Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the 'Night of Broken Glass' in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

Dynamic I-O model to project United States freight transportation demand

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-161).Understanding and modeling U.S. freight transportation demand is essential for infrastructure planning, the development of transportation-related regulatory frameworks, and the assessment of environmental implications. However, existing models that forecast U.S. freight transportation demand are very complicated and require a vast computational effort. In the following, I develop a simpler, yet more effective, model to project economic performance and the resulting freight transportation demand. I analyze and project economic growth and structural change using an input-output framework. This economic part of my model projects U.S. commodity output values for the next two decades. In the second part of my model, commodity values are transformed into quantities of freight transportation demand. The latter are the basis for deriving environmental implications of growing freight shipment activities. In the analysis of model outputs, I examine a significant trend towards relatively light, high-value commodities, which reflects ongoing dematerialization in the U.S. economy. Nevertheless, these commodities promote a shift towards faster, more energy-intensive freight transport modes, which gives reason for environmental concern and requires regulatory action to support less carbon-intensive freight transportation.by Nico Voigtlaender.S.M

including © notice, is given to the source. Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

offered useful criticisms. We are grateful to Hans-Christian Boy for outstanding research assistance, and Jonathan Hersh, Maximilian von Laer, and Diego Puga for help with the geographic data. Davide Cantoni and Noam Yuchtman kindly shared their data on year of incorporation and first market for German cities. Voigtländer acknowledges financial support from the UCLA Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER). Voth thanks the European Research Council for generous funding. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view