Insectopedia (64 page)

36.
Frazer,
Golden Bough
, 3:55, 56.

37.
Michael Taussig,
My Cocaine Museum
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 80; Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in
Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 333–36.

38.
Kaufmann,
Mastery of Nature
, 79–99. For a very different discussion of this painting, which situates it in the history of early-modern ideas of beetles, see Yves Cambefort, “A Sacred Insect on the Margins: Emblematic Beetles in the Renaissance,” in
Insect Poetics
, ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 200–222.

39.
Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg,
Mira calligraphiae monumenta.

40.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64; and Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in
Reflections
, 61–94.

41.
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations
, 217–52.

42.
Kaufmann,
Mastery of Nature
, 38–48.

1.
Aharon Appelfeld,
The Iron Tracks
, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).

2.
Heinrich Himmler, speech to SS officers, April 24, 1943, Kharkov, Ukraine, reprinted in U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality,
Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 4:574.

3.
In exile in Britain and the United States, Szyk worked tirelessly to publicize events in Europe. A friend of Vladimir Jabotinsky and, later, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), he put his work at the service of the Revisionists—whose movement was founded on the principle of a sovereign, undivided Jewish state—campaigning first for a Jewish army, then for open immigration to Palestine, and consistently on behalf of the paramilitary Irgun. See Stephen Luckert,
The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), and Joseph P. Ansell, “Arthur Szyk’s Depiction of the ‘New Jew’: Art as a Weapon in the Campaign for an American Response to the Holocaust,”
American Jewish History
89 (2001): 123–34.

4.
Christopher R. Browning provides the rather remarkable statistic that over 50 percent of the people killed by the Nazis died in the eleven months between March 1942 and February 1943. Browning,
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
(New York: HarperCollins, 1992), xv. By the time the United States acceded to the pressure to acknowledge events across the Atlantic, the fate of European Jewry had been effectively settled.

5.
Both of these images are discussed in Richard I. Cohen’s fascinating and comprehensive
Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 221–30. As Cohen points out, Nossig’s innovation was to take an image that was widely familiar at the time and imbue it with an utterly different sensibility.

6.
Jacob Döpler,
Theatrum poenarum
(Sondershausen, Germany, 1693), and Jodocus Damhouder,
Praxis rerum criminalium
(Antwerp, 1562), quoted in E. P. Evans,
The
Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials
(1906; repr., Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 153 (emphasis added).

7.
Boria Sax,
Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust
(New York: Continuum, 2000).

8.
Alex Bein, “The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with Special Reference to Germany,”
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
9 (1964): 3–40. See also Michel Serres,
The Parasite
, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

9.
Bein, “Jewish Parasite,” 12.

10.
Donna J. Haraway,
When Species Meet
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 78.

11.
Mahmood Mamdani,
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 13. For this type of argument in relation to the Holocaust, see Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer,
Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2–3, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 71.

12.
Insectification such as this from a January 1994 article in the Hutu-power newspaper
Kangura
was a common feature of the Rwandan genocide. Quoted by Angeline Oyog, “Human Rights-Media: Voices of Hate Test Limits of Press Freedom,” Inter-Press Service, April 5, 1995, and cited in Mamdani,
When Victims Become Killers
, 212.

13.
Shmuel Almog, “Alfred Nossig: A Reappraisal,”
Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture
4, no. 1 (1983):1.

14.
The ZOB mainly targeted the notorious Jewish police. See Hanna Krall,
Shielding
the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
, trans. Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 50, and Vered Levy-Barzilai, “The Rebels among Us,”
Haaretz Magazine
, February 18, 2007, 18–22. Levy-Barzilai estimates that the ghetto underground liquidated thirty-three Jews. My thanks to Rotem Geva for drawing my attention to this source.

15.
Cohen,
Jewish Icons
, 227.

16.
Alfred Nossig,
Próba˛ rozwia˛zania kwestii ˙zydowskiej
[
An Attempt to Solve the Jewish Question
] (Lvov, Poland, 1887), quoted in Ezra Mendelsohn, “From Assimilation to Zionism in Lvov: The Case of Alfred Nossig,”
Slavonic and East European Review
49, no. 117 (1971): 531.

17.
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow
, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, trans. Stanislaw Staron and the staff of Yad Vashem (Chicago: Elephant/Ivan Dee in association with U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1999), 84.

