Language:
English
Year of publication:
1996
Titel der Quelle:
European Judaism
Angaben zur Quelle:
29,1 (1996) 75-87
Keywords:
Weininger, Otto,
;
Self-hate (Psychology)
;
Jews Identity
;
Jewish philosophy
;
Jewish women
Abstract:
Discusses a series of novels by British writer Dorothy Richardson, collectively entitled "Pilgrimage" (1915-1930s), and its relationship with Otto Weininger's "Geschlecht und Charakter" (1903), focusing on the links between Jews and women in each. Weininger's book spoke to anxieties about national identity, sexual difference, and moral relations between the sexes at the turn of the century. Richardson's heroine is a Christian woman who feels alienated from the English femininity of her mother and sisters, and plunges into an intellectual pilgrimage in quest of an identity. She becomes involved with a Russian student who she discovers is Jewish. She decides not to marry, in order to preserve her individuality. Weininger spoke against procreation in general, and of the Jewish race specifically. His book served to transmit the antisemitic and anti-feminist discourses of the 1890s to those of the 1920s-30s. Richardson's heroine comes to recognize the nature and cost of her renunciation, and how her Christian identity has been constructed against the Judaic Other. She speaks of freedom with a new conception - an acceptance of the necessary hybridity of tradition, culture, and identity.
Note:
On Otto Weininger.
,
Appeared also in "Modernity, Culture and 'the Jew'" (1998).
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
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