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Robert Braun suggests national border crossings act as focal points for xenophobia.

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Institution: University of California Berkeley

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Robert Braun suggests national border crossings act as focal points for xenophobia.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 13, 2024

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The speaker reflects on a childhood story from the Netherlands about a man in a bow tie, created by their parents to deter them from straying too far from home. This video video story, while effective at the time, had lasting implications on the speaker's perception of bow ties and their association with fear. The speaker discusses how this narrative fits into a wider genre of European folklore known as "Kinder Shrek," which they are using to explore antisemitism and xenophobia.

The speaker's research focuses on local and subnational factors that contribute to antisemitism, arguing that existing metrics (like pogrom data and voting patterns) are limited. They collected a dataset from 19th-century folklore that details antisemitic narratives across various German localities, alongside data from the archives of a prominent Jewish organization combating antisemitism. This video video research indicates that antisemitism was relatively rare until post-World War I but surged in specific locales, particularly border towns.

The findings reveal that socioeconomic discontent among small farmers and shopkeepers often led to the scapegoating of Jews as international threats, reflecting a broader fear of outside influences exacerbated by socioeconomic struggles. The research suggests that antisemitism and xenophobia are influenced both by local social dynamics and spatial contexts, rather than solely political or economic factors.

The study is part of a larger book project examining various societal fears in Central Europe from the 1860s to the 1930s, aiming to create a unified theory of fear that encompasses not just xenophobia but also fears related to gender, nature, and fantasy.

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When I grew up,

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as a small young boy in the Netherlands,

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when I was about eight, nine, years old,

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my parents always used to tell me a story.

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And this was a story, about the guy with the bow tie.

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And the story was intended to,

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scare me away from certain places.

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My parents, when I would go out

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and play outside, close to dinner time, wouldn't want me

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to stray too far away from the house.

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And therefore, they would often make up a story about a guy

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with a bow tie who was living at a certain block.

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And if I would cross that block, that guy

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with the bow tie would, throw me in a well,

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and, things would not end well for me.

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Now, this story, well, first of all, it worked,

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but one should also not underestimate the consequences that

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that story has had on my life moving

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forward when I grew older.

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Um, when I go to conferences at the East coast, less

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so at Berkeley and the West coast

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where I'm living right now,

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and I see someone with a bow tie on an escalator,

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or when I go to an East coast University

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and there's people with,

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a bow tie sitting in the audience, I have a very primitive

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response coming up right away.

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And that's like, yikes, the guy with the bow tie.

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Now, obviously, I'm old enough

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and I've acquired the abstract reasoning skills to,

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to know that people with bow tie are not

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inherently bad or evil.

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Nonetheless, it's always stuck with me.

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And it turns out that this story is actually part

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of a broader genre of stories that parents used

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to tell their kids all over northern and Central Europe.

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And it's the story of Kinder Shrek.

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And I used the, it is the genre

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of stories called Kinder Shrek,

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and it's this genre that I exploit methodologically

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in this research project.

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The project is very much, looking at the subnational

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and local factors that shape antisemitism

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and xenophobia more in general.

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And existing research often relies on pogrom data

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or, votes for, anti-Semitic parties

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to capture this phenomenon.

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Now, I see these measures as fairly limited.

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Um, pogroms, for instance, rely on,

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can only emerge in the existence of Jews.

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However, if we know from research

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that there's a lot of antisemitism in the absence of Jews,

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antisemitism exists even when there's no Jews around.

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Therefore, I wanted to have a more subtle measure

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to capture, antisemitism at a local level.

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And this is where the kinder strict stories that I started,

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today's, interview with come into play.

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It turns out that foists starting in the seven, in the 18th

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and 19th century, started systematically collecting

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information on the oral stories that people will tell,

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tell their stories, tell their children apologies.

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And of course, they also collected information

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on kinder Shrek.

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So what I have done for the last three years

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during the summer is I've went to archives of,

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of these vocalists.

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And here I found a very impressive data set.

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It was a, a folklore atlas compiled

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by the Deutsche Force Wing Scheide shelf, sort

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of the German equivalent in the 19th century

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of the National Science Foundation.

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And they, from sort of 1860 onwards,

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would ask questions to all high school

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teachers in Germany about

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what kinder Shrek tales they would have.

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Uh, they would know of that their, their,

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their parents would tell their children.

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And based on this sort of atlas, I've been able

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to acquire information about, folk, sort

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of re tales in approximately,

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20,000 localities in Germany.

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So that forms, that's one part of the dataset,

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and the dataset is over time.

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So it runs from the eight, from the 1860s to the 1930s.

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So it allows for temporal analysis

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and of course for cross-sectional analysis across

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all these different towns.

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Um, and this, allows me to sort of see

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where antisemitism started during this time period

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and how it spread forward.

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Now, that's one data set that I use.

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The second data set that I use, that I used

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to compliment is, an archive that's located in, in,

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in, in Jerusalem.

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And it's the archives of the Rine.

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The Rine, which was,

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the largest secular Jewish organization active

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in, Germany.

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And Central Europe at the time was a association that wrote,

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that tried to sort of combat antisemitism

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during this time period,

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by informing the audience about incidents of antisemitism.

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So they would have around 50,000 employees collecting

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information about where

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and when antisemitism actually happened.

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Um, and, they would, report this back.

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And I've spent, two summers in Jerusalem sort of calling

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through these archives

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to get more qualitative information about the evolution

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of antisemitism between the 1860s and the 1930s.

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Um, and these data sets compliment each other quite nicely,

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whereas the boogeyman data, the Kinder Shrek data, the tale

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allows me to trace, the evolution

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of antisemitism over time in space.

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The centine DA data allows me to look at the actors

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that are involved in producing the antisemitism.

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There's a couple of interesting findings, in the data.

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The first interesting finding that I found was that if

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You look at the boogeyman data,

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so the Jewish kinder trick, boogeyman data, one would see

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that, antisemitism was actually quite rare in

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oral folk horistic traditions up

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until the post World War I periods that time period,

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we see an enormous spike in antisemitism, taking place.

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And the Jewish boogeyman starts claiming center stage

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in German folklore.

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The second interesting thing is that this in particularly

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happened in border towns all across Germany.

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Often it was in towns located at the border with Denmark,

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the border with the Netherlands, the border with Belgium,

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France, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia,

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or the Czech,

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where we saw these Jewish boogeymen start appearing

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in folklore.

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Okay, now when you look at the report,

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she can make more sense of what was going on

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during this time period.

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So one, so, so what was happening during this time period is

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that there was all these socioeconomic groups,

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the lower middle classes in particular, so small shopkeepers

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and, small medium sized farmers

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that were facing all sorts of socioeconomic problems

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because of the volatility of the markets

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and all the problems

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that we know the Weimar Republic at the time was facing.

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And people process these social problems, they had

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to come up with reasons for why these

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social problems existed.

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And people living in border towns

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or near border towns did this differently than people

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living inland.

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People in the border towns

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linked almost automatically these problems

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that they were facing, the socialeconomic problems

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that they were facing to the international flows

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that were entering the country.

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So for instance, the, a sm the, the sort

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of the small farmers at the, the border

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with the Netherlands would see all these Dutch people

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with their stronger guilders

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and their stronger currency come in

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and buy up everything in local towns, leaving nothing

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for the local population.

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And they saw these Dutch people as sharks, right,

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coming from the outside, coming from across the border

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to demolish the beautiful German nation in their eyes.

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Over time, however, this, their shift took place

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where originally they perceived the Dutch to be the threat.

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The Dutch became rep came replaced by the Jewish boogeyman.

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So we see this interesting shift taking place,

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whereas initially there's this international fear,

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but all international fears then suddenly are bundled

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together and attached to the Jew.

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Um, so that's one process.

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The other process is that,

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the borders also had a symbolic, important symbolic role

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in the ideology of far right radical nationalist groups,

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including of course, Hitler's party.

