▶︎ 0:00 Hi. My name is Ken Gemes. I was a professor of philosophy at Yale for a while, and then at the University of London. I'm now retired. And this is a course I formulated first at Yale. Frankly, I've been teaching it for 30 years, but I think it's a hell of a lot more topical now than it was when I first taught it, and I'll say more about that later.
▶︎ 0:20 It's called The Biology of Evil. I want to start off with a wonderful quotation from one of my favorite writers, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, and it's very relevant to what this whole course is about. He says, "Universal history is perhaps the history of the different intonations given to a handful of metaphors." And in this course, we'll be looking at certain metaphors and we're going to see how they're repeated by scientists, by philosophers, by poets, by writers, and then we're going to talk about the power of these metaphors.
▶︎ 0:52 What this course is really aiming to do is to give you an introduction to a lost rhetoric. It's called the Rhetoric of Degeneration. It was extremely important in the 19th century, but actually because of certain events which we'll come to in the 20th century, it got totally obliterated and covered over and people just don't know about it. But I think it's really important to study it, because it helps us understand how we got to events in the 20th century and how those events are kind of resurfacing again in the 21st century.
▶︎ 1:22 Here's an overview. In the Enlightenment, in Enlightenment rhetoric as developed by philosophers like Kant or Descartes, evil is normally considered as a species of error. It's like having a faulty representation. It's a fault in your application of reason. But I hope you can see the trajectory of that.
▶︎ 1:42 Let's say if evil comes from mal-education, it can be remedied. You just have to get the natural light of reason, to use a metaphor that Descartes liked, to shine on people. You can think of the Enlightenment thought of this as a cone of light and it's going out and it's taking more and more of us into its scope. And so the idea is that, yes, certain people are not properly educated, certain people have the wrong representations, but through education, we can ameliorate that and essentially evil can be overcome.
▶︎ 2:15 There might be certain people a bit retrograde, a bit slow, but the idea was, it was an optimistic idea, this cone of light going out and taking in more and more people.
▶︎ 2:27 There's a big change, and that's a highlight of this course, in the 19th century. There was a new model of evil, and evil was no longer configured as a matter of what's in your head, as in what is in your mind, what your representation is. It was, evil is in the body. Today we would say faulty genes. That wasn't available in the 19th century. It was bad blood. But you gotta see, that has a totally, totally different logic. You can't educate blood.
▶︎ 2:54 So if you think evil is bad blood, then there becomes a huge worry as it's not. You can't ameliorate it, and what if their blood mixes with our blood? What if we get infected? So it has a completely different logic to that of the Enlightenment. If evil is seen as basically, and they use this metaphor all the time, of disease, as an infection, then the worry is, well, how can we stop it? We either need to eliminate it or isolate it. So it's a totally different model.
▶︎ 3:23 Now, look, I wanna be careful here and say, I'm not saying this was the only model of evil that was available in the 19th century. And a lot of people still held onto Enlightenment ideals, but especially among a certain subset, certain medical practitioners, certain scientists, certain philosophers, this model of infection became really widespread and it had huge, huge consequences.
▶︎ 3:47 So in this course, we'll be looking at this model and it was often developed by scientists or it was developed by criminologists like the Italian, Cesare Lombroso. Darwin was to a certain important way implicated in it. He's a very tricky case and we'll come to that. But there were also philosophers like Nietzsche, like Freud, or writers like Zola or Bram Stoker's Dracula is full of this kind of talk of degeneration.
▶︎ 4:14 So the first aim of this course is to expose this rhetoric of degeneration and how it developed this model of evil in the 19th century. And then the second part will be to look at case studies of these particular intellectual figures I mentioned, like Nietzsche, Freud, Baudelaire, Zola, and also the scientific people like Lombroso, the criminologist, and Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory.
▶︎ 4:39 There are certain presumptions I'm gonna make in this course that I'm not gonna fully defend. One is, I call it the Freudian presumption. This is probably 20th century talk 'cause who reads Freud these days? But it's a presumption that belongs to these 19th century figures that I'm very interested in. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud. Freud is 20th century. And they all reference a non-conscious part of our individual being, of our mind, and they take that to be at least as important as our conscious part.
▶︎ 5:10 If you wanted to use a computer analogy today, you'd say there's a hell of a lot of computational work going on that we're not conscious of. You're playing baseball. You wanna catch a ball. Somewhere there's actually calculations of trajectories and trigonometry that most of us don't even have the maths to do, but your hand ends up there. Well, the presumption I'm making is there's a lot going on in our mind that we're not aware of. I call that the Freudian presumption.
▶︎ 5:38 The important point I wanna make is that I wanna apply this not just to individuals, but also to society. That you can say society can have an ethos, and to a certain extent, people in this society can be aware of that ethos or not aware of it. We'll see this a lot when we come to talk about infection. Talk about infection might seem to be a mild thing that we understand, but it can also be deeply, deeply pathological in a way that we use the rhetoric without understanding its full implications.
▶︎ 6:11 Another important point is that often these unconscious motivations, and this, again, is a Freudian point, is they're not always fully rational. And you'll see this a lot with the rhetorics we look at, they're often contradictory. For instance, a lot of people in the 19th century were really, really worried about these degenerates who were living amongst us and being infected by them, but at the same time, part of the rhetoric was that degenerates are inferior and naturally die off. And you can see there's a bit of a clash here. Why should we be worried about these degenerates taking us over if, by their very nature, they eliminate themselves? But this is just kind of typical of this kind of rhetoric that it can be very contradictory and it can contain its opposites within itself. I often call that the logic of opposites.
▶︎ 6:59 And part of the background here, of course, is the unconscious is often moved by these metaphors, these contradictory metaphors, and not by rational reasons. The next presumption I want to make is what I call the Hegelian presumption. And the Hegelian presumption is that the meaning of our terms and our very thoughts are determined by actually what we call inferential associations. Why is this important? Because our terms can have references and associations that we're not even aware of.
▶︎ 7:33 Think about this. Descartes said, "Look, I don't know if the real world exists. I don't know what's out there. I know my own mind." Well, do you know your own mind? You might know what words you're disposed to utter, but what about the real meaning of the word? If the meaning of the words is determined by its associations, there may be associations you don't know about, there may be historical associations that are important to the meaning of the word that you don't have access to.
▶︎ 7:57 Just to fill it out, because my background is in philosophy, think about this, a very mundane example. A kid at a very early age might be saying the word mama. But is it really thinking, "My mum," and it says it in front of its mom, "Mom, Mom, Mom." Is it really thinking, "Mother"? Well, does it have the idea of giving birth? Does it have the idea of having a womb? A little baby, no. So, the little baby may be making the sound, "Mama," but does it really have the concept, mother? Because it doesn't have the full set of associations, I think it's quite plausible to say it doesn't really have the concept.
▶︎ 8:32 Well, I want to make the same claim for us. We use a lot of words and they have certain associations that we're not aware of, they have a certain history, and this is the Hegelian point. Hegel said something, it's what we call holism, as opposed to atomism, like you could have an atom of meaning, its meaning in itself. Hegel said, "No, I reject atomism. A thing has meaning by its relations to other things." But then to really know the meaning of something, you've got to know its relations, and those relations can be very broad.
▶︎ 9:02 So, in some sense, we're not even master of our own house. That is, as I said, the Descartes presumption is I at least know what's in my mind. No, you don't. You might know what words you are disposed to say, but the true meaning of those words are hidden, and it's by doing genealogy and history that we actually figure out the meaning. So, these are the two corollaries of the two presumptions, the Freudian presumption that a lot of our mind is not accessible to us, the Hegelian presumption because it's unconscious. The Hegelian presumption is a lot of our mind isn't accessible to us because we don't know the full associations of the terms and the concepts we're using.
▶︎ 9:39 Corollary one, we don't have privileged, or if you like, Cartesian access to what our thoughts and our words mean. Corollary two, we need to do genealogy. That is history, it's a very Nietzschean concept, to make explicit the full meaning of our language and thoughts. And you can think about, that's what this course is trying to do, we have certain metaphors that we use today, metaphors of disease, infection, and the word degenerates is coming back today, and this course gives us the full historical resonance, so that we actually know what we're talking about.
▶︎ 10:11 There's something else I want to say here. As I said, I started teaching this course, I think, in 1995, and I think a lot of the students at Yale were thinking, "What the hell, this 19th century, this is old hat." And my personal motivation for doing it is because I wanted to get them to see certain events in the 20th century as having a beginning, as having a conceptual basis in the 19th century. But now, you can say this rhetoric is making a horrible reappearance and this becomes a hell of a lot more topical. I don't have the fear of motivation that I had when I used to teach it. The point of the rest of this
▶︎ 10:54 Lecture is to make an admission. I don't want anyone to go away thinking, "Oh, so this rhetoric of difference and degeneracy and the biologistic approach just happened in the 19th century." There have always been biological approaches. And by the way, in this course, we'll be mainly centering, it's very Eurocentric, it's centered more in Europe than in America, and we'll be looking particularly at the representation of women by various scientists and philosophers and the representation of Jews.
▶︎ 11:29 Look, there's a big lacunae here. I don't want to talk about the rhetoric of degeneration as it is applied to Black people in particular, because for a lot of people, it's extremely upsetting and it's extremely triggering in a certain way, and I think we can get the basis of this rhetoric of degeneration just looking at Jews and women, and also, because I'm in the European context, that was much more important. There was much less of this rhetoric directed towards Black people, because they were not that visible in Europe in the 19th century. It was much more to do with the characterization of Jews and women.
▶︎ 12:11 Now I'm going to do a little acknowledgement of how some of this metaphoric of certain groups being inferior, being degenerate, being biologically based in their inferiority, was already in very ancient texts. This is an introduction before we get to the mainstream stuff I want to do in the 19th century. But it's an admission I have to make. The biological accounts of difference were always there.
▶︎ 12:40 But let me clue you in to a key point that's really, really important. Yes, there have always been biological accounts of difference; sexual differences, other differences, but what really happens in the 19th century is this notion of biological difference grounding mental differences, for instance, or moral differences. It also got coupled with a rhetoric of infection, and that changes the game completely. You might think, "Oh, these people are biologically different from us and that makes a difference in their worth, their value, their morality, whatever." But if you start worrying, "What if I get infected by these people?" That raises it up a lot of degrees, and that's what makes it pathological.
▶︎ 13:33 So now, we start with Aristotle. Aristotle had a clear differential between males and females. Look, there's a complicated story here, there's been more recent work saying it's not as bad as it looks, and I don't mean to be painting Aristotle, a philosophical super heavyweight, a genius, as some kind of base misogynist. But there's elements of misogyny in his work, and because he was so influential, it got taken up. But one thing you can say about whether he was or wasn't a misogynist, he wasn't concerned with this idea that we could all become infected. We could all, for instance, become infected with femininity, which turns out, in the 19th century, to be a huge, huge worry. Funnily enough, it's reappeared quite recently in the 21st century.
▶︎ 14:20 I'm gonna stand up. On the board, I've got these lists. So this is taken from Aristotle's, from the 4th century BC, from his Metaphysics, and he actually basically attributes this to Pythagoras, the famous philosopher and mathematician. And so, he gives these two lists. I haven't got all the terms in the list, because I didn't want to make it too long, but male, female.
▶︎ 14:42 Now some of this is hard for us to read, because you might think, "Unlimited. That's huge, that's the infinite, that's good." No. Unlimited was a bad thing. Limit is having particular form, having a particular structure. Unlimited is meaning unstructured. This was very positive, this was negative. Odd, even. Actually, I'll leave that out for now. One, plurality. Plurality, again, is like having no character. It's being all things and nothing at the same time. One is having a particular character.
