Inferiority Embodied: The ‘Men-struating’ Jew and Pre-Modern Notions of Identity and Difference

Autor(en)

Kerstin Mayerhofer

Abstrakt

Kerstin Mayerhofer engages with the role of cultural narratives in the process of formation of identity. She scrutinises the discourse of embodied inferiority and uses the example of the motif of Jewish “male menstruation” for her reflections on Inferiority Embodied: The “Men-struating” Jew and Pre-modern Notions of Identity and Difference. Based on the concept of racism and race as grounded in a proclaimed hierarchy of one group of people over another, Mayerhofer presents the “men-struating” Jew as one motif in a canon of imagery surrounding the “Jewish body,” which, in turn, reflects back on pre-modern understandings of sex, gender, and, ultimately, race. In the example of the “men-struating” Jew, that is, the figure of a Jewish man afflicted with a regular flow of blood from his body, pre-modern Christian notions of difference and inferiority are reflected both on a cultural and on a “scientific” level. The example shows that premodern formation of identity is not solely based in culture or religion. Corporeal aspects, too, “served the construction as categories [of identity],” however, they were always “deeply connected with faith” (156). In presenting three sources from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries from a clerical, medical, and legal background, Mayerhofer uncovers the mechanisms that lie at the core of the establishment of the theme of an aberrant and inferior “Jewish body”: universalisation, naturalisation, and normalisation. These mechanisms linked, first theologically, to mark all generations of Jews as responsible and guilty for the death of Jesus Christ, secondly, and “scientifically,” to embody this hereditary guilt in images using somatic markers of distortedness conveying inferiority, and, finally, to “normalise and institutionalise the socio-political and socioeconomic marginalisation and discrimination” (153) of the Jews.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Judaistik

Band

3

Seiten

135-160

Anzahl der Seiten

25

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-008

Publikationsdatum

08-2021

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

601012 Mittelalterliche Geschichte, 603906 Jüdische Religion

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/inferiority-embodied-the-menstruating-jew-and-premodern-notions-of-identity-and-difference(09a68897-806f-493c-8a8a-e522a6e26f70).html