ABSTRACT
Those who watched Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) will recall the imposing figure of Raul Hilberg, the only scholar who features in this reconstruction of Holocaust memory, as he leafs through mounds of Nazi documents and remarks that hardly any of the specific anti-Jewish measures that Hitler’s henchmen came up with were, as such, original. To his mind, almost everything had its precedents in centuries of Christian persecution of Jews. The one-crucial —difference was that the Nazis set out to murder each and every Jew they could find, in other words, to commit genocide, whereas the church had first attempted to convert the Jews, then to expel them, but never to organize wholesale murder (despite innumerable massacres and pogroms).
