The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust [Paperback]

Tom Segev (Author), Haim Watzman (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 14, 2000

The Seventh Million is the first book to show the decisive impact of the Holocaust on the identity, ideology, and politics of Israel. Drawing on diaries, interviews, and thousands of declassified documents, Segev reconsiders the major struggles and personalities of Israel's past, including Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Nahum Goldmann, and argues that the nation's legacy has, at critical moments--the Exodus affair, the Eichmann trial, the case of John Demjanjuk--have been molded and manipulated in accordance with the ideological requirements of the state. The Seventh Million uncovers a vast and complex story and reveals how the bitter events of decades past continue to shape the experiences not just of individuals but of a nation. Translated by Haim Watzman.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Segev ( 1949: The First Israelis , LJ 2/1/86), a highly respected Israeli journalist-historian, presents a compelling work of scholarship. This tour de force draws on previously untapped archival sources, including thousands of unpublished and recently declassified documents and scores of personal interviews. Segev belongs to the generation of Israelis about which, in part, he writes. He portrays dramatically how the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine prior to 1948) faced the challenges of Nazi Germany and wartime Zionist politics as well as the subsequent impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society. Segev unearths and probes a range of disturbing and delicate historical issues, raising important questions about the use and misuse of Holocaust instruction to today's Israeli youth--a generation born after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. This path-breaking volume will enrich any public or academic collection on Israel, Zionism, or the Holocaust.
- Mark A. Raider, Brandeis Univ., Waltham, Mass.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

An unflattering examination of how political positions have shaped Israeli attitudes toward the Holocaust. Segev (1949: The First Israelis, 1986) covers world events for Ha'aretz, a leading Israeli newspaper. The ``seventh million'' is Segev's metaphor for the yishuv (the Jewish population of Palestine and, later, Israel), still grappling to come to terms with the memory of the six million Jews exterminated by Hitler. In his telling--based on thousands of archival documents and numerous interviews--the Holocaust became a political football in the hands of the various factions that continue to plague Israel. Few idols are left unscathed here--not Chaim Weizmann, not Ben-Gurion, not Menachem Begin. Zionists like Ben-Gurion, Segev says, had only scorn for the ‚migr‚s who managed to escape from Germany to Palestine before WW II, and for Jews throughout the world who opted for what the Israeli leader considered the false security of their native lands instead of flocking to Palestine to build up the Homeland. Early settlers resented the ``yekkes''--their disparaging term for German immigrants--for their individualistic, capitalistic notions, so different from the communal, socialist ideals of the Zionist pioneers. Efforts to spirit Jews out of Europe during and after the war, Segev contends, were generally guided by political considerations as each faction shamefully focused on bringing in only those individuals who might strengthen its own position. Similarly, the trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk have become skirmishes in factional battles to gain advantage from the Holocaust. Segev concludes with the hope that the lesson of the Holocaust will, in the end, be a humanist one--accepting the need to preserve democracy, to fight racism, to defend human rights, and to refuse to obey manifestly illegal orders. But he acknowledges that this lesson will be difficult to learn as long as Israel must fight to defend itself and to justify its very existence. A powerful and disturbing book, sure to arouse heated debate. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (November 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805066608
• ISBN-13: 978-0805066609
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #150,385 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Israelis and the Holocaust April 27, 2003

By Jason A. Miller

Format:Paperback

In the the span of only two weeks, Jews mark three separate modern holidays: Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Yom Hazikaron (Israel's Memorial Day), and Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel's Independence Day). These holidays, while observed separately, share many commonalities. This is a book that combines the Holocaust with the State of Israel, focusing on the issue of communal memory.

It is no secret that the modern Jewish State would not be in existence without the Holocaust having occurred. Yet, we often do not consider the relationship between Israel and Israelis to the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum has long been the first stop in Israel for visiting world leaders, and virtually no Jew who visits Israel leaves without stopping there. However, as author Tom Segev documents in his study of Israelis and the Holocaust, the story of Israel's response to the Holocaust and its commemoration of the greatest atrocity to humankind is not so simple. Looking at the role of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine) during the Holocaust, how Israelis received survivors in the early years of the nation, and the struggle to establish national memory, Segev tells the story of the Israeli path from contempt to acceptance, and finally to compassion and commemoration.

