Antisemitismus und Islamfeindlichkeit im postosmanischen 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Rumänien und Serbien)
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Islamic Sentiment in the Post Ottoman 19th and 2w Centuries: Romania and Serbia

Summary/Abstract: This article analyzes the role of antisemitism and anti-Islamic sentiments for the Romani-an and Serbian nation building processes. While the Great Powers served as role models in the construction of these respective identities, these principal “Others” were represented as uncivilized and non-European, allegedly preventing the nation-states from achieving their European destiny. The discursive construction of the nation in major debates is iden-tified as a first step which was followed by policy recommendations from intellectuals and actual attempts to fulfil the dream of an ethnically homogenous nation-state. In the con-cluding section, I tentatively follow the intellectual and political trajectory of the devel-oped model of upper and lower levels of identity construction. While in pre-Holocaust and colonial times both Jews and Muslims were represented through Orientalist tropes, after 1945 some sections of the radical and academic left discursively moved Jews to the catego-ry of “white settler colonialists”, and Muslims to the ranks of “black” oppressed peoples.

• Details
• Contents