A small subset of the denier literature, drawing on a long European antisemitic tradition, claims that the Holocaust was “predicted” in Jewish religious texts and that the prediction is evidence either that the Holocaust was a Jewish self-fulfilling prophecy, or that it was actively desired and engineered by the Jewish community itself for political purposes (typically the establishment of the State of Israel). The claim is recycled antisemitism with a thin layer of pseudo-scholarly framing. It rests on misreadings of biblical and rabbinic texts, on inversions of Jewish religious self-understanding, and on the standard antisemitic figure of the Jew as conspirator against gentiles.
What the claim typically asserts
The claim takes several forms. In its mildest form, it points to passages in the Hebrew Bible (Deuteronomy 28, Leviticus 26, parts of Ezekiel) that describe catastrophic divine punishment of the Israelites if they fail to keep the covenant, and presents these passages as “prophecies” of the Holocaust. In its more aggressive form, it points to passages in the Talmud and the kabbalistic literature that discuss exile, suffering and redemption, and presents these as evidence that the Jewish religious tradition itself anticipated, expected, or even welcomed mass persecution. In its most overtly antisemitic form, it claims that the Jewish community engineered the Holocaust, or allowed it to happen, in order to fulfil the prophecy and create the political conditions for the establishment of Israel.
The forms differ in their explicitness but share the same structural logic: the Holocaust was Jewishly predicted, therefore Jewishly desired, therefore not a crime against the Jews but a project conducted by them or for them.
What the cited passages actually say
The covenantal-curse passages in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 are part of the standard ancient-Near-Eastern legal-covenant form, in which the parties to a covenant set out the consequences of breach. The form is the same as in the Hittite suzerainty treaties of the second millennium BCE and was a common feature of legal documents across the region. The covenant in question is between God and Israel; the curses describe what will happen if Israel breaks the covenant. The literary form is conditional, not predictive: “if you do X, then Y will happen”. The passages are not prophecies in the sense of forecasting specific future events; they are statements of consequence within a covenantal framework.
The application of these passages to the Holocaust as a “prophecy” is not how the Jewish religious tradition has read them. The mainstream rabbinic and academic-Jewish reading of Deuteronomy 28 is that the chapter describes the conditions of the covenant and the historical Israelite experience under conditions of exile and dispersion (the Assyrian conquest of 722 BCE, the Babylonian conquest of 586 BCE). The chapter has been read with increasing pain after every subsequent catastrophe, including the Holocaust, but it has never been read as a prediction in the deniers’ sense.
The talmudic passages on exile and redemption are similarly part of a long tradition of Jewish reflection on catastrophe. The most cited talmudic passage on exile is in Megillah 29a, where the rabbis discuss the relationship between exile and divine presence; the passage is theological, not predictive. The kabbalistic literature on exile (the Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum and shevirat ha-kelim) develops the theological framework further; it is a metaphysical structure within which to make sense of suffering, not a prediction of specific historical events.
The structural antisemitism of the claim
The claim is antisemitic in the same structural sense that the Talmud-libel pages elsewhere on this site address. The mechanism is the same: a Jewish religious text is selected, detached from its context, presented to an audience that does not know the source language or the interpretive tradition, and reframed as evidence that the Jewish community has been engaged in a conspiracy against gentiles. The Talmud-libel claims that Jews are religiously authorised to deceive non-Jews. The biblical-prophecy claim claims that Jews have been religiously planning their own catastrophe. Both work by inverting the Jewish religious tradition’s own self-understanding and presenting the inversion as if it were the tradition’s actual content.
The standard antisemitic figure of the Jew as conspirator against gentiles is the same figure in both cases. In the Talmud-libel, the conspiracy is contemporary deception. In the biblical-prophecy claim, the conspiracy is a multi-millennial project culminating in the engineering of a national catastrophe to produce political ends.
The claim does not need to be true to do its work. It needs only to plant the suggestion that the Jewish community was complicit in its own destruction.
What Jewish religious authorities have said
The post-war Jewish religious response to the Holocaust has been substantial and continuous since 1945. The principal post-war Jewish theologians (Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Emil Fackenheim, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, Ignaz Maybaum) have engaged with the theological question of catastrophe at length. None of them has held that the Holocaust was a fulfilled prophecy in the deniers’ sense. The disagreement among them is on the much harder questions of how the Holocaust is to be reconciled with traditional Jewish covenantal theology, whether it requires a fundamental reformulation of Jewish religious thought, or whether it falls within the framework of hester panim (the hiding of the divine face) that the tradition had already developed for catastrophe.
The Hasidic communities reconstituted after the war (the Satmar, Bobover, Belzer, Vizhnitzer, Ger and Lubavitch dynasties, all of which lost their pre-war centres in eastern Europe and rebuilt in Israel and North America) have produced an extensive religious literature on the Holocaust. The Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum’s Vayoel Moshe (1959) developed a non-Zionist religious reading; the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson developed a different reading; other dynasties developed others. None of these readings has held that the Holocaust was a prophecy fulfilled by the Jewish community.
The political deployment
The biblical-prophecy claim, in its modern denier form, is typically deployed alongside the broader argument that the Holocaust was used to justify the establishment of the State of Israel. The political point of the claim is to delegitimise Israel by suggesting that the catastrophe on which its post-war international support partly rested was itself a Jewish project. The dedicated leaves under “Holocaust Inversion” and “Motivation and Fabrication” elsewhere in this section address the specific claims that the Holocaust narrative was used to establish Israel, that Zionists collaborated to provoke Nazi persecution, and that Jewish organisations fabricated the Holocaust for reparations purposes. The biblical-prophecy claim is the religious-rhetorical wrapper for the same political argument.
The state of the claim
The claim has no support in the Jewish religious tradition, in academic biblical scholarship, in the post-war Jewish theological literature, or in the historical record. It survives in denier circles because it provides a religious-sounding justification for an antisemitic political position. The claim is not engaged with by any mainstream historian or biblical scholar because there is nothing to engage with. The dedicated denial-claim leaves in this section address the political substance of the underlying position; the religious wrapper is, on inspection, empty.
See also
Sources
- Adin Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud, Basic Books, 1976, an introduction to Talmudic literature for general readers
- Adin Steinsaltz, The Steinsaltz Edition of the Talmud, multiple volumes, Random House, 1989 onwards
- Joel Teitelbaum, Vayoel Moshe, Jerusalem, 1959, the Satmar non-Zionist religious reading
- Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, New York University Press, 1970
- Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, KTAV Publishing, 1973
- Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966; second edition Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
- Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman and Gershon Greenberg, eds., Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 2007 (the principal anthology of primary sources)
- Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933, Harvard University Press, 1980
- Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010
- Anti-Defamation League, “Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories”, https://www.adl.org
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Antisemitism”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org