▶︎ 15:18 Right and left. Well, right is often associated with goodness, in Christianity. Later on, left gets associated with the devil, et cetera. Well, in the ancient world, right was seen as preferable to left. Rest and moving. Aristotle said, by nature, I mean, he took, this modern physics totally overturns this, but essential to Aristotelian physics is everything seeks to be at rest, and moving is the unnatural state. Hence, the female is unnatural. And light and darkness, now, that speaks for itself, obviously which is positive, which is negative. Good, evil, again, speaks for itself.
▶︎ 15:58 And this is a second list. This is from Aristotle, from his On the Generation of Animals. Again, male and female. So there's a distinction which actually gets recapitulated in the 19th century in really, really interesting ways, that men, oh, sorry, this is a male, that's a female. So the men are active, female are passive. Obviously, activity is something that's valorized. Being passive is a negative thing.
▶︎ 16:29 Form and matter. This is very important for Aristotle, because matter is seen as, just like in Christianity I might add, matter is seen as mere matter, unthinking. In some sense, a lower state. Whereas form is what gives shape, gives purpose to everything. Infuses it with meaning. Act is actually doing something. Potency is a mere possibility of action. But act is always valorized above potency. Valorized just means valued more.
▶︎ 17:01 Perfection, imperfection. I'm gonna let that speak for itself. Completion, incompletion. We'll come back to that. Possession. That is, a male is an active, possessive thing. A female is a deprivation. Well, we'll come to that in a minute.
▶︎ 17:15 Because Aristotle actually gave an account of how a birth turned out to be female rather than male. He said, "In some sense, a female birth is a botched male birth." He basically said if there's not enough movement at the time of copulation, or enough heat, then the embryo will be female. If there's sufficient heat and movement, it'll be a male. So, some Aristotle scholars dispute some of this, but it doesn't really matter exactly what he said. The question is his historical resonance and influence, and a lot of people were influenced by Aristotle to think of a female birth, in the Latin it is quasi maslecens, meaning a botched man, or a monstrous animal.
▶︎ 18:03 By the way, I've sometimes taught this course and people have walked in and I'm saying outrageous things about females or outrageous things about Jewish people, and they think it's in my own voice. This is just about certain ideas, and it's worth doing these ideas because they still animate people, some consciously, a lot not consciously.
▶︎ 18:26 Aquinas, in the 13th century, a very famous philosopher, he said in The Summa Theologica, "It seems that the women ought not to have been produced in the original production of things, for Aristotle says the female is incomplete version of the male." By the way, there's a lot of problems that these later on Christian theologians who were influenced by Aristotle had, because they had to explain why God made females in the first place if they're incomplete, if they're imperfect. God should be dealing in perfection. And they'd come up with various answer. Well, the woman by herself is incomplete and not a full being, but in the wider circle of things she needed for reproduction, and so in the wider circle of things she has her place.
▶︎ 19:11 There are certain texts from medieval times where they discussed whether the female is a human being at all, and there's a question, how can she be made in the image of God? Adam, man was made in the image of God, but what was female made in the image of? And there were questions like, for the resurrection, whether females when they're resurrected will be resurrected as males. And I think it was, who was it? I think that Duns Scotus. Yeah, it was Duns Scotus. He said, "All females will be resurrected as males except the Virgin Mary. She gets a free ticket."
▶︎ 19:50 So I'll quote also from a very famous book, called The Hammer of Witches. This is a medieval tract. It says of women, "They are defective in all powers of both body and soul. So it's not surprising that they cause more acts of sorcery to happen. For in terms of the intellect or the understanding of spiritual matters, they seem to belong to a different variety than man." It's almost saying, and we have a very clear notion of species, which really developed mainly in the 19th century. But earlier generations, pre-19th century didn't have such a clear notion of species, and there were actually discussions of whether women and men belonged to the same species. So he says, "They seem to belong to a different variety than man."
▶︎ 20:36 And here, this is a very important quote because we'll see this echoed a lot in the 19th century. The same thing. "Women are generally like children, possessing trivial views. There is an natural explanation, namely that she is more carnal than man." So this is a big theme that women are often seen as more, and we'll see this with Jews too, that they're seen as somehow more sexual. And the idea is that's because they're more of the body, but men are more of the spirit, of the mind.
