Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and first published in 1915 in René Schickele's journal Weiße Blätter, was not the only narrative that dealt with animal figures as protagonists. Readers of Kafka's work are familiar with Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; Jackals and Arabs; and the character Red Peter from A Report to an Academy. In addition to Kafka there were other German Jewish writers—from Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to the screenwriter and author Curt Siodmak, who escaped to the United States in 1933—who depicted anthropomorphized animals. Jay Geller interrogates the intentions of these representations in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews.
Focusing on the period from 1750 until the 1940s, Geller avoids a simplification of political and ideological questions. He is interested in the “development of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire … about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems” (5). On the one hand, he discusses different representations of animal figures and their humanization as a result of social and political developments. On the other hand, he points out the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the German states from the Middle Ages and the association of Jews with animals and animality in Christian and later racist writings. His work discusses well-known and widely explored authors such as Heine and Kafka; specific studies by Sigmund Freud, including The Rat Man and The Wolf Man; prose texts by Gertrud Kolmar, Felix Salten, and Max Brod; and Maus by Art Spiegelman. However, the emphasis is on the mentioned “major” German Jewish authors.
Geller's book is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and an afterword. His notes function partly as a commentary elucidating the historical and social backgrounds of the different periods. Most of these chapters derive from lectures, as becomes noticeable with some repetitions in the analysis of Freud and Heine.
The following detailed description of the first chapter should clarify the whole structure of the book. The chapter “‘O Beastly Jews’: A Brief History of an (Un)Natural History” gives an overview of the identification of Jews with images of nonhuman creatures and how the image of “the Jew” and “the Jew-Animal” had developed over the centuries. The depiction of Christian—and later European, especially German—imagination of Jews and pigs, wolves, dogs, apes, or goats demonstrates the formation of stereotypes, starting with the Christian polemical bestiaries of the Middle Ages. Geller incorporates illustrations that he uses to demonstrate the broad impact of antisemitism in “humorous” postcards, journals, or pamphlets since the nineteenth century. Among these images is the 1899 Museé des Horreurs from France, which caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and the Jews and non-Jews who supported him. By analyzing the illustrations, Geller emphasizes that it is not only the question “of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human/animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order” (44). Geller offers a complementary and extended perspective on sources about medieval Jewry. In his discussion of human-animal hybrids, the author compares several sources and confronts Christian practices with Jewish traditions where animals—in contrast to the Christian interpretation—“did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups” (45).
Most of the chapters (2 until 7) include analyses of prose texts, poems, and tales by Heine and Kafka. Geller ties his selected corpus together by pointing out processes of publication, discourses of social and political developments, discussions about Jewish identity, and attributions by the non-Jewish majority. Geller uses the example of Heine's poems, as well as some of his Travel Pictures that sketched out animal figures, to critically demonstrate both the project of Emancipation and inner-Jewish discussions on the one hand, and German scholars’ defamation of Jewish writers and artists as uncreative and imitative on the other hand. The connection between the accusation of mimicry and the comparison of Jews with apes reveals the issue of stereotypical classification. After all, it was not just antisemites such as Wagner who criticized Jewish artists using the German word nachäffen. Analogies with simians or canines, and the combined associations with ugliness, brazenness, primitiveness, and exaggerated gesticulation, were routine. Reading Kafka's Report to an Academy as a reaction to these stereotypical representations amplifies perspectives on negotiations of alleged Jewish animalty. As compared to other studies, Geller discusses some works dealing with questions of Zionism in Kafka's work very critically, though his analysis avoids ideological polemics and gives us new readings of the works.
The last chapter outlines the idea of the transformation of humans into wolves, using the example of Curt Sidomak's screenplay The Wolf Man, filmed in 1941. Based on the stereotypical association of Jews with wolves in the modern age, Geller's interpretation of the film and screenplay contextualizes its date of origin and regards it as a reaction to the Shoah.
If there is a single critique to be offered of this enriching study, it is the emphasis on the works of Kafka and Heine. The last chapter and the afterword in particular deal with texts and authors that are less prominent than these two figures, such as Curt Sidomak and Gertrud Kolmar, and a wider interpretation of their texts could be helpful. However, both Geller's concentration on the period, which saw Emancipation alongside the phenomenon of the “animalization of Jews, the Jew-Animal” (226), and his contextualization for American readers explain his focus on the major German Jewish writers.
