As a child, I had to wash my hands before I was shown books of photographs depicting the ghettos and death camps so that I didn’t leave fingerprints on the pages. This wasn’t a Jewish custom, just the way things were done in our house. Looking back, however, it felt part of the rituals of memorial designed to prevent the atrocities of previous generations from slipping into the sands of time.

The Jews – the only people to have been persecuted in every single century of their existence – hold a culture rich in traditions of remembrance, all freighted with duty. Never mind books of photographs. On Passover we stayed up all night to relate the story of the enslavement in Egypt and the redemption. On Tisha B’Av, we fasted to commemorate the destruction of the Temple in 70AD, which precipitated the Jewish exile from the land of Israel. Holocaust Memorial Day – which is today – does not have such a formal religious significance, but it bears similar moral obligation. However distant the events of the Shoah, however grainy the footage, and however comfortable our lives become, it has been a duty to never forget.

This year we don’t need a duty. The animating darkness of the Shoah is once again among us. But it wasn’t just the Nazi genocide that was revived on October 7. In Baghdad in 1941, Jewish bodies were mutilated; in Kishinev in 1903, Jewish babies were torn to pieces by the mob; in 1834, in the mystical city of Safed in northern Palestine, Jewish women were stripped and raped; in the Iberian Peninsula in 1391, Jews were butchered in their thousands; in York in 1290, Jews were burned alive in Clifford’s Tower. Aside from the cosmetics of modernity, there is one difference. Throughout history, the slow progress of everyday bigotry had climaxed in an orgy of violence; in 2023, an orgy of violence gave way to everyday bigotry.

QOSHE - Will we ever learn the lessons of the Holocaust? - Jake Wallis Simons
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Will we ever learn the lessons of the Holocaust?

6 1
27.01.2024

As a child, I had to wash my hands before I was shown books of photographs depicting the ghettos and death camps so that I didn’t leave fingerprints on the pages. This wasn’t a Jewish custom, just the way things were done in our house. Looking back, however, it felt part of the rituals of memorial designed to prevent the atrocities of previous generations from slipping into the sands of time.

The Jews – the only people to have been persecuted in every........

© The Spectator


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