General Editor’s Introduction

Summary

Few events, if any, in the modern era have been more disturbing than the Holocaust. This four-volume Cambridge History, with over 100 contributions from leading scholars in the field, represents the most wide-ranging effort in decades to grapple with the catastrophe. The present moment seems an ideal time to offer such an extensive review. Since the end of the Cold War there has been an explosion of scholarship on every aspect of the Holocaust, from origins and participation to memory and memorialization, from top-level decision-making to everyday responses and experiences across all the regions involved. As part of this wave of new work there has been an integration into English-language scholarship of historiographies too long segregated into separate enclaves, not least the extraordinarily rich Yiddish-language and other Jewish research of the early postwar period (in whose recovery several authors in this collection have played a pivotal role). All this cries out for a synthesis.