Recent scholarship on anti-Semitism has devoted significant attention to the “Jewish criminal.” Asserting that images of alleged Jewish unlawfulness were an important part of European anti-Semitism, these texts present the “Jewish outlaw” as a project of modernity and thus tend to focus on histories of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stereotypes. Few of these analyses, then, examine the role this charge played in the Holocaust. Nor do most scholars consider how it influenced European Jewish life after World War II.

With his examination of the history of “Jewish criminality” during the Holocaust and postwar period, Michael Berkowitz's fascinating new study extends this important scholarship. Berkowitz deftly shows that the Nazi government used the long-standing association of Jews and criminal behavior to gain favor with Germans otherwise uncomfortable with the National Socialist emphasis on race. He finds that the Nazis' emphasis of “Jewish criminality” influenced Jewish behavior in ghettos and concentration camps and later in the displaced person camps. Finally, he suggests that images of the “Jewish criminal” resonated long after World War II and had a significant influence on how people treated Jewish displaced persons (DPs) during the postwar period.

Berkowitz does not suggest that charges of Jewish criminal behavior signify the “key to anti-Semitism in all times and places” (p. xiv). Instead, relying on a wide evidentiary foundation that includes governmental memos, photographs, memoirs, and scientific studies, he carefully investigates when and how images of the Jewish criminal resonated among disparate groups.

The Crime of My Very Existence begins with an analysis of early modern discourses on “Jewish crime” to suggest that the National Socialists drew from long-standing beliefs when they promoted the equation of Jews with illicit behavior. According to Berkowitz, the image of the Jewish criminal had been salient as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Jews participated in the robber bands of that era. These charges reemerged in the Jewish emancipation debates of the late 1700s and early 1800s, in late nineteenth-century deliberations concerning the relationship of Jews, civic worthiness, and criminality, and during the interwar period when the German state convicted a number of Jews of financial impropriety. “Jewish criminality” therefore provided the Nazis with an older stereotype that resonated among a wide group. The promotion of this discourse allowed them to appeal to Germans without having to rely on racial doctrines.

Once it assumed power in 1933, the Nazi government translated charges of Jewish criminality into policy and action. During much of the 1930s, the Nazis charged Jews with individual crimes, frequently arresting them for financial violations. After 1939, Nazi accusations of Jewish criminality deepened as National Socialists increasingly claimed that Jews needed policing. In their schema, because all Jews were outlaws, Jews warranted imprisonment, harsh treatment, slave labor, and execution. After 1944, these images were joined by an additional claim, namely that Zionism, because it constituted a form of organized malfeasance, served as a rationale for the annihilation of European Jewry. Throughout their reign, the Nazis nurtured images of Jewish criminality through the use of photojournalism and police photography. Photographers and cinematographers not only fashioned innocent Jews as criminals but they also manufactured charges that would be used to justify accusations of Jewish unlawfulness.

The stigma of Jews as criminals resonated even after the Nazis' defeat. According to Berkowitz, during the postwar era, some Germans envisioned Jewish efforts to leave Europe as evidence of a “criminal and conspiratorial undertaking on behalf of world Jewry” (p. 146). In addition, as Germans and American GIs accused Jews of participating in the black market and taking advantage of their previous status as victims, a wide range of individuals continued to think of Jewish survivors as a criminal threat.

Charges of Jewish criminality had a significant impact on Jews themselves. The ghettos and camps, explains Berkowitz, served as “incubators of crime.” The Nazis fashioned them in such a way that the only way to survive was to live outside the law. Jews, in turn, were aware of this paradox, and some expressed deep ambivalence about their senses of selves as outlaws. Later, in the displaced person camps, Jews continued to be aware of—and respond to—notions of Jewish criminality, emotions complicated by the existence of Jewish police and the ubiquitous black markets.

The Crime of My Very Existence boldly contributes to the extant scholarship on anti-Semitism and “Jewish criminality” by examining Jewish responses to images of “Jewish illegal behavior” and by investigating these charges during the Holocaust and postwar years. Berkowitz's book ends with an interesting, but unexpected, analysis of the history of the Jewish community of Estonia, and his epilogue seems out of place. Such a complaint, however, could only be raised because of the book's many strengths. This is a wonderfully nuanced study that is deeply significant for scholars of German and Jewish history alike.