The end of the war followed by the final crisis of Unionism forced the minorities to undergo profound changes. They first lived through a time of mourning – for the famed ‘blood sacrifice’ of a generation in the war, but also for the passing of the Union. Then they experienced the need to adapt rapidly to the new political system which was emerging from a revolution which they had not supported. For the Jewish people, much more important than the 1916 Proclamation was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whose importance is discussed in the third section of this chapter. The latter also introduces Christian Zionism, a well-represented view among southern Protestants. Between the end of the First World War and the 1921 Treaty, Irish Protestants and Jews were similar not only in their relation to the new order, where their priority was safeguarding their continued existence as distinctive communities, but also in the way they behaved when they found themselves in a position of power – as Protestants did in Northern Ireland and Jews in the Zionist settlements in Palestine.

This chapter considers ‘minority’ and other interpretative concepts, in the historical the context created by the break up of the Union in Ireland Partition was ultimately about one question: religious minorities and their oppression – real or imagined, anticipated or remembered. Far from being introverted and parochial, many of these people displayed an exceptional awareness of contemporary global challenges and opportunities: they were intrinsically transnational in terms of background, instincts, and interests. For both Jews and Protestants, religion encoded centuries of conflict but also of practices of everyday compromise. In its political application, religion provided these groups with their main source of self-awareness and underpinned their distinctive understandings of both Unionism and Irish nationalism, and indeed Zionism, which was itself a radical form of minority politics. Empowered but also limited by partly segregated institutional and social environments, the minority mind encompassed both culture and identity.

Portugal, Castile, and Catalonia completed separate reconquests of Muslim territory. In 1469, Princess Isabel of Castile married her cousin, Prince Fernando of Aragón. After inheriting their respective thrones, they fought a war establishing separate areas of the world for Portugal and Castile to explore. In 1492, they defeated the last Muslim king of Granada and allowed Christopher Columbus to seek a westward route to Asia for Castile, avoiding the Portuguese route eastward. Instead of Asia, he happened upon the Americas, which had been unknown to European cosmography. That same year, the monarchs expelled Jewish subjects who refused to convert to Christianity, two centuries after England and France had done so. Isabel and Fernando established a religious inquisition to enforce Christian orthodoxy on the population as a whole, including new converts. In another decision with far-reaching consequences, they arranged marriages for their children with Portugal, France, England, and the Habsburgs of Central Europe. The unplanned consequence of the Habsburg alliance, together with a series of premature deaths, left their grandson, Charles of Ghent, heir to a large collection of territories in Europe, as well as all the lands claimed for Castile in the Americas.

Barred from many employments, Jewish artists entered the music industry and produced a twentieth-century canon of Tin Pan Alley hits, show tunes, and jazz standards combining light opera, sophistication, and Black music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat (1936) set a new paradigm: its “Ol’ Man River” blends minstrelsy, classical music, and spirituals. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) fused European influences with blues, foxtrot, ragtime, and jazz. His “I Got Rhythm” (1930) is among history’s most influential jazz compositions, and his jazz opera Porgy and Bess (1935) boldly depicts Black experience. Gershwin’s union of lowbrow-highbrow, Jewish and African American music created a radical multicultural art. Although recent scholars accuse Gershwin, Kern, and others of cultural exploitation, many Black jazz artists embraced their music. Even Duke Ellington, who denounced Porgy and Bess, eventually recorded it and imitated Gershwin’s chord progressions and rhythms.

Chapter 3 considers how evolving demands for uniformity fit into the cultural norms of political institutions in late antiquity. It uses reports on (supposed) pagans, heretics, Jews, and Samaritans in service to sketch out the contours of those demands in practice. While these exemplary stories cannot be used to substantiate the presence of these groups in administration, they can help us understand when and why the perceived divergence of a ruler’s subordinates from his version of correct religion mattered. Their continued service is, in part, a reflection of the continued capacity of rulers and their subordinates to put requirements for religious uniformity to one side. This chapter argues that it was also a result of the precise framing of those requirements. Late ancient laws tended to portray orthodox Christian officials as necessary to ensure laws on correct religion were enforced. It is easy to see how those heterodox officials willing to uphold a Christian political dispensation could continue to serve in political institutions. In that sense, the appointments of non-Christians and heretics should be seen, not as a breach of requirements for uniformity, but a product of their specific contours.

