Abstract
Historians have generally depicted antisemitism as a reactionary movement that emerged as a rejection of liberalism. In their political goals, antisemites certainly sought bring an end to the core features of liberal life: religious toleration, equality before the law, social mobility, and the economic tumult produced by decades of free-market capitalism. This historiographical essay seeks to add nuance to the question by looking at the movement from the point of view of Europe’s periphery, particularly Romania and Algeria, where antisemitism emerged as part of the transition to democracy and was very much aligned to the liberal movement. In so doing, it ultimately suggests that antisemitism could be more “liberal” than we have tended to assume.
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Notes
- 1.
By antisemitism I refer not to anti-Jewish prejudice in general, but rather to the late-nineteenth-century political mass movement aimed at limiting Jews’ newly won political rights, social integration, and economic activities.
- 2.
Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism, chap. 2. Before Pulzer, Paul Massing described the German antisemitic movement as a clerico-conservative alliance against the German Liberal party in Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
- 3.
Birnbaum. “La France aux français”; Katz, “The Preparatory Stage of the Modern Antisemitic Movement (1873–1879),” in Almog, ed., Antisemitism through the Ages, 279–90; Levy, The Downfall of the Antisemitic Political Parties; Parkes, Antisemitism; Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français; Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools.
- 4.
Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, xix.
- 5.
Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left. For another take on the diversity of antisemitic views, see Engel, “Away from a History of Antisemitism,” 30–53.
- 6.
See, for example, Sternhell, Maurice Barrès, also Pulzer, Rise; Birnbaum, La France aux français; Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair; Wilson, Ideology and Experience. and Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology.
- 7.
Levy, Downfall; for an excellent statement of the problem, see Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 432.
- 8.
Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Pitts, A Turn to Empire; Pateman, The Sexual Contract, and Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History.
- 9.
Bell, Reordering the World; Gunn and Vernon, eds., The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity.
- 10.
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment; Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. On antisemitism and the Enlightenment, see, e.g., Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews. One exception to this is Katz, who includes a short chapter called “The Liberal Ambiguity,” which focuses on the antisemitism of French thinkers Jules Michelet and Ernest Renan in From Prejudice to Destruction, 129–138.
- 11.
Bell, “What is Liberalism?” In Reordering the World, 64.
- 12.
Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries.
- 13.
James P. Krokar, Review of Judson, Pieter M., Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. HAPSBURG: H-Net Reviews. April, 1999. Accessed online at https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2973
- 14.
On other aspects of this paradox, see Jianu, Circle of Friends, 358.
- 15.
Jianu, Circle of Friends, 3–12.
- 16.
Cohen, “The Jewish Question during the Period of the Romanian National Renaissance,” in Fischer-Galati, Florescu, and Ursal, eds. Romania between East and West, 205, and Iancu, Jews in Romania 1866–1919, 9.
- 17.
Iancu, Jews in Romania and Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 183–8.
- 18.
See for example Cohen, “The Jewish Question.”
- 19.
Iancu (Jews in Romania, 40) contends that these anti-Jewish protests were in fact orchestrated by Brătianu.
- 20.
Green, Moses Montefiore, 344.
- 21.
Andreas Pfuetzner, “The Romanian-Jewish Question.”
- 22.
Brown, “The Adaptation of a Western Political Theory,” in Fischer-Galati, Florescu, and Ursal, eds. Romania between East and West, 270.
- 23.
Jianu, A Circle of Friends, 358.
- 24.
Iancu, Jews in Romania, 70–1; Pfuetzner, “The Romanian-Jewish Question.”
- 25.
Iancu, Jews in Romania, 89–94.
- 26.
From the liberal newspaper Romania Libera of 11 June 1879, as cited in Iancu, Jews in Romania, 104.
- 27.
July 29, 1879 article from the Telegraful, as cited in Iancu, Jews in Romania, 104.
- 28.
For more on the history of the campaign and its aftermath, see Duhaut, “The Europeanisation of French Jews.”
- 29.
Brown, “Adaptation,” 270. On Western European liberals’ turn away from free trade, see Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV.
- 30.
Mishkova, “Forms without Substance,” in Daskalov and Mishkova, eds. Entangled Histories of the Balkans. Vol. 2, 16–37.
- 31.
For a useful comparison, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, and The Nation and Its Fragments.
- 32.
On the Marseillaise antijuive, see Zack, “Who Fought the Algerian War?,” 55–97; for this quotation from Régis, see Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 104.
- 33.
Ageron, Modern Algeria, 47–63.
- 34.
Dermenjian, La Crise antijuive oranaise (1895–1905), 21.
- 35.
Sivan, “Stéréotypes antijuifs dans la mentalité pied-noir,” in Les Relations entre juifs et musulmans en Afrique du Nord, XIXe-XXe siècles, 169.
- 36.
Szajkowski, “Socialists and Radicals,” 257–80.
- 37.
Cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 231.
- 38.
See Zack, “Algeria,” in Levy, ed., Antisemitism, 10.
- 39.
David Prochaska shows how this worked in the municipality of Bône but it is equally true of other towns. See Making Algeria French. On salaries, see Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 231.
- 40.
Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 32–39.
- 41.
Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise.
- 42.
Zack, “French and Algerian Identity Formation,” 122–3.
- 43.
Both Lizabeth Zack (in “Who Fought the Algerian War?”) and Sophie Roberts (in Citizenship and Antisemitism) warn against reading Régis’s separatism as anti-republican; if anything, he and his followers were resisting French central authority by declaring their right to self-determination in decidedly republican terms.
- 44.
See Zack, “French and Algerian Identity Formation” and “Who Fought the Algerian War?”
- 45.
Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 80–110.
- 46.
Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise, 136–7.
- 47.
Godley, “Almost Finished Frenchmen,” 235–6.
- 48.
Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise, 134–5 and Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism, 68.
- 49.
Dermenjian, Crise antijuive oranaise, 90.
- 50.
Godley, “Almost-Finished Frenchmen,” 231. For comparison to West Africa, see Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, and Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State.
- 51.
This point is made beautifully by Judson, “Rethinking the Liberal Legacy,” in Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900, 65–9.
- 52.
Judson, “Rethinking,” p. 67.
- 53.
Mishkova, “Forms without Substance,” in Daskalov and Mishkova, eds. Entangled Histories of the Balkans. Vol. 2, 1–98.
- 54.
Jones, Politics and Rural Society.
- 55.
Pulzer notes the importance of such factors in the rise of antisemitism in Germany and Austria in Rise of Political Antisemitism. On Panama, see Mollier, Le Scandale de Panama.
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Leff, L.M. (2020). Liberalism and Antisemitism: A Reassessment from the Peripheries. In: Green, A., Levis Sullam, S. (eds) Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_2
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