Zur Bedeutung der Sexualbilder im rassistischen Antisemitismus

Abstract

One of the striking characteristics of anti- Semitism in the 19th century is that it was both biological‹ and deeply religious in terms of its vocabulary and images. This showed especially clearly in the sexual stereotypes projected upon the body of the Jew‹. Many of them were quite paradoxical: Thus, the Jew‹ was on one side feminized‹ and described as a sexual perpetrator on the other. The paper focuses on the Christian origins of some of these ideas and shows how they were transformed as they underwent a process of secularisation and became part of modern thinking‹: i.e. the Christian idea of the purity of the blood of Christ and the martyrs was transformed into the racist idea of the purity of Aryan blood. By sexualizing the Jew‹ religious otherness was turned into a physiological or natural‹ otherness, with the effect that Jewish otherness appeared as ineffaceable and rooted in physiological reality‹. In spite of the fact that the anti-Semitic vocabulary made wide use of religious terms, for contemporaries the religious origins of the constructs were hardly discernible. This is exactly what the force of these images relied upon: they were deeply embedded in the collective unconscious. Paradoxically, the modern belief‹ in the natural sciences, based on rationality itself, had prepared the way for this acceptance of a materialisation‹ of transcendent ideas.