whose ethical values are based on the idea of a community of suffering. Many Christians also believe that, as Mary Ann Evans, later known as George Eliot, wrote in 1848, ‘Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.’ Yet here was a specific suffering that was of the ‘highest,’ the most distinguished grade imaginable.”23 Alexander’s response to Eliot is ironic, which is why the word highest is in scare quotes. His point is that whatever nineteenth-century Christians may have thought concerning the low-grade nature of any concern specifically involving the Jews, the Holocaust, whatever else it has done, has at least rendered impossible that kind of airily patronizing dismissal. The point has, in short, no bearing whatsoever on the meaning of uniqueness. Nor can the phrase the uniqueness of Jewish suffering be taken, as Stannard seems to imagine, to align Alexander’s understanding of the term uniqueness with his own. What Alexander, like other Jewish commentators, takes the uniqueness of the Holocaust to consist of, as he makes clear in the first paragraph of the essay concerned, is not the supposedly “incomparable” extent of Jewish suffering but rather the nature of the criteria by which its victims were selected.
The Jews held a unique position in the Nazi world because they alone, of all the peoples subject to German rule, had been marked for total destruction, not for anything they had done or failed to do, but because they had been born of three Jewish grandparents. Their guilt lay exclusively in having been born. Although only Jews could be guilty of being Jewish, the centrality of the Jews in the mental and political universe of the Nazis established a universal principle that involved every single person in German-ruled Europe: in order to be granted the fundamental human right, the right to live, one had to prove that he was not a Jew.24
That leaves Stannard with nothing to brandish but the phrase moral capital, which he takes, by implication, to convict Alexander—in a manner at the very least, highly redolent of one of the central motifs of traditional gutter antisemitism—of a willingness to see everything, including the sufferings of his fellow Jews, in light of a “possession,” of “capital,” and of “wealth.” I have no access to the original Midstream version of Alexander’s article, and I cannot locate the phrase, beginning “plunder the moral capital,” that Stannard cites, in either of the versions of the essay that Alexander later reprinted (in The Holocaust and the War of Ideas25 and The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies). But that hardly matters, since the phrase “moral capital,” expressing much the same thought, recurs, anyway, in a passage in the version of the article included in The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies. In this passage, Alexander discusses the tendency, in recounting and dramatizing the diary of Anne Frank for popular consumption, to downplay, in the interests of giving the work a “universal significance,” its author’s references to her own and her family’s Jewishness as the cause of their predicament. “Cut free from her Jewish moorings, improperly understood by her own people, Anne Frank has become available for appropriation by those who have a sounder appreciation of the worth of moral capital, and know how to lay claim to sovereignty over it when the question of sovereignty has been left open.”26
I think it is clear from context that the term moral capital refers here, not as Stannard insists, to quantity of suffering, Jewish or otherwise, but rather to the recognition of the causal role played by their Jewishness in the selection for persecution of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In short, for Alexander, as for Bauer, Lipstadt, Rosenfeld, and other Jewish (and many non-Jewish) defenders of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it is general recognition of the fact that Jews, unlike other victims of Nazi atrocity, were killed just for being Jews that constitutes the “national asset” of which would-be universalizers and de-Judaizers of the Holocaust wish to deprive the Jewish people.
WHO OWNS WHICH ASPECTS OF THE HOLOCAUST?
If Alexander and Stannard agree about nothing else, they agree that the uniqueness debate was, and is, a debate about ownership. I want to conclude, therefore, by confronting this question afresh and head-on. Who does “own” the Holocaust: the Jews alone or all the victims of Nazi atrocity, of whatever kind or nation, or maybe all of suffering humanity? Evidently, one cannot answer that question without also confronting the central question of the uniqueness debate: was the Jewish experience of the Holocaust unique?
I have argued, with a nod to Wittgenstein, that the question of whether something X is or is not unique becomes answerable only if one has specified the characteristic or characteristics in respect of which uniqueness, for purposes of present discussion, is to be predicated of X.
So let’s make the question a little more complex by way of making the discussion a little more interesting and maybe somewhat increasing the proportion of light over heat. In what respects was the Holocaust unique, and in what respects was it not unique? And to whom—to the Jewish people or to others—does the Holocaust considered in each of these respects “belong”?
Bringing into play the notion that a thing can be unique in one respect and not in another opens up two possibilities that, simple and obvious as they are, appear so far as I am aware to be new to the debate. The first is that the Holocaust might turn out to have been unique among genocides in some respects and not unique in others. The second is that the respects in which it was unique, while they might turn out to “belong to the Jews,” might just as well turn out to belong to others—that is to say, to the non-Jewish part of humanity. I believe, for reasons that I shall now set before you, that this second possibility is in fact the case.
Much has been made in the uniqueness debate, not only by David E. Stannard but also by many other contributors, of the uniqueness claim as a pretended attempt by Jews to exalt themselves above all other persecuted peoples since the beginning of time in respect of the supposed uniqueness of their suffering. One of the reasons why the bulk of Jewish (and for that matter non-Jewish) scholars have in fact made no such claim is, no doubt, that it would be an impossible claim to defend. Equally, I take it, the reason why those, like Stannard, hostile to the idea that the Jewish experience of the Nazi persecution was in any sense unique, emphasize the aspect of the Holocaust as suffering to the exclusion of all other aspects, is that by doing so, they think to position themselves on strong ground.
Both sides are right, at least about this! Sadly, there is seldom anything unique about suffering. However great, however abominable the present form it takes, however satanically ingenious the modes of its present infliction, as bad or worse can generally be found in the long panorama of human barbarity.
But the proper conclusion to be drawn from this truth is not Stannard’s. Suppose we agree with Stannard, for the sake of argument, that the Holocaust may be said to belong to the Jews under the aspect of suffering. In that case, it belongs to them under an aspect that, far from dividing them from the rest of suffering humanity, unites them to it. No distinction arises between Jews and members of other nations in that respect. As victims of suffering, we may all weep together.
But what about other aspects of the Holocaust? What in particular about its aspect as a persecution conducted against the members of a certain people for no other reason than that they were members of that people, and therefore, in logic, even if not always in practice, directed against every member of that nation without exception?
Here, the Holocaust does seem to me, as it has to many others, Jewish and non-Jewish, including all of Stannard’s “small industry of Holocaust hagiographers,” to have been unique.
But under that aspect, the aspect of persecution upon the sole ground of birth, the Holocaust in no way belongs to the Jews. It belongs to the rest of us, to non-Jews—that is to say, simply because the project of extermination on the sole ground of membership by birth of a given people has no Jewish component. It took its rise and, in the course of time, arrived at the moment of its attempted implementation entirely within gentile circles.
We
