The Jews in European History

These lectures by internationally renowned historians from Germany, Israel, and the United States were originally presented to large audiences at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. Published soon thereafter, they have enjoyed remarkable popularity in Germany and now appear together for the first time in English. The topics of the lectures are varied. Eberhard Jäckel deals primarily with the problems the Holocaust poses for the historian. Amos Funkenstein traces the close interdependence between Christianity and Judaism — confrontational cultures since the Middle Ages — and the odd dialectic of mutual attraction and rejection that has historically informed that relationship. David Sorkin discusses the deeply ambivalent relationship between the men of the Enlightenment and the Jews, so facilely covered up by Jewish devotees of the Enlightenment in subsequent decades. Michael A. Meyer focuses on the internal difficulties of modernizing. the Jewish religion along with Christianity's skepticism and even rejection — or at the very least incomprehension — of those efforts. Shulamit Volkov presents her view of a fundamental unity that can, from today's vantage point, be assumed to underlie the remarkably divergent trends in pre-First World War German Jewry. Jehuda Reinharz recounts the multifaceted efforts towards redirecting and strengthening Jewish identity under the aegis of Zionism. And Saul Friedländer shows that other approaches than those hitherto considered necessary are required with regard to an event only inadequately termed "Holocaust," "Shoah," or "Auschwitz."