The Holocaust tragedy 2/10

Names of the Holocaust

The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókauston, an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole (holos) animal is completely burnt (kaustos).

Its Latin form (holocaustum) was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes in the 1190s. For hundreds of years, the word holocaust was used in English to denote massive sacrifices and great slaughters or massacres. During World War II, the word was used to describe Nazi atrocities regardless of whether the victims were Jews or non-Jews. Since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews.

The term entered common parlance after 1978, the year that the popular mini-series Holocaust was broadcast on the American NBC television network. The series proved that the subject matter could have popular appeal, as well as providing a convenient and enduring term.

The biblical word Shoah (שואה) (also spelled Sho'ah and Shoa), meaning "calamity", became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s.[13] Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word holocaust, which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom.

Holocaust, Shoah and Final Solution

The word holocaust has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people. For example, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I. Since the 1950s its use has increasingly been restricted, with its usage now mainly used as a proper noun to describe the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany.

Holocaust was adopted as a translation of Shoah-a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster and destruction-which was used in 1940 in Jerusalem in a booklet called Sho'at Yehudei Polin, and translated as The Holocaust of the Jews of Poland. Shoah had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of catastrophe. For example, in 1934, when Chaim Weizmann told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler's rise to power was an "unvorhergesehene Katastrophe, etwa ein neuer Weltkrieg" ("an unforeseen catastrophe, comparable to another world war"), the Hebrew press translated Katastrophe as Shoah.

In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used Shoah in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe's Jews, calling it a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people.

The word Shoah was chosen in Israel to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot, the national day of remembrance. In the 1950s, Yad Vashem, the Israel "Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority" was routinely translating this into English as "the Disaster". At that time, holocaust was often used to mean the conflagration of much of humanity in a nuclear war.

Since then, Yad Vashem has changed its practice; the word Holocaust, usually now capitalized, has come to refer principally to the genocide of the European Jews.

The American historian Walter Laqueur (whose parents died in the Shoah) has argued that the term Holocaust is a "singularly inappropriate" term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a "burnt offering" to God.

Laqueur wrote "It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim".

The British historian Geoff Eley wrote in a 1982 essay entitled "Holocaust History" that in his opinion the term Holocaust implies "a certain mystification, an insistence on the uniquely Jewish character of the experience".

The Israeli historian Saul Friedländer wrote in 1987 of "the growing centrality of the Shoah" for Jewish communities in the Diaspora and that "The Shoah is almost becoming a symbol of identification, for better or for worse, whether because of the weakening of the bond of religion or because of the lesser salience of Zionism and Israel as an identification element".

The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote in 1989 that the term Holocaust was unsuitable, and should not be used.

The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust".

For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah.