Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust [Hardcover]

The Nazi Holocaust is often said to dominate the study of modern Jewish history. Engel demonstrates that, to the contrary, historians of the Jews have often insisted that the Holocaust be sequestered from their field, assigning it instead to historians of Europe, Germany, or the Third Reich. He shows that reasons for this counterintuitive situation lie in the evolution of the Jewish historical profession since the 1920s.

This one-of-a-kind study takes readers on a tour of twentieth-century scholars of the history of European Jewry, and the social and political contexts in which they worked, in order to understand why many have declined to view their subject from the vantage point of Jews' encounter with the Third Reich. Engel argues vehemently against this separation and describes ways in which a few exceptional scholars have used the Holocaust to illuminate key problems in the Jewish past.

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 . . . Engel's is an important and provocative work that explains why the Holocaust has been the preserve of historians of Europe rather than historians of the Jews. It further points to the intellectual consequences of this development. It ought to be read and considered by anyone working in these areas. Engel uncovers the intellectual and sociological roots of a longstanding partition between Jewish history and Holocaust Studies and argues persuasively for its removal. This is an extremely important work that ought to provoke all modern Jewish historians to reflect on the assumptions governing their own work and their approach to the matters they study. David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Professor of History at New York University. David Engel . . . provides us inHistorians of the Jews and lk