Jews, Lice, and History - The New School

Jews, Lice, and History
Hugh Raffles
Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of
lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In
just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question
of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon
have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only
20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole
of Germany.
— Heinrich Himmler, April 1943
The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.,
exhumes the bodies with minimum ceremony, forcing acknowledgment of the
facticity, specificity, and proximity of genocide. Always in the air is the fraught
My thanks to Steve Connell for sensitive and expert translation of Alfred Nossig’s works as well
as for a series of highly informative conversations. I also thank Sharon Simpson for her unfailing
provocation and for encouraging a difficult compulsion. Jacek Nowakowski at the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., provided a detailed and authoritative introduction to the life
and work of Arthur Szyk that initiated this exploration. This essay also benefited from discussions
with Paul Gilroy, Susan Harding, Dan Linger, Saba Mahmood, Don Moore, Lisa Rofel, Jim Scott,
Rebecca Stein, and Eric Worby and from engagement with students in my core theory course at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Particular thanks also to Claudio Lomnitz, the Public Culture
Editorial Committee, and the three anonymous reviewers solicited by this journal. I have presented
this material in various forms at Berkeley, Duke, Harvard, Irvine, the New School, and Stanford and
have received helpful comments and critique at all these events, in particular, from Robin Blackburn,
Tina Campt, Hazel Carby, Steve Caton, Lawrence Cohen, Ewa Domanska, Lousie Fortmann, Engseng
Ho, Nancy Jacobs, Paul Kottman, Smita Lahiri, Thomas Laqueur, Peter Lindner, Dilip Menon,
Public Culture 19:3 d o i 10.1215/08992363-2007-008
Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press
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question of exceptionalism; but pressing as that is, resolving it is not the task the
curators have assumed. With politicians invoking appeasement to justify militarism,
with the Middle East rent by war and occupation, and with the specter of
populist fascism again stalking Europe, the museum made me face something I
already sensed but only half admitted: Jews are still struggling with the identifications
bequeathed by the Nazis, damned to judge and be judged in terms of loss,
guilt, trauma, and redemption. Hunted in the past, haunted in the present.
“Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing,” says the Schutzstaffel (SS)
Reichsführer. 1 And though at times he could strain for the apposite euphemism,
Himmler was famous for choosing his words with precision. Antisemitism is
not like delousing; nor is it merely a form of delousing. It is exactly the same as
delousing. Does he mean that Jews actually are lice? Or only that the same measures
should be taken to eradicate both evils?
The SS commander is a constant presence at the Holocaust Museum. Controlled
and confident among his famous colleagues — Hermann Göring, Joseph
Goebbels, and the Führer himself, Adolf Hitler. The calm within the storm.
Downstairs, when I visited in summer 2002, the museum had hung a show by the
painter and propagandist Arthur Szyk, student of medieval illumination, savage
caricaturist, and activist for the Revisionists, the ascendant militarist wing of the
Zionist movement. 2 Szyk captured Himmler’s clinical impassivity well. In late
1943, just a few months after the U.S. State Department had, for the first time,
officially confirmed conservative reports of 2 million Jews killed by the Nazis,
Szyk, exiled in New York and aggressively campaigning for an interventionist
Diane Nelson, Susan O’Donovan, Jackie Orr, Charles Piot, Leander Schneider, Mary Steedley, Ann
Stoler, Sylvia Yanagisako, Mayfair Yang, and Mei Zhan. My thanks also to Richard I. Cohen, Rotem
Geva, David Goldberg, Susanna Hecht, Tom Mertes, Ben Orlove, Grzegorz Sokol, Laura Surwit,
and Irvin Ungar. In addition, I am grateful to the Center for Jewish History, the Leo Baeck Institute,
and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, all in New York City, for bibliographic assistance and
permission to access their collections.
1. Speech to SS officers, April 24, 1943, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Reprinted in U.S. Office of Chief of
Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 11 vols. (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 4:572 – 78, 574.
2. In exile in Britain and the United States, Szyk worked tirelessly to publicize events in Europe.
A friend of Vladimir Jabotinsky and, later, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), he put his work at the
service of the Revisionists — a tendency founded on the principle of a sovereign, undivided Jewish
state — campaigning first for a Jewish army, then for open immigration to Palestine, and consistently
on behalf of the paramilitary Irgun. See Stephen Luckert, The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002); and Joseph P. Ansell, “Arthur Szyk’s
Depiction of the ‘New Jew’: Art as a Weapon in the Campaign for an American Response to the
Holocaust,” American Jewish History 89 (2001): 123 – 34.
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escue policy, produced a drawing of characteristic clarity. 3 Himmler, Göring,
Goebbels, and Hitler complain: “We’re Running Short of Jews!” On the table,
the Gestapo report: “2,000,000 Jews Executed.” In the upper-right-hand corner:
“To the memory of my darling Mother, murdered by the Germans, somewhere in
the Ghetto of Poland. . . . Arthur Szyk.” He was only guessing this last part, but
he was right: his mother had already been herded onto the transport from Lodz
to Chelmno.
A year later, at the end of 1944, with Majdanek already liberated, Szyk again
drew his Nazi gang, this time for the cover of the Revisionist journal the Answer.
The dead are all present in skulls, bones, and tombstones etched with the names
of the camps. The Nazi leaders, towering over the ruined landscape, are tattered
and facing defeat, Goebbels at the front, throws up his hands in disbelief and
a kind of surrender as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, passes through, grimly
grasping the Torah, the emblem of collective survival. Where we see one, many
lurk in the shadows. An eternal people, as the caption says.
The Answer was the house organ of the Bergsonites, Revisionist militants in
the United States who had thrown themselves into publicizing the plight of the
European Jews. Szyk’s drawing — used prominently in the group’s materials —
displays his gift for distilling programmatic politics into complex, yet visceral,
imagery. The Wandering Jew, that enduring and ambivalent antisemitic icon —
he who mocked Christ on his progress to the cross and was condemned to roam
the earth until the Second Coming — had already been reclaimed by Jewish artists,
and Szyk drew from at least two prominent versions. One, a turn-of-thecentury
image by Shmuel Hirszenberg in which a stripped Ahasuerus, victimized
to derangement, flees the grisly horrors of the 1881 pogroms, circulated throughout
Jewish Europe on postcards and posters. Another, a sculpture, is by Alfred
Nossig, whose life occupies the center of this essay. Nossig’s statue transforms
Hirszenberg’s traumatized vision with a radically assertive response to suffering,
one that — in a profoundly awkward irony that will shortly become apparent — fit
well with Szyk’s taste for the heroic. 4
3. Christopher R. Browning provides the rather remarkable statistic that over 50 percent of the
people killed by the Nazis died in the eleven months between March 1942 and February 1943 (Christopher
R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
[New York: HarperCollins, 1992], xv). By the time the United States acceded to the pressure to
acknowledge events across the Atlantic, the fate of European Jewry was effectively settled.
4. Both of these images are discussed in Richard I. Cohen’s fascinating and comprehensive
Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
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Arthur Szyk, Oh Ye Dry Bones, Hear the Word of the Lord, cover of the Answer (1944).
Reproduced with the cooperation of Alexandra Szyk Bracie and the Arthur Szyk Society
(www.szyk.org)
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.........
Lice are parasites (as are Jews). They suck our blood (as do Jews). They carry
disease (as do Jews). They enter our most intimate parts (as do Jews). They cause
us harm without our knowing it (as do Jews). They signify filth (as do Jews).
They are everywhere (as are Jews). They are disgusting. There is no reason they
should live.
.........
Insects were there in the Holocaust. And not merely as convenient rhetorical figures
for what Mahmood Mamdami — drawing parallels between the genocides in
Nazi Germany and Rwanda — calls race branding (“whereby it [becomes] possible
not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an
easy conscience”). 5
“Ordinary” dehumanization of this type — “the Tutsi ‘cockroaches’ should
know what will happen, they will disappear” 6 — requires two associations: the
identification of a targeted group with a particular type of nonhuman, and the
association of the nonhuman in question with adequately negative traits, traits that
are always specific to that time and place. The rhetorical boundary that separates
humans and nonhumans is notoriously labile, though it is worth making the obvious
point that humans — in the generic — always (almost always?) retain their
position at the top of any species hierarchy. Equally obvious, generic humans
are more theoretical than lived, and in everyday practice the humanist human
tends to be simultaneously universal and not universal, differentiated by all those
naturalized markers of race, gender, and class with which it is so impossible not
to be familiar. In these terms, genocide is a state of exaggeration rather than a
state of exception, a hyperbolization of the familiar story in which universalism is
restricted through the naming and instrumentalizing of biologized difference.
221 – 30. As Cohen points out, Nossig’s innovation was to take an image that was widely familiar at
the time and imbue it with an utterly different sensibility.
5. Mahmood Mamdami, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide
in Rwanda (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 13. For this type of argument in
relation to the Holocaust, see Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitism: Myth and
Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 2 – 3; Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s
Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), 71.
6. Insectification such as this from a January 1994 article in the Hutu Power newspaper Kangura
was a common feature of the Rwandan genocide. Quoted by Angeline Oyog, “Human Rights-Media:
Voices of Hate Test Limits of Press Freedom,” Inter-Press Service, April 5, 1995, cited in Mamdami,
When Victims Become Killers, 212.
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Although the Nazis imposed the borders with unprecedented ferocity, they did
not initiate the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom of humanity. Just as the
practices of modern German antisemitism were directly connected to colonial
technologies developed in Africa and Asia, the ontologies proposed by Judeophobia,
a religio-cultural racism that reaches back beyond medieval Europe, were
deeply tied to the logics and practices of an emergent imperial politics of race
and difference. 7 In early modern France, for example, “since coition with a Jewess
is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog,” Christians
who had heterosexual sex with Jews could be prosecuted for the capital crime of
sodomy (the peccatum gravissimum that encompassed both homosexual sex and
intercourse with animals) and burned alive with their partners — “such persons
in the eye of the law and our holy faith differ[ing] in no wise from beasts” (who
were also subject to judicial execution). 8 In a minor key, long-standing German
identifications of Jews with dogs (mongrels) and, in some circumstances, pigs,
persisted through the Nazi era. 9 More destructive — and more insinuating — was
the association of the Jew with the shadowy figure of the parasite, a figure that
infests the individual body, the population, and, of course, the body politic, that
does so in both obvious and unexpected ways, and that invites innovative interventions
and controls.
There is more here than dehumanization by association. The parasite takes
us closer to the making of difference, not simply to the patrolling of the borders,
but to the situated emergence of the human that takes place in conjunction with
the making of the animal. Giorgio Agamben usefully describes the making of
two impure beings, part animal, part human, neither wholly animal nor wholly
human, both of which are emergent in the historical practices with which I am
concerned here. One, formed by the incorporation of the animal that lies beyond
the human, brings the slave, barbarian, and foreigner to the doorstep of humanity,
7. For a genealogy that takes the preoccupation with the government of difference to the fifteenth
century and pays attention to the unfolding of empire within the borders of the nation, see Anthony
Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology,
2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The classic reference for attitudes to Jews
in medieval Europe is Jehoshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception
of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1943).
8. E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History
of Europe’s Animal Trials (1906; repr., Boston: Faber, 1987), 153, emphasis mine; quotations are
from Jacob Döpler, Theatrum poenarum (Sonderhausen, 1693), and Jodocus Damhouder, Praxis
rerum criminalium (Antwerp, 1562).
9. Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York:
Continuum, 2000).
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“figures of an animal in human form.” The other emerges as an exclusion from
humanity of the animal that is always already within, “the non-man produced
within the man,” the parasite, the corrosive trace of the animal inside. 10
Three ideological streams converge in the Jewish parasite: modern antisemitism,
populist anticapitalism, and biologistic social science. Alex Bein tracks the
figure prior to its racialization — in the form of a destitute person and a stock
character in Greek comedy who sparred wittily with host and guests intent on
extracting humiliation in return for a meal — and its subsequent entry into European
vernacular with the early modern humanist return to the classical texts. 11 In
this later incarnation, its comedic qualities flattened by the centuries, “parasite”
reappears as an expression of contempt for persons who fawn on the rich and for
people who profit without labor at the expense of those who sweat. And it is in
this sharply moralistic form that the word is taken up by the eighteenth-century
sciences: first botany, then zoology, and, finally, fatally, by the sciences of man.
I worry more than Bein about this moment of adoption by biology. He offers a
series of definitions from natural science textbooks that strip the term of its violent
social history, reducing it to bare fact, which he summarizes as follows: “The
parasite exists at the expense of another living organism which is called its host.
