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

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JON PETRIEhaving four fewer letters than “Holocaust”—frequently in newspaper headlinesin British Jewish newspapers in the late 1990s “Shoah” is employed while in thearticle below the “Shoah” headline, “Holocaust” is used exclusively. Possibly ina generation, “Shoah” will rival “Holocaust” as a referent to the Nazi genocide(s).The Jewish tragedy is now so central to Western historical consciousnessthat it no longer gains resonance and emotional weight from “holocaust’s” nowrather slight association with nuclear destruction. 70(Interested readers may consult the endnote for remarks on the meanings ofthe Hebrew shoah, a 1937 description of Nazi persecution of Jews as a shoah,a 1939 Ben-Gurion prediction of a coming shoah, and a correction of wellcirculatedclaims that shoah in the Bible always connotes Divine judgment.) 71ConclusionThis essay began with quotations from well-known scholars asserting that“holocaust” has Judeo-Christian religious overtones and that these overtonesaffect our understanding of the Jewish catastrophe. The evidence presented inthis essay has show that “H/holocaust” in modern secular use carries noJudeo-Christian connotations and that the word is substantially more terrestrial,more chameleonic, and more pagan than represented by Holocaust scholars.James Young has written: “As one of the rst hermeneutical moves regardingan event, its naming frames and remembers events [and] determines particularknowledge of events … Every … name thus molds events in the image of itsculture’s particular understanding.” 72 However, the key “hermeneutical move”may not be the actual naming of an event but the construction by scholars of afalse or misleading history of an existing name and of the name’s meaning(s)and overtone(s). This construction, if unchallenged, will then help mold a“culture’s particular understanding.” Hopefully, this essay’s challenge to scholarlymisrepresentations of the last 10 years will result in a new, more accurate,sense of the history, overtones, and meanings of the word “H/holocaust” withinthe community of Holocaust scholars, which in turn may decrease the acceptabilityof any mysti cation of the Nazi-orchestrated mass slaughter of Jews andremove a subtle verbal obstacle to comparisons between the Jewish Holocaustand other organized mass murder.Let me remind readers of Garber and Zuckerman’s well-circulated andheretofore uncontradicted assertion: “[T]he editors of the King James Version ofthe Bible … translated the Hebrew term for whole-burnt offering, theolah … ‘holocaust.’ Indeed, the adoption by the King James editors of this useof the term probably played the decisive role in xing ‘religious sacri ce’ as theprimary sense of the term in English up until the mid-Twentieth Century.”Also consider Michael Marrus’s representation: “The term Holocaust … servesnow to separate this particular massacre from other historical instances ofgenocide. Holokaustos … comes from the third century B.C. Greek translation ofthe Old Testament … the designation … connoted an event of theological54
THE SECULAR WORD HOLOCAUSTsigni cance, and perhaps as well an event whose mysteries were not meant tobe understood.”Contrast these representations with a summary of the evidence and argumentpresented in this essay: “Holocaust” came into English from the Greek by wayof medieval translations of the Bible, but the word has not appeared in aProtestant or Jewish Bible since about 1600. Like many older English words, themost common meanings of “holocaust” in the 20th century differ signi cantlyfrom the word’s original English meaning. For the last 100 years “holocaust” hasbeen employed to refer to a wide variety of con agrations, massacres, wars, anddisasters, and carries, in secular use, no theological overtones. In the USA of theearly 1960s, about 15 years before the word had become closely linked toHitler’s Judeocide, the word’s principal referent was nuclear catastrophe. CommonAmerican understandings of the word in the mid-1960s are illustrated intwo citations from the 1967 Holocaust: “Holocaust and holocaust. A few terribledeaths can be termed holocaust as can be the destruction of the vitals of a singlecountry.” And, “I do not agree with the holocaust they plan, the holocausthere—and the all-out attack, the holocaust there.” 73The lowercased “holocaust,” usually modi ed, saw occasional employment inthe USA, England, and Israel in the 1940s and 1950s as a referent to the Nazipersecution and slaughter of Jews. At Yad Vashem in Israel, the only institutionof the late 1950s and early 1960s regularly publishing in English on theJudeocide, “H/holocaust” had become the principal English referent to thatcatastrophe by 1960. In the USA in 1960 the word, in its rare theological sense,was employed in the introduction to a key Holocaust text, Elie Wiesel’s Night.François Mauriac wrote: “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob … hasvanished forevermore … in the smoke of a human holocaust exacted by Race,the most voracious of all idols.” This “holocaust” is today, and has been for thelast almost 40 years, the best circulated “holocaust” amongst Jews and Protestantsin its original Greek and English sense of “burnt offering wholly consumed.”Starting around 1963, burgeoning American Jewish interest in the destructionof European Jewry paralleled an increased American favoring of “holocaust” asa referent to that destruction/the time period of that destruction, a favoring drivenboth by dissemination of Israeli-English usage and by the utility of associatingthe Nazi Judeocide with the then actively feared nuclear mass destruction.Increasingly in the 1970s, “holocaust,” used in the sense of the Jewish disaster,was capitalized, and by 1979, partly as a result of the popularity and impact ofNBC’s 1978 mini-series, The Holocaust, the predominant and readily recognizedreferent of “Holocaust” in American English had become the Nazi persecutionand slaughter of Jews. Today, as in past decades, while there is no ambiguityabout the core referent of the term—concentration camp and death camppersecution and slaughter of Jews—there is little consensus amongst users of theterm on the starting date of the Holocaust and implicit disagreement as to whichNazi persecutions and murders, beyond concentration camp and death camppersecutions and slaughters of Jews, are encompassed by the term. In addition55
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