Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust

By David Engel

The Nazi Holocaust is often said to dominate the study of modern Jewish history. Engel demonstrates that, to the contrary, historians of the Jews have often insisted that the Holocaust be sequestered from their field, assigning it instead to historians of Europe, Germany, or the Third Reich. He shows that reasons for this counterintuitive situation lie in the evolution of the Jewish historical profession since the 1920s.

This one-of-a-kind study takes readers on a tour of twentieth-century scholars of the history of European Jewry, and the social and political contexts in which they worked, in order to understand why many have declined to view their subject from the vantage point of Jews' encounter with the Third Reich. Engel argues vehemently against this separation and describes ways in which a few exceptional scholars have used the Holocaust to illuminate key problems in the Jewish past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9780804773461

Book preview

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STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust

David Engel

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust was originally published in

Hebrew under the title Mul har haGa’ash: Hokrei toledot yisra’el

lenochah haSho’ah © Zalman Shazar Center.

Published with the assistance of the Maurice R. and Corinne P.

Greenberg Chair in Holocaust Studies, New York University.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or

retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford

University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Engel, David Joshua, 1951–

Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust / David Engel.

p. cm.—(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)

Originally published in Hebrew under the title Mul har haGa’ash.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804773461

1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Historiography. 2. Jews—Europe—Historiography. 3. Historiography—Europe—History—20th century. 4. Jewish historians. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

D804.348.E55 2010

940.53’18072—dc22

2009024652

Typeset by Westchester Book Services in 10.5/14 Galliard

In Memory of Amos Funkenstein

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

One - Negating Lachrymosity

Two - Rehabilitating Exile

Three - The Jewish People Murdered Itself

Four - What Is More Central Than the Holocaust?

A Final Word

Reference Matter

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book is the product of three incidents.

In 1991 I transferred the center of my academic activity from Tel Aviv to New York. Several months later I ran into a former colleague who had made a similar move a year earlier. When I told him I had been invited to occupy a chair in modern Jewish history at New York University, he responded with surprise. But you don’t do Jewish history! he exclaimed. You study the Holocaust.

His reaction epitomized a phenomenon whose extent and significance I had yet to appreciate—the tendency of historians of the Holocaust on one hand and historians of the Jews, especially of the modern period, on the other to construct their fields as two separate realms, each with its own rules and practices, whose border is not readily crossed. The phenomenon is counterintuitive: at first glance it seems self-evident that the mass murder of European Jews during the 1940s was connected in some way with the history of the Jews in modern times. Indeed, for publishers and booksellers, whose interests intersect closely with those of the academy, the two subjects are commonly treated as overlapping.a Still, my colleague, himself an outstanding historian of

This version of the book has been somewhat pared from the original, mainly in the footnotes. Readers seeking additional supporting or explanatory material should consult the Hebrew.

Nazi Germany, had no doubt that the history of the Holocaust and the history of the Jews defined two distinct specialties, and he wondered how someone like me—thoroughly rooted, he thought, in one of them—would suddenly trespass a clearly designated professional boundary.

