Category: Focus

ABSTRACT
Relations between Poles and Jews deteriorated significantly in the three decades leading up to World War I. Many reasons for this phenomenon can be given, for example: economic competition, a general atmosphere of acute nationalism, increased migration, perceived threats to traditional forms of life and religion. Exacerbating all of these factors, however, was the fact of Polish statelessness and the extreme sensitivity of Poles to perceived threats to their culture and nation. In particular within the Russian Empire, Poles perceived the very future of their nation at risk. In such circumstances the continued existence of Jewish cultural difference combined with the development of specifically Jewish forms of national awakening (e.g., the Bund and Zionism) were understood by many in Polish society as ingratitude and collaboration with the Russian occupier.

ABSTRACT
The study deals with the processes of transformation within political antisemitism in Hungary around 1900. It mainly investigates the extent to which the crisis of Hungarian political antisemitism in the early 1890s fostered antisemitic practice, namely, the social and economic boycott of rural Jews in particular through the establishment of cooperatives and credit unions. It is to be assumed that antisemitic practice was not restricted to a strictly antisemitic milieu, but propagated and executed by diverse anti-liberal actors such as political Catholicism, the agrarian lobby and the Slovak nationalists. The study illuminates antisemitic practice in the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary in the context of agrarian and nationality policies. In the rural parts of Upper Hungary this practise was accompanied by propaganda against “usury” as a way of legitimizing cooperatives and credit unions. The study will elaborate to what extent the Hungarian campaigns against the Jewish money-lenders united ethnically diverse, non-Jewish actors, such as Hungarian conservatives and Slovak nationalists.

ABSTRACT
The idea of having to liberate the Christian peasants from the harmful economic and moral influence of Jewish merchants was an essential element of the political agenda of both the secular intelligentsia and the Catholic clergy. Activists of both political camps started founding cooperative shops, which were seen as the most promising tool to “emancipate” the peasants and the founding of which became legally possible after a streak of reforms shortly before the Russian Revolution of 1905/06. The article thus poses the questions of what role antisemitism played in the cooperatives, what tasks these cooperatives were supposed to fulfill and whether they were a success or not. The article comes to the conclusion that after the Revolution, there was a significant dissent between the two groups mentioned: While priests argued that cooperatives needed to be antisemitic in order to be successful, the liberal intelligentsia countered that antisemitism deterred cooperative shops from being economically successful. Both groups, however, celebrated the founding of such shops as a means for Lithuanians to gain foot in the Jewish dominated towns.

ABSTRACT
Before the Croatian-Slavonian parliamentary elections in 1897, two oppositional parties formed the so called United Opposition which was backed by large segments of the clergy. Afraid, variously, of liberalism, the Hungarian church reforms, the ideas of social democracy and the demands for secularization, the United Opposition chose antisemitism as a political means. Supported by the Catholic paper (Katolički list) and its editor in chief Stjepan Korenić, who openly called for the clergy to organize politically, they blamed Jews for all the putative threats of the modern world. For the first time an election campaign in Croatia-Slavonia had open antisemitic traits. The author shows the impact of antisemitic ideas within some parts of the Croatian opposition since the 1880s, including political Catholicism and the United Opposition, down to the turn of the century. The paper considers in addition the role of the Catholic newspaper and the press in general in the antisemitic campaign in 1897, as well as in the distribution of antisemitic ideas in the 1880s and 1890s in the Habsburg crownland Croatia-Slavonia.

ABSTRACT
This article describes how it came to pass that the clerical milieu in Cracow deployed the concepts “antisemitism” and “Aryan people”, why Karl Lueger, accused of German nationalism, served as a bearer of hope, and how all of this came to a head in the call for an antisemitic movement in 1897. The reference to Vienna was not a mere copy of Viennese antisemitic ideas. Rather it made up one element in a larger strategy of the Cracovian Clericals to gain votes in the ballot box. Analyzing these strategies and rhetorics allows a better understanding of antisemitism in the Catholic milieu in particular and in antisemitic agitation in Galicia in general.

