Transforming Hatred

Vox just published a new piece by Nico Voigtländer and me on anti-Semitism in Germany:

Hatred Transformed: How Germans Changed Their Minds about Jews, 1890-2006

The persecution of Jews during WWII is one of the darkest and most puzzling chapters of recent history. This column asks how economics can help our understanding, particularly of how people’s attitudes to Jews have changed over time. It argues that ‘cultural economics’ shows that there is more to understanding how people behave than looking at their incentives. How and when do people change their minds? For example, watching a popular television series like AMC’s Mad Men seems to transport us straight to another planet. It shows the lives of advertising executives on Madison Avenue in the 1960s who spend their days drinking heavily (from 9am), chain-smoking, and fornicating. While not necessarily an accurate portrayal of corporate life in the middle of the 20th century, it reminds us how deeply cultures can be transformed in a relatively short space of time. In the Western world today, attitudes towards homosexuals, pre-marital sex, and women working outside the home are radically different from what they were a generation ago (Fernandez-Villaverde et al. 2011). At the same time, culture seems to persist over long periods of time. Italian towns that were self-governing in the middle ages are still more prosperous, citizens give more blood, and are more trusting (Guido et al. 2008). Areas of Africa affected by the slave trade continue to show lower levels of interpersonal trust (Nunn and Watchekon 2011). What accounts for the two-faced nature of culture? Why does it change so radically some of the time, while remaining unaltered over long periods? Anti-Semitism as an indicator In the past, canaries were used in coal mining to detect the presence of toxic fumes. Anti-Semitism serves a similar function in our study. As an attitude, it is arguably puzzling – it is extreme, clearly-defined, and dysfunctional. Germany has not been home to Jews in any significant numbers since 1945 (despite some minor inflows after the 1990s). In recent research, we look at the persistence of Jew-hatred in Germany (see Voigtländer and Voth 2012). In earlier work, we show that towns that saw pogroms in 1350, at the time of the Black Death, were still more anti-Semitic in the 1920s and 1930s (Voigtländer and Voth 2011). In this column, we examine how much of the past still matters for the present. Specifically, we ask how much of the anti-Semitism we see based on data from 1996 and 2006 reflects attitudes in the same location as far back as the late 19th century. We also examine the conditions under which hatred of this kind can be accentuated or reduced. Germans today are on average probably not much more anti-Semitic than other Europeans (Bergmann and Erb 1997). At the regional level, however, there are considerable differences. We use data from the German Social Survey (ALLBUS) to examine attitudes towards Jews. The survey asks a battery of questions, such as “Do you think that Jews partly brought persecution in the 20th century on themselves?” Answers range from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Figure 1 shows regional differences (at the district level) for answers to this question, based on the proportion of the population giving a score of 5, 6, or 7. Figure 1. Distribution of extreme anti-Semitic views you can read the rest here. If you want to read the article on which the VOX piece is based, look here. This research follows on from earlier work we did on the medieval origins of Jew-hatred in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany (now forthcoming in the QJE).

Persistence over the very long run.

I am over at Harvard for a few days, giving a talk tomorrow. Nico Voigtländer and I have a bunch of papers on the long-run consequences of the Black Death. Since I have done some other work on Nazi Germany, one day, we wondered if there wasn't a parallel between the two periods worth exploring. As the plague sweeps through Europe, causing unprecedented mortality, people look for causes - and many blame the Jews for poisoning the wells. In many - but not all - towns and cities in Europe, the Jewish population is brutally murdered in 1348-50. We were wondering if there is some logic to the geographical pattern of violence - and in particular, if we can find the same pattern in the 20th century. It turns out that there seems to be a huge degree of persistence - areas where Jews were burned in the 14th century were much more antisemitic in the 20th. Here is the abstract of our paper [download HERE]:

Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany
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.

With this, we are trying to contribute to the burgeoning literature on the long-run persistence of culture. Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales found that Italian cities with a history of independence had higher rates of trust and income even today; Jha shows that Indian cities with a mercantile past show less violence between Hindus and Muslims over a horizon of 300 years. Relative to these papers, we show a) persistence over a much longer horizon b) the survival of a pure cultural trait without obvious economic benefit, especially since Jews largely vanished from Germany after 1500.

*** Jonathan Haskel, whose intellectual judgement I hold in high esteem, actually called our results "the most amazing correlation he has ever seen". The title of his post? "Are the experts wrong?" ;-)