ABSTRACT
The Holocaust (Shoah) is one of the watershed moments of the twentieth century, and arguably in the history of humanity; so much so, that it is possible to talk about the pre-Holocaust and the post-Holocaust in discussions of politics, history, philosophy and theology, as well as especially in Jewish thought. Its uniqueness has been noted by many prominent thinkers, including Jürgen Habermas, Ernest Mandelm, Primo Levi and Saul Friedlander. However, it is the historian Yehuda Bauer who, in our view, best characterises the Holocaust when he says that:
The conclusion to draw is that one ought to differentiate between the intent to destroy a group in a context of selective mass murder and the intent to annihilate every person of that group. To make this as simple as possible, I would suggest retaining the term genocide for murder and the term Holocaust for total destruction . . . [the term] Holocaust can be used in two ways: to describe what happened to the Jews at Nazi hands and to describe what might happen to others if the Holocaust of the Jewish people becomes a precedent to similar actions.
