Historiosophy as a Response to Catastrophe: Studying Nazi Christians as a Jew

Abstract

One of the earliest historians of the Holocaust, Philip Friedman, himself a survivor, wrote in 1958 that ‘every generation creates its own historiosophical doctrine as well as research methods compatible with its spirit’.¹ Note that Friedman does not use the term ‘historiography’, but rather ‘historiosophy’, a somewhat obscure term for the philosophy of history, but one brought into Jewish discourse by Gershom Scholem in his best-known book, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published just a few years before Friedman’s book. In discussing sixteenth-century Lurianic mysticism’s myth of creation as divine catastrophe, Scholem argued that kabbalists were using metaphysics to reify historical reality. Friedman may have had the same understanding in his use of the term: historians do not simply describe or interpret an event; rather, they bring what is unknown or forgotten into reality. Such was certainly the case in Friedman’s day. He was one of the earliest historians of the Holocaust, and much of what he wrote about was unknown, suppressed or simply lost with the lives that had been extinguished. His careful research brought into reality events that had occurred, studying the Jews ‘not only as tragic victims but as bearers of a communal existence with all the manifold and numerous aspects involved’.²