Attraversare la società: ebrei “erranti” e panico categoriale

My aim in this paper is to reconceptualize the Jew’s ‘wandering” as the crossing of borders which are not exclusively, or even mainly, spatial, but above all social, and to highlight its deeply anxiety-provoking effect on mainstream Christian society. For the antisemite, the Jews’ ability to cross social boundaries is their chief transgression, and the one which triggers the antisemitic repression in all its violence. The real nature of this transgression, and the real stakes in this form of ‘wandering’, can be illuminated through Harvey Sacks’s Membership Categorization Analysis, a methodology of formal analysis of the logical properties of social categories, and through two related theoretical concepts which are here introduced for the first time: categorial scandal and categorial panic.