In The Holocaust in Historical Context (pp. 58–62), a revised definition of the difficult concept of “genocide” was put forward. This definition, and the explanation that was offered for adopting it has, not surprisingly, engendered much comment. The nature of the criticism directed at my definition indicates that many readers did not fully grasp the meaning that I assigned to this term, nor my purpose in defining the term as I did. Therefore, so that readers of the essays in the present volume will not be confused and will know what I mean when this basic term is used in the present study, let me once again set out my position.2
Due to irremediable problems in the United Nations’ definition of “genocide” that was included in its “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” and unanimously adopted without abstentions by the General Assembly on December 9, 1948, I have chosen to offer a revised, more restrictive, definition for the purpose of my own work. Accordingly, as was previously done and as will be done again in the present collection, the notion of “genocide” will be seen as applying to, and only as applying to, “the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in its totality of any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender, or economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means.” The implementation of such intent, which is very specific, is most usually carried out by states, but this is not required by my definition. As an empirical matter, government power is very often employed in actual (and putative)3 genocides, but this need not always be the case.4 In the absence of centralized state power, it may be possible for groups within the body-politic to carry out genocidal assaults against other segments of the population. Which is to recognize that genocide is possible in socio-political situations where you have direct state intervention or state collusion as well as in those where you have a weak central authority that is unable to prevent genocide from happening within given borders. Recognition of this variable precludes the criterion of state intervention as a necessary condition for the definition of “genocide.”5 In the argument that follows, any form of mass murder that does not conform to the definition of “genocide” provided here will not be identified by me as an occasion of this very particular phenomenon.
My revised definition emphasizes that intent,6 that is, the intent to murder a group in its totality (possibly linked to a variety of national, utilitarian, political, ideological, racial, retributive, religious, sexual, social, and economic ends), is a necessary condition of “genocide.” Those who find this requirement problematic on the grounds that the notion of intention is ambiguous should recognize that, whatever ambiguities attend this concept, it is a widely and successfully employed legal concept,7 for instance, in the distinction between premeditated murder and lesser forms (legally defined) of murder. As such, it has proven its functionality and practical usability. Therefore, there is no good reason not to utilize it. In consequence, I employ the notion of “intention” as being crucial to the definition of “genocide”8 in the essays published in this study. This axiomatic usage will, in fact, be one of the essential characteristics that distinguish9 “genocide” from other forms of mass death, for example, those related to the unintended consequences of pandemics. My insistence on involving the notion of “intent” in the definition of “genocide” reflects, among other things, an awareness of the fact that not every cause represents or implicates an intentional act, that is, an act of a will.
It needs, in addition, to be noted that the original draft of the Genocide Convention prepared in 1947 by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights included in its definition the broad idea of what can properly be labeled “cultural” genocide, understanding this category to mean the “destruction of the specific characteristics of the persecuted group by means, including forced exile, prohibition of the use of the national language, destruction of books, and similar acts.”10 Though this clause was dropped from the final formulation as being too indefinite for purposes of international law, by recalling it, we can differentiate – following the precedent of the U.N. discussion, if not of its final draft – between cultural genocide and physical genocide. Cultural genocide is defined as “the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to destroy the national, ethnic, religious, political, social, or class identity of a group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrators.”11 This difference between cultural and physical genocide is self-evidently important and should be, as a matter of method and substance, always respected. For it entails the essential recognition that identifying an event as an instance of “cultural genocide” and identifying a different event as an instance of “physical genocide” is, in effect, to describe two dissimilar realities.
The employment of the terms “unique” and “uniqueness” in relation to the Holocaust and, by implication, the significance that these notions might have in relation to other events of mass death that have been identified as instances of “genocide,” has engendered a good deal of discussion. Because much of this conversation has been critical of the use of these concepts, a number of distinguished Holocaust scholars interested in this issue have altered their earlier positions and now avoid the employment of these terms. Instead, they now utilize other descriptors, e.g., the terms singular, paradigm, and paradigmatic, as in the description that “the murder of European Jewry is the paradigmatic genocide.” This change of nomenclature serves to signal that the Holocaust, while highly significant in itself and in relation to an analysis of the concept of “genocide,” is not the only historical instance of a specific “class” of events. Moreover, this revisionist strategy has the added advantage of removing a considerable amount of the heat that all too often surrounds the consideration of the Holocaust in comparative analyses.
The appeal of avoiding the terms “unique” and “uniqueness” is, therefore, obvious. Before endorsing this decision, I would, however, make six points.
The horrific violence in Darfur was indisputably criminal. But, now that we can, with hindsight, see this event clearly, it is evident that it did not constitute genocide on my definition. However, given the looseness of the United Nations definition – allowing murder “in part” to qualify as genocide – there are those who argue that this event meets this very vague standard. It might be considered to meet this standard. But to so conclude is to extend the meaning of the term “genocide” in ways that essentially undermine its significance as a description of a distinctive type of crime.
