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Оглавление“PROFITING” FROM THE HOLOCAUST
There is [in Holocaust Studies] a distinct danger of escaping from the reality of the Nazi regime and its consequences into a nebulous general humanism, where all persecutions become holocausts, and where a general and meaningless condemnation of evil helps to establish a curtain between oneself and the real world. This escapism must of course be fought.
—Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective
PRELIMINARIES
My second example of antisemitism operating as a type of pseudo-explanatory political fantasy moves from European polls and Islamist rodomontade to the groves of American academe. It concerns the long-running dispute over the question of whether the Holocaust was a “unique” event. This has divided academic opinion since roughly the start of the 1990s. An excellent account that surveys its various stages and its main contributors can be found in an outstanding new book by Gavriel Rosenfeld.1 My concern in this chapter will not be to contribute to this debate but rather to question the intellectual and moral solidity of some of the assumptions underlying it.
Several features of the uniqueness debate mark it out from the general run of academic or scholarly controversies. There is, for instance, the unusual degree of acrimony with which it has frequently been conducted. Another curious feature of the debate is its power to unite academic solemnity at one extreme with political scurrility at the other. The academic end of this spectrum of opinion has for almost twenty years found rich expression in Alan S. Rosenbaum’s voluminous anthology, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives in Comparative Genocide, which has now run into three editions, the first in 1996, the most recent in 2009.2 The other, scurrilous extreme can be encountered in the spatter of openly antisemitic and Holocaust-denying websites that can be located by typing the words Was the Holocaust Unique? into a search engine.
As putatively academic debates go, this one has proven unusually free, even in the present age of “culture wars,” from the disinterested objectivity popularly associated with the academy. On the contrary, it has been remarkable from the outset for the incessant and resolute grinding of political axes that has accompanied its various phases. In addition, it has been widely characterized, by journalistic and academic observers alike, as a dialogue of the deaf, or more accurately a collection of such dialogues, in which participants characteristically argue, not so much against one another, as past one another.
QUESTIONS OF MEANING
At its most abstract level, the dispute turns on the question of whether the terms Holocaust and genocide are general terms like horse or proper names like Aristotle or Bismarck: whether, in short, given the nature of the thing named, there can be in principle more than one such thing.
When such abstruse philosophical issues become the focus of high emotions and pitched battles among nonphilosophers, there is generally a reason. In this case, the reason is itself philosophical. One of my teachers at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s was the late C. L. Stevenson. Stevenson was, and remains, famous for his book Ethics and Language, a monument of American Pragmatism that is still read, though not as widely as it ought to be. Chapter 9 concerns what he calls persuasive definitions. For Stevenson, the meaning of a moral term—for example, freedom—has two components. First, there is a factual description, a statement of what constitutes a free society. Then, second, there is the emotional aura that surrounds the word; in the case of murder, say, a negative, disapproving one; in the case of freedom, a positive, approving one.
Stevenson takes from Hume the thought that these two components of meaning can be made, on occasion, to shift independently of each other. A term like freedom or murder thus becomes an instrument of political or moral persuasion to the extent that one can get people to accept a shift in the descriptive meaning of the term, while leaving its emotional aura unchanged. If one can persuade people, for instance, that abortion counts descriptively as murder, then the bleakly negative emotional aura surrounding the term murder can be successfully displaced onto the term abortion. If one can persuade people to accept that part of being free, descriptively speaking, is to possess a legally enforceable right to demand that the state provide one with medical care, then with luck, the warm emotional aura surrounding the term freedom can be displaced onto the idea of state provision of medical care. As Stevenson puts it, “our language abounds with words which, like ‘culture,’ have both a vague descriptive meaning and a rich emotive meaning. The descriptive meaning of them all is subject to constant redefinition. The words are prizes which each man seeks to bestow on the qualities of his own choice.”3
THE CONTESTED POSITIONS
An understanding of Stevenson’s distinction, it seems to me, is essential to making sense of the uniqueness debate. The debate exists only because the intense emotive auras surrounding the words Holocaust and genocide have become covetable enough for the words themselves to become “prizes” in exactly the sense that Stevenson here exposes.4 What turns a word into a prize for political debate, he suggests, are the evaluative and associative structures that constitute its “emotive meaning.” In the case of Holocaust and genocide, these include horror and revulsion against the perpetrators, on the one hand, and on the other, sympathy and fellow feeling for the victims.
These, of course, are responses of a kind that all of us would wish acts of mass murder to evoke. And recent history offers many episodes of mass murder, including many felt, by the communities involved, to be inadequately recognized or condemned. This has led some to seek redress for that situation in what Charles Stevenson would have called a persuasive redefinition of the terms Holocaust and genocide.
If—such people feel—the descriptive meaning of those terms could only be redefined in such a way as to make them capture descriptively any episode of mass killing, then the emotive meaning of the words, the responses of pity and horror indelibly associated with them, would transfer over to a multitude of eminently deserving cases in exactly the manner described by Stevenson.
The trouble, from the point of view of those who think like this, is that both Holocaust and genocide are uniquely linked in their origins with one specific episode of mass murder. And that episode has generally been supposed to stand in a unique relationship to one particular people—namely, the Jews.
For the emotive connotations of the terms to transfer smoothly to other episodes of mass murder involving other, non-Jewish groups, that link must be broken. To a degree, it has been broken in the case of the term genocide. Significant ambiguities attend the word genocide, as they do all the contested terms in the uniqueness debate. It remains contestable, for instance, whether for an act of genocide to have occurred the people in question must have undergone total extermination or “merely” have endured persecution aiming at total extermination, or at the very least, at extensive loss of life. Equally, people disagree over whether it can be appropriate to speak of “cultural genocide,” where the people of a nation, or some of them, remain extant but where everything that gave their nation its original character, as a special human group, has been systematically extirpated. But on any of these readings of the term, historical instances both Jewish and non-Jewish can be found. Among cases of more or less total extermination (by systematic hunting among other things), one might cite the Tasmanian and Western Australian aboriginals. As survivors of cultural genocide, one might cite the Inca or the inhabitants of a few mountain villages in Portugal of whom I once read, remnants of campaigns of persecution and forced conversion of Jews in earlier centuries, who know that they once were, or were descended from, Jews, but know nothing of Jewish religion or culture.
