Religious Minorities and Resistance to Genocide

• In Event: 252 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Can Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World? (3) Genocide

Abstract

This paper hypothesizes that religious minority groups are more likely to protect persecuted groups during episodes of mass killing. The author builds a geo-coded dataset of Jewish evasion in the Netherlands during the Holocaust to test this hypothesis. Spatial regression models of 93 percent of all Dutch Jews demonstrate a robust and positive correlation between the proximity to minority churches and evasion. While proximity to Catholic churches increased evasion in dominantly Protestant regions, proximity to Protestant churches had the same effect in Catholic parts of the country. County fixed effects and the concentric dispersion of Catholicism from missionary hotbed Delft are exploited to disentangle the effect of religious minority groups from local level tolerance and other omitted variables. This suggests that it is the local position of church communities -and not something inherent to any religion itself- that produces collective networks of assistance to threatened neighbors.

Author

• Robert Braun, Cornell University