(This takes approximately ten minutes to read. Aside from anti-Jewish violence, it also discusses one instance of animal abuse.)

For anyone still unaware, (the) Tōrāh is Judaism’s and Samaritanism’s foundational text and their most sacred object. Abrahamic tradition attributes its authorship to Prophet Moses, who in turn was inspired by the Almighty. This attribution is probably legendary, but whatever the case may be the Torah remains a work of great cultural importance.

I have mentioned before how the Fascists destroyed Toroth, but after I found one particularly baffling example of Torah desecration, I decided that the phenomenon deserved its own thread to supplement my discussion of Fascist anti-Judaism. Before we delve into how the Fascists intentionally desecrated these works, it is important to grasp the Torah’s value even if you are completely irreligious. For starters, Sifrei Torah are not exactly the sorts of objects that you can find on an assembly line. To quote Karen Kaplan:

Creating a Torah scroll requires experience, patience, and dedication to detail. The words are written, letter by letter, with the greatest care, by a highly trained scribe. There can be no mistakes. It must all hold together perfectly. And then it’s rolled into a scroll.

Judaists have numerous rules for treating Sifrei Torah, including how they should face the readers, and if something or someone severely damages a Sefer Torah, it has to be buried or ‘secreted’ as Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried put it. Here is a brief look at how Jews respect the Torah from Katherine Aron-Beller’s Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators: The History of an Allegation, 400–1700, ch. 4:

The idea that the Torah, as a divine object, had a preexistence in heaven had been developed in early rabbinic literature. Jews are not allowed to touch it with their hands, when it is carried before them in a procession in their synagogues. It is the only Jewish object [that] Jews are expected to bow down before.⁹⁴

When the Crusaders (from whom the Third Reich took inspiration) intentionally desecrated Toroth, it traumatised Jewish onlookers:

The Hebrew chroniclers first emphasized the holiness and beauty of the Torah, how it was honored by a particular Jewish community, and how terrible it was that the uncircumcised contaminated it.

[…]

The Mainz Anonymous depicts the grief of the Jewish women who saw the Torah as it was torn in the Mainz synagogue in 1098: “There was also a Torah scroll in the room; the errant ones came into the room, found it, and tore it to shreds. When the holy and pure women, daughters of kings, saw that the Torah had been torn, they called in a loud voice to their husbands: ‘Look, see, the Holy Torah—it is being torn by the enemy!’ And they all said, men and women together: ‘Alas, the Holy Torah, the perfection of beauty, the delight of our eyes, to which we used to bow in the synagogue, kissing and honoring it. How has it now fallen into the hands of the impure uncircumcised ones?’”⁹⁸

It may still be uneasy to understand why someone would attach so much importance to a scroll, especially if you hold some of its contents in low regard, but imagine how you would feel if somebody destroyed one of your most cherished or valuable possessions. Alternatively, imagine how you would feel if somebody destroyed an irreplaceable work of history.

While none of those is quite the same thing as a Sefer Torah (with several exceptions), the point is to give you an approximation of how you would feel. Sifrei Torah are not only sacred ritual objects: they take great skill to make, they have distinguishing features that make them unique to their synagogues, and they are effectively family heirlooms, often being sources of fond memories.

It is because Jewish communities instilled so much value in these scrolls that Fascist gentiles found it fulfilling to deliberately damage them. This was not only a source of amusement for the Fascists, it was also a useful demonstration of power and an intimidating rejection of Jewish cultures that made Jews feel even more tempted to either leave or avoid the Fascist bourgeoisie’s increasingly homogeneous empires, thereby freeing up room and other resources for the White, gentile colonisers. Quoting Alon Confino’s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, page 3:

[A]s dawn broke over the town’s elegant houses, something else had happened in Schlageter Square. By now, all Jews had been assembled. Some, like Oskar and his family, had been standing there for some four hours. A good-­sized crowd of citizens had also gathered. At the center of the square the [Fascists] had piled Jewish ritual objects from the synagogues along with items from the Jewish community house, which had been destroyed earlier.

Clearly visible on the pole in the middle were the synagogues’ Torah scrolls. There, after first rolling out the scrolls in the square and forcing the rabbis to walk on them, the [Fascists] hung the Torah. Then, before the assembled crowd, they set the pyre ablaze (simultaneously with one of the synagogues, it seems): the Hebrew Bible […] was thus publicly burned.

Page 109:

In Vienna, after Austria joined the Reich in March 1938, Torah scrolls were used as carpets.³¹

Pages 115–118:

The [Germanic Fascists] burned the Hebrew Bible on November 9 and 10, 1938. Not one copy but thousands, not in one place but in hundreds of communities across the Reich, and not only in such metropolises as Berlin, Stettin, Vienna, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Cologne but in such small communities as Sulzburg, a Protestant village in Baden with 1,070 inhabitants where the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were thrown from the roof of the synagogue and the [Fascists] marched mockingly up and down the main street with Torah scrolls before destroying them.¹ By fire and other means, the destruction of the Book of Books was at the center of Kristallnacht, when fourteen hundred synagogues were set on fire.²

In Berlin, [Fascists] burned the Torah scrolls of the Hebrew Bible in front of the Levetzowstrasse synagogue, while others carried the scrolls from the Fasanenstrasse synagogue to Wittenberg Square and burned them there.³ The scrolls that were saved from Wittenberg Square were later buried by the community in Weissensee according to Jewish tradition.

In Pestalozzistrasse shredded Torah scrolls and prayer books as well as religious objects from the altar littered the area near the synagogue. Children were mockingly marching on the shredded Torah with top hats on.⁴ In the Jewish quarter of Leopoldgasse in Vienna, the Arks and Torah scrolls from four synagogues were piled up in the street and set on fire. In Mosbach, in Baden, a community of five thousand souls, a photograph captured local inhabitants watching as the interior of the synagogue was burned on the morning of November 10.⁵

Destroying the Hebrew Bible in small communities was a public event [that] no one could ignore, one in which children often participated.

In Fritzlar, a small town in Hessen where in the year 919 the Reichstag gave birth to the Holy Roman German Empire, Torah scrolls were rolled along the Nikolausstrasse as Hitler Youth rode their bicycles over them.⁶ Children played with the Torah on the street in Hirschberg, in Silesia, while in Herford, a small town in western Germany, they shredded it to pieces to a general bellowing and laughing.⁷

In the village of Kippenheim, Baden (1,821 inhabitants), youth threw the Torah scrolls into the local brook, while in one quarter of Vienna, schoolchildren were taken to watch the Torah set on fire.⁸

Jewish children conjured their own image of the Bible on that day. Batya Emanuael, thirteen years old, watched with her brother the destruction of a small synagogue that stood next to their house in Frankfurt: “A window was pushed open, a chair flew out. […] It was followed by another chair and yet another. And then there was silence. […] A white snake jumped down from the windowsill and slithered down, down to the ground below, it seemed unending. ‘Scrolls of the Law, Torah Scrolls,’ we gasped, not wanting to believe our eyes.”⁹

In Aachen, [Fascists] tore the Torah in front of the synagogue and put scraps in their pockets, claiming [that] it would bring them good luck (an old belief of unknown origins).¹⁰ In Vienna, Siegfried Merecki, a fifty-one-year-­old lawyer with three children, lived near one of the city’s synagogues. That night he saw “packages being carried away. […] Shadowy figures were moving toward the bridge over the Danube. Then I understood. The Torah scrolls were being taken to the bridge and thrown into the river. I watched and counted six [scrolls] and heard hideous laughter.”¹¹

Also in Vienna, Jews were dressed in the robes and decorations of the Ark and then marched and chased through the streets with torn Torah scrolls tied to their backs, while in Frankfurt Jews were forced to tear up the Torah and burn it.¹² In small Schmieheim, a Protestant community of 752 souls in Baden, [Fascists] rolled the synagogue’s seven Torah scrolls down the street like a carpet. Some rolls were later hung in the train station of the nearby village of Dinglingen bei Lahr.¹³

A Jewish woman who attempted to save the scrolls and ritual objects in Lichtenfeld, Bavaria, was stopped by children. A scuffle ensued, and the woman was killed. The children later played football with the prayer books.¹⁴

In Altdorf, a Catholic village of 1,112 souls in Baden, a [Fascist] mimicked the Jewish prayer in front of the synagogue using the talith, the Jewish prayer shawl, as toilet paper, and then read from the prayer book, spitting invective against Jews.¹⁵ And in Wittlich, in western Germany, “a shouting SA man climbed to the roof, waving the rolls of the Torah: ‘Wipe your asses with it, Jews,’ he screamed while he hurled them like bands of confetti on Carnival.”¹⁶

In Württemberg, a man who picked up Jewish prayer books in the street, presumably as an act of respect toward the holy objects, was later hanged publicly on a tree on the road from Steinach to Hall. In Euskirchen in the Rhineland, the Torah was rolled open and hung from the adorned roof of the synagogue at Annaturmstrasse, visible to the crowd who gathered before the building as well as to those who viewed the smoking temple from a distance. As Torah scrolls burned in a synagogue’s yard in Düsseldorf, German men, some wearing the robes of the rabbis and cantors, danced around the fire.¹⁷

Page 161:

[Wehrmacht] soldiers during the Polish campaign first treated Jews according to anti-­Jewish acts familiar from the prewar years. Previous experience is often the first guide for action. Synagogues were burned and Torah scrolls destroyed all over Poland.

Page 209:

One object was no longer of interest to the [Fascists]. The [Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt] did not [always] bother to collect Torah scrolls, although one official noted that “perhaps the leather can still have some use for bookbinding.” Scrolls were used in areas occupied by the [Third Reich] for binding books and making such leather objects as belts and shoes.⁵³

Quoting Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich’s Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation:

Before destroying synagogues throughout Germany and eastern Europe, the [Fascists] would often desecrate and destroy the sacred objects that they found within, including Torah scrolls. This was part of the larger [Fascist] effort not only to wipe out all Jewish communities but to humiliate and eradicate the Jewish culture[s] as well.

In 1941 in Slobodka, Ukraine, for example, [Axis] troops filled the town synagogue with dead cats and forced Jewish inhabitants to tear up Torah scrolls and then strew the pieces across the corpses of the animals. What this event reveals is the fact that destruction was not enough—the Torah, as the book most sacred to the Jewish people and therefore emblematic of Jewish belief and culture as a whole, had to be desacralized and stripped of its power.

Attempts to desecrate sacred Jewish objects appear in anti-Semitic cartoons as well, such as those found in Julius Streicher’s infamous Der Stürmer. In one cartoon, for example, a Jewish man prays before an altar topped with a bag of gold that is marked with a Star of David. Beneath the altar, at his feet, lies a discarded Torah scroll.²⁴ Wealth and greed, the cartoon claims, are what are truly sacred to the Jew; the Torah is merely a prop that is discarded when the real sacred object—money—appears.

It is true that [Fascism] did not invent the act of burning or desecrating the Torah. Indeed, Torah scrolls were often trampled underfoot or burned—along with the synagogues that held them—by mobs during pogroms throughout European history. Torah scrolls were not officially burned by the church, however, as was the case with the Talmud, which was publicly burned a number of times in Italy and France between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.²⁵

The destruction of Torah scrolls during the [Fascist era], however, is unparalleled. It is impossible to know how many Torah scrolls were desecrated and destroyed by the [Fascists] throughout [the Third Reich] and its occupied territories, but the number is certainly in the thousands.

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

Quoting Jared McBride’s ‘The Tuchyn Pogrom: The Names and Faces Behind the Violence, Summer 1941’:

Most explicitly German involvement in early violence is recounted by one witness, who noted how a few soldiers found a small synagogue in the home of Chaim Szprinc and set alight six Torah scrolls in his yard.⁴¹

Quoting Andreas Schulz in The Greater German Reich and the Jews: Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935–1945, page 223:

In Neuhof, ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) collected Torah scrolls, wrapped them up with the shorn hair of Jewish women, and tried to force an elderly Jew to set the sacred scriptures on fire. Refusing to do so, he was shot. In the end, the rest of the town’s Jews had to kindle the flames and dance around the burning Torah scrolls.

Quoting World War II: the Encyclopedia of the War Years, 1941–1945, pages 445–446:

[Axis] occupation forces randomly killed Polish Jews, taunted and tortured them, or made them perform despicable acts. A favorite: forcing Jews at gunpoint to gather up sacred Torah scrolls and burn them while they danced around the fire singing, “We rejoice that this shit is burning.”

The Axis’s willing collaborators frequently participated in damaging these scrolls, too.

Believe it or not, these remarkably tasteless displays of dominance were not entirely what prompted me to discuss this subject. Inspiration struck after I found an article on shoe soles made from Torahic parchment. Quoting Jay Prosser’s ‘Cecil Roth’s Torah scroll shoe soles: collecting Holocaust relics in Greece’:

Other scrolls, such as the one [that] we find left over in Roth’s shoe soles, were stolen by the [Fascists] or local populations to provide material for new goods. In accordance with halacha (Jewish religious law), the parchment of Sifrei Torah is kosher animal skin and most often calf. Yad Vashem holds a number of leather goods ‘recycled’ from desecrated scrolls, including a handbag, a toy drum, and a wallet.¹⁹

Yad Vashem also holds three shoe soles which are the Sefer Torah fragments most comparable to Roth’s: one pair of insoles found in the shoes of [an Axis] officer in Italy; plus a single sole without any known provenance or history.²⁰ Only in the case of Roth’s Sefer Torah soles can we know the collector, the year, as well as the country of collection. Only with these soles can we reconstruct most of the story involving collection.

To end this on a less depressing note, the Axis’s approach to the Torah was not always as straightforward as these desecrations. Mihai I. Poliec found a curious instance where a few Wehrmacht officials prevented an Axis merchant from destroying Sifrei Torah that he found in a closet, and Jay Prosser’s article talks about the Third Reich sometimes seizing these scriptures as mere trophies, whereafter they eventually ended up in Jewish hands again:

Scrolls faced a number of possible different fates. Fire, bomb, or other damage destroyed some completely. Many were stolen from synagogues to be transported to the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, the antisemitic center for holding and debasing Jewish culture.¹⁶

The fortunate ones were stored and restored after the war. Most famous among these are the Czech Scrolls, the 1,600 scrolls uprooted from synagogues across Bohemia and Moravia, which were held in the Jewish Museum in Prague during the war, then in an abandoned synagogue outside of Prague. In 1964 they were rescued and brought to Westminster Synagogue in London.¹⁷ They are now lent to Jewish communities around the world.