Holocaust

Without the British stand in WWII it is debatable that any Jews would be alive today.

If the British had lost the Battle of Britain then most Jews,maybe all, would have been destroyed, along with many other groups of people.

Jewish people should be very aware of this and thankful to the British,and Polish, fighters who defeated Hitler at the Battle of Britain.

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"Jewish people should be very aware of this". Britain was not fighting to save Jews, and the liberation of the camps was a by-product of the Allied victory over Germany.

Having said that, I would add that late in 1942 there was some public discussion in the media in Britain about what might be done to help the Jews - and in November 1942 the News Chronicleactually described what was happening to the Jews as a holocaust ... (It was the first time this word was used in this context). However, attention shifted to other matters.

The Holocaust has had innumerable effects across the world. This is just a small sampling of them:

1) End of European Judaism: This is a very sad thing to admit, but the Holocaust effectively erased Judaism and a Jewish future in most places in Europe. European Judaism used to be the center of the Modern Jewish Experience with the seeds of almost all Jewish movements (from Modern Orthodoxy and Hasidism to the Conservative and Reform Movements). The debate as to whether a Jew could be a "proper" European, which dragged on from the Renaissance times, was effectively ended because there was no longer a sufficiently large Jewish population in Europe to matter. Jews who returned to their hometowns after the Holocaust found their homes settled by squatters and were attacked in many instances by the non-Jewish residents because of the anti-Semitic brainwashing they had both during and after the War.

A number of Jewish groups did not exist outside of Europe and were almost completely wiped out like the Romaniot Jews of Greece (which today number less than 100 people).

2) State of Israel: The Zionist project existed long before the Holocaust. (The first Halutzim came to the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine while it was still under Ottoman control -- late 1800s and early 1900s and Ze'ev Jabotinsky encouraged Polish Jews to immigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1937.) However, after the Holocaust, it became clear to the International Community that the Jews needed a place to exist freely and without fear of persecution where previously this sentiment was confined to radicals in the Jewish community. (Most Jews were anti-Zionist or at least not pro-Zionist before the Holocaust.) As a direct result of the Holocaust, the United Nations convened and proposed the UN Partition of the British Mandate in 1947 which gave Israel a legal claim to statehood in 1948.

3) America as a Jewish Center: The United States had always been considered to be on the periphery of the Jewish World until the Holocaust. However, as the American Jewish population was the only reasonably large Jewish population to survive the Holocaust intact, it suddenly had to take on the burden of being the center of Jewish education and identity formation.

4) The Crime of Genocide: The Aftermath of the Holocaust described the horrific events therein as a genocide and led to much international law concerning Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide. The Nuremberg Trials further solidified what genocide was (the intentional slaughter of civilians belonging to a specific ethnic group, religious group, or racial group).

5) German Guilt: The Holocaust has had a profound effect in shaping the Modern German Identity. It is one of the few cases in the world where an entire nation of people feels guilty for actions taken by their parents, grandparents, and in some cases, great-grandparents. It also shapes how Germans view their economic obligations (reparations) to Israel. Germans today debate whether they have the right to feel the same patriotic fervor that is very much at home in most countries (like the United States) and use national symbols and songs.

6) Massive Immigration to Latin America: Jews and former Nazis alike had difficulty sometimes gaining entry to the United States and Canada. (In the case of former Nazis, they also wanted to hide their identities.) As a result, many immigrated to Brazil and Argentina to live out the rest of their lives. As a result, there are many ethnic Germans in Argentina to this day.

As concerns the Middle East and Arab World specifically, the following are two lasting effects in addition to the creation and maintenance of the State of Israel:

1) Nazification of Arab Nationalism: This is usually glossed over, but the root causes of the Holocaust like the Nazi ideology were important in the development of Arab Nationalism. During the Colonial Period in the Arab World, the Arabs felt that while they were the sons of conquerors who ruled vast empires, they were now humiliated and conquered by the British and the French. This feeling of subjugated superiority matched the Nazi profile and as a result, Arabs began pilfering Nazi doctrine and adding it to their own Nationalist sentiments. This caused Arab Nationalism to have a more militaristic and violent character in addition to giving it a more anti-Semitic character. Pogroms and violent persecution of both Jewish and Christian minorities ensued, especially in nations that had direct dealings with the Axis Power like Iraq. The legacy of the Nazification of Arab Nationalism is still quite strongly ingrained in the Arab World.

2) Mizrahi Jewish Exodus: Because of the two above results of the Holocaust, the overwhelming majority of Jews who lived in Arab countries were forced out of their homes or felt compelled to leave to avoid further persecution and went to Israel, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, in addition to other regions. The amount of Jews in the entire Arab World in 1945 is over ten times the number in 1975.

Jews had been kicked around enough that they decided to seek a homeland of their own. The British Empire was controlling the land in the Middle East that is now Israel and Palestine. It was land that nobody else wanted but the Jews really wanted to get away from all of the people who wanted to destroy them, and to establish a homeland of their own.

Jews started putting pressure on Britain and eventually the land was given to the Jews. The rest of the Middle east decide to run the Jews into the sea, and vowed that they would never rest until every Jew was dead. When Egypt attacked the newly formed state of Israel, they were surprised that they were pushed back and defeated. Israel took some of the land on the "west bank", and kept it until just recently. The events of the Holocaust have left the citizens of Israel very defiant and willing to fight for their rights. Many people today have forgotten that Jews were the victims, and only want to have a place of their own, where they can live in peace. Land was given to them that nobody else wanted. Now the Arab nations want them destroyed. Xenophobia still exists.

The proposal for a Jewish National Home in Palestine was accepted by the British government in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 as the British army advanced into the Ottoman Empire.

After the holocaust there weren't that many Jews left in Europe except in Russia. Many left Europe. Some went to Israel, some to the U.S. Very few German Jews returned to Germany.

The murder of a large number of Holocaust survivors* by Poles* in Poland in 1945-46 led many suriving Jews to leave Europe altogether.