Genocide, then, has become, for better or worse, a general term. There can be—have been—genocides other than the Holocaust. The term Holocaust, on the other hand, remains obstinately possessed, in common usage, of the logical characteristics of a proper name. A proper name, such as Bismarck or Gandhi, names a single individual; in the case of those names, an individual person; in the case of the term Holocaust, an individual act of mass murder—namely, the Nazi destruction of the bulk of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945.
The uniqueness controversy has concerned, for the most part, the issue of whether that link—the link between the term Holocaust and a specific act of mass murder—can and should also be broken. Some—David E. Stannard, Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, the late Tony Judt in some of his writings, and many others—consider that there is nothing about the murderous events commonly denominated by the term Holocaust that links those events specifically to the Jewishness of their Jewish victims. According to such views, Holocaust becomes to all intents and purposes a synonym for genocide and shares all the ambiguities as well as the resulting subordination to a multitude of political uses that have come to characterize the latter term.
The thought is that what happened to the Jewish victims of the Nazis has also happened to large numbers of non-Jewish victims, whose sufferings, it is then alleged, are diminished and obscured by the concentration in commemorative activities, including museums and educational programs, on the sufferings of the Jews. Should we not, such reasoners suggest, universalize our conception of the Holocaust by recognizing that what made it a crime against humanity was that its victims, irrespective of whether they were Jews or gentile Germans, Poles, or Soviet prisoners of war, were human beings? And does not that eminently humane and reasonable shift of perspective, they conclude, commit one to seeing the Holocaust not as something confined to World War II or to Europe but as a type of human aberration that has had, and continues to have, many exemplars, from the starvation in the Ukraine brought about by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization in the 1930s, to the Cambodian massacres under Pol Pot, or to Srebrenica, or for that matter, to the history of Palestine since 1948?
Against this way of reconceiving the Holocaust, a broad spectrum of scholars, whose Jewish representatives include Elie Wiesel, Yehuda Bauer, Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, and latterly Alvin Rosenfeld,5 have in general retorted that one cannot universalize the Holocaust without de-Judaizing it in ways utterly false to the historical record. The basic thrust of their objections is that to treat the Holocaust as a crime against humanity rather than against the Jews is not only to render its nature and origins impossible to understand, except in terms of some vague and explanatorily vacuous notion of evil or “the darkness of the human heart.” It is to erase Jews and Jewishness from the historical record in a manner entirely agreeable to, and indeed reminiscent of, the ideology of National Socialism.
THE JEWS AS PUTATIVELY JEALOUS “PROPRIETORS” OF THE HOLOCAUST
Given the seemingly progressive and humanitarian note characteristically struck by opponents of the uniqueness claim, such as Native American historians David E. Stannard or Ward Churchill, it might appear surprising that their views should attract the promoters of openly antisemitic, revisionist, and white supremacist websites.6 Codoh.com, for example, the website of a Holocaust-denial group calling itself the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, currently carries a 1996 essay by Stannard, titled “The Dangers of Calling the Holocaust Unique,” despite the fact that in that piece Stannard expressly dissociates himself at the outset from both Holocaust denial and antisemitism.
What strikes one about these caveats on Stannard’s part, however, is that the internal logic of the enterprise of universalizing—and thus necessarily de-Judaizing—the Holocaust itself works to defeat any such attempt at dissociation. Arguments involving what Stevenson called persuasive definition are, by their nature, arguments about ownership, even though the asset whose ownership they contest is no more than a word—or to be more accurate, the emotional connotations of a word. From the perspective of those questioning the singularity of the Holocaust—the perspective, that is to say, of the putatively disinherited—the attempt to defend the singularity of the Holocaust, especially when conducted by Jewish writers, can hardly be perceived otherwise than as an attempt to assert a proprietary claim to the word and its emotional connotations and thus as an attempt to exclude other abused groups from enjoyment of any benefit that might accrue to them in consequence of the horror and sympathy widely evoked by the very word Holocaust.
Furthermore, once the notion of ownership has been introduced into the debate—as it must be if the debate is to get off the ground at all—it can hardly fail to evoke by association a familiar range of antisemitic stereotypes. There is, for a start, that of the obstinately “particularist” Jew with no interest in anybody’s suffering but his own, attached passionately to his own community but chillingly unresponsive to wider humanitarian causes. Then, more darkly, there is the stereotype of the Jew as owner of assets that should not by rights belong to him at all; of the Jew who uses his legendary business abilities in underhand ways that baffle the simple blond gentile to acquire suspiciously vast assets of just the kind to afford him the means of exercising secret and illegitimate kinds of control over non-Jews. More darkly still, there is the stereotype of the Jew who controls Hollywood or controls Wall Street—and who also, it now appears, “controls” the history of World War II. And finally—one could extend the list further, but an end must be made somewhere—there is the stereotype of the Jew who, whenever anyone attempts to reclaim his ill-gotten assets in order to put them at the service of a wider suffering humanity, uses the craven and dishonest cry of antisemitism to smear and obscure the sterling nobility of his opponents’ motives.
These stereotypes, and others related to them, have no particular political constituency. Historically important as they are, they can equally be found nowadays, figuring, though usually in ways less overtly expressed, as much in the public discourse of far-left political groupings as in that of movements on the far right.7 And as we are about to see, they can also be found in putatively academic writing.
