September 11: The First International Anti-Semitic Conference

The Conference for Safeguarding Non-Jewish Interests, the first international anti-Semitic conference, convened in Dresden, Germany on this date in 1882. Among the delegates were three members of Hungary’s parliament, where the National Antisemitic Party (Orszagos Antiszemita Party) was formed the following year and won seventeen parliamentary seats as well as control of the Pressburg municipal council. Anti-Semitic parties also formed in Russia, France, Poland, Germany, and Austria during the 1880s and 1890s, in response to Jewish emancipation and Jewish entry into universities and a wider range of business enterprise that were formally barred to Jews, and against a background of economic crisis, especially for farmers. Anti-Semitism was thus largely redefined in Europe as a form of “racial” or ethnic hatred instead of religious persecution, which paved the way for Nazism’s racist theories. To read Leon Volovici’s excellent, brief history of anti-Semitic parties and movements in Europe right through to the 21st Century, visit the YIVO website.
“Every good Romanian must visit this exhibition, which includes kosher things . . . such as epileptic rabbis, Talmudic criminal scenes, as well as diverse types of kikes. . . . Entrance for dogs and kikes, 1 leu.”—Advertisement for an antisemitic exhibition held in the hall of the newspaper Nationalistul (The Nationalist), 1923