Biberman - Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew

MASCULINITY, ANTI-SEMITISM AND EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World

Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger

In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgates new series of interdisciplinary and comparantive studies, Woman and Gender in the Early Modern World, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered.

Titles in this series include:

Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England
Edited by Douglas A. Brooks

Shall She Famish Then?
Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England
Nancy A. Gutierrez

Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England
Ina Habermann

Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeares England
Caroline Bicks

Subordinate Subjects
Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 15881688
Mihoko Suzuki

Poetic Resistance
English Women Writers and the Early Eodern Lyric
Pamela S. Hammons

Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature

From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew

MATTHEW BIBERMAN
University of Louisville, USA

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright Matthew Biberman 2004

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Biberman, Matthew

Masculinity, anti-semitism and early modern English literature : from the satanic to the effeminate Jew. (Women and gender in the early modern world)

1. English literature Early modern, 1500-1700 History and criticism 2. Jews in literature 3. Antisemitism in literature 4. Misogyny in literature 5. Masculinity in literature

I. Title

820.935282960903

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biberman, Matthew, 1966

Masculinity, anti-semitism and early modern English literature : from the satanic to the effeminate Jew / Matthew Biberman.

p. cm. (Women and gender in the early modern world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7546-5045-6 (alk. paper)

1. English literature Early modern, 1500-1700 History and criticism. 2. Jews in literature. 3. Antisemitism England History 16th century. 4. Antisemitism England History 17th century. 5. Jews England History 16th century. 6. Jews England History 17th century. 7. Antisemitism in literature. 8. Masculinity in literature. 9. Satanism in literature. 10. Sex role in literature. I. Title. II. Series.

PR151.J5B53 2004

820.93529924--dc22

2004005394

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5045-4 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-25797-9 (pbk)

This book is for
Martha and Lucy

One of the lessons of the Hitler period is the stupidity of cleverness. How many were the expert arguments with which Jews dismissed the likelihood of Hitlers rise, when it was already as clear as daylight.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

The true God hates us, but we have dreamed up an idol who loves us and has made us His chosen people. You said it yourself: The Gentiles makes gods of stone and we of theories.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Enemies, A Love Story

Contents

1 His stones, his daughter, and his ducats:
The Jew-Devil, the Jew-Sissy and the Theo-Sexual Matrix

3 By thee adulterous lust was drivn from men:
Donne, Milton and the Rise of the Jew-Sissy

4 She proving false, the next I took to wife:
Divorce Law and Violence in Jonson, Cary and Milton

5 He is imitating nobody, and he is inimitable:
T. S. Eliot and the Antisemitic Aesthetics of the Milton Controversy

6 When King Laugh come he make them all Dance:
The Gothic Reconstitution of the Jew-Devil

This project derives from my doctoral work. While a student I found Duke Universitys English department and Literature program to be especially rewarding. I am forever grateful to the members of my dissertation committee: Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Thomas Pfau, Tom Ferraro, and Robert Gleckner. I wish Professor Gleckner were alive to receive my thanks and I know this book would have been a better one if he were still here.

The debts I owe to friends and colleagues are many. Erika Gaffney at Ashgate has been generous with her time, patiently working with me to insure that the finished product would be up to her high standards. The anonymous readers she secured also provided valuable input. Susan Ryan generously read and responded to a draft of the entire manuscript, helping me to find my arguments footing. Ben Saunders continues to teach me much about the stealing of scraps from the great feast of languages; may he continue to live long on the alms-basket of words. Andrew Cole provided a medievalists eye when asked for his assistance. John Rossini kindly shared with me his own on-going work on Shakespeares Merchant. In correspondence John Shawcross supplied a steady hand and encouraging words at a time when I needed it. My students help has been enormous, for which I now offer this simple thanks.

My colleagues at the University of Louisville have provided me with a wonderful environment in which to pursue my investigations. Debra Journet and Susan Griffin have both been excellent Chairs of the English Department, always alert to opportunities to enable scholarship, especially among the junior faculty. With their aid, I was able to secure crucial assistance in the way of a research initiation grant from the University, and I would like to thank the Dean of Research for this award.

Formative work leading up to this book appeared in several venues. I published early essays exploring the presence of Judaic / Hebraic material in John Miltons work in Studies in English Literature and in the Milton Quarterly. My chapter in the festschrift Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Gleckner extended this theme through an investigation into what I then called the Christian Hebraic roots of English republicanism. I am grateful to the editors and readers associated with all of these publications.

I would also like to thank those staff members at Harvard University and the Huntington Library who so generously assisted me in my research efforts. Special thanks go to the following individuals: David A. Cobb (at the Harvard Map Collection), Elizabeth A. Falsey (at Harvards Houghton Library) and Jill Cogan, Susi Krasnoo and Anne Mar (all at The Huntington Library).