Major Changes Within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust, Proceedings of the Ninth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, June 1993, Eds. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996.
Every enterprise dealing with the Holocaust - whether a memorial, museum, or research institute - is influenced by its communal environment. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington reflects an American perspective on events; some might even call it an Americanization of the Holocaust. The museum in racially troubled Los Angeles is devoted primarily to the reduction of prejudice. Until recently, the memorial museum in Buchenwald, in the former German Democratic Republic, barely mentioned the Jews at all and focused on the communist victims, particularly Ernst Thaelmann, a founding father of German communism.
The subject of the Ninth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, convened in Jerusalem in 1993, was the changes wrought by the Holocaust on the Jewish people. Not unexpectedly, the papers units volume often reflect a distinct Israeli perspective. In one of its foci, the conferees sought to examine the role the world Zionist movement and the Yishuv and its leaders played during those bitter years. Did thinkers armed with Zionist ideology perceive the developing threat in Europe better than did the nonZionists? Was the Zionist movement caught unprepared? What was the relationship between the founding of the Jewish state and the Holocaust? Did it rise like a "phoenix out of the ashes?" Although these questions hardly exhaust the subjects and problems posed in the various papers, I will confine my interest primarily to them.
There is little in the lead essays of David Vital and Israel Kolatt to indicate that Zionist thinkers and ideologues, with the exception of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Nahum Goldmann, were aware that the old "normative" antisemitism was quickly giving way to something more biological and murderous. Zionism was, after all, an ideology that was born in the struggle with antisemitism and viewed itself as the sole solution. Genocide had been precedented. There was the murder of the Armenians during World War I, and the war itself, that led to an incredible cheapening of life. Yet a superbly gifted historian like Salo Baron published a plan for postwar world Jewish organization in 1943, totally unaware that the European Jews, who figured so centrally in it, would no longer exist. According to Professor Jacob Katz ("Was the Holocaust Predictable?") this is not as strange as it seems.
In the 1930s, even those who had been exposed to antisemitism were unable to imagine that it contained the seeds of genocide. This allowed world Zionist leaders to go forward with a "life as usual" posture and even enter into a transfer agreement with the Reichsbank, in the hope that European Jewry's travail might be converted into demographic and financial asset for the Yishuv. In the 1930s the National Socialists were also not yet certain about what they would do with the Jews. They first spoke of resettlement. The idea of the mass murder of an entire people was such an incredible datum that few could fathom it. Perhaps Zionist thinkers were too civilized to conceive of a "Final Solution."
There may, however, be other explanations. It is possible, as some claim, that, preoccupied with its own difficult internal problems, the Zionist movement in the inter-war period developed a kind of "inferiority complex." It was interested in the practical needs of further developing the Yishuv economy so that, should the need arise, more Jews could be absorbed. "Rebuilding the land" and the social-justice aspects of socialist Zionist ideology were still powerful in the 1930s. The need to build the "New Jew" and the land dunam by dunam continued to be the highest priority.
As a natural outcome, this led to a distancing from the troubles in the Diaspora and, in some cases, even its negation. Vital's and Kollat's essays are also reminders as to how full the Zionist plate was at the time. Aside from its limited power and small numbers, the Yishuv's response to the catastrophe engulfing European Jewry was also affected by the seemingly insoluble problem with the Arab population.
From hindsight the Maximalist and the B'rith Shalom positions on the Arab problem seem strangely unrealistic. Six decades and thousands of lives later the problem seems as intractable as in 1936. From a Jewish survival perspective, however, the major problem would not be the bloody riots in Palestine but rather the events in Europe. One glance at the contemporary press is sufficient to establish that the Yishuv was hardly unaware or indifferent to the events in Europe. The inability of the Yishuv and American Jewry to respond adequately was not only rooted in an inability to imagine the worst: the Yishuv was too small an operational base to assume responsibility for all the massive problems facing world Jewry; and American Jewry, while in a better position, also lacked the power and coherence to respond. In both communities a strife-ridden political culture prevailed: "The wheel that squeaked the loudest, got the grease." For the Jews of Palestine the threat nearest to home was the bloody Arab riots of the 1930s; for American Jewry it was the virulent antisemitism of Coughlin and Sylvester. Later into the Holocaust, we find that other, nations and agencies, like the Roosevelt administration, the Vatican, and the neutrals - made the same choice. They were primarily concerned about their own survival and well-being. The sense of "our own first" was and is an intrinsic part of American isolationism. How could it be otherwise?