ABSTRACT
Whereas the Italian state constituted in 1861 was long considered to be a nation without antisemitism, recent studies have shown that the Catholic Church had in fact vigorously advocated antisemitic positions in liberal Italy and actively spread new accusations against Jews. In no other Italian city however did a more vehemently antisemitic political Catholicism develop than in Mantua. Following a brief recapitulation on how the Catholic Church in Italy had responded to the political, cultural and socio-economic challenges, the second section of this essay presents the news coverage of the Catholic paper “Il Cittadino di Mantova.” Founded in 1896, the first year’s issues will examine how the Catholic journalists in the city picked up and propagated the language of antisemitism. The third section moves the attention from language to politics analysing the antisemitic election campaign of the political catholicism in Mantua for the local elections of 1903. Attention is focused on identifying to what extent antisemitism had ‘arrived’ as a political movement in Italy.

ABSTRACT
In a case study, this article re-examines three key aspects of the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1905-1906 in Tsarist Russia: the concept of “Black Hundreds” as the major perpetrators, the question of whether state authorities approved pogrom violence, and finally, the significance of Jewish self-defence. Contemporary observers and subsequently modern scholars as well, interpreted the pogrom in the city of Zhitomir in April 1905 as a classic example of those three characteristics of the entire pogrom wave. However, a close examination suggests that the relevance of “Black hundred” instigators has been grossly overestimated and the ambivalent behaviour of the police and military forces can largely be attributed to structural conditions of their service, such as a lack of personnel, of resources and of competence. Zhitomir’s self defence unit is portrayed as a contentious generational, emotional, and political project which by its very nature as an instrument of socialist activists pursued more objectives than the mere prevention of anti-Jewish violence. Finally, misperceptions regarding the pogroms are explained by the predominance of the pogrom of Kishinev in 1903 as an interpretive template for the ensuing anti-Jewish riots. The article thus provides interpretations that may lead to a more complex picture of pogrom-style violence in the late Russian Empire.

ABSTRACT
At the beginning of April 1891 a Jewish girl was found murdered on the ground floor of a Jewish residence in Corfu. Rumours raged on the island: Was this about a love story or, with a stretch of imagination, a story about sex and crime? Or was this murder evidence of the culmination of a family drama which unfolded at the girl’s house, committed by her-supposedly-adoptive parents? Perhaps she was not Jewish, but Christian, and was murdered by the Jews in order for them to fulfil their religious needs? Upon discovery of the body the local police began spreading the rumour of ritual murder, while the first coroner’s report confirmed it. Local and Athenian newspapers spread it beyond the island’s community, while local politicians maintained it for their own political agenda. On the other hand, judicial authorities upheld the innocence of the Jews accused. Military forces sent by the government desired to protect the secluded Jewish district. Not only did the antisemitic sentiment go beyond the borders of the island, but it also led to the migration of a large portion of the most important Jewish community of the Ionian islands and to its final downfall wrought by the unheard of local violence, bringing death, injuries and material destruction.

ABSTRACT
Reflecting the achievements of comparative historical research, this paper tries to outline the new feature of European antisemitism since the late 19th century. Political antisemitism is presented as a protest movement against the modern society, and the new term antisemitism was immediately adopted into European languages. The Christian churches, too, shared in the making of antisemitism and its struggle against liberalism, capitalism and secularisation. Although only in a few European countries did specifically antisemitic parties take part in general elections, nearly all European antisemites shared fundamental antisemitic convictions. In conclusion the papers points to some methodological problems of researches on antisemitism, from the danger of isolating the object of study to the overestimation of the dimensions of antisemitism, given that antisemitic actions are more likely documented than forms of coexistence between Jews and Christians. Furthermore, it is argued that too little attention is given to the opposing forces against antisemitism, or to the integration of Jews into general society, or to the support, Jewish politicians received from non-Jewish voters, as may be demonstrated, for example by the German working class movement. The paper concludes with a remark that despite the radical agitation and even in the face of the acts of violence against Jews, the impact of political antisemitism remained limited until the First World War.