One class periodA fully planned 40-minute lesson.Grades 9–12 · 6–8
A weekFive Chapters, five days, one story.Grades 9–12 · 6–8
Dear educator,
Welcome, and thank you for wanting to give your students more of the story.
When I taught art history survey courses, I kept adding the Jewish history the textbooks skipped. That habit grew into this site. The history runs through the eras your students already study: Babylon and Rome, the rise of Christianity and Islam, Spain in 1492, the World Wars, the modern Middle East. It is also a story about who belongs and how a hatred works, and it speaks to every student in the room.
Pick the unit you are teaching. For each one, there is a 15-minute lesson to add to it: the story, one source to read together, and one question to discuss. Print it tonight and teach it tomorrow.
This is most likely not history you were taught in school either. Give yourself time to absorb it, and make the lessons your own. If we keep building on these lessons together, I hope that one day the whole story will be in the textbooks themselves. Every lesson you add brings that day a little closer. I’d love to hear how it goes.
On a map of the ancient world, the land of Israel is easy to miss. Yet for millennia an entire civilization has kept its bearings by this narrow strip of land. For most of Jewish history most Jews lived somewhere else, and the land still ran through their prayers, their calendar, and their law.
Read together
“Next year in Jerusalem.”
The closing words of the Passover Seder, spoken for centuries by Jews who had never seen the city.
A place at the center (C3 D2.His.14). Jewish prayer faces Jerusalem, the calendar keeps the land’s harvest seasons, and holidays end on “next year in Jerusalem,” even for communities that lived far away. How can a place stay at the center of a culture for people who have never set foot on it?
Unit 1 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Synagogues around the world are built to face the same spot in Jerusalem. At a traditional Jewish wedding, the groom breaks a glass to mourn what once stood there. The building has been gone for nearly two thousand years, and it still organizes Jewish life on every continent.
Read together
The exile left a cultural mark that outlived it: Psalm 137, written in its memory, opens
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion”
The menorah on the Arch of Titus was carved by Rome to mark a victory over Judaea. The same seven-branched form is now the official emblem of the State of Israel. How does one object travel from a conqueror’s monument to a national seal, and what does that show about memory?
World history
Teaching Greece and Rome? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 1 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
For nearly two thousand years the Jewish people had no state of their own, no army, and no capital. Yet a question could leave a synagogue in Spain, travel by ship and camel to a scholar in Babylonia, and the answer would come back and be followed. They ran a civilization by mail.
Read together
Philo of Alexandria, writing about those years, says they were freed
“without ever having been compelled to alter any of their hereditary or national observances.”
They had synagogues, and they gathered in them “most especially on the sacred sabbath days,” Philo wrote, to study their law together.
The Seder Rav Amram prayer book was written in Babylonia and seems to have begun as an answer sent to the Jewish community of Barcelona, in Spain. What does that single exchange tell you about how a people with no shared government stayed one people?
Unit 1 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
The result was an institution that could travel. A synagogue did not require sovereignty, a priesthood, or a single sacred building. It required a community, a Torah, and the act of gathering.
Read together
In Jerusalem, a Greek inscription from the late Second Temple period records that a priest named Theodotus
“built the synagogue for the reading of the Law and the teaching of the commandments”
Compare the synagogue with another house of worship you have studied, such as a cathedral or a mosque. What does the synagogue share with it, and what sets it apart?
World history
Teaching world religions? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 1 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Jewish sources call the Jews a people and a nation, am Yisrael, with one religion, Judaism. Judaism is at least as much about what you do as what you believe. The commandments cover how to treat other people as well as how to worship: honesty, care for the poor and the stranger, and “love your fellow as yourself.”
Read together
The Talmud teaches that
“all Jews are considered guarantors, i.e., responsible, for one another.”
An old phrase, tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” appears in the Mishnah, where rabbis changed laws
The Talmud makes all Jews responsible for one another, and the Mishnah changed laws “for the betterment of the world.” Where do you see both kinds of responsibility, to your own group and to everyone, in the place where you live? (C3 D2.His.2)
Unit 1 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
These objects are still in use: the Hanukkah lamp is still lit each winter, the ketubah still signed at weddings, the Torah still crowned in synagogues today. Jewish law fixes the ritual, not the object’s form, so the shapes of ketubot, finials, lamps, and cups vary widely and record the local world each community lived in. The objects show one people living in many worlds at once.
If you had to choose one object from your own household to represent your family’s life to someone five hundred years from now, what would it be, and what would it get wrong about you?
Unit 1 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Every culture notices the same handful of moments (a birth, the passage into adulthood, a marriage, a death) and every culture marks them somehow. Judaism marks them with old and specific rituals, carried across the whole map, and colored each time by wherever Jews happened to be living. Together these rites form much of the shared structure through which Jewish life has traditionally been lived.
Read together
The band was embroidered or painted with the boy’s name, his birth date, and the blessing spoken at the circumcision itself: may he grow up
“to Torah, to the wedding canopy, and to good deeds.”
The band, called a wimpel, was then given to the synagogue and used to bind the Torah scroll.
The bar and bat mitzvah marks the start of responsibility, not the end of learning. Why might a tradition choose to mark becoming responsible rather than finishing a course of study? What does that say about how it sees growing up?
World history
Teaching the rise of Christianity? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 3 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For centuries, Christian Europe taught that the Jewish people bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus, crucified under Rome’s authority in Jerusalem around the year 30. Those theological claims, repeated and elaborated over centuries, became the framework within which medieval European law, art, and violence toward Jews operated. After the Second World War, the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches repudiated its central positions.
Read together
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the badge … Canon 68 required that Jews and Muslims be
“marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.”
From that rule local rulers later developed the badge.
Choose one claim of the Adversus Judaeos literature and trace it from the teaching itself, to the way it was carried into law and practice, to its documented effects. Which link in that chain does the page document most strongly, and which least?
Unit 6 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
In about 1,600 words, issued October 28, 1965, the Catholic Church reversed teachings about the Jewish people that had run through its preaching and instruction for most of two thousand years. One starting point was a meeting: the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac, a Holocaust survivor, met Pope John XXIII in June 1960. Six decades of partnership followed, through later Vatican documents and formal dialogue institutions.
Read together
On guilt for the death of Jesus, the sentence opens with a concession: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.” It continues:
“still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”
One starting point of the document was a 1960 meeting between a pope and Jules Isaac, a Jewish historian whose wife and daughter were murdered at Auschwitz. What does Isaac’s role show about how large institutions come to change?
World history
Teaching the rise of Islam? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 3 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The dhimma was a standing legal contract: protection of life, property, and worship for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians under Muslim rule, in exchange for the jizya tax and conditions of subordination set out in texts like the Pact of Umar. The same legal world produced the academies of Baghdad, the Hebrew golden age of Córdoba, and Jewish viziers of Granada, and also the 1066 Granada massacre, the Almohad persecutions, and the Mawza exile. A mid-eleventh-century Cairo Geniza list of people needing help paying the poll tax shows the system as families lived it, and how communities organized to carry their poor.
Read together
“We shall show deference to the Muslims and shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit down. We shall not ride on saddles… We shall not wear swords or bear weapons of any kind… We shall not build our homes higher than theirs.”
The Pact of Umar, in the translation published by Norman Stillman in The Jews of Arab Lands (1979).
Halper 468 is a list of people who could not pay the poll tax, kept so the community could pay it for them. What does this one scrap show about the difference between law as written and life as lived?
Unit 5 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Driven from Córdoba by the Almohad conquest at about age ten, he wandered for eighteen years before settling in Fustat (Old Cairo), where he served as a physician in Saladin’s court circle and led Egypt’s Jewish community. Maimonides sorted the legal tradition by subject and wrote it out in clear Hebrew, so a literate Jew could look a matter up. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars read him in his own time and after, and Jewish readers have studied him without a break for more than eight hundred years.
Read together
In the twelfth century Maimonides, writing in Egypt, described a Bible codex that had been “kept in Jerusalem for many years so that scrolls could be checked from it.” He wrote that
“everyone relies upon it because it was corrected by ben Asher”
Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah, and the Torah Scroll 8:4
The same man served a Muslim ruler, was quoted by a Christian theologian, and wrote law for Jews. What does his career suggest about how ideas crossed religious lines in the medieval Mediterranean? (C3 D2.His.1)
World history
Teaching medieval Europe? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 5 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Rashi (1040–1105), a rabbi in Troyes, in northern France, wrote line-by-line explanations of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. Rashi’s documented response to 1096 is in his legal rulings: Jews forced into baptism who returned to Judaism were to be received without reproach, their standing whole. Christian scholars, including the Victorines and Nicholas of Lyra, drew extensively on Rashi’s biblical commentary, helping transmit aspects of medieval Jewish interpretation into Christian biblical scholarship.
Read together
At Genesis 3:8 he states that he is concerned only with
“the plain sense of Scripture” (peshuto shel mikra) and with rabbinic stories “that explain the words of Scripture.”
Later Jewish interpreters returned to that line again and again.
Rashi wrote short, and only where the text was hard. What does it tell you about a reader’s needs when an explainer chooses what not to comment on? (C3 D2.His.5)
Unit 3 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The blood libel was the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood in Jewish religious rituals. Jewish law prohibits consuming blood, a prohibition rooted in the biblical dietary code and elaborated in later halakhic (Jewish religious) law. At Blois, in France, in 1171, Count Theobald had more than thirty Jews, children among them, burned at the stake on that accusation. Popes and an Ottoman sultan rejected it, and it still circulates today.
Read together
Pope Gregory X · Sicut Judaeis renewal · October 7, 1272 … Gregory X’s text decreed that
“Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type”
It also required that Christian testimony against Jews be corroborated by a Jewish witness, a rule that, where courts applied it, made blood libel accusations harder to pursue.
The same false accusation reappears at Norwich (1144), Trent (1475), Damascus (1840), Kiev (1911), and into the present. What makes a claim durable enough to cross eight centuries and many cultures, even after being repeatedly disproven?
Unit 3 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Between 1290 and 1492, one Western European kingdom after another expelled its entire Jewish population: England, France, Spain, and a long list of German and Italian cities and territories. The governments that expelled Jews had usually first invited them in, taxed them, restricted them, and drawn on their money. In Spain, families had four months to sell what they owned, could take no gold, silver, or coin, and faced death if they stayed as Jews.
Read together
“We order all Jews and Jewesses … that … they depart from all of these our said realms and lordships … and they shall not dare to return.”
Ferdinand and Isabella, the Alhambra Decree (Edict of Expulsion), March 31, 1492
When a community was expelled, the debts Christians owed it often passed to the crown or went uncollected. How might that single fact help explain why expulsions were frequently popular? Whose interests did banishment serve?
World history
Teaching the Crusades? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 1 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Between the fall of the Temple, the central Jewish sanctuary in Jerusalem, in 70 CE and the founding of modern Israel in 1948 lie eighteen centuries. Jewish communities lived in the land through all of them. Across every ruling power, the number of Jews in the land rose and fell, in Jerusalem at times to a few households, but the presence never broke.
Read together
In 1267 the Catalan rabbi and physician Nachmanides … reached Jerusalem at about seventy-three. He found the city devastated. In a letter to his son he described what was left of its Jews:
“only two brothers, dyers who bought their dye from the governor”
Within weeks he had founded a synagogue in a ruined house, and Torah scrolls that had been evacuated to Shechem before the Mongol raid were brought back. Jewish life in Jerusalem revived around him.
The simple version of the story has the Jewish people leaving the land in 70 CE and returning in 1948. Choose one period in between. What evidence on the page shows Jews living in the land then?
Unit 5 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Rashi (1040–1105), a rabbi in Troyes, in northern France, wrote line-by-line explanations of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. Rashi’s documented response to 1096 is in his legal rulings: Jews forced into baptism who returned to Judaism were to be received without reproach, their standing whole. Christian scholars, including the Victorines and Nicholas of Lyra, drew extensively on Rashi’s biblical commentary, helping transmit aspects of medieval Jewish interpretation into Christian biblical scholarship.
Read together
At Genesis 3:8 he states that he is concerned only with
“the plain sense of Scripture” (peshuto shel mikra) and with rabbinic stories “that explain the words of Scripture.”
Later Jewish interpreters returned to that line again and again.
Rashi wrote short, and only where the text was hard. What does it tell you about a reader’s needs when an explainer chooses what not to comment on? (C3 D2.His.5)
World history
Teaching Spain and 1492? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 2 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Jews had lived in Spain for more than a thousand years when a royal decree of 1492 forced them to leave. After the expulsion of 1492 they kept speaking their own form of Spanish, called Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, and wrote it in Hebrew letters. The exiles built Jewish communities in Salonika, Istanbul, Izmir, Safed, Amsterdam, and London, and their descendants were still printing newspapers in Ladino in the 1900s.
