Talk:Names of the Holocaust

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Contents 1 Dark animal 2 Ownership 3 Merge 4 1970's?! 5 Source query

[edit] Dark animal

About this bit of text near the top of the page:

In Greek and Roman pagan rites, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. Holocaust was later used to refer to a sacrifice Jews were required to make by the Torah.

What is a "dark animal"?

Also, the phrasing suggests that the Roman rites predated the Jewish ones. I'm guessing what is meant here is that the word "holocaust" was used in English (and maybe Latin and/or Greek?) to refer to the Jewish sacrifice ritual, which if I have it right, is called olah in Hebrew. In other words, the Jewish "olah" predates the Roman, and maybe the Greek "holocaust" rituals, but the word "holocaust" only later became used to refer to olah, right?

Perhaps this could be written more clearly? Pfly 05:38, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

It means dark in colour. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the text implies that "Roman rites preceded the Jewish ones". It means that the Greek term "holocaust" was later used to refer to sacrifice described in the Torah. Whether or not that predates "Roman" practices depends on when you date the Torah and how you define the origin of Roman culture, which arose from earlier Indo-European traditions. Paul B 11:48, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ownership

Probably wants addressing on this page also. Londo06 22:11, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

Not seeing any compelling reason why the coverage of this subject in the main article isn't sufficient. Otto4711 06:10, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 1970's?!

The thing about "The Holocaust" only being in wide use (to describe the genocide against the Jews in Nazi Germany) since a 1978 TV miniseries is simply bizarre, and not sufficiently sourced. I was alive and reading about the Holocaust years before that, and this is certainly news to me, as well as to those of my age group (and older) with similar experiences. Paul Barlow (talk · contribs) simply reverted the edits I made, without adding a citation. I have no desire to edit war here, but you really need to source the hell out of that sort of statement if you want it to stand. - Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 08:20, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I assure you that it is not bizarre, but very widely accepted. I did not simply revert the edits you made. Please check before you make such statements. I added some citations and removed citation requests where I had added a citation. Citations are not required in the introduction if the citation is in the body of the article, which it is. Check MoS. There is nothing controversial about this. The word holocaust was barely used at all in the years immediately after the war, except in a descriptive sense along with other descriptive terms. "Holocaust" was a common word used to describe many things. I have a copy of Freud's letters published in the 1970s in which the editor says that Freud "made a holocaust" - meaning that he burned many of his letters. The word was sometimes used descriptively to refer to Nazi murders along with many other things, great and small. It became increasingly widely used in scholarly literature in the 60s as a standard term for Nazi murders, but it was still the case that if you referred to "the holocaust" in a general sense the most common meaning that would be understood by that was nuclear war in the near future, not mass murder in the near past. Do a literature search of books published on Nazism. You will find that almost all of the books with 'holocaust' in the title were published after the mid 1970s. See also the discussion in Talk:The_Holocaust/Archive_17#Consensus_proposal, especially the conributions of Woogie and Catherineyronwode. I suggest that you also read the cited article by Petrie. It was the TV series that led to the word becoming the standard term to refer to Nazi murders in common culture. I've no doubt that you were "reading about the holocaust" before the 70s, but it's unlikely that the literature you read used the term The Holocaust as a proper noun. Paul B (talk) 09:57, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Source query

I've removed this as a source — Petrie, J. The Secular Word Holocaust — as it seems to be a personal webpage. If it has been published elsewhere by a reliable source, we should cite that publication instead. SlimVirgin ^talk|edits 21:45, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

It has been pointed out to you before - I think twice - that it was published in the Journal of Holocaust Studies. Paul B (talk) 22:06, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't think this has ever been pointed out to me, Paul. But if it has been published there, we should use that as the source, not a personal website. SlimVirgin ^talk|edits 22:26, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

One of his footnotes says that a version of his web article was published in the Journal of Genocide Research; we need to use the published version, not a self-published one. He also says he has participated in many H-Net discussions [www.h-net.org/lists], which he says can be found by following that link and looking for "Jon Petrie Soviet." It remains unclear who he is, though. SlimVirgin ^talk|edits 22:29, 19 May 2008 (UTC)