"the holocaust" in the eyes of historians: The problem of conceptualization, periodization, and explanation

An expanded version of a paper presented at a conference held at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, April 1991. Summarizes the basic conceptions and explanations of the Holocaust expressed by seven Jewish historians, aiming to reveal their answers to three leading questions: what do they see as the characteristic feature of the Holocaust; what period it included; toward what explanation of the Holocaust do they lean. According to their different perspectives, there are some historians (L. Poliakov, G. Reitlinger) who exclude the first years of Nazi rule from their accounts. L. Yahil distinguishes two "Holocausts" (1932-40, 1941-45), while for R. Hilberg the bureaucracy carrying out a "destruction process" is the combining force, and the period of its activities is 1933-45. J. Tenenbaum and L. Dawidowicz bind the periods either through racism or antisemitism, which had been in existence long before 1933. For A.J. Mayer, the killing of the Jews was something "incidental", the outcome of a more general problem. Concludes that the diversity of viewpoints demonstrates that we are still distant from a true understanding of the Holocaust.