The secular word HOLOCAUST: scholarly myths, history, and 20th ...

JON PETRIEL’Holocauste de Juin dans les Facultés. (Le Figaro Littéraire, June 28, 1958, p 1, headline.The referent is the high failure rate in the French universities’ year-end exams)It does appear that “holocauste” in the 1950s was similar to the English-language“holocaust” of the 1930s and 1940s in its broad range of possible secularreferents. In the quotations presented, “holocauste” refers to the totality of deathsin World War II, the Nazi extermination of Jews, and the failures in the 1958French university exams. Unlike any 20th century native English speaker’scoloring of “holocaust,” however, is Mauriac’s 1958 “holocauste.” Translated in1960, Mauriac’s words became: “For him [Wiesel] … God is dead … the God ofAbraham, of Isaac, of Jacob … has vanished forevermore … in the smoke of ahuman holocaust exacted by Race, the most voracious of all idols.” This“holocaust,” on the third page of the foreword of Night, is by far the bestcirculated “holocaust,” employed in its now rare sense of “burnt offering,” of thelate 20th century, apart from translations of olah in Roman Catholic Bibles.In French, there is signi cant use of “holocauste” in the sense of an abhorrentimmolation to honor an infernal god and/or of a destruction inspired by hate, ause encountered in writings of native English speakers rarely before 1900 andnot at all in the 20th century. 28 Voltaire wrote: “Ces abominables holocaustess’établirent dans presque toute la terre. Pausanis prétendent que Lycaon immolale premier des victimes humaines en Gréce.” Flaubert wrote: “LesDruids … dans leurs criminels holocaustes.” And Baudelaire wrote: “Un hommede génie, mélancolique, misanthrope … jette un jour au feu toutes ses oeuvresencore manuscrites. Et comme on lui reprochait cet effroyable holocauste fait àla haine …” 29 This now distinctive French use of “holocauste/holocaust” perhapsre ects a greater knowledge of the deep pagan roots of the word(s) than the citedscholarly commentary on the word’s etymology and overtones demonstrates.Before holokauston and similar saw employment in the Septuagint, Xenophon,in a text read by virtually all students of classical Greek, employed holokau …to refer to Greek pagan sacri ces. For example: “… he offered the customaryholocaust [holokautei] of hogs” (Anabasis—c.365 BCE—VII, viii, 4 and 5). Inrelatively recent times the educated in both France and England were often asfamiliar with classical Greek texts as they were with the Bible and wouldfrequently associate “sacri ce” and “holocaust”—in the sense of “whole burntoffering”—with pre-New Testament pagan practices. The “Saci ce” article inthe 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannica devotes three of six pages to human sacri ceand mentions in passing the Carthaginian practice of placing live children in astatue’s hands extended over a furnace (burnt sacri ces). 30 The one third of acolumn entry under “Holocaust” in the same Encyclopaedia refers readers to the“Sacri ce” article and states, “Sacri ces of this sort [holocausts] are oftenmentioned by the heathens as well as Jews …” The 30 line entry for“Holocauste” in the Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie (1765) makes noreferences whatsoever to Jews or Jewish practices, only to immolations honoring“dieux infernaux” (infernal gods).And in the Hebrew Bible, olah, translated in Protestant Bibles of before 160042