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Normalization of antisemitism, 1880–1900: the case of a Jesuit community in Rome

ABSTRACT The significance of the political antisemitism of the 1880s and 1890s for developments in the twentieth century remains controversial. Researchers have been divided as to whether the antisemitism of the nineteenth century, or even earlier, was one of the factors that made the Holocaust possible, or whether it was a phenomenon with little or no relevance for subsequent events. The decline of most antisemitic political parties at the beginning of the twentieth century appears to support the latter point of view. Yet some commentators, such as Shulamit Volkov and Peter Pulzer, have convincingly suggested that the importance of nineteenth-century antisemitism lies less in the political fortunes of antisemitic parties than in the way antisemitism came to penetrate civil society. Thus, they have argued, antisemitism came to form a component of a widespread conservative and anti-liberal world-view. Following Pulzer and Volkov, it might be desirable to investigate the processes by which antisemitism could have been transformed from an extremist political position into a common element in the outlook of broad portions of European society: mechanisms that have remained largely unexplored. Dahl's article studies the normalization of antisemitism in the two last decades of the nineteenth century through a scrutiny of shifts in the attitudes to Jews of a restricted group of Italian Jesuits. The analysis is based on a detailed study of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit community in Rome that published a journal of the same name. Since its foundation in 1850 this institution has been an authoritative exponent of Catholic policy and is generally perceived as having been a protagonist in the formulation of a Catholic stance towards the ‘Jewish question’ in the later nineteenth century. Dahl shows that, while in the early 1880s, most members resisted or opposed the use of antisemitic propaganda, through the following two decades the attitudes of virtually all of them became tinged with antisemitism, supporting the hypothesis that antisemitism became part of a widespread ‘culture’. In his analysis, Dahl does not focus on the wider circulation of ideas that influenced the Roman Jesuits, but on the dynamics within the institution that made possible the gradual acceptance of antisemitism, arguing that a debate over antisemitism among the Jesuits in the early 1880s was a crucial moment in this development. As they failed at this early stage to formulate an anti-antisemitic response, they allowed antisemitism to become part of the culture of their institution, and rendered its later rejection practically impossible.