Andrei Dan Sorescu1; 1 New Europe College Institute of Advance Studies, Romania
Discussion
The present paper aims to chart the ways in which nineteenth-century Romanian xenophobic discourse imagined analogies, connections, and overlaps between two foundational categories of foreign Other: “Phanariot” Greeks and Jews. In so doing, it shall unpack the temporal politics that accompanied the two processes of Othering. On the one hand, the Phanariotes were insistently presumed to have become a “past” menace as of 1821, yet also continued to haunt the nation through a legacy of “corruption”; on the other hand, the more recent concern with the emergence of a “Jewish Question” came with anxieties over a seemingly-imminent takeover of the nation by an even more dangerously “corrupting” Other in the present. By examining a broad variety of sources, the paper will consider how the imagological arsenal of rising antisemitism borrowed not a few cues from that of Hellenophobia, and how comparisons drawn between allogenous antagonists actively shaped both xenophobias.
