ABSTRACT
The genocide of European Jews – which many scholars and others call simply “the Holocaust” – “is perhaps the one genocide of which every educated person has heard.” Between 1941 and 1945, 5 to 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime, its allies, and its surrogates in the Nazi-occupied territories. Yet despite the extraordinary scale and intensity of the genocide, its prominence in recent decades was far from preordained. Until the later nineteenth century, Jews were uniquely stigmatized within the European social hierarchy, often through stereotypical motifs that endure, in places, to the present. The rise of modernity and the nation-state recast traditional anti-Semitism in new and contradictory guises. It would be misleading, however, to present European history as one long campaign of discrimination and repression against Jews. For several centuries, Jews in Eastern Europe “enjoyed a period of comparative peace, tranquility and the flowering of Jewish religious life”.
