(Former) Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' Holocaust Nonsense

[Karl Radl]

(Former) Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' Holocaust Nonsense

Sometimes I wonder how I am ever going to get through all the books that I need to read and one of said books that has sat in my 'to read' stack for quite some time is the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Jonathan Sack's 2003 work on the Haggadah prayers that are used at Pesach (Passover).

With no particular surprise I noticed that Sacks, as is common in modern popular rabbinics, used the 'holocaust' as a source of moral and ethical examples to illustrate his points. Firstly I'd like to comment on Rabbi Sacks' ludicrous claim that 'Gradualism later became part of the Nazis programme of genocide.' (1)

Now the concept of 'gradualism' (or the progressive evolution towards a necessary conclusion and/or a defined objective) harks back to one of the most fundamental debates in 'Holocaust Studies': the 'Intentionalist' versus the 'Functionalist' debate.

In simple terms the 'Intentionalists' believed that Hitler explicitly ordered the 'holocaust' at some point before or after the beginning of the Second World War, while the 'Functionalists' believed that Hitler tacitly encouraged the 'holocaust' policy to be implemented once the Second World War began, but that it was never explicitly ordered or intended.

Both of these points assume that there was a 'gradual' escalation in the Third Reich's policy towards and that this had a definite objective in providing a complete solution to the Jewish Question.

This is erroneous because it has never been demonstrated, although it is often claimed without demonstration, that German policy or objective ever significantly altered before the advent of the Second World War and even then it was simply a continuation of peace time policy (isolation and population transfer).

There was no 'gradual ramp up' the amount of violence towards, and the 'persecution' of, jews stayed at approximately the same level; the only thing that changed was that the quasi-legal policies of 1933-1935 (i.e. think of the SA's creation of the 'wild camps') were formalized into full legality and implemented from 1936-1945 (i.e. think of the SS' creation of the concentration camp system).

Now I am sure you'd instinctively claim Kristallnacht as Exhibit A of said ramp up as per standard procedure, but think about it a moment. The Germans didn't enact a new policy during or after Kristallnacht (if you hold to the standard version of events anyway), but rather carried out a reprisal to an external event.

Much like the German boycott of jewish businesses 1933 is much talked about without the necessary context that prior to this jewish organizations around the world had announced a boycott of German businesses/produce following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

Where then was the 'gradual escalation' of anti-jewish policy in the Third Reich when the so-called 'gradual escalations' were caused by jewish behaviour outside of Germany towards Germans?

Clearly the Third Reich never actually substantially altered its policies or defined objective, but merely retaliated with temporary reprisals following an act of flagrant terrorism in the premeditated murder of one of its diplomats in a foreign capital.

Or perhaps you don't know that many of the jews rounded up on Kristallnacht were subsequently released from protective custody (which is how and why they were detained) by the Third Reich's police force?

We can therefore see that the idea that there was a 'gradual escalation' of anti-jewish policy in the Third Reich is absolute nonsense as the policy was same in 1933 as in 1939 and 1945. Sacks' contention that 'gradualism was part of the Nazi programme' is simply utter drivel as it is a conspiracy theory that lacks any actual evidence to support it other than 'received wisdom'.

Sacks recycles similar nonsense in another anecdotal claim, which reads as follows:

'In the Kovno ghetto in the early 1940s an extraordinary scene took place one morning in the makeshift synagogue. The Jews in the ghetto had begun to realize the fate that lay in store for them. They knew none of them would escape, that the work camps to which they would be transported were in fact factories of death.' (2)

We should notice two things about this anecdote.

In the first instance the time period has to be from late 1941 to the autumn of 1943 (the time the Kovno ghetto existed), but the way it is expressed is vague, which suggests it is more like something someone dreamed up that became ghetto, and then 'holocaust', folklore (i.e. an uplifting tale if you will). It is rather like saying 'I met a telepathic Rabbi in the Kovno ghetto sometime in the early 1940s' in that is an improbable vague claim based on no independent authority or convergence of evidence.

The second is, as with much so-called 'holocaust survivor' testimony, the fact that it necessarily invalidates the entire premise on which the 'holocaust' assertion is built. In that this anecdote claims that jews were 'aware' that the 'labour camps' were really 'death camps' sometime between 1941 and 1943 (the 'holocaust' only supposedly started in early/mid-1942).

This is nonsense on two levels since in the first case according to orthodox 'holocaust' theory the entire operation was a closely guarded secret and the only jews aware of it were the 'death camp' kapos (i.e. jewish helpers). This is because there is no actual documentation of the 'holocaust' and is required proposition to explain this to avoid the rather obvious use of Occam's razor (no paperwork for an alleged systematized industrialized homicidal program targeted at a specific group of people = there was probably no such program as there is no evidence to justify the previous claim).

In the second the idea that the 'labour camps' were 'death camps' is absurd since the only alleged 'pure death camps' (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka) were supposedly masked as transit camps not as labour camps. While the best known, and largest, 'death camps', such as Auschwitz, were actually labour camps with a small area dedicated to supposedly 'exterminating' jews according to orthodox theory.

In essence the stated, and apparently magically acquired, belief that the jews and their relatives from Kovno weren't going to a labour camp but a 'death camp' is absurd, because the so-called 'pure death camps' were never claimed to be labour camps, but rather that they were transit camps. While the 'death camps' were in the main, according to orthodox holocaust theory, labour camps with a small attached facility for killing jews who were not able to used to support the war effort.

In other words they would have always going been going to a 'pure death camp' they would have in fact gone to a transit camp, while if they were going to a 'death camp' then they would have been going to a labour camp, which were never 'factories of death' claimed by Sachs anecdote even according to orthodox theory on the subject.

In essence Rabbi Sacks is engaging in that classically jewish habit of bluffing and making stuff up as he goes along.

In jewish culture this is called Chutzpah.

References

(1) Jonathan Sacks, 2003, 'The Chief Rabbi's Haggadah: Hebrew and English Text with New Essays and Commentary by Jonathan Sacks', 1st Edition, Harper Collins: London, p. 28
(2) Ibid, p. 14

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This was originally published at the following address: http://www.semiticcontroversies.blog...han-sacks.html