From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline’s Anti-Semitic Style

Author(s):  
David Fieni

Orientalist philology brought people deemed Semitic together under the rubric of Semitism, and it subsequently broke up this forced grouping into the distinct categories of Jew, Arab, and Muslim. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the Dreyfus Affair exacerbated tensions between Jews, Muslims, and European residents of French colonial Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century. It explores the history of philological Semitism, discusses the legal status of Jews and Muslims in Algeria, and summarizes how the Dreyfus Affair affected Algerian politics and business. In order to think through the stylistics of French colonial anti-Semitism, the chapter examines pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish texts from the Algerian press of the 1890s. It ends with a close reading of Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre, demonstrating the way that popular literary philology reveals a lasting fracture between Jews, Arabs, and Muslims, while also exposing a process of psychological minoritization of the French majority population.

Author(s):  
Yulia Egorova

The chapter explores how notions of Jewish and Muslim difference play out in the history of communal violence in independent India. In doing so it will first interrogate the way in which trajectories of anti-Muslim ideologies intersect in India with Nazi rhetoric that harks back to Hitler’s Germany, and the (lack of) the memory of the Holocaust on the subcontinent. It will then discuss how the experiences of contemporary Indian Jewish communities both mirror and contrast those of Indian Muslims and how Indian Jews and the alleged absence of anti-Semitism in India have become a reference point in the discourse of the Hindu right deployed to mask anti-Muslim and other forms of intolerance.


1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 895-900
Author(s):  
ELISABETH ALBANIS

A history of the Jews in the English-speaking world: Great Britain. By W. D. Rubinstein, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Pp. viii+539. ISBN 0-312-12542-9. £65.00.Pogroms: anti-Jewish violence in modern Russian history. Edited by John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xx+393. ISBN 0-521-40532-7. £55.00.Western Jewry and the Zionist project, 1914–1933. By Michael Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi+305. ISBN 0-521-47087-0. £35.00.Three books under review deal from different perspectives with the responses of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe to the increasing and more or less violent outbursts of anti-Semitism which they encountered in the years from 1880 to the Second World War. The first two titles consider how deep-rooted anti-Semitism was in Britain and Russia and in what sections of society it was most conspicuous, whereas the third asks how Western Jewry became motivated to support the Zionist project of settlement in Palestine; all three approach the question of how isolated or intergrated diaspora Jews were in their respective countries.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


Author(s):  
Consuelo Sendino

ABSTRACT Our attraction to fossils is almost as old as humans themselves, and the way fossils are represented has changed and evolved with technology and with our knowledge of these organisms. Invertebrates were the first fossils to be represented in books and illustrated according to their original form. The first worldwide illustrations of paleoinvertebrates by recognized authors, such as Christophorus Encelius and Conrad Gessner, considered only their general shape. Over time, paleoillustrations became more accurate and showed the position of organisms when they were alive and as they had appeared when found. Encyclopedic works such as those of the Sowerbys or Joachim Barrande have left an important legacy on fossil invertebrates, summarizing the knowledge of their time. Currently, new discoveries, techniques, and comparison with extant specimens are changing the way in which the same organisms are shown in life position, with previously overlooked taxonomically important elements being displayed using modern techniques. This chapter will cover the history of illustrations, unpublished nineteenth-century author illustrations, examples showing fossil reconstructions, new techniques and their influence on taxonomical work with regard to illustration, and the evolution of paleoinvertebrate illustration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-277
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sessions

Abstract On 26 April 1901, members of the Righa tribe overran the French colonial village of Margueritte in central Algiers province. They seized the settlement’s male colonists and demanded they ‘make [them]selves Muslims’ by reciting the shehada and donning North African clothing. Several Europeans who could not or would not comply were killed. This article explores the meanings of this forced conversion of European settlers, which made the Margueritte revolt unique in the history of Algerian resistance to French colonialism. For French colonial officials, the religious ritual indicated the causal role of ‘Islamic fanaticism’ in fomenting the revolt. Administrators and magistrates focused their investigations on the religious habits of the revolt’s leaders, possible ties to Sufi brotherhoods and pan-Islamist conspiracies. But in doing so, they largely overlooked the more quotidian meanings of the conversion ritual for the inhabitants of Margueritte itself. By resituating the symbolic transformation of body and soul within the cultural logics of everyday life in the settler village, the article attempts to map out the more mundane social practices by which ethno-religious colonial hierarchies were enacted and embodied in French Algeria.


