A SCHOLAR'S LEGACY.

Problems Unique to the Holocaust
Edited by Harry James Cargas
University of Kentucky Press, $20, 198 pp.

When President Jimmy Carter sought someone of the Jewish faith to chair the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Commission, he turned to Elie Wiesel. When he sought a Catholic to serve on this commission, he found a good one in the late Harry James Cargas, who died in 1998. When Israelis wanted a Catholic to serve on the international advisory board of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem, Cargas was the logical choice. In recognition of Cargas's prolific scholarly work (more than twenty books and scores of articles) and his enormous service to improving Jewish-Christian relations, the Jewish National Fund bestowed on him its Tree of Life Award. Five thousand trees planted in his name now grow outside Jerusalem in a parkland.

Cargas was indefatigable in forging links between Jews and Catholics. People who didn't talk to one another spoke with Harry Cargas, and his intimate interviews with them enabled his readers to hear these scholars as though they were in dialogue with one another. His best- known book, Reflections of a Post-Auschwitz Christian (1989), is an open letter to Pope John Paul II written shortly after the pope's meeting with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. Not content to quarrel with the pope over a particular incident, Cargas went for much higher stakes, cataloguing the church's anti-Semitism over the centuries. For example, in the fourth century the church aligned itself with emperors who removed from Roman law the very exemptions for Jews that had enabled early Christians to survive as a minority, free for the most part from the general duty of emperor worship and from other conflicts with their consciences. In the seventh century the church even forbade Christians to consult with Jewish doctors, a teaching no Catholic would now take seriously. The eleventh century witnessed a new Christian attitude toward war: that it could be divinely inspired, or at least papally commended, if not commanded. As it happened, the Crusaders drew first blood not in the "Holy Land" but in the Rhineland, where they slaughtered thousands of Jews. They did worse when they got to the city of peace, locking its Jews into a synagogue and burning it to the ground. In subsequent centuries Christians expelled the Jews from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from Spain in 1492.

Cargas was famous for his rigorous honesty as a historian. Ten years ago he urged the Vatican to open its archives on Pius XII to independent historians, a much better antidote for biased or shoddy history than selective publication of some of the evidence. Always identifiably Catholic, Cargas preferred to describe himself not as a Roman Catholic, but as a post-Auschwitz one. He did so to preserve the memory of the Nazi desecration of human dignity.

If there is a single word that marks Cargas's work, it is "moving." He enabled people to change even closed minds and hardened hearts. In Shadows of Auschwitz (1990), for example, he artfully selected powerful images of the Shoah. His gentleness as a teacher shines through the effective, understated questions he poses for his readers as they confront visual evidence of atrocities.

Problems Unique to the Holocaust is an anthology in which historians and philosophers, scholars of art, literature, and religion argue in various ways that the Shoah entailed so profound a collapse of universal moral truths that one must suspend all judgment about the acts and omissions of its victims. Realistic assumptions in normal life became "optimistic, mistaken, fateful, and deadly" in the Nazi killing centers. Where pregnancy was neither "a medical condition nor a blessing from God" but "a capital crime" in the death camps, can standard ethical reasoning on abortion be of much value? Or what is one to make of parents who "smothered their own babies whose cries otherwise would have revealed their secret positions"? Are suicides in the death camps really suicides or Nazi murders?

"Dare we throw stones?" asks Cargas. David Patterson replies: "Any moral judgment of the actions undertaken by inmates of the Nazi death camps must begin with an acknowledgment of our tenuous position as judges in these matters. Those of us who have not seen the inside of the sealed trains, who have not been covered with the ashes of our mothers and fathers and children raining down from the sky...can hardly presume to peer into these souls under assault and make moral pronouncements upon them."

The essays in this book encapsulate the shift toward empathy that characterized its editor's work as an ethicist. If one is moved to compassion, to suffer together with others, one cannot easily sit in judgment on them, let alone repeat centuries-old venomous condemnations. In the case of Christian hatred for Jews, such judgments proved to be as poisonous of Christianity as they were destructive of their intended victims.

The book is better read in small doses to enable it to sink in. But it can be read in a single day. Ash Wednesday would be a good time for Christians to do so. The ashes marking our foreheads on that day serve as a paradoxical remembrance of a future event, our death. That remembering enables us to prepare for the future by turning from a past that is sinful. The Hebrew word for this is teshuvah.

This book is Harry Cargas's last. We will all miss his clarion voice stirring our consciences and continuously urging us never to forget the events of the Holocaust. Such a call to remembering remains the most effective guarantee that it will never happen again.

Edward McGlynn Gaffney, Jr., a frequent contributor, is professor of law at Valparaiso Law School in Valparaiso, Indiana.