A history of Chinese perceptions of 'Jews' and Judaism
While prejudice against Jews has been regarded as a real and ongoing category in Western culture, little attention has been paid to the myths of the 'Jews' and their impact in countries outside the West. My work draws on a wide variety of source material from the past two centuries to examine the images of the 'Jews' as constructed in China. However, my interest here does not lie in the determination of the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it lies in the implications associated with the 'Jew' as an 'other', which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the 'self ' amongst various social groups in modern China. In China, representations of the 'Jews' and Judaism are very complex. Although these representations seem to correspond to images of the 'Jews' in Europe, it would be superficial to reduce them to purely 'Western influence'. Representations of the 'Jews' have been endowed with indigenous meaning by modernizing elites since the late nineteenth-century. Unlike anti-Semites of Europe who used the language of Jews as the mark of their inferiority, in China the difference of the 'Jews' has been marked by their 'non-Chineseness'. By creating the 'Jews' as a homogenous
Zhou, Xun
Philosophy
A history of Chinese perceptions of 'Jews' and Judaism. While prejudice against Jews has been regarded as a real and ongoing category in Western culture, little attention has been paid to the myths of the 'Jews' and their impact in countries outside the West. My work draws on a wide variety of source material from the past two centuries to examine the images of the 'Jews' as constructed in China. However, my interest here does not lie in the determination of the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it lies in the implications associated with the 'Jew' as an 'other', which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the 'self ' amongst various social groups in modern China. In China, representations of the 'Jews' and Judaism are very complex. Although these representations seem to correspond to images of the 'Jews' in Europe, it would be superficial to reduce them to purely 'Western influence'. Representations of the 'Jews' have been endowed with indigenous meaning by modernizing elites since the late nineteenth-century. Unlike anti-Semites of Europe who used the language of Jews as the mark of their inferiority, in China the difference of the 'Jews' has been marked by their 'non-Chineseness'. By creating the 'Jews' as a homogenous
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