Catholic racism and anti-Jewish discourse in interwar Austria and Slovakia: the cases of Anton Orel and Karol Körper

Abstract

ABSTRACT Szabó’s study deals with the phenomenon of so-called Catholic racism, that is, the penetration of racist argumentation into anti-Jewish polemics within European Catholicism, in the first half of the twentieth century. It presents the ideas of two Catholic intellectuals—Anton Orel from Austria and Karol Körper from Slovakia—to demonstrate that, while this process unfolded against the background of the rising Nazi movement in Germany, it was specific to the different national contexts of Central Europe. While in Germany several Catholic commentators and theologians sought to reconcile Catholic doctrine with notions of racial supremacy, in other countries they responded differently to such tendencies. The Austrian writer Anton Orel, for example, highlighted the supranational identity of a ‘Great Austria’ (Grossösterreich) based on Catholicism and corporatism, as opposed to German national and Protestant racism, whereas his Slovak colleague Körper surprisingly drew inspiration from the white supremacist ideology of North America. Apart from the different national contexts, Szabó’s study also describes the transnational character of Catholic racism. In modern Catholic antisemitism Jews are stereotyped not only based on religious differences but, in the light of conspiracy theories, they are also presented as an embodiment of modernization, a socio-economic and political ‘threat’. Another specific feature of Catholic racism is the fact that it did not primarily defer to the authority of natural science, which had challenged its earlier monopoly on the interpretation of the world and man’s place in it. Instead, its supporters gave a political character to the traditional doctrine of substitution theology, so-called supersessionism, based on which Christians claimed to assume the role of the Jews as the chosen people. Correspondingly, the chosenness of the Jewish people is negatively connoted as a conspiracy of the ‘Jewish race’ against the Catholic religion and traditional states as well as new Christian-corporative nations, which Jews had allegedly sought to subdue in their conquest for world domination by means of capitalism or Bolshevism. Catholic racism is thus set in the wider context of the development of modern antisemitism towards its most radical Nazi form. Not even the Nazis were able to define their anti-Jewish bias scientifically, and they were therefore dependent on religious cultural models.