The Feminised Jew

The link between misogyny and antisemitism

I’ve been thinking recently about Jewish understandings of masculinity and femininity and the link between this and antisemitism. This has been prompted partly by my wife and I trying to start a family, leading to thoughts about what type of Jewish father I want to be (although I’ve actually thought about that for years) and also by some books I’ve been reading about these topics, both coincidentally by Reform rabbis: Anti-Semitism Revisted: How the Rabbis Made Sense of Hatred by Delphine Horvilleur and Searching for My Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World by Jeffrey K. Salkin.

These thoughts and books are obviously framed for me by the violence of 7 October 2023, violence that was both antisemitic and sexual. Indeed, the sexual violence seemed to be a crucial component of it, perhaps the most shocking component, along with the murder of small children. Lists of Hebrew phrases found on Hamas fighters killed or captured by the IDF included the Hebrew for “Take off your pants,” because the rapes were a part of the violence of the day deliberately planned by the Hamas leadership.

I think there is a relationship between antisemitism and misogyny, although it is a complex one. It is possible to be an antisemite, but not a misogynist or vice versa, but often they do go together and not just because someone with one irrational prejudice is likely to have several prejudices. In other words, there is an intrinsic link between them, a causal link, albeit not a certain one. To understand why, we need to look at one of the biggest crisis points in Jewish history, nearly two thousand years ago.

In the time of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites feature as Bronze Age warrior tribes and later a united kingdom of Bronze or Iron Age warrior tribes that quickly fractured into two kingdoms. Aside from being monotheists (and not always even that), these tribes and kingdoms were not very different from those around them.

Things changed in late antiquity, between 70 CE and 135 CE. In this period, a series of revolts against Roman rule in Judea and elsewhere in the Roman Empire were brutally suppressed by the Roman army. Realising that defeating the mighty Roman Empire on the battlefield was impossible and having already, in 70 CE, lost the Temple in Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish religious life, the rabbis reorientated Judaism towards Torah study as the primary mode of Jewish expression. No longer would they fight God’s enemies as warriors. Instead, they would wait patiently for God’s salvation, in His time, perhaps taking centuries. To bolster this project, they created a new model of Jewish masculinity. No longer would Jewish men be mighty warriors on the field of battle. Instead, they would be scholars fighting intellectual battles for truth in the study hall. The rabbis even re-imagined the Jewish warriors of the past, like Joshua and King David, as functioning primarily as religious scholars and only secondarily as fighters.

An example of how thoroughly the rabbis had transformed Jewish masculinity is found in the Talmud, in the story of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, known as Reish Lakish. Although Jewish by birth, Reish Lakish was not religious and had become a gladiator or highwayman – professions that are hardly Jewish, but very macho. One day, he saw Rabbi Yochanan bathing in the Jordan River and, mistaking the hairless rabbi for a beautiful woman, jumped in to pursue her, presumably with the intention of rape. On realising his mistake, he stated that Rabbi Yochanan should use his beauty for attracting women. In return, Rabbi Yochanan said that Reish Lakish should use his strength for Torah study. Rabbi Yochanan offered to marry Reish Lakish to his sister if the latter would repent and study Torah. Agreeing, Reish Lakish attempted to jump out of the Jordan River to get his clothes, but no longer had the strength to leap out. Merely agreeing to study Torah had already sapped his strength. Reish Lakish would go on to become a man of great piety and learning, but no longer a macho fighter.

Whether the story “really” took place as described is less important than the fact that the rabbis were telling stories like this one, that clearly positioned Jewish masculinity as based around a “feminine” passivity. Rabbi Yochanan is mistaken for a woman, while Reish Lakish loses his macho gladiatorial strength as soon as he agrees to study Torah. The message is clear: physical prowess and rape are goyish (as Lenny Bruce would have put it); marriage and Torah study is Jewish.

This antithesis then read further back into history, into the story of Jacob and Esau. Esau, seen by the rabbis as the progenitor of the Roman Empire, was seen as violent, a hunter of men and women as well as animals. Jacob, the ancestor of the Children of Israel (his other name) was the man who sat in what the rabbis understood as “tents of Torah study” and who defeated his enemies by using his cunning. The rabbi’s perceived dynamic was: mighty Rome, clever Israel – and, in the ends, brains would win out over brawn. It just might take some time.

Diaspora Jewish men have typically presented themselves in a way that non-Jews and especially antisemites see coded as feminine: non-violent, argumentative, focused on the home and the life of the mind. Even today, many young Orthodox men affect a weak, limp, “dead fish” handshake, as if to demonstrate how physically puny and therefore intellectually mighty they are.

This was fine as an internal Jewish discourse. Unfortunately, once the Roman Empire had converted to Christianity, Medieval Christendom began to fashion its self-image as a reflection of an imagined Judaism. If David Nirenberg is correct that “Jew” is what non-Jews have historically called the aspects of themselves and their own societies that they want to get rid of through projection onto others, then it’s no surprise that misogynistic societies project femininity onto Jews.

Where Christians were seen as vigorous and manly, Jews were seen as weak and feminine. Ironically, this is seen most clearly in the female statues of Ecclesia and Synagoga present on many Medieval churches. These show two women, Ecclesia representing the church (Christianity), Synagoga representing the synagogue (Judaism). While Ecclesia is young and strong, Synagoga, while still young, is weak; she is also blind, to show that Jews were blind to the truth of Jesus. Never mind that many of Europe’s most beautiful cathedrals were built with money borrowed from Jewish moneylenders.

