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Overall, Jewish life in Germany has been able to take root again: synagogues have been rebuilt or restored in many towns, sometimes on the sites of synagogues destroyed in 1938. If the properties were overbuilt, synagogues were built elsewhere and memorial plaques were erected in their former places.

To document Jewish life as an important part of European cultural and intellectual history, for example, Jewish museums and documentation sites were built in Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Cologne, Berlin and elsewhere. In the past 70 years, institutes for the study of Judaism and Jewish life have been established in Frankfurt am Main, Potsdam, Berlin and elsewhere. In Heidelberg, the Central Council of Jews in Germany founded the private University of Jewish Studies with state recognition in 1979. In addition, Prof. Manfred Koob of Darmstadt Technical University, a native of Heppenheim, has used modern CAD simulation to create visual representations of synagogues destroyed in 1938. In the meantime, in addition to religious and cultural institutions, Jewish restaurants or stores with kosher offerings can be found in cities and communities – again, Jewish holidays are celebrated and there are Jewish sports clubs.

It seems almost natural, but it is only almost: because recently men were attacked on the open street just because they wear a kippa on their head; a right-wing extremist party representative calls the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “stigma of German history” and new anti-Semitism has led to the 2019 attack on the synagogue in Halle.

Captions
Fig. 4: Logo of the University of Jewish Studies with state recognition in Heidelberg.
(Source: Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies)
Fig. 5: 3-D reconstruction of the main synagogue in Mannheim, built in 1885 and destroyed in 1938,
entrance facade (source: Architectura Virtualis GmbH, cooperation of the Technical
University of Darmstadt, Dr.-Ing. Marc Grellert)
Fig. 6: 3-D reconstruction of the main synagogue in Mannheim, built in 1885 and destroyed in 1938,
View from the entrance into the men’s room (Source: Architectura Virtualis GmbH, Cooperation of the Technical University of Darmstadt, Dr.-Ing. Marc Grellert)

The Nazi terror had wiped out centuries of Jewish life in Germany in just 12 years between 1933 and 1945. After the surrender of the German Reich on May 8, 1945, some Jews returned from exile to help re-educate Germans and build a democratic, free state. They were active in interrogating German prisoners of war, in radio broadcasting, or in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Other Jews returned to Germany, but mostly only temporarily until they left for the new state of Israel.

In addition to the approximately 15,000 Jews living in Germany in 1950, there were about 200,000 Jews who, as former forced laborers from Eastern Europe, were unable to return to their homeland during the emerging Cold War. Some of them stayed here or emigrated to Israel. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many mostly Orthodox Jews from the former Soviet republics came to Germany. At the beginning of the 21st century, there are about 230,000 Jews living in 105 communities.

In the summer of 1945, a Central Committee of the liberated Jews in the American zone was formed to represent their interests. On July 19, 1950, this committee joined with other committees to form the new Central Council of Jews in Germany. This council had to deal with various topics and problems: in the founding years of the Federal Republic of Germany, questions of reparations had to be introduced into the legislative process and the criminal and historical-political reappraisal of the Nazi era had to be demanded in view of new right-wing extremist parties and renewed anti-Semitism in the 1960s/70s.

Captions
Fig. 1: David Ben Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence of Israel on May 15, 1948 (Source: Flickr – Government Press Office (GPO) – David Ben Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence, Government Press Office (Israel), via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 2: New Synagogue Darmstadt (Source: Stadtarchiv Darmstadt, Photo Roland Koch)
Fig. 3: Former synagogue in Pfungstadt (Source: Former synagogue Pfungstadt, Commander-pirx, via Wikimedia Commons)

After World War II, the Allies set up an International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949 for a trial of the main war criminals or those mainly responsible for the Nazi regime. The German population also took note of this. They saw in newsreels how Göring, Speer, Rosenberg, Hess, Keitel and others brazenly rejected their responsibility with a “Not guilty!”.

