ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author cites examples illustrating the attitude to foreigners in earlier cultures. She quotes texts from various religious mythologies indicating how the religions, most especially the monotheisms, saw foreigners. The perspective of the foreigner himself is most clearly shown in the albeit brief example of Moses. Grimms’ fairy tales, products of the collective unconscious of the nineteenth century, reveal the cultural complexes of the times concerning foreigners – most especially heroic foreigners, and on the negative side, the irredeemable evil stepmothers and Jews. Both religious leaders and adventurers have historically been foreign, the former in the sense of representing new and different beliefs, norms and ways of being, the latter in the sense of being foreigners in the countries they travelled to. Despite the frequency of the motif of the voyage in literature from the earliest times on, descriptions of the inner world of the foreigner have most often been neglected. This changes radically in the twentieth century.