18.
Michael Zylberberg, “The Trial of Alfred Nossig: Traitor or Victim?”
Wiener Library Bulletin
23 (1969): 44.

19.
Arthur Ruppin,
Memoirs, Diaries, Letters
, ed. Alex Bein, trans. Karen Gershon (New York, Herzl Press, 1972), 74–76; Mitchell B. Hart,
Social Science and the
Politics of Modern Jewish Identity
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 33.

20.
John M. Efron, “1911: Julius Preuss Publishes
Biblisch-talmudische Medizin
, Felix Theilhaber Publishes
Der Untergang der deutschen Juden
, and the International Hygiene Exhibition Takes Place in Dresden,” in
Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996
, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 295.

21.
Virchow was a distinguished political liberal and a founder of German anthropology. His conclusions cut against the grain of belief in the anthropological and pathological distinctiveness of the Jews and were received with general skepticism. See John M. Efron,
Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 24–26; George L. Mosse,
Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 90–93; and Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in
Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition
, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 79–154.

22.
Mitchell B. Hart, “Racial Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation,”
Isis
90 (1999): 275–76. For a sustained discussion of degeneration as the narrative complement to evolutionary theorizing, see Daniel Pick,
Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

23.
For a concise account of the politics of this debate, see Robert Proctor,
Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 30–38, who points out that antisemites considered Lamarckism a Jewish doctrine.

24.
For the detailing of this point in relation to Germany, see Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,”
Osiris
3 (1987): 193–226.

25.
The point here is that the logics of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century eugenics could not only bolster anti-militarist agendas (it is the breeding stock of strong young men that is lost in war) but could also underlie welfarist social agendas based on class. On this, see Robert A. Nye, “The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical Thought in Modern Society,”
Historical Journal
36 (1993): 687–700.

26.
Alfred Nossig,
Die Bilanz des Zionismus
[
The Balance Sheet of Zionism
] (Basel, Switzerland: Verlag von B. Wepf, 1903), 21, quoted in Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 9.

27.
I am leaving aside here the complex history of shifting relations between German Jews and “eastern Jews,” in which the location of Jewish degeneracy moved gradually from the
Ostjuden
to the Diaspora more broadly and a Romantic critique of the psychopathologizing impact of modernity on the Jews of the West. For many Zionists, eastern Jews came to stand both as the expression of pathology (triply oppressed by antisemitism, poverty, and the Orthodox rabbinate) and, somewhat later, as the positive site of an authentic
Judentum
in contrast to the deethnicized modern Jews of western Europe. See Steven E. Aschheim’s groundbreaking
Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).

28.
Though, of course, for many Jews—and not only the religious—statements such
as Marx’s “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism” (“On the Jewish Question,” 1843) and Kautsky’s “The sooner … [Judaism] disappears, the better it will be, not only for society, but also for the Jews themselves” (
Are the Jews a Race?
, 1914) invite a form of extermination.

29.
See Alfred Nossig,
Zionismus und Judenheit: Krisis und Lösung
[
Zionism and Jewry: Crisis and Solution
] (Berlin: Interterritorialer Verlag “Renaissance,” 1922), 17.

30.
See Israel Kolatt, “The Zionist Movement and the Arabs,” in
Zionism and the Arabs: Essays
, ed. Shmuel Almog (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel, 1983), 1–34.

31.
Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 22. Presumably, this offer was made under the Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement, by which 60,000 Jews were able to leave Germany from November 1933 until December 1939 (that is, soon after the SS took direct control of Jewish “emigration”). The agreement permitted the transfer of part of the value of emigrants’ possessions to the Jewish Agency in Palestine in the form of German goods worth an allegedly equivalent amount.

32.
Marek Edelman, “The Ghetto Fights,” in
The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising
, ed. Tomasz Szarota (Warsaw, Poland: Interpress, n.d.), 39.

33.
Krall,
Shielding the Flame
, 15. The publication of Edelman’s memoir, in 1977, was an important moment in the Polish reassessment of the Holocaust. The book sold out its initial print run of 10,000 copies in just a few days, and Edelman, who went on to become an activist in Solidarity, found himself a reluctant celebrity.

34.
I take the image and its connection to Edelman from Paul Julian Weindling’s magisterial
Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. It was Weindling who convinced me that if Himmler’s conflation of Jews and lice was a commonplace among Nazi leaders, it was also both the index to a specific set of regional histories and a recognizable code that summarized a concrete array of racial policies and practices.