Orientalist Body Politics. Intermedia Encounters between German and Polish Jews around 1800

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the transformation of the German Jews’ appearance was often defined in terms of Europeanization and modernization, whereas the so-called Polish Jews were reproached for clinging to their outdated ‘Oriental’ caftans, beards, and head coverings. Inner-Jewish differences were moulded in the terms of a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, as Polish Jews were stylized into anachronistic, semi-Oriental figures by their German peers. The paper retraces the genesis of this pattern of thought and analyses its functions. Bringing together a disparate range of textual and pictorial evidence, it asks how and why the spatial-temporal divide of West/Present and East/Past came to be established in late-eighteenth-century debates about Jewish Emancipation and in what ways it helped Christians and Jews alike to stylize the European Enlightenment into a civilizing mission which had to be enforced by means of a ‘Western’ body regime. In sum, it argues that the body politics which helped organize the sociocultural changes of Jewish life around 1800 were premised on modern Orientalism and on modern concepts of history, including emphatic notions of progress and perfectibility.