The Exile, the Nomad, and the Ghostly: Holocaust Memory and Identities of the Biblical at the Edge of Reception Studies
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This article considers the relationship between biblical reception studies and Holocaust memory, with particular reference to the construction of a new Holocaust memorial in central London. I suggest that although in the twenty-first century there has been a small but growing body of literature on the interface of Bible and Holocaust memory, this scholarship has been unable to engage with the fullest possibilities of encounter between the two. Amidst plans for the new memorial we see an unconventional kind of reception taking place, one that resonates with Primo Levi’s description of Holocaust witness accounts as ‘stories of a new Bible’. To explore the implications of this phenomenon I turn to Brennan Breed’s recent discussion of the Bible as ‘nomadic text’, proposing that an extended version of his ideas can speak valuably to this context.
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1
UK Government, ‘Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Terms of Reference’, 2014; accessible at <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/275198/Terms-of-Reference-PM-Holocaust-Commission.pdf>.
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4
Brennan Breed, Nomadic Text: A Theory of Reception History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
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14
Tod Linafelt (ed.), A Shadow of Glory: Reading the New Testament After the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2002).
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15
Marvin A. Sweeney, Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah: Engaging Holocaust Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), p. 1.
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19
Kelly M. Wilson, ‘Daughter Zion Speaks in Auschwitz: A Post-Holocaust Reading of Lamentations’, JSOT 37.1 (2012), pp. 93-108 (93).
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25
Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: KTAV, 1973), p. 78.
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26
Melissa Raphael, ‘Witnesses to Presence: Reading Jewish Women’s Holocaust Memoirs as Holy Texts’, Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 12 (2004), pp. 103-114 (109).
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28
David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 202.
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29
George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p.193.
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30
Zoë Waxman, ‘Testimonies as Sacred Texts: The Sanctification of Holocaust Writing’, Past and Present 206.5 (2010), pp. 321-41; Isabel Wollaston, ‘Memory and Monument: Holocaust Testimony as Sacred Text’, in Jon Davies and Isabel Wollaston (eds.), The Sociology of Sacred Texts (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993), pp. 37-44. See also David Tollerton, ‘“A New Collection of Holy Scriptures”? Assessing Three Ascriptions of the Sacred to Holocaust Testimony within Jewish Theology’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14.3 (2008), pp. 61-84.
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32
Breed, Nomadic Text, p. 206. Breed does briefly discuss the biblical beyond writing, reflecting that ‘[t]exts are often powerful even when they are not read; the Jewish practice of binding tefillin, found even in the Second Temple period, exemplifies this, as does the writing covering the monumental art of the ancient Near East. Even today, politicians, judges, and witnesses often swear while touching a Bible’ (p. 136). This line of enquiry is not ultimately followed in a sustained manner.
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33
Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 141-43.
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34
UK Government, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report, 2015; accessible at <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/398645/Holocaust_Commission_Report_Britains_promise_to_remember.pdf>.
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38
Cited in Avril Alba, The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 58.
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41
Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (trans. Haim Watzman; New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 424.
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42
UK Government, Britain’s Promise to Remember, pp. 11, 15, 17, 31, 49, 50.
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57
Alba, The Holocaust Memorial Museum, p. 193, emphasis original.
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The Exile, the Nomad, and the Ghostly: Holocaust Memory and Identities of the Biblical at the Edge of Reception Studies
In: Biblical InterpretationSearch for other papers by David Tollerton in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article considers the relationship between biblical reception studies and Holocaust memory, with particular reference to the construction of a new Holocaust memorial in central London. I suggest that although in the twenty-first century there has been a small but growing body of literature on the interface of Bible and Holocaust memory, this scholarship has been unable to engage with the fullest possibilities of encounter between the two. Amidst plans for the new memorial we see an unconventional kind of reception taking place, one that resonates with Primo Levi’s description of Holocaust witness accounts as ‘stories of a new Bible’. To explore the implications of this phenomenon I turn to Brennan Breed’s recent discussion of the Bible as ‘nomadic text’, proposing that an extended version of his ideas can speak valuably to this context.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 200 | 36 | 2 |
| Full Text Views | 112 | 3 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 108 | 9 | 1 |