The Secular Word "HOLOCAUST":
Scholarly Sacralization, Twentieth Century Meanings ¹⁾

The journal article that preceded and was the basis for this web article is cited in note 1. This web article is a work in progress (last revision late Jan '06).   Comments and suggested corrections are encouraged. (jon_petrie@yahoo.com)

Introduction

Holocaust scholars, when commenting on the word "H/holocaust," almost invariably assert that the word carries Judeo-Christian religious / sacrificial overtones, sometimes decry these supposed overtones, ignore totally the word's pagan religious / sacrificial employments, and for the most part leave the impression that "holocaust" had absolutely no secular history before it became the principal American-English referent to the Nazi mass murder of Jews.  For example, Omer Bartov asserts: "'Holocaust' is a name that provides the event with meaning, and the meaning carries deep religious, Judeo-Christian connotations ... Holocaust means sacrifice, God, purpose." And Michael Berenbaum writing with the authority of the US Holocaust Museum claims: "The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, translates the Hebrew word olah as holokauston. The Hebrew literally means that which is offered up; it signifies a burnt offering offered whole unto the Lord. The word itself softens and falsifies the event by giving it a religious significance." (Michael Berenbaum, on the first page of his The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)⁽³⁾ (For a Marrus quote see this footnote.)

A major claim of this essay is that virtually all of the scholarly writings before 2005 on the connotations and history of the word "H/holocaust" are perniciously misleading or perniciously incorrect. Berenbaum (and others) have stated that our conscious and unconscious understanding of the term "H/holocaust" effects how we understand the Jewish catastrophe, or, in other words, that the term "H/holocaust" is a subtly distorting lens through which we view the tragedy. If this idea is accepted then it follows that any misrepresentations of the word's history and connotation propagated within the Holocaust Studies community have influenced the historiography of the Jewish catastrophe, distorting the lens and "falsif[ying] the event."

It would be difficult to argue that Barenbaum et al are wrong, that the connotations of "holocaust" -- as misrepresented by eminent Holocaust scholars primarily to each other but also to outsiders, e.g. in the different printings and editions of The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum -- have had no effect on the event's historiography.

A social psychology experiment of the 1970s demonstrated the significant falsifying effects that a single word's assumed connotations can have on understanding and memory of an event. Groups of fifty were shown a film of an automobile accident and immediately afterward questioned about the speed of the colliding vehicles. Those asked, "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?" gave a mean speed thirty per cent higher than those asked, "About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?" A week later the viewers of the film were asked if they had seen broken glass at the accident scene. About a third of those asked the "smashed" question the week before remembered having seen broken glass; those asked the "hit" question were half as likely to remember broken glass. (No broken glass was visible in the film of the accident.) ⁽⁴⁾

In the opinion of this writer, the implicit denial within the Holocaust Studies community that "holocaust" had a significant secular history prior to its employment as a referent to the Nazi Judeocide helps to support the idea that "h/Holocaust" can only be legitimately applied to the Nazi killings which, in turn, supports the pernicious ahistorical idea, that since other massacres require a different vocabulary, other massacres are totally incomparable to the Judeocide. And the repetition of the phantasm that the word "holocaust" carries "deep religious Judeo-Christian connotations" helps to mystify the destruction of European Jewry, subtly supporting a pernicious intellectual climate in which a well regarded Holocaust historian can wonder if "the Holocaust ... [is] an event whose mysteries were ... meant to be understood."  (The statements in the previous two sentences may not resonate with some readers but they are congruent with the results of the "hit" and "smashed" experiment and they do mirror statements by scholars who, while circulating the false notion that "H/holocaust" carries "Judeo-Christian sacrificial overtones," claim to deplore the effects of those fabricated overtones. For example (from the most frequently cited article dealing with the "h" word): "To turn the Jewish genocide into a sacrifice makes it a 'biblical' event rather than an event of our time -- a myth rather than a reality ... 'The Holocaust' should not be isolated, labeled as sui generis, the cataclysmic event, the discontinuity in history -- all those things that necessarily follow when the Holocaust is seen as 'The Holocaust.'") ⁽⁵⁾

The first objective of this essay is to demonstrate that "holocaust" was in broad secular use before World War II and that for the last century "holocaust" -- within a secular context and unmodified by religious words -- has carried NO connotations of Judeo-Christian religious sacrifice.  That "holocaust" was in broad secular use before the Nazi killings is fairly easily shown, but to demonstrate convincingly the absence of Judeo-Christian sacrificial connotations in such secular use requires an extensive sample of quotations. Presented below is a complete list of secular book and booklet titles containing "holocaust" and published 1900 - 1959 per the WorldCat data base and the British Library on-line catalogue.⁽⁶⁾ This list is immediately followed by every employment of "holocaust" in the American Historical Review 1915-1939 (from the JSTORE on line data base). And these Review quotations are followed by fourteen quotations: every use of "holocaust" in the Palestine Post from December 1937 through December 1938, and a small but representative sampling of later uses in the Palestine Post. ⁽⁷⁾ (The Palestine Post is on searchable CD-ROMs, so every use can be readily accessed.)

Excluded from the 1940s Palestine Post selections below are instances where "holocaust" denotes Jewish suffering and death.

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The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adna (1913 -- massacre of Armenians in 1909.)

The Holocaust and Other Poems (1914 -- "Holocaust" in this title refers to the San Francisco earthquake and fire.)

The Holocaust in Minnesota (1918 -- great forest fire.)

Fire from Holocaust to Beneficence: the Romance of Aryano and Semita (1918 -- "Holocaust" refers to a volcanic eruption; Aryano tames fire.)

The Holocaust: Italy's Struggle with the Hapsburg (1919 -- the oppression of Italy in the 1800s, suffering and dying patriots.)

The Last Ditch: ... the Minnesota holocaust ... (1920 -- drainage and irrigation law, inequalities, the destruction of water resources.)

The Holocaust (1922 -- poem in memory of the Armenian massacres.)

The Smyrna Holocaust (1923 -- destruction of Christian neighborhoods by arson; the massacre of Armenians.)

Holocaust Poems (1944 -- World War II's effects on England and the English.)

Holocaust at the Bar X (1952 -- potboiler Western.)

Holocaust at Sea (1956 -- account of a 1942 naval battle, the sinking of the battleship Scharnhorst.)

World Law or World Holocaust (1957 -- address before the Oklahoma Bar Association.)

Jungle Holocaust (Date uncertain but 1950s -- World War II in New Guinea.)

Holocaust! (1959 -- account of a 1942 fire. A newspaper headline description: "Boston Fire Death Toll 440; Night Club Holocaust Laid to Bus Boy's Lighted Match" -- New York Times 30 November 1942, p. 1.) ......................................................

"[T]he wars of the Roses made a holocaust of the old families." (American Historical Review, January 1915, p. 397)

"Savoy and Nice must then be sacrificed ... Cavor accepted the holocaust ... he ... signed [the treaty of cession] with a firm hand." (American Historical Review, January 1922, p. 222)

"... the loss of population in the holocaust of 1914-1918. (American Historical Review, January 1931, p. 477)

"[B]etween 1861 and 1865 his emotions were torn between a desire to press on to the extinction of slavery and a wish to stop the holocaust of young lives." (American Historical Review, January 1938, p. 420) .......................................................

"Whosoever shall go against this decree will ... fall under the knife ... his house will be no more, his body will perish in a holocaust." (Palestine Post, 24 December 1937, p. 5, col. 4. Archaeologist's translation of an Egyptian inscription of 500 BCE.)

"... the French press is worried lest there be some connection between the bloodless holocaust of German Generals and Ambassadors and the persistent reports that Mussolini is about to intervene in Spain ..." (Palestine Post, 6 February 1938, p. 4, col. 4. On 4 February, Hitler replaced Neurath at the German Foreign Ministry, removed three key ambassadors, and announced the retirement of eighteen senior generals.)

"For the first time since last September Japanese aeroplanes again raided Canton ... Although the damage exceeds September's holocaust, the death toll was somewhat less ..." (Palestine Post, 29 May 1938, p. 1, col. 1)

"After the Haifa holocaust ... " (Palestine Post, 17 July 1938, p. 8, col. 1. Exact referent is unclear. A series of incidents in and around Haifa earlier in July resulted in about six deaths.)

"Yesterday was also an anniversary of destruction. It was the day on which Great Britain entered the World War 24 years ago. Since that holocaust swept over the world, it has had no real peace ..." (Palestine Post, 5 August 1938, p. 6, col. 2)

"... the holocaust of 1914-18 ..." (Palestine Post, 11 September 1938, p. 8, col. 3)

"... thanks to the general dread of yet another European holocaust ... [Hitler] has brought them peace with territorial aggrandisement. (Palestine Post, 11 October 1938, p. 6, col. 2. German troops occupied part of Czechoslovakia in early October following the Munich agreement.)

"... the planning system of the Bolshevist regime has broken down ... The holocaust of directors and engineers shot as "wreckers" to stimulate others has brought only spasms ..." (Palestine Post, 27 October 1938, p. 3, col. 2)

"We hope and pray that the holocaust will be avoided ... There will be no war unless Herr Hitler wills it." (Palestine Post, 30 August 1939, p. 2, col. 3. Words of Arthur Greenwood, British Labour MP.)

"Stalingrad is the pivot ... this prolonged holocaust ..." (Palestine Post, 1 October 1942, p. 4, col. 1)

"The slaughter of their manpower is immense ... the German command must soon become appalled at the holocaust." (Palestine Post, 18 January 1944, p. 1, col. 7)

"There are women ... whose household labours resounds [with] the constant ringing of crashing china and glasses ... Those glasses that escape the holocaust of housework ..." ( Palestine Post, 26 July 1946, p. 8, cols. 1-2)

"After the holocaust of war, with its toll of 30 million victims of whom six million were Jews ..." (Palestine Post, 28 March 1947, p. 4, col. 2)

"On May 4 1897 ... 1,200 people crowded into a tent to see the cinema. Suddenly the light bulb of the projector exploded ... the holocaust, which lasted 20 brief minutes, claimed 124 lives." (Palestine Post, 9 May 1947, p. 4, cols. 2-3)

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The range of disaster and destruction described as a "holocaust" or "the holocaust" in the above titles and citations may seem extraordinary to those who know only the word's most common contemporary meanings. Of the seven "holocausts" in the 1938 Palestine Post, three refer to World War I or a future European war, but the four others refer to events that, in comparison to world war, are trivial affairs. And in a 1946 Palestine Post the word refers to the effects of clumsiness in the kitchen ("... glasses that escape the holocaust of housework ..."). No connotation of religious sacrifice seems intended in any of the above titles and quotations -- all could be rewritten, without altering meaning or connotation, by replacing "holocaust" with "conflagration," "catastrophe," or "massacre(s)." More generally, none of the hundreds of secular "holocausts" from the period 1910 - 1950 found and recorded by this writer carries a religious connotation. ⁽⁸⁾ And no dictionary definition I have consulted suggests that "holocaust," when used to mean "catastrophe," "conflagration," or "massacre," carries any sense of religious sacrifice.

