so how is your yidish sister in Jew York doing, you...

so how is your yidish sister in Jew York doing, you yidiot
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FEATHERMAN FILE
By BLAKE ESKIN

FORWARD STAFF

As Long As He Loves His Sister: "Antisemitism in the late nineteenth century saw the Jews as an essentially 'ill' people, and labeled the origins of that illness as incest/inbreeding," writes Sander Gilman in the current issue of Jewish Social Studies.

In an article called "Sibling Incest, Madness, and the 'Jews,'" Mr. Gilman explores the cultural myths spawned by Christian reactions to "perpetual endogamy," or the practice of marrying within the Jewish faith. "The claim was that Jews violated the incest taboo by repudiating the European/Christian rule of exogamy, which requires marriage outside of one's perceived inner group," writes Mr. Gilman. "The assumption of the medical science of the day was that Jews harbored illnesses, including madness, because of their marriage practices....Child abuse cases in late-nineteenth-century literature usually had a female child victim (Christian) and a male child abuser (Jewish) who reenacted the sexual fantasy of the Jewish rapist/murder and his victims that dominated the discussion of Jack the Ripper during this period." (These ideas may still linger a century later; think of how the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow custody battle played out in the media.)

Mr. Gilman goes on to trace the Jewish sibling-incest myth in literature. He finds it in the work of Byron, whose "use of the wandering Jew motif as the formative theme of his Manfred was to no little degree shaped by Manfred's crime - the desire and seduction of his sister." Poe's Roderick Usher, "the last offspring of a highly inbred family, was visualized as degenerate and, therefore, as Jewish." And Thomas Mann's 1905 novella "The Blood of the Walsungs," Mr. Gilman explains, features 19-year-old Jewish twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde Aarenhold, who go to bed together after attending Wagner's "Die Walküre," in which their on-stage namesakes consummate their own incestuous love. "Mann's father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim, so objected to the inclusion of Yiddishisms to represent the hidden [language] of the Jews...as a sign of the siblings' ethnic identity that Mann suppressed the planned publication of the story," Mr. Gilman writes, adding that when the novella was reissued in 1921, the Yiddishisms were removed.