Jewish Manhood

European Precedents

The image of the gentle Jewish man served as a positive selfidentification among Jews—as well as the foundation of anti-Semitic caricatures. In particular, standards of Jewish manhood, both in Europe and the United States, have been historically grounded in the idea of the mensch, which means an “admirable person” in Yiddish. In nineteenth-century Europe, a mensch was dependable, patient, modest, and passive—both a kind husband and a devoted scholar. European Christian culture separated such qualities from male sexuality, but Jewish cultures celebrated these characteristics as seductive traits.

Judaism also emphasized a masculine ideal of religious scholarship for boys and men, which contrasted with Euro-Christian martial codes of masculinity. Jewish fathers groomed their sons for religious study and encouraged critical thinking—preconditions for their leadership roles in the synagogue, community, and family. Literacy in Hebrew and knowledge of the bible also were expected of all males. The bar mitzvah, a coming-of-age ritual celebrated on a Jewish male's thirteenth birthday, required initiates to display their intellectual skills and religious responsibility by memorizing and publicly reciting passages of the Torah (the Jewish scripture) in Hebrew.

Because this model of manhood greatly differed from dominant European Christian models, European culture represented Jewish men as either feminine or incompletely masculine at least as far back as the thirteenth century. Circumcision (the removal of the foreskin of the penis for symbolic and hygienic reasons) was a controversial sign of this Jewish manhood. Among Jews, circumcision expresses the covenant between God and Jewish men, and has also been associated with cleanliness. Gentiles (non-Jews) and some assimilated Jews viewed circumcision as a partial castration or feminization of the male body, while some thought that circumcision caused deviant male sexuality (including masturbation) and sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. The ambiguity of Jewish men's masculinity was also the basis of Jewish men's close association with hysteria, a nervous disease most often identified with women. In these ways, male Jewish bodies were central to debates about sexuality and health.

The focus in Jewish culture on intellectualism (such as argumentation and the manipulation of language), and the de-emphasis of physical strength, only intensified the Gentiles' identification of Jewish men with traditional feminine traits. Jewish women often worked alongside their husbands to provide for their families, or earned money (frequently as shopkeepers and peddlers) so that their husbands could devote part of the day to religious study. Even working-class Jews who did not engage in sedentary, scholarly lives were perceived as being unmanly by Christian Europeans.

Immigration and Assimilation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America

Immigration to the United States involved both continuity with and departure from longstanding traditions of Jewish masculinity. The first major migration of Jews to the United States, in the mid-nineteenth century, consisted of German Jews who, having already assimilated to bourgeois European society, accepted a male focus on secular economic success and women's domestication. The second wave of Jewish migration, between 1880 and 1920, was dominated by eastern-European Jews who had not conformed to the middle-class ideology of separate spheres for men and women. The full-time scholar persisted as a masculine ideal (if only rarely a reality) for eastern-European Jews, while women gained some flexibility and autonomy in the public sphere to support men's education.

...