Introduction

The Holocaust stands as a tragic but instructive test case for the usefulness and accuracy of the historical concept of modernity. Intense debates on this subject have surrounded Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Since its publication in 1989—the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall—the book has provoked scholars to speculate whether the Holocaust represented a lapse into a barbaric past—a break with modern civilization—or whether, on the contrary, it epitomized the nastiest aspects of modernity.

Modernity and the Holocaust has been called an unattractive book (see Irwin- Zarecka 1991, 217). Who wants to read about the death of millions of Jews, or how the plans for these deaths were formed at the heart of the twentieth century? But Bauman's approach, always framing modernity as his backdrop, has been welcomed by many other scholars. Bauman offers a new interpretation of the Holocaust, both for sociologists and for historians. He puts aside the conventional category of anti- Semitism—long the focus of sociologists and historians—and adopted modernity itself as his object of study. He sees the extermination of the Jews in Europe as an outcome of the concepts of modern rationality and bureaucracy. With this argument, Bauman introduced a change of scholarly perspective that has produced endless debate, with many ups and downs, among both sociologists and historians. Moreover, Bauman's new perspective has been brought to the scene of “Holocaust Studies” sociological discipline, considered to be delayed in its study of the Holocaust. Thus, Bauman's approach has been welcomed by sociologists such as Jack N. Porter (1993), Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf (2007), and Burton P. Halpert (2007) who appreciated the role of his work in opening the way to the post-Holocaust sociology. Likewise, historians such as Zoë Waxman (2009) and Mark Roseman (2011) have admired the book's universalistic perspective, which serves to solve the knotty tensions among functionalist and intentionalist historians (notably, Bauman has been labeled a functionalist by historians like William W. Hagen and Tom Lawson).