The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust

Dan Michman is Professor of Modern Jewish History and Chair of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan. He is Chief Historian at the Yad Vashem International Institute of Holocaust Research. His work has been published in 11 languages and deals with modern Jewish history and the history of Dutch Jewry, with a focus on the Holocaust. His books include Bimay Shoa Ufkuda (Days of Holocaust and Reckoning), Het Liberale Jodendom in Nederland, 1929–1943 (Liberal Jewry in the Netherlands 1929–1943), and Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues, and he is co-author of Pinkas: Geschiedenis van de joodse gemeenschap in Nederland (Pinkas: The History of the Jewish Community in the Netherlands). Volumes he has edited include Post-Ziyonut ve-Shoa (Post-Zionism and the Holocaust); Belgium and the Holocaust: Germans, Belgians, Jews; Les intellectuels face à l'affaire Dreyfus: alors et aujourd'hui (Intellectuals Responding to the Dreyfus Affair: Then and Now; co-edited with Roselyne Koren); Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses; Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Belgium; Hashoa Bahistoriya Hayehudit: Historiografiya, Toda'a u-Farshanut (The Holocaust in Jewish History: Historiography, Consciousness, Interpretations); and Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (co-edited with David Bankier).

• Introduction; 1. Historiography and popular understandings; 2. 'Ghetto': the source of the term and the phenomenon in the early modern era; 3. 'Ghetto' and 'ghettoization' as cultural concepts in the modern age; 4. The Nazis' anti-Jewish policy in the 1930s and the question of Jewish residential districts; 5. First references to the term 'ghetto' in the discourse of the makers of anti-Jewish policies in the Third Reich (1933–8); 6. The semantic turning point in the meaning of 'ghetto': Peter-Heinz Seraphim and Das Judentum in osteuropäischen Raum (1938); 7. The invasion of Poland and the emergence of the 'classic' ghettos; 8. Methodological interlude: the term 'ghettoization' and its use during the Holocaust itself and later scholarship; 9. Would the idea spread to other places? Amsterdam 1941, the only attempt to establish a ghetto west of Poland; 10. Ghettos during the final solution, 1941–3: the territories occupied in Operation Barbarossa; 11. Ghettos during the final solution outside the occupied Soviet Union: Poland, Theresienstadt, Amsterdam, Transnistria, Salonika and Hungary; Summary and conclusion.

“This profound, insightful, and surprising book proves the extraordinary value of asking the right questions. Michman’s reassessment of the ghettos unsettles key assumptions about the Holocaust: about the role of antisemitism; links between ghettoization and mass murder; differences across Europe; and relations between the German leadership and the people who implemented anti-Jewish measures on the ground. Ghettos, Michman shows, were enormously significant, but they were neither uniform nor an inevitable step toward annihilation. Everyone interested in the Shoah, how it occurred, and how it has been understood, should read this book.” —Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto