Approaches to Auschwitz, Revised Edition

The Holocaust and Its Legacy

Richard L. Rubenstein, John K. Roth

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781611642148
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Distinctively coauthored by a Christian scholar and a Jewish scholar, this monumental, interdisciplinary study explores the various ways in which the Holocaust has been studied and assesses its continuing significance. The authors develop an analysis of the Holocaust's historical roots, its shattering impact on human civilization, and its decisive importance in determining the fate of the world. This revised edition takes into account developments in Holocaust studies since the first edition was published.

PART ONE

HOLOCAUST ORIGINS

Chapter 1

The Jew as Outsider: The Greco-Roman and Early Christian Worlds

Jews must always be special cases in products of the Christian imagination, because of the uniquely ambivalent place which the Jewish people inhabit there.

Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses:
Jews and the Christian Imagination

Holocaust history begins in a world that had no Jews at all. This fact suggests that the Holocaust leaves some questions beyond answering, for the path that must be followed to explore how Auschwitz came to be will not finally lay to rest issues about why existence is structured so that Auschwitz was possible. Granted, philosophical, scientific, and theological theories are not lacking to respond to that ultimate “Why?” and some of them make more sense than others. But it is also true that the more one learns about the Holocaust, the more understandable it becomes, the more one may be left to wonder. Such claims deny neither that the Holocaust is thoroughly a historical event nor that historical inquiry can go far in explaining how that catastrophe happened. Nevertheless, comprehension of the Holocaust has limits, partly because of our finite and fallible human capacities and partly because the event raises questions and possesses implications that are more than history can contain.

“Man,” said the French philosopher Albert Camus, “is not entirely to blame; it was not he who started history; nor is he entirely innocent, since he continues it.”¹ Jewish history, which has so distinctively marked the world, is a case in point.² The biblical accounts of creation in Genesis, for example, do not identify Adam and Eve as Jews. Whether one takes them to be actual persons or mythic figures, they are man and woman in a pre-Jewish world. And yet that appraisal is not all that must be said, for the story of Adam and Eve is also a Jewish story, one that begins an ancient account that ponders why there are Jews as well as why the world and its human life exist.

A PEOPLE SET APART

Genesis, the first of five biblical books forming the Pentateuch or the Torah, which constitutes the most important part of Judaism’s Scripture, is a blending of oral and written instruction much older than the final written codification that scholars place around 550 B.C.E. Insofar as it hinges on that written testament, Jewish identity is a human creation forged as tribes of diverse origin blended their shared experiences and memories into a unifying, articulated self-consciousness. But these experiences and memories, and even their articulation in a final written form, are not solely the results of conscious choices. Events and experiences happen to people; the forces of life are not completely under human control but instead move in and through us partly at their own bidding. Jews do not account for themselves any more than Adam (man) and Eve (woman) can do so.

Religiously speaking, Jews have affirmed that God accounts for their existence. We shall see some of the awesome effects that have followed from that conviction, but first let us probe a gray zone where the world vacillated between having and not having “the Jewish question.” Even the best recent scholarship cannot fix the dates precisely, but biblical history appears to begin between the year 2000 B.C.E. and 1900 B.C.E. At some point in the early centuries of that millennium, tribes of people, eventually led by a patriarchal figure whom tradition calls Abraham, migrated southwestward from Haran in Mesopotamia into the land of Canaan.³ No one is sure why these journeys occurred, but the biblical tradition asserts it was because Abraham felt that his God had so directed. Lured by a divine promise that he would become the father of a great people, Abraham and his seminomadic followers stopped at the site of Shechem. There, the Bible tells us, God promised to give the surrounding land to Abraham’s offspring. Periodic famines kept these people on the move. Under Abraham’s successors, Isaac and then Jacob (the latter eventually identified as Israel), they moved about the hill country of Canaan until hard times once more drove them southwest, this time into Egypt.

A majority of modern biblical scholars regard these accounts not as literal historical records but as a reconstruction brought about as a congeries of strangers formed a community by adopting a common faith at Sinai. As the well-known stories of the Exodus and the theophany at Sinai are recounted in Scripture, the “Hebrews” who were enslaved in Egypt appear to share common tribal and religious roots.⁴ In reality, the Bible offers ample hints that the group who escaped from Egypt with Moses did not possess a common inheritance. For example, referring to Moses’s band in the wilderness, Scripture speaks of “the rabble that was among them” (Num. 11:4).

