Holocaust

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HOLOCAUST

A number of philosophical issues arise relating to the destruction of most of the Jewish community in Europe in the twentieth century by the Nazis and their allies. This event has been labeled the Holocaust—or Shoah in Hebrew—in order to indicate its unique status.

Uniqueness

Was the Holocaust unique? There has been an extended debate on this issue. The obvious response is that it was not unique, because other ethnic groups have also been singled out for destruction—and have been destroyed—by powerful enemies. Hitler famously referred to the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey in the early part of the twentieth century when the question arose as to whether people would object to the Holocaust. Because few were interested in the fate of the Armenians—who had so recently been massacred—who would care about the Jews? Throughout human history groups of people who were in some way distinctive have been singled out for persecution and death, and the Jews are hardly the only target. Nor was the Holocaust the only large-scale act of genocide to occur; even in the same century there were several other instances of attempts to destroy an ethnic group.

It has been argued that the Holocaust is unique because never before, or since, have the entire technological resources of the state been directed in such a protracted manner against an indigenous community. The Holocaust took place over many years, against a group of people who could not be realistically regarded as any sort of threat to the state, and was in many ways carried out in opposition to the main aims of the war. For example, when the German army was short of railway stock in order to transport troops, the organizers of the Holocaust increased their efforts to direct stock away from the military in order to continue with the policy of annihilation. Even when the war was clearly lost the policy continued to be pursued until almost the last moment of practicability.

Why does the issue of uniqueness matter? It matters because if the Holocaust was unique, then it may call for new answers and directions. For example, it may give some validation to the creation of the State of Israel as a home for the Jewish people who survived. It may also call for new responses because it would then represent a break in history, and in particular in Jewish history. After all, Jewish history is replete with disasters of one kind and another, and the large-scale destruction of Jewish communities is a familiar feature of that history over the millennia. Is the Holocaust just another disaster among many similar—albeit more limited—disasters? Or does it represent a change in quality, not just quantity?

Radical Responses

One of the most radical responses to the Holocaust is provided by Richard Rubenstein (1966), who argues that the events of the Holocaust rule out the traditional God of the Jewish Bible. The traditional God participated in Jewish history; were such a God to exist he would surely have participated in the Holocaust, and prevented it. Because he did not, it follows that the concept of God has to change. What is needed is a concept of God that takes people closer to nature rather than away from it. Thus the traditional Jewish laws and rituals that emphasize the denial of nature are to be transcended and replaced with a far more hedonistic form of practice. For Rubenstein the return of the Jews to Israel typifies this, to a degree, because it represents a return to the land and to a more rooted and organic form of existence. By forging a new relationship with nature, Jews can transcend the negativity of history—whose paradigm is the Holocaust—and change Judaism itself.

Irving Greenberg (1981) also takes the Holocaust to compel radical steps—an end to the idea of a covenant between the Jews and God. Whereas to begin with the Jews were the junior partner in the covenant—and later on became equal partners—after the Holocaust the Jews are the senior partner, because God has to show himself prepared to act on behalf of the survivors if he is to play any role in their continuing lives at all. The whole idea of an agreement implies that both parties to it will uphold their side of the agreement, and God has clearly not held up his side because he allowed the Holocaust to occur. While Greenberg does see the hand of God in some events after the Holocaust—in particular in relationship to the State of Israel—he clearly holds God in dereliction of his duty, and calls therefore for a new relationship with him.

Arthur Cohen (2002) derives from the Holocaust the silence of God, and his distance from human affairs. To a degree this is not a new factor, because God has always been remote; he has to be if he is to allow people to be free and make their own decisions. Yet the God who emerges is clearly not the ordinary God of religion, but rather a deity who often hides his face and leaves his creatures to get on with their lives by themselves. Clearly such a God cannot be implicated readily in the State of Israel either, and Cohen is skeptical of the point of such a state, reflecting the doubts of Franz Rosenzweig on Zionism. It is the role of the Jewish people to typify a long and difficult relationship with God, not to live in a state of their own like everyone else.

Clearly these responses to the Holocaust call for a new definition of the relationship between God and the world. They also call for a new understanding of what constitutes religious practice, because the old prayers and rituals of Judaism may seem to be irrelevant given this new concept of God. What is worth noting is the crucial significance of the Holocaust to the propounders of these views. The Holocaust is not taken to be one disaster coming after many other disasters, but as an event with an existential meaning all its own. It is a unique event and so calls for unique responses. If those responses demand an entirely new understanding of Judaism, then it would be intellectually dishonest not to establish such an understanding.

Art and the Uniqueness Doctrine

There are important implications of the uniqueness doctrine for art. Adorno famously is supposed to have said that after Auschwitz there could be no art. As a factual claim this is problematic, because not only has there been art subsequently, there was even art during the Holocaust. However grim the conditions are under which artists work, they always manage to operate—some even believe that the harder the conditions the more important it is to respond aesthetically. What Adorno may be suggesting is that the whole context within which art takes place has changed irrevocably due to the Holocaust, and so art that does get done no longer has the character that it appears to have. For example, it may be that the German language has been so corrupted by its use in Nazi Germany that it can never be used again in a fresh and creative way. Although this may be plausible about German, it hardly would extend to other languages—and in fact does not even seem to describe German. Indeed, there has been no shortage of successful German prose and verse since the Holocaust, and in fact that event has often been its subject. It is difficult to make sweeping claims about art, of course, but it does not seem to have been noticeably altered by the Holocaust, nor has art changed much since the Holocaust.

Adorno probably means something a bit less obvious by his claim. Art rests on a whole range of human practices and expectations, and the Holocaust seriously threatened many of these. A defenseless and inoffensive minority were ruthlessly murdered by their fellow citizens, not as a random act of violence but through the machinery of the state and with little evidence of anyone outside of the minority disapproving. The scientific and rational forces of society were used for this purpose, occurring in what had until then been widely regarded as one of the most civilized and advanced societies in the world.

Adorno is pointing to the end of what is sometimes known as the Enlightenment Project, the idea that over time the world would progress as a result of the growing reliance on rationality and science. During the Holocaust, rationality and science were put entirely at the disposal of the murderers, and those techniques were revealed to be mere tools to be employed without reference to moral restrictions. The optimism of the Enlightenment was thereby undone and should be replaced to by a thoroughgoing realism about the possibility of human progress.

The implications for art are clear. Whereas in the past it was thought that art has a civilizing impact, the Holocaust taught people that it may be enjoyed just as much by the morally corrupt as by anyone else. Thus its status changes from being an aspect of human nobility and cultural progress to becoming a morally neutral means of distraction. Hence Adorno's claim that art has irretrievably changed after the Holocaust.

Other Responses to the Uniqueness Thesis

Emil Fackenheim (1982) presents a powerful defense of the uniqueness thesis, deriving from it what he calls the 614th commandment (there are traditionally held to be 613 commandments applicable to the Jews) that Hitler is awarded no posthumous victories. Such victories include assimilation and the destruction of the State of Israel, but Fackenheim does not see the Holocaust as calling for a radically new approach to Judaism itself or to the relationship between Jews and God.

Another important thinker is Elie Wiesel (1969), who wrote powerfully on his experiences and those of others during the Holocaust. He also sees it as not calling for a new understanding of faith. In particular, to the question of where was God at Auschwitz, he replies with the question where was humanity? The Holocaust represents an event carried out by human beings against other human beings and it is squarely on the shoulders of the murderers that the responsibility should be placed. One cannot expect God to rescue people from the evil decisions and actions of others, because were he to do so their capacity to act freely would be severely constrained.

This latter point is drawn on extensively by Eliezer Berkovits (1973) and Ignaz Maybaum (1965), different thinkers who agree that the Holocaust can be put within a normal Jewish theological context. The Holocaust does not represent a break in history, it is just one more disaster undergone by the Jewish people, and these disasters do have a point to them. God has a role in mind for the Jews, and this is to represent the divine role in history. That the Jews are never entirely destroyed reveals God's actions on behalf of the Jews. For Berkovits the Jews have to undergo suffering in order to sanctify the Holy Name, the traditional interpretation of Jewish suffering. For Maybaum the Holocaust represents an important stage in human history, and the sufferings of the Jews are supposed to lead the gentile world to reflect on the direction that their actions are leading them to pursue. Both thinkers discuss the difficult balancing act that God undertakes. He has to separate himself sufficiently from his creation in order to allow people to be free, whereas at the same time he has to enter into the human world in order to play a part in history.

