This collection of articles about anti-Semitism in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century is in many ways an excellent resource for the study of the development of hostility to Jews during this era. It makes many perceptive points about how relations between Jews and non-Jews could turn violent in such sites as Galician villages and Greek islands, or how Catholic anti-Jewish ideologues often used modern, racial approaches to justify their polemics against Jews and their liberal, secularist supporters. There is also an excellent afterword by Hillel Kieval that not only reprises many of the themes of the book, but also opens up theoretical vistas that the essays only suggest. However, the book suffers from a lack of theoretical coherence at the start, especially a failure to define its terms clearly. It tends to use “antisemitism” as a blanket term for all forms of Jew-hatred. The unfortunate use of the dangerously misleading medical analogy of anti-Semitism as a “virus” (8) suggests that more time should have been spent thinking through the central theme of the collection.

Ostensibly, the book's contribution to the field is to “disaggregate” (3) the concept and history of anti-Semitism: emphasizing the local in order to get at the details of what actually happened in outbreaks of violence; searching for “transnational links” (4) that connect these apparently disparate events; and yet looking for multiple meanings. This appears to imply that for some, anti-Semitism was indeed a response to foes within a modern context, whereas for others it was more a chance to act on old grudges, stoked by excessive alcohol (an ancient, traditional phenomenon). The “‘micropolitical’ approach” (5) yields the conclusion that anti-Semitic violence had more causes than once thought.

The book's contents are informative and often intriguing. Part I relates how political Catholicism and the Catholic press created an anti-Semitism that combined religious anti-Judaism with more modern economic and racial aspects. It then shows how this new anti-Semitism combined with Polish nationalism to spark violence by Polish peasants in Galicia. Part II looks at the role of nationalism in shaping or explaining anti-Semitic riots in Romania, Moravia, and Croatia. Part III is a miscellany of additional case studies: anti-Russian-Jewish movements in Britain, the fascinating “Hervay affair” in rural Austria, and Greek blood libel riots from 1840 to 1892. Part IV concerns the state and military's relationship to anti-Semitism, which was often not as sympathetic as many historians once thought, especially in Russia. Kieval's afterword points out an interesting characteristic of the evidence presented: the gap between France and Italy, where the Catholic anti-Semitic ideology was produced, and the Central and Eastern European places where major anti-Semitic violence occurred. (Kieval wisely discounts the violence around the Dreyfus affair as a passing phase.) He asks: Why the disparity? Perhaps this is a result of the local emphasis of the book not providing enough of a horizon to make general connections, or omitting the heart of the subject. If one wanted to find a place where reactionary “Catholic” ideology and anti-Semitic violence—or at least anti-Semitic mass politics—were both at home and closely connected, then one need only look at Karl Lueger's Vienna. Had Vienna been included, then the Central European phenomenon of anti-Semitism, local and transnational, would have been far more easily explained.

Mention of Lueger leads to another observation: between the lines of several chapters—and explicitly in Robert Nemes's astute study of wartime Nagyvárad—lies the instrumental rationality behind much supposedly ideological or even so-called traditional anti-Semitism. Rumors of “ritual murder” (72) in the Greek islands look much more like rationalizations than actual reasons for violence, which was really generated by ethnic commercial rivalries. The background to the Galician riots was a nationalist drive to change the economic status quo, in which Jews were indeed prominent. Much of anti-Semitism, whether ideologically modern or religiously based, was a form of identifying an exposed “Other” to attack in order to pursue one's own rational ends (such as national integration, a bigger slice of the pie, or political power). As Nemes points out about refugee policy in wartime Nagyvárad, it came down to who was one of “us” and who was not. In the illiberal “modern” world of us-versus-them nationalism, where pluralism had come to be seen as outmoded, the Jews, the traditional outsiders, were always going to be in trouble. This book's case studies show how local contexts could indeed make European anti-Semitism—a highly irrational, historical ideology—seem rational and modern.