Introduction
The European Jewish History collection is comprised primarily of printed and electronic bibliographical works and primary sources, with the addition of a number of reference works, devoted to the history of Europe’s Jewish communities from the early medieval period to the present day.
General material in the European Jewish History collection is at the classmark EY, but material on this subject is also held across many of the other collections found in the library.
Most of the physical material we currently have is devoted to the Holocaust, comprising of personal accounts of both the victims of and those who oversaw the genocide, historical bibliographies and archive guides as well as secondary monographs that discuss the development of Holocaust historiography and the nature of how it is remembered.
Other present strengths include works on Jewish historiography, biographical reference resources, as well as electronic access to Yiddish source materials.
Highlights from the Collections
Guides to Sources
General Historiography
- Changing the immutable: how Orthodox Judaism rewrites its history
- From anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism: ancient and medieval constructions of Jewish history
- Haskalah and history: the emergence of a modern Jewish historical consciousness
- Historical consciousness, Haskalah, and nationalism among the Karaites of Eastern Europe
- How Jewish is Jewish history?
- The Jewish past revisited: reflections on modern Jewish historians
- Martin Luthers "Judenschriften": die Rezeption im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
- Medieval Jews and the Christian past: Jewish historical consciousness in Spain and Southern France
- Propheten des Vergangenen: jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
- Prophets of the past: interpreters of Jewish history
- Rethinking European Jewish history
- Visualizing and exhibiting Jewish space and history
- Zakhor: Jewish history and Jewish memory
General Titles and Reference Works
Medieval Jewish History
Selected titles include:
- Abrabham Ibn Daud's Dorot 'olam (Generations of the ages)
- Christian attitudes towards the Jews in the Middle Ages: a sourcebook
- Debating truth: the Barcelona disputations of 1263
- The Jews in the legal sources of the early Middle Ages
- The Jews in Western Europe 1400-1600
- Judaisim on trial: Jewish-Christian disputations in the Middle Ages
- "On everyone's lips": humanists, Jews and the tale of Simon of Trent
- Pesher nahum: texts and studies in Jewish history and literature from Antiquity through the Middle Ages presented to Norman (Nahum) Golb
- Regional identities and cultures of medieval Jews
- Studies in medieval Jewish intellectual and social history: Festschrift in honor of Robert Chazan
- The trial of the Talmud, Paris 1240
From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century
Selected titles include:
- La beauté du diable:portrait de Sabbataï Zevi
- Du rappel des Juifs, 1643
- Jewish culture in early modern Europe: essays in honour of David B. Ruderman
- The Jewish state
- Jews and diaspora nationalism: writings on Jewish peoplehood in Europe and the United States
- The Jews, instructions for use: four eighteenth century projects for the emancipation of the European Jews
- The Jews' mirror
- The rise of Reform Judaism: a sourcebook of its European origins
- Sabbatai Zevi: testimonies to a fallen messiah
- Theodor Herzls Tagebücher
The Twentieth Century
See the separate section below for our Holocaust collection. A selection from our holdings includes:
European Jewish Communities
Other Collections
Within the IHR Wohl Library
Browse collection guides to find material relevant to your particular area of interest. Other collections that may be relevant include:
Other libraries, archives, organisations
Further Help
Contact us if you would like help on finding or using our collections, or if you have any comments or suggestions about the content of this guide. We are happy to help.
You can also book a tour or training session.
The Holocaust
Guides to sources
A selection of titles include:
- Aosof tiodot il Shoah Yahudi Germaniah (Hativah arkivot 0-8)
- Aosof tiodot il Shoah Yahudi Yugoslawiah (Hativah arkivot 0-10)
- Aosof tiodot imasamkom il halekem sal Yehudi Tsekoslivakiah bi-mavak bi-Germaniah ha-Natsiot (Hativah arkivot 0-59)
- Holocaust literature: a handbook of critical, historical and literary writings
- Memorial books of Eastern European Jewry: essays on the history and meanings of Yizker volumes
- Numbered days: diaries and the Holocaust
- Shoah e deportazione: guida bibliografica
Holocaust Historiography and Memory
- After the Holocaust: challenging the myth of silence
- Anxious histories: narrating the Holocaust in Jewish communities at the beginning of the twenty-first century
- Britain and the Holocaust: remembering and representing war and genocide
- Historians at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial: their role as expert witnesses
- The Holocaust and the revival of psychological history
- The Holocaust and the West German historians: historical interpretation and autobiographical memory
- Holocaust historiography in context: emergence, challenges, polemics and achievements
- Holocaust memory in the digital age: survivors' stories and new media practices
- Holocaust representations in history: an introduction
- Israeli Holocaust research: birth and evolution
- Jewish histories of the Holocaust: new transnational approaches
- The Jews of Italy, 1938-1945: an analysis of revisionist historians
- New approaches to an integrated history of the Holocaust: social history, representation, theory
- Witnessing witnessing: on the reception of Holocaust survivor testimony
Memory and Commemoration
- Auschwitz, Poland, and the politics of commemoration, 1945-1979
- Commemorating the Holocaust: the dilemmas of rememberance in France and Italy
- Holocaust angst: the Federal Republic of Germany and American Holocaust memory since the 1970s
- Holocaust consciousness in contemporary Britain
- Holocaust public memory in postcommunist Romania
- Holocaust rememberance between the national and transnational: the Stockholm International Forum and the first decade of the International Task Force
- Jewish Poland revisited: heritage tourism in unquiet places
- Marking evil: Holocaust memory in the global age
- Memorializing the Holocaust: gender, genocide and collective memory
- Multidirectional memory: remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization
- Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust tourism and the meaning of remembrance
The Holocaust on Film and Television
- After the fact: the Holocaust in twenty-first century documentary film
- Conflicts of memory: the reception of Holocaust films and TV programmes in Italy, 1945 to the present
- Memories of resistance and the Holocaust on film
- Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the politics of commemoration
Holocaust Denial
- Gli assassini della memoria: saggi sul revisionismo e la Shoah
- Denying history: who says the Holocaust never happended and why do they say it?
- Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory
- Holocaust and genocide denial: a contextual perspective
- Telling lies about Hitler: the Holocaust, history and the David Irving trial
General Titles and Reference Works
- Children during the Holocaust
- Fifty key thinkers on the Holocaust and genocide
- Historical dictionary of the Holocaust
- The history of the Holocaust in Romania
- Holocaust and Antisemitism: research and public discourse: essays presented in honor of Dina Porat
- The Holocaust encyclopedia
- The Holocaust in Hungary: evolution of a genocide
- The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
- Jewish responses to persecution
- The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia
- Microhistories of the Holocaust
- Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Middle East: Arab and Turkish responses
- The Oxford handbook of Holocaust studies
- The participants: the men of the Wannsee Conference
- La resistenza silenziosa: leggi razziste e deportazione nella memoria degli ebrei di Roma
- Time's witnesses: women's voices from the Holocaust
- Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das Nationalsozialistiche Deutschland 1933-1945
- War, pacification and mass murder, 1939: the Einsatzgruppen in Poland
- Women's experiences in the Holocaust: in their own words
Personal Accounts
This sizeable section of the Holocaust collection includes published witness testimonies, narratives and diaries. A selection of present titles includes:
Czechoslovakia
- Boy 30529: a memoir
- Helga's diary: a young girl's account of life in a concentration camp
- The Terezin diary of Gonda Redlich
France
- J'étais le numéro 20832 à Auschwitz
- Les jours obscurs: Épernay 1939-1945: témoignages de survivants de la Shoah
- Lettres de Buchenwald
- Passeport pour Auschwitz: correspondance d'un médicin du camp de Drancy
- Le pull-over de Buchenwald: "j'avais 14 ans dans les camps de la mort"
Germany
- The evil that surrounds us: the WWII memoir of Erna Becker Cohen
- Auswanderung vorläufig nicht möglich : die Geschichte der Familie Herskovits aus Hannover
- Mein liebes Ilsekind : mit dem Kindertransport nach Schweden - Briefe an eine gerettete Tochter
- My darkest years : memoirs of a survivor of Auschwitz, Warsaw and Dachau
Hungary
- How it happened: documenting the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry
- Auschwitz : a doctor's eyewitness account
- When the Danube ran red
Italy
- Lettere e pagine di diario (1938-1946)
- Il futuro della memoria : conversazioni con Nedo Fiano, Liliana Segre e Piero Terracina, testimoni della Shoah
- Inside the gas chambers : eight months in the Sonderkimmando of Auschwitz
Netherlands
- Het Achterhuis : dagboekbrieven 12 juni 1942-1 augustus 1944
- The complete works 1941-1943 - Etty Hillesum
- Dat alles heeft mijn oog gezien : herinneringen aan het concentratiekamp Theresienstadt 1942-1945
Poland
Ghettos - Concentration Camps - Death Camps
- Auschwitz testimonies, 1945-1986
- Der Judenrat von Bialystok : Dokumente aus dem archiv des Bialystoker Ghetto 1941-1943
- K. L. B : journal de Buchenwald, 1943 - 1945
- The Kishinev ghetto, 1941-1942 : a documentary history of the Holocaust in Romania's contested borderlands
- Matters of testimony : interpreting the scrolls of Auschwitz
- Theresienstadt, 1941-1945 : the face of a coerced community
- I verbali degli interrogatori sovietici degli ingegneri della Topf : le dichiarazioni di Kurt Prüfer, Karl Schultze, Fritz Sander e Gustav Braun su "camere a gas" e forni crematori di Auschwitz : analisi storico-tecnica
- Chris Webb series
- Who will write our history? : rediscovering a hidden archive from the Warsaw ghetto