The Meaning of Medieval Persecution in the Third Reich

• In Event: Jewish History and Jewish Historical Imagination

Abstract

In this paper, I explore medieval persecutions of Jewry as a shared locus of historical imagination during the Third Reich for both Germans and German Jews. These pre-modern Jewish persecutions and their aftermaths register ambivalent understandings, hopes, and fears for the present by author and exhibitors in addition to their heterogeneous readers and observers. This engagement with the past provides us with a prism as to how writers and readers also grappled with where things were heading. The project tracks a series of mostly forgotten but remarkable texts and cultural events, as well as their receptions from the 1930s-1940s, in order to recover the ways in which strained conditions of persecution and censorship paradoxically led writers and scholars to write texts infused with multivalent temporal and hermeneutic registers. How did contemporary audiences interpret events and texts with a heightened hermeneutic sensitivity required to catch these or refract such cues and codes? These are the central elements and questions of this paper.

author

• Eugene R. Sheppard, Brandeis University