The study focuses on the apocryphal figure of Judith, the man-killer. Dramatic texts about Judith are of great interest for cultural scholars for three reasons: first, they belong to the genre of dramatic representations of fear and anxiety, which provide an opportunity to experience these amorphous emotions in a playful way. Second, they represent the female Jew, and in so doing exemplify how the voyeuristic appropriation of fear and anxiety is related to the construction of gender and race. Third, these Judith dramas function as containers for fantasies of both desire and fear. In other words, Judith dramas elucidate how gender models contain the repressed Other in a culturally acceptable form in order to domesticate it. German dramas of Judith in the early 19th century represent prototypical examples of different strategies of containment ...