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This chapter examines the Kielce pogrom. On July 4, 1946, the most horrifying outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland took place in Kielce. On that day, ordinary citizens of this central Polish town, together with soldiers and militiamen, murdered forty Polish Jews and injured more than a hundred. This was not an isolated act of anti-Jewish violence in this early post-war period, but one of many such events which took place between 1945 and 1947. Nevertheless, it was striking because of its dimensions, because of the brutality with which it was accompanied, and because of the participation of local forces representing the new communist authority. The Kielce pogrom was the most powerful indicator that Jews were not to be welcomed to restore their lives among the ethnic Polish population. The chapter then assesses the extent to which anti-Jewish attitudes were prevalent among Polish society during and after the Kielce pogrom.

This chapter considers the stance of the Jews of Poznań during the tumultuous Spring of Nations in 1848. It attempts to put an end to the simplifications, myths, and stereotypes in the historical literature concerning the Spring of Nations in the Poznań region. With a few exceptions, the stereotypes formed in 1848 in evaluations of the attitude of Poznań's Jews have been continually and uncritically repeated, and, as a result, have become established in historical literature. In many publications, the judgement of authors has additionally been clouded by emotion and bias, not to mention occasionally even partisanship or hatred. Therefore, the chapter seeks to re-evaluate the attitude of the Jews in the Grand Duchy of Poznań to the events of the Springtime of the Nations in a way that is free of oversimplification. Because of its limited framework, the chapter only summarizes and gives a critique of the literature on the subject to date. It also pays some attention to how the events of 1848 resonated beyond the Duchy.

This chapter explores questions about Judaism, disability, and technology from the vantage point of a group of documentary film-makers and other activists concerned with the place of the physically and mentally disabled within modern Ashkenazic Jewish community. The chapter examines a series of films that document religious, scientific, and popular conceptions of Jewish community as a shared genetic heritage, the ways such evidence has been used to silence or hide the presence of disabled Jews, and the strategies deployed by activists to re-imagine Jewish kinship and to redefine the notion of the human as made in God's image. Examples discussed include: Liebe Perla, a film about a short-statured Holocaust survivor; Praying with Lior, which focuses on the religious life of a Jewish boy with Down syndrome; and the recent proliferation of Internet-mediated forums for “cyber-kinship” that are enabling Jews born with genetic diseases to network with one another and to achieve a visible presence that is transforming Jewish public culture.

This chapter focuses on the prohibition of robbery, which is based on the principle that society is necessary for human flourishing. And a central element of the construction of any human society is property, or the relation of persons to things, especially in economic transactions. The rabbinic tradition makes fine distinctions between Jews and gentiles regarding robbery, ultimately creating a double standard. Although the practical effects of a socially unfair law were removed, the rabbis maintained that Noahide law remained stricter than Jewish law regarding robbery. Like other violations of the Noahide commandments, the penalty was assumed to be death. In atypical historical circumstances—especially times of war or oppression—the rabbinic supposition was that all gentile robbery was aggressive and occurred because of anti-Jewish attitudes and not greed. Because the crime was ideological and not practical, its intent was far more lethal and therefore any act of robbery, no matter how minor, was to be punished with death.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the degree of cultural embeddedness that was manifest among the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz with regard to their beliefs and practices surrounding the dead and their world. Medieval Ashkenaz as a cultural milieu included the Jewish communities of Germany (the empire north of the Alps), France north of the Loire, and England. Historians of western Europe have documented major transformations in attitudes and practices related to death and the hereafter which took place in that period. One such transformation consisted of a movement away from the perception of death as a generalized, objective experience and towards a more subjective, individualized notion of it. Belief in personal judgement after the death of the individual similarly became widespread at the time. Historians of medieval Jewry have also pointed to the primacy of the high medieval period in the shaping of Jewish practices and attitudes regarding the dead. Bearing in mind the simultaneous shifts in consciousness and praxis within both the dominant culture of Christian Europe and the subculture of medieval Ashkenaz, the book seeks to discover whether these changes were related or merely coincidental. It assesses how far death-related beliefs and practices that circulated in the Germano-Christian environment of the time penetrated Sefer ḥasidim, the great religious-ethical work of the Pietists.

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings and main points of the book. What this study has revealed is that Jewish attitudes towards the dead and the hereafter in medieval Ashkenaz resembled more those of their Christian neighbours than those of their rabbinic ancestors of talmudic times. The unconscious interiorization, within Ashkenazi society, of Germano-Christian beliefs, customs, and fears about the dead — a result of acculturation — is clearly manifest. Although popular in origin, these practices, beliefs, customs, and fears were found among both elite groups and ordinary people within this small medieval Jewish enclave. Even the literary mediums through which the material was conveyed within the host society — visionary literature and the ghost tale — were adopted in Sefer ḥasidim and other, non-Pietist sources. The chapter then draws a sketch of the Pietist aspirations that emerge when one ties together the various strands of Pietist teaching on many of the subjects touched upon in previous chapters.