Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2153429
Richard I. Cohen
ABSTRACT Saul Friedländer’s ‘Two Jewish Historians in Extremis: Ernst Kantorowicz and Marc Bloch in the Face of Nazism and Collaboration,’ served as an inspiration for this essay, which sets the wartime musings of two Jewish historians in France – the Ukrainian-born Elias Tcherikower and the French-born Bloch against one another. Though different in nature, Tcherikower’s personal diary in Yiddish (still in manuscript) and Bloch's Strange Defeat, published posthumously, discussed in the essay, touch on the ways in which the inner being of individuals translates the dramatic moments of the period into their lives and responds to them; the so-called ‘ego-documents’ provide discrete moments of reflection and narration that enable the historian to consider a variety of historical insights that cannot be reduced to simple ‘objective facts’ alone – as emotions, musings, dreams, nightmares, and character, and how one came to make certain decisions are enmeshed in these texts. The ways in which an East-European Jew relates to the German occupation as opposed to those of a native French Jew are at the heart of this essay.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2162779
Dany Diner
ABSTRACT This article’s basic focal point is a central argument concerning the Holocaust as an unprecedented event against the backdrop of other mass crimes. Alongside the empirical fact of distinguishing between death and death, my emphasis is on an argumentative figure reflecting the theological rejection of the biblical election of the Jews. Starting with the epistemic distinction between capital crimes in domestic criminal law – for example, the distinction between murder and homicide – I address why such factual distinctions are not made with respect to externally committed mass crimes. Instead, we find an evocation of collective images of a specific population chosen for victimhood, images evidently drawn on to justify the crime. When it comes to discourse concerning Jewish victims of the Holocaust, it is striking that essential arguments center on the question of exceptionality; more specifically, that what seems at stake is negating that exceptionality. In their formation, such negating arguments correspond to theological discourse concerning Jewish chosenness: the Nazi negative election of the Jews as their central ideological victims is denied, with reference made to other historical examples of victimhood due to mass crimes. The theological figure at work here is manifest both in the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s concerning the crimes of Bolshevism on the one hand and Nazism on the other, and the current widespread tendency related the priority of colonial crimes vis-à-vis the Nazi mass murder: What came before, what was the more original crime? In this article, I wish to focus solely on a discursive argument in view of an emerging theological form in secular garb.
{"title":"Arguing the Holocaust: Legal Anthropology and Theological Form","authors":"Dany Diner","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2022.2162779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2022.2162779","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article’s basic focal point is a central argument concerning the Holocaust as an unprecedented event against the backdrop of other mass crimes. Alongside the empirical fact of distinguishing between death and death, my emphasis is on an argumentative figure reflecting the theological rejection of the biblical election of the Jews. Starting with the epistemic distinction between capital crimes in domestic criminal law – for example, the distinction between murder and homicide – I address why such factual distinctions are not made with respect to externally committed mass crimes. Instead, we find an evocation of collective images of a specific population chosen for victimhood, images evidently drawn on to justify the crime. When it comes to discourse concerning Jewish victims of the Holocaust, it is striking that essential arguments center on the question of exceptionality; more specifically, that what seems at stake is negating that exceptionality. In their formation, such negating arguments correspond to theological discourse concerning Jewish chosenness: the Nazi negative election of the Jews as their central ideological victims is denied, with reference made to other historical examples of victimhood due to mass crimes. The theological figure at work here is manifest both in the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s concerning the crimes of Bolshevism on the one hand and Nazism on the other, and the current widespread tendency related the priority of colonial crimes vis-à-vis the Nazi mass murder: What came before, what was the more original crime? In this article, I wish to focus solely on a discursive argument in view of an emerging theological form in secular garb.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116883408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2164433
D. Porat, C. Ginzburg, Michal Govrin, D. Ohana
{"title":"Introduction (with Yehuda Bauer)","authors":"D. Porat, C. Ginzburg, Michal Govrin, D. Ohana","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2022.2164433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2022.2164433","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116768272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2156083
S. Volkov
