Europe Against the Jews: 1880–1945 by Götz Aly (review)

One of the most prolific scholars of the Holocaust, Götz Aly has authored over a dozen books on the subject in German and English. His most recent publication, Europe Against the Jews, 1880–1945, is a translation of the 2017 German-language edition (published by Fischer Verlag). As in other monographs, including Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race, Hatred and the Prehistory of the Holocaust (Picador, 2015), and Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (Metropolitan Books, 2007), here too Aly approaches the origins of the Holocaust and the functioning of the Third Reich from a socio-economic, rather than cultural-ideological, perspective.

Indeed, his books represent a decades-long historiographical trend drawing into the picture factors beyond antisemitism and Nazi ideology, such as reverses on the Eastern Front, cumulative radicalization, and colonial-resource exigencies. David Cesarani's Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933–1949 targeted the stalled military campaign in the East as a determining factor in the turn to genocide, and Timothy Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning treats the Holocaust as the culmination of a colonial project aimed for hegemony over the Eastern European rimlands. The spectrum of responsibility for the genocide has widened as well, extending beyond Hitler and his henchmen, and even beyond Nazis and Germans, to their allies, neutrals, and onlookers.

In his earlier books, Aly emphasized material envy as a factor driving anti-Jewish attitudes and policies, and this continues to be a major thread in Europe Against the Jews. He cites nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars, such as Carl Vogt, who argued that antisemitism had "nothing to do with religion, but with instinctive hatred of the untalented for the gifted" (p. 39). The number of countries that Aly investigates is as broad as it is necessary to correct the idea that the Holocaust can be explained by German "eliminationist" antisemitism. Antisemitism was universal in Europe, and as Aly demonstrates in his later chapters, it continued to impact surviving Jews well after World War II.

Aly adds to this the new post-World War I nationalisms focused on ethnic homogenization: "nationalist striving for independence and pressures caused by industrial progress often discharged themselves in hostility to Jews" (p. 55). The contention that the entire continent was in the throes of nationalist projects of ethnic purification that accelerated after World War I is the most convincing component of Aly's picture. In the author's words, "homicidal policies towards Jews were part of more broadly conceived projects of ethnic cleansing" (p. 260). From France to Poland and especially in the countries carved out of three collapsed empires at the peace treaties following World War I, ethnic minorities, Jews in particular, faced an ever-tightening vise of legal discrimination.

Concentrated as they were in cities and in certain professions (mostly because of centuries of anti-Jewish policies), Jews encountered increasing restrictions on their livelihoods throughout interwar Europe. We learn about the Lithuania Awaken Project, which targeted Jewish economic activity and through which, in 1934, Jews were banned from diverse industries like forestry, transport, or the sale of tobacco, coal, and sugar. The drive to "make Lithuania for Lithuanians" continued after the war, when the Vilnius city soviet ordered its restored synagogue shut down in 1945 and closed Jewish schools three years later. We also learn about countries like Romania and Poland, whose antisemitic histories well before World War II included both violence and economic discrimination. The "Hellenization" of Salonika, for centuries a center of Sephardic Jewry, also features prominently in the book, as does the rise of xenophobia and antisemitism in France, although Western Europe and Italy do not receive the same attention that Eastern and Southeastern Europe do.

The incorporation of more unpublished primary sources and of more thoroughgoing conclusions in each chapter might have strengthened the volume. Aly might have devoted more analysis to the interplay between culture and...