Jews have been associated across the ages with a frightful menagerie of animals. The frequently deliberate effect of these identifications and analogies was the debasement and dehumanization of the Jewish other. Indeed, the proliferation of verbal and visual images constitutes a veritable Jewish bestiary. In the introductory chapter to his appositely named monograph, Jay Geller offers a “field guide” to this Bestiarium Judaicum, in which he traces the loathsome practice in painstaking detail, all the way back to the Church Fathers, through the medieval period, and to modernity. Yet, the author's real interest is in the creative processes and hermeneutic dynamics that determine the appropriation of these zoological identifications and analogies by Jewish writers at a time when the so-called Jewish Question loomed large. More specifically, Geller identifies and critically explores animal tales and the use of animal imagery by nineteenth- and twentieth-century “Jewish-identified” writers from a Germanophone background.

Delving into the works of authors as diverse as Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak, the author scrutinizes in absorbing and lucidly argued detail their engagement with the Jewish bestiary. Situated at the intersection of Jewish studies and literary criticism, antisemitism studies and ethnic studies, as well as the recently burgeoning animal studies, Bestiarium Judaicum complements Geller's previous work, from which this one emerges. Following on The Other Jewish Question (2011), it shifts focus from the mediation of Jewish identification through corporeal rhetoric to the zoological, and it investigates how this allowed writers such as Heine, Kafka, and Kolmar to reflect on their specific situations in modernity.

Geller is well aware of the ambivalence inherent in the creative adoption of animal identifications and allusions which, after all, may also be considered a surrender to the debasing and dehumanizing images of the dominant, oppressive culture. Yet, his argument is that the animal narratives he discusses—among them, prominently, Heine's “Princess Sabbath” (1851), Sigmund Freud's “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (i.e., The Wolf-Man Case, 1914), Leivick's Yiddish narrative poem “Der Volf” (1920), Salten's Bambi (1923), Kafka's “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse People” (1924), Kolmar's “The Day of the Great Lament” (1938), and Siodmak's screenplay for The Wolf Man (1941)—are the product neither of the mere internalization of negative stereotypes nor of so-called Jewish self-hatred. Rather, he contends that such tales problematize human/animal difference aside from any potential “Gentile/Jewish overcoding” (22). Geller significantly recognizes that the texts he analyzes employ different strategies to this end, and that not every literary animal is necessarily more than just an animal. They nevertheless present interpellations into a society that maintains the subjection or abjection of Jews through the authority of discourses that utilize human/animal difference in order to reinforce assertions of Gentile/Jewish difference. Geller convincingly demonstrates that the literary engagements of Jewish-identified writers with the Jew-as-animal foil easy equations between words and their referents, and that they range from resisting (neutralizing or mitigating) to succumbing to those “bestial identifications,” which ultimately seek to exclude the Jews from “the community of moral obligation” (22).

The theoretical framework within which Geller operates and with which he enters into critical conversation primarily encompasses, but is not limited to, poststructuralist insights into the historical contiguity, constructedness, and interdependence of implicit hierarchical relations between categorical oppositions. More specifically, in critical engagement with Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944), the author seeks to invert and convert Jacques Derrida's conception of animot (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 1997) in relation to explorations of Jews and animals functioning as figures. Geller suggests that, going beyond the notion of becoming-animal, the Jewish-identified writers whose Tiergeschichten he interrogates, posit conceptions of the performing animal, of the Jew-as-Animal, by literalizing identifications figured in the collective mind. They thus expose and challenge the animal/human divide both latent and manifest in their own sociocultural and political situations.

There is a certain captivating immediacy to Geller's book that manifests itself in the compelling rigor of the thought processes it records, but also in the way in which it unfolds them. Stylistically demanding, the study bristles with syntactical complexity and the pyrotechnics of sophisticated badinage. To read Bestiarium Judaicum is a real pleasure, but it is a highly cerebral pleasure. Geller's study demands constant reflection and engagement, and it therefore opens a conversation which extends not only to rigorously researched critical opinion but also to the reader. The author does not shy away either from an uncompromising confrontation with claims made by other scholars. Geller takes to task very seriously and persuasively earlier attempts to impose on Kafka's animal stories readings that appropriate their author's work for contemporary political debates and “other historical presentations” (108).

Given his own constructively critical spirit, the author will surely appreciate the subtle irony of quails making an unexpected appearance in his book: a printing error (or, since it recurs, more likely an auto-correction) transformed into “quails” the Latin qualis in Plautus's original phrase about one man being a wolf to another (188, etc.; see Asinaria, 1916). In the tradition of the medieval bestiaries that Geller discusses as a prominent example of Christian polemical texts directed against Jews, the allegorical significance ascribed to the bird (which, attacked by the hawk, represents the Christian who, if approaching worldly things, is assailed by the devil) does not readily lend itself to adding a new entry to the Bestiarium Judaicum. Yet, something might conceivably be made of the suggestion that the ancients would not eat the bird because it supposedly gorges on poisonous seeds; whereas the Book of Numbers relates how the Israelites are fed on fowl in the desert—“until it come out at your nostrils, and it be loathsome unto you: because that ye have despised the Lord which is among you, and have wept before him, saying, Why came we forth out of Egypt?” (11:20; see also Exodus 16:13). Finally, there is also the potential association of the so-called Judas quail, used by hunters to lure other birds before their guns and resonating with antisemitic allusions of betrayal.

This unintended but illuminating slip aside, Geller's monograph is a work of immense erudition and sparkling wit. It is an original, eye-opening, and thought-provoking inquiry into hierarchical categorical oppositions by which Jewish difference was identified in the period leading up to the cataclysm of the Holocaust. Yet, Geller repudiates any teleological associations of the Jewish bestiary. Rather than arguing for its trajectory toward the Holocaust, he analyzes paradigmatic performances of the Jew-as-animal, identifications and analogies of Jews with animals, as responses to the specific historic situations of their authors. While this is convincing in itself and quite rightly appreciates the dangers of hindsight, the successive and synchronous interweaving of these chronotopic situations nevertheless leaves a nagging suspicion that this may, after all, have portended the looming conflagration.

Geller's book is an extraordinary one. Its meticulously researched detail, intellectual rigor, and analytical acuity, no less than its broad yet never unrestrained sweep, recommend it to scholars from many disciplines, including German culture and literature, Jewish studies, cultural history, antisemitism studies, and animal studies.