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They saw borders as places that had to be defended from

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outside influences.

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So what you saw is you saw disproportionate amount

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of radical right wing mobilization in these towns.

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And it's these two processes coming together.

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So the discontent among the lower middle classes

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that gets linked to international influences

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and these radical right-wing groups, which present the Jew

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as a scapegoat for international problems that produced

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spatial configurations and clusters of anti-Semitism.

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I would see two big contributions to the literature.

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First of all, the first contribution is,

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to the literature on xenophobia.

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So there's, lots of, lots of,

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work been done on the local determinants of xenophobia.

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And roughly speaking, these,

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the literature can be summarized in sort of two,

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in two camps.

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There's a political camp and there is an economic camp.

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So the economic camp suggests that xenophobia

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and antisemitism in particular emerges in response

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to socioeconomic problems, unemployment,

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economic downfall, et cetera, et cetera.

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And the political sort of camp argues that, no, it's not

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so much economics, it's political dynamics.

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It's elite instigation.

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It's political threats that create xenophobia

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and antisemitism.

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What I actually show in my paper is

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that it's these two things working together,

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but they're working together with something else.

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And that something else is the distinct spatial position

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within the nation.

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Space is not a neutral thing in which economic

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and political actions take place,

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spatial position within the nation independently

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shapes xenophobia.

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Economic problems only became linked to Jews

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if they took place near borders.

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A lead instigation only had an impact on the emergence

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of antisemitism

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because the border towns were a symbol for a distinct type,

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of social problem.

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So in order to better understand the local determinants

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of xenophobia and antisemitism, we need to look at space

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and we need to understand that economic

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and political problems

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and threats take place in a distinct spatial setting.

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And that this distinct spatial setting shapes the rise

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of antisemitism.

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The second contribution is more, in the domain

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of a nation state formation.

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So we know that in Europe during this time period,

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during the rise of the nation state, there was an enormous

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increase in aggressive exclusionary nationalism.

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What my paper does is that it shows

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the refined spatial pattern in which

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this exclusionary ideology actually emerged.

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It didn't happen everywhere equally, it started at the

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outside, and from the outside it went to the center.

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The paper is part of a larger book project, which tries

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to study the evolution of all types of fear,

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in central Europe between the 1860s

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and the 19, thirties.

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So I've talked about ethnic fears and xenophobia

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and fear for the Jews, but of course, there were also fears

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for other social groups, such as,

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and I apologize for my language in advance, for gypsies

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or big bad Turks,

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or the Dangerous Man, which with had,

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who had a dark skin color.

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Right now, some

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of the thes are not racialized or ethnic at all.

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There was also an enormous fear for the role

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of women in society.

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So a lot of the boogeymen were gendered witches

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and all sorts of dangerous female figures that sort

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of challenged, existing norms in society.

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Sometimes the boogies were, were located in nature.

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During this time period,

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there was an enormous battle going on

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between the modern German state that tried

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to conquer nature, and nature was also a source of fear.

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Um, and obviously sometimes these fears were also imaginary

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or were completely made up monsters from pre,

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rooted in previous myths, that were created

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during earlier time periods.

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And in my project, I'm trying to sort of come up

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with a unified theory of fear that doesn't only try

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to explain xenophobia fear for the other,

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but fears for nature, fears for the other in terms

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of gender and fears that are located perhaps in magic

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and fantasy.

