JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] ANTISEMITISM IN WAGNERIAN OPERA 251
some, honest, virtuous, and brave, and whose most significant flaw is that
he is too trusting of strangers.
It is often argued that every representation of a negative physical characteristic
should not automatically be interpreted as an antisemitic statement.
This is a perceptive and valuable criticism, but not as applied to these
five specifics, none of which are in the least extreme. As Paul Lawrence
Rose said in Wagner: Race and Revolution, “If Wagner, with the supreme
artist’s infallible intuition, never intruded his racialist theories into his
works of art, this does not mean that the art is free of racist content. It
simply means that Wagner was too subtle an artist to reduce his operas to
the level of political tracts.”
While it would be possible to level a criticism of overreaction were
there to be only one or two instances where Wagner’s utterances could be
confused with coded antisemitic statements, the presence of five specifics—
feet, smell, voice, sight, and race mixing, as found in three of the four
operas of The Ring—defies the laws of probability. I suggest that The Ring,
with the exception of Valkyrie, is an anthology of Jew hatred from first note
to last.
NON-WAGNER OPERAS
Other than Wagner, negative stereotypes of Jews in opera are rare.
Richard Strauss’s portrayal of five Jews in Salome shows quarreling, complaining,
and whining men. Furthermore, four of the Jews are high tenors,
which gives an especially shrill quality to their singing. As Sander Gilman
has pointed out, 12 in the latter part of the nineteenth century, high voices
were associated with castration, which, in the mind of the ill informed, was
synonymous with circumcision. 13
Sergei Prokofiev’s opera, Betrothal in a Monastery (La Duenna),
based on an eighteenth-century play, La Duenna, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
(1751-1816), contains the individual, Isaac Mendoza, a Jew portrayed
in a negative fashion. But this would be very much out of character for
Prokofiev, who was not an antisemite. His Overture on Yiddish Themes was
written in New York for his conservatory colleagues in the touring Jewish
12. Sander Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences
at Emory University, where he is the director of the Program in Psychoanalysis as
well as the University’s Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. In 2007 he was
appointed professor, Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College (London) and a
visiting fellow of the new Institute of Advanced Studies, Warwick University, UK.
13. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and
Hall, 1991).