The prominent historian Karl Bosl, who during World War II had been a high school teacher in Ansbach, Franconia, intimated that he had been critical of the Nazis and asserted that he had belonged to a small group that engaged in active resistance; one of its members, Robert Limpert, was apprehended by the Nazis and brutally put to death just hours before the Americans arrived. The present study, based on a large number of unpublished official and private documents, records Bosl’s manifold links to the Nazi regime and reveals that as late as December 1944 he delivered a stirring lecture before Ansbach’s Nazi leadership in which he extolled the struggle for the preservation of Hitler’s Greater German Reich; yet as early as September 1945 he vigorously condemned Nazism at a ceremony at Limpert’s grave. The documents attest also to how Bosl succeeded in persuading Ansbach’s Denazification Tribunal that he had risked his life opposing the Nazis. An unpublished account allows for a detailed reconstruction of the daring, little-known activities of young Limpert and his three classmates.

The present volume charts ways that may allow a larger number of historians to experiment with the comparative method. It contains articles that deal with the history and problems of comparative history as well as studies that demonstrate the potential of symmetrical, asymmetrical, parallel and cross comparisons. The studies include comparisons of the Roman and Inca empires, of Muslim networks of renewal of the eighteenth century, of serfdom in Russia and slavery in the American South, of early modern European expansion and present-day globalization, of modern welfare states, and of multiple modernities. Comparative studies of feudalism exemplify some of the method’s pitfalls. The volume concludes with a report by three faculty members on the problems encountered while teaching a course in comparative history. Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Elisheva Baumgarten, Esther Cohen, Michael Confino, S.N. Eisenstadt, Tamar Herzog, Benjamin Kedar, Jürgen Kocka, Sabine MacCormack, Diego Olstein, Susan Reynolds and Ruth Roded.

What was the balance of power in the battles of Judas Maccabaeus and in Israel's War of Independence? Were they, as is commonly assumed, wars of the few against the many? These questions were discussed in a conference organized by the School of History of the Hebrew University in December 1999. The participants were in general agreement that the discussion of the balance of power must not be confined to the number of troops and that other variables must be taken into account. Nevertheless the numbers of troops is important. Conflicting views were presented on the battles of Judas Maccabaues whereas on the number of troops in Israel's War of Independence there was general agreement. Published in this collection, for the first time, are a General Staff document from 1952 and a research paper by Yehosuha Ben Arie for the IDF History Branch from 1955. Both conclude that in the matter of the number of troops the War of Independence on the whole was not an instance of the few against the many. Other articles, based on lectures delivered at the conference include Bezalel Bar Kochva and Israel Shatzman on the battles of Judas Maccabaeus; Beni Morris and Amitzur Ilan on the balance of forces in the War of Independence, Eyal Nave and Mordechai Bar-On on the evolution of Israeli collective memory of the balance of power and on possible ways of representing the facts of the case in school books; Shmaryahu Ben-Pazi, Moshe Erenwald and Nimrod Hagiladi on three case studies: Safad, The Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, and Rechovot; and Joseph Heller's essay on the centrality of the 'few against many' theme in David Ben Gurion's thought which widens the scope of the discussion in the conference.