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

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JON PETRIEdriven signi cantly by the widespread contemporary American secular use of“holocaust” as a referent for nuclear disaster, and probably also driven by thebroad use of “holocaust,” particularly in Israeli English, as a referent to the Nazimurders, but driven not at all by knowledge of biblical or theological meanings.More generally, the adoption of “holocaust” in American Jewish circles as theprimary referent to the Jewish disaster was partly driven, in my opinion, by theterm’s use in the larger American culture to denote atomic warfare. Explicitcomparisons between the Nazi mass murder and nuclear mass death were notuncommon in the USA of the 1950s and early 1960s. 48 And, I suspect, evenwithout the impetus of the previously documented dissemination of Israeli-English“holocausts,” some American Jewish writers in the 1960s wishing to betterconvey the horror of the Nazi slaughter would have abandoned such referents as“extermination,” “great catastrophe,” and “Jewish tragedy” in favor of thatoccasional 1950s referent, “holocaust,” in order to associate emotionally theNazi Judeocide with a feared nuclear mass death.Wiesel’s use of “H/holocaust” is a good test of whether the word in the late20th century can or does carry theological associations in secular discoursewithout explicit religious modi ers. Certainly Wiesel grapples in his writingwith the theological signi cance of the Nazi-organized genocide, “the site andoccasion of [God’s] abdication,” and might have chosen a word that carriedtheological overtones to refer to the Judeocide had such a word been available. 49Representative quotations from Wiesel are presented below. In this writer’sopinion, “destruction” or “disaster,” uppercased if appropriate, could be substitutedfor “H/holocaust” in any of the quotations that follow with no change inmeaning or connotation.“The experience of the holocaust in Europe de es language, and leads to a mystique ofsilence, or to madness itself.” And: “… a full twenty years after the holocaust …” (October27, 1963, The New York Times Book Review, pp 3, 69—Wiesel’s second and third“holocaust” in print)And God? Where was He during those dark years? The Holocaust has had a great impacton religion … (November 1967, Address: Union of American Hebrew Congregations)Your entire universe is crumbling … Yesterday’s holocaust will followed by tomorrow’s,and that one will be total! (1970, A Beggar in Jerusalem, p 42)Why were the Gypsies persecuted … exterminated? Their lot seems to me, on one level,more tragic than that of the Jews … They are scarcely mentioned in the so-called literatureof the Holocaust. An outrageous injustice … (May 28, 1978, Los Angeles Times: BookReview, p 4) 50American employment of “H/holocaust” from the mid-1960s until today hasbeen primarily driven by an extraordinary increase in interest and writing on theNazi-orchestrated Judeocide and a decline in concern and writing on nuclearwar. From the mid-1960s, books on the Jewish catastrophe began to nd a readymarket in the USA. Six books on the subject and with “Holocaust” in their titleswere published before 1970. In September 1968, the Library of Congress created48
THE SECULAR WORD HOLOCAUSTa new category, “Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945),” for material that earlierwould have been categorized under such headings as “World War, 1939–1945—Jews.” But an unmodi ed “holocaust” was not yet likely to evoke “Jewishcatastrophe” outside of Jewish circles. A search of 1969 JSTOR journals yields21 “holocausts,” seven nuclear, four references to one of the World Wars or anaspect of those wars, three references to the Vietnam War, and two arereferences to the Jewish catastrophe. (The remainder are references to theAmerican Civil War, to the French Revolution or are pre-1910 “holocausts”within citations of works by Zola, Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane.)In the 1970s the Judeocide started to become of real interest within theacademy. The rst PhD thesis with the word “Holocaust” in its title wascompleted in 1972; 16 more PhD theses with the word “Holocaust” in their titlesappeared before 1980. (By way of contrast, in the 1950s a graduate studentexploring the possibilities of working on the Nazi period was advised by adistinguished Jewish American historian to nd another topic: “No one isinterested in Hitler.”) 51 By the mid-1970s, within scholarly circles, the mostfrequently encountered referent of “H/holocaust” was the Jewish catastrophe,and increasingly the word, employed in this sense, was capitalized. A wordsearch of JSTORE’s 1977 journal texts yields 64 “H/holocausts.” Thirty-onerefer to the Jewish catastrophe; of the 31, 22 are an unmodi ed—except bycontext—“Holocaust,” ve an unmodi ed—except by context—“holocaust,” andthe remainder a Nazi, German, or Jewish “H/holocaust.” Of the 33 non-Naziholocausts, nine are references to nuclear destruction.In the spring of 1978 over 100 million Americans viewed some part of NBC’smini-series titled The Holocaust—the screening was a major cultural event. Asan immediate consequence, the capitalized and unmodi ed “Holocaust” becamethe recognized referent to Hitler’s Judeocide in an American society newlysensitized to that tragedy. In JSTORE journals, January–June 1979, “H/holocaust”is employed 37 times. Twenty-eight of the references are to the Jewishcatastrophe, and 27 of the 28 are an unmodi ed “the Holocaust.” In 1980 TheNew York Times annual indexes abandoned “Nazi holocaust” and “Nazi Holocaust”in favor of “the Holocaust.” 52A few weeks after the screening of The Holocaust, partly as a gesture to theAmerican Jewish community unhappy with the intended sale of American ghterplanes to Saudi Arabia, President Carter announced the American government’sintention to create a memorial “to the six million who were killed in theHolocaust.” Following protests by Polish-Americans and Ukrainian-Americans,who demanded that the millions of their own killed by the Nazis be recognizedin any American taxpayer-supported memorial, and perhaps re ecting his ownecumenical humanism, and almost certainly in uenced by Simon Wiesenthal’scontemporary employment of the term, Carter in his 1979 Executive Ordercreating the United States Holocaust Memorial Council de ned “the Holocaust”as the “… extermination of six million Jews and some ve million otherpeoples …” This presidential broad de nition of the term was unwelcome tomany Jews who feared that the extreme virulence of the Nazis’ Jewish annihila-49
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