Jews among the Peoples

Drawing on the BordersMinorities were a menace to modern nationalism, and none more so than Jews in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Among other issues, their seeming cosmopolitanism made them a threat to the cultural categories on which nationalism based its claims.Richard Wagner inveighed against "Judaism in music," because, as outsiders, Jews could not express the soul of a nation, rooted only in the blood of its natives. 2 Th e fi eld of art history warded off similar threats to national ethnic ideals and its own nationalistic structure in a more straightforward fashion, with recourse to the anti-Semitic notion that Jews were forbidden to make art. 3 Th e present chapter concerns the situation of the Jew along the borders between ethnicities as they were constructed in the early years of the twentieth century.In doing so, the chapter operates on other seams and boundaries as well: the blurred boundaries around visual phenomena we call art, the boundaries between Self and Other in the visual communities constructed by photographs and other depictions, and the boundaries between anthropology and art.Th ese boundaries demarcate spaces, determining who may, or must, enter them, and who is pushed, or allowed, out.Th is chapter takes place in a location that was itself a blurred 1 This chapter is a draft of ongoing research.I am grateful to all participants in the conference on Anthropology in Wartime for their suggestions, and particularly to

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