Most of the defendants were found guilty by the court and mostly sentenced to death by hanging. Other defendants received prison sentences, including Heinz Jost, a native of Lorsch. An SS brigade leader and SD Einsatzgruppenführer, Jost was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948 for participating in executions of Jews, but the sentence was reduced to a ten-year sentence only three years later. He was released from prison after only one year.

Thirteen years after the Nuremberg Trials, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had taken over the organization of the Holocaust in the East after the “Wannsee Conference” and whom the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad had tracked down in Buenos Aires, took place in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann was sentenced to death on December 15, 1961, and executed on June 1, 1962.

After a heated discussion in the Federal Republic of Germany around 1960 about the so-called “Schlussstrichfrage,” a trial on National Socialist perpetration was opened for the first time in a German court on December 20, 1963, with the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main, despite deliberate delays. The course of the trial was recorded in minutes, but also in tape recordings. It attracted a great deal of attention among the general public, but also among a senior class of the Old Electoral High School in Bensheim. The school class attended the trial on March 25, 1965. The impressions of the then 18-year-olds were reflected in an article in their school newspaper (Kurfürst).

The first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt became a landmark in the prosecution of Nazi crimes in the death camps. Although this coming to terms with Nazi terror was soon accompanied by inflammatory writings by Holocaust deniers in the 1970s, crimes committed in the extermination camps of Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and others could be prosecuted and punished under the rule of law. A change in society’s attitude toward responsibly coming to terms with the past and remembrance policies, as well as the decision of the German Bundestag to lift the statute of limitations for murder, have laid an essential foundation for this.

Captions
Fig. 1: Main war crimes trial in Nuremberg (Source: Nuremberg Trials. Looking down on defendants dock, circa 1945-1946. – NARA – 540127, National Archivesat College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 2: The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 at the District Court in Jerusalem (the defendant left in glass case), (Source: Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death at the conclusion of the Eichmann Trial USHMM 65289, Israeli GPO photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Fig. 3: First Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1965 in the specially equipped Haus Gallus in Frankfurt am Main (Source: bpk media number: 70243319, Photographer: Abisag Tüllmann, Dated: 03.04.1964, Geographical reference: Location: Frankfurt am Main / Germany)
Fig. 4: Observations of a senior class of the Altes Kurfürstliches Gymnasium (Old Electoral High School) in Bensheim, which spent a day as audience members at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial on March 25, 1965; report by Joachim-Felix Leonhard for the school newspaper “Kurfürst” in 1966.

Before that, in 1938, the Nazi rulers had occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia and now persecuted the Jews there as well, driving many into exile or deporting them to extermination camps. With the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the extermination work of the Wehrmacht and SS units expanded against many Eastern European Jewish communities that had been settled in shtetls or ghettos for centuries.

A little more than two years later, at the so-called “Wannsee Conference” on January 20, 1942, the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” and thus the industrial mass killing by gassing, poisoning, shooting and burning in extermination camps in the East was decided. Until shortly before the end of the war in 1945, about 6 million Jews, about 500,000 Sinti and Roma and many other prisoners were murdered.
Few had survived when the Red Army opened the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945, and the British Army opened the gates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945. They liberated starving people and gave testimony to the world public of the genocide committed in the German name.

After the surrender of the German Reich on May 8, 1945, the victorious Allied powers – the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France – quickly began the search for the war criminals. At the same time, they also took the first step toward a re-education for a postwar development of Germany oriented toward freedom and democracy. They were unable to apprehend all of the Holocaust’s henchmen and bring them all to justice: some, such as Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, had cowardly evaded responsibility by committing suicide, others went into hiding and were only later discovered and brought to justice – and still others, such as the notorious SS camp doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele, were never caught.

