The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age.

One of the sadder spectacles of our time is the growth of a victimization industry. Beginning with the initial discussions to build a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., groups representing the victims of Nazi conquest demanded that they be included in any memorial. Even the meaning of the word Holocaust which, after the opening of the death camps was synonymous with the murder of European Jewry, was redefined to mean the murder of 6 million Jews and 10 million others.

The trivialization of the term Holocaust has reached a point where many scholars have begun to eschew the word and substituted the Hebrew Shoah in an effort to protect the history of the European Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. It would appear that one objective of Katz's superb first of a projected three-volume work is to set the historical record straight by not only examining in what ways the Shoah was unique but also to provide direction so that reasonable people can distinguish between the historic Novum known as the Holocaust and other historic examples of mass murder.

From its opening pages Katz, who is professor of Jewish history and thought at Cornell University, makes it clear that the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust derived from Hitler's intention to rid the planet of its Jewish population. It was Hitler's determination to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child simply because of the accident of their birth that gives the Holocaust its unique meaning. Katz makes it clear through his historical survey of state-sponsored mass murder that the Nazi policy to immolate world Jewry had no precedent in history. Actually, much of Katz's meticulously researched book focuses on the causes and objectives of mass murder from ancient times to the present and concludes that in none of these historic examples was there the intention on the part of the perpetrators to systematically engage in genocide or, as Katz defines the term, to intend to physically destroy an entire group of people. As a consequence of the European colonization of the New World Native Americans died in larger numbers than did the Jews during the Shoah, but it was never the intention of the Spanish, Portuguese, or English to engage in a policy of genocide against the native population. In fact, Katz shows that most Indians died of disease and not as victims of premeditated violence.

Hitler, according to Katz, was obsessed with racial views that pitted the Aryan race against the Jews whom he viewed as a parasite people that fed on the lifeblood of Germany. Katz makes the important observation that Hitler's belief in the Aryan myth and the struggle for world domination between Aryans and Jews was different from the Christian myth that fixed the Jews among the minions of the devil and the Antichrist. He makes the significant distinction between Christian anti-judentum and Nazi anti-Semitism when he observes that in medieval Christian Europe, Jews always had the possibility of redemption through conversion. Living in the Thrid Reich, Jews had no choices and therefore no escape. In one of his valuable insights, Katz makes the observation that the Nazi policy toward Jews was, therefore, not a continuation of medieval Christian practices but rather the revolutionary overthrow of Christian dogma toward Jews. The Nazi credo was to murder Jews whereas the medieval church sought not only to persecute and proselytize among Jews but also to protect them from the hatred of the Christian masses. In this sense, the real failure of the Catholic church during the Holocaust was to abdicate its historic role of openly protecting Jews from those who would commit violence against them.

Having made the argument that Nazi ideology toward the Jews was not a direct result of centuries of the Christian teaching of contempt, Katz nevertheless contends that both Catholic and Protestant churches bear responsibility for creating the environment that allowed for the stereotyping of the Jew. The Christian churches did create the "mythic" Jew who inhabited the mindset of all areas of Christian life and culture. From christ-killer to Antichrist to the Wandering Jew, the Jew became depersonalized and emerged as the hated mythic "Other." What the Nazis did, according to Katz, was to appropriate the millennial old imagery of the Jew for their own murderous purposes. In short, the Nazis eschewed the Christian belief in the ultimate redemption of the Jews for the terminal end known as the Final Solution.

If Katz rejects the view that Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric is "Hitler by anticipation," he also argues against the view that the Holocaust was possible as a consequence of traditional anti-Semitism, technology, and the refinements of modern bureaucracy. Katz agrees that all three were necessary in bringing about the Holocaust, but what was absolutely essential was the determinative ideology of the Nazis, the ideological superstructure that created and governed the machinery of the Nazi state. As Katz puts it, "Neither technocratic rationality nor bureaucratic modalities per se create Auschwitzes! Ideas do."

From the passage of the Nuremberg Laws to the construction of the death camps, each step was an expression of an innovative and genocidal dogma. From the start, Hitler viewed the Jew as anti-Man and was determined to destroy him. In this regard, Katz would agree that World War II was essentially two wars: one, the traditional type of war that Europe had been fighting for centuries only updated with the latest in technology; and the other, a war against the Jews. Katz makes a convincing case that Hitler was determined to win the war against the latter even if it meant being defeated by the Allies.

Stephen Katz has written a compelling and remarkable book that will dazzle the reader with the breadth of his scholarship. Without diminishing the historic suffering of groups such as the Armenians and the victims of Stalin's purges, Katz makes it quite clear why the Holocaust in its historical perspective was an unprecedented event in history. Yet there are historians, such as Ernst Nolte, who would relativize the barbarism of Nazi Germany and argue that the Nazis were no worse than the Soviets or that Hitler's genocidal mentality was learned from observing the tactics of Stalin during the purges. Katz's work is a necessary corrective to that view. To negate the uniqueness of the Holocaust is to invite its repetition. The murderous legacy of Nazi Germany has obviously not been absorbed as we witness a resurgence of fascism and neo-Nazism throughout Europe, and an indifference to "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia.

Katz has performed a valuable service in focusing on the significance of intentionality in understanding what discerns one state-sponsored act of violence from another. Not all historic acts of violence are holocausts and most have limited objectives. The Holocaust is unique because it was different--because it is the only instance in history where an entire people were marked for extinction. By making this point, Katz has reclaimed the moral high ground in future discussions of the Holocaust. For this we should be grateful and look forward to the publication of the next two volumes.