An Introduction to Holocaust Studies

Michael Bernard-Donals

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315507910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This single volume traces three approaches to the study of the Holocaust - through notions of history, theories of memory, and a focus on art and representation. It introduces students to the different ways we have come to understand the Holocaust, gives them an opportunity to ask questions about those conclusions, and examines how this event can be understood once all the survivors are gone. In addition, the book looks at the different disciplines - history, sociology, religious studies, and literary interpretation, among others - through which studies of the Holocaust take place.

I THE HOLOCAUST

CHAPTER 1 The Holocaust

The Holocaust might best be defined as the systematic destruction of European Jews implemented by the National Socialist government in Germany and its allies during World War II. As a policy, it was known in Germany as the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”; the “question”—of what to be done with Jews living in the midst of non-Jewish cultures—had been around in Germany, as it had been in Europe and the Americas, for as long as Jews had lived there. That the Final Solution took place in Germany, the most industrially advanced country in Europe, raises a number of other questions, among them the relation between industrial society and anti-Semitism, German cultural understanding of non-Germans, and particularly of Jews, other countries’ and cultures’ apparent inaction in the face of the concentration and later the liquidation of Jews in Germany and German-occupied and allied countries. But because the “Jewish question” to which a final solution had to be found—and which Hitler and those in the National Socialist government of Germany implemented—was at least a thousand years old, the question of where to begin a history of the Holocaust is a difficult one to answer.

There are many very good histories of the Holocaust—among them Raul Hilberg’s pathbreaking The Destruction of the European Jews, published initially in 1961; currently Saul Friedlander is writing a three-volume history, Nazi Germany and the Jews, the first volume of which (published in 1998) covers the years 1933–39—and chronologies of the events are widely available. This chapter considers of some of the key historical moments of the Holocaust and examines why they are worth studying. It is impossible to isolate the history of the Holocaust from a broader study of it. So while there’s a difference between a history of the Holocaust and “Holocaust studies”—which focuses upon how the events are described, studied, and understood, not on the events themselves—it’s worth knowing the events’ historical timeline.

PRELUDE

But how far back does that history go? One could argue you’d have to go back as far as Judaism’s dispersion from its homeland to the far reaches of Europe and Asia after the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem to fully grasp its character in the early twentieth century in central Europe. With the Temple destroyed, Jews reconstituted their religious and cultural practice so that it could continue while essentially inside non-Jewish (primarily Christian and, later, Islamic) cultures. Before the end of the European middle ages, Jewish communities had already been established in England, in what is now France, Germany, Italy, the central European regions of Russia and Belarus, and in the southern Mediterranean including Greece, Turkey, north Africa, and west-central Asia (including Baghdad and Damascus). There, Jewish communities had to design agreements with what were essentially their national hosts, agreements that allowed Jewish practice and guaranteed their protection in the midst of a mainly Christian and sometimes-hostile environment. Hundreds of communities in Europe had by turns flourished and been persecuted in waves of an anti-Semitism that originated in the years after Jesus’s death over the non-Christian Jews’ apparent failure to accept what Christians adopted as a new covenant and—eventually—an entirely new religion (see Figure 1-1).

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the outlines of central European Jewish culture had already been established. Jews formed communities in urban centers and often, either by choice or by decree, lived separately from the broader secular or religious community. In most places laws were passed that prohibited Jews from participating in some aspects of communal life, including but not limited to banning them from owning land, joining the medical or legal professions, holding property over a certain value, or living outside designated areas of a community or city. (The term “ghetto” has its origins in sixteenth-century Venice, when the Jewish members of its community were told they could live only inside the walled area near the city’s iron foundry, or getto.) Because of restrictions that often limited Jews’ contact with non-Jews, Jews turned to one another for economic, religious, and cultural support; when Jews were allowed to work among and with non-Jews, they did so in the professions into which they were allowed—selling of merchandise and, in some cases, animal products (eggs, hides); textile manufacturing; and the handling, lending, and changing of money. They were often educated in their own communities where they received not only religious training but also apprenticeships in the trades.

