Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust.(Book review)

Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust by David Engel. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2010. xvii, 314 pp. $65.00 US (cloth).

Almost all Jewish, Anglo-American, and German scholars of the Third Reich totally dismiss the racist ideas leading Hitler's Nazis to exterminate six million Jews (the Holocaust). David Engel, an American social historian educated at UCLA, researched the Holocaust in Hebrew in Israel. This Jewish professor predicts that overemphasis on the Holocaust martyrdom will eventually fade. He moved from Tel Aviv to New York University in 1991. Professor Engel's bibliography cites some 240 authors, focusing especially on Nazi Germany from 1933-1945.

In chapter one, Engel covers the work of Salo Baron, a professor of social history appointed in 1930 to the History Faculty of Columbia University. Baron was the first Jew to hold a chair of Jewish history in a secular United States university, and few American professors were Jews at the time.

Baron, who came from Vienna, published the first volume of his lengthy Social and Religious History of the Jews in 1937. That work eventually expanded into eighteen volumes chronicling repression and discrimination (mostly by Nazis) against Jews. After the establishment of the State of Israel 1947-1948, he continued to write on implications of the Holocaust until his death in 1983.

Baron claimed that small groups of diaspora Jews had lived peacefully in the ancient Greek and Roman empires and later in Christian kingdoms. The few pogroms …