A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide by Alon Confino (review)

As in his earlier work, Alon Confino challenges us to think anew a topic with which we think we are familiar. In A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, he has written a novel study of the advancing mental landscape that allowed Jews to “disappear” or cease to exist in Germany and across Europe, from 1930s legislation to 1940s killing. Taking as its centrepiece the symbolic and actual destruction of the Torah (the Old Testament) that accompanied Kristallnacht in November 1938, A World without Jews begins by posing the question of why this artefact was targeted for destruction and what this singular act meant. As the argument unfolds to trace the anti-Semitic persecution from the beginning of the regime in 1933 through to its end in 1945, the significance of this act is made clear: the destruction of the Torah was not a random act of vandalism but instead was key to the intellectual destruction of the Jews and their religion as the forebears of European culture.

The extension of this idea provides a fascinating argument; namely, that Nazi anti-Semitism was part of a national revolution that meant to eradicate historical roots and create a new civilization in its place. In essence, Confino argues that the Nazi persecution of Jews was a by-product of the Nazi desire to achieve a cultural genesis rather than the simple result of a racial ideology put into practice. As Confino himself puts it, “The Nazis persecuted the Jews because they were a key element that came from within their own German and European-Christian civilization; to rebuild this civilization anew, they had to destroy a central part of their own culture” (p. 131). This is not to say, however, that “modern race theories” did not play a part; rather, they were an element—alongside “moral religious sentiments associated with a tradition of Christianity, and key elements of Heimat and German national identity”—that together formed what Confino calls “a modern salvation worldview” that became the main aim of Nazi policy, the elimination of “evil” Jewry serving as the central feature of the application of this worldview (p. 237). As such, Confino sees the entire period as a “powerful continuity of making since 1933 a Nazi world without Jews” (p. 191).

Confino’s writing is persuasive and compelling, though there is a slight tendency towards repetition that could have been avoided. At times, one also wishes that the images that accompany the text and underline many of Confino’s points had been more carefully aligned with the text itself, eliminating the need to travel back and forth between text and image to find the connection. Slight improvements to the quality of the images would have also been welcome, though in their present format they still represent excellent examples of the type of anti-Semitic activity found throughout the period and effectively punctuate Confino’s argument.

This work is without doubt a fascinating read, challenging us to resituate the Holocaust not only as part of Jewish history but also as part of German history, and particularly, as a realm of European intellectual expression. As a result, Confino’s work represents a significant contribution to modern European intellectual history. In embedding his study of the Holocaust in this wider intellectual culture, however, one fears that the book might find criticism among some readers on account of its focussing less on the Jewish victims themselves and more on the thoughts and actions of Nazis and Germans (as well as other Europeans complicit in the killing). But this is precisely the point—Confino explores the topic from an unusual and interesting perspective that enriches the subject and its meaning as a domain of European intellectual and cultural understanding. It also situates European Jews within a European tradition, providing them with a validation of their centrality to European culture decades after Nazi policies attempted to expunge them from this...