Jewish Themes

JEWISH THEMES ACROSS A VARIETY OF CEU PRESS PUBLICATIONS

This compilation features books of the Central European University Press, published since its establishment in 1993, that have some relevance to Jewish history and culture. After the latest release, titles in the backlist are arranged by content: contemporary topics are on top, older themes below. For more substantial information about the content and availability, please click on the covers of the book, or on the links inserted into the citations.

“The numerus clausus law passed in Hungary in 1920 elevated anti-Semitism to an institutional level. According to this thinking, the so-called ‘Jewish question’ could only be resolved through special laws applied only to Jews, laws that changed the legal status of Jews and denied their equality before the law.”—The Beginnings of Anti-Jewish Legislation.
“Only as many members of each ‘nationality’ or ‘racial group’ could be admitted to university as was proportionate with their share of the overall population. The proportion of Jews among the population as a whole was at 6 % in 1920, whereas their numbers among university students exceeded 30 % by 1918.”
“By emphasizing the continuity between the 1920 law and the ‘Jewish Laws’ of the late 1930s and early 1940s, she demonstrated that segments of Hungarian society bear moral responsibility for the persecution of its Jews, that Hungary’s endemic antisemitism cannot be dismissed as a German import.”

“Prior to this show, nowhere has there been an exhibition about a country’s full history of Jewish cuisine, including the manufacturers and purveyors of kosher food, restaurants, etc. We had to provide concise, usually only one sentence-long information about kashrut, the holidays, the specific Jewish specialty dishes, and the difference between Ashkenazic and Sephardic culture.”—Exhibiting Jewish Culinary Culture.
“Based on 1.8 million DNA tests taken worldwide in 2019, the MyHeritage organization found that 18.3% of Hungary’s population has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, which is the second highest percentage after Israel (51.6%).”
“The exhibition did not intend merely to preach tolerance, but to celebrate diversity. This is an important consideration in a country which shares with Poland the second highest rate of anti-Semitic prejudice in Europe, exceeded only by Greece.”
“A copy of the world’s first Hebrew-lettered cookbook, published in 1854, was by far the greatest novelty and most valuable object at the exhibition.”

“After his arrival in Czernowitz in September 1914, Murav’ev persistently attempted to persuade his superiors to approve harsh repressive measures against Jews, concluding that ‘the peasants expect from us liberation from the Jewish yoke.’”— Imperial Designs, Postimperial Extremes.
““The Jewish MP argued that the Jews of Bukovina had generally maintained their ‘flaw­lessly loyal attitude’.”
“Despite the rising anti-Semitic tendencies in Yugoslavia, the country still issued permits for Jewish refugees until 1938–1939. It was only after the Anschluss, when Jewish emigration turned into desper­ate escape, that Yugoslavia ceased to be a safe haven for the refugees.”
“As many Jews supported the Yugoslav government, they were also an easy target for radi­calized Croatian nationalists.”
“For the vast majority of German Jews in Yugoslavia Palestine was not an option. The Balkan Jews accepted Zionism along political lines, rather than as a nationalist movement aimed at the unification of all Jews and their emigra­tion into one Jewish state.”

“According to the 1897 Russian Imperial Census data, the to­tal population of Minsk was 90,912 people, of which 51.2% were Jewish.”—Belarusian Nation-Building in Times of War and Revolution.
“Ober Ost was the largest among all of the territories administered by the Germans in 1915. German soldiers made the ‘discovery’ of Eastern Jews (Ostjuden), who were different from the educated, prosperous, and assimilated Jews of the German Empire.”
“Jews formed an isolated and closed community in Belarusian-Lithuanian lands, determined to keep their cultural and religious distance, despite the fact that the Jewish intelligentsia widely used the Russian language.”
“While Poalei Zion combined Zionism and Marxism, favoring national and political autonomy for the Jewish minority with the ideal of their own territory in Palestine, the Bund had a different position in 1917, supporting a cultural autonomy program.”

“In 1781, the Protestant churches were granted freedom in the Austrian part of the empire through the Edict of Toleration for the ‘Augsburg- and Helvetian’ confessions, which also benefited the Greek-Orthodox Church. Jews were also given an Edict of Toleration in 1783 that concerned both parts of the empire.”—Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire.
“The ‘Western’ Jews in Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, and Hungary were the main exponents of the German language and culture in the empire and thus the first to rally to the Haskalah movement, initiated by Enlightenment intellectuals like Moses Mendelssohn, that led them ‘out of the ghetto’.”
“Rather than healing the schism, the 1868 congress deepened it, resulting in the official division of the Hungarian Jews among Neologues, Orthodox, and those who did not want to change anything and wished to return to the pre-congress state of affairs and were from them on called ‘Status Quo’ communities.”
“Percentage of Jews in 1880 and 1910:
Arad      12.4 - 10.0
Brünn   7.4 - 7.1
Czernowitz 25.1 - 32.8”

CEU Press titles with a Jewish focus, going backwards in time:

1945–1953 – the short-lived revitalization of Jewish life, 1953–1980 – “sitting on packed suitcases”, 1980–2015 – settled and flourishing: the terms taken from chapter titles tell the dynamic of the trajectory of Jewish communities in Austria and Germany after the Shoah.
Based on primary and secondary materials and oral interviews with some eighty communal and organizational leaders, experts and scholars, this book provides a comparative account of the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in both Germany and in Austria (where 98% live in the capital, Vienna) after 1945. The author explains the process of reconstruction over the next six decades, and its results in each country. She examines the changes in Jewish group identity and its impact on the development of communities. The monograph focuses on the variety of prevailing perceptions about topics such as: the state of Israel, one’s relationship to the country of residence, the Jewish religion, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the influx of post-soviet immigrants.

This book explores representations of the Holocaust in contemporary art practices. Through carefully selected art projects, the author illuminates the specific historical, cultural, and political circumstances that influence the way we speak—or do not speak—about the Holocaust.
The international focus brings into view film projects made by key artists, including of course Claude Lanzmann and Steven Spielberg, reflecting critically upon forms of Holocaust memory in a variety of geographical contexts. Kékesi connects the ethical implications of the memory of the Holocaust with a critical analysis of contemporary societies, focusing upon artists who are deeply engaged in doing both of the above within three regions: Eastern Europe (especially Poland), Germany, and Israel.

“The 2.5–2.7 million Soviet Jewish Holocaust victims were simply folded into the 26.6 million Soviet war victims (military and civilian) in total.”—Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism.
“After the war Russian writers had to contend with a strong antisemitic undercurrent, and the fact that most of the Jewish victims were not exactly ‘Soviet,’ as they stemmed from the newly annexed Soviet lands in Western Ukraine, the Baltics, and Belarus.”
“Recent research highlights the attempts by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman to negotiate the commemoration of the particular Jewish suffering during the war with the universalist Soviet ideas of antifascism.”
“Khrushchev’s ‘gesture’ of recognition towards Soviet Jews by providing them with a mere literary outlet clearly did not stem from a desire to fully revitalize Soviet Yiddish culture, which late Stalinism had virtually destroyed.”
“In his 1979 novel Heavy Sand, Rybakov used common Soviet war narratives to embed the Holocaust in a Soviet-Jewish family history.”

“I became first aware of the tremendous importance of sound in prayer, and possibly in all human spiritual expression, during my research among traditional Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. The subtitle of this book refers to the sounds of these communities.”
Based on extensive interviews, musical recordings, photographs and erudite analyses, a poetic testimony of the scholar of traditional Jewish music.
“Everything in this book happened—nothing has been invented for the sake of poetry. Similarly, the photographs were taken at the places I describe in the book. The poetic aspect concerns the form and the style, not the content.”

For more than half a century the truth about Jewish life in post-war Belarus was sealed in inaccessible archives. The detailed presentation of the attrition that the small surviving Jewish community went through during the last years of Stalin’s rule required years of minutious studies that included browsing in KGB archives, thumbing through statistical tables and interviewing former Belarusian citizens in Israel. The roughly 200,000 Jews who remained of the one million Jews who had lived in Belarus within its 1941 borders actively participated in the restoration and reconstruction of the Belarusian economy and of its cultural, scientific, and educational projects. But in 1949–53 the Belarusian authorities were particularly zealous in their conducting of campaigns against “cosmopolitans,” the destruction of Yiddish culture, by the official silence on the Holocaust and its consequences and on the Jewish contribution to the victory over Germany, and finally, by the “Doctors’ Plot.” As a result, the Belarusian Jews suffered possibly considerably more than Jews in other regions of the USSR.

“When it comes to migration patterns, makeup of the Jewish community, Jewish-Gentile relations, and levels of antisemitism, Estonia is perhaps closer to Finland and Norway than it is to Latvia and Lithuania, at least until 1940.”
Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, this book wrestles most profoundly with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia.
“Many Jews reacted incredulously to information coming from Soviet sources. A significant factor was the common perception of the Germans as a nation of civilized people devoted to order. This stereotype did not relate well to the crimes allegedly committed by the very same Germans.”
“It is impossible to determine the exact proportion of Jews in the NKVD. As of early summer 1941, the total number of people working for the regime in Narva was 3,424. By ethnicity, 38 percent were Russian, 26 percent Estonian, and 32.2 percent of ‘unknown’ ethnicity.”

According to most historians, the Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of what the Nazis termed as the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish question” in Europe. More than seventy years after the Shoah, the origins and prehistory as well as the implementation and aftermath of the genocide still provide ample ground for scholarship.
In fact, Hungarian historians began to seriously deal with these questions only after the 1980s. Since then, however, a consistently active and productive debate has been waged about the history and interpretation of the Holocaust in Hungary and with the passage of time, more and more questions have been raised in connection with its memorialization.
This volume includes twelve selected scholarly papers thematically organized under four headings: 1. The newest trends in the study of the Holocaust in Hungary. 2. The anti-Jewish policies of Hungary during the interwar period 3. The Holocaust era in Hungary 4. National and international aspects of Holocaust remembrance.
The studies reflect on the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Hungary during the interwar period; analyze the decision-making process that led to the deportations, and the options left open to the Hungarian government. They also provide a detailed presentation of the Holocaust in Transylvania and describe the experience of Hungarian Jewish refugees in Austria after the end of the war.

Jewish Cuisine in Hungary has been bestowed with the Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award in the category Cook­books & Food Writing.
“This labor of love is a work of erudition that demonstrates the importance of food as an area of serious study. While cookbooks abound, there is no other study of Jewish food that can compare with this book. The 83 recipes in its pages bring the story into our kitchens today, but with a fullness of meaning that a recipe alone cannot convey. Rather, what we have here is not only comprehensive in its historical and regional scope, but also in attending to all aspects of Hungarian Jewish food culture.”—from the Preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.
“As a social history of Hungarian food culture, this book examines the changing circumstances of Hungarian Jewish life. The result is the most complete account of a Jewish food culture to date.”

CEU Press longseller Jewish Budapest has received a powerful rival with How They Lived. An important and integral part of the nation, Jews contributed to a particularly successful historical period in the life of Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The richly commented nearly two hundred original black and white photos display environments where Hungarian Jews dwelt, worked or relaxed before their world sank.
The volume portrays life scenes of Jews from every layer of society, the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy; from unknown people of the street to personalities with full identification, including people of international renown. Some lived in separate communities, others were integrated within the majority society, some photos present Hasidic laborers, others members of the Higher Chamber of the Parliament – in this volume of outstanding aesthetic and intellectual merit.

“How did the inhabitants of Atlantis spend their days before the island sank into the sea?”—begins the Introduction to the presentation of family, religious, and social life, learning, military life, vacationing, sports, charity – dimensions of the everyday lives of Hungarian Jews before the Holocaust. Each one of over two hundred fifty historic photos is accompanied by a text analyzing it and highlighting the social and historical background.
There were huge differences in the lifestyles of the Hassidim, the Orthodox, as well as the assimilated Jews; in addition, there were regional differences among them, and their conditions kept changing within the examined decades. The religion of their ancestors was the prevailing bond combined with a shared awareness that they represented a small minority in a society that frequently discriminated against them.
Koerner hopes to give rise to an illusion of three-dimensional reality in the reader’s imagination about this sunken world, in the belief that even an illusion of continuity is better than resignation to the reality of the schism caused by the Holocaust.

