On Monday, 10th of December, SICSA held a research seminar titled The Jew's Daughter: Beyond Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism.
The event was chaird by SICSA's director, Prof. Manuela Consonni, and featured a lecture by Prof. Efraim Sicher of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
The lecture discussed the narrative of the "Jew's Daughter" in west European culture, from the Ballad of Little Hugh (based on a twelfth-century blood libel) through The Merchant of Venice and Lessing's Nathan the Wise to Wonder Woman in the twenty-first century. This narrative, as was shown in the lecture, is based on a binary structure of gender relations (wicked ugly Jew / beautiful desirable daughter) which has been used in discourses of exclusion and emancipation in a number of historical contexts.
In going beyond the conventional definitions of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, we can see parallels between misogyny and hatred of Jews in the gendering of the Other. Thus, a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society is created.
