The Historiography of the Holocaust

15
Jewish Resistance
Robert Rozett
The concept of Jewish resistance in the historiography of the Holocaust has
evolved over time. Towards the end of the Second World War, two opposing
positions surfaced regarding its nature. Over the next two decades, the often
emotionally charged debate spilled over the borders of academic discourse and
engendered distorted notions that became entrenched in many quarters of the
Jewish world and beyond. By the 1970s, consensus was forming among many
scholars for an approximate and inclusive definition of the concept of Jewish
resistance. By the end of the twentieth century, researchers began considering
Jewish resistance less and less as a special category of behaviour, and started to
discuss it in the context of a broader exploration of the life of Jews under the
Nazi domination.
Writers have touched on the subject of Jewish resistance in many different
formats. It has been the theme of articles in newspapers and magazines, and is
often a significant topic in the memoirs of Holocaust survivors as well as in
memorial books. This essay is concerned primarily with how Jewish resistance
has been treated in scholarly discourse, although some popular publications
are also addressed, because they were seminal for later scholarship.
Glorious armed resistance
In his groundbreaking study about the legacy of the Holocaust in Israel during
the first two decades of the Israeli state, Roni Stauber clearly demonstrates that
the issue of Jewish heroism and its commemoration was tightly bound to the
notion of Jewish resistance, and to the idea that Jews living in Israel were a new
breed, different in their behaviour from their brethren in the Diaspora. 1 Many
early writers considered armed resistance to the Nazis to be the only legitimate
response for Jews, who had shed their Diaspora-like behaviour. Those who did
not resist with arms (or at least flee in the face of the Nazi onslaught) were
denigrated, and they were bunched together under the rubric of having gone
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