By Martin Jaffee, JTNews Columnist
It so happens that I can sing about a half dozen Christmas carols in German. How many of you out there know the lines that follow “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deiner Blatter”? Not many, I bet! How is it, you ask, that a nice Jewish boy from Long Island came to master such mysteries? Let me explain.
The year is 1960. I am beginning the 7th grade. At my high school, everyone has to take at least four years of German, French, or Spanish in order to get their diploma. I choose German and find myself in a class of 30 other kids, of whom about 28 are Jews.
Why the high Jewish enrollment? You guessed it! Our parents, mostly American-born children of Jewish immigrants from Europe, spoke at least some Yiddish in the home – especially when they needed to discuss things they didn’t want the kids to know about.
To us, the sound of hushed Yiddish conversation meant that tantalizing mysteries of the adult world were being revealed – and we remained shrouded in ignorance! Learning German, we thought, would give us a map to help us scout out the Promised Land of adult knowledge, whose cities were guarded by the watch towers of Mamaloshen!
We were wrong. If today I can read Yiddish passably, that comes from my graduate student days. In high school, what I really learned to do was translate “Casey at the Bat” and “I Saw Her Standing There” into ridiculous German versions. And, as I said, I learned all those carols. Each year at the school Christmas pageant, our class – represented by kids with names like Andrea Talmud, Karen Siegel, Ira Hecht, Jimmy Zucker, and Lisa Rosenberg (and the token Gentile, Carl Fortunato) – would ascend the school stage and belt out “O Tannenbaum,” “Stille Nacht, Ruhige Nacht” and other favorites accompanied by the elegant piano stylings of our teacher, Mrs. Bragelli.
Anything wrong with this picture? You bet! Not 15 years after the murder of 6 million European Jews, a group of American Jewish children gamely performs Christmas songs in the language spoken by Storm Troopers and the Obersturmbahnfuhrers of Auschwitz and Maideneck. And not even a wink of irony from the kids, nor a whiff of outraged protest from the families of these children, many of whom had lost European relatives to the Nazi rampage. Could you imagine such a scene in any American public school with a large Jewish population today?
Of course not. Why, then, have time and distance made Jews more aware – rather than less – of our victimization by the Nazis? Part of the answer is best summed up in a word so common today that we barely recognize its novelty. But it is a word virtually unheard in 1960. That word is “Holocaust.” It is a Greek word that means something
totally consumed by fire. Its history in Judaism goes back 2200 years, when the translators of the Torah into Greek chose it as their preferred rendering of the Hebrew term, olah. The
olah is a sacrificial offering in which the slaughtered animal is wholly burned to ash on an altar.
An olah is what Abraham believed God wanted him to make of Isaac on Mt. Moriah. An olah is what Aaron offered at dawn and dusk in the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness. These were the original “holocausts.”
By what logic did the murder of Jews come to be symbolized as a sacrifice to the God of Israel? Holocausts on the altar brought God’s life-giving power into the world for a blessing. What blessing was achieved by the obliteration of 1,000 years of Jewish civilization in Europe? If the Jews were the sacrificial beast, was Hitler the High Priest at the altar doing God’s work? It’s hard to figure. But by the 1970s, perhaps a decade after my classmates and I offered our final “O Tannenbaum,” the term Holocaust was everywhere in the Jewish world.
True, Israelis still preferred a much more appropriate Hebrew term, Shoah (“devastation”), which had been used since the 1940s to describe the Hitler period. But certainly in the States, the Holocaust became more than a name for an event. It became a mandatory touchstone of Jewish identity.
Who was a Jew? Anyone whom Hitler would have murdered as a Jew! Who was a good Jew? Anyone who did what he or she could to make sure that the Holocaust would never be re-enacted.
“Never Again!” became the organizing formula of American Jewish fundraising for Israel. Lectures and reminiscences by survivors became the sure-fire topic to attract a crowd to a Jewish communal event. The Holocaust had become such a routine part of American public discourse that it was memorialized in a museum in the nation’s capital.
But then the problems started. Our success in fostering “Holocaust Awareness” turned our unique catastrophe into a consumer product remarkably malleable in the American game of identity politics.
You’re the descendant of African slaves and still suffer from institutionalized racism? Then you’ve suffered a Holocaust!
You’re opposed to abortion on demand? Then you’re a virtuous saint trying to prevent a Holocaust of the unborn.
You’re a Palestinian Arab whose family orchard has been appropriated for the purpose of Jewish State building? Then the Jews are committing against you the Holocaust which they themselves suffered!
In fact, if you’re a thoroughly warped anti-Semite, the Holocaust is nothing but a Jewish hoax.
The events symbolized as the Holocaust were among the most horrible in human history, and we are correct to memorialize them. But the symbol itself has escaped our control. It has become, at best, a political cliché, and at worst, a tool of the anti-Semites themselves. What to do? Restore “the Holocaust” to the synagogue’s ritual calendar, where Jews have always memorialized our martyrs and heroes. In the public arena, let us tend the rich garden of Jewish culture that has retaken the scorched earth of European Jewish civilization. The best answer to “the Holocaust” is to share with the world the sweet fruits that we have cultivated in conquering our victimization. Leave to others the petulant rhetoric of “you owe me for what your ancestors did to mine.”
Martin Jaffee is Chair of the Comparative Religion Program at the University of Washington, and he teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs. He also writes on the history of Talmudic literature and the theoretical problems in the study of religion.
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