Its very existence is bound to injure the host, often to the point of death.” 12 For
Bein, disaster occurs as the parasite travels on into the social sciences and finds its
niche in the body politic. But now — forty years after he wrote — it is so routine
to locate ideology in the putatively descriptive rhetoric of the natural sciences
that I will not labor the issue more than by pointing to the felicitous intersection
of economic liberalism, welfarist morality, and scientific rationalist affect that
continues to make the metaphorical conflation feel just right — natural, even. As
will become clear, the prime characteristic of the racial hygiene embodied by
Himmler’s lice was the collapse in every respect of the biological (in particular,
the medical) into the political and, equally, of the political into the biological. The
institutional and intellectual boundaries are not merely breached.
Bein persuasively argues that the parasite enters European political philosophy
via the liberal political economy of the Physiocrats. François Quesnay’s Tableau
10. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 37.
11. In preparing this discussion, I have drawn extensively from Bein’s pioneering essay “The Jewish
Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem with Special Reference to Germany,” Leo
Baeck Institute Yearbook 9 (1964): 1 – 40. On the parasite as a contemporary product of exclusionary
state juridical regimes, see Jacques Derrida with Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 59 – 61.
12. Bein, “Jewish Parasite,” 9.
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économique of 1758 (which Karl Marx called “the most brilliant idea of which
political economy had hitherto been guilty” 13) slices society neatly into three: the
classe productive of agriculturalists, the class of landowners, and the unproductive
classe stérile made up primarily of merchants and manufacturers.
While Marx noted that by understanding agricultural labor as the basis of surplus
generation the Physiocrats took the critical step that allowed value — and
therefore capitalism itself — to be investigated from the standpoint of production
rather than circulation, Bein makes the rather different point that it is the introduction
of the “parasitic” classe stérile into political-philosophical discourse that
will give racial antisemitism its populist base in anticapitalism: “The Jew, decried
since the Middle Ages as a blood sucker and exploiter of his ‘host nation,’ [now]
made to bear the added burden of the odium of capitalism, always and everywhere
regarded as an alien and belonging according to the race theory of the
antisemites, to an inferior unproductive race — who else would fit the descriptive
term ‘parasite’ better?” 14
Parasites drain the lifeblood from the body politic — blood figured as money
from a body figured as nation. 15 But in order for this commonplace to sustain
political violence a decisive metamorphosis has to take place: a people must
become vermin in fact as well as analogy, the naturalistic metaphor must be literalized
in “the real objects of natural science.” 16 Explaining this shift is at the
heart of an understanding of the fate of the Jews, who, after all, will be killed
like lice — literally — with the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers,
with the same technology.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Eugen Dühring, Franz Mehring —
social theorists of both “left” and “right” — shared a virulent, activist hostility
to Jews. 17 As in more scholastic circles, the issue was cast in terms of belonging.
13. Quoted in Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1954), 238.
14. Bein, “Jewish Parasite,” 10.
15. Later, Bein (“Jewish Parasite,” 22) quotes Alfred Rosenberg from Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts
(The Myth of the Twentieth Century) (Munich, 1933). The conception of the Jew as parasite
(Schmarotzer), writes the Nazi ideologist/mythologist, “shall in the first instance not be taken as
a moral judgment but as biological reality, exactly in the same way in which we speak of parasitic
occurrences in the life of plants and animals. The sacullina pierces the rectum of the common crab,
and gradually grows into it, it sucks away its vital forces; the same process occurs when the Jew
invades society through the open wounds of the people, consuming their creative forces and hastening
the doom of society” (emphasis added). As is well known, Jews often appeared as bacteria in
similar biologistic narratives.
16. Bein, “Jewish Parasite,” 12.
17. For a series of exemplary antisemitic statements from Proudhon and his associates, as well
as from Bakunin — for whom Jews were “a sect of exploiters, a people of leeches, nothing but one
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For Paul de Lagarde, the Göttinger Orientalist and raciologist, Jews are “aliens
in every European state, and as such nothing but harbingers of decay.” 18 It was a
formulation that captured the rich political possibilities of the new race theories
emerging from the meeting of biology and anthropology at a moment of nationstate
ascendancy, a formulation that, with its invocation of degeneration, indexed
the new “biologico-social racism” resulting from what Michel Foucault has called
“the biological transcription.” 19 Lagarde was writing nearly fifteen years after the
single devouring parasite” — see Edmund Silberner, “The Attitude of the Fourierist School towards
the Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (1947): 339 – 62; also Zosa Szajkowski, “The Jewish St.-Simonians
and Socialist Anti-Semites in France,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (1947): 33 – 60. Mehring and the
intellectuals of the German Social Democratic Party regarded mass antisemitism as a progressive
anticapitalism that signaled the proximity of the socialist revolution. This position enabled them to
look favorably on figures such as Adolf Stöcker and on the rising antisemitic movement at the turn
of the century. See Robert S. Wistrich, “Anti-Capitalism or Antisemitism?” Leo Baeck Yearbook 22
(1977): 35 – 51. For an unfortunate attempt to relativize nineteenth-century socialist antisemitism by
distinguishing class antagonism from hostility to Jewish emancipation, see Hal Draper, “Marx and
the Economic-Jew Stereotype,” in Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 1, State and
Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review, 1977), 591 – 608. I would suggest, to the contrary, that
one should read Marx’s class discourse of “vampire-capital” within a racialized frame and, indeed,
that this version of the Jewish Question is constitutive of nineteenth-century Marxist theorizations
of capitalism: “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and
lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New
York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:224. Clearly, the close relationship between the vampire
and the parasite is worthy of further exploration. For another take on Jews as vampires, see Judith
Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1995).
18. Paul de Lagarde, Juden und Indogermanen, eine Studie nach dem Leben (Jews and Indo-
Germans: A Study from Life) (Göttingen, 1887), quoted in Bein, “Jewish Parasite,” 12.
19. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 – 76,
trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 61. Karl Kautsky opens his Are the Jews a Race?
with a concise statement of the novelty of modern antisemitism, “which — contrary to the naïve antisemitism
of earlier periods — is proud of its scientific spirit and feels itself free from religious prejudices.
Just as religion was once obliged, and is still obliged, to cloak or justify all possible varieties
of secular partisan interests, so natural science must now aid in representing aspirations of interests
with strictly temporal and spatial limitations as natural and eternal necessities” (Karl Kautsky, Are
the Jews a Race? [1926; repr., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976], 11). For extended discussions,
see, among others, George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European
Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder,
c. 1848 – 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robert N. Proctor, Racial
Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Proctor,
“From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological Tradition,” in Bones, Bodies,
Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988), 138 – 79; George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., “Volksgeist” as Method and Ethic:
Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National
Unification and Nazism, 1870 – 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and, for a less
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unification of 1871, and that birth of the nation also marks the formal emancipation
of Germany’s Jews. Yet from this moment, and particularly after 1878 and
the rise of Adolf Stöcker’s Christian Social Party, antisemitism develops an official
cast and the door — the one that finally slams shut in 1933 — starts to close
on the assimilationist project that underwrote Jewish enthusiasm for the German
Enlightenment. 20
This is the moment Jews across Europe are thrown into spiraling crisis. It is
also — not coincidentally — the moment a Jewish nation coalesces as a utopian
political project. Below, I take up the parasites’ story again, following the violent
expulsions and flight across the Pale to Poland, Berlin, Basel, Prague, Palestine,
and the United States. But before that, let’s see how far Germans had traveled. One
hundred years earlier, Johann Gottfried Herder, the Hebrew scholar and leading
theorist of German romanticism, whose role in finding a common basis for emergent
nationhood would not be overlooked by his successors of the mid-twentieth
century and whose belief in the incommensurability of peoples had convinced
him that each culture, self-contained, had its own geographical place, assessed
the predicament faced by the Jews: “The people of God, once endowed by Heaven
itself with a fatherland, have been for thousands of years, nay almost since the
time of their beginning, a parasitic plant on the trunk of other nations; a tribe of
cunning jobbers, spread over nearly the whole earth, they nowhere show, in spite
of all oppression, a longing for honor and a place of their own, a fatherland.” 21
The Jews’ failure of national aspiration, it seems, is also their strength. Assimilation
is to be their reward. The parasite is still confined to botany (and will not
German-centered account, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1996).
20. This trajectory was, of course, by no means obvious at the time, and it could be argued — in
fact is argued by some contemporary German Jews — that, however brutal, the end of assimilation
was only a twelve-year hiatus (though presumably the ideal would never again be quite so innocent).
For a powerful counterstatement and complex postwar refusal to reclaim German identity, see Jean
Améry, At the Mind’s Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans.
Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
21. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Hebräer” (“Hebrews”), in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of Human History) (Riga, 1784), quoted in Bein, “Jewish
Parasite,” 10. On Herder’s anthropology, see Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the
New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993),
172 – 88; and John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002). For an assessment of Herder’s attitude to the Jews and a critique of his
supposed philosemitism, see Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary
Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97. My
thanks to an anonymous reviewer from this journal for this reference.
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enter zoology for another fifty years). The Jews, unlike other peoples eternally
wandering, know the art of communication in an alien land — albeit their method
is wiliness and their language is commerce. But the choice that faces them is stark
indeed: wither away as a people or persist, like Ahasuerus, in geospiritual limbo.
As Lagarde’s comment reveals, a full century later, with Herder’s national aspirations
finally realized, the choice is starker still.
.........
Alfred Nossig was seventy-nine when he was arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto by
the ZOB (Z · ydowska Organizacja Bojowa), the Jewish Fighting Organization that
would lead the iconic uprising. It was February 1943, one of those dead days
of terror between the Gestapo’s January incursion and the April revolt, and the
details are confused. There was a secret trial, a conviction for treason, and a summary
execution. After Nossig’s death, an incriminating document, a report he had
prepared for the Germans on the impact of their routed action, was found in his
pocket, or perhaps in the desk drawer of his apartment, or perhaps not at all. No
one could say for sure, and by that point, of course, it didn’t really matter.
Nossig was not only a sculptor. He was a well-known writer of philosophical
and political treatises; a poet; a playwright; a literary critic; the author of
an opera libretto; a journalist; a diplomat; a polymath trained in law and economics
(in Lvov), philosophy (in Zurich), and medicine (in Vienna); and, as the
historian of Zionism Shmuel Almog puts it, “a conceiver of great schemes.” 22
He was a mysterious figure, and a tireless one, always organizing, always arguing,
and somehow always on the losing side. For decades, he reveled in the furious
center of early Zionism as Jewish intellectuals and activists wrestled bitterly
to make sense of their situation in the midst of new ideologies, new possibilities,
and unprecedented dangers. The contradictions Nossig struggled with — his
aporetic desires for a Jewish identification that could be defensive and affirming,
effective and ethical, national and nonexclusive, led him to places I suspect he
barely understood. Eventually, they led him to his death. Other Jews — though
not many — were executed by the ZOB, but none were as prominent as Nossig. 23
22. Shmuel Almog, “Alfred Nossig: A Reappraisal,” Studies in Zionism 7 (1983): 1–29, 1.
23. The ZOB mainly targeted the notorious Jewish police. See Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame:
An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising, trans. Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 50. For
an extraordinary account of the armed factions’ dealings with presumed collaborators that is drawn
through interviews with six survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, see Vered Levy-Barzilai, “The
Rebels among Us,” Haaretz Magazine, October 13, 2006, 18 – 22. Levy-Barzilai estimates that the
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The untidy death of the old man at this moment of enduring redemption is still a
moral, political, and historical problem.
Judging from the relative success of Hirszenberg’s Ahasuerus, Nossig’s vigorous
statue was premature in aligning the Torah with resistance. Hirszenberg’s
visceral image cleared ground on which East and West European Jews could
meet in a world undone by the vicious pogroms that followed the assassination of
Czar Alexander II in 1881, a world soon to experience the explosions of 1903 and
after — cataclysms that sent 2.75 million Jews from the Pale of Settlement pouring
west across Europe between 1881 and 1914. Hirszenberg leaves no doubt that
the ground, scorched as it was, was Christian antisemitism, a reality that posed
the question of assimilation in its sharpest form.
Despite the rise of active and organized Jewish self-defense during the
pogroms, it was suffering — what Hannah Arendt dismisses as “the ‘lachrymose’
presentation of Jewish history” — that was the resonant popular idiom. 24
In contrast to Hirszenberg’s painting, and despite its prominent placement in the
Berlin Zionist-cultural magazine Ost und West, Nossig’s statue “fell quickly into
oblivion.” 25 As we know, however, its traces would reappear in Szyk’s rendering
of the theme forty-five years later, a vision that found in the lachrymose a wellspring
of defiance.
Nossig rejected assimilation in favor of practical Zionism sometime around
1886. 26 This reversal was far from unusual at a time of rising antisemitism and
intense Jewish political debate, but it was dramatic nonetheless, as, until that
moment, he was the principal Jewish spokesman for Polish nationalism in eastern
Galicia. He had been a child when Polish self-rule came to Galicia in 1867. As
Lemberg became Lvov, his secular father, an activist tied to Enlightenment emancipation,
lost his leading position in the city’s Jewish community as a result of
his inadequate Polish-language skills. 27 The son, however, embraced the romantic
nationalism of the Mloda Polska (Young Poland) literary movement and the
Ghetto underground liquidated thirty-three Jews in total. My thanks to Rotem Geva for drawing my
attention to this source.
24. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 12 n. 2.
25. Cohen, Jewish Icons, 227.
26. Ezra Mendelsohn, “From Assimilation to Zionism in Lvov: The Case of Alfred Nossig,”
Slavonic and East European Review 49, no. 17 (1971): 521 – 34, 530. Rather than diplomatic maneuvering
for great power sponsorship of a Jewish state as a condition prior to settlement (the program
of Theodor Herzl and the “political Zionists”), “practical Zionists” organized an active program of
small- and large-scale emigration and settlement in Palestine.
27. Mendelsohn, “From Assimilation to Zionism,” 524.
532

Shmuel Hirszenberg, The Wandering Jew (1899). Collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo
© The Israel Museum/David Harris
533
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Alfred Nossig, The
Wandering Jew (1901).
From the Archives of the
YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research,
New York
534

philosemitic poets Jan Kasprowicz and Adam Mickiewicz. A dandy, he adopted
what passed for Polish national dress, and he wrote his own romantic poetry.
Poland, Nossig and his comrades argued, was a haven for Jews, and the cause of
Jewish emancipation was best served by an alliance of Jews and Poles, two trammeled
peoples marginalized within a hostile Europe. Still in his teens, he edited
the journal Ojczyzna (Homeland) and soon founded Przymierze braci (Union of
Brothers), an assimilationist society based on the journal’s program.
Jewish politics in Lvov at this time took the form of competition over the legacies
of the Enlightenment. The Zionists, contemporaries of the Union of Brothers,
were likewise young graduates of the German-language gymnasium, and they too
rejected religious orthodoxy as antimodern. They opened a yeshiva in the city,
promoted the study of Hebrew, and by 1888 had formed Zion, an explicitly nationalist
organization dedicated to cultural regeneration. Jewish history, they argued
in plays, essays, and public lectures, was a struggle for survival against twin evils:
antisemitism and assimilation.
Antisemitism was the trump card of the Galician Zionists. 28 It was Nossig’s
recognition that the new scientized racism that targeted Jewishness rather than
Judaism was “characteristic of our situation in Lvov” — an acknowledgment that
the Jewish-Polish utopia would remain unrealized — that confirmed the crisis that
drew him to Zionism. 29 It was an unsatisfactory transformation. Nossig broke
with the Union of Bothers but was, in turn, rejected by the members of Zion, who,
relishing the coup of such a prominent convert, invited him to lecture. The talk,
an account of Moses as a Darwinian materialist, was heard as “gentile psychological
criticism” by an audience dedicated to the propagation of Judaic high culture
and who — unlike the lecturer — had little interest in emigration. The Enlightenment
writer Reuvan Asher Braudes, who was present at the meeting, described
Nossig’s lecture as “very odd to us,” and his response pinpoints the critical divisions
emerging among Jewish intellectuals among the “political,” “practical,”
28. Or, as Arendt puts it, more sweepingly: “The only direct, unadulterated consequence of
nineteenth-century antisemitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism, which, at
least in its Western ideological form, was a kind of counterideology, the ‘answer’ to antisemitism”
(Origins of Totalitarianism, xv). For a nuanced account, see John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race:
Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1994), 124 – 27.
29. Nossig quoted in Mendelsohn, “From Assimilation to Zionism,” 530. I take the formulation of
the shift in the “object of hostility” from Judaism to Jewishness from Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism:
Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette
and Lyn Marcus (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 145.
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and “culturalist” tendencies of the Zionist movement. 30 To these culturalists, the
failure of the secular and self-consciously modern Nossig to mark his Jewishness
in recognizably cultural terms was a sign of lack — the lack of authenticity of the
ex-assimilationist. He was not invited back. 31
But Nossig himself was now arguing that the Diaspora had corrupted Jews of
all persuasions. Emancipation and assimilation had directly provoked antisemitism
by fomenting insecurity among Christians. Jews and Christians, it seemed,
were fundamentally incompatible. Among Jews, historical “exile” had led to
degeneration. In An Attempt to Solve the Jewish Question (1887) Nossig writes,
“The average Jewish type exhibits strength in the struggle for survival but is morally
on a lower level than the non-Jew; he possesses more shrewdness and endurance,
but at the same time more ambition, vanity, and a lack of conscience.” 32
The book caused a sensation. But it was not through offense. Instead, Nossig’s
explicit call for the rededication of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as the
only solution to the problem of the European Jews thrust him to the forefront of
Zionist polemicists — a prominent rival to Theodor Herzl, whose own manifesto,
Der Judenstaat, had been published the year before. Yet passages like the one
above, overlooked at the time, now reveal the latent symptom. With some scholarly
restraint, Almog has written that Nossig “grappled with his Jewishness his
whole life through, accepting it at an intellectual level, remaining apologetic about
it emotionally.” 33 Consistent to the end in his commitment to Zionism, Nossig was
equally constant in his ambivalence toward Jewish identity, both his own and that
of his fellows. Shortly before he was executed by the ZOB, the Germans appointed
him director of the Department of Art and Culture in the Warsaw Judenrat, the
Jewish administrative council in the Ghetto. Opening the council’s first meeting,
the elderly Nossig spoke on the role of art in the Ghetto, by now a place of acute
30. Mendelsohn, “From Assimilation to Zionism,” 533.
31. This antagonism, as Mendelsohn points out, expresses the critical divides that would emerge
among Herzl’s political Zionists, the practical Zionists such as Nossig, and the “spiritual Zionism”
of Ahad Ha’am. From the 1890s until his death in 1927 (in Palestine), Ha’am opposed diplomacy,
arguing that large-scale settlement was impractical, undesirable, and oppressive to the Arab population.
Palestine, he maintained, should be viewed as a diasporic focus of religious and spiritual regeneration.
See Ahad Ha’am, Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings, ed. Hans Kohn (New
York: Schocken, 1962). Also, Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins
of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
32. Alfred Nossig, Proba rozwiazania kwestji zydowskiej (An Attempt to Solve the Jewish Question)
(Lvov, 1887), quoted in Mendelsohn, “From Assimilation to Zionism,” 531.
33. Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 1. For similar symptoms in Herzl’s early writings, see Sander L.
Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 237 – 40.
536

desperation and advancing starvation. “Art means cleanliness,” he is reported to
have said, “and we have to introduce culture into the streets.” But why? “So that
they are clean and so that we are not ashamed in front of our German visitors.” 34
.........
It is difficult to write about this. The attempt to describe instantly domesticates
the horror, subdues it, memorializes it. And yet it is all so cinematic now. Nossig’s
arrest, the hurried trial, execution, and — jump/cut — across the Soviet border,
the Einsatzgruppen unleashed, systematically butchering the frozen Ukrainians.
The bleached white landscape, the cabins engulfed in flame, black smoke pluming
into an empty sky, red blood soaking out across the crisp snow. It is February
when Nossig dies in Warsaw. The uprising begins on April 19, and the fighters
are still holding out five days later as Himmler lectures on lice to his SS officers
in Kharkiv.
Let’s take stock of what’s happening in this difficult history, a history growing
more and more uncomfortable as it reaches toward our present, a history shadowed
by the enormity of the disaster about to fall. There are others, but the latenineteenth-century
words that matter most here are the following: degeneracy,
science, nation, and race. There are Jews, Poles, and Germans. There is empire
too, and I will return to that. Soon, Europe and its colonies will burn in war upon
war. The Judenfrage, the Jewish Question, is also the Jewish Problem, and new
solutions are beginning to appear. Nossig will travel. Before he comes back to
die in the filth of the Ghetto, he will crisscross the continent, studying; sculpting;
writing books and plays; editing journals; organizing museums, exhibits, and
research institutes; founding a Jewish publishing house and attempting to establish
a Jewish university; addressing meetings and conferences in Paris, Vienna,
London, Berlin, and many other cities, building a reputation as a social liberal
and committed pacifist, doing anything he can to further the cause of Jewish
emigration.
All that romantic energy he once poured into Polish poetry he rechannels into
the new cultural and political activism of Gegenwartsarbeit — the practical work
of transforming the present. By his late thirties he is one of the best-known Jews
of his generation. But he will end up barely a footnote, his name tied always to
that worst of all words: “collaborator.” What more terrible fate could posterity
bestow?
34. Quoted from the diary of Jonas Turkov by Michael Zylberberg, “The Trial of Alfred Nossig:
Traitor or Victim,” Weiner Library Bulletin 23 (1969): 44.
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Opening event of the “Ausstelling jüdischer Kunstler” (“Exhibition of Jewish Artists”), Berlin, 1907.
From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
Nossig will fall foul, first of Herzl and the political Zionists, then of the Zionist
Organization itself. But he does not stop. He negotiates with the Ottomans, the
British, the Germans, the Poles. He cultivates around himself the kind of mystery
no one likes or trusts, something malign maybe, who can say for sure? People
know he is driven. They are no longer sure by what. It is as if he sensed the enormity
of the disaster about to fall. (Did anyone sense the enormity of the disaster
about to fall?)
People do not know what to make of him. He has the kind of mystery no one
likes or trusts. (Adam Czerniakow — chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat — calls
him the Tausendkünstler, “the conjurer,” “the man of a thousand parts.” 35) By the
time he appears in the Ghetto he is taciturn and haughty. (“A word from him was
35. Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, ed. Raul
Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz; trans. Stanislaw Staron and the staff of Yad Vashem
(New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 84.
538

are indeed.” 36) Is he scheming to prevent the disaster about to fall? (Could he
have sensed the enormity of the disaster about to fall?)
We have to go back: back to the 1880s and their stunned aftermath, back to
the loss of that moment of idealistic possibility, the loss of that poetic space in
which Jews and Poles might make a new land for the oppressed. Old Israel in New
Poland, as the young Nossig imagined it. A moment before cosmopolitan was tied
so emphatically to rootless, to alien, to Jew. Because, back then, before everything
that is to come, as the skein starts to unravel, in the moment the ground forever
slips away, Nossig reaches for the race. A modern man of social science, he grasps
to the solidity of facts, as if this kind of real will hold back whatever disaster may
befall. He forms the Association for Jewish Statistics and enlists many of the most
dynamic Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. They want Jews to know who
Jews are and how they live; they want to reveal the corrupting effects of assimilation
and the new antisemitism; they want to organize and regenerate.
So they publish surveys of Diaspora life and they produce statistics. It is
Gegenwartsarbeit. And Nossig (like others who are not Jews) realizes at once
that survival will be a question of social hygiene. That the words that matter most
are degeneracy, science, nation, and race.
.........
Already prodigious, Nossig was further energized by his break with the Union of
Brothers. Almost immediately he set about building institutions and writing publications
that would help define the new “Jewish social science.” 37 From Berlin, the
36. Zylberberg, “Trial of Alfred Nossig,” 44.
37. On the emergence and practice of Jewish social science, see Efron, Defenders of the Race,
and Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2000), both of which I have drawn on extensively in this section. In
addition, see John M. Efron, “1911: Julius Presse Publishes Biblisch-talmudische Medezin,” in Yale
Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096 – 1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman
and Jack Zipes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 293 – 98; Mitchell B. Hart, “Racial
Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation,” Isis 90 (1999): 268 – 97; and Hart,
“Moses the Microbiologist: Judaism and Social Hygiene in the Work of Alfred Nossig,” Jewish
Social Studies 2 (1995): 72 – 97. Martin Buber characterized the new social science as a jüdischer
Wissenschaftskomplex (“Jewish science”), in contrast with the Enlightenment scholarly tradition
of Wissenschaft des Judentums (“science of Judaism”). The Zionists saw the latter as no more than
empty scholasticism and proposed the new “national” science with its emphasis on the investigation
of the contemporary conditions of diasporic life as a break with the assimilationist impulse of the
past. On this, see Martin Buber, “Jewish Scholarship: New Perspectives,” Die Welt (1901), repr., The
Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 241 – 42; Hart, Social Science, 39 – 43.
