Herbert Baum (1912-1942) was a German Jewish resistance leader in Berlin, who in 1933 started to organize a group of mostly Jewish anti-Nazis who maintained links with all major underground groups in the German capital, strengthening the morale of a Berlin Jewish community being deported to death camps in the East.

Except for the messianic Bar Kochba uprising of a.d. 132-135, the idea of self-defense and resistance played a relatively small role in Jewish history during the almost 2,000 years that elapsed between the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 and the 20th century. These political and military catastrophes, which brought on the destruction of ancient Israel as a sovereign state, led to the dispersion of the majority of the Jewish population throughout the civilized world. Powerless and unwilling to accept the religion of the Christian majority, the best they could hope for was to be protected by...