Literary notes about Gentile (AI summary)
The term “gentile” has been used in literature in a variety of nuanced ways, often serving as a marker for cultural or religious otherness. In historical and religious texts, authors use it to distinguish non-Jewish practices and beliefs from those of ancient Jewish tradition, as seen in the works of Josephus and Hobbes [1][2][3]. In narrative and poetic literature, the word sometimes creates a contrast between different societal groups or highlights an outsider status, exemplified in texts like Scott’s Ivanhoe and Joyce’s Ulysses [4][5][6][7]. Meanwhile, in works that lean more towards allegory or satire, “gentile” may carry symbolic or even ironic implications, bridging the mundane with the exotic, as in the case of Boccaccio and Rabelais [8][9][10]. Overall, the diverse applications of “gentile” across these texts underscore its role as a flexible term that both delineates and enriches cultural identities in literature [11][12].
- Nor certainly ought ancient Jewish emblems to be explained any other way than according to ancient Jewish, and not Gentile, notions.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus - He was also the author, not of any ancient Jewish, but of the first Gentile heresies, as the forementioned authors assure us.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus - For therein is the righteousnesse of God revealed from faith to faith;" from the faith of the Jew, to the faith of the Gentile.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes - Our harps we left by Babel's streams, The tyrant's jest, the Gentile's scorn; No censer round our altar beams, And mute our timbrel, trump, and horn.
— from Ivanhoe: A Romance by Walter Scott - “Father Abraham!” said Isaac of York, when the first course was run betwixt the Templar and the Disinherited Knight, “how fiercely that Gentile rides!
— from Ivanhoe: A Romance by Walter Scott - —A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not? —They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce - Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce - At the end of the Novelle of Gentile Sermini of Siena, there is a chapter called Il Giuoco della pugna, the Game of Battle.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais - Messer Gentile de' Carisendi, coming from Modona, taketh forth of the sepulchre a lady whom he loveth and who hath been buried for dead.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio - Another asked her if the child was hers and a third if she were Messer Gentile's wife or anywise akin to him; but she made them no reply.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio - Further, I believe that God hath made a testament which maybe called "old" with every people and nation,—Gentile or Jew, Christian or Heathen.
— from Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe - On the stage and in music alone can the Jews be said to have proved absolutely the equals of their Gentile competitors.
— from Secret societies and subversive movements by Nesta Helen Webster
