Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Notes

notes 1 introduction 1. Nachmanides, Commentary on the Torah, vol. 1, 398. 2. Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Bachodesh 2. 3. See Moshe Weissman ed., The Midrash Says, vol. 4, 423. 4. As Heschel has noted, “the Bible knows neither the dichotomy of body and soul nor the trichotomy of body, soul, spirit, nor [even] the trichotomy within the soul”; see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 2, 37. 5. The Baal Shem transmitted this teaching to his disciple Yaakov Yosef of Polnoe, who relates it in the introduction to his Toledot Yaakov Yosef al HaTorah, 19. See also Schneur Zalman, Likutei Amarim Tanya, 589. 6. Yitzhak Katznelson, Vittel Diary, 202–3. 7. See Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 311. 8. Ignaz Maybaum,The Face of God after Auschwitz, 25–26, cited in Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 156–57. 9. See Maybaum, The Face of God after Auschwitz, 32. 10. Fackenheim has correctly noted that the scapegoat theory loses its plausibility “when public incitement [is] turned in[to] top-secret action. And plausibility becomes sheer absurdity when at length the ‘big’ question comes into view”; see Emil L. Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, 149. 11. See Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 134. 12. Said Rosenberg, “This heroic attitude [of National Socialism], to begin 259 with, departs from the single but completely decisive avowal, namely from the avowal that blood and character, race and soul are merely diªerent designations for the same entity”; see Alfred Rosenberg, Race and Race History and Other Essays, 131–32 (quoted in Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 26; Rosenberg’s emphasis). 13. Rosenberg, Race and Race History, 181. This thinking that is in the soul is precisely what makes the Jew a pathological threat to the German Volk. Thus, for example, in 1935 the journal of the Association of German Physicians stated, “The comparison between Jews and the tuberculosis bacilli is a telling one. Almost all people harbour TB bacilli, almost all nations on earth harbour the Jews—a chronic infection, which it is di‹cult to cure. Just as the human body does not absorb the TB germs into its general organism, so a natural, homogeneous society cannot absorb the Jews into its organic association” (quoted in H. H. BenSasson , ed., A History of the Jewish People, 1019). 14. Cited in Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, 122. 15. Reported in Die Zeit, Dec. 29, 1989; see Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Apology,” 12. 16. Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, 99. 17. Commentary on Numbers 31:3 in Rashi, Commentary on the Torah. 18. See Louis I. Newman, The Hasidic Anthology, 147; see also Zohar III, 73a. Yitzhak Katznelson makes the same point; see Katznelson, Vittel Diary, 122. And recall what Kalmanovitch wrote in his diary from the Vilna Ghetto: “A war is being waged against the Jew. But this war is not merely directed against one link in the triad [of Israel, Torah, and God] but against the entire one: against the Torah and God, against the moral law and Creator of the universe.” See Zelig Kalmanovitch, “A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna,” 52. 19. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 142. 20. Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum, 100–101. 21. Michael L. Morgan, A Holocaust Reader, 160–61. 22. See Adin Steinsaltz, Beggars and Prayers, xx–xxi. 23. See H. J. Zimmels, The Echo of the Nazi Holocaust in Rabbinic Literature , 339. 24. Ibid., 64. 25. Ibid., 214. 26. See Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 144. 27. See Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 12, 22. Equally enamored of the Nazi Heidegger is Funkenstein, who insists that no human life has tran260 Notes to Introduction scendent meaning or value and that the Holocaust therefore poses no particular problem for Jewish religious thought; see Amos Funkenstein, “Theological Interpretations of the Holocaust.” 28. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 95. 29. From the Freiberger Studentenzeitung, Nov. 3, 1933, cited in Guenther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 45. 30. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 145. 31. Michael L. Morgan, Interim Judaism, 32. 32. See Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 68, 119. 33. See Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 148; see also Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 135 ª. Katz, in fact, correctly describes Rubenstein’s paganism as a form of idolatry; see Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 197–98. 34. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 198...