The Nazi plan to recreate a new German society did not begin with the idea of exterminating Jews, but rather of eradicating all traces of “Jewish” religious and historical influence. Judaism, said historian Alon Confino, represented to the Nazis “a kind of unclean modernity” that had to be cleansed in order to bring about their new world order. Confino, a history professor at the University of Virginia and Ben-Gurion University in Israel, is a leading scholar of German memory and national culture.