Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Peter Kenez

Reviewed by PETER KENEZ

No topic in twentieth-century history, including the Russian Revolution, inspired such an outpouring of scholarly studies as the Holocaust. Remarkably, interest in the topic not only has not diminished over time, but on the contrary, it has constantly increased. How can one explain this phenomenon? Perhaps the issues raised are less threatening in the perspective of decades; perhaps a new generation of Jewish historians feel an obligation to their dead ancestors to retell their stories; perhaps diminished anti-Semitism in the Western world has created the necessary conditions for this publishing industry. It is worth remembering that Raul Hilberg about forty years ago had trouble publishing his magnum opus.

The two books under review have been written by first rate-scholars who have worked diligently for years to produce their studies. Katz's volume is the first of an envisaged three and Friedlander's is the first of two. Both books represent considerable scholarly achievements, yet they could not be more different from one another. Isaiah Berlin discussing Tolstoy made a distinction between two types of thinkers who are seeking the truth: the hedgehogs are looking for one great unifying idea, and the foxes are satisfied with finding many little truths. According to this metaphor, Katz is a hedgehog and Friedlander is a fox.

Professor Katz set himself a simple goal: he wanted to show that the Holocaust was a unique historical event, a true genocide unlike the other dreadful mistreatments of human beings that took place in the past. He decided to go about his task in a straight-forward manner. He defined genocide as a state-organized, ideologically motivated attempt to eliminate every single member of a group, and then proceeded to take one purported genocide after another and came to the conclusion that none measured up. It is Steven Katz's intention in the next two volumes to show that the Holocaust was also fundamentally different from the other horrors of the twentieth century.

He assumed the burden of writing both as an historian and a philosopher, and one cannot but admire his industry. This 700-page-long first volume shows that he has acquainted himself with different topics spanning millennia. The book has approximately 5,000 entries in its bibliography written in half a dozen languages. There are so many footnotes, and of such length that at times there is no text on a page at all. Some of the footnotes simply give references to other books; in others the author elaborates points made in the text and yet on other occasions he expresses his disagreements with other authorities. (On the other hand, he did not footnote his assertion that there was a blood libel case in Hungary in 1965. I would have liked to know where he got this information.) It is a mistake, however, to think that a flood of footnotes is the equivalent of historical proof. That great lake of footnotes only makes it difficult to follow the text.

It is easy to understand what motivated Katz in deciding to devote many years of his life to "proving" his main point. He is plainly and understandably irritated by the trivialization of the Holocaust, by thoughtless comparisons between Auschwitz and abortion clinics, by people who describe a city ordinance which forbids people to sleep in the streets as a "Holocaust," and by similar inane comparisons. For better or worse, the Holocaust in our modern terminology has become a synonym for evil, and therefore many people who hold passionate beliefs, when they want to demonstrate the injustices committed against their group, turn to the Auschwitz analogy almost instinctively.

Even more disturbing, there are respected scholars, most notably Ernst Nolte, who argue that since the Nazis were not more wicked than many other groups in the twentieth century in particular, the Soviet Communists, we should not be overly upset by the Holocaust. At least some of the scholars who make this argument do so in order to serve a particular, rightist political purpose and their writings are not free of a taint of anti-Semitism. Probably Katz chose to write his book in order to refute such ideas.

In evaluating Katz's project two questions need to be posed: Is his fundamental proposition correct? And if so, what follows? Comparisons and analogies are, of course, essential tools of the historian's craft. But no historian would look for complete agreement; maybe modern revolutions have features in common, but no one would argue that two revolutions were exactly alike. The purpose of comparisons is to raise questions, look at events from a novel point of view, and to point out differences as well as similarities. Alas, Katz has not approached his task as a good historian should. It is easy to demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust, especially if one defines the criteria for establishing uniqueness by studying the Holocaust. It is easy, because it is a tautology. No doubt one could demonstrate the uniqueness of the persecution of witches if we derived our categories from the history of witchcraft. But uniqueness by itself means very little.