Andrei Oisteanu
University of Nebraska Press, 2009
Foreword by Moshe Idel
Translated by Mirela Adascalitei
Inventing the Jew is a history of stereotyping “the other.” It begins with the image of the Jew in traditional Romanian and other Central-East European legends, fairy tales, ballads, carols, anecdotes, superstitions, and iconographic representations and it goes on to trace this composite portrait’s invasion of “high” cultural artifacts: fiction, literature, essays, journalism, and sociopolitical writing. Motifs specific to “folkloric anti-Semitism” migrated to “intellectual anti-Semitism.” Andrei Oisteanu carefully observes how the image of the Jew as stranger differs from representations of other “strangers”: Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks while noting the gap between the image of the imaginary Jew and the existence of the real Jew varied according to time and place. This work of cultural anthropology consist of five chapters that present physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magical, and religious portraits of “the Jew”—not all of them negative.
Andrei Oisteanu is a researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions in Bucharest, and associate professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Bucharest. He is the author of several books, including The Image of the Jew in Romanian Culture, Order and Chaos: Myth and Magic in Romanian Traditional Culture, andReligion, Politics, and Myth: Texts about Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu.
Praise for Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures
“This scrupulously researched study is a profound revelation of ‘the other’ in western culture. The ‘imaginary Jew,’ in its specifically Romanian and central-east-European incarnation, reverberates through all of Europe’s hellish myth-making, beginning in the first Christian century. The layering of stories and images has the effect of a masterful horror-film. Andrei Oisteanu’s book is an unflinching look at Europe’s darkest secret. It is therefore an indispensible text.”—Andrei Codrescu, MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University
“This book is erudite, richly documented and intelligently written. Though both a comprehensive and explicit analysis of so many themes concerning the images of the Jews, it is at the same time an implicit critique of an important component of Romanian culture. However, Andrei Oisteanu's book is above all a very courageous one.”—Moshe Idel, Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University in Jerusalem
“A profound and illuminating anthropological study, with many cultural, historical, social-political, and religious layers about an old-new topic. The image of the stranger says a lot about the stranger’s own history and psychology but perhaps even more so about his neighbor-observer. Between the fictionalized Jew and the real one rests an entire history of thousands of years. The author of this fascinating book offers a thorough, subtle, and lucid description and analysis of a certain location, but its meaning goes well beyond it.”—Norman Manea, Professor of European Literature and writer-in-residence at Bard College