Alternatively, though there are significant differences between what took place in Rwanda in 1994 and the Holocaust, the murderous conditions that did obtain in this heinous circumstance though, unlike the Holocaust, geographically limited to one country, appear to go a long way towards meeting my criteria for identifying a historical experience as genocide. In this event, one appears to be confronted with the “intention” to kill an entire group, in this instance “the entire group” being those Tutsis who resided within the boundaries of Rwanda, i.e., not Tutsis universally. The lethal violence in this immediate context began with the killing of the Tutsi elite in Kigali, the nation’s capital, on April 6–7, 1994, and then spread throughout the country. The Hutus, claiming that they were defending the country from a Tutsi insurrection and the breakup of Rwanda, unleashed a ferocious and indiscriminate rampage, with the asserted objective of creating a homogeneous Hutu state, that claimed approximately 800,000 victims in three months.
Given what I now know about the events in Rwanda, including what I learned from my conversations in a country visit in 2014, I would characterize them as a second instance of “genocide” according to my definition of this concept.21 That is to say; my definition may now apply to two cases, not just one.22 However, the many crucial phenomenological differences between what transpired in Rwanda and the Holocaust still allow for the conclusion that there were a number of singular aspects related to the murder of European Jewry that need to be recognized, and that distinguish the two events, one from the other. Among these significant differences are: the role of technology and bureaucracy, the definition of the “victim” on racial criteria, the governing ideology, i.e., the national vs. ontological teleology, the unlimited assault on children, and especially the international character of the campaign against Jews, being five of the most important such elements.
A serious misinterpretation of my reason(s) for defending the claim that the Holocaust is unique has been widely circulated by A. Dirk Moses. His view needs to be addressed and corrected both because it is totally false in itself and because other scholars not investigating the topic for themselves have repeated it. Moses, in discussing my views on uniqueness, has correctly noted that I “profess not to posit a hierarchy of victims or to claim that individual Jewish victims suffered more than non-Jewish ones.” Yet, he concludes that “the burden of [Katz’s] argument, nonetheless, is that Jewish victims are sacred and those of other genocides are not because only the Jews as a group were singled out for total extermination.”23 This is a complete misrepresentation that has been advanced without any relevant supporting evidence. I have never advanced such a claim. In fact, I have continued to contest any such argument. I have never, in contradistinction to Moses’ assertion,24 referred to either the Holocaust or the victims of the Holocaust as “sacred.” In point of fact, I assign no specific theological meaning to the Holocaust.25 Furthermore, I have never said anything at all about other occasions of mass death/genocide and the presumably profane, i.e., “non-sacred,” character of their victims.
Because of the unfortunate influence that Moses’ inaccurate interpretation of my work has had, I reproduce the key passage in his analysis here.
Elie Wiesel has made the logical connection between trauma, group identity and the insistence of uniqueness:
I always forbade myself to compare the Holocaust of European Judaism to events which are foreign to it. Auschwitz was something else. The Universe of concentration camps, by its dimensions and its design, lies outside, if not beyond, history. Its vocabulary belongs to it alone.
Accordingly, he has expressed alarm that other victim groups are “stealing the Holocaust from us… we need to regain our sense of sacredness.” Renowned scholars such as Lucy Dawidowicz, Steven T. Katz, and Bauer do not differ from Wiesel and survivors in this regard, even if they locate the Holocaust in history. Bauer himself has pointed out the traumatizing effect of the Holocaust on Israeli society, demonstrated, above all, by its instrumentalization by all sides in public debate for partisan political purposes. And with characteristic forthrightness, Katz insists on its centrality for Jewish identity:
To understand ourselves [as Jews] requires ineluctably that we come to some grasp of these events [the Holocaust] and our relation to them… Those who would enquire what it means to be a Jew today must ask not, or even pose primarily, vague and unformed questions about Jewish identity and the relation of Judaism and modernity and Judaism and secularity, but must rather articulate the much more precise and focused question through which all other dimensions of our post-Holocaust identity are refracted and defined: “What does it mean to be a Jew after Auschwitz?” Auschwitz has become an inescapable datum for all Jewish accounts of the meaning and nature of covenantal relation and God’s relation to man. Likewise, all substantial answers also need to be open and responsive to the subtleties of the dialectical alternation of the contemporary Jewish situation: that is, they must also give due weight to the “miracle” which is the state of Israel. They must thoughtfully and sensitively enquire whether God is speaking to the “survivors” through it and if so how.