Needless to say, I saw things differently. My academic training as a historian had given me expertise precisely in the history of the Jews in modern Europe. True, at the time of my encounter with my colleague the greater part of my publications (although by no means all) had focused on the years 1939–1945, but I regarded my occupation with that particular chronological interval largely as an expression of a broad interest in a historical problem of paramount importance for Jews (and other minority populations) over the previous three hundred years: How did the international system that crystallized gradually between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries—that is, the system of territorially contiguous sovereign nation-states whose internal affairs are beyond the control of any overarching power—affect the ways in which Jews pursued their physical safety and material well-being, and their efforts’ relative success or failure, in the various countries in which they lived? My two books about the relations between the Polish government-in-exile and various Jewish organizations and representatives during the Second World War—the initial source, it seems, of my reputation as a scholar of the Holocaust—were informed largely by a desire to examine the political resources that that system placed at the Jews’ disposal at the height of its development and the ways in which Jews deployed them at a time of grave collective existential danger. It was obvious to me that such an examination demanded detailed exploration of the many exogenous factors that influenced the situation of the Jews, the extent of their resources, and the use they made of them during the interval in question. As a result I studied the histories of Nazi Jewish policies, Polish-Jewish relations, the Second Polish Republic, the Polish-Soviet conflict, international efforts to protect minorities, and Allied diplomacy during the Second World War. Along the way I took part in discussions of interest primarily to historians of Nazi Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union, the Second World War, European minorities, twentieth-century international relations, and modern genocide, without reference to the specific questions about Jews that initially catalyzed my research. But as far as I was concerned, I was reaching into these other areas, including the Holocaust, mainly in order to help me understand what had happened specifically to Jews during the modern era, in much the same way that other participants in the same discussions came to them out of a particular interest in Germans, Poles, Armenians, communists, or liberal internationalists. Acquiring expertise in the history of the Holocaust thus hardly seemed a departure from what I had thought of as my original professional trajectory. Nor did I think that being appointed to a chair in modern Jewish history required me to cease being involved in Holocaust studies. I was changing my geographic center, not my intellectual one.

Not that I wasn’t aware of an inclination to divide the two fields. On the contrary, I knew that historians of my generation who studied the Holocaust were increasingly being trained in the history of Europe (especially Germany), not of the Jews. Those historians were interested primarily in the people who killed the Jews or assisted the murder campaign. They regarded Jews largely as passive victims; if they assigned them any role in the broad narrative of the Holocaust that emerged from their studies, it was as images in their murderers’ minds, not as cognizant or sentient actors struggling to cope with an increasingly desperate situation. I also knew that hardly any of my contemporaries who studied the history of the Jews in modern times assigned the Holocaust a significant place on their intellectual agendas. In 1986 a former president of the Association for Jewish Studies, the principal learned society of Judaicists in North America, had even complained publicly that there were too few trained historians of the Jews capable of teaching the history of the Holocaust in American universities (Band, Editorial.). Nevertheless, at the time I thought the situation a temporary coincidence. After all, academic interest in the Holocaust was growing, along with interest among the larger public. I believed that such mounting curiosity would attract historians of the Jews to the subject, just as they and their colleagues from other fields of history are routinely drawn to topics that excite the broader academy and its surrounding society from time to time. Only after encountering my colleague did I understand that the situation was not a passing one, born of momentary circumstance, but the product of a principled position deeply rooted in the professional discourse of Holocaust scholars and historians of the Jews alike.

Since then I have heard that position articulated many times. I doubt, however, that I would have undertaken to think systematically about its foundations or to search for its roots were it not for two additional occurrences. The first took place in 2000, when senior academic officers at New York University asked me to move from the chair in modern Jewish history to a new chair in the history of the Holocaust, to be established in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. University and museum officials agreed that the occupant of the chair should be a historian of the Jews, precisely in order to balance the dominance in Holocaust studies of research about perpetrators and bystanders. At first I hesitated over the implications of what colleagues might (and in some cases did) interpret as a second transgression of a professional boundary, this time in the opposite direction from the first. That prospect compelled me to look carefully at the intellectual grounds for separating the two fields. When I examined the arguments routinely put forth by those who endorsed the separation, I discovered a set of logical fallacies and empirical misconceptions. That finding made me see the proposed move as a chance to open a discussion, in the hope that professional discourse concerning the nexus between the two fields might eventually be placed upon a sounder intellectual footing.