Captions:
Fig. 6: Man with Jewish star (Source: Berlin, Man with Jewish star, Bundesarchiv, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 7: Star of David (Source: Star of David, Daniel Ullrich, Threedots, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 8: Prisoners in Auschwitz camp (Source: Auschwitz Liberated January 1945, Unknown, assumed to be the work of the Red Army, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Fig. 9: Imprisoned children in the Auschwitz camp (Source: Mujeres y niños en los campos de concentración nazi, AlanMe123, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 10: “Materials for Jewish resettlement” served to conceal the mass murder of Jews (Source: Order of departure for a 5-tons truck with a trailer to Dessau for materi- als for Jewish resettlement, SS, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

With the end of World War I and during the Weimar Republic, nationalist and anti-Semitic tendencies permeated society. After the failed National Socialist putsch of November 1923, Adolf Hitler, in the inflammatory pamphlet Mein Kampf, singled out the Jew as a “world enemy” and even as a “parasite in the body of other peoples” and called for a “struggle” against him. Just 10 years later and less than two months after the seizure of power on January 30, 1933, the first concentration camp was set up in Dachau on March 20, 1933.

For the rapid penetration of society with Nazi ideology, the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels primarily used radio to influence the masses and bring the party and state into line. On April 24, 1933, he declared over the radio that “the radio should hammer and chisel people until they become slaves to us.”

Earlier, in Darmstadt, as the first city in the German Reich, Jewish stores were closed for 24 hours on March 28, 1933, justifying this with alleged hate propaganda by foreign Jews. In university towns, books by Jewish and other authors were thrown into the fire and their works entered in a “directory of undesirable and harmful literature.” Civil servants were dismissed from the civil service and artists were excluded from cultural life.

More and more often, inflammatory speeches by Hitler, Goebbels and others were broadcast over the radio. Julius Streicher agitated viciously against Jews in the combat magazine “Der Stürmer” and in 1938 published the book “Der Giftpilz” (The Poisonous Mushroom) with invective caricatures as a supposed “mood book for young and old”.

After the seizure of power in 1933, propaganda minister Goebbels adapted the film industry to the goals of the Nazi dictatorship. Newsreels now had to serve propaganda and disinformation, but above all, quite a few anti-Semitic films were produced, such as “Jud Süß” (1940). Radio, publishing and the film industry had an important accompanying function in the political and propagandistic repression and elimination of Jews.

In addition, the National Socialists enacted the Nuremberg Laws or Race Laws in 1935. For this purpose, Friedrich Wilhelm Euler from Bensheim had compiled data on mixed marriages and Jewish mongrels for the Reich Ministry of the Interior from 1933 and statistics on Jewish baptisms and mixed marriages for the police and Gestapo in 1936. With the “Nuremberg Laws”, the National Socialists now also created legal conditions for the intensified persecution, expulsion and extermination of Jewish fellow citizens. The laws met with widespread approval, including the obligation to wear the so-called Jewish star from the fall of 1939 as an outwardly visible sign of exclusion.

Captions
Fig. 1: The first Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, today a memorial (source: Dachau 1991, Francisco Santos, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 2: Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz, edited by Julius Streicher, Nuremberg: Verlag Der Stürmer, 1938. (Source: Der Giftpilz cover, Julius Streicher, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 3: “Jud Süß” movie poster, 1940 (Source: Jud Süss, Shawshots, via alamy.de).
Fig. 4: Nuremberg Laws (source: Nuremberg Laws, public domain, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 5: Scheme for “Aryan Proof” (Source: Nuremberg Laws, in the public domain, via Wikipedia Commons)

In the mid-18th century, laws and ordinances such as Emperor Joseph II’s Rescripts of Tolerance were enacted in individual territories and Jews were placed under the protection of the respective rulers.

The relationship between majorities and minorities began to change again when, after the French Revolution of 1789 and after the end of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806, first individual territorial and later national states were formed. This was accompanied by definitions of the “national” or of what “constituted a nation”. These soon led to a general self-image of national and increasingly nationalistic majority societies vis-à-vis minorities. Accordingly, Jews were soon classified as “foreigners” who did not belong to the majority society.

