THE HOLOCAUST DOMINATED the moral
imagination of the 20th century. Before the rise of Hitler, anti-Semitism
was a parochial concern of the Jews; after the war it was everyone's
concern, and everyone regarded it with horror. The cause of anti-Semitism
is a mystery to most Jews and most Gentiles. One school of thought,
wrongly, I believe, blames anti-Semitism on Christianity itself.
Certainly many Christians have accused the Jews of denying
that they have
been superseded -- to most the difference in doctrine is not enough
to
explain the virulence of anti-Semitism. Another kind of anti Semitism
is
more subtle and only a century or two old.
Rebecca West described it in her travels through pre-World
War II
Yugoslavia: "Now I understand some other cause for anti-Semitism;
many
primitive peoples must received their first indication of the
toxic quality
of thought from Jews. They know only the fortifying idea of religion;
they
see in Jews the effect of the tormenting and disintegrating ideas
of
skepticism." This feeling is shared by those who saw the
Jews behind such
forces as Bolshevism and "progressive" movements of
all kinds: A supposed
Jewish "weakness for communism" was observed by such
genial anti-Semites as
Greggor von Rezzori, villains like Hitler, and, in his interesting
new book
on the Vietnam War just published, by the well-liked young American
liberal
Michael Lind.
But a new kind of anti-semitism may emerge in the 21st century,
in reaction
to the attempt to make "the Holocaust" central to our
civilization. The
explosion of "the joy of sex in the death camp" movies,
the proliferation
of Holocaust memorials and museums, the emergence of a new academic
discipline detached from history called Holocaust and Genocide
Studies ---
all these threaten to undermine a proper understanding of the
Nazi war
against the Jews. More disturblingly, however, it is igniting
resentment
against what is seen as moral and political posturing on the part
of some
Jews.
The National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.,
is the perfect
example of what happens when the attempt to understand the Holocaust
breaks
free of the historical discipline and is raised in a hothouse
of preening
modish concern; when it becomes "Holocaustology."
Now one of the most popular tourist destinations in town, the
museum has
become a political circus. The sacred mission of memorializing
the victims
and blaming their killers has been surrounded by an aura of careerism
and
self-importance. The Museum's "Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies" is
staging a conference this week in Washington on the direction
of Holocaust
studies in the 21st century in which papers on historiagraphy,
art looting,
and the various national varieties of extermination are joined
by a paper
on "careers for newly trained holocaust scholars." Its
summary roundtable
includes such scholars as John Roth, who was denied the chairmanship
of the
museum only when several op-ed pieces he had published came to
light, in
which compared Reagan to Hitler and the Israeli military operations
in
Lebanon to the Nazi death camps.
Another participant is Professor Atina Grossman, of Cooper
Union, who gives
talks comparing the sufferings of the German civilians in the
aftermath of
WWII to those of the inmates of the death camps. Before an audience
of
holocaust survivors she has lamented that while German civilians
suffered a
high incidence of infant mortality, the Jewish women who had survived
the
death camps were experiencing an abnormally high birth rate, even
though
they were unprepared for motherhood and domesticity and often
quite
neurotic.
The Museum's former Director of Education, Joan Ringelheim,
was exposed by
Gabriel Schoenfeld, together with other feminist Holocaust scholars,
in a
brilliant article in Commentary (June 1998). She "has
gone so far as to
draw a connection between Nazi "sexism" and the, to
her, age-old
"exploitation" of Jewish women by . . . Jewish men.
In this very link, indeed, Ringelheim has
located a key to the puzzle of why "malestream" scholarship
has allegedly
erased the history of women in the Holocaust. After all, she writes,
many
people today simply find it "too difficult to contemplate
the extent to
which . . . the sexism of Nazi ideology and the sexism of the
Jewish
community met in a tragic and involuntary alliance."
In the world of Ms Ringelheim, the Holocaust becomes a means
to other ends.
It's important for Holocaustology to show, for example, that the
Nazis were
sexists as well as butchers; that the extermination of the Jews
has to be
put in historical context with other persecutions; that persons
of color
and members of the working class lived in Auschwitz-like conditions
before
and after the historical Holocaust. More recently, another feminist
scholar
has re-examined Anne Frank's diaries and discovered that had Ms.
Frank
escaped the crematorium, she might well, with luck, have become
a lesbian.
In America, in one "mission statement" after another,
universities
advertise their "Holocaust and Genocide Studies" programs
as specific
remedies for Holocaust relapse. The University of Minnesota declares
that
the basic purpose of Holocaust studies is "to educate people
to be
sensitive and vigilant toward behavior with potential for a Holocaust."
(as
if genocides lurked around unlit alleys in downtown St. Paul).