It became believed that Jewish men menstruated as a punishment for shedding the blood of Jesus. As a result of the unnatural loss of blood, they were believed to need to consume the blood of Christians, to restore themselves. In this way, assertions of Jewish femininity connected with the deicide accusation and the blood libel – a kind of all-consuming conspiracy theory explaining Jewish “evil” and rooting it in perceived Jewish femininity.

As we move towards the modern era, the materialism with which Jews were associated was also arguably coded as female, as “real” men were supposed to be interested in honour and victory ahead of money and gems. This became a feature of Nazi propaganda in particular. At the same time, the perceived sexual voraciousness of Jews, both men and women, was a source of moral panic, prompting fears of the corruption of innocent gentile women and men. Again, the Nazis voiced this most of all. The Nazis, who wanted to create a race of warrior men and “breeder” women, were particularly worried about feminine Jewish men and masculine Jewish women inter-breeding with Aryans, an inversion of Nazi gender assumptions as well as a challenge to racial purity.

It was this feminine diaspora Jewish identity that early Zionists like Theodore Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky put a lot of effort into erasing. They wanted to “masculinise” Jews, making them willing and able to defend themselves. Herzl was a proponent of Jewish duelling societies at universities, while Jabotinsky wanted Jews to “learn to shoot,” less for defence and more to win back masculine pride. This, of course, turned out to be a practical necessity when the Zionist movement was opposed by the Arab and Islamic world.

This brings us to the horrific events of a period arguably stretching from the pogroms of the late nineteenth century Eastern Europe through the Holocaust to 7 October 2023. Violence against women was a big part of all of these, but it only seems to have been talked about significantly with regard to the massacres of 7 October, perhaps because of an unwillingness to talk about sexual violence in earlier periods or perhaps because other forms of violence were focused on. Although the silence of feminists who had tweeted #metoo for rape victims was rightly criticised, it may be that the history of the #metoo movement brought this to the forefront of consciousness as an issue in its own right, not just a part of the wider story of that terrible day. Perhaps the fact that Hamas filmed their attacks and streamed them online also contributed to this. Whereas the Nazis and most other genocidaires and war criminals of the past were anxious to leave no documentary evidence of their crimes, Hamas gloated about it online, often posting to the victims’ social media pages so that their relatives and friends would be traumatised.

Contrary to the obscene protest war cry in the West that “Rape is resistance,” rape can never be conceived or justified as “resistance”– what, exactly, is a rape “resisting”? Similarly, this is not about land or settlements; rape and murder (including of children) is not a logical response to a property dispute. This is real, visceral hatred expressed through sexual violence, hatred of Jews, hatred of women and perhaps most of all hatred of Jewish women. Bear in mind the notorious danger that unaccompanied women, particularly Western women, are in throughout the Middle East (except in Israel, of course), the strict regulations about hair covering and, in some places (including Gaza under Hamas) the prohibitions on women leaving the house without the permission of a man, the so-called “honour” killings of women who disobey their menfolk and even rape victims.

There is in much of the Islamic world a sexualisation of women, an assumption that women are inherently sexual unless restrained and, if not restrained in the “appropriate” way (covered hair, chaperoned) are asking for sex, which can just be taken by men. This has been the Palestinian perception of Jewish or Israeli women since the early days of the conflict, when female Zionists on kibbutzim in pre-state Israel shocked the nearby Arab men by wearing shorts and not covering their hair. That this attitude is fundamentally Islamic can be seen by comparing pictures of women in Iran before the Islamic Revolution (Persia) with Iranian women now. Before the Revolution, they wore Western-style clothes and makeup and did not cover their hair; now, they would face prison or even death for doing that. It is one of the many hypocrisies of the modern Western left that women who cosplay The Handmaid’s Tale to protest against Donald Trump have literally nothing to say about the reduction of women to chattel-status and their brutalisation across the Islamic world.

The rapes of 7 October therefore occurred at the confluence of two parallel streams: the misogynistic and the antisemitic. If, as I read recently, genocide is often triggered when a low-status group attempts to improve its status, triggering violence against it from the higher-status group, then the whole Zionist project and the creation of the State of Israel can be seen as a “trigger” to the Islamic world. The Islamic world, like the Christian world, had always treated Jews as feminised second-class citizens, albeit in slightly different ways. As in Europe, Jews were forbidden to bear swords (the ultimate symbol of masculine honour and power), but were also forbidden to ride horses and even had to ride their donkeys side-saddle, like women, purely to humiliate them. Now Israel asserted Jewish pride in a strongly masculine form through its victorious army. Note also the presence of women in the army from its early days to the presence, including the female tank crews who helped fight back against Hamas on 7 October, the female military intelligence “spotters,” whose warnings were ignored by the military hierarchy in the days before 7 October and who were murdered or taken into captivity in Gaza and the female navigators who guided planes to bomb Iran.

The rapes of 7 October were a brutal attempt to feminise the Jewish people and assert masculine Islamic dominance over them. The irony is that, while Israeli society is more militarised than other Western societies, with people in uniforms and often with guns visible everywhere, Israelis have a complex identity as people who serve in the military and fight wars and can seem macho, yet are also sensitive and caring. Israelis and diaspora Jews are rightly proud not just of the achievements of the Israeli armed forces, but also of Israeli hospitals and their treatment of Israel’s enemies as well as Israeli citizens; of Israeli Nobel Prize winners, Israeli artists, writers and musicians. If the antisemite hates a “feminine” male Jew, and a woman who can stick up for herself, how much more will he hate a “feminine” Jew who can fight for himself and his people. It is the ultimate challenge to masculine gentile dominance, a challenge that can not be ignored by the misogynistic antisemite.