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Pen Ultimate / The semantics of disaster

06.05.11

Both words, thought to be equivalent (although, as we will see, they are not ) were in use, in Hebrew and English, before the historical phenomenon they commonly describe took place. And both have their origin in the Bible. They are today, in the collective consciousness, terms for what the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called, in a broadcast on August 24, 1941, "a crime without a name."

Churchill was not referring specifically to the extermination of the Jews. He said: "As [Hitler's] Armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands - literally scores of thousands - of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots ... there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale... We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

The word "shoah" is mentioned in the prophecies of doom of both Isaiah and Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, although its exact meaning in those references is unclear. Based on the root and the context, the term apparently denoted a catastrophe of a magnitude that defies belief, implying deafening noise, desolation and destruction that occur without prior warning. Especially in Israel the word has assumed an exclusively Jewish connotation, which makes many object, sometimes vehemently, to expressions concerning the shoah - or holocaust - of the Armenians.