Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism

Marilyn Reizbaum

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350098961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

An obsession with "degeneration" was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in "degeneration theory" – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – were Jewish. Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism is the first in-depth study of the Jewish cultural roots of this strand of modernist thought and its legacies for modernist and contemporary culture. Marilyn Reizbaum explores how literary works from Bram Stoker's Dracula, through James Joyce's Ulysses to Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, the crime movies of Mervyn LeRoy, and the photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes manifest engagements with ideas of degeneration across the arts of the 20th century. This is a major new study that sheds new light on modernist thought, art and culture.

1

Avatars

Degeneration discourse has an array of distinguished associates. The wide field may be organized in a number of ways. In the prominent European theater, the French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel’s Traité des dégénérescence physique (1857) defined the condition in medical-psychiatric terms; Viennese psychiatrist Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis became a standard text within the medicolegal glossary of “deviant” sexual practices, including sadomasochism, homosexuality, and bisexuality; he also diagnosed the “Jewish disease,” as mental illness or neurasthenia, resulting from inbreeding, which then produced hypersexuality. Fellow Viennese Otto Weininger does similar work, except that he approached it from a philosophical rather than medical orientation, and was much more emphatically anti-Semitic and misogynist, and even more influential. Freud is, of course, the most famous Viennese among them, but is rarely grouped with them because of his departure from most of their thinking on sexual matters and degeneration; and his creation of psychoanalysis distinguishes him, as should its epithet as the “Jewish science.” Havelock Ellis was Krafft-Ebing’s equivalent in England. English thinkers were mostly aligned along the Darwinian track of evolutionary science, including eugenicist Francis Galton, who, following on from French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s experiments in Paris, used photography for the developing area of forensics; he produced composites of “degenerate types,” among them the “Jewish type,” which Galton’s protégé, the biostatistician Karl Pearson, lauded. Another Galton student, Australian Joseph Jacobs, defensively or antidotally pioneered Jewish race science where he attempted to disavow the hereditary basis for racial characteristics.¹ The German landscape was rife with sexual scientists, including many who will appear on the following pages and some who will not, such as Albert Moll, who differed from Hirschfeld by pathologizing homosexuality and by fiercely opposing Hirschfeld’s use of their findings for political aims (to repeal the legal criminalization of homosexuality). Karl Heinrich Ulrichs preceded Hirschfeld with the most comprehensive theory of homosexuality. Cesare Lombroso is probably most famous for his anthropological interventions into crime, certainly in the Italian field; his student Enrico Ferri is also notable for his work and his turn to fascism (Criminal Sociology, 1917). Nordau is singular in the work he did to theorize the aesthetics of degeneration (Oscar Wilde’s theory of decadence might be seen as a counterweight), though he was consumed with the ills of modern society as causal for this aesthetic condition.²

Referring to Morel’s seminal contribution to the concept of degeneration, Daniel Pick sums up:

dégénérescence was more than just another mental condition, to set alongside the others in an interminable psychopathia sexualis; it became the condition of conditions, the ultimate signifier of pathology. Dégénérescence was thus perceived as the resolution to a felt imprecision of language and diagnosis. It served to anchor meaning, but paradoxically its own could never be fully stabilized, indeed was in doubt more than all the others; it explained everything and nothing as it moved back and forth between the clinic, the novel, the newspaper, and the government investigation. It suggested at once a technical diagnosis and a racial prophecy.³

Though we know it to be a more global phenomenon, Pick posited degeneration as “a European Disorder” in his study, owing to a number of historical circumstances, among them the anxieties produced by and the clash between emancipatory forces and industrialization, the origins of figures like Darwin, and the First World War, “which put paid to the dominance of dégénéresence within psychiatry and shifted the terms of debate.”⁴ Pick turns to England for his exemplary “fictions of crime,” in order to show the more obscure theories at work in the familiar—Sherlock Holmes, The Secret Agent, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, etc. But he does not observe as an aspect of these narratives the instability he identifies in degeneration discourse.

