Once these deeply dubious suggestions have been introduced into the unwary reader’s mind—essentially by blank assertion alone—the remaining bulk of the essay is taken up with an attempt, in itself unexceptionable enough though frequently cursory, to show that in a range of other genocides, from the Ottoman massacres of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 to the accelerating destruction of the native peoples of the Americas in the decades and centuries following 1492, the sum total of the suffering endured, estimated by a variety of criteria (all of them conceptually parasitic on the idea of counting the dead) may be reasonably supposed to have been as great or greater than that endured by the sum total of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
There is, though, one point late in the essay at which something at least resembling textual evidence is offered, with reference to an essay by Edward Alexander of the University of Washington.
According to uniqueness advocate Edward Alexander, for instance, the experience of the Holocaust provided “a Jewish claim to a specific suffering that was of the ‘highest,’ the most distinguished grade available.” Even to mention the genocidal agonies suffered by others, either during the Holocaust or at other times and places is, Alexander says, “to plunder the moral capital which the Jewish people, through its unparalleled suffering in World War II, had unwittingly accumulated.” One of the most ghastly amassments of genocidal suffering ever experienced is thereby made the literal equivalent for its victims of a great bounty of jealously guarded “capital” or wealth. It is unlikely that there exists any more forthright expression than this of what Irving Louis Horowitz calls Holocaust “moral bookkeeping.”22
Stannard here equips Alexander, who happens to be Jewish, with the character and motives of Shylock: the pitiless Jew who not only considers the sufferings of Jews “higher” and more “distinguished” than those of the non-Jew but who can think in no other terms than those of ownership, possession, wealth, and “capital” to describe human suffering, even the sufferings of his own tribe, and who “jealously guards” both the word Holocaust and the thing itself as uniquely Jewish possessions.
It thus becomes rather an important question whether Alexander’s text, considered in extenso, will actually bear this thrillingly accusatory interpretation. Alas, when the context of Alexander’s remarks is restored, the heightened colors so easily bestowed by selective citation fade, as happens in such cases, into the light of common day. The distinction between “high” and “low” as applied to Jewish concerns, it turns out, is not Alexander’s at all but George Eliot’s, and the attaching of central significance to suffering, in Alexander’s opinion, not to be Jewish but rather Christian in character. Here is the full sentence in context: “The uniqueness of Jewish suffering and of the Jewish catastrophe during the Second World War had no sooner been defined than it was called into question, by Jews as well as by Christians. The fact and the idea of suffering are central in Christianity, whose ethical values are based on the idea of a community of suffering. Many Christians also believe that, as Mary Ann Evans, later known as George Eliot, wrote in 1848, ‘Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.’ Yet here was a specific suffering that was of the ‘highest,’ the most distinguished grade imaginable.”23 Alexander’s response to Eliot is ironic, which is why the word highest is in scare quotes. His point is that whatever nineteenth-century Christians may have thought concerning the low-grade nature of any concern specifically involving the Jews, the Holocaust, whatever else it has done, has at least rendered impossible that kind of airily patronizing dismissal. The point has, in short, no bearing whatsoever on the meaning of uniqueness. Nor can the phrase the uniqueness of Jewish suffering be taken, as Stannard seems to imagine, to align Alexander’s understanding of the term uniqueness with his own. What Alexander, like other Jewish commentators, takes the uniqueness of the Holocaust to consist of, as he makes clear in the first paragraph of the essay concerned, is not the supposedly “incomparable” extent of Jewish suffering but rather the nature of the criteria by which its victims were selected.
The Jews held a unique position in the Nazi world because they alone, of all the peoples subject to German rule, had been marked for total destruction, not for anything they had done or failed to do, but because they had been born of three Jewish grandparents. Their guilt lay exclusively in having been born. Although only Jews could be guilty of being Jewish, the centrality of the Jews in the mental and political universe of the Nazis established a universal principle that involved every single person in German-ruled Europe: in order to be granted the fundamental human right, the right to live, one had to prove that he was not a Jew.24
That leaves Stannard with nothing to brandish but the phrase moral capital, which he takes, by implication, to convict Alexander—in a manner at the very least, highly redolent of one of the central motifs of traditional gutter antisemitism—of a willingness to see everything, including the sufferings of his fellow Jews, in light of a “possession,” of “capital,” and of “wealth.” I have no access to the original Midstream version of Alexander’s article, and I cannot locate the phrase, beginning “plunder the moral capital,” that Stannard cites, in either of the versions of the essay that Alexander later reprinted (in The Holocaust and the War of Ideas25 and The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies). But that hardly matters, since the phrase “moral capital,” expressing much the same thought, recurs, anyway, in a passage in the version of the article included in The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies. In this passage, Alexander discusses the tendency, in recounting and dramatizing the diary of Anne Frank for popular consumption, to downplay, in the interests of giving the work a “universal significance,” its author’s references to her own and her family’s Jewishness as the cause of their predicament. “Cut free from her Jewish moorings, improperly understood by her own people, Anne Frank has become available for appropriation by those who have a sounder appreciation of the worth of moral capital, and know how to lay claim to sovereignty over it when the question of sovereignty has been left open.”26
I think it is clear from context that the term moral capital refers here, not as Stannard insists, to quantity of suffering, Jewish or otherwise, but rather to the recognition of the causal role played by their Jewishness in the selection for persecution of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In short, for Alexander, as for Bauer, Lipstadt, Rosenfeld, and other Jewish (and many non-Jewish) defenders of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it is general recognition of the fact that Jews, unlike other victims of Nazi atrocity, were killed just for being Jews that constitutes the “national asset” of which would-be universalizers and de-Judaizers of the Holocaust wish to deprive the Jewish people.
WHO OWNS WHICH ASPECTS OF THE HOLOCAUST?
If Alexander and Stannard agree about nothing else, they agree that the uniqueness debate was, and is, a debate about ownership. I want to conclude, therefore, by confronting this question afresh and head-on. Who does “own” the Holocaust: the Jews alone or all the victims of Nazi atrocity, of whatever kind or nation, or maybe all of suffering humanity? Evidently, one cannot answer that question without also confronting the central question of the uniqueness debate: was the Jewish experience of the Holocaust unique?
I have argued, with a nod to Wittgenstein, that the question of whether something X is or is not unique becomes answerable only if one has specified the characteristic or characteristics in respect of which uniqueness, for purposes of present discussion, is to be predicated of X.
So let’s make the question a little more complex by way of making the discussion a little more interesting and maybe somewhat increasing the proportion of light over heat. In what respects was the Holocaust unique, and in what respects was it not unique? And to whom—to the Jewish people or to others—does the Holocaust considered in each of these respects “belong”?
Bringing into play the notion that a thing can be unique in one respect and not in another opens up two possibilities that, simple and obvious as they are, appear so far as I am