Obstinate Hebrews

Schechter, Ronald

doi:10.1525/9780520929357

Cited by 59 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…97 argues that the revolutionary thinkers used Jews to consider a range of ideas and ideals. 100 Building on Schechter's work, I suggest that the artwork is particularly focused on law and legality.…”

Section: Legal Napoleonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Napoleonic Freedom of Worship in Law and Art

Cooper

2019

J. law relig.

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Napoleon's most famous innovation in his legendary military career was the use of the daunting Grande Armée with an emphasis on speed, maneuverability, and maintaining the offensive. Yet Napoleon understood that while skirmishes were won or lost on the battlefield, the real war lay in public perception. To that end, Napoleon used art and cultural treasures as part of his arsenal in order to create the perception of victory, regardless of the outcome of any particular campaign. Examining contemporary French artistic representations of Napoleon granting freedom of worship to religious groups, this article analyzes artwork as a tool for fashioning and communicating legal narrative. Popular visual arts are mined for meaning, painting a portrait of the legal and cultural setting of these creative works. The partisan artwork demonstrates how Napoleon's artists depicted freedom of worship as the freedom—granted to all faiths—to worship Napoleon. It is noted that Jews feature disproportionately in the Empire period's depictions of freedom of worship. This is surprising, as the Jewish community was numerically insignificant and hardly influential in Napoleon's realm. This article argues that in addition to broadcasting religious tolerance, Napoleonic artwork used Jews and symbols like Moses and tablets of law to fashion a narrative of law that foregrounded the legal legitimacy of Napoleon's rule: Napoleon's regime is legally just; the enlightened ruler affords rights and liberties to all his subjects; divine Napoleon is the new lawgiver.

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Section: Legal Napoleonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Napoleonic Freedom of Worship in Law and Art

Cooper

2019

J. law relig.

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“…Our analysis has been conducted by constructing diachronic word embedding spaces and tracing changes in the meanings associated to Jews in such spaces. A previous analysis based on the ARTFL Project (American Research Treasury of French Literature) database had limited itself to note the relevant frequency of references to Jews (Juif, Juifs, Juive, Juives) in the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary literature, without an actual further characterization of such references (Schechter, 2003). Analyses over such a long period of time are rich of methodological challenges-how to make embedding spaces comparable over time, how to trace the evolution of "meaning", how to detect discontinuities in discourse, or how to manage the heterogeneity of sources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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Introduction: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: Towards a Twenty-First-Century History

Green

Sullam

2020

Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism

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Obstinate Hebrews

Cited by 59 publications

References 0 publications

Napoleonic Freedom of Worship in Law and Art

Napoleonic Freedom of Worship in Law and Art

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

Introduction: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: Towards a Twenty-First-Century History

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