The Seventh Million

by Tom Segev

Book Overview

"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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809085631
• ISBN13: 9780809085637
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Hill & Wang
• Length: 593 Pages
• Weight: 2.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

An elightnening read

Mr. Segev's book is one of the most enlightening reads I have come across. His book has done more than any other I have read in giving readers a look into the very complicated relationship between Israel and the Holocaust and its survivors. Segev's account is at once intensely personal while at the same time giving expression to the national trauma of coming to terms with the war and the destruction of European Jews. One of the main points I took away from his book is that this relationship is in no way static. This relationship is an ever evolving. After the war there existed a great tension between those survivors and those who were already in Israel. This conflict had a lot to do with emotional baggage each side brought to the new relationship. For those early Zionists the facts of the Holocaust were a direct contradiction to the "new man" they were trying to create in Palestine. There was shame in their powerlessness to save or help the Jews of Europe. This powerlessness was in stark contrast to the self-image these people were attempting to create of a strong and independent Jewish people self-sufficient and capable, and when they were confronted by the survivors these people became reminders of their own weakness. Of course the survivors had an enormous burden themselves. Not only had they survived the most inhuman treatment but now they were in, ostensibly, a foreign land surrounded by a people who did not know exactly how to deal with them. One of the things about the early history of Israel that can't help but produce a certain amount of cynicism in readers is the attempt by the differing political parties to co-opt the Holocaust for their own political purposes. Every political persuasion, whether from the left all the way to the right, attempted to use the Holocaust for their own purposes. In so doing they often perverted and manipulated the Holocaust for base political gains. While these attempts should rightly produce a certain amount of revulsion in readers, there exists beside this cynical use a very real pragmatism as well. There can be no doubt that this event was one of the most important in the eventual creation of the Israeli state. One of the things I brought away from this work is that memory can be a powerful yet dangerous thing. For the Israelis it is one source of their power yet at the same time it is a weakness as well. The creation and legitimization of the Israeli state is partly based on the victimization of the Jewish people. The memory of the Holocaust has created powerful incentives and a rallying point for the Israeli people. It has created the saying "never again", and given the people the call to physically ensure it never does. This has helped unify a very disparate group of people, and has built a mentality very much needed for the difficult neighborhood of the Middle East. Yet it has its hazards as well. Taken too far the memory of the Holocaust can push the saying "never again" int

A History of Israel With Broad Implications

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 Hit

Excellent! Very Well Done!

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.

Israelis and the Holocaust

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 ba

Superb and well-documented

This book provides a refreshing new outlook on Israel's history and how the collective Israeli culture regards its history. Although at first it may seem controversial, it's impossible to ignore the volumes of references that Segev intelligently uses to support his thesis.