Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification

Neil Levi

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823255078
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition "Degenerate Art." Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections—not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.

Part I: Modernist Form as Judaization

ONE

Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau

At the heart of the story of how modernist form comes to be regarded as Jewish is the myth of Judaization. Discussions of modernism and antisemitism often acknowledge this myth in passing, but it is seldom the subject of extended reflection. (Indeed, if there is another book on aesthetic modernism and Judaization, I have not been able to find it.) It might be useful, then, to sketch briefly the structure of the notion of Judaization as it appears in the modern European context.1 In what follows, I turn to what is widely regarded as the concept of Judaization’s most historically consequential iteration: the composer Richard Wagner’s 1850 essay “Judaism in Music.” It is “Judaism in Music” that introduces the term Verjüdung (Judaization) into the German language. Wagner’s essay offers a plausible point of origin for the critique of works of art as Jewish despite their being neither by nor about Jews. In the twentieth century, “Judaism in Music” becomes a source text for many antisemitic opponents of modernism in the arts, particularly the Nazis, who repeatedly recycle its arguments and language. It is almost impossible to read the essay without these later appropriations in mind. But what did Wagner understand by what he called the Verjüdung of modern art? As I show, at the core of “Judaism in Music” is an obsession with what Wagner perceives to be a historical crisis in the production of artistic value, an obsession that animates both his antisemitism and his protomodernism. Tracing the points of their convergence permits us both to measure the distance between “Judaism in Music” and the racial antisemitism of the twentieth century and to see why Wagner’s account of what he calls “modern art” so uncannily anticipates the distinguishing features of aesthetic modernism proper.

Alongside “Judaism in Music,” the text most often invoked in discussions of the antisemitic (and particularly Nazi) interpretation of modernism in the arts is Max Nordau’s bestselling 1892 Entartung (Degeneration). Nordau’s book is generally understood to have introduced the medicalized notion of degeneracy into the cultural sphere and thus to have provided a precise, determinable point of origin for the Nazis’ own notion of “degenerate art.” Here again I want to show that we can soberly examine what it is in Nordau’s book that appears congruent with Nazi ideology while also seeing the pronounced differences between his ideas about modernism in the arts and the Nazis’. Nordau’s notion of Entartung, I propose, might be interpreted as a vain attempt to wrest the concept of degeneration away from an extant antisemitic context and to do so, no less, by rewriting the very antisemitic conceptions of the cultural realm found in such texts as Wagner’s “Judaism in Music.” Indeed, I suggest that Nordau’s notion of Entartung is, among other things, a reworking of Wagner’s concept of Verjüdung, a reworking that seeks to strip Wagner’s concept of its antisemitic content by translating its essential features into the language of what Nordau understood to be science. My account of Wagner and Nordau does not call for historical blinkers—I do not see how we can read these texts without remembering how they were appropriated or what happened after they were written—but it does seek to show what it means to read without backshadowing, which is to say, without thinking that we can look at Wagner and Nordau’s writings and see the future already inscribed within them.

The Myth of Judaization

Focusing on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German versions of the myth of Judaization, the intellectual historian Steven Aschheim explains that the term “Judaization” referred both to the belief that the Jews exerted “disproportionate influence,” occupying positions of great “economic, political, and cultural power,” and something more radical,

a condition in which the “Jewish spirit” had somehow permeated society and its key institutions, one in which Jewish Geist had seeped through the spiritual pores of the nation to penetrate and undermine the German psyche itself.2

As Aschheim points out, the distinguishing feature of the myth of Judaization is precisely the notion of the Jewish spirit’s malleability, the way its putative attributes change according to the object under critique, be it liberalism, capitalism, or secularism,3 or, to take the cases that matter to us here, Dada, Surrealism, or Expressionism. But despite this malleability, it’s worth pointing out several features of the myth of Judaization that are particularly salient for understanding the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form.

First and most obviously, the myth of Judaization has long been inextricable from ideas about materialism, usury, and finance. The Jews were first associated with usury and moneylending in the Middle Ages, when the Crusades led both to an increasing demand for credit and to the exclusion of Jews from most other economic roles.4 While Jews were by no means the only moneylenders, the activity was scorned and censured as Jewish and eventually declared a heresy.5 Christians who engaged in usury were called Kristenjuden. In his 1625 essay “Of Usury” Sir Francis Bacon reports as a commonplace the view that all usurers “should have tawny orange bonnets, because they do Judaize.”6

Aschheim notes that in the modern period Judaization was always understood to include a “corrupting materialist message” and that this eventually “melded with a new, peculiarly modern consciousness of the role of ‘material’ forces in moulding culture, with a heightened awareness of the ‘economic’ as an autonomous factor in social and political affairs.”7 But we can say more: the modern myth of Judaization can be understood as the corollary of the distinctive way that the modern antisemitic imaginary conceives of the figure of the Jew. The critical theorist Moishe Postone claims that

a careful examination of the modern anti-Semitic worldview reveals that it is a form of thought in which the rapid development of industrial capitalism, with all its social ramifications, is personified and identified as the Jew. It is not merely that the Jews were considered to be the owners of money, as in traditional anti-Semitism, but that they were held responsible for economic crises and identified with a range of social restructuring and dislocation resulting from rapid industrialization: explosive urbanization, the decline of traditional social classes and strata, the emergence of a large, increasingly organized industrial proletariat, and so on. In other words, the abstract domination of capital, which—particularly with rapid industrialization—caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, became perceived as the domination of International Jewry.8