Read together
In 1655 Menasseh ben Israel, an Amsterdam rabbi and the city’s first Jewish printer, traveled to London with a request to Oliver Cromwell, who then ruled England as Lord Protector. He asked him
“to grant us place in your Countrey, that we may have our Synagogues, and free exercise of our Religion.”
Cromwell gave no formal answer, but by 1657 Jews in England had opened a synagogue.
Jacob Culi wrote the Me’am Lo’ez in Ladino so that readers without Hebrew could have the tradition in their own language, and by 1900 Salonika’s newspapers were printed in Ladino too. What does a community’s choice of language for its books and newspapers tell a historian?
Unit 3 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Between 1290 and 1492, one Western European kingdom after another expelled its entire Jewish population: England, France, Spain, and a long list of German and Italian cities and territories. The governments that expelled Jews had usually first invited them in, taxed them, restricted them, and drawn on their money. In Spain, families had four months to sell what they owned, could take no gold, silver, or coin, and faced death if they stayed as Jews.
Read together
“We order all Jews and Jewesses … that … they depart from all of these our said realms and lordships … and they shall not dare to return.”
Ferdinand and Isabella, the Alhambra Decree (Edict of Expulsion), March 31, 1492
When a community was expelled, the debts Christians owed it often passed to the crown or went uncollected. How might that single fact help explain why expulsions were frequently popular? Whose interests did banishment serve?
Unit 5 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Joseph Karo (1488–1575) was driven out of Iberia as a small child and spent about forty years moving across the Ottoman world before settling in the Galilee hill town of Safed. His Shulchan Aruch (“Set Table,” 1565) condensed centuries of scattered Jewish law into one short, usable rulebook, still the standard reference for traditional Jewish practice today. Because Karo’s rulings leaned Sephardic, the Polish rabbi Moses Isserles added notes (the Mappah, “Tablecloth”) with Ashkenazi practice, making one book that served both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews.
Read together
More than 450 years later, the combined book, Karo’s table plus Isserles’s cloth, is still studied by rabbis, students, and observant Jews as a first reference for questions of practice
A refugee from Spain and a rabbi of Kraków share one page.
Karo’s “Set Table” and Isserles’s “Tablecloth” let two different traditions share one book instead of splitting into two. Why might a shared reference matter to a scattered people? (C3 D2.His.1)
World history
Teaching the Renaissance and Reformation? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 3 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The ghetto is an early-modern European institution with an exact birthday (Venice, March 29, 1516), not a Nazi invention. Its gates were locked at night by Christian guards the Jews themselves had to pay, and Jews who went out by day had to wear a yellow hat or badge. Inside the gates, communities governed themselves and produced lasting work: the Bomberg Talmud, the writings of Sara Copia Sullam and Leon of Modena, the synagogue art of Venice and Mantua.
Read together
The second great ghetto was Rome’s, created by the bull (a formal papal decree) Cum Nimis Absurdum, issued by Pope Paul IV on July 14, 1555, barely two months into his reign … Its opening words, Cum nimis absurdum
“since it is utterly absurd”
The same opening sentence stated the theology behind the law: the Jews, it said, had been condemned by their own guilt to perpetual servitude.
Inside the gates, the community governed itself, its own council, court, schools, and one of the great Hebrew printing centers in the world. How does the record of what was made in the ghetto change the way you read three centuries of confinement?
Unit 3 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For centuries, Christian Europe taught that the Jewish people bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus, crucified under Rome’s authority in Jerusalem around the year 30. Those theological claims, repeated and elaborated over centuries, became the framework within which medieval European law, art, and violence toward Jews operated. After the Second World War, the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches repudiated its central positions.
Read together
Martin Luther's later writings … In 1994 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) acknowledged
“the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews.”
Choose one claim of the Adversus Judaeos literature and trace it from the teaching itself, to the way it was carried into law and practice, to its documented effects. Which link in that chain does the page document most strongly, and which least?
Unit 2 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For more than seven hundred years, Poland and Lithuania held one of the great centers of Jewish life. Jews there ran their own councils and courts, built schools and study houses, and argued in print about religion and politics. Until the Holocaust, most of the world’s Jews could trace their families to these lands.
Read together
On July 2, 1792, Lublin’s Catholic tailors’ guild and the city’s Jewish tailors settled their dispute on paper … For three years, the guild would admit forty-four Jewish tailors
“to the freedom of practicing the tailor’s craft”
The elders of the brotherhood sign “with their own hands,” in two columns of Hebrew script. Most lines begin ואני, “And I,” then a name and a father’s name: “And I, David, son of Asher.”
Kings issued charters that protected Jews, and townspeople and Jews signed agreements that set terms on trade. Using the Statute of Kalisz and the Lublin tailors’ agreement of 1792, what did each side want, and what did each side get?
World history
Teaching the Enlightenment? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 5 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) became a celebrated figure of the European Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century movement that put reason and open debate above inherited authority, and he remained an observant Jew. He became the leading figure of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and his Torah translation, German in Hebrew letters, taught standard German to Jewish readers through the Bible. His question, how to be fully Jewish and fully modern, drew three answers in Reform, Neo-Orthodoxy, and Frankel’s school, and it is still debated.
Read together
Mendelssohn’s Torah translation with its Bi’ur commentary set German words in Hebrew letters, in a single line of type.
The Leo Baeck Institute, the archive of German-speaking Jewry, preserves early editions.
State Mendelssohn’s question in your own words. Do immigrant families you know face a similar choice between entering the surrounding culture and keeping apart?
Unit 3 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The ghetto is an early-modern European institution with an exact birthday (Venice, March 29, 1516), not a Nazi invention. Its gates were locked at night by Christian guards the Jews themselves had to pay, and Jews who went out by day had to wear a yellow hat or badge. Inside the gates, communities governed themselves and produced lasting work: the Bomberg Talmud, the writings of Sara Copia Sullam and Leon of Modena, the synagogue art of Venice and Mantua.
Read together
The second great ghetto was Rome’s, created by the bull (a formal papal decree) Cum Nimis Absurdum, issued by Pope Paul IV on July 14, 1555, barely two months into his reign … Its opening words, Cum nimis absurdum
“since it is utterly absurd”
The same opening sentence stated the theology behind the law: the Jews, it said, had been condemned by their own guilt to perpetual servitude.
Inside the gates, the community governed itself, its own council, court, schools, and one of the great Hebrew printing centers in the world. How does the record of what was made in the ghetto change the way you read three centuries of confinement?
World history
Teaching nationalism and empire? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 3 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
For well over a thousand years, the hatred aimed at Jews in Christian Europe had a door in it. Then, in a single decade in the late nineteenth century, a group of German and French writers built a new version of the hatred, one that defined Jewishness as a hereditary, biological category. Conversion could not touch it.
Read together
On November 12, 1880, seventy-five public figures published a declaration against the movement, drafted by Mommsen. Its signers included the historian Johann Gustav Droysen and the pathologist Rudolf Virchow. It warned that
“like a contagious disease, the revival of an old delusion”
threatened relations between Christians and Jews. The movement spread anyway.
Leading scientists and scholars of the day, among them the seventy-five signers of the 1880 declaration, rejected the movement as it was being built, and it spread anyway. Why might expert rejection fail to stop a false idea, and what does that imply about how such ideas are actually countered?
Unit 3 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
In the Russian Empire, pogroms, violent mob attacks on Jews, broke out more than 250 times in 1881 and 1882. Rioters killed 49 Jews in Kishinev (today Chișinău, Moldova) in 1903 and between several hundred and more than a thousand in the port city of Odessa in 1905. In the civil war after the 1917 revolution, armies and armed bands killed at least 50,000 Jews. Many concluded that safety would require leaving, self-defense, or both. Between 1881 and 1924, roughly two million Jews left the Russian Empire, the great majority bound for the United States, with others going to Britain, Argentina, South Africa, and beyond.
Read together
This is an internal passport, issued in 1885 to a Jewish townsman of Rakov, a small town in the province of Minsk … The passport let its holder leave his town for one year and travel to
“various towns and villages of the Russian Empire”
Wherever he went, the law of the Pale still decided where he could live.
Between 1881 and 1924 roughly two million Jews left the Russian Empire, and others joined the first waves of settlement in the Land of Israel. Using the Chapter, which pressures pushed people to leave, and which events gave the departures their urgency?
Unit 5 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was an assimilated Viennese journalist who became the founder of modern political Zionism, the movement for a sovereign Jewish state. In roughly eight years, from 1896 to his death in 1904, he built the machinery to carry that idea. It included a political movement, a regular congress, a worldwide organization, and a diplomatic campaign conducted as if a stateless people already had a seat at the table.
Read together
In September 1897, after the First Zionist Congress at Basel, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary:
“At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.”
The State of Israel was founded fifty years and eight months after he wrote those words.
Herzl died in 1904 having achieved none of his diplomatic goals, yet a state arose in 1948 along the lines he had drawn. How do we measure the influence of someone who set events in motion but did not live to see them? (C3 D2.His.14)
World history
Teaching the interwar years? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 2 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For more than seven hundred years, Poland and Lithuania held one of the great centers of Jewish life. Jews there ran their own councils and courts, built schools and study houses, and argued in print about religion and politics. Until the Holocaust, most of the world’s Jews could trace their families to these lands.
Read together
In 1932, 1934, and 1939, YIVO held autobiography contests for Jewish youth in Poland … One writer, identified only as “the Stormer,”
“May my life, such as it is, serve others as a guide.”
Kings issued charters that protected Jews, and townspeople and Jews signed agreements that set terms on trade. Using the Statute of Kalisz and the Lublin tailors’ agreement of 1792, what did each side want, and what did each side get?
Unit 3 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Almost every element of Nazi antisemitism existed before the Nazi Party, from the early Christian image of the Jew as Christ-killer and demon to the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, already in global circulation. Because it traced every problem to a single cause, the worldview left no room for evidence against it. In Nazi Germany, antisemitism became an organizing principle of government.
Read together
On April 1, 1933, the regime organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses
Six days later, on April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service introduced the “Aryan paragraph,” using the Nazis’ term for the supposed non-Jewish German race. It began expelling Jews from government employment, with exemptions, chiefly for war veterans, that lasted until 1935. It was the regime’s first major law aimed at Jews by descent.
The Nazi worldview traced every problem to a single cause. Using the synthesis described here, why might that kind of explanation be harder to answer than an ordinary prejudice?
World history
Teaching Nazi Germany? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 4 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Between 1933 and 1939, Nazi Germany stripped Jewish citizens of work, rights, citizenship, property, movement, and safety through hundreds of laws and decrees. German Jews organized to meet the crisis. In 1935 Rabbi Max Dienemann ordained Regina Jonas of Berlin, the first woman known to have been ordained a rabbi. She was deported in 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
Read together
The Reich Citizenship Law
It split German residents into two classes: “Reich citizens,” who held full rights, and “state subjects,” who did not. Only “persons of German or related blood” could be Reich citizens. The effect was to strip German Jews of their citizenship.
The Nazis built the machinery of persecution step by step for six and a half years before the war began. Choose two steps from this Chapter and explain what each one took away from Jewish Germans, and why the order of the steps mattered.
Unit 4 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Aktion T-4 was the Nazi program that murdered disabled Germans. T-4 established methods, personnel, and administrative practices that were later adapted for the mass murder of European Jews. The official halt of August 1941 followed public protest led by Bishop von Galen of Münster.
Read together
The sermon on the killings came at St. Lambert’s Church in Münster on Sunday, August 3, 1941. It included this passage:
“A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimises the violent killing of disabled persons, cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm who are no longer capable of work.”
Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, Sermon at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster (August 3, 1941).
The official halt of August 1941 came weeks after public protest led by Bishop von Galen. No comparable public protest met the murder of the Jews. Using what this Chapter says about Galen’s standing and how the regime answered him, what might explain the difference?
World history
Teaching World War II and the Holocaust? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 4 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
Before the deportation trains, there were the ghettos, sealed quarters where the Germans held Jews, sometimes for years, under starvation and forced labor. In Warsaw alone, about 83,000 people died of hunger and disease before the mass deportations began. Inside the walls, people ran secret schools for children who were forbidden to be taught.
Read together
It held part of the secret record of the Warsaw ghetto
The box is one of the ten metal boxes that held the first part of the Oneg Shabbat archive. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum started it. He gathered a hidden group of perhaps sixty people to document the life around them: the hunger and the smuggling, the schools and the deportations, the jokes, the rumors, the deaths. They met on Saturdays and took the cover name “the joy of the Sabbath.”