Around the same time my longtime friend and colleague Avraham (Patchi) Shapiro, professor of modern Jewish intellectual history at Tel Aviv University, offered me a platform from which discussion could begin. In one of our conversations he spoke of a new book series he was editing featuring studies of central problems in modern Jewish thought. Agreeing that the Holocaust’s imprint upon the ways in which the modern history of the Jews has been narrated and conceptualized is a subject worth investigating, he invited me to write about it for the series. As a result the book was written and initially published in Hebrew (although ultimately not in the series for which it was originally prepared). Also, it was decided that the book should concentrate upon historians of the Jews and their thinking about the Holocaust’s place among their professional concerns instead of upon scholars of the Holocaust and their approaches to the history of the Jews. Investigating the interrelations between the two fields from the perspective of Holocaust studies would no doubt add much to the picture presented below. So too would comparing the situation among historians of the Jews with the impact of the Holocaust and the Nazi period in general upon the historiography of Germany, or studying how the Holocaust has influenced representations of the Jewish past in the countries formerly under Nazi occupation. However, practical considerations have made it necessary to limit the scope of what follows to discourse among academic historians of the Jews about the Holocaust’s proper role in conceptualizing and representing earlier eras in that history, primarily as that discourse has developed in the two primary centers of Jewish studies following the Second World War—North America and the State of Israel. I am thus deeply grateful to Patchi for the many ways in which he has helped shape this work. Of course he bears no responsibility for anything that I have written. On the other hand, if the book has any merit, much of the credit belongs to him.

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The limits of the book require further emphasis at the outset, so that readers will not misapprehend its intent. To begin with, this is not a book about the Holocaust or Holocaust studies strictly speaking. It is concerned instead with the approaches to the Holocaust most commonly demonstrated by academic historians of the Jews whose chief interest lies in earlier periods of Jewish history and not in the years of the Holocaust proper. Hence its principal focus is not the many efforts of historians and academicians from other disciplines to explain the Holocaust but the ways in which the growing body of academic research about the Holocaust has (or has not) influenced how historians of the Jews describe and analyze the eras and issues that most interest them. In other words, the book inquires initially after the extent to which historians of the Jews have employed the work of scholars of the Holocaust as a source of data or insights that might inform their own studies. It finds that in practice the historians in question have for the most part not regarded Holocaust studies as especially relevant to their concerns. They have adopted this attitude, however, not because they have made a systematic effort to locate such data or insights and come up empty but because they have dismissed a priori any possibility of locating them and thus rejected all efforts to do so out of hand.

The major portion of the book searches for the roots of that rejection. It locates them first of all in the academic discourse concerning the history of the Jews as it has evolved since the 1920s. As a result, the book rests upon two layers. At its core is an exposition of the development of the historiography of the Jews during the past eight decades in which the attitudes of prominent historians toward the Holocaust offer a new critical lens for rereading familiar texts and reconstructing the history of the Jewish historiographical enterprise. Wrapped around this core, as it were, is an essay urging extended scholarly consideration, such as has yet to take place, of how study of the Holocaust might contribute most productively to the study of the Jewish past. The essay calls for discussion, but it does not suggest what its outcome ought to be. Thus it does not preclude the conclusion that the Holocaust reveals nothing of value about the lives its victims lived before disaster struck. It notes only that at present most leading academic historians of the Jews affirm that conclusion as a matter of faith and have not submitted it to critical scholarly examination. Against such faith the book suggests that only after extended consideration informed by both detailed empirical studies and broad scholarly syntheses of data from the Holocaust period will it be possible to assess intelligently how scholarship on the Holocaust might contribute to illuminating other eras and themes in the history of the Jews.

Similarly, the book does not pretend to list and describe all possible points of intersection between the Holocaust and Jewish history or to put forth a positive proposal for reformulating the latter in light of the former. Instead it confines itself to demonstrating that various positive proposals for reformulation have been raised over the years, only to be dismissed by most historians of modern Jewry for reasons stemming less from serious intellectual engagement than from a process of historical conditioning that began a decade and a half before the Holocaust itself. The major part of the book traces that process and the imprint it has left on contemporary academic Jewish historiographical practice.

In presenting its argument the book offers critical comment on the writings of several leading historians, including accomplished and valued colleagues from whom I have learned much and whose contributions to the study of Jewish history are inestimable. Let it thus be underscored: the book treats only the work of scholars of the first rank, and whatever dissent it expresses from one or another argument they have raised should be taken only as a sign of the esteem in which I hold them. I can only hope that my colleagues will note the seriousness and respect with which I regard their views and will afford what follows the same consideration.

