8 WAS THE HOLOCAUST UNIQUE?: A PECULIAR QUESTION? Alan Rosenberg
The question of the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust has itself become a unique question. However, when we approach the Holocaust we are at once confronted with the following dilemma: if the Holocaust is the truly unique and unprecedented historical event that it is often held to be, then it must exceed the possibility of human comprehension, for it lies beyond the reach of our customary historical and sociological means of inquiry and understanding. But if it is not a historically unique event, if it is simply one more incident in the long history of man's inhumanity to man, there is no special point in trying to understand it, no unique lesson to be leamed.1 Of all the enigmas, paradoxes, and dilemmas facing Holocaust scholarship,2 the "uniqueness question" is surely the most vexing and divisive, the one question most likely to evoke partisan debate and to generate emotional heat in discussion.3 In my own efforts at analysis of the issues underlying the "uniqueness question" I have been struck by the very oddity of the question itself, for it is strange that there should be argument about it at all. What strikes me as peculiar about it is the fact that the legitimacy of the question as such is so taken for granted, that it is so readily assumed that the uniqueness of the Holocaust is not merely a fit subject for analysis but is a problem of the very first rank in importance. The anomaly here is just that the "uniqueness question" itself is taken to be crucially relevant to an understanding of the Holocaust although it is relevant to few-if any-other landmark events of history. One finds little discussion, for example, of the "uniqueness" of the Protestant Reformation or the Industrial Revolution. The atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-surely qualified as "unique" and "unprecedented" in terms of