An obsession with “degeneration” was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in “degeneration theory” – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – were Jewish. Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism is the first in-depth study of the Jewish cultural roots of this strand of modernist thought and its legacies for modernist and contemporary culture. Marilyn Reizbaum explores how literary works from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through James Joyce’s Ulysses to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, the crime movies of Mervyn LeRoy, and the photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes manifest engagements with ideas of degeneration across the arts of the 20th century. This is a major new study that sheds new light on modernist thought, art and culture.This book examines the cultural legacies of degeneration theory for modernism and contends that they are crucially inflected by the Jewish subject, often made exemplary of the theories born of degeneration. The insistence on the parochiality and fixity of the Jewish subject has inhibited a more fluid, more global vision of degeneration and its legacies for modernism. My purpose here is to revisit a term that demonstrates the mobility of discourses across a number of borders, concomitant with modernism’s expansion of its scope. Unfit argues that the Jewish subject is imbricated culturally, translationally, and formally within modernism.Unfit identifies a nexus of influence that conjoins different forms—literary and film studies and visual arts—through figures that are unified by several common factors, but perhaps most suggestively and controversially by one: their Jewishness. Cesare Lombroso (Criminal Man) (1835–1909), Max Nordau (Degeneration) (1849–1923), Magnus Hirschfeld (The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress) (1868–1935), and Otto Weininger (Sex and Character) (1880–1903), were all physicians and/or scientists in the German sense of academician and they were all Jewish. Together they represent a significant force in the interlocution of relevant ideas of criminality, literary decadence, and sexology as part of the larger swirl of degeneration theories through which we may re-view modernism and its after effects. Accordingly, the exemplary works examined here correspond to each idea in a way that inscribes the Jewish dimension: these include Little Caesar (1931) and The Bad Seed (1956), American film classics that were formative in the establishment of the crime genre and are illustrative of vernacular modernism; James Joyce’s Ulysses, which critically reflects Nordau’s aim in Degeneration to graft the basic concept of the degenerate or misfit onto literary value or fitness and not solely through its “Jewish” protagonist Leopold Bloom; Claude Cahun’s photography audaciously engaged with sexological theories that were responsive to degeneration.

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