(Talk given at a conference in Cape Town honoring Professor Milton Shain)
I am delighted to be part of this wonderful occasion in honor of Milton Shain. Milton and I have been friends for more than 30 years and I have had the pleasure of visiting the Kaplan Center under his auspices several times. He has done a masterful job making the Jewish Studies and Holocaust program at the University of Cape Town an integral part of the world academic community, as indicated by the stellar roster of his friends who have come together from near and far to honor him at this conference.
The assignment given to speakers for this meeting was to speak personally about our own intellectual odyssey while explaining why our scholarly concerns are not just our own private interests but also legitimately enrich Holocaust scholarship more generally. So, let me start at the beginning of my own involvement with Holocaust studies. At Cambridge, during my doctoral studies, I did not involve myself in the study of the Holocaust in any way. And even during the first eight years that I taught at Dartmouth College in the U.S. when I returned from Cambridge, I did not teach anything dealing with the Shoah, nor did I publish anything bearing on or about it. Even my serious reading generally avoided the subject. This evasion was due partly, as I now realize looking back, both to my own profound ignorance of the subject and because I was well aware, as a non-tenured Assistant Professor, of the jaundiced view that some of my colleagues had regarding it. I was reminded more than once by both Jewish and non-Jewish colleagues that: “there is no business like Shoah business.” In addition, this avoidance was at least partly due to my own Yeshiva education that still exerted some influence on my philosophical views and had taught me to see the Holocaust as – in the classic interpretation given of the cause of antisemitism in the midrash – just another, if more intense, case of “Esau hates Jacob.”
This all changed suddenly and unexpectedly in 1981 when I was asked to give the annual Jewish lecture to the Theology Department at Notre Dame University. After accepting the invitation, I had to find a subject, but this presented a serious conundrum: what Jewish topic could I talk about that would make sense to a Catholic audience at Notre Dame. While wrestling with this problem, and seeking some guidance, I asked my hosts at Notre Dame what the previous year’s speaker had talked about. I was told that the speaker had been Elie Wiesel and that he had spoken about his view of the unique and apophatic nature of the Holocaust. Armed with this information I decided, even though I had not heard or read Elie’s lecture, that I knew, based on our friendship and many conversations, what he would have said, and so I decided that I would present the opposite view to his: the Holocaust was not unique.
But then came my research. For six months I probed and explored and looked at what would now be identified as the early comparative literature on mass murder and genocide that then existed. After this intensive study I realized that I was wrong and Elie Wiesel was right, but he was right for reasons other than the ones he gave. That is to say, by this point in my research I had come to realize that to make the academic case for the Holocaust’s uniqueness one had to do rigorous and in-depth historical study and had to be willing to historicize every aspect of the “war against the Jews.” It was, as I was beginning to understand, if only “through a glass darkly” at this early stage, that one had to submit the Holocaust to the most detailed historicization and to reject apophatic claims if one wanted the argument for uniqueness to be academically valuable and a claim that could, and would, be accepted as a respectable position within the world of the academy.
And so, I gave the lecture at Notre Dame on “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust” or some such title, incorporating the insight into the issue that I thought I had gained. And, at the same time I called a friend, Arthur Samuelson, then editor at Schocken books and asked him if he wanted a short study on the subject of my lecture that would be ready in six months. The more general interest in the Holocaust was then taking off, and he said “sure,” he would be delighted to have the monograph. Six months later I called him back and, with considerable embarrassment, told him that there would be no book as I had come to realize that I did not even know how to begin to do the historical and conceptual work that needed to be done to make a reasonable, coherent, knowledgeable, case for my conclusion.
Now more than thirty years later, and having written many thousands of pages in manuscript, with only a fifth of this material so far in print, I am beginning to grasp what the right questions are and have some, at least minimal, grasp of the methodological and hermeneutical issues that confront – and challenge – this scholarly undertaking.
Let me conclude these brief opening biographical comments by simply observing that all of this labor over the past three decades has been energized by my unwavering sense of the academic and ethical significance of the study of the Shoah. As many of you know, I have also written and edited books and essays on Jewish philosophy, and Jewish history, like volume 4 of the Cambridge History of Judaism on the rabbinic era, and have worked in detail on comparative mysticism – but no subject has so gripped my imagination and dominated my intellectual life, because of the absolute seriousness of the subject, as the destruction of European Jewry.
