The Holocaust

Raul Hilberg, whose study remains the foundation of the field, described the Holocaust as a process that unfolded in stages: definition, expropriation, concentration, annihilation. It began not with camps but with law, the register and the identity card. From 1933 the Nazi state stripped German Jews of professions, property and citizenship; from 1938 violence became open with the November pogrom; from 1939 the conquest of Poland brought the largest Jewish population in Europe under German control and into ghettos; and from the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the shooting squads of the Einsatzgruppen, and then the extermination camps built on occupied Polish soil, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Majdanek, carried out the murder of some six million Jews, two thirds of the Jews of Europe.

What was destroyed was not population alone but a civilization: the Yiddish speaking world of eastern Europe, its yeshivas and Hasidic courts, its synagogues, printing houses, libraries and schools, a religious culture a thousand years in the making, murdered in four. The Roma were subjected to a parallel genocide, and disabled people, Slavic elites, Soviet prisoners, political and religious dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses among them, and homosexual men were persecuted and killed within the same machinery.

The perpetrators were a modern European state and its willing helpers, and that fact, more than any other, is what the disciplines of history, law and theology have been answering since 1945.

The Holocaust anchors more modern Jewish thought than any single event since the destruction of the Second Temple, and the responses to it map the whole range of possibility. Richard Rubenstein argued in 1966 that after Auschwitz the traditional God of history could no longer be affirmed. Emil Fackenheim answered with what he called a 614th commandment, added to the traditional 613: Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories, forbidden to despair of God or of the world lest Judaism perish by their own hand. Eliezer Berkovits reached for the older category of hester panim, the hiding of the divine face, holding that faith after the Shoah must carry both the protest of Job and the endurance of the generations. Elie Wiesel made memory itself the religious act: to testify, so that the dead are not murdered twice.

Christian theology was confronted from the other side, with the churches' own inheritance. The centuries of the deicide charge, the ghetto and the anti Jewish sermon stood exposed as part of the soil in which the catastrophe grew, and the reckoning, documented for the Catholic case by Michael Phayer, moved from silence toward repudiation: the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate in 1965 rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt, and later statements from many churches went further.

Observance has absorbed the event. Yom HaShoah entered the Jewish calendar in 1951, kept in the spring between Passover and Independence Day, and the six million are named in liturgy, memorial and stone across the Jewish world.

Sources God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical ReflectionsEmil L. Fackenheim with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965Michael Phayer, The Destruction of the European JewsRaul Hilberg