Is the Holocaust comparable to other genocides? The Holocaust — fifty years on.

Some of our contemporaries in the Jewish world have taken the position that whoever tries to compare the Holocaust to other examples of genocide commits a kind of sacrilege or an act of antisemitism. As though the Holocaust, or its memory, were something sacred, and the Holocaust itself an absolute that can be compared to nothing. If this is how the term uniqueness is understood, then I strongly disagree with that term: first, because the Holocaust was a murder, and there is no murder that is sacred; second, because its memory in our minds is a memory of horror, of suffering, of loss, and there is nothing sacred about this terrible sorrow; third, because if the Holocaust is unique in the sense of incomparability, then it stands outside human history, as though it were the product of some extraterrestrial, extra-human factor — God or Satan or both — and all we can then do is gaze upon it, since it is absolutely, and as a matter of principle, inexplicable. All attempts to seek out reasons and motivations in the agents of this tragedy are pointless, for the Holocaust is, from this point of view, supposed to lie beyond human comprehension. This is, indeed, the position taken by many Orthodox Jews and by all ultra-Orthodox Jews.

But on the other hand, if one accepts the idea that the Holocaust is an event that falls within the parameters of human history, then, from the standpoint of a historian, the term uniqueness applied to the historical events we call the Holocaust can have a certain number of meanings.

The first is the banal assertion that every historical event is unique, in the sense that no human action is ever exactly the same as other actions it may resemble; consequently every event is unique, and so it is with the Holocaust, but no more so than any other event.

The second meaning might be that the event we are discussing is the product of so unusual a combination of circumstances that it has no precedent with which it could be compared. And although the theoretical possibility of a repetition is not excluded, its probability or its plausibility is negligible; one may therefore suppose that, for all practical purposes, the event has neither precedent nor possibility of repetition. This approach is very close, it seems, to that of the Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox, although it is put forward above all by non-Orthodox Jews.

Any attempt by Jews who regard themselves as the guardians of the memory of the Holocaust to deny the legitimacy of comparisons is a self-defeating exercise that can only be doomed to failure.

The third possible sense is that the event has only partial precedents but includes aspects that, so far as we know today, have no precedent; and there is a possibility of repetition in the future, which is proved by the fact that the basic conditions that created the event have not disappeared.

The first, banal assertion can be set aside, for it is not this kind of uniqueness that we have in mind when we discuss the Holocaust. The two other interpretations imply that what is unique is the character of the plan to annihilate the Jewish people and its possible connection to what is called “genocide.” But if its uniqueness is to have any meaning, that meaning can be brought out only by comparison with other cases of genocide. Otherwise the term uniqueness becomes meaningless. Consequently, any attempt by Jews who regard themselves as the guardians of the memory of the Holocaust to deny the legitimacy of comparisons is a self-defeating exercise that can only be doomed to failure. If you do not compare, you can lay claim to no kind of uniqueness.

In order to be able to discuss the two fundamental approaches I have mentioned, we must first define our terms. What do we mean by holocaust? For me, the holocaust (Shoah, Churban, Judeocide, call it what you will) was the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people totally, down to the last person, on the basis of an ideology that saw it as a satanic force whose very existence endangered humanity, in the sense in which the Nazis understood it. However, by extension, a holocaust would then be any attempt of this kind — past, present, or future — made to annihilate totally a people, an ethnic group, or a racial group. Contrary to some of my colleagues, I would not include in this definition political or religious groups, for individuals belonging to such groups have, in theory at least, the option of changing their views or their religion, and thereby of escaping annihilation. The members of ethnic, national, or racial groups do not have this choice. I would assert, rather, that genocide belongs to the same category as the holocaust. However, the term genocide is different insofar as it implies, in all known cases, a selective mass murder, without a plan for total annihilation. Genocide is the attempt to efface an ethnic, national, or racial group by depriving it of its identity through various means, using in every case an oppressive force.

Since 1945 we have seen a certain number of situations very close to a holocaust.

