Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man.

By Daniel Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xxiv plus 393pp. $50.00/cloth $14.95/paperback).

Strictly speaking, Unheroic Conduct is less a book than a series of provocative essays taking off from a broad historical-theoretical outline. Almost any review will offer this outline, but the diversity of topics in the essays necessitates that my interests and expertise will determine further discussion and response. Let me also add that Unheroic Conduct is remarkable for its stimulus to my thinking, although I find portions with which I disagree.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture, mourns a mostly lost world, the post-biblical, Diaspora era (after 500) of Jewish learning and culture. It was a time, he says, when the ideal Jewish men were studious, gentle, mild, nonviolent, and sexually appealing. "The House of Study was . . . the rabbinic Jewish equivalent of the locker room, barracks, or warship [even though] maleness through study . . . was read as female in the [wider] cultural environment." (pp. 143-144) He finds that Jewish women, although second-class citizens, had a great deal of freedom and authority vis-a-vis the outside world as a result of their economic activities by which they supported their scholar-husbands. They were kept away from real power, however, by the men, who refused to allow them to study Torah and the Talmudic commentaries.

This world, Boyarin continues, existed until the late nineteenth century when Jews began to assimilate into Western society, a culture in which manliness was defined by "physical strength, martial activity and aggressiveness, and contempt for and fear of the female body." (p. 78) Traditionally, Jews had always scorned these traits as "goyim naches" (passim), which might be roughly translated as "Gentile pleasures." Assimilation, Boyarin argues, created self-image problems for Jews because it was precisely at that time that "heterosexuality . . . a peculiar institution of contemporary Euro-American culture" (p. 14) was "invented." Jews began to move toward bourgeois ideals of manliness and femininity. Men, not wanting to appear "effeminate," deserted their former values of quietness and studiousness and sought to become "Muscle Jews." Male intimacy was rejected and homophobia developed. Women, on their part, eschewed their traditional productive roles and became stunted "angels in the house." (p. 330)

This, in brief, is the broad historical picture that Boyarin has created as a launching point for the investigation and reinterpretation of psychoanalysis, Zionism, and the life of Bertha Pappenheim (the famous Anna O. of the Breuer/Freud literature.) Boyarin offers an all-embracing explanation for Freud's controversial switch from the seduction theory to the theory of instinctual infantile sexuality as well as his development of the "phallic" ideas of oedipal conflict, castration anxiety, and penis envy. To wit: Freud was a sufferer from self-diagnosed hysteria - a female disease - that he speculated might have been spawned by his father's seduction; Freud was left with a "homoerotic desire" (p. 212) for his father. He became panicked by the turn-of-the-century emphasis on manliness and heterosexuality and the anti-semites' indictment of Jews as degenerate (homosexual), based on the traditional view of them as effeminate. Filled with Jewish self-hatred and the desire to assimilate, Freud constructed psychoanalysis, a theoretical edifice based on heterosexuality that was "an elaborate defense against the femminization [sic] of Jewish men." (p. 242)

Even more assimilationist than Freud, according to Boyarin, was Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, which he hoped could "transform the Jewish man from his state of effeminate degeneracy into the status of proper . . . mock-'Aryan male'" (p. 276). Herzl attacked the Talmud as a "product of an unnatural . . . isolation from the mainstreams of humanity" (p. 280) and had nothing but disdain for the distinctive tradition of postbiblical Jewish literature and culture. Herzlian Zionism was an up-to-date version of goyim naches and a manifestation, like psychoanalysis, of "newfound Jewish masculinity." (p. 304) Zionism, Boyarin concludes, has been wrongly seen as the antithesis of Jewish self-hatred while it is actually a display of it.

