Holocaust scholarship: towards a post-uniqueness era

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary theoretical approaches that combine Holocaust studies and genocide studies, and the historiography of the Holocaust with the German occupation of eastern Europe. It analyses the sources of the idea, long dominant in Israeli historiography and among Jewish historians in the United States, that the Holocaust was an event of unique historical significance, as well as the crisis that has beset this perspective since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The place of the national-martyrological view of the Holocaust has been taken by new ideas that seek to incorporate the Holocaust into a broader history of the twentieth century. The article's premise is that the current trend of writing about the Holocaust as part of genocide studies offers only a partial answer to the need to write an integrated history of the Holocaust. It must be supplemented by the development of an approach that incorporates Holocaust studies into the broader national context of the countries and societies in which it took place, particularly eastern Europe, where European Jews were murdered alongside millions of members of the other nations that lived in the region.