not the version in which he dipped his finger in forbidden food but the one in which it was another member). Reversing the usual topos in which a holy man comes into a brothel disguised as a soldier (and thus a customer) to rescue a virgin, here we have a holy man (well, Prophet) disguised as a whore to rescue a pseudo (?) John. Now notice that for the good Rabbi the miracle that takes place and saves him does not involve any necessity that he prove his virtue, nor certainly his chastity; indeed, were he quite chaste, he would not have been saved at all. Rabbi Meir’s sexual act cannot be simply dismissed in our reading (unless we are providing pious literature for children, I suppose). He actually had sex with Elijah, in whatever guise she was appearing at the moment. Else the Roman pursuers would not have let him go. The implication is inescapable; for the girl to have given up her chastity to save her skin would have been damning; for Rabbi Meir it is permitted and even part of the miracle. Lest one still demur and propose that sex with an apparition is not sinful, I can argue against that claim from the Talmud itself. In yet another incident, it is Rabbi Meir who is rescued from unlawful carnal knowledge through a miraculous intervention: Rabbi Meir was given to making fun of fornicators [claiming that it was easy to overcome one’s sexual drive]. One day Satan [his sexual drive, yetzer hara, so Rashi, correctly23] appeared to him as a woman on the other side of the river. There was no ferry. [Rabbi Meir] began crossing the river by holding on to a rope that was stretched between the banks. When he had reached halfway across the rope, he [the sexual drive] let him go saying, “If they had not declared in Heaven: Be careful of Meir and his Torah!, I would made your blood worth two farthings! [You would have been a dead man.]” (TB Kiddushin 81a)

In the one narrative, it is Elijah who appears to Rabbi Meir in the appearance of a desirable woman with whom he does have sex; in the other, it is his own desire, in the shape of Satan but the appearance of another woman who appears to him and makes him nearly lose himself entirely. There is a genuine set of puzzlements here then. A virgin girl, having been raped (i.e., had she been raped) would have been disqualified for miraculous 23 There are manuscripts such as Munich 95 that don’t read the word “Satan” at all. 43

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rescue, but the Rabbi is rescued through illicit sexual practice. On the other hand, in another story the Rabbi would have put himself in mortal danger, had he engaged (unwittingly) in another kind of apparitional illicit encounter. Finally, it is at least worth pointing out that in both cases of the Rabbi Meir’s Scheinsex (appearance of sex, playing with the scholarly convention of referring to Scheintod in the novels24), the partner is a male figure, making this a kind of drag-queen sex altogether. Rabbi Meir is saved by this queer intercourse, in one case, while in the other, he is very nearly done in by such an appearance of sex, and the Rabbi is saved from it by a miracle. Going back to the comparison with the poor virgin girl, moreover, we see that it was her effort to remain chaste that enabled the miracle that in the end would make it possible for her to marry a virgin, while in Rabbi Meir’s case, his chastity was also saved but far from having protected himself from unchastity, he arrogantly had thought that he was immune to such desires. It would seem that Scheinsex (which is presumably enjoyable by the real human participant; otherwise the shine would be quite off it) is not sinful; it is only the giving in to the sexual instinct which would have caused the potential sin, from which sin Rabbi Meir is saved by (his own?) sexual desire having been warned in heaven to leave him be. But if that be the case, then, why would the girl’s submitting to rape to save her life not be equally as sinless and render her worthy of a miraculous salvation? In placing these talmudic texts together, I might suggest that for the Talmud, one could claim, as Burrus does for Leucippe and Clitophon “that the tyranny of divine [demonic] eros doubles the tyranny of men.”25 Underlying this talmudic narrative there appears to be a “Jewish” sexual ethic that quite contradicts the words of John Chrysostom: “The Jews disdained the beauty of virginity, which is not surprising, since they heaped ignominy upon Christ himself, who was born of a virgin. The Greeks admired and revered the virgin, but only the Church of God adored her with zeal.” It would seem that at least some Jews, alike in this respect to Chrysostom’s Christians (and even at least some Greeks), adored the virgin girl (or condemned her “disgraced” sister) with great zeal indeed, since, as pointed out by Burrus, both the Christian Thekla and Leucippe meet threats to their virginity with defiance to the (potential) death.26 But how does this all sit together? I don’t intend to attempt to reduce these contradictions but rather, indeed, to suggest that they, the contradictions, are the very point of the Babylonian Talmud, that to which we must attend in the Talmud is its all pervasive heteroglossia, its almost Doestoevskyan character in which, “It is not only the heroes who quarrel in Dostoevsky, but separate elements in the development 24  Morales, op. cit., 166–69. 25  Burrus, op. cit., 67. 26  Ibid., 62. 44

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of the plot seem to contradict one another: facts are decoded in different ways, the psychology of the characters is self-contradictory; the form is the result of the essence.” If as Bakhtin has put it, “the novelistic hybrid is an artifically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving out of a living image of another’s language,”27 then it would be a serious mistake to read the Talmud monologically, to try to reduce its dialogism to a monologism. As Bakhtin himself has complained, “Everyone interprets in his own way Dostoevsky’s ultimate word, but all equally interpret it as a single world, a single voice, a single accent, and therein lies their fundamental mistake. The unity of the polyphonic novel—a unity standing above the word, above the voice, above the accent—has yet to be discovered.”28 The most productive way of reading the Talmud, I am suggesting, is to take it as a novel, as the text—Dare I say “work”—in which the different languges of the late-ancient Jews of Babylonia are brought into contact with each other; the halakha and the aggada as separate languages, each one “carving out a living image of another language.” In other words, I am suggesting that far from being harmonious with the halakha of the official rabbinic discourse in the Talmud, the aggada may represent for us in dialogical form the voices of the non-rabbinic (or not fully rabbinic, whatever that might mean)—not necessarily “the folk”29—as well. It would be a serious mistake, then, to search for some “ultimate word,” some single world, single voice, single accent of the Talmud or the Rabbis. Note, as well, what I am not claiming; I am not claiming that the dialectic of the talmudic halakhic discussion is itself polyphonic or dialogical. The dialogical relations I propose are, rather, between the halakha as one voice and the aggada as another (or perhaps many others). As Arkady Kovelman has pointed out, the Torah plays an ambivalent role in this last story of Rabbi Meir.30 It is his arrogance borne of his learning that leads him to not take seriously the dangers of his own desiring self, to imagine himself immune, but then, once again, it is that very Torah-learning that saves him in the end. The story thus enacts in its own ambivalence the ambivalence, or even jangling of languages, of halakha and aggada in the Talmud itself. A fine parallel to this can be found once more in Philostratus’s Apollonius. It seems that a certain youth, Menippus the pupil of Demetrius no less, was the lover 27  M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 361. Burrus has discussed the relation of Bakhtin’s hybridity to that of Homi Bhabha; Burrus, op. cit., 51. 28  M. M. Bakhtin and Caryl Emerson, op. cit., 43. 29  Cf. Hasan-Rokem, op. cit. 30 Kovelman, op. cit. 45

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of a “foreign woman.” But it was in fact only delusion, an apparition. She was, in fact, “a phantom in the shape of a woman.” The youth, however strong in philosophy, was quite taken in by this phantom lover, and went to visit her often, not realizing that she was a phantom. Apollonius looks at Menippus and divines the situation and through a ruse rescues the boy from the woman who was one of the vampires, the sirens, and a werewolf, too (IV, 25).31 We see here a similar, but certainly not identical, plot. The young man is a philosopher as Rabbi Meir is a Torah scholar, and both presumably consider themselves immune from certain kinds of seduction, but both prove seduceable and in both cases by demon-lovers appearing as beautiful women. In the end Menippus’s philosophy and Meir’s Torah save them. I think we are not wrong in seeing in these parallel stories a dramatization of the difference between the serious discourses of philosophy/Torah and the seductions of erotic narrative/aggada. But we must also be on guard against an equally serious and equally seductive error, namely to consider the aggada the voice, always and everywhere, of the lenient, the forgiving, while halakha is given the role of the severe and restrictive, our story being a case in point. According to the halakha, at every level, from the text of Leviticus, through rabbinic literature, and into the halakhic jurisprudence following the Nazi genocide, the law is entirely clear: a woman raped to save her life or that of others is blameless, Esther the Queen being the very type of such a woman. It is only in the Babylonian Talmud, one in which the language of aggada is allowed to interpenetrate the language of halakha, that we can perceive the image of another language, another discourse of the Jews of the time of the Talmud, one in which a much harsher, more severe indeed sexual ethic for women is prescribed, one in which, it would seem, a woman, much as Lucretia or Agnes32 ought rather to allow herself to be killed rather than violated, while a man might get away scot-free by sleeping with a Prophet.

31  Philostratus and Jones, op. cit., i: 371–77. 32  Virginia Burrus, “Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3.1(1995): 25–46. 46

Chapter 3

Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges Steven F. Kruger

Speaking for Christianity

From the twelfth century to the fifteenth, Christian orthodoxy quite frequently speaks through the figure of the Jewish convert. This observation is unexpected because we are familiar with – and scholarship has tended to emphasize – the ways in which medieval Jewish converts to Christianity had difficulty gaining access to full membership within Christian communities. Most notably, in Iberia in the late fourteenth through the fifteenth century, whole communities of New Christians or conversos came to be viewed with suspicion as somehow still stubbornly or secretly Jewish, not real Christians at all. Nonetheless, even in such a moment of strong ambivalence about whether Jewish converts had become   I would like to thank, for their suggestions, the attentive and helpful audiences at Southern Connecticut State University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Northwestern University, and Cornell University who have heard earlier versions of sections of this essay. In particular, I thank Jim Rhodes, Debra Blumenthal, Aranye Fradenburg, Susie Phillips, Barbara Newman, Richard Kieckhefer, Jamie Friedman, and Corey Wronski for invitations, hospitality, and discussion. This chapter also owes a large debt to the members of my writing group – Valerie Allen, Jennifer Brown, Glenn Burger, Matthew Goldie, Michael Sargent, Anne Stone, and Sylvia Tomasch.   On the (non-)assimilation of medieval Jewish converts into Christian communities, see Jonathan M. Elukin, “From Jew to Christian? Conversion and Immutability in Medieval Europe,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 171-89, and Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For opposed views of the situation of Jewish converts in late-medieval Iberia, see Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols., trans. Louis Schoffman, et al. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992 [1961-66]), and B. Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain from the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, 3rd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999 [1966]), and The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, 2nd ed. (New York: New York Review Books, 2001 [1995]).

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fully or truly Christian, at least some prominent converts became important spokesmen for orthodoxy. Thus, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, Paul of Burgos, formerly Shlomo ha-Levi, became an important player in both Iberian royal and European papal politics, and he wrote several significant works of polemic and exegesis (including exegetical “additions” to Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla, “twelve questions on the divine name,” and the Scrutinium scripturarum, a dialogue that explicitly foregrounds the figure of the convert, since it names its two disputants Saul and Paul). Paul’s student, friend, and former co-religionist, Joshua ha-Lorki, wrote against him from a Jewish position after Paul’s conversion. Joshua himself, however, later converted to Christianity, taking the name Geronimo de Santa Fe and switching from antiChristian to anti-Jewish polemic; he composed the Contra perfidiam Judaeorum and the De Judaeis erroribus ex Talmud, and he also became the principal Christian spokesman at the extended, grand public disputation between Christians and Jews held at Tortosa in 1413-14 and presided over by one of the three competing popes of the moment, Benedict XIII. Geronimo’s participation in the Tortosa debate continues an earlier medieval pattern in which the Christian spokesmen at public interreligious disputations are frequently converts. Thus, the convert Nicholas Donin speaks for Christianity at Paris in 1240, while several Jewish converts were involved in the compilation of the dossier against the Talmud in   On Shlomo ha-Levi/Paul of Burgos, see Baer, op. cit., 2:139-50, and Netanyahu, op. cit., 168-206. A number of manuscripts of the Scrutinium scripturarum survive; see, for instance, Bibliothèque nationale, nouv. acq. lat. 1379. There were also several early printed editions, including Mantua, 1474/1475. On the transmission of the Scrutinium, see Ryan Szpiech, “Converso Polemic in Naples: The Transmission of Pablo de Santa María’s Scrutinium Scripturarum,” in New Studies on Yale Manuscripts from the Late Antique to the Early Modern Period, ed. Robert G. Babcock (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2005), 113-128.   See Joshua ha-Lorki, Das apologetische Schreiben des Josua Lorki an den Abtrünnigen Don Salomon ha-Lewi (Paulus de Santa Maria). Iggeret R. Yehoshua ha-Lorki, ed. L. Landau (Antwerp: Verlag von Teitelbaum & Boxenbaum, 1906).   For more on Joshua ha-Lorki/Geronimo de Santa Fe, see La Disputa de Tortosa, 2 vols., ed. Antonio Pacios Lopez (Madrid: Instituto “Arias Montano,” 1957), 1:4051. There is a fragmentary Hebrew account of the Tortosa Disputation; see Hyam Maccoby, ed. and trans., Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993 [1982]), and La Crònica en Hebreu de la Disputa de Tortosa, ed. Jaume Rieri i Sans (Barcelona: Fundació Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1974). Pacios Lopez’s La Disputa de Tortosa gives the full Latin transcript, with an extensive introduction.   For overviews of these public disputations, see Maccoby, op. cit., and Oliver Shaw Rankin, Jewish Religious Polemic of Early and Later Centuries, A Study of Documents Here Rendered in English (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1970). 48

Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges

Paris during the early 1240s. The Dominican Pablo Christiani, also a convert from Judaism, becomes an important missionary, and is at the center of several public disputations, voicing Christian positions most notably at Barcelona in 1263, but also at Paris in 1272. Texts authored by converted Jews also sometimes became important sources of information about Judaism, about its differences from Christianity, and about the ways in which Christian orthodoxy might most effectively respond to Jewish positions and make its own doctrine clear. The most striking example is Peter Alfonsi’s Dialogues, which presents an extended debate between the post-conversion Peter and his pre-conversion self Moses, and which became the most popular of anti-Jewish Latin polemics, surviving in seventy-nine manuscripts, translated into Catalan, and redacted into Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale. I am concerned here with the reasons why Jewish converts might so often have become orthodox Christian spokesmen. I want to emphasize, at the outset, that I do not think there will be some simple answer or set of answers   On Nicholas Donin, see Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of Their Relations during the Years 1198-1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, rev. ed. (New York: Hermon Press, 1966 [1933]), 33940; Ch. Merchavia, “Did Nicholas Donin Instigate the Blood Libel?” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 49 (1979-80): 111-21; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 60-76. The dossier on the Talmud survives as Extractiones de Talmut, Bibliothèque nationale, MS lat. 16558. On the burning of the Talmud at Paris during the 1240s, see Le Brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 1242-1244, ed. Gilbert Dahan, with Élie Nicholas (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999).   On Pablo Christiani, see Judah M. Rosenthal, “A Religious Disputation between a Scholar Named Menahem and the Apostate and Dominican Friar Pablo Christiani” (Hebrew), Hagut Ivrit ba-Amerika 3 (1974): 61-74; Joseph Shatzmiller, “Paulus Christiani: Un aspect de son activité anti-juive,” in Hommage à Georges Vajda: Études d’histoire et de pensée juives, ed. Gérard Nahon and Charles Touati (Louvain: Éditions Peeters, 1980), 203-17; Cohen, Friars, 103-28; Jeremy Cohen, “The Mentality of the Medieval Jewish Apostate: Peter Alfonsi, Hermann of Cologne, and Pablo Christiani,” in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), 2047; Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 43-48, 7071, 76-77, 83-85, 90-98, 102-37; Chazan, “Chapter Thirteen of the Mahazik Emunah: Further Light on Friar Paul Christian and the New Christian Missionizing,” Mikhael 12 (1991): 9-26. For a full account of the Barcelona disputation, see Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). On the 1272 Paris disputation, see Shatzmiller, La deuxième controverse de Paris: Un chapitre dans la polémique entre chrétiens et juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions E. Peeters, 1994).   For the fullest account of Peter Alfonsi’s career, see John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993). 49

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to this question. The reasons for the popularity of Peter Alfonsi’s Dialogues in the twelfth century will not necessarily be the same as the reasons Nicholas Donin or Pablo Christiani came to the fore in the interreligious disputations of the thirteenth century, and these in turn may overlap with but differ from the reasons Geronimo of Santa Fe and Paul of Burgos moved to the center of late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century Iberian anti-Jewish missionizing. I also want to leave in suspense, at least for the moment, the question of whether it is the convert’s own initiative that leads to his becoming prominent as a Christian spokesman, or alternatively the desire of the Christian community itself. Evidence points in both directions – as we will see in turning to some specific texts – and, again, each individual case might be different. Still, I think it is useful, at least as a stimulus to further work, to ask whether there might be some more general, overarching reasons why – across much of the medieval period – we see converts coming to occupy the role of orthodox spokesmen. I also want to make clear that recognizing that some Jewish converts rose to prominence to speak for Christian orthodoxy does not necessarily suggest that converts – and even the very same converts – did not also meet with hostility and suspicion, with the idea that they might somehow not be fully Christian after their conversions, or even the notion that they might remain actively hostile to Christianity. We have seen already that the convert spokesman can take up that position even in situations where there is significant hostility toward and suspicion of converts – as, for instance, in late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenthcentury Iberia. Indeed, some convert texts clearly dramatize the ways in which they are both welcomed as testimony by the wider Christian community and yet still somehow suspect. In fact, convert authors sometimes seem actively to undermine their own status as reliable spokesmen for Christianity. Consider, for instance, the following comic episode in the twelfth-century conversion autobiography of Hermann (born Judah) of Cologne, a Jew from a money-lending family who converted and ultimately became a Premonstratensian canon and a priest.10 At the very moment of his baptism – having just told us that he has “been sufficiently imbued, according to [his] capacity, with other

10  On Hermann/Judah, see Cohen, “Mentality,” op. cit.; Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 154-65; and JeanClaude Schmitt, La conversion d’Hermann le Juif: Autobiographie, histoire et fiction (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003). I cite the Latin from Hermann of Cologne [Hermannus quondam Judaeus], Opusculum de conversion sua, ed. Gerlinde Niemeyer, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1963), and the English translation of Karl F. Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), providing page numbers parenthetically. 50

Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges

matters concerning orthodox faith” (108)11 – Hermann misunderstands the ritual of baptism itself: I stepped into the waves of the life-giving font. Immersed in it once, toward the east, I believed that that one immersion sufficed for the renewal of the ancient state. But the clerics standing around the baptistery shouted that I ought to be immersed more times. Having already just left the font, I could not hear their voices distinctly, nor, since water was running down the hairs of my head, could I see clearly the gestures that they were making to me. Therefore, wiping the water from my face with my hands, I heard what they wanted, but, stiff with the bitter cold of the font, I at first did not willingly yield to their wish; but, bent by the gentle admonition of my baptizer, I did what had to be done for salvation. And so, considering that I had satisfied the divine mysteries by the second dipping, I began to want to get out of the font. I was almost frozen rigid by its extreme cold. But again the clergy clamored with loud shouts that to complete the sacrament I had humbly to submit to be immersed to the south in the saving waves. Overcome therefore by diabolical fraud, I suspected that they were making a laughingstock of me. (108)12

Although Hermann here presents his misunderstanding as resulting from the devil’s last-ditch attempt to derail the conversion, such an explanation might only resolidify our skepticism about the convert as a Christian spokesman. After all, many currents in medieval thought and culture pointed toward a tight, perhaps unbreakable connection between the Jew and the devil.13 And 11  “in ceteris ad fidem ortodoxam pertinentibus sufficienter pro mea capacitate imbutus” (118-19). 12  “Fluenta igitur vivifici fontis ingressus et in eo semel contra orientem immersus, solam hanc immersionem suffecisse credebam ad antique vetustatis renovationem. Clerici autem baptisterium circumstantes sepius me mergi debere clamabant. Sed ego, qui fonte iam recens emerseram, discrete eorum voces audire vel clare quos mihi faciebant nutus, defluente nimirum hinc inde piloso capite aqua, videre non poteram. Igitur a facie detersa manibus aqua, quid vellent audivi, sed magno fontis astrictus frigore eorum primo voluntati non libenter obedivi. Attamen blanda baptiste mei flexus ammonitione feci quod faciendum erat pro salute. Ratus itaque hac me secunda tinctione divinis misteriis satisfecisse, cepi de fonte velle exire. Siquidem pre nimio eius algore pene totus obrigueram. Sed clerus magnis rursum vocibus perstrepebat, me ad consummationem sacramenti etiam versus austrum salutaribus fluentis humiliter debere submitti. Diabolica ergo fraude circumventus suspicatus sum haberi me ab eis derisui” (119). 13  See Joshua Trachtenburg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983 [1943]). 51

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Hermann’s emphasis on the coldness of the water, on being “almost frozen rigid,” frustrates the expectation that the moment of baptism should be one at which the convert feels the fire of God’s love; this also echoes stereotypes about Jewish “stiff-necked” rigidity that strongly call into question the possibility that a Jew can truly become a Christian. If we are urged by the Christian writer Hermann here to laugh at the persistent misunderstanding of his once Jewish protagonist, this call for laughter curiously comes at a moment when the convert’s status as new, believing Christian should be firmly established – at a moment when, in fact, the text has expended considerable energy stabilizing this new identity. The comic scene thus operates to undermine that stability and the laughter it evokes potentially echoes back against its convert author. Still, as Hermann/Judah presents the situation, the writing of his conversion autobiography is a response to the urgings of pious Christians: “Many religious, both men and women, persist in trying to find out from me how I converted from Judaism to the grace of Christ and whether, among the first beginnings of my conversion, I endured temptations of the malign Enemy. Indeed, recently … the devout request of some women of holy lives compelled me to unfold its whole sequence of events” (76).14 Hermann makes clear here that his audience is an audience of Christians – “believers of the coming age, as of the present” (76)15 – and that, paradoxically, the account of his conversion is all the more valuable because the conversion did not occur easily: For I was not converted with that ease with which we often see many unbelievers, whether Jews or pagans, converted to the catholic faith by a swift and unanticipated change … But, by contrast, my conversion was gained in the face of powerful waves of temptations, which ever mounted at the beginning, of many treacheries that the ancient Enemy laid to arrest it … For these reasons, it ought to be all the more delightful for pious ears to hear, as it is amazing in light of the difficulty with which it came to pass. (76)16

14  “Solent plerique religiosi tam viri quam femine a me sciscitari, qualiter de Iudaismo ad Christi gratiam conversus sim, vel si que inter ipsa conversionis mee primordia maligni hostis temptamenta pertulerim, sicut et nuper … quarundam sancte conversationis feminarum devota petitione coactus sum omnem eius seriem replicare” (69). 15  “tam futuri quam presentis evi fidelibus” (70). 16  “Non enim ea facilitate conversus sum, qua multos sepe infideles sive Iudeos sive paganos ad fidem catholicam repentina et inopinata mutatione converti videmus ... At vero mea conversio, gravissimis in eius primordio crebrescentibus temptationum procellis multisque se ei opponente antiquo hoste insidiis … Unde et piis auribus tanto ad audiendum est delectabilis, quanto ex hac ipsa effectus sui difficultate extitit mirabilis” (69-70). 52

Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges

Something about the struggle of the convert to convert speaks intimately to all Christian believers, present and future, “faithfully … proclaim[ing] the inestimable grace of him who has called me from darkness into his wondrous light” (76-77).17 This begins to suggest one hypothesis for why certain converts, and their conversion experiences, might have provided important support for Christian orthodoxy: in dramatizing the struggle to reach the truth that he presents as the Christian dispensation, Hermann/Judah highlights a process – of the difficult arrival at true belief – that is especially salient for the convert but pertinent as well to all Christians in their struggle to move from darkness to the “wondrous light” enabled by God’s “inestimable grace.” There are, of course, other, plausible reasons why former Jews might have been perceived as especially apt and effective Christian spokesmen. As, following the twelfth century, the Christian/Jewish debate focused more and more on Talmudic, rather than Biblical, material – a movement that converts like Peter Alfonsi, Nicholas Donin, and Pablo Christiani in many ways helped instigate – former Jews, with a knowledge of Hebrew and the Talmud, were necessary “native informants.”18 But that they served not just as behind-the-scenes advisers but also as the “front men” for much Christian polemic remains in need of explanation. Insofar as anti-Jewish literary polemic and public disputation were directed toward Jewish as well as Christian audiences – as is probable in some cases, but not in others – and specifically toward persuading Jews of the truth of Christian revelation, and hence of the need to convert, those who had already converted might be seen as particularly effective spokesmen, able to address their former coreligionists with more knowledge and through more persuasive rhetoric. (Here one might argue, however, that, given the sadness, resentment, and anger an individual’s conversion could elicit within his former community, the convert might in fact encounter more resistance with a Jewish audience than would a complete outsider.) But we also have significant evidence that convert texts and public performances were directed not just toward Jewish audiences, and that converts were considered effective Christian spokesmen even on questions that did not depend upon more abstruse Hebrew or Talmudic knowledge. To give one suggestive instance, Peter Alfonsi’s Dialogues is quite frequently found in manuscripts whose main goal seems to be the refutation 17  “inestimabilem gratiam eius, qui me de tenebris vocavit in admirabile lumen suum [citing 1 Peter 2.9] … fideliter annuntiare” (70). 18  On these broad historical changes, see Amos Funkenstein, “Basic Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 2 (1971): 373-82; Cohen, Friars, op. cit.; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); and Kruger, Spectral Jew, op. cit. 53

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of heresy: here, we can see the text’s explicit arguments against Judaism and Islam being understood as also speaking effectively against heretical Christian positions.19 Guillaume de Bourges, Liber bellorum Domini: Claiming Abjection

To address further the questions I have begun to raise, I turn now to a closer examination of one example of a convert orthodox spokesman, the French Jewish convert, Guillaume de Bourges, who flourished circa 1235. Guillaume wrote the Liber bellorum Domini [The Book of the Wars of the Lord], a work of Christian exegetical polemic, contained in a single manuscript (Bibliothèque nationale [BN], MS lat. 18211); he also authored two homilies – one on Matthew, chapter 2, verses 1-12 (the story of the three magi) and one on John, chapter 8, verses 1-11 (the account of the woman taken in adultery), which follow directly on the Liber bellorum Domini in BN MS lat. 18211.20 Of the three works, only the Liber bellorum Domini explicitly foregrounds Guillaume’s status as convert, though both homilies also engage certain themes of the antiJewish polemic. In addition, as I will suggest here, the Homily on John may be read as reflecting in a more implicit way on conversion experience and, in so doing, as suggesting some of the ways in which Guillaume sees his own Jewish to Christian conversion as resonating with Christian moral experience more generally.

19  Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, gives a full account of the contents of manuscripts containing the Dialogues. As this account suggests, manuscripts that place Peter’s Dialogues (or sections of it) in proximity to texts attacking heresy include Charleville, Bibliothèque Municipale 113; Klosterneuburg Stiftsbibliothek 826; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 6502; Oxford, Merton College 175 (formerly K.3.3); Prague, Archiv Praźského hradu C.XCV. 20  For the text (and a French translation) of all three of these works see Gilbert Dahan’s edition: Guillaume de Bourges, Livre des guerres du seigneur et deux homélies, ed. and trans. Gilbert Dahan, Sources Chrétiennes 288 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1981). Dahan’s introduction provides the fullest available account of Guillaume de Bourges and his work. The title of the Liber bellorum Domini is a citation of Numbers 21:14, and perhaps refers to Jewish polemical works with similar titles. Dahan argues persuasively that all three works are by Guillaume (the manuscript attributes the Liber directly to him, and the two, immediately following homilies are ascribed to “eiusdem” [the same one].) Dahan judges other works contained in Bibliothèque nationale, MS lat. 18211 to be not necessarily (or certainly not) by Guillaume. I use Dahan’s edition here (though I have also consulted the manuscript), giving page numbers parenthetically. The English translation is my own. 54

Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges

In opening the Liber bellorum Domini, the author introduces himself explicitly as a convert, “Guillaume, a deacon of Christ, formerly a Jew.”21 Although the Liber contains a few Talmudic references, it works fairly traditionally to prove Christian truth through Old Testament exegesis, compiling thirty chapters (to correspond to the “thirty pieces of silver” for which “Christ was turned over to the Jews” to be destroyed.)22 These chapters take up in turn the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the life of Christ, to show how all are prophesied in Hebrew scripture. Guillaume’s polemic has the interesting innovation that it (quite accurately) transliterates the Hebrew citations it considers, as Guillaume notes, “in order that … the Jews may not be able to deny the authorities of the prophets pertaining to Christ.”23 Clearly, Guillaume here uses his status as former Jew in a quite specific way to make his text more persuasive and authoritative, particularly to a Jewish audience. But Guillaume also presents the text as having a more complex motive than the refutation of traditional Jewish exegesis and a more multiplex audience than the Jewish communities he, as convert, has left behind. Like Hermann/Judah, Guillaume notes in his Prologue that the work has been requested by faithful Christians: at the instigation, as I believe, of certain faithful people who believe me to have advanced a certain distance in knowledge of the Hebrew language, I have been compelled to compose a book of disputation against the perfidy of the Jews, concerning our catholic faith, according to that which the true Hebrew attests, so that, concerning that truth itself which [the Jews] keep in the obscurity of the letter, carnally, not truly and spiritually, [these Jews] be confounded both in understanding and in act by the testimony of the letter itself.24

And a moment later, Guillaume expands on the mission of his work: “Since truly our savior, with his hands stretched out on the cross, deigned to fight for us before his passion, [and] as we read, he did so not only against the Jews but also against the heretical Saducees, therefore, if we love him perfectly,

21  “Guillelmus Christi diaconus, olim iudeus” (66). 22  “Et quia Iudei pro triginta argenteis Christum sibi traditum per invidiam perdiderunt, ideo scripsi eis triginta capitula evangelica” (76). 23  “Ut igitur Iudei negare non possint prophetarum auctoritates ad Christum pertinentes” (76). 24  “instigantibus, sicut credo, quibusdam fidelibus qui me in noticia lingue hebrayce credunt aliquantulum profecisse, compulsus sum de fide nostra catholica, secundum quod hebraica veritas attestatur, disputacionis librum componere contra perfidiam Iudeorum, ut de ipsa veritate quam tenent in littere obscuritate, carnaliter, non veraciter et spiritualiter, intellectu vel opere iuxta ipsius littere testimonium confundantur” (66). 55

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insofar as we are able, we must fight against the enemies of God.”25 The full title Guillaume gives his work, in its opening line, is the “The Books of the Wars of the Lord against the Jews and against the Heretics,”26 and following its engagement with Hebrew scripture, the Liber concludes with a discrete “book against the heretics.”27 Gilbert Dahan, who has edited and translated Guillaume’s work, argues that the attack here operates not just against heresy in general but more specifically against a Cathar-like, dualist heresy, probably that located at La Charité-sur-Loire, which was attacked by Pope Gregory IX and his inquisitor Robert le Bougre, at roughly the same moment when, it seems, Guillaume was composing his text.28 (One might ask parenthetically here whether Robert’s own career – as a Cathar converted to orthodoxy; as a Dominican inquisitor working to suppress heresy, but himself ultimately imprisoned, perhaps for violent excesses in his anti-heretical activities – echoes in certain ways the careers of Jewish converts like Guillaume de Bourges who also came to speak for Christian orthodoxy.) Whatever the precise historical circumstances of Guillaume’s polemical attack on both Judaism and heresy, somehow the convert is seen by the “faithful” who ask him to write – and he also sees himself – as an appropriate spokesman not just in addressing the Jews among whom he once lived but also in leading an attack against Christians who have deviated in heretical fashion from their own religion. But Guillaume assumes his position of authority, in the Liber, in a complex, indeed paradoxical manner, and importantly he chooses to highlight rather than downplay this complexity. He emphasizes that, at the same time the “faithful” have called on him to write this book, other Christians have resisted the project; quoting Psalms, Guillaume reports, “But false witnesses arose against me [Psalms 26 [27].12]. They asked, how dare you compose a book of disputation, since you are a Jew [cum tu iudeus sis] and have only recently been baptized, and have worked hardly at all among the grammarians and the scholars? You are an ass; you are a dog.”29 In the voice of his opponents, Guillaume here mobilizes 25  “Cum vero redemptor noster, expansis in cruce manibus, dignatus est pro nobis pugnare ante passionem, non solum contra Iudeos, verum eciam contra Saduceos hereticos sic legitur fecisse. Itaque, si eum perfecte diligimus, contra Dei inimicos pro posse debemus pugnare” (68). 26  “Libri bellorum Domini contra Iudeos et contra Hereticos” (66). 27  “liber contra hereticos” (264). 28  Guillaume, Livre, op. cit., 47-48. 29  “Sed insurrexerunt in me testes iniqui. Quomodo, inquiunt, ausus es disputacionis librum componere, cum tu iudeus sis et nuper baptizatus, et inter gramaticos atque scolares minime laborasti? Tu es asinus, tu es canis” (68). The citation is from Psalms 26 in the Vulgate, numbered as 27 in the King James Version. In future citations of Psalms, I give (as here) the Vulgate chapter number followed in brackets by the alternative numbering. 56

Convert Orthodoxies: The Case of Guillaume de Bourges

what might very well be more general Christian objections to adopting former Jews as spokesmen – objections quite like those mobilized against converts, for instance, in the later Iberian situation. Despite his conversion, Guillaume is still a Jew and hence also an ass and a dog. “Compelled to respond” to this objection, Guillaume interestingly does not simply deny or refute it. Instead, in a move that echoes contemporary reclaiming and revaluation of terms of attack like “queer,” he turns the objection around, making the projected disparagement redound to his own advantage. Guillaume answers, by his own account, without animosity or defensiveness: “Certainly, most dear ones [karissimi], I was the brother of dragons and the companion of ostriches [Job 30:29], and from asses and dogs I have taken my origin. But he who has made the blind to see and the deaf to hear and the mute to speak [Mark 7.37], has led me beside the waters of restoration, and has converted my soul [Psalms 22 [23].2-3], and, since I have not learned letters, I desire to enter into the power of the Lord [Psalms 70 [71].15-16].”30 (The argument here is made all the stronger by Guillaume’s skillful interweaving into his response of scriptural material – and of references not just to the Hebrew Biblical text, Psalms and Job, but also to the New Testament.) Guillaume’s argument is that the abjected position of the convert in fact connects him particularly strongly to divine grace, to the actions of a Lord “who converts the soul,” actions of course necessary for the salvation not only of a Jew but of every human being. Indeed, Guillaume goes on to suggest that his very status as “ass” and “dog” – which he moves to embrace – also makes him an especially effective Christian spokesman. In an elaborate, indeed virtuoso, use of Biblical allusion, in which he refers to Isaiah, Tobit, Exodus, Psalms, Numbers, John, Genesis, Matthew, Ecclesiastes, Judges, 1 Samuel, Esther, Lamentations, Revelation, Proverbs, Mark, 1 Corinthians, Titus, 2 Timothy, 2 Thessalonians, and 1 Kings (more or less in that order), Guillaume aligns himself with Balaam’s ass, and with an ass that throws off its rider specifically in order to take up Christ as he rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.31 Quoting Ecclesiastes 9.4, “a living dog is better than a dead lion,”32 he embraces, too, the animal so often associated with a position of non- or antiChristian degradation,33 and he uses the comparison of dog and lion then to 30  “Quibus compulsus sum respondere: Utique, karissimi, frater draconum fui et socius structionum et de asinis et canibus traxi originem. Sed ille qui cecos fecit videre et surdos audire et mutos loqui, super aquam refectionis educavit me, animam meam convertit, et, quia non cognovi literaturam, cupio intrare in potencias Domini” (68). 31  Guillaume, Livre, 68, 70, 72, 74. 32  “Ecclesiastes enim dicit: Melior est canis vivus leone mortuo” (70). 33  See Kenneth R. Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 57

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leave behind the animal references and move into a new register of allusion in which he shows that a weaker figure’s triumph over the strong is more striking and significant than a strong man’s triumph over the weak. Here, he affiliates his own less than fully established position within Christianity explicitly with that of David, as the unlikely conqueror of Goliath and the equally unlikely young king who outdoes Saul. All of this serves to associate Guillaume – as converted Jew – with the long tradition of thinking the Christian as the weak, the poor, the disprivileged who will miraculously, through God’s grace, triumph over those who are worldly rich and powerful. Indeed, what Guillaume ultimately suggests here is that he, as dog and ass, as Jewish convert, is the truest sort of Christian and, therefore, an appropriate instructor not only for erring Jews and not only for heretics but also for believing Christians themselves. At the very end of the Prologue, he strongly associates his own position as convert with a “truth” (emphasized through insistent repetition) that should provide reliable guidance for all: “We truly, who have received blessed baptism from God, truly three and one, firmly and faithfully believe in that truth, which rejecting all falsehood and leading his faithful into every truth, will provide the true and endless rewards of truth world without end.”34 Guillaume de Bourges, Homily on John: Reading Like a Convert

The Liber bellorum Domini thus foregrounds and ultimately grants authority to the figure of the convert. Guillaume’s Homily on John, although not explicitly acknowledging its author’s status as convert, nonetheless puts conversion experience at its center – both in its content and in its form – in such a way as to develop an implicit argument that resonates with the more explicit exploration of the convert’s status in the Liber. The account of the woman taken in adultery from John, which serves as the text for Guillaume’s homily, lends itself to readings that emphasize stark moral contrasts, and Guillaume develops these in a striking manner, emphasizing in particular turns or reversals in moral positioning that might suggest conversionary movements. Thus, the “scribes and Pharisees”35 of the story, representatives of a mistaken Jewish orthodoxy, are identified at the outset of the Homily as “the sons of Satan,”36 34  “Nos vero, qui a Deo vero trino et uno baptismum suscepimus sacrum, firmiter et fideliter credamus veritati, que omnem respuens falsitatem suosque fideles in omnem veritatem inducens, vera et sine fine veritatis premia precepturos in secula seculorum. Amen” (74). 35  “scribe et Pharisei” (290). 36  “Sathane filii” (290). 58

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an identification that prepares for the story’s ultimate, inverse revelation that the sinner at its center, the adulteress charged by these upstanding men, is herself to sin no more. Guillaume’s interpretation, which starts out as a close, line-by-line, literal reading of the Biblical text, several times highlights the chiastic structures thus put into play from the beginning of the Homily – the respectable men who are in fact Satanic and whose moral bankruptcy is clearly demonstrated; the sinner who should not be attacked, but saved – and it shows such structures in fact to characterize the largest trajectory of the scriptural story. When he reaches the midpoint of his literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative, Guillaume pauses to review and reemphasize its overall structure: “To this point, we have heard about the malice and foolishness of the scribes and Pharisees, so that we learn to shun evil. But now we will hear the goodness and prudence of Christ, so that we learn with him to choose good.”37 But if the malice and foolishness of the scribes and Pharisees are neatly posed against Christ’s goodness and prudence; if the listener’s moral options – to shun evil or to choose good – are clear-cut; if the scribes and Pharisees and the woman they accuse move in opposite directions in the story, the crossed thematics of the homily’s exegesis are not so simple. While the scribes and Pharisees literally represent the historical Jews who do not follow Jesus, and who in fact try actively to confound him, they are also identified by Guillaume with the “adulterous generation”38 of Matthew 12.39, and hence associated quite strongly with the adulterous woman they have come to accuse, who is thus herself associated with their Jewishness. The two – accuser and accused – enter the stage of the story together, if adversarially, and Guillaume’s interpretation, in its language, brings them together here, if only immediately to reemphasize their separate trajectories: “Therefore, the adulteress [adultera] left just as Satan from the face of the Lord, and the woman [mulier] stands before the Lord.”39 Of course, it is, in John 8.9, the scribes and Pharisees, identified by Guillaume as the “adulterous generation,” who exit the scene, but Guillaume’s language here – making the one who departs the female “adultera” – suggests that it is simultaneously one aspect of the woman that departs, leaving the simple “mulier,” no longer identifiable as “adultera,” standing before the Lord. One type of Jewishness – both the “adulterous generation” of the scribes and Pharisees and the adulterous aspect of the woman – turns away, definitively, from Christ while another stands with him, ready for conversion. And it is 37  “Usque huc de malicia et stulticia scribarum et Phariseorum audivimus, ut discamus reprobare malum. Demum audiamus bonitatem et prudenciam Christi, ut discamus cum eo eligere bonum” (294). 38  “generacionem adulteram” (296). 39  “Exivit igitur adultera sicut Sathan a facie Domini, et mulier stat ante Dominum” (296). 59

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the woman’s conversion that the remainder of Guillaume’s literal reading of the text from John emphasizes: “penitent,”40 she is of course directed by Jesus to “go and sin no more.”41 At this point, moreover, what has been largely a literal reading of the gospel moves into an allegorical mode that emphasizes simultaneously the historical supersession of Judaism by a new dispensation and the need for a moral transformation, embodied particularly in the woman but necessary for every human being: “Go [Vade] and sin no more [John 8.11]. Go out of this temple made by hands, in which not one stone will remain upon another that will not be pulled down [Matthew 24.2], and go into the temple not made by hands, concerning which Isaiah says that not at all will it be able to be taken down, nor shall any of its stakes be removed forever [Isaiah 33.20].”42 Unlike the scribes and Pharisees, the woman taken in adultery is able to move out of her Jewishness and into a new order; her experience is here understood as conversion, and specifically linked to the historical conversion from Judaism to Christianity, from the literal, perishable temple of the Old Testament to an eternal temple identified with the new, Christian dispensation. To this point in the Homily, Guillaume has pursued a fairly close, literal reading of the passage from John, with occasional excursuses into its moral implications, but without developing any extended allegorical reading. With the charting of the woman’s final moral movement, her conversion, however, he moves definitively into a new, allegorizing mode, which he highlights, and which leads him to return to the text from John and elaborate a new, extended reading of it. Although Guillaume’s literal exegesis has here reached the end of the text, the Homily is less than half finished, and the reading of the gospel text begins anew. Having interpreted the text’s Vade as a call to move from the literal, earthly temple to a spiritual, eternal one, Guillaume continues, calling on his readers (and himself) to “Go from the letter to the spirit, from the figure to the truth, from this world to the Father. And ‘sin no more,’ nor wish to look backwards like Lot’s wife [Genesis 19.26].”43 He then reminds us that, in the account just explicated, the Lord bent down twice to write, which Guillaume now reads allegorically as a call to him as interpreter: “And since, for the love of Him who for the sinner twice wrote on the ground, I have now, according

40  “penitens” (298). 41  “Vade et amplius noli peccare” (300, citing John 8.11). 42  “Vade et amplius noli peccare. Vade de hoc templo manu facto, in quo non remanebit lapis super lapidem qui non destruatur, et intra in templum manu factum, de quo dicit Ysaias quod nequaquam transferri poterit nec auferentur clavi eius in sempiternum” (300). 43  “Vade de littera in spiritum, de figura in veritatem, de hoc mundo ad patrem. Et amplius noli peccare, noli respicere retro sicut uxor Loth” (300). 60

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to my ability, made a historical [i.e., literal] exposition, I wish a second time with His aid to run through this Gospel allegorically.”44 The re-beginning of the Homily replays – this time at the level of form – the kinds of doubling and distinction that the literal reading of John has emphasized as a matter of theme or content. If the distinction of Jesus from the scribes and Pharisees; the scribes and Pharisses from the adulterous woman; the woman as “mulier” from her self as “adultera” – if such movements of distinction structure the literal reading of the text, the move to an allegorical register returns to the literal reading so far developed to redouble but also to exceed it. In other words, the Homily develops a literal reading – conventionally associated with the Jews and thematized toward the beginning of the homily in the reading practices of the scribes and Pharisees (who want to apply the law and its punishment of stoning literally to the woman they bring before Jesus) – in order ultimately to show this literal reading left behind in a new beginning. As Christ addresses first the erring scribes and Pharisees and then the woman ready to begin a new life; as the woman herself stands in front of Jesus at a moment that separates her adulterous past from her reformed future; so the author of the homily – himself a convert from Judaism to Christianity – demonstrates in his movement from literal to allegorical reading his definitive movement from a Jewish past to a Christian present and future.45 Simultaneously, the thematics of the interpretation turns more fully toward emphasizing, on the one hand, the necessity of certain conversionary movements and, on the other, the need to attack non-orthodox (both Jewish and heretical) positions. Thus, for instance, Christ’s journey from the mountain to the temple (suggested in the first verses of the passage from John) is now read by Guillaume as mandating a movement for the “us” addressed in the Homily “from the heights of Holy Scripture to the temple of the body of Christ, from the active life to the contemplative or, if it will be necessary, from the contemplative to the active.”46 Here, as the reversibility of the contemplative and active lives suggests, it is perhaps less the particular conversion that is urged than it is conversionary movement itself. The Homily will end, too, with a long call, again addressed to “us,” for conversionary movements (wrapped up now with a certain apocalyptic 44  “Et quia amore eius qui pro peccatrice bis in terra scripsit hystorice iam pro posse meo exposui, iterum volo cum ipsius adiutorio allegorice hoc Evangelium transcurrere” (300). 45  A similar charting of the movement from literal to allegorical understanding characterizes Hermann/Judah’s account of his conversion. See my discussion in Dreaming in the Middle Ages, op. cit., 154-65. 46  “sic et nos debemus de altitudine sacre Scripture ad templum corporis Christi venire, de vita active ad contemplativam vel, si necesse fuerit, de contemplativa ad activam” (302). 61

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thematics): “Let us flee therefore, dearest brothers, the evils that are to come”;47 “Let us similarly flee the temple of Dagon, in which is the king of Babylon with goats on his left hand.”48 And these calls for flight are complemented by the anticipation of arrival: “let us hasten to enter into the temple of God, in which is the true king Solomon, with sheep on his right hand.”49 Lest we confuse this movement with a Judaism that would claim Solomon as its own, Guillaume continues, “But first it is necessary that we enter through the gate of the temple. The gate of the temple and the temple of the temple is the blessed Virgin Mary, concerning whom Ezekiel says: I have turned [Converti] to the way of the gate of the exterior sanctuary which faces to the East, and this was closed [Ezekiel 44.1]. This is the gate of the Lord; the just will enter through it [Psalms 117 [118].20].”50 At the same time that “we” are urged to move in the right direction, along with Christ and the woman taken in adultery, we are directly warned to avoid the snares of both Judaism and heresy. In the second half of the Homily, the hostile treatment of the historical “scribes and Pharisees” in the Homily’s literal reading mutates into a more direct (if allegorizing) attack on contemporary (i.e., medieval) Judaism and heresy. The “scribe et Pharizei” of the gospel text are explicitly allegorized as the “Iudei et Heretici” who “condemn the blessed Church or the blessed soul through their false traditions and empty deceit.”51 Guillaume makes explicit that, “By the scribes are designated the Jews, who are writers not of good things but of evil ones,” and that “By the Pharisees are designated the heretics, who are understood as ‘divided [or separated off]’.”52 Christ’s double writing on the ground is now reinterpreted as his writing against both the Jews and the heretics.53 And Guillaume develops an extended, and unusual, reading of Solomon and the two harlots (1 Kings 3.16-28) that makes the two women representatives not of Ecclesia and Synagoga (as is often the case) but instead of Synagoga and the “heretical Sadducean people.”54 This 47  “Fugiamus ergo, fratres karissimi, mala que ventura sunt” (314). 48  “Fugiamus similiter templum Dagon, in quo est rex Babilonis cum hedis ad sinistram” (316). 49  “et festinemus ingredi in templum Dei, in quo verus Salomon rex, cum agnis ad dexteram” (316). 50  “Sed primum oportet nos introire per portam templi. Porta templi et templum templi est beata Virgo Maria, de qua Ezechiel ait: Converti me ad viam porte sanctuarii exterioris que respiciebat ad Orientem, et hec erat clausa. Hec est porta Domini; iusti intrabunt per eam” (316). 51  “scribe et Pharizei, id est Iudei et Heretici condempnant sanctam Ecclesiam vel sanctam animam per falsas tradiciones et inanem fallaciam” (302, 304). 52  “Per scribas designantur Iudei, qui sunt scriptores non bonorum sed malorum … Per Pharizeos designantur heretici, qui interpretantur ‘divisi’” (304). 53  See Guillaume, Livre, 306. 54  “gens saducea heretica” (306). 62

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allegory significantly complicates the force of Guillaume’s Homily, for, if both Judaism and heresy are to be turned away from, here Synagoga, though negligent in “sleeping” while her child (that is, allegorically, “the living son of God”55) is stolen from her, is destined to awake: “And up until the end, she will not see the light. But then she will contemplate the bright and true light [John 1.9] … She will seek the true Solomon, that is God the Father, and will seek the living son of God, and through the sword of the Holy Spirit [Ephesians 6.17] the son of God is handed over to her … And thus the remnants of Israel will be saved.”56 Appropriately, the Jewish convert to Christianity here emphasizes how his individual movement will be, at the end of time, echoed in the conversion of the entire “Synagogue,” and he simultaneously attempts to separate off this conversionary movement from the heretical abandonment of the new law that the unredeemable “harlot” here represents – an abandonment that, in this reading at least, can never be turned back or compensated for. If the allegorical (re)reading of the gospel text provides the occasion for an elaboration of anti-Jewish and anti-heretical doctrine, it also thus provides an opportunity for distinguishing contemporary Jews, no matter how erroneous their beliefs might be, from heretics, who have actively abandoned – “divided” themselves from – the body of the Church. The expectation of the end-time “conversion of the Jews” is of course standard within Christian apocalyptic thinking, but here too it provides at least a suggestion of the convert author’s selfidentification, with a Judaism overcome by the movement into Christianity and against a heresy that would take Christianity in precisely the wrong directions. Queer Convert Orthodoxies?

The convert figure calls attention, for Christians, to questions that remain unresolved (and vital especially at moments of Reform) about Christian identity: How does the original humility of Christ and the Christian jibe with an increasingly powerful Church? Does being born a Christian guarantee the benefits of Christianity? Since it does not, how does one gain those benefits? How does the idea that one must throw off the old and embrace the new – become a convert within the Christian dispensation – connect to those who begin their lives outside that dispensation and desire or decide to enter it? Is this kind of intra-religious conversion the same as the Jewish to Christian conversion

55  “Dei filium vivum” (306). 56  “Et usque in finem non videbit lumen. Sed tunc intuens erit clara luce et vera … Petet verum Salomonem, id est Deum Patrem, petet filium Dei vivum, et per gladium Spiritus sancti traditus est ei filius Dei ... Et sic reliquie Israel salve fient” (306, 308). 63

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(with which, after all, Christianity itself began)?57 Raising questions like these is orthodox – and connects clearly to such major movements within Christianity as the elaboration of the fraternal orders, where established Christian selfunderstandings are challenged from within to reassert a relationship to a purer, original Christian and Christ-like impulse. But such orthodox movements are at the same time destabilizing of mainstream Christianity (as we see, too, when radical, spiritual Franciscans push too far their insistence on originary, humble, poor Christian values and stray into the territory of heresy, or when lay people and women try to claim spiritual prerogatives that previously have been largely the province of the male clerisy). If true Christian identity is always – like St. Paul’s, or like Guillaume de Bourges’s – a convert identity, how to deal with, how to respond to movements of conversion that claim to connect to originary Christian values but that are judged ultimately by the Church hierarchy to be heretical? Relatedly, while the Jewish convert to Christianity might show the way into the true Church, and might be seen to echo movements of spiritual conversion within Christianity, at the same time any movement of conversion – and perhaps especially Jewish to Christian conversion – raises anxieties about the possibility of improper or unfaithful conversions. How, having admitted conversion as central to Christian experience, can conversion be delimited to only particular kinds and directions of movement? One way might be – as seems to be the case with Guillaume de Bourges’s text – to deploy the Jewish to Christian convert to suggest a normative movement – to suggest at one and the same time that this is the movement that Jews must take, and that the movement away from a Christian orthodox center that characterizes heresy is not the same movement, is perhaps in fact simply a reverse movement back into a false and blind Judaism rather than toward true Christian faith. After all, medieval heresies are frequently identified as Judaizing, as suggesting a turning not just away from orthodox truth but in fact back toward a Judaism that Christianity is supposed to have superseded. Still, if all Christians are supposed to experience a spiritual conversion, on the model of a Jewish movement into Christianity, there remains the problem of how to discern movements of conversion that fail, go too far, become heretical. While the Jewish convert might thus stand as a kind of model figure for Christian spiritual movements, he also stands at a place of high anxiety for Christian orthodoxy. The tension that Guillaume de Bourges identifies around his project – with his now fellow Christians both calling on him to write and telling him that he should be disqualified from writing – might be seen to characterize more generally the place of the Jewish convert within 57  See Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), for a discussion of the centrality of conversion to medieval Christian self-understanding. 64

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orthodoxy. Urging converts to enter Christian communities, Christians show themselves ready both to exploit their new Christian colleagues as proof of the persuasiveness of Christian truth and to accuse them of not being true or full or perfect Christians. Converts stand both as the perfect foils to heresy and as themselves potentially or actually heretical. We should see here not simply a reiteration of Christian anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism but also a deep problem that medieval Christianity has yet fully to work out about its own contours and identity. Movements of change and conversion (like those Jewish converts exemplarily take on) are crucial to the Christian self, but such movements of change and conversion simultaneously threaten the Christian subject with a fall into heresy, which is potentially a Judaizing fall back into the Jewish past that Christianity claims and hopes definitively to have left behind. It is not easy, then, to judge to what extent convert identities are disturbing to – or, alternatively, reinforcing of – dominant Christian identities. They seem, in fact, to be disruptive and stabilizing at one and the same time. If we often think queer at the current moment as a force of destabilization operating visà-vis solid and stable norms and normative identities, convert identities like those described here – identities that depend for their force on an embrace of movement and radical change in the self – are certainly somehow queer. But at the same time they resonate strongly with dominant Christian notions of a self that must be converted, changed radically, reborn, and hence these convert identities are also, no matter how queer, deeply implicated in the dominant. There is, no doubt, something queer in the convert’s (paradoxical) positioning of himself at the center of Christian identity, and in the embrace, enacted by Guillaume of Bourges, of disparaged, abjected identity positions. This something queer is in part a survival of Christianity’s own, originary, anti-social impulse, its radical overturning of what it means to be righteous, strong, good, saved. In the medieval moment, however, a moment in which Christianity is no longer a powerless upstart, the convert’s queer torsions are at the same time orthodox Christian movements, complicit with the power of an established Church that would think itself anything but queer. If we assume (as seems sometimes, or often, to be the case in presentist queer theory) that queer equals destabilization equals resistance to normativity, what do we do with convert identities that embrace their own abject, destabilized positions in order precisely to emphasize their approach to an ideal of dominant Christian selfhood? When Judith Halberstam, in a book that contains rich material for a rethinking of “queer time and place,” valorizes disruptive queer subcultural spaces and lives by fantasizing a normative heterosexuality in which “heterosexual men and women are spending their weekends, their extra cash, and all their free time shuttling back and forth between the weddings of friends and family,” she suggests (mistakenly, I think) that normative heterosexuality gains its power only from standing still, trapped in an endless round of wedding 65

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after wedding.58 But doesn’t much of the force of normativity reside precisely in its investment in change – what Lee Edelman recognizes as a persistent fantasy of a future that can never arrive?59 Normative heterosexuality, after all, might be seen as entailing not just (and not primarily) a stable occupying of a comfortable place at the wedding table but instead an almost frantic movement from position to position – an embrace of romantic love that has, as its object, a future embrace of marriage, the goal of which is the production of children, whose presence then sparks the anticipation of being freed from the responsibilities of childrearing (and so forth). If we imagine, from the queer margins, that this forward-rushing narrative of a “heterosexual” life is secured by a simple, stable “heterosexual” self, we run the risk of missing how the ideology of heterosexuality is, at least in part, buttressed by the imagination that the stages of this narrative are in fact “life-changing” and transformative, anything but stabilizing. Complementarily, don’t we lose something by imagining queerness as simply unstable, destabilizing, never standing still? Isn’t part of queer resistance at least sometimes the insistence on a strategic stability, a refusal to embrace normative movements – for instance, the refusal to “grow out” of queer subcultural life recognized in Halberstam’s own analysis, or a “staying Jewish” in the medieval context that resists the pressure toward conversion.60 Medieval “convert orthodoxies” thus might suggest to us some general ways in which we need to think change, instability, destabilization not only as socially resistant or disruptive but also potentially as the very means by which larger social structures establish themselves as dominant – as stable structures (paradoxical though the formulation may be) of change, instability, movement.

