The word “shema” comes from the Hebrew meaning “hear” and refers to Deuteronomy 6:4, which reads “Hear of Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” This verse opens morning prayers (shacharit) and is repeated throughout Jewish prayer services.
Between 1922–1948, Great Britain governed the region of Palestine in the Middle East under an international mandate. When thousands of Jews fled to Palestine to escape the Holocaust, Britain began to restrict Jewish immigration after 1939 due to pressure from Arab leaders. In 1948, the international mandate came to an end and the state of Israel was established.
The Vatican is an independent, ecclesiastical city-state in Rome, Italy. However, because the Vatican serves as the seat of the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic church, it is also used as a term to refer to the authority or will of the Pope or Roman Catholic church.
The Hlinka Guard were a paramilitary unit of Andrej Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, established October 8, 1938. Modeled after similar Nazi paramilitary groups, one of its main purposes was addressing the “Jewish Question” in Slovakia.
The phrase the “Jewish Question” emerged in the context of the gradual process of Jewish emancipation in Europe, and referred broadly to what extent Jews should be allowed—or expected—to integrate into the societies in which they lived and granted civil equality. The influence of new pseudo-scientific ideas such as Social Darwinism and eugenics led to the reframing of the “Jewish Question” through the lens of racial antisemitism.