THE POLITICS OF MISPLACED UNIVERSALISM
It will be useful in further developing that last claim to examine in some detail a specific contribution to the uniqueness debate—namely, David E. Stannard’s lengthy closing contribution to the Rosenbaum volume,8 “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship.”9
First, though, a further question of definition needs to be got out of the way. It is customary in academic controversy for all parties to agree at the outset on common definitions of the main terms that define the debate if for no other reason than to ensure that they are at least arguing about the same things. One of the oddest things about the uniqueness debate is the cheerful indifference shown by most of its participants to this elementary requirement. The terms Holocaust and genocide, for instance, appear to take on whatever meaning happens to suit the changing dialectical needs of each participant, as the moving sands of debate shift under him or her.
Such ambiguities extend to the term unique itself, where they are even less helpful to the cause of rational debate. Wittgenstein, criticizing the philosophical use of the term simple to characterize a supposed class of metaphysical entities, pointed out that the term means little until we specify what kind of simplicity we have in mind. The term unique behaves in much the same way: in any given context, that is to say, the question “Is X unique?” remains unanswerable, even in principle, until we answer the further question, “In what respect?” Moby-Dick, for instance, may be unique in respect of being a novel about a whaling skipper called Ahab but is not unique in respect of being a novel by Melville.
It matters, therefore, whether the parties to the uniqueness debate specify in the same way the respect in which uniqueness is to be attributed to, or denied of, the Holocaust. And the briefest acquaintance with the main documents in the debate is sufficient to reveal that they do not. The specifically Jewish defenders of the uniqueness claim, singled out for attack by Stannard, with one accord take the Holocaust to have been unique in respect of the criteria used to select its victims for destruction. A typical statement of this kind occurs in Elie Wiesel’s response to the presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal, on April 19, 1985: “I have learned that the Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish event, albeit with universal implications. Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”
Elsewhere Wiesel expands on this judgment as follows: “I believe the Holocaust was a unique event. For the very first time in history … a Jew was condemned to die not because of what beliefs he held … but because of who he was. For the very first time, a birth certificate became a death certificate.”10
For Yehuda Bauer, again what made the Holocaust a “totally new reality” was “the unique quality of Nazi Jew-hatred”: “The unique quality of Nazi Jew-hatred was something so surprising, so outside of the experience of the civilized world, that the Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish people, could not comprehend it. … The post-Holocaust generation has difficulty understanding this basic psychological barrier to action on the part of Jews—and non-Jews—during the Nazi period. We already know what happened, they, who lived at that time, did not. For them it was a totally new reality that was unfolding before their shocked eyes and paralysed minds.”11 Stannard, on the other hand, takes what is fundamentally at issue in the uniqueness debate to be, as he puts it, “the uniqueness of Jewish suffering.”12 For Stannard, the claim that the Holocaust was unique equates, that is to say, with the claim that the Holocaust was unique in respect of the quantity of suffering experienced by its Jewish victims; a quantity of suffering that he alleges to be considered, not merely by his selected Jewish opponents, but by a wide spectrum of non-Jewish opinion, to have been grossly in excess of the quantity of suffering experienced by any other people, in any other of the numerous episodes of mass murder that have occurred in world history.
Stannard in effect takes this extraordinary proposition to be at present accepted, and accepted as undeniable, moreover, by the bulk of informed opinion. Commenting on the fact that more is heard of the Holocaust than of the far more prolonged and numerically destructive processes of near-extermination that overtook the native peoples of the Americas following the arrival of the Europeans, and having ironically discounted the obvious explanation, that the victims of the latter destruction were nonwhite, he adds:
For those who might find such overt racial distinctions distasteful and preferably avoided, however, a more “reasonable” explanation exists for the grossly differential responses that are so commonplace regarding the American and the Nazi Holocausts. This explanation simply denies that there is any comparability between the Nazi violence against the Jews and the Euro-American violence against the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples. In fact, in most quarters it is held as beyond dispute that the attempted destruction of the Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe was unique, unprecedented and categorically incommensurable—not only with the torment endured by the indigenous peoples of North and South America, but also with the sufferings of any people at any time in any place during the entire history of humanity.13
This claim for the uniqueness of the Holocaust does not, on the face of it, appear to be the claim that Wiesel, Bauer, Lipstadt, and other Jewish defenders of the uniqueness of the Holocaust wish to advance. Their claim is merely that the Holocaust has a Jewish dimension that is essential to understanding it and that is lost sight of when one universalizes and hence de-Judaizes the word Holocaust. There is no inconsistency between claiming that and granting that other, even vaster episodes of mass murder have killed more people. So Stannard’s proposed counterclaim is, it would seem, not a counterclaim at all but merely an adroit change of ground. With such blank disparities of meaning and intention at its heart, it is surely small wonder that the uniqueness debate should have struck many observers as a dialogue of the deaf, between antagonists who argue not with but past one another.
But failure to grasp what it is that troubles his Jewish opponents is clearly not the only thing wrong with Stannard’s argument at this point. The claim that Stannard takes to be “in most quarters beyond dispute”—that the sufferings of Jewish victims of the Holocaust were greater in sum than (those of) any people at any time in any place during the entire history of humanity—is surely too vaunting in its generality to be seriously held by anyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, in his or her right mind. And even more fundamentally, how are sufferings to be quantified in any way capable of giving a clear meaning to a comparative judgment of any kind, let alone that kind? How could anyone in his or her senses assent to a proposal not only as absurdly overgeneral, but as ludicrously underdefined as that?
