Word Matters

WRITERS KNOW that the words we choose make a difference. Synonym lists, whether in our head, on the internet, or in a book, are frequent go-tos when searching for the perfect word for a sentence.

As a writer of stories and articles about WWII, my decisions can be fraught, especially as even synonyms come loaded with different connotations. I must decide whether to refer to Nazis as fanatics, extremists, or right-wing politicians. Should the SA be called thugs, ruffians, violent street gangs, or a paramilitary organization? Many words that are necessary to describe the times I write about hold emotional significance for readers, making word choice doubly complex.

Holocaust is a word that has come to hold huge emotional resonance with many, especially Jewish survivors and their descendants. In the English-speaking world, Holocaust is the common term for the systematic murder of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime during WWII. In fact, the word is so locked to this meaning that it is now capitalized and given an article: The Holocaust.

A look at the origins of the word Holocaust reveals that it derives from “holokauston,” an ancient Greek word that means a burnt sacrifice or destruction by fire, especially as an offering to the gods.

Shocked by the ovens and burned corpses found at Germany’s concentration camps, WWII historians began to use this English translation of the Greek word to designate the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule. At its best the word conveys the horror of the ovens, but, for some, the term does not properly convey the intentions of the Third Reich.

In an article for The Torah.com, Professor Zev Garber, chair of Jewish studies and philosophy at Los Angeles Valley College, writes, “… the word’s origin as a reference to a ‘burnt offering’ remains. … It seemingly designates the murderers as priestly officiants engaged in acts of divine propitiation [gaining God’s favor] and brings up the grotesque image of Nazis burning six million Jews as an offering to God.”

Professor Garber follows up by saying that the Yiddish term “Hurban Europa” used by many survivors of the Nazi period is equally inappropriate because the word Hurban simply means destruction. He suggests other words that can work without any sacrificial connotation: extermination, annihilation, massacre, and genocide, a relatively new word (1944) for the purposeful destruction of an ethnic, racial, or religious group.

While researching for various writing projects, I noticed that most Israeli and European sources refer to the European Jewish genocide during WWII, not as the Holocaust, but as the “Shoah.”

The Hebrew word Shoah first appears in the Old Testament and has been used since in historical Hebrew writings to mean a calamity, unfathomable disaster, or utter destruction. In the 1940s, the word Shoah was adopted in Palestine and by Jewish groups everywhere to describe Nazi atrocities, news of which was filtering back from Germany and Eastern Europe. Today, worldwide, Jewish scholars generally prefer this Hebrew term. They feel that using the word Holocaust, with its religious connotations of a purifying experience or religious offering, is problematic.

We should never forget that many besides Jews were imprisoned and murdered by the Third Reich. However, it was only the Jews who the Nazi government swore to eradicate. In fact, in 1942, Hitler and his collaborators created what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” which made mass murder of all European Jews official Nazi policy.

Shoah, a powerful-sounding word, forces us to remember the Jewishness of the six-million victims. Besides my new understanding of the origins of the word, I like the simplicity and beauty of the letters S-H-O-A-H. As a short word with the repeating H and the two vowels, it stands out in a line of text. Plus, the fact that “Shoah” is preferred by Jewish scholars resonates with me. I’d like to see the word Shoah become as familiar to North Americans as the term Holocaust.

Another word prevalent in writing about WWII has changed due to both its etymology and its format. In the last ten years, anti-Semitism, in this hyphenated form, has almost disappeared from literature and the media.

The word Semitic was coined in 1781 to designate a language group (Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages from the Middle East) for use in the study of linguistics. The speakers of these languages do not share history or heritage; thus, there is no such thing as a Semitic ethnicity—there are only Semitic languages.

A hundred years later, in 1879, a racist German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, made the questionable jump to using the term Semite or Semitic to mean the “Jewish race.” His racist ideas stemmed from the emerging pseudo-science of eugenics and 19th-century race theories. Marr expanded his usage of the word Semitic by adding the prefix “anti,” thus creating the word antisemitism to mean hatred of Jews. Note that he did not use a hyphen; in German the word was written as antisemitismus.

The hyphen was added in English around the turn of the century when the word entered common usage. The hyphenated form of the word, including the capitalization of Semitism, was used for decades. Listed in traditional American English dictionaries in the United States, it served as the standard for legal documents, academia, and journalism. About ten years ago, critics of the hyphenated form pushed for a shift to “antisemitism” as a more accurate way to express the idea.

Critics argue that the use of a hyphen implies there is a root word for some recognized, separate, true thing that one can be against, such as Communism, Vaccination, Defamation, or War. The capitalization of the word “Semitic” designates it as a proper noun, something specific and real, in this case a non-existent racial classification associated with Nazi dogma.

Kudos to the Chicago Manual of Style, which recommended the unhyphenated, lowercased spelling “antisemitism” as early as 2003. More than ten years later, in 2015, after consulting historians and linguists, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance published an official memo saying they were changing to use antisemitism, and soon after, Microsoft Word’s spellcheck function accepted the new, preferred form. The next year, in 2016, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) adopted the unhyphenated spelling.

Within a few years, most style guidelines and organizations (including the Anti-Defamation League, the New York Times, and the Associated Press) transitioned to using the unhyphenated word.

In 2021, in an article on their website, the Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit that protects British Jews from terrorism and antisemitism, explained their stance by writing, “The hyphen legitimizes the idea that there is scientific basis for Jew-hate—that there is a Jewish ‘Semitism’ to take a stance against—and risks confusing discrimination against Jews with bigotry towards those who speak a Semitic language.”

During the editing process for Ashes and Ruins, my editor, Lorraine Fico-White, who uses the Chicago Manual of Style as her guiding principle, made sure the following sentence was formatted correctly: “He [Charlie] pointed out how all the Nazi, antisemitic posters had been taken down to impress the many foreigners who would soon be arriving for the Olympics.”

Now that I am aware of the significance of this spelling, I make sure the word is always unhyphenated in my writing. And I’m planning to make Shoah my preferred word to refer to the suffering and murder of millions of European Jews by the Nazis.

English is a living language, and words change over time as they adjust to reflect history and popular usage. My thanks to linguists, organizations, and historians who make the effort to find the right words for important concepts and events. I am happy to follow their lead.