Finally, if Stannard’s “handful of Jewish scholars and writers” actually believed what he says they believe, then irrespective of their success in getting others to believe it, they would be not unreasonable targets for the third, ancient trope of antisemitism, recently popular again, that I mentioned above: that the Jews believe Jewish blood, Jewish suffering, to be worth more than the blood and suffering of non-Jews.
It would be surprising if this last claim were actually true, since “it is fundamental to the whole Jewish Weltanschauung that no life is more valuable than any other. In the words of the Talmud: ‘What makes you think your blood is redder?’ ‘Perhaps his blood is redder’” (Pesanhim 25b).15 Nevertheless, the canard that Jewish blood per se is held by the Jews to be redder than non-Jewish blood has of late become part of the stock in trade of revisionist and antisemitic propaganda around the world. The following, from the American antisemitic website The Resistance Report, is typical: “The Holocaust was crafted for two purposes. (1) To justify wiping Palestine off the map so that Jews can have a homeland there. (2) As a propaganda weapon to fool Gentiles into believing that Jews suffered more than any other people in the world.” Setting aside the relatively urbane and academic style of Stannard’s paper, it is not easy to see any difference in content between the above piece of gutter antisemitism and the following remark of Stannard’s, à propos his observation that although a given revolution may display characteristics peculiar to it, no one would deny that all revolutions are revolutions, or consider one so special in nature as to require a special, capitalized word to designate it: “This has not been done, because to do so would be to depart from the world of scholarship and enter the world of propaganda and group hagiography—which in fact quite clearly is what Holocaust uniqueness proponents are up to: elevating the Jewish experience to a singular and exclusive hierarchical category, thereby reducing all other genocides to a thoroughly lesser and wholly separate substratum of classification.”16
And the impression can only be deepened when this is followed up a page later with a passage asserting the classic antisemitic interpretation of Jewish “chosenness,” not as chosenness to obey a stricter moral law than others but as an assertion of superiority over all other peoples: “We are concerned with a small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots. For that is what they are: zealots who believe literally that they and their religious fellows are, in the words of Deuteronomy 7:6, ‘a special people … above all people that are on the face of the earth,’ interpreting in the only way thus possible their own community’s encounter with mass death.”17
A major motif of antisemitic propaganda has always been the myth of the Jewish conspiracy. In all versions of the myth, a tiny Jewish elite motivated by a belief in the innate superiority of Jew over non-Jew exerts overwhelmingly disproportionate power over non-Jewish societies. Stannard’s thesis follows that pattern. A “small industry of Holocaust hagiographers,” composed of “zealots” who supposedly interpret Deuteronomy 7:6 in a way lacking not only any basis in Jewish tradition but any textual basis in Deuteronomy 7 read as a whole, have succeeded, remarkably enough, in persuading the non-Jewish world that the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust vastly outweigh all non-Jewish sufferings since the beginning of time. In consequence, the bulk of non-Jewish opinion has been led to consider the sufferings of non-Jewish groups in genocide after genocide as of little or no consequence by contrast with those endured by European Jews between 1933 and 1945.
As many contributors to the uniqueness debate pointed out at the time,18 the last claim in particular appears to stand reality on its head. The term genocide and the concept itself, not to mention the genocide convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, owe their origins not merely to the climate of alarm created by the destruction of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, but to the work of one particular man: a Polish-Jewish lawyer by the name of Raphael Lemkin,19 whose struggle to establish the latter legal instruments was by no means motivated solely by Jewish concerns. “Born in relatively comfortable circumstances in 1900 on a farm belonging to his parents in Eastern Poland, Lemkin grew up deeply troubled by the numerous and vicious acts of antisemitism committed around him, as well as by other, more distant but no less appalling acts of barbarity of which the most notable was the massacre by the Turks in 1915 of a million or so Armenians.”20
In 1948, I was a politically aware British fifteen-year-old. At that point, the Armenian genocide of 1915–17 had sunk entirely from European consciousness (I certainly recall no mention of it at the time or for many years afterward). At the same time, no general consciousness existed of the full extent of the destruction visited upon non-European peoples, in the Americas and elsewhere, by European expansion and colonialism from the late Middle Ages onward. All of that was still for the most part seen, I seem to recall, as it had been for the preceding two centuries as part of the onward march of civilization. The publication, in 1966, of Alan Moorhead’s The Fatal Impact, which cataloged the ill effects, including massive losses of native populations through the introduction of alien diseases and weapons of warfare, consequent upon European invasion of the South Pacific from the mid-eighteenth century onward, marks, to my recollection, the first point at which the complacencies of Whig history in that respect began to be seriously doubted by large numbers of educated people.
I would therefore be inclined to say—pace Stannard’s blank assertion to the contrary—that far from it being the case that opinion has been distracted from the sufferings of non-Jewish groups through the effort of “Holocaust hagiographers” to exalt the sufferings of Jews above those of others, the post–World War II awareness of the historical prevalence of genocide arose largely as a consequence of the Shoah, and did so to a considerable extent through the work of Jewish pioneers, among whom the now largely forgotten Lemkin was perhaps the most prominent.
As a result of their work, there has been since the 1960s, at least, no lack of consciousness among Western intellectuals of the long history of genocide to be laid at the door of European colonialism. To finger a supposed group of Jewish zealots, as Stannard does, as responsible for an entirely nonexistent lack of concern is evidently absurd. Equally evidently, it is antisemitic.
Since the Holocaust, the malignant absurdities of antisemitic calumny have tended—though with some surprising exceptions—to encounter, for obvious reasons, a less receptive mass audience than they did, say, in the 1930s and earlier. For that reason no doubt, antisemitic discourse tends nowadays to be marked by a tendency to conclude each Judeophobic harangue with a complaint to the effect that innocent folk who merely attempt to tell the truth about the Jews always get accused of antisemitism, with a view to shutting them up. Here is a move of that type from the website The Resistance Report: “They want us to think that they are always innocent and powerless, and anyone who disagrees with or hates even one Jew must be anti-Semitic. Yet if I say I hate White racists, does that make me anti-White? If not, then how does it make me anti-Semitic to say I hate Jewish racists? It doesn’t, but they don’t want you to know that.” And here is the equivalent move in Professor Stannard’s essay: “In short, if you disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unique, you are, by definition—and like David Duke—a crypto-Nazi. Needless to say, such intellectual thuggery usually has its intended chilling effect on further discussion.”21
IN SEARCH OF TEXTUAL EVIDENCE
But does Deborah Lipstadt, or anyone else in Stannard’s chosen band of Jewish “zealots,” actually say, either in so many words or via some plausibly paraphrasable circumlocution, that what was unique about the Holocaust was the suffering it involved, taken—in terms of some suitable modulus—quantitatively?
Manifestly, Stannard stands in need of textual evidence to back up a claim like that. It is nowhere to be found in his essay. In its place, we find repeated and forceful, but entirely unargued, assertions of the pair of implausible assumptions we have already repeatedly encountered. The first is that non-Jewish Holocaust scholars who regard