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9 - The Shoah and Its Legacies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Peter Hayes
Edited by
Judith R. Baskin  and
Kenneth Seeskin
Judith R. Baskin
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Kenneth Seeskin
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
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Summary

In the Bible, the Hebrew word “shoah” connotes a sudden disaster or catastrophe. Thus, “the Shoah” strikes many scholars as a more descriptively accurate term by which to refer to the persecution and murder of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945 than the more commonly used “the Holocaust.” That word, of Greek origin, means “a sacrifice (or offering) totally consumed by fire.” However, few, if any, of the killers of the Jews during the Nazi era were seeking to propitiate divine power, many of those who were massacred would have rejected an attribution of religious meaning or purpose to their deaths, and burning is not how vast numbers of the victims either died or were disposed of. By virtue of being direct and unmetaphorical, “the Shoah” avoids the sanctification of senseless killing that is implicit in the word “holocaust.”

THE ROAD TO HITLER

The origins of the Shoah lie in a long tradition in Christian Europe of despising and punishing Jews for rejecting the new covenant with God that Jesus purportedly offered. For centuries, the official teachings of the Catholic Church walked a fine line between encouraging the social and spatial confinement of Jews as penalties for this refusal, yet also tolerating the presence of the first “Chosen People” until its conversion would herald the Last Judgment and the coming of the Heavenly Kingdom. Neat in doctrinal terms, this balancing act frequently proved unsustainable in practice.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture , pp. 233 - 257
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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