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

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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
THE SECULAR WORD HOLOCAUSTas “holocaust,” and represented by Berenbaum and others as meaning an offeringto “the Lord,” is not necessarily an offering to the Jewish/Christian Lord but maybe an immolation performed by a non-Jew in the vain hope of pleasing a pagangod. Balak, king of Moab and fearful of the Hebrew tribes, stands beside hisolah while waiting for his favored prophet/sorcerer, Balaam, to curse the “thechildren of Jacob” (Numbers 23:3). Balaam, to Balak’s dismay, blesses “thechildren of Jacob.”“Holocaust”, then, is a sensitive, chameleonic instrument, whose connotationsare not xed, even when employed in its original sense of “whole burntoffering,” but highly dependent on the context of employment, and subtlydependent on the nature and depth of a reader’s exposure to scholarly commentary,classical Greek texts, and the Bible. And “holocaust,” employed in the nowrare sense of “burnt offering,” a meaning conveyed by an explicit religiouscontext, in the introduction to an early and core text of Holocaust Studies,denotes not an offering “to the Lord,” but a “pagan immolation”—“exacted byRace, the most voracious of all idols.”Post-1948 employment of “h/Holocaust” in the USAThis essay now turns away from its investigation of the use of “holocaust/holocauste” in Israel and France to focus on American employment of“holocaust” and the social and cultural context of that employment. In the 1950sand early 1960s American Jews, with few exceptions, avoided any publicengagement with the then recent mass murder of European Jews. In 1953, TheNew York Times could refer to “6,000,000 Jews allegedly killed during the Naziregime” without fear of complaints from Jewish organizations. 31 And a 1955Commentary review of “the only … comprehensive account of the Jewishtragedy” made a comparison that would be unimaginable in an American Jewishmagazine today: “American Jewry[’s attitude] to the great catastrophe [is similarto that] of so many decent Germans during the war. Dimly aware of the Eastern‘death camps,’ they were yet able to close their minds to them.” 32 Twentymonths and one short piece on the Bialystock uprising later, Commentarypublished an essay on printed memorials to destroyed communities (yizkor). Theessayists wrote: “The few solid works published here and abroad on the Naziholocaust have not found a large audience. Massacres make bitter reading.” 33(All italicization of “holocaust” in this essay is mine.)A variety of reasons account for Jewish disinterest in/avoidance of—in the1950s and early 1960s USA—the Nazi-led mass murder. Many American Jewswere bent on assimilation and felt none too secure. (“We have buried fully sixmillion … A holocaust of such dimensions is bound to make the survivorsapprehensive” [1949].) And in the context of the Cold War, memories of theRosenberg trial, and the importance of West Germany as an American ally, itwas not politic for hyphenated Americans to be overly interested in Germanmurders of Jews. 34 (See the next endnote for examples of American “holocausts”43
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