Yet, even with an awareness of the historical context in which the response was fashioned there are researchers who view the protagonists in the historical drama like judges in court, and pronounce them either guilty or innocent. The researchers who delivered papers at the conference inevitably framed their responses to the question in terms of Tom Segev's controversial The Seventh Million, The Israelis and the Holocaust (1993), which has triggered a response by Shabtai Teveth (Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust, 1996). But lacking balance and historical context and by posing the wrong questions, such histories are not sustained over time. From a historian's perspective, it is too early to write the full story because the full historical context is not yet known. When that balanced history is written, it will weigh the response of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv, which were, after all, not full-fledged players on the historical stage of the inter-war period, against the power available to them. At the moment the "intentionalist" school of historiography that tends to find a linear development and a logical progression of the Holocaust from Martin Luther to Auschwitz dominates. It has a drastic accusatory impact on the witness role of the Yishuv and American Jewry. But as more data becomes available, the highly ordered reading of the past by intentionalist historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Daniel Goldhagen should give way to a more humble view of the chaotic jumble of events, with little logic to them, that was the reality of the bitter years of the Holocaust.
The situation in American Jewry, as presented in Menahem Kaufman's paper, is especially instructive as it reveals the disunity of American Jewry during the crisis. Yet his perception of American Jewry as lacking a "central authority" is culture-bound. He views the governance of American Jewry through the lens of an Israeli and therefore encounters difficulty in understanding that, unlike a community governed by a national authority, American Jewry in the 1930s was held together by voluntary association. There was no authority that could order Jews to their Judaism, and, had there been, few Jews would have obeyed. As Judah Magnes, the builder of the New York Kehillah and later the chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered, even a federated authority could not sustain itself in the free atmosphere of America. But Kaufman is certainly on target when he notes the role played by antisemitism in striking fear in the hearts of American Jews; many were convinced that what was happening in Germany was about to happen to them.
A factor seldom examined in causing that disunity is discussed in a precious article by Bat-Ami Zucker. During the Depression years the American Communist Party projected an influence far beyond its small size. With its own special Jewish section, organizational network and press, the party could create chaos, especially in the Jewish labor movement. Its influence among Jews reached its peak during the Spanish civil war, when Jewish young men, seeking a way to express their outrage at the events in Germany, flocked to the Lincoln Brigade to fight the "scourge of fascism." To the credit of Jewish labor leaders, who had experienced a costly attempt by the party to penetrate the Jewish unions in the 1920s, they saw through the opportunism of the communists and fought them off. The Jewish Labor Committee, organized in 1934, to unify the rescue effort of the Jewish unions, prohibited communists in its ranks, and, by 1940, the left-leaning American Jewish Congress had weeded out most communist infiltrators who wanted to take over the organization. But the price was high. At a critical juncture energy was deflected by a small group who skillfully employed the social-justice motif, but, in reality, slavishly followed every twist and turn of the party line as dictated from Moscow. For American Jewry the disunifying influence of the communists needs to be factored into our account of American Jewry during the Holocaust.
Judging from the submissions of Zvi Bacharach, Leni Yahil and Yisrael Gutman, the problem of finding the relationship between antisemitism and the Holocaust has grown no simpler in the last five decades. Most researchers find that the antisemitism that developed after 1870 went far to target Jews for a special animus. That is the historians' answer to the classic question: "Why the Jews, why not the bicycle riders?" But thereafter the waters become muddied, especially concerning the "new" antisemitism. The biological, racialist antisemitism of the "Final Solution" seems new, though there are recognizable elements of the old normative antisemitism in it. The idea of liquidating the despised Jews-a radical but minor note in conventional antisemitism - comes to the fore. Yet, while Jews were targeted for genocide in National-Socialist cosmology, they were not alone in being singled out. The character and content of the new radical antisemitism is at the heart of the debate between the intentionalists and the functionalists. Clearly, if the objective from the beginning was to eliminate the Jews, then the research tracing the role of witnessing agencies and nations like the Roosevelt administration, the Vatican, and the Yishuv is useless. The argument used at that time by the witnessing nations and agencies, that short of physical intercession on the killing ground, little could be done against a powerful nation-state utterly intent on genocide, is substantiated. For most of the war the balance of forces was on the side of the killers.
