BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

attitudes toward Jews in select major newspapers until after 1932. 56 The later upsurge of anti-
Jewish journalism in those countries suggests the impact of coordinated propaganda or pressures
put on journalists rather than any spontaneous outpouring of popular antisemitism, and the period
from 1933 to 1939 in Brustein’s analysis correlates with significant political developments: the
Nazi accession to power in Germany, the rise of antisemitic rhetoric culminating in the Nazi-
oriented Goga government in Romania and, in relatively philosemitic Italy, Mussolini’s racial
“revolution” and his opportunistic attempts to win Nazi approval. 57 Brustein’s study casts doubt
upon the idea of axiomatic German antisemitism with evidence of its variability and thus
disqualifies arguments for an endemic German “eliminationist” ideology or the inevitability of a
56 Roots of Hate, 25.
57 Besides the presence of Jews in the Italian fascist camp itself, many non-Jews, including
Mussolini, despised and obstructed Nazi exterminationist policies. See R. J. B. Bosworth,
Mussolini, (London; New York: Arnold; Oxford University Press, 2002), 282, 334-344. For an
interpretation stressing imperial-totalitarian objectives in a futuristic fascist racial policy see,
Frank Hugh Adler, “Why Mussolini Turned on the Jews,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 3 (2005).
On the dominating presence of antisemitism in within the Romanian nationalist movement, and
the conversion of many formerly non-xenophobic writers and intellectuals to a “rational”
antisemitism motivated by fears of Jewish incursion into spheres of economic and social life,
including literature and journalism, see Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism:
The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, trans. Charles Kormos (Oxford: Pergamon;
published for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991), 155-58, 163-67, 177-80, 189. 192-93. Romanian
nationalists from both Right and Left had long embraced an antisemitism clothed in Orthodox
Christian symbolism and spirituality, but during the 1930s the increased popularity of the fascist
Iron Guard hyped by a “new generation” of pro-fascist intellectuals provoked a countervailing
barrage of antisemitic propaganda from loyalist clergy. The flare up in Romanian antisemitic
journalism may also reflect campaigning leading up to the election of 1937. See Paul A. Shapiro,
“Faith, Murder, Resurrection: the Iron Guard and the Romanian Orthodox Church,” in Kevin P.
Spicer, ed., Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 136, 139-50, 152-55.
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