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center of German Jewish intellectual life, he used his substantial organizational
talents to found the Verein für jüdische Statistik (Association for Jewish Statistics)
in 1902; to edit its initial publication Jüdische Statistik (1903); and, in the following
year, to launch the Büro für Statistik der Juden. He also achieved the considerable
coup of hiring the prominent Jewish lawyer and demographer Arthur Ruppin
as the bureau’s director. Ruppin resigned in 1907, complaining of the inadequacy
of financial support, but the bureau nonetheless stands as a key location of Jewish
political and intellectual life in the pre-Nazi period, remaining “the focal point of
Jewish social scientific activity in Europe . . . until the mid-1920s.” 38
Jewish social science was a direct response to the Judenfrage. John Efron
sums up this issue succinctly: “The question revolved around accounting for the
physical, cultural, and social differences between Jews and Germans. The central
issue was why, after their initial emancipation in 1812 in Prussia, their subsequent
integration into German society, and their adoption of German culture, the Jews
remained a distinct, visible, and easily identifiable group. Why had they failed to
shed themselves of their Jewishness — that rarely described, but often observed,
essence?” 39
That this was a preoccupying question for non-Jewish Germans can be seen
from the scale and intensity of research it provoked. Most famous, perhaps, are
the comparative craniometric studies of almost 7 million German and Jewish
schoolchildren carried out by Rudolf Virchow in the 1870s. Virchow — a distinguished
political liberal and a founder of German anthropology — demonstrated
the impracticality of distinguishing phenotypically between Aryans and Jews and,
accordingly, of claiming isomorphism between race and nation. His conclusions
cut against the grain of conventional raciological belief in the anthropological and
pathological distinctiveness of the Jews and were received with skepticism by the
German Anthropological Society. 40
Yet, by its very conception, Virchow’s study implicitly acknowledged the failure
of assimilation. And it also indicated the critical convergence between a confident
and hegemonic scientific methodology — institutionalized in physical anthropology
— and the contemporary preoccupation with race as a fundamental social
category. As Nossig’s work shows, interventions from the ground of alterity con-
38. Hart, Social Science, 35; see Arthur Ruppin, Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, ed. Alex Bein; trans.
Karen Gershon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 74 – 76.
39. Efron, “1911,” 295.
40. Efron, Defenders of the Race, 24 – 26; Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 90 – 93; Benoit
Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine
Germany,” in Stocking, “Volksgeist” as Method and Ethic, 79 – 154.
540

firmed the bounds of permissible discourse and pointed to the impact of particular
modes of racial theorizing on contemporary Jewish experience. Yet they could also
simultaneously constitute an appropriation that recast the terms of discussion. 41
In this regard, it is important to acknowledge the oppositional quality of Jewish
social science and, in particular, its seriously historical dimension, its ambivalence
about “race” reflected in the imprecision and interchangeability of key terms such
as nation (Nation), people (Volk), race (Rasse), and tribe (Stamm), and the widespread,
critical refusal of Jewish intellectuals — assimilationist and Zionist — to tie
“racial” identity to hierarchy. 42 Moreover, we should hold on to a sense of the range
of Jewish polemic and scholarship. The emerging Zionist movement, for example,
could encompass thinkers as varied as Max Nordau, Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber,
and Ruppin (all of whom believed in some kind of distinctive Jewish identity but
rejected hierarchical racial categories), as well as Ignaz Zollschan (who, at least
in his early career, believed that the Jews, along with a select group of other pure
races, were charged with the evolution of human culture). Yet, at the same time, it
is apparent that the most agitated debates — those around the relative significance
of biology and environment, the existence of essential characteristics, and the basis
of “national” or “tribal” unity — were typified by inconsistency, doubt, and contradiction,
even within a particular text. 43
Nossig’s work is typical in this respect. Trained, like so many German-Jewish
intellectuals of the time, as a physician, his allegiance to biological science is
especially evident in his Social Hygiene of the Jews and Ancient Oriental Peoples
(1894). 44 Why “social hygiene”? The answer is clear: “Social hygiene,” he
explains in the introduction, “is the science of the maintenance and advancement
of the physical welfare of peoples.” 45 And it is a science at which the Jews, along
41. For parallel examples, see Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the
Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on
Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991),
72 – 103.
42. In this respect, as Nossig’s work shows, Kautsky’s claim in Are the Jews a Race? that Zionist
race theory was a simple inversion of racial antisemitism was far too simplistic. Efron, in Defenders
of the Race, 124, 174, makes a similar point.
43. Efron, Defenders of the Race, 131.
44. Alfred Nossig, Die Sozialhygiene der Juden und des altorientalischen Völkerkreises (Social
Hygiene of the Jews and Ancient Oriental Peoples) (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1894). This
work has been discussed in detail by Hart, “Moses the Microbiologist.” I follow Robert Proctor in
using “German-Jewish” in relation to an identity derived from language and cultural identifications
rather than from citizenship.
45. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 1.
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with the other orientalisch peoples — the Chinese, Indians, Persians, and Egyptians
— have excelled. By careful review of Mosaic, Talmudic, and Rabbinical
law, as well as of the teachings of Maimonides, Nossig demonstrates that ancient
religion, far from an archaic repository of superstition, should be understood as a
remarkably prescient protoscience. The Jews, he argues, have always been modern:
“Moses did not merely ‘guess at’ but actually knew of the existence of those
small germs which today we call microbes. . . . The author of the Bible understood
the anatomy and physiology of microbes to the extent that this was possible
without a microscope.” 46
Jewish physical and mental vigor, grounded in medical hygiene, is a refutation
of both the obscurantism of orthodox religion and of antisemitic discourses of
inherent Jewish pathology. This may not be an original claim — Elkan Isaac Wolf,
a physician in Mannheim, had made a similar case as early as 1777, and Jewish
hygiene and dietary laws were reinterpreted in line with scientific rationalism
throughout the nineteenth century 47 — but Nossig makes it an argument about
Jewish national survival, about how the Jews have persisted for so long under
hostile conditions and what it will take to continue in the face of contemporary
dangers. The point, unmistakably, is that despite dispersal and the differentiations
it brings, the Jews remain a nation, the subject and agent of nationalist politics.
We already know the message of Nossig’s Attempt to Solve the Jewish Question:
the loss of cultural distinctiveness through assimilation is destroying the
Jewish body, the individual body and the body of the race. This is the paradox of
a diasporic modernity that induces pathology at the same time as — in medicine
and social science — it provides the remedy. The logic of degeneration corrupts a
people in exile subject to diseases of the flesh and the psyche, a people in need of
physical and spiritual regeneration and, therefore, in need of those willing physicians
of the postemancipation scientific cohort who are already debating and
formulating social policy. 48
Because they share a commitment to the emerging logics of physical anthropology,
evolutionary theory, and medicine, this is a crisis about which Jewish
social scientists and antisemites can agree. Yet there were, of course, crucial
distinctions. In particular, Jewish scholars — Zionists, non-Zionists, and anti-
Zionists — tended to adhere to Lamarckian theories of the mutability of inheri-
46. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 39 – 40.
47. Efron, “1911,” 295.
48. Hart, “Racial Science, Social Science,” 275 – 76. For a sustained discussion of degeneration as
the narrative complement to evolutionary theorizing, see Pick, Faces of Degeneration.
542

tance. Such a view, in contrast with Mendelian and popular Weismannian notions
of fixed characteristics, emphasized the role of environment in evolution and thus
enabled Jews to argue historically for the social (rather than biological) determinants
of national pathologies. 49 For assimilationists, Lamarckianism provided a
wedge against antisemitic attempts to roll back the gains of emancipation; for
Zionists, it promised that a new land would produce a new Jew. 50
As did modern antisemitism, eugenics and what Germans were beginning
to call Rassenhygiene captivated thinkers across the political spectrum. 51 It can
be difficult now to recognize the idealism tied up in this objectivist social engineering.
And it can be hard also to appreciate the extent to which even the most
catastrophic of outcomes was contingent. Darwinism did not have to devolve to a
crude sociology of competition; eugenics required commitment neither to nation
nor to race hierarchy, only to a scientific improvement of a given population. 52 But
what is striking is how the confluence of these ideologies — and the associated
biologization of political discourse — proved so irresistible and how it could take
so many people to such unnerving places. Look where it leads Nossig.
Nossig’s Social Hygiene was not simply a rerun of earlier treatments. It had a
greater historical reach, and it was also more conceptually expansive. His social
hygiene, he wrote, would include “not merely the usual public health regulations,
but rather everything which has an influence on the health and life of peoples — i.e.,
also customs, marriage laws, sex life.” 53 A man of science, an intellectual as well
as a spiritual and military leader, his Moses is also a strict moralizer. It is by hon-
49. For a concise account of the politics of this debate, see Proctor (Racial Hygiene, 30 – 38), who
points out that antisemites considered Lamarckianism as a Jewish doctrine.
50. I am unable to do more than gesture toward a further theme here, the fetishization of the
muscular Ashkenazi “Zionist body” that emerges as a fantasy figure for pioneer nation building (particularly
in the second aliyah) in opposition to the diseased bodies of the shtetl and of the Sephardim
already resident in Palestine. The persistence of this ideal postindependence and its articulation in
relation to the Mizrahi immigration of the 1950s have been explored in particular by Meira Weiss.
See her “The Children of Yemen: Bodies, Medicalization, and Nation Building,” Medical Anthropology
Quarterly 15 (2001): 206 – 21, and “The Immigrating Body and the Body Politic: The ‘Yemenite
Children Affair’ and Body Commodification in Israel,” Body and Society 7 (2001): 93 – 109. My
thanks to Rebecca Stein for directing me to this line of inquiry.
51. For the detailing of this point in relation to Germany, see Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race
Hygiene Movement in Germany,” Osiris 3 (1987): 193 – 226.
52. The point here is that the logics of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century eugenics could
not only bolster antimilitarist agendas (it is the breeding stock of strong young men that is lost in
war), they could also underlie welfarist social agendas based around class. On this, see Robert A.
Nye, “The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical
Thought in Modern Society,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 687 – 700.
53. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 3.
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oring thy father and mother, by not committing adultery, and by not coveting thy
neighbor’s wife that the people/race/tribe/nation survive and prosper. The theme
now is the fundamental incompatibility of Jews and Europeans, the impossibility,
rather than the failure, of assimilation. Jews of today are the result of evolutionary
processes driven by the extremities of an antisemitic environment:
544
It is clear that the struggle to secure the bare necessities of life which
the Jews have been compelled to lead for thousands of years since their
Diaspora allowed only the most tenacious organisms to survive and
reproduce, and therefore bred within the tribe the favorable characteristics
of physical toughness and resistance. It is no less clear that the repeated
expulsions, migrations, and resettlements of the Jews in earlier centuries,
which brought with them great physical exertions and often enormous
suffering, reinforced this positive breeding process to a great extent, since
only the most viable individuals could survive such violent upheavals. 54
And to what lengths would Moses go to lift up “the depraved Egyptian serfs
[he] wanted to breed into an exemplary people”? 55 To Nossig, more impressive
even than the farsighted dietary restrictions and epidemic controls were the ruthless
measures the patriarch enforces against prostitution and exogamy, against
sexual contamination:
[Moses] is not about to surrender the results of his carefully developed
system of social hygiene, by means of which a healthy, vital, and fertile
people was to be bred, by allowing his people to intermix with the unclean
blood and the corrupting urges of tribes which have been led in a very
different way. He understands that this is the decisive point, that the law
of the strict national separation of the Hebrews constitutes the keystone,
whose destruction would inevitably lead to the fall of the entire boldly
developed edifice. . . . So just as he imposed a cruel death on the adulterers
and fallen women within his people in their early years, in order to make
purity an inherited habit to the Hebrew women of later generations, so he
ordained that any tribes the Hebrews encountered within the territory that
they were to inhabit should be completely exterminated, in order that no
intermarriage could take place with them, and that all female prisoners
should be mercilessly put to death. 56
54. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 139.
55. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 49.
56. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 59 – 60.

