This paper explores the 1933-1945 Holocaust as a cataclysmic episode in Jewish history within the context of persecution as a recurrent theme throughout Jewish history. It is argued that the function of Jewish historical memory and commemoration of the Holocaust is to preserve the sense of imminent (not merely past) danger and to instill the conviction that the Holocaust is as much a reality now as it was then. The tribal memory of wrongs becomes a collective basis for the survival of the Jewish people: hence the paradox of persistence through (not despite) persecution. The doctrine of historic exceptionalism, theologized as Chosenness, brings expiatory suffering to the center of the Jewish sense of history. Persecution as sacred martyrdom is experienced by Jews as simultaneously timeless, dreaded, and expected. What happen in history conforms to what unconsciously should happen in history. Outer events confirm inner meanings and participate in the psychohistorical process whereby those terrifying outer events are continuously reexperienced. Any social role theory that purports to account for Jewish history is incomplete if it does not subsume the dynamics of projection and externalization in that accounting. The Holocaust possesses the quality of the uncanny as discussed by Freud: familiar, familial, secret, frightening, alien. Jews focus upon their historic role of suffering and victimization in order to defend (by projection and intellectualization) against looking at the relationship between victims and their own victimization. The passive role is in fact a subtly active one. The equation, victim = sacrifice, is analyzed from within Jewish ethnopsychology and theology (e.g., the Abrahamic covenant), and is shown to predispose Jews to seek the role of historic partner in sadomasochistic social systems governed by reciprocal projective identifica