Valhalla, Calvary & Auschwitz (review)

158 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 • The overwhelming majority ofthe 27,000 "enemy aliens" arrested by the British government in the early summer of 1940 were German Jews (p. 605). • Not only was Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, an antisemite (p. 644), but the IRA was a supporter of the Nazis, and many of their men received military training in Germany (p. 650). • The Wagner-Rogers Children's Bill of 1939, which would have allowed more German Jewish children to enter the United States, had no support from Roosevelt and never reached the floor of Congress; when Britain entered the war, legislation to allow the immigration of an unlimited number ofBritish children was immediately passed (p. 703). • General Patton described Jewish DP's as "lower than animals"; Jews lived under conditions in DP camps similar to the concentration camps until late 1945, when a scathing report was fmally submitted to the War Department by Earl G. Harrison (p. 708). • The United States did not ratify the U.N. Genocide Convention, which was passed in 1950 to make genocide a war crime, until 1988 (p. 820). Of course, when we pick up a book that attempts to cover the world's reaction to the H910caust, the "Why didn't they include ... ?" questions arise. The reader will look in vain for essays on Belgium, Spain, or Switzerland in the Western Europe section, on the Ukraine in the Soviet Bloc section, on Australia in the British Sphere section, or on Mexico in the North America section. Indeed, South America, a notorious haven for Nazi war criminals, is not included at all. One soon realizes however, that in asking for this we are asking for another book or a series of books. And that is the value of this book: it is sure to lead to a much deeper and wider exploration of the vast topic that it has opened up for the fIrst time. David Patterson University Honors Program University ofMemphis Valhalla, Calvary & Auschwitz, by S. Giora Shoham. Cincinnati: Bowman & Cody, 1995. 459 pp. Co-published by Ramot Publishing House of Tel Aviv University. This is a complex, intriguing, insightful, yet in many ways a disappointingly superfIcial volume. Professor Shoham is a criminologist by training. He serves as an interdisciplinary lecturer at Tel Aviv University's School of Law. He has also taught at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and at Oxford University. Shoham insists from the outset that his perspective is not based on new documentation on the Holocaust. Rather his goal is to confIgure the information brought forth by Book Reviews 159 leading Holocaust historians such as Raul Hilberg in a new way. He develops an interpretive framework based on macro-criminology, particularly its stigma and labeling theories. In addition he draws on prevailing notions ofthe principal dialectics of human behavior, focusing on the mutually dependent relationship between Jews and Germans which the Holocaust irrevocably ruptured. Shoham argues that antisemitism was the core element ofNazi ideology. He sees a close affinity to the classical "deicide charge" propagated by Christianity over the centuries, though he admits some marked differences. The principal one was that not even baptism could save Jews under the Nazis. Nazi antisemitism clearly was rooted in race. As Shoham interprets.the Holocaust, there was an epochal struggle between pureblooded Nazis and racially polluted Jews. Only blood-letting would resolve this in the end. The Nazis saw themselves, Shoham insists, as the resurrected deities, as the Eddic Aesir and Vanir. For Shoham the Holocaust also involved the core dialectics of separation and participation coupled with a mytho-empirical predisposition to antisemitism. This is the unique feature of his interpretation as he understands it. When the separant Teutonic social character seemed subdued by the so-called "Judaeo-Christian" laws and morals rooted in the participant community, the German nation reacted with a rage resembling Furor Teutonicus against the scheming, wise Elders of Zion. Teutonic mythology is critical for Shoham in analyzing the Holocaust. The Nazi leaders, as he sees it, conducted their activities according to this ancient mythology. The worship of death as a precedent condition for resurrection in Valhalla can be seen, he argues by way of concrete example...