Still, Aly has a masterly command of the facts of the Nazi catastrophe, its bricks and mortar amassed in all their mountainous detail. And the details he captures are all the more crucial because they are generally inaccessible in secondary sources elsewhere.

Curiously, Aly sees his new book as something more than a historical narrative: It is, he suggests, a guide for how to prevent similar horrors from happening in the future. Thus, it begins (this a jarring turn for a study of the backdrop to Nazi genocide) with Zionisms progenitor, Theodor Herzl. In Alys version, Herzl sought to guide the construction in the Middle East of a European-inspired, Jewishly homogeneous nation-state, with its predictable outcome: the dismissal of the lands indigenous population, a tragedy that festers to the present day.

Herzl is portrayed, at the same time, as a prescient prophet of doom, who sees more starkly than most the dangerous development in Europe of a view of Jews as disruptive immigrants, subversive radicals and intolerable economic competitors. Herzls solution, as Aly sums it up, is Jewish settlement on the empty spaces on earth so that Jews can create a homogeneous nation at peace with itself.

This he culls from Herzls diaries. But the problem once again is with Alys inclination to flatten his details. Herzl does indeed say all that Aly attributes to him, but as the Harvard historian Derek Penslar has observed, Herzls diaries are not a readily transparent source for his politics since theyre often punctuated by fevered speculations on matters contradicted by Herzl elsewhere. This is especially true with regard to his late-life novel Old-New Land, the work probably dearest to Herzls heart, where Palestine is depicted as a social utopia with Arabs and Jews living peacefully side by side. There the villain is a heinous Jewish ethnocentric.

Alys book appears, of course, at a moment when anti-Semitism seems ascendant, yet also when the chasm between proponent and foe is more confounding than ever. Israels Benjamin Netanyahu is now the most articulate, respectable proponent of much the same far-right nationalist populism that has historically nurtured anti-Jewish hatred. And in the United States the White House continues to stoke anti-Semitisms embers, branding others as purveyors of hate while itself remaining the bearer of insidious messages that cut deep into public life.

Alys reminder of the usefulness of taking a close look at the quiet horrors of Europes interwar years thus, despite the shortcomings of his new book, feels all the more valuable today. And his acknowledgment that comparisons between now and then once the province of the ill-informed deserve more serious attention from historians and others is just one of many reminders as to how far weve stumbled into an age of troubled sleep.

See the rest here:

What Were the Origins of the Holocaust? - The New York Times