“The story starts in 1815 with the earliest printed Jewish cookbook and concludes in 1938 with the last Jewish cookbook published in Hungarian before the Holocaust.”—Early Jewish Cookbooks, from the Preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.
“The emergence of printed Jewish cookbooks can by itself be seen as a part of the assimilatory process. In their desire to be like their Christian peers, they sought a more refined version of Jewish cuisine, but they did not want to abandon kashrut, at least not in this period of the mid-nineteenth century.”
„Cookbooks are more than manuals. They are works of literature, the recipes themselves poems. They are to be read and relished, and not only followed.”
“Insert butter into slits in the fish. Fill its belly with a mixture of butter, lemon slices, salt, black pepper, and mace. Sew it closed, push a spit through it, baste it with butter, and roast it so that it stays juicy. Serve it with anchovy sauce.”

"The higher marriage rate among Jews in late eighteenth-century Bohemia was a fact. In a society where most children were born inside wedlock it led also to higher fertility among Jews. Jewish women breastfed longer, and this was a very important factor for improving the chances of a child's survival during the first six months of life." The population growth of Jews was therefore higher than in the total population." But then, faster modernization of the Jewish population led to a decline in births earlier than in other segments of the society. "In 1930, the share of married people was smaller in almost every age group in the Jewish population than in the total population. The proportion of never-married Jewish women exceeded that of gentiles in every age group. The share of divorcees was also larger in the Jewish than in the total population."

“Jews did not pose a threat to Lithuanian national culture. In the sphere of national culture, the question of Lithuanian–Russian and Lithuanian–Polish relations was a hundred times livelier and more acute than that between Lithuanians and Jews.”
This explains why in Lithuania, where more than 90 percent of Jews were killed during WWII pogroms in the nineteenth century were less cruel than further down in the south. The anti-Jewish excesses that took place in Lithuania were shortlived. The accounts imply that these outbreaks did not last for more than a few hours. Smaller domestic conflicts between Jews and Christians would turn into violence between young people, especially on market days.
During the nineteenth century the superstition about blood libel was the strongest part of Lithuanian Judeophobia. The book discusses cases connected to the disappearance of a child or a young girl, especially during Easter.

Earlier titles with a Jewish focus from our backlist:

Other titles from the backlist, where Jewish issues are touched upon. Contemporary topics on top, historical themes below:

“Conservative Poland still operates on the basis of the narrative that it was the first country to resist Hitler, the nation that saved many of its Jewish citizens, and the nation that suffered the most.” – from a collection of essays on current Polish politics.
“Even though the massacre of Jewish inhabitants in an eastern village by their Polish neighbors was balanced by a Pole-hating Jewish judge as one of the main characters, Ida the Oscar-winning film was seen as antiPolish.”
“For Kaczyński, shedding any sense of guilt for what happened to Polish Jews during WWII is a crucial step towards forging an identity Poles can be proud of, an identity in which the Polish nation is not only guiltless; it is a morally superior collective.”
“The line that appeared to make Gross public enemy number one was the one in which he said Poles had killed more Jews—in pogroms, murders of Jews who fled the ghettoes, and by turning Jews over to the Nazis—than Germans during the war.”

“Polish religiosity supports anti-Semitic and xenophobic attitudes. They are associated with a certain ideological image of Polishness and the Pole, in which Jews are a negative point of reference; moreover, Jews are blamed for having a negative influence on Poles throughout history.”—from a book on current values in Poland.
“The leaders of PiS certainly are not anti-Semites, but they clearly benefit from the support of those for whom national feelings and antipathy towards Jews are synonymous.”
“Today’s textbooks hint at Polish participation in the murder of Jews and mention the Jedwabne massacre. Nevertheless, the master-narrative about Polish martyrology and Polish heroism dominates.”
“Presently, Poland is witnessing a tangible rejuvenation of the Jewish community and culture. Moreover, anti-Semitic incidents in Poland are much rarer than in other established liberal democracies, such as Sweden, Germany, or the Netherlands.”

I feel comfortable only in my home area. I am Ashkenazi and people don’t look at me nicely.” – from an interview taken during the research on an ethnically mixed residential area in Israel. Here is a quote from a response from the other ethnicity: “I am very connected to the land. The identity of Jaffa is very strong for me.” The richly documented findings of the research appear among the collection of essays on social space, the challenges of pluralism and the prospects for tolerance.

“The ‘Jewish theme’ is a very sensitive subject in Ukrainian history and collective memory (in this sense, Ukraine really belongs to Europe, especially Eastern Europe).”—Memory Crash.
“Before the middle of the 2000s, only fleeting mentions of the extermination of Jews were to be found in school textbooks on Ukrainian history. The Holocaust was included in world history textbooks, but only as a European event.”
“Right after the Maidan events, the Bandera cult became a sort of fashion logo. The neologism zhydobanderivtsi became popular as an ironic representation of the unity of ethnic Jews and nationalists in the struggle against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.”
“State events dedicated to the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy in Kyiv demonstrated the readiness of part of the ruling class to accept the European model of Holocaust remembrance.”

“Beginning in the 1960s, the ‘rescue’ (or ‘salvation’) of the Bulgarian Jews became more and more instrumentalized by the communist regime to boost its interna­tional image.”
In the majority of cases the fate of Jews before and during World War II is a central issue in post-communist memory politics.
“The Jewish people should be grateful to the Romanian people. Some anti-Jewish ‘persecutions’ had been registered, be­tween (at most) 100,000–120,000 had been murdered, yet no extermi­nation in gas chambers had taken place.”
“Mainstream Hungarian commemorative practices try to integrate the victims of what is regularly called the Hungarian Holocaust (magyar holokauszt) into the larger group of Hungarian victims.”
“Slovenia has, like other countries, ignored the Jewish victims by presenting the Holocaust as a process that had nothing to do with the Slovenes.”

“Approximately 8.9 percent of those deported by the Soviets in 1941 were Jewish.”
A book on Soviet deportation memoirs from the Baltic States.
“The crimes committed during the German occupation were not addressed on any of the three floors of the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius at the time of the viewing… The Museum of Latvian Occupation treats the Holocaust with due attention. The exhibition also discusses historiographical controversies during the Soviet period… In the Estonian Museum of Occupations the Holocaust is almost completely absent in the physical exposition and completely marginal in the documentary focusing on the Nazi occupation.”

“Once you have gone through the other German and Soviet crimes, then you are in a position to talk about the singularity of the Holocaust in a convincing way” – concludes the review over the deliberate killing between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, taking the lives of about 17 million people.
This powerful essay is in the book that analyzes three complementary and interconnected trajectories: the public use of history, politics of memory, and transitional justice in the past decades in Europe.
Examining the troubled variations of coming to terms with the past (communism, fascism, collaboration, complicity, authoritarianism, opportunism, failed democracies etc.) the contributors to the volume assume that practically only Germans and Germany appear to offer “an imperfect but incredibly important model for reckoning with the demons of the twentieth century.”