▶︎ 21:04 And you'll see often there's this opposition, but here, you'll see in Aristotle you've got it between form and matter. The modern version of that is, oh, men are rational, they're of the mind, whereas women are ruled more by passions, passions coming from the body. So you see this juxtaposition of the rational mind and the irrational matter or the body. And the worry is then in the 19th century, are we all becoming effeminized? Are we all becoming sexualized? Are we becoming hyper-sexualized? Are we being turned into females? But we'll come to that later.
▶︎ 21:37 In the Renaissance, there were various different reactions to the way Aquinas made this difference between men and women. And actually Martin Luther, who we'll come to actually quite shortly, he actually said, "It is evident that woman is a different animal to man."
▶︎ 21:54 I'm going to have a little sidebar here, because it's a tradition that becomes really important for later figures, in particular for what I want to say about Baudelaire and Nietzsche, who are two of the heroes of this cause, which runs separately to this view I'm giving. And I'm going to put a label on this view. I'm going to call it Manichean. So Mani was, I think it was, was it the second century AD? He had developed a... Or it may have been BC. Sometimes get those ones mixed up. Anyhow, doesn't matter.
▶︎ 22:30 Mani famously trying to solve the problem of evil, it's an age-old problem for all religions, if God is a perfect being, then why is there evil in the world? He said, "Oh, that's because there are two opposing principles. There's a good principle and an evil principle, and both are equally strong in battle." And all of these years I'm looking, in my eyes, they're basically Manichean, and the woman is put on the bad side, on the side of evil, and the man is put on the good side.
▶︎ 22:59 But at the same time in the early part of the first century, there were views that became known as Gnosticism. And Gnosticism has an alternative version. I don't actually believe there is evil, but if I was going to use that terminology, I'd prefer this version. And that version says, no, it's not like you can locate evil over here, female, Jew, whatever, and good here, Christian, male, whatever. Evil comes because of a misalignment between two principles. So it says basically there's a misbalance. It could be a misbalance between Christian and Jew, misbalance between male and female, whatever. It doesn't really matter.
▶︎ 23:45 What's really important for you to see is the Manichean view says, "There is evil in itself, and there is good in itself." And that allows for a particular fantasy we can eliminate evil. But if you think, no, there's no evil or good in itself, there are just these different elements, then you have a different model. You say, well, evil can't be eliminated by eliminating those people over there or that thing over there. Evil gets eliminated by getting a balance.
▶︎ 24:16 But I've got to say, the Manichean view is very, very attractive. It's really nice to think it's not us. It's not that I've got a lack of balance in me. It's evil over there and we can eliminate it. So it's got a focused character to it, and it's got an attractiveness, attractiveness of evils, of easy solutions, and it also takes it out of oneself. To think the problem is in me is threatening to my identity. To think it's those people, those women, those Jews, those foreigners, that's a very, very comforting thought. Of course, we're getting this to reappear now in the 21st century, so that's why I say it's so much more topical.
▶︎ 25:02 I now want to make the same claim about Jews, because those are the two main figures we'll be looking at, the representation of Jews and the women in 19th century literature and philosophy. We'll talk about representation of other groups too, but we'll be mainly focusing on those. Of course, antisemitism was given various biological notions, like for instance, there was this idea that Jews have horns. You famously see it in that famous misreading by Michelangelo of Moses in the chapel in Rome where Moses has these two little horns there. So it was seen like, oh, Jews are, there's a lot of identification of Jews with goats. But a lot of this was also, by the way, this animal representation of Jews was seen as associating Jews with the devil because the devil was thought to consort with horned animals such as goats, et cetera.
