ABSTRACT
Let us return to the colonial and scientific paradigms of the fin de siècle, which will, in turn, lead us back to Freud’s footnote to the case of Little Hans. As we have seen, Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not considered White, but were viewed as a dark-skinned, swarthy race. Jewish men and women were both perceived as homosexual. While Jewish women were considered aggressive and masculine, Jewish men, marked by circumcision, were viewed as castrated. Jewish men were thought to be passive and effeminate, perverse and degenerate, and since they were like women, hysteric. As we have shown, the characteristics attributed to Jews by the surrounding society were not simply viewed as cultural in nature or as responses to anti-Semitic circumstance, but as being due to racial degeneration, resulting from the Jewish practice of endogamous marriage, characterized as incestuous inbreeding. The biological explanation for Jewish degeneracy dovetailed perfectly with the shift in anti-Semitism away from religious prejudice toward racism.
