Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (62 page)

Indeed, like but even more so than that of the homosexual, the figure of the Jew arose from a semiotic problem: the inadequacy of any of the emerg- ing nineteenth-century categories to explain the presence and prominence of real, live Jews in such places as Paris, London, New York—the new modern cosmopolis with which that figure, like the homosexual, rapidly became identified. Under the impact of Jewish emancipation Jews could increasing- ly be found looking like, acting like, competing in professions alongside their gentile counterparts (and indeed, frequently married to them, which multi- plied the possible confusions for all concerned). Adding to this complexity, a whole new tide of immigration brought into these cities a different species of Jewishness: nonassimilating Jews, largely from Eastern Europe, who cleaved to their own customs and communities and frequently their own tra- ditional garb. Nineteenth-century philosophers, theologians, politicians, and cultural theorists attempted to come up with categories that would explain the perplexing presence of Jews in Western societies, but kept foundering on the multivariate quality of Jewish difference. If they were members of a reli- gion, why were so many freethinkers or converts? If Jewishness was defined by language, why did they speak so many different tongues? If they were members of a race, why did they look so different from each other? If a na- tion, how to think of them as citizens? As such, the matter of Jewry was posed in the form of a riddle, a conundrum, or—to use the nineteenth century’s preferred term, a
question
. “The Jewish question is universal and elusive,” wrote one avowed antisemitic author in the 1890s. “It cannot truly be expressed in terms of religion, nationality, or race. The Jews themselves seem destined so to arouse the passions of those with whom they come into contact.”
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In such a semiotic void a language of sexual aberration could serve to ground the radically amorphous figure of the Jew: the simultaneously emerging terminologies of sexual perversion could provide a definition for a Jewish identity that was increasingly understood as pliable, metamorphic, ambiguous. Jews might be many things—and undoubtedly were; to under- stand them as racialized degenerates was to find at least one tidy box in order to contain their proliferating indecipherability.

The results of this discursive cross-referencing were multiple. It led on the one hand to the slurs and genocidal campaigns that marked the unfortunate history of twentieth-century Europe’s treatment both of Jews and of gay peo- ple.
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But it led on the other to an equally complex set of possibilities of redef- inition for both the sexually and the religiously/racially/culturally other and, along the way, a questioning of the adequacy of race and sexuality—those two problematic taxonomies with which the nineteenth century has endowed us— to define essential properties of being. Or such, at least, is the project I associ- ate most fully with the work of Marcel Proust. Proust has long been a crucial site for parsing the interplay between Jewish and non-normative sexual identi- ties. One thinks of Hannah Arendt, who famously sees in Proust’s interplay be- tween “the pervert” and “the Jew” the structure of a chiasmus, one leading on the one hand to a sense of Jewishness as perversion—and of the pervert as a Jew.
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Or one thinks of Sedgwick’s meditations on the coimplication of Jewish and queer identities through a reading of Proust’s Esther imagery—and Sedg- wick’s own experience as a child-Esther—which suggests that Jewishness stands as a patriarchal, definitive Other to the infinitely ramifying gay male subject. Or one thinks of Julia Kristeva’s brilliant, if ultimately
weird
, reading of Jew- ishness in Proust, in which Jewishness comes to be associated with the partic- ularism, nationalism, and sadomasochism in which Jewishness has been prob- lematically entangled from the nineteenth century to our own.
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I have been influenced by all three of these—and, as well, by Elaine Marks’s fascinating attempt to use Proust to deconstruct the stable opposition between Jew and gentile on both sides of the cultural and social divide.
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But, I want to try to use Proust to argue, none of these positions can account for just how ramified the relation between the figure of the Jew and that of the sexually transgressive could become, and (perhaps more important) for all the work of social interrogation and personal positioning that Proust could get ac- complished through that relation. And I want to use this complex relation to suggest two things. First, I want to use it to suggest that Proust’s play between the figure of the (always already Jewified) Sodomite and that of the (always al- ready sexually deviant) Jew can point to a more expansive understanding of the intimate relation between Jewishness and idioms of race and nation at the emergence of all these fraught and consequential reifications. And I also want to suggest that Proust’s textual wrestlings with the issues raised by this inter- play can help us articulate a new, more complex understanding of Jewish identity in diaspora culture, particularly as it approaches those revisionary theories of identity—racial, religious, individual—that circulate in precisely the critics I have mentioned above and in the furtherance of which they have recourse to reading, and rereading, Proust.

