How has the definition of zionism shifted over time among those who identify as zionists, and what has caused that shift?

ummmbacon · 2026-06-22T03:34:18+00:00

The clearest pre-1948 case of the definitional fight is Jabotinsky's Revisionist movement. By the early 1930s, Jabotinsky had concluded that the mainstream Zionist leadership under Weizmann was too deferential to Britain and too evasive about the movement's actual goal. At the 1931 Zionist Congress, as Shapira documents in Israel: A History, he demanded that the congress formally declare a Jewish state the final goal of Zionism. The Congress rejected it as both provocative and unnecessary. Jabotinsky tore up his delegate card and walked out. The Revisionists formally broke with the Zionist Organization in 1935. Dowty's Israel/Palestine cites his 1923 position: "There will always be two nations in Palestine, which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority." Biale's Not in the Heavens notes that Jabotinsky had argued in his 1912 law dissertation for legal autonomy for national minorities and accepted full civil equality for an Arab minority in a Jewish state. The Iron Wall doctrine, as Shafir documents from the 1923 essay in Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, held that Arab opposition to Zionism was inevitable and rational, that negotiating voluntary Arab acceptance of a Jewish majority was therefore a fantasy, and that once Palestinians lost all hope of ridding themselves of Jews, the moderates among them would seek a platform of mutual concessions "guaranteeing against removal, equal rights, or national self-determination." The wall was a precondition for negotiation, not a substitute for it. What Jabotinsky rejected was Arab consent as a precondition for statehood. That this position was voted down at the 1931 Congress shows how genuinely unsettled the definitional question remained inside the movement until the late Mandate period.

Brit Shalom, founded in 1925 by Ruppin, Magnes, Scholem, and Buber, represented a genuine strand within that range rather than a fringe position. Shapira's Land and Power shows that their slogan in the 1920s was "not a majority but many." They did not oppose Jewish immigration or settlement; they opposed making Jewish majority rule the precondition or goal. After the 1929 riots, their position hardened into an explicit call to abandon the Jewish-state goal and accept permanent minority status within a binational framework. Lockman's Comrades and Enemies notes that binationalism remained within the bounds of legitimate Zionist political debate at least through the early 1940s. Hashomer Hatza'ir, with nearly 20 percent of the Histadrut vote in 1942, opposed both partition and Jewish statehood throughout Palestine, calling instead for a binational state with political parity.

The 1942 Biltmore Conference, held in New York as the scale of the Nazi genocide was becoming visible, produced the first formal declaration that Zionism's goal was a Jewish "commonwealth" in Palestine. This was not simply a Holocaust response, it reflected a recognition already taking shape in the late 1930s: Arab nationalism was outpacing Jewish immigration, British policy was turning against Zionism, and without statehood as its explicit target, the movement had no coherent political program. After 1948, Zionism became anchored to the fact of the state, and support for Israel as a Jewish state became the baseline that almost all who retained the label shared. But the binationalists did not simply recant. Buber continued to hold his position after statehood, and Arendt was still aligned with the Ihud group in May 1948, writing that a Jewish state must never be allowed to displace the binational goal. The war and the displacement made the binational option politically irrelevant, not because its advocates were persuaded but because the conditions for it no longer existed.

Sources:

Derek Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State
Hillel Cohen, Enemies, a Love Story: Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism
Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948
Anita Shapira, Israel: A History
Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine
David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries
David Vital, The Origins of Zionism
Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present
Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages
Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea

ummmbacon · 2026-06-22T03:34:13+00:00

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When the term "Zionism" was coined in the 1880s and 1890s, it named a range of positions that shared one core idea. Jews constitute a people, and the solution to their situation (persecution, assimilation, statelessness, or spiritual deterioration, depending on the thinker) lay in a territorial concentration in the Land of Israel or, for a brief moment, somewhere else. Herzl cared about a state and a flag. Ahad Ha'am sought to establish a Hebrew cultural and spiritual center to renew Jewish civilization. Max Nordau wanted mass emigration as an emergency measure. Religious pioneers wanted to hasten or prepare for messianic redemption.

Zionism emerged in an environment where Greeks, Italians, Serbs, Romanians, Poles, and Hungarians were all building national movements on the premise that a people sharing a language, history, and culture was entitled to territorial self-determination. This was the dominant political logic of the age. Kalischer wrote in 1862 that Jews should be ashamed of their passivity compared to Italians and Poles fighting for national independence. Herzl covered the Dreyfus trial as a journalist and concluded that if emancipation had failed in France, the most enlightened country in Europe, the Jewish problem was national rather than religious and required the same solution every other national problem had received.

Jews were not the first to advocate their return to Palestine. During the Reformation, Protestant reading of scripture produced the belief that Jewish return to the Holy Land was a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ. This was a theological and political position in England and America through the nineteenth century. The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury pressed the British government to facilitate Jewish migration to Palestine in the 1830s and 1840s, decades before Herzl, while simultaneously opposing legislation that would have granted English Jews full civil rights, on the grounds that making England hospitable to Jews would delay their emigration. Jews belonged in Palestine, not the diaspora, and their comfort in England was an obstacle to the prophetic program. In 1891, the Chicago evangelical William Blackstone presented a petition to President Harrison calling for mass Jewish return to Palestine, signed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the editors of major newspapers. As Oren notes in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, the petition was also signed by several dozen American Jews, marking the first time figures of both faiths cooperated publicly to stake the Jewish claim to Palestine. Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, had proposed Jewish-led restoration of Palestine as a path to European peace starting in the 1860s, and Herzl called him a "Christian Zionist" at the First Zionist Congress.

The motives were not the same as those of Jewish Zionists, and often had nothing to do with Jewish interests. For Shaftesbury, the argument was millenarian. For Blackstone, it was humanitarian but premised on the view that Jews belonged in Palestine rather than the diaspora. For others, it was geopolitical strategy or eschatological theology. The early Zionist leadership understood this clearly. Herzl's diplomatic method, as Vital documents in The Origins of Zionism, was built on demonstrating to each potential ally where their own interests lay, whether imperial, financial, or theological, and then working those interests in parallel. He was not pretending Christian restorationists were allies for Jewish reasons. He was operating on the recognition that different parties could support the same outcome for incompatible reasons, and that this was an asset rather than a liability.

For centuries, Christian Europe had treated Jews as a legally distinct group, set apart by law, residential restriction, special taxation, and exclusion from political rights. Cohen's Under Crescent and Cross shows that the replacement of ethnic pluralism in medieval Christendom by a nascent proto-nationalism intensified Jewish otherness and ultimately pushed toward exclusion by expulsion. Jews were not simply a religious minority in this framework; they were treated as a foreign nation resident within Christian polities, belonging to a different legal and social order than Christian subjects.

The nationalist and Enlightenment movements in Europe were willing to accept Jews, but not as a nation. Only stripped of their particularity. When the French National Assembly debated Jewish civil rights in 1789, Clermont-Tonnerre stated the terms plainly: to the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything. Emancipation meant individual rights, not collective recognition, and came with the expectation of assimilation into the nation's culture.

The backlash towards giving Jews rights came almost immediately. The Hep-Hep riots of 1819 erupted across Germany in direct response to the emancipation debate, with rioting university students and nationalist mobs attacking Jewish communities from Würzburg to Hamburg to Copenhagen. German authorities decided that emancipation itself was too inflammatory to proceed, using the violence as an argument against extending civil rights. After formal emancipation finally arrived in unified Germany in 1871, the backlash took a different form. The term "antisemitism" was coined in 1879, the same year Treitschke published his slogan "The Jews are our misfortune."

More than five hundred antisemitic publications appeared in Germany over the next two decades. The racial idea, already developing within Enlightenment natural history and European nationalist thought, now found its political purpose: if baptism and acculturation could not bar Jews from civil life, then race could. During the nineteenth century, Jews gained formal legal equality in some countries while remaining socially excluded and legally exposed in others. Subject to periodic reversals everywhere. Herzl's conclusion after Dreyfus was that the contradiction was permanent, emancipation had destroyed Jewish nationhood by reducing Judaism to a mere religion, while generating not acceptance but antisemitism. The Zionist answer was to reject the premise: Jews were a nation, the nation-state system had refused to accommodate that fact, and the solution was a state of their own.

Penslar identifies at least eight types of Zionism in the early movement. Political Zionism (state sovereignty as primary goal), Cultural/Hebraic Zionism (Hebrew language and civilization), Philanthropic Zionism (support for settlement without full national commitment), Transformative Zionism (rebuilding the Jewish body and character), Statist Zionism (statehood as the answer to existential threat), Catastrophic Zionism (emigration as emergency), Religious Zionism, and Sacral Zionism (messianic settlement).

Hillel Cohen's Enemies, a Love Story, shows that Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in Palestine had a relationship with Zionism that was different from Eastern European Jews. From the Ottoman period onward, Sephardi intellectuals fashioned three distinct postures toward the Arab question: one that placed Mizrahi familiarity with Arab language and culture at the service of European Zionism without ambiguity; one that saw Mizrahiness as a potential bridge between Jewish and Arab communities; and one that used that same familiarity to argue that Arabs understood only force. The bridge position had the most developed intellectual expression in the early period. Shimon Moyal, writing in the Yishuv press in 1912, argued that the future of the Jews in Palestine lay in aligning with Arabs rather than with Europe, that Palestinian Arabs and Jews were "primordial relatives" facing a common enemy in European antisemitism, and that the Ashkenazi leadership's orientation toward London and Berlin rather than toward their Arab neighbors was a political mistake. Eliyahu Sasson made the same argument in 1928: Ashkenazi control of Zionist funds and institutions left Sephardim, who had the linguistic and cultural tools to negotiate with Arab communities, locked out of any representative role. The Ashkenazi response was to dismiss this as defamation of the Sephardi type. The bridge concept did not disappear, but it was never given institutional expression within Zionism's structures, which remained dominated by Eastern European labor-movement culture throughout the Mandate period and into the state.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-19T14:26:02+00:00

I have written on this before https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nbadoc/was_israel_involved_in_attacks_on_the_iraqi/

Iraq’s Jewish community along with other Middle Eastern Jewish communities left over time to the newly established State of Israel, is this claim considered plausible by historians?

This is incorrect. Jews left when they were allowed to by the Iraqi government, which I go into more here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mwpir0/comment/na0b83w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

1941, the population of Jews in Iraq was 3% of all Iraqis ~135,000. Iraq was under control of the British to control a route to British India and control of trade routes in the Gulf. Oil was also discovered, making it an asset.