BLAMING THE JEWS
Nevertheless, this is the claim Stannard takes to be “in most quarters … beyond dispute.” And he takes its supposedly wide acceptance to be the outcome of “hegemonic” activity on the part of the Jews, those practiced pullers of wool over the eyes of honest but simple gentiles. “This rarely examined, taken-for-granted assumption on the part of so many did not appear out of thin air. On the contrary, it is the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labor by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea.”14
Folded together in the above sentence are two of the characteristic motifs of traditional antisemitism, together with a new one that has taken hold since the turn of the present century. First, there is the motif of Jewish “exclusivism,” or as it is more usually phrased, particularism, of which we shall have more to say in chapter 13. This is the idea that Jews are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own community to the exclusion of any wider humanitarian goal or concern.
Second, there is the motif of secret, behind-the-scenes Jewish control of the non-Jewish world implicit in the adjective hegemonic. A tiny group of Jewish scholars, through “strenuous intellectual labour” occupying—obsessively it is to be supposed—“much if not all” of “professional lives” that might, by implication, have been better spent, has, according to Stannard, succeeded in establishing the hegemony over a multitude of non-Jewish minds of the idea that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was incomparably worse than, and so by implication, should be held to matter more than, the sum total of all other human suffering, “of any people at any time in any place during the entire history of humanity.”
Finally, if Stannard’s “handful of Jewish scholars and writers” actually believed what he says they believe, then irrespective of their success in getting others to believe it, they would be not unreasonable targets for the third, ancient trope of antisemitism, recently popular again, that I mentioned above: that the Jews believe Jewish blood, Jewish suffering, to be worth more than the blood and suffering of non-Jews.
It would be surprising if this last claim were actually true, since “it is fundamental to the whole Jewish Weltanschauung that no life is more valuable than any other. In the words of the Talmud: ‘What makes you think your blood is redder?’ ‘Perhaps his blood is redder’” (Pesanhim 25b).15 Nevertheless, the canard that Jewish blood per se is held by the Jews to be redder than non-Jewish blood has of late become part of the stock in trade of revisionist and antisemitic propaganda around the world. The following, from the American antisemitic website The Resistance Report, is typical: “The Holocaust was crafted for two purposes. (1) To justify wiping Palestine off the map so that Jews can have a homeland there. (2) As a propaganda weapon to fool Gentiles into believing that Jews suffered more than any other people in the world.” Setting aside the relatively urbane and academic style of Stannard’s paper, it is not easy to see any difference in content between the above piece of gutter antisemitism and the following remark of Stannard’s, à propos his observation that although a given revolution may display characteristics peculiar to it, no one would deny that all revolutions are revolutions, or consider one so special in nature as to require a special, capitalized word to designate it: “This has not been done, because to do so would be to depart from the world of scholarship and enter the world of propaganda and group hagiography—which in fact quite clearly is what Holocaust uniqueness proponents are up to: elevating the Jewish experience to a singular and exclusive hierarchical category, thereby reducing all other genocides to a thoroughly lesser and wholly separate substratum of classification.”16
And the impression can only be deepened when this is followed up a page later with a passage asserting the classic antisemitic interpretation of Jewish “chosenness,” not as chosenness to obey a stricter moral law than others but as an assertion of superiority over all other peoples: “We are concerned with a small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots. For that is what they are: zealots who believe literally that they and their religious fellows are, in the words of Deuteronomy 7:6, ‘a special people … above all people that are on the face of the earth,’ interpreting in the only way thus possible their own community’s encounter with mass death.”17
A major motif of antisemitic propaganda has always been the myth of the Jewish conspiracy. In all versions of the myth, a tiny Jewish elite motivated by a belief in the innate superiority of Jew over non-Jew exerts overwhelmingly disproportionate power over non-Jewish societies. Stannard’s thesis follows that pattern. A “small industry of Holocaust hagiographers,” composed of “zealots” who supposedly interpret Deuteronomy 7:6 in a way lacking not only any basis in Jewish tradition but any textual basis in Deuteronomy 7 read as a whole, have succeeded, remarkably enough, in persuading the non-Jewish world that the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust vastly outweigh all non-Jewish sufferings since the beginning of time. In consequence, the bulk of non-Jewish opinion has been led to consider the sufferings of non-Jewish groups in genocide after genocide as of little or no consequence by contrast with those endured by European Jews between 1933 and 1945.
As many contributors to the uniqueness debate pointed out at the time,18 the last claim in particular appears to stand reality on its head. The term genocide and the concept itself, not to mention the genocide convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, owe their origins not merely to the climate of alarm created by the destruction of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, but to the work of one particular man: a Polish-Jewish lawyer by the name of Raphael Lemkin,19 whose struggle to establish the latter legal instruments was by no means motivated solely by Jewish concerns. “Born in relatively comfortable circumstances in 1900 on a farm belonging to his parents in Eastern Poland, Lemkin grew up deeply troubled by the numerous and vicious acts of antisemitism committed around him, as well as by other, more distant but no less appalling acts of barbarity of which the most notable was the massacre by the Turks in 1915 of a million or so Armenians.”20
In 1948, I was a politically aware British fifteen-year-old. At that point, the Armenian genocide of 1915–17 had sunk entirely from European consciousness (I certainly recall no mention of it at the time or for many years afterward). At the same time, no general consciousness existed of the full extent of the destruction visited upon non-European peoples, in the Americas and elsewhere, by European expansion and colonialism from the late Middle Ages onward. All of that was still for the most part seen, I seem to recall, as it had been for the preceding two centuries as part of the onward march of civilization. The publication, in 1966, of Alan Moorhead’s The Fatal Impact, which cataloged the ill effects, including massive losses of native populations through the introduction of alien diseases and weapons of warfare, consequent upon European invasion of the South Pacific from the mid-eighteenth century onward, marks, to my recollection, the first point at which the complacencies of Whig history in that respect began to be seriously doubted by large numbers of educated people.
I would therefore be inclined to say—pace Stannard’s blank assertion to the contrary—that far from it being the case that opinion has been distracted from the sufferings of non-Jewish groups through the effort of “Holocaust hagiographers” to exalt the sufferings of Jews above those of others, the post–World War II awareness of the historical prevalence of genocide arose largely as a consequence of the Shoah, and did so to a considerable extent through the work of Jewish pioneers, among whom the now largely forgotten Lemkin was perhaps the most prominent.
As a result of their work, there has been since the 1960s, at least, no lack of consciousness among Western intellectuals of the long history of genocide to be laid at the door of European colonialism. To finger a supposed group of Jewish zealots, as Stannard does, as responsible for an entirely nonexistent lack of concern is evidently absurd. Equally evidently, it is antisemitic.
Since the Holocaust, the malignant absurdities of antisemitic calumny have tended—though with some surprising exceptions—to encounter, for obvious reasons, a less receptive mass audience than they did, say, in the 1930s and earlier. For that reason no doubt, antisemitic discourse tends nowadays to be marked by a tendency to conclude each Judeophobic harangue with a complaint to the effect that innocent folk who merely attempt to tell the truth about the Jews always get accused of antisemitism, with a view to shutting them up. Here is a move of that type from the website The Resistance Report: “They want us to think that they are always innocent and powerless, and anyone who disagrees with or hates even one Jew must be anti-Semitic. Yet if I say I hate White racists, does that make me anti-White? If not, then how does it make me anti-Semitic to say I hate Jewish racists? It doesn’t, but they don’t want you to know that.” And here is the equivalent move in Professor Stannard’s essay: “In short, if you disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unique, you are, by definition—and like David Duke—a crypto-Nazi. Needless to say, such intellectual thuggery usually has its intended chilling effect on further discussion.”21
IN SEARCH OF TEXTUAL EVIDENCE
But does Deborah Lipstadt, or anyone else in Stannard’s chosen band of Jewish “zealots,” actually say, either in so many words or via some plausibly paraphrasable circumlocution, that what was unique about the Holocaust was the suffering it involved, taken—in terms of some suitable modulus—quantitatively?
Manifestly, Stannard stands in need of textual evidence to back up a claim like that. It is nowhere to be found in his essay. In its place, we find repeated and forceful, but entirely unargued, assertions of the pair of implausible assumptions we have already repeatedly encountered. The first is that non-Jewish Holocaust scholars who regard the Holocaust as without parallel (and there are, after all, plenty of them) do so only because of pressure from Jewish “Holocaust hagiographers.” The second is that the only sense in which the Holocaust could intelligibly be deemed unique or unparalleled is in respect of the quantity of suffering (assuming suffering, as distinct from number of persons killed, to be quantifiable) endured by its Jewish victims.
Once these deeply dubious suggestions have been introduced into the unwary reader’s mind—essentially by blank assertion alone—the remaining bulk of the essay is taken up with an attempt, in itself unexceptionable enough though frequently cursory, to show that in a range of other genocides, from the Ottoman massacres of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 to the accelerating destruction of the native peoples of the Americas in the decades and centuries following 1492, the sum total of the suffering endured, estimated by a variety of criteria (all of them conceptually parasitic on the idea of counting the dead) may be reasonably supposed to have been as great or greater than that endured by the sum total of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
There is, though, one point late in the essay at which something at least resembling textual evidence is offered, with reference to an essay by Edward Alexander of the University of Washington.
According to uniqueness advocate Edward Alexander, for instance, the experience of the Holocaust provided “a Jewish claim to a specific suffering that was of the ‘highest,’ the most distinguished grade available.” Even to mention the genocidal agonies suffered by others, either during the Holocaust or at other times and places is, Alexander says, “to plunder the moral capital which the Jewish people, through its unparalleled suffering in World War II, had unwittingly accumulated.” One of the most ghastly amassments of genocidal suffering ever experienced is thereby made the literal equivalent for its victims of a great bounty of jealously guarded “capital” or wealth. It is unlikely that there exists any more forthright expression than this of what Irving Louis Horowitz calls Holocaust “moral bookkeeping.”22
Stannard here equips Alexander, who happens to be Jewish, with the character and motives of Shylock: the pitiless Jew who not only considers the sufferings of Jews “higher” and more “distinguished” than those of the non-Jew but who can think in no other terms than those of ownership, possession, wealth, and “capital” to describe human suffering, even the sufferings of his own tribe, and who “jealously guards” both the word Holocaust and the thing itself as uniquely Jewish possessions.
It thus becomes rather an important question whether Alexander’s text, considered in extenso, will actually bear this thrillingly accusatory interpretation. Alas, when the context of Alexander’s remarks is restored, the heightened colors so easily bestowed by selective citation fade, as happens in such cases, into the light of common day. The distinction between “high” and “low” as applied to Jewish concerns, it turns out, is not Alexander’s at all but George Eliot’s, and the attaching of central significance to suffering, in Alexander’s opinion, not to be Jewish but rather Christian in character. Here is the full sentence in context: “The uniqueness of Jewish suffering and of the Jewish catastrophe during the Second World War had no sooner been defined than it was called into question, by Jews as well as by Christians. The fact and the idea of suffering are central in Christianity, whose ethical values are based on the idea of a community of suffering. Many Christians also believe that, as Mary Ann Evans, later known as George Eliot, wrote in 1848, ‘Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.’ Yet here was a specific suffering that was of the ‘highest,’ the most distinguished grade imaginable.”23 Alexander’s response to Eliot is ironic, which is why the word highest is in scare quotes. His point is that whatever nineteenth-century Christians may have thought concerning the low-grade nature of any concern specifically involving the Jews, the Holocaust, whatever else it has done, has at least rendered impossible that kind of airily patronizing dismissal. The point has, in short, no bearing whatsoever on the meaning of uniqueness. Nor can the phrase the uniqueness of Jewish suffering be taken, as Stannard seems to imagine, to align Alexander’s understanding of the term uniqueness with his own. What Alexander, like other Jewish commentators, takes the uniqueness of the Holocaust to consist of, as he makes clear in the first paragraph of the essay concerned, is not the supposedly “incomparable” extent of Jewish suffering but rather the nature of the criteria by which its victims were selected.
