Holocaust Memory and Britain's Religious-Secular Landscape

Politics, Sacrality, And Diversity

David Tollerton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429671104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

British state-supported Holocaust remembrance has dramatically grown in prominence since the 1990s. This monograph provides the first substantial discussion of the interface between public Holocaust memory in contemporary Britain and the nation's changing religious-secular landscape.

In the first half of the book attention is given to the relationships between remembrance activities and Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and post-Christian communities. Such relationships are far from monolithic, being entangled in diverse histories, identities, power-structures, and notions of 'British values'. In the book's second half, the focus turns to ways in which public initiatives concerned with Holocaust commemoration and education are intertwined with evocations and perceptions of the sacred. Three state-supported endeavours are addressed in detail: Holocaust Memorial Day, plans for a major new memorial site in London, and school visits to Auschwitz. Considering these phenomena through concepts of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, it is proposed that response to the Holocaust has become a key feature of Britain's 21st century religious-secular landscape. Critical consideration of these topics, it is argued, is necessary for both a better understanding of religious-secular change in modern Britain and a sustainable culture of remembrance and national self-examination.

This is the first study to examine Holocaust remembrance and British religiosity/secularity in relation to one another. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Jewish studies and Holocaust Studies, as well as the Sociology of Religion, Material Religion and Secularism.

1 Introduction

On 27 January 2014, David Cameron gave a speech at 10 Downing Street (Figure 1.1) to a group of Holocaust survivors, politicians, and civic leaders setting out the vision of a new Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission (PMHC).¹ ‘I’ve had some extraordinary gatherings of people in this room’, he reflected, ‘but I don’t think there’s been a more extraordinary gathering or a gathering I’ve been prouder to have’. Turning to the assignment of the new commission he then stated that

the sacred task is to think, ‘How are we best going to remember, to commemorate and to educate future generations of children?’ In 50 years’ time, in 2064, when a young British Christian child or a young British Muslim child or a young British Jewish child wants to learn about the Holocaust, and we as a country want them to learn about the Holocaust, where are they going to go? Who’re they going to listen to? What images will they see?²

The passage is significant for its breadth of vision but also its ambiguities. Cameron frames Holocaust education and remembrance as an endeavour that, without differentiation, spans across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian experience, mirroring the bold language of Britain’s Promise to Remember, the commission report published 12 months later. There, the executive summary’s introduction ended with a sweeping conviction to convey ‘lessons that will resonate with people of all faiths, from all lands, for all times’.³ But what Cameron and Britain’s Promise to Remember leave unexplored is how such a mission might interact differently with the histories and experiences of different Abrahamic communities, and we may wonder if such complications are even thinkable amidst this starkly universalising rhetoric. It is also notable that Cameron describes the commission’s task as ‘sacred’, vocabulary that is hardly accidental given that it recurs three times in his short speech (and is very rare among his other public statements).⁴ Yet it is left unstated where this sacredness has come from, how it will tangibly shape commemorative and educational endeavours, and in what ways it intersects with the pre-existing sacralities of religious faith traditions.

Figure 1.1David Cameron speaking at the launch of the PMHC in January 2014. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis is on the left of the image.

Source: Reproduced with permission of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

It is of course unlikely that Cameron and his speechwriters intended for these ambiguities to be dwelt upon, but they nonetheless serve as a useful opening frame for the purposes of this book. In the chapters that follow, I argue that the remarkable rise to prominence of public Holocaust memory in Britain has interacted with the experiences of Jewish, Muslim, and (post-)Christian communities in ways that are complex, uneven, and contested: Jewish communities have responded in varied and conflicted ways to the state’s new enthusiasm for commemorative and educational initiatives; teasing out the relationship between Muslim communities and public Holocaust memory means navigating both antisemitic denunciations of remembrance and Islamophobic othering of Muslims; (post-)Christian responses have included self-critical confrontations with historic Jewish-Christian relations yet also conspicuous evasions, all the while shaped by declining levels of Christian affiliation and divergent models of what (post-)Christian identity practically means. But beyond these diverse interactions with Abrahamic communities, in this book I also argue that state-supported Holocaust remembrance initiatives have, in their own right, become deeply infused with manifestations and perceptions of the sacred. This has played out through a variety of forms: the ritual-making of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), the plans for a new sacred memorial site in the centre of London, and the facilitation of pilgrimages to Auschwitz. Recurring features of these endeavours are reconfigurations of older religious tradition, curations of transformative experience, and presentations of the Holocaust as an event that makes radically unique, universal, and eternal demands upon society. In sum, Holocaust memory in the public sphere is not a phenomenon that sits on top of Britain’s religious-secular landscape in a simple and uniform manner, but instead intersects with tradition, ideology, and (non-)belief in multifaceted and at times uncomfortable ways. Holocaust Memory and Britain’s Religious-Secular Landscape argues that there is an analytical need to identify and explain these phenomena, but on a more critical level, also that ‘the sacred task’ envisaged by Cameron should be held to greater account, lest state-driven piety distract from understanding of memory’s ideological entanglements.

