On May 25, 1901, a letter threatening antisemitic violence appeared in the East London Observer. It was written by a self-proclaimed member of the newly formed British Brothers' League who predicted that unless the national government intervened to stem the influx of “a dirty, money-grubbing population” into Britain, “the time will come when there will be a flame kindled before which the antisemitism of the continent will pale” (145). The letter's publication postdated by several weeks the chaotic London inaugural meeting of the xenophobic League, where working-class attendees inveighed against the recent upsurge of Jewish immigration and, at one point, loudly contested the denial by one speaker that antisemitism was motivating the anti-immigrant sentiment in London's East End that had inspired the League's creation. The East London Observer reported the following year that Jews had been “chased in Mile End Road” and that Jewish shops had been attacked after another mass meeting. The paper insisted that the League's “anti-alienism is antisemitism, in both origin and conduct,” and accused the organization of acting “in imitation of vile Continental practice” (153). One correspondent predicted that the League would “make it so hot for the Jews, that the aliens will be glad to ask mercy of Russia or Romania” (151).

Sam Johnson's chapter on the activities of the British Brothers' League from 1901 to 1903 is one of fourteen chapters in this fascinating edited collection of case studies dealing with antisemitic episodes in the decades around 1900. The geographical range is broad—the investigations cover western, central, southern, and eastern Europe, from London to Lithuania to the Greek Mediterranean—and most of the authors focus on lesser-known outbursts, all outside the boundaries of Imperial Germany. Together, the essays demonstrate that the upsurge in turn-of-the-century antisemitic agitation was virtually continent-wide—concentrated in central and eastern regions, to be sure, but also affecting countries underrepresented in the historiography of modern antisemitism, such as Great Britain and Greece.

As editors Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky state in their introduction, the task of the volume is to explain “outbreaks of violence and patterns of prejudice among groups who otherwise live in relative peace” (1). The contributors are united in the conviction that “local conditions mattered” (4) in generating forces that shattered long periods of peaceful cohabitation. Influenced by anthropologist Clifford Geertz and by recent scholarship on German antisemitism, they turn to “thick descriptions” of local events to uncover the diverse meanings of anti-Jewish episodes, as well as the various motivations for violence. The guiding principle of the volume is that it “listens carefully to the locals' stories” (2), yet the authors also pay close attention to external influences, tracing how outside forces interacted with local conditions to affect the timing, character, or outcome of antisemitic episodes. The most important external influences explored in the collection include the actions and attitudes of sometimes remote Catholic authorities who, these authors show, often echoed racial antisemitism in their writings; the activity of political parties and ethnic-national movements; the policies of national governments; regional and transnational immigration trends and economic developments; as well as the outbreak and progression of revolution and war.

Despite the editors' insistence upon the primacy of local conditions, these external forces loom large in many of the case studies. In his chapter on the Moravian riots of 1899, for example, Michal Frankl shows that it was the Austrian state's revocation of ordinances protecting the use of the Czech language that generated crowds of Czech speakers who carried out anti-Jewish actions, but argues that local conditions determined the crowds' descent into anti-Jewish violence. The tremendous attention paid throughout Moravia to a ritual murder trial in a small Bohemian town two weeks before the riots was of crucial importance, as were attempts by Moravian Czech nationalists to generate anti-Jewish boycotts earlier in the 1890s. Combined with a Czech tendency to associate Jews with Germans—because of a Jewish preference for the German language—these local events helped determine the targets of the Czech crowds.

What emerges most strongly from the various chapters is that many local actors felt “it was right and appropriate to punish the Jews” (260), as Hillel J. Kieval points out in his short afterword. Different factors fueled the conviction that Jews were legitimate targets, but what surfaced frequently was the idea that Jews were a powerful, oppressive, malevolent force working in concert with outside forces to harm local people. Those external forces included the anticlerical Republican government in France, according to Catholic writers appalled by state secularization campaigns; exploitative landlords in London's East End, in the view of working-class members of the British Brothers' League; and the Ottoman state, from the perspective of Greeks on the Ottoman-controlled island of Chios. Most of the essays reveal a widespread perception at the time of Jews as aggressors and collaborators with oppressive outside forces, something that seems to have formed a type of general cultural knowledge that suffused much of Europe by the turn of the century. What these case studies also show is that Jews were present in thousands of towns and villages and were therefore accessible targets. Tales of ritual murder and other bloody transgressions spread, above all, by newspapers primed many local actors for anti-Jewish activity.

Sites of European Antisemitism complements other recent studies in its emphasis on local conditions, its focus on culture over ideology, its explorations of the effects of external forces on local situations, and its revelations about the internal dynamics of pogroms and other anti-Jewish activity. Scholars familiar with the 2002 collection, Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Violence in Modern German History, edited by Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, will see considerable parallels between the approaches and conclusions of the two works. The current volume is nevertheless a welcome addition to the literature because of the way it brings the insights pioneered in examinations of modern German antisemitism to the study of other parts of Europe.