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Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1989 4(2):127-148; doi:10.1093/hgs/4.2.127
© 1989 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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‘Genocide in the 20th Century’

ESSAY: QUANTITY AND INTERPRETATION — ISSUES IN THE COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE HOLOCAUST*

STEVEN T. KATZ

Comell University New York

This essay attempts to situate the Shoah as an historical phenomenon by comparing it to six other well known instances of persecution: (1) the witch hysteria of the 15th–17th centuries; (2)the destruction of North American Indians; (3)the history of Black Slavery in America; (4) the Nazi persecution of Gypsies; (5) of Homosexuals; and (6) other Eastern European groups. The objective of the study is to distinguish the phenomenological characteristics of these various cases of oppression and mass murder so as to facilitate more responsible and accurate judgements regarding them as such as well as vis-à-vis the Holocaust. Contra all too common simplistic conclusions regarding the comparability and similarity of these events to each other and to the destruction of European Jews the present paper argues that fundamental distinctions, elemental differences, mark off the Holocaust phenomenologically from these other, similarly immoral and abhorrent, cases.

*This is a revised version of the paper presented at the ‘Remembering for the Future’ Conference, Oxford, 10–13 July 1988.


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Current Sociology, March 1, 1990; 38(1): 113 - 126.



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