The Holocaust from a Christian Point of View

A theme of many Christian views calls for some introspection into the responsibility of various churches for antiSemitism and its eventual outcome in the Holocaust. There have also been more positive analyses, in particular the argument that only Christianity can properly explain human suffering, because only Christianity has at its heart the notion of a suffering deity, in the person of Jesus Christ. The normal conception of God in Judaism is abstract, and many leading Jewish thinkers—such as Maimonides—have strenuously fought against any anthropomorphizing of the concept of the deity. This rather distant notion of a deity is said to be unhelpful during events such as the Holocaust.

It is certainly true that if people are in pain it is good to be comforted by someone who knows precisely what it is like to share in that condition. However, it may be argued that if such a person were in a position to relieve the pain, and does nothing, then the comfort is somewhat reduced. People may be more interested in pain relief than in sympathy, and indeed the latter may be valued largely as a stage on the route to the former. The Christian approach to the Holocaust does, however, raise the important question that runs through the debate—namely, what concept of God can survive the Holocaust experience? The more radical responses insist that a new concept of God is needed, whereas the less radical approaches defend the continuation of the traditional notion of God, and see the Holocaust as just another stage in Jewish history.

The Indescribability Thesis

Fackenheim (1982) and others have declared that the Holocaust is indescribable. This follows to a degree from its uniqueness. If it is, as an event, really unique, then it could be argued that it escapes the normal categories of description. The indescribability of the Holocaust also explains to a degree why it has been little discussed by philosophers. The indescribability thesis does not appear to be plausible, because there have been many accounts of the Holocaust, and there seems to be little difficulty in describing it. Around the world there are museums, memorials, and libraries designed to ensure that the world does not forget the Holocaust. In order not to forget the event itself must be described.

The indescribability thesis is rather like the uniqueness thesis in that it is intended not to literally make a claim about the Holocaust, but instead is a metaphorical indication of the extraordinary nature of the attempted extermination of the Jews in Europe as carried out by Germany and its allies. To say that this is easy to describe and that it is just one example of mass murder among many others has seemed to many commentators to diminish the enormity of the Holocaust.

Israel

As noted earlier, one of the effects of the Holocaust is taken to be the creation of the State of Israel. Fackenheim suggests that the Holocaust represented the breakdown of Christian-Jewish relations, and the State of Israel is a tikkun, a repair of those relations. In the same way that the Holocaust is a break in history, so is the creation of Israel. It may well be that there is a factual link between the Holocaust and the State of Israel, but from a philosophical point of view it is difficult to see the logical link. Could God not have brought about a state for the Jews in a less costly manner? Was it really necessary for so many innocent people to die? And what about the rights of the people displaced from Palestine to make room for a Jewish state? These people played no part in the Holocaust, and yet were uprooted from the land by Zionism. The opposition to Zionism frequently compares it as a doctrine with Nazism in order to try to weaken the idea that Israel's existence is justified by the occurrence of the Holocaust.

Related Moral Issues

An event of the stature of the Holocaust brings out sharply some interesting moral topics, such as the responsibility of the bystander for what goes on in his or her country, and the possibility of forgiveness for a crime of such enormity. During the Holocaust a large number of civilians apparently could have helped the victims, but did not, or could have expressed their views on what was happening, but declined to do so. Of course, there would have been a cost involved, yet the attitude of many was that the events of the Holocaust were not their responsibility because they were not actually the perpetrators and they had not troubled to find out precisely what was going on.

Since the Holocaust, the responsibility of the bystander—as opposed to the actual criminal actor—has become much more of an issue. For the criminal actor, the excuse of only following orders has become less defensible. Agents are expected to be able to consider the moral acceptability of the orders they are given and not carry them out if they are immoral. Finally, the issue of forgiveness and national responsibility arises. Who if anyone is entitled to forgive the agents of the Holocaust? Under what circumstances should they be forgiven—if they should be forgiven at all? What responsibility do their descendents have for the well-being of the survivors, or the Jews in general, or the State of Israel? Is it appropriate to blame a country—Germany—when most of its citizens were born after the Holocaust? How far can a country be held to be guilty at any time?