For several centuries before the Exodus, people from Canaan and Syria had entered Egypt, some as hostages and prisoners of war, some as merchants, and some who had been forced to take up residence in Egypt after engaging in activities hostile to their Egyptian overlords. The name “Hebrews,” then, probably designated a number of alien peoples who shared a common condition and social location in Egypt but were from varied backgrounds. Each group of resident aliens retained something of its own identity, especially insofar as their indigenous religious traditions involved elements of ancestor worship. Not all were slaves, but their situation tended to deteriorate over time. In some respects, the situation of the Hebrews was similar to that of members of a modern multiethnic metropolis, in which diverse groups share common problems in the present but remain distinct because of differences in origin, religion, and culture. Once unified, they explained their experience by the cycle of stories involving Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and even Moses himself. When Moses arrived on the scene, however, the Hebrews were less than Jewish.

Restricted to biblical sources, which draw on oral tradition and myth, biographical data about Moses is imprecise, but it seems likely that he was a charismatic leader born during the reign of Seti I, Pharaoh of Egypt (1308–1290 B.C.E.). Tradition has it that Seti I, fearing that the Hebrew slave population was becoming too large, decided for reasons of security to limit its growth by eliminating all newborn Hebrew males. Moses survived. According to Scripture, he was put into the Nile in a reed basket fashioned by his mother, and then he was discovered and adopted by an Egyptian princess. Although nurtured in the Pharaoh’s court, Moses also identified with those who were oppressed. Thus, when he took revenge on an Egyptian soldier who killed one of them, he had to seek refuge in the desert.

Again, no one knows with certainty what happened to Moses as he lived there with a tribe called the Midianites. The Bible, however, speaks of Moses’s encountering a strangely burning bush. The bush was not consumed. Instead, as Moses approached to discern it better, he was left with the conviction that the God called Yahweh (“The One who causes to be”) was directing him to return to Egypt and to liberate the captives. Conviction was mixed with reluctance and skepticism about this mission, but Moses went, and under his leadership the Hebrew clans fled.

Until this time, the Hebrews probably shared a common yearning for liberation and a common hatred of their overlords but little else. This was enough to unify them for the escape. As soon as they were beyond the reach of the Egyptians, however, a compelling basis for unity beyond shared antipathy and a desire to flee had to be found if the band of fugitives and outcasts was to survive the natural and human hazards of the wilderness. Fortunately, the escape provided a further shared experience, the Exodus itself.

In the ancient Near East, where the distinction between group membership and religious identity was unknown, there could be only one basis for communal unity. The diverse peoples could become a single people only if they were united by a common God who was the author of their shared experience. This new basis for unifying the ethnically diverse band was proclaimed in the prologue to the Ten Commandments: “ ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery’ ” (Exod. 20:2).

The God of the new religion, moreover, had to be one whose power exceeded that of Pharaoh, the Egyptian god-king. Nor could any of the diverse peoples among the escapees claim that its particular ancestral god (or gods) was the true God of the entire band without arousing the mistrust and hostility of the others. Ancestral gods were an impediment to unity. The Hebrews shared a common historical experience more than kinship. Only a God who was regarded as the author of their shared experience could unify them. The Bible reflects this emphasis: “ ‘You shall have no other gods before me. . . . for I the LORD your God am a jealous God’ ” (Exod. 20:3, 5).

Yahweh’s insistence on exclusive worship had both political and religious implications. It united those who accepted worship of Yahweh into a community and barred them from returning to the disuniting worship of their ancestral gods. After they had been unified under the new God, it was natural for the assorted peoples to claim that they had been kin all along and to read back elements of continuity between their common God and their ancestral gods. Hence, Yahweh, the God of Moses, was identified as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, too.

Thus, in the desert at Mount Sinai, probably in the thirteenth century B.C.E., the Hebrews, though still far from being a people united under an earthly king, took formative steps toward a distinctive identity. Their unifying pact with Yahweh, it is crucial to underscore, was a covenant. This agreement presented through Moses to the people by Yahweh, set forth the terms of an agreement that bound God and the Hebrews together, albeit on an asymmetrical footing. God’s deliverance of the people from Egyptian bondage, Moses told them, had not been an end in itself. God expected something more: “ ‘Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’ ” (Exod. 19:5–6). The people accepted this status of being God’s chosen people. It was the proper response to their liberation.

We can better understand this crucial action of covenant and election by noting that the structure of the biblical covenant between God and the followers of Moses resembles that between a suzerain and his vassals in Hittite treaties of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C.E. In these treaties, the ruler grants his vassal protection but stipulates what is expected of the vassal in return. In both the Hittite and the biblical versions, blessings and curses, the former as reward for compliance and the latter as dire consequences of disobedience and rebellion, are emphasized.

In the Hittite world the solemnity of these pacts was often dramatized in elaborate ceremonies. Biblical scholars note that the account in Deuteronomy reflects the procedure of such a treaty ceremony. A recital of the historical events that moved the vassal to enter into the covenant is followed by proclamation of the law to be obeyed, then by a statement of mutual obligations between God and Israel, and finally by the crucial blessings and curses. Although the Hebrews were not yet politically united, they had become one people in agreeing to obey the commandments of their God. Having entered this covenant, the people were warned that disobedience could not take place with impunity, for Yahweh is a jealous God who tolerates no rivals.

