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David Engel's excellent book challenges scholars to reconsider the relationship between the Holocaust and modern Jewish history, two fields deliberately sequestered from one another by modern Jewish historians. The separation, Engel argues, "rests upon the shakiest of intellectual foundationsâ[euro] (p. 227) and has resulted in an inability of the two fields to inform one another. Greater crossover, Engel argues, would offer richer accounts of variant Jewish responses to mass murder, which ranged from tragic misreading of German intentions to open resistance. At the same time it would open new questions for historians of modern Jewry who, he says, must weave the Holocaust into larger narratives rather than treat it as a sudden unrelated rupture of Jewish history imposed by other, namely German, historical traditions. Engel thus proposes the rewriting of the Holocaust's Jewish history and Jewish history itself through better integration of the two fields.
Especially valuable are Engel's historiographical analyses of how the fields became separated in the first place and how the separation has been maintained. A major source of the break comes from the reading of Salo Baron's "lachrymosity thesisâ[euro] by which Baron warned against casting Jewish history as nothing more than a series of persecutions. Baron's warning became a roadblock against a teleological backward reading by which anti-Semitism and the Holocaust would flatten the writing...