Only two weeks separate the annual celebrations of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, from the Foibe Remembrance Day. During the Shoah, or Holocaust, two thirds of European Jews were exterminated by Hitler’s Nazi regime in the name of his “superior Aryan race” ideology. The Foibe refers to the massacres of thousands of Italians who lived in southern Istria (Croatia), Dalmatia and the surrounding areas during and after the Second World War, perpetrated by Yugoslav partisans as a war revenge against the Italian fascist regime.
This year, an official letter was disseminated to the entire Italian school system by the Ministry of Education in which the Foibe have been compared to the Shoah. Just a few weeks earlier in the US, a very popular African-American TV host had casually declared that the Shoah had no connection with racism, that it was just another demonstration of man’s inhumanity towards man. In both cases, no mention was made of the true, unique, historical causes of the Shoah. Blind spots and knowledge gaps in communication can easily be interpreted by the misinformed as true facts, and so the evil seeds of an Orwellian rewrite of history are planted and destined to flourish in future generations, especially when they are spread by people or institutions. in influential positions, which impact public opinion and circulate further through social media.
Evidence of the infinite capacity of mankind to commit the greatest crimes against its fellow men unfortunately requires nothing more than a list of some of the multitude of past and present horrors called Biafra, Rwanda, the Foibe, the Armenian genocide, the massacre of Srebrenica, etc. Currently one is happening, that of the Uighurs in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, which the “free” world has not yet been able or willing to stop.
Each of these horrors and their victims requires and deserves to be carefully and individually remembered, while the horrors in progress require real intervention. Our commemorations all repeatedly invoke “Never Again”, while we well acknowledge our powerlessness in the face of a reality dominated by ruthless competition for economic domination and national power struggles.
So why was the Shoah unique, and why can’t it be compared to other genocides?
The answer freezes our reflections on the continuity of the past and the present. The Holocaust was planned in cold blood according to precise concepts of efficiency and modern technology. It was carried out by a highly educated, cultured, advanced civilization, with the use of a diabolical, meticulous plan of mass murder aimed at the total extinction of all the members of a certain people, a certain religion, a certain tradition and culture. They were condemned for their DNA: men, women, children, babies, old and infirm, all those who belonged to what was considered an “inferior race” by a madman and his followers subjected to an ideological brainwashing. The German Nazis identified their prey in the family trees of all traceable Jews: the normal, peaceful, integrated, productive citizens who had lived as integral and integrated parts of the nations of Europe for over two millennia, since the Etruscan era, pre – Roman.
As the famous sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, “… the Holocaust was not simply a Jewish problem nor an event exclusive to Jewish history. advanced of our civilization and at the apex of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture “.
In their ruthless and insane quest to establish a “pure, white, Aryan superior race”, Hitler’s henchmen introduced other “categories” of human beings unfit for life, such as gypsies, the mentally or physically handicapped, homosexuals, etc. The Nazis wanted to conquer the world and create more “Lebensraum” or living space for themselves as “pure Aryans.” If they had won the war, all Jews and all those considered “unfit for life” by the conquerors would have been totally “eliminated” efficiently.
The Jewish people, however, were the essential obsession of the Nazis, their main objective of elimination. In 1933, about 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe. They were about 60% of the world Jewish population. In 1945 about 6 million, that is two thirds of European Jews had been “scientifically” eliminated in the gas chambers of concentration camps, either by direct elimination, or by the sadistic and inhuman conditions of their imprisonment. The diabolical brains of the Nazis had meticulously organized a scientific genocide.
These defenseless humans were hunted across the continent, guilty only of being born. Despite having been part of some of the most civilized societies and nations of the 20th century for centuries, they were left with nowhere to hide and where to seek refuge. A small minority of courageous and kindhearted citizens risked their lives to save the persecuted, and will be remembered forever by the trees planted in honor and remembrance of their names in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, in the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Those Jewish people and families who were able and fortunate enough managed to escape by ships to other continents before the “final solution” reached its final stage.
In remembering this horror, in fairness we should pay more attention to a historical context that is still largely ignored today. Jews in Europe were a people who had contributed to the construction of European culture, democracy, human rights – a culture based on their religious and spiritual roots, and a legal system whose moral values were drawn from the concepts of the Hebrew Bible (Torah ) of equality (man was created in the “image and likeness” of his Creator) and an ideal of justice (“Din”) fused with compassion and empathy (“Rachamim”). Establishing courts of law wherever a community lived was one of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down to his people from Mount Sinai.
