MASTURBATING IN YIDDISH: Jewish bodies and voices from Eastern Europe

By offering an introduction to the nearly unstudied Eastern-European archive of Yiddish sexology from the first three decades of the twentieth century, the following chapter will reveal the complex trajectories of knowledge production, translation, and dissemination, crossing East and West in heretofore uncharted movements. I will focus on one particular act, masturbation, which has been widely recognized by scholars of sexuality as a key site of power, “the first form of prohibition and, historically, the first form of problematization of sexuality” (Foucault 2011, 391). Here masturbation will serve specifically as a site for identifying the ideologies animating Yiddish sexology and exposing its intertextual and cross-cultural dialogues (Ajzenstadt and Cavaglion 2002). Yiddish masturbation, I will show, linked the religious and the secular, playing a role in shaping scientific discourse, and with it modern Jewish corporeality and subjectivity.