# Tracing Antisemitic Language Through Diachronic Embedding Projections: France 1789-1914

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01440 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01440/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11410/) (2021)
- [Fair and Argumentative Language Modeling for Computational Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04026/) (2022)
- [Diachronic Analysis of German Parliamentary Proceedings: Ideological Shifts through the Lens of Political Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06295/) (2021)
- [Divine LLaMAs: Bias, Stereotypes, Stigmatization, and Emotion Representation of Religion in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06908/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuned LLMs are "Time Capsules" for Tracking Societal Bias Through Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05331/) (2025)
- [Computational modeling of semantic change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06337/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Detection of Contextualized Embedding Bias with Application to Ideology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07547/) (2022)
- [A Group-Specific Approach to NLP for Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11223/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models for Antisemitic Incident Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04890/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We investigate some aspects of the history of antisemitism in France, one of the cradles of modern antisemitism, using diachronic word embeddings. We constructed a large corpus of French books and periodicals issues that contain a keyword related to Jews and performed a diachronic word embedding over the 1789-1914 period. We studied the changes over time in the semantic spaces of 4 target words and performed embedding projections over 6 streams of antisemitic discourse. This allowed us to track the evolution of antisemitic bias in the religious, economic, socio-politic, racial, ethic and conspiratorial domains. Projections show a trend of growing antisemitism, especially in the years starting in the mid-80s and culminating in the Dreyfus affair. Our analysis also allows us to highlight the peculiar adverse bias towards Judaism in the broader context of other religions.