58  Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 174. 59  Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 60  On “staying Jewish,” its power and its dangers, see Kruger, Spectral Jew, op. cit. 66

Chapter 4

Anglican, Jewish and Pagan: The Queen Anne Churches as Queer Spaces Chris Mounsey

When we look at the London churches built following the 1711 Act, we see structures that differ greatly from the Medieval cruciform plan with Romanesque or Gothic arch-work, that had hitherto been prevalent in England. The new churches display quite recognizable Greek, Roman and Egyptian elements, but, as we shall see, they are also quintessentially Anglican in conception. The problem with so simple a designation as “quintessentially Anglican” lies, however, in the question of what is essential about Anglicanism. Despite the Book of Common Prayer, which attempted to impose a uniform liturgy upon worshippers in 1662, Anglicans have always been Latitudinarians, and even though the form of words used in worship might be identical, what worshippers understood by them was vastly different as we can readily see in the pamphlet debates on religion in the first decade of the eighteenth century. And so it is, this chapter will argue, with the Queen Anne churches, whose architecture has a unifying plan, but one which, while producing churches that make up a recognizable group, are all different. To say that two things are “the same only different” smacks of childish doggerel, but when we discover what was likely to have been in the minds of the architects and builders of the churches, we find that the reason why these churches take the form they do is irreducibly complex. They are at once thoroughgoing Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and pagan temples in conception and design. It is in this sense that I want to argue that the Queen Anne churches are queer spaces in that they fit with more than one mutually exclusive model for their conception, and thus confound the logic of non-contradiction, and the controlling Anglican idea of Conformity. The argument is made on purely logical grounds, and queer sexuality is used as a complex metaphor to indicate and highlight the non-standard nature of

 The OED notes the first reference to Latitudinarian as the same date as the Prayer Book.

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this group of churches: where the non-standard is by definition set against a normative expectation. It may seem strange to argue that buildings can be called queer, so an explanation will be in order, especially since my work on sexuality may be said to have gone beyond Queer Theory, in that it no longer works from Foucault, but rather from the method of questioning the normative and always finding the queer. It seems to me that the problem with the Foucauldian analysis was that it ignored the glaringly obvious in its fear of essentialism. Based in the deconstructive methodology, Foucault’s History of Sexuality employed the dictum “sodomy is a hopelessly confused category” to tread lightly around the problem of reference to the body, and analyze Confusion rather than sodomy, since reference between language and things in the world has always been the heart of the philosophical conundrum that led to deconstruction. How does the mind know that the body is in contact with the world through its perceptions? The Foucauldian answer to ignore reference to the body and to study only mental concepts, such as social and political connections, is consonant with the methodology of the language-based structuralist/poststructuralist/ deconstructive/postmodern project in which Foucault was engaged. However, I believe that the special case of sexuality can bridge the gap between the mind and body by placing emphasis on desires and capabilities which work in a different way from language. Even though the subjects in a sexual relationship may be classified by their political and social condition, that set of values does not mask the basic desires, or the response of the body to those desires. If a king commands his footman to sodomize him, the footman might be personally inclined to do so or he might not, but he will try to do what the king commands because of his subordinate role. But the king cannot command the footman to desire him, or to maintain an erection out of desire for him. But, moreover, would a king ask a footman to do such a thing if the footman did not show himself, however indirectly, so inclined? At the heart of this example is the irrefutable logic of the body and its mind’s desires. The king may crave the footman’s physical attention, but all his political power cannot answer the blank stare of unreciprocated desire. Even if the footman is able to use his own fantasy to bring himself to the point where he can fulfil the king’s wishes, that act is not the same as a consensual and mutually desired act. But this is not to equate and confuse the consensual and mutually desired act with some kind of ideal based in modern homosexuality. The morganatic relationship between king and footman (Edward II and Piers Gaveston?) may have been as fulfilling as that between two modern men who have been politically and economically joined in a civil partnership. Likewise, the apparently equal civil partnership between a modern millionaire and his penniless partner may be fraught by the power dynamic of money and ownership. But while the physical 68

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is one level of a relationship and the social and political another, fundamental to it being a relationship at all has to be the physical response to the desire which links the mind and body. This is not to say that the modern civil partnership is necessarily a perfect physical and mental union. The power dynamic of money and ownership might enslave the penniless partner in return for financial stability. It might mean that the penniless partner only entered into the civil partnership for money. But these possible explanations – and there are many more – all exist as real versions of the ideal physical and mental union, and the queer compromises of the real relationship are the stuff of life and literature. They ensure that understanding of the queerness of people is local and particular, which was one of the fundamental goals of Queer Theory when it began, and which should remain central to analysis. If this is the metaphor of queer with which I am working, it must seem all the more strange to try to apply it to religious buildings. Surely buildings do not follow the logic of the body or have desires? Yet Anglican church buildings are an expression of the desire of a unified body of people to worship God properly: the congregation say together “We are the body of Christ” and this suggests there may be the aptness of the application of sexuality as a metaphor. In this case, the single body is represented by the congregation, its mind by the acts of worship, and desire by the hope for conformity within the group – and the hope for conformity with the truth of God, which links the body and mind. That the hope for both these types of conformity can represent desire is central to my use of the sexual metaphor, and as we shall see, Sir Christopher Wren’s general plan for what were to become the Queen Anne churches was one which gave a central role to the diverse body of worshippers to link them to the priest and the acts of worship by removing the rood screen, which had hitherto separated the two. Furthermore, the group of churches were built to accommodate the Book of Common Prayer as the nexus of the worship, in the form of the repetition of the same words by not only the congregation present, but by all congregations around the country, in order that everyone conformed to what was thought to be the truth of God. However, if the truth of God is the hoped-for ideal that underpins the group of buildings, close examination of the individual plans discloses the fact that the Queen Anne Churches conform to many different ideal worship structures (the three sets of dimensions given for the Temple of Jerusalem, Stone Circles, Greek and Egyptian temple architecture). They are also at the mercy of the dynamic of money and ownership, as, for example, St. Mary Woolnoth, which owes its shape to the plot of land available after the Fire of London. Together, these local and particular queernesses account for a group of buildings which are “the same only different,” which, following the metaphor of sexuality, may be called queer. And they are particularly queer, since the heterodox buildings, 69

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which reflect the heterodox congregation, were built at the very moment that orthodoxy was prescribed for the Anglican Church in the Book of Common Prayer. If we take the buildings themselves as a metaphor we might argue that the Anglican Church is as heterodox as its churches, from which we might see the Book of Common Prayer as an unwonted call upon a normative reading of the Bible (a reading which closes down that text’s interpretability) to guarantee an unchanging set of rules. And the Queen Anne churches that punctuate the London skyline certainly do have the appearance of heterodoxy, despite their common architectural theme, and hope of imposing orthodox worship. But what we shall see finally is that the eighteenth-century mind did not shirk this paradoxical view of heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and that it will be shown that the diversity of the churches was understood at the time of their building as part of the unified Divine Plan. At one level it might not seem surprising to find that the designs of early eighteenth-century worship spaces (Anglican churches, Dissenting meeting houses and Jewish synagogues) are similar. After all, they are the worship spaces of related religions, built in the same cultural climate. As Edward Jamilly notes of the Bevis Marks synagogue (1701), “we have a traditional Sephardi ceremonial layout inserted into an English meeting house: exactly what might be expected from a Quaker builder who had previously worked on a Wren Church.” Jamilly’s argument is not new, and we can find a culturally determined explanation for it in Helen Rosenau’s explanation dating, significantly, from 1940. “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Protestant Churches were frequently used as models for synagogues; this may be explained by the fact that most of the architects were Gentiles and that an atmosphere of toleration prevailed.” Rosenau’s argument that synagogue architecture derives its sources from the local vernacular is a timely call for assimilation of different religious beliefs written during the Nazi pogroms. She explains that Jews adapt to local customs the same way that their architecture draws on local models: The derivation of this synagogue type from the Protestantism which attaches so much importance to preaching, is illuminating. For instance, a church like St. James Piccadilly with its simple ground plan and galleries is not far from the basilical synagogue tradition. It is therefore easy to see that since similar social and religious conditions lead to corresponding results, it was the Spanish

 Edward Jamilly, The Georgian Synagogue (Trowbridge: Redwood, 1999), 4.  Helen Rosenau “The Synagogue and Church Architecture”, Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 4. 1/2 (1940), 81. 70

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and Portuguese Jews who assimilated the Protestant Church types as it was in keeping with their own traditions.

Here, Rosenau draws attention to the new Anglican and Dissenting church form that derived from the Reformation and the Anglican Expulsions. In 1599 and in 1662, the move to worship services in the vernacular language was concomitant with the opening up of church spaces into a single area so that the whole congregation could hear the priest speaking to them in their own language. The open space Wren church with galleries looked something like Spanish and Portuguese synagogues (though in these the galleries were for women), so local builders and architects could be employed to build synagogues from their own Protestant models. The problem with Rosenau’s argument is that it derives the form of the London synagogue from the London Protestant church, and does not recognize any debt the church architects may owe to the synagogues of Spain and Portugal – or elsewhere. Rosenau’s argument says more about the time in which it was made, and her desire for Jews to be seen to be easily assimilated into any Gentile culture, than it does about church or synagogue architecture. It does not take into account that Protestant church architects of the early eighteenth century may have been seeking validation of their designs from the same source as the Spanish and Portuguese Jews – from the (Jewish) Bible. If both religions are derived from the same book, it is probable that they will look for inspiration to the same models for worship spaces. In a detailed study, Nancy Schless points out the numerous similarities between the designs and features of churches and synagogues in buildings built by the Protestant Dissenter, Joseph Avis, who was responsible for Bevis Marks. Wren employed Avis on several church projects, including St. Bride’s Fleet Street, St. Edmund King and Martyr Lombard Street, St. James’s Piccadilly, and St. Mary Abchurch Cannon Street. Avis was also employed as carpenter on Robert Hooke’s screen for the Merchant Taylor’s Hall in Threadneedle Street. Among the elements Schless notes are the twisted balusters around the Font at St. Edmund King and Martyr, which are similar to the twisted balusters around the Ark at Bevis Marks. In St. Mary Abchurch, the tripartite altarpiece with Corinthian columns is remarkably similar to the Ark at Bevis Marks, which, like the altarpiece, is integral with the wall. Both these wooden structures are also similar in design to the screen at Merchant Taylor’s Hall. It would seem that Schless locates the similarities in the structures at a very local and vernacular level, but more importantly, she notes the relationship between the church and   Ibid., 83.  Nancy Schless, “Peter Harrison, the Touro Synagogue and the Wren City Church,” Winterthur Portfolio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). 71

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synagogue derives from a more complex relationship between the past and present. “The second prototype for Bevis Marks Synagogue, the Wren parish church of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, was both a survival of the English Medieval church with its three aisle plan and also, as at Christ Church Newgate, London (ca. 1677) an innovation.” Thus, while Schless follows Rosenau’s view that there is a vector of influence from Protestant church to synagogue in the uptake of local vernacular architecture, she also points out that the local vernacular architecture of late seventeenth and early eighteenthcentury churches is not a stable entity. Her example of Christchurch Newgate draws our attention to the fact that Wren used both the medieval church ground plan (and in fact the foundations of the former Gothic church in Newgate that was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666) as well as the innovation of neoclassical architecture, which would later be called the English Baroque. Furthermore, Christchurch Newgate, along with all but three of Wren’s churches, marked perhaps the most major of innovations in church design in the late seventeenth century: the building of a single interior space without a chancel screen. The word “chancel” is derived from the Latin “Cancel” meaning separated space, and the chancel screen is traditionally made up of “Cancelli” or small slats. Thus, the separated space is at once exclusive for those who officiate at a worship service, but does not hide the celebrant from the congregation. The screen, according to Joan Branham, acts as a “physical divider of space [which] signals conceptual notions of religiosity, purity and hierarchy and bears heavily on the issue of sacred space in the antiquity.” In the Jewish tradition, the chancel separates the Ark of the Covenant from the congregation, and often takes the form of a railing surrounding the scrolls. In the Christian tradition, the chancel screen represents the veil of the temple that separated off the holy of holies, and which, according to Matthew 27.50-51: “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent.” Its removal from the eighteenth-century church is therefore perhaps accountable with reference to this text. But to account for its contemporaneous removal from the synagogue would seem to require a more complex argument than the uptake of local vernacular architecture. The Ark in Bevis Marks, for example, is incorporated into the wainscoting, and so is not demarcated by a separate space. More has happened than architectural   Ibid., 194.   Only St. Peter’s Cornhill and St Mary the Virgin, Ingestre, Staffordshire have chancel screens.   Joan Branham, “Sacred Spaces under Erasure in Ancient Synagogues and Early Churches,” The Art Bulletin 74.3(1992): 375-394.   Ibid., 375. 72

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uniformity; the whole significance of the synagogue building appears to have been altered. These confusions suggest that we ought to reconsider the vectors of influence in eighteenth-century worship space design. In order to do this, we need to explore the significance of the design of the space to the religion practiced within it. What we shall find is a dynamic cross fertilization between Jewish and Protestant architecture, so much so that the case of Bevis Marks seems to be not so much an anomaly – a synagogue that looks like a church – as the rule, where all early eighteenth-century churches and synagogues follow and diverge from a single model. Thus, while a religion might have specific requirements for its design, the actual worship spaces are much more miscellaneous because that was the contemporary view of how a religious space ought to be. We shall begin with a look at the general requirements for an Anglican church, then move on to examples from Hawksmoor’s churches, and end with hitherto unnoticed theories of ecclesiastical architecture from William Stukeley which add the pagan dimension to the mix. While this essay will in no way attempt to re-write or even write architectural history, what it will argue is that although there is a break in tradition in church and synagogue design in the eighteenth century, there was, most probably, no perceived break in the tradition of building worship spaces: at least not in the minds of the architects themselves. Influences upon Anglican Church Design

The liturgical significance of the developments in Anglican church architecture is discussed in detail by George Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells. They note that the early Roman Catholic church was divided into several spaces which were distinct from and separated from each other: “the nave, the aisles, the chantry chapels with their parclose screens, the transepts, and the long chancels and their aisles separated from the nave by a screen, roodloft and tympanum.”10 However, with the Reformation, and the introduction of services in vernacular language, they argue, “It was not enough for the laity to be merely present in church; the prayer book intends that they should enter into the liturgy, making its moods their own, and following intelligently the action of the rite.”11 The conversion of the existing buildings into new Anglican churches could not, therefore, countenance self-contained spaces of the Roman church if the congregation were to be able to hear and see the service. All rood screens, 10  G.W.O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 15. 11  Ibid. 73

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which separated the altar and priest from the congregation were duly removed, but this makes it doubly difficult to explain the retention of the chancel screen. The priest could be clearly seen as he turned to the people when reading the lesson, though he would still be within the chancel. The congregation could also see and hear the priest as he raised the host because he stood behind a new wooden communion table that replaced the stone altar at the back of the chancel, which was brought forward once a month for that service: but he was still behind the dividing screen. When addressing the question of building fifty new churches in 1708, Addleshaw and Etchells record Sir Christopher Wren’s declaration that “churches must be ‘auditories’ and in future this plan of church will, for convenience be called an auditory plan.”12 That is to say, churches should be single rooms, in which everyone could see and hear equally well and with no dividing screens. Looking back to the Medieval cruciform church design with its separate spaces, Wren pointed out that In the church of Rome there need be no restriction as to size; for it is enough “if they hear the murmuring of the Mass and see the Elevation of the Host.” In the Church of England we are confronted with the problem of how to hear not only the sermon but the services as well. This necessitates a certain limitation in size of churches; and he enunciates a principle that a minister cannot be heard in a church which is so large that is holds more than 2000 people.13

Writing to a friend, Wren even gave the ideal dimensions for the auditory plan: By what I have said, it may be thought reasonable, that the new Church should be at least 60 Feet broad, and 90 Feet long, besides a Chancel at one End, and the Belfry and Portico at the other. These Proportions may be varied, but to build more room, than that ever Person may conveniently hear and see, is to create Noise and Confusion. 14

This is not to say that the chancel screen disappeared from all Wren churches. St. Peter’s Cornhill is one of Wren’s two London churches with chancel screens, and he included one at Ingestre, in Staffordshire.15 Likewise, at the east end of two of Hawksmoor’s churches, Christchurch Spitalfields, and St. Mary Woolnoth, there are four pillars carrying an entablature, which serve the same purpose as a screen and create a space in front of the altar recess separate from 12  Ibid., 54. 13  Ibid. 14  Christopher Wren, Parentalia (London, 1750), 318-20. 15 If, in fact, Wren designed Ingestre. 74

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the nave and corresponding to the chancel in the older medieval building.16 Nevertheless, as Addleshaw and Etchells suggest, the “room plan was developed and popularized by Wren; even when his churches have aisles they are still single rooms, open at one end and forming one whole, with the altar immediately against the east wall or in a recess.”17 So it would seem that the single room church without a chancel screen was accepted as the preferred plan at the time of the conception of the fifty Queen Anne churches, and the disappearance of the chancel screen suggested the essence of the Anglican church with its demand from the Book of Common Prayer for the priest to be seen and heard: Wren’s design for the “auditory” church being taken up at the first moment of sustained church building after the Reformation. Offering a different account of Anglican Church design is John Wilkinson’s research into a comparison between the dimensions and proportions of churches and synagogues, which he notes “are so alike each other, that they may well have been laid out according to some kind of rule.” The rule, he argues from measuring many church and synagogue buildings, is the plan of the Heavenly Temple as described in the Bible.18 And he concludes that churches are based in synagogue design, and that “[Altar and Ark are placed]… proportionally where heaven and earth meet,”19 that is, the positioning of the Ark and altar in both buildings is the same, and writes large the same relationship between the human and the divine. In Wilkinson’s estimation, therefore, the design for the Christian church can be regarded as based on the model of the synagogue. But the evidence of measurement stops with the Queen Anne churches, along with the disappearance of the chancel screens, and the placement of the altar against the east wall. The dimensions drafted by Wren for the auditory church are so different from earlier churches, that the buildings no longer fit Wilkinson’s plan, and churches no longer can be said to look like synagogues. Wilkinson suggests that this change was theorized at the time as a rejection of Platonic Mathematics and its replacement by Newton’s Principia Mathematica. But the problem with such a conclusion is twofold: firstly synagogues and churches continued to look similar at this time (as we discussed above), and secondly, Wilkinson’s model for the design of both early church and synagogue,

16 The existence of these screens does not weaken my argument in favor of heterodoxy in Anglican Church design. If anything it strengthens it. 17 Addleshaw and Etchells, op. cit., 53. 18 Which Heavenly Temple Wilkinson means is unclear, but as we shall see below this is not an easy point to make. 19  John Wilkinson, Synagogue to Church: The Traditional Design (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 170. 75

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the Heavenly Temple, was at the heart of Wren’s auditory design, and of Hawksmoor’s designs for his Queen Anne churches. The versions of the inception of the design of the Anglican Church offered by Addleshaw and Etchells and Wilkinson are not, of course, mutually exclusive: the church could have looked like a synagogue until the Wren churches followed the Reformation strictures, then the synagogues may have started to look like churches for reasons of the assimilability of Jewish culture. But in both of these narratives we see a break in design tradition that is marked by the eighteenthcentury building design of both church and synagogue. In fact what we shall see is that in the eighteenth-century mind, there was no perceived break. The One Design for the Fifty Churches

Writing on Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect of seven of the eleven Queen Anne Churches, Kerry Downes argues that the intention of the new churches was to impose a visible mark of power upon London. Downes states that there was “concern among churchmen at the lack of churches in the new areas and the proliferation of dissenting chapels in the East End, the return to power in 1710, after a long period of opposition, of the Tories, who were the High Church Party.”20 The intention was to sprinkle a group of distinctive buildings about the city,21 which would act as a visible reminder of the rule of the king as head of the State Religion. And even from the vantage point of a modern skyscraper, it has to be agreed that Hawksmoor’s white stone churches with their individual spires still articulate and punctuate the London of today. In order to bring about the propagandist part of the plan, Downes continues: the “Commission made a further curious provision for ‘one general Design or Form’ to be agreed upon for the churches excepting the towers or steeples; subsequent discussion led to no agreement and the idea lapsed.”22 Germane to the present argument, and whether or not the “one general Design” did in fact lapse, Downes suggests that “at the time of these preliminary discussions … Hawksmoor produced the hypothetical ‘Basilica’ plan.”23 The plan for one of the fifty churches at Bethnal Green, which was never built, bears the inscription “The Basilica after the Primitive Christians” with reference to the “purest times of Christianity.” 20 Kerry Downes, Hawksmoor (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 104. 21  Peter Ackroyd argues imaginatively that Hawksmoor’s churches are situated at key mystical points about the city, but evidence for any such claims is scanty. Ackroyd’s reading is based on the idea that Hawksmoor seems to have been associated with Freemasonry, but given his trade, it would be more surprising if he were not. 22 Downes, op. cit. 106. 23  Ibid. 76

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None of Hawksmoor’s designs or actual churches can be called a basilica in the proper sense of a building with colonnaded aisles and an apse, therefore, and possibly because of the dramatic presence of the white structures dominating the London street scene, Downes argues that a major influence on the design was Hagia Sophia. Without going into the architectural details of Downes’s argument, which are not relevant here, if a building can be said to dominate a city, it is Hagia Sophia, which seems to be at the end of every street in Istanbul. In the same way, if, for example, you stand in the left hand archway in the central space of the British Museum looking south, you can see the statue of King George III atop the stepped spire of St. George Bloomsbury, appearing over the intervening rooftops. The dominance of the churches is subtle but pervasive. In that sense, Downes’s final position, that “It is … unlikely that a single source will be found for Hawksmoor’s and Archer’s axial plans,”24 begs the question why a group of buildings that are “the same only different” should be so recognizably a group, and have so dominant an effect upon London. Their color alone sets them apart from the surrounding buildings, but it is their difference from earlier church buildings, and from each other – for example St. Luke’s, Old Street with its obelisk spire in contrast to the stairway to heaven of St. George’s – that somehow makes them part of a group. Set on by Downes, two other architectural historians have suggested general designs that may or may not underlie Hawksmoor’s churches. Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey suggests two models, Solomon’s Temple and George Wheler’s ideal early Christian Church from An Account of the Churches (1689).25 Developing the idea, Vaughan Hart combines the two sources in his exploration of the influence of Solomon’s Temple on Wren’s architecture, and in turn, points out Hawksmoor’s notes on Ezekiel’s design for the Heavenly Temple written on the reverse side of his preliminary plan for a circular Belvedere at Castle Howard. He makes the connection by arguing that “[t]heologians studied Solomon’s Temple as a prototype of the early primitive Christian church, from whose ‘basilica’ Hawksmoor’s own London churches drew their inspiration.”26 What is at stake here is the Biblical influence on church design, and Wheler’s design for Christian churches takes its model from the temples described in the Jewish Bible. It takes the form of a great square building separated into nine smaller squares by the four pillars that hold up the roof. In fact, Wheler’s design does not fit exactly with any of the three Jewish temples, described in the Bible 24  Ibid., 108. 25  Pierre de la Ruffiniere Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches: Architecture and Theology (University of Chicago: Chicago, 2000). 26  Vaughan Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders (Yale UP: New Haven, 2002), 96. 77

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at 1 Kings 6, Ezra 6 and Ezekiel 40, but as we shall see, this may be said to account for the diversity and unity in Hawksmoor’s designs, and in the idea that he was not substantially altering the design of churches from the antique.27 Three-in-One Temples

The queer little epithet about the Queen Anne Churches that they are a group that are “the same only different” and that Wren and Hawksmoor could believe that their churches were consistent with the tradition of church design can be understood best in terms of the three Temples described in the Bible. The first, which appears in 1 Kings 6, measures sixty cubits long by twenty cubits wide, with a porch ten cubits deep held up by pillars of bronze of eighteen cubits surmounted by chapitres (capitals) of five cubits. The measurements given in Ezra 6 for the second are incomplete, being sixty cubits wide, and sixty cubits high. Those found in the edict of King Cyrus helping the Jews build it are notably generous, and if the proportions of the first are followed, the length of the building must have been one hundred and eighty cubits, which is not out of the question for a building so high. But the second was meant to be a copy of the first, built after the return from captivity in Babylon. That it is dramatically different cannot have escaped the notice of generations of readers of the passages, and the fact that they are the same but different may therefore be argued to be fundamental to the two temples that were built and destroyed. The third, the Heavenly Temple, found in Ezekiel 40 and 41, and which was never built, is yet again different, being forty cubits long by twenty cubits wide and six great cubits high. Ezekiel’s instructions to build a double cube building were nevertheless a source of great interest to eighteenth-century High Churchmen, and Christopher Smart, for example, used its complex mathematics to encode the Heavenly Temple in Fragment C of his poem Jubilate Agno. Smart’s poetry in no way describes a building, but the internal evidence of this part of the poem suggests two cubic spaces in tandem making the double cube space of Ezekiel’s Heavenly Temple. In particular, the arithmetical construction of the poem from its key lines (Lines 3, 3 squared [9], 9 squared [81] being marked, and the whole “fragment” having 162 lines [that is, twice 81]) together with line notes about squaring (by line 3 are the words “As in the Jub2d”)), suggests the sort of 27 St. Mary Woolnoth is built in this cubic form, and might be identified as being influenced by Wheler’s primitive church. Christianity in its most primitive form was a goal of the higher elements of the Anglican Church at this time, so it is perhaps not surprising that Wheler’s model should be chosen as the design for the new churches to be built by a high Anglican Commission. 78

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model that we see in Ezekiel’s dream.28 Furthermore, the church where Smart worshipped, St. George the Martyr, Queen Square, follows Wheler’s model for the Primitive Christian Church (which may perhaps be understood as half of Ezekiel’s Heavenly Temple) being square in shape, with the interior cut into nine cubes by four pillars. This latter part of the design, as we shall see, is even more significant to the meaning of the design. St George the Martyr was built as a chapel of repose29 in 1704 by Robert Nelson, the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and rebuilt by Nicholas Hawksmoor as part of the Queen Anne Churches project. Its minister from 1747 (when Smart worshipped there) was William Stukeley, known as “The Antiquarian.” He had worshipped there formerly, between 1717 and 1726 when he lived in Ormond Street. Stukeley was central to the foundation of the revived Antiquarian Society, the Egyptian Society, the Roman Society, and the Royal Society when Newton was president.30 He was fascinated by the design of religious buildings from Avebury and Stonehenge to the newest churches of London. His publications in the field of religious architecture and its sacred meaning abound, but it is to the manuscripts (kept at the Masonic Library, Great Queen Street, London) that I shall attend as they are less well known, and contain suggestions more radical than those that were eventually printed.31 In effect, Stukeley’s manuscripts argue that everything on earth, in all its diversity, from the human body to sacred architecture, is based on one divine design. In a way, Stukeley is following the Hermetic tradition of “as above, so below” in that he argues that the shape of the human body and the architecture of all religious buildings is based on the harmony of the spheres. But more than this, Stukeley believed that Newtonian physics was not a new way to understand the universe, but rather an iteration of Biblical truth. When looking into the works of the Hebrew Lawgiver particularly the First Chapter of Genesis, if it be not the oldest Writing in the World yet it must be acknowledgd the first & only that gives an exact & intelligible, a strictly 28 See Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), Chapter 7ff. 29 That is, not to be a parish church. Most services could be carried out there but it had no place in the diocesan hierarchy. When rebuilt, St. George the Martyr became the parish church for part of the original large area of St. Andrew Holborn. 30 His is the first record of the famous anecdote about Newton’s apple. 31  For a full list of Stukeley’s MSS held at the Masonic Library in Great Queen Street London, see: Chris Mounsey, “More Manuscripts by William Stukeley, The Archdruid,” N&Q (December 1998), 466. The numbering of the MSS is taken from the Library catalogue at the Masonic Library, and explained in this short paper. 79

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Philosophical Account of the Generation of the World & all the Creatures in it, Moses cannot be accounted less than Gods Natures Secretary… being we are assured tis dictated from the Same Spirit that made the World, its Veracity is unquestionable the most genuine & natural Account of the Great Truths it delivers cannot be accounted any less than most pure and incorrupt streams issuing from the fountain of knowledge. Here is the Original Source of True philosophy The Oracle of Nature The Springhead of knowledge Where Those that thirst after NEWTONIAN Draughts may drink largely at the Fountain.32

The date of this MS (1708) places this as Hutchinsonianism before Hutchinson’s Moses Principia (1724-27), as well as in the ambit of the architects of the Queen Anne churches while they were discussing their design: Stukeley was giving papers on this very topic to the Royal Society in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The passage argues that we can read the book of nature in the Pentateuch, in the same way that we can read Newton’s Principia Mathematica in the words of Moses, since both are accurate descriptions of the world and how it works. But Stukeley does not maintain the hierarchy of the old informing the new that marked the hitherto unflinching belief in authority, since he believed that it is possible to understand God’s creation better through the new mathematics. Now began the beautiful Dance of this Nimble Chorus, vast Globes of Matter the Planetary & Cometary Bodys round the Sun the Glorious Representative & viceroy of their Maker … The very Conception of which is in the highest degree imaginable, Surprizingly admirable and charming & the philosophy on which it depends opend to the world by Sir Isaac Newton in its majestic Simplicity On the sole Principle of Attraction.33

Thus, when Stukeley suggests that all things partake of a single pattern, he is arguing that this pattern is both the movement of the planets, the words of scripture and Newton’s mathematics and his theory of gravity. The fact that human bodies do not look like churches, though they are built to the same design, is not a problem for Stukeley. He draws typically hermetic pictures of constellations of stars on human bodies and on temple designs, and argues that diversity and unity are the glory of God. There is a certain admirable Continuation & Series of things, whereby some depend upon others, & are mutually & aptly connected together, says Cicero de Nat Deor 1.1. To wit the Great Workman of Nature has rendered the effects of 32 Stukeley MS 1, 5. 33  Ibid., 44. 80

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his power not more wonderful & remarkable by their incredible Variety, than by the stupendous relation & conformity one among another. He loves to vary the same mode of operation a thousand ways, … yet ever with a curious diversity, whereby all his works seem as we speak, of a piece, & equally proclaim him their common founder and Contriver.34

Commenting upon the architecture of the Temple of Solomon, Stukeley may then argue without internal contradiction that “an exact adhesion … to the Words of Scripture … [will give] … the Draughts of the Whole of the Temple of Solomon & every part, its Ground Plot & Sections & whatever are Necessary to a perform the perfect Comprehension of the Same.”35 And this is because although the whole plan for the Temple may not be evident in one place in the Bible, and that the measurements may be different in different places, following the Cabbalist tradition, Stukeley argues that “all those things mutually tend to prove, explain & illustrate one another.”36 The whole plan for the Temple does not lie in one set of measurements, since God’s design produces diversity rather than uniformity, and the three sets of measurements are three ways of discovering the underlying unified design that is not apparent to the casual viewer. Diversity is so much the order of the universe, that when Stukeley gave a paper to the Royal Society on religious buildings, he saw no difference in the design of Avebury, Stonehenge, Solomon’s Temple and any modern Anglican church. The paper, The Order of the Pillars of Solomon’s Temple Demonstrated (1720)37 argues that all temples from the Stone Age, through to Solomon’s Temple, are taken as models after one design, and beginning with quaint drawings of sacred groves of trees, shows how gothic architecture is no more than a collection of stone trees. “They planted groves in patriarchal times, as for publick worship. … For we are told, Abraham dwelt long at Beersheeba, where he planted the grove. These were as our Cathedrals; … Whence and temples became a synonymous appellation.”38 What is more, Stukeley believed that the earliest religion of Britain was akin to modern Christianity: “the patriarchs had the knowledge of the true nature of the deity, and that the Christian or mediatorial religion is the first and last.”39 What is at stake here is that if God is omnipotent, 34  Ibid., 127. 35  Ibid., 74. 36  MS 9c, Bezaleel Cap III, 97. 37  MS 2. 38  Avebury, A Temple of the British Druids (London: Innys, Manby, Dod, Brindley, 1743), 4. 39  Ibid., 3-4. 81

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omniscient and omnipresent, He must have been the object of veneration for all earlier religions than Christianity, which is, as Stukeley says, the mediatorial religion, or the clearest version of the truth available, since it is based on God’s own words given to us through Christ. Therefore, all forms of veneration and its buildings must all be the same – albeit that they are obviously different in outward appearance. Despite the quaintness of Stukeley’s argument, it must be born in mind that his books were published by Manby who is described by Plomer as one of the foremost booksellers of the period. But if the arguments in the published works seem quaint, the arguments in the manuscripts are more detailed and more far fetched. However, they too are based on the idea that there is one design behind the diversity of natural phenomena and the architecture of sacred buildings. Stukeley begins with the arrangement of the gemstones on the pectoral of Aaron, noting that “the colors are rang’d exactly in the same order, as Sr Isaac Newton observes in the rays of light … transmitted thro’ a prism, & found arts to separate the colors & make them distinct, & to measure their proportions one to another, which he found to be exactly the same as that of musical notes, or the 7 tones.”40 In fact there are nine gemstones on the pectoral, arranged in three rows of three, forming a square: the same ground plan as St. George the Martyr, and Wheler’s plan for the primitive Christian Church. This plan, the phenomena of the world writ large, Stukeley goes on to argue is the same shape as Solomon’s Temple, the Israelite Camp, and the Heavenly City of St. John the Divine, concluding that they are but one & and same design, with the necessary variation belonging to each. The analogy between them easily appears, when we are got into a right track of thinking: the drawings mutually confirm, & illustrate one another.41

As I have shown above, none of the three temples of Solomon is square in design, but this is not simply a misreading. Stukeley’s message in this late essay is to understand that a uniform underlying plan does not lead to uniformity in observed phenomena. Worldly observations are partial, and only the close study of many diverse individuals will eventually illuminate the underlying design. This latter is, of course, the basis of Newton’s empirical and inductive method, which accounts for Stukeley’s praise of Newton in the first passage quoted above. For though individuals may be different at the most basic level, they may still be members of a species, and of a genus. 40  MS 4, Shecinah, The Breast-Plate of Iudgment, within the Urim and Thummim, dated 3 November 1735, 2. 41  MS 16, Solomon’s Temple, 19 December 1751, Addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 82

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The Same Only Different

So it is with church architecture, and I would suggest that the underlying single design of the Queen Anne churches is Solomon’s Temple, as understood in its three manifestations in the Bible, which means that individual churches must be expected to be different while still being the same. The sameness of these churches does not lie in some mystical correlation between the particular difference between, for example, St. George Bloomsbury’s step steeple with George III atop, and St. Luke Old Street’s unadorned obelisk spire. If it lies in anything observable, it is in the ineffable feeling that one is looking at a Queen Anne church – a unifying idea that is not empirical and more irrational. The principle of sameness underlying difference can also be used to explain the similarity between Anglican churches and synagogues observed at the beginning of this essay. But now, we need not look to the empirical similarities between Bevis Marks and Wren’s or Hawksmoor’s churches, but to the divine plan that stands behind both, to discover the similarities. The two types of places of worship are both based on Solomon’s Temple, and are interpretations of that model in relation either to the vernacular architecture of the place in which the Jewish congregation may find itself, or in relation to the other architectural movements of the time of construction. The synagogue and church are generically the same, but are different species of worship space. The principle of sameness underlying difference may also be discovered in the disjunction in church design that marked the innovation that marked Wren’s and Hawksmoor’s seventeenth-century design. Therefore, unlike Wilkinson, we should not despair at the differences between the Gothic cruciform churches and the oblong auditory design, and call it a break in the tradition in church buildings. Stukeleyian logic demands that the purpose of worship defines how we interpret the space, not the architecture. Albeit the building is a grove of trees, a collection of menhirs, a Gothic forest of stone block built pillars upon cross-shaped foundations, or a four square oblong, it is still a manifestation of the unified divine plan for worship places: and the analogy between each different manifestation mutually confirms and illustrates the others to be part of the unified plan. More than this, worship space architecture is hereby shown to be a way to know God and His plan the better. Rather than looking for conformity, you must study as many individuals as you can, as none of them is a perfect example. Each individual is partial, but the group of partial manifestations, when inspected in all their difference, make up a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Rather as in the prayer of St. John Chrysostom: where three or more are gathered together, there Jesus (the way and the truth) will be. It is the principle of empiricism and the inductive method: Newton found in the Bible. 83

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Stukeley’s interpretation of phenomena may be empirical and inductive, but its outcome is flawed at a very basic level. When we compare an individual church which is not unlike another individual synagogue, and we call the two a species of the same design for a worship space, we may call this an example of empiricism and induction, but in effect we are saying, with childish disregard for logic, that they are the same only different. Or we might analyse the comparison in a different way as one which avoids the use of a pre-existing norm, which is clearly defined, by which to judge a new individual: the process of deduction. But this is not simply a question of deduction and induction, although the shift from one to the other was in debate while Stukeley was writing.42 Stukeley has suggested that empiricism and induction are grounded in the Bible, and that the search for the norm is impossible when faced only with partial examples of the divine plan. In other words, there is no clear iteration of a norm on earth by which to judge individuals. If one is set up, it is without proper authority and misses the point of the diversity of God’s creation – that diversity is an expression of the unified Divine Plan. To draw out one final metaphor: if the Queen Anne Churches may be argued to demonstrate the diversity of the unitary Divine Plan, they might also be said to represent the diversity that has always been part of the project of Queer Theory. In the ten years I have worked in the field, there has never been a single methodology that could be said to typify Queer Theory, or even a single definition of the word “queer.” This is not to say that Queer Theory or what has come after it is anything like a Divine Plan, but more properly that it is a plan which we can still use to explain more than just the diversity of sexual behavior.

42  For example, the Bentley Boyle debate which Swift lampooned so harshly in The Battel of the Books. 84

Chapter 5

Jews, Geniuses and the Rewriting of National History: Benjamin Disraeli’s Biography of His Father Richard Dellamora

The following chapter focuses on Benjamin Disraeli’s writing of group history in the biographical essay about his father that he wrote in 1848. In the essay, Disraeli provides intertwined narratives of national and minority history designed so as to alter the reader’s perceptions of both. Moreover, his double narrative of English and Jewish, Jewish and Christian, history is complemented by a counter narrative that, reworking the validation within Jewish tradition of gentleness, unworldliness, and scholarship on the part of the Jewish head of household, refigures genealogy through affinity between subjects of male-male desire rather than or in addition to literal filiation. In doing so, Disraeli invokes aesthetic discourse, in particular the rhetoric of Romantic genius, in order to make it possible to write genealogical difference differently. This shift is also couched in terms of the signs of what sexologists, by the end of the century, would refer to as sexual perversion. In this chapter, I frame the ideological work of Disraeli’s essay with reference to the Sodom-narrative of Genesis 18-19. While many historians have commented on ways in which the terms sodomy and sodomite in the modern period connote, at times denote, national infidelity, idolatry, even treason, my proposal is somewhat different: namely, that aspects of this narrative are continually reworked in collective narratives in Western Europe that depend on the concept of group chosenness. This fact helps account for aspects of both Disraeli and his father’s work, for example, their fixation on group trauma and on the threat of individual and group annihilation. Just as significantly, in a number of figures, in particular that of Lot’s wife, Genesis enlists instances of gendered and sexual abjection within a foundational text of Western national identity. This process compels the violent othering of particular individuals and groups while simultaneously providing means for Disraeli and other writers to remember history – and to attempt to live it – differently.

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Benjamin Disraeli, a politician of Jewish derivation in England, could scarcely avoid thinking about the relationship between minority existence and national identity. Disraeli began his political career as something of a latterday Marrano, an originally pejorative term that was first used to name Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism in Spain and Portugal at the time of the Inquisition. Disraeli’s father, Isaac, was persuaded by Sharon Turner to arrange for his son to be baptized as an Anglican at the age of twelve in 1817. Turner is remembered today for having written the key book defining British citizenship in terms of “English” nationality. Disraeli’s political career was premised upon Turner’s intervention since Jews were not permitted to sit in Parliament until 1858. In a limited and negative sense, “Marranos, named after pigs by anti-Jewish Christians in Spain during the fifteenth century, were converts to Christianity who performed as Christians but remained secretly Jewish and faithful to Mosaic Law.” Disraeli might reasonably be called a Marrano in this sense too since, although he defended the Establishment of the Church of England, in private he acknowledged that he was not a believing Christian (Weintraub, 33-34). Likewise Disraeli was a Marrano in the extended use of the term, in which Elaine Marks uses it in Marrano as Metaphor, when she writes: “Marranos are Jews who have to some degree been taken in by or assimilated to the other religious cultures in which they live (these may be Christian or Muslim) and who continue in spite of this inevitable acculturation to profess a belonging to Jewishness” (xviii). The double consciousness attributed by Marks to Marranos shares a number of features with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has referred to as the epistemology of the closet. Just as closeted homosexuals attempt to pass as heterosexuals, Marranos attempt to pass as Christians while concealing their real or true  Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography (New York: Dutton, 1993), 32; hereafter cited in text as “Weintraub.”   History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805); see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 93-94; hereafter cited in text and notes as “Ragussis.”   David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 342.   Elaine Marks, Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xvii; hereafter cited in text as “Marks.”  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pursues the analogy between concealed Jewish identity and closeted homosexual identity in her discussion of the Book of Esther, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 75-82. For another approach to same-sex desire in Disraeli, see Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206-246. The standard biographical account of this aspect of Disraeli occurs in Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 213-219. 86

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identity as Jews. The notions of a double self, of passing, of concealment, and of identity as something premised on a single inherent factor occur in both paradigms. Throughout his career, political opponents of Disraeli asserted that his claims to be Protestant and English disguised a real commitment to Jewish domination of Europe. In order to succeed as a politician, he had to neutralize the representation of himself as a “closeted” Jew. He did so by affirming both his Jewishness and his identity as Protestant and English. In doing so, he began subtly to detach the identification of English nationality from Christian profession. Disraeli’s double avowal negated the bipartite structure of Marrano identity although it could not neutralize the attacks of men such as Anthony Trollope and William Gladstone when Disraeli was Prime Minister in the 1870s. Already at the beginning of his political career in the 1830s, Disraeli found it difficult to win election to Parliament, in part because of anti-Jewish attacks. In self-defense, he published The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), a historical romance about David Alroy, a medieval Jewish leader, who led a successful revolt of the Jews against their Muslim overlords and eventually became Caliph of Baghdad. Writing the romance gave Disraeli an opportunity to protest the anti-Semitism of majoritarian religions while affirming Jewish material practices. The crisis of the novel turns on Alroy’s refusal to establish a theocracy, with the capital of the kingdom to be transferred from Baghdad to Jerusalem. In the spirit of Jewish Enlightenment thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Disraeli defends the particularities of Jewish existence – faith, ritual, group loyalty, etc. – but not the subordination of individual action and judgment to the Law or the Rabbinate. Alroy affirms civil, political, and social rights, but without negating particular cultural values in favor of universal ones. In the romance, Alroy also resists the influence of Honain, a Jew at the court of Baghdad who poses as a Greek physician. Honain is a Marrano in the first, cynical sense of the term. David attempts a middle way as a Marrano by marrying the daughter of the Caliph in a Muslim ceremony. In the 1840s, Disraeli began to use racial arguments in defending Jewish existence, with highly combustible ideological effect. In this chapter I focus on yet a third approach by Disraeli to the question of the relationship between Jewish and national difference. In the biographical essay that he appended to his edition of his father’s writings in 1848, Disraeli contextualizes Jewish existence in England in terms of family history. He develops an immigrant’s myth of national identity, in which the Jew emerges as the “true” Englishman. In part, this process occurs as a result of the success of Disraeli’s grandfather in precisely the sorts of economic activities at which the English were believed to excel and for which Karl Marx, in his essay of the same decade entitled “On the Jewish Question,” condemns Judentum. For his part, Disraeli downplays economic activity as well as literal genealogy. Instead, inscribing his father within a romantic myth of the artist, he traces a cultural and homoerotic 87

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lineage, with the result that family history becomes the history of men linked across generations by erotic self-absorption and an investment in sexual and emotional ties between men. This genealogical narrative may be termed queer insofar as it suggests alternative ways of imagining individual and interpersonal history. At the same time, it functions within the same processes of democratic modernization that produced imperial rule at home and abroad. And it occurs through a process of gendering history as masculine that leaves in place the continuing subordination of women. In other words, queer lineage in Disraeli is both complicit in and resistant to social injustice. This double reality raises questions about the relationship between queer cultural constructs and ethnic, national, sexual, and gender politics. In her account of the story of Esther, for example, Sedgwick contends that the affirmation of Jewish identity in the narrative depends upon the stability of the male/female binary or, in other words, upon “a salvific ideal of female submissiveness” (82). In this chapter, I will argue that another Biblical narrative – that of Sodom in Genesis 18-19 – offers crucial ways of understanding the relationship between religious, racial, and national identity, on the one hand, and homophobia, anti-Semitism, and an appetite for holocaustal violence, on the other. Further, I will argue that the portmanteau of vices summed up in the designation of an individual as a S/sodomite includes not only sexual intercourse between men, the most familiar usage of the word sodomite today, but – by way of the figure of Lot’s wife – other transgressions of sexual and gender norms. The Sodom-narrative, moreover, functions as a counterexample within a set of narratives in Genesis that focus on God’s promise of survival and salvation to Abraham and his descendants. The Sodom-narrative in Genesis 18-19 poses the infidelity of the citizens of Sodom to the promises made by God to the seed of Abraham. In early modern culture, the subjects of monarchs claimed the inheritance forfeited as a result of the failure of the Jews to accept Christ as the Messiah. In this substitution, Jews were not simply replaced, they were displaced to the other side of the antithesis, where they found themselves, to their discomfiture, at home with the inhabitants of Sodom. The term Sodomite “is not a common noun, but the proper name for the inhabitant of a historical city. It is extended  Sodomy is “the name for every form of sexual behavior besides married, heterosexual, procreatively aimed sex. Sodomy could include sex between men or between women, sex between men and women not sanctioned by marriage or bent on frustrating reproduction, sex between humans of whatever gender and animals” (Jonathan Goldberg, “Introduction,” Reclaiming Sodom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2-3).   Robert Alter, “Sodom as Nexus: The Web of Design in Biblical Narrative,” in Goldberg, Reclaiming Sodom, op. cit., 28-42. 88

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metaphorically to others, who are counted covert or honorary citizens. So too sodomia is the name for the characteristic activity or vice of those inhabitants.” In their commentaries on the Sodom-narrative, the Fathers of the Church made a number of different but related suggestions as to the character of this vice: for example, pride, inhospitality, luxury, and sexual perversion. “Augustine is quite clear that the citizens of Sodom wanted to rape the male angels” (Jordan, 34). The sin of sodomy, however, includes a wide range of perverse sexual practices, including practices between women. Both in the story of Sodom and in the narrative of God’s promise to Abraham, within which the story of Lot is couched, women register demurral to the imperative of patrilineal succession not by speech but by bodily signification. These signs of resistance qualify the divine covenant with Abraham and his progeny in two ways. On the one hand, especially at the end of the story of Sodom, when Lot’s daughters get him drunk in order to become pregnant by him, the sin of incest is built into the lineage of David and thereby Jesus, who was a direct descendant via Ruth of one of these unions. Accordingly, within proper genealogy there is an inward turn that denotes sexual perversion, however obliquely the Bible may note the fact. On the other hand, Sarah and Lot’s wife signify incredulity in face of the series of events in Genesis that instate one nation as the people of God while dramatically condemning another to annihilation. Moreover, as I have mentioned, the substitution in later teaching of Christians for Jews as the Chosen People suggests the transferability of such designations. When Abraham informs the post-menopausal Sarah that she will have a child, she responds by laughing. When Lot takes the women of his family away from Sodom into the wilderness, his wife, against the explicit injunction of the angels, turns back to glance at the city and is punished by being turned into a pillar of salt. Both the laugh and the look express wifely dissidence in face of a divine command. Ambrose of Milan (4th c.) argues that “when Lot’s wife turns back to look at the burning city, she is turning back to the impure region of lust” (Jordan, 34). The way in which the predicate “turn” draws on a Latin root that is contained both in the predicate, to convert, and the predicate, to pervert, links sexual perversion with infidelity, a failure of religious belief. In this respect, it is logical that the Jews, who fail to heed the word of God, should also be identified as sexual perverts. And, of course, intercourse a tergo also derives from the same root.

  Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6-7; hereafter cited as “Jordan.”   Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire: 1660-1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 78. 89

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In rewriting the history of the Jews in England, Disraeli wrote against the practice of overlaying repudiated identities one upon another – even though Edmund Burke, a political theorist whom Disraeli admired, exploited this possibility.10 Both Burke and Disraeli supported the aristocratic constitution, including the political settlement of 1688, which confirmed the replacement of the direct, Roman Catholic descendants of James I by the Protestant branch of the Stuart family. This deflection of royal genealogy mars the ideological propositions that the monarch is divinely anointed and that the English are God’s Chosen People.11 The anomaly is accounted for in the fact that it is the Protestant English that are God’s Chosen People. Burke directs the distinction in the first instance against England’s imperial rival, France, and secondly against the Irish, Scottish, and Roman Catholic allies of France in England. In his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), Burke represents the French Revolution as an attack on both the English constitution and English identity. Doing so, he identifies England’s antagonists as atheists, revolutionaries, Frenchmen, Radical Whigs, financiers, and Jews. Disraeli detaches this last group from the former at the same time that he fantasizes that, if his grandfather and namesake, Benjamin Disraeli, had not retired from business when he did, he would have made a fortune to rival those of the Rothschilds (x-xi). Disraeli attempts to show that Jews are true Englishmen. In tracing the ways in which he makes this attempt, I must beg the patience of my readers since Disraeli’s historical reconstruction is complex and contradictory. Moreover, while the primary genre is biography, the text also works generically in other ways. For example, as a series of portraits of a man at various stages in his life, the text functions in analogy with the genre of the family portraiture, especially favored in the country homes of the aristocracy and gentry.12 In representing his own father, Disraeli constructs a series of portraits that affirm the propriety of the relation between father, grandfather, and grandson. But Disraeli also deploys another strategy, one that creates an alternative family history based on the absent referent of same-sex desire. Neither narrative exists at the expense of

10  See Ragussis, op. cit., 119-125; Robert Blake, Disraeli (London: Methuen, 1966), 282-283. 11 In somewhat different terms, David Katz comments: “Civil disabilities on the basis of religious confession alone were meant to have disappeared in the settlement after the Glorious Revolution. The excitement of the Jew Bill controversy in 1753 demonstrated that the answers were not nearly so simple” (op. cit., 239). 12 As Karen Stanworth has shown, portraits of Isaac’s contemporary, Edward Onslow, son of George, first Earl of Onslow, at Clandon Park were arranged so as to efface the traces of a male-male sexual scandal of his youth (“Picturing a Personal History: The Case of Edward Onslow,” Art History 16(1993), 408, 412). 90

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national or group history; Disraeli uses both to write that history (and its future) differently. The execution of Charles I marks a point of trauma within British history. The monarchy is deposed and succession violently disrupted. In the Reflections, Burke is still attempting to cover over the psychological and social effects of this moment within the Puritan Revolution. The act of regicide fascinated Disraeli’s father, who wrote a five-volume biography of the Anglican martyr and slain king. In it, Isaac comments: Authorised by the doctrines of the age, by his consequent education, and by the natural gravity and elevation of his own mind, to ascend the throne as the anointed of his Creator, it was the doom of Charles the First to witness the divine authority of his crown trampled upon, the might of his magnificent hierarchy overwhelmed, the civil institutions of his realm swept away, all that he deemed sacred profaned, all that he held received denied, all that he considered established subverted; and in their stead new doctrines and new practices introduced, much of which was monstrous, and all extraordinary.13

The Ciceronian period projects upon the Puritans the perversity that they attached to the courts of James I and Charles I.14 In Isaac’s attraction to the spectacle of state violence, I recognize a parallel with the need to account for repeated acts of violence against Jews as well as to reconstitute the Jewish (and not just the Jacobite) subject in the aftermath of the apparent failure of the divine covenant. Isaac’s son likewise registers both the existence of group trauma and compensatory identification with English “blood” not only in his lifelong advocacy of an aristocratic constitution but also in rewriting the history of his family. In the biography of his father that he prepared in 1848, Disraeli attempts to make restitution for the repeated efforts to drive Jews out of history while supplanting them within a privileged genealogy.15 At the outset of his account of his father’s life, Disraeli fabricates a connection between his family and that of aristocratic Sephardic Jews and Marranos, who 13 Isaac Disraeli, Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England, Volume One (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 4. 14  Later in the century, strong affinities exist between the affirmation of desire between men, Anglo-Catholicism, and the veneration of the memory of the martyr king (Douglass Shand Tucci, Boston Bohemia: 1881-1900: Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 316-322, 350, 373; The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardiner (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 129-132). These relations may be traced in the loyalties of Disraeli’s father and in the ties that exist between father and son. 15 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7, 9-10, 13, 229-230. 91

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were exiled from the Spanish Peninsula at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. This claim is not in fact true.16 But the untruth is in service of truth since the reference indicates the traumatic effects, for Disraeli’s family and other Jews, of the Christian history of repeated onslaughts against them. In this context, Disraeli, who had been subjected to anti-Jewish attacks early in his political career by the Irish Catholic nationalist politician, Daniel O’Connell, is unlikely to have missed the genocidal implications of (the likewise Irish) Burke’s representation of Jews in the Reflections.17 Burke identifies revolutionary republicans in England with the position taken by a dissenting minister named Doctor Richard Price in a sermon that he delivered at “the dissenting meeting-house of the Old Jewry,” so-called because it stood on the former site London’s medieval ghetto, which had been abolished at the time of the expulsion of the Jews, an edict that was not repealed until the time of the Commonwealth.18 The phrase Old Jewry becomes a leitmotif of Burke’s polemic, repeatedly reinforcing the danger of alien contamination – be it republican, French or Jewish. In Burke’s narrative, the destruction of the ghetto echoes God’s destruction of the unholy people of Sodom. Shortly before writing the essay, Disraeli had experienced a dramatic reminder of the legal restrictions that Jews in England continued to experience. In 1847, he and his co-leader as head of the Tory party in Parliament, Lord George Bentinck, attempted to secure the seating of Baron Lionel de Rothschild, who had been elected Liberal member for the City of London. Because incoming members were required to subscribe to an oath “abjuring the right to the throne of the descendants of the Old Pretender, which concluded with the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian,’” no Jew was able to subscribe to the oath. Early in 1848, a Jewish Disabilities Bill was introduced to enable Rothschild to take his seat nonetheless. Despite Disraeli and Bentinck’s support, the Tories voted against them “to a man.” Nor did the Anglican Church, of which Disraeli was a champion, support the Bill. It passed the House but, because of the Bishops, failed in the Lords.19 In this effort, Disraeli followed in his father’s footsteps 16  James Ogden, Isaac D’Israeli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 5-6; hereafter cited in text and notes as Ogden. 17 See Blake, op. cit., 124-126, 131. The Irish, especially Roman Catholics, were frequently numbered among the citizenry of Sodom. Both O’Connell and Burke shift the stigma and the horror from the Irish onto another group, namely Jews. Disraeli, a lifelong antagonist of Irish Catholic nationalism, traded similar invective with O’Connell. 18 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1953), 9. 19  Jews were not placed on the same footing as Christians until passage of the Promissory Oaths Act of 1871. In the same year, a Jewish member of Parliament, Sir George Jessel, was appointed Solicitor-General, the first Jew to become a Minister 92

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since Isaac had written a defense of Jewish existence in a book entitled The Genius of Judaism in 1833, a time when, in the aftermath of successful passage of the Reform Bill, legislation had been introduced in Parliament to relieve Jews of their political disabilities (Ogden, 202). Less than a month before his death, Isaac “enthused over his son’s speech on the Jew Bill of 1847, which he said was the most important ever delivered in the House of Commons” (Ogden, 204). In choosing the Tory party as his own, Disraeli had scarcely chosen sympathetic allies. To the contrary, Jews had benefited from the republican, Puritan, and Whig strains in British politics – both during the period of the Commonwealth and again later from the Hanoverian monarchs, the Protestant cousins who displaced the line of James II. This reality didn’t fit the alliance that Disraeli was attempting to draw between Jews, aristocrats, and Tories; nonetheless, it had to be acknowledged. As a young Tory ideologue, Disraeli attacked what he referred to as “the Venetian constitution” of the Whig ascendancy under the House of Hanover. But in his account of family history, he acknowledges that Sephardi Jews found a refuge in the Venetian Republic. My grandfather, who became an English Denizen in 1748, was an Italian descendant of one of those Hebrew families whom the Inquisition forced to emigrate from the Spanish peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, and who found a refuge in the more tolerant territories of the Venetian Republic.20

In the nineteenth century, England was often portrayed as the heir of Venice in a number of different ways: as a constitutional state that limited the power of the executive; as a bulwark against Papal and pagan infidelity; and as the leading commercial and imperial power in Europe. In the work of John Ruskin, these associations are inverted in s/Sodomitic fashion so that Renaissance Venice is associated with the Whore of Babylon, luxury, infidelity, and apocalyptic destruction. In contrast, in the cited passage the proposition is implicit that the successful naturalization of Disraeli’s family validates the practical and moral achievement of England as heir of Venice. This achievement will not, however, be complete until Jews win full rights as English citizens (again implicitly, until Disraeli becomes leader of the Tory party and eventually Prime Minister). This last is the purport of the biography as campaign literature. Burke identifies the British body politic, its constitution, and British liberties with the legal incorporation of Britons as subjects within a monarchy in which of the Crown (Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 259-61; 268). 20  “On the Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli,” in Isaac Disraeli, Works, ed. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume One, Rpt. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), viii; hereafter cited in text. 93

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lines of blood genealogy are honored – even if not strictly observed. This argument is based on the Tudor and Stuart concept of the monarch’s two bodies, whereby the monarch’s body metaphorically incorporates the bodies of his or her subjects, a process that is reciprocally necessary in the constitution of the inhabitants of England as English subjects.21 Burke cites the statute called the Declaration of Right that secured the inheritance of the throne to James I’s Protestant descendants, despite the fact that the Roman Catholic ones were in more direct line to succeed. This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess. 2, ch. 2) is the corner-stone of our constitution....It is called “An Act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown.” You will observe, that these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and bound indissolubly together.22

Disraeli makes related points in his political writings. But, in the biography of his father, it is not incorporation but naturalization that Disraeli highlights as the way in which a foreigner – an Italian and a Hebrew – becomes a British subject and an English citizen. Shortly after Disraeli’s grandfather came to England, there was a major fracas over the Jewish Naturalization Act (popularly known as “the Jew Bill”) of 1753, whose provisions would have secured to first-generation Jewish migrants privileges such as land ownership open to their children born in England.23 City merchants envious of Jewish interlopers led a nation-wide agitation that resulted in what Disraeli calls “the disgraceful repeal” (x) of the Act. Agitation was also stirred by prejudice against the recent migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Holland and Germany, a group generally lower in socio-economic status than earlier Jewish immigrants. If both Disraelis read English history as traumatically severed as a result of the beheading of Charles I, Disraeli inscribes a second trauma (replaying that of the Jewish expulsion from Iberia) within the history of the Jews in England. Arguing that the wealthy, aristocratic Sephardic families who immigrated to England from Portugal and Spain in the seventeenth century are now “extinct” (ix), he turns his attention to their successors, Ashkenazi Jews from central and northern Europe, who migrated to England during the following century. Disraeli acknowledges that the Sephardim regarded the Ashkenazim as an “inferior caste” (ix). The fact that the older, nobler group fared less well in the 21  Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 50-51. 22  Burke, op. cit, 15. Jews in England were first referred to as British subjects in an act of Parliament of 1723 (Roth, op. cit., 215n.). 23 Roth, op. cit., 212-223. 94

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struggle for existence than their ill-bred Eastern cousins suggests a paradox. Progress (historical, social, familial, individual) can depend on qualities that, in other contexts, might be seen as negative or even degenerate. In making up family history, Disraeli tries to overcome this awkward reality by conflating the two Jewish lines in the persons of his grandparents. But, as I have mentioned, this claim is untrue. By associating himself with his immigrant grandfather, who was a founding member of the London Stock Exchange, Disraeli identifies himself with the ambitions and eventual success of Ashkenazim such as the Rothschilds. When Disraeli celebrates his grandfather, he also describes himself: “He was a man of ardent character; sanguine, courageous, speculative, and fortunate; with a temper which no disappointment could disturb, and a brain, amid reverses, full of resource” (x). In addition to implicit parallels between the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, the fate of the Jacobite aristocracy, and the extinction of Sephardic Jews in England, Disraeli registers awareness of Jewish trauma in yet a third way – namely in the prejudice that Jews could direct against each other. I have already mentioned the disdain in which Sephardim held Ashkenazim. If his grandfather provides Disraeli with a model of successful naturalization, his grandmother, née Sarah Shiprut de Gabay’s (Weintraub, 22), contempt for all things Jewish – including her husband and son’s surname – indicates the high price that naturalization could entail. Disraeli remarks: “My grandmother, the beautiful daughter of a family who had suffered much from persecution, had imbibed that dislike for her race which the vain are too apt to adopt when they find that they are born to public contempt. The indignant feeling that should be reserved for the persecutor, in the mortification of their disturbed sensibility, is too often visited on the victim” (x). Disraeli’s response emphasizes the burden carried by the objects of prejudice. Despite his sympathy, however, he may misrepresent his grandmother’s resistance to things Jewish. Sarah’s anger, which was legendary, might be read instead as an affective and intellectual rejection of the concept of genealogy that is central to the myths of national “chosenness.” In this she was at one with her younger contemporary, Rahel Levin, whose rooms in Berlin “became the hearth of literary life in Germany.” Levin hated being Jewish. As she wrote to her brother: “I do not forget this shame for a single second. I drink it in water, I drink it in wine, I drink it with the air; in every breath, that is ... The Jew must be extirpated from us, that is the sacred truth, and it must be done even if life were uprooted in the process.”24 In terms of the typology I trace, Levin and Disraeli’s grandmother may be seen as latter-day examples of Lot’s wife: namely, as individuals who reject the idea that women’s primary importance 24  Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Vanguard Press, 1975) 3: 200; hereafter cited in text and notes as Poliakov. 95

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exists in being wives and mothers within a patrilineal family. In his biography of Disraeli, Stanley Weintraub suggests that Leonora Charisi, Daniel Deronda’s mother in the novel by George Eliot, may be based upon Disraeli’s portrait of his grandmother (23). Leonora complains about her husband’s attempt to turn her into a professing Jew: “I was to feel everything I did not feel ... I was to care for ever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it.”25 The history of the Inquisition is the history of the persecution of the Jews. It is also the history of the persecution of sodomites. Under the terms of the Inquisition, the definition of sodomy included intercourse between a Christian and a Jew or a Saracen.26 Likewise, Jews were frequently accused of malemale sodomy.27 There is no representation in the biography of ungentlemanly behavior on the part of Isaac. Queer suggestion, however, occurs in the way in which the essay partakes in Isaac’s favorite genre of ana or anecdotes. Isaac made his name through a successful, much revised, re-edited, and republished work entitled Curiosities of Literature. In this work and others, he especially enjoyed telling anecdotes about literary figures, short narratives from which he liked to believe that he drew philosophic points. Isaac’s prime interest was in literary psychology, the aspect of his work that his son most admired. Disraeli’s favorite book by his father is The Literary Character...of Men of Genius. In the essay, Disraeli traces the difference between his father and his grandfather by invoking the terms genius and artist. Readers of my text will be aware that, by the end of the nineteenth century, words like artist, artistic, aesthetic, and aesthete, are often used as coded references to what was by then designated as the male homosexual. Disraeli’s biographical essay provides evidence at midcentury of how this linkage came to be made. Isaac experienced what today might be termed gender dysphoria. Disraeli comments: “My grandfather had only one child, and nature had disqualified him, from his cradle, for the busy pursuits of men” (xi). The outline of Isaac’s upbringing sounds like a proto-Freudian case study of the etiology of male homosexuality. Isaac’s maternal grandmother doted on him to the point of making him her heir. Her bequest enabled him at the age of twenty-five to 25  Cited in Weintraub, op. cit., 23, 24. 26  Luiz Mott and Aroldo Assunção, “Love’s Labors Lost: Five Letters from a Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Sodomite,” The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, eds. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989), 99-100; Mary Elizabeth Perry, “The ‘Nefarious Sin’ in Early Modern Seville,” ibid., 67-89; Theo van der Meer, “The Persecutions of Sodomites in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam: Changing Perceptions of Sodomy,” ibid., 265. 27 Donald F. Lach, India in the Eyes of Europe: The Sixteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 444. 96

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abandon gainful employment for the life of a writer. The relation with his father was alienated and uncomprehending. “To the last hour of his [father’s] life,” Isaac remained “an enigma ... disappointing all his [father’s] plans” (x). The enigma exacted a psychic cost. During his twenties, Isaac experienced a deep, inexplicable depression similar to the affliction that likewise incapacitated Disraeli as a young man. This shared dysfunction seems to have resulted in increased understanding between the two men. Isaac fathered a number of children yet Disraeli describes him as having been without sexual interest in women. Disraeli mentions his father’s marriage only to assure the reader that it did not reduce his absorption in literary pursuits. When Isaac’s modern biographer tries to compensate for the absence of Isaac’s wife from his son’s account, he produces the following unreassuring comment. A year after his marriage, Isaac told a friend “what a wonderful wife he had: ‘I have never yet found her desires interfere with my wishes, my pleasures are her pleasures, & my friends are her friends’” (Ogden, 72). Isaac’s identification of his wife’s pleasures with his own is characteristic of Ashkenazi tradition.28 That tradition condemned male violence against women, including marital rape. In the very next breath, however, it validated Isaac’s practice of fathering numerous children while feeling free to ignore his wife’s views about doing so. Daniel Boyarin quotes two passages that are juxtaposed in the Babylonian Talmud: Rabi bar Hama said in the name of Rav Assi: a man may not force his wife to have sex with him ... Rabbi Shmuel the son of Nahmani said in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: Any woman who requests sex from her husband will have children such as were not seen even in the generation of Moses. (UC, 170)

Continuing to gloss the passage, Boyarin points out the way in which it guarantees a husband’s sexual access to his wife by defining her needs and desires for her. Since, in the ensuing discussion in the Talmud, it emerges that a wife’s consent “can be understood through silence and necessarily ambiguous signs,” it is clear that in the citation above “requests” need not necessarily mean “requests” (UC, 171). In this respect, silence about Isaac’s wife in the biography speaks. Ashkenazi tradition, then, functions in part to constitute a hierarchical relationship between male and female. It also validates what Boyarin refers to 28 Daniel Boyarin confines his study to Ashkenazic tradition. The Disraelis were not Ashkenazi, but the “fit” between Boyarin’s description and Disraeli’s account of his family suggests that Boyarin’s suggestions suit members of other traditions as well. See Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 151-152n; cited in text as UC. 97

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as a “cross-gendered” construction of gender (UC, 353). What Boyarin means by this phrase is the fact that this tradition validated women as individuals who functioned in the economic, which means also public, sphere, and who frequently were more conversant with gentile languages and cultural practices than their husbands. At the same time, “the ideal male Jew” was a man who devoted his time to the study of Torah – he was “gentle, passive, emotional” (UC, 151, 156).29 Disraeli’s biography contains similarities to both types. The economic surplus upon which Isaac’s life as a scholar depended was bestowed, as I have observed, by a woman, his maternal grandmother. Isaac himself, absorbed in literary studies to the neglect of other interests, sounds like a secular antitype of the rabbinical scholar. In this light, Disraeli’s biography resituates in a national and aesthetic context tendencies already prominent in Jewish existence. This shifting marks one of the ways in which terms such as Jewish, aesthetic, and homosexual come to imply one another later in the century. At the same time, one can doubt Boyarin’s characterization of Jewish scholars as “pseudowomen,” a designation that his portrayal of men and women in Ashkenazi culture belies (UC, 156). Had Isaac been womanly in this respect, he would have been actively engaged in economic work for the material welfare of his family. In using the phrase, Boyarin reifies attitudes towards gender within a gentile culture that, in an uncharacteristic lapse, is represented as though it were monolithic. The charm that men find in other men who are gentle, sensitive, and intellectual depends on their being men, not on their being women, much less pseudowomen. What Boyarin refers to as masculine “femminization” appeals as a masculine mode. The effeminate man appeals to other men because he is both effeminate and a man. Isaac was obsessed by the topic and need for literary friendship, something he felt he never quite managed to achieve (Ogden, 12). His closest relationships were with his publisher and literary friends, but, as Jews, he and his family did not quite fit the mold of late eighteenth-century literary sociability (Ogden, 73, 91). Although he circulated among the writers of the day, he did so at a bit of a distance, uncomfortable and awkward in conversation, at times the butt of others’ wit.30 Indeed, he theorized that intimacy between writers could best be cultivated at a distance by the written and printed word (Ogden, 116). The friendships that Isaac desired belonged to the familiar world of elite male homosocial ties. In late eighteenth-century literary circles, however, these ties were often accompanied by intensities that resulted in gossip and disgrace. The world of aristocratic and gentlemanly writers of the late eighteenth century was 29 This passivity does not imply a passive sexual aim. As Boyarin argues, the sexual aim could be (aggressively) active. 30 The close friendship with his publisher, John Murray, is the one exception to this general rule. 98

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well stocked with men with sexual and emotional ties to other men, including Matthew G. Lewis and Lord Byron. Along with Byron, the Whig aristocrat William Beckford is the most scandalous of these. Isaac’s best literary work is a romance, “Mejnoun and Leila,” in the genre of Oriental tale of which Beckford was the English master. Tracing a line of literary genealogy, Disraeli mentions in a letter that when he met the elderly Beckford in 1834, he remarked that the work was “capital” (Ogden, 56). In the genre of pastoral, the rhetoric of youthful, artistic melancholy often signifies love between men, especially in the work of Thomas Gray and his circle. These conventions reappear in Isaac’s typology of male genius, which Disraeli adapts in portraying his father (Ogden, 112-113). As Gray remarks in his sonnet on the death of Richard West: “A different object do these eyes require.”31 He and West were intimately allied in the so-called “Quadruple Alliance” of Eton schoolmates that also included Horace Walpole and Thomas Ashton.32 Gray became romantically entangled with both Walpole and West, whose death in his mid-twenties Gray memorializes in both the “Sonnet” and his best-known poem, the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”33 In an essay on the latter poem, George Haggerty develops a psychological narrative in which sexual repression and personal loss result in an abandonment to suicidal melancholy. In the “Elegy,” it is by turning to and sharing this dejection with a knowing “friend” that the poetic persona is able to find the strength to continue to live.34 Disraeli and his father may both have lived this pattern. At any rate, Disraeli signals his father’s share in such experiences by repeatedly associating “Gray’s genius” and “the elegiac churchyard” with the country home in Buckinghamshire to which Isaac eventually moved his family. Disraeli does so likewise in emphasizing the prolonged period of “despondency” (George Haggerty would say abjection) that Isaac experienced as a young man: “When he was in his 29th year, there came over my father that mysterious illness to 31  George Haggerty, “‘The Voice of Nature’ in Gray’s Elegy,” Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 201. 32 Isaac knew of Horace Walpole through a mutual friend, Horatio Mann (Ogden, op. cit., 7). 33  Gray “probably was exclusively homosexual” (G. S. Rousseau, “The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: ‘Utterly Confused Category’ and/or Rich Repository?”, Unauthorized Sexual Behavior during the Englightenment, ed. Robert Maccubbin, Eighteenth-Century Life 9(1985), 136). 34 Haggerty, “‘The Voice of Nature,’” op. cit., 199-214; Jean H. Hagstrum, “Gray’s Sensibility,” Fearful Joy: Papers from the Thomas Gray Bicentenary Conference at Carleton University, ed. James Downey and Ben Jones (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), 6-19; B. Eugene McCarthy, Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 44-104. 99

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which the youth of men of sensibility, and especially literary men, is frequently subject – a failing of nervous energy, occasioned by study and too sedentary habits, early and habitual reverie, restless and indefinite purpose” (xxi). In the sentence, the phrases “men of sensibility” and “literary men” connote men with the sort of melancholy that afflicted Gray. Disraeli says that his father suffered from this condition well into his thirties and periodically thereafter (xxiii). When Disraeli underwent a similar depression in his twenties, the experience drew him and his father together. Disraeli does other signaling too. His description of his father as a young boy is based on a portrait that appears as the frontispiece of Curiosities of Literature in the edition for which Disraeli wrote the biography. Disraeli reads the portrait under the sign of melancholy: A pale, pensive child, with large dark brown eyes, and flowing hair ... had grown up beneath this roof of worldly energy and enjoyment, indicating even in his infancy, by the whole carriage of his life, that he was of a different order from those among whom he lived. Timid, susceptible, lost in reverie, fond of solitude, or seeking no better company than a book, the years had stolen on, till he had arrived at that mournful period of boyhood when eccentricities excite attention and command no sympathy. (xi)

Disraeli’s description of his father as a “moonstruck” adolescent offers yet another way of deflecting patrilineal succession with the suggestion of sexual perversity, in this case not homosexuality but rather masturbation. Compare the contemporaneous comments that appear in the first medical text devoted solely to masturbation, the Swiss physician, Samuel Tissot’s Tentamen de morbis ex manustrupratione (1758; trans. into French, 1760).35 Tissot says that masturbators are characterized by “an air of distraction, embarrassment, and stupidity” and “a disagreeable feeling of laziness.”36 It is only later in the century that the conflation of the categories of masturbation and male homosexuality occurs. But Isaac’s potential slippage into “sympathy” with another order of beings disrupts genealogical order by importing into it – as what J. Hillis Miller would term a parasite or a guest – the specter of the (anti-reproductive) sodomite.37 Ghosting his father with a figure of imaginative reverie, self-absorbed inversion, 35 Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993), 45. 36  Ibid., 46. Cohen demonstrates that in the nineteenth century “the masturbator” becomes the antithesis of all that was deemed desirable in the middle-class male (3568). 37  J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 217-253. 100

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and inaptitude for worldly success, Disraeli absorbs the perverse other into the line of a supposed normalcy. And yet, not quite. Since, seeming to anticipate late twentieth-century debates about male homosexuality, the similarity between Disraeli’s psychological makeup and his father’s plus the assurance that “nature had disqualified him, from his cradle, for the busy pursuits of men” suggests a belief that unconventional gender-formation and errant desires may be hereditary and therefore, by a certain logic, ineffaceable. In this way, the alternative genealogy Disraeli traces may be in some ways literal even if, as with Disraeli himself, who was married but childless, it implies the eventual end of a direct line of progeny. The survival of this perverse lineage depends on a process of affinity rather than literal filiation. Of course the chief literary exponent of sexual perversity in Isaac’s lifetime was Lord Byron, whom Disraeli met through Murray. Isaac was put off when he first met the young poet: “I once met Lord Byron before he was known, before he traveled. Such a fantastic and effeminate thing I never saw. It was all rings and curls and lace. I was ashamed to speak to him; he looked more like a girl than a boy” (Ogden, 117). Despite the repulsion, Byron and Isaac were drawn together by their interest in the psychology of genius and became mutual admirers in correspondence and print. After Byron was forced into exile in 1816, Murray obtained a copy of An Essay on the Literary Character with Byron’s annotations, which Isaac incorporated into the second edition in 1818 (Ogden, 107). When Murray sent a copy of the new edition to Byron, he replied, chiding Murray for having given Isaac the notes. Byron wrote: “I don’t know a living man’s books I take up so often, or lay down more reluctantly, as Israeli’s” (108). Another literary convention that joins subjects of male-male desire in the nineteenth century is the exchange of literary works, often in manuscript, that show pleasurable response to young men.38 Byron went further when he wrote to Isaac in 1822 and asked him whether he had read “a MS memoir of mine (not to be published till I am in my grave)” in Murray’s possession. “As you are curious in such things as relate to the human mind,” Byron continued, “I should feel gratified if you had.” It contains “the truth – not the whole truth,” which might be considered scandalous, “but, nevertheless nothing but the truth” (Ogden, 119). Byron reached to Isaac as someone capable of understanding the sexual complexities of his life – including the truths that could be surmised though not directly reported even in a posthumous memoir. The most noteworthy of these, according to readers who had seen the manuscript, were Byron’s mysterious references to “a nameless person whom he calls his ‘love of loves,’” probably 38  For example, Manuscript B, the volume of transcriptions of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s unpublished poems that Robert Bridges circulated (Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 56). 101

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John Edlestone. In reply, Isaac said he would like to read the text; but, after Byron’s untimely death, John Cam Hobhouse, a friend of Byron who shared his sexual interest in young men, persuaded Murray to burn the manuscript.39 Isaac’s attention to Charles I was stimulated in the first place by a desire to defend his father, James I, against “popular notions” of his character (xxvii n.). Isaac published a short book about James I in 1816. In it, he attempts to rationalize the embarrassing endearments expressed by James’s favorites in their letters. Nonetheless, Isaac also remarks that “the luxurious idlers of that day were polluted with infamous vices.” Reverting to the same topic a bit later, he observes, if only to deny, that “the King’s occasional retirements to Royston and Newmarket have ... been surmised to have borne some analogy to the horrid Capraea of Tiberius.”40 In an essay on James in Curiosities of Literature, Isaac, a bit more forthcoming, describes James as “singularly effeminate; he could not behold a drawn sword without shuddering; was much too partial to handsome men; and appears to merit the bitter [anti-sodomitic] satire of Churchill.”41 Isaac cites “the gross familiarity” of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who in his letters referred to James as “Dere dad and Gossope!” and signed himself, “your humble slave and dogge, Stenie.” As for James, he wrote to Buckingham: I cannot content myself without sending you this present [letter], praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you and that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.42

The relation of subordination here is rapidly reversed: James is at once “widow” and husband to Villiers as “wife.” James’s elevation of Villiers to the rank of Duke is a notable example of sodomy in an explicitly political context.43 Such violations of court precedence stand in odd relation to genealogical principles. For Puritans, sodomy made 39  Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 340-341. 40 Isaac Disraeli, An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First (London: John Murray, 1816), 187-188 n., 189, 205. 41  Ibid., 463. 42  Quoted by Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14. 43  Ibid., 178. 102

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James a figure of the Antichrist worthy to be deposed so that God’s Covenant with English Protestants could be reaffirmed in a revolutionary state. But the actuality was more ambiguous and ambivalent than this view permits. In Tudor and Stuart times, the practice of governing by male friendship was regularly construed by political opponents as governance by sodomy. In mixing the two, James demonstrated the fact that, in practice, male friendship and male-male sexual and emotional entanglement were mutually implicated realities. James’s wandering regard called in question the assumption, basic to the ideological deployment of the Sodom-narrative, that there is a tie between the government in London and God’s promise to the English. Greg Bredbeck suggests that this negation is the most challenging, most modern aspect, for example, of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. The king’s actions in promoting his favorite, Gaveston, over peers of superior blood exemplifies governance as a field of individual choice – whether decisions are governed by reason or, as in Edward’s case, by caprice. In tracing the different and opposed patrimonies he received from his father and grandfather, Disraeli similarly incorporates what are supposed to be the mutually canceling terms of a binary opposition. Sodomy, in the case of James I, art, genius, and melancholy in the case of the biography, signify sexual and emotional ties between men as part of normal existence. Genius signifies participation in a cultural genealogy that enables the existence, affiliation, and memory of men who resist conventional norms of gender and sexual preference. The masculinism of this genealogy inhibits recognition of the ways in which being a woman can result both in the incorporation of women within patrilineal genealogy and/or in practices that resist these mandates. It took someone like George Eliot to exploit the latter potential within Disraeli’s family history. Beyond domesticity, such history is also the history of the survivals and losses of group history, both Jewish and English. These connections in Disraeli’s text cumulatively indicate how unsustainable is the myth of a national covenant secured by lines of primogeniture or even by other, looser relations of consanguinity. Opening a view to other, asymmetrical affinities of culture, intimacy, and group existence, Disraeli exemplifies the cultural and ethnic hybridity of Victorian England. I want to counter the triumphal aspect of this narrative by reminding readers of the insistent way in which violence, trauma, even the threat of extinction keep returning. Disraeli continually re-inscribes these matters on the surface of the biography. From his father, Disraeli inherited the unusual combination of a selfconsciously Enlightenment temperament, open to consider particular issues from a number of different, even contradictory, points of view, plus a devotion to the place of tradition in national life, and a keen awareness of ways in which social violence can be enlisted in sustaining a fictional sense of continuity. In his persona and career, he aspired to mediate these tensions. Presenting the 103

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history of his family, Disraeli presented his own genius to the English public as the means whereby both continuity and progress could be achieved through Parliamentary leadership. It is important to remember that in Ireland and the Empire, the norm of cultural hybridity validated the subordination, indeed the subjection of many populations to the British state. In England, the same norm implied widening citizenship but in terms of the integration of cultural difference, of which Coningsby (1844) provides a novelistic model. In Alroy, however, Disraeli had affirmed the proliferation of different cultural practices. And in the biography of his father, Disraeli writes against the idea of a national genealogy secured through biological reproduction. If Weintraub is right in seeing a linkage between Disraeli’s portrayal of his grandmother and George Eliot’s repudiation of the narrative conventions of Coningsby and the myths of Anglo-Norman lineage in favor, literally, of celibacy for Gwendolen Harleth and of Deronda’s decision to affirm Jewish particularity through marriage and emigration, then Disraeli’s work, for Eliot and others, models not only the use of the novel to imagine and represent a hybrid genealogy but likewise the negation of that genealogy in a process of living and inquiry beyond the limits of the modern imperial nation-state. The commitment of the Disraelis, father and son, to think in terms of particularities did not neutralize the invidious effects of the narrative structures, characterology, tropes, and displacements with which the Sodom-narrative of Genesis has continued to be replayed in Western culture on those occasions when individuals and institutions lay claim to a collective chosenness. Nonetheless, Disraeli keeps showing how opposed terms are marked by internal differences. The failures and contradictions within his political ideology: for example, the bias against Roman Catholicism he shared with his father and grandfather; his attendant lack of sympathy with Irish national political aspirations; his confidence that colonial subjects were precisely that, subjects, not citizens; occur when he privileges single terms such as Protestant and English. Sodom narratives offer powerful examples of how damaging collective fictions can be. Nonetheless, they can be challenged from gendered and sexed positions that do not conform to heteronormative genealogy. These positions in turn have the potential of giving rise to alternative genealogies with their own prophetic appeal to cultural dissidents. Unlike the narratives of national election, such genealogies do not promise redemption. Or rather, when they do so, their assurance needs to be met with skepticism. But they do call to a continual rethinking of individual and collective responsibility.

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Chapter 6

Bottoming for the Queen: Queering the Jews in Protestant Europe at the Fin de Siècle, Steven Lapidus

1. Introduction

Jews and homosexuals have frequently been paralleled over the centuries. Both groups have been similarly portrayed as moral degenerates, sexual predators, outsiders, and ultimately, anti-Christian. It would take nineteenth-century medicine to forcibly merge the Jew and the homosexual into a unique social danger. Antisemitism was driven by religious and ethnic hatred with an admixture of sexual threat. With the advent of modernity and the putative espousal of rationality, recent medical theories fostered a biologically-based antisemitism that paralleled a biologized homophobia. The endorsement of sexology   Protestantism has a history of intransigence in judging individual behavior, which was only reinforced under Pietism and Evangelicalism, resulting in especially English and German concerns with rigid social roles, which is the primary concern of this chapter. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 26-27.   Jean-Paul Sartre writes: “[t]o know what the contemporary Jew is, we must ask the Christian conscience. And we must not ask, ‘What is a Jew?’ But, ‘What have you made of the Jews?’” Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans. G. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 67-69.   “Heterosexuals, who regard themselves as ‘normal’ because they are in the majority, and who (in the prime of life, at any rate) are apt to have an instinctive dislike for homosexuals and their ways — a dislike that is fostered by the suggestive influence of education — hypocritically incline to pretend that homosexual practices cannot have arisen spontaneously in their own happy land and among their own fortunately endowed ‘race.’ Hence the canting insinuation that homosexuality must have been introduced from without, from the foreign land or by the foreign people with whose name it is associated.” Magnus Hirschfeld, Racism. Trans. E. & C. Paul (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973), 150-51.

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introduced new bases for social prejudices in which race and heteronormativity played significant roles. Since reproduction is by definition heterosexual, in a nationalistic society, it serves additionally as a site for the pursuit of racial purity. With the growing acceptance of biology, miscegenation and nonheterosexuality merge as they now assume physiological dangers. Old hatreds were not only resurrected and substantiated by a newer Truth — Science — they now merged with questions of sexual health and would further serve to exclude outsiders. Since Emancipation limited the legal power of antisemitism, old and new canards of sexual illness would form an overt element of the new antisemitism. Europe’s Jews had been effectively queered. Indeed, there is much overlap between tropes and caricatures of Jews and homosexuals. Initially, these groups were rejected for theological reasons: both Jews and homosexuals forfeited their share in the Kingdom of God by rejecting Christ and His laws. With the onset of modernity, those religious prejudices were putatively discarded in favor of the more rational and empirical discoveries of medical science. No longer were antisemitic or anti-homosexual ideas merely products of obscurantist theology, they were now products of contemporaneous science. Daniel Boyarin observes that the “founding of psychoanalysis and the   Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18.   There are two important caveats to be noted at this point. The first concerns a question of definition. The usage and meaning of the word “queer” is nowhere an unequivocal choice. However, lacking the space to engage in this debate, I will limit myself to using the word “queer” to mean difference; specifically, I mean sexually different in tastes, habits, and practices. Second is a question of dating. Other scholars have argued that the queering of religious minorities is a pre-modern phenomenon with many examples from the Middle Ages. See, for example, Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Glenn Burger, Steven F. Kruger, eds., Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). I concur in that the roots of the modern queering of the Jews, as I will show, has medieval antecedents. However, I also argue that the queering of the Jews reached a pinnacle with the marriage of religious (and social) prejudice to the nascent fields of anthropology and sexology, where Jewish queerness was biologized. It follows the trend described by those medievalists noted above, but the introduction of purported scientific substantiation in the nineteenth century encourages us to see this era as a significant milestone in the merging of Jewish and queer history. Indeed, Peter Lewis Allen underscores this difference when he observes that as the last vestiges of plague died in the eighteenth century, so too did the belief that religion and medicine were directly aligned, with one significant exception: diseases linked with sex remained subject to old theological and social prejudices (The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 76-77). 106

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Oedipus complex are specifically embroiled in the homophobic-antisemitic movement of the fin de siècle.” Many sexologists also concurred that Jews were, like homosexuals, fixated at prior stages of sexual development. However, the science that united Jews and homosexuals at the turn-of-thecentury notwithstanding, Western discrimination against these groups has not drifted far from its religious roots. In fact, many fin-de-siècle scientific discoveries seem suspiciously mirrored by — or mired in — traditional religious attitudes. I am most specifically interested in how modern scientific knowledge was used to unite Jews and queers into a singular medical and moral hazard. I will do so by outlining the twinning of Jews and homosexuals during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prior to exploring the religious roots of this pattern. In order to understand this evolution, we must begin by exploring the relationship among society, religion, and science at the turn of the twentieth century. 2. Victorian Society

In Nationalism and Sexuality, George Mosse argues that respectability was the pre-eminent bourgeois marker of morality. Respectability was located in the obsession with sexual mores and gender roles. As the state became increasingly identified with the bourgeoisie, middle-class values came to represent the very health of the nation, resulting in public concern over rigid gender roles, clear sex-based division of labor, and sexual health — all features of the new morality. Furthermore, it was popularly believed that individual morality could have considerable ramifications on the wellness of the entire society. “Once again the qualities of manliness coincided with the ideals of bourgeois society; they served to symbolize those manners and morals, that ideal of beauty and energy, that made the difference between the normal and the abnormal.”10   Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 189-90.   Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 136.   Mosse, Nationalism, op. cit., 1-6. Robert Aldrich suggests that concomitant with concerns over respectability at home, “Colonialism and imperialism, in theory, aims to set up respectable, loyal and profitable European outposts overseas, and to impart European (generally Christian) virtues to ‘savages’ and ‘heathen’” (Colonialism and Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4).   David A. Hirsch, “Dickens’s Queer Jew and Anglo-Christian Identity Politics: The Contradictions of Victorian Family Values,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, eds. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, & Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 311-33. 10  Mosse, Nationalism, op. cit., 144-45. 107

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A properly gendered and hierarchical social system would in fact police not merely individual moral behavior, it would also protect the society, the state, and ultimately Protestantism itself against a plethora of outside threats.11 In turn-of-the-century Germany, the concern with sexual behavior was ultimately a reflection of “an implicit crisis in gender relations.”12 The ever-growing obsession with gender roles led to the policing of those who crossed these lines.13 When national health became equated with social conformity and homogeneity, the greatest menaces to respectability were the outsiders — primarily Jews, and the sexually unhealthy (read: homosexuals, and Jews, again). “The sexuality of the Other is always threatening.”14 Further reinforcing the isolation of Jews and homosexuals was the commonly-held belief that sexual health was plainly visible on one’s body. “Homosexuality, by the close of the nineteenth century… not only manifested itself in ‘perverted’ acts but was written on the body of homosexual through the appearance of specific, visible signs.”15 Homosexuals were not the only ones who could be spotted: “The construction of the Jewish body in the West is absolutely linked to the underlying ideology of antisemitism, to the view that the Jew is inherently different.”16 Jews were purported to have distinct feet, gait, skin color, voice, nose, and smell.17 Jewish and homosexual deviance had at last one common etiology: voice. Indeed, it was believed that as a Jew’s 11  Mosse observes that conspiracy theories that addressed potential societal and national threats abounded and often paired Jews with homosexuals, and not infrequently communists as well (Mosse, Image of Man, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 68). In a contemporary example Michael Kimmel writes how, while involved in an antiVietnam rally in New York City, he was accosted by a counter-demonstrator who called him a “commie, Jew, fag.” (“Judaism, Masculinity and Feminism,” in A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, ed. Harry Brod (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1988, 153-56). 12  John C. Fout, “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2.3 (1992), 391. 13  In England, for example, during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as other times of crisis, national safety was predicated upon the suppression of sexual immorality — a classification that included homosexuals, foreigners, political challengers, and “Latin” people — including Italians and post-Revolutionary French. Arthur N. Gilbert, “Sexual Deviance and Disaster During the Napoleonic Wars.” Albion 9.1(1977), 110-13. In Germany, too, sexual impropriety was attributed to the French and Italians (Fout, op. cit., 408). 14  Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 158. 15  Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 164. 16  See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 38. 17  Ibid., 10-59, 169-79. 108

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voice would expose him as such, so too the effeminate, pre-pubescent voice of the homosexual marked him as degenerate.18 Thus was the distinction between normal and abnormal medicalized and biologized, which while substantiating racist ideologies, also elevated alleged group differences to the status of concrete and objective knowledge.19 As Michel Foucault writes of this era: [sexual discourse] set itself up as the supreme authority in matters of hygienic necessity, taking up the old fears of venereal affliction and combining them with the new themes of asepsis, and the great evolutionist myths with the recent institutions of public health; it claimed to ensure the physical vigor and the moral cleanliness of the social body; it promised to eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardized populations. In the name of a biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon. It grounded them in “truth.”20

So fundamental to national health was masculinity that even churchmen preached muscularity. Merged with physical prowess, purity of thought and religious piety were believed to protect the state and justify colonialism and sexism. Clearly, the deviant and effeminate homosexual or Jew could never render service to church or country as could a pure English boy.21 Purity Leagues arose in the late eighteenth century in an attempt to control perceived threats to the masculine ideals. These groups aimed, in the name of the state and society, to stem the tide of “moral degeneration.” They attempted to accomplish this by protesting movements to decriminalize homosexuality, masturbation,22 and in some cases, prostitution. In fact, the obsession with seminal continence demanded by groups such as Muscular Christianity and Purity leagues effectively — and intentionally — excluded homosexual men. Nineteenth-century English preacher Charles Spurgeon makes the case clearly: “When I say that a man in Christ is a man, I mean that, if he be truly in Christ, he is therefore manly. There has got abroad a notion, somehow, that if you become a Christian you must sink your manliness and turn milksop.”23

18  Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 163-65. 19  See Mosse, Nationalism, op. cit., 1-47. 20  Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 54. 21  Mosse, Image, op. cit., 47-49. 22  Ibid., 98-99. 23  C. H. Spurgeon, as cited in Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 26, emphasis in original. 109

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In Germany, by the turn of the century, Protestant purity movements played a similar role. In his analysis, John Fout observes: Purity-activists, supported by their church-based claim of moral authority, preached their vision of a moral order, which countered the demand for sexual diversity with a pronounced emphasis on the centrality of heterosexual marriage and family as defined by their interpretation of “Christian values.” They contrasted those values with the perversity of all other forms of sexual behavior, most decidedly male homosexual acts. In close alliance with the Protestant churches in Germany, the moral purity organizations increasingly saw their role as championing the existing — and, in their minds, divinely ordained — gender order. In fact … the leadership of Protestant churches reaffirmed in the modern era what they believed was the church’s traditional role as the arbiter and upholder of the gender order.24

Not only does Fout describe the narrowing focus on homosexuality as the singular sexual concern, he also implicates Christian theology as the source for modern homophobia, as he underlines the connection between the German purity movements and the Protestant hierarchy of the era.25 Supporting this idea, Mosse observes that “even in a secularizing society these [modern virtues] were for the most part thought to rest on Christian foundations as well as upon the Greeks.”26 In fact, so persuasive were these nascent nationalist models of health, that they were adopted by several Jewish and queer thinkers. Max Nordau, ideologue and leader of the political Zionist movement, expounded his theory of degeneration — the notion that physical and social health were correlated. As physical health declined, which was assumed to be the case for ghetto Jews as well as homosexuals, so too did mental salubrity and hence the potential for social leadership. Thus, theories of degeneration provided psychological and sexual health with societal and political valence. “Nordau’s call for a ‘new muscle Jew’ is premised on the belief that the Jew had degenerated ‘in the narrow confines of the ghetto.’ But it was not merely the muscles of the Jews but also their minds that had atrophied in the ghetto.”27 Hans Blüher, a homophilic writer of fin-de-siècle Germany, for example, while erotizing “heroic males,” condemned “effeminate introverts” as the unhealthy product of racial mixing, inbreeding, and decadence, accusations which typically would be levelled at Jews

24  25  26  27 

Fout, op. cit., 390-91. Ibid., 405-06. Mosse, Image, op. cit., 47. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, op. cit., 158. 110

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as well.28 Mosse also notes that many queer men internalized the stereotype of themselves proffered by society.29 Even Magnus Hirschfeld believed that homosexuality was visible on the individual.30 3. Victorian Dichotomies

During the Victorian era, Emancipation and immigration wrought important social changes. The growth in numbers and diversity of the outsiders, or the queer group, led to increased fears of contamination resulting in a strong dichotomous division between the inside and outside. The medical practitioners of the time supported this polarity as diagnoses and categorization were often drawn along class, gender, and racial lines. These divisions juxtaposed healthy sexuality with amoral sexuality. In other words, non-conformist sexuality was not simply unhealthy, it was morally questionable and grounds for social exclusion.31 Medicine had merged with morality. This moral equivalence fell hard upon Jews and homosexuals. Both were seen to violate the strict gender dichotomy of Victorian society. Men in neither group were accepted as fully men — they were seen as gender-benders. “Historically, the Jewish male is, from the point of view of dominant European culture, a sort of woman.”32 Jacob Press offers a similar observation of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: “Eliot thematizes Deronda’s shame about his penis/parentage as a metaphor for what she reads as the nonphallic faux masculinity of the man whose consciousness and loyalties are European but who is nonetheless marked in his gender as a Jewish other.”33 Even the Jewish smell — perhaps Nature’s 28  Jay Geller, “Freud, Blüher, and Secessio Inversa: Männerbünde, Homosexuality, and Freud’s Theory of Cultural Formation,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, eds. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 98. 29  Mosse, Image, op. cit., 150. Gilman notes that many assimilated Jews feared they would be associated with feminized homosexuals based on contemporaneous prejudices (Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 162). 30  Fout, op. cit., 400. 31  Ornella Moscucci, “Clitoridectomy, Circumcision, and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in Sexualities in Victorian Britain, eds. Andrew H. Miller & James Eli Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 60. 32  Daniel Boyarin, “Masada or Yavneh? Gender and the Arts of Jewish Resistance,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, eds. Jonathan Boyarin & Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 306. 33  Jacob Press, “Same-Sex Unions in Modern Europe: Daniel Deronda, Altneuland, and the Homoerotics of Jewish Nationalism,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 303. 111

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advanced warning system — came to foreshadow Jewish sexual immorality, which was seen to threaten male heterosexual gender identity.34 This period also witnesses a blending of Jewish and queer stereotypes. As Boyarin, Itzkovitz and Pellegrini argue, the identification of the Jews’ undesirable traits, especially the sexual ones, newly biologically determined by racial science — and hence immutable — coincided temporally with the creation of the medical diagnosis and social identity of the modern homosexual.35 Further distinct from the Romantic ideal where purity lay in the rural areas, Jews and queers thrived in the unnatural urban settings. “The city — icon of the rejection of redemption, of Abraham’s failure in Sodom and Gomorrah, of the Jerusalem of Herod — permeates the image of civilization and is represented as the breeding ground of perverse and unnatural sexuality.”36 Outsiders settled in the city, while the respectable and native-born lived in the pure air of the pastoral countryside.37 The city also offered Jews and queers another nefarious advantage: secrecy.38 So heinous are the acts of both groups, that they require hidden places to engage in their unspeakable rituals. “The conspiracy of homosexuals to subvert society ran parallel to the universal world Jewish conspiracy; both Jews and homosexuals were regarded by their enemies as a ‘state within a state.’”39 Perhaps the most titillating Victorian association among the Jew, the sexually different and the city came to light during the investigations of the Whitechapel murders in 1888. Members of two groups were most likely targeted as suspects in the crimes of Jack the Ripper: Jews and queers. It was assumed by the police at the time that Jack the Ripper must have been an Eastern European Jew and in fact, a large proportion of the men arrested in the Ripper case

34  See Jay Geller, “(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard EilbergSchwartz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 243-82. In this chapter Geller further shows how smell is associated with animality and thereby “arose an implicit connection among Jews, their noses, and ‘primitive,’ ergo degenerative, sexuality; that is, between Jews and a sexuality which did not support or which threatened male heterosexual gender identity” (253). 35  Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini, Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, op. cit., 1-3; Foucault, op. cit., 43. 36  Gilman, Difference and Pathology, op. cit., 214. 37  Mosse, Nationalism, op. cit., 32. 38  Daniel Itzkovitz makes this point regarding Jews and queers in American history as well. See Daniel Itzkovitz, “Secret Temples,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, op. cit., 179. 39  Mosse, Nationalism, op. cit., 138. 112

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were Jews.40 Certainly no Christian could have committed so heinous a crime, and definitely no Englishman.41 The murderer had to be representative of an image of sexuality that was both distant and frightening;42 the brutality and posthumous evisceration of the five murdered prostitutes demanded a sexually deviant killer.43 The theory posited that the sexually abnormal Jew killed the syphilitic prostitute. Both threatened the moral, social and Christian order and the murder of one by the other was seen in some way as redemptive. The deviant (Jew) was the necessary prophylactic for the wayward woman. It was further speculated that to overcome the guilt of sexual relations with a Christian woman, the Jew killed her post-coitally. For the Jew, the taint of miscegenation could only be erased by the murder of his sexual partner.44 The association of sexuality, violence, and predation also alludes to the urban homosexual. To the people of the era, Jack the Ripper — qua Jew or queer — represents all sexual deviants: “The Jew, with all of his associations with disease, becomes the surrogate for all marginal males, males across the boundary from the (male) observer, males, who like women, can be the source of corruption, if not for the individual, then for the collective.”45 Of course, English society at this time was prepared to believe almost anything about the sexual depravity of Jews and queers. In mid-century, for example, the London Society for the Protection of Young Females and Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution tried to close down London’s brothels, believed to be predominantly run by Jews, including one Jewish-run male brothel where “twelve to fourteen boys, from ten to fifteen years of age, have been congregated there on the Sabbath, and the most dreadful scenes of depravity — scenes at which human nature shudders — were constantly enacted.”46 The belief that Jack was syphilitic (partly to explain the violence of his crimes) merely enhanced the belief that he was either Jewish or queer — both associated with 40  Gilman adds that one official description of Jack described a man “age 37, rather dark beard and moustache, dark jacket and trousers, black felt hat, spoke with a foreign accent” (Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989), 251). 41  In fact, one newspaper noted that precedents for such heinous crimes could only be found in the “wilds of Hungary” or “French peasant life.” (as cited in L. Perry Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2001), 126). 42  Gilman, The Jew’s Body, op. cit., 119. 43  Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Night: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 198. 44  Curtis, op. cit., 170, 236-37. 45  Gilman, The Jew’s Body, op. cit., 123. 46  Hirsch, op. cit., 320. 113

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sexually-transmitted diseases.47 Allusions to pederasty and boy prostitution, not uncommon in Whitechapel of the era, only further targeted queer men. Although most newspapers of the era shied away from specific references to sexual orientation,48 one can still find evidence that specific homosexual men were also targeted. First, Whitechapel had at least one well-known gay brothel, which would become the object of a press scandal within a year. As a godless place bereft of Christian morality, Whitechapel was home to sexual outsiders.49 Second, many of the terms used to refer to Jack the Ripper —such as “sexual psychosis,” “sexual insanity,” “anthropologically degenerate,” “perversion of the sexual impulse,” “double-life,” and “Jekyll and Hyde”50 — were also frequent euphemisms used to describe homosexuals.51 Finally, the three years prior to the Ripper killings witnessed a “massive political initiative against nonmarital, non-reproductive sexuality” including the 1885 criminalization of “indecent” acts between consenting male adults which further marginalized sexual minorities.52 In those cases where there was detailed information on a suspect’s homosexuality, his sexual preference was deemed a contributing factor in the crime. Such was the case for several suspects including Montague John Druitt and Dr. Francis Tumblety.53 Even more illuminating is an excerpt from a letter written by John Littlechild to a journalist in 1913. Although penned twenty-five 47  Gilman, The Jew’s Body, op. cit., 119. 48  Curtis, op. cit., 176. 49  Ibid., 161. 50  Interestingly, in the Stevenson thriller, Mr. Hyde’s nocturnal sexual escapades were not clearly heterosexual or homosexual. The object of desire was intentionally omitted, permitting the story to work in a homosexual or heterosexual context (Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Night, op. cit., 206). 51  Curtis, op. cit., 146, 150, 176. 52  Judith R. Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence.” Feminist Studies 8.3 (1982), 545-46. 53  For example, the Duke of Clarence (Eddy), his lover, James Stephen, Montague John Druitt, and Francis Tumblety were all suspects because of their sexual preferences (Curtis, op. cit., 28-29). Prince Edward Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria was known to frequent a male brothel in Cleveland Street in Whitechapel (favored by aristocrats), although Eddy only formally became identified as a suspect in the 1970s. Eddy’s tutor at Cambridge and later his lover, James K. Stephen, who was known for his misogyny, was also a suspect, especially considering his anger over having been jilted by the Prince. Schoolteacher and barrister John Montague Druitt, whose strange suicide and homosexuality led to suspicions that he was the Ripper, drowned himself in the Thames in December 1888. Francis Tumblety, an American doctor also considered a potential suspect, was most probably homosexual, since he had once been arrested for “unnatural offences.” 114

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years after the crimes of 1888, the letter was written by the man who was in charge of the Scotland Yard investigation of the Whitechapel murders at the time. One line from this letter is highly suggestive, and I quote Littlechild as he draws a forensic portrait of Jack the Ripper: “it is very strange how those given to contrary sexual instinct and degenerates are given to cruelty, even [Oscar] Wilde used to like to be punched about.”54 Evidence notwithstanding, in a context of social prejudice and sexual violence, many in England were willing to accept the theory of Jewish or queer culpability. “The growing list of candidates reflected the local social economy of Whitechapel; it also mirrored the prejudices of the police and local residents.”55 4. Science or Religion?