▶︎ 26:02 There's also a famous thing called the foetor Judaicus. There's a very good book called by a guy called Trachtenberg called The Devil and the Jews and he gives all these medieval representations of Jews as being basically biological different in various ways. He's also talking about the genesis of antisemitism in a more general way. But there's this famous foetor Judaicus which said that the Jews have some kind of evil smell, like they smell sulfurous. While sulfur is associated with the fires of hell, the devil, et cetera. And there are all these accounts in medieval times, these wondrous accounts how after a Jew has been converted and baptized, suddenly the awful sulfurous smell disappears.
▶︎ 26:46 Interestingly, this idea of this Jewish smell, we'll call it, not to use the Latin, was actually picked up by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. And often in the medieval times, you'd have this contrast between this sulfurous smell of Jews and the smell of the beautiful smell of saints. There were these stories about how certain saints after they'd been buried, you'd come to their grave years later and it would smell of perfume, et cetera. So my last case I wanted to do, where there's this pathologizing of Jews in terms of their very, very nature, not so much an emphasis on biology, but there's a biological element, is the case of Martin Luther.
▶︎ 27:31 This is also amusing too. It's just so extreme. The first thing I want to say is Luther actually was, actually originally, Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, one of the fathers of Protestantism, was actually a philosemite, if you like, pro-semite. He wrote a book called Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, Das Jesus Christus Ein Geborener Jude sei in German. And that's because he encountered a lot of antisemitism, and he tried to combat antisemitism by telling his audiences that our revered founding father, Jesus, he himself was a Jew. Hence, the notion of that book.
▶︎ 28:14 But bit by bit, he got disillusioned with the Jewish people. Part of it was that he felt that, "Look, I'm starting this new religion, breaking away from the papacy and the Catholic Church, and so I'm opposed to Catholicism. You Jews, you should convert too because you're opposed to the Catholic Church." Some rabbis discussed it with him and they said, "Nah, maybe it'll be easier if you converted to us than we convert to you." Anyhow, bit by bit, he went from being a philosemite to being an antisemite. And then one of the reasons I'm gonna do it is there's a certain feature of this antisemitism that is gonna become extremely important to this cause.
▶︎ 28:53 So let me read. In 1523, he wrote this book, Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew. In 1543, he wrote a thing called the Shem HaForas, which is really about the ineffable secret name of God. And you'll see that a certain obsession with liquids, a certain obsession with subversion, and a certain obsession with abilities of interpretation. I'm gonna read you the quotation, then I'm gonna come back to it. This is pretty over the top. And I'm a very bad reader of texts, partially because I'm dyslexic.
▶︎ 29:33 "Damned goy that I am, I cannot understand where they got such great abilities unless I must believe that when Judas Iscariot hung himself, his intestines burst, and, as happens to the hanged, his bladder burst. Perhaps the Jews had their servants there with gold and silver jugs and basins which caught the Judas piss, as it is called, together with the rest of the holy things. Thereafter, they mixed it into the excrement and ate it amongst each other and drank it, so they developed such sharp eyes so that they see such things commented in the scripture which neither Matthew nor Isaiah himself, nor all the angels, let alone we damned goyim can see. Or they looked up the behind of their godshed and found this written in an impossible place. It is not in the scripture, that is certain. Therefore, it cannot be taken from there."
▶︎ 30:26 It's very scatological, talking about shit and piss, et cetera. And it's quite mad, obviously, and it's often very repressed by people in the Lutheran Church. But that's neither here nor there. What I want to say is, what Luther is really scared of is problems of interpretation. Why? Think about this.
▶︎ 30:48 What Luther is doing is he's saying, "Forget the papacy, forget the priests, forget the archbishops. What's really important is the book." And what makes you a Christian is your relation to this book, which is now being made available by Gutenberg for ordinary people in German. Talking about German audience. And you could have a direct relationship with God. You can bypass the pope. You can bypass the bishop, the archbishop, the priest. It's your relation to God through God's words.
