The Guardian (London) – Final Edition
January 25, 2005
G2: Shortcuts: The meaning of holocaust: Mind your language
by John Mullan
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.