Allosemitism

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Allosemitism is a neologism that encompasses both philosemitic and antisemitic attitudes towards Jews as the Other.

Contents

Origin of term

The term was coined by Polish Jewish literary critic Artur Sandauer and popularized by the Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Sandauer used the term "allosemitism" in his essay On Situation of Polish Writer of Jewish Descent In the 20th Century published as a book in 1982. [1] [2]

Zygmunt Bauman proposed the term in his 1997 essay "Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern" in which he argued that "allosemitism" should be used in place of "antisemitism". [3] Bauman's argument was that allosemitism can represent a "radically ambivalent attitude" encompassing both philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism; [4] allosemitism is a form of proteophobia, fear and horror of things that defy clean-cut categories, not, like anti-Semitism, of a simple fear of the "other"; and that Judeophobia is diverse, and, therefore, not adequately encompassed by the term "anti-Semitism". [5]

Ruth Gruber describes the neologism as a response to "the idea that, good or bad, Jews are different from the non-Jewish mainstream and thus unable to be dealt with in the same way or measured by the same yardstick". [6] According to Gruber, the term was coined by the Polish-Jewish literary critic Artur Sandauer. [6]

In her 2010 book Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness, the literary scholar Maren Tova Linnett described the term as having originated with both Sandauer and Bauman. [7]

Use

Linnett uses the term "to describe the multiple modes of difference that these women authors ascribed to the Jew in order to complicate what she views as the overly simplistic polarities of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism". [7]

The sociologist Eliezer Ben-Rafael uses the concept in his 2014 book Confronting Allosemitism in Europe: The Case of Belgian Jews.

See also

Related Research Articles

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  2. Christian antisemitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages which was religious in nature and has extended into modern times
  3. Muslim antisemitism which was—at least in its classical form—nuanced, in that Jews were a protected class
  4. Political, social and economic antisemitism during the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe which laid the groundwork for racial antisemitism
  5. Racial antisemitism that arose in the 19th century and culminated in Nazism
  6. Contemporary antisemitism which has been labeled by some as the new antisemitism

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Anti-antisemitism is opposition to antisemitism or prejudice against Jews, and just like the history of antisemitism, the history of anti-antisemitism is long and multifaceted. According to historian Omer Bartov, political controversies around antisemitism involve "those who see the world through an antisemitic prism, for whom everything that has gone wrong with the world, or with their personal lives, is the fault of the Jews; and those who see the world through an anti-antisemitic prism, for whom every critical observation of Jews as individuals or as a community, or, most crucially, of the state of Israel, is inherently antisemitic". It is disputed whether or not anti-antisemitism is synonymous with philosemitism, but anti-antisemitism often includes the "imaginary and symbolic idealization of ‘the Jew’" which is similar to philosemitism.

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References

  1. ↑ Artur Sandauer, O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku (Rzecz, którą nie ja powinienem był napisać...) (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1982, p. 9.
  2. ↑ Published in English as: Artur Sandauer, On the Situation of the Polish Writer of Jewish Descent in the Twentieth Century : It Is Not I Who Should Have Written This Study...Trans. Abe Shenitzer, Ed. Scott Ury (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2005).
  3. ↑ Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)
  4. ↑ Weinstein, Valerie. "Dissolving Boundaries: Assimilation and Allosemitism in E. A. Dupont's "Das Alte Gesetz" (1923) and Veit Harlan's "Jud Süss" (1940)." The German Quarterly 78.4 (2005): 496-516.
  5. ↑ Eva Frojmovic. Review of Kessler, Herbert L.; Nirenberg, David, eds., Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. March, 2013.
  6. 1 2 Gruber, Ruth (7 August 2008). "Allosemitism (noun)—Jews as the perpetual 'other'". Jewish Journal. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
  7. 1 2 Briefel, Aviva. "Allosemitic Modernism." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43, no. 2 (2010): 361-63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40959717.
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