To what extent is the writing teacher responsible for teaching students this subject matter?  It seems reasonable to argue that we do not have the same responsibilities that, say, a history professor who is teaching a course in the Holocaust.  Students are taking the writing course to learn something else besides history.  At the same time, though, it is wise to offer students a few “orientation lectures” or activities before they begin researching a particular topic.  If possible, we should arrange for the students to teach this material to themselves, without their having to be lectured to.  While the lecture format remains one of the more efficient ways to transmit information to students and there are still some occasions when transmitting information is necessary, it is easy to overdo this technique and convince ourselves that we are actually teaching something when we tell the students something and they write it down.  In this chapter, I describe some of the background information that students could use before they begin exploring specific areas.  I also suggest some alternative ways that we can avoid having to lecture to the students, even if it is for only for 10 or 15 minutes.

What Do Students Already Know about the Holocaust?

It is probably impossible to generalize about what students already know about this subject  Freshmen students are likely not be as informed as more experienced students, but even here it would be foolish to generalize.  Teachers cannot assume that student have a good historical framework in which to fit new information.  My own experience has been that students, who have lived through the war in Bosnia and the Gulf War, have difficulty conceiving of the scale on which the Second World War was fought.  And the relationship of that war to the Holocaust is also a difficult to fathom.  A special difficulty results from students being especially knowledgeable about one aspect of the war or the Holocaust, but having little sense of how what they know relates to the larger context.

Having used the Holocaust in writing classes at several different levels over a ten-year period, I though that I could describe the level of knowledge students at my own university seem to have on this subject.  To test my generalizations, I surveyed four sections of first-year writing students and learned that my own perceptions were not entirely accurate.  The survey and specific results are described in Appendix A.  From that survey and my own experience, I am able to offer a few generalizations about some students’ background knowledge.  It is important to take care to understand the limitations of these results.  Nevertheless, this example may illustrate the general patterns that students’ misconceptions may sometimes take, misconceptions that I suspect are reflected in larger American culture.  It is important for writing teachers to realize these misconceptions not only so that we better address our students’ beliefs and current knowledge, but also because deniers’ claims tend to prey on these same misconceptions.  Here is a statement about the Holocaust that most of my students would agree with:

The Holocaust arose from the imperfect peace that resulted from World War I.  The victorious nations imposed conditions that were too harsh on defeated Germany.  Hitler, a mesmerizing speaker, who came to power during a time of economic depression in Germany, was able to capitalize on the feeling that Germany had not really lost World War I and did not deserve to be punished for it.

Hitler personally hated Jews, and he was able to communicate this hatred to large numbers of the German people. Hitler also felt that his race—the Aryans—was superior to the Jews.  He wanted to make his society pure, and the way he did this was by killing all the Jews.  He also started World War II to provide more territory for the “pure-blooded” Germans.  Hitler was able to convince the Germans to carry out the destruction of the Jews because of his persuasive powers. 

There were many Jews in Germany, and they were mostly killed in gas chambers, although some were shot.  The Germans also put to death lots of Jews who lived outside of Germany.  These death camps were located in Germany and in nearby countries, mostly to the east of Germany. 

The Nazis killed about 6,000,000 Jews—a gigantic number—practically all the Jews there were in Europe.  This is just about the largest number of people that any government has ever killed.  The Nazis also killed large numbers of other groups—including Gypsies, homosexuals, and Soviet POWs—but most of their victims were Jews.

At the end of the war, the Allied armies came and rescued the Jews from the death camps. Then the United Nations established the State of Israel for the survivors to live in.  The Holocaust is the main reason that the State of Israel exists today.[1]

While this statement is correct in many of its details, it also distorts the Holocaust in significant ways.  Here are some of the misconceptions and gaps in the students’ knowledge.

·        When asked to think of the underlying causes of the Holocaust, some students would refer to the terms of the peace that ended World War I.  None of them, however, mentioned the long history of antisemitism as being one of the underlying causes of the Holocaust.  Even after I prodded them in discussion afterwards, students did not generally seem aware of this history.  One student mentioned that he knew there was a great deal of antisemitism as long ago as Shakespeare’s time.

·        The students tend to overemphasize somewhat the extent to which Hitler’s personal prejudices determined the policies of Nazi Germany.  They tend to have a simplified notion of how Hitler brought about the Holocaust.  They credit him with creating antisemitism among the German people, rather than directing the powerful antisemitism that was already there.[2]  He is also believed to have had the ability to control—even “brainwash”—an entire nation.  The responsibility for the Holocaust tends to devolve completely on to this evil genius.

·        The students I surveyed also seemed to be unaware of what I had thought would be some of the more well-known cruelties of the perpetrators.  A large proportion of them did not seem to know that the Nazis made use of the victims’ hair, or even that Nazi doctors performed cruel medical experiments on adults and children.  In each class, at least one student would insist that the Nazis made soap from the bodies of the victims, which is not true (Hilberg 955 and 967). These students did not appear as familiar as I had expected with Nazi stereotypes from movies, including the names of notorious Nazis, such as Mengele, Eichmann, or Himmler.

·        The students tended to think that most of the victims came from Germany.  Raul Hilberg puts the numbers of victims from Germany at “over 120,000,” which is only 2.4 percent of his total of 5,100,000 (a low estimate).[3]  A corollary of this belief is that the death camps were in Germany.  In fact, the six death camps are all located in what is now Poland.  During the war, though, Auschwitz and Chelmo were in the portion of Poland that Germany had annexed, so they were technically in the “greater Reich.”  The borders of the various European countries during World War II confuses many people, though, not just college freshmen.

·        There appears some evidence that students believe that the victims were probably better off financially than others around them.  This may arise partly from the fact that the economic status of Jews in the U.S. is relatively high, and that it therefore seems natural to students that European Jews in the 1920s and 1930s would also have been more wealthy than average.

·        Many students did not appear to realize that there was any sort of connection between the creation of the Holocaust and State of Israel, when I had assumed that they would tend to make such a connection too easily.

What Background Information do Students Need?

Studying the Holocaust in some depth offers students the opportunity to learn about two important influences that shaped the circumstances just before the middle of this century in Europe that made the Holocaust possible.  The first is the history of Christian antisemitism, extending back even to the early Church.  The second is the history of eugenics—the pseudo-science that attempts to apply the principles of scientific breeding to humans.  The Nazis managed to combine these two strands in Western thought in such a way that one served to enable the other.  And the two strands of history have not yet reached an end:  antisemitism is still alive and well in various forms in the world today, and the concern with “race purification” continues in various parts of the world even now.  As the historian István Deák points out, many other Europeans approved in various degrees of the general program of the Holocaust:  “All of this was an extreme manifestation of a process of ethnic cleansing that had begun in Europe in the nineteenth century and is still continuing.”  Deák goes on to draw a causal connection between “the xenophobic, nationalist policies pursued by nearly all governments in the years preceding and during World War II and the Nazi death camps.”  In the United States, these policies were expressed by the practice of “admitting as few refugees as possible, particularly if they were poor or had no influential connections” (43).

