Brit-Am Historical Reports (24 November 2016, 23 Cheshvan, 5777)
Contents:
1. Cannibalism in Germany.
2. Holocaust Studies. Functionalism versus Intentionalism
3. Holocaust Studies. British Attempts to Alleviate the Situation. The Kinderstransport (Child Evacuation)
(a) KINDERTRANSPORT AND KTA HISTORY
 (1) Why was the Kindertransport important?
(2) Did the Kindertransport children keep their Jewish faith?
(b) On 75th Anniversary of the Kindertransport, British Jews finding it hard to ask questions
(c) The Power of the People in Influencing the British Government: The Kindertransport by Sophia Cantwell
4. Big Viking families nurtured murder. Killers more likely to belong to large extended clans, victims to small vulnerable ones
5. The Expulsion of Jews from England (1290) and Native English Adherents to Judaism?
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1. Cannibalism in Germany.
Fritz Haarmann
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haarmann
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2. Holocaust Studies
Functionalism versus Intentionalism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_versus_intentionalism
Extracts:
 Daniel Goldhagen went further, suggesting that popular opinion in Germany was already sympathetic to a policy of Jewish extermination before the Nazi party came to power. He asserts in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners that Germany enthusiastically welcomed the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime in the period 1933-39.
A number of scholars such as Arno J. Mayer, Yehuda Bauer, Ian Kershaw and Michael Marrus have developed a synthesis of the functionalist and intentionalist schools. They have suggested the Holocaust was a result of pressures that came from both above and below and that Hitler lacked a master plan, but was the decisive force behind the Holocaust.Â
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3. Holocaust Studies. British Attempts to Alleviate the Situation. The Kinderstransport (Child Evacuation)
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(a) KINDERTRANSPORT AND KTA HISTORY
http://www.kindertransport.org/history09_faq.htm
Extracts:
 (1) Why was the Kindertransport important?
The Kindertransport saved only 10,000 children, a small number compared to the million and a half children who perished, yet it has its importance. The children were able to go to a friendly country not through luck, contacts or subterfuge, but through the will of the British people as expressed by their representatives in Parliament. This demonstrates that, even in the worst of times, actions can be taken to save lives.
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(2) Did the Kindertransport children keep their Jewish faith?
The majority did keep their Jewish faith. Even when children where cared for by Christians, rabbis visited them and stayed in touch. However, some did convert to the religion of their British hosts, and a few eventually reconverted to Judaism. A play, Kindertransport, by Diane Samuels, treats the issue of such a case.
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(b) On 75th Anniversary of the Kindertransport, British Jews finding it hard to ask questions
http://www.ajr.org.uk/index.cfm/section.journal/issue.Sep13/article=13331
Extracts:
Letters of guarantee for 50 pounds that were necessary so the children could receive a visa are also on display, as is the small suitcase carried from Berlin by 15-year-old Martin Thau. We are told that his stepmother, who packed his case, and his sister also applied for visas but could not leave Germany, and Martin never saw them again.
These short captions hint at some thorny issues that are not mentioned in polite British-Jewish society. Why did it take a particularly violent outbreak of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism to get the British government to change its policies and allow the victims of Nazism into Britain? Why were the children of the Kindertransport allowed in but their parents consigned to extermination? The Germans would have allowed the adults out, it was Britain's refusal to give them visas that damned them. What was the influential British Jewish community doing about this in the 1930s?
Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the leading chronicler of the history of Britain's Jews, says that it is no coincidence that in the official events for the Kindertransport's anniversary 'several facts were conveniently omitted. The first of these facts was that the initiative of bringing unaccompanied child refugees was undertaken despite the established organs of British Jewry and not because of them.'
According to Alderman, the leaders of British Jewry in the mid-1930s were not in favor of allowing large numbers of Jewish refugees into the country and did little if anything to lobby the government to change its immigration policies. The man who organized efforts by the Jewish community on behalf of European Jews in the 1930s was the banker Otto Schiff, who had been decorated by the government for his work with Belgian refugees during World War I. Schiff was trusted by the government, says Alderman, 'because he brought to bear their prejudices that only a certain type of Jew should be admitted to England.'
Thousands of Jews were allowed in, but only those who were guaranteed not to be a 'financial burden,' and in many cases the arrival of German Jewish refugees in the mid-1930s was stymied by organizations such as the British Medical Association and the Association of University Teachers, who were anxious not to allow Jewish doctors and academics, who had all been forced out of their jobs by the 1934 Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws, to enter Britain.
Last month, veteran journalist Michael Freedland wrote what can be certainly described as a rare column in the Jewish Chronicle headlined 'When we did not do enough.' Freedland highlights the stories of non-Jewish families who opened their homes to lonely Jewish refugees while at the same time lamenting'for every non-Jew who said yes, there were Jews who said no,' and 'that Jews in the street here were worried about having these strangers among us.'