This dilemma is not considered by Yahil and Gutman, who explore the radicalization of antisemitism as they later do the responsive radicalization of Zionism. Historically, the two are linked. At one point Gutman envisages the difference between the old and the new antisemitism by comparing the extraordinary difference in behavior of German troops in Eastern Europe during World War I and II. But he finds inadequate Zygmunt Bauman's explanation that the roots of the genocide idea can be found in modernity. Nor does Gutman, who actually felt the lash of the new antisemitism in Auschwitz, come closer to explaining this new murderous antisemitism. After all, other nation-states who experienced the modernization process did not conceive of genocide in order to solve real or imagined problems. Until a more adequate explanation comes along, we remain, together with Gutman and others, with the interpretation that the antisemitism that produced Auschwitz was composed of a bedrock of traditional Judeophobia, in which the Christian schema and the charge of deicide are prominent, on which was imposed a pseudo-scientific racialist theory and a misreading of Darwin. As the Holocaust shows, the resultant amalgam is lethal, especially when modern communication and marketing techniques are employed to drive the message home.
However, the difference between normative antisemitism and the Hitlerian brand remains too formidable for even such explanations. The death camps flew in the face of other cherished values of modernity, including the efficient use of human resources. Yahil's article does not deal with the "no Hitler, no Holocaust" argument, where to place Hitler's power to impose his pathological hatred on a people made peculiarly ready by its history to receive its deadly message and act upon it? In the end Leni Yahil sounds a note of hope-not that an answer will be found, but that the Jewish people will survive this, too. "What counts is not hatred of Jews," she writes, "but the survival of the Jewish people at all times, including the Holocaust" (p. 241). Perhaps she will tell us in a future essay how Jews living in the Diaspora could manage that with such an antisemitism on the loose.
One aspect of the Holocaust that naturally draws the interest of Israeli historians is the role of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv in trying to rescue those that could be rescued. However, research in this area is made difficult by the emotional freight inherent in the problem. Researchers who disregard the fact that the sufficiency problem of what would have been enough is unanswerable, inevitably produce a damning indictment of all witnessing agencies, including American Jewry and the Yishuv. Aside from the factual imprecision of someone like Segev whose work lacks inclusiveness and contextualization, the real problem with such exercises in retroactive investigative journalism is that they inevitably get caught in a trap. In theory, witnesses like the Yishuv, or American Jewry, or even the Roosevelt administration had choices. They could have helped or collaborated or remained indifferent. Once the idea of choice exists, the moralist gains entry. He is armed with a list of things that might have been done had the witness been less morally obtuse. Inevitably, the actual power of the witness to do, which hinges on countervailing outside power and internal political coherence, is neglected. The Yishuv is pictured as a full-fledged sovereign power with complementary financial resources and military power, while American Jewry is imagined to dominate the Roosevelt administration, and so on.
The indictment is more a scream of pain than historical narrative, but, in a peculiar way, it has helped maintain the legitimacy of Jewish historiography. For years the great attention Jewish historians have paid to the Holocaust, particularly the indictment that has been drawn up against the non-Jewish Holocaust witness, has served to fuel the charge of conspiracy. It has been intimated that Jewish researchers produce an indictment in order to generate the advantages of victimization, which might be support for Israel, money from Germany, and so on. But with the appearance of scholarship that takes the Jewish witness to task for not doing enough, these charges lose much of their credibility. Indeed, Jewish historians are as tough on the Jewish witness as they are on the non-Jewish witness.
In the case of the Yishuv, the papers of Israel Bartal and Jehuda Reinharz remind us how little coherence there was in the world Zionist movement. The bitter strife between Brandeis and Weizmann, the difficulty in restructuring the weak Jewish Agency, the movement’s chronic financial problems, the disrupting effects of the Russian revolution and its aftermath on socialist labor Zionism seem slight in retrospect but were divisive at the time. The strife within the movement confirms Reinharz's observation that, after the disruption of World War I, the world Zionist movement never recovered its delicate internal coherence. In a sense it was a movement in name only, held together by a common passion for the restoration of the homeland, but by little else. The lack of cohesiveness also must be factored into the reasons for its inability to comprehend and adequately respond to the crisis developing in Central Europe.
