UNION UNIVERSITY

JEWISH THEOLOGY AND THE BODY:

NAKEDNESS IN THE HOLOCAUST EXPERIENCE

A PAPER SUBMITTED TO

DR. TAYLOR WORLEY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS OF GOD AND THE BODY

CHR 444

SCHOOL OF CHRISTIAN STUDIES

BY

MATTHEW ELIA

JACKSON, TENNESSEE

4 MAY 2009
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I — The Holocaust as Question

For the cultural memory of the West, the Holocaust is not an event so much as a

question—a rupturing interrogative not to be answered, but to be heard, received, haunted by.

This essay intends to foster a better reception of that interrogative in the site of human

embodiment, the place of suffering and understanding. As Benedict Ashley observes, “any

question I know how to ask concerns bodies, since even if something exists that is not bodily, I

will know it only if somehow it contacts me as I am a body.”1 In what follows, I attempt to hear

the Holocaust as an embodied question, heeding the voice of Jewish theology to offer a distinct

view of human embodiment, in hope that this view might enable greater understanding of the

Jewish experience of the Holocaust—in particular, the experience of forced nakedness.

Hearing the question in this manner today demands the listener shoulder a sobering burden.

Not only must we come to grips with the bare facts of millions of innocents killed, but that

it happened in the heart of the world’s most “advanced” civilization, the likes of whose scientific

breakthroughs, secular “Enlightenment” and technological progress the world had never known.

It was in large part the very ‘advancements’ of the modernized world which enabled destruction

of human life at an unprecedented scale. In addition to the new killing efficiency granted by

technological machinery and systematic bureaucracy, the Nazis employed revisionist history

and dubious social-scientific studies of race—under the guise of respectable modern

scholarship—to target one particular racial/religious group as the primary target for

extermination.2 Eminent Holocaust scholar Richard Rubenstein contends “far from being a

1
Benedict Ashley, Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (Braintree, MA: National
Catholic Bioethics Center, 1985), 4.
2
See Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (New York:
Hyperion, 2006).
 3

relapse into barbarism or an atypical ‘episode,’ genocide is an intrinsic expression of modern

civilization as we know it.”3

Yet, for all its utilization of modernity’s tools and outworking of modernist tendencies,

Nazism contained a distinct residue of anti-modernism from the Weimar era. The nationalist

reform movements of the early twentieth century idealized the rustic charm of the countryside

set against the squalid decadence of modern urban life. This return to the ‘natural’ became a

critical forerunner of later Nazi race-nation theory:

In Germany in the 1920s, the anti-modernist revolt gave rise to a racialist vision that was
articulated through the body. Corporality became a symbolic site in the nationalist
rebellion against modernity: the unnatural, the impermanent, the decadent. Modern
styles of life, with their materiality and pornographic sexuality, were “condemned as
breeding grounds of immorality and moral sickness” (Mosse 1985:52). The terrain of the
city, presumed to induce bodily ills, was set in opposition to the terrain of nature, which
was extended to include the natural body: human nudity. German nationalism, with its
antiurban focus and its rejection of the modern lifeworld, was marked by a rediscovery of
the body. In other words, the German disenchantment with the modern was to be cured
by purging the body of its materialist wrappings. Public nudity and the unclothed human
body became important signifiers of this new nationalist consciousness.4

In further contrast to the secularism of the modern period, this nationalist consciousness

trafficked in a quasi-religious grammar, exhorting Aryans to ecclesial unity in their identity as the

supreme Race-Nation, bound together mystically in the blood and soil of Germany. Hitler’s civil

religion canonized the “thousands and thousands of young Germans [who] have stepped

forward with self-sacrificing resolve to sacrifice their young lives freely and joyfully on the altar of

the beloved father land.”5 The Führer’s rhetoric was part of a complex cultural shift from the

actual practice of public disrobing to the aestheticization of the naked white body, an ideal

image which coincided with his metaphor of German bodies as components of one national

3
Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2d ed.
(Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 123.
4
Alexander Laban Hinton, Annihilating Difference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
239.
5
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 631.
 4

