Holocaust scholarship distorted past Jewish persecution by forcing a continuity narrative

Evidence

Its influence on research, however, was not unambiguous. On the one hand, it led to much fresh research with a wide geographical and chronological scope, as scholars moved beyond the Nazi era and the case of Germany. On the other, there was sometimes a tendency to view past hostility as “a rehearsal for destruction” rather than to put it in specific context reflecting the anxieties of a particular age and the particular impact on the Jewish minority. Continuity has been emphasized at the cost of looking at periods in history which were marked by an absence of persecution or when responses were more complex than outright rejection. Furthermore, the sheer enormity of the Holocaust has often acted as a barrier to meaningful comparisons, even within the other racisms and general persecutions carried out by the Nazi state and its collaborators. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 493

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates about whether antisemitism is unique vs. one racism among many — echoes comparative genocide and racism scholarship. — connects to: Comparing the Holocaust to postwar German expulsions broke all possibility of dialogue — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 606; Scholars shifted Holocaust study from Hitler to the bureaucratic middlemen — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 47