Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (review)

This important volume is based on the 2004 International Scholars' Conference sponsored by the Yad Vashem International Institute of Holocaust Research. The book contains most of the papers presented there, in addition to contributions by scholars who did not attend the event.

As edited by Israeli scholars Dan Michman and the late David Bankier, the volume is largely, though not exclusively, concerned with Jewish and Israeli historiography of the Holocaust. The early contributions of survivors, particularly in Israel, receive a good deal of attention. Sometimes referred to as "survivor-historians," these men and women arrived in Palestine between 1944 and 1948. As Dina Porat notes, some of their accounts of German atrocities had reached the Yishuv even earlier. In the early years after statehood was achieved, two questions confronted Israelis concerned with teaching and studying the Holocaust: Should the study of the Holocaust be used to warn and inspire, in light of the then-current needs of the Israeli population and the state? Or ought contemporary Holocaust research more properly be the purview of academics, who try to write source-based, value-free scientific history? Since about one-quarter of the population of the young state consisted of survivors, the debate was tilted in favor of memory and narrative, not scholarship.

Founded in 1953, Yad Vashem became the preserve of survivors determined to engage in the "monumental commemoration of the Holocaust" (p. 43). But the testimony of survivors did not fade into the mists of the past, forgotten because of inconsistencies or disbelief. The Eichmann trial demonstrated that eyewitness accounts could be woven into a plausible narrative. Hanna Yablonka comments that, because of this event, Israelis "heard the story of the Holocaust in its own context, through the lives of the people who had lived it in Europe" (p. 575). But Yad Vashem, despite its commitment to scholarly research, continued to serve as home to survivor-historians who insisted that discourse about the Holocaust belonged solely to "those who had been there" (p. 291).

In 1959, the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University entered into the breach. Led at various times by Yehuda Bauer and Israel Gutman, the Institute fostered the scholarly study of the Holocaust. In his contribution to the volume, Boaz Cohen traces the subsequent rise of Holocaust-focused courses at the Hebrew University and at Bar-Ilan University. After the Six-Day War, Holocaust studies became part of the Israeli academic curriculum. Eventually, as Cohen notes, Yad Vashem, too, strove to combine its reliance on memory with a dedication to scientific research and scholarship. In some ways, the dispute reflected uncertainty about the mission of Holocaust studies. Did they form a unique academic field, subject to the rules of strict scholarship? Or did the study of the Holocaust rest more properly upon commemoration and the admonition to remember?

Various contributors to this volume address "national" aspects of Holocaust historiography in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Nicolas Berg's essay on the stateless German-Jewish historian Joseph Wulf shows how Wulf's relentless attempt to assemble documentation related to the Final Solution both repelled and frightened German scholars. In his essay on British historiography of the Holocaust, David Cesarani is highly critical of those British historians who portrayed Hitler as a power-crazed politician not unlike many others in history. Cesarani notes that Anglo-American historians have tended to overlook ideological considerations when examining this German demagogue. Alan Bullock, for example, viewed Hitler as a tyrant. If one takes into account the Greek origin of the term, a "tyrant" was a person who seized power illegally. This description is inappropriate in the case of Hitler, and omits any reference to his racist and criminal nature. The roots of Hitler's passionate antisemitism, and its impact on Germans and Austrians in his time, were largely ignored in Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny and A.J.P. Taylor...