Referring back to Origins of the Holocaust, written by David Downing, the Jewish people are not a country, race, or strictly a religion in fact many Jews are not religious. Downing describing the Jewish people, “Perhaps the one thing that binds Jews together is their shared history — and the sense of themselves as a people that sharing that history gives them” (Downing, pg. 7). Jewish religion is monotheistic, meaning that they only believe in one God. In Jewish religion they use the Torah, which refers to the Old Testament in the Hebrew Bible, and the Ten Commandments as their moral law. Hebrew was the sacred language of the Jewish people its importance is expressed in the article, “The Holocaust: An Introductory History”. “It was never merely a vehicle of communication but part of the fabric and texture of Judaism. Words vibrate with religious meaning, moral values and literary associations. Torah and Hebrew are inseparable and Jewish education was always predicated on mastering Hebrew” (Levine, Jason). The Jewish people took great pride in their language as it represented to them something greater than themselves. “Hebrew literacy is key to Judaism to joining the unending dialect between sacred text, between Jews of different ages, between God and Israel. To know Judaism only in translation is, to quote Bialik, akin to kissing the bride through the veil” (Levine, …show more content…
These harmful stereotypes with which Jews have been characterized have changed throughout history, but have always been used as a means of justifying a causeless hatred already present in a person or society” (The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education). Discrimination against Jewish people has been around for as far back as was recorded. The Holocaust did not occur overnight. The Holocaust was the unfortunate culmination of years of prejudices, economic and social events and a plethora of other