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Many people have helped me prepare this book, and I note their contributions with gratitude. Gulie Ne’eman Arad, Israel Bartal, Daniel Blatman, Robert Chazan, and Yael Feldman read all or part of the manuscript and offered valuable comments. Paula Hyman, Antony Polonsky, and Steven Zipperstein accepted my invitation to participate in a roundtable discussion of the book’s theme when the project was still in its preparatory phase. This event, which took place at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies in December 2001, contributed much to sharpening my perception of the subject’s dimensions. Paul Shapiro encouraged me to begin putting my thoughts into writing, first when he suggested that I lecture on the topic at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, later when he invited me to lead a series of workshops on the links between the Holocaust and Jewish studies, and finally when he arranged for the museum to cosponsor publication of the original Hebrew edition. At those workshops I was joined by co-leaders Berel Lang and Alvin Rosenfeld, who helped me understand the impact of the Holocaust upon their fields—philosophy and literature. Dan Michman and Boaz Cohen permitted me to examine important pieces they had written prior to publication. Israel Gutman and Guy Miron drew my attention to pertinent sources. Michal Engel helped locate materials for research. Some of these people may contest much of what the book has to say; some may even disavow their contribution altogether. I offer them my apologies in advance. Mentioning their names does not associate them in any way with any of the book’s opinions and certainly not with its defects. Responsibility for all that appears below is mine alone.

The book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher Amos Funkenstein, who nearly four decades ago introduced me to most of the writings whose analysis provides the nucleus of the discussion that follows. There is no way to calculate the intellectual, professional, and personal debt I owe him. He has left the corporeal world, but his spirit continues to inspire.

The greatest debt of all I owe my wife, Ronit, for her sacrifice and support throughout the years. It is an obligation that is beyond repayment.

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It has become customary to conclude the preface to a scholarly book with an indication of the place where it was written. The custom presumes that every such book necessarily reflects a geocultural perspective about which readers ought to be informed. Because this book is the product of thinking about boundaries and their transgression, it is perhaps fitting that it was written in more than one location. Most of the first draft was prepared during my tenure as the Louis and Bessie Stein Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. Special thanks are due the center’s director, David Ruderman, and his staff for the gracious hospitality and outstanding working conditions they provided. Additional pieces were written in Paris, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, New York, and Washington, DC as well as during travel between these and other points. Indeed, the Hebrew text of this preface was composed in an airport transit lounge en route between the United States and Israel while I was awaiting a delayed departure. Readers are invited to determine for themselves if those facts are significant in any way.

Terminal 4, Heathrow, London

26 May 2006

Introduction

In 1945, with the Second World War drawing to a close, Gershom Scholem—professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a scholar of international renown, famous as both a pathbreaking humanist and an unrelenting questioner of his generation’s conventional wisdom—published a provocative essay with a deceptively bland title: Thinking about Jewish Studies.¹ Sixty years after its initial publication the article continues to invite vigorous responses, much as it did upon first appearance. With undisguised mockery Scholem excoriated the grotesque face that modern academic scholarship on Jews and Judaism had assumed, to his mind, from its early nineteenth-century origins to his own day. Most grotesque, he thought, was the way in which the field’s pioneers had exaggerated the theological and spiritual dimensions of the Jewish people’s historical experience, falsified the past by obscuring the subversive elements in [Jewish] history, and diminished the imprint of phenomena that do not comport with the doctrine of progress . . . to the point of obscuring them altogether.² Even the Zionist-sponsored creation of a center for academic Jewish studies in Palestine and the replacement of German with Hebrew as the primary language of Jewish research had not sufficed, to his mind, to make the crooked straight: We came in the spirit of rebellion, he declared, but in the end we perpetuated what went before.³ Nor did he see improvement in the immediate offing—a situation he attributed in no small measure to the catastrophe that had just befallen the Jews of Europe:

