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`I do not Attach Great Significance to it': Taking Note of `The Holocaust' in English Case Law

University of Kent, UK

The first part of this article traces the history of the word `holocaust' and the phrase `the Holocaust' in English judicial discourse, both in cases where the mass killing of Jewish Europeans in the early 1940s was a relevant issue, and the many more cases where it was not. The second part of the article returns to a selection of the recent cases, arguing that when the Holocaust is referred to in contemporary judgments it tends to be spliced in as a form of stock footage, and suggest that this routinized manoeuvre succeeds in misremembering the past, rather than contributing to any substantive comprehension of the events the phrase is intended to describe. More than this, however, the uses of the Holocaust by the judges may also reinforce particularly English understandings of Jews and Jewishness. Far from acting as a mnemonic device to recall atrocity, the Holocaust can in fact act as an aid to remembering what it is `the English' find distasteful and alien about `the Jew'.

Key Words: Holocaust • Jewish • judges • memorialization • memory

Social & Legal Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, 427-452 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0964663908097079


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