Holocaust Studies without the Holocaust: Review Essay

The Holocaust may be defined as the attempted extermination not only of the Jews but also of Judaism, inasmuch as the meaning of each is tied to the other. With the proliferation of scholarship on “the representation of the Holocaust,” however, the Holocaust itself—that is to say, the attempted extermination of the Jews and Judaism—has become more and more obscure. Focused on the representation and not on the Holocaust, scholars are far more interested in theory and aesthetics than in the Jews and Judaism. The result has been the general erasure of the Jews from Holocaust studies. Yes, the Jews are usually mentioned somewhere in these theoretical, analytical, and philosophical investigations. But in their examination of “representations of the Holocaust” scholars seldom address what the Jews represent as a people. While they often proceed from a well-intentioned, ethical concern, they seldom consider the ethical grounding that comes to the world through Jewish teachings and traditions. All sorts of texts are invoked and examined in these studies, except the texts that most profoundly define who the Jews are and what was therefore under assault in the murder of the Jews. Thus we have Holocaust studies without the Holocaust.

Three recent publications illustrate this point, albeit it to varying degrees. In Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust, for example, Lea Wernick Fridman explores “an existential connection between the experience of historical trauma and its utterance in poetic and literary form” (p. 3). In “History, Fantasy, and Horror,” the first of her six chapters, she contrasts Edgar Allen Poe’s psychological horror with Joseph Conrad’s “historical horror” to show, quite rightly, that in Heart of Darkness Conrad opens a realm of horror previously unrepresented in literature. In her analysis of Conrad’s novel, however, she mistakenly views Kurtz’s famous dying words, “The horror, the horror,” as an “insight into the human capacity for and complicity with evil” (p. 28). What Fridman fails to understand—and what feeds the forces that led to the Holocaust—is this: the horror that Kurtz collides with lies not in an insight into evil but in the realization that there is no evil, no good, no meaning. There is simply what is “there,” neutral and void of any value except the value we impose through our will. It is the horror of what Emmanuel Levinas describes as the “there is,” from which emerges nothing but the anonymous rumble of silent emptiness. ¹

In her second chapter, “The Silence of Historical Traumatic Experience,” Fridman offers an excellent observation on the function of silence in Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, noting that “the words have died . . . the way the Jews of Badenheim will die” (p. 39). In the Holocaust the tearing of word from meaning indeed parallels the tearing of the soul from the Jew, the divine spark from the human being, before murdering him. But Fridman does not explain this connection between the assault on the word and the assault on the human being. Similarly, she cites Dr. Pappenheim’s comment in the novel on the Jews’ need to return to their origins (p. 42), but she addresses neither Jewish origins nor Jewish identity. And here lies much of the horror of Badenheim: the Jews here had lost their Jewish souls long before they were murdered for being Jewish. For in a tragic effort to fit into the world that murdered them, they had lost their identities as adherents of the Torah that forbids murder.

Continuing with the theme of word torn from meaning, in her third chapter, “Silence in Language and in...