The Holocaust in Historical Context: Volume 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age

The Nazi program of mass extermination of the Jews, argues Katz in this provocative study, was the only true genocide in history: never before had a state attempted, as a matter of policy, to annihilate every member of a specific group. Professor of Jewish history at Cornell, Katz presents a series of heavily annotated case studies comparing the Holocaust to ancient and medieval examples of brutality and mass murder--slavery in the Greco-Roman world, the medieval witch-hunt craze and persecution of homosexuals, the 13th-century crusade against Albigensian heretics, the Catholic church's wars against Huguenots. None of these tragedies was a genocide, Katz concludes. The first installment in a three-volume opus, this scholarly tome holds that Christian anti-Judaism did not set the stage for the Holocaust because, despite the Church's centuries of persecution of Jews, it nevertheless permitted Jewish survival by promoting constraint and ethical scruples among Christians. (Apr.)