Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic stereotypes in Romania and other Central-East European cultures, 468pp. University of Nebraska Press. £46.
Times Literary Supplement, August 21, 2009, p. 33
The Romanian scholar Andrei Oisteanu is a distinguished historian of religions and expert in East European folklore. In this richly documented book, he explores the representation of Jews and the interaction between general perceptions and the nationalist discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the main sources which underlie the portrayal of Jews as the embodiment of otherness in a region where ethnic purity has long been seen as a virtue. Some of these sources are derogatory, others suggest unavowed envy, others admiration. Physical descriptions range from bodily features to clothing. We also read of occupational pigeonholing (the Jew as craftsman, moneylender, musician, tavern-keeper), of psychological and moral attributes (the Jew is intelligent, yet perfidious and cowardly) and the mythical, magical, and religious dimensions (among which are the legend of the wandering Jew, and fixations including the Jew as murderer of Christ).
Inventing the Jew examines the cultural, religious and economic conditions that gradually led in the late 1930s and early 40s to an intensification of anti-Semitic racial persecutions, followed by legislative, judicial and exterminatory measures during Ion Antonescu’s dictatorship. Some of the stereotypes remained persistent even during Communist rule, when they surreptitiously permeated the official ideology. Many have been resurrected in the xenophobic rhetoric of Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a former supporter of Ceausescu and now a member of the European Parliament. Andrei Oisteanu’s expertise has been put to excellent use. Timely and enriching, Inventing the Jew is a necessary book. Nobody interested in the history (past and present) of Eastern and Central European anti-Semitism, radical nationalism and ethnocentric populism should miss it.
Vladimir Tismaneanu
tismaneanu.wordpress.com 