IN HIS book "The Arabs and the Holocaust", Gilbert Achcar makes two little-known points about the naming of the Nazi genocide that I didn't have space.
The first is that "holocaust", the usual English name for it, comes from a Greek word, holokaustos, meaning "totally consumed by fire":
More precisely, it comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 1:3) and... refers to the ancient Israelites' practice of burning sacrificed animals as an expiatory offering... the burnt offering, or olah, is a variant of qorban, which means "sacrifical offering". In the Bible, the word olah is used only to describe animals that were to be entirely consumed by fire, which is why it was translated as "holocaust".
There is, in other words, a clear and somewhat controversial theological subtext to calling the genocide a holocaust (or, as it soon became, "the Holocaust"): it suggests that the murdered Jews were a sacrifice to God. Mr Achcar produces evidence that Elie Wiesel, the writer who did the most to popularise the word, did so in full knowledge of this subtext.
The second point is that name used in Hebrew for the Nazi genocide, shoah—which carries no sacrificial overtones—and the Arabic name for the loss of Palestine and the refugee crisis, nakba, are essentially the same word: both can be translated as "catastrophe". Hebrew and Arabic don't have capital letters, but they add the definite article—ha-shoah, al-nakba—to signify the uniqueness of each event.
So, even though the two events, one a genocide, the other a mass displacement, are clearly not in the same league, there is a symmetry in their naming and narrative, and hence in their perception, by the people who use them. For both peoples "the Catastrophe" is the worst event to have occurred in their history.
What's more, each side relies on its level of suffering to establish the legitimacy of its claims in the conflict—the Jews on showing that their tragedy was unique and justifies their taking of the land, the Palestinians on showing that their tragedy was so great that nothing can justify it. Even though, as Mr Achcar establishes, the Palestinians did not adopt nakba in imitation of shoah (as some Israeli academics have claimed), the parallel between the words no doubt helps drive this constant struggle between the two peoples, a struggle as much for the recognition of pain as for the land itself
http://riskability-riskability.blogspot.com/2010/08/jews-and-islam-people-of-book.html
The first is that "holocaust", the usual English name for it, comes from a Greek word, holokaustos, meaning "totally consumed by fire":
More precisely, it comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 1:3) and... refers to the ancient Israelites' practice of burning sacrificed animals as an expiatory offering... the burnt offering, or olah, is a variant of qorban, which means "sacrifical offering". In the Bible, the word olah is used only to describe animals that were to be entirely consumed by fire, which is why it was translated as "holocaust".
There is, in other words, a clear and somewhat controversial theological subtext to calling the genocide a holocaust (or, as it soon became, "the Holocaust"): it suggests that the murdered Jews were a sacrifice to God. Mr Achcar produces evidence that Elie Wiesel, the writer who did the most to popularise the word, did so in full knowledge of this subtext.
The second point is that name used in Hebrew for the Nazi genocide, shoah—which carries no sacrificial overtones—and the Arabic name for the loss of Palestine and the refugee crisis, nakba, are essentially the same word: both can be translated as "catastrophe". Hebrew and Arabic don't have capital letters, but they add the definite article—ha-shoah, al-nakba—to signify the uniqueness of each event.
So, even though the two events, one a genocide, the other a mass displacement, are clearly not in the same league, there is a symmetry in their naming and narrative, and hence in their perception, by the people who use them. For both peoples "the Catastrophe" is the worst event to have occurred in their history.
What's more, each side relies on its level of suffering to establish the legitimacy of its claims in the conflict—the Jews on showing that their tragedy was unique and justifies their taking of the land, the Palestinians on showing that their tragedy was so great that nothing can justify it. Even though, as Mr Achcar establishes, the Palestinians did not adopt nakba in imitation of shoah (as some Israeli academics have claimed), the parallel between the words no doubt helps drive this constant struggle between the two peoples, a struggle as much for the recognition of pain as for the land itself
http://riskability-riskability.blogspot.com/2010/08/jews-and-islam-people-of-book.html
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