San Antonio College Library

"The history of the Jewish people is one of the greatest historical tapestries of modern times. Starting in 1650, when there were no more than one and a quarter million Jews in the world, Gartner looks at the Jewish traditions and communities, and how they interacted both externally and internally. The story moves through the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and into Emancipation, through the dark shadows of anti-Semitism, and up to the twentieth...

Esau's Tears explores the remarkable and revealing variety of modern anti-Semitism, from its emergence in the 1870s in a racial-political form to the eve of the Nazi takeover, in the major countries of Europe and in the United States. Previous histories have generally been more concerned with description than analysis, and most of the interpretations in those histories have been lacking in balance. The evidence presented in this book suggests that...

Why so many German Jews appeared reluctant to leave their homeland and escape the Nazi terror is one of the great unsolved questions of the Holocaust. Theories abound: the vagaries of Hitler's Jewish policy during the 1930s did not clearly foreshadow the Final Solution; Jews expected to survive this period of German anti-Semitism as they had others throughout the centuries; those who tried to escape were denied immigration visas all over the world....