Chapter 1 considers the evolving significance of a putative ideal of religious uniformity for the makeup of political institutions in late antiquity. It suggests that we have the chronology of the Christianisation of late ancient bureaucracies back to front. It was only when those elites became predominantly Christian that religious uniformity within the state became a feasible goal for individual regimes. In that sense, for the Christianisation of the Roman state, the conversion of the Roman aristocracy only represents the beginning of the story. This chapter thus pursues the question of religious uniformity further into late antiquity, by considering the developing understanding of what was required to ensure an appropriately (orthodox) Christian state in the fifth and sixth centuries. It argues that requirements for (orthodox) Christian administrators were not simply an axiomatic assumption of late (and post-)Roman regimes, but a product of shifts in institutional norms and wider cultural assumptions across the fourth to sixth centuries.

Gaining resonance from 1918, pacifism joined socialist internationalism and Communists’ novel militancy. The League of Nations drew much of that sentiment, from refugees and humanitarian relief through public health and the ILO to nutritional science and development economics, claiming economic planning, scientific and technological transfer, and humanitarian cooperation for new networked expertise. Self-consciously “Europeanist” initiatives formed, including fascist ideas of a united European “great space” under Mussolini and Hitler. By 1936–1939, imperialist visions of a New Europe made population politics key to international revisionism, exchanging self-determination and minority protections for greater-national expansion and population removal. Brutally radicalized by the Nazis’ Kristallnacht (November 1938), antisemitism became a violent driver. In 1937–1941, anti-Jewish laws reversed earlier emancipation – from Poland and Romania, through Italy and Hungary, to Czecho-Slovakia, Croatia, and Vichy France. That was the ugly backcloth to Hitler’s drive for war. In September 1939, vitally enabled by Franco-British appeasement and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Hitler invaded Poland.

This chapter considers modernity from the perspective of the self-fashioning subject, stressing both the centrality of Jews to European modernity and their precarity. It pairs two contexts of change: the central-European crucible of Jewish modernity from the 1880s to 1920s; and the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian-related thought. Torn between assimilation and collective identification against discrimination and antisemitism, many exchanged rural Judaism for emancipated intellectuality and leftwing political action. By the 1920s, a transnationally scaled antagonism pitted cosmopolitanism and this mobile intellectual culture of the highly educated against exclusivist ideas of national belonging. Freud’s life and career exemplified those histories. As a “scientific” approach to the study of mind, consciousness, and emotions, Freudianism reached far beyond the professional therapeutics of psychoanalysis itself. It joined far wider thinking about personhood and the unconscious, including other psychologies, spiritualism, esoteric knowledge, and the occult. It appealed to anyone seeking enlightenment by means of a self-consciously crafted modern self.

When they invested in steamboats, railroads, roads, education, communication routes, and other infrastructure, Feliciana elites advanced the national and global transportation revolution. They used enslaved convict laborers to build railroads and to work on them. Meanwhile, small numbers of immigrants moved there, including German Jews in St. Francisville. They lived alongside free Black residents, a group who also occupied a precarious position. Some free Black people acquired property and exercised limited citizenship rights. This all rested on chattel slavery, and between 1800 and 1860 this region became central to the early republic and cotton production. But in this “Age of Emancipations,” these bondspersons survived, celebrated, and sometimes resisted.

The chapter opens with comments on autobiographical writings by Petrarch, Augustine, Uriel da Costa, Franciscus Junius, Ludvig Freiherr von Holberg, Jan Amos Komenský, and Leibniz. There are seen as attempts to make sense of one’s own life circumstances, while aware that absolute knowledge of one’s own life is not possible. This is particularly salient when it comes to understanding one’s sufferings. Following this, there is a discussion of the concepts of public and fatherland, comparing contemporary times to olden times, primarily Greek and Roman antiquity. The public is understood as a kind of collective moral and legal arbiter, and language plays an important role in its existence. This is seen to be particularly important for what is called a public of the Hebrews. The contemporary public is that of Christianity, but also of commerce, schools, and universities. A fatherland is explained in terms of familial bond to a community and a link in the chain of humanity. This is followed by a discussion of Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius, and Leibniz.

The chapter provides a summary history of the Jews in Berlin following their readmittance in 1670 through to the period of the births of Fanny and Felix. It notes the relationship of Moses Mendelssohn with figures of the Berlin Enlightenment and the consequent parallel development of the Haskalah movement with the growing interest by prominent Jewish families in Gentile culture and Bildung, exemplified by the Berlin Jewish salons. The decision – or rather attempt – of Abraham Mendelssohn to dissociate from Judaism on the part of himself and his family is placed in the context of the development of German nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish reform movement.

