Good Jew, Bad Jew: An Essay of Ethnic Imagology
Good Jew, Bad Jew: An Essay of Ethnic Imagology
Author(s): Andrei OişteanuSubject(s): Jewish studies
Published by: The Goldstein Goren Center for Hebrew Studies
Keywords: “The Good Jew” vs. “the Bad Yid”; Corneliu Vadim Tudor; “A Jew; Yet a Good Romanian”; Nae Ionescu; “He Is a Good Man; Although he’s a Yid”; “A Jew Is Still a Jew”; “Some of My Best Friends are Jews”; “If All Jews Were Like You …”; “Not all Jews are bad”;
Summary/Abstract: Chauvinists have a macabre saying: “A good Jew is a dead Jew.” To other people (Gustav Freyteg, for instance, in the novel Soll und Haben, 1855), the “good Jew” is whoever integrates himself into the “host society” to the point of disappearance, while a “bad Jew” is whoever refuses to be assimilated. Paradoxically, he who ceases being a Jew becomes a “good Jew.” This is one of the “themes” of the European Enlightenment and a usual subject for certain nineteenth-century German authors such as Felix Dahn, Gustav Freytag, Julius von Eckardt, and others.
Journal: Studia Hebraica
- Issue Year: 2004
- Issue No: 4
- Page Range: 44-54
- Page Count: 11
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF