Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Read Online Free Page A

castration anxiety to all men— trace the faultlines of a subject divided against himself. Boyarin’s critical in- tervention here is to reread Freud’s explanation of the etiology of the castra- tion complex. In Freud’s Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy , also known as the case of Little Hans, Freud asserts both that the castration com- plex is the “deepest unconscious root of anti-semitism” and , in the next
    breath, that “there is no stronger unconscious root for [men’s] sense of supe- riority over women.” Boyarin goes on to reveal a link between antisemitism, misogyny, and fantasies of phallic wholeness and phallic lack: the gender trou- ble of the Jewish male. It is the troubling difference of the Jewish man that Freud sought continually to keep at bay, in large part by projecting the specter of difference elsewhere and onto the bodies of some other others.
    The displacement and divided consciousness Boyarin perceives in the case of Freud are not unique to Freud, of course, as Boyarin also demonstrates. In fact, to make this point and its implications clearer, Boyarin stages an en- counter between Freud and another paradigmatic postcolonial subject, Frantz Fanon. By bringing together Freud and Fanon—rereading each in the light of the other—Boyarin is able to return psychoanalysis to history and thus to sug- gest the conditions of emergence not just of an influential body of theory but also, and more crucially, to show something of the way bodies get formed and deformed in the crucible of a colonial race/gender system.
    With its shuttling between the historical and the textual, Boyarin’s essay provides a neat bridge to our next cluster of essays, which concern themselves with Jewish responses to the stigmatized linkage of Jewishness to dangerous sexual difference. Bruce Rosenstock’s essay reads the Messiah fantasies of seventeenth-century Spanish converso Abraham Miguel Cardoso as a signal moment in the history of Jewish homoeroticism. Cardoso’s fantasy resitu- ates—and potentially “outs”—the homoeroticism of Jewish religious practice. While earlier stages of the rabbinic imaginaire understood God’s subjects to be in a feminine position with respect to the masculine deity, preserving a male-female erotics even in its breach, Cardoso deploys a phallic male-male model. In his fantasy he is one of the two Messiahs projected in rabbinic lit- erature, the Messiah ben Ephraim (or ben Yoseph), while the much more fa- mous Shabbetai Zevi was the Messiah ben David. As Rosenstock argues, Car- doso then goes on to project the homoerotic joining of these two Messiahs in “unabashedly sexual” terms, imagining himself “the human analog of Yesod, the divine phallus.”
    The explicitly homoerotic theme of the last section of Rosenstock’s essay is not the least of his essay’s contributions to this volume. He also makes won- derful use of Sedgwick’s “homosexual panic,” as he analyzes the complex sit- uation of conversos. Rosenstock analyzes the messianic unions articulated by his subject both as an example and as a special case of the homoerotic themes so basic to medieval kabbalah (see Wolfson 369–77). This article, unique as such within the collection, articulates the virtues of some aspects of queer theory when addressed to distinctly premodern texts and problems of the Jew- ish question. Through judicious employment of queer theory and historical
    contextualization, Rosenstock provides a novel answer to the origins of some striking and puzzling themes in Spanish kabbalah itself.
    The issue of homoerotic love, its representation in and reverberations for a Jewish cultural context, are also at the heart of Naomi Seidman’s essay. In a close reading of the Yiddish theater classic The Dybbuk , Seidman argues that the play contains two love relationships: a doomed heterosexual romance as well as a thinly veiled love relation between the unhappy couple’s fathers. In a subtle