Let us examine the argument that the conditions that produced the holocaust are so unusual that in practice they have no precedent and that, practically speaking, they cannot recur. What were these conditions? I single out five basic conditions: an ancient hatred, a brutal dictatorship, a bureaucracy that wishes not only to carry out the directives coming from above but keenly desires to show initiative by acting within a consensus created by the dictatorship, a technology that allows the holocaust to be carried out with efficiency and thoroughness, and a war or armed conflict in whose shadow a mass murder is possible.

Suppose a hypothetical situation in the future in which a relatively powerful state is led by a dictatorship convinced that a minority — territorial, internal, or adjacent to that state, or an ethnic or racial group dispersed within that state — endangers the very existence of that state. In the event of a general or regional conflagration, such a state would have the possibility of carrying out a plan of total annihilation of the targeted population, provided there were a sufficiently long history of animosity between the majority and the minority. Since 1945 we have seen a certain number of situations very close to a holocaust. It is not so difficult to envisage a situation in which the Muslims of Bosnia, turned into refugees by the process of “ethnic cleansing,” with nowhere to go because the European states refuse to accept them, would be completely effaced by the Serbs and the Croats — although this is not the present situation. There is indeed an ancient animosity in that region, based on historical situations (Turkish power over Slavic Christians and the emergence of Slavic-speaking “collaborators” with the Muslim conqueror); there are elements for a brutal dictatorship; there is a military bureaucracy in place; and there is a reasonably advanced military technology. But, of course, there is no holocaust situation at present.

There have been numerous cases of this kind over the last fifty years, and one must, I think, conclude that holocaust situations have become possible in our time and in our age.

Another part of the same argument is that the unique character of the holocaust lies in our inability to apprehend it, whereas all, or almost all, historical events can be apprehended.

This one we cannot apprehend, because we cannot put ourselves in the place of the victims, and certainly not in the place of the executioners. The answer to this argument must surely be that, unfortunately, sadism, murder, and the suffering they bring have accompanied us ever since there has been written history, and very probably before it. The murder of children, the most terrible tortures, and acts of extreme sadism are not what makes the holocaust unique: they existed before. Neither the number of victims of the holocaust nor their proportion relative to the total number of Jews is unique: the number of Chinese killed by the Maoist regime or the number of Russians killed by the Nazis are greater in quantity, and the proportion of Armenians killed by the Young Turk regime relative to the total Armenian population is probably at least as high as for the Jews. The method of gassing, which was applied by the Nazi murderers to about half the Jewish victims, had earlier been used on mentally ill Germans and/or those supposed to be such, on persons afflicted with genetic diseases; and later, while no fewer than 90 to 96% of the gassed victims were Jews, thousands of Roma and some Russians and Poles were also gassed.

Moreover, if we cannot understand the victims, we can have no access to history, for it is full of victims of murder, torture, and sadism. For the Jewish victim as an individual, the experience was not that of a mass killing; it was the personal experience of an intensity of terrible suffering of one person, one family, one community. In written history there are millions of experiences like these. We cannot, in our turn, undergo this suffering. But we can be in empathy with it and understand it, approach the suffering, and understand it, as we can understand any human emotion or the suffering of another human being. Within certain limits, we can understand the victim, for many of us have the subjective desire to identify and to understand. The modern techniques of communication make this understanding more practicable.

It has been argued that, while it is possible to understand the victim, it is impossible for a civilized human being endowed with sensibility to understand the mass murderers, the executioners. “I would never be able to understand Himmler or Heydrich, for I am incapable of being one of them; I cannot be in empathy with them; I do not have the drives that made them become what they became” — that is the argument.

