short, that what belongs to the Jews, where the Holocaust is concerned—that is to say, suffering so vast as not in practice to be remotely imaginable or quantifiable—is not the thing that makes the Holocaust unique. It is rather what makes it part of the common human inheritance of distress. On the other hand, what does make the Holocaust unique—namely, the nature of the grounds upon which it was conceived and set in motion—is in no sense “the property of the Jews.” On the contrary, if it is part of any “inheritance,” the heritage of which it forms a part is not the Jewish heritage but the gentile heritage. As a property bequeathed by history it belongs, in other words, not to the Jews but, as the French say, to nous autres, to the rest of us: to non-Jews.
Every attempt to secure the “prize” of the term Holocaust for another oppressed group, however deserving of sympathy expressed in other terms, therefore carries with it the risk of losing touch with the uniqueness of the Holocaust as crime. Here it is worth quoting at length Pascal Bruckner:
In other words the Shoah has become a monstrous object of covetous lust. … From this comes the frenzied effort to gain admission to this very closed club and the desire to dislodge those who are already part of it. Consider this circa-2005 statement by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Great Britain until 2006, who proposed replacing Holocaust Memorial Day with Genocide Day: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’ and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.” In short, and to put it bluntly, it is now time to change victims. In the contest for world title of best outcast, the Muslim must replace the Jew, all the more so because the latter not only failed to live up to his status but because he has himself become, with the creation of the state of Israel, an oppressor. In short, the idealization of the Jews has paved the way for his later vilification, or, to put it differently, the Judaization of the Muslims necessarily leads to the Nazification of the Israelis.27
Once again, it apparently needs to be said, the crime committed by the prosecutors of the Holocaust was that of treating a birth certificate as equivalent to a death warrant. It was not that of regarding the death of one person as less valuable (whatever that may mean) than the death of another. To think that it was is to forget. And with forgetfulness comes the possibility of repetition: perhaps this time not in the shape of a further destruction of the Jews but in that of some other group.
CONCLUSION: HOLOCAUST MEMORY AS BOTH DUTY AND PRUDENCE
That is the ultimate reason why Stannard and others who think like him are wrong to suppose that we can do without the term Holocaust understood as a singular term—a proper name referring uniquely to the destruction of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945. We need it because it is essential to the work of Holocaust memory that includes museums, such as the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, along with Holocaust Days, research groups, university and school courses, books and articles.
The place occupied by the Jews in the imagination of both Christians and Muslims being what it is, it might still be asked: But why should all this effort be put into remembering the sufferings of the Jews, when others have suffered as much or more without being accorded this kind of attention?
The answer I have offered here—to repeat it one last time—is that what such things serve to keep alive is not the (alleged) uniqueness of the suffering inflicted in the Holocaust but rather the (actual) uniqueness of the Holocaust as political crime. The Holocaust was a unique and (for the moment at least) uniquely European crime because it was the first moment in history at which an entire people was willed to destruction merely to save the credit of a political fantasy.28 No doubt we, who as non-Jews belong to nations the bulk of whose citizens are non-Jews, ought to remember these things as a duty to the Jews. But non-Jews like myself, and no doubt many of my readers, also stand under a duty of prudence of which I shall have more to say in chapters 14–16: a duty to ourselves as non-Jews to remember these things. While the Jewish world suffered the consequences of the Holocaust, it was the non-Jewish world, its mythic structures, its resources of secular political messianism, that originated and contrived it. But the bulk of non-Jews who were in no way a party to Hitler’s war against the Jews, except through lack of vigilance, also paid a price for that lack of vigilance. Antisemitism is certainly part of what drew converts to the Nazi Party, and so part of what served to bring Hitler to power. Hence, antisemitism lay causally at the root of many millions of non-Jewish as well as Jewish deaths. Antisemitism, as long as it remains alive, will continue to retain the power it then demonstrated, to blind many to the demonic character of messianic politics until it is too late.
That is why “the Holocaust industry,” as Norman Finkelstein derisively calls it, is not, as he and others like Stannard have wished to persuade us, a specifically Jewish enterprise. It is an enterprise that serves all of us, one that we should pursue with all the industry we can muster, because it is in everyone’s interest, the interest of all citizens of the free world, Jewish and non-Jewish, to remember the specific nature and origins of the Holocaust as a crime. To lose that memory, at the behest of a sophistical universalism, is to lose a precious bulwark against the perennial power of spurious moralizing to betray society into the bloody hands of political messianism.
CONCLUDING POSTSCRIPT
The most troubling thing about this chapter, to me, is the fact that it needed to be written. Its origins go back to a talk I gave to a university audience in Seattle in 2011. The discussion inevitably turned to the topic of the Holocaust, at which point a former colleague in the audience whom, as a literary critic, I knew to be widely read and deeply insightful, and as a man, utterly devoid of any form of bigotry, raised the question whether commemoration of the Holocaust, dreadful as was the extent and nature of the suffering the Holocaust involved, and understandable as is the Jewish desire to see that suffering commemorated, was not nowadays serving to deflect attention from the sufferings—considerable, even if not as considerable—of other, non-Jewish groups.
In my reply, I made on the hoof the obvious point that I have been laboring in this chapter. The object of Holocaust commemoration was not, I said, to perpetuate the memory of Jewish suffering, suffering being the property of no particular people, but inseparable per se from the experience of humanity in general. Rather, I suggested the object of Holocaust commemoration was to perpetuate the memory of a crime unique not in the amount of suffering it caused but rather in its nature: as murder inflicted on grounds of ancestry alone. The task of commemoration, I said, was to perpetuate among other things the memory of the nature of that crime, of its historic unfolding and bleak fruition, and of the essential and central part played in that process by an irrational hatred of Jews—a hatred that survived the downfall of the Third Reich and remains with us today.
I should not have thought that there was much deserving to be thought original, or even surprising, about that as a reply: a host of Jewish writers and thinkers, after all, have said as much. But my reply seemed to strike my ex-colleague as astonishing—as unheard of in its startling originality, in short as some sort of thunderbolt. “Well, that may be a good point,” he said, “but I have to say it’s new to me. Who says this? Where did you read it? Where is it in print? I’d like the reference.”
I had to tell him, lamely, that so far as I knew it was not in print anywhere, at least precisely in that form—that I had just said it off the cuff, for no better reason than that it had happened to occur to me just at that moment, on my feet, in the stress of discussion. On the other hand, the nature of his response was such as to have made me think it, since then, eminently worthwhile to say it again and this time in print.
What was puzzling and a little distressing to me about this exchange was that my reply should have seemed so new and surprising to my former colleague. On the one hand, he is a man
