This latest volume in the Studies in Antisemitism Series looks at the interaction between nationalism and antisemitism in post-Napoleonic Europe. Using a framework of major historical events for the period 1815-1945, Shmuel Almog traces the radicalization of national ideology in these years and its relationship to the rise of political antisemitism. Nationalism in early nineteenth-century Europe developed originally as a liberal-democratic philosophy in opposition to existing political, social and economic structures. This coincided with a period of increasing integration of the Jewish minority into mainstream European life, particularly in economic spheres. By the 1870s, however, the continued growth of nationalist aspirations, increasingly allied to an imperialist, conservative and militaristic culture, led to a rise in discord between nations and a concomitant increase in the importance of national peculiarities. This was to have a profound effect on the Jewish communities in Europe, with the Jews being viewed as an alien and even dangerous force within the newly-created nation-states. The book argues that growing extremism in nationalist attitudes afforded a suitable ideological and social background for antisemitic activity, as manifested by calls for discriminatory legislation against Jews, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and, ultimately, the Nazi Holocaust. This analysis is substantiated and reinforced by a series of annotated documents and illustrations. This book is a clear account of the development of one of the key elements of antisemitic ideology in this important period of European history.

This latest volume in the Studies in Antisemitism Series looks at the interaction between nationalism and antisemitism in post-Napoleonic Europe. Using a framework of major historical events for the period 1815-1945, Shmuel Almog traces the radicalization of national ideology in these years and its relationship to the rise of political antisemitism. Nationalism in early nineteenth-century Europe developed originally as a liberal-democratic philosophy in opposition to existing political, social and economic structures. This coincided with a period of increasing integration of the Jewish minority into mainstream European life, particularly in economic spheres. By the 1870s, however, the continued growth of nationalist aspirations, increasingly allied to an imperialist, conservative and militaristic culture, led to a rise in discord between nations and a concomitant increase in the importance of national peculiarities. This was to have a profound effect on the Jewish communities in Europe, with the Jews being viewed as an alien and even dangerous force within the newly-created nation-states. The book argues that growing extremism in nationalist attitudes afforded a suitable ideological and social background for antisemitic activity, as manifested by calls for discriminatory legislation against Jews, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and, ultimately, the Nazi Holocaust. This analysis is substantiated and reinforced by a series of annotated documents and illustrations. This book is a clear account of the development of one of the key elements of antisemitic ideology in this important period of European history.

By looking at the very specific case of the Greek-speaking Romaniote and the Ladino-speaking Sephardic communities in Southern Greece, Epirus and Macedonia, this book explores the attitudes and policies of the Greek state with regards to the Jewish communities both within its borders and in the areas of the Ottoman Empire it craved. Evdoxios Doxiadis traces the evolution of these policies from the time of Greek independence to the expansion of the Greek state in the early-20th century, telling us a great deal about the Jewish experience and the changing face of modern Greek nationalism in the process. Based on the evidence of numerous Greek consular reports, speeches, memoirs, political interviews and coverage of the status and treatment of the communities by the international Jewish press, State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece sketches a detailed picture of the Greek political elite and the state's bureaucratic view of the various Jewish communities. By focusing on the state, though not ignoring popular attitudes, the book successfully argues that the Greek state followed policies that did not conform, and often were in opposition to, popular attitudes when it came to minorities and the Jews in particular. By focusing on the Jewish communities in modern Greece separately the book allows us to recognize how Greek governments recognized and used divisions and conflicts between the communities, and other minorities, to achieve their goals. As a result Greek state policies can be seen in a new light, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the Jewish people and the Greek state. Using this case study, Doxiadis then discusses broader questions of state, nationalism and minorities in a volume of significant interest for students and scholars of modern Greek or modern Jewish history alike.

William I. Brustein offers the first truly systematic comparative and empirical examination of anti-Semitism within Europe before the Holocaust. Brustein proposes that European anti-Semitism flowed from religious, racial, economic, and political roots, which became enflamed by economic distress, rising Jewish immigration, and socialist success. To support his arguments, Brustein draws upon a careful and extensive examination of the annual volumes of the American Jewish Year Books and more than 40 years of newspaper reportage from Europe's major dailies. The findings of this informative book offer a fresh perspective on the roots of society's longest hatred.

In this provocative and insightful book, Joanna Beata Michlic interrogates the myth of the Jew as Poland's foremost internal "threatening other," harmful to Poland, its people, and to all aspects of its national life. This is the first attempt to chart new theoretical directions in the study of Polish-Jewish relations in the wake of the controversy over Jan Gross's book Neighbors. Michlic analyzes the nature and impact of anti-Jewish prejudices on modern Polish society and culture, tracing the history of the concept of the Jew as the threatening other and its role in the formation and development of modern Polish national identity based on the matrix of exclusivist ethnic nationalism.

The first major history of Germany in a generation, a work that presents a five-hundred-year narrative that challenges our traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past. For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history—the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II—challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation’s history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Smith’s aim, then, is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of Germany: Is it essentially a bellicose nation that murdered over six million people? Or a pacific, twenty-first-century model of tolerant democracy? And was it inevitable that the land that produced Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Käthe Kollwitz, would also carry out genocide on an unprecedented scale? Combining poignant prose with an historian’s rigor, Smith recreates the national euphoria that accompanied the beginning of World War I, followed by the existential despair caused by Germany’s shattering defeat. This psychic devastation would simultaneously produce both the modernist glories of the Bauhaus and the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. Nowhere is Smith’s mastery on greater display than in his chapter on the Holocaust, which looks at the killing not only through the tragedies of Western Europe but, significantly, also through the lens of the rural hamlets and ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe, where more than 80% of all the Jews murdered originated. He thus broadens the extent of culpability well beyond the high echelons of Hitler’s circle all the way to the local level. Throughout its pages, Germany also examines the indispensable yet overlooked role played by German women throughout the nation’s history, highlighting great artists and revolutionaries, and the horrific, rarely acknowledged violence that war wrought on women. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany for the twenty-first century.

France and Germany, two great powers in Europe and the world, had in many respects a similar fate in the first half of the twentieth century. Both nations knew war and defeat, social upheaval, grave economic crisis, as well as political turmoil, including major changes in their political regime. On the other hand, the two countries also faced some very different experiences in the course of their history in this period. Germany had the terrible experience of the Third Reich, while France shared with other powers the agonies of decolonisation. Here is a collection of twenty two studies, dealing with important aspects of the history of the two nations. The studies are grouped under seven headings and include topics like foreign policy in peace and war, domestic changes, the impact of ideologies, the colonical and Jewish aspects. Taken as a whole, these studies offer many new perceptions and insights to the history of France and Germany in the twentieth century.

This Companion provides an overview of European history during the 'long' nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914. Consists of 32 chapters written by leading international scholars Balances coverage of political, diplomatic and international history with discussion of economic, social and cultural concerns Covers both Eastern and Western European states, including Britain Pays considerable attention to smaller countries as well as to the great powers Compares particular phenomena and developments across Europe

This is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. It shows that early-twentieth-century authors, poets, and critics, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz, actively engaged with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians raging across Europe. These debates contributed to developing new ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and literature, and informed contemporary critical writings on aesthetics and poetics.

Phayer explores the actions of the Catholic Church and the actions of individual Catholics during the crucial period from the emergence of Hitler until the Church's official rejection of antisemitism in 1965. 20 photos.