Chastening Germany: Graetz’s Lusty Jew aAnd Asexual Jewess As Semitic Saviors

Abstract:Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), the famous historian and biblical exegete, penned his commentary to the Song of Songs in 1871 to counter rising antisemitism fueled by racialized fantasies of Jewish gender and sexuality. Graetz contested antisemitic tropes of Jewish masculinity and femininity by reconfiguring the Song of Songs, this most blatantly erotic book of scripture, as a testament to and celebration of Jewish chastity. Against the lascivious femme fatal, Graetz introduced the tender Sulamit, whose paradigmatic chastity renders romantic ardor into asexual, sisterly affection. In contrast to the effeminate Jew, Graetz introduced the Friend, a brawny adventurer whose masculine attempt at chastity only reveals his sexual potency. Graetz leverages the co-constitutive relationships among gender, class, and race to bestow on these figures not only the bourgeois virtues connoted by their chastity, but also associations of whiteness and middle-class belonging. Graetz’s exegetical construction of new models of Jewish femininity and masculinity was no mere theoretical exercise, but a response to matters of life and death as the rise of sexually transmitted diseases coalesced into a public health crisis. With the specter of syphilis in the background, Graetz’s commentary to the Song of Songs proffered German Jews—and German Christians—a Semitic path to redemption from the immorality crippling fin-de-siècle Germany.