Argues that Jewish writers used depictions of Jews as animals to question prevalent notions of Jewish identity.The Infrahuman explores a littleknown aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period preceding World War II in which Jewish writers in German Hebrew and Yiddish employed figures of animals in pejorative depictions of Jews and Jewish identity. Such depictions are disturbing because they sometimes rival common antiSemitic stereotypes and have often been explained away as symptoms of Jewish selfhatred. In this book Noam Pines shows how animality emerged in Jewish literature not as a biological or conceptual category but as a theological figure of exclusion from a state of humanity and Christianity alike. By framing the humananimal question in theological terms rather than in racialbiological terms writers such as Heinrich Heine S. Y. Abramovitsh Hayim Nachman Bialik Uri Zvi Greenberg Franz Kafka S. Y. Agnon and Paul Celan subjected the pejorative designations of Jewish identity to literary elaboration and to philosophical negotiation.