"The Holocaust: The Latent Issue In The Uniqueness Debate" by Professor John Murray Cuddihy
A presentation to The Holocaust Resource Center's Faculty Seminar, January 1980.
[The two pictures at the end and the beginning are my insertions. The article itself, republished here in full, serves as the gateway and introduction of The Indo-European Friendship Club’s book club on the works of Professor John Murray Cuddihy.]
“There is no escape from the self-defeating ethos of exclusivism and intolerance…as long as our fundamental culture is derived from a /Judeo-Christian/ religious tradition that insists upon the dichotomous division of mankind into the elect and the reprobate.” —Richard L. Rubinstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York, 1978), p. 93.
“The problem…dealing with Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews (goyim) is the great sleeper issue of contemporary Jewish life. It interacts with almost every aspect of the Jewish situation.” —Michael Wyschogrod, “Love your (gentile) Neighbor,” Sh’ma, IX, No. 175 (May 25, 1979), 113.
STATEMENT TO MY READERS
1) Throughout, I am hardly ever speaking about the Holocaust itself as an historical event. I am speaking about speech about the Holocaust; I am talking about Holocaust ideologies, about debates, and debates about the Holocaust. Historiography, not history.
2) Even so, some of my ideas may offend. Nevertheless, I know this dread and awful murder occurred. It is a matter for grief as well as for study. I, too, grieve with Jews over their irreparable loss. And I too have been moved by the moral radiance of some of its victims. As I came to the end of Chaim Kaplan’s Warsaw Diary, as the “destroyers” block by block closed in on him — yes, indeed, among them, 70 Jewish policemen, he notes with his usual bitter scrupulousness — and as I read his final words — “If my life ends— what will become of my diary?”— (I don’t know what the common reaction is), I cried, —from sadness, from joy that the Diary and its testimony had survived in triumph, that a Pole had been its custodian, and that Kaplan had had the last word, for here was I, now, reading those very words, and crying.
I. Comparisons: “Obscene” or “Sacrilegious”?
The debate rages. It divides Jewish and Christian scholars, but, not infrequently, Jews and Christians can be found on both sides of the divide. Is the Holocaust unique? The argument runs right down into the very nomenclature for debating it. “What problems did the book /Sophie’s Choice/ pose for you initially?” LOOK magazine asks author William Styron in the August issue. “There was a kind of sacrosanct quality about Auschwitz,” he replies, “and from now on I’m going to say Auschwitz instead of the Holocaust because I’d prefer it. I fully understand the use of the word Holocaust, but I don’t think it’s applicable to the entire experience of the concentration camp, especially because it applies to a lot of other people who were not Jewish who were victims. So I’m going to use Auschwitz as a generic description,” he concludes bluntly.1
The argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, on the other hand, occurs, frequently, in oblique form, in the indignant denial of the legitimacy of comparison, or in the brusque dismissal, say, of the Armenian massacre as an “obscene comparison.” City University of New York historian Henry Feingold, for example, criticizes Marcel Ophuls, film director of “The Meaning of Justice,” for his tendency to rob the Jewish Holocaust of its “horrendous particularity” and thus to “trivialize” it. “Nazism becomes not a uniquely demonic force,” he writes, “but the dark side of the human spirit which lurks in all of us.”2 The comparisons and equations Daniel Ellsberg formulates in this same film represent an attempt, Dorothy Rabinowitz claims, “to discredit the idea of a unique evil perpetrated by Nazism and unequaled in history.”3
Why do so many Jewish and some Gentile scholars insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust? The obvious first answer is: because it was unique. The obvious reply to this is: but every event in any region of space-time is unique. The answer to this, in turn, is given by Roy Eckhardt: but the Holocaust is “uniquely unique.”4
“Uniquely unique” according to what criterion, in what category? There has been much search—research—invested in establishing such criterion, a criterion that will be positive and not negative, empirical and not mystical, one which will decisively differentiate the Holocaust from all other atrocities and from all other genocides. A quantitative criterion, since scale is a continuous variable, will not do, since it invites, precisely, comparison. The quarry of this quest is for a property which will place the Holocaust in a sui generis category.
