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Holocaust History, Far-Right Parties, and Antisemitic Incidents

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Abstract

In many countries in Europe, acts motivated by antisemitism, including the desecration of Jewish tombs or simple assaults on Jewish individuals, occur with varying levels of frequency. Using new event data on antisemitic incidents, this paper analyzes two factors that influence antisemitic incidents in Eastern Europe. In particular, we analyze a country’s Holocaust history and the presence of nationalist far-right parties in legislatures as factors that influence the likelihood that a country experiences an antisemitic incident. We posit that both a high proportion of Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the presence of nationalist far-right parties in parliament will increase the likelihood of an antisemitic event in a given year. We find strong evidence that a country’s Holocaust history is a powerful predictor of antisemitic incidents in Eastern Europe, but that the presence of nationalist far-right parties in parliament, contrary to our expectations, has no effect on the likelihood of antisemitic incidents. Thus, our findings suggest that the destruction of a country’s Jewish community during the Holocaust is a better predictor of antisemitic events than the presence of far-right political parties. At a pragmatic level, we are cautiously optimistic that our results suggest that the rise in political participation of far-right parties across Europe does not increase the likelihood of antisemitic events. Nonetheless, scholars should continue to explore the causes of antisemitic incidents in Europe in order to identify what causes its fluctuations.

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Notes

  1. In this article, we use the terms “far-right” and “nationalist” interchangeably. While there are certainly conceptual challenges that accompany terms such as “far-right” and “nationalist,” nationalism is a common ideological feature of far-right parties along with a combination of populism and extremism (Golder 2016).

  2. This explains why Jews did not possess citizenship in many European countries until the 19th and 20th centuries. Even then, state-wide and state-sanctioned discrimination was common.

  3. An example of this, which occurred in 2017, was a far-right rally in Warsaw, Poland, when over sixty thousand people broke out into numerous antisemitic chants including “Jews out of Poland” (TOI and AFP 2017).

  4. This idea that antisemitism exists because of the Holocaust was first conceptualized by the infamous work of Adorno et al. (1950) and has been attributed to several authors, including Katcher (1968) and Zvi Rix, according to Heinsohn (1988). To avoid any attribution error, we use a common paraphrase.

  5. “Axis” - if the country was part of the original tripartite pact, acceded to the tripartite pact, or was a co-belligerent state in Europe. “Mixed” - if the country had a puppet government allied with Axis powers ruling all or part of the country. “Occupied East” - if the country was occupied by Axis powers in the eastern part of Europe. “Occupied West” - if the country was occupied by Axis powers in the western part of Europe.

  6. A quick look at Finns Party quotes on its Tumblr page, a social networking website, reveals other similar quotes.

  7. In line with the coding procedure of SCAD, bomb and arson attacks on synagogues are coded as event type = 9 (the code for extra-government violence). Many events in the data also involve the desecration of cemeteries and the vandalism of Jewish tombs. These events are coded as violent riots (event type = 4 in SCAD), since they involve the destruction of property. For more details on the coding procedures of SCAD, see Salehyan et al. (2012).

  8. It is important to note that some countries enter the dataset in the year of their independence. For instance, Slovakia enters the dataset in 1993.

  9. We also looked for sources that document the number of non-Jews killed in the Holocaust but were unable to find a reliable, scholarly breakdown of these numbers at the country-level.

  10. There is some variation across sources as to the number of Jews and percentage of Jews killed in certain countries. This is particularly true for Bulgaria. While no Bulgarian Jews were deported to death camps, just over eleven thousand Jews in territories awarded to Bulgaria and fully administered by the country during World War II were deported and ultimately killed. If we were to include these Jews as Bulgarian, this would amount to 14% of the country’s Jewish population being killed in the Holocaust.

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Feinberg, A., Stewart, B. Holocaust History, Far-Right Parties, and Antisemitic Incidents. Cont Jewry 39, 191–209 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-018-9274-5

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