Yehuda Bauer

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Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer

Yehuda Bauer (born 1926) is an historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born and raised in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Bauer was fluent at an early age in the Czech, Slovak and German languages, later learning Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French and Polish. His father had strong Zionist convictions and during the 1930s tried to raise money to get his family to the British Mandate of Palestine. On March 15, 1939, the family migrated to Palestine.

Bauer attended high school in Haifa and at sixteen, inspired by his history teacher, Rachel Krulik, decided to dedicate himself to studying history. Upon completing high school, he joined the Palmach. He attended Cardiff University, Wales on a British scholarship, interrupting his studies to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, after which he completed his degree.

Bauer returned to Israel to join Kibbutz Shoval and began his graduate work in history at Hebrew University. He received his doctorate in 1960 for a thesis on the British Mandate of Palestine. The following year, he began teaching at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University.

He served on the central committee of Mapam, then the junior partner party of Israel's ruling Mapai (Israel Labour Party), and was a visiting professor at Brandeis University, Yale University, Richard Stockton College, and Clark University. He was the founding editor of the Journal for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, published by Yad Vashem in 1990.

In recent years, Bauer has received recognition for his work in the field of Holocaust studies and the prevention of genocide. In 1998, he was the recipient of the Israel Prize, the highest civilian award in Israel. In 2001, he was elected a Member of the Israeli Academy of Science. Currently, he serves as academic adviser to Yad Vashem, academic adviser to the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, and senior adviser to the Swedish Government on the International Forum on Genocide Prevention.

[edit] Views

[original research?] Bauer is a respected authority on the subjects of the Holocaust, antisemitism — a word he insists be written unhyphenated [1] — and the Jewish resistance movement during the Holocaust, and has argued for a wider definition of the term. In Bauer's view, resistance to the Nazis comprised not only physical opposition, but any activity that gave the Jewish people dignity and humanity in the most humiliating and inhumane conditions. Furthermore, Bauer has disputed the popular view that most Jews went to their deaths passively. He argues that, given the conditions in which the Jews of Eastern Europe had to live under and endure, what is surprising is not how little resistance there was, but rather how much.

With regard to the Functionalism versus intentionalism question, Bauer started out as an Intentionist, but is now the leading proponent of a synthesis of the two schools. Bauer argues that on the basis of Heinrich Himmler's memorandum of May 25, 1940 to Adolf Hitler regarding the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" — in which Himmler states his rejection of "the Bolshevik method of physical annihilation of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible," and goes on to recommend the Madagascar Plan as the desired "territorial solution" of the "Jewish Question" — proves that there was no master plan for genocide going back to the days when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. However, Bauer takes issue with Functionalist historians, such as Hans Mommsen, who argue that the lead in the Holocaust was taken entirely by lower level officials with little involvement by the leadership in Berlin.

Bauer believes that Hitler was the key figure in causing the Holocaust, and that at some point in the later half of 1941, he gave a series of orders for the genocide of the entire Jewish people. Bauer has pointed to the discovery of an entry in Himmler’s notebook from December 18, 1941 where Himmler wrote down the question "What to do with the Jews of Russia?". According to the same notebook, Hitler’s response to the question was "Exterminate them as partisans." In Bauer’s view, this as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust. Bauer believes that, at about the same time, Hitler gave further verbal orders for the Holocaust, but that unfortunately for historians, nobody bothered to write them down.

Bauer has often criticized what he considers to be deleterious trends in writing about the Holocaust. He has often taken exception to those who argue that the Holocaust was just another genocide. Though he agrees that there have been other genocides in history that have targeted groups other than Jews, he argues that the Holocaust was the worst single case of genocide in history, in which every member of a nation was selected for annihilation, and that it therefore holds a special place in human history. This views have caused clashes between Bauer and the American historian Henry Friedlander who argues that Roma and the disabled were just as much victims of the Holocaust as Jews were.

Another trend Bauer has denounced is those who represent the Holocaust as a mystical experience outside the normal range of human understanding. He has argued against the work of some Orthodox rabbis and theologians who say that the Holocaust was the work of God and part of a mysterious master plan for the Jewish people. In Bauer’s view, those who seek to promote this line of thinking argue that God is just and good, while simultaneously bringing down the Holocaust on the Jewish people. Bauer has argued that a God who inflicts the Shoah on his Chosen People is neither good nor just. Moreover, Bauer has argued that this line of reasoning robs Adolf Hitler of his evil: if Hitler was just fulfilling God’s will regarding the Jews, then he was merely an instrument of divine wrath and did not choose to be evil.[citation needed]

Bauer has criticized the work of the American political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, who writes that the Holocaust was the result of the allegedly unique “eliminationist” anti-Semitic culture of the Germans. He has accused Goldhagen of Germanophobic racism, and of selecting only evidence favorable to his thesis. For example, Bauer has written that, according to the 1931 German census, about 50,000 German Jews were living in mixed marriages with Christians, giving Germany one of the highest rates of mixed marriages in the world at the time. In Bauer’s opinion, if the average German was full of murderous “eliminationist" anti-Semitism, as Goldhagen argues, there would have been fewer mixed marriages.[citation needed] Goldhagen in his turn has accused Bauer of not understanding his arguments properly and of being jealous of what Goldhagen considers to be his discovery of the “key” that explains the entire Holocaust.[citation needed]

Bauer is an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network.

