ROMS 4230 - [Perspectives in Intellectual History: Modernity, Cataclysm and the Jews (1880-1930)]

(crosslisted) GERST 4231, HIST 4232, JWST 4230
(CA-AS)

Spring. Next offered 2016-2017. 4 credits.

Co-meets with GERST 6231/HIST 6232/JWST 6230/ROMS 6230.

E. Traverso.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the second World War, the Jewish intellectual appears as a new figure of European societies, quickly becoming a major actor in public spheres. During those years, the Jewish intellectual becomes a privileged object of investigations, definitions and fantasies – including anti-Semitic stereotypes – for literature and popular culture, sociology and medicine or law, deeply shaping national mentalities and imagination. A considerable iconography, from painting to political propaganda and illustrated magazines, sketches his real or invented profile. As an incarnation of urbanity, mobility, extraterritoriality, textuality and rational thought, the Jewish intellectual turns out to be a mirror of modernity, eliciting a strong conservative rejection. Lasting from the Dreyfus Affair to the Nazi burning of books in 1933, and focusing on three national contexts – France, Germany and Italy – the course tries to explore the history of this collective representation through its multiple expressions, both textual and visual.