In line with this conception, Kulka made an effort to avoid using the terms "Shoah" or "Holocaust", neither of which, in his opinion, accurately encapsulates this period within the continuity of Jewish history and does not convey its singularity.
In his research on modern antisemitism, Kulka drew, among other sources, on studies by his university teachers, the historians Jacob Talmon and Shmuel Ettinger, applying their insights to his empirical findings about National-Socialist ideology and policy.
To gain a broader perspective, he examined the centrality of the ambivalent Jewish component in the major trends of Western culture in the modern age, as well as the radicalization of the elements of antagonism toward Judaism and the Jews within them.
In 1989, Kulka articulated his approach succinctly: Many scholarly works written on National Socialism over the past three decades have reached the conclusion that antisemitism played a vital role in the ideology and policy of the Third Reich.
Of all the ideological and political ingredients that went into the making of Hitler's outlook, antisemitism, in its broadest sense, appears to be not only the one consistent and immutable element, it also bridges such seemingly contradictory leanings as anti-Marxism and anti-capitalism, the struggle against democracy and modernism, and a basic anti-Christian disposition.
In the movement's racial-determinist conception, the Jews stand in an obviously dominant relationship to all these forces and factors as the biological source of doctrines and ideologies whose most radical expression is Bolshevism but whose origin was Judaism's introduction of Christianity into the Western world.
[28] Decades earlier, in the mid-1960s, Kulka was one of the pioneers of scholarly research into this subject, later collaborating with his German colleague Eberhard Jäckel and the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw.
"[30] However, the dominant trend, as emerged clearly, was the constantly expanding and ever more extreme "removal" of the Jews from all spheres of life of the "German people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) and finally from all of Germany.
[31] Drawing on these sources, Kulka devoted a special study to the complex problem of the attitude taken by the churches and the religious population in Germany toward the Jews, including those who converted to Protestantism and Catholicism.
[32] In another study based on the above-mentioned highly reliable source material Kulka devoted a special article to the examination of another aspect - the popular opinion in Nazi Germany and the government's attitude toward the Jews.
"[33] Kulka also considered it important to probe the abundant detailed information contained in these reports about the life of the Jews and their organized activity as they coped with both the regime's policy and the attitude of the German population toward them.
He viewed the picture that emerged of the diverse, systematic, and continuous information that was presented to the various levels of the regime as a significant supplementary to what could be gleaned from the contemporary Jewish sources.
In the newly found documentation from early 1942, the general consensus reported from most areas of the Third Reich was that the population wished to see all the Jews deported from Germany (in the German original: "Am meisten würde jedoch eine baldige Abschiebung aller Juden aus Deutschland begrüßt werden").
"[38] Revising the prevailing historiography, Kulka showed that the National Representation of the Jews of Germany was not established in 1933, after the Nazis' rise to power, but that its foundations were laid a year earlier, in 1932.
In the light of the rapidly deteriorating political situation, the Jewish leadership in the various district states (Länder) realized that it was essential to create a united central organization to represent German Jewry vis-à-vis the regime.
Kulka's comprehensive article, "Germany," in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, offers an overview of the developments among German Jewry in this period within their historical context, integrating the three areas of his research on this subject.
[39] Summing up his analysis of the status and activities of the Jewish society under the Nazi regime, he wrote: Among the Jews, the reaction to what was happening was different on the individual and the organizational level.
This was, however, the freedom of the outcasts, of a community that now seemed doomed to disappearance.According to Kulka, German Jewry faced three alternatives upon the establishment of the Nazi regime and the promulgation of the first anti-Jewish decrees in 1933.
[49] In all his studies of the Nazi period, Kulka refrained from dealing with the final stage of the physical annihilation of the Jews in the death camps and with the mass executions in the German-occupied areas of Eastern Europe.
"[51] It deals, inter alia, with the continuity of the patterns of life and the basic values of the Jewish society even in the very heart of the Auschwitz annihilation camp and in the face of a clear awareness of the certainty of death.
The purpose of this special camp's existence and the reason for its liquidation – part of the policy of Adolf Eichmann's Jewish section in the Reich Security Main Office – did not become clear until long after the war.
In 1982, Kulka initiated a large-scale international conference within the framework of his activity in the Historical Society of Israel and his research on the relations between Judaism and Christianity in the modern era.
The volume of the conference's proceedings, edited by Kulka and published in 1987 by the Historical Society of Israel,[52] has become a reference point for research and discussion about this highly charged, complex issue.
Insight about the distinctiveness of Maharal's ideas concerning nationhood and education, and the connection between them, could be gained by observing the historical setting in which he was active and examining possible influences to which he was susceptible in those specific circumstances.
One striking result of his research is the solution to the deeply puzzling similarities between Maharal's educational doctrine and that of the "teacher of nations", Jan Amos Comenius, as set forth by Aharon Kleinberger.
However, Kulka proves that Comenius, the last bishop of the humanistic Christian denomination of the Bohemian Brethren (in Latin: Unitas Fratrum), was the successor and codifier of the educational theories and methods of his teachers in this sect, who were Maharal's contemporaries and interlocutors.
This study concentrates initially on the twenty years of Maharal's tenure as "head of the [Jewish] communities of the State of Moravia," (אב בית דין וראש מדינת מעהרין) in close proximity to the educational center of the Bohemian Brethren.
I am also aware that these texts, though anchored in concrete historical events, transcend the sphere of history.The book was extensively discussed in the press and the electronic media in Israel and throughout the world, particularly in England, France, and Germany.
[57] Most reviewers commented on its different style of language and observation amid the rich literature of the Holocaust period, and remarked on its special place alongside the autobiographical works of Saul Friedländer, Primo Levi, and Imre Kertész.
[60] This, in spite of the following clear declaration of the author: "These recordings were neither historical testimony nor autobiographical memoir, but the reflections [...] of memory and imagination that have remained from the world of the wondering child of ten to eleven that I had once been".