Teach Jewish History is a free, source-based online textbook of Jewish history and of antisemitism, from antiquity through the Holocaust to the present. It sets the Holocaust inside that longer history, with what came before it and what came after. Each Chapter cites its sources on the page. It is open to everyone, and on a campus it serves three ways: as reading for college courses, for incoming students, and for the community your institution serves.
For facultyIn college courses
The site is organized as six Units and more than 60 Chapters, each a readable history followed by the primary sources it is built on. For an instructor, it can be the text for a new course, or Chapters folded into ones you already teach. A 14-week sample syllabus for a college survey is on the Sample Syllabi page.
The courses it fits, and the Teaching Guides
The material fits a wide range of courses:
- World and Western civilization, where the Jewish story belongs beside Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
- Art history, from ancient synagogue mosaics and illuminated manuscripts to the work of modern Jewish artists.
- Archaeology: the coins, mosaics, inscriptions, and sites that document the Jewish past.
- Anthropology: a living civilization read through its communities, customs, and material culture.
- Psychology: the mechanics of prejudice, obedience, and dehumanization.
- Philosophy and ethics, from Maimonides to Arendt on the nature of evil.
- Medieval studies: Jewish life in Muslim and Christian Spain, the Church’s teaching about Jews, the blood libel, which spread despite papal condemnation, the expulsions, and the Inquisition.
- American history and immigration: the American Jewish story and the nativism it met.
- Race and civil rights in America: prejudice, scapegoating, and the fight for equal standing, with the Jewish experience alongside.
- The Arab and Islamic world: Jewish life under the dhimma, the legal status that governed Jews and Christians under Muslim rule for some twelve centuries.
- Middle East studies: the modern State of Israel and the region to the present day.
- Modern European history: emancipation, the pogroms, and the racial turn of 1879.
- Political science and government: nationalism, statelessness, minority rights, and the nation-state.
- Human rights and international law: Nuremberg and the foundations of modern international justice.
- Law and legal studies: the Dreyfus Affair, the Nuremberg Laws, and the trials that followed.
- Introductions to Judaism and to Jewish history: the arc from antiquity to the present.
- The history and mechanics of antisemitism, from its origins to today’s record.
- Holocaust and genocide studies: the centuries that led to it and the decades after.
- Comparative religion and world religions: the sacred texts, the calendar, the synagogue, the life cycle, and the long encounters with Christianity and Islam.
The eight Teaching Guides, written for schools but mapped to the same chapters, also plan the survey ground: an era-by-era world history chart, the American thread from 1654, and the history of antisemitism laid out as a course.
Assign a Chapter as weekly reading and send students to the sources it cites, or draw on the Timeline and the Museum for a lecture. No page sits behind a paywall or a login. Begin with Unit 1, or browse the whole arc.
Research and a primerFor your students
Students can work from the site directly, for research papers, essays, and source-based projects. The student entry point, For Students, lays out research topics across the whole history, shows how to work from evidence, and connects the history to books and courses they are already taking.
It also serves as a primer. An incoming or first-year student can read it before a course begins and arrive knowing the centuries that connect the ancient world to the Holocaust.
How it is madeBuilt from the record
Each Chapter is built from primary documents and scholarship.
A few Chapters from across the range
- 1879: how “race science” reinvented an ancient hatred. The Racial Turn
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery traced across the globe. The Protocols
- The theological roots of the hostility, in the Church’s early teaching. Adversus Judaeos
- The Holocaust’s reach into the Middle East and North Africa. The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa
- How the pattern resurfaces now. Contemporary Antisemitism
The Sources page sets out the method, and the directory of archives and scholarship behind the work.
Two reference pages follow the present: The Legal Record, court judgments and statutes, and the Incident Record, incidents that ended in a verdict, a plea, or an official finding.
Share and partnerYour campus and the community it serves
Teach Jewish History is also a resource for the community around your campus: a free reference anyone can read. Campus offices and programs that share educational resources with their communities are welcome to list it.
The Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter sets out three published definitions of antisemitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition (2016), the Jerusalem Declaration (2021), and the Nexus Document (2021), and where they differ. Read the definitions.
Teach Jewish History’s original content is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license (CC BY-NC 4.0). See the Terms of Use. Open-education libraries, including OER Commons and MERLOT, list the site, and each listing is the organization’s own. Where it’s listed.
If it would be useful to your campus or your students, we would be glad to talk. Get in touch.
Teach Jewish History is free and open to everyone. For classroom materials, see For Teachers. For the student entry point, see For Students. To discuss how it might serve your campus and community, get in touch. · Return home
Last updated: November 2026.