Now, what have I learned that is of more than personal interest? I will describe what I think is important about my work under three headings, beginning with the issue of method.
I have come to understand that one must never make moral comparisons between mass tragedies. The death of an Armenian woman or child or Native American woman or child or black woman and child caught up in New World slavery, or women and children trapped in the Gulag or East Timor, or Rwanda are all morally and humanly equal. I know of no way to quantify evil such that one could create a moral hierarchy of evils. Likewise, and related, one should never engage in conversations about comparative suffering for this too is a subject beyond quantification and legitimate comparison.
I have also learned that before you compare two things, you should know something about at least one of them. I emphasize this point because most of the comparative work done, much of it – indeed too much of it – by sociologists, is historically uninformed and full of both historical errors and false generalizations. One needs, to do the required comparative work properly, to be the master of all the details and subtleties of not only the Holocaust but also the tragedies to which the Holocaust is compared. Otherwise you get the gross distortions found, for example, in David Stannard’s and Ward Churchill’s work on the history and tragedy of Native Americans. In their historical reconstruction they completely ignore, among other critical things, the missionary aspects of Spanish (and Portuguese) colonialism, the unintentional character of the main killer of the native peoples, disease, and misrepresent the nature of American government policy form Jefferson to the twentieth century, including the Indian wars and the crucial subject of reservations. Here it is necessary to know that by 1887 there were 138 million acres of land devoted to reservations. Then there is the ideologically driven, monumental historical ignorance of Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and others who have argued that there were 9,000,000 women killed during the European witch craze and therefore one can, and should, create a new subject of study called “genocide.” I will return to this issue in more detail in a moment.
Or again, we have the repeated misrepresentation of the Armenian tragedy in World War I by numerous authors who fail to appreciate that the largest Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire, numbering some 250,000 persons, was not violated by the Young Turks (with minor exceptions that took place at the end of the war), that several hundred thousand Armenians were forcibly converted to Islam – a terrible act but a contra-genocidal one – and that approximately 50 percent of the population that was forced marched across Mesopotamia survived. Or again, there are scholars like Richard Rubenstein who mistakenly compare the Shoah and New World black slavery and do not appear to know that 400,000 African men, women and children were imported into the United States over the centuries and that by 1860 and the Emancipation Proclamation there were over 4 million blacks in America. Thus whatever else slavery as an institution was in the United States, it was not genocidal. This inventory of ignorance that passes for scholarship could be extended, almost without end, to include those who do not know that most Albigensians and Cathars were not murdered by the medieval Church, that most conversos were not killed by the Inquisition, that most Kulaks and the majority of the populations of the deported national minority groups were not killed by Stalin, and that he had no intention of killing them, and that, contrary to A. Dirk Moses’ extraordinary misrepresentations of the Holocaust, the crimes of New World colonialism are phenomenologically distinct from those committed by the Third Reich.
The second important lesson gained is an understanding, however partial and still incomplete, regarding the structures of almost all historical instances of mass murder relative to the structure of the Holocaust. And this has taught me that there is a defining dialectic that operates in the many non-Holocaust cases that we are all familiar with and that explains the nature and morphology of these terrible historical events, but which did not exist in the Holocaust.
What I here refer to is this: usually the ideology, the central idea, that causes the violence and mass death in a given instance, also, perhaps ironically, limits it. Consider, for example, the very interesting and challenging example of the witch craze that has already been mentioned.
This craze, that spread across Europe and to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was rooted in Christian misogynism. And this misogynism was newly energized by the breakdown of medieval Christendom and the need to explain why “the body of Christ,” which was the Christian Community, was unraveling. This is to say, here an explanation was at hand in the theological traditions of Eve and Lilith, i.e., the stereotypical image of women as embodiments of inexhaustible negativity, that explained who the enemies of Christ and Christendom were. Women, in league with the Devil, were the cause of the societal and religious disarray that was occurring. As Augustine had taught, women were non posse non peccare (incapable of not sinning). Just as Eve at the beginning of time was the subtle, insidious tool of Satan in the Garden of Eden, so every generation knows the unsanctified alliance of its womenfolk with the Devil. Playing upon congenital feminine weaknesses, Lucifer involves them in unholy ritual intercourse with himself, violates them, and draws them into his cabal against Christendom. Thus, the witch craze is a justified defensive action by the Church. And it claims up to 50,000 (or so) female victims.
