Introduction: The Jewish Body

Abstract

The Jewish body has long caught the interest of historians and anthropologists. For both Jews and non-Jews, the body of the Jew had features which distinguished it essentially from a non-Jewish body, similar to the way a male body is conceived of as essentially different from a female body. Often, these bodily features were imagined as unchangeable. The following set of articles aims to contribute to scholarship compiled since the 1980s on the history of the body, according to which the body is not understood as a biological and invariable constant but rather as a social construction, formed through discourse, and changing over time. The perception of the body depends on both the one who inhabits the body and the outside observer, who sees and perceives the body of the other according to his/her own ideas and perceptions. Thus, we look at an imagined body, which we only get to know through descriptions that are deeply influenced by the observer’s cultural concepts and ideas. The ways contemporaries wrote, spoke, or thought about the body – their own and that of the other – formed and altered this very body. The articles in this volume aim at deconstructing the discourses which contributed to shaping the Jewish body. The following example illustrates how central the question of the body and its features could be. The early modern Frankfurt ‘ethnographer’ of the Jews, Johann Jacob Schudt (1664–1722) had no doubt that ‘one could identify a Jew immediately among many thousands of people.’He argued that it was easy to recognize a Jew, even when he tried to hide his identity. Outward signs ‘partly physical, partly in relation to his mind, partly in his lifestyle’ could easily reveal his Jewishness. Moreover, he claimed that distinguishing features of the Jew included the nose, lips, eyes and ‘the whole body-posture’. Jews and non-Jews had a long tradition of discussing and ruminating about such an imagined Jewish body, and they also marked the Jewish body to make it recognizable. The question of distinguishability and the markers of difference were among the core issues in JewishChristian relations and were often directly related to the (Jewish) body and included the question whether a conversion could turn a Jew into a Christian or some inherent and