Yad Vashem's new museum opened yesterday. There's a brief report here; and there's a longer one here, which explains the shift of perspective between the old museum, 'based largely on pictures and records by the Nazis and their collaborators', and the new one, where the Holocaust is viewed 'through the lenses of individual Jews'. This feature by Chris McGreal from yesterday's Guardian makes the same point, quoting Avner Shalev, the museum's curator and chairman:
[T]he most important part is the text; the text is the personal stories. It's looking into the eyes of the individuals. There weren't six million victims, there were six million individual murders.Unfortunately, McGreal's piece, as informative as it is, is marred by counterposing two ways of thinking about the Holocaust: on the one hand, as embodying universal human lessons concerning human rights, and racism, genocide, evil; on the other hand, as a Jewish event speaking specifically to the Jews about their tragedy in Europe and about the importance of Israel as a Jewish homeland. It is true that McGreal doesn't present this choice simply out of his own mouth. It comes by way of the Israeli writer, Tom Segev. It is a spurious choice for all that.
I've already tried to explain why, briefly, once before. I do so here again because the choice as offered is an offensive one even when it is on the authority of a Jewish writer.
No one who studies the Holocaust, as indeed any other genocide, can fail to see the universal human dimension of it if they are not morally blind in some way. For what is done to the victims, whether it is Jews or Gypsies, Kurds or Tutsis, is a terrible cruelty and violence simply in virtue of their shared characteristics as human beings. It is not because someone bears a particular identity that they suffer from being humiliated or tortured or slaughtered, or that they will be grieved over by those who love them - even when it is their identity that is given as the reason for doing these things to them, and even when some of the things actually done are especially designed to turn their particularistic beliefs cruelly against them. But the suffering itself is in virtue of characteristics that human beings have in common, as the vulnerable beings we all are, in need of protection and respect. To view, or to present, or to teach, the Holocaust or any other national or ethnic calamity without noticing this is not a serious option and nor is it a serious danger. Yes, it happens; I have myself seen it very occasionally. But it isn't the dominant, or even an influential, discourse in the literature on, or debate about, the Judeocide.
At the same time, what happened to the Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945 happened precisely because they were targeted as Jews. Quite apart from the millions of individual tragedies involved, this was a disaster from which European Jewry did not recover, wiping out not only two-thirds of their number, but breaching centuries-old cultural traditions across a continent. For anyone, Jewish or otherwise, to lecture in these circumstances that Jews must not focus too much on the Jewish dimension of their own tragedy is an insult. That peoples mourn and commemorate their dead, from wars, national disasters, periods of occupation or oppression, is a commonplace. The worse the episode, the more this is the case. But just in relation to this one experience - the Jews and the Shoah... well, you mustn't lose sight of racism.
Run it past me again: why were the Jews of Europe murdered?
It's a simple matter. This is not either-or; it's both-and. And consequently it's both.
[Amended at 9.50 PM.]
