Alon Confino begins his latest book with a seemingly simple question: “Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible” (3)? Steeped in histories of emotions and culture, Confino's multifaceted answer amounts to an insightful, book-length rereading of key issues in the study of Nazism and the Holocaust. With his usual eloquence, the author builds on the interpretative argument and reflections on historical construction developed in his previous study, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (2011), and brings these approaches to bear on the questions posed in this empirical work.

Confino portrays the widespread burning of the Hebrew Bible during Kristallnacht in November 1938 as an intentional and public act that constituted anything but an aberration. He argues that these practices of “Nazis and other Germans” (14) should be seen as part of a large-scale project of “fixing the past” (120) by ending the imagined Jewish “authority over a moral ancient past” (120) and historical origins enshrined in the Bible. In so doing, they sought to create a new “Nazi civilization” (14) and a “world without Jews” (120–21). The author's reading adds further complexity to scholarly interpretations of Nazi antisemitism by analyzing the pivotal role of emotions and sensitivities in a way that goes beyond calls by historians such as Jeffrey Herf (The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust[2006]) to take the fantasies of the Nazi elite seriously. As a result, Confino demonstrates that, during the prewar years, most Germans already considered the erasure of Judaism and the Jews—an idea not yet associated with genocide—as imaginable, representable, and even justifiable. At the same time, Confino firmly places these sentiments into their broader historical contexts, identifies Nazism as part of Western culture, and points to its “fundamental affinity” (129) with Christianity, especially with respect to the latter's extensive anti-Judaic traditions.

Confino's interpretation thus takes issue with much of the current focus on Nazi racial ideology in Holocaust scholarship. He faults an overemphasis on this ideology and scientific racism for failing to acknowledge how new racial concepts commingled and enforced previously cherished religious and local beliefs, and how emotions critically aided in integrating these ideas into Germans' complex identities. The author likewise challenges the multicausal emphasis on wartime brutalization, careerism, and peer pressure for not offering sufficient links to prewar German and Nazi culture and to the November pogrom.

To make his case, Confino has organized his book into three parts that follow how Germans imagined and acted to bring about a “world without Jews,” from the onset of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship to the destruction of the Third Reich. The first part analyzes these phenomena up to the eve of Kristallnacht. It offers a rereading of the 1933 book burnings as a “national redemption” (52) that represented an initial step in imagining a new Germany without Jews. The author also discusses the widespread public humiliations of Jews, local cultural practices (especially Carnival), and the emerging “forest of anti-Jewish signs” (95) to show how the new story of origins took hold, and how participants' emotions attributed coherent meanings to these events.

In the book's second part, Confino turns to an elaborate rereading of Kristallnacht and ties the brutality against Jews and the burning of Torah scrolls to Germans' imagined need to destroy Judaism as a central component of their own European-Christian civilization, which they had set out to build anew. Characterizing most Germans' internalization, by the onset of the war, of the notion of a country without Jews as the Nazis' key “anti-Jewish revolutionary achievement” (155), the author traces its implications for the early war years, during which the regime and its supporters began to remake Jewish and German histories by killing Jews.

In the third section, Confino applies his approach to the Nazis' total extermination of Jews, which began in the second half of 1941. He places the so-called Final Solution's “radical rupture” amidst “the powerful continuity of making since 1933 a Nazi world without Jews” (191). Indeed, German soldiers remembered their previous transgressions and the “chords of emotions” (186) that linked their targeting of prewar German-Jewish communities to the wartime assaults on European Jews.

Confino's study employs few new archival sources. The most fascinating documents are Germans' prewar photographs from the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; these range from souvenir group shots in the ruins of destroyed synagogues to antisemitic Carnival floats. Confino makes good use of published source collections, such as the accounts by survivors of Kristallnacht in the Wiener Library, demonstrating that sources on Bible burnings have been readily available to the scholarly community.

For all its thoughtfulness, the author's exploration of histories of emotions and the use of Nazi-era photographs still contains some inconsistencies that weaken the study. Confino rightfully points to the limitations of language and the need to grasp what Germans “left unsaid,” but “felt” and “performed” (78). Yet, reflecting the methodological challenges of the study of emotions, the author has to rely, time and again, on the very language of his sources to reconstruct sentiments—using, for example, the phrase “drooling like hysterical beasts” (77–78) by a Socialist witness to make sense of a 1933 assault by the Sturmabteilung (SA) on a Jewish lawyer. This reading is paradoxically on the verge of reifying the primacy of language that the author seeks to question. In order to strengthen its analysis of Germans' emotions, the study would have benefited from reworking its examination of extra-discursive sources, especially the rich and complex photographs. Instead of limiting his analysis to short descriptions of these images, the author could have strengthened his work by drawing on visual history and visual cultural studies, making use of the approaches of these fields to photographs and of their interplay of visuality, institutions, discourse, bodies, gaze, and spectatorship. The study is nevertheless an illuminating addition to the steadily growing field of Holocaust Studies and deserves a broad readership and careful discussion. Confino explicitly seeks to add to the multicausal interpretation of genocide, not replace it with a monocausal approach. In this sense, his work indeed has a great deal to offer.