The Jews held a unique position in the Nazi world because they alone, of all the peoples subject to German rule, had been marked for total destruction, not for anything they had done or failed to do, but because they had been born of three Jewish grandparents. Their guilt lay exclusively in having been born. Although only Jews could be guilty of being Jewish, the centrality of the Jews in the mental and political universe of the Nazis established a universal principle that involved every single person in German-ruled Europe: in order to be granted the fundamental human right, the right to live, one had to prove that he was not a Jew.24
That leaves Stannard with nothing to brandish but the phrase moral capital, which he takes, by implication, to convict Alexander—in a manner at the very least, highly redolent of one of the central motifs of traditional gutter antisemitism—of a willingness to see everything, including the sufferings of his fellow Jews, in light of a “possession,” of “capital,” and of “wealth.” I have no access to the original Midstream version of Alexander’s article, and I cannot locate the phrase, beginning “plunder the moral capital,” that Stannard cites, in either of the versions of the essay that Alexander later reprinted (in The Holocaust and the War of Ideas25 and The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies). But that hardly matters, since the phrase “moral capital,” expressing much the same thought, recurs, anyway, in a passage in the version of the article included in The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies. In this passage, Alexander discusses the tendency, in recounting and dramatizing the diary of Anne Frank for popular consumption, to downplay, in the interests of giving the work a “universal significance,” its author’s references to her own and her family’s Jewishness as the cause of their predicament. “Cut free from her Jewish moorings, improperly understood by her own people, Anne Frank has become available for appropriation by those who have a sounder appreciation of the worth of moral capital, and know how to lay claim to sovereignty over it when the question of sovereignty has been left open.”26
I think it is clear from context that the term moral capital refers here, not as Stannard insists, to quantity of suffering, Jewish or otherwise, but rather to the recognition of the causal role played by their Jewishness in the selection for persecution of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In short, for Alexander, as for Bauer, Lipstadt, Rosenfeld, and other Jewish (and many non-Jewish) defenders of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it is general recognition of the fact that Jews, unlike other victims of Nazi atrocity, were killed just for being Jews that constitutes the “national asset” of which would-be universalizers and de-Judaizers of the Holocaust wish to deprive the Jewish people.
WHO OWNS WHICH ASPECTS OF THE HOLOCAUST?
If Alexander and Stannard agree about nothing else, they agree that the uniqueness debate was, and is, a debate about ownership. I want to conclude, therefore, by confronting this question afresh and head-on. Who does “own” the Holocaust: the Jews alone or all the victims of Nazi atrocity, of whatever kind or nation, or maybe all of suffering humanity? Evidently, one cannot answer that question without also confronting the central question of the uniqueness debate: was the Jewish experience of the Holocaust unique?
I have argued, with a nod to Wittgenstein, that the question of whether something X is or is not unique becomes answerable only if one has specified the characteristic or characteristics in respect of which uniqueness, for purposes of present discussion, is to be predicated of X.
So let’s make the question a little more complex by way of making the discussion a little more interesting and maybe somewhat increasing the proportion of light over heat. In what respects was the Holocaust unique, and in what respects was it not unique? And to whom—to the Jewish people or to others—does the Holocaust considered in each of these respects “belong”?
Bringing into play the notion that a thing can be unique in one respect and not in another opens up two possibilities that, simple and obvious as they are, appear so far as I am aware to be new to the debate. The first is that the Holocaust might turn out to have been unique among genocides in some respects and not unique in others. The second is that the respects in which it was unique, while they might turn out to “belong to the Jews,” might just as well turn out to belong to others—that is to say, to the non-Jewish part of humanity. I believe, for reasons that I shall now set before you, that this second possibility is in fact the case.
Much has been made in the uniqueness debate, not only by David E. Stannard but also by many other contributors, of the uniqueness claim as a pretended attempt by Jews to exalt themselves above all other persecuted peoples since the beginning of time in respect of the supposed uniqueness of their suffering. One of the reasons why the bulk of Jewish (and for that matter non-Jewish) scholars have in fact made no such claim is, no doubt, that it would be an impossible claim to defend. Equally, I take it, the reason why those, like Stannard, hostile to the idea that the Jewish experience of the Nazi persecution was in any sense unique, emphasize the aspect of the Holocaust as suffering to the exclusion of all other aspects, is that by doing so, they think to position themselves on strong ground.
Both sides are right, at least about this! Sadly, there is seldom anything unique about suffering. However great, however abominable the present form it takes, however satanically ingenious the modes of its present infliction, as bad or worse can generally be found in the long panorama of human barbarity.
But the proper conclusion to be drawn from this truth is not Stannard’s. Suppose we agree with Stannard, for the sake of argument, that the Holocaust may be said to belong to the Jews under the aspect of suffering. In that case, it belongs to them under an aspect that, far from dividing them from the rest of suffering humanity, unites them to it. No distinction arises between Jews and members of other nations in that respect. As victims of suffering, we may all weep together.
But what about other aspects of the Holocaust? What in particular about its aspect as a persecution conducted against the members of a certain people for no other reason than that they were members of that people, and therefore, in logic, even if not always in practice, directed against every member of that nation without exception?
Here, the Holocaust does seem to me, as it has to many others, Jewish and non-Jewish, including all of Stannard’s “small industry of Holocaust hagiographers,” to have been unique.
