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PARTISAN REVIEW
abled, the afflicted?) Even Nietzsche, who warned of what was in
store with the advent of' 'nihilism," caught only the barest flashes of
the coming of Hitler and the actuality of total dehumanizing torture
and death.
* * *
Is Israel now the answer for Jews? Or is Israel to be the
place where hostilities between Jews break out into the open again?
Or is there perhaps no answer any longer for Jews as Jews , or for
Christians as Christians, but only for both as human beings? Is this
what the eruption of the Hitler hell really signifies? The extermina–
tion factories in which people were treated as vermin-do they not
silently attest that Jews as Jews and Christians as Christians do not
matter now, but only both of them as human beings?
It was a natural reaction in Buchenwald , Auschwitz, Dachau
and the other camps, the survivors say , to think: "This
can't
be hap–
pening" (even as it was happening);
"Humanity won't let it happen."
But
there was no humanity,
internally or externally, between the killers
and the victims, or between the camps and those outside who knew,
and did nothing . The shock does not wear off; where we had
imagined there was something, there was nothing.
Is there a similar situation now with regard to the nuclear
holocaust? We think: "There won't be any nuclear holocaust.
Humanity will not allow it." But the truth is:
There is no humanity .
What we have to begin to comprehend is this: that humanity as
such has never mattered in Christianity, Islam or Judaism. They
each claimed the right to define humanity for themselves against
each other and against "pagans" and "heathens." But it was not
this
difined
humanity which was stripped away in the death camps. It
\
was not
Jewish
humanity or
Christian
humanity or
Islamic
humanity
which was reviled and spat upon; it was just ordinary humanity .
And this is what no one was prepared for.
Because
these people were
Jews or Gypsies or Jehovah's Witnesses or Communists , their com-
mon humanity was cancelled . The crime was against what united
them to the human race, what had been taken for granted, but
which none of the Western religions had ever spoken up for. In other
words,
it was against something which neither Christianity nor Islam nor
Judaism has ever been prepared to admit existed.
The astounding thing about the Holocaust, therefore, is that
what was done to the Jews and others is something which the
Biblical religions had no basis for even imagining. This is because
humanity (the bond between human beings as such with no further
