What is the Grand Sanhedrin?

named after the main legislative and judicial body of the Jewish people in classical and late antiquity, it was created by Napoleon to give legal sanction to the principles expressed by the Assembly of Notables in answer to the twelve questions submitted to it by the government

What is Six Day War?

a war in 1967 between Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

Who is Dov Bar of Mezerich (“Maggid” of Mezerich)?

(d. 1772) this respected Talmudist and follower of the Baal Shem Tov was instrumental in disseminating the BeShT’s message. Steered Hasidism to stay within the bounds of Jewish tradition and was one of the main responsible for the spread of Hasidism.

What is Mein Kampf?

written in 1923, this autobiography outlined the Nazi program.

What is the Damascus Affair?

Blood libel in the capital of Syria in 1840, where the Jewish community was accused of having killed a monk and his servant.

What is the Hep-Hep riots?

Began in August 1819, these anti-Jewish riots that began in Wurzburg and spread from southern and western Germany northward to Hamburg and Copenhagen, and even south to Cracow. They seem to have broken out as a response to Jewish emancipation and are known by the words shouted by the rioters.

What is the Balfour Declaration?

November 1917 declaration by the British War Cabinet, which expressed support for the establishment of a national home for the jewish people in Palestine.

What is Mitnagdism?

movement of direct opposition to Hasidism, stressed the importance of Torah study, defended traditional basis for rabbinical authority

What are the Nuremberg Laws?

promulgated at a Nazi Party Congress in 1935, these sets of discriminatory laws deprived all German Jews of citizenship and all civil and political rights.

What is the Dreyfus Affair?

A political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s and which brought to the fore the limits of emancipation.

What is the Pale of Settlement?

The western border region of imperial Russia, to which the state, beginning with Catherine the Great in 1791, tried to confine the Jews. By the end of the 19th century it was home to more than 5 million Jews and covered nearly 400,000 square miles. Abolished with the Russian Revolution of 1917.

What is the British White Paper of 1939?

considered a repudiation of the Balfour Declaration and called a “death sentence” by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann.

Who is Abraham Geiger?

(1810-1874) – Frankfurt-born philologist and historian who became the spiritual leader of Reform Judaism.

What is Kristallnacht?

triggered by the assassination in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew, this coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property left 91 Jews dead and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. It is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the Final Solution.

What is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

A fictional account of a meeting by Jews plotting world domination, written by the Russian secret police in Paris sometime between 1896 and 1898. A canonical work in anti-Semitic literature unto the present day, with translations in many languages.

What are the Cantonists?

Underage Jewish recruits taken from their families between 1827 and 1855, on average at the age of fourteen, for a preparatory period before their twenty-five year service in the Russian army. Fifty thousand Jewish boys were forcibly recruited in this way and it was part of the policy of forced integration of Jews held by successive czars.

What is Haganah?

Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948

Who is Samson Raphael Hirsch?

(1808-1888) German rabbi born in Hamburg who founded modern Orthodoxy.

What is Einsatzgruppen?

squads composed primarily of German SS and police personnel which had among their tasks the murder of those perceived to be racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union.

Who is Wilhelm Marr?

Inventor of the term antisemitism, probably in the late 1870s, and author of a pamphlet entitled The Victory of the Jew Over the Germans (1879)

Who is Moses Mendelssohn?

1729-1786 – Leading German and Jewish luminary in 18th century Berlin. Philosopher as well as biblical commentator, who became an icon of the Haskalah.

What is Operation Magic Carpet?

operation between June 1949 and September 1950 that brought 49,000 Yemenite Jews to the new state of Israel; first of a series of operations whose purpose was to move entire Jewish communities in Arab countries in the 1950s to Israel.

Who is Mordecai Kaplan?

(1881-1983) this American Rabbi founded the Reconstructionist movement.

What is Warsaw Ghetto

major Polish ghetto created in 1940 and in which 400,000 Jews were squeezed in an area of little more than 1.2 square miles. Its uprising in 1943, although unsuccessful is considered the largest, symbolically most important Jewish uprising, and the first urban uprising, in German-occupied Europe.

Who is Theodor Herzl?

(1860-1904) – chief architect of political Zionism and founder of the World Zionist Organization. An assimilated/secular Jew he was inspired by the growing antisemitism