Differences

Frank Kermode

  • The Jew’s Body by Sander Gilman
    Routledge, 303 pp, £10.99, September 1992, ISBN 0 415 90459 5
  • Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend by John Gross
    Chatto, 355 pp, £18.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 7011 3523 9
  • Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading by Alan Sinfield
    Oxford, 365 pp, £27.50, September 1992, ISBN 0 19 811983 6

Anti-semitism is so disgusting a disease that timid laypersons might prefer to leave its pathology to the experts, but it is pandemic and they cannot wash their hands of it. Sander Gilman’s book concerns the curious manner in which sufferers from anti-semitism explain away their condition by describing Jewishness as the disease. This is done so literally that the Jewish body (predominantly the male, because of circumcision) has, by a pseudo-scientific pathology, been characterised as diseased, quite literally from top to toe. Jews are therefore ‘different’; and from their difference, and of course they are in some obvious respects different, arise, to the astonishment of the right-thinking layperson, pogrom and Shoah.

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[*] A detailed account of the persecution of the Jews of the northern Italian city of Trent in 1475 is provided in Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial by R. Po-chia Hsia (Yale, 173 pp., £14, 29 October, 0 300 05106 9). This account is based on a contemporary German manuscript account of the trial. The horrible story of judicial torture, false witness, conversions exacted on the promise of less painful forms of execution, is told calmly and with scholarly care. The manuscript is evidently a beautiful and expensive document, appropriate to what was regarded as the triumph of just authority over evil. Of course in those days it was the truth and power of Christianity, rather than the racial purity of the larger community, that was sullied by the Jews.