Since at least late antiquity, anti-Judaism narratives have connected Jewish communities to the spread of disease and contagion. The Church accused Jews of being carriers of the bubonic plague during the medieval period (Lacqueur 2006). With the advent of scientific racism in the early nineteenth century, medical treatises associated Jews with the spread of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, tying Jewish sexuality to fears of pollution (Gilman 2003). At the same time, psychiatry argued that Jewish practices like circumcision were signs of homosexuality and other “degenerate” forms of gender difference that might infect the wider population (Gilman 1992). Extreme political movements similarly accused Jews of spreading everything from capitalism to communism (Slezkine 2004). Nazism, in turn, adopted such theories to argue that Jews were “matter out of place” in the body politic and used it to justify their program of extermination (Musloff 2010). Antisemitic rumors and hearsay have also often circulated like infectious diseases, provoking pogroms and other forms of racist mob violence. More recently, “infodemics” and conspiracies like QAnon have spread antisemitic tropes about global Jewish control and blood libel to assert the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax. Even more moderate elements, such as public health officials, have singled out particular Jewish communities as resistant to adopting appropriate preventative measures against the virus.

Jews have thus long had to contend with accusations of being both “infected and infecting” (Gilman 2003)—the putative carriers of physical and moral disease, as well as the targets of ideological afflictions. This panel, “Contagion in/around Jewish Literature,” challenges pernicious discourses associating Jews with disease, as well as reframing contagion and infection beyond physical hygiene and illness. It will explore how aesthetic, cultural, and affective forms can disrupt ideological and discriminatory representations of Jews. In the first presentation, Aliza Atik explores sexuality in the work of the English Victorian poet Amy Levy, by suggesting that the fractious and unstable metaphors around Jewishness, gender, and lesbian identity circulate via language of affect and contagion. Levy’s work metaphorically frames Jewish and queer identities as affects that circulate, transmit themselves, and orient subjects in multiple, conflicting ways. Atik argues that Levy’s work comes to no conclusion about the limitations of these contagious affects and the porous social boundaries they unsettle.

Naomi Brenner’s presentation turns to the circulation of literature itself as a potentially contaminating influence by examining serialized Hebrew detective fiction and other sensationalist literary genres in 1930s Mandatory Palestine. Critics designated this literature “shund” (or trash, from Yiddish), arguing that it represented a fundamental lack of taste and excessive emotion and had the potential to corrupt young readers. United by an anxiety that mass culture was a form of contamination, these Hebrew critics shared the suspicion of mass culture epitomized by contemporary European thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Yet, as Brenner argues, these texts flourished despite the critical condemnation, demonstrating the power—and the infectious nature—of new forms of Jewish literary culture.

İlyas Deniz Cinar explores the biopolitics of contagion and identity politics in work by the Jewish Turkish playwright Beki Luiza Bahar. Drawing on ancient Hittite mythology about a plague caused by a queen’s infidelity, this twenty-first-century playwright draws together different narratives about Jewishness representing a form of both biological and gendered contagion. Situating the work within the paradigm of global Jewish theatre, Çınar argues that the playwright constructs a modern feminist repertoire that challenges the biopolitical exclusion of both Jews and women from the body politic.

The final presentation shifts to oral testimony and the question of memory. Drawing on the concept of “postmemory” (Hirsch), or the intergenerational transfer of traumatic memories and experience, Lucas Wilson explores how the homes of Holocaust survivors function as sites of memorial transference and contagion. Household objects, the organization of space, and even décor help transmit traumatic memories. Through an analysis of the second-generation video archive, Wilson explores how children of survivors often experienced “memorial” contagion in the space of the home, while the home can also offer a place of shelter from wider political forces.

These presentations represent the global breadth of Jewish culture and cover a wide range of genres and forms, including English Victorian poetry, Turkish theatre, North American video testimony, and Hebrew serialized fiction from Israel. It shifts the focus from Jews as carriers of disease, to think about how Jewish literature and other cultural forms can offer forms of resistance long-standing ideological narratives.