But under that aspect, the aspect of persecution upon the sole ground of birth, the Holocaust in no way belongs to the Jews. It belongs to the rest of us, to non-Jews—that is to say, simply because the project of extermination on the sole ground of membership by birth of a given people has no Jewish component. It took its rise and, in the course of time, arrived at the moment of its attempted implementation entirely within gentile circles.
We seem forced to conclude, in short, that what belongs to the Jews, where the Holocaust is concerned—that is to say, suffering so vast as not in practice to be remotely imaginable or quantifiable—is not the thing that makes the Holocaust unique. It is rather what makes it part of the common human inheritance of distress. On the other hand, what does make the Holocaust unique—namely, the nature of the grounds upon which it was conceived and set in motion—is in no sense “the property of the Jews.” On the contrary, if it is part of any “inheritance,” the heritage of which it forms a part is not the Jewish heritage but the gentile heritage. As a property bequeathed by history it belongs, in other words, not to the Jews but, as the French say, to nous autres, to the rest of us: to non-Jews.
Every attempt to secure the “prize” of the term Holocaust for another oppressed group, however deserving of sympathy expressed in other terms, therefore carries with it the risk of losing touch with the uniqueness of the Holocaust as crime. Here it is worth quoting at length Pascal Bruckner:
In other words the Shoah has become a monstrous object of covetous lust. … From this comes the frenzied effort to gain admission to this very closed club and the desire to dislodge those who are already part of it. Consider this circa-2005 statement by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Great Britain until 2006, who proposed replacing Holocaust Memorial Day with Genocide Day: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’ and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.” In short, and to put it bluntly, it is now time to change victims. In the contest for world title of best outcast, the Muslim must replace the Jew, all the more so because the latter not only failed to live up to his status but because he has himself become, with the creation of the state of Israel, an oppressor. In short, the idealization of the Jews has paved the way for his later vilification, or, to put it differently, the Judaization of the Muslims necessarily leads to the Nazification of the Israelis.27
Once again, it apparently needs to be said, the crime committed by the prosecutors of the Holocaust was that of treating a birth certificate as equivalent to a death warrant. It was not that of regarding the death of one person as less valuable (whatever that may mean) than the death of another. To think that it was is to forget. And with forgetfulness comes the possibility of repetition: perhaps this time not in the shape of a further destruction of the Jews but in that of some other group.
CONCLUSION: HOLOCAUST MEMORY AS BOTH DUTY AND PRUDENCE
That is the ultimate reason why Stannard and others who think like him are wrong to suppose that we can do without the term Holocaust understood as a singular term—a proper name referring uniquely to the destruction of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945. We need it because it is essential to the work of Holocaust memory that includes museums, such as the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, along with Holocaust Days, research groups, university and school courses, books and articles.
The place occupied by the Jews in the imagination of both Christians and Muslims being what it is, it might still be asked: But why should all this effort be put into remembering the sufferings of the Jews, when others have suffered as much or more without being accorded this kind of attention?
The answer I have offered here—to repeat it one last time—is that what such things serve to keep alive is not the (alleged) uniqueness of the suffering inflicted in the Holocaust but rather the (actual) uniqueness of the Holocaust as political crime. The Holocaust was a unique and (for the moment at least) uniquely European crime because it was the first moment in history at which an entire people was willed to destruction merely to save the credit of a political fantasy.28 No doubt we, who as non-Jews belong to nations the bulk of whose citizens are non-Jews, ought to remember these things as a duty to the Jews. But non-Jews like myself, and no doubt many of my readers, also stand under a duty of prudence of which I shall have more to say in chapters 14–16: a duty to ourselves as non-Jews to remember these things. While the Jewish world suffered the consequences of the Holocaust, it was the non-Jewish world, its mythic structures, its resources of secular political messianism, that originated and contrived it. But the bulk of non-Jews who were in no way a party to Hitler’s war against the Jews, except through lack of vigilance, also paid a price for that lack of vigilance. Antisemitism is certainly part of what drew converts to the Nazi Party, and so part of what served to bring Hitler to power. Hence, antisemitism lay causally at the root of many millions of non-Jewish as well as Jewish deaths. Antisemitism, as long as it remains alive, will continue to retain the power it then demonstrated, to blind many to the demonic character of messianic politics until it is too late.
That is why “the Holocaust industry,” as Norman Finkelstein derisively calls it, is not, as he and others like Stannard have wished to persuade us, a specifically Jewish enterprise. It is an enterprise that serves all of us, one that we should pursue with all the industry we can muster, because it is in everyone’s interest, the interest of all citizens of the free world, Jewish and non-Jewish, to remember the specific nature and origins of the Holocaust as a crime. To lose that memory, at the behest of a sophistical universalism, is to lose a precious bulwark against the perennial power of spurious moralizing to betray society into the bloody hands of political messianism.
CONCLUDING POSTSCRIPT
The most troubling thing about this chapter, to me, is the fact that it needed to be written. Its origins go back to a talk I gave to a university audience in Seattle in 2011. The discussion inevitably turned to the topic of the Holocaust, at which point a former colleague in the audience whom, as a literary critic, I knew to be widely read and deeply insightful, and as a man, utterly devoid of any form of bigotry, raised the question whether commemoration of the Holocaust, dreadful as was the extent and nature of the suffering the Holocaust involved, and understandable as is the Jewish desire to see that suffering commemorated, was not nowadays serving to deflect attention from the sufferings—considerable, even if not as considerable—of other, non-Jewish groups.
In my reply, I made on the hoof the obvious point that I have been laboring in this chapter. The object of Holocaust commemoration was not, I said, to perpetuate the memory of Jewish suffering, suffering being the property of no particular people, but inseparable per se from the experience of humanity in general. Rather, I suggested the object of Holocaust commemoration was to perpetuate the memory of a crime unique not in the amount of suffering it caused but rather in its nature: as murder inflicted on grounds of ancestry alone. The task of commemoration, I said, was to perpetuate among other things the memory of the nature of that crime, of its historic unfolding and bleak fruition, and of the essential and central part played in that process by an irrational hatred of Jews—a hatred that survived the downfall of the Third Reich and remains with us today.
I should not have thought that there was much deserving to be thought original, or even surprising, about that as a reply: a host of Jewish writers and thinkers, after all, have said as much. But my reply seemed to strike my ex-colleague as astonishing—as unheard of in its startling originality, in short as some sort of thunderbolt. “Well, that may be a good point,” he said, “but I have to say it’s new to me. Who says this? Where did you read it? Where is it in print? I’d like the reference.”
I had to tell him, lamely, that so far as I knew it was not in print anywhere, at least precisely in that form—that I had just said it off the cuff, for no better reason than that it had happened to occur to me just at that moment, on my feet, in the stress of discussion. On the other hand, the nature of his response was such as to have made me think it, since then, eminently worthwhile to say it again and this time in print.
What was puzzling and a little distressing to me about this exchange was that my reply should have seemed so new and surprising to my former colleague. On the one hand, he is a man of both goodwill and high intelligence. On the other hand, the point that struck him as so original and unheard of is, I would have thought, once stated, not only obvious but trivially and unanswerably so. The distinction between the nature of a crime and the suffering it produces is in itself, after all, neither obscure nor difficult to grasp. The idea that the Jews use the extent of their sufferings in the Holocaust to obscure and devalue the sufferings of others remains plausible, as we have seen, only as long as that distinction can be ignored or somehow made to seem irrelevant.
So what could explain my colleague’s surprise? I in no way suspect him of conscious antisemitism. On the other hand, I do think him deeply sensitive, like all good literary scholars, to the subtleties of Western culture. And lurking deeply in that culture is the conviction that Judaism is a deeply particularist culture. Bound up with that conviction is the subordinate and plainly fatuously antisemitic proposition that the Jews characteristically use their sufferings to gain illicit advantages over non-Jews. One can find that proposition assumed as axiomatic in a host of literary sources. It can be found, for example, in Alphonse Daudet’s Algerian sketch “À Milianah” in which Daudet says of the plight of an elderly Jew struck and injured by a French settler in a dispute over land, “a large indemnity is alone capable of curing him; so don’t take him to the doctor, take him to the man of business.”29
Any mind that, however unconsciously, takes as axiomatic the proposition that Jews use their sufferings as a lever to gain advantage will naturally be inclined to pass with dizzying speed, without touching ground at any intervening point, from it to the closely allied thought that the “Holocaust industry” offers a case in point.
It is when thought moves like that, too fast, too easily, over rails locked into one position by long cultural familiarity, that we are led to overlook obvious distinctions and the possibilities of alternative interpretation opened up by them. I should like to think that this is not the explanation of my colleague’s ability, and that of others since, to find “original” and “surprising” the arguments presented in this chapter. But sadly, I think that that probably is the explanation.
NOTES
1. See G. D. Rosenfeld 2014, 78–121.
2. Rosenbaum 2009.
3. Stevenson 1944, 212–13.
4. For an excellent examination, complementary to the present chapter, of the operation of this principle in current political discourse, see Pascal Bruckner, “Antisemitism and Islamophobia: The Inversion of the Debt,” in A. H. Rosenfeld 2015, 7–20.
5. See A. H. Rosenfeld 2011; Harrison 2011.
6. Including, for instance, those of CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust), Davidduke.com, Focal Point Publications (a site devoted to the writings of David Irving), and jewwatch.com.
7. See Harrison 2006, chap. 2 and passim.
8. A. S. Rosenbaum 2009.
9. David E. Stannard, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 295–340.
10. Both citations from the section “Wiesel Resources” on the PBS website, www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/resources/.
11. Bauer 1978, 7.
12. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 301, emphasis mine.
13. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 299, emphasis mine.
14. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 299.
15. Gershon Weiler, “The Jewish Establishment,” New York Review of Books, letters section, March 17, 1966, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/03/17/the-jewish-establishment-3/.
16. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 324.
17. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 325.
18. See, for example, Samantha Power, “To Suffer by Comparison,” Daedalus 2 (Spring 1999): 31–66; Alan Steinweis, “The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Fall 2005): 276–89; John Torpey, “Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: Reflections on Reparations,” Journal of Modern History (June 2001): 333–58. Further instances to be found in A. H. Rosenfeld (2015).
19. See Cooper 2015.
20. Conway 2015.
21. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 300.
22. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 325.
23. Edward Alexander, “Stealing the Holocaust,” in Alexander 1998, 101 (originally published in Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review, November 1980).
24. Alexander 1998, 99.
25. Alexander 1994.
26. Alexander 1994, 102.
27. See endnote 5. The passage cited here is from p. 16.
28. Several of the essays in the A. S. Rosenbaum (2009) volume, including one by Professor Ben Kiernan, director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, explore the question of possible analogies between the Holocaust and other genocides. Am I committed to regarding this as an illegitimate activity? Clearly not. The only claim I am committed to is that Holocaust is rendered unique, whatever analogies may exist between it and other episodes of mass killing, interesting as those may be, by the strange but clearly causally determining relationship subsisting between it and the uniquely European system of politically active myth and delusion concerning the Jews.
29. Alphonse Daudet, Lettres de mon moulin (Paris: Le Livre de Poche Classique, 1994), 154 (the translation in the text is mine): “Une forte indemnité est seule capable de le guérir; aussi ne le mène-t-on pas chez le médecin, mais chez l’agent d’affaires.”
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An earlier and rather different version of this chapter appears under the title “The Uniqueness Debate Revisited” in A. H. Rosenfeld 2015.
