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"RIGHTEOUS GENTILES" IS THE COMMON TRANSLATION
of the Hebrew "Hasidei Umoth Ha'olam" [literally, "Righteous among the Nations of the World"]-an honorific title now known mainly through its conferral by Yad Vashem on non-Jews who acted during the Holocaust to save Jewish life at the risk of their own. This use of the traditional phrase, however, is a misrepresentation of the conduct it is meant to honor as well as of other moral issues related to the Holocaust; furthermore, the weight of its distinctions between Jews and non-Jews and between "righteous" and other gentiles is invidious and offensive. As the language of the Holocaust itself was expressively significant in the unfolding of that event, so the language of postHolocaust reflection ought to be considered-and questioned-in its effects on the shape of this history.
The fault in the "Righteous Gentiles" is not, to be sure, in the rescuers or their actions, or in the decision to honor them. Rather it is in the concept of "Righteous" Gentiles-the standard by which they are judged and which, by implication, the larger number of other, "non-righteous" gentiles failed to meet. This criterion, I should argue, produces a two-fold distortion-at once of diminishing and exaggerating. It diminishes the acts of the gentile rescuers of Jews-since the responses in which they risked their lives were clearly more than only "righteous"; at the same time it exaggerates what the other, "nonrighteous" gentiles were morally obligated to do, as it implies that they too ought to have risked their lives as the rescuers did. The effect of this twofold distortion, furthermore, is to obscure the common and actual responsibility of the non-Jews touched by the Holocaust which was more fundamental and in the end more consequential than the responsibility attributed to them on the invidious comparison between them as a group and the much smaller group of heroic rescuers.
Again: the "Righteous Gentiles" cited by Yad Vashem are individuals or groups who in the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe risked their lives in order to save Jews-and who, after passing an examination of the evidence by a Committee at Yad Vashem, are then formally recognized. (As of the end of 1995, 13,618 names had been so designated.) And the issue that emerges here is not...