“World Jewry has a special responsibility.” This hectoring trumpet call blared forth from the midst of a New York Times op-ed piece (November 9, 1992) by Flora Lewis entitled “Save Lives in Bosnia.” Jews, she argued, had acquired this special responsibility to Bosnian survivors of Serbian camps because their own ancestors had experienced concentration camps; now they had the opportunity “to show that concentration camps provoke the solidarity of victims of persecution.” For Lewis, the lesson of the Holocaust is that Jews now have a responsibility to behave particularly well because their ancestors suffered so much persecution. The unstated corollary of this argument (as Conor Cruise O’Brien once pointed out in another context) is that the descendants of people who have not been persecuted do not have a special responsibility to behave particularly well, and the descendants of the persecutors of Jews can be excused altogether for behavior that would be very hard to excuse in other people. That is perhaps why Lewis went on to give specific instructions to Jews to offer Bosnian Muslims refuge in Israel in order to show “that the Jewish state does indeed want to get on in peace with its Muslim neighbors.” Since the ancestors of these Muslim neighbors did their very best to choke off Jewish immigration to Palestine during World War II, it follows, according to Lewis’s immaculate logic, that these Arab neighbors should now not only be excused for their recent attempts to keep Soviet and Ethiopian Jews from reaching Israel, but should also be offered this conciliatory gesture (which can be expected to have a mighty impact on nations that have always treated Arab refugees like human refuse).
If this seems rather a peculiar lesson to extract from the Holocaust, it is sobriety itself when compared with some that have been expounded by even more nimble interpreters. In Israel, one of the few places in the world where the “special responsibility” of Jews is discussed more frequently than in the editorial pages of the New York Times, the new minister of education, Shulamit Aloni, has taken it upon herself to reverse the direction of that country’s study and commemoration of the Holocaust. A generation ago Israel’s greatest writers, from Uri Zvi Greenberg on the right to Abba Kovner on the left, exhorted their countrymen to look backward and reflect upon the impetus they had received from the experience of the Nazi murder of European Jewry and the callous indifference of the nations of the world to the Jewish catastrophe, and to consider their responsibility to redeem the dead. “From the promised land I called you,” wrote Kovner in poetic address to the murdered children of Europe: “I looked for you/among heaps of small shoes. / At every approaching holiday.” Gershom Scholem, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, justified the choice of the Star of David for the Israeli flag precisely because “under this sign [the Jews] were murdered,” and “the sign which … has been sanctified by suffering and dread has become worthy of illuminating the path to life and reconstruction.”1 In 1970 he predicted, in an essay in Ariel, that “the reaction to the Holocaust, when it comes, could be either deadly or productive. We hope it will be productive; that is why we are living here, in this Land.”2
But Mrs. Aloni, the Israeli version of what East European Jews used to call “a cossack in a sukkah,” has deplored the stress upon the Holocaust as regressive and nationalistic. “I do not take pictures of the backside of history,” she declared on Israeli Radio. “The Ministry of Education must be concerned with the future.” Even before her elevation to office, Aloni had frequently denounced Holocaust education in Israel because it taught children that “the Nazis did this to the Jews instead of the message that people did this to people.” If Mrs. Aloni has her way in the Israeli schools, then the Nazi murder of the Jews of Europe, a crime of terrifying clarity and distinctness, a crime based on the principle that every European must be able to prove that he is not a Jew in order to claim the right to live, will become for young Israelis a blurred, amorphous agony, an indeterminate part of man’s inhumanity to man.
Do the ratiocinations of Lewis and Aloni confirm the wisdom of replying to the question of what we learn from the Holocaust with the dismissive quip: “Nothing, I hope”? The late Lucy Dawidowicz would not have thought so. In her posthumously published collection of essays, What Is the Use of Jewish History?, she returns frequently to this question, most notably in “How They Teach the Holocaust” and “Could America Have Rescued Europe’s Jews?” The former, a survey of how the Holocaust is taught in American secondary schools, shows that some American Holocaust curricula have already achieved the condition to which Aloni would have the (putatively Jewish) Israeli schools aspire. One used excerpts from Mein Kampf not just to show that “racist hatred extends to all groups that are ‘others’” but to give the impression that blacks and not Jews were Hitler’s primary targets. The most pervasive failure of these curricula, Dawidowicz discovered, was omission of the long history of antisemitism, with the term itself generally subsumed under the generic “racism and prejudice.”3 Dawidowicz never doubted that we study the history of the murder of the European Jews not only to mourn and remember them, but to try to understand and learn lessons from the past. The past could not, however, instruct those who asked it the wrong questions. The unrelenting ferocity of her attack on historian David Wyman, who in The Abandonment of the Jews asked the question “Could America Have Rescued Europe’s Jewry?”, arose not so much from a desire to defend Roosevelt and American Jewry from allegations of complicity in the Holocaust as from a flinty political realism. Not for her the imagined otherwise of what she derisively labeled “preaching History” (176), which made moral judgments on the basis of the ought rather than the is of history.
The real question to ask, she insisted, was how the country called Nazi Germany could have quickly gained dominion over Europe and readily enlisted both its own citizens and other peoples into mass murder of the people called the Jews. Judicious answers to this question, she asserted, would suggest the lessons to be learned from the Holocaust. The first was the infectious power of antisemitism, especially when embodied in the state; the second was the importance of a strong military (for if the pacifists, appeasers, and isolationists had not first had their way in England and America, Hitler would not have had his way in Europe); the third, “one which every Jewish child now knows” (177), was the necessity of Jewish political power and a Jewish state for Jewish survival.
Those who reject these lessons have a vested interest in opposing study of the Holocaust or distorting its history. Given Shulamit Aloni’s insistence that it was not the Nazis who murdered the Jews but “people [who] did this to people,” it would not have surprised Dawidowicz (or, for that matter, Gershom Scholem) to learn that Aloni has also blamed Jews for arousing antisemitism in Poland by displaying the flag of the Jewish state at Auschwitz and for other Holocaust-related activities “which create the feeling that we were victims and that we have to be strong.” Apparently, the wisdom Dawidowicz attributed to every Jewish child has not yet reached every Jewish adult.
1.The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971), 281.
2.“Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time,” Ariel 26 (Spring 1970): 46.
3.What Is the Use of Jewish History, ed. Neal Kozodoy (New York: Schocken, 1992), 70–73. Subsequent reference to this work will appear parenthetically in the text.