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position of the Church in Western Christian myth-and with it the hope
of changing the Jewish people into a "people like all others"---contin–
ues the myth's political and ideological metamorphoses.
It
also partici–
pates in writing the present chapter of the story war.
One way of formulating the Holocaust in Western Christian memory
was in terms of martyrdom, beginning with the term
holocaust-a
burnt
offering to God. Transforming the Jew from the accused to holy martyr
was ostensibly a gesture of grace. This granted a dimension of holiness
to the event and to the slain, and according to belief in the power of suf–
fering and death to atone and redeem, it also allowed for the hope of
changing European guilt into atonement, mercy, and compassion. But, in
fact, the martyrological formulation preserved a grain of violence.
Appropriating those murdered in the Holocaust as martyrs constituted a
rewriting of the self-definitions of those who were murdered and who
survived.
In
addition, formulating genocide in terms of sanctification and
sacrifice was a capitulation to the violence of the impulse to sacrifice–
by perpetuating the numinous quality of human sacrifice and extending
its terms into the political arena. As Jacques Lacan hinted in his remarks
on "the profound hypocrisy of the criticism of history," it was capitulat–
ing to "the fascination of human sacrifice to the dark gods."
The implications of the sacrifice resonate
in
much of post-World War
II Western culture, as well as in Jewish and Israeli culture, which is molded
by dialogue with and dependence on the West.
It
started with arguments
about forming the memory of the Holocaust in Israel and in the American
Jewish community, with demonstrations against accepting German repa–
rations in the 1950s, and with criticisms of the political exploitation of the
memory of the Holocaust, and went on in the public storm stirred up in
Israel in the 1990S by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's attempt to interpret the Holo–
caust in terms of reward and punishment. Their reverberations touch on
the internalization of the sanctification of the martyr in the concepts of
"hostage" or "marrano" in the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Lev–
inas and Jacques Derrida, on the struggle against the impulse of the victim
in Spiegel's study, which was written right after the Holocaust, and on the
rejection of female victirnhood in Eve Ensler's
Vagina Monologues,
among
others. Perhaps it was also the traditional recoil from the public exposure
of torments and their sanctification that precludes presenting the Israeli
population as a sacred victim in the current story war.
Moreover, the (forced and appropriated) identification of the Jew as
martyr violently collided with his traditional role in the Christian myth
and produced impulses of rejection that fuel many relations between the
Jewish people, Israel, and the West. One of the manifestations is "envy
