At the Edge of the Abyss: Jewish Intellectual Responses to Nazism, 1933-1940

This course will explore Jewish intellectual responses to Nazism from the rise of Hitler in 1933 to the first year of World War Two in 1939-1940. Recent historiography has moved beyond describing the physical destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust to exploring its deep crisis in the years immediately prior to the war’s outbreak. This course will, to quote one historian, seek to recover “the catastrophe before the Catastrophe.”

First, the course will survey the political plight of European Jewry on the eve of and following Hitler’s rise to power. Then, we will analyze different Jewish intellectual reactions to the Nazi repeal of Jewish emancipation and the spread of virulent anti-Semitism throughout Europe. Among the topics to be discussed are as follows: the crisis in faith in Enlightenment and modern civilization, the debate amongst Jewish intellectuals about the legacy of Jewish emancipation, differing rabbinic responses in both Central and Eastern Europe, the “return to the ghetto” debate in the Yiddish press, and the 1939-1940 Yiddish journal of ideological revision Oyfn Sheydveg (At the Crossroads).

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