Emanuel Ringelblum’s circle buried their archive in milk cans. Mendel Grossman photographed the deportations in secret. An unnamed girl kept a diary. All risked their lives to make a record. What does it mean to decide that being remembered is worth that risk? C3 D2.His.10.9-12 (sources).
Unit 4 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The most important distinction is between a concentration camp and a killing center. Concentration camps were places of imprisonment, brutality, and forced labor, where prisoners died in great numbers from starvation, disease, beatings, and executions. Killing centers were built to murder entire populations on arrival.
Read together
Item 13/15 is Höfle’s message to SS officer Franz Heim, the deputy commander of the Security Police in Kraków. It is a fortnightly report on “Einsatz Reinhart,” the arrivals of the last two weeks, then the totals to December 31, 1942:
L 24733, B 434508, S 101370, T 71355, “zusammen” (together) 1274166.
The letters stand for Lublin (Majdanek), Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The Treblinka figure lost a digit in transmission: the total only adds up if it reads 713,555.
The Chapter distinguishes a concentration camp from a killing center by purpose. How would you explain that distinction to someone who has only ever heard the phrase “concentration camp”?
Unit 4 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Most accounts of the Holocaust center on persecution and mass murder. The historical record also holds thousands of acts of resistance, rescue, documentation, religious perseverance, and mutual aid. They were carried out under conditions the regime built to make them nearly impossible.
Read together
Anielewicz’s last letter, written on April 23, 1943, is among the most quoted documents of the uprising. In it he wrote (translation from the Yad Vashem edition):
“[W]hat happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. One of our companies held out for 40 minutes and another for more than 6 hours. […] The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts.”
Historians broadened the definition of “resistance” after the 1960s to include unarmed and spiritual acts. What is gained, and what might be lost, by defining resistance so broadly?
World history
Teaching the war in the East? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 4 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
As many as one in three Jews murdered during the Holocaust was killed not in a camp, but at the edge of a ravine, a forest, or a field, often within sight of the communities where they had lived. Three thousand men could not kill 1.5 to 2 million people alone. Order Police battalions, the army, and local auxiliaries were part of the machinery.
Read together
Dina Pronicheva survived. Before the war she was an actress at the Kyiv Young Viewers’ Theater … On the road to the ravine she walked beside an old man in a prayer shawl who, she remembered
“prayed the same way as my father did when I was a child.”
She fell into the pit before the shots, pretended to be dead until dark, and climbed out. She testified about the massacre before a Soviet court in January 1946.
The mobile units themselves numbered only about 3,000 men. Using this Chapter’s evidence, explain how so few could kill so many: what help did they have, and from whom?
World history
Teaching the war in North Africa? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 4 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The Holocaust era reached the Middle East and North Africa. The Farhud of June 1–2, 1941, was a Nazi-influenced pogrom in Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers and policemen, members of a youth movement modeled on the Hitler Youth, and city residents killed between 150 and 180 Jews. The record also includes Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, and Berber (Amazigh, the indigenous people of North Africa) rescuers, alongside collaboration and indifference.
Read together
The sculptor titled it Prayer. It stands in Ramat Gan, a city next to Tel Aviv in Israel. It was put up by Jews who had come from Iraq, from Baghdad, where on the first two days of June 1941 mobs attacked the Jewish quarter in a wave of killing called the Farhud. The people who raised this memorial, or their parents, had lived through that, then left Iraq and built new lives here.
Memory. The Ramat Gan memorial in Israel remembers the Farhud through a reading figure rather than a depiction of the attack. What does a community communicate by how it chooses to memorialize loss, and how does that choice affect how later generations learn the history? (C3 D2.His.3, how the significance of people and events is judged differently over time.)
Unit 2 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For more than two thousand years, there were Jews in North Africa, in the mountain villages of Morocco, the old cities of Tunisia, the coastal towns of Algeria and Libya. These communities had their own languages, music, cooking, dress, and centuries-old traditions. They produced great scholars, traded across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, and lived in the region’s cities and in many of its villages.
Read together
This is a Mimouna spread, set out on the night the Jewish holiday of Passover ends
For generations it was a neighborhood event. Jewish families opened their homes, and Muslim neighbors would often take part, bringing the first flour or honey of the post-Passover season. When the Jews of Morocco left, and almost all of them did, they left their houses, their cities, and their mountain villages. They carried the Mimouna with them to Israel and France.
The Mimouna survived the loss of the community’s homeland and is now more widely celebrated than ever. What does it mean for a tradition to outlive the place it came from?
Unit 2 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
The community that began as a forced exile became a permanent home. For long stretches of history the community was the center of the Jewish world. It was the place where the most important book in Judaism after the Bible was assembled, and the place distant communities wrote to for answers.
Read together
In 2014 Laurie Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch published 103 cuneiform tablets (clay tablets in the wedge-shaped script of Babylonia)
Many come from a settlement the Babylonians called Al-Yahudu, “the town of Judah.” Written between 572 and 477 BCE, they are ordinary legal records of Judeans farming, building houses, paying taxes, and doing service for the king, with Hebrew names built on the name of God among them.
The community began as a forced exile in 597 and 586 BCE, yet when the Jews were later allowed to return to Jerusalem, many chose to stay. Why might a community that started in catastrophe become a permanent, even thriving, home?
World history
Teaching the postwar world? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 6 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
The killing stopped at liberation in 1944–45, but the survivors’ ordeal did not: roughly a quarter-million Jewish Displaced Persons could not go home, and lived in DP camps until as late as 1957. Life in the DP camps went beyond waiting. The 1948 founding of Israel and the U.S. Displaced Persons Act of 1948 opened the doors that finally emptied the camps.
Read together
“From bondage to freedom, from darkness to a great light.”
Title-page inscription of the Survivors’ Talmud, an edition of the central text of Jewish learning printed by Holocaust survivors with the U.S. Army on German presses, 1948
In the DP camps, survivors married, had children, published newspapers, staged theater, and printed the Survivors’ Talmud. What do these choices suggest about how survivors understood their situation, and what evidence on this page supports your reading?
Unit 6 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–46) tried a defeated nation’s leaders for “crimes against humanity” for the first time. The Nuremberg Charter ruled out “I was only following orders” as a defense, and the trials assembled much of the documentary record. The Eichmann trial of 1961 put the organizer of the deportations in a Jerusalem courtroom and moved survivor testimony to the center of the record.
Read together
The Allies could have executed these men without trial, and Winston Churchill had at one point favored summary execution. Instead they chose a courtroom. Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor, explained why in his opening statement
“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
The problem had no legal precedent. Historians credit Luxembourg money with helping to build the national water company Mekorot, the Israel Electric Corporation, the Zim shipping line, the railways, and much of the country’s early infrastructure. More than seventy years after Israel and West Germany signed the Luxembourg Agreement, monthly payments still reach elderly survivors around the world.
Read together
“In the name of the German people, unspeakable crimes were committed which call for moral and material compensation.”
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, address to the Bundestag, its parliament, 27 September 1951
International law at war’s end covered only reparations between warring states. In 1951 twenty-three Jewish organizations founded the Claims Conference. Whom did it speak for, and why was it needed?
World history
Teaching human rights? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 2 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Jewish communities lived across the Middle East and North Africa continuously for centuries (in Iraq, for more than 2,500 years) long before the modern states they left. Governments across the region stripped citizenship, seized property, and ordered expulsions, and the pogroms began years before the State of Israel was founded in 1948. The departing communities rebuilt their lives chiefly in Israel, France, and the Americas, where their traditions continue.
Read together
The page comes from the Aleppo Codex, a complete Hebrew Bible written by hand around 930 CE in Tiberias … On the night of December 1, 1947, days after the United Nations voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine, mobs attacked the Jewish quarter of Aleppo and set the Great Synagogue on fire
The codex was thought destroyed. It had in fact survived, hidden by members of the community, but pages were lost in the violence and its aftermath.
In 1958 the surviving portion was smuggled out of Syria by way of Turkey and given to Israel’s president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who placed it with the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. It became the base text for modern scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible, and it is now displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Roughly 850,000 Jews left the Middle East and North Africa within a generation. The Chapter documents the laws that stripped citizenship, froze property, and conditioned exit. How do those laws change what the word “left” describes?
Unit 2 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The Jewish story has an African chapter. The Beta Israel kept their own form of Jewish life in Ethiopia for many centuries, and between 1984 and 1991 Israel carried most of them out in a series of airlifts. A community that prayed toward Jerusalem from the Ethiopian highlands for many centuries now celebrates the Sigd in Jerusalem.
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The central object of Beta Israel religious life is a book: the Orit, the Torah and its neighboring books rendered in Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of Ethiopia. Copied by hand onto parchment, bound as a codex, and kept in the synagogue in the care of the kessoch, the Orit stood at the center of the community’s scriptures.
The Beta Israel kept the Sabbath, the festivals, and the Hebrew Bible, but not the Talmud, which never reached them. What does that tell you about how a tradition survives in isolation?
Unit 2 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Iran, the country once known to the West as Persia, holds one of the longest continuous Jewish histories anywhere on earth. Persian kings appear by name in the Hebrew Bible, and a Jewish queen of Persia is the central figure of an entire biblical book. After more than 2,500 years, through empires, conquests, forced conversions, and a revolution that scattered most of its members across the globe, a Jewish community still lives on the Iranian plateau.
Read together
The community left writing of its own. In the fourteenth century the poet Shahin retold the stories of the Torah in Persian verse written in Hebrew letters. His Musa-nama, the Book of Moses, was completed in 1327 and runs to about ten thousand lines. His Ardashir-nama wove the Book of Esther, the story set at the Persian court, into a Persian epic.
The Persian king Cyrus allowed the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem, and is remembered in Jewish tradition unlike almost any other foreign ruler. Why might a community remember a specific outside leader so powerfully, thousands of years later?
World history
Teaching the modern Middle East? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 2 · Ch. 11Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared, the first Jewish state in the Land of Israel since antiquity. Most of Israel’s Jewish citizens descend from the communities traced in the earlier Chapters of this Unit. The Law of Return (1950) gives any Jew the right to immigrate and become a citizen.
Read together
“ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books…”
The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948 · English text, Avalon Project, Yale Law School
The Declaration’s published text grounds the state in history: “the birthplace of the Jewish people.” Why might the founders have opened with history rather than with the catastrophe that had just ended in Europe?
Unit 2 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Jewish communities lived across the Middle East and North Africa continuously for centuries (in Iraq, for more than 2,500 years) long before the modern states they left. Governments across the region stripped citizenship, seized property, and ordered expulsions, and the pogroms began years before the State of Israel was founded in 1948. The departing communities rebuilt their lives chiefly in Israel, France, and the Americas, where their traditions continue.
Read together
The page comes from the Aleppo Codex, a complete Hebrew Bible written by hand around 930 CE in Tiberias … On the night of December 1, 1947, days after the United Nations voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine, mobs attacked the Jewish quarter of Aleppo and set the Great Synagogue on fire
The codex was thought destroyed. It had in fact survived, hidden by members of the community, but pages were lost in the violence and its aftermath.
In 1958 the surviving portion was smuggled out of Syria by way of Turkey and given to Israel’s president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who placed it with the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. It became the base text for modern scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible, and it is now displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Roughly 850,000 Jews left the Middle East and North Africa within a generation. The Chapter documents the laws that stripped citizenship, froze property, and conditioned exit. How do those laws change what the word “left” describes?
Unit 2 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
The community that began as a forced exile became a permanent home. For long stretches of history the community was the center of the Jewish world. It was the place where the most important book in Judaism after the Bible was assembled, and the place distant communities wrote to for answers.
Read together
In 2014 Laurie Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch published 103 cuneiform tablets (clay tablets in the wedge-shaped script of Babylonia)
Many come from a settlement the Babylonians called Al-Yahudu, “the town of Judah.” Written between 572 and 477 BCE, they are ordinary legal records of Judeans farming, building houses, paying taxes, and doing service for the king, with Hebrew names built on the name of God among them.
The community began as a forced exile in 597 and 586 BCE, yet when the Jews were later allowed to return to Jerusalem, many chose to stay. Why might a community that started in catastrophe become a permanent, even thriving, home?
World history
Teaching the Cold War? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 2 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
The Soviet state shut down organized Jewish life and, in 1952, shot thirteen Yiddish writers and Jewish leaders after a secret trial. The Six-Day War of 1967 became a turning point: a generation that had grown up under state silence began applying to leave, and the refuseniks paid for the application with their jobs and sometimes their freedom. Between 1968 and the end of the century, about 1.6 million Jews and their family members walked out of the Soviet Union and the countries that replaced it.
