Nationalism

Abstract

Hostility toward Jews has existed for centuries, but modern nationalist antisemitism, with its grounding in conspiracy theories and a struggle-for-survival worldview, arrived only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the product of a concerted campaign of political agitation. Nationalism as such was not preconfigured as antisemitic, mostly because nationalism as such is a rhetorical framework for talking about politics, not a single coherent ideology with a linear history. Moreover, nationalism did not become antisemitic simply because of the social or demographic context from which it emerged. The liberal assimilationist approach to the Jews by the early nationalists was indeed a response to observed social conditions, but the more familiar (and more virulent) versions of racialized nationalist antisemitism came to fruition in the absence of significant communities of easily identifiable Jews.