Cultural Study, Doxa, Dictionaries: The Case of Jewish Identity

This essay is a contribution to the theory as well as to the critical analysis of doxa. Analyzing French dictionaries of the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, it shows how they organize, transform, and develop dominant reprensentations of Jewish identity. It thus studies doxa across historical, cultural, and ideological issues in discourse and more specifically discourse endowed with a legitimizing power and a pedagogical vocation. One of the objectives of this study is to show that the neutrality of dictionary is only apparent: self-evidence is a cultural construction that escapes the subjects' awareness. The analysis as a whole is based on a fundamental distinction between the (dominant) exogenous and (dominated)endogenous perspectives.