In the Hobsbawmian long 19th century gender and processes of sexualization and feminization
have been crucial in the construction of the »Jewish Other«. Ulrike Brunotte explores how these
processes came about by addressing imaginative aesthetic and epistemological questions. She
analyzes how literature psychoanalysis and the performing arts traverse and react to the
ambivalence of racialized stereotypes. The »femininity puzzle« presents itself in two ways:
first in the role of effeminization of the male Jew in antisemitic discourse and then in the
transgressive forms of femininity connected to Jewish women especially the allosemitic
orientalization in the figure of the »Beautiful Jewess«.