“When György Konrád returned to the village where he was born, he learnt that out of two hundred Jewish children only seven came back.”—More Nights than Days.
“Saul Friedländer recalls an episode in an orphanage where he is placed during the war. A group of orthodox Jewish boys beats him up because they find him different: I was a non-Jew, a goy.”
“Clemantine Wamariya read Elie Wiesel’s Night when she was sixteen: Wiesel was white, European, male, and Jewish. Wiesel was me. He expressed thoughts I was ashamed to think, truths I was afraid to acknowledge.”
“One day Julian Tuwim, visits the orphanage. He is shocked to encounter those little cynics in the bodies of seven-year-olds. Tuwim would pass them quickly without looking and run to the new-borns, to whom he would read his poems for hours.”
“In Jiří Robert Pick’s book about Terezín, sexuality represents a momentary safe haven in the midst of destruction and inhumanity; a powerful way to chase away anxiety, solitude, and the ubiquitous presence of death.”

By the beginning of the 21st century most of the previously taboo topics became subject of scholarly publications and were presented in mass media. New national narratives found their way into official discourse and school textbooks. Old monuments were pulled down, to be replaced by new ones. The concept and practice of historical politics was born. In a number of countries the exploration of minefields of collective memory centered around the wartime treatment of the Jewish population. The overview on recent developments revisits the Historikerstreit, further analyzes the impact of the disclosure of the Jedwabne crime, and gives the account of young historians faced with the fate of Jews in their countries while researching the 1940s in Ukraine and Moldova.

  • It is inconceivable to discuss post-communist restitution in Europe without ample references to Jewish property.
  • A point is made about the collective nature of responsibility for collective crime done in the past decades across the world.
  • The issue of memorial places to holocaust and genocide in the politics of history.
  • The Jews in Tatarstan have also availed of the opportunity to revive their identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Thatcher contrasted the Soviet policy with the situation in the West, where many countries have had to stop people from coming in. Gorbachev replied that 89 percent of those who applied for permits to leave received them. December, 1984
Face to face conversations of superpower leaders on 1000 pages.
Gorbachov’s notes: We know with whom we will start a dialogue: with liberal Jewish organizations in the United States. They are knocking at our door. There are some among them who support Jewish national development in the USSR rather than emigration. They want to develop culture, newspapers, theaters, assemblies, religious communities. How realistic is this? I think it is realistic. May, 1987
Reagan
noted that some one-half million Jews sought to leave the USSR for religious-cultural freedom. Gorbachev said these figures were completely unconfirmed. December, 1987
Gorbachev
. As soon as we see progress on the settlement—we will recognize Israel. We have many interests in common. December, 1989
Bush
. There are points I must raise: human rights, refuseniks, immigration, and human rights in general. You want us to take more Jews. We are taking more—about all we can. June, 1990
Gorbachev
. By the way, our people were recently in Israel and said that Russian speech can be heard everywhere in Tel Aviv.
Bush. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are a burning issue. We strongly oppose this. In the past, American Jews fully supported Peres’s policy of not building more settlements. However, their position changed under Shamir’s influence. July, 1991

“In Nazi Germany patent law remained comparatively ‘neutral’ toward racial policy and the persecution of the Jews. Under pressure to forcibly sell their patents, administratively obstructed from the payment of patent fees and prohibited from acting as patent agents and consultants, Jewish patent holders experienced various forms of discrimination; their status, however, as right holders with full patent rights remained intact.”
“In 1950, a Jewish publisher who emigrated from Germany, sued the World Zionist organization to prevent it from printing Theodor Herzl’s writings in Hebrew. Which law was to be applied to decide ownership? Was it British law that was carried over onto the Israeli system, or perhaps German law, under which the copyright transactions had been made? The copyright case involving Herzl's work provides a case study for transplantation-by-immigration.”

“A scientist may have been forced out of Hungary on account of his Jewishness, but once he wins the Nobel Prize he is welcomed back as a Hungarian hero.”—Brilliance in Exile.
“For Philipp Lenard (1905 Nobel), ‘Aryan Physics’ was the only true science and ‘Jewish Physics,’ especially Einstein’s, was a fraud.”
“George de Hevesy (1943 Nobel) belonged to the Hungarian nobility on both his mother’s and his father’s side. It was not rare that Franz Joseph I, ennobled families of Jewish origin.”
“Karman, Szilard, Wigner, von Neumann, and Teller acquired the ‘Martians’ label due to an anecdote originating from the time of the Manhattan Project, which was the development of the American atomic bombs.  The ‘explanation’ was that they had come from the planet Mars and, to disguise their extraterrestrial origin, spoke this strange Hungarian language.”
“Eugene P. Wigner’s (1963 Nobel) mother had the rare distinction among Jewish families of being able to trace back her ancestors for a thousand years.”

“Here is a Jew, born in Timișoara, after the Holocaust which claimed so many members of his family, who emigrated first to Vienna, then to the United States and who does not look back in anger, nostalgia, or longing for his lost roots.”—The Passport as Home.
“Even though he was only one-quarter Jewish, and even though he is buried in a crypt in St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Sacramento, for my father and millions of Jewish men of his generation, Max Baer was as Jewish as King David.”
“The Jew and the American are all about money; only noble nations, like Germans, can create Helden, heroes; Jews and Americans are mere Händler, merchants; the Jew and the American lack soul; the Jew and the American lack roots. These images are dominant in all of nineteenth-century German, French, and English literature.”
“The Dutch also featured the one and only Johan Cruyff, superstar of Ajax Amsterdam and an avowed friend of the Jews and other minorities, even back then, when soccer was so völkisch and racist.”

“The more tangled the ethnicities of a region, the richer an example of what it means to be Central European. One coherent trope which evidently coexisted with many of the diverse nationalities and languages of the region is Jewish identity.”—from a book on the relevance of the concept of Central Europe.
“If the Jewish culture signifies for Kundera what is marginalized within Central Europe, Russian culture works at the other extreme: it is a negative definition of what it means to be Central European and, by extension, European.”
“It was not until the English-language translation Neighbors came out in 2001 that the book started to provoke a transatlantic conversation between Polish Jewish émigrés abroad, their American audience, and the Polish audience at home.”
“Jewish culture as the defining supra-ethnic paradigm for what Central Europe might have been presents a paradox: how can a culture that is largely no longer present define its essence in the late twentieth century?”

