Analyzes the causes of the anti-Jewish violence of the First Crusade. The spiritual revival and rapid growth of the 10th-11th centuries led both to Church reform and the Crusades, an attempt to direct feudal violence against the enemies of the Church. Under the impact of popular frenzy and loss of control by the papacy, the traditional Church doctrine of both denigration and toleration of the Jews broke down. The crusading bands' ideological motivation is reflected in contemporary Hebrew chronicles and in two Christian accounts. Discusses the Jewish response of martyrdom in preference to conversion. Contends that 1096 was not a turning-point - the destroyed communities were quickly resettled, and in later Crusades anti-Jewish excesses were prevented by the Church. The massacres indicated a change in Christian attitudes, including the view of Jews as enemies of Christendom, ritual murder accusations, and the demand for the Jews' total destruction or conversion. The appendix (pp. 223-297) contains an English translation of the texts of the two chronicles.

In this volume, scholars from the United States, Israel and Eastern Europe examine the history of the Holocaust on Soviet territory and its treatment in Soviet politics and literature from 1945 to 1991. Of special interest to researchers will be chapters on some of the major research sources for historical study, including census materials, memorial books, archives and recently released documents.

Based on two extant Jewish sources describing the pogroms in the Rhineland in 1096, the Mainz Anonymous and the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, narrates the history of the massacre of Jews by the Crusaders and by burghers who joined them, in Mainz, Worms, Köln, and Speyer. The Pope, who conceived the Crusade, did not call for the massacre of Jews, nor did the secular authorities approve of it; it was Count Emicho's army that unleashed the murders. Clergymen and imperial officials, as well as some burghers, tried to protect the Jews, not always successfully. The revulsion toward Christianity, the readiness for martyrdom evinced by the Rhineland Jews, the mass suicides, and even the murder of their families by Jews themselves only incited the Crusaders to greater excesses. Despite the brutality of the massacres of 1096, the bulk of Ashkenazic Jewry survived them unharmed. Although later Jewish literature sometimes praised the Jews' behavior during the First Crusade, this pattern was not repeated in other disasters which befell European Jewry.

"The Christian discovery of the Babylonian Talmud is a significant landmark in the long and complex history of anti-Jewish polemic. While the Talmudic corpus developed in the same period as early Christianity, this post-biblical text was largely unknown to the Christians. Full awareness of the Talmud among Christian authors did not arise until the late 1230s, when the Jewish convert Nicholas Donin presented a Latin translation of Talmudic fragments to Pope Gregory IX. Though the Talmud was subsequently put on trial (1240) and burnt (1241/2) in Paris, the controversy surrounding it continued over the following years, as Pope Innocent IV called for a revision of its condemnation. The textual basis for this revision is the Extractiones de Talmud, that is, a Latin translation of 1.922 Talmudic fragments. The articles in this volume shed new light on this monumental translation and its historical context. They also offer critical editions of related texts, such as DoninÕs anti-Talmudic polemic. Authors of the contributions are: Wout van Bekkum, Piero Capelli, Ulisse Cecini, Enric Cort s, îscar de la Cruz Palma, Federico Dal Bo, Alexander Fidora, Gšrge K. Hasselhoff, MoisŽs Orfali, Ursula Ragacs and Eulˆlia Vernet i Pons."

Who are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? What lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East? Lyn Julius undertakes to answer all these questions and more in Uprooted, the culmination of ten years of work studying these issues. Jews lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for almost 3,000 years. Yet, in just 50 years, their indigenous communities outside Palestine almost totally disappeared as more than 99 percent of the Jewish population fled. Some 650,000—including a minority of ideological Zionists—went to Israel. Before the Holocaust they constituted ten percent of the world's Jewish population, and now over 50 percent of Israel's Jews are refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, or their descendants. This same process is now repeating in Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East. This book assesses how well these Jews have integrated into Israel and how their struggles have been politicized. It charts the growing clamour for recognition, redress and memorialization for these Jewish refugees, and looks at how their cause can contribute to peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Muslim world.

" . . . a chronicle of man's bestiality to man, and therefore the few exceptional instances of courage and humanity shine forth with particular brightness." —The Russian Review "Essential reading for any holocaust course." —Religious Studies Review Bitter Legacy collects scholarship from America, Israel, Russia, Germany, and the Ukraine on the perpetration of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and its lasting consequences from the postwar period through post-Soviet times. Newly accessible wartime archives in the former Soviet Union provide chilling details of what happened, of collaboration with the Nazis, and of rescue efforts, too.

