The Jewish Body

Drawing on a wealth of medical and historical materials, Sander Gilman sketches details of the anti-Semitic rhetoric about the Jewish body and mind, including medical and popular depictions of the Jewish voice, feet, and nose. Case studies illustrate how Jews have responded to such public misconceptions as the myth of the cloven foot and Jewish flat-footedness, the proposed link between the Jewish mind and hysteria, and the Victorians' irrational connection between Jews and prostitutes. Gilman is especially concerned with the role of psychoanalysis in the construction of anti-Semitism, examining Freud's attitude towards his own Jewishness and its effect on his theories, as well as the supposed "objectiveness" of psychiatrists and social scientists.

A history of the Jewish people from bris to burial, from “muscle Jews” to nose jobs. Melvin Konner, a renowned doctor and anthropologist, takes the measure of the “Jewish body,” considering sex, circumcision, menstruation, and even those most elusive and controversial of microscopic markers–Jewish genes. But this is not only a book that examines the human body through the prism of Jewish culture. Konner looks as well at the views of Jewish physiology held by non-Jews, and the way those views seeped into Jewish thought. He describes in detail the origins of the first nose job, and he writes about the Nazi ideology that categorized Jews as a public health menace on par with rats or germs. A work of grand historical and philosophical sweep, The Jewish Body discusses the subtle relationship between the Jewish conception of the physical body and the Jewish conception of a bodiless God. It is a book about the relationship between a land–Israel–and the bodily sense not merely of individuals but of a people. As Konner describes, a renewed focus on the value of physical strength helped generate the creation of a Jewish homeland, and continued in the wake of it. With deep insight and great originality, Konner gives us nothing less than an anatomical history of the Jewish people. Part of the Jewish Encounter series

An encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present That the human body can be the object not only of biological study but also of historical consideration and cultural criticism is now widely accepted. But why, Robert Jütte asks, should a historian bother with the Jewish body in particular? And is the "Jewish body" as much a concept constructed over the course of centuries by Jews and non-Jews alike as it is a physical reality? To comprehend the notion and existence of a Jewish body, he contends, one needs to look both at the images and traits that have been ascribed to Jews by themselves and others, and to the specific bodily practices that have played an important role in creating the identity of a religious and cultural community. Jütte has written an encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present, often for anti-Jewish purposes. He examines the techniques for caring for the body that Jews acquire in childhood from parents and authority figures and how these have changed over the course of a more than 2000-year history, most of it spent in exile. From consideration of traditional body stereotypes, such as the so-called Jewish nose, to matters of gender and sexuality, sickness and health, and the inevitable end of the body in death, The Jewish Body explores the historical foundations of the human physis in all its aspects.

Providing valuable insights into an element of European nationalism and modernist culture, this book explores the development of the 'Zionist body' as opposed to the traditional stereotype of the physically weak, intellectual Jew. It charts the cultural and intellectual history showing how the 'Muscle Jew' developed as a political symbol of national regeneration.

Drawing on a wealth of medical and historical materials, Sander Gilman sketches details of the anti-Semitic rhetoric about the Jewish body and mind, including medical and popular depictions of the Jewish voice, feet, and nose. Case studies illustrate how Jews have responded to such public misconceptions as the myth of the cloven foot and Jewish flat-footedness, the proposed link between the Jewish mind and hysteria, and the Victorians' irrational connection between Jews and prostitutes. Gilman is especially concerned with the role of psychoanalysis in the construction of anti-Semitism, examining Freud's attitude towards his own Jewishness and its effect on his theories, as well as the supposed "objectiveness" of psychiatrists and social scientists.

This volume explores perceptions of the "Jewish body" in variety of early modern Jewish sources. It discusses, among other topics, ideas of the ideal body in normative sources, the influence of Kabbalistic ideas on Jewish-Christian discourse and the link between melancholy and exile.

Through a symptomatic reading of Freud's corpus, from his letters to Fliess through the case of Little Hans to Moses and Montheism, this book demonstrates how "circumcision"--the fetishized signifier of Jewish difference and source of knowledge about Jewish identity--is central to Freud's construction of psychoanalysis. Jay Geller depicts Freud as an ordinary Viennese Jew making extraordinary attempts to mitigate the trauma of everyday antisemitism. He situates Freud at the nexus of antisemitic, misogynistic, colonialist, and homophobic discourses, both scientific and popular. These held in place the double bind of post-Emancipation and pre-Shoah Viennese Jewish life: the demand for complete assimilation into the dominant culture, accompanied by the assumption that Jews were constitutionally incapable of eliminating their difference. Incarnate in the figure of the circumcised (male) Jew, this difference haunted the Central European cultural imagination and helped create, maintain, and confirm Central European identities and hierarchies. Exploring overlapping layers of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in identity construction, theories of trauma, fetishism, and writing, Geller looks at Freud's representations of the Jewish body--especially circumcised penises and their displacements onto noses. He shows how Freud reinscribed the virile masculine norm and the at once hypervirile and effeminate Jewish other into the discourse of psychoanalysis.

By shifting attention from the image of Jews as a textual community to the ways Jews understand and manage their bodies — for example, to their concerns with reproduction and sexuality, menstruation and childbirth— this volume contributes to a revisioning of what Jews and Judaism are and have been. The project of re-membering the Jewish body has both historical and constructive motivations. As a constructive project, this book describes, renews, and participates in the complex and ongoing modern discussion about the nature of Jewish bodies and the place of bodies in Judaism.