Frontiers of hate: Anti-Semitism, empire, and the novel in nineteenth-century France

This dissertation uncovers sites of articulation between late nineteenth-century French anti-Semitism and imperialism. The wave of anti-Semitism that gripped France in the 1880s and 90s coincided with one of the most feverish periods of colonial expansion in the nation\u27s history. Yet despite the repeated engagement by anti-Semitic figures with colonial questions, little attention has been paid to the complicated causeways between these two phenomena. The dissertation addresses this lacuna, drawing on a body of newspapers, treatises, and novels to argue that French anti-Semitism and imperialism shaped each other in profound ways. Noting the contribution of novels both canonical and non-canonical to the association of Jews with empire in the French imaginary, the dissertation documents how the imperial frontier spawned a narrative frontier that helped metropolitan anti-Semitism adopt its modern racial and economic guise. It also considers how, at the end of the century, the imperial project afforded radical anti-Semitism a discursive theatre in which to resolve its own contradictions. The dissertation traces, for instance, how the imperial periphery was constructed by anti-Semites into a place where anti-Semitic rhetoric against “Jewish” capitalism might usefully be reconciled with anti-Semites\u27 ideological implication in the modern capitalist order. It suggests that, in turn, French anti-Semitism shifted the discursive parameters of the imperialist project itself. Mapping this ideological feedback loop, the dissertation argues that the novel form offered a particularly suitable medium for readers and authors alike to negotiate the complex convergences between the politics of anti-Semitism and of empire. The novel afforded radical anti-Semites an opportunity to explore in depth the ideological possibilities of empire for anti-Semitism without committing them, in a more politically overt way, to a governmental project of empire they initially decried. More casual anti-Semites, for their part, could find in novels addressing anti-Semitism and empire a venue for sublimating their anti-Semitic impulses. This indulgence of popular anti-Semitic fantasies, the dissertation concludes, contributed to the increasing ideological hegemony of empire. It also hastened metropolitan anti-Semitism\u27s turn-of-the-century political swoon by deferring onto the colonies anti-Semitic sentiments the French were not fully prepared to act on at home