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 Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was incomparably worse than, and so by implication, should be held to matter more than, the sum total of all other human suffering, “of any people at any time in any place during the entire history of humanity.”
Finally, if Stannard’s “handful of Jewish scholars and writers” actually believed what he says they believe, then irrespective of their success in getting others to believe it, they would be not unreasonable targets for the third, ancient trope of antisemitism, recently popular again, that I mentioned above: that the Jews believe Jewish blood, Jewish suffering, to be worth more than the blood and suffering of non-Jews.
It would be surprising if this last claim were actually true, since “it is fundamental to the whole Jewish Weltanschauung that no life is more valuable than any other. In the words of the Talmud: ‘What makes you think your blood is redder?’ ‘Perhaps his blood is redder’” (Pesanhim 25b).15 Nevertheless, the canard that Jewish blood per se is held by the Jews to be redder than non-Jewish blood has of late become part of the stock in trade of revisionist and antisemitic propaganda around the world. The following, from the American antisemitic website The Resistance Report, is typical: “The Holocaust was crafted for two purposes. (1) To justify wiping Palestine off the map so that Jews can have a homeland there. (2) As a propaganda weapon to fool Gentiles into believing that Jews suffered more than any other people in the world.” Setting aside the relatively urbane and academic style of Stannard’s paper, it is not easy to see any difference in content between the above piece of gutter antisemitism and the following remark of Stannard’s, à propos his observation that although a given revolution may display characteristics peculiar to it, no one would deny that all revolutions are revolutions, or consider one so special in nature as to require a special, capitalized word to designate it: “This has not been done, because to do so would be to depart from the world of scholarship and enter the world of propaganda and group hagiography—which in fact quite clearly is what Holocaust uniqueness proponents are up to: elevating the Jewish experience to a singular and exclusive hierarchical category, thereby reducing all other genocides to a thoroughly lesser and wholly separate substratum of classification.”16
And the impression can only be deepened when this is followed up a page later with a passage asserting the classic antisemitic interpretation of Jewish “chosenness,” not as chosenness to obey a stricter moral law than others but as an assertion of superiority over all other peoples: “We are concerned with a small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots. For that is what they are: zealots who believe literally that they and their religious fellows are, in the words of Deuteronomy 7:6, ‘a special people … above all people that are on the face of the earth,’ interpreting in the only way thus possible their own community’s encounter with mass death.”17
A major motif of antisemitic propaganda has always been the myth of the Jewish conspiracy. In all versions of the myth, a tiny Jewish elite motivated by a belief in the innate superiority of Jew over non-Jew exerts overwhelmingly disproportionate power over non-Jewish societies. Stannard’s thesis follows that pattern. A “small industry of Holocaust hagiographers,” composed of “zealots” who supposedly interpret Deuteronomy 7:6 in a way lacking not only any basis in Jewish tradition but any textual basis in Deuteronomy 7 read as a whole, have succeeded, remarkably enough, in persuading