Professor Bauer is one of those who paints a positive picture of people like Sally Mayer, whom others consider to have been a major obstructor of rescue[1]. Unlike many historians, for example Professor David Wyman and Dr. Rafael Medoff, Professor Bauer believes Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson) and his rescue group saved no one[2]. In contrast, others credit Kook with being perhaps the most effective activist on behalf of Jews, and that over 200,000 people were rescued as a result of his consistent pressure on the Roosevelt administration in spite of equally persistent and intense obstruction of his rescue efforts by Jewish leaders[3]. Professor Bauer also exclaims in one of his books that it is very surprising that an ultra-orthodox Jew like Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl could think of a practical rescue step such as request to bomb the railway to Auschwitz[4]. Professor Bauer also believes that people must go to Yad Vashem to learn the right way of understanding the Holocaust.[5]. Many others believe that complex phenomena such as the Holocaust require a marketplace of ideas rather than a centrally controlled view, however well intentioned and enlightened it may be.[6]

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Marrus, Michael The Holocaust In History, Toronto : Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987.
  • Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil, New York : Random House, 1998.


[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Dr. David Kranzler's historical works on Jewish rescuers
  2. ^ Conversation with Prof. Bauer at Yad Vahem, circa 2004
  3. ^ Works by Prof. David Wyman and Dr. Rafael Medoff
  4. ^ Title of book is being researched
  5. ^ Interview for book by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfed
  6. ^ e.g. correspondence with Prof. Alan Dershowitz

[edit] Bibliography

  • Rethinking the Holocaust. Haven, Yale University, 2001
  • A history of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts, c1982, 2001
  • The Impact of the Holocaust. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996
  • Jews for sale?: Nazi-Jewish negotiations,. New Haven: Yale University Press, October 1994
  • The significance of the Final Solution. 1994
  • Antisemitism in the 1990s. 1993
  • The Wannsee "Conference" and its significance for the "Final Solution". 1993
  • Antisemitism as a European and world problem. 1993
  • On the applicability of definitions - Anti-Semitism in present-day Europe. 1993
  • Vom christlichen Judenhass zum modernen Antisemitismus - Ein Erklaerungsversuch. 1992
  • The tragedy of the Slovak Jews within the framework of Nazi policy towards the Jews in general, 1992
  • Holocaust and genocide. Some comparisons. 1991
  • Who was responsible and when? Some well-known documents revisited. 1991
  • The Holocaust, religion and Jewish history. 1991
  • The danger of Antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of. Jerusalem: The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: c1991
  • The Brichah: Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990
  • La place d'Auschwitz dans la Shoah. 1990
  • Is the Holocaust explicable? 1990
  • World War II. 1990
  • Antisemitism and anti-Zionism - New and old. 1990
  • Out of the Ashes. Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1989
  • Résistance et passivité juive face à l'Holocauste. 1989
  • Jewish reactions to the Holocaust. Tel-Aviv: MOD Books, c1989
  • ed., Remembering for the future: Working papers and addenda. Oxford: Pergamon Press,c1989
  • The mission of Joel Brand. 1989
  • Out of the ashes: The impact of American Jews on post-Holocaust European Jewry. Oxford: Pergamon Press, c1989
  • ed., Present-day Antisemitism: Proceedings of the Eighth International Seminar of the Study Circle on World Jewry under the auspices of the President of Israel, Chaim Herzog, Jerusalem 29-31 December 1985. Jerusalem: The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University, 1988
  • Antisemitism in Western Europe. 1988
  • Antisemitism today: Myth and reality. Jerusalem: Hebrew University. Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1985
  • Jewish survivors in DP camps and She'erith Hapletah, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984
  • Jewish foreign policy during the Holocaust. New York: 1984
  • American Jewry and the Holocaust. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981
  • The Holocaust as historical experience: Essays and a discussion, New York: Holmes & Meier, c1981
  • The Jewish emergence from powerlessness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, c1979
  • The Judenraete: some conclusions. [Jerusalem]: [Yad Vashem, 1979]
  • The Holocaust in historical perspective. Seattle: University of Washington Press, c1978
  • Trends in Holocaust research, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977
  • The Holocaust and the struggle of the Yishuv as factors in the establishment of the State of Israel. [Jerusalem]: [Yad Vashem 1976]
  • My brother's keeper: A history of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, c1974
  • Rescue operations through Vilna, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1973
  • They chose life: Jewish resistance in the Holocaust. New York: The American Jewish Committee, c1973
  • Flight and rescue: Brichah. New York: Random House, c1970
  • From diplomacy to Resistance: A history of Jewish Palestine. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1970
  • The initial organization of the Holocaust survivors in Bavaria, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1970
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