He tells the story of the Jewish community in the coastal town of Bournemouth, who when asked to provide homes for Kindertransport refugees decided that rather than risk the good relations they had with local residents by harboring alien citizens, to give each of the children 10 shillings and send them away. 'It is a disgrace that needs thinking about' he writes, but few British Jews seem capable of doing so.
Another issue conveniently brushed over is the reason the children had to come over on their own, leaving behind their parents and elder siblings (16 was the age limit) and the resulting trauma, guilt and often ill-treatment of the surviving children. Not all the children who arrived were lucky enough to be sheltered by warm families - some were exploited as child labor by their foster families, there were cases of sexual exploitation and in many cases the children were sent to families clearly unsuitable for them (in some cases after the war there were ugly fights over children who had converted to Christianity under the influence of their foster parents).
And of course, there are a lot of positives in the Kindertransport story: British people from all walks of life, Jewish and non-Jewish, who opened their homes and helped lonely children, aside from the basic fact that nearly 10,000 souls were saved from almost certain death.
And it is easy to excuse many of the failings in a program that was launched in a matter of days, was run by different and often competing organizations and had little if any time to locate suitable accommodation and families for all the children. And yet, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Kindertransport narrative has paid little attention to these failings, and glossed over the children�s hardships and trauma, partly because of the uncomfortable fact that the only reason their parents were left behind was that the British government refused them visas.
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(c) The Power of the People in Influencing the British Government: The Kindertransport by Sophia Cantwell
http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=younghistorians
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4. Big Viking families nurtured murder
Killers more likely to belong to large extended clans, victims to small vulnerable ones
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/big-viking-families-nurtured-murder
By
Bruce Bower
12:33pm, October 3, 2016
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5. The Expulsion of  the Jews from England (1290) and Native English Adherents to Judaism?
http://www.mylapidmedia.com/uploads/8/1/0/5/8105580/a_history_of_the_jews_in_england_oxford_1941.pdf
Extracts from the historian Cecil Roth, "A History of the Jews of England.".
# Except for the incidental statement that Jews had been brought over from Rouen to England by William the Conqueror, there is no authentic reference to them during his reign.William Rufusencouraged the exotic strangers somewhat too exuberantly, words at least, if we are to believe contemporary accounts. On a certain solemnity when the Jews of London brought him a gift he persuaded them to enter into a religious discussion with bishops and churchmen present at court. Not content with the scandal caused by this, he jestingly swore, by the Holy Face of Lucca, that if they were victorious he would himself embrace Judaism, an impiety which can hardly have enhanced their popularity in ecclesiastical circles. 9
# At the beginning of the reign of Henry II, according to the official Treasury records, there were Jewish nuclei not only in London but also in Norwich, Lincoln, Winchester, Cambridge, Thetford, Northampton, Bungay, Oxford, and Gloucester (the order given is that of financial, and presumably in most cases numerical, importance). 28 In addition, isolated families were living in Worcester and Leicester, and from other sources we know communities to have existed in Bristol and York. In consequence of favourable conditions, there seems to have been during the course of the reign a veritable influx from the Continent, stimulated without doubt by the expulsion of the Jews from the Ile de France in 1182, and facilitated by the immense extension of the Angevin possessions overseas. The area of settlement expanded, the records showing further groups before the end of the reign at Exeter, Stamford, Lynn, Bury, Bedford, Devizes, Ipswich, Canterbury, Hereford, Dunstable, Chichester Newport, and some smaller places.8 At Dunstable it is reported that the entire diminutive community saved itself from massacre by submitting to baptism. Jewish tradition preserved the memory of one place containing a small congregation of twenty-two souls who were exterminated without exception. 9
9. This place is possibly to be identified with Lynn, where according to the English sources the slaughter seems to have been comprehensive. Ephraim of Bonn and the chroniclers who derive from him, followed by all modern authorities, speak of this as a. 'community of proselytes'. This is highly unlikely, and the reading is plainly due to a faulty passage in the chronicle of Ephraim of Bonn, where Gerim ('proselytes') was read for Garim ('inhabitants'): a subsequent copyist fixed the confusion by adding the Talmudic gloss 'a community of proselytes is considered a community'
Brit-Am Comments:
Dunstable is located in Bedfordshire, in the southeast of England, to the north of London. Here the Jewish community converted to Christianity to save their lives.
Lynn is the name of several smallish locations. here it could be someplace in the southwest, or west-center.
It is common in Jewish Historiography to re-interpret any reference to "ger" or "gerim" as meaning "dweller" or "sojourner" after its Biblical connotations. We however take it to always mean "convert" unless there is evidence to the contrary.
This would imply that in England there was at least one whole village whose inhabitants had converted to Judaism.
England was referred to as the "Isle of the Sea"
# Rabbi Menahem ben Jacob, of Worms, bewailed what had taken place in a heart-broken elegy:
'His hand dealt disaster, they vanished; Even their refuge is no longer known; In the Isle of the Sea, all the noble Have been brought low, low from their throne. '
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