High on the list of “talks I wish I had not missed this semester” is last week’s NYU presentation of this paper:
How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared these horrors.
We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.
The dark side of path dependence…
2 Responses
Arabs are Semites, too, Chris.
Interesting. I would like to see this data compared to population mobility or exchange. While the plague and the 30 years war had the biggest impact on population size the mobility within Germany was highest in the age of emigration of nations (obviously) and after the second world war; of course there were notable migrations locally, like the influx of eastern workers (culturally polish, legally often german) into the Ruhr area.
The late german nation building may have some impact too. When culture is the only bracket it easily can get exclusionary. Light and dark sides of culture persist longer then.