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VWI invites/goes to...

 

Cycle of VWI Fellows’ Colloquia

 

The VWI fellows present their intermediary research results in the context of colloquia which are announced to a small audience and are open to a public audience with an academic and topical interest. The lectures are complemented by a response or commentary by an expert in the given field and are discussed with the other fellows.

 

Due to the previous lack of an appropriate space, the colloquia were held at other Viennese research and cultural institutions with a topical or regional connection to the given subject. From this circumstance was born the “VWI goes to …” format.

 

With the move to a new institute building at Rabensteig 3, the spatial circumstances have changed, so that the VWI is now happily able to invite other research and cultural institutions. Therefore, the VWI is now conducting its colloquia both externally and within its own building, in the framework of continued co-operation with other institutions.

 

The new cycle of fellows’ colloquia “VWI invites/goes to …” is not only able to reach a broader circle of interested persons, but moreover integrates the VWI further into the Viennese scholarly establishment, perhaps even crossing borders into the greater regional research landscape.

 

 

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VWI invites/goes to...
Ionuț-Florin Biliuta: Sowing the Seeds of Hate – The Antisemitism of the Orthodox Church in Interwar Romania
   

Wednesday, 18. March 2015, 16:00 - 17:30

Institute for Human Sciences, Spittelauer Lände 3, 1090 Vienna

 

VWI goes to the IWM

 

Biliuta picThe present project is focused on the antisemitic discourse of several prominent orthodox clergy-men and theologians associated with the Romanian Iron Guard and the radicalisation of orthodox nationalism under the impact of fascism. Under a wave of right-wing ideological radicalisation, or-thodox clergymen and theologians shifted from understanding the Jew according to the Patristic theology and Canon law to a more confessional, exclusivist trend of theology. The contributions of the Orthodox theologians and laymen to the narrative related to identity construction in post 1918 Romania led to a process of exclusion of the Jews from the midst of the nation fundamentally dif-ferent from other fascist movements, namely the exclusion on confessional grounds: if a Romanian citizen did not share the same religious confession as the majority of the population, he was deemed ethnically unfit to be a true Romanian citizen and could only achieve the status of a good Romanian. This was the first step for the complete exclusion of the Jewish minority from the Ro-manian nation, and the process was so radical that the need for racial laws became obsolete. If in Nazi Germany the Protestant Churches followed their political leader's antisemitic stance, in the Romanian case some of the most radical anti-Jewish positions stemmed from within the Orthodox Church. These theologians distanced themselves from the conceptual views of the Jews cultivated by the Nazis (with their positive Christianity and Aryans as the master-race) and the Italian fascists (with a complicated relation with Roman Catholicism) both perceived as deviations from Christian dogma. Instead they defended the presence of the Old Testament in the Corpus of the Scriptures and denied any Aryan trace in the Orthodox Church's Christology.

 

Comments by Oliver Jens Schmitt

 

Ionuț-Florin Biliuta is currently a Junior Fellow at the VWI. He has a PhD in History from CEU (Budapest, Hungary) and is a PhD student in Theology at Babeş-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). He has nu-merous publications in Romanian historical journals. Together with Nadia Al-Bagdadi and Anca Şincan, he is currently editing 'Transforming a Church. Eastern Christianity in Post-Imperial Societies' (Budapest: CEU University Press, 2014).

 

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Oliver Jens Schmitt is historian, Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Vienna.

 

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Click here to download the invitation as a PDF file.

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The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) is funded by:

 

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