Beschreibung:
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<jats:italic>Ivanhoe</jats:italic>
(USA, 1952) is one of only a handful of historical films set in medieval Europe, and by far the most significant one, to include Jewish characters. This high-grossing film, ultimately derived from Walter Scott’s 1819 sprawling historical novel, was produced by Pandro Berman, a Jew with explicitly political goals. The film put Jews on to the imagined map of medieval Europe, the bedrock of heritage and identity for North Americans and Europeans, when Jews were not necessarily perceived as ‘belonging’ either in Europe or in European-dominated North America. This article explores how the film countered the anti-Semitism of the era by using the interfaith romances of the Jewess Rebecca (Elizabeth Taylor) to create desire for cross-cultural integration. The film stoked this desire over several decades through the star script of the extraordinarily desirable Taylor, whose conversion to Judaism in 1959 sutured her on- and off-screen bodies even closer together.
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