German Jews Dogged by Destiny: Werewolves and Other Were-Canids in the Works of Heinrich Heine and Curt Siodmak

Summary

Against the background of the millennia-long association of Judentum with the lupine (or canine) in Christian and European discourses, this article focuses on metamorphoses of the human into members of the Canidae family by Jewish-identified, German-born writers. Analysis of, first, Heinrich Heine's characterizations of both Shylock (1838) and the consort of “Prinzessin Sabbath” (1851) and, then, Curt Siodmak's scripts for The Wolf Man (1941) finds werewolves and other were-canids mediating Jewish life and death in their respective historically distinct and distinctly hostile situations: a Gentile Europe resisting Jewish integration in the first half of the nineteenth century, and a post-Emancipation Europe increasingly threatening Jewish existence in the first half of the twentieth. Their hybrid constructions of Jew (explicit or implicit) and wolf (or canid cousin) call attention to how the intersection of Jewish and lupine (or canine) stereotypes functions differently. This article argues that Heine rendered the purported Jewish referent of those interpellating identifications indefinite—that is, as both animal and human and neither; as both Jew and Gentile and neither—while Siodmak demonstrated the tragic consequences on individual lives of such oppressive identifications.

THE JEWISH BODY has often been stereotyped as hirsute, and the representation of Judentum has frequently crossed that of wolves within the long history of what I call the Bestiarium Judaicum, the vast menagerie of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) that have been disseminated to debase and bestialize Jews over the past two millennia. The Jew has been associated with the lupine in Christian discourse since at least St. John Chrysostom, for whom Jews were “more dangerous than any wolves.” The assumed behavior of wolves led to their use as figures for several traits that were either desired or repudiated by a human community, as well as for what (and whom) was to be included within or excluded from its bounds. While the fierceness ascribed to the wolf (and the wolf-pack) was a quality that might serve well for the warrior who extended the boundaries of the polis outward, for those within the polis, who might be subjected to the wolves’ (or the warriors’) predations, that attribute was translated as rapaciousness and cruelty.