ABSTRACT
If John M. Hoberman is correct that ‘the poisoned image of the Jewish male [as effeminate] is a postmedieval construct that assumed its modern form and special virulence only toward the end of the nineteenth century,’1 then the ascendancy of that Jew-Sissy trope would also seem to reflect a reciprocal transformation of the Jew-Devil into an invisible specter. In this chapter I argue that the primary cause for the corrosion of the overt linkage between Judaism and masculinity is the consolidation of heterosexuality within Western Christian culture.2 The stabilization of bourgeois, oedipalized masculinity as the cultural standard demands that the Jew-Sissy replace the Jew-Devil as the social image for the Jewish man. Retention of the Jew-Devil as the Christian man’s alter ego would only serve to illustrate the manifold ways in which modern masculinity falls short of the previous idealization of Greco-Roman martial masculinity.