In order to understand the earlier history of antisemitism, student also need some understanding of the history and practices of Judaism.  Without some background knowledge, it is difficult to understand how Christianity could grow up from Judaism and then foster a culture that for more than a thousand years was so antagonistic to it.  And then it is important to grasp how what was originally a religious difference could be transformed into what was perceived as a racial one.  Finally, the students need to review the major events of World War II.

Introducing Judaism

It is certainly the case that in some parts of the country, non-Jewish students are familiar with Judaism.  Certainly, when one grows up near Jews and goes to school with them, it is natural to be somewhat familiar with the religion and culture.  However, my students, many of whom who come from towns with a population smaller than 20,000, lack this sort of familiarity with other cultures.  The problem is complicated by the fact that these students generally do not feel this lack of sophistication to be a problem.  They have of course heard of areas that are rich in cultural diversity, but they are far more impressed by what they believe to be the disadvantages of such problems—widespread crime, intolerance, and racism.  It is common for them to believe that they and people whom they know personally are free of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.  It is not at all clear to them why anyone should be antisemitic.

These students are probably not representative of students taking writing courses in colleges and universities today.  One could argue that that their sheltered environment is a handicap to understanding the modern world and, by extension, to learning to advance arguments in writing that will affect others in that world.  Yet, there is a freshness and lack of cynicism in these students that can be refreshing.  They also provide a testing ground in approaching the issue of how to introduce students to Judaism in general.  The more familiar students are with Jewish religion and culture, the easier it is to fill in this background knowledge.  If we can determine how to introduce Judaism to unsophisticated students like most of mine have been, the task of modifying these lessons for other students should not be too difficult.

Even my students have some familiarity with Judaism, but many of them have little sense of Judaism as one of the great religions of the world, one that is much older than Christianity and out of which Christianity sprung.  Without this understanding, it is extremely difficult for students to make sense of antisemitism, and they cannot recognize what should be transparent depictions of normal Jewish life.  For example, the opening sequence of Schindler’s List shows a Jewish family from Eastern Europe celebrating the Sabbath.  The family fades away representing the deaths of the millions of victims of the Holocaust.  The candle that is lit at the beginning burns out, and the film is transformed to black and white.  Students who have no familiarity with how Jews observe the Sabbath can understand aspects of this scene, but its main suggestion—that  is God is absent from the world of the Holocaust—is muted.

I have found it very helpful to devote an entire class to Judaism and how it relates and compares to Christianity, not so that students can give this information back to me on a test or even in a paper, but so they can get a sense of both the difference and continuity that Judaism offers to Western culture.  On the one hand, European culture has regarded Jews as the Other, as a people set apart, forever different from the vast majority.  On the other, Jewish traditions affect Western culture in profound ways.

Important Points About Judaism for Students to Understand

In claiming that it is helpful that students know something about the beliefs and histories of these major religions, I am of course not suggesting that they subscribe to the major tenants of the religions.  In discussing religious practices in this general way, it is important to make this point clear to students and to be careful to direct discussion in a way that distinguishes between statements about a particular religion (“Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God”) and examples of religious beliefs that may be expressed by other students or even the instructor (“Jesus is the Son of God”).  Whether an instructor decides to reveal his or her personal religious beliefs (if any) is an issue that each of us has to decide individually.  It seems unlikely to be able to discuss religious beliefs in an absolutely neutral way.  At the same time, our goal as instructors should be to foster a classroom atmosphere in which students with strong religious beliefs can speak about religious beliefs with students who are unbelievers or simply unchurched. 

An important goal of these discussions can be to model for students how to discuss a religious belief without endorsing or condemning it.  One difficulty with relying on students who are religious believers as sources for what a particular religion may be believe in general is that these students may be unable or unwilling to distinguish between what most people would regard as religious beliefs and historical facts.  I have found it helpful to distinguish between understanding an event or a text historically and understanding it in other ways—religiously, mythically, or culturally.  For example, it is impossible to argue seriously that Jesus did not exist at an historical figure, while it is quite possible to claim that the ancient patriarchs, Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac, did not exist—at least not as historical people.  In other words, the historicity—the historical authenticity—of religious figures should have no bearing on that figure’s religious significance.  Some students, especially Fundamentalists, may not accept this distinction, but it is nevertheless important to make in order to establish a common discourse.

Keeping all this mind, I have assembled some information about Judaism from standard reference works, two introductions to Judaism, and a popular guide to Judaism.[4]  I have arranged this information with an eye for the main points that students should at least hear about in some form before they undertake an extended study of the Holocaust; it isn’t necessary that they be tested on this knowledge, but they should be expected to show some awareness of these points in their writing.  I have used the notes to include information that I think it would be useful the instructor to know.

1.      According to traditional sources, the founder of Judaism is Abraham (which means “father of a multitude” in Hebrew).  The story of Abraham is told in the Book of Genesis.  Abraham’s son was Isaac, whose sons were Jacob and Esau.[5]  Jacob had twelve sons, each of whom established his own tribe.[6]   The important figures in Judaism—the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as Moses, and the other prophets—are important figures in both Christianity and Islam.

2.      The Jews had to leave Canaan because of a famine (or perhaps as part of a larger population movement); they ended up in Egypt as farmers, but were severely persecuted under the pharaoh.  Moses arose as a leader and led them out of bondage to the edge of Canaan. This escape is called the Exodus.[7] The festival of Passover is a seven- or eight-day celebration of the Exodus—deliverance from the yoke of Egypt.  During the first or second day of the celebration, Jews eat special dishes that are meant to remind them of the hardships endured by the Jews in Egypt and the narrative of the Exodus, the Haggadah, is recited. 

3.      Moses was in constant touch with God, and at Mt. Sinai, God gave him the Law, which included the Ten Commandments, the criminal code, and the liturgical law.  The story of Moses is told in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  Together with Genesis, these five books make up the Pentateuch or the Books of Moses.  These first five books are also called the Torah.[8]

4.      The word “Torah” (without the definite article) to Jews also means the Jewish way of life. Torah “is the very essence of Jewish spirituality.  It is synonymous with learning, wisdom, and love of God.  Without it, life has neither meaning or value” (KH 39). 

5.      What distinguished Jews from other peoples was their belief in monotheism.  Both Christianity and Islam have their roots in Judaism. Under monotheism, God is conceived of as a single Lord of the universe.  This God is unique; he doesn’t eat or sleep; he doesn’t have sex, unlike some other gods of the time.  God requires that his people be holy righteous, and just, and he is thought to require “a kingdom of priests to assist in the fulfillment of His designs for humankind and the world.  Israel’s chosenness consists of this special designation and the task that accompanies it.” (CE 1433).  God promised this people the land of Canaan.  The Torah prescribes an elaborate set of laws governing diet, social justice, clothing, circumcision, and agriculture.  In addition, Jews were to observe the Sabbath and other holy days. 

Jews continue to practice circumcision as a sacred rite performed on the eighth day of the boy’s life to signify God’s covenant with that particular child.[9]  In eastern Europe, Jewish males were the only males who had been circumcised, so a physical examination was one method that Nazis could use to detect Jews (although usually the identity papers and cards that everyone was required to have sufficed).

6.      Out of these beginnings, the Jews grew from a collection of different tribes (thought to be descended from each of Jacob’s twelve sons) into one kingdom that was united in the eleventh century BCE under King David; this kingdom was called Israel.[10]  The people who lived there were the Hebrews or the Israelites.[11]  For the next 1100 years or so, they existed as both a nation and a distinct religion.  They were often subjugated by other more powerful kingdoms, but they continued to practice their religion. For about 70 years in the sixth century BCE, many of them were deported to Babylon; this is known as the Exile.[12] 

7.      Also central to Jewish belief today is the concept of exile and restoration.  Jacob Neusner claims that it is this idea that is now unique to Judaism in all its variations: 

The conception that the Jews are in exile but have the hope of coming home to their own land, which is the Land of Israel (a.k.a. Palestine).  The original reading of the Jews’ existence as exile and return derives from the Pentateuch, the Five  Books of Moses, which were composed as we now have them (out of earlier materials, to be sure) in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in 586 B.C.E.  In response to the exile to Babylonia, the experience selected and addressed by the authorship of the document is that of exile and restoration.  But that framing of events into the pattern at hand represents an act of powerful imagination and interpretation.  That experience taught lessons people claimed to learn from the events they had chosen and from the Pentateuch, which took shape in 450 B.C.E. when some Jews returned from Babylonia to Jerusalem . . .  . (The Way of Torah 18)

The Pentatuch or Torah tells the story of the first exile and return, but this story was not written down in the form we have it today until after the experience of being exiled to Babylon and returning to Jerusalem.  Judaism is a traditional or historical religion; not all its beliefs developed at the same time. 

 The historicity of particular portions of the Bible may interest some students and trouble others.[13]  There is considerable evidence from outside the Bible for some of the events described, especially those after the Babylonian exile.  Most scholars would not argue for the historicity of the patriarchs—Abraham, Issac, and Jacob—and it is impossible to say just when they might have lived, if they even existed as historical people.  Moses, though, probably arose in the 13th century during the reign of Ramses II in the 13th century BCE.  But even the historicity of kings David and Saul, thought to have reigned in the 10th century, has been challenged by recent scholars.[14]  The Babylonian Exile is well documented from many sources, but it was probably on the leadership that was exiled to Babylon.  Furthermore, some Jews stayed in Babylon even after they were allowed to return to Jerusalem.

8.      The conquests of Alexander the Great affected the Jews and further shaped their beliefs.[15]  By the time of Jesus, they were technically self governing, but in fact were dominated by the Romans.[16]  The practice of Judaism during its early period centered around the Temple in Jerusalem.[17] 

9.      Early in the first century, the Jewish world was in a state of crisis. Conditions for Jews deteriorated, and “apocalyptic beliefs grew—national catastrophe and the messianic kingdom were seen as imminent events.  Some groups . . . fled into the desert to lead righteous lives in anticipation, while others followed claimants to the mantle of Messiah (most notably Jesus).  Out of these numerous ingredients came both Christianity and classical, or rabbinic Judaism” (CE 1433).  In 66 CE, the Jews revolted against the Romans, who responded by crushing the revolt and in 70 CE destroying both Jerusalem and the Temple.[18]

10.  Before the Exile, there was already developing a belief “in the ultimate coming of God’s kingdom on earth, a time of peace and justice” (CE 1433).  Many Jews saw the Exile as punishment for idolatry (this may have finalized the belief in monotheism), and after this period, the idea of the Messiah became further developed into the expectation of a national leader who would be a descendent of the house of David and born in Bethlehem.  The word “Christ” is Greek for “Messiah.”  Christians, of course, consider Jesus to be the Christ, while Jews do not. “The common idea of Jesus’ time was that the Messiah should reign in glory as an earthly king, a political figure sent by God, not a savior in the Christian sense” (CE 1755).  Today, it is probably more accurate to say that the Christian belief in the second coming of Christ corresponds to the Jewish belief in the Messianic advent.

11.  During Jesus’ time, the Pharisees were the political-religious party who believed in reinterpreting the scriptures for their own time.  They were opposed by the Sadduccees, who insisted on a strict approach to the scriptures.  “Many of the saying of Jesus are paralleled in the teachings of the Pharisees” (KH 18); indeed, it was the Pharisees who provided an important link between Christianity and Judaism.  “Modern Judaism is essentially the religion of ‘the Rabbis,’ and the Pharisees were the first Rabbis” (18).  The Hebrew word rabbi means “my teacher” or “my master.”

12.  The Rabbis (sometimes written with a capital R) were the Jewish scholars and teachers who lived the period from about 70 CE to about 1100 CE and created Judaism as it exists today.  They wrote the Talmud, a vast collection of Oral Law with commentary.[19]

13.  The Talmud consists of two main parts:  the Mishna, which is the text of Oral Law in Hebrew, and the Gemara, which is a commentary on the Mishna in Aramaic.  (Another word for Talmud is Gemara, and sometimes “Talmud” in the narrow sense is used to refer to just the Gemara.)  There are two Talmuds, a Palestinian one, completed by about the fourth century, and a Babylonian one, completed about 200 years later.[20]

14.  After the destruction of Jerusalem, Jewish communities located outside of Palestine—the Diaspora (a Greek word meaning “dispersion”)—assumed a much more significant role.  Jews lived in both the Moslem and Christian parts of the world.  For much of that time they were tolerated better in Islamic countries.  From the ninth to the twelfth centuries, Jews living in Moslem Spain “enjoyed a golden age of literary efflorescence marked by a highly creative interaction between Jewish and Islamic culture” (CE 1411).  Spain became a center for the Cabala (or Kabbalah), a system of interpretation of the scriptures based “on the belief that every word, letter, number, and even accent contained mysteries interpretable by those who knew the secret” (CE 1441). 