Body. 6 Along with this fascist ideological preoccupation with the visual body came a

corresponding debasement of those bodies which failed to match the ideal of pure racial

whiteness. The need to eradicate the unaesthetic elements of society—the bodies of inferior

races—thus became an urgent, pathological lust. 7 This project took shape “first through

withdrawal of citizenship, then sterilization and euthanasia, and finally through the industrial

efficiency of death camps and mass murder.”8

So vile were the Jews as a people—their very bodily existence on earth—the Nazi

project necessitated wholesale torture, humiliation and extermination down to the very last

individual. According to Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, this constitutes one aspect of the

historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, that “the Nazi’s primary goal was total annihilation of the

Jewish people (rather than conversion, persecution, the conquest of land, or political

power)…The destruction of the Jews was not a means to a goal but an end in itself.”9 It was not

merely a pragmatic need for expanding the Lebensraum, but rather, as the ‘Final Solution to the

Jewish Question,’ the holistic shaming and annihilation of all Jewish bodies.

Ironically, postwar denazification efforts often reinforced German racial perceptions of

the Aryan body as pure and beautiful, the Jewish body as emaciated and ‘ugly.’ The Allied

forces, and years later certain exhibitions in German museums, 10 sought to confront the German

6
Richard A. Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology (New York: The
Library of Social Science, 1975), 5-54.
7
Uli Linke, German Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1999), 50-51.
8
Heide Fehrenbach,1994. German Body Politics. Post-doctoral fellow’s project, Rutgers Center
for Historical Analysis. Rutgers University, 2.
9
John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical
Implications (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 2.
10
Ingrid Strobl offers an account of the opening of a Holocaust museum in Berlin intended to be a
startling visual record of the Final Solution. Strobl objects to the display of these disturbing photographs
“[w] ithout further commentary, without explanation regarding the origin of these photos and the intent
which produced them, without any attempt to thematize the distorting gaze of the photographer: thus,
what Germans made out of human beings after years of systematic impoverishment and denigration is
presented here as a truthful vision of ‘the Jewish victims.’ As if they had always looked like this and had
always stared into the camera with complete apathy…” Ingrid Strobl, Das Feld des Vergessens: Jüdischer
 5

public with the stark reality of genocide through graphic footage and photographs, depicting the

horrors of Jewish suffering. Yet engraving into German postwar imagination “these endless

images of broken, emaciated, and entangled corpses tended to reify the cultural associations of

Jewishness with the unaesthetic and grotesque…the Jewish body was thus further debased:

rendered lifeless and putrid, dehumanized, and transformed beyond recognition.”11

Several years ago, a group of Haredi Jews, followers of what outsiders call ‘Ultra-

Orthodox Judaism,’ protested a display at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem of

photographs which showed naked Jewish women being led away to death before Nazi soldiers.

Though graphic visual images are singularly disturbing, the graphic verbal depictions of this

paper may invite similar protest. Why continue to display the desecration of Jewish victims,

aggravating already unhealable wounds? Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit offers a possible

response: “The picture in question is definitely a case of terrible humiliation; stripping those

women of their clothes was a deliberate act of stripping them of their dignity. The issue for us is

to sort out whether by our gaze at the picture we take part in the Nazi ritual of humiliation, or

whether it is instead a way to dignify the memory of those women by identifying with their

plight.”12 It is my intent that this essay might comprise just such an identification with those who

suffered, and foster solidarity with their descendants. For those outside it, Auschwitz must

remain no mere event, but an unintelligible rupture in cultural memory—the question retains its

essential ambiguity. Yet, perhaps exploring a Jewish theology of the body, together with tracing

specific elements of this theology through the embodied experience of nakedness during the

Holocaust may contribute an added layer of understanding for us as outsiders. Or at least, it

might give us eyes to see and ears to hear the question more faithfully. The Holocaust tends to

Widerstand and deutsche “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Berlin: Edition ID Archive, 1993). As quoted in

Linke 52-3.
11
Linke, 51.
12
Avishai Margalit, “Privacy in the Decent Society,” Social Research (Spring 2001) : 15.
 6

invite attempts to access it and relate to it as a particularly devastating example of universal

human suffering. For example, to make more accessible the incomprehensible six million

Jewish lives lost, we could imagine the entire population of Tennessee being wiped out. Yet this

was no extermination of a general collection of diverse individuals, but an attack upon a specific

group with shared religious beliefs, history and view of the world. This essay attempts to

delineate some features of a particular, distinctively Jewish experience of the Holocaust, one

which would differ profoundly from an attack upon, say, all left-handed people, younger siblings,

or people with green eyes.

II — Jewish Embodied Theology: The Question Heard in a Chasm of Space

The first problem of a Jewish theology of the body concerns whether a ‘theology of the

body’ as such exists within the Judaic tradition. Within Christian thought, unprecedented

questions created by modern biotechnology have been a major force in the emergence of such

a project as a distinct discipline in the last fifty years. This enterprise has pushed contemporary

thinkers to reexamine and attempt to disentangle Christianity’s historically complex relationships

with various strands of Gnostic dualism, manifest from the earliest centuries of the Church in its

struggles with the Docetists, the Encratists and the Manicheans to name a few. Sister Mary

Timothy Prokes, whose Toward A Theology of the Body is among the most significant of this

emerging discipline, offers a concise account of the origins of dualism in Christian thought:

The very word ‘dualism’ indicates division into two separate entities. More specifically, it
refers here to the antagonistic division between ‘body’ and ‘soul,’ between ‘the material’
and ‘the spiritual.’ Christianity emerged at a time when two basically different concepts
of the human person were found in societies surrounding the Mediterranean: the Greek
concept, a ‘more (Plato) or less (Aristotle) extreme dualism,’ and the Hebrew concept
which presumed the unity of the body-person. Just as New Testament writings strongly
affirm the goodness of the body and the material universe, they also provide evidence
that the early Church was already involved in a struggle with dualistic influences.13

13
Mary Timothy Prokes, FSE, Toward a Theology of the Body (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996),
7-8. See also George Foot Moore’s classic text for further inquiry into the Judaic rejection of body-soul
dualism. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1950), 485-88.
 7

The earliest disciples of Jesus spoke out of a shared heritage rooted in the Hebrew

concept, but as their movement experienced growing pains in the transition from Jewish sect to

fully separate religious community, the Greek concept sowed seeds of dualism still bearing fruit

to this day. By contrast, modern Judaism—across its expressions in various movements14—

retains a deep rootedness in a creational ontology which affirms the goodness of the human

being as “a single psychosomatic unity of two elements.” This integrated view of embodiment

employs the term nephesh “to emphasize what might be termed the life-force, the breath, or the

center of the human personality” and the term basar “to indicate the whole living being in its

concrete, fleshly aspects.”15 These exist together not as an oppositional dichotomy but as a

harmonious unity of what it means to be human.

Speaking then of a Jewish ‘theology of the body’—in the sense Christian theologians

typically use the term, viz., a theological approach to the topic of the body—seems odd, for in

some sense all Jewish theology is embodied theology. It is less surprising then to find the

Encyclopedia Judaica entry for ‘Body and Soul’ state bluntly, “Jewish theology has no clearly

elaborated views on the relationship between body and soul…The Talmudic rabbis, as opposed

to certain Jewish philosophers of the medieval period, never considered views on such a purely

theoretical subject as important. Their interest was focused on the connected, but more

practically orientated beliefs, such as in the resurrection of the body and God’s future

14
Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman are right to warn of the danger in speaking too simply of
‘moden Judaism’ without taking into account “that there are four separate movements within North
American Judaism [alone]…We cannot legitimately speak about ‘Jewish bioethics,’ ‘Jewish sexual ethics,’
or ‘Jewish business ethics’ as if there were a single, unambiguous perspective on these subjects. We
must instead talk more humbly about ‘a Jewish approach’ rather than ‘the Jewish approach,’ and then
demonstrate that the position we are taking is rooted in Jewish sources, concepts, and values, making
legitimate our claim that our position is indeed a Jewish approach.” Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman,
eds., Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2008), xvi.
15
Prokes, 8.
 8

judgment.”16 In the third section of this essay, we explore the implications of these practically

oriented beliefs in the experience of nakedness in the Holocaust. Before turning to these

outworkings of embodied theology, a second general observation concerning the idea of a

Jewish theology of the body facilitates our attempt to hear the question of the Holocaust with

distinctively Jewish ears.

