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