Meaning of allosemitism | Babel Free

Definitions

The belief or attitude that Jewish people are significantly different from the mainstream and should therefore be treated differently.

uncountable

Examples

“I suggest⟳ that the allosemitism endemic to western Civilization is to a decisive extent the legacy of Christendom. The Christian Church's struggle⟳ with the inassimilable, yet indispensable modality of the Jews bequeathed to later ages two factors crucial to the emergence and self-perpetuation of allosemitism.”

“While it may not be entirely accurate to call⟳ these phrases 'anti-Jewish tinged gibes', as the Jewish Telegraph reporter did, they are nonetheless characterised by allosemitism's construction of Jewish difference.”

“As a result⟳ of the latter prejudice, some integrationists developed an internal antisemitism or, perhaps, allosemitism, whereby an acculturated Jew looked at a traditional Jew and began to scorn him for being Other.”

“But what we have⟳ learned from Taguieff and many others about the new antisemitism, seems to temper Bauman's optimistic perspective: it is indeed rather difficult to state today that allosemitism has lost any validity.”

“The great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism both fall⟳ under “allosemitism”: literally Othering the Jew. He defined it not as resentment of what is different, which is xenophobia, but rather of what defies order⟳ and clear categories. In 1997, he wrote, “The Jew is ambivalence incarnate. And ambivalence is ambivalence mostly because it cannot be contemplated without ambivalent feeling: it is simultaneously attractive and repelling.””

CEFR level