Holocaust uniqueness debate
Historiographical debate
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Through Human history, Zionism and Totalitarianism
History
The Jerusalem school of Jewish history originated in the 1920s and it sought to document Jewish history from a national, as opposed to a religious or philosophical, perspective. It developed the notion that Jewish history itself was unique, a progenitor to the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The uniqueness of the Holocaust was advanced while it was ongoing by the World Jewish Congress (WJC), but rejected by governments of countries in German-occupied Europe. In the early decades of Holocaust studies, scholars approached the Holocaust as a genocide unique in its reach and specificity. Holocaust uniqueness became a subject for scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, in response to efforts to historicize the Holocaust via such concepts as totalitarianism, fascism, functionalism, modernity, and genocide.
In West Germany, the Historikerstreit ("historians' dispute") erupted in the late 1980s over attempts to challenge the position of the Holocaust in West German historiographical orthodoxy and compare Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union. Critics saw this challenge as an attempt to relativize the Holocaust. In the 1980s and 1990s, a set of scholars, including Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz, Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, and Daniel Goldhagen—mostly from the field of Jewish studies—authored various studies to prove the Holocaust's uniqueness. They were challenged by another set of scholars from a wide diversity of viewpoints that rejected the uniqueness of the Holocaust and compared it to other events, which was then met with an angry backlash from uniqueness supporters. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, polemical approaches for the debate were exchanged for analytical ones relating to claims of uniqueness in Holocaust memory. By 2021, there were few scholars who were still making the uniqueness argument.
Unlike most Orthodox Jewish rabbis and theologians, the Lubavitcher Rebbe eventually came to the conclusion that the Holocaust was historically and theologically unprecedented and could not be understood with older religious categories such as sin, punishment, or Tikkun.
In the twenty-first century, an increasing body of scholarship challenged the claims of uniqueness proponents. While Holocaust scholars have largely moved beyond the uniqueness debate, belief that the Holocaust is unique continues to be entrenched in public consciousness and moral pedagogy in the West. In 2021, A. Dirk Moses initiated the catechism debate, challenging the uniqueness of the Holocaust in German Holocaust memory. The same year, in his book The Problems of Genocide, Moses argued that the development of the concept of genocide based on the Holocaust led to disregard of other forms of mass civilian death that could not be analogized to the Holocaust.
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Arguments
Proponents of uniqueness argue that the Holocaust had unique aspects which were not found in other historical events. In 1986, during the debate about Holocaust uniqueness amongst West German historians, Eberhard Jäckel argued that "never before had a state, authorised by its leader, decided and announced that it was going to wipe out a certain group of people, including the elderly, women, children and infants, and then used all imaginable instruments of power to carry out that decision".
Historian Daniel Blatman sums up the uniqueness position as arguing it was the "only genocide in which the murderers' goal was the total extermination of the victim, with no rational or pragmatic reason", although Blatman and other scholars say that this was not true of the Holocaust either. For example, historian Dan Stone writes that Yehuda Bauer's definition of "Holocaust" as "total destruction" (with the latter arguing that this renders it unlike all other genocides in history) is mistaken, since the destruction was not in fact total. Opponents also argue that since every historical event has unique features, uniqueness proponents are in fact making ideological rather than historical claims.
German historian Wolfgang Benz argues that the six million victims alone makes the Holocaust "a unique crime in the history of mankind". On the other hand, historian Annette F. Timm argues that the Holocaust was unique due to the categorical rejection of any single Jewish person from being assimilated.
Critics of the uniqueness concept have argued that it is Eurocentric. Some Holocaust scholars who support the uniqueness concept deny other genocides, such as the Romani Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Some observers claim that the Holocaust was influenced by the earlier Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, while others reject the comparison. The German historian Jürgen Zimmerer has criticised both German liberals and German conservatives who do not see "continuities" between the Namibian genocide and the Holocaust, claiming that conservatives have an unwillingness to examine German colonial history, while liberals have a "fear of challenging the dogma of Holocaust uniqueness".
Christian Gerlach argues that putting the Holocaust above other atrocities involves "constantly devaluing and demoting all other victim groups", which he calls racist.
Philosopher David Scott argues that by turning the Holocaust into a "meta-evil, the evil that defines evil as such", other atrocities are diminished.
Some genocide researchers have argued that the uniqueness of the Holocaust not only leads to a sense of Israel as exceptional but contributes to denial of the Gaza genocide and other forms of Israeli violence. As Raz Segal and Luigi Daniele put it, Holocaust exceptionalism leads to "the idea that Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors, can never perpetrate genocide".