Equally intriguing is the question of the relationship of the Holocaust to the creation of the state. Like scientologists who trace all to the birth trauma, researchers want to know whether this birth was legitimate or merely granted in a fit of remorse. Jews in the postwar period were repeatedly subjected to a fund-raising rhetoric that pictured Israel rising "like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust," and that vision worked its way into the imaging of the time. But not all accepted the notion that Israel was given to the Jews as payment for the loss of the six million. Isaac Deutscher, the well-known biographer of Leon Trotsky, ended his 1968 book The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays with a ringing rejection of the transaction. "Give me back the six million," he pleaded, "and you can have Israel."
The notion that the two are related is based on the sense that, by 1948, remorse at what had befallen European Jewry had opened a "window of opportunity." The United States and the Soviet Union momentarily abandoned the normal motivations of real-politik, which dictated support of the oil-rich and far more numerous Arab world, and supported the birth of Israel.
Though it was a far from accurate or complete reading of postwar international relations, from the Zionist vantage point, such a reading offered the opportunity of rationalizing the existence of a Jewish state while anchoring it firmly in Jewish history. Israel would be European Jewry's successor as the core of organized world Jewry. As in the pre-war period the Zionist movement was not able to claim a consensus among the Jewish people, armed with such a Grundingsmythos that the legitimacy problems inherent in reestablishing a Jewish state after an absence of millennia would be resolved. However, as Bartal, Bauer, and Friesel take pains to point out, the "phoenix out of the ashes" school hardly corresponds to the actual events of 1948.
Particularly incisive is Evyatar Friesel, who reminds us that the building of a Jewish homeland was central to the ideology and strategy of the Zionist movement from its inception and that the crisis actually accelerated the notion of statehood. The state, observes Friesel, is "the last creation of a Jewry that was no more" (p. 544 ). He challenges the notion that the difficult UN debate of 1947 and 1948 had anything to do with remorse about what had happened to European Jewry. The rejection by Ernest Bevin, Britain's minister of Foreign Affairs, of even considering the admission of 100,000 Jewish Displaced Persons to Palestine, is presented by Yehuda Bauer as a major factor in winning diplomatic approval for the State. A momentary confluence between Washington and Moscow, led, each for its own reasons, to recognize the state.
Friesel’s and Bauer’s contention that the Holocaust did not serve as the incubator of the state, but, rather, by eliminating the Jews of Europe who were its settlers, nearly destroyed the possibility of its ever coming into being, seems to be a more realistic reading. It sees the Yishuv as the subject rather than the master of historical forces. The full Jewish reentry into history came after the state was formed. Still, the Zionist response to the crisis remains problematic and will undoubtedly be the issue of more scholars' conferences in the future.
Yad Vashem, as the Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, has a special interest in the question of resistance. This is understandable, as one of the dangers in so closely linking Israel to the Holocaust is that the picture of a passive Jewry that went "like sheep to the slaughter" would present the wrong image for building the fighting spirit that Israel requires in order to maintain its security. The idea of struggle is also deeply embedded in the socialist ideology of Israel's founding fathers. Nevertheless, such a preoccupation with resistance is not the case in France, which has not yet fully explored the Vichy experience, or Norway, which turns its face away from Quisling, or the Ukraine, which knows little about Vlasov and his army. Rather than being merely a search to establish the full scope of Jewish resistance as a historical truth, one suspects that it also is motivated by a search for lost honor, the kind that Mordecai Anielewicz sought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Rummaging through the shards of a destroyed culture and people, seeking a kernel of courage that the dead can pass on to the living, helps redeem a fallen image of the Jewish people. Unfortunately, it sometimes produces a history with an undeniably apologetic tone.
Yet resistance there was, and a full historical account requires that it be recorded. As Michael Marrus suggests in a lucidly written essay, the problem is to find a proper balance so that it is neither overstated nor ignored. It can neither succumb to heroic mythmaking or to measuring its extent by its impact on the German war machine. Even the extensive Soviet partisan warfare had little effect on the latter.
In measuring the extent and type of resistance, as is done in this volume by Yitzhak Arad, Dov Levin, Shmuel Spector and Shmuel Krakowski, two familiar problems are raised: what is sufficient to satisfy the demands of honor; and what is the relationship between resistance and rescue?
To answer the first question, there must first be some agreement on how to count the disproportionate numbers of Jewish fighters who fought under the flags of other nations. Arad points out that the Jewish fighting groups in the forests of the Soviet Union were part of the strategy and orderof-battle of the Red Army command and were therefore part of the Soviet antiNazi resistance. So, too, the Jews who participated in the French, Dutch, and Italian resistance and, for that matter, the thousands of Jewish soldiers in the Allied armies. Even the much-touted Jewish Brigade, reluctantly organized by the British, was part of the British war effort. That leaves only the resistance in the ghettos and the uprisings in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz as undiluted examples of resistance by Jews as Jews. Even in these cases there are problems, and calculating the extent of physical resistance may never yield a full picture. One is left wondering whether, beyond establishing the fact that Jewish resistance occurred despite the enormous difficulties, if it is necessary to calculate at all.
