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202 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 important for the serious scholar in the continuing field of German- and Austrian-Jewish culture, as well as for the interested lay person. Diane R. Spielmann, Ph.D. Leo Baeck Institute Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust, by Laurence Mordekhai Thomas. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. 211 pp. $44.95. For any student attending graduate school in history in the late 1960s and early 1970s the watchwords of success were "comparative history." While econometrics and statistics were just breaking new historical ground with the "quantifiers," along with the academic hustles called "Women's Studies" and "Black Studies" (as if women and blacks had operated in a historical vacuum without men or whites around), the trend toward comparative history was exciting and compelling. When it came to the subject of Black America, the historian Stanley Elkins had broken brave new ground with his book"Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life." Elkins was one of the first historians to see parallels between what happened to the Jews of Europe under the Nazis and the Africans who were brought to the New World to live for 250 years under the oppressive yoke of slavery. Elkins undoubtedly helped to influence an entire generation of comparative studies in the last quarter century. George M. Frederickson's Wbite Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and Soutb African History and James O. Gump's The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of tbe Zulu and tbe Sioux are two recent examples of the vitality of comparative history. Laurence Mordekhai Thomas's study Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and tbe Holocaust is not. Professor Thomas, who teaches at Syracuse University, offers readers a philosophical and sociological rumination on the Holocaust and slavery. He tries to come to grips with the old saw of which was worse and finally concludes that the Holocaust and American slavery "were two entirely different evil institutions." ,However, it is his major premise that is most troubling: Thomas writes, ". . . in the main these atrocities were committed by ordinary, decent human beings-people like you and me." I don't know about Professor Thomas, but I don't know too many people who could perpetrate the Holocaust or keep slaves. The Nazis, to coin Hannah Book Reviews 203 Arendt's phrase, might have been banal little men. They were not like you and me. In other places Thomas borrows lavishly from pop culture. For example, he writes, "The occurrence of such moral atrocities as the Holocaust and American Slavery ... should not astound and bewilder us. On the contrary, the surprise should be that there have been comparatively few events of this kind in the history of humanity" (see Woody Allen's film Hannah and Her Sisters for the exact observation made by the character Max Von Sydow plays who says, "Given what people are, the question is ... 'Why doesn't it [the Holocaust] happen more often?'''). Professor Thomas offers up creative sociological terms such as "moral dissociation" and "the fragility-goodness model" to draw the reader to his conclusion that slavery and the Holocaust were unspeakable evils. So what else is new? He also comes to the astounding conclusion that" hideousness is surely in the eye of the beholder" when he ruminates on wanton killing. This, perhaps, would have been an excellent place to take up the Nat Turner revolt where Turner slaughtered innocent women and children to make a valiant statement on the "hideousness" of slavery. But Thomas goes no further with his analysis. In the end, Thomas sees the main difference between slavery and the Holocaust in rather simplistic terms: "extermination versus the utter dependence ofslavery, respectively." He tells us that both were "coercive" institutions and that their coercion was exemplified in "profoundly different ways." Again, what else is new? The reader will leave this study wondering: wondering why it was written, wondering what Professor Thomas was trying to say, and wondering whether a case can actually be made for comparing slavery with the Holocaust. If there is a case to be made for a comparative analysis of slavery and the Holocaust, this is not the study that makes it...

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