commit one to seeing the Holocaust not as something confined to World War II or to Europe but as a type of human aberration that has had, and continues to have, many exemplars, from the starvation in the Ukraine brought about by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization in the 1930s, to the Cambodian massacres under Pol Pot, or to Srebrenica, or for that matter, to the history of Palestine since 1948?
Against this way of reconceiving the Holocaust, a broad spectrum of scholars, whose Jewish representatives include Elie Wiesel, Yehuda Bauer, Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, and latterly Alvin Rosenfeld,5 have in general retorted that one cannot universalize the Holocaust without de-Judaizing it in ways utterly false to the historical record. The basic thrust of their objections is that to treat the Holocaust as a crime against humanity rather than against the Jews is not only to render its nature and origins impossible to understand, except in terms of some vague and explanatorily vacuous notion of evil or “the darkness of the human heart.” It is to erase Jews and Jewishness from the historical record in a manner entirely agreeable to, and indeed reminiscent of, the ideology of National Socialism.
THE JEWS AS PUTATIVELY JEALOUS “PROPRIETORS” OF THE HOLOCAUST
Given the seemingly progressive and humanitarian note characteristically struck by opponents of the uniqueness claim, such as Native American historians David E. Stannard or Ward Churchill, it might appear surprising that their views should attract the promoters of openly antisemitic, revisionist, and white supremacist websites.6 Codoh.com, for example, the website of a Holocaust-denial group calling itself the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, currently carries a 1996 essay by Stannard, titled “The Dangers of Calling the Holocaust Unique,” despite the fact that in that piece Stannard expressly dissociates himself at the outset from both Holocaust denial and antisemitism.
What strikes one about these caveats on Stannard’s part, however, is that the internal logic of the enterprise of universalizing—and thus necessarily de-Judaizing—the Holocaust itself works to defeat any such attempt at dissociation. Arguments involving what Stevenson called persuasive definition are, by their nature, arguments about ownership, even though the asset whose ownership they contest is no more than a word—or to be more accurate, the emotional connotations of a word. From the perspective of those questioning the singularity of the Holocaust—the perspective, that is to say, of the putatively disinherited—the attempt to defend the singularity of the Holocaust, especially when conducted by Jewish writers, can hardly be perceived otherwise than as an attempt to assert a proprietary claim to the word and its emotional connotations and thus as an attempt to exclude other abused groups from enjoyment of any benefit that might accrue to them in consequence of the horror and sympathy widely evoked by the very word Holocaust.
Furthermore, once the notion of ownership has been introduced into the debate—as it must be if the debate is to get off the ground at all—it can hardly fail to evoke by association a familiar range of antisemitic stereotypes. There is, for a start, that of the obstinately “particularist” Jew with no interest in anybody’s suffering but his own, attached passionately to his own community but chillingly unresponsive to wider humanitarian causes. Then, more darkly, there is the stereotype of the Jew as owner of assets that should not by rights belong to him at all; of the Jew who uses his legendary business abilities in underhand ways that baffle the simple blond gentile to acquire suspiciously vast assets of just the kind to afford him the means of exercising secret and illegitimate kinds of control over non-Jews. More darkly still, there is the stereotype of the Jew who controls Hollywood or controls Wall Street—and who also, it now appears, “controls” the history of World War II. And finally—one could extend the list further, but an end must be made somewhere—there is the stereotype of the Jew who, whenever anyone attempts to reclaim his ill-gotten assets in order to put them at the service of a wider suffering humanity, uses the craven and dishonest cry of antisemitism to smear and obscure the sterling nobility of his opponents’ motives.
These stereotypes, and others related to them, have no particular political constituency. Historically important as they are, they can equally be found nowadays, figuring, though usually in ways less overtly expressed, as much in the public discourse of far-left political groupings as in that of movements on the far right.7 And as we are about to see, they can also be found in putatively academic writing.
THE 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
