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Holocaust uniqueness debate

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The assertion that the Holocaust was a unique event in human history was important to the historiography of the Holocaust, but it has come under increasing criticism in the twenty-first century.[1] Related claims include the claim that the Holocaust is external to history, beyond human understanding,[2] a civilizational rupture (German: Zivilisationsbruch), and something that should not be compared to other historical events.[3][4] Uniqueness approaches to the Holocaust also coincide with the view that antisemitism is not another form of racism and prejudice but is eternal and teleologically culminates in the Holocaust, a frame that is preferred by proponents of Zionist narratives.[5][6]

History

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The Jerusalem school of Jewish history originated in the 1920s and it sought to document Jewish history from a national, as opposed to a religious or philosophical perspective. It developed the notion that Jewish history itself was unique, a progenitor to the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust.[7] The uniqueness of the Holocaust was advanced while it was ongoing by the World Jewish Congress (WJC), but rejected by governments of countries in German-occupied Europe.[8] In the early decades of Holocaust studies, scholars approached the Holocaust as a genocide unique in its reach and specificity.[9] Holocaust uniqueness became a subject for scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, in response to efforts to historicize the Holocaust via such concepts as totalitarianism, fascism, functionalism, modernity, and genocide.[10]

In West Germany, the Historikerstreit ("historians' dispute") erupted in the late 1980s over attempts to challenge the position of the Holocaust in West German historiographical orthodoxy and compare Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union. Critics saw this challenge as an attempt to relativize the Holocaust.[11] In the 1980s and 1990s, a set of scholars, including Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz, Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, and Daniel Goldhagen—mostly from the field of Jewish studies—authored various studies to prove the Holocaust's uniqueness.[12] They were challenged by another set of scholars from a wide diversity of viewpoints that rejected the uniqueness of the Holocaust and compared it to other events, which was then met with an angry backlash from uniqueness supporters.[13] Around the turn of the twenty-first century, polemical approaches for the debate were exchanged for analytical ones relating to claims of uniqueness in Holocaust memory.[14] By 2021 there were few scholars who were still making the uniqueness argument.[15]

Unlike most Orthodox Jewish rabbis and theologians, the Lubavitcher Rebbe eventually came to the conclusion that the Holocaust was historically and theologically unprecedented and could not be understood with older religious categories such as sin, punishment, or Tikkun.[16]

In the twenty first century, an increasing body of scholarship challenged the claims of uniqueness proponents. While Holocaust scholars have largely moved beyond the uniqueness debate,[17][18] belief that the Holocaust is unique continues to be entrenched in public consciousness and moral pedagogy in the West.[17] In 2021, A. Dirk Moses initiated the catechism debate, challenging the uniqueness of the Holocaust in German Holocaust memory. The same year, in his book The Problems of Genocide, Moses argued that the development of the concept of genocide based on the Holocaust led to disregard of other forms of mass civilian death that could not be analogized to the Holocaust.[4][19]

Arguments

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Proponents of uniqueness argue that the Holocaust had unique aspects which were not found in other historical events.[20][21] Historian Daniel Blatman sums up the uniqueness position as arguing it was the "only genocide in which the murderers' goal was the total extermination of the victim, with no rational or pragmatic reason", but Blatman and other scholars say this is not true of the Holocaust, either.[22] For example, historian Dan Stone writes that Bauer's definition of "Holocaust" as "total destruction", unlike all other genocides in history, is mistaken because in the Holocaust destruction was not total.[23] Opponents argue that since every historical event has unique features,[7] uniqueness proponents are in fact making ideological rather than historical claims.[24][25]

German historian Wolfgang Benz argues that the six million victims alone makes the Holocaust "a unique crime in the history of mankind".[26] On the other hand, historian Annette F. Timm argues that the Holocaust was unique due to the categorical rejection of any single Jewish person from being assimilated.[27]