ABSTRACT Recalling Saul Friedländer’s early life under the shadow of National Socialism and his initial encounter with the horrors of the Holocaust, this article reviews first his early efforts at analyzing both, and then his experiments with applying psychoanalysis to history in general and to antisemitism in particular during these early years. It then revisits his now classic chapter on ‘redemptive antisemitism’ in volume 1 of Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997). Having recaptured the main ingredients of this new brand of Jew-hating, which was concocted by the circle of Wagnerians in Bayreuth of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it turns to indicate two of this chapter’s other characteristics: the repeated stress on the importance of traditional Christian antisemitism, and the constant intermingling of German Jewish history with the history of antisemitism throughout this text. The article concludes by underlining that Friedländer’s main accomplishment is not in explaining the Shoah, but rather in finding the right tone for chronicling it; and by upholding the awe and disbelief one senses in confronting it, the article comes to an end.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2153978
S. Ben-Ami
ABSTRACT This article is an explication of our immediate times in plainly historical terms; an underwriting, as it were, of the idea of the present as part of the historian’s craft and mission. The West’s victorious end of the Cold War was seen by many as a defining ideological triumph that heralded the coming of a post-historical era, in which wars and sanguinary revolutions would be a thing of the past. But it did not take too long for the ‘end of the end of history’ to be apparent in both the geostrategic sphere and the political-cultural realm. The new prevailing notion that the emerging Huntingtonian reality would be mostly confined to asymmetric wars between states and terrorist insurgencies in faraway lands was belied by America’s regime-change wars in the Middle East, and now by Russia’s war on Ukraine. The latter has shattered Europe’s fantasy about a post-historical world where military power does not matter, nationalism can be tamed by subsidies, world leaders are law-abiding gentlemen, and the continent’s security can safely be outsourced to America’s power. Rearmament and military alliances are again the order of the day in Europe, as is the division of the continent between East and West. In Europe and beyond, geopolitics have again prevailed over economic calculations. History strikes back on all fronts, and our understanding of current crises – deglobalization, the competition between the US and China, Russia’s aggressive revisionism, capitalism’s 2008 crisis, the rise of populism, and Brexit’s essay in imperial nostalgia – would greatly benefit from the invocation of relevant historical analogies. But the determinist assumption that ‘analogies (are) the key to understanding our future’ (Oswald Spengler) is stretching the concept into the realm of prophecy.
{"title":"History Strikes Back","authors":"S. Ben-Ami","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2022.2153978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2022.2153978","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article is an explication of our immediate times in plainly historical terms; an underwriting, as it were, of the idea of the present as part of the historian’s craft and mission. The West’s victorious end of the Cold War was seen by many as a defining ideological triumph that heralded the coming of a post-historical era, in which wars and sanguinary revolutions would be a thing of the past. But it did not take too long for the ‘end of the end of history’ to be apparent in both the geostrategic sphere and the political-cultural realm. The new prevailing notion that the emerging Huntingtonian reality would be mostly confined to asymmetric wars between states and terrorist insurgencies in faraway lands was belied by America’s regime-change wars in the Middle East, and now by Russia’s war on Ukraine. The latter has shattered Europe’s fantasy about a post-historical world where military power does not matter, nationalism can be tamed by subsidies, world leaders are law-abiding gentlemen, and the continent’s security can safely be outsourced to America’s power. Rearmament and military alliances are again the order of the day in Europe, as is the division of the continent between East and West. In Europe and beyond, geopolitics have again prevailed over economic calculations. History strikes back on all fronts, and our understanding of current crises – deglobalization, the competition between the US and China, Russia’s aggressive revisionism, capitalism’s 2008 crisis, the rise of populism, and Brexit’s essay in imperial nostalgia – would greatly benefit from the invocation of relevant historical analogies. But the determinist assumption that ‘analogies (are) the key to understanding our future’ (Oswald Spengler) is stretching the concept into the realm of prophecy.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124819292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2162777
Michal Govrin
ABSTRACT In response to the historian’s perspective on the transmission of memory, this article proposes a writer’s point of view. Facing the tension between personal and collective memory, especially powerful in the case of the Shoah – a collective event that had imprisoned the individual – the personal dimension is described in this response as a transmission from mother to daughter. Ritual is presented as a genre enabling the shaping of memory for the collective psyche. The foundation myth of the Lurianic Kabbalah is a mode of facing Evil not as a source of fascination, but rather as a definite entity, an aim for struggle and defeat. The Jewish way of shaping the memory of the slavery in Egypt as an ongoing struggle against slavery through laws and designated rituals offers a model for shaping a ritual of Shoah remembrance as both a personal and collective responsibility.
{"title":"Shaping the Myth of the Memory of the Shoah: Response to Prof. Saul Friedländer","authors":"Michal Govrin","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2022.2162777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2022.2162777","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In response to the historian’s perspective on the transmission of memory, this article proposes a writer’s point of view. Facing the tension between personal and collective memory, especially powerful in the case of the Shoah – a collective event that had imprisoned the individual – the personal dimension is described in this response as a transmission from mother to daughter. Ritual is presented as a genre enabling the shaping of memory for the collective psyche. The foundation myth of the Lurianic Kabbalah is a mode of facing Evil not as a source of fascination, but rather as a definite entity, an aim for struggle and defeat. The Jewish way of shaping the memory of the slavery in Egypt as an ongoing struggle against slavery through laws and designated rituals offers a model for shaping a ritual of Shoah remembrance as both a personal and collective responsibility.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124113553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2159125
C. Ginzburg
Abstract A relationship between Saul Friedländer’s autobiographical text When Memory Comes and his historical magnus opus Nazi Germany and the Jews has been suggested by Stéphane Bou. This article develops this suggestion, focusing on the narrative choices Friedländer made in his major historical work. An analysis of the use of estrangement and fragmentary evidence unveils their cognitive implications.
{"title":"Between Memory and History","authors":"C. Ginzburg","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2022.2159125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2022.2159125","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A relationship between Saul Friedländer’s autobiographical text When Memory Comes and his historical magnus opus Nazi Germany and the Jews has been suggested by Stéphane Bou. This article develops this suggestion, focusing on the narrative choices Friedländer made in his major historical work. An analysis of the use of estrangement and fragmentary evidence unveils their cognitive implications.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132040079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2155379
Norbert Frei
ABSTRACT The Germans' awareness of the murder of the European Jews began with the liberation of the concentration camps by the Allies. From there, a complicated history leads, via the judicial confrontation with the crime and the establishment of the new discipline of Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history), to the TV event ‘Holocaust’ (1979), which marked a caesura not only for the German public, but also for historical scholarship. Of great importance was the mere fact that ‘Holocaust’ established a globally understandable term for what in German had until then only been referred to in the language of the perpetrators Endlösung (Final Solution) or Judenvernichtung (extermination of the Jews), or in a metaphorical manner (‘Auschwitz’). The intensified public and historiographical examination of the destruction of the European Jewry that followed ‘Holocaust’ also provoked political and cultural counterforces, and led to heated debates in the 1980s. The term Zivilisationsbruch (breach of civilization) introduced by Dan Diner in the wake of the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) marked the singularity of the Jewish genocide and influenced both the development of Holocaust historiography and the evolution of Holocaust memory. The article seeks to explore this impact by going back into the German and European history of research on and remembrance of the fate of the Jews in Europe during World War II – from its beginnings in the late 1940s up to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000 and the years thereafter.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2160103
D. Ohana
ABSTRACT This article illuminates memory from the perspective of the historical writings of Saul Friedländer. The theoretical term I coined for this phenomenon is restorative memory, which describes the functional adjustment of the frequently changing plasticity of memory which essentially inflects our attitude toward our past experiences. This is especially evident when details and events related to our past are reconstructed and adapted to the current circumstances of our personal and private lives, adapted to serve specific contemporary political, social, and educational goals. The selective reconstruction of biographic and collective events occurs through emphasis, deletion, enhancement, rejection, addition, or elimination of relevant details. The needs of the present result in the reconstruction of the past and the attribution of new meanings to events that have also been emphasized, deleted, enhanced, added, or eliminated from memory. According to Thomas Mann, the term ‘historiology’ refers to the objective study of history to obtain scientific knowledge. Restorative memory refers to the reconstruction of past events to shape the present. History is fleeting; restorative memory persists.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2022.2156572
Ilan Troen
ABSTRACT This essay brings together observations regarding the struggle over the Holy Land in the context of Saul Friedländer’s interests in Zionism, the role of memory in history, and the Holocaust. History and collective memory remain fundamental to the way claims have been made to the Holy Land. Jewish control over Mandatory Palestine has often been challenged in established monotheistic theology, particularly Christian supersessionism. Like other nationalisms, Zionism is supported by historical narratives framed in secular terms. Thus, arguments that support a Jewish state and those that deny its legitimacy have recourse to historical narratives. With the disposition of the Ottoman Empire largely determined by the Christian West, European antisemitism and the Holocaust proved of singular importance in the ongoing theological and ideological arguments for establishing a secure refuge for Jews. Moreover, the essay demonstrates that these discourses are not necessarily separate, but rather often overlap and complement one another. In the course of this examination, the essay references selected strands of contemporary Christianity: Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Mainline Protestantism, and Palestinian Liberation Theology. While accounting for antisemitism and the Holocaust once seemed to promise change in some established dogmas, it remains to be seen how significantly and permanently it has occasioned the hoped-for reevaluation of the Jews’ role in history given the extent and depth of supersessionist thought when also supported by ostensibly secular political categories.
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