"Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time." -Samuel Moyn "Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history." -The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism. "It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little." -Mark Mazower, Financial Times "From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element-the Jews-aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers." -Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

In this important historical account of the role that religion played in defining the political life of a modern national society, Paul A. Hanebrink shows how Hungarian nationalists redefined Hungary a liberal society in the nineteenth century as a narrowly "Christian" nation in the aftermath of World War I. Drawing on impressive archival research, Hanebrink uncovers how political and religious leaders demanded that "Christian values" influence public life while insisting that religion should never be reduced to the status of a simple nationalist symbol.

In Defense of Christian Hungary also explores the emergence of the idea that a destructive "Jewish spirit" was the national enemy. In combining the historical study of antisemitism with more recent considerations of religion and nationalism, Hanebrink addresses an important question in Central European historiography: how nations that had been inclusive of Jews before World War I became rabidly antisemitic during the interwar period. As he traces the crucial and complex legacy of religion's role in shaping exclusionary antisemitic politics in Hungary, Hanebrink follows the process from its origins in the 1890s to the Holocaust and beyond.

More broadly, In Defense of Christian Hungary squarely addresses the relationship between antisemitic words and antisemitic violence and between religion and racial politics, deeply contested issues in the history of twentieth-century Europe. The Hungarian example is a chilling demonstration of how religious nationalism can find a home even within a pluralist and tolerant civil society."