MINI SEMINAR – 3 April – 20 April 2017
Mondays and Wednesdays. 6:10pm-8:40pm
Instructor: Michele Battini, ICLS Visiting Professor Spring 2017, University of Pisa
This short course is devoted to the study of a crucial aspect of the cultural catastrophe of Europe in the years comprised between World War One and World War Two. We will analyze this catastrophe as an aspect of the collapse of the XIXth Century European society and its foundations: free market, diplomatic relations among nation-states, representative government, and liberal rights. This complex order survived until 1929, when the first of the above foundations, self-regulated market, failed and the European élites chose to defend this kind of market stabilizing the economy, by resorting to mighty executives and Fascist regimes and destroying democracy. Modern Anti-Semitism should be understood within this historical context, when the European nations depicted themselves as victims of the plot orchestrated by the Jewish international finance and chose the European Jews as scapegoats for the crisis.
This political representation was a change of fundamental importance in the history of European cultures, and a crucial morphological transformation of the millenarian anti-Jewish Christian Tradition into a new type of anti-Semitism, that grew as hostility to the legal emancipation of the Jews, which had started in late XVIIIth century. Emancipation was really won in 1791 for the first time, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in revolutionary France but, after a few years, the anti-Semitic propaganda opposed emancipation and launched a frontal attack against citizenship rights and their beneficiaries, who were held responsible for the decline of the European civilization. This literature may be held at the far origin of the self-representation of the European nations in the 20th century as victims of the financial power of the emancipated Jews. This historical and cultural analysis is timely and can help us to cast some light on the political mutation that the actual financial crisis is impressing on the democratic order that emerged in Europe after the defeat of the anti-Semitic regimes in World War Two.