Part of the foundation for contemporary scholarly assertions that "holocaust" had little secular circulation in the first half of the twentieth century and that the word carries Judeo-Christian religious connotations are certain false, but unchallenged, representations by Zev Garber and Bruce Zukerman in a 1988 paper, a 1989 journal article, and a 1994 book chapter. According to Garber and Zukerman's frequently cited "Why do We Call the Holocaust 'the Holocaust' ? ...", previous to 1950 "the primary sense of the term [holocaust]" was "religious sacrifice," and the "Jewish thinkers and writers who first adopted the term" were aware of the "religious/sacrificial connotations" that the term carries. To support this statement Garber and Zuckerman assert: "[T]he editors of the King James Version of the Bible ... translated the Hebrew term for whole-burnt offering, the olah ... 'holocaust.' Indeed, the adoption by the King James editors of this use of the term probably played the decisive role in fixing 'religious sacrifice' as the primary sense of the term in English up until the mid-Twentieth Century." ⁽⁹⁾ One major problem with this assertion is that the word "holocaust" is not to be found anywhere in the King James Bible. The Hebrew olah is translated as "burnt offering(s)" or "burnt sacrifice(s)" in the King James Bible. In the preface to the first edition of the King James Bible the translators state "... we haue shunned the obscuritie of the Papists ... their ... Holocausts, Præpuce, Pasche ... we desire that the Scripture ... may bee vnderstood euen of the very vulgar." ⁽¹⁰⁾

A check of concordances and a sampling of representative passages show that all of the principal Protestant and Jewish English-language Bibles of the last few centuries translate olah as "burnt offering(s)" or some very similar expression. Thus, contrary to what Garber and Zuckerman assert, virtually no twentieth century Jew or Protestant would be familiar with any biblical employment of the word "holocaust." (It should be noted, however, that Catholic Bibles do translate olah/olot as "holocaust" and thus Catholics would be familiar with the "religious sacrifice" sense of the word but, if they know their Bibles, would associate the word, when used to refer to a sacrifice of more than one human being, with a sacrifice to a pagan god. .)

In addition to falsely asserting that the King James Bible uses "holocaust" as a translation of olah, Garber and Zuckerman claim: "[Before World War II] most often the term was ... employed to characterize a particular sort of consumption by fire: the religious sacrifice. THUS [my capitals] the first definition in the OED is ... 'a whole burnt offering'; while the second definition applies this sense of sacrifice in a more general fashion ." ⁽¹¹⁾

This statement suggests that the academics, Garber and Zuckerman, the authors of the statement, and possibly the Holocaust scholars who have uncritically cited Garber and Zuckerman, have a limited grasp of how the most important English dictionary is organized. In the Oxford English Dictionary the first meaning given is NOT normally the meaning most often encountered.  It is ALWAYS, however, the oldest known meaning, a meaning that today may be archaic or infrequently encountered. (The first definition of "disaster" in the OED: "1. An unfavourable aspect of a star or planet; an obnoxious planet.")

Generally, dictionaries published before 1950, and contemporary updates of such dictionaries, do not indicate the frequency of use of different meanings of a word. However, two American dictionaries, one published in 1927 and the other in 1947, do indicate that the most frequently used meaning of "holocaust" is "great destruction of life" or "destructive fire," and not, as Garber and Zuckerman claim, "sacrifice" and "burnt offering." ⁽¹²⁾  A third dictionary, the Thorndike Century Junior Dictionary of 1942, which claims that its definitions derive from an examination of word usage in an extensive sampling of texts, gives no indication that "holocaust" has any religious meaning whatsoever: "holocaust: 1) complete destruction by fire, especially of animals or human beings, 2) great or wholesale destruction." And my Jerusalem printed 1958 Oxford English-Readers Dictionary gives as its only meaning of "holocaust": "A large scale destruction, esp. of human lives."

Possibly underlying some statements alleging religious overtones of "holocaust" by scholars who have not read Garber and Zuckerman is the "etymological fallacy," the belief that a word's original meaning forever conditions the "true" or "correct" sense of a word. Serious students of language have long recognized that "the original sense of words is often driven out of use by their metaphorical acceptations" (Samuel Johnson), and thus etymological knowledge is often not an aid to understanding the meaning(s) or connotation(s) of a word. ⁽¹³⁾

Perhaps a few examples are necessary to demonstrate the unreliability of etymology as a guide to meaning. The first meaning of "revolution" probably was "astronomical motion that returns to the point of departure," a meaning that remains in current use. An early political "revolution," the English Revolution of 1688, was seen by many contemporaries as a felicitous return to the past, the replacement of a Catholic absolutist king by a monarch similar to the Catholic's predecessor in both his Protestantism and his respect for Parliament. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Today, "the Revolution" can refer to very different events, but events that almost invariably are believed to constitute a radical break from some aspect of past practice rather than a return to a previous condition. Another brief word history: "halo" in early Greek referred to a "threshing floor." From medieval times, a "halo" in Christian iconography symbolized sanctity. "Halo spot" today is the name of a disease effecting oats and beans. "Catastrophe," like "halo" and "holocaust," comes from the Greek. Until the nineteenth-century a common meaning of "catastrophe" was the denouement of a play, a denouement that might be happy. Today, "Jewish catastrophe" as a referent to the Nazi mass murder of Jews is readily accepted by scholars, yet "catastrophe," in an English sense, referred to fictional events, fictional events that respectable audiences often applauded. 

In this essay's first extensive set of quotations, Jewish "holocausts" were excluded in order to avoid confusing different issues. A second series of quotations is presented below, examples of the use of "holocaust/um/s" c. 1200 - 1949 to denote Jewish persecution and death. A frequently cited scholarly article claims that "holocaust" was first used in 1957 as a specific referent to the Nazi murders of Jews, other scholars claim that Wiesel introduced the word circa 1963; thus some of the quotations from the 1940s and the statement preceding footnote  19 should surprise some readers. ⁽¹⁵⁾ In none of the twentieth century quotations below does "holocaust" appear to be intended to carry any connotation of religious sacrifice.

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"Londonie immolare Iudeos ... potuerit holocaustum." (c. 1200 - The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes (ed. J. T. Appelby, 1963), p. 3 -- See below for translation.)

"On the very day of the coronation [3 September 1189] ... a sacrifice of the Jews to their father the devil was commenced in the city of London ... the holocaust could scarcely be accomplished the ensuring day." (Chronicles of the Crusades (1848), p. 3 -- a translation of the Latin partially quoted above. Per the  Jewish Encyclopedia (1964): "September 1189 ... a mob ... after vainly attacking throughout the day the strong stone houses of the Jews, set them on fire at night, killing those that attempted to escape. The king was enraged ...")

"Since your Majesty don't like the peas in the shoe ... what say you to burning a Jew or two ... The Saints love a roast ... A Grand Auto-de-Fe ... YO EL RE! ... Thank Heaven, 'tis o'er! The tragedy's done! ... The last wretched Hebrew's burnt down in his socket! ... cost ... the whole of the Holocaust."  (Richard Barham c. 1840 -- "Holocaust" is the last word in the main section of the parody "The Auto-Da-Fe" in the Ingoldsby Legends.  This "Holocaust" is probably the most circulated of the 1840 - 1914 period -- circa 40 printings by various publishers, five by Oxford University press.  Patriotic Englishman of the 19th century regarded Roman Catholics as vaguely pagan, the Pope was sometimes referred to as the "Whore of Babylon.")

"Rabbi Jacob: ... You say the Jews shall burn ... Know ye what burning is ? Hath one of you, Scorched ever his soft flesh ... and raises not his voice To stop this holocaust ? God! 'tis too horrible! Wake me, my friends, from this terrific dream."  (Emma Lazarus, "The Dance to Death: A Historical Tragedy" in Songs of a Semite, 1882, pp. 37-38 -- In Nordhausen, Germany in the plague year of 1349, Jews have been accused of poisoning the wells. Rabbi Jacob is addressing the Nordhausen town council who have just voted to burn the town's Jews -- Lazarus is best known today for the lines on the base of the Statue of Liberty: "... Give me your tired, your poor ...")

"Wherever one moves in Spain the sickening breath of the auto da fe lingers in the air.  In such a square, we read, was once a mighty holocaust of Jews."  (New York Times, 7 May 1899, p 14:1)

"We charge the Russian government with responsibility for the Kishineff massacre.  We say it is seeped to the eyes in the guilt of this holocaust."  (New York Times, 16 May 1903,  p 1:1 quoting a Jewish Chronicle (London) editorial -- also "this barbaric holocaust" [Kishineff] Oscar Straus in The New York Times, 20 May 1903, p 2)

"Reports reach us regarding an appalling massacre of our people alleged to have taken place in the Ukraine ... 100,000, a figure which we doubt not is vastly exaggerated ... Even this holocaust does not stand alone, and the country traversed by the troops of KOLTCHAK and DENIKIN is said to be sodden with the blood of 'pogrommed' Jews." (Jewish Chronicle [London], 4 July 1919, editorial, p. 5, col. 2. Uppercasing exactly reproduced; Koltchak and Denikin were White Russian generals.)

"[Millions] are dying ... through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood. In this threatened holocaust of human life ... In this calamity ..." (American Hebrew, 31 October 1919, p. 582)


"Else Lasker Schuler, the poet, one of a number of prominent German Jews reported to have disappeared without a trace, is alive and safe ... Dr. Margoshes said he had received a letter from the poet at Zurich ... stating that 'she had run away from the the holocaust' and was destitute but perfectly safe."     (New York Times, 1 June 1933, p 6:8 -- probably the earliest well circulated American 'the holocaust' referencing Nazi persecution of Jews. Schuler almost certainly wrote to Dr. Margoshe, the editor of the New York Yiddish newspaper 'Der Tog', in German, not English --- so 'the holocaust' from the NY Times of June 1933 is almost certainly Margoshes's translation of a German word.  And Yad Vashem, the first institution to employ 'holocaust' with any regularity in reference to events of the Nazi era, usually defines 'the holocaust' as persecution and murder of Jews, 1933-1945,  within Nazi controlled territory --- hence Dr. Margoshes 1933 employment is in accordance with one of the prevaling definitions of 'the h/Holocaust' within Holocaust Studies. Another similar employment in an Australian Jewish newspaper on  25 May 1933: "The offering (funds/charity raised in Australia for the German Jewish community) might be regarded more in the nature of a thanksgiving that Australian Jewry has been spared the brutal holocaust that has overwhelmed its co-religionists in Germany."   Source for above,  W.D.Rubinstein on H-Holocaust, 29 Apr 2005.  See:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-holocaust&month=0504&week=e&msg=V%2bgLSvOovM334y5NudqGDA&user=&pw=      )

"PROPOSE YOU WITH LEADING FRENCH AMERICAN RABBIS AND OURSELVES PROCLAIM JEWISH DAY OF MOURNING THROUGHOUT WORLD FOR HOLOCAUST SYNAGOGUES GERMANY ..." (I. Herzog and J. Meir, Chief Rabbis of Palestine, to J. H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, telegram, uppercased, 16 November 1938.) ⁽¹⁶⁾

"The inflammatory fever which has been consuming Germany in recent years threatens a holocaust, a wholesale incineration ... The progress of the sickness can be examined in ... Mr. Warburg's account of racial persecution [of Jews]."  (Times Literary Supplement (London), 26 August 1939, Philip Tomlinson, "Flamens" (lead article), p. 503:2 -- the first well circulated "holocaust" referencing the fate of Jews in Nazi Europe)

"BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST" (The American Hebrew, 3 October 1941, front cover -- uppercase caption below a photograph of two men carrying Torah scrolls through a gate topped by a Mogen David. One of the men is wearing a tallith, the other is dressed in a French uniform.)

