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

THE SECULAR WORD HOLOCAUSTThe range of disaster and destruction described as a “holocaust” or “theholocaust” in the above titles and citations may seem extraordinary to those whoknow only the word’s most common contemporary meanings. Of the seven“holocausts” in the 1938 Palestine Post, three refer to World War I or a futureEuropean war, but the four others refer to events that, in comparison to worldwar, are trivial affairs, one even a “bloodless” holocaust. And in a 1946Palestine Post the word refers to the effects of clumsiness in the kitchen(“… glasses that escape the holocaust of housework …”). No connotation ofreligious sacri ce seems intended in any of the above titles and quotations— allcould be rewritten, without altering meaning or connotation, by replacing“holocaust” with “con agration,” “catastrophe,” or “massacre(s).” More generally,none of the 93 secular “holocausts” from the period 1910–1950 found andrecorded by this writer carries a religious connotation. 8 And no dictionaryde nition I have consulted suggests that “holocaust,” when used to mean“catastrophe,” “con agration,” or “massacre,” carries any sense of religioussacri ce.Part of the foundation for contemporary scholarly assertions that “holocaust”had little secular circulation in the rst half of the 20th century and that the wordcarries Judeo-Christian religious connotations are certain false, but unchallenged,representations by Zev Garber and Bruce Zukerman in a 1988 paper, a 1989journal article, and a 1994 book chapter. According to Garber and Zukerman’sfrequently cited “Why do We Call the Holocaust ‘the Holocaust’? …”, previousto 1950 “the primary sense of the term [holocaust]” was “religious sacri ce,”and the “Jewish thinkers and writers who rst adopted the term” were aware ofthe “religious/sacri cial connotations” that the term carries. To support thisstatement Garber and Zuckerman assert: “[T]he editors of the King JamesVersion of the 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.” 9 Onemajor problem with this assertion is that the word “holocaust” is not to be foundanywhere in the King James Bible. The Hebrew olah is translated as “burntoffering(s)” or “burnt sacri ce(s)” in the King James Bible. 10 A check ofconcordances and a sampling of representative passages show that all of theprincipal Protestant and Jewish English-language Bibles of the last few centuriestranslate olah as “burnt offering(s)” or some very similar expression. Thus,contrary to what Garber and Zuckerman assert, virtually no 20th century Jew orProtestant would be familiar with any biblical employment of the word“holocaust.” (It should be noted, however, that Catholic Bibles do translate olahas “holocaust” and thus Catholics would be familiar with the “religious sacri ce”sense of the word.)In addition to asserting that the King James Bible uses “holocaust” as atranslation of olah, Garber and Zuckerman claim: “[Before World War II] mostoften the term was … employed to characterize a particular sort of consumptionby re: the religious sacri ce. Thus the rst de nition in the OED is … ‘a whole35