The nineteenth century marks an important turning point from older prejudices to so-called newer ones. Homophobia takes on a decidedly new flavor as it is substantiated by modern science. “Old antisemitism” also gives way to a “new antisemitism.” The old form, justified by theology, is replaced by the new antisemitism which is rationalized, explained, and concretized in light of nineteenth-century scientific discovery. Jewish rejection and isolation were no longer justified by archaic and irrational perfidy, but are now founded in the new empirical data of the era that explained how Jews replicated immoral and antisocial traits through reproduction. The fundamental belief in Jewish hereditary contamination seems little different although the rationalizations have been modernized. Homosexuals come under scientific scrutiny too. Indeed, by the turn of the century, the topic of sexuality generally comes to be increasingly targeted at homosexuality alone: In such texts as Billy Budd and Dorian Gray and through their influence, the subject — the thematics — of knowledge and ignorance themselves, of innocence and initiation, of secrecy and disclosure, became not contingently but integrally infused with one particular object of cognition: no longer sexuality as a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topic. And the condensation of the world of possibilities surrounding same-sex sexuality — including shall we say, 54  Littlechild letter, http://www.casebook.org/official_documents/cletter.html. Accessed July 10, 2007. In the same paragraph Littlechild exposes his bias in linking homosexuality, pedophilia, and sadism. Immediately following his reference to Wilde, Littlechild describes in great detail a case in which an older man entrapped a younger boy, and after having caught the boy stealing, stripped and whipped him prior to submerging him in a saltwater bath. 55  Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Night, op. cit., 202. 115

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both gay desires and the most rabid phobias against them — the condensation of this plurality to the homosexual topic that now formed the accusative case of modern processes of personal knowing, was not the least infliction of the turnof-the-century crisis of sexual definition.56

When all sexual difference comes to be seen as a question of homosexuality, all sexual outsiders are provisionally queered, because a focus on homosexuality means a focus on all queer behavior. For both Jews and queers religious opprobrium had been assimilated into the medical discourse, giving antisemitism and homophobia scientific justification. Although many historians argue that the physiological and biological discoveries provided a rational explanation for much xenophobia, replacing the putatively unscientific biases of theological claims, in fact, many so-called new ideas of biological racism can be shown to have deep and powerful connections to earlier forms of xenophobia. Further, although not entirely novel, the merging of Jewish and queer threats to proper Christian society came together very forcefully in this period. Among the first sources for the religious roots of modern religious xenophobia is the evolution of many sexual illnesses out of medieval Christian morality. This synthesis of physiological health with morality signified the manner by which physicians adopted the moral imperatives of the clerics.57 Not only did doctors diagnose physical illness, they adopted, virtually unmodified, the moral judgments of the clergy: onanism became masturbation, and sodomy homosexuality. As Peter Lewis Allen observes: What had been an art and a craft was becoming a priesthood: as the influence of clergy declined, physicians more and more took over their role as guardians of specialized knowledge, professional secrets, and philanthropic benevolence … The doctor’s office replaced the confessional booth — particularly in matters of sex.58

The medicalization of religious values would have tremendous impact on those identified as sinners. Since religious values formed the basis for much medical knowledge, those with the most sins would be most pathologized. Further, the focus on manliness as a social and religious value emanates from Christian — and frequently Protestant — norms. Calvinistic influence can easily be detected in the encouragement of moderation, control of passion,

56  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 74. 57  Mosse, Image, op. cit., 82; Nationalism, 27. 58  Allen, op. cit., 93-94. 116

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along with sexual and mental purity.59 In nineteenth-century England, the Muscular Christianity movement proposed that a strong body, coupled with sexual abstinence, would guard against sinfulness and intemperance, the greatest national threats. Such attentive efforts would produce manly and godly men worthy to rule over women and effete nations.60 In turn-of-the-century Germany strict gender lines were at the root of Christian morality. “Women, idealized as sexually passive, obedient, chaste, and motherly, were to provide a loving home and a Christian atmosphere and morality for the good German family.”61 Mosse adds: “medical definitions of normal and abnormal sexuality accompanied the rise of respectability … those distinctions which had been used rather more loosely by Christian moral theology became firm and unbending matters of sickness and health.”62 The Hegelian notion that later forms of human thought are more advanced than earlier ones clearly advantaged Christian sexual morality over Jewish ethics. The Fall from Grace provided rationale for both degeneration and subsequent regeneration. The sexually ill were excluded from any such redemption. Symbolically, this was manifest in the belief that proper sexuality is exemplified in the adult Christian male, i.e. the white European male. All other sexualities were suspect: that of the Jew, the woman, the child, and certainly the homosexual. None of these exemplified the social and moral standard of the proper Christian. Further, the aberrant sexuality of the Other is a product and a constant reminder of the Fall from Grace. Thus, the sexuality of the Other is not only about fears of infiltration and contamination, but it also serves as proof of the Truth. Any sexuality that is not inspired by Christian ideals is suspect, dangerous, and must be controlled, if not eliminated. The cycle of the Fall and redemption is the paradigm for the rejection of the sexuality of the Other, because it is contaminating.63 In some cases, of course, the historical roots of the antisemitism and homophobia are easy to detect. Heresy and sodomy, for example, were frequent medieval handmaidens which only reinforced the spurious indictment that sexual impropriety was tantamount to apostasy.64 In another example of the 59  Mosse, Image, op. cit., 48. 60  Elizabeth Abbot, A History of Celibacy (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999), 235. 61  Fout, op. cit., 408. Later, Fout notes that purity leagues were designed for the “preservation of the myth of male sexual dominance and female submissiveness in all things sexual” (409). 62  Mosse, Nationalism, op. cit., 10. 63  Gilman, Difference and Pathology, op. cit., 213-16. 64  D. A. Coward, “Attitudes to Homosexuality in Eighteenth-century France,” in History of Homosexuality in Europe and America, eds. Wayne R. Dynes & Stephen Donaldson (New York: Garland, 1992), 35-37. 117

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conflation of sex with apostasy, in Renaissance Venice sexual relations between Jews and Christians were seen as a personal affront to God himself.65 The “Wandering Jew” — condemned to roam eternally for refusing to help Christ on his road to Golgotha — was sometimes depicted as transsexual.66 In this way, the diasporic wanderings of the Jew merged with the outsider status of the queer and set the pattern for an even newer antisemitism — Jew as queer, Jew as sexual predator.67 The source for this ostensibly newer image was, however, long-believed myths about Jewish religious difference. 5. Circumcision

Perhaps the single most maligned, caricatured, and feared Jewish ritual — circumcision — is an ideal site for a plethora of Christian terrors. It is also one of the most fruitful avenues of analysis into the perceptions of Jews throughout Christian Europe. This archaic Jewish ritual that involves violence to the phallus is also a rich source for the merger of homophobia and antisemitism. In rejecting Pauline Christianity, by maintaining circumcision, not only was the Jew’s rejection of Christ branded into his flesh, but his very sexuality — the symbol of his stubborn deafness — was seen as polluting and threatening. Where Christ’s virginal sexuality was redemptive, the Jew’s — like the homosexual’s — was disruptive and menacing. First, circumcision was seen as castration. Cutting the foreskin was seen as no less than symbolic castration — the unmanning of the male Jew, resulting in the Jewish male as neither fully male, nor fully female.68 The Jew, like the queer, was a gender-bender straddling the border demarcating male and female, which of course made them both suspect, especially in the obsessively gendered bourgeois society. Second, circumcision not only emasculated the Jew by removing part of his masculine sexual organ, it also became a route — symbolic and literal — for the transmission of disease into society. “Central to the definition of the Jew was the image of the male Jew’s circumcised penis as impaired, damaged, 65  Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 70-71. 66  Mosse, Image of Man, op. cit., 68-69. 67  Causal of the moral decay of the city were some of the physical changes of modernity, especially the increased pace of life and subsequent overstimulation (Max Nordau, Degeneration, Trans. from the 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968, 38-39)). However, as Gilman argues, much of this urban nervousness was specifically associated with Jews (Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 123-25). 68  Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 76-77, 83. 118

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or incomplete, and therefore threatening to the wholeness and health of the male Aryan. The damaged penis represented the potential ravages of sexually transmitted disease.”69 The Jewish penis, not only disfigured, and perhaps even less-than-functional, was a vehicle for two specific diseases: syphilis and masturbation. Syphilis was the concrete manifestation of un-Christian, un-controlled sexual immorality. Syphilis not only threatened health and progeny, it challenged one’s very gender. It was a medical disease that could not be ignored. It linked foreigners, Jews, homosexuals, and prostitutes, whose depraved equivocation of money and sex could only result in physical illness, for the wages of sin are death.70 The link between sin and syphilis offered a smooth transition from confessional to surgery. As Peter Lewis Allen observes regarding early modernity, “Neither preachers nor physicians had the slightest hesitation about announcing that syphilis — and syphilitics — were wicked.”71 Circumcision was also linked to masturbation. Masturbation — representing one’s internal struggle with sexual immorality — was seen as personally and societally threatening throughout the era, and was particularly associated with circumcision.72 As a serious medical concern since the eighteenth century, masturbation was also implicated in a host of societal problems that went far beyond the sexual release of an individual’s private orgasm. It could cause illnesses such as tuberculosis, paralysis, gangrene, apoplexy, and even death.73 It obviously became another catch-all to enforce societal morals on the public and was attributed with many dangers, not least of which were depletion of health, fornication, and the erosion of self-discipline.74 It was the moral vice that challenged the safety of a properly gendered Christian society. That masturbation was prohibited no less vehemently by Jewish law seemed irrelevant when laying the blame on Jews for increased childhood sexual experimentation. Masturbation connected Jews, children and sex, a combined threat that paralleled the dangers of homosexual pederasty. Onanism and homosexuality, of course, 69  Ibid., p. 61. 70  “In terms of social obloquy, all homosexual males as a class were equated with female prostitutes” (Jeffrey Weeks, “Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Homosexuality 6.1-2 (1980-81), 118. 71  Allen, op. cit., 47. 72  In fact, circumcision was either the prophylactic for masturbation (cf. Allen, op. cit., 101) or the source for increased Jewish sexuality (cf. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, op. cit., 92-93). 73  Allen, op. cit., 79. 74  Lesley A. Hall. “Forbidden by God, Despised by Men: Masturbation, Medical Warnings, Moral Panic, and Manhood in Great Britain.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2.3(1992), 369. 119

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were clearly connected and hardly distinguished: “Lyttelton concluded that if ‘solitary vice’ [masturbation] were stamped out, ‘dual vice’ would all but disappear, for masturbation allowed lust to dominate a man’s life, and the result was mental debility — of which homosexuality, a ‘disease of the will,’ was a sign.”75 There was, however, an even greater connection among circumcision, homosexuality, pedophilia, and syphilis: metsitsah. According to Jewish law, not only was the foreskin to be cut, all traces of its covering of the glans must be removed, and blood must be extracted from the wound via suction, which until modern times involved the direct placement of the mohel’s (ritual circumciser’s) mouth on the open wound to extract blood.76 This siphoning — metsitsah — is a site of controversy. Most obviously, metsitsah potentially exposed the child to any transmittable infections that the mohel might have had, including syphilis. However, even more than the possibilities of the transmission of physical illness, metsitsa became a site for Jewish transmission of inherent homosexual immorality to the child. “The association of Jews and sodomites has a long history in English culture, and the particular notion of Jewish men as fellators of children seems to be related to Eastern European circumcision rituals, especially the ritual of metsitsah.”77 The act of an adult male Jew placing his mouth on the infant’s penis is another manifestation of the inherent sexual immorality of this pariah people. Indeed, the connection among homosexuality, pedophilia, ancient Jewish rituals, and bloodletting was actively invoked at the fin de siècle. Gilman notes: A male Jew can infect another male Jew with a sexually transmitted disease … Thus no male Jew is free from the risk of becoming infected with syphilis as a part of his becoming a Jew … Metsitsah was associated with the feminization of the male Jew and his absolute position as one at risk for a sexually transmitted disease. The male Jew’s presence in emancipated European society presented another source of infection and pollution, a source independent of the presence of women.78

The transmission of sexual disease from one Jew to another takes place specifically in the context of a same-sex ritual. In fact, the disease that passes from purported male pedophile to victimized child via circumcision is even more 75  Jeffrey Weeks, “Sins and Diseases: Some Notes on Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” History Workshop 1(1976), 215. 76  Leonard B. Glick, Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44-45. 77  Hirsch, op. cit., 331n29. 78  Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 69. 120

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insidious and impervious to cure than syphilis. “The disease that is transmitted from adult Jew to Jewish child is Jewishness, hidden under the disguise of the debate about circumcision and sexually transmitted diseases.”79 Circumcision thus can be described as a vehicle for gender violations, transsexualism, physical disease — especially sexually transmitted illnesses — and a site of Jewish male pederasty. It forcefully links religion, theology, Jews, homosexuals, and pedophilia. A single, momentary Jewish ritual has thus, in the modern era, provided a singular site for both ancient and contemporary antisemitism and homophobia.80 Further, the prominence and attention given to this one overtly sexual ritual underscores both the Christian desire to distance Jews, but even more specifically, to combine them with another predatory group: queer pederasts. There is, however, another theological angle to circumcision: the drawing of blood. Bloodletting always harkens back to the Crucifixion. Thus, circumcision — with all of its queer elements — echoes the Passion. “Here as elsewhere in Judeo-Christian ideology, the Jewish ritual circumcision stirs up Christian memories of their originary crucifixion’s myth and becomes a motive spring for antisemitism.”81 Not only is circumcision socially and morally problematic, it hints at the original deicide. The connection between blood libel and gendered Jewish ritual gave birth to another, even more bizarre medieval myth, whose implications resonated well into the modern era: Jewish male menstruation. As Eve was cursed with menstruation — a sign of her sin in her flesh — so too are Jewish men afflicted.82 Jewish rejection of Christ was no longer simply a mark on one’s flesh, it had actually caused physiological ramifications to one’s sexual functioning, a notion that persisted well into the twentieth century, long after the biological theory of Jewish male menstruation had been rejected.83 The cure for Jewish male menstruation was said to be communion. By drinking Christ’s blood the male Jew would be cured of his sanguinary affliction. However, the story goes, this explanation was mistranslated and reported to the Jews by one of their own leaders as the blood of a Christian — rather than Christ’s blood — which explains the medieval blood libel. Not satiated with spilling and tasting the

79  Ibid., 66. 80  I should note, of course, that kosher slaughter is a more workaday Jewish ritual that involves knives, body parts, bearded men, and blood. 81  Marc Shell, “The Holy Foreskin; or, Money, Relics, and Judeo-Christianity,” in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, op. cit., 351. 82  Similarly, Jews have also been accused of anal health problems: hemorrhoids, and its cause, constipation (Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 156-67). 83  Geller, op. cit., 253-55. 121

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blood of Christ at the crucifixion, the Jew continues to search for the blood of innocent Christian children.84 Once merged, the Jewish and queer image of the pederast offers another reason to reinforce the protection of children and hence the very transmission of Christianity to the future. Not only did Jews and homosexuals violate gender norms, they went further and threatened the most vulnerable in the society. Pursuing children, the Jew looks to satisfy his bloodlust and the queer his sexual lust.85 “The implication that infidel homosexual interest posed a threat not only to adult Christians but to their children, like comparable accusations against Jews, was particularly effective.”86 6. Genital Obsession

Jewish religious attitudes faced another Victorian prejudice: prurience. Certain Jewish rituals, such as niddah, onah, and circumcision for example, exhibited an inappropriate indulgence in sexual and genital information. Niddah, the laws of sexual moderation that govern traditional Jewish families, were seen as characteristic of Jewish obsession with sexuality.87 Another Jewish sexual law – that of onah -- was also particularly troubling. The law of onah requires that a Jewish man offer his wife sexual pleasure. Within the bounds of halakha, Jewish men were obligated to ensure that their wives were sexually satisfied. Such prurient interest in the details of one’s private and intimate life troubled Protestant Victorian society. Further, overt piety, especially when combined with sexual interest or behavior, was suspicious. To Victorian sensibilities, Jewish law, with its prurient interest in its practitioners’ sexual habits, sexual satisfaction, and even genital emissions, was a clear sign of the primitive nature of Judaism. Jewish ritual was also connected to another Victorian (and Christian) anathema: spilling seed. Besides masturbation via circumcision, Jews (and queers) were also associated with prostitution — another form of seed-spilling. 84  Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 74-75; Sexuality, op. cit., 42. 85  Both of these accusations come together in an American publication, Atlantic Monthly, in 1908: “the suppression of physical development in Jewish children makes them a tempting butt for their neighbor.” Edwin J. Kuh, as cited in Itzkowitz, “Secret Temples,” op. cit., 188. 86  John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 283. 87  Although, occasionally, niddah was credited with greater fertility. Cf. Bernard Harris, “Anti-Alienism, Health and Social Reform in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Patterns of Prejudice 31.4(1997), 11. 122

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Jewish sexual depravity, along with their renowned obsession with money, makes prostitution an obvious Jewish vice.88 As another group to profit from sex, queers were frequently connected with all forms of illicit sex.89 But the strongest connection among Jews, queers, and prostitution comes in a form we have already seen: the transmission of disease (especially syphilis) in the absence of women. “Moreover, masturbation also suggested, like homosexual activity and sexual intercourse with prostitutes, a sexual outlet for men outside the confines of marriage and the family, sites of heterosexual male domination.”90 The Jewish and queer vices related to seed-spilling threaten gender roles by replacing women with men and thereby threaten the Christian patriarchy that keeps Queen and Empire healthy and safe. Even more perniciously, seed-spilling does not advantage the nationalist cause as it wastes sperm. A final source for Jewish sexual taint is to be found in reputed Jewish inbreeding. Jews, typically endogamous, were often perceived as incestuous. Certain requirements of Jewish law violate Protestant incest taboos. The obligation of Levirate marriage obliges the brother of a man who died childless to marry the widow in order to ensure the family lineage of his deceased brother. The Bible provides the widow with an option to refuse, should she so desire. In fact, since Talmudic times, Levirate marriages have most often been refused. Nevertheless, Jews were accused of marrying their sisters-in-law, an abhorrent act in Western Europe. Jewish law also permits the marriage of first cousins, another basis for Protestant rejection of Jewish sexual mores. Further, Jewish endogamy, both a biblical commandment as well as a commonplace ethnic tactic to ensure continuity, was perceived not only as Jewish elitism, but many went so far as to identify endogamy as incestuous and of course, degenerative.91 “The confusion of endogamous marriage with incestuous inbreeding was a result of the desire of scientific discourse to have categories circumscribing the explicit nature of the Other.”92 Jewish mental illness was a product of consanguinity.93

88  Gilman, Sexuality, op. cit., 255. 89  Jeffrey Weeks, “Sins and Diseases,” op. cit., 214; Gilman, An Illustrated History, op. cit., 258. 90  Fout, op. cit., 413. 91  Gilman, Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 173-84; Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 148. 92  Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 101. 93  Ibid., 123. 123

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7. Conclusion

Modernity fused its own unique blend of national identity, religion, medicine, and morality. In Protestant Europe, particularly, dichotomization was a powerful strategy used to distinguish “inside” from “outside.” There are numerous examples of these divisions in Victorian and fin-de-siècle Europe that ran along class and race lines.94 One fundamental boundary was drawn between healthy and unhealthy sexuality. Into that latter category were gathered a variety of people and groups, all of whom shared one common denominator, and it was not sexual: they were all alien to the larger white, Christian, heterosexual imperative. Whatever their historical differences, science dictated that these sexual outsiders shared a common etiology for their diseased behavior: biological difference. From a religious, social, and sexual menace, queers were transformed into biological hazards. Historically accused of spreading sexual illnesses as well as abusing children, nineteenth-century science was still able to create novel reasons to persecute homosexuals. Jews, whose original taint derived from religious, ethnic, and sexual improprieties, were also transformed into biological hazards who reproduced their immorality genetically onto their offspring. But the transformation of Jews would continue. Besides their biological threat, Jews’ very sexuality was diseased. Although Jews had often been characterized as sexually unhealthy and lascivious throughout most of medieval history, the Jewish threat was heterosexual: the old Jew leering and pawing at the virginal young Christian maiden. Conversion, however, could alleviate some of the Jewish taint, because it was not yet hereditary. At the time that Jewishness is biologized in the nineteenth century and conversion is no longer sufficient to escape the Jewish taint, Jewish sexuality also undergoes a change. It is no longer associated with the Jew as heterosexual menace, but now it is queer — threatening to men, women, children, and society in general. There is one final characteristic of the association between Jews and homosexuals of this era that needs to be addressed: the Jew — like the homosexual — was queered by being feminized, by bottoming. As the science of the era combined the tropes of Jews and homosexuals, social prejudices merged their sexual proclivities as well. The symbolic yet overt feminization of the Jew was understood as a manifestation of castration anxiety related to

94  Upper-class homosexuals, if discreet and sufficiently contrite, could be ignored or only gently censured by their peers. Cf. William T. Gibson, “Homosexuality, Class and the Church in Nineteenth Century England: Two Case Studies,” Journal of Homosexuality 21.4(1991), 46-47. 124

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circumcision.95 Bottoming — or feminization — seems to be the preferred route for Jews and queers to learn their immoral ways. These images were based on an overt notion of sexual submission among Jews and homosexuals, via anal penetration, fellatio, or its Jewish equivalent: circumcision. Leonard Glick reminds us that the image of an infant being violated by an adult Jew via metsitsah is essential: The image of the rabbi-circumciser-slaughterer, rooted in actual observation but interpreted in a folk-cultural framework, linked circumcision to beliefs about deicide and blood lust. Perhaps the most vivid personification was the bearded mohel [circumciser], his mouth stained with blood after he had sucked the wounded infant penis. To dismiss such imagery and the deep-seated repulsion it engendered as just further manifestations of groundless antisemitism would be to fail to recognize a singular element in the history of the Jewish-Christian encounter.96

As the Jew gains his identity and its concomitant biological hazard through an act of pedophilic sadism where the infant is secured, cut, and then sucked off by his top, the homosexual gains his true identity after he loses his anal virginity: both are bottoms. Contemporary science and its medieval religious antecedents merged antisemitism and homophobia in a unique way. Images, biases, and unfounded fears were resurrected in the service of the modern nation-state. While Jews and homosexuals were always perceived as sexual predators, in reality, each group represented distinct threats, even if their persecutions were parallel. In modern Protestant Europe the distinction was barely visible, and even if visible, it was irrelevant, because there was no longer any distinction between the Jewish and the queer threat. They shared a similar scientifically-substantiated etiology and prognosis. Europe’s Jews had been queered.

95  Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, op. cit., 163. 96  Glick, op. cit., 101. 125

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Chapter 7

Marc-Andre Raffalovich: A Russian-French-Jewish-Catholic Homosexual in Oscar Wilde’s London Frederick S. Roden

On March 22, 1897, as Oscar Wilde was completing De Profundis in prison, the International Herald Tribune published the following report from St. Petersburg: There has been an outbreak of anti-Semitic feeling among the peasants in the Government of Kieff at Shpola. The attackers pillaged the shops and entered the houses. It was only when the Governor with Cossacks arrived that the plundering ceased. A sad picture of devastation is seen in the rich houses of Mssrs. Brodski, Raffalovich and others. The windows and doors, valuable mirrors and pianofortes are smashed, and most of them thrown out on to the street. The Jews, taken with panic, fled the town.

Just a few years before, there had been another mass exodus, this one from England: during the Wilde trials for “gross indecency,” when the boats to France were filled with affluent British homosexuals fleeing to the continent in fear of their lives. This essay will examine a shared flight: from Judaism to Christianity, homosexual Decadence to Catholic respectability, “perversion” to conversion. The Mr. Raffalovich referred to here may have been the uncle of Marc-Andre, the subject of this study. Two Raffalovichs, Marc-Andre’s father Herman and his brother, were successful bankers in Odessa. When compulsory Christianity became an imperative for Russia’s cosmopolitan Jews, Herman moved his family to Paris (in 1863), while his brother converted and stayed. Like those conversos after the Spanish Inquisition – indeed, as for the many Christians of Jewish descent who perished during the Holocaust – nominal Christianity hardly meant safety. The same might be said about the conversion from homosexual notoriety at the fin de siècle. Marc-Andre Raffalovich, his friend John Gray, and so many others spent the remainder of their lives reinventing themselves. The past life was over; a new life had begun. After death, there was resurrection.

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In their introduction to Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini set their goal as the investigation of “the rhetorical and theoretical connections that tie together the constellations ‘Jew’ and ‘homosexual.’” They note that late nineteenth-century theories of racial difference essentializing the Jew invented a particular kind of modern antiSemitism in the same way that the Victorian definition of “the homosexual” created modern homophobia. Richard Dellamora, in Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England, links Jews and Irish in that culture. He writes: “unlike natives in the Indian subcontinent or others brought under colonial rule during the nineteenth century, Jews and the Irish were not subordinated subjects living outside the metropole.” Of course, homosexuals fell into this category as well, particularly given the presence of urban subcultures in late Victorian London, spaces that men easily moved in and out of. Dellamora appropriates Jonathan Boyarin’s term to name Jews and Irish as “internal others.” He describes late nineteenth-century England as marked by internal alterity. The political and cultural assimilation of Jews and Irish plotted them in increasingly racialized terms. The outcome was a “hybrid nationality in which Jewish and Irish difference would be sublimated in the formation of a composite national subject.” Dellamora elides the otherness of the sexual deviant with the racial otherness of the Jewish or Irish, and indeed places these in specifically religious terms. He cites the “annihilating othering of those against whom Chosenness is defined”: Israel versus the citizens of Sodom, Christianity versus Jews and Muslims, and in the post-Reformation West, Protestantism versus Roman Catholics. These paradigms may be applied to the subjects of this essay: the Jewish convert to Christianity Marc-Andre Raffalovich and the most famous Irish homosexual, Oscar Wilde. To briefly sketch Raffalovich’s heritage, his Russian Jewish banking family prospered in Paris, where Marc-Andre’s mother Marie established a successful salon. His father Herman financially supported poor Russian Jewish exiles. Marie’s sister married a French nobleman, and her nephew (a vicomte) became a priest and later a bishop. Marc-Andre had a cousin, George Raffalovich, who   Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds. Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1. See also the discussion of this text in the introduction to this volume.   Ibid., 3.   Richard Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2.   Dellamora, ibid., 2, from Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).   Ibid., 2.   Ibid., 4. 128

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was a noted author, while his elder brother Arthur was a celebrated economist connected to the Russian imperial embassy in Paris. Their sister Sophie married the Irish nationalist O’Brien in 1890 and converted to Catholicism. Andre, born in 1864, moved to England at the age of eighteen, originally intending to study with Pater in Oxford. Instead, he established a home in London where he attempted without much success to re-create the kind of elegant salon his mother presided over in Paris, and he wrote. The long history of Marc-Andre’s reception in England is filled with denigrations of his looks and customs. Perhaps the most frequent accusation concerns his “ugliness.” His defenders claim that “Certainly he had mobile beady eyes and a large mouth.” These words were written by the most important of his chroniclers, Brocard Sewell, a Carmelite priest who sustained the memory of Gray and Raffalovich for more than fifty years after their deaths in 1934. Peter Anson, the well-known monastic historian, depicts Raffalovich from his last days in Edinburgh: “Andre was a funny little man to look at, and except for his smile, which lit up his face, it would be true enough to say that he was ugly. His features revealed his Jewish ancestry, and although he had spoken English from boyhood he retained a strong foreign intonation.” Sewell, in 1983, agreed that “to British eyes and ears there was always something foreign about him; he never got rid of his guttural accent.”10 Janet Grierson, who was a regular visitor to the Edinburgh salon as a young woman, recalls Andre’s farewell parties for her when she would leave to spend summers in Vienna. “At the end of it Andre would say, with the slight foreign accent and the strong gutteral [sic] r’s he had never lost: ‘And, dear child, don’t marry some horrible foreigner!’”11 Sewell asserts that Raffalovich’s “riches and his foreign appearance and manner prejudiced some people against him.”12 In 1991 John Gray’s biographer, Jerusha McCormack, came out and stated that Raffalovich’s “Jewishness … proved a barrier in the anti-Semitic and xenophobic London of the eighties.”13 Andre published extensively and with moderate success. However, the gallery of   Brocard Sewell, Footnote to the Nineties: A Memoir of John Gray and Andre Raffalovich (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1968), 25.   Brocard Sewell, “John Gray and Andre Sebastian Raffalovich: A Biographical Outline.” Two Friends: John Gray and Andre Raffalovich (Great Britain: Saint Albert’s Press, 1963), 11.   Peter F. Anson, “Random Reminiscences of John Gray and Andre Raffalovich, Two Friends, op. cit., 138. 10  Brocard Sewell, In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray, 1866-1934 (Great Britain: Tabb House, 1983), 32. 11  Footnote, op. cit., 60. 12  Two Friends, op. cit., 13. 13  Jerusha Hull McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy, Priest (Brandeis University Press, 1991), 46. 129

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Victorian homosexual Aestheticism, wherein the Aryan ephebe was idealized, hardly welcomed a dark, foreign-born Jew. Later both Wilde and Raffalovich would befriend the same fair youth John Gray, but not before the famous critic had attacked the poet in print and clever conversation. Wilde reviewed Raffalovich’s second book of verse, Tuberose and Meadowsweet, in the Pall Mall Gazette on March 27, 1885. He wrote: “it seems a pity he does not know how to pronounce the title of his book and the theme of his songs. For he insists on making ‘tuberose’ a tri-syllable always, as if it were a potato blossom shaped like a tiny trumpet of ivory.”14 Raffalovich defended his pronunciation in a letter to the editor, citing the poet Shelley’s example, but the significance of Wilde’s critique should not be underestimated. Visiting Raffalovich’s house for a luncheon, Wilde told the butler, “We want a table for six, please.”15 He was as eager to commodify Raffalovich’s gracious living as he was to fault his poetry as gauche. The best-known of Wilde’s statements about Raffalovich is one he recycled to apply to the ambitious Lady Brandon in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde said of Raffalovich that “He came to London with the intention of opening a salon, and he has succeeded in opening a saloon.”16 Wilde was eager to portray Raffalovich as a tradesman, like the droves of eastern European Jewish immigrants who flooded the East End of London in the late nineteenth century. At that time a huge number of Irish also came to the city for work and relief from rural poverty. The Wildeans want to defend Saint Oscar from any taint of anti-Semitism. One could cite his great friendship with Ada Leverson, or his affair with Reggie Turner – both Jews. To be sure, the greater question concerns the place of Jewish – and Irish – in late nineteenth-century British culture, rather than attempting to label Wilde’s less politically-correct voice from another time and place. Nevertheless, what can we do with Wilde’s art? Christopher Nassaar is perhaps the only critic to have paid serious attention to the character of the theatre manager Isaacs in The Picture of Dorian Gray.17 I quote the title character from the novel: A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. “Have a box, my Lord?” he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous

14  Footnote, op. cit., 27. 15  Ibid., 26. 16  McCormack, op. cit., 47. 17  Christopher S. Nassaar, “The Problem of the Jewish Manager in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The Wildean: A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies (January 2003). 130

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servility. There was something about him, Harry, that amused me. He was such a monster.18

Indeed, the description of the proprietor of this theatre is not far from Wilde’s quip about Raffalovich’s establishment, for he articulated both in service to the public. Isaacs is called “the horrid old Jew,” “a most offensive brute,” and “the [grinning] old Jew.”19 The actress Sibyl Vane states that “He is not a gentleman, and I hate the way he talks to me.”20 The most vivid depiction comes through Dorian’s gaze: “the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily, tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands, and talking at the top of his voice. Dorian Gray loathed him more than ever.”21 Dorian also notes that “There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young Hebrew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away.”22 Here as in the description of the manager, Jews are failures at art. Isaacs may be passionate about Shakespeare, but he cannot produce a successful play. Similarly, according to Wilde, Raffalovich may run a public house or restaurant, but he cannot write poetry – he cannot even pronounce the words. Nassaar observes the weakness of the Jewish community at this time, that we have no written record of any disputes about the novel’s representation. I do not suggest that we indict Wilde ahistorically or without context. I do recommend that we consider his shared otherness with Raffalovich. In the decade that followed Wilde’s unfavorable review of Raffalovich’s book of poems, their paths crossed many times. A young Aesthetic poet who once signed letters to his mentor Wilde as “Dorian,” John Gray fell out of favor with his patron. A Catholic convert, he eventually began writing religious poetry. Raffalovich met Gray through Arthur Symons. They dabbled in literary collaboration. Before long, the wealthy Raffalovich was supporting him. At the time of the Wilde trials, Raffalovich wrote a scathing pamphlet in French, “L’Affaire Oscar Wilde.” The following year, 1896, he incorporated this essay into his magnum opus, Uranisme et Unisexualité. The homosexual poet had become a sexologist, a scientist theorizing inversion. Although some critics have been especially harsh on Raffalovich, I argue that he could hardly have done otherwise. Not long before, the Jewish homosexual painter Simeon Solomon had been arrested for indecency in a public washroom. Wilde’s experience of 18  Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. 3rd ed. (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 47-48. 19  Ibid., 50, 51. 20  Ibid., 55. 21  Ibid., 68. 22  Ibid., 48-49. 131

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otherness in British society has been amply shown to have been inflected by his Irishness.23 How much more difficult would Raffalovich’s life have been, as a foreign-born Jewish homosexual? Raffalovich admitted in print (writing as Alexander Michaelson over thirty years after the trials, in the Catholic magazine Blackfriars), “‘You cannot be Oscar’s friend and mine,’ marked a certain stage in my friendships.”24 To be more precise, Andre could not stand the sight of Oscar, who had hurt his friend John Gray. Recounting one of the queerest stories surrounding the Wilde trials, Raffalovich recalls: I was in Brussels: I tore open in the lift the telegram from a London hairdresser, announcing the verdict. Why a London hairdresser? Because whenever Oscar and I met in a certain hair-dressing establishment in Bond Street he never occupied his usual seat next to mine: so that I became somebody in that shop – the customer who makes Mr Wilde uncomfortable.25

Raffalovich was defined with respect to Wilde. Likewise he is perhaps best remembered in relation to the great Aesthete. To do so fails to credit the intellectual (let alone cultural and artistic) legacy of Raffalovich. If Wilde’s “Soul of Man Under Socialism” or De Profundis may be read as championing individual liberties (with extension to an understanding of homosexual rights, as I have argued elsewhere), then Raffalovich’s sociological text on inversion surely goes further.26 In the preface to Uranisme et Unisexualité, the new “scientist” asserts firmly: “It is foolish, it is evil, to permit the majority to believe that all is permissible for them and nothing is for the minority.”27 He continues later on: Each man, Goethe has said, has the right to a philosophy that does not destroy his individualism, provided that it does not damage the individualism of others. This is the psychological origin of philosophies. And my study of certain manifestations of the sexual instinct rests upon this indestructible axiom that I believe to be incontestable.28 23  See Noreen Doody, “Oscar Wilde: Nation and Empire,” in Frederick S. Roden, ed. Palgrave Advances: Oscar Wilde Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 246266. 24  Blackfriars viii.92 (1927), quoted in Sewell, Footnote, op. cit., 112. 25  Ibid., emphasis in original. 26  See Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 27  Marc-Andre Raffalovich, Uranisme et Unisexualité: Etude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel (Lyon: Storck, 1896), 12. All translations are my own. 28  Ibid., 13. 132

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I have called this book a Roman Catholic apologia for homosexual orientation. Here I add that it is one written by a multi-diasporic Jewish homosexual, one whose arguments for individual liberty cannot be limited to sexuality. In the Uranisme et Unisexualite, Raffalovich calls Wilde an “unhappy priest of Priapus,” English society’s clown, and a “national danger.”29 In a shocking indictment, a stunning example of a racialized other deploying racial theory, Raffalovich alludes to Wilde’s Irishness: Oscar Wilde (son of a well-known Irish doctor and a mother still living who, under the name Speranza, wrote Irish poetry) has always been very Irish, able to speak for hours on end without tiring himself out, loving the sound of his own slow voice, laughing violently at his incessant pleasantries, often seeming to devour his own words as if they were bon-bons. You couldn’t watch him speak without noticing his sensual lips, his discolored teeth and his tongue which seemed to lick his own words. This crude comparison is strikingly accurate … My readers have probably seen him: tall, a blanched or blushed negro, beardless, coiffed in poor taste.30

As Wilde had done to him, Raffalovich dismisses the Aesthete’s capacity for creating art: “The painters said of him: he understands everything except painting. The writers over 23 years of age: everything except literature. The musicians: everything except music.”31 Turning to the novel, Raffalovich asserts: “There was a little balking when he wrote Dorian Gray, an unoriginal novel (Oscar Wilde has never been original) that is artificial, superficial, and effeminate. Unisexuality reigns there, but without vigor: in the half-light of affectation and fear.”32 “Oscar Wilde, having neither common sense nor talent, can only treat sexual inversion or perversion feebly, deceitfully, languishingly.”33 Raffalovich goes on to elaborate on Wilde’s career, his affair with Douglas, and the trial. With respect to his homosexual aesthetic historiography, Raffalovich had declared, “I see no serious argument against the study of unisexuality in art. The masters are unafraid of it, from Aeschylus to Swinburne. In England, the theatre, the novel, and poetry have taken hold of it and used it, but always with frankness, heroism, satire, or passion.”34 Instead, Wilde’s famous speech on the

29  30  31  32  33  34 

Ibid., 242, 244, 243. Ibid., 243-244. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 246. Ibid., 247. Ibid., 246. 133

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“Love that dare not speak its name,” alluding to the greats, is, in Raffalovich’s words, a “revolting and hypocritical fervor.”35 A man whose principles are sure, whose life is calm and ordered, for whom friendship is a privilege, whose affections are enlightened, intelligent, held fiercely in check, could have the right to speak like Wilde or Socrates. Coming from Wilde these words are painful … It is clear that Wilde never understood the obligations imposed by a love based on Plato, Shakespeare, Michelangelo.36

To read Raffalovich’s discussion of Wilde without context, it would seem that Uranisme et Unisexualité is a hopelessly homophobic text instead of the queer, if ambivalent, kind of apologia it is. Rather, regarding homosexual artists, Raffalovich states that “The great inverts are themselves always pardoned for their inversion; it never keeps them from being themselves, from accomplishing their work in this world. Do you believe that Plato, Walt Whitman, Michelangelo, Conde, Winckelmann and the whole legion of others should have the right or desire to complain about their homosexuality?”37 Raffalovich’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, like Wilde’s, deserves particular attention. In his Blackfriars memoir, Raffalovich pseudonymously states: “In the early weeks of 1896 I became a Catholic. I went on a pilgrimage to Loreto, and arranged for masses to be said in the Santa Casa for the conversion of Oscar Wilde, Alfred Douglas, and others whose names I wish I could recover.”38 This passage is especially significant for understanding postWildean “recovery.” What Raffalovich writes at three decades of distance is more about forgetting than recovery. Ellis Hanson and I have demonstrated the relationship between Roman Catholicism, Decadence, and homosexuality at the turn of the century.39 Patrick O’Malley has shown the exoticism and xenophobia associated with the queerness of both Roman Catholicism and sexual deviance throughout the long nineteenth century.40 The allure of the Church for that “lost generation” is well documented. Decadent Catholicism was once dismissed for its aesthetic attraction, its modern refuge viewed as the home of the penitent sinner. Raffalovich’s prayer for Wilde’s conversion is ambiguous in that while the text indicates the hope of Catholic communion, 35  Ibid., 268. 36  Ibid. 37  Ibid., 91. 38  Footnote, op. cit., 112. 39  Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Roden, Same-Sex Desire, op. cit. 40  Patrick O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 134

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the subtext suggests a conversion from a past homosexual life. The Catholicism that was “perversion” in Newman’s day (as Oliver Buckton has articulated) became the resurrection for the post-Wildean homosexual.41 A deathbed convert, Wilde had a lifelong fascination with the Church of Rome. His was not the Catholicism of Ireland, but rather the intellectual, sensual religion of the Oxford Movement’s second generation. At university he wrote of being “caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman – I may go over in the vac. I have dreams of a visit to Newman, of the holy sacrament in a new Church, and of a quiet and peace afterwards in my soul.”42 The Church “simply enthrall[ed him] by its fascination.”43 Wilde stated that “The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do,” and “Catholicism is the only religion to die in.”44 Hanson, O’Malley, and I have provided a context as well as a theology for understanding Wilde’s homosexual Catholicism; here I stress that very otherness of the Roman Church that made it an English Decadent cliché.45 For both Wilde and Raffalovich, Catholic devotion stood in some relation to their same-sex desire. In Wilde’s case, a theology of male bodies – worshipped in the Incarnation and consumed at the Eucharist – became the highest art, a Platonic experience merging love of bodies and love of beauty. Raffalovich’s Catholicism cannot be understood without knowledge of John Gray, who was his life-partner for forty years – thirty of which were within the chastity of Gray’s priesthood. If we know little about Raffalovich’s conversion – he was baptized quietly at the Jesuit church in Mayfair – Gray’s religiosity is vividly revealed in his letters, about which I have written.46 Like many Decadent converts, Gray had a sort of “second conversion.” His first came at the height of homosexual Aestheticism, only to waver; the second fervor never faded, for through it he left his active homosexual life behind as he entered into a trinity of Divine Love with his friend Raffalovich and his God. Critics and historians have celebrated the union between these two men, as did the Catholics who memorialized them. Raffalovich built Gray a church in Edinburgh and established a townhouse 41  Oliver Buckton, Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 42  Oscar Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), 30-31. 43  Ibid., 31. 44  Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1984), 583. 45  Hanson, Roden, O’Malley, op. cit.; see also O’Malley, “Religion,” in Roden, Palgrave Advances, op. cit., 167-188. 46  See Frederick S. Roden, “Michael Field, John Gray, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship in Modernity.” Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, eds. Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden, and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 57-68. 135

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there himself, where for the last thirty years of his life he maintained the elegant salon he had been unable to create in London. He attended Gray’s daily mass, and despite the outward formality of their relationship, they were constant companions. Gray died just a few months after Raffalovich, and from the pulpit the love of the two friends was proclaimed. It may seem an unusual phenomenon, this Catholic celebration of same-sex friendship, but the chaste union between the two men exemplified an experience of the time wherein the faded flower of homosexual Decadence bloomed again in modern faith. Gray and Raffalovich shared a devotion to Saint John of the Cross, whose ecstatic romantic poetry on the love of Christ was translated by the one (Gray), and queered by the other (Raffalovich, discussing mysticism and homosexuality in Uranisme). That saint, by coincidence, came from a Spanish converso family – like Teresa of Avila and indeed the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada. Only once does Raffalovich address Jewish conversions, or Jewish anything: in a letter to Gray as the Edinburgh plans were being completed. He alludes to “the Memoirs of Joseph Wolff (father of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff) a little jew boy of Prague, who became a Catholic, knew everybody… He says no Jewish conversions are any good unless they are sudden like St Paul’s, or Ratisbonne’s in Rome.”47 Wolff ’s memoir is a classic of nineteenth-century conversion narratives, demonstrating that period’s obsession, as Michael Ragussis details.48 The brothers Ratisbonne strike rather close to home: they were from a bourgeois Parisian banking family. After becoming Catholics, they founded an order of nuns, the Sisters of Sion, for the conversion of the Jews. Sewell writes that Raffalovich’s “faith was at the centre of it all; but there was no hint of propaganda or proselytizing.”49 “Andre was interested in the writings of St John of the Cross and other Christian mystics, but not at all, it would seem, in the Jewish faith in which he had been brought up.”50 As a young man he contributed book reviews to the Journal de Saint Petersbourg, read by Russian Jewish exiles in France, but otherwise he had few links to Jewish identification or community. In contrast, he had a very strong homosexual identification, taking Sebastian as his middle name when he became a Dominican tertiary, a lay brother, in 1898. Raffalovich built St. Sebastian’s Priory for the Dominicans. A 47  Letter from Raffalovich to Gray. Archives of the English Dominicans, National Library of Scotland Dep 372 /14 (to 31 March 1904). Quoted with the permission of Fr. John Farrell, Prior Provincial of the English Dominicans. My thanks to Philip Healy, Raffalovichian extraordinaire, for pointing out this letter to me, and for his unfailing support in research. 48  Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” & English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 49  Footnote, op. cit., 58. 50  Sewell, In the Dorian Mode, op. cit., 35. 136

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priest’s suggestion that a group of boy scouts publicly present Mr. Raffalovich with a bouquet of white lilies for his patronage elicited howls of laughter from a parochial council. Peter Anson recalls the late period in the Edinburgh salon: “Memories crowd in on me; for instance, the particular Sunday in 1920 when we were taken into the study to admire the newly arrived statue of St. Sebastian, which Andre had commissioned Eric Gill to carve for him, I have the feeling that some of the guests were a little embarrassed by the martyr’s nudity.”51 That saint of homoerotic devotion, depicted in Renaissance painting as a beautiful youth penetrated by arrows, could be incorporated into the post-Wildean world of the devout Catholic art-lover. Anson indicates that the past was never fully eradicated from the Edinburgh house: “A reminder of one of his earlier interests was a shelf filled with medical and psychological treatises (most of them in German) on homosexuality.”52 In this essay, I have sought to point toward ways that two homosexual rivals and Catholic converts, Marc-Andre Raffalovich and Oscar Wilde, shared some common cultural foreignness – with respect to both their racialized identities and sexual deviance – in Victorian society. The trope of conversion is a powerful and painful one for both sexual and ethnic/religious minorities. The exhortation and imperative to change is as real in “ex-gay” ministries as it is in “Jews for Jesus.” While the exotic – Catholic or otherwise – can be fetishized into an attraction, there are many narratives in which that other is not so provocative. If Wilde styled himself as a Christ-figure, is the Jew Raffalovich his Saint Paul? – a persecutor, a traitor, a fellow homosexual – who condemns, only to ultimately exonerate a homosexuality as distinct from Wilde’s as the Christian religions differ from the life of Christ? In the course of research I came across two pieces of trivia to lay at the graves of these men. Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover who drove him to prison, became a virulent antiSemite who translated the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion into English. And among those exterminated in Buchenwald was another Jew named Andre Raffalovich. May we never forget.

51  Sewell, Two Friends, op. cit., 139. 52  Ibid., 138. 137

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Chapter 8

“Next Easter in Rome”: Freud’s Queer Longing Alan Lewis and Goran Stanivukovic

In the rich tapestry of Sigmund Freud’s knowledge and imagination of Rome, Shakespeare’s Rome is a weave that rewards unraveling, where Rome is a prestigious cultural parent that is often represented in an embattled cityas-psyche trope. Crucial also to this picture is Freud’s identification with an ambivalent Brutus, a Brutus in love with Rome and with the homosocial “name of honour” (1.2.89), loves which he pursues through the murder of his “best lover” (3.2.44) Caesar. In 1900, the Freud who identifies with Brutus in Die Traumdeutung (4, 552-53, 622-26) loves Rome in such a heroic mode, with all its tragic pathos, though he is at least implicitly more conscious of his ambivalences and their roots in lost love than Brutus is. In particular, Freud casts the repressed content of the unconscious as longing for the father, a longing that will have great significance for his theory of religion.

  For Shakespeare’s metaphor, see, for example, Donald Cheney’s essay, “Tarquin, Juliet, and Other Romei,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, III, 1982. A great number of works deal with Freud’s development of oedipal theory. Some are general, while these and others deal with Freud’s imagination of Rome. Among the most helpful are Didier Anzieu’s Freud’s Self-Analysis, trans. Peter Graham (Madison, Conn.: International University Press, 1986), Chapter Three, “The Discovery of the Oedipal Complex,” especially the section on Freud’s Rome dreams (182-212); William McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986); Peter Gay, “From Rome to Vienna: A Progress,” in Freud: A Life for Our Times (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988), 132-41; Peter Rudnytsky, Freud and Oedipus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).   Arthur Humphries, ed., Julius Caesar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).   All subsequent citations to Freud’s text are made parenthetically in our text by title, volume number, and page number(s). These references are to the Pelican/Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey and under the general editorship of Angela Richards. References to Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism are to the Vintage editions and translations still available in print. Full bibliographic citations are made in a note and then by abbreviated title and page number(s) parenthetically.

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Freud’s early identification with Brutus is supported by the author’s efforts to make the difficult translation of a suspended patricide into a “politics” for the disaffected son. If Freud is precisely not Brutus or a Roman republican, the author nonetheless participates in the agonistic ethos informing Roman ideals of masculinity, in part abandoning traditional, more peaceful ideals of the Jewish male in formulating a theory of the divided subject that might be viewed as surpassing politics per se. As glimpsed in the epigraph, the moving force for Freud’s early articulation of political resistance stems largely from his cultural marginalization as a Jew, with its effect of doubling and opposing his familial father-son agon. These crossed patricidal arcs reach their singular resolution in the theory of the symbolic father’s foundational murder and its institution of the Law in Totem and Taboo (1912) – with the melancholic pathos attendant on that patricide as it contributes to the father’s retroactive authority. Within this economy of the father-son relationship, which we see central to the queer project discussed in this essay, is the question of how the sacrifice of the homosexual attachment subtends the assumption of paternal authority. Lee Edelman’s discussion in “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive” about how queer politics will not endorse a nostalgic construction of an always already lost past ideal (childhood) as a motivation for an equally fictional future this is provocative for our project, tracking how a renounced homosexuality is to be redeemed and ideal on conditions of loss and futurity. The sacrifice of homosexual attachment in Freud’s early writing is redeemed within Christian and Jewish myths, which draws attention to, and obscures, the violence of this redemptive narrative. Rather, as this chapter shows, Freud’s early writing in relation to homosexuality is double edged: on one hand, it is subversive by introducing the unstable split subject; on the other, his “authority” is complicit in the regulation of sexuality. This article, therefore, delineates how “Rome” in the Freudian scene of writing about the Roman dreams is a complex and varied figure for the seat of Catholic hegemony, for the split subject, and more importantly perhaps, for an originary homosexual plenitude or such a prohibited phantasy object. Our aim is to supplement previous work on this theme, drawing out the homoerotics   See Carl E. Schorske’s essay on the early Freud’s politics, in which he discusses Freud’s Rome dreams in the Traumdeutung. “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 328-47.   Lee Edelman, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” Narrative 6:1 (January 1998): 18-30. Edelman’s position in this essay was criticized by John Brenkman, in “Queer Post-Politics,” Narrative 10:2 (May 2002): 174-80 and in “Politics, Mortal and Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder,” Narrative 10:2 (May 2002): 186-92. Edelman expands his argument in his book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 140

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that subtend orthodox oedipal and political readings of Freud’s road to Rome. In particular, we unpack how this road to Rome and then its last authorial leg in the book on Moses and monotheism are sustained by his fascination with a phantasied patricide contiguous with – and therefore problematic – the disavowal or sacrifice of homosexual attachment: Freud supplants the father through a rhetoric of authority that moves him from the position of the transgressive and melancholic son to that of the betrayed, murdered father. In this trajectory, the son’s murderous act is revenged in the revenants of the son’s repressed love, in the punitive conscience through which paternal authority is upheld. The lawbearing Moses descending from Mount Sinai is of course an attractive figure here, and in a brief epilogue, we describe the continuity of the early Rome dreams with the later assumption of paternal authority in the Mosaic texts. By tracking the Jewish background, labile identifications, and phantasy structures that appear to govern Freud’s scene of writing, most evident in his Moses identification and his re-presentation of a Hebraic sublime, one can better understand the motives for his elaboration of the theory of paternal authority via the enforced instinctual renunciations of the sons and the foundational patricide. On the winding road to Rome, Freud’s writing participates in a suspended patricide and oedipal trangressions – as well as repeating a fetishized “prior” sacrifice of homosexual attachment from which the patricide often appears to take its motive. The theory and the writing both aim at a problematic redemption – in an appropriation of Christian doctrine that is grafted onto the Promised Land sighted by Moses – of the Son’s “impossible” homosexual passion for the Father in his covenant as symbolic castration. Leo Bersani’s critique of the discourse of redemption in Freud is particularly directed at his discussion   For a brief oedipal take on this theme, see Kenneth A. Grigg, “All Roads Lead to Rome: the Role of the Nursemaid in Freud’s Dreams,” JAPA 21 (1973): 108-26. A recent pamphlet published in a “Freud on Holiday” series is notable for its omission of homoerotic themes. In “Freud Dreams of Rome,” Sharon Kivland introduces the dreamwork and its three processes, followed by a series of evasions regarding their significance for Freud’s dreaming of Rome: he is lonely in an unspecified way; a conclusion evades him; he chooses not to detail their significance. Kivland playfully participates in Freud’s knowing or unknowing avoidance, as suggested in their shared writing-as-forbidden-sexual activity. See Sharon Kivland, “Freud Dreams of Rome,” Freud on Holiday, Vol. I (York: Information as Material, 2006), n.p.   Though we leave this important question aside, Freud’s primary debt appears to be to Hegel’s linking of Hebrew scripture with the sublime in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).   Our article is indebted to Judith Butler’s re-readings of the Freudian corpus. See Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), esp. 62-65. 141

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of the logic of renunciation and sublimation in art. We elaborate this critique in our discussion of the fetishistic structure of the sacrifice of homosexual attachment. We hope then to contribute to the study of the Jewish/Christian forces at play at Freud’s scene of writing. We argue that the author’s Jewishness – and its imputed carnal dimension – impacts the theoretical elaboration of the divided subject, castration, and the foundational patricide. The thematic focus on Rome foregrounds the crucial question of Freud’s Jewishness and its relation to the place of a repressed – and ideal – homosexuality in his emerging theory of subjectivity. The article begins by sketching Freud’s knowledge and imagination of Rome and gives a brief of some gender theory germane to the investigation. It then examines Rome’s queer place in his letters to his compatriot Wilhelm Fliess (from which the title’s reference to Easter comes) and investigates the Roman dreams in Die Traumdeutung, with their difficult translation of patricide into his own politics. This stance diminishes traditional politics by making them symptomatic repetitions of prior conflicts. A revenge on authority of the early Freud was how his research challenged traditional, German ideals of an unimpaired masculinity, most famously perhaps in his theories of male hysteria and bisexuality that confounded his Aryan colleagues. In his “An Autobiographical Study,” Freud frames his lack of professional advancement, his being “forced into the Opposition” to the establishment, with an anecdote regarding his first lecture to the Society of Medicine in Vienna (1886) in which he recounted Charcot’s findings: “But I met with a bad reception … One of them, an old surgeon, actually broke out with the exclamation: ‘But, my dear sir, how can you talk such nonsense? Hysteron (sic) means the uterus. So how can a man be hysterical?’” (15, 198). Attending to the cultural embeddedness of Freud’s theoretical ruminations, we unpack how the redemptive sexual and “political” trajectories are implicated not only in splintered homosexual eros, the divided subject and patricidal ambivalence, but also more basically in his vexed Jewish heritage. From the beginning, located in the cultural moment of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis addresses not only his oedipal ambivalence towards his father as a son, or his pained sense of betrayal by his imputedly “unheroic” Jewish father: the universal theory is apotropaic, turning around and redeeming the discursive castration of a Jewish masculinity ideologically associated with pathological melancholia, hysteria, effeminacy, and homosexuality.10 Though his locution is less direct,   See Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Bersani also critiques Freud’s recurrent equation of passive sodomy with castration, in Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995): 108-12. 10  Recent social historians have helped us assess the degree to which Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis is implicated in, and writing against, contemporary hegemonic discourses about Jewish masculinity. See Sander L. Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: 142

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Freud was similar to his Jewish compatriots like Joseph Jacobs who engaged the race and nascent anthropological science of the day to interrogate the so-called logic that made the Jew into the Aryan male’s degenerate “other.”11 Freud’s turn to Rome consistently serves as an index of his identity at a crossroads of sexuality and “politics” where each impacts the other, describing the author’s psychic life that is perpetually to double business bound. Rome as a symbolic crossroads limns Freud’s divided identity, as culturally Jewish versus a “Roman” or Catholic Europe that nevertheless gave Freud educational and political nurturance. As we will see below in an extended analysis, his dream “My son, the Myops” articulates precisely this feeling of two traditions and divided allegiances, where a foreboding sense of threat in the anti-semitic political climate might be mitigated by the Jewish strategy of cultural assimilation. In the group of Roman dreams in Die Traumdeutung, going to Rome is patricidal towards his Jewish father, a betrayal of his culture and ideals, but also pious towards that Hasidic father – who was indeed quite liberal – and patricidal towards Rome, i.e., insofar as like a slightly less militaristic Hannibal, he would combat Roman oppression. Moreover, Freud’s sense of being divided against himself on this road to Rome is underscored by that ancient city’s proximity to the lost world of the East and the Mediterranean from which his family came. His first biographer Jones repesented the “myth” of the diaspora of Freud’s family that passed through Rome (“So in 1859, when Sigmund was just three years old, the ancient march of the family – Palestine, Rome, Cologne, Lithuania, Galacia, Moravia – was resumed…”),12 making his return a homecoming of sorts. For the author of Die Traumdeutung, this return to nearly conflated Semitic-Roman origins – something that literally occurs in many of Freud’s dreams – was to an archaic and inescapably sexual domain. Medicine and Identity at the Fin-de-Siècle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), “Sigmund Freud and the Sexologists: A Second Reading,” in Reading Freud’s Reading, ed. Sander L. Gilman, Jutta Birmele, Jay Geller, and Valerie D. Greenberg (New York: New York University Press, 1994). For the analysis of the apotropaic nature of the writing, its avoidance of the image of the effeminate Jewish male, we are especially indebted to Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1997). 11  Regarding Freud’s professional aspirations, see the fine book by Louis Rose, The Freudian Calling: Early Viennese Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Cultural Science (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). Regarding Joseph Jacobs, see the important book by John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 12  Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953), Vol. 1, 12-13. 143

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The manner in which Freud was himself mired in the widespread ideological demonization of the former, that is, of the Jewish male’s sexuality, can be detected in a letter of 24 January 1897 to Wilhelm Fliess: “I am beginning to grasp an idea: it is as though in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative, we have before us a remnant of a primeval sexual cult, which once was – and perhaps still is – a religion of the Semitic East (Moloch, Astarte) … I dream, therefore, of a primeval devil religion with rites that are carried on secretly …”13 Perversion and hysteria were both “pathologies” regularly attributed to the Jewish male. I.

In Die Traumdeutung and beyond, the phantasy-object “Rome” in the Roman dreams and the “crossed” road to Rome more generally indicate Freud’s ambivalence towards Christian imperialism – where Rome is the seat of an antisemitic Catholicism and privileged locus of the original Western empire.14 In a first approach, Rome is the object of the heroic Jewish conquistador’s patricidal quest to obtain a position of distinction within European culture. Further, the Jewish doctor strives to assault notions of respectability, especially in relation to gender and theories of sexuality.15 Somewhat less heroically, Rome is the road to redeem Jewish roots through a pragmatic cultural assimilation. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), well after Freud has established the essential contours of his thought, he makes an effort to picture the workings of memory through an archeological trope in which Rome figures as the topos of memory’s preservation. In short, Rome is a figure for an unconscious that suffers no repression, an impossible palimpsest recording the subject’s plenitude before repression, displacement, and so on; this type of memory is interwoven 13  The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1877-1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaief Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985). Citations of Freud’s letters to Fliess are cited parenthetically in the text. 14  We are indebted here and below to the essay by David Damrosch, “The Politics of Ethics: Freud and Rome,” in Pragmatism’s Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 15  Important in this respect is the Latin epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronto movebo,” translated by James Strachey from The Aeneid as, “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.” The epigraph is also cited on page 769 of the Penguin edition. Citing Juno here, Freud’s appeal is to the forces of the unconscious to achieve his ends. For a general account of how the ideal of masculinity operated in respectable European society and political movements from the 18th into the 20th century, see George Mosse’s volume, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 144

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with Freud’s earlier notions of Rome – dating from the letters to Wilhelm Fliess and Die Traumdeutung – as a lost and prohibited phantasy object or eros. Freud’s view at the time of writing Die Traumdeutung is that what men repress in hysteria is essentially so-called passive homosexuality or the feminine, where constitutional bisexuality predisposes the subject to disavowal and self-division. This is Freud’s early formulation of the content of the unconscious; in a letter to Fliess detailing “The Architecture of Hysteria” (Draft M), he writes: “It is to be supposed that the element essentially responsible for repression is always what is feminine … What men essentially repress is the pederastic element” (25 May 1897). Eleven years later in his essay “Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality” (1908), we find another example of Freud’s view of an “archaic” Rome and Roman paters; an unrestrained pederastic element finds a home in a temporally distant “Rome”: Anyone who studies hysteria, therefore, soon finds his interest turned way from its symptoms to the phantasies from which they proceed. The techniques of psychoanalysis enables us in the first place to infer from the symptoms what those unconscious phantasies are and then to make them conscious to the patient. By this means it has been found that the content of the hysteric’s unconscious phantasies corresponds completely to the situations in which satisfaction is consciously obtained by perverts; and if anyone is at a loss for examples of such situations he has only to recall the world-famous performances of the Roman Emperors, the wild excesses of which were, of course, determined only by the large and unrestrained power possessed by the authors of these phantasies. (10, 90)

Although he may flirt with this narrative,16 Freud does not endorse here the standard Victorian attribution of Rome’s decline to an increase in homosexuality. In fact, the passage appears free of ethical judgement, as was the declared position of psychoanalysis from the start vis-à-vis the so-called perversions and sexuality.17 Contrary to Freud’s contemporary aetiology of hysteria in his analysands, ostensibly German but whose features bear the stigmatic trace of the stereotypically carnal Jewish male, the apparent lack of hysteria in such formidable Roman figures might attest to a queer admiration for their imagined difference from men today. In another text concerned, like Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), with the origins of culture and the agon between instinct and repression, Freud writes of the manner in which paternal Law is paradoxically 16  “But this degenerate carnality is Roman as much as Jewish,” Freud would seem to say, “even if you are speaking of my ‘primitive’ Eastern brethren.” 17  See, for example, the eloquent footnote in Die Traumdeutung, 4, 766-67, n2. 145

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strengthened by its transgression (this essay posits that Freud repeatedly stages this dialectic as a means of assuming his “sacral” paternal authority). In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud cites the separation or difference between the ego and the internalized ego ideal as a source of dissatisfaction, but introduces Rome’s Saturnalia as an instance of the manner in which the Law provides for its transgression in festival: “The Saturnalia of the Romans and our modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the festivals of primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of every kind and the transgression of what are at other times the most sacred commandments” (12, 163-64). Here the Roman ego is imagined as an agent pursuing instinctual satisfactions that normally follow the more perverse path dictated by the ego ideal and symbolic castration, that of renunciation’s satisfactions when judged by the tyrannical ego ideal in the drama of conscience. Indeed, Freud speaks of “the part played by love in the origin of conscience” (12, 325) when discussing the inevitable loss of happiness in civilization due to its “heightening of the sense of guilt” (12, 327). From the repeating foundational murder of Totem and Taboo to its recasting in Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud stages this drama of a punitive conscience enacting in displaced form a “longing for the father” at the root of religious and social feeling.18 Judith Butler interrogates the Freudian narrative’s implication of the putative inception of culture with the renunciation of homosexuality, together with a melancholic masculinity’s perverse satisfactions in the experience of renunciation and the “turn” of conscience: The prohibition on homosexuality preempts the process of grief and prompts a melancholic identification which effectively turns homosexual desire back upon itself. This turning back upon itself is precisely the action of self-beratement and guilt. Significantly, homosexuality is not abolished but preserved, though preserved precisely in the prohibition on homosexuality. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud makes clear that conscience requires the continuous sacrifice or renunciation of instinct to produce the peculiar satisfactions that conscience requires; conscience is never assuaged by renunciation, but is paradoxically strengthened (“renunciation breeds intolerance”). Renunciation does not abolish the instinct; it deploys the instinct for its own purposes, so that prohibition, and the lived experience of prohibition as repeated renunciation, is nourished precisely by the instinct that it renounces. In this scenario, renunciation requires 18  For example, see Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Life of Savages and Neurotics, trans. A.A. Brill (New York: Vintage, 1946): 191-93, Civilization and Its Discontents (12, 260), and Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage, 1967), 140, 172-73. Freud several times avails himself of his earlier work of “anthropology” in Moses and Monotheism (71, 102, 113, 166-69). 146

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the very homosexuality that it condemns, not as its external object, but as its own most treasured source of sustenance.19

Butler’s work effectively draws out the political dimensions to Freud’s narrative of the originary place of a fetishized homosexual sacrifice for melancholic masculine identity, in symbolic castration, in the institution of conscience, and in cultural achievements generally. Our methodological innovation and queer ideological purchase here is to analyze Freud’s meshing of a disciplinary theory of sexuality with the almost self-reflexive motor of his writing, its trauerspiel of same-sex attachment, and his cultural assumption of authority through his theory’s cooption of gender ideology and homophobia.20 Freud’s hermeneutic also appears invested in retracing the sacrifice of homosexual desire, for instance when he characterizes primitive instinct as prototypically homosexual: this so-called archaic desire is narratively unveiled and represented as always already overcome in, if strangely inhabiting, the assumption of heterosexual masculinity and its symbolic castration.21 In any event, Freud’s rhetoric of authority – in his theory of the divided subject and conscience, at his infolded scene of writing, in his fetishistic hermeneutic – stages both the murder of the father and the discreet renunciation of homosexual desire with which the murder is contiguous, aiming at a deeply problematic melancholic seduction of his assumed male reader.

19  Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 142-43. A troubling point for “straightening” Freudian theory is the dynamic in which melancholic identification with the father entails a consequent passivity or “feminine attitude” through deepened relations with the punishing superego. See Christopher Lane, “Freud on Group Psychology: Shattering the Dream of a Common Culture,” in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), on this problem, especially 158-60. 20  In a line of argument that supports ours, Boyarin describes Freud’s scene of writing – when elaborating the oedipal complex and censoring the “paternal” seduction theory – as one of homosexual panic. Unheroic Conduct, op. cit., 205-09. 21  See Trevor Hope, “Sexual Indifference and the Male Homosexual Imaginary,” Diacritics 24:2-3 (1994): 169-83 (especially 171-77). In this article, Hope cites a letter of Freud to Fliess in which he speculates about the primacy of homosexual desire (169): “What would you say if masturbation were to reduce itself to homosexuality, and the latter, that is, male homosexuality (in both sexes) were the primitive form of sexual longing” (17 October 1899). 147

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II.

At the outset of “From Rome to Vienna: A Progress,” Peter Gay gives a survey of how the theme of Rome preoccupies the author of The Interpretation of Dreams: “A charged and ambivalent symbol, Rome stood for Freud’s most potent concealed erotic, and only slightly less concealed aggressive wishes, and glanced at their secret history.”22 It is true that Freud regularly plays up the competitive and aggressive components to his phantasies, especially as pursued through professional rivalries and ambition, to the point that they appear as screens for the erotic wishes23 (both oedipal and the homoerotic, or the socalled negative oedipal). The tendency to read the aggressive wishes as merely oedipal (in a familial scenario) risks missing the implication of the patricidal phantasy with the stigma of his Jewish identity, where the patricide is a defence against anti-semitic imputations of homosexuality (“I do not love him, I hate him and kill him as proof ”), that is, as a hysterical symptom arising from the discursive imputation of perversion to the Jewish male, inextricable here from any reading of repressed homosexual eros. Remarkably, Gay avoids the text’s staging of any type of homosexual phantasy, though in a footnote he appears to glance at his omission: “The psychoanalytic implication of that kiss (though Freud does not explicitly say so) is triumph over the father. There may be deeper mysteries still, and wider implications, but Freud does not provide enough fuel for secure speculations.”24 The avoidance of these particular depths seems to conspire to straighten Freud’s own hermeneutic and his literary enterprise.25 In Die Traumdeutung and his letters to Fliess, the so-called oedipal Rome often operates as a cover or screen for homoerotic desire. In following how Freud develops a “Rome” that serves as an object of patricidal and oedipal desire, we demonstrate how these phantasies are supplemented by a notional homosexual presence for which Rome is so often a symbol, that is, through the “presence” of an ambivalent paternal relation (though one could argue that this homoerotic 22  Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, op. cit., 132. See also Ernest Jones, “Freud’s Early Travels,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 35:2 (1954): 81-84. 23  Marthe Robert observes Freud’s personal and strategic substitution in Die Traumdeutung of professional ambition for the primacy of the sexual. See From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City: Anchor, 1977), 65-75. 24  Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, op. cit., 132n. 25  Inevitably, the critic’s discovery of homoerotic desire in the text is always susceptible to privileged (heterosexual) or hegemonic and disciplinary, “othering” operations that work through a supposed knowledge, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described the “epistemology of the closet.” Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). Lee Edelman unpacks this double-bind of queer criticism in “Homographesis,” in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). 148

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presence is also imagined as specular and/or “fraternal”). We suggest that Freud’s phantasies of symbolic castration in his imaginary relations to Rome, as rewritten in the negative oedipal complex, inform and support his scene of writing, most notoriously vis-à-vis a Moses figure who is often linked with Rome. Has Gay – as the implicitly straight reader? – succumbed to Freud’s charm when he introduces the author, yet again, as a conquistador on an impossible (oedipal) quest? “Perhaps the most intriguing, certainly among the most poignant of the clues to his mind that Freud scattered through The Interpretation of Dreams, is the theme of Rome, glittering in the distance as the supreme prize and incomprehensible menace.”26 In fact, we can read the poignancy of Freud’s self-disclosure here as a question of its subject matter alternately in oedipal or sodomitical phantasy (“the supreme prize and incomprehensible menace”), though the poignancy of the latter requires that the desire be censored once again. If the death of a father is a “most poignant loss,” as Freud considered the death of a father in his famous prefatory remarks to The Interpretation of Dreams (4, 47), is this not because the dead father’s power is implicated in the loss of another kind that one keeps one’s mouth shut about (“A pity that one keeps one’s mouth shut about the most intimate things”), an “impossible” loss the memory of which that death revives?27 While Freud relates that his wish to go to Rome “had become in my dream life a cloak and symbol for a number of passionate wishes,” he is only ever quite candid when revealing an oedipal or a political-as-patricidal aspect – involving “the tenacity of Jewry” (4, 285) – of his Roman daydreams and phantasies. In an oft-cited passage Freud recounts how, upon once again turning away from Rome on an Italian journey, he discovers “the way in which my longing for the eternal city had been reinforced by impressions from my youth,” particularly in his resistance to Roman anti-semitism, a resistance bound up in patricidal phantasy:

26  Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, op. cit., 132. Damrosch also considers these autobiographical revelations to be told with “poignancy,” though ostensibly because of the shame and anger experienced by the young Freud when his father relates to him an anti-semitic story from his youth, and how he responded mildly when he was struck by the Christian. “The Politics of Ethics,” op. cit., 114. The famous anecdote is cited later in our text. 27  If Freud’s Die Traumdeutung in the preface thus positions itself as a trauerspiel or “mourning play,” the text also manages to perform a passable mourning of the lost homosexual attachment, with a certain seduction vitiated by the melancholic pathos of this figure. 149

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I was in the act of making a plan to pass Rome next year and travel to Naples, when a sentence occurred to me which I must have read once in one of our classical authors: “Which of the two, it may be debated, walked up and down his study with the greater impatience after he had formed his plan of going to Rome – Winckelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, the Commander-in-Chief ?” I had actually been following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had expected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble in these respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school-days. Like so many boys of that age, I had sympathized in the Punic Wars not with the Romans but with the Carthaginians. And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-semitic feelings among the other boys warned me that I must take up a definite position, the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church. And the increasing importance of the effects of the anti-semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days. Thus the wish to go to Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes. Their realization was to be pursued with all the perseverance and singlemindedness of the Carthaginian, though their fulfilment seemed at the moment just as little favoured by destiny as was Hannibal’s lifelong wish to enter Rome. (4, 285-86)28

In the first approach, Freud’s longing to enter Rome is tied to active political resistance to anti-semitism, where entering the city would be a revenge on the anti-semitic Catholic Church. In this reminiscence Freud wishes to vanquish a contemporary Rome; he is motivated by his angry wish to redeem his social abjection as a Jew. We know he does this through his professional success, that is, in his creation of psychoanalysis, which he is already groping towards in his heroic self-fashioning. As many of his letters to Fliess attest, the fear and difficulty of entering Rome is emblematic for Freud of his lack of professional success or recognition, with its relations to a prevailing anti-semitism. In this latter vein, in an oft-cited passage in Die Traumdeutung explaining Freud’s ambivalence to his Jewish heritage and father, he accounts for his tyrannicidal posture to Rome by recounting how his father tells him a story about his own youth: 28  On the censoring critical tradition of reading the homoerotic aspects of Freud’s Hannibal identification, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, op. cit., 226-27. Though he makes short shrift of this aspect, McGrath is good on Freud’s Hannibal phantasy, Freud’s Discovery, op. cit., 64-66, 205-11, 233-34. 150

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I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to tell me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. “When I was a young man,” he said, “I went for a walk on a Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well-dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: ‘Jew! Get off the pavement!’” “And what did you do?” I asked. “I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,” was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another that fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies. (4, 286)

Freud’s more heroic thoughts of revenge on the Romans resemble a rescue phantasy, though this is complicated by the fact that he dreams of revenging his father, rather than his mother. The imagined “patricide” against illegitimate authority, i.e., vanquishing the anti-semitic Catholics/Romans, would allow Freud to redeem his father and Jewish heritage while also supplanting his always gentle Hebrew father. Indeed, such a phantasy conformed to broadly European martial ideals of masculinity and is itself arguably a betrayal of his Jewish roots, a tradition in which the civility of the Ostjude, for instance as a pious scholar, was often contrasted to the figure of the evil Roman soldier.29 Freud often appears at such a crossroads in his Roman dreams, where the self-division of filial piety shading into the profane would be compounded by his descent from Eastern Jewry or Ostjude, a doubly alien community insofar as they were stereotyped by assimilated German Jews as their archaic other, while also being the possessor of real, authentic or Ur-Jewishness.30 Freud’s passing Hannibal identification should shed light on the Jewish dimension to his Roman dreams examined below, not least in the authorial displacement of an imputed Jewish “castration” through identifying with this heroic, martial figure. Freud-as-Hannibal writes in a “to double business bound” patricide, where he is intent on subverting the “compact majority” (15, 191) of a 29  See Boyarin’s chapter, “Goyim Naches,” in Unheroic Conduct, op. cit., which begins with this hat anecdote of Freud and reads it as emblematic of a shift from “traditional” to “modern” and “eastern” to “western” conceptions of masculinity in relation to martial aggression and self-control; see especially 33-38 and 51-55. 30  See Steven A. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The Eastern European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), especially chapter 10, “The Inverted Image.” 151

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persecutory religious authority and supplanting the Jewish father in his revenge. Furthermore, there is the question of what the always deferred trip to Rome might signify beyond its patricidal meanings, that is, in terms of displaced or sublimated sexual longings. We will argue below that Freud’s insistent longing for Rome becomes a matter of an oddly Christ-like homosexual satisfaction in the renunciation of desire and the melancholic authority of this gesture. In Freud’s citation of a question “from one of our classical authors” we encounter the figure of Johann Winckelmann, the famous classical archeologist and art historian, only in order to follow in the footsteps of a martial Hannibal: “I had actually been following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome” (285). But the form of that question Freud repeats to himself might tell us something more than Freud can or is willing to: Winckelmann much more represents the road Freud will take in his own scholarly researches, especially insofar as the Protestant Winckelmann’s Rome and scholarly researches appear as objects of his displaced homosexual desire and its difficult, highly vexed cultural redemption. Indeed, Damrosch remarks on how “virtually everything about Winckelmann has particular resonance for Freud’s interests generally, and especially his project in Die Traumdeutung. Winckelmann performed for art history and archeology precisely what Freud wished to perform for the study of dreams and the psyche: to transform impressionistic and amateuristic fields of study into modern science.” Damrosch aligns Winkelmann’s valorization of classical culture and its art’s sexual freedom with the “Freudian plea for the importance of the open recognition of our physical selves, an argument for the importance of recognizing the hidden ‘lower’ self, which is in fact indissolubly bound to the highest manifestations of culture.”31 The erotic aspects of Freud’s imagination of Athens and Rome can be viewed against Winckelmann’s fear of visiting Greece, despite his writing an important history of Greek art. Winckelmann’s death would also have homoerotic resonances for Freud due to the analyst’s rather haunting preoccupation with fraternal betrayal and the occulted murder, speaking allegorically, of the homosexual within normative masculinity.32 31  Damrosch, “The Politics of Ethics,” op. cit., 114; 115. For an oedipal reading of Freud’s avoidance of the Winckelmann identification, i.e., one that ignores or even censors the homoerotic, see Schorske’s essay “Politics and Patricide,” reprinted and cited here from Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, Vintage, 1980), see 192-93. 32  As Damrosch recalls in “The Politics of Ethics,” op. cit., the Vatican librarian was murdered on his return to Rome from Vienna, murdered by a man he had befriended en route and with whom he appears to have become romantically involved (115). These remarks on the romantic history between victim and murderer have relevance to Die Traumdeutung because its story links Rome and homosexuality and then both as an ambivalent symbol and force respectively that haunt Freud. 152

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III.

Rome is a phantasy love-object for Freud, an impossible object of desire always out of reach. Freud eventually overcomes his inhibitions and begins to visit Rome regularly after 1901. He visits as a somewhat perverse “pilgrim,” as he recounts in footnotes added to the 1909 and 1925 editions of The Interpretation of Dreams (4, 282, n1). Investigating the erotic underpinnings of Freud’s Rome dreams, the road to Rome redeeming renounced desire is the same road that redeems his Jewish identity (this parallelism should not surprise as perverse desire is supposed to be a Jewish trait). The redemption of eros on this road, however, betrays a “homosocial corpse” (with its melancholic draw), a male body to be resurrected from a distinctly Christ-like sacrifice.33 The letters to Fliess repeatedly document Freud’s passionate interest in classical culture, for instance in his reading: “For relaxation I am reading Burckhardt’s History of Greek Civilization, which is providing me with unexpected parallels. My predilection for the prehistoric in all its human forms has remained the same” (20 January 1899). As the Rome trope in Civilization and Its Discontents recasts this analogical methodology (“unexpected parallels”) near the end of his career, the archeological interest in uncovering the so-called prehistoric and a repressed “primitive” inflects his preoccupation with Rome from the beginning. Reading these letters to Wilhelm Fliess, one is struck by the persistent theme of a passionate desire for Rome whose mention appears as a discreet homoerotic seduction. In the letter dated 3 December 1897, Freud writes: “My longing for Rome is, by the way, deeply neurotic. It is connected with my high school worship of the Semitic Hannibal, and this year in fact I did not reach Rome any more than he did from Lake Trasimeno. Since I have been studying the unconscious, I have become so interesting to myself. A pity that one always keeps one’s mouth shut about the most intimate things.” He describes this letter as meschuggene (Yiddish for “crazy”), confessing his “deeply neurotic” longing for Rome, and glosses his reticence with a citation from Goethe’s Faust, “The best you know, you may not tell to boys” (3 December 1897). We might pause over the “deeply neurotic” longing for Rome, coded in the letter as a symptom of homosexual passion rather than oedipal wishes. Freud repeatedly writes to Fliess on the subject of Rome, a city whose distance often figures his desire for Fliess: sometimes, if rarely, the desire for 33  Again, see Hope’s “Sexual Indifference and the Male Homosexual Imaginary,” op. cit. Regarding the melancholic draw of the homosocial corpse, see Hope’s other important article, “Melancholic Modernity: The Hom(m)osexual Symptom and the Homosocial Corpse,” in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, ed. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). 153

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“Rome” appears frankly homophilic.34 The young Jewish doctor describes his study of the topography of Rome as a sort of deflection of his desire for a meeting with Fliess: “I am not sufficiently collected, to be sure, to do anything in addition [but anticipate this talk about his work on the neuroses and, we can assume, the recently developed role of phantasy and bisexuality], other than possibly studying the topography of Rome, the yearning for which becomes ever more tormenting” (23 October 1898). This reference to a longing for Rome becomes a sort of fond coda to his letters, as if the desire for Rome had a symptomatic homosexual significance for Freud, only slightly dampened or refined in his epistolary wit. The first entry of a letter dated 2 and 3 March 1899 begins with Freud’s confession, “I can hardly wait till Easter to show you in detail a principal part of the story of wish-fulfillment and the coupling of opposites.” He breaks off his ruminations about the difficulty of attaining a position of theoretical mastery regarding the (bisexual) psyche, while retaining his hope for receiving help from a meeting with Fliess: “Rome is still distant; you know my Roman dreams.” The second entry remarks “Easter really is not so far away anymore. Are your plans fixed yet? I am already itching to travel.” Freud ends the letter: “Thus, if Rome becomes possible, I shall give up the lectureship. But, as I said, we are not yet in Rome. I sorely miss news of you. Does it have to be so?” What is striking is how the phantasied trip to Rome and a promised, delightful “congress” with Fliess becomes wrapped up in the story of Easter. Rome evidently substitutes for Jerusalem in another sort of homecoming, that is, in Freud’s retroping of “Next year in Jerusalem!” In the letter of 27 August 1899, Freud’s parentheses lift while drawing attention to the censorship and proliferating obstacles: What would you think of ten days in Rome at Easter (the two of us of course) if all goes well, if I can afford it, and have not been locked up, lynched, or boycotted on account of the Egyptian dream-book? A long-standing promise! Learning about the eternal laws of life for the first time in the Eternal City would not be a bad combination.

As an originary topos in Freud’s own erotic imagination, Rome is an appropriate place to learn “about the eternal laws of life for the first time in the Eternal City,” presumably about the originary repressions of the subject vis-à-vis the

34  Drawing on the available or predominant discourses of his humanistic studies and contemporary culture, Freud mainly presents two modalities or styles of homoerotic desire in his letters and the Roman dreams: the hyper-virile agonistic and the socially stigmatized and normally censored “passive” or feminine conception. Freud evidently imagined classical Rome as a place where the two coincided, albeit with some conflict. 154

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original plenitude of this barred phantasy object/desire, in a hermeneutic that repeatedly cleaves to such prohibited homosexual jouissance. After his father’s death, Freud writes to Fliess again about the phantasied trip to Rome and their planned congress. “The secret dossier is getting thicker and thicker and literally longs for its opening at Easter. I myself am getting curious about when Easter in Rome will be possible,” Freud writes. “I am still perfectly serious about a change of profession and residence,” he continues, “in spite of all the improvements in my practice and income. On the whole, things are really too awful. A pity these plans are just as fantastic as ‘Easter in Rome’” (6 February 1899). The professional ambition – and its disavowal – displayed in these last two letters appears as the displaced form of a secret desire which Freud’s writings promise to deliver (“[t]he secret dossier”), a desire whose phantasied archaic origin and destination is Rome. If the retrojected origin places homosexual desire as always already lost, as narratively and psychically encrypted, to be unlocked by the Freudian hermeneutic, the destination of Rome is also represented as the impossible object of an always suspended or anticipatory desire. Between the lines, “Rome” mediates the return of repressed desire and a phantasied resurrection of a Christ-like, perversely ideal “homosexual” body with this desire’s redemption at Easter: “A long-standing promise!” Freud’s references to Easter translate the Christian faith in the resurrection and its redemptive power for humanity into a more secular view of sexuality and the subject’s self-sacrifices. The key repeating scenario is the prohibiting, punitive father and the son’s loving covenant of symbolic castration. As Freud uses the language of Christian doctrine to gloss his passion for Rome, we might wish to ask how this doctrine has appeared to more recent Freudians. In “God is Love,” Julia Kristeva asks, Who could ever forget, indeed, that the Name of the adoptive Father is nourished by the corporeal passion of the Son, that pure love is channeled through the nullification of the entire body, which is by the same token destined for resurrection and yet put to death for the time being?35

The neutralization of literal sacrifice through its “subjective internalization” in Freud’s thought is aligned with this renunciation of an ill-defined homosexual libido often conflated with narcissism. Paradoxically then, these self-sacrifices encourage a narcissistic identification with Christ from the masochistic position – with its satisfactions – while also allowing the subject access to the Name of the Father. Christian theology, with its representation of the Son’s pure love 35  Julia Kristeva, “God Is Love,” Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 145. 155

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in symbolic castration, appears a resource for Freud’s self-understanding of the road to Rome, and then his staging of an encrypted homoerotic desire supporting paternal authority. A decided atheist who still thought of himself as a Jew, Freud somewhat curiously substituted Easter for Passover in his household. “Freud’s rigorous secularism did not permit the slightest trace of religious observance to survive in his domestic life,” Gay writes. “The Freuds studiously ignored even the companionable Jewish family holidays, like Passover.” That said, Gay complicates his first assertion by conceding that, according to Freud’s son Martin, the family did celebrate Christmas and Easter.36 Freud’s letters to Fliess on the Rome-forEaster theme would seem to bear out a certain line of Jewish subversion of Catholic authority through inhabiting its hegemonic discourse, replaying social castration and imputations of pathological hysteria and homosexuality in a blissful seduction between men: “If I closed with ‘Next Easter in Rome,’ I would feel like a pious Jew. So I say rather, ‘Until we meet in the summer or fall in Berlin or where you will” (16 April 1900). Even though Freud’s passionate friendship with Fliess is waning at this time, the “or where you will” appears to strive for some erotic lability, while the passed over destination of Rome at Easter might be read as a pointed rejection (where religious piety and homosexual eros are aligned). In one of his last letters to Fliess, Freud’s adieu again dwells on the social abjection whose overcoming a trip to Rome would symbolize: “In the midst of the present and material depression I am tormented by the temptation to spend this year’s Easter week in Rome. There is no justification for it whatsoever – nothing has been accomplished, and external circumstances will probably also make it impossible” (30 January 1901, our emphasis). In relation to Freud’s Jewishness, the phantasied trip to Rome signifies a suspended “political” patricide. This patricidal dream has twin homoerotic valences, the first being a figurative sodomy of the oppressive, anti-semitic “Rome,” visiting on the enemy the precise injurious eros attributed to the stereotypically perverse Jewish male. “It is remarkable to observe,” Freud writes in the Die Traumdeutung, “how frequently reversal is employed precisely in dreams arising from repressed homosexual impulses” (4, 440). This sodomitical reversal of an imputed lack is counterpoised by a more idealizing and serene anticipation of the resurrection of a homosexual body, the redemption of an impossible (that is, both imputed and prohibited) homosexual longing rooted in what Freud – within his homophobic culture/psyche – understood as masochism: “There is a masochistic component in the sexual constitution of many people, which arises from the reversal of an aggressive, sadistic component into its opposite …” (4, 243). At any rate, this impossibility accrues to the author a certain pathos and melancholic authority, especially given the overlapping discourses of 36  Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times, op. cit., 600. 156

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repression, sexual longing, and the resurrection of the homosexual body within Die Traumdeutung. In the dream book Freud describes “a series of dreams which are based on a longing to see Rome” (4, 282). We have seen how the import of these dreams is markedly Jewish, “the tenacity of Jewry” in opposition to gentile hegemony, while also figuring an ambivalent homosexual eros. Freud recounts the first dream: “I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city. The view that I had seen was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients” (4, 282). As Schorske explains the symbolism here, Freud fails to reach the castle he views from the window, a castle that is “a house of both buried paganism and Christian salvation.” Indeed, as with the other Roman dreams, what is at stake is some sort of “redemption or fulfilment that is never quite achieved.”37 We would suggest that this is due to the “impossibility” of either transcending the opposing patricidal impulses at this crossroads, or fully owning the homosexual eros that shadows these. A Rome that Freud has never visited takes on the features of other more idyllic locations in another of his dreams: In a third dream I had at last got to Rome, as the dream itself informed me; but I was disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an urban character. There was a narrow stream of dark water; on one side of it were dark cliffs and on the other meadows with big white flowers. I noticed a Herr Zucker (whom I knew slightly) and determined to ask him the way to the city. I was clearly making a vain attempt to see in my dream a city which I had never seen in my waking life. (4, 283)

The landscape ends up being a composite of Ravenna, once the capital of Italy, and a lush valley outside of Karlsbad. Implicitly, the white flowers in the dream are to be picked, and for Freud at any rate, they are clearly an instance of sexual symbolism (for example, 4, 464-65, 494-97) and perhaps death: “I found that the white flowers took me to Ravenna … In the marshes round Ravenna we found the loveliest water-lilies growing in black water. Because we had such difficulty picking them out of the water, the dream made them grow in meadows like the narcissi of our own Aussee” (4, 283). Even though Freud is supposed to be in Rome, the landscape is taken from other associations. The dark cliffs are derived from Karlsbad, and this city is also important for “the material out of which the dream was woven,” which included two Jewish anecdotes: 37  Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, op. cit., 190. 157

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Here is the first one: the “constitution” story. An impecunious Jew had stowed himself away without a ticket on the fast train to Karlsbad. He was caught, and each time tickets were inspected he was taken out of the train and treated more and more severely. At one of the stations on his via dolorosa he met an acquaintance, who asked him where he was travelling to. “To Karlsbad,” was his reply, “if my constitution can stand it.” (4, 283)

This “facetious” (4, 283) constitution story puts the reader in mind of the author’s previous comments when introducing “a series of dreams which are based upon a longing to visit Rome. For a long time to come,” Freud writes in the first edition, “no doubt, I shall have to continue to satisfy that longing in my dreams: for at the season of the year when it is possible for me to travel, residence in Rome must be avoided for reasons of health” (4, 282). If Freud’s avoidance of and longing to visit Rome is likened to Christ’s stations of the cross, this attack on his constitution “approaches” the Passion-as-masochisticphantasy. In another of his Rome dreams, Freud once again hesitates to enter the city, a city whose significance has been grafted from Egypt in the Bible, together with a suggestion of an erotic import: Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome halfshrouded in mist; it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of “the Promised Land seen from afar” was obvious in it. (4, 282-83)

The dreams of Rome in the distance appear – this much is obvious to Freud – to align him with Moses looking at Israel’s promised land, Moses who is also fated not to reach his destination. One conflict here appears to be the question of Freud’s favoring of cultural parents, Israel or Rome, a crossroads from which progress is difficult. If the promised land of the dream is also the prohibited homosexual body, we might understand Freud’s self-censoring reluctance to detail this significance. Leaving the Rome dreams proper, in a section on absurd dreams in a later chapter (“The Dream-Work”), Freud discusses a dream called “My son, the Myops.” This dream again links Rome to the exodus from Egypt, substituting Rome for Egypt and the exile from Jerusalem, and Easter for Passover in Freud’s gloss of the time of the Exodus flight (4, 572-76). The dream expresses concern about pernicious contemporary anti-semitism and Freud’s Jewish legacy to his son(s). We cite in its entirety the third part of the dream, the crucial part Freud gives in full: 158

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On account of certain events which had occurred in the city of Rome, it had become necessary to remove the children to safety, and this was done. The scene was then in front of a gateway, double doors in the ancient style (the “Porto Romana” at Siena, as I was aware during the dream itself). I was sitting on the edge of a fountain and was greatly depressed and almost in tears. A female figure – an attendant or nun – brought two boys out and handed them over to their father who was not myself. The elder of the two was clearly my eldest son; I did not see the other one’s face. The woman who brought out the boy asked him to kiss her good-bye. She was noticeable for having a red nose. The boy refused to kiss her, but, holding out his hand in farewell, said “AUF GESERES” to her, and then “AUF UNGESERES” to the two of us (or to one of us). I had a notion that this last phrase denoted a preference. (4, 574)

The portrait of Freud nearly weeping by the gates of Rome is one of great pathos, most obviously in the political narrative of the exile from Jerusalem which this dream recalls (“By the river of Babylon we sat down and wept” [4, 573]). The other source of pathos is the literal and affective separation of the father from his son, to which we return below. The dream’s Jewish dimension is highlighted by Freud in his initial treatment of the dream: “This dream was constructed on a tangle of thoughts provoked by a play which I had seen, called Das neue Ghetto [The New Ghetto]. The Jewish problem, concern about the future of one’s children, to whom one cannot give a country of their own, concern about educating them in such a way that they can move freely across frontiers – all this was easily recognizable in the relevant dream-thoughts” (4, 573). Freud’s dream exhibits anxious concern for his Jewish child(ren) by making Rome/Siena into another Egypt from which the “Children of Israel” (4, 574) are fleeing. One can see refracted in the dream the author’s wish for a cultural salvation that is represented in terms of twin roads and crossings, of flights that lead back to and preserve a sense of cultural origins and identity. Somewhat against this line of cultural preservation, Freud interprets the dream as being about his conflicted wish to educate his children so that they can assimilate to Gentile culture as a means of survival. Boyarin explains the dream thus by linking its content to the concerns of the play by Theodor Herzl and thoughts about the double doors of the gateway:

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The play is explicitly founded on the premise that although physical walls have been broken down between Jew and German, spiritual, cultural, and social walls are still in place. The “double-doors in the ancient style,” can be taken to refer to Freud’s Jewish life in the ancient style, since, after all, Freud’s word for doors is Tore, that is, via a typical dream-work pun, Torah. This verbal association would have strengthened by a visual connection with the double doors of the Holy Ark within which the Torah is kept in the synagogue.38

Moreover, if the gateway to a politically redemptive future – again, read “to a Rome that substitutes for Jerusalem” – is to be achieved through a cultural assimilation, this appears figured in the dream by the double-doors: the scene of the double-doors and the gateway is precisely recognized by Freud in the dream as the “Porto Romana” at Siena (4, 572). Thus one wishful means to the emancipation of the Jews, the duplicitous road to Rome taken by Freud himself, is through their educational and professional achievements in the Gentile world.39 When Freud attempts to explain “an absurd and unintelligible verbal form” of AUF UNGESERES in the dream, the neologism which expresses the eldest boy’s preference for Freud, he is led by his associations to another verbal opposition that has a Jewish meaning: “This [transitional idea] was provided by ‘leavened – unleavened’ [‘gesauert – ungesauert’]. In their flight out of Egypt the children of Israel had not time to allow their dough to rise and, in memory of this, they eat unleavened bread to this day at Easter” (4, 574). Freud’s substitution of Easter for Passover here is telling, providing us with a performative instance of the dream’s wish for redemption through cultural assimilation, here precisely through conflating the Jewish and Christian rituals as well as their topos. This redemption is complicated and deepened, moreover, by the sense of an Easter that celebrates the resurrected body of Christ. If the dreamer wishes to redeem the body, if he follows Christian doctrine, this occurs through the Son’s Passion.

38  Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, op. cit., 223. Our interpretation here of the double doors complicates Boyarin’s conflation of the doors with Judaism and the Torah. Though we like his reading, one can see the double doors as also a figure for Freud’s cultural doubleness and the staged leaving and anticipated return to Rome. Boyarin duly notes that although Rome is the home of the Gentile oppressor, it also functions as a point of cultural aspiration and value beginning with Freud’s classical education or Bildung (224). 39  It is worth noting here that the play’s protagonist, Jakob Samuel, not only has the name of Freud’s father, but dies heroically in a duel with a Christian in what the audience is supposed to understand as a sacrifice for the cause of Jewish assimilation. 160

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Are we reading too much into the son’s AUF UNGESERES? Perhaps, but Freud’s own interpretative interest is first drawn by this word (“‘ungeseres’ was a private neologism of my own and was the first word to catch my attention, but to begin with I could make nothing of it” [4, 573]) and Freud’s record of the dream ends by indicating that the phrase denotes, as he puts it, “a preference” (4, 572). This preference is evidently for him over the female attendant or nun in the dream that is a revenant of Freud’s childhood nurse (the Catholic with the red nose), so that Freud is also in the son here. Further, the preference appears to be for him as opposed to the “weeping and wailing” that Geseres is supposed to signify in Yiddish slang (from the Hebrew of “imposed suffering” or “doom”) (4, 573). While the son’s longing for the impossibly distant father seems like an important amorous analogue to the theme of political exile and hopes of liberation, it also appears to reverse the orthodox direction or agency of preference here. After all, who shows the Children of Israel preference, if not God the Father, here played by a remote Freud in the dream?40 We witness the two boys being “handed over to their father, who was not myself,” although Freud insists that “The elder of the two was clearly my eldest son; I did not see the other one’s face” (4, 572). In replaying his own childhood separation from the father as a poignant exile, is Freud here the adoptive Father? Wishfully here, Freud appears to unite in himself the roles of the real father and adoptive Father, though which one receives the child’s preference is unclear (“and then ‘AUF UNGESERES’ to the two of us (or to one of us)” (4, 572). More crucially though, the dream’s wishfulfillment transforms the political exile and weeping of the children leaving Rome-as-Egypt: in the sexual register it appears to signify its opposite, that is, the son’s (sexual) preference for his ideal Father over the Catholic nurse, and in a further chiastic mirroring, the Father’s preference for his eldest Jewish son, i.e., the covenant with the Hebrew race. In this dream we find again a version of the Son’s Passion – as well as the Father’s distorted covenant – in a narrative of renounced desire’s anticipated redemption.41 The staging of the father-son scenario presents in embryo Freud’s meditations on the sexual meaning of the covenant and symbolic castration. The Christian Gospel and the resurrection of Easter offer Freud a mythic 40  In the “phantasy” scene’s presentation of a series of pairs and fragmented figures, Freud appears dispersed, traversing these positions, that is, he appears in the father(s) here, certainly, but also in the son(s). 41  We would suggest the pertinence of the fact that Freud at this time was vacillating between the seduction theory (in which the father is the agent and guilty party) and an early version of oedipal theory (in which the child’s phantasies are central) to account for hysteria and the neuroses. One could argue that the dream presents the son’s “preference” as balanced against the father’s seduction while Freud is groping towards oedipal theory. 161

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paradigm for his own psychoanalytic narrative of the return of the repressed, a phantom resurrection of a sacrificed “homosexual” body that will find its highest expression in paternal Law and the operation of conscience. The tenuous resolution of cultural doubleness and the wish fulfillment of the dream then appear less in the politico-cultural realm than in the sexual – and an emerging theory of bisexuality and the unconscious. To begin this analysis, the dream’s name is taken from its first fragment in which a Professor M. says “My son, the Myops …” (4, 572). Professor M. and his son appear in the dream as a residue of Freud’s conversations with Fliess about “the biological significance of bilateral symmetry” (4, 574), which Fliess saw as an extension of the theory of bisexuality they had discussed together. In his explanatory text, Freud associates Myops to Cyclops and thence, through a number of other memories and affiliations, to a concern that his own son’s education “save the child from being short-sighted and one-sided” (4, 575). Freud neglects to mention that “the reference to bilaterality” has a strong further association for him to the theory of bisexuality, though he does acknowledge the levels of meaning closer to the surface: “My concern about one-sidedness had more than one meaning: it could refer not only to physical one-sidedness but also to one-sidedness of intellectual development” (4, 575). Freud continues his account with a discreet gloss of the sexual level unpacked above: May it not even be that it was precisely this concern which, in its crazy way, the scene in the dream was contradicting? After the child had turned to one side to say farewell words, he turned to the other side to say the contrary, as though to restore the balance. It was as though he was acting with due attention to bilateral symmetry! (4, 575)

The son’s qualified affection for the nurse and preference for the father belies the subject’s bisexual constitution much more than its formal screen in the dream of “bilateral symmetry!” Freud makes an implicit interpretation of the psychological underpinnings of theological doctrines and religious stories in the reading offered above: and from the entangled politico-religious dimensions of the dream it appears to fulfill Freud’s wish for his nascent theory of constitutional bisexuality to be true. Freud withholds the erotic aspect or “sexual ideas” of his dreams, claiming that he has “intentionally left gaps” in these analyses because “an explanation

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of sexual dreams would involve me deeply in the still unsolved problems of perversion and bisexuality; and I accordingly reserved the material for another occasion” (4, 766-67, n2).42 This article assumes the retrospective vantage of the Freudian theory of “perversion” and the vicissitudes of the negative oedipal complex, reading the early text in light of his theory’s development, while also suggesting how the Freudian narrative’s use of lacunae and reserves, its promissory structure, contributes to the seductive power of psychoanalytic theory within a melancholic modernity. The pathos of this mournful staging of dislocation, loss and yearning requires foregrounding to assess Freud’s bid for authority in his dreaming and then how these wishes are folded back into the rhetoric of his scene of writing. The pathos derives, if we follow Freud’s trope of Rome at Easter and “the Promised Land seen from afar,” from the staged renunciation of homosexual desire and an anticipation of this body’s resurrection – its vexed “redemption” in Freud’s theory of sublimation, phantasy, and the sodomitical inflection of symbolic castration and the covenant. Indeed, the context of these Rome dreams is Freud’s explanation of how present-day wishes apparent in dreams (for example, the “political” conquest of Rome) have their origin in and overlay childhood phantasies like patricide, castration, and being loved by the father. A Mosaic Epilogue

Freud’s road to Rome – a crossroads describing many of the author’s selfdivisions – is not so much relinquished as elaborated in his oeuvre. In the Die Traumdeutung Freud is mostly “in the son,” even when he imagines himself as a Moses figure sighting “the Promised Land seen from afar,” or when he is dispersed between the two at a scene, as in “My son, the Myops.” But the Brutus/Hannibal/Joseph identifications lose their hold: the basic telos of Freud’s patricidal agon is realized in his growing identification with the heroic paternal figure, of which Moses is the most interesting and dominant vis-à-vis his Jewishness. The first is displayed in an interpretation of the self-conquest of aggression by Moses in the statue by Michelangelo, the narrative Freud reads in “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914), leading to his assumption of an embattled paternal authority. This is followed more than twenty years later by

42  Again, in this connection it is worth observing that the theory of bisexuality – and its prominent place in the neuroses through the repression of homosexuality – was a theory initially worked on with Fliess by Freud. These theoretical musings were not without the circuits of rivalry, debt, misrecognition, and disavowal one might expect in such pursuits. 163

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his famous work on the man Moses, a murdered Egyptian Moses as well as his Hebrew counterpart, in Moses and Monotheism. Famously, Freud is first able to visit Rome in 1901 after his break and selfstyled “liberation” from Fliess and the spectral threat of homosexual desire he represents. When he comes to write “The Moses of Michelangelo,” Freud’s enduring patricidal scenario is tilted towards an identification with paternal authority, that is, with the Moses figure of Michelangelo’s statue. The occasion of Freud’s writing the essay was his repeated visitings of the statue after his longproscribed trip to Rome. The statue’s Roman locale contributes to the immense attraction its subject matter had for Freud. As the patricidal son entering Rome, betraying and redeeming his Jewish heritage, Freud was primed to recognize a “betraying fraternity versus the father” scenario he had established in Totem and Taboo (1912) at the origins of the Law and paternal authority, though here the father is the Jewish hero.43 Freud’s initial confession of a guilty identification with the profane son before the statue gives way to an endorsement of the righteous anger and immediate restraint of Moses – his interpretation of the actions of Moses upon seeing the idolatrous Hebrews pictures him moving “as though to turn his violence against his own body” [14, 271]) – in the face of his betrayal by an idolatrous fraternity. If Freud comes upon his interpretation at least in part by transporting himself into the Moses figure, the patriarch surrounded by a betraying fraternity losing their loyalty to the father of psychoanalysis bearing its laws, the article marks a turning point in Freud’s increasingly paternal identification. Taking its cue from the contemporaneous text “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (1914), Freud’s sense of being a beleaguered patriarchal authority is well documented by the critical literature. At this time “he was identified with Moses in his restrained wrath over the bitter disappointments experienced with Jung, Adler, and Stekel,” his defecting disciples who threatened to fragment the psychoanalytic fraternity.44 43  Notably, the statue by Michelangelo was commissioned by Pope Julius II, a statue that indeed tacitly associates an entombed, memorialized Julius with the Jewish hero Moses. However, there is no need to unduly emphasize a link between Freud’s art criticism of this Renaissance statue and the Shakespearean Julius Caesar or to Freud’s confession of having felt guilty regarding the death of his infant brother Julius for whom he had held such wishes. See Freud to Fliess, The Complete Letters, op. cit., 3 October 1897. 44  See Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, op. cit., 3: 368. The citation is Harold P. Blum, “Freud and the Figure of Moses: The Moses of Freud,” Reading Freud’s Reading, op. cit., 115. The homoerotic economies inhabiting and theoretically elaborated by psychoanalysis, together with its historical existence as a fraternity and sometimes secret society, are worth remarking on. See also François Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship From Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 164

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The famous passage describing how Freud approaches his subject of the Moses statue is worth citing at length. Describing his pilgrimages to the statue, Freud sets the initial scene of the author coming into the sun and his fascination by the Jewish hero’s angry, castrating gaze: No piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned – the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols. (14, 255)

Freud evidently feels in this scene like a transgressor before the Law, and it is his fascination with the statue on these grounds that motivates his repeated visits and eventual analysis of Michelangelo’s intentions in executing the statue. Freud’s analysis is wrested from the affect that the statue’s “subject-matter” (14, 253) inspires in him, as he struggles with his analytical method to resist “being overcome by the total impression of the statue and as it were paralyzed by it” (14, 261). Freud’s projective identification with the father as an agent of castration allows escape from the paralyzing gaze. As long as the author is in the guilty son, his powerlessness is deepened by his passive attitude to punishment, confirming as it were stereotypes of the effeminate, perverse Jewish male. Transported into the justly angered Hebrew patriarch, a renunciation of aggression leads to the triumph of spirituality and the intellect.45 But more importantly for our argument, this manly self-control redeems the imputedly Jewish effeminacy by locating it exclusively in the guilty son as universal subject. Freud writes Moses and Monotheism while thinking about Jewish persecution as well as his personal exodus, death, and hopeful legacy. In a manner articulating some of his own inner divisions, Freud produces a pair of Moses figures (Moses, 64), Hebrew and Egyptian, and has the latter murdered: “when they killed this great man they only repeated an evil deed which in primeval times had been a law directed against the divine king, and which, as we know, derives from a still older prototype” (Moses, 141). The “still older prototype” for the death of 1982), and less polemically, Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers (New York: New York University Press, 1984). 45  See Boyarin’s argument about how Moses and Monotheism finesses the question of different gender ideals, where the renunciation of desire or aggression is effeminizing in an Aryan culture Freud wishes to participate in. Unheroic Conduct, op. cit., esp. 249-54. 165

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Moses is the murder of the primal father of Totem and Taboo, the event that Freud sees everywhere and which secures the dead father’s authority through the return of the repressed. Freud’s sense of symbolic castration as a Jew in a virulently anti-semitic Germany of the 1930s helps explain his reparative identification with a Moses whose self-difference he makes good on: imputed Jewish lack is redeemed via the heroic identification and the theory in Moses and Monotheism of the populace’s disavowal of the murder and love that leads to the dead father’s force in the unconscious. Thus the castration complex has quite specific Jewish contours in the instance of Freud’s redemptive identification with Moses.46 Freud’s writing cleaves to the scene of imputed lack, retroping that lack as a notionally sodomitical castration in the covenant: the jouissance of that “other scene” of the unconscious appears to support his writing. The Roman dreams already showed how Freud assumes authority at this scene, traversing the positions of a melancholic masculinity whose impossible homosexual desire and renunciations are its “open secret,” to an imagined patricide in contiguous relation to that problematic homosexual sacrifice that renders some bliss (Die Freude). In the sodomitical phantasy in Freud’s writing, he traverses the position of the patricidal son and the punitive revenant of the castrating father, that “tyrant” conscience, in(to) the son. If the author-son’s guilt accrues from the murder of homosexual attachment as well as the suspended patricide, a melancholic authority is derived from both. We have seen how apotropaic stagings of a phantasmatic gender appear to guide much of Freud’s theory, from his articulation of the repressions dividing the male subject to the institution of the prohibitive Law and the operations of conscience. Following Freud on his initial road to Rome, the anticipation of the resurrected homosexual body in a Christic Passion was his discreetly confessed phantasy (that is, Rome at Easter). This messianic expectation of a Jewish carnality’s redemption suffers a recursive fate in the vision of a Hebraic sublime in Freud’s ein Roman (a novel). In Moses and Monotheism, the homosexual object is encrypted in normative masculinity and desire is subject to increasingly rigorous renunciations that provide a certain “rapture.” In his Moses identification, Freud is now in the universal father and appears to know very well what the “precious 46  See Barbara Johnson, “Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible,” in Poetics in the Americas: Race, Founding, Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 15-29. Johnson remarks on how Freud identifies with a Moses who is the dead father of psychoanalysis or Lacan’s name-of-the-father (19-20), an insight that we develop as essential to Freud’s “authority” at his scene of writing. Johnson eloquently suggests how Freud’s experience as a Jew would have enabled his “insights into maleness as a locus of denied self-difference (which he calls the castration complex)” (28). 166

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treasure” (Moses, 134) of the Jews is, that is, the jouissance of symbolic castration and the reminder of this in the covenant. Freud as castrating father or dead father is now playing God: he is speculating on the unconscious (masochistic) desire of the sons and the vicissitudes of lost love in conscience. If a perverse jouissance supports his “authority” on the road to Rome, the Moses identification in Moses and Monotheism is his final phantasm. Freud’s Jewishness certainly impacts the development of the theory of psychoanalysis as a discourse that can perpetuate homophobia and gender ideology. Some of his greatest theoretical insights into the subject’s selfdifference and fundamental masochism were doubtless generated by his own position as a culturally and discursively castrated Jewish male. Introducing the issue of Freud’s Jewishness does not extenuate the theory’s reproduction of a hegemonic gender ideology within anti-semitism, a legacy that Freud resisted, but it helps explain the way phantasmatic gender and the bid for authority form and deform the theory, while necessitating the work of dismantling Freud’s “heroic” quest for mastery and the father’s melancholic authority.

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Chapter 9

Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: Questions of Morality and Identity During the Third Reich Bryan Mark Rigg

Recently, the interest in the Second World War and the Holocaust has grown dramatically. Books on these topics frequently hit the best seller list and newspapers run articles nearly every week on some aspect of this time period. Whether it is a doctoral thesis calling the vast majority of Germans Hitler’s Willing Executioners or an exposé of IBM’s role in the Holocaust, it seems that the general public cannot get enough of the subject matter. With the release of films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and The Grey Zone, the thirst for knowledge about the Third Reich, World War II and the Holocaust has only increased. It is true, however, that there are numerous areas relating to the Holocaust and the Nazi era in general that remain largely unexamined or poorly understood. This research about Jews and Mischlinge (partial-Jews) in the Wehrmacht represents a close study of one such area and, while it does not presume to offer the final word, it is hoped that it will provide its readers with a new way of looking at one of the central issues of the history of the Third Reich and Holocaust, namely, Jewish identity. To understand this research, one must first be aware of Jewish law, Halakha, and how it defines a Jew because this causes confusion about the men documented in this study. For most Jews today, especially observant Jews, a Jew is a person who is born of a Jewish mother or who converts to the Jewish religion. Knowing this will help one understand the confusion surrounding the individuals researched and whether they are Jewish or not. One must also have a fundamental understanding of the Nazi racial laws. In 1935, the Nazis issued the Nuremberg Laws that created   For additional details, see Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002) and Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: Untold Tales of Men of Jewish Descent Who Fought for the Third Reich (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).   Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, op. cit., 277n17.

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the categories of Jew, “half-Jew” and “quarter-Jew.” The Nazis defined a Jew as a person who had three or more Jewish grandparents. “Half-Jews,” according to the Nazis, had two Jewish grandparents. A “quarter-Jew” had one Jewish grandparent. The Nazis also called these people Mischlinge, which is a horrible term loosely translated as mute, half-breed or bastard. There was a lot of confusion about these racial laws. Although the Nazis called the Jews a race, they ultimately had to use religious criteria to define that race. Birth, Death and Marriage-certificates in Germany always noted the religion of the person involved. As a result, the Nazis relied on these documents to prove someone’s “race” instead of looking at his “blood” or physical traits such as large noses or flat feet. Knowing this, one sees how bankrupt the Nazi racial laws were. Also, if a person had converted to Judaism, although his ancestry was purely Gentile, the Nazis would view him as a full-Jew. However, if a Jew converted to Christianity, then for the Nazis he remained a Jew. A telling story to illustrate this confusion surrounding these racial laws happened to Erwin Fuchs in 1937. In 1937, half-Jew Erwin Fuchs was five years old. He boarded a streetcar with his older brother. Both boys had been informed that Jews were no longer allowed to sit in public transportation, so they remained standing. A woman sitting near the boys made a little room for Erwin on her seat and said, “here’s half a seat for you little one.” Doubtful, little Erwin looked up at his brother and asked, “Which side of me is Jewish, the right or left?” When people hear about these Nazi racial laws, they often ask, “How could these people serve? I thought everyone of Jewish ancestry was killed.” This is where this research becomes very interesting. When full-Jews in the Wehrmacht were documented, they only did so with false documents. As far as their superiors were concerned, they were “Aryans” and treated accordingly. “Half-Jews” on the other hand had to serve. The conscription laws of 1935 included “half-Jews” in the draft. However, these men could not become noncommissioned officers (NCOs) or officers without Hitler’s personal consent. In other words, these men could not become professional soldiers. On the one hand, perhaps Hitler drafted “half-Jews” because he did not want the Wehrmacht to miss out on so many soldiers. Hitler knew how many men could be lost in one battle from his experience in WWI, and maybe he felt like he had to field every German he could in the coming war without bending his racial ideology too much. On the other hand, it is often difficult to find rational explanations for Hitler’s behavior, and allowing tens of thousands of “halfJews” to serve in the Wehrmacht did not make sense when looked at through the glass of Nazi racial ideology.   Ibid., 94-100.   Ibid., 19. Special thanks to Christa Brunner for information on this event recorded on 29 February 1998. 170

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Such ideological problems would soon cause Hitler some difficulties. After the successful defeat of Poland, thousands of decorated “half-Jewish” soldiers felt disturbed by how the Nazis treated their Jewish family members. Traditionally parents of soldiers were honored by their communities, but Jewish parents of soldiers were excluded from such praise and glory in 1939 and 1940. Mischling soldiers found that their mothers and fathers had lost their jobs, could not shop in certain stores and that Nazis spit on some of them in public. Such mistreatment added insult to injury for Mischling families and soldiers who had risked their lives fighting for Germany. Although families of Mischling soldiers did enjoy some protection from persecution in the late 1930s and early 1940s, they felt they deserved more. Many Mischling soldiers complained to their commanders about the mistreatment of their parents. To the credit of thousand of “Aryan” officers, they sent such complaints up the chain of command. Complaints also poured into military offices from families whose sons fought in the Polish campaign. Clara von Mettenheim, a Jew, wrote Army Commander-in-Chief General Walther von Brauchitsch on 8 December 1939 on behalf of all “half-Jewish” soldiers asking him to work with the Party to alleviate the problems families like theirs experienced. She wrote: I speak to you as the mother of three soldiers, and as an old army’s wife... My boys are soldiers from head to toe. The god-father of one of my boys is Germany’s Crown Prince, and my old friend [General von] Seeckt held the other one at his christening. My sons are Mischlinge because of me. During the war, when my sons were fighting in Poland, we were tortured here on the home front as if there were no more important tasks to be done during the war ... Please stop this mistreatment of half-Jewish soldiers and their parents.

Frau von Mettenheim felt desperate and did not understand why a family of their social standing had to endure such persecution. She felt responsible for the misfortune that had visited her family, and pleaded with Brauchitsch to remove the obstacles her sons faced. She described how angry her son Dieter had become when he returned from the war in Poland to find that his sister had been expelled from certain organizations and his mother was constantly being persecuted. Dieter also accompanied his mother Clara von Mettenheim to the office for Jewish Affairs to pick up her Jewish ID papers. On this day,   Ibid., 113. From 1903 until 1918, Clara von Mettelheim was married to Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Fischer. Fischer was the chief of the General Staff of the army Abteilung (an Abteilung was a formation larger than a corps but smaller than an army) under General Strantz during World War I. The Crown Prince had many Jewish friends—something that irritated Goebbels. See Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943, trans. and ed. Louis P. Lochner (New York: Doubleday, 1948). 171

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he wore his uniform with his decorations. He did so not to provoke anyone but because he was about to return to his unit, never imagining how this would shock the people working in that office. He returned to the front deeply upset and worried about his mother. Hearing this story and others, Hitler pronounced such events intolerable. Either all “half-Jews” must immediately leave the Wehrmacht, Hitler stated, or the government must protect their Jewish parents. Hitler did not want to protect full-Jews so he ordered the “half-Jews” discharged. The discharge order was not issued until 8 April 1940. Since the next day, Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway, all “half-Jews” in these units remained. Most “half-Jews” in units preparing for the French campaign that Hitler launched in May 1940 also remained untouched due to bureaucratic mishaps, or the secrecy surrounding the plans for the attack on France and the fact that many were not known to be “half-Jews.” After Hitler successfully defeated France in six weeks, many “half-Jews” were located and discharged. According to one source, around 70,000 were probably discharged at that time. According to this study, 50 per cent of all the “half-Jews” documented were still serving in Spring 1941. In other words, the discharge order of April 1940 had not affected many of them. However, Hitler allowed those who had proven themselves in battle to apply for clemency and those “half-Jews” remained with their units until he decided on their application. This was the policy affecting “half-Jews” in the Wehrmacht during the Third Reich. Interestingly, there were other minorities like Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals who had trouble with the Wehrmacht as well. In this study, it was documented that homosexual Mischlinge suffered as both Jewish and “sexual degenerates,” two groups the Nazis persecuted. Most Mischling homosexuals documented successfully hid their sexual orientation, but not their ancestry. For example, the army almost discharged Fritz Bayerlein, the later famous general and Rommel’s Chief of Staff in Africa, in 1934 when the Arierparagraph came out. However, because of his abilities, Hitler probably awarded him an exemption. Although he could not hide his quarter-Jewish status, he surprisingly could hide his bisexuality. Although police files existed about his homosexual activities prior to 1933 and even though some of his subordinates knew about his behavior, Bayerlein prevented that information about his life from reaching the authorities. He became one of the most successful German generals earning the oak leaves with swords to his Knight’s Cross and commanding the Panzer Lehr Division. Since the Third Reich prohibited homosexuality, when the Nazis found a Mischling guilty of this crime, they judged him harshly. For example, half-Jew   Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, op. cit., 116-119, 209.   United States National Archives, Box 329, AE 501661, Fritz Bayerlein, 1-155. 172

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Herbert Lefèvre had received Hitler’s Genehmigung (special permission) and served in the navy. He was also a member of the Party and SA. In 1944, a court found him guilty of homosexuality and sentenced him to death. He had misused his position as a cook by giving extra food to fellow sailors in return for sexual favours. Naval judge August Berges ruled that as a half-Jew, Lefèvre should have taken advantage of the chance to prove himself a worthy member of the Wehrmacht. Instead of seizing this opportunity, he had revealed his true “criminal instincts of his Jewish heritage.” His Party membership and Genehmigung did not excuse his dastardly behaviour as a sailor. The court reasoned Lefèvre should have been more conscious of his obligations because of his privileged status. The court showed no mercy. The Nazis hanged him on 6 July 1944. It took him seven minutes to die. Knowing these cases, one sees that if a Mischling was also gay, he had more cause for worry about his status and how the Nazis would treat him due to the racial laws and the discriminatory antihomosexual legislation known as Paragraph §175. It was a deadly combination as one sees with poor Lefèvre. Hitler also made it mandatory for “quarter-Jews” to serve with the conscription laws of 1935, but like “half-Jews,” they could not become NCOs or officers unless Hitler granted them special permission. This policy did not change throughout the entire war. How many Mischlinge served in the Wehrmacht? According to assimilation and mixed-marriage records, birth-rates in Germany and Austria, military records and other government documents, and with the help of a few statisticians and mathematicians, my research conservatively estimates that at least 60,000 “half-Jews” and 90,000 “quarter-Jews” served in the Wehrmacht. Since many historians have not studied the Mischlinge in depth before, many have failed to uncover the large number present in Germany during the Third Reich. However, 150,000 Mischling soldiers represent only a small percentage of the Wehrmacht’s personnel. By 1945, over 17 million men had passed through the ranks of the German Armed Forces. So, 150,000 represents less than 1 per cent of Germany’s total manpower. The large numbers of Mischlinge serving in the Wehrmacht are both startling and important for what they tell us about how Jewish identity was viewed, constructed and contested by German citizens, Nazi leaders, military commanders and the Jewish community within German borders, and for what they tell us about how these perceptions saved some while condemning others to the death camps. Even more startling, this study demonstrates that Hitler played a direct role in permitting Mischlinge to serve in the Wehrmacht. This essay has already mentioned exemptions and special permissions that Hitler granted Mischlinge. Generals, admirals, navy ship captains, fighter pilots and thousands   Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, op. cit., 26.   Ibid., 51-65. 173

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of ordinary soldiers served in the Wehrmacht, and they did so with Hitler’s personal approval. There were three types of exemptions from the racial laws which allowed a “half-Jew” to stay in the Wehrmacht. One form allowed him simply to remain in the armed forces. The next allowed him to remain and be promoted. These forms were generally called Genehmigungen (special permissions). Hitler had in all these forms a clause included that he would decide after the war whether the Mischling was worthy to be declared “Aryan.” The third allowed him to describe himself on official documents as deutschblütig (of German blood). The Deutschblütigkeitserklärung gave the recipient all the rights of an “Aryan” except the right to join the Party or own farmland. Some “quarter-Jews” tried for the second and third types just as aggressively as the “half-Jews.” This third form allowed men like General der Flieger Helmut Wilberg who developed the operational concept of Blitzkrieg and Field-Marshal Erhard Milch who was second in command of the Luftwaffe to remain in their positions. How many received such exemptions? It is difficult to document the exact number due to the chaotic filing system. The different departments that handled these cases did not produce any central data base. According to Hitler’s Secretary of State Lammers, Hitler granted thousands. This study concurs with this assessment, especially since Hitler had decreed that some “half-Jews” who died in battle were to be posthumously declared “Aryan.” He claimed that he did not want to be ungrateful to those “half-Jews” who had “shed blood” for the Third Reich.10 Another question that is often asked about the findings of this research is “did these men know about the Holocaust?” Most soldiers in war, according to historian Stephen Fritz, have enough trauma with “physical hardships, the psychological burden, and the often crushing anxieties of death and killing that constitute the everyday life of combat without worrying about their families’ and their own persecution at the hands of their countrymen.”11 Jewish and Mischling soldiers not only served in armed forces controlled by a government hostile to them as “racially” inferior beings, but many also witnessed the disappearance and occasionally the death of their relatives. During this research, the question whether or not these men knew about the Holocaust (i.e. the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis) was carefully considered. It was expected at the beginning of this research to find that the majority of these men did know. Shockingly, the opposite was true. Many did indeed know about some atrocities, deportations and some executions, but that many of their relatives, once deported, met their fate immediately in a gas chamber and then were 10  Ibid., 172-235. 11  Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 3. 174

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burned in a crematorium was beyond their powers of imaginations. The fact that most of these men would ultimately follow their relatives also remained unknown or unacknowledged by most.12 The most important evidence to support their ignorance was the “half-Jews” experience with Organization Todt (OT) forced labor camps. By late summer 1941, thousands of “half-Jews” were discharged and had been home working or studying. In 1944, Hitler decided that this pool of manpower should be sent to forced labor camps. Unbeknownst to the “half-Jews,” this was the last step before their final destruction. If “half-Jews” knew about the Holocaust, why did they report to their OT deportation stations? The answers to this question are complex. Since most reported to their OT deportation stations when ordered, this indicates that most did not know about the Holocaust. If everyone knew about the Holocaust, one might assume that they would have tried to hide, escape or possibly commit suicide, rather than report at the OT gathering point. It is true that few foolproof hideouts existed in Nazi Germany. Also, the Swiss border was heavily patrolled on both sides and Sweden was difficult to reach, being separated from Germany by the Baltic Sea. Nonetheless, although the odds were stacked against those who attempted to hide or escape, one would think that had “half-Jews” known what eventually awaited them, they would have tried their luck no matter what the cost. Most had the time to make a quick getaway. Most received their deportation notices from either the Gestapo or local government employment offices, which gave them several days, if not weeks, to report. Usually most reported as ordered because they did not fear for their lives. One half-Jew claimed he knew about Nazi atrocities, but still reported to his OT deportation station. He did not know where he was going or why “half-Jews” were being “really” drafted. He heard about Auschwitz only after the war and did not fear for his life at the time. He does not know why he was not scared, “but that’s the truth of the matter—I simply did not think it was dangerous.”13 When another half-Jew was deported to an OT camp, he recalled another train parked near his own in which he heard people crying and groaning, “a true sound from Hell.”14 However, he still did not think his own life was in danger. One would think that if they had known their deported relatives had probably been murdered, their survival instinct would have taken over and most of them would have tried to flee Germany or gone underground. Nonetheless, the majority were unaware of what lay beyond the OT camps. One half-Jew said that “very few knew or even suspected [that their Jewish relatives had been

12  Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, op. cit., 247-66. 13  Ibid., 262. 14  Dieter Bergmann, Between Two Benches (California: 1995), 257. 175

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murdered] at that time.” Thus, the majority reported when called to OT. They did not know that this was the beginning of the end for them. Renowned historian Ian Kershaw eloquently explains the difficulty of knowing about the Holocaust. During the war years interest in the “Jewish Question” declined still further. The deportation passed off apparently little heeded by the population. Most people seem to have asked little and cared less about the fate of the Jews. The war, its worries and deprivations, dominated opinion. The Jews were out of sight and out of mind. Knowledge of shootings and atrocities in occupied territories was widespread, and rumors about extermination circulated. Details in particular about the systematic gassing program in the camps, appear, however, to have been largely unknown.15

This research offers several historical insights besides showing that it was difficult to know about the Holocaust. It shows that the Third Reich cannot be understood in extremes of black and white. Not everyone who wore a uniform with a swastika was a Nazi as we use that word today. Not everyone who had Jewish ancestry was a victim of the death camps. This research shows that there were hundreds of thousands of people persecuted by the Nazis not because they themselves called themselves Jewish, but because the Nazis called them Jewish and treated them accordingly. With this in mind, it is interesting to note that the “half-Jews” in the Eastern territories were labeled as full-Jews by the Nazis although most of these people who were sent to the death camps would not have called themselves Jews; however, the Nazis killed them because the Nazis called them Jews. Not every German officer was a pure “Aryan,” and not every “Aryan” officer was a rabid anti-Semite. The Mischling experience clearly demonstrates the complexity of life in the Third Reich. Nazi policy toward these men was a maze of confusion and contradictions which reflected the regime’s uncertainty about how to deal with Germans of partial Jewish descent. Mischling policy was difficult to enforce for many reasons. One reason was that the Nazi ideology of “race” came into conflict with the goal of maintaining power. If Hitler had treated the Mischlinge too harshly in the 1930s and early 1940s, he might have lost support from thousands of “Aryans” in key positions in the economy, armed forces and government who had Mischling relatives. Another reason for the difficulty of enforcing Mischling policy was that since they did not exist as a category of people before 1935, bureaucrats had to rely on church and 15  Ian Kershaw, “Popular Opinion in the Third Reich,” in Jeremy Noakes, ed., Government, Party, and People in Nazi Germany (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1980), 71. 176

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city or county registry records, denunciations and honest confessions to identify Mischlinge. In the Wehrmacht, enforcement, particularly of discharge orders, was often hindered by officers who valued trained soldiers more than the racial laws. The fact that Hitler reserved the right to grant exemptions from these laws reinforces the perception that even he recognized how impractical these laws and how contradictory his goals were. However, as historian Henry Turner wrote, Hitler was driven by “the unshakeable conviction that reality would eventually conform to his will.”16 Hitler had complete faith in his abilities to change reality to conform to his irrational philosophy. Diplomatic and military triumphs from 1933 to 1940 reinforced his belief in his own infallibility as a leader, prophet and racial hygienist. Hitler perverted Germany’s legal system, and forced it to implement his racial ideas as laws. In light of how aggressively Hitler pursued the extermination of the Jews, it is surprising how much time he spent reviewing applications for exemptions from the racial laws submitted by Mischlinge. One can understand his careful analysis of the pros and cons of removing a Mischling general from his post, but many to whom Hitler granted these coveted exemptions were common soldiers with the ranks of private or NCO. Hitler’s exemptions and the actions of thousands of “Aryan” officers, including men close to Hitler, in support of Mischlinge, contradicted the Nazis’ Weltanschauung. What is particularly difficult to believe is that the arch anti-Semite Hitler himself granted even one exemption from the racial laws. But he personally issued many. As Kershaw wrote, “nothing was as it seemed in the Third Reich.”17 Some of his actions suggest that Hitler believed Jewish “blood,” even in minute amounts, could ruin a person. Other actions suggest that Hitler believed Mendel’s theory of genetics by which a Mischling could be 100% “Aryan” if he inherited all his “blood” from the “Aryan” parent. But Hitler consistently wavered on “facts” about “race.” Many of his decisions with Mischlinge do not reflect the pure categories of “race” so central to Nazi rhetoric and philosophy. Mischling policy also demonstrated the triumph of ideology over reason. Hitler should have focused his efforts on winning the war first and then he could have implemented whatever racial policy he wanted on the territories he dominated. The Wehrmacht discharged tens of thousands of “half-Jews” on Hitler’s orders throughout his regime. If winning the war had been his top priority, Hitler could have easily recalled all these soldiers to active duty on the Russian front. But even in the winter of 1942, when Germany needed every able-bodied man to fight, Hitler still ignored the thousands of Mischlinge previously discharged 16  Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 36. 17  Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 406, 709. 177

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from the Wehrmacht. Instead, Hitler focused upon whether a few hundred Mischlinge deserved exemptions. Hitler was even giving exemptions in 1944 as his regime crumbled before his eyes. If the war was more important than the destruction of the Jews, then Hitler could have allowed thousands of Mischlinge to serve in the Wehrmacht. The vast majority would have fought bravely for their homeland, and even the worst soldier would have been useful as cannon fodder. Hitler apparently valued a pure “Aryan” society more than victory. Hitler took this exemption process seriously, and believed he had the power to discern a person’s true racial makeup. For Hitler, carrying out racial policy was simply more important than winning the war. Hitler once said, “The Jewish question takes priority over all other matters.”18 After the attempt on his life in July 1944, Hitler revoked many of the exemptions he had granted earlier—think of all those wasted man-hours dealing with Mischling applications. He needed to blame someone for this attack, and Mischlinge presented an easy target. To order the discharge of so many highranking officers late in 1944, even generals who had received the Ritterkreuz, simply because they were partially Jewish did not make strategic sense. But, as the war worsened, Hitler’s persecution not only of Jews, but also of Mischlinge, dramatically escalated. Mischlinge often found themselves the losers in a game where the rules changed at the whim of their opponent. Many of these men, who had served loyally and had been awarded some of Germany’s highest honors, would eventually have been subjected to the same fate as the Jews. Had the war continued, or had Germany won, most “half-Jews” would have been exterminated. “Quarter-Jews” would have suffered further discrimination, and probably selective extermination. That was the wonderful thanks of the Fatherland for Mischling veterans. This research also raises several problems about identity and often departs from history and enters realms of forcing people to ask “how does one come to define oneself?” The following story illustrates some of the identity issues that this study often confronted. After interviewing Heinrich Hamberger in Munich, a “half-Jew,” his girlfriend recommended that he take me with him that evening. He tried to hush her, but she insisted saying, “the young American would find it interesting.”19 He explained that his army buddies met in a pub once a month. After discussing the matter, he agreed to take me there, but only on two conditions: first, under no circumstance would I tell anyone about his Jewish descent, and second, I would tell them I studied something else besides Mischlinge who fought in the Wehrmacht. I agreed. A few hours later, we entered the pub. Loud voices greeted us, and the smell of smoke smarted our nostrils. I felt odd sitting among 18  George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1998), 197. 19  Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, op. cit., 49. 178

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these old men singing, drinking and telling war stories. I watched the years melt away as they relived the “good old days.” After a while, Hamberger left me alone and I started to talk with his former company commander. He wanted to impress upon me how honorable the Wehrmacht had been. I just listened. I mentioned that during my studies I had come across an anomaly that Jews and men of Jewish descent had fought in the Wehrmacht. “Have you ever heard about this?” I asked. The commander looked around, spotted Hamberger on the other side of the room, and nodded his old, scarred head. He lowered his raspy voice to a conspiratorial tone: “Don’t tell Hamberger, but we know he’s a Jew.”20 I acted surprised and promised not to tell. This event illustrates the universal fear present among many Mischlinge who feel insecure about their “Jewishness” and cower at being labeled “Jewish.” Moreover, Hamberger’s comrades did not appear to have cared that he was Jewish. To them, he was simply a member of the unit; he was a comrade. This story highlights the irony inherent in the fact that most Mischlinge’s fellow soldiers viewed them as brothers-in-arms which created strong bonds of friendship. Many non-Jewish Wehrmacht soldiers did not view “Aryan” and Mischling unit members differently. This fact, with time, greatly influenced the way Mischlinge came to view themselves and their time in the armed forces. Whether they felt their comrades knew about their “problem” or not, they started to feel like they were among close friends who were loyal to one another regardless of circumstances. This bond is quite common among men-of-arms, but for the Mischlinge, who had experienced years of persecution, this bond was particularly cherished. This research should force us to ask several questions about our own identity. Many psychologists would claim that a very common reason why so many people have problems is that they do not know who they are. Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. This history shows that identity is crucial in knowing why we behave the way we do and why we treat people in the manner we do. Am I rich or am I poor? Am I Black or am I White? Am I a Jew or am I a Christian? Am I an American or am I a German? When answering any of these questions, what influences how we arrive at the answers? How does the government we are born under affect how we view ourselves? Do our parents define us or can we define ourselves? Am I able to escape the identity the religion I am born into has given me? If yes, why should I remain in one religion over another? Am I worthy to live or am I unworthy of life? Who decides the answer to this question? As one can see, it is not easy to explain why we are the way we are. The quest for identity should be something we struggle with consciously until we enter the grave. For the way we come to view ourselves directly reflects the way we view and understand history, and more importantly, how we treat others. Therein lies the wisdom. 20  Ibid., 50. 179

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Chapter 10

“A Roller-coaster of a Life with Everything in it”: Pamela Frankau (1908–67) Caroline Gonda

In a radio broadcast from the mid-1950s, the successful novelist Pamela Frankau sketched the usual “roller-coaster” course of her life for the last ten months: “Overwork, overplay, large sums of money one minute, none at all the next; shocks and set-backs, fun and fear, with me praising God, but otherwise making little sense.” Frankau’s life had long been one characterized by divisions and extremes: prolific to the point of nervous collapse in her teens and through her twenties, she became unable to write for most of her thirties after the death of her married lover, the poet Humbert Wolfe; a third-generation AngloJewish novelist proudly conscious of her heritage, she converted to Catholicism in 1942; living a life split between Britain and America for many years, and suffering from what she called “Transatlantic schizophrenia,” she became   The title phrase comes from Diana Raymond, Frankau’s cousin and biographer, whom I interviewed in February 2008. The sad news of Diana Raymond’s death in February 2009 reached me as I was about to embark on the proofs of this essay. I am more grateful than I can say for her kindness and assistance, including her generosity in lending me the typescript of her unpublished biography of Frankau. I am also extremely grateful to Timothy d’Arch Smith, Frankau’s nephew and literary executor, for making an unpublished work by Frankau available to me. I should like to express here my gratitude for helpful comments: to the audience at the international conference, Lesbian Lives XII: Thinking about the Closet in Lesbian Lives, Studies and Activism, University College Dublin, 11-13 February 2005, where some material from this essay was presented as a paper; and to Clare Walker, who corresponded with me subsequently about that early draft. As always, my work would have been impossible without Alison Hennegan; this piece is for her, for my godmother Ethel Shaw, and in memory of my grandmother, Magda Gonda.   BBC Woman’s Hour broadcast 17 March 1955, quoted in Diana Raymond, Pamela Frankau: A Life (1908-1967), unpublished typescript, 236.   Pamela Frankau, Pen to Paper: A Novelist’s Notebook (London: Heinemann, 1961), 135.

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bilingual as a writer in British and American English; her sexual and affectional life included her nine-year relationship with Humbert Wolfe, a disastrous shortlived marriage to an American academic, which foundered after the death of their only child, and significant, though often troubled, relationships with other women. The integration of different aspects of Frankau’s life – Jewish, Christian, Queer – into her work was a lengthy and complex process, in which both the changing world around her and her most important close relationships played an essential part. Americans have more of a racial-and-religious-umbrage problem than we do. Particularly on the radio, where the word “Jew” has to be left out of The Merchant of Venice, which makes the play sound very odd from time to time. If you have cause to mention a Jew on the air, you must be careful to call him a “gentleman of the Jewish faith.” I did on one occasion point out that it would be correct to describe me as a half-Jewish lady of the Catholic Faith, but the observation was thought to be in bad taste.

As Todd Endelman’s article on the Frankaus of London reveals, each of the three generations of Anglo-Jewish novelists culminating in Pamela Frankau had its own problematic relation to Jewishness. Pamela’s grandmother, Julia Frankau, née Davis (1859-1916), was born in Dublin, to a Reform Jewish family, though she and her sister Eliza were educated partly at an Orthodox school in London; their brother James (who became a successful musical comedy librettist under the name “Owen Hall”) was a friend of Oscar and Willie Wilde, who played tennis with the Davis sisters. After her marriage in 1883 to Arthur Frankau, the son of a prominent assimilated Jewish family of cigar-merchants, Julia became a novelist, writing under the name “Frank Danby”; her first novel was the controversial Dr Phillips. A Maida Vale Idyll (1887, published by Vizetelly), an attack on materialistic, nouveau riche London Jewish life, in which the Jewish doctor murders his wife with an overdose of morphine in order to be with his Gentile mistress and their child. A second novel, Pigs in Clover (1903), contrasted “good” and “bad” Jews – a technique which would be adopted by Julia’s novelist son, Gilbert. Although Arthur Frankau had briefly joined a Reform Jewish congregation to please his future mother-in-law, he left it after a row over his refusal to have   Ibid., 159.   Todd M. Endelman, “The Frankaus of London: A Study in Radical Assimilation,” Jewish History 8.1-2(1994): 117-54.   See Endelman, also Elizabeth Eccleshare, “Frankau (née Davis), Julia [pseud. Frank Danby] (1859-1916), novelist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed online 24 September 2004: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55572. 182

“A roller-coaster of a life with everything in it”

his and Julia’s eldest son, Gilbert (1884-1952), circumcised; the Frankaus’ five children were brought up Anglican and Gilbert was sent to Eton and not told of his Jewishness till he was sixteen. Gilbert went into the family business but rapidly found fame and popular success as a writer; his brother Ronald became a popular entertainer and singer of risqué songs, and their sister (Aline) Joan, later Bennett, became a don at Girton College, Cambridge, writing one of the first critical studies of Virginia Woolf. Gilbert’s marriage to Dorothea Drummond-Black, a witty and extravagant Gentile ten years his senior, produced two daughters, Ursula and Pamela. The dominance of Julia Frankau created problems in the marriage, and Gilbert showed little enthusiasm for home life and fatherhood, especially of daughters; the marriage ended in divorce when Gilbert left his wife for an actress, Aimée de Burgh. Pamela and her sister were brought up Anglican, and had little to do with their father until their late teens. The relationship between Gilbert and Pamela in later life was often stormy, but their shared profession brought them closer together. Endelman contrasts what he sees as Gilbert’s vexed and obsessive relation to his own Jewishness, which issues in his frequently stereotypical representations of Jews in his novels, with Pamela’s apparently more relaxed, if still essentialist and sometimes sentimental attitude to the subject. Endelman’s examples of Pamela Frankau’s views, however, are taken predominantly from The Devil We Know (1939), a novel about anti-Semitism, or from later works. Her earliest published works of fiction, which Endelman doesn’t discuss, show an altogether more uneasy relation to Jews and Jewishness. In Letters from a Modern Daughter to her Mother, written for a magazine serial in 1928 but mostly not published until 1931, the heroine’s father is Jewish and her parents are divorced; meeting a noisy, bitchy and exotic group of Jews, including some distant relations of her father, is clearly not pleasant: “The odd part is that the whole lot live in Grosvenor Street, or Berkeley Square, or Park Lane, which haunts were once the sole prerogative of the lost English nobility. It is all very sad. In fact, the Old Order changeth, giving place to Jew, and one must just face it.” The group’s materialism and obsessive card-playing suggest echoes of “Frank Danby”’s works, and Pat’s discomfort with what she calls “the ghetto” makes uncomfortable reading:10 “They were even glad to see me– as though we were members of a secret society. I suppose it’s a relic of the days when they had to hunt in couples or tribes for fear of annihilation. And,   Frankau, Pen to Paper, op. cit., 179-224.   Endelman, op. cit., 143.   Pamela Frankau, Letters from a Modern Daughter to her Mother (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1931), 176. 10  Ibid., 177. 183

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darling, what a time Moses must have had with them all in the wilderness!!!”11 Other unflattering portraits from Frankau’s early novels include the careless half-Jewish adulterer who seduces and deserts Eve in The Fig Tree (1928), and the Jewish writer Asher Michael’s vision of himself screaming at his Gentile mistress, Jane, in She and I : “He shouted at her, ‘Liar!’ and then saw himself in the looking-glass, a Jew in a bright dressing-gown, screaming at a woman, his head thrust forward and his hands moving. Scene in an Oriental market. He drew breath with a sob. He felt sick.”12 Anger and loss of control also seem to characterize Jewishness in Born at Sea, where the blackmailing Peter Raphael’s dark Jewish beauty makes him “conventionally faunish, the epitome of all the young seducers in girls’ sad modern novels”; when the woman he desires, Clare, rejects him, he loses “the lounging grace of the covetable young man. He was in a black, sulky rage that twisted his eyebrows and his mouth; he shouted at her with the fury of the jeering Jew boy.”13 When Clare first meets him, she is initially struck with his beauty, but notes with disfavour that “his hands took too active a part in the conversation.”14 Frankau’s relation to Jewishness seems to change in the 1930s, in part as a result of her involvement with Humbert Wolfe, who became the central figure in her intellectual as well as emotional life: “I was content to take my standards from the man I loved … I sat at his feet,” Frankau commented later.15 In his biography of Humbert Wolfe, Philip Bagguley notes Wolfe’s increasing selfidentification with persecuted Jews in the 1930s, and quotes from Wolfe’s 1933 work of autobiography Now a Stranger, which depicts his sense of difference and persecution as a Jewish child in Bradford. Bagguley suggests that Wolfe’s preoccupation with his own Jewishness was concentrated in the last ten years of his life and that he rewrote his childhood in the light of this;16 even if this was the case, however, his relationship with Frankau took place during this period, and his influence on her attitude to Jews and Jewishness seems hard to dispute. As she writes of her heroine, Una, in No News, clearly a version of herself, “She fitted her mouth to his phrases; her mind to his opinions.”17 In Tassell-Gentle, the first of Frankau’s novels to feature a portrait of Wolfe, the hero, Jacob Rolf (later “Penn Jacob”) is half-Jewish, but not particularly conscious of his Jewishness; indeed he embarrasses himself at a Jewish meeting, 11  Ibid., 176. 12  Pamela Frankau, She and I (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1930), 113. 13  Pamela Frankau, Born at Sea (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1930), 151, 159. 14  Ibid., 167. 15  Frankau, Pen to Paper, op. cit., 73. 16  Philip Bagguley, Harlequin in Whitehall: A Life of Humbert Wolfe, Poet and Civil Servant 1885-1940 (London: Nyala, 1997), 21. 17  Pamela Frankau, No News (London: Heinemann, 1938), 130. 184

“A roller-coaster of a life with everything in it”

realizing that he has “quoted the New Testament to a Jewish audience” and worse still, when offered something to eat, “I’d love a ham sandwich,” Penn said into a silence. “That wasn’t very good, was it?” he whispered to Ann. She seemed startled out of contemplation and he smiled at her. They were herded in the crowd. “Asking for ham sandwiches in a synagogue,” he explained and giggled, disconcerting his immediate neighbours.18

Unlike Penn, the Gentile Ann becomes acutely conscious of the likeness between him and his Jewish audience: “For the first time Ann realised his race, that he talked to his own people and she was not of them.”19 For the self-consciously Jewish Oliver Lazarus, defensive self-mockery has clearly become a habit: “‘Richard – I ask you– should I attempt business with a seagreen incorruptible like yourself ?’ Oliver made with his hands and eyebrows a Jewish gesture that raised a laugh at parties.”20 Important as the relationship with Humbert Wolfe was to Frankau’s development as a novelist, it earned the jealous wrath of Frankau’s friend and erstwhile mentor, Rebecca West. Introduced to each other by Frankau’s great-aunt, Eliza Aria, West and Frankau had become close, despite their difference in age; indeed, Frankau later said “Of course, I must have been in love with Rebecca then.”21 Diana Raymond says “I don’t think Rebecca was ‘in love’ with Pamela, but she very much felt … she’d got this younger woman of brilliance like her own, of whom she was … possessive.”22 Rebecca West’s novella, “The Addict,” a clearly identifiable attack on Humbert Wolfe, appeared in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine in February 1935: the central character, Claude Cambray, is a self-centred poet and bank clerk addicted to emotional affairs with numerous women, one of whom is a portrait of Frankau. The deeply unsympathetic Cambray is represented as lisping and as giving an impression of always being unclean (traits associated with Jews by anti-Semitic writers). Given the anti-Semitic coloring of “The Addict,” it is no coincidence that Frankau’s vengefully satirical portrait of West appears in The Devil We Know. Jennifer Nash, a wealthy socialist who fails to live up to her early radicalism, is not only politically naïve to an embarrassing degree, but is also seen as unsympathetic to the hero’s Jewishness. Jennifer thinks of him as

18  19  20  21  22 

Pamela Frankau, Tassell-Gentle (London: The Bodley Head, 1934), 255. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 434. Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 22. Diana Raymond, Interview, 8 February 2008. 185

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“invest[ing] even the making of champagne cocktails with your own imaginary sorrows. Wearing your gabardine under the motley.”23 Philip Meyer is obsessed with “the race,” as he calls it, repeatedly questioning how much Jewish blood people have, and always braced for slurs, slights and attacks, but the novel doesn’t let readers assume that his sorrows are “imaginary.” Anti-Semitism is obviously rife in the England of the 1930s and Philip is the object of numerous small and not so small persecutions. Ronald Arthur, the Gentile lover of Philip’s part-Jewish cousin, Sally Fisher, is vilely abusive to Philip when he discovers that Philip has borrowed money from their rich Jewish cousin Michael in order to pay for Sally to have an abortion in comparative safety. (The cheap and unsafe alternative is to go to an unpleasant Jewish abortionist passing himself off as a Gentile.) Ronald later apologizes for behaving “like a cad and a Jew-baiter … I said some filthy things about your race”; Philip tells him “My race doesn’t fight; it has got what it wants by a policy of acceptance tempered with denial for two thousand years.”24 Philip’s obsession is an uncomfortable one, for himself and others, but it takes a much darker turn when he is violently assaulted by the viciously anti-Semitic John Harrison, the other lover of Philip’s mistress, Victoria Lloyd. Harrison complains that the Café Royal is “turning into a ghetto” and after an exchange of insults cracks Philip over the head with a champagne bottle.25 Philip subsequently goes through a period of hating his own race and despising them as victims; it’s suggested that his bitter tirades against Jews are part of the change of personality brought on by his head injury. “I know that to be born a Jew is to be damned,” he writes: We suffer; we die. But when I see our hands raised to heaven for pity, I see the palms turn outward and sink until the plea is only the deprecating shrug of the Jew, caricatured along the ages. From Shylock to the music-hall comedian, you know that gesture. It must be the last thing that you will remember of us. We go down to our damnation with a sneer.26

Philip tells the unsympathetic Jennifer that he is writing a book: “A study of Anti-Semitism. But I should think that by the time it is finished there will be no more need of it; and nobody to publish it either.”27 Lawrence, Jennifer’s genuinely Socialist son, is horrified at Philip’s self-loathing:

23  24  25  26  27 

Pamela Frankau, The Devil We Know (London: Heinemann, 1939), 405. Ibid., 279, 280. Ibid., 349. Ibid., 353, 354. Ibid., 375. 186

“A roller-coaster of a life with everything in it”

“It is all so damnably crazy. It’s a myth; a mania. Everybody knows that the Hitler racial theories are lunatic rubbish. Philip must know that. He can’t hate his own people.” “He appears to.” “If he does – if any of them do, that’s the wickedest result of the persecution. Worse than the murders.”28

Watching Jennifer’s anguish as Lawrence departs to fight in the Spanish Civil War begins to restore Philip to sanity. By the end of the novel, in 1937, Philip has achieved self-acceptance, saying to Sally “I love [my race] and I am proud of it. And I can take away part of my sin against it.”29 Putting himself knowingly into danger, as a German-born Jew who has written against Nazism, he is travelling to Nazi Germany to rescue his crippled brother, Joseph, and seems to be finally at peace. The novel did not find favor with Gilbert Frankau, whose own right-wing politics were notorious, as witness his 1933 article “As A Jew I Am Not Against Hitler” and his short-lived imperialist journal Britannia. He and Pamela quarrelled both about The Devil We Know and about her involvement with Tythrop House (a charity for Jewish refugees), at a party which she was giving for the latter: “he was bored by my rushing to identify myself with the Jewish race, particularly, he said, when he had taken the trouble to provide me with a Christian mother … [He said that] I had created one of the least sympathetic Jewish heroes in fiction.”30 Gilbert’s views on Hitler had changed as more information about Nazi Germany began to reach England, but he clearly remained uncomfortable with the idea of identifying himself as a Jew, whereas Pamela felt standing up to be counted was essential: He reported an admiral saying to him in Malta, “You’ll agree with me, Frankau, about these damn’ Jews.” “What did you say?” “Laughed my head off.” “Did you say you were a Jew?” “Certainly not: none of the b––––’s business.” Alas, I said, I should always weigh in. “Why?” “Because I think it’s cowardly not to.” “You mean,” said Gilbert, “it frightens you to weigh in?” It made, I said, for a heart-thump now and again.31

Jewishness is not central to Frankau’s novels after The Devil We Know, but is part of the scenery: in The Willow Cabin (1949), the heroine’s pompous stepfather is suspicious of the multi-talented theatrical genius in whose play she is starring, 28  29  30  31 

Ibid., 385. Ibid., 480. Frankau, Pen to Paper, op. cit., 202. Ibid., 203. 187

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Jay Brookfield, because the Brookfields are Jewish; the ultra-normative, bigoted and closed-minded Mr. Bradley in A Wreath for the Enemy is rebuked for his open anti-Semitism by his adolescent son, Don, who remarks, “The racialist would do well to remind himself once a day that Our Lord was a Jew”;32 the sculptor Anthony Carey in The Winged Horse, a novel crucially concerned with truth and lies, recalls a half-Jewish ex-officer weighing in angrily against anti-Semitic gibes at a regimental dinner and says that the man “would have felt a coward” if he hadn’t done so;33 casual anti-Semitism also appears in The Bridge, where a pub landlord in the early days of the Second World War refers dismissively to the Jewish family of evacuees billeted on him as “my Four-by-Twos.”34 Leo Clyde, the 1920s Jewish comedian in Sing for Your Supper (1963), the first volume of Frankau’s trilogy, shares Oliver Lazarus’s defensive self-mockery, while Dick Abrahams, in the trilogy’s later volumes, Slaves of the Lamp (1965) and Over the Mountains (1967), is a sympathetic and defiantly political Jew, displaying antiSemitic quotations from the British press on the wall of his office, weathering his boss’s disapproval of his openly pro-Jewish politics, and dealing politely but firmly with anti-Semitic remarks. It is no accident that Abrahams becomes the place of refuge and love for one of the trilogy’s central characters, the widowed Sarah Weston. If The Devil We Know marks Pamela Frankau’s full acceptance, and ultimately celebration, of Jewishness, the same can’t be said for that novel’s relation to homosexuality. Leslie Gage, the only female dramatic critic in London, is an unappealingly presented lesbian stereotype; loud and mannish, sporting cropped hair and an eyeglass, she makes Philip’s life at work a misery with her arrogance and bullying. Lesbianism appears as a source of insults and smutty jokes between men: “How do you feel about Leslie Gage?” “Feel about her? I leave that to her own sex.”35 When the right-wing playwright Ralph Broughton says he’ll have to find someone to breed from, he adds “There is Gage, of course. But it’s most unlikely, even if she would, that she could.”36 When the actress Margaret Ford protests that Gage’s private life needn’t affect her judgment as a critic, Broughton says that it might, and complains of the intellectual corruption of male homosexuals: “I find the persons of my own sex who suffer from that disability extraordinarily unsound.”37 Later in the novel Gage appears somewhat less rebarbative, as when she reveals how she got the sack from the film studio where she and Philip had both worked; annoyed by being asked to write love 32  33  34  35  36  37 

Pamela Frankau, A Wreath for the Enemy (London: Heinemann, 1954), 109. Pamela Frankau, The Winged Horse (London: Virago, 1988), 381. [1953] Pamela Frankau, The Bridge (London: Heinemann, 1957), 70. Frankau, The Devil We Know, op. cit., 129. Ibid., 342. Ibid., 84. 188

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scenes between Paolo and Francesca for a ridiculous film scenario, Gage replaces them with Verlaine and Rimbaud. The studio unwittingly accepts this innovative gay male storyline at first because nobody knows who Verlaine and Rimbaud were, but when they find out Gage is fired.38 Homosexuality is still only acceptable if it’s a joke, it seems, even if in this case it’s the ignorant film executives who look silliest. Frankau’s early novels give rather mixed messages about sexuality, which perhaps is not surprising. Even while still living at home with her mother and sister in Windsor and writing her first novel, she was aware of a range of sexual possibilities: as Diana Raymond notes, the best-selling novelist, Berta Ruck, a friend of the family, talked openly about her own affairs with both men and women: “‘And you can imagine,’ Pamela once said to me ‘how well that went down at Windsor.’”39 Frankau’s early heroines are often described as boyish: Sydney Sherne, in Frankau’s first novel, Marriage of Harlequin, is seen by her husband as “A boyish, marvellous, unbelievable person,” “a kind of shadowy little boy, playing all by herself.”40 Janet, the heroine of Three, shares Sydney’s boyishness: “She had come hatless, as usual, wearing a grey flannel suit, doublebreasted like a man’s, with a green shirt and tie ... She might have been a tall, nonchalant boy, pushing up past them all, the cigarette still between her lips.”41 The boyishness of these heroines could be seen as partly a matter of fashion: in the late 1930s, Una Scarlett, in No News, seems to Paul Smith, the journalist hero, “a little out-of-date; ten years, perhaps, with the boy’s head and the overscarlet lips.”42 But there is obviously more to Frankau’s boyish heroines than just modish 1920s androgyny. Male homosexuality also figures in the early novels, either as an uncomfortable subject, a danger to be rejected, or a source of worldly amusement. In Letters from a Modern Daughter, Patricia Davies realizes that two of the party she is with in a nightclub are probably homosexual because they don’t laugh at a “foul” song “about a chorus-boy”: I suppose they are both like that, which is why they talk so queerly. I hadn’t thought about it until Jack Sévigny’s song … And then I couldn’t think of anything else. I asked Ronny afterwards, and he just laughed and said, Yes, I

38  39  40  241. 41  42 

Ibid., 393-4. Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 57. Pamela Frankau, Marriage of Harlequin (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1927), 86, Pamela Frankau, Three (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1929), 120-21. Frankau, No News, op. cit., 95. 189

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should think so, aren’t they funny, so I suppose that is the attitude to take– and of course it is all very good copy.43

In I Was The Man, male homosociality and male bonding are called into question: the narrator, August, muses “The talk about best friends whose Greek attachment is split by the marriage of one or the other is not all nonsense. I felt rather ill for about a fortnight after Leopold had announced his engagement.”44 Leopold finally rejects August, saying “You and I have been pretty sentimental, thanks to Cambridge and poetry and mooning about with our arms round each other’s necks, vowing eternal friendship. It’s silly. It’s over. We don’t mean a thing to one another any more.”45 August is hurt but doesn’t challenge this, and in the end neither does the novel. Tassell-Gentle presents a more violent rejection of male homosexuality in the figure of Raoul O’Sullivan, whose declaration of love disgusts Penn: “If ever you say anything like that again, I shall be reluctantly obliged to throw you down those cold stone stairs,” Penn tells him.46 Raoul becomes a drunk, is killed in a flying accident from which Penn escapes with the loss of his memory, but Raoul’s body is misidentified as Penn’s because he is wearing Penn’s distinctive black seal-ring, which he has stolen. In Frankau’s Riviera social comedy, Villa Anodyne (1936), the unattractive and foolish Oscar Thame has a somewhat equivocal relationship with his secretary-companion (and possible lover?) Timothy; Thame’s main function in the book is to be defeated and outwitted by the hero, Peter Scribe, a too-attractive civil servant and biographer with more than a dash of Humbert Wolfe about him. Villa Anodyne draws its setting from Frankau’s visits to the South of France with Rebecca West and her entourage, most memorably in 1929. The TwentyNine Summer, which haunts Frankau’s fiction, plunged her into what Diana Raymond calls “this conclave of brilliant women with its lesbian overtones”: Rebecca West and her beautiful secretary; G.B. Stern, known to her friends as “Peter,” and her beautiful secretary; Stern’s sister; Frankau herself; and – somewhat adrift in this company – West’s fifteen-year-old son, Anthony, who became devoted to Frankau.47 Anthony West later said he had been aware even then of Frankau’s uncertainty about her sexuality: “Pamela was trying to make up her mind whether she was a Lesbian or a normie … and was giving herself a rough time by having affairs with a series of young and youngish men who were bad news.”48 Diana Raymond suggests about the unsympathetic treatment 43  44  45  46  47  48 

Frankau, Letters from a Modern Daughter, op. cit., 73. Pamela Frankau, I Was the Man (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1932), 38. Ibid., 157. Frankau, Tassell-Gentle, op. cit., 167. Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 77. Ibid., 86-7. 190

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of homosexuality in Frankau’s early novels that “perhaps some of that was an effort to turn away from something, I don’t know.”49 The affair with Humbert Wolfe might have seemed to swallow up Frankau’s struggles to define her sexuality, but Wolfe’s sudden death in January 1940 unleashed those sexual uncertainties once more. Frankau bolted to America, distraught, and spent several months trying to blot out her grief through heavy drinking and casual sexual encounters; when she returned to England she shocked and repelled her old friend Pat Frere (Edgar Wallace’s daughter) by telling her about “a week-end in Atlantic City when she and another woman first became lovers.”50 Diana Raymond recalls that Frankau “said herself that the first part of her life was men and the second part was women,” but it is not entirely clear when one part ended and the other began.51 The decade following Wolfe’s death would contain a significant relationship with a fellow woman officer in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, Marjorie Vernon Whitefoord, a partnership which ended with Vernon’s death; Frankau’s disastrous marriage to Marshall Dill, Junior, who was himself homosexual; and the start of Frankau’s relationship with the American socialite, Ethel Harriman Russell. The most enduring bond formed in this decade, however, and the one which most influenced the rest of Frankau’s life and works, was her relationship with Catholicism. Like other prodigals I came home; in my thirties; to the truth. To the Catholic faith that I’ve loved and lived by, for nearly sixteen years. And as long as the present world detains me in the flesh, my faith will be my home. I fail it often; it has never failed me. And I know my small, strenuous, nerve-ridden life is lived, for all its failures, to the greater glory of God.52

Pamela Frankau was received into the Catholic Church on 16 May 1942 at St Columba’s Church, Edinburgh; Vernon Whitefoord, a cradle Catholic, was her sponsor. “It had been a long journey,” Frankau wrote: “I had loved the Church and feared it; I had mocked it and hankered after it; I had turned away from it in angry sorrow when death robbed me.”53 In her months of wild grief after Humbert’s death, she had “embraced physical self-indulgence and spiritual despair, as though they were my dearest friends. And they had let me down.”54 Reacting against this life without discipline or sense, she turned first to the 49  Raymond, interview. 50  Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 159. 51  Raymond, interview. 52  Pamela Frankau, personal papers, 1957/8, qtd. in Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 164-5. 53  Pamela Frankau, untitled, unpublished narrative, written circa 1944, 12. 54  Ibid., 13. 191

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Anglican church of her youth but found something lacking. Diana Raymond says “It suddenly came to her that … the Catholic church had what had been missing in the Anglican church – I don’t know exactly what that was but it was more emotional than rational.”55 Frankau embraced “the Church that held all I had ever wanted” exuberantly and with a sense of lightness;56 G.B. Stern, another Anglo-Jewish convert to Catholicism, recalls Frankau’s joyful exclamation, “Oh, it’s the best club in the world!”57 and their jointly invented game of Desert Island Saints, “in imitation of a weekly programme called Desert Island Discs which has gone on for years on the radio.”58 The Catholics, Frankau declared, “have all the fun as well as all the answers.”59 Shaken in the Wind (1948), Frankau’s first published novel after nine years of silence, “shouted her creed from the housetops,” as she was the first to admit:60 There was a Church not built with hands, that was not in Rome nor anywhere in the world, the church universal that soared against the sky. It was thunderous with God and it endured and against it the gates of hell should not prevail. It was the affirmation in the mind of man because God had made him and commanded him to say Yes.61 … [Catholics] believed in the impossible all round the clock and dared to know that it was true.62

Contemplating the majesty and mystery of the Church to which she does not belong, Cynthia Hendricks feels defeated. Unhappily married, an Englishwoman exiled in California, Cynthia is painfully aware of her exclusion from the faith which now unites her American Catholic husband and his long-time love: “Stuart and Kay belonged to that bright company… Their first allegiance was to this and she could not join them at the place in their minds where they met.”63 Knowing that Stuart still loves Kay and that divorce is impossible, Cynthia decides to kill herself; she writes to Stuart that despite her efforts to 55  56  57  58  59  60  61  62  63 

Raymond, interview. Frankau, untitled, op. cit., 12. G. B. Stern, The Way It Worked Out (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 106. G. B. Stern, All in Good Time (London: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 62. Raymond, introduction, The Winged Horse, op. cit., vii. Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 208. Pamela Frankau, Shaken in the Wind (London: Heinemann, 1948), 333-4. Ibid., 335. Ibid., 335. 192

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understand Catholicism she is unable to accept it: “it is too big for me.”64 Shaken in the Wind ends with Stuart’s return to Cynthia; Kay has departed for a life of good works in Manila so that she and Stuart won’t resume their affair; it is also clear that Cynthia is pregnant. The sense of impending disaster in the closing chapters is not realized, as Cynthia tears up her suicide note, even though she doesn’t yet know what has happened with Stuart and Kay: “There was no fight left in her. There was only freedom; she felt light now; the heaviness was gone; the flat mood was ebbing also, giving way to a stirring of curiosity. ‘What have I said Yes to? What will come?’”65 Cynthia’s “Yes” echoes the pervasive sense of Catholicism as affirmation; the novel’s last lines show her finding the acceptance she had thought was impossible: There was a phrase coming back into her mind; it was not a new phrase, though it came differently this morning. “Fiat: let it be done unto me. . .”66

Though none of Frankau’s subsequent works took quite such a tub-thumping approach to Catholicism, her faith continued to inform her writing over the next two decades. Characters’ different relationships to Catholicism are at the heart of Road Through the Woods (1960), which Diana Raymond describes as “a gentle, God-inspired book, haunted with magic;67 in A Wreath for the Enemy, Don Bradley’s ultimate rebellion against his stiflingly conformist parents takes the form of becoming a Catholic priest, the logical continuation of his youthful vow never again to “desert in time of trouble” anyone or anything.68 Even the philandering playwright, Geoffrey Bliss (an unflattering portrait of Humbert Wolfe), in Ask Me No More (1958), acquires a sense of his own mortality and a desire for transcendence, confronting the sixteenth-century French sculptor Ligier Richier’s figure of death in the church at Bar-Le-Duc: “To have nothing. To have even myself taken from me. To be utterly bereft, to be broken, stripped… and so to stand as he stands, the skeleton holding up his heart to God.”69 Frankau’s last completed work, the trilogy Clothes of a King’s Son (19637), was her attempt to write “a book about a saint.”70 The central character, Thomas Weston, is both very ordinary and thoroughly magical: first seen as a ten-year-old boy in the 1920s, he is a figure of dogged integrity, subject to periodic rages on behalf of ill-treated people and things (including inanimate 64  65  66  67  68  69  70 

Ibid., 337. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 352. Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 256. Frankau, A Wreath for the Enemy, op. cit., 69. Pamela Frankau, Ask Me No More (London: Heinemann, 1958), 56. Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 263. 193

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objects); he is psychic and has the power of healing, but in the later volumes he is increasingly haunted by uncertainty about whether “the gift” comes from God or the Devil. Shot and reported dead while fighting in the Second World War, Thomas is miraculously preserved, and comes to accept the gift for what it is. The supernatural framework of the trilogy includes the Catholic Church to which Thomas’s grandmother now belongs, despite her lingering affection for the Tarot cards; the world of spiritualism, mediums and faith-healers which she has left, and into which Thomas is unwillingly drawn; and Thomas’s dreamscape of “the two theatres,” with its echoes of his father’s comically dreadful seaside Pierrot show, “Moonrakers.” Pamela Frankau’s most imaginative and complex engagement with Catholicism in her fiction can be seen in The Bridge (1957). In a memo to her American publishers, Harper’s, she explained that “it tells the story of a soul on its purgatorial journey; the times and places appointed are the occasions of sin and spiritual failure.”71 The bridge between this world and the next becomes the site of this purgatorial journey for David Neilson, in life a writer: when Harper’s, who apparently had not understood the novel at all, asked for a more upbeat view of David’s religious beliefs, Frankau resisted, explaining that David is “a man of faith and not enough works; spiritually lazy; humanly weak; aware always of the presence of God and doing far too little about it. Not an unusual animal.”72 Neilson encounters his past selves, David from childhood to middle age, painfully reliving the moments for which he has never forgiven himself: moments of cowardice, unkindness, betrayal, dishonesty, carelessness, destruction, “unresolved then, awaiting his judgment now.”73 At the center of the novel is Neilson’s pitiless, unending trial of himself for the death of his seventeen-year-old daughter, killed in a car crash on an outing for which he’d given her permission when he shouldn’t have. Neilson finds his many selves trapped “in the court-room of his own head, where the wheels of argument turned and turned”: as prisoner at the bar, judge, jury and an audience of thousands produced by the mirrored walls, “cut and angled so that David Neilson saw only David Neilson, repeated to infinity.”74 This nightmare vision multiplies and magnifies the end of an earlier scene, when David has turned his eccentric and mentally unstable mother away because he is ashamed to introduce her to Linda, the young woman he is in love with:

71  72  73  74 

Ibid., 245. Ibid., 246. Frankau, The Bridge, op. cit., jacket copy. Ibid., 141, 140. 194

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“Damn––” he thought. “It isn’t so bad, is it? I’ve never sent her away before. I never will again. This is the only time . . . And I did try to give her the money for the movie. It’s all right; it’s a little thing.” It was a little thing, surely. What could it matter when he set it beside the magic in this room? But the magic was out of the room. It would come back, perhaps; now it was gone; there was only David, hating David.75

The novel presents David – and everyone else – as literally made up of “the Two”: Neilson sees both David’s youthful, dark-eyed, hopeful self and his pale counterpart, “the other fellow, the antagonist. The one who did the Devil’s work.”76 It is “the other fellow” who shuts the door on David’s mother, and who increasingly takes over, forcing David’s idealistic younger self into the background. Even after Neilson has destroyed the courtroom and released his imprisoned self, he still has to relive the collapse of his marriage to Linda who, he believes, blames him for Anne’s death; worse still, he has to confront once more his failure to help Linda as she struggles from agnosticism towards Christianity, and his drunken inability to rescue her when in her despair she takes a fatal overdose. G.B. Stern said of The Bridge that “certain chapters I should be reluctant to read again unless I could be sure that I had time to go on to her triumphant-after-pain solution”;77 Frankau, she said, had a “rare talent … for reaching down to pain and suffering so that vicariously it hurts.”78 It’s that talent, and the experience of bereavement which fuelled it, Diana Raymond suggests, which sets Frankau’s later novels so far apart from her earlier ones. Frankau herself said that she had “learned to ‘be easy’ with the words,” in contrast to her earlier straining for stylistic effect, but that her later novels were much harder to write.79 Diana Raymond agrees that there is something “slightly artificial” about the early works, though “you can see the gift there,” but that there was something “almost miraculous” about the strength of Frankau’s writing after the long nine-year silence: “it all came back with The Willow Cabin.”80 The Willow Cabin, Frankau’s most popular novel, draws extensively on her relationship with Humbert Wolfe: the heroine’s complicated and difficult love75  76  77  78  79  80 

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 147. Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 245. Raymond, introduction, The Winged Horse, op. cit., [v.] Frankau, Pen to Paper, op. cit., 74. Raymond, interview. 195

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affair with a much older, married man, her devastation at his death, and the stages of her mourning, are presented vividly in all their detail. The novel quotes Humbert Wolfe’s poetry, unattributed, including lines of a poem he’d written for Frankau soon after they first met and which she had quoted in I Was The Man and in her autobiographical work, I Find Four People (1935). Quoting Wolfe had long been a habit, part of the private language of allusions, “nuances and hints” which Frankau’s novels had evolved to represent and protect their relationship.81 The Willow Cabin’s dedication likewise gives its secrets away only to those who know the code: To the memory of D.M.F. H.W. M.V.W.

While readers who know the basic outlines of Frankau’s life should be able to decode “D.M.F.” (Frankau’s mother, Dolly, who had died of cancer in May 1945) and “H.W.” (Humbert Wolfe), the identity of “M.V.W.” (Marjorie Vernon Whitefoord) remained until recently unknown to most. Although Diana Raymond’s biography of Frankau, commissioned by Virago but never published, identifies “M.V.W.”, the first published statement of the relationship between Frankau and Whitefoord came in Raymond’s 2004 DNB essay on Frankau, which does not mention Whitefoord by name. Frankau herself, in the winter of 1944-5, some months after Whitefoord’s death (from a stroke, exacerbated by drink), had written an untitled narrative about their relationship, a lament for Vernon; it was offered to Heinemann by Frankau’s agents in November 1946 but turned down as “almost too personal for publication.”82 Frankau agreed that Heinemann should keep the narrative “in cold storage” for a while, and in the event it was never published; indeed, for many years it was believed lost. Echoes of this unpublished narrative find their way into Shaken in the Wind, where Vernon’s Ludlow childhood becomes Cynthia’s, and quotations abound from the talismanic book of poetry Vernon and Frankau shared (John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét, a book which will also recur significantly in Over the Mountains); there are echoes, too, in The Bridge, where David’s non-fiction memoir of Anne, A Pause in the Conversation, borrows both its title phrase and its form from the unpublished narrative; most obviously, aspects of it recur in Frankau’s fictional accounts of all-female organizations in wartime: the ATS in The Willow Cabin, and the ambulance-corps in Over the Mountains.