15.  Under the militant Christianity of the Spanish monarchs who gained complete control of Spain by 1492, Jews were forced to convert or were expelled from the country.  These Jews and their descendents, called the Sephardim, constitute one of the two main divisions of Jews in the Diaspora.  Sephardic Jews—who trace their ancestry to Jews living in Spain—later established themselves throughout Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.  The majority of Jews in Israel today are Sephardic.  The other main division of Jews is the Ashkenazim or Askenazim, who in the ninth century begin to settle in the Rhine Valley.  A predominant characteristic is their use of Yiddish.[21]  The Ashkenazim migrated east to Poland and the Soviet Union. Because of immigration patterns at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, most American Jews are Ashkenazic.  The Holocaust was primarily directed at Ashkenazic Jews.

In Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, there arose a sect of Judaism called Chasidim or Hasidism that emphasized the mystical traditions in Judaism, the heart over the intellect. The founder was “a simple, devout, mystically inclined lime digger, Israel ben Eliezer,” whom people later the Ba'al Shem Tov (the “Master of the Good Name”).  While he did not reject traditional Judaism, insisted “that true religion was knowledge of the immanence of God in all creation. . . . Piety is superior to scholarship, and all men, however poor or ignorant, can commune with God if they have enthusiasm (hitlahavut) and a warm and trusting heart” (“Hasidism,” Britannica Online).  This movement was opposed by those who stressed formal academic learning; they were called Mitnagdim or Mitnaggedim (“the opposition”).  The original movement split into various sects, each named after their European place of origin.  Hasidic Jews today “are the most fundamentalist of Jews, even dressing as their founders did in eighteenth-century Poland in an effort to protect Judaism from any change whatever” (KH 20-23).

16.  Until the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe, Jews lived as a people apart.  Aside from the geographical designations, all Jews were basically premodern.[22]  Almost all European countries had special laws that applied only to Jews:  they could not own land or practice certain professions, such as law or teaching, or belong to the guilds.  They were permitted to lend money for interest during the long period when Christians could not (the charging of exorbitant interest is the practice of usury, but when no one but Jews can lend money, the interest will rise to what may appear exorbitant levels), and so they came to be associated with financial dealings—pawnbrokers, money-changers, bankers, and merchants.  The consequence of these restrictions was that the medieval period for Jews did not really end until the eighteenth century.  Because they would not convert to Christianity, Jews were occasionally expelled from entire countries (England in 1290 and Spain in 1492), or they were confined to particular area of the city (the ghetto) or a region of the country (the Pale in Russia).[23] 

17.  The French Revolution in 1789 began a process of emancipating the Jews; these barriers against Jews were slowly eliminated, with the result that it was possible for Jews to enter the mainstream of European life.  (The Enlightenment played an important role in the development of antisemitism, however; see below, pages 29 - 30 ,  for further discussion.)  Jews who choose to do so assimilated relatively rapidly by entering professions that involved the work of the mind; instead of becoming small farmers or craftsmen, they became journalists, bankers, university professors, businessmen, and publishers.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews affected European culture in profound ways:  Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Gustav Mahler, Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Arnold Schoenberg were Jews; Felix Mendelssohn and Karl Marx came from families that were originally Jewish.

18.  Jews have lived in America since the seventeenth century, but large number of Jews immigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.  Until the 1950s, they were routinely discriminated against in professions and universities.  They were able to enter the entertainment industries; many of the early Hollywood producers were Jewish (although the stars were not), and there is a tradition of Jewish comedy, which extends back to the Marx Brothers and includes Woody Allan, Jerry Seinfeld, and Billy Crystal.[24]  When these barriers were eliminated, Jews made rapid progress. Jews are very well represented in the professions; consequently, their income as a group is higher than average in the United States today.

19.  Even after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, most Jews are in the Diaspora; the largest number live in the United States.  “There were approximately 17.8 million Jews in the world in 1990, with 8 million in the Americas (of which about 5.6 million were in the United States), 3.5 million in Israel, and 3.5 million in Europe” (CE 1411).

According to the American Jewish Committee, there were 5.9 million Jews in the U.S. in 1995, which made up 2.3 percent of the total population of 260,341,000.  The percentage of Jews is highest in New York (9.0 percent) and lowest in Idaho (0.04 percent) (“Jewish Population in the United States, 1995”).  The largest number of Jews live in the Northeast (47.9 percent of all Jews in the U.S.), the smallest number in the Midwest (11.7 percent); the South has 21.1 percent, and the West 19.4 percent (“Distribution of  U.S. Jewish Population by Regions, 1995”).

20.  Jews today fall into three broad categories: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.  The roots of Reform Judaism are in the nineteenth century when newly emancipated Jews “tried to make premodern Judaism responsive to the changing conditions of their newly found civil status” (KH 10).  Under Reform Judaism, women can become rabbis.  Conservative Judaism (called Historical Judaism in Europe) agrees that Judaism must adapt to modern life, but the process by which this occurs is much slower.  The ultimate grounds for making changes in Judaism is “the consensus of learned scholars and the accepted practice of the community” (KH 13); women can also be rabbis under this tradition, but this change occurred as recently as 1985 (the first woman Reform rabbi was ordained in 1972).  Orthodox Judaism arose in the nineteenth century as a response to the first Reform Judaism; Orthodox Jews object to changes and insist on maintaining the same traditions as existed among premodern Jews.  Women cannot become rabbis under Orthodox Judaism, and they are not counted in the minyan, the minimum number required for public worship.  In the United States today, Reform Jews number about 42 percent of all Jews; Conservative Jews constitute 40 percent, and Orthodox Jews number 5 percent.  Reform Judaism is the fastest growing segment.[25]

21.  Just as the practice of Christianity centers around attending church on Sundays, the practice of Judaism centers around worship and religious observance in the home.  The central practice in Judaism is the observance of the Sabbath or, as most Jews would say nowadays, Shabbat, the Hebrew word for Sabbath.  Shabbat begins at sunset on Friday and lasts until a little after sunset on Saturday evening.  After a brief service, which includes the lighting of sabbath candles, a family (and often its guests) partakes of the best meal of the week, which may include special foods.[26]  There is also a Saturday morning service, which includes a public reading from the Torah. This reading is done from a Torah scroll, which is made of parchment, wrapped around two rollers, and covered with an embroidered cloth.[27] 

