Difference of a Different Kind

Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century

Inbunden, Engelska, 2014

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European Jews, argues Iris Idelson-Shein, occupied a particular place in the development of modern racial discourse during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Simultaneously inhabitants and outsiders in Europe, considered both foreign and familiar, Jews adopted a complex perspective on otherness and race. Often themselves the objects of anthropological scrutiny, they internalized, adapted, and revised the emerging discourse of racial difference to meet their own ends.Difference of a Different Kind explores Jewish perceptions and representations of otherness during the formative period in the history of racial thought. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including philosophical and scientific works, halakhic literature, and folktales, Idelson-Shein unfolds the myriad ways in which eighteenth-century Jews imagined the "exotic Other" and how the evolving discourse of racial difference played into the construction of their own identities. Difference of a Different Kind offers an invaluable view into the ways new religious, cultural, and racial identities were imagined and formed at the outset of modernity.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2014-05-01
Mått152 x 229 x 28 mm
Vikt621 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieJewish Culture and Contexts
Antal sidor280
FörlagUniversity of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN9780812246094

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Note on Translations and TransliterationsIntroduction1 An East Indian Encounter: Rape and Infanticide in the Memoirs of Glikl Bas Leib2 "And Let him Speak": Noble and Ignoble Savages in Yehudah Horowitz's Amudey beyt Yehudah3 Whitewashing Jewish Darkness: Baruch Lindau and the "Species" of Man4 Fantasies of Acculturation: Campe's Savages in the Service of the HaskalahEpilogue. A Terrible Tale: Some Final Thoughts on Jews and RaceNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments

"A welcome addition. . . . This book focuses on the Jewish attitude toward race as it evolved in the so-called long eighteenth century, mostly during the Jewish Enlightenment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." (American Historical Review) "Iris Idelson-Shein gives us a window into a far richer and much more dynamic interplay between the Jewish and the non-Jewish world than what one finds in most scholarship on the Haskalah. She contextualizes her readings with exemplary rigor, breadth, and elegance. Idelson-Shein's prose truly sparkles, and each of the chapters is a sheer pleasure to read, full of narrative drive, stylistic sophistication, and conceptual subtlety. Difference of a Different Kind is a powerful book that delivers an original argument in a lucid and elegant manner." (Jonathan Hess, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) "A substantial and well-researched study of the complexities of racial thinking in the European Jewish Enlightenment. Iris Idelson-Shein covers an extraordinary range of topics: rape, infanticide, the savage, hirsute peoples, miscegenation, children's books, issues of translation, and the formation of scientific racism." (Felicity Nussbaum, University of California, Los Angeles)