The chapter analyzes the situation of Jews, Jewish organizations, Zionism, anti-Semitism, and the development of racist ideologies.

Jesus’s Jewish identity offers fresh insights into Christian–Jewish relations and historical Jesus research. Although often obscured in Christian tradition, this recognition has been emphasized by Jewish scholars to counter anti-Semitism and challenge Christian theological narratives. Memory of the Jewish Jesus serves as a critical tool in rewriting the history of Jewish–Christian relations and understanding the evolution of both Judaism and Christianity. It can energize a reevaluation of exegetical methodologies and dogmatic discourses, thus reshaping Christian theology and fostering mutual understanding.

Bernstein’s fame, reputation, and personality have for the most part been seen as excessive and problematic. This perception militated from the start against his position in time, place, and tradition as a serious composer being influential or even accepted. Yet from the golden moment of opportunity for American composers in which he grew to adulthood to his barely noticed final works, he was following a diligent route of creative output that may yet bear fruit at greater distance from the man himself, though it would be difficult to claim that, taken as a whole, it has yet done so.

This chapter explores a key aspect of Pirandello’s relationship with the Fascist regime. In 1926, Benito Mussolini created the Royal Italian Academy (the Academy), to rival the prestigious national academies of other European countries such as France and Britain. Pirandello was the most famous appointee amongst the first thirty nominations of accademici in March 1929. The chapter traces Pirandello’s ambivalent attitude toward the Academy. On the one hand, he considered it just recognition of both his fame as an author and his early support of Fascism. On the other, he was skeptical of the usefulness of a national academy, especially if it bent to the will of the Fascist regime. The chapter reconstructs several episodes showing how Pirandello’s status as an accademico was related to his hopes of taking a leading role in the renewal of Italian theatre. His correspondence with his son Stefano and his confidant and muse Marta Abba reveals Pirandello’s low opinion of the rhetoric and emptiness of Fascist cultural policies, of which the Academy was a prime example.

Today’s reception of Wagner and assumptions about the composer’s complicity in inspiring the Holocaust are primarily influenced by events that transpired long after the composer’s death. This chapter analyses Wagner’s own shifting attitudes toward Jews in the context of his life and times and considers the twentieth-century events that have shaped the Wagner legacy: Adolf Hitler’s associations with the Wagner family and Bayreuth, the exploitation of works and musical excerpts for political purposes during the Third Reich, rumours about the use of Wagner’s music in concentration camps, repertoire and staging during the Hitler years, and the troubled and conflicted reception of Wagner’s works in Israel. It also considers how refugees from Nazi Germany initially raised suspicion about the anti-Semitic content of the music dramas and their characters, how post-war scholarship has concentrated on proving these allegations, and how the Wagner family still struggles to come to terms with the past.

The title of this essay references two provocative discourses in contemporary critical conversation, both of which inform my reading of Ruth Gilligan’s extraordinary novel, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan (2016). “Afterlives” alludes to Paige Reynolds’ Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (2016), a volume that explores how the “themes, forms and practices of high modernism are manifest in Irish literature and culture produced subsequent to that cultural movement.” Following Reynolds’ lead, this essay expands the idea of “afterlives” to include “diaspora” and “race” while constructing an archive of Irish–Jewish texts, both fictive and academic, for a novel that concerns the intersections of Irish and Jewish characters at three historical moments: the inaugural decade of the twentieth century, the years during and after World War II, and the fall of the Celtic Tiger economy in the present century.

The grand hoteliers of Berlin, who were also German financial, industrial, and commercial elites, cast their lot with Hitler in 1932. Several factors played into the decision, but the most important was an unshakable pessimism, born of the chaos of 1918–23, especially the hyperinflation of 1923, that never quite dispelled in the years of relative prosperity of 1924–28. After 1929, during the Great Depression, this pessimism hardened into fatalism: that is, certainty that business would fail under present conditions. Under the influence of a contagious fatalism endemic to their milieu by 1932, the Kaiserhof’s owners, in particular, would not have seen or understood the ramifications of their decision to let Hitler use the hotel as his headquarters. On the one hand, the decision at least kept open the possibility of a different future under the next regime. And on the other hand, the alternative, ejecting Hitler, might trigger immediate and violent retaliation by the Brownshirts. In the end, however, these same hoteliers, because they were Jewish, found themselves running for their lives as some of the earliest victims of the Nazi persecution.

