His­to­ri­an Alon Confino’s book is one of the most orig­i­nal and sug­ges­tive the­o­ret­i­cal respons­es to the Holo­caust to have appeared in recent years. Unlike most Holo­caust schol­ars who have ana­lyzed the phe­nom­e­non from the per­spec­tive of the his­to­ry of anti-Semi­tism; the social psy­chol­o­gy of the killers and col­lab­o­ra­tors; the tech­nol­o­gy of the killing process; the bru­tal­iza­tion ethos cre­at­ed by World War II; or a com­par­a­tive geno­cide approach, Con­fi­no exam­ines the Holo­caust as a prob­lem in cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Detailed accounts of what hap­pened dur­ing the Nazi peri­od are cer­tain­ly nec­es­sary but they are not suf­fi­cient to cap­ture the ele­ments of the strange­ness, and the pas­sion of the Nazi killers, a pas­sion whose essence is fan­tasies about a nonex­is­tent Jew­ish threat to destroy Ger­many. He con­tends that the Nazis’ exter­mi­na­tion­ist fan­ta­sy about Jews was at once root­ed in Euro­pean and Chris­t­ian cul­ture and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary attempt to inau­gu­rate a new tem­po­ral order, a world with­out Jews. In this sense, its aim was to save Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion and world his­to­ry, not sim­ply Ger­many. He ana­lyzes the cul­ture and sen­si­bil­i­ties that made it pos­si­ble for the Nazis, oth­er Ger­mans, and Euro­peans to imag­ine the mak­ing of a world with­out Jews. As a prob­lem in cul­tur­al his­to­ry that fan­ta­sy was, for Con­fi­no, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary achieve­ment of the Nazis — to make the imag­i­na­tion of a world with­out Jews and Judaism pos­si­ble. How and why that hap­pened are key to under­stand­ing the Shoah, more so than the exam­i­na­tion of social ide­ol­o­gy or the con­text of war. The ques­tion is not only how ide­ol­o­gy and con­text made the Holo­caust pos­si­ble but also what was the ground of cul­ture and sen­si­bil­i­ties that made it con­ceiv­able to begin with.

To under­stand the Holo­caust as an extreme his­tor­i­cal event that uncov­ers gen­er­al prob­lems of his­tor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion, he iden­ti­fies and works through the four bedrocks of his­tor­i­cal under­stand­ing: the prob­lem of begin­nings and ends, of con­text, of con­tin­gency, and of cul­ture. To help with this process he seeks insights from the way his­to­ri­ans inter­pret­ed anoth­er vio­lent and foun­da­tion­al event in mod­ern Euro­pean his­to­ry — the French Rev­o­lu­tion.

Foun­da­tion­al Pasts is a bril­liant, lucid, and acces­si­ble med­i­ta­tion on inter­pre­ta­tions of the Holo­caust and sug­ges­tions on the lim­i­ta­tions of that research and new direc­tions to be pur­sued. It will sure­ly gen­er­ate much reflec­tion on how the Shoah should be understood.