In the transnational literary community that was created during the endeavors to help nonconformist literature reach western readership New York Jewish intellectuals were intensely involved, including writers of global fame.
Arthur Miller built a direct biographical link between the destiny of the underground writer and the life of his Jewish ancestors – “we are each other’s continuation.” Tom Stoppard claimed he had been waiting for the call for fifteen years, and within a few days traveled to Prague. More personally involved in creating a concrete link between memories of two kinds of dictatorial experiences was the Romanian Jewish writer Elie Wiesel.
Philip Roth regularly traveled to Prague to meet underground writers before he initiated the Penguin book series entitled Writers from the Other Europe in 1974. His own perspectives on literary life in the city were mirrored in the fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckermann, a New York Jew who travels to Prague. Even John Updike also relies on a Jewish-American alter-ego, the writer Henry Bech who dives into the literary life of Czechoslovakia.

“The word ‘communism’ did not emerge after the war in a vacuum. It carried negative prewar connotations of rebellious acts, associated with prison, with something alien, but above all, they were an element of the strong, antisemitic package of ‘Judeocommunism’ (Zydokomuna), which had lingered on at least since the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920.”—Reassessing Communism.
“Politicians, journalists, and writers associated with PAX and its magazine actively participated in the production and dissemination of antisemitic discourse. Disguised as ‘anti-Zionism’, such discourse appeared in the public space of People’s Poland on such a large scale for the first time.”
“In her collection of interviews with communist activists, Teresa Toranska recognizes and condemns Party antisemitism with great accuracy and precision but the fact that the antisemitic campaign of 1968 fell on exceptionally fertile ground and gathered a wide following among the so-called ordinary people is not mentioned at all.”

“Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939 came as a shattering blow to the communist-Jewish solidarity of the previous four years.”—One Hundred Years of Communist Experience.
“In 1947, Gromyko famously supported the UN Partition Plan for a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, the original ‘two-state solution,’ accepted by the Jews but rejected by the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs.”.
“During the Six Day War of 1967, the East German leader Walter Ulbricht not only blamed Israel for the war and ignored the threats it faced from Arab states he also compared its policies to the occupation and expansionist policies of the Nazi regime.”
“Rudolf Slánský, the General Secretary of the Czech Communist Party, and thirteen other defendants were found guilty of being agents of American imperialism and Zionism. By then, within the communist world, ‘Zionism’ had become a term of abuse.”
“The anti-Zionism from 1949 to 1989 was a return to ideological normalcy in the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history and politics.”

“The Irish minister in Berlin had much admiration for the Nazis and downplayed their cruelty against the Jews, notably during Kristallnacht in 1938.”—Ireland's Helping Hand to Europe.
“It is believed that a mere sixty Jews reached Ireland during the war, an insignificant number, as the Irish government was not particularly liberal in its refugee policy and included ministers and civil servants who were not above antisemitism.”
“De Valera’s infamous handshake with the German minister in Dublin on Hitler’s death was not forgotten but the international Jewish community had not misinterpreted his gesture. The memory of the kosher meat sent to Orthodox Jews cannot have failed to have played a role in naming the newly planted forest near Nazareth after him.”
“The Nazi occupation of Poland went beyond the atrocious. But now these German expellees, who had shown no compassion to Jews, Poles, and others, received Irish bacon, sugar, and blankets.”

The biographical account of the leading scholar begins in a middle class Jewish home in Budapest.

“Typical for Hungarian assimilated Jews, we were not prepared to resist or fight. That remained a choice for the very small group of radical Zionists and some communists, a few of whom had been members of our Boy Scout troop.”— from the conversations with four medievalists in Central Europe.
“In 1940 they changed the law to ‘the Boy Scout regards every Christian Boy Scout as his brother.’ But we were singing the same folksongs and the rather stupid, quite nationalist Boy Scouts’ hymn. We were in a way negating the exclusion from the Hungarian Boy Scout Association—as a kind of naiveté, and a typical belief of the assimilated ‘Jewish’ middle class, like my father and many of our friends, who were convinced that nothing like the murderous persecution of Jews could happen in Hungary. ‘This is not Germany, this is not occupied Poland: It won’t happen here,’ they used to say. But it happened.“

“At our school, we were constantly mocking the Zionists, whose views and behaviour we found unacceptable. The Zionists did the same with us. We had nasty, sometimes even obscene names for the students of the Hebrew schools, as they did for us.”—from Irena Veisaitė‘s memoir in conversations.
“There was a shortage of blood for injured German soldiers and Jewish children were in demand as blood donors. Dr. Rudaitis did not let the Gestapo have a single one of the children.”
“Although Lithuanian Jews were also transported to Siberia in cattle cars together with ethnic Lithuanians, to the Jews the Nazi regime meant death, while the Soviets, and even deportation, offered some chance of survival. We must understand this and stop blaming each other.”
“I have been, and continue to be, pained by the antagonism between the Lithuanians and the Jews, because I myself am an ‘authentic’ Litvak, or, if you will, a Lithuanian of Jewish ethnicity. Both of those cultures are alive in me.”

“The increasing affirmation of Polishness among Lviv’s Jews led to a change in many families who, once assimilated to German culture and language, now switched to Polish. Generations of young Jews were raised in the spirit of love for Polish culture. Many of them later became Polish patriots.”—about Lviv and Wroclaw.
“While Polish literature made important strides towards discussing the difficult questions of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, Ukrainian literature remained silent in this regard, preferring laughter and parody to somber self-criticism.”
“In Wroclaw, the synagogue in turn forms a central and arguably leading part of an officially promoted ‘Four Denominations District,’ conceived in 1996 with cultural walking routes, and themed architectural and culinary experiences.”

“Before German forces occupied Hungary, Gábor Sztehlo was clearly a bystander who possessed no concept of the persecution being committed against Jews since this type of knowledge exceeded his sphere of experience.”—The Children’s Republic of Gaudiopolis.
“Sztehlo was not aiming to increase the Lutheran fold: he did not want to convert children, but rather to operate the kind of children’s home that would be based upon the teachings of Christ. Sztehlo not only opposed the demands of his own Church, he also refused to accept the expectation of Jewish organizations that his orphanage be exclusively for Jewish children.”
“The young people who were persecuted as Jews during World War II and rescued by the International Red Cross and Sztehlo formed the core of the PAX orphanage that was founded in the early postwar years.”
“While the majority of orphans were of Jewish origin, the ‘prime minister’ to the ‘municipal council’ that the children voted into place was the son of a member of the far-right Arrow Cross Party.”

  • The exemption of 47,250 Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust is also touched upon in the historiographic review of a century of that country.
  • The monograph on forced migrations in the USSR covers also that of Jews in the previous centuries. An oral history collection contains the record of an Estonian Jewish victim of those tribulations.
  • When the diabolic career of Stalin and Stalinism nears its end, Jews appear at increasing frequency in the records.

“Communist-era historiography attempted to ascribe the rescue of Jews to laudable characteristics of the Bulgarian people, while attributing the deportations in the occupied lands to the ‘monarcho-fascist’ regime.”—from Battling over the Balkans
Professor Coja claimed “those concentration camps in Transnistria were nothing but villages. No barbed wire, no military watch. They only had a few gendarmerie, patrolling only during the night, in order to defend the Jews against Ukrainian civilians.”
“Increased attention in the 1990s has led to a more critical approach by Greek scholars that has highlighted the collaboration by Greeks in shaping the local Holocaust.”
“Zionist circles were interested in bringing a considerable Jewish community to Albania. The German government also planned to send a part of these unwanted Jews to Albania.”
“The stereotype that would have the Jews as having played a key role in the process of communist East European takeovers is lacking any empirical basis.“

“By the 1930s about a quarter of Italy’s adult Jews belong to the National Fascist Party in Italy, well above the average membership of some 10% of Italians.”—from the volume on intellectuals and the totalitarian temptation.
“The life Koestler found in Palestine did not suit him at all. After three mostly uncomfortable years, he concluded that Palestinian Jews could never be like Europeans and he could never be a Palestinian. He soon found his way to Marxism, which had the same electric impact on him as Zionism beforehand.”
“Antonescu made his own particular contribution to the solution of the ‘Jewish problem’ by deporting Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria.”
“The East German reversal of the meaning of antifascism led to a bizarre outcome: a selfdescribed antifascist regime in East Berlin denounced the leaders of the Jewish state as Nazis.”

“The antisemitic categorization of Jews as ‘foreign’ in the Russian Empire continued after its collapse, especially as most Latvian Jews were German, Russian, or Yiddish speakers.”—Defining Latvia.
“Equating the Perkonkrusts (Thunder Cross) party’s anti-German attitude with their anti-Jewish activities downplays the existence and results of their radical antisemitism. It was applied deliberately by some of Perkonkrusts’s members after World War II.”
“Physical and verbal violence and repeated calls for boycotts made the exclusion of Jews conceivable and increasingly acceptable. Such alienation of Latvia’s Jewish population continued to influence national politics even after Perkonkrusts was banned and forced underground in 1934.”
Perkonkrusts was resurrected by about a dozen extremists in 1995. It continued the interwar organization’s antisemitic stance, but augmented it with an anti-Russophone rhetoric, calling for a renewal of the racial purity of the Latvian people.”

“In the case of assimilated, middle-class Jews, there was, apparently, greater openness towards modern women’s roles and also greater social mobility. Emancipation in religion and gender roles was equally influential. From another angle, Jewishness, womanliness, and psychoanalysis all involved simultaneous assimilation and marginalization.”—from a book on the history of “psy-sciences.”
“Psychoanalysis had Jewish origins and was dominated by Jews until the coming of the Nazis. Then it was destroyed, with various degrees of heroic resistance and culpable complicity, and neither the international psychoanalytic movement nor many of the countries involved have fully dealt with the legacy of this destruction.”
“The German Psychoanalytic Society was ‘Aryanized’ by the end of 1935, nearly three years before other Jewish professionals, such as lawyers and doctors, were excluded from their equivalent organizations.”

“French diplomats wrote with particular hostility about the Hungarian-Jewish population. For example, one report in 1928, disapproving of the Magyarophilia of the Transylvanian Jews, described it a Jewish-Hungarian honeymoon.”—from the book on big powers’ interfering into middle Europe.
“A considerable part of Hungarian public opinion gradually turned to the Nazi swastika as a symbol of the defense of Christian Europe against the Bolshevik-Jewish menace exemplified by the creation in 1935 of the far right and anti-Semitic Arrow Cross Party, with a program directly inspired by Nazi ideology.”
“According to a report from the Budapest Italian Fascio, Italian propaganda in Hungary had to compete with German propaganda, which depicted Italian Fascism as philo-Semite movement.”

“His name appeared in ‘Jewish’ fashion as ‘Schein’ until 1883, when he had his name officially changed to Şăineanu.”—Listening to the Languages of the People.
“Mihai Eminescu affirmed, ‘The Jews are not—cannot be Romanians... They are Jews and cannot be anything else.’ … Sturdza, head of the Liberal party, announced to the assembly that ‘he was voting against the Jew who has tried to introduce himself into the Romanian city by devious paths.’”
“The decision to reject Şăineanu’s naturalization was accepted by a vote of 79 to 2. He was soon to be cheered when King Carol expressed regrets at the Senate’s vote and went on to award Şăineanu a medal of merit for his publications.”
“As Şăineanu wrote to a Yiddish scholar in Vienna, ‘I wanted to erect a memorial to my blessed mother, who had so treasured and loved her version of the dialect.’”
“Şăineanu had shown little interest in colonization in Palestine or in Zionism. In none of his writing does he discuss a Jewish homeland or a Jewish national culture oriented to Palestine.”

The encyclopedic volume on the Carpatho-Rusyns, and their historic homeland, the Transarpathian region of Ukraine carries a chapter on Jews, who accounted for 14 percent of the province’s population before the Shoah.
Pogroms and other acts of violence against Jews were absent in this region. This was due to the similar socioeconomic status—most Subcarpathian Jews were poor like their Rusyn neighbors—and because both Jews (the Hasidic majority) and Christian Rusyns were God-fearing believers, which encouraged equality and mutual respect between the two groups.
The reader learns about the often bitterly rival divisions inside the Jewish community, renging from charismatic Hasidic rebbes to zealous communists and devoted Zionists.

„Unlike the typical evolutionary process, in which a territorially based ethno-national community turns its continuously inhabited homeland into a nation-state, the Jewish body politic in Palestine was created by diaspora-originated Jewish settlers.”—from a book on nationalism and the economy.
„Planners of the Zionist project were largely inspired by the German effort starting in the 1880s to turn the ethno-demographic mix of the ‘Polish Provinces,’ annexed to Prussia in the 1795 Partition of Poland, in favor of ethnic Germans.”
„The fundamental principle of Zionist land policy was that all land on which colonization takes place should eventually become the common property of the Jewish people.”
„A turning point in the nature of land rights in Israel was reached in 2000 with a landmark ruling by the High Court of Justice, disallowing ethno-national distinction of leasehold rights on Israel’s state lands. The ruling was given in response to a petition by an Arab married couple.”

“The ‘homecoming’ of Polish (Jewish) medical experts from abroad to a newly founded Poland in 1918, and their active contribution to the project of Pol­ish state building, leads us to reconsider the relationship between expert knowledge gained in Western Europe and the processes of adopting this knowledge to the allegedly national contexts of Eastern Europe.”
In the volume on the intertwined relationship between public health and nation building.
After the First World War, “the immense influx of transatlantic goods, in the form of food and clothing, guaranteed the saving of the masses of impoverished Hun­garian Jewish children.”

  • Besides emphasizing the Jewish component in the early history of Lodz, it is in the Hungarian context that the book that explores the influence of Christianity in Eastern Europe's social, cultural, and political history also refers the most often to Jews.
  • Students of Jewish subjects will not be indifferent about a book on the history of the swastika.
  • The latest member of the series on the history of eugenics is about how the nazis tried to identify the blood group specific to their ideal German race; ironically, the pioneer of the relevant science, serology, was a Polish Jew. The historical survey of eugenics in east Europe is also intertwined with references to Jews (and includes a chapter on Moses als Eugeniker?); including in the context of health and hygiene. By the 1940s, Italian eugenics, too, became pervaded by racism and anti-Semitism.
  • Both CEU Press books that analyse the historic self-perception of Ukrainians, relate to the fate of Jews from the Czarist time till World War II.

“The Karaites, who in the 1790s considered themselves conservative non-Talmudic scripturalist Jews, by the 1940s transformed into an ethnic group with a distinctive Turkic identity and religion.” The Karaite case, the only example in which the loss of Jewish identity was carefully thought out and supported by scholarly literature, is discussed in the volume on the history of ethnography in imperial Russia and the USSR. Among others, the broad scope of the ethnography cultivated in Ukraine is described, pointing at the example of the Jews. Jewish ethnography in Ukraine inscribed itself into the transnational context of yidishe visnshaft. “The tragedy of German Jewry was that most German Jews wanted to be part and parcel of the nationalizing core of the empire. However, the eminent historian Heinrich von Treitschke reminded them in 1879 that they, in his view, were Germany’s ‘misfortune.’ Culturally and ethnically, they could not be integrated into the German nation.”

Eminent scholars examine trajectories of nation-building within the empires in Europe.
“In most parts of the empire, local Jewish populations seem to have placed their hopes in a liberal Ottomanism and remained deaf to the call of Zionism. In Palestine, the political landscape was more complex, but here too, the indigenous Jewish population seems to have felt more secure in supporting liberal Ottomanism.”
“The leading figure of Russian nationalist journalism, Mikhail Katkov openly argued for the emancipation of the Jews, who constituted around 5% of the population of the empire. Katkov insisted that emancipation would open the way to Jewish assimilation into Russianness, instead of pushing them towards Poles and Germans. ‘The Jews,’ emphasized Katkov, ‘are acting in the interests of the political unity of the state wherever their rights are recognized.’”

  • The first story in the collection of the Nobel Prize winning author is about the tragic love between a Croatian nobleman and a Jewish girl in Bosnia.
  • Among the essays on national ideologies in east Europe Jews occupy prominent position in the studies on Croatia and Romania.
  • Jewish emancipation was a major issue in the history of Hungarian conservatism.

“The Greek-Ottoman War of 1897 intensified tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire and promoted the solidarity and mobilization of Muslim and Jewish communities for the imperial cause.”—Imagined Empires.
“In Salonica an episode of violence by the Muslim and Jewish crowd towards a convoy of Greek prisoners of war (among whom were Red Cross nurses) passing through the city, was widely reported by the local and international press and European representatives. Fearing reprisals, the Israelites of Greece addressed a letter to the Jewish community of the city.”
“Even though the Sephardic Jews in Vienna held public prayers for the Ottoman state and later on sent their congratulations to the victorious Ottoman army, there was clearly no general support for Herzl’s pro-Ottoman actions. Only the Sephardic Jewish communities of Bulgaria, where Yosef Marco Barukh had considerable impact, were receptive to Zionism.”

Alarming was the situation of the Jewish population, as reported in 1864 by doctor Niculescu: „In the market town of Băceşti I saw two families living in one and the same room; these families, and all the other Jewish families, had 3–6 children each; one cannot imagine the foul air and the gross odors in those rooms.”—from a monograph on health conditions in the Romanian Old Kingdom.
In 1867, in his doctoral thesis, doctor Agappi concurred: “The Romanian element, even if not totally disappearing, will decrease to such an extent that Iaşi will become a new Palestine through the gradual increase of the Israelite element.”
„The 1899 census showed that there were only 266,652 Jews in Romania, representing 4.5 per cent of the total population. Indeed, Jews represented 19 per cent of Romania’s urban population and 38.7 per cent of Moldavia’s urban population.”

How did the conversion policies in the Russian empire affect Jews? Notwithstanding discriminatory practices, with the brief exception of a decade in the reign of Nicholas I, these practices did not include massive pressure to convert.

“The dominant faith in Poland is Roman Catholicism. The second, existing from time immemorial—and Poland is full of its adherents—is Judaism.”—as broadcast from the 18th century.
“Toward the end of August III’s reign, an eleventh sect arrived in Poland, the Frankists. A wealthy Jew from Turkey by the name of Frank, became convinced that the Messiah predicted by the prophets had already arrived, and therefore the need for the Old Testament had come to an end. He first appeared in the diocese of Kiev, and then in Łuck, attracting greater and greater numbers of Jews to his belief.”
“Jews on the street would be yanked about and pummeled with sticks, for being the ones who tormented the Lord Jesus. Such was student custom that, without any other pretext, they would set upon and beat a Jew for as long as they liked, until the poor besieged Jew managed to find cover. If by chance a Jew was spotted somewhere near where students were playing, he would hop away as fast as a rabbit among hounds.”

