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  • The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust
  • Michael Berenbaum
The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust, Dan Michman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), viii + 191 pp., hardcover, $89.00.

Holocaust studies is a field that yields little pleasure. The material is emotionally and intellectually taxing, and the insights that one gains, especially if they are important, are often profoundly depressing with regard to human beings' capacity to inflict evil upon one another. But one of the pleasures that one can have in this field is to see its maturation, to read the new work of young scholars and the fresh work of experienced scholars who are taking innovative approaches to their field of study.

Christopher Browning, for example, has a well-deserved reputation as a "documents man." A protégé of Raul Hilberg, he can read German documentation and come to insights that glisten; he examines details in their greatest specificity but still presses toward larger conclusions. His most recent book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp, takes what for him was the opposite track. He examined oral histories of survivors and critically evaluated their testimony to construct an understanding of what happened in the slave-labor camp of Starachowice, for which surviving documents are few, but recollections are plentiful. Yehuda Bauer's examination of The Death of the Shtetl is similarly innovative methodologically, with unexpected and important results.

Dan Michman's work The Emergence of the Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust employs what for him is a significant change of methodology. From Michman, the Bar-Ilan scholar and chief historian of Yad Vashem, we have come to expect historical studies of great precision. Here he employs semantic and linguistic analysis and the cultural context to understand the emergence of the term "ghetto" and the various ways in which it was used over the centuries and later by the Nazis. He seeks to understand not only the emergence of the ghetto but the various iterations of the ghetto in areas under German occupation, with pathbreaking results. The word was used in many different contexts to signify rather different living arrangements and policy goals, and Michman tries to make sense of the differences.

Since the publication of Raul Hilberg's pioneering study The Destruction of the European Jews, Holocaust scholars have referred to the process of ghettoization as if it were a single phenomenon, imposed from on high, indispensible to the Nazi implementation of the Final Solution to the "Jewish Problem." No so fast, [End Page 131] Michman argues. Ghettos existed in certain areas of Poland, but they were not established all at once, and they lasted for varying lengths of time. Moreover, they were used for different purposes. With the exception of something akin to a ghetto in Amsterdam, there were no ghettos in Western Europe, though in some places Jews were confined to certain streets or buildings. Farther east, in areas conquered by Germany after June 1941, ghettos were imposed after the Einsatzgruppen had already been at its murderous work; one must see these ghettos, at least in part, in terms of the Germans' need for labor. In Hungary, in locales other than Budapest, ghettos were used for only the briefest periods as transit camps for Jews who had been expelled from their homes and would eventually be deported to Auschwitz.

Michman's detailed examination of the specific use of the term "ghetto" in each of these cases shows that when we consider which officials were engaged in the establishment of the ghetto, for what purpose it was established, and how long it remained in existence, we begin to see ghettos as local phenomena, created in response to local needs, and initiated at the local level. The author obliges his readers to differentiate between the formation of Jewish councils and the formation of ghettos, and to see only the former as the result of a general policy. Much of Holocaust scholarship, by contrast, has viewed the two as virtually indistinguishable.

Michman writes with precision and with great clarity. In his last chapter he reviews the basic conclusions of his work. He has tried something new, asking and answering new questions: "Where and...

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