Did God or only Moses speak at Sinai? Did divine revelation bring Jewish identity to the fore, or was that consciousness forged more by forces of human politics that used religious ingredients to secure a base of power? The historical record can be read in more than one way, but of this much we can be sure: the existence of a Jewish people who fell under Hitler’s threat three thousand years later does depend on the tradition that God acted in history in the Exodus and at Sinai. That action, moreover, singled out a people whose destiny would not only be linked with the land of Israel but also would set them apart from every other human group that has walked the face of the earth. With Moses, if not with God, the world received “the Jewish question.” Nothing would ever be the same again.

ANTI-JEWISH POLICIES IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD

Space permits no detailed account of the next millennium of Jewish history. Suffice it to say that Moses did not live to enter the “promised land” of Canaan, the land of Israel, which came to be construed as part of the pact between Yahweh and the Hebrew tribes or Israelites. Joshua succeeded in dominating that territory, but pressure from hostile elements remained intense. In waging wars of defense, however, the Israelite confederation was ultimately solidified under its first king, Saul, and later under the more expansive rule of David and Solomon (ca. 1000–922 B.C.E.). For a time an Israelite empire prospered, but Solomon’s death brought political division, and two states emerged: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Existing in a buffer zone between Egypt and Mesopotamia, these small powers were constantly threatened by political struggle in the Middle East. In 722 the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians. When the Babylonians seized hegemony from the Assyrians, Jerusalem and the southern kingdom fell to them in 587/586, and the Jews were dispersed and exiled. A century later, under Persian rule, they were permitted to return to their homeland. Jerusalem and the Temple were restored. Politically, Jewish life remained under Persian authority until the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.E.) brought Jews under Greek control.

Jewish life has enriched human experience in countless ways and out of all proportion to its numbers. Yet, viewed in one way, these ancient Jews seem singularly unimportant in the world’s history. Admittedly their ways of life differed from other groups around them, but their political power was less than overwhelming. Most people knew little about them. It would even be hard to document that Jews were consistently singled out for special discrimination and persecution in the world of pre-Christian antiquity. This is not to say that they were specially favored or even that there was nothing to approximate either the anti-Judaism that emerged from the triumph of Christianity or the racially oriented antisemitism that would follow in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Some of the seeds of that hostility were planted in the Greco-Roman era prior to the birth of Christianity. It will be well to note them.

As we do so, let us take a moment to clarify some concepts. Uses of the term “antisemitism” are now so frequent that one might suppose them to be of long standing. In fact, the term was first popularized in the late 1870s by a German racist ideologue and journalist named Wilhelm Marr.⁵ He employed it in speaking about the largely secular anti-Jewish political campaigns that were widespread in Europe at the time. The word derives from an eighteenth-century etymological analysis that differentiated between languages with “Aryan” roots and those with “Semitic” ones. This distinction, in turn, led to the assumption—a false one—that there are corresponding racial groups. Under this rubric, Jews became Semites, paving the way for Marr’s usage. He might have used the conventional German Judenhass, but that way of referring to Jew-hatred carried religious connotations that Marr wanted to de-emphasize in favor of racial ones. Apparently more “scientific,” the term Antisemitismus caught on and eventually became a way of speaking about all the forms of hostility experienced by the Jews throughout history. Antisemitism, then, is both one thing and many.⁶ Hatred of Jews is at its heart, but the driving motives behind that hatred can be diverse: economic, political, racial, religious, social, and mixtures in between. To reckon with antisemitism, then, is to do much more than to deal with “prejudice,” for its causes reach deep down into fundamental social, economic, and religious structures.

Religious, and therefore social, factors became an ancient seedbed for modern antisemitism, as Alexander the Great sought to bring his empire under the domination of Greek culture. As far as the Jews were concerned, that policy had impact not only in the Jews’ ancient homeland but also upon the now widely scattered Jewish enclaves that could be found throughout the Mediterranean world. Jewish immigration—much of it forced by exile, but some of it voluntary—had for centuries dispersed this people, and even when there was opportunity to return to the homeland, significant numbers decided that their interests were best served by remaining in the Diaspora. Some of these Jews assimilated completely. In most cases, however, a Jewish identity that differentiated Jew from non-Jew (Gentile) was sustained. The decision to remain different, needless to say, could lead to friction between a Jewish minority and any dominant power whose aspirations for empire were predicated on cultural homogeneity. It should be noted, however, that Jews who had migrated to the East did not generally experience such tension. In both China and India, for example, Jews led essentially peaceful lives as a group. In particular, they experienced none of the violence that would be the fate...