Holocaust

Jean-Marie de Bourqueney

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

There are some words which resonate. Tragically. Whenever I hear « holocaust », I see again the images of those millions of massacred Jews. It is impossible to escape these images which are the lowest point of human wickedness. As long ago as the 19th century, Chateaubriand or Bernard Lazare used this word in order to speak about a mass murder. This is a strange evolution of a word into something ignoble. However, this word used to mean something quite different. So it is a mistranslation. Moreover, in Europe, there are few people who still use the word holocaust to call to mind the Jewish genocide. The word « Shoah », which means absolute catastrophe, is preferred. So holocaust, in Greek culture as in that of the people of Israel, had the basic meaning of the sacrifice of an animal which was cooked. Obviously, to rehabilitate the idea of animal sacrifice would be a form of archaism and of lack of care for animal rights.

Rene Girard, who passed away last November, considered the idea of sacrifice as an example of the mimetic violence which establishes societies. Even a classroom does not escape this rule, since it is still necessary to combat the harassment of the « scapegoat » by a whole group which comes together in a shared detestation. There, undoubtedly, is the first positive meaning of the idea of holocaust: sacrifice is a way of containing human violence by « scripting » it ritually, linking it to the presence or the will of God who in this way « displaces » the initial violence. Archaic holocaust has a cathartic function. But there is another element, certainly more anecdotal, a little too anthropomorphic, but certainly present in the Bible: that is the idea of « God’s pleasure » at the scent of the smoke from the cooking, a bit like our pleasure in passing by a rôtisserie and delighting in the scent of a chicken as it is roasting… A God of sense?

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