After lunch (and possibly a nap), there may well be another service in the late afternoon, followed by Torah study and another meal. Shabbat ends at home with another ceremony called Havdalah (separation) “to mark reentry into the world of ordinary time.”  Orthodox Jews refrain from any kind of activity associated with work on the Sabbath, such as driving a car or even gardening, but Reform Jews interpret Shabbat more broadly to mean a time set aside from the daily preoccupations of the world, a time to concentrate on one’s spiritual life, serenity, and peace.[28]

Saturday mornings are also the time for a Bar Mitsvah, a celebration for a boy sometime after his thirteenth birthday.  The ceremony marks the time he assumes adult responsibilities in his religious life. As part of the ceremony, the boy usually reads a portion of the Torah (in Hebrew), and he may deliver a commentary about the text. In many Conservative and Reform congregations, girls have a similar ceremony, called a Bat Mitsvah.[29]

Shabbat is a holy day, as are the major Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Passover, and Shavuot, and the minor ones, Hanukkah, Purim, and Tisha Be’Av.  The most important holidays are the High Holy Days (or Days of Awe) beginning with Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and ending ten days later with Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement); because the Jewish calendar is based on the moon (whose cycle is between 29 and 30 days), these holidays occur at slightly different times each year, but they usually fall at the end of the of September and the beginning of October.[30]  Three of the holidays are especially associated with the seasons and with agriculture: Sukkot (the Festival of the Tabernacles or “Booths”) occurs in the fall, Passover in the spring, and Shavuot seven weeks later.[31]  Simchat Torah occurs on the day that Sukkot ends, but is actually a separate holiday; on that day the weekly readings of the Torah are completed and a new cycle begins.[32]  The holiday of Hannakah or Chanukah (Feast of Lights) occurs around the time of Christmas; its religious significance is to commemorate the Maccabees’ rededication of the Second Temple after Syrian occupation.[33]  Because of its proximity to Christmas and the enormous commercial emphasis on that season in the United States today, more Jews celebrate this holiday than any other.  For each of the eight days of Hannakah, Jews light an additional candle on the eight-candle candelabrum called a menorah.  Purim, which usually falls in February, also commemorates the deliverance of the ancient Hebrews from their foes. Tisha Be’Av, which occurs during the summer, is a three-week period of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Temple.

Many Christian practices and holidays have their roots in Jewish practices.  The most obvious is Easter, which occurs at the end of Passover.  The sacrament of communion grew out of the seder meal that is part of the celebration of Passover.[34]  Pentecost, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, is celebrated at the same time as the Jewish Pentecost or Shavuot (the word Pentecost is Greek for 50th day—Pentecost is the fiftieth day after Easter).  The seven-day week is Jewish in origin, as is the concept of the sabbath or “Lord’s Day.”  Christians, of course, designate the first day of the week as their “sabbath,” but even this practice came from Jewish influence: 

[Early] Jewish Christians probably kept the sabbath at the synagogue, then joined their Gentile fellow believers for Christian worship after the close of the sabbath at sundown, either in the evening or early Sunday morning. When the church became predominantly Gentile, Sunday remained as the customary day of worship.  (“Christianity: . . .  Church year . . .  ”)

Even the practice of saying grace at meals was originally a Jewish custom (although today Jews say grace after meals).[35]  Some Christians follow a custom of lighting one additional candle around a wreath for each week of the four weeks of advent, the season just before Christmas; this custom corresponds to the Jewish practice of lighting candles on a menorah during Hannakah.  The Old Testament of the Christians is composed of most of the same texts as the Jewish Bible, but it is important to note that books occur in different order.  (It is not a good practice to refer to the Jewish Bible as the “Old Testament,” since the different order of the books creates an entirely different effect; a better term is the Hebrew Bible or TaNakh.[36])

22.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were large numbers of unassimilated Jews in Europe and Russia, who also had a strong ethnic identity:  they wore distinctive clothing, spoke Yiddish, ate distinctive food, and even looked similar especially to non-Jews.  Because for centuries Jews had married only Jews, it is not surprising that they shared some physical characteristics.  But no one today considers Jews to be a “race”; indeed the very term race is unscientific, in spite of the fact that most Americans still categorize people in this way.  The Nazis, however, did classify Jews as a separate race.[37]

23.  Only about half of people who identify themselves as Jews belong to a synagogue.  Yet, as Jacob Neusner explains in one of his many books on Judaism, An Introduction to Judaism, it would be mistake to conclude that these other Jews as entirely secular.  Neusner claims that there are two Judaisms, the Judaism of Home and Family and the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption.  Neusner does not include the small number of Orthodox Jews in either category; rather these two categories describe how the fast majority of Jews in North American, those who do not follow Torah in every respect, practice the first sort of Judaism at home and the second sort in public.  The defining event of the second sort of Judaism is the Holocaust; the Redemption is the creation of the state of Israel.  The second sort of  Judaism constitutes Jewry’s civil religion.[38]  This second form of Judaism attracts greater attention from Jews than does the first:  “nearly all American Jews identify with the State of Israel, and regard it welfare as more than a secular good . . . .  In many ways, every day of their lives these Jews relive the terror-filled years in which European Jews were wiped out—and every day they do something about it” (75).  This dual form of Judaism arises in North America, Neusner claims, because of the conviction that religion is something private and personal; it should not directly affect government and affairs of state.  This leads to a state of affairs that is not satisfactory to Neusner: it imposes “upon Jews two devilish enchantments:  First, [its] message . . .  is that difference is not destiny but disaster . . . .  Second, the expressions of Holocaust and Redemption—political action, letters to public figures, pilgrimages to grisly places—leave the inner life untouched but distorted” (80).  But an utterly private Judaism is also not the answer either.  The problems of these two forms of Judaism will be difficult for students to grasp, but the fact that such an influential writer as Neusner would raise the question demonstrates that the extent to which American Jews see the Holocaust in religious terms.

It is likely that students already know about many of the points above (although not in the detail that they are described here), and it is of course best to solicit their knowledge from them as if it were something that they already know.  In this way, students who are not familiar with Judaism learn not only the background knowledge, but also what others at approximately their level of education also know.  Some of the information about Judaism can be imparted by short lectures.  I have found it effective to invite a guest lecturer to perform this function.  Occasionally, I have asked friends of mine who were Jewish to speak to students about Judaism, but this tactic requires them to suddenly become the spokesperson for an entire religion.[39] Another technique that seems better suited for the semester-after-semester use has been to ask a professor of religious studies to provide a half hour lecture and then respond to questions.  If the students write the questions out in advance; the guest lecturer may find it easier to know what level at which to address the class.  It would also be possible to organize a short writing assignment in which students are assigned to discover most of this information on their own.

The History of Antisemitism

I have often relied on a videotape of the television series on antisemitism, The Longest Hatred, which was broadcast on PBS in 1991.  Robert S. Wistrich, who was an historical adviser to the series, wrote a companion book, Antisemitism.  The Longest Hatred consists of three parts, each slightly less than an hour long.  It is first part of the series, “From the Cross to the Swatiska,” that I have found most useful.  The second part of the series focuses on the antisemitism in Germany today, and the third part on antisemitism in the Arab world.  This film is an efficient way to explain some of the most important points about this topic.  Here are some of the main points that students need to understand about Christian anti-Judaism:

1.      Antisemitism has a long history in Europe, although the actual term “Anti-Semitism” did not come into use until the 1870s.  For most of the history of Europe, antisemitism had a religious basis.  Jews were seen by the Christian majority as a people responsible for the death of Christ (the killing of God or deicide) and as people who deliberately chose not to follow the Christian faith.  For most of the history of Europe, students may need to be reminded, a failure to conform to the religious practices of the majority was subject to extreme censure or was simply illegal.  In addition to their actions against Jews, Christians carried out persecutions, tortures, and wars against other Christians.

2.      The image of Jews as Christ killers gets considerable reinforcement from the gospels of the New Testament.  The Gospel of Matthew puts particular emphasis on that idea that it was the Jews who are responsible, but all the gospels have the same general outline.[40]  When Christianity became the official religion through most of Europe, these passages, which were read at Easter time, often incited mobs to attack local Jews.

3.      During the medieval period, Jews were accused of other crimes.  Around the time of the First Crusade in 1095, Jews became associated with Satan and the Antichrist, “a man who would lead the armies of the Devil against those of Christ” (Wistrich 30).  Jews were thought to engage in the practice of ritual murder, especially of Christian children, and they were also thought to engange in the desecration of host wafers; in each case, “Jews were assumed to be compulsively repeating their original cruelty towards Christ.”[41]  During the Black Death in the fourteenth century, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells in order to destroy the Christians and take over the world (32).  The Papacy and the official Church teaching rejected these charges, but “the popes consistently condemned the Talmud and deplored Jewish obstinacy in refusing to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their savior” (33).

4.      The Church forbade Christians to take interest from money lent to other Christians.  Since the charging of interest is necessary to any economic system, it was necessary to allow someone to engage in the practice of moneylending, and Jews, who could not own land, engage in many trades, or belong to guilds, increasingly gravitated to this profession.  Medieval society became increasingly dependent on money, and “Jews became associated in the popular mind with banking, money, exchange and the parasitical exploitation of a land-based Christian peasantry which formed the backbone of the European nations” (Wistrich 27).  This resulted in a very potent stereotype, which persists until this day (many of my students believe that the victims of the Holocaust were wealthier than the average European).

These prejudices and superstitions resulted in a kind of hatred of Jews that, while medieval in its origins, never really vanished from the typical European mind.[42]  The way in which this anti-Judaism became transformed into the antisemitism of educated Europeans in the early twentieth century becomes a prime example of how the nineteenth century idea of progress has turned out to be an illusion. 

1.      The Enlightenment brought many benefits to Western culture (including the founding documents of the United States), but it also had the odd effect of reinforcing the impulse toward anti-Judaism.  The problem arose in the hostility of the Deists and the French materialists toward religious feeling, Wistrich explains.  The man who “provided a new, international, secular, anti-Jewish rhetoric in the name of European culture rather than religion was Voltaire” (Arthur Hertzberg, quoted in Wistrich 44-45).  With the Enlightenment, “antisemitism simply found a new guise, one which . . .  held [the Jews] responsible for all the crimes and perversities committed in the name of monotheistic religion; the Jews were no longer guilty of rejecting Christ belief but were judged to be inherently perverse, and their ‘fossilised’ religion to be an obstacle to human progress” (45). There is much in Voltaire’s own writing that reflects antisemitism, and it cannot all be explained by reference to Voltaire’s personal difficulties in dealing with Jewish moneylenders; other members of the Enlightenment such as Diderot and even Rousseau had similar views.

2.      Later, in the nineteenth century, the French scholar Ernest Renan and the German Christian Lassen were the first “to popularize the racial concept of ‘Semites’ in contrast to the Indo-Europeans or ‘Aryans’” (they were borrowing the term from the name for language groups).[43]  These ideas were picked up by socialist writers in France and later in Germany (although born a Jew, Karl Marx echoed much anti-Jewish mythology, although he never became a full-fledged antisemite); these writers would single out the Jewish banking house of the Rothschilds.  The economic power of this firm, which was in fact quite successful, “would become one of the most potent symbols for the fantasy of a shadowy Jewish world government and an obsession with antisemites of the Right and Left for generations” (Wistrich 44-51).

3.      Antisemitism was widespread throughout Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it was by no means clear that it would result in the Holocaust.  In exploring the precedents and “causes” of the Holocaust, it is possible to give students the impression that the Holocaust was inevitable.  This can lead, in its extreme form, to the attitude that no one can be held responsible for what later happened.  It can be helpful to remind students that it was in France that antisemitism was the most prominent. From the Dreyfus Affair in 1897 to the continued political strength of the National Front, an ultra-Right political party whose candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen received 14.4 per cent of the vote in the 1988 presidential elections, antisemitism has been a continuing presence.  Yet France itself never carried out anything like the Holocaust itself:  in spite of the fact that the Vichy government during the war cooperated extensively with the Nazis, only about 20 percent of France’s Jews perished in the Holocaust (Niewyk 173).[44]  Although antisemitism was clearly an important cause of the Holocaust, it did not necessarily lead to it.  Governments, political parties, and individuals all had choices to make, and it was only in Germany that these choices had the result that they did.

4.      In central Europe, particularly Germany and Austria, where democratic traditions were slow to develop and whose national identity was unclear, antisemitism “assumed a uniquely racial and extremist quality” (54).  The great composer Richard Wagner (1818-1893) was also an influential antisemite; he “gave to German antisemitism a metaphysical pseudo-profundity, an aesthetic rationale rooted in the pagan world of classical Greece” (56-57), directly influencing Hitler himself.  Organized political antisemitism developed in Germany after the collapse of the stock market in 1873 (the same decade in which the term “Anti-Semitism” came to be used by such writers as the radical German jouranlists Otto Glagau and Wilhelm Marr).

5.      The Nazis took these discussions of antisemitism and radicalized them.  As Wistrich explains, they “took over all the negative anti-Jewish stereotypes in Christianity but they removed the escape clause” (xxii).  Hitler would explain this by claiming that it was false to think that “a splash of baptismal water” could alter the genetic problem, as he saw it, of Jewishness.  This was a crucial and tragic shift in antisemitic thought, for it provided the basis for taking extreme measures against all Jews, no matter what their personal beliefs: “

the Nazis were driven with terrifying literalness to institutionalise their irrational belief in an unchanging, satanic Jewish "essence" which was supposedly rooted in physical characteristics.  In order to demonstrate the reality of their myth of "Aryan" racial superiority . . .  they committed themselves to the total eradication of Jewry as a people.  In the process, Nazism itself became contaminated with a profound Christophobia, decrying Christianity as a “Semitic" religion which was emasculating the healthy, heroic and warrior virtues of the German people with its preaching of the virtues of humility, compassion, charity and love. (68).

Although their version of antisemitism had become secularized and radicalized, they were careful not to be too hostile to Christianity in public.  Instead, they shrewdly used “the rich armoury of Christian myths of the Jew as Satan, Antichrist, sorcerer, usurer and ritual murderer for their own political ends.”  In this way they assured themselves of the cooperation of the Christian Churches and “successfully subverted Christianity from within, even as they replaced it with a pseudo-scientific, irrational ideology based on blood and soil, race and destiny, the worship by the Herrenvolk (‘master race’) of its own eternal renewal” (69).

At the very beginning of the film The Longest Hatred, Sander Gilman summarizes how antisemitism has come to operate in the twentieth century:  “the image of a Jew is a Protean one—it shifts. . . .  It isn’t that the Jews are X; the Jews are everything you don’t want yourself to be.  The Jews are everything that threatens you.”[45]  The objective of a lesson about the history of antisemitism is to bring students to understand the enduring nature of antisemitism.

With these points understood (not necessarily in the detail I have presented them here), students are usually in a much better position to see why the Nazis were able to bring about the Final Solution.  In my experience, students are more knowledgeable about how the Treaty of Versailles, combined with economic instability and depression, brought about conditions under which Hitler could flourish.  The radical antisemitism of the Nazis was certainly not accepted by most German people, and it is true that propaganda played an important role in intensifying these feelings.  Students are well aware of Hitler’s public speaking ability, and they tend to know quite a bit about Hitler’s own personal life (although it is important to emphasize that he personally was engulfed in a personal, obsessive form of antisemitism).

The film “From the Cross to the Swastika” does not provide quite this much detail, and it presents much of the material a good deal more dramatically.  The story of antisemitism from the times of early Christianity, through the Holocaust, to Vatican II is told by excerpts of interviews from well-established historians and theologians.[46]  It is illustrated with details of art from the period under discussion and uses dramatic music to illustrate its points. Without some preparation and follow-up, however, the information comes too rapidly.  I have tried providing students a handout that gives the names of the all the various speakers in the film with a brief description of what they talked about (the names appear too rapidly for students to note them), and I have encouraged them to take notes and even use that information in later papers.  Even in my advanced classes, it is very rare for any information of this sort to appear in the later writing.  The reason appears to be that the film presents some rather complex ideas too rapidly for the students to assimilate.

Although the film is often reviewed as being quite balanced and fair by other academics, some students often react quite negatively to it.  The reason is partially that it presents an aspect of 2,000 years of Christianity that most people do not like to emphasize; the film is not meant to be a survey of Christianity in general.  Another reason is that many of the ideas are completely new to the students.  In particular, students are shocked by John Gager’s explanation of why the Gospels show Jews as the killers of Christ.  Richard Rubenstein makes the very profound point that no religion except Christianity makes the charge of deicide against the Jews—it accuses the Jews of being killers of God.  Gager explains rather emphatically that the Gospel writers, who lived in a Roman world, were going to shape the story of the crucifixion in such a way that the Romans would be absolved.  Gager is assuming that it is understood that historically the Romans were responsible for the death of Jesus and that Gospel writers might even go so far as to fabricate the extent to which the Jews in Jerusalem were responsible.  Such a way of regarding the scriptures is foreign and even anathema to some students, but the film forges on.  By discussing with the students what the Gospels generally say about the death of Jesus, an instructor might well prepare them for such a dramatic statement.

Gager’s views on this subject are not considered extreme by other scholars.  John Dominic Crossen, in a short and accessible work entitled Who Killed Jesus? argues that historically it is extremely unlikely that a peasant thought to be causing a disruption during Passover at this period would ever come before the highest Jewish authorities and the Roman governor.  Such a person would be executed, but “it was,” writes Crossen, “in my view, handled under general procedures for maintaining crowd control during Passover.  If individuals cause serious trouble in the Temple, crucify them immediately as a warning” (212).  The much more interesting question for Crossen is how and why the elaborate story of Jesus before Pontius Pilate came to be and what it was meant to show (Crossen, a former priest, is a devout Catholic).  His short answer is that it was effective (and even inspired) Christian propaganda when Christians were powerless.  After Christianity became the official religion of Rome, though, these gospel stories became dangerous.  In a predominantly Christian world, they became stories that sent people out to kill:  the passion-resurrection stories “have been the seedbed for Christian anti-Judaism.  And without that Christian anti-Judaism, lethal and genocidal European anti-Semitism would have been either impossible or at least not widely successful.  What was at stake in those passion stories, in the long haul of history, was the Jewish Holocaust” (35).

This kind of argument is probably a little too much to try out on a typical group of freshman writing students.  And there are other ways that Christians deal with these gospel stories without having to conclude that the Jews are blamed.  In an effort to distinguish itself as a religion, Christianity did use Judaism as a kind of scapegoat.  The history of Christianity is filled with religious figures who are frustrated at the apparent recalcitrance of the Jews; one of the earliest of these figures is St. Paul himself in the eleventh chapter of Romans.  But to see the Jews living around you as responsible for the behavior of Jews at the time of Christ is more than most people can stomach. The important thing for students to understand is that these stories were taken seriously by Christians in medieval Europe; preachers would often use them as justification for whipping of feelings of anti-Judaism especially around the Easter. 

Reviewing the History of World War II

We should not assume that students are familiar with what should be common knowledge about World War II.  Sometimes the misconceptions can be considerable (sometimes students will have the impression that the Americans fought the Soviet Union), but generally students are embarrassed by their lack of knowledge.  A quick rehearsal of a few facts is helpful:

1.      World War II started on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.  As a result of this invasion, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.  The conquest of Poland was almost complete when, by prior arrangement with the Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17.  After an inactive winter, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and in May they invaded France by passing through the Netherlands and Belgium.  France fell to the Germans in June, and the Vichy government was set up.

2.      Germany attempted to bomb Great Britain into submission during the Battle of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940; Italy, who was Germany’s ally, invaded Greece and North Africa; the Germans waged submarine warfare in the Atlantic.  Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria became allied with Germany in late 1940; in April and May 1941 Germany defeated Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete.

3.      On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) and managed to destroy a good portion of the Soviet army and occupy much of the Soviet Union by that December.  The Final Solution began at the same time, as special units (the Einsatzgruppen) followed closely behind the German front line and shot thousands of Jews in Eastern Poland and the Soviet Union (including the Ukraine).

4.      The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  The U.S. immediately declared war on Japan, as did the British (and members of the Commonwealth) and the Netherlands.  The major nations of the Axis powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan.  Consequently, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S.    The Japanese conquered the Philippians (a U.S. possession) and swept through islands in a large part of the Pacific and also through Southeast Asia.  The Allies was the name given to the nations opposing the Axis; the most important Allies were the U.S., Great Britain (and the Commonwealth nations, all except Ireland), and the Soviet Union.  The first major Allied victory came in the summer of 1942 in the Battle of Midway in the Pacific.  At the same time, the Germans were quick successful against the British in North Africa.

5.      The tide turned against the Axis in late 1942, when the British won the Battle of Alamein in North Africa in October 1942, the Americans invaded Algeria in November 1942, and the Soviet army forced the surrender of the German army at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943 after a battle that had lasted three months.  By May 1943, the Germans were completely routed from North Africa.  In July and August, the Allies invaded Sicily and Italy, which surrendered on September 8, 1943 (the Germans continued to fight in Italy until June 1944).

6.      The Allies won complete control of the skies by the 1944 and attempted to bomb Germany into submission.  On June 6, 1944, the Allies invaded France and, after heavy fighting in Normandy, started to advance on Germany.  Some Allied generals were anticipating victory by late fall 1944.  German resistance, however, proved stiffer than expected, especially as the Allies reached the Siegfried Line, the line of fortifications that had guarded the frontiers of Germany since World War I, and the British and American armies began suffering from extended supply lines.  The major offensives into Germany concentrated on the front running from the southern Netherlands to Switzerland (consequently Germans stayed in the northern European countries until the very end of the war).  The U.S. Army had to fight the largest battle in its history in December 1944 and January 1945—the Battle of the Bulge—and the war dragged on into 1945.  On the Eastern front, the Soviet armies made rapid progress through the Baltic States, Eastern Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine, Finland, and Bulgaria by September 1944.   The Germans resisted in Hungary until February 1945.  In January 1945, the Soviets entered East Prussia and Czechoslovakia and then occupied Germany to the line of the Oder River.  The Allies entered crossed the Rhine River into Germany on March 7 and met the Soviets on April 25.  Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7.

7.      Throughout 1944 and 1945, the United States advanced on Japan by conquering various island groups.  Throughout the first half of 1945, the U.S. bombed Japanese cities in an attempt to break the morale and resolve of the people and the government.  This bombing culminated in the dropping of two atomic bombs, one at Hiroshima on August 6, the other at Nagasaki on August 9.  The Japanese surrendered on August 14. 

It was against this background that the Holocaust occurred.  And it was in this context that the world first learned of the genocide itself.  The Soviet armies had discovered the Majdanek extermination camp near Lublin, Poland in mid 1944; American reporters had even visited Lublin in September 1944.  The Soviets had liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, but the Germans had already marched thousands of the prisoners back into Germany (including Vladek Spiegelman, Elie Wiesel, and his father; Anne Frank and her sister and mother had been transported back into German in October 1944; prisoners who were in the prison hospital, such as Otto Frank, were saved by the Soviet armes).  The SS had dynamited the gas chambers before leaving, so the full enormity of what had occurred there was not clear at first. In spite of these discoveries and the discovery of the Natzwiller slave labor camp near Strasberg, France (in a part of France that the Germans had annexed) in early December 1944, it wasn’t until April that Allied troops discovered the concentration and slave labor camps in Germany that shocked the world. 

On April 5, American troops discovered the slave labor camp at Ohrdruf; Eisenhowers, Patton, and Bradley toured the site on April 12, 1945.  On April 11, American troops came into the camp at Nordhausen, while Americans entered a portion of the much larger camp at Buchenwald (where Elie Wiesel was held). British troops took over the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (where Anne Frank had died earlier in the year) on April 15; conditions were so bad and there were so many prisoners that about 28,000 of them died after the British arrived (Abzug 84).  On April 29, American troops liberated Dachau. These were the biggest camps, but almost every day American and British troops came across examples of the Germans’ system of slave labor and terror.  Although the American troops were most interested in rescuing the 90,000 American POWs from prison camps (many of whom were in very poor condition, but not anywhere near as bad as the Jews in the concentration camps) and most of these same troops had experienced horrible carnage on the battlefields, they were shocked by the camps.  Robert H. Abzug described these encounters: “an almost unbearable mixture of empathy, disgust, guilt, anger, and alienation pervaded each entry into a camp, compounding the palpable horror that greeted the liberator in each barracks and on every parade ground” (44).

There was a far greater loss of life as a result of the war (the Soviet Union probably lost about 20 million people, China even more), and there were other terrible atrocities against civilians.  But the victims of the Holocaust were for the most part inhabitants of countries that had already been defeated by the Germans.  Nevertheless, it is important that students realize the general context in which the Holocaust occurred.[47]

History of the Holocaust

Students also need to have an understanding of the Holocaust itself, but they do not need to receive an orientation before they begin examining specific works.  It might appear at first that such an orientation would be of considerable help later as they interpret and respond to both different materials on the Holocaust.  However, they will learn this history much better if they have to use it in a meaningful way in their writing.  All the works that they read for the rest of the course on the Holocaust will be providing them this history, and it is far better that they fill in the gaps as they study individual works.  I prefer to have them read Art Speigelman’s Maus at first because with a few exceptions that I note in the next chapter, Speigelman provides just enough information for his reader to understand the Holocaust as a whole while he narrates his father’s story.  But other details can be provided at the moment that the students need them.  This “just-in-time” form of mini-lecture and background providing is a much more effective way for students to become acquainted with historical information.

To learn about Judaism or the history of antisemitism, I recommend guest lecturers or films, combined with discussions to orient students to particular points.  A review of World War II itself should not occupy more than half an hour.  I advocate these rather traditional delivery systems for this kind of material because they do not take much time, and students can pick up the details later.

It is important, though, that the instructor have a pretty good background knowledge of the Holocaust itself.  This book does not attempt to provide such a history because there are already a number of excellent histories of this period by professional historians.  For understanding the Germans and their destruction process, I highly recommend Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in the student edition.   This 331-page text is preferable to Hilberg’s definitive edition, which is in three volumes for a total of 1,194 pages, simply because of the length.