of time. In consequence, the bulk of non-Jewish opinion has been led to consider the sufferings of non-Jewish groups in genocide after genocide as of little or no consequence by contrast with those endured by European Jews between 1933 and 1945.
As many contributors to the uniqueness debate pointed out at the time,18 the last claim in particular appears to stand reality on its head. The term genocide and the concept itself, not to mention the genocide convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, owe their origins not merely to the climate of alarm created by the destruction of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, but to the work of one particular man: a Polish-Jewish lawyer by the name of Raphael Lemkin,19 whose struggle to establish the latter legal instruments was by no means motivated solely by Jewish concerns. “Born in relatively comfortable circumstances in 1900 on a farm belonging to his parents in Eastern Poland, Lemkin grew up deeply troubled by the numerous and vicious acts of antisemitism committed around him, as well as by other, more distant but no less appalling acts of barbarity of which the most notable was the massacre by the Turks in 1915 of a million or so Armenians.”20
In 1948, I was a politically aware British fifteen-year-old. At that point, the Armenian genocide of 1915–17 had sunk entirely from European consciousness (I certainly recall no mention of it at the time or for many years afterward). At the same time, no general consciousness existed of the full extent of the destruction visited upon non-European peoples, in the Americas and elsewhere, by European expansion and colonialism from the late Middle Ages onward. All of that was still for the most part seen, I seem to recall, as it had been for the preceding two centuries as part of the onward march of civilization. The publication, in 1966, of Alan Moorhead’s The Fatal Impact, which cataloged the ill effects, including massive losses of native populations through the introduction of alien diseases and weapons of warfare, consequent upon European invasion of the South Pacific from the mid-eighteenth century onward, marks, to my recollection, the first point at which the complacencies of Whig history in that respect began to be seriously doubted by large numbers of educated people.
I would therefore be inclined to say—pace Stannard’s blank assertion to the contrary—that far from it being the case that opinion has been distracted from the sufferings of non-Jewish groups through the effort of “Holocaust hagiographers” to exalt the sufferings of Jews above those of others, the post–World War II awareness of the historical prevalence of genocide arose largely as a consequence of the Shoah, and did so to a considerable extent through the work of Jewish pioneers, among whom the now largely forgotten Lemkin was perhaps the most prominent.
As a result of their work, there has been since the 1960s, at least, no lack of consciousness among Western intellectuals of the long history of genocide to be laid at the door of European colonialism. To finger a supposed group of Jewish zealots, as Stannard does, as responsible for an entirely nonexistent lack of concern is evidently absurd. Equally evidently, it is antisemitic.
Since the Holocaust, the malignant absurdities of antisemitic calumny have tended—though with some surprising exceptions—to encounter, for obvious reasons, a less receptive mass audience than they did, say, in the 1930s and earlier. For that reason no doubt, antisemitic discourse tends nowadays to be marked by a tendency to conclude each Judeophobic harangue with a complaint to the effect that innocent folk who merely attempt to tell the truth about the Jews always get accused of antisemitism, with a view to shutting them up. Here is a move of that type from the website The Resistance Report: “They want us to think that they are always innocent and powerless, and anyone who disagrees with or hates even one Jew must be anti-Semitic. Yet if I say I hate White racists, does that make me anti-White? If not, then how does it make me anti-Semitic to say I hate Jewish racists? It doesn’t, but they don’t want you to know that.” And here is the equivalent move in Professor Stannard’s essay: “In short, if you disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unique, you are, by definition—and like David Duke—a crypto-Nazi. Needless to say, such intellectual thuggery usually has its intended chilling effect on further discussion.”21
IN SEARCH OF TEXTUAL EVIDENCE
But does Deborah Lipstadt, or anyone else in Stannard’s chosen band of Jewish “zealots,” actually say, either in so many words or via some plausibly paraphrasable circumlocution, that what was unique about the Holocaust was the suffering it involved, taken—in terms of some suitable modulus—quantitatively?
Manifestly, Stannard stands in need of textual evidence to back up a claim like that. It is nowhere to be found in his essay. In its place, we find repeated and forceful, but entirely unargued, assertions of the pair of implausible assumptions we have already repeatedly encountered. The first is that non-Jewish Holocaust scholars who regard the Holocaust as without parallel (and there are, after all, plenty of them) do so only because of pressure from Jewish “Holocaust hagiographers.” The second is that the only sense in which the Holocaust could intelligibly be deemed unique or unparalleled is in respect of the quantity of suffering (assuming suffering, as distinct from number of persons killed, to be quantifiable) endured by its Jewish victims.
Once these deeply dubious suggestions have been introduced into the unwary reader’s mind—essentially by blank assertion alone—the remaining bulk of the essay is taken up with an attempt, in itself unexceptionable enough though frequently cursory, to show that in a range of other genocides, from the Ottoman massacres of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 to the accelerating destruction of the native peoples of the Americas in the decades and centuries following 1492, the sum total of the suffering endured, estimated by a variety of criteria (all of them conceptually parasitic on the idea of counting the dead) may be reasonably supposed to have been as great or greater than that endured by the sum total of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
There is, though, one point late in the essay at which something at least resembling textual evidence is offered, with reference to an essay by Edward Alexander of the University of Washington.
According to uniqueness advocate Edward Alexander, for instance, the experience of the Holocaust provided “a Jewish claim to a specific suffering that was of the ‘highest,’ the most distinguished grade available.” Even to mention the genocidal agonies suffered by others, either during the Holocaust or at other times and places is, Alexander says, “to plunder the moral capital which the Jewish people, through its unparalleled suffering in World War II, had unwittingly accumulated.” One of the most ghastly amassments of genocidal suffering ever experienced is thereby made the literal equivalent for its victims of a great bounty of jealously guarded “capital” or wealth. It is unlikely that there exists any more forthright expression than this of what Irving Louis Horowitz calls Holocaust “moral bookkeeping.”22
Stannard here equips Alexander, who happens to be Jewish, with the character and motives of Shylock: the pitiless Jew who not only considers the sufferings of Jews “higher” and more “distinguished” than those of the non-Jew but who can think in no other terms than those of ownership, possession, wealth, and “capital” to describe human suffering, even the sufferings of his own tribe, and who “jealously guards” both the word Holocaust and the thing itself as uniquely Jewish possessions.
It thus becomes rather an important question whether Alexander’s text, considered in extenso, will actually bear this thrillingly accusatory interpretation. Alas, when the context of Alexander’s remarks is restored, the heightened colors so easily bestowed by selective citation fade, as happens in such cases, into the light of common day. The distinction between “high” and “low” as applied to Jewish concerns, it turns out, is not Alexander’s at all but George Eliot’s, and the attaching of central significance to suffering, in Alexander’s opinion, not to be Jewish but rather Christian in character. Here is the full sentence in context: “The uniqueness of Jewish suffering and of the Jewish catastrophe during the Second World War had no sooner been defined than it was called into question,