Author(s):  
Wolfgang Benz

Anti-Semitism refers to all anti-Jewish statements, tendencies, resentments, attitudes, and actions, regardless of whether they are religiously, racially, socially, or otherwise motivated. Ever since the experience of National Socialist ideology and dictatorship, anti-Semitism has been understood as a social phenomena which serves as a paradigm for the formation of prejudices and the political exploitation of the hostilities that ensue from them. As prejudice research, it is primarily interested in the behaviour and attitudes of different majority societies, and strictly speaking, it does not even require knowledge of the discriminated minority. This article claims that anti-Semitism research and Jewish studies are not interconnected, nor dependent on one another. However, the history of Jews, their interaction with non-Jewish majority societies, their persecution and extermination, serves anti-Semitism research as a paradigm.


Author(s):  
David Paroissien

This chapter questions the view that Dickens took little interest in history and remained ignorant of the challenge of writing about the past. Following John Forster’s dismissal of A Child’s History of England as ‘that little book’, which ‘cannot be said to have quite hit the mark’, A Child’s History, Barnaby Rudge, and A Tale of Two Cities have received often unsympathetic treatment, particularly with respect to the way the past is used in his two historical novels. Read within the context of ideas about history advocated by Carlyle and Macaulay in the 1830s, this chapter contends that fresh light can be shed on Dickens’s awareness of historiography and on his familiarity with an invigorated approach to the discipline advocated by the two most prominent historians of the first half of the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Yulia Egorova

In the European imaginary Jews and Muslims have shared a common space reserved for the ultimate other and have been constructed in opposition to each other. This book examines the way Jewish and Muslim communities encounter each other in South Asia and interact in ways that do not easily fit conventional Western tropes of Jews-Muslim relations. In doing so, the book explores how, in the history of the subcontinent, globalized discourses about Jewishness and Islam intersect and acquire different dimensions in varying sociopolitical contexts in ways that cast analytical light on the notions of race, religion, and minorities. Moving on to the contemporary period, the book demonstrates how South Asian Jewish experiences have been turned into a rhetorical tool to negate the discrimination of Muslims and argues that the ostensible celebration of Jewishness in the discourse of the Hindu and, analogously, European right masks not only anti-Muslim but also anti-Jewish prejudice. It also interrogates both those accounts that inscribe Jews and Muslims as each other’s enemies and those that imagine them as linked by a commonality of theologies, rituals, and narratives, and suggests that rather than being considered as a category of analysis, Jewish-Muslim relations would be best thematized as a construct produced by the very processes of minoritization, stigmatization, and othering that have been applied to Jews and Muslims in Europe and then globalized at the turn of the twenty-first century.


Gesnerus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-271
Author(s):  
Roger Smith

This paper outlines the history of knowledge about the muscular sense and provides a bibliographic resource for further research. A range of different topics, questions and approaches have interrelated throughout this history, and the discussion clarifies this rather than presenting detailed research in any one area. P art I relates the origin of belief in a muscular sense to empiricist accounts of the contribution of the senses to knowledge from Locke, via the idéologues and other authors, to the second half of the nineteenth century. Analysis paid much attention to touch, first in the context of the theory of vision and then in its own right, which led to naming a distinct muscular sense. From 1800 to the present, there was much debate, the main lines of which this paper introduces, about the nature and function of what turned out to be a complex sense. A number of influential psycho-physiologists, notably Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer, thought this sense the most primitive and primary of all, the origin of knowledge of world, causation and self as an active subject. Part II relates accounts of the muscular sense to the development of nervous physiology and of psychology. In the decades before 1900, t he developing separation of philosophy, psychology and physiology as specialised disciplines divided up questions which earlier writers had discussed under the umbrella heading of muscular sensation. The term ‘kinaesthesia’ came in 1880 and ‘proprio-ception’ in 1906. There was, all the same, a lasting interest in the argument that touch and muscular sensation are intrinsic to the existence of embodied being in the way the other senses are not. In the wider culture – the arts, sport, the psychophysiology of labour and so on – there were many ways in which people expressed appreciation of the importance of what the anatomist Charles Bell had called ‘the sixth sense’.


Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gry Hedin

During the first part of the nineteenth century, geologists developed a history of the earth so different from that accepted in previous centuries that it encouraged a rethinking of the relationship between man and nature. In this article I will argue that painters followed these changes closely and that some of them let the narratives and images of geology inform the way they depicted nature. In arguing my point, I will focus on images and descriptions of the chalk cliffs on the Danish island of Møn by both geologists and painters. I will follow the scientific advances in geology by referring to the texts and images of Søren Abildgaard, Henrich Steffens, Johan Georg Forchhammer, and Christopher Puggaard, and discuss how their changing theories correspond with paintings of the cliffs by four artists: Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, Frederik Sødring, Louis Gurlitt, and Peter Christian Skovgaard.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document