Based on this text, Moses goes on to conclude that:
Because Katz and Bauer locate the Holocaust at the centre of Jewish life, they are forced to insist on its uniqueness, for to do otherwise would undermine their personal identity and concept of collective Jewish existence. The significance Katz and Bauer attach to the Holocaust cannot be sustained if it is “merely” another case of the mass killing that punctuates human history, for the problem of evil – the mystery of undeserved suffering – cannot be faced without the sense of a cosmic meaning subtended by the division of the world into sacred and profane domains.26
But this argument is completely nonsensical. As readers will immediately see, the term “sacredness” comes from Elie Wiesel, not me. Yet, Moses’ analysis moves forward first by completely ignoring this basic fact and then, secondly, by conflating Wiesel’s position and my own. The reality, however, is that Elie Wiesel and I often discussed this issue in private conversation and held very different views on the matter.27 Contrary to Moses’ assessment that: “Steven T. Katz… does not differ from Wiesel and survivors in this regard,” the truth is that I “do differ from Wiesel and survivors fundamentally in this regard.” As evidence in direct support of this important claim regarding my difference from the position articulated by Elie Wiesel I note that in The Holocaust in Historical Context, in a section entitled “Clarifying Disclaimers,” I wrote: “One must be open to the philosophical possibility that the Shoah is transcendentally unique, [but] I shall not advance this and like claims as my own.”28 Explicating my position, I explained that “I am not proposing or endorsing any particular theological conclusions. It is not clear to me that there is a direct, preferred, theological meaning to be drawn from the exceptionality of this event.” Moreover, I contended that both religious radicals and conservatives have “run ahead of the available evidence… to posit conclusions that are not epistemologically or intellectually persuasive.”29 After which I concluded that: “We remain, therefore, satisfied with a more modest phenomenological, contra transcendental, definition of the historical novum that is the Sho’ah.”30 That is I have always rejected all views which claim that the Holocaust is “sacred” and opposed all comparisons that would advance metaphysical and theological truths predicated on the Shoah. Because of this agnosticism, I have explicitly and repeatedly emphasized that: “I reject the metaphysical mystification of the Sho’ah,”31 and have very publicly observed that “I oppose… an analogy between the Sho’ah and religious experience.”32
As for Moses’ linking of my views with those of Professor Yehuda Bauer the same methodological error is made, but even more so. Though there is a similarity of view on many points in Bauer’s work and my own, to evaluate my views one has to consider what I wrote not what Bauer wrote. Professor Bauer and I have never worked together to write anything in common, and most definitely, have never jointly composed anything that bears on the topic of uniqueness. In point of fact, there are significant differences between our views on this matter. Therefore, if Moses wants to discuss Katz let him discuss Katz rather than an invented, i.e., nonexistent, Katz-Bauer thesis. This erroneously asserted connection leads only to confusion and error, for it inevitably leads Moses to attribute things to me that I have never said and assigns meanings to my work that are without foundation. I may well have written things that are incorrect, and misinterpreted the historical evidence with which I work, but you cannot “prove” this by quoting the views of Yehuda Bauer and imputing them to me.
Here I would add, parenthetically, that Professor Bauer does not believe in God, and was for several years the President of The International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. He is the last person who would introduce the term “sacred” into the analysis of Holocaust victims. This was one of his long-standing differences with Elie Wiesel whose writings he strongly felt were too theological. Furthermore, the citation of Bauer’s position employed by Moses is given a completely distorted meaning. He quotes Bauer to the effect that:
All these universalizing attempts [regarding the Holocaust] seem to me to be, on the Jewish side, efforts by their authors to escape their Jewishness. They are expressions of a deep-seated insecurity; these people feel more secure when they can say “we are just like all the others.” The Holocaust should have proved to them that the Jews were, unfortunately, not like the others. Obviously, it did not.33
And then interprets this statement as proof that Bauer is addressing, as Moses describes it, the “sacredness of the Holocaust.”
The link between the ongoing maintenance of group identity and the sacredness of the Holocaust could hardly be made more explicitly than in this extraordinary statement.34
But this is absurd. Bauer is not talking about the “sacredness” of the Holocaust and its Jewish victims but, rather, about what he takes to be the historical singularity of antisemitism and Jewish self-hate. As readers will have no difficulty recognizing, Bauer never mentions anything to do with religion or “sacredness.”
Then, too, I would add, so that there will be no confusion regarding the significance of holding the Holocaust central to post-Holocaust Jewish identity (what I referred to as “an inescapable datum”), that making this claim about the post-Holocaust consciousness of contemporary Jews is not equivalent to saying anything regarding “sacredness.” It means only that in discussing the nature and meaning of Judaism in the post-war era it is necessary to consider what implications, if any, the Shoah may have for Judaism after Auschwitz. So, for instance, Richard Rubenstein explored these issues and came to the radical conclusion that there was no God, no covenant, and no revelation at Sinai or subsequently. Which is to say that all that is being insisted upon when one refers to the extermination of European Jewry as “an inescapable datum” is that one must wrestle with the possible meaning(s) of the Holocaust in our contemporary circumstance. My own position has continually been non-committal as to specific theological proposals based on the experience of the Holocaust. I would also repeat that I have never said anything about the religious status of the victims killed during other occasions of mass death, and I certainly do not posit, as Moses falsely asserts (ibid., p. 64), a typological distinction between Jewish victims of the Holocaust being “sacred” and victims of other occasions of mass death being profane. This claim is simply untrue.
This altogether mistaken argument about “sacredness” has unfortunately been recycled by Dan Stone in an essay, “On the Holocaust and Genocide.”.35 Stone, in discussing my work on the issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, tells us that the “historical grounds for defending the Holocaust’s uniqueness are in fact ideologically driven attempts to maintain the Holocaust as a kind of ‘sacred entity’… it stems from a historically explicable, but by now harmful, belief that Jewish identity would be massively threatened if one of the mainstays (the fact that all Jews were potential victims of Nazism) were to lose its ‘sacred’ aura, and also, unconsciously a belief that the Holocaust status as unique constitutes a bulwark against revivified antisemitism.”36 This explanation, that readers will recognize as a repetition of Dirk Moses’ erroneous reading, is no more correct when it is repeated than when it was first articulated. Insofar as it relates, or is said to relate, to my use of the terms “unique” and “uniqueness” and seeks to explain my position, I need only repeat that I do not believe that the Holocaust is a “sacred entity,” nor that it has a “sacred aura.” It is not an accident that Stone provides no citation from my publications, not a single sentence or even a part of a sentence, that would indicate that I have ever said anything like this. I see nothing “sacred” in the murder of 1,400,000 (or more) Jewish children, the use of Jewish women in ghastly medical experiments, a million and a half Jewish men and women killed by Einsatzgruppen and millions more gassed in death camps. Nor do I hold now, nor have I ever held, that the Shoah needs to possess a “sacred aura” in order to serve as a prophylaxis against antisemitism. This interpretation, in its totality, is simply fallacious.
Donald Bloxham has, likewise, repeatedly objected to identifying the Holocaust as unique. In 2005 he called the issue of “uniqueness” “an obstacle to historical understanding,” though unlike Dirk Moses he agreed that “it itself [is] an acceptable contention for a historian to make.” But he, nonetheless, critically observed that it “can never be more than a contention for the simple reason that it is not possible to prove. It is a matter of opinion, not fact.” As he understands it, this concept belongs to a Holocaust “metanarrative” that rests on weak historical foundations. Furthermore, he asks:
Since the intent and extent of the killing are the salient issues both in judging “uniqueness” and indeed in establishing genocide, at what point, are we entitled to ask, [when] did genocide become genocide, and this uniqueness thereby manifest itself? Thousands of Jews had already perished under Nazi rule, particularly in the Polish ghettos, before the beginning of the “Final Solution” as many historians have understood it (that is, before the invasion of the Soviet Union crystallized or precipitated mass direct killing as a policy tool). And even when killing of Soviet Jews on a genocidal scale had demonstrably begun – say by the end of August 1941 – did this equate to the sort of total, utterly all-encompassing genocide that Bauer and Katz have in mind in their ex post facto judgments?37
But this critique is nothing more than a series of logical and conceptual errors. Bloxham is correct that the “Final Solution” went through and, in its totality, represented a developmental process, but this fact does not eliminate the specific question about the outcome of the process and its “uniqueness.” Obviously, the claim for uniqueness is being made looking back at the event as a whole, and, as I use the relevant term(s), does not deny that there were many steps along the way. Which is to say that, in making these arguments and working towards my conclusions, I have employed the same type of analysis as that utilized by other scholars to describe, characterize, and evaluate other (all other) historical events. To the degree that this common method considers past events from a future position that is capable of viewing them in their entirety, it allows for judgments relative to all historical matters including the Holocaust. Bloxham is correct that the claim for “uniqueness” is an “ex post facto judgment” and represents what he now labels a “metanarrative.” However, insofar as it is a judgment about a historical event, it must be a “metanarrative.” This is true of all judgments, whether phenomenological or moral, or otherwise – including Bloxham’s judgments – about all historical events. Thus, we can either give up all historical judgments or learn to cope with “metanarratives.”
Second, in asserting that the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” cannot be proven one has to ask what type, what form, of “proof” Bloxham is requesting. It is certainly reasonable to assert that the claim regarding “uniqueness” is not verifiable in the way that scientific propositions are verified. But, at the same time, it is necessary to insist that this contention is open to “proof” in the same way that all other historical evaluations are: that is, by marshaling evidence that one hopes will make a persuasive case. Similarly, disconfirming the claim happens in the same way that falsifying all historical conclusions occurs, i.e., by way of superior counter-arguments and reference to relevant evidence. Accordingly, the claim that “the Holocaust is unique” is comparable to other historical judgments. And this not least to the contrary position that Bloxham endorses: that the Holocaust is not unique. What sort of evidence will Bloxham produce to defend and verify this claim, this “metanarrative,” that is different from the type of evidence – and method – that I, and others, have employed to make the contrary case. To show that X is unique, understanding “unique” to mean different from all other items or events, one measures X and all the other items or events against the same criteria to see if X is like or unlike all of these other possibilities to which it is compared. There is no mystery or metaphysics here. This method is, as I invoke it, strictly historical and phenomenological.
In his more extended study, The Final Solution: A Genocide, published in 2009, Bloxham returned to the issue of “uniqueness.” The book’s subtitle “A Genocide,” is meant to indicate that the Holocaust is just one event in a series of like-events, all the events in the series being instances of genocide. Thus, he writes that, “even the most extreme genocide, the murder of the Jews, retains some of the shape of other genocides.” (p. 10). But this standard setting sentence entails that the “Final Solution” was not only like other genocides but that it had properties, attributes, a “shape” that it did not share with other events identified by Bloxham as genocides. Therefore, it appears to be different – the “most extreme genocide” – even on Bloxham’s accounting. He emphasizes this by noting that among Nazi crimes, such as the 13 million forced laborers made to work for the Nazis, and the assault on the Roma, “none [of these crimes] was pursued with quite the same zeal as the Jewish genocide” (p. 10). So, at a minimum, within the context of World War II and Nazi violence, the murder of the Jews was distinctive, and destructive in such a way including a special “zeal” – that is significant. Otherwise, its destructiveness would not need to be called to attention.
Bloxham then continues to explain why, in his view, certain scholars have identified the Holocaust as “unique.” In doing so, he attributes the reason to “identity politics” that he defines as “the need to give a special significance to past suffering of Jews in the name of present communal identity.”38 There is, in a general sense, truth to this. But there is a crucial distinction that he ignores between the question of “uniqueness” per se, i.e., is it the case or is it not the case that the Holocaust is “unique,” and the use of the answer given to this query. The “uniqueness” or “non-uniqueness” of the Holocaust as an event is completely separate from the instrumental use that individuals may make of the answer to this question. Furthermore, insofar as Bloxham attributes this instrumental purpose to my work, he is unable to cite a single sentence that I have written as evidence that I have such an agenda. The reality is that I have never advanced such an argument.39
Bloxham refers to my work as developing “uniqueness” into a philosophical proposition. I am described as seizing upon the “Nazi racial imperative that all Jews must die, and they must die here and now,”40 as the grounds for a philosophical argument for the singularity of the Holocaust. But Bloxham finds this highly problematic and argues that:
While the scale, determination, and intensity of the Nazi pursuit of Jews across Europe is exceptional even within the annals of genocide, we have seen earlier in this book that the murder was not perpetuated mindless of economic, political, or logistical cost, and that up to the last stage, it was paralleled by less destructive forms of ethnopolitics against other groups. We have also seen that the idea that Hitler (and Himmler) actively sought to murder every last Jew everywhere is open to question. It is far from clear that even Hitler himself was overly concerned with the fate of the Jews of Norway or Rhodes.41
But this counter-argument is defective. For we know that the Führer state, with Hitler in charge, was, in fact, concerned enough with the complete extermination of the Jewish People to deport the Jews of Norway and Rhodes to death camps; and to kill almost the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki. While, the “exceptions” to the Nazi plan to murder all Jews, that Bloxham refers to, were little more than very temporary exemptions. See the papers on the killing of Jewish women and children, and also on Jewish workers in this collection that make this very clear. Nor should we ignore Bloxham’s self-contradictory observation that the murder of the Jews was “exceptional even within the annals of genocide,” and at “the last stage,” was not paralleled by any other actions of the Third Reich. So, indeed, the Nazi assault on the Jewish People was, in fact, “exceptional.” This sounds very much like a “metanarrative” defending the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust.
It is notable that Bloxham does not enter into any conversation regarding my detailed case-by-case comparisons and does not attempt to correct or refute them. Instead, he repeats Dirk Moses’ objection that:
Whether the similarities [between the Holocaust and other genocides] are more significant than the differences is ultimately a political and philosophical, rather than a historical question… Uniqueness is not a category for historical research; it is a religious or metaphysical category.42
But this claim is false no matter how many times it is repeated. “Uniqueness” can be a meaningful historical category if the conditions of its employment are appropriately defined. I note that Bloxham does not hesitate to refer to “the exceptional character of the Holocaust.” Is the term “exceptional” less metaphysical and more subject to proof than the term “uniqueness”? Bloxham further asserts that “it is possible to go further still [i.e., beyond Moses’ criticism]. The claim of uniqueness must mean unique from any perspective.” This, however, is still another logical mistake. To utilize the concept of “uniqueness” appropriately requires only that one employs it according to the notion as defined; X is “unique” in terms of the criteria A, B, C… Z given.
Bloxham concludes with the requirement that “the study of the Holocaust should be no different to the study of any given genocide.”43 This is a principle I agree with. In The Holocaust in Historical Context, when discussing the topic of historicization, and the critical claim that Holocaust scholarship tends not to be sufficiently historicized, I stressed that:
Like Martin Broszat I accept the sensible argument that the Holocaust must be open to historical investigation. However, contra the conventional wisdom on this subject (i.e., in opposition to the false dichotomy championed by Broszat and others between historicization and uniqueness), it is my intention to establish the uniqueness of the Sho’ah precisely by historicizing it. This, in fact, is the cardinal objective of the extensive comparative historical exploration undertaken in volumes 1 and 2 of this study.44
Historicization is the necessary condition for establishing, in a logically and methodologically valid way, the uniqueness of the Shoah. This is precisely what my research is primarily about. In consequence, adhering to this methodological requirement will not disconfirm my use of the term “unique” and “uniqueness.” It would be a conceptual mistake to conclude otherwise.
Finally, in a third attempt to explain his rejection of “uniqueness,” Bloxham, in a paper published in 2016,45 entitled a subsection of his discussion: “The Uniqueness Issue Revisited – It is Hoped For the Last Time.”46 Given his faulty argument, now repeated yet again, I too hope it is the “Last Time.” As previously, self-contradiction is introduced early in this latest version of Bloxham’s critique by his acknowledgment that “I have always recognized the extremity of the Holocaust relative to other genocides.”47 But is “extremity” – like his use of the term “exceptional” – more provable and non-metaphysical than “uniqueness”? Then he again introduces the bogus claim that the use of the term “unique” necessarily creates a “hierarchy that hinders the integrated study of genocide.”48 But he does not recognize that this asserted “hierarchization” may well not be the actual meaning of what defenders of “uniqueness” write (or “intend”) but, rather, the outcome of a serious misreading, based on stilted a priori assumptions, by those who dislike this particular idea. To say “X” is not “Y” is not to rank “X” higher than “Y.” Here he refers for support to “Moses’s seminal article on the subject.”49 But, as already shown, Moses’ article is not “seminal” but fictional. Bloxham, Stone, and others, would have done well to make sure of the correctness of Moses’ interpretation before endorsing and employing it. Furthermore, his explication of what the use of the term “unique” means, relative to my work, is inaccurate. He writes:
By “unique” is meant not the mundane uniqueness of every historical event, but a special quality whereby the particular characteristics of the Holocaust are promoted to the exclusion of its commonalities with other genocides, and whereby comparative studies – which is concerned with similarities as well as differences – is, therefore, a distorted pursuit.50
But, I have never attributed a “special quality” to the Holocaust. (Readers should note that there is no corroborating citation from my work.) Rather, the purpose of all my critical reading and detailed historical work is to show that, using “uniqueness” in the “mundane sense” of “every historical event,” the extermination of European Jewry was “unique.”
The criticisms of the concept of “uniqueness,” which have just been discussed, have a common character. Individually and collectively they attempt to disconfirm the claim for the Holocaust’s uniqueness and substitute instead a relativizing thesis that the murder of European Jewry is like other instances of genocide, of which, it is asserted, there was quite a number. The arguments made to defend this position, however, and in particular, the exposition of my views, have been more than questionable. None of my critics can cite anything I have written that might justify their claims, but they feel, nevertheless, justified in asserting that I made the claims they erroneously attribute to me. In place of evidence all three of my critics depend on invented, fabricated, religious, psychological, and sociological theories that do not rightfully, accurately, apply, and put forward arguments that are essentially a series of non-sequiturs. What all scholars have a legitimate right to require is that academic criticism be fair and based on a reasoned investigation of the position being rebutted. In the present instance, this requirement for basic intellectual honesty has not been met.
This essay was prompted by my continued wrestling with the issues related to the definition of genocide that are unavoidable as I pursue my research on the issue of the “Uniqueness” of the Holocaust. As stated in footnote 1, the material republished here is part of the Introduction to my two-volume study entitled The Holocaust and New World Slavery (Cambridge, UK, 2019). Because of its topicality I am re-using a version of it in the present collection.
I am confident that proposing new definitions of “genocide” will continue to be a growth industry. I am not confident, however, based on the efforts in this direction that already exist, that most of these attempts will shed much new light on the subject. In many cases, this specific enterprise has to date yielded only very modest “added value” to the existing conversation that centers around the definition adopted by the United Nations Convention on Genocide, though there have been some contributions of significance (see here my comments in n. 2 of this essay). What I will now try to do, having reviewed this potpourri of proposals in detail, is to respond critically in a new essay to these various revisions of the concept of “genocide.” But based on what I already know about this vexing issue of definition, I am prepared even now to suggest that the most significant way forward would be for a new, or heavily revised, international definition to be formulated by the United Nations. However, there is no sign of this happening.
1 This essay was written only recently and forms part of the Introduction to my two-volume study The Holocaust and New World Slavery (Cambridge, UK, 2019).
2 Because of the problematic nature of the United Nations definition of “Genocide,” there have been many further attempts to provide a better definition over the past twenty years. Collectively, these efforts highlight a number of relevant matters that require a thorough analysis. Many of these attempts raise considerations of salience with regard to fundamental issues like the question of what constitutes a “group,” whether genocide is always state-related, how should one apply the Genocide Convention’s notion of “in whole or in part,” and the role of, and necessity for, the presence of “intent.” However, I do not believe that any of these revisionist attempts materially alters the value of my definition as stated. I will return to this issue, and the more recent body of suggestive proposals for improvement, at length in a future publication.
3 The term putative is being used to indicate that many of the cases referred to and classed by others as “genocide” are, in my view, not instances of genocide but cases of mass murder.
4 Dan Stone, for instance, ties “genocide” to state action, what he describes as “state-led mass murder,” in History Today 60.7 (2010): 5. Similarly, Meredith Hindley refers to “state sponsored mass murder,” “Executing the Twentieth Century,” H-Net Reviews (December 2004). Both of these citations were drawn to my attention by Dan Michman, “The Jewish dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits? Current Challenges of Interpretation and Scope,” in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches, ed. Norman Goda (New York, 2014). Also relevant in this context is Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989), that emphasizes that modernization and the nation state are central to genocide; and Mark Levene’s two interrelated projects that highlight international political and economic competition between nations, as indicated by the title of his 2005 two-volume study Genocide in the Age of Nation States (London, 2008); and his more recent two-volume work The Crisis of Genocide (New York, 2013).
5 Frank Chalk’s effort at definition does not recognize this nuance adequately; see his “Definitions of Genocide and Their Implications for Prediction and Prevention,” in Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda, vol. 3, The Impact of the Holocaust and Genocide on Jews and Christians, ed. Yehuda Bauer et al. (Oxford, 1989), pp. 70ff.
6 The presence of “intent” is a requirement for genocide as this crime is defined in international law. This necessity has been reconfirmed by a series of discussions and debates among legal scholars. To pursue this issue further turn to John Quigley, The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis (Burlington, VT, 2006); Alexander Greenawalt, “Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-Based Interpretation,” Columbia Law Review 99 (1999): 2259–94; William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes (Cambridge, UK, 2000); Otto Triffterer, “Genocide, Its Particular Intent to Destroy in Whole or in Part the Group as Such,” Leiden Journal of International Law 14.2 (2001): 399–408; and the analysis offered in the proceedings of the Yugoslavian trials of the International Tribunal Prosecutor v. Krstić, IT 98–33-T (see n. 19 below for further information on this trial).
7 The objection to including “intent” and “intention” in the definition of genocide has, by now, a long history. It was made, for example, by Isidor Wallimann and Michael Dobkowski in 1987, in their edited volume, Genocide in the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (New York, 1978), pp. XVI – XVIII. The paper by Tony Barta, “Relation of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia,” in the Wallimann and Dobkowski volume, pp. 237–52, similarly advanced an argument that would eliminate the notion of “intention” from the concept of “genocide” but makes a series of logical and historical errors in doing so. This methodological suggestion was, likewise, proposed by Henry Huttenbach, “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3.3 (1988): 289–304. Unfortunately, his argument was thoroughly misleading and, therefore, found almost no supporters. More recently a redefinition along this line has been championed by Martin Shaw in What is Genocide, 2nd ed. (London, 2015); idem, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitioning of the Late Modern World (Cambridge, UK, 2013); idem, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge, UK, 2003). What Shaw’s multiple efforts show is that a faulty argument can be repeated over and over again.
8 I well understand that ascertaining the intent of a particular action or series of actions, especially as the cause of an action or actions that eventuate in mass death or genocide, is not a simple matter. This is one of the main reasons why I have studied the relevant occasions suggested as instances of genocide in close detail.
9 Here no misunderstanding should arise. My intention in drawing and defending this distinction between genocide and other forms of mass murder is not to lessen the moral and criminal responsibility involved in these other crimes. There are many forms of “crimes against humanity,” as well as crimes of a more usual political and socioeconomic type, that should be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, and in regard to which other national and international legal statutes exist (e.g., those involving homicide, national and group self-determination, and human rights). It is unnecessary, as well as contrary to good sense, to force all manner of state and collective criminality under the rubric of genocide and the stipulations of the U.N. Genocide Convention.
10 Nehemiah Robinson, Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York, 1960), p. 19. This is Robinson’s explanation of the meaning of the term cultural. See also his discussion of why the concept was deleted from the final draft, pp. 64–65.
11 Obviously, cultural genocide cannot include the subcategories of racial or gender obliteration without becoming physical genocide.
12 Bauer now prefers the term “unprecedented” to “unique.” So, for instance, in a speech given at UNESCO in January 2012 he made this point very clearly. I thank Professor Bauer for sharing this still unpublished essay with me. Working in the same direction, Timothy Snyder refers to the “radical defense of the unprecedented character of the Holocaust” in his essay “The Holocaust as a Regional History: Explaining the Bloodlands,” in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust, ed. Norman Goda, p. 49. And in n. 12, p. 51, Snyder adds regarding his description that: “Yehuda Bauer’s formulation of the Holocaust as ‘unprecedented’ seems well chosen.”
13 Christopher Browning, in describing the Holocaust, has written that the Final Solution “gained an autonomy priority, significantly apart from all other persecutory and genocidal policies of the Nazi regime. Its goal was the total and systematic extermination of every Jew – man, women, and child – within the Nazi sphere of power, and was therefore a genocidal project that ultimately had no geographical limit,” “The Nazi Empire,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York, 2009), pp. 420–21, emphasis added. Saul Friedländer has argued relative to this issue: “the absolute character of the extermination of the Jews, not only within the general framework of Nazi persecution, but even within the wider aspects of contemporary ideological-political behavior such as fascism, totalitarianism, economic exploitation and so on… the Holocaust does not fall within the framework of explanatory categories of a generalizing kind.” “On the Possibility of the Holocaust: An Approach to Historical Synthesis,” in The Holocaust as Historical Experience, eds. Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich (New York, 1981), pp. 2, 6. David Cesarani, in a variation of this same idea, has employed the term “singular” to describe the Holocaust in a number of his publications. See his Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York, 2016). Similarly, Michael Marrus has described the Holocaust as: “Unlike the case with any other group, and unlike the massacres before and since, every single one of the millions of targeted Jews were to be murdered. Eradication was to be total” The Holocaust in History (London, 1987).
14 Kurt Jonassohn and Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations: In Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998), p. 132.
15 See, for example, D. Stannard’s comments in “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in Is the Holocaust Unique? ed. A. Rosenbaum (Boulder, 1996), pp. 162–208. And those of Adam Jones who makes the same misleading argument in his edited volume, Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, 2004), p. 19. Some of the voluminous evidence that disconfirms this position is presented in the papers on Jewish women and children, and the essay (Chapter 7) on Jewish labor, that are included in the present volume.
16 Ibid., p. 8.
17 In addition to the more recent events mentioned here there are a number of other cases that have occurred since the end of World War II that are regularly referred to in the scholarly literature on genocide. These include the killing of Communists in Indonesia in 1965, the murder of Mayans in Guatemala in the 1960s and 1970s, the violence connected with both the Nigerian Civil War and the Pakistan/Bangladesh Civil War, and the large-scale killing in East Timor. In all of these locations mass murder was undoubtedly committed and, were this the sole criterion for identifying acts and events as genocidal, all of these historical happenings would count as “genocide.” However, given my definition of this term, I do not classify any of them as instances of genocide. All fall short of the definition’s requirement that the perpetrators intended to murder all victims in the target group. On the United Nations’ definition, however, a number of these events would be correctly classified as genocide. All these cases require closer inspection whether one finds them to be instances of genocide or not. I will, therefore, return to them individually, and at length, in future publications. Here I would add, in light of recent events in Myanmar, that the world community should react as vigorously to “Crimes Against Humanity” and “ethnic cleansing” as to instances of genocide. It should not be necessary for criminal state (and other) actions to be [mis] identified as “genocide” in order to arouse the conscience of the civilized world community. Thus, the case of the Rohingya, which is clearly a case of ethnic cleansing, not genocide, should be as vigorously prosecuted as one which is correctly identified as involving “genocide.” “Genocide” is a legal, not a moral, term!!
18 Section 546 of the Trial Record of Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić by the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law committed in the Territory of Former Yugoslavia since 1991, case No. IT-98–33-T, August 2, 2001.
19 Ibid., section 565 of the Trial Record.
20 The court has explained both the method it created to justify its conclusion – that this was an instance of genocide – and its reliance on the notion of “in part” in the U.N. Convention on Genocide in its Judgment issued in the case of Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić. When the initial finding for “genocide” was appealed the court defended its logic this way: “If a specific part of the group [being oppressed] is emblematic of the overall group… that may support a finding that the part qualifies as substantial” (Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić, ICTY Appeals Chamber Judgment, 19 April 2004, paragraph 12). And it went on to argue:
Srebrenica was important due to its prominence in the eyes of both the Bosnian Muslims and the international community… The elimination of the Muslim population of Srebrenica, despite the assurances given by the international community, would serve as a potent example to all Bosnian Muslims of their vulnerability and defenselessness in the face of Serb military forces. The fate of the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica would be emblematic of that of all Bosnian Muslims. (paragraph 16)
This, however, transforms the notion of “genocide” beyond all recognition and makes it over into a symbolic action rather than an actual occasion of murder of such a specific character as to be included within the category of genocide. A fuller critical analysis of this case, that differs from mine, has been offered by Robert Hayden, “Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia, 1941–1945,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (New York, 2008), pp. 487–516. I would like to thank Judge Theodor Meron, President of the Court, for meeting with me in The Hague to discuss this case and for subsequently providing me with the relevant documents. I would, in addition, note that the issue of “genocide” was debated in the appeal launched by Radislav, Krstić’s legal team. The discussion of the appeals court can be found in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić, case No. IT-98–33-A, 19 April 2004, sections 14–58. On the issue of killing “part of a group” as constituting genocide, see sections 43–44, pp. 102–103, of the “Partial Dissenting Opinion of Judge Shahabuddeen” in the record of the appeal.
21 Note here Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, vol. 1, The Meaning of Genocide (London and New York, 2005), p. 40, who, more than a decade ago, linked the events in Rwanda with my criteria regarding the application of the term “genocide.”
22 The literature on Rwanda is extensive and will be cited when I return to examine the Rwandan case in detail in a future study.
23 A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” in idem (ed.), Genocide: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, vol. 1, The Discipline of Genocide Studies (London, 2010), pp. 164–165. This was first published in Patterns of Prejudice 36.4 (2002): 7–19.
24 Ibid., p. 164. Quoting from Steven Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York, 1983), pp. 142–43.
25 I neither endorse nor deny any particular theological opinion as a consequence of my conclusion as to uniqueness – a position I explained in The Holocaust in Historical Context, pp. 28–31, 45–46; and earlier articulated in my Post-Holocaust Dialogues.
26 A. D. Moses, “Conceptual Blockages,” pp. 452–53.
27 See here my critical comments on the apophatic interpretation of the Holocaust in The Holocaust in Historical Context, pp. 42–53. I have written about my close relationship with Wiesel in an essay entitled “Elie Wiesel: The Man and His Legacy” which first appeared in Yad Vashem Studies 44.2 (2016): 11–41, and is reprinted in the present collection.
28 S. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, p. 36.
29 Ibid., pp. 28–30.
30 Ibid., p. 37.
31 Ibid., p. 45.
32 Ibid.
33 A. D. Moses, “Conceptual Blockages,” pp. 14–15.
34 Ibid., p. 15. Lest anyone think it possible that Professor Bauer spoke about Jewish Holocaust victims as “sacred,” I call to attention his sharp theological argument: “In retrospect, we must admit that belief in God in our generation has been transformed into an elementary absurdity of logic,” and again, and even more radical: “If there is God [after the Holocaust, S.K.], then He is Satan. If He is not Satan, then He does not exist”. “Returning to the Source of Human Morality,” in Steven Katz (ed.), Wrestling with God (New York, 2007), p. 295.
35 This essay, “On the Holocaust and Genocide,” appeared in Dan Stone’s volume History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London, 2006), pp. 236–51.
36 Ibid., pp. 237–38.
37 Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner (eds.), The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester, UK, 2005), p. 67.
38 The Final Solution, p. 315.
39 Ibid., p. 318.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 316.
42 This citation from Moses appears in ibid., p. 317.
43 Ibid., p. 319.
44 The Holocaust in Historical Context, p. 25. The reference to Volume 2 is to The Holocaust and New World Slavery (2019).
45 “Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies: Past, Present and Future,” in Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives, ed. Joyce Appel and Ernesto Verdeja (London, 2016), pp. 59–81.
46 Ibid., p. 63.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.