This statement, I think, is false. It brings us back to the German historicist school of the last century, whose members, Dilthey and the others, maintained that one had to draw a distinction between explaining (erklären) and understanding (verstehen). It is maintained (within this perspective) that to explain the behavior of the executioners is a possibility, but that to penetrate into their psyche, into what made them “tick,” is ultimately impossible, because the element of a possible identification with them, which would be the first brick in the construction of an understanding, is missing. But as we have learned from psychologists as well as from historians, human beings are capable of the most widely varied range possible in their actions and their reactions to real situations; God and Satan, as symbols of what we call “good” and “evil,” reside potentially in the human psyche of all human beings, at least in embryonic form. Himmler could, in other circumstances, have led his life as a chicken breeder in Bavaria; Heydrich could have pursued a musical career or returned to the Armed Forces of a democratic Germany, even after being expelled from the German Navy. There must be a considerable number of Himmlers and Heydrichs in every society, unknown to themselves and to others. The societal framework that would have allowed their capacity to carry out murderous actions to manifest itself does not exist, hence their anonymity. We all have pieces of Himmler and Heydrich within us, and the fact that we deny it with such vehemence shows how frightened we are of our own potentialities.

If, then, we are able not only to explain the holocaust but also to understand it, we can no longer maintain that this particular horror is inexplicable while the others would be explicable. Indeed, the second argument would lead us to an absolute uniqueness that would exclude the holocaust from all human consideration. As we saw above, this is the position of all ultra-Orthodox Jews and of many Orthodox Jews.

Let us now return to this extreme position. It is well known that, traditionally, religious Jews in past times — and in those times that meant all Jews — imputed to themselves the guilt for the disasters that befell the Jewish people at the hands of others. The disasters came mipnei chataenu, “because of our sins.” This was certainly an effective way of resolving the troubling question of election by an all-powerful and just God on the one hand, and the evident suffering, the powerlessness, and the humiliation of this supposedly “chosen” people on the other. In all past epochs, the answer was that the Jews had not followed God’s commandments in the way they should have, and the logical conclusion was that, if they now followed them, then no danger would lie in wait for them.

Some of our contemporaries are engaged in the search for the sins the Jews are supposed to have committed — sins that are supposed to have brought about the punishment of an angry God.

Very often the rabbis and others pointed their finger at certain persons, at certain groups, or certain attitudes or customs associated with certain Jews, and saw in them transgressions for which the whole community was punished. At bottom, things have not changed in our day; some of our contemporaries are engaged in the search for the sins the Jews are supposed to have committed — sins that are supposed to have brought about the punishment of an angry God.

The foundation of this self-accusation was a theology that claimed that all things, good or bad, came from God, and that ultimately — since God was good and just — the purpose of punishment and chastisement was educational, that is, intended for the good of the one who suffered. The perpetrators of atrocities against the Jews were seen as scourges sent by God to accomplish his wishes, from Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and beyond. In this way all autonomy seemed to have been removed from the perpetrators. They could not have acted otherwise, for they were merely instruments in the hands of a wrathful divinity. At the same time, however, and without much logic, these same perpetrators were evil beings who in the end would be punished for their crimes, whether in this world or in the world to come.

We can see this attitude in the writings of the great masters of contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy, for example the Lubavitcher Rebbe or the former Rebbe of Satmar. The Lubavitcher, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, did not accuse the Jews of specific transgressions, although there is an obvious allusion in him to the idea that Reform Judaism and assimilation are the principal culprits. He simply indicates, in his book Emunah Vemada, the “fact” that God acted like a surgeon. A great number of pious Jews were killed, along with others, because God punished the Jewish people by hiding his face (Panim), the pious Jews being the pnei hador, the “face of the generation.” In this way, the theological requirements are met; God is the source both of good and of evil, but the responsibility is shifted onto the Jews themselves, to whom the free will to make a moral choice was given.

A similar attitude is that of the late Joel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe of Satmar, in his book Vajoel Moshe. Saved by the Zionist Kastner in Hungary, Teitelbaum accuses Zionism, which is in contradiction with God’s commandment not to rebel against the nations and not to “climb over the wall,” i.e., to return to the Holy Land before the coming of the Messiah.

One can find similar explanations not only among the ultra-Orthodox but also among certain Orthodox leaders. Distinguished and brilliant minds such as the former British Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits have maintained that, while it is futile to try to guess why God punished the Jewish people in so terrible a manner, it is clear that it was the sins of the Jews that brought on the disaster, once again pointing the finger at Reform Judaism.

