Crime, Jews and News Vienna 1890-1914 [Hardcover]

Crimes committed by Jews, especially ritual murders, have long been favorite targets in the antisemitic press. This book investigates popular and scientific conceptualizations of criminals current in Austria and Germany at the turn of the last century and compares these to those in the contemporary antisemitic discourse. It challenges received historiographic assumptions about the centrality of criminal bodies and psyches in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criminology and argues that contemporary antisemitic narratives constructed Jewish criminality not as a biologico-racial defect, but rather as a coolly manipulative force that aimed at the deliberate destruction of the basis of society itself. Through the lens of criminality this book provides new insight into the spread and nature of antisemitism in Austria-Hungary around 1900. The book also provides a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of modern Ritual Murder Trials by placing them into the context of wider narratives of Jewish crime.

Daniel Mark Vyletawas educated in Germany, the USA and England. He holds a PhD in History from King's College, University of Cambridge. Currently, he serves as Assistant Professor in Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconisn-Milwaukee.

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Tables

Introduction

Chapter 1.Scientific Tales of Criminality
Chapter 2.Jewish Criminals
Chapter 3.Paper Trials
Chapter 4.Jewish Crimes
Chapter 5.The Hilsner Ritual Murder Trials

Conclusions

Bibliography
Index

Vyleta raises an interesting question in what is a most thoroughly researched and wittily written book, and part of what he says about the conscious, instrumental use, or otherwise, of antisemitic discourse is very well taken.? Patterns of PrejudlÈ