The final chapter considers tensions between beliefs in the “healthy,” salvific character of crusading and anxieties about the morality of violence. It argues that, finding their origins in events that took place during the First Crusade, these tensions became especially acute in late medieval crusade culture, crystallizing in works by John Gower, John Wyclif, and Michel Pintoin, among others, and complexly articulated in The Siege of Jerusalem and Richard Coeur de Lion. The chapter reads these romances alongside literary and historical responses to the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, pogroms against Europe’s Jewish communities, and acts of cannibalism perpetrated by crusaders at the siege of Ma‘arra in 1098. The Siege of Jerusalem, Richard Coeur de Lion, and authors who wrote about these events deployed similar representational strategies to raise questions about the corruptive potential and human costs of holy war.

The German lands – a nation-state came into being only in 1871 – were a major world region for outmigration until the middle of the nineteenth century. This chapter tells the story of emigration from Germany, highlighting parallels between how German immigrants were treated abroad and how immigrants in Germany were, and indeed are, being treated. It begins by showing how migration had always been a reality for Germans. After that it turns to the United States and Russia, the two main destinations of emigration, especially during the mass migration in the 1800s, making Germans the United States’ largest ethnic group. With poverty and religious and political persecution as main push factors, Germans on the move were subjected to discrimination, even racism, physical violence, and pogroms. They reacted by hyper-assimilation or retreat into ethnic communities, particularly from the early 1900s onwards when hybrid identities – German and American/Russian – came under threat from homogenizing nationalism. This history needs to be remembered so that Germans realize how quickly history can turn around: once a liability, a German passport today is coveted by many, but this may change.

This introduction opens with a story about a Jewish relief worker writing home. The reader is then introduced to the vast suffering of Jews in the Great War. Together, the war experience, American ascendancy, the Balfour Declaration, the Russian Revolution, the new states of East Central Europe, and new migration restrictions completely transformed Jewish life across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The chapter then provides a European, American, and Jewish genealogy for the emergence of American Jewish humanitarianism prompted by the war. It summarizes the narrative arc of the book, chapter by chapter, from relief to the Eastern war zones during American neutrality, to postwar emergency relief with other American organizations, to the development of several thematic forms of long-term relief across East Central Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Several characteristics of international Jewish humanitarianism in this era are explained, such as its grounding in American pluralism, welfare state Progressivism, and diaspora connections. This history is both a Jewish intervention into the field of humanitarianism history and a rethinking of the master narrative of humanitarianism via the Jews.

After the armistice on the Western Front in 1918, the United States provided major food aid programs across Central and Eastern Europe. The American Relief Administration and the American Red Cross rushed into these fragile new nation-states where violence was ongoing with programs aimed largely at children. The JDC jumped aboard other American emergency relief efforts, which helped it reach Poland and later Russia, where Jews were in greatest need. Deployed around Europe, American Jews distributed emergency food relief, medicines, sanitary supplies, and clothing during harsh winters. Much like American postwar diplomacy carried out by the ARA and through private loans with tacit and direct support from the US government, Jewish “diplomacy” was carried out by the JDC, a private humanitarian association. American Jews led the way for American humanitarians of all kinds: as food remitters and as the first American organization in Soviet Russia. American Jewish relief paradoxically appeared as a peripheral humanitarian undertaking and as a central partner in the main humanitarian projects of the day.