This is crude and unsettling language, language deeply implicated in the emergent
racial logics of Nossig’s Germany. A history of the present, it is an intervention
in the Jewish Question of the turn of the century. It is the story of how the
Jewish Volk was made: blood steeped in blood, flesh tamed by the sword. “Over
time, [these] cruel practices become a national habit . . . an inherited instinct.” 57
Something world historical, an inchoate cluster of nation/people/race/tribe, is
born. Yet the ultimate moral mocks the pretensions of Rassenhygiene: “While
in Europe the once so flourishing Greeks and Romans have now already been
succeeded by two generations of peoples, the eastern tribes still display the same
national entities which appeared at the beginning of world history. The Chinese,
the Indians, the Jews — they look down in amazement, like age-old and yet
vital figures, on these toddler peoples, who already conduct themselves like old
men.” 58
What stronger statement against assimilation could Nossig make than this
refusal of Europe and with it the entire emancipatory Enlightenment heritage?
Invoking the civilizational authority of his Eastern trinity, he rejects the apologetic
gesture toward Jewish pathology, he disdains the degeneracy of Europe, and
he holds fast to the Lamarckian line. And, despite maintaining the primacy of an
environmental history, he closes off the transcendent space of humanist universalism,
insisting on not only the particularity of the Jews but — in an anticolonial
spirit of ingratitude — their superiority-in-solidarity with the other “ancient oriental
peoples.”
But even in rebellion against Europe, Nossig writes as a European as well
as a Jew. His preoccupations are European preoccupations, his modernity is a
European modernity, and his civilizational discourse betrays his enmeshment in
the exclusions and seductions of European high culture. 59 It may seem a peculiar
contribution, a shot from some now-forgotten margin, but his Social Hygiene
participated in a far-reaching and still-resonant debate in which eugenics was the
language to make sense of the new political possibilities of biology, population,
and nation. Soon, though, the purities he both celebrates and confounds will surge
beyond his control. Indeed, soon they will surge beyond anyone’s control.
.........
57. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 60.
58. Nossig, Sozialhygiene, 141 – 42.
59. And here, I am reminded of similar ambivalent gestures, for example, C. L. R. James’s famous
wrestling with the affective and ethical politics of British colonialism in Beyond a Boundary (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
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Degeneracy, science, nation, and race. Nossig stayed within the Zionist Organization
for a decade following the first Congress of 1897. He threw himself into
activism but was increasingly at odds with a leadership he considered elitist and
antidemocratic. Allied with the dissident Democratic Faction — which sponsored
the bureau as well as a series of important cultural and educational projects — and
working closely with Buber and other Zionist socialists, he flew around the margins,
generating a whirlwind for Jewish emigration. 60
He vied constantly for the diplomatic ear of anyone who might hold a key to
the gates of Palestine. He negotiated with British, Polish, and American officials.
But his most persistent contacts were with the Ottoman Empire, which at the
time controlled the territory of Palestine. His constant traveling to clandestine
meetings produced anxiety, even among his allies, and a sense of unreliability
and danger around his person that would precede him all the way to Warsaw.
Even worse perhaps, he failed to disguise his distaste for his Zionist rivals and
so created enemies, powerful ones, through displays like the public showdown
in Basel in 1903 when he denounced Herzl and Nordau for “jüdische Chuzpeh.”
“All nations got their countries thanks to conquest or labor,” he wrote that year in
language that could only sharpen the antagonisms, “only the Jews, who buy and
sell everything, bought themselves a homeland too.” 61
Nossig’s most consuming project at this time was the statistics enterprise.
Speaking of the Association for Jewish Statistics, the historian Mitchell Hart
observes that “the ability to speak about Jews authoritatively meant the ability
to speak for Jews,” to marshal the authority of science in the service of the Jewish
body. 62 The first task — a task only ever accomplished provisionally — was
to identify that body; the second was to diagnose its condition. The body was
sick: life in the primitive East (or, later, the degenerate West) made this plain. 63
60. On Nossig’s engagement with socialism, see Alfred Nossig, Revision des Socialismus (Socialism
Revised) (Berlin: J. Edelheim, 1901); for a sense of the hostile field in which his intervention was
received, see Wistrich, “Anti-Capitalism or Antisemitism.” Like Buber, Nossig believed in a Jewish
socialism drawn from a Judaic ethic.
61. Alfred Nossig, Die Bilanz des Zionismus (The Balance Sheet of Zionism) (Basel, 1903), 21.
Quoted in Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 9.
62. Hart, Social Science, 41; my emphasis.
63. I am leaving aside here the complex history of shifting relations between German Jews and
“Eastern Jews” in which the location of Jewish degeneracy moved gradually from the Ostjuden to
the Diaspora more broadly and a romantic critique of the psychopathologizing impacts of modernity
on the Jews of the West. For many Zionists, Eastern Jews come to stand both as the expression of
pathology (triply oppressed by antisemitism, poverty, and the Orthodox rabbinate) and, somewhat
later, as the positive site of an authentic Judentum in contrast to the de-ethnicized Western European
Jewish moderns. In addition to studies on this period already cited, see Steven E. Aschheim’s
546

Here again, Jews and antisemites found common ground. But, for Jews, of course,
sickness demanded regeneration and transformation, not extermination. 64 Nossig’s
review of recent Jewish history in Jüdische Statistik sounded like his own
conversion narrative:
The brief dream that was the era of emancipation and assimilation, during
which Jews believed they had been absorbed forever into the peoples surrounding
them, had been rudely shattered by the bloody persecution in
Russia, and the antisemitism — the new form of the old Judeophobia —
which then spread from one country to the next rubbed the last of the sleep
from their eyes. Long healed-over wounds had been reopened. Their suffering
as a people awakened their consciousness of themselves as a people.
The hordes of Jewish emigrants who passed before the eyes of their Western
European brothers like the phantoms of an unhappy past, compelled
them to recall their origins and activated the feeling of a common bond
between all Jews. . . . A feeling of tribal curiosity stirred. 65
The rottenness in Nossig’s talk of blood and compulsion may now seem obvious,
but in Berlin, in 1903, there was not only a name for utopia, there were road
signs to follow, and the most compelling routes for radicals led to the nation. Jews,
Nossig comments later, in a perfect, aphoristic sentence that conveys both the
possibilities of cosmopolitanism and the pains of statelessness, are “a people who
inhabit the world in the way that other peoples inhabit a country.” 66 Yet despite
this sense of rootlessness, Zionism made little headway among the Ostjuden until
the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and remained a marginal politics among German
Jews until 1933. Before the ascendance of National Socialism, most German Jews
groundbreaking Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish
Consciousness, 1800 – 1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); also Sander L. Gilman,
The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993); John M. Efron, “The ‘Kaftanjude’ and the ‘Kaffeehausjude’: Two
Models of Jewish Insanity; A Discussion of Causes and Cures among German-Jewish Psychiatrists,”
Leo Baeck Yearbook 37 (1992): 169 – 88.
64. Though, of course, for many Jews — and not only the religious — statements such as Marx’s
“the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism” (“On the Jewish
Question,” in Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph O’Malley [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994], 56) and Kautsky’s “the sooner [Judaism] disappears, the better it will be, not
only for society, but also for the Jews themselves” (Are the Jews a Race? 249) invite a form of
extermination.
65. Alfred Nossig, ed., Jüdische Statistik (Jewish Statistics) (Berlin: Jüdische Verlag, 1903),
7 – 8.
66. Nossig, Jüdische Statistik, 16.
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regarded it as — at best — a possible solution to the dilemma of East European
Jewry but largely irrelevant to their own situation. 67 It was this that provoked
Gershom Scholem’s well-known accusation that prior to 1933 German Jews had
been living a lie.
The attempt of these dissidents to objectify Jewishness in social science was
therefore only partly motivated by a desire to refute the “bad science” of antisemitism.
It was also driven by the impulse to place themselves in dialogue with
other Jewish intellectuals and activists, and so provide a platform for an inclusive
Jewish politics, though under the mantle of a nondenominational Zionism. “One
said to oneself,” wrote Nossig in terms intended to resonate throughout the Jewish
world,
548
Yes, I am a Jew, but what does it mean to be a Jew today? Are the Jews
a religious community or are they also a nation? How do the majority of
Jews feel about this? How many Jews are there on this earth — where do
they live and under what conditions? What do they look like? How do they
occupy themselves?
And one went on to ask: Is the condition of the Jews in the various
countries where they live such that further bloody catastrophes are to be
expected? What are our prospects? And what is this antisemitism, this
hatred manifested by other peoples? Are we truly, the majority of us, that
corrupt and corrupting creature we are made out to be, that mangy sheep
in the flock of humanity? Or is it rather different circumstances that have
made us politically indigestible? Are we really that greedy people which
has piled up all the treasures of the world? Or do we not rather suffer all
too much from the truth of the Biblical saying: “There will always be poor
ones amongst you”? 68
Activists of the Democratic Faction saw social science and popular culture
as points of articulation with the major liberal Jewish organizations, groups that
were continuing to work for social amelioration within the framework of emancipation
and that were deeply suspicious of the secularism and nationalism of the
67. It seems reasonable to characterize Zionism as a noisy but minor project until it gained the
public sponsorship of the world powers through the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Not only were the
vast majority of East European rabbis dismissive of the notion that a Jewish homeland could be reestablished
before the coming of the Messiah, but major secular intellectuals such as Hermann Cohen
and Simon Dubnow argued forcefully and influentially for a cosmopolitan Jewish diaspora. In the
same vein, others such as Ahad Ha’am and (later) Albert Einstein warned that settlement would lead
to a moral crisis among Jews through the inevitable sanctioning of harsh treatment of Arabs.
68. Nossig, Jüdische Statistik, 8.

upstart Zionists. 69 Appointed to an important propaganda commission at the Seventh
Zionist Congress of 1907, Nossig responded by staging folk music concerts
and comedy shows, establishing an art commission, and proposing a Zionist news
agency as well as a series of newspapers in Germany and the Ottoman Empire,
bringing to his tasks “an intensity and audacity that seemed dazzling.” 70
He continued to organize compulsively. In 1908 he finally left the Zionist
Organization, increasingly uncomfortable with its exclusion of non-Zionist Jews
as well as with an institutional rhetoric that he felt was fomenting an indistinctive,
extreme, and non-Jewish nationalism and a counterproductive and unethical “cult
of power” in relation to Palestinian Arabs. 71 Believing also that the Herzlians
were neglecting settlement, he established a new, broad-based colonization body,
the Allgemeine Jüdische Kolonizations-Organisation (AJKO), which he hoped
would become an institutional rival to the official organization. At this point,
many Zionists envisaged a “home for the Jews” within the framework of the Ottoman
Empire and were encouraged by the sultanate’s developing policy of limited
territorial autonomy based on religion and ethnicity. 72 In the years leading up to
the First World War, Nossig maneuvered aggressively for the Ottomans to recognize
the AJKO, not foreseeing the empire’s collapse and the British capture of
Palestine. Even though German Jews overwhelmingly allied as patriots with the
Central Powers in the First World War, Nossig’s agitation was sufficiently highprofile
to mark him as a German agent — a whisper circulated by British and
American diplomats in the region, as well as by the Zionist Organization itself,
and a rumor that would have an entirely different resonance when it resurfaced
twenty years later.
Nossig’s energies did not slacken after the war. He sponsored the Association
of European Nations (for which he succeeded in organizing a conference of
twenty-six states in Geneva in 1926); formed a broad-based Jewish committee to
mediate with the Polish government in a time of pogroms; led an interdenominational
peace alliance; and founded another peace movement for young Jews in
Berlin in the 1930s. These politics of peace and inclusiveness predominate, as
does a critique of the rising influence of the militaristic, antiaccommodationist
Revisionist tendency within the Zionist movement.
69. Nossig, Jüdische Statistik, 2; Hart, Social Science, 36 – 55.
70. Hart, Social Science, 12.
71. See Alfred Nossig, Zionismus und Judenheit: Krisis und Lösung (Zionism and Jewry: Crisis
and Solution) (Berlin: Interterritorialer Verlag “Renaissance,” 1922), 17, and below.
72. See Israel Kolatt, “The Zionist Movement and the Arabs,” in Zionism and the Arabs: Essays,
ed. Shmuel Almog (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel, 1983), 1 – 34.