"This issue of the JEWISH FRONTIER attempts to give some picture of what is happening to the Jews of Europe ... In our calculations of the holocaust that has overtaken the Jews ... [w]e speak ... of the victims not of war, but of massacre ... The annals of mankind hold no similar record of organized murder ..." (Jewish Frontier, November 1942, editorial, p. 3 - uppercasing exactly reproduced. The first well circulated "holocaust" clearly referencing the Nazi Judeocide and employed by someone with a full understanding of what was happening to the Jews of Europe.)

"HOLOCAUST: Hitler has familiarized the world with brutality and terror ... But nothing ... is comparable to his treatment of the Jews ... more than half of Poland's three and a half million Jews have already been done to death ... Reprisals are out of the question ... We can make it plain ... those ... responsible ... for cold blooded calculated mass murders will be brought strictly to account." (News Chronicle [London], 5 December 1942, editorial preceded by uppercased title, "HOLOCAUST," p. 2, col. 2.)

"... a time of great tragedy for our people ... for those who will survive this holocaust ... [we] must go forward ..." (Chaim Weizmann, letter to I. Goldstein, 24 December 1942) ⁽¹⁷⁾

"Whereas the holocaust of mass murder of civilian populations, especially Jews, continues ..." (Congressional Record, 7 July 1943, Vol 89. section 11, p. 3601.)

"The Jewish people are today undergoing a process of decimation which has no parallel in history. Is it too much to expect that those who succeeded in escaping from the holocaust should not be condemned to the same process, even though the agency of death may not be the asphyxiation chamber of Poland ..." (Palestine Post, 21 June 1944, editorial, p. 4, col. 1.)

"Mass meetings were held ... [per] the Palestine Post ... a "last hour plea for opening our gates to the survivors of the Nazi holocaust."  (New York Times, 9 October 1945, p. 5:1)

"What sheer folly to attempt to rebuild any kind of Jewish life [in Europe] after the holocaust of the last twelve years!" (Z. Shuster, Commentary , December 1945, p. 10.)

"[A]fter the holocaust of the last few years the Jews ... have the right to expect sympathy ..." (Issac Deutscher, Economist, 12 January 1946, p. 45, col. 2 -- unsigned in the Economist but reprinted in Deutscher's The Non-Jewish Jew, p. 86.)

"Resolution on the Jewish People ... These six million dead are beyond tears. But the survivors of that holocaust of anti-Semitism have a special claim on the conscience of democratic mankind ..." (Fifteenth Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1946.) ⁽¹⁸⁾

"Other nations are liberated and can rebuild their ruins, but the survivors of our holocaust languish without liberty ..." (Chaim Weizmann at the 22nd Zionist Congress, Palestine Post , 10 December 1946, p. 1, col. 3.)

"The small remnant of Jewry ... that have survived the Hitler holocaust lend significence ..."  (Rabbi Wise quoted in the Los Angeles Times, "Britain Target ..." 27 January 1947, p. 5.)

"... in the case of Exodus 1947 ... May [the Red Cross] intervention put an end to the terrible ordeal of those survivors of the Nazi holocaust ..." (Palestine Post, 4 August 1947, p. 1, col. 3.)

"The Nazi holocaust which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe proved anew the urgency of the re-establishment of the Jewish state ..." (Israeli Declaration of Independence, New York Times, 15 May 1948, p. 2, col. 3.)

Franklin Littel, one of the founding fathers of what we now call "Holocaust Studies," employed "holocaust" in a 1949 newsletter written in Germany. In 1995, Littel wrote, "I must have picked it up -- as a precise reference to the Nazi genocide of the Jews -- from American Jewish chaplains or from workers in the DP camps." ⁽¹⁹⁾

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To summarize and conclude the first part of this essay before considering the employment of "holocaust" after 1948, any religious associations carried by the term "H/holocaust" today, when employed in a secular context, can only be the consequence of the nature of our understanding of the Nazi slaughters, usage of "H/holocaust" since the 1940s, and/or claims by Holocaust scholars that the word carries religious connotations.

"Holocaust" cannot be assumed to carry religious or sacrificial connotations today simply because the word was first employed to denote a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire.  No Protestant or Jewish translation of the Bible in twentieth century use contains the word "holocaust."  (In the Catholic Bible "holocaust" [olot in the Hebrew] is used once and only once to refer to the killing/ sacrifice of human beings (plural), a killing of children to honor Baal).  Between the world wars "holocaust" was employed as a referent to a broad range of non-Jewish secular disasters and carried in this employment no religious associations.  And when the word was used in 1919 in a Jewish newspaper to refer to the massacres of Jews in the Ukraine, in 1938 by the Chief Rabbis of (British) Palestine referencing the burning of synagogues, and in the 1940s by Jews and Gentiles to denote the Nazi organized systematic slaughter of Jews, the word apparently  carried no connotations of sacrifice unto the Lord.

Employment of "H/holocaust" at Yad Vashem in the 1950s and 1960s

The principal institution of the 1950s and 1960s devoting resources to the study of the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews was Yad Vashem, established in Jerusalem in 1953. Starting in 1957 and through the period in which the term "holocaust" became the dominant English language referent to the systematic Nazi mass murder of Jews, Yad Vashem published the only English language journals devoted to examining the Jewish catastrophe. The use of "holocaust" at Yad Vashem will be examined in some detail, partly because Yad Vashem's adoption of "h/Holocaust" as the referent to the Nazi genocide of Jews presumably heavily influenced general Israeli-English usage, and this usage, together with the direct dissemination of Yad Vashem usage, contributed significantly to the adoption of "H/holocaust" as the American referent to the Nazi genocide of Jews.

In Israeli official and academic circles, the Hebrew shoah (שואה) -- sometimes written shoa and sho'ah -- has always been the primary referent to the Nazi-organized destruction of European Jewry. (In Hebrew capitalization is not possible.) The Knesset law of 1953 establishing Yad Vashem was printed in Hebrew, English, and French. The English version translates shoah as "Disaster," while the French version of the Knesset law uses "l'Holocauste" on two occasions. ⁽²⁰⁾ In the years 1953 through 1955, shoah at Yad Vashem was usually translated into English as "Disaster" (capitalized with few exceptions), "the Great Disaster," "the Destruction Period," and "the European catastrophe" (this last usually uncapitalized). In 1954, the first of Yad Vashem's serials, Yediot -- initially printed entirely in Hebrew except for publication information ("Remembrance Authority of the Disaster and Heroism ...") -- began publishing a few pages of English summary. In 1955 the phrase "European holocaust" appears once in this English summary as an equivalent of shoah. ⁽²¹⁾ In the 1956 numbers of Yediot, the phrase "Nazi holocaust" is used on eight occasions in the seven pages of English text. (For example, "...the main task of Yad Vashem in Jewish life, the preservation of the memory of those lost in the Nazi holocaust.") In one instance in 1956, an unmodified "holocaust" follows a "Nazi holocaust." And in another instance, "Holocaust" is employed, as it is most commonly today, capitalized and with no modifier: "... the main ceremony of the Memorial Day of the Holocaust and Jewish Heroism ..." ⁽²²⁾ In no case in these early years at Yad Vashem does "h/Holocaust" appear to be intended to convey any sense of religious sacrifice. In 1957, Yad Vashem began publication of two journals in the English language: the Yad Vashem Bulletin and Yad Vashem Studies. The first number of the Bulletin (April 1957) uses "holocaust" more frequently than the whole set of other terms and phrases available as English equivalents of shoah. On one page,in a section noting books received in the library, "the holocaust" is employed eleven times. ⁽²³⁾ Elsewhere in this first issue, besides additional employment of "the holocaust," there are references to "the Nazi holocaust," the "European holocaust," and in a capitalized subtitle, "... the Holocaust Period." In the second number of the Bulletin (December 1957), four of five articles, in a section entitled "Writings on the Disaster Period," use the word "holocaust" in their texts. In the third number of the Bulletin (July 1958), the dominance of the term "holocaust" continues, but curiously, the next three issues (October 1959, June 1960, March 1961) contain very few "holocausts." Perhaps a translator changed or the Bulletin editor, Nathan Eck, developed reservations about the previous adoption of "holocaust" as the primary referent to the genocide. However, from 1962, "Holocaust," now generally capitalized, is the dominant referent in the Bulletin to the European Jewish disaster.

In contrast to the Bulletin's copious use of "holocaust" in 1957 and 1958, the more formal and academic Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance, in its first two years, barely used the term. "European holocaust" appears perhaps three times in the text of the first volume, and "the Holocaust," unmodified by "European" or "Nazi," appears three times in the text of the second volume. ⁽²⁴⁾ The favored word for the Hitlerite Jewish catastrophe in these first volumes is "catastrophe," usually preceded by "European." In the third volume of Studies (1959) and thereafter, however, "the Holocaust," capitalized and unmodified, is the dominant referent to the Judeocide both in texts and titles.

The adoption of "Holocaust" by Yad Vashem as the referent to the Judeocide at Yad Vashem does not seem to have led to a belief among Yad Vashem writers and editors that it was no longer appropriate to use "holocaust" in its other well known senses, or that a modifier before "Holocaust" was not sometimes needed to clarify meaning. In the 1963 Studies, a reviewer commented: "[S]ome Jewish researchers have subordinated themselves to political forces ... [to] the needs and temperaments of local potentates, one shudders at the nightmare of a holocaust-on-the-Holocaust." ⁽²⁵⁾ And an article in the April 1966 Bulletin is titled, "The Jewish Holocaust in Soviet Writings." 

Three early uses of the uppercased "Holocaust" at Yad Vashem are suggestive of the forces encouraging capitalization of the word when used as a referent to the Jewish catastrophe. On the first page of "The Holocaust in the Consciousness of Our Generation" (Bulletin, July 1958), "holocaust" is used eight times lowercased and only once capitalized: "... the Inquisition, for example, is not the same as the Holocaust ..." Presumably, the lowercasing of "holocaust," contrasting with the capitalization of "Inquisition," appeared inappropriate to an editor or translator at Yad Vashem; rather than lowercasing "Inquisition," "holocaust" was capitalized. Presumably too, if "holocaust" was seen at Yad Vashem as a substitute for "European catastrophe," it would not normally be capitalized, but if substituted for the officially favored term, "Disaster," particularly if in an ideologically significant phrase, it would be capitalized. The first capitalization of "holocaust" at Yad Vashem, as mentioned earlier, was in the phrase, "the Holocaust and Jewish Heroism," in a 1956 Yediot. In the Bulletin, the first capitalization is found in what is essentially the same phrase, "the Holocaust and the Heroism" (December 1957). Both English phrases are translations of the Hebrew shoah ugevurah, a key ideologically charged phrase in the Israel of the 1950s and part of Yad Vashem's full Hebrew title. ⁽²⁶⁾

A brief aside on capitalization: the rules regarding capitalization of terms comparable to "holocaust" are not absolute. The Chicago Manual of Style states: "Most period designations ... are lowercased ... [a]ppellations of historical ... events ... are generally capitalized ... Civil Rights movement (often lowercased) ... New Deal ... cold war ... gold rush." And jumping ahead in this biography of a word, "holocaust," lowercased, as a specific referent to the Nazi genocide(s) was gradually replaced in American usage by the capitalized "Holocaust" in the period 1965-1985, perhaps partly as a method of indicating that the referent was the Nazi mass killing and not another destruction. In current usage, the referent of a lowercased "holocaust" is rarely the Nazi murders, while the core referent of a capitalized "Holocaust" is almost invariably the Judeocide of the Nazi camps. ⁽²⁷⁾

And a guess as to why at Yad Vashem "Disaster" was dropped in favor of "h/Holocaust": The alliteration of "holocaust" and "heroism" sounded better to Israeli ears than "Disaster and Heroism". SHOAH UGEVURAH was the key ideologically charged Hebrew phrase of Yad Vashem's early days, GEVURAH was always translated as "heroism" and it was the most important word of the phrase in the 1950s. Of the various possible translations of SHOAH, "holocaust" fitted best alongside the "h" of heroism. More generally, I suggest writers choose one word from competing alternatives more frequently than is usually recognized because of the "fittingness" of the initial letter of the chosen word in a particular context of letters and sounds, and "holocaust" was often selected as a synonym for "massacre," "catastrophe" etc. in the 1940's and 1950s, partly because a writer was associating and/or employing other "h" words at the time she was mentally reaching for a word to reference the Nazi orchestrated Judeocide. Some "h" words that might, consciously or unconsciously, have been associated with the murder of Jews in the 1940s: "Hitler," "horror," "Hurban" (the Yiddish word for Hitler's Judeocide), and "Haidamachina" (a word used by Simon Dubnow amongst others to denote the massacres of Eastern European Jews in 1648, 1768, and 1919).

