Introduction: “Swedes know nothing about us”
Having explored how processes of racialisation of Jews are present in public debates in Sweden, and in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander as an example of a cultural artefact, we now turn to the in-depth interviews. The purpose of these chapters is to explore anti-Jewish racism and the Swedish racial regime at large, through the analysis of Jewish subjectivities in Sweden as expressed in the interview material.
The analysis of the interviews has been organised into four chapters, covering various themes that evolved from the interviews. In this first chapter, a central topic is the notion of a historical change that was present in many of the accounts among interviewees born during the first couple of decades after the Holocaust, particularly in their reflections of how the nature of racism against Jews in Sweden had changed during the span of their life. A pivotal aspect in relation to this change is the demand for “sameness” in the Swedish racial regime, and how national belonging is enacted through this “sameness”.
This in turn relates to what some interviewees experienced as forms of invisibility in Swedish society, and is connected both to strategies of adaptation to Protestant-secular society as well as the relation between anti-Jewish racism and other forms of racism in the Swedish racial regime.
An aspect of this perceived invisibility became obvious during my fieldwork. In October 2018, a key interviewee brought me to Bajit, a Jewish cultural centre in central Stockholm, a visit I also mentioned in Chapter 4. After a lunch at the restaurant at Bajit, the interviewee introduced me to a few of her acquaintances and explained that I was a PhD student from Lund University.
When asked about the topic of my research, I replied that I was interested in antisemitism, Jewish identities and their relation to the Swedish nation. At this answer, a woman, who I guessed was in her sixties, exclaimed: “Relation to the Swedish nation?! There is none! Swedes know nothing about us!” I was
surprised by the answer, and unsure how to interpret both the alleged absence of a Swedish-Jewish relation, and the fact that the woman, by her choice of phrasing, located herself outside “Swedishness”. I have reflected upon this scene several times during the work with this thesis. The woman’s exclamation that “Swedes know nothing about us!”, as well as many interviewees’
expression of a perceived lack of knowledge, interest and support from majoritarian society, obliged me to ponder upon the complexities of racism in the Swedish context as far as visibility and room for difference are concerned.
I noticed that many interviewees born in the first decades after the Shoah shared views similar to that of the woman at Bajit. According to them, majoritarian Swedish society lacked knowledge about Jewish life in Sweden, was not interested in it, and did not show any support for the Jewish community, which was frustrating to many interviewees. At the same time, many of them also expressed their opinion that the situation for Jews in Sweden
“had been better before”.
“There was almost no antisemitism”
In most cases, I would begin an interview by asking how the interviewee’s Jewish identity had evolved over their life span. Through this question, I learnt about many expressions of Jewish identity and experiences of racism during the interviewees’ childhood and adolescence. However, several interviewees, who grew up during the first few decades after the Holocaust, declared that it had been fairly unproblematic to grow up as a Jewish child in Sweden in this time period. Many also told me that they had faced hardly any form of racism in their childhood, something that aligns with previous interview studies in Sweden where Jewish interviewees said they lack or have limited experiences of antisemitism (Nylund Skog 2006). For example, one informant, who grew up in a town in western Sweden as a child of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, told me the following about his childhood:
It was fairly unproblematic. Once in a while I got to hear “bloody Jew” from someone I was in a fight with. But I didn’t wear any glasses, and I was rather good at school, so what else could they say? Then they had to use this “bloody Jew”. I have heard from others who got very… well, on a few occasions I got angry too and then I threw something, a stone or something, at their head. So I have fought for it too, but it wasn’t anything…. For the most part, it was rather innocent.
In this case, the interviewee understood racist invectives such as “bloody Jew”
as normalised boyish acts, comparable to other, non-racist, invectives used in school settings. While this interviewee expressed a high degree of worry about contemporary anti-Jewish racism in Sweden, he made a sharp contrast with the 1950s and 1960s, which he described as almost an idyllic period in which anti-Jewish racism was largely absent. Among some of the interviewees, this was a common understanding of Sweden in the aftermath of World War II, and was often contrasted to today’s Sweden, where anti-Jewish racism was described as growing. A woman who grew up in Gothenburg in the 1950s and 1960s shared a positive memory from her childhood:
When I was at elementary school, I used to live close to school, so I went home to have lunch, because I didn’t eat the food in the canteen. And that wasn’t weird at all. And I went to church for the end of the school year. We were in Sweden, we felt secure about our Jewish identity, and we were obviously a part of majoritarian society. If the end of the school year took place in a church, then it took place in a church. I liked Christmas a lot, and I didn’t have to believe in Jesus just because he was in the nativity scene. But I learnt what it meant. And the psalms. We had morning celebrations. I still know the psalms.
