Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] POLLS AND ANTISEMITISM IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA 421of the self-propelling antisemites as being potential political allies. FormerRomanian president Ion Iliescu is such a utilitarian politician.There are many aspects to “reactive antisemitism,” but the most recentones refer to what has been called “the competition of the victims” or “competitivemartyrology” between the Holocaust and the Gulag. 69 To avoid anymisunderstanding, let me clearly state that “reactive antisemites” would besurprised to observe that anyone can consider them as having anti-Jewishprejudice. Considering the issue of competitive martyrology in a more generalanalytical framework, Dan Stone rightly titles it a “memory war.” 70Rather than dealing with history, one deals in this case with what PierreNora in 1989 termed a dispute among “counter memories.” 71 While notnecessarily explicitly antisemitic, partisans of this symmetric or doublegenocide approach often imply that Jews indulge in “monopolizing sufferance,”mostly in order to conceal their participation in and responsibility fortheir country’s sufferance under communist rule. Romania is by no means asingular case in this category, but as tables 7 and 8 show, the impact of suchcontentions cannot be overlooked either. In Budapest’s Terror House, 72 inTallinn and Riga’s Occupation Museums, and in Vilnius’s Museum of theVictims of Genocide, the memories of Nazism and communism are placedin competition with each other, and anti-fascism is employed only if it doesnot impinge on the anti-communist narrative.In his seminal Rethinking the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer stresses therole of “Lumpenintellectuals” in the emergence of Nazi ideology. Theseintellectuals, he writes, were people who were “largely unemployed,exceedingly bitter regarding the bourgeois society that rejected them for avariety of reasons, searching for explanations for their disappointment in asociety that appeared to be disintegrating.” It would be these people whowould form the future “Nazi elite.” The danger of drawing parallels in differenthistorical contexts aside, such “transition losers” are not absent in69. Jean-Michel Chaumont, La Concurrence des victime: génocide, identité,reconnaissance (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1997); Alan S. Rosenbaum, “Introductionto First Edition,” in Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on ComparativeGenocide, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), 2.70. Dan Stone, “Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe,’ ” in The Oxford Handbookof Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2012), 714-31.71. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations,No. 26 (Spring), 13-25.72. For my own views on the Terror House, see Michael Shafir, “The Politics ofPublic Space and the Legacy of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Hungary,”Zeitgeschichte-online, June 2004, http://www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/Portals/_Rainbow/documents/pdf/asm_oeu/shafir_asm.pdf.