More problematic is determining what resistance actually entailed. Should illegal prayer or meetings be considered part of the definition? Is merely the will to outlive - "iberlebn" - a form of resistance? Shmuel Krakowski skillfully probes the thin line between resistance and rescue and the other life supporting factors that had to be considered before resistance could be mounted. Jewish partisans, for example, in addition to bearing the full force of German counter-partisan warfare, often had to deal with an unfriendly local population. They could not follow Mao Tse-tung's prescription to the guerrilla fighter, to "swim in a sea of peasants." Even their fellow partisans were often not trustworthy and full of murderous intent. The Red Army that had broken the back of the German war machine at enormous cost was naturally greeted by survivors and fighters alike as liberators. But that is not how the Poles saw them. Adding insult to injury, the Jews were willy-nilly linked to these hated new invaders. That set the stage for the deprivations after the war. The price of weakness is lack of options and stigmatization.
We come finally to the question of the historical weight or valence of the Holocaust. Those who link it to the Holocaust's uniqueness as a historical event have discovered many reasons why it should be so considered. They point to the enormous scale of the killings and to the technology involved; in a word, to its modernity. Professor Steven Katz presents a preview of his comparative approach, which serves as the basis for differentiating the Holocaust from other bloodlettings by demonstrating its "unique intentionality." The "Final Solution" was an integral part of the Reich's public policy, implemented by the German nation in the name of progress. However, even a successful differentiation of the Holocaust by comparison cannot establish its historical weight. That depends on the importance of the victims.
How important was European Jewry in the development of Europe. This is a highly controversial question. We need to distinguish importance based on the normal acoutrements of power, from oddity. The antisemitic imagination assigned Jews enormous power, but obviously it was not the kind of power that could prevent their almost total destruction. Fortunately, history itself should eventually yield an answer to the question of the comparative importance of the destruction of European Jewry in the same way that it tells us that the discovery of the toothpick is not as important as the discovery of the wheel. If there were an abrupt change in direction in the flow of subsequent events and processes, if the destruction of European Jewry radically altered European history, then we can assign it a high valence. Thus far the radical change has been noticeable largely, but not exclusively, on the Jewish historical canvas. Europe is becoming something of a historic backwater-but that might have happened in any case.
Ultimately, the question of weight and uniqueness will be determined by what is believed to be the nature of man and the society he lives in. Formerly, Hannah Arendt noted the utter normality, even banality, of Eichmann. In this volume Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men (1992), also eschews the demonic image of the killers.
To be sure, modernity has improved the technology of mass murder and thereby increased its scale. But the nature of man has not appreciably changed. He is still Cain and Abel. We cannot say "no modernity, no Holocaust," as we say, "no Hitler no Holocaust."
The mandate of the Ninth Yad Vashem International Conference held in June 1993, which sought to examine the changes wrought by the Holocaust, was so broad that almost any paper dealing with Jewish history in the modern period could be submitted - and was. The result is a collection of papers not only disparate in quality, but also in subject. So difficult was it to locate a binding theme that, ultimately, this reviewer confined his attention to those papers that dealt with major Holocaust themes that concern, but are hardly confined to, Israeli researchers.
The major change that is never directly stated is that little remains of the preHolocaust European Jewish culture that served as the incubator of Zionism whose abundance nourished Diaspora Judaism. That is the bad news. The good news is that its derivative Jewish cultures in Israel and America have thus far managed to prevent the larger National-Socialist objective of totally obliterating the Jewish presence in the world. Both are Jewish communities that are more empowered than ever before in Jewish history. Contemporary Jewry exercises a far greater control over its fate than during the preHolocaust period. But, for the foreseeable future, survival remains precarious. In part that is attributable to the demographic and cultural hole left by the absence of European Jewry, especially the Jews of Poland. Its loss has altered the Jewish persona almost beyond recognition, and the question of whether Israel can play a similar role in the twenty-first century has yet to be determined.
Source: Yad Vashem Studies Vol. XXVI, Jerusalem 1998 pp. 433-447