As participants in modern, liberal states, most Westerners assume the prevailing notion

of the body as the individual’s personal property. As long as I do not harm anyone else, I am

free as the ‘owner’ of my body to use it as I please. The Jewish perspective differs sharply, for it

was God who breathed life into the nostrils of man, formed him from the dust of the ground and

made him in his own divine image. 17 Thus, it is also God who ‘owns’ the body, and thereby has

the ‘right’ to dictate its proper use. 18 The practical and ethical implications of this theological

norm are vast. In a secularized world increasingly unable to provide a substantive theoretical

foundation for human dignity or sustain the notion of human rights as more than ‘necessary

fictions’ for societal wellbeing, a Jewish theology of the body offers immense resources. 19 That

a people whose theology of embodiment engenders such fertile ground for human rights

suffered the worst abuses of human rights imaginable in the Holocaust constitutes grim irony. It

also suggests one particular component of a Jew’s crisis of faith in light of the atrocities of the

Holocaust. Virtually any religious group, or any human at all, of course finds belief in some

sense of transcendent good challenged in the face of Auschwitz, but the believing Jew faces a

unique trauma in view of the notion of body and soul together as an integrated whole, part of

God’s good creation: If the “human body is deemed as the possession of God[,] man, as its

16
Encyclopedia Judaica, 1980 ed., s.v. “Body and Soul.”
17
Genesis 2:7.
18
Dorff and Newman, xii.
19
For a comprehensive reference tool on the many resources available, see S. Daniel Breslauer,
Judaism and Human Rights in Contemporary Thought: A Bibliographic Survey (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing, 1993).
 9

custodian, is responsible for protecting it from mutilation,” for faithfully securing its flourishing. 20

Or put another way, if “the soul is a guest in the body here on earth…this means that the body

must be respected and well treated for the sake of its honored guest.”21

Unlike the Gnostic ascetic who can regard physical suffering as the proper treatment of

what is essentially evil, or “the Hindu and Christian ascetics who torture themselves in order to

suppress bodily desire in their quest of a higher existence,”22 the faithful Jew must come to

terms with physical suffering as destruction of what is essentially good, her very self as an

embodied person. For the Jew, gratuitous suffering in the body offers no metaphysical escape

of the good soul from the evil body’s prison; it is, rather, much more like what it appears to be

physically—the evil imprisonment and torture of a body-person bearing God’s image, containing

the ‘divine spark.’ What then does it mean to be responsible for the proper care of one’s body

under God, when that proper care is rendered impossible, the body’s very existence assaulted

directly? How is belief in such a God viable when an irreducible space looms between the

Jewish vision of the body’s proper care—prescriptions regarding diet, exercise, clothing,

sexuality, modesty, burial—and that vision’s harshest possible antithesis—the deliberate

humiliation and destruction of those bodies during the Holocaust? It is a chasm no theodicy can

bridge. 23 If God assigns man the task of stewarding over his body as a farmhand tends his

master’s crops, in the Holocaust, the assignment is to grow grapes amidst desert.

20
Oxford Dictionary of Jewish Religion, 1997 ed., s.v. “Body.”
21
Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “Body and Soul.”
22
Kaufmann Kohler, Jewish Theology: Systematically and Historically Considered (Madison, WI:
Macmillan, 1918), 189.
23
“Religious thinkers (including biblical and rabbinic authors) often try to couch suffering and
death in terms of spiritual goods and ethical virtues. In contrast, classical Jewish texts contain antitheodic
strains according to which suffering and death remain less a spiritual opportunity than a sad mystery.”
Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 54.
Though beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted many Jewish religious leaders assert
that the Holocaust in fact confirms their faith in God in various ways. For a discussion, see Richard L.
Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 330-52.
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III — Nakedness and Embodied Theology: Echoes through the Chasm

In one sense the physical and psychological aspects of Jewish suffering during the

Holocaust are universally accessible as part of the common condition of being human. Most

people can at least imagine the horrors of daily physical brutality and deprivation, as well as the

psychological trauma of being treated as sub-human. Likewise, the specific violation of forced

nakedness would be humiliating and dehumanizing for Jew and Gentile alike. Yet, this essay

attempts to illumine the chasm between the particularities of a Jewish view of embodiment—one

which honors the body as harmonious unity, and understands God to demand its good

treatment in specific ways—and the diametrically opposite treatment of those bodies by Nazi

perpetrators in the Holocaust. This chasm between the Jewish vision of the body as it should

be and the Jewish body as it was treated in Auschwitz is the irreducible space in which the

question of the Holocaust is received. Thus, as an attempt to inhabit this space and thereby

hear the question better, we overview in this section several specific, practical topics in Jewish

body theology, considering them in sharp relief against the nakedness of the Holocaust.

Shame, Modesty and Ritual Purity

One of the first issues of the body in Torah concerns the relation between shame and

nakedness. Prior to disobeying the Lord’s command, “the man and his wife were both naked

and were not ashamed” (Gen. 1.25). When they ate of the fruit, “the eyes of both were opened,

and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves

loincloths” (Gen. 2.7). First century Jewish historian Josephus reflects common Jewish

understanding of the passage in its telling of the ancient story: “and being ashamed thus to

appear abroad, they invented somewhat to cover them; for the tree sharpened their

understanding; and they covered themselves with fig leaves; and tying these before them, out of
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modesty, they thought they were happier than they were before…”24 In forming garments of

skin to clothe them (Gen. 2.21), God seems to confirm modesty as the virtue corresponding to

the shame of the naked body.

In this context, we make the distinction between the German ideal of ‘nudity’ discussed

above and the Jewish concept of ‘nakedness’ found in the Genesis story: “The issue of

nakedness, not nudity, is the key to the mythos of the Eden story. While these two terms are

synonyms, they cannot (in common with all synonyms) do duty for one another in every

instance. Both mean bare, without clothing. Yet ‘nude’ conveys a neutral meaning, and is

nonjudgmental, while ‘naked’ conveys an assessment of deficiency, such as defenselessness

or moral impropriety.”25 This original connection between nakedness and deficiency—either in

the sense of moral/sexual impurity or defenselessness—lays the groundwork for the bodily

concerns in Levitical codes of ritual purity, the frequent instructions in traditional rabbinic

literature concerning modesty and ongoing emphasis of these virtues in modern Judaism.

Rabbi Harry A. Cohen, for example, underscores the central importance within Jewish morality

of the virtues of tzniut vetohorat hammishpahah (decency, modesty and family purity). 26

Conversely, he notes “the concept of trayf as ‘something forbidden’ is very significant in Jewish

life in maintaining the distinctiveness of the Jewish people and the Jewish way of life and in

expressing the Jewish abhorrence of vulgarity and immodesty. It thus has a moral as well as a

ritual application.”27

In light of the relation of nakedness to shame in Torah and the attendant emphasis upon

modesty, decency and ritual purity, the bodily horrors of the Holocaust take on an intensified,

24
Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, trans. William Whiston (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth
Editions, 2006), 8 (emphasis added).
25
Herbert Chanan Brichto, The Names of God: Poetic Readings in Biblical Beginnings (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 83.
26
Rabbi Harry A. Cohen, A Basic Jewish Encyclopedia: Jewish Teachings and Practices Listed
and Interpreted in the Order of Their Importance Today (Hartford, CT: Hartmore House, 1965), 89.
27
Ibid., 113.
 12

disturbing meaning. Consider the words of one Jewish survivor recalling the task assigned him

by the Nazis, to order a group of female prisoners to remove their clothes upon entrance to

camp:

We did not have the inner fortitude, the gall, to tell them, these beloved sisters of ours,
that they must strip naked. The clothing that they wear, after all, is still a coat of armor
that shelters their lives. The moment they remove their clothing and stand there as
naked as on the day they were born, they lose their last staff of support, forfeit their last
grip, to which their lives are still clinging. Therefore, no one wants to tell them now that
they must undress at once. Let them stand there for another moment, another moment
in that armor, in the coat of life.28

Moreover, by many accounts Nazi perpetrators were acutely aware of the

Jewish concern for modesty and ritual purity. Not concerned merely with the pragmatic work of

redistributing the soiled clothes to the next ‘shipment’ of prisoners, the Nazis forced Jews to

undress as a deliberate effort to profane all that is considered sacred in the Judaic tradition. In

the following instance, they purposed to desecrate the Jewish ritual bath:

