Literature and the Study of Anti-Semitism

Samuels, Maurice

doi:10.1093/ahr/rhy031

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…We should also keep in mind, given the relevance of literary texts in our corpus, that stereotypical representations of Jews, including negative and positive representations, also when connected in different ways to the history of the centuries-old anti-Jewish prejudice, were part also of the Western literary tradition, including literature of the highest standards from Shakespeare to Céline (and literature produced and spread by Jews or partly Jewish authors) [most recently Samuels (2018)].…”

Section: The Dimensions and Evolution Of A Bias: Between Stereotype And Antisemitic Offencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, this closer reading should allow us to formulate reasonable hypotheses on the relationships between texts and contexts: i.e. to further investigate to what extent contexts generated those texts and contributed to their success; whether those texts represented popular attitudes and at the same time contributed to produce them, together with their related biases (Samuels, 2018).…”

Section: Neighborhood Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Representation of Jews and Anti-Jewish Bias in 19th Century French Public Discourse: Distant and Close Reading

et al. 2022

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We explore through the lens of distant reading the evolution of discourse on Jews in France during the XIX century. We analyze a large textual corpus including heterogeneous sources—literary works, periodicals, songs, essays, historical narratives—to trace how Jews are associated to different semantic domains, and how such associations shift over time. Our analysis deals with three key aspects of such changes: the overall transformation of embedding spaces, the trajectories of word associations, and the comparative projection of different religious groups over different, historically relevant semantic dimensions or streams of discourse. This allows to show changes in the association between words and semantic domains (referring e.g. to economic and moral behaviors), the evolution of stereotypes, and the dynamics of bias over a long time span characterized by major historical transformations. We suggest that the analysis of large textual corpora can be fruitfully used in a dialogue with more traditional close reading approaches—by pointing to opportunities of in-depth analyses that mobilize more qualitative approaches and a detailed inspection of the sources that distant reading inevitably tends to aggregate. We offer a short example of such a dialogue between different approaches in our discussion of the Second Empire transformations, where we mobilize the historian’s tools to start disentangling the complex interactions between changes in French society, the nature of sources, and representations of Jews. While our example is limited in scope, we foresee large potential payoffs in the cooperative interaction between distant and close reading.

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Section: The Dimensions and Evolution Of A Bias: Between Stereotype And Antisemitic Offencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Neighborhood Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%