BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

vision of necessary individual moral restraint and Fourier’s utopian leap to the inevitable,
communal realization of God-instilled passions.
The Jewish Other in Europe and Britain
The role of the Jewish other stands as a decisive factor in European divisions between
civic and ethnic nationalisms. William Brustein, in a recent quantitative study of antisemitism in
Europe, compared attitudes in print toward Jews with antisemitic acts, legal and otherwise,
recorded from 1899 to 1939 in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Romania. Besides the
salience of economic troubles, increased Jewish immigration and growth of the political Left in
fomenting antisemitism, Brustein’s quantitative analysis revealed telling spatial and temporal
variations between act and opinion. 54 French antisemitism appears to have been relatively non-
activist and not the hotbed of anti-Jewish activity supposed from the Dreyfus Affair or years
preceding Vichy government—a diagnosis supportive of Rogers Brubaker’s work on
Franco/German citizenship differences. 55 But perhaps more interesting, the greater incidence and
violence of antisemitic acts in Germany and Romania did not broadly coincide with unfavorable
54 Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK ; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10, 12, 34. Antisemitic acts numbered as follows:
Britain (73), France (49), Germany (709), Romania (431) and Italy (39), 401 of the German
antisemitic acts having occurred under the Nazi regime. Brustein used the American Jewish Year
Book for a primary record of antisemitic acts and a random sampling of two major newspapers in
each country for an index of attitudes. He coded as favorable, unfavorable or neutral all
reportage on Jews in these ten selected newspapers for the 15 th of each month between 1899 and
1939. Temporal variation within the time frame appears in two series of graphs: one for
antisemitic acts, both in toto and differentiated by country (pp. 15, 16); the second for attitudes
during the periods 1899-1913, 1914-1923, 1924-1932 and 1933-1939 (pp. 26-29).
55 Ibid., 337. Brubaker only lightly touched on the issue of antisemitism in relation to
national identity, explicitly to highlight the French adherence to, and German rejection of, jus
soli during a period of intensified anti-Jewish feeling throughout Europe. See Citizenship and
Nationhood, 12, 102, 135-36
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