The Historiography of the Holocaust

Jewish Resistance 345
or gassed; as indeed were the starving who came to eat at the soup kitchens;
the faithful who came to pray in the synagogues; [and] the children and
their teachers in the homes and orphanages. 14
Steinberg also praises Jewish armed resistance, but in a more subdued and
complex voice than his predecessors: ‘By revolting against the Hitler regime
which intended to exterminate the entire Jewish population, the Jews were not
engaging in acts of heroism, they simply wished to preserve the material and
moral substance of their people. Their success won them immortality.’ 15
For his part, Ainsztein states outright that his book is a response to Hilberg,
Bettelheim and Arendt. In an historical survey that stretches from the Bar
Cochva rebellion against the Romans to Jewish self-defence against pogroms
in the First World War, Ainsztein refutes those who claim that the Diaspora
conditioned Jews against active self-defence. The rest of the book is devoted to
showing the public just how much Jewish armed resistance there was during
the Holocaust. But in a sense, Ainsztein is not so different from those he seeks
to refute. He too attacks Jews for not offering armed resistance to the Nazis, in
this case Hungarian Jewry in 1944–45. 16 In so doing, he seems to be unaware
that the large rescue operation that occurred in Budapest, in which Jews were
closely involved, was an active response to their specific situation. To a certain
extent this is understandable, because the first major monograph about that
rescue appeared a decade after Ainsztein’s book. 17
Amidah
At the same time that many writers were attempting to glorify armed resistance
and vilify other Jewish responses, some were pointing out that in addition to
armed resistance there were other forms of Jewish resistance to the Nazis. This
wider and more encompassing definition of resistance came to be known by
the Hebrew term Amidah. Amidah translates as ‘stand’. By the late 1960s it was
being used more and more in lieu of the word resistance in Hebrew-language
discussion, and the ideas it embodies were becoming more accepted within the
scholarly community. In a pioneering essay, Dan Michman lays out the theoretical
and political discussion underpinning the term. He also points out that
Amidah is used less in English than in Hebrew, to a large extent because of the
difficulty in translating it adequately. 18
In his statements and writings just after the end of the Second World War, Berl
Katzenelson declares that the struggle to maintain human dignity, often called
‘spiritual resistance’, is no less weighty than armed resistance. For Benzion
Dinur, the first chairman of Yad Vashem, Jews’ daily struggle for existence in
the adverse conditions of Hitler’s Europe was even more important than armed
resistance. Moreover, Dinur stresses that armed resistance never stood a chance
of succeeding. Others, like Nathan Eck, Zorach Warhaftig and Mark Dworzecki,