Site designed and created by Razvan Paraianu. © Created in February 2002, Last revised: May 14, 2002.

— Studies of anti-Semitism and the rise of extreme right movements —

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index of Projects:

Internet Modern Jewish History Sourcebook for Central and Eastern Europe [IMJHS]

The Internet Modern Jewish History Sourcebook on Central and Eastern Europe is a series of primary historical sources. It is intended to serve as a comprehensive resource database for professors, graduate students, and researchers interested in modern history of Jews in these regions.

Our goals are:

• To make available for on-line research primary material on modern history of Jews in Central and Eastern European. A special attention will be paid on literature regarding Jewish Emancipation, anti-Semitism and anti-racist propaganda.

• To add primary sources on the history of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe to a number of other online collections on legal and political documents on the history of Jews in Europe. As such, the database tries to overcome the relatively disproportionate coverage of the history of Jews in Western Europe, as compared to the scarcity of sources available on Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.

• To encourage comparative studies on the modern social and political history of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, and on the intellectual and political history of anti-Semitism in these regions.

This project was specially design for my home university (Central European University) where the variety of students from all over the central and east European countries might  be extremely beneficial for such an otherwise ambitious project. It is worth mentioning the heuristic model of The Internet Modern History Sourcebook edited by Paul Halsall with whom I emulated in designing this project. See The Internet History Sourcebook  Project.

Literary Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Political Right Wing in Romania

My current research project is an attempt to revaluate the Romanian political thinking regarding anti-Semitism. In doing so, I am taking into consideration a the existence of a certain number of texts written by classics of Romanian literature, texts usually neglected by current commentators. There is a certain genre of  political literature that came in between history and literature studies — at least in Romania. These texts proves the intimate relation between politics and literature and offer the background for a further study on the emergence of Romanian populism. What I am trying to do in my work is to highlight the literary devices of these writers and to identify how they emploted history and fictionalised realities in narratives about Romania and Jews in order to create arguments for their political stances. My preliminary conclusion is that literary antisemitism of the late nineteenth century and early twenty century is a critique of modernity, sharing all the ambivalences of modernity, in which the national entity was created against a present perceived as alien. Thus, because of symmetry reasons, the anti-nation was positively identified as being Semitism; Semitism is on the same ontological level with Aryanism or Romanianism. To distinguish this particular kind of antisemitism I do not suggest another term but its spelling as anti-Semitism to remained about its anti-Modern primary sources. It cannot describe either pre-modern anti-Jewish attitudes and or the racist theory under whose influences the terrible crimes of Holocaust happened, because in the both cases the above-mentioned narrative was missing.

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