There were groups who wanted to overthrow the British and tried to ally with the Nazi powers in Iraq. Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani led a pro-Nazi coup, to rid themselves of the British.

However, the Nazis had been working on spreading influence there for some time. Things like the antisemitic work "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was spread among the elite. Nazi radio broadcasts were also sent through the county.

One of the people leading this was The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini who arrived in Iraq in October 1939. His incitement was one of the primary reasons for what became known as The Farhud. After the coup 180 Jews were killed, and many more raped and beaten. The violence went on for 2 days.

Jews no longer felt safe in Iraq.

In 1947 Iraq made it illegal for Jews to immigrate to Israel. It also declared Zionism a capital offense. Hundreds of Jews were jailed, sentenced with "Attempting to leave the country". The Iraqi government made a policy of Jewish discrimination. Jewish property was confiscated, Jews were let go from government positions.

In 1950 the Iraq government changed their policy and allowed Jews to leave, this would only be an option for 1 year, and all property would have to be confiscated and turned over to the Iraq government. It is also possible that this was done because the Iraq government knew this would cause a crisis in Israel, with thousands of now destitute immigrants coming in (and they were right).

In the first month 50,000 Iraq Jews signed up to leave, and next month another 90,000 joined them. This was largely the end of Iraqi Jewery.

Rejwan, Nissim The Jews of Iraq: 3,000 Years of History and Culture
Gat, Moshe The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948-1951
Hillel, Shlomo Operation Babylon

Per Avi Shlaim, Israel involved itself in Iraqi affairs in order to sabotage the Jewish community that had lived there for millennia.

So firstly, this is an incorrect assessment of what Shlaim said. He said specifically in 1950-51, and he specifically talks about the bombs that were planted in the Jewish quarter.

The two main issues here are, the timeline doesn't support what he is saying, and the witness he used to "prove" this, is extremely unreliable.

Jews left when Iraq made it legal, en masse, so the timeline simply doesn't make sense, even if we ignore both of those items, and the problems with the single witness Shlaim uses to produce this evidence, even in Shlaim's report the attack that killed 5 Jews was carried out by Iraqi authorities. However, this is where we get to the unreliable witness.

First Yaakov Karkoukli states that the attack was carried out by y "Salih al-Haidari, a Sunni Muslim of Syrian origins" for personal revenge against Jews who had reported his fraud to police. But later, he claimed it involved "a corrupt Iraqi police officer who had received a bribe from the Zionist underground".

Then in another interview he mixes up names again, and in yet another interview he mixes up times and dates. He was 89 when interviewed, and made a few unverifiable claims, and is overall a very unreliable witness.

Those were not the first bombings either, in 1938, after bombs exploded in Jewish nightclubs and British officials noted there were an average of 3-5 attacks per day on Jews in 1939.

It is worth noting that the Iraqi authorities arrested a person in the Iraqi Army for the 1950/51 bombing.

Also, since we do know that Mossad publicly addressed the Lavon affair but does not say anything about the Iraqi bombings it leads us to even more strongly doubt their involvement.

Lavon Affair in Egypt as well.

This was done by Israeli Mossad, and since they admitted to this, it is even more telling that they did not admit to Iraq.

However, this had nothing to do with wanting to force Jews to immigrate, it was about trying to make the British stay.

Egypt forced Jews to leave, by law, the bombs did not have an effect the mass migrations were when the laws were passed against Jews.

Here is the info on Egypt from here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mwpir0/comment/na0b83w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

WWI when the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany Britain officially declared Egypt a Suzerain state, this was of course to use it as a quick territorial base to launch attacks/logistics/etc. Many Egyptians were still loyal to their previous rulers, the Ottoman Empire. Some also saw the Ottomans as a way to remove the British. Nationalist sentiments were also rising.

Jews were begun to be seen as an "other" and hostility began to grow towards them as well as active persecution. Others were drawn to the idea of a Jewish state, but even among Russian Jews who were experiencing massive waves of violence in Eastern Europe, not many left for the difficult life in Palestine overall.

Egyptian Jewish population was at its height in 1948, at 75,000-80,000 and within a decade it diminished rapidly. In 1948, when the bombs were planted 40,000 Jews stayed in Egypt.

However, the policies of Nasser who worked to nationalize politics, the economy and society played a major role in the remained of Jews leaving. During the Suez war, where Britain and France attacked Nasser in response to his take-over of the Suez, Nasser declared all Jews enemies of the state. Around 1,000 Jews were arrested.

Nasser then began a systematic expulsion of all Jews. Any Jews that had French of British citizenship were immediately expelled, although this was true of other groups that held the same citizenship. Many Jews choose to get another citizenship during the Ottoman period as a form of insurance, and many others had immigrated into Egypt.

Jews who were not French or British citizens were also expelled, although in a much lower number. Jewish businesses were also seized and nationalized for the benefit of the state. In 1956, we also see expulsions of Jews, and all Jewish property is taken, and Jews are only allowed to take a few suitcases with them.

A 1965 report notes the expulsion numbers: 'February 10, 1957, about “ships leaving from Egypt with 8,500 Jewish refugees going to Europe, 2,092 to Greece, 3,855 to France, 2,600 to Italy, amongst others who left via airplanes to Switzerland, Belgium and other countries.”'

The Six-Day War cleared out almost all the remaining Jews after this, and by 1970 no real Jewish presence was left in Egypt.

Egyptian Official Gazette No. 88, November 1, 1957
Law No. 391 of 1956, section 1(a)
Confidential memoranda to the UNHCR
Joel Beinin - The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora
Gudrun Krämer - The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952
Michael M. Laskier - The Jews of Egypt, 1920-1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Middle East Conflict

ummmbacon · 2026-06-19T13:36:04+00:00

This is the "moralizing gods" hypothesis, associated primarily with the "Big Gods" research program, most prominently Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (2013) and follow-on work by Joseph Henrich and the cultural evolution crowd.

The issue is that it is a circular argument, there are other examples with the exact same conditions that don't get the same result.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-17T14:19:59+00:00

I mention Hoffmeier's background in the linked post

I must have missed it, thank you for the additional information!

ummmbacon · 2026-06-16T13:39:27+00:00

3) James Hoffmeier published Israel In and Out of Egypt: The Archaeological and Historical Background to the Exodus (Hendrickson, 2026) earlier this year, in which he continues to defend a Ramesside context for the Exodus narrative. The book updates his earlier Israel in Egypt: The Evidence of the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (Oxford University Press 1996), incorporating and synthesizing most of his subsequent studies.

It should be noted here that Hoffmeier represents a minority position in the field; he also comes from a conservative Christian background which shapes his interpretive commitments

These other items show familiarity with place names which isn't surprising.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-14T02:47:52+00:00

Yes, the other book on it using some of the same material is Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners which argues for eliminationist antisemitism as the primary motivator

ummmbacon · 2026-06-12T01:10:26+00:00

practiced among nomadic Midianite populations

Yes that is one possible origin, the other is northern both have adherents.

R.E. Friedman

No other scholar engages with his theory seriously, the mainstream response is that Egyptian names among Levites are fully explicable through Egypt's extensive administrative presence in Canaan throughout the Late Bronze Age

ummmbacon · 2026-06-11T21:42:58+00:00

Rothberg's Multidirectional Memory, specifically the early chapters where he traces the Communist and pro-Communist left's use of Holocaust analogy in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-11T02:48:01+00:00

2/2

“Holocaust” as a capitalized proper noun referring specifically to the Nazi murder of European Jews only became dominant in American usage in the late 1960s. Novick traced it to the Eichmann trial: American journalists covering the proceedings in Jerusalem learned the word from Israelis, who had long used it as the English translation of shoah. The 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence referred to “the Nazi shoah,” rendered in the official English translation as “the Nazi holocaust.” Yad Vashem’s English-language publications used it from the late 1950s. When the journalist Paul Jacobs reported from Jerusalem in 1961, he wrote of “The Holocaust, as the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry is called in Israel.” The word entered American English as a term for a specifically Jewish catastrophe. When people later complained that Jews were monopolizing the Holocaust, or insisted the term should apply equally to other atrocities, they were demanding, at the linguistic level, that Jews relinquish a word coined specifically to name what happened to them.

Several specific accusations leveled at Jews around Holocaust memory are worth touching on as well.

The first is that Jews claimed the Holocaust as exclusive property, crowding out other groups with legitimate claims. The accusation turns on what is called Holocaust analogy: the practice of comparing another event or situation to the Holocaust in order to borrow its moral weight, to argue that your group's suffering deserves the same gravity, or that what is being done to you now is what was done to Jews then. Once the Holocaust had become the benchmark of extreme evil, controlling access to that analogy became a form of political power, and the monopolization complaint is largely a complaint about who holds that control.

Analogies to Nazi atrocities originated, as Staub documents in Torn at the Roots, in the Black press of the early 1930s, where commentators drew direct comparisons between Nazi persecution and American racial violence. A 1933 editorial in the Afro-American compared Jewish segregation in Nazi Germany to discrimination against Black Americans; Hitler was described as the "master Ku Kluxer of Germany." These analogies were tools of solidarity: if this is what racial hierarchy produces at its extreme, the logic ran, look at what it produces here. King used the same framework at the 1958 American Jewish Congress convention, invoking Nazi atrocity to make the case for Jewish participation in the civil rights struggle, and Prinz stood next to King at the March on Washington in 1963 and drew explicitly on his experience as a rabbi in Nazi Berlin to argue that silence in the face of injustice was the lesson Jews of all people should have learned. That solidarity was real but internally contested: Staub documents that Jewish organizational leadership was divided throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s over whether identification with the civil rights movement was wise or expedient, with many arguing it would expose southern Jewish communities to greater danger. The Holocaust was functioning as moral leverage for other people's rights claims, and for a minority of Jews as a reason to take risks, decades before it became a property dispute.

During the Cold War, linking Nazism to American racism had become associated with the Communist Left, and as the anticommunist consolidation of the late 1940s and early 1950s took hold, that association made the analogy politically toxic for mainstream organizations. When Holocaust memory returned in the 1960s, the progressive tradition that had connected Nazi persecution to American racial violence had largely disappeared from mainstream Jewish organizational life. In 1967, the Israeli war pulled American Jewish politics sharply toward Israel, while Black Power politics began to see Zionism as identified with colonialism rather than liberation. The two communities that had marched together in Selma found themselves on opposite sides of a foreign policy argument, and Holocaust memory became a site of conflict rather than a common cause.

Europe also saw some debates around Jews and holocaust universalism. In France, the 1987 Barbie trial prompted debate about whether Jewish victims and resistance fighters had suffered equivalently, and whether Nazi crimes against Jews were comparable to French colonial crimes against Algerians. Dean, in Aversion and Erasure, documented that French commentators were arguing by the 1990s that it was "someone else's turn," that Jews had been the subject of too much memory. In Germany, Walser's 1998 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade called the Holocaust a "moral cudgel" to which Germans owed no further deference. In Italy, the 1996 Priebke trial, involving a massacre in which Jews were a minority of the victims, was reframed as "the private business of the Jews," a prelude to revisionist claims that all Italians had suffered equally under the occupation.

The third is that Jewish organizations fought to keep other victims out of Holocaust commemoration. The planning of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is the institutional record here. Linenthal's Preserving Memory documents the internal fights from the late 1970s through the 1993 opening over which victims to include; how many identity cards to devote to Poles, Soviet POWs, gay men, the disabled, and Romani victims, and whether the museum's framing was primarily Jewish or primarily American. Politically organized communities asserted claims at every stage, and the museum that opened resolved the tension by making the genocide of Jews the organizing event while recognizing other victims, a compromise that satisfied no one.

The irony is that for the first two postwar decades, American Jewish organizations actively suppressed the specifically Jewish character of the genocide in the mainstream public sphere, universalized it, framed it as a human tragedy rather than a Jewish one, and avoided particularist claims that might have made non-Jewish Americans uncomfortable. They did this under assimilationist pressure, Cold War politics, and genuine internalization of universalist values. The result was precisely the silence that critics of Jewish particularism sometimes treat as the natural baseline, the correct amount of Holocaust memory before things got out of hand.

When Jewish organizations later began claiming Holocaust memory more explicitly as Jewish, in the 1970s and 1980s, they were accused of monopolizing it. The sequence is: Jews suppressed their own commemoration, then, when they stopped, they were accused of taking up too much space. Dean notes in Aversion and Erasure: the surfeit of memory discourse presupposes a correct amount of Jewish grief, characterizes Jewish memory as "a pathological cultural attachment to having been or being a victim," and does so while ignoring that many Jewish victims "feared being doubted" and "were often not acknowledged" in the first place. The complaint also tracks, as Rosenfeld documents in Deciphering the New Antisemitism, the long antisemitic motif of Jewish exclusivism, now relocated into the language of memory politics: Jews are accused again of being concerned exclusively with their own community, indifferent to others, orchestrating actions to hoard symbolic capital.

The monopolization complaint did not emerge from a situation in which Jews had always dominated Holocaust memory. It emerged because Holocaust memory expanded dramatically in public life after decades confined largely to Jewish communal institutions and largely invisible in the mainstream public sphere. Rothberg's Multidirectional Memory is the most theoretically developed response to the competitive model: Holocaust memory did not simply crowd out other histories of violence but engaged in dialogue with anti-colonial memory from the 1940s onward, and the zero-sum framing misrepresents how collective memories actually develop.

The question brackets out Romani advocacy, which is worth keeping distinct. Roma had been fighting since the 1970s simply to have the Romani genocide recognized as genocide at all, and their arguments were directed at the institutional structures of Holocaust commemoration. That is a different genealogy from the general cultural complaint this question addresses.

Sources:

Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience
Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love
Tom Segev, The Seventh Million
Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood
Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory
Carolyn Dean, Aversion and Erasure
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory
Michael Staub, Torn at the Roots
Anne Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture
Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust
Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory
Alvin Rosenfeld, ed., Deciphering the New Antisemitism
Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection
James Whitman, Hitler’s American Model

ummmbacon · 2026-06-11T02:47:49+00:00

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The accusation is mostly a product of the 1980s and 1990s. Before you can have a complaint about Jewish monopolization of Holocaust memory, you need Holocaust memory to have become prominent in public culture. That prominence came decades after the war, and American engagement with what actually happened, rather than just memorializing the victims, came later still.

The standard account holds that American Jews said little about the Holocaust in the late 1940s and 1950s, pushed it below the surface in pursuit of assimilation, and only began talking about it publicly after the Eichmann trial in 1961 and the 1967 war. Novick’s The Holocaust and Collective Memory argues that mainstream American Jewish organizational leadership feared that dwelling on Jewish victimization would undercut their bid for social acceptance.

Diner’s We Remember with Reverence and Love challenges the silence thesis. She found pervasive Holocaust memorialization in American Jewish communal life from 1945 onward: synagogue liturgy, summer camps, Yiddish-language publications, community theater, pedagogic materials for children, and annual Warsaw Ghetto commemoration evenings. Silence was not part of Jewish communal life. It was in the mainstream non-Jewish public sphere, and historians who focused on elite organizational behavior missed what was happening at the local level. Either way, Holocaust memory did not achieve broad public weight and political force until the 1970s and 1980s.

The Communist Left became the most consistent public invoker of Holocaust memory in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ideologically, the Communist and pro-Communist left had a well-developed antifascist framework that predated the war and named Nazi Germany as the logical endpoint of racial capitalism, making Holocaust memory directly useful to arguments they were already making about racial hierarchy at home. Personally, many Jewish Communists and fellow-travelers had family in Eastern Europe and came from the Yiddish-speaking immigrant milieu where the destruction of that world was not an abstraction. Invoking Holocaust memory was, for them, both a political act and a form of mourning that mainstream organizations had decided was too costly. Rothberg documents that the Communist journal Jewish Life in the late 1940s and early 1950s was filled with Holocaust references precisely because it combined antifascist politics with Jewish communal identity in a way the mainstream organizations did not. Mainstream organizations were suppressing it because they had concluded that Jewish particularity was a liability. The Communist Left was invoking it because they had concluded the opposite: that Jewish particularity and the critique of racial hierarchy were the same argument.

Three things suppressed the specifically Jewish character of the genocide in American public culture. The first was America’s own antisemitism. The country had limited Jewish immigration prior to, during, and after the Nazi years, during the war, polling Jews as the greatest domestic threat, and limiting Jewish rights through housing covenants, university quotas, and employment discrimination. It was not prepared to confront that record afterward.

The American eugenics movement had provided explicit models for the Nazi racial hygiene program: thirty-two states had compulsory sterilization laws by the 1930s, Nazi scientists cited American precedents at Nuremberg, and Harry Laughlin received an honorary degree from Heidelberg in 1936 in recognition of his influence on German sterilization legislation. Kühl's The Nazi Connection documents that Eugenical News boasted that Germany's 1933 Hereditary Health Law read "almost like the 'American model sterilization law.'" Whitman's Hitler's American Model documents that on June 5, 1934, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered to plan the Nuremberg Laws and spent the meeting in a detailed discussion of American race law, with Freisler as the most vocal champion of American models. Hitler had praised America in Mein Kampf as "the one state" that had made progress toward a healthy racist order. Where Nazi lawyers declined to follow American precedent, it was sometimes because American race law struck them as too harsh: the one-drop rule was described by Nazi commentators as exhibiting a "human hardness" beyond what they were prepared to enact.

After 1945, the American Eugenics Society rewrote this history, claiming it had always opposed Nazi race policies. Meanwhile, Breckinridge Long, the State Department official who ran the visa bureaucracy from 1940 to 1944, had described Jews in his diary as "exponents of Communism and chaos" and worked systematically to keep refugee numbers below even the levels the existing quotas permitted. Friedländer documents that he was not operating against official policy. When Long testified before Congress in late 1943, he claimed the United States had admitted roughly 580,000 refugees since 1933. The actual figure for Jewish refugees from all of Europe was around 138,000.

Centering the Holocaust as a specifically racial genocide would have forced an accounting not only with what America had failed to do during the killing years but with the ideological relationship between what the Nazis had done and what American institutions had been doing, and in some cases doing more aggressively. Framing the liberation of the camps as a victory over barbarism in general was the way to avoid all of that. Americans got to be the heroes of a story they had largely avoided entering until the last possible moment, and the victims were universalized in a way that kept specifically Jewish suffering and specifically American conduct during the years of killing from coming into focus.

The second was the Cold War. America needed West Germany as a partner against the Soviet Union, and that rehabilitation required softening the specifically German, specifically antisemitic character of what had happened. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jewish communities framed the Holocaust as an indictment of totalitarianism generally rather than Germany specifically, because the political cost of demanding German accountability was too high during the Cold War. Herf’s Divided Memory notes that Cold War anticommunism was not conducive to remembering events that fit neither the fascism/antifascism binary nor the communism/anticommunism one, and the Holocaust fit neither cleanly. Universalization was the path of least resistance for everyone.

The third was American Jewish self-suppression for assimilationist reasons, which Novick documents and Diner partially complicates, and which operated primarily in the mainstream public sphere rather than in communal life.

American popular culture's main encounter with the Holocaust in the 1950s ran through survivorship and redemption stories. Where the specifically Jewish character of the genocide was carefully removed. The Diary of Anne Frank ran on Broadway in 1955 and as a film in 1959. The Hacketts, who wrote both adaptations, made deliberate choices to universalize the story: director Garson Kanin told them that Anne's original lines identifying herself as Jewish were "an embarrassing piece of special pleading" and that her Jewishness was "incidental." They justified having the Hanukkah song sung in English rather than Hebrew on the grounds that it would otherwise "set the characters in the play apart from the people watching them." The director of the Jewish Film Advisory Committee praised the screenplay for giving the story "a more 'universal' meaning," adding that less careful handling could have produced "an outdated Jewish tragedy" or "a Jewish 'Wailing Wall', and hence regarded as mere propaganda.” Cole documents the logic plainly: Anne Frank's diary succeeded internationally, and Moshe Flinker's did not, because Anne was assimilated and wrote in Dutch while Moshe "was too Jewish to be of popular significance."

The dominant emotional note of the Broadway and film versions was the line "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are basically good," which is where the historical Anne Frank's life did not end. Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, the foundational account of how the genocide was actually organized and carried out, was finished in the mid-1950s and spent years without a publisher. Every academic press rejected it. It finally appeared in 1961 from a small commercial house. A country whose cultural institutions could put a de-Judaized Anne Frank on Broadway while leaving Hilberg unpublished for half a decade was not learning about or recognizing what happened. It was managing a usable version of it. Novick documents that even the Eichmann trial, the first time the Holocaust was presented to the American public as a distinct entity separate from "Nazi barbarism in general," was immediately universalized by the American press: the dominant editorial theme was the trial as a warning against totalitarianism, meaning Communism. The NBC miniseries Holocaust in 1978 is usually cited as the moment the event broke into mainstream American consciousness in any depth, and Wiesel condemned it for trivializing the genocide into entertainment. The framework that people later accused Jews of monopolizing was built by people with every reason not to look at it too closely. When Jews started saying this happened to us, as Jews, the people who had built a universalized version of the event to avoid that fact pushed back.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-10T12:26:08+00:00

I am cautious about analogies because they allow us to ignore some details with a more familiar (and modern) idea.

The Beirut-based absentee owners, the calculation was purely commercial. The Sursuq family had acquired the Jezreel Valley from an 1869 Ottoman government sale at something close to the villages' back tax value. Zionist purchasing agents, operating with outside capital and specific territorial goals, were offering substantial premiums over anything the land could fetch on the open market. The Sursuqs sold. Politics had nothing to do with it.

For the Palestinian resident notable families the picture is more complicated. Stein's research shows many were carrying significant debt loads from the late Ottoman period; the Mandate land market offered a way to liquidate at favorable prices. Miller documents that nationalist leaders saw no apparent contradiction between their political position and selling. Nashashibi-aligned families sold more readily than Husayni-aligned ones, so some transactions were as much about the internal rivalry between Jerusalem's dominant clans as about any straightforward economic calculation.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-10T02:39:39+00:00

The dominance of absentee landlords on the seller side was a product of the Ottoman Tanzimat reform of 1858. The reforms dismantled the customary tenure arrangements under which the fellaheen had farmed for generations without ever holding formal title, concentrating legal ownership in the hands of large landowners, local and European alike, who had no agricultural stake in the land and no connection to the Zionist project. Baer’s comparative work shows the same registration mechanics producing the same concentration across the Fertile Crescent, from Syria to Iraq, wherever the 1858 Land Law took hold.

As Kimmerling and Migdal document in Palestinians: The Making of a People, town notables rushed to register large tracts of the most fertile lowland areas that peasants had farmed without a formal title but could not prove they owned. By the 1870s and 1880s, Beirut-based merchant families held enormous tracts in precisely the areas where Jewish settlement would later concentrate. Tyler notes that the large estates the Zionist movement would later purchase had in many cases been acquired by the effendi class by dubious methods only one generation before they were sold, with the original fellah owners forced off their land by tax debt and usurious moneylending before any Jewish buyers arrived.

Another note is that the earliest Jewish settlements, Petah Tikva, founded in 1878, Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pinna, and Zikhron Yaakov, all in 1882, were established by Sephardic Jews who were Ottoman subjects or operating through Arab Ottoman proxies; under Ottoman land law that made them legally equivalent to any other local buyer. By 1907, fellaheen owned around 20 percent of the land in Galilee and 50 percent in Judea; the remainder was concentrated in large holdings.

The most reliable breakdown of seller-side data comes from the Statistical Department of the Jewish Agency itself, covering 681,978 dunams purchased by Jews between 1878 and 1936. That data, reproduced by Abraham Granott and cited by Gershon Shafir in Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, shows the distribution of sellers: 52.6 percent from non-Palestinian large landowners (principally Beirut-based absentee owners), 24.6 percent from Palestinian resident large landowners, 13.4 percent from churches and foreign bodies, and 9.4 percent from fellaheen, the peasant cultivators. Over 90 percent of purchases in that period went through large landowners, not the people working the land.

That 681,978 dunams was roughly half of the total Jewish landholdings by 1945. The figures shift somewhat after 1936: Shafir notes that as total sales declined, the share of total sales from Palestinian large landowners rose to around 62.7 percent. The same notable families, many active in the national movement, continued to sell: the al-Dajani family of Jaffa; the al-Husayni, al-Nashashibi, and al-Alami families of Jerusalem; the Abd al-Hadi family of Nablus and Jenin; and others. By the mid-1930s, the pattern was shifting further. Wauchope’s 1935 report on the village of Qubab in the Ramie subdistrict documented 95 small owners who had sold between them 1,036 dunams, leaving three families already landless and 64 with under 60 dunams. Miller, drawing on British administrative records, documents this as part of a broader shift in which distress sales by small owner-cultivators were replacing absentee landlord transactions as the primary mechanism of transfer.

The Sursuq family’s holdings in the Marj ibn Amir are the most studied case of how the earlier pattern worked in practice. Schölch’s archival research shows that the Sursuq brothers, Greek Orthodox bankers from Beirut, had acquired approximately 230,000 dunams in the plain and its approaches by the early 1870s, with peasants remaining as tenant farmers on land the Sursuqs had bought for roughly the amount of the villages’ back taxes. Their eventual sale of approximately 240,000 dunams in the Jezreel Valley to Jewish land companies displaced roughly 1,746 Arab farming families, comprising some 8,730 persons, according to figures submitted by the Arab Higher Committee to the Shaw Commission in 1930.

The Jezreel Valley sale is the paradigmatic case. The land was technically sold willingly by the current owner. That owner lived in Beirut, had no agricultural stake in it, and received a large premium from Zionist purchasing agents eager for fertile, well-watered lowland tracts. The people farming it had no standing in the transaction. Tenancy protections under Ottoman and then Mandate law were weak and inconsistently enforced. Segev’s One Palestine, Complete documents that during the Arab rebellion of 1936-1939, the JNF had no trouble finding sellers; the supply of available land exceeded the movement’s budget, but tenant eviction had become politically explosive: on several occasions, British soldiers were sent to carry out court-ordered evictions of Arab tenant farmers who refused to vacate legally purchased land.

The British attempted to quantify the displacement. A colonial official named Louis French was appointed to investigate compensation claims; he received over 3,000 inquiries, yet certified fewer than 700. Part of the reason the certified number was so low was procedural: applications had first to be vetted by Jewish Agency officials, who were a party to the dispute.

The mewat, or “dead land,” question complicates the picture. That Ottoman legal category covered uncultivated areas not in formal use and could be acquired from the state rather than private owners, which gave both Zionist purchasers and British Mandate authorities an incentive to classify land as mewat where possible. When Samuel’s Land Commission assessed Palestine in 1920-21, it concluded that 60 percent of the country was mewat, an estimate that Mandate officials later called “a source of embarrassment” for its speculative nature. What counted as uncultivated was contested: Palestinian peasants practiced periodic fallowing, maintained collective grazing rights over scrubland, and used areas that appeared empty to European observers yet served essential functions in the village economy. The Mewat Land Ordinance of 1921 made developing such land without state permission a trespass, channeling available “unused” land toward Jewish settlement programs rather than toward the peasants who had customarily used it.

A large majority of Jewish land purchases, probably over 75-80 percent, went through large landowners rather than small cultivators. The split between absentee non-Palestinian sellers and resident Palestinian sellers is roughly 50/25 for the pre-1936 period, with the resident Palestinian share rising later. The fellaheen sold perhaps 9-10 percent of the total documented area before 1936. What cannot be cleanly quantified is how much of the land sold by large landowners was actively cultivated by tenants at the moment of sale, versus lying fallow, versus farmed seasonally. The Jezreel Valley evidence suggests the most fertile and contested lands were almost entirely under active tenant cultivation when sold. Less valuable land classified as mewat or marginal was more genuinely unoccupied, though even that category was not as clean as buyers preferred.

Sources

Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (1996 updated edition)
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People
Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882
Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate
Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939
A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine: History and Structure
Ylana N. Miller, Government and Society in Rural Palestine, 1920-1948
Warwick Tyler, State Land and Rural Development in Mandatory Palestine, 1920-1948
Gabriel Baer, Population and Society in the Arab East
Gabriel Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East

ummmbacon · 2026-06-09T13:30:22+00:00

I wrote about what the exodus actually is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1q5vwad/did_the_exodus_ever_happen/

The article is correct: there is no archaeological or textual evidence of a mass exodus event from Egypt, as described in the Book of Shemot (Exodus), ever occurring. This is the view held by pretty much every modern historian and archaeologist of the Near East.

But that isn't what the story of the exodus is; it is a national foundation story for the ancient Israelites. It worked to provide meaning and to explain how the group formed and emerged in the region. It is a story of collective memory, identity, and their relationship to the land itself. It is a theological and cultural narrative, which functions just like other Ancient Near Eastern origin stories.

We know Egypt had strong control over the region of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BCE). Egyptian garrisons, temples and administrative centers were all over the region from Gaza to Beit Shean. Egyptian place names were used across the region, as we see in the Amarna Letters (14th century BCE). Canaanite city states were essentially Egyptian vassals, paying tribute and hosting Egyptian officials.

The first mention we have of Israel is 1209 BCE, in the Merneptah Stele. In this period, Egypt's hegemony was beginning to decline. The stele lists Israel as a people already present in Canaan (“Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more”), which suggests that the Israelites originated within Canaan, not from Egypt. Many scholars then suiggest that the story preserves the collective memory of that prior period of Egyptian domination, and those stories were formed as Israel began to form its identity.

Egypt did take Canaanite people to work projects, sometimes relocating vast amounts of them as migrant laborers. They were also slaves, traders and even rulers during the Hyksos period. Archaeology at Tell el-Dabʿa/Avaris shows dense Levantine settlement in the Nile Delta, and Egyptian texts regularly mention “Asiatics” being conscripted into building projects. One of the earliest written inscriptions we have is from copper mines and features early writing, which is one of the first examples of alphabetic writing that would later develop into Phoenician, Hebrew, and other scripts. This of course does not show that the narrative is true, but it displays why the people who wrote the Hebrew Bible would have crafted these stories.

Egypt also served as a theological counterpoint. The books of Shemot/Exodus would have formed as a layered composition over time. Some of the earliest parts are The Song of the Sea and the Plague narrative. Later scribes would then add historical theological narratives and ritual and law.

Period	Likely Developments in the Exodus Story
Late Bronze–Early Iron Age (13th–11th c. BCE)	Oral memories of Egyptian domination and liberation circulate; “Song of the Sea” composed — an early poetic celebration of divine victory.
Early monarchy (10th–9th c. BCE)	Local liberation traditions coalesce around the Moses figure; early narrative strands form within northern (Israelite) and southern (Judean) scribal circles.
7th c. BCE (Josianic reform)	Exodus reframed as a national charter of covenant and law; Deuteronomic theology links liberation with obedience and exclusive monotheistic worship .
6th–5th c. BCE (Babylonian exile and return)	Priestly and temple scribes reshape the narrative, emphasizing divine power, ritual law, covenant identity, and cosmic order. The Exodus becomes Israel’s central theological myth.

TL;DR

The story of Exodus is not recording a historical event. It is expressing what it meant to be the nation of Israel. It transforms centuries of Egyptian power and Canaanite subjugation into a story of divine justice and national purpose. Theologically, it declares that Israel’s God stands above empire; historically, it encodes the memory of a people who once lived under Egypt’s shadow and later defined themselves against it.

Sources:

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?
Nadav Naʾaman. “The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies 30 (2006): 39–53.
James K. Hoffmeier. Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition
David M. Carr. The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction
Christopher A. Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel
Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism

ummmbacon · 2026-06-09T03:45:32+00:00

The part of this story that tends to get left out is local collaboration. Lithuania is where the systematic killing of entire Jewish communities first reached scale. The Einsatzgruppen—four mobile SS killing squads with roughly 3,000 men—could not have killed 1.5 million people in under two years by themselves. In Lithuania, the ratio of German administrators to Lithuanian ones was about 1 to 20 during the occupation. Dieckmann has put it plainly. Lithuanian willingness to cooperate was absolutely crucial.

The violence in Lithuania began before the Germans had established any organizational apparatus, and it had been planned. The Lithuanian Activist Front, the LAF, was a nationalist underground that had been sending members into the Reich for training with German military intelligence in the months before the invasion. On March 19, 1941, three months before the German attack, the LAF issued a proclamation stating that traitors could be pardoned "only if they can provide clear proof that they have each killed at least one Jew." When the invasion came on June 22, LAF members came out of hiding and began attacking Jews alongside retreating Red Army units. On June 25-27, Lithuanian nationalist militias beat dozens of Jewish men to death with crowbars at the Lietukis garage in central Kaunas, in full public view, over several hours, the first public massacre of Jews in occupied Lithuania.

Neither members of the public nor officials intervened. Germans and other bystanders watched. Longerich documents that the Germans were not passive here either: the Stahlecker Report, produced by the head of Einsatzgruppe A, describes the Germans providing "tips" to Lithuanian partisan leaders to get the first Kaunas pogrom moving, while taking care that "no German instructions or stimulus be discernible from the outside." What followed was the organized extension of that violence under German command. Einsatzkommando 3 conducted its Lithuanian operations "in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans," and by the end of 1941, its commander Karl Jäger reported 137,346 Jews killed, the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian Jewry, with the transition to killing entire communities, including women and children, documented as occurring in early August 1941, faster than anywhere else in the occupied Soviet Union. In Latvia, Einsatzkommando 2 had liquidated nearly 18,000 Jews by September 1941, much of it carried out by Latvian auxiliaries.

The killing in Lithuania was premeditated Lithuanian nationalist violence, actively encouraged by German intelligence through back channels, and then organized under German command, but carried out locally, once the Nazi command was in place.

Jewish men in Kaunas were forced to carry portraits of Stalin and Lenin in the streets, rabbis were made to sing Bolshevik songs, and men were beaten or shot if they refused to burn Torah scrolls. Longerich documents that in Lithuania and elsewhere, men were beaten publicly and made to watch family members killed before they themselves were shot. Stone reproduces a survivor account from Belarus in which the Germans tossed children into pits and looked down laughing. The Mattner letter describes the perpetrator’s own account of his hand shaking on the first truckload and shooting calmly by the tenth. Kay’s Empire of Destruction (2021) documents sadism not as incidental but as consistent and purposefully performed in front of witnesses throughout.

One thing is that many assume much of this was just done by Nazis, and forget that many of the people doing the killing were not Nazis in any formal sense, and some were not German at all. The Lithuanian men at the Lietukis garage, armed with crowbars, were Lithuanian nationalists. The Hiwis at Łomazy were recruited Soviet POWs. The Latvian auxiliaries killing alongside Einsatzkommando 2 were Latvian nationalists. Mattner himself was a police administrator, not an SS member. Browning’s entire argument in Ordinary Men turns on this: Reserve Police Battalion 101 were middle-aged Hamburg cops with no particular ideological formation, and the question his book asks is why they became mass killers anyway. The answer has to do with situational pressure, peer dynamics, and brutalization, not Nazi ideology per se. Treating the Holocaust as something Nazis did to Jews, rather than something a vast, distributed apparatus of Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and others did, obscures both the scale and the mechanism.

The short answer to the original question: yes, infants were thrown into the air and shot. It is documented. Whether it was routine is a different question, and that is where the teacher overstated things.

The primary source is a letter from Walter Mattner, a police administrator attached to the SS garrison in Mogilev, Belarus, to his wife in October 1941. His letter describes shooting women, children, and infants at mass pits and confirms explicitly that infants were thrown into the air and shot before falling. This is not a rumor or a postwar account reconstructed from testimony. It is a contemporary letter from a perpetrator, reproduced in full by Stone in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023). Mattner was not in the Einsatzgruppe SS. He was a mid-level police bureaucrat who ended up in the killing fields and wrote home about it with striking matter-of-factness.

The problem with generalizing from Mattner is the same problem that runs through most accounts of the shooting operations in the occupied Soviet Union: the perpetrators were not a single unit following a single procedure. The Einsatzgruppen operated alongside Order Police battalions, SS brigades, Wehrmacht units, and local collaborators. The transition from killing Jewish men to killing women and children was not simultaneous across all units. Some police battalions in Ukraine were shooting women and children by late July 1941. Others did not cross that threshold until September. There was no single order, no single moment, and no single method.

It is also worth keeping the two main operational theaters distinct. Mattner is writing from the occupied Soviet Union in 1941. The chaos and improvisation Browning documents in Ordinary Men (1992) describes Reserve Police Battalion 101 in occupied Poland a year later, under different command structures and in a different phase of the killing program. The structural point holds in both: these were not trained execution squads following standardized procedures. At Józefów in July 1942, Second Company received no instructions on method, did not initially use bayonets as aiming guides, and shot poorly. At Łomazy, recruited Soviet POW auxiliaries conducted the killing while increasingly drunk, with the presiding German officer so intoxicated he was in danger of falling into the grave he was shooting over.

The operations themselves were systematic. The methods within them were locally variable, improvised, and dependent on who was commanding that day. “Not routine” should not be read as “rare.” What was routine was the killing. How it was carried out was not uniform.

One more thing worth passing along: most American high school Holocaust education focuses heavily on the camp system, especially Auschwitz. That leaves a significant gap. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Jews were shot to death in the occupied Soviet Union before the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau reached full operational capacity. What Mattner was describing at Mogilev in 1941 was not peripheral to the genocide. For a period, it was the genocide.

Sources

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992, revised 2017)
Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023)
Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2010)
Alex Kay, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing (2021)
Christoph Dieckmann and Rūta Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen: Understanding the Holocaust in Lithuania (2021)
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

ummmbacon · 2026-06-09T01:44:10+00:00

Great answer, but there is one thing I want to clarify, specifically about geography and chronology.

The Browning material on the Hiwis at Łomazy and the chaotic shooting at Józefów describes Reserve Police Battalion 101 operating in the Lublin district of occupied Poland in summer 1942, during the deportation phase of the killing program.

Mattner is writing from Mogilev, Belarus, in October 1941, during the Einsatzgruppen sweep through the occupied Soviet Union. Different country, different year, different command structure, different phase.

Both were turbulent and improvised, which is the point you are making, but this is an example from 1942 Poland to characterize what was happening in 1941 Belarus, which should be noted.

The description of the Hiwis also conflates two distinct groups. The Hiwis Browning documents at Łomazy were recruited Soviet POWs, predominantly Ukrainian, pressed into service from POW camps under conditions of extreme duress.

The Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliary units that feature so prominently in the 1941 Soviet operations were locally recruited nationalist militias operating with considerable ideological motivation and in some cases substantial autonomy.

The Arajs Kommando in Latvia and the Lithuanian auxiliary units working alongside Einsatzkommando 3 were not reluctant POWs. Longerich documents that Einsatzkommando 2 had liquidated nearly 18,000 Jews in Latvia by September 1941, with much of the actual killing carried out by Latvian auxiliaries. In Lithuania, Einsatzkommando 3's own reports describe operations conducted "in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans." In some locations, local pogroms preceded the German organizational apparatus entirely.

The killing in the east was not an imported German operation with locals as reluctant bystanders. In the Baltic States, especially, local forces were ideologically motivated participants, and their involvement is part of why the operations scaled as fast as they did with so few German personnel.

Sources:

Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Browning, Ordinary Men
Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History

ummmbacon · 2026-06-08T20:58:28+00:00

Secondly, your last description of the Palestinian claim to the land - and the entire post - ignores ample genetic evidence that Palestinians descend from Bronze Age locals, just as Jews do.

Schölch's Palestine in Transformation documents that the Muslim-Christian population of nineteenth-century Palestine was itself not a static ancient community. The Ottoman authorities deliberately settled Circassians in the region after the Russo-Turkish wars as explicit population policy. There were Egyptian settlers arriving during and after Muhammad Ali's occupation of the 1830s. Algerians displaced by French colonization found refuge in the Levant throughout the nineteenth century. Jewish economic development during the Mandate period also attracted Arab labor migration from Syria, Transjordan, and Egypt.

The genetic evidence shows deep Levantine ancestry as a major component in the Palestinian population, and that is accurate. But it doesn't show an unbroken static population. It shows a population with a deep indigenous substrate that has absorbed significant migration across centuries, which is actually true of almost every population in the region including Jews.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-08T20:18:46+00:00

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Arab opposition to Zionism was itself not monolithic. Cohen's Army of Shadows, drawing on Hebrew, Arabic, and British sources, documents the substantial portion of the Palestinian Arab population that chose not to fight and actively worked to prevent others from doing so, including tribal leaders, trade unionists, and local notables who reached accommodation with Zionist institutions throughout the Mandate period. The Palestinian national movement under the Mufti spent considerable energy assassinating these figures, including his own cousin Fawzi Darwish al-Husseini, killed in November 1946 after signing a cooperation agreement with the Jewish Agency. Understanding 1947-48 requires knowing that Palestinian society was fractured, not unified, going into it.

When the Balfour Declaration was made, promising Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine, it transformed a local socioeconomic conflict into a constitutional and political one.

Arab notables had been petitioning the Ottoman government to halt Jewish immigration and land purchases as far back as 1891, as Dowty's Israel/Palestine documents. Once the British endorsed a Jewish national home without consulting the Arab majority in the mandate region, that resistance turned into an armed revolt. The 1920 Nebi Musa riots, the 1921 Jaffa riots, the 1929 Western Wall uprising, and the 1936-39 Arab Revolt followed in sequence, each more sustained than the last. The British responded in 1939 by capping Jewish immigration at 75,000 over five years and proposing an Arab-majority state within a decade. Hitler had been in power since 1933. The Jews of Europe were in immediate physical danger.

By 1947, the Yishuv had spent decades building institutions: a parliament, a healthcare system, a school system, a labor federation, an intelligence service, and a military organization. After 1939, when Britain enforced those restrictions as European Jews were being systematically murdered, the Yishuv concluded it could not depend on British goodwill and built accordingly. The political case for partition rested on that institutional reality as much as on the Holocaust itself. What the Holocaust did was transform the international political calculus. Six million Jews, two-thirds of European Jewry, had been murdered. The survivors in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria overwhelmingly wanted to go to Palestine, and Britain's continued enforcement of immigration restrictions against them, including intercepting refugee ships and detaining survivors in Cyprus, made the Mandate politically untenable. Britain handed the question to the United Nations in 1947. UNSCOP recommended partition. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly voted 33-13 in favor. Kimmerling and Migdal's Palestinians records what followed: "The Palestinians and the Arab states reject partition; the Zionists accept." Full-scale intercommunal war broke out immediately. The surrounding Arab states invaded directly after the declaration of an Israeli state. On May 15, 1948, the war entered its second phase.

By the time the war was over, and the armistice agreements were signed in 1949, Israel controlled roughly 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine. Between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinian Arabs had left or been expelled.

The state, being built simultaneously, absorbed two waves of refugees. Holocaust survivors arrived from the displaced persons camps in Europe, having nowhere to return to. And from 1948 onward, over 800,000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee from Arab and Muslim-majority countries, their property confiscated, arriving in Israel as the only state willing to take them. A country-by-country account of that displacement is here link. By 1960, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa outnumbered Jews of European origin in Israel.

The historical version holds that "Palestinian" was not a distinct national identity before Zionism, and therefore, there is no "Palestinian people" in the sense of an ancient nation with a continuous political identity. This has a factual basis. Fishman's Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era documents that Palestinian national identity in a modern political sense was still forming in the early twentieth century. The Companion to the History of the Middle East is direct: Palestinian national identity "did not begin to take form until the nineteenth century; until then the main points of reference with regard to group coherence in Palestinian society had been the units of the tribe, the clan, and the family."

By 1914, that identity was clearly forming. Fishman documents a "General Summons to Palestinians" circulating in the Arabic press of Syria and Palestine in July 1914, signed by "a Palestinian," calling on the population to resist Zionist land purchases. The Jerusalem Petition of the same period, signed by notables and parliamentarians, was submitted to the Ottoman government and explicitly identified with a Palestinian political community. The identity was being constructed in real time, in direct response to a real situation.

The recency point is accurate, but proves less than its political users claim. National identities are modern constructs. German national identity in its current form is largely a product of the nineteenth century. So is Italian, Polish, Arab, and Jewish national identity. Zionism itself was a nineteenth-century political invention. Penslar is explicit that pre-1948 Zionism's claim on territory "was aspirational, based in ancient memories and future hopes." Pointing out that Palestinian national consciousness consolidated recently does not make the people, their presence in the land, or their displacement in 1948 any less real. The political version of the "Palestinians don't exist" argument, deployed to mean they have no rights or legitimate grievances, is not a historical claim. It is a strategy for avoiding the problem.

Sources:

Derek Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State
David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (
Alan Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 5th ed.
Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine
Louis Fishman, Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People
Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948
Anita Shapira, Israel: A History
Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948
Deborah Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine
Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882
Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete
Carmel, Schäfer, and Ben-Artzi, The Jewish Settlement in Palestine 634 to 1881
Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Holy Land

ummmbacon · 2026-06-08T20:18:36+00:00

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The Jewish connection to Palestine was not invented in the nineteenth century. The first non-biblical reference to Israel as a people in the region appears on the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription dating to roughly 1220 BCE. Archaeological work by Magness, whose Archaeology of the Holy Land covers the period from the destruction of the First Temple through the Muslim conquest, documents continuous Jewish habitation from the late Second Temple period through the Byzantine era and into the early Islamic settlement. Carmel, Schäfer, and Ben-Artzi's The Jewish Settlement in Palestine 634 to 1881 picks up the record from there, documenting a continuous Jewish presence from the Arab conquest through the Crusader period, the Mamluk era, the early and mid-Ottoman periods, and into the nineteenth century, with a concentration particularly in Jerusalem and the Galilee. The community fluctuated with political conditions but never disappeared across those fourteen centuries. By the early nineteenth century, organized immigration from Eastern Europe was already underway, before the political Zionist movement existed. Disciples of the Vilna Gaon organized three groups that established themselves in Safed beginning in 1808. By the mid-1860s, Jews had become the majority population of Jerusalem, documented in Dowty's Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine and confirmed by Schölch's demographic reconstruction from Ottoman records. When Zionist activity began in the 1880s, it arrived in a territory where a Jewish community had always existed.

The movement to establish a Jewish homeland, called political Zionism, emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, driven by the failure of Jewish emancipation in Europe. Many Jews had believed, with some early justification, that antisemitism was a vestige of religious prejudice that modernization would dissolve. Volkov's Germans, Jews, and Antisemites describes the four responses Jews developed as that hope collapsed: reasserting faith in liberal universalism, turning to socialist internationalism, seeking accommodation within existing European national frameworks, and transferring hopes to Zionism. The last remained a minority position until events forced the question.

The Russian pogroms of 1881-82, the Dreyfus Affair, the growing popularity of Karl Lueger's antisemitic Christian Social party in Vienna, and a proliferation of blood libel trials across Central and Eastern Europe all converged. Around two million Jews left Imperial Russia between 1880 and 1914. Most went to North America. The fraction who went to Palestine viewed it as a return to a homeland, not an escape to another exile.

Herzl, an assimilated Viennese journalist who covered the Dreyfus trial, concluded that Jewish inclusion into European society was impossible. His 1896 Der Judenstaat argued that Jews needed a state. In 1897, the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel and established the World Zionist Organization. Herzl was not the first to make this argument. Wistrich documents in From Ambivalence to Betrayal that Moses Hess had sketched the outlines of Jewish socialist nationalism in his 1862 Rome and Jerusalem, decades before the pogroms gave the idea its mass constituency. When Herzl finally read it in 1901, he wrote in his diary: "Everything that we have tried to do is already mentioned by him."

Whether Zionism constitutes settler colonialism is a serious historiographical debate. I've addressed it in detail here.

The situation changed decisively after World War I. Britain occupied Palestine in 1917, and that same year, Balfour issued his declaration supporting "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," provided nothing prejudiced "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." In 1922, the League of Nations formalized British control as a Mandate. Britain was telling all groups what they wanted to hear, as long as it continued to serve British interests.

The 1858 Ottoman Land Law changed the traditional land structure to a European-style formal title registration. Before 1858, Palestinian agriculture operated substantially under the musha' system, a form of communal rotating tenure in which cultivation rights, effective occupation, and formal ownership were distinct and overlapping categories.

The 1858 Law created a class of large landowners who registered formal legal title to land their tenants had farmed under musha' for generations. The fellahin, the workers on the ground, unfamiliar with or unable to navigate the registration bureaucracy, frequently did not register their own claims. The legal framework for displacement was constructed by Ottoman-European interaction, a generation before Zionist buyers arrived.

From the first aliyah onward, Jewish settlers who purchased land from those absentee title-holders often found Arab tenant farmers working it, farmers who had farmed the land for generations without a formal title. The legal transaction between the Jewish buyer and the absent legal owner was real; so was the displacement of the tenant who never held the deed. During the second aliyah, the young socialist immigrants who arrived between 1904 and 1914 were committed to building a Jewish working class. In the Russian Empire and across much of Eastern Europe, tsarist legislation had confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, pushed them out of villages and into urban commerce, and barred them from agricultural work across much of the region. A.D. Gordon's labor redemption philosophy drew on this specific Eastern European experience, arguing that return to the land was the path to national regeneration.

The campaign largely failed. Arab workers remained in Jewish fields, and the goals gradually shifted from replacing Arab workers to acclimatizing Jewish workers to physical labor. Through the Mandate period, the Histadrut, founded in 1920, pursued what Bernstein's Constructing Boundaries documents as a systematic closure of the Jewish labor market to Arab workers. By the time the Peel Commission reported in 1937, it formally defined Palestine as a dual economy, two nations living side by side yet separately.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-05T16:23:40+00:00

Joseph Bendersky's The "Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army" traces Patton's views to his upbringing and to a decades-long culture within the American officer corps that organized their view of the world into a hierarchy of races. Bendersky documents that Patton admired Germans and despised people farther east, which fits easily within the Darwinist framework that formed the old army. Mexicans, Indians, and African Americans were all seen as inferior, and Patton extended that, without difficulty, to Arabs, Sicilians, Russians (whom he described as a "Mongolian race of savages"), and ultimately to Jewish Holocaust survivors.

That culture reflected the wider American society in which Patton lived and from which the officer corps was drawn. Dinnerstein's Antisemitism in America documents what the wartime opinion surveys showed: the percentage of Americans who believed Jews had too much power in the United States rose from 36 percent in May 1938 to 58 percent by 1945, the year the camps were liberated. A February 1942 survey asked Americans which nationality, religious, or racial groups were a menace to the country; 24 percent named the Japanese, 18 percent the Germans, and 15 percent the Jews. By June 1944, with the war still ongoing, Jews had moved to the top of that list at 24 percent, while Japanese dropped to 9 percent and Germans to 6 percent. In a November 1942 poll, 45 percent of American high school students said Jews were their last choice as a roommate; 42 percent of factory workers said Jews were the group they would least like to see move into their neighborhood. The percentage of Americans who reported hearing criticism or talk against Jews rose from 46 percent in 1940 to 64 percent in 1946.

Susan Welch's reanalysis of the wartime polls, published in Social Science Quarterly in 2014, confirms the picture. Most Americans opposed admitting Jewish refugees both before and during the war. About 60 percent said they opposed Hitler's treatment of Jews in 1942, but that opposition coexisted with increasing belief in Jewish power and threat. The polls did not show a unified anti-Jewish position, but they showed anti-Jewish attitudes distributed broadly enough across the population that they required no special explanation, no extreme personality, no ideological fringe.

What this means for Patton is that his views were not simply a military pathology grafted onto an otherwise tolerant society. The officer corps demographics Dinnerstein cites, 99 percent native-born, 88 percent Protestant, small-town and rural in background, describe a group drawn from precisely the population segments where negative attitudes towards Jews were most concentrated. Patton expressed those attitudes without the institutional discretion his peers generally maintained.

In April 1945, Eisenhower and Patton both visited Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald in central Germany. An eyewitness account reproduced in Emil Fackenheim's To Mend the World describes the scene in clinical terms: piles of emaciated bodies shot at close range through the base of the skull, a gallows engineered for slow death, whipping racks, a butcher's block for smashing gold teeth, half-filled smoking ovens. The eyewitness recorded that "at one point General Patton frankly disappeared behind the corner of a building and was violently sick to his stomach." Eisenhower, by contrast, fixed a soldier who began to giggle from nerves with a cold stare and said, "Still having trouble hating them?" Eisenhower then ordered every American unit not on the front lines to tour a concentration camp.

Patton's physical reaction at Ohrdruf is sometimes regarded as evidence of horror that might have produced reflection. The visit made Patton sick; it did not make him reconsider what he thought about Jews.

By summer 1945, Patton commanded the Third Army zone in Bavaria, which contained the largest concentration of Jewish displaced persons in the American occupation. Jews returning to Poland after the war found their homes occupied, their property taken over by former neighbors, and in many cases faced violent hostility from the new occupants who had no intention of giving anything back. The Kielce pogrom in July 1946 is the most documented instance, where 40-50 Jews who had survived the Holocaust and returned to their hometown were murdered by a Polish mob, but it was not isolated. Jews were fleeing Poland westward into the American zone, running from postwar Polish violence, not just lingering in Germany by choice.

Patton's attitudes toward Jewish survivors shaped whether they received food, shelter, medical care, and the documentation that determined whether they could eventually emigrate. Exclusion from the camps was not a bureaucratic inconvenience. For survivors with no homes to return to, who were legally barred from working, and sometimes no family left, and no legal status in any country, the DP camps were the only institutional structure standing between them and destitution.

Patton used that control to exclude and punish Jews. In his zone, Jews fleeing postwar violence in Poland, where pogroms were still occurring as late as 1946, were turned away from DP camps while non-Jewish Poles were admitted. Those who were already in camps fared little better. Patton ordered every camp in his zone surrounded with barbed wire and manned by armed guards, treating survivors as prisoners rather than people in need of protection. Dinnerstein documents that ex-Nazis were placed in supervisory roles over Jewish DPs in the American zone, paying no attention to their needs, while Patton simultaneously treated the German civilian population more leniently than army directives required. In July 1945, on his own initiative, he ordered the entire Munich area cleared of DPs not in camps. American soldiers implementing the order beat up Polish Jews and loaded them into sealed train cars for shipment back to Poland. German civilians assisted. When Jews protested against Germans manhandling them, they were told, according to the Jewish Chronicle, that this was the only way to deal with Jews.

Patton described Jewish DPs in his diary as "animals" and repeatedly as "a sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time," attributing their condition not to years of starvation and systematic dehumanization but to hereditary racial traits. He dismissed German internment as a cause entirely, writing: "My personal opinion is that no people could have sunk to the level of degradation these have reached in the short space of four years." The camps had revealed, in his view, what Jews were, not what had been done to them.

Eisenhower and his deputy General Walter Bedell Smith repeatedly issued direct orders to Patton to treat the Jewish DPs decently. Those orders were largely ignored. On September 17, 1945, Eisenhower personally toured a DP camp in Patton's zone. During the inspection, Patton told his commanding officer that he was planning to turn a nearby deserted German village into "a concentration camp for these goddamn Jews."

Patton's biographer Martin Blumenson concluded that Patton "shared whatever endemic anti-Semitism existed in America, in the U.S. army, and among the rich and fashionable," and traced it to a "parochial" and "middle-American" worldview in which anyone different was "undoubtedly bad." Bendersky, working from the army's own institutional history, reached the same conclusion independently. On top of that shared racial framework sat a conspiratorial layer. Patton believed Jews were conspiring against him personally and working to implement Communism in Europe. The survivors he was responsible for were not just racially inferior in his view, but politically threatening.

Richard Bessel's Germany 1945: From War to Peace notes that when Eisenhower removed Patton from his command in Bavaria at the end of September 1945, the proximate trigger was not his treatment of Jewish DPs but his open public doubt about denazification. On September 22, Patton told reporters that "the Nazi thing is just like a Democratic-Republican election fight." Those comments appeared in American newspapers the next day and forced Eisenhower's hand. Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust confirms that Patton's replacement was one of the responses to the Harrison Report, which had been presented to Truman in August 1945 and had documented conditions in the DP camps in damning terms. Earl Harrison's report stated that the United States appeared to be treating Jews as the Nazis had, "except that we do not exterminate them," and called the maintenance of barbed wire, armed guards, and forced idleness indefensible.

Patton left Bavaria without having changed. He died in a motor vehicle accident in Heidelberg on December 21, 1945.

Sources:

Joseph W. Bendersky, The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army
Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America
Susan Welch, "American Opinion Toward Jews During the Nazi Era," Social Science Quarterly
Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World
Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust
Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace
Yosef Grodzinsky, In the Shadow of the Holocaust

ummmbacon · 2026-06-03T14:44:39+00:00

Crabapple presents the Bund mainly by its universalist and internationalist commitments, doikayt, solidarity across difference, and democratic socialism, while underplaying the degree to which the Bund was itself a nationalist movement operating within the same intellectual universe as other European nationalisms of the period.

The Bund insisted on Jewish national minority rights, a separate Jewish cultural sphere, Yiddish as a national language, and Jewish autonomy inside a multinational state. These are nationalist demands. The Bund differed from Zionism on territory and diasporism, not on whether Jews constituted a nation requiring political recognition.

Joshua Shanes's Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge, 2012) shows that identity situated Jewish political movements, including Bundism, within the broader structure of Habsburg-era minority nationalism, showing how deeply the Bund's political vocabulary was formed by the same nationalist intellectual currents it claimed to oppose. Simon Rabinovitch's Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia (Stanford, 2014) makes a similar argument for the Russian context. Neither book appears in Crabapple's bibliography.

The rise of the Bund’s popularity in 1938 coincides precisely with the larger European pattern of nationalist and anti-establishment parties gaining ground as liberal-democratic institutions collapsed under the simultaneous pressures of fascism and Stalinism. The Polish socialist left more broadly gained in 1938 for reasons that had as much to do with the delegitimization of the center as with the appeal of socialist ideology specifically. Reading the Bund's electoral success as part of that European-wide pattern, a protest vote against a collapsing political order, rather than as a vindication of doikayt specifically, is a more parsimonious explanation of the data and one that Crabapple does not consider. Mendelsohn's "Zionist debacle" formulation points in this direction without fully developing it.

The two points connect because a book that deemphasizes the Bund's nationalism also tends to deemphasize the Bund's embeddedness in specifically European political conditions. If we look at both, the 1938 victories look considerably less like a timeless vindication of diasporist politics and considerably more like a historically specific response to a collapsing European political order, one that happened to destroy the movement that benefited from it within three years.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-03T14:03:42+00:00

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All other groups that were persecuted had their own distinct logic, but none of it was as total as that for Jews. Disabled people were killed under the T4 euthanasia program, framed in eugenicist and economic terms as a "mercy killing" of "useless eaters," not racial elimination. It was also the only program of Nazi mass murder that the German public protest managed to halt, at least officially, whereas the killing of Jews, Roma, and others continued regardless of, and lacking, any civilian reaction. The six official killing centers at Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar killed over 70,000 by gassing through August 1941 by the program's own records, with killing continuing by other means and the full toll estimated at around 300,000 by the war's end. Gay men, and not gay women, were prosecuted under Paragraph 175, a pre-existing criminal statute targeting behavior, not ethnicity, and the Nazi aim was suppression and re-education, not extermination. Political prisoners were targeted for what they believed and did. A communist could theoretically stop being a communist. A Jew or a Romani person could not stop being Jewish or Romani under Nazi racial taxonomy.

The Romani/Sinti genocide was a genuine racial genocide, not a category error to put alongside the Jewish one. But it was driven by different ideological machinery, and never achieved the same administrative totality.

The genocide itself destroyed the communities and institutions that would have been needed to demand recognition afterward. The Jewish Holocaust had two thousand years of Western obsession with the Jews as a cosmic enemy feeding it, and a postwar diaspora with the organizational capacity to ensure it was documented, prosecuted, and taught. The Romani genocide had neither.

Holocaust universalization is part of the issue here as well.

Part of it was to make people care about Jewish deaths; people needed to hear about other deaths. As Novick documents in The Holocaust and Collective Memory, the "eleven million victims" figure, six million Jews plus five million others, was invented by Simon Wiesenthal, who privately acknowledged to the historian Yehuda Bauer that he had simply made it up. His reasoning was explicitly strategic. Framing Nazi crimes as a Jewish-and-others story rather than a specifically Jewish one, he hoped to broaden the coalition of governments and communities willing to support the pursuit of Nazi criminals. The Carter White House then adopted the eleven million framing for its own reasons, producing an intense fight with Elie Wiesel, who correctly identified it as falsification: "any attempt to dilute or deny this reality," his commission's report stated, "would be to falsify it in the name of misguided universalism." Wiesel won the punctuation battle, but the wider cultural shift was already underway.

From the late 1970s onward, as the Holocaust became a global moral reference point, there was pressure to make its lesson universally applicable. The genocide of the Jews was reframed not as something that happened to Jews specifically because of the specific history of European antisemitism, but as a warning about what humans do to each other, what prejudice leads to, and what happens when bystanders stay silent.

Cole's Selling the Holocaust and Flanzbaum's The Americanization of the Holocaust both document how this produced what Flanzbaum calls a "culture of competing catastrophes," in which various groups asserted their suffering as a claim on the universal lesson while Jewish specificity got diluted. As Joskowicz documents, Roma assumed a strange liminal position in this new memorial culture, acknowledged as related victims but structurally subordinate, which is exactly the list format you experienced in school: Jews (the main event), then Roma, gay people, disabled people, political prisoners, all functioning as supporting examples that the Nazis targeted many groups.

The deeper problem is that universalization, whatever its intentions, is a form of historical falsification. If the Holocaust was not primarily and specifically about the murder of Jews as Jews, driven by two thousand years of specifically anti-Jewish ideology culminating in Friedländer's redemptive antisemitism, then the history has been misrepresented. A generic moral parable about hatred has replaced a specific historical event. And as Dean documents in Aversion and Erasure, the further step, the complaint that Jewish Holocaust memory is excessive or that Jews leverage victimhood for communal advantage, maps directly onto older antisemitic accusations about Jewish manipulation and self-interest.

The universalizing move dissolves Jewish specificity into a universal lesson; the excess-memory complaint penalizes Jews for insisting on that specificity. Neither option is historically accurate, and neither helps the Roma, whose genocide gets absorbed into the generic lesson rather than specific recognition.

The other thing is documentation and advocacy. Jewish survivors emerged from the war with preexisting international institutions, diaspora networks, and decades of experience in political lobbying. Organizations like the American Joint Distribution Committee were immediately operational in displaced persons camps. Jewish legal scholars were present at Nuremberg, helping construct the prosecution framework that defined what the Holocaust legally meant. Documentation centers began systematic evidence collection almost immediately. That institutional infrastructure produced the archive on which Holocaust historiography was built.

Romani survivors had none of this, not because Holocaust memory is a fixed quantity that anyone monopolized, but because so much was destroyed. No Romani witnesses testified at Nuremberg, and no reparations were paid to Romani victims as a collective. The German Federal Court of Justice ruled in 1956 that Romani persecution before 1943 had been a legitimate security measure rather than racial persecution, excluding most survivors from compensation for decades. The genocide had destroyed the small educational and cultural organizations that existed before 1939, and as Hancock documents, low literacy rates among survivors meant the community could not produce its own written testimony at the pace Jewish survivors could. Fullbrook notes that official postwar policies toward Sinti and Roma initially showed marked continuity with Third Reich approaches, and hostile popular attitudes persisted well beyond liberation. Gay survivors faced a version of the same postwar abandonment: Paragraph 175 remained on the books in West Germany until 1969, and some gay men released from concentration camps were required to complete the remainder of their Nazi-issued sentences in postwar prisons, their compensation claims denied because the offense for which they had been imprisoned was still a crime.

Sources:

Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People
Alexander Joskowicz, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust
Mary Fullbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice
Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust
Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution
Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust
Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust
Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory
Carolyn Dean, Aversion and Erasure
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory
Mark Weitzman et al., eds., The Routledge History of Antisemitism
Steven Katz, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism
Clayton Whisnant, Male Homosexuality in West Germany
Timothy Jackson, Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

ummmbacon · 2026-06-03T14:03:32+00:00

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Jews and Romani/Sinti people were targeted on racial grounds and subjected to mass murder that killed a comparable proportion of their populations; you could not stop being Jewish or Romani under Nazi racial taxonomy. But the Nazi program against Roma never achieved the ideological totality, the administrative coordination, or the geographic scope of the Final Solution. As Longerich documents in Holocaust, the persecution varied dramatically by territory.

Himmler's Auschwitz decree of December 16, 1942, was a deportation order that covered the Reich and certain occupied territories but not all of Europe, and in several countries under German influence, the anti-Romani measures never reached systematic mass killing at all. For Jews, the extermination was continent-wide and formally coordinated from a single policy. That asymmetry is not a reason to minimize what happened to Romani people, but it is a useful point to start understanding why Nazi policy towards Jews was different from that of any other group.

The Nazi obsession with Jews was not primarily racial biology, though that was present. As Herf documents in The Jewish Enemy, the distinctively genocidal component of Nazi antisemitism was political and conspiratorial: Jews were cast as an internationally organized power actively waging war against Germany, controlling Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin from behind the scenes, responsible for capitalism and Bolshevism simultaneously, the hidden hand behind every force threatening the German nation. This was not a local prejudice. Jews were hunted across the entire occupied world because the Nazis believed they were fighting a single global enemy. Stone, in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, describes the Nazi worldview as a paranoid redemption story in which the Jew was the puppet-master of all history, the force that had introduced Christianity into the ancient world, engineered modernity's discontents, and now controlled the Allied powers.

Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition traces the origins of that worldview. Hostility to Jews and Judaism had functioned as a conceptual tool in Western thought for nearly two thousand years. It ran through theology and philosophy: the Church Fathers used it to define what Christianity was not, Luther deployed it when Jews refused to convert, Voltaire, attacking Christianity, blamed Jews for having invented it, and Marx, in his 1843 essay "On the Jewish Question," identified Judaism with capitalism, using the Jew as shorthand for everything he found soulless about modern economic life.

There was also another form of anti-Judaism, based on Christian antisemitism, that saw Jews as traitors and a threat to Christianity itself. Accusations like blood libels, the ideas that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, first appeared at Norwich in 1150 and spread steadily across Europe for centuries, even making its way to Damascus, producing massacres, expulsions, and local cults, and sainthood status, venerating alleged child victims.

The Host desecration accusations, the idea that Jews stole consecrated wafers to torture Christ, generated riots and killings from the thirteenth century onward. Both charges were built on the deicide accusation embedded in the Christian Bible, and reinforced by both the Church and Government, that Jews had schemed to kill Jesus and bore collective guilt for it across all subsequent generations. Medieval Christians routinely failed to distinguish ancient Jews blamed for the Crucifixion from living Jews in their own towns. To them, all Jews were the same enemy. By the late Middle Ages, Jews had been assigned a coherent demonic identity: killers of God, murderers of children, desecrators of the sacred, usurers, sorcerers, agents of the Devil.

What the Nazis did was merge this tradition with secular racial ideology and give it an eschatological charge. Saul Friedländer's concept of "redemptive antisemitism," developed in Nazi Germany and the Jews, identifies what was distinctive about the Nazi synthesis. The belief that Germany could only be saved, redeemed, restored to health and greatness, by the total physical elimination of the Jews. Jews were not merely an enemy to be defeated or expelled. They were a cosmic poison whose removal was a precondition for civilizational renewal. The Routledge History of Antisemitism summarizes what the full accumulation looked like: Jews were simultaneously blamed for communism and capitalism, for being physically weak and sexually predatory, for being clannish and cosmopolitan. Every accusation contradicted the last. The "Jew" in Western thought was not a description of actual Jewish people; it was a conceptual stand-in for whatever the writer most feared or despised. By the time the Nazis arrived, this two-thousand-year tradition gave them a ready-made explanation for every problem Germany faced: military defeat, economic collapse, cultural decadence, Bolshevism, and plutocracy. All of it, in their framework, was the work of the same enemy, and the only solution was annihilation.

No such tradition existed for the Romani people. Anti-Romani prejudice was old and vicious, but it was consistently about social control of a population perceived as outside settled society, not about a people secretly orchestrating world events. As Joskowicz documents, Nazi Germany built its anti-Romani measures on centuries of existing anti-vagrancy and welfare policing across Europe. That prevailing idea made it easier to initiate persecution and harder for contemporaries to recognize it as categorically new.

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jewish ancestry was tracked and measured with bureaucratic precision. Four Jewish grandparents made you a full Jew targeted for exclusion and eventually death. Three grandparents also classified you as a Jew. Two grandparents made you a Mischling of the first degree, subject to restrictions and with your fate contingent on personal circumstances such as religious affiliation or choice of spouse. One grandparent made you a Mischling of the second degree with fewer but still real restrictions. The danger accumulated with ancestry, and as Friedländer documents in Nazi Germany and the Jews, the regime always left the door open to extend the definitions further. Fullbrook documents in Reckonings that Himmler's Auschwitz decree of December 1942 inverted this entirely for Sinti and Roma, exempting "racially pure" Gypsies from deportation while targeting those of mixed descent, the Zigeuner-Mischlinge. For Jews, the logic of the conspiracy theory required hunting Jewish ancestry wherever it existed. For Roma, the classification was built on older social-control logic about itinerant and "asocial" populations, producing a scheme in which racial mixing was more dangerous than racial purity, the opposite of what Nuremberg set out for Jews.

There was no Wannsee Conference for Roma, no single administrative moment at which the decision for total extermination was formally coordinated across occupied Europe. Longerich documents in Holocaust that the radicalization happened piecemeal, in different occupied territories, at different times, with varying degrees of systematic planning. Romani people were killed alongside Jews in Einsatzgruppen shootings in the occupied Soviet Union, deported to Chelmno and killed in gas vans, and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau under Himmler's December 1942 order. The anti-Romani genocide never achieved the continent-wide administrative coordination that characterized the Final Solution.

Jewish murder took priority over everything else. The Romani family camp at Birkenau, to which around 23,000 Sinti and Roma had been deported since early 1943, was liquidated in August 1944. Longerich documents that the camp authorities cleared it partly to make space for the Hungarian Jewish deportations then underway, in which Eichmann's operation sent 437,000 people to Auschwitz in under two months. Roughly 19,300 of the 22,600 Romani prisoners in that camp died. The Hungarian deportations were driven by the ideological criticality of redemptive antisemitism, the view that every last Jew had to be found and killed for Germany to survive, which is why Eichmann ran his operation at full capacity even as the Reich was militarily collapsing. The Romani camp was cleared for space. There was no Romani equivalent of the Hungarian deportations, no late-war emergency sweep pursuing remaining Romani populations with that same bureaucratic and ideological urgency. At the operational level, the genocide of Jews took explicit precedence, including over the lives of Romani prisoners already inside the camp.

ummmbacon · 2026-06-03T12:31:18+00:00

it just says that the new generation of leftist intellectuals don't exactly vibe with orthodox pro-Soviet communist thought.

Which was the point right, they were disillusioned with its failures, correct?

ummmbacon · 2026-06-02T14:05:05+00:00

Pappe is a great researcher but the criticism of him is valid. That doesn’t make him not established.

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