This angry, menacing description of women, however, is only a partially accurate account of the medieval Christian image of women, and it ultimately fails to be a true portrait because it altogether ignores the more encompassing ideology that governed and defined the real position of women in medieval society. The whole truth comes into focus only by recognizing that the adversarial conception of women as witch, as sorcerer, as numinous being was juxtaposed, and profoundly mediated in medieval and Reformation Christendom, by a whole series of countervailing understandings and their institutionalization whose purpose was to fully integrate women in a “non-terrifying” way into the larger communal fabric.
Women, in effect, were perceived to lose their sybaritic indecency by entering into, by being absorbed within, various anodyne structures whose very existence – as understood by the Church – was tied to their ability to assure just such a transmutational result. From sensual and devouring creatures of ordinary and extraordinary ability, women become domesticated (i.e., sexually controlled and subordinated) by entering into societal arrangements meant to insure just this austere transformation. So, the institution of the family – of women as wives and mothers and economic partners in nearly every trade and task – and the institution of the nunnery, with its idealized sublimation of female sexuality for non-married women, particularly of the upper and middle classes, came into being and had their sacred function. These culturally defined roles acted to neutralize women’s inherently anarchic libido, to subdue the undesirable qualities of feminine nature, and hence to curtail the feminine threat to the divine order.
Within socially constructed parameters, women were to be protected and loved. Marriage, even if viewed as an exchange of women by men, was, in society’s estimation, a divine blessing, having the status of a sacrament. Later, for Luther and the reformers, though marriage was no longer a sacrament per se – Protestantism having eliminated such sacraments – it was a great good, “the commonest, noblest state.” Sexuality when expressed within matrimony was a sacred action blessed by God with children and the cycle of responsibility and care that such procreatic activities engendered. Medieval philosophers and mystics alike saw motherhood in positive terms and described it through such affirmative attributes as generation and sacrifice, love and tenderness, nurturing and selflessness.
In sum, the family unit was intended to serve as the medium through which female nature, female sexuality, was controlled and transformed. And it appears, largely, to have succeeded in this ambition. The roles of mother and wife had the desired prophylactic impact and guaranteed both the proper control of women by men as well as the creation of bonds of mutual affection that served to protect women in moments of societal crisis. Insofar as nearly all women entered into, and performed, these pre-established, publicly defined roles, they were, with very small statistical exceptions, so protected. The system worked.
Complementing the integrative function of the family was the socio-doctrinal role of the nunnery, predicated upon the dominant critical Christian view of sexuality, coupled with the transcendental meaning of the virginity of Mary, “the Mother of God.” As a result of this two-sided Christian view of women, I estimate that less than one twenty-seventh of one percent of the late medieval female population was executed as witches. Christian safeguards were socially effective.
This same type of dialectic of theologically rooted aggression and limit also applied in the cases of medieval antisemitism – remember Jews survived about 1500 years of Christian domination despite the dark image of the Jew that runs from the Adversus Judaeos writings of the Church Fathers into Protestantism through Luther’s invective, and despite the pogroms, blood libels and other manifestations of prejudice. Here the dialectic that creates this possibility of survival lies in the Pauline roots of Christianity and its theology of Israel in Romans 9:11 and elsewhere and Augustine’s teaching on Jews that demanded of Christians that they not destroy the Jewish People. And the same, if in a different way, was true of the Church’s response to heretics. This, too, was created as well as limited by Christian beliefs and values. In a manner that appears to us as paradoxical, the mentalité of the medieval Church sought the conversion of the nonbeliever and the abjuration of the heretic rather than their death. Indeed, even for those entire communities that proved unassimilable, unconvertible, like the Jews, the ultimate medieval solution was expulsion. And this because, for all real and symbolic violence manifest in this civilization, the social order was controlled and constrained by a heteronomous, Christian, moral vision that – however often forgotten, ignored, abused, or contorted – neither encouraged nor permitted physical genocide.
A dialectic, that is the inseparable linkage of aggression and restraint of the sort that I have here pointed to vis-à-vis major persecutions of the medieval era, is also present in the various modern cases usually raised in discussions of historical comparisons to the Holocaust. I include here, for example, the Armenian tragedy in 1915–16; Stalin’s war on the Soviet Union’s peasantry; and the four-centuries-long crime of New World black slavery. (And, if time and space allowed, I could illustrate my argument with many other cases.)