Critics of the uniqueness concept have argued that it is Eurocentric.[28][29] Some Holocaust scholars who support the uniqueness concept deny other genocides, such as the Romani Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.[29] Some observers believe that the Jewish Holocaust had roots in the German colonial Herero and Namaqua genocide in Namibia earlier in the 20th century, while others observers reject the comparison.[30][31] The German historian Jürgen Zimmerer has critiqued both German liberals and German conservatives who do not see "continuities" between the Namibian genocide and the Holocaust, claiming that conservatives have an unwillingness to examine German colonial history and that liberals have a "fear of challenging the dogma of Holocaust uniqueness".[32]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Blatman 2015, p. 21.
  2. ^ Rosenbaum 2009, p. 1.
  3. ^ Bomholt Nielsen 2021.
  4. ^ a b Stone, Dan (4 January 2022). "Paranoia and the Perils of Misreading". Fair Observer. Retrieved 22 March 2022.
  5. ^ MacDonald 2007, p. 5.
  6. ^ Judaken 2018, pp. 1125, 1130, 1135.
  7. ^ a b Blatman 2015, p. 22.
  8. ^ Moses 2021, pp. 195, 206.
  9. ^ Stone 2010, p. 206.
  10. ^ Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 80–81.
  11. ^ Stone 2010, p. 207.
  12. ^ Rosenfeld 2015, p. 81.
  13. ^ Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 85–86.
  14. ^ Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 86–87.
  15. ^ Krondorfer 2021, p. 393.
  16. ^ Reiser, Daniel (2024). "The Holocaust as an (UN)Exceptional Phenomenon: Development and Change in the Lubavitcher Rebbe's Outlook". Modern Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience. 44 (1): 40–59. doi:10.1093/mj/kjae003.
  17. ^ a b Sutcliffe, Adam (2022). "Whose Feelings Matter? Holocaust Memory, Empathy, and Redemptive Anti-Antisemitism". Journal of Genocide Research. 26 (2): 222–242. doi:10.1080/14623528.2022.2160533.
  18. ^ Rosenfeld 2015, pp. 78–79.
  19. ^ Moses 2021, p. 236.
  20. ^ Michman, Dan (2014). "The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits? Current Challenges of Interpretation and Scope". In Goda, Norman (ed.). Jewish Histories of the Holocaust. New Transnational Approaches. New York: Berghahn Books. pp. 17–38.
  21. ^ Michman, Dan (2022). Holocaust Historiography between 1990 to 2021 in Context(s): New Insights, Perceptions, Understandings and Avenues. An Overview and Analysis, Search and Research Series. Vol. 34. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem.
  22. ^ Blatman 2015, p. 24.
  23. ^ Stone 2010, p. 210.
  24. ^ Stone 2004, p. 129.
  25. ^ Blatman 2015, p. 25.
  26. ^ Benz, Wolfgang (1999). The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide (1st ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. p. 152. ISBN 0-231-11215-7.
  27. ^ Timm, Annette F. (2022). Graziosi, Andrea; Sysyn, Frank E. (eds.). Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-2280-0951-1.
  28. ^ Kellenbach, Katharina von (2021). "Beyond competitive memory: The preeminence of the Holocaust in religious studies". The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429317026-44. ISBN 978-0-429-31702-6. S2CID 241287958.
  29. ^ a b Lim, Jie-Hyun (2022). "The Second World War in Global Memory Space". Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing. Columbia University Press. p. 80. ISBN 978-0-231-55664-4.
  30. ^ Rozett, Robert; Michman, Dan (3 January 2021). "The Unprecedented Nature of the Holocaust and its Unique Features: Some Reflections - Part I". Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 28 July 2024. Retrieved 2 January 2024.
  31. ^ Rausch, Sahra (2022). "'We're equal to the Jews who were destroyed. [. . .] Compensate us, too'. An affective (un)remembering of Germany's colonial past?". Memory Studies. 15 (2). Sage Journals: 418–435. doi:10.1177/17506980211044083.
  32. ^ Adhikari, Mohamed (November 2008). "'Streams of blood and streams of money': New perspectives on the annihilation of the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia, 1904-1908" (PDF). Kronos. 34. SciELO: 303–320. JSTOR 41056613. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 August 2024. Retrieved 2 January 2024.

Sources

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