Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, 1880s to 2008

Henrietta Mondry

Open Access Published by Academic Studies Press 2009

Exemplary Bodies

Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, 1880s to 2008

Henrietta Mondry

In the series Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy

In the series Borderlines: Russian and East European-Jewish Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781618118523

Overview
Contents

About this book

Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since 1880s explores the construction of the Jew’s physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal “exotic” and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a biological Other whose acts, deeds, and thoughts were determined by racial differences. This Jew allegedly had physical and psychological characteristics that were genetically determined and that could not be changed by education, acculturation, conversion to Christianity, or change of social status. This stereotype has become a stable archetype that continues to operate in contemporary Russian society and culture.

Author / Editor information

Mondry Henrietta :

Henrietta Mondry is Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has published widely on cultural history and literature. Her books include Populist Writers and the Jews and Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture.Henrietta Mondry is Professor and Director of the Russian Program at University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her recent books include Populist Writers and the Jews: In the Footsteps of Two Hundred Years Together, St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2005 (in Russian); and Pure, Strong and Sexless: Russian Peasant Woman's Body and Gleb Uspensky, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

Reviews

Elena Katz, University of Oxford:
"[A] major and very timely contribution to the field of Russian–Jewish studies, given that contemporary Russian anti-Semitism still breeds on a long-standing cultural tradition of racial pseudo-science in the treatment of Jews. ‘The Jew’ has for centuries served as a trope of the universal Other in Western literary and cultural productions. In her book, Mondry examines how Russians adopted this image to construct and reassert their own sense of national identity. . . . By incorporating a whole range of disciplinary perspectives, from anthropology and psychology to genetics and political history, Mondry’s engaging study shows how the Jewish physical and ontological body became a site onto which Russian culture at various historic times inscribed a negative meaning, constructing it as pathological, carnal, incestuous, picaresque, criminal, or sadist. The monograph would be of interest to any scholar of Russia who wants to learn how Russian culture sought to tackle the ‘eternal’ question ‘what is Russianness?’ by answering a rather different one —‘what is Jewishness?’."

William Nickell, University of Chicago:
"Henrietta Mondry's study of the representation of Jewish bodies in Russian culture over the past 130 years addresses a very important issue for scholars, and will be of great interest to those working in the growing field of Russian-Jewish studies. She explores a number of texts that have not been widely discussed in the field, and very effectively contextualizes them in the history of Russian attitudes toward Jewish identity. Her book shows that many of the ideas informing Judeophobic and Judeophilic sentiment have been situated in attitudes toward the Jewish body, and have remained consistent in many respects, despite vast changes in regimes and official policies...It contains a wealth of material for the study of the body in its relation to racial and national prejudice in general, as well as for students interested in problems of Jewish and Russian national identity. The author is to be commended for her work in advancing what should be a fruitful, continued discussion of these matters."

Nadja Berkovich, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
"By bringing together previously unexamined Russian Jewish and Russian antiemetic texts, the book makes an important contribution to Russian Jewish cultural studies. Furthermore, Mondry expands the frame of deciphering the mechanism of othering the Jew by examining the construct of the Jewish body in the works of Jewish and Russian writers....Mondry s work is a must read for those seeking to understand the perpetual existence of a racializing and mythological vilification of the Jewish body."

Brendan McGeever, Revolutionary Russia:
"This book is a welcome addition to the small but growing literature that aims to address the neglect of 'race'…It represents a welcome theoretical shift away from the tendency to view religious-based anti-Semitism and racialized anti-Semitism as being somehow distinct."

Annotation ©2010 Book News Inc. Portland, OR:
"Dipping into a number of writers from the 1880s to the 2000s Mondry (Russian, U. of Canterbury, New Zealand) shows how the construct of the Jewish body, psyche, and character has been modeled by Russian culture, and how Russian culture has responded to this construct during the period. She argues that is the Jewish body that culture inscribed meaning onto, and that this body had a surface and inner organs — the psyche being as material and biological as the brain — and this is responsible for a special kind of behavior. Her topics include the medicalization of the Jewish body by Anton Chekhov during the 1880s, sadists' bodies of the anti-zionist campaign era in the 1960s and 1970s, glasnost and the uncensored sexed body of the Jew, and important Jewish personalities and post-Soviet corporophobia."

Sander Gilman, author of The Jew’s Body:
"Henrietta Mondry’s Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since the 1880s is one of the most important books to appear in the burgeoning field of Russian-Jewish studies this decade. Taking seriously the problematics of real Jews in the Russian speaking lands, Mondry examines the fantasies about their bodies in writings from Anton Chekhov to the new Russian racial science of the 2000s. This is a readable and engaging study offering methodological and critical insights into anti-Semitism and its images. It provides the reader with a detailed understanding of the function of such images over the past century from Romanoff Russia through the short and bloody history of the USSR to Putin’s Russia. It gives one pause about the continuities in Russian images of the Jew into the future."

Topics

Frontmatter Open Access Download PDF	1
Acknowledgements Open Access Download PDF	6
A Note on Transliteration Open Access Download PDF	7
Contents Open Access Download PDF	9
List of Illustrations Open Access Download PDF	10
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	11
Chapter 1: Russian Anthropological and Biological Sciences and Jewish “Race,” 1860s-1930 Open Access Download PDF	29
Chapter 2: Stereotypes of Pathology: The Medicalization of the Jewish Body by Anton Chekhov, 1880s Open Access Download PDF	41
Chapter 3: Carnal Jews of the Fin-de-Siècle: Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish Body, and Incest Open Access Download PDF	64
Chapter 4: Ilya Ehrenburg and His Picaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920s Open Access Download PDF	88
Chapter 5: Criminal Bodies and Love of The Yellow Metal: The Jewish Male and Stalinist Culture, 1930s-1950s Open Access Download PDF	124
Chapter 6: Sadists’ Bodies of the Anti-Zionist Campaign Era: 1960s-1970s Open Access Download PDF	147
Chapter 7: Glasnost and the Uncensored Sexed Body of the Jew Open Access Download PDF	168
Chapter 8: The Repatriated Body: A Russian Jewish Woman Writer in Israel, or the Corporeal Fantasy of Dina Rubina, 1990s to the Present Open Access Download PDF	188
Chapter 9: The Jewish Patient: Alexander Goldstein and the Postmodern Russian Jewish Body in Israel, 2000s Open Access Download PDF	208
Chapter 10: The “Real” Jewish Bodies of Oligarchs: Important Jewish Personalities and Post-Soviet Corporophobia Open Access Download PDF	232
Chapter 11: The Post-Soviet Assault on the Jew’s Body: The New Racial Science Open Access Download PDF	244
Conclusion Open Access Download PDF	271
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	277
Index of Names Open Access Download PDF	293
Index of Subjects Open Access Download PDF	298

Language: English
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 300

eBook

Published: November 11, 2016
ISBN: 9781618118523