Beyond the Legality Principle: Sacher-Masoch’s Economies of “Jewish Justice”

Abstract

In Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s short story “Frau Leopard,” one of the author’s many popular tales of Jewish life, a town’s local anti-Semite gets his comeuppance after he falls in love with the beautiful Jewish widow of the title. He thereby enters into a system of desire, displacement, and revenge that Sacher-Masoch, in one of the tale’s three subtitles, curiously names “Jewish Justice.” Although Sacher-Masoch’s vision of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Poland is clearly no more than pure fantasy, the story’s farcical plot nevertheless constitutes a real engagement with the questions of law, justice, fairness, contract, retribution, and citizenship that also lie at the core of both Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, a discussion about the latter of which also marks the turning point of Sacher-Masoch’s own tale. In direct contrast to both the drama and the political treatise, Sacher-Masoch’s exoticizing and eroticizing of Jewish culture, or rather of minority and marginalization per se, act as a way to bypass normative demands in favor of perverse pleasure, and from this to attempt an answer to the problem of how to exercise justice in the absence of transcendent authority.