Remembering Communal Catastrophe: From the Hurbanot Through the Holocaust

Catalog description

This course will examine the Jewish attempts to commemorate the communal catastrophes they experienced from the destructions of both Temples in ancient times through the twentieth century. We will analyze the specific particularity of the response to each of the historical events we will study - the destructions of the Temples (586BCE and 70CE), the Crusades (1096), the massacre at Blois (1171), other medieval Jewish persecutions, the Chmielnicki massacres (1648-49) and its aftermath, and the Holocaust - while attempting to discover the overarching paradigms, trans-temporal patterns, and fundamental archetypes that these responses had in common with one another.