In historical analysis, biblical criticism and comparative mythology/religion, parallelomania has been used to refer to a phenomenon (mania) where authors perceive apparent similarities and construct parallels and analogies without historical basis.
In historical analysis, biblical criticism and comparative mythology/religion, parallelomania has been used to refer to a phenomenon (mania) where authors perceive apparent similarities and construct parallels and analogies without historical basis.
The concept was introduced to scholarly circles in 1961 by Rabbi Samuel Sandmel (1911–1979) of the Hebrew Union College in a paper of the same title, where he stated that he had first encountered the term in a French book of 1830, but did not recall the author or the title. Sandmel stated that the simple observations of similarity between historical events are often less than valid, but at times lead to a phenomenon where an author first notices a supposed similarity, overdoses on analogy, and then "proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying a literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction". Martin McNamara, MSC (Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy) stated that Sandmel's initial paper has proven to be "highly influential".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).