Before The Holocaust

An important new study on a complex and highly controversial topic. Albert Lindemann provides a clear and balanced guide to anti-Semitism from ancient times right through to the twentieth-century inter-war period and the Nazi Holocaust. He looks at all countries where anti-Semitism manifested itself at different times and in different ways xxx; in Russia, the US, Poland, England, Germany, South Africa, and Holland. Throughout he asks difficult and unfamiliar questions to challenge long held and misguided beliefs. An important new study which fills a gap in current literature.

This innovative and ambitious work is a systematic examination of the many instances of genocide that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century centuries that were precursors to the Holocaust. There is an appalling symmetry to the many instances of genocide that the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world witnessed. In the wake of the break-up of the old Hapsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires, minority populations throughout those lands were persecuted, expelled and eliminated. The reason for the deplorable decimations of communities - Jews in Imperial Russia and Ukraine, Ottoman Assyrians, Armenians and Muslims from the Caucasus and Balkans - was, Cathie Carmichael contends, located in the very roots of the new nation states arising from the imperial rubble. The question of who should be included in the nation, and which groups were now to be deemed 'suspect' or 'alien', was one that preoccupied and divided Europe long before the Holocaust. Examining all the major eliminations of communities in Europe up until 1941, Carmichael shows how hotbeds of nationalism, racism and developmentalism resulted in devastating manifestations of genocidal ideology. Dramatic, perceptive and poignant, this is the story of disappearing civilizations - precursors to one of humanity's worst atrocities, and part of the legacy of genocide in the modern world.

William I. Brustein offers the first truly systematic comparative and empirical examination of anti-Semitism within Europe before the Holocaust. Brustein proposes that European anti-Semitism flowed from religious, racial, economic, and political roots, which became enflamed by economic distress, rising Jewish immigration, and socialist success. To support his arguments, Brustein draws upon a careful and extensive examination of the annual volumes of the American Jewish Year Books and more than 40 years of newspaper reportage from Europe's major dailies. The findings of this informative book offer a fresh perspective on the roots of society's longest hatred.

Divided into five discrete sections, this book examines the issue of Holocaust denial, and in some cases "Holocaust inversion" in North America, Europe, and the Middle East and its relationship to the history of antisemitism before and since the Holocaust. It thus offers both a historical and contemporary perspective. This volume includes observations by leading scholars, delivering powerful, even controversial essays by scholars who are reporting from the ‘frontline.’ It offers a discussion on the relationship between Christianity and Islam, as well as the historical and contemporary issues of antisemitism in the USA, Europe, and the Middle East. This book explores how all of these issues contribute consciously or otherwise to contemporary antisemitism. The chapters of this volume do not necessarily provide a unity of argument – nor should they. Instead, they expose the plurality of positions within the academy and reflect the robust discussions that occur on the subject.

Analyzes the life, work, and reception of a founding father of modern Jewish art in Eastern Europe.

A single photograph--an exceptionally rare "action shot" documenting the horrific murder of a Jewish family--drives a riveting forensic investigation by a gifted Holocaust scholar.

This three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Includes more than 600 black-and-white photographs.

Ben-Zion Gold's memoir brings to life the world of a million Jews in pre-World War II Poland who were later destroyed by the Nazis. Warmly recalling the relationships, rituals, observances, and celebrations, Gold evokes the sense of family and faith that helped him through the catastrophe that followed. With him we experience the life and institutions of the time: the Heder and hooky playing, his encounter with Hassidism, the courtship and marriage of his oldest sister, and the author's own first inkling of love. And with him, we recapture the memories that made life worth living in the face of disaster, along with the experience of the human capacity for evil that tested and transformed his faith as it devastated his world. Finally, Gold tells of the fate of his family and of his own escape from that fate.