9 - Antisemitism in Eastern Europe: Theoretical Reflections in Comparative Perspective

Summary

Within the social and historical sciences, the greater part of antisemitism research, in terms of theory construction, has focused on Western European case studies. This process of theory construction has been insufficient in making systemic comparisons incorporating the numerous studies that examine and analyze Eastern European antisemitism and its lines of development. This can also be seen in how the classificational differentiation between “old” and “new” antisemitism, so often exercised in antisemitism research, is insufficiently nuanced for application in the Eastern European context. While the forms of so-called “old antisemitism”—which on the one hand can be seen in religiously motivated Christian anti-Judaism, and on the other hand in völkisch-racist antisemitism (cf. Benz 2004a)—can in fact be labeled as “old” or “older” in a historically contextualizing way when interpreting the historical development of forms of antisemitism as manifested in Western Europe, such a classification cannot be seamlessly applied to Eastern Europe. For, the historical caesura between “old” and “new” antisemitism that is broadly applicable to Western Europe—the defeat of National Socialism and the end of World War II—is further supplemented and overlaid in Eastern Europe by other significant caesuras that have influenced the respective national manifestations of antisemitism: the October Revolution of 1917 and the Eastern European transformations of 1989/90.

The motives behind a “new” guilt-denying manifestation of antisemitism, which also emerged in parts of Eastern Europe during the postwar era, differ from those in Western Europe (here, the denial of guilt as collaborators or as a perpetrator nation), amalgamating— in significant contrast to Western Europe—much more with Christian religious motives so that the guiltdenying aspect of antisemitism has quantitatively a distinctly lesser weight in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, particularly Germany and Austria. Furthermore, it is conspicuous that the anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli variety of antisemitism, which attempted to avoid accusations of antisemitism by channeling its antisemitic ressentiments through the communicative detour of Israel-hating, achieved prominence noticeably earlier in Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union, than as happened in Western Europe in the aftermath of the later caesura of the 1967 Six-Day War and in the context of the anti-imperialist positionings of the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s.