Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures Andrea Pető Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romania and Other Central European Cultures, by Andrei Oisteanu. Studies in Antisemitism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009. 468 pp. $60.00. Moshe Idel, the most prominent kabala scholar of our time, sets the tone of this volume, as the first sentence of his introduction labels Oisteanu as "an expert in Romanian folklore and an active Jewish intellectual in Romania." The lengthy book is a summary of "ethnic imagology" of Jews in Romania and a long overdue historical milestone in Romanian research on stereotyping. The book comes out of a very controversial national legacy. In 1940 the second largest European Jewish community, with 800,000 members, lived in Romania, labeled by Hannah Arendt as "the most anti-Semitic country." However the, "Olympics of antisemitism"—examining who is the most antisemitic of all—does not lead anywhere, as Oisteanu himself also pointed out, especially not after 1945, when the antisemitic climate reflected in the sheer denial of the existence of any other nationalities than Romanian living in Romania caused the book by Lion Feuchtwanger, The Jewess of Toledo, to be published in Romanian with a neutral title, The Spaniard Ballad. The book summarizes Oisteanu's research, executed at an often daunting level of detail, in the best tradition of Romanian intellectual life: it is rich in content and flamboyant in style and in its empirical basis. The book's divisions show the physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magical, and religious portrait of the Jews. It resembles an encyclopedia which aims to include all possible details and information about the "image of the other," and its stringent demands on the reader's concentration makes it difficult reading. It is very useful for those who want to experience the richness of this very complex matrix of stereotyping based on all possible written sources about Romanian culture. The empirical base of the book is very wide and heterogeneous: from jokes to newspapers and literary works. The author has examined every possible corner of Romanian culture to find out what people have thought about the Jews—every corner except visual sources such as artwork and cartoons. [End Page 183] My critical comments are related to how the book handles temporality. Stereotypes are presented as timeless, and regardless of the fact that the chapters present the material more or less chronologically, the reader is left in the dark as to why certain types of stereotypes surface at a certain historical period, while others do not. This timelessness, on the other hand, has an advantage because it shows how invisible the line is between marking a group of people according to certain characteristics and denying their existence along the very same lines. In the book "Jew" stands as a "category," understood by Rogers Brubaker in disaggregated, dynamic, and relational terms (Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe [Cambridge, 1996, p. 16]). This understanding could have been more fruitfully explored in some cases, such as that of the stereotypical "Jewess." This issue is discussed in a rather old fashioned way in the section of the book on the physical appearance of the Jew, where the author describes the female Jew as beautiful, tempting but inaccessible, wearing silk and sophisticated jewelry, but does not examine how gender stereotypes are constitutive parts of constructing the image of the other and how these stereotypes change over time in different contexts. In the introduction of the book the author describes the methodology as comparative in time and in space, in cultures and in ethnicity. This is a very ambitious aim. We cannot blame the book for failing to meet this broad goal, or for the number of rich but heterogeneous details that often make the argument difficult to follow. We should rather celebrate the book as a closing cornerstone which is a historical snapshot of difficult centuries of the co-habitation of Jews and Romanians in Central Europe. Andrea Pető Central European University Budapest Copyright © 2010 Purdue University...