▶︎ 31:23 And what happened to Luther is he became obsessed with the notion that the Jews have a secret meaning to the Bible. There's a tradition in Judaism called Kabbalahism which sometimes uses numerical methods and adds numbers, treats letters as numbers and does mathematical properties, and it gets secret interpretations. But think about how threatening that is to Luther. He says, "Look, all that counts is your relationship to God's word. God's words is in the Bible." But here are these Jews who are saying, "And the Bible has no meaning that is accessible to you." Not no meaning. It has many meanings that are not accessible to you, and it's the secret meaning that we as special readers of the Bible can have.
▶︎ 32:07 That is really, really threatening to one's identity. One stakes one's identity on a book, and here are these people who have a special interpretation not accessible to you, so that you didn't even know what you're worshiping when you worship, so to speak. So that's why he became scatological and talked about the Jews eating piss and shit and having secret powers of interpretation and seeing things that we could never hope to see.
▶︎ 32:33 One of the features of anti-Semitism is that the Jews have a secret meaning. You can think of Elders of Zion kind of stuff or the Illuminati or all these, that we're ordinary, everyday people and we talk plainly, but they have a secret meaning, and their meaning is subverting us. It's subverting our language. It's subverting our society. And the same thing we'll see is said in the 19th century about women, that women talk in a way that is seen as basically subversive, that what does a woman really mean? Freud even says that. He calls it the unknown continent, phrases like that.
▶︎ 33:13 So women are seen as a site of a disruption of meaning, and I think this is really important in that it's an attack on our identity. As I say, we like this Cartesian thought that I know my own mind, I know who I am. But I have to interact with these people, these Jews, these women, these whoever, and they use language, but they use it in a way different from me with different meanings. They subvert my meaning. In the end, they subvert my identity. So I think a lot of the tropes of anti-Semitism and misogyny we see are an expression of people's worry about their own identity.
▶︎ 33:52 There's this worry about subversion through language. Also, I should add that Luther also maintained that the Jews spoke the base language called Yiddish. This appeared a lot in the 19th century, and this language is also the language of thieves. Again, thieves are people who disrupt us, who are outsiders of society, who are inimical to society. So Luther had this idea that the Jews and the thieves have a special language in common.
▶︎ 34:17 And you'll get this echoed in this wonderful quotation from Kristen Wangeseil who, some of his stuff is a basis of one of Wagner's operas actually, but I've forgotten which one. He actually wrote a book called the Instruction in the Jewish-German Manner of Reading and Writing, and this really captures the worry which got echoed a lot in the 19th and 20th century anti-Semitism. "The Jews have dealt with no language as sinfully, as one says, as with our German language. They have given it totally foreign intonation and pronunciation. They have mutilated good German words. They have tortured them."
▶︎ 34:58 So the Jews are a site of an infection of our language, and this became really important to Germany again in the 19th century because in the 19th century, Germany was, I don't know, 39 different principality states, city-states, et cetera. And very importantly, they had different religions. Up the north, they were Protestant. Down the south, they were Catholic, in Bavaria for instance, and they didn't really have a language in common. Bayerischer Deutsch, the German spoken in the South, someone from the north, from Hamburg, could barely understand it. One thing they had in common was they were not Jews, and the Jews were seen as this element amongst us who are stopping us becoming a whole, who are a perversion, who are a threat to our identity.
▶︎ 35:46 And also, Wangeseil's stuff about them having tortured, mutilated good German words, they've tortured them, that is also hearkening back to something I won't talk a lot about, but there were a lot of stories in the medieval times. I think the first one was in Berlin. Don't have the year written down here. Yeah, the first one was in Berlin at 1243, that the Jews were accused of host desecration. That is, they were accused of pretending to be Catholics, going to the church, getting the wafer, and then taking it home and banging nails into it and torturing it, et cetera, so that Jesus Christ is suffering. But it's just this idea that the Jews are these people who live amongst us and somehow subvert us, et cetera.
▶︎ 36:32 There were also charges of ritual murder, very famous case in England in, when was it? 1144. I thought it was 1044, but my notes say 1144. William of Norwich. The Jews were accused of stealing a young Christian boy and using his blood for making their matzoh for Passover and stuff like that. It's a really weird accusation because Jewish religion has a lot of fetish about mixing blood with other things. But nevertheless, there was this big idea in the medieval times that Jews needed blood for various of their rituals. But the point here is that Jews were seen as living amongst us in Europe, but as a subversive, strange element who are difficult to read.