The four years after World War I proved disastrous to the grand hotels of Berlin. There were threats from the left in the form of revolution, the January Uprising, and strikes, and there were threats from the right in the form of vandalism, looting, atrocity, and an unsuccessful coup d’état. Then there were the threats that originated neither on the right nor on the left: material and labor shortages, high crime, inflation, hyperinflation, and rising taxes. Between 1918 and 1923, hoteliers began blaming the left and the state for all these misfortunes – a tendency that pushed them into the camp of the anti-republican right, Weimar’s enemies. With the hyperinflation of 1923, an unmitigated disaster for Berlin’s grand hotels, that tendency became the rule. The republic, Berlin’s grand hoteliers had come to believe, was bad for business. Their efforts to manage the crisis of the postwar era, 1918–23, reveal the links between quotidian struggles and political decisions – decisions against the republic in favor of more authoritarian solutions to Germany’s problems.

This chapter explores the impact of William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirts or Silver Legion, and the Legion’s place within the broader field of Interwar American extremism, when an undergrowth of xenophobia and antisemitism overtook the landscape of domestic politics. This chapter addresses a previously unknown genocidal dimension of American fascist rhetoric – which, in its violence and its visibility, went further than what even the Nazi regime was advocating at the time. The leading Silver Shirt dailies, most particularly The Liberator, and published interviews with William Pelley in other outlets are examined to reveal the precise nature of this rhetoric, which goes beyond emotional frisson to detailed proposals for programmatic, genocidal action. Genocidal antisemitism was not just the purview of German National Socialists, but was a concept autonomously articulated by fascists on both sides of the Atlantic. What this speaks to is a shared set of agendas: rather strikingly identical ideological precepts rooted in similar national, racial, and particularly religious cultures.

The final phase of Vichy’s dealings with Rome brought the sharpest divergence in its relations with the two Axis governments. The full occupation of France ended the last vestiges of French sovereignty. However, the power relationship between Vichy and Rome evolved very differently to that between Vichy and Berlin. Vichy’s negotiations between the conflicting demands of the German and Italian authorities were, characterised by opportunism, not fully appreciated when focusing exclusively on the German occupation. Whereas Vichy chose to work with Rome to offset Berlin’s demands on the Service du Travail Obligatoire, it resolutely chose collaboration with Berlin over the opportunities afforded by Rome when it came to the treatment of Jews. Vichy’s willing collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitic policies saw it oppose the Italian attempts to prevent the deportation of Jews in their occupation zone. The fall of Mussolini ended the prospect of any fruitful cooperation with Italy. With growing internal pressure from French collaborationist forces to engage in a more radical and ideological form of collaboration, Vichy’s alignment with Nazi Germany finally became definitive.

On September 13, 1918, as autumn settled upon the Western Front after the costly failure of Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive and ensuing loss of strategic initiative against strengthening Allied Armies, Martin Heidegger, serving in a weather unit in the vicinity of Verdun, sat down in the early morning at his observation post to write a letter to his recently betrothed Elfriede, at home in Freiburg with their newborn son. He is sitting “at the telephone and passing huge quantities of numbers on to the artillery, airship men, [and] gas officers” against the backdrop of “heavy artillery” and the “thunder of bombs, making everything in the hut shake.”

Chapter 2 investigates how the three opening stories of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron reformulate examples of ascetic and altruistic behavior used in vernacular sermons, concentrating on Italian sources close to Boccaccio: the homilies of Giordano da Pisa and the devotional treatises of Domenico Cavalca and Iacopo Passavanti. It explores the Dominican friars’ vicious representations of Jews, and the Decameron’s surprisingly sympathetic attitude toward them and other excluded or subordinate social groups in medieval society. The apparent filogyny and filo-Judaism in Boccaccio’s reworkings of antifeminist and anti-Semitic exempla do not seem to respond to contemporary women’s or Jews’ historical circumstances, however, so much as to the reductive didacticism of his sources. The chapter’s final sections examine how Decameron novelle 5.8 and 5.9 parody sermon exempla by showing how abstract moral injunctions can be put to different ends, thereby undermining the assumption that any lesson can be universally applied.

Vette traces the anti-Semitic image of the ‘ungrateful Jew’ through its usage in early Christian literature to its origin in the imperial rhetoric of the first-century ce. Vette describes how imperial rhetoric employs racial stereotypes to demarcate dominator and dominated, thereby inscribing hierarchy and difference. Then, as now, gratitude can become weaponized in the service of Empire; but as the first-century Jewish author ce Josephus explains, gratitude can also disrupt imperial discourse.