Aging Holocaust scholar says he doesn't have enough time to prove his theories
* Interesting individual:
Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua reviews Yehuda Bauer's new book on the Holocaust, which 'breaths truth,' despite the author's claim that his work is a fraud.
"Ha'am Hamehutzaf" ("The Impossible People" ), by Yehuda Bauer. Nahar Books, 338 pages, NIS 98 (in Hebrew )
"I confess that the book presented here is in fact an act of fraud. The work of a historian of the Holocaust is based on finding documentation that will prove the validity and the analyses of historical events, and here he is presenting a book almost entirely free of footnotes. A historian who makes claims but does not take the trouble of proving them by suitable citations, relying on authorities concerning the matters he is discussing and so forth? ... And I agree with this criticism, because it is indeed so: Here I am offering theses and opinions without proving them in the accepted way. This is a book of essays ... I am an old man, I don't have time, and what is important to me is to present my approach, which in any case will not be acceptable to most readers. And anyway, who can guarantee that a reasonable number of readers will be found for this book? After all, this is quite a crazy attempt: I am trying to look at the history of the people into which I was born - the Jewish people, from its beginning until today, from the perspective of the present. Is this a historian? And selectively, without any pretension of predicting its future, as story and prophecy contradict each other."
This is how Prof. Yehuda Bauer's new book opens - an important and special book, rich in original insights, a knowledgeable book, broad in scope, written in bountiful and fluent language. And even though the author apologizes in the introduction and calls his book "an act of fraud," in the book itself there is no fraud or pretense whatsoever. This is a book that breathes truth, not only with respect to the facts and the historical distinctions, but rather, above all, with respect to the stance of the author himself, who does not hide behind some kind of real or pretended neutral objectivity. He explicitly reveals his ideological, political and moral positions and (modestly ) combines them with autobiographical details. The truths the book reveals and lays bare are also examined, insofar as possible, with universal moral tools.
For example, this is how Chapter 3, "Holocaust, God and Religion," begins: "It isn't that I do not believe in God: The truth is that I believe with complete faith - the way any religious person believes in his truth - that there is no God, because there is no possibility at all that God could exist as an objective entity beyond the imaginations of human beings." This militant secularism along with other clearly liberal opinions are expressed at a number of points in the book, not for polemical purposes but rather as a basic position that guides the historian in his analysis and understanding.
The most stunning example in this book is the author's situating of the Holocaust within the painful and harsh web of genocides that preceded, coincided with, and followed the Holocaust of the Jews in World War II. In this case Bauer evinces familiarity with the acts of collective slaughter of the Armenians, of the Gypsies, in Darfur, in Rwanda, in Ukraine and elsewhere. As a Holocaust scholar he tries to locate the uniqueness of that event amid all the horrors perpetrated in the past and still being perpetrated today.
In full: http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/aging-holocaust-scholar-says-he-doesn-t-have-enough-time-to-prove-his-theories.premium-1.506632
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