A World Without Jews
By Alon Confino
Yale University Press, £20
Historians have got the causes of the Holocaust all wrong. That's the central tenet of Alon Confino's new reinterpretation of the world's worst-ever genocide.
Confino, a professor of history at both the University of Virginia and Ben Gurion University, thinks most historians have things in reverse. They believe antisemitism was the Nazis' primary motivation: "an accumulation of the ancient hatred through the ages paved the way and ultimately produced the Holocaust". Not so, says Confino: "The Nazis interpreted anew the past of Jewish, German and Christian relations to fit their vision of creating a new world." And that was a world without Jews.
That may sound to many of us who don't have any professorships, never mind two, as irrelevant hair-splitting, but there's more: Confino thinks Holocaust historians have left the human element out. I can't imagine where he got this notion from: my bookshelves are full of personal accounts of the Holocaust and the build-up to it in all its appalling detail and I'm not even a historian.