Israelis reacted very critically to Segev's controversial book when it first appeared in Israel in the late 1980s. By the time it was translated into English and brought to the American audience, much of the controversy had subsided, yet it still makes for an uncomfortable reading, as it is very critical of Israeli society in the first few decades following World War II. As Segev describes, most Israelis were of the belief that their European relatives walked "like sheep to the slaughter." Also telling of the Israeli sentiment toward the Holocaust was the moniker "sabon" (soap) given to survivors during the first decades of Israel's statehood, taken from the myth that the Nazis made soap from the skin of Jewish victims in the camps.

Segev writes passionately about the refugees who found themselves despised by a society devoted to heroism. The new Jewish nation wanted to focus on the heroes of the Holocaust who in the face of death rose up to revolt (note that Yom Hashoah takes place on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising). Much of Israel's identity in the years after the Holocaust was defined by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, the secret negotiations between Germany and Israel over reparation payments (how much for a human life?), and the revenge schemes against former Nazis (including a plot to poison the water systems of major German cities hoping to exact the same outcome on six million Germans). The decisions to create a national day of memory and to construct a Holocaust museum were major controversies in Israel. The focus was to be not on the sorrow of the demise of European Jewry, but rather on the stories of courage by some who chose to fight back. After all, to the brave young pioneers, the Holocaust was nothing short of embarrassment to the Jewish people.

This controversial and compelling book shows the divisive impact of the Holocaust on the identity, ideology, and politics of Israel. Segev was able to use many documents, previously classified by the Israeli government, for his research, and for this reason, many of his stories will come as a surprise to the reader. Was David Ben-Gurion involved in secret negotiations to buy Jews out of the camps? How did Prime Minister Menachem Begin's "survivor syndrome" affect his governing of Israel? In The Seventh Million, Segev answers these questions and expertly shows how the Holocaust continued to shape the experience not only of the individuals who experienced it, but also the experience of an entire nation.

It has taken much healing and newfound understanding for Israel to confront the Holocaust. We can now see how meaningful it is that immediately after Passover (our national commemoration of our ancestors' exodus from Egypt), we first remember our six million European ancestors, and then a week later, we pay homage to those who fell while defending our Jewish homeland only to advance to joy and merriment the next day celebrating another year of Israel's independence. As we learn from this important book, we must not take these acts of commemoration for granted.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A History of Israel With Broad Implications September 21, 2006

By Jan Peczkis

Format:Paperback

This one volume focuses on Israel from before its beginnings as a nation until the early 1990's. Owing to the breadth of this book, this review is necessarily limited to a small fraction of its content. Its content sheds light on many issues, including ones not explicitly elaborated in the book.

On the origins of the Holocaust, Segev comments: "Scholars of the Holocaust know of no extermination order signed by Hitler...David Ben-Gurion said that no one needed official announcements to know that Hitler intended to exterminate the Jews--it was all in Mein Kampf. All that people had to do was read the book." (p. 79). This, of course, undermines the common argument that Germans did not understand what they were doing when they freely voted for Hitler.

Segev's book sheds light on the world's reaction to early news of the Holocaust. David Engel has criticized the Polish government-in-exile for allegedly being slow and low-keyed in publicizing the extermination of Polish Jews, and then doing so only within the context of other wartime events (all because of ulterior motives). It is therefore interesting to note that comparable accusations could be made against Jewish sources in Palestine at the time. As Segev writes: "The newspapers generally published such Jewish stories beside the major reports from the war fronts, as if they were only a local angle on the real drama. From a professional point of view, the newspapers missed one of the biggest stories of the century." (p. 73). And, "...the Revisionists charged that the Mapai leadership had known about the extermination of Jews for months and had deliberately kept the public in the dark. Their silence had been intended to conceal their own failure, the Revisionists claimed..." (pp. 78-79).

Segev wades into controversial issues. He tackles Jewish passivity as follows: "Yitzhak Gruenbaum said, while the Holocaust was still at its height, that the fact that the Jews of Poland 'had not found in their souls the courage' to defend themselves filled him with a feeling of 'stinging mortification.'" (p. 109). Segev also discusses the Judenrat, and focuses harshly on Jewish collaborators: "The kapos had authority to impose punishments; many were notorious for their cruelty. 'Every one of them murdered, ' Dov Shilansky related. 'The Jews who worked for the Germans, and almost every Jew with even the ribbon of a deputy kapo on his arm, murdered---all but an exceptional few.'" (p. 259).

Segev elaborates on efforts to free the Jews from Nazi-ruled Europe, including the unfulfilled Europa Plan (p. 91) and Trucks-for-Blood proposal (p. 93); as well as the successful Kastner-Eichmann deal, in which 1, 685 Jews were freed (p. 265) to go to neutral Switzerland. Based on Document D. I 5753, housed in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz (p. 534), Segev comments: "And the idea of trading Jews for ransom was not, apparently, foreign even to Adolf Hitler himself. A memo Heinrich Himmler wrote on December 10, 1942, states that Hitler agreed to the exchange deals, on condition that they bring Germany large amounts of foreign currency." (p. 96). The potential and actual freeing of Jews by Nazis contradicts the claim of Holocaust uniqueness, which posits that, unlike the situation of non-Jews, the killing of EVERY SINGLE Jew was the Nazi goal, and furthermore that this was the very highest of Nazi objectives. Along the same lines, columnist Boaz Evron is mentioned as rejecting the claim that the extermination of Jews had been a unique Nazi crime (p. 402). He cites the non-Jewish victims of the Nazis and the fact that the Germans intended eventually to exterminate other peoples besides the Jews.

Segev's description of the red tape that Holocaust survivors encountered in securing German reparations (pp. 246-248) rings true. My father, a former inmate of the concentrations camps at Dachau and Gross Rosen, had the same experience.

Some recent authors (e. g., Jan Thomas Gross) would have us believe that the Zydokomuna (Jewish Communism) was something between imaginary and insignificant. Such was emphatically not the attitude of early Israeli leaders: "Thus the Joint Distribution Committee continually came under attack in the Zionist executive for helping Jews build new lives in Europe. 'I feel the danger of the Communist vermin uniting with the Joint,' Ben Gurion said. He called the Jewish Communists of eastern Europe 'the dregs of Judaism.'" (p. 129).

In this book, common Polonophobic views stand in contrast with some reasonable ones, including those related to the subject of the victims of Auschwitz. Segev writes: "Teveth attacked the Poles for concealing from visitors to Auschwitz the fact that most of those murdered there had been Jews...Shalmi Barmor tried to explain to the students that the Poles were not guilty of the murder of the Jews. Indeed, the Poles felt they had been defeated in the war---they had traded the Nazi conquest for a Soviet occupation. Anti-Semitism in Poland should not be ignored, Barmor told his students, but he emphasized that the Poles considered the mass murder of the Jews part of their Polish national tragedy. The students argued with him. 'Someone, after all, has to be guilty of the Holocaust,' one of them said. 'We have to hate someone, and we've already made up with the Germans.'" (pp. 491-492). Although not developed further by Segev, the common displacement of Jewish anger over the Holocaust from the Germans to the Poles, besides being an act of historical revisionism that parallels that of Holocaust denial, is a discouraging portent for the future.

It turns out that the Carmelite convent controversy had been fuelled, in part, by old-fashioned politics: "Riegner said that Auschwitz was not only a national memorial belonging to the Jewish people that should not be taken by anyone else; it was also an important political asset. Among other things, it served the diplomatic efforts of both the World Jewish Congress and Israel." (p. 474).

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent! Very Well Done! September 27, 2005

By Jeff

Format:Paperback

I'm biased. I am a huge Tom Segev fan. I have read all of his books now and am amazed by his objectivity and thoroughness in research. This is not a book about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. This is a book about the psyche of the Israeli state and experience. Very well done! I would highly recommend this, and any Tom Segev book to any student of the state of Israel and the modern Middle East.