We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009, and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish Studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 3 features special forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Renowned Heine scholar Jeffrey Sammons offers a magisterial critical retrospective on this towering "German Jewish" author, followed by a response from Ritchie Robertson, while the dean of Kraus scholarship, Edward Timms, reflects on the challenges and rewards oftranslating German Jewish dialect into English. Paul Reitter provides a thoughtful response.
Contributors: Angela Botelho, Jay Geller, Abigail Gillman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Leo Lensing, Georg Mein, Paul Reitter, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Egon Schwarz, Edward Timms, Liliane Weissberg, Emma Woelk.
William Collins Donahue is the John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Against the background of the millennia-long association of Judentum with the lupine (or canine) in Christian and European discourses, this article focuses on metamorphoses of the human into members of the Canidae family by Jewish-identified, German-born writers. Analysis of, first, Heinrich Heine's characterizations of both Shylock (1838) and the consort of “Prinzessin Sabbath” (1851) and, then, Curt Siodmak's scripts for The Wolf Man (1941) finds werewolves and other were-canids mediating Jewish life and death in their respective historically distinct and distinctly hostile situations: a Gentile Europe resisting Jewish integration in the first half of the nineteenth century, and a post-Emancipation Europe increasingly threatening Jewish existence in the first half of the twentieth. Their hybrid constructions of Jew (explicit or implicit) and wolf (or canid cousin) call attention to how the intersection of Jewish and lupine (or canine) stereotypes functions differently. This article argues that Heine rendered the purported Jewish referent of those interpellating identifications indefinite—that is, as both animal and human and neither; as both Jew and Gentile and neither—while Siodmak demonstrated the tragic consequences on individual lives of such oppressive identifications.
THE JEWISH BODY has often been stereotyped as hirsute, and the representation of Judentum has frequently crossed that of wolves within the long history of what I call the Bestiarium Judaicum, the vast menagerie of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) that have been disseminated to debase and bestialize Jews over the past two millennia. The Jew has been associated with the lupine in Christian discourse since at least St. John Chrysostom, for whom Jews were “more dangerous than any wolves.” The assumed behavior of wolves led to their use as figures for several traits that were either desired or repudiated by a human community, as well as for what (and whom) was to be included within or excluded from its bounds. While the fierceness ascribed to the wolf (and the wolf-pack) was a quality that might serve well for the warrior who extended the boundaries of the polis outward, for those within the polis, who might be subjected to the wolves’ (or the warriors’) predations, that attribute was translated as rapaciousness and cruelty.
