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Hebrew Bible
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Alon Confino
- When we consider the Holocaust as emerging from racial ideology and a state-run administrative process during a brutal war, it becomes difficult to place Kristallnacht and the burning of the Bible within this framework. … A world of meaning is lost when these views of racial ideology, the brutalization of war, and the state-run process of extermination dominate our understanding of the Holocaust because the question "Why did the Nazis and other Germans burn the Hebrew Bible?" demands a historical imagination that captures Germans' culture, sensibilities, and historical memories. … Burning the Bible was an intentional act: it happened all over Germany, in public for all to see, and both those who perpetrated the act and those who watched it perceived it as a transgression whether they supported or opposed the burning.
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- Did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible? … In history the sources govern. The Nazis did burn the Hebrew Bible, on November 9 and 10, 1938—not one copy, but thousands; not in one place, but in hundreds of communities across the Reich; and not only in metropolises such as Berlin, Stettin, Vienna, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Cologne, but also in small communities such as Sulzburg, a Protestant village in Baden with 1,070 inhabitants, 120 among them Jewish, where the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were thrown from the roof and the Nazis marched mockingly up and down the main street with the Torah scrolls before destroying them. By fire and other means, the destruction of the Book of Books was at the center of Kristallnacht, when 1,400 synagogues were set on fire.
- In Berlin, Germans burned the Torah scrolls in front of the Levetzow Street synagogue, while other Germans carried the scrolls from the Fasanen Street synagogue to Wittenberg Square and burned them there. In Pestalozzi Street, shredded Torah scrolls and prayer books as well as religious objects from the altar littered the area near the synagogue. Children marched mockingly on the shredded Torah with top hats on. In the Jewish quarter of Leopoldgasse in Vienna, the Arks and Torah scrolls from four synagogues were piled up in the street and set on fire.
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