Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
from BOOK REVIEWS
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Summary
Sander Gilman, an authority on both German literature and medical history, has already published several important studies of stereotyping, most recently Difference and Pathology (1985). Stereotypes are not based on objective perceptions of social groups: ‘the very concept of color is a quality of Otherness, not of reality’ (p. 6). Instead, they belong to systems of representations which are distorted by the power-group's desire to withhold cultural authority and political power from the encroaching Other. In this book Gilman moves into new territory by discussing the reactions of a minority group, the German Jews, to the stereotyping applied to it by the majority. The first substantial study of Jewish selfhatred, this supersedes everything previously written on the topic.
The introduction explains with remarkable clarity the complex generation of self-hatred. The power-group is always divided, since it claims that whoever satisfies its criteria may join its ranks, yet preserves its identity by defining those criteria so elusively that outsiders can never fully satisfy them. Unable to admit that the power-group they long to join is flawed by contradiction, the outsiders introject this division, and thus place themselves in a double bind. To join the power-group, outsiders must accept its values. But this means admitting that their own distinctive qualities must always exclude them from the power-group.
The immutable qualities of German Jews were thought to include linguistic distinctiveness. Since Jews in the Diaspora were normally bilingual, their peculiar languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, always aroused suspicion. ‘Jewish books’ were publicly burnt in 1244 as well as in 1933. After the eighteenth century's elevation of language as the most intimate expression of national identity, Jews were thought incapable of mastering German without somehow contaminating it by their ‘hidden language’. Gilman's ample documentation justifies him in making this concept central to his analysis of self-hatred, though his concentration on written texts prevents him from considering other aspects of language, such as intonation, gesture, and facial expression, which were supposed to distinguish the Jew.
The immutable qualities of German Jews were thought to include linguistic distinctiveness. Since Jews in the Diaspora were normally bilingual, their peculiar languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, always aroused suspicion. ‘Jewish books’ were publicly burnt in 1244 as well as in 1933.
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- Jews and the Emerging Polish State (Polin Volume Two) , pp. 453 - 456Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008