Antisemitism history explains the victims, not the Holocaust’s criminal nature.

Evidence

This interpretation overlooks the essential discontinuity between even the most violent outbursts of premodern Judeophobia and the meticulously planned and executed operation called the Holocaust. It also glosses over the fact that - as Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago - only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, can be derived (if at all) from the history of antisemitism; indeed, it replaces the crucial issues of the nature of crime with the question of the unique features of Jews or Jewish-Gentile relations. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 369

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Arendt’s claim that only victim choice not crime nature derives from antisemitism history is worth chasing in her original Eichmann in Jerusalem or Origins of Totalitarianism.

Related

• Only the choice of victims, not the crime’s nature, derives from antisemitism history. (similarity 0.95)
• The Holocaust’s crime type is explained by something other than antisemitism. (similarity 0.91)
• Antisemitism explains victim selection, not the crime’s nature (similarity 0.88)
• Pre-Holocaust Jew-hatred was never genocidal and did not inevitably lead there (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust should not define what antisemitism across history looks like (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust drew little scholarly interest until recently (similarity 0.82)
• Holocaust scholarship distorted past Jewish persecution by forcing a continuity narrative (similarity 0.81)
• The Nazi claim that antisemitism was central is routinely dismissed as mere demagogy. (similarity 0.81)
• Antisemitism scholarship asked the uniqueness question at the expense of comparative racism (similarity 0.80)
• Holocaust exceptionalism hinders understanding antisemitism as racism (similarity 0.80)
• Social framing of Jews as a vice, not crime, enabled genocidal thoroughness. (similarity 0.80)
• Explanatory doctrines denying Jewish responsibility prefigured extermination practice (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust fused antisemitism with social and political mechanisms of an entirely different character. (similarity 0.80)
• Antisemitism was added to Pan-German program rather than foundational to it (similarity 0.79)
• Goldhagen claimed anti-Semitism alone but sufficiently explains the Holocaust at every level (similarity 0.79)