Quick Answers

The Lasting Impact of Childhood Stories

00:00:00 - When I grew up, as a small young boy in the Netherlands, when I was about eight, nine, years old, my parents always used to tell me a story. And this was a story, about the guy with the bow tie. And the story was intended to, scare me away from certain places. My parents, when I would go out and play outside, close to dinner time, wouldn't want me to stray too far away from the house. And therefore, they would often make up a story about a guy
00:00:32 - And if I would cross that block, that guy with the bow tie would, throw me in a well, and, things would not end well for me. Now, this story, well, first of all, it worked, but one should also not underestimate the consequences that that story has had on my life moving forward when I grew older. when I go to conferences at the East coast, less so at Berkeley and the West coast where I'm living right now,
00:01:04 - or when I go to an East coast University and there's people with, a bow tie sitting in the audience, I have a very primitive response coming up right away. And that's like, yikes, the guy with the bow tie. Now, obviously, I'm old enough and I've acquired the abstract reasoning skills to, to know that people with bow tie are not inherently bad or evil. Nonetheless, it's always stuck with me.
00:01:35 - of a broader genre of stories that parents used to tell their kids all over northern and Central Europe. And it's the story of Kinder Shrek. And I used the, it is the genre of stories called Kinder Shrek, and it's this genre that I exploit methodologically in this research project. The project is very much, looking at the subnational and local factors that shape antisemitism and xenophobia more in general.
00:02:08 - or, votes for, anti-Semitic parties to capture this phenomenon. Now, I see these measures as fairly limited. pogroms, for instance, rely on, can only emerge in the existence of Jews. However, if we know from research that there's a lot of antisemitism in the absence of Jews, antisemitism exists even when there's no Jews around.
00:02:39 - to capture, antisemitism at a local level. And this is where the kinder strict stories that I started, today's, interview with come into play. It turns out that foists starting in the seven, in the 18th and 19th century, started systematically collecting information on the oral stories that people will tell, tell their stories, tell their children apologies. And of course, they also collected information

Exploring Antisemitism Through Folklore Archives

00:03:09 - So what I have done for the last three years during the summer is I've went to archives of, of these vocalists. And here I found a very impressive data set. It was a, a folklore atlas compiled by the Deutsche Force Wing Scheide shelf, sort of the German equivalent in the 19th century of the National Science Foundation. And they, from sort of 1860 onwards, would ask questions to all high school
00:03:41 - what kinder Shrek tales they would have. they would know of that their, their, their parents would tell their children. And based on this sort of atlas, I've been able to acquire information about, folk, sort of re tales in approximately, 20,000 localities in Germany. So that forms, that's one part of the dataset, and the dataset is over time. So it runs from the eight, from the 1860s to the 1930s.
00:04:13 - and of course for cross-sectional analysis across all these different towns. and this, allows me to sort of see where antisemitism started during this time period and how it spread forward. Now, that's one data set that I use. The second data set that I use, that I used to compliment is, an archive that's located in, in, in, in Jerusalem. And it's the archives of the Rine.
00:04:44 - the largest secular Jewish organization active in, Germany. And Central Europe at the time was a association that wrote, that tried to sort of combat antisemitism during this time period, by informing the audience about incidents of antisemitism. So they would have around 50,000 employees collecting information about where and when antisemitism actually happened. and, they would, report this back.
00:05:19 - through these archives to get more qualitative information about the evolution of antisemitism between the 1860s and the 1930s. and these data sets compliment each other quite nicely, whereas the boogeyman data, the Kinder Shrek data, the tale allows me to trace, the evolution of antisemitism over time in space. The centine DA data allows me to look at the actors
00:05:50 - There's a couple of interesting findings, in the data. The first interesting finding that I found was that if You look at the boogeyman data, so the Jewish kinder trick, boogeyman data, one would see that, antisemitism was actually quite rare in oral folk horistic traditions up until the post World War I periods that time period, we see an enormous spike in antisemitism, taking place.

Border Towns: Socioeconomic Fears and Antisemitism

00:06:22 - in German folklore. The second interesting thing is that this in particularly happened in border towns all across Germany. Often it was in towns located at the border with Denmark, the border with the Netherlands, the border with Belgium, France, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, or the Czech, where we saw these Jewish boogeymen start appearing
00:06:52 - Okay, now when you look at the report, she can make more sense of what was going on during this time period. So one, so, so what was happening during this time period is that there was all these socioeconomic groups, the lower middle classes in particular, so small shopkeepers and, small medium sized farmers that were facing all sorts of socioeconomic problems because of the volatility of the markets and all the problems
00:07:26 - And people process these social problems, they had to come up with reasons for why these social problems existed. And people living in border towns or near border towns did this differently than people living inland. People in the border towns linked almost automatically these problems that they were facing, the socialeconomic problems that they were facing to the international flows
00:07:55 - So for instance, the, a sm the, the sort of the small farmers at the, the border with the Netherlands would see all these Dutch people with their stronger guilders and their stronger currency come in and buy up everything in local towns, leaving nothing for the local population. And they saw these Dutch people as sharks, right, coming from the outside, coming from across the border to demolish the beautiful German nation in their eyes.
00:08:32 - where originally they perceived the Dutch to be the threat. The Dutch became rep came replaced by the Jewish boogeyman. So we see this interesting shift taking place, whereas initially there's this international fear, but all international fears then suddenly are bundled together and attached to the Jew. so that's one process. The other process is that,
00:09:04 - in the ideology of far right radical nationalist groups, including of course, Hitler's party. They saw borders as places that had to be defended from outside influences. So what you saw is you saw disproportionate amount of radical right wing mobilization in these towns. And it's these two processes coming together. So the discontent among the lower middle classes

Spatial Dynamics of Antisemitism and Xenophobia

00:09:33 - and these radical right-wing groups, which present the Jew as a scapegoat for international problems that produced spatial configurations and clusters of anti-Semitism. I would see two big contributions to the literature. First of all, the first contribution is, to the literature on xenophobia. So there's, lots of, lots of, work been done on the local determinants of xenophobia.
00:10:06 - the literature can be summarized in sort of two, in two camps. There's a political camp and there is an economic camp. So the economic camp suggests that xenophobia and antisemitism in particular emerges in response to socioeconomic problems, unemployment, economic downfall, et cetera, et cetera. And the political sort of camp argues that, no, it's not so much economics, it's political dynamics.
00:10:36 - It's political threats that create xenophobia and antisemitism. What I actually show in my paper is that it's these two things working together, but they're working together with something else. And that something else is the distinct spatial position within the nation. Space is not a neutral thing in which economic and political actions take place, spatial position within the nation independently
00:11:11 - Economic problems only became linked to Jews if they took place near borders. A lead instigation only had an impact on the emergence of antisemitism because the border towns were a symbol for a distinct type, of social problem. So in order to better understand the local determinants of xenophobia and antisemitism, we need to look at space
00:11:40 - and political problems and threats take place in a distinct spatial setting. And that this distinct spatial setting shapes the rise of antisemitism. The second contribution is more, in the domain of a nation state formation. So we know that in Europe during this time period, during the rise of the nation state, there was an enormous increase in aggressive exclusionary nationalism.
00:12:13 - the refined spatial pattern in which this exclusionary ideology actually emerged. It didn't happen everywhere equally, it started at the outside, and from the outside it went to the center. The paper is part of a larger book project, which tries to study the evolution of all types of fear, in central Europe between the 1860s

Exploring Complex Fears in Society

00:12:42 - So I've talked about ethnic fears and xenophobia and fear for the Jews, but of course, there were also fears for other social groups, such as, and I apologize for my language in advance, for gypsies or big bad Turks, or the Dangerous Man, which with had, who had a dark skin color. Right now, some of the thes are not racialized or ethnic at all. There was also an enormous fear for the role
00:13:12 - So a lot of the boogeymen were gendered witches and all sorts of dangerous female figures that sort of challenged, existing norms in society. Sometimes the boogies were, were located in nature. During this time period, there was an enormous battle going on between the modern German state that tried to conquer nature, and nature was also a source of fear. and obviously sometimes these fears were also imaginary
00:14:09 - rooted in previous myths, that were created during earlier time periods. And in my project, I'm trying to sort of come up with a unified theory of fear that doesn't only try to explain xenophobia fear for the other, but fears for nature, fears for the other in terms of gender and fears that are located perhaps in magic and fantasy.

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