Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew.(Book review)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses

Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew, by Matthew Biberman. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xii + 260. Hardcover $89.95.

Matthew Biberman's book on masculinity and anti-Semitism reflects wide reading, imaginative ingenuity, and great ambition. But the book is better at identifying provocative issues than at convincing this reader that its argument hangs together point by point.

Early modern English literature is only a starting point for Biberman's argument. For him, representations of Jews both reveal and enable a series of turning points in Western culture. The first turn, from a classical conception of masculinity apparently synonymous with Christian knighthood to modern capitalist bourgeois subjectivity, seems to occur in the brief moment between The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice. Modernity then gives way to postmodernity at Hitler's holocaust, an event that, according to Biberman, empties anti-Semitism of content and makes it a purely aesthetic phenomenon. Biberman asserts that classical masculinity is in conflict with Christianity because of premodern culture's embrace of a gender...

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