Distinctions between delinquency and illness were ill-defined and problematic, as we have seen in the case of the masturbator Johann A. And it was precisely in this vague grey zone between the two that psychiatry was able to insert itself in defining a new mental pathology. The problem of deciphering the difference between delinquency/criminality and madness was further complicated and given a unique twist in the cases of Jewish patients, whose Jewishness (in the eyes of the asylum) was by definition a kind of criminality and immorality. Jewishness, in other words, represented a category of interpretation distinct from illness, one which, in turn, had become highly politicized in the debates about Jewish emancipation since the eighteenth century. Therefore, when race was used to interpret patient behavior, it constituted a form of thinking outside of the medical domain in the strictest sense. In this way, it was potentially at odds with the medical process, and could, as I will show in two case studies, function to prevent the asylum staff from seeing and treating patients as ill. This chapter thus examines the limits of the medicalization of deviancy— the points where, in contrast to the “illnesses” discussed heretofore (male masturbation, nymphomania, and religious madness), medicine pulled back, seeking explanations for the person in a framework outside of the terms of medicine. That extramedical framework drew from long-standing stereotypes of Jews as immoral and criminal; but it also had a more immediate source in a contemporary trope that united Jewishness and criminality in a social type: the jüdischer Gauner (Jewish crook). Such images of Jews had in turn become part of the political arsenal of those opposing Jewish emancipation on the grounds of an incorrigible Jewish “character.” My argument here runs counter to the few historical works on Jews and insanity, which, consistent with the medicalization thesis, have focused exclusively on the conflation of Jewishness and illness in medical theories. In part, this approach derives from their focus on the second half of the nineteenth century, where the conflation was indeed overwhelming, psychiatry and medicine (as well as other human sciences) having become saturated with racial and degeneration theories.
