ABSTRACT
The witness is both someone who testifies about an event, whether a crime or an ordinary occurrence, and a moral figure of extraordinary power. The witness’s origins are Biblical: bearing false witness, according to the ninth commandment, is a sacrilege. Witnessing is thus a religious and secular moral practice, and it establishes knowledge about an event or events. Witnessing thus refers to the establishment of empirical truth and the reliability of a story, but also evokes a potentially transcendent truth in the context of social recognition and trust, especially when the witness testifies to God or to extreme physical and psychic suffering. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century condemnations of mass violence, witnesses were dismayed spectators rather than victims themselves because the credibility of testimony was associated with distant reserve. The characterization of the witness has also changed since the turn of twenty-first-century. The witness delineates parameters of moral responsibility and accountability within which victims’ suffering is acknowledged and mourned.