• • •

The center of my concern is—as it must be—the famous set piece on the “Race Maudite” early on in
Sodom et Gommorrhe
—a passage that has had ex- traordinary resonance not only for Sedgwick but also both for later queer- themed readings of Proust and Proust-themed readings of queerness. For our purposes it’s best to begin with the obvious, the fact that the narrator’s fervent attempts to classify the “race” of Sodomites, occasioned by his embarrassed but avid observation of the encounter between his friend the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien, are wrought with a persistent reference to the “race” of Jews:

I now understood, moreover, why earlier, when I had seen him coming away from Mme de Villeparisis’s, I had managed to arrive at the conclu- sion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one! He belonged to that race of beings, less paradoxical than they appear, whose ideal is manly precisely because their temperament is feminine, and who in ordi- nary life resemble other men in appearance only. . . . A race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing; which must deny its God, since its members, even when Christians, when at the bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must before Christ and in his name refute as a calumny what is their very life; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie all her life long and even in the hour when they close her dying eyes; friends without friendships, despite all those which their fre- quently acknowledged charm inspires and their often generous hearts would gladly feel—but can we describe as friendships those relationships which flourish only by virtue of a lie . . . unless they are dealing with an impartial or perhaps even sympathetic spirit, who however in that case, misled with regard to them by a conventional psychology, will attribute to the vice confessed the very affection that is most alien to it, just as certain judges assume and are more inclined to pardon murder in inverts and trea- son in Jews for reasons derived from original sin and racial predestination?

(II:637–38)
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This cross-referencing might appear to be an odd one, since the Biblical Sodomites and Gomorrahites were a distinctly separate people from the He- brews, then consisting only of Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob—a separation prophetic diatribes and Talmudic commentary both emphasized. (Tellingly, many critics who treat the passage extend Proust by wholly confl the two:

Kristeva, for example, refers to the “Hebraic cities of Sodom and Gomorrah,” which is sort of like referring to the French cities of Frankfurt and Berlin [152]).
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But what’s most striking about this passage is not its oddity but its in- evitability. The “Race Maudite” contains references to a broad range of assimi- lated, upper-middle class confi of Jewishness—in addition to the ones I have cited above, it references Zionist groups, Mendelssohn musical societies, and, most powerfully, Dreyfusards—and in so doing plays off the time-honored confl of the Jew with the sexually unnatural (itself explicitly cited by Proust in
The Guermantes Way
) in ways that stress the coimplication of each with each. Thus, for example, the fi lines of the text invoke the culturally contumacious belief in the sexual doubleness of the Jewish man. As Sander Gilman has re- minded us, the Jewish man was considered in the medieval period to be a fi ure of biological indeterminacy, a man/woman capable of menstruation as a sign of his cursedness in the eyes of God for his betrayal of Christ.
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Scientifi and medical thought may have undermined the image of the Jewish menstru- ating male, although it rose to the surface again in popular antisemitic screeds of the nineteenth century (Gilman still fi it surfacing as late as 1901); but the association between the Jewish man and effeminacy or feminization persist- ed in European culture. Citifi ghettoized, thoroughly inbred, the Jewish man was identifi by a host of observers—most relevantly to Proust, the name of Charcot was prime among them—as effeminate, given to high rates of neuro- sis, and identifi with the unmanly pathology of hysteria.
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Given this psycho-sexual-racial context, it is hardly surprising that when Marcel attempts to anatomize the “race” of Sodomites he should do so by using categories of Jewish deviance emerging in contemporary medical dis- course. But he goes one step further, echoing not only the pseudoscientific codifications of medieval prejudices but also contemporary, explicitly antise- mitic discourses circling in the wake of the Dreyfus affair—the language of Drumont as well as Charcot. Thus we learn that this “race” must lie in court and deceive its friends, as the antisemites alleged that Dreyfus in particular, and the Jew in general, could and must do. So one branch of the Sodomiti- cal “race,” the solitaries, escapes entirely into a Sodom-hood that is explicit- ly glossed by the common trope of the Jew as member of a self-enclosed “colony”—a reference that insinuates as well the common antisemitic slur that Jews composed a nation within a nation, a state within a state, and hence were, as the earlier passage suggests, implicitly treasonous. Indeed, so fully is this transfer wrought that when the explicit link returns in the end of the passage—with the comparison of judges who excuse murder in homo- sexuals and treason in Jews because of original sin and racial predestina- tion—it is impossible to distinguish between the “invert” and the Jew at all,

to each of whom the language of “original sin” and “racial predestination” would seem well to apply.