Interviewer: It sounds very idyllic?
But it was! The times were different. I and my brother were the only ones who were dark. And there was one guy who had Italian parents; they had come here as labour migrants. That was the only non-Swedish element in the entire school.
And I was a picturesque element, as I usually say.
In this account, the interviewee gives the image of Sweden during her childhood and adolescence as an ethnically relatively homogenous society, where her position as a dark-haired Jewish girl among her white Swedish Christian peers didn’t cause problems. It is noteworthy that she described herself as different from her peers due both to her religious-cultural practices as well as her physical appearance. Her difference came across as
“picturesque”, and in the interview she explained to me that the exotifying image was sometimes filled with erotic undertones. In her memory, she never experienced this differentiation in a negative way. Further, she portrayed the strong Christian elements in Swedish public schools in this era—end of school year celebrations in church, Christmas celebrations, and daily morning gatherings with psalm-singing—as unproblematic, and as something that she and her family easily adapted to without this causing any problem for their
Jewish identity. It is noteworthy that when I concluded that her description was idyllic, she emphasised that this was indeed her memory of her upbringing.
Later in the interview, she contrasted this with contemporary discussions in Sweden, in which it has been questioned whether it is suitable for public schools to celebrate the end of the school year in church. When she described how she had to go home to have lunch, since the school canteen didn’t serve kosher food, I asked whether this wasn’t experienced as a difficulty, as she and her brother were the only ones who would go home to have lunch and that this must have singled them out. She replied that she didn’t remember it as anything negative.
On the contrary, she added that sometimes other kids would follow her home for lunch, if they didn’t like the food served in the canteen on a particular day. In this interview and in some others, the interviewees conveyed a very positive image of Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s. Although they were categorised as
“different” from their non-Jewish peers, they didn’t seem to think that this excluded them or located them at an inferior position vis-à-vis non-Jewish Swedes. At the same time, it was obvious that they and their families worked actively to adapt themselves to the Protestant-secular norms of Swedish society, and that there didn’t seem to be many options to do otherwise.
Many of the interviewees who were born during the first two decades after World War II, some of them as children of Holocaust survivors, would tell me about what they understood as a strong commitment among their parents to
“adapt to Swedish society”, during their childhood and adolescence. Sometimes, they said, their parents strove very hard to “integrate” into Swedish society.
While they also told me there was a relative lack of anti-Jewish racism during this time, they simultaneously conveyed that Swedish society of the period was ethnically homogenous, with strong social imperatives to adapt to the cultural-religious norms of the majority population. One interviewee, when asked what it was like to grow up in Malmö in the 1950s and 1960s, summarised the attitude of his parents as “one was supposed to be proud to be Jewish, but one shouldn’t speak too much about it”. When asked to elaborate, he answered:
So, there was pride, but also carefulness. And that comes from the position of being a minority. One has learnt to be careful; one doesn’t talk too much about it. And if your employer wants you to work on Saturdays, then you work on Saturdays. And you go to school on Saturdays. And then you go to the synagogue some other day. And I think all Jewish boys of my age went to school on Saturdays. I cannot remember anyone who didn’t. Maybe there was someone, but I don’t remember. And it was kind of part of this “we adapt to this country”. Everyone was a Social Democrat. Everyone.
In this excerpt, the informant explained the ambivalence that he identified among his parents’ generation in the first decades following World War II, combining a pride in their Jewish identity with what he labelled as
“carefulness”, which translated into not displaying their Jewishness openly. He framed this demeanour as a willingness to “adapt to this country”, by accepting the Protestant-secular norms of Swedish society, including working and going to school on Saturdays, and being off work or school on Sundays. Partly, his emphasis that “everyone” in the Jewish community in Malmö where he grew up voted for the Social Democratic party, hegemonic in Sweden during that time, could be interpreted as mirroring this willingness to “adapt”. What stands out in this account is that the interviewee seemed to express a mixture of nostalgia of what was portrayed as a harmonious past without conflicts—
different from today’s Sweden, where migrants and people racialised as non-Swedish are constantly blamed for “not adapting to Sweden”—but also an acknowledgement that fear was a driving force behind this alleged harmony.
