Jan 27, 2005
When Did the Word "Holocaust" Come into Wide Use to Describe the Horrors of WW II?
John Mullan, in the Guardian (1-25-05):
In the week that sees the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an argument about some of the most terrible events in human history turns on a preference for the definite or indefinite article. The Muslim Council of Britain is to boycott this week's public commemoration of the Holocaust because, in effect, our usual word for the Nazi's mass extermination of Europe's Jews implies its singularity. Iqbal Sacranie, the council's secretary general, says it will not attend because the event does not acknowledge "genocide" in the occupied territories of Palestine.
In effect, he is proposing that we return Holocaust to the range of meaning that it had up until the 1940s. Contrary to what is often supposed, the word had long referred to what the OED calls drily "the complete destruction of a large number of persons". In the 19th century it was readily used for mass slaughter, especially of innocent or unarmed victims. Churchill, like others, used it just after the first world war to refer to the killing of Armenians by Turks. He called this "a holocaust": appalling, but not unprecedented.
The horrors of mass murder during the second world war pressured the English language into a new, now sickeningly familiar word: genocide. It was only retrospectively, during the 1950s, that "the Holocaust" came to acquire its definite article and capital letter. This was much influenced by historians, trying to account for what was now seen as a singular chapter of human history. It was to be the equivalent for non-Jews of "the Shoah". By the 1960s, the usage was generally accepted in Britain, in particular by broadcasters and journalists. Now there was something called "Holocaust studies": the examination not of mass murder in general, but of one particular project for exterminating a race.
We have other words, notably the Nazi's own impeccably bland euphemism, Endlosung ("the final solution"). Their term certainly presumes the appalling uniqueness of what they were doing. Holocaust, however, has a power that comes from its older roots. From the 13th century it was used to mean a sacrifice that was wholly consumed by fire (from the Greek words for whole and burned). It awakens recollections of the burnt offerings of the Old Testament (holocaust was used in some of the earliest English translations) and then of another burning: the industrialised cremations organised by the Nazis. No contestation is likely to unroot these associations, or the word's terrible singleness of meaning
In the week that sees the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an argument about some of the most terrible events in human history turns on a preference for the definite or indefinite article. The Muslim Council of Britain is to boycott this week's public commemoration of the Holocaust because, in effect, our usual word for the Nazi's mass extermination of Europe's Jews implies its singularity. Iqbal Sacranie, the council's secretary general, says it will not attend because the event does not acknowledge "genocide" in the occupied territories of Palestine.
In effect, he is proposing that we return Holocaust to the range of meaning that it had up until the 1940s. Contrary to what is often supposed, the word had long referred to what the OED calls drily "the complete destruction of a large number of persons". In the 19th century it was readily used for mass slaughter, especially of innocent or unarmed victims. Churchill, like others, used it just after the first world war to refer to the killing of Armenians by Turks. He called this "a holocaust": appalling, but not unprecedented.
The horrors of mass murder during the second world war pressured the English language into a new, now sickeningly familiar word: genocide. It was only retrospectively, during the 1950s, that "the Holocaust" came to acquire its definite article and capital letter. This was much influenced by historians, trying to account for what was now seen as a singular chapter of human history. It was to be the equivalent for non-Jews of "the Shoah". By the 1960s, the usage was generally accepted in Britain, in particular by broadcasters and journalists. Now there was something called "Holocaust studies": the examination not of mass murder in general, but of one particular project for exterminating a race.
We have other words, notably the Nazi's own impeccably bland euphemism, Endlosung ("the final solution"). Their term certainly presumes the appalling uniqueness of what they were doing. Holocaust, however, has a power that comes from its older roots. From the 13th century it was used to mean a sacrifice that was wholly consumed by fire (from the Greek words for whole and burned). It awakens recollections of the burnt offerings of the Old Testament (holocaust was used in some of the earliest English translations) and then of another burning: the industrialised cremations organised by the Nazis. No contestation is likely to unroot these associations, or the word's terrible singleness of meaning