This passage thus seems a classic—if doubled—form of self-hatred, shut- tling the taint of degeneracy between two out-groups as a way of distancing an author who might fear to be contained by either one, if not both. But clos- er inspection reveals that the passage performs yet more complicated work. In the final sentence I have quoted, where the juridical conflation of
both
de- viancies is put most fully on display, only
certain
judges “excuse” punishment based on a reading of inversion and Jewishness, and their warrant to do so seems somewhat whimsical, at best. And matters become yet more compli- cated when we recognize the incommensurability of these vices to the acts they gloss. The doctrine of original sin, after all, is governed by the dynamics of
heterosexual
fallenness—it is, homophobes remind us, Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, who were housed in the Garden of Eden—and it is sub- tended throughout its long history in Christian theology by the question of concupiscence in marriage. The applicability of the doctrines of original sin to questions of inversion thus would seem, at the very least, fraught. Do the same ambiguities apply, by a Proustian version of the commutative property, to “certain judges’s” judgements of the Jew on grounds of “racial predestina- tion”? If not, how can one distinguish between the race of Sodomites and that of the Jews? If so, are the judgments made on both shown by Proust to be equally arbitrary, rendered in utter disjunction from, if not ignorance of, the thing judged?

This passage raises these questions but leaves them hanging—free to res- onate, as I think they do, throughout the rest of the text. Throughout the
Recherche
both Jewishness and perversion return over and over as topics of mystery and interrogation. Both betoken a social otherness that has the prop- erty of constructing communities within communities, cities within cities, a people within a people whose group affiliations are deeply occulted yet who compose a powerful, destabilizing counter to the ideological as well as social structures of the dominant culture both the Jew and the Sodomite inhabit. Fre- quently, the comparison between the two seems, as it does in this passage, to establish the Jew as the “out” Other, the one whose closetedness has, at least, a local habitation and a name; indeed, since the name
Jew
had been sounded as a synonym for “Other” throughout the long history of Christian Europe, sodomy by comparison appears yet more secret, yet more epistemologically unstable when brought into contact with it—knowable through, or best de- fined by, the image of the Jew. But the instant the figure of the Jew is so es- tablished, the relation between the two switches. The more it is compared and contrasted to the ways of Sodom, the more Jewishness emerges as far more

complicated and perhaps more ultimately unknowable than its Sodomitical twin, its very definition increasingly fraught and ambiguous the more one con- siders it. What does Jewishness mean, exactly, when Swann and Bloch, genteel passer in aristocratic circles and vulgar
arriviste
who has invaded them, can both be classified as “Jewish”—especially when the former, as we shall see in more detail, “outs” himself as a Jew, even though he thinks he can pass as a gen- tile, and the latter transforms himself into a gentile, although he looks most os- tentatiously like a Jew? What does the association between Jew and alienness mean when Jews, reviled as German-loving traitors during the Dreyfus affair, can march off to World War I as fully credentialed Frenchmen while that prime representative of the anti-Dreyfusard reactionary aristocracy, Charlus, makes visibly anti-French proclamations on the streets of Paris? What does a coherent racialized Jewish identity mean when Jews move from being out- siders—actresses, prostitutes, or lovers of gentiles—to fully assimilated mem- bers of aristocratic gentile families, like Gilberte Swann Saint-Loup? As the
Recherche
continues, by contrast, Sodomitical and Gommorahish tendencies become increasingly clear: ubiquitous and, perhaps more important, identified as the very ground of human desire itself. Gilles Deleuze has famously argued that in the
Recherche
we increasingly learn the lesson “Homosexuality is the truth of love”—that same-sex coupling is the ineluctable telos of desire itself; we might add to his claim that the more homosexuality reveals itself as this mysterious “truth,” the more Jewishness becomes the mystery that homosexu- ality originally appeared, through its comparison to Jewishness, to be.
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