“According to Piccolomini, the Turks were ‘foes of the Trinity.’ They followed a certain false prophet called Mohammed, ‘an Arab imbued with gentile error and Jewish perfidy’.”
The essays in this book provide interesting contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the representation of differing cultures in the early modern period.
“Nicholas of Cusa points out that some sentiments in the Koran, written against Christians, were introduced only later by Mohammed under the influence of his Jewish advisors.”
“Pius II uses the Jews as an example: although they were conquered by the Assyrians and the Romans and were oppressed and led off into slavery, they remained true to their religion.”
“Apart from the Muslim population—Moors, Ottoman Turks, renegades, corsairs, Moriscos—a great number of Jews and Christians lived in Algiers: artisans, merchants, free men, and slaves. An important distinction indicated by dress and hairstyle is between Jews and Muslims: no Jew is allowed to wear shoes of any color.”

Every historical monograph hopes to match the success of the life story of an extraordinary woman from the 16th century. One tells about the deeds and vicissitudes of Jesuit communities in the eastern half of the Habsburg empire. "Jesuits' negative view of Jewish 'perfidy' inevitably spilled over the ways Jesuits interacted with Jewish families. Almost any activity undertaken by a Jew might be in fact suspect, and the mere Jewish nature of a thing was sufficient cause for its name to be used as an insult."

“Sephardic Jews opened the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire (in Istanbul), already in 1494, but they published only in Hebrew letters and for Jewish consumption. Central Europe’s first Jewish printing press publishing in Hebrew for religious needs of Judaism was founded in Prague in 1522.”—Words in Space and Time.
“Jewish nationalists (Zionists) established a German-medium Technikum in Haifa in 1912. But the Jewish diaspora in North America and Russia contested the decision, and two years later, Hebrew replaced German as this institution’s language of education, and the name was duly Hebraized to Technion.”
“Jews, whether they resided in the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere across Central Europe, stuck to their ‘holy tongue’ of (Biblical) Hebrew. This explains why Yiddish used to be disparagingly referred to as a ‘jargon’ by many Jews themselves until the mid-twentieth century.”
“Yiddish speaking Jews constituted a plurality of Soviet Belarus’s students throughout by World War Two.”

“The dramatic processes associated with early Jewish forms of apocalypticism, understood as cataclysmic, cata­strophic, or entailing a radical rupture in history or in nature, were gradually domesticated, as they were adopted into Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature.” - from a collection of essays on the apocalypse.
“Early Kabbalah, and many forms of early medieval Jewish philoso­phies, only marginally engaged messianic apocalypticism. After the Jewish expulsion from Spain, however, Messianism grad­ually became part of the core of Kabbalistic thought.”
“The founder of Hasi­dism, R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, known as the Besht, re­portedly concluded that the Messiah relates to the social body the way the soul is related to the physical body. Eighteenth-cen­tury Hasidism and the later Central European Jewish thinkers granted the highest value to the utopia un­derstood as Messianism.”

“The culture of medieval and Renaissance Spain arose from the fusion -—coexistence and interaction—of three traditions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim.” The many examples and illustrations corroborate Peter Burke’s thesis about cultural hybridization being the essence of the Renaissance. Jews were a pivotal element in these processes, especially in the great multicultural centers of Venice, Constantinople /Istanbul or Wilno/Vilnius.
At the time of the Renaissance, Venice, like Spain, harboured Jews and Muslims. Its population included Greek Christians as well as Latin ones. Its printers produced books in different scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Glagolitic (for liturgical books destined for Croatia, for example).

The narrative of medieval Christian culture is also the narrative of its relationship to Jews. In another work Jews are described as believers in, and (more typically) targets of witchcraft and related magic.

Things were not different centuries earlier in the realm of Louis IX. "The crown's anti-Jewish measures were intended to protect common people - le menu peuple chrétien - from what was stigmatized as usury but may have been counterproductive in reducing the numbers of men and women who could provide needed consumption loans to poor people."

“There was great excitement, or rather divine inspiration, among the people to go to Jerusalem. Some of them, while crossing our country, attacked with God’s permission the Jews, forcibly baptized them, and slaughtered those who resisted. Bishop Cosmas, who saw that this was against canon law, moved by the zeal of justice, tried to prevent them being forcibly baptized, but in vain, for there was nobody to assist him.”—Cosmas of Prague.
“The Jews soon thereafter rejected the yoke of Christ, dis regarded the grace of baptism together with the salvation of the Catholic faith and took again upon their shoulders the yoke of the law of Moses.”
“The duke was informed that some of the Jews had fled and some had taken their wealth with them in secret, some to Poland others to Hungary.”
“You sons of Ismahel, born as bastards,
You have to tell the duke, he orders, why you flee
And take away the treasures gotten for nothing.
For all is mine, mine is here everything.”

In Byzantium, “Jews held a special position for Christians: they were ‘a dialogical necessity’. That is, Christians needed to refute the objections of the Jews in order to assert the truth of Christianity. Argument was the essential tool in this intellectual and religious struggle. The defeat of the Jews, real or not, who featured in such debates was the proof of Christian superiority.” The book focuses on the leading literary genre of the place and the era, prose dialogues in Greek.
The few thousand Jews, Rabbanite and Karaite, living in the Pera district were treated badly by the Greeks. “Yet the Jews are rich and good, kindly and charitable, and bear their lot with cheerfulness.”

“The idea of Christ’s vicarious and redeeming death was comprehensible for both Jews and pagans alike, whereas the divinity of Jesus was comprehensible and acceptable for the pagans, but to the Jews it was, on the contrary, pure blasphemy.”
Issues of human sacrifice and martyrdom in the early period of Christianity.
“While Christian exegetical tradition concentrates mainly on the figure of Abraham, in Jewish tradition it was Isaac’s merits, rather than those of Abraham, which received ever greater attention. The twelfth-century Jewish reality was that Jewish parents, imitating Abraham, killed their own children in order to avoid their forced Christianization.”
“A highly cultivated Jew in the early first century found nothing at all repulsive in human sacrifice; on the contrary, he found it natural and sometimes even praiseworthy.”
“Pious Jews accept death for the glory of God. And it is not their task to defeat the evil forces; the cosmic battle is waged by God.”