“The More Determined Opponents of Semitism” - On Anti-Semitismand Slovenian Liberalsin Carniola

Based on the examined sources, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the attitude of Slovenian liberalism in Carniola towards Jews was, as a rule, multidimensional, occasionally contradictory, and (almost) always dismissive. Simultaneously, it also opposed the attitude towards Jews adopted elsewhere in Europe by the political orientations which the Carniolan liberalism shared its name with – albeit with reservations. Despite the nuances that emerged in the internal structure and ideological outlook of Carniolan liberalism in the long term, over the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, this attitude was always characterised by various aversions, antipathies, and outright hatred rather than positive feelings. The ideological dominance of the Catholic camp, the characteristics of the environment, and a common external enemy in the form of German liberalism were the circumstances that dictated a specific situation in which anti-Semitism in Slovenia was a common feature of both clericalist and liberal politics. Although anti-Jewish views did not become part of the official party political programmes, anti-Semitism represented a constant in the liberal camp’s ideological character: the Young Slovenians in the 1870s and 1880s, as well as the party-organised national progressives in the 1890s, both swore by it. The fact that even afterwards, things did not change, and the liberals and their central daily bulletin sometimes even surpassed the members of the clericalist camp in their anti-Semitic zeal is attested to by the words of the vice-president of the Jewish religious congregation in Zagreb, Lavoslav Šik. In 1919, he complained that “we, as Jewish people, face the spirit of hatred almost daily in the press of free democratic Slovenia, mainly from the editorship of the liberal newspaper ‘Slovenski narod’ /.../”