Figure 1-1 Jewish communities in Europe during the Middle Ages.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the concentrations of Jews in western Europe were mainly in the cities, and this sometimes changed the character of these communities. The growth of political reform movements in the late eighteenth century extended earlier enlightenment (or Haskalah) ideals, particularly the one highlighting the importance of interweaving Jewish tradition with a modern and politically secular sensibility. As a result, many urban Jewish communities made an effort to update their practices and worldviews so that they would be more in line with the contemporary national cultures in whose midst they lived. This, the advocates of this movement believed, would help Jews become more fully accepted as members of civil communities. Within two years of the Revolution in France, Jews were “emancipated,” which meant that they were given—for the first time—the full range of rights and obligations due all citizens. Within twenty years, Jews were granted Emancipation in Holland and Prussia, and by 1870 full rights were granted to Jews in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland. With this shift over the course of just under a century, Jews became integrated into the cultures and economies of western and central Europe: by that time, 30 to 40 percent of tradespeople involved in the textile industry were Jewish, as were 16 percent of doctors and 11 percent of lawyers. Jews were active in the financial and banking industry, as well as in other professions. Though there were continually arguments over just how full the “full citizenship” rights should be—there was an argument in British parliament in 1847 over whether Lionel de Rothschild should be seated, emancipation was withdrawn in the German states according to one of the articles of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and a series of anti-Jewish riots erupted in Germany in 1819—and though anti-Semitism continued to boil just beneath the surface of these developments (and sometimes erupted), Jews had a place, and a face, in the western European landscape.

Things were different in the east. While a significant Jewish community also flourished there—in Russia, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic region—it was mainly (though certainly not exclusively) a rural phenomenon, with Jews concentrated largely in smaller towns and villages (shtetls), in some cases forming majorities of the population. The Reform movements of the western part of Europe were not as influential in the east. In part because of the influence of Hasidism (a combination of folk belief, mysticism, and more traditional Jewish observance) and the dissolution of rabbinical authority in the regions of Poland and western Russia in the 1760s, Judaism had a very different character there. Because of a more marked difference in the eastern Jews’ way of life, as well as their separation both geographically and religiously from non-Jews, anti-Jewish sentiment tended to be more virulent and violent in the east, as Jews were easier to identify as Jews. After Poland’s partition in 1772 (between Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Prussia), Russia’s Catherine the Great showed some friendliness toward those Jews inside Russia’s new boundaries. By 1791 there was enough animosity toward Jews by merchants and others who saw them as a threat to competition that Catherine was asked to restrain settlement. In 1804 she did, restricting Jews to settle a swath of territory known as the “Pale of settlement,” which stretched from Odessa in the south to Vilna in the north, and which included the cities of Lodz, Kiev, and Warsaw. Waves of pogroms against Jews overtook the region between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often during times of economic hardship. According to some scholars who have paid attention to this period—including Josef Yerushalmi and Eva Hoffman, to name only two—this led to the belief among some eastern European Jews that while borders and fortunes may change, the Jews would survive.

What all of this presaged for the mid-twentieth century was a clear distinction—of culture, of religion, and even of language—between an eastern Jewish culture that appeared (or was believed to be) different in character from rural and Christian culture, and a western Jewish culture large parts of which were becoming complementary to, if not assimilated with, the prevailing western culture and economy. It also led to the lessening, if not the elimination, of the more virulent kinds of anti-Semitism in the west, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, without an equal lessening—and perhaps even a rise—in anti-Semitism in the east. Finally, it makes clear that there had been a culture of separation of Jewish culture from broader, national cultures, one that by the beginning of the twentieth century led to questions about Jews’ affiliation with the nation or state in which they resided; their participation in, or their “ownership” of, the national economy, particularly in the west; and a set of precedents (ghettos, exclusionary laws, Jewish councils separate from but beholden to national governments, a culture of discrimination) that would come to play a major role in National Socialist Jewish policy.

