15 Spring 2026 In April 1993, when I first walked through the permanent exhibition of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I was struck by one artifact: a sign from a German hotel sometime in the 1930s asking Jewish guests to eat their meals in their rooms. How, I thought, did this differ substantively from signs in hotels and restaurants in the U.S. prior to the 1960s prohibiting whites and non-whites from eating together in restaurants or staying at the same hotel? Historian Raul Hilberg traced the origins of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor to the canonical prohibition of intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews promulgated by the Synod of Elvira in the year 306 of the Common Era.27 I subscribe to Professor Whitaker’s theory that the far more contemporary American anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited marriages between whites and non-whites in 30 states in 1935 were a far more likely source of inspiration. These state laws were very much sui generis in western societies before the enactment of their Nazi German counterpart in 1935, and at least sixteen of them remained on the books for more than two decades after the Nuremberg Laws were abrogated as part of the Allied denazification of post-Nazi Germany. Fourteen of these were repealed between 1948 and 1967, but it was not until 1967 that the remaining American anti-miscegenation laws were held to be unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia.28 Indeed, in a 1934 article in the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation that described the different American anti-miscegenation laws in alphabetical order, Herbert Kier, then an academic at the University of Berlin, wrote that “the 30 states listed here all have prohibitions on miscegenation, which with a single exception all pursue the aim of safeguarding the American population of European origin against race-mixing with non-European races.” The exception, according to Kier, was North Carolina which also prohibited miscegenation between Blacks and Native Americans. He further noted that “Extramarital sex between members of different races is also forbidden in several states, or even subjected to criminal punishment, for example in Alabama and Arkansas.”29 It must be emphasized here that when the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, neither Hitler nor any member of his government was actively contemplating what is today referred to as the Holocaust. The Nazis’ immediate objective was to marginalize Jews and ostracize them from German society to the greatest extent possible, and their long-range goal was to cause them to leave Germany. Rhetorical excesses by the likes of Goebbels and Julius Streicher did not reflect actual consideration of the systematic mass murder of Jews — that would not come until 1941. What the Nuremberg Laws accomplished, however, was to lay the groundwork for the genocide that was to begin six years later. The sign at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that asked Jewish hotel guests to eat their meals in their rooms — which I mentioned earlier — instinctively made me think, “there but for the grace of God . . .” But then, I remembered the prosecutions throughout the American south of American Black men falsely accused of raping white women and the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were shamefully incarcerated in concentration camps during World War II. And then I thought of the tens of thousands of Native Americans who were ethnically cleansed in the first half of the 19th century by order of a callous and racist U.S. government, and of the thousands who died on the death march that has become known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The problem with history is that it can be, it often is, unrelenting, and we ignore its truths at our peril.n Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. He is the author, most recently, of “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz” (Ben Yehuda Press 2025). 27. 1 Raul Hilberg, THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS 11 (Revised and Definitive Ed., Holmes & Meier 1985). 28. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). 29. Supra note 20, at 122.
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