Representation of Jews and Anti-Jewish Bias in 19th Century French Public Discourse: Distant and Close Reading

Abstract

We explore through the lens of distant reading the evolution of discourse on Jews in France during the XIX century. We analyze a large textual corpus including heterogeneous sources—literary works, periodicals, songs, essays, historical narratives—to trace how Jews are associated to different semantic domains, and how such associations shift over time. Our analysis deals with three key aspects of such changes: the overall transformation of embedding spaces, the trajectories of word associations, and the comparative projection of different religious groups over different, historically relevant semantic dimensions or streams of discourse. This allows to show changes in the association between words and semantic domains (referring e.g. to economic and moral behaviors), the evolution of stereotypes, and the dynamics of bias over a long time span characterized by major historical transformations. We suggest that the analysis of large textual corpora can be fruitfully used in a dialogue with more traditional close reading approaches—by pointing to opportunities of in-depth analyses that mobilize more qualitative approaches and a detailed inspection of the sources that distant reading inevitably tends to aggregate. We offer a short example of such a dialogue between different approaches in our discussion of the Second Empire transformations, where we mobilize the historian’s tools to start disentangling the complex interactions between changes in French society, the nature of sources, and representations of Jews. While our example is limited in scope, we foresee large potential payoffs in the cooperative interaction between distant and close reading.

Literary Intertextual Semantic Change Detection: Application and Motivation for Evaluating Models on Small Corpora

“…Nevertheless, this intersection has previously been hinted at as a direction for future work by authors working in the field of semantic change detection (Tahmasebi and Risse, 2017;Kutuzov et al, 2018;Tahmasebi et al, 2021), and there is other prior work at this intersection. Semantic change detection has been used to track semantic innovation in abolitionist newspapers (Soni et al, 2021), investigate a debate about compositional shifts in a single authored series of Danish historical works (Nielbo et al, 2019), study evolving representations and stereotypes of Jewish people in 19th century France (Sullam et al, 2022), track the transformation of tropes in a large curated corpus of German poetry (Haider and Eger, 2019), and attempt to model character relations in the Harry Potter series (Volpetti et al, 2020;.…”

Measuring Intersectional Biases in Historical Documents

“…Analyses of historical biases and stereotypes, in particular, can shed light on past * Equal contribution. societal dynamics and circumstances (Levis Sullam et al, 2022) and link them to contemporary challenges and biases prevalent in modern societies (Payne et al, 2019). For instance, Payne et al ( 2019) consider implicit bias as the cognitive residue of past and present structural inequalities and highlight the critical role of history in shaping modern forms of prejudice.…”

“…Thus far, previous research on bias in historical documents focused either on gender (Rios et al, 2020;Wevers, 2019) or ethnic biases (Levis Sullam et al, 2022). While Garg et al (2018) separately analyse both, their work does not engage with their intersection.…”