He explicitly told me that he believed that many Jews in Sweden in the aftermath of the Shoah had been afraid that history would repeat itself, and that it had therefore been important for the many to try to prevent this by “adapting to Sweden” and refraining from displaying their religiosity in the public sphere. In all the interviews with people who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, Sweden was portrayed as a society with a very strong pressure to adapt to what can be conceptualised as Swedish “sameness” (Gullestad 2002), something that seemed to have formed the upbringing of many interviewees, as well as their relationship to notions both of Swedishness and Jewishness. Often, this
“sameness” was expressed as Protestant-secular norms, to which the interviewees and their families adapted.
What can be framed as a “strategy of adaptation”, but also the low degree of racism that many interviewees told me they had experienced, could be seen in light of the low number of people who, according to the interviewees, did deviate publicly from Swedish Protestant-secular norms. The woman who grew up in Gothenburg, and who used to go home to have lunch as a school pupil, made the following reflection when I asked her to elaborate on this experience:
There were just a few of us. It didn’t really matter for the school if we went home for lunch because we had another tradition. It wasn’t worth talking about.
But today, if you have a school with 2,000 pupils and 1,000 of them do not eat the Swedish-Swedish food that is offered, then that obviously requires the school to take another position, to make other decisions and to offer other things, so to speak. Times are different. Completely different. That is also provocative for majoritarian society, because you have to question yourself.
[…] Swedes love travelling abroad to visit churches and temples and eat different kinds of food, but when it comes here and it is around your corner, it is not so funny any more.
The interviewee described a situation of “tolerance” (Goldberg 2004; Balibar 1991)—or maybe acceptance that she understood as relating to the relatively small number who were perceived as deviating from Swedish ethnic, religious and cultural norms—toward “difference”. From this perspective, those who were categorised as “different” in racial-cultural-religious terms were so few that they did not constitute a “provocation” for majoritarian society, in the words of the interviewee. In the interview, she also conveyed a critique of
“Swedes”, by which I understood white, non-Jewish, Protestant-secular Swedes, and their alleged cultural narrowmindedness, which implied that they would feel threatened by public manifestations of cultural diversity when these occurred in Sweden.
Thus, for this interviewee and several others born during the first couple of decades after the Holocaust, historical change appears as a central topic to understand experiences of antisemitism. In these accounts, there was often a binary opposition between notions of a happy past and a much more problematic present. Nevertheless, the accounts from “the past” contained several descriptions of adaptations to “sameness”, of moments of exclusion, racial slurs, and of being singled out as different.
Racialisation, difference and national belonging
Besides accounts of what was described as fairly unproblematic adaptations by the interviewees’ families to expectations of sameness, I was also told stories from this period in which the interviewees were more explicitly differentiated by the majority population. Sometimes the interviewees were not sure whether these cases of differentiation had positive, neutral or negative connotations.
The following quote is an example of this type of differentiation:
There are these subtle things, people knowing very quickly that you are Jewish, despite… I had recently moved to [name of town in mid-Sweden], I got a job there, we had a new-born baby and then we got an apartment in this newly constructed area, a bit outside of town. Everybody there had recently moved in.
And then a friend of ours came to visit us, but he didn’t know what street number was ours, so he went to see the janitor and asked for us. “Yes, she is a Jew, right?” the janitor replied. “Well, I don’t know,” my friend said. But then
he recalled that I was born in [European city] and had moved to Sweden in the late 1930s, so he added, “Well, yes, maybe she is.” “Ah, yes, they live at this street number,” the janitor said. We had just moved in! I think it almost a mystery that something like this can happen! [Laughs] It wasn’t the smallest of towns, but still the rumour had spread. This was 1959.
Interviewer: And why was it like that?