▶︎ 37:14 And I'll just put a marker here for the future. If you think of, in this Manichean way, we're the good, they're the evil. We're male, they're female. We're Christian, they're Jews. You can't have the fantasy. Well, let me go the other way. You can't have the fantasy of eliminating all the women, and I'll make a reservation, because later on I'm gonna come back to a certain very small group who thought they could have this fantasy. But of course, you can't have the fantasy of eliminating all the Jews, and it's this Manichean style of thinking that says the evil and the good can be separated that makes that a possibility.
▶︎ 37:53 The last thing I want to talk about is, and it's part of the reason I mentioned host desecration and Jews needing Christian blood, is what I call the economy of liquids. There's a side of insecurity, I don't know how to put it, of nervousness, a side of anxiety about liquids. What's special about liquids? Form, matter. Form is seen as good, as having a distinct shape. Matter is seen as secondary. Liquids have no distinct shape. They just adapt to whatever they are. There's no there there with liquids. We have definite bodies with definite shapes, but liquids, there's something strange, uncanny about that.
▶︎ 38:39 And by the way, we'll come back to that later in the course. The notion, Freud's notion of the uncanny, of something familiar but terribly foreign is very important to us. Liquids obviously are familiar to us. We drink water, we drink wine, we drink coffee. But there's something peculiar about liquids, that they don't have a shape. Well, we'll see that this very notion is often applied to Jews. They kind of adapt to us, they look like us, but they're not really us.
▶︎ 39:04 Well, it was often said about women too in the 19th century, that they have no real shape, that they are shifty, that they change, that they just adapt to the society or the men around them, et cetera. There's also a famous side of anxiety about women and liquids, mainly the big literature about menstruation. Menstruation under Christianity is the curse of Eve, the curse of God for taking the apple from the tree of knowledge, et cetera.
▶︎ 39:30 Now interestingly, according to, and there is some debate about this, there was a medieval discourse about whether the Jews were really male. And there's this Sander, well, Augustin cites Thomas à Campaillie about this, about there was this question of whether Jews menstruate, whether they too might be under the curse of Eve. There's some debate about how seriously this literature is to be taken. Sander Gilman in his book Jewish Self-Hatred, Sander Gilman's a great, great scholar of the representation of Jews, says, and I quote from his book, "The image of the Jewish male as female was introduced to link the Jew with the corrupt nature of woman since both are marked as different by the sign that signified Eve's mortal nature after a fall from grace."
▶︎ 40:24 So there are these interesting associations between women and Jews even at the level of metaphor of that the Jews and women both seem to be configured often as shape-shifters, as people without limit, as people who are matter that assumes many different forms but has no essential form of self. And this was often contrasted with the male, where the male has a definite form. There's even an alleged literature about whether Christian literature about whether women have souls. But it's a very, very minority literature, and there's some dispute about whether it wasn't done as a joke basically, because of course the official doctrine has to be that both men and women have souls.
▶︎ 41:06 But it gives you the flavor of the kind of fears that animated people, that these are so other that they can't even be like us. They can't even have a soul. So basically what I've done here in this
▶︎ 41:17 The introductory part is to say, look, there have been biological accounts of different, there have been biological Jews as different animals from us. They have horns, they have different anatomical features. The female is different from males because it's an incomplete male. There wasn't enough heat or there wasn't enough motion at the time of generation, so it's a botched male. So biological accounts of differences have always been there, but what we're going to see in the 19th century, what makes the whole rhetoric, biological rhetoric different in the 19th century, is there's a fear.
▶︎ 41:54 Well, to put it very bluntly, we could become Jews. We, even we could become women, that somehow we're going to be infected. Remember the Manichean model? It says there's good and evil and it's a job of good to smash evil. But now the fear becomes we are becoming infected by evil. We will all end up being evil. And that's what we'll come to next.