ABSTRACT
When I began this project, I did so with the rather modest aim to undermine the critical commonplace that there is an inevitable and transhistorical linkage uniting femininity with Judaism. For example, we find this received wisdom recently encapsulated in Daniel Boyarin’s comment that ‘In the antisemitic imaginary of Christian Europe (and perhaps Muslim Africa and Asia as well), male Jews have been represented traditionally as female.’1 In this study I advance the alternative thesis that the conflation of femininity and Judaism is better understood as a distinct historical and psychological phenomenon, one that emerged in European culture during the Renaissance and then gradually acquired only the status of mythic truth. Specifically, I demonstrate that the related ideologies of antisemitism and antifeminism, which stand behind the stereotype of the effeminate Jewish male, emerged in the Renaissance but did not fully take shape and gain dominance within the culture until as late as the nineteenth century. In addition, I also seek to provide the back-story for this image of the effeminate Jew by identifying its origins in an earlier dominant antisemitic vision that associates Judaism with a demonized form of hypermasculinity. As my project developed, this initial impulse expanded, however, ultimately assuming, in its final form, a desire to fashion a broad thesis for linking banal, garden-variety antisemitism of the contemporary cultured type to its more virulent incarnations.
