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A Visual Kingdom in Red: The Red Jews in Early Modern Yiddish Culture

Mon, December 18, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, Marquis Salon 3

Abstract

The Red Jews are a red-haired, red-bearded or ruddy-complected variant of the Ten Lost Tribes. This idiosyncratic figure is unique to Yiddish and German. However, these two cultures developed the Red Jews differently, perceiving of their redness in contrasting shades. The imagology of the Red Jews highlights the interconnectedness of Jewish and Christian notions of otherness and identity in bright relief. Early modern Yiddish culture translated the Red Jews from German by inverting the original medieval Christian color symbolism: the pejorative implications of the red body was transformed into a proud badge of self-assertion.
This paper argues that the myth of the Red Jews provided a visual idiom for vernacular Jewish identity in Ashkenaz which simultaneously responded to contemporary modes of viewing and color symbolism that enabled even the unlettered to participate. The Yiddish re-appropriation of the Red Jews is a story about power: whereas Christians viewed the Red Jews with an accusatory gaze, through the Yiddish lens, this image was appropriated in an effort to negotiate a sense of place vis-à-vis the Christian majority. This reversal emphasized Jewish agency, countering a hegemonic vision that reflected Christian political and social oppression. In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate how the Yiddish Red Jews created what Stuart Clark, in his study on vision in early modern Europe, has called a “visual field” that “was tantamount to a visual kingdom.”
Suggesting a visual approach to Old Yiddish literature, I show that the Yiddish Red Jews are agents of what Rudolf Arnheim has termed visual thinking, i.e. visual perception as productive cognitive activity: The Red Jews enlist the human fascination with the visual and accommodate the sensual appeal of colors. They compelled reactions by appealing to the sense of sight. In relation to the study of sight and color codes, this paper contributes to the understanding of the articulation of self-awareness and the construction of vernacular Jewish identity as a result of visual cultural encounter.

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