Jews and Sacrilege after

the Reformation
MAGDA TETER
Criminal law became a
key tool in the effort to
legitimize Church authority
in post-Reformation
Poland. Recounting
dramatic stories of torture, trial, and punishment
involving Christians and Jews, this is the first
book to consider the sacrilege accusations of the
early modern period within the broader context
of politics and common crime.
SuperbIn her captivating narrative, Teter has
painstakingly documented how the body politic
and the body of Christ were inextricably bound
together through the early modern period, and
how the Reformation not only failed to diminish
the host-desecration calumny but, at least in
Catholic Poland, gave it new energy.
ALLAN NADLER, JEWISH IDEAS DAILY
Teters brilliant book shows how accusations
of host desecration leveled against the Jews in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Poland took
place against the backdrop of conflicts between

church and state, king and nobility, and

Catholics and Protestants. While these accusations
diminished markedly in Western Europe
after the Reformation, in Poland, it was precisely
the Reformation and the consequent
Counter-Reformation that led to a host of
new cases.
DAVID BIALE,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS
2011 15 halftones, 2 maps 358 pp.
Cloth $39.95 / 29.95 ISBN 978-0-674-05297-0
New in paperback
BEYOND JUSTICE
The Auschwitz Trial
REBECCA WITTMANN
Fraenkel Prize, Category A, Wiener Library
When Germans began bringing other Germans
to trial for Nazi atrocities, prosecutors found
themselves struggling through a thicket of ambiguities,
some created by the laws they had to use
and some by the equivocal emotions of the German
public. Exhibit A in this process remains
the trial of 24 Auschwitz guards, held in Frankfurt
from 1963 to 1965The trial was a pivotal
event in German history but until [now] no one

has described it in detail. Rebecca Wittmann

fills the gap with a clear, thorough and highly
intelligent book.
NATIONAL POST
2012; 2005 6 halftones, 1 line illus. 360 pp.
Paper $19.95 / 14.95 ISBN 978-0-674-06387-7
New
SHATTERED SPACES
Encountering Jewish
Ruins in Postwar
Germany and Poland
MICHAEL MENG
After the Holocaust, the
empty, silent spaces of
bombed-out synagogues,
cemeteries, and Jewish districts
were all that was left of
Jewish life in many German
and Polish cities. What happened to this scarred
landscape after the war, and how Germans, Poles,
and Jews encountered these ruins over the past
sixty years, is the story this book tells.
Meng digs through the neglected ruins of Jewish
urban life after 1945 to uncover fascinating
clues about the complex ways in which Germans

and Poles dealt with the physical legacy of genocide.

Rigorously researched and commendably
comparative, the book makes an important contribution
to the fields of Jewish history, Holocaust
history, and memory studies.
GAVRIEL D. ROSENFELD, AUTHOR OF
BUILDING AFTER AUSCHWITZ
2011 42 halftones, 4 maps 368 pp.
Cloth $35.00 / 25.95 ISBN 978-0-674-05303-8
ADVERTISING EMPIRE
Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany
DAVID CIARLO
Co-Winner, George Louis Beer Prize,
American Historical Association
A stunning, breakthrough book; easily the
most important new work on the colonial and
racial imagination in preWorld War I Germany
in nearly a decade. In startling detail, Ciarlo
shows us a new landscape of consumer advertising
that shaped German attitudes towards imperialism,
the colonies, and racial hierarchies.
HELMUT WALSER SMITH,
VANDERBILT