The image of the Jew in European liberal culture, 1789-1914

Cheyette, Bryan and Valman, N. (eds.) (2004) The image of the Jew in European liberal culture, 1789-1914 , Vallentine Mitchell, 232pp.

Abstract

This collection of essays explores the complex articulations and contexts of anti-Semitism in the literature of four cultures — Britain, Germany, France and Italy — in the long nineteenth century. The essays examine the presence both of explicitly anti-Semitic writing and apparently anti-Jewish stereotypes in the work of writers who were not consciously hostile to Jews. The book scrutinizes assumptions about the relative absence of anti-Semitism in Britain, the image of Germany as resistant to Jewish assimilation, and of Italy as particularly hospitable to Jews. The essays are placed in a comparative framework in order to examine the representation of Jews both within particular national cultures and in the context of Western European modernity. The volume considers the ways in which anti-Semitism functioned within liberal culture in the nineteenth century as part of the broader history of oppression with which Western modernity has been complicit.

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