81  Frankau, Pen to Paper, op. cit., 71. 82  Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 189. 196

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Frankau’s friendship with Vernon, the unpublished narrative makes clear, dates back fourteen or fifteen years, before her involvement with Wolfe, and her attraction to Vernon is equally long-standing: What I had to admit to myself whenever we met would have embarrassed you. So I never said it and must say it now. The thing that you have for me is romance. Romance is a word cheapened and hollowed by its associations, but I do not know a better substitute. I found romance in you, from the first time that I looked at you, a stranger in a familiar room, and realised how much your face interested me. It is not a face that belongs to this century at all; it is too generous; the lights are too vivid, the shadows too smoky; its whole trend is at the same time too vulnerable and too gay. The pictures of your ancestors have this look; some of them must have had your temperament … If it seems silly to find romance in the person of my closest friend I can only apologise. It came into the room with you and went out with you. If you came back now, it would return.83

The narrative stands in stark contrast to the unfavorable recollections of Frankau’s women friends – one recalled Vernon as a drunk, another as “an unattractive woman who ‘sponged on Pam’ and was unworthy of her”; as Raymond notes, jealousy may be a factor in this description.84 Here, Frankau celebrates Vernon’s gifts to her: Going deeper, I see that on the foundations of my self-dissatisfaction and my doubt, you gave me back my courage. You guided my way to the Church. You turned me from a would-be sybarite into a would-be soldier ... You were something that I have not known before and shall not know again; a thing that a woman is not expected to know; my comrade-in-arms … You gave me the Army and the Army gave me that.85

The narrative suggests some hostility to the relationship nevertheless from Army colleagues; when Vernon finally overcomes opposition to her transfer into Pamela’s unit, the two women are immediately posted two hundred miles apart. Despite this, Frankau and Vernon take rooms together in Pimlico so that they can share a private life when their peripatetic Army Education work

83  Frankau, untitled, op. cit., 7. 84  Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 181. 85  Frankau, untitled, op. cit., 71-72. 197

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permits: “Behind that door we could be, together or separately, at peace.”86 Vernon’s legacy is both material – “in your will, you left me privacy and peace by paying all my debts. Nobody else ever did that for me” – and spiritual: a second chance to learn the lessons of mourning, not running away from grief this time as she had after Humbert’s death: “So I mourn you in the places where we went together, and I thank you for the second chance.”87 A haunting little scene in their local bar, towards the end of the narrative, shows both that process of mourning, and an outsider’s view of the two women as a couple: The woman came in and we said Good-evening; You’ll remember her, she was the one with the daughter in the W.R.N.S., the one who didn’t buy the fur coat. “You’re always alone now” she said, “What’s happened to your friend?” I am getting used to this one and I repeated my formula “You didn’t hear about that?” “No.” But like the others, she had got it before I said “She died in August.” I looked at the pretty, ordinary little face and saw it begin to quiver and crumple. She said how much she liked you, how much everybody liked you; how awful this must be for me. “Well, it is and it isn’t,” I said stupidly, “I’m quite all right, you know.” “That’s a thing I’ve always wanted and never had,” she said. “What is?” “A great friend; a woman friend. I’ve always thought how lovely it must be. I used to think so when I saw you two together. You must miss her.[”] “I do. All the time.”88

The mixture of desperate sadness and touching validation here is powerful and characteristic of Frankau: the vignette opens up a bleak world of loneliness and longing for intimacy, but one which is nevertheless illuminated by the recognition of love. Unlike the unpublished narrative, which links Vernon’s death with Humbert’s, implicitly equating the two, The Willow Cabin puts heterosexual love and loss center stage. Female homosociality and female homoerotic attraction are nevertheless important, troubling presences. The shadowy hero, Michael Knowle, a successful Harley Street surgeon, dies almost exactly halfway through the novel; and the grieving and slow recovery which his lover, Caroline, undergoes, will be completed only in her relationship with Michael’s widow, Mercedes. When they finally meet, five years after Michael’s death, 86  Ibid., 41. 87  Ibid., 76, 71. 88  Ibid., 70. 198

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Mercedes’ physical likeness to Michael is so strong that Caroline at first sees her as Michael come back to life. Later, Caroline comes to realize Mercedes’ formative influence on Michael: “So much that she had loved in Michael and learned from him had its origins here.”89 The recognition reminds Caroline of another man’s confession to her, “When I fell in love with Joan [Caroline’s best friend], I fell in love with a bit of you.”90 At the end of the novel, Caroline asks Mercedes to come home to Europe and live with her, but Mercedes declines, despite her now strong affection for Caroline. In addition to this intense female homosociality, both Caroline and Mercedes attract devotion from other women: Michael’s gruff sister, Dorothy, unused to feeling tenderness for another woman, is disconcertedly “attracted to Caroline,” while Mercedes becomes an obsession for the Knowles’ former secretary, the uncomfortably intense Vera Haydon.91 The possibility of mutual female homoeroticism appears briefly during Caroline’s time as an ATS instructor; a young cadet, disapprovingly described by Caroline’s ultra-conventional colleague as “the very masculine-looking girl with the cropped hair,”92 evidently attracts Caroline: It was impossible not to feel instincts of favouritism towards Vale, who had a lively mind and a dark boyish beauty; she was the most vivid person in the platoon; she talked Caroline’s language; like the potential favourites on other courses, she received carefully anonymous treatment. 93

When Vale, who is clearly attracted to Caroline as well, suggests an outing to a local bar, Caroline finds herself irritated because she was thinking “It would be fun to go to the Aperitif with you.” Again she saw the danger-line of this incarceration among women; the school-atmosphere breeding emotion where none should exist.94

Desire between women is out of place, not just because of its potentially disruptive effects on military discipline, or even because The Willow Cabin is a novel about Humbert Wolfe, but also because of Frankau’s personal situation,

89  [1949]. 90  91  92  93  94 

Pamela Frankau, The Willow Cabin (London: The Reprint Society, 1951), 380. Ibid., 380. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 163. 199

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“a time of dark unhappiness” as she called it.95 Frankau’s marriage had baffled her friends: “[Lettice Cooper said] ‘Well, we all knew it was wrong, I mean we all went to this wedding and thought, What is going on?’”96 Despite the couple’s shared Catholicism, Pamela’s relationship with Vernon and Marshall’s affair with Robin Maugham indicated “a disaster … waiting to happen.”97 The marriage was now collapsing after the death of their premature baby, a loss made even more painful by Pamela’s inability to bear another child to term. Marshall blamed Pamela’s new partner, Ethel Harriman Russell, a woman of “gamine charm,” for the marital breakdown, but seems also to have acquired a young male companion of his own.98 In this context, The Willow Cabin’s rejection of lesbian relationships could be seen as one last effort of denial. Frankau’s loves from now on would be exclusively for women: for “Rab,” as she called Russell, a partnership shadowed by Russell’s cancer and ended by her death on 4 July 1953; and for the theatre producer Margaret Webster, a relationship which Webster later described as “fourteen years of total happiness” and which ended only with Frankau’s death, from cancer, on 8 June 1967.99 From the comparative calm of her life with Webster, Frankau became more able to write openly about same-sex relationships. In A Wreath for the Enemy, fear and suspicion of homosexuality are evidence of the Bradleys’ middle-class small-mindedness, while the admirable characters take different sexualities as a fact of life.100 David, in The Bridge, tells the young Linda, “All one’s first loves are for one’s own sex,”101 a statement echoed by Sarah in Over the Mountains; Linda insists that “all intelligent people … are bisexual,” and says that being in love with a woman is like being in love with a man, only worse: It’s too close. There’s no privacy, d’you see? Your minds are too much alike; there are no thoughts you can hide. The wave-length’s too strong. And a man can’t be in love twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four. But a woman can … She doesn’t go off by herself in her own head; and forget your existence over a golf game or the Wall Street prices.102

95  Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 211. 96  Raymond, interview. 97  Ibid. 98  Raymond, Pamela Frankau, op. cit., 213-14. 99  Margaret Webster, Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage (New York: Knopf, 1972), 274; Milly S. Barranger, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 100  Frankau, A Wreath for the Enemy, op. cit., 106-7, 110-114. 101  Frankau, The Bridge, op. cit., 46. 102  Ibid., 47, 54. 200

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Despite Linda’s fear of this claustrophobic intensity, when her marriage to David falls apart after Anne’s death, her desires for women resurface; those desires are partly enabled by, and partly sublimated in, Linda’s role as a charismatic lecturer surrounded by admiring female students. What drives Linda to a breakdown is her sexual and emotional rejection (which we never see but are left in no doubt about) by the young woman the other students refer to as “The Present Incumbent.”103 Frankau’s trilogy, Clothes of a King’s Son, revisits the territory of The Willow Cabin, writing about the interwar years and the Second World War with the greater sexual openness possible in the 1960s. In Slaves of the Lamp, the boyish heroine, significantly named Rab, is living with the elegant butch artist, Lisa Groves, on Martha’s Vineyard (a place familiar to Frankau from her life with Webster); although Lisa loves and desires her, Rab doesn’t return her feelings. Rab’s stepfather, Philip Weston, is insulted, offended and deeply shocked by the mere fact of lesbian existence, and agitated about Rab and Lisa, but Rab’s mother apparently “[takes] the relationship for granted.”104 Taking homosexuality for granted is surprisingly widespread in both Slaves of the Lamp and Over the Mountains. Jay Brookfield, whose sexuality was never mentioned in The Willow Cabin, is here described as “most contentedly queer” by the unhappily homosexual Morris Ward; Thomas Weston, who is straight, realizes without surprise that his brother Gerald is “Cut to the same pattern” as Jay, and later talks matter-of-factly to Gerald about “Morris being in love with you.”105 The bisexual Gerald finds himself torn between Morris, who has launched Gerald’s career as an actor, and Mary Castle, the famous actress who leads him to betray Morris, and who marries Gerald knowing the truth about him; the marriage goes hellishly wrong as Gerald fails to banish his homosexual self, “the one behind my shoulder.”106 Both Gerald and Sarah look skeptically at the developing relationship between Thomas and their stepsister Rab, who have become lovers. Gerald regards the notion of a wedding as “Family-fantasy department: he knew the word for Rab, a word doubtless foreign to Brigstock,” the Westons’ old Nanny, who thinks Thomas and Rab will marry; Sarah muses that Rab “still strikes me as Lesbian … even away from Lisa Groves” and wonders whether “Brigstock knows about lesbians,” concluding “Certainly, but without saying so to herself.”107 When even Nanny is supposed to know about Lesbians, though not by name, we’re a long way from The Willow Cabin. Frankau can make a joke of casually mentioning Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness 103  104  105  106  107 

Ibid., 175. Pamela Frankau, Slaves of the Lamp (London: Heinemann, 1965), 262. Ibid., 147, 151, 206. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 341, 395. 201

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(lent by one minor character to another), sure that her readers will understand what they’re being told. The Well of Loneliness (1928) may also exercise an unacknowledged influence on Over the Mountains, with its women’s ambulance-corps in wartime France, run by two rival lesbians: Lisa Groves, who struggles to repress her desires; and the dashing, charismatic Noel, who seduces the younger, inexperienced Rab, arousing Lisa’s jealous hatred. The dangerous erotic potential of all-female organizations has returned with a vengeance here. Rab recalls both Linda (the two are facially and physically very similar) and Frankau’s early boyish heroines; but whereas Linda comes to repudiate her bisexuality as a kind of arrested development, what happens with Rab is more complicated. Rab has “always been a boy inside,” thinking “he” rather than “she” about herself.108 Her own first love is for Sarah Weston, and with the exception of Thomas she has felt only hate and fear towards men, male bodies and male sexuality. Loving Thomas, she is nevertheless impelled to act on her feelings of sexual desire for Noel: “Somehow I have to know … This thing has been with me too long. It’s always waited for me. When I think about me I know it.”109 Rab’s response to making love with Noel is a sequence of uncertainty, pleasure and tenderness, followed by violent ambivalence: “How can I love her and hate her at the same time? Let me not hate her, it is my fault. Childish to feel that this is the end of honour.”110 Feeling she has to “choose between Noel and Thomas,” Rab is “scared of the choice, guilty and awed and excited and miserable, hating and loving.”111 But Rab doesn’t get to make the choice; the narrative makes it for her. Noel is killed and Rab is left blaming herself for not being there. At the end of Over the Mountains it is clear that Rab will marry Thomas, despite her reservations about her sexuality and her fear of “what happens afterwards.”112 The heterosexual resolution of Over the Mountains is a fragile and qualified one, given the pervasiveness of homosexuality, bisexuality, homoeroticism and gender dissonance throughout the trilogy. Because so much of the trilogy’s narrative focus is on Thomas, however, there is a drive to make his love for Rab triumph; he is also an exceptional, magical, even shamanistic figure who seems to have come back from the dead. Perhaps this is what it would take to make that marriage work; but both he and Rab know that it may fail, like Gerald’s marriage (or like Frankau’s own). At the point where Thomas is missing, believed dead, Rab tells Sarah “I loved him. I’d have loved Noel more, though, given half a 108  109  110  111  112 

Pamela Frankau, Over the Mountains (London: Heinemann, 1967), 67. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 322. 202

“A roller-coaster of a life with everything in it”

chance.”113 The only way Rab can deal with her grief about Noel is to close it off, as she explains to Sarah: “I’m slamming the door on all that, here and now.”114 It’s not clear whether Rab can “slam the door on all that,” or indeed whether Frankau thinks she should have to. Unlike Frankau’s earlier versions of the divided self as a succession of selves – in I Find Four People, for example, or in The Bridge – the trilogy doesn’t operate a teleological model, in which homosexuality or bisexuality could be seen as a phase. Instead, we see the different selves within the person as simultaneously present. For Gerald, living under a (never mentioned) law which criminalizes one half of himself, integration is never a possibility; he remains unreachable, enamelled with secrecy. Rab’s future is more uncertain. In Frankau’s last completed works, relations between women no longer have to be triangulated through their love for a man, as they were in The Willow Cabin (and as they are in She and I, A Wreath for the Enemy and Ask Me No More, in ways there isn’t time to explore here). Sexual desire between women can not only be made explicit but acted upon. What Frankau can’t do, it seems, is to give Rab that “half a chance” to love Noel more than Thomas. Even in the 1960s, and even from the love and security of Frankau’s long-term relationship with the exclusively lesbian Margaret Webster, a lesbian happy ending remains out of reach for Frankau’s heroine. In her obituary for Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West wrote “none of her novels, though they are better than most, was as good as she was; and this was due to the fierce accidents of her personal life.”115 Gilbert Frankau had once advised his daughter “As for you, Pamela, if you’d only put your intelligence into your life and your emotion into your books, instead of the other way round, you’d die a rich woman.”116 What could have happened if only Frankau’s life had not been cut short, if only she had been given more time to integrate all the aspects of herself – Jewish, Christian, Queer, the “fierce accidents of her personal life,” her intelligence and her emotion – into her work, is impossible to know.

113  Ibid., 271. 114  Ibid., 273. 115  [Rebecca West,] “Obituary: Miss Pamela Frankau. A gifted novelist,” The Times, 9 June 1967, 12. 116  Frankau, Pen to Paper, op. cit., 188. 203

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Chapter 11

Faith of Our Fathers as Blood Sacrifice: Judaic Recovery and the Broken Christian Body in Michael Arditti’s Easter and The Celibate Frederick S. Roden

The idea for this chapter began with an intense and passionate reading in 1997 of Michael Arditti’s novel The Celibate. I was completing a doctoral dissertation on the role of the Catholic revival in late 19th-century definitions of homosexuality. My work focused on the roles that both religion and sexuality play in shaping that concept we call identity. When I read Arditti’s book, I was struck by the rich and sophisticated interweaving of Christian theology with a narrative of self: the genre of the gay coming-out novel. Arditti plays with postmodern conventions, as the unnamed narrator articulates his own experience of what Oscar Wilde’s lover Bosie Douglas called “the Love that dare not speak its name.” The novel spoke to me, because the scholarly work of my 20s – interrogating the relationship between sexuality and religion – was strongly driven by a desire to integrate my experience as a gay man and Catholic Christian. When asked to deliver a lecture to a Judaic Studies Program in 2006, I remembered the Jewish background of Arditti’s narrator, and his struggle between the Law of the Father(s) and his Christian Father in heaven. The scholarship that has “come out” of this inquiry is more than I had hoped for – if equal to my earlier erotic/spiritual reading of The Celibate, bringing together opposites in the quest for personal identity. Here I ask, in the words of Hugh Montefiore: what does it mean to be a Jewish Christian?   Michael Arditti, The Celibate (New York: Soho, 1997). First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Sinclair Stevenson.   Lord Alfred Douglas, poem: “Two Loves,” The Chameleon (1894).   Hugh Montefiore, On Being a Jewish Christian: Its Blessings and Its Problems (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998).

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The Jew in Christianity/Christianity and “The Jews”

While there has been abundant scholarship on the relationship between Christian anti-Semitism and the history of Jewish-Christian community, I wish to sketch out a few points here. Saint Paul, perhaps the most famous Jewish convert to Christianity – or, some would argue, the Jew who invented the religion of Christianity – opens his Letter to the Hebrews in the Christian New Testament: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” He continues in Chapter 3: “Therefore, brothers and sisters, holy partners in a heavenly calling, consider that Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses also ‘was faithful in all God’s house.’” Paul’s work goes on to exhort a reminder of the history of salvation and faith of the Jewish people, especially in Chapter 11 where he chronicles the line from Abraham down through patriarchs and prophets. It is significant to begin with Paul, given his well-known conversion experience on the road to Damascus: a move from persecutor of proto-Christians to inventor of a missionary, evangelical religion. How different would the history of Christian anti-Semitism have been had the historical figure of Jesus as a voice of Jewish renewal not been eventually articulated in opposition to Judaism? That’s to say, what if the “new religion” of Christianity had been defined to spread the message of God already revealed in Judaism to a Gentile population by means of the teachings of Jesus, as some contemporary Jewish/Christian apologists suggest? What if Christian theologians had maintained that Jews do not need Christ’s sacrifice or salvation – but that Gentiles need the teachings present in Judaism – again, another system of recent popular reconciliation. What if early Gentile Christians and the Jews like Paul who followed Christ had accepted that Jews were always already saved, a formulation that much of late twentiethcentury mainline Christianity has implied, if not always specifically stated (even as “salvation” as it is described here is a Christian notion with no inherent Jewish meaning).   Hebrews 1.1-1.2, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). For the purpose of this chapter, I presume Paul’s authorship of this epistle, which is disputed.   Hebrews 3.1.3.2, NRSV.   See Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).   For a general history of Christian anti-Semitism, see James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).   Compare these questions with Eugene Rogers, Jr.’s answers in Chapter 1 of this volume. 206

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Modern politically-correct Christianity can still be sadly reductive of Judaism. Some of the most “Judaeocentric” Christians who value the history of the Jewish people are at times the most dismissive, in the imagination that Judaism without Christ is always incomplete. Many others rarely think about the “Jewish Jesus” or Judaism in and of itself at all. Supersession, that Christianity is the “fulfillment” of Judaism, allows Christians to integrate the history of Jesus’s Jewish heritage and the prophetic nature of the “Old Testament.” Without the narrative of the Hebrew scriptures, much of Christian theology would be in the position that Christianity leaves Judaism in: incomplete. The predominant Christian vision of Judaism articulates a historical and theological background that Jesus can “fulfill.” To remove that would leave little explanation for Jesus’s actions as they have been constructed in Christian understanding. These issues raise a difficult question: can Christianity ever exist as anything other than in opposition to Judaism? Must Christian discourse always be somehow antiJewish? In his brilliant book, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, Steven F. Kruger writes, As archetypal human being, attached to all human beings, Christ supersedes his own Jewishness, and while, in relation to the “Gentiles,” universalizing Christ in this way operates as a gesture of embrace, the gesture, in relation to those Jews who, after Christ, remain Jewish, is rather one of refusal and rejection. Indeed, after Christ, to be properly human, to participate in Christ’s powerful conflation of divinity and “humanity,” to live in a present of Christ’s presence, one needs specifically not to be Jewish, no longer to subscribe to an “old,” preincarnational system, as Christ opens up for the “human” a future not before possible. To be Jewish after the incarnation is precisely not to be “human” in the ways enabled by Christ, not to participate in the dispensation of the “spirit,” not to have access to the future of salvation.10

Kruger continues: “Christian ideology developed a complex rationale that simultaneously justified Jewish survival and reaffirmed Jewish obsoleteness.”11 “Despite all the pressure to disavow, indeed destroy, Judaism, Christianity also expressed a certain need to preserve Jews”: particularly in relation to the idea of ultimate conversion.12 More than the actual Jew, the idea of the Jew was central to the development of Christian theology. “In such formulations, the true   For a discussion and refutation of supersession, again see Rogers, Chapter 1. 10  Steven J. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 3-4, emphasis in original. 11  Ibid., 5. 12  Ibid., 5. 207

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Israel, verus Israel, becomes not the historical (Jewish) Israel, but its Christian successor.”13 The medieval Christian notion is that of the Jew as a bad reader of texts: unwilling to read the prophetic fulfillment of Judaism in Christianity. The argument went that “Jews were proverbially literal readers of scripture, unable to penetrate the spiritual truth of their own texts, and this literal bent was closely associated with a Jewish corporeality that involved both bodily exorbitances and disintegrations.”14 This narrative is evident in the twelfth-century Chronicle of Solomon Bar Simson of Mainz, who recounts the massacre of German Jewish communities when Christians, en route to Jerusalem for Crusades to recover the “Holy Land,” decided to mete out punishment upon those closer to home. He articulates the voice of the perpetrators: “You are the children of those who killed our object of veneration, hanging him on a tree; and he himself had said: ‘There will yet come a day when my children will come and avenge my blood.’ We are his children and it is therefore obligatory for us to avenge him since you are the ones who rebel and disbelieve in him. Your God has never been at peace with you. Although he intended to deal kindly with you, you have conducted yourselves improperly before Him. God has forgotten you and is no longer desirous of you since you are a stubborn nation. Instead, He has departed from you and has taken us for His portion, casting His radiance upon us.”15

The violence done here is rhetorical as well as literal, as the familial status of the nation of Israel as embodied in Jesus the messiah is usurped by the medieval Christian. This theology effectively severs the relationship of covenant. Solomon Bar Simson makes a common connection in the following complaint: “We were not even comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah; for in their case they were offered reprieve if they could produce at least ten righteous people, whereas in our case not twenty, not even ten were sought.”16 As Kruger observes, medieval Christian theology associated Jews with sodomy, making the definition of “the sodomite” as equally “against nature” as the body of the Jew.17 Given this political history of Jews in medieval Europe (despite spaces and places of toleration and co-existence), we know that conversion to Christianity – for all kinds of reasons, not the least self-preservation – was not uncommon. 13  Ibid., 4. 14  Ibid., 87. 15  “The account of Solomon Bar Simson,” Readings in Medieval History, ed. Patrick J. Geary. 3rd ed. (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2003), 420. 16  Ibid., 422. 17  See Kruger, op. cit., 90-96. 208

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In the multicultural world of medieval Spain, where Christianity, Islam, and Judaism co-existed with greater peace (at times) than elsewhere, a surprising statement appears in Las Siete Partidas, a law code written under Alfonso X of Castille in the thirteenth century and put into effect in 1348: No force or compulsion shall be employed in any way against a Jew to induce him to become a Christian… after any Jews become Christians, all persons in our dominions shall honor them; and that no one should dare to reproach them or their descendants, by way of insult, with having been Jews; and that they shall possess all their property, sharing the same with their brothers, and inheriting it from their fathers and mothers and other relatives just as if they were Jews; and that they can hold all offices and dignities which other Christians can do.18

Lest we imagine some kind of medieval Spanish Jewtopia, contrast that statement with the law that follows it in the code: “When a Christian is so unfortunate as to become a Jew, we order that he shall be put to death.”19 Kruger writes on medieval narratives of Jewish conversion to Christianity: The circular conversion narrative follows, one might say, a spectral logic: the prior, Jewish self must be conjured up so that the self may be made to disappear; but, even at the moment of its disappearance, the specter is, if liminally, present – as that whose disappearance is necessary for the emergence of a new, Christian self. Paradoxically, that new self could not emerge as new if the discarded self were simply forgotten or completely, successfully superseded; its aura must be maintained even as its disappearance is confidently proclaimed.20

Hence in narrative, Jewishness – even with the erasure of medieval conversion – is always present: perhaps nowhere more so than when the religion is renounced in favor of Christianity. Conversions, Returns, and Encounters: When Jewish/Christian Intersects

Twentieth-century literature, art, and culture are filled with Jewish/Christian intersections. While some of these instances are highly problematic – for example, social questions about assimilation or the relationship between Christianity and the Holocaust – the Jewish Christian contradiction is not 18  “Las Siete Partidas,” Readings in Medieval History, op. cit., 805. 19  Ibid., 805. 20  Kruger, op. cit., 111, emphasis in original. 209

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always discursively constructed as Jewish “conversion” (literal or figurative, in the sense of subjection) to Christianity. While there are controversial stories of Christian conversion, there are also – in the flowering of late twentieth-century Judaeophilia – narratives of return to origins, recoveries of lost Judaism. Not all of these are well received, however – by either Jews or Christians.21 To begin with another debt to Kruger, Marc Chagall’s incorporation of the crucifixion into a number of his works is striking. In a discussion of Chagall’s famous 1938 “White Crucifixion,” Kruger observes, The fleshly, passionate bodiliness claimed by Christianity for itself – the power of an incarnation, of a suffering that might transform the world and history – is here remade as Jewish. A Jewish past, both the “Old Testament” and Jesus, that has been taken away from Jews is here revivified, reawakened as Jewish, to be activated in a situation of present distress.22

In his introduction to Chagall: A Retrospective, Jacob Baal-Teshuva maintains that “It seems that Chagall regarded Jesus as one of the great Jewish prophets, in direct contradiction to Jewish teachings. He failed to convince his fellow Jews that Jesus was a universal symbol.”23 In 1958 Raissa Maritain wrote that “What the hand and the heart are looking for is, I suppose, at one and the same time the symbol of the suffering of the world and the suffering of the Jewish people.”24 While I do not endorse some crypto-Christianity of Chagall, his use of the literal Christian “icon” is perhaps the best example of modern Jewish deployments of Jesus. Maritain’s question of pain pervades Jewish-Christian intersections: the relationship between Christ’s crucifixion sacrifice and the involuntary sufferings of the Jewish people. Chaim Potok takes up the issue of Jewish art in his classic novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, which practically begins with a statement – a contradiction that poses the dramatic question for the plot of the novel – that “observant Jews do not paint crucifixions.”25 The story of a young Hasidic boy 21  The complementary phenomenon of the “Jew by choice” – the Gentile convert to Judaism, with or without ethnic Jewish heritage – has come to define an important portion of new Jewish culture. 22  Kruger, op. cit., 8. 23  “Introduction,” Chagall: A Retrospective, ed. Jacob Baal-Teshuva (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin, 1995), 29. 24  “On Chagall’s Surrealism,” Chagall, op. cit., 146. See also Benjamin Harshav, “Jewish Art and Jesus Christ,” Chagall, 299-302. A recent book has made a study of this subject: Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 25  Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (New York: Anchor, 2003), 3. Originally published 1972. 210

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with artistic genius, the novel struggles with Jewish and Christian understandings of suffering, the family, and Christ. Having secretly taken her gifted son to a museum, Asher’s mother explains the paintings of the crucifixion to him: “‘Jesus was a Jew who lived in Eretz Yisroel at the time of the Romans. The Romans killed him. That was the way the Romans executed people. They hung them from those big poles, the way you saw in the paintings.’”26 In Asher’s mother’s version, Jesus’s Jewishness is contrasted with his killers’ Roman imperialism. She will not utter the word “cross.” Asher asks her, “‘Were many Jews killed by the Romans?’”27 Asher thus learns of Jesus’s execution as a specifically political act done by the government at the time; he attempts to understand it through the lens of Jewish oppression. His mother explains that indeed the Romans did kill many Jews and that Jesus claimed to be the messiah, but wasn’t – if he were, how could there still be so much suffering in the world? Yet Asher asks why there are so many paintings of Jesus if he is not. His mother laments, “‘Where your painting has brought me, Asher. To Jesus,’” and again, “‘Your painting. It’s taken us to Jesus.’”28 Asher’s interest in the visual arts has caused his mother – as the embodiment of Judaism – to literally look the Christian’s Jesus in the face. Besides the potential atrocity of this signification – to face the icon of the Christians’ God – Asher’s “passion” has forced his mother to articulate a specifically Jewish understanding of Jesus. Her words are poignant, but could be misleading: she has not, at least in her admission, been theologically or spiritually led to Christian belief. Nevertheless, as a viewer of art, she has been brought to the stage of consumption of the image of the crucifixion. She is the recipient of Christ’s body, which is dangerously close to the sacrament of communion where the bread and wine in the Eucharist perform for the Christian as true God. As the novel unfolds, his family will in fact be brought to the cross in another way. Asher goes back to the museum to copy paintings of the crucifixion, enacting a gesture that would all the more claim a right to Christ. “It was only later, on my way home, that it occurred to me how strange it must have been to see a red-haired boy in a black skull cap and dangling earlocks standing in a museum copying paintings about Jesus.”29 Asher’s mother takes him to task on this project – how much Jewish blood has been spilled on account of this Jesus. Yet he feels compelled to copy the crucifixions. He says, “‘I couldn’t find that expression anywhere else.’”30 The singularity of Jesus as the Christ suggests Asher’s dangerous potential for embracing Christian theology through 26  27  28  29  30 

Ibid., 169. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 170, 171. Ibid., 171-172. Ibid., 172. 211

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iconography. When his father returns home to celebrate Passover – from postHolocaust Europe, where he has been working to re-establish a religious Jewish presence through the foundation of yeshivas – he is furious about his son’s actions. Nevertheless Asher comes to study with a secular Jewish artist, who asks him to read the story of the slaughter of the innocents in the Christian Bible, the state-mandated murder of Jewish infants at the time of Jesus’s birth. Asher grows and develops as an artist under this mentorship. As an adult, a selfidentified artist, he goes abroad to see the history of western art first-hand. Asher enters churches in Florence. Upon viewing Michaelangelo’s Pietà – the famous statue of the Virgin Mary holding her dead son Jesus – he responds: I was an observant Jew, yet that block of stone moved through me like a cry, like the call of seagulls over morning surf, like – like the echoing blasts of the shofar sounded by the Rebbe. I do not mean to blaspheme. My frames of reference have been formed by the life I have lived. I do not know how a devout Christian reacts to that Pietà. I was only able to relate it to elements in my own lived past.31

Here Asher understands Christian symbol and aesthesis, the experience of art, through lived experience. Can art ever truly be secular? Is all art religious? As he moves to the utilization of the crucifixion in his own work, Asher exclaims: For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting – an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.32

Asher creates crucifixion paintings – into which he has inserted his own parents. Through art, his mother has come to walk where Jesus walked. But that does not mean that she, or he, has embraced Christianity. Rather, Christian symbol has been used in the exploration of personal experience. His father sees this as the ultimate betrayal: Asher’s grandfather had been murdered during the Easter season. Like the uniqueness of Christ, Asher has also become singular – in effect, forced into exile from his family. Potok’s novel resists easy psychoanalytic reductions of Asher’s sympathy for the crucifixion or Pietà to simple resonances with his familial relationships. At the same time, Asher’s experiences of his 31  Ibid., 310. 32  Ibid., 330. 212

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mother and father are very real, and are shaped by his family’s suffering. Christians might extrapolate the suffering of the Jewish family into an understanding of the “Holy Family” of Jesus: in effect, the necessary embrace of the Jewish Jesus as a resolution to generations of inherited Jewish suffering. As in Asher’s family, there is a connection between the Christian commemoration of the Passion of Christ and violence done to the Jewish communities claimed as latter-day inheritors of the blame for His crucifixion. In the second half of the twentieth century, the greatest struggle in ChristianJewish relations was to understand the nature of suffering: the literally iconoclastic parallels that are sometimes drawn between the crucifixion and the Holocaust. These implied comparisons sting because of the history of Christian anti-Semitism. At the same time, in the words of Michael Arditti, in the mind of God the murder of one single person is as grave as the murder of many.33 Of course from a cultural perspective, the murder of six million has a dramatically different inflection. Likewise, the crucifixion, when understood by Christians as the murder of God, makes this execution particular. Certainly, the distinguishing mark is an element of choice, a concern that almost all Jewish commentators point to when analyzing this problematic comparison. If Jesus willingly accepted His role as a sacrificial victim, those Jews who were killed in the Holocaust had no such choice. Ulrich Simon’s excellent book, A Theology of Auschwitz: The Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, performs a remarkable analysis, bringing together the Passion and the Shoah. Simon, a refugé to England, became a priest and professor of Christian literature. His father had perished in Auschwitz. Although a convert – what some may deem an atrocity given the reality of the Holocaust – Simon’s theology is acutely aware of the uniqueness of that suffering, especially in distinguishing its uniqueness from the uniqueness of Christ’s. I will briefly cite some of Simon’s main points, in his poignant narrative moving from arrest to execution – of Holocaust victims and Jesus. Simon notes, on the Nazi seizure of Jews, “This, then, is not the arrest of Christ re-enacted.”34 “Where Christ can welcome the fulfillment of his self-willed destiny, our victims of the terror are wholly unprepared for their long journey in the dark.”35 “The arrest of Christ makes sense in terms of the whole Passion narrative; the arrest of our contemporaries makes no sense morally or spiritually … once again Jerusalem has fallen.”36 Imagining the train journeys, “The modern stations of the Cross 33  Interview with Michael Arditti, February 12, 2006. “In Judaism, to save one life is to save the whole world.” 34  Ulrich Simon, A Theology of Auschwitz: The Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979), 43. Originally printed 1967 (London, SPCK). 35  Ibid., 43. 36  Ibid., 43. 213

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are unlit and the procession leads to an Auschwitz from which there is no return … The via dolorosa of the railway is the via dolorosa of God.”37 Contrary to popular notions of Christianity and its teachings about forgiveness, Simon observes: “I do not myself believe that there can be forgiveness for Auschwitz, and I do not believe that the words of Christ apply here … There is a sin against Man and Spirit which Christ declared to be unforgivable, and Auschwitz is this sin against Man and Spirit.”38 Nevertheless, those murdered by the Nazis share with Christ the position of scapegoat. “Christ died to save mankind from its pagan madness. The victims of Auschwitz died because pagan madness wished to extirpate the light and to rule the world in dark, ecstatic nihilism.”39 It is important to observe Simon’s use of the word “pagan,” making clear that he does not hold Israel responsible for the execution of Christ. Furthering the distinctions, Simon states that unlike Jesus, “None of the victims at Auschwitz wrought atonement. This was not the work assigned to them by God. Their purpose was to create new norms of martyrdom which fit into no known scheme of theology.”40 In this subtle passage, Simon suggests that while those murdered in the Holocaust should not be interpreted using Christian definitions of martyrdom, their deaths should nevertheless be understood as significant for Christian theology since there is no form for comparison. On a practical level, while not serving as sacrifices, “The dead at Auschwitz, however, died also for the sins of others, for in as much as they died there they took the place of all who died there.”41 Thus the concept of the survivor: not his or her rightful guilt, but the collective realization that there was a reason given for the imprisonment and death that defies reason – a reason shared with those outside who for whatever reason escaped imprisonment and death. As a closing warning, Simon denounces the peril of when “We venture to attribute the glory of transcended Christ to the gassed millions.”42 What glory can they know? Nechama Tec’s biography of convert Oswald Rufeisen, who passed as a Christian in Nazi-occupied Poland – only to later convert and become a Carmelite priest – presents a rather different view. Rufeisen observes, “‘In Jesus I found an answer to the Holocaust which I could not find in Judaism. In Jesus I see a crucified Jew who through his crucifixion offers redemption … For me

37  38  39  40  41  42 

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 105. 214

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the Holocaust is the Golgotha of the Jews, a road to redemption.’”43 Rufeisen quotes Cardinal Lustiger, the French Jewish convert: “‘Jews have been crucified by us Christians for many centuries. We failed to see in them the brothers of Christ. Jews were condemned to follow the same path Jesus did. Christians did to the Jews what was done to Christ without realizing that they were continuing to crucify Christ … We the Jews in the Church have an obligation to make Christians aware of what they have done to the Jews.’”44

In an incredible movement between inside and outside – the Church, and Jewish identification – Lustiger enacts the erasure and embrace that Kruger identifies in Jewish conversion narratives. Rufeisen claims that he “‘want[s] to explain all suffering’” – not just the Holocaust.45 In response to Tec’s distinction between voluntary and involuntary suffering, Rufeisen asserts “‘I am not sure that in order for suffering to lead to redemption there has to be acceptance.’”46 Rufeisen’s apologia for his conversion resembles other Jewish Christian narratives: an understanding of Christianity as an extension of Judaism, and a concern for the damage done to Judaism by conversion. He observes: “‘Suddenly, and I don’t know how, I identify his suffering and resurrection with the suffering of my people and the hope of their resurrection … Then I think that if there is justice toward Christ in the form of resurrection, there will be some kind of justice toward my people too.’”47 Christianity becomes a way of making things right, given the horrors of the Holocaust. “In the end my move to Christianity was not an escape from Judaism but, on the contrary, a way of finding answers to my problems as a Jew … when I realized that I stood before a decision to embrace Catholicism the psychological battle began. I myself had all the prejudices about Jews who convert to Christianity. Aware of these prejudices, I was afraid that my people, the Jews, will reject me. Actually, they did not … “It was not an intellectual battle … Intellectually I accepted Jesus. The entire problem was what will be my relationship to the Jewish people, to my brother, possibly my parents if they lived …

43  Interviewed in Nechama Tec, In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 169. 44  Ibid., 169. 45  Ibid., 170. 46  Ibid., 170. 47  Ibid., 169. 215

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“For me the acceptance of Christianity was a Jewish step … “Christ’s teachings as such are basically Jewish … The New Testament is Jewish, written by Jews for Jews.”48

Perhaps in the wake of the Holocaust, Rufeisen is all the more concerned not to deny his Jewish identity: to do so could be seen as greater betrayal as well as accruing more guilt. However, he neglects to mention the large portion of the New Testament taken up by Paul’s evangelical letters: inventing and justifying Christianity for a Gentile audience. Baptized on his father’s birthday, Rufeisen comments, “‘I want to show that there is continuity, that I am not rejecting Judaism but accepting its special form.’”49 But where does this leave other Jews who do not convert? E. Anne Kramer, whose self-published autobiography, You Trace My Journeys and My Resting Places (quoting Psalm 139.2), addresses some of these questions. Born in Germany, she and most of her family escaped, although they experienced Kristallnacht and her grandmother (too old and ill to travel) died in Auschwitz. Kramer became a Christian while a refugee in England. Later in life, while living in the U.S., she was ordained an Episcopal priest. Kramer opens her story, “I, born a Jew, acknowledged in baptism the Jewish Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Since I made this commitment in baptism as a young adult, never have I considered denying or hiding my Jewish ancestry.”50 As she documents the history of anti-Semitism from the Crusades to Shylock to Mel Gibson, Kramer notes, “it should not be forgotten that initially it was Jews only who said ‘yes’ to Jesus and that they did so without entertaining any thought of thereby leaving Judaism.”51 Yet Kramer articulates the difficulty of becoming a Christian as a Jew. She speaks of her conflict. “How could I, driven from my home because of being a Jew, ever dare to think of this? What kind of traitor was I? Betraying my people? If I were to accept baptism, would I not carry a deep burden of guilt on my shoulders for the rest of my life?”52 Kramer admits that the guilt lasted for many years, until she eventually rejoiced at having been born a Jew yet become a Christian. She compares her experience to Janus, the Roman god of two faces gazing in opposite directions: “The question ‘where do I belong’ became acute once more and I lived with this uncertainty for many years. Over those years I experienced the pain of being left in limbo, of not being a ‘respectable’ Jew.

48  49  50  51  52 

Ibid., 167-168. Ibid., 168. E. Anne Kramer, “You Trace My Journeys and My Resting Places” (2005), 2-3. Ibid., 21-22. Ibid., 53. 216

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I experienced the surprise and hesitation of Christians who were not sure of what to make of me.”53 Kramer does not identify as an evangelical Christian: I made a resolution long ago that I would never try to “convert” a Jew to Christianity but would such a possibility present itself, I would encourage any inquirer first to consider the richness of the Jewish heritage. I believe we are meant not to convert, but to learn to be tolerant of those whose faith differs from ours and to live in harmony with them, letting others walk their journey and never to allow ourselves to be critical or condescending about what they believe.54

Kramer sees as her spiritual challenge the difficulty, or inability, to forgive the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Can she forgive herself for not forgiving? She makes a point that is also found in analyses of the most famous convert to die in the Shoah. Kramer says that as a young woman she was moved by the story in the Gospels of Jesus speaking to the woman at the well, which she contrasts with the Jewish prayer thanking God for not being born a woman.55 In her biography, Aunt Edith: The Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint, Susanne Batzdorff, the niece of Edith Stein, suggests that what drew her aunt to Christianity was the limited role Judaism assigned to women at that time.56 Conversion to Catholicism and becoming a nun offered more to her. The philosopher Dr. Edith Stein became a Carmelite nun. She died in a concentration camp and has been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church as a saint. An abundance of commentary has accumulated in recent years on the canonization of Stein. Why the Church should choose a Jewish convert as the saint of the Holocaust is a hugely controversial question: one that raises the issue of what more the institution could have done to prevent (in its 1900 years) and/or stop the Shoah. Batzdorff, who identifies as an observant Jew, notes that Stein died as a Jew for her Jewishness. “There is something troubling to those of us who are Jewish in viewing someone who turned away from Judaism and embraced Christianity as a symbol for the Jews.”57 Stein has been quoted apocryphally as having said, “We are going for our people” – does that mean “We are going in place of our people,” or “We are going on behalf of our people”?58 Her niece observes, 53  Ibid., 59. 54  Ibid., 62. 55  Ibid., 47. 56  Susanne M. Batzdorff, Aunt Edith: The Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1998), 191. 57  Ibid., 204. 58  Ibid., 205. 217

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There is the problem with the concept of Edith going to her death “for her people.” The death of Jesus is considered by Christians to be a redemptive death. By his sacrifice, Jesus atoned for the sins of the people. In contrast, my aunt Edith was killed alongside millions of Jews. Her suffering and death could not save the others. It was a death she did not choose, could not choose and could not have avoided.59

As Batzdorff succinctly comments, “Even though she left the Jewish fold, she was finally, in an ironic twist, reunited with them in death. She was resigned to that fate, but she had no control over it.”60 If Stein did not return to the Judaism of her heritage, there are certainly those conversos who did, and do. Two recent books point to Deronda-like returns. In Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past, Susan Jacoby interrogates the question of assimilation. She rejects what her aunt asserts: “‘that you can be a Jew and a Catholic – just as Jesus was.’”61 Jacoby’s family story concerns cultural assimilation rather than religion. She wants to recover her Jewishness – her father was a Jew who married a Gentile – but there are plenty of Jews who do not recognize it for religious reasons. Stephen J. Dubner’s Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family is equally provocative. His working class, first-generation New York Jewish parents separately converted to Catholicism during the Second World War. The devout converts married and raised a brood of Catholic children in conservative postwar America. His parents never hid their Jewishness, although Dubner’s embrace of his family heritage and religion was tumultuous. His Catholic mother struggles to accept her Jewish son. The memoir ends with a yahrzeit trial of faith. Having said Kaddish in his synagogue on the anniversary of his father’s death a few days before Christmas, Dubner feels moved to go to midnight mass at the church where his parents were received into Catholicism. He does so, but unlike his parents, he does not feel called to Catholicism. Instead, he renews his commitment to his ancestral Judaism.62 If Dubner’s story is more about faith than the melting pot, one detail is important. His mother’s first cousin was executed Communist Ethel Rosenberg 59  Ibid., 204. 60  Ibid., 205. 61  Susan Jacoby, Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past (New York: Scribner, 2000), 262. What is a Half-Jew and how can one be one? See also Half-Life: Jewish Tales from Interfaith Homes, ed. Laurel Snyder (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006); www.half-jew.org. There have been some attempts to posit the “half-Jew” as a new category of identity, as a person of mixed ancestry regardless of the degree or present religion of the subject. 62  Stephen J. Dubner, Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family (New York: Perennial, 2004), 314-317. Originally published 1998, Morrow. 218

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– a figure who looms large in Tony Kushner’s epic plays, Angels in America. Part I of Angels and America, “Millenium Approaches,” opens with a focus on the same New York Eastern European Jewish immigrant culture that Dubner discusses. As Jewish Louis ponders leaving his WASP lover who has just been diagnosed with AIDS, the rabbi who buried Louis’s grandmother tells him “The Holy Scriptures have nothing to say about” a person “who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need.”63 Catholics have confession and forgiveness, Rabbi Chemelwitz says; Jews have guilt. In this decidedly Jewish play by a secular playwright, Jews betray other Jews. The famous McCarthy lawyer Roy Cohn is known to be a Jew, but is threatened with outing as a homosexual by his AIDS diagnosis. As he is dying, Cohn is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg whose death he is held responsible for. Louis’s Gentile boyfriend Prior, as he battles AIDS, becomes a prophet – or perhaps a Christ-figure. Louis, meanwhile, is marked as a betrayer. Discussing Prior with the AfricanAmerican queer nurse Belize, Louis talks about a cut on his forehead. “I cut my forehead, here, see, and now I can’t see much and my forehead … it’s like the Mark of Cain, stupid, right, but it won’t heal and every morning I see it and I think, Biblical things, Mark of Cain, Judas Iscariot and his silver and his noose, people who … in betraying what they love betray what’s truest in themselves.”64 In his guilt, the nonreligious yet culturally Jewish Louis inserts himself into Christian narrative, as the betrayer of his Gentile lover. His body is marked, like the bodies of those with AIDS. Kruger writes elsewhere that the “experience of HIV illness is often conceived as involving a conversion of the self (we speak, e.g., of ‘seroconversion’).”65 If the secular Jewish Kushner’s magnum opus is marked with the spiritual blood of Judaism, its employment of Christian tropes and religions (especially Mormonism) underscores the influence of Christianity on Jewish artists. At the end of the plays, the vision of the healing fountain of Bethesda infuses hope for a world where redemption comes in the form of human kindness: a world where God can only be found in the touch of the Other.

63  Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millenium Approaches. Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 31. Both plays originally published 1992. 64  Ibid., 105. 65  Steven F. Kruger, “Identity and Conversion in Angels in America,” Approaching the Millenium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 155. On Jewishness in the play, see also Alisa Solomon, “Wrestling with Angels: A Jewish Fantasia” in the same volume (118-133). 219

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Angels, and Engelsteins, in Arditti

In their introduction to Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini set their goal as the investigation of “the rhetorical and theoretical connections that tie together the constellations ‘Jew’ and ‘homosexual.’”66 They note that late nineteenth-century theories of racial difference essentializing the Jew as a type invented a particular kind of modern anti-Semitism in the same way that the late Victorian definition of the category of identity called “the homosexual” created modern homophobia.67 How do these areas intersect? In two novels by Michael Arditti, Easter (2000) and The Celibate (1993), how are these categories further complicated and elucidated by two twentieth-century matrices upon which human suffering is plotted: the Holocaust and AIDS? To the point of this discussion, how does Arditti’s AngloCatholic theology inflect the particular manifestation of all of these experiences – Jewish, Holocaust, conversion; homosexual, AIDS, seroconversion? If it is dangerous to compare the Shoah to other forms of suffering, certain similarities in responses can be shown. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, reactionary politicians suggested that people with AIDS be put in internment camps. During outbreaks of plagues in the Middle Ages, Jews were blamed for poisoning wells, or otherwise infecting or corrupting the air.68 This naming of responsible blame, triggered by homophobia and anti-Semitism, makes it possible to link these two categories of identity. Kushner’s Angels in America analyzes the idea of community among Jews as well as gays. The gay African-American nurse Belize despised by Roy Cohn tells Cohn to get his hands on AZT, the drug that in 1985 was prolonging the lives of people with AIDS. When Cohn eventually dies, Belize asks Louis, the Jew-he-knew, to say Kaddish for Cohn. The secular Louis receives the words from the spirit of Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn’s AZT stash goes to WASP prophet Prior, who thus indirectly benefits from Cohn’s access to power: Prior lives. Despite the obvious distinctions between people defined by their sexual behavior versus individuals marked by their “race” and religion, both populations – homosexuals and Jews – are subject to particular kinds of oppression in the West by Christian culture. Blood – Jewish blood and AIDS blood – signifies more than other markers of difference: people who share a marginalized identity yet might otherwise be enemies pulse into unholy alliances. 66  Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1. See also discussion of this passage in the introduction to this volume. 67  Ibid., 3. 68  My thanks to Steve Kruger for sharing his lecture on plagues medieval and postmodern, presented at New York University on December 2, 2005. 220

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When I interviewed Michael Arditti, he explained that he writes about the Holocaust because it is the greatest evil to have occurred in recent memory. He also regularly writes about AIDS, including in a sermon he gave as a layperson on World AIDS Day some years ago. He preached on the nature of suffering: as an abstract idea versus active physical suffering which he calls “continuing crucifixion.”69 Arditti says he understands suffering as a part of God’s purpose: the only way in which the exercise of free will can have meaning. His perspective is reminiscent of Jewish Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl’s argument in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.70 Everything rests on human action. However much we may distance Jesus’s suffering on the cross from us as voluntary and ordained by God, it is nevertheless enacted at the hands of humanity. In an intensely incarnational theology, Arditti asserts, “if there is to be any meaning to be found in the idea of being made in God’s image, it is that we have moral discrimination.”71 For Christianity, Arditti sees this as the work of the Holy Spirit in the world. Suffering provides a framework through which our lives might claim purpose: to exercise moral choice. He says that “morality is what I write about,” and “religion is of interest to me because it’s often the public profession of morality”: where it breaks down.72 Arditti notes that Judaism “is an important part of me and it’s an important part of Christianity.”73 Arditti’s contributions to contemporary Jewish thought have a significant publication history. One of his books, A Sea-Change, charts a Jewish boy’s coming of age on the St. Louis, the famous vessel carrying European refugees that was turned away by Cuba, returning many to their deaths. Another book, Unity, was shortlisted for the British Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Award. An excerpt from his novel Easter was published there some years ago. That book, which examines the lives of members of and visitors to an English parish during Holy Week (Palm Sunday to Easter), demonstrates the journey of the Passion. It traces a Jewish woman’s return to the faith of her childhood. Trudy England, a retired secretary, is presented as a troubled member of St. Mary-in-the-Vale. She carries a secret, which she ponders during the Palm Sunday Eucharist: The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life. For fifty years, Trudy has never once stood at the rail without wondering whether this will be the day when God strikes her down. If He looks into her heart, as 69  Arditti, interview. 70  Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books, 1997). Originally published 1959. 71  Arditti, interview. 72  Ibid. 73  Ibid. 221

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Jesus promised, then she has nothing to fear; but if He looks into her blood then she is doomed. Shaking like a bigamist at the banns, she swallows the wafer. When nothing happens, she starts to relax. She waits for the wine. Then, as Blair lifts it to her lips, a lie-detector detonates around her. It rings in her ears and her brain and her stomach. She chokes and retches. Sacrilege is averted only by Blair’s deft removal of the cup.74

Trudy receives the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood with fear in her heart. She thinks her blood gives her away because she bears the mark of the Jews who killed Christ. She drinks the transubstantiated wine, the blood of Christ, aware of the anti-Semitic accusations that Jews drink Christian blood. When an elderly parishoner’s alarm goes off, Trudy panics and chokes on the wine as if she finally has been caught – or that her body is rejecting the sacrifice she wrongfully claimed for herself. The crux of her post-traumatic stress is the crisis of the Jewish Christian: having closeted her Judaism, fifty years of her life have been contradiction, strife. When she recovers her composure – the noise is compared to “a gasworks built for a single Jew” – she concludes that her “secret is safe for another week.”75 Trudy’s “secret” is revealed during celebration of the Stations of the Cross – the visual devotion Christians prayerfully practice that recounts the suffering and death of Jesus. [This section is the portion of the novel that was excerpted.] At the first station, “Jesus is condemned to death,” “Trudy looks at the face of Christ as at a human parchment. She sees her history written in His expression. Etched on His features are those of her father and uncles. Echoing from His sentence is the death-knell of her youth.”76 Trudy sees the Jewish Jesus: one who is condemned to die. The parish’s Stations are a contemporary interpretation of the story, created by an artist who is a member. They depict events leading up to the death of a person living with AIDS. But for Trudy, the narrative is the concentration camp. “The court has been transposed from Jerusalem to Vienna. The judges are no longer high priests but petty functionaries … He has become the ‘filthy Jew’ of popular myth.”77 She relives the trauma of her childhood: “she recalls the little shops on the Judenviertel.”78 Jesus becomes Solomon Engelstein, Trudy’s father. The crown of thorns is instead anti-Jewish slogans; the cross is a pile of holy relics, “as high as the Christmas tree in the Rathausplatz, a symbol both of His oppressor’s faith and His own shame.”79 74  75  76  77  78  79 

Michael Arditti, Easter (London: Arcadia, 2000), 18-19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 23. 222

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Trudy reads Jesus’s strain under the cross as the damage to his back from having to hide out in an attic. She knows that Holy Week is the most dangerous time for Jews. She contrasts her life as a refugee with those who stayed – and died. In the station of Jesus meeting Mary, Trudy recalls saying farewell to her own mother. “For sixty years she has tried to make sense of this abandonment; at first, wondering why her parents hated her, and then, when horror recreated her life in the image of a newsreel, why they believed her unworthy to share their deaths.”80 The person who helps Jesus carry His cross, Simon of Cyrene, has been rendered as a black man by the artist; Trudy recalls Nazi attitudes about nonwhite races. Veronica, who wiped the face of Jesus, is clothed as a nun; Trudy recalls a friend sheltered by nuns during the war who went on to take vows herself. Sent away to a convent during the London blitz, Trudy also knew nuns; she remembers being taunted as a “Jew” by schoolgirls there – not because they had found out her secret, but because she did not share a cake and they maligned her with an ethnic stereotype. The fear that once sent her to a sanatorium has made her paranoid in her own home: she associates the health department’s visits with the government malevolence of her childhood. The women of Jerusalem who meet Jesus in the eighth station bring up identification and rejection: These were the women whom she used to see in the streets around Swiss Cottage, victims of their own survival, with memories as livid as scars. They walked down the Finchley Road as if it were the Kartnerstrasse, filling the cafes with the scent of Vienna – the violet-scented soap that put her in mind of her mother. And she remembers what she has read about soap and imagines that scent on another woman’s skin. A place called Swiss Cottage should be neutral but they made it a source of danger, wearing their over-elaborate clothes and over-emphatic jewels like an act of defiance, adding inches to their height with their hair so stiffened that it hurt. She never spoke to them – that would suggest they had something in common – but she longed to point out that, even in London, they were making themselves a target. They should take their cue from her.81

Trudy has closeted her Jewishness. The “i” of her name became a “y”; her surname Engelstein became “England.” She lost her self, and became an adjective and noun of a foreign nation. But Trudi can’t hide forever; her landlord is trying to push her out.

80  Ibid., 25. 81  Ibid., 27. 223

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In the next station, Jesus’s third fall, His body is not visible. “The identification of man and Cross is as absolute as the identification of Jew and race.”82 She reflects on the Aryan faces of the Hollywood Jesus, and observes, “if Christ were not a Jew, then there was no reason for the Nazis to kill the Jews; in which case the Holocaust could not have happened.”83 Since having learned that many film producers were Jewish, she can understand the Aryan Jesus. They shared her closet; all claimed a belief in erasure of the past. While the tenth station, “Jesus is stripped of His garments,” is meant by the artist to convey a hospital, to Trudy it is a concentration camp. Christ loses His identity in a uniform. Trudy claims a deeper understanding of the suffering than her fellow worshippers. “This is not just Jesus’s journey, but her mother’s, her father’s, her five-yearsolder sister who stayed behind in Vienna because her parents were determined not to disrupt her schooling.”84 Trudy tries desperately to distance herself, but it is impossible for her to do so. As Jesus is nailed to the cross in the next station, Trudy sees pseudo-scientific experimentation at Auschwitz. “She is riddled with guilt at her own survival. It makes no sense that six million died and yet she has been spared.”85 Survivor’s guilt has shaped her life. The artist shows no body in Jesus’s death on the cross. To Trudy, this makes sense, given the impossibility of representing the Holocaust, “which would require a canvas six million pieces long.”86 This station, which the artist rendered as a cross, an empty plastic bag, and a pool of blood – AIDS-infected blood was actually used in making it – is the most poignant for Trudy’s associations. “The Passion has been reduced to its most basic element … A single grandparent will infect the supply like a virus.”87 She sees not the usual INRI on the cross – Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews – but just JUDE. The purity of Christ’s blood is its role in the sacrament of the Last Supper, the sacrifice of the cross. Here its presentation is the opposite, “as if it is not only Christ the victim but Christ the saviour who resembles her. And that cannot be true.”88 As the body is taken down from the cross, Trudy imagines with revulsion a visit to a former concentration camp as a sort of theme-park experience. She will never go back to the Continent, but nor can she ever forget what happened there. Attending the Good Friday service, Trudy has a breakdown.