Here we find that the assault on the ritual bath, and therefore on the notion of any purity
associated with holiness, goes well beyond a mere prohibition against using the bath. In
an entry dated 12 May 1942 Czerniakow notes an occurrence in the ghetto that at first
glance might seem relatively innocuous: "Avril [an SS sergeant] arrived with the
filmmakers and announced that they would shoot a scene at the ritual baths on Dzielna
Street. They need 20 Orthodox Jews with ear-locks and 20 upperclass women" (35253).
But on 14 May Kaplan reveals the perverted, blasphemous intention behind Avril's
demand: "Both sexes were forced by means of intimidation and whiplashes to remove
their clothes and remain naked; afterward they were made to get into one bath together
and were forced into lewd and obscene acts imitating the sexual behavior of animals. . . .
While one Nazi cracked his whip over the heads of the captives, his partner set himself
up in a corner with a camera. Henceforward all the world will know how low the Jews
have fallen in their morals, that modesty between the sexes has ceased among them
and that they practice sexual immorality in public" (33132). From a Jewish standpoint,
this incident far exceeds anything like forced pornography. Staging this outrage in the
place of ritual purification, the Nazis assail the whole notion of purification as a means of
approaching God. For the relation of Israel to God is often understood in terms of the
conjugal relation that belongs to the sanctity of marriage. 29

28
Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Zonderkommandos (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 13-14.
29
David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the
Holocaust Diary (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 110-1.
 13

It is in these sharp contrasts, the chasmic space between Jewish morality concerning

the body and the Nazi abuse of the Jewish body that we as outsiders begin to hear faint echoes

of what the Holocaust means for the Jewish people.

Diet, Exercise and Physicians for Bodily Health

The robust affirmation of the physical body’s goodness in Jewish thought entails valuing

its proper care: “The human body is deemed as the possession of God; man, as its custodian,

is responsible for protecting it from mutilation, and [influential twelfth century Jewish

philosopher] Maimonides includes in his religious code a detailed regimen of diet, exercise, and

other rules to ensure the health of the body (Yad, Hilkhot De’ot 4).”30 Rabbi Cohen observes

kashrut (Jewish food regulations) are intended to promote both spiritual and physical health. He

further notes that the Jewish understanding of trust in God (emunah) concerning physical health

is seen not in fatalism but in practical care of the body, “Health…is in the hands of God, but the

Jew is directed to take care of his physical well-being; he is commanded to consult a physician

when necessary.”31 For the Jew, physical care of the body is not mere self-preservation; it is

part of one’s sacred duty to uphold and celebrate the goodness of God’s material creation.

Forced undressing regularly subjected Jewish prisoners to images of the emaciated,

broken bodies of their mothers, grandfathers, sons and daughters, haunting reminders of the

slow death brought on by starvation, physical brutality and overwork—three violations counter to

the respective Jewish sanctifications of food, healthy exercise and rest. Moreover, the Nazis

implicitly mocked Jewish respect for the healing vocation of the physician. In most

concentration camps, SS medical professionals put their training not toward healing the sick, but

30
Oxford Dictionary of Jewish Religion, s.v. “Body.”
31
Cohen, 49-50, 100.
 14

to the tasks of performing torturous medical experiments, improving the efficiency of execution

methods and extracting gold from the teeth of corpses.32

Death, Burial, Resurrection and Judgment

The gruesome harvesting of valuables from bodies further shocks the Jewish tradition of

kevod hammet —honor for the dead. This conviction, like all the teachings discussed in this

essay, finds its roots in the Jewish reverence for the integrity of the body as God’s creation, for

“in death, too, the body is inviolable; hence, the insistence on its speedy interment (cf. Dt. 12.23)

and the Orthodox opposition to cremation, autopsies and dissections, embalming, or any other

violation of its resurrection.”33 Rabbi Cohen emphasizes the necessity of proper burial in a

Jewish cemetery, a place so essential to the Jewish way of life that it is placed alongside the

synagogue and the Jewish school as the three necessities for a Jewish community.34 He

continues: “Respect for the dead is also emphasized in Judaism by its insistence that the dead

body be handled as little as possible, for the body, Judaism teaches, is the work of God and

must be respected.”35

Could there be then a more tragic sight to Jewish eyes than the mountains of stacked

corpses, the ashes of cremated victims descending like snowflakes, the mass graves of thinly

covered bodies still warm, the naked, huddled crowd in the gas chambers, still clutching one

another at the moment of death? One survivor reflects, “I could not escape the thought that

someday my naked body might simmer in that towering flame…”36 For the Jewish people, every

human being—including Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann—is a bearer of the image of God, his or

her body the pinnacle of creation’s goodness. For the SS men of the concentration camps,