This chapter provides an examination of the complex beginning and ending of the Spanish Inquisition, with attention to the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1391, the ambiguous religious status of those converts in the fifteenth century, and the creation of yet another new generation of converts after the Jewish Expulsion of 1492. The aims of Ferdinand and Isabella are explored, as is the resistance to the Inquisition’s creation. The essay explores the attempted abolition of the Spanish Inquisition in 1808, with Napoleon’s invasion, as well as the contested legal relevance of the Inquisition in the 1812 Cortes of Cádiz, and the institution’s gradual extinction from 1814 to 1834.

Chapter 6 considers how the legal system dealt with theft, damage to property, personal insult, and violence, and how citizens obtained redress. The law of obligations is important since, for example, theft, the most common action that modern law defines under criminal law, was under Roman law a delict, prosecuted through action taken by the injured party on the basis of an obligation on the wrongdoer to make restitution. Therefore, the Romans distinguished between a delict and a crimen, which was punished by public penalty after formal trial. In the legal definition of unlawful killing, injury, outrage, and loss, concepts of negligence, deceit, and causation emerged in assessing responsibility. We then consider the definition of theft and robbery, the remedies available for plaintiffs, and the main criminal offences tried in the public jury courts. Those who did not conform with the religious establishment and social conventions, for example, magicians, Jews, and Christians, faced pursuit and prosecution.

This chapter considers the deployment of radical Orientalism as a mode of political critique in the popular fiction of the bestselling Chartist leader and author George W. M. Reynolds. It focuses on the structural congruences between the depictions of aristocratic debauchery in his two Mysteries series (1844–8; 1848–56) and the figuration of Old Corruption as in league with the Jewish sweater in ‘The Seamstress’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany (1850). Examination of this alignment permits a discussion of the mutable hierarchies within the category of the People at mid-nineteenth century, focused specifically on those groups excluded from full political rights: the working-class man, women, and Jews. It considers how Reynolds’s use of radical literary-political tropes positions Jews as Occidental in matters of parliamentary democracy, but designates them Oriental when the sweating system that they are understood to represent is figured as an atavistic, foreign, and unchristian form of economics.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 marked a fundamental change in both the scope and systematic nature of Nazi mass violence. Over the course of the next three years, German warfare and rule in the occupied Soviet territories caused death and suffering on an unprecedented scale. It is particularly the death toll among civilians and other non-combatants that stands out here. The majority of Soviet war dead comprised civilians and unarmed, captured soldiers. In deliberate policies of mass murder, German forces killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 2.6 million Jews, more than 2 million residents of Soviet cities, 30,000 Roma, at least 17,000 psychiatric patients, and up to 600,000 rural-dwelling civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations. The military operations of the German-Soviet War cannot be addressed independently of mass murder in this theatre, where 10 million Wehrmacht soldiers were stationed at one time or another between 1941 and 1944. The number of Wehrmacht divisions deployed on the Eastern Front in which no war crimes were committed was low, and members of the Wehrmacht may indeed have made up the majority of those responsible for large-scale crimes committed here by the German Reich.

This chapter examines the role religion played in the prosecution of the American Revolution. It explains the way that Revolutionary leaders often utilized religious language in their public appeals, translating justifications for rebellion from terms of Enlightenment reason and international law to religious terms. This chapter also demonstrates how the Continental Congress coopted hundreds of American clergymen as spokesmen for the independence. Finally, it demonstrates how religious beliefs – and religious identities – were affected by the Revolution, including conflicts over liturgy and fractures within religious communities over politicized public rituals such as days of fasting and prayer. Although Protestant Christian denominations were the most numerous in the colonies at the time of the Revolution, this chapter considers the experiences of American Catholics and Jews as well.

This second chapter on Julian’s Against the Galileans traces the second movement of Julian’s strategy of narrative subsumption: charting the apostasies that cascaded from, first, the Hellenic and, then, the Hebrew traditions, culminating in the Christian sect. Having pointed out the basic compatibility between Hebrew and Hellenic doctrine, Julian emphasizes next the most significant difference between the two: the glaring inferiority of the Hebrew to the Hellenic tradition. This basic framework makes sense of Julian’s claim that Christians are double apostates: Christians started out as Hellenes, and their first mistake was of degree rather than kind: they opted for the lesser Hebrew tradition, rather than the Hellenic one. They latched onto a deviation within the Hebrew tradition, however, which became the grounds for their second apostasy, now away from the Hebrews, to create a new sect.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.