From a general Jewish perspective, which does not exclude the Orthodox perspective, a question arises: how could any transgression have “caused” the murder of one and a half million Jewish children under the age of thirteen, who were obviously responsible for no sin? Jewish tradition has, after all, long since rejected the formula according to which the sins of the ancestors will be visited upon the children, and has instead adopted the formula according to which each will be judged on his own faults. There is no possibility of escaping this dilemma in the terms used by these people, except by saying — which they also do — that one cannot pose such questions, for the ways of God are unfathomable. There is a clear contradiction between this statement and the attempts at explanation in the spirit of mipnei chataenu (because of our sins). And yet the two contradictory statements are constantly uttered.

For Orthodoxy and ultra-Orthodoxy there can be no comparison, because the Holocaust befell the chosen people and therefore acquires, in principle, a metahistorical quality.

The proposed explanations lead to a conclusion that the ultra-Orthodox, obviously, totally reject: if, indeed, God is responsible for good as for evil, and a million innocent Jewish children were killed, then God must be evil; if God is just, then God is not all-powerful.

In confronting this dilemma, Rabbi Irving Greenberg has argued for the necessity of a new covenant between the Jewish people and God, based on the recognition that the Jews have the responsibility to help a God who is not all-powerful. This formulation raises a difficult question: why pray to a poor God, without power?

In the comparison of the Holocaust with other genocides, Orthodoxy and ultra-Orthodoxy have no problem: there can be no comparison, because the Holocaust befell the chosen people and therefore acquires, in principle, a metahistorical quality.

Another consideration that renders the holocaust incomparable for many Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox is the view according to which the holocaust is a clear sign of the Chevlei Mashiach, the turbulence preceding the arrival of the Messiah. Through the ages, each time a major disaster befell the Jewish people, it was the clear sign of the imminent arrival of the Mashiach (Messiah). The worse the disaster, the stronger the belief in the nearness of Redemption. (In contemporary Israel another aspect has been added: victories and successes too have been interpreted as a sign of the arrival of the end of days, “the beginning of our Redemption.”) This relieved the psychological trauma of the disaster but also stripped the believers of all contact with reality, for no Messiah is in sight. This dangerous pseudo-messianism (which is shared, moreover, by the other radical monotheistic elements, Christian and Muslim, in their own terms) constitutes a danger for the body politic of the Jewish people. It also heightens the metahistorical character of the Holocaust in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox, thus rendering any comparison with similar events blasphemous.

For a non-Orthodox Jew the questions are far more difficult. We have already seen that it is neither the brutality nor the sadism that makes the Holocaust unique. Likewise it is not a sign of election, for millions upon millions of other victims have been massacred by enemies in times past and in our own day, and they were not chosen peoples (although most peoples and tribes regard themselves as chosen in one way or another). God must be put in parentheses, so to speak — whether or not one accepts his existence — for obviously the Holocaust, like other genocides, was the work of human beings, and the action or inaction of God has no meaning in this discussion. The question lies squarely in our hands: Are genocides comparable? If so, what does that teach us about the human propensity to carry out such acts? And if such a propensity exists, is there something special about the holocaust that emerges from a comparison with other genocides?

The life of a Jew killed at Auschwitz is worth neither more nor less than the life of a Russian villager killed by the Germans, an Armenian killed by the Turks, or a Cambodian killed by an executioner of Pol Pot.

The answer, evidently, is that, although the holocaust is comparable to other genocidal events, there are several factors that make it qualitatively different. One must immediately warn the reader that this difference does not imply that the holocaust is more extreme in the sense that it is “worse” than other genocidal events. There is no distinction between one mass murder and another mass murder. The life of a Jew killed at Auschwitz is worth neither more nor less than the life of a Russian villager killed by the Germans, an Armenian killed by the Turks, or a Cambodian killed by an executioner of Pol Pot. However, the holocaust is more extreme in the sense that the murderer’s intention is to annihilate a group in its totality. Whoever was born of three or four Jewish grandparents was condemned to death for the crime of being born — and that, to my knowledge, had never happened before.

