Roots of Hate: Popular Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust

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It is commonly accepted that the years 1879 to 1939 marked a high point anti-Semitism in Western societies. This project will address the following questions: What factors account for this wave of extraordinary anti-Semitism? Was the rise of anti- Semitism between 1879 and the Holocaust steady or uneven? Did popular anti-Semitism vary in content and intensity across societies? Did ordinary Germans embrace anti-Semitism in a way that ordinary Americans, British, French, Polish and Romanian citizens did not as has been suggested in a number of recent works on German anti-Semitism? How does anti-Semitism differ from other forms of religious, racial or ethnic prejudice? The principal explanations for the rise of anti-Semitism emphasize the effects of modernization on the emergence of popular anti-Semitism after 1879 or point to the role that Jews played as scapegoats during periods of national crises. While these theories contribute to our understanding of the rise of modern anti-Semitism they fail to explain temporal and spatial variation in popular anti-Semitism. This study proposes that temporal and spatial variation across the five nations resulted chiefly from the effects of four critical factors: the deterioration in a nation's economic well-being, the impact of increased immigration of East European Jews, the popular support for the political left, and the extent to which leadership of the political left could be identified with Jews. A database on anti-Semitic acts and attitudes for the period of 1899 to 1939 will be created from the annual volumes of the American Jewish Year Books and the largest circulating daily newspapers from the five countries. Pooled time series analysis will be used to test the key hypotheses.