THE JEWISH QUESTION

By the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, western European Jews had become full participants in their nations’ lives. But with the defeat of France by Prussia in 1871 and the world economic collapse of 1873, matters took a turn for the worse. During these years, the anti-Semitism that was held at bay in the west, and that emerged periodically in the east with varying degrees of violence and hatred, became more pronounced, in part because Jews were an obvious target. They were “others,” in the estimation of some not quite nationals but not quite foreigners whose religion and cultural practices (in spite of assimilation) made them an object of some suspicion when an object of blame or scorn was needed. After the economic collapse of 1873, Germany fell into economic stagnation (as did much of the rest of the economically developed world), and because Jews had become prominent in the financial marketplace, some suspected that Jews might be responsible for the collapse and failure of recovery measures. In Germany in 1878, the Christian Social party, led by Adolf Stocker, realized that in order to get votes from the workers and small shopkeepers who were most severely affected by the crisis, the rhetoric of Jewish “arrogance,” “control” of the press, and “finance capitalism,” could lead to a rise in the representation from that party. By 1893, explicitly anti-Semitic parties in Germany elected sixteen members to the Reichstag. In the east during the economic turmoil, particularly in Poland and Russia, significant numbers of Jewish tradespeople and workers began to sympathize with the workers’ reform movements, culminating eventually in socialist and communist parties by the early twentieth century. The formation of the Bund (the General Union of Jewish Workers) in Vilna in 1897—the same year of the first Zionist Congress—joined workers with radical intellectuals. Their common project was to revolutionize the economy for a more equitable and just society, and to help make coercive and imperial states—and Russia was seen as just such a state—to disappear. These developments helped to create an ideological (rather than a primarily religious) anti-Semitism, one based on an increased suspicion that Jews could not be counted on to join forces with members of their national community for the common good. Jewish socialists on the one hand and a “cabal” of Jewish plutocrats on the other were seen as specters of political and economic crisis on the European landscape of the late nineteenth century.

At about the same time there was a growth of racial anti-Semitism. Alfred Dreyfus was the only Jew on the General Staff of the French Army when he was accused of treason in 1894. Some of the suspicion against Dreyfus was a misplaced symptom of long-simmering French humiliation for the defeat at the hands of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war, but much of that suspicion was also the result of French anti-Semitism. Though Dreyfus was eventually acquitted of the charges against him (the evidence had been forged), the question of his guilt or innocence polarized France for nearly a decade (and some suggest it informs French anti-Semitism today). In Russia, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by socialist revolutionaries, violent pogroms sponsored by the government—eventually culminating the “May Laws” of 1882—seriously curtailed Jewish settlement in the Pale and formally reversed a comparably liberal policy toward Jews. State-sponsored anti-Semitism came to a peak in Russia with the trial of Mendel Beilis in 1911 for ritual murder. When Beilis, like Dreyfus, was finally exonerated, it pushed anti-Semitic feeling into the background, but it did not disappear. A corrupt social-Darwinist racial pseudo-theory and the beginnings of the eugenics movement emerged clearly in the last decade of the nineteenth century: Houston Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899, theorized that the Jew was a social parasite that could only sustain itself by feeding off a national host, and this image was proof of the Jew’s cultural inferiority The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery purported to be the minutes of a meeting for Jewish world domination, was published in the first decade of the twentieth century and widely circulated as genuine.

During World War I, Jews fought in the Armies of both sides: Germany, France, Britain, the United States, and Russia, among other countries. After the German defeat and the Versailles Treaty—which demilitarized Germany and exacted severe reparations payments that would hamstring the German economy and its eventual territorial designs by the third decade of the new century—many Germans again looked for scapegoats, and found many who had “stabbed Germany in the back” both during the war and after it. These included Jews, particularly “Jewish Bolsheviks” who sympathized with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and who were seen as a destabilizing force in the German political and economic systems. In 1917, the British Government—which had been given mandatory control over Palestine—declared its intention to establish a national home for Jews there. With the redrawing of the European map after the war, large numbers of Jews were concentrated in the east: in Poland (over three million), Romania (nearly a million), Hungary (nearly half a million), Lithuania and Latvia (nearly 200,000), Czechoslovakia and Austria (half a million), and the Soviet Union (nearly three million). For a time after the war, Jewish intellectual and artistic culture flourished, particularly in the German Weimar Republic, but this ended with the world economic collapse of 1929.

