The Other/Foreign

The representation of Jews as foreigners or strangers—or simply the Other—constitutes the oldest stereotype on which all antisemitic stereotypes and other concepts are built. While many different groups and peoples have been and are conceptualised as “the other,” Jews and Judaism can be understood as “the paradigmatic other.” The movement of Jewish groups and the formation of the Jewish diaspora created a dynamic where Jews often lived in close proximity to other groups while retaining their own ethnic, cultural and religious identity. This made Jews a common object for practices of in- and out-group identity formation across centuries. Indeed, the twin questions of Jewish “belonging” and “otherness” are deeply woven through the political, cultural and philosophical history of Western and/or Christian societies. They lie at the root of a long tradition of “anti-Judaism,” in which different people in different contexts used the image of “the Jew” to think about and describe the present, to engage and transform their understanding of the past, and to reshape visions of the future. The idea of “the Jew” here is used again and again throughout history as a limit point, the line beyond which one community, history, belief system and understanding of the world, reaches its end—and another, one entirely alien and foreign, begins.