Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online

The phrase “non-Jewish Jew” can be traced back to the Marxist journalist and writer Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967). In a lecture published as  The Non-Jewish Jew (1958), Deutscher used the term to characterize Jewish thinkers and intellectuals who had broken with the religion and culture of their origins, while at the same time reacting against the religious intolerance, nationalism, or antisemitism of their surrounding culture. Deutscher, who himself corresponds exactly to this description, referred to Spinoza, Heine, Ma…

In the 19th century the novel, especially in the form of the historical novel, became a popular genre of Jewish literature. Among followers of both the Reform movement and neo-Orthodoxy in the German-speaking world, it became a medium that relayed specific elements of Jewish self-understanding in each case. Through adaptation and translation, the novel found its way into Eastern European Jewry, where it increasingly took on national Jewish characteristics. In the early 20th century, Jew…

A term for the violence perpetrated against Jews and Jewish establishments in Germany between November 7 and November 10, 1938. As a result of the campaign of pogroms and the internment of people in concentration camps, which was organized by the NSDAP leadership and carried out by the Gestapo, SA, SS, and Hitler Youth, between 1,300 and 1,500 Jews died, and hundreds of synagogues and prayer rooms as well as thousands of businesses and residential properties owned by Jews were destroyed…

The assignation of a numerical value to the letters of the alphabet is already documented in the Hebrew Bible. Since late antiquity Jewish scholars have drawn on the letters’ numerical value for the interpretation of holy scripture. With the help of these values, it was possible to perform mathematical computations called gematria (from Hebr.-Aram.  gematriya), which were intended to point to hidden analogues between individual words or groups of words and enable a deeper understanding of the text. In medieval Kabbalah (Mysticism) gematria develope…

Common term for a law issued in 1920 in Hungary under the government of Pál Teleki which determined the number of new students admitted to universities in accordance with their proportion of the nationalities living in the country. Although the text of the law did not expressly mention Jews, the Numerus Clausus Act (from Lat.  numerus - number;  clausus - closed) was targeted purely at evicting them from Hungarian universities. The law is one example of a whole series of state discriminations, especially in the fields of education and economics, whic…

City in the Bavarian administrative region of Middle Franconia, whose name evokes diametrically opposed memory traces. Having attracted medieval romanticism and nostalgia for the Holy Roman Empire since the 19th century, Nuremberg was considered the “City of National Socialism” during the Third Reich. It is inscribed into Jewish history, in particular, as the location of the announcement of the antisemitic race laws and as the site of the Allied tribunal for major war criminals. This tr…