The dialectic embodied and played out in the Ottoman Empire during World War I centers around the cause of this tragedy: nationalism. Though there are real and significant similarities between the Armenian tragedy and the Shoah, there is a decisive difference that results from the nationalist rather than racial priority in the former event. The Young Turks persecuted and sought to uproot the Armenians out of fear of Armenian nationalism that they believed had led to treason and revolution in a time of war. The primary intentionality behind Turkish inhumanity was essentially a profound concern with further dismemberment and diminution of the Ottoman Empire/Turkey. This led, under the exigencies of war, to the attempted destruction of Armenian nationalism that, of course, also meant killing Armenians – but within limits.
The importance of recognizing the political-cum-nationalist configuration of this historical event lies in the fact that it provides the proper and necessary frame of reference for analyzing and evaluating Turkish behavior. It allows one to recognize that the Young Turks had no argument against Armenians per se, or put more appropriately, against “Armenianism,” for example, the Armenian population of Russia or the U.S. Rather they objected to Armenians on Turkish soil, seeing them as a vital source of the betrayal of Turkish destiny and integrity. Therefore, and this is the essential matter in this context, one could satisfy Turkish interests through several processes that, though destructive and immoral, did not require murdering all Armenians resident in Turkey. The most salient of these in terms of their life-saving significance were:
Thus at least 50 percent, if not up to 65 percent of the Turkish Armenian population, despite contrary Armenian claims and ignoring Turkish falsifications, survived the onslaught against them.
And, in relation to Stalin’s crimes, particularly regarding the Kulaks, the dialectic turns on issues of class. But class, unlike race, allows for “conversion” and so all members of the “offending class” do not need to be murdered. And the majority of such class enemies, though subject to brutal, violent, persecution, were not murdered in the Soviet Union between the late 1920s and Stalin’s death in 1953. And this holds, I would specifically add, for the Ukrainian tragedy between 1932 and 1935. In this context too, the issue was Ukrainian nationalism and this Stalin could decapitate within limits – though certainly horrifically high limits of approximately 4–5 million that was equivalent to 10 to 12.5 percent of the Ukrainian population. It even applied in the Gulag where economics was more important than politics. The main purpose of the Gulag was producing raw materials not exterminating the labor force.
The third element that I have learned is significant is what I call “mediation.” That is, searching out those factors in historical contexts of mass murder that work against, and restrain, genocide. Here, for example, consider the issues of the value of reproduction, the significance of miscegenation and the connection between sex and manumission in the universe of black slavery; or again the possibility of, and actual historical role of, expulsion rather than extermination in the cases of medieval antisemitism; the case of the forced migration of five Southern Indian Tribes under President Jackson; and the deportation of the minority nationalities under Stalin. Only in the Shoah – and with recognition of the killings in Rwanda – was “mediation” essentially absent. This was true even with regard to Jewish labor during the Holocaust – a large subject that I do not have time to explore here.
My study of the Holocaust, and its singularity, has given me a way of interpreting the phenomenon of Nazism more generally. While recognizing that monocausal explanations of Nazism are inadequate, the Holocaust points to the absolute centrality of racial antisemitism in the construction of the Third Reich and the policies it pursued.
I would here mention six major issues illuminated in fundamental and distinctive ways as a result of the concentration on the unique Nazi assault against world Jewry.
(1) At the center of the Nazi Weltanschauung stood a massive project of racial engineering and population restructuring, at the core of which was an unyielding racial antisemitism that was at the apex of this racial hierarchy. In this schema the Jew was the main source of all national and international political, social and economic problems. As such, Jews had to be removed without remainder in order to “liberate” history from their controlling, deforming, and destructive presence. According to Hitler’s worldview, that became the blueprint for the building of the Third Reich, all other interests, motives, policies, agendas, intentions, and goals were secondary to this absolute requirement. The extraction and elimination of “der Jude” was the necessary precondition for all other cultural, socio-economic and political progress. This cardinal belief impacted, directly or indirectly, on just about everything that was significant in Nazi Germany and within all the territories conquered by the armies of the Hitler state. It was now insisted that all normative values, and all practical undertakings, be brought into conformity with this foundational racial belief. Anything else was treason against the natural order, and against the National Socialist state that was created to pursue and defend this natural order. And when the lethal ends dictated by this unshakable obsession clashed with other ends or ambitions, it was almost always the other goals, the alternative objectives, that had to give way. Making Europe free of Jews was far more important to the Führer, and hence to the workings and predetermined teleology of the Third Reich, than more mundane political or economic aims.