Second, the motivation of the Nazi perpetrator was purely ideological; that is, it bore no relation to the reality of the Jewish people: the Jews were considered diabolical and ready to launch into the conquest of the world by means of a conspiracy; they were considered a criminal anti-race whose criminality was hereditary. The enemy of Nazism was not the real Jew — although he/she was the real victim — but an abstraction, a wholly imaginary construct called International Jewry, to which every real Jew belonged as an obedient subject. This, again, had some vague precedents but no real parallel. Third, the holocaust affected a very important minority, the Jews. This is a thought that needs to be argued carefully, for it can so easily be misused and misunderstood.

The Jewish heritage is, without any doubt, one of the pillars of the Western, Northern, and Christian-Muslim civilizations. The other principal pillar is classical Greece. But modern Greeks are distant descendants of the ancient Greeks, as regards culture, language, customs, philosophy, art, and so on. The Jewish heritage too has undergone enormous changes, but the contemporary expressions of Jewish civilization, though shattered, divided, and fragmented, are the results of a continuous development down to the present day. The tales, the legends, the stories, the modes of expression, and many other things besides have had a continuous extension over several thousand years. Modern Western civilization tries to follow the path of the prophets, it desperately attempts to observe the Ten Commandments, and it uses the Jewish experience as a paradigm. The moral values to which the West aspires — without success — originate, to a degree that is not negligible, in those of the Jews.

The fact that the holocaust struck the Jews, who are the visible continuation of a civilization so essential to the understanding of that of the West, calls into question the legitimacy of that civilization. From a Christian standpoint, it calls into question the credibility of a faith that prays to a savior who came nineteen centuries ago to preach a gospel of love and who died in expiation of human sins. Nineteen centuries after his arrival and his sacrifice, his people is massacred by baptized Gentiles. The murder of the Jews can perhaps, arguably, be seen as a rebellion of the sinful son against the father figure in Western culture. It is no surprise to me that not a month goes by without a play, a film, a television series, a work of art, a piece of fiction, on the subject of the holocaust. The Holocaust has become a code in Western civilization, a complex paradigm.

Compared to the other examples of genocide, these three points of difference render it unique, for in so many other cases it is the practical results that predominate. The Spaniards killed Indians for gold and silver; the colonists in North America killed Indians because they coveted the tribal land; the Young Turks wanted to annihilate the Armenians in Turkey in order to create a pan-Turkic empire stretching from the Bulgarian frontier to Kazakhstan, and the Armenians stood in their way. The way of life of the Roma and the Roma themselves were a nuisance in the eyes of the Nazis. In none of these cases do we see the kind of universalist ideology that imagines an enemy that does not exist at all in reality and that nonetheless has its supposed representatives everywhere in the form of real Jews. Wherever there has been a genocidal ideology, it has served as a rationalization of material, economic, political, or historical reasons connected to real situations: the Meso-American and South American Indians had access to gold, and later could serve as slaves on the Spanish plantations; the North American Indians possessed land and forests; the Armenians, who were a people with their own ethnic and national aspirations, were settled on a land that had been theirs for thousands of years and that was coveted by the Turks; the Roma were, in part, a nomadic people that had not been absorbed by a civilization that rejected them. And none of these peoples whose sufferings are comparable to those of the Jews occupied a place comparable to that of the Jews in Western civilization. The tragedy of the Jews was, and is, that the Jews are important in the cultures in which they live. They do not want to be, but they are. And they must accept this fact.

Jewish opposition to such comparisons is clearly of a defensive order. The only way for future disasters of the genocidal type to be successfully prevented consists in opening a realistic discussion about human societies, which are in essence of equal value, have both resemblances and dissimilarities, and whose tragedies possess elements that can be compared. A qualitative uniqueness in one case or another does not contradict such an approach. •

(Translated by I. Rosenman)