Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914

Abstract

We investigate some aspects of the history of antisemitism in France, one of the cradles of modern antisemitism, using diachronic word embeddings. We constructed a large corpus of French books and periodicals issues that contain a keyword related to Jews and performed a diachronic word embedding over the 1789-1914 period. We studied the changes over time in the semantic spaces of 4 target words and performed embedding projections over 6 streams of antisemitic discourse. This allowed us to track the evolution of antisemitic bias in the religious, economic, socio-politic, racial, ethic and conspiratorial domains. Projections show a trend of growing antisemitism, especially in the years starting in the mid-80s and culminating in the Dreyfus affair. Our analysis also allows us to highlight the peculiar adverse bias towards Judaism in the broader context of other religions.

Diachronic Analysis of German Parliamentary Proceedings: Ideological Shifts through the Lens of Political Biases

“…Natural Language Processing for the Analysis of Historical Corpora. The studies closest to ours were presented by Garg et al [13] and Tripodi et al [33]. Similar to us, Garg et al quantify bias in historical corpora employing word vector spaces as proxies.…”

“…We observe the differences between Christian and Jewish target sets through seven different views, each of which is defined with one pair of attribute sets (A 1 , A 2 ). Views b-g) correspond to five bias lines identified by [33]: a) Sentiment. We rely on the widely-used attribute set of pleasant (A 1 ) and unpleasant (A 2 ) terms introduced by [5] and translated to German by [21]; b) Religious.…”

“…For each of these views, terms in A 2 have been recognized by [33] to be commonly used in constructions expressing negative stereotypes about Jews: for example, the negatively biased view of greedy and economically influential Jews symbolized by the Rothschilds (economic); the Jews involved in political machinations and secret plots symbolized by George Soros (conspiratorial); or the Nazi myth of Jews as distinct and inferior race (racial).…”

“…However, despite much interest on studying and mitigating bias in semantic spaces, few works - [13], [33] being notable exceptions -have taken a historical perspective and looked at ways to study bias in diachronic corpora through the lens of distributional embedding models. In this paper, we create a new historical corpus of parliamentary proceedings spanning three different centuries and set to quantify different kinds of bias in the underlying historical periods.…”

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

“…We organize our presentation categorizing words by four streams which have often been recognized by historians as constitutive of antisemitic thought in the 19th century: the religious, the economic, the conspiratorial, and the racial streams of antisemitism (Wilson, 1982). We suggest however to describe them, more generally as streams of bias (refining what we did previously in Tripodi et al (2019), as they are not necessarily the result of straightforward antisemitic expressions, but can be associated to discourse going from stereotype (including literary representations considered only today stereotypical or even antisemitic) to prejudice, to outspoken antisemitic offences (including accusations of conspiracy). To clarify this distinction we should first add historical perspective to our analysis.…”