Paul Robinson, in the New York Times Book Review, in questioning Bruno Bettleheim’s conviction that our age has been uniquely terrible and that its unique terribleness found perfect expression in the death camps of the Third Reich, examines three explanations typically advanced from the uniqueness of the Holocaust: it was systematic or total, it was senseless or non-instrumental, and it was specifically death-intending. Each criterion is, in the end, found wanting. But what really troubles Robinson is not the inadequacy of the various criteria, but the search for a category of uniqueness itself. “It serves little intellectual or moral purpose, in my opinion, to insist that the victims of the camps occupy a status ontologically different from, say, the victims of Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, the Albigensian Crusade, the Thirty Years’ War, European imperialism or black slavery.” The reason given for “placing the destruction of European Jewry in a distinct category” are important, “but they do not categorically separate the holocaust /sic/ from other historical acts of humanity.” Of course there are distinct differences between, say, “the horrors of the holocaust and those of slavery” but “we should resist the temptation to make the distinction categorical.”5
If we listen carefully to this text “with the third ear,” do we not hear echoes of the Jesus Prayer, “…lead us not into temptation?” By yielding to the temptation to make the difference between the Holocaust and, for example, slavery categorical, Robinson continues, “we do not deepen our sense of shame about what we, as a species, have done to another. Just the opposite: We impoverish that sense because we dismiss as relatively trivial all the sins that mankind had to answer for up to 1933.” A further consequence: “one would have to set aside as out-of-date the great historical portrayals of human wickedness left to us by, among others, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, for the simple reason that there was no holocaust in the moral universe of any of these artists.”6
In the “temptation” to make the Holocaust sui generis Robinson detects a sin, the sin of “impoverishing” our sense of shame and guilt by particularizing it. He urges that we “resist” that temptation.
Let us turn now to the other side. How do Jewish proponents of the utter, unique depravity of the Holocaust hear comparisons between the Holocaust and other atrocities? Let us attend to Professor Michael Walzer of Harvard. Walzer listens as Yehudi Menuhin, in the Ophuls film, says, ‘ “Every human being is guilty…’ “ /of the Holocaust/, and Walzer’s instant reaction is: “That is a pleasantly Christian pronouncement….”7 I thing that in this text we must take the adjective “Christian” as importantly as in Robinson’s case we took words like “resisting,” “temptation,” and “sin.” The unmistakably sardonic undertone of Walzer’s words is inseparable from the conviction that, in Menuhin, he confronts a Jew who, tempted to apostatize from the uncomfortable particularity of Jewish identity and the Holocaust, has succumbed to the lure of a “pleasant” Christian universalism.
Another argument for the uniqueness and centrality of the Jewish victims in World War II is the well-known argument from “reversed” priorities of Lucy Dawidowicz and others. The idea that Nazi anti-Semitism was of “a qualitatively different character than its predecessors in central Europe and that it held a unique primacy in Nazi decision-making is not a new one,” as historian Henry Feingold notes, citing Poliakov, Mosse, and Jacob Robinson. Instances of the diversion of rolling stock and personnel from prosecuting the physical or national war to the ideological “war against the Jews” do not prove that the ideological war against the Jews was necessarily the real or primary war. Feingold writes:
“The absence of even a pretense of being value free history raises questions on the nature of the evidence Dawidowicz used to prove the primacy of the war against the Jews….For Jews and their historians the holocaust is naturally the touchstone of all sensibility. But does that distort a true historical perspective? Ethnocentric readings are not unheard of among Jewish historians….To my knowledge no noteworthy student of European history would deny that a racial fixation was one of the keys to Nazi motivation, but neither would any of them assign to Nazis’ racial ideology the role that Dawidowicz does….the liquidation of the Jews, terrible as it was, was a relatively minor happening. Genocide is neither unprecedented nor metahistorical. The ‘final solution,’ /Feingold concludes/, takes its place with other atrocities in the bloody history of the West. Seen on the larger canvas of European history, the holocaust does not have the importance and uniqueness it has on the canvas of Jewish history.”8
