That we've broken their statues,
that we've driven them out of their temples,
doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead . . .
So wrote a Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, two thousand years after the reduction of history from—let's think of the young in this room!—stereo to mono. And let us hope that he is right.
And yet even before history got secularized—in order to become merely scientific—the damage was done: the upper hand that was gained by historical determinism in the course of those two thousand years gripped the modern conscience tightly and, it seems, irreversibly. The distinction between time and chronology was lost: first by historians, then by their audience. One can't blame either of them, since the new creed, having grabbed the places of pagan worship, shanghaied time's metaphysics, too. And here I must go back to where I sidetracked myself with my own aside, to nomads and settlers.
"Scatter," said God to His chosen people; and for a long time they did. That was actually the second time He spoke to them about moving. Both times they obeyed, albeit reluctantly. The first time, they had been on the road for forty years; the second time, it took them a bit longer, and in a manner of speaking, they are still in progress. The drawback of being in progress for so long is that you start to believe in progress: if not in your own, then in history's. It is about the latter that I'd like to comment here, on one of its recent examples; but first I must issue a few disclaimers.
The historical literature about the fate of Jews in this century is vast, and one shouldn't aspire to add anything qualitatively new to it. What prompts the following remarks is precisely the abundance of that history, not its want. More pointedly, the reason for these remarks is a few books on the subject that recently came my way. They all deal with the whats and the whys of the wrong that was done to the Jews by the Third Reich; and they are all written by professional historians. Like many books before them, they are rich in information and hypothesis; moreover, like many that will no doubt come after them, they are stronger on objectivity than on passion. This, one should hope, expresses the authors' professionalism as historians rather than the distance from these events accorded to the authors by their own age. Objectivity, of course, is the motto of every historian, and that's why passion is normally ruled out—since, as the saying goes, it blinds.
One wonders, however, whether a passionate response, in such a context, wouldn't amount to a greater human objectivity, for disembodied intelligence carries no weight. Moreover, one wonders whether in such a context the absence of passion is nothing but a stylistic device to which writers resort in order to emulate the historian or, for that matter, the modern cultural stereotype, a cool, thin-lipped, soft-spoken character inhabiting the silver screen for the better part of the century in a sleuthing or slaying capacity. If that's the case—and all too often the imitation is too convincing to feel otherwise—then history, which used to be the source of ethical education in society, has indeed come full circle.
In the end, however, most of these thin-lipped folk of the silver screen pull the trigger. A modern historian doesn't do anything of the sort, and he would cite science as the explanation for his reserve. In other words, the quest for objectivity of interpretation takes precedence over the sentiments caused by what is interpreted. One wonders, then, what is the significance of interpretation: Is history simply an instrument for measuring how far we can remove ourselves from events, a sort of anti-thermometer? And does it exist independently, or only insofar as historians come and go, i.e., solely for their sake?
I'd rather let these questions hang for a while; otherwise I'll never get through with my disclaimers, let alone with what they are meant to precede. To begin with, I'd like to point out that the following remarks are in no way motivated by my identification with the victims. Of course, I am a Jew: by birth, by blood, but not—alas, perhaps—by upbringing. That would be enough for a sense of affinity, except that I was born when they, those Jews, were dying, and I was not very cognizant of their fate until quite late into my teens, being pretty much absorbed by what was happening to my race, and to many others, in my own country, which had just defeated Germany, losing in the process some 20 million of its own. In other words, I had plenty to identify with as it was.
Now, I mention this not because I have caught the bug of historical objectivity. On the contrary, I speak from a position of strong subjectivity. As a matter of fact, I wish it were greater, since for me what happened to the Jews in the Third Reich is not history: their annihilation overlapped with the burgeoning of my existence. I enjoyed the dubious comfort of being a witless babe, bubbling sweet bubbles while they were going up in smoke in the crematoria and the gas chambers of what is known these days as Eastern or Central Europe, but what I and some friends of mine still regard as Western Asia. I am also cognizant that, had it not been for those 20 million dead Russians, I could have identified with the Jewish victims of the Third Reich in more ways than one.
So if I sometimes peruse books on this subject, I do it largely for egotistical reasons: to get a more stereoscopic picture of what amounts to my life, of the world in which I found myself a half century ago. Because of the close, indeed overlapping parallelism of the German and Soviet political systems, and because the penal iconography of the latter is rather scarce, I stare at the piles of corpses in my life's background with, I believe, a double intensity. How, I ask myself, did they get there?
The answer is breathtakingly simple: because they were there. In order to become a victim, one ought to be present at the scene of the crime. In order to be present at the scene of the crime, one ought either to disbelieve its probability or to be unable or unwilling to flee the premises. Of the three, it is the last, I'm afraid, that played the major role.
The origins of this unwillingness to move are worth pondering. This has been done many times over, yet less than the origins of the crime. This is so partly because the origins of the crime appear, to historians, to be an easier proposition. It is all ascribed to German anti-Semitism, whose lineage is habitually traced, with varying degrees of enterprise, to Wagner, Luther, and further down to Erasmus, the Middle Ages, and generally to the Jews-versus- gentiles business. Some historians are prepared to take their audience all the way back to dark Teutonic urges, straight into Valhalla. Others are content with the aftermath ofWorld War I, the Peace of Versailles, and Jewish "usury" against the backdrop of Germany's economic collapse. Still others lump all these things together, adding at times an interesting wrinkle, such as linking the virulence of the Nazis' anti- Jewish propaganda, rich in vermin imagery and references to Jewish hygienic habits, to the history of epidemics and their relatively small toll among the Jews in comparison to the main ethnic stock.
They are Lamarckians, these historians; they are not Darwinists. They appear to believe that affiliation to a creed can be passed on genetically (thus approximating one of Judaism's main tenets), that the same goes for attendant prejudices, intellectual patterns, and so on. They are biological determinists moonlighting as historians. Hence a straight line out of Valhalla into the bunker.