Alon Confino's A World Without Jews is an extended think-piece, a follow-up to his Foundational Pasts (2011). That prior work was, among other things, a bold defense of a culturalist approach to thinking about the Holocaust in general, as well as the motivations of its architects more specifically. One of the core contentions of that book was that, underneath the discursive layers of scientific dispassion or alternative spirituality with which some Nazis attempted to proclaim their political novelty, their language revealed a much more deeply rooted “Christian imaginary tradition about the Jews” (126). This language explained the emotional urgency of Jew-hatred among Nazis as well as how so many ordinary Germans largely acquiesced in the Nazi worldview, when they were not actively supporting it.

A World Without Jews elaborates on the question of Nazi motive and the role Christianity played in it. In his quest to investigate Nazi “dreams” and “fantasies,” Confino takes his interest in motive a step further—moving from a prior culturalist approach to a more obviously psychoanalytical approach. Though he demures on the question of Freudian analysis in the introduction, his interest in exploring unintentional, unspoken, or unconscious motivations makes his methodology clear. Through the heuristic device of national memory, Confino seeks to interrogate the way the Nazis carried forward a now-suppressed, now-embraced tension in the German-cum-European psyche: the presence of Jews who should have disappeared, according to the eschatological narrative of Christian supersessionism, and yet did not. Their stubborn persistence in the face of an allegedly superior Christian civilization was, at varying points, in the collective European consciousness a source of tolerance, disappointment, resentment, anger, and violent hostility—with frequent swings back to tolerance. The Nazis wanted to break this cycle finally.

Confino may avoid blatantly Freudian terminology, but the dynamic is clear: when unresolved resentment of one brother against the other—suffused by promises of fatherly preferment long unrealized and therefore doubted—reached an untenable breaking point, it finally gave way to fratricide. Culturally rooted resentment of the older brother is sublimated into his socially-sanctioned murder. Confino suggests that in Nazism, this longue durée of Christian petulance against the Jew—the elder brother who would neither disappear nor surrender his claim to being the father's preferred son—finally gave way to murderous violence. He does not attempt to construct a standard narrative of the historical antecedents of Nazi antisemitism, because he does not want to get bogged down in another debate about continuities. Rather, he uses the category of “memory” to explain that it is not he, but the Nazis themselves, who viewed their actions in such terms.

For Confino, this is not simply a case of Nazis rewriting the historical past of Germany through their actions, or breaking violently with that past. Confronting the question of whether Nazi antisemitism constitutes continuity or break, Confino attempts to synthesize the dialectic by saying it is both. It is a matter of “break” because the foundation of Germany's Christian civilization, Judaism, is being obliterated: “The Holocaust was the first experiment in a new humanity achieved by extermination, a humanity liberated from the shackles of its own past” (15). But it is also continuity: not in the murderous plans that had long been planned out and were only awaiting the technological means of industrialized mass-murder to be realized; but rather, in the continuity of long dwelt-upon fantasies of a brother—Christianity—who could not abide the existence of a sibling—Judaism—whose very presence, let alone interaction with the brother, challenged the truth claims upon which his own identity rested. For Confino, Nazism's genocide of the Jews represented the extreme opposite of centuries of Christian tolerance of Jewish existence. This did not constitute a breach with Christianity, however, since genocide was still predicated on a Christian understanding of the Jew as an eschatological menace. The Nazis, then, effectively created their own End Time by fulfilling in physical terms what had been long hoped for culturally: the disappearance of the Jews.

There is much to commend in Confino's book. Its arrival comes at a fortuitous time, when a renewed focus on the soothsayers, tree huggers, pseudo-mystics, and other allegedly “alternative” sources of Nazism constitutes something of a scholarly backlash against the proposition that Nazism—like slavery, fascism, or racism itself—was not some modernist aberration in the development of Western society, but rather sprang (not inevitably but nonetheless congruently) from its most venerable traditions. Only by keeping our focus on Christianity in the Nazi “imagination,” Confino insists, can we explain the “Nazi urgency to kill all the Jews but not all the members of other persecuted groups” (239).

Taking into account that this is an extended essay rather than a meticulously researched monograph, there are nonetheless times when greater attention to detail could have helped Confino's cause. He tries to anticipate this criticism by warning the reader early on that he believes the history of the Holocaust “is often written too close to the documents” and reflects an “almost positivistic attachment to facts” (17). Puzzling words for a historian—especially if one believes that the grand sweep of analysis is a lofty goal that can only be reached using the mundane building blocks of empiricism. Could, for instance, his examination of the Nazi burning of the Jewish Bible (which Confino identifies as the chief “symptom” of the problem he is trying to solve) have been made stronger by examining the dialogue between Nazis and theologians regarding the New Testament versus the Old Testament? While Confino does cite Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack's attempts to remove the Old Testament from the Christian canon at one point, and briefly cites Susannah Heschel's examination of theology in the Third Reich (The Aryan Jesus [2008]), his case would have been fortified if he had spent more time analyzing the ways in which Germans both anticipated and responded to such Nazi behaviors. Exploring further the reaction “on the ground” could have helped him better establish the resonance of the Nazis' metaphysical ambitions for their intended Christian public—while acknowledging that, in their religious diversity, the Germans were not a monolith.