"Focusing on the former province of Galicia, this book tells the story of Europe's eastern borderlands, stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans, through the eyes of the diverse communities of migrants who settled there for centuries and were murdered or forcibly removed from the borderlands in the course of World War II and its aftermath. Omer Bartov explores the fates and hopes, dreams and disillusionment of the people who lived there, and, through the stories they told about themselves, reconstructs who they were, where they came from, and where they were heading. It was on the borderlands that the expanding great empires--German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman--overlapped, clashed, and disintegrated. The civilization of these borderlands was a mix of multiple cultures, languages, ethnic groups, religions, and nations that similarly overlapped and clashed. The borderlands became the cradle of modernity. Looking back at it tells us where we came from." -- Provided by publisher.

"Jiří Weil’s documentary prose poem, Lamentation for 77,297 Victims is a literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. A remarkable Czech-Jewish writer who worked at Prague’s Jewish Museum during the Nazi Occupation and after – he survived the Holocaust by faking his own death – Weil wrote his Lamentation while he served as the museum’s senior librarian in the 1950s. Remarkable literary experiment opening new ways how to write about the undescribable combines a narrative of the Shoa, newspaper style accounts of individual lives destroyed by the Holocaust, and quotes from the Tanakh, each having a specific and powerful effect." -- From publisher's website.

The Holocaust in Croatia recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity (including rare humane acts by those who helped to save Jews) and is complemented by a large bibliography offering an outstanding referential source to archival materials. The Holocaust in Croatia stands as the definitive account of the Jews in Croatia, up to and including the criminal acts perpetrated by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regine, adding significantly to our knowledge of the Holocaust. -- Provided by publisher

The Invisible Wall is one man's quest to understand the failure of the German-Jewish relationship and to explain the character and attitudes of Germany's assimilated Jews over a three hundred-year period. He found rich and remarkable stories in the lives of six Blumenthal ancestors--all of whom happened to be major figures in German-Jewish history. Jost Liebmann, an itinerant peddler of trinkets and cheap jewels who became court jeweler to the Brandenburg nobility; Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, whose Berlin salon was the meeting place of Prussia's intellectual elite; Giacomo Meyerbeer, a celebrated composer of grand opera who dealt with the antisemitism he encountered by ceaselessly striving for success; Louis Blumenthal, a respected businessman and founder of his town's bank; Arthur Eloesser, a scholar and literary critic in the heyday of Weimar; and Ewald Blumenthal, the author's father. Once a decorated soldier in the Kaiser's elite guards, he was later a prisoner at Buchenwald. By recounting the stories of these individuals within the historical context of three centuries, Blumenthal presents a portrait of German Jews from the birth of Christianity to the eve of the Holocaust, revealing how Jews of various generations tried but failed to pierce the prejudice that separated them from other Germans.

In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv were mindful of the plight of European Jews in the face of the Nazi threat during the 1930s. Drawing on a wide variety of memoirs, letters, and institutional reports by people from all walks of life, this volume sheds new light on a troubled period in Jewish history. Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit trace Jewish responses to developments in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as reactions to British policy on the question of a Jewish homeland, to show that Zionists in the Yishuv worked tirelessly on the international stage on behalf of their coreligionists in Europe. Nevertheless, their efforts were all too often shattered by the realities of their powerlessness and lack of resources. Piercing to the heart of conversations about how or whether to save Jews in an increasingly hostile Europe, this volume provides a nuanced assessment of what could and could not be achieved in the years just prior to World War II and Holocaust.

Before the Inquisition, Spain was a tolerant and peaceful society. How, precisely, does a culture that prizes autonomy and harmony within the population descend so quickly into one of the most oppressive nations to have ever existed? Focusing on the humanity of the major historical players, Erna Paris traces the obscure origins of what was to become a brutal and enduring campaign of religious and ethnic conformity through terror and segregation. The conclusions she draws from the annals of Spanish history are enduring lessons on basic human nature, as applicable to the modern world as they are to the medieval.

"American and British appeasement of Nazism during the early years of the Third Reich went far beyond territorial concessions. In Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich, Stephen H. Norwood examines the numerous of ways that the two nations' official position of tacit acceptance of Jewish persecution enabled the policies that ultimately led to the Final Solution and how Nazi annihilationist intentions were clearly discernible even during the earliest years of Hitler's rule. Further, Norwood looks at the nature and impact of American and British Jewish resistance to Nazi persecution and the efforts of Jews at the grassroots level to press Jewish organizations to respond more forcefully to the Nazi menace. He examines the worldwide protest and boycott movements against Germany and German goods as well as mass demonstrations by working-class and lower-middle-class Jews in many American and British cities. Prologue to Annihilation details how the events of 1930-1936 tested American and British societies' willingness to accept Nazism and its anti-Jewish philosophy and illuminates the divisions that existed even within the Jewish community about how best to challenge Nazi antisemitic policies and atrocities"--

Argues against the myth of Jews and Arabs living peacefully side by side before the advent of Zionism and the creation of Israel. The enmity of Arabs and Muslims dates from the time of Muhammad, and the inequality of Jews in Muslim societies is embedded in Islamic law. It is not only the Covenant of Omar which has determined the Jews' inferior status, but also local laws and customs of Islamic societies. The rise of Arab nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel exacerbated Arab-Jewish relations. Argues that, initially, the Nazis and the antisemites in other European countries favored the idea of Jewish mass emigration from Europe to Palestine; however, the Nazis abandoned this idea for the sake of an alliance with the Arab nationalists. During the Holocaust, the Land of Israel could have become a refuge for Jews, but this possibility was thwarted by British restrictions of Jewish immigration. Contends that Arab pressure on British authorities prevented the immigration of hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the Land of Israel. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Arab antisemitism reached a peak. In the present-day Arab and Muslim world, anti-Zionism, traditional Muslim anti-Judaism, modern antisemitism, and Holocaust denial (while extolling Hitler for the Holocaust) have merged together into one dangerous complex.

A biography of Gertrude van Tijn (1891-1974), born as Gertrud Franzisca Cohn in Braunschweig, Germany. From 1911-15 she lived in London, but was forced to immigrate because of her status as an enemy alien. She then went to Holland, where she became a fervent Zionist. In 1920 she married Jacques van Tijn, a Dutch Jew, and gave birth to two children. As he was a mining engineer, they lived in different countries until 1932 when they returned to Holland; in 1937 they were divorced. Focuses on her life and activities during 1933-45, when she worked for organizations dealing with the resettlement of Jewish refugees from Germany who fled to Holland, as well as with emigration of Dutch Jews, in particular for the Committee for Jewish Refugees. In April-May 1941 van Tijn, with Nazi approval, traveled to Portugal to coordinate, together with Portuguese authorities and the Joint Distribution Committee, the transit of Jewish refugees through Portugal and across the Atlantic. Her task proved to be very difficult, but some Jews got through, including her daughter. Her son served in the Allied army in France and Belgium. Van Tijn became head of the emigration department of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam; however, her achievements in this capacity were modest. In September 1943 she was deported to Westerbork, and in March 1944 to Bergen-Belsen. In the summer of 1944 she was freed with a group of prisoners in exchange for Germans arrested in Palestine. She stayed in Palestine for a few months, traveled back to Europe in 1945, and eventually settled in the USA, living close to her daughter. While in Palestine she wrote a report of what she had witnessed, which is found in the Leo Baeck Archives in New York, but was never published. Soon after the war van Tijn was criticized and censured as a dupe of the Nazis, guilty at the least of false credulity and at the most of collaboration, but she was later exonerated.

"Why the story of the exile is the heart of the modern condition"--

'In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years' War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space--a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938--today known as Kristallnacht--when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler's forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city's early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that "express the life lost, the life kept." Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family's history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.'--Publisher description.

Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1927 in Borisław, Poland. Pp. 31-132 deal with the Holocaust period, based on information found in a diary she kept at the time. Wolanski survived in hiding, at first with a Christian family and then in a bunker in the forest, until the liberation.

Zwi was born in Mexico in 1928 but spent most of her life in South Africa. She moved to Australia in 1988. Her family came from Zhager, a small town on the Lithuanian-Latvian border, where over 3,000 Jews were massacred on 2 October 1941 by members of the Lithuanian Militia, and lie in a mass grave in Naryshkin Park, formerly the heart of the shtetl. Zwi recounts her quest to discover the fate of her father's family, that perished in the Holocaust, and that of her uncle Leib Yoffe, a communist idealist. Includes interviews and her own observations based on trips to Zhager (Zagare in Lithuanian) in 1991 and 1993.