82  83  84  85  86  87  88 

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 30. 224

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Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant. Trudy never feels the pain of her Jewishness more acutely than on Good Friday. Her longing to miss the service is exceeded only by the fear that to do so might expose her to comment. She feels a complicity in murder as intimate as that of a woman on the anniversary of her abortion. It is the day from which she dates her loss of innocence, ever since a schoolfriend refused to talk to her in the park because she had killed the baby Jesus. At once, all her parents’ hopes of assimilation were dashed.89

Trudy suffers the memories of an internalized anti-Semitism in addition to her survivor’s guilt. “She did kill Jesus. All the Jews did, however much they may try to deny it. They cannot have it both ways. If they insist on tracing their identity back to the Old Testament, then they have to accept responsibility for what they did in the New … Her life has been an attempt to atone for her guilt.”90 But it is Trudy’s church as well as her conscience that blames her. The old service book that the vicar ignores states “‘deliver this people from the darkness of their ignorance.’”91 Her anxiety over her domestic instability haunts her: “She is condemned like Him and she is condemned for Him.”92 As the choir sings the Good Friday Reproaches, Trudy England breaks and Trudi Engelstein emerges. Hysterical, she beats her breast, exclaiming, “‘Jew! Jew! I am a Jew! I killed Christ and I am poisoning your church. I eat your bread and I drink your wine, but I am an impostor. I am a Jew! A Jew!’”93 In the sacristy, revived with communion wine, the vicar’s wife Jessica comforts her. Trudy confesses her story – her fears and terrors. “‘I thought I could hide, as much from God as from anything. If I came to church every Sunday, He’d grow used to me. He’d forget that I’d ever been anything else. When I stood in line for Heaven, I wouldn’t have to wear a yellow star.’”94 Jessica argues that Christ is one way to God, but not the only way. “The one you believe in is a choice, but it’s not a choice like the colour of your curtains. The choice chooses you. The only crime is to deny the choice in your heart.”95 Jessica arranges for Trudy to celebrate Passover with a Jewish family she knows. Although she is terribly nervous, when Trudy is handed a haggadah, “prompted by an instinct which she believed lay buried alongside her parents, [she] turns 89  90  91  92  93  94  95 

Ibid., 114. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 121. 225

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to the back. She has returned to the back-to-front world of her childhood, but it no longer seems odd. On the contrary, it has a logic and a magic reminiscent of the inverted words in the codes she invented with Eva. At the thought of her sister, her eyes fill with pain.”96 As she sits through the meal, Trudy reflects on the church where she’d ordinarily be at the time, the Last Supper as the Passover meal. Looking around, if the people “transport her back to Vienna and the heavily furnished dining-room of their flat in the Neulinggasse,” the food on the Seder plate brings her out of the “dryness of the Red Sea with a nation which has escaped the wrath of Pharoah. And she realizes that her childhood faith was not destroyed in Auschwitz, that its source lies much deeper and she is tapping into it once again. God’s love is revealed as clearly at Passover as on the Cross. No meal has ever meant so much to her, not even the food parcels sent from America during the war. She is back at the table she left in 1938 and to which she failed to return, even after the final All Clear. The ritual has resumed as if sixty years were a mere gap between courses. It is the same Passover supper that her parents served before organizing an egg hunt on Easter morning. But what they had viewed as the best of both worlds, others held to be divided loyalties.97

“Memories return, which she thought had been held back at the Austrian border.”98 Trudy relives her flight from Vienna, a maid’s deception, and her new life with an English Gentile family, an associate of her father’s bank. Back in the present, the children of her hosts ask too many questions. Eventually, the course of the meal becomes too much for her; she calls herself a Jew-killer. Trudy breaks down and reveals her truth. She could have sent for her sister, but childhood sibling rivalry kept her from doing so. For sixty years, she has held herself responsible for her sister’s death. The family entreat her to forgive herself, and at their Passover meal say Kaddish for Trudy’s dead relatives. “A deep peace descends on her. She has recovered the faith beyond consciousness – and conversion – which is patterned in her blood. As she prays, she begins to bury her guilt and to breathe the true holiness of God.”99 At that same Stations of the Cross where Trudy England recalled her buried past, a young gay man named Joe Beatty, HIV-positive, experienced the depictions differently. Yet their narratives intersect. At the sixth station, where Veronica who wiped the face of Jesus is portrayed as a nun, Joe recalls Sister Hanna who was born a Jew in Vienna and converted in the convent 96  97  98  99 

Ibid., 127. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 135. 226

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which sheltered her from the Nazis. Having been a nun for nearly fifty years, she has spent the past decade working among people affected by the virus. She neither proselytizes nor judges … And yet her commitment leads her into constant conflict with the hierarchy of her Order, which prefers a less practical application of prayer. The love with which Veronica wipes the face of Jesus puts him in mind of Sister Hanna at the deathbed of his friend Jacques. As the sheets soaked up more than his weight in water and he lay in a bandage of towels … as his teeth chattered and his body temperature fell until the sweat froze on his skin, she pulled down the blankets and stretched out beside him, warming his racked body in her embrace.100

Joe’s Sister Hanna is the woman whom Trudy recalls from girlhood. Joe and Trudy experience complementary readings of Christ’s death; Arditti repeats the very sentence: “The Passion has been reduced to its most basic element.” What counts is not its provenance, whether it is pure or impure or any of the other things that racists looks for – but simply whether it is healthy. A single drop will infect the supply the way that a Jewish grandparent did for the Nazis. He looks to the top of the Cross, where Pilate wrote INRI, and, although he is too far off to see without squinting, he is sure that Alice has written AIDS. He feels again the identification which he lost at the last station, as his blood stands for Christ’s blood just as Christ’s blood was shed for his. [The artist] was right. Even if no one else ever knows, it is important that it should be infected blood which is put at the heart both of the Crucifixion and of the Church.101

It is Joe’s HIV-infected blood that stands in, which is redeemed: just as it was Jesus’s blood that was Jewish for Trudy – and for the whole of the Church. The Easter service, after a Holy Week filled with scandals, is held outdoors as the church has burnt – its own holocaust, or passion of sacrifice. The curate preaches that “Christ became incarnate not in order to redeem a sinful people who had cut themselves off from salvation but to reassure a suffering people of their unity with God. Or, to put it another way, the world was not in a state of sin waiting for Christ to rescue it; the world is in a state of grace, waiting for us to recognize it.”102 Trudy came to church that Easter – not in Christian faith but in some greater solidarity: 100  Ibid., 236. 101  Ibid., 240-241. 102  Ibid., 377. 227

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Trudy is no longer afraid of the Peace, having found a peace in herself. She is grateful for all the hands that are offered and holds out her own in return, but she can no longer hold out her heart. She had not intended to come to church this morning, but, when she opened her curtains and saw the flames, she knew that she must. And yet it is not the real her … she found that at last night’s Seder, and she will be returning to it this afternoon. The strange thing about the [Easter] service is that, although she has been able to follow every word, it has no meaning for her – rather like hearing German after she moved to England. But, this time, she knows better than to tear up her past. So, when people speak to her of Christ, she resorts to a careful compromise, replying with a more general expression of Peace.103

At the Lord’s Supper, her participation and sacramental participation are felt most. Although Trudy no longer feels able to take the Sacrament, she still feels a part of the communion. On the way to church, she bumped into Jessica rushing down the path in search of bread for the Host. She thought of the box of Matzah which her friends had given her to take home and which she had kept in her bag for luck. Dismissing the fear that it might be sacrilegious, she produced it for Jessica, who pronounced it perfect. So, although she won’t be going up to the rail… she is cheered to find that, in her own way, she remains one with them and that the passover bread of the Jews is again serving for the body of Christ.104

Although one could read this passage as yet another sacrifice of Judaism in the service of Christianity, it is important to note that Trudy gives of her abundance – of peace, love, and security in her childhood faith. Although this novel traces the spiritual journeys of so many diverse characters sketched by Arditti – based on race, class, gender, age, sexual orientation, economics, bodily health, and national identification – I have focused here on Trudy’s story for obvious reasons. In Trudy the author paints a portrait of Holocaust post-traumatic stress and Jewish recovery in the face of, if not conversion, at least fearful assimilation. Arditti’s earlier novel, The Celibate, may show an integration of Christian character in a young gay man – but that process of self-realization comes not only through his processing of sexuality in relation to spirituality, but also the full ownership of his Jewishness. If Easter’s Trudi Engelstein was an “angelstone” (like St. Peter, Petrus, the rock upon whom the Church was built), the narrator of The Celibate is nameless. 103  Ibid., 386. 104  Ibid., 389. 228

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While I have suggested that like his homosexuality, his unnamed self reflects the love that dare not speak its name, his lack of specific identity also claims an incarnate everyman in Christ. Easter is a scathing critique of how marginally Christian the contemporary Church really is, and how much the institution needs the redemption of the Resurrection and the action of human hands put to good use. The Celibate, as a complement, is a brilliant, poetic meditation on how incarnational Christianity can heal the historical separation of the soul from the body found in all-too-familiar bad theology. This re-weaving of soul and body requires putting the Jewish body back into the Christian soul. The unnamed narrator of the book speaks to three audiences: a psychotherapist and two tour groups – one on a “Jack the Ripper” walking tour of London, the other surveying a village decimated by the plague. The entire novel exists as a first-person narration. The young man has been sent to psychotherapy because he had a breakdown on the altar. A candidate for the Anglo-Catholic priesthood, he somehow broke and attacked a priest whom he loved, spilling the communion wine – the blood of Christ. Theological inflections for the narrator are all too real. His breakdown occurs on January 25 – the feast of St. Paul, that famous Jewish convert to Christianity. Here, the lover of Christ spills His blood, the opposite of Paul’s move from persecutor of Christians to promoter of the faith. In the course of his therapy sessions, the narrator names his heritage. He was born into a Rothschild-esque family, raised in baronial splendor at a castle called Edensor (an obvious allusion to Eden, a Biblical Windsor like Trudi Engelstein’s England). The epitome of the unreliable narrator, he states: Not that I’ve ever made any secret of my family’s religion; nor do I even regret the bitter struggle it’s cost. On the contrary I’ve felt it’s yet another tie that binds me to Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, the Jew who became the Christ. And although in the past, I admit, it may have caused a number of complications, I wouldn’t like you to think it’s caused me any complexes.105

His childhood room had images from Hebrew history in its elaborate décor; he watched the events of Masada from his bed. His sickly mother had died in a fire. He was raised by a maiden aunt (his father’s sister) who hounded her brother for having married a Gentile. So our narrator notes that he’s not even a true Jew, by his aunt’s standards. Growing up, he sought solace in the local church, the one place his aunt could not reach him. He felt called to become a priest, which he insists is no “sacrifice.” However, he fearfully associates his breakdown at the altar, the spilling of Christ’s blood, with God’s rejection of his theological sacrifice. The narrator is the epitome of Jewish self-hatred: he is not 105  Michael Arditti, The Celibate, op. cit., 19-20. 229

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good enough to be a true Jew, and yet neither is he worthy to sacrifice himself through Christ’s own sacrifice. In the course of his sessions, the narrator’s crises are elucidated. Jonathan, the priest he loved, had preached radical re-interpretations of the Biblical stories. He argued that the incest taboo was the real reason that homosexuality had been accentuated as worse, in order to divert attention from incestuous marriages in the foundation of Israel. “And so for thousands of years a grave injustice had been done to a group of people who’d been made the scapegoats for the innate guilt of every Jew who traced his faith back to his forefather Abraham and every Christian who based his faith on the faith of the Jews.”106 The narrator is twice blessed: as a Jew, and, as the novel unfolds, as a homosexual. He describes his breakdown as his body striking back. That body is both the homosexual body that loved Jonathan unrequitedly and chastely as well as the body of the Jew that has been indicted, and ultimately spills Christ’s blood. When Jonathan visits him in the hospital, the narrator wishes he could talk, and wants to forgive him, but instead he expectorates at him. “And for a moment I saw that I was the man who first spilt Christ’s blood and then spat in his face.”107 Jonathan as vicar of Christ stands in for Him. He is the man the narrator loves and whom, like Christ, he cannot have. The narrator’s Jewishness blocks him from Christ, as does his unreconciled and despised homosexual orientation. In a later session, he reflects on the day of judgment: “we who’ve lived with Christ and then rejected him will be dealt with most severely of all … Tell me, do many of your clients claim to be the anti-Christ?”108 Elsewhere he states that it was his goal to exceed Christ’s suffering, to prove himself. Like the Jewish mob who denied Pontius Pilate’s offer to spare Jesus, the narrator tries to save a criminal, a “Barabbas” instead.109 At a crucial “crossroads” in his therapy, he substitutes body worship for Christ worship: he throws himself into sex with a male prostitute named Jack. While he is beginning to claim his erotic body, he is also giving walking tours about the famous Victorian murderer of female prostitutes, Jack the Ripper. Just as he believes he is a Christ-killer, he now imagines himself capable of killing other desirable men’s bodies. He must recover both his Jewish and his homosexual body. He identifies with the most famous Jew of Christian anti-Semitism, Judas.110 In his walking tour on Jack the Ripper the narrator notes, in passing the famous Bevis Marks synagogue, that his forefathers had been among the founders – and that Jews had at one point been blamed for the Victorian murders. 106  107  108  109  110 

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 122. 230

Faith of Our Fathers as Blood Sacrifice

With time, the narrator changes – transubstantiates, as it were. He finds a real boyfriend rather than a prostitute. Mark is adamant that it’s impossible to be both Christian and gay – “he insists that it’s as much a contradiction as a Jewish anti-Semite: another charge I’ve had levelled at me before now.”111 He claims to have fully integrated his spirituality and homosexuality, and while the narrator of course is overstating the case, he has grown. The utter isolation and trauma he had experienced as his Jewishness begins to break through. He says that the line in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” always made him feel like Shylock. In school he auditioned for other parts in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, but, he says, “the producers could see no further than their noses – or rather, mine,” one of the few mentions the narrator makes of his body’s ability to signify its difference, whether Jewish or homosexual.112 Schoolboys were not specifically anti-Semitic: they were just ignorant. Once again, the matter comes down to blood. Their treatment of him made him black-and-blue. “But the bulk of their gibes and the burden of my guilt was rather that it was Christ who had suffered for me – and not on my behalf, but on my account. And beneath the taunts I could hear the strain of the cruellest verse in the entire Bible: ‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’”113 “I wanted to redeem myself, and not just from the sin of Adam but from the sin of Israel. And even though I’d yet to be confirmed, I longed to take the sacraments every day so that by filling myself full of Christ’s blood my own could be washed clean.”114 As a child, he went so far as to play at celebrating mass. When his aunt discovered him, she insisted he be refused participation in chapel at school, “which to my tormentors was further proof that I was endowed with the luck of the Devil – or at any rate, the guile of the Jews.”115 Instead, he was made to study in preparation for being barmitzvahed. The young man had no appreciation for his aunt’s faith, or the weight of tradition and his family’s exalted role in the English Jewish community – which hung upon him like his grandfather’s gold-threaded prayer shawl that he found himself unwittingly unraveling. The foreignness of the religious Jewish world made him feel all the more alone, unlike the Christianity he had come to know as home. On the day of his bar mitzvah, his aunt confided in him a hope that one day he would become a rabbi. He was unable to go through with the reading: it would have been a betrayal of both his faith and his aunt’s. Although he knew his passage from memory, he was unable to read it. The letters blurred, which the narrator associated with St. Paul’s blindness on the road to Damascus. The 111  112  113  114  115 

Ibid., 178. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 181-182. 231

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response was outrage, since he was the scion of such a prominent family. But for him, this was really becoming a man: asserting himself. His aunt and father were horrified: he tells them he is unable to deny his convictions – especially when Christ had died for them. The trauma was so great that afterwards his aunt left England to work on behalf of Soviet Jews in Israel. From this harsh narrative, it is clear that what the narrator views as betrayal of his family and his aunt’s faith had traumatized him. He weeps during his therapy session: “She’d devoted her life to me and I’d devalued it in front of her family and friends and so utterly that she could never face any of them again.”116 His father, who had never been religious, was nevertheless angry. The narrator admits that “when I think of the Old Testament God it is almost exclusively in terms of an authoritarian father.” He understands his family dramas through the lens of the Old Testament stories, especially Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. For the narrator, there is only Christ: “And maybe one day he’ll reconcile me to my earthly father, just as he did long ago to the divine.”117 Bloodlines in The Celibate, as in Easter, literally concern blood: the blood of Christ, of the Jews, and of people with AIDS. The narrator’s lover’s ex-partner is diagnosed, and the novel takes a turn with this focus. The experience of AIDS becomes a move into community for the narrator in a way he had never known before. If being a “survivor” here he is marked like those Jews who were not directly affected by the Holocaust, he nevertheless finds within his gay community an opportunity for connection. He eventually attends a Christian AIDS retreat in the town of Eyam, which was decimated by the plague in the seventeenth century. There he is reunited with Jonathan, his priest and true love. The narrator begins putting together the pieces of his Christian faith in relation to his identity as a gay man living in the age of AIDS. Reflecting on his departure from the retreat, he later tells his therapist, “I knew that one day I’d return to Eyam, as surely as the night before I’d returned to God.”118 The two are intimately connected, for he is in the process of returning to the “I AM,” the God whose name cannot be spoken – like the narrator’s identity. Upon returning to London, he works with an AIDS group and finds, of all people, his uncle – his late mother’s brother, now a person living with AIDS. What emerges from yet another small breakdown is that his uncle had abused him as a child. The narrator longed for a father, and in his uncle he found someone else: the rest of his life had been a narrative of self-blame made real in Jonathan’s sermon on the Jewish incest taboo that scapegoated homosexuality as a deflection. In the loss of the Eden (that was Edensor), he had invented an Original Sin that only Christ could redeem. His father’s absence left him with contempt for the 116  Ibid., 185. 117  Ibid., 187. 118  Ibid., 278. 232

Faith of Our Fathers as Blood Sacrifice

patriarchs of the Bible. He despised his own body for the fall of humankind. His body, like Christ’s, needed to serve as the sacrifice in this new covenant. Reconciliation comes in the form of healing his relationship with the father who had abandoned him. Upon his uncle’s death (a particularly bloody affair), the narrator’s father comes back to England and questions get answered. His father’s avoidance of him came from the memory evoked of the narrator’s mother. The missing link is Judaism and the Holocaust. His father’s mother, a Viennese, had withdrawn into the world of Edensor after the loss of her family. How could her son marry a Gentile after all that had happened? For his wife to convert to Judaism would not have been enough: to the narrator’s grandmother, “religion began and ended with blood.”119 So the father waited until his mother’s death to marry the woman he loved, and their child became a constant reminder of his betrayal of his mother and his heritage. The narrator was born on a day that a group of neo-fascists attempted to burn down Bevis Marks. Yet his father loved him so deeply, almost pathologically – how could he have brought a child into a world of such suffering? The father had nightmares of the Holocaust, and withdrew from his child because his fear of losing him was so great. He finally left his wife and son at Edensor. His wife’s subsequent death in a fire had been by her own hand. In this return of father to son, the father asks the narrator if he has any idea what it felt like to have lived through the age of Auschwitz and survived. As the narrator compares his father’s survivor’s guilt to his own, as one who was living through the age of AIDS, his Jewishness breaks through. He understands his Christianity as having embraced the Son, having no patience for a Father whom he understood as impervious to suffering. But there was as great a suffering in the Creation as in the Incarnation; whilst God suffered as much by proxy in the Old Testament as in person in the New. Even the stories of Abraham and Jephthah were emblems of his agonised love. But I refused to see. I made God the Father in my father’s image and my father in God’s, thereby rejecting them both.120

He comes out to his father as a gay man, and in a gesture of blessing, his father places his hand on his forehead. Near the end of the novel, the narrator takes a second retreat in Eyam. He does a dance – for the grace he has received in his life, and that it was Jesus, and not he, destined for sacrifice. The dance underscores his experience of having a body. He eventually consummates his relationship with Jonathan. But he also seals, at the end of the book, his desire, and readiness, to return to his 119  Ibid., 309. 120  Ibid., 312-313. 233

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studies for the priesthood. He has absolved himself from guilt – personally and collectively – for Jesus’s death. He has known suffering in the world: suffering that can lead one to action, not suffering that serves as punishment. Christianity has chosen him; for better or worse, he has also chosen it. In a sense, he has not rejected Judaism, for in truth he is not Jewish by Halakhah anyway, since his mother was a Gentile. Judaism is not “incomplete” in the novel. Rather, its own integrity leaves him at peace as a Christian of Jewish heritage to experience joy rather than self-blame. If Easter offered Trudi Engelstein a peaceful return to Judaism, The Celibate offers integration to the troubled Christian “half-Jew.” Coda: Sero/conversion

In the thoughts of Easter’s Jewish Trudy and HIV-positive Joe: “A single grandparent will infect the supply like a virus.” “A single drop will infect the supply the way that a Jewish grandparent did for the Nazis.”

I offer this study for all the “Jewish Christians,” “half-Jews” and otherwise; and to honor those Jews who claim Christian descendants, and those Christians who celebrate their Jewish ancestry. May the Crucifixions and Holocausts of human suffering draw less blood in the future than they have in the past. May Christianity, the Son of a Jewish Father, honor that father in his own integrity and renounce supersessionist theologies. May the diaspora of Jewish blood into Christian bodies still keep holy the blessing, in Kushner’s words, that is “more life.”121

121  Kushner, op. cit., 288. 234

Index Note: Numbers in brackets preceded by n are footnote numbers. Aaron’s pectoral 15 Abraham 81, 88, 89, 112, 206, 232 Abrahamic traditions 5 Achilles Tatius 41-42, 44 Ackroyd, Peter 76(n21) Addleshaw, George 73, 74, 75 adultery 54, 58-59, 61 aesthetic/aesthete 96 aggada 45, 46 AIDS see HIV/AIDS Alfonsi, Peter 14, 49, 50, 53-54, 54(n19) Alfonso X of Castille 209 Alison, James 7(n12) allegory 60-63 Allen, Peter, Lewis 116, 119 Alroy, The Wondrous Tale of (Disraeli) 87, 104 Althaus-Reid, Marcella 7(n12) Ambrose of Milan 89 ancient/sacred sites 79, 81-82 androgyny 30-31 Angels in America (Kushner) 219, 220 Anglicanism 12, 14-15, 67, 70 architecture of see Queen Anne churches Anne, Queen see Queen Anne churches Anson, Peter 129, 137 antisemitism 2, 3, 15-16, 17, 213, 216 and Christian theology 206-209

circumcision and see circumcision of converts 65, 95 degeneration theory 110, 117, 123 genital obsession 122-124 and homophobia 105-109, 108(n11) inbreeding 123 Jack the Ripper and 112-115 in literature 183, 185-188 modern invention of 128, 220 and national identity 88 and psychoanalysis 106-107 and science 105, 106-107, 109, 112, 115-116 and sexual immorality 111-112, 113, 117-118, 122-123 stereotypes 108-109, 111-112, 129, 223 violent 127, 208 Anzaldua, Gloria 8 apocalyptic theme 61-62, 63 Apollonius (Philostratus) 37, 45-46 apostacy 117-118 Apuleius 40-41 Aquinas, Thomas 20 Arditti, Michael 17-18, 205-234 context for writings 205-219 HIV/AIDS and 220-221, 222, 224, 226-227, 232, 233 Holocaust and 221, 224-227, 228, 232, 233 Jewish/Christian identity of 221 Passion of Christ and 221-229

Jewish/Christian/Queer

suffering/guilt and 221-226, 229230, 232-233, 234 Ark of the Covenant 71, 72, 75 art and religion 210-213 artist/artistic 96, 99-100 Aryan ideal 9, 130, 142, 170, 174, 176 of Jesus 224 Ashkenazic Judaism 2, 17, 94, 97 Ask Me No More (Frankau) 193, 203 assimilation 17, 47(n2), 70-71, 76, 143, 159, 218 Augustine 14 Aunt Edith (Batzdorff) 217-218 Auschwitz 213-214, 222, 224, 233 Auschwitz, A Theology of (Simon) 213214 Avis, Joseph 71 Aviv, Caryn 6(n12) Baal-Teshuva, Jacob 210 Babylonian Talmud 35-36, 40, 44-45, 46, 97 Bagguley, Philip 184 Bakhtin, Mikhail 37, 45 Balaam’s ass 57 baptism 50-52 Barbarus 40-41 Barth, Karl 19-20, 27-28 Basilica plan 76-77 Batzdorff, Susanne 217-218 Bayerlein, Fritz 172 Beckford, William 99 Benedict XIII 48 Bentinck, Lord George 92 Bersani, Leo 141-142, 142(n9) Bethnel Green church 76 Bevis Marks synagogue 70, 71, 72, 73, 83, 230 Bhabha, Homi 7 Bible 15, 30, 31 and architecture 71, 75, 77-78 and Newton 79-80, 83-84

see also specific books biological determinism 3-4, 11, 12, 17, 106 of Paul 22, 23, 30 bisexuality 162, 163(n42), 172 bloodletting 120, 121 bloodlines see genealogy Blüher, Hans 110-111 bodies 10 and antisemitism 108-109 and architectural symbolism 15, 69 and conversion 2, 12-13 and mind/desire 68-69 Book of Common Prayer 67, 69, 70, 75 Border Lines (Boyarin) 3, 4, 5-6, 7 born-again 12-13 Boyarin, Daniel 3, 4, 5-6, 7, 10, 20, 97-98, 106-107, 112, 128, 165(n45), 220 Branham, John 72 Bredbeck, Greg 103 bribes 35, 41 Bridge, The (Frankau) 17, 188, 194195, 196, 200, 203 Britain see England; Scotland British Empire 104 brothels 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43 male 114 Brown, Angela 6-7(n12) Burke, Edmund 90, 91, 93-94 Burrus, Virginia 38, 44 Butler, Judith 146-147 Byron, Lord 99, 101-102 Cabbala 81 Cathars 56 Catholicism 3, 6, 104, 205 converts to see conversion/ converts and homosexuality 12, 135-136

236

index

CBST (Beth Simcha Torah) 6(n11) celibacy 3, 12 The Celibate (Arditti) 17-18, 205, 220, 228-234 Chagall, Marc 210 chancel/rood screen 69, 71, 72, 73-76 La Charité-sur-Loire 56 Charles I 91 chastity 44 tests 35, 41-43 children 11, 13 see also pedophilia Christ see Jesus Christchurch Newgate 72 Christchurch Spitalfields 74-75 Christian identity and conversion 2, 14, 63-65 and goyim 24, 27-28 homosexual 229-231 see also Jewish-Christian identity Christian law 3 Christian women 8, 11, 21, 21(n7), 22 Christiani, Pablo 14, 49, 53 Christianity/Christian theology 2, 3, 206-209 evangelical 4, 5 Jews/gender in 19-20 Judaeocentric 207-209 Muscular 109, 117 non-supersessionist 32 normative 5, 7(n12) paternal/maternal 8 supersessionist see supersessionism Chrysostom, John 44 church architecture 67, 70 and ancient/sacred sites 79, 81-82 Basilica plan 76-77 Gothic 67, 81, 83 medieval cruciform 67, 72, 74 queer 67-68 Roman Catholic 73

rood/chancel screen 69, 71, 72, 73-76 unifying plan of 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76-78, 83-84 vernacular 72 see also Queen Anne churches circumcision 5, 11, 118-122, 125 as castration 118 and disease 118-119 and masturbation 119-120 metsitsah 120 and pedophilia 120-122, 124, 125 citizenship 94 civil partnerships 68-69 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 144, 145-146, 153 Clothes of a King’s Son (Frankau) 17, 193-194, 201 colonialism/postcolonialism 7, 8, 104, 107(n8) “coming out” 5-6, 188-191, 198-202 community 31, 32, 33, 220 concentration camps 18, 214, 222, 224, 226 see also Auschwitz Contra perfidiam Judaeorum (Geronimo de Santa Fe) 48 conversion/converts 2, 12-13, 131, 134-137, 214-219 assimilation of 17, 47(n2) baptism of 50-52 and Christian identity 2, 14, 63-66 compulsory 127 and heresy 54, 56, 62 in literature 191-195, 220 Marranos 86-87, 91-92 medieval 14, 47-66, 208-209 orthodoxy and 63-64, 66 penitance/struggle of 51-53 polemics of 48-50, 53, 54-63 in public disputations 48-49, 53

237

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suspicion towards 47-48, 50, 52, 56-57 see also Guillaume de Bourges; Liber bellorum Domini covenant 208, 233 cross 2 crucifiction see Passion of Christ Crusades 208 cultic irony 33 Dahan, Gilbert 54(n19), 56 Damian, Peter 19 Damrosch, David 152 Daniel Deronda (Eliot) 96, 103, 104, 111 David, King 58, 89 Davis, Laura 38 De Judaeis erroribus ex Talmud (Geronimo de Santa Fe) 48 degeneration theory 110, 117 Dellamora, Richard 128 demons/phantoms 45-46 Devil We Know, The (Frankau) 17, 183, 185-187 Dialogues (Peter Alfonsi) 49, 50, 53-54, 54(n19) diaspora, queer 10 dietary codes 5 difference 9-10, 15-16 geneological 85, 87 Dignity 6 Disraeli, Benjamin 15, 85-104 Alroy 87, 104 biography of father 86, 87-88, 90 as convert 86-87 double self of 87 on his grandfather 90, 93, 96 on his grandmother 95-96, 98 on Jew Bill 93 Jewish history of 90-91, 93, 94-95 national identity and 85-86

queer lineage of 85, 87-88, 90, 91-92, 93, 96-97, 100-101, 103-104 and Romantic genius 85, 96, 103 and Tories 92-93 Disraeli, Isaac (Benjamin’s father) 86, 87-88, 90, 91, 92-93, 96-104 and Byron 99, 101-102 friendships of 98-99, 101-102 on James I 102-103 literary work of 96, 99 melancholy of 99-101, 103 Disraeli, Sarah (Benjamin’s grandmother) 95 Dissenters/Dissenting meeting houses 70, 71 Domitian 5 Donin, Nicholas 48, 53 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 44-45 double self 87 Douglas, Alfred 6, 133, 134, 137, 205 Downes, Kerry 76-77 dream interpretation see Traumdeutumg Du Prey, Pierre de la Ruffiniere 77 dualism 17 Dubner, Stephen J. 218-219 Easter 16, 155-156, 158, 161-162, 166, 220, 221-229 see also Passion of Christ Easter (Arditti) 17, 18, 220, 221-229, 232, 234 Ecclesiastes 57 Edelman, Lee 66, 140, 148(n25) Edinburgh 135-136, 137 Edlestone, John 102 effeminacy 8, 108-109, 110-111, 142 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard 20 Elijah 36, 39, 40 Eliot, George 96, 103, 104, 111 Elisha 39-40 empowerment 8

238

index

Endelman, Todd 182 endogamy 123 England Jew Bill (1753) 94 Jew Bill (1847) 93 Jews in 90, 90-92, 93, 94-95 monarchy/constitution of 93-94 national identity in 86, 108(n13) Puritans in 91 see also Victorians Ephesian Tale (Xenophon) 4 Ephesians 63 eroticism 37-38 eschatology 11, 24-25, 29 see also supersessionism Esther 88 Esther, Queen 46 Etchells, Frederick 73, 74, 75, 76 ethnicity 20 evangelism 4, 5 ex-gay ministry 12 Ezekiel 62, 77, 78 Ezra, Book of 78 Fall from Grace 117 fallenness 12 Fascism see Nazis/Nazism father figure, Freudian 139-141 feminist theology 11 feminized space 8 fin-de-siecle Europe 105-125, 127, 142 see also Victorians Fleiss, Wilhelm 16, 17, 142, 144, 148, 153-154, 162 food taboos see kosher Foucault, Michel 68, 109 Fout, John 110, 117(n61) France 90, 172 Franciscans 64 Frankau, Arthur 182-183 Frankau, Gilbert 182, 183, 187, 203 Frankau, Julia 182, 183

Frankau, Pamela 17, 181-203 anti-Jewish sentiment in 183-184 conversion of 181, 191-195 family 182-183 homosexuality in fiction 188-191, 198-202 and Humbert Wolfe 181, 182, 184-185, 191, 193, 195-196 Jewish identity of 181, 183-189 lesbian relationships 190-191, 196-198 marriage/death of child 182, 191 and Rebecca West 185, 190-191, 203 and Vernon Whitefoord 191, 196-198 Frankl, Viktor 221 Freud, Sigmund 13, 16-17, 139-167 and assimilation 144, 159, 160 and Brutus 139-140 and castration 149, 156, 161, 163, 165-167 and Easter 155-156, 158, 160, 161-162, 166 father figure 139-141 and Hannibal 143, 150, 151, 152, 153, 163 homoerotic elements in 140-141, 148, 152, 153-154 on homosexuality 17, 140, 145147 on hysteria 145 Jewish identity of 140, 142-144, 148, 149-151, 153, 156-161, 166-167 melancholy and 142, 146, 147, 147(n19), 156-157, 163, 167 on Moses figure 141, 163-167 Myops dream 158-162 oedipal theory of 140-141, 142, 147(n20), 148-149, 161(n41) 239

Jewish/Christian/Queer

and patriarchy/patricide 139-141, 142, 146, 147, 148-149, 164167 politics of 140, 143, 150 redemption and 141-142 revenge/rescue fantasy of 151 Roman fantasy of 140-141, 143, 148-155, 157-158 on Saturnalia 146 theory of religion 139, 155-156 Traumdeutung see Traumdeutung Fritz, Stephen 174 Galatians 30, 32 Gay, Peter 148 gay/lesbian theologies 6-7 gender 11-12, 19-33 politics 88 roles 15, 108, 110 gender dysphoria 96-97 genealogy 85, 87-88, 89, 232 royal 90, 94 see also queer lineage under Disraeli, Benjamin Genesis 60, 85, 88 genius 85, 96, 101, 103 Gentiles 13, 19-23, 206 and architecture 70 and gender 19-22 Germany 9, 94, 108, 108(n13), 110, 166 see also Nazis/Nazism; Third Reich Geronimo of Santa Fe 14, 50 ghettos 92 Gill, Eric 137 Gilman, Sander 120 Gladstone, William 87 Glick, Leonard 125 God Kingdom of 32 kinky 21, 25-26, 31, 32-33

Paul and 21, 23, 24, 25-26, 29, 31, 32-33 promise/fulfillment of 28-29, 88, 103 God-fearers 25 Goldberg, Jonathan 88(n6) Goldhill, Simon 42 Gospels 40 see also Babylonian Gospels goyim 24, 27-28 grace 12, 57, 58 Gray, John 16, 127, 129, 130, 131, 135-136 Gray, Thomas 99-100 Greco-Roman novel 36-37, 42, 44 Greenberg, Steven 7(n12) Gregory IX 56 Grierson, Janet 129 group history 85, 90-91, 103 Guillaume de Bourges 14, 47-66 in context 47-54 homilies of 54, 58-63 opponents of 56-57 and orthodoxy 64-65 see also Liber bellorum Domini Gypsies 172 Hagia Sophia 77 hagiographies 10, 12 see also Rabbi Meir Halakhah 5, 8, 12, 17, 45, 46, 169 Halberstam, Judith 65-66 Half-Jew (Jacoby) 218 Hanson, Ellis 134 Hart, Vaughan 77 Hasan-Rokem, Galit 40 Hawksmoor, Nicholas 14-15, 73, 74, 76-78, 79, 83 health and religious difference 15-16 Heavenly City 92 Heavenly Temple 75-76 Hebrew 53, 55

240

index

Hebrews, Letter to 206 heresy 14, 54, 56, 62, 117-118 and orthodoxy 64-65 Hermann/Judah of Cologne 50-53, 55 Herzl, Theodor 159-160 heterodoxy 69-70 heterosexuality 65-66 and homophobia/racism 105(n3), 112 Hirschfield, Magnus 105(n3), 111 history, gendered 87-88 Hitler, Adolf 170, 172, 173-174, 177178 HIV/AIDS 18, 219, 220, 221, 222 and Passion of Christ 224, 227 Holland 94 Holocaust 3, 5(n7), 46, 127, 137, 169, 220 in literature 221, 224, 233 and Mischling soldiers 174-176 OT forced labour camps 175-176 and Passion of Christ 213-218 Holy Spirit 13, 19(n1), 29-30, 31 homilies 54, 58-63 Homily on John (Guillaume de Bourges) 58-63 adulterous woman in 54, 58-59 allegorical section 60-63 conversionary movement in 61-62 heresy in 62-63 Virgin Mary in 62 Homily on Matthew (Guillaume de Bourges) 54 homophobia 3 and anti-Semitism 105-107, 111114, 128 circumcision and see circumcision modern invention of 128, 220 and science 105, 106-107, 109, 112, 115-116 homosexuality 3, 220

and Catholicism 135-136 coded references to 96 in fiction 188-191, 198-202 Freud and 17, 140, 145-147 and identity 12, 136-137, 228-234, 229-231 invention of 3, 7-8 Nazis and 172-173 passive/feminine 145, 154(n34) visual signs of 108-109, 111 see also homophobia Hooke, Robert 71 Hunsinger, George 19-20(n2) hybridity 7 hysteria 142, 144, 145, 156 I Was The Man (Frankau) 190 Iberia 10, 47-50 identity 2-3, 6-8, 11, 18, 220 convert 2, 14, 63-66 mischling see mischlingkeit national 85, 87 and Pauline Christianity 9 politics 1, 3, 8, 9 postmodern 8 see also Christian identity; Jewish identity; Jewish/Christian identity idolatry 22, 23, 29, 33, 85 immigration 111 incest/inbreeding 89, 123 infidelity 85, 88 Inquisition 86, 96, 127 interfaith dialogue 5 interreligious dialogue 1 Ireland 90, 92(n17), 104 anti-Irish racism 128 immigrants from 130 Isaiah 60 Islam 10, 54, 87 Israel 3(n4) Israelite Camp 15, 82

241

Jewish/Christian/Queer

Italy 93 Itzkovitz, Daniel 3, 112, 128, 220 Jack the Ripper 112-115, 229 sexuality of suspects 114(n53) Jacobs, Joseph 143 Jakobsen, Janet 4 James I 94, 102-103 Jamilly, Edward 70 Jehovah’s Witnesses 172 Jerusalem 154, 160 Temple of 69 Jesus 15, 54, 58-63 Gentiles and 21, 24-25 Jewish response to 2 lineage of 89 passion of see Passion of Christ resurrection of 30, 31 and sexual orientation 31-32 Jew, Wandering 118 Jewish converts see conversions/ converts Jewish Enlightenment 10 Jewish families heads of 85, 122 queer 3-4 Jewish identity 3, 3(n4), 5, 88 crypto- 10 male 15, 16-17, 97-98, 140 patriarchal/maternal 8 self-hatred 225-226, 229-230 Jewish law/ritual practice 3, 16, 122 Jewish-Christian dialogue 9-10, 11, 14 in art/literature 209-219 converts in 48-50, 53 and Holocaust 214-218 and Passion of Christ 210-214 Jewish-Christian sex 118 Jewish/Christian identity 2-3, 205209, 222-229, 234-235 Jews goyim and 27-28

Paul and 19-21, 23-24, 27 queering of 105-107 stereotypes of 108-109, 111-112 Job 57 John of the Cross 11, 136 John’s Gospel 54, 58-63 Jordan, Mark D. 7(n12) Joshua ha-Lorki (later Geronimo de Santa Fe) 48 Jubilate Agno (Smart) 78-79 Judaeophilia 210 Judaism converts to 2, 3(n4), 4 counter-Christian theology 2, 206 as incomplete see supersessionism patriarchal/feminized 8 saints in see Meir, Rabbi Judaizing 64, 65 Judenfrage 21 Katz, David 90 Kershaw, Ian 176, 177 Kings, Book of 78 Kivland, Sharon 141(n6) Koltun-Fromm, Naomi 38 kosher 21, 23, 35, 36 Kovelman, Arkady 45 Kramer, E. Anne 216-217 Kristeva, Julia 155 Kruger, Steven 2, 10, 207-208, 209, 215 Kushner, Tony 219, 220, 234 labor, sex-based division of 15 Latin America 10 Latitudinarians 67 law see Torah Lefèvre, Herbert 173 lesbian Jews 3-4 Letters From a Modern Daughter (Frankau) 189-190

242

index

Leucippe and Clitophon (Achilles Tatius) 41-42, 44 Leverson, Ada 130 Levin, Rahel 95-96 Levine, Amy-Jill 5 Levinson, Joshua 36(n3) Leviticus 46 Lewis, Matthew G. 99 LGBTQ 2, 5 Liber bellorum Domini (Guillaume de Bourges) 54-63 authority in 56-58, 58 Biblical references in 57-58 grace in 57, 58 opponents of 56-57 structure of 55-56 Liberal/Reform Judaism 10 liberation theology 6 limen 7 Lindbeck, George 29, 32 literature genius in 85 Graeco-Roman 36-37 Talmud as 44-45 virginalized eroticism in 38 see also Arditti, Michael; Frankau, Pamela Littlechild, John 114-115 Logos 9 London 14, 76-77, 103, 112-115, 223 churches in see Queen Anne churches Great Fire of (1666) 69, 72 Jewish ghetto in 92 Lot’s wife 60, 85, 88, 95-96 Lustiger, Cardinal 215 McCormack, Jerusha 129 male menstruation 121-122 maleness 20 and history 87-88 Maritain, Raissa 210

Marks, Elaine 86 Mark’s Gospel 39, 57 Marlowe, Christopher 103 Marranos 86, 91-92 Marriage of Harlequin (Frankau) 189 marriage, transgressive 4 martyrdom 214 Marx, Karl 87 masculinity 15, 109, 116-117, 142 melancholic 146, 147 masturbation 100, 109, 116, 119, 123, 147(n21) and circumcision 119-120 Matthew’s Gospel 54, 59, 60, 72 MCC (Metropolitan Community Church) 6 Meir, Rabbi 14, 35-46 chastity and 35, 42-43, 44 Elijah and 36, 39, 40, 43 and Greco-Roman novel 36-37, 41-42 miracles of 38-39, 41-44 sainthood of 37 sexual element 37-38, 43-44, 4546 Torah and 45-46 melancholy 99-100, 103, 142, 146, 147, 147(n19), 156-157, 163 Mendelssohn, Moses 87 Menippean satire 36-37 Menippus 45-46 menstruation, male 121-122 Merchant Taylor’s Hall 71 messianic hopes 11 mestiza 8 Metamorphosis (Apuleius) 40-41 metsitsah 120, 125 Mettenheim, Clara von 171-172 Michaelson, Jay 6(n12) midrash 38-39, 40 Miller, J. Hillis 100 miracles 38-39

243

Jewish/Christian/Queer

Mischling soldiers 169-179 enforcement of policies on 171, 176-177 exemptions for 170, 172, 173, 174, 177-178 families of 172-173 high-ranking 172, 173-174, 178 and Holocaust 174-176 homosexual 172-173 and Jewish cetegories 169-172 Jewish identity of 173-174, 178179 numbers of 173 and OT camps 175-176 “quarter-Jews” 170, 171, 172, 173 mischlingkeit 8-9, 12, 17 monks/nuns 3, 31 Montefiore, Hugh 205 morganatic relationships 68-69 Moses 49, 206 Moses of Michaelangelo (Freud) 163, 164-165 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 141, 146, 163-164, 165-167 Moses Principia (Hutchinson) 80 Mosse, George 107, 108(n11), 110, 117 Muscular Christianity 109, 117 My Name Is Asher Lev (Potok) 210213 Myops dream 158-162 Myrmex 40-41 mysticism 13, 136 Nassaar, Christopher 130-131 national identity 85, 87 nationalism 15, 105(n3), 107, 108(n13) and health models 108-110, 117, 123, 125 naturalization 94 Nazis/Nazism 9, 17, 46, 70

racial laws of 169-170 see also Holocaust Nelson, Robert 79 Netherlands 94 New Testament 57 Newton, Isaac/Newtonian physics 75, 79-80, 82 Nicholas of Lyra 48 niddah 122 Nordau, Max 110 normative 5, 7(n12), 65-66, 68 nuns/monks 3, 31, 136, 217-218 Nuremberg Laws (1935) 5, 169-170, 173 O’Connell, Daniel 92 Ogden, James 93, 97 Old Testament 1, 57-58, 60, 207 O’Malley, Patrick 134 onah 122 orthodoxy and converts 64-66 queer 14 OT (Organization Todt) labour camps 175-176 otherness 10, 16, 85, 108, 123, 128, 132 Over the Mountains 188, 196, 200, 201, 202-203 para phusin 13-14, 19, 20, 25-26, 32-33 parents 13 Paris 48-49, 127, 128 Parthenius 37 Passion of Christ 18, 38, 39 in art/literature 209-214, 221-229 and Holocaust 210, 213-218 stations of the Cross 213-214, 223-224, 226 see also Easter Passover 225-226 patriarchs 81, 163-164, 206

244

index

patricide 139-141, 142 Paul 19-33 conversion of 48, 206, 231 difference in 5, 9, 10 see also Romans Paul of Burgos (formerly Shlomo haLevi) 14, 48, 50 pedophilia 113, 115(n54), 120-122, 124, 125 Pellegrini, Ann 3, 4, 112, 128, 220 Peter, St. 49 Petronius 36(n5) Pharisees/scribes 58-59, 60, 61, 62 Philesitherus 40-41 Philostratus 37, 45-46 Picture of Dorian Grey (Wilde) 130131, 133 pogroms 208 Poland 171, 214 Portugal 86, 94 synagogues in 70-71 postcolonialism see colonialism Postilla (Nicholas of Lyra) 48 postmodernism 8, 205 bodies and 68 by-Choice and 12-13 difference and 9-10 Potok, Chaim 210-213 Press, Jacob 111 Price, Richard 92 Principia Mathematica (Newton) 75, 79-80 procreation see biological determinism prophets 40, 46, 209 Jesus as 210 see also Elijah prostitution 114, 122-123 see also brothels Protestantism 12, 20, 105(n1), 125126 Purity movements 109-110, 116117

royal line of 90 see also Anglicanism Protocols of the Elders of Zion 127 Psalms 38, 39, 40, 56, 57, 62 psychoanalysis 13, 16-17, 106-107, 142-143 purgatory 17 Puritans 91, 102-103 Purity Leagues 109, 116-117 Quakers 70 Queen Anne churches 14-15, 67-84 and ancient sites/nature 81-82 and Book of Common Prayer 67, 69, 70, 75 dominance of 76-77 and Greek/Roman/Egyptian temples 67, 69 heterodoxy of 69-70 influences on 73-76 and Newtonian physics 74, 79-80, 82 as queer spaces 67-68, 69-70 and Queer Theory 69, 84 no rood/chancel screen in 69, 71, 72, 73-76 room plan/”auditory” of 74-75, 76 and Solomon’s Temple 15, 77, 81, 82, 83 symbolism of 15, 69 and synagogues 70-73, 75-76, 83, 84 Three Temples and 75, 77-82 unifying plan of 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76-78, 83-84 and Wheler’s primitive ideal 77, 78(n27), 79, 82 Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (Boyarin, Itzkovitz and Pellegrini) 112, 128, 220 queerness 1, 3

245

Jewish/Christian/Queer

converts and 65-66 scholarship on 6-7 use of term 4-5, 6-7(n12), 106(n4) rabbinic literature 36, 40-41 erotic element in 37-38, 46 gender in 12, 14 Gospels and 35-36, 40 halakha/aggada 5, 8, 12, 17, 45 see also Meir, Rabbi Rabbinical courts see Jewish law rabbis LGBTQ people as 12(n18) see also Meir, Rabbi racial purity 106, 108, 110-111 racism 128 see also antisemitism Radcliffe, Timothy 33 Raffalovich, Hermann 127, 128 Raffalovich, Marc-Andre 16, 127-137 antisemitism against 129-130 appearance 129 conversion of 134-137 family 128-129 homosexual identity of 136-137 and John Gray 135-136 Uranisme et Unisexualite 133-134, 136 and Wilde 130-134 Ragussis, Michael 136 rape 43-44, 46, 89, 97 Raymond, Diana 189, 190-191, 193, 195, 196 redemption 141-142, 215, 232-233 Reflections (Burke) 92 Reformation 76 “Reformodoxy” 10 respectability 107-108 resurrection 30, 31, 155, 161-162, 163, 215 rhetoric 41 Rigg, Bryan Mark 9(n16)

Robert le Bougre 56 Romanos the Melodist 19(n1) Romans, Paul’s Epistle to 11, 13-14 anti-law polemic in 23-24 binary opposition/three-point inclusion in 29-31, 32-33 community in 31, 32, 33 eschatology in 24-25 flesh/spirit in 29-30 Gentile sexuality in 19-23 God of Israel in 21, 23, 24, 25-26, 29, 32-33 goyim in 24, 27-28 idolatry in 22, 23, 33 para phusin in 19, 20, 25-26, 32-33 stereotyping in 20, 22-23 supersessionism in 19(n1), 25, 26-27 Torah in 20, 21, 23-25 women in 21, 21(n7), 22, 30, 32-33 Rome 16-17 topography of, in Freud’s dreams 154-155, 157-158 see also Freud, Sigmund rood/chancel screen 69, 71, 72, 73-76 Rosenau, Helen 70, 72 Rosenberg, Ethel 218-219, 220 Rothschild, Baron Lionel de 92 ruach ha-kadosh 13 Ruck, Berta 189 Rufeisen, Oswald 214-216 Ruskin, John 93 Russell, Ethel Harriman 191 Russia 127 sacrament 222, 229 Sadducees 55 St. Bride’s Fleet St. 71 St. Edmund King and Martyr Lombard St. 71 St. George the Martyr, Queen Square 79, 82 246

index

St. James Picadilly 70, 71 St. John Chrysostom 83 St. John the Divine 82 St. Luke’s Old St. 77 St. Mary Abchurch Cannon St. 71 St. Mary Woolnoth 69, 74-75, 78(n27) St. Peter’s Cornhill 74 saints 10 salvation 206 sameness 9-10 Sartre, John-Paul 105(n2) Satan 43, 58-59 Saturnalia 146 Satyrica (Petronius) 36(n5) schechina 15 Scheintod/Scheinsex 44 Schless, Nancy 71-72 Schneer, David 6(n12) science 105, 106-107, 109, 112 Scotland 90, 135-136 Scrutinium scripturarum 48 Sea-Change, A (Arditti) 221 Second World War 17, 169-179 secular modernity 12 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 86, 148(n25) seduction 4, 43, 45-46 Seneca the Elder 42(n17) Sepharad see Spain Sephardic Jews 91-92, 93, 94-95 Sephardic Ladino Judaism 2(n1) seroconversions 13, 219 Sewell, Brocard 129 sexual desire 68-69 sexual health/illness 15, 106, 107, 108-109, 116-117 circumcision and 118-122 masturbation and 119-120 sexual perversion 85, 89, 108, 163 see also sodomy sexually transmitted diseases see syphilis Sha’ar Zahav 6(n11)

Shaken in the Wind (Frankau) 192-193, 196 Shakespeare, William 139 Shlomo ha-Levi (later Paul of Burgos) 14, 48, 50 Shoah see Holocaust Siete Partidas, Las 209 Simon, Ulrich 213-214 sin 15, 58-60 see also sodomy slaughter of the innocents 212 slaves 21, 32, 33, 40-41 Slaves of the Lamp (Frankau) 201 slum naturalism 37 Smart, Christopher 78-79 social exclusion 15-16 Sodom/Sodomites 85, 88-89 equated with Jews 88, 92, 92(n17), 96, 112 sodomy 85, 88, 89, 104, 116, 208 and Inquisition 96 in political context 102-103 Solomon 62, 63 Solomon Bar Simson of Mainz 208 Solomon, Simeon 131 Solomon’s Temple 15, 77, 81, 82, 83 Song of Songs 31, 32 soul 4 Spain 10, 86, 92, 93, 94, 209 synagogues in 70-71 Spectral Jew, The (Kruger) 207-208, 209 Speculum historiale (Vincent of Beauvais) 49 Spirit 29-30 Spurgeon, Charles 109 stations of the Cross 213-214, 223224, 226 Stein, Edith 217-218 stereotypes 20, 22-23, 25-26 Stern, David 36, 37-38 Stern, G.B. 190, 192, 195 stone circles 79, 81-82

247

Jewish/Christian/Queer

Stonewall 6 Stowers, Stanley 21(n5), 23 Stuart, Elizabeth 7(n12) Stuart kings 90-91, 94, 103 Stukeley, William 73, 79-82, 84 suffering 209-219, 220, 233, 234 supersessionism 1-2, 19(n1), 25, 2629, 31-32, 207-208 non- 32 three forms of 26-27 Synagoga 62-63 synagogues 67, 70-73, 75-76, 83, 84 syphilis 113-114, 119, 123 Talmud 38, 43, 44 converts’ commentaries on 48-49, 53, 55 dossier against (1240s) 48-49 see also Babylonian Talmud Tassell-Gentle (Frankau) 184-185, 190 Tatius see Achilles Tatius Tec, Nechama 214-216 temple 15, 62 ancient 79, 81-82 Greek/Roman/Egyptian 67, 69 Heavenly 75-76 of Jerusalem 69 Solomon’s 15, 77, 81, 82, 83 Three 75, 77-82 see also synagogues Teresa of Avila 11, 136 Third Reich 169-179 homosexuality in 172-173 Jewich soldiers in see Mischling Jewish categories in 169-170, 173 Nuremberg Laws (1935) 5, 169170, 173 Three (Frankau) 189 Tissot, Samuel 100 Toledot Yeshu 38-39 topos 41-42 Torah 98

Paul and 20, 21, 23-25, 32 Rabbi Meir and 45-46 Torquemada 136 Tortosa debate 48 Tory Party 92-93 Totem and Taboo (Freud) 140, 145-146, 164 transexuals 118 Traumdeutung (Freud) 17, 142, 143, 144, 148-149, 150-151, 153, 163 Trinity 32, 55 Trollope, Anthony 87 Tudor period 94, 102 Turbulent Souls (Dubner) 218-219 Turner, Henry 177 Turner, Sharon 86 Unheroic Conduct (Boyarin) 20, 97-98, 106-107, 165(n45) United States (US) 20 military 17 Uranisme et Unisexualite (Raffalovich) 133-134, 136 Venice 93, 118 Victorians 105-125 anti-Semitism/homophobia of 105-107, 128 and masculinity 15, 109 moral crusades of 107-109 and national health 15-16 and respectability 107-108 and sexual health 106, 107, 108111 Villa Anodyne (Frankau) 190 Villiers, George 102 Vincent of Beauvais 49 Virgin Mary 55, 62 virginalized eroticism 37-38 Walpole, Horace 99 248

index

Wandering Jew 118 Webster, Margaret 203 Weeks, Jeffrey 120 Wehrmacht see Mischling Weintraub, Stanley 96, 104 Well of Loneliness, The (Frankau) 201202 West, Anthony 190 West, Rebecca 185, 190-191, 203 Wheler, George 77, 78(n27), 79, 82 Whitefoord, Marjorie Vernon 191, 196-198 Wilde, Oscar 5-6, 16, 115, 127, 182 conversion of 134 Irishness of 131-132, 133 and John Gray 131 and Raffalovich 130-134, 137 Wilkinson, John 75-76, 83 Willow Cabin, The (Frankau) 187-188, 195-196, 198-200, 203 Winckelmann, Johann 150, 152

Wolfe, Humbert 181, 182, 184-185, 191, 193, 195-196 Wolff, Joseph 136 woman, adulterous (John) 54, 58-59, 61 women 8, 11, 71, 95-96 Paul and 21, 21(n7), 22, 30, 32-33 subordination of 88, 97-98 see also chastity; Lot’s wife; rape Wondrous Tale of Alroy (Disraeli) 87 Wreath for the Enemy (Frankau) 188, 193, 200, 203 Wren, Christopher 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 83 Wyschogrod, Michael 28 Xenophon 42 Yiddish language 2 Yiddishkeit 2 You Trace My Journeys (Kramer) 216217

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