Who knows if we shall still manage to complete our task. We hoped for healing, and what befell us was horror. With the total destruction of our people in Europe, most of the fresh reinforcements we hoped would carry on our project were destroyed as well. We may not even realize just how alone . . . we are in our work. Is the surviving remnant strong enough to rebuild us?⁴

Fourteen years later Scholem returned to the same theme, in a lecture entitled The Science of Judaism—Then and Now.⁵ This time his tone was more optimistic and his assessment of the Nazi impact upon Jewish studies more even-keeled. True, he noted, the recent calamity had sawed off the branch we were sitting on . . . [:] the great reservoir of strength, the rising generation, the hope of an enthusiastic youth which would . . . turn its attention to a new Jewish historiography . . . died at Auschwitz.⁶ On the other hand, he declared, the holocaust has finally and irrevocably removed a view which was possible only until then, one that had made it difficult for the founders of academic Jewish studies to regard Jewish history . . . as the continuity of a social whole, which certainly struggled under the inspiration of great ideas, but was never completely ruled or directed by them.⁷ Scholem thus anticipated a fundamental shift in future conceptions and representations of the Jewish past, with the Holocaust serving as a primary catalyst.⁸

He did not see the shift happening any time soon, however:

We have suffered a loss of blood which has indeterminable consequences for our spiritual and scholarly creativity. We ourselves . . . have as yet scarcely been able to rationalize and understand in a scholarly manner the meaning of what we ourselves have lived and suffered through. It is simply not possible to draw the consequences this soon. The great catastrophe of the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492 provides a historical precedent. This community was one of the largest and most flourishing . . . branches of the living tree of Judaism. When it suddenly was broken off the Jewish people needed a very long time before it could render itself account and come to grips with what had happened. Two generations passed until it reached that point. . . . The situation today is not very different. I do not believe that we, the generation that experienced this event . . . , can be in a position to draw the consequences as yet. However, the meaning of the holocaust must remain of overwhelming significance for . . . the Science of Judaism and, in my opinion, cannot be assessed too highly.⁹

In referring to the great catastrophe . . . of 1492 Scholem hinted at the nature of the change he anticipated.¹⁰ His construction of Jewish history depicted the Spanish expulsion as the catalyst for an intellectual revolution in Jewish life, one that laid the groundwork for the entire modern Jewish experience. In his view, the meaning of that earlier cataclysm was of overwhelming significance first of all to an elite of mystics, who, impelled by the expulsion to take a fresh look at sacred texts and traditions, abandoned their earlier preoccupation with theosophy and cosmology, taking up instead the messianic implications of esoteric Jewish lore. Scholem saw the turn to messianism as the decisive step that transformed mysticism into the dominant mode of thought among the Jewish people as a whole, channeling popular longing for cosmic redemption into positive action aimed at removing the sting from exile. Such activism, he claimed, was the leitmotiv of the modern period in Jewish history.¹¹

Scholem anticipated an intellectual revolution of similar proportions in response to the great catastrophe of 1942. He expected such a revolution to become evident two generations after the catastrophe had passed. Indeed, he asserted, the first buds of change after the Spanish expulsion appeared only in the middle of the sixteenth century precisely because of the complex character of that historical moment. In his reading, the expulsion was initially understood as a harbinger of imminent redemption; only after redemption tarried was it figured as a problem demanding critical intellectual engagement. As the event lost more and more of its redemptive element and its catastrophic aspect became increasingly evident, he explained, a fire broke forth from the abyss of apocalypse, penetrating ever more deeply throughout the Jewish world until it melted down the entire esoteric tradition, transforming it root and branch.¹² Similarly, he ventured, the Nazi Holocaust contained a redemptive element of its own—the establishment of the State of Israel, which he understood not only as the beginning of cosmic salvation for Jews but also as a dialectical response to the collapse of the European diaspora.¹³ At the time, as he pondered the Holocaust’s potential influence upon the future development of Jewish studies, this redemptive element still registered more powerfully than the catastrophe in Jewish popular consciousness, at least in Israel and the United States.¹⁴ Scholem evidently expected that as years passed the fact of Israel’s existence would cease to console the Jewish people for its losses during the Holocaust. Then, he suggested, when the Holocaust appeared as pure misfortune, with no redeeming quality, the efforts of Jewish intellectuals to probe its depths would generate a fundamental change in their understanding of the Jews’ past and their place in the contemporary world.

