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While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.

Prejudice against Jews was part of the landscape in the Union of South Africa long before Nazism made inroads into the country during the 1930s, at which stage Jews constituted approximately 4.6% of the country’s white (or European) population. Aggressive Afrikaner nationalism was marked by fervent attempts to proscribe Jewish immigration. By 1939, Jewish immigration was included as an official plank in the political platform of the opposition Purified National Party led by Dr D.F. Malan, along with a ban on party membership for Jews residents in the Transvaal province. Racial discrimination, in a country with diversified ethnic elements and intense political complexities, was synonymous with life in the Union long before the Apartheid system, with its official policy of enforced legal, political and economic segregation, became law in May 1948 under Dr Malan’s prime ministership. Although the Jews, while maintaining their own subcultural identity, were classified within South Africa’s racial hierarchy as part of the privileged white minority, the emergence of recurrent anti-Jewish stereotypes and themes became manifest in a country permeated by the ideology of race and white superiority. This was exacerbated by the growth of a powerful Afrikaner nationalist movement, underpinned by conservative Calvinist theology. This chapter focusses on measures taken in South Africa by organisational structures within the political sphere to restrict Jewish immigration between 1930 and 1939 and to do so on ethnic grounds. These measures were underscored by radical Afrikaner nationalism, which flew in the face of the principles of ethics and moral judgement.

Faith in working-class revolution and the inevitability of socialism all but evaporated in the wake of the First World War when nationalism and patriotism triumphed over the principles of international solidarity and, as Perry Anderson put it, “The unity and reality of the Second International, cherished by Engels, was destroyed in a week” ([1976]1979, p. 14).¹ The notion of revolutionary inevitability seems embarrassingly naïve today (to the point that, now, discussions of radicalism are much more likely to focus on intellectuals rather than labor movements)² but prewar optimism was, in many ways, justified and, in fact, the idea of inevitability was shared across the political spectrum and not merely a symptom of the left. Dreading the rise of “plebian radicalism” Rudolf Sohm, for example, wrote that “The people is [sic] already aware of its powers. Already it has recognized itself as the real nation. The battalions of the workers are about to form, that they may thrust from its throne the bourgeoisie, the monarch of the present. More and more clearly are shown the signs of a movement, the aim of which is to destroy the entire social order, the State, the Church, the family….” (Smith, 1998, p. 38).

The religious tradition of male circumcision has come increasingly under attack across a number of European states. While critics of the practice argue that the problem is about children’s rights and the proper relationship between secular and religious traditions, Jews tend to see these attacks within the longer history of attempts to assimilate and remake them according to the norms of the majority. Using the 2012 German legal controversy concerning the issue as my vantage point, I explore how contemporary criticism of male circumcision remains entangled with ambivalence toward Judaism and the Jews as the “other.” Through a close reading of the arguments, I show how opponents use the seemingly neutral language of universal human rights to (re)make Jewish difference according to the norms of the majority. I conclude by arguing that such an approach to this issue runs the risk of turning Jews once again into strangers at a time when cultural anxieties are troubling European societies.

In his 1919 article ‘The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe’, Thorstein Veblen addressed the subject of Jewish intellectual creativity. Specifically, Veblen traced Jewish overrepresentation in the ranks of leading scientists and scholars back to their hyphenate status between their own community and gentile society. This essay has generally been neglected by Veblen scholars as puzzling or pointless in comparison with his preceding works, in which he developed his institutional-evolutionary economics. Moreover, the allegoric reading of Veblen’s image of the ‘renegade Jew’ as a representation of his own social and academic marginalization has overshadowed the scientific relevance of his analysis of Jewish intellectual creativity. The present article attempts both to take this 1919 essay seriously and to place it firmly within the context of his preceding literary productions. Specifically, this essay shows how Veblen’s view of Jewish intellectual creativity as the product of an enduring dynamic of Jewish–gentile relations is consistent with his ideas on the mechanism of development and reinforcement of institutions developed in his writings published between 1898 and 1914. The present chapter also suggests that Veblen reversed anti-Semitic arguments about the so-called ‘Jewish type’ in a pro-Semitic direction. In this respect, Edward Alsworth Ross’s explanation of the supposed characteristics of the Jewish people is taken as one hallmark of the racial thought of the American Progressive Era.

This note presents new archival evidence about John Maynard Keynes’ attitudes toward Jews. The relevant material is composed of two letters sent by Robert G. Wertheimer to Bertrand Russell and Richard F. Kahn along with their replies. Between 1963 and 1964, Wertheimer – an Austrian-born Jewish immigrant then professor of economics at Babson College – wrote to Russell and Kahn asking for their personal reminiscences concerning Keynes’ anti-Semitic utterances. In their brief but still significant responses, both Russell and Kahn firmly denied any hint of anti-Semitism in Keynes, thereby providing significant first-hand testimonies from two of his closest acquaintances.

Review essay on Muller, J. Z. (2010). Capitalism and the Jews, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 272 pp. ISBN: 9781400834365. $24.95.

This chapter examines the processes of rewriting nationhood in educational narratives regarding the Second World War (WWII) in Poland. Using mixed methods, this case study analyzes narrative change in state-approved history textbooks published between 1977 and 2008, thus covering the period of political transition from a communist to a democratic Poland. Although trends in learning theory and international norms suggest that attention to diversity should have increased in textbooks, in Poland these trends have been subsumed by more long-lasting Polish specific cultural tropes. WWII narratives, in particular, emphasize an ethnically homogeneous nation. Throughout the 31-year sample, educating youth about WWII in Poland continues to be focused on reclaiming “Polishness” rather than on espousing global understandings and citizenship.

This chapter explicates the logic of a computational agent-based model bearing on the willingness of perpetrator agents to conduct genocidal actions against Jewish people during World War II. Given realistic distributions of benefits and costs and sufficient time, as a joint consequence of these distributions and interpersonal influence the model readily creates agents who are avowed anti-Semites, Nazis, and perpetrators of the genocide, even transforming agents characterized initially by lower levels of anti-Semitism. Although many agents initially exhibit dissonance (i.e., a disjunction) between their attitudes and choices, toward the end of this period their anti-Semitic attitudes and choices become consonant (i.e., internally consistent). Experiments and parameter studies using this model indicate that different distributions of benefits and costs, changed legitimacy of authority, and different values of anti-Semitism of influential agents can modify the growth of prejudice, Nazism, and genocidal choices in these random-number-based Monte Carlo trials. The results clarify the conflicting interpretations of Goldhagen and Browning concerning the genocidal actions of a battalion of perpetrators and the role of propaganda in reducing moral costs. Six hypotheses that focus the testing of the model can be generalized creating insights about other genocides.

The author reconstructs the anti-Semitic press campaign led by Maffeo Pantaleoni, one of the major Italian economists, between 1915 and 1924. A declared supporter of Nationalism and Fascism, co-editor of the magazine La Vita italiana, the economist moreover promoted the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1921 plus the publication of lists of Jews who had prominent roles in Italy. Pantaleoni’s work is particularly important from the idealogical point of view because it supports that of the founder of La Vita italiana, Giovanni Preziosi, who was destined to hold, after the death of his ‘master’, a primary role in the Fascist culture and policy of anti-Semitism during the Republic of Salò (1943–1945) which promoted the systematic extermination of Italian Jews.