Read together
The network abroad
Their rallying cry, “Let My People Go,” borrowed from the Passover story, became one of the defining American Jewish causes of the postwar era. On December 6, 1987, a day the organizers called Freedom Sunday, more than 200,000 people filled the National Mall in Washington, the largest Jewish rally the capital had ever held.
The 1967 war was fought far from Moscow, yet the Chapter calls it the turning point for Soviet Jews. Why might a distant event awaken an identity that decades of local pressure could not erase?
U.S. history
Teaching colonial America? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 2 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
American Jewish history is one community arriving in distinct waves, each from a different corner of the Jewish world and each leaving for different reasons. It also shows a single principle being tested over and over: whether a country built on religious liberty would extend it to a small and visible minority. Within three years of the first landing in 1654, Jews had argued and won their first civil-rights fights in America. In 1915 a mob in Georgia lynched Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager. In the 1920s Harvard and other colleges limited Jewish admissions, and the 1924 immigration law in effect shut the door to Eastern European Jews. In 2018 a gunman killed eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Read together
In 1790, Moses Seixas, warden of Newport’s Hebrew Congregation, welcomed President George Washington by praising
“a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Washington’s reply took up Seixas’s own phrase and made it the government’s promise.
Asser Levy answered each exclusion with a petition to the same courts that excluded him, and won guard duty, the butcher’s trade, and the burgher right within three years. What does his method tell us about how rights were actually secured in a colonial town?
U.S. history
Teaching the Gold Rush and the West? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 5 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
The blue jean began with Jacob Davis, a Jewish tailor in Reno who riveted pocket corners and needed a partner to pay for a patent. Strauss’s firm paid, and Patent No. 139,121 was granted May 20, 1873, to Davis and the firm together. Strauss never married. He supported Jewish charities in his lifetime and left bequests to Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant orphanages.
Read together
So in 1872 he wrote to his fabric supplier in San Francisco and offered a deal. In his own spelling, he wrote:
“for these $68 I will give you half the right to sell all such clothing revited according to the patent.”
Bavaria’s Matrikel capped how many Jewish households a town could hold. Trace the chain from that registry to a garment now worn all over the world. Which links in the chain were choices, and which were forced?
U.S. history
Teaching immigration and the industrial era? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 5 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), an American Sephardic poet mentored by Emerson, wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 for an auction raising money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. The poem followed her work with refugees from the Russian pogroms of 1881–82, whom she visited on Ward’s Island and taught in New York. The poem calls the statue the Mother of Exiles.
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“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883, as she copied it into her notebook of poems.
Lazarus wrote the poem’s welcome after her work with pogrom refugees. Read the sonnet above with that fact in mind: which lines change when you know who she was picturing?
Unit 2 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
American Jewish history is one community arriving in distinct waves, each from a different corner of the Jewish world and each leaving for different reasons. It also shows a single principle being tested over and over: whether a country built on religious liberty would extend it to a small and visible minority. Within three years of the first landing in 1654, Jews had argued and won their first civil-rights fights in America. In 1915 a mob in Georgia lynched Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager. In the 1920s Harvard and other colleges limited Jewish admissions, and the 1924 immigration law in effect shut the door to Eastern European Jews. In 2018 a gunman killed eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Read together
In 1790, Moses Seixas, warden of Newport’s Hebrew Congregation, welcomed President George Washington by praising
“a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Washington’s reply took up Seixas’s own phrase and made it the government’s promise.
Asser Levy answered each exclusion with a petition to the same courts that excluded him, and won guard duty, the butcher’s trade, and the burgher right within three years. What does his method tell us about how rights were actually secured in a colonial town?
Unit 5 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) was born to a Dutch-Jewish family in a London tenement, left the Jews’ Free School at ten to work, and came to New York’s Lower East Side at thirteen. The cigar shop became his school. He helped found the American Federation of Labor in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1886, and served as its president for thirty-seven of its first thirty-eight years, until his death.
Read together
He took up the question in an 1893 speech in Chicago, “What Does Labor Want?” Part of his answer reads:
“We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge.”
Gompers left school at ten, yet the cigar shop, where one worker read aloud to the others, gave him an education. What does his story say about where learning happens, and who pays for it?
U.S. history
Teaching the twentieth century? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 5 · Ch. 11Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Universal, Paramount, Fox, MGM, Warner Bros., and Columbia were all founded or led by Jewish immigrants or children of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, within roughly a dozen years. Largely shut out of established industries, the founders entered the new and looked-down-on nickelodeon business and built the Hollywood studio system. Carl Laemmle, Universal’s founder, signed affidavits for more than 300 German Jews in his final years.
Read together
His April 12, 1938, letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, asking that the American consulate in Stuttgart speed its work, survives in the National Archives. In it he wrote that he felt it
“the solemn duty of every Jew in America who can afford it”
The Chapter sets aside explanations based on a supposed group talent. Why is a flattering group explanation still a stereotype, and what explanation does the record support instead?
Unit 5 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) became world-famous for his physics. His place in Jewish history rests on his life as a refugee, an activist, and a public Jewish figure. Driven out of Nazi Germany in 1933, with a bounty on his head reported in the press, he used his name to help other Jewish refugees escape and became a leading public critic of the regime. In 1952 he was asked to become president of the new State of Israel.
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Einstein said no. He wrote back the next day, on November 18
“I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel,” he wrote, “and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.”
Einstein used his fame to vouch for refugees the immigration system would otherwise have turned away. What does that tell you about how fame can function as a kind of power? (C3 D2.His.1)
Unit 5 · Ch. 12Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Jonas Salk (1914–1995), raised in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family and the first member of it to attend college, led the team that developed the killed-virus vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh with March of Dimes funding. The March of Dimes, the national polio charity funded by the coins of ordinary families, backed him. He never patented his vaccine, and he earned no money from it.
Read together
On the evening of the announcement, Edward R. Murrow interviewed Salk on CBS television and asked who owned the patent on the vaccine. Salk’s answer, preserved on film:
“Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Salk is quoted as saying, “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” Which of his choices on this page meet that standard, and what would meeting it look like where you live?
U.S. history
Teaching the civil rights era? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 2 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
American Jewish history is one community arriving in distinct waves, each from a different corner of the Jewish world and each leaving for different reasons. It also shows a single principle being tested over and over: whether a country built on religious liberty would extend it to a small and visible minority. Within three years of the first landing in 1654, Jews had argued and won their first civil-rights fights in America. In 1915 a mob in Georgia lynched Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager. In the 1920s Harvard and other colleges limited Jewish admissions, and the 1924 immigration law in effect shut the door to Eastern European Jews. In 2018 a gunman killed eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Read together
Abraham Joshua Heschel, a philosopher, became a friend and ally of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr … Afterward he wrote that
Asser Levy answered each exclusion with a petition to the same courts that excluded him, and won guard duty, the butcher’s trade, and the burgher right within three years. What does his method tell us about how rights were actually secured in a colonial town?
Civics, media, and today
Teaching government and civics? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 6 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–46) tried a defeated nation’s leaders for “crimes against humanity” for the first time. The Nuremberg Charter ruled out “I was only following orders” as a defense, and the trials assembled much of the documentary record. The Eichmann trial of 1961 put the organizer of the deportations in a Jerusalem courtroom and moved survivor testimony to the center of the record.
Read together
The Allies could have executed these men without trial, and Winston Churchill had at one point favored summary execution. Instead they chose a courtroom. Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor, explained why in his opening statement
“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
Laws, museums, archives, remembrance days, and name databases for Holocaust memory were built deliberately across more than sixty years. Israel built the first national framework: Yom HaShoah in 1951 and Yad Vashem in 1953, whose Hall of Names has recovered about 4.9 million names. As the survivor generation ages, their families have organized to carry the testimony forward.
Read together
The name says what the place is for
Yad vashem is an ancient Hebrew phrase meaning “a memorial and a name.” It comes from Isaiah 56:5, which promises a name that “shall not be cut off.”
Israel built an entire national institution around that promise: to give back a name to people the Nazis had tried to reduce to numbers.
The Stolpersteine set memory into the pavement outside a victim’s last home instead of inside a museum. What happens to a person who trips over a name in the street that cannot happen behind glass?
Unit 3 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Almost every element of Nazi antisemitism existed before the Nazi Party, from the early Christian image of the Jew as Christ-killer and demon to the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, already in global circulation. Because it traced every problem to a single cause, the worldview left no room for evidence against it. In Nazi Germany, antisemitism became an organizing principle of government.
Read together
On April 1, 1933, the regime organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses
Six days later, on April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service introduced the “Aryan paragraph,” using the Nazis’ term for the supposed non-Jewish German race. It began expelling Jews from government employment, with exemptions, chiefly for war veterans, that lasted until 1935. It was the regime’s first major law aimed at Jews by descent.
The Nazi worldview traced every problem to a single cause. Using the synthesis described here, why might that kind of explanation be harder to answer than an ordinary prejudice?
Civics, media, and today
Teaching media literacy? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 3 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
It claims to be the stolen minutes of a secret meeting where Jewish leaders plot to rule the world. Much of the text was copied from a French satire that never mentioned Jews at all, and it is still being sold today. One unchanging text served many different political purposes.
Read together
the same words, the target changed
Maurice Joly, Dialogue in Hell (1864)
“Like the god Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, and these arms will give their hands to all the different shades of opinion.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
“These newspapers, like the Indian god Vishnu, will be possessed of hundreds of hands, each of which will be feeling the pulse of varying public opinion.”
Long passages of the Protocols were copied from Maurice Joly’s 1864 satire, which attacked Napoleon III and never mentioned Jews. Why is a match between two texts stronger evidence of forgery than an expert simply declaring the document false?
Unit 6 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The Holocaust is among the most thoroughly documented crimes in history, recorded by the perpetrators, the Allied armies, and the survivors, and confirmed under oath at Nuremberg. Denial carries a hidden charge, that Jews invented or exaggerated the genocide. Denial reuses a small set of recognizable techniques, so it can be identified and answered from the record.
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The historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom David Irving sued for libel … Lipstadt has said
“The only reason to deny the Holocaust is to inculcate and foster antisemitism.”
There are not two sides to whether a documented genocide occurred. Where is the line between questioning sources, a core historical skill, and staging a settled fact as an open debate?
Unit 3 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged text claiming to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination, was circulating in Arabic by 1925, twenty-three years before the State of Israel was founded. That European material traveled into the Arabic-speaking world through a forgery, a radio station, a charter, and a classroom. From April 1939 until the end of the war in 1945, Nazi Germany broadcast daily Arabic-language radio programming to the Middle East and North Africa from its shortwave station at Zeesen, outside Berlin.
Read together
In 2019 the European Union commissioned the Georg Eckert Institute, a German research institute that specializes in textbook analysis, to review the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority … It described “a complex picture”: the books adopted UNESCO standards on subjects such as human rights, and they also expressed antagonism toward Israel. One religious-education textbook, in the institute’s words
“contains cumulative stereotypes and accusations that can clearly be characterised as anti-Semitic”
portraying Jews as hostile to the Prophet Muhammad and his community.
Radio in the 1940s, television in 2007, textbooks today: each medium carried the same underlying ideas to a new generation. Comparing the Zeesen broadcasts with Tomorrow’s Pioneers, what changed, and what stayed exactly the same?
Civics, media, and today
Teaching current events? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 3 · Ch. 12Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
In 2024 the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States, more than twenty-five a day and the most since it began counting in 1979. Most were harassment and vandalism. Among them were 627 bomb threats against Jewish organizations, nearly nine in ten of them aimed at synagogues. Three published definitions, the Working Definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the Jerusalem Declaration, and the Nexus Document, all treat hostility to Jews as Jews and the use of old tropes as antisemitism.
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Holding Jews responsible for Israel
The IHRA definition lists
“holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”
The Jerusalem Declaration lists
“holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct or treating Jews, simply because they are Jewish, as agents of Israel.”
Since 1920, organized violence against Jewish civilians has run in a documented line. The marker that moves an event into this Unit is selection: the documented moment when civilians are chosen as targets for being Jews or Israelis. The legal texts judge an attack by its target, not by its cause.
Read together
In 2004 the UN Security Council stated that criminal acts against civilians meant to spread terror
“are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature.”
Leon Klinghoffer was a retired American on a cruise. Stefano Gaj Taché was two years old, outside a synagogue in Rome. Neither had any connection to a battlefield. What do the diaspora attacks establish about who the target of this violence was?
Unit 6 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Antisemitism is far older than the Nazis, and it outlasted their defeat in 1945. Postwar Germany underwent denazification, a public, forced reckoning that discredited the ideology where the defeat reached, but the Nazi project had already exported its antisemitism to places that never went through that process.
Read together
The clearest traceable carrier is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: exposed as a forgery in 1921, embraced by the Nazis, translated and circulated worldwide, and still in print today
“The Truth About the Protocols: A Literary Forgery.”
“Old myth, new costume”: take one historical myth from an earlier Unit and trace how its core accusation could reappear in a form a modern audience would recognize.
Civics, media, and today
Teaching scientists and inventors? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 5 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) became world-famous for his physics. His place in Jewish history rests on his life as a refugee, an activist, and a public Jewish figure. Driven out of Nazi Germany in 1933, with a bounty on his head reported in the press, he used his name to help other Jewish refugees escape and became a leading public critic of the regime. In 1952 he was asked to become president of the new State of Israel.
Read together
Einstein said no. He wrote back the next day, on November 18
“I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel,” he wrote, “and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.”
Einstein used his fame to vouch for refugees the immigration system would otherwise have turned away. What does that tell you about how fame can function as a kind of power? (C3 D2.His.1)
Unit 5 · Ch. 12Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Jonas Salk (1914–1995), raised in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family and the first member of it to attend college, led the team that developed the killed-virus vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh with March of Dimes funding. The March of Dimes, the national polio charity funded by the coins of ordinary families, backed him. He never patented his vaccine, and he earned no money from it.
Read together
On the evening of the announcement, Edward R. Murrow interviewed Salk on CBS television and asked who owned the patent on the vaccine. Salk’s answer, preserved on film:
“Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Salk is quoted as saying, “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” Which of his choices on this page meet that standard, and what would meeting it look like where you live?
English
Teaching The Diary of a Young Girl or Night? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 4 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Between 1933 and 1939, Nazi Germany stripped Jewish citizens of work, rights, citizenship, property, movement, and safety through hundreds of laws and decrees. German Jews organized to meet the crisis. In 1935 Rabbi Max Dienemann ordained Regina Jonas of Berlin, the first woman known to have been ordained a rabbi. She was deported in 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
Read together
The Reich Citizenship Law
It split German residents into two classes: “Reich citizens,” who held full rights, and “state subjects,” who did not. Only “persons of German or related blood” could be Reich citizens. The effect was to strip German Jews of their citizenship.
The Nazis built the machinery of persecution step by step for six and a half years before the war began. Choose two steps from this Chapter and explain what each one took away from Jewish Germans, and why the order of the steps mattered.
Unit 4 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The most important distinction is between a concentration camp and a killing center. Concentration camps were places of imprisonment, brutality, and forced labor, where prisoners died in great numbers from starvation, disease, beatings, and executions. Killing centers were built to murder entire populations on arrival.
Read together
Item 13/15 is Höfle’s message to SS officer Franz Heim, the deputy commander of the Security Police in Kraków. It is a fortnightly report on “Einsatz Reinhart,” the arrivals of the last two weeks, then the totals to December 31, 1942:
L 24733, B 434508, S 101370, T 71355, “zusammen” (together) 1274166.
The letters stand for Lublin (Majdanek), Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The Treblinka figure lost a digit in transmission: the total only adds up if it reads 713,555.
The Chapter distinguishes a concentration camp from a killing center by purpose. How would you explain that distinction to someone who has only ever heard the phrase “concentration camp”?
English
Teaching Number the Stars? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 4 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Most accounts of the Holocaust center on persecution and mass murder. The historical record also holds thousands of acts of resistance, rescue, documentation, religious perseverance, and mutual aid. They were carried out under conditions the regime built to make them nearly impossible.
Read together
Anielewicz’s last letter, written on April 23, 1943, is among the most quoted documents of the uprising. In it he wrote (translation from the Yad Vashem edition):
“[W]hat happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. One of our companies held out for 40 minutes and another for more than 6 hours. […] The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts.”
Historians broadened the definition of “resistance” after the 1960s to include unarmed and spiritual acts. What is gained, and what might be lost, by defining resistance so broadly?
English
Teaching a poetry unit? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 5 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), an American Sephardic poet mentored by Emerson, wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 for an auction raising money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. The poem followed her work with refugees from the Russian pogroms of 1881–82, whom she visited on Ward’s Island and taught in New York. The poem calls the statue the Mother of Exiles.
Read together
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883, as she copied it into her notebook of poems.
Lazarus wrote the poem’s welcome after her work with pogrom refugees. Read the sonnet above with that fact in mind: which lines change when you know who she was picturing?
English
Teaching essays and nonfiction? Add 15 minutes:
Unit 6 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 11–12 · College Courses
Reporting the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, she argued the man in the glass booth was an ordinary functionary rather than a monster. She did not argue that this made him less guilty. Later research on Eichmann’s own writings showed that he was a committed Nazi.
Read together
Her Epilogue ends with the judgment she would have had the court give him:
“This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
“The banality of evil” became one of the most argued-over phrases of the twentieth century. From this Chapter’s account, what exactly did Arendt claim about Eichmann, and what did her critics say she got wrong?
Browse by ChapterEvery Chapter, in the order of the six Units.
Unit 1 The Jewish World
Unit 1 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Jewish sources call the Jews a people and a nation, am Yisrael, with one religion, Judaism. Judaism is at least as much about what you do as what you believe. The commandments cover how to treat other people as well as how to worship: honesty, care for the poor and the stranger, and “love your fellow as yourself.”
Read together
The Talmud teaches that
“all Jews are considered guarantors, i.e., responsible, for one another.”
An old phrase, tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” appears in the Mishnah, where rabbis changed laws
The Talmud makes all Jews responsible for one another, and the Mishnah changed laws “for the betterment of the world.” Where do you see both kinds of responsibility, to your own group and to everyone, in the place where you live? (C3 D2.His.2)
Unit 1 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
On a map of the ancient world, the land of Israel is easy to miss. Yet for millennia an entire civilization has kept its bearings by this narrow strip of land. For most of Jewish history most Jews lived somewhere else, and the land still ran through their prayers, their calendar, and their law.
Read together
“Next year in Jerusalem.”
The closing words of the Passover Seder, spoken for centuries by Jews who had never seen the city.
A place at the center (C3 D2.His.14). Jewish prayer faces Jerusalem, the calendar keeps the land’s harvest seasons, and holidays end on “next year in Jerusalem,” even for communities that lived far away. How can a place stay at the center of a culture for people who have never set foot on it?
Unit 1 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Between the fall of the Temple, the central Jewish sanctuary in Jerusalem, in 70 CE and the founding of modern Israel in 1948 lie eighteen centuries. Jewish communities lived in the land through all of them. Across every ruling power, the number of Jews in the land rose and fell, in Jerusalem at times to a few households, but the presence never broke.
Read together
In 1267 the Catalan rabbi and physician Nachmanides … reached Jerusalem at about seventy-three. He found the city devastated. In a letter to his son he described what was left of its Jews:
“only two brothers, dyers who bought their dye from the governor”
Within weeks he had founded a synagogue in a ruined house, and Torah scrolls that had been evacuated to Shechem before the Mongol raid were brought back. Jewish life in Jerusalem revived around him.
The simple version of the story has the Jewish people leaving the land in 70 CE and returning in 1948. Choose one period in between. What evidence on the page shows Jews living in the land then?
Unit 1 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Synagogues around the world are built to face the same spot in Jerusalem. At a traditional Jewish wedding, the groom breaks a glass to mourn what once stood there. The building has been gone for nearly two thousand years, and it still organizes Jewish life on every continent.
Read together
The exile left a cultural mark that outlived it: Psalm 137, written in its memory, opens
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion”
The menorah on the Arch of Titus was carved by Rome to mark a victory over Judaea. The same seven-branched form is now the official emblem of the State of Israel. How does one object travel from a conqueror’s monument to a national seal, and what does that show about memory?
Unit 1 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
The result was an institution that could travel. A synagogue did not require sovereignty, a priesthood, or a single sacred building. It required a community, a Torah, and the act of gathering.
Read together
In Jerusalem, a Greek inscription from the late Second Temple period records that a priest named Theodotus
“built the synagogue for the reading of the Law and the teaching of the commandments”
Compare the synagogue with another house of worship you have studied, such as a cathedral or a mosque. What does the synagogue share with it, and what sets it apart?
Unit 1 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Open a printed page of the Talmud and you are looking at a conversation that spans more than a thousand years on a single sheet of paper. From the compilation of the Mishnah around 200 CE through the modern period, Jewish scholars kept writing, debating, interpreting, codifying, and preserving what came before. The result is a conversation in writing that has run for more than eighteen centuries.
Read together
The most famous rivals, the schools of the sage Hillel and of his contemporary Shammai, argued for three years. Then, the Talmud says, a heavenly voice declared
“Both these and those are the words of the living God. However, the halakha is in accordance with the opinion of Beit Hillel”
The printed Talmud page places the central text in the middle and surrounds it with commentaries written centuries apart, all readable at once. Why might a tradition design its books so that disagreement and debate are literally printed onto the same page, rather than edited out?
Unit 1 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
On the same day, a Jew in Yemen, a Jew in Poland, and a Jew in Spain would each mark the start of a new month, the same month, by the same count. They lived under different rulers, spoke different languages, and ate different food, yet they kept the same time. As the central court in the Land of Israel lost its authority, the calendar shifted, over centuries, to a fixed mathematical rule any community could compute for itself.
Read together
The Jerusalem Talmud records the tradition that the names of the months
“ascended with them from Babylonia”
The calendar a Jewish child learns today still wears the vocabulary of one of the civilization’s oldest displacements.
The shift from watching the moon to calculating the calendar removed the need for a single central authority. Why might that have made the calendar more secure for a scattered people, not less?
Unit 1 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
These objects are still in use: the Hanukkah lamp is still lit each winter, the ketubah still signed at weddings, the Torah still crowned in synagogues today. Jewish law fixes the ritual, not the object’s form, so the shapes of ketubot, finials, lamps, and cups vary widely and record the local world each community lived in. The objects show one people living in many worlds at once.
If you had to choose one object from your own household to represent your family’s life to someone five hundred years from now, what would it be, and what would it get wrong about you?
Unit 1 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Every culture notices the same handful of moments (a birth, the passage into adulthood, a marriage, a death) and every culture marks them somehow. Judaism marks them with old and specific rituals, carried across the whole map, and colored each time by wherever Jews happened to be living. Together these rites form much of the shared structure through which Jewish life has traditionally been lived.
Read together
The band was embroidered or painted with the boy’s name, his birth date, and the blessing spoken at the circumcision itself: may he grow up
“to Torah, to the wedding canopy, and to good deeds.”
The band, called a wimpel, was then given to the synagogue and used to bind the Torah scroll.
The bar and bat mitzvah marks the start of responsibility, not the end of learning. Why might a tradition choose to mark becoming responsible rather than finishing a course of study? What does that say about how it sees growing up?
Unit 1 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
For nearly two thousand years the Jewish people had no state of their own, no army, and no capital. Yet a question could leave a synagogue in Spain, travel by ship and camel to a scholar in Babylonia, and the answer would come back and be followed. They ran a civilization by mail.
Read together
Philo of Alexandria, writing about those years, says they were freed
“without ever having been compelled to alter any of their hereditary or national observances.”
They had synagogues, and they gathered in them “most especially on the sacred sabbath days,” Philo wrote, to study their law together.
The Seder Rav Amram prayer book was written in Babylonia and seems to have begun as an answer sent to the Jewish community of Barcelona, in Spain. What does that single exchange tell you about how a people with no shared government stayed one people?
Unit 2 Communities Across the World
Unit 2 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The Jewish world was a network, not an outpost. Scattered across Asia, Africa, and Europe, and later the Americas, they stayed one people, in steady contact for centuries. A legal ruling issued by the academies of Iraq could be carried to Spain, and a scholar trained in one community could be read in another.
Read together
Back in Egypt, he reused a legal statement made out in his name. It was written in Arabic script, dated June 17, 1153, and recorded that he had freed a slave in Aden
In the spaces around its lines, and on the back, Ben Yiju kept his accounts in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic written in Hebrew letters, which Jews from Spain to Iraq could read.
Accounts of the India trader Abraham Ben Yiju, written in Hebrew letters around the lines of an Arabic legal statement dated 1153. Fustat (Old Cairo). Found in the Cairo Geniza.
The Object Spotlight shows one merchant’s accounts, not a royal chronicle. What can an ordinary business record prove about the connected Jewish world that an official history cannot?
Unit 2 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
The community that began as a forced exile became a permanent home. For long stretches of history the community was the center of the Jewish world. It was the place where the most important book in Judaism after the Bible was assembled, and the place distant communities wrote to for answers.
Read together
In 2014 Laurie Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch published 103 cuneiform tablets (clay tablets in the wedge-shaped script of Babylonia)
Many come from a settlement the Babylonians called Al-Yahudu, “the town of Judah.” Written between 572 and 477 BCE, they are ordinary legal records of Judeans farming, building houses, paying taxes, and doing service for the king, with Hebrew names built on the name of God among them.
The community began as a forced exile in 597 and 586 BCE, yet when the Jews were later allowed to return to Jerusalem, many chose to stay. Why might a community that started in catastrophe become a permanent, even thriving, home?
Unit 2 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Iran, the country once known to the West as Persia, holds one of the longest continuous Jewish histories anywhere on earth. Persian kings appear by name in the Hebrew Bible, and a Jewish queen of Persia is the central figure of an entire biblical book. After more than 2,500 years, through empires, conquests, forced conversions, and a revolution that scattered most of its members across the globe, a Jewish community still lives on the Iranian plateau.
Read together
The community left writing of its own. In the fourteenth century the poet Shahin retold the stories of the Torah in Persian verse written in Hebrew letters. His Musa-nama, the Book of Moses, was completed in 1327 and runs to about ten thousand lines. His Ardashir-nama wove the Book of Esther, the story set at the Persian court, into a Persian epic.
The Persian king Cyrus allowed the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem, and is remembered in Jewish tradition unlike almost any other foreign ruler. Why might a community remember a specific outside leader so powerfully, thousands of years later?
Unit 2 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For more than two thousand years, there were Jews in North Africa, in the mountain villages of Morocco, the old cities of Tunisia, the coastal towns of Algeria and Libya. These communities had their own languages, music, cooking, dress, and centuries-old traditions. They produced great scholars, traded across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, and lived in the region’s cities and in many of its villages.
Read together
This is a Mimouna spread, set out on the night the Jewish holiday of Passover ends
For generations it was a neighborhood event. Jewish families opened their homes, and Muslim neighbors would often take part, bringing the first flour or honey of the post-Passover season. When the Jews of Morocco left, and almost all of them did, they left their houses, their cities, and their mountain villages. They carried the Mimouna with them to Israel and France.
The Mimouna survived the loss of the community’s homeland and is now more widely celebrated than ever. What does it mean for a tradition to outlive the place it came from?
Unit 2 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Jewish communities lived across the Middle East and North Africa continuously for centuries (in Iraq, for more than 2,500 years) long before the modern states they left. Governments across the region stripped citizenship, seized property, and ordered expulsions, and the pogroms began years before the State of Israel was founded in 1948. The departing communities rebuilt their lives chiefly in Israel, France, and the Americas, where their traditions continue.
Read together
The page comes from the Aleppo Codex, a complete Hebrew Bible written by hand around 930 CE in Tiberias … On the night of December 1, 1947, days after the United Nations voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine, mobs attacked the Jewish quarter of Aleppo and set the Great Synagogue on fire
The codex was thought destroyed. It had in fact survived, hidden by members of the community, but pages were lost in the violence and its aftermath.
In 1958 the surviving portion was smuggled out of Syria by way of Turkey and given to Israel’s president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who placed it with the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. It became the base text for modern scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible, and it is now displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Roughly 850,000 Jews left the Middle East and North Africa within a generation. The Chapter documents the laws that stripped citizenship, froze property, and conditioned exit. How do those laws change what the word “left” describes?
Unit 2 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Jews had lived in Spain for more than a thousand years when a royal decree of 1492 forced them to leave. After the expulsion of 1492 they kept speaking their own form of Spanish, called Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, and wrote it in Hebrew letters. The exiles built Jewish communities in Salonika, Istanbul, Izmir, Safed, Amsterdam, and London, and their descendants were still printing newspapers in Ladino in the 1900s.
Read together
In 1655 Menasseh ben Israel, an Amsterdam rabbi and the city’s first Jewish printer, traveled to London with a request to Oliver Cromwell, who then ruled England as Lord Protector. He asked him
“to grant us place in your Countrey, that we may have our Synagogues, and free exercise of our Religion.”
Cromwell gave no formal answer, but by 1657 Jews in England had opened a synagogue.
Jacob Culi wrote the Me’am Lo’ez in Ladino so that readers without Hebrew could have the tradition in their own language, and by 1900 Salonika’s newspapers were printed in Ladino too. What does a community’s choice of language for its books and newspapers tell a historian?
Unit 2 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For more than seven hundred years, Poland and Lithuania held one of the great centers of Jewish life. Jews there ran their own councils and courts, built schools and study houses, and argued in print about religion and politics. Until the Holocaust, most of the world’s Jews could trace their families to these lands.
Read together
On July 2, 1792, Lublin’s Catholic tailors’ guild and the city’s Jewish tailors settled their dispute on paper … For three years, the guild would admit forty-four Jewish tailors
“to the freedom of practicing the tailor’s craft”
The elders of the brotherhood sign “with their own hands,” in two columns of Hebrew script. Most lines begin ואני, “And I,” then a name and a father’s name: “And I, David, son of Asher.”
Kings issued charters that protected Jews, and townspeople and Jews signed agreements that set terms on trade. Using the Statute of Kalisz and the Lublin tailors’ agreement of 1792, what did each side want, and what did each side get?
Unit 2 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
The Soviet state shut down organized Jewish life and, in 1952, shot thirteen Yiddish writers and Jewish leaders after a secret trial. The Six-Day War of 1967 became a turning point: a generation that had grown up under state silence began applying to leave, and the refuseniks paid for the application with their jobs and sometimes their freedom. Between 1968 and the end of the century, about 1.6 million Jews and their family members walked out of the Soviet Union and the countries that replaced it.
Read together
The network abroad
Their rallying cry, “Let My People Go,” borrowed from the Passover story, became one of the defining American Jewish causes of the postwar era. On December 6, 1987, a day the organizers called Freedom Sunday, more than 200,000 people filled the National Mall in Washington, the largest Jewish rally the capital had ever held.
The 1967 war was fought far from Moscow, yet the Chapter calls it the turning point for Soviet Jews. Why might a distant event awaken an identity that decades of local pressure could not erase?
Unit 2 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
American Jewish history is one community arriving in distinct waves, each from a different corner of the Jewish world and each leaving for different reasons. It also shows a single principle being tested over and over: whether a country built on religious liberty would extend it to a small and visible minority. Within three years of the first landing in 1654, Jews had argued and won their first civil-rights fights in America. In 1915 a mob in Georgia lynched Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager. In the 1920s Harvard and other colleges limited Jewish admissions, and the 1924 immigration law in effect shut the door to Eastern European Jews. In 2018 a gunman killed eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Read together
In 1790, Moses Seixas, warden of Newport’s Hebrew Congregation, welcomed President George Washington by praising
“a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Washington’s reply took up Seixas’s own phrase and made it the government’s promise.
Asser Levy answered each exclusion with a petition to the same courts that excluded him, and won guard duty, the butcher’s trade, and the burgher right within three years. What does his method tell us about how rights were actually secured in a colonial town?
Unit 2 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The Jewish story has an African chapter. The Beta Israel kept their own form of Jewish life in Ethiopia for many centuries, and between 1984 and 1991 Israel carried most of them out in a series of airlifts. A community that prayed toward Jerusalem from the Ethiopian highlands for many centuries now celebrates the Sigd in Jerusalem.
Read together
The central object of Beta Israel religious life is a book: the Orit, the Torah and its neighboring books rendered in Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of Ethiopia. Copied by hand onto parchment, bound as a codex, and kept in the synagogue in the care of the kessoch, the Orit stood at the center of the community’s scriptures.
The Beta Israel kept the Sabbath, the festivals, and the Hebrew Bible, but not the Talmud, which never reached them. What does that tell you about how a tradition survives in isolation?
Unit 2 · Ch. 11Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared, the first Jewish state in the Land of Israel since antiquity. Most of Israel’s Jewish citizens descend from the communities traced in the earlier Chapters of this Unit. The Law of Return (1950) gives any Jew the right to immigrate and become a citizen.
Read together
“ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books…”
The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948 · English text, Avalon Project, Yale Law School
The Declaration’s published text grounds the state in history: “the birthplace of the Jewish people.” Why might the founders have opened with history rather than with the catastrophe that had just ended in Europe?
Unit 3 The Evolution of Antisemitism
Unit 3 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
For centuries, Christian Europe taught that the Jewish people bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus, crucified under Rome’s authority in Jerusalem around the year 30. Those theological claims, repeated and elaborated over centuries, became the framework within which medieval European law, art, and violence toward Jews operated. After the Second World War, the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches repudiated its central positions.
Read together
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the badge … Canon 68 required that Jews and Muslims be
“marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.”
From that rule local rulers later developed the badge.
Choose one claim of the Adversus Judaeos literature and trace it from the teaching itself, to the way it was carried into law and practice, to its documented effects. Which link in that chain does the page document most strongly, and which least?
Unit 3 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The blood libel was the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood in Jewish religious rituals. Jewish law prohibits consuming blood, a prohibition rooted in the biblical dietary code and elaborated in later halakhic (Jewish religious) law. At Blois, in France, in 1171, Count Theobald had more than thirty Jews, children among them, burned at the stake on that accusation. Popes and an Ottoman sultan rejected it, and it still circulates today.
Read together
Pope Gregory X · Sicut Judaeis renewal · October 7, 1272 … Gregory X’s text decreed that
“Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type”
It also required that Christian testimony against Jews be corroborated by a Jewish witness, a rule that, where courts applied it, made blood libel accusations harder to pursue.
The same false accusation reappears at Norwich (1144), Trent (1475), Damascus (1840), Kiev (1911), and into the present. What makes a claim durable enough to cross eight centuries and many cultures, even after being repeatedly disproven?
Unit 3 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The ghetto is an early-modern European institution with an exact birthday (Venice, March 29, 1516), not a Nazi invention. Its gates were locked at night by Christian guards the Jews themselves had to pay, and Jews who went out by day had to wear a yellow hat or badge. Inside the gates, communities governed themselves and produced lasting work: the Bomberg Talmud, the writings of Sara Copia Sullam and Leon of Modena, the synagogue art of Venice and Mantua.
Read together
The second great ghetto was Rome’s, created by the bull (a formal papal decree) Cum Nimis Absurdum, issued by Pope Paul IV on July 14, 1555, barely two months into his reign … Its opening words, Cum nimis absurdum
“since it is utterly absurd”
The same opening sentence stated the theology behind the law: the Jews, it said, had been condemned by their own guilt to perpetual servitude.
Inside the gates, the community governed itself, its own council, court, schools, and one of the great Hebrew printing centers in the world. How does the record of what was made in the ghetto change the way you read three centuries of confinement?
Unit 3 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Between 1290 and 1492, one Western European kingdom after another expelled its entire Jewish population: England, France, Spain, and a long list of German and Italian cities and territories. The governments that expelled Jews had usually first invited them in, taxed them, restricted them, and drawn on their money. In Spain, families had four months to sell what they owned, could take no gold, silver, or coin, and faced death if they stayed as Jews.
Read together
“We order all Jews and Jewesses … that … they depart from all of these our said realms and lordships … and they shall not dare to return.”
Ferdinand and Isabella, the Alhambra Decree (Edict of Expulsion), March 31, 1492
When a community was expelled, the debts Christians owed it often passed to the crown or went uncollected. How might that single fact help explain why expulsions were frequently popular? Whose interests did banishment serve?
Unit 3 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
For well over a thousand years, the hatred aimed at Jews in Christian Europe had a door in it. Then, in a single decade in the late nineteenth century, a group of German and French writers built a new version of the hatred, one that defined Jewishness as a hereditary, biological category. Conversion could not touch it.
Read together
On November 12, 1880, seventy-five public figures published a declaration against the movement, drafted by Mommsen. Its signers included the historian Johann Gustav Droysen and the pathologist Rudolf Virchow. It warned that
“like a contagious disease, the revival of an old delusion”
threatened relations between Christians and Jews. The movement spread anyway.
Leading scientists and scholars of the day, among them the seventy-five signers of the 1880 declaration, rejected the movement as it was being built, and it spread anyway. Why might expert rejection fail to stop a false idea, and what does that imply about how such ideas are actually countered?
Unit 3 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
In the Russian Empire, pogroms, violent mob attacks on Jews, broke out more than 250 times in 1881 and 1882. Rioters killed 49 Jews in Kishinev (today Chișinău, Moldova) in 1903 and between several hundred and more than a thousand in the port city of Odessa in 1905. In the civil war after the 1917 revolution, armies and armed bands killed at least 50,000 Jews. Many concluded that safety would require leaving, self-defense, or both. Between 1881 and 1924, roughly two million Jews left the Russian Empire, the great majority bound for the United States, with others going to Britain, Argentina, South Africa, and beyond.
Read together
This is an internal passport, issued in 1885 to a Jewish townsman of Rakov, a small town in the province of Minsk … The passport let its holder leave his town for one year and travel to
“various towns and villages of the Russian Empire”
Wherever he went, the law of the Pale still decided where he could live.
Between 1881 and 1924 roughly two million Jews left the Russian Empire, and others joined the first waves of settlement in the Land of Israel. Using the Chapter, which pressures pushed people to leave, and which events gave the departures their urgency?
Unit 3 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
It claims to be the stolen minutes of a secret meeting where Jewish leaders plot to rule the world. Much of the text was copied from a French satire that never mentioned Jews at all, and it is still being sold today. One unchanging text served many different political purposes.
Read together
the same words, the target changed
Maurice Joly, Dialogue in Hell (1864)
“Like the god Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, and these arms will give their hands to all the different shades of opinion.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
“These newspapers, like the Indian god Vishnu, will be possessed of hundreds of hands, each of which will be feeling the pulse of varying public opinion.”
Long passages of the Protocols were copied from Maurice Joly’s 1864 satire, which attacked Napoleon III and never mentioned Jews. Why is a match between two texts stronger evidence of forgery than an expert simply declaring the document false?
Unit 3 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Almost every element of Nazi antisemitism existed before the Nazi Party, from the early Christian image of the Jew as Christ-killer and demon to the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, already in global circulation. Because it traced every problem to a single cause, the worldview left no room for evidence against it. In Nazi Germany, antisemitism became an organizing principle of government.
Read together
On April 1, 1933, the regime organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses
Six days later, on April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service introduced the “Aryan paragraph,” using the Nazis’ term for the supposed non-Jewish German race. It began expelling Jews from government employment, with exemptions, chiefly for war veterans, that lasted until 1935. It was the regime’s first major law aimed at Jews by descent.
The Nazi worldview traced every problem to a single cause. Using the synthesis described here, why might that kind of explanation be harder to answer than an ordinary prejudice?
Unit 3 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The dhimma was a standing legal contract: protection of life, property, and worship for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians under Muslim rule, in exchange for the jizya tax and conditions of subordination set out in texts like the Pact of Umar. The same legal world produced the academies of Baghdad, the Hebrew golden age of Córdoba, and Jewish viziers of Granada, and also the 1066 Granada massacre, the Almohad persecutions, and the Mawza exile. A mid-eleventh-century Cairo Geniza list of people needing help paying the poll tax shows the system as families lived it, and how communities organized to carry their poor.
Read together
“We shall show deference to the Muslims and shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit down. We shall not ride on saddles… We shall not wear swords or bear weapons of any kind… We shall not build our homes higher than theirs.”
The Pact of Umar, in the translation published by Norman Stillman in The Jews of Arab Lands (1979).
Halper 468 is a list of people who could not pay the poll tax, kept so the community could pay it for them. What does this one scrap show about the difference between law as written and life as lived?
Unit 3 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged text claiming to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination, was circulating in Arabic by 1925, twenty-three years before the State of Israel was founded. That European material traveled into the Arabic-speaking world through a forgery, a radio station, a charter, and a classroom. From April 1939 until the end of the war in 1945, Nazi Germany broadcast daily Arabic-language radio programming to the Middle East and North Africa from its shortwave station at Zeesen, outside Berlin.
Read together
In 2019 the European Union commissioned the Georg Eckert Institute, a German research institute that specializes in textbook analysis, to review the curriculum of the Palestinian Authority … It described “a complex picture”: the books adopted UNESCO standards on subjects such as human rights, and they also expressed antagonism toward Israel. One religious-education textbook, in the institute’s words
“contains cumulative stereotypes and accusations that can clearly be characterised as anti-Semitic”
portraying Jews as hostile to the Prophet Muhammad and his community.
Radio in the 1940s, television in 2007, textbooks today: each medium carried the same underlying ideas to a new generation. Comparing the Zeesen broadcasts with Tomorrow’s Pioneers, what changed, and what stayed exactly the same?
Unit 3 · Ch. 11Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
Since 1920, organized violence against Jewish civilians has run in a documented line. The marker that moves an event into this Unit is selection: the documented moment when civilians are chosen as targets for being Jews or Israelis. The legal texts judge an attack by its target, not by its cause.
Read together
In 2004 the UN Security Council stated that criminal acts against civilians meant to spread terror
“are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature.”
Leon Klinghoffer was a retired American on a cruise. Stefano Gaj Taché was two years old, outside a synagogue in Rome. Neither had any connection to a battlefield. What do the diaspora attacks establish about who the target of this violence was?
Unit 3 · Ch. 12Recommended for · Grades 10–12 · College Courses
In 2024 the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States, more than twenty-five a day and the most since it began counting in 1979. Most were harassment and vandalism. Among them were 627 bomb threats against Jewish organizations, nearly nine in ten of them aimed at synagogues. Three published definitions, the Working Definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the Jerusalem Declaration, and the Nexus Document, all treat hostility to Jews as Jews and the use of old tropes as antisemitism.
Read together
Holding Jews responsible for Israel
The IHRA definition lists
“holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”
The Jerusalem Declaration lists
“holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct or treating Jews, simply because they are Jewish, as agents of Israel.”
Between 1933 and 1939, Nazi Germany stripped Jewish citizens of work, rights, citizenship, property, movement, and safety through hundreds of laws and decrees. German Jews organized to meet the crisis. In 1935 Rabbi Max Dienemann ordained Regina Jonas of Berlin, the first woman known to have been ordained a rabbi. She was deported in 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
Read together
The Reich Citizenship Law
It split German residents into two classes: “Reich citizens,” who held full rights, and “state subjects,” who did not. Only “persons of German or related blood” could be Reich citizens. The effect was to strip German Jews of their citizenship.
The Nazis built the machinery of persecution step by step for six and a half years before the war began. Choose two steps from this Chapter and explain what each one took away from Jewish Germans, and why the order of the steps mattered.
Unit 4 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Aktion T-4 was the Nazi program that murdered disabled Germans. T-4 established methods, personnel, and administrative practices that were later adapted for the mass murder of European Jews. The official halt of August 1941 followed public protest led by Bishop von Galen of Münster.
Read together
The sermon on the killings came at St. Lambert’s Church in Münster on Sunday, August 3, 1941. It included this passage:
“A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimises the violent killing of disabled persons, cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm who are no longer capable of work.”
Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, Sermon at St. Lambert’s Church, Münster (August 3, 1941).
The official halt of August 1941 came weeks after public protest led by Bishop von Galen. No comparable public protest met the murder of the Jews. Using what this Chapter says about Galen’s standing and how the regime answered him, what might explain the difference?
Unit 4 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
Before the deportation trains, there were the ghettos, sealed quarters where the Germans held Jews, sometimes for years, under starvation and forced labor. In Warsaw alone, about 83,000 people died of hunger and disease before the mass deportations began. Inside the walls, people ran secret schools for children who were forbidden to be taught.
Read together
It held part of the secret record of the Warsaw ghetto
The box is one of the ten metal boxes that held the first part of the Oneg Shabbat archive. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum started it. He gathered a hidden group of perhaps sixty people to document the life around them: the hunger and the smuggling, the schools and the deportations, the jokes, the rumors, the deaths. They met on Saturdays and took the cover name “the joy of the Sabbath.”
Emanuel Ringelblum’s circle buried their archive in milk cans. Mendel Grossman photographed the deportations in secret. An unnamed girl kept a diary. All risked their lives to make a record. What does it mean to decide that being remembered is worth that risk? C3 D2.His.10.9-12 (sources).
Unit 4 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The most important distinction is between a concentration camp and a killing center. Concentration camps were places of imprisonment, brutality, and forced labor, where prisoners died in great numbers from starvation, disease, beatings, and executions. Killing centers were built to murder entire populations on arrival.
Read together
Item 13/15 is Höfle’s message to SS officer Franz Heim, the deputy commander of the Security Police in Kraków. It is a fortnightly report on “Einsatz Reinhart,” the arrivals of the last two weeks, then the totals to December 31, 1942:
L 24733, B 434508, S 101370, T 71355, “zusammen” (together) 1274166.
The letters stand for Lublin (Majdanek), Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The Treblinka figure lost a digit in transmission: the total only adds up if it reads 713,555.
The Chapter distinguishes a concentration camp from a killing center by purpose. How would you explain that distinction to someone who has only ever heard the phrase “concentration camp”?
Unit 4 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
As many as one in three Jews murdered during the Holocaust was killed not in a camp, but at the edge of a ravine, a forest, or a field, often within sight of the communities where they had lived. Three thousand men could not kill 1.5 to 2 million people alone. Order Police battalions, the army, and local auxiliaries were part of the machinery.
Read together
Dina Pronicheva survived. Before the war she was an actress at the Kyiv Young Viewers’ Theater … On the road to the ravine she walked beside an old man in a prayer shawl who, she remembered
“prayed the same way as my father did when I was a child.”
She fell into the pit before the shots, pretended to be dead until dark, and climbed out. She testified about the massacre before a Soviet court in January 1946.
The mobile units themselves numbered only about 3,000 men. Using this Chapter’s evidence, explain how so few could kill so many: what help did they have, and from whom?
Unit 4 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The Holocaust era reached the Middle East and North Africa. The Farhud of June 1–2, 1941, was a Nazi-influenced pogrom in Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers and policemen, members of a youth movement modeled on the Hitler Youth, and city residents killed between 150 and 180 Jews. The record also includes Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, and Berber (Amazigh, the indigenous people of North Africa) rescuers, alongside collaboration and indifference.
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The sculptor titled it Prayer. It stands in Ramat Gan, a city next to Tel Aviv in Israel. It was put up by Jews who had come from Iraq, from Baghdad, where on the first two days of June 1941 mobs attacked the Jewish quarter in a wave of killing called the Farhud. The people who raised this memorial, or their parents, had lived through that, then left Iraq and built new lives here.
Memory. The Ramat Gan memorial in Israel remembers the Farhud through a reading figure rather than a depiction of the attack. What does a community communicate by how it chooses to memorialize loss, and how does that choice affect how later generations learn the history? (C3 D2.His.3, how the significance of people and events is judged differently over time.)
Unit 4 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Most accounts of the Holocaust center on persecution and mass murder. The historical record also holds thousands of acts of resistance, rescue, documentation, religious perseverance, and mutual aid. They were carried out under conditions the regime built to make them nearly impossible.
Read together
Anielewicz’s last letter, written on April 23, 1943, is among the most quoted documents of the uprising. In it he wrote (translation from the Yad Vashem edition):
“[W]hat happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. One of our companies held out for 40 minutes and another for more than 6 hours. […] The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts.”
Historians broadened the definition of “resistance” after the 1960s to include unarmed and spiritual acts. What is gained, and what might be lost, by defining resistance so broadly?
Unit 5 Jewish Contributions
Unit 5 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Today, the world’s Jewish population is estimated at roughly 15 to 16 million people, about 0.2 percent of humanity. Across science and medicine, scholarship, the arts, music, law, computing, and commerce and labor, Jewish names recur far more often than the population’s size would predict. Much of this work was done by people who were, in the same years, being expelled, barred, or hunted.
Read together
On the back of the Physics and Chemistry medals, a veiled woman, Nature, stands holding a cornucopia while a second figure, the Genius of Science, gently lifts her veil
The Latin around the rim reads, in translation, that it is good to have improved human life through discovered arts.
Many of the people on this page did their most important work after being forced to leave their home countries. How might persecution and migration affect what a community produces, and what it loses? (C3 D2.His.5)
Unit 5 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Rashi (1040–1105), a rabbi in Troyes, in northern France, wrote line-by-line explanations of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. Rashi’s documented response to 1096 is in his legal rulings: Jews forced into baptism who returned to Judaism were to be received without reproach, their standing whole. Christian scholars, including the Victorines and Nicholas of Lyra, drew extensively on Rashi’s biblical commentary, helping transmit aspects of medieval Jewish interpretation into Christian biblical scholarship.
Read together
At Genesis 3:8 he states that he is concerned only with
“the plain sense of Scripture” (peshuto shel mikra) and with rabbinic stories “that explain the words of Scripture.”
Later Jewish interpreters returned to that line again and again.
