A Time to Keep Silent and a Time to Speak

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 361–375 R E V I E W F O R U M DANIEL J. GOLDHAGEN. A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Pp. 362. A Time to Keep Silent and a Time to Speak ROBERT B ONFIL WHEN I WAS ASKED to join the discussion on Goldhagen’s new book, I was tempted. And, as it often happens with irresistible, and ultimately traumatic temptations, I did not pause to reflect rationally about the object of my rapture or about my actual chances of meeting the challenge. What induced me to suspend my wise resolution, quite successfully pursued in the last decades, not to review other people’s books? What urged me to dare enter a field decidedly extraneous to my academic qualifications ? Did I at once forget the good old saying ne sutor ultra crepidam? Things only became worse as I began to confront the assignment. In fact, I immediately got lost, for I realized that since so many renowned and qualified historians of the Holocaust had already faced the Goldhagen ‘‘phenomenon,’’1 one more opinion, especially from a reader unspecialized A preliminary draft of this note benefitted from the kind remarks of Professor David Berger, whose scholarly expertise and extraacademic activity in this field I greatly admire and respect. Needless to say, the responsibility for the contents is entirely mine. 1. Even a highly selective bibliographical reference would readily exceed the limits of one unspecialized person’s reading capacities, as may be inferred from the extensive discussion in the wake of the meteoric marketing success of Goldhagen ’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). Robert R. Shandley was indeed quite immediately able to judge an impressive collection of penetrating comments from Jürgen Habermas, Hans Mommsen , Jost Nolte, and many others: Robert R. Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis, 1998). I borrowed the idea of referring to the ongoing discussion as the ‘‘Goldhagen phenomenon’’ from Andrei S. Markovits’s assessment quoted by A. D. Moses, ‘‘Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and His Critics,’’ History and Theory 37:2 (1998): 195, where the important references in the footnotes are so extensive as to discourage the The Jewish Quarterly Review (Spring 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 362 JQR 94:2 (2004) as I am, was hardly needed. I felt overwhelmed by the impression that everything was already said; worse, everything and the contrary of everything . And yet I was trapped, I could not get out. What began as an irrational temptation, turned into another frustrating reflection on the actual chances of historians to conceive the past properly (that is, to cope efficiently with the most basic constitutive element of their own cultural personality) as a viable way to face the future. Does Cicero’s saying historia magistra vitae make any actual sense? As everybody knows, Cicero’s adage is part of a classical conception which views history as pertaining to the practice of rhetoric, about which Carlo Ginzburg has recently offered remarkable insights in History, Rhetoric , and Proof.2 The chapters of that book were initially formulated as the first lecture series established by the Historical Society of Israel in memory of Menahem Stern, the outstanding scholar of ancient Jewish history who was murdered in Jerusalem by a Palestinian terrorist as he was walking from his house to the National and University Library. While the frame of his talks naturally directed Ginzburg toward the roots of the classical match between history and rhetoric, his own concern was definitely with the deep cognitive, political, and moral convergence between the historian’s craft and judgment, viewed as both actual understandings of past realities and essential foundations of ongoing decisionmaking . Toward the end of his first essay, Ginzburg pointed en passant to Goldhagen’s first book as one of two examples of the failure of authors of recent controversial books on...