Half a century has passed since Scholem offered his forecast, more than sixty years since the great loss of blood which has [had] indeterminable consequences for our spiritual and scholarly creativity. The interval is more or less the same as the one that separated the Spanish expulsion from the intellectual revolution that, in Scholem’s view, ensued from it. The time thus seems right to ponder the extent to which his prophecy has been fulfilled. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, do any signs suggest an elemental transformation in the way Jewish history is conceptualized, interpreted, and represented in light of what has been learned through five decades of scholarly investigation and debate about the Nazi Holocaust?

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Were the question one of the Holocaust’s place in popular understandings of Jewish history, the answer would be clear: the common wisdom among Jews in their principal centers at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that the catastrophe of two generations before demands a thoroughgoing reassessment of the Jewish past and its meaning. Though it is often asserted that in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the Holocaust was relegated to the periphery of Jewish communal concern, observers from disparate vantage points agree that since the 1970s Holocaust consciousness has become a significant component of Jewish group identity in Israel and the United States alike.¹⁵ Some even describe that consciousness as the pillar of a new Jewish civil religion, in which rituals aimed at shaping collective attitudes draw primarily upon symbols and myths associated with the encounter between European Jewry and the Third Reich, and that encounter is represented as a fundamental rupture in the flow of Jewish history.¹⁶ Auschwitz, exponents of that faith declare, inaugurated a new historical era, one in which the Jewish people finds itself in constant existential peril, surmountable only by the ability to wield military force on its own behalf.¹⁷ Sacred festivals, spaces, and texts have been created to bolster belief in the precariousness of Jewish existence; public ceremonies have been designed, special liturgies composed, positive commandments prescribed, and institutions built for embodying the values that any contemporary Jew who affirms his identity is expected to espouse. To be sure, voices that decry these activities and warn of their potentially adverse consequences are heard with some frequency in Jewish intellectual circles, but there is little disagreement that during the final three decades of the twentieth century the Holocaust has assumed a commanding presence in collective Jewish awareness.¹⁸

Jewish theologians have helped underwrite these developments. In the mid-1960s several thinkers, including Ignaz Maybaum, Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, and Arthur Cohen, pondered how Jews could continue, in Rubenstein’s formulation, to believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz.¹⁹ For many of them, serious engagement with Rubenstein’s question demanded critical reexamination of fundamental Jewish traditions, similar to what Scholem claimed had taken place after 1492. Among traditional beliefs to be scrutinized was the idea that, as the Jewish festival liturgy proclaims, because of our sins we [Jews] were exiled from our country and banished from our territory. The successive Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman conquests of the promised land and the removal of Jews from it, especially following the Roman destruction of the great Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., were interpreted since antiquity as divinely ordained punishment, a penalty to be endured by Jews for transgressing the covenant that the universal sovereign had made with them at the outset of their collective historical career. According to this interpretation, the penalty for repeated violations was not only dispersion but constant suffering, oppression, and humiliation, all of which would end only when God saw fit to relent. Thus, for example, where God had initially promised Abram that he would make his offspring as the dust of the earth (Genesis 13:16), in exile the promise had became a curse: Just as dust is the product of earth being trampled underfoot, so will your offspring be trampled underfoot by foreign kingdoms .²⁰ Only one thing prevented complete annihilation: the oath that God had purportedly extracted from the nations of the world at the time of the people’s banishment not to oppress Israel excessively.²¹