A Minnesota instructor, Lucy Smith, is actively opposed to
the role of
history in this enterprise. She wonders, I think rather unfairly,
whether
"teaching about, for example, The Night of St. Bartolomy
in France, ever
prevented any other genocide? If our purpose in teaching is to
prevent such
occurrences, then we need to reach the emotions of the students
before
teaching them historical facts." As a way, perhaps, of reaching
emotions
before worrying about facts, the Web site of the Minnesota program
offers electronic buttons to press for "educational resources",
"visual resources", and the like, in the shape
of little ovens built into a brick chimney, which light up when
you press
them. Perhaps this is to sensitize one to the incineration of
a
cyber-Holocaust-victim.
The success of the Holocaust has terrible consequences. It
undermines
memory of the Holocaust, it puts irresistible pressure on other
groups to
demand their time in the Holocaust sun: gays, members of the working
class,
women, decendents of African slaves. It provokes many traditional
anti-Semites smilingly to deny that it happened at all, or that
it was part
of a wider war against civilians of all kinds (and despite their
preening,
the dry academicism of the Holocaust boffins can do nothing effective
to
counter this odd propaganda).
Steadily focusing on the Holocaust without its historical accidental
origins produces a whole new set of myths --- quite apart from
the myth
that the Holocaust did not happen.
But these myths have all become more prevalent not less as
Holocaustology
has taken root: That Churchill or Roosevelt or Pope Pius XII or
the
American Jewish community could have done something substantial
to rescue
the Jews from Hitler, but deliberately declined; that the second
world war
was undertaken on behalf of the Jews; that Germany was occupied
and
dismembered in order to punish her for her treatment of the Jews
(an idea
advanced -- horrifyingly -- by Professor Goldhagen of Harvard
this spring),
that eternal vigilance against something called fascism will prevent
future
holocausts, when in fact one might argue, that genocide -- or
massacre of
whole classes -- only becomes a necessary part of the ideology
of class
warfare, and has taken place -- and will yet take place -- wherever
radical
socialist regimes take sway, as in China, Russia, and Cambodia;
that the
Nazi holocaust was, far from being the conclusion of an historical
inevitability, as accidental a disaster as has ever befallen the
Jewish people; that nothing like the Nazi holocaust has ever happened
before to the Jews.
Again, it is a sad fact of Jewish history that near-complete
extinction of
Jewish communities within greater or lesser areas is a commonplace.
That
"no G-d could have permitted Auschwitz" is falsified
by the other horrors
the Jews have horribly endured, from almost the beginning of their
history,
at the hands of greater powers, most of whom have utterly perished.
Finally, there is the awful end-point of Holocaust studies:
In an
unintended imitation of the Nazi butchers, holocaust historians
engage in
the intimate examination of the unspeakable lives of Jews in the
death
camps before they were butchered as if they were scientists observing
gnats
or flies. If ever there was a way to re-dehumanize the victims
of the
Nazis, this is it. But such is the logic of the professionalization
of
"Holocaustology": First perish, then publish-or-perish.
The Talmud vividly warns that the Torah must not be made merely
into an
instrument for something other than itself: "Do not make
the Torah a crown
wherewith to magnify thyself, or a spade wherewith to dig."
The Holocaust,
which should be held sacred, is in danger of becoming used as
such an
instrument.
An American official in Macedonia crowed when Elie Wiesel visited
a refugee
camp during the Nato bombing campaign, "You need a person
like Wiesel to
keep your moral philosophy on track." Well, no, you don't.
Wiesel didn't suffer-and millions of his fellow Jews didn't
die--in order
merely to keep anyone's moral philosophy from going off the rails.
And if
the Holocaust is subjected to such a feeble purpose, then its
point and its
very reality may well in time be forgotten and its victims mocked.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sam Schulman, "Did Six Million Die for This?", Jewish
World Review, January 11, 2000, http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0100/holocaustology.html
WR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki's Top
Drawer,
appearing in New York Press, and was formerly publisher of Wigwag
and a
professor of English at Boston University. You may contact him
by clicking
here...
<[email protected]>
or <[email protected]>
This text has been displayed on the Net, and forwarded to you
as a tool for educational purpose, further research, on a non
commercial and fair use basis, by the International Secretariat
of the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Recits de Guerre et
d'Holocauste (AAARGH). The E-mail of the Secretariat is <[email protected].
Mail can be sent at PO Box 81475, Chicago, IL 60681-0475, USA..
We see the act of displaying a written document on Internet as
the equivalent to displaying it on the shelves of a public library.
It costs us a modicum of labor and money. The only benefit accrues
to the reader who, we surmise, thinks by himself. A reader looks
for a document on the Web at his or her own risks. As for the
author, there is no reason to suppose that he or she shares any
responsibilty for other writings displayed on this Site. Because
laws enforcing a specific censorship on some historical question
apply in various countries (Germany, France, Israel, Switzerland,
Canada, and others) we do not ask their permission from authors
living in thoses places: they wouldn't have the freedom to consent.
We believe we are protected by the Human Rights Charter:
ARTICLE 19. <Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.>The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris.