Few, if any, events in human history have attracted the amount of attention as the so-called Jewish "Holocaust," capital H as opposed to all other lower case genocides. "Scholarship on the Holocaust," wrote Theodore Ziolkowski, "whether accurate or not, is piling up at such a rate that some observers believe the end of the century will witness an accumulation of works exceeding the total number produced on any other subject in human history." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 593] Moral arguments, factual contentions, survivor's accounts, Nazi documents, Jewish polemics, and every other kind of angle about the Nazis' attempts to eliminate Jews have been the base of careers for a huge number of mostly Jewish scholars. There are over ten thousand existent publications just about the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. [MILLER, p. 35] In 1982 a conference in Israel about the Holocaust drew 650 scholars from around the world, many with presentations about the subject. [LIBOWITZ, p. 272] And what has been a common core to the Jewish discourse on the subject? Wounded pride, often expressed in torrents of irrationality and emotionalism. "The blow to the national and human pride of the Jewish nation inflicted by the extermination of one-third of its people," notes Israeli sociologist Chaim Schatzker, "hardened the remainder to any logical and rational argumentation on the subject of the Holocaust." [SCHATZKER, p. 95] Jewish author Philip Lopate notes that Jewish emotionalism on the subject "forces the mind to withdraw." And in the world of contesting ideas, "in its life as a rhetorical figure, the Holocaust is a bully." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 33]
Jewish obsession with the Holocaust knows few limits, and leaves no stone unturned in its quest for esoteric minutia. "Sometimes one is even tempted to ask whether historians working on the Holocaust are not stretching the bounds of common sense," says Evytat Friesel, "One example is the debate that took place in 1991 in Frankfurt, where a Study and Documentation Center is being planned, in which well-known historians participated in a learned discussion on whether the Holocaust had been rational, irrational, or anti-rational." [FRIESEL, p. 228-229] "In the Jewish community," complains Gabriel Schoenfeld, "well-meaning organizations and individuals are mindlessly sponsoring Internet sites offering a 'Holocaust cybrary' or a 'virtual tour' of [concentration camp] Dachau! Already, an academic conference has been scheduled in Washington on the subject of 'Deaf People in Hitler's Europe,' where for four days scholars in three separate victimological fields -- 'Holocaust Studies, Deaf Studies, and Deaf History' -- will have an opportunity to 'interact.' Do we need more of this?" [SCHOENFELD, p. 46]
By the end of the twentieth century the Holocaust is understood by Jews to be the tragically golden cap that proves the Jewish mythos of eternal victimization. "One lesson we [Jews] frequently derive from our history," says Steven Cohen, "a very powerful one -- is the lesson of victimization, whose paramount example is the Holocaust. Jews believe that we have been victimized over the years, that we have a unique history of persecution. The lesson gets pounded into us in a variety of ways. It starts with the central formative events in Jewish history, namely the enslavement in Egypt. It continues through to the Holocaust in Europe and is punctuated with invasions, expulsions, and pogroms in between. The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld has said that Jewish history is a series of Holocausts, with only some improvement in technology." [COHEN, Uses, p. 26]
The popular formation of a modern Jewish identity that is completely Holocaust-centric is cause for some dissent in the Jewish community. "Some Jews actively search out anti-Semitism," says Adam Garfinkle, "as a raison d'etre to be Jewish, along with the modern cult of martyrology -- the canonization of the Holocaust. This they do because positive motivation for Jewishness, flowing from their grasp of the value of the Jewish perspective, is all but absent in their lives." [GARFINKLE, p. 21] By 1981 Jacob Neusner was disturbed by the "puzzling frame of mind of people whose everyday vision of ordinary things is reshaped into a heightened, indeed mythic, mode of perception and being by reference to awful events they never witnessed, let alone experienced, and by the existence of a place which they surely do not plan to dwell in or even to visit." [NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 2]
"I think there is absolutely no question, as I look at the American Jewish experience," says Jonathan Woocher, "that we have appropriated both the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel in a mythic fashion. The myth has even been given a name, though not by me, 'From Holocaust to redemption.' Israel is a resurrection and all the world's great religions have a resurrection myth." [WOOCHER, Discussion, p. 28]
As always in the Jewish collective understanding of itself, and reflecting the traditional Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism, victims of the Holocaust were all categorically "innocent." "Holocaust theology," notes Marc Ellis, declares that "the Jewish sense of purpose [is] that of an innocent, suffering people in search of their destiny." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 6] The innocence of the European Jews is thereby transferred categorically to the intrinsic innocence of Israelis fighting Arabs. "For Holocaust theologians," says Ellis,
"the victory in the [1967] Six Day War was a miracle, a sign that an
innocent people so recently victimized might be on the verge of
redemption. That is, a subtheme of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust
is the total innocence of the Jewish people and thus the innocence of
those who defend the lives of Jews in Israel. For Holocaust theologians,
the victory of Israel in 1967 is a victory of the innocent trying to forestall
another catastrophe, another holocaust, and the redemptive sign is that
this time Jews will prevail." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 3]
Rooted in the mythology of relentless victimization of Jewish innocence across the centuries, one of the most curious obsessions for most Jews today is the militantly avowed "uniqueness" of the Holocaust in comparison to all other atrocities in the human record. The Jewish Holocaust's declared outstanding "specialness," grotesque and horrible, inevitably echoes -- and is sometimes overtly theologically linked to -- the traditional tenets of self-asserted Judaic claims to distinction, exclusiveness, and chosenness. Over the years, notes Edward Linenthal, the Holocaust became to be understood by Jews as even a pseudo-religious event itself, "not only a transcendent event, it was unique, not to be compared to any other genocidal situations, and its victims were Jews. Any comparison of event or linkage to any other victim group could be, and often was, perceived as, if not the murder of memory, at least its dilution. Moreover, the story ended with a kind of redemption, the creation of the state of Israel." [LINENTHAL, p. 4] (This communal conviction has evolved over time, politically and socially, as it suited Jewish needs. As Peter Novick notes about earlier years: "After the war began, and after the main outlines of the Holcoaust had become known, it was common for Jewish writers to interpret Nazi atrocities in a univeralist fashion -- stressing that Jews were far from the only victims.") [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 38]
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