Rashi wrote short, and only where the text was hard. What does it tell you about a reader’s needs when an explainer chooses what not to comment on? (C3 D2.His.5)
Unit 5 · Ch. 03Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Driven from Córdoba by the Almohad conquest at about age ten, he wandered for eighteen years before settling in Fustat (Old Cairo), where he served as a physician in Saladin’s court circle and led Egypt’s Jewish community. Maimonides sorted the legal tradition by subject and wrote it out in clear Hebrew, so a literate Jew could look a matter up. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars read him in his own time and after, and Jewish readers have studied him without a break for more than eight hundred years.
Read together
In the twelfth century Maimonides, writing in Egypt, described a Bible codex that had been “kept in Jerusalem for many years so that scrolls could be checked from it.” He wrote that
“everyone relies upon it because it was corrected by ben Asher”
Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah, and the Torah Scroll 8:4
The same man served a Muslim ruler, was quoted by a Christian theologian, and wrote law for Jews. What does his career suggest about how ideas crossed religious lines in the medieval Mediterranean? (C3 D2.His.1)
Unit 5 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Joseph Karo (1488–1575) was driven out of Iberia as a small child and spent about forty years moving across the Ottoman world before settling in the Galilee hill town of Safed. His Shulchan Aruch (“Set Table,” 1565) condensed centuries of scattered Jewish law into one short, usable rulebook, still the standard reference for traditional Jewish practice today. Because Karo’s rulings leaned Sephardic, the Polish rabbi Moses Isserles added notes (the Mappah, “Tablecloth”) with Ashkenazi practice, making one book that served both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews.
Read together
More than 450 years later, the combined book, Karo’s table plus Isserles’s cloth, is still studied by rabbis, students, and observant Jews as a first reference for questions of practice
A refugee from Spain and a rabbi of Kraków share one page.
Karo’s “Set Table” and Isserles’s “Tablecloth” let two different traditions share one book instead of splitting into two. Why might a shared reference matter to a scattered people? (C3 D2.His.1)
Unit 5 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) became a celebrated figure of the European Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century movement that put reason and open debate above inherited authority, and he remained an observant Jew. He became the leading figure of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and his Torah translation, German in Hebrew letters, taught standard German to Jewish readers through the Bible. His question, how to be fully Jewish and fully modern, drew three answers in Reform, Neo-Orthodoxy, and Frankel’s school, and it is still debated.
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Mendelssohn’s Torah translation with its Bi’ur commentary set German words in Hebrew letters, in a single line of type.
The Leo Baeck Institute, the archive of German-speaking Jewry, preserves early editions.
State Mendelssohn’s question in your own words. Do immigrant families you know face a similar choice between entering the surrounding culture and keeping apart?
Unit 5 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
The blue jean began with Jacob Davis, a Jewish tailor in Reno who riveted pocket corners and needed a partner to pay for a patent. Strauss’s firm paid, and Patent No. 139,121 was granted May 20, 1873, to Davis and the firm together. Strauss never married. He supported Jewish charities in his lifetime and left bequests to Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant orphanages.
Read together
So in 1872 he wrote to his fabric supplier in San Francisco and offered a deal. In his own spelling, he wrote:
“for these $68 I will give you half the right to sell all such clothing revited according to the patent.”
Bavaria’s Matrikel capped how many Jewish households a town could hold. Trace the chain from that registry to a garment now worn all over the world. Which links in the chain were choices, and which were forced?
Unit 5 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), an American Sephardic poet mentored by Emerson, wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 for an auction raising money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. The poem followed her work with refugees from the Russian pogroms of 1881–82, whom she visited on Ward’s Island and taught in New York. The poem calls the statue the Mother of Exiles.
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“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883, as she copied it into her notebook of poems.
Lazarus wrote the poem’s welcome after her work with pogrom refugees. Read the sonnet above with that fact in mind: which lines change when you know who she was picturing?
Unit 5 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) was born to a Dutch-Jewish family in a London tenement, left the Jews’ Free School at ten to work, and came to New York’s Lower East Side at thirteen. The cigar shop became his school. He helped found the American Federation of Labor in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 1886, and served as its president for thirty-seven of its first thirty-eight years, until his death.
Read together
He took up the question in an 1893 speech in Chicago, “What Does Labor Want?” Part of his answer reads:
“We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge.”
Gompers left school at ten, yet the cigar shop, where one worker read aloud to the others, gave him an education. What does his story say about where learning happens, and who pays for it?
Unit 5 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was an assimilated Viennese journalist who became the founder of modern political Zionism, the movement for a sovereign Jewish state. In roughly eight years, from 1896 to his death in 1904, he built the machinery to carry that idea. It included a political movement, a regular congress, a worldwide organization, and a diplomatic campaign conducted as if a stateless people already had a seat at the table.
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In September 1897, after the First Zionist Congress at Basel, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary:
“At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.”
The State of Israel was founded fifty years and eight months after he wrote those words.
Herzl died in 1904 having achieved none of his diplomatic goals, yet a state arose in 1948 along the lines he had drawn. How do we measure the influence of someone who set events in motion but did not live to see them? (C3 D2.His.14)
Unit 5 · Ch. 10Recommended for · Grades 6–12 · College Courses
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) became world-famous for his physics. His place in Jewish history rests on his life as a refugee, an activist, and a public Jewish figure. Driven out of Nazi Germany in 1933, with a bounty on his head reported in the press, he used his name to help other Jewish refugees escape and became a leading public critic of the regime. In 1952 he was asked to become president of the new State of Israel.
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Einstein said no. He wrote back the next day, on November 18
“I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel,” he wrote, “and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.”
Einstein used his fame to vouch for refugees the immigration system would otherwise have turned away. What does that tell you about how fame can function as a kind of power? (C3 D2.His.1)
Unit 5 · Ch. 11Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Universal, Paramount, Fox, MGM, Warner Bros., and Columbia were all founded or led by Jewish immigrants or children of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, within roughly a dozen years. Largely shut out of established industries, the founders entered the new and looked-down-on nickelodeon business and built the Hollywood studio system. Carl Laemmle, Universal’s founder, signed affidavits for more than 300 German Jews in his final years.
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His April 12, 1938, letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, asking that the American consulate in Stuttgart speed its work, survives in the National Archives. In it he wrote that he felt it
“the solemn duty of every Jew in America who can afford it”
The Chapter sets aside explanations based on a supposed group talent. Why is a flattering group explanation still a stereotype, and what explanation does the record support instead?
Unit 5 · Ch. 12Recommended for · Grades 7–12 · College Courses
Jonas Salk (1914–1995), raised in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family and the first member of it to attend college, led the team that developed the killed-virus vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh with March of Dimes funding. The March of Dimes, the national polio charity funded by the coins of ordinary families, backed him. He never patented his vaccine, and he earned no money from it.
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On the evening of the announcement, Edward R. Murrow interviewed Salk on CBS television and asked who owned the patent on the vaccine. Salk’s answer, preserved on film:
“Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Salk is quoted as saying, “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” Which of his choices on this page meet that standard, and what would meeting it look like where you live?
Unit 6 Memory, Responsibility, and Today
Unit 6 · Ch. 01Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
The killing stopped at liberation in 1944–45, but the survivors’ ordeal did not: roughly a quarter-million Jewish Displaced Persons could not go home, and lived in DP camps until as late as 1957. Life in the DP camps went beyond waiting. The 1948 founding of Israel and the U.S. Displaced Persons Act of 1948 opened the doors that finally emptied the camps.
Read together
“From bondage to freedom, from darkness to a great light.”
Title-page inscription of the Survivors’ Talmud, an edition of the central text of Jewish learning printed by Holocaust survivors with the U.S. Army on German presses, 1948
In the DP camps, survivors married, had children, published newspapers, staged theater, and printed the Survivors’ Talmud. What do these choices suggest about how survivors understood their situation, and what evidence on this page supports your reading?
Unit 6 · Ch. 02Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–46) tried a defeated nation’s leaders for “crimes against humanity” for the first time. The Nuremberg Charter ruled out “I was only following orders” as a defense, and the trials assembled much of the documentary record. The Eichmann trial of 1961 put the organizer of the deportations in a Jerusalem courtroom and moved survivor testimony to the center of the record.
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The Allies could have executed these men without trial, and Winston Churchill had at one point favored summary execution. Instead they chose a courtroom. Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor, explained why in his opening statement
“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
Reporting the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, she argued the man in the glass booth was an ordinary functionary rather than a monster. She did not argue that this made him less guilty. Later research on Eichmann’s own writings showed that he was a committed Nazi.
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Her Epilogue ends with the judgment she would have had the court give him:
“This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
“The banality of evil” became one of the most argued-over phrases of the twentieth century. From this Chapter’s account, what exactly did Arendt claim about Eichmann, and what did her critics say she got wrong?
Unit 6 · Ch. 04Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The problem had no legal precedent. Historians credit Luxembourg money with helping to build the national water company Mekorot, the Israel Electric Corporation, the Zim shipping line, the railways, and much of the country’s early infrastructure. More than seventy years after Israel and West Germany signed the Luxembourg Agreement, monthly payments still reach elderly survivors around the world.
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“In the name of the German people, unspeakable crimes were committed which call for moral and material compensation.”
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, address to the Bundestag, its parliament, 27 September 1951
International law at war’s end covered only reparations between warring states. In 1951 twenty-three Jewish organizations founded the Claims Conference. Whom did it speak for, and why was it needed?
Unit 6 · Ch. 05Recommended for · Grades 8–12 · College Courses
Laws, museums, archives, remembrance days, and name databases for Holocaust memory were built deliberately across more than sixty years. Israel built the first national framework: Yom HaShoah in 1951 and Yad Vashem in 1953, whose Hall of Names has recovered about 4.9 million names. As the survivor generation ages, their families have organized to carry the testimony forward.
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The name says what the place is for
Yad vashem is an ancient Hebrew phrase meaning “a memorial and a name.” It comes from Isaiah 56:5, which promises a name that “shall not be cut off.”
Israel built an entire national institution around that promise: to give back a name to people the Nazis had tried to reduce to numbers.
The Stolpersteine set memory into the pavement outside a victim’s last home instead of inside a museum. What happens to a person who trips over a name in the street that cannot happen behind glass?
Unit 6 · Ch. 06Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
In about 1,600 words, issued October 28, 1965, the Catholic Church reversed teachings about the Jewish people that had run through its preaching and instruction for most of two thousand years. One starting point was a meeting: the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac, a Holocaust survivor, met Pope John XXIII in June 1960. Six decades of partnership followed, through later Vatican documents and formal dialogue institutions.
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On guilt for the death of Jesus, the sentence opens with a concession: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.” It continues:
“still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”
One starting point of the document was a 1960 meeting between a pope and Jules Isaac, a Jewish historian whose wife and daughter were murdered at Auschwitz. What does Isaac’s role show about how large institutions come to change?
Unit 6 · Ch. 07Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
The Holocaust is among the most thoroughly documented crimes in history, recorded by the perpetrators, the Allied armies, and the survivors, and confirmed under oath at Nuremberg. Denial carries a hidden charge, that Jews invented or exaggerated the genocide. Denial reuses a small set of recognizable techniques, so it can be identified and answered from the record.
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The historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom David Irving sued for libel … Lipstadt has said
“The only reason to deny the Holocaust is to inculcate and foster antisemitism.”
There are not two sides to whether a documented genocide occurred. Where is the line between questioning sources, a core historical skill, and staging a settled fact as an open debate?
Unit 6 · Ch. 08Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Across Germany, and in a few places beyond it, medieval carvings made to insult Jews are still fixed to churches that are in use today. Such a carving is both a standing insult to a living people and evidence of how antisemitism was taught. Three kinds of answer recur: recontextualize the object, repudiate the idea behind it, and refute the lie when it returns.
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German courts, up to the Federal Court of Justice in 2022, declined to order it taken down … The Federal Court of Justice described the relief as antisemitism
“carved in stone.”
It found, however, that the parish had distanced itself from the carving through the memorial and the explanatory text on site, which present it as a warning.
Compare the Judensau to one modern example on the page: a Soviet statue, a colonial figure, or a Confederate monument. What makes the choices feel alike, and what makes them different?
Unit 6 · Ch. 09Recommended for · Grades 9–12 · College Courses
Antisemitism is far older than the Nazis, and it outlasted their defeat in 1945. Postwar Germany underwent denazification, a public, forced reckoning that discredited the ideology where the defeat reached, but the Nazi project had already exported its antisemitism to places that never went through that process.
Read together
The clearest traceable carrier is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: exposed as a forgery in 1921, embraced by the Nazis, translated and circulated worldwide, and still in print today
“The Truth About the Protocols: A Literary Forgery.”
“Old myth, new costume”: take one historical myth from an earlier Unit and trace how its core accusation could reappear in a form a modern audience would recognize.
