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A lon Confino, born in Jerusalem, is a professor in the Department of History at Ben Gurion University and the University of Virginia. I have read many books on the Holocaust, the German genocide of Jews. the Wikipedia bibliography on the Holocaust lists eighteen authors, the most notable for me being Lucy Dawidowicz (1975, 1981), Henry Friedlander (1995), Raul Hilberg (2003), and Christopher Browning (2004). the scholarship of those authors is unquestioned, but I have found Confino's book the most illuminating. He questions the received view that Hitler's war against the Jews had to do with race. Confino makes a convincing case that the genocide of the Jews as designated by the Geneva Convention had to do with religion, with Judaism and the Old Testament, which were foundational for the New Testament and Western civilization: “for the Nazis and other Germans,” he writes, “Jews represented a time, symbolizing evil historical origins that had to be eradicated for the Nazi civilization to arise. the Nazis chose as their main enemy the Jews, an ancient people with a long history and fundamental role in Christian, European, and German society, and a source of a long tradition of positive and negative moral, religious, and historical symbols. the Jews stood at the origins of the Bible, of Christianity, and for many in Germany and Europe of modernity, liberalism, communism, and capitalism” (p. 14).
The period he focuses on is from 1933, beginning with the public burning of books, to November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, a date on which most of the synagogues in Germany went up in flames and Torahs were burned and defiled as well. From 1933 on, what was being imagined in