I do not pretend to fully grasp the Jewish argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust. But I do know that Jewish scholars are not saying that the Jewish Holocaust was worse than any other genocide. They are certainly not trying to diminish the horror and injustice of so many other terrible events that blot the story of human history by elevating the Holocaust above all other atrocities.
My sense is that Jews use the term “unique” in reference to the Holocaust not as an evaluative term, but in an attempt to indicate that something different happened in Europe between 1938 and 1945 than has ever happened previously or has ever since been repeated. As far as I understand it, the argument for uniqueness resides primarily in the fact that the Nazi intention was to eliminate all Jews from Europe solely because they were Jews.
The American historican Lucy S. Dawidowicz who died in 1990 wrote,
To refer to the murder of the 6 million Jews as distinctive, as unique, is not an attempt to magnify the catastrophe that befell them nor to beg tears and pity for them. It is not intended to minimize the deaths of the millions of non-Jews that the Germans brought about, or to underplay the immeasurable and unendurable suffering of Russians, Poles, Gypsies, and other victims of the German murder machine. To speak of the singularity of the murder of the 6 million European Jews is not to deny the incontestable fact that the gas chambers extinguished without discrimination all human life. The murder of the 6 million Jews stands apart from the deaths of the other millions, not because of any distinctive fate that the individual victims endured, but because of the differentiative intent of the murderers and the unique effect of the murders.
The intent on the part of the German dictatorship to annihilate the Jews was based on their judgment that the Jews had no right to live, a judgment that no one has the right to make. Karl Jaspers, German philosopher, explained the uniqueness of the murder of the 6 million Jews: “Anyone who on the basis of such a judgment plans the organized slaughter of a people and participates in it, does something that is fundamentally different from all crimes that have existed in the past.”
The “differentiative intent of the murderers” to which Dawidowicz refers is the Nazi determination to destroy Jews only because they were Jews. As Emil Fackenheim has said, the Jews’ “‘crime’ was Jewish existence.”
The “unique effect of the murders” Dawidowicz describes as that fact that
The immensity of the Jewish losses destroyed the biological basis for the continued communal existence of Jews in Europe. Every country and people ravaged by the war and by the German occupation eventually returned to a normal existence…. But the annihilation of the 6 million European Jews brought an end with irrevocable finality to the thousand-year-old culture and civilization of Ashkenazic Jewry, destroying the continuity of Jewish history. This is the special Jewish sorrow. This is why the surviving Jews grieve, mourning the loss of their past and the imperilment of their future.
For me as a Christian, it may be that the particular importance and power of the Holocaust lie in the undeniable link between the vicious antimsemitism at the heart of Nazism and the tragic history of many Christians’ attitudes toward Jewish people.
The fact that the Jews of Europe were slaughtered solely because they were Jews means that their destruction was at heart fundamentally driven by antisemitism. And it seems increasingly clear to me that there is a link between a kind of arrogant Christian triumphalism and the legitimization of antisemitism. We must acknowledge the damage done by the Christian tendency to divide the world into those we accept as fully blessed by God because they agree with us and those we view as excluded from God’s full favour because they do not accept our understanding of God and faith.
So, the Holocaust demands of me as a Christian that I renounce any claim to God’s special favour to the exclusion of any other of God’s people. It challenges me to examine deeply the Christian claims for the distinctiveness of Christ. I must be wiling to ask myself what impact the Christian claims for special status before God may have upon my ability to embrace the whole human community with the openness and compassion I believe are the fundamental characteristic of the God who is the source of all creation.
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August 21, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Jaqueline
>> The intent on the part of the German dictatorship to annihilate the Jews was based on their judgment that the Jews had no right to live.
That was their judgement. But only part of it. That was the part of the judgement that was carried out.
If the Nazi’s had won, it would not be Jews alone who would be grieving the loss of millions. The Final Solution was the beginning, the first fruits of a cleansing of the earth to get it ready for those judged to be the only ones who had the right to live.
There would be no Arab ( despite for a while Arabic SS Divisions tolerated for the purpose they served ) no First Nations, no Spanish, no Italian, no Chinese, no Russian, no Black ( except those races might have had the privilege to be a slave class…for a while ).
Were the Armenians sent walking into the desert for any other reason than they were Armenian? Were the Tutsi’s not massacred simply for being Tutsi’s? Were Bosnians not massacred simply for being Muslim? Do First Nations not grieve the loss of land, the decimation of population and and the loss of a way of life that can never be restored or returned to them? Do not any of these people have THEIR special burden?
Every example of Genocide is different and unique from another. Every one can lay claim to being the only one.
We cannot look for answers by trying to establishing whether it is unique or different.
If it truly is so , let us lay the Holocaust to rest and say “Thank Goodness! THAT will never happen again!” If it truly is only about being Jewish, let’s give the floor to others who have suffered for a change. Let us leave the Holocaust alone and get on with it. Let us say “alright we get it already!”.
Instead we are told we should never forget it. Never forget it? Why not? We apparently have forgotten everyone else’s tragedy, and we do not get inundated every day in the media with anyone elses Genocide or anyone elses nasty Dictator.( Look how quickly we have forgotten Darfur, and the CBC’s latest offering on Twentieth Century History makes Mao and Stalin look almost like Boy Scouts).
We, still on a smaller scale have the same attitudes that ended up killing the Jews, obviously remembering the Holocaust has not made us more cautious about our own xenophobia, our own need to have the world ‘just so’. It hasn’t stopped Christians finding some other group of people to be branded the disgusting, abominable ones. If it truly is unique and is only about Jews and the Nazi’s, go bury that past and stop making us sorry for something we can’t go back and undo. I mean we fought a very big nasty War to defeat the Nazi’s, is that not enough? Perhaps not to save Jews specifically, to save ourselves actually, but some wonder that they might have thought to take up arms themselves…..
We did not care for Rwanda or Darfur because we have not learned from the Holocaust. Christians can raise placards declaring Gays burn in Hell because we did not learn from the Holocaust. Australia can call it’s Refugee containment strategy “The Pacific Solution” because we did not learn from the Holocaust.
We will learn nothing unless we see it as not only the Jewish story, we HAVE to see it as OUR story, we HAVE to see ourselves in every face behind every bit of barbed wire, upon every corpse and behind every Nazi Uniform. We have to see ourselves in Hitler, we HAVE to see ourselves in Anne Frank. This is the Massacre, the Genocide that came home to us. This is the one that ought to lead us into every other human tragedy there ever was and cause us to repent of our superiority, our prejudice our racial, social, moral, aspirational uniqueness. We will not learn from it unless it becomes more than the Jewish story. If it is only to remain that, it is time to close that book and put it to bed please.
But the Holocaust perhaps does not leave us alone because we have not learned what we need to from it. I do know that what we think we have learned has not hit home or has not done it’s job or has missed the point because as in any story ever told, Ghosts will not leave us in peace until we have heard and learned from what they have to tell.
August 22, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Jaqueline
Interestingly I read this link WordPress provided to this blog by a Jewish man addressing the same issue : http://jewonthis.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/why-is-this-genocide-different-from-all-other-genocides/
“…By highlighting and overstating the Jewish Holocaust I think that people remember unethically: they remember for their own purposes, rather than to support others who have been through similar atrocities.”
“And this, I think, underscores the anxieties which Jews in the post-war world feel: that unless we can be the standout victims then our position is precarious.”