Even if the argument from “reversed” priorities or counterproductivity were to prove the priority of the fanatical ideological war against the Jews, this would not of itself categorically distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide. For example, Helen Fein in her recent, powerful book, Accounting for Genocide, notes that the German Ambassador to Turkey, Count Wolf-Metternich, “understood that the Armenian extermination was an end in itself to the ruling /Turkish/ triumvirate and its party…,” and quotes the ambassador’s complaint that the Turkish ally, in its efforts to deport and exterminate the Armenians, “‘hampers the conduct of the war. These measures…gave the impression as if the Turkish government were itself bent on losing the war.’” Professor Fein, noting that “skilled Jewish workers were killed and railroad cars were diverted to bring the Final Solution into effect rather than to mobilize against the allies,” adds, “just as Armenian workers had been annihilated in Turkey during World War I, hindering Turkey’s mobilization.”9
Emil Fackenheim, a philosopher of the Holocaust, defends a version of the centrality thesis in arguing for uniqueness. Refusing what he takes to be Richard Rubenstain’s “extreme technological nightmare” analysis of the Holocaust, that, he maintains, derives from Lewis Mumford and others, in which the Jews become the “waste products” of a radically dehumanized industrial machine,10 Fackenheim identifies the uniqueness of the Holocaust with the uniqueness of its victims: it was uniquely and directly targeted to Jews.
The text in which he summarizes his conclusion bears close reading: “We must conclude, then,” he writes, “that the dead Jews of the murder camps /and here Fackenheim adds a revealing parenthetical aside/ (and all other innocent victims, as it were, as quasi-Jews, or by dint of innocent-guilt-by-association) were not the ‘waste products’ of the Nazi system. They were the product.”11
The Gypsies, Catholic Poles, Christian Slavs, and others are proving to be syntactically awkward for this particular reading of the Holocaust, just as they proved to be juridically awkward, as we shall see, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. If the uniqueness of the Holocaust is demonstrated by the uniqueness of its victims—the Jews—then the other victims become a kind of residue, to be mentioned in passing in a parenthesis, and converted to a new, and sociologically anomalous, if presumably honorable, status: “quasi-Jews,” “as if Jews.” “It helps, even if we are not ourselves victims, if we can ‘claim relationship with’ accredited victims.”12
The Gentile victims at Auschwitz, then, become what Talcott Parsons calls a “residual category,” whose deaths were somehow the unintended consequences of a purposeful social action, who died as if they were not themselves but stand-ins for another group, the Jews.
Fackenheim’s als ob strategy for coping parataxically with the Gypsy and Gentile victims of Auschwitz involves a curious sequel. Two years later, in early June of 1974, a Jewish and Christian symposium on Auschwitz was held at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City.13 Eighteen days later there appeared, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, an essay by the novelist William Styron, in which he protested the symposium’s “overwhelming emphasis on anti-Semitism and Christian guilt.” Noting that more than one million Christian Slavs were murdered in the same way as the Jews, in the same place, he concluded: “…I cannot accept anti-Semitism as the sole touchstone by which we examine the monstrous paradigm that Auschwitz has become…to place all the blame on Christian theology is to ignore the complex secular roots of anti-Semitism as well.. If /the Holocaust/ was anti-Semitic,” he ends, “it was also anti-Christian…it was anti-human. Anti-life.”14
Styron’s reaction to the Auschwitz symposium provoked, in turn, the notoriously indignant and astonishing counterattack by Cynthia Ozick, “A Liberal’s Auschwitz.” (It appeared, in a quarterly appropriately titled Confrontation.) In this reply of Ozick, defending the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Fackenheim’s quasi-victims return, minus their parenthesis. “The Jews,” Ozick retorts to Styron, “were not an instance of Nazi slaughter; they were the purpose and whole reason for it. Like any successful factory in roaring production,” she adds, “the German death-factory produced useful by-products: the elimination of Slaves and most Gypsies.”15
A curious transposition occurs in this Ozick text. In the original Fackenheim formulation, which Ozick had evidently read,16 the term “waste product” is vigorously rejected as applicable to Jewish victims. Ozick then picks up the epithet rejected by Fackenheim for Jews, changes it to “by product,” and applies it to the non-Jews.
In this Ozickian hermeneutic of the Holocaust, Christian Slavs and most Gypsies are, indeed, de facto victims, but they fail to achieve what I have elsewhere called “accredited victim” status.17 They fail to achieve it because, being an ascriptive status, it cannot be achieved. For Miss Ozick these “non-Jewish” victims are dead all right, but dead for all the wrong reasons, incidentally dead, mere “by-products” of the Holocaust, as she calls them, lapsing into her revealing and ghastly metaphor.
Styron waits three years and then returns to the thrust of Ozick’s “by-product” metaphor in New York Review of Books essay entitled “Hell Reconsidered.”18 He argues as follows: Yes, he concedes, the vast numbers of Russians, Polish Christians, Gypsies, and others who were exterminated by the Nazis “would possibly seem less meaningful if the victims had been part of the mere detritus of war, accidental casualties, helpless by products of the Holocaust; but such was not the case….”19
II. Residual Categories, Like Ideas, Have Consequences
Hovering over the uniqueness debate as we look back, and haunting it at every turn, there is, I believe, an ancient residual category, viz., that of “non-Jew.” It re-emerges at all the great turning points in Jewish history, and in all the great historiographical debates: in the Balfour Declaration, during the Eichmann trial, in the historiography of the Holocaust. Residual categories are negative categories, and they create not only substantive and methodological problems for the social scientist but they have moral consequences for human beings.
The late Talcott Parsons offered this definition of a residual category (in The Structure of Social Action)—by thinking of the category “non-Jew” as you read it:
“If, as is almost always the case, not all the actually observable facts of the field, or those which have been observed, fit into the sharply, positively defined categories, they tend to be given one or more blanket names which refer to categories negatively defined, that is, of facts known to exist, which are even more or less adequately described, but are defined theoretically by their failure to fit into the positively defined categories of the system. The only theoretically significant statements that can be made about these facts are negative statements—they are not so and so.”20
Let us take two examples, the Balfour Declaration and the Eichmann trial.
When British foreign secretary Arthur James (subsequently Lord) Balfour, at the instigation of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, wrote his famous 67-word letter to the second Baron Rothschild on November 2, 1917, the two sleeper words among the 67 were “home” and “non-Jewish”: “…His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, …it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”21 The population of Palestine at the time was 800,000 of which 58,000 were Jews.22 The “non-Jewish” population category was 742,000. With the vast majority of Palestinians thus defined residually, as not being Jews, it was understandable that Herzl could speak of the Jews as “a people without a land” emigrating to “a land without a people.”
In the Eichmann trial, in the eleventh count of the indictment, Eichmann was convicted of the “deportation” of “scores of thousands of Gypsies” to Auschwitz, but he was not also convicted of their murder by the Israeli court, as he was in the case of the Jewish victims. Hannah Arendt comments on this as follows “…the judgement /of the court/ held that ‘it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction’—which meant,” Arendt notes, “that no genocide charge except the ‘crime against the Jewish people’ was brought” in the Eichmann trial.23
The court, Arendt appears to be arguing, embraced the defendant’s own alibi—namely, Eichmann’s fiction of the separation of deportation from extermination—only when it applied to the Gypsies. For how is the Holocaust to be uniquely Jewish unless a way can be found for juridically confining the crime of genocide uniquely to its Jewish victims?
“This was difficult to understand /Arendt remarks/, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of the Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police interrogation that he knew of it….His department had been commissioned to undertake the ‘evacuation’ of thirty thousand Gypsies from Reich territory, and he could not remember the details very well, because there had been no intervention from any side; but that the Gypsies, like Jews, were shipped off to be exterminated he had never doubted. /Thus/ he was guilty of their extermination /she concludes/, in exactly the same way he was guilty of the extermination of the Jews.”24
Before concluding this section, we will take one more text for analysis. In his second Stroum lecture, “Against Mystification: The Holocaust as a Historical Phenomenon,” Professor Yehuda Bauer of Hebrew University, while conceding that there are certain parallels to the Holocaust—otherwise “the whole phenomenon is inexplicable”25 —insists at the same time on the utter uniqueness of the Jewish situation. What is significant for us is that he falls back on two lexicons to argue this position: Marxist and religious.
“Not to see the difference…,” he writes, “not the realize that the Jewish situation was unique, is to mystify history,”26 and he sets his task as the demystification of the mystification. But soon, significantly, he builds to the language of classical, Levitical anathema: “…to say that the Holocaust is the total of all the crimes committed by Nazism in Europe, to do any or all of this is an inexcusable abomination….”27
Despite the book’s title, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, Bauer culminates with a definition of the Holocaust in the perspective of religion, religious not alone from the perspective of the victims but, surprisingly, from the perspective of the perpetrators also: “Holocaust,” he writes, “was the policy of the total, sacral Nazi act of mass murder of all Jews they could lay hands on.”28
There is, this suggests, a latent sacred interpretation of the Holocaust that surfaces from time to time, even in academic Jews of impeccable secularity. It is as though the ultimate, evidential proof of the Holocaust’s uniqueness had to pass through a process of radically separating one class of Hitler’s victims from all the others before appealing to the intention of Hitler himself as a guarantee, when empirical doubts arise, of the centrality of the class of Jewish victims.
When all else fails, we can fall back on the fanatical purity of Hitler’s racial fixation: He, at least, knew what he was doing. Others of us may be misled by trivial comparisons with other carnage; Hitler alone discerned the unique identity of his sacred victim.
Bauer’s definition, like Ozick’s, validates this eerie latent hermeneutic of the Holocaust. The ultimate, hidden assumption behind the insistent definition of the Holocaust as “uniquely unique”—from Bauer to Eckhardt—involves essentially a Durkheimian division of the Holocaust “product”—its victims—into two kinds: sacred and profane. Thus, to call the Nazi Holocaust, as Bauer does, a “sacral Nazi act,” may be—if we may thing the unthinkable—to depict Hitler himself as beholden to the Orthodox Jewish definition of itself as a sacred people, a people apart, a goy kadosh? a people k’khol ha-goyim that, even in death, is forbidden to mingle with “the nations,” with what Cynthia Ozick calls the unintended and profane consequences, the mere “by-products,” the—dare we say it?—trayf of the “sacral” act of the Holocaust?29 Two ritual categories of victim: the “sacred,” intended victims, and the profane “by-products”: is this not—as Robie Macauley says30 —a way of playing Hitler’s game?
Or is it? Suppose Hitler borrowed his game.31 Who started this game anyway? Who cares?! The point is to stop playing it. As Richard Rubenstein writes: “There is no escape from the self-defeating ethos of exclusivism and intolerance…as long as our fundamental culture is derived from a /Judeo-Christian/ religious tradition that insists upon the dichotomous division of mankind into the elect and the reprobate.”32
III. Symbols of Subcultural Status: Prestige as a Control System
Whatever the merits of the uniqueness claim, we can still inquire into its functions. Even if our contention as to the latent content of the uniqueness debate—viz., that the uniqueness claim is premised on a secularized (and sometimes not so secularized) conviction of Jewish chosenness—should prove to be inadequate or false, as sociologists we can still examine what functions (latent and manifest) the claim to the Holocaust’s uniqueness performs for its claimants.
One function, for example, is that by stressing what I have called “sacred particularity,”33 empirical enquiry into the complex secular roots of anti-Semitism is neglected in favor of easy theological deductions. A direct causal emanation from the cultural value system into the social system spares us the trouble of seeing what conditions in politics, economics, demography, and psychology conduce to anti-Semitism.
Again, the uniqueness claim lends itself to the classical Zionist ideological conviction of the ubiquity and eternity of Diaspora anti-Semitism. A unique Holocaust involves the almost a priori symbiosis of Judaism and anti-Semitism. This interpretation claims, according to David Blumenthal, that the Holocaust, “in its truest sense, is a Jewish affair; that is, therefore, has its deepest roots in anti-Semitism…. It is more than ironic that both the Zionists and their enemies should perceive the hermeneutic of the Holocaust developed by the Jewish community as being the same.”34 “In this connection,” Peter Berger argues, “the insistence by some that the Holocaust must be the core of Jewish self-reflection today has the function of freezing the presence of anti-Semitism in the consciousness of Jews—and this covering up the question of why one should be a Jew.”35 Berger calls this insistence a “strategy” for circumventing the “heretical imperative” of choice immanent in modernity”36
My chief interest in the uniqueness claim is to ask: What, today, is the Jewish community getting out of this claim? What function is the consuming interest in the Holocaust performing for the Jewish subculture and its members? Like all important, deep concerns, even obsessions, this one is “overdetermined,” sociologically speaking. It has many functions to perform, and more than one reason for existing.
I select, as the focus of my interest, the Holocaust and its uniqueness claim as an instance of a cultural status claim. Too often, status is seen in relation to social class alone. My work has explored how subcultures and their minority intellectuals may be viewed as cultural status-seekers engaged in an inter-ethnic and intra-social kulturkampf.
Like the struggle of scientists over priorities in scientific discovery—which Robert Merton has so brilliantly explored37 —I view the ardent concern for uniqueness as a special case of what Merton calls “the power of the drive for ethnocentric esteem.”38 What he terms “the type of ethnocentric concern with national priority of discovery that turns up again and again…,”39 I regard as a variant form of the concern with uniqueness or specialness. Let us be frank: National priority and national uniquity (uniqueness) are both covert claims to superiority, parallel paths to the same summit, and that summit is what Merton calls “ethnocentric glory.”40 Individuals, like groups, pursue the prestige of the superiority of uniqueness even in the terrible passages of their history. “Jesus Christ, supreme victim”41 may be a paradox; it is not a contradiction.
As in the case of “Symbols of Class Status,” as Goffman has shown,42 so in the case of symbols of cultural (and subcultural) status, uniqueness is a pre-eminent cultural value, enabling cultures (and subcultures), and the groups which are their carriers to be invidiously ranked on a scale of prestige.
Of course, much Holocaust attention is a prolonged act of grieving. It is grief-work.43 Some interest in the Holocaust is sheer cognitive desire to know for-its-own-sake “what happened?” Another of its functions is to memorialize, to remember, and at the same time—perhaps paradoxically—to celebrate. There is a genuine effort to participate in—to use the title of William Goode’s recent study—The Celebration of Heroes, to which we must add his more sociological subtitle: Prestige As a Control System.44
To the profane eyes of a sociologist who is neither a Jew nor a Christian, one of the obvious if latent functions of the appeal to a sacred uniqueness is that it stakes out a subcultural status claim to exclusiveness, setting the claimant’s group and its members apart and making them immune from comparison. Praising the superiority of one’s group becomes a legitimate avenues of indirect self-congratulation. Self-regarding sentiment, improper as egoism, is praiseworthy when it acts out as “us-ism.”
In good part, the status power of the Holocaust symbol derives from the fact that it functions as a double theodicy: in one act, it separates Jews from Gentiles and blames Gentiles, in the person of Hitler, for that separation. This is the function of the uniqueness claim that Jacob Neusner of Brown University has in mind when he writes of the Holocaust not as an historical event, but as an ideology the Holocaust in italics. Neusner writes: “‘The Holocaust’ is the Jews’ special thing: it is what sets them apart from others while giving them a claim upon those others. That is why,” Neusner concludes, “Jews insist on the ‘uniqueness of the Holocaust.’”45 What Neusner calls “the claim upon others” that the Holocaust confers is what I call the social control function exercised by the prestige of cultural and subcultural symbols. Like social class symbols, cultural symbols serve “to influence in a desired direction other persons’ judgment” of the group that is the symbol’s carrier.46 Think of the aristocratic function of family trees and “patents” of nobility. Symbolic cultural behavior, or social action featuring symbols, is designed to move (and thus to socially control) others, to pay us the old difficult doxa: glory, honor, praise, esteem, approval, deference, opinion, repute. The craving for recognition and prestige is ubiquitous. How, when legal sanctions do not apply, prevent the misrepresentative use of class and cultural symbols? A latent function of at least some of the research devoted to the Holocaust symbol is to find, in the absence of legal restrictions for the misrepresentative use of it, moral, intrinsic, natural, socialization, and cultivation restrictions47 on the misuse of it.
It is in this light that one should view even the definitional struggle itself, in its focus on uniqueness. Uniqueness is at once a device for conferring status and for preventing “fraud” (i.e., “obscene comparisons”). Hence, cultural items, events, and behavior used to signify cultural prestige—paralleling the case of class and social status—are frequently proposed and defended on the basis of limited supply or natural scarcity. What Goffman calls “historical closure”48 is a form of temporal scarcity. An incident a few years back illustrates the importance of this as a device for restricting misrepresentative use of the Holocaust symbol.
The late Shlomo Katz, then editor of Midstream magazine, got into an angry exchange with black novelist-intellectual James Baldwin over Baldwin’s comparison of the solitariness of prisoner Angela Davis to that of “the Jewish housewife on the way to Dachau.” “Everybody,” he wrote indignantly, “tries to jump on each other’s bandwagon without regard to fact, to meaning, to consequence….” Then Katz proceeded to instruct Baldwin in the fact “that genocide has happened, once and for all, in the literal sense, and not in the rhetorical misuse of it ‘by fly-by-night self-styled revolutionaries.’” It is the term “fly-by-night” that gives the game away; Katz “considers himself to be addressing, clearly, cultural upstarts” who, in a subcultural status struggle, are violating proprietary cultural rights in a precious and unique symbol.49 In the status-politics of subcultures, emulation is experienced as subversion, as, in another institution of the culture system, the art world, supreme value attaches to “originals,” not “reproductions.”
The case of Katz and Baldwin is an early example of the genus “obscene comparison” which Katz seeks to interdict by the devise of “historical closure.” Professor Yehuda Bauer, on the other hand, while insisting on historical uniqueness, shades the position, writing: “We should properly use the term ‘Holocaust’ to describe the policy of total annihilation of a nation or a people,” adding: “To date, this has happened once, to the Jews under Nazism.”50 This is a modified “historical closure” position.
In part to prevent misuse of the cultural (or class) symbol, a curator personnel of subcultural intellectuals emerges “whose task it is to build and service”51 the symbol (or symbols) of cultural status. A cultural control system develops to prevent symbol contamination—religiously, syncretism—and to monitor and expose the evasions and circumventions of the devices for restricting misrepresentable uses of the Holocaust symbol. These curator groups seek to prevent what William Goode calls the “subversion of the prestige process.”52
In such “subversion” through imitation, comparison, and, occasionally, outright falsification, other groups seize and manipulate the symbol for their own purposes. A form of such “subversion” occurs when the privileged symbol circulates53 downward—call this “vulgarization”—or outward to other groups—call this “expropriation” by another group (say Blacks)—or upward—call this “elevation” (or universalization).
The drive behind the uniqueness claim—in this perspective, that of subcultural status aspirations—is to place the symbol “beyond comparison,” as, for example, when people exclaim: “Oh, there’s no comparison!”
This exemption from comparison is a heady privilege. This very exemption is itself a symbol of high cultural yichus. Among the many items selected by culture to symbolize status, incomparability alone is inimitable.
Peter H. Stone, “A Conversation with William Styron,” LOOK, n.s., II, No. 2 (August, 1979), 34.
Henry Feingold, “Ophuls ‘The Meaning of Justice’: The Power and the Muddle,” Congress Monthly, XLIII, No. 8 (October, 1976), 8 (my italics).
Dorothy Rabinowitz, “Ophuls: Justice Misremembered,” Commentary, LXII, No. 6 (December, 1976), 67 (my italics).
A. Roy Eckhardt, “Is the Holocaust Unique?” Worldview, XVII, No. 9 (September, 1974), 31.
Paul Robinson, “Apologist for the Superego” /review of Bruno Bettleheim, Surviving and Other Essays/, The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1979, p. 63.
Ibid.
Michael Walzer, “The Memory of Justice: Marcel Ophuls and the Nuremberg Trials,” The New Republic, LXXV, No. 15 (October 9, 1976), 21.
Henry L. Feingold /review of Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York, 1975)/, Jewish Social Studies, XXXVIII, No. 1 (1976), 83.
Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York, 1979), pp. 16-17, 24.
Emil L. Fackenheim, “The Human Condition after Auschwitz: A Jewish Testimony a Generation After,” Congress Bi-Weekly, XXXIX, No. 7 (April 28, 1972), 9.
Ibid., p. 10, reprinted in Emil L. Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York, 1978), p. 93.
John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York, 1974), p. 212.
The papers are collected in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust (New York, 1977).
William Styron, “Auschwitz’s Message,” The New York Times, June 25, 1974, p. 37.
Cynthia Ozick, “A Liberal’s Auschwitz,” Confrontation, No. 10 (Spring, 1975), 128.
This is extrinsically probable because—among other reasons—Ozick was herself a much-discussed author in the pages of the Congress Bi-Weekly. In the next issue, e.g., carrying the concluding Part II of Fackenheim’s essay (May 19, 1974), she is singled out for prominent mention twice (24 and 30). Again in the very next issue (June 30, 1972), a reviewer writes that “Cynthia Ozick has called attention to…” etc. (25).
Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility…., p. 212.
Part of this article reappears in altered form as the “Introduction” by William Styron to Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York, 1978). /The book is a paperback edition of The Cunning of History: Mass Death and the American Future (New York, 1975)/.
William Styron, “Hell Reconsidered,” The New York Review of Books, XXV. No 11 (June 29, 1978), 12 (my italics).
Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (Glencoe, Illinois, 1949), pp. 17-18. For another application of this concept, see Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility…., p. 222.
Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York, 1958), p. 375 (my italics).
Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews (New York, 1961), p. 375.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1964), p. 245.
Ibid. The word “Thus” appears in the earlier The New Yorker version.
Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle, 1978), p. 36.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 37, 38 (my italics).
Ibid., pp. 36 (my italics).
For a different development of this theme—the secularization of Jewish chosenness—see Chap. 5, “Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and the Metaphoricality of Jewish Chosenness” in John Murray Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York, 1978), pp. 101-155.
“Letters to the Editor: Who Should Mourn?”, The New York Times Book Review, August 8, 1976, p. 22.
See the “Erster Punkt” in George Steiner, “The Portage to San Christobal of A. H.,” The Kenyon Review, n.s., 1, No. 2 (Spring 1979), 114-116.
Rubenstein, Cunning of History… (1978), p. 93.
Cf. Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility…, p. 235.
David R. Blumenthal, “Scholarly Approaches to the Holocaust,” SHOAH, I, No. 3 (Winter, 1979), 23 (my italics).
Peter L. Berger, “Converting the Gentiles,” Commentary, LXVII, No. 5 (May, 1979), 36 (my italics).
Cf. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, New York, 1979).
Cf. Robert K. Merton in Norman W. Storer (ed.), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago and London, 1973), Chap. 14.
Ibid., p. 184
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 185.
Cf. Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility…., p. 212.
Erving Goffman, “Symbols of Class Status,” The British Journal of Sociology, II (1951), 294-304. I will quote from the reprint in Howard Robboy et al. (eds.), Social Interaction: Introductory Readings in Sociology (New York, 1979), pp. 266-276.
Cf. Peter Marris, Loss and Change (New York, 1974).
Berkeley, 1978.
Jacob Neusner, “A ‘Holocaust’ Primer,” National Review, XXXI, No. 31 (August 3, 1979), 978.
Goddman, “Symbols…,” in Robboy et al. (eds.), Social Interaction…, p. 268.
Ibid., pp. 269-272.
Ibid., p. 270.
All these passages are in Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility…, p. 211.
Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust…, p. 38 (my italics).
Goffman, “Symbols…,” p. 274.
William J. Goode, The Celebration of Heroes: Prestige as a Social Control System (Berkeley, 1978). See Chap. 10: “The Dynamics of Subversion.”
Goffman, “Symbols….,” p. 274.