Hair: Transcultural Entanglements of Place, Race, and Identity in Central Europe
Hair is the most obvious elements of a person’s appearance. Beyond a marker of individual esthetic and cultural choices, its appearance is marked by beliefs, customs and rituals.
Hair is among the most obvious elements of a person’s appearance. Beyond a marker of individual esthetic and cultural choices, its appearance is marked by beliefs, customs and rituals. Religious traditions offer sometimes detailed prescription what to do or to avoid in matters of hair. This lecture will look at a particularly poignant example of how in early modern and modern Europe, ideas about hair have been negotiated, namely the phenomenon of the matting of hair. While today best known as a choice – in the form of the so-called dread locks – the spontaneous matting of hair was understood in pre-modern times as the result of demonic or supernatural interference with the human body. In the early modern period, this assumption was supplanted by a medicalized concept, the matting of hair as the result of a condition. This condition was defined in 1600 as Plica polonica, identifying the matting of hair as a condition endemic to Eastern Europe. In Germany, it was also identified with Jews and called Judenzopff. Today an almost completely forgotten phenomenon, the academic and public debate around controling this allegedly dangerous disease informed policies of containment, and contributed to shaping negative ideas about the other – eastern Europe, Jews –well into the 19th century. |
François Guesnet is a Visiting Brownstone Professor in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College during the Fall Term 2017. He is Reader in Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He holds a PhD in Modern History from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau, and specializes in the early modern and 19th century history of Eastern European, and more specifically, Polish Jews. |
