Antisemitism and sexual violence have a bond that demands theorization. Historians have recognized the wide range of sexual fantasies underlying attitudes toward Jewish men and women that have developed over the centuries – Jewish men as a third gender, menstruating, and posing a threat of rape to Gentile women, for example. For centuries, antisemites have viewed Jews as sexually abnormal, “perverting” gender and sexual norms, and using sexuality as a weapon. Those fantasies have been expressed in explicit language, in subtle and implicit wording, and in visual representation.
Fantasies about Jewish women, which have received far less attention from historians, have been enacted over the centuries in horrific acts of sexual violence, most recently in Israel on October 7, 2024, and have also informed the denial of that violence, including by noted feminist theorists. Given the sexual fantasies and violence, I will argue that antisemitism requires reinterpretation as a culture of sadism. Further, I will argue that rape constitutes the climax of pogrom violence by combining sexuality, physical cruelty, and intimacy in a unique form of sadistic aggression against both the body and the soul. I define mass-perpetrator rape as an attack against women, against Judaism as a religion, and as an effort to end the possibility of a Jewish future.
Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Programme at Dartmouth College. She is the author of several books, including Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung (Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2018); The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2010); Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press, 1998); and a forthcoming book, written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies, as well as numerous articles and edited volumes.