Why is it called the Holocaust?

Holocaust remembrance candle

The writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said, “The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened. You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.”

Yet the history of the word holocaust itself tells the story of our collective refusal to learn this lesson.

For those who may not know, Wiesel had survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentrations camps. He was instrumental in bringing about greater awareness to the Holocaust, and in doing so, some measure of honor to those who lived it. His memoir, Night, is one of the greatest classics of Holocaust literature. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which is probably one of the most haunting museum experiences I have ever had outside of Yad Vashem, which is of course Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. In 2005, at the opening ceremony of Yad Vashem, Wiesel gave a speech in which he said:

I know what people say – it is so easy. Those that were there won’t agree with that statement. The statement is: it was man’s inhumanity to man. NO! It was man’s inhumanity to Jews! Jews were not killed because they were human beings. In the eyes of the killers they were not human beings! They were Jews!

This feels to me the proper way to set into a history of the word holocaust, because so much of its history, as you will see, is actually not about Jews, and yet the word is now irrevocably about nothing other than man’s inhumanity to Jews. It is an inhumanity that seems only to fade in order to surprise you that it has been gaining strength in the shadows, an inhumanity that we felt was far behind us and now find right in our faces.

This is why I wrote the post, “Hostage to an Ongoing Holocaust,” because in several important ways, I do not think the Holocaust ever completely ended. It didn’t even completely change hands. Or locations. Like antisemitism, it has merely shifted and morphed into something less obvious, more insidious. But where does this word holocaust come from originally?

We trace its origins to the Hebrew term qorban ola (קרבן עלה), in which qorban refers to a ritual sacrifice such as an animal, while ola means to go up, as in ‘to go up in smoke.’ Therefore, qorban ola is a sacrifice that goes up in smoke, or simply, a burnt offering.

In ancient times, there were 45 such offerings made every day in the great Jewish temple, or as it was known, Bet haMiqdash (בית המקדש), literally the Holy House. This was during the time of the First Temple from the 10th century until 587 BCE, when the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, as well as during the period of the reconstructed Second Temple from 516 BCE until 70 CE, when it was destroyed by the Romans. Perhaps, if the temple is ever rebuilt, these offerings may resume.

When early Christians translated the Jewish scriptures into Greek, qorban ola became holokauston, a combination of the words holos or whole, as in ‘holistic,’ and kaustos or burned, as in ‘caustic.’ Therefore, a holocaust is a wholly burned sacrifice to God, as opposed to burning only part of the animal and eating the rest in communion.

Some English-language translations of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, translate qorban ola as “burnt offering.” But, for example, if we look at the New American Bible, then in Exodus 18:12 we find the translation, “Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, brought a holocaust and other sacrifices to God.”

The word holocaust was first used to describe killing people in 1833, when the journalist Leitch Ritchie wrote that Louis VII of France “once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church.” He was describing a massacre that took place in northern France in 1142 when the king ordered his troops to burn a town to the ground, including all the people who were taking refuge in the local church.

The next major usage was by the greatest epic poet in the English language, John Milton, who described the self-immolation of a phoenix in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes in the following lines.

Like that self-begott'n bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay e're while a Holocaust,
From out her ashie womb now teem'd
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem'd,
And though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird ages of lives.

In all these usages, we see the authors using the word quite literally to denote something being entirely burned, but the term edged closer to its current meaning when, in 1895, The New York Times described the Ottoman massacre of up to 300,000 Armenian Christians as a “holocaust.” However, the first person to use it in describing an actual genocide was National Geographic journalist Melville Chater, who in his 1925 article “History’s Greatest Trek,” used the word to describe the 1922 burning of Smyrna.

This event was the great atrocity of its day, shocking the world into stupefied horror. It took place during the rule of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey and its first president, although scholars dispute his degree of direct involvement in the burning of Smyrna itself. In fact, he is seen as a national hero by many for having fended off the partition of Turkey by Western powers.

In the Muslim world, however, Western powers were viewed mainly as Christian powers, and their looming encroachment looked to many Muslims very much like another Crusade, making Atatürk not just a Turkish hero but a hero to Muslims worldwide.

Another disputed aspect of Atatürk’s biography is the degree to which he took part in the late Ottoman genocides committed by the Young Turk movement, which the Turkish government today denies. Atatürk was a member of the movement at the time but, on the other hand, many people were, and not because they hated Armenians, Greeks, or Assyrians, who would each suffer their own genocides at the hands of the Young Turks, but for many, simply because they opposed Abdul Hamid II, the 34th and final sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

In any event, the burning of Smyrna took place when Turkish troops and Muslim mobs initiated the mass murder of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians, destroying the port city in September 1922 as part of the larger Turkish genocide of Christians that lasted from 1914 to 1924. Smyrna, known today as the city of Izmir, had been a famous Greek city known for its tolerance and ethnic as well as cultural diversity.

But in 1908, the Young Turks seized power from the empire, beginning their own reign of terror, which morphed into the Nationalist government that took office in 1919 with its “Turkey for Turks” campaign, framing diversity as a threat to national identity.

Now, there are many reasons we can cite for the massacres that would follow, but principle among them was the idea, put forward by the sociologist Ziya Gökalp and others, that ethnic pluralism would destabilize Turkish society. To be strong, Turkey had to be united in its values, and according to the theory, different races have different values, which meant non-Turkish races would have to go.

This, among a number of other factors that I would go into, led to the brutal persecution of Christians in Turkey, and in particular, the burning of Smyrna. Scholars say 10,000 to 125,000 people died in the fire, which to this day is one of the worst urban fires in human history. Yet as the fire raged, Western powers did nothing to stop it nor to save the roughly 1 million refugees who fled. As Melville Chater wrote in his article:

A few days after the triumphal entry of the Turks, the arm of quay-squatters saw flames dancing in the old wood-constructed Armenian quarter, a mile and a half away. The dance became a fiery hurdle race, as the wind-fanned flames leaped from balcony to balcony across the narrow streets; then the race became a hungry conflagration whose roaring mouth the through and gulped down to where the refugee multitude huddled between a waste of fire and a waste of sea.

It is interesting to note here that our two earliest holocausts, in the modern sense, were both perpetrated by Islamic militants. It is also interesting to note that Smyrna was an incredibly tolerant city, overtaken by radical Muslims as the West sat idly by. I am not going to push the parallels between this and modern-day events too hard, because many of the particulars do not line up, and besides, the broad similarities are clear enough that they do not need to be spelled out.

In his 2003 book With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide, Colin Martin Tatz, the director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, writes:

Holocaust, with a capital H, was Elie Wiesel’s chosen term because he wanted the Jewish destruction to be tied to God in that the word derives from ritual sacrifice … Shoah and Churn, the Hebrew words for ‘catastrophe’ and ‘destruction,’ suggest a more human, secular realm of death. Rightfully so: there was no Jewish ritual or offering, as in Abraham’s binding of Isaac. There was only a Nazi ritual and a routine of manufactured death.

Tatz adds that he prefers American historian and Holocaust expert Arno Mayer’s term “Judeocide” over “Holocaust.” He also objects to the term “antisemitism,” which was coined in 1879 by the German agitator and journalist Wilhelm Marr.

I think it’s important to note here that Marr wasn’t opposed to antisemitism. In fact, he wrote a pamphlet in 1879 titled “The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism,” in which he argued that Jews were not Germans and could not be assimilated, which is the same conclusion Adolf Hitler would arrive at decades later. Marr believed that German liberalism had allowed Jews to flourish, and that they had used this opportunity to seize control of German finance. To combat this, he founded the Antisemiten-Liga, or the League of Antisemites, advocating for the forced removal of all Jews from Germany.

As for Tatz, his objection to the term is much simpler. He simply notes that it is illogical because there is in fact no Semitism to be anti. Instead of this term then, Tatz prefers Judenhass, Jew-hatred, or Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien’s recommendation of anti-Jewism, which Tatz calls “an ugly term for an ugly reality.”

Reacting to the Armenian genocide in Turkey, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke in 1929 of “massacring uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women, and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust.” Churchill was not alone in using the word holocaust to describe the Armenian genocide, in fact it was this atrocity that popularized the use of the word to describe genocide, as in the title of the 1923 book The Smyrna Holocaust.

When the shadow of World War II loomed over Europe, people referred to it as “another holocaust.” Even after the war, the word had not yet caught on as a description for the genocide of Jews. In the late 1940s, the fire-bombing of Dresden was being described as a holocaust while the nuking of Hiroshima were referred to as a nuclear holocaust.

Possibly the earliest use to refer to Jews came in a May 23, 1943 article in The New York Times by Julian Meltzer, “Palestine Zionists Find Outlook Dark,” in which he described Jews immigrating to Palestine from “the Nazi holocaust.”

By the 1950s, people began to more commonly speak of the Jewish holocaust. In Hebrew, the term Shoah (שואה), meaning catastrophic destruction, refers to the Jewish holocaust, and many people use that term in English today who consider “holocaust” offensive because they do not want to speak of Jewish victims as if they were a sacrifice to God. But in English, “Jewish holocaust” remained somewhat common practice until, if you can believe it, Meryl Streep got involved.

Streep starred in the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust, which you can watch here. The show was sadly, for many Americans, their first real education on the subject. Streep’s performance was unsurprisingly phenomenal, gut-wrenching, and haunting. The show is often credited with having popularized the word holocaust to refer exclusively to the Jewish holocaust.

In other words, Meryl Streep is the reason we call it the Holocaust rather than simply a holocaust. As for why we capitalize it, again, for that we can thank Elie Wiesel, who as it happened, absolutely hated the miniseries, calling it, “Untrue, offensive, cheap: As a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived.”

As for all those who perished and survived, this of course includes more than just Jewish people, and for this reason Soviet prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Romani, people with disabilities, the LGBT community, and others are often included under the term Holocaust, but some, myself included, prefer to use Holocaust only for Jewish victims.

And some of these groups already have their own terms anyway. For instance, the Romani genocide is known as the Porajmos, or literally, the ‘devouring.’

Again, Wiesel would disagree, as he once famously said, “Not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”