“Anti-Semitism” as a political fighting term for general “hostility toward Jews” emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century, when authors such as Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) called for hatred and persecution of Jews in inflammatory writings. Soon Jews had their civil rights restricted and their dignity taken away in anti-Semitic articles and caricatures. This anti-Semitism found resonance in the German Empire, but also in France and elsewhere in Europe through inflammatory writings by the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau, the Anglo-German writer Houston Stuart Chamberlain, by Richard Wagner or the Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke, etc. Not to be underestimated in their media impact were vicious caricatures such as those of the French draftsman Gustave Doré.

The “anti-Semitism” that developed into the Holocaust in the 20th century did not end with the end of the National Socialist German Reich and the liberation of the people from the extermination camps: on the contrary, it continued and is gaining new momentum in the 21st century among right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists in Germany, Europe and North America.

The European Union (EU) opposes this inhuman ideology with its democratic and liberal stance and therefore adopted this resolution on May 15, 2016 at the proposal of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA): “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which can be expressed as hatred towards Jews.

Anti-Semitism is directed in word or deed against Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, as well as against Jewish communal institutions or religious bodies. In addition, the State of Israel, understood in this context as a Jewish collective, may also be the target of such attacks.

Captions
Fig. 6 | 7: Ecclesia and Synagoga Notre-Dame de Paris, allegorical Gothic statues (Source: Statue on the west facade / Statue. Synagoga of Notre-Dame de Paris, France, Luis Miguel Bugallo
Sánches [Lmbuga]).
Fig. 8: Sculpture of the “Jew sow” at the Wittenberg town church, here as an insult leaf, Wittenberg 1546.
(Source: broadsheet depicting the Wittenberg Judensau, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 9: The Wandering Eternal Jew, color woodcut after Gustave Doré, 1852 Reproduction in an exhibition at Yad Vashem, 2007 (Source: The Wandering Eternal Jew, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Exclusion of Jews can already be found in the Middle Ages: stereotypically, Jews were often described as “money-grubbing,” “devious,” “treacherous,” as “well poisoners,” “ritual murderers,” ” profiteers,” and depicted in pictures as “ugly,” “unsympathetic,” and so on. This was also the case in everyday life, for example in the business seal of an Iacobus from Bremen around 1350, where a distorted depiction of a Jew looks into the anus of a pig as an anti-Jewish invective. Such so-called “Jewish pigs” as invective objects from this period can also be found on 36 Christian places of worship in Central Europe, such as the Wittenberg City Church (around 1310). In addition, Jews were also marked in their clothing in everyday life. This is shown until modern times by yellow Jewish hats in pictorial manuscripts, on frescoes in churches and also the regulations on the color and shape and wearing of such hats. Similarly, in the dress regulations until the 17th/18th century, the attachment of a yellow ring on the left side of the cloak was prescribed for a long time.

Across the board, the Jewish religion was represented in the juxtaposition of radiant “Ecclesia” (for the Christian church) and depressed “Synagoga” (for the Jewish religion) in allegorical sculptures on Romanesque or Gothic churches (e.g., Strasbourg Cathedral or Bamberg Cathedral). The aim of these depictions and the dress codes was to exclude, humiliate and offend Jews.

After the introduction of printing by Johannes Gutenberg (Mainz, around 1456), many anti-Jewish diatribes appeared in the 16th century (e.g. Martin Luther’s “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen”, Wittenberg 1543). In their function at the time, these deliberately distorted images are comparable to today’s inflammatory and hateful posts on social media.

In the relationship between Christians and Jews, periods of coexistence and exclusion alternated: on the one hand, sovereigns granted Jews a right of protection and residence, on the other hand, Jews were persecuted.

The modern development in Frankfurt am Main can serve as an example for a stronger integration of Jewish life in Germany: although the so-called “Fettmilch Rebellion” of 1612 resulted in acts of violence against the council as well as the looting of the Judengasse, a period of mutual respect and tolerance began afterwards.

Jews were able to practice their religion, their culture, their customs and traditions in villages and towns for a long time in coexistence and side by side. For example, children of Christian denominations and Jewish religion could learn reading, writing and arithmetic together from the 17th century onwards, as in the Old School in Lorsch.