Postone argues that the figure of the Jew serves to personify those invisible, unrepresentable, abstract aspects of capitalist social relations that exceed the cognitive reach of most, and his thesis is central to my claim that modernism and antisemitism share a certain representational problematic. I will have more to say about this in the chapters that follow, but here I want to emphasize Postone’s observation that the power attributed to Jews “is mysteriously intangible, abstract, and universal” and that it “does not manifest itself directly, but must find another mode of expression. It seeks a concrete carrier … through which it can work.… It is considered to stand behind phenomena, but not to be identical with them.”9 If the Jew does not appear directly, and if his power is invisible, intangible, abstract, mobile, and stands behind phenomena, then we should understand Judaization as a sort of wild symptomatic interpretation obsessed with showing how certain social and cultural forms—forms that may not on the face of it have anything to do with actual Jews—should nevertheless be read as the modes of expression of Jewish power.

Second, the myth of Judaization often expresses a concern with the problem of what we might call interpretive deviation. The Jew serves as an uncanny reminder to European Christianity that what goes without saying can be contested, that what seems to constitute the fabric of the world as it is—the normal, the natural, the self-evident—rests on a particular interpretation. Here it’s worth recalling that before “Judaizer” was the name for a usurer it was the name for a heretic. The Apostle Peter’s followers, who urged conformity to Jewish ritual law against the Apostle Paul’s universalizing message, were called Judaizers, and Jews themselves were regarded and treated as heretics in the Middle Ages.10 The medieval association of Jews and heresy is particularly revealing because, strictly speaking, as Joshua Trachtenberg notes in The Devil and the Jews, the Jews could not be heretics. Heresy, Trachtenberg points out, “implies a deviation from a prescribed and accepted course but not refusal to pursue that course ab initio.”11 Because they were not Christians to begin with, according to ecclesiastical doctrine the Jews were guilty of perfidy, not heresy.12 Yet popular opinion, many church leaders, and ultimately the Inquisition all ended up treating Judaism as heretical and, perhaps most importantly of all, as responsible for other heresies within the Church.13 This slippage reflects the ambiguous relationship of Judaism to Christianity: on the one hand, it is a different religion (hence perfidy); on the other, it shares a fundamental sacred text, even as it contests how to interpret and how to name it (Old or Original Testament?). And Judaism also, of course, presents a nagging reminder of the origins, lineage, and debts of the Christian dispensation. Hence the Christian iconography of blindfolded Synagoga to radiant Ecclesia.14

In modern antisemitism the medieval concern with Judaization as heresy metastasizes into an obsession with Jewish control of the cultural apparatus, particularly those branches concerned with words rather than images. In his 1906 The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, arguably the founding figure of what Saul Friedländer calls “redemptive antisemitism”15 (the belief that the world-historical fate of Western Civilization rests on a battle to the death with the Jews), writes that

One does not need to have the authentic Hittite nose to be a Jew; the word indicates rather a special kind of feeling and thinking; a person may very rapidly become a Jew without becoming an Israelite; some need only to associate actively with Jews, read Jewish newspapers and become accustomed to the Jewish conception of life, literature, and art.… We must agree with Paul, the apostle, when he says: “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly in the flesh, but he who is a Jew inwardly.”16

For Chamberlain, Judaization means not only Jewish control of the culture but internalization of Jewish ideas and sensibilities. So one might see the myth of Judaization as a fetishistic theory of the subject’s insertion into the symbolic order: a projective, displaced form of recognition of the presence of alien views within oneself, of the constitutive dispossession of the subject, in which that dispossession is imagined to be entirely contingent, as if European subjects would not be strangers to themselves if only there were no Jews in control of the culture, planting strange ideas and tastes inside of them.

What I find both most troubling and most interesting about the myth of Judaization is this explicit preoccupation with the Jew within. We tend to understand the figure of the Jew to embody all that the antisemite projects, that is, all that he represses, disavows, and externalizes. But Judaization reveals the antisemite as acknowledging and dwelling upon precisely what we imagine he cannot bear to contemplate: his own possession of the traits he attributes to the Jew. In doing so, however, he does not reflect critically on the source of his ideas; instead he finds a demonstration of just how powerful and dangerous the Jewish spirit is: even those who guard most vigilantly against it are not immune! This veiled acknowledgment can take place, I suspect, not least because the discourse of Judaization provides a way for the antisemite to talk about what he wishes to disavow but cannot do without, be it antecedents for Christian belief or the social relations of production in industrial capitalism, the social conditions necessary to subject formation or the necessity of interpretation to the very constitution of art as art. Rather than such acknowledgment leading to a change in consciousness, however, it serves to reinforce and even strengthen the fantasy of Judaization.17

Wagner: Jews and Judaization, Modern Art and Modernism

In his 1850 essay “Jud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite
• Part I: Modernist Form as Judaization
• Part II: Modernist Form and the Antisemitic Imagination
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index