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This chapter highlights the ways in which French Jews reacted to the various kinds of hostility directed against them. Three general points can be made in conclusion. First, despite the process of assimilation, Jews in France at the turn of this century retained many of the characteristics of an unassimilated minority, characteristics which antisemitism strengthened. The Jewish opposition to antisemitism was mainly the option of individuals responding to some general sense of Jewish solidarity but lacking the support of established collective organizations, and it frequently involved great personal sacrifice. Second, although the element of individual courage in such behaviour cannot be overlooked, the main factor for its interpretation in socio-historical terms seems to be a confidence based on Jewish assessment of the strength and meaning of antisemitism in France. Third, the often negative response of Jews to antisemitism must be related to the nature of antisemitism which have been analysed in the previous chapters. The Jews were not simply the objects of explicit acts of discrimination or threats, to which they could react, or against which they could defend themselves. They were the central characters in someone else's mythical view of the world, which was, in important ways, a much less comfortable position to be in, if only because there was no clear way to extricate themselves from it.

This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.

This introductory chapter centres the volume's discussion on the Anglo-Jewish community during World War II. Here, the major themes lie not within the Holocaust itself, but in the Anglo-Jewish response to it. The chapter briefly discusses the history of the Anglo-Jewish community, explaining in particular the East End/West End divide of the London Jewish community, which by the time of the war had since faded away. Additionally, the chapter provides an overview of the historical documents, sources, and other materials which focus largely on the Anglo-Jewish community, taking care to exclude materials which focus on the Holocaust in particular. What emerges here then is an argument that the Jews constituted a people who, even after emancipation, remained united by strong cultural bonds.

This chapter looks at Jewish religious identity. Religion operated as an organizing principle in Sephardic life. The key elements of this process included the adoption of local customs in new areas of settlement, the importance of public displays of piety and allotment of honors, and the different ways in which rabbis and average Jews dealt with the religious identity of the former Conversos who reverted to Judaism during this period. The shared set of religious values and legal tradition that had bound together Mediterranean Jewry for centuries continued to allow for mutual recognition, understanding, and support throughout the Jewish world. However, the divisions between rabbinic ideals and popular practice that had strained Jewish solidarity before 1492 remained a defining characteristic of Sephardic life.

This chapter provides an overview of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews' flight westward after 1648. Three major issues underlie the discussion as a whole. First is the nature of Jewish solidarity in those years and the fate of the Jewish refugees outside Poland–Lithuania when the religious imperative to ransom captives was not a relevant issue. Second is the policies adopted by the states of the Holy Roman Empire toward the refugees and their impact on the refugees themselves as they tried to rebuild their lives on German lands. Third is the new social and cultural formations created by the encounter of “eastern” and “western” Ashkenazim in the wake of the refugee crisis and their consequences for the development of German Jewry in both the short and long term.