Even during the height of the Jewish-German renaissance of 1924–29, there were significant pockets of anti-Jewish animosity, not to mention anti-Semitism: Adolf Hitler, who had fought in World War I and had been demoralized by its aftermath, combined anti-Communism with anti-Semitism in forming the National Socialist party in the 1920s, and attempted a coup-d’etat in Munich in 1923. By the eve of the economic collapse, the Nazis had 800,000 votes in national elections; two years later they’d collected six million, and by 1932, 14 million (nearly 38 percent of the electorate). This support had been gained by promising a resurgence of German military, territorial, and cultural supremacy in Europe; by promising to heal the country’s economic ills; and by instilling a kind of pride (or arrogance) in German peoplehood at the expense of non-German, inferior peoples (Slavs and, most important, Jews).

What had become apparent by 1932 throughout Europe was that in spite of strong anti-Semitic feelings, and even programmatic anti-Semitic political agendas, Jews had gained a secure foothold in national political dialogues. This didn’t mean that Jews could rest assured: in the 1920s, Zionists in Europe and the United States understood that there was a greater need than ever to establish a safe national home for Jews outside the non-Jewish cultural centers that were productive but nonetheless perilous. The rise of the National Socialist party in Germany, as well as other fascist or fellow-traveling parties in Italy, Romania, and even the United States, was enough for some Jews to seek permits to emigrate to safer locations in the 1920s and early 1930s. But even with the sometimes virulent and racist animosity—sometimes murderous in the east—toward Jewish communities during the early years of the twentieth century, Jews thought of themselves as members of a national polity, particularly in the west. Even when their orthodoxy or religious observance maintained a distinction between their practice and their participation in a national home, most nonetheless believed that persecution was part and parcel of their condition, and that they would persevere.

THE HOLOCAUST

In early 1933, with a political stalemate in the German Reichstag, an ailing Chancellor Hindenburg, the hero of the Franco-Prussian war, appointed Hitler as a compromise leader. In the March elections that followed the appointment, the National Socialists gained 44 percent of the vote, the largest for a single party but smaller than the total of left-socialist and progressive parties. With Hitler as Chancellor and the Nazis in control of the legislature, the party quickly consolidated its power. Civil liberties were suspended and the government was given dictatorial powers right after the election; social institutions were merged into a more or less monolithic state bureaucracy, and by that summer all competing political parties had been eliminated. Trade unions were replaced by a government-controlled “labor front,” and after book burnings in 1933, a number of scientists, intellectuals, and artists who were seen as posing a threat to the party were either arrested, deported, or “persuaded” to emigrate. (By this time, however, a number of countries had put a severe cap on immigration, particularly the immigration of European Jews.) A large number of those who fled early on were Jewish. In 1934 officials of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the party’s paramilitary storm troopers, were purged (in what was called the “night of the long knives”), paving the way for an expansion of the role of the SS (Schutzstaffeln) or guard troops, what would become the Nazi elite under Heinrich Himmler. The army and police were merged in 1935, and the Army itself was brought under the direct command of the Fuhrer in 1938. Large public works projects were begun, and military factories were built and began production, in direct contravention of the Versailles Treaty. Germany occupied the Rhineland (which had been under League of Nations control) in 1936, supported Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, annexed Austria in 1938, and in that same year—with the approval of British, French, and Italian ministers who thought the move would put an en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Part I: The Holocaust
• Part II: History
• Part III: Memory
• Part IV: Representation
• Part V: Teaching
• Bibliography
• Index