Politicians speaking on Holocaust remembrance have frequently portrayed it as an activity that feeds neatly into building a more tolerant society. When, in 1999, Andrew Dismore brought to parliament a bill for creating a new memorial day, he predicted that ‘it will provide a national focus for promoting a democratic, tolerant, and respectful society’.⁵ And when the creation of HMD was officially announced in the following year, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw respectively described it as part of the ‘fight to build a truly just, tolerant and multi-racial Britain’ and ‘work toward a tolerant and diverse society’.⁶ These are commendable aims and my purpose in this book is not to offer a wholesale critique of the extent to which Holocaust education and commemoration have contributed toward them (as several academic commentators have noted, it is hard to measure).⁷ But looking in closer detail produces a decidedly messier picture. Holocaust memory has interacted with Jewish, Muslim, and (post-)Christian communities in ways that have been, and continue to be, particular to social, historical, and political contexts, and we should be wary of rhetoric that artificially smooths over this. Moreover, the manifold ways in which sacred experience is evoked amidst remembrance activities can, if unexamined, make it harder to construct a public discourse that allows for difficult but necessary conversations about the future of memorialisation and critical interrogation of British identity in the 21st century.

In drawing together analyses of both Britain’s religious-secular landscape and remembrance of the Holocaust, this book offers something new. From one disciplinary direction, it is notable that scholars writing on religion in contemporary Britain have given little to no attention to public memory of this atrocity. It is possible to line up key survey works such as Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto’s Religion and Change in Modern Britain (2012), Grace Davie’s Religion in Britain (2015), and the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life’s Living With Difference report (2015), and find no mention of the topic.⁸ Put simply, the idea that Holocaust education and commemoration has moved to a central place in 21st century British value-building and experience of the sacred is not on their radar. From the direction of scholarship on Holocaust memory in Britain the situation is more complicated. The historians and educationalists in the field are certainly aware, to name a few examples, that successive Chief Rabbis have been closely involved with memorialisation events, that the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has at times had a difficult relationship with HMD, or that the National Holocaust Centre and Museum (NHCM) was developed by a devoutly Christian family.⁹ But this book offers the first attempt to think about such phenomena in a more integrated way from a religious studies perspective. There is a recurring tendency for these historians and educationalists to dip into religious vocabulary when complaining about the perceived failings of British discourse on the Holocaust. ‘Ritualising’, ‘sacred’, ‘enshrined’, ‘mythic’, ‘sermonising’, ‘homiletic’, and ‘sanctimonious piety’ are mobilised essentially as synonyms of ‘uncritical’, with Lucy Russell’s Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers or Preachers? (2006), for example, foundationally premised on a fear of becoming the latter.¹⁰ While I share some of these concerns, in this book – especially its second half – I explore the relationship between public Holocaust memory and the sacred in a more substantial and systematic manner.

So Holocaust Memory and Britain’s Religious-Secular Landscape has two core audiences in mind: scholars of religion in contemporary Britain and scholars of British Holocaust memory. As such, it is useful to clarify further where I understand this book to be located in relation to religious studies and Holocaust studies.

On disciplinary location

In Anglophone contexts, writings on religion and the Holocaust over the last half-century have been dominated by confessional works from Jewish and Christian theologians. With regard to Judaism the seminal work is Richard Rubenstein’s controversial 1966 book After Auschwitz, which made bold claims about the need to radically reframe ideas of covenant in the aftermath of atrocity.¹¹ Even if Rubenstein gained few enthusiastic followers, his ideas provoked vivid counterproposals by Emil Fackenheim, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, and later responses by David Blumenthal and Melissa Raphael, each of whom demanded reorientations to the divine and Jewish tradition.¹² With Christianity the focus has looked more to questions of guilt and complicity, both with regard to the Nazi period but also with an eye to the deeper theological roots of anti-Jewish thought in church history. In the 1970s and 1980s book-length treatments came from Rosemary Radford Ruether, Alice and Roy Eckhardt, and Paul Van Buren, and in recent decades there have been further historical-theological assessments of Christian behaviour during and after the Third Reich.¹³ But for my concerns, an important development has been the more recent appearance of works written not with direct reference to Judaism or Christianity in their more traditional forms, but rather the religious-secular dimensions of Holocaust remembrance itself. As Holocaust films, witness accounts, memorial sites, and remembrance days have grown in public profile across a range of societies, so in turn they have become an object of study in themselves, with key works produced by Oren Baruch Stier, Avril Alba, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, and Jackie Feldman among others.¹⁴ Through interaction with theories of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, such works give attention to the reconfiguration of religious traditions and practices, and the production of new modes of sacred experience. It is in this strand of scholarship that I write, which is to say that my concern is not the theological challenge posed by the Holocaust – though this will be mentioned at certain points – but rather the religious dimensions of remembrance activities themselves. Where this study is distinct is in addressing developments in Britain since the late 20th century. As such, the following discussions need to be sensitive to the particularities of the nation’s religious-secular landscape, and later in this introductory chapter I will address the current state of discussion on this topic. Alongside the sociologists of religion w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Holocaust memory and Abrahamic communities
• Part II Holocaust memory and the sacred: ritual, shrine, and pilgrimage
• Bibliography
• Index