The chapter opens with comments on autobiographical writings by Petrarch, Augustine, Uriel da Costa, Franciscus Junius, Ludvig Freiherr von Holberg, Jan Amos Komenský, and Leibniz. There are seen as attempts to make sense of one’s own life circumstances, while aware that absolute knowledge of one’s own life is not possible. This is particularly salient when it comes to understanding one’s sufferings. Following this, there is a discussion of the concepts of public and fatherland, comparing contemporary times to olden times, primarily Greek and Roman antiquity. The public is understood as a kind of collective moral and legal arbiter, and language plays an important role in its existence. This is seen to be particularly important for what is called a public of the Hebrews. The contemporary public is that of Christianity, but also of commerce, schools, and universities. A fatherland is explained in terms of familial bond to a community and a link in the chain of humanity. This is followed by a discussion of Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius, and Leibniz.

The chapter provides a summary history of the Jews in Berlin following their readmittance in 1670 through to the period of the births of Fanny and Felix. It notes the relationship of Moses Mendelssohn with figures of the Berlin Enlightenment and the consequent parallel development of the Haskalah movement with the growing interest by prominent Jewish families in Gentile culture and Bildung, exemplified by the Berlin Jewish salons. The decision – or rather attempt – of Abraham Mendelssohn to dissociate from Judaism on the part of himself and his family is placed in the context of the development of German nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish reform movement.

This chapter provides an examination of the complex beginning and ending of the Spanish Inquisition, with attention to the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1391, the ambiguous religious status of those converts in the fifteenth century, and the creation of yet another new generation of converts after the Jewish Expulsion of 1492. The aims of Ferdinand and Isabella are explored, as is the resistance to the Inquisition’s creation. The essay explores the attempted abolition of the Spanish Inquisition in 1808, with Napoleon’s invasion, as well as the contested legal relevance of the Inquisition in the 1812 Cortes of Cádiz, and the institution’s gradual extinction from 1814 to 1834.

Chapter 6 considers how the legal system dealt with theft, damage to property, personal insult, and violence, and how citizens obtained redress. The law of obligations is important since, for example, theft, the most common action that modern law defines under criminal law, was under Roman law a delict, prosecuted through action taken by the injured party on the basis of an obligation on the wrongdoer to make restitution. Therefore, the Romans distinguished between a delict and a crimen, which was punished by public penalty after formal trial. In the legal definition of unlawful killing, injury, outrage, and loss, concepts of negligence, deceit, and causation emerged in assessing responsibility. We then consider the definition of theft and robbery, the remedies available for plaintiffs, and the main criminal offences tried in the public jury courts. Those who did not conform with the religious establishment and social conventions, for example, magicians, Jews, and Christians, faced pursuit and prosecution.

This chapter considers the deployment of radical Orientalism as a mode of political critique in the popular fiction of the bestselling Chartist leader and author George W. M. Reynolds. It focuses on the structural congruences between the depictions of aristocratic debauchery in his two Mysteries series (1844–8; 1848–56) and the figuration of Old Corruption as in league with the Jewish sweater in ‘The Seamstress’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany (1850). Examination of this alignment permits a discussion of the mutable hierarchies within the category of the People at mid-nineteenth century, focused specifically on those groups excluded from full political rights: the working-class man, women, and Jews. It considers how Reynolds’s use of radical literary-political tropes positions Jews as Occidental in matters of parliamentary democracy, but designates them Oriental when the sweating system that they are understood to represent is figured as an atavistic, foreign, and unchristian form of economics.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 marked a fundamental change in both the scope and systematic nature of Nazi mass violence. Over the course of the next three years, German warfare and rule in the occupied Soviet territories caused death and suffering on an unprecedented scale. It is particularly the death toll among civilians and other non-combatants that stands out here. The majority of Soviet war dead comprised civilians and unarmed, captured soldiers. In deliberate policies of mass murder, German forces killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 2.6 million Jews, more than 2 million residents of Soviet cities, 30,000 Roma, at least 17,000 psychiatric patients, and up to 600,000 rural-dwelling civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations. The military operations of the German-Soviet War cannot be addressed independently of mass murder in this theatre, where 10 million Wehrmacht soldiers were stationed at one time or another between 1941 and 1944. The number of Wehrmacht divisions deployed on the Eastern Front in which no war crimes were committed was low, and members of the Wehrmacht may indeed have made up the majority of those responsible for large-scale crimes committed here by the German Reich.

This second chapter on Julian’s Against the Galileans traces the second movement of Julian’s strategy of narrative subsumption: charting the apostasies that cascaded from, first, the Hellenic and, then, the Hebrew traditions, culminating in the Christian sect. Having pointed out the basic compatibility between Hebrew and Hellenic doctrine, Julian emphasizes next the most significant difference between the two: the glaring inferiority of the Hebrew to the Hellenic tradition. This basic framework makes sense of Julian’s claim that Christians are double apostates: Christians started out as Hellenes, and their first mistake was of degree rather than kind: they opted for the lesser Hebrew tradition, rather than the Hellenic one. They latched onto a deviation within the Hebrew tradition, however, which became the grounds for their second apostasy, now away from the Hebrews, to create a new sect.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.

Jews trying to survive in Poland, on the “Aryan” side, were exposed to permanent risk of detection not so much by the Germans, but by their Polish neighbors, passers-by, officers of the “Blue” police and the ever-present szmalcovnicy (blackmailers). The behavior, cultural and religious codes, speech, aand stereotyped physical characteristics of Jews conspired to make Jewish survival so very unlikely.

This chapter establishes and problematizes the category of “survivor” and the ways in which its meaning changed over the postwar decades. The definition of survivors is “unstable,” and includes diverse groups, not just those who lived through the camps or ghettos, but also those in exile or hiding. The chapter discusses how trauma affected not just survivors, but also their children and grandchildren, in complex ways. It analyzes the ways in which the experience of the Holocaust affected family life and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, as well as the (re)construction of Jewish communal life.

This chapter offers a nuanced account of liberation, displacement, and homecoming after the Second World War. It emphasizes the ambiguity of a liberation that was not always freeing, displacement that continued wartime suffering, and a homecoming that was often bittersweet, when it was even possible. It traces the ways in which the savage history of postwar Europe led to massive population transfers, including of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It looks at “homecoming” both in western and in eastern Europe, as well as post-liberation migration out of Europe. After all, most east European Jews quickly realized they had little future in Europe, their sense of belonging shattered. The surrounding societies were often unwelcoming for returnees, reluctant to return appropriated property, and retained substantial antisemitism. If, in western Europe, Jewish survivors could, to a degree, “go home again,” this proved impossible for the most part in eastern Europe. Thus, Jewish survivors often abandoned Europe altogether, seeking new lives in Israel, the USA, and elsewhere. The political and social history of displaced persons after the war is thus both pan-European and global.

Over the course of a tumultuous ecclesiastical career, John Chrysostom (ca. 349–407) put on many hats. He was a brilliant student of rhetoric and literature under the tutelage of Libanius of Antioch; he joined Diodore of Tarsus’ ascetic circle, which counted as a member Theodore of Mopsuestia, among others; he was appointed lector in 371 and then presbyter in 381 by Meletius of Antioch; and finally he was consecrated as bishop of Constantinople after the death of Nectarius (a target of Gregory of Nazianzus’ ire in Poem 2.1.12, “On Himself and Concerning the Bishops”). It was during his time as a presbyter in Antioch that he earned his gilded reputation for preaching, which Christians in the fifth century would encapsulate with the moniker “Chrysostom,” or Golden-Mouth. His sermons were known for their power and eloquence, but also for their confrontational tenor and furious hostility toward opponents (in this case, Jews and “Judaizing” Christians). John hoped that every member of his congregation would demonstrate the same zeal that he strived to embody every day.

This chapter first turns to patterns of arrest, imprisonment, and release, then to life inside the camps, including sites of terror, and also to prisoners’ attempts at survival, self-assertion, and resistance. It examines how inmate populations changed over time and how life and death in the camps was tied to gender, age, and class as well as networks. It also compares the experiences of Jewish inmates to non-Jews in these same camps.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prohibited marriage between people “of German blood” and Jews (including, in practice, “half-Jews”). So-called mixed marriages already in existence were subjected to persecutory measures. This chapter examines the fates of couples in mixed marriages and their “mixed-blood” children, both inside Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The introduction highlights the enduring impact of the Holocaust, the global reach of its legacy, and the ways it has shaped all domains of social and cultural life. Briefly tracing the changing shape of Holocaust memory and post-Holocaust politics, it is argued that the Holocaust has become a global touchstone for thinking about mass atrocity. The Holocaust has become a master metaphor for evil, which has led to it being appropriated and misappropriated for diverse contemporary political uses in ways that are often detached from the historical event itself. The introduction suggests that the various chapters in the volume trace these developments across a range of geographical spaces and cultural practices.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.