The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism

A turn-of-the-century Jew undergoes a series of disfiguring operations that transform him into a "European". Oskar Panizza's chilling story "The Operated Jew" (1893) mingles loathing with compassion for its title character. Thirty years later, Panizza's tale was answered by "Mynona", (Salomo Friedlaender) an urban German Jew who turned the story's tables in "The Operated Goy" (1922). Jack Zipes translates these two stories into English and provides an extensive introduction as well as bibliographic essays that recover these two writers, placing their often bizarre tales within the history of modern anti-Semitism. Panizza and Mynona were both haunted and persecuted by religious and racist fanaticism in Germany. Taken together, these writers form a dialectical image, the operated Jew/German, a figure that in turn casts its shadow on our present, illustrating why we devastate our bodies in quest of purity and perfection. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of literature and modern German history.