Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Read Online Free PDF Page A

depic- tion of the ‘love of families’ extends itself quietly and subtly into a nationalist and even racist ideology.” For Hirsch, Oliver Twist ’s “story of an orphan’s dis- covery of familial identity serves as an allegorical history of the ascendant middle class in England, which is defined not only though opposition to the deviant familial orders of the working and upper classes but also through a racial-religious opposition to the queerly atomized familial order of Fagin ‘the Jew.’” Hirsch here exposes yet another nexus between the Jew and the queer: both are outsiders to the order of the middle-class family. 3
    Compellingly, disturbingly, Fagin “the Jew” also recalls aspects of Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.” Hirsch recounts associations between Fagin and the Jews of Chaucer’s story, associations that would not have been lost on Dickens’s contemporary readership. Indeed, in an interpretive move that dovetails with Press’s reading, Hirsch explicitly connects Fagin’s character with the pederastic Jews of the narratives of William of Norwich, Simon of Trent, and Hugh of Lincoln. In so doing, Hirsch persuasively explains why Fagin must be a pederastic Jew, that this is, indeed, not an isolated speech act of an- tisemitism on Dickens’s part but central to the project (an incoherent one, as Hirsch shows) of the production of “Christian” family values.
    In his essay on Proust’s Jewish and queer question, Jonathan Freedman ar- ticulates yet another aspect to the persistent association in modern European
    culture between Jews and sexual deviance. To theoreticians of the Metropole, the Jews in their midst were a conundrum: not a religious group per se (for many were freethinkers or converts), not a language group, not a race, not a nation. In the face of such a “semiotic void,” Freedman suggests, “a language of sexual aberration could serve to ground the radically amorphous figure of the Jew: the simultaneously emerging terminologies of sexual perversion could provide a definition for a Jewish identity that was increasingly under- stood as pliable, metamorphic, ambiguous.” This developing language, with its scientistic heft, offered at least “one tidy box” in which to contain Jews’ “proliferating indecipherability.”
    But this “discursive cross-referencing,” as Freedman calls it, could be put to multiple uses, sometimes even subversive ones. Freedman marks Proust’s Recherche as the richest example of a project that enlists this “discursive cross- referencing” not to disenfranchise (or worse) Jews and homosexuals but to queer identity, to question “the adequacy of race and sexuality—those two problematic taxonomies with which the nineteenth century has endowed us—to define essential properties of being.” Where Hirsch exposes the man- ifold dangers of this cross-referencing when it is put to work for “the” nation, Freedman indicates something of its destabilizing potential. He reveals how Proust’s cross-referencing of the Jew and the sodomite may point “to a more expansive understanding of the intimate relation between Jewishness and id- ioms of race and nation at the emergence of all these fraught and consequen- tial reifications.” In an essay full of exciting suggestions, one of the most ex- citing is this: For Proust’s Belle Epoque France, Freedman argues, Jewishness was more problematic than homosexuality, such that in Proust the latter is in part the cipher of the former (a reversal of the relation we frequently find in American texts of the twentieth century).
    Together, Jacob Press, David Hirsch, and Jonathan Freedman demonstrate the culture- and history-making potentialities of literary texts. Their historicist analyses reveal the literary text not as the product of its times, nor as the au- thorial signature of individual “genius,” but as one of the producers of its times, part and parcel of the discursive structures that it both