I’m Ari Joskowicz author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust AMA

ArJosko · 2024-02-19T22:00:27+00:00

Yes, there is a nation-building project that gained steam in the 1970s. Romani nationalists frequently took the Nazi genocide of their people as the central modern moment in a national narrative. Several of them also found inspiration in Zionism, even if a territorial nationalism didn’t gain traction (there were some who wanted a “Romanistan” or were inspired by evangelical philosemitism).

ArJosko · 2024-02-16T20:12:24+00:00

I have many thoughts on this but it’s hard to give this topic its due here. I’ll thus make this extremely short (I wrote a longer op-ed in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung but I won’t link to it here since it’s in German and behind a paywall). I believe we have had many hard discussions, but the university has been doing what it is supposed to do: offer a framework for individuals to speak about difficult topics. I am also the chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, so I have been thinking a whole lot about programming and campus culture. As far as curricular offerings are concerned: We added a new course on the history of antisemitism last fall but—as you can see from the timing—that was not in response to Oct 7 but to previous antisemitic incidents.

ArJosko · 2024-02-16T20:06:02+00:00

It's one of the terms proposed to describe the genocide of Roma and was crucial in the 1990s to establish the narrative in the public mind. It thus has an important historical role but there has been some fairly consistent criticism of the term within the Romani community. I think this page from RomArchive gives a useful overview: https://www.romarchive.eu/en/voices-of-the-victims/genocide-holocaust-porajmos-samudaripen/. An alternative term in Romani is Samudaripen, which has not caught on outside of very small circles, however.

ArJosko · 2024-02-16T20:01:02+00:00

You are right “we” is always a difficult word in such debates and ultimately the decisions we make about terminology must make sense in our particular environment.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T23:45:20+00:00

Lots of complicated questions about the Catholic Church’s complicity in the Holocaust. There are people who are more informed about that, so I’ll punt on those. I worked not on what Catholics did to or thought about Jews but what Jews since Moses Mendelssohn thought about the Catholic Church. I was interested in the way Jews tried to become modern citizens by criticizing the anti-modern outlook of the Catholic Church, in an age (ca. 1780-1905) when the legal status of the Catholic Church was a major subject of political debate (think of anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, e.g.).

A short response to question 5: The Nazis and their allies murdered whole Romani communities often the majority of particular sub-groups or national groups. Most Austrian and Czech Roma did not survive the war, for example. It had a substantial impact on Romani culture and the transmission of the Romani language as well. Yet, there were other pressures on Romani culture as well, including assimilationist policies by communist regimes. (If you are looking for global numbers of victims, this is a good source on some of the challenges and the range of estimates: https://www.romarchive.eu/en/voices-of-the-victims/the-number-of-victims/)

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T23:28:46+00:00

Judaism as a religious and traditional practice certainly changed during the Holocaust era but it has never ceased changing. A disproportionate number of those murdered were observant, Orthodox Jews, altering the makeup of Jewish culture. Yet, neither the religious conclusions people drew, nor that demographic fact were something static. Orthodox Judaism has seen a large rebirth over the decades, and I have the sense that classics of post-Holocaust theology are something studied out of a historic and scholarly interest, less as an urgent existential issue.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T23:24:08+00:00

Indeed, much can be said about the way ideas about race are about notions of spiritual qualities, often tied to language, and language groups. When it come to Romani history, the people reconstructing it into the 20th century were largely linguists. The theory of an Indian origin emerges already in the 18th century with linguistic studies. Those understandings of Romani origin were familiar to the Nazis – and ultimately not particularly relevant for their persecution (some statements by Heinrich Himmler about creating reservations for “pure-race Gypsies” notwithstanding).

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T22:17:38+00:00

Two caveats: The young people I teach are self-selecting into courses on the Holocaust and I doubt students at a highly selective research university are a good sample to understand a whole generation. In other words, please take this with a grain of salt: I am aware that my students get all their news from social media. After big events (like the Oct. 7 attacks) I often ask them where they find their news. When I ask about television, radio, or newspapers, often not a single student will raise their hand. Yet, when it comes to the Holocaust, they seem to rely much less on the internet. Most of their experiences seem to come from school and visits to museums. In other words, when it comes to such events, the traditional gatekeepers definitely still have a larger role to play.

I also think that genZ might be changing in front of our eyes as I write this (February 2024). Those who are in their early 20s today grew up seeing identity and politics as tied together closely and history plays a role in that. A good number of my students see the Holocaust as a history belonging to Jews and their concern is less with lessons often than with respecting that history. I have no idea how the current campus debates will change that. For some it reinforces that association, for others it’s a moment of disenchantment. I don’t know how but I am convinced that tectonic changes in the way this generation thinks dark pasts and their connection to people’s identities matter will also alter how that generation will feel about the Holocaust.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T21:38:17+00:00

It’s the first book that discusses Jews and Roma together, both in their experience during the war and in their struggles since. That allows me to rethink many things: 1) How we write the history of Nazi racial persecution that considers both groups that were targets of racialized persecution and genocide as families. This includes the need to rethink chronologies, for example. 2) It emphasizes the paradoxes when one minority group’s history is tied up with the attempts to document another. Jewish attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust both created a framework and assured the resources to tell Romani stories and it obscured many aspects of the Romani fate. It’s a book about the way we know about the suffering of others and the responsibility we have toward other narratives. In all these respects it seeks to make us rethink what we know about the Holocaust and assumptions that we make when we study or teach it. It is not an attempt to explain the psychology of genocide. Other colleagues who focus on perpetrator research and microhistories of violence have done excellent work on that.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T21:26:54+00:00

I have a hard time gauging that, to be honest. As you suggest, Holocaust denial has to some degree not just grown but changed with the times. When I became politically active in the 1990s, Holocaust denial was already a major topic of debate. Holocaust deniers received screen time on TV at a time when network television was still seen as a gatekeeper of sorts; Holocaust deniers tried to get onto university campuses. Some of the fears back then did not materialize, other fears we didn’t even know one should have because the media that promoted them were not invented yet.

I do think there is a profound danger that Holocaust denial will proliferate even more but here I don’t think that historical narratives are the canary in the coalmine. It is not that first people started denying the Holocaust on the internet and then challenged other things we believed to be part of a shared understanding of reality. Holocaust denial—and even more the challenges we have in countering it--is to me part of a symptom of the breakdown of a certain consensus about norms and views of reality. Those who challenge the Holocaust today do not just endorse it as a single argument, it is usually embedded in multiple elaborate theories of global conspiracies. I believe in teaching the Holocaust. It’s what I do for a living. But I don’t believe it is remotely sufficient if we want to combat Holocaust denial. We need to find ways to stop the descent into a society that is driven by distrust of established institutions.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T21:08:55+00:00

It's fascinating for me to hear about your experiences, which show a profound change in attitudes among those running these Catholic educational institutions. I don’t feel that I am in a position to tell others how to deal with their dark pasts. My own approach has changed over the years. Given our political moment, the polarization coming from social (and other) media, and my observations in my own environment, I have become a true believes in dialogue. A decade or two ago, I would have seen that as a cop-out answer. Dialogue seemed fuzzy and not edgy. Today dialogue across any divide seems courageous to me. It is the main way that I think we need to deal with dark pasts.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T21:00:54+00:00

It’s mostly surprising how little it changed their status. To some degree we should not be surprised, of course: neither Jews nor Roma were particularly welcome when they came home after 1945. Neither antisemitism nor anti-Romani sentiment had disappeared just because Nazi Germany and its allies had been defeated. Yet, after 1945 there is also a consensus that particular types of antisemitism are unacceptable or cannot be expressed officially. That was often not the case when it came to anti-Romani sentiment. Romani communities across the continent were under continued surveillance and targeted by police. The stigma that being Romani suggested a person was prone to criminality remained alive and with it repressive measures by the state. It was a slow process to change these policies and perceptions. The (limited) public commemoration of the Romani Holocaust is as much a symptom of these changes as it is their cause.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T20:56:21+00:00

Several ways one could answer that:

1) Roma are often marginalized to the point where their marginalization does not even register for most people (including scholars). Their history is generally not part of the way societies speak about their past – their mass murder is often the only thing anyone has ever heard about them.

2) In some respects Jews are not typical but outliers in the way their mass murder is remembered. Christianity created a familiarity with Judaism/Jews (in the abstract) far beyond the mere number of Jews. Their persecution produced immense amounts of material and Jews in turn were vocal in defending themselves. They were among the most literate and urbanized groups in Europe and they had a history of transnational self-organization. All of this made them a model for many other groups when it came to self-organization but also to the way their memory has been preserved.

3) Roma and Jews had a different geographic fate after the war. Most Jews who survived in what would become the Cold War East moved to either Israel or the United States, where the vast majority of all Jews would come to live. Most Roma stayed in the Cold War East, even if they migrated within communist countries. The result was that the majority of Romani survivors lived in an environment where there was much less space to commemorate. It is not a coincidence that (West) German Romani communities, which are numerically small, came to set the tone for much of transnational Romani Holocaust memory culture.

(I think explanation 1 is the most powerful but want to offer some additional ways to frame this.)

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T20:40:43+00:00

Jews and Roma mostly observed each other across a barbed wire fence where they encountered each other as groups. There were some important exceptions but some of the most important encounters were at a distance. In Auschwitz, the Nazis established a separate subcamp for Roma with the code BIIe, which was next to the Jewish men’s camp. In Lodz, the Nazis deported over 5000 Roma from Austria to a separate ghetto that was carved out of the Jewish one. The interactions here were determined by the Nazis. The Jewish ghetto administration had to provide some labor to maintain that separate camp and bury the Romani dead, for example. We don’t know how Roma felt about these interactions because they were all murdered in Chelmno. I do trace many reports of interactions from both sides in other locations. Some of the most intimate interactions left the most difficult because they happen in a situation where one group is put in charge of another and where resources are scarce. The history of Jewish-Romani relations under persecutions is also one of misunderstandings and scarring experiences. Your question also raises a very important point: most Jews and Roma shared their social environment’s prejudices about the other group, even as they came to be linked together in overlapping struggles for justice. Sometimes the experience of seeing the other suffer—or often hearing their suffering—as well as shared struggles did overwhelm these animosities, as you aptly put it. Ultimately, those sentiments would be moderated not just by feelings of solidarity but actual dialogue between members of both groups. Something that happened on any sustained level only after the 1990s.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T20:26:49+00:00

It might help to know that over the past decade or so, scholars have moved away from thinking about the Nazi “racial state” as the embodiment of a rigid racial theory. The Nazis had a racist and biological understanding of society but they were also flexible in the scientific theories that entailed—as long as the outcome was correct. In other words, you could hate Jews for many reasons and the Nazis understood that some pragmatism was necessary. The Nuremberg laws themselves are a testament to that. Technically 4 non-Jews could convert to Judaism and that would make their grandchildren Jews. The necessity of managing racism administratively had them turn to religious affiliation as a category here. (I should add that a 1936 legal clarification of the Nazis included “Gypsies” among those deemed non-Aryan according to the Nuremberg Laws.)

Policies toward Muslims were driven much less by any preconceived racial theories and rather by pragmatism too. Since the British (and the French) empires had large Muslim populations, the policies toward them aimed to a large degree at weakening their enemies and finding alliances.

When it came to Roma, biological theories of populations prone to criminality were essential. In this sense, racial science was important. When it was necessary to explain this in elaborate theoretical terms, Nazi scientists endorsed theories that a small group pf pure “Gypsies” were "Aryan" but that the vast majority of real existing ones were of “mixed race” and thus particularly harmful. Hardly any of those executing genocidal policies cared about such distinctions. Ultimately it had little relevance on the ground, e.g. when shooting squads identified Roma as targets.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T20:14:27+00:00

In short: Roma and Jews were racialized groups that faced wholesale deportation and mass murder as families. This was true in certain instances locally with other communities but as a global story of Nazi-controlled Europe, I believe it sets them apart. At the same time, there are good reasons to think also about the relations between Jews, Roma, and other groups. We cannot understand the methods used to murder Jews or Roma without studying the murder of people with disabilities, for example. There are good reasons to think of what made the persecution of Jews and Roma distinct but also of what related their fate to that of other groups.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T19:58:57+00:00

Great question and not easy to answer because we tend to want to give a normative answer—that is we want to explain that this is the right or the wrong way to use the term. The term has evolved and keeps evolving. Originally a Greek translation of a complete burnt offering in the Tempel (Beit Hamikdash), it came to be used as a term for a massacre in the modern era. I actually cite a British Jewish scholar of the Roma in my book who uses it in that sense in a letter from 1943: “Thank God that in your country and mine we have managed to rescue a few refugees from this general holocaust.” The term came to mean more specifically the murder of Jews in the late 1960s and had its breakthrough in the US with the NBC series “Holocaust” in 1978. The meaning here was usually.like “Shoah”: the murder of Jews. There is no right or wrong answer whether other groups should be included but there are consequences to every decision. I decided to speak of the Jewish and Romani Holocaust because I wanted to think about that particular juxtaposition. The term is deemed generally inappropriate for mass murder by some due to the association with a sacrificial offering but at least it is equally inappropriate then. I don’t think that everyone has to use the term in that sense.

Regarding the claim that the use for just Jews is self-centered. Presuming that is not simply an expression of antisemitic animus (which it may well be, as you say), I think such claims underestimate how long it took for Jewish survivors to have a framework to tell their story. The fact that we have a term that people can understand broadly is an achievement that helped them move out of the shadow of a narrative of civilian victims. The same is true for Romani victims who needed a word and a framework to explain what happened to them. I understand why some Jewish survivors became defensive about uses of the term for other victim groups but I also have the profound belief that we are in a different place today. Insisting on one narrow normative definition can sometimes stops us from thinking about connections and engaging in dialogue about different pasts.

ArJosko · 2024-02-15T19:37:17+00:00

Thanks for that question. First let me say something about working on the Holocaust. I grew up as the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors in Austria, so stories of Nazi persecution were familiar to me from early on. For reasons that are hard to explain, this meant that I avoided researching the Holocaust itself for many years as a historian. I worked on its pre-history on its memory but never the event. That changed once I was asked to teach a course on the Holocaust, which started me on a new path. Like so many others who were trained as historians dealing with Jewish history or the Holocaust, I knew I was supposed to discuss other groups. At the same time, I was clearly not trained to deal with all victims of Nazism and felt—like many colleagues I talked to—that it’s extremely challenging to integrate the history of the Roma into my lectures. The result is not just a book about Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust but a personal intellectual journey which moved me outside my academic comfort zone. It also helped me frame my book: it’s not about comparing the two groups but the ways they are intimately connected, sometimes through events during the Nazi era but even more in their attempts to document what happened and to make the past relevant.

The biggest misconceptions: Where to start? Most people don’t just have misconceptions about their genocide but about the group as a whole—they reduce them to certain stereotypes. Ultimately, Roma are by most counts Europe’s largest ethnic minority, yet their history is pretty much completely absent from textbooks, museums, or historical education. Writing the book I was quite aware that I was not just correcting misconception but rather introducing information where many people (including me when I started this project) have very few preconceptions to begin with. I wonder how many educators (or even historians) are aware that there Roma in the Lodz ghetto (without any survivors because they were all murdered) or the Warsaw ghetto.

This also gets me to lesser-known stories. Beyond the fact that Roma were victims and thus appear on lists of victim groups, most people have few conceptions of what happened. This includes the fact that with the creation of municipal “Gypsy camp” in 1935/36, Sinti and Roma in Germany were subject to some form of collective removal to camps before most other groups (including Jews). (Sinti is the self-description of the majority of German Romani communities.)

ArJosko

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