Imago Dei and Peoplehood: Comparative Rhetorics of Racialization in Orthodox and Jewish Public Discourse
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Abstract
This article examines how sacred vocabularies from Orthodox Christianity and Judaism function in racialised public discourse in Poland and Ukraine between 2020 and 2025. It asks how terms such as imago Dei/tselem Elohim, neighbour-love and chesed, holiness/purity, suffering/martyrdom, and exile/return are mobilised across pulpit, policy, and platform communication. Drawing on a corpus of 23 publicly available texts, the study applies comparative rhetorical discourse analysis informed by Burke’s concepts of identification and logology and Pernot’s account of the religious dimension of rhetoric, alongside a coding scheme focused on topoi, metaphors, frames, appeals, and boundary work. The findings show convergences in dignity claims, memorial warning, and care rhetoric under conditions of war and displacement but also clear divergences: Jewish discourse more often mobilises peoplehood as a rhetoric of continuity and communal protection, whereas Orthodox discourse more often ties sacred language to national-historical self-location, ecclesial autonomy, and opposition to russkii mir (“Russian world”). Across the retained corpus, dog-whistle-like discourse appears mainly as an object of quotation or denunciation, while explicit counter-speech is widespread. The article concludes that sacred language remains an active rhetorical resource for defining dignity, injury, solidarity, and belonging, although its function varies across arenas, traditions, and the corpus’s asymmetries.
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This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
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17(6)
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687
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Imago Dei and Peoplehood: Comparative Rhetorics of Racialization in Orthodox and Jewish Public Discourse. 2026: 687. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.3390/rel17060687