32
Rubenstein and Roth, 356-8.
33
Oxford Dictionary of Jewish Religion, s.v. “Body.”
34
Cohen, 88.
35
Ibid., 88-9.
36
Boris Kacel, From Hell to Redemption: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Niwot, CO: University Press
of Colorado, 1998), 131.
 15

dead Jewish bodies were reportedly considered “Scheiss-Stücke,”—pieces of excrement (or

more literally, “pieces of shit”). 37 The chasm could not yawn wider: the highest of the material

world and the basest, man and feces. In the center of this irreducible gap, we hear the

echoes of the question in its piercing dissonance.

Jewish theology offers no conclusive description of what lies beyond the grave, affirming

with certainty only that physical death is not the final end of the person.38 Specific beliefs

concerning the resurrection of the body are therefore complex and differ widely across and

within various movements of Judaism, 39 but several elements are common to most strands. On

the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, men wear a white robe called a kittel, which

symbolizes purity and reminds the faithful of their mortality, for Jews are ultimately to be buried

in white shrouds. 40 Holocaust survivor Leon Weliczker Wells explains the white as “a symbol of

death and the symbol of eternal life in the coming world.” The wearing of the kittel on Yom

Kippur demonstrates “our belief in the resurrection of the dead ‘with clothes on.’”41 Here again is

a space of painful contrast, where the respectful treatment of the body in hope of its renewal

meets its absolute antithesis in the Nazi procedure of consistently ensuring the victim dies with

clothes off.

The question of God’s judgment is likewise difficult, but several common beliefs are

relevant to our discussion of nakedness and the Holocaust. First, most Jews agree man will

undergo judgment as an inseparable body-soul unity. One commonly-cited Talmudic parable

elucidates the inability of the body to ‘blame’ the soul or vice versa at the judgment:

37
Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the
Holocaust, (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 67.
38
Cohen, 106.
39
Norman Solomon, Judaism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 95.
40
Berel Wein, Living Jewish: Values, Practices, Traditions (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications,
2002), 142-4.
41
Leon Weliczker Wells, Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy (Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 1995), 66.
 16

[Emperor Antoninus] had said that at the last judgment both soul and body might deny
all guilt. The body may say: “The soul alone has sinned, for since it has parted from me,
I have lain motionless as a stone.” And the soul, on its part, may reply: “It must be the
body that sinned, for since I have parted from it I soar about in the air free as a bird.” To
this [Rabbi] Jehuda ha Nasi answered: “A king once possessed a garden with splendid
fig-trees, and appointed as watchmen in it a blind man and a lame man. Then the lame
man spoke to the blind man, ‘I see fine figs up there; take me upon your shoulders, and I
shall pick them, and we can enjoy them together.’ They did so, and when the king
entered the garden, the figs were gone. But when they were held to account for it, the
lame man said, ‘How could I have taken them, since I cannot walk?’ And the blind man
said, ‘And I cannot see.’ Then the king had the lame man placed upon the shoulders of
the blind man and judged them both together. In like manner will God treat the body and
the soul, as it is said: ‘He calleth to the heavens above—that is, the heavenly element,
the soul—and to the earth beneath—the earthly body—and places them together before
His throne of judgment.’”42

Thus, cryptic though it may be, a Jewish theology of body-soul unity suggests judgment

befalls body and soul together in one act. Second, at the heart of the Jewish religion are

Abraham’s faith that God cannot judge unjustly 43 and the joyful praise of the Psalmist:

“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne.”44 Third, as Kaufmann Kohler’s

authoritative volume Jewish Theology attests—written thirty years before the Holocaust—Jews

hold that “Scripture considers all the great catastrophes of the hoary past,—flood, earthquakes,

and the rain of fire and brimstone that destroys cities—as judgments of the divine anger on

sinful generations.”45 These judgments, however, according to the Hebrew prophets, are not

only reserved for Gentile nations but are frequently turned upon God’s own nation. Even more

difficult to swallow is God’s use of pagan nations to execute judgment upon Israel in times of

unfaithfulness. The Jewish people, as a tradition rooted deeply in understanding their own

history, has borne the heavy burden of these three elements in struggling to find God during and

after Auschwitz. Perhaps most painful among these historic texts is the metaphor of Israel as

the unfaithful harlot. It is not unfounded to conceive of faithful Jews, having been immersed in

