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Nils Roemer, German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms . Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010. x, 316 pp.

Since the end of World War II, German Jewish historiography has tended to be Berlinocentric. This is understandable, as Berlin was home to Germany’s largest Jewish community, and many members of the founding postwar generation of German Jewish historians either came from there or had family ties to it. One consequence of this focus is that there have been few English-language local histories of Jewish communities other than that of the imperial capital. Nils Roemer’s German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms runs counter to this trend and constitutes a genuine breakthrough in our approach to the German Jewish past. Roemer’s focus is on the tension between popular history and memory in Worms, one of the founding communities of Ashkenazic Jewry. Beginning with the First Crusade and continuing as such today, Worms is remembered as a site of horrendous violence, the resting place of pious Jewish martyrs, and a great Jewish intellectual center. Rather than merely telling this story, Roemer brilliantly examines the way Worms was celebrated and remembered from the Middle Ages on. The book is divided into discrete periods—the medieval, the early modern, the modern, the Nazi period, and the postwar era. Each succeeding stage saw how the memories and rituals commemorating Worms became increasingly complex and elaborate. By the Middle Ages, Worms’s reputation as a site of Jewish suffering and scholarship was firmly established. Accounts of the First Crusade proliferated, and Worms created its own rituals of remembrance to honor its Jewish martyrs. These included reading their names out loud in the synagogue on the Sabbath preceding Shavuot, as well as the imposition of a fast day on the 23rd of Iyyar, accompanied by the prohibition against performing marriages, cutting hair, and trimming beards on that date. The fast day was observed until the nineteenth century. And thanks to the chronicle of the distinguished Talmudist, kabbalist, and descendant of the Kalonymous family, R. Eleazar b. Judah, who was born Book Reviews