And I suggest that "H" of Hiroshima is part of the explanation of the adoption of "holocaust" as a primary referent to nuclear destruction in the American of the late 1950s and early 1960s.  (The employment of "holocaust" in its well used nuclear sense will be discussed in detail after footnote 36 and, in connection with Wiesel's first use after footnote 45.  Curiously the OED's entry "holocaust" does not record any employments of the word in its nuclear sense -- see appendix of this essay.)

Some anecdotal evidence supporting the alliteration explanation:  a) the first employment of "holocaust" as a reference to the Judeocide in the American Historical Review (per a JSTORE search) is "Hitler's holocaust" (April, 1959, p. 611) and b) the first employment in the Journal of Modern History (December 1959, p. 354) is "Hitler holocaust". And c) a significant number of 1940s employments of "holocaust" are preceded by an unusually high number of "h" words. For example: "... the persecution was brought *home to *him with overwhelming *horror. *Here was a call on one as a *human being because the [Jewish] *holocaust was of a kind quite unlike ...." ("*"s are mine -- Manchester Guardian, 15 April, 1943, p. 2 - "Child Refugees").  And, "Stalin came to the microphone ... A *horrified nation *heard the truth about the *holocaust spreading quickly towards the capital. "The *Hitlerite troops," Stalin said ..." (Again my "*", Victor Kravchenko, I Choose Freedom (1947), p. 359).

The French "h/Holocauste," the Greek holokauston, the Hebrew olah, and "pagan sacrificial holocausts"

Partly because of the use of "l'Holocauste" in Yad Vashem's 1953 founding documents referenced above and in footnote 20, this is an appropriate moment to examine briefly French secular use of "holocaust" in the 1950s, which, in turn, will lead to a consideration of the pagan referents of holokauston and similar words in classical Greek and of olah in the Bible. Presented below is a representative sample of French secular use from the period. The 1958 Francois Mauriac quotation below is from an appreciation of Elie Wiesel's La Nuit. This quotation is a key "holocaust / holocaust" text -- translated it became part of the forward / frame text of Night (1960). Yet no American Holocaust scholar has drawn attention to either the French or the English language translation.  (All italicization of "l'holocauste" below is mine and accent marks have been eliminated.)

"Dans le souci continuel d'entretenir le secret, il y a lieu de voir autre chose que le desir de ne pas ebruiter un etat des choses que par ailleurs les Nazis laissaient transpercer. Il y a la volonte d'entourner l'holocauste d'une horreur sacree ..." (Leo Poliakov, Breviaire De la Haine, 1951, pp. 244-245 -- Mauriac wrote the introduction to Poliakov's book.)

Bavard intarissable et qui pencherait vers le comique si, tout le temps qu[e Hitler] perore, nous ne considerions la toile de fond, enfumee par les crematoires, par l'holocauste enorme, indefiniment ravitaille, et auquel tous les peuples d'Europe pourvoient; huit millions d'innocents ... sans compter ce que devore la bataille." (Francois Mauriac, 14 Juillet 1954, Bloc-notes, 1993, p. 189.)

"Le Memorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu ... perpetuer dans le temps le souvenir de l'holocauste Juive sous la Croix-Gammee." (La Revue du Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, January 1956, p. 2.)

"Dieu est mort ... le Dieu d'Abraham, d'Isaac et de Jacob s'est a  jamais dissipe, sous le regard de cet enfant, dans la fumee de l'holocauste humaine exige par la Race, la plus goulue de toutes les idoles." (Francois Mauriac, Le Figaro Litteraire, 7 June 1958, p. 4. "Cet enfant" is Wiesel.)

"L'Holocauste de Juin dans les Facultes" (Le Figaro Litteraire, 28 June 1958, p. 1, headline. The referent is the high failure rate in the French universities' year-end exams.)

It does appear that the French "holocauste" of the 1950s was similar to the English language "holocaust" of the 1930s and 1940s in its broad range of possible secular referents. In the quotations presented, "holocauste" refers to the totality of deaths in World War II, the Nazi extermination of Jews, and the failures in the 1958 French university exams. Unlike normal twentieth century native English speaker's coloring of "holocaust," however, is Mauriac's 1958 "holocauste." Translated in 1960, Mauriac's words became: "For him [Wiesel] ... God is dead ... the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob ... has vanished forevermore ... in the smoke of a human holocaust exacted by Race, the most voracious of all idols." This "holocaust," on the third page of the foreword of Night, is by far the best circulated "holocaust," in its now rare sense of "burnt offering," of the late twentieth century, apart from translations of olah in Roman Catholic Bibles.

In French, there is significant use of "holocauste" in the sense of an abhorrent immolation to honor or required by a pagan god and/or of a destruction inspired by stupidity or hate, a use encountered in writings of native English speakers fairly frequently before 1900 but rarely in the twentieth century.  The Roman Catholic biblical precedent: "... they haue forsaken me ... they haue filled this place with the bloud of innocents. And they haue built the excelses [high places] of Baalim, to burne their children with fire for holocaust [in the Hebrew OLOT] to Baalim: which I commanded not, nor haue spoken of, neither haue they ascended into my hart. (Rheims Douai [Roman Catholic] Bible, 1582-1610, Ieremie [Jeremiah] 19:4,5) And Mark Twain 1869: "[T]wo hundred thousand young men ...  the world's glorious ones ... And where are they now? ... prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays ... victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward." (For full citation see note  2)  And the Chambers's Encylopaedia (1871): "Any illness, danger ... sufficed to move the Gauls towards a human holocaust, in the fashion of the worshipers of Baal and Moloch ... this kind of murder [has a firm hold on] the human mind." (A few paragraphs before the end of the essay titled "Sacrifice.")⁽²⁸⁾  And some French similar employments:  Voltaire, "Ces abominables holocaustes s'etablirent dans presque toute la terre. Pausanis pretendent que Lycaon immola le premier des victimes humaines en Grece." Flaubert, "Les Druids ... dans leurs criminels holocaustes." And Baudelaire, "Un homme de genie, melancolique, misanthrope ... jette un jour au feu toutes ses oeuvres encore manuscrites. Et comme on lui reprochait cet effroyable holocauste fait a la haine ..." ⁽²⁹⁾ 

The Berenbaum/ US Holocaust Museum quote in the first paragraph of the main text of this essay implies that the first employment of the Greek  holokauston  was within the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible.  And the online Britannica states "The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word 'olah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God."  However, over a hundred years before holokauston and similar saw employment in the Septuagint, Xenophon, in a text read by virtually all students of classical Greek, employed holokau.... to refer to Greek pagan sacrifices. For example: "... he offered the customary holocaust [holokautei] of hogs." (Anabasis - c. 365 BCE. - VII, viii, 4 and 5.)  The Greek word's first recorded employment thus referenced a pagan sacrifice and not a sacrifice to the biblical Lord.

And until relatively recent times the educated in both France and England were often as familiar with classical texts as they were with the Bible and thus would frequently associate "sacrifice" and "holocaust" -- in the sense of "whole burnt offering" -- with pagan practices.  Dryden's 1697 translation of Virgil's Aeneid reads in part, "With Holocausts he Pluto's altar fills." (VI:360)  The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannica "Sacrifice" article devotes three of six pages to human sacrifice and mentions in passing the Carthaginian practice of placing live children in a statue's hands extended over a furnace (burnt sacrifices). ⁽³⁰⁾ In the same Encyclopaedia the one third of a column entry under "Holocaust"  refers readers to the "Sacrifice" article and states, "Sacrifices of this sort [holocausts] are often mentioned by the heathens as well as Jews ..." The thirty line entry for "Holocauste" in the Diderot and D'Alembert Encyclopedie (1765) makes no references whatsoever to Jews or Jewish practices, only to immolations honoring "dieux infernaux" (infernal gods).

And in the Hebrew Bible, olah/ olot, translated in Catholic Bibles as "holocaust," in important instances is not a Jewish rite but a pagan rite -- the only olah/olot of human beings in the Bible  (quoted a few paragraphs back and below this article's title) is a sacrifice to Baal (Jeremiah 19:4,5). And per 2 Kings 5:17 (a Roman Catholic translation): "Naaman said: ... I will no longer offer holocaust or any other sacrifice to any other god except to the Lord." And Balak, king of Moab and fearful of the Hebrew tribes, stands beside his olah/ holocaust while waiting for his favored prophet / sorcerer, Balaam, to curse the "the children of Jacob" (Numbers 23:3). (Balaam, to Balak's horror, blesses "the children of Jacob.")

"H/holocaust/e" then, is a sensitive, chameleonic instrument, whose meaning and connotations are not fixed -- even when employed in its original sense of "whole burnt offering" -- but highly dependent on the context of employment and subtly dependent on the nature and depth of a reader's exposure to misinformation/ information propagated by scholars, museums, and standard reference works.  (For a critique of the Oxford English Dictionary's entry "holocaust" see the Appendix following the footnotes.)

Employment of "h/Holocaust" in the United States circa 1945 - 1965 

This essay now turns away from its investigation of the use of "holocaust / holocauste" in Israel and France to focus on American employment of "holocaust" and the social and cultural context of that employment. In the 1950s and early 1960s American Jews, with few exceptions, avoided any public engagement with the then recent mass murder of European Jews. In 1953, the New York Times could refer to "6,000,000 Jews allegedly killed during the Nazi regime" without fear of complaints from Jewish organizations. And a 1955 Commentary review of "the only ... comprehensive account of the Jewish tragedy" made a comparison that would be unimaginable in an American Jewish magazine today: "American Jewry['s attitude] to the great catastrophe [is similar to that] of so many decent Germans during the war. Dimly aware of the Eastern 'death camps,' they were yet able to close their minds to them." Twenty months and one short piece on the Bialystock uprising later, Commentary published an essay on printed memorials to destroyed communities (yizkor). The essayists wrote: "The few solid works published here and abroad on the Nazi holocaust have not found a large audience. Massacres make bitter reading." ⁽³³⁾ (All italicization of "holocaust" in this essay is mine.)

A variety of reasons account for Jewish disinterest in / avoidance of the Nazi lead mass murder in the United States of the 1950s and early 1960s. Many American Jews were bent on assimilation and felt none too secure. ("We have buried fully six million ... A holocaust of such dimensions is bound to make the survivors apprehensive" [1949].) And in the context of the cold war, memories of the Rosenberg trial, and the importance of West Germany as an American ally, it was not politic for hyphenated Americans to be overly interested in German murders of Jews.⁽³⁴⁾ (See the next note for examples of American "holocausts" 1949 - 1960 as a referent to the Nazi Judeocide beyond the examples incorporated in this text.) ⁽³⁵⁾

Possibly the desire to avoid the subject of the mass murder of European Jews discouraged the framing of the events within a single and singular name. ("Since June 1942 a special unit had been going about carefully destroying all traces of the Nazi holocausts." [1954]) ⁽³⁶⁾ And certainly American writers in the 1950s used a greater variety of names and phrases to refer to the Judeocide than did writers at Yad Vashem, an institution set up in order to explore and publicize that mass murder. But with the few American published writings on the subject coming from disparate sources, a disparate vocabulary to describe a set of events difficult to assimilate and with little modern precedent should not surprise.

While the word "holocaust" was used only occasionally as an American appellation for the Nazi Judeocide, the word was used by Americans starting in 1945, and increasingly in the 1950s, as a referent to nuclear war.  An early employment by Robert Frost: "Having invented a new Holocaust/ And been the first with it to win a war,/ How they make haste to cry with fingers crossed/ King's X--no fairs to use it anymore!"  ("U. S. 1946 King's X" in Steeple Bush, 1947)   Another example from 1949: "... the people of the world should know the menace of atomic warfare ... while there is yet time to avoid such a holocaust." ⁽³⁷⁾  After Sputnik and the recognition that Soviet missiles could reach American cities, concern about nuclear war accelerated sharply. Approximately two hundred entries are listed under the heading "Atomic Bombs" in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, March 1959 - February 1961; in contrast, eight entries are listed under the heading "World War 1939 - 1945: Jews." And by the early 1960s "holocaust," without a contextual framework and with no modifying adjectives, was a readily understood referent for nuclear warfare within American intellectual circles. The Reporter of 17 August 1961 titled a review of two books on nuclear war and nuclear strategy, "A Cold Look at the Holocaust." In the October 1961 Commentary, Stuart Hughes spoke of "the holocaust of a day or two ... the contemplated forty million dead ..." And a 1962 Nation editorial on life after nuclear war was titled "Post-Holocaust Morals."⁽³⁸⁾

But "holocaust," 1945 - 1962, was not only a referent to the feared nuclear catastrophe and the Nazi mass murders. As in the 1930s and during World War II, the word was an occasional appellation for a diverse range of massacres and disasters, though increasingly the word was applied only to massive destruction. The JSTORE data base (texts on line of over one hundred scholarly journals) yields ten 1950 "holocausts." Four are references to World War II or a future world war, two are references to the climatic death scene in Hamlet, one is a reference to the American Civil War, and the remaining three are references to obscure events. For 1959 the same data base yields eleven "holocausts." Three are references to nuclear disaster, two refer to World War I, two to the American Civil War, one to events in twelfth century Flanders, and two employ the words "Hitler's/the Hitler holocaust" and are referents to the Jewish catastrophe. 

Five examples of 1945-1963 employment of "holocaust," and one 1957 definition:  A photograph in Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1948 Crusade in Europe is captioned "BOMBER'S HOLOCAUST." A historian in the 1953 Journal of Negro History described a North Carolina 1898 race riot as "a holocaust of death and destruction in which scores of Negroes were beaten and killed." A 1955 translation of Augustine's Confessions referred to "the wooden horse ... and the holocaust of Troy." In 1956 Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal "Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted [Hughes] in London ... wild destructive London night ." And in 1961, Bernard Lewis wrote of "... the terrible holocaust of 1916 (sic) when a million and [a] half Armenians perished." And in 1963 "Dr. [Martin] King warned President Kennedy that "the worst racial holocaust the nation has ever seen" might break out in Alabama ..." Finally, per the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage of 1957, "Holocaust is often used as a synonym for disaster ... Disaster (which means, literally, a bad configuration of stars) ... designates any unfortunate event, especially a sudden and great misfortune ... A holocaust may be accidental ..." ⁽³⁹⁾

By the early 1960s, an intellectual climate in which American Jews could be compared in a Jewish magazine to the "decent Germans" of World War II who "close[d] their minds" to the death camps had begun to shift. Exodus, the bestseller of 1959, made references to the Jewish experience during the Hitler years. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was a bestseller in both 1960 and 1961 -- a complete surprise for the publisher. And Mila 18, a story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was number four on Publisher's Weekly's 1961 annual bestseller list.  And in 1962 Porter's Ship of Fools, a study of Germans just before Hitler's rise to power, was the bestseller. (Number six on the list was Fail Safe, a story of  accidental holocaust (atomic) --  this book will be referenced later.)

In May 1960, Eichmann was captured, and in the fall of 1961 put on trial in Jerusalem. The trial was covered in newspapers and on TV and, as intended, significantly increased awareness of the Nazi genocide of Jews. As mentioned earlier, The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature has eight entries under "World War 1939 - 1945: Jews" in its volume covering the two-year period ending February 1961. The next volume, ending February 1963, has twenty-nine entries, eleven with "Eichmann" in their titles.

In early 1963, almost a year after Eichmann's execution and a virtual cessation of media interest in the trial and the genocide, the New Yorker devoted five consecutive issues to Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." This New Yorker series was the first meaningful attempt in a prestigious non-Jewish American magazine to grapple with the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. The anger that Arendt's tone and some of her statements provoked in the Jewish community resulted in considerable discussion, speeches in synagogues, and many critical articles. In my opinion, the reaction to the Arendt articles and to Arendt's subsequent book marks the real beginning of American Jewry's full public engagement with "Holocaust Studies." The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature has thirty-seven entries under "World War 1939 - 1945: Jews" in its volume that ends February 1965. Five are the Arendt articles and ten are reviews or discussions of Arendt's work. This new willingness to engage in some serious writing and thinking about the European Jewish catastrophe was not, however, simply a reaction to Arendt's high-profile controversial statements, but also reflected a sea change in American culture in the early 1960s. This sea change was driven and symbolized by the election of Kennedy, the Civil Rights movement, and student activism. Starting around 1963, particularity, ethnicity, and identification with victims was not necessarily to be hidden in middle-class America. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

The new American Jewish willingness to confront the Nazi destruction of European Jewry was paralleled by an increasing adoption of "holocaust," modified if context did not sufficiently elucidate meaning, as the referent to the disaster. The concerns of this essay demand close attention to the major disseminators of the term between January 1960 and mid 1963, but it should not be forgotten that the term had been "in the air" and in occasional use by American Jews since 1933 as a reference to Nazi persecution and murder of Jews. (For 1933 usage see main text quote prior to footnote 16.)  The four most widely circulated "holocausts" (Jewish) of the early 1960s, and the first two essay titles to employ the term in well circulated American Jewish magazines are displayed below. Documented in the next note is employment of the term in less well circulated American published texts during the period. ⁽⁴¹⁾

"... one of our motives in bringing Eichmann to trial is to make the details of the case known to the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the holocaust." (David Ben-Gurion,New York Times Magazine, 18 December 1960, p. 62.)

"... Counsel Says Mercy Might Help Avert New Holocaust [from headline]"; "Eichmann ... might ... serve as an instrument against any recurrence of a Nazi holocaust." And "[The Attorney General of Israel stated]: 'the overwhelming majority of this country [identify] with the victims of the holocaust ...'" (New York Times, 24 March 1962, p. 7, col. 1.)

"And if the Jews outside Israel had to be shown the difference between Israeli heroism and Jewish submissive meekness, there was a complementary lesson for the Israelis; for 'the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the holocaust'..." (Hanna Arendt quoting Ben-Gurion, New Yorker, 16 February 1963, p. 42. And see note 43 for another Arendt Israeli quotation.)

"The Dignity of the Destroyed: Towards a Definition of the Period of the Holocaust" (Essay title: Shaul Esh, Judaism, 1962, p. 99.)

"Miss Arendt Surveys the Holocaust" (Essay title: Marie Syrkin, Jewish Frontier, May 1963 - printed on the cover of the magazine in bold letters.)

These quotations and titles demonstrate significant dissemination of Israeli English usage of "holocaust" to the United States. The first of the Ben-Gurion remarks above is, to my knowledge, the first use of an unmodified "holocaust" as a referent to the Jewish catastrophe in the New York Times. The "New Holocaust" above is, almost certainly, the first use of "holocaust" in a 1960s New York Times headline. ⁽⁴²⁾ The article was filed in Jerusalem. "Holocaust" is employed twice in the text of the article, once in what is probably an Israeli translation of German or Hebrew and once by the Israeli Attorney General. (The four pre-1960 uses of "[Nazi] holocaust" in the New York Times that I have found are also all quotations from Israeli sources.) ⁽⁴³⁾ Arendt's only uses of "holocaust" in her New Yorker text are quotes from Israeli sources. Arendt herself in the New Yorker articles uses the terms "Jewish catastrophe," "great catastrophe," and "Final Solution," and not "holocaust." Shaul Esh's article "... Towards a Definition of the Period of the Holocaust," was the first attempt in Judaism to grapple with the Jewish catastrophe. It was also the first article in an important American Jewish publication to employ "Holocaust" in a title and the first to use "h/Holocaust" as the dominant referent to the Nazi Judeocide within a text. "Holocaust," uppercased, appears seven times in the first page of Esh's text. Esh, an Israeli, was chief editor at Yad Vashem from 1955 to 1959 and thus a key figure in the replacement of "Disaster" by "H/holocaust" as the favored Yad Vashem and Israeli translation of "shoah." Syrkin's "Miss Arendt Surveys the Holocaust" title cannot be directly attributed to an Israeli source, but Syrkin, a longtime committed Zionist, had strong and important Israeli connections -- she was, for example, a biographer and close friend of Golda Meir. It is doubtful that Syrkin would have used "holocaust" prominently in 1963 if her Israeli friends and acquaintances (and Yad Vashem) in the early 1960s had avoided that term and favored "D/disaster" and "catastrophe."

(Marie Syrkin's importance as a contributor to the establishment of "holocaust" as the primary referent in the United States to the Nazi Judeocide and as  an early writer on the Judeocide bears recognition. "Miss Arendt Surveys the Holocaust" (May 1963) was the first use of "Holocaust" on the cover of a well-circulated American Jewish magazine in the post-war period. Another Syrkin title, "The Literature of the Holocaust" (May 1966), was the first use of "Holocaust" in a Midstream title. And Syrkin's 1964 - 1965 Brandeis course, "The Literature of the Holocaust," was, I suspect, the first American university course with "holocaust" in its title and perhaps the first course on an American campus to grapple with the 'Final Solution.'  Syrkin's employment of "H/holocaust" as a referent to German mass murder predates the 1960's, e.g. "The Jewish D.P.'s ... survivors of the Nazi holocaust..."  (Nation, 7 June 1947, 680:1)  Syrkin may have been responsible for the Jewish Frontier's "holocaust" in its unsigned editorial of November 1942 --- the first well circulated employment of the word as a referent to the 'Final Solution' by someone with detailed information about the then ongoing German Judeocide.  Syrkin, on the board of the Frontier, contributed a remarkable article on the mass murder of Jews by the German border police to that November issue basing her information on articles by "ordinary police officials of various ranks" in the German police's professional journal, copies of which had reached the US via Sweden. (The November 1942 number of the  Jewish Frontier is seldom mentioned by Holocaust scholars though it contains by far the most complete well circulated account of what was happening to the Jews of Nazi controlled Europe published in English in 1942 or 1943.))

Wiesel

Elie Wiesel's first printed "holocaust" dates from August 1963 -- after "H/holocaust" had become the dominant referent to the Nazi Judeocide in Israeli English and after "holocaust" had seen significant circulation in its Judeocide sense within American publications. Since Wiesel's influence on the dissemination of "H/holocaust" and his reasons for employing "holocaust" have been grossly misrepresented by scholars and because Elie Wiesel became -- years after he first employed "holocaust" -- a key figure in the discourse on the Jewish experience of the Hitler years, Wiesel's first employment of the word and the background to that employment are germane to this essay. 

In the early 1960s, Wiesel, based in New York, was earning a precarious living writing for an Israeli newspaper and for the Yiddish Forward.  His first book in English, Night, was selling poorly.  Wiesel was in Israel during the Eichmann trial, had a strong interest in the Jewish experience during the Hitler years, and would, presumably, from time to time, read Yad Vashem publications. By 1962, as has been demonstrated, within Yad Vashem publications "h/Holocaust" was the principal English referent to the Jewish catastrophe.

And Wiesel, before his own first "holocaust," had almost certainly seen the cover of the May 1963 Jewish Frontier on which Syrkin's "Miss Arendt Surveys the Holocaust" essay title was boldly displayed, seen his own Night described as a "holocaust" novel (Christian Century, 25 July 1962, 909), read Ben Gurion's "holocaust" in the Arendt articles, and probably read in early 1963 at least one of the New York Times articles datelined Jerusalem and employing "Nazi holocaust" to denote the Nazi Judeocide (March 2, p. 3:6, March 21, p. 2:5, April 21, p. 15:3). [For other "holocausts" (Jewish) Wiesel might have encountered see note 42.] 

Unfortunately Wiesel has claimed authorship of "H/holocaust" in its Judeocide sense: "I am the one who introduced the word into this framework."  Many scholars, perhaps overly in awe of Wiesel, a writer of power and sensitivity, or uncritically relying on Garber and Zuckerman, circulate a watered down version of this Wiesel statement. Garber and Zuckerman state: "[Wiesel's] adoption of the term was the single most important factor in legitimizing its usage." The two scholars provide no evidence whatsoever to support their claim beyond an assertion that the New York Times of 15 October 1986 and unnamed other newspapers credited Wiesel with "coining of the term."  No "coining of the term" suggestion is to be found in the New York Times."⁽⁴⁴⁾ 

And another myth has been constructed by scholars regarding Wiesel's employment of the word: relying on Garber and Zuckerman,  Ann-Vera Sullam Calimani in the prestigious Modern Language Review  writes: "Wiesel has frequently explained ... how his use of 'holocaust' derives from an analogy between the sacrifice of Isaac ... and the destruction of the Jews ... God ... 'olah, a sacrifice: a holocaust."  Garber and Zuckerman claim: "Wiesel's use of "The Holocaust" has unmistakable religious/sacrificial overtones, as his own writings reveal. Indeed in invoking the "holocaust" terminology, it was a particular scene of sacrifice that Wiesel had in mind -- the Akedah, i.e. the story in Genesis 22 where God orders Abraham to offer his son as an olah sacrifice. Wiesel has commented in a number of places regarding what he meant when he joined the concept of holocaust/sacrifice to the Akedat Yitshak.  For example ... in 1980 [Wiesel] declared: '... I call Issac the first survivor of the Holocaust because he survived the first tragedy. Issac was going to be a burnt offering, a korban olah, which is really the Holocaust.  The word "holocaust" has a religious connotation.'"⁽⁴⁵⁾

Garber/Zuckerman write in their footnote 15 referencing the 1980 Wiesel statement and their own claim that the 1980 statement is one of a series:
"For similar statements, cf., for example  ... 1965 ... 1971 ... 1970." But the 'similar' Wiesel statements cited by Garber/Zuckerman, discuss the Akedah without making any connection whatsoever between that biblical story and the word "holocaust."  Wiesel's first mention of any connection between the Akedah and the word "holocaust" was in 1980, seventeen years after his first employment of "holocaust." Surely if "holocaust's" alleged Abraham/Issac sacrificial associations drove and informed Wiesel's employment of the word, Wiesel would have taken advantage of those associations/ made some reference to those associations before 1980, for example when discussing the Akedah in 1965, 1970, or 1971 --- Wiesel is  not noted for shyness in making  biblical or religious connections.

In a 1980 interview Wiesel stated that he first employed "H/holocaust" because he found it "poetic" and made no claim whatsoever to have employed the word because of religious or biblical associations. In a 1986 talk -- after claiming that he had "introduced the word into this framework" -- Wiesel expressed displeasure with the word: it had become too common ("... there are no words") and had become trivialized ("... a description of the murder of six people ... the [newspaper] called it a holocaust"). Wiesel made no mention of religious or biblical associations in the course of this 1986 talk.  However, Wiesel did write in September 1964: "When Jews speak of the destruction ... they generally refer to it as "The Holocaust," a Biblical term which gives the event some obscure mystical magnitude."  Please note that Wiesel made no reference to religious sacrifice or the Akedah in this 1964 statement. To my knowledge Wiesel made no further statements alluding to the word's biblical, primarily Roman Catholic, employment until his 1980 Akedah statement quoted by Garber and Zuckerman.  ⁽⁴⁶⁾

The evidence presented below strongly suggests the impetus for Wiesel's 1963 adoption of "holocaust" -- after the word had become the Israeli English language translation of Shoah and had seen some use in American Jewish circles --  was the common contemporary employment of "holocaust", often without a modifier, to reference nuclear catastrophe.   In 1961 Wiesel had explicitly linked possible nuclear mass death to the mass death of the Nazi period. ("We can talk today of the extermination of millions by H-bombs because the world allowed the extermination of millions by Hitler (New York Post, 2 October 1961, p. 30)).   And an interview with Wiesel in the 6 June 1963 French news magazine L'Express is subtitled "D'Auschwitz a Hiroshima";  Wiesel in the interview: "... [mon] passe est aussi l'avenir.  Le chemin d'Auschwiz meanait a Hiroshima.  L'homme concentrationnaire annonce la fin du monde, l'Apocalypse." (#625, p. 34:3)  And Wiesel in 1963 surely was familiar with "holocaust" in its sense of "nuclear destruction," the principal American referent of the word in the early 1960s.  (In a ten day period, around the time Wiesel was writing his first "holocaust," the New York Times employed the word in its nuclear sense five times (5 July 1963, p. 8:3; 6 July, p. 14:3; 9 July, p. 30:5; 11 July, p. 4:3; 15 July, p. 12:1).)  .")  And Wiesel's first employment of "holocaust" was immediately followed by a reference to a novel whose subject is nuclear holocaust: ⁽⁴⁷⁾

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"It has become a kind of intellectual fad to upbraid the Jews murdered in World War II for allowing themselves to be killed ... Psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim, and sociologists like Hannah Arendt, are not the only ones who have been complaining ... One finds this ... even in fiction whose theme has nothing to do with the Nazi holocaust. For example, in Fail Safe, the best seller about an atomic accident ... a minor character [contends that Jews] should have murdered the SS men who came to arrest them." (Elie Wiesel, The New Leader, 5 August 1963, p. 21.)

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(True to form, this August 1963 employment with its reference to Fail Safe and thus indirectly to nuclear holocaust is never mentioned by Wiesel scholars who presumably have read Wiesel's writings -- a less suggestive 27 October New York Times employment is cited by scholars as Wiesel's first use.  The Bettleheim 1961 Midstream attack on the glorification of Ann Frank, apparently referred to by Wiesel in the quote above, contained the words "impending holocaust."  And two key sentences in Fail Safe read: "When [the President] resumed speaking his voice was so slow that each word seemed to dangle. 'Those of us on this hookup are the only people who can save the world from an atomic holocaust.'")⁽⁴⁸⁾

Setting aside Wiesel for one paragraph, it seems to me the adoption of "holocaust" in American Jewish circles in the first half of the 1960s as the primary referent to the Jewish disaster was partly driven by the word's frequent employment in the larger American culture to denote atomic warfare. Fairly frequently the Nazi mass murder and nuclear mass death were explicitly linked in the United States of the 1950s and early 1960s and, I suspect, even without the impetus of the previously documented dissemination of Israeli English usage, American Jewish writers in the 1960s attempting to convey the horror of the Nazi slaughter of Jews to American audiences would have abandoned such referents as "extermination," "great catastrophe," and "Jewish tragedy" and favored "holocaust" in order to verbally link the Nazi Judeocide with the then actively feared menace of nuclear mass death. ⁽⁴⁹⁾

Wiesel's 1963-1979 employments of "H/holocaust" are a good test of whether the word had for Wiesel significant religious associations and, by extension, whether the word did carry implicit religious associations in the 1960s and 1970s.  Wiesel wrestled with religious questions, and presumably, if "holocaust" in the 1960s and 1970s had easily evoked religious meanings, Wiesel would have repeatedly employed or alluded to those meanings and, further, the "H/holocausts" of the Wiesel opus could not be replaced with some synonym with no possible biblical associations without changing nuance. In this writer's opinion "C/catastrophe" -- a word whose first English signification referenced a twist in the plot of a work of fiction -- could be substituted for "H/holocaust" in all of the following representative quotations with no change in nuance.

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"The experience of the holocaust in Europe defies language, and leads to a mystique of silence, or to madness itself." And:  "... a full twenty years after the holocaust..." (27 October 1963, New York Times Book Review, pp. 3, 69 -- Wiesel's second and third "holocaust" in print.)

"A group of Jewish children ... re-create the world in play, endowing it with a soul ... the theme of Aichinger's novel ... among the finest works ever written on the Holocaust." (November 1963, Hadassah Magazine -- probably Wiesel's fourth "H/holocaust")

"And God ? Where was He during those dark years ? The Holocaust has had a great impact on religion ..." (November 1967, Address: Union of American Hebrew Congregations)

"Your entire universe is crumbling ... Yesterday's holocaust will followed by tomorrow's, and that one will be total!" (1970, A Beggar in Jerusalem, p. 42)

"Why were the Gypsies persecuted ... exterminated ? Their lot seems to me, on one level, more tragic than that of the Jews ... They are scarcely mentioned in the so-called literature of the Holocaust. An outrageous injustice ..." (28 May 1978, Los Angeles Times: Book Review, p. 4) ⁽⁵⁰⁾

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Let me remind readers that Garber and Zuckerman have asserted that Wiesel adopted "holocaust" because of its "unmistakable religious /[Abraham/Issac] sacrificial overtones," that Calamari accepted this claim and further circulated it, and that Garber and Zuckerman provide no evidence, other than one quote from sixteen years after Wiesel's first use, to support their claim. And the claim has been circulating uncontested within the academy for fifteen years conditioning scholarly understanding of the word "H/holocaust" and of the events evoked by the word. In my view the credibility of Holocaust scholarship and of Holocaust scholars is undermined by the circulation of false claims. 

And in my view any honest discussion of Wiesel's possible knowledge of "holocaust's" 'religious' meaning has to mention that the Wiesel of the early 1960s had to be aware of "holocaust's" pagan 'religious' potential.  Wiesel's first big literary break was Mauriac's review/ appreciation of Wiesel's La Nuit (Night) in Le Figaro Litteraire, 7 June 1958. That review / appreciation became the English introduction to Night (1960). Wiesel surely had read Mauriac's review/ appreciation more than once in both English and French before his own first employment of "holocaust" in August 1963.  Mauriac wrote [English translation per the forward to Night], "For him [Wiesel] ... God is dead ... the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob ... has vanished forevermore ... in the smoke of a human holocaust exacted by Race, the most voracious of all idols."

(I find it unacceptable that no scholarly discussion of the 'religious' potential of the word "holocaust," beyond my own, mentions that "holocaust" almost always has had a pagan 'religious' meaning when employed to denote a 'religious' sacrifice of humans, and further that no American Holocaust scholar has made a reference to the pagan 'religious' nature of Mauriac's usage. And yet Mauriac's usage is by far the best circulated explicitly 'religious' employment of the "H/h" word within Shoah literature.)

1965 - circa 1979 American employment of "h/Holocaust" to denote the Nazi Judeocide

American employment of "H/holocaust" from the mid 1960s until today has been primarily driven by an extraordinary increase in interest and writing on the Nazi orchestrated Judeocide and a decline in concern and writing on nuclear war. From the mid-1960s, books on the Jewish catastrophe began to find a ready market in the United States. Six books on the subject and with "Holocaust" in their titles were published before 1970. In September 1968, the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish (1939 - 1945)," for material that earlier would have been categorized under such headings as "World War, 1939-1945--Jews." But an unmodified "holocaust" was not yet likely to evoke "Jewish catastrophe" outside of Jewish circles. A search of 1969 JSTOR journals yields twenty-one "holocausts," seven nuclear, four references to one of the World Wars or an aspect of those wars, three references to the Vietnam War, and two are references to the Jewish catastrophe. (The remainder are references to the American Civil War, to the French Revolution or are pre 1910 "holocausts" within citations of works by Zola, Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane.)

In the 1970s the Judeocide started to become of real interest within the academy. The first PhD. thesis with the word "Holocaust" in its title was completed in 1972; sixteen more PhD. theses with the word "Holocaust" in their titles appeared before 1980. (By way of contrast, in the 1950s a graduate student exploring the possibilities of working on the Nazi period was advised by a distinguished Jewish American historian to find another topic: "No one is interested in Hitler.") ⁽⁵¹⁾ By the mid 1970s, within scholarly circles, the most frequently encountered referent of "H/holocaust" was the Jewish catastrophe, and increasingly the word, employed in this sense, was capitalized. A word search of JSTORE's 1977 journal texts yields sixty-four "H/holocausts." Thirty-one refer to the Jewish catastrophe; of the thirty-one, twenty-two are an unmodified - except by context - "Holocaust," five an unmodified - except by context - "holocaust," and the remainder a Nazi, German, or Jewish "H/holocaust." Of the thirty-three non-Nazi holocausts, nine are references to nuclear destruction.

In the spring of 1978 over one hundred million Americans viewed some part of NBC's mini-series titled The Holocaust - the screening was a major cultural event. As an immediate consequence, the capitalized and unmodified "Holocaust" became the recognized referent to Hitler's Judeocide in an American society newly sensitized to  that tragedy. In JSTORE journals, January - June 1979, "H/holocaust" is employed thirty-seven times. Twenty-eight of the references are to the Jewish catastrophe, and twenty-seven of the twenty-eight are an unmodified "the Holocaust." In the early 1980s the New York Times annual indexes abandoned "Nazi holocaust" and "Nazi Holocaust" in favor of "the Holocaust." ⁽⁵²⁾

A search using ProQuest's of The New York Times found thirty articles that contained both words "Jews" and "h/Holocaust" written beween 1899 and 1945,  forty more between 1945 and May 1961, another eighty between May 1961 and March 1969,  three hundred more between March 1969 and April 1978, and one thousand  five hundred or so written between April 1978 and October 1990.  1970,  twenty between 1970 and 1976,  thirty between 1976 and 1979,  thirty more between 1979 and 1982, and sixty between 1982 and 1987.  (The same search employing 'holocaust' and "atomic" and/or "nuclear" found five hundred New York Times employments before May 1964 -- as against less than a hundred "holocaust" and "Jews.")

"The Holocaust" denoting  the mass muder of Jews and (sometimes) "others" (five million [sic]) post 1979

A few weeks after the screening of The Holocaust, partly as a gesture to the American Jewish community unhappy with the intended sale of American fighter planes to Saudi Arabia, President Carter announced the American government's intention to create a memorial "to the six million who were killed in the Holocaust." Following protests by Polish-Americans and Ukrainian-Americans, who demanded that the millions of their own killed by the Nazis be recognized in any American taxpayer supported memorial, and perhaps reflecting his own ecumenical humanism, Carter in his 1979 Executive Order creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Council adopted a version of Simon Wisenthal's formulation and defined "the Holocaust" as the "... extermination of six million Jews and some five million other peoples ..." [Wisenthal, in the late 1970s a well know hunter of Nazi criminals, had, since the late 1940s, spoken and written of "eleven million civilian dead, amongst them six million Jews." The "five million" number corresponds to no historical reality.  The number was picked out of the air by Wisenthal probably because it is less, but not much less, than six million.]  This important Presidential definition of "the Holocaust" was unwelcome to some who feared that the extreme virulence of the Nazis' Jewish annihilation campaign and the resulting catastrophic biological destruction of the Jewish people in Europe could easily be obscured if "the Holocaust" was used to refer to both non-Jewish and Jewish death of the Hitler years. An eminent Israeli Holocaust scholar's 1980 reaction (Yehuda Bauer's): "The Wiesenthal-Carter definition appears to reflect a certain paradoxical 'envy' on the part of non-Jewish groups directed at the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. This itself would appear to be an unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes ... Jews were murdered without much effective action on the part of the free world ... Today they stand in danger of having their specific martyrdom as Jews obliterated by their friends."  (Do remember these words were written in 1980;  I doubt if Bauer would have the same reaction in the  historical cultural climate of today.)

In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the sense of "the Holocaust" in which the Nazi victims were both Jewish and "others" became one important aspect of mainstream usage, while the employment of "the Holocaust" as a referent to the fate of Jews, and only Jews, in Nazi-dominated Europe continued to increase paralleling the growth of attention, and thus references to, the Nazi Judeocide. (Note 73 details a sample of employments 1980 -1999.) The post 1990 growth of attention has been in part fueled by the opening (and the continual drawing power) of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (over fifteen million visits by mid 2001), the commercial and critical success of the movie Schindler's List, the attention given to Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the publicity given to the Swiss banks expropriation of funds from the dormant accounts of Hitler's Jewish victims. But this attention given to the Museum, Schindler's List etc. was in part a product of active nursing / encouragment by some prominent Jews and some important Jewish organizations who hope that directing attention to  the 'Final Solution' will help mute criticism of certain Israeli policies and buttress an increasingly attenuating Jewish American identity. Per one of the important contributor's to the Wisenthal Center: "a sad fact ... Israel and Jewish education and all the other familiar buzzwords no longer seem to rally Jews behind the community. The Holocaust, though, works every time." (In 1991, according to one poll of American Jews, a sense of being Jewish was more likely to come from some feeling of connection to the Holocaust than from a sense of connection to the Torah, God, or the state of Israel.)  Partly as a result of the mass murder's political utility, partly due to its centrality to late 20th century American Jewish identity, and partly due to the significant number of elderly wealthy Jewish survivors who, prompted by fund raisers, are anxious to ensure that their horrific experiences in Nazi Europe are not forgotten, financial resources for Holocaust memorials and education have been readily available, which, in turn, has ensured growing institutional commitment to memorialization and research and increasing employment of "H/holocaust" in both its Jewish victims and its Jewish plus "others" senses.

Returning again to the "others," the Los Angeles Simon Wisenthal Center on its web site (2003) states: "the recognized figure [of "non-Jewish civilians murdered during World War II"] is approximately five million ... Gypsies, Serbs, Polish intelligentsia, resistance fighters ..."   An email sent years ago to the Simon Wisenthal Center requesting a numerical breakdown of the five million figure was never answered.  (The Wisenthal Center avoids clarity as to whether non-Jews should be considered "Holocaust" victims.) 

Even if Wisenthal's and the Wisenthal Center's five million "other" civilian death toll reflected a meaningful historical reality, the exclusion of the three million plus non-civilian but non-combatant Soviet POW deaths from any "Holocaust" definition claiming to include "others" would blatantly mislead.  Per the Wisenthal Center, "Soviet prisoners of war were the second largest group of victims, after the Jews, of the Nazi extermination policy." See: http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/pages/t062/t06261.html  Carter's 1979 understanding of "others" apparently did include all non-combatants  ("some five million other peoples ...") and thus included the death of three million plus Soviet POW's.  But since the original Wisenthal five million figure referenced only civilians, Carter's apparent enlargement of Wisenthal's Holocaust boundary should have required Carter's Holocaust to become "the extermination of six million Jews and some eight million other peoples."

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum avoids the "five million" formulation and defines the "the Holocaust" in at least one of its publications as the "murder of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II."  (In other publications it is unclear whether non-Jews murdered are considered Holocaust victims.)  The "millions" formulation has the advantage of ambiguity but "millions" does suggest to this writer a figure of well under ten million and the number of Gentile non-combatant deaths resulting from Nazi policies informed to some degree by Nazi racial ideas might be over twenty million.  (For the record it should be stated that the Nazis racial ideas resulted in a Jewish extermination campaign -- the Nazi death camps were built to kill Jews -- but no other racial group, with the possible exception of the Roma, was targeted for  total destruction and no other racial group had comparable proportional losses.)

No historian, to my knowledge, has forcibly and publicly protested the "five million" number and many have accepted it uncritically.  (See for example Garber / Zuckerman in note 68.  And also see a posting of mine on H-Holocaust referenced at the end of note 3.)  The number five million does suit those Jews who fear death toll competition and it suited the Cold War politics of the 1970s -- the Soviets were the enemies and the West Germans allies.  Any real appreciation of what the Soviets suffered at German hands is actively discouraged by the circulation of the five million "others" number.  (Soviet Gentile civilian losses 1941-1945, admittedly many within Soviet controlled territory, were around 12 million, Soviet non-combatant losses, including POW losses, were around 15 million.)

The acceptance (and repetition) of the five million number by historians is paralleled by historians contributing to and/or accepting the playing down of non-Jewish World War II death tolls within the galleries of major Western museums. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum's galleries give prominence to Jewish death tolls but no figures are given that hint at the total Soviet death toll. And while Soviet POW losses of over three million are mentioned once on a panel titled "Prisoners of the Camps" these losses are given no meaningful context. And the Museum's important "Soviet Invasion" panel suggests to most of its readers that 1941 Soviet losses (prisoners plus dead) were in the hundreds of thousands, not three million plus.  The Museum's reluctance to change this panel and the absence of any protest of the panel's wording by any historian speaks volumes.  (For more details see  http://www.berkeleyinternet.com/ushmm/soviet.html)

Within the (London) Imperial War Museum's Holocaust exhibit an elliptic reference to the death of roughly two million Gentile Soviet POWs at German hands in 1941 and early 1942 (to my knowledge, the sole reference to Soviet World War II losses within the museum's display cases) is obscured literally and figuratively by references to Jewish POW death and Jewish death.  Downstairs in the War Museum's World War II section a display case titled "Prisoners of War" informs visitors of the extent of Soviet POW suffering and death in these terms: "The war of rapid movement ... lead to unprecedented numbers of combatants being taken prisoner ... While most POWs suffered levels of privation and boredom the situation of Soviet and German captives on the Eastern front was particularly harsh."  (See http://www.berkeleyinternet.com/iwm/soviet.html). ⁽⁵³⁾ And ⁽⁵⁴⁾

Post 1979 employment of "H/holocaust" to refer to non-Jewish mass death

Starting in the late 1970s, the increasing association between the word "holocaust" and the Nazi mass slaughter and the increasingly iconic status given to that slaughter in mainstream Western media both encouraged and discouraged the employment of "holocaust" as an appellation for other instances of mass suffering and death. After the screening of The Holocaust any sensitive Western writer employing a prominent "holocaust" to refer to mass death "X" should have been aware that such employment would invite some readers to make conscious or unconscious comparisons between mass death "X" and the Jewish catastrophe. In 1979 a group pressuring the British government to grant asylum to Vietnamese boat people -- at the time drowning in large numbers -- used the phrase "An Asian Holocaust" in newspaper advertisements. Considerable discussion preceded the use of this phrase and the governing board of the major British Jewish umbrella organization was contacted for its opinion. The board raised no objections. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ In 1983 an American Ukrainian press published The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust. The book explicitly compares the two mass destructions: "[T]he Ukrainian holocaust [1932 - 1933] ... was of the same order of magnitude as the Jewish Holocaust. It was, however, a very different kind of genocide in that it was not motivated by a quest for racial purity and was not an attempt to destroy a nation by the physical murder of all its members." ⁽⁵⁶⁾ In the 1989 Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, Larry Kramer felt the need to defend his use of the word: "I submit there are different kinds of holocausts ... despite the Jewish insistence that the word is now totally attached to their own destruction ... [A] holocaust does not require a Hitler ... Holocausts can occur, and probably most often do occur, because of inaction." ⁽⁵⁷⁾

A sampling of "holocausts" in the non-Jewish and non-nuclear senses in American book titles follow. (For "holocaust" used in its nuclear sense and some additional samples of usage in the non-Jewish and non-nuclear senses consult note 58.) Abortion, the Silent Holocaust (1981); Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust (1985); The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939-1944 (1986); And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust(1986); American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (1987);The Black Holocaust: Global Genocide (1992); American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (1992);The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997). ⁽⁵⁸⁾

The employment of "holocaust" with non-Nazi referents by those who have some investment in guarding and perpetuating the memory of the Jewish slaughter of the Hitler period is germane to the concerns of this essay, as is the disapproval that sometimes followed such employment. Quoted earlier was a reviewer's remark in the 1963 Yad Vashem Studies, "... one shudders at the nightmare of a holocaust-on-the-Holocaust." Amos Elon in The Israelis (1971), employs "the holocaust" and "Nazi h/Holocaust" in a discussion of the Eichmann trial and its aftermath, but reserves "the Holocaust" for a translation of Arabic words used to denote Arab defeat at the hands of Jews in 1948. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ A 1972 American book entitled The Holocaust is an autobiographical account of the battle of Verdun. The book's dedication reads: "To my sister Gretel, who during the holocaust of the Kaiser's World War dedicated herself to sending food parcels to the starving soldiers in the trenches of Russia and France yet was to perish during Hitler's holocaust in a concentration camp." ⁽⁶⁰⁾In the 1970s Elie Wiesel on occasion used the phrase "nuclear holocaust" and in 1983 the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism published Preventing the Nuclear Holocaust: a Jewish Response. ⁽⁶¹⁾In 1984 Michael Berenbaum exchanged views in the pages of Sh'ma with David Weiss, an Israeli scientist and rabbi born in Vienna. Weiss wrote: "But the uniqueness of even these aspects of the holocaust is debatable ... Whole regions have been devastated of their Jewish communities in recurrent, earlier holocausts; I employ that denotation advisedly." Berenbaum took exception to Weiss's vocabulary: "Professor Weiss ... offend[s] many by using the plural, small 'h' (holocausts)." ⁽⁶²⁾ Four years later in Shores of Refuge, authored by a former editor of Midstream and published by Schocken Books, two chapter titles contain the phrase "The Ukrainian Holocaust," references to the massacres of Ukrainian Jews in 1919, and in the text these 1919 massacres are described as "the worst holocaust the Jewish people had ever known." ⁽⁶³⁾In 1994 Shimon Peres spoke at a UN "Peace Bell Ceremony" of "two holocausts: the Jewish holocaust and the Japanese holocaust" and suggested that "nuclear bombs are like flying holocausts." The Jerusalem Post responded in an editorial: Comparing [the Holocaust] to the atrocities of war, or even to genocidal outrages ... is a betrayal of ... the whole Jewish people ... When such comparisons are made by non-Jews, they are deemed either morally bankrupt or vicious and hateful." And Eric Breindel in the New York Post wrote: "[Peres indulges in a] bizarre exercise in moral equivalence ... the Holocaust was manifestly unique: the darkest moment in the history of man." And per the the New Jersey Department of Education's Commission on Holocaust Education (August 2003): "Examples abound of the use of the word to represent a range of historic events ... only one event is appropriately named the Holocaust ... and [the commission] shall further discourage the inappropriate use of this word to describe other catastrophic human or natural events ... shall not endorse curriculum materials that use ... "Holocaust" to describe events other [than] that unique historic genocide." ⁽⁶⁴⁾

The Multiplicity of Meanings of "the Holocaust"

Some readers may have noted earlier in this essay the differing temporal senses of "after the holocaust of the last twelve years!" and "after the holocaust of the last few years," both references to the Jewish tragedy and both written shortly after the end of World War II (Z. Shuster, Commentary, December 1945; Issac Deutscher, Economist, January 1946). While there is wide agreement that the Holocaust ended with the German surrender, there has been and continues to be considerable variation, depending on both user and context, in the events encompassed by the term, and thus no accepted date for when the Holocaust began. American libraries and indexes generally date the beginning of the Holocaust to 1939, perhaps because of the initial convenience of transferring all the items in a "World War II: Jews" category into a newly opened "Holocaust, Jewish (1939 - 1945)" category. (The Library of Congress in 1996 explored changing the "1939 - 1945" dates of its "Holocaust, Jewish ..." category but, in the absence of a consensus on an alternative, the dates were left unchanged.) ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Yad Vashem in the 1950s and 1960s officially favored including within the boundaries of the term all the Nazi government's anti-Semitic actions and thus favored a 1933 date for the beginning of the Holocaust. But usage within Yad Vashem publications is not consistent. For example, "... the Holocaust (1933-1945)" and "this fact of full knowledge of the Holocaust, and of all [the Nazi persecutions] that led up to it ... must never be forgotten." (Both uses from the 1963 Studies.) ⁽⁶⁶⁾ And for some, while the early persecutions of the Nazi regime are not part of the Holocaust, the term does cover the later persecutions. A 1988 New York Times article states, "many say the Holocaust began" on Kristallnacht. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ Definitions in encyclopedias and dictionaries reflect not only different senses of the term with respect to persecutions, but also different understandings of which groups of Nazi victims and which mass killings of Jews should be included within the term's boundaries.

The online Encyclopaedia Britannica defines "Holocaust" as "the 12 years (1933-45) of Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities ... climax[ing] in the 'final solution.'" The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) defines the term "h/Holocaust" as "The (period of the) mass murder of Jews (or transf. of other groups) ... 1939-1945."  The American Heritage College Dictionary (1997): "The genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and others by the Nazis during World War II." The Oxford Modern English Dictionary (1996): "[T]he mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis 1941-1945." And The Random House Webster's College Dictionary (1997) gives a narrow, but not uncommon meaning: "the Holocaust, the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II." This last definition places a significant portion of Jewish death at Nazi hands -- for example the Einsatzgruppen shootings -- outside the term's boundaries. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ The range of meanings of "H/holocaust" in its role as a referent to events in the Nazi period has been largely ignored by scholars who do, however, engage in lengthy disputes as to the 'correct', or most analytically helpful, meaning of genocide. ⁽⁶⁹⁾

"Shoah": the new English word (and the Hebrew shoah / שואה)

"Shoah" has been used occasionally in American Jewish publications since the 1960s. (Paul Tillich, 1965: "I did not realize that there is already a technical vocabulary ... holocaust and Shoah.") The movie Shoah (1985) dramatically increased American awareness of the word in the late 1980s.  Over the last dozen years employment of "Shoah" has increased notably, possibly to avoid the real ambiguity as to the referent(s) of "Holocaust," and/or to avoid the imagined religious connotations of "holocaust," and/or to vary the vocabulary. Today, the meaning of "Shoah" in English is more ambiguous than it was in the early 1990s. Occasionally, the term is used as a synonym for "Holocaust" in contexts where "Holocaust" is a referent to the Nazi mass murder of both Jews and non-Jews. But still the new English word "Shoah" has a clear advantage over "Holocaust" in unambiguously calling to mind Nazi slaughter, while "Holocaust," capitalized in a title, has had a large variety of referents. "Shoah" also has the advantage of having four less letters than "Holocaust" -- frequently in newspaper headlines in British Jewish newspapers in 1998 "Shoah" was employed while in the article below the "Shoah" headline, "Holocaust" is used exclusively. Possibly in a generation, "Shoah" will rival "Holocaust" as a referent to the Nazi genocide(s). The Jewish tragedy is now so central to Western historical consciousness that it no longer gains resonance and emotional weight from "holocaust's" now rather slight association with nuclear destruction. ⁽⁷⁰⁾

Interested readers should consult endnote 71 for a mini essay on the twentieth century meanings of the Hebrew shoah, a 1933 reference to Nazi persecution of Jews as a shoah, a 1939 Ben-Gurion prediction of a coming shoah, and a refutation of scholarly claims that shoah in biblical usage connotes Divine judgment and retribution. ⁽⁷¹⁾

Conclusion

James Young has written: "As one of the first hermeneutical moves regarding an event, its naming frames and remembers events [and] determines particular knowledge of events ... Every ... name thus molds events in the image of its culture's particular understanding." ^{(72 )} Let me contradict Dr. Young.  The key "hermeneutical move" may not be the actual naming of an event but the construction by scholars of a false or misleading history of an existing name and of the name's meaning(s) and overtone(s). This construction, if unchallenged, will then help mold a "culture's particular understanding" (or at a minimum a scholarly subculture's understanding).  Hopefully, this essay's challenge to repeated and patterned scholarly misrepresentations will result -- eventually -- in a more accurate, sense of the history, overtones, and meanings of both "H/holocaust" and "Shoah" and this  new understanding may decrease the acceptability of mystification of the Nazi orchestrated mass slaughter of Jews and remove a subtle verbal obstacle to legitimate comparisons between the Jewish Holocaust and other organized mass murder.

Let me remind readers of Garber and Zuckerman's well circulated and heretofore uncontradicted assertion: "[T]he editors of the King James Version of the Bible ... translated