Allosemitism is a neologism that encompasses both philosemitic and antisemitic attitudes towards Jews as the Other.
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]
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.
Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against, Jews. This sentiment is a form of racism, and a person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Primarily, antisemitic tendencies may be motivated by negative sentiment towards Jews as a people or by negative sentiment towards Jews with regard to Judaism. In the former case, usually presented as racial antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by the belief that Jews constitute a distinct race with inherent traits or characteristics that are repulsive or inferior to the preferred traits or characteristics within that person's society. In the latter case, known as religious antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by their religion's perception of Jews and Judaism, typically encompassing doctrines of supersession that expect or demand Jews to turn away from Judaism and submit to the religion presenting itself as Judaism's successor faith—this is a common theme within the other Abrahamic religions. The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by the concept of anti-Judaism, which is distinct from antisemitism itself.
Antisemitism and the New Testament is the discussion of how some Christians' views of Judaism in the New Testament have contributed to discrimination against Jewish people throughout history and in the present day.
Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites.
Philosemitism, also called Judeophilia, is "defense, love, or admiration of Jews and Judaism". Such attitudes can be found in Western cultures across the centuries. The term originated in the nineteenth century by self-described German antisemites to describe their non-Jewish opponents. American-Jewish historian Daniel Cohen of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies has asserted that philosemitism "can indeed easily recycle antisemitic themes, recreate Jewish otherness, or strategically compensate for Holocaust guilt."
Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
Rootless cosmopolitan was a pejorative Soviet epithet which referred mostly to Jewish intellectuals as an accusation of their lack of allegiance to the Soviet Union, especially during the antisemitic campaign of 1948–1953. This campaign had its roots in Joseph Stalin's 1946 attack on writers who were connected with "bourgeois Western influences", culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent Doctors' Plot in 1953.
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish–British sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
The terms "self-hating Jew", "self-loathing Jew", and "auto-antisemite" are pejorative terms used to describe Jewish people whose viewpoints, especially favoring Jewish assimilation, Jewish secularism, limousine liberalism, or anti-Judaism are perceived as reflecting self-hatred.
Bogdan Musiał is a Polish-German historian. In 1985 he left Poland and became a political refugee in Germany, where he obtained German citizenship. In 2010 he returned to Poland and became a professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.
Antisemitism, the prejudice or discrimination against Jews, has had a long history since the ancient times. While antisemitism had already been prevalent in ancient Greece and Roman Empire, its institutionalization in European Christianity after the destruction of the ancient Jewish cultural center in Jerusalem caused two millennia of segregation, expulsions, persecutions, pogroms, genocides of Jews, which culminated in the 20th-century Holocaust in Nazi German-occupied European states, where 67% European Jews were murdered.
The Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), founded as the Institute of Jewish Affairs, is a London-based research institute and think tank. It specialises in contemporary Jewish affairs. JPR also runs a public education programme, and has hosted lectures from Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, James Wolfensohn, Professor Jonathan Sarna and Professor Zygmunt Bauman.
Głos was a Polish language social, literary and political weekly review published in Warsaw between 1886 and 1905. It was one of the leading journals of the Polish positivist movement. Many of the most renowned Polish writers published their novels in Głos, which also became a tribune of the naturalist literary movement of the late 19th century. During the Revolution of 1905 it was closed down by tsarist authorities.
Jewish Koine Greek, or Jewish Hellenistic Greek, is the variety of Koine Greek or "common Attic" found in numerous Alexandrian dialect texts of Hellenistic Judaism, most notably in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and associated literature, as well as in Greek Jewish texts from the Levant. The term is largely equivalent with Greek of the Septuagint as a cultural and literary rather than a linguistic category. The minor syntax and vocabulary variations in the Koine Greek of Jewish authors are not as linguistically distinctive as the later language Yevanic, or Judeo-Greek, spoken by the Romaniote Jews in Greece.
Antisemitism in Spain is the expression through words or actions of an ideology of hatred towards Jews on Spanish soil.
Evidence for the presence of Jewish communities in the geographical area today covered by Austria can be traced back to the 12th century. In 1848 Jews were granted civil rights and the right to establish an autonomous religious community, but full citizenship rights were given only in 1867. In an atmosphere of economic, religious and social freedom, the Jewish population grew from 6,000 in 1860 to almost 185,000 in 1938. In March 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and thousands of Austrians and Austrian Jews who opposed Nazi rule were sent to concentration camps. Of the 65,000 Viennese Jews deported to concentration camps, only about 2,000 survived, while around 800 survived World War II in hiding.
Artur Sandauer was a Polish and Jewish literary critic, essayist, and professor at the University of Warsaw.
The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland is a 1991 book about the intersection of communism in Poland and Polish Jewry. Its primary focus are the Polish Jews of the generation born in the early 1900s, many of whom embraced the communist ideology.
Maren Tova Linett is a literary critic and Professor of English at Purdue University. Her research focuses on modernist literature and Jewish studies, disability studies, and bioethics, and her major works include Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness (2007), Bodies of Modernism (2017), and Literary Bioethics (2020). She has also published work in academic journals such as the Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal of Medical Humanities, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Modernism/modernity, and ELH.
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.
Zionist antisemitism or antisemitic Zionism refers to a phenomenon in which antisemites express support for Zionism and the State of Israel. In some cases, this support may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. Historically, this type of antisemitism has been most notable among Christian Zionists, who may perpetrate religious antisemitism while being outspoken in their support for Jewish sovereignty in Israel due to their interpretation of Christian eschatology. Similarly, people who identify with the political far-right, particularly in Europe and the United States, may support the Zionist movement because they seek to expel Jews from their country and see Zionism as the least complicated method of achieving this goal and satisfying their racial antisemitism.