In making a case for the grouping of Lombroso, Nordau, Hirschfeld, and Weininger as most relevant for a discussion of degeneration theory, Jewishness, and modernism, the question of how Jewish they are arises. The presentation of their biographies and major ideas below sets out both to answer the question and complicate it. Being Jewish in a period of emergent emancipatory movements throughout Europe and at time in which race theory most virulently appeared added layers to the “Jewish Question” (not just what are, but what to do with, Jews) that frame the lives of these theorists. Freud and Weininger differ from the others by their fame or infamy and for being more overt about their Jewishness and the role of Jewishness in their work. Weininger, exemplary of the interplay between author and subject by virtue of the condition identified by Theodor Lessing as “Jewish self-hatred,” is the subject of the Coda; Freud is referenced throughout, but especially in Chapter 2, where the psychoanalytic theories of identity and identification inflect Lombrosian crime narratives. Both are by this point overdetermined for discussions of modernism.⁵ Putting his Jewishness squarely on the table, especially in a later essay like “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis” (1925), Freud wonders whether anti-Semitism might account for the negative response to his work, but also, even, for the nature of the work. In declaring it no surprise perhaps that the founder of psychoanalysis is Jewish, Freud would seem to accede to the charge that his science is “Jewish,” but with an ambiguous tone of at once defiance and defeat. In this accession, Freud acknowledges directly what is crucially at work with Lombroso, Nordau, and Hirschfeld, if recessed: that they are both the subjects and authors of their theories and that their Jewishness is the medium of that duality.

Cesare Lombroso

While Cesare Lombroso’s Jewishness seems to have been well known in his day—it would have to be given the laws governing Jews and other minorities in Italy before the Risorgimento—this is a fact about Lombroso that today is mostly surprising. Lombroso (1835–1909) came from a prominent and well-established northern Italian Jewish family, assimilated but cohesively Jewish. His daughters both wrote about their Jewish backgrounds and even worried about their father’s contribution to certain misapprehensions about Jews.⁶ When Lombroso does write about Jews, in L’antisemitismo e le scienze moderne (“Anti-Semitism and Modern Sciences,” 1894), he sets out to refute racial prejudice against Jews by, in effect, repudiating Judaism, and for this he has been labeled as self-hating.⁷ Central to his repudiation is the charge of atavism for the adherence to religious ritual, a concept central also to his theories about criminality. This response to religion is key for all four figures, whose contradictoriness on this matter was tied up with the split between religious and ethnic affiliations, a split underwritten by emancipatory movements in the period and the move toward cosmopolitanism for Jews, who at once fall prey to racialization as a result of degeneration theory. Lombroso wrote in his will that he wanted no flowers and no rabbi or clergy of any kind to be invited to his funeral, requests that are characterized by such a split in that Lombroso seems to observe the western Jewish burial custom that eschews flowers from cemeteries and yet also refuses a religious ceremony. He was bound by both impulses and the split is embedded in his central theory about the born criminal, who variously is both a throwback and a dupe.

It is my contention that Lombroso’s ideas were crucially affected by his Jewish background and that his “condition” as Jewish criminologist is articulated in the literary typology of crime. The enfolding of subject and object that is performed by a figure like Lombroso, as scientist and Jew, criminologist and, by virtue of theories he helped to formulate, “criminal,” helps to explain the conundra in the identificatory methods that attach to the subject of criminality in science and art. One such conundrum may be seen in the way in which the “regressive” concepts of criminality, contagion, and atavism for which Lombroso’s theories were primary, and Jews often exemplary, became cornerstones of innovatory art forms and genres.

That Lombroso was considered a source more than the subject of degeneration theories is key to my premise here in that, as Mary Gibson has put it, “complications in the application of race to behavior arose from the personal biographies of positivist criminologists. From the available record, it is reasonable to assume that Lombroso’s own Jewishness caused him to be sensitive to the new racial anti-Semitism in northern and eastern Europe that questioned the patriotism and threatened the civil and political rights of Jews.”⁸

Many of the vagaries in his work appear in the anomalous roles Jews occupy within his classifications or in the shifting concept of atavism, erratically assigned to Jews. As Gibson and others have suggested, his disciples and colleagues fashioned their theories in line with Lombroso’s “adjustments” out of deference or loyalty to him, even when the science might be flawed. At the very least, his background evinces a partiality within the science that calls the term “positivist” into question. At best, given how prevalent and generally applied his theories became, it opens a window onto a practice of detection in literature and film that, in the best Jamesian way, complicates the flaw in the evidence.⁹

The editors of the recent Cesare Lombroso Handbook sum up Lombroso’s career like this: “In the late nineteenth country, Lombroso popularized the body-centered social-scientific study of aberrant behavior—criminality, pathology, madness, and violence.”¹⁰ Most crucial, perhaps, in this catalog, is “body-centered,” especially when it comes to setting Lombroso in relation to Nordau, Hirschfeld, and Weininger, all of whom centered their ideas on the body but with very different outcomes, revolving around the idea of cure. Lombroso’s ideas about the born crim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Avatars
• 2 Bad Seeds: Mervyn LeRoy’s American Crime
• 3 Fitness Movements: Literary Degeneration and Jewish Muscle in Joyce’s Ulysses and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy
• 4 Sexology’s Photoshop
• Coda: Otto Weininger and the Jewish Joke as Terminus
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright