ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how far modern antisemitism, in its early phases, was a movement of the Left or Right, radical or conservative – or whether it belongs to some more heterogeneous, hybrid category. The volkisch anti-Christian antisemitic tradition in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria embodied by Theodor Fritsch, Otto Boeckel, and Georg von Schoenerer followed in Duhring’s wake and found expression in a plebeian populist agitation that claimed to be above party and religious denominations. The very abstractness of the antisemitic ‘ideology’ - itself largely a creation of semi-radicalized, frustrated intellectual misfits and some sensation-mongering journalists – succeeded in activating the sense of an ideal world beyond the social atomization, the class antagonisms, and the decadence of contemporary bourgeois society. In France the tradition of literary antisemitism was no less distinguished than in Germany and also contributed its share towards making the new ideology socially respectable by the end of the century.
