SOURCE: “Sex and the Anti-Semite: Vasilii Rozanov's Patriarchal Eroticism,” in The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia, Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 299-333.

In the following essay, Engelstein explores Rozanov's anti-Semitism, which was manifested in his stereotyping of Jews as possessing great sexual prowess.

Along with the evils of urban life and the possibility of proletarian aggression, Jews had figured throughout the nineteenth century as prime culprits in the symbolic drama of imagined national peril. They were construed as the opposite of the peasant: alien and cosmopolitan rather than native and rooted in the soil; urban rather than rural; commercial rather than productive; artificial rather than organic; cerebral rather than instinctive; sober rather than drunk; insidious rather than violent. The Jews' symbolic function, however, was profoundly contradictory. They simultaneously intruded an unwelcome particularism into the Christian body of state and society (which in...