The Holocaust and comparative history

Steven T. Katz is Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University. In 1993, he held the 37th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture at the Leo Baeck Institute New York. Katz reflects on the fate of European Jewry under the Third Reich with regard to the contemporary debate on the singularity of the Shoah. The question of to what degree the destruction of European Jewry does constitute a unique historical event is in the center of his analysis. In order to answer this question, Katz looks at the destruction of the Armenian community of Turkey during World War I and at Stalin's Gulag. In his opinion, the destruction of European Jewry stands alone not as a moral but as a phenomenological and historical novum. (Abstract by Laura Ewers).