Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews

‘TOLERANCE and Intolerance’ was the theme of a conference in 1996 organised at the University of Southampton by the Parkes Centre for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. This volume is in large part the fruit of that encounter (although some of the papers have been recycled in the interim). In keeping with the aims of the Parkes Centre, most of the contributors address the theme in relation to Jews and Judaism. This presumably is the justification for the inclusion of ‘semitism’ (either philo- or anti-) in the title to the volume. All the same, the impression of a mismatch between title and contents remains vivid, for only one of the fourteen papers has the locution ‘antisemitism’ in its title. The other noteworthy feature about the title is the enclosure of ‘the Jews’ in inverted commas. This follows the precedent of Brian Cheyette's Construction of the Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge U.P., 1993); note also Modernity, Culture and the Jew, ed. Brian Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Polity P., 1998). This enclosure of the Jew is presumably a typographical device to suggest that the Jews depicted here are only the Jews as seen in the distorted vision of the anti-Semite (or the philo-Semite, for that matter) and not the Jews of reality. In any event, although Jews are indeed present in this volume, the enclosure effectively relegates them to the status of a questionable entity, a shadowy form, an indistinct and largely inarticulate third party (for the few exceptions, see below). The Jews figure here as some sort of ‘other’, with which neither the anti- nor the philo- has much personal acquaintance, still less with the writings of that ‘other’. In these pages the Jew of flesh and blood, released from his inverted commas, rarely appears

Antisemitism · Art · Art history · Judaism · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Polity · Relation (database · Theme (computing · Theology · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · Classics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity · Religious studies