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A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. By Alon Confino. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 284. $30.00 hardcover.
This important book offers significant new insights into our understanding of the Holocaust. Alon Confino has applied the methodology of the history of emotions to the story of the Nazi persecution and annihilation of the European Jews, and the result does not negate current understandings-a la Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners in the mid-1990s-but rather enriches them.
Confino begins A World Without Jews with an anecdote describing the violent destruction of the Jewish synagogue in the town of Fürth, Germany during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938.What catches Confino's eye is not merely the humiliation of the local Jews or the burning of their house of God, but rather the desecration and ritual burning of their Torah scrolls. "Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?" Confino asks, and why have historians largely ignored this surprisingly widespread antisemitic act? Moreover, how do we understand this Nazi obsession with Jewish religion, which doesn't seem to fit our interpretive lenses of racial ideology, the brutality of war, or impersonal bureaucracy as ways to explain the Holocaust (3-4)?
These questions are the launching pad for Confino's analysis of the Nazi persecution and annihilation of the Jews. He wants to explore the world of culture, sensibility, memory, and emotion, which cannot, he argues, be separated from the Holocaust. Burning the Hebrew Bible "was part of a larger story Germans told themselves during the Third Reich about who they were, where they came from, how they arrived there, and where they were headed" (5). For Confino, Nazis attempted to destroy Jews and Judaism in order to create a new civilization, a new morality, and a new humanity-in short, a new national story. The key to getting at this story and thus the key to understanding Nazi antisemitism is to ask "what the Nazis thought was happening" and "how they imagined their world" (6)....