German, Jew, Muslim, Gay

This biography succeeds in contextualizing his ideas, while leaving the man himself, rightly perhaps, still somewhat in the shadows. * Times Literary Supplement * Perhaps most significant among the important contributions of Baer's brilliant biography of the queer, German-Jewish convert to Islam, Hugo Marcus, is the new perspective he offers on the history of Jewish-Muslim relations. Not only Marcus's engagement with Islam but also that of other Jewish converts to Islam-as well as that of Jewish 'Orientalists'-allow Baer to demonstrate the mutual 'Semitic' affinity of Jews and Muslims. -- Robert Beachy, author of <i>Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity</i> That identity is fluid is no surprise in the twenty-first century: that such fluid identities collided with changing realities in the rapid transition from Imperial to Republican to Nazi Germany in the early twentieth century may also not surprise the reader. Yet the story of Hugo Marcus seems unique: we have other accounts of gay Jews fighting their double stigmatization as well as the lives of German Jews attracted to or indeed converting to Islam during this period. Yet in the tale of Hugo Marcus, elegantly told by Marc David Baer, we have a biography that links complex questions of identity to institutional histories and their dislocation in the German-speaking world. Ending with his ashes strewn on a paupers' grave in Bern, Marcus's tale is moving, exemplary in its uniqueness for the transitions of German Jewish intellectuals and perhaps indicative of paths yet to be followed by other marginalized individuals in our ever darkening age of rising antisemitism, Islamophobia, and homophobia. -- Sander Gilman, coauthor of <i>Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity</i> This extraordinary biography of Hugo Marcus reads like an amazing detective novel of twentieth-century history. Baer recreates the life and times of a gay Jewish intellectual in Germany who converts to Islam and whose life is saved from the Nazis by the Muslim community of Berlin. The story is a thrilling page turner that upends our assumptions about Jewishness, homosexuality, Muslim-Jewish relations, orientalism, and the challenges of modernity. -- Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College