¹ Frequently, as in currently widespread American usage, a boundary line drawn between ethnicity and race is based on distinctions between social and genetic inheritance. In many instances, however, the presence or importance of a physical trait may be only a matter of subjective judgment or imagination. Thus, whatever its analytic Utility, the clearcuc separation of these categories is difficult, if not impossible.

² Burks, Richard V., Die Dynamik des Kommunismus in Osteuropa (Hannover 1969)Google Scholar.

³ Fejtös study was recently published in German, unfortunately without any attempt to bring it up to date on important developments in the intervening period. See Fejtö, François, Judentum und Kommunismus. Antisemitismus in Osteuropa (Wien, Frankfurt, and Zürich, 1967)Google Scholar.

⁴ According to Fejtö sources (East Europe, March, 1959, quoted on p. 60), the number of Jews in the countries of East Europe was as follows:

Country After the War 1957

Czechoslovakia 45,000 5,000 (?)

Hungary 140,000 80,000

Poland 50,000 25,000

Rumania 400,000 200,000

⁵ We may get some idea of these differences by comparing the conduct of the Rajk and the Slansky trials, both of them purportedly (Fejtö, p. 65) designed to purge the country of Jewish Communists. In Hungary 3 out of 8, in Czechoslovakia 11 out of 14, of the principal defendants were Jewish. In the incomplete transcripts of the Czech trial the term “Zionist” appears no less than 47 times, accompanied by references to “Jewish nationalists,” “Jewish bourgeoisie,” and “Jewish cosmopolitans.” In the transcript of the Rajk trial, on the other hand, we find no more than two references to Zionism (both of them in connection with the background of Andras Szalai, who was made to confess his past membership in such an organization), and the term “Jewish” appears only once in an interesting exchange between the president of the court and Rajk, in the course of which the defendant was made to state that he was not Jewish, that he was of Aryan [sic] stock and of Transylvanian German parentage. Corresponding to these “quantitative” differences were the respective propaganda campaigns that surrounded the two trials. Whereas in the Hungarian press the trial was accompanied by at least one vigorous denunciation of anti-Semitism, the Czechoslovak press used the Jewish theme with abandon to whip up popular sentiment against “alien” elements. See Radio Free Europe, Inc. Transcript of the Slansky Trial (New York and Munich 1952)Google Scholar; László Rajk and His Accomplices Before the People's Court (Budapest 1949) esp. pp. 81Google Scholar and 164.

⁶ Sec, for instance, Paul Hoffman, “Jews in Czechoslovakia Fear Rise of Anti-Semitism in Party,” New York Times, January 14, 1970, p. 11. This article reports a “surge of anti-Semitism in the Communist party apparatus” triggered by the conviction that “Jewish intellectuals were prominent among the backers of Alexander Dubcek.” The article also quotes “well-informed sources” to the effect that recent attacks on Jews had been promoted by a “document circulated among party officials … believed to have been compiled by the secret police with the assistance of Soviet security officers … [in] an assessment of the alleged role of Jews in the events that led to the invasion of August 1968.”

⁷ The first, best-known, and most elaborate formulation of this hypothesis is in Deutsch, Karl W., Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass, and New York 1953)Google Scholar.

⁸ For this explanation see, for instance, Haas, Ernst B., Beyond the Nation State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford 1964), 465Google Scholar.

⁹ These examples are found throughout history but are perhaps most striking in the instance of the Germanic states of the People's Migration Era. There, ethnicity—i. e., a common language or dialect—not only conferred membership in the political community but also carried with it a notion of equality. Although contemporary social science often overlooks this historical fact, the political patterns of the Migration Era became a model for many nineteenth-century nationalists who extolled its ascriptive, affective, and particularistic characteristics. In contrast, the legitimacy of the medieval political community in Western Europe was based on the notion of contract, and was, in Weberian terms, rational. It is well to remember, therefore, that nationalism is not unequivocally “modern” either in chronological or in sociological terms.

¹⁰ For this concept see Almond, Gabriel A., The Appeals of Communism (Princeton 1954), 66–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.