Etnoantropološki Problemi (Dec 2022)
The Image of the Jews in the Travel Book Orient by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Abstract
In this article we study the image of the Jewish people in Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's travel book Orient. The book describes the author’s journey from France to the Orient, more specifically Istanbul, in 1907. The first descriptions of the Jews already appear in the first text of the book, in which the author depicts the small spa town of Vichy in France. The author describes different nationalities gathered in Vichy, remarking on its cosmopolitan atmosphere. In Vichy, he identifies a few Jewish nationals as paradigmatic characters - stereotyped visions of beautiful cocotte or good Rebecca/Miriam in the company of her husband, who is marked by greed and stinginess as racial characteristics, thus expressing his prejudiced views towards the Jews. Later on, on his journey to the East, Blasco Ibáñez spends two days in Serbia, leaving a testimony about the Serbian people, but also about an encounter with some Sephardic Jews in Belgrade. A similar meeting will take place in Istanbul, prompting the author to express his wish to continue writing about this nation in the future. In the travel book Orient, Blasko Ibáñez presents the Sephardim and discusses their language and nostalgic need to reconnect with Spain. Through the author’s presentation and selection of Sephardic attributes we can draw some conclusions about his personal attitude that preserves some Judeophobic elements We will start from Ibáñez's contradictory judgments about the Jews, expressed in several articles and literary works, and then, following the principles of imagology, we will examine how the image of the Jews, the Sephardim, is constructed within the cultural spaces of Belgrade and Istanbul. We will try to connect these images with the general panorama of the Jewish question and the frequently cited anti-Semitism in the work of Blas Ibáñez. We will pay special attention to Judeophobia, as well as the economic aspect of this problem.
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