Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust: A Learned Behavior Essay -- Essays

Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust A Learned conductWhen thinking of Jewish persecution, images of Nazi Germany, concentration camps, and the Holocaust are to the highest degree likely to be conjured. Although these images do represent the attempted destruction of the Jews, persecution real began thousands of years earlier. The Holocaust, or Final Solution, which was the destruction of European Jews by the Nazis, was the culmination of attempts by other groups to eradicate Jews from their society.1 Reacting in many different shipway to persecution, the Jewish sect has undergone years of harsh treatment, climaxing during the Holocaust. Jewish persecution did not arrive in Europe with the onset of World War II rather, antisemitism had existed for the past several thousand years. The rise and eventual domination of Christianity resulted in the persecution of the Jews starting in fourth-century Rome and lasting through the Middle Ages, when large numbers of Jews were massacred during Christian crusades.2 Also, during the Middle Ages, the Christian Church attempted to permute Jews to Christianity. This policy was put into affect in order to ensure that Christians were defend from the harmful consequences of intercourse with Jews by rigid laws against intermarriage, by prohibitions of discussions about ghostlike issues, by laws against domicile in common abodesby burning the Talmud and by barring Jews from public office.3 The second anti-Jewish policy in story is known as expulsion, or the attempt by European countries to drag the emigration of Jews during the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. Jews were no longer macrocosm required to convert to Christianity because Christians then thought that Jews could not be changed, ... ... 13. Dawidowicz, 342-43. 14. Hilberg, 16. 15. Hilberg, 17. 16. Hilberg, 664. 17. Hilberg, 665. 18. Hilberg, 666-67. 19. Dawidowicz, 344. 20. Dawidowicz, 347. 21. Hilberg, 3-4. Bibliograph y- antisemitism Encarta Concise Encyclopedia. httpencarta.msn.com/index/conciseindex/5b105b6f000.htm (26 October 1998). - Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against The Jews 1933-1945. New York Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. - Haines, Grove C. and Ross J. S. Hoffman, The Origins and Background of the twinkling World War. New York Oxford University Press, 1943. - Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York Harper and Row, Publishers, 1961. - Rubenstein, Richard L. and earth-closet K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz. Atlanta John Knox Press, 1987.