I don’t know. Well, still in 1959… yes, there was some immigration: we had people from former Yugoslavia, first and foremost Finland, Italians coming, at least to Gothenburg. […] But it seems like there was still something exotic about it, you know. Because you can’t say that my physical appearance is typically Jewish—I don’t know what that would be, but you can’t say I’ve got it. My dad had dark-blond hair and blue eyes. It is very hard to tell. There are these strange things that I can’t really explain. It was so obvious that, for them, a Jewess had moved into “our neighbourhood”, you know. But I can’t really tell you if this janitor harboured negative feelings about it, because the story doesn’t say. But just this thing that they knew, it is so enigmatic to me. ´ In this story, the interviewee emphasised that her differentiation as a Jew in Sweden at the end of the 1950s seemed like “a mystery” and was “enigmatic”
to her. In the interview situation, she seemed to be trying to understand why she had been differentiated, despite not looking “Jewish” (“you can’t say that my physical appearance is typically Jewish”). Although she didn’t know whether to interpret the memory as a form of exclusion (“I can’t really tell you if this janitor harboured negative feelings”), the interviewee was clearly bothered by the way she had been categorised as a Jew, since she couldn’t understand the reason for this categorisation. This account gives the image of a semi-urban Sweden where everything that did not fit into Swedish
“sameness” was regarded as extremely “exotic” and worthy of gossip (“the rumour had spread”), mirrored in other interviewees’ accounts of a rather homogenous and somewhat provincial Sweden.
In parallel with the interviewees’ memories of Sweden during a time of limited ethnic heterogeneity, in which some interviewees described that they had been categorised as “different” from notions of Swedish “sameness” but didn’t necessarily remember this as something negative, I also learnt of more violent forms of differentiation of Jews. One interviewee, whose father had grown up in Gothenburg in the 1930s, told me the following when I asked him about his fear of antisemitism:
You know, my dad was forced out of German class at school. The teacher in junior high simply said: “[surname] leaves the room! We don’t teach Jewish
boys here.” This was in Gothenburg. I think similar things happened at various places. And that doesn’t leave anyone. That pain is still there, I think.
This short quote highlights the interviewee’s transgenerational transference of trauma (Wiseman and Barber 2008), due to his father’s childhood experiences of racism. Although the interviewee didn’t elaborate any further on this episode, the quote transmits a sense of solitariness, and the feeling that there was no other teacher, presumably without racist attitudes, who would defend the interviewee’s father at a Swedish public school in the 1930s. I interpret the lines “[T]hat doesn’t leave anyone. That pain is still there, I think” as referring to the interviewee’s feelings of pain due to the racist exclusion that was forced upon his father in a societal context with few possibilities to challenge Swedish racism.
While the quote above refers to pre-Holocaust anti-Jewish racism, I was also told about experiences of explicit forms of exclusion in the 1950s and 1960s, which other interviewees regarded to be an idyllic period for Jews in Sweden.
For example, one interviewee, who grew up in what she described as a “very blond, petit-bourgeois area” on the outskirts of Stockholm in the 1960s, told me that she had been repeatedly bullied at school due to her “strange name”
and for being one of the few “non-blond” children in the neighbourhood. She also remarked that her sister, who had the same family name but a blonder hair tone, was not an object of bullying. Often in the interview she would come back to her feeling of being differentiated in Sweden for the simple fact that she wasn’t blonde:
I realise I have mentioned this already three times now, but if you were born at the beginning of the 1960s, Sweden was so blond. I have this anecdote… When I defended my doctoral dissertation at the end of the 1990s, my sister came to the defence, and so did a bunch of my Jewish friends. When a former student of mine saw them, she exclaimed: “Oh, you have so many sisters!” [Pause]
Well…
In this quote, the normative “blondness” of Swedish society appears in a parodic form when the interviewee’s acquaintance assumed her friends to be family members, since they all deviated from the norm of blondness.
Following this, Swedish “sameness” appears not only as a set of cultural-religious norms rooted in a Protestant-secular worldview, regarded to be
“universal” in character, but is also expressed in terms of phenotypical traits.
In the case of this interviewee, her non-blonde hair was one of the ways that she deviated from this sameness, and she connected this to the childhood trauma of being bullied at school. These remarks about blond (and sometimes