The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, Jay Geller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), xiv + 510 pp., hardcover $110.00, paperback $40.00

Abstract

Jay Geller's The Other Jewish Question challenges any conventional way of reviewing a book. His densely written analysis of both iconic and arcane (mostly German-language) texts across a roughly two-hundred-year period is not for the intellectually faint-hearted. But it is a feast for the connoisseur who follows the evolution and morphing of ideas and uncovering how these ideas become markers for defining, defending, or regulating social relationships. Countless cross-references, ideational interpolations, phonemic allusions, psychoanalytic evocations, intertextual linkages, and morphemic conjectures—characteristic of both Geller's style and method—make up the bulk of the present work's 300-plus pages, followed by more than 200 pages of endnotes and references. Such an accomplished intellectual amalgamation dazzles in its virtuosity, at times revealing with stunning lucidity the textual genesis and decline of ideas, if at other times weaving a nearly impenetrable web of opaque connections. What then is this book about? It is about the European discourse (and counter-discourses) on the “Jew” in the period from Rahel Levin Varnhagen's birth in 1771 to Walter Benjamin's death in 1940. The book stops, so to speak, just at the moment that European antisemitic ideology begins to reach its pinnacle, having moved from curious and spurious textual ideas about “Jews” to the material reality of physical annihilation. And thus The Other Jewish Question traces the possible outcome of an insidious discourse on what is perceived as “the Other”: cultural assumptions spread widely and enduringly across discrete disciplines of knowledge, artistic expression, and social agencies.