Holocauste ou Shoah ? Génocide ou ‘Hourbane ? Quels mots pour dire Auschwitz ? : Histoire et enjeux des choix et des rejets des mots désignant la Shoah

Résumé 0

This article (and its chronological Appendices) tries to trace the first appearances of words referring to the mass murder of Jews in Nazi Europe : in the Nazi terminology, inside the Jewish community, in the State of Israel, and in the non-Jewish French and American press and literature. We will discuss how and why the neologism Genocide was created by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 ; how the word katastropha, then Shoah became preferred to the Hebrew-Yiddish denomination Churban and was chosen, in 1951, by the Israeli Parliament for the official Remembrance Day about the victims of the Nazi Final Solution ; and how the word holocaust was adopted in American English to translate the Hebrew Shoah and has received in French a strong Christian sacrificial connotation, leading to its being rejected and replaced, mainly in French and European languages, by the borrowed word Shoah. The article also tries to describe what is at stake when using or rejecting these words and how each one of them has been also used and abused for improper goals.