Does Judaism have the wrong interpretation of the Holocaust?

The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim famously instituted what he called the 614th commandment (Judaism legendarily has 613 of these): because the Nazis had tried to destroy Judaism and Jewish life (and largely did so in Yiddish-speaking Central and Eastern Europe, for those who had not already left for America or elsewhere to escape pogroms and misery), it is essential that Jews be Jewish and observe the rites and traditions of Judaism. This is a woefully inadequate response based on a largely incorrect interpretation of what the Holocaust did. It did not attack the Judaism of the Jewish people so much as their very existence; it did not attack their existence as Jews so much as their existence as human beings. And this distinction is an important one. It is part of what allows us to look at the phenomenon more broadly. Which is necessary first, because millions of non-Jews also perished in the same way, or if they were luckier, were merely subjected to a very dehumanizing form of incarceration and forced labor, aiming to destroy people through the way it kept them alive, with or without finally sending them to the death house.

And secondly, because the Nazi concentration and death camps are all too obviously in part a product not just of extreme prejudice and attitudinal nastiness of the kind that presumably would find its cure in some form of Americanism, where everyone is welcome from everywhere (just so long as they share our mores and values). And the consequence of that is that there is all too much obvious resemblance between the prison camp that Auschwitz and the other places were, and the prisons, mental hospitals, and other places where so many people, otherwise unwanted, are sent, still, even today, and even in the most enlightened countries that celebrate human rights and liberty, like America, which has more prisoners per capita that anywhere. It is true enough that our prisons are “not as bad” as the Nazi, Soviet, and other prison systems were. But what kind of recommendation is that?

Is it that we are humane because we don’t kill these millions but are determined to keep them alive, merely outside of society, which must be protected, etc.? Prisoners are thrown away. That’s the truth.

It is true that Nazism was based on hatred of a people. The Jews are not a race, though in Europe after Darwin they were often thought to be. But if it is obviously true enough that there would have been no Holocaust without anti-Semitism, it is perhaps even more glaringly true that there would have been no concentration and killing camps like those had it not been for modern European colonialism, the practices of imprisonment and incarceration of people deemed “mentally ill” or otherwise not wanted, and indeed, practices like that of psychiatry, from which Nazism derived some of its key motivational metaphors.

The Nazi state was one devoted to health: hygeine, eugenics, social gatherings to devoted to gymnastics, fighting disease, and building a nation that was “pure” in several senses, giving the true medical metaphorics to “ethnic cleansing.” Notions of health provided the organizing metaphorics for the Third Reich’s continental neo-colonial project. And so it was only “natural” that the physically deformed and the “mentally ill” would also get the correctional treatment of an asphyxiating gas. Couldn’t they instead keep them alive, and try to end all degrading treatments, while still removing people from their friends, family, community, and work, interests, and life, giving them sanitized clean environments, healthy food, total supervision, and indefinite detention in a system of warehousing? They can be given their human rights, which, alas, at least when made the object of adminstrative organization, turn out to be animal rights. (Food, medical care, shelter, absence of physical violence, and otherwise - just nothing to do, having been separated from everything that had given one’s life meaning, unless that is some empty Stoical or Buddhist affiirmation of the mere breath of life, perhaps augmented by some heroic moral discourse. As with the American slaves, they will be allowed to worship the boss of it all).

Now our societies have progressed. The dominant forms of “spirituality” are intensely therapeutic, and their metaphors are drawn not from religion (holiness) nor ethics (the good life) or morality (recognizing the divine or good in other persons) exactly, but rather health and sickness. The New Age “God” is not very different from the old Puritan one; he wants you to be healthy and pure. And won’t mind too much if you also want to be “clean” with respect to other persons, who might be thought to contaminate you. These ideologies, which are certainly not very “Judeo-Christian” (note: A “Judeo-Christian” is, precisely, a Christian, or at least one who is not a Gnostic and so reads the “Old Testament”), have their corrolate in social practices: Today we police ourselves and each other with reference to psychiatric medicine, or a bio-medical psychology. Its norms are not so different from the “spiritual” religiosity of care for health of the individual and social body. It is fully consistent with racisms and hatred of foreigners. But if there could be something akin to Nazism without prejudices against any social groups or minorities, it might just be practices of mental health and illness.

We also have a tendency as a society to treat with suspicion and want to prosecute large categories of misdemeanors or bad manners. You can be arrested for “raising your voice” to a public official or some other putative transgression of normality and civility. The 615th commandment must be to understand a history that we cannot just claim exemption from. Otherwise, it will repeat itself, maybe excepting “us” this time around. Small comfort, I say. The repetition will surprise us, with horrible consequences, because like all repetitions in historical time, it will happen in a different way that we were not prepared for. The German Third Reich was a capitalist police state, and while it was a bit more than that, too, it was also that. Recognition of this, and the fact that it is a problem — in many ways, the problem (I do not say it is the only one, nor that garden variety anti-Semitism is not also a problem, as it certainly is, including on the "left”), is one of the things that divides the left from the right and the center, and within the Jewish world as much as anywhere.