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Difference of a Different Kind

Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century
  • Iris Idelson-Shein
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2014
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About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Iris Idelson-Shein Iris Idelson-Shein is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Reviews

"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." --- "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." --- "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."

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    vii
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    Note on translations and transliteration

    ix
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    Introduction

    1
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    Chapter 1. An East Indian Encounter

    13
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    Chapter 2. “And Let Him Speak”

    55
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    Chapter 3. Whitewashing Jewish Darkness

    108
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    Chapter 4. Fantasies of Acculturation

    151
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    Epilogue. A Terrible Tale

    179
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    Notes

    185
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    Bibliography

    229
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    Index

    259
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    Acknowledgments

    265

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
April 2, 2014
eBook ISBN:
9780812209709
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
280
https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812209709
eBook ISBN: 9780812209709
Keywords for this book
Religion; History; Jewish Studies; Religious Studies; European History; World History
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
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