42
Kohler, 302-3.
43
Genesis 18:25.
44
Psalm 89:14.
45
Kohler, 108.
 17

the scriptures, being haunted during times of crisis by these texts which incorporate the relation

of nakedness to shame into a horrifying vision of God’s judgment:

You also played the whore with the Egyptians, your lustful neighbors, multiplying your
whoring, to provoke me to anger. Behold, therefore, I stretched out my hand against you
and diminished your allotted portion and delivered you to the greed of your enemies, the
daughters of the Philistines, who were ashamed of your lewd behavior…

Therefore, O prostitute, hear the word of the LORD: Thus says the Lord GOD, Because
your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whorings with your
lovers, and with all your abominable idols, and because of the blood of your children that
you gave to them, therefore, behold, I will gather all your lovers with whom you took
pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated. I will gather them against you from
every side and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your
nakedness. And I will judge you as women who commit adultery and shed blood are
judged, and bring upon you the blood of wrath and jealousy. And I will give you into their
hands, and they shall throw down your vaulted chamber and break down your lofty
places. They shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful jewels and leave you
naked and bare. 46

The inclusion of this text is no perverse suggestion of the Holocaust as somehow a

‘fulfillment’ of this passage. Rather, it constitutes a final, painful aspect of our attempt to

understand the distinctively Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Chief among this experience

was the question of how to retain faith in a God who allowed Auschwitz to happen, and

moreover, does not rule out the possibility of gas chambers mysteriously serving his ‘will.’ I

propose no answer to this question, but rather attempt to receive it, to continue the metaphor, as

an echo in the chasm. For many Jews and Christians alike, the Holocaust meets us in this

irreducible space, leaving the project of theology less confident than before to answer such

questions. In the absence of a totalizing solution, some neat answer to this haunting

interrogative, we can stand in solidarity with those who have suffered by hearing the question as

best we can through their ears. In so doing, we can hope perhaps God will meet us in this

space beyond the horizon of human reason—and somehow transform it into a sacred place of

faith.

46
Ezekiel 16: 26-29, 36-39 (emphasis added).
 18

Selected Bibliography

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Catholic Bioethics Center, 1985.

Braiterman, Zachary. (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish
Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Breslauer, S. Daniel. Judaism and Human Rights in Contemporary Thought: A Bibliographic

Survey. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1993.

Brichto, Herbert Chanan. The Names of God: Poetic Readings in Biblical Beginnings. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998.

Cohen, Rabbi Harry A. A Basic Jewish Encyclopedia: Jewish Teachings and Practices Listed
and Interpreted in the Order of Their Importance Today. Hartford, CT: Hartmore House,
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Dorff, Elliot N. and Louis E. Newman, eds. Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body. Philadelphia:
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Fehrenbach, Heide. German Body Politics. Post-doctoral fellow’s project. Camden, NJ: Rutgers
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Hinton, Alexander Laban. Annihilating Difference. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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Kacel, Boris. From Hell to Redemption: A Memoir of the Holocaust. Niwot, CO: University Press
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Kohler, Kaufmann. Jewish Theology: Systematically and Historically Considered. Madison, WI:
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Linke, Uli. German Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Margalit, Avishai. “Privacy in the Decent Society.” Social Research (Spring 2001) : 15.

Moore, George Foot. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the
Tannaim. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.
 19

Patterson, David. Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the
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Pringle, Heather. The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust. New York: Hyperion,
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Prokes, Mary Timothy, FSE. Toward a Theology of the Body. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

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Solomon, Norman. Judaism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
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Strobl, Ingrid. Das Feld des Vergessens: Jüdischer Widerstand and deutsche
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Wein, Berel. Living Jewish: Values, Practices, Traditions. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications,
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Wells, Leon Weliczker. Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy. Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 1995.

Werblowsky, R. J. Zwi and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds. Oxford Dictionary of Jewish Religion. 1997
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