Customer Reviews

Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830 (Johns Hopkins Jewish Studies)

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Felsenstein has diligently done a large amount of research into the so-called long 18th century Britain, and how anti-semitic ideas were invidiously propagated in the writings and illustrations of the times. To a modern reader, Jewish or not, this can at times be uncomfortable. For we have seen in our era where such feelings have led, in Germany.

But keep in mind that in the period surveyed, there was not one pogrom in Britain. And perhaps as another mitigating factor, that Britain was rife with all sorts of stereotypes, ethnic, cultural, racial and sexual. When slavery, at least in the British colonies, was condoned as a natural order of things. And where women were denied such suffrage as existed for men (admittedly minimal), because of their supposed inabilities. Set against this, the book's examples are scarcely unique in their invidiousness.