THE LIBERAL FRIEND, REPRESENTATIONS OF JEWISHNESS AND JEWS IN BORGES’ TEXTS

Abstract

The following article intends to inquire about the way in which the ethinicist imaginary, in relation to representations of Jewishness, is incorporated and naturalized in the works of Jorge L. Borges, author associated with the liberal wing of the Argentinean literary field (which endorsed the flags of cosmopolitanism and, particularly, of philo-Semitism). Specifically, we will study how Jewishness is dealt with (characters from that origin or topics related to that ethnic group), in texts produced by Borges towards 1949 and 1967, and we will examine how the anti-Semitic ideology is reproduced by the writer. On the basis of the theoretical definitions of Van Dijk and Bordieu in relation to substantialist thinking, to common sense and to racism of the symbolic elite, we wish to investigate how certain stereotypes become crystallized to such an extent in the social ideology, that they turn to be reference frameworks even for authors that openly reject them. To a large extent, this endeavor aims to the need to strip down the mechanisms of naturalization used by authors to include elaborations of common sense that are materialized both on narrative and linguistic levels.