David Engel's excellent book challenges scholars to reconsider the relationship between the Holocaust and modern Jewish history, two fields deliberately sequestered from one another by modern Jewish historians. The separation, Engel argues, “rests upon the shakiest of intellectual foundations” (p. 227) and has resulted in an inability of the two fields to inform one another. Greater crossover, Engel argues, would offer richer accounts of variant Jewish responses to mass murder, which ranged from tragic misreading of German intentions to open resistance. At the same time it would open new questions for historians of modern Jewry who, he says, must weave the Holocaust into larger narratives rather than treat it as a sudden unrelated rupture of Jewish history imposed by other, namely German, historical traditions. Engel thus proposes the rewriting of the Holocaust's Jewish history and Jewish history itself through better integration of the two fields.

Especially valuable are Engel's historiographical analyses of how the fields became separated in the first place and how the separation has been maintained. A major source of the break comes from the reading of Salo Baron's “lachrymosity thesis” by which Baron warned against casting Jewish history as nothing more than a series of persecutions. Baron's warning became a roadblock against a teleological backward reading by which anti-Semitism and the Holocaust would flatten the writing of post-emancipation Jewish history, rendering it transitory and almost trivial. In fact, says Engel, Baron was misread. The caution against lachrymosity actually argued that Jewish historical trajectories were developed organically rather than by persecution. Moreover, Baron himself initiated Holocaust-related research and called for its placement within the Jewish historical framework. Nonetheless the fight was on. Social historians such as Paula Hyman who viewed emancipation as a purely positive development in Jewish history employed the lachrymosity thesis, incorrectly in Engel's view, to reject the more pessimistic assessment by Arthur Hertzberg, who, looking backward from Auschwitz to the French Revolution, detected both remedies and poisons in liberalism's view of Jews. But to this day, modern Jewish history has yet to incorporate the Holocaust in the same way that the Holocaust has informed the history of modern Germany, Poland, and France.

Early Zionist historiography of the Jews did not help matters. It initially read backward from the Holocaust simply to reveal emancipation as a sham that destroyed the Jewish spirit from the start. The work of Ben Zion Dinur, the most influential of the early Zionist scholars in Israel, attempted to move modernity's center of gravity from emancipation to the return from exile that culminated in 1948. As late as 1949 acculturated European Jews were not part of Dinur's narrative—they had removed themselves from Jewish history—and the Holocaust for Dinur merited little mention. With the formation of Yad Vashem and his assumption of the directorship in 1953 Dinur focused on heroic resistance and the exilic experience of national struggle. He called for study of the Holocaust within this Jewish historiographical context. Even so, historical research agendas in Israel were already set. The Hebrew University's Department of Jewish History did not even teach the Holocaust, leaving it to the University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, which cordoned off the Holocaust and taught it as European rather than Jewish history.

For historians of Germany, Engel's assessment of the effect of Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt are the book's most fascinating aspects. Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) mostly concerned the German machinery of destruction. But it also famously argued that a Jewish historical tradition of passivity and appeasement contributed to the catastrophe. Such an account challenged the Zionist historiography of a Jewish national struggle while blaming the Jewish historical tradition, at least in part, for the catastrophe. Arendt never argued such a thing in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), but her work was read that way owing to her acerbic critique of Jewish Councils, without which, she argued, fewer Jews would have been killed, and her representation of Adolf Eichmann as nothing more than an unthinking bureaucrat. Israeli historians closed ranks against Hilberg and Arendt as self-hating Jews who would wreck Jewish national consciousness. Engel powerfully argues that these intellectual wars of the 1960s further separated the Holocaust from Jewish history, for while Jewish Holocaust historians refuted, for instance, Arendt's assessment of Jewish Councils, those working on broader Jewish narratives veered away from the Holocaust entirely. As Jacob Katz put it, Jewish history contained no seeds that grew during the Holocaust years. From the Jewish perspective, it was completely unpredictable and unrelated.

Accordingly, concludes Engel, the Holocaust has been integrated into the historiographies of Germany, France, Poland, and elsewhere, but not the historiography of the Jews. For the most part Jews in Holocaust scholarship, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, have become objects divorced from their own historical traditions. Engel sees limited alleviation of this problem in the works of scholars trained in Jewish history who have undertaken Holocaust study—he discusses Yehuda Bauer and Dan Michman—but he still notes that at a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Seminar in 2002, only six of 240 participants came from Jewish Studies programs (p. 27). Engel's is an important and provocative work that explains why the Holocaust has been the preserve of historians of Europe rather than historians of the Jews. It further points to the intellectual consequences of this development. It ought to be read and considered by anyone working in these areas.