Captions
Fig. 1: Anti-Jewish object of shame of a so-called “Judensau” at the city church in Wittenberg (around 1310).
(Source: Jewish sow at the town church in Wittenberg, Posi66, via Wikimedia Commons)
Fig. 2: Anti-Jewish depiction of the crucifixion of Christ. Chapel of St. Catherine in Landau in the Palatinate, after 1350 (Source: Wall painting Landau, D. Krieger, via Wikipedia Commons).
Fig. 3: Depiction of a Jewish hat in the Frankfurt Jewish Ordinance (Stättigkeit 1613). The obligation to wear the hat had already been abolished around this time (Source: Judenhut, public domain, via Wikipedia Commons)
Fig. 4 | 5: Portrait of a Jew from Worms, Thesaurus Picturarum of Marcus zum Lamm (1544 – 1606), University and State Library Darmstadt, manuscript 1971, vol. 23, p. 121/122 (Source: Portrait of a Jew from Worms / Portrait of a Jew from Worms, in the public domain, via Wikipedia Commons)

They were led by a rabbi. The services were held in prayer houses, halls or synagogues. At the same time, Jewish life continued to develop depending on the territory and especially in commercial and civic cities with large congregations and participation in urban life.
In Germany and Central Europe, in art and literature, in science and music and many other fields, a cultural-historical development lasting almost 200 years got underway with the participation of many Jewish minds and personalities.

This was especially due to the influence of the Enlightenment and also made itself felt with its reference to reason, tolerance and respect in corresponding manifestations of the French Revolution in 1789 and the American Constitution in 1776.

This was also reflected in the recognition of Jewish customs such as the Jewish calendar, the Shabbat, Jewish festivals, Jewish cuisine and its dietary laws, and many others.

However, in the 19th century, despite this positive development, anti-Semitism began to spread, and on August 29, 1897, the Zionist movement was founded in Basel on the initiative of the Austro-Hungarian writer Theodor Herzl. Its goal was based on Herzl’s writing of the need to establish a Jewish state as a consequence of pogroms that had taken place again and again. Soon and long before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the first immigrations to Palestine took place and kibbutzim were established there. One of the initiators was the religious philosopher Martin Buber, who lived in Heppenheim from 1916 to 1938 and emigrated to Palestine.
In the 20th century, the anti-Jewish tone in Germany soon led from hurtful words to inflammatory propaganda, political and soon murderous attacks by National Socialist combat units and the systematic murder of 6 million Jews in the concentration camps of Nazi terror: an unprecedented breach of civilization in world history.

Captions
Fig. 9: Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat. The Jewish State, Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question, Leipzig u. Wien, 1896. (Source: Der Judenstaat, in public domain, via Wikipedia Commons).
Fig. 10: Martin Buber, philosopher (1878-1965). (Source: Martin Buber in Palestine/Israel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).
Fig. 11: Martin Buber’s residence in Heppenheim during his professorship at the University of Frankfurt between 1916 and 1938, now a memorial, home of the Martin Buber Society and the International Council of Christians and Jews. (Source: Heppenheim: Martin Buber House, S. Zimmermann, via rhein-neckar-wiki.de)

Jews may have already existed in Roman times on the Rhine and Neckar around Ladenburg, founded in 98 AD, as soldiers or officials of the provincial administration. There is hardly any evidence of this, but at that time a “Völkermühle” (mill of nations) as the “winepress of Europe” probably brought together people from all directions (according to Carl Zuckmayer, “Des Teufels General”).

Around 321 Jews can be proven as inhabitants of Cologne. Emperor Constantine the Great allowed them to join the city council. An oil lamp decorated with a menorah (ca. 5th century) was excavated in Augsburg.

Jewish communities are attested in the Middle Ages at the latest in Worms (c. 960, synagogue c. 1034) and an Iudaeus for 1065 in the Lorsch Codex. Soon, however, Jews were depicted in illuminated manuscripts with the exclusionary sign of the so-called Jewish hat. In the late Middle Ages, they were even reviled with disgusting sculptures on churches, such as the so-called “Jewish sow” in Wittenberg.
There is also evidence of pogroms against Jews after the proclamation of the First Crusade: Fueled by the crusade propaganda, namely, on May 18, 1096, more than 800 Jews were murdered in Worms, according to the report of the Jewish chronicler Salomo bar Simson of Mainz. At The infamous Count Emicho of Leiningen played a major role in this, because he participated so actively in the pogroms in Mainz, Worms and Speyer out of religious delusions and hatred of Jews that he is called the greatest enemy of the Jews in the chronicles.

Chronicles he was called the greatest enemy of the Jews. On the occasion of the Crusades in 1146, 1188 and 1196 there were again pogroms and expulsions against the Jewish community in Worms. Social crises as well as the plague raging around 1348/49 caused the coexistence of life, living and working in medieval cities to fall apart. Jewish families and communities were quickly persecuted as the alleged perpetrators of the plague or forced to live in ghettos from then on: a social exclusion that began in the 14th century and was to lead to systematic destruction by Nazi terror in the 20th century. Jewish life in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation experienced prolonged periods of coexistence with Christians, but also repeated tensions. For example, Martin Luther in his writing “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen” (1543) called for the destruction of synagogues and houses of Jews and the expulsion of Jews. Despite recurring anti-Jewish attitudes, quite a few Jewish communities grew up after the Thirty Years’ War, both in the expanding cities and in the countryside.

Captions
Fig. 1: Fragment of a late Roman oil lamp with depiction of the menorah, around 400 A.D., in the background a completed replica (Source: Augsburg Art Collection and Museums, Central Archaeological Depository, photographer Karin Baumann)
Fig. 2: Codex Manesse, fol. 355r, Süsskind, the Jew of Trimberg (Source: Master of the Codex Manesse (Nachtragsmaler I), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Fig. 3: Martin Luther, About Jews and their lies, Wittenberg 1543, via Wikimedia Commons
Fig. 4: Moses Mendelssohn, (1729–1786)
Fig. 5: Baruch de Spinoza, Philosopher (1632–1677)
Fig. 6: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Composer (1809–1847)
Fig. 7: Ludwig Börne, Publisher (1786–1837); Fig. 4 – 7: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Lorsch pharmacopoeia of 795 and its medical-pharmaceutical content may have been disseminated via the monasteries. For this purpose, information may have been exchanged with Spain, which was still Moorish at the time. There, in Cordoba, the Jewish philosopher, jurist and physician Moshe ben Maimon or (in Greek) Moses Maimonides (born around 1135, died 1204) lived and later worked as one of the most important scholars of the Middle Ages between Orient and Occident. After the occupation of Andalusia by the Muslim Almohads, he fled to Fez (today Morocco), later arriving in Cairo via Jerusalem and Alexandria, where he worked as personal physician to the secretary of Sultan Saladin, the opponent of Frederick Barbarossa in the Third Crusade.

In the High and Late Middle Ages, after the plague pogroms that raged throughout Europe and later after the Inquisition and expulsion from Spain in 1492, Jews and their families had moved mainly to Eastern Europe. They met, as for example in Eastern Poland, communities settled since the 13th century or founded so-called shtetl. Thus, a long tradition of a rather conservative-orthodox Judaism developed in Eastern Europe.

Nevertheless, the shtetls were also subject to changing political conditions, when, depending on the political power, mutual tolerance and acceptance alternated with exclusion and threat. Through the nationalism and anti-Semitism of the 19th/20th century, Jewish life in Eastern Europe was first oppressed, then persecuted, and finally almost completely extinguished by the German Reich. The persecutions and the poor social and economic situation led in the 19th century to extensive emigration to the “New World”, where in the United States of America a liberal Judaism developed alongside Orthodox Judaism.

Captions
Fig. 4: Moshe ben Maimon. (Source: Graphic of Maimonides, with his statement of Blackstone’s Ratio, Kaz Vorpal, via Wikimedia Commons)
Fig. 5: Former synagogue of Starejsoli, a shtetl in present-day Poland (Source: Stara Sól, synagoga, Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).