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ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

Oxford Handbook

Date

1933CE

c. 1933 to c. 1945approximate date

The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies discusses Holocaust/Shoah nomenclature, distinguishes anti-Jewish attitudes from willingness to act, and places Jewish annihilation at the core of Nazi demographic engineering.

Antisemitism and persecutionReligious history
1950
The Holocaust: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

6 statements

01Naming the field

Hayes and Roth note that many scholars favor Shoah (catastrophic destruction) because 'Holocaust' derives from a burnt offering and carries sanctifying connotations; yet since the 1950s Holocaust has become the most prevalent descriptor across languages and the apt heading for the field.

02Antisemitism and action

In Richard S. Levy's Handbook essay, a broad clinical definition of antisemitism is not enough to link prejudice to genocide: one must distinguish an ancient, adaptable body of anti-Jewish attitudes from the concrete willingness to act against Jews. The Handbook introduction ties Nazi control of Europe to population engineering whose central aim was wiping out Jewry, bound up with nationalism and race thinking.

03SS rhetoric

In Steinweis's Handbook essay, SS rhetoric foreshadowed wartime antisemitic barbarism: on the eve of Kristallnacht, Himmler vowed to drive Jews out with 'unprecedented ruthlessness'; afterward Das Schwarze Korps spoke of the 'hard necessity' of exterminating the 'Jewish underworld' by fire and sword.

04Occupation and Church

In Browning's Handbook essay, a Nazi official (Palfinger) asserts that a rapid dying out of the Jews was a matter of total indifference, if not desirable, illustrating the bureaucratic brutality of occupation policy. Spicer (in the Handbook) notes that the Church rejected race-based Jew-hatred that treated ancestry as a permanent stamp of Jewish identity and thereby emptied baptism of effect.

§ 04Network

Connections

    § 05Bibliography

    Further reading

    • Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

      Reference handbook of Holocaust studies (terms, perpetrators, memory) · recommended in Hayes and Roth, p. 2

    § 06Apparatus

    Sources on this page

    1. 01Hayes and Roth, p. 2inspect
    2. 02Hayes and Roth, p. 5inspect
    3. 03Hayes and Roth, p. 23inspect
    4. 04Hayes and Roth, p. 120; Hayes and Roth, p. 120inspect
    5. 05Hayes and Roth, p. 134inspect
    6. 06Hayes and Roth, p. 234inspect
    • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
    • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
    • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
    • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
    • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.