HOLOCAUST
Definition from the Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust, volume 2 from Macmillan
Publishing
HOLOCAUST
(Heb., sho'ah). The word "holocaust"
is derived from the Greek holokauston,
which originally meant a sacrifice totally
burned by fire; it was used in the translation
of I Samuel 7:9, "a burnt offering to
God." In the course of time it came to. be used
to describe slaughter on a general or large
scale, and, especially, various forms of the
destruction of masses of human beings. In the
1950s the term came to be applied
primarily to the destruction of the Jews of
Europe under the Nazi regime, and it is also
employed in describing the annihilation of other
groups of people in World War II. The mass
extermination of Jews has become the archetype
of GENOCIDE, and the terms sho'ah and
"holocaust" have become linked to the attempt by
the Nazi German state to destroy European Jewry
during World War II.
The
use of the Hebrew word sho'ah to denote
the destruction of Jews in Europe during the war
appeared for the first time in the booklet
Sho'at Yehudei Polin (The Holocaust of
the Jews of Poland), published by the United Aid
Committee for the Jews of Poland, in Jerusalem
in 1940. The booklet contains reports and
articles on the persecution of Jews in eastern
Europe from the beginning of the war, written or
verbally reported by eyewitnesses, among them
several leaders of Polish Jewry. Up to the
spring of 1942, however, the term was
rarely used. The Hebrew term that was first
used, spontaneously, was hurban (lit.,
"destruction"), similar in meaning to
"catastrophe," with its historical Jewish
meaning deriving from the destruction of the
Temple. It was only when leaders of the Zionist
movement and writers and thinkers in Palestine
began to express themselves on the destruction
of European Jewry that the Hebrew term sho'ah
became widely used. It was still far from
being in general use, even after the November
1942 declaration of the Jewish Agency
that a sho'ah was taking place. One of
the first to use the term in the historical
perspective was the Jerusalem historian BenZion
Dinur (Dinaburg), who, in the spring of
1942, stated that the Holocaust was a
"catastrophe" that symbolized the unique
situation of the Jewish people among the nations
of the world.