The Holocaust: History and Metahistory in Three Recent Works

Steven E. Aschheim, ed. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 428.

Yehuda Bauer. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 335.

Raul Hilberg. Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. Pp. 218.

Even though the three volumes assigned here for collective review all bear some connection, in whole or in part, to the broad central theme of the Holocaust, the connection in each is manifested quite differently, to the point where at first glance the volumes seem entirely incommensurable. The first, cast largely in the language of contemporary cultural studies, consists of twenty-one papers by scholars from various disciplines presented at a 1997 Jerusalem conference devoted to the full range of the work of Hannah Arendt, including but not limited to her controversial interpretation of the career and trial of Adolf Eichmann. The second is a set of eleven essays analyzing broad interpretive problems in the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews, using the conventional tools of an academic historian. The third is a brief but densely written handbook outlining types of source material encountered by students of the Holocaust and illustrating some technical difficulties in their explication. Nonetheless, there does appear to be a basis for discussing all three together, although the reason has less to do with the books' specific content than with the identities of their authors and the roles they have played in the development of the scholarly field of Holocaust studies.

That basis is adumbrated (no doubt unknowingly) in an autobiographical aside at the beginning of the second of the three volumes, Rethinking the Holocaust, in which the author, Yehuda Bauer, one of the field's primary architects, observes that he "came to the study of the Holocaust because [he] wanted to be a historian of Jews," and he understood that "the Holocaust was unfortunately . . . the central event in modern or perhaps all Jewish history" (pp. xv–xvi). Indeed, Bauer received his academic training in the department of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 1950s and early 1960s, when the Nazi period was not taught as a distinct unit, and before turning unequivocally to the matters that have become his dominant scholarly concern he had already established himself as a historian of Palestinian, European, and American Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century.¹ Implicit in his turn to the Holocaust was thus the thought that by studying what befell the Jews of Europe under Nazi impact he might learn something of importance about the history of the Jews more broadly, certainly in the modern period, perhaps even in earlier eras as well.

On the surface that thought seems sensible enough: since the end of the Second World War it had been widely assumed, not only in Israel but in Europe and the United States as well, that the Holocaust would be a subject of particular interest to Jews and that historians of the Jewish people or of individual Jewish communities would naturally lead the way in laying the foundations for its historical study. For a time, in fact, they actually appear to have done so.² How strange, then, that in the years since he committed himself fully to Holocaust studies, only a handful of academics, mostly from Israel, has followed Bauer into the field from the direction of Jewish history. As it happens, his principal interlocutors in Rethinking the Holocaust are overwhelmingly contemporary historians of Germany or of modern Europe, whose findings and interpretations regarding questions such as the comparability of the Holocaust with other genocides, the modernity of the Holocaust, and the relative merits of ideological and psychological explanations for mass killing he reports and analyzes, disputes or affirms, in a straightforward style that makes the book a valuable and accessible guide to Holocaust historiography and the controversies that animate...