{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020187454938716654, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007209805335255948, 'mean_word_length': 5.168888888888889, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
CAUGHT IN THE ACT

This article explores where several vexing methodological issues converge: the history of affect and emotion and its relationship to the important and embattled methodological vagary of Jewishness. To that end, my argument unfolds in three interrelated parts. The first is genealogical and concerns what I will argue were crucial, but regularly “forgotten”, political interests that initially drove the history of emotion. As I will suggest, these beginnings relate to subsequent, more recent awkwardness, unease and ambivalence in that historiography.1 I am interested in the connection between such political beginnings, anxiety and Jewishness primarily in Norbert Elias’s early and now canonical work, The Civilizing Process. Second, I consider the status of emotion in discourse of German history generally, in which emphasis on emotion is pronounced precisely in relationship to Jewish history and in post-1945 thinking about history, but not in history. The final and third site of inquiry is visual. I propose that the 1923 film Das Alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law) visually instantiates the insights about shame that Elias set on paper in some of his earliest writing, and most famously years later in The Civilizing Process.2 This film is an occasion to argue for the relevance of spectatorship and the unconscious allegiances it demands as an aspect of history.