The Crime of My Very Existence

The Crime of My Very Existenceinvestigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the making of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality. In a lucid, wide-ranging narrative that draws from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, Michael Berkowitz traces the myths and the realities pertinent to the discourse on Jewish criminality from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic and on into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews. In addition to reconstructing a little-recognized but protean element of the Nazi perpetrators' mind-set, this important study of the social construction of criminality is also the first to ask how Jewish victims themselves understood the assault on them as criminals.

Michael Berkowitz is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London