What is Europe? Europeana, the digital library, museum and archive will provide an answer through the unrivaled access to the digitised expressions of European civilization. Judaica Europeana will present in this context the contribution of Jews to the development of European cities. Jews presence in Europe goes back to the Roman Empire. Their role in urban settings and the development of citie...

In recent years, several controversies have beset official relations between Jews and Catholics. These include whether Catholics should pray for the conversion of Jews, whether the purpose of interreligious dialogue is to lead others to Christian faith, and whether Catholics should undertake non-coercive "missions" to Jews. An underlying theological topic in all these disputes is how the biblic...

This essay uncovers the systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history on English-language Wikipedia, world’s largest encyclopedia. In last decade, a group committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting skewed version one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes role society in and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s a...

Why, after the outbreak of World War II in Eastern Europe, did the inhabitants of some communities erupt in violence against their Jewish neighbors? The authors hypothesize that the greater the degree of preexisting intercommunal polarization between Jews and the titular majority group, the more likely a pogrom. They test this proposition using an original data set of matched census and elector...

Contemporary Jews retain a genetic imprint from their Near Eastern ancestry, but obtained substantial genetic components from their neighboring populations during their history. Whether they received any genetic contribution from the Far East remains unknown, but frequent communication with the Chinese has been observed since the Silk Road period. To address this issue, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA...

Born in Portugal and the son of Marranos (Christianized Jews from Spain), Eliahu de Luna Montalto lived during a particularly harsh period for the Jewish people. Throughout Europe, the situation for Jews was unfavorable; laws had been passed forbidding them to live in England for the past 300 years, and for the past 200 years in France. Additionally, in France, while Jews were permitted to stud...

The contemporary study of Jewish genetics has a long prehistory dating to the eighteenth century. Prior to the era of genetics, studies of the physical makeup of Jews were undertaken by comparative anatomists and physical anthropologists. In the nineteenth century the field was referred to as "race science." Believed by many race scientists to be a homogeneous and pure race, Jews occupied a cen...

While most of the research on the Holocaust has appropriately focused on the suffering of the Jewish population of Axis-occupied Europe, the Gypsies also were targeted for extinction by the Nazis. The Gypsies as a people survived the campaigns directed against them in large measure because they were located in areas under the control of governments allied with Germany. These governments general...

This paper investigates the arguments used in public documents to mobilize Bulgarians against the deportation of Jews in World War II. We focus on the key documents relating to the first wave of mobilisation in 1940-1 as provided by Todorov (2001). We demonstrate that these documents are based on three types of argument. The first, category inclusion, treats the Jews as part of a common ingroup...

Since the establishment of Israel sex differentials in life expectancy at birth exhibited by Israeli Jews have been very low in comparison to other developed countries as a result of relatively high male and relatively low female life expectancy. To advance understanding of this phenomenon this paper explores cause-specific contributions to the difference in life expectancy between Israeli Jews...