Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
POLITICS OF MISPLACED UNIVERSALISM
It will be useful in further developing that last claim to examine in some detail a specific contribution to the uniqueness debate—namely, David E. Stannard’s lengthy closing contribution to the Rosenbaum volume,8 “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship.”9
First, though, a further question of definition needs to be got out of the way. It is customary in academic controversy for all parties to agree at the outset on common definitions of the main terms that define the debate if for no other reason than to ensure that they are at least arguing about the same things. One of the oddest things about the uniqueness debate is the cheerful indifference shown by most of its participants to this elementary requirement. The terms Holocaust and genocide, for instance, appear to take on whatever meaning happens to suit the changing dialectical needs of each participant, as the moving sands of debate shift under him or her.
Such ambiguities extend to the term unique itself, where they are even less helpful to the cause of rational debate. Wittgenstein, criticizing the philosophical use of the term simple to characterize a supposed class of metaphysical entities, pointed out that the term means little until we specify what kind of simplicity we have in mind. The term unique behaves in much the same way: in any given context, that is to say, the question “Is X unique?” remains unanswerable, even in principle, until we answer the further question, “In what respect?” Moby-Dick, for instance, may be unique in respect of being a novel about a whaling skipper called Ahab but is not unique in respect of being a novel by Melville.
It matters, therefore, whether the parties to the uniqueness debate specify in the same way the respect in which uniqueness is to be attributed to, or denied of, the Holocaust. And the briefest acquaintance with the main documents in the debate is sufficient to reveal that they do not. The specifically Jewish defenders of the uniqueness claim, singled out for attack by Stannard, with one accord take the Holocaust to have been unique in respect of the criteria used to select its victims for destruction. A typical statement of this kind occurs in Elie Wiesel’s response to the presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal, on April 19, 1985: “I have learned that the Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish event, albeit with universal implications. Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”
Elsewhere Wiesel expands on this judgment as follows: “I believe the Holocaust was a unique event. For the very first time in history … a Jew was condemned to die not because of what beliefs he held … but because of who he was. For the very first time, a birth certificate became a death certificate.”10
For Yehuda Bauer, again what made the Holocaust a “totally new reality” was “the unique quality of Nazi Jew-hatred”: “The unique quality of Nazi Jew-hatred was something so surprising, so outside of the experience of the civilized world, that the Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish people, could not comprehend it. … The post-Holocaust generation has difficulty understanding this basic psychological barrier to action on the part of Jews—and non-Jews—during the Nazi period. We already know what happened, they, who lived at that time, did not. For them it was a totally new reality that was unfolding before their shocked eyes and paralysed minds.”11 Stannard, on the other hand, takes what is fundamentally at issue in the uniqueness debate to be, as he puts it, “the uniqueness of Jewish suffering.”12 For Stannard, the claim that the Holocaust was unique equates, that is to say, with the claim that the Holocaust was unique in respect of the quantity of suffering experienced by its Jewish victims; a quantity of suffering that he alleges to be considered, not merely by his selected Jewish opponents, but by a wide spectrum of non-Jewish opinion, to have been grossly in excess of the quantity of suffering experienced by any other people, in any other of the numerous episodes of mass murder that have occurred in world history.
Stannard in effect takes this extraordinary proposition to be at present accepted, and accepted as undeniable, moreover, by the bulk of informed opinion. Commenting on the fact that more is heard of the Holocaust than of the far more prolonged and numerically destructive processes of near-extermination that overtook the native peoples of the Americas following the arrival of the Europeans, and having ironically discounted the obvious explanation, that the victims of the latter destruction were nonwhite, he adds:
For those who might find such overt racial distinctions distasteful and preferably avoided, however, a more “reasonable” explanation exists for the grossly differential responses that are so commonplace regarding the American and the Nazi Holocausts. This explanation simply denies that there is any comparability between the Nazi violence against the Jews and the Euro-American violence against the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples. In fact, in most quarters it is held as beyond dispute that the attempted destruction of the Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe was unique, unprecedented and categorically incommensurable—not only with the torment endured by the indigenous peoples of North and South America, but also with the sufferings of any people at any time in any place during the entire history of humanity.13
This claim for the uniqueness of the Holocaust does not, on the face of it, appear to be the claim that Wiesel, Bauer, Lipstadt, and other Jewish defenders of the uniqueness of the Holocaust wish to advance. Their claim is merely that the Holocaust has a Jewish dimension that is essential to understanding it and that is lost sight of when one universalizes and hence de-Judaizes the word Holocaust. There is no inconsistency between claiming that and granting that other, even vaster episodes of mass murder have killed more people. So Stannard’s proposed counterclaim is, it would seem, not a counterclaim at all but merely an adroit change of ground. With such blank disparities of meaning and intention at its heart, it is surely small wonder that the uniqueness debate should have struck many observers as a dialogue of the deaf, between antagonists who argue not with but past one another.
But failure to grasp what it is that troubles his Jewish opponents is clearly not the only thing wrong with Stannard’s argument at this point. The claim that Stannard takes to be “in most quarters beyond dispute”—that the sufferings of Jewish victims of the Holocaust were greater in sum than (those of) any people at any time in any place during the entire history of humanity—is surely too vaunting in its generality to be seriously held by anyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, in his or her right mind. And even more fundamentally, how are sufferings to be quantified in any way capable of giving a clear meaning to a comparative judgment of any kind, let alone that kind? How could anyone in his or her senses assent to a proposal not only as absurdly overgeneral, but as ludicrously underdefined as that?
BLAMING THE JEWS
Nevertheless, this is the claim Stannard takes to be “in most quarters … beyond dispute.” And he takes its supposedly wide acceptance to be the outcome of “hegemonic” activity on the part of the Jews, those practiced pullers of wool over the eyes of honest but simple gentiles. “This rarely examined, taken-for-granted assumption on the part of so many did not appear out of thin air. On the contrary, it is the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labor by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea.”14
Folded together in the above sentence are two of the characteristic motifs of traditional antisemitism, together with a new one that has taken hold since the turn of the present century. First, there is the motif of Jewish “exclusivism,” or as it is more usually phrased, particularism, of which we shall have more to say in chapter 13. This is the idea that Jews are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own community to the exclusion of any wider humanitarian goal or concern.
Second, there is the motif of secret, behind-the-scenes Jewish control of the non-Jewish world implicit in the adjective hegemonic. A tiny group of Jewish scholars, through “strenuous intellectual labour” occupying—obsessively it is to be supposed—“much if not all” of “professional lives” that might, by implication, have been better spent, has, according to Stannard, succeeded in establishing the hegemony over a multitude of non-Jewish minds of the idea that