David Engel

Citizenship in the conceptual world of Polish Zionists

In seeking to stake out the most advantageous position possible for Jews in the political community of the Second Polish Republic, Zionist spokesmen set forth a conception of citizenship linked to national autonomy instead of to individual civic equality. That conception differed significantly from the prevailing understandings of citizenship at the time in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Imperial Russia. It also departed from the regnant contemporary theoretical understanding of citizenship. Zionist explorations of the dimensions of citizenship in Poland during the 1920s helped lay the groundwork for the ethnically differentiated citizenship model adopted by the State of Israel.

A Colleague Not a Sacred Authority—Reflections on Salo Baron's Scholarly Opus

The three papers by Elisheva Carlebach, David Sorkin, and Adam Teller refreshingly do not merely invoke the name of Salo Baron as a sacred authority but actually reflect critically upon significant pieces of his scholarly corpus. As Adam Teller has pointed out correctly, academic historians of the Jews have sought for decades to align themselves with what they have taken to be the fundamental thrust of Barons approach to his subject and have warned their students against too great a deviation from it. In the discourse of the field, to claim Barons mantel is altogether bon ton, while “lachrymose” has long served as a term of severe reproach. Yet, many more people appear to have claimed to be Barons acolytes in abjuring lachrymosity than have actually read a significant portion of Barons corpus, much less seriously engaged with what he had to say in those writings. The three contributors are, happily, not among them: in their papers they all have entered into a genuine conversation with certain key propositions in Barons work, with a mind to refining his insights and building upon them. Baron has served them not as an icon but as an interlocutor in the continuing discussion of significant problems to which he devoted much thought and study. That is a salutary development. Barons contribution to the study of Jewish history was hardly exhausted by his articulation of a particular conceptual approach to it. As anyone who takes the multiple volumes of A Social and Religious History of the Jews or The Jewish Community in hand becomes aware immediately, Baron was a prodigious researcher whose painstaking mining (and in some cases even discovery) of a vast array of source materials laid the empirical foundations for future scholarship on a broad range of Jewish historical subjects. On that level, as well, reading his work returns significant rewards.

Christopher R. Browning. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 , with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004. xii, 615 pp.

Christopher Browning is perhaps most widely known for his seminal study of the motives of the “ordinary men” who perpetrated the systematic murder of European Jewry at the behest of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, in the past two decades he has devoted much of his attention to studying the processes and decisions that led the Reich to make systematic mass murder its official policy and to provide the impetus and means for its implementation. Now he has brought his empirical findings and interpretations together in a single volume that provides the most rigorous, cogent, and lucid analysis currently available of this crucial problem in the history of the encounter between Nazi Germany and the Jews.