A religiously motivated rejection of idolatry turned into a deep-seated aversion to unconditional obedience to the authority of unjust kings and dictators. The religious precept of the study of the Torah made education a fundamental value in Jewish homes, where reading, writing, study and debates with different voices led to a high percentage of literacy among the Jewish minorities living in Europe. This led to the high percentage of Jews active in all professions and trades and their contribution to the advancement of the arts and sciences and the general welfare of society.
Yet all this activity also made them a disproportionately visible minority, often regarded as alien and annoying “stumbling blocks” to all who wielded earthly power. They were comfortable scapegoats for rulers whenever natural or political crises created unrest that threatened the ruling classes. Absurd anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were spread which accused Jews of being “murderers of Christ” (guilty of “deicide”), of committing “ritual murders” of Christian children, of “poisoning wells”, of spreading the plague, of plotting to become masters of the world (from “Protocols of the Sages of Zion”) and an endless series of anti-Semitic stereotypes about dirty, ugly, greedy Jews, despised by God, condemned to eternal perdition. The hatred was thus fed repeatedly and led to frequent pogroms, expulsions, massacres.
The diabolical myths fell on the ears and eyes of the Christian faithful who had already been poisoned and conditioned by centuries of “teaching contempt”, based on an anti-Judaism born in the years in which the followers of Jesus tried to make their beliefs prevail over that of their “older brothers”, so as to encourage ever greater conversions to the new religion of Christianity.
The controversy at first took the form of Jesus’ accusations against Jewish religious leaders of his time, calling them corrupt, hypocritical, superficial – accusations similar to those used today by Pope Francis against Catholics who are only nominally faithful but do not live up to the of the spiritual ideals of Christianity, accusing them of sinking into “clericalism”, into “empty worldliness” and lack of spirituality. Over the centuries these accusations have been stripped of their original context and clothed with a lexicon that justifies the hatred against Jews passed down from generation to generation and perpetuated by the teachings of preachers who had totally forgotten that Jesus was born, lived and died as a Jew who did not want to change “an iota” of the Torah.
The Second Vatican Council put a noticeable and courageous brake on this diabolical process, and brought about a change in Christian leadership that officially recognized that a false reading and interpretation of the Gospels (further developed by the Fathers of the Church) had created a subliminal basis for an enormous contempt for the Jewish people and a mass indifference of the majority to their fate. This, they admitted, had facilitated the march towards the Shoah. It is important to remember that the Shoah was preceded by centuries of repeated persecutions, pogroms and expulsions throughout Europe. The prayer inserted into the Western Wall of Jerusalem (the Kotel) by Saint John Paul II and read aloud by him during the Jubilee celebrations in Rome, was an acknowledgment of these fatal human errors which had led to tragedy after tragedy, culminating in the Shoah.
The document “Nostra Aetate”, with its elimination of the accusation of deicide and all similar clichés, its recognition of the common roots of Judaism and Christianity, ushered in the new era of sincere friendship and mutual trust in we are currently experiencing. Fortunately, this new awareness and sensitivity is spreading in the educational programs of Catholic institutions and in the ever more numerous circles of Christian-Jewish friendship.
However, too many old anti-Semites and conspiracy theories are “alive and well” again. They have migrated to the problematic contemporary international political and social contexts of our times largely through social media, from across the political spectrum, from extremist groups ranging from Islamists to white supremacists, and in general, the gullible uninformed and uneducated. Ironically, there are several minority groups today who, guided by new theories such as “intersectionality” “critical race theory” and “identity politics”, now see Jews as recipients of “white privilege” rather than victims and survivors of a racist genocide. In the context of Middle Eastern politics controversies, we find cartoons with Palestinian Christians dying on the cross at the hands of ugly Israelis identified by the Star of David, and conspiracy theories abound in relation to Covid. Acts of anti-Semitic violence against Jews in the United States, France, Germany and other parts of Europe are multiplying. The challenge of breaking a vicious historical circle and staying true to our “Never Again” commitment is more important than ever.
* Representative in Italy and liaison with the Holy See of the AJC – American Jewish Committee