(2) In the long-running, and consequential, debate between “intentionalists” and “functionalists” that, despite the view of many contemporary scholars, is neither unimportant nor transcended by more recent scholarship, the “functional-ist” position must be judged erroneous, even dysfunctional. The key to events in World War II from the German side were almost always the result of a decision or series of decisions made by the Nationalist Socialist leadership in Berlin – what happened was the consequence of decisions and choices made at the “center” of the Reich rather than at its “periphery,” even while all that occurred at the periphery is recognized as being significant for an understanding of the entire historical narrative. Moreover, in every significant instance where decisions were made in Berlin and elsewhere, and choices decided, the role and implications of racial antisemitism were preeminent factors. If conflicts arose between the cardinal racial imperatives held by the Hitler state and other interests and goals of the state, it was the former that almost always held sway, and the course of action taken was consistent with its requirements.
(3) I would remind everyone of the following in support of this claim:
In regard to all of these major, central, matters, recognition of the unique role of racial antisemitism and the unique project that was the “Final Solution” helps explain the nature of the Third Reich as nothing else does.
Thus, contrary to much foolishness written about studying the Holocaust in comparative perspective, and after decades of close study, I am still willing to defend the uniqueness of the Shoah as an historical event. I would conclude that the comparative approach, and the study of the Holocaust – and Nazism and World War II – within a comparative frame of reference, sheds light on the events under consideration in a particular, distinctive, and especially helpful way.
I would, therefore, recommend it to others.
The shape of this essay may well seem odd to readers so the occasion for which it was written should be explained. In 2012, Milton Shain, a distinguished historian of antisemitism in South Africa, was nearing retirement from the University of Cape Town where he had directed the Kaplan Center for Jewish Studies for many years. To honor his work, as well as his person, a group of friends and colleagues, all of whom could be broadly defined as Holocaust scholars, came together in Cape Town, in the summer following his retirement, to hold a conference in his honor.
Prior to the conference it was agreed by those of us presenting papers that instead of just offering the usual academic lecture, the speakers would also say something about their own schooling, families and careers. And, as for their scholarly work, they would identify larger themes that their research had addressed and explain why their publications were, and remained, valuable. Thus the reason for the biographical details at the start of this essay, and then a concentration on broad conceptual issues in the remainder of the paper.
The central point I attempted to make in reporting on the nature of my research on comparative history was that the dialectic that usually operates in cases of mass murder, and that limits the number of individuals in the targeted group of victims who are killed, was absent in the Holocaust. This fact, and I take it to be certain, illuminates in a powerful and distinctive way both the dominant structural circumstance to be found in cases of mass murder and genocide (according to the U.N. definition) other than the murder of European Jewry and the peculiar morphology of the Endlösung. This is to say, there was, in contradiction to other cases of mass murder, no restraining ideological or utilitarian factor that limited the murder of Jews.
To further explain what I mean by the “dialectic that usually operates in cases of mass murder” I will refer to my work on New World black slavery and my research on Spanish Colonial America. In the context of slavery in the Americas, I would emphasize that economic considerations both caused and limited the violence that slavery incarnated as an institution. Profit was the aim of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic, and of slave ownership in the Western hemisphere. It was both the chief cause, and the primary goal, of slavery as an institution in the United States, the Caribbean sugar islands, and Brazil. This pursuit of monetary gain, however, required limits on the maltreatment permitted, including lethal injury – as dead slaves produce no economic benefit. Likewise, in colonial Spanish America, the lust for wealth not only was responsible for the exploitation of the aboriginal peoples but, as represented by the ameliorating interventions of both the Crown and the Church, was the reason for restraint relative to this exploitation. Indian labor was required to take advantage of the New World’s natural and mineral resources. Moreover, for the Crown, living Indians were required in order to collect tribute while, for the Church, the presence of native peoples was required if there was to be meaningful proselytization. Alternatively, in the Holocaust, Hitler wanted only that Jews become corpses (allowing for some small temporary exclusions related to the use of Jews as slave laborers).2
1 This essay, written in 2012, was originally published as “On the Holocaust and Comparative History.” I have changed the title for the purposes of this volume so as not to confuse it with my Leo Baeck lecture (1993) which also bore the same title but deals with different topics (see Chapter 1).
2 These temporarily exempted Jews were, of course, also already marked for death, if not immediately. See my further comments in the essay on “Extermination trumps production” in this volume (Chapter 7).