Nineteenth Century
Following legislation supporting the equality of French Jews with other citizens during the French Revolution, similar laws promoting Jewish emancipation were enacted in the early 19th century in those parts of Europe over which France had influence. The old laws restricting them to ghettos, as well as the many laws that limited their property rights, rights of worship and occupation, were rescinded.
Despite this, traditional discrimination and hostility to Jews on religious grounds persisted and was supplemented by racial antisemitism, encouraged by the work of racial theorists such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and particularly his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race of 1853–5. Nationalist agendas based on ethnicity, known as ethnonationalism, usually excluded the Jews from the national community as an alien race. Allied to this were theories of Social Darwinism, which stressed a putative conflict between higher and lower races of human beings. Such theories, usually posited by white Europeans, advocated the superiority of white Aryans to Semitic Jews.
Read more about this topic: History Of Antisemitism
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents.... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority, that the nineteenth century is infatuated with was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)