The Lonely Isle of Raul Hilberg

The Nation has an interesting article on Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, touching as well on the work of Hannah Arendt. A few passages struck me:
At the lecture he delivered a few months before he died, a question was put to Hilberg: "Why do you not feel part of your community?" Without missing a beat, he responded, in an even voice, "I don't feel part of anything. I don't feel part of the university I've been a part of for decades. I don't feel part of Burlington, where I've spent all my years since 1956. I think some of us are just destined to be alone."

I am reminded of the hymn by minister of industrial theology, Al Jourgenson: "Sky high with a heartache of stone / You'll never see me cos I'm always alone." The irony is that those who are truest to the essence of "religion" (religion meaning to bind together) are usually the most alone.
Like Arendt, his relationship with Judaism was very much on his terms. The legacy of Jewish victimhood galled him as much as it did Arendt, but it didn't stifle his respect for the Jewish conscience. Here it was his turn to borrow from Arendt. Shortly before the end of the war, Arendt wrote an intriguing set of essays about the notion of "the Jew as pariah," in which she identified Sholom Aleichem, Franz Kafka and Henrich Heine as heirs to the greatest Jewish tradition. "It is the tradition of a minority of Jews who have not wanted to become upstarts, who preferred the status of 'conscious pariah,'" she claimed. "All vaunted Jewish qualities--the 'Jewish heart,' humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence--are pariah qualities." In 1965, two years after the appearance of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hilberg published a little-noticed essay in Midstream magazine in which he described the conditions that had motivated Germans to perpetrate the Holocaust. He then expressed his admiration for the pariahs of his people. "Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols," he wrote. "The Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding."

But what good is a conscience without firepower?
Yehuda Bauer, the eminent Israeli Holocaust scholar, recalls a moment when he was giving a lecture with Hilberg before a college class in Boston during the '70s. Bauer spoke about Jewish resistance to the Nazis; Hilberg began his rejoinder on a characteristically dry note before suddenly losing his temper. "He yelled at those students and he said, 'How many of you have guns in your home?'" Bauer remembers. "I said to him, 'You think there will be Nazis in Boston?' But he wasn't talking to the students--he was talking to the Jews in Europe. For a moment he forgot himself."

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