St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Jul 2024)
Post-Holocaust Theology
Abstract
The Shoah (Holocaust) has raised a number of questions to which Jewish philosophers, theologians, and historians have given different answers. This article offers a survey of how Jewish thinkers have shaped the memory of the Shoah and how they reimagined Judaism after the catastrophe. In the post-Auschwitz period, Jews reflected anew on God, on the divine (non-)intervention in history, on the relation between God and evil, and on the role of Christianity in the history of antisemitism that culminated in the Shoah. They pondered what made the Shoah possible. In view of the vast range of reflections on the Shoah, it is not this article’s intention to treat all these questions exhaustively. It rather endeavours to point out the main directions in which these questions were answered by well-known Jewish thinkers (Meir 2006b).
