Abstract: The aim of this publication is to critically rethink Manfred Böcker’s classic notion of “Antisemitismus ohne Juden” (Böcker, M. 2000. Antisemitismus ohne Juden: Die zweite Republik, die antirepublikanische Rechte und die Juden. Spanien 1931 bis 1936. Berlin: Peter Lang) and to translate it within the contemporary context of the Spanish Nationalpopulismus (Hirschmann, K. 2017. Der Aufstieg des Nationalpopulismus. Wie westliche Gesellschaften polarisiert werden. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung; Wilp, M. 2019. “Konfrontation statt Konsens: Der Aufschwung des Nationalpopulismus in den Niederlanden: Die politische Auseinandersetzung um Migration und Integration.” In Rechtspopulismus in Einwanderungsgesellschaften, edited by H. U. Brinkmann, and I. Panreck, 187–215. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften) represented by the radical party Vox España. The existence of a formula of “Anti-Semitism without Jews and without Anti-Semites” (Botsch, G., and C. Kopke. 2016. “Antisemitismus ohne Antisemiten?” In Wut, Verachtung, Abwertung Rechtspopulismus in Deutschland, edited by R. Melzer, D. Molthagen, A. Zick, and B. Küpper, 178–194. Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung; Wodak, R. 2018. “The Radical Right and Antisemitism.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, edited by J. Rydgren, 1–33. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks Online) seems to acquire corporeity in the “Civil-War-like” lexical arsenals (Rivas Venegas, M. 2018. Propaganda activities of Willi Münzenberg in Support of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. An Approximation to His Visual and Rhetorical Communication Strategies. Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung / Münzenberg Forum, 2019) of a party acutely connected to its Francoist past and to the paranoia of the “Francmason-Jewish-Bolshevist” conspiracy. This article aims to offer new perspectives on the study of national-populism via the parallel analysis of its “lexical arsenals” and visual-performative dispositives, what we here and in further publications identify as the messa in scena populista. It aims to fulfill the complex task of identifying the latent or indirect traces of Anti-Semitism in a party that chose the Muslim community as its preferred and most visible scapegoat, applied the tested political formula of the transnational nouvelle droite, yet never fully abandoned certain aspects of the Francoist and Spanish fascist worldview.
Abstract: The emergence of interactive online spaces and the evolution of internet-based communication have dramatically changed the way the individual relates to the world and interacts with other web users. The specificities of online communication such as anonymity and mutual reinforcement of web users have led to an increase and normalisation of hate speech (Troschke and Becker 2019. “Antisemitismus im Internet. Erscheinungsformen, Spezifika, Bekämpfung.” In Das neue Unbehagen. Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Europa heute, edited by Günther Jikeli and Olaf Glöckner, 151–72. Glöckner Hildesheim: Olms; Becker and Troschke 2023. “Decoding Implicit Hate Speech: The example of antisemitism.” In Challenges and perspectives of hate speech analysis: An interdisciplinary anthology, edited by Christian Strippel, Sünje Paasch-Colberg, Martin Emmer and Joachim Trebbe. Berlin: Digital Communication Research). This paper presents the results of our qualitative analysis of antisemitic content on Facebook profiles of British, French and German mainstream media, generated in the framework of the Decoding Antisemitism research project. The online debates of interest were identified in the context of discourse events – real-world events that have the potential to trigger antisemitic reactions – such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, escalation phases in the Middle East conflict, including the events of October 2023, or scandals and instances of hate crime in Europe and beyond. The results of our analyses point to several commonalities in the three language communities in how Israel is conceptualised and evaluated through stereotypes in these comment sections. On the other hand, there are also consistent differences between the three corpora in the choice of stereotypes. Another significant difference concerns the verbal immediacy and frequency with which these mental concepts are communicated in online debates. This article will attempt to map the qualitative and quantitative patterns, compare and contrast the analyses for the three language communities and at the same time put forward for discussion possible socio-historical and -political reasons for this discursive behaviour (cf. Ascone et al. 2022. Decoding Antisemitism: An AI-driven Study on Hate Speech and Imagery Online. Discourse Report 4. Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin. Centre for Research on Antisemitism).
Abstract: This paper aims at providing a new systemic contribution to research about perceptions of antisemitism/Judeophobia by contemporary Jews in 12 European Union countries. The perspective – the viewpoint of the offended side – has been less prominent relatively in research literature on antisemitism. The data analysis demonstrates the potential power of Similarity Structure Analysis (SSA) as a better theoretical and empirical tool to describe and conceptualize the contents of chosen research issues. After a brief review of some methodological problems in the study of antisemitism, this paper will re-elaborate data first published in the report of the 2018 FRA study Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism – Second survey on Discrimination and Hate Crimes against Jews in the EU (FRA 2018a). Topics include the perceived importance of antisemitism as a societal issue, the contents of anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination, channels of transmission, perpetrators of offenses, regional differences within Europe, and the role of antisemitism perceptions as a component of Jewish identification. Special attention is paid to the distinction between cognitive and experiential perceptions of antisemitism, and to the typology of practical, populist, political, and narrative antisemitism.
