Julius Pokorny: An Outsider Between Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, Ethnicity and Celticism
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Julius Pokorny was one of the most enigmatic characters of the twentieth century. Born in Prague in 1887 as an Austrian Catholic of Jewish ancestry, he was a German and Irish nationalist and one of Europe’s foremost Celtic scholars. He held the Chair of Celtic Philology in Berlin from 1920 until 1935. Despite being a victim of the Nuremberg Race Laws, he was able to continue publishing on ethnic themes despite his Jewish origins right up to 1943. He fled to Switzerland in 1943 and was accepted there as a refugee thanks to an Irish visa issued in Berlin in 1940. His biography combines nationalism, ethnicity, anti-Semitism and Celtic scholarship and propaganda in a unique way. He died in Zurich in 1970.