Traditional Jewish theology held such an oath to be part and parcel of the covenant. God, Jews believed, might chastise His treasured people, try its faith with agonizing ordeals, and subject it to cathartic pain, but the survival of the people as a whole was never in danger. On the contrary, because Jews believed they played a special role in God’s great cosmic plan, they were confident that God would not permit them to perish altogether. God’s words, spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, were a source of abiding confidence: See, a time is coming . . . when I will sow the House of Israel and the House of Judah with seed of men and seed of cattle, and just as I was watchful over them to uproot and to pull down, to overthrow and to destroy and to bring disaster, so I will be watchful over them to build and to plant.²² Individual Jews and specific Jewish communities might periodically be called upon to sacrifice their lives in God’s service, but the Jewish people would live forever. In every generation, Jews proclaim at their annual Passover meal, [the nations of the world] rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One saves us from their hand.

After the Holocaust several Jewish religious thinkers wondered whether God had finally ceased to enforce the oath of the nations and repudiated the divine covenant with Israel. What, Emil Fackenheim asked rhetorically, if not Auschwitz, is ‘excessive persecution’?²³ The Holocaust seemed to him an attack upon the very foundations of exilic Jewish existence, one undertaken with God’s tacit approval. Hence, he ventured, a new, postexilic age in Jewish history had begun—one in which Jews were obligated to extricate themselves from the condition of powerlessness in which they had been mired, in order not [to] arouse . . . murderous instincts.²⁴ That obligation had fallen upon Jews, he claimed, because "the God who had broken his promises in the Holocaust could no longer be trusted to keep any promise.²⁵ Eliezer Berkovits reached a similar conclusion from a different theological starting point when he called the Holocaust a radically new event . . . that entered Jewish history. For Berkovits and Fackenheim alike, the Holocaust demonstrated that for the first time in our history, the Exile itself was destroyed."²⁶

Perhaps the most explicit exponent of this position was Irving Greenberg, who placed the Holocaust at the beginning of what he called the third era of Jewish history":²⁷

The degree of success of [the Nazi] attack constitutes a fundamental contradiction to the covenant of life and redemption. . . . Since there can be no covenant without the covenant people, is not the covenant shattered in this event? In Elie Wiesel’s words: The Jewish people entered into a covenant with God. We were to protect His Torah, and He in turn assumes responsibility for Israel’s presence in the world.... Well, it seems, for the first time in history, this very covenant is broken. . . . By every logical standard, Wiesel . . . [is] right. The crisis of covenant runs deep; one must consider the possibility that it is over. . . . In effect, God was saying to humans: You stop the Shoah. You bring the redemption. You act to ensure that it will never again occur. I will be with you totally in whatever you do . . . , but you must do it. And the Jewish people heard this call and responded by taking responsibility and creating the State of Israel. Thereby, the people took power into its own hands to stop another Shoah as best it could.²⁸

Such theological pronouncements can be criticized, of course, and critiques have been offered in abundance.²⁹ Moreover, it is yet unclear to what extent the appearance of such a theology can be taken as the harbinger of an enduring intellectual revolution in Jewish thought. Indeed, toward the end of the twentieth century some observers noted that after its apogee in the 1960s and 1970s theological writing about the Holocaust faced intellectual gridlock as a result of Jewish thinkers’ inability to find original and creative ways to address . . . the profound challenges raised by this subject.³⁰ Important Jewish academicians and public figures found this situation sufficiently disconcerting to initiate a series of conferences with the hope of encouraging new approaches to the subject.³¹ Whatever the case, one thing appears certain: on the intellectual plane, no less than on the popular one, the Holocaust impressed itself powerfully upon Jewish thought during the final third of the twentieth century, to the point where it emerged as one of its paramount concerns.

That status closely resembles the one Scholem assigned to the Spanish expulsion as a problem for sixteenth-century Jewish thought. Even if the speculation that places the Holocaust at its center does not turn out to have launched a long-term intellectual revolution, it surely points to a change of direction in the way sacred texts and long-standing traditions are interpreted. Such interpretation has been powerfully refracted through the lens of recent historical events. That historical hermeneutic echoes the "recognition that the world is not only the manifestation of [God’s] bountiful splendor but also of the emptiness and the harsh regime of judgment into