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It is in this post-Balfour period that Zionists begin to recognize the inseparability
of the Jewish national question from what is becoming the “Arab Question.” 73
Important figures such as Ha’am had condemned the treatment of the local population
by Jewish settlers as early as 1891, and there were a growing number in
both the old and new Yishuv who — in contrast to the ethnostatism of the Zionist
Organization — emphasized “binational” relations of full and equal citizenship in
a federation that offered utopian horizons to both peoples. In his address to the
Twelfth Zionist Congress in Karlsbad in September 1921 — the first since the Balfour
Declaration and a meeting that followed the most serious Arab uprisings yet
to occur in Palestine — Buber spoke on behalf of the Hitachdut, a new coalition of
non-Marxist socialist parties in Palestine and the Diaspora. Radically reworking
the logic of social hygiene, Buber launched a scathing attack on the “arbitrary”
nationalism of the Zionist Organization, arguing that “when nationalism transgresses
its lawful limits, when it tries to do more than overcome a deficiency . . .
it no longer indicates disease, but is itself a grave and complicated disease. A
people can win the rights for which it strove,” he warned, “and yet fail to regain
its health — because nationalism, turned false, eats at its marrow.” 74
Reviewing the conference and its unsatisfactory outcome, Nossig wrote in
similar terms that Zionism had recently taken on “certain new characteristics . . .
that made it more like the nationalism of other peoples but distanced it still further
from the Jewish Weltanschauung and the true essence of Jewishness.” In
characteristically unconstrained language, he continued: “Even before the Jews
had attained a serious position in Palestine, they were being posited as the future
master race [Herrenvolk], while the current masters of the land, the Arabs, were
seen as a quantité négligeable, who ought to be treated humanely, but whom one
did not need to consult.” 75 It was this “Zionist imperialism” (and the accompanying
“Zionist militarism”) that was responsible for the legitimate hostility of the
Arabs. His assessment of the political situation is worth quoting at length:
550
Any policy towards the Arabs that looks down on them from the perspective
of the cultural development, financial means, and political influence
73. See Elyakim Rubinstein, “Zionist Attitudes on the Jewish-Arab Conflict until 1936,” in
Almog, Zionism and the Arabs, 35 – 72; Yossi Katz, “Status and Rights of the Arab Minority in
Nascent Jewish State,” Middle Eastern Studies 33 (1997): 535 – 56; Kolatt, “Zionist Movement and
the Arabs.”
74. Martin Buber, “Nationalism,” in A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs,
ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 47 – 57, 52.
75. Nossig, Zionismus und Judenheit, 16. Nossig’s use of Herrenvolk, a word closely associated
with the Nazis, of course, is startling.

of the Jewish people scattered throughout the world, and which believes it
can force through all Jewish wishes with regard to Palestine with the help
of foreign powers, is mistaken. Our new position must proceed from the
recognition that the Arabs are already the true masters of the land, and
that their strength, resting as it does on the many millions of their brothers
in neighboring countries, will increase year by year as a result of the
continuing cultural development of the Arab world and the political conditions
that obtain in the region. The entire future of the Jewish homeland
depends on our relationship to the Arabs. . . . We must give up any politics
based on domination and force and seek to erase any traces of it in the
memory of the Arabs. If we do not succeed in transforming the tensions
that exist today, nourished by our previous policies, into a community of
interest with the Arabs, then our work to create a homeland will forever be
faced with blood and fire. 76
There was still no question in the minds of Buber, Nossig, and, indeed, most
Zionists about the ancestral legitimacy of a Jewish national home in Palestine
and its necessity as both a potential refuge from antisemitism and a site of spiritual
fulfillment. 77 Yet what the dissidents understood as the ethical dimension of
life in Palestine was of paramount political importance. Increasingly, they found
themselves at odds with a Zionist Organization that saw in British sponsorship the
opportunity to supplant the Arab population, a position that the Zionist opposition
considered entirely unacceptable for reasons both pragmatic and moral. The
Zionist Organization had dedicated itself to overcoming the numerical advantage
of the Arab population in Palestine, and, not surprisingly, the halting of Jewish
immigration was a key demand of the emergent Arab politics in the 1920s and
1930s. In response to this impasse, Buber, Ruppin, Scholem, Judah Magnes, and
others allied to Hebrew University formed the group Brith Shalom (Covenant of
Peace) in 1925, arguing from the premise that “the Land of Israel belongs to two
peoples, and these people need to find a way to live together . . . and to work for
a common future.” 78 The population question should be made irrelevant, they
76. Nossig, Zionismus und Judenheit, 35, emphasis in original; paragraph break suppressed.
77. See, for example, Buber’s extended and impassioned response to Gandhi’s open letter of
November 1938 in support of the Palestinian Arabs, a position devastating to Gandhi’s Jewish followers,
particularly given that his reasoning — with its paralleling of the situation of the Indian minority
in British South Africa with that of the Jews in Nazi Germany — struck them as irresponsibly uninformed.
The exchange is reprinted in Mendes-Flohr, Land of Two Peoples, 106 – 26.
78. Gershom Scholem, 1972, quoted in Mendes-Flohr, Land of Two Peoples, 73. I do not have
space here to deal in detail with the complex Palestinian politics of the full range of socialist Zionist
groups. For a concise overview, see Kolatt, “Zionist Movement and the Arabs.”
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argued, with constitutional parity and equal representation in administration for
all, no matter the relative numbers. In contrast to the effort of the Zionist Organization
to develop a legal formula by which Arabs were guaranteed “minority
rights” within the framework of a Jewish state, Buber called for settlement
“together with” Palestinians: “We have not settled Palestine together with the
Arabs but alongside them. Settlement ‘alongside,’ when two nations inhabit the
same country, which fails to become settlement ‘together with’ must necessarily
become a state of ‘against.’ ” 79 Citizenship rights within the framework of the
existing mandate would be based, as Brith Shalom’s founding charter stated, on
“absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples.” In 1926, with
the Arab population still ten times greater than that of the Jews, members of the
organization issued a controversial call for a moratorium on Jewish settlement. 80
This was, however, a position Nossig could not share. Despite his engagement
with Arab aspirations, he maintained his commitment to the rescue of the Ostjuden,
holding to a platform that included unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine. Yet
it was precisely the dramatically accelerated rates of emigration from Europe after
1933 that precipitated the series of complex crises that led to the Arab revolts of
1936 – 39 and the British response — in the White Paper of 1939 — barring further
Jewish immigration and land purchase. 81 In turn, the Revisionist militants and
their paramilitary associates began their decisive underground campaign.
Negotiations between the Zionist and Arab leaderships had long foundered on
the refusal of the Herzlian Jewish Agency to compromise the logic of a Jewish
state and on the increasing unwillingness of Arabs to countenance an institutionalization
of Jewish majority (or parity). Nevertheless, throughout this period,
members of Brith Shalom as well as many others continued to agitate for a solution
outside of the framework of a Jewish state, searching for an “Arab-Jewish
Palestine” based on the principle of binational alliance. 82 Moreover, as we know
79. Martin Buber, “The National Home and National Policy in Palestine,” in Mendes-Flohr, Land
of Two Peoples, 81 – 91, 91. Buber made this speech in October 1929 in Berlin shortly after renewed
Arab revolts against the expansion of the Jewish Agency that left over 130 Jews dead and hardened
the positions of the dominant antiaccommodationists in the Zionist Organization.
80. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, “Editor’s Prefatory Note to ‘Soul-Searching’ by Martin Buber,” in
Mendes-Flohr, Land of Two Peoples, 76.
81. On the great revolt of 1936 – 39, see Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936 – 1939
Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
82. Although highly influential, Brith Shalom did not survive into the 1940s. Other significant
organizations formed by Yishuv Jews in an attempt to counter the rush to a Jewish state included the
League of Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation (1939) — which included the substantial
socialist Zionist party Ha’Shomer Ha’Tzair — and the Ichud. The phrase “Arab-Jewish Palestine” is
from Nossig, Zionismus und Judenheit, 27.
552

from nineteenth-century Lvov and from Ha’am, there were also Zionisms based
on a national-cultural revival focused on Palestine but not tied to emigration and
settlement. For the many and varied Zionists who held such positions, the content
of the nation — both within and beyond Palestine — was still to be written.
In the 1930s, Nossig lived in Berlin and then Prague and devoted himself once
more to his sculpture. Europe was becoming increasingly precarious for the Jews,
but he somehow succeeded in publicly exhibiting in Nazi Berlin a scale model
of a monument he planned to erect on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. It was called
The Holy Mountain and consisted of more than twenty outsize statues of biblical
characters, a symbolic landscape of Judaism, now lost, that I assume was peopled
by figures as vigorous and resolute as his Ahasuerus. Nossig was in his seventies
by this point and, as Almog tells it, was offered asylum in Palestine “as a veteran
Zionist.” 83 But he doesn’t go. The old man who has spent so much of his life working
for Jewish emigration refuses to leave without his sculptures. The next we
hear he has arrived in Warsaw as a refugee.
.........
To Marek Edelman, a ZOB commander in the Warsaw Ghetto, the execution of
“the notorious Gestapo agent, Dr. Alfred Nossig,” was a necessary action in “a
programme designed to rid the Jewish population of hostile elements.” 84 I would
like to think the contrast between Edelman’s military language and his retention
of Nossig’s title suggests unease. But it could just as easily signal bureaucratic
officiousness.
Remarkably, Edelman survived the uprising. Days after emerging from the
sewers of the razed Ghetto with a few battered comrades, he takes a streetcar
through the bustling streets of Aryan Warsaw and finds himself staring at his
own image. It was a poster that appeared immediately following the uprising, and
on seeing it, Edelman found himself instantly “seized by the wish not to have a
face.” 85
83. Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 22. Presumably, this offer was made under the Ha’avara Transfer
Agreement through which sixty thousand Jews were able to leave Germany from November 1933
until December 1939 (i.e., soon after the SS took direct control of Jewish “emigration”). The agreement
permitted the transfer of part of the value of the emigrants’ possessions to the Jewish Agency
in Palestine in the form of German goods worth an allegedly equivalent amount.
84. Marek Edelman, “The Ghetto Fights,” in The Warsaw Ghetto: The Forty-Fifth Anniversary
of the Uprising, ed. Tomasz Szarota (Warsaw: Interpress Publishers), 22 – 46, 39.
85. Krall, Shielding the Flame, 15. The publication of Edelman’s memoir in 1977 was an important
moment in the Polish reassessment of the Holocaust. The book sold out its initial print run of ten
thousand copies in just a few days, and Edelman, who went on to become an activist in the Solidarity
movement, found himself a reluctant celebrity.
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jews-lice-typhus. The poster that confronted Edelman showed a monstrous
louse crawling into a hideously deformed “Jewish” face. It was part of a concentrated
campaign that accompanied the liquidation of the Ghetto. 86 His panicked
reaction testifies to the potency of its figurations. Edelman drags himself
out through the bowels of the Ghetto to find that his raciologized self, the parasite,
has been forced into daylight, too. The secret self made public. It truly is a shock
of recognition.
We already know something of the darkening histories buried in this horror.
We too recognize the parasite and its biology. We remember there was a moment,
not long before, when Jews like Edelman and Nossig could imagine themselves
as children of emancipation or as Polish patriots, as heirs to European science
and letters. We know they saw the old Judeophobia had become a new antisemitism.
We know that many reached for the nation. We did not know — though it is
surely no surprise? — that in 1895 (the year after Nossig’s Sozialhygiene), Alfred
Ploetz responded to the general fear of social and racial degeneration in the wake
of industrialization by publishing Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz
der Schwachen (The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak), the
founding statement of German Rassenhygiene, in which he warned that “traditional
medical care helps the individual but endangers the race.” 87 We also did
86. I take the image and its connection to Edelman from Paul Julian Weindling’s magisterial Epidemics
and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890 – 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
3. It was Weindling who convinced me that if Himmler’s conflation of Jews and lice was a commonplace
among Nazi leaders, it was also both the index to a specific set of regional histories and a
recognizable code that summarized a concrete array of racial policies and practices.
