Letting judges breathe: Queer survivance in the book of Judges and Gad Beck’s An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin 1

Abstract

Scholars typically describe the book of Judges as encompassing a cyclical transgress–suffer–prosper–transgress–again trope. Although Israelite peace and autonomy are maintained at various moments throughout the text, hardship inevitably ensues, leading exegetes to focus on the Israelites’ repeated demise as opposed to their continual triumphs. As David Gunn notes, ‘reward and punishment is often viewed as the book’s dominant theme’. Or, in the words of Danna Nolan Fewell, the stories within Judges are frequently read as a collective ‘downward spiral for Israel and its leaders’. I question, however, whether such thematic analysis might prove insufficient when engaging a hermeneutic of trauma and survival—or queer survivance, as we will see. Interestingly, of the 400-year period covered in the book of Judges, only 111 of them are spent in subjugation. Nearly three-fourths of the time period covered by the book, in other words, recounts times of judgeship and autonomy. Might this story be less about cultural transgression and more about the creative ways in which the Israelites managed to endure? In this article, I will provide an intertextual comparison of the Judges cycle with the memoir of Holocaust survivor, Gad Beck. In doing so, I will suggest that Judges offers us a literary representation of an ancient culture’s fight to persist. Rather than guide readers through the entirety of the Judges narrative, however, I will focus on Judges 3 and 4, as the stories of and events surrounding Ehud and Jael offer a more concentrated instance of the aforementioned cyclical trope. From a stance of hetero-suspicion and with a theoretical view to intertextuality and queer survivance, I will argue that, like Beck, Ehud and Jael subvert oppressive power structures through gender-bending performances and the embodiment of ambivalent, and even comedic, identity markers. Taking such similarities into consideration, I will then suggest that Ehud’s and Jael’s queer-comic consciousness becomes another thematic trope within the book of Judges as a whole. Yet instead of focusing on the repetition of the Israelites’ self-fulfilling demise, this trope spotlights the creative ways in which the Judges narrative becomes one of survival and reflects an ancient culture’s will to resist, persist, and indeed, live.