Bestiarium Judaicum : unnatural histories of the Jews /
Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals, pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize and justify the persecution of Jews, "Bestiarium Judaicum" asks what is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories? F...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Fordham University Press,
[2018]
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| Edition: | First edition. |
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| Summary: | Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals, pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize and justify the persecution of Jews, "Bestiarium Judaicum" asks what is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories? Focusing on the nonhuman-animal constructions of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka and Gertrud Kolmar, Jay Geller expands his earlier examinations (On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions and The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity) of how such writers drew upon representations of Jewish corporeality in order to work through their particular situations in Gentile modernity. From Heine's ironic lizards to Kafka's Red Peter and Siodmak's Wolf Man, this book brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers' engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species "Jew" were identified. |
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| Physical Description: | ix, 404 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780823275595 0823275590 |