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From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933

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This book was a textbook for a class I took on the Holocaust. I have since read other works by Jacob Katz and I find his work to be well-written, even for people who are not academics, and thorough in its approach. This book in particular offers an excellent survey of the development of anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic thought throughout European history. If you are interested in understanding the sources of anti-Semitic thought and race theory as phenomena that culminated in the Holocaust and other modern manifestations of the genocidal impulse, this book is a must. The things Katz highlights and discusses will blow your mind. By the time I finished the book, I understood so much more about how things like the Holocaust could happen in the first place.

Jacob Katz has now been dead for twelve years, but his genius is still sorely missed. There is nobody else who has taught us so much about Jewish-Gentile relations in Europe.

Among other things, he teaches us here about the nature of religious Christian anti-Semitism. In the first chapter, for example, there is the story of Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, whose lengthy anti-Semitic book, "Judaism Discovered," Katz calls a "great work." Eisenmenger (born 1654) spared no effort, over a period of twenty years, to learn Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and much else, and to pore over the Talmud and other Jewish sacred books, only to come up with an unsparing indictment of Jewish religion and, more particularly, the Jewish people. Eisenmenger never misquoted; in fact he went to great lengths to read with care. And yet, as Katz shows with great brilliance, Eisenmenger was completely wrong, a prisoner of misconceptions.

How can that be ? Read Chapter 1 in this book. If Eisenmenger's work was "great," Katz's is greater by far. You need to read it, or rather study it, if you wish to know what the world is all about.