Language:
English
Year of publication:
2014
Titel der Quelle:
Judaica Bohemiae
Angaben zur Quelle:
49,2 (2014) 73-87
Keywords:
Antisemitism History 19th century
;
Antisemitism History 20th century
Abstract:
The term "populist antisemitism", used for the first time by the German antisemite Otto Böckel in the 19th century, reflected a specific phenomenon that existed in Eastern Central Europe in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Its adherents in the Czech Lands, Slovakia, and Hungary contrasted their "practical" antisemitism with radical or racist antisemitism, leading to violence and murder. According to them, the "Jewish question" had a social and ethnic character, and the legitimate tools for its solution were an economic boycott of Jewish traders and the cooperative movement. In the center of the populist ideology was the notion of "the people" (like the notion of the "plebs"), and for the sake of its emancipation, an economic and social suppression of Jews was necessary. Focuses on the tension between the antisemitic, thus anti-emancipationist semantics of the populists and their "emancipatory" practice. The Eastern European populists could not explain why a boycott of Jewish competitors in the context of ethnic conflict should be more justified than religious prejudice or racial antisemitism. When reacting to the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, they could only say that it was not the right way to solve the "Jewish question".
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