The modes in which historical research is being shaped have become themselves topics of research. Holocaust historiography - the documentation, depiction and analysis of one of the most horrific events in human history - is today a wide ranging academic field in which Jewish and non-Jewish scholars throughout the world are active. But how did this historiography, especially its Jewish aspect, emerge and by what factors was it shaped? This volume examines the very beginnings of the effort to apply scholarly standards to the understanding of the Holocaust - when World War II was still raging and immediately after it had ended.

With this volume, Steven T. Katz initiates the provocative argument that the Holocaust is a singular event in human history. Unlike any previous work on the subject, The Holocaust in Historical Context maintains that the Holocaust is the only example of true genocide--a systematic attempt to kill all the members of a group--in history. In a richly documented, subtly argued, and amazingly wide-ranging comparative historical and phenomenological analysis, Katz explores the philosophical and historiographical implications of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. After he establishes the nature of genocide, Katz examines other occasions of mass death to which the Holocaust is regularly compared from slavery in the ancient world to the medieval persecution of heretics, from the depopulation of the New World to the Armenian massacres during World War I, and from the Gulag to Cambodia. In the first of three volumes, Katz, after setting the groundwork for his analysis with four chapters dealing with essential methodological issues, begins his comparative case studies with slavery in the ancient Greek and Roman world, and continues with such subjects as medieval antisemitism, the European witch craze, the medieval wars of religion, the medieval persecution of homosexuals, and the French campaign against Huguenots. Throughout this investigation of pre-modern Jewish and non-Jewish history, Katz looks at the ways in which the Holocaust has precedents and parallels, and in what way it stands alone as a singular, highly distinctive historical event.

"On the one hand, then, this is traditional historiography: the history of history writing. On the other hand, the problem is approached via recent work in the philosophy of history, closely analysing historical works as texts. This is an interdisciplinary study that brings to bear on historiography the kind of textual analysis usually reserved for fiction, testimony, or film." "The Holocaust, precisely because it throws into doubt older methodologies, demands the search for new ones. Showing how Holocaust historians inadvertently and paradoxically reinscribe into the wider culture patterns of thought that the Holocaust repudiated, Constructing the Holocaust tries to respond to the Holocaust in a way that recognises its potential impact on usually unquestioned beliefs and unspoken methodological assumptions."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is timely and necessary and often extremely challenging. It brings together an impressive cast of scholars, spanning several academic generations. Anyone interested in writing about the Holocaust should read this book and consider the implications of what is written here for their own work. There seems to me little doubt that Holocaust history writing stands at something of a cross roads, and the ways forward that this volume points to are extremely thought provoking. -- Tom Lawson, University of Winchester.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in their fields provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Holocaust historiography available. Covering both long-established historical disputes as well as research questions and methodologies that have developed in the last decade's massive growth in Holocaust Studies, this collection will be of enormous benefit to students and scholars alike.

Defying comprehension, the tragic history of the Holocaust has been alternately repressed and canonized in postmodern Western culture. Recently our interpretation of the Holocaust has been the center of bitter controversies, from debates over Paul de Man's collaborationist journalism and Martin Heidegger’s Nazi past to attempts by some historians to downplay the Holocaust’s significance. A major voice in current historiographical discussions, Dominick LaCapra brings a new clarity to these issues as he examines the intersections between historical events and the theory through which we struggle to understand them.In a series of essays—three published here for the first time—LaCapra explores the problems faced by historians, critics, and thinkers who attempt to grasp the Holocaust. He considers the role of canon formation and the dynamic of revisionist historiography, as well as critically analyzing responses to the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings. He also discusses Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, and he sheds light on postmodernist obsessions with such concepts as loss, agora, dispossession, deferred meaning, and the sublime. Throughout, LaCapra demonstrates that psychoanalysis is not merely a psychology of the individual but that its concepts have sociocultural dimensions and can help us perceive the relationship between the present and the past. Many of our efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, he shows, continue to suffer from the traumatizing effects of its events and require a "working through" of that trauma if we are to gain a more profound understanding of the meaning of the Holocaust.