87. Alfred Ploetz, Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen: Ein Versuch
über Rassenhygiene und ihr Verhältniss zu den humanen Idealen, besonders zum Socialismus (The
Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak: An Essay of Racial Hygiene and Its Relationship
to Humanitarian Ideals, in Particular to Socialism) (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1895). The phrase is
Proctor’s, Racial Hygiene, 15. I do not want to flatten the politics of German racial hygiene by suggesting
that it was a straightforwardly racist project from the outset. As all scholars of the period
are at pains to make clear, eugenics was sufficiently flexible to appeal to thinkers across the political
spectrum. The German variant was initially a more or less conventional eugenics movement that
paralleled contemporary tendencies elsewhere in Europe in its concern with “improving” population
in general; that is, it emphasized the human race ahead of specific races. In these early years, the
implications of such politics for gender (via reproduction) were more significant than for specific
racial groups. Nonetheless, in Germany, as in Britain, there was quite clearly a subjugated Nordic
tendency — both institutionally organized and theoretically emergent — present in these earliest
expressions. Moreover, where Nossig emphasized the positive role of the state in improving health
care, Ploetz proposed negative policy logics, such as the withdrawal of medical support from the
weak and otherwise undesirable. By 1918, the German race hygiene movement had been captured by
the conservative nationalists who would staff the Nazi medical hierarchy. For thorough accounts, see
Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial
554

Generalgouvernment poster “Jews-Lice-Typhus” (1940). Reproduced from the collection of the
Biblioteka Jagiellonska, Krakow, sygn. BJ 749040 III 59 Rara
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not know that in 1904 and 1905 — the years Nossig and the Democratic Faction
are launching the Association for Jewish Statistics and its publications — Ploetz,
also in Berlin, establishes the journal and institutional apparatus of the new racial
hygiene movement. It is time to return to the problem we started with. How could
the Reichsführer say those things? Do you remember? “Antisemitism is exactly
the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter
of cleanliness . . . which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon
be deloused.”
Perhaps Himmler was indulging in an intimate irony with his men. As is
well known, prisoners at Auschwitz were treated to an elaborate charade. Those
selected for death were directed to “delousing facilities,” equipped with falseheaded
showers. They were moved through changing rooms, allocated soap and
towels. They were told they would be rewarded for disinfection with hot soup.
Despite the peculiarities of their situation, the fears of disease, the hunger for
cleanliness, and the routine character of such procedures for migrants, there
is evidence of considerable confusion and recalcitrance. The prisoners massed
uncertainly in the shower room. Overhead, unseen, the disinfectors waited in
their gas masks for the warmth of the naked bodies to bring the ambient temperature
to the optimal 25.7 degrees Celsius. They then poured crystals from the cans
of Zyklon B — a hydrogen cyanide insecticide developed for delousing buildings
and clothes — through the ceiling hatches. Finally, the bodies, contorted by the
pain of the warning agent (a life-saving additive in other circumstances), were
removed to the crematoriums. 88
In this grotesque pantomime, the Jews — and, of course, it was not only the
Jews, but let me continue to focus on Jews and Germans — move from objects of
care to objects of annihilation. 89 To diseased humans, delousing promises reme-
Hygiene, trans. Belinda Cooper (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Proctor,
Racial Hygiene; Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics; Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene
and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987); and Weiss, “Racial Hygiene Movement.” In relation to German anthropology, see Proctor,
“From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde,” and Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer.”
88. Many of these details are now widely available despite the increasing currency of Holocaust
denial and revision. See, e.g., Uwe Dietrich Adam, “The Gas Chambers,” in François Furet,
ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken,
1989), 134 – 54; and Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 301 – 3. Of the six Nazi death camps,
only Auschwitz and Majdanek — which accounted for approximately 20 percent of the total Jewish
deaths in the Holocaust — used Zyklon B. In the other four camps prisoners were gassed with carbon
monoxide. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.
89. It should be entirely clear that I am not prioritizing Jewish experience at the expense of other
victims of the Holocaust, but given the charged nature of these questions, this is worth underlining.
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Model of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination facilities by Mieczyslaw Stobierski.
Courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
diation, a return to community, a return to life; to lice, it offers only extermination.
Too late the prisoners discover they are merely insects.
Biopolitics as thanatopolitics. The politics of life as the politics of death. Life
stripped bare of its humanness. 90 (Though, of course, the work of turning humans
into bare lice also makes lice human.) Such things were possible not because of
the inferiority of the Jews — a fact never securely established: how could they
be so powerful and so subhuman all at once? — but because of their unsettling
My focus on the specific histories and practices of antisemitism is intended to preclude a conflation
of the distinctive racisms that produced the multiple foci of Nazi killing.
90. Agamben’s point is worth restating: “The dimension in which the extermination took place is
neither religion nor law, but biopolitics.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 114.
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alterity. 91 This is the moment sovereign power is vested in the medical professionals,
not the Jewish physicians like Nossig (and Edelman), of course, but others
who had debated the science of national survival in ways that were at once similar
and different. It is both horribly aberrant and horribly normal. 92
Yet this alone cannot explain the literalization of Himmler’s conceit that takes
place in the gas chambers. His language contains metaphor, euphemism, and,
at some level, I suspect, a statement of belief. The word the Nuremberg lawyers
translate as “getting rid of” — “getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology” — is
entfernen, “to remove or make distant,” one more euphemistic ambiguity in the
self-consciously legalistic series that has Himmler elsewhere evade naming the
killing, talking instead of “mortality rates,” “special treatment,” “emigration,”
and “known tasks.” 93 And, decisively, as we have started to see, there is also a
profoundly material history underwriting his language of parasitic insects. It is a
history that finally dissolves the distinction between the outside (of the individual
body, of the body politic, of the foreign body) and the inside (of the parasitic animal
within). It is the final collapse of distinction between human and nonhuman;
the collapse that allows for extermination.
For Germans, the association of Jews with disease was a long one, encased in
the memory of the Black Death as a Judenfieber, a Jewish sickness, penetrating
from out there, beyond the eastern borders. 94 Of the modern Black Deaths, it was
the lice-borne typhus, with its sudden and catastrophic mortality rates, that was
the most feared, and, even though by 1900 it was “virtually dormant,” its menace
was palpable — and also locatable: in Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other degenerate
social groups associated with the “east.” 95 Nativist nosophobia only intensified
with the rise of the bacteriological sciences. Robert Koch, pioneer of German
91. See Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities,
ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1991), 17 – 28, 28 n. 8;
also — and see below — Zygmunt Bauman on antisemitism as a “proteophobia” (“Allosemitism,”
143).
92. The principal source for this material is Weindling’s exhaustive Epidemics and Genocide on
which I have drawn extensively for the remainder of this section.
93. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey
Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 13; Richard Breitman, The Architect
of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 6.
94. A notion resurrected by Hitler in Mein Kampf; see Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 221.
95. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Biography, Which after Twelve Preliminary
Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of Typhus
Fever (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press / Little, Brown, and Company, 1935); Weindling, Epidemics
and Genocide, 8.
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acteriology and a Nobel Prize winner in 1905 for his work on cholera and tuberculosis,
refused to tie pathogens to race (instead emphasizing questions of transmission),
yet his research dovetailed effectively with the new ideologies of racial
hygiene and introduced a logic of extermination that would resonate ever more
strongly during succeeding decades. Koch’s most significant legacy in this respect
lay in the formalization of a set of authoritarian protocols including compulsory
testing, quarantine, and household disinfection that he developed and operationalized
in research in colonial Africa. Therapeutic intent is perhaps not the question
here: as social practice and rhetoric many of these procedures must be regarded
as both actively racist in practice and as prefiguring the further crimes that would
be committed as colonial politics came home. In 1903, in German East Africa,
for example, Koch established a “concentration camp” for the isolation of sleeping
sickness. Though such draconian social policy was only one lesson that could be
drawn from his work, it was an influential one. 96 Claus Schilling, one of Koch’s
assistants who would go on to direct a department for tropical medicine at his
mentor’s Hamburg Institute, was eventually executed for his malaria experiments
at Dachau. 97
Developments in bacteriology, parasitology, and economic entomology (i.e.,
insect control and eradication) were by no means restricted to Germany. Medical
science provoked both rivalry and a degree of cooperative research among
96. Perhaps drawing on the example of the reconcentrado system established by Spain in Cuba
in 1896, “concentration camps” became a notable feature of colonial rule in southern Africa. Surpassing
H. H. Kitchener’s camps for Boer civilians from which the name originated, the most notorious
example was German: the camps established for the Herero in 1906 and abolished in 1908
under pressure from liberal church groups and the Social Democratic Party in Berlin. A concise
account is provided by Tilman Dedering, “ ‘A Certain Rigorous Treatment of All Parts of the Nation’:
The Annihilation of the Herero in German South West Africa, 1904,” in The Massacre in History,
ed. Mark Levine and Penny Roberts (New York: Berghan Books, 1999), 204 – 22. Dedering is
careful — and I think correct — to distinguish between these slave labor camps and the extermination
camps of the Nazis, instead pointing to links between the genocidal actions of the Namibia
Schutztruppe in 1904 – 6 and those of the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front during the 1940s.
Nevertheless, the fondness of the infamous General Lothar von Trotha for the word extermination
(Vernichtung) in regard to the Herero echoes the term’s increasing vernacular currency through the
popularization of Koch’s applied biology and thickens the connections that tie “east” and “south” as
sites of German genocide. For a detailed history of the Herero, see Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes:
A Socio-political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890 – 1923 (Oxford: James Curry, 1999). For
a similar argument that emphasizes the colonial sites of genocidal practice as a corrective to work
that threatens to dehistoricize the Shoah by insisting on its sui generis European genesis, see Paul
Gilroy, “Afterword: Not Being Inhuman,” in Cheyette and Marcus, Modernity, Culture, and “the
Jew,” 282 – 97.
97. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 19 – 30.
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the imperial powers as a series of shared concerns became evident. Hygiene was
the rubric that enabled investigation into the intertwined vectors of human, animal,
and plant disease as researchers worked to safeguard the health of settlers,
livestock, and crops. At the same time, concern about contamination in Europe
and the United States led to restrictive border policies and punitive inspection
procedures targeted at particular social groups — with quarantine laws enacted
in the United States specifically to prevent the entry of Jews fleeing the Russian
pogroms. 98 Disease both necessitated and facilitated the isolation of particular
bodies as sites of medical intervention and social control, and the apparent predisposition
of Jews and others to infection was self-evidently a mark of cultural
primitivism. 99 We might therefore imagine that hygienic interventions expressed
a type of missionary modernity. But it appears instead that regimes of cleansing
were dispensed and experienced as punitive rather than redemptive, the implication
being that disease — at least for these parasitic populations — was an inherent
trait rather than a curable condition.
This is the period we see the development of those technologies of disease control
that achieve a kind of fulfillment at Auschwitz. Collective showers, bacteriological
soaps, chemical gas, cremation — these were already compulsory features
of a network of border-control stations that fortified the German frontiers with
Russia and Poland and encouraged migrants from the east to regard the national
territory as implacably foreign ground. Following a severe cholera outbreak in
Hamburg in 1892 that was widely attributed to Russian Jews, Germany closed
its eastern borders, relenting only to establish a hygienic transport corridor to the
ports of embarkation for Ellis Island. For a while, the major shipping lines took
over the financing and expansion of the control posts. 100
The outbreak of war in 1914 soon produced mass epidemics among refugees,
troops, and enemy captives. In a lightning typhus outbreak in Serbia, over 150,000
civilian refugees and prisoners died in six months. 101 Hygiene became an urgent
political priority and sanitary regimes correspondingly more severe. It was Russian
soldiers — rather than the atrocious conditions — who were blamed for the
98. See Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City
Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
99. One example was the German campaign — in which modernizing Jewish doctors also participated
— against the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath for women. See Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide,
42 – 43. Later, however, this discourse shifts and an emphasis is placed on the vulnerability of
Germans to contagion and the innate resistance of “eastern peoples” — who, so the argument went,
had grown up in the midst of disease.
100. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 63 – 65.
101. Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History, 297.
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appalling mortality rates in the prisoner of war camps. “Eastern peoples” — the
category Nossig recuperates — were characterized, not as victims of disease
but as its carriers. State efforts were directed to protecting the civilian population
from contamination (Russian prisoners were to be tended only by Russian
doctors). The critical scientific breakthrough — the identification of lice as the
typhus vector just prior to the war — led to an industrialization of delousing and
its expansion to civilians:
The routine demanded total nudity, and special attention to the hair, skin
folds, and the “Schamgegend” where the lice might lurk in pubic hair or
between the bottom cheeks. If any person resisted the shaving of all their
hair (and it was noted that women often protested), then a louse-killing
substance like petroleum or eucalyptus oil was to be used on those parts of
the body defended from more radical hygienic intervention. . . . Clothing,
bed linen, and mattress covers had to be placed in ovens or steam chambers.
For disinfestation of rooms either steam or canisters of sulphuric acid
or sulphur dioxide were used. Items of low value were burned. 102
Paul Weindling describes the mass application of such procedures by German
disinfectors throughout German-occupied Poland, Romania, and Lithuania in
response to typhus outbreaks during the war. He documents an increasingly strident
association of disease with Jews and other racial degenerates. Jewish-owned
stores in Poland were closed until the owners had undergone delousing. Lodz, a
town with a large Jewish population, was ringed by thirty-five detention centers
for persons considered infested. 103 But military defeat in 1918 radically changed
the calculus. Rather than expand into purified colonial living space, medical
authorities now found themselves confined to a dramatically reduced national territory
and confronting an unmanageable crisis of refugees — mostly ethnic Germans
and Ostjuden — and returning sick and wounded military personnel. In the
years following the Treaty of Versailles, highly restrictive immigration controls
and draconian inspection practices were imposed in an effort to protect the newly
vulnerable Volk against contamination from the east. 104 Nevertheless, despite the
102. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 81 – 82.
103. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 102.
104. This policy reaction was not restricted to Germany. The Aliens Act passed in Britain in 1919
allowed inspection and “decontamination” of arrivals. Winston Churchill’s florid characterization of
Soviet Russia in a 1920 speech justifying support for the Whites in the Civil War offers something
of the flavor of the times: anti-Bolsheviks were defending Europe against “a poisoned Russia, an
infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia, a Russia of armed hordes smiting not only with bayonets
and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by the swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slay
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terrible events of the Russian civil war — 25 million typhus cases and up to 3 million
deaths between 1917 and 1923105 — it was becoming clear that the real danger
was no longer external. As early as 1920, police in Berlin and other cities were
invoking “hygienic control” as they rounded up Ostjuden and transported them to
disease-infested camps along the national borders.
The elements of this narrative should by now be clear. Not only the discourses
of hygiene (themselves an amalgam of eugenics, social Darwinism, political
geography, bacteriology, parasitology, and entomology), but also specific technologies,
identifiable personnel, and particular institutions initially dedicated to
the eradication of disease, shifted rapidly and quite seamlessly to the eradication
of people. The elimination of typhus would enable a simultaneous purification of
race and polity — one and the same, of course, by the mid-1930s — and increasingly
the disease’s human victims become functionally and perhaps ontologically
indistinguishable from its nonhuman vectors.
From 1918, this trajectory accelerated as a conservative political and medical
consensus formed around the understanding that contagion was directly tied to
degeneration, that a body politic whose health had been shattered by the humiliation
of Versailles was now dangerously contaminated, that disease had reached
the racial heartland, and that exorcising the phantasm of infection was the only
solution. The interwar period is striking for the radical conflation of political philosophy
and medicine, such that ghettos, for example, will become places of confinement
that protect the excluded German population from disease and simultaneously
— and inevitably given the appalling conditions — diseased sites that
generate a pathological anxiety around fears of contamination from escapees. The
rest is too well known to bear further repetition.
.........
An elderly Alfred Nossig appears repeatedly in Adam Czerniakow’s diary of the
Warsaw Ghetto. The entries are cryptic and a little irritated, perhaps even condescending.
Nossig runs to the Judenrat chairman with stories from the Ghetto
streets; he is short of money; he bombards the Germans with letters, and on one
occasion they throw him out of their offices. 106 It all raises the suspicion that the
the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroy the health and even the souls of nations”
(Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide, 130, 149).
105. Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History, 299. Weindling makes the important observation that the
catastrophic Russian epidemic and famine served as a vast experimental station for German tropical
specialists recently deprived of colonial medical subjects (Epidemics and Genocide, 177 – 78).
106. Czerniakow, Warsaw Diary, 228, 226, 236.
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old man is senile. 107 Czerniakow describes him as “pleading” and “babbling.” He
talks about Nossig’s “antics.” At one point he “admonishes” him. 108
It is clear enough that even though Czerniakow may not find Nossig directly
threatening, he does not trust him. The new arrival is too familiar with the Nazis.
It is the Germans who introduce him to the Jewish administration — to whom he
is already known — and it is the Germans who insist on a position for him. Appropriately
enough, he is appointed as the council’s emigration officer. But what kind
of farcical task is this? Ghettos were soon to be liquidated all across the Reich
and Nossig is negotiating resettlement with the SS as if this is 1914, as if we are
all still Germans! Nevertheless, the work seems to energize him and for a while
he appears to convince himself (if no one else) that there is real hope of relocating
the Warsaw Jews to the German colony of Madagascar. When the Ghetto is sealed
in November 1940, he is put in charge of the Department of Art and Culture and
turns his attention to the repertoire of the Ghetto’s theaters, the quality of its
stained glass, and, as we have seen, to the cleanliness of its streets. 109
Everything is pulling in different directions. As European Jewry slides into
ghostliness, a Jewish Palestine grows daily more substantial; as the old nation
shuffles warily into the gas chambers, the new state claws its way from the womb.
What were once our kin, are now our killers; what was once negotiation, is now
collaboration. In the United States, Hannah Arendt — who in 1933 had fled Berlin
and passed through Prague, Geneva, and Paris before arriving, stateless, in New
York — is finally breaking with the Zionist Organization. For a while she has
actively supported the calls of the Revisionist militants for a multinational Jewish
army, believing that we Jews have to fight antisemitism ourselves, on our own
terms, not through a proxy, that this is the moment to refute parasitism by standing
on our own two feet, and that most of all, an army could be just what is needed to
remake the Jewish people in the name of the social outcast (whose “impassioned
intensity” is so different from the mealy mouthed conformity of this plutocratic
leadership), because “one can only defend oneself as that for which one has been
attacked.” 110 This Jewish army is the Jewish rallying cry in the United States from
107. Almog, “Alfred Nossig,” 22 – 24.
108. Czerniakow, Warsaw Diary, 226, 103, 104.
109. Czerniakow, Warsaw Diary, 302, 335 – 36.
110. Arendt’s terms are “pariah” and “parvenu”; see Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,”
in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007),
275 – 97. Quotation is from Arendt, Die Krise des Zionismus: Essays und Kommentare (The Crisis of
Zionism: Essays and Commentaries), ed. Eike Geisel and Klaus Bittermann (Berlin: Edition Tiamat,
1989), 168, quoted in Anson Rabinbach, “1944: Hannah Arendt Writes ‘The Jew as Pariah; A Hidden
Tradition,’ ” in Gilman and Zipes, Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought, 606 – 13, 610.
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mid-1941 until that shocking announcement of systematic extermination that provoked
Szyk’s mordant “We’re Running Short of Jews!” With that, the Bergsonites
shift their energies to united front agitation for rescue, and the American Zionist
Organization (AZO) drops the Jewish army in favor of a Jewish brigade under the
command of the British.
Arendt, as so often, was at war with the Jews. As the politics of a joint national
project with Palestinian Arabs espoused by Brith Shalom staggered under the
burden of the Arab nationalist revolts, the Zionist establishment moved further
along the path to a Jewish state — “undivided and undiminished” as the AZO
convention of 1944 put it. Arendt saw this as wholesale capitulation to the Revisionists
and the great power sponsors. “A Jewish State actually means that Jews
propose to establish themselves from the very beginning as a ‘sphere of interest’
under the delusion of nationhood,” she wrote in 1945; “only folly could dictate a
policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the
good will of neighbors.” 111 This was the decisive moment. With the establishment
of the Jewish state, the binationalists — and this is by no means a small
minority — can no longer be Zionists. Instead, they become enemies of the new
state, anti-Zionists imperiling the nation. It is not only the map of Palestine that is
redrawn in 1948. There are new topographies of Jewishness, too.
When it came to Palestine, Arendt — like Ha’am, Buber, and Nossig — seemed
cursed with the gift of prophecy. Perhaps her determination to sever the political
from the social also let her distinguish friends and enemies in a way that Nossig,
so embedded in cultural intimacy and geopolitical pragmatisms, could never
manage. Rather than a bastion against antisemitism, she wrote, a Jewish state
“will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow
will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of the foreign big powers
in that region but had actually plotted it.” 112
Antisemitism (or, more broadly, “allosemitism . . . the practice of setting the
Jews apart as a people radically different from all the others”) is marked above
all by an intense ambivalence, says Zygmunt Bauman. 113 Though there are always
specificities to attend to, this feels right to me. These deeply shared histories of
degeneracy, science, nation, and race are as imponderable for Jews as for their
neighbors. Without the fateful, intimate ambivalences that tie Jews and Germans
111. Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in Kohn and Feldman, The Jewish Writings,
372.
112. Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” 345.
113. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 143.
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and — though I have spent little time on this — Jews and Arabs, this would be an
entirely different history. 114 Lice become people and people become lice, but it
takes an enormous amount of work to accomplish. The Nazis made insects out
of Jews, but even before this, many Jews had themselves come to understand that
their humanity could be restored only through the assertion not simply of universalist
humanism but (in Zionism) of Jewishness, because, as Arendt has it, “one
can only defend oneself as that for which one has been attacked.” Yet, even here,
the ambivalence is profound. Who is to say what it means to act as a Jew when
neither Jews nor antisemites can truly say what a Jew is? Who has the right to
assume the burden of these awful histories?
If we want to understand what has become of the Jewish state today, we must
think hard about the remarkable appeal of Zionism and the peculiar intensity of its
progenitor, antisemitism. Such powerful, sustaining, world-changing ideologies.
If antisemitism is a “proteophobia” — an anxiety aroused by someone who “does
not fall easily into any of the established categories,” as Bauman argues — Zionism
is a protean ideology, protean in its ability to harness the contradictions of
an ambivalent nationalism, a self-consciousness of difference, an idealism tempered
by hard-headedness and existential insecurity, a secular utopianism, and a
fundamentalist messianism. 115 “Zionism is already a politics and a non-politics.
An epic and a Passion. Wild energy and extreme vulnerability,” wrote Emmanuel
Levinas. 116 This is something to take seriously. And one place to start is by recovering
a moment when the joining of science and nation still generated excitement,
a moment when — despite their profound enmeshment in the logics of racial politics
— activist intellectuals like Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and
Alfred Nossig were attempting to reimagine a nation beyond race, thinking, as
Levinas puts it, “after politics.” 117
114. Jews and Arabs, noted Edward Said, have been “thrown together, sometimes not too pleasantly,
sometimes very pleasantly. . . . Our history as Palestinians today is so inextricably bound with
that of Jews that the whole idea of separation . . . is doomed.” Edward Said, “Edward Said Talks to
Jacqueline Rose,” Critical Quarterly 40 (1997): 72 – 89, 82; also, Said, “Invention, Memory, and
Place,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 175 – 92. See also Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
115. Bauman, “Allosemitism,” 143.
116. Emmanuel Levinas, “Politics After!” in Seán Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989), 277 – 83, 280. Levinas was writing on the eve of Anwar Sadat’s fateful visit to
Jerusalem.
117. For contemporary debates on binationalism, see the material archived at www.one-state
.org; also, Tony Judt’s much-discussed “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books 50, no.
16 (2003): 8 – 10, as well as the exchange that followed in vol. 50, no. 19 (2003).
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But we can do even more. Tracking Nossig’s insufferable, unstoppable determination
and his tawdry death on the eve of heroism can tell us something meaningful
about history and those complicities that we need to draw on now more
than ever. Listening to Himmler, listening closely when he speaks of parasitic
insects, can help us understand the mechanics of death as a redefinition of life that
unfolds — as a nightmare — through an ethic of care. Listening intently can help
us understand the complex practices through which “the non-man [is] produced
within the man,” through which “the animal [is] separated within the human
body itself,” and may help us find ways to stop these unending reproductions. 118
It is true that all this is vitiated by the brutalities that pervade contemporary
Israel. The Zionism we experience today as permanent war, the Zionism that is
hostage to an exclusionary state apparatus, that is hostage also to the anxieties of
American Jews (and currently to the instrumentalities of both Jewish and Christian
conservatives), the Zionism that is a caricature of its enemies’ mythologies,
the Zionism that invites the antisemitism of both left and right and that has made
itself the sole guardian of a traumatizing past and the vehicle of messianic yearning
“was once fed on the very lifeblood of genuine political passions,” wrote
Arendt in the gloom of 1944, finding in the parasite — the vampiric parasite — yet
another history of the Jews. Even then it stalked like a “living [ghost] among
the ruins of our times,” she said, with great prescience but perhaps too much finality.
119 Sixty years on, Jews are still struggling with the identifications bequeathed
by the Nazis, still damned to judge and be judged in terms of loss, guilt, trauma,
and redemption. Hunted in the past, haunted in the present. If — as we must — we
truly want a world free of this tragedy, we have to ask how it happened that Zionism,
such a powerfully polyvalent ideology, an idea that could consume a Nossig,
has, like Alfred Nossig himself, come to meet such a pitiable fate.
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118. Agamben, Open, 37.
119. Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” 352.