Biography
Norbert Glässer, PhD is a research fellow at the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest and an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Szeged. He was born in 1979 in Bečej (Yugoslavia). He completed his university studies in Szeged and Budapest. His research interests encompass Hungarian Jewry and modernity, with primary topics including the Israeli press, contemporary challenges in the institutionalization of Orthodox Judaism, Israeli symbolic politics, and the history of everyday life. He was awarded the Alexander Scheiber Prize in 2015 and the Leopold Lévy Memorial Plaque in 2019 for his research on Hungarian Jewry.
THE SHIFTING FRAMEWORK OF EMPIRES AND NATIONAL CONCEPTS: REPRESENTATION OF NATIONAL MOVEMENTS IN THE BALKANS IN THE HUNGARIAN JEWISH PRESS
Abstract: The modern national framework emerged in the Balkans during the 19th century. Judaism, as part of the modern era, adapted to these developments. Changes in the empire and the formation of new states also brought about shifts in how these new states defined themselves. These transformations had both organizational and existential impacts on the Jewish community. As a segment of modern society, middle-class Jews were active agents of modernization. After the Great War, ethnic self-definition became dominant in the Balkans, which also strengthened the Jewish national movement. Central European Jewry was deeply concerned with the issue of antisemitism between the two world wars. Following Hitler's rise to power, the position of Jews in Europe, particularly in neighbouring countries, became a subject of intense interest in the Hungarian Jewish press. They examined political developments in neighbouring states from a Jewish perspective. They were used as either positive or negative examples and often reflected more on the situation of Hungarian Jewry than on actual events in these countries. For instance, the philosemitism of the Serbian royal family was presented as a positive example, whereas the antisemitism of the Croatian Ustashe was depicted as a warning sign.
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