The Dark Core of European Civilization: Fascisms and Anti-Semitism

This short course is devoted to the study of a crucial aspect of the catastrophe (economic, social and cultural) 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 19th century European order 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 (the myth of a self-regulated market) failed. It failed when the European elites chose to defend the market and stabilize the economy by resorting to mighty executives and Fascist regimes. Anti-Semitism should be understood within this context: the European nations depicted themselves as victims of the financial plot orchestrated by the Jews. This representation was a change of fundamental importance in the history of European cultures, a morphological transformation of the millenarian anti-Jewish Christian tradition into a new anti-Semitism that grew as hostility to the legal emancipation of the Jews, which had started in late 18^th century. Emancipation was won in 1791 for the first time, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in revolutionary France. 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 was the genesis of the self-representation of the European nations in the 20th century as victims of the financial power of the emancipated Jews, and the theme that this course will study. 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.