suffering and persecution. This view, though a highly oversimplified view of
Jewish history, was harder to critique in the wake of Auschwitz. At the same
time, the Holocaust affirmed the Zionist view of Jewish history, that Jewish
life in the diaspora is ultimately pointless. Finally, the Holocaust set in
motion a critique of Jews’ political behavior and elicited a prevailing notion
of the passivity and political impotence of Jews in the diaspora.
In addition, the Holocaust had a decisive impact on Jewish theology,
specifically Jewish theodicy. The conventional rabbinic notions of chosenness
and that God rewards the just and punishes the wicked, and even the belief
that such rewards and punishments would be divinely meted out in the after-
life, were harder to swallow after the murder of more than a million Jewish
children. To be sure, some rabbis continued to refer to conventional Jewish
theology. Joel Teitelbaum, the Szatmar Rebbe, interpreted the Holocaust as
divine retribution for the evils of the Jews themselves, particularly assimila-
tion and secularism. The Reform rabbi Ignaz Maybaum interpreted the
Holocaust in terms of Isaiah 53, in which Israel is described as God’s suffering
servant. Needless to say, both explanations sounded hollow after the war.
Other scholars looked for new theological explanations. The most com-
pelling was offered by the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim. Rather than
trying to explain how the Holocaust could have happened, which he believed
was beyond the capability of human understanding, Fackenheim instead
defined what he believed was the proper Jewish response to it. In this vein, he
defined the 614th commandment as “Thou shalt not give Hitler a posthu-
mous victory.” In the aftermath of Auschwitz, he argued, Jewish survival
became a divine commandment.
Finally, the destruction of the Jews of eastern and central Europe led to an
abrupt shift in the center of world Jewry, and the rise of three new centers of
world Jewry: Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union. These three
Jewish communities would define the parameters of world Jewry in the post-
war world.
230 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45