From “a sho'ah” to “the Sho'ah”

Why did the genocide of European Jewry in the 1940s require a new entry in the Hebrew lexicon? How did this shape the singularization of the Holocaust among Hebrew speakers? This article traces the linguistic process through which Shoah shifted from a general term for disaster to the exclusive name for the Nazi genocide. Using big-data analysis of grammatical forms alongside content analysis, it identifies two stages: first, by the 1950s, the definite form ha-Shoah became the primary reference to the annihilation of European Jewry in commemorative discourse; second, by the 1990s, Shoah no longer denoted other disasters, losing its modifiers, construct state, and plural or verbal forms. Without public reflection, the term and the event it named were singularized, sacralized, and universalized as the ultimate calamity and metaphysical evil. The article situates this transformation within emerging 1990s exceptionalist and victimhood discourses

Construct (python library · Event (particle physics · Genocide · Hebrew · Metaphysics · Plural · Term (time · The Holocaust · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration