What is the origin of the word Holocaust?
3383889#1
The word "holocaust" originally derived from the Greek word "holokauston", meaning "a completely ("holos") burnt ("kaustos") sacrificial offering," or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god." In Greek and Roman pagan rites, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word "holocaust" was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the olah, standard communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required to make in the times of the Beit HaMikdash (Temple in Jerusalem). In its Latin form, "holocaustum", the term was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jewish people by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes in England in the 1190s.
Names of the Holocaust
42621186#3
Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust has received criticism regarding the use of the word "holocaust" in their name. Although "Merriam-Webster Dictionary" defines "holocaust" as "a mass slaughter of people: a genocide", since the 1940s "the Holocaust" usually refers to the mass slaughter of Jews by Nazis during World War II. Fueling the controversy over their name, in 2013, Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust held an anti-abortion demonstration at the New Mexico Holocaust & Intolerance Museum, and they demanded the museum include exhibits on abortion, offending local Jewish leaders. Rabbi Harry Ronsenfeld said, "It is offensive when someone co-opts what's yours". In defense of their use of the term, the Survivors said the number of abortions that take place in the United States qualifies it as a genocide.
Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust
3383889#14
Czechoslovak–Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, stated: "Let us be clear: … Shoah, Churban, Judeocide, whatever we call it, is the name we give to the attempted planned total physical annihilation of the Jewish people, and its partial perpetration with the murder of most of the Jews of Europe." He also contends that the Holocaust should include only Jews because it was the intent of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews, while the other groups were not to be totally annihilated.
Inclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Holocaust is objected to by many persons including, and by organizations such as Yad Vashem, an Israeli state institution in Jerusalem established in 1953 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. They say that the word was originally meant to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such totality and specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis. Nobel laureate and Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, does consider other groups, besides the Jews, as Holocaust victims, declaring to President Jimmy Carter, "Not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims," when he asked his support for a national Holocaust museum in Washington.
Names of the Holocaust
42402#34
The word "genocide" was generated from a need for new terminology in order to understand the gravity of the crimes committed by the Nazis. First coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, the word became politically charged when The Genocide Act was enacted by the United Nations on December 9, 1948, which created an obligation for governments to respond to such atrocities in the future. The debate on the "Gay Holocaust" is therefore a highly loaded debate which would result in an international acknowledgement of state sponsored homophobia as a precursor to genocide should the proponents of the "Gay Holocaust" succeed. However the United Nations definition does not include sexual orientation (or even social and political groups) within its qualifications for the crime. Genocide by the U.N. definition is limited to national, ethnical, racial or religious groups and as this is the only accord to which nations have pledged allegiance, it stands as the dominant understanding of the term. It is, however, what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms "an age when collective apologies are becoming increasingly common" as well as a time when the established Holocaust discourse has settled and legitimized claims of the Jewish, Roma and mentally ill victims of Nazi persecution so it would seem an appropriate time to at least bring attention to the debate of the Gay Holocaust, even if the issue is not to be settled.
Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany
3383889#7
By the late 1960s, the term was starting to be used in this sense without qualification. Nora Levin's 1968 book "The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945" explains the meaning in its subtitle, but uses the unmoderated phrase "The Holocaust". An article called "Moral Trauma and the Holocaust" was published in the "New York Times" on February 12, 1968. However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period. The 1978 television miniseries titled "Holocaust" and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture. "Holocaust" was selected as the Association for the German Language's Word of the Year in 1979, reflecting increased public consciousness of the term.
Names of the Holocaust
3383889#2
The earliest use of the word "holocaust" to denote a massacre recorded by the "Oxford English Dictionary" dates from 1833 when the journalist Leitch Ritchie, describing the wars of the medieval French monarch Louis VII, wrote that he "once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church", a massacre by fire of the inhabitants of Vitry-le-François in 1142. As this occurred in a church, it could be seen as a religious offering. The English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem "Samson Agonistes," in which the massacre was clearly divinely dedicated. The word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon, taking on a secular connotation.
Names of the Holocaust
3383889#8
The Hebrew word "Shoah" is preferred by some people due to the supposed theologically and historically unacceptable nature of the word "holocaust". The American historian Walter Laqueur (whose parents died in the Holocaust) has argued that the term "Holocaust" is a "singularly inappropriate" term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a "burnt offering" to God. Laqueur wrote, "It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim". The British historian Geoff Eley wrote in a 1982 essay entitled "Holocaust History" that he thought the term Holocaust implies "a certain mystification, an insistence on the uniquely Jewish character of the experience".
Names of the Holocaust
13224#175
In 1941, the Nazi leadership decided to implement a plan that they called the "Final Solution" which came to be known as the Holocaust. Under the plan, Jews and other "lesser races" along with political opponents from Germany as well as occupied countries were systematically murdered at murder sites, German concentration camps, and starting in 1942, at extermination camps. Between 1941 and 1945 Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled and members of other groups were targeted and methodically murdered — the origin of the word "genocide". In total approximately 11 million people were killed during the Holocaust including 1.1 million children.
History of Germany
3383889#17
The biblical word Shoah (שואה), also spelled Shoa and Sho'ah, meaning "calamity" in Hebrew (and also used to refer to "destruction" since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the 20th-century "Holocaust" as early as the early 1940s. In recent literature it is specifically prefixed with Ha ("The" in Hebrew) when referring to Nazi mass-murders, for the same reason that "holocaust" becomes ""The" Holocaust". It may be spelled "Ha-Shoah" or "HaShoah", as in Yom HaShoah, the annual Jewish "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day".
Names of the Holocaust
3383889#16
The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: "Endlösung der Judenfrage") was the Nazis' own term, recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, and translated into English for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. Before the word "Holocaust" became normative this phrase was also used by writers in English. For example, in William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", the genocide is described as "The Final Solution" (in quotation marks; the word "Holocaust" is not mentioned). In both English and German, "Final Solution" has been widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust". Whereas the term "Holocaust" is now often used to include all casualties of the Nazi death camps and murder squads, the "Final Solution" refers exclusively to "the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people," as defined at the site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term "Völkermord" ("genocide"), or in full, "der Völkermord an den Juden" ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either "Holocaust" or increasingly "Shoah."
Names of the Holocaust