Otto Weininger

Born in Vienna into the family of an affluent goldsmith, Otto Weininger received a broad primary and secondary education, studying several languages from an early age. In 1898, he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study philosophy. He received his doctoral degree in 1902 for a dissertation titled “Eros and the Psyche.” Upon completing his studies, Weininger converted to Protestantism and espoused intense antisemitism, a viewpoint that would find expression in his only published work, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Published in 1903, this deeply misogynistic work ascribes intrinsic characteristics to masculinity and femininity and lays out a view in which all people partake of both natures. In his view, masculinity is fundamentally positivistic, active, and moral, whereas femininity is the opposite. Weininger extended the analysis to religious categories, mapping Christianity as masculine and Jewishness as feminine. Soon after his book was published, Weininger committed suicide, apparently motivated by a Jewish self-hatred to which his work had given a “scientific” basis. The profound misogyny and antisemitism of Weininger’s work, still shocking today, did not prevent contemporaries, including Jewishly proud Jews, from taking it seriously as a provocative “theory of everything” that demanded a reckoning; for instance, the Yiddishist and Bundist (!) A. Vayter felt compelled to write seriously about it in the Yiddishist cultural journal Literarishe monatsshriften in 1908. The book’s later popularity among Nazis helped finally bury it.