A Jewish history professor spoke about the catalysts of the Holocaust and how awareness of these phenomena can aid people in their understanding of genocide at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event Monday.
Daniel Schwartz, a professor of modern Jewish history, discussed the difficulties with analyzing the key events that led to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust — like the rise of German nationalism and changes in legislation — in an event hosted in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The event took place in the University Student Center’s Grand Ballroom and was arranged by Muslim Voice, a student organization that seeks to educate Muslim students about Islam, and was the first in a series on discussion topics that Muslim Voice President Abdalla Wael Hassan said are “inextricably” linked to the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a state-sponsored persecution and killing of six million European Jews by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Holocaust Remembrance Day honors the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a concentration camp in south Poland where the Nazis killed over a million people.
The event began with a recitation by Hassan of one of the earliest accounts of genocide mentioned in the Quran, Surah Al-Buruj.
Hassan said there was “confusion” among some of the organization’s members as to why a Muslim student group would host an event on Jewish affairs. Referencing the King Solomon story from the Quran in which Allah affirms concerns over Solomon, a prophet — even though he is “divinely inspired” — to show there is always truth on both sides, Hassan said Muslim Voice’s decision to host the event was based on the Quranic principle of acknowledging the truth regardless of one’s worldview.
“Truth remains truth,” Hassan said. “Even if it doesn’t resonate with your particular world view, even if it doesn’t serve your particular narrative about how the world works, even if it doesn’t rhyme with what you believe to be your ultimate cause, truth has to be acknowledged.”
Hassan then welcomed guest speaker Matthew Levinger, a professor of practice of international affairs and previously the founding director of the Academy for Genocide Prevention at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Levinger said genocide begins when one social group perceives an advantage in diminishing another social group’s power and population and begins to dehumanize them.
“We need to resist this effort to see the evil in others, and instead, embrace their humanity and work to honor that,” Levinger said.
Hassan then asked Schwartz to explain what he sees as the first stages of the Holocaust. Schwartz said people’s first inclination is to identify “conceptual stages” leading to a historical event but that this is difficult to do with the Holocaust because a myriad of factors leading to the Holocaust can be traced as far back as the origin of Christianity, with some historians drawing a connection between the Holocaust and the false claim that Jews are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Holocaust.
He said there must be a balance between examining historical concepts and how they might have led to an event and looking at how things “play out.”
“If we’re going to study the Holocaust, we actually need to do so by putting some of these — what some have considered the lessons — aside for a second, in terms of what leads to what, and really trying to do a little bit more, I should say, microscopic, but a little bit like, you know, trying to understand specific moments,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz said an event foreshadowing the Holocaust was German nationalism that arose after World War I, when the democratic Weimar Republic was established to govern the defeated Germany. He said nationalism that brewed during this time period hinged upon traditional political beliefs of authoritarianism and exclusionary antisemitic thought.
“What you would call almost a kind of folkish antisemitism, this idea of the folk, it’s very important in Germany. I mean, today, many people use it just to mean, ‘the people’ or ‘we the people’ type of sense,” Schwartz said. “But we also know, often what appeals to the people don’t necessarily mean all people.”
Schwartz said the Nazis’ rise to power was the result of a democratic process that ultimately led to disintegration of the republic. He said the Nazi party utilized conservative coalitions to usher in legislation that allowed them to take full control of the government.
Schwartz said in his closing statement that an education on the Holocaust that analyzes the conceptual stages that lead to genocide, like dehumanization, in an effort to prevent similar thinking, omits its sheer damage to the Jewish population.
“The Holocaust was not simply one genocide. It was the destruction of an entire civilization, okay?” Schwartz said. “It was the destruction of a civilization that had its own language, its own culture. It’s a whole culture that was destroyed and has never been reconstituted.”