The person who combined being Jewish and modern in an ideal way, Boyarin contends, was Bertha Pappenheim, who upheld "Jewish traditional life, religion, and practice [while] mounting a militant feminist critique" of Orthodox misogyny. Boyarin dubs her "my hero." (p. 312) Throughout a long and productive career, Pappenheim was a feminist activist who campaigned to provide Jewish women access to Torah study. Moreover, seeking to explain the mental illness Pappenheim suffered in her early life, Boyarin finds the answer not in the usual indictment of Pappenheim's strict Orthodox background but in the heterosexual, bourgeois Viennese culture that insisted that she be only "decorative and reproductive" and that stifled her by not providing "higher and professional education for women." (p. 321)

Boyarin calls his book a "project" by which he hopes to effect change. He wants to counter Jewish assimilation and "preserve Jewish difference in a creative, vital manner," (p. 282) "reclaim the eroticized Jewish male sissy," (p. xxi) undo the Orthodox Jewish oppression of Jewish women by allowing them to study Talmud, and campaign for a traditional Orthodox Judaism that is non-homophobic.

Although, because of space limitations, I have not been able to present the richness of detail in Boyarin's book, I can summarily state that Boyarin is imaginative, inquisitive, challenging, broadly read, and possessed of wide-ranging interests. Unfortunately, this is somewhat offset by a style that is self-absorbed, plagued by numerous asides and long discursive footnotes, repetitive, and strewn with unhelpful neologisms like "adequation," "heteronormativity," "chronotope," and "alterity." Boyarin is also given to using abstruse words when a common one would do, e.g. "circumambient" for "surrounding." If nothing else, good editing is lacking.

I also have substantive criticisms and questions, but - frustratingly - I can elaborate only very briefly. First of all, Boyarin allows his enthusiasm for his historical-theoretical scenario to carry him away. No major cultural or scientific development ever comes about as the result of one factor, and certainly, there can be no monocausal explanation of psychoanalysis - in this case Freud's Jewish self-hatred and a desire to masculinize Judaism. Boyarin does not seem averse to psychoanalytic knowledge throughout his book, but here he does not even acknowledge the fact that a considerable portion of psychoanalytic theory is based on the clinical observation of analysands. Disregarding the known frequency of sexual abuse, Boyarin even writes that the sexual abuse Freud saw in his patients was his own projected fantasies and desires (though admitting in a footnote that he does not deny the possibility that a patient may have been abused.)

This last method of argument brings me to another point. Boyarin has an irritating and ultimately ineffectual habit by which he tries to avert criticism of his controversial, forcefully-stated positions i.e., he backs off at the end. I have cited one example of this above: Boyarin's attempt to protect himself at the final minute in a footnote. Another example: after unremittingly and often vituperatively attacking Herzl for many pages Boyarin says that, of course, he does not know what he would have done if he had been Freud or Herzl faced with anti-semitism.

Furthermore, in an attempt to lend credence to his theories about Freud, Boyarin claims that he is "not psychoanalyzing Freud but historicizing him." (p. 206) But Boyarin is, in fact, psychoanalyzing Freud, with the scenario of Freud's homoerotic desires, his efforts to quell them, and his desire to appear "masculine." Finally, Boyarin presents a radical reinterpretation of Freud's well-known turn-around from being ashamed of his Jewishness to asserting it.

I have run out of space. Let me state briefly some other areas of concern, though I must forego detailed elaboration of them. I question Boyarin's understanding of the complexity of the current controversy surrounding repressed memories/false memories; I do not believe there are significant barriers today to most women who want to study Talmud; I get impatient at what seem to be Boyarin's ethnic and religious prejudices (or are they meant to be just a turn of phrase ?); I believe Boyarin has overestimated the "stores of autonomy, power, and fulfillment" (p. 330) that Jewish women had in traditional society.

I will close by addressing one of the fundamental suppositions of Boyarin's book. Are we required to accept the supposed truism that the labels of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" coined at the end of the nineteenth century were indeed radically determinative ("inventive") of the way we conceive of sexuality in the West? Perhaps it is time to question the grip Foucault has maintained on the interpretation of the history of sexuality. A new interpretation could be inclusive of Foucault but also expand our search into sexuality and social control. To start with, we should consider that the appearance of a word or label not only has an effect but is itself an effect of what has gone before.

Hannah S. Decker University of Houston