What’s in a name?
April 9, 2010 
5 Comments
by Toni Kamins
Communications Manager, URJ
On April 11 we observe Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance day. Apart from all the appropriate memorials and tributes, it is also a good time to examine the single word that now defines for us many of the singular and unspeakable events of the Second World War – Holocaust. Why? Because the word holocaust is an inaccurate description of what occurred, an insult to the memory of those who were murdered, and a theological affront to Jews.
Despite the fact that the English-language calendar indicates that Yom HaShoah translates as Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Hebrew word hashoah and the word holocaust (which comes from Greek) do not mean the same thing – not even close. HaShoah means a calamity or catastrophe, something devoid of the presence of God. It was this word, along with the word hurban (Hebrew for destruction), that was used by contemporary European Jews to describe what was happening all around them. Jewish documents and reports of that era also use the word hashoah as did the pre-Israel Jewish government, the Jewish Agency for Palestine. And it is the word used in Israel today to describe the events. But the word holocaust means something very different.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary holocaust is derived from the Greek words holos (whole) and kaustos (burnt). The first definition listed is “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering.” The earliest use of the term to describe the mass murder of the Jews of Europe goes back to the 1950s, although some sources can pinpoint such a use in the mid-1940s. However the Hebrew word for this kind of sacrifice is olah, a complete offering to God made by fire.
The key words for this discussion are sacrifice and offering and as such the use of the word holocaust is fraught with theological implications. In using it to describe the murder of millions of Jews the word holocaust really begs three interrelated and very disturbing questions:
Who is being sacrificed; for what reason; and to whom?
Are we to infer that millions of Jews were sacrificed to God? Why was this sacrifice made and by whom? Did God accept this sacrifice?
For the sake of argument, if the answers to the first two questions are yes, we must then assume that the sacrifice had a purpose. If the answers to the first two questions are no we are left to wonder why we are using the word holocaust.
Among Jews, for whom the end to the practice of human sacrifice was codified in the Book of Genesis when God provided Abraham with a ram in place of his son Isaac, the very notion of millions of lives given as an offering for any reason, and the acceptance by God of such an offering is not only abhorrent, it is theologically untenable. Yet for Christians, the idea of human sacrifice, or more accurately, one human’s sacrifice for a higher purpose, is at the core of their belief.
We must ask then, from a Christian perspective, does the death of so many Jews have a higher purpose? Was it God’s plan that Jews should continue to be punished for the crime of refusing to accept Jesus as the messiah? Can the Christian belief in the sacrifice of the Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth, and his transcendence through death, be extended down
through the centuries to include every Jew, perhaps his familial, but not his theological descendants? Christians may be comfortable with the concept of rebirth following physical and spiritual destruction. Indeed Christians may feel at ease with the premise that so many Jews were destroyed and then reborn in the form of the State of Israel. Not only does it absolve them of complicity in the Shoah and the centuries of persecution, murder, segregation, and forced conversions to Christianity that preceded it, but it serves as a means of fulfillment of their prophecies.
The use of the word holocaust as it has become generally accepted to describe the murder of millions of Jews during World War II carries with it a constant replaying, whether intentional or not, of the fundamental Christian story – redemption or rebirth through a human sacrifice to God, and the rebirth of Jews into a new covenant with God, through the sacrifice of one of their own.
But this is most definitely not a Jewish concept. Indeed a lifetime of using the word holocaust notwithstanding, many Jews now reject it in favor of HaShoah once they are made aware of the theological implications.
Christianity as a group of institutions may find it difficult to accept its complicity in the vicious murder of so many Jews, and in order to mitigate this they may take comfort in wresting something good from it. By doing this Christianity attempts to shoehorn the surviving Jews into the same theological agenda that lead to the Shoah in the first place…that a Jew can be murdered for the crime of being a Jew, but an entirely new life awaits after redemption through death. In reality it is just another form of forced conversion.
Parenthetically, it is no coincidence that some evangelical Christians, nominally some of Israel’s strongest supporters, also perpetuate this notion and their support for Israel on this basis is disingenuous: Their sole purpose in supporting the modern sovereign Jewish state is the hope that all Jews will find their way there in fulfillment of their interpretation of Christian prophecy. They’re eager for a whole lot more Jews to be sacrificed so that we and the rest of the world can be redeemed.
What’s in a name? Plenty. There is a reason Jews chose the word HaShoah. We are keenly aware now as we were then of the meaning of what occurred.
You’ve certainly made a convincing case for our using Shoah instead of Holocaust, and without even including the implicit indignity to those Shoah victims who never got to the crematoria.
I am reminded of at least two other arenas where informed and linguistically sensitive Jews fight the good fight in what remain losing battles:
1. Our effort to use B.C.E. and C.E. instead of B.C. and A.D.
2. Our effort to avoid using Old Testament to describe our Bible, substituting Tanach or Holy Scriptures.
Now the question arises, how do we respond when we refer to the Shoah, and are met with uncomprehending stares? What’s the plan to get a name change for the museum in Washington, and its counterparts in Skokie, Houston, Florida, and the list goes on?
Obviously, the H word is here to stay — and maybe the best we can do is analogize it to other terms in the Jewish vocabulary that have different meanings when upper-cased than when lower-cased: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox as primary examples.
Remember, too, that the definition you give from the OED,”a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering,” pads the actual etymology of wholly burnt, even while referring to the lower-case word without regard to the event we capitalize.
Having said all this, I nonetheless will try to remember to say Shoah when the subject arises.
Toni, you may be over-thinking this. Everyone knows what the Holocaust is. Regardless of the derivation of the word (a technicality which almost no one knows or cares about), the Holocaust now has a clear meaning and that alone is a good reason not to change it. Changing it involves a major effort (debating the change, winning organizational, popular and governmental support, renaming buildings, organizations, holidays, revising statutes, educating people as to the new term, etc.) and creates confusion. If successful in changing the term, people the vast number of existing references to the Holocaust would still be there. In my judgment, it’s way too late.
When we have language which is clearly understood and widely accepted, there must be a compelling reason to adopt a new meaning, even if the new term would have been a better choice in the beginning. I am not persuaded that there is a compelling reason here.
As for B.C. and New Testament, I don’t expect the proponents of new terms to be successful for much the same reasons.
Words change meaning with time.
Not too long ago, “gay” meant happy. Now, it means “homosexual”.
Holocaust may have originally meant “burnt offering”, but now it means “catastrophe”.
W. G. Miller
Actually what changes is a word’s usage, not necessarily its meaning. Gay still means happy, and its meaning as homosexual is certainly NOT new, it goes back at least one hundred years. Take a look for example at some old movies (1930s) where it is used instead of homosexual.
Words get dropped in favor of more accurate or better words all the time so there is no reason why, through education, people can’t be taught that the word holocaust is inappropriate and the word shoah is preferred. There are plenty of words we no longer use because they are offensive or inappropriate.
I think, Toni, that we have to differentiate between holocaust and Holocaust — and regardless of the root of holocaust, accept its contemporary meaning as a generic term for a large-scale destruction, especially by fire. The specific event of the Shoah (again, capitalized in English to differentiate it from other calamities) can still be preferred as the term for the destruction of the European Jews in the ’40s. Since Hebrew lacks capital letters, the differentiation there comes from the use of HaShoah, THE catastrophe.
Meanwhile, as to new meanings or changes in meaning, what continues to exist is the historicity of a meaning. Any use of gay in ’30s